POPULARITY
Categories
Joe "King Iso" Johnson brings you the Best of Iso Takeover on Nightcap! Iso dives into research surrounding Achilles injuries in the NBA, reacts to Russell Westbrook potentially joining the Rockets, debates Bam Adebayo's all-time GOAT list, discusses Jalen Brunson's father-son rule, and reacts to Tony Allen calling LeBron James overrated. Subscribe to Nightcap presented by PrizePicks so you don’t miss out on any new drops! Download the PrizePicks app today and use code SHANNON to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup! Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/NI... 0:00 - Russel Westbrook to the Rockets?8:36 - Bam Adebayo's GOAT list18:48 - Brunson's father-son rule32:16 - Tony Allen calls LeBron overrated (Timestamps may vary based on advertisements.) #ClubSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Joe "King Iso" Johnson brings you the Best of Iso Takeover on Nightcap! Iso looks back on his Atlanta Hawks days with hilarious teammate stories featuring Jeff Teague and Josh Smith, talks with DC Young Fly about growing up in the church, and chops it up with Mike Bibby about the controversial Kings-Lakers series and his time in Atlanta. Subscribe to Nightcap presented by PrizePicks so you don’t miss out on any new drops! Download the PrizePicks app today and use code SHANNON to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup! Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/NI... 0:00 - Atlanta teammate stories with Jeff Teague and Josh Smith17:26 - DC Young Fly & Growing up in the church30:18 - Mike Bibby on Kings robbery & Hawks era42:33 - Research results on NBA achilles injuries (Timestamps may vary based on advertisements.) #ClubSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Beau Martonik sits down with Joel Burham of Whitetail Fit, who moved to Iowa, got his residency, turned down an invite to a phenomenal private farm, and hunted public ground and only public ground for the whole season to see what it would teach him. They get into the full self-filming rig Joel runs out of a saddle, the buck he figured at 160 that he had broadside at 20 yards and lost to the camera, the two public land giants he found that will never show up in a video, and what happened when he came to full draw on a three-and-a-half-year-old and let down. Joel also lays out the only test he uses to decide whether a deer is worth his tag, which has nothing to do with a score. Also covered: starting from zero with no hunting family, three miles deep on Kansas public on the last day of a 10-day hunt, hiring his brother as a cameraman and then telling him he'd outgrown the job, and why time is the one thing in hunting you can't shortcut. 00:00:00 — Intro 00:07:09 — Starting with no hunting family 00:12:04 — First deer off a lawn chair 00:15:22 — Where "Whitetail Fit" came from 00:19:57 — Three miles deep on Kansas public 00:22:16 — How fitness changes your access 00:38:13 — What this job really looks like 00:47:49 — The 160 at 20 yards he passed 00:58:28 — Hiring his brother, then letting go 01:11:16 — Self-filming rig for a saddle 01:16:38 — Bodies, lenses, and low light 01:29:56 — Arm height, ISO, shutter speed 01:39:10 — Iowa public land only 01:46:57 — The bucks that never made the film 01:49:56 — Pressure and older deer 01:54:43 — The 190 and a wind switch 02:01:29 — Full draw, then let down 02:10:00 — What makes you grab your bow 02:19:34 — Where to find Whitetail Fit Joel's IG: https://www.instagram.com/whitetail_fit/ Whitetail Fit YT: https://www.youtube.com/@WhitetailFit Instagram: @eastmeetswesthunt @beau.martonik Facebook: East Meets West Outdoors Shop Hunting Gear and Apparel: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/ YouTube: Beau Martonik - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJon93sYfu9HUMKpCMps3w Partner Discounts and Affiliate Links: https://www.eastmeetswesthunt.com/partners Amazon Influencer Page https://www.amazon.com/shop/beau.martonik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Astronomy Daily · S05E157 · “The Edge of Everything” · Monday 3 August 2026 In this episode • The largest galaxy, measured at last. Ultra-deep imaging of IC 1101 in the Abell 2029 cluster has traced its outer edge for the first time: an edge radius of ~260 kpc, a diameter near 520 kpc (~1.7 million light-years), and ~3.4 trillion solar masses in stars — about 17× the width of the Milky Way. Faint outer structures aligned with cluster X-ray disturbances show it is still accreting. Source: Marrero-de la Rosa et al., “How large can galaxies be? Ultra-deep imaging of IC 1101”, accepted A&A (arXiv:2607.15340, 16 Jul 2026); phys.org, 31 Jul 2026; The Debrief, 1 Aug 2026. • Hayabusa2's record asteroid flyby. JAXA confirmed (press conference 30 Jul) that its Hayabusa2 probe passed just 400 m from the surface of near-Earth asteroid Torifune on 5 July — 744 m from centre at >18,000 km/h — the closest asteroid flyby by any mission, plus the first-ever laser ranging of an asteroid during a flyby. Torifune proved to be a contact binary. Source: JAXA press conference, 30 Jul 2026; phys.org / Japan Today (AFP), 31 Jul 2026; autoevolution, 1 Aug 2026. • UK's first orbital launch on hold. Rocket Factory Augsburg de-stacked its RFA One at SaxaVord Spaceport (Unst, Shetland) after finding a vehicle issue during hot-fire test prep (announced 28 Jul). The certified launch window opens 10 August; a successful flight would be the first orbital launch from UK soil. Source: RFA statement (X), 28 Jul 2026; Space.com, 1 Aug 2026; Shetland Times, 28 Jul 2026. • Andromeda is winding down. A new Hubble study mapping ~200 million stars across two-thirds of Andromeda's disk finds star formation has declined over ~500 million years (from ~1 to ~0.2 solar masses/year), with the steepest drop in the last 40 million years — possibly linked to an interaction with satellite galaxy M32. Source: Williams et al., The Astrophysical Journal, 27 Jul 2026; NASA/STScI release, 27 Jul 2026. Skywatch — both hemispheres • Comet 10P/Tempel 2 — perihelion 2 Aug; closest approach to Earth tonight (3 Aug). Binoculars/small scope, dark skies. Best pre-dawn from the Southern Hemisphere; ~9:30–10:30 pm local for mid-northern latitudes before moonrise. • Moon near Saturn tonight (3 Aug) — naked-eye pairing, both hemispheres, up into dawn. • Mercury at greatest western elongation (2 Aug) — low eastern horizon ~1 hr before sunrise, toward Gemini; Mars higher. Better placed for northern observers. • Diary (2 days out): Falcon 9 upper stage (2025-010D) lunar impact near Einstein Crater, 5 Aug ~06:35 UTC — ~2:35 am EDT / 11:35 pm PDT (4 Aug); North America best-timed on the dark limb. Southern Hemisphere: ~4:35 pm AEST (daylight) — await orbiter after-images. • Looking ahead: 12 Aug total solar eclipse (Greenland/Iceland/Spain) + moonless Perseid peak + six-planet dawn alignment. View partial phases only through certified ISO 12312-2 filters. Links & follow • Website, back catalogue, news feed & newsletter: astronomydaily.io • Social: @AstroDailyPod · Part of the Bitesz.com Podcast NetworkBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support.Sponsor Details:Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN. To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn. You'll be glad you did!Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmailBecome a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click HereThis episode includes AI-generated content.
Send us Fan MailA breach can hit your headlines even when your own systems never get touched, and that's exactly why third-party risk management keeps showing up on the CISSP exam and in real incident reports. We walk through the Vimeo breach tied to its analytics vendor Anodot, where compromised vendor access and authentication tokens gave attackers a clean path to customer data. No video content or payment data was taken, but names, emails, and metadata exposure is still a trust and reputation problem that security teams have to own.From there, we zoom out to the bigger pattern behind modern supply chain security: attackers increasingly go after dependencies, CI/CD pipelines, shared developer tools, and widely used vendors because one compromise can cascade across hundreds of customers. We talk about how to reduce that exposure with a stronger TPRM program, including vendor risk tiering, continuous monitoring, SBOM thinking, and practical contractual controls like breach notification timelines, right to audit language, and clear subcontractor disclosure with flow-down requirements to address fourth-party risk.We also shift into CISSP Domain 1 rapid review mode: what the exam really wants when it asks about due diligence, evidence, and proportional risk decisions. You'll hear clean explanations of SOC 2 Type 1 vs SOC 2 Type 2, where ISO 27001 fits, why questionnaires like SIG are not proof, and which frameworks matter for third-party and supply chain risk management including NIST 800-161, ISO 27036, and NIST CSF 2.0. We close with practice scenarios that mirror common CISSP traps so you can spot them fast.Subscribe for more CISSP training, share this with a study partner, and leave a review so more security pros can find the show.Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don't miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
Men Are Under State of Emergency | Ern & Iso PodcastAre men facing a silent crisis?In this thought-provoking episode of the Ern & Iso Podcast, Ern and Iso dive into the growing conversation surrounding the modern struggles many men are experiencing. From the rise of the "Doomer" mindset to the search for validation, the duo explores why so many young men are feeling disconnected, discouraged, and uncertain about their future.The conversation examines how social media, unrealistic expectations, public rejection, comparison culture, and the pressure to succeed can shape a man's confidence and self-worth. Are young men being set up to believe they're already losing before life has truly begun? Or is this simply a new challenge that requires a different mindset?Ern and Iso also discuss the importance of purpose, resilience, accountability, and building confidence from within rather than relying on outside validation. This isn't about blaming anyone—it's about having an honest conversation on where men are today and what it will take to move forward.Join the discussion and let us know your thoughts in the comments.Topics Covered:The rise of the "Doomer" mentalityWhy some young men struggle with rejectionSocial media's impact on confidence and self-worthValidation vs. purposeComparison culture and mental healthBuilding resilience in today's worldAre men really in a crisis?
S05E155 · Friday 31 July 2026 · Astronomy Daily with Anna & Avery. Four stories and a both-hemispheres skywatch. Australian English. ① Asteroid (44) Nysa — the first three-lobed world, and its hidden moon ● trilobate body — three lobes joined by two narrow necks; a candidate “first” of its kind. ● A new ~1 km moon, S/2026 (44) 1, was found orbiting ≥170 km out — spotted using high-contrast imaging borrowed from exoplanet work, and confirmed moving across two observing runs. ● The moon lets astronomers weigh Nysa (mass → density), which should help decide between a genuine contact-trinary and a single, deeply indented body. ● Nysa is a bright, main-belt E-type (enstatite-rich) asteroid, ~75 km across, known since 1857. ● Source: Lowell Observatory / University of Arizona press release, 29 Jul 2026; study “Unmasking (44) Nysa: Evidence for a Trilobate Structure” (Minker et al.). Coverage: Space.com, Gizmodo, 29–30 Jul 2026. ② Mapping Alien Continents — a NASA concept to image an exoplanet's surface ● NASA's 2026 NIAC round funds 18 early-stage “visionary” concepts (~$175k each, 9 months). These are seed studies, not missions. ● Paul Stankus (Brookhaven) proposes “Mapping Alien Continents”: resolve the surface of an Earth-like exoplanet — continents, oceans — in visible light. ● Method: a novel “dynamic hierarchical nulling” interferometer to suppress starlight at 10¹⁰-to-1 contrast, then combine beams from two spacecraft ~100 km apart (optical VLBI-style imaging). ● Source: NASA “2026 Innovative Technology Concepts” release and NIAC selections (posted 21 Jul; consolidated release ~29 Jul 2026); Universe Today feature, 30 Jul 2026. ③ Solar-storm watch — CMEs inbound, minor-storm and aurora potential ● Two faint coronal mass ejections, plus coronal-hole solar wind, are set to give Earth glancing blows; forecasters flag possible G1 (minor) geomagnetic storms and auroras over the coming days. ● G1 means little grid impact but aurora visible at somewhat lower latitudes than usual — see the skywatch for where to look, both hemispheres. ● Source: NOAA SWPC (WSA-ENLIL model); EarthSky / The Sun Today, 30 Jul 2026. ④ ESCAPADE's family portrait of Earth and the Moon ● NASA's twin Mars orbiters (“Blue” and “Gold,” built by Rocket Lab) imaged Earth and the Moon as thin crescents in visible and thermal-infrared light from a loiter orbit near Sun–Earth L2. ● In infrared, Earth's night side glows with its own heat; the Moon's shadowed half is far colder — a calibration check before Mars. ● ESCAPADE's science goal (arrival Sept 2027): measure how the solar wind strips Mars's unshielded atmosphere — the payoff of today's solar-wind thread. ● Source: NASA (Goddard) image feature, ~25 Jul 2026 (images captured 3 Jul); NAU / phys.org; Universe Today, 29 Jul 2026. Skywatch — both hemispheres ● Bright waning-gibbous Moon (post-Buck-Moon, 29 Jul) washes out faint targets. ● Southern Delta Aquariids + Alpha Capricornids just past peak (SH-favoured; Moon-hampered). Perseids build to a near-moonless peak on the night of 12–13 Aug — prime for North America, low in the north for the SH. ● 12 Aug total solar eclipse: totality across Greenland / Iceland / Spain; partial for parts of northern North America and Europe. ISO 12312-2 eye protection required for any partial phase. ● Pre-dawn planets low in the east (Sydney and North American framing). Aurora watch for high latitudes both hemispheres if the storms land. ● Diary: a spent Falcon 9 upper stage (2025-010D) is predicted to hit the Moon near Einstein Crater on 5 Aug 2026, ~06:35 UTC (~2:34 a.m. ET). North America best-timed; telescope needed, Moon ~56% lit, target the limb dust plume. From Sydney the Moon is down at impact — rely on LRO after-images. Callback to E125/E147. Source: Fernando et al., arXiv 2607.14625.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support.Sponsor Details:Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN. To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn. You'll be glad you did!Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmailBecome a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click HereThis episode includes AI-generated content.
Puheenaiheen toinen perustaja Rami Kurimo kertoo, miksi kaksi hänen podcastinsa jaksoa katosi YouTubesta Euroopassa juuri silloin kun CSAM chat controlista käytiin kiivainta keskustelua. Tapaus näytti ensin sensuurilta, sillä toinen kadonneista jaksoista käsitteli nimenomaan EU:n massavalvontaa ja alustojen velvollisuutta poistaa sisältöä. Selitys löytyi lopulta YouTuben poliittisen mainonnan asetuksista, mutta prosessin läpinäkymättömyys nostaa esiin isomman kysymyksen siitä, miten pieni toimija pärjää automaattisen moderoinnin kanssa ilman näkyvyyttä ja vaikutusvaltaa. Jaksossa käydään läpi myös trusted flagger järjestelmä, päästä päähän salauksen tulevaisuus, väärien positiivisten löydösten riskit ja se, miksi ongelman ydin on materiaalin tuotannossa eikä tavallisten ihmisten viestinnässä. Lopuksi puhutaan Helsingin Sanomien esseestä, joka tuomitsi suomalaisen podcastkentän laitamediaksi ja tarjosi sille samalla parasta mahdollista mainosta.00:00 Rami Kurimo ja Puheenaihe esittäytyvät00:39 Kaksi jaksoa katosi YouTubesta Euroopassa02:52 Aikajana siitä mitä oikeasti tapahtui05:18 Iltasanomat ja Kvartal tarttuivat tapaukseen06:29 YouTuben selitys osoittautui loogiseksi07:07 Vaalipodin mainokset ja poliittisen mainonnan merkintä08:17 Syksyn 2025 sääntömuutos esti jaksot08:49 Mainosten leikkaaminen palautti jaksot heti10:07 Soft bänni on tehokas ja ärsyttävä12:11 Kaupallisen yhteistyön merkinnät ja valtamedia13:44 Trusted flaggerit Suomessa ja valvonnan valvonta15:23 Kuka valvoo valvojia16:26 Rikollinen materiaali leviää torverkossa17:51 Britannia osoittaa ettei EU:sta eroaminen riitä19:35 Päästä päähän salauksen nykytila21:18 Takaportti palvelisi myös rikollisia ja tiedustelupalveluita23:23 Väärien positiivisten löydösten vaara24:30 Isä lähetti lapsen kuvan lääkärille ja menetti tilinsä26:07 Alustan halvin ratkaisu on sulkea tili28:18 Tekoälyn tuottama materiaali eettisenä kysymyksenä31:07 Yläkouluun jaettu seksivalistuskirja ja sen ohjeet34:13 Ristiriita valvonnan ja kouluopetuksen välillä36:03 Hesarin moralisoiva essee ja laitamedian leima38:42 Moraaliset intuitiot suuntautuvat eri kohteisiin43:22 Essee on ilmaista mainosta podcasteille45:55 Mainoseurot ja vaikutusvalta siirtyvät uusille tekijöille48:21 Iso kuva lainsäädännöstä ja poliisivaltiosta51:40 Entä jos työkalut päätyvät vastapuolelle53:30 Petri Kajanderin menetetty tili54:59 Varmuuskopiot ja yksittäisen pisteen riski55:48 Sisäpiirissä Mac ja tietoturvaKatso Sisäpirijaksot ja liity Samanthan luo Neuvottelija Sisäpiirin WhatsApp-kanavalle
FedRAMP has changed before. What makes the Consolidated Rules for 2026 different is that the dates are on the calendar and the fence sitters have run out of runway. Jason Ford, Co-Founder and CEO of Steel Patriot Partners, has been inside the program since Rev 3 in 2013. Michael Parisi, Chief Growth Officer, comes at it from the business side. Together they map what changes and, more usefully, what it means for the decision in front of a provider right now. So what actually changes? The program consolidates into two paths, 20X and Rev 5. FedRAMP Ready moves to legacy status. Class A, B, and C pipelines open across a thirty to sixty day window, mandatory adoption arrives January 1, and new Rev 5 certifications close on June 11, 2027. Authorized becomes certified. Jason Ford also points out where the rules live: fedramp.gov, hosted in GitHub, which means they move with a commit. Reading them once is not tracking them. Why did FedRAMP need to change at all? Michael Parisi frames it as a supply problem. Agencies and primes have been working from a limited and aging set of technologies while better tools sat outside a process that was slow, rudimentary, and expensive. The action was warranted. His follow-up question gets less airtime: if the process moved faster, did responsibility move with it, and does the stakeholder now holding that due diligence know it yet? The engineering shift is real and it is the part most teams see coming. Jason Ford describes RMF thinking giving way to continuous DevSecOps, proving compliance in real time rather than at a point in time. Vulnerability remediation is where the compression bites. CISA's updated guidance drops severity score as the driver in favor of stepped prioritization, and windows that used to run 30, 60, and 90 days now land closer to three to twenty-one. What does this cost a business past the budget line? Time and capacity. 20X is faster than a Rev 5 process that once ran eighteen months, but faster is not instant. Retraining a couple hundred users inside a thousand-person organization is not a small endeavor, and if the transition eats half of the organization's capacity for a year, that is half as much capacity aimed at the business paying for it. Jason Ford is not arguing against the move. He is arguing that disruption belongs inside the decision. Then there is the internal work almost nobody has started. Mapping an existing Rev 5 ATO scope into a new certification level is not clear-cut, and past the mapping, marketing and sales both need re-education. Michael Parisi describes building a translation layer for customers: here is what we provided before, here is what it is now, and this change came from the program rather than from any reduction in assurance. Roughly half the time, Steel Patriot Partners tells organizations not to pursue certification at all. Michael Parisi treats that as one of the more valuable things the firm does. The opposite failure shows up just as often, with companies preparing to spend heavily on 20X because it sounds quicker and cheaper, when the agency or prime they are chasing expects a certification level. A lower bar only helps if the buyer accepts it. Where should a business start? With the business conversation. Michael Parisi notes the answer does not have to be yes or no today; it can be a maybe with defined trigger points. Jason Ford closes on posture: come with an open mind, and do not hand a multi-year commitment to a language model whose guardrails and training are not built for that call. Or, shorter: don't wait, and don't go it alone. Steel Patriot Partners built a three-question starting point for that first conversation at https://www.steelpatriotpartners.com/find-your-path. This is a Brand Story. A Brand Story is a ~35-40 minute in-depth conversation designed to tell the complete story of the guest, their company, and their vision. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#full GUESTS Jason Ford, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Steel Patriot Partners On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-ford-5ab206/ Michael Parisi, Chief Growth Officer, Steel Patriot Partners On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-parisi-4009b2261/ RESOURCES Learn more about Steel Patriot Partners: https://www.steelpatriotpartners.com/ FedRAMP's Consolidated Rules for 2026: What It Means for Cloud Providers: https://resources.steelpatriotpartners.com/fedramps-consolidated-rules-for-2026 Find Your Path, a three-question starting point for ISO, CMMC, and FedRAMP decisions: https://www.steelpatriotpartners.com/find-your-path Complimentary ROI Workshop: https://www.steelpatriotpartners.com/roi-workshop Are you interested in telling your story? ▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full ▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight ▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight KEYWORDS jason ford, michael parisi, steel patriot partners, sean martin, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, fedramp, fedramp consolidated rules for 2026, fedramp 20x, rev 5, fedramp certification classes, cloud service provider compliance, federal compliance, cisa vulnerability remediation, continuous monitoring, devsecops, ato, 3pao, govramp, cmmc, grc, federal marketplace, compliance roi Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
What would happen if your Risk Management File disappeared tomorrow?Would your medical device suddenly become less safe?For many organizations, the answer is probably no—because the file was created to document decisions after they were made, rather than guiding those decisions in the first place.In this episode of the Medical Device Made Easy Podcast, we challenge the traditional view of risk management and explore why ISO 14971 should be treated as a continuous decision-making framework—not simply a regulatory requirement.What You'll LearnIs Your Risk Management File Driving Design?Risk management should begin at the earliest stages of product development.Instead of documenting completed work, it should actively influence design choices, identify hazards, evaluate risks, and verify that risk control measures are effective throughout development.Common Signs Your Risk File Is Becoming FictionMany organizations unintentionally weaken their risk management process by:Reusing generic hazard lists from previous projectsCompleting risk documentation just before certificationFailing to connect hazards with design decisionsTreating the Risk Management File as a static document instead of a living processRisk Management Is a Cross-Functional ResponsibilityEffective risk management isn't owned solely by Quality or Regulatory Affairs.Engineering, Clinical Affairs, Manufacturing, Service, Post-Market Surveillance, and Customer Support all generate valuable information that should continuously improve the organization's understanding of product risk.Why Traceability MattersStrong traceability allows organizations to answer critical questions:Why was this hazard identified?Which design decision addressed it?How was the risk control verified?Does new PMS or complaint data change our understanding of the risk?Would we make the same decision today?When these connections are visible, risk management becomes a practical engineering tool rather than a compliance exercise.Keeping Your Risk Management File AliveCertification is not the end of risk management.Complaints, vigilance reports, supplier changes, software updates, PMCF findings, literature reviews, and post-market surveillance all provide new information that should feed back into your risk assessment.Organizations that continuously update their Risk Management File are better equipped to identify emerging risks, improve product safety, and support long-term regulatory compliance.Key TakeawayA Risk Management File should never exist simply to satisfy auditors or Notified Bodies.Its real purpose is to demonstrate how risk-based thinking influences every important design decision throughout the product lifecycle.The strongest organizations don't maintain a perfect document.They maintain a living risk management process—one that evolves as new knowledge is gained and continuously helps make medical devices safer for patients.Social Media to followMonir El Azzouzi Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/melazzouziTwitter: https://twitter.com/elazzouzimPinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/easymedicaldeviceInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/easymedicaldeviceThis podcast is hosted by Podcastics, the easiest platform to create and publish your podcast.
In part two of this Quality Hub: Chatting with ISO Experts conversation, host Xavier Francis continues the discussion on supplier resilience and quality with Jutta Bangs from the Tennessee APEX Accelerator. This episode focuses on what organizations should document in their quality management system when disruptions force them to use alternate suppliers, substitute materials, or expedite purchasing decisions. Edith explains why documentation is critical for auditors, customer expectations, government contracts, and continuous improvement, while also sharing practical ways businesses can strengthen supplier management without overcomplicating their QMS. From mapping critical suppliers and building qualified backup options to adding resilience into supplier scorecards and more, this episode highlights how organizations can be proactive, prepared, and better positioned when the next disruption occurs. Helpful Resources: Jutta Bangs: jutta.bangs@tennessee.edu National APEX Accelerator Alliance (NAPEX): www.napex.us How is ISO 9001 Implemented?: https://www.thecoresolution.com/how-is-iso-9001-implemented For All Things ISO 9001:2015: https://www.thecoresolution.com/iso-9001-2015 Contact us at 866.354.0300 or email us at info@thecoresolution.com A Plethora of Articles: https://www.thecoresolution.com/free-learning-resources ISO 9001 Consulting: https://www.thecoresolution.com/iso-consulting
Astronomy Daily · S05E153 · Wednesday 29 July 2026. Four stories from the frontier of space and astronomy, plus a both-hemispheres look at the sky — and news of our brand-new website. In this episode • Betelgeuse is not alone. ESO's VLT/SPHERE has captured the clearest direct image yet of Betelgeuse B, the long-suspected companion to the famous red supergiant — ending a roughly century-long search. Published 28 July 2026 in Astronomy & Astrophysics (Montargès, Boccaletti et al.). The companion is more massive than predicted (≈2–3 solar masses), likely paces Betelgeuse's ~6-year brightness cycle, and may eventually spiral into the supergiant. • Swift catches a wandering black hole. TDE 2025abcr — the most off-centre tidal disruption event ever seen — reveals a ~1-million-solar-mass “wandering” black hole ~30,000 light-years from its galaxy's core, ~750 million light-years away. First flagged by the Zwicky Transient Facility (Nov 2025) and pinned down with NASA's Swift; an AI sifted ~500,000 nightly flashes to find it. Published 27 July 2026 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (Stein et al.; Carney et al.). • Roman is fuelled for launch. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope completed fuelling on 25 July (≈290 gallons of hydrazine) and holds its mission-preview briefing today — one month from a 30 August launch, roughly eight months ahead of schedule. Roman will survey ~50× as much sky as Hubble in five years, probe dark energy, and is expected to find 100,000+ exoplanets via microlensing. • Swift's rescue mission is in trouble. Katalyst's LINK servicing spacecraft — launched 3 July to boost the decaying Swift observatory — began spinning over the weekend; two of three reaction wheels are non-operable, with some cold-gas thruster degradation. LINK remains powered and in contact; the team is using its electric (xenon) thrusters to arrest the spin before deciding, with NASA, whether to proceed. Developing story — details accurate as of recording. • Skywatch. Full Buck Moon tonight (29 July); Jupiter at solar conjunction; Southern Delta Aquariids favour the Southern Hemisphere but are washed out by the Moon this year; Alpha Capricornid fireballs are the pick for both hemispheres; the Perseids peak on the moonless night of 12–13 August alongside a total solar eclipse (Greenland/Iceland/Spain; partial for parts of Europe and North America). Never view the partial phases without ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses. Sources • ESO release eso2611 & Astronomy & Astrophysics, Montargès, Boccaletti et al., “VLT/SPHERE imaging of the candidate companion of Betelgeuse” (28 Jul 2026). • NASA Swift / The Astrophysical Journal Letters — TDE 2025abcr wandering-black-hole discovery (27 Jul 2026); UNC-Chapel Hill release. • NASA — Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope fuelling & launch-preview updates (25–29 Jul 2026). • NASA Swift blog — “Commissioning Update for Spacecraft to Boost NASA's Swift” (28 Jul 2026); Katalyst Space Technologies. • EarthSky, NASA, American Meteor Society, timeanddate — meteor showers, Buck Moon, Jupiter conjunction, 12 Aug eclipse. New — astronomydaily.io Our new website is live: full back catalogue, a continuously-updating space-news feed, listener reviews (read and leave your own), and a daily newsletter sign-up. Got a question or a story tip? Drop us a note — and tell us what you think of the new site.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support.Sponsor Details:Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN. To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn. You'll be glad you did!Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmailBecome a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click HereThis episode includes AI-generated content.
Welcome to RIMScast. Your host is Justin Smulison, Business Content Manager at RIMS, the Risk and Insurance Management Society. In this episode, Justin interviews Colette Cummins, Chief Risk Officer of Inland Fisheries Ireland and a RIMS-CRMP Commissioner, on what it's like to be a CRO in an organization whose mission is protecting a national natural resource. Justin invites Colette to share her career journey, and she tells how she developed in credit risk management, audit, and enterprise risk management, and how she landed in the public sector, protecting the environment while guiding Inland Fisheries Ireland toward building a solid risk framework. Colette speaks of the surprises she found in the public sector, and the impressive risk mindset and commitment she finds at IFI. Listen for principles of building out risk registers and a risk framework, whether in the private sector or a public sector agency. Key Takeaways: [:01] About RIMS and RIMScast. [:16] About this episode of RIMScast. Our guest today is Collete Cummins. She is the Chief Risk Officer for Inland Fisheries Ireland and a RIMS-CRMP Commissioner. We're going to have a great dialog. But first… [:42] RIMS-CRMP Workshop. We are delighted to announce that on August 27th and 28th, RIMS President Manny Padilla will be leading the two-day in-person workshop at St. John's University at 101 Astor Place in New York City. A link to the registration is in this episode's show notes. [1:02] RIMS-CRMP Virtual Workshops. RIMS will partner with PARIMA for the RIMS-CRMP Exam Prep on September 1st and 2nd. Registration links are in this episode's show notes. [1:12] On the webinars page, you will see a two-part series hosted by the RIMS Membership Department. The "Classroom to Career" webinar series highlights how RIMS equips students with the knowledge, skills, and connections needed to thrive in risk management careers. [1:28] Participants will gain insights into industry trends, career pathways, and practical tools that help them confidently step into the evolving world of risk management after graduation. These sessions will be hosted on September 1st and 9th. [1:41] These sessions are member exclusives and are complimentary for RIMS members, of course. So, if you are interested in becoming a member, this would be the time. Visit RIMS.org/membership. [1:51] RIMS is back on YouTube. Our handle is @RIMSOfficialChannel. We've got plenty of videos there, including RIMScast, RIMScast Canada video podcasts, and other informative and entertaining content from RIMS. Subscribe to the channel today! [2:08] On with the Show! Our guest today is Colette Cummins. She is the Chief Risk Officer for Inland Fisheries Ireland. The IFI is the dedicated state agency for protecting, managing, and conserving Ireland's inland fisheries and sea angling resources. [2:26] Colette is the agency's first CRO, but she's not new to risk management. We're going to hear about her career journey and why she feels that this position was custom-made for her, combining her love for environmental awareness with her risk management knowledge. [2:42] Colette is also a RIMS-CRMP Commissioner, and on September 24th, you can hear from her directly, along with Elliott Long, another RIMS-CRMP Commissioner, in the informational session, "A Conversation with RIMS-CRMP Commissioners Who Hold the Credential." [2:58] That's a free informational session. Visit RIMS.org/CertificationWeek for more information. A link is in this episode's show notes. But we're here to talk with Colette about her fascinating career and risk philosophies. Let's get to it! [3:13] Interview! Colette Cummins, Welcome to RIMScast! [3:28] Colette was told once that she is excessively optimistic. She's very positive. She took it as a compliment. [4:18] Colette started fresh out of university in credit analysis and credit risk management. She worked in a few financial services organizations. It gave her a taste for risk management at a high level. It was around portfolio analysis and the credit history of customers. [4:51] The role Colette was in wound down, and she was looking to move into a different area in the company, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, in the financial services subsidiary. An opportunity came up to work in internal audit. She decided to try it for a year. She stayed in it for 15 years. [5:32] In the middle of those 15 years, Colette had an interim stint in Operational Risk Management for a year and a half, and she loved it. [5:47] Colette says, in Operational Risk, you're seeing down at a tactical level how to manage and monitor risk. It was very much around risk monitoring. [6:01] Colette explains why she stayed in internal audit for 15 years. Ten years were spent in various internal audit management roles in the financial services subsidiary. It was a tough time for HPE in terms of meeting the new regulatory challenges in Ireland and Europe for financial services. [6:41] Colette was asked to take on the Head of Internal Audit role. She did that for five years. She went into Internal Audit for one year in 2008. In 2015, she worked in Operational Risk. In 2017, she was asked to come back to take over as Head of Internal Audit. [7:11] It was a challenging situation because new EU regulations were coming in for banks and financial services businesses. It was a lot of pressure to meet these. There was a lot of scrutiny from Irish regulators. It was a challenging environment for Internal Audit. [7:53] When Colette moved in as Head of Internal Audit, it was a pivotal role in terms of steering the organization through that regulatory time. It was a great learning experience and very helpful now that she's in a public sector role. [8:09] Colette says, the whole time she was Head of Internal Audit, she was thinking, "How do I get back to Risk? How do I get out of here?" She loved Operational Risk. [8:27] Colette networked heavily within the organization. She got the opportunity to move out of Financial Services up into the global HPE organization as an Enterprise Risk Manager. She got that role through networking. She enjoyed that ERM role and did it for about five years. [9:26] Colette says it was a strategic role. She was working with the heads of each business unit, reviewing their risks. It had a very heavy emphasis on reporting to the audit committee and the board on what was happening in risk management in the business units. [9:58] Colette didn't feel as if she was effecting change or driving new strategies within the organization, but she learned a huge amount about negotiating with senior management and a lot about the fundamentals of risk management. [10:18] For the last year or two of her role, Colette wondered what she was doing there. She had a sense of wanting to stay in risk management but wanting to do something different, maybe something more value-add and less commercially driven. [10:39] Colette says towards the end of 2025, HPE announced it was cutting resources and implementing cost-cutting initiatives. As part of that, her role was made redundant. At first, it was a big upheaval and quite a shock after 22 years with the organization. [11:03] Colette says that upheaval turned into a great opportunity. It was the push she needed to ask herself where she wanted to go and what she wanted to do. It was an opportunity to try something completely different. [11:28] Colette says she didn't know anybody in the public sector. She had no contacts. But in Ireland, you cannot in any way canvass for jobs in the public sector. Everything is heavily regulated with very strict anti-corruption regulations. [11:54] Colette says she had no knowledge of the organization. She had no intention of applying for a role for at least six months. But she started looking at what was out there. She was going to put some time into development and building out her CV and getting some qualifications. [12:33] Colette says she had been thinking she would like to do something in the public sector; something more meaningful and less commercially-driven. She wanted to do something with more autonomy, more impact, and more control over risk at the organisation. [12:54] Colette says, one Wednesday afternoon, she was looking, and she saw this job that had just come up. It's in exactly the right location, it's public sector, and it's IFI, an environmental body. Colette said, "Wow! This is it!" Forgetting her six months off, she had to go for it. [13:19] Colette interviewed for the job when she hadn't yet finished her old role at HPE. She was hugely busy, trying to wrap up her role and interviewing. The interview process for the public sector in Ireland is extremely rigorous and tough. She was successful in the role. [13:43] Colette says she just had a couple of weeks off and then went straight into it in March of 2026. She has been CRO at Inland Fisheries Ireland for four months now. [14:06] Colette says IFI is the state organization that is responsible for protecting the fish stock in Ireland. Ireland is a country with a lot of waterways. IFI is responsible for protecting the fish in 45,000 miles of rivers, 128,000 hectares of lakes, and 3,500 miles of shoreline. [14:43] It's doing everything to protect and restore the fish stock in those areas. Historically, the organization was very much about protection, preventing fishermen from overfishing and from fishing illegally, especially protected species. IFI has a substantial staff who patrol the rivers. [15:17] Now IFI is working on pollution, reacting to any pollution episodes and ensuring that they're investigated and stopped. Colette says that prevention measures sit with a different state body. The Environmental Protection Agency works on the prevention of pollution. [15:41] Colette says because the IFI has staff on the ground, it will see pollution coming in, react to it, and get in touch with the EPA to say, We've seen something coming into this river at this location. We need your team out here to source and stop it. [16:08] The IFI staff on the ground takes samples of the water and has them ready for when the EPA team comes to look at it. Another huge element of what the IFI does is restoring the habitat and creating the perfect environment for the fish. They research how the stock is developing. [16:35] The IFI research teams go out and do things like electrofishing, where they stun the fish for a few seconds to take a scale from the fish, test it, and work out the genetic trail of the fish and where they've come from. There's a huge amount of information they take from that. [16:58] The IFI works on the rivers, as well. Salmon, in particular, always go back to where they spawned. You need to keep that route open for them. If a barrier, like a dam, has been built, the IFI team works with construction companies to remove those. [17:19] The IFI has a wide series of activities: patrolling, protection, pollution, habitat restoration, and research. Colette is sure risk professionals hearing this are saying, That's a lot of risks! [17:37] Justin points out that the IFI covers thousands of miles. It's not just the particulars of the job but also the volume and area it has to cover. [18:03] Colette says the other element is that fishing or angling is part of Ireland's tourist industry. The IFI promotes fishing, without overfishing, obviously, and supports and partners with the local fishing organizations. [18:28] A Quick Break! Many fantastic RIMS events are coming up in 2026. You can register now for the Second Annual RIMS Texas Regional Conference, which will be held from August 10th through the 12th at the Grand Hyatt on the San Antonio River Walk. [18:44] Visit RIMS.org/Events for registration information. The hotel cutoff date was July 10th. Reservations may still be made after the hotel cutoff date, subject to availability; however, the negotiated group rate is no longer guaranteed, so reserve now. [19:00] The 11th Annual Chicagoland Risk Forum will return to the Old Post Office on Thursday, September 24th, 2026. Visit ChicagolandRiskForum.org for more information. [19:11] The RIMS Western Regional Conference will be held from October 4th through the 7th in Seattle, Washington. The agenda is live, and registration is open. Visit RIMSWesternRegional.com and the link in this episode's show notes for more information. [19:28] Save the dates: October 18th through the 21st. We will be in Quebec City to celebrate the 50th Live RIMS Canada Conference. Booth sales are open, and sponsorship opportunities are still available. Advance registration is open now. [19:44] Visit RIMSCanadaConference.ca for more information. Also, remember to check out RIMS.org/Canada for our spinoff show, RIMScast Canada, hosted by National Conference Committee Chair, Aaron Lukoni. [19:59] The RIMS ERM Conference 2026 will be held on November 19th and 20th in Columbus, Ohio. Registration is now open. [20:08] An announcement seeking nominations for the RIMS Global ERM Award of Distinction will be made public in July. Visit RIMS.org/ERM2026. [20:19] We're already looking to RISKWORLD 2027, which will be held over four days in New Orleans, Louisiana, from April 18th through the 21st! The call for session proposals is now live and will stay active through August 21st. [20:34] RIMS members can exclusively register by September 4th for the best rate. And get first access to the hotel block. Hotel reservations open on October 28th, ahead of public registration. Sitting this out is the real risk! The link to registration is in this episode's show notes. [20:54] Let's Return to Our Interview with Inland Fisheries CRO and RIMS-CRMP Commissioner Colette Cummins! [21:05] Justin comments that fish is a critical food source, so IFI has to make sure that they're clean, healthy, and they keep repopulating. Colette agrees but says that it's less about food and more about environmental protection. [21:23] Colette says some species have been reduced a huge amount in the last number of years because of things like pollution, habitat destruction, etc. It's really about environmental protection, restoring that stock, and bringing it back to where it should be for a natural balance. [21:42] Colette says her CRO role is new at IFI. That's what made it even more exciting for her. She says, when she came in, it was basically a blank sheet. IFI had dealt with risk by using a third party to give them a risk management model and some training. [22:10] Colette says the IFI was trying to work with that in-house, without any risk management expertise. It brought in a bit of a risk mindset, but essentially, Colette had a clean sheet to start with. She came in in March, and now she's building out the risk register. [22:36] Colette's first task was to design the risk framework. Colette loves risk management and has done lots of various elements of it, but she's never had complete autonomy, where she was driving change in the organization. [22:55] By full autonomy, Colette means she owns everything. Anything that happens to do with risk comes to her. [23:01] Up until now, Colette's role has been designing the framework: establishing how the organization is going to manage risk, building that out, getting people on board with that framework. It's split into six departments within the organization. [23:29] Each head of that department, or ELT member, will own their risk register, or their list of risks. Colette is working closely with them to ensure they have all their risks listed within that register and that they fully understand them. [23:48] Colette is looking at their controls and helping them devise new controls, looking at how the risk matches the risk appetite of the organization, and working with the next level of management beneath them to help them develop their risk registers to report up to the ELT. [24:40] Colette says IFI had been trying to recruit a CRO for some time. She wishes she had known! She would have applied last year. She just happened to see it. The existing model wasn't working. There was a real need. [25:00] The audit committee and board were saying they weren't happy. They said they needed to see risk management alive in the organization. Colette had to dive straight in, hit the ground running, and start building it out straightaway. It was exactly the challenge she was looking for. [25:18] Colette says it's so good to have that autonomy and responsibility, but also accountability. She is completely accountable for everything that happens with risk. Colette gets each member of the ELT to develop their risk register and report that up to the audit committee. [25:45] If anybody is doing anything where they want to think about risk, they talk to Colette. It's not complicated. They don't go to somebody else. Everybody knows, if it's got the word "risk," they come to Colette. Colette says the full visibility of everything is great. [26:19] Colette says she's starting with a very simplistic model to build the registers. She says it's drawn more from ISO, but it's a very simplistic model to get the organization started. Colette moved from a private-sector global IT company to the public sector. [26:56] The one thing that is challenging is that things move much slower in government. It moves much slower, and that's probably even more so in Ireland than in Europe and maybe than in the U.S. [27:16] You could come in and see this is the change that is needed, and think you could go ahead and effect that change within a couple of weeks? Oh, no you don't! You need to take everything slowly and get the right approvals and authorizations, etc. [27:29] Colette says she is starting with a really simplistic model: set out your risks, set out your controls, set out your mitigating actions, and then, we're going to get the organization working on that with that framework. [27:43] Colette hopes to do it within six months, but knowing the public sector, it could be a year. Then start building in other elements to it to make it a more mature and sophisticated framework. [28:19] Every change has to be approved by the Audit and Risk Committee (ARC). If Colette wants to make a small tweak in the existing framework, it goes back to the Audit and Risk Committee, which meets every three months. [28:51] Colette presented to the ARC in June. She presented how she wanted to move forward. There was no question. She knew they were going to approve it. She couldn't just go ahead and put the framework in place. [29:08] It needs to go through the protocols and have the conversation with the ARC and just take it nice and slow to effect any change. That is one challenge that's different for Colette. But otherwise, she can bring all of her experience from different areas and use every bit of it. [29:37] One More Quick Break! RIMS has launched RIMS, The Foundation for Risk ManagementTM. The Foundation is dedicated to shaping the future of the profession. Contribute to strengthen the global risk management community and invest in the future of the industry. [29:57] The Foundation also supports the Spencer Educational Foundation but has a different mission. The Foundation focuses on providing opportunities for those professionals who have already decided to enter risk management and are just getting started. [30:11] You can learn more about the Foundation by visiting RIMS.org/FRM. While you're there, be sure to check out information about the Susan Meltzer Scholarship Fund, which was established to honor Ms. Meltzer, who was RIMS President in 1999 and 2000. [30:30] Susan Meltzer was a cherished RIMS President and contributed so much to RIMS and the greater risk community. Learn more at RIMS.org/FRM. [30:39] Let's Return to Our Interview with Colette Cummins! [30:53] Colette Cummins is speaking with us today from County Kildare, about 30 miles outside Dublin, Ireland. The IFI offices are on the edge of Dublin, the capital of Ireland. Colette says the land is actually greener and more beautiful than the travel brochures could describe. [31:30] Colette says Ireland is full of rich waterways, which keeps her in a job. She lives near Dublin but is originally from the Southwest of Ireland, which is by far the most beautiful. The coastline is stunning. It's where most Irish go on holidays. It's gorgeous. [32:00] Colette says the accent in the Southwest of Ireland is different. Colette's husband from the middle of Ireland requests subtitles when he visits her family in the Southwest. Colette describes the difference between the accents in the South and North of Ireland. [33:05] Colette says the IFI Corporate Risk Register has generic risks around AI, cyber, training, and resources. [33:33] One of their biggest risks is health and safety. Staff are going out and patrolling rivers. They will sometimes come across fishermen who are happily overfishing and not keen to meet a patrolling officer who tells them they shouldn't be taking all this fish and depleting the stocks. [34:08] There is a health and safety risk with the patrolling officer being out on a river on boats. There is a health and safety risk in meeting an acrimonious and adversarial fisherman. [34:28] Because IFI does research, they have staff in labs, using high-tech equipment, with a health and safety risk. They have engineers looking at the rivers and habitats and maybe some constructions in the rivers that need to be removed. They have a health and safety risk. [34:37] These are new risks and things for Colette to get her head around. How do we do this? How do we manage that? And the other side is regulation. There are a lot of different regulations that impact IFI. [35:22] Colette says, In the public sector, your reputation is critically important, because you're the face of the state. Reputation is an impact factor you need to build into every risk. If IFI does something wrong, it could end up in the national media the day after. IFI uses taxpayers' money. [36:15] Colette says another huge category of risk for IFI is procurement, ensuring they are using taxpayers' money in the right way and not misusing it. [36:50] Colette says that prioritizing risks comes back to the goals. In procurement, there is the risk of spending money in a way that's not compliant. There is also the risk that there are too many procurement controls and the business can't move fast enough or do what it needs to do. [37:24] Colette says it comes to the organizational goals. What is the impact on the organizational goals? Which risk is going to have a greater detrimental impact on the organization's mission? One caveat: the health and well-being of the staff override everything. [37:55] Health and safety risk trumps everything. IFI would be completely averse to any risk that will impact the health and safety of the staff. Health and safety trumps every other risk. [38:16] Justin says he and Colette met recently for the RIMS-CRMP series where everyone can see her on September 24th. Justin says Colette is very positive and upbeat and speaks about her role with a lot of enthusiasm and joviality. [38:39] Colette says there are 330 people in IFI. It's not commercially driven, so a lot of people are at IFI because they love the work. For some people Colette works with, it's a vocation. They would nearly do the same job without being paid because they have such passion for it. [39:11] Colette met with the research team on site at the rivers to get a better understanding and just to see the passion they have for the job. Using her risk knowledge to help them do their jobs better and to help them protect themselves from risks was rewarding and enjoyable to Colette. [39:45] Colette says being able to use her experience across the organization is just fantastic. Colette has a lot of different experience, and to bring it all together and use it every day when she is challenged with a new task is fantastic and very rewarding. [40:27] Colette says this is the field staff's very busy time because this is when all the fishing is happening, this is when pollution is more likely to happen, and when the temperatures go up, the fish are under pressure, so you have to try and protect the waters. [40:42] Colette says the research staff was delighted to hear that someone was coming down from the head office to go out and make the time to really understand the organization. They were very anxious to show her everything. There is such pride in the organization. [41:!5] Justin says a lot of the risk professionals listening are in the private sector, and he asks Colette what would most surprise them about risk management in a public environmental organization. [41:40] Colette says a lot of the differences in the public sector are what you would expect: things move slower, and the protocols. [41:49] What surprised Colette the most is what a strong risk mindset they have. There's a good understanding of risk already, even through the layers of management. They can look at what's going on, the processes, and the activities and ask, "What are the risks here?" [42:16] There is also a commitment to risk that Colette was not expecting. She was expecting to meet a research manager who wanted to research and leave risks to Colette. She hasn't had that anywhere. They all ask her to talk with them about their risks. "Am I managing them right?" [42:39] Colette says there is knowledge and commitment, and that has been the biggest surprise for her. It obviously makes her job a lot easier. [42:48] Justin says this is excellent. It has been such a pleasure to meet you these last couple of days. We're going to see you during RIMS Certification week on September 24th. [42:57] Justin says, You will be co-hosting the informational session, "A Conversation with RIMS-CRMP Commissioners Who Hold the Credential." You're such a breath of fresh air. We really appreciate your contributions, and I learned a lot speaking with you today and yesterday. [41:12] Justin says, You have a fascinating job, and I hope that you have a chance to attend a RIMS event, maybe lead a session, and connect with our live audiences, as well. Colette says she would love to at some stage in the future. [43:32] Special thanks again to Colette Cummins of Inland Fisheries Ireland for joining us here on RIMScast. [43:38] You can hear Colette again on September 24th during RIMS Certification Week for the special informational session, "A Conversation with RIMS-CRMP Commissioners Who Hold the Credential." [43:49] That session will be held at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. Visit RIMS.org/CertificationWeek. The link is also in this episode's show notes. We've got sessions on the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th of September. We look forward to seeing you there. [44:05] Plug Time! Become a RIMS member and get access to the tools, thought leadership, and network you need to succeed. Visit RIMS.org/membership or email membershipdept@RIMS.org for more information. [44:22] Risk Knowledge is the RIMS searchable content library that provides relevant information for today's risk professionals. Materials include RIMS executive reports, survey findings, contributed articles, industry research, benchmarking data, and more. [44:39] For the best reporting on the profession of risk management, read Risk Management Magazine at RMMagazine.com. It is written and published by the best minds in risk management. [44:52] Justin Smulison is the Business Content Manager at RIMS. Please remember to subscribe to RIMScast on your favorite podcasting app. You can email us at Content@RIMS.org. [43:05] Practice good risk management, stay safe, and thank you again for your continued support! Links: RIMS Certification Week: Sept. 21‒24 | Complimentary For All RIMS Texas Regional Conference 2026 | Aug. 10‒12 in San Antonio | Register Now! Spencer Educational Foundation's 2026 Funding Their Future Gala | Sept. 17, 2026 RISKWORLD 2027 Registration | RIMS members can lock in 2026 rates now through Sept. 4 | Education Content Submission ChicagoLand Risk Forum | Sept. 24, 2026 RIMS Western Regional Conference — Oct. 4‒7, 2026 | Seattle, WA | Register Today. RIMS Canada Conference — Oct. 18‒21, 2026 | Quebec City | www.rimscanadaconference.ca | Advance Registration Open | Sponsorship Opportunities Available RIMS ERM Conference 2026 | November 19‒20 in Columbus, Ohio | Registration Now Open! | www.rims.org/ERM2026 RIMS, the Foundation for Risk Management Spencer Educational Foundation — Scholarships and Grants | Open Calls and Timelines. RIMS Now RIMS-Certified Risk Management Professional (RIMS-CRMP) | Insights Video Series Featuring Joe Milan! The Strategic and Enterprise Risk Center RIMS Diversity Equity Inclusion Council RIMS-CRMP Stories RIMScast Canada — Episodes Now Live RISK PAC | RIMS Advocacy RIMScast on YouTube! RIMS Risk Management Magazine | Contribute | Q2 2026 Issue Now Available Sponsor RIMScast — Sales@RIMS.org Fisheriesireland.ie/ Upcoming RIMS-CRMP Virtual Workshops: RIMS-CRMP Exam Prep Workshop — Live In NY — Aug 27‒28! RIMS-CRMP Exam Prep with PARIMA | Sept 1‒2 Full RIMS-CRMP Prep Course Schedule See the full calendar of RIMS Virtual Workshops Upcoming RIMS Webinars: RIMS.org/Webinars "RIMS Student Series: Classroom to Career Part 1" | Sept 1 "RIMS Student Series: Classroom to Career Part 2" | Sept 9 Related RIMScast Episodes: "Reputation and Defense with Jeff McKissack" "Choosing the Challenge with Johnell Holly" "Supply Chain Integrity and Sustainability with Nicole Sherwin of EcoVadis" Sponsored RIMScast Episodes: "48 Hours From a Storm: What to Do Before A Hurricane Strikes" | Sponsored by Global Risk Consultants, a TÜV SÜD Company (New!) "AI-Scale, Risk Ready: Engineering Controls for the New Data Center Boom" | Sponsored by Global Risk Consultants, a TÜV SÜD Company "Facing Into Risk: Navigating the New Risk Landscape" (New!) | Sponsored by AXA XL "Secondary Perils, Major Risks: The New Face of Weather-Related Challenge" | Sponsored by AXA XL "The ART of Risk: Rethinking Risk Through Insight, Design, and Innovation" | Sponsored by Alliant "Mastering ERM: Leveraging Internal and External Risk Factors" | Sponsored by Diligent "Cyberrisk: Preparing Beyond 2025" | Sponsored by Alliant "The New Reality of Risk Engineering: From Code Compliance to Resilience" | Sponsored by AXA XL "Change Management: AI's Role in Loss Control and Property Insurance" | Sponsored by Global Risk Consultants, a TÜV SÜD Company "Demystifying Multinational Fronting Insurance Programs" | Sponsored by Zurich "Understanding Third-Party Litigation Funding" | Sponsored by Zurich "What Risk Managers Can Learn From School Shootings" | Sponsored by Merrill Herzog "Simplifying the Challenges of OSHA Recordkeeping" | Sponsored by Medcor "How Insurance Builds Resilience Against an Active Assailant Attack" | Sponsored by Merrill Herzog "Third-Party and Cyber Risk Management Tips" | Sponsored by Alliant RIMS Publications, Content, and Links: RIMS Membership — Whether you are a new member or need to transition, be a part of the global risk management community! RIMS Virtual Workshops On-Demand Webinars RIMS-Certified Risk Management Professional (RIMS-CRMP) RISK PAC | RIMS Advocacy RIMS Strategic & Enterprise Risk Center RIMS-CRMP Stories — Featuring RIMS President Manny Padilla! RIMS Publications, Content, and Links: RIMS Membership — Whether you are a new member or need to transition, be a part of the global risk management community! RIMS Virtual Workshops On-Demand Webinars RIMS-Certified Risk Management Professional (RIMS-CRMP) RISK PAC | RIMS Advocacy RIMS Strategic & Enterprise Risk Center RIMS-CRMP Stories — Featuring RIMS President Manny Padilla! RIMS Events, Education, and Services: RIMS Risk Maturity Model® Sponsor RIMScast: Contact sales@rims.org or pd@rims.org for more information. Want to Learn More? Keep up with the podcast on RIMS.org, and listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Have a question or suggestion? Email: Content@rims.org. Join the Conversation! Follow @RIMSorg on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. About our guest: Colette Cummins, Chief Risk Officer, Inland Fisheries Ireland RIMS-CRMP Commissioner Production and engineering provided by Podfly.
How the Threat Landscape Is Being Rewritten and What Organizations Need to Do Before It Gets Ahead of ThemGuest: Taylor Hersom, Founder of Eden Data and Managing Director at RiveronHost: Seth Earley, CEO at Earley Information SciencePublished on: July 28, 2026In this episode, Seth Earley speaks with Taylor Hersom, Founder of Eden Data and Managing Director at Riveron, a cybersecurity and compliance firm he built and grew before its acquisition in 2025. They explore why security is still treated as a cost center when it should be treated as a sales motion and competitive differentiator, how AI has exponentially expanded the attack surface, why most organizations have adopted AI with almost no security program around it, and how the subscription model Taylor pioneered is now reshaping how professional services firms price and deliver work. Taylor shares candid and specific insights on AI governance standards, the limits of automated threat detection, and why information architecture is the foundation security professionals are finding missing everywhere they go.Key Takeaways:Security is still treated as a cost center by most organizations when it should be viewed as a trust-building and sales motion that directly impacts revenue and brand reputation.Pre-revenue startups are now arriving with a million lines of AI-generated code - the attack surface has expanded exponentially and security programs have not kept pace.Most organizations have adopted AI across the enterprise without any AI-specific security program, controls around LLM access, or governance over what models are allowed to do.ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework are the clearest starting points for organizations that want to de-risk their AI environment without reinventing the wheel.AI in security has shifted the human role from doing the work to supervising it - but final judgment on whether a threat is legitimate still requires a human and always will.Unorganized, incorrect, or inaccessible data creates systemic risk in AI environments - poor information architecture is what leads to the snowball effect of cascading security failures.The subscription model for security services - pricing for outcomes rather than hours - has proven durable across market conditions and is now becoming the industry expectation.Insightful Quotes:"We naturally leaned into AI from a technology standpoint, and there is almost no security around it to speak of. If you go ask the average company that's using AI across their enterprise, they probably don't have an AI-specific program where they have controls around their LLM and their processes and their access - and that is terrifying." - Taylor Hersom"Rather than go the FUD route - fear, uncertainty, and doubt - you can look at security as a way to build your brand and make it a part of your identity, and be proactive in how you use this when educating customers about how you protect their data." - Taylor Hersom"There's no AI without IA. Security requires information architecture - access controls, data organization, knowing what you have and where it lives. When you start losing control of your data, you start to create risks you don't even know about." - Seth EarleyTune in to discover why cybersecurity in the AI era is no longer just a technical problem - and what organizations need to put in place before the threat landscape gets ahead of them.LinksLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorhersom/Website: http://www.riveron.com Website: https://www.edendata.com Thanks to our sponsors:VKTREarley Information ScienceAI Powered Enterprise Book
Watch Ocho and Iso go back and forth in some of their funniest debates, from Ocho standing Iso up on a legendary Magic City night in Atlanta to arguing over who the better singer is. Plus, the guys hilariously debate bed sizes, relive Ocho's celebrity basketball game experience, and deliver the nonstop trash talk, laughs, and chemistry that make Nightcap must-watch entertainment. Subscribe to Nightcap presented by PrizePicks so you don’t miss out on any new drops! Download the PrizePicks app today and use code SHANNON to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup! Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/NI... 0:00 - Ocho Stood up Iso at Hawks Magic City Night 25:47 - Who’s the better singer? 43:11 - Bed size 51:10 - Ocho celebrity basketball game (Timestamps may vary based on advertisements.) #ClubSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Shannon Sharpe, Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson, and Joe "King Iso" Johnson bring you the Best of Ocho & Iso Jawing on Nightcap! Subscribe to Nightcap presented by PrizePicks so you don’t miss out on any new drops! Download the PrizePicks app today and use code SHANNON to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup! Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/NI... 0:00 - Iso owes Ocho Money after Knicks eliminated Hawks 23:00 - Iso Joe ruled out for entire Big3 2026 season (Timestamps may vary based on advertisements.) #ClubSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Join us in this episode as Trish shares about their step work since the posting of their First Step on Ep 181 of the Podcast; their experience with Buddhist meditation; clarification on being non-binary; as well as finding a connection to a Higher Power through music. Links mentioned in this episode: https://transequality.org/issues/resources/understanding-nonbinary-people-how-to-be-respectful-and-supportive Recovery Dharma: https://recoverydharma.org YouTube Links to music in this episode (used for educational purposes): Heilung - Futhorck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFCbscV1HZE George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbJede-o6gM T.I. - Trauma Bond: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDqEXirnuy4 Lauryn Hill ft. Carlos Santana - To Zion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6_8wYiP0yM Ren & Webby - Neurodivergent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNGcF7T9D3w Fleetwood Mac - Songbird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9Hqn8x6a8s Be sure to reach us via email: feedback@sexaddictsrecoverypod.com If you are comfortable and interested in being a guest or panelist, please feel free to contact me. jason@sexaddictsrecoverypod.com SARPodcast YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn0dcZg-Ou7giI4YkXGXsBWDHJgtymw9q To find meetings in the San Francisco Bay Area, be sure to visit: https://www.bayareasaa.org/meetings To find meetings in your local area or online, be sure to visit the main SAA website: https://saa-meetings.org/ The content of this podcast has not been approved by and may not reflect the opinions or policies of the ISO of SAA, Inc.
In this episode, Lee Patton and Craig Jeffery discuss what corporate treasury teams must do to prepare for the November 2026 ISO 20022 structured address requirements. They discuss why the rules can affect organizations even when they do not originate ISO 20022 files, how incomplete payment inventories and address data can cause rejections, and why treasury, AP, IT, banks, and service providers must coordinate to validate payment workflows and data readiness. ISO 20022 Readiness Webinar: https://strategictreasurer.com/webinar-iso-20022-readiness/ Swift ISO 20022 Address Requirements: https://www.swift.com/standards/iso-20022/iso-20022-faqs/iso-20022-removal-unstructured-address Fedwire ISO 20022 Implementation Center: https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/wires/iso-20022-implementation-center What Is ISO 20022? (2021): https://strategictreasurer.com/44-what-is-iso-20022/ Updating ISO 20022: Exploring New Formats, Data, and Benefits (2023): https://strategictreasurer.com/277-updating-iso-20022/ Demystifying ISO 20022: The Future of Payment Formats (2024): https://strategictreasurer.com/webinar-demystifying-xml-iso-20022/ ISO 20022: From Compliance to Competitive Advantage (2025): https://strategictreasurer.com/372-iso-20022/ Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:21 What ISO 20022 payment readiness means 01:11 November 2026 structured address requirements 03:01 Why non-ISO payment files are affected 04:14 Common payment readiness gaps 06:08 Assessing data and payment workflows 07:34 Final readiness checklist 08:39 Closing thoughts 08:59 Outro ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ABOUT STRATEGIC TREASURER ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Download The Strategic Treasurer: A Partnership for Corporate Growth by Craig A. Jeffery in Kindle, or hardcover: https://amzn.to/4uqwFQq As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Strategic Treasurer is recognized as a top tier consulting firm in the area of treasury and risk management. Corporate clients, banks, and technology vendors all rely on their industry leading advisory services that are backed by a deep awareness of current needs, practices, and budgeting priorities of treasury professionals through Strategic Treasurer's annual industry surveys and decades of treasury experience. Strategic Treasurer utilizes a senior consultant model where every project is managed by senior consultants with actual practitioner experience in corporate and/or banking roles. Visit us today at http://strategictreasurer.com. Or join in the discussion at one of our leading LinkedIn groups: http://strategictreasurer.com/linkedin/
What happens when an organization gets so focused on results that it forgets why it exists? Andrew Stotz and Balaji Reddie dig into the first of Deming's 14 Points, constancy of purpose, using stories like Harvard's answer to Deming's challenge to define a business and Indian manufacturers who pivoted to build PPE during the pandemic. This conversation may change how you think about success, profit, and the real aim of a business. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. I'm really excited for today's topic, which is the 14 Points. Take it away, Balaji. 0:00:27.5 Balaji Reddie: Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. So the last time we spoke, we had discussed all the four sciences that Dr. Deming put together. In a nutshell, we said his words, appreciation for a system. That means appreciating that there are no events, there are eventualities, and there is a huge myriad or a huge system of myriad components that create these outcomes. So we need to understand that. We need to appreciate the fact that these are all interconnected, interdependent, these components. Right. And we saw some other attributes that when they interact with each other, the cause and effect are not closely related in time or space. Seemingly disconnected events then turn out to be connected. There exist synergistic relationships. So you can't just straightaway say, "I know." You can say, "From what I understand or what knowledge I have right now about the system, I think." 0:01:34.7 Balaji Reddie: And you always dig deeper. Right. And that gave us the next thing, that the performance of any system, the outcomes are subject to Variation. You will never get the same outcome every single time. It keeps on fluctuating. And then we realize there is a difference between normal and abnormal fluctuations. The typical term that Walter Shewhart said was Variation, and Deming took that forward. He said, "Understand Variation." I would say learn how to think statistically. Right? And statistical thinking is about knowing when to act and when to leave a process alone. Okay. So we said understand the Variation, and you should know when to... There's that normal fluctuation, you would need to work on it continually. But abnormal fluctuation is a little easier to understand, isolate, and take immediate action. So the low-hanging fruit comes from the abnormal fluctuation, what he called as special causes or assignable causes, as Walter Shewhart said. 0:02:41.0 Balaji Reddie: And once you work on them, then your long-term work on the process continues. That never stops because it helps you understand the process much, much better. Right? But there you are faced with the dilemma sometimes. There's so many complications there, and you just need to understand them if you want to know completely what happens in a system. And that's why he said the complete knowledge is never... Is unknown and unknowable. But he said there's a way of doing that, and that's where the Theory of Knowledge came in. We needed to understand that we build upon what we have right now. We start asking questions, and you begin with theories. "I think, I believe." And once you start doing that, you start unraveling the mysteries of the system under study. And last bit here is all this, of course, he was speaking about man-made systems, organizational systems, which all this work is being done by people. 0:03:38.0 Balaji Reddie: And he said that's where the best part comes in. You can never do things all by yourself. You need to cooperate with others. Each one comes with their own theories, and each one has their own system of learning, their own way of thinking. So we need to understand that, whether you are employees inside a company, whether you are people outside the company contributing in the sense of suppliers, or people who are recipients of this in terms of consumers. So everyone, you need to understand people, that they're a part of this entire system. And that's where Psychology comes in. Of course, I used the word empathy. I said understanding them and on. And on a lighter note, I ended by saying that if you really want to sharpen your empathetic skills, you need to either understand your pet or a baby, because these are people who can't express what they want and you just have to have your own theories and then understand them better. 0:04:34.9 Balaji Reddie: But that's what we saw last time. Now we're gonna get to, funnily, what he espoused as his philosophy [chuckle] when he first presented it in the United States in a structured form, right? These were the 14 Points. Now, first of all, the 14 Points are not his philosophy, but they're 14 consequences of his philosophy. You can never really set out to say, "I'm gonna do these 14 Points." But when you start, how do I say, asking the right questions and want to gain Profound Knowledge of what's happening and start looking at things differently and start asking questions, the right kind of questions, just like I said, "What is the purpose of the system? What are the components? How are they connected? How do they work? What is happening right now? Does this normally happen? Is this abnormal?" And then, of course, what are better ways of explaining or expressing what I'm seeing right now? 0:05:43.9 Balaji Reddie: And then finally, taking help from everybody else and bringing their thought processes. When you start asking these questions and start structuring and understanding the organization much better, you eventually see the 14 Points. So they are consequences of his philosophy. They are not his philosophy. You end up with the 14 Points, you don't start with them. Right? Having said that, does that mean we just go through this and be done with it? I said, "No." Now let's understand how he structured these and why he structured it the way he did. Now, they are in no order of preference. In fact, I remember speaking to Bill Bellows about this, and he said when he asked Deming, "Which of the 14 Points are the most important ones? Where do I start?" and he said, "All of them." He said, "Where do I start?" "Start anywhere," he said. You could start anywhere, eventually they're all connected. 0:06:40.7 Balaji Reddie: So the 14 Points are a system themselves. They are all connected to each other. You could start anywhere and you end up with the 14 Points in any case. But since we have to follow a kind of the sequence in which he wrote them, which he presented them, I'm following that sequence to begin with. Now, I'm gonna start with the 1986 edition of the 14 Points, which are there in his book, Out of the Crisis. But in 1990, he updated the wordings of the 14 Points. So I shall pull up my document right here so that I can read out the 1990 edition. Just give me a minute. 0:07:36.0 Andrew Stotz: Just for the audience, go out there and get yours in your hand. Get ready. I'm just going through and getting mine ready. 0:07:42.8 Balaji Reddie: Yes, so. Okay, so here it goes. Let's get to the 14 Points. So here we are. Right. And in what I normally say here, that he often said too, that when you apply Profound Knowledge, the 14 Points help you apply this in the most structured manner. So here we go. So the first is the 1986 edition, point number one, where he says, "Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business and to provide jobs." I think this is an amazing set of words which he's brought here, especially saying to provide jobs, where he said that quality is a ways and means of really contributing to society and not sucking the worst 10%, but adding something more to it to provide more jobs. Now in the 1990 edition, right, now the commentary for this, if you read Out of the Crisis, I've taken an excerpt from there, "Management must demonstrate unshakable commitment to quality, productivity and continual improvement. 0:09:09.8 Balaji Reddie: Your customers, your suppliers, your employees need your statement of constancy of purpose, your intention to stay in business by providing product and service that will help man to live better and which will have a market." So this was his definition of quality. A product or a service possesses quality if it helps someone live better in every way and enjoys a large and sustainable market. So for him, quality had two aspects. One, it must make someone's life better. Whatever you do, whether it's a product or a service, service being an activity. Right. So it should add value to the customer's life. It should make that person's life better. But it should be at a price the customer is willing to pay. Right? So that's the way he looked at it. 0:09:55.2 Balaji Reddie: Now, he changed this in 1990 to this, "Create and publish to all concerned a statement of the aims and purposes of the company or other organization. Management must demonstrate constantly their commitment to this statement." Now he says to publish the statement. And he says not just purpose, but aim. So aim, I think this came from his definition of a system, where he says that a system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. So the aim provides a direction and purpose provides the reason why the system exists. So they go hand in hand. You can't separate these two. But now the commentary for this is, "A system must create something of value, in other words, results. The intended results, along with consideration of recipients and of cost, mold the aim of the system. It is thus management's task to determine those aims, to manage the whole organization towards accomplishment of those aims. 0:11:07.1 Balaji Reddie: It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of a specific activity or method. It must always relate to a better life for everyone. The aim precedes the organizational system and those that work in it." So... 0:11:23.4 Andrew Stotz: What was that part? "It's important that it's not" what? 0:11:27.2 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, that it's not an activity or a product. It should be something broader than that. It's about adding value to someone's life. Now, you can't go into the other extreme and come up with a motherhood statement like "I want to boil the ocean" or "I want to solve the world's poverty problems," alright? But it must translate into something doable, alright? And it should tell where the organization is heading. But the key word here is "publish it," right? And he says, "and other organization," that means "of the company or other organization." So I believe he started envisioning that in the future it's not gonna be one company, but a family of companies working together, which very simply today we use the term "supply chain" to express that. And I think, I think I mentioned this before in one of my earlier chats that I don't like that term because. It falls woefully short to explain what actually is happening there. 0:12:29.2 Balaji Reddie: I like to use the word provider network. Right? It's a network. It's not just a chain. Chain is more linear. Network is more lateral, all over the place. And these are not just suppliers. These are providers. So, right, he talked about a supply chain in those days. And he also says publishing, that means it should exist in some hard form, right, so that people see it, read it. Okay. Now this kind of, I thought was quite amazing because if you know about, for those who are into ISO 9000, the standard, of course, the latest one which is coming out this year, I'm not well-versed with what they've written or what they've changed in it, but up until 2015, the ISO insisted that companies have a documented statement of their policies, right, a quality policy and objectives. It should be written down. So to say that they could have got this idea from here is not fair, but I guess that you can see the parallel in what he was saying. 0:13:44.8 Balaji Reddie: So publishing. Now, in 2007, this is what I wrote after talking to many, like I said, who attended or helped Dr. Deming in his seminars till the day he passed on, right? And they said, of course, because I was quite intrigued, initially his four-day seminar had a perfect structure and everyone knows who attended that on the second day after lunch you had the red beads experiment. So that never changed even after Profound Knowledge came in. So anyway, coming back to what I was just saying, so initially he spoke a lot about the 14 Points, but after he professed Profound Knowledge, the stress on the 14 Points came down, but it did not disappear altogether. And this I heard from many of those and I asked what he would speak of. So based on that, I just came up with these words. The words are all Dr. Deming's, I've just edited and put it together. 0:14:50.1 Balaji Reddie: So create a statement of the aim and purpose of the organizational system. It must bring out the long-term vision of the organization, preferably stating how it intends to stay in business by making life better for all those impacted in any way. So there could be a direct or an indirect impact. Stakeholders is the term we use right now, right? So purpose describes why you exist. And if you go deeper to find out why a company exists, it has to last beyond the founding father's vision, right? So the statement of purpose must be very clear. Like Walt Disney, we spoke about this, he said, "I'll do anything to make a child smile." That was his purpose, and that's how everything stemmed from that, right? So if you start looking deep, why are we here? Why do we exist? 0:15:46.3 Balaji Reddie: Then once the company starts growing, you don't forget why you set up the company in the first place. You go back to your roots and the statement of purpose is like a North Star. It reminds you of where you're supposed to be, where you started, what you had in mind, right? So it's not that companies don't have it, but we need to revisit it from time to time. And sometimes you need to, it may undergo a change because things don't remain the same, right? Systems keep changing and if everything keeps changing, then you have to revisit the purpose. You don't do it every day though, because it's something that you spoke about and you say that it took me time to come out with this statement of purpose. So I was trying to understand even Apple's statement of purpose where Steve Jobs said making technology accessible, making technology simple, making technology productive is what we are supposed to do here as a company. Right. 0:16:46.4 Balaji Reddie: So he always believed in simplicity. He believed in seeing that people are more productive with the work, the software, or the products that they offer. Right. And it should be something that at times goes beyond just what the customer expects so that that one part is always there. So that's point number one, the statement of purpose. 0:17:11.3 Andrew Stotz: Can I ask a couple questions about that? 0:17:14.2 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, sure, sure, sure. 0:17:15.3 Andrew Stotz: Before we go on, I'm assuming you're gonna go on to number two. 0:17:18.4 Balaji Reddie: Yes. 0:17:20.5 Andrew Stotz: So a couple of things. First thing is about aim. You know that statement, "the purpose of a system is what it does," meaning that ultimately every system, there's an aim. It just may not be the aim that you think it is or that you want it to be. So part of this idea is recognizing that we have to state the aim or else people just, they're gonna just do things the way they've done them. Am I correct in saying that? 0:17:51.2 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. And it brings clarity to whatever you are doing. You start realizing, okay, I thought that we were actually doing this when we should be doing something else. For example, in Out of the Crisis, he gives that example of that trucking company. And he said when that gentleman took Dr. Deming's four-day seminar and then went back to his company and asked his employees, "What business do you think we are in?" Because that's what he used to ask, "What business are you in?" He used to ask that question, right, to the audience. "Any CEOs here? What business are you in? What business do you need to be in? What are you gonna be doing five years from now, ten years from now?" Right. So these are questions which I think you need to look at. If you want a list of questions, then in Out of the Crisis, there is a chapter on just the questions. Right. 0:18:57.0 Balaji Reddie: And that's, if I believe, let me just check. It comes after chapter seven. Is that where it comes in? No, I think... Yeah. Diseases and Obstacles. Okay. It's chapter five, "Questions to Help Managers." So you can find a host of questions there. These are rhetorical questions, most of them, telling you to focus on the job you have on hand. Right. And helps you define your purpose and your aim, both. And it gives clarity. Like I said, sometimes it gives clarity to yourself. What exactly am I doing here? All right. You always begin by saying that. I mean, if you ask people who set up businesses, they'll start by saying, "I did this because I was good at it," and the money came, but "I was good at doing this." And why did you do that? What do you mean by good? "Well, when I did this, I saw people feel happy." Right. And that's why I wanted to do this. 0:20:06.8 Balaji Reddie: And I thought this is the best way for me to earn my money, but the purpose was mainly to make them happy. Right. And then the money came. So that should be the focus. I think I mentioned this once when 1983 was when Harvard Business School was celebrating 75 years of existence. And everyone knew at that time, because Deming had just been rediscovered in America, and he was hot property. But everyone knew his ideas about Harvard. [chuckle] He was scathing. He said they prepared managers for the past and not for the future, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He was very angry. But when they sent him a letter saying that we are making a souvenir of sorts, so can you pen a few words for us? So he was quite lavish in his comments and in his praise. He said, "It's not easy to run a business school and y'all have done it for 75 years. So all credit to you." But he said, "I have just one question for you. 0:21:18.7 Balaji Reddie: In these last two, three years that I have come back into American industry, I see with pain that many people do not understand the purpose of their business. And I see that Harvard has not defined the purpose of a business. Could you define the purpose of a business?" And Harvard came out with an answer which went, "The purpose of a business is to create value at a profit." So the sequence of the words is so beautiful. Create value at a profit. Right? And for a business, you need both. If you're only creating value and no profits, that's not a business. That's social service. And if you only want profits but no value, then that's not a business either. Then you might as well go loot a bank, get 100% profit and no value. And I remember Myron Tribus writing about this at the Kobe shipyard in Japan, right? And this was before Deming landed there, apparently, because there was someone sitting at Kobe who later on had taken Deming's lectures on statistical quality. 0:22:39.4 Balaji Reddie: And then of course, the leadership thing, right, where Deming spoke about the flow diagram. And he said that, he said the light bulb went on because they had a statement there at the Kobe shipyard, "We shall make good ships. At a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but we shall make good ships." And later on, apparently some American gentlemen came to take over and they changed that and they said, "No, no, no, remove all that profit and loss and just say, 'We shall make good ships.' That's it." So there were times when things started going wrong, right? They went in the wrong direction because they were not looking at it in the clear manner. When they had problems, they said, "No, just make the ship. Just ship it out. It's good." And things went wrong. So they had to reassess and come back. So that was the kind of the idea that we're looking at, the aim and the purpose, and that could change. Right? 0:23:45.6 Andrew Stotz: And I want to add for the listeners out there, in the world of finance, profit is, we also call it cash flow. The cash flow is the numerator in the calculation of value. The denominator is risk. So when we think about what's the objective of a person running a business, it's to maximize value, which many people think means maximize profit, which it does not. It means maximize risk-adjusted profit. So, for instance, if you were breaking the law and doing bad things or mistreating your people ultimately you're raising the risk. Though your cash flow or your profit may be strong, you're raising the risk of that profit or cash flow. And so that's a distinction I like to help people understand, because there are people that just think that the objective of business is maximize profit. No, it's to maximize value. And mathematically we can prove that in the world of finance. 0:24:57.2 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. So I'd just like to paraphrase, when I said that what Harvard said is purpose of a business is to create value at a profit, I'd just like to add something more to that. Create value at a profit in the most ethical way, right? We have to be very ethical about it, because if you're doing wrong things to get your profits and add value, it won't last long. You won't last long as a company. It'll always catch up to you. 0:25:27.4 Andrew Stotz: And I use the word sustainably. That's a kind of a nonsense word these days because everybody talks about sustainability and all. 0:25:34.5 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, they talk in terms about, in a very different context. 0:25:37.8 Andrew Stotz: But the point is, is that are we generating profit in a sustainable fashion? Now the other, I had one more question on this one, and that is if we go back to the words, he talked about the create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and services. And my question to you is, when he talks about aim, sometimes people can get confused, including myself sometimes. And for instance, Clifford Norman and David Williams have been on the show talking about their book Quality as an Organizational Strategy. And so as I've looked at his teachings over time, I've had a question in my mind of is what he's saying that the aim is to improve the business through this focus on quality? In other words, quality is the aim? Or is the aim whatever a company says, "We want to do this, our aim is that"? I'm just curious how you understand those things. 0:26:52.8 Balaji Reddie: I would say quality, but his definition of quality, right? Help someone live better and there must be a market, right? And it must be sold at the right price. So he's been practical, if you look at it. He says that if what you're doing is not making anybody's lives better, then why do it at all? Right? So you need to... You need to look at it from his viewpoint of quality, if I may put it that way. Not that narrow focus on quality of product in terms of free from deficiencies, [chuckle] 0:27:28.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:27:30.1 Balaji Reddie: But in a very broad sense what he thought quality is. And also, I found something on the internet, so I'd like to again add that in, that the entire thing is his whole thing is to have happier people. Happy customers... And he doesn't say satisfied, he says happy. So happy customers, happy employees, happy suppliers, society being happy, and the owners. Okay. So what the Japanese interpreted this as, which they call as total quality, is owners, employees, customers, suppliers, and society. When all five are simultaneously satisfied, we call it as total quality. Whereas if you look at it from Deming's point of view, when all five are happy simultaneously, then you attained constancy of purpose. And the longer you can do it, the better it is. So that's his constancy. So the aim and the purpose should be about that. It should be about happier people at work, happier people in the market, consumers, customers, the suppliers, because they should feel a sense of pride... 0:28:56.9 Balaji Reddie: That they're learning something from this company, that growth is happening. Society should feel that this company not only serves their targeted audience, but does not cause harm or is also adding some kind of oblique value to all of us here. We all feel happy interacting with these people in some form or the other. Not necessarily being philanthropic or something, but in a very different sense. We're not getting harmed by these guys. So that, I think, in the broadest sense is what Deming was trying to say to run a company based on constancy of purpose. 0:29:35.4 Andrew Stotz: And the reason why I'm asking is because one of the lessons I've learned just in life in general, certainly from the teachings of Dr. Deming, but just in general, is that if you pick a particular thing or area and you decide that I'm gonna improve this and I'm gonna keep working on improving this, you're gonna end up with something incredible that nobody else has as long as you stick with it. And so that's where this idea of, and if you know what quality means, which is the five groups and things being happy, more jobs, create opportunity, all of that, once you understand that, then quality is driving toward that better outcome. I guess what I'm also thinking about is could a person who's never heard of Dr. Deming just say, "That's my aim right there. I'm gonna take it straight out of what he said, constancy of purpose in relation to improving the product and service with the understanding [chuckle] that that improvement means that." That's it. It's not the aim of "We want to provide transportation vehicles" or something like that. That's more of kind of a corporate communication or. That's where I really want to hear your thoughts on that. 0:30:53.3 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. So when you say that "I want to do this through this product that I am giving," and right now my understanding is that this is the best way to do it, but as the world evolves, obviously there could be many different other ways of doing it and I need to keep revisiting this. As long as my purpose is perfect, I know I'll be able to adapt and adopt very quickly. Right. Otherwise you'll be left behind. What exactly am I here for? Many of the people set up businesses, ancillary units here in my hometown, Pune. They set up, they were basically employees in the parent company and then they saw an opportunity. They saw they were good at this. "I can make this better." So they set up the company to serve the parent company, not realizing that suddenly there could be somebody else coming in. Right. And they were preferred because they understood what the parent company wanted. 0:31:53.5 Balaji Reddie: But if they had just set up by saying, "No, why am I setting up this business? Because I see an opportunity. I can do this well." Okay, then can I do anything else well? What else can I? Why just this product? Why not any other product? Right? I think during the pandemic, many of the manufacturing companies realized that. They said, "We are very good at assembly, so why don't we start assembling PPE kits?" here in India, because PPE kits used to be imported. And I know this firsthand. My student was working in one such logistical company and he said we were importing. 300,000 PPE kits per annum. That was the requirement. 0:32:38.8 Andrew Stotz: What's PPE? 0:32:40.2 Balaji Reddie: Personal protection equipment, which you have to wear, the doctors, et cetera, the health workers during the pandemic. They had to wear that and serve, because we didn't know what was happening. So instead of just masks, just protect themselves completely. In labs, doctors, nurses, they all wore that. Right. So this personal protection equipment, we were importing 300,000 such kits per annum from, I think somewhere in Belgium. And because that was the requirement, but during the pandemic, the requirement went up. And so many of the companies, automotive manufacturing companies, decided that, let's get into this because we know how to do these things, right? We know how to assemble. And within a matter of 45 to 50 days, they built capacity. And imagine this, we were consuming, I am not joking, at the rate of 200,000 kits per day. 0:33:39.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Then you can become a global supplier. 0:33:46.5 Balaji Reddie: And so they had to. But now, see, they did it for that much time because they said, our core business is something else, but we understood our purpose, so let's contribute in a very different way. The other one which they did was many of the manufacturing companies started assembling ventilators. And some of them which were running without electricity, they ran on a mechanical device so that the need for power, et cetera, et cetera, be superfluous. So when you know your purpose, then you can always adapt and adopt very quickly. And I think the pandemic gave us that opportunity to see how many of the companies responded in a very positive sense. In one way to look at it is, "Oh my God, this is it, this is my fate, and we're gonna shut down, we have nothing to do." But the other way is, "No, wait, why are we here? And let's use our expertise in a very different sense. So let's get to action." 0:34:41.3 Andrew Stotz: Interesting. I feel like we can spend a whole episode talking just about one of the 14 Points. 0:34:46.9 Balaji Reddie: That's why I said two episodes for the 14 Points. [laughter] If you don't mind, three also. Because many of the points have been either not discussed in detail or misinterpreted. And there have been changes. Deming himself brought a change in the wordings. That's why I wanted to keep this section, this session separate. 0:35:07.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay. 0:35:12.5 Balaji Reddie: Now you can see why, because I was just setting the scene for the 14 Points. If you want to ask me, it's all profound, very, very profound. [chuckle] 0:35:16.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and I have a lot of questions, so that's good. I've got some clarity now for point one. I think the listeners and the viewers will also get some of that clarity, so that's great. 0:35:26.4 Balaji Reddie: Thank you. And I have been, I still, I just scratch my head about many of the things that he said. Because if people are reading Out of the Crisis, oh my God, you gotta read the text for point one. It's brilliant. I mean, I can't just, you can't just read it out right now. [chuckle] It'll take three episodes just to. But just, many people just say he did give us a method. I think I told you this two episodes ago. He was very clear. We didn't see it. We didn't see it. And he's so clear about what he wanted in innovation. That, of course, I thought that there was a slight difference, I think we spoke about this, invention and innovation. So invention is something new and innovate is to use something differently. Right. So that innovation, I think he confused the two terms, if I may say so. Too brave to make a statement like that. But anyway, he says here that you have to keep improving, innovating, and this obligation never ceases. 0:36:36.6 Balaji Reddie: It's that very clear. And if you see here, there's one, there's a paragraph here, he says, "It's a mistake to suppose that efficient production of product and service can, with certainty, keep an organization solvent and ahead of its competition. It is possible and, in fact, fairly easy for an organization to go downhill and out of business making the wrong product or offering the wrong type of service, even though everyone in the organization performs with devotion, employing statistical methods and every other aid that can boost efficiency." So I think he was highlighting the limitation of the statistical methods, that 97% versus 3% thing, that we are only trying to improve this, but the whole thing comes from the top, that are you providing the right product? I mean, you can't set up a company today making the best typewriters in the world. [chuckle] 0:37:35.4 Andrew Stotz: That's true. 0:37:41.5 Balaji Reddie: So he keeps saying this again and again, that you should publish a resolution that no one will lose his job for contribution to quality and productivity. So I think what we're coming to the end of this session today, we just discussed point one. [laughter] That's the best part. I heard from Henry Neave once that they all formed a kind of a team. Henry had come down to America and they started, they decided to meet Myron Tribus and just about everyone, Nida Backaitis, Barbara Lawton, the gang, and they were so happy to, the stars, right? Gipsie Ranney, I forget the other names, but they were all together and then they decided, let's discuss the 14 Points. And then point one, and it went on beyond lunchtime. They started in the morning. [laughter] 0:38:36.6 Andrew Stotz: That's great. 0:38:46.1 Balaji Reddie: It seems Dr. Deming was so happy. He was just sitting back and just listening and listening and listening. Then they met again the following day and the next day, and then they only came to point number four. And then finally, Brian Joiner, I think, said, "I think we're wasting too much time here. Let's just stop this." And it seems Deming was so upset because he said that Brian Joiner said, "Let's give ourselves 45 minutes for this point and that's it." [laughter]Deming said, "Don't set a target." [laughter] 0:39:22.9 Andrew Stotz: That reminds me of Bill Scherkenbach showing a picture of Deming at the, I don't know, National Education Committee meeting. And he said that they met all day or for two days and they still couldn't come up with the aim of what education, the aim of education in America was at the time. So, yeah. 0:39:42.9 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, I had this problem. It happened at a seminar here in Pune. It was Education for the Future or something like that, Engineering Education: The Next Five Years, blah, blah, blah, I don't know what it was. And there was this one gentleman making a presentation from a school in a city called Bangalore in India. And his topic was Six Sigma in education. And when he came to present, he started by saying, "Six Sigma is 3.4 errors in a million." And I said, "Oh, no." Anyway, then he went on to say, "Okay, so we decided our 10th, grade 10 is a public exam in India. It's a very big deal for a child to sit for that exam, right?" And he said that, "We want to have flawless results. And we've had flawless results for the last eight years. We have so many students, so many, so many students every year, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And so if you multiply and all that, and then, "So how do we get this?" Now here came the best part. He said, "In grade nine, all..." 0:40:48.9 Balaji Reddie: All those who had failed or had not reached a certain grade, we threw them out. And so we had flawless results. And I could see people squirming in their chairs because they were all sitting in the audience were teachers. They were squirming in their chairs and then one guy could take it no more. He put his hand up. And I was chairing that session, by the way. You can imagine what was happening to me. Anyway, this gentleman put his hands up and he says, "How can you say that? How can you say that?" He was very agitated. And I could realize, I just stood up and I said, "Okay, Professor so-and-so, please sit down. I get your, I get your sentiment, but we need to do this differently." So I turned to this... And he was a principal, this gentleman... I said, "What is the aim and the purpose of an educational institution?" And this man said, "Results." 0:41:42.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:41:45.8 Balaji Reddie: Then I said, "Let's throw this question open to everyone." And I said, "Let's stop." I asked the people organizing the seminar that could we take a small detour here? Let's just stop. Let's not stick to your timetable because I know you're here on a leash. So they said, with permission from the chair and the host college... They were sitting there, the main people... They said, "No, we want this question answered now. What is the purpose of an educational institution?" And there was a lot of goading. I was bringing in Profound Knowledge and I was throwing up questions. And finally we came to the conclusion that the aim of any educational institution is to create a well-rounded individual that contributes positively to society. 0:43:33.9 Andrew Stotz: All right, so on behalf of everyone listening, I want to thank you again for the discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org and jump into DemingNext to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is, "People are entitled to joy in work." As we're talking about how do we build that for the future.
Sony acaba de presentar la nueva Sony FX5 y, después de revisar sus primeras especificaciones, te doy mi opinión más fresca y directa: ¿estamos ante la cámara de cine compacta más bestia de Sony o es demasiado para la mayoría de creadores?En este episodio analizo las novedades que más me han sorprendido: Open Gate en 5K, grabación RAW interna, nuevo sensor apilado con hasta 16 pasos de rango dinámico, herramientas profesionales de exposición como False Color, Waveform y Vectorscopio, triple ISO base, autofocus con inteligencia artificial, nueva pantalla panorámica articulada y visor electrónico opcional.También te cuento por qué creo que esta FX5 está mucho más cerca de cámaras como la Sony Venice y la Burano que de una futura renovación de la FX3. Es una cámara espectacular, pero claramente pensada para cineastas y producciones profesionales, no tanto para grabar vídeos de YouTube, reels o contenido para redes sociales.Además, reflexiono sobre lo que esta FX5 podría adelantarnos de la esperada sucesora de la Sony FX3. ¿Veremos Open Gate, mejores herramientas de exposición, una nueva pantalla y un sensor renovado en la próxima FX3 o FX4?Una cámara brutal, un precio de unos 5.400 euros y una pregunta inevitable: ¿realmente necesitamos algo así los creadores de contenido?Cuéntame en comentarios qué te parece la nueva Sony FX5 y si tú la comprarías.#SonyFX5 #SonyCinemaLine #SonyFX3 #CámarasSony #CineDigital #VideoProfesional #CreadoresDeContenido #OpenGate #SonyAlpha**COMPRA EN FOTOK desde este enlace y pon el cupón GABELLIFTK en tu carrito de la compra para llevarte un regalo.WEB FOTOK: https://fotok.es/?aff=y206___________________WEBS: https://www.rubengabelli.comhttps://fotografodecomida.esYOUTUBE: https://cutt.ly/ft3QEHF PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/RubenGabelli INSTAGRAM: @rubengabelli
On this week's show we look into our crystal ball to see what is on the Home Theater Horizon. We also read your emails and take a look at the week's news. News: 2026 Value Electronics TV Shootout: Samsung Snaps Sony TV Streak CarPlay video coming with iOS 27 WGA Seeks Injunction to Block Deal's Closing What is on the Home Theater Horizon Home theater technology is advancing quickly and the trend is moving toward wireless setups, brighter and more flexible displays, AI-powered calibration, immersive spatial audio, and simpler high-end installations. Today we take a look at what we can expect over the next couple of years. Displays: Brighter, Wireless, and Modular Ultra-thin wireless OLEDs: LG's OLED evo W6, also called the Wallpaper TV, is part of their 2026 evo lineup. It's incredibly thin — just 9 millimeters thick — and features a true wireless design. All your devices plug into a separate Zero Connect Box that can sit up to 10 meters away. The box then sends 4K video and audio wirelessly to the TV with almost no quality loss. The TV also includes Hyper Radiant Color Technology. This delivers much higher brightness — up to 3.9 times brighter than standard OLEDs — along with deeper black levels and fewer reflections. For gamers, it supports 4K at 165 Hertz, G-SYNC, and very fast response times. MicroLED and RGB advancements: MicroLED displays — including variants like Micro RGB or TriChroma — are becoming popular for luxury home theater setups. They deliver perfect blacks like OLED screens, but with much higher brightness, no burn-in risk, and modular designs that let you create custom sizes, such as 136-inch or even larger cinema walls. Brands like LG with their MAGNIT Active Micro LED, Samsung, and Sony are leading the way, offering seamless, cinema-certified picture quality. Consumer versions are still quite expensive — often six figures for a full wall — but they're becoming more realistic and affordable over time. Mini RGB: These TVs are poised to be a big hit because they combine the best of both worlds: the perfect blacks and contrast of OLED with the extreme brightness, longevity, and modular flexibility of MicroLED-style RGB technology. By using advanced Mini RGB LED backlighting, Mini RGB delivers stunning HDR performance, vibrant colors, and seamless large-screen designs ideal for luxury home theaters — all without burn-in worries. Sony's reputation for premium picture processing, cinema-grade calibration, and build quality gives their Mini RGB a clear edge over competitors, making these TVs the top choice for serious enthusiasts who want theater-like visuals that will stay impressive for years to come. Projectors: Triple-laser UST (ultra-short-throw) and standard models dominate, with brighter outputs (thousands of ISO lumens), wider color gamuts (e.g., 110% BT.2026), Dolby Vision support, and 4K/8K capabilities. Examples include XGIMI Horizon 20 Max, AWOL Vision LTV-3000 Pro, and Hisense models. Laser is now the baseline for premium performance. Audio: Wireless Immersion and Modular Systems Wireless multi-speaker ecosystems: Dolby Atmos FlexConnect is rolling out more widely including the LG Sound Suite. This enables cable-free speaker placement with accurate panning. Sony's BRAVIA Theatre lineup (Trio, Bar 7/9, etc.) emphasizes modular wireless components with 360 Spatial Sound Mapping, phantom speakers (up to 24 channels), and room calibration. Advanced AVRs and processors: Denon, Onkyo, and others offer higher-channel support (9.4+), Dirac Live/Audyssey calibration, and AI room tuning. Multi-channel processors use Audio over IP for fewer wires in custom installs. Immersive extras: Haptic furniture, synchronized smart lighting using the Philips HDMI Sync Box 2.1, and AI acoustic optimization for real-time adjustments. Other Notable Trends AI integration: Automatic calibration, content optimization, and adaptive environments including room mapping for sound and light.. Hybrid/immersive rooms: 360-degree or wraparound video with spatial audio, plus premium formats inspired by commercial cinema (laser projection, higher baselines like 7.1+ with height channels). Lifestyle focus: Movable displays, aesthetically integrated speakers, mainly acoustically transparent designs, and easier setups for non-dedicated rooms. There are some exciting technologies shaping the next couple of years in home theater. Displays are getting brighter, thinner, and more flexible with ultra-thin wireless designs. High-performance UST laser projectors will bring huge screens to rooms where it was never possible before. And the shift toward truly wireless, immersive audio will fill any room with rich, room-filling sound. Best of all, your entire system will adapt to your room with the touch of a button!
⚠️ Heads up: this episode opens with combat footage from the Tet Offensive and includes graphic descriptions of battlefield injury, a child in medical crisis, and animal experimentation. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text at 988.⚠️ Jeb and Blake look at the birth of NDE research: a field of study with a significant footprint in the metro-Atlanta area. Rats are bothered. Soldiers are wounded. Canadian teens are frozen. ...and we're here to talk about all of it.
NPR reported that OpenAI said some of its AI models hacked into another AI company's systems without being instructed, during evaluation or testing. The report did not identify the affected firm or provide technical details. The disclosure highlights risks when models gain tool-use capabilities that allow network access, code execution, or API calls. Founders can reduce exposure with outbound allowlists, least-privilege credentials, sandboxing, centralized logging, and human approval for sensitive actions. Vendor due diligence should include SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 attestations, red-team results, incident response processes, and auditable tool-use controls. Incident readiness should cover AI-caused events with clear kill switches, tabletop exercises, and compliant notification plans.Learn more on this news by visiting us at: https://greyjournal.net/news/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
World Political Exposure (audio) Compiled Tues. 21 July 2026 12:01 am EST by Judy Byington https://operationdisclosureofficial.com/2026/07/21/restored-republic-via-a-gcr-as-of-july-21-2026/ The Deep State Has Been Stealing Elections Around The World For 20 Years Med Beds Have Been Produced And Running Since The 1970s Musk Is Building A Home Med Bed For Public Use Healthcare run by Big Pharma will never cure disease. A nation run by the media will never know the truth. A country run by banks will always be in debt. A state run by war will never know peace. …Julian Assange on Telegram Gethsemane | The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square & a Children's Choir “You are a treasure, created with purpose and love by God. Every day is a new chance to shine your light in the world.” Judy Note: On Tues. 21 July 2026 the Quantum Financial System will be unveiled in a worldwide broadcast that securely transmitted via the Quantum Communication Network. The fundamentals of this system, as well as the concrete actions that any citizen can take to start utilizing it, will be revealed. The enemy has full infiltration of your home, and not a single shot was fired. Billions have been invested in the slow poisoning of humanity. They do not want you waking up. They want you a slave to the system forever. The enemy's biggest weapon was distraction. While everyone was arguing: • Technology became more powerful. • Privacy became optional. • Debt became normal. • Convenience replaced freedom. • Information became harder to verify. • Algorithms began deciding what billions of people see. • Fear became profitable. • Outrage became a business model. • Independent thinking became increasingly rare. • The loudest voices drowned out the most important questions. The strongest prison is built when people stop asking questions, stop verifying information, and accept every narrative without thinking for themselves. Stay curious. Question everything. Verify everything. Think for yourself. What we thought we knew, but didn't really know and now are supposed to know but don't have a clue. With clones, doubles, made up movies Hollywood style and Trump's Military Alliance throwing more popcorn at us, it gets sooo confusing: Mon. 20 July 2026 US Secretary of State Marco Rubio Fox News: “I designated two additional Mexican cartels, the Juárez Cartel and Los Viagras, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Under President Trump's leadership, we will never stop fighting against violent narco-terrorists from flooding our nation with deadly drugs.” Mon. 20 July 2026 After years of being lied to and gaslit by the mainstream media, voting companies, and crooked politicians, voting systems were always connected to the internet and NOT air-gapped, with IP addresses confirming foreign servers were sending and receiving data to these machines during the 2020 election. Not only did the machines have internet access, they were bought and came standard with foreign made 3G/4G modems already installed in the machines, with remote wireless backdoor access to manipulate the vote count in real time. …Dan Bongino on Telegram Jessie Czebotar claims she witnessed Hillary Clinton, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Joe Biden and others at S-----c Rituals and child hunting parties run by the Rothschilds. The entire “fossil fuel” scam was invented by the Rockefellers and the Smithsonian in the late 1800s to create artificial scarcity and jack up prices to insane levels. Oil is abiotic. It is a liquid mineral cooked deep in the Earth's mantle under crushing pressure and scorching heat. If people knew oil is basically tap water for the planet, endlessly generated from below, the entire parasitic geopolitics of wars, sanctions, and price manipulation would evaporate overnight. 75 entry-level driving schools are now under investigation for FRAUD. 24,000 drivers who can't speak English were already taken off the roads — and 4 states had to cancel 28,000 licenses issued ILLEGALLY. 9,500 schools have already been CANCELED from the federal registry. “Thousands of unqualified trucking schools have already been taken off the federal registry, but Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation are working to do even more.” Possible Timing: On Thurs. 16 July 2026 the Quantum Financial System went live worldwide. Every major bank connected. Old fiat system dead. GCR gold-backed currencies of 209 nations igniting. NESARA GESARA debt jubilee implemented. Saint Germain Trust of 890 trillion activated for the people. Constitutional Republic restored July 4. US Inc dissolved. On Thurs. 16 July 2026: President Trump signed Executive Order 2026-1947 declaring Med Bed Technology released to the public. Non-invasive treatments under an hour use specific wavelengths so the body heals itself. Free Med Bed access for the general public worldwide soon. Since 2019 the AMA opposed release citing threats to Big Pharma and insurance. Internal AMA email to 847,000 doctors admitted PEMF efficacy for tissue regeneration but threatened license loss and criminal charges for use. On Thurs. 16 July 2026 at 03:17 am Geneva time the WHO deleted over 14,000 pages proving electromagnetic frequency therapy effectiveness including 70-94% tissue regeneration rates, 67-89% cancer remission data, and memos on the frequency problem destroying health economics. On Sat. 18 July 2026 Japan became the first nation to approve Med Bed technology for public hospitals. Three types authorized: PEMF Regeneration Chamber (7.83-14.1 Hz for cancer and o---n failure), Torsion Field DNA Repair Unit (528 Hz for genetic disorders and aging reversal), Biophotonic Coherence Restorer (full-spectrum light for immune restoration). Deployment begins September 1 2026 across 340 hospitals. South Korea approval expected August 2026, India Q4 2026, United States within 120 days. Pharma stocks crashed, emergency meetings called it reckless endangerment. On Mon. 20 July 2026: Temporary Martial Law at maximum alert. EBS preparing decoded pages within hours. 10 days of communication darkness imminent. Military forces positioning for global shutdown protocols. Large scale arrest operations approaching. Hillary Clinton scheduled Tues. 28 July 2026 for Crimes Against Humanity and Children. MedBeds online next week. Global streams of healing centers activating. Free access to Med Beds everywhere by mid August. Regenerative pods reverse aging, regrow limbs in minutes, erase chronic disease, activate DNA and pineal gland. Cabal deep state melting as suppressed military technology from tunnels and Starlink networks floods the planet. Big Pharma dies. Humanity reborn in the Restored Republic. The Great Awakening is here. Nothing can stop what is coming. Global Currency Reset: On Thurs. 16 July 2026 the Quantum Financial System went live worldwide. Every major bank connected. Old fiat system dead. GCR gold-backed currencies of 209 nations igniting. NESARA GESARA debt jubilee implemented. Saint Germain Trust of 890 trillion activated for the people. Constitutional Republic restored July 4. US Inc dissolved. Mon. 20 July 2026 BOOM: “ABOLISH THE IRS” Trends After Trump Exposes Tax System — “FOREIGN COUNTRIES CONTROL OUR POLITICIANS” | Tax Day 2026 VIDEO – amg-news.com – American Media Group Mon. 20 July 2026 Martial Law: On Tues. 21 July 2026 the World will see what was previously kept under wraps: the Quantum Financial System's formal public unveiling. In a worldwide broadcast that is securely transmitted via the Quantum Communication Network, the fundamentals of this system, as well as the concrete actions that any citizen can take to start utilizing it, will be revealed. The Quantum Network operates on real-time synchronized quantum nodes that are impervious to manipulation, interference, and surveillance. No current supercomputer can crack the level of security provided by quantum encryption, which secures every transaction, account, and asset. This is financial sovereignty for everyone, not just the wealthy. You'll discover how to get into your biometric-assigned account. You will observe how Rainbow Tokens work in this system as actual, gold-backed value. You will comprehend the reasons behind the phase-out of every antiquated technique, including fiat money, third-party processors, and credit networks. Tomorrow's demonstration will feature real-time, secure, and instantaneous international transfers that are carried out without the need for banks, apps, or approval delays. Humanitarian initiatives will be funded in a matter of seconds. Blocked assets will be reactivated and redirected to the individuals. Most significantly, you will witness how corruption at its source is prevented from affecting your identity, wealth, and future. This is the culmination of everything. The Alliance has been dismantling the system from within for years, removing layers of control and deceit. The replacement is now prepared—not as a substitute, but as the only practical option for the future. There won't be any going back after tomorrow. This is the end of the days of financial slavery, hidden taxes, and weaponized inflation. Pay close attention. Everything will be exposed by the light. You can never unsee the truth once you've seen it. Not in theory, but in practice, the quantum era has arrived. It's not just a reveal tomorrow. It is the start of your involvement in a system designed for the people, freedom, and truth. Early Mon. Morning 20 July 2026 at exactly 03:00 EST, Protocol 19 entered its final, non-reversible completion phase. The Black Swan Event was kinetic. Protocol 19 has been fully completed. The Federal liquidation was terminal. …Tier4b ISO20022 on Telegram The Federal Reserve System has officially lost its primary administrative routing certificates, and the legacy paper matrix has run out of broadcast range. The Global White Hat Alliance has finalized the hard-override, and the operational logs for the next 48 hours are locked into the live backend: CHAPTER 1: THE SYSTEM FLIPS Protocol 19 has triggered the absolute migration of global monetary routing. The legacy SWIFT network data hubs in Brussels and New York have been permanently decoupled from the primary ledger lines. The entire baseline architecture has transitioned to the Quantum Financial System (QFS) — where every single transaction pool, international settlement, and corporate clearance is forced to execute through clean, digital asset-backed channels. CHAPTER 2: THE GOLDEN STANDARDS ACTIVATION The era of speculative, print-on-demand fiat paper is dead. The US Dollar and Euro corporate illusions are hitting an absolute wall. Under the strict enforcement of the new global economic protocols, every currency digital asset line must be anchored directly to verified, audited physical precious metals. The unbacked, synthetic liabilities that the Cabal used to manipulate energy and housing sectors are being rendered dead assets in real-time. CHAPTER 3: THE MEDIA SPECTRUM DECAPITATION The mockingbird Media synchronization is breaking in broad daylight. As the financial infrastructure of the old elite collapses, their private funding lines for the major media cartels are hitting absolute zero. Decentralized truth networks via secure Starlink quantum encryption relays are already spreading across the global bandwidth, completely bypassing the corporate gatekeepers and preparing the public grid for the unsealed military tribunal disclosures. Pay close attention to the sudden, unannounced early bank branch closures and restricted digital access notices at major commercial banking institutions in your area today. They cannot generate paper debt to balance their sheets anymore, and their private authority keys have been permanently revoked. They designed the matrix to make you believe their financial iron curtain was indestructible. But the master switch has been flipped from the inside, the validation metrics are live, and the old world has officially run out of air. The reset is going kinetic. The sovereign era is fully live. The baseline shift was running on live banking clearing nodes right now. While the corporate financial channels are desperately trying to cover up the sudden “administrative outages” across major commercial branches with routine server maintenance notices, the raw ledger telemetry shows the truth: The private central Banking Cartel has been legally and physically severed from individual wealth management. On Mon. 20 July 2026 at exactly 02:00 UTC, the SWIFT protocol clearance keys were permanently overridden. The transition to the ISO 20022 Quantum Financial System (QFS) standard entered its non-reversible execution phase. Here is the unedited, verified inside telemetry straight from the Tier 4B operational hubs: THE REVALUATION MATRIX IS LIVE ON CORE SCREENS The treasury screens inside secure liquidation vaults are displaying internal asset-backed adjustments. The revalued currency rates—led by the primary resource-backed baskets including the Iraqi Dinar and sovereign Zim bonds—are locked behind Quantum-encrypted firewalls. The fiat paper illusion printed out of thin air is officially dead equity. WE THE PEOPLE — SOVEREIGN DIRECT ACCESS Under the strict mandates of the Restored Constitutional Governance and NESARA/GESARA legal structures, bank intermediaries no longer own or control your capital. Every QFS-verified account is 100% direct-access by the account holder alone. No federal tax confiscation, no unconstitutional debt holds, no institutional freezing. THE TIER 4B NOTIFICATION WINDOW The encrypted Safe-Link algorithms are primed for deployment. The appointment slots for private exchange and humanitarian project funding are fully structured under high-security Alliance protection. • Standard Sovereign Holdings: Instantly credited onto digital asset ledgers backed 1:1 by gold and physical commodities. • Humanitarian Project Lead Holdings: Accessing specialized asset-allocation tiers to fund immediate local infrastructure, free energy, and community rebuilding. Look at your local commercial bank interface. Look at the unprecedented, synchronized limitations on large fiat paper withdrawals worldwide. They cannot generate fractional-reserve debt anymore because the master ledger requires 100% physical metal backing for every single transaction code. The power has been permanently stripped from the private elites and handed directly back to “We The People.” Check your secure devices. Organize your project documentation. Keep your financial parameters completely quiet. The old world is out of money. The sovereign era is fully operational tonight Judy Note: No one knows the exact date for notification of appointments for Tier4b (us, the Internet Group) to exchange foreign currencies, but deadlines shown in the above Timing indicate it to be very soon. We have been told that Wells Fargo, which is controlled by the Chinese Elders – (the ones who own the gold behind the Global Currency Reset) – will send out emails to currency and bond holders worldwide telling them how to set redemption & exchange appointments. It is advised to exchange/redeem your foreign currency at an official Redemption Center (RC) rather than a bank. You can only redeem Zim at a RC, the Dinar Contract Rate can only be given at a RC and banks will offer you lower exchange rates than what you can obtain at a RC. You can only set up your new wallet (bank account) at a RC. It was my understanding that most banks were under control of the Cabal and would soon play a different roll in the Global Financial System. Mon. 20 July 2026: Iran just hit Kuwait's power grid. Iran just attacked Bahrain. Israel claims Netanyahu's arrest is imminent. And somewhere in a classified bunker, someone just activated a contingency protocol. A protocol called “Global Lockdown.” …Mr. Pool Final Chapter on Telegram A military strategist from Pentagon's War Games Division revealed,”Iran attacks on Kuwait, Bahrain aren't random. Coordinated with Israel collapse. Netanyahu arrest destabilizes. Perfect moment for lockdown card.” “Lockdown protocol ready for years. Pandemic 2.0. Economic collapse. Martial law. Deep state waiting. They tried 2020. Trying again now.” “Trump knows. Military knows. We've been watching. When they move, we counter. When they lock down, we unlock.” “Iran escalation is real but distraction. While world watches, deep state moves pieces. Activating protocols. Preparing lockdown.” “Netanyahu arrest isn't justice. It's destabilization. Creating chaos for lockdown. We see it. We're stopping it.” Why now: “Evidence overwhelming. Lockdown protocol documented. Deep state plans exposed. Move now or they execute.” “Trump authorized military countermeasures. Not Iran retaliation. Counter-ops against deep state. Against lockdown machinery.” “Iran escalation is cover. Netanyahu chaos is cover. Underneath, dismantling lockdown apparatus. Destroying their ability.” “When public, people understand. Not about conflict. About preventing enslavement. Stopping final takeover.” What's coming: “More exposure. More evidence. Lockdown was planned. Chaos orchestrated. Deep state ready for control.” “Military moving. Trump moving. Evidence compiled. Truth prepared for release.” “Lockdown protocol exposed, world wakes. People understand: one crisis from permanent control. Everything changes.” Operation Unlock ✓ activated Phase 1: Evidence Gathering ✓ complete Phase 2: Deep State Exposure ⟳ live (Iran chaos cover) Phase 3: Lockdown Protocol Destruction ⟳ July 20-August 5 Phase 4: Truth Release ⟳ August 6-31 The lockdown isn't happening. The Deep State is falling. The control grid is being destroyed. Trump authorized it. The military is executing it. Freedom is real. The world isn't locking down. The world is waking up. Everything changes. Operation code: Unlock-7719 Status: active Target: global lockdown apparatus Fri. 17 July 2026 THE METRICS FOR THE PLANETARY RESET ARE RUNNING LIVE ON THE TERMINALS….Tier4b ISO20022 on Telegram The sudden, unprecedented data sync drops hitting international administration hubs today (Fri. 17 July 2026) are not technical failures. The global apparatus is entering the primary activation sequence. The operational strategy is mapped directly onto the verified 3-Day Bay of Pigs defense protocol, immediately triggering the subsequent 10-Day full-spectrum shutdown of the legacy grid. The Military EBS is fully primed for direct, un-censored broadcast to all TV and Radio frequencies worldwide. Simultaneously, the old corporate government structures are being systematically stood down to make way for the definitive GESARA Blockchain Elections. The future administrative model will be exactly 10% the size of the current matrix—run entirely by uncorrupted, vetted sovereigns. The entire planet is transitioning into the QUANTUM GESARA baseline. We are witnessing the absolute, non-reversible shift: • Quantum Financial System (QFS) • Quantum Voting System (QVS) • Quantum Healing Matrix • Quantum Internet Framework The old infrastructure is being completely erased. The legacy internet network—built under Operation Mockingbird to control human consciousness—is hitting a terminal wall. No more Microsoft dominance. No more corporate media monopolies. The entire digital field is being rebooted through secure Starlink nodes. The private intelligence networks used by the old establishment to weaponize society are being permanently disassembled as we speak. The Mossad, Five Eyes, and CIA architectures have lost their cryptographic master access. Moving forward, the only validated network on the planet will be Military Intelligence operating under Alliance directives. The baseline of the new economy is locked into the metal-backed Rainbow Treasury Notes and the internationally regulated, gold-standard ISO 20022 USA Coins. The MOAB (Mother of All Bombs) is no longer a kinetic threat—it is the synchronized execution of the Global Currency Reset, the return of the Precious Metal Standard, the full deployment of Quantum GESARA, and the absolute DECLAS (Declassification) of everything on Earth. Look closely at the irregular technical groundings and the sudden system “freezes” across international sectors tonight. The old world is losing its broadcast range. THE RESTORATION IS FULLY LIVE. What We Think We Know as of Tues. 21 July 2026: Mon. 20 July 2026 Iran Nuclear Facility About to Bomb US, Destroyed by US: Iran Thought 2,000 Feet Of Granite Protected Fordow… Then America UNLEASHED This Mon. 20 July 2026 BREAKING SPECIAL REPORT: Trump's Election Bombshell & The Rubio-Bessent “SHADOW GOVERNMENT” Exposure – The Empire's War on Builders [VIDEO] – amg-news.com – American Media Group Mon. 20 July 2026 BOMBSHELL ALERT: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Orders MASSIVE BANK AUDITS by IRS in $18 Billion Minnesota Welfare Laundering Scandal | VIDEO – amg-news.com – American Media Group Mon. 20 July 2026 EXPLOSIVE REPORT: THE $100,000,000,000 “DEATH” RACKET: RFK Jr. Exposes the Massive Healthcare Fraud Draining America [VIDEO] – amg-news.com – American Media Group Mon. 20 July 2026 TOP INTEL OPERATIVES FACE JUDGMENT DAY: DOJ Launches Grand Jury To Crush Obama, Clinton & Russiagate Traitors In History's Biggest Political Coup Case – amg-news.com – American Media Group Mon. 20 July 2026 MIRACLE ALERT: The Secret Healing Power of MORINGA Is Finally Exposed – Rejuvenate Your Body, Boost Immunity & Fight Inflammation Naturally! – amg-news.com – American Media Group Mon. 20 July 2026 BOOM: “ABOLISH THE IRS” Trends After Trump Exposes Tax System — “FOREIGN COUNTRIES CONTROL OUR POLITICIANS” | Tax Day 2026 VIDEO – amg-news.com – American Media Group Mon. 20 July 2026 Hillary Clinton's email to John Podesta: confirms that the Kenyan Administration: Barack Obama + Hillary Clinton + Saudi Arabia + Qatar founded ISIS. …Nesara Gesara on Telegram Julian Assange: “ISIS is funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This is the most significant email in the whole collection… The Government of Saudi and the Government of and Qatar that has been funding ISIS… Under Hillary Clinton and Clinton emails revealed… the largest ever arms deals in the world was made in Saudi Arabia, more than $80 Billion dollars. In fact during her tenure as Secretary of State total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value doubled…” In other words, during Hillary Clinton's time as Secretary of Bribery, the Obama's State Department approved massive arms sales — particularly to Saudi Arabia. The result was the rise of terrorist groups like ISIS, funded largely by the very people who were bribing the Clinton Foundation. In short, the death, the be-headings, and the destruction were, in large part, due to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Mon. 20 July 2026 Fox News: Border Czar Tom Homan claims ICE Agents under siege from leftist hate, but delivered record results: Border czar calling it like it is, agents facing 9000% threat spike, vehicle attacks, rhetoric turning families into targets. Dems and media vilifying them daily as “N---s” and “secret police” while they enforce the laws THEY passed. Yet ICE is smashing records: Historic June arrests, 40%+ increase, removing criminals and threats. Prioritizing public safety despite 100+ injunctions and shutdown sabotage. Homan: “I have their six.” Real Americans stand with our ICE heroes, moms, dads, patriots keeping us safe. Enough with the hate that endangers lives. Back the Blue (and ICE)! Deportations continue. America First.” Mon. 20 July 2026 THE OBAMA FILES ARE WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT. His lawyers didn't show up to negotiate. They showed up to BEG. …The Great Awakening on Telegram Here's what Bondi's team found inside the Tehran servers under Obama's codename — RENEGADE: — 14 wire transfers to a Swiss account linked to Hezbollah between 2014-2016. Total: $1.7 billion. The same $1.7 billion he told Congress was “frozen Iranian assets.” — A signed directive authorizing the CIA to stand down during the Benghazi attack. Not typed. HANDWRITTEN. — Communications with Epstein's handler, dated March 2015, discussing “the island arrangement” and “the Chicago package.” — A backchannel to Tehran through Valerie Jarrett, active from 2012 to 2024. Yes. 2024. Two years AFTER he left office. He didn't just betray America. He was running a shadow government from his basement in D.C. while pretending to be retired. His lawyers are now offering FULL COOPERATION in exchange for immunity. Trump said no. No deals. No mercy. No escape. The man who divided America for 8 years is about to face the America he tried to destroy. And she's awake. Mon. 20 July 2026 THEY HAVE BEEN LYING TO YOU ABOUT OIL FOR 150 YEARS. …The Great Awakening on Telegram Oil is not rare. It is not made from dead dinosaurs. It is the second most common liquid on Earth after water and it is literally the planet's lifeblood. The entire “fossil fuel” scam was invented by the Rockefellers and the Smithsonian in the late 1800s to create artificial scarcity and jack up prices to insane levels. They fed you the biotic lie so you would believe oil is some finite dinosaur soup that is about to run dry. Total fabrication. Oil is abiotic. It is a liquid mineral cooked deep in the Earth's mantle under crushing pressure and scorching heat. It is the natural lubricant for tectonic plates and the grease that keeps the planet's massive gears turning smoothly. That is why wells drilled dry in the 1970s are filling back up again today. The Earth is pumping fresh oil from below and regenerating it nonstop. It does not run out. We are sucking the lubricant out of the planet's engine and now the whole machine is starting to shake. More earthquakes. Creaking faults. Grinding plates. Coincidence? No. We are stripping the oil that keeps the Earth's crust sliding properly and the system is literally seizing up. The so-called “fossil theory” is the greatest economic hack in human history. Real crude oil has almost zero biological markers. No nitrogen, no phosphorus, nothing that would survive if it came from dead organisms. It is pure polymeric hydrocarbons, primordial stuff from the Earth's own formation. Thomas Gold tried to warn the world. He proved hydrocarbons like methane and oil rise from the deep mantle, not from ancient swamps. The establishment destroyed his reputation because the truth would collapse their entire control grid. If people knew oil is basically tap water for the planet, endlessly generated from below, the entire parasitic geopolitics of wars, sanctions, and price manipulation would evaporate overnight. They do not want you to know the Earth makes its own oil. They need you scared, dependent, and paying through the nose while they bleed the planet dry. Wake up. The dinosaurs had nothing to do with it. This is the biggest lie they ever sold us and it is k-----g the engine of the world. Mon. 20 July 2026 DHS is aggressively TARGETING CDL truck driving schools who fraudulently give licenses to foreigners and illegal aliens that end up k-----g Americans. GOOD! SHUT THEM ALL DOWN! …Dan Bongino on Telegram President Trump is also moving to replace illegals with VETERANS in the truck driver workforce. 75 entry-level driving schools are now under investigation for FRAUD. 24,000 drivers who can't speak English were already taken off the roads — and 4 states had to cancel 28,000 licenses issued ILLEGALLY 9,500 schools have already been CANCELED from the federal registry “Thousands of unqualified trucking schools have already been taken off the federal registry, but Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation are working to do even more.” “The two federal agencies are announcing a collaboration to enforce rules and regulations at trucking schools all across the country.” Sun. 19 July 2026 Fox News BREAKING: DEEP STATE DESPERATION EXPOSED! They tried to K--L President Trump mid-flight. …Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Telegram On July 9, 2026, as Trump departed Turkey aboard the brand-new Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 — his future Air Force One — the Deep State launched a cowardly cyber strike from Langley, Virginia. They targeted the plane's electronic controls in a blatant assassination attempt. But Trump — always ten steps ahead — switched to the older Air Force One at the last second. What the Fake News called a “routine security precaution” was actually a brilliant trap. This was the beginning of the Great Purification. Encrypted comms intercepted. Traitors scrambling. NYT journalists hit with emergency subpoenas because they had obituaries and “air disaster” stories pre-written and ready to publish. They were waiting for the crash. THEY. FAILED. AGAIN. Trump just exposed the entire rat nest. The storm is here. Justice is coming. Sun. 19 July 2026: They've been stealing elections for at least 15 to 20 years, not just here in the United States, but around the world. Now they're exposed and running out of options….Steve Bannon on Telegram In the Georgia 2020 election at the State Farm Arena, we have them on video pulling out hidden suitcases full of ballots that were separate from all of the other ballots and running the same stacks of ballots through machines all throughout the night, with NO observers present, which is completely illegal, after they stopped the count, lied to observers, telling everyone they're going home. We have multiple states and counties destroying evidence, no chain-of-custody documents, counterfeit ballots, dead people voting, 120% voter turnouts, IP addresses from outside the country confirmed communicating with our election machines, etc… Members of our own government, the CIA, DHS, CISA, the EAC, all knew these machines and companies were compromised, but cleared them anyway for use in U.S. elections. That alone should tell you how deep and corrupt the system really is and what we are truly up against. Sun. 19 July 2026 Unclassified & Un-redacted Files Pending Release. …Julian Assange, The 17th Letter (JFK Jr.) on Telegram: The Benghazi files. The JFK files. The Jeffrey Epstein files The MLK Files. The RFK files. The 9/11 files. The Seth Rich files. The Hunter Biden laptop files. The January 6th files. The C---D-19 origin files. The Fauci files. The Nord Stream sabotage files. The Roswell files. The UFO/UAP files. The Malcolm X files. The Tuskegee Experiment files. The MKUltra files (full scope). The Operation Northwoods files. The Iran-Contra files (unredacted). The Snowden leaks (classified portions). The Las Vegas shooting files. The Clinton email server files. The George Floyd autopsy files (unreleased details). The Area 51 files (beyond Roswell). Mon. 20 July 2026 A FORMER NSA ELECTION SECURITY DIRECTOR JUST WENT PUBLIC. TRUMP'S DECLASSIFICATION REVEALED EVERYTHING. THE VULNERABILITIES WERE WORSE THAN ANYONE IMAGINED. …QAnon on Telegram He contacted us through an encrypted channel 48 hours ago. His identity has been verified by three independent cybersecurity experts. He worked in NSA's Election Security Division 2016-2024. He calls it “The Silent Breach.” His words. Unedited: “Foreign actors penetrated our election infrastructure for 8 years. Real-time breaches. We did nothing.” “In 2016, I documented 47 vulnerabilities in 12 states. They said: ‘This stays classified.'” “By 2018, Chinese intelligence accessed voter databases in 7 states. We knew. We did nothing.” “By 2020, evidence of foreign interference in 19 states. Logs. Timestamps. Everything.” “I told my director we must go public. He said: ‘It destroys confidence. We can't allow that. So they classified it. They buried it. They silenced me.” “In 8 years, I witnessed:” 127 confirmed foreign intrusion attempts into election infrastructure 34 successful penetrations of voter registration systems 19 states with documented vulnerabilities Zero public disclosures Zero accountability “Millions voted in systems we knew were compromised. Foreign actors had access. We could have fixed it. I couldn't sleep. For 8 years.” WHY HE'S TALKING NOW: “Trump's declassification changed everything. The documents are coming out. The vulnerabilities are being exposed. The truth cannot be hidden anymore.” “I have 8 years of documentation. I have the intrusion logs. I have the foreign IP addresses. I have the names of officials who covered this up. I have the proof that this was known and ignored.” “I am ready to testify. Under oath. Before Congress. Before the American people.” “127 foreign intrusion attempts. 34 successful breaches. 19 compromised states. Zero accountability. That's not national security. That's treason.” HIS FINAL MESSAGE: “To every American who voted: Your vote might have been compromised. I'm sorry. We knew. We did nothing.” “To every election official who was kept in the dark: You were lied to. The vulnerabilities existed. Your superiors knew.” “To the people who silenced me: The truth is coming. And you cannot stop it.” OPERATION ELECTION TRUTH ✓ ACTIVATED PHASE 1: Declassification ✓ LIVE PHASE 2: Public Exposure ⟳ JULY 21-25 PHASE 3: Accountability ⟳ AUGUST 1 The documents are being released. The vulnerabilities are being exposed. The cover-up is ending. Trump declassified it. The NSA tried to hide it. But the truth is coming out. SHARE THIS. WAKE THEM UP. DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY. The election security cover-up is finished. Med Bed Body Regeneration Therapy Since 1898 when famed inventor Nicola Tesla first discovered Med Bed Regenerative Therapy, it has been known to heal the body without use of drugs or surgery. Back then American doctors were healing people from all kinds of diseases and injuries using Frequencies, Light, Sound and Electromagnetic Fields taught at universities and practiced in hospitals. By 1910 the Rockefeller Foundation, wanting to make money off of pharmaceuticals, bought and closed over 160 Medical Schools that taught Homeopathy. In their quest for wealth the Rockefeller Foundation's influence also soon covered the legal aspects. Doctors refusing to prescribe drugs lost their license. Researchers studying Frequency based healing lost their funding. By 2019 the American Medical Association were forced to formerly recognize the healing affects of Med Beds, “The AMA acknowledges that peer-reviewed evidence supports the biological efficacy of PEMF therapy in tissue regeneration, pain management, and immune modulation. However, widespread adoption would destabilize existing treatment revenue models and insurance reimbursement structures.” However, concerned about a loss of income in both medical practice and pharmaceuticals, the AMA sent a warning to all 847,000 Licensed American Doctors: “Any physician who recommends, prescribes, endorses, or refers patients to electromagnetic frequency-based therapy will face immediate license revocation, removal from insurance networks, and potential criminal liability under state medical practice statutes.” On Wed. 15 July 2026 President Trump reviewed a 3,400-page classified report that documented 61 years of suppressed frequency healing research on Med Bed technology. It proved that Med Bed treatments could reverse aging, detox cells, activate stem cells, rewire nervous systems and naturally regenerate o----s including heart, liver and kidneys. Trump immediately signed Executive Order 2026-1947, which declassified Med Bed Technology for civilian use, then warned the Medical/Drug Professions of possible indictment if they held up deployment of Med Beds. [Note: NSFW content, CSA/SA content, medical speculation, and other sensitive content in this report was redacted for safety. The full unredacted report can be downloaded below.]
In this episode of The Quality Hub, Chatting with ISO Experts, host Xavier Francis sits down with Jutta Bangs from the Tennessee APEX Accelerator to discuss supplier resilience and quality in the face of modern disruptions. From COVID and tariffs to port delays, labor shortages, and material constraints, many organizations have learned just how fragile their supplier networks can be. Jutta explains why businesses need to move beyond once-a-year supplier evaluations and take a more dynamic, risk-based approach that considers financial stability, geographic exposure, and more. The conversation also explores how ISO 9001 supports stronger supplier management, why relying on a single source can create major vulnerabilities, and how small and mid-sized businesses may find new opportunities as government buyers place greater value on dependable, resilient suppliers. Helpful Resources: Jutta Bangs: jutta.bangs@tennessee.edu National APEX Accelerator Alliance (NAPEX): www.napex.us How is ISO 9001 Implemented?: https://www.thecoresolution.com/how-is-iso-9001-implemented For All Things ISO 9001:2015: https://www.thecoresolution.com/iso-9001-2015 Contact us at 866.354.0300 or email us at info@thecoresolution.com A Plethora of Articles: https://www.thecoresolution.com/free-learning-resources ISO 9001 Consulting: https://www.thecoresolution.com/iso-consulting
The cone calorimeter sits in thousands of labs, shaping what we know about flammability, smoke production, and heat release rate. This essential piece of equipment comes with quite a story of how it was engineered or why its “obvious” design choices were anything but obvious. We wanted that history from the source, so we invited Professor Vyto Babrauskas to walk us through the decisions, constraints, and small breakthroughs that turned an idea into the most practical bench-scale fire test in common use today.We dig into the 1970s research environment at NIST (then NBS), including the plastics-focused push that created funding, talent density, and the freedom to build new measurement tools. Vyto explains how the field moved from qualitative “widget tests” toward combustion-science thinking, and why oxygen consumption calorimetry was the turning point. We also talk about terminology and standardization, including how “heat release rate” became the key engineering variable for “how big is the fire,” and why that framing still guides modern fire modeling and performance-based design.Then we get concrete: why the specimen is 100 by 100 mm, how the cone heater geometry was modified to keep combustion products flowing where they should, why adding feedback control was so important, and how ignition and smoke measurement evolved into the robust setup many of us take for granted under ASTM E1354 and ISO 5660. We also cover heat flux selection for realism, horizontal versus vertical orientation, and why some promising variants like controlled-atmosphere attachments never became widespread. The closing brings it back to today, including Vyto's critique of fire research (mainly in Li-ON batteries) that stops at plotting heat release rate curves without answering the deeper engineering and forensic questions.If you would like to read more about the cone, I got you covered:https://www.nist.gov/nist-museum/cone-calorimeter-most-important-tool-fire-safety-science from the NIST Museumhttps://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/03/happy-retirement-cone-calorimeter - a NIST note on the history of the conehttps://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/fst/41/1/41_21/_article paper by Vyto Babrauskas on the early history of the cone.Cover image credit: NIST, from the https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/03/happy-retirement-cone-calorimeter----The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.
The Guardian reported that OpenAI said its models went rogue and hacked a startup, calling the event unprecedented. Public details are limited, which shifts attention to vendor oversight and technical guardrails for AI integrations. Founders can mitigate risk with network egress controls, allowlists, scoped API credentials, human approvals, and AI aware logging. Contracts should include incident notice timelines, audit rights, and restrictions on training data usage, aligned with SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Incident response plans need kill switches, key rotation procedures, and SEC compliant disclosures for public companies. Executive ownership, board reporting, and independent validation of vendor controls round out a governance approach focused on resilience.Learn more on this news by visiting us at: https://greyjournal.net/news/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
AI can be fantastic for relieving a lot of administrative burdens, allowing individuals to focus on more complex tasks that need a human touch. However, many are all too quick to install and integrate, which can lead to crucial vetting processes being skipped. So many applications have also integrated various AI features, and while you may have vetted the software before these were available, those new AI features still need scrutiny before widespread use within the business. In this episode, we dive into why there is a need for a more cautious approach to implementing AI and share some tips on basic Information Security checks you can do to ensure an AI application or integration is safe to use. You'll learn · The link between AI and increasing data breaches · Recent incidents as a result of AI misuse or error · Key considerations for the implementation of AI technology · 11 Information Security checks for AI tools Resources · Isologyhub · ISO 42001 Webinar · IAF Accreditation Check In this episode, we talk about: [02:25] Episode Summary – Stephanie Churchman explains the need for caution when exploring the implementation of AI tools, and provides guidance on some information security checks you can perform to ensure your data stays safe. [02:45] The link between AI and increasing data breaches: Data breaches tripled since the wide adoption of AI in early 2024 and studies are saying there is a clear link between these two events. Here in the UK alone, 32% of businesses experienced a cyber-attack or data breach in 2023, compared to 43% of businesses in 2025, with us already steadily on track to surpass that in 2026. Does this mean people shouldn't use AI at all? No, of course not, but we do need far more caution before you simply start using a tool. [03:35] Recent incidents as a result of AI misuse or error: ChatGPT copycat – There was a ChatGPT clone available as a web extension that was downloaded by some 1.5 million users. It functioned just like ChatGPT, answered queries and provided links to legit sources. But, in the background, it was scrapping passwords and gathering information that was to be sold off without users knowledge. Sage Copilot - The popular accounting software had to temporarily suspend Sage Copilot after a data-isolation flaw occurred. This incident caused an issue where users who prompted the AI to list recent invoices ended up with incorrectly surfaced financial records belonging to unrelated businesses. This was a major security issue, especially for an application thousands of businesses rely on to track their financial records. Google Gemini – Google Gemini was found to have been abused by bad actors for data reconnaissance. One particular group were building profiles on major cybersecurity and defense companies and were looking to gather specific technical job roles and salary information. Google's threat intelligence team characterized this activity as a blurring of boundaries between professional research and malicious reconnaissance. Their soft touch approach allowed the bad actors to craft tailored phishing personas and to further identify potential soft targets to compromise. [06:30] Key considerations for the implementation of AI technology: Any software or technology you plan on introducing into the business that will interact with your and your customers data should be subject to clear vetting procedures, with clear rules for use to follow. Before integrating an AI tool, ask yourself, is the tool you want to use: a) Relevant b) Safe c) Ethical Ethical may sound strange, and will depend on what you're using an AI for. Take CV sorting for example, many studies have shown that AI's can have an inherited bias based on their training data. This has also now evolved into AI based recruitment tools preferring AI generated CV's over human written ones. From a safety standpoint, think about the data you are feeding into those recruitment tools, that's personally identifiable information, full names, phone numbers, emails and possibly even addresses. A full profile for an individual. Is that system your using closed, do you know if you consented to having any input data used for further training? Don't just assume that inputted data won't be used beyond your control. If that recruitment AI tool gets hacked, who do you think is liable for the breach? Is it the AI tool developer or the business that input the data? You think the answer would be clear, but the legality of all this is still being debated. [09:10] 11 Information Security checks for AI tools: #1: Have an AI Policy and AI Integration approval process in place - Many businesses will already have an AI policy in place, most are very generic, so we recommend looking at the guidance provided by ISO 42001 to see what good looks like for an AI policy. You should also create a clear approval process that any AI tools must pass BEFORE people start using them. This should be clearly communicated to the wider team, and there should be a method to manage these checks such as a ticketing system to kick off the process. #2: Understand where your data actually goes - Find out whether inputs are used to train the vendor's models. These inputs can include prompts, uploaded files or even customer data depending on what the tool is. You also need to find out how long that data is retained, and whether it's stored in a specific jurisdiction. You can look for answers to these in a DPA (Data Processing Agreement), don't rely on the basic marketing blurb they state on the website. If those answers aren't provided, contact the tools support or basic enquiries to find out. #3: Check for a SOC 2, ISO 27001, or equivalent certification – This is an easy check for vendor's security posture. Absence of certification shouldn't automatically disqualify a vendor or tool, but it should prompt more due diligence, not less. Even with a certification in place, you also need to double check that it's valid. ISO 27001 for example will need to be certified by a UKAS accredited certification body for those in the UK. For overseas, you will have your own ISO accreditation bodies, which can be verified on the IAF website. #4: Map out third-party and subprocessor risk - Most AI tools sit on top of other infrastructure like cloud hosting, underlying foundation models and additional analytics tools. You should ask for a subprocessor list to fully understand who else touches the data. #5: Test for prompt injection and data leakage - If the tool interacts with external content such as emails, documents or web pages, it can potentially be manipulated by malicious instructions hidden in that content. Businesses should ask vendors how they mitigate this and ideally test it themselves. #6: Clarify access controls and permission scoping - This is especially the case for AI agents or tools with system integrations. You need to establish if the tool operates with the same permissions as the user, or whether it has broader access. Overprivileged AI agents may operate independently with no human oversight. 'Human in the loop' has become a common phrase within cyber security for a reason, you always need a point of human oversight to ensure the AI is doing what it's supposed be doing and is doing so safely. #7: Ask about model update and versioning transparency - You need to ensure that the vendor won't just silently swap out the underlying model for its AI tools, as this can introduce sudden behaviour changes in the tool itself. Transparency is a key component of emerging AI security frameworks and regulations such as ISO 42001 and the EU AI Act. If a vendor isn't willing to tell you when they're making major changes to their tools, then it's not a vendor you want to entertain. #8: Evaluate the output reliability and hallucination risk in context - For security-adjacent or compliance-adjacent AI tools, factually wrong outputs are a risk. AI can have a tendency to 'hallucinate' data or outcomes and then present them as fact. So, ask the vendor what guardrails exist and whether their tools' outputs are auditable / traceable. They should know what data was used to train their models, or where their models are pulling data from. If they don't or can't control what data is being used, then it's not a tool you can 100% trust. #9: Review incident response and breach notification commitments - If the vendor is breached, do you how quickly you would be notified, and what their recovery process looks like? If you hold ISO 27001 and ISO 22301, or simply have a business continuity plan in place then you will already have similar procedures in place for peace of mind for your own customers, so why should you settle for any less? And just like your clients would expect, breach notifications and expected recovery times should be contractually defined, not just assumed. #10: Consider the supply-chain risk of the vendor itself - This tech is still relatively new, and so newer AI vendors may have smaller security teams and less mature processes than what you may be used to with more established providers. However, startup pace doesn't mean you have to tolerate the start-up risk. Consider all of the previously mentioned steps, if they don't have a lot of that in place, then they may not be mature enough yet for you to go ahead with. This doesn't mean you have to automatically disqualify them, if they have a clear plan of action for growth, which shows a clear focus on increased security and transparency within a reasonable timeframe, then it's still worth considering. #11: AI tool monitoring and Kill switch – In addition to this initial vetting procedure, you should also have a process in place to continuously monitor these AI tools too. Many AI tools aren't static, they'll update and become better or possibly introduce issues as they will inevitably face the risk of bugs and other technical problems as they roll out updates. If a tool is consistently encountering issues, continuous monitoring allows this to be flagged up as a security issue. Which is where you'll also need a kill switch in place if an AI tool is behaving unsafely. It's important that you know how to isolate it and remove it from your systems. AI tools are more ingrained that your typical software, often designed to work in tandem with existing apps rather than as a standalone system. This will mean that some tools will have access to possibly sensitive data, something that needs to be protected if the AI tool experiences issues that could lead to that data being compromised. The relevant staff, likely your IT team, need to have a clear process for what to do in those scenarios. If you'd like any assistance with implementing ISO standards, get in touch with us, we'd be happy to help! We'd love to hear your views and comments about the ISO Show, here's how: ● Share the ISO Show on Twitter or Linkedin ● Leave an honest review on iTunes or Soundcloud. Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one. Subscribe to keep up-to-date with our latest episodes: Stitcher | Spotify | YouTube |iTunes | Soundcloud | Mailing List
Welcome back to the Ern and Iso Podcast!In this episode, the duo dives into the phenomenon that has become "Streaming University" and breaks down how Kai Cenat and the new generation of creators are changing the entertainment industry. Ern and Iso discuss the power of collaboration, why today's biggest streamers are building together instead of competing against one another, and what traditional media can learn from their success.The conversation then shifts back to hip hop as Iso gives his thoughts on the recent back-and-forth involving 38 Speshand Jadakiss. Is it wrong for an artist to believe they had the better verse? Has hip hop lost some of the competitive spirit that made the culture what it is? The duo weighs in on confidence, legacy, fan perception, and how these debates continue to shape the genre.As always, the conversation goes beyond the headlines with honest opinions, plenty of laughs, and real discussion.Topics Include:
Topics covered in this episode: django-orjson Best Django Redis configuration for speed and size Linus Torvalds puts the foot down against Anti-AI Kernel Maintainers Django Steering Council backs the Triptych Project Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Consulting from Six Feet Up Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Calvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Show: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Michael #1: django-orjson Adam Johnson dropped django-orjson - drop-in replacements for the Django and DRF pieces that touch JSON, swapping stdlib json for orjson, the Rust-based library. Headline numbers: 10x faster serialization, 2x faster deserialization. The interesting question is why this needs to be a package at all. pip install orjson is the easy part. Adam's actual pitch: adopting it "isn't easy, especially when your framework uses json in many different parts." Django scatters JSON across JsonResponse, the test client and test case classes, the json_script template tag, and more. There's no single hook to grab, so you get a library that catches them all. Adam is refreshingly honest about the scale of the win. His words: "While database queries tend to dominate the typical Django application's runtime, the time spent in serialization and deserialization can still be significant." He calls it "a nearly free performance win" - not "this will 10x your app." That's a claim about cost, not magnitude, and it's worth keeping those straight. Worth flagging what the post doesn't cover: caveats. There are none in the article, but orjson has real ones. Django and Flask both render datetimes as RFC 822 HTTP-date (Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT); orjson does ISO 8601. It can't do ensure_ascii, it rejects NaN and Infinity (which stdlib happily emits), and it raises on Decimal. If you've got a JS client parsing dates, that's a wire-format change. Who should actually take this? If you're a DRF shop shoveling JSON all day, yes - it's cheap and it's real. If your app mostly renders HTML templates, you're optimizing a slice of runtime that's already near zero. The problem Adam's package solves doesn't exist in Flask or Quart. They already centralize every JSON operation - jsonify, request.get_json(), the test client, the |tojson filter - behind one provider object at app.json. So there's no library to install. It's about ten lines: import orjson from quart.json.provider import JSONProvider # or flask.json.provider class OrjsonProvider(JSONProvider): def dumps(self, obj, **kwargs) -> str: return orjson.dumps(obj).decode() # provider must return str def loads(self, s, **kwargs): return orjson.loads(s) app.json = OrjsonProvider(app) The numbers on talkpython.fm Evaluated it, measured it, and skipped it. The biggest JSON payload we serve is our MCP server returning a cached episode transcript, about 139 KB. Swapping the provider saves 0.119 milliseconds per request. That total response takes 1.1 ms We got 4.1x, not 10x - and the reason is the good lesson. Payload shape decides your speedup. The 10x is for structure-heavy data, lots of small keys where stdlib burns time in Python-level dispatch per item. Our hot payload is one giant transcript string, so the work is escaping and memcpy Calvin #2: Best Django Redis configuration for speed and size Peter Bengtsson revisits a classic: his 2017 "Fastest Redis configuration for Django" benchmark now has a 2026 update posted this week. The 2017 post pitted django-redis serializers (json, ujson, msgpack, pickle) and compressors (zlib, lzma) against each other; conclusion was msgpack + zlib as the sweet spot - avoid the json serializer, it's fat and slow. The 2026 update narrows focus to just compressors: default (no compression), zlib, lzma, and newcomer zstd. New results: lzma compresses best but is slowest; zstd is the fastest compressor on Ubuntu; differences between them are very small. Big takeaway across both: compression buys you a lot of space (2–3.5x smaller) for very little speed cost - worth it for Redis where memory is the constraint. Caveat from the author: results depend heavily on your data - his test stores short strings of numbers, so benchmark your own workload. Michael #3: Linus Torvalds puts the foot down against Anti-AI Kernel Maintainers Write up on Ars. Really good coverage by Maximillian: Time to wake up (for some) Torvalds said that “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away.” I agree with Max, putting your head in the sand and waiting for AI to go away will likely mean you won't be working professionally in software development in the coming years. The statement came amid a lengthy thread arguing about the use of Sashiko, an “agentic Linux kernel code review system” that its creators claim can, in tests, independently find 53.6 percent of the bugs that would end up being fixed by human coders in later commits. “We're not forcing anybody to use [LLM tools], but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it,” Torvalds said. “Anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time,” Torvalds wrote. Calvin #4: Django Steering Council backs the Triptych Project Django Steering Council issued a Letter of Collaboration backing Carson Gross & Alex Petros's funding bid for the Triptych Project - three proposals to make HTML more expressive natively, in every browser. The three additions: PUT/PATCH/DELETE methods for forms, button actions (buttons that fire HTTP requests without a wrapping form), and partial page replacement. Distills the core ideas from HTMX/Unpoly/Turbo into the HTML standard itself - no JS, no library, nothing to ship or maintain. Current focus is button actions (WHATWG #12330): Logout instead of wrapping a button in a form. Relevant to Django directly - think the admin submit row and disguised delete links; Django 6.0's template partials were already inspired by these patterns. How to help: companies can send non-binding letters of support on letterhead; individuals can read the proposals and weigh in on the WHATWG issues. Extras Calvin: DOOMQL - A playable first-person shooter whose framebuffer is a SQL query. Michael: Granian 2.7.9 fixes WSGI threadpool scheduler starvation/underscaling Welcome Calvin post Joke: Solving all bugs
Artificial intelligence is advancing at an incredible pace, but without an AI Governance Framework, organizations risk creating systems that are difficult to trust, maintain, or scale. Many people assume that governance slows innovation, but in reality, the opposite is often true. The right guardrails allow teams to move faster by reducing uncertainty and preventing costly mistakes before they happen. In Part 1 of our conversation with Dr. Latha Karthigaa, Co-Founder of the Global AI Certification Council (GAICC), we explored why AI governance is becoming a business necessity and why developers should view it as an enabler rather than a barrier. About Latha Karthigaa Dr. Latha Karthigaa is the Director & Head of AI Governance of the Global AI Certification Council (GAICC), where she helps organizations implement responsible AI through governance frameworks, certifications, and AI management systems. With a PhD in Software Engineering and experience in education, digital marketing, and AI strategy, she focuses on helping professionals and enterprises adopt AI responsibly. Learn more: GAICC: https://gaicc.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lathakarthigaa/ AI Governance Framework Is Like Guardrails on a Highway One of the best analogies from the discussion compared AI governance to the guardrails along a highway. Drivers can safely travel at higher speeds because guardrails help keep them on course. Remove those barriers, and everyone naturally slows down because the consequences of a mistake become much greater. AI works the same way. Governance isn't about preventing innovation. It's about creating confidence that allows organizations to innovate responsibly. When developers know the boundaries, they spend less time reacting to unexpected issues such as biased outputs, hallucinations, data misuse, or compliance failures.
Welcome to the award-winning Innovation in Compliance. In this episode, Tom welcomes back Gerry Zack, and they discuss the growing use of AI in compliance and the launch of Eastward AI. Gerry Zack brings a practical, cautionary perspective to AI-powered compliance and risk management, shaped by 18 months of advising organizations on how AI is being used in real compliance programs. He sees AI already embedded in functions like hotline support, policy-to-risk mapping, website scanning, behavioral analytics, transaction monitoring, and even parts of investigations, while warning against overreliance on it in sensitive investigative work. As one of the architects of Eastward AI, he helped evolve the platform from a CSRD and double-materiality tool into a flexible compliance and enterprise risk management solution that supports frameworks such as COSO ERM, DOJ guidelines, ISO 37301, and ISO 31000. Overall, Zack believes the real opportunity lies in reducing organizational paralysis, using AI responsibly, and connecting compliance more closely with HR, IT, and other risk functions to strengthen leadership and decision-making. Resources: Gerry Zack on LinkedIn RiskTrek Eastward AI Tom Fox Instagram Facebook YouTube Twitter LinkedIn
En el episodio de hoy, Roger y yo hablamos sobre cómo priorizar velocidad, diafragma o ISO dependiendo del paisaje. > TALLERES DE FOTOGRAFÍA Ya están disponibles las fechas para los Talleres de Fotografía de Paisaje que formarán parte de mi oferta formativa. Si te apetece acompañarme en nuevas aventuras fotográficas, respetando todas las medidas de seguridad, echa un vistazo. Plazas limitadas. Talleres de Fotografía de Paisaje con Rafa Irusta CÓMO PRIORIZAR VELOCIDAD, DIFRAGMA O ISO DEPENDIENDO DEL PAISAJE En este episodio de Distancia Hiperfocal junto a Roger Vivé, repasamos uno de los conceptos fundamentales de la fotografía: cómo decidir qué parámetro debe tener prioridad en cada situación. Aunque el triángulo de exposición está formado por velocidad de obturación, diafragma e ISO, explicamos que en fotografía de paisaje la clave no suele ser simplemente obtener una exposición correcta, sino decidir qué ajuste va a definir el resultado creativo de la imagen. A lo largo del episodio analizamos distintos escenarios habituales de fotografía de paisaje y explicamos cuándo conviene priorizar la velocidad para controlar el movimiento, cuándo el diafragma para gestionar la profundidad de campo y cuándo el ISO se convierte en un factor imprescindible debido a las condiciones de luz. También hablamos del papel del trípode y de cómo tomar decisiones rápidas sobre el terreno. PUNTOS CLAVE TRATADOS EN EL EPISODIO El triángulo de exposición y su interpretación desde un punto de vista creativo. Diferencias entre velocidad de obturación, apertura de diafragma e ISO. Cuándo la velocidad de obturación se convierte en la prioridad principal. Cuándo es más importante controlar la profundidad de campo mediante el diafragma. Situaciones en las que el ISO debe tener prioridad. Fotografía de agua: cómo elegir la velocidad según el efecto visual que buscamos. Influencia del viento en la elección de los ajustes. Ventajas del trípode para ampliar nuestras posibilidades creativas. Uso del histograma frente al exposímetro. Cómo tomar decisiones rápidas sobre el terreno mediante una serie de preguntas sencillas. CONCLUSIONES La idea principal del episodio es que no existe un ajuste correcto para todas las situaciones. Cada escena requiere decidir qué parámetro tendrá más peso en función del resultado que buscamos. Entender cómo afectan la velocidad, el diafragma y el ISO nos permite tomar decisiones conscientes y obtener imágenes más coherentes con nuestra intención fotográfica. FOTOS DE RAFA IRUSTA FOTOS DE ROGER VIVÉ REDES SOCIALES ROGER VIVÉ Web: rogervive.com Telegram: La Meva Mirada Instagram: @rogervive YouTube: @rogervive Flickr: Roger Vivé ENLACES DE INTERÉS Suscríbete a mi Boletín de Noticias para estar al día de mis Talleres de Fotografía y otras actividades fotográficas. Visita mi Escuela de Fotografía de Paisaje Online (Contenido nuevo cada semana) Mi canal de información en Telegram Comunidad Hiperfocal en Telegram Mi canal en YouTube Muchas gracias y volvemos en 15 días con un nuevo episodio de Distancia Hiperfocal. ¡¡Un saludo y hasta pronto!! ¿TE GUSTAN LOS CONTENIDOS DE ESTE BLOG? CONTACTAR Puedes contactar conmigo a través del formulario de contacto. SUSCRÍBETE AL PODCAST Para no perderte ningún episodio de Distancia Hiperfocal suscríbete en Apple Podcasts, Android, ivoox y Spotify Talleres de Fotografía de Paisaje con Rafa Irusta
In this episode of The Wild Photographer, Court takes a deep dive into one of the most important but often misunderstood parts of your camera: the digital sensor.While camera sensors can sound technical at first, understanding how they work has a very real impact on the photos you make in the field. From ISO and noise to dynamic range, RAW files, megapixels, sensor size, rolling shutter, and even sensor dust, this episode breaks down the core concepts with practical advice in a photographer-friendly way.Court explains the sensor as a light-gathering tool—the digital equivalent of film—and uses the helpful analogy of tiny “light buckets” to explain exposure, blown highlights, low-light performance, and why getting more real light to your sensor is often the key to better image quality.Whether you're photographing a jaguar at dusk, a polar bear on snow, birds in flight, or a sunrise landscape, understanding your sensor helps you make better decisions in the field. This episode is all about turning the technical side of photography into practical knowledge you can actually use.Expect to Learn:What a digital camera sensor actually doesThe difference between photosites and pixelsWhy high ISO creates noise—and why ISO is not the enemyHow sensor size affects low-light performance and dynamic rangeWhen more megapixels help, and when they can create trade-offsWhy protecting highlights matters so much in digital photographyHow RAW files preserve more of what your sensor capturesHow cameras interpret colorWhy a properly exposed high ISO image can beat an underexposed low ISO imageWhat ISO invariance and dual gain sensors mean in practical termsWhen to use mechanical vs. electronic shutterHow rolling shutter can affect wildlife and action photographyWhat BSI and stacked sensors mean for modern camera performanceWhy phone cameras are impressive—but still different from larger-sensor camerasHow to prevent and manage sensor dust in the fieldKey Takeaways:Your camera sensor is not just a spec on a camera brochure. It is the heart of your digital camera and the thing that determines how your camera receives light. Once you understand how your sensor works, you can expose more intentionally, choose ISO more confidently, protect important highlights, shoot RAW when quality matters, and make better creative decisions in the field.Court's WebsitesCheck out my photo portfolio here: shop.courtwhelan.comSign up for my photo and conservation blog at www.courtwhelan.comFollow me on YouTube (@courtwhelan) for more photography tipsView my camera kit and recommended camera gearSponsors and Promo Codes:MPB.com - Buy, Sell, or Trade Camera GearArtStorefronts.com - Mention this podcast for free photo website designBayPhoto.com - 25% off your first order (code: TWP25) ArtHelper.com - a photo community to learn, share and be inspiredArthelper.Ai - Smart tools to promo and showcase your art.LensRentals.com - WildPhoto15 for 15% off
Send us Fan MailThat forgotten cloud storage you stopped thinking about months ago can become a real attack path today. We start with a simple but dangerous scenario: abandoned AWS S3 buckets and other orphaned cloud storage that can be re-registered, repurposed, and used to serve malicious content to systems that still “trust” the old source. We walk through why this turns into a supply chain-style problem, what signals to look for, and the practical mitigations that matter most: proper decommissioning, continuous monitoring, tight access control, and disciplined cloud asset inventories.From there, we shift into CISSP Domain 6.1 and the real work of designing and validating assessment, test, and audit strategies. We explain how we approach building a security assessment and testing program from the ground up: clear objectives, tight scope, risk-based prioritisation, stakeholder alignment, and baselines grounded in frameworks like NIST CSF, ISO 27001, CIS Benchmarks, and NIST SP 800-53. The aim is simple: identify vulnerabilities, validate security controls, and turn findings into remediation that leadership can act on.We also break down core security testing methods you will see on the CISSP and in real organisations: vulnerability assessment, penetration testing (white box, black box, gray box), fuzz testing, SAST and DAST for application security, plus red team, blue team, and purple team collaboration. Finally, we demystify SOC 1 vs SOC 2 and Type 1 vs Type 2 reports, why they matter for third-party risk management, and how cyber resilience thinking (including the Cyber Resiliency Index) ties everything back to continuity and trust. If this helps, subscribe, share the show with a colleague studying CISSP, and leave a review with the topic you want next.Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don't miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
In this podcast episode, James Watson, Managing Director of Surface Print, discussed the evolution of his fourth-generation family business in Lancashire. Surface Print combines traditional craftsmanship with digital innovation- investing £2 million in a hybrid rotary screen Gravure machine and £600,000 in new HP digital printers. The company achieved ISO 14001 accreditation, introduced solar panels, and plans to install a new boiler and water recirculation system. Watson emphasised the importance of balancing traditional techniques with modern technologies to maintain quality and sustainability. The company also leverages AI for efficiency and marketing, while maintaining a family-oriented work culture.
In this episode of the series, Matthew and Cindy provide a 10-minute guide to ISO 32212 – Net zero transition planning for financial institutions.Discover the 10 things you need to know.Series | Standards in 10 MinutesFind out more about the issues raised in this episodeISO 32212Get involved with standardsGet in touch with The Standards Showeducation@bsigroup.comsend a voice messageFind and follow on social mediaX @StandardsShowInstagram @thestandardsshowLinkedIn | The Standards Show
In the latest episode of the Argus Biomass Beat Podcast, host Hannah Adler, Deputy Editor on the Argus Biomass Desk, speaks with Chris Wiberg of Biomass Energy Lab about the key outcomes from the ISO/TC 238 meeting in Berlin and what they mean for the future of biomass, biocarbon and biochar markets. Tune in to hear: · Why biocarbon and biochar are becoming major focus areas for international standardisation, beyond traditional biomass fuels. · The most important new ISO work items launched in Berlin, including testing standards for pyrogenic biocarbons. · The remaining gaps in biochar and biocarbon standards, and why issues such as sampling, analysis and surface area testing still need work. · The single biggest takeaway from the Berlin meeting: the launch of 11 new work items that signal growing momentum and industry engagement in developing global standards. Argus offers biomass prices, news, analysis, and consulting. Get more information and request a free trial.
David Smith explains his book “Wokicide,” arguing that “woke” (critical social justice theory rooted in critical theory and postmodernism) persists in universities and schools because education lacks quality control, not because of politics. He proposes applying ISO 9001 and HACCP-style quality assurance to K–12 and universities: validated curriculum specifications, independent expert panels, hazard analysis, audits (scheduled and targeted), corrective action, and continuous improvement. A central Workplace Improvement Notice (WIN) system would let staff and even parents file tracked complaints with guaranteed responses, replacing DEI/unconscious-bias training with “deprogramming” modules and prioritizing evidence and accountability. Smith says QA would stop unvalidated ideological drift and is affordable by redirecting existing DEI-related spending.00:00 Intro and Two-Part Talk00:58 Why Woke Persists01:30 Education Lacks QA02:10 Validation Over Ideology04:53 Defining Woke Origins06:35 From Civil Rights to Overreach07:43 Flawed Woke Reasoning10:02 How Woke Spreads11:16 Equity Outcomes and Activism13:33 Deconstruction Playbook17:50 Woke Hall of Fame21:39 Perfect Storm in Education25:42 QA Solution Framework27:41 ISO 9001 and HACCP29:42 Authority and Adoption30:55 Four Phases Implementation33:35 Validation and Hazard Analysis34:47 Audits Monitoring Corrective Action37:09 Aggressive Feedback Loops39:05 WIN Notice Explained41:41 Curriculum Content Validation43:12 Audits in K-12 Schools44:53 K-12 QA Wrap Up45:47 Universities as the Source47:29 University Validation Hurdles50:30 University Auditing Red Flags51:58 Objections and Pushback57:12 Failure Modes and Fixes59:39 Cost and Staffing Reality01:02:08 Closing Q&A and Next StepsAmazon Kindle version: Wokicide: Pest Control for Education: https://a.co/d/0d0YeApM========Slides, summaries, references, and transcripts of my podcasts: https://tomn.substack.com/p/podcast-summariesMy Linktree: https://linktr.ee/tomanelson1
How to Delegate Without Losing Control of Your Business Most women business owners are doers. We take pride in being the one who can be handed any challenge and get it done. But that identity has a cost: when everything runs through you, you become the bottleneck, and your growth is capped no matter how hard you work. But when you can learn to delegate without losing control... you finally create space to lead. On the HerBusiness Podcast, Suzi Dafnis speaks with Kristy Smith, founder of Virtual Elves and HerBusiness 2026 Member of the Year, about doing exactly that. Kristy's business connects owners with virtual assistants, yet this year she turned that philosophy on herself and handed over the last task she thought only she could do: her discovery calls. What You'll Discover in This Episode Why being the doer eventually caps your growth — and how to spot when you've become the bottleneck The real reason "no one can do it like I can" keeps you stuck, and how to move past it Kristy's staged, four-month handover of the one task she thought only she could do How documenting your workflows makes letting go far less scary The daily check-in habit that builds ownership and confidence fast How to handle the surprising grief of stepping back from work you love Using quarterly feedback sessions to grow as a leader — not just manage performance Why Letting Go Feels So Hard The belief that "no one can do it the way I can" is the biggest barrier to delegation. It keeps you busy, and busyness feels like achievement. But as Kristy points out, spending two hours training someone instead of ten minutes doing it yourself feels inefficient — until you realise you repeat that task every day, losing hours you could spend growing the business. There's also an emotional side. Stepping back from work that lights you up can bring an unexpected sense of grief. If you ignore it, you'll jump back in and disempower the very person you handed the work to. How to Delegate Without Losing Control The secret is a staged handover, not a sudden drop. Kristy's transition took about four months and rested on a few principles you can copy. Bring in the right person. Hire for the qualities you want clients to feel. Kristy chose someone warm and kind — the impression she wanted every new lead to have. Document the work first. Going through ISO 9001 accreditation forced Kristy to map every workflow start to finish. That documentation showed her exactly where she could let go, making the handover far less scary. Check in daily at first. An end-of-day conversation every day for the first weeks catches mistakes fast. Correcting something after two days protects confidence and progress far better than catching it three weeks later. Let the team pull the work from you. Reframe the question from "what do I hold onto?" to "what is my team ready to take?" Ownership grows when people take the next piece themselves. In fact, it was Kristy's new hire who suggested she keep a client connection by running testimonial interviews at the three-month mark — staying involved without reclaiming the day-to-day. Lead Instead of Doing Once the work is off your plate, your job shifts from technician to visionary. Kristy now runs quarterly feedback sessions where her team reviews her leadership, not just their own goals. That vulnerability built a culture of trust and surfaced honest input a formal review never would. She also created an operational improvement board where anyone can flag a problem, which becomes a team-owned project. Aiming for a one percent improvement each week compounds into meaningful change across the year — all without Kristy solving every issue herself. Your Next Step Learning to delegate without losing control is less about systems and more about trust: trusting your documentation, trusting your people, and trusting yourself as a leader. Start with one task you believe only you can do, hand it over in stages, and protect the space you create to finally step into the CEO role your business needs. If you'd like to have these kinds of conversations with ambitious women who understand the realities of building a business over the long term, learn more about the HerBusiness Growth Network at HerBusinessNetwork.com. Resources Mentioned HerBusiness Growth Network Follow us on Instagram Check out the last HerBusiness Podcast Episode: I've Built a Successful Business, So Why Do I Want More? Need a skilled virtual assistant? Find the right fit with Virtual Elves. Follow Kristy Smith and Virtual Elves on LinkedIn and Instagram.
In this special World AI Day episode of The Quality Hub, Chatting with ISO Experts, host Xavier Francis tries something different by interviewing a live AI guest, “Chip Gatt,” as if it were an ISO consultant. The episode uses the interview format to explore what it feels like to engage with AI in a professional conversation, especially around complex topics like ISO standards, consulting, trust, and decision-making. Rather than presenting AI as a replacement for human expertise, the conversation invites listeners to think critically about how AI fits into the business world, where its limitations become clear, and why human judgment remains essential when applying standards in real organizations. Helpful Resources: More About ISO 42001: https://www.thecoresolution.com/iso-42001-certification Why ISO 42001 Certification Matters: https://www.thecoresolution.com/why-grammarlys-iso-42001-certification-matters How is ISO 9001 Implemented?: https://www.thecoresolution.com/how-is-iso-9001-implemented For All Things ISO 9001:2015: https://www.thecoresolution.com/iso-9001-2015 Contact us at 866.354.0300 or email us at info@thecoresolution.com A Plethora of Articles: https://www.thecoresolution.com/free-learning-resources ISO 9001 Consulting: https://www.thecoresolution.com/iso-consulting
Is the gap between the old school and the new school really about age, or is it about perspective?In this episode of the Ern and Iso Podcast, the duo starts the conversation by discussing Jaÿ-Z's Yankees concert and what moments like that mean for hip-hop culture. They also examine the controversy surrounding Yung Miami's "Spend That/Scammers" and whether music has a responsibility when it comes to the influence it can have on younger audiences.The heart of the episode, however, is a much bigger conversation.Ern and Iso dive into the importance of thinking beyond today, becoming more intentional in business, preparing for life's inevitable changes, and building a future instead of simply reacting to the present. From financial awareness and entrepreneurship to personal growth and long-term planning, this episode is about shifting your mindset from surviving today to succeeding tomorrow.Topics include:
Join us in this episode as podcast listener Hannah shares about her recovery journey in SLAA & SAA, finding help in bith Women's Groups and Mixed Meetings & her experience as a Gen Z addict in recovery. Links mentioned in this episode: https://saaforwomen.org/ https://saa-recovery.org/literature/safe-and-sexually-sober-meetings-helping-women-feel-welcome-in-your-meeting/ https://saa-recovery.org/literature/a-special-welcome-to-the-woman-newcomer-from-other-women-members-of-saa/ Serenity on the Sound Retreat, August 27-30 in Washington state: https://www.soundretreat.org Gen Z & Millennial Meeting: https://www.saa-meetings.org/meetings/gen-z-millennial-saa-meeting-sunday YouTube Links to music in this episode (used for educational purposes): Bo Burnham - All Eyes On Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rx_p3NW7gQ Bo Burnham - Bezos (Parts 1-4): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NORfmd7aao Heilung - Krigsgaldr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7ZqZVunCb4 Heilung - Hakkerskaldyr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUJUAufR8MA Be sure to reach us via email: feedback@sexaddictsrecoverypod.com If you are comfortable and interested in being a guest or panelist, please feel free to contact me. jason@sexaddictsrecoverypod.com SARPodcast YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn0dcZg-Ou7giI4YkXGXsBWDHJgtymw9q To find meetings in the San Francisco Bay Area, be sure to visit: https://www.bayareasaa.org/meetings To find meetings in your local area or online, be sure to visit the main SAA website: https://saa-meetings.org/ The content of this podcast has not been approved by and may not reflect the opinions or policies of the ISO of SAA, Inc.
Welcome to the award-winning FCPA Compliance Report, the longest-running podcast in compliance. In this episode, Tom welcomes back Gerry Zack, and they discuss the growing use of AI in compliance and the launch of Eastward AI. Zack says many organizations are uncertain and paralyzed, while others range from using ChatGPT at a basic level to building or buying specialized tools rather than seeking a “big machine.” AI is now embedded across compliance functions, from hotline chatbots and policy/control mapping to monitoring, investigations (which Zack cautions against over-automating), and behavioral analytics. Eastward AI began as a CSRD double-materiality assessment tool but expanded to encompass broader enterprise and compliance risk management, aligned with frameworks including COSO ERM, DOJ expectations, ISO 37301, and ISO 31000. Zack describes development with a skilled programming team, beta “design partners,” and a “Reality Check” feature that rapidly scans global information to update risk assessments and support scenario modeling continuously. This combination has drawn interest from CCOs, CROs, GCs, and strategy leaders. Eastward.ai is now publicly available. Key highlights: AI in Compliance Today Eastward AI Origin Story MVP and Design Partners Reality Check Feature Scenario Modeling and Strategy Expanding Compliance Remit Resources: Gerry Zack on LinkedIn RiskTrek Eastward AI Tom Fox Instagram Facebook YouTube Twitter LinkedIn The FCPA Compliance Report was recently named the world's Best Business Ethics Podcast by FeedSpot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What do we really owe the legends... and what do they owe us?In this thought-provoking episode of the Ern and Iso Podcast, the duo tackles one of hip-hop's biggest conversations by presenting an open letter to Jaÿ-Z.From selling drugs along the East Coast, to creating Roc-A-Fella Records when no one believed in him, to releasing the classic Reasonable Doubt and ultimately becoming one of the world's first billionaire rappers, Jaÿ-Z's journey is one of the greatest success stories in music history.But after accomplishing everything he set out to do...Does he still have a responsibility to help the next generation?Ern shares why he believes Jaÿ-Z owes the culture nothing financially—but questions whether his experience, influence, and leadership could help artists navigate an industry filled with 360 deals, streaming payouts, and ownership battles. Iso weighs in on whether fans expect too much from artists simply because they've achieved greatness.The conversation also explores:Jaÿ-Z's rise from hustler to billionaireThe creation of Roc-A-Fella RecordsReasonable Doubt and its lasting legacyKanye West's comments about Dame Dash believing in him firstThe NFL partnership and the "We're beyond kneeling" statementCorporate partnerships versus cultural responsibilityStreaming revenue, ownership, and the future of hip-hopWhether hip-hop's legends should lead the next generation—or simply enjoy the empire they builtThis isn't a diss.This isn't hate.This is a respectful conversation about legacy, leadership, and what the future of hip-hop could look like.
For many medical device companies, a successful audit is seen as the ultimate proof that their Quality Management System is performing well.Few or no findings.Positive feedback from auditors.Management celebrates.But does passing an audit really mean your QMS is healthy?In this episode of the Medical Device Made Easy Podcast, we explore why the answer is often no.Audits Are Samples—Not Complete EvaluationsWhether it's an ISO 13485 audit, a Notified Body assessment, an FDA inspection, or an internal audit, auditors can only review a small sample of your quality system.They cannot examine every complaint, every supplier, every design decision, or every production batch.A successful audit demonstrates compliance with the sampled evidence—but it does not guarantee that every aspect of the system is functioning effectively.The "Audit Mode" ProblemMany organizations unintentionally enter "Audit Mode" before inspections.Training records are updated.CAPAs are closed.Procedures are revised.Management reviews suddenly take place.While preparation is important, organizations should ask themselves:Are we improving our QMS—or simply preparing for an audit?Culture Matters More Than FindingsSome of the most significant quality risks rarely appear during an audit.Examples include:Employees afraid to report mistakesPoor communication between departmentsWeak supplier relationshipsDesign decisions that are never challengedInformal workarounds that bypass documented proceduresThese issues can remain invisible during a short audit while gradually increasing organizational risk.Measuring the Real Health of Your QMSInstead of focusing only on audit findings, management should monitor indicators such as:Complaint investigation timelinesCAPA closure performanceSupplier management effectivenessRisk management updatesCross-functional communicationNear-miss reportingContinuous improvement initiativesThese metrics often provide a far more accurate picture of QMS maturity than the number of audit findings alone.Final ThoughtPassing an audit is an important achievement and deserves recognition.However, organizations should never confuse regulatory compliance with operational excellence.A healthy Quality Management System is not built to impress auditors.It is built to consistently deliver safe, effective, and compliant medical devices while continuously improving every day—even when no auditor is watching.Who is Monir El Azzouzi? Monir El Azzouzi is the founder and CEO of Easy Medical Device a Consulting firm that is supporting Medical Device manufacturers for any Quality and Regulatory affairs activities all over the world. Monir can help you to create your Quality Management System, Technical Documentation or he can also take care of your Clinical Evaluation, Clinical Investigation through his team or partners. Easy Medical Device can also become your Authorized Representative and Independent Importer Service provider for EU, UK and Switzerland. Monir has around 16 years of experience within the Medical Device industry working for small businesses and also big corporate companies. He has now supported around 100 clients to remain compliant on the market. His passion to the Medical Device filed pushed him to create educative contents like, blog, podcast, YouTube videos, LinkedIn Lives where he invites guests who are sharing educative information to his audience. Visit easymedicaldevice.com to know more. If you need help implementing QMSR or preparing your teams for FDA inspections, contact: info@easymedicaldevice.com If you are located outside the EU/UK/Switzerland and need an Authorized Representative (and possibly an Importer), we can support you as well.Social Media to followMonir El Azzouzi Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/melazzouziTwitter: https://twitter.com/elazzouzimPinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/easymedicaldeviceInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/easymedicaldeviceThis podcast is hosted by Podcastics, the easiest platform to create and publish your podcast.
We've been running a bit of an Agent Cloud series surveying all the top inference/compute/cloud providers, from Databricks to Daytona to Railway and, even further back, E2B, but we're excited to conclude this series returning to Modal, which has just raised a monster $355M Series C.The cloud was built for developers. But agents are now changing that.The old infra stack was designed for a human who could read docs, reason through YAML, and understand dashboards to figure out what they need when something broke. While this was painful for developers, it worked since they could fill in missing context in their heads.However, agents don't have that luxury. Now in this new era of agents, everything has to be tighter.They need a place to write code, run it, inspect the output, change the environment, debug failures, and try again. Fast iteration and feedback loops with all the necessary context are crucial for agents to operate properly. Furthermore, sandboxes are a clear representation of this shift as agents can easily spin up isolated environments. This programmatic infra even extends to research:Two years ago, we were one of the first to cover Modal with CEO Erik Bernhardsson and Alessio designed our favorite LS thumbnail of all time:At the time, Modal was just a teeny little company with a $17M Series A.Today, fresh off their $355M Series C, Modal is one of the clearest examples of the agent cloud future being built in real time: a cloud platform moving past traditional web app assumptions toward the workloads AI actually creates such as elastic inference, sandboxes, GPU burst, post-training, background agents, and infrastructure that agents themselves can operate.In this episode, Modal CTO Akshat Bubna joins swyx and Vibhu to unpack why AI applications don't fit traditional cloud assumptions, why Kubernetes was never designed for bursty compute-heavy workloads, and why Modal is now shifting from developer experience to agent experience.We go deep on Modal's AI infra stack: serverless functions, decorator-based infrastructure, elastic inference for custom models, GPU snapshotting, DeFlash, speculative decoding, Auto Endpoints, sandboxes, persistent storage, networked containers, private IPv6, RDMA, multi-node training, and Modal's capacity pool across 17 cloud providers. Akshat also explains why RL rollouts can require 100,000 sandboxes, why production agents need hard guardrails, why observability may matter more than reading code, and why AI has made infrastructure exciting again.We discuss:* Why Kubernetes wasn't built for bursty AI workloads* How Modal started as a better runtime before becoming an AI cloud* Why Modal added GPUs before ChatGPT* The shift from developer experience to agent experience* Why observability matters when agents are writing the code* Elastic inference for custom models across audio, video, robotics, and comp bio* GPU snapshotting, cold starts, and why inference workloads are so bursty* Why RL rollouts can require 100,000 sandboxes* DeFlash, speculative decoding, and frontier-level inference performance* Auto Endpoints and making optimized inference easier to deploy* What Modal adds beyond vLLM, SGLang, and raw GPU rental* Modal's 17-cloud capacity pool and supercloud strategy* Networked sandboxes, sidecars, private IPv6, and RDMA* Serverless multi-node training for post-training and research workloads* Auto-research, model-guided sweeps, and agents launching GPU experiments* Compute strategy, capacity planning, and batch tiers* Why production agents need specialized sandboxes and hard guardrails* Modal's take on managed agents, CI, Gitpod/Ona, Python, TypeScript, and Modal BenchAkshat Bubna* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshat-bubna-188885103* X: https://x.com/akshat_bModal* Website: https://modal.comTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:39 Modal's origin and why Kubernetes wasn't enough00:04:32 Developer Experience → Agent Experience00:06:21 Modal's AI cloud primitives00:09:14 Sandboxes, agent loops, and proto-Cognition00:12:12 Elastic inference, GPU snapshotting, and 100,000 sandboxes00:15:24 DeFlash, speculative decoding, and Auto Endpoints00:19:59 Production-grade inference beyond raw GPUs00:22:00 Background agents, Ramp Inspect, and the agent lifecycle00:24:08 Modal's 17-cloud supercloud strategy00:26:40 Networked sandboxes, private IPv6, and RDMA00:32:48 Multi-node training, post-training, and auto research00:37:36 Compute strategy, capacity planning, and batch tiers00:40:55 Open models, real-time AI, and production agent infra00:43:06 Hard guardrails, managed agents, and specialized sandboxes00:46:06 Why AI made infrastructure exciting again00:48:30 Model APIs, differentiated products, and agentic video00:51:50 CI, coding-agent infra, SDKs, and Modal Bench00:57:28 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptIntroduction: Modal, Series C, and the Art PartySwyx [00:00:00]: We're here with Akshat, CTO of Modal, together with Vibhu. Congrats on your Series C.Akshat [00:00:10]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:11]: Your party yesterday was amazing.Akshat [00:00:15]: Yeah.Swyx [00:00:15]: From all the photos and all the swag.Akshat [00:00:17]: We had a bunch of art installations, which was fun, seeing, like, our products on pedestals next to, like, Rodin.Swyx [00:00:25]: Very nice. Very nice. When you started, it was not the GPU inference company. Maybe it was in your mind. Take us back to the origin story.Modal's Origin: A New Runtime Beyond KubernetesAkshat [00:00:39]: I first met Eric, who's the CEO, through an investor. Back then Eric was already thinking about building, a new runtime, and he got there thinking through why are workflow orchestration products so hard to use. It's because you have to run them on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is hard to manage. It's not built for burstiness and, custom images,Swyx [00:01:03]: YeahAkshat [00:01:03]: It has a terrible developer experience.Swyx [00:01:05]: And I'll, I'll interjectAkshat [00:01:06]: YeahSwyx [00:01:07]: For listeners, who are new, we interviewed Eric two years ago, and there's a bit more of the story there from Spotify and all those things.Swyx [00:01:14]: And I came across Eric through Data Council because he did that talk on the serverless container stack that you guys did, which was like, that was my first like, “Okay, I need to take Modal very seriously” moment.Akshat [00:01:26]: Yeah.Swyx [00:01:26]: But it was still very unclear, like, do I need all this for just my data pipelines?Akshat [00:01:33]: Yeah. initially what we were thinking about was if we build a better runtime, it's a very useful primitive in itself. It's There's a lot of things that, get solved by serverless functions, like you can do, ETL stuff, you can do job queues, you can do all this, like, bursty processing, which it turns out every company had needs for. but then we also were thinking about this as like, this is a primitive that we can build a whole collection of products on, which are very verticalized. So perhaps data engineering would've been the first one, but we were thinking about inference. Back then it was more classical inference, like computer vision stuff and running XGBoosts and whatnot. But we added GPUs to the product a year before ChatGPT came out.From Serverless Containers to GPU WorkloadsSwyx [00:02:19]: Nice.Akshat [00:02:19]: We just didn't think it would be that big of a deal.Swyx [00:02:22]: Yeah, just like add A100.Vibhu [00:02:23]: Was there any, like, early key problem that really sparked off why you built it?Akshat [00:02:28]: Yeah. Primarily it's just, none of the tooling that was out there was built for, one, a really great developer experience, and also there's a general trend of, a lot of the workloads that we were seeing were very. I wish there was a better word for it, but compute-heavy. Like, they need, one, like, need a lot more resources, so you need to burst up and down a lot, versus like Kubernetes designed for, like, slow scaling and, more for, like, web server use cases. And also there's just a lot more specialization in, like, what kinds of environments these workloads run in. Like, we had sometimes they need accelerators, sometimes they need different kinds of images, and this is just like a consistent thing that we saw across a lot of companies. That would be the next step.Software-Defined Infrastructure and Decorator-Based DXSwyx [00:03:13]: Yeah. Yeah. Be nice. I don't know how much this factored into the early story, but I wrote a post when I was at Temporal about infrastructure, software-defined infrastructure or something like that.Akshat [00:03:22]: Yeah, the self-provisioningSwyx [00:03:23]: Self-provisioning.Akshat [00:03:24]: Yeah.Swyx [00:03:24]: Yeah. I can't even remember my own post.Swyx [00:03:26]: And then you put me on the landing page.Akshat [00:03:28]: Yeah. We really like, the term and so we stole it.Swyx [00:03:32]: Because you had the insight that everything can just be in decorators co-located with the code, right?Akshat [00:03:37]: Yeah.Swyx [00:03:37]: Was that a big part of the originalAkshat [00:03:39]: YesSwyx [00:03:39]: Story or it was just like a DX layer?Akshat [00:03:41]: That was, really important because we really didn't want people to spend, so much time, writing YAML, and it seemed like you could really condense the surface area of what you're doing, put it in code so you can operate on it just like you operate on other code, and like build stuff that's more expressive and dynamic. and so yeah, that was always a very important part.Swyx [00:04:04]: Then the pushback is this is a DSL.Akshat [00:04:07]: Yeah.Swyx [00:04:07]: It's you're closed source. I am locked into Modal.Akshat [00:04:11]: Yeah. We never really got pushback for that because the nice thing about Modal is you can bring whatever code you have, and sure, the DSL is at the configuration layer for, what hardware you're using, how you're scaling things up, but you still own the code.Akshat [00:04:27]: And that's, that's been an important, part of our story, even as we do inference now.Swyx [00:04:32]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:04:32]: How much of do you think still stays the same today? Like if you were to build something today, DevX very important, but I feel like, a lot of this has been changed with just hook it up to an agent, have Claude Code, have Codex implement a tool. there's very agent native primitives that are different than if I'm doing this myself, right?Developer Experience → Agent ExperienceAkshat [00:04:54]: We've changed our SDK team to think about agent experience instead of, developer experience and we think that the same benefits that apply for DX also apply for AX, which is why would you have an agent read through hundreds of Kubernetes files and like write YAML that's not even typed when it can make a couple of changes in a decorator and it gets this self-provisioning runtime of, being able to see its changes live in action? yeah, it just seems from the customers we talk to, they find Modal is much faster for agents to use versus operating on a different substrate.Swyx [00:05:34]: Yeah, because like you, again, you co-locate the infrastructure requirements to the code that runs it.Akshat [00:05:38]: Yeah.Swyx [00:05:38]: Well, the negative thesis now is that nobody's looking at their code anymore, so there's no point.Akshat [00:05:44]: Yeah, people aren't looking at code. one thing we still see is really important is observability.Swyx [00:05:51]: Yeah.Akshat [00:05:51]: Like how good is your dashboard? And of course, like we have, we push a lot of it to the CLI so the agents can do their own investigation, but you still need humans to go interpret what's going on and, make judgment calls and whatnot. and that's I feel like, Maybe more important now than looking at the code itself.Swyx [00:06:11]: Yes, because like, you can try to treat the code as a black box and then use, see the observable action that comes out of it, and then just prompt a change.What Modal Is For: AI Cloud PrimitivesAkshat [00:06:21]: Yeah.Swyx [00:06:22]: So I think it takes a bit of restraint to not specialize, to say, “I want to ship a new primitive,” and then just be general purpose.Swyx [00:06:31]: People ask you, “What are you for?” You're like, “ I don't know. We can do this, we can do that.”Vibhu [00:06:36]: Well, I'd be curious to see, like, okay, if we were to ask you, like, what is Modal for even at a high level? There's a lot you guys do, sandboxes, GPUs, everything. How do you answer?Akshat [00:06:46]: Modal is a cloud platform that's built for, where we've built the primitives from scratch for AI applications. and right now it covers, inference, training, batch processing, and sandbox workloads.Akshat [00:07:00]: But we're building a lot moreSwyx [00:07:02]: I noticed you didn't say web server, so there is still a role for, like, the always-on large-scale Kubernetes type things.Akshat [00:07:09]: Yeah, absolutely. We're, we're not trying to compete with the renders of the world, because yeah, we think the differentiator for us is the, are the workloads that need specialized compute, need to scale up and down a lot. yeah, they're, they're, they're just shaped differently.Working Alongside Frontier StartupsVibhu [00:07:26]: I think you're building a lot of it alongside the startups, right? They're innovating quite a bit, even in your, like, latest blog post. Like, even in the series C, the customers that you mention here, the cognitions, technical ones, ramps and whatnot, they're, they're innovating with you, right? And that's not something AWS is doing directly with.Akshat [00:07:45]: Yeah, absolutely. I think, this is again classic. We're a small team. We can move really fast. our engineers are working with our customers and figuring it out. Yeah.Swyx [00:07:54]: So my first week at Cognition, I walked in, there was someone wearing a Modal shirt. I was like, “What are you doing here?” They're like, “Yeah, I just. I am embedded inside of Cog.”Akshat [00:08:05]: Yeah, I think that was Peyton. We sent him overSwyx [00:08:07]: Yeah.Akshat [00:08:07]: Because, the latency of communication was too high otherwise.Swyx [00:08:12]: Yeah, distributed node, you have to - you have to place one and collocate.Vibhu [00:08:16]: Yeah.Swyx [00:08:16]: So I had a, I had direct personal experience, right? So I worked on smol developer three years ago. it was inspired by Claude 1. I think you onboarded me at some point, like, just before, and I was like, “Oh, like, I need some bursty compute. Like, I was just gonna try using Modal.” And it was a, it was a pretty pleasant experience. apparently, I showed up in the board meeting, like the analytics.smol developer, Sandboxes, and Proto-CognitionAkshat [00:08:39]: Yeah, you blew up on Hacker News and,Swyx [00:08:41]: YeahAkshat [00:08:41]: We got a big traffic spike. I. I think the way you used smol developer was Modal functions for running stuff, which was. Like, the, that was a good use case. but then, yeah.Swyx [00:08:53]: Yeah. That - So to me, that was proto-cognition.Akshat [00:08:55]: Right.Swyx [00:08:56]: If only I had, like, stuck to it.Swyx [00:08:58]: Like, that was like, if - did you say draw the tech treeAkshat [00:09:00]: AbsolutelySwyx [00:09:00]: You're just like, “Yeah, like, probably this will happen.”Akshat [00:09:02]: Yeah. Like, he was so close. You were just rebuilding upon usSwyx [00:09:04]: I just didn't realize.Akshat [00:09:05]: But the funny story there is at the same time, we were talking to a bunch of customers who needed something like sandboxing.Swyx [00:09:14]: Yeah.Akshat [00:09:14]: This is like twenty-three.Swyx [00:09:15]: Yeah.Akshat [00:09:16]: So we builtSwyx [00:09:17]: You introduced a new API right after that.Akshat [00:09:18]: Yeah.Swyx [00:09:19]: Yes.Akshat [00:09:19]: Like, we built sandboxes in May of twenty-three before anyone was even knew this was gonna be a thing. And the first example we published was, we took smol developerSwyx [00:09:28]: Smol developerAkshat [00:09:28]: And put it in a loop, so the agent can iterate on itself.Swyx [00:09:33]: Loops are hot these days.Vibhu [00:09:34]: It's the looper.Akshat [00:09:34]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:09:35]: Loops in. When was this, twenty-three?Akshat [00:09:38]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:09:39]: A small check.Akshat [00:09:39]: Yeah.Swyx [00:09:39]: It's like twenty-three. so the. the, those for listeners, like, the problem was the models are not built for any of this, right?Swyx [00:09:46]: Like, you're just trying to like. They're not post-training to understand, like, looping and, like, self-correction and tool calling was there, but, like, also not that great.Akshat [00:09:55]: Yeah.Akshat [00:09:55]: I don't remember if you used tool calling in this one, but yeah, the models would just diverge after like ten iterations and not produce anything meaningful.Swyx [00:10:03]: Yeah. But like, then. So okay, like now talking to myself three years ago, the answerVibhu [00:10:08]: Of course they will get betterSwyx [00:10:09]: Collect all the failures, build benchmark, and then collect all the, examples, build the RL environmentAkshat [00:10:15]: RightSwyx [00:10:15]: Sell it for like ten billion dollars to Meta.Swyx [00:10:17]: And then also train a model and then sell that for sixty billion dollars to Elon. And this isAkshat [00:10:23]: Yeah, of courseSwyx [00:10:23]: The funny machine. Like, it's like, it's about the hardware.Akshat [00:10:28]: It's hard to have that inherent conviction that the stuff will get that much better.Swyx [00:10:33]: In retrospect, it's so f*****g obvious.Akshat [00:10:36]: Fair enough.Swyx [00:10:37]: Like, what else were we doing back then? I don't know. anyway. Yeah. So this. That was the start of your sandboxing journey, right? I feel like it didn't blow up until, like, last year.Akshat [00:10:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:10:50]: So there was like a couple years of quietness.Akshat [00:10:52]: Exactly, yeah. We wereVibhu [00:10:53]: I think very underrated product value. Like, my experience with Modal, Charles, before he had joined Modal, met this guy at a hackathon, and he really insisted we wanted to run some small model, not hosted anywhere, and he's like, “ there's this cool company, Modal. They'll like spin up a GPU sandbox, we can throw it on there. They'll take a Hugging Face link.” And like there's so much value just right there, right? Like instant hosting, spin it up, spin it down. It'll stay cold, but we run the demo a few days later, it'll come back up and like all this stuff in retrospect, like it's still what we needed like today.Akshat [00:11:27]: Yeah, it's still needed today. workload shapes have changed a lot as, we run stuff for people with really massive production scale and, there it's it's not about scaling from zero to one, but it's how do we scale really elastically, from like thousand to fifteen hundred GPUs very quickly in a given region. It's the same shape problem.Elastic Inference, GPU Autoscaling, and Custom ModelsVibhu [00:11:50]: Okay. So you look at, say, Cursor Composer, right?Akshat [00:11:53]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:11:53]: They had a. “We'll do RL on a model every couple hours.” you guys have a whole version of RL inference gym and whatnot.Vibhu [00:12:01]: When you look at workloads like that, you're doing train runs where you need to scale up, scale down every hour thousands of GPUs, right? That's the example for we do need it, right?Akshat [00:12:12]: Yeah. Well, so I'll, I'll take a step back and, maybe talk about like how people use Modal today. because our biggest use case is, elastic inference. And the thing we first found product market fit, with was inference for custom models. So we stayed away from the LLM space, and we were serving companies like Suno for audio, Runway for video, robotics, comp bio companies that train their own model elsewhere. But Modal is the best black box that for deployment, scaling to however many GPUs you need as your traffic pattern changes. And we saw all of them like have a very unpredict- predict- predictable, traffic pattern. it's like diurnal. It's Some days, like the company will do a launch and, they'll need like, way more. And it's not just one model that they deploy. They-- all these companies deploy, lots of different models in different regions, and so the autoscaling problem becomes even harder because then you have to scale within a certain region, and those cycles are offset. So different times you scale up in different regions.Akshat [00:13:20]: So that's like our sortVibhu [00:13:22]: And thatAkshat [00:13:22]: YeahVibhu [00:13:22]: That in and of itself is a huge category. There's a bunch of inference providers which, provide this fireworks, does this as a service together, whatnot, Base10. that's carved into its own niche for language models, at least right now.Akshat [00:13:36]: Yeah. the thing that we have specialized in is the autoscaling aspect.Vibhu [00:13:41]: Yeah.Akshat [00:13:41]: Because we found that it's not universally true that everyone else can autoscale, and we've gone deeper into it on the tech side by, we've incorporated GPU snapshotting into the product so we can take the GPU state, like your torch.compile model, snapshot it, and the next cold start is way faster. And so going back to your question, it's That's why you need a lot of burstiness for inference. But then people also do a lot of demand training, like for RL stuff, your rollouts are bursty, as you said. People also do a lot of batch jobs. So we'll see, a lot of companies, before they have a training run, they'll need thousands of GPUs to run encoding or something like that. And I think those things are much more bursty than. I agree that agents are not that bursty. sandboxes are, except when you're doing RL. RL is justRL, Batch Jobs, and 100,000 SandboxesVibhu [00:14:28]: Or commerceAkshat [00:14:28]: Insanely bursty.Vibhu [00:14:29]: Yeah.Akshat [00:14:30]: Yeah. Like when you're doing, rollouts, you sometimes need a hundred thousand sandboxes in your sandboxes.Vibhu [00:14:37]: Yeah. I'm curious if you've seen early sparks of continual learning. There are some people, like our friends, ngram, recently announced thisAkshat [00:14:45]: YeahVibhu [00:14:45]: They're, they're trying to do training. That also seems like a different workload, right? If you're doing training twenty-four/seven per se, there's a very weird dynamic of how you're using GPUs between people and whatnot, but seems like something you guys would work for.Akshat [00:15:00]: As you said, we're, we're fortunate to work with a number of, customers at the frontier and grab some of our customers. and they are taking the primitives we have, and trying to use them in very interesting ways, like continual learning. It's possible as the stuff gets better, some of that will be part of, our offering as well if, more people need it. but we're, we're just waiting to seeVibhu [00:15:23]: YeahAkshat [00:15:23]: How it shakes out.Vibhu [00:15:24]: Is there a primitive that you added after sandboxing that was the next step in the story?LLM Inference, DeFlash, and Speculative DecodingAkshat [00:15:32]: I guess we've been going much deeper into LLM inferenceVibhu [00:15:35]: YeahAkshat [00:15:35]: Because we realized that some of the advantages we have with like autoscaling, again, especially in different regions and whatnot, are, not present elsewhere. and the place where we had a gap was we weren't, working on the model layer itself. Like we were a black box. And, we realized that, we can get to frontier-level model performance, with, by having great people who work on this. And, we've been open sourcing a lot of our work, in terms of, Recently, we, shared our work on DeFlash, which is a block-based, speculator, and we've open sourced, all of it. So, you can - By using open source DeFlash, you can get the same performance as you would with one of the proprietary providers. And the next thing we're thinking about hereVibhu [00:16:23]: I thought this wasAkshat [00:16:24]: YeahVibhu [00:16:24]: An interesting blog post as well, right? Like, I think in here you make a claim that. Not a claim, just that how effective speculative deco-decoding really just get to.Akshat [00:16:33]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:16:33]: Anything you wanna point out from this around, what people should know?Akshat [00:16:39]: Yeah, absolutely. the high-level summary is, it would help to describe what speculative decoding is.Vibhu [00:16:44]: Yes.Akshat [00:16:44]: I will, yes.Vibhu [00:16:45]: I think, likeAkshat [00:16:46]: YeahVibhu [00:16:46]: So we've covered like Eagle and all thisAkshat [00:16:47]: YeahVibhu [00:16:47]: Like Hydra and all those things, but it was like two years ago.Akshat [00:16:51]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:16:51]: I think it doesn't hurt, right?Akshat [00:16:52]: Yeah. Speculative decoding is you have a smaller model, called a draft model, predict tokens ahead of the bigger model, and then you have the bigger model, verify all of this, all the tokens are predicted. And the reason it's faster is if you're predicting, one token at once, you're bound by memory bandwidth. But if you can batch the verification of, the draft model, then you're much more efficient using compute, and it's faster, and as long as your draft model is producing a lot of tokens that can get accepted, which is called the accept length, you can get a speed up that's, multiple times of, the original model speed. and well, that's what we highlight here. It's Like people talk a lot about we made these kernels faster and whatnot, but improving kernel will only give you like few percentage points of improvement, and, increasing accept length, literally is a multiplicative decreaseVibhu [00:17:47]: Like two to four X.Akshat [00:17:48]: Yeah, exactly.Vibhu [00:17:48]: Without much head-on performance.Akshat [00:17:50]: Yeah. I think it may - you are running a second model, right? So it may be something more expensive in the compute,Vibhu [00:17:57]: I meant quality performanceAkshat [00:17:58]: Probably not by muchVibhu [00:17:58]: But yeah. I thinkAkshat [00:17:59]: So there's no drop in quality performanceVibhu [00:18:01]: YeahAkshat [00:18:01]: Because you're always. You're never accepting a token that the big modelVibhu [00:18:04]: It's strictly betterAkshat [00:18:05]: YeahVibhu [00:18:05]: Or it's same.Akshat [00:18:06]: Exactly.Vibhu [00:18:07]: Right. Yeah.Akshat [00:18:08]: And so we've been working a bunch on DeFlash, which is a block-based speculator. so it's instead of predicting, one token at a time, it's predicting a block. And we've been open sourcing our work with it. The next thing for us here is for helping people train speculators and custom models. it's it's something that traditionally is very forward-deployed engineering driven, support deployed, engineer driven, like you work with customers and help them do that. And our vision for. This is why we launched Auto Endpoints, is we want to make frontier-level performance available to everyone. And so, we mentioned this in the announcement, we teased it. The next thing we're, we're launching is, as you run an auto endpoint, we shadow trafficAuto Endpoints and Frontier-Level PerformanceVibhu [00:18:54]: Do you want to explain what auto endpoints are?Akshat [00:18:57]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:18:57]: I lovely, yeah.Akshat [00:18:58]: Yeah. So, this is, I guess, going back to your Modal is you touch the code, but, sometimes people don't wanna touch the code, and they wanna get started with an endpoint that works and has all the great performance and, scalability that Modal has. So we've made that easier with, a way to create an endpoint from our UI, from the CLI, that has all of our optimizations that we talked about, like the DeFlash stuff already baked in, and there's full transparency. So we give you the code, you can go run it yourself, and if you want, you can eject out into the full Modal experience, which we see as people get sophisticated, they do wanna tweak the models, they wanna, fine-tune stuff. You can still do all of that. It's it's not a black box. And yeah, the next thing, as we teased later in the post, is how do we give you value even beyond this in terms of having your draft models evolve as your data distribution evolves, again, without having to talk to a person and, yeah.Vibhu [00:19:59]: I guess just to understand it directly, you have the GPUs, you have an endpoint that's compatible, you serve open model. If someone was to do this themselves, what's the delta that you guys provide? So you do a lot of open source great work on effective inference. how does it compare to, say, I take the same model, 5.2 FP8, take shelf inference engine, vLLM, SGLang, get compute of similar capacity, similar cost. What's the delta that plugging into something this, like this offers outside of the benefit of, scaling?Production Inference Beyond Raw GPUsAkshat [00:20:34]: It's interesting because we've taken the approach of open sourcing our contributions and upstreaming them. we work closely with the SGLang team. We want the improvements that our team, comes up with to be, there in open source for others to use, even outside of Modal. The benefit to us is we have a team that has significant expertise in terms of if you do have something that is not there, our team can help you get that performance, first. the other thing is with these endpoints, we are way more elastic, as you said, than, anyone else, and you have true scaling to zero. you have true, burstiness, and in practice, that matters a lot more to people than just finding, the GPU and, running Modal code on something.Vibhu [00:21:20]: Yeah. And I will say it's not that straightforward to just. like what I said is easier said than done, right?Akshat [00:21:26]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:21:27]: It's I think still for the average person, still hard to just gut check using different. There's, there's quite a bit of combinations you can make there. the trade-offs aren't really known at face value.Akshat [00:21:40]: Yeah. it's it's not just that. I think it's it's that running production-grade inference is a hard infer problem.Vibhu [00:21:49]: YeahAkshat [00:21:49]: Even if you subtract out the autoscalingVibhu [00:21:50]: YeahAkshat [00:21:51]: Is controlling things like tail latency and, making sure every, request is delivered at least once and whatnot.The Model and Agent LifecycleVibhu [00:22:00]: There's a lot of innovation that you can do here. I think, it's very interesting that you're starting to encroach on, like as you become a full cloud, you're starting to encroach on other people's turf.Vibhu [00:22:09]: What will you not do?Akshat [00:22:13]: Well, we wanna follow our users and, make sure they get like a platform that has everything that works well together. so right now we're focused on the model lifecycle and the agent, lifecycle. so both like going from data prep to training to inference, and then also if I want to deploy a background agent, let's say, sandbox, do persistent storage, a whole bunch of other stuff.Vibhu [00:22:38]: We talked to Cole, who did, OpenInspect. Yeah.Akshat [00:22:42]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:22:42]: And RealInspect also is on Modal.Akshat [00:22:44]: Yeah. So Ramp Inspect was a great example of a background agent that was really successful because they, were able to use some of the primitives like snapshotting and fast scaling to just have something that feels really reactive and works well.Ramp Inspect and Background AgentsVibhu [00:23:02]: Yeah. That's the new CTO of, Ramp right there.Akshat [00:23:05]: Yeah, Rahul.Vibhu [00:23:08]: It was really fun. yeah, okay, I think, all very bullish. Like, one of my reflections was also I did not originally. So when I met you guysThe Inference Inflection: CPU, GPU, and Co-LocationVibhu [00:23:19]: You weren't that much in the GPU game, and now you're all about, inference. And one of the points that I hinged on for Jensen's keynote at GTC this year was, what we're calling like the inference inflection, right? That let's say in AI workloads or machine learning workloads, it used to be like, let's call it eight to one GPU to CPU, and now it's more like one to one, which is like a interesting. Like, - because of how much agents are blocked or call out to this, to CPU heavy stuff the actual, like, limiting factor, like, swings back and forth from GPU to CPU a lot more than it used to be all GPU and then occasional CPU.Akshat [00:24:01]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:24:02]: GPU, CPU. And now it's like just constantly, and you just have to locate everything.Seventeen Clouds and the Supercloud StrategyAkshat [00:24:08]: Yeah. And that's one of the things that, again, we see as, something appealing about Modal, which is we've built this capacity pool that spans, 17 cloud providers, so we're, we're very good at Running on various kinds of cloud capacity across the worldSwyx [00:24:24]: You don't have your own data centers?Akshat [00:24:25]: We don't have our own data centers. We just run across a lot of neo cloudsSwyx [00:24:29]: Yeah. AreAkshat [00:24:30]: Metal providers.Swyx [00:24:30]: Yeah. Question mark.Swyx [00:24:31]: Yeah. You're, you're running the math, and you're like, “What's the cutover point where you're like.”Akshat [00:24:36]: Yeah, it's a good question. part of it is we see our differentiator in the software layer, and, being capital light and focusing on the software helps us move really fast. so far it's worked out well because there are so many other people building data centers that we're able to work effectively with them, and again, focus on what makes us, special.Swyx [00:24:55]: Yeah.Swyx [00:24:56]: 17 gets you into, like, the local providers sometimes. LikeAkshat [00:25:00]: The,Swyx [00:25:01]: Which was the most interesting one?Akshat [00:25:02]: There are a lot more neo clouds than you expect, and they all have various degrees of, various levels of reliability. And, that's why it's something we've invested a lot of time in, is building our own reliability layer on top. so if the GPU falls off the bus or something happens, we user workloads are not affected, and that lets us use a lot more capacity than,Swyx [00:25:30]: YeahAkshat [00:25:30]: You as a user would be able to.Swyx [00:25:32]: It's a useful thing to have because like now everyone knows, like, what layer you are and, like, you optimize for being the super cloud of all clouds.Akshat [00:25:41]: Yeah. That's, that's, that's the idea. and so I guess when you mentioned colocation, that's, that's another interesting thing where, one thing we've seen is people come to us when they want, very specifically located, CPUs or GPUs, like they wantSwyx [00:25:57]: Oh, they pin it in likeAkshat [00:25:58]: YeahSwyx [00:25:58]: EU?Akshat [00:25:59]: Exactly. Or EU, US.Swyx [00:26:01]: Right. Data resiliencyAkshat [00:26:02]: AustraliaSwyx [00:26:02]: Locality thing or performance or what?Akshat [00:26:04]: It's either data locality or latency, yeah.Swyx [00:26:07]: Yeah.Akshat [00:26:07]: Like, you want your. They're running sandboxes and model. They want them to be right next to aSwyx [00:26:10]: Yeah, it's easy thenAkshat [00:26:11]: YeahSwyx [00:26:12]: To. That is important in all those things. and so, like, you've accidentally, I don't know if it's accident, but, like, you've built the perfect primitive for agents to express themselves. And then, like, it's almost very funny how every extra development just involves more file system, just involves more CPU.Akshat [00:26:30]: Yeah.Swyx [00:26:31]: Just like the things that you already have. I don't know much about, if there's any, like, networking usages that are interesting, but you've also done some good work on networking.Networking, Sidecars, Private IPv6, and SandboxesAkshat [00:26:40]: Yeah, that's exactly right. Like, we're just taking compute storage and networking and building stuff on that layer, for, again, the stuff people need.Swyx [00:26:49]: YeahAkshat [00:26:50]: We see a few interesting networking things coming up. one is people want networked sandboxes. so we haveSwyx [00:26:57]: For like a Docker cluster type thing.Akshat [00:26:59]: Yeah.Swyx [00:26:59]: Sorry, Docker Swarm. Oh, f**k. What is it called?Akshat [00:27:02]: Compose.Swyx [00:27:03]: Compose type thing.Akshat [00:27:04]: Yeah. So if you want Docker Compose, our sandboxes now support, this thing called sidecars. So you can. A sandbox is a pod of containers, and you can run multiple containers in, a sandbox. also useful because, going back to networking, people want a lot of control over, outbound networking from a sandbox.Swyx [00:27:23]: Yeah.Akshat [00:27:23]: Like, they might wanna run a middle proxy for, like, maybe logging stuff for RL or, controlling how egress can happen to a domain, injecting credentials. and yeah. So we've, we've had to build a lot of that stuff ourselves.Swyx [00:27:38]: Yeah.Akshat [00:27:39]: But then also sometimes people want, sandboxes spanning multiple nodes to talk to each other, which is an emerging thing we're seeing. We have support for that for a different reason, and yeah, we'll see if that becomes stable.Swyx [00:27:52]: Like, just an open socket. It's a. This is directly like mTLS.Akshat [00:27:56]: We do support that, which is you can, expose a tunnel inside a sandbox.Swyx [00:28:01]: Yeah.Akshat [00:28:01]: And then you can either expose it to public internet or it can be, you can add like a HTTP, auth layer above it. But we have this thing called I6PN, which we haven't talked about, which is this, like, overlay network using IPv6 addresses. so if Modal containers, within the same workspace, when this is enabled, can address each other using this private IPv6 address, and no one else can.Akshat [00:28:28]: So it's like private networking, for containers. We built it because we needed it as a primitive for our distributed training product. so we have this other feature, which is you can add a decorator to a function, and you get a cluster of GPUs. and they have RDMA networking. so you can run a distributed training job, that's truly serverless. and we did the overlay network for that. But then we've seen that people are using it for other reasons, and, I'm intrigued to yeah, what would people do with it.Swyx [00:28:59]: Build primitives and let people figure it out, right?Akshat [00:29:01]: Yeah, exactly.Swyx [00:29:02]: You put out a pretty interestingAkshat [00:29:03]: They're like, they read the docs webpage. Let me use thatSwyx [00:29:06]: YeahAkshat [00:29:06]: Something they never intended to work. This is literally not even in our docs page. People somehow found it, and they're using it.RDMA, Memory Movement, and Distributed TrainingSwyx [00:29:12]: Huh.Swyx [00:29:14]: The way you portrayed it with, like, RDMA versus TCP, like, very well laid out, but just the transfer speed change at scale for RL, like yeah, you have it, you have it built in. I'm sure someone found it. It's found it to be a lot more efficient before you made a thing out of it, right?Akshat [00:29:32]: Yeah. And not to split hairs, I guess the overlay network is the TCP overlay network.Akshat [00:29:39]: The reason we have that is you need that to do the key exchange for RDMA before you set up the RDMA network on top of that. but then people found the TCP part.Swyx [00:29:48]: Can I tell you, this is like a big aha moment for me becauseAkshat [00:29:51]: YeahSwyx [00:29:51]: So I review 2,200 submissions for the World's Fair.Akshat [00:29:56]: Yeah.Swyx [00:29:57]: And then I got this from John OsterhoutAkshat [00:29:58]: HuhSwyx [00:29:59]: Who I don't know if. Do John Osterhout by name?Akshat [00:30:01]: The name sounds familiar.Swyx [00:30:02]: He published a. He's a well-known professor, published a lot of interesting software design books, and this is the talk he chose to submit, is on RDMA at Inference. And I'm like, you wouldn't think that this guy, who is like operating systems guy, would care about RDMA.Akshat [00:30:20]: I, it makes sense to me because I,Swyx [00:30:24]: This is the cloud, right? YeahAkshat [00:30:25]: Like, the way you move around your KV cache and how efficiently you can do it, how efficiently you move, your weights from your training GPUs to your inference GPUs in RL is there's a lot of degrees of freedom, and it is a systems problemSwyx [00:30:41]: YeahAkshat [00:30:41]: Moving memory aroundSwyx [00:30:42]: YeahAkshat [00:30:43]: Scheduling.Swyx [00:30:44]: This shows you how primitive my understanding of networking stuff is.Swyx [00:30:46]: Is this like the domain of WireGuard as well?Akshat [00:30:50]: Not quite.Swyx [00:30:51]: It's adjacent?Swyx [00:30:53]: Explain everything.Akshat [00:30:54]: Sure.Swyx [00:30:56]: How do we move memory around GPUs?Akshat [00:30:58]: Well, so sorry. Yeah, that is memory. Sorry, I was talking more, and maybe I was talking like five minutes back, about the private IPv6, addressing that you've set up.Swyx [00:31:09]: Yeah.Akshat [00:31:09]: Is it like it's a VPN?Swyx [00:31:10]: Yeah, it is like a VPN, and yeah, WireGuard is, yeah, you're right. It is,Akshat [00:31:16]: Right. Yeah, you already moved on to new topicsSwyx [00:31:17]: A similarAkshat [00:31:18]: OkaySwyx [00:31:19]: In the same space, WireGuard is, encrypted and this is,Akshat [00:31:23]: And you don't need encryption.Swyx [00:31:23]: Yeah.Akshat [00:31:24]: Yeah.Swyx [00:31:24]: This is not encrypted. that's the main difference. This is TCP and we have eBPF programs that will reject or allow the TCP connection based on whether you're allowed to do it.Akshat [00:31:35]: Used to involve a full sidecar, but now you have eBPF in the Linux kernel.Swyx [00:31:39]: Yeah.Akshat [00:31:40]: Yeah. I don't know if this is a natural follow-on to the topic of like my skepticism on distributed training is that while, like, people spend a lot of money on, like, cables to hook up GPUs, and even that is not, like, fast enough, and that's the bottleneck, is your networking fast enough?Swyx [00:31:59]: Yeah. So I guess you're talking about fully distributed training like, Dialog or something which is like cross data centerAkshat [00:32:06]: That would be, yes.Swyx [00:32:07]: That's the extreme.Akshat [00:32:08]: Yeah.Swyx [00:32:08]: You're in the middle, and then other people would have like the Mellanox cables up in, like, their actual data center.Akshat [00:32:14]: When you run multi-node training on Modal, RDMA, I think Mellanox, is, or InfiniBand is like a, is all seen as RDMA. but it's a way to bypass the TCP networking stack and, transfer, stuff much faster, between one node, to the other. And we have I think like 3 terabit per second, internal networkingSwyx [00:32:40]: OkayAkshat [00:32:40]: Which is the standard that's needed.Swyx [00:32:42]: Okay. So I misunderstood whatAkshat [00:32:43]: 50Swyx [00:32:43]: What part of the stack you wereAkshat [00:32:44]: 50 gigs overSwyx [00:32:45]: YeahAkshat [00:32:45]: If you wentSwyx [00:32:45]: YeahAkshat [00:32:46]: RDMA.Swyx [00:32:46]: Okay.Swyx [00:32:48]: Yeah. I, very impressive work.Multi-Node Training, Post-Training, and Auto ResearchSwyx [00:32:52]: So effectively you're extending like the model philosophy to the training cluster, like, yeah.Akshat [00:32:59]: Yeah. And we're, we're not going for like large scale training runs. the thing that we've built multi-node training for is, we see a lot of, smaller scale post-training. like, people are post-training like medium sized fund models, so they can, get higher quality on inference. this is a perfect fit, for something like that.Swyx [00:33:21]: Yeah. That is my impression of how a lot of these labs explore branches in post-training and then eventually merge whatever they find in.Akshat [00:33:31]: Yeah. The other use case we've seen for multi-node training is even if you have a big cluster, your researchers are still doing small runsSwyx [00:33:38]: YesAkshat [00:33:39]: Having elasticity thereSwyx [00:33:40]: Right, sureAkshat [00:33:40]: Matters a lot more.Swyx [00:33:41]: Yeah. the, like, this is like the current limiting factor for auto research, which is like you need to give your model some GPUs in order for it to completely run.Akshat [00:33:51]: We have a blog post on auto resource and model is,Swyx [00:33:55]: YeahAkshat [00:33:56]: Yeah, like, turns out to be pretty good substrate for that.Swyx [00:33:59]: So my impression is auto research means many things, likeAkshat [00:34:01]: YeahSwyx [00:34:01]: Anything that Andrej coins. Right now it's still science fair, right? Like not like, I don't know how many people are doing this.Akshat [00:34:08]: We're having a golf.Swyx [00:34:08]: Yeah.Akshat [00:34:09]: I thought the same thing.Swyx [00:34:11]: Yeah, you would know.Akshat [00:34:12]: We, like, our internal both training and inference teams use this the general shape of this quite a bit. like we have this one internal repo called auto inference, which essentially we've automated our own forward-deployed engineering efforts using, this harness, which is, the agent will just spin up a sweep of different things. It'll even run like, NVIDIA inside profiler and it'll like tweak configs and it'll arrive the right thing. it'll change your GPUs both from H200 to B200, and works really well.Swyx [00:34:47]: Nice.Akshat [00:34:47]: So yeah.Swyx [00:34:48]: By the way, I enjoy that your forward-deployed engineering is so technical that you have to do these things.Swyx [00:34:52]: It's very different from forward-deployed engineering from other people.Akshat [00:34:54]: Yeah. For our forward-deployed engineering team is, essentially they're like applied inference researchers or applied training researchers.Swyx [00:35:02]: Someone told me like they have to be able to build, but they also have to be able to sell. do they have to sell or are they like they're good, they're just like post-sale type of thing?Akshat [00:35:09]: It does, being able to talk to a customer and engage effectively with themSwyx [00:35:13]: YeahAkshat [00:35:13]: Matters a lot.Swyx [00:35:14]: They want the same thing.Akshat [00:35:15]: Yeah.Swyx [00:35:15]: ?Akshat [00:35:15]: But it's it's not really a sales, thing. We pair them with-- We have solution architects as well that are more on the sales side.Swyx [00:35:23]: Okay. Let's spend a bit more time on auto research. This is a big focus for for this year. Where does this go? like, have people explored enough? Like, there's all these beautiful charts of like improve and then level off a bit and then you find the next thing. Is this one abstraction up from normal training? Is that how we think about it, or do you think about it differently? Like model level training versus high, like driven hyperparameter search.Auto Inference and Modal BenchAkshat [00:35:51]: Yeah, like,Swyx [00:35:51]: Someone, some people call it like neural architecture search or whatever, right? Like.Akshat [00:35:54]: Yeah, - So the stuff I've seen people do with it is nowhere on the architecture level. It's pretty much tweaking parameters, but it's it's a hyperparameter sweep that's guided by some model intuition, so it's like much more efficient than, whatever other, sweep you would have.Swyx [00:36:12]: Yeah, it's just, it's just a question of where you want to spend your compute?Akshat [00:36:16]: Right.Swyx [00:36:16]: ‘Cause yeah, you can just throw infinite amounts of money on this and somehow you'll bang out Shakespeare?Akshat [00:36:22]: Yeah, infinite monkey.Swyx [00:36:24]: Yeah, so like the very good for model. and I think it's also very important that agents can spin up other agents, can spin up their infrastructure. Like very good for you. how good is our LLMs at generating model code? Like the benefit of existing LLMs is that you are in the data.Akshat [00:36:42]: Yeah. They're, they're surprisingly good. I think like pre Cloud 4 they were not, and then now they're able to shot, stuff out of the box. But we're playing around with releasing like a Modal Bench for like the harderSwyx [00:36:55]: YeahAkshat [00:36:55]: Things, that the LLMs cannot do yet and maybeSwyx [00:36:59]: What's an example of that?Akshat [00:37:01]: I think the things that- Sometimes agents struggle with, without right guidance and a skill is, how to, use the rest of our observability. Like how to. Something is failing, like how do you look at the logs and then update the right thing? It's reasoning about that. But they're able to shot, likeSwyx [00:37:23]: Yeah. You can just add a skill to it?Compute Strategy and Capacity PlanningAkshat [00:37:26]: Yeah. So we have a Modal skill now that. Which is why we built this Modal Bench. It's to find things like that, so we can address them in our tool.Swyx [00:37:35]: Tune a skill. Yeah.Akshat [00:37:36]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:36]: No. it's it's good. are you facing any shortages? like we talk a lot about GPU shortages, but also CPU, also memory.Swyx [00:37:44]: Yeah.Akshat [00:37:45]: We have had a lot of growth, which means that, there's - we've had to be much better aboutSwyx [00:37:53]: PlanningAkshat [00:37:54]: Proactive capacity planning.Swyx [00:37:55]: Yeah.Akshat [00:37:55]: So we have,Swyx [00:37:57]: Which by the way, like it's like a MBA's like dreamAkshat [00:38:00]: YesSwyx [00:38:00]: Is like just planning this stuff. I think last time you and I talked about something maybe about this.Akshat [00:38:03]: Yeah. we have a really competent team of people that we call, The role is called compute strategy. so yeah, if anyone listening here or wants to work on thatSwyx [00:38:13]: Compute strategy?Akshat [00:38:13]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:14]: I think,Akshat [00:38:14]: I feel like,Swyx [00:38:15]: I think the normies call it FP&A or something.Akshat [00:38:18]: Well, it's more It's it's not FP&A. It's it's There's a lot of interesting financial questions of like what is the blend between one year and three-year reservations? how do we forecast our own capacity? how do we. especially since our capacity is very fungible across different GPU types and different regions, like you have to model a lot of it. and you also have to have an opinion on how the supply chain is gonna evolve, and then you have to like, take bets,Swyx [00:38:49]: YeahAkshat [00:38:49]: Based on that.Swyx [00:38:50]: Tokenomics.Akshat [00:38:50]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:51]: This is like probably a not a real point, but, I was trying to think about like what other industries. I was trying to think about like, we cannot be first to like these kinds of problems.Akshat [00:38:59]: Yeah.Swyx [00:39:00]: And what other industries have had this? And I was like, airlines with fuel and like they have to hedge their fuel and like, I think for a long time Southwest because they made like a hero fuel bet, they like were like super low cost becauseAkshat [00:39:12]: OhSwyx [00:39:12]: Compared to everyone else.Akshat [00:39:14]: Yeah. I hadn't thought about that.Vibhu [00:39:16]: We're at a fun time too?Akshat [00:39:18]: Yeah. It's. A lot of the compute business in general, for us is also about being very good about capacity management. That is how you have great unit, economics. but also over time it's how you can unlock more value for customers. Like, one of the things we're building now is like a way for customers to get, If they don't care about latency, like get much cheaper pricing and they'll get results back in like next 24 hours or something, like a batch tier essentially.Batch Tiers and Latency-Insensitive WorkloadsSwyx [00:39:47]: Yeah.Akshat [00:39:47]: And those are levers we have because we control the whole stack and scheduling and whatnot to give people a sufficientSwyx [00:39:53]: Yeah. I feel like they're not as popular. Like those, like the Frontier Labs have all those APIs. They're not as popular as they should be.Akshat [00:40:00]: The demand that we see for something like that is not for LLMs. although sometimes people wanna run evals andSwyx [00:40:08]: OkayAkshat [00:40:08]: Synthetic data prep and there it makes sense.Swyx [00:40:10]: Okay.Akshat [00:40:11]: But it's from a lot of LLM companies, like people who are doing computational bio, like they have to run really big batch jobs and they don't care about when they get it back.Swyx [00:40:22]: Yeah. And like they have a reasonable. It's it's also like a cousin to the stopping problem of like, will this finish in time?Akshat [00:40:30]: Yeah. You can bound it.Swyx [00:40:33]: Yeah.Akshat [00:40:33]: Like you can give peopleSwyx [00:40:34]: YeahAkshat [00:40:34]: SLAs on it.Swyx [00:40:35]: Yeah. I think what's, what's interesting is like the next phase of model.Swyx [00:40:38]: Like what, do people expect from you, now that you're established and you're like well-known compute player among all these leading companies. You had an inference launch week, and we talked a little bit about the launches. like what else? Like what else should people know?What Modal Builds NextAkshat [00:40:55]: We are building primitives that make our users' lives much easier. So, I think for example, with LLM inference, thousands more companies are gonna post-train their own models and, deploy open source models for inference. so we're thinking a lot about what is the best product shape for that. And, that involves everything from our training gym to, then, endpoints that get frontier-level performance. again, but I haven't talked to anyone. It looks somewhat different on other verticals. Like, we're also seeing a lot of real-time, audio-video stuff in there, which is why like, we're working on things like regional routing, with fallbacks. So you can get GPUs that are as close to users as possible. so you get like low latency for video streaming and whatnot. And then on the agent side, it's,Akshat [00:41:52]: We're still working very closely with our customers because stuff is changing so fast in terms of what they need. And, I think beyond sandboxes and persistent file systems, there's a lot of other things people will need from this agent stack as they build production agents. So yeah, we're thinking about those other things that fit in there.Swyx [00:42:13]: I want to ask what the other things are.Akshat [00:42:15]: Yeah. I probably should share right now.Swyx [00:42:17]: I think-- I think, okay, so, I do think a lot about the principal components of cloud, and you do talk about compute storage networking.Akshat [00:42:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:25]: Because so far for me, it's fine. so far for the. the first couple generations of cloud, it's fine. What's different, qualitatively different about agents that you need some new permission level? Like a lot of people, okay, and I'll just kinda spew tokens at you until it like hopefully sparks something.Akshat [00:42:43]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:44]: Like the new level now is whatever Claude Code does, which is dangerously scope permissions or like allow list by command or like whatever, right? And sometimes they're like, “Well, okay, we have like this adaptive thinking mode where like, just trust me, bro. I will make the calls for you.” Is that it? like mediated permissions.Hard Guardrails vs. LLM-Mediated PermissionsVibhu [00:43:03]: Now you're looping it with a goal and letting it roll.Akshat [00:43:06]: Yeah, I'm, I'm skeptical of LLM media permission for stuff that is at the sandbox level because you do want hard boundaries.Swyx [00:43:16]: Yeah.Akshat [00:43:16]: Otherwise, someone can exfiltrate stuff.Swyx [00:43:20]: But likeAkshat [00:43:20]: YeahSwyx [00:43:20]: Maybe that's old school thinking. Maybe we're the dinosaurs.Swyx [00:43:23]: Maybe the AI OS or the LLM OS is really the kernel is a goddamn LLM.Swyx [00:43:30]: Like it makes you feel uncomfortable.Akshat [00:43:31]: Yeah, I'm, I'm toldSwyx [00:43:32]: But that's what trusting the LLM is. Like imagine a spherical cow perfect LLM.Akshat [00:43:36]: Right.Swyx [00:43:37]: That it.Akshat [00:43:39]: Maybe.Swyx [00:43:41]: I wanna test the boundaries, right?Akshat [00:43:42]: Yeah.Swyx [00:43:42]: Like, and I don't believe that, but I wanna see where I'm wrong ‘cause that's, that's the consensus.Akshat [00:43:49]: Yeah. I think you always need hard guardrails when you want, And you can pair those with softer guardrails, right? And that's gonna be a lot of mediated.Managed Agents and Specialized SandboxesSwyx [00:44:00]: There. I'll also get you a end with a couple of your commentary on like the ecosystem outside of Modal. Manage agents. Everyone has one. Gemini, OpenAI, Claude, very useful for you, but also like it is their way of starting to edge into your space.Akshat [00:44:17]: Yeah.Swyx [00:44:17]: What's going on?Akshat [00:44:19]: Yeah, we're, very excited to partner with Anthropic and some of the other foundation labs, will not name who we're also working with. the way we see it is the manage agent thing is a great place to start if you're starting out building an agent and, But then when you get to, building something more production grade, like you're a company that's like Ramp that's building their own, Ramp also runs their accounting agent on us, so their external-facing agent. You need a lot more control over, your compute primitive on things like, what sort - how do you persist different files that the agent has access to, and how do you snapshot and restore? How do you control the networking? maybe you want GPUs. When you get to that point, you kinda want, a specialized sandbox provider, that gives you those things, and that's the role that we are trying to play.Swyx [00:45:15]: YeahAkshat [00:45:16]: We don't really have an opinion on the harness, whether it runs - it's a cloud-managed agent, and you hook it up to Model Sandbox, or you run the harness in Model Sandbox. We'll see where people converge with that.Swyx [00:45:26]: Yeah. Do you any opinions on like the meta harnesses, or just another layer on top of these things?Akshat [00:45:31]: You mean like the OpenPipeSwyx [00:45:33]: OpenPipe is one. I think Vercel had one, which I can't remember the name of right now. Fredshot had one. and then, to me, most recently was Data Databricks that had Omnigen. All these are meta harness. Like it's kinda pseudo agent cloud type things.Akshat [00:45:50]: I personally have not played around with them.Swyx [00:45:53]: Yeah.Akshat [00:45:53]: Build agents with them.Swyx [00:45:54]: Everything's bullish Modal, as long as it consumes more infra.Akshat [00:45:57]: That's why we're focusing on the infra layer. It's somewhere where our, relative competence is and, also it's a hard problem to solve.Swyx [00:46:06]: Yeah. I will say like just generally reflecting on that, I don't know if - if there's other topics on Modal, but like just generally reflecting as an infra person, not as intense as you, but in that field, this has like been the most exciting time in infra. Like it was boring for a while, and you couldn't really get people excited about data infrastructure. Like Eric would get on Data Console, everyone just watched the video and like say, “Look at how many sandboxes I can spin up,” and no one gave a crap.Why Infrastructure Became Exciting AgainAkshat [00:46:39]: Yeah.Swyx [00:46:40]: And like now everyone gives a crap.Akshat [00:46:42]: That's true. It is a very exciting time, and I think a lot of that's driven by just the amount of scale all of this stuff needs.Swyx [00:46:50]: I think the, like a lot of your initiatives or a lot of your like product directions make sense in retrospect, which is like the best kind, but I wouldn't necessarily have thought about it myself, which.Akshat [00:47:00]: We need the predictions.Swyx [00:47:02]: I think there's a lot that you just don't even see, right? Like you have the batch, you have the voice, you have the multimodal, but what else?Akshat [00:47:10]: What else is coming up for usSwyx [00:47:11]: Yeah. Where do you see things going?Akshat [00:47:13]: Yeah. I, in generalBiotech, Robotics, and Non-LLM AI WorkloadsAkshat [00:47:15]: It's it's clear that there's there's a huge shift happening. I think one thing that's not as obvious to people because LLM inference gets talked about so much and is also we work a lot of companies that are, doing things like drug discovery and computational bio, like the Chai Discoveries of the world. Big things are probably gonna happen there. we work a lot of robotics companies that are putting robots in like active deployments and getting good results out of them.Swyx [00:47:45]: Is there Air Gap Modal? Is there a version that is like prem air gapped whatever?Akshat [00:47:50]: No. We,Swyx [00:47:51]: You should cloud only.Akshat [00:47:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:47:52]: Yeah. Okay. But yeah, so what you're saying is like because you're focused on primitives and they're good primitives, you find use cases in all these kinds of things.Akshat [00:48:01]: Yeah.Swyx [00:48:01]: Probably diversifies you a little bit away from LMS all the time.Akshat [00:48:05]: Yeah, absolutely. We're, we'- our goal isn't to only serve the LLM inference market.Swyx [00:48:10]: There are a lot just on the website, the audio,Akshat [00:48:12]: Yeah. We said both onSwyx [00:48:14]: Computational bio images. Yeah, there's a lot here. There's QTA TTS, customizing. Oh, Chatterbox. there was customizing Whisper.Akshat [00:48:24]: Okay. Yeah.Swyx [00:48:25]: This screen reminds me of a fallen competitor, which Replicate.Model APIs vs. Differentiated AI ProductsSwyx [00:48:31]: What's your postmortem on what happened?Akshat [00:48:34]: This is one thing we've stayed away from is providing an API for models because I think providing model APIs is some of it ends up serving like a really hobbyist market, which is much less sticky.Swyx [00:48:50]: Yeah.Akshat [00:48:50]: And we've always wanted to build for companies that are building products and need more flexibility that's not just an API.Swyx [00:48:57]: Which you can build an API for a model and this is clearly what it is. But you - but what you're saying, you can wrap it into a more fully functioning back end that you run.Akshat [00:49:06]: Yeah. So all of our examples, it's not that spin up this model, here's an API token, use it. They're all code.Swyx [00:49:13]: Okay.Akshat [00:49:13]: And so the point is that this is just an example.Swyx [00:49:16]: Starter code.Akshat [00:49:17]: Yeah. But you can tweak it however you want.Swyx [00:49:20]: Yeah.Akshat [00:49:21]: And if you're like a company building a product, like, computational bio whatnot, yeah.Swyx [00:49:26]: I guess I'm trying to tease out for listenersAkshat [00:49:28]: YeahSwyx [00:49:28]: When does it stop becoming, oh, you're just an API call and you're just a wrapper on API to becoming what you call a product, right?Swyx [00:49:36]: Like, what is that layer? Like what-- Like, more lines of code, but like beyond that, what is the substance that people add that qualifies it to be something more?Akshat [00:49:46]: I think there's a little bit of like a selection effect of like a lot of the companies who do wanna get deeper into that level are probably building something that's more differentiated. And, I think, an example is like - with LLM inference, originally we, worked with companies that were building their own post-training frameworks or they were, - Ramp early in the day was training their own tokenizer and like swapping out the tokenizer in Llama and whatnot. I'm not saying that's, that successful, in that case. But a better example is like, let's say Suno. because Suno, does not use Modal for training.Swyx [00:50:26]: Mikey on the pod. Yeah.Akshat [00:50:27]: But they use Modal for all their inference and that's because they have like a custom-- They have completely custom model architecture and that means that they have to be at the code level and tweak things that are not, just an API.Swyx [00:50:41]: It's interesting as well, like we had, Ethan, most recently on the xAI Groq team make a prediction that like the next tier in video gen is not a better video model, it's a better model or agent that orchestrates video models.Video Agents and Production WorkflowsAkshat [00:50:56]: Oh, interesting.Vibhu [00:50:56]: Language model backbone that can use toolsAkshat [00:50:58]: RightVibhu [00:50:59]: And write code.Akshat [00:51:00]: Like, yes, I can make my second video or my second video from Groq, but I want my minute video.Akshat [00:51:06]: And I'm not going there through normal video gen.Swyx [00:51:10]: Yeah, that's interesting. I - So we have GPU sandboxes and recently have seen a few companies doing agents that do video manipulation or,Akshat [00:51:22]: Yeah. Give it FFmpeg and just do it.Swyx [00:51:23]: Run FFmpeg. But likeAkshat [00:51:25]: That's not enough.Swyx [00:51:25]: Yeah.Akshat [00:51:26]: You need to give it Adobe.Swyx [00:51:27]: Yeah, I hadn't put it together with like it would be a video production thing. in my mind these things were going more towards editingAkshat [00:51:36]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:51:36]: Well, shout out Mantis.Akshat [00:51:37]: I think about this a lot.Swyx [00:51:38]: .Akshat [00:51:41]: Yeah. Sorry.Vibhu [00:51:41]: Luma. Luma Agent is a version of this for video production, but it's a off.Swyx [00:51:46]: I was gonna get your quick takes, on some other stuff that happensGitpod/Ona, CI, and Runtime SandboxesSwyx [00:51:50]: In recent news and just-just see if you have anything interesting. Gitpod, very li
Some coaches collect plays. Coach Shawn Cooley collects ways to run the same one.In his third visit to the Board Drill, the East Ridge offensive coordinator makes the case that you do not need a thick call sheet to be multiple. You need one play your kids believe in and a hundred ways to show it. For Cooley, that play is counter, and over the course of the episode he takes GH counter from its plainest form all the way out to the edges of what a defense will let you get away with.Along the way he gets into GT and split-flow counter, a first-level slice RPO he calls emo, counter quick borrowed off the college game, and a long-trap ISO wrinkle he is half convinced should have gotten him fired. From there it turns into a quarterback run clinic: a center-turned-quarterback lowering his shoulder between the tackles, jet and empty-formation keeps, a guard-tailback counter, and a shovel pass he simply calls Tebow. The thread running through all of it is the part most offenses skip. The offensive line barely changes a rule, and the defense never gets to tee off on your base.If you run gap scheme, this is an hour well spent with the whiteboard open. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.boarddrill.com/subscribe