Podcasts about jonathan how

Patrick talks about prayer and about God answering prayer and his Providence. He also shares the wonderful miracles associated with Lourdes. Patrick counsels a caller who wants to be more comfortable with the Novus Ordo mass. Patrick explains the Jewish faith, how they have different beliefs regarding the Messiah within the faith itself. Kathy-Why do we pray if God already knows everything and has it planned? (0:57) Patrick talks about the numerous miracles at Lourdes (7:26) Jonathan-How can I be more comfortable with the Novus Ordo mass? (15:05) Jonathan-What’s the difference between falling asleep in hopes of resurrection, purgatory and going to heaven? (22:19) Brian-Why are Jewish still waiting and how will they know if he comes? (27:21) Mary Ann (email): Why didn’t the ones who were in paradise go to purgatory (32:09) A.J.-(email) How do you know if you’re detached from sin in regards to plenary indulgence? (34:00) Mark-Where does our faith come from (42:30) Jessica (email)-Question about getting marriage convalidated as I enter OCIA? (46:58) Agnes-Is it okay to cut or break a rosary held by a deceased person before burial? (48:09) Angelica - How can I help people understand that there is life after death? (44:02)

The hardest chapters of your life often become the clearest mirror of your values. When Rabbi Jonathan Cohen woke up one Shabbat (Saturday) morning unable to move, he had no idea he was facing a life-altering medical emergency. What followed - emergency brain surgery, a cancer diagnosis, and a whirlwind of hospital visits - could have broken his spirit. Instead, it clarified his purpose. In this raw and deeply human conversation, Jonathan - affectionately known as "JoCo" - shares how he continues to show up with purpose during hard times, for his family, his community, and himself, even in the midst of fear, fatigue, and the unknown. With humor, wisdom, and an unmistakable warmth, he invites us to rethink what it means to live meaningfully when life turns upside down. This isn't just a story about illness. It's a story about resilience, presence, and the power of showing up with purpose, even when everything else falls away. In this conversation about showing up with purpose during hard times, you'll hear: The Shabbat (Saturday) morning that changed everything for Jonathan How he stayed grounded in his values through a health crisis and what helps him through the hard times What it meant for him to suddenly be a patient What makes a visit meaningful when someone is seriously ill Caring for others and visiting communities affected by October 7, even as he confronts his own health challenges Jonathan's reflections on vulnerability, community, and setting boundaries And many more insights   TIMESTAMPS 00:00 – Introduction to Jonathan Cohen's Journey 01:37 – Life Before the Cancer Diagnosis 07:27 – The Morning Everything Changed 13:59 – Emergency Brain Surgery and Hospitalization 21:03 – Adjusting to Life as a Patient 26:50 – Support from Family and Friends 32:09 – Navigating Visits and Staying Positive 36:12 – What Makes a Visit Truly Meaningful 40:10 – Balancing Illness with Family Life 40:57 – Creative Ways Visitors Made an Impact 42:44 – Community Engagement as a Healing Practice 45:44 – The Therapeutic Power of Getting Outside 47:37 – Supporting Others Through Small Gestures 50:28 – Seeing Life Differently Through Illness 55:42 – Fighting vs. Managing Illness 59:33 – Finding Strength Through Support and Positivity 01:02:44 – Final Reflections and Life Lessons   ABOUT THE GUEST Rabbi Jonathan Cohen (affectionately known as "JoCo") is a dynamic force of inspiration within the Jewish community. He works with Yeshiva University (YU) recruiting gap-year students to continue their education at YU, while also serving with NCSY (a division of the Orthodox Union) to help young couples find their place in Jewish communities across the United States. Beyond his professional roles, Rabbi Cohen is renowned for his exceptionally warm and open home, where he and his family have hosted countless students for Shabbos and Yom Tov meals. Recently diagnosed with cancer, Rabbi Cohen faces this challenge with remarkable resilience and positivity. Despite undergoing intensive treatment, he remains steadfast in his mission to serve others. He continues to travel across Israel, leading impactful trips and providing support to communities affected by the events of October 7th, turning his personal struggle into an opportunity to spread kindness and connection to those in need. QUOTES “Being a hero also means going through challenges and creating opportunities.” - Jonathan Cohen “What I've learned most importantly is that we have to be there more for each other.” - Jonathan Cohen “That first week, there were certain people [who] weren't even thinking about themselves. They were thinking about ‘what can we do to put a smile on your face?'” - Jonathan Cohen “Communication is still a hard thing in the generation that we live.” - Jonathan Cohen ABOUT THE HOST Uri Schneider, M.A. CCC -SLP is co-founder and leader at Schneider Speech; creator and host of Transcending Stuttering; and former faculty at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine. SEE ALL SHOW NOTES http://www.transcendingx.com/podcast LEARN MORE at http://www.transcendingx.com and http://www.schneiderspeech.com

The Bureau of Meteorology has provided the latest update on the conditions after ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred. BOM Senior Meterologist, Jonathan How, told Gary Hardgrave on 4BC Drive, "We are seeing rain ease across Brisbane and we've just issued the latest severe weather warning." "Brisbane has now been removed from that, so no longer expecting heavy rainfall across Brisbane." "But we still have that warning current for the Lockyer Valley and for places north of Caboolture, but the good news is that rain is easing across the metro area," Mr How continued. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Patrick in this hour answers questions related to the Holy Eucharist and in particular about Eucharistic Ministers Patrick responds to an emailer who still thinks the Holy Eucharist is cannibalism (0:33) Book Recommendation: Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating https://ignatius.com/catholicism-and-fundamentalism-cafp/ Jonathan-How would Catholics improvise mass in the prison?  (7:49) Book Recommendation: Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza: https://www.amazon.com/Left-Tell-Discovering-Rwandan-Holocaust/dp/1401908977 Kristen-I was an extraordinary minister at a friend's wedding and I knew that at least 10-15 people were not Catholic. I gave them communion and I feel really culpable in this. What should I do? (18:00) Rick- I had the same experience as Kristen. The priest told me I was not supposed to be the one to police them, as that was between them and God. (31:49) Susan-Kristen's call is one of the most important calls I have heard on RR in years! I think it is so important to talk about this in regards to Eucharistic Ministers! (39:16) Thomas- I believe what you are saying in regards to Cannibalism and the Holy Eucharist is faulty logic  regarding dead people. Organ donors are dead but it is not the sufficient thing. (45:04)

JLP Tue 7-23-24 Country & Western Tuesday! Hr 1 Kamala Harris is "unburdened." Dems against citizenship proof for voting! Calls: Country going down! Confrontational brief call. // Hr 2 CALLS: Tyler: Homeless 24yo lost in imagination, not eating animals. Jonathan: Don't believe in the Devil, can't admit he's evil? RIP Sheila Jackson Lee! Super Chats. Kim Cheatle resigned! // Hr 3 CALLS… physical ailments, Job… No-thinking life… Women's evil? New Biblical Question: Have you ever seen God? TIMESTAMPS (0:00:00) HOUR 1 (0:05:59) Warning: No expectation. Desperate Dems (0:12:20) Kamala Harris: "What can be, unburdened by what has been" (0:16:59) Plantation: America was AMAZIN'; Independent thinking not allowed! (0:23:11) Safeguard American Voters Eligibility, SAVE Act: Dems say no! BREAK (0:33:23) Wesley Hunt, R-TX, Making blacks get an ID, a low bar! (0:36:23) ALEX, CA: Dems believe Trump shooting was staged … TYLER … (0:38:47) SHAWN, FL: Country going down … (0:46:25) SHAWN: Smash and grab in Florida? Mess (0:50:02) KEVIN, FL, 1st, mad after hearing your jawn. Race in America (0:55:00) NEWS Hr 1 (1:01:00) HOUR 2 (1:04:11) TYLER, MN, 1st: Eating animals, 24, homeless, "forgave" (1:08:19) TYLER: Silent Prayer? Feel God's presence. Living in imagination. (1:12:06) JONATHAN, PA, 1st, watches BOND, don't believe in God (1:14:39) JONATHAN: How did you become evil, if the Devil doesn't exist? (1:19:33) JONATHAN: How will you overcome evil if you can't admit you're evil? (1:28:41) JONATHAN: Hake wanna help you. Not atheist? BREAK (1:32:55) RIP Sheila Jackson Lee (1:34:36) JONATHAN wrapping up, nice call (1:38:30) Supers: Messianic Jew, Sabbath (1:41:43) Breaking: Kim Cheatle resigned. SUPERS: Sion: JD Vance, Kamala (1:47:34) THEO, CT, 1st, great call, loves Jesse (1:51:25) JLP: You go to work to work! Sion: Trump Vance choice. (1:53:12) NATHAN, TX, 1st, great message, forgive parents. HOLD (1:55:00) NEWS Hr 2 - JLP sings (1:59:49) HOUR 3 - WHM, New BQ, Country gone, Sion: What now? (2:05:07) NATHAN: Shingles virus, physical body issues. Book of Job? (2:15:29) AMAN, India, 24, not "sir." See. No-thinking life. Fear. (2:25:31) BLAQROSE, AL: Not grown children's mother? Dogs bark, HOLD (2:27:40) JONATHAN, NE, hold on, BREAK (2:33:08) JONATHAN, realizing who he's not. (2:35:57) BLAQROSE's house dog! Woman is evil? Men are evil! (2:41:23) BLAQROSE: Stop walking with Satan. Anger. Forgiven mother? Playing (2:42:26) VICTOR, CA: gf didn't respect me, I dropped her. Stronger now. (2:43:56) Supers (2:45:01) DYLAN, Australia: Baptism? (2:48:51) TONY, PA: Wrote a poem (2:49:52) KYLE, OK, BQ: Seen God? US flag in closet lit up (2:52:18) JIM, VA: Read the Bible, 3x, God's own word. No perfect peace!

Patrick dives into the shocking aftermath of the attempted assassination on Donald Trump, uncovering various public opinions and conspiracy theories. From skepticism about the attack being staged to the real emotions and dangers surrounding political violence, he explores all angles. Plus, heartfelt calls from listeners remind us of the need for compassion in these challenging times.   Audio: People on the street saying Trump staged the assassination attempt (01:32) AUDIO: Person on the street: “It's a shame the person missed, the shooter was Republican, and I'm scared of political violence.” (06:57) GOP Press conference a reporter asked about the shooter being a republican (11:56) Joanne - I think it is disgusting where this country is at, it is really sad how we are treating each other. (14:40) Jonathan – How do Angels acquire language, do they have to learn to communicate, whether they are a fallen angel or not? (19:36) Jared - JD Vance is a Catholic convert. (25:27) Tracy – Seems like a lot of hate speech on social media? (38:15) David - I agree with Patrick about returning the power back to states in regards to abortion, I think it is a mistake. (48:00)

In this profound episode, Jonathan is joined by esteemed theologian and author Michael Horton to discuss his latest book, "Recovering Our Sanity: How the Fear of God Conquers the Fears that Divide Us." In a world teetering on the brink of chaos—from unsettling politics to the lingering effects of the global pandemic—Horton's book offers not a typical self-help guide but a deep theological exploration of how a proper fear of God can liberate us from our myriad earthly fears.Dr. Horton, Professor of Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary, explains what it truly means to fear God—both biblically and theologically—and how this reverential fear can effectively drive out fears of the future, others, and even death itself.Throughout the episode, Dr. Horton discusses the different types of fears that plague our society—from cultural anxieties to personal struggles—and how these stem from a lack of genuine fear of God. He emphasizes confronting our earthly fears with the hope found in Christ, rooted in the Gospel, and the shift from self-preservation to a Christ-focused life.This episode is a humbling, thought-provoking, and hope-igniting journey that challenges listeners to replace false securities with the profound joy of knowing Christ, who commands us, "Do not be afraid." Join us as we explore how cultivating a healthy fear of God can recover our sanity in these turbulent times.To ask Jonathan a question or connect with the Candid community, visit https://LTW.org/CandidFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/candidpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/candidpodTwitter: https://twitter.com/thecandidpodTRANSCRIPT:This transcript recounts Candid Conversations with Jonathan Youssef Episode 249: Recovering Our Sanity: How the Fear of God Conquers the Fears That Divide Us: Michael Horton.  [00:01] Jonathan: My very special guest is Mike Horton. He is a professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary in California, and he is the author of many books, including The Christian Faith Ordinary and Core Christianity. He also hosts the White Horse Inn radio program. He lives with his wife, Lisa, and their four children in Escondido, California, and it looks like he's on his back patio,  having a conversation with me and being very gracious with his time. Mike Horton, thank you so much for taking the time to be on Candid Conversations.[00:45] Michael: Thank you, Jonathan.[00:50] Jonathan: I do thank you for your time. Now Mike, I've read your books, I have subscribed and I do recommend all of our listeners subscribe to the White Horse Inn. If you could just give us a quick, whirlwind tour of your story, we can talk a little bit about the podcast and some of your books as we progress through the interview.[01:19] Michael: Well, thank you, Jonathan. Yeah, I was raised in a Christian home and came to understand the doctrines of grace partly through my older brother. Kind of had my own little, not little, my own Romans revolution and then started digging deeper into Church history and theology and biblical studies, and eventually went to Biola University, Westminster California, then to Oxford for doctoral studies and then post-doc at Yale and came back to teach at my alma mater and have been here for 25 years. Blessed to be able to have a hand, with my colleagues, in training pastors; pastors training pastors.[02:17] Jonathan: I've been a recipient of many of the students of Westminster Seminary who taught me at Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta, and I've been really blessed by your work. You've got a very jovial, friendly, California vibe to you, but when you speak, you're like a double-edged sword. It's so penetrating. And I think there could be a theological issue that I've been struggling with for months and you'll say it so concisely in a few sentences, and I'll think, Where was that when I needed that?[03:09] Michael: You're too kind. Thank you.[03:11] Jonathan: Tell us a little bit about the White Horse Inn. It has been on for something like thirty years.[03:17] Michael: Yeah, thirty-plus, almost thirty-five years now. It has been such a fun thing. I've learned so much from my colleagues on the program. I still learn from the new team. We produce a magazine, too, Modern Reformation Magazine, which is really—I encourage people to subscribe to that. It's a good digest of topical theology related to culture. The umbrella organization is called Sola Media, and one of the things that we do that I'm so excited about being a part of is called Theo Global, where we host theological conversations (like we do on the White Horse Inn) between Baptist, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican traditions and bring people together from a particular region. So we've been doing it for eleven years in India and also almost that long in Nigeria or in Kenya, in Nairobi. And then also Cairo for the Middle East. We just did one in Thailand that Pakistanis and Indians were able to come to, because they're not able usually to see each other. And then we are, Lord willing, starting another one in Southeast Asia, probably Singapore.So these have been so rich. Out of them are coming, a series of theology books from the global church to the global church. And so instead of having just regional theologies or theologies that pretend that they're not culturally contextual, we want to hear the voices of people from different locations testifying to the same Gospel, and that's just really been lots of fun.[05:42] Jonathan: Well, having ministered near that area of the world in Australia, you're right, there can be a disconnect between the cultures. We read each other's books and that sort of thing, and those are Western cultures, but I think we miss out on hearing about what is happening in Southeast Asia, Because they do face similar obstacles but also some quite different. As one of the points of your book is, there is still the one true God and the one Gospel that reaches across those cultures and reaches across so many of those things that we would consider barriers. And I think that's wonderful. I pray the Lord would bless that.[06:30] Michael: Thank you. One of the things I find, Jonathan, is there is a sweet unity around the Gospel that binds us when I go to these other places. Wherever I am in the world, I don't feel like I'm a stranger because I'm with my brothers and sisters. I wish I felt the same way in America. It's very different here.[06:51] Jonathan: Yeah, I was going to say it's interesting that what you're doing is you're unifying and uniting across denominations, across cultural things, and yet that's working almost in the opposite direction of where we see things here, which is there's division within denominations; there's division within small regions. You're undoing what is happening on a bigger scale in some of the Western parts. It's exciting to hear that's not happening everywhere, that there's actually some unification taking place and that's encouraging. And I know that's going to be an aspect of what we talk about in our conversation about one of your new books.Now, I know that you had some health issues with your heart a couple of years ago. Maybe for some of our audience who didn't know or having heard any updates, are you healthy?[07:54] Michael: Thanks for asking. Yes, what it was was a valve that just exploded in my heart, so it was an emergency open-heart surgery. But they said—they know my arteries and my heart better than anybody, they said, you'll die of something, but it won't be of heart disease. You have a good heart; you have good arteries; this was just a fluke.[08:24] Jonathan: Unbelievable.[08:25] Michael: So—yeah. I'm fully recovered. They said I could go bungee jumping again if I want to.[08:32] Jonathan: Again. I'm glad that you were already doing that—I picked up your book a while ago and I've been wanting to have you on the podcast ever since reading it. And the book is called Recovering Our Sanity: How the Fear of God Conquers the Fears that Divide Us. And my goodness, what a perfect title for everything we see. Give us a little bit of the reason for writing and the timing of the book.[09:18] Michael: Well, it had been percolating for years now, actually. I wrote a book many years ago called Beyond Culture Wars: Is America a Mission Field or a Battlefield? And this is in a similar vein, but really in light of the fears that really divide us today. And the center used to be the Bible, the Gospel, getting the Gospel right and getting the Gospel out. We have our doctrinal differences across the evangelical mainstream, but basically we had different political views and those political views didn't divide between brothers and sisters and churches.And what I've seen lately has just been like a food fight in a cafeteria, and political issues and social issues raised to the level of the Trinity. And it's like, okay, well, we can argue about that over coffee, but we don't bring it into the church. That used to be kind of how people thought about things. These things are important, but they're not as important as our unity in Christ. But I hear people attacking pastors, pastors attacking their flock, back and forth over these issues. And I think people don't get this heated over the doctrine of election or justification or the Trinity. Does it suggest that these issues are deeper in our hearts than the truth of Christianity, so what really binds us?And I looked at it and I said what really binds us is salvation, what we think we're saved from. If we think we're saved from the people over there who are threatening our values, or the people over there who are different from us ethnically, or the people over there who have a different view of economics and social justice? What are we really afraid of? What are our ultimate fears? And I argue that we have all these secondary fears. The real fear deep down, the mother of all fears, is the fear of death. And none of the solutions that can be offered by FOX or CNN, there is no solution to that. But we have it. Why isn't that on our dashboard as central, getting it right and getting it out?[13:01] Jonathan: In the book you cast a broad net in kind of what you've just said up here, picking out a few of the issues that you're seeing so much division over. But then you lay out some of the theological framework to reorientate your reader to where fear should rightly be placed. And it's away from the fear of one another and having a right fear of God.And you use the word sublime in the book, which I found really helpful as an aspect of God. I wonder if you could give us a little bit of explanation and walk that out for us.[13:52] Michael: Sure. I love that word. Sublime is really, I think, what we're talking about when we talk about the fear of God. Some people will say, “Well, it's not really fear. It's reverence, awe.” Fear is a big part of it, but it's a kind of fear that attracts. Think of what happens if you've ever stood at the mouth of a volcano, looking over it, watching the lava flow. Or I live in Southern California, so we have fires, and there's a kind of weird attraction to going to the fire and seeing it. Or you're out on the ocean and you're terrified. A squall comes up you're afraid, but you're also kind of your heart is racing not just because you're afraid, but also because you're kind of in awe of what's happening. In awe of the waves.God, you know whenever an angel shows up in the Bible, an emissary of God, what's the first thing? You know the number-one commandment throughout Scripture? The number-one command is “Be not afraid.” Because when even the mailman of God shows up, people are terrified.[15:31] Jonathan: Yeah, or Moses's face is a little too bright.[15:36] Michael: Yeah. Hey, put a napkin over that or something… That's what, really, is the basis for all sublime events, encounters that we have is really the fear of God. And so it's … A Jewish writer, John Levinson, puts it well. He says, “In the Hebrew Scriptures God beckons with one hand and repels with the other.”So there's a kind of don't get too close. Even Jesus in His Resurrection, “Don't touch me. I'm different.” God is different from us. And that sense of awe, of majesty, of even terror. Think of the disciples in the boat with Jesus. They were afraid of the storm, and then Jesus calmed the storm and they were afraid of Jesus. Who is this who has control over the winds and the waves? They were terrified. And that's the kind of Who is this? What am I dealing with here? The kind of shock and awe, the surprise is something that is missing, I think, from a lot of our experience as Christians today.[17:11] Jonathan: Well, and I know in the book we've seen a lot of the statistical evidence that comes in support of what you've just said, which shows that evangelical Christians really don't know what they believe. They have a complete misunderstanding of God, of the nature of Christ, of their roles.[17:51] Michael: If the fear of God is not the beginning of our wisdom, then something else will be. We'll fear something else. We will fear other people who are different from us and we'll fear cancer, we'll fear losing our job, we'll fear environmental collapse and catastrophe, we'll fear these other people taking over. It's not that those … that there aren't legitimate concerns of a political and social and cultural nature. But we have a disordered fear. And if we have disordered fears, we have disordered loves.God is not only the source of our greatest fear, legitimate fear; He's also the only one who conquers our fears and says, “Welcome home, prodigal. Welcome home, here's the feast.”[19:22] Jonathan: And deals with our, as you refer to it, the mother of all fears.[19:27] Michael: Death. We're dying. In California, people aren't allowed to die; they pass away; and we put these cemeteries out, far away from view, or we turn them into parks and things. And it used to be every time you walked into a church there would be headstones, and it reminded you as you walked in why you're going in there. The Gospel is for dying people, and we're all on that road. And so the question is, How do we face death? … How is that ultimate anxiety relieved? We mourn, but not as those who have no hope. So what does that mean for my daily life now? I could be twelve years old and I'm dying. I could be eighty and I'm dying. So what … Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the dying and the resurrection of the dead and being attached to Jesus so that what He is in His humanity right now, glorified, we will be. Let's talk about that. That's a lot better than anything on CNN or FOX.[21:00] Jonathan: I love it. I think in the book you tell the story of when you went to a debate with, I might be messing this up, but I think it was with an atheist and you sort of said, “Yep. Great. Can I talk about Jesus now” and kind of put him off, and he sort of like, “I wasn't prepared to debate that.”[21:22] Michael: Yeah. This was years ago. Bill Nye the Science Nye.[21:24] Jonathan: Bill Nigh, that's right.[21:25] Michael: He was talking about how religion is based on false fears and so they develop myths and so forth.[21:37] Jonathan: And you were like, “Well, that's true.”[21:39] Michael: Yeah. I don't disagree; that's a pretty fair analysis of religions. I guess you'd have to take one by one and analyze it, but as a generalization, now can I talk about Jesus and His Resurrection? Let's keep getting back to the main business here.[21:59] Jonathan: The main issue. Yeah. In the book you draw this distinction between naturalistic and hyper supernatural, but then you sort of carve out this third option of ordinary. Can we talk a little bit about that and how we see that playing out in our world today, particularly in the Church?[22:23] Michael: Sure. Often what you see today is a naturalism underwriting the progressive agenda and John Lennon's “Imagine.” On the right, you tend to have a hyper supernaturalism wedded to a conservative agenda. And so what do I mean by that? Well, a naturalistic worldview says, of course, God isn't involved. If God exists, then He's not involved in this world. He didn't create it, it's self-evolving and so forth.A hyper-supernatural worldview says that God works miraculous. You know, to say that God did it means it's a miracle.[23:34] Jonathan: Yeah.[23:35] Michael: Whereas in the Bible God does all sorts of things. Mostly, He doesn't perform miracles. What about all the times when we cut our finger and it heals after a week? What about that? What about a child [who] has a brain bleed in NICU and it resolves in 24 hours. How about those? Those aren't miracles. People say, “the miracle of childbirth.” There's no miracle of childbirth; it's just a spectacular example of God's providence. That's part of our problem is we're looking for God only in the spectacular, only in the extraordinary, only in places where we can point to and say, “Oh, God did that.”So we can't explain how somebody recovered from cancer; we say, “Well, God did it, not the doctors.”[24:46] Jonathan: Right.[24:47] Michael: Well, how about God did it and the doctors did it. God did it through the doctors.[24:52] Jonathan: How much control does God have here?[24:55] Michael: Right. He has control of everything. It's not just supernatural events; it's not just miracles. God's in control of every second, every breath. Every breath that you and I take is under His dominion.[25:11] Jonathan: That's right. He holds all things together. You know, I hear that phrase a lot, “That was a God thing. That was a God thing,” and I always have to stop and say to them, “Everything is a God thing.” I mean, conversations. The fact that your brain works. The ability to read. The ability to understand and reason. It's like I hate when you get that narrow scope, as you're saying. We've lost the sublime. We've lost an understanding of how much—you know, it's almost a deistic view that, you know, God sort of—[25:42] Michael: Yes![25:43] Jonathan: He's put some things in place and then He occasionally steps in and—[25:47] Michael: That's why I argue that actually naturalism and hyper supernaturalism unintentionally conspire with each other against Christianity—[25:57] Jonathan: Right.[25:58] Michael: —you know because, you know, we get to the place where we don't see God in our ordinary, everyday existence, but only in these punctuated events, and we've got to raise things. I think we do a lot of pretending. We pretend that things that have an ordinary explanation are miracles because we have to have God in our life. These large swaths of our lives where there are no miracles are upheld by God's marvelous providence.[26:40] Jonathan: Right. Amen to that. In the book, one of the fears you mentioned is fear of losing your job. And I think in the book you helpfully distinguish between calling and vocation or job and helping us understand and distinguish the two things. I wonder if we can talk a little bit of bringing clarity to that, because we're longing for something to put our identity in. Is it a football club? Is it a university? We're currently, I don't know when this will air, but we're in the middle of March Madness. Who did you pick? What's your university? What's your background?And vocation is very much one of those things we can put our identity in, and yet I think you talk about the ultimate and the penultimate between calling and vocation. I wonder if you could bring some clarity to that, and then we'll turn to some of the practical outworkings of the division we see after that.[27:53] Michael: Yeah. Well, one of the things I try to maintain throughout the book is, look, the things I'm talking about are not unimportant. They are legitimate fears. There is a legitimate anxiety. The question is, where do we go with that? But yes, let's affirm it. It's real, it's a deal, but penultimate not ultimate.For example, if I am in a circle of people I've never met before, we're having breakfast, and I ask them, “Tell me about yourself,” very ordinarily they'll say, “Well, I'm a dentist. I'm a …”Now okay, there's an example. That is part of our identity. Vocation is a gift of God; it's a calling. So to say, you know, we shouldn't place our identity in our vocations, well, not ultimately. That's the problem. It's a part of our identity, just like being a father is part of my identity. That's a calling. And we have to realize, as Luther said, we have many callings, many vocations during our life. We're parents, we're spouses, we're children, we are extended family members, we're dentists, and cleaning movie theaters. We have all kinds of callings/vocations. Sometimes we have a vocation to suffer, to carry a cross. Sometimes we have a vocation to be a friend. We have lots of vocations, and keeping them in balance is very important.Keeping them penultimate, not ultimate, is my point. My ultimate identity is chosen, redeemed, justified, being sanctified, will be glorified, in union with Christ. That's my identity and that's really who I am. Paul talks about himself as if he's almost collapsed into Jesus. His identity is so bound up with Christ that he can even say his suffering is something he glories in because it shares in Christ's suffering. That's my identity; that's where I really find who I am. The other stuff is not just stuff I do, that turns it back into a job. It is part of my identity, but it's penultimate, not ultimate.[30:57] Jonathan: Well, as we said at the beginning, we see division in so many different places. We're, of course, as you know, we're in another election year, and that—fear is going to be used as a … it's going to be weaponized this year, particularly this year, in America. And we have an international audience, so I want to be sensitive, but I know that internationally also they see a lot of American news as well. I think you talk about how, in the book, two sides to the fear coin. You mention both in the book. One side, fear is easily exploited as a motivator. On the other, fear is a weak motivator in the long term. Why is that? Let's kind of unpack that a little bit.[32:07] Michael: Yeah. I use the analogy of deer who are … there is this fight or flight that God gave us and the animals as well. It's purely instinctual, instinctive. You don't … Whether you're a deer or a human being, you don't really think about, you don't contemplate, you don't calculate, you don't explore what … You have a car coming towards you, you flee. You get out of its way if you can. But what happens is—That's adrenaline. That adrenaline rush is just a marvelous gift of God's providence. The problem is what would happen is deer had this disease of constantly being afraid, every crack of brush of another deer drove them wild running in fear? That's what I see us doing now, and what happens is it works in the short term. If you're going to cynically use fear to get a herd of people to do what you want them to do, that might work in the short term, but long term, people can't live like that. Long term, people actually become cynical. They won't participate at all. They'll just turn it off because “I've had this scare a thousand times and I'm not going to have it anymore. I'm tired of it.” It just runs out.And that's what I think a lot of people are feeling right now with American politics. So I'm not an analyst of American politics by any stretch of the imagination; I'm simply looking at it on the pastoral side. What is driving us to be like the deer in the headlights every five minutes? And it's exhausting us.[34:33] Jonathan: Yeah.[34:34] Michael: Each side whipping up the other side against each other. If I don't win this election, dot, dot, dot. If the other person wins the election, dot, dot, dot. It's apocalypse not. I especially find offensive any use of God or the Bible or Christ for that fear. Anyone who does that, particularly cynical leaders who don't even go to church, aren't professing Christians really, but they use the lingo to gain the nomination of particular groups. When Christians participate in that, they carry crosses to the U.S. Capitol to storm it and talk about hanging the vice president, and they're carrying crosses with Bible verses, this is the sort of thing that must just aggravate our Lord and Savior whose name is taken in vain.And yeah, is that a critique especially of evangelical political conservatives? Yes, it is. Because they are my brothers and sisters closest to me. The secularists aren't really invoking the name of Jesus and Bible verses and carrying crosses. I'm more worried about evangelicals distorting the gospel than I am about who wins this next election.[36:54] Jonathan: What is that doing to your testimony to those people who don't know the Lord? What message is it giving them?[37:10] Michael: That Christianity is about power.[37:11] Jonathan: Right, exactly.[37:12] Michael: It's not about a cross with God who has all power becoming flesh being spat upon and then being crucified upon a cross, bleeding for our sins. It's about basically choosing Caesar over Jesus, making Pilate our hero rather than Jesus.[37:45] Jonathan: I found that chapter, I can't remember if it's the Christian nationalism chapter or the one before, but it was really helpful the way that you walked out American history in a way that probably a lot of the readers might say, “I don't know if I understood that.” Or “I don't know if I fully understood Thomas Jefferson and his letter to the Danbury Baptist Church in Connecticut.” Understanding separation of church and state, understanding like how we got to where we are and the creating of even thinking between the British … French revolution and those different paths that were laid out before us. And even just understanding our own history and how we got to where we are, I think a lot of it is just cast as Christian nation. And I found it helpful the way you distinguish that.Because I hear this a lot in the church in terms of America being the new Israel, are there blessings that have come with certain things? Sure, fine. Our Constitution is well put together. I love the history of Witherspoon, the Scottish Presbyterian, and you can see some of that in the language that comes out through the Constitution. Again, I think it's helpful to have your historical understanding rather than this reinterpretation that we have now that it's, as you said, it's this feeling like someone's come in and taken this from us. And now, to use the title of your other book, now we're at war, right? It's not a mission field, it's a battlefield. We're fighting for the honor of our country. And all that's done is create us and them division and a lack of clarity and a lack of what we're called to in a mission sense as Christians. Where was I going with that? Who knows? Anyway, I found it helpful.[40:10] Michael: You said it better. Preach it, brother.[40:16] Jonathan: Just random thoughts. Just reading your books and regurgitating it to the people. So later on in the book you sort of walk us through the areas where division has come in. So we have Christian nationalism has certainly seeped into churches. Then you have some really helpful, short chapters with issues with LGBTQ+ community, cancel culture, racism. Let's just kind of walk through some of these and help Christians who are listening to this who are saying, I thought this was the right way to handle that situation but you're saying something else. Let's kind of walk through maybe even just one or two of those. Again, you had a really great illustration under your LGBTQ+ chapter of the young man whose family had sent him to you and you were pastoring him and what happened with all that. If you could tell us a little bit about that, just to help kind of encapsulate what we're talking about here.[41:35] Michael: Sure, this brother struggling with homosexuality, his dad was on the board of a prominent evangelical organization, and his pastor had told him that we basically don't want your influence in the church, so he was considering leaving the faith. But then he read Putting Amazing Back Into Grace, a book I wrote a long time ago, and came out to work at our organization as just a pretext for just hanging out and shepherding this guy. He became a part of our church and a lot of people looked after him and we got a lot back from him.He went back home, and his pastor said that all this reformed teaching he was getting was heresy and so forth, and no, you've lost your salvation. Romans says that He gave them over to a depraved mind. So he committed suicide and …So what is it? Why do you do stuff like that? Well, you do it out of bad theology, to be sure, but also out of fear. There are a lot of churches that just don't want to deal with it. They don't want to have this problem. They don't want to say that they have people in their congregation who are really, really suffering. If you're a secularist, you don't suffer from homosexuality. You don't suffer with gender dysphoria. Only Christians do. And only Christians suffer with greed and envy and malice and other sins that are listed in these same sin lists in the New Testament. You don't lose your salvation over those.The key is repentance, right? We're called to a life of repentance. Whatever our tendencies are towards particular sins, we're all corrupt in heart. We're sinners and we're sinned against and we are in a sin-cursed world. And so where do we go with that fear? And then once that fear is solved objectively in Christ, having been justified through faith, we have peace with God. That's an objective fact. With that now as an objective fact, how do I respond to this brother or sister who's justified just as I am, and who is being sanctified just as I am, but has propensity toward a particular sin that I think is particularly serious, particularly great? How do I love this person? How do I respond to this person?John Calvin said a pastor needs to learn how to have two voices: one for the sheep and one for the wolves. And what I've seen in some very close cases to my own experience, what I've seen sometimes is pastors confusing the sheep for wolves and treating them as apostates or as people who, you know, if you really were a Christian, you wouldn't be suffering with that. Well, they're not saying, “I have a right to this sin.” They're not saying that it's okay. That's why they're struggling with it—and they're struggling with it in your church.So one of the surveys, actually a couple of the surveys concluded that about 80 percent of people in the LGBTQ+ community were raised in conservative Roman Catholic or Protestant churches.[46:39] Jonathan: Give that statistic again because I think we need to hear it again.[46:42] Michael: I don't know exact, it's in the 80s, 80 percent.[46:46] Jonathan: Over 80 percent.[46:49] Michael: Right. And what's even more striking is the same percentage said that they would come back to church, even if they didn't change their rules, but listened to them and cared for them. That's what I found amazing. I was glad that they asked … they added in that survey even if they didn't change their beliefs but they were kind and they listened and they cared for me.So if I'm fearful, here again the adrenaline, the deer in the headlights, that's a gift God gave us for fleeing something that is imminently threatening. This is not imminently threatening. If I come to understand that, then I'm not a deer in the headlights; instead, my brother or sister, my friend, parent, I'm someone who is looking out for the best of this person and now I can actually get ahold of myself and think and make judgments and articulate things. And ask questions and get information. That's a big part of it. It's not all spiritual. People are suffering from mental health disorders, and that's physical, that's brain chemistry. All kinds of things.People are suffering from sins that have been committed against them in the past. A lot of this is very complicated, and it's not all that person's direct fault. Again, we're all sinners, sinned against, and live in a sin-cursed world. And all those factors play into what we have to consider when we're not the deer in the headlights but can sit down with people over a long time, be willing to walk with them over a long time, be willing to read up on things, ask them questions, we're that interested in them and understanding what they're going through, understanding their pain. It's like if they have cancer we'd be at their house with casseroles, but if they have these things, you know … So let's … fear of the Lord drives out the fears of everyone and everything else. This is the beginning of wisdom.[48:52] Jonathan: Exactly. Well, I think we could probably have this conversation for probably another four more hours, which we might do just because we're having so many technical difficulties. You know, I can't recommend this book enough. Mike Horton, Recovering Our Sanity: How the Fear of God Conquers the Fears that Divide Us. I told my team I want to re-air this as we get closer to November so that we can all be reminded once again of what we're called to. Mike, what are you working on at the moment?[50:35] Michael: I've been kind of obsessive compulsive about a project, three volumes with Eerdmans. First volume is coming out in May, titled Shaman and Sage. This is a very different project. It's the history of spiritual not religious. Where does this come from? You have this divine self within trying to break out of all constraints. And so I trace it all the way back to ancient Greece and to the Renaissance. And then the second volume, Renaissance to the scientific revolution. And then the third volume is covering Romanticism to the present.[51:31] Jonathan: Oprah.[51:32] Michael: Exactly.[51:35] Jonathan: That's going to be a massive help for believers, because that's the one we see a lot in those statistics. Yeah, I hear that from quite a few people, spiritual but not religious, or whatever the phrase is. But well, Mike Horton, it's been such a privilege. I'm so grateful for your time and coming on to Candid Conversations and sharing with us.[52:10] Michael: Jonathan, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.[52:14] Jonathan: Thank you, brother.  

Presenter Dr Shane is joined by Dr Ray and Dr Linden for the latest science news; Assistant Professor Clarice D. Aiello from the Quantum Biology Tech Lab at UCLA explains how nature may be following quantum mechanics for its biological processes; Jonathan How, Senior Meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology discusses El Niño and how bushfire outlooks are assessed; Monica Bello, Head of Arts at CERN and Tilly Boleyn, Head of Curatorial at Science Gallery Melbourne talk about the Dark Matters exhibition at Science Gallery Melbourne and the dialogues and crossovers between science and art. These collaborations open the door between scientists in the lab and artists, allowing complex scientific ideas to be communicated in an accessible way to the public.Remember, “Science is everywhere”, including:Program page: Einstein-A-Go-Go Facebook page: Einstein-A-Go-Go Twitter: Einstein-A-Go-Go

We are excited to be the first podcast in the world to release an in-depth interview on the new SOTA in commercially licensed open source models - MosiacML MPT-7B!The Latent Space crew will be at the NYC Lux AI Summit next week, and have two meetups in June. As usual, all events are on the Community page! We are also inviting beta testers for the upcoming AI for Engineers course. See you soon!One of GPT3's biggest limitations is context length - you can only send it up to 4000 tokens (3k words, 6 pages) before it throws a hard error, requiring you to bring in LangChain and other retrieval techniques to process long documents and prompts. But MosaicML recently open sourced MPT-7B, the newest addition to their Foundation Series, with context length going up to 84,000 tokens (63k words, 126 pages):This transformer model, trained from scratch on 1 trillion tokens of text and code (compared to 300B for Pythia and OpenLLaMA, and 800B for StableLM), matches the quality of LLaMA-7B. It was trained on the MosaicML platform in 9.5 days on 440 GPUs with no human intervention, costing approximately $200,000. Unlike many open models, MPT-7B is licensed for commercial use and it's optimized for fast training and inference through FlashAttention and FasterTransformer.They also released 3 finetuned models starting from the base MPT-7B: * MPT-7B-Instruct: finetuned on dolly_hhrlhf, a dataset built on top of dolly-5k (see our Dolly episode for more details). * MPT-7B-Chat: finetuned on the ShareGPT-Vicuna, HC3, Alpaca, Helpful and Harmless, and Evol-Instruct datasets.* MPT-7B-StoryWriter-65k+: it was finetuned with a context length of 65k tokens on a filtered fiction subset of the books3 dataset. While 65k is the advertised size, the team has gotten up to 84k tokens in response when running on a single node A100-80GB GPUs. ALiBi is the dark magic that makes this possible. Turns out The Great Gatsby is only about 68k tokens, so the team used the model to create new epilogues for it!On top of the model checkpoints, the team also open-sourced the entire codebase for pretraining, finetuning, and evaluating MPT via their new MosaicML LLM Foundry. The table we showed above was created using LLM Foundry in-context-learning eval framework itself!In this episode, we chatted with the leads of MPT-7B at Mosaic: Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist, and Abhinav Venigalla, Research Scientist who spearheaded the MPT-7B training run. We talked about some of the innovations they've brought into the training process to remove the need for 2am on-call PagerDutys, why the LLM dataset mix is such an important yet dark art, and why some of the traditional multiple-choice benchmarks might not be very helpful for the type of technology we are building.Show Notes* Introducing MPT-7B* Cerebras* Lottery Ticket Hypothesis* Hazy Research* ALiBi* Flash Attention* FasterTransformer* List of naughty words for C4 https://twitter.com/code_star/status/1661386844250963972* What is Sparsity?* Hungry Hungry Hippos* BF16 FPp.s. yes, MPT-7B really is codenamed LLongboi!Timestamps* Introductions [00:00:00]* Intro to Mosaic [00:03:20]* Training and Creating the Models [00:05:45]* Data Choices and the Importance of Repetition [00:08:45]* The Central Question: What Mix of Data Sets Should You Use? [00:10:00]* Evaluation Challenges of LLMs [0:13:00]* Flash Attention [00:16:00]* Fine-tuning for Creativity [00:19:50]* Open Source Licenses and Ethical Considerations [00:23:00]* Training Stability Enhancement [00:25:15]* Data Readiness & Training Preparation [00:30:00]* Dynamic Real-time Model Evaluation [00:34:00]* Open Science for Affordable AI Research [00:36:00]* The Open Approach [00:40:15]* The Future of Mosaic [00:44:11]* Speed and Efficiency [00:48:01]* Trends and Transformers [00:54:00]* Lightning Round and Closing [1:00:55]TranscriptAlessio: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio partner and CTO-in-Residence at Decibel Partners. I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx, writer and editor of Latent Space.Swyx: Hey, and today we have Jonathan and Abhi from Mosaic ML. Welcome to our studio.Jonathan: Guys thank you so much for having us. Thanks so much.Swyx: How's it feel?Jonathan: Honestly, I've been doing a lot of podcasts during the pandemic, and it has not been the same.Swyx: No, not the same actually. So you have on your bio that you're primarily based in Boston,Jonathan: New York. New York, yeah. My Twitter bio was a probability distribution over locations.Swyx: Exactly, exactly. So I DMd you because I was obviously very interested in MPT-7B and DMd you, I was like, for the 0.2% of the time that you're in San Francisco, can you come please come to a podcast studio and you're like, I'm there next week.Jonathan: Yeah, it worked out perfectly. Swyx: We're really lucky to have you, I'll read off a few intros that people should know about you and then you can fill in the blanks.So Jonathan, you did your BS and MS at Princeton in programming languages and then found your way into ML for your PhD at MiT where you made a real splash with the lottery ticket hypothesis in 2018, which people can check up on. I think you've done a few podcasts about it over the years, which has been highly influential, and we'll talk about sparse models at Mosaic. You have also had some side [00:01:30] quest. You taught programming for lawyers and you did some law and privacy stuff in, in DC and also did some cryptography stuff. Um, and you've been an assistant professor at Harvard before earning your PhD.Jonathan:  I've yet to start.Swyx: You, you yet to start. Okay. But you just got your PhD.Jonathan:. I technically just got my PhD. I was at Mosaic which delayed my defense by about two years. It was, I was at 99% done for two years. Got the job at Harvard, Mosaic started, and I had better things to do than write my dissertation for two years. Swyx: You know, you know, this is very out of order.Jonathan: Like, oh, completely out of order, completely backwards. Go talk to my advisor about that. He's also an advisor at Mosaic and has been from the beginning. And, you know, go talk to him about finishing on time.Swyx: Great, great, great. And just to fill it out, Abhi, you did your BS and MS and MIT, you were a researcher at Cerebras, and you're now a research scientist at Mosaic. Just before we go into Mosaic stuff, I'm actually very curious about Cereus and, uh, just that, that space in general. Um, what are they doing that people should know about?Abhinav: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think the biggest thing about CEREUS is that they're really building, you know, kind of the NextGen computing platform beyond, like GPUs.Um, they're trying to build a system that uses an entire wafer, you know, rather than cutting up a wafer into smaller chips and trying to train a model on that entire system, or actually more recently on many such wafers. Um, so it's, and it's really extraordinary. I think it's like the first time ever that kind of wafer scale computing has ever really worked. And so it's a really exciting time to be there, trying to figure out how we can map ML workloads to work, um, on a much, much bigger chip.Swyx: And do you use like [00:03:00] a different programming language or framework to do that? Or is that like..Abhinav: Yeah, so I mean, things have changed a bit since I was there.I think, um, you can actually run just normal tensor flow and pie torch on there. Um, so they've built a kind of software stack that compiles it down. So it actually just kind of works naturally. But yeah.Jonathan : Compiled versions of Python is a hot topic at the moment with Mojo as well. Swyx: And then Mosaic, you, you spearheaded the MPT-7B effort.INTRO TO MOSAIC [00:03:20]Abhinav: Uh, yeah. Yeah, so it's kind of like, it's been maybe six months, 12 months in the making. We kind of started working on LMs sort of back in the summer of last year. Um, and then we came with this blog post where we kind of profiled a lot of LMs and saw, hey, the cost of training is actually a lot lower than what people might think.Um, and then since then, you know, being inspired by kind of, you know, meta's release, so the LLaMA models and lots of other open source work, we kind of started working towards, well, what if we were to release a really good kind of 7 billion parameter model? And that's what MPT is. Alessio:You know, we mentioned some of the podcasts you had done, Jonathan, I think in one of them you mentioned Mosaic was not planning on building a  model and releasing and obviously you eventually did. So what are some of the things that got you there that maybe obviously LLaMA you mentioned was an inspiration. You now have both the training and like inference products that you offer. Was this more of a research challenge in a way, uh, that you wanted to do?Or how did the idea come to be?Jonathan: I think there were a couple of things. So we still don't have a first class model. We're not an open AI where, you know, our businesses come to use our one great model. Our business is built around customers creating their own models. But at the end of the day, if customers are gonna create their own models, we have to have the tools to help them do that, and to have the tools to help them do that and know that they work we have to create our own models to start. We have to know that we can do something great if customers are gonna do something great. And one too many people may have challenged me on Twitter about the fact that, you know, mosaic claims all these amazing numbers, but, you know, I believe not to, you know, call out Ross Whiteman here, but, you know, I believe he said at some point, you know, show us the pudding.Um, and so Ross, you know, please let me know how the pudding tastes. But in all seriousness, like I think there is something, this is a demo in some sense. This is to say we did this in 9.5 days for a really reasonable cost, straight through 200, an intervention. 200 K. Yep. Um, you can do this too.Swyx: Uh, and just to reference the numbers that you're putting out, this is the, the last year you were making a lot of noise for trading GPT 3 under 450 K, which is your, your initial estimate.Um, and then it went down to a 100 K and stable diffusion 160 k going down to less than 50 K as well.Jonathan: So I will be careful about that 100 K number. That's certainly the challenge I've given Abhi to hit. Oh, I wouldn't make the promise that we've hit yet, but you know, it's certainly a target that we have.And I, you know, Abhi may kill me for saying this. I don't think it's crazy. TRAINING AND CREATING THE MODELS [00:05:45] Swyx: So we definitely want to get into like estimation math, right? Like what, what needs to happen for those big order magnitude changes to in, in infrastructure costs. But, uh, let's kind of stick to the MPT-7B story. Yeah. Tell us everything.Like you have, uh, three different models. One of them. State of the art essentially on context length. Let's talk about the process of training them, the, uh, the decisions that you made. Um, I can go into, you know, individual details, but I just wanna let you let you rip.Abhinav: Yeah, so I mean, I think, uh, we started off with the base model, which is kind of for all practical purposes, a recreation of LLaMA 7B.Um, so it's a 7 billion perimeter model trained on the trillion tokens. Um, and our goal was like, you know, we should do it efficiently. We should be able to do it like, kind of hands free so we don't have to babysit the runs as they're doing them. And it could be kind of a, a launching point for these fine tune models and those fine tune models, you know, on, on the one hand they're kind of really fun for the community, like the story writer model, which has like a 65,000 length context window and you can even kind of extrapolate beyond that. Um, but they're, they're also kind of just tr inspirations really. So you could kind of start with an MPT-7B base and then build your own custom, you know, downstream. If you want a long context code model, you could do that with our platform. If you wanted one that was for a particular language, you could do that too.But yeah, so we picked kind of the three variance chat and instruct and story writer just kind of like inspirations looking at what people were doing in the community today. Yeah. Alessio: And what's the beginning of the math to come up with? You know, how many tokens you wanna turn it on? How many parameters do you want in a bottle? 7 billion and 30 billion seem to be kind of like two of the magic numbers going around right now. Abhinav: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, I think like there's sort of these scaling laws which kind of tell you how to best spend your training compute if that's all you cared about. So if you wanna spend $200,000 exactly in the most efficient way, there'd be a recipe for doing that.Um, and that we usually go by the Chinchilla laws. Now for these models, we actually didn't quite do that because we wanted to make sure that people could actually run these at home and that they [00:07:30] were good for inference. So we trained them kind of beyond those chinchilla points so that we're almost over-training them.I think there's like a joke going on online that they're like long boy and that that came up internally because we were training them for really, really long durations. So that 7B model, the chinchilla point might be 140 billion tokens. Instead, we trained a trillion, so almost seven times longer than you normally would.Swyx: So longboi was the code name. So is it, is it the trading method? Is it the scaling law that you're trying to coin or is it the code name for the 64 billion?Jonathan: Uh, 64. It was just an internal joke for the, for training on way more tokens than you would via chinchilla. Okay. Um, we can coin it long boy and it, it really stuck, but just to, you know, long boys filled with two ELs at the beginning.Yeah. Cause you know, we wanted the lLLaMA thing in there as well. Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our darn CEO we have to rein him in that guy, you know, you can't, yeah. I'm gonna take away his Twitter password at some point. Um, but you know, he had to let that one out publicly. And then I believe there was a YouTube video where someone happened to see it mentioned before the model came out and called it the Long G boy or something like that.Like, so you know, now it's out there in the world. It's out there. It's like Sydnee can't put it back inSwyx: There's a beautiful picture which I think Naveen tweeted out, which, um, shows a long boy on a whiteboard.Jonathan: That was the origin of Long Boy. In fact, the legs of the lLLaMA were the two Ls and the long boy.DATA CHOICES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF REPETITION [00:08:45]Swyx: Well, talk to me about your data choices, right? Like this is your passion project. Like what can you tell us about it?Jonathan: Yeah, I think Abhi wanted to kill me by the end for trying to use all the GPUs on data and none of them on actually training the model. Um, at the end of the day, We know that you need to train these models and [00:09:00] lots of data, but there are a bunch of things we don't know.Number one is what kinds of different data sources matter. The other is how much does repetition really matter? And really kind of repetition can be broken down into how much does quality versus quantity matter. Suppose I had the world's best 10 billion tokens of data. Would it be better to train on that a hundred times or better to train on a trillion tokens of low quality, fresh data?And obviously there's, there's a middle point in between. That's probably the sweet spot. But how do you even know what good quality data is? And. So, yeah, this is, nobody knows, and I think the more time I spent, we have a whole data team, so me and several other people, the more time that we spent on this, you know, I came away thinking, gosh, we know nothing.Gosh, if I were back in academia right now, I would definitely go and, you know, write a paper about this because I have no idea what's going on.Swyx: You would write a paper about it. I'm interested in such a paper. I haven't come across any that exists. Could you frame the central question of such a paper?THE CENTRAL QUESTION: WHAT MIX OF DATA SETS SHOULD YOU USE? [00:10:00]Jonathan: Yeah. The central question is what mix of data sets should you use? Okay. Actually I've, you know, you had mentioned my law school stuff. I went back to Georgetown Law where I used to teach, um, in the midst of creating this model, and I actually sat down with a class of law students and asked them, I gave them our exact data sets, our data mixes, um, like how many tokens we had, and I said, Create the best data set for your model.Knowing they knew nothing about large language models, they just know that data goes in and it's going to affect the behavior. Um, and I was like, create a mix and they basically covered all the different trade-offs. Um, you probably want a lot of English language [00:10:30] text to start with. You get that from the web, but do you want it to be multilingual?If so, you're gonna have a lot less English text. Maybe it'll be worse. Do you wanna have code in there? There are all these beliefs that code leads to models being better at logical reasoning, of which I've seen zero evidence. Rep. It's not, um, I mean, really made a great code model, but code models leading to better chain of thought reasoning on the part of language or code being in the training set leading to better chain of thought reasoning.People claim this all the time, but I've still never seen any real evidence beyond that. You know, one of the generations of the GPT three model started supposedly from Code Da Vinci. Yes. And so there's a belief that, you know, maybe that helped. But again, no evidence. You know, there's a belief that spending a lot of time on good sources like Wikipedia is good for the model.Again, no evidence. At the end of the day, we tried a bunch of different data mixes and the answer was that there are some that are better or worse than others. We did find that the pile, for example, was a really solid data mix, but you know, there were stronger data mixes by our evaluation metrics. And I'll get back to the evaluation question in a minute cuz that's a really important one.This data set called c4, which is what the original T five model was trained on, is weirdly good. And everybody, when I posted on this on Twitter, like Stella Beaterman from Luther mentioned this, I think someone else mentioned this as well. C4 does really well in the metrics and we have no idea why we de-duplicated it against our evaluation set.So it's not like it memorized the data, it is just one web scrape from 2019. If you actually look at the T five paper and see how it was pre-processed, it looks very silly. Mm-hmm. They removed anything that had the word JavaScript in it because they didn't want to get like no JavaScript [00:12:00] warnings. They removed anything with curly braces cuz they didn't wanna get JavaScript in it.They looked at this list of bad words, um, and removed anything that had those bad words. If you actually look at the list of bad words, words like gay are on that list. And so there's, you know, it is a very problematic, you know, list of words, but that was the cleaning that leads to a data set that seems to be unbeatable.So that to me says that we know nothing about data. We, in fact used a data set called mc four as well, which is they supposedly did the same pre-processing of C4 just on more web calls. The English portion is much worse than C4 for reasons that completely escape us. So in the midst of all that, Basically I set two criteria.One was I wanted to be at least as good as mc four English, like make sure that we're not making things actively worse. And mc four English is a nice step up over other stuff that's out there. And two was to go all in on diversity after that, making sure that we had some code, we had some scientific papers, we had Wikipedia, because people are gonna use this model for all sorts of different purposes.But I think the most important thing, and I'm guessing abhi had a million opinions on this, is you're only as good as your evaluation. And we don't know how to evaluate models for the kind of generation we ask them to do. So past a certain point, you have to kinda shrug and say, well, my evaluation's not even measuring what I care about.Mm-hmm. So let me just make reasonable choices. EVALUATION CHALLENGES OF LLMs [0:13:00]Swyx: So you're saying MMLU, big bench, that kind of stuff is not. Convincing for youJonathan: A lot of this stuff is you've got two kinds of tasks. Some of these are more of multiple choice style tasks where there is a right answer. Um, either you ask the model to spit out A, B, C, or D or you know, and if you're more [00:13:30] sophisticated, you look at the perplexity of each possible answer and pick the one that the model is most likely to generate.But we don't ask these models to do multiple choice questions. We ask them to do open-ended generation. There are also open-ended generation tasks like summarization. You compare using things like a blue score or a rouge score, which are known to be very bad ways of comparing text. At the end of the day, there are a lot of great summaries of a paper.There are a lot of great ways to do open form generation, and so humans are, to some extent, the gold standard. Humans are very expensive. It turns out we can't put them into our eval pipeline and just have the humans look at our model every, you know, 10 minutes? Not yet. Not yet. Maybe soon. Um, are you volunteering Abhi?Abhinav: I, I, I just know we have a great eval team who's, uh, who's helping us build new metrics. So if they're listening,Jonathan:  But it's, you know, evaluation of large language models is incredibly hard and I don't think any of these metrics really truly capture. What we expect from the models in practice.Swyx: Yeah. And we might draw wrong conclusions.There's been a debate recently about the emergence phenomenon, whether or not it's a mirage, right? I don't know if you guys have opinions about that process. Abhinav: Yeah, I think I've seen like this paper and all and all, even just kind of plots from different people where like, well maybe it's just a artifact of power, like log scaling or metrics or, you know, we're meshing accuracy, which is this a very like harsh zero one thing.Yeah. Rather than kind of something more continuous. But yeah, similar to what Jonathan was saying about evals. Like there there's one issue of like you just like our diversity of eval metrics, like when we put these models up, even like the chat ones, the instruct ones, people are using 'em for such a variety of tasks.There's just almost no way we get ahead of time, like measuring individual dimensions. And then also particularly like, you know, at the 7B scale, [00:15:00] um, these models still are not super great yet at the really hard tasks, like some of the hardest tasks in MMLU and stuff. So sometimes they're barely scoring like the above kind of random chance, you know, like on really, really hard tasks.So potentially as we. You know, aim for higher and higher quality models. Some of these things will be more useful to us. But we kind of had to develop MPT 7B kind of flying a little bit blind on, on what we knew it was coming out and just going off of like, you know, a small set of common sensor reasoning tasks.And of course, you know, just comparing, you know, those metrics versus other open source models. Alessio: I think fast training in inference was like one of the goals, right? So there's always the trade off between doing the hardest thing and like. Doing all the other things quickly.Abhinav: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, even at the 7B scale, you know, uh, people are trying to run these things on CPUs at home.You know, people are trying to port these to their phones, basically prioritizing the fact that the small scale would lead to our adoption. That was like a big, um, big thing going on. Alessio: Yeah. and you mentioned, um, flash attention and faster transformer as like two of the core things. Can you maybe explain some of the benefits and maybe why other models don't use it?FLASH ATTENTION [00:16:00]Abhinav: Yeah, absolutely. So flash attention is this basically faster implementation of full attention. Um, it's like a mathematical equivalent developed by like actually some of our collaborators, uh, at Stanford. Uh, the hazy research. Hazy research, yeah, exactly.Jonathan: What is, what, what, what's the name hazy research mean?Abhinav: I actually have no idea.Swyx: I have no clue. All these labs have fun names. I always like the stories behind them.Abhinav: Yeah, absolutely. We really, really liked flash attention. We, I think, had to integrate into repo even as [00:16:30] as early as September of last year. And it really just helps, you know, with training speed and also inference speed and we kind of bake that into model architecture.And this is kind of unique amongst all the other hugging face models you see out there. So ours actually, you can toggle between normal torch attention, which will work anywhere and flash attention, which will work on GPUs right out of the box. And that way I think you get almost like a 2x speed up at training time and somewhere between like 50% to a hundred percent speed up at inference time as well.So again, this is just like, we really, really wanted people to use these and like, feel like an improvement and we, we have the team to, to help deliver that. Swyx: Another part, um, of your choices was alibi position, encodings, which people are very interested in, maybe a lot of people just, uh, to sort of take in, in coatings as, as a given.But there's actually a lot of active research and honestly, it's a lot of, um, it's very opaque as well. Like people don't know how to evaluate encodings, including position encodings, but may, may, could you explain, um, alibi and, um, your choice?Abhinav: Yeah, for sure. The alibi and uh, kind of flash attention thing all kind of goes together in interesting ways.And even with training stability too. What alibi does really is that it eliminates the need to have positional embeddings in your model. Where previously, if you're a token position one, you have a particular embedding that you add, and you can't really go beyond your max position, which usually is like about 2000.With alibies, they get rid of that. Instead, just add a bias to the attention map itself. That's kind of like this slope. And if at inference time you wanna go much, much larger, they just kind of stretch that slope out to a longer, longer number of positions. And because the slope is kind of continuous and you can interpret it, it all works out now.Now one of [00:18:00] the, the funny things we found is like with flash attention, it saved so much memory and like improved performance so much that even as early as I kind of last year, like we were profiling models with, with very long context lines up to like, you know, the 65 k that you seen in release, we just never really got around to using it cuz we didn't really know what we might use it for.And also it's very hard to train stably. So we started experimenting with alibi integration, then we suddenly found that, oh wow, stability improves dramatically and now we can actually work together with alibi in a long context lens. That's how we got to like our story writer model where we can stably train these models out to very, very long context lenses and, and use them performantly.Jonathan: Yeah.Swyx: And it's also why you don't have a firm number. Most people now have a firm number on the context line. Now you're just like, eh, 65 to 85Abhinav: Oh yeah, there's, there's a, there's a big age to be 64 K or 65 k. 65 k plus.Swyx: Just do powers of twos. So 64 isn't, you know. Jonathan: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. But we could, I mean, technically the context length is infinite.If you give me enough memory, um, you know, we can just keep going forever. We had a debate over what number to say is the longest that we could handle. We picked 84 cakes. It's the longest I expect people to see easily in practice. But, you know, we played around for even longer than that and I don't see why we couldn't go longer.Swyx: Yeah. Um, and so for those who haven't read the blog posts, you put the Great Gatsby in there and, uh, asked it to write an epilogue, which seemed pretty impressive.Jonathan: Yeah. There are a bunch of epilogues floating around internally at Mosaic. Yeah. That wasn't my favorite. I think we all have our own favorites.Yeah. But there are a bunch of really, really good ones. There was one where, you know, it's Gatsby's funeral and then Nick starts talking to Gatsby's Ghost, and Gatsby's father shows up and, you know, then he's [00:19:30] at the police station with Tom. It was very plot heavy, like this is what comes next. And a bunch of that were just very Fitzgerald-esque, like, you know, beautiful writing.Um, but it was cool to just see that Wow, the model seemed to actually be working with. You know, all this input. Yeah, yeah. Like it's, it's exciting. You can think of a lot of things you could do with that kind of context length.FINE-TUNING FOR CREATIVITY [00:19:50]Swyx: Is there a trick to fine tuning for a creative task rather than, um, factual task?Jonathan: I don't know what that is, but probably, yeah, I think, you know, the person, um, Alex who did this, he did fine tune the model explicitly on books. The goal was to try to get a model that was really a story writer. But, you know, beyond that, I'm not entirely sure. Actually, it's a great question. Well, no, I'll ask you back.How would you measure that? Swyx: Uh, God, human feedback is the solve to all things. Um, I think there is a labeling question, right? Uh, in computer vision, we had a really, really good episode with Robo Flow on the segment. Anything model where you, you actually start human feedback on like very, I think it's something like 0.5% of the, the overall, uh, final, uh, uh, labels that you had.But then you sort augment them and then you, you fully automate them, um, which I think could be applied to text. It seems intuitive and probably people like snorkel have already raised ahead on this stuff, but I just haven't seen this applied in the language domain yet.Jonathan: It, I mean there are a lot of things that seem like they make a lot of sense in machine learning that never work and a lot of things that make zero sense that seem to work.So, you know, I've given up trying to even predict. Yeah, yeah. Until I see the data or try it, I just kind shg my shoulders and you know, you hope for the best. Bring data or else, right? Yeah, [00:21:00] exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Alessio: The fine tuning of books. Books three is like one of the big data sets and there was the whole.Twitter thing about trade comments and like, you know, you know, I used to be a community moderator@agenius.com and we've run into a lot of things is, well, if you're explaining lyrics, do you have the right to redistribute the lyrics? I know you ended up changing the license on the model from a commercial use Permitted.Swyx: Yeah let's let them. I'm not sure they did. Jonathan: So we flipped it for about a couple hours. Swyx: Um, okay. Can we, can we introduce the story from the start Just for people who are under the loop. Jonathan: Yeah. So I can tell the story very simply. So, you know, the book three data set does contain a lot of books. And it is, you know, as I discovered, um, it is a data set that provokes very strong feelings from a lot of folks.Um, that was one, one guy from one person in particular, in fact. Um, and that's about it. But it turns out one person who wants a lot of attention can, you know, get enough attention that we're talking about it now. And so we had a, we had a discussion internally after that conversation and we talked about flipping the license and, you know, very late at night I thought, you know, maybe it's a good thing to do.And decided, you know, actually probably better to just, you know, Stan Pat's license is still Apache too. And one of the conversations we had was kind of, we hadn't thought about this cuz we had our heads down, but the Hollywood writer Strike took place basically the moment we released the model. Mm-hmm.Um, we were releasing a model that could do AI generated creative content. And that is one of the big sticking points during the strike. Oh, the optics are not good. So the optics aren't good and that's not what we want to convey. This is really, this is a demo of the ability to do really long sequence lengths and.Boy, you know, [00:22:30] that's, that's not timing that we appreciated. And so we talked a lot internally that night about like, oh, we've had time to read the news. We've had time to take a breath. We don't really love this. Came to the conclusion that it's better to just leave it as it is now and learn the lesson for the future.But certainly that was one of my takeaways is this stuff, you know, there's a societal context around this that it's easy to forget when you're in the trenches just trying to get the model to train. And you know, in hindsight, you know, I might've gone with a different thing than a story writer. I might've gone with, you know, coder because we seem to have no problem putting programmers out of work with these models.Swyx: Oh yeah. Please, please, you know, take away this stuff from me.OPEN SOURCE LICENSES AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS [00:23:00]Jonathan: Right. You know, so it's, I think, you know, really. The copyright concerns I leave to the lawyers. Um, that's really, if I learned one thing teaching at a law school, it was that I'm not a lawyer and all this stuff is a little complicated, especially open source licenses were not designed for this kind of world.They were designed for a world of forcing people to be more open, not forcing people to be more closed. And I think, you know, that was part of the impetus here, was to try to use licenses to make things more closed. Um, which is, I think, against the grain of the open source ethos. So that struck me as a little bit strange, but I think the most important part is, you know, we wanna be thoughtful and we wanna do the right thing.And in that case, you know, I hope with all that interesting licensing fund you saw, we're trying to be really thoughtful about this and it's hard. I learned a lot from that experience. Swyx: There's also, I think, an open question of fair use, right? Is training on words of fair use because you don't have a monopoly on words, but some certain arrangements of words you do.And who is to say how much is memorization by a model versus actually learning and internalizing and then. Sometimes happening to land at the right, the [00:24:00] same result.Jonathan: And if I've learned one lesson, I'm not gonna be the person to answer that question. Right, exactly. And so my position is, you know, we will try to make this stuff open and available.Yeah. And, you know, let the community make decisions about what they are or aren't comfortable using. Um, and at the end of the day, you know, it still strikes me as a little bit weird that someone is trying to use these open source licenses to, you know, to close the ecosystem and not to make things more open.That's very much against the ethos of why these licenses were created.Swyx: So the official mosaic position, I guess is like, before you use TC MPC 7B for anything commercial, check your own lawyers now trust our lawyers, not mosaic's lawyers.Jonathan: Yeah, okay. Yeah. I'm, you know, our lawyers are not your lawyers.Exactly. And, you know, make the best decision for yourself. We've tried to be respectful of the content creators and, you know, at the end of the day, This is complicated. And this is something that is a new law. It's a new law. It's a new law that hasn't been established yet. Um, but it's a place where we're gonna continue to try to do the right thing.Um, and it's, I think, one of the commenters, you know, I really appreciated this said, you know, well, they're trying to do the right thing, but nobody knows what the right thing is to even do, you know, the, I guess the, the most right thing would've been to literally not release a model at all. But I don't think that would've been the best thing for the community either.Swyx: Cool.Well, thanks. Well handled. Uh, we had to cover it, just causeJonathan:  Oh, yes, no worries. A big piece of news. It's been on my mind a lot.TRAINING STABILITY ENHANCEMENT [00:25:15]Swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you've been very thoughtful about it. Okay. So a lot of these other ideas in terms of architecture, flash, attention, alibi, and the other data sets were contributions from the rest of the let's just call it open community of, of machine learning advancements. Uh, but Mosaic in [00:25:30] particular had some stability improvements to mitigate loss spikes, quote unquote, uh, which, uh, I, I took to mean, uh, your existing set of tools, uh, maybe we just co kind of covered that. I don't wanna sort of put words in your mouth, but when you say things like, uh, please enjoy my empty logbook.How much of an oversell is that? How much, you know, how much is that marketing versus how much is that reality?Abhinav: Oh yeah. That, that one's real. Yeah. It's like fully end-to-end. Um, and I think.Swyx: So maybe like what, what specific features of Mosaic malibu?Abhinav: Totally, totally. Yeah. I think I'll break it into two parts.One is like training stability, right? Knowing that your model's gonna basically get to the end of the training without loss spikes. Um, and I think, you know, at the 7B scale, you know, for some models like it ha it's not that big of a deal. As you train for longer and longer durations, we found that it's trickier and trickier to avoid these lost spikes.And so we actually spent a long time figuring out, you know, what can we do about our initialization, about our optimizers, about the architecture that basically prevents these lost spikes. And you know, even in our training run, if you zoom in, you'll see small intermittent spikes, but they recover within a few hundred steps.And so that's kind of the magical bit. Our line is one of defenses we recover from Las Vegas, like just naturally, right? Mm-hmm. Our line two defense was that we used determinism and basically really smart resumption strategies so that if something catastrophic happened, we can resume very quickly, like a few batches before.And apply some of these like, uh, interventions. So we had these kinds of preparations, like a plan B, but we didn't have to use them at all for MPT 7B training. So, that was kind of like a lucky break. And the third part of like basically getting all the way to the empty law book is having the right training infrastructure.[00:27:00]So this is basically what, like is, one of the big selling points of the platform is that when you try to train these models on hundreds of GPUs, not many people outside, you know, like deep industry research owners, but the GPUs fail like a lot. Um, I would say like almost once every thousand a 100 days.So for us on like a big 512 cluster every two days, basically the run will fail. Um, and this is either due to GPUs, like falling off the bus, like that's, that's a real error we see, or kind of networking failures or something like that. And so in those situations, what people have normally done is they'll have an on-call team that's just sitting round the clock, 24-7 on slack, once something goes wrong.And if then they'll basically like to try to inspect the cluster, take nodes out that are broken, restart it, and it's a huge pain. Like we ourselves did this for a few months. And as a result of that, because we're building such a platform, we basically step by step automated every single one of those processes.So now when a run fails, we have this automatic kind of watch talk that's watching. It'll basically stop the job. Test the nodes cord in anyone's that are broken and relaunch it. And because our software's all deterministic has fast resumption stuff, it just continues on gracefully. So within that log you can see sometimes I think maybe at like 2:00 AM or something, the run failed and within a few minutes it's back up and running and all of us are just sleeping peacefully.Jonathan: I do wanna say that was hard one. Mm-hmm. Um, certainly this is not how things were going, you know, many months ago, hardware failures we had on calls who were, you know, getting up at two in the morning to, you know, figure out which node had died for what reason, restart the job, have to cord the node. [00:28:30] Um, we were seeing catastrophic loss spikes really frequently, even at the 7B scale that we're just completely derailing runs.And so this was step by step just ratcheting our way there. As Abhi said, to the point where, Many models are training at the moment and I'm sitting here in the studio and not worrying one bit about whether the runs are gonna continue. Yeah. Swyx: I'm, I'm not so much of a data center hardware kind of guy, but isn't there existing software to do this for CPUs and like, what's different about this domain? Does this question make sense at all?Jonathan: Yeah, so when I think about, like, I think back to all the Google fault tolerance papers I read, you know, as an undergrad or grad student mm-hmm. About, you know, building distributed systems. A lot of it is that, you know, Each CPU is doing, say, an individual unit of work.You've got a database that's distributed across your cluster. You wanna make sure that one CPU failing can't, or one machine failing can't, you know, delete data. So you, you replicate it. You know, you have protocols like Paxos where you're literally, you've got state machines that are replicated with, you know, with leaders and backups and things like that.And in this case, you were performing one giant computation where you cannot afford to lose any node. If you lose a node, you lose model state. If you lose a node, you can't continue. It may be that, that in the future we actually, you know, create new versions of a lot of our distributed training libraries that do have backups and where data is replicated so that if you lose a node, you can detect what node you've lost and just continue training without having to stop the run, you know?Pull from a checkpoint. Yeah. Restart again on different hardware. But for now, we're certainly in a world where if anything dies, that's the end of the run and you have to go back and recover from it. [00:30:00]DATA READINESS & TRAINING PREPARATION [00:30:00]Abhinav: Yeah. Like I think a big part, a big word there is like synchronous data pluralism, right? So like, we're basically saying that on every step, every GP is gonna do some work.They're gonna stay in sync with each other and average their, their gradients and continue. Now that there are algorithmic techniques to get around this, like you could say, oh, if a GP dies, just forget about it. All the data that's gonna see, we'll just forget about it. We're not gonna train on it.But, we don't like to do that currently because, um, it makes us give up determinism, stuff like that. Maybe in the future, as you go to extreme scales, we'll start looking at some of those methods. But at the current time it's like, we want determinism. We wanted to have a run that we could perfectly replicate if we needed to.And it was, the goal is figure out how to run it on a big cluster without humans having to babysit it. Babysit it. Alessio: So as you mentioned, these models are kind of the starting point for a lot of your customers To start, you have a. Inference product. You have a training product. You previously had a composer product that is now kind of not rolled into, but you have like a super set of it, which is like the LLM foundry.How are you seeing that change, you know, like from the usual LOP stack and like how people train things before versus now they're starting from, you know, one of these MPT models and coming from there. Like worship teams think about as they come to you and start their journey.Jonathan: So I think there's a key distinction to make here, which is, you know, when you say starting from MPT models, you can mean two things.One is actually starting from one of our checkpoints, which I think very few of our customers are actually going to do, and one is starting from our configuration. You can look at our friends at Rep for that, where, you know, MPT was in progress when Refl [00:31:30] came to us and said, Hey, we need a 3 billion parameter model by next week on all of our data.We're like, well, here you go. This is what we're doing, and if it's good enough for us, um, hopefully it's good enough for you. And that's basically the message we wanna send to our customers. MPT is basically clearing a path all the way through where they know that they can come bring their data, they can use our training infrastructure, they can use all of our amazing orchestration and other tools that abhi just mentioned, for fault tolerance.They can use Composer, which is, you know, still at the heart of our stack. And then the l l M Foundry is really the specific model configuration. They can come in and they know that thing is gonna train well because we've already done it multiple times. Swyx: Let's dig in a little bit more on what should people have ready before they come talk to you? So data architecture, eval that they're looking, etc.Abhinav: Yeah, I, I mean, I think we'll accept customers at any kind of stage in their pipeline. You know, like I'd say science, there's archetypes of people who have built products around like some of these API companies and reach a stage or maturity level where it's like we want our own custom models now, either for the purpose of reducing cost, right?Like our inference services. Quite a bit cheaper than using APIs or because they want some kind of customization that you can't really get from the other API providers. I'd say the most important things to have before training a big model. You know, you wanna have good eval metrics, you know, some kind of score that you can track as you're training your models and scaling up, they can tell you you're progressing.And it's really funny, like a lot of times customers will be really excited about training the models, right? It's really fun to like launch shelves on hundreds of gfs, just all around. It's super fun. But then they'll be like, but wait, what are we gonna measure? Not just the training loss, right? I mean, it's gotta be more than that.[00:33:00]So eval metrics is like a, it's a good pre-req also, you know, your data, you know, either coming with your own pre-training or fine-tune data and having like a strategy to clean it or we can help clean it too. I think we're, we're building a lot of tooling around that. And I think once you have those two kinds of inputs and sort of the budget that you want, we can pretty much walk you through the rest of it, right?Like that's kind of what we do. Recently we helped build CR FM's model for biomedical language a while back. Jonathan: Um, we can. That's the center of research for foundation models. Abhi: Exactly, exactly.Jonathan: Spelling it out for people. Of course.Abhinav: No, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. No, you've done more of these than I have.Um, I think, uh, basically it's sort of, we can help you figure out what model I should train to scale up so that when I go for my big run company, your here run, it's, uh, it's predictable. You can feel confident that it's gonna work, and you'll kind of know what quality you're gonna get out before you have to spend like a few hundred thousand dollars.DYNAMIC REAL-TIME MODEL EVALUATION [00:34:00]Alessio: The rap Reza from rap was on the podcast last week and, uh, they had human eval and then that, uh, I'm Jon Eval, which is like vibe based. Jonathan: And I, I do think the vibe based eval cannot be, you know, underrated really at the, I mean, at the end of the day we, we did stop our models and do vibe checks and we did, as we monitor our models, one of our evals was we just had a bunch of prompts and we would watch the answers as the model trained and see if they changed cuz honestly, You know, I don't really believe in any of these eval metrics to capture what we care about.Mm-hmm. But when you ask it, uh, you know, I don't know. I think one of our prompts was to suggest games for a three-year-old and a seven-year-old. That would be fun to play. Like that was a lot more [00:34:30] valuable to me personally, to see how that answer evolved and changed over the course of training. So, you know, and human eval, just to clarify for folks, human human eval is an automated evaluation metric.There's no humans in it at all. There's no humans in it at all. It's really badly named. I got so confused the first time that someone brought that to me and I was like, no, we're not bringing humans in. It's like, no, it's, it's automated. They just called it a bad name and there's only a hundred cents on it or something.Abhinav: Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's for code specifically, right?Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. It's very weird. It's a, it's a weird, confusing name that I hate, but you know, when other metrics are called hella swag, like, you know, you do it, just gotta roll with it at this point. Swyx: You're doing live evals now. So one, one of the tweets that I saw from you was that it is, uh, important that you do it paralyzed.Uh, maybe you kind of wanna explain, uh, what, what you guys did.Abhinav: Yeah, for sure. So with LLM Foundry, there's many pieces to it. There's obviously the core training piece, but there's also, you know, tools for evaluation of models. And we've kind of had one of the, I think it's like the, the fastest like evaluation framework.Um, basically it's multi GPU compatible. It runs with Composer, it can support really, really big models. So basically our framework runs so fast that even Azure models are training. We can run these metrics live during the training. So like if you have a dashboard like weights and biases, you kind of watch all these evil metrics.We have, like, 15 or 20 of them honestly, that we track during the run and add negligible overhead. So we can actually watch as our models go and feel confident. Like, it's not like we wait until the very last day to, to test if the models good or notJonathan: That's amazing. Yeah. I love that we've gotten this far into the conversation.We still haven't talked about efficiency and speed. Those are usually our two watch words at Mosaic, which is, you know, that's great. That says that we're [00:36:00] doing a lot of other cool stuff, but at the end of the day, um, you know, Cost comes first. If you can't afford it, it doesn't matter. And so, you know, getting things down cheap enough that, you know, we can monitor in real time, getting things down cheap enough that we can even do it in the first place.That's the basis for everything we do.OPEN SCIENCE FOR AFFORDABLE AI RESEARCH [00:36:00]Alessio: Do you think a lot of the questions that we have around, you know, what data sets we should use and things like that are just because training was so expensive before that, we just haven't run enough experiments to figure that out. And is that one of your goals is trying to make it cheaper so that we can actually get the answers?Jonathan: Yeah, that's a big part of my personal conviction for being here. I think I'm, I'm still in my heart, the second year grad student who was jealous of all his friends who had GPUs and he didn't, and I couldn't train any models except in my laptop. And that, I mean, the lottery ticket experiments began on my laptop that I had to beg for one K 80 so that I could run amist.And I'm still that person deep down in my heart. And I'm a believer that, you know, if we wanna do science and really understand these systems and understand how to make them work well, understand how they behave, understand what makes them safe and reliable. We need to make it cheap enough that we can actually do science, and science involves running dozens of experiments.When I finally, you know, cleaned out my g c s bucket from my PhD, I deleted a million model checkpoints. I'm not kidding. There were over a million model checkpoints. That is the kind of science we need, you know, that's just what it takes. In the same way that if you're in a biology lab, you don't just grow one cell and say like, eh, the drug seems to work on that cell.Like, there's a lot more science you have to do before you really know.Abhinav: Yeah. And I think one of the special things about Mosaic's kind of [00:37:30] position as well is that we have such, so many customers all trying to train models that basically we have the incentive to like to devote all these resources and time to do this science.Because when we learn which pieces actually work, which ones don't, we get to help many, many people, right? And so that kind of aggregation process I think is really important for us. I remember way back there was a paper about Google that basically would investigate batch sizes or something like that.And it was this paper that must have cost a few million dollars during all the experience. And it was just like, wow, what a, what a benefit to the whole community. Now, like now we all get to learn from that and we get, we get to save. We don't have to spend those millions of dollars anymore. So I think, um, kind of mosaical science, like the insights we get on, on data, on pre-screening architecture, on all these different things, um, that's why customers come to us.Swyx: Yeah, you guys did some really good stuff on PubMed, G B T as well. That's the first time I heard of you. Of you. And that's also published to the community.Abhinav: Yeah, that one was really fun. We were like, well, no one's really trained, like fully from scratch domain specific models before. Like, what if we just did a biomed one?Would it still work? And, uh, yeah, I'd be really excited. That did, um, we'll probably have some follow up soon, I think, later this summer.Jonathan: Yeah. Yes. Stay tuned on that. Um, but I, I will say just in general, it's a really important value for us to be open in some sense. We have no incentive not to be open. You know, we make our money off of helping people train better.There's no cost to us in sharing what we learn with the community. Cuz really at the end of the day, we make our money off of those custom models and great infrastructure and, and putting all the pieces together. That's honestly where the Mosaic name came from. Not off of like, oh, we've got, you know, this one cool secret trick [00:39:00] that we won't tell you, or, you know, closing up.I sometimes, you know, in the past couple weeks I've talked to my friends at places like Brain or, you know, what used to be Brain Now Google DeepMind. Oh, I R I P Brain. Yeah. R i p Brian. I spent a lot of time there and it was really a formative time for me. Um, so I miss it, but. You know, I kind of feel like we're one of the biggest open research labs left in industry, which is a very sad state of affairs because we're not very big.Um, but at least can you say how big the team is actually? Yeah. We were about 15 researchers, so we're, we're tiny compared to, you know, the huge army of researchers I remember at Brain or at fair, at Deep Mind back, you know, when I was there during their heydays. Um, you know, but everybody else is kind of, you know, closed up and isn't saying very much anymore.Yeah. And we're gonna keep talking and we're gonna keep sharing and, you know, we will try to be that vanguard to the best of our ability. We're very small and I, I can't promise we're gonna do what those labs used to do in terms of scale or quantity of research, but we will share what we learn and we will try to create resources for the community.Um, I, I dunno, I just, I believe in openness fundamentally. I'm an academic at heart and it's sad to me to watch that go away from a lot of the big labs. THE OPEN APPROACH [00:40:15]Alessio: We just had a live pod about the, you know, open AI snow mode, uh, post that came out and it was one of the first time I really dove into Laura and some of the this new technologies, like how are you thinking about what it's gonna take for like the open approach to really work?Obviously today, GPT four is still, you know, part of like that state-of-the-art model for a [00:40:30] lot of tasks. Do you think some of the innovation and kind of returning methods that we have today are enough if enough people like you guys are like running these, these research groups that are open? Or do you think we still need a step function improvement there?Jonathan: I think one important point here is the idea of coexistence. I think when you look at, I don't know who won Linux or Windows, the answer is yes. Microsoft bought GitHub and has a Windows subsystem for Linux. Linux runs a huge number of our servers and Microsoft is still a wildly profitable company.Probably the most successful tech company right now. So who won open source or closed source? Yes. Um, and I think that's a similar world that we're gonna be in here where, you know, it's gonna be different things for different purposes. I would not run Linux on my laptop personally cuz I like connecting to wifi and printing things.But I wouldn't run Windows on one of my surfers. And so I do think what we're seeing with a lot of our customers is, do they choose opening IR mosaic? Yes. There's a purpose for each of these. You have to send your data off to somebody else with open eyes models. That's a risk. GPT four is amazing and I would never promise someone that if they come to Mosaic, they're gonna get a GPT four quality model.That's way beyond our means and not what we're trying to do anyway. But there's also a whole world for, you know, domain specific models, context specific models that are really specialized, proprietary, trained on your own data that can do things that you could never do with one of these big models. You can customize in crazy ways like G B T four is not gonna hit 65 K context length for a very long time, cuz they've already trained that [00:42:00] model and you know, they haven't even released the 32 K version yet.So we can, you know, we can do things differently, you know, by being flexible. So I think the answer to all this is yes. But we can't see the open source ecosystem disappear. And that's the scariest thing for me. I hear a lot of talk in academia about, you know, whatever happened to that academic research on this field called information retrieval?Well, in 1999 it disappeared. Why? Because Google came along and who cares about information retrieval research when you know you have a Google Scale, you know, Web Scale database. So you know, there's a balance here. We need to have both. Swyx: I wanna applaud you, Elaine. We'll maybe edit it a little like crowd applause, uh, line.Cuz I, I think that, um, that is something that as a research community, as people interested in progress, we need to see these things instead of just, uh, seeing marketing papers from the advertising GPT 4.Jonathan: Yeah. I, I think I, you know, to get on my soapbox for 10 more seconds. Go ahead. When I talk to policymakers about, you know, the AI ecosystem, the usual fear that I bring up is, Innovation will slow because of lack of openness.I've been complaining about this for years and it's finally happened. Hmm. Why is Google sharing, you know, these papers? Why is Open AI sharing these papers? There are a lot of reasons. You know, I have my own beliefs, but it's not something we should take for granted that everybody's sharing the work that they do and it turns out well, I think we took it for granted for a while and now it's gone.I think it's gonna slow down the pace of progress. In a lot of cases, each of these labs has a bit of a monoculture and being able to pass ideas [00:43:30] back and forth was a lot of what kept, you know, scientific progress moving. So it's imperative not just, you know, for the open source community and for academia, but for the progress of technology.That we have a vibrant open source research community.THE FUTURE OF MOSAIC [00:44:11]Swyx: There's a preview of the ecosystem and commentary that we're, we're gonna do. But I wanna close out some stuff on Mosaic. You launched a bunch of stuff this month. A lot of stuff, uh, actually was, I was listening to you on Gradient descent, uh, and other podcasts we know and love.Uh, and you said you also said you were not gonna do inference and, and, and last week you were like, here's Mosaic ML inference. Oops. So maybe just a, at a high level, what was Mosaic ml and like, what is it growing into? Like how do you conceptualize this? Jonathan: Yeah, and I will say gradient, when graded dissent was recorded, we weren't doing inference and had no plans to do it.It took a little while for the podcast to get out. Um, in the meantime, basically, you know, one thing I've learned at a startup, and I'm sure abhi can comment on this as well, focus is the most important thing. We have done our best work when we've been focused on doing one thing really well and our worst work when we've tried to do lots of things.Yeah. So, We don't want to do inference, we don't want to have had to do inference. Um, and at the end of the day, our customers were begging us to do it because they wanted a good way to serve the models and they liked our ecosystem. And so in some sense, we got dragged into it kicking and screaming. We're very excited to have a product.We're going to put our best foot forward and make something really truly amazing. But there is, you know, that's something that we were reluctant to do. You know, our customers convinced us it would be good for our business. It's been wonderful for business and we are gonna put everything into this, but you know, back when grading dissent came out, I [00:45:00] was thinking like, or when we recorded it or focused, oh God, like focus is the most important thing.I've learned that the hard way multiple times that Mosaic, abhi can tell you like, you know, I've made a lot of mistakes on not focusing enough. Um, boy inference, that's a whole second thing, and a whole different animal from training. And at the end of the day, when we founded the company, our belief was that inference was relatively well served at that time.There were a lot of great inference companies out there. Um, training was not well served, especially efficient training. And we had something to add there. I think we've discovered that as the nature of the models have changed, the nature of what we had to add to inference changed a lot and there became an opportunity for us to contribute something.But that was not the plan. But now we do wanna be the place that people come when they wanna train these big, complex, difficult models and know that it's gonna go right the first time and they're gonna have something they can servee right away. Um, you know, really the rep example of, you know, with 10 days to go saying, Hey, can you please train that model?And, you know, three or four days later the model was trained and we were just having fun doing interesting, fine tuning work in it for the rest of the 10 days, you know. That also requires good inference. Swyx: That's true, that's true. Like, so running evals and, and fine tuning. I'm just putting my business hat on and you know, and Alessio as well, like, uh, I've actually had fights with potential co-founders about this on the primary business.Almost like being training, right? Like essentially a one-time cost.Jonathan: Who told you it was a one time cost? What, who, who told you that?Swyx: No, no, no, no. Correct me. Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. Let me correct you in two ways. Um, as our CEO Navine would say, if he were here, when you create version 1.0 of your software, do you then fire all the engineers?Of [00:46:30] course not. You never, like, MPT has a thousand different things we wanted to do that we never got to. So, you know, there will be future models.Abhinav: And, and the data that's been trained on is also changing over time too, right? If you wanna ask anything about, I guess like May of 2023, we'll have to retrain it further and so on.Right? And I think this is especially true for customers who run like the kind of things that need to be up to date on world knowledge. So I, I think like, you know, the other thing I would say too is that, The malls we have today are certainly not the best malls we'll ever produce. Right. They're gonna get smaller, they're gonna get faster, they're gonna get cheaper, they're gonna get lower latency, they're gonna get higher quality.Right? And so you always want the next gen version of MPT and the one after that and one after that. There's a reason that even the GPT series goes three, four, and we know there's gonna be a five. Right? Um, so I I I also don't see as a, as a one-time cost.Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. And I, if you wanna cite a stat on this, there are very, very

For the first time in its 175-year history, participants living outside the United States joined the 360-voice Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square during the 193rd Annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The singers, part of a pilot program for the choir, sang with the storied choir in the Saturday morning session and both Sunday sessions of general conference on April 1 and 2, 2023. The 10 singers from six countries — Brazil, Mexico, Ghana, Malaysia, Philippines and Taiwan — join this episode of the Church News podcast to report on their visit to Salt Lake City and their experiences of testifying of Christ through music. The 10 international singers are Sundae Mae Indino of Cagayan de Oro, Philippines; Ronald Baa of Cagayan de Oro, Philippines; Álvaro Jorge Martins of Natal, Brazil; Rodrigo Domaredzky of Curitiba, Brazil; Thalita De Carvalho of São Paulo, Brazil; Tubo-Oreriba Joseph Elisha of Accra, Ghana; Jonathan How of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Denisse Elorza Avalos of Tijuana, Mexico; Georgina Montemayor Wong of Monterrey, Mexico; and Pei-Shan Chung (Kylie Zhong) of Taipei, Taiwan. The Church News Podcast is a weekly podcast that invites listeners to make a journey of connection with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints across the globe. Host Sarah Jane Weaver, reporter and editor for The Church News for a quarter-century, shares a unique view of the stories, events, and most important people who form this international faith. With each episode, listeners are asked to embark on a journey to learn from one another and ponder, “What do I know now?” because of the experience. Produced by KellieAnn Halvorsen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What is La Niña and El Niño? How often do they happen? And are they good or bad?  In this episode, Anika and Esther find out all about La Niña and El Niño with Jonathan How who is a senior meteorologist at Australia's Bureau of Meteorology.  Our thoughts are with all the communities across the world who have been - and are being - affected by the flooding and drought that can result from the La Niña and El Niño weather systems.  Enjoy a new episode every fortnight, and if YOU have a big Fact Detective question, send it to factdetectives@kinderling.com.au  Guest: Jonathan How who is a senior meteorologist at Australia's Bureau of Meteorology Hosts: Anika and Esther Production: Cinnamon Nippard Sound design: Josh Newth Executive Producer: Lorna Clarkson  Hear it first on LiSTNR.  Listen ad-free on Kinderling.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jonathan How on festive season forecast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jonathan: How do I finance the first real estate deal I find?

Jonathan How, Senior Meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) runs through a typical day as a meteorologist and how the BOM has changed how they communicate weather to the public; Dr Laura brings us news of innovations in the humble toothbrush - a hands-free toothbrush which uses shapeshifting microrobots; we talk about the benefits of beavers and how they are critical to the environment with Dr. Euan; and Dr. Shane gets excited about the upcoming Roman Space Telescope. Dr. Euan and Dr. Shane then dive into the 2021 State of the Environment report. This report is the most comprehensive environmental report in Australia - threatened species, the condition of the waterways, soil, air - the works. Hear the conclusions from the authors and discuss what must happen next. With presenters Dr. Shane, Dr. Euan, and Dr Laura.Program page: Einstein-A-Go-GoFacebook page: Einstein-A-Go-GoTwitter: Einstein-A-Go-GoAnd live every Sunday at 11:00am AEST on RRR 102.7mHz FM.

Have you considered the significance of infrastructure as code and its importance in the industry? Will, Jillian, and Jonathan deep dive into this topic, plus discuss Amazon CDK and current frameworks and tools for the best workflows. Sponsors Tonic.ai (https://www.tonic.ai/?ref=adventuresindevops) Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/) Coaching | Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/coaching) Picks Jonathan- Kivick CLI Tool – Jonathan created a Go Driver tool that allows you to do a replication from file system to CouchDB instance. Jonathan- How to Automate Anything (https://jhall.io/archive/2021/03/23/how-to-automate-anything/) Jillian- Dash overview (https://plotly.com/dash/) Jillian- His Dark Material Book Series (https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Materials-Yearling-3-book-Boxed/dp/0440419514) Will- Open AI.com (https://openai.com/) Will- DevOps Roadmap for 2022 (https://devopsfordevelopers.io/roadmap/)

Jonathan How from the Bureau of Meteorology joins Jonesy & Amanda with the latest.

Jonathan How from the Bureau of Meteorology joins Jonesy & Amanda with the latest.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join the discussion on Facebook!Full Transcript:Jonathan:Welcome to the Tooth & Coin podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones. Some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey.Jonathan:Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid task or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand.Jonathan:Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. So we've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share. Join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth & Coin podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there.Jonathan:Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering it around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So if you'd like access to that, whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word toothandcoin T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444.Jonathan:Again, that's toothandcoin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444. Reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into a Facebook group, as well as add you to a list to be able to send you those resources when they're available and if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well. So onto today's episode. I hope you enjoy it.Jonathan:Hello, ambitious dentist. So today we are talking about the CFO role in dental practices. One of the things that I talk to about, a lot of dentists about throughout all of my conversations is what a CFO is, what they do, how they are aligned with your business. Do you even need one? I'll be honest with you. There's a lot of confusion in the dental industry around the function of a CFO, what CFOs do and is your CPA your CFO? Is that who it is?Jonathan:There's a lot of misconceptions about it and Joseph and I are going to talk about that today. So if you didn't listen to the first episode, this is episode number two. On the first episode, we outlined a bit about what the podcast is going to be about. In this episode, we're going to talk a little bit more about that CFO role and what it is, how it works and things like that.Jonathan:Joseph was actually the CFO of a medical company that was in the services space and had a lot of success. Seeing that business go from around $3 million a year in revenue upwards to almost eight figures in revenue. So he's got a lot of insight to this and I'm going to be asking him and interviewing him on this topic. So Joseph, why don't we start with that. Let's start with what is a CFO and what do they do?Joseph:Great question. Thanks. So when we think about different roles inside of the organization, I think most people are familiar with a CEO and could probably even tell you what a CEO is, a chief executive officer, and you may have heard terms thrown around like C-suite. When we talk about C-suite, what we're talking about is all of the team leads that have C at the beginning of their name.Joseph:So you may have a CEO, you may have a CMO, a chief marketing officer. You may have a chief operations officer or COO, you may have a chief compliance officer. So the CFO is the chief financial officer of an organization. So I think that's first and foremost, as you look at the traditional C-suite has three seats, a CEO, chief executive officer. Basically the one that is spearheading everything, the CEO has the vision. They typically are the owner of the practice, owner of the deal.Joseph:You're going to have a chief operations officer. So somebody that makes sure that the operations of the company are out there and then you've got the chief financial officer who are making sure that all of the money works. That's as simple as I can break it down. What are your thoughts when you think about what a CFO is, Jonathan?Jonathan:Same. The financial side, the F in there which obviously stands for financial, not the other F, it is there to talk about money. It's talking about the numbers. Talking about the ways in which that business has measures and manages its money in terms of the way it's coming in and the terms of the way it's going out. Definitely that's what most people think about when they think about CFOs. What I find in small businesses though, is that there's not always room for a CFO. So the owner usually takes on in smaller businesses.Joseph:I think first and foremost, you got to have cash to run a business. You can't pay payroll on an IOU. So at some form or fashion, you've got to have somebody that is managing cash. So that is cash that comes in the business. That's cash that comes out of the business, that comes in and goes out lots of different ways. It may come in through a line of credit, a beginning working capital draw.Joseph:It may come in through patient sales and collections. It may come in through credit card transactions, and then it's going to go out by writing checks, paying credit card bills, paying employees, all of those different things. So first and foremost, a typical owner of a small practice is going to be the one that's making sure that the cash comes in and the cash goes out. At the basic, most simplistic level, that's the first role that people are doing.Jonathan:I agree. Usually the person who is the owner or ends up being the dentist, they basically have to be all three of those things. They've got to be the CEO, they've got to be the COO and they've got to be the CFO. In that CFO role, they've got to make sure that the money going in and out is going to the right places and that there is something to manage and there's things happening.Jonathan:So it's this unique problem that is in the dental industry, that you have to be all of these things in this organization. Now, pretty much every small business has that problem. Obviously I'm the CEO, CFO, COO of Tooth & Coin but I have other people that help me with those things, but I haven't always had those people because we haven't always been as big as we've had.Jonathan:So we've had to grow people into those positions as our company has grown and evolved and things like that, but in terms of that small dental practice owner, you mentioned you got to have cash and you got to move those things in and out. What is it that you see in the dental space, being the dentist are doing, maybe even unknowingly as CFOs? What is it that they're probably, whenever they're thinking about their practice at night, they're probably doing in terms of like what a CFO would normally do for you?Joseph:Great question. So I think that a lot of them are trying to figure out top line revenue which when we talk about top line revenue, what is the amount of services that have been delivered? We can measure revenue a couple of different ways. As someone comes in the practice and as they get a treatment and they get a cleaning, they get an exam, once that service has been performed, you are owed that money.Joseph:So that could be one way that we measure revenue. One of the ways that you can pull that out is pull that out of your practice management software. So they're trying to get an idea of how much revenue is generated. So the next piece of that, that I think that a lot of practice owners are looking at is how much cash is coming in the door?Joseph:So there are certain times that 100% of the service that you provide turns into cash the same day, or within a couple of days, if somebody writes you a check, brings you cash or pays with a credit card. So there's not often a lag time between those. What is most common is that there is a lag time between when the service is performed, when the revenue is generated and when the cash actually comes in the door. That's where there's often a difference in timing.Joseph:That timing, if you've got a great front office billing person, that's billing and pushing claims out the door, that may just be five days between the time we send it to the PPO insurance company and the time that an EFT shows up into our bank account. We may have patients that are paying us out a month to month to month.Joseph:We may have somebody that pays in full with care credit, or with a credit card that turns into money in the bank account within a couple of days. So all of those things, I think that small practice owners are trying to get their arms wrapped around all of these different things as money comes in the door, as revenue is generated. Then what they're trying to do is they're trying to figure out, okay, did I make enough money this month to pay rent, to pay my people, to pay my supply bill, to pay my lab bill, and hopefully to pay myself?Joseph:So if I'm set up and I've got payroll running out, hopefully I've generated enough cash coming into the practice to cover all of those expenses. Then at the end of the day, whatever is left over, it depends on who you talk to, but we'll just call it profit. Profit is the simplest way of doing that. As the money came in and the money went out, do you have more money in your bank account today than you did 30 days ago? Then I would call profit.Jonathan:So try and get some type of an understanding of how they're making money in practice from revenue to expenses, and then eventually paying themselves and profit and things like that. All within the responsibilities of that dental practice owner, who also is generating production and revenue every day, and managing employees, doing the marketing, doing all the different things that go along with their business. So, with that in mind, what was it that you saw whenever you went to your ... When you started your role as a CFO?Jonathan:Again, I could see many of my practices, and many of our clients here at Tooth & Coin are having the same issues as the business that you got into at the time that you got into it as the CFO. Around that $3 million in revenue mark, you got a lot of practices that are around that level, half a million, a million, 2 million, 3 million, but $3 million mark.Jonathan:They get to be pretty busy in a small business. So what is it that you saw whenever you walked into that business in the first day in the role of the CFO, that really just hadn't been done that needed to be done from a CFO perspective. Because again, that owner of that business couldn't do everything. There's just no way that you could have that type of skill set to be able to do everything on your own.Jonathan:There's a reason there's a million employees at Bank of America. The CFO there is not ahead of every financial element. The CEO doesn't do all the COO and CFO and all the other roles and things. There's reasons why there's more than one person doing all of these things. So what was it that you walked in at day one, your becoming a CFO from the smaller medical business to grow into where it was?Joseph:Sure. I think the first thing I noticed is the wild swings and cashflow. It wasn't a matter of, we had the same exact amount of money that would come in every month and every day and we were pretty product heavy. So we had to spend quite a bit of money to provide these specific devices and services before we ended up actually delivering the service. So as you're paying your lab bill, as you're paying your supply bill, there's all these huge outflows that go, and they don't always match up with your revenue perfectly.Joseph:So I would see these wild swings in our cashflow. So, as an inquisitive person, if you see wild swings in the cashflow, the first question you're going to ask is why. So the first question I started asking was, "Well, how do we get to deposits into the bank account?"Joseph:Well, insurance companies write us checks, patients write us checks, we take credit cards, all these different things. That's how money turns into the bank account. I'm like, "Okay, well, how much did we generate in services last month, for example?" Okay, we'll pull the rapport and we got all the billing done. We got all the services delivered and we would pull the report and they'd say, "All right, well, we did 300,000 this month. That was a great month."Joseph:I was like, "Oh, okay. Well, what kind of service was that?" "Well, we did 300,000 this month." I was like, "No, no, no, no. Like specifically, you've got eight lines of business here. How much did you do in each one of those?" They're like, "Well, we can think of those couple of big ones that we delivered. I know that our shoe business was big. We had some big shoe," but it was very clear early on that they were not measuring revenue by line items.Joseph:So when you translate that to the dental practice, it's like, well, how many cleanings are you doing? How much hygiene are you doing? How many crowns are you doing? How many are you doing that are implants? It's like, the first thing that you've got to do is you've got to measure what specific revenue pieces you did in each month. So, if we're looking at the month of January, I'm going to say we did X amount on this, X amount of that, X amount on that. Then we as accountants, what we like to do is we'd like to compare.Joseph:So I came in and said, "Okay, well, you did 300,000 this month. Well, what'd you do last month?" "Oh, we'll have to go back and rerun that report. We don't remember what we ran. Oh, but we remember that May, of last year was a really, really good month. We should run that month." So it became very clear and apparent that they weren't measuring how the practice was doing month by month by service line.Joseph:So that was the first thing. So the first thing I did is okay, why don't we categorize our sales? Why don't we just make it simple and just have three or four different big buckets of sales that are all kind of related and we'll just measure those specific line items, rather than trying to do some kind of procedure code, because the healthcare practice that I was in, we had a thousand different procedure codes. Some of them were the big numbers and some of them were the small numbers and there's all these add-on codes for these additional things.Joseph:So it's like, I don't want to look at a revenue by code line item because I've got a thousand codes that we use in the course of the month. Why don't we break that down and summarize that into three or four different ones that we can measure? Why don't we look at that for this month versus last month versus the month before, and let's figure that out. So the next thing that I figure out, I get in there and I'm like, "Okay, so that number of 300, tell me what that number is? What makes up that number?"Joseph:They pulled it up and I started looking at the individual patients that made up that line. It became very clear that what they were calling revenue was usual and customary. We may refer to that in the dental world as the UCR, the usual and customary rate, or you could just say, that's your general fee. I said, "Okay, well, of this 300,000 that you generated in revenue, is that going to be what turns into collections in the bank?"Joseph:They're like, "Oh no, no, no, no, no. Insurances, they all take their discounts." I'm like, "Okay, well, that's probably where we need to start measuring revenue. We didn't do 300,000 revenue. We did much less than that. So let's come up and figure out what's the allowed charge." The next thing that I figured out is that whenever I went into the allowed charge, they had taken a standard discount off of everybody.Joseph:So we had, in the business that I was in and we had the Medicare allowed fee. So basically what they did was they keyed in the Medicare allowed fee for every single patient that came through the door. What's the problem with that? Problem with that is not every single patient is on Medicare. We've got Blue Cross Blue Shield, we've got Humana, we've got UnitedHealthcare. We've got TRICARE, we've got a number of these different ones and I'm like, "Well, how do we know what Blue Cross is going to pay us whenever Blue Cross comes in?"Joseph:They were like, "Oh, well, we just adjusted off the EOB, or the explanation of benefits whenever it comes in." I said, "Okay. So what you're telling me is whenever we've measured that revenue, we measured it at the Medicare allowed rate, but we're not going to make an adjustment for the Blue Cross rate until next month when they pay the claim or next week when they pay the claim or whenever they decide to pay the claim?" They said, "Yeah, that's what we do. That's when we adjust it."Joseph:I said, "So this $300,000 number is not a real number. The $250,000 is not a real number. So why don't we drill in and figure out, well, what are our contracted rates for all of these different insurance companies?" And as you can imagine, Jonathan, they were all different. Blue Cross had a certain percentage off of the Medicare allowed, United had a certain fee schedule that they had determined. TRICARE had something different. We had a workers' comp that would take a percentage off of our usual and customary rate.Joseph:So one of the things that I've always subscribed to is the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. So I was like, okay, why don't we 80/20 this thing. What 20% of our payers make up 80% of our revenue? So obviously to go through, we had hundreds of contracts. To go through hundreds of contracts and trying to get all of those fee schedules immediately ready, that would have taken months.Joseph:So I was like, why don't we just take the top 20% of our payers, the ones that pay us the most money and why don't we go ahead and make sure that that is correct inside of our billing software so that we were able to get to an allowed fee. The other thing that I figured out was that the Medicare allowed fee changes every year. Some years it goes up, some years it goes down. I'm like, "Well, what's that Medicare allowed fee?"Joseph:They were like, "Oh yeah, we loaded that in a couple of years ago." I'm like, "Okay, we should probably upload the current Medicare allowed fee. We should probably upload the current Blue Cross Blue Shield fee." Because one of the things is that as your accounts receivable people have money that's coming in the door and they have an EOB, we should know and expect to know what Blue Cross is going to pay us for this specific client, for this specific line item and if they pay us different, we need to know about that.Joseph:We need to investigate that, we need to follow up on that and say, "Well, is it because they paid us incorrectly? Is it because this is a Tennessee Blue Cross Blue Shield versus a Texas Blue Cross Blue Shield?" What are these differences that are inside of this? So I think that was where it first started was we need to start measuring revenue.Joseph:We need to start measuring revenue. We need to record it. We need to be measuring it month to month. We need to figure out what is revenue and it's obviously not your usual and customary. I was having this conversation with the dentist the other day. I said, "What was your production for the month of January?" She said it was $30,000.Joseph:I said, "Okay, well, tell me more about that number. What is that number?" She's like, "Oh yeah, that's the UCR." I said, "Okay, you understand that the UCR is not what your insurance company is going to pay you that you're in network with?" She was like, "Well, yeah, that's not the right number." I was like, "Okay, well, the first thing we need to do is we need to figure out what are you generating."Joseph:Because her question to me was how much can I afford to spend on you know, this next thing or this next loan, or can I hire another employee or can I increase my salary? Can I take a draw? Is my rent too high? She started asking these questions. I said, "Well, the first thing we got to figure out is how much money is coming in the door and how much revenue is coming in the door."Jonathan:There's usually a reason that revenue is the first thing on a profit and loss, because it's the first thing you're supposed to be able to know about. I find a big misconception inside of the dental space is that the CPA equals the CFO. When I try and tamper expectations with all of our clients is that, look, there is a lot more to revenue than just that first line item. Whenever you file a tax return, you file income. Sometimes you have a cost of services or whatever it is that you put down there as well, but revenues is a one line on the tax return, but it's much more than that. So would you say that's a fair statement to say that one of the jobs of the CFO, one of the responsibilities of small dental practice owners in their role as the CFO is to understand their revenue?Joseph:Absolutely. I think that's got to be where it starts. It's got to be where it starts because we got to understand ... So we've got to put expense models together and figure out how much we can afford based on our revenue. Obviously your revenue is going to fluctuate month to month, year to year. I'm looking at financials in January. Financials in January look a lot better than December. Why is that? Well, we took a week off for Christmas to New Year's.Joseph:So January, we worked full month. February will probably be shortened because we've got crazy snow storms that have hit the United States and people have been shut down for a week. So there's always going to be some fluctuation of revenue, but it's got to start with that. So then if we can figure out, well, what's a general rolling average that we can forecast out for revenue, then we can break that down per month and we can say, "Well, what did we do in July of last year?"Joseph:"Well, July is always a great big month for us, but it never is quite as big as August. August is so big because the kids are coming back to school. They want to get all their dental work before they go back to school. So August is always a big month in dental. March is always a big month in dental because of spring break."Joseph:So then we can forecast that stuff out and understand what our revenue's going to look like so that we can build our expense models based upon that. I think that's a big thing for CFOs is, people like to talk and use the word budget all the time. They're like, "We need a budget."Joseph:I'm like, "Well, we need a forecast is what we need." How many patients came in the door last month? How many of those were new patients? What percentage of that? What was the percentage of each one of the different service line items? So can we expect that to come back? If it's a hygiene client, are they going to be expected to come back in six months?Joseph:Well, we had X amount coming in January. That means that we know that we're going to get a certain percentage of those to come back in July and we can look and compare that and say, "Okay, well, what percentage of hygiene clients actually keep up with every six months?" Okay, well, it's not 100%. We wish it was 100%, but it's not 100%. Is it 90%? Is it 80%? Is it 50%?Joseph:Well, if it's 50%, we've probably got some things that we need to work on with our front office staff to make sure that we're confirming appointments, whether they were doing all the things that you guys know that we do in order to make sure that people are coming in for their six month checkups, but we can start forecasting and start getting a picture of what things are going to look like from here on out.Joseph:We can say, "Okay, well, if revenue, this month is $30,000, but our goal is $50,000 and we know that we're projecting that next month is going to be $40,000, we know that we've got 10,000 that we got to make up. So where are we going to make that up? Is it going to be new patients?" All right. So let's say that it's going to be in new patients. How many new patients do we need? How many of those are going to be hygiene patients versus emergency patients versus some more complex procedures that we're running specials on?Joseph:So these are all the things that when you try to get a handle on your top line revenue and get a handle of the money that the business is generating, these are things that are all going to project out so that you figure out what you're going to do money-wise moving forward.Jonathan:So you mentioned a lot of strategic game plan that was coming up. To me, it's like, step one, understand revenue. Step two, create a baseline of what it is we know is happening currently and then step three, would be to design some type of a game plan to effect those numbers, to try and create something around those things.Jonathan:So like you said, maybe it's that where we find that our deficiency is in our hygiene recall rate. Do we have enough of our patients coming back in for hygiene after they come in for the first time? Do we have enough people to getting back on the schedule today compared to whenever they come back in the future? Or do we let too many people just walk out with our unscheduled treatment?Jonathan:How many treatment plans did we do today and how many of those were actually on the schedule? Did we have a conversion issue? Understanding those different components after you have a bigger picture idea and understanding of that revenue allows you to start optimizing and influencing those numbers. So is that what a CFO's role is or is the CFO's role to influence those numbers or is it to unearth those numbers?Joseph:So I think it's both. I think a great CFO is going to do both. I think that if you look at the accounting world, one of the things that's tough about the accounting world is we're always looking backwards in time. We're looking at what happened last month, what happened last year. We're generating a tax return four or five months later after the year's closed. So, if you're trying to figure out what you're going to do with your business in May of a year, but you're waiting on last year's tax return to get done or last year's books to get done, you're always looking backwards.Joseph:I think the best CFOs that are out there do a combination of both. Number one, they're reporting the results in a way that'll help us understand the past, but they're also looking at all of the different pieces that we know that are going to happen in the future.Joseph:We're going to take some projections. We're going to make some assumptions. We're going to look forward and try to figure out what is life going to look like moving forward. Then we say, "Okay, life looking forward. If I take the snapshot of it today, that's not where we want to be. So let's figure out where we want to be. Why don't we create some goals around this? Why don't we create a monthly goal? Why don't we create a daily goal? If it's a number of new patients that are coming in, how many new patients should you be getting per day?"Joseph:Then we can start to influence those numbers and we can say, "Okay, we know that where we're at today is X. We want to be at 2X of where we are. What's the plan to get there." So that is where I think good CFOs are able to really, really hone in on a practice and really help you move forward and help you project to the future and make good, smart business decisions and influence those decisions and help your team understand how they influence those decisions.Jonathan:So how would it be, again, this is, this is a question that I get a lot is do you think that a CPA, someone who works as a CPA for a dental practice, that that CPA should be the CFO of that company?Joseph:I just think that it's got to be a lot more granular than that. As CPAs, we're typically reconciling banks daily, weekly, monthly. We're looking at financial statements, we're trying to get everything to tie out. We're doing everything that we can to make sure that the books are right, which is a very important part of your financial picture is understanding what your books look like. But I don't think that CPAs are equipped to be out there and to be in your practice to know like, well, how many confirmation calls did we have on patient schedules today?Joseph:Okay, well, we can track that. We can get it in the software. We can create all these different systems that are out there, and then maybe the CPA can look at that, but I think that that's outside of the CPA's role just because we don't have access to all that. We don't have the boots on the ground.Joseph:Now, if you have a full-time CPA that works in your office, many practices do. Huge, huge practices. Once you get to several, several millions of dollars, you're going to have a controller onsite that's going to help you out with some of this stuff. Maybe they're going to have a CFO on site once they get to that 10 or $15 million mark so that you can do that. But if you're a CPA and you're working with 20, 40, 50, 100, 200 clients, there's just no way that we can project all of that granular detail out in order to to do that and to fulfill that CFO role. That's certainly my opinion anyways.Jonathan:I agree. I see a lot of it because I speak to Dennis every week and it's not uncommon for me to hear someone say one of two things. One being that I need a CFO and they think that they need a CFO because they need someone who's going to help with all of these things. Then we can start digging into it and it's like they're doing three, four, $500,000 a year in revenue. Or even all the way up to say a million to $2 million a year in revenue.Jonathan:I need a CFO because I need someone who's going to do all of these things for me. Completely get an understanding of my revenue, which just for the listeners out there, that means we're going to have to understand your production philosophies, we're going to have understand the way that you view dentistry, the way that you view your patient care.Jonathan:As you dentists know, every other dentist is going to be different. So every CFO is going to have to understand that about you as the provider, as well as any other providers in your office. The way that we do that as data people is, we look at the production procedure code, service mixes, things like that, to be able to see what that looks like, but that's on a very high level.Jonathan:If we were to be the CFOs for you, that would be what we would have to do from a provider standpoint, for us looking at our provider level. What I tell most of these people is, "No, you don't really need a CFO. You just need more production right now. You need more revenue, you need to do more dentistry or have more patients," and that's basically all I can tell you.Jonathan:That's exactly what a CFO would tell you if they were to be engaged with you right now is, "We don't have enough revenue, we don't have enough production and we don't have enough patients." There might be some small problems that that person could uncover, but the amount of money you would have to pay someone to be able to do that, to uncover those problems would be a negative value compared to what they find, because you'd be paying them a whole bunch of money because it takes a whole lot of time to understand all of these elements for every business.Jonathan:While dentistry, yes is an industry and single office owner practices are similar in nature, they're all different. They're all different nuances and things like that and most of that nuance comes from the provider, the person that is doing the production.Jonathan:So I completely agree that the CPA role is not designed around this and the cost structure is not designed around this. If we're charging someone say a $1,000 a month for accounting, bookkeeping, tax planning, tax prep, projections, keeping updated on all the things that are going on in the dental ecosystem from a financial perspective, we don't have the ability to be able to make sure that Susie in the front is entering in the production correctly into the computer. That's not what we're engaged to do. The amount of money that we typically are getting paid for that, we don't have enough time in the day to be able to be helping with those types of things.Jonathan:So it then falls back on the dental practice owner to do those things, unfortunately. So I completely agree. It's, CPA does not equal CFO. I guess that's the point I'm trying to make with that, is that people sometimes think that they're the same person. It's a very specific subset. It's a different skillset, number one, and number two, it's not typically what you're paying your monthly fee for whenever you're seeing these people come in.Jonathan:So I mentioned earlier, there's two things. The first one was the person I'm talking about. They need a CFO and I don't think they really need one, and the second one is that they'll have already had a CFO and they'll be looking for someone new, which is the reason they're talking to me and I'll look at the work that's been done and it's literally just CPA work that's been done. It's not CFO work.Jonathan:So it's what you're saying here. It's financial statement analysis is all that that CFO is doing. To me, financial statement analysis, yeah, your CPA can help you with financial statement analysis. Almost every CPA can do that. I'm asking this to you, Joseph.Joseph:Yeah, absolutely.Jonathan:So every CPA can help you with financial statement analysis. Financial statement analysis is like one line item of things that CFOs do out of hundreds of things the CFOs do. So CPAs can help you with financial analysis, which is the things we talked about. The way that our firm does that is through a management report that we send out every month, where we're calculating out and are rolling quarterly averages and doing overhead analysis and things like that, but that just is the overall picture of the results of the practice.Jonathan:It is not the granular detail of, we did, say, three times more crowns this month than we did the month before. That does not exist on a financial side, on the traditionally prepared financial statement done by a CPA firm. So a lot of times what I'll tell people is lean on these softwares that can pull these data elements out of their practice management softwares, like Dental Intel is really good. Practice By Numbers is really good and they can do some of these practice management data calculations for you, but don't lean on your CPA for those things because we're not traditionally trained for those types of roles.Jonathan:A lot of the times what I tell people is that CFO role, we can find the problems, but we can't usually find the solutions if we're not in that practice every day. So you're paying a lot of money for someone just finding problems. Whereas in this industry, to me, if you're a smaller business, you have to be paying a practice manager consultant to find and fix those problems a similar amount of money. So when is it to you that a dental practice should consider having an outsourced CFO or a CFO and just in general, that is not that owner of that business.Joseph:I think that all the stuff that you're hitting on definitely says to that. So the question is, we're dealing with dentist who are very, very intelligent people. They're all very entrepreneurial because they went out and started their own practice, or they're thinking about starting our own practice and want to start their own practice.Joseph:So they've got that grit and grind about them to figure all of this stuff out. I really don't think that it's something that they can't handle on their own. I think that it really boils down to time. Do you have the time to devote to this? Do you have the resources, the manpower that you've got in your office to help you out with it? At the point where you're doing dentistry five, six days a week, and you're busting at the seams and your schedule's full, that's probably time that you can probably hire somebody else to do that.Joseph:I certainly think a lot of startups can benefit from having an overall plan and just kind of having some goalposts to operate on to help them out with that, but I don't know that there's actually a magic moment where you say, "I need to outsource a CFO." Certainly as the practice grows, if you had 50, 60 employees or more, I think that's kind of like the traditional, that's the point where you need to have a CFO.Joseph:Once you're probably at probably 25 or 30 employees or more, you probably need to have some kind of a controller in place. Another question is like, well, at what point do you have an HR manager in place? Well probably when you get to about 75 employees. So I say that to say like the businesses that you and I work with, almost all of them are single office, two office, way, way smaller than that.Joseph:I think that they'll be able to wrap their arms around a lot of it, maybe with a little bit of coaching and some help on the side from some consultants and some practice analytics, different pieces that they can figure out there and certainly podcasts like ours, where they get a chance to go out and learn, like, what are the things we need to be looking at and measuring?Joseph:Okay, well, this is what we need to be looking at. Let's go measure it now inside of our software. We knew that we probably could, but now we know this is what we need to go look at. So I don't know. What are your thoughts on that, Jonathan? That's a really good question. It's probably one that several of our clients hem-haw around about.Jonathan:So to me, I don't see much of a reason for a CFO on a practice. From a traditional CFO role, I don't see any reason for a dental practice that's doing less than, probably at a minimum, 2 million a year in revenue. I don't see much of her need for a CFO. The money that you're going to pay for a CFO ... If we're talking dollars and cents here, if you're going to have a CFO, that's actually going to do the work that the CFO needs to do, you're talking like at a minimum, outsourced a day a week, maybe four grand a month, five grand a month is what you'll end up paying that person, if you're lucky.Jonathan:So 40, 60 grand a year for, not financial analysis, hopefully it's more than financial analysis, but basically looking for little problems and little tweaks that are going to have ... Let's say it adds a 10% increase to your revenue. That's great. That pays for that, but you got real lucky if that person finds a 10% change. More than likely what they're going to do is they're going to be overseeing stuff and helping set plans and game plans up and things like that.Jonathan:I just don't see that creating that much of an impact on that business. Conversely, you get a really good practice management consultant in there that can help you do a better job with your treatment planning or do a better job of turning nos into yeses when it comes to getting patients to accept care. Then that money spent is going to have a much higher impact on your practice from a dollars and cents perspective. So almost like my best financial advice is to not get financial advice from a CFO until you get to a level where the tweaks can be worth that dollar output effectively.Jonathan:To me, it depends on the practices and things involved. To me, it's probably at the three to $4 million range and about what you said. Somewhere 25, 30 employees. So for example, you hear about these practices and we have a few practices that are similar to this. That could be if expand and scale, but they'll do $2 million, $3 million in revenue and they'll have 20 or 15 employees.Jonathan:So they'll hit the revenue number, but not have as many employees. Those practices, they're probably already doing most of these things already because they got probably really high production per patient. They got really high operatory usage. They got really high efficiency from their employees, probably have really strong protocols in terms of their collections and payments and things like that. So those things are probably already in for those types of offices, but we're talking about is whenever there gets to be a lot of people involved, a lot of revenue and a lot of patients.Jonathan:That's, to me, when optimization starts creating an unexpected value that's high enough to be able to pay someone else to come in and help analyze and optimize and strategize around those numbers. So that's kind of my thing. So real rough numbers, but at the bare minimum, 2 million a year in revenue, probably closer to 3 million before you start having that conversation. Then also somewhere around that 30 employee and up mark is where you start having someone that can start doing this for you, or start paying someone to be able to do that for you.Jonathan:Real rough numbers, but every situation is a little bit different case by case basis, but that's in general what I would be saying. So we talked about some of the problems today that the dentists are facing is one, an understanding of revenue. Understanding what revenue is, how to analyze it, how to record it, how to you ... See what it is that you're doing.Jonathan:What does revenue equal, and what does that mean in dollars and cents perspective? Then what does cashflow mean? Then coming up with a game around those things. So one of the things that we're doing on this podcast is we're highlighting problems and then we're going to try and create episodes around how to address those problems. So expect in a future episode for us to talk about these problems and give you different ways, as a listener, to be able to come up with solutions and to be educated in these problems so that you can do some of these things on your own.Jonathan:So that is our episode on the CFO role in dental practices. We may do a follow-up episode in the future, but that is the episode for that. So any closing thoughts on the CFO's role in dental practices, Joseph?Joseph:I think the dental industry is just a great industry in general. It's something that I'm excited to be out helping dentists. Super, super smart men and women. Very, very, very hardworking. Very entrepreneurial. So a lot of this stuff, at the smallest of the small scales, at the small offices, they'll be able to figure it out. They'll be able to make those decisions internally and as you grow, that's going to be the point where you've got to figure out at what point does it make sense to invest in additional health.Jonathan:As a final thought, what are some of the other problems that a CFO can help with? We talked about understanding revenue, we talked about coming up with a game plan and I guess another thing would be to track the success or failures of that game plan. Is that accurate?Joseph:Yeah. I think one other things that I think a great CFO will help you out in the dental space with is figuring out what does your insurance reimbursement look like. I know there was a point in time where pick a company shows up and says, "Hey, we want you to be a network with us," let's say at Cigna, "And we're going to offer you X," and that's significantly below what your usual and customary is. So the question becomes, can we afford to take this contract?Joseph:It could be United or Concordia, or it could be any number of places. What's that look like? What's the financial impact of that look like? I talked to a client one time that was in the Midwest that was close to an insurance headquarters and they wanted to drop their reimbursements by, I think it was 30%.Joseph:I said, "Hey, by the way, we're making cuts. You guys are on the hook for 30%." So then the question becomes, and this is a great CFO question. So what percentage of your patient base does this insurance carrier represent and how much dollars in revenue does that mean per year and if we take a 30% hit in that specific insurance carrier, how does that project out? What this practice was able to figure out was that it would have been a couple of staff members.Joseph:I think that the impact of this was like two staff members. So they wrote the insurance company back and said, "We're not going to be in network with you anymore if you continue to say this, because every one of our staff members are important to us and you're taking away two jobs from our practice, and we choose not to do that."Joseph:That's a great CFO project to look at. Certainly, there's smaller contracts that you can afford to take bigger losses on and that kind of thing if you wanted to, but I think that understanding insurance reimbursements and your contracts and all those things. Of course, there's always plenty of people that you can outsource, you can do this with, but that's a big CFO role.Joseph:What's the impact of this specific contract going to be and how's that going to go? One of the markets that I was in had a big, huge FedEx plant and the FedEx switched insurance carriers and the insurance carriers dropped everybody that was in network. So it was like, oh my gosh, are we going to survive? Because so much of this town's employees ... And it was like, well, let's run the numbers. Let's see.Joseph:Well, it turned out that out of, let's say, 100% of the total revenue, only 5% of it was this specific insurance carrier. So I think we're going to be okay. It's not going to be great. It's not going to be helpful, but I think those are great things for CFOs to get a chance to look at for you.Jonathan:Cool, awesome. So we will follow up with those in future episodes. Stay tuned to the Tooth & Coin podcast to hear more about the different problems inside of the dental industry, from a financial management perspective that we will be addressing here on the Tooth & Coin podcast. So we thank you very much and we'll see you next time.Jonathan:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth & Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA service, head on ever to toothandcoin.com where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country and we'd love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice.Jonathan:We do specialize in new practice owners. So people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. We'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.Jonathan:If you enjoyed today's episode, again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about. Join in on the discussion and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm.Jonathan:Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444. That's toothandcoin, no spaces. T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Reply with your email address, we'll send instructions in the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available and we will see you next week.

Show NotesWe've deliberately chosen to design privacy into Clinnect. This means using cryptography to ensure that only the intended recipient is able to view patient data. In fact, as builders of the software, we can't even see the patient data.For the curious, Chris suggests these articles to better understand cryptography: Crypto101 is a great book for learning cryptography basics. It's very long but thorough and free: https://www.crypto101.io/ The API we use to do this securely in the browser is the WebCrypto API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_API Two of the models we based our cryptography on were the Firefox sync model and the Lastpass model. Breakdown on those here: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ & https://enterprise.lastpass.com/wp-content/uploads/LastPass-Technical-Whitepaper-3.pdf We highly recommend using a password manager like Last Pass to keep yourself safer on the internet. Many are free, including Last Pass.Fact CheckThe LifeLabs hack was one of the largest data breaches in Canadian history. An estimated 15 million Canadians were affected.Find Us OnlineAngela Hapke - @angelahapke - https://www.clinnect.caJonathan Bowers - @thejonotron - https://www.twostoryrobot.comChris Foster - @chrisfosterelli - https://fosterelli.co/CreditsProduced by Jonathan Bowers and Angela HapkeMusic by Andrew Codeman (CC BY 3.0)TranscriptJonathan:  Check this out, Chris. So we've got these new pop filters. This is it. Without the pop filter, Peter Piper picked a Peck of pickled peppers.[00:00:09] And with the pop filter, Peter Piper picked a Peck of pickled peppers[00:00:15] Chris: So much better.[00:00:16] Angela: Isn't[00:00:17] Jonathan: then better.[00:00:17] Chris: I feel a little bit like the black sheep, because I am I'm that person who joins the podcasts and does not have a high quality bike. And I know as a listener, whenever I hear that, I'm like, Ugggg![00:00:30] Angela: Do you? Because I'm more like, Oh, thank God. Not everybody has everything in their house.[00:00:38] Chris: I usually just skip podcasts that, that are guests like me.[00:00:45]Introduction[00:00:45][00:00:45] Jonathan:  Hi, I'm Jonathan Bowers[00:00:49]Angela: and I'm Angela Hapke. And I went camping for the first time with my family. Last weekend, we bought a[00:00:57] new tent trailer[00:00:58] Jonathan: the first time ever.[00:01:00] Angela: with all four of us. Yup.[00:01:02] Jonathan: Oh, wow.[00:01:03] Angela: Yeah.[00:01:04] Jonathan: anyone get any sleep?[00:01:05]Angela: So we bought it a popup trailer and Brad and Alex were on one side and Nora and I were on the other side. One half of the trailer got sleep. It was not my side.[00:01:19] Oh, I promptly when I got home ordered memory foam, like two inch memory foam toppers for the mattresses, because both Nora and I were like, Oh, heck no, we're not doing that.[00:01:34] we joke that our children are like drunk octopuses, trying to search for their keys when they're sleeping at night. Like that's a bit how Nora is. So yeah, it was a lot of like toe kicks to the kidneys and moving around and yeah, it was tough.[00:01:51] Today we have a guest, uh, the chief technology officer at Two Story Robot. Can you introduce yourself?[00:01:58]Chris: Hi, my name is Chris Foster. I'm like you said, the chief technology officer at Two Story Robot. I have been building web applications for about a decade now. Um, and before that I was into computer security, pretty heavily. I have a degree in computer science with a specialization in software engineering, as well as a graduate degree in computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence.[00:02:29] Angela: Oh my goodness. A lot of those words didn't make sense to me, but that's[00:02:36] okay.[00:02:36] Jonathan: you said, computational neuroscience, that's an obscure term that. So what, what does that mean?[00:02:41] Chris: yeah. We use machine learning models to better understand how language is processed in the human brain.[00:02:47]Jonathan: How did you do that?[00:02:48]Chris: We put some people in a very uncomfortable machine. It's called a EEG machine. So. They put a whole bunch of goop in your hair and sensors. And then we make you sit in a dark room or of what feels like a very long time staring at symbols on a screen, as you learn to map those to English words. Uh, we tried to replicate sort of replicate an experiment that was done with a much, much more expensive machine.[00:03:12] And then we showed that you don't necessarily need the $1.5 Million machine and said, you can do it. Uh, with something that's more in the range of $60,000. We did it while trying to learn kind of a language that we made up, which was something that was new too.[00:03:25]Jonathan: That's cool.[00:03:25] Angela: That is cool.[00:03:27] Chris: it was a fun project, but yeah, I definitely nothing like graduate studies to also make you feel like you have no idea about computational neuroscience, more questions than answers at the end of it, it often feels like.[00:03:39]Jonathan: You've expanded your knowledge a bit, but you've also expanded that surface area of things, you know, that you have no idea about. Um, which I like, I like that feeling. I like knowing that there's all this world of things that I don't know, uh, it feels like a better place than not knowing that that stuff exists.[00:03:55]Um, It's it's something that I talk. So I talk about this with the team every now and again. And I like my goal for our team is not to not to expand the circle of knowledge of things they know. It's to expand the circle of knowledge of things they know they don't know because that stuff you can go and learn.[00:04:18]you don't need to know all that, all that stuff. You need to know that it exists and that you can go and find it.[00:04:23] Angela: I think you're right. And I think that's probably a good segue into what we're talking about today. Ah,[00:04:29] Chris: It is because computer science follows a very similar learning curve. I think.[00:04:33]Angela: As the CEO of a digital health company. I know we're about to find out about how much I know about the topic of encryption and how it is more about knowing what you don't know and either finding the right people, uh, to do it or to understand what you don't have an idea of what you don't know.[00:04:58]What is Encryption as a High Level?[00:04:58] Jonathan: Yeah. And so, yeah, that's the topic of today is, well, we wanted to talk about encryption, um, because clinic is, um, what's called end to end encrypted. Which practically means that only the person who sent a referral and the person who receives a referral can read or see any of that data.[00:05:20] No one else can see that including, including us as the builders of this software. Chris, how would you characterize that encryption is discussed in terms of products and things that exist now?[00:05:30]Chris:  encryption comes up all the time. And maybe from, from a layman's perspective, it can often seem like encryption is encryption, which I guess it's technically true, but how you're using that encryption really matters for how private your data is. Um, and it kind of fits into three broad categories.[00:05:52] Uh, the first type of category is the most popular of encryption. The, when that, um, whether knowing it or not, you use this all the time in your day to day life, which is communication encryption. So this isn't encrypting data between two end points that are talking to each other. So a good example of this is when you open up the Facebook application and Facebook goes and fetches your profile data, or your timeline data from facebook.com.[00:06:17] It's doing that in an encrypted way. So your internet service provider, for example, can't read that data, but Facebook can. So although there's encryption in place, there, it's not the same as other types of encryption that might protect your data from everyone, even including Facebook.[00:06:32]The second type is encryption at rest. So this is maybe if you have a file on your computer and you've decided to encrypt that file and you've used a password to do that. Or if you're using something like Mac's operating system's encryption feature. No one can actually open up your Mac and read all the data on it without your password. So if you're using that feature, then that's kind of encryption at rest while your Mac is actually unlocked, someone could certainly come over to your computer and access all the data.[00:07:00] But if you had your computer turned off and someone stole it and ran away, they wouldn't be able to read any of the data off the hard drive. So that's another way that is Christian has often used. And then the third way, which is. Probably the most privacy preserving, but is less common is end to end encryption.[00:07:19] An end to end encryption is similar to what, and you're using a tool like Facebook, but it's even if Facebook, as the person passing the data around, even if they couldn't read it. So for example, when you use Facebook messenger and I send a message to someone else on Facebook messenger, That person is receiving it.[00:07:38] And both of us are encrypted when we talk to Facebook, but Facebook in theory could read those messages. Um, Facebook does actually have an end to end encryption model. And if you were to turn that on, what it's then doing is the encryption is directly between me and whoever I'm messaging. So if I'm messaging Jonathan, that would mean that even Facebook can't read those messages because the encryption is directly between us and it's a little bit harder to set up and certainly more complicated and it makes building an application.[00:08:05] Have a lot of interesting limitations and technical challenges and all sorts of feature problems that can come up when you, as the company, can't read the data, but that's what we've tried to do with Clinnect to protect patient privacy. Um, just because it's so important, right? So that's what we've done here is when someone sends a referral to someone else, us a Two Story Robot or Clinnect, we can't actually see that data. It's directly encrypted between the members of the sending medical practice and the members of the receiving medical practice[00:08:35] like to be secure, like even, even like the baseline requirement is that the internet service providers should not be able to read your data. That is like the bare minimum for building a web application today.[00:08:45] But being end to end encrypted is definitely being a lot more forward thinking.[00:08:49]Jonathan: I have some questions. I don't think they're relevant.[00:08:51] Chris: I love irrelevant questions.[00:08:53]Jonathan: I was thinking like, are there, are there still cases of, of applications or services that aren't even hitting that baseline requirement[00:09:07] Chris: I mean, they're not, they're not right. Like the, the phone line provider could in theory, uh, re read your data. Um, I mean, there's, there's some advantages in some ways in that the phone line provider, isn't, isn't storing that fax but ultimately you have to trust them when they say they're not doing that.[00:09:23]Jonathan: one of the things about encryption is that it does it, it adds that layer of trust, or maybe, maybe the right word is you don't have to trust, right? Like a fax machine. You have to trust that the carrier, that telephone company is acting in a way that is not, um, privacy invading.[00:09:41] encrypting that communication. So it doesn't matter. Like we don't have to trust, like the fax operation could be run by bad person company.[00:09:50] Um, and they, they, you know, they can record all they want. It doesn't matter because they, they wouldn't be able to read it.[00:09:56] Angela: exactly, that's it? Yeah. And I think too, um, what we're also forgetting around the fax machine privacy issue is that. You could send it to the wrong fax number because there's no verification on the other end that they are who they are.[00:10:16] Right. So it could end up on any fax machine.[00:10:19] Chris: Yeah, I think that that's also has an interesting corollary to, to building a web application cause the internet works a fair bit different than the phone network and it say we had built this without that end to end encryption. There's lots of interesting problems that can happen. Um, now again, I've said that kinda like encryption to the server is the bare minimum, but it also becomes like even more important when you start talking about the internet, because with the phone line connection, if I was to call you Angela, it's probably pretty likely that like how that call is going to get routed is controlled by the phone network.[00:10:56] And it's pretty likely going to go to you where the internet doesn't quite work that way. Um, the way the internet works is through the system called BGP. Basically an ISP or an internet service provider or someone who's a big player on the internet. We'll sort of just say, Hey, I'm handling the traffic for all of these addresses.[00:11:14] And it's very brittle. There's actually been mistakes in the past where, uh, say something, I don't remember the exact countries, but, um, say someone, an internet service provider in Brazil has said, I own all of the google.com IPS. And then everyone starts sending all of their traffic to Brazil, even if maybe they were already right beside, at Google data center.[00:11:35] So it's also difficult to ensure how our traffic is even routed through the internet, which is why, like, of course there's people monitoring this and if you behave, you're, you're a bad player they're going to boot you out. But ultimately it's important to have that even that baseline encryption and end to encryption on top of that is even more helpful.[00:11:54] Um, Just because the internet works so much differently.[00:11:57]Jonathan:  we've deliberately chosen to build Clinnect in an end to end encrypted way, which is kind of the, the most encrypted, the most encrypted way we could, we could build it or is there another, like, is there an even more encrypted way that we could build this?[00:12:13]Chris: I think everything is going to be a compromise. There's probably some things we could do that would have been more encrypted, but anything you do is going to come with a little bit of a sacrifice to user usability, right? So one, one thing we've done is when you send a referral, anyone at the receiving practice can access it.[00:12:34] That is the doctor or their MOAs as well. We could have made it more encrypted by sending it specifically to the doctor,[00:12:43] um, and never allowing you have to be sent to anyone else in the future ever again, and encoding it directly for the doctor's keys. If we had done that, that would arguably be more more encrypted because you're reducing the number of people with access to the unencrypted version of that file.[00:13:01] But that would obviously come with very large considerations for the user experience. So I think ultimately with these things, it's going to be a trade off between the level of thoroughness in your encryption architecture and the user experience. And I feel like for something as important as patient data, we still have to make some product compromises, but we're right on the balance and the sweet spot where it's an effective and a usable product, and also highly secure compared to alternate approaches.[00:13:31]An Analogy to Boxes and Locks[00:13:31]Jonathan: when thinking about it from the user's perspective, like we always have to. We have to explain this to them sometimes and help, help guide them to why this is better, why this does protect them, them like as, as, um, practitioners and patient data. Uh, and so we've, tried to come up with analogies to explain this.[00:13:55] So. Um, in explaining this in the past. So Chris kind of explained what we did in a very technical diagram. I tried to bake that into a different analogy and then Angela took that and also tried to explain that to some potential customers. So I'm curious to hear that replayed back to us.[00:14:14] Angela: Oh, my, okay. So what I tell people and let's go back to the primary care provider is putting together a package. This package is a referral. So this referral package contains like every thing about this person. So highly sensitive patient data. What I say is that when you take this package it gets put into a box that is locked. But depending on how many people can open it on the[00:14:52]Editors Note[00:14:52] Jonathan: Okay, Jonathan here. Uh, I'm editing this and listening to Angela and myself, trying to explain encryption through an analogy and we go on and on and on about boxes and locks and putting boxes inside of boxes with locks inside of locks and boxes and boxes and locks and boxes and locks. And it's very confusing.[00:15:13] Um, very hard to listen to it. So I'm going to save you all the trouble and we're just going to skip all that part and just suffice to say, we butchered an analogy for trying to explain encryption. It was terrible.[00:15:27]Back to the program[00:15:27] the receiving team gave us. And so that lock gets put on that box and that whole box gets put in another box with the key, uh, uh, damn.[00:15:39] Chris: built this and I'm not, I'm not following.[00:15:41]It's a good analogy. And you're, you're not. Wrong per se, but it's a struggle to use an analogy to explain the system because anytime you try and be even remotely, correct, the analogy starts to break down to the point that you might as well just teach someone cryptography.[00:16:03] Angela: don't[00:16:03] Jonathan: Okay. How does it work, Chris? What's this[00:16:08] Angela: And you really don't need to use.[00:16:10] Chris: Can I abandon the[00:16:12] Angela: Yes, please. Please do this, the analogy. So this all started from me saying to Jonathan, like the cryptography that we've built into Clinnect is sits in the background. As a user, you have no idea actually how secure it is, but it's privacy by design.[00:16:32] This is what we've done with Clinnect. And, um, but I wanted to showcase that I wanted a really easy analogy. Apparently there isn't one a really easy and okay. Okay. Well then, then go ahead. Yeah. I wanted to share with users, so they were like, Oh yeah. Cool.[00:16:50] Chris: There is an easy analogy. I think that the thing is, is you have to trade off being correct. Um, both of you, I think, are trying to be like, actually correct in the explanation, in which case you might as well just talk about the cryptography. I think if you don't mind quite a bit of oversimplification an analogy is actually not too bad.[00:17:11]Jonathan: So what's the oversimplified version of[00:17:14] Angela: Yes, please do.[00:17:15] Chris: The oversimplified version is I would say, imagine a lock that has two keys and one key can lock the lock and the other key can unlock the lock. Each key only turns one way, so you can only lock or unlock it. So the key that unlocks it is your secret key. It's the one that you just want to hold on. You don't want to give that to anyone else, but the one that locks it, that's fine because all it does is lock it. You can make as many copies of that, of, of that as you want and send that to as many people as you want. So when you send a referral. What you're doing is you're asking the Clinnect server, you're saying, Hey, can I have the public key and Clinnect server saying yep. Here you go. Here's what copy of that? And you use that to put all the referral data in this box and do you lock it, but you can't unlock it and neither can we, and then you give the box to us. And then when the receiving specialist logs in. We give them the box and they have the key that can unlock, which is derived from their password.[00:18:20] And we don't know their password. So we don't know the secret key. But they have that secret key and they can use that to unlock the box. That's the core. Now of course, the parts where that's over simplifying is there's actually multiple people that can unlock this box. Everyone at the receiving specialist can unlock it.[00:18:39] So that includes their MOAs, um, and that's, that's where things start to become complicated because what we actually do is we give keys to each user and then keys that represent the practice. And then we take the practices secret key. And we use each user's public key to then encrypt it for them so that they have their own kind of double wrapped copy of the practices key.[00:19:02] But now you can see that now it's starting to get complicated and you can see where it breaks down. So you don't that you, that's why you have to trade off the accuracy. We could talk about asymmetric versus symmetric encryption. And, and if you could explain it, um, it's actually not too hard, but maybe maybe a bit longer than, than 30 minutes.[00:19:20] Um, But it's honestly not quite that daunting, but I think, yeah, if you, if you want something for, for a nontechnical audience that is okay with a little bit of inaccuracy and simplification, then I like that analogy for it.[00:19:34] Angela: Okay, Chris, so people are going to be listening and then there, you're going to peak their interest. They're going to go. Huh, but this guy's talking about is really interesting. And maybe I do want to know a little bit more, where would you point someone who let's say is like me knows very little about this, but is really interested in learning a little bit more about it.[00:19:55] Chris: Google is a great resource. I think part of the, where the analogy breaks[00:20:00] Jonathan: it.[00:20:00] Angela: Just freaking Google it. God, I want to do something better that we, where we can like link in the show notes or[00:20:07] Chris: Oh, I can link in the show notes, but if you ask me offhand, I mean, I learned most of this a decade ago, so it's a little bit challenging to put yourself in the beginner's shoes, but I could find some resources. Um, yeah, I think part of it is that the analogy, the analogy, it skips the actual names of these things, right.[00:20:26] Which is asymmetric cryptography[00:20:29]Jonathan:  it's it's hard to explain without explaining cryptography, how hard is it to implement? How hard is it to build this stuff?[00:20:38] Chris: It's simultaneously easier than you would expect and harder than it should be.[00:20:44] Angela: If that wasn't the classic Chris Foster answer, I don't know.[00:20:49] Jonathan: I'm going to sit firmly on the fence.[00:20:52] Chris: There's some parts, like the core concept of it feels quite simple when we approached it and we first started talking about the end to end encryption thought through some of the ideas and I thought, yeah, this, this feels pretty approachable. Um, but the devil's in the details with this thing, I think for sure.[00:21:07]it's easy in the sense that we've leaned on a lot of existing models. With cryptography the less you can do that looks like something new, the better. So the one rule of cryptography is kind of that you should never implement your own cryptography.[00:21:21]So we based this on a whole bunch of similar models, like the Firefox Sync architecture, as well as, um, Last Pass' security model. Basically anything we could find in existing systems that were established and have been around for years and had lots of people looking at them and were built by teams of experts.[00:21:38] We wanted to try and copy as much as we could from those architectures. Some of the complicated bits have been that, doing this in the browser was a little bit tricky. Some of the APIs are pretty new. We've been using what's called the web crypto APIs, um, which have just reached a stage where they are appropriate to be used, but they definitely differ quite a bit between each browser.[00:22:00] And it's pretty hard to get them to work for some things that you need in some situations. So, when we write out the whole plan feels very approachable, sensible. We're basically doing what everyone else has been doing. But then actually implementing it comes with lots of little gotchas that we had to work through. So. So I would say, yeah, I think like there's no other way to put it other than to say it is easy and hard.[00:22:24] Jonathan: I like that answer. I like that answer. what are some other reasons why we wanted to build end to end encryption into this product?[00:22:32]Angela: maybe I'll take you back to like when we were first talking about doing all of this, and I remember, I actually remember the day that I kind of dropped the bomb on you, Jonathan, where I said, I don't think I want Clinnect to see like anybody that works in Clinnect to see any of these actual referrals.[00:22:48] And I remember you kind of going. Oh, okay. That changes things, you know? There was a couple of different business reasons behind this. It seemed like the most appropriate way to handle patient data.[00:23:03] We don't need to see what's in those referrals. We don't want to see what's in those referrals. That is a hundred percent patient data that we should not be entitled to. Clinnect is a really small company right now.[00:23:16] I mean, there's only a few of us that work there. Uh, I trust everybody that works there. I think they're amazing. Um, what if Clinnect was to balloon into a team of hundred hundreds of people and I all of a sudden had an application where you could go in and see anybody's personal health data. That's not okay in my opinion at all.[00:23:41] It would've felt weird to add that in after the fact too. And I think a lot of the discussions that we had was, well, if this is the way that you want to do it, let's, let's build it right from the get, go that way, rather than trying to add that in later, which I think probably would have been a nightmare.[00:23:54] Chris: Borderline impossible.[00:23:56] Angela: Or borderline impossible. There you go. So glad we made that decision[00:24:02] We're a startup, we're a young company. We do not know where this company is going. We know who owns it right now, but what does it look like in 10 years? And would that have changed the direction that we went to?[00:24:15] If we had access to that data and to be honest from a social enterprise perspective, it is not the world that I want to get into with having access to personal health data and managing the risk around that.[00:24:31]Jonathan:  We own it now. And what you're saying is that there's the potential that the Clinnect gets acquired and that acquirer could do something else with the data, even though our intention was, if we had an end to end encrypted it, like our intention was yet, we're not going to do anything nefarious with this data.[00:24:48] Um, but now we've protected against that from happening in the[00:24:51] Angela: in the future and I mean, that's not a protection for me or Clinnect. That's a protection for every user and every person that has their data going through us. It was a decision that I didn't make lightly that's for sure. But it also was something that it wasn't a hard decision to make either as soon as we kind of ran through a couple scenarios and I was like, Whoa, why, why are we even considering not doing this?[00:25:16] Chris: And also even as like technical lead, like I like that, like that feels a little bit of weight off my shoulders. Um, then knowing that, that we are creating this repository that is going to be such a massive target of personal data. Now I absolutely think, especially as we continue to grow, we should treat it as if it is personal data, put all of those safeguards in place, and operational policies and treat our security with the importance that we would as if we were holding patient data.[00:25:47] But it sure makes me feel a whole lot better knowing that, that we,[00:25:52] Angela: exactly. Yep.[00:25:53] Jonathan: And ultimately, like, what is the, what is the risk here? Like what is our exposure to, to somebody doing something bad? What's the worst that can be done?[00:26:03]Chris:  if we're talking about absolute worst case scenario, is that someone could. Compromise our servers, or if there was a very malicious acquisition and replace the version of the application that comes out with one that has bad code in it, and it could wait for the user to enter their password and then start decrypting data and then push it somewhere else.[00:26:23] Un-encrypted that's a potential risk. It's. There's practical limits on that. So for example, you would only be able to compromise individual users and the rate at which you could extract data would be much slower than if you just had a giant database of say hundreds of gigs of private data. That's, that's just a database you can download that has all the private data where this must be a targeted attack against individual users.[00:26:46] Right. You have to set up a server to receive that data. And then you have to also store all of that data . So, so that is in theory, something that could happen, which is sometimes why end to end web applications kind of get some criticism, but is it a whole lot better than if we didn't have that stuff encrypted?[00:27:02] Absolutely. so I would say that there's still, there's maybe targeted attacks that could in theory be at risk, but. Again, that's why our responsibility should be to still treat the security of the application as if it was personal data. And I would say that certainly from a, hacker's perspective, I wouldn't say that that that's a, that's a small feat to pull off that sort of attack.[00:27:23] Um, it's definitely far more complex than, than some of the other than say, just like getting access to a database and downloading all of the data. Um, it's definitely quite a bit more complex, but.[00:27:35]Angela: when you talk about a targeted attack on Clinnect, it would be relatively unfruitful. Cause it would take a long time, whereas there's a lot of other low hanging fruit targets. And so even that alone, right. Is decreasing risk there too.[00:27:51] Jonathan: Yeah, we make, we make ourselves look less attractive than another[00:27:56] than another potential target. Like, I mean, and, and that, that has happened already in, in our world. Like the, the life LifeLabs was hacked and breached, and I don't know how many, how many patient records were exposed, but.[00:28:11] Angela: I can't remember. We can take a look and we'll put it in the show notes, um, link an article to it, but it was, it was a significant amount. I mean, I was one of the people that received, uh, a notification that. That my stuff had, had potentially been[00:28:31]Chris:  ultimately nothing is a silver bullet, right? Um, I think also one of the other things is that cryptography is not a replacement for user education. Um, the users are certainly probably the more likely weak point, uh, would be someone attacking an individual user's machine or even trying to social engineer them.[00:28:49] Um, which is say, for example, calling them up and pretending to be Clinnect staff or emailing them and saying that they need their password. Um, those sorts of things that, that our user might fall for are probably the most likely risk[00:29:03] Angela: Yep. Yeah, a little PSA do not give your password over the phone to anybody[00:29:12] Jonathan: Ever ever[00:29:13] Angela: ever don't do it. People[00:29:17]Recommendations for building an End-to-End encrypted app[00:29:17]Jonathan:  if someone wanted to build an end to end encrypted app, do you have any recommendations?[00:29:23]Chris: like we said, the core of it is pretty easy, but the hard bits are the hard bits. I think something that we already touched on, which is of course the first rule of cryptography is that make sure you, you feel confident in what you're doing and familiar and like, make sure you have some sort of expertise in these systems and don't ever create your own cryptography. Um, yeah, you want to, you want to always lean on, on what experts have done. So, so yeah, I would always say that like, if you are working with sensitive data and your goal is to build an end to end encrypted app and make sure that that you're not doing anything new.[00:30:03] Angela: I like that. I actually feel like you're demystifying. Um, the work that you're doing a little bit with the average, like. General population listening is I think we commonly think that you build everything from scratch, but that's not the case. And as you mentioned it's, and in this case, it shouldn't be the case.[00:30:25] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. There's absolutely some, some small adaptions. Like I said, that we've, we've kind of made like the Firefox Sync architecture or Last Pass are different products ultimately than Clinnect. So there's, there's some small adaptions, but ultimately, the architecture is basically really heavily leaning on what people have already done and then the encryption themselves, or the encryption itself, the act of actually encrypting the data.[00:30:47] Um, we wrote none of that code. That's all handled by the browsers through the web crypto API. So yeah, we, um, it's, it's not quite as simple, but in essence we say like, Hey encrypt this, and that's, that's the extent of what we've implemented for encryption. So the browsers handle all of that portion. Um, and if we had say implemented that ourselves, it just, it opens up so many doors for something potentially going wrong.[00:31:11] So, um, in some respect, it is, it is better to take the easier route.[00:31:17]Jonathan: A two story robot. We take the easy path.[00:31:23] Angela: It's all hard and simple at the same time.[00:31:27] Chris: and it's not the easy route in some respect, too, right? Like the easy route would be no end to end encryption that's easiest.[00:31:32] Angela: that's actually a really good point, Chris is that we could have done this , without any of this and law doesn't require us to do what we are doing. We are taking the extra, additional step and protecting patients and users. Been an interesting journey for me because I originally just thought, well, I just don't want to see any of it. And if we could build it like that, that would be great. And I[00:31:58] had no[00:31:59] Jonathan: an off the cuff[00:32:01] you just[00:32:02] Angela: off the cuff,[00:32:03] but it was a thought out decision, but it certainly wasn't thought out to the point of what does this mean from a development perspective at all?[00:32:13] I didn't know what I was getting our team into. So[00:32:15] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. That's and that's a fair point. The, uh, the non-encrypted end to end version of this application is a much smaller application. That is, would it have been much faster to put together? Um, but I mean, yeah, we, we also, we don't know of any other provider doing something like this for medical referrals.[00:32:34] So it's it's because patient privacy is so important that, that we wanted to ensure we took the time to think about the system and make sure we got it right. So.[00:32:42][00:32:42]Jonathan:  taking the time to get things right. Uh, Chris, where can people find you and follow you? If they're interested in.[00:32:49] Chris: Um, I have a Twitter account and a blog with a mailing list. If you're interested in more technical details on stuff like cryptography or artificial intelligence, um, if you Google chrisfosterelli, it comes up with all of my profiles. Don't Google, just Chris Foster. I'm not the most popular Chris Foster, but.[00:33:07]Jonathan: how many more years until you're the most popular?[00:33:10] Chris: Oh, is that a goal? Do I have to commit to that?[00:33:13] Angela: Yeah, Yeah, you do.[00:33:14] Chris: Yeah. Decade 10 years.[00:33:17] OutroAngela: Thanks for listening to Fixing Faxes, building a digital health startup. I'm Angela Hapke and my cohost is Jonathan Bowers. Our guest today was Chris Foster. Our music is by Andrew Codeman. Follow us on Twitter @FixingFaxes. You can find us wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And please do us a favor and tell a friend. Thanks for listening.[00:33:41]Jonathan: I wonder, I wonder if the memory foam topper is like the pop filter[00:33:46] of camping.[00:33:47]Angela: Maybe takes that edge off[00:33:49]Chris: My camping tent barely has enough room to sit up. So I feel like I am the laptop mic of camping.

Show NotesThis episode finally delves into who Jonathan and Angela are, a bit of our backgrounds and how we both took very different paths to get to where we are. We give shout outs to our team, mentors, friends, and family.We talk in this episode about non-medical fabric masks and we wanted to give a shout out to Sew the Curve Kamloops. We also mention a local company Desert Lily Clothing that made the custom masks for Two Story Robot.Find Us OnlineAngela Hapke - @angelahapke - https://www.clinnect.caJonathan Bowers - @thejonotron - https://www.twostoryrobot.comCreditsProduced by Jonathan Bowers and Angela HapkeMusic by Andrew Codeman (CC BY 3.0)Transcript[00:00:00] Angela: Just buy a mic.[00:00:00] Jonathan: You're just going to buy a mic anyways.[00:00:03] Angela: Why not?[00:00:03] Jonathan: Okay. Well tell me if you do, and then I will also buy the mic and[00:00:06] Angela: Well, okay. I don't want to make you buy a mic,[00:00:09] Jonathan: Well, no, no, no. Cause I, I will, um, I kind of want to[00:00:12] Angela: Let's just buy my mics then[00:00:15]Intro[00:00:15] Jonathan: Hi, I'm Jonathan Bowers. I'm the CEO of Two Story Robot and we're helping Angela build a digital health startup. And we had a bunch of masks, custom made masks that I delivered to my team yesterday. Yeah, it was super fun.[00:00:34] Angela: do people like them.[00:00:35] Jonathan: Yes. Uh, Lindsey posted a picture of her wearing our branded mask, the branded hat, some chainmail, and a sword to vanquish COVID[00:00:50]Angela:  that's awesome.[00:00:52] Jonathan: I'm excited We made a, I think there's like 35 or so. Um, so we're distributing everyone on the team gets one, it's the Olsen[00:01:01] Angela: The Olsen mask[00:01:02] Jonathan: got. Uh, I had her use some scrap fabric, whatever scraps she had for[00:01:07] Angela: well, that one has hello,[00:01:08] Jonathan: This one is Hello Kitty.[00:01:10] Angela: That's cute. That's perfect.[00:01:12] That's super fun.[00:01:13] Jonathan: Yeah, it's super fun. We're going to sell them, sell the extras, mark them up a whole bunch and give a, give the profits to charity.[00:01:21] Angela: That's great. Awesome.[00:01:23] Hi, my name is Angela Hapke and I am the CEO of Central Referral Solutions. The company that has launched Clinnect the digital health product, um, that Two Story Robot is helping us with. And speaking of masks I made masks for. Sew the Curve Kamloops, which is a grassroots organization that made over 10,000 masks for, our geographic area around Kamloops and, um, not just mass, they made scrub caps and, um, bags.[00:01:58] So like healthcare workers could put their, their scrubs in their clothes, in a bag that had like a drawstring. So they could just dump them in the washer when they got home and things like that. But it was really, really cool in the beginning of COVID to be part of something that was, um, that was really.[00:02:14] Making an impact like that. So I think I ended up making about, I want to say about 40 scrub caps and about 25 masks.[00:02:26] Jonathan: Yeah, the, uh, we hired a business out of the Sew the Curve to make our masks, somebody new who is just starting a business for the first time. Um, and she, you know, she wanted a Desert Lily Clothing.[00:02:39]She is going to make children's clothing, but then became really active on the Sew The Curve. And so we reached out to her and she was super excited about it. So yeah. Yeah, that's fine.[00:02:49] Angela: Hence the Hello Kitty uh, scrap fabric[00:02:51]yup. There we go. Somebody we can talk about today.[00:02:57]Getting to Know Each Other[00:02:57] Jonathan: Well, I wanted to, I wanted to get to know Angela. I already know Angela.[00:03:03] Angela: But do we like, so this is an interesting part is so we've known each other for a few years now. and I feel like, um, we know each other from like the last five years of our career, but I don't actually know the Jonathan pre.[00:03:20] Pre age 30 or something like that.[00:03:23] Jonathan: How old do you think I am?[00:03:24] Angela: I know exactly how old you are, because you're the same age as me.[00:03:27] Jonathan: Oh, am I?[00:03:28] Angela: Well, you're a few months older[00:03:30] Jonathan: Oh, okay. When's your birthday? What? In December. Oh, so you haven't,[00:03:35] Angela: I[00:03:36] Jonathan: you haven't[00:03:36] Angela: the big four. Oh[00:03:38] yeah, but I mean, you turned 40 during COVID.[00:03:43] Jonathan: Yeah, it was, uh, not the birthday I wanted, but it was still, it was still enjoyable. It was still fun.[00:03:49]Angela: Brad and I will be married 10 years. This December, I will turn 40 this December Yeah, we had plans to go to France. I really lovely trip. And none of that's going to happen now. So no I'm adjusting expectations as is everyone right now with life.[00:04:11] So, yeah. So, so how do we segue into the, who are we?[00:04:17] Jonathan: talk about it. Who, who, who is Angela?[00:04:20] Angela: how far do you want me to go back?[00:04:21]Jonathan: well, I was thinking about this. We met, um, when I was working at FreshGrade. Um, I was, one of the first employees and I can't remember how big the team was at that point, but you, knew one of the founders, Steve, Steve Wandler, or you knew Steve from some other thing and you were doing some kind of project through your MBA.[00:04:44] And I remember that, but I don't remember much about it. I just remember that. That's what you were there doing. And then, I dunno, you went and finished the MBA. I went and did some stuff. And then, and then you were back in Kamloops and you came, I think you came through, um, the innovation center. And I think that's how we got reintroduced.[00:05:04] Angela: I think that was I actually, I think it was Steve again. So Clinnect is, is a long journey. Forget about overnight successes. Long journey has been about three years in the making. We started off as a government project. Um, and we thought we kind of landed on something really interesting.[00:05:24] And I wondered if we couldn't make it some kind of digital health product of some kind. And so I sought out Steve, um, Just because previously I lived in Kelowna, I worked for what at the time was the Okanagan Science and Technology Council, which is now morphed and grown up into Accelerate Okanagan and I, so I knew Steve through that and we remained in contact.[00:05:51]Uh, I helped him, um, with his very first Metabridge events. Metabridge is at its root , um, uh, a series of events that would connect, um, BC and the Okanagan to the Silicon Valley. So I was helping him with that. Uh, we moved to Kamloops, um, because Brad got offered a job up here in Kamloops. It was a great one. We need, we were looking at a transition at the time. Anyway. I started working at the hospital as a project manager at Royal Inland hospital, first in the emergency department and then for the hospital itself.[00:06:25] And that's how I got introduced to a group of surgeons that wanted to do a pooled referral. Um, what we soon found to be unscalable and unsustainable way? And we thought, you know, I think there's a better way to do this.[00:06:38] Hence Clinnect was born. And at that point I reached out to Steve to say, I need a technical team um to do this and I actually I actually bounced the idea that we were bouncing around the ideas of whether I build it in house or um find someone[00:06:58] Jonathan: to do that and right away he mentioned you he said um[00:06:59] oh really? Oh, that's cool. I don't, I don't recall that, but, okay. Yeah.[00:07:03] Angela: And so, and I think that's how we met. And then it just kind of morphed organically from there is I realized like, Oh my gosh, trying as a nontechnical founder to build a technical team would be a little unruly.[00:07:19] And so then you came along and we're like, perfect. You guys can build it. And then I hired a software developer anyway, because she's brilliant.[00:07:28] And,[00:07:28] Jonathan: Oh, she's awesome. Jackie's the, Jackie's the best?[00:07:31]Angela: yeah, so she's been working with you guys straight out, straight out of university.[00:07:36]MBAs[00:07:36]Jonathan:  you did the MBA at both the university of British Columbia and Thompson Rivers University[00:07:41] Angela: Correct. So I did my core MBA through UBC Sauder School of Business.[00:07:46] And so you had to, like, I was flying in every other weekend for three days. And it was just getting too much on my relationship with Brad and I just, I couldn't do your number two right away. And then they changed it so that you couldn't take off, you had to start all over again. And I was like, Oh, that's not going to happen.[00:08:06] And the price had gone up in the time that I had started to when I wanted to go back and do my second year. So we went to TRU or Thompson Rivers University, and they were like, Oh yeah, Come well, we'll give you all these credits for your core MBA classes and you can finish here.[00:08:24] Jonathan: Yeah, I did. So I did the same. I did the same MBA program at UBC a few years before you, I think, um, and we had the reason why I chose it was because they had a, they had one that had a part time program.[00:08:39] And then, and they said, Oh, and you can, you can do this from Kelowna. I was like, Oh, that's, that's an easier drive. But when you get into it, it was just, no, you've got to come down for pretty much everything. But I remember those, those, it was like every other weekend I would, you know, leave, leave work at lunchtime ish on Friday[00:08:59] Angela: and wouldn't get home until,[00:09:01] Jonathan: Yeah, like a late Sunday night and just the whole, the whole weekend in that basement. Just[00:09:08] Angela: in the basement. No, I don't think I even remember windows in that[00:09:11] Jonathan: no, but I remember I enjoyed it. I loved it. I[00:09:14] Angela: to say the programming was unreal. It was very, very good.[00:09:20] Jonathan: And my, yeah, the classmates, like I still am in touch with, uh, not as in touch as I should be or wants to be, but I'm still, still in touch with a lot of my cohort. Um, Just, yeah, I had a much better experience in my MBA program than I did in my undergraduate, um, computing science program. It was just so much better just could have done with the driving and, um, yeah, it was also a pretty heavy strain on the relationship.[00:09:46]Undergraduate Degrees[00:09:46] Angela: Um, where did you do your undergrad?[00:09:47]Jonathan: I went to SFU, Simon Fraser University in Burnaby. So I did my undergraduate in computing science.[00:09:53] Angela: Did you go straight from high school to university or did you take some time off?[00:09:57] Jonathan: No. Well, I went, I, not exactly. Like I there's a university college in Salmon Arm. So I did my first year there. Cause it was cheap and they actually had a very, very good science program and, and computing science instructors,[00:10:11] the physics, the math and the computing science instructors at Salmon Arm were just very, very good. Like I remember, I remember in one of our first year computing science programs, doing stuff that. We never even came close to doing in the four years at, at SFU.[00:10:28] Angela: Wow.[00:10:29] Jonathan: Uh, I really liked it. And then yeah, I went to SFU for the remaining six years, six years of my degree.[00:10:38] Angela: Sorry.[00:10:39] Jonathan: six Yeah. I took like seven years to do my undergraduate degree. Yeah. Yeah. I took a year off, not quite a year off. I took basically a year off. I took her a couple of semesters where I only took three or four courses.[00:10:53]Working Through University[00:10:53]Um, I also worked through through university. I had a, I had a very, it wasn't a, it wasn't a hard job, but it was, um, it was very relevant.[00:11:02]Somebody referred me to this, to this person in Hawaii who, uh, was like, who needed help doing, doing some work on websites and stuff?[00:11:11] I was like, okay, well, I'll sure and, uh, he just employed me through through university and it was. No, not a lot of work. It was maybe maybe 10 or 20 hours of work a week if that, but it was in US dollars and pretty good, pretty good wage.[00:11:27] So yeah, I was, and the stuff that I got to do was kind of, um, wouldn't say over my head, but the clients were not the clients I should have been interacting with.[00:11:38] Angela: Right. You're a little bit out of your[00:11:41] Jonathan: they were big.[00:11:43] Angela: That's awesome.[00:11:44] Jonathan: I worked on a pharmaceutical for a large pharmaceutical company helping with some of their, some of their website.[00:11:50] I worked, uh, at one point we had a client that was, um, going to be featured on Oprah. And so they said, yeah, we're going to get an onslaught of orders to our eCommerce site. So we just want to make sure that things are like tickety, boo. And so.[00:12:09] Yeah, he phones me. He's like, Hey, can you, can you spend the next couple of weeks getting ready?[00:12:13] I'm like, okay, sure. And I go in there, I'm like, Oh man, there's a whole bunch of stuff that needs fixing. And I would fix a bunch of things and report back. And then, uh, yeah, it was, it was a neat, it was a neat, like, very, very odd job for me to have as a university student. But, um,[00:12:28] Angela: That sounds like a perfect odd job to have.[00:12:31] Jonathan: it was, it was, uh, I could one work remotely, which in 2000 whatever. um, was a strange thing, right. Working, remote and working on the types of things that I was doing, which I was very excited about. Um, yeah, it was a good, it was a good job.[00:12:47] Angela: Did you, so, okay. So like 15 year old, Jonathan. Did he know what he wanted? Like, did he know that he was going to be doing what 40 year old Jonathan is doing right now?[00:13:01]Jonathan: Um, maybe not exactly, but, uh, pretty close. I think I was doing lots of programming classes and I was doing stuff like that on my own time. Um, it wasn't really though, until I got into maybe grade 12 that I was really doing, like taking it more seriously. And I had, I mean, I, I had basically started this, not this company, but this version of version of this, when I was in grade 12, I had made friends with this, um, with someone in a game who lived in New York, who happened to be a really good graphics designer. Uh, and then one of my other friends from high school and we started building, management information systems for people, for other companies.[00:13:41] They were like, it was really, really small potatoes. Like they were, we built the theaters, um, the, uh, like a system for the theater to update their what's what's playing.[00:13:50] Um, and so we built that and we like learned all sorts of technology and ideas. And then, so yeah, it was, it was great.[00:13:56] Uh,[00:13:57] Angela: is so cool.[00:13:59]Linear paths vs Z-shaped paths[00:13:59] I like your linear process.[00:14:03]Uh, well, if you want to, I have what we call it, like the, the, the Zed. Uh, path[00:14:08] Jonathan: Okay. Your, Oh your Oh, my path was linear. Oh yeah.[00:14:11] No, my path was very,[00:14:13] Angela: Yes. Yes. Sorry. I meant your path. Not your, yeah. Your path. Like, I feel like 15 year old Jonathan, you could potentially see, okay. Where[00:14:23] Jonathan: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was, it was pretty clear from when I was fairly young and that, I mean, that comes from some pretty significant privilege, right? Like I've got a computer when I was quite young and then never, um, I didn't feel like I was missing anything.[00:14:39] I mean, I also, I also had to like save up and buy some, buy some things, but I, you know, I had some jobs, which again was some privileged cause my dad helped me get those.[00:14:49] and uh, yeah, and then I just got like a lot of experience, very, very young and very relevant experience. But yours was a Z yours wasn't straight like an arrow like mine was?[00:15:02] Angela: Oh, Oh boy, uh, grew up on a ranch in Saskatchewan. Um, and then I left for university when I was 17,[00:15:12] Jonathan: Oh,[00:15:12] Angela: because, well, because I'm a December baby. So I was actually, uh, 17, my whole first semester of university. I moved four or five hours away. Um, Lived in an apartment with two friends and had just way too much fun, um, applied to university, got in, uh, for a kinesiology degree.[00:15:31] actually, sorry, I applied and got in under a business degree. So a marketing degree is what I was going for. And then I went to one economics class and one statistics class and hated it. And so I went down to the student counselor and said, I don't think this is for me.[00:15:51] Like, I don't even like where was my resiliency? No idea. Um, went down to that basement. Said to her. I can't like I can't do this. And she goes, well, what are your interests? And it was like, I really liked sports when I was in like in high school. Like, that was my thing. I loved sports. And she goes, well, have you looked at her kinesiology program?[00:16:10] I looked at it and it involved a lot of, a lot of classes that were like, I took fencing,[00:16:18] Jonathan: Yeah. As a class.[00:16:24] Angela: Oh, Tai Chi. Ooh. I took Tai Chi, like just random. And I looked at this and 17 year old[00:16:30] Jonathan: You went through the like parks and recreation catalog and thought that,[00:16:35] Angela: Yeah. She could have handed me the parks and recreation catalog. I was like, yep.[00:16:39] That's for me. Um, yeah. Seventeen-year-old Angela was, was. Going to do that and pair it with an education degree. So now I went from marketing and I was going to, because Lethbridge was the university of Lethbridge was well known for its education degree. And you could get a dual degree in five years.[00:16:58] And I thought, well, that just makes a lot of sense. And so I was on the path to be a phys ed teacher[00:17:06] Jonathan: I don't imagine you being a phys ed[00:17:08] teacher at[00:17:08] Angela: no, I would have been an awful teacher period. so third year I've now decided I just want to go do something different for the summer. So I decided to move up to Lake Louise and worked for whitewater rafting company, which I did. four months turned it into eight months and then they decided that I had to go back and finish.[00:17:29] I had 15 classes to finish and I had a goal of finishing the by September. So January to September, I was going to finish 15 classes.[00:17:39] Jonathan: that's that's ambitious.[00:17:40] Angela: So I went and I told somebody this, and she goes, Angela, you can do this.[00:17:46] but you cannot go below B in any of your classes. Well, 21 year old Angela was up for the challenge and I did it. So I finished by September and they phoned me and they were like, Angela, we're really impressed with your work ethic and how you came back and you really upped your grades and you kept the up blah, blah, blah. We'd like to invite you to do your master's program with us. And then all of this, I'd never got into the education program because I didn't have a 4.0 GPA.[00:18:19] And like four kinesiology students get into the ed program, they forgot to mention that to me when I was like, this is what I want to do. Uh, so then, uh, I got this phone call and I said, thank you very much. Um, but I have a job in Banff and I'm just going to go be a, like a, uh, gonna go be a ski bum for the winter.[00:18:39] And she just laughed and she goes, okay, have fun? So that's what I did. And what was only supposed to be eight months in Banff, turned into four years.[00:18:47] Jonathan: Cool. You ski bummed for four years.[00:18:53] Angela: In a way. Yeah, but I actually got like a pretty grownup job at a pretty young age there. So I was, I was a project coordinator for a destination management company. So it was managing these big corporate events and vacations and things like that. That's where I learned, like everything I kind of needed to learn for project management in the future, because I worked for this amazing woman named Laurie who had this really cool company, but she was like, she was really tough on , on, um, internal workflows and what must be done so that you could hand over projects really easily.[00:19:30] So she kind of trained us all to, and that set the stage for, so for me, kind of in the future. So then we met, I met Brad, we moved to Kelowna. I started working for the Okanagan Science and Technology Council, as I mentioned. Um, got into tech, which I like, then I was like, Ooh, this is fun. Um, in all of this, I've like, I've done wedding planning.[00:19:52] I've I've, I've worked like you talk about what you worked during university. I worked at the Nikka Yuka Japanese gardens. Like as a tour guide wearing a, um, a yukata. So it's not a con kimono, but it's a yukata. And like, it was just like Zed path. And then, um, moved to Kamloops, got into health care. And then I blended those two passions of healthcare and technology.[00:20:20] And here we are,[00:20:23] Jonathan: That's so funny. It is a Zed path, but I like that, like I like.[00:20:27] Angela: the ridiculous it's Zed path.[00:20:29] Jonathan: No, I feel, I feel like my path is a little restrictive. Like it's, it's good. It's focused, but I don't have a ton of breadth of experience.[00:20:40] I mean, I have, I have different experiences, obviously. I'm not totally, uni-dimensional, but where you, you know, you've got these other things that you can draw on that are okay.[00:20:52] Roll your eyes.[00:20:53] Angela: I rolled my eyes because it's like, yeah, I guess I can, you know, you're, you're right there at different experiences. That's for sure. But, Oh man, I also feel like I delayed. My career by at least four years by sidetracking and going to, you know. Like Brad always jokes that my time in Banff was my never, like, it was never, never land.[00:21:17] So it didn't age or gain[00:21:20] Jonathan: Gain anything. You're stunted by four years,[00:21:24] Angela: I'm stunted by four years. So we would joke about when, how old I'm turning. We minus four, because[00:21:29] Jonathan: you have the emotional maturity of a 30 something year old, not a, not a nearly40 year old.What Do You Want To Do When You Grow Up?[00:21:38] Angela: Yeah. And Brad, so Brad has a similar path to you and I just find it so fascinating when I meet these people that are like, okay, they were in high school and they could see themselves doing what they do now.[00:21:50] Jonathan: Yeah, I don't, I don't see that a lot. Like I've I talked with not a lot of high school students, but a fair number of high school students and, and they, you know, some, some of them are like just clearly like, yep, I want to program.[00:22:03] I want to be, I want to do this, but most, most just have no clue.[00:22:09] And it's hard, like, and the pressure to the pressure to have made all those decisions in grade nine, you know, what do you want to do when you're in your late twenties? When you're in grade nine? I don't[00:22:20] Angela: I don't have a clue. Why should I know that?[00:22:24] Jonathan: it seems unfair[00:22:26] Angela: I think I, I even think like at 17 or 18, when you're heading into university, even then, like the 30 year old Angela was dreaming of what I'm doing now, but it wasn't ever really sure if that's even like, and that was just a decade ago.[00:22:44] Jonathan: yeah. I think, I think my, I was fortunate in that I I understood what I wanted to do, maybe. Well, not, not specifically, but I understood the direction that I wanted to go in. And always, I mean, I always felt this desire to, to start a company or to start and start a business. Um, and eventually got there.[00:23:07] I had rose colored glasses though, when I was 18 or 19 thinking, thinking it would be a lot easier and a lot, like a lot more financially successful than I would that I am.[00:23:20]It's Mostly Luck[00:23:20] Um, but I think we both, and I think we both need to check that for a minute though, because you and I graduated, maybe you less. So just, it took a little bit longer to graduate from university. But when I graduated from university, it was, um, so it was 2002 and I was in Alberta. Everything the world was my freaking oyster.[00:23:43] Angela: I could, I could have got a job in five minutes there, anything, and, and, and now, so I look at, you know, the environment and the work environment that we graduated into versus these kids that better. I shouldn't call them kids. These young, young people are graduating into right now. And I'm, I, I can't even[00:24:04] Jonathan: So, yeah, I can't, I mean, yeah, like I did, I did school right when the tech crash happened and, um, it was a great time to be in school and, uh, a very, very fortunate time to have a job that was. I'm paying for it. Like, I, I came out of, came out of university with very little debt.[00:24:26] Angela: awesome.[00:24:28] Jonathan: like, yeah. And then, and then also managed to get, uh, get a job in public sector, um, which paid quite well.[00:24:35] Uh, yeah, as my first job, I, as my first job out of university, I, within three months was a manager of an IT department. I mean, I had, like, I had nobody to actually manage. It was just a title. I didn't have any, I didn't have any experience managing anyone, but they needed to put me in excluded staff.[00:24:55] Angela: This is what us as we, because we sit on the cusp of gen X and millennial. Um, wow. What an amazing time to be born.[00:25:04] Jonathan: Yeah. Yep. Super lucky. I think I it's, I've reflected on this a little bit and I mean, there's, there's a ton of luck that is unearned completely, you know? My dad introduces me to some folks and says, Hey, you should hire my son and go and do the, you know, go and hire it. Do a good job. Like I'm not, I'm not saying like I didn't deserve to work there, but I probably didn't deserve the introduction.[00:25:32] Um, I didn't earn that, but earned my keep once I got there. And then, and, but everything, everything up until up until now feels like it's just luck. Like, I've just, I've just been lucky. Right? Like meeting, meeting Steve at FreshGrade was pure luck. It it, you know, there wasn't there wasn't, I didn't go off looking for it.[00:25:53] I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and was doing, doing the right kind of thing. And he said, Hey, we should, we should chat. Uh, okay, sure. Let's let's chat. And then, um, you know, everything's, everything's like all the clients that we have is luck. It's just people, people show up and we happened to be there and.[00:26:14] It happens. I think the skill is maybe recognize not, not squandering that luck, not, not,[00:26:20] um, not letting that opportunity pass because I do see that happen a lot where people, people, people are in the right place at the right time. And, you know, I've taught with mentored these people and. And they just don't have the, they don't, they don't, they don't see it either.[00:26:34] They don't see the opportunity or they're missing some, some skill to actually, uh, be able to take advantage of that opportunity and then they miss it. And so I think that's some, one of the skills that I've managed to figure out is that I can recognize that luck is happening. Try to increase my surface area of luck and, uh, hopefully, um, hopefully turn that into, into[00:27:00] Angela: I like that. Um, I also love where we're at right now in the fact that we're now at the experience level and the age and the, um, just time in life where we can start handing the opportunities down like to, to others that are like, you know. When I take a look at, um, hiring Jackie was pure luck, I found Jackie by pure luck, that being said.[00:27:28] when I, you know, kind of got to meet her and understand, you know, where her passion was and, and her interests and things like that, I was like, Oh my gosh. Like if you got to come work for us, like, I can't afford somebody to be hired yet, but like, I gotta, I gotta find a way to get you on board. And just being able to give that.[00:27:47] You know, to be able to give her her first job out of university, what it felt so amazing. And, and those kinds of things, where we get to give the opportunity now to those that are exiting and graduating at a time, that is just crap. And now we're in the positions where we can give those, you know, um, help them out in, in some ways just feels.[00:28:11] So amazing.[00:28:12] Our Families are Our Best Fans!Alex and I were listening to Spotify. And I don't pay for the premium. and of course the ads pop up it was an ad for a podcast that was, that was being released on Spotify.[00:28:27] Comes running into my room and she's like, Mama, somebody else is releasing a podcast too. She's like you, I thought that was pretty cute.[00:28:43] Jonathan: Oh, she's so proud of her mom. That's so cool.[00:28:48] Angela: like, Aw, warms my heart. She was so excited for me

Here's What You'll Learn in our Interview with Jonathan: How to properly communicate with your tenants Why investing in your property management systems is so an important How top investors and companies are utilizing property management systems to get the best results Where the property management business is headed in the future And much, much more! Jonathan Margel, 33, is the co-founder and CEO of Building Stack. He has a varied and unique background in real estate coupled with a passion for technology and trends in the industry. Following his graduation from the John-Molson School of Business, Jonathan spent a few years managing over 2,000 apartments throughout Quebec. Wanting to make a difference in an outdated industry starving for better solutions, Jonathan teamed up with his dear friend and now Building Stack co-founder Pablo Menghini to design a customer-centric property management platform. The all-in-one software provides landlords a way to communicate with their tenants, post online listings automatically, collect online rent payments and track their property-related financials. Building Stack is currently live in 150,000+ doors across Canada. Jonathan and his talented team are fiercely motivated to build and improve their solutions, bringing landlords into the next generation of property management. Contact Jonathan: jm@buildingstack.com

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Jeff: So, Jonathan, I'd like to meet a nice girl. I'm looking to meet a nice girl but I'm not quite sure where we should go to meet women. What do you think? Where's a good place to meet some women?Jonathan: You know, that's hard to say, I mean, there are all kinds of things that work for other people that they haven't necessarily worked for me. I mean, I talk to people who say that met girls in libraries, but I don't really want to go to a library. Usually they've got a silence rule. I don't want to go up and try to talk to a girl and have the librarian say, SHHH!Jeff: Actually, one of my friends told me that he met a girl in the grocery store once in one of the aisles. He was looking at milk and she came up beside him, so maybe we should go get some groceries.Jonathan: That seems to be a really unnatural kind of way to meet women in a grocery store. Maybe is a woman sees that you're buying individual portions of something and you're buying like little TV dinners that are only put in the microwave oven, she knows that you don't have someone at home cooking for you, but if I go out and I see a woman filling a basket with lots of tomatoes and cucumbers and so on, then I imagine she's probably cooking for a family.Jeff: Well, why don't we go do something like bowling. Bowling! Women love to bowl. I'm sure we can meet some nice ladies at the bowling alley.Jonathan: Oh, but women don't like putting on those ugly shoes.Jeff: Well, then...Jonathan: It's unfashionable when they go to the bowling alleys.Jeff: Well, then, shopping! Let's go shopping. Girls love shopping. We can meet them at a store.Jonathan: Girls love shopping but then they're gonna make you hold their bags for two hours while they go and try on different things. That's no fun.Jeff: OK.Jonathan: How about a concert?Jeff: Ah, no, Too noisy.Jonathan: Yeah, I guess you can't talk to women there.Jeff: Well, I think actually, another one of my friends once met a lady at a bank - the bank teller.Jonathan: Bank teller.Jeff: Yeah.Jonathan: That would seem like a little bit of a strange thing, and there I think the woman would be judging you by how much money you have in your account. She'd be able to see all of your information.Jeff: Well, actually, I think let's just go to the pub.Jonathan: OK.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Jeff: So, Jonathan, I'd like to meet a nice girl. I'm looking to meet a nice girl but I'm not quite sure where we should go to meet women. What do you think? Where's a good place to meet some women?Jonathan: You know, that's hard to say, I mean, there are all kinds of things that work for other people that they haven't necessarily worked for me. I mean, I talk to people who say that met girls in libraries, but I don't really want to go to a library. Usually they've got a silence rule. I don't want to go up and try to talk to a girl and have the librarian say, SHHH!Jeff: Actually, one of my friends told me that he met a girl in the grocery store once in one of the aisles. He was looking at milk and she came up beside him, so maybe we should go get some groceries.Jonathan: That seems to be a really unnatural kind of way to meet women in a grocery store. Maybe is a woman sees that you're buying individual portions of something and you're buying like little TV dinners that are only put in the microwave oven, she knows that you don't have someone at home cooking for you, but if I go out and I see a woman filling a basket with lots of tomatoes and cucumbers and so on, then I imagine she's probably cooking for a family.Jeff: Well, why don't we go do something like bowling. Bowling! Women love to bowl. I'm sure we can meet some nice ladies at the bowling alley.Jonathan: Oh, but women don't like putting on those ugly shoes.Jeff: Well, then...Jonathan: It's unfashionable when they go to the bowling alleys.Jeff: Well, then, shopping! Let's go shopping. Girls love shopping. We can meet them at a store.Jonathan: Girls love shopping but then they're gonna make you hold their bags for two hours while they go and try on different things. That's no fun.Jeff: OK.Jonathan: How about a concert?Jeff: Ah, no, Too noisy.Jonathan: Yeah, I guess you can't talk to women there.Jeff: Well, I think actually, another one of my friends once met a lady at a bank - the bank teller.Jonathan: Bank teller.Jeff: Yeah.Jonathan: That would seem like a little bit of a strange thing, and there I think the woman would be judging you by how much money you have in your account. She'd be able to see all of your information.Jeff: Well, actually, I think let's just go to the pub.Jonathan: OK.

082 | Brad and Jonathan’s wives, Laura and Dani (respectively), talk about their introduction to FI, combining finances, budgeting with children, and maintaining balance. How did Dani and Laura approach saving before meeting Jonathan? How did Laura’s parents change careers to improve their financial status? How was growing up in Zimbabwe different from a typical American upbringing? What did saving money mean to Dani when she started working? How did Dani respond to Jonathan’s initial proposal to combine finances? When and how did Brad and Laura merge finances? What does a typical day in Dani and Laura’s lives look like? How does “busy” look different from when Dani and Laura were working full-time jobs? Are kids expensive? How do Laura and Dani budget with the extra and unexpected costs of children? What is a “Buy Nothing” group? How does Laura advance purchase things for her children? Do Brad and Laura give their children many choices? How do Brad and Laura create space in their lives to not be consumed by FI? By saving money on unnecessary expenses, Brad and Laura can be generous and unconcerned with some of the smaller expenses that come up in life. How does the 72-hour-rule, introduced by the Frugalwoods, make a difference for Dani and Jonathan? How did Laura and Dani respond when Brad and Jonathan decided to leave their jobs and start ChooseFI? Does the pursuit of FI ever get too intense? How do Dani and Laura plan their meals and prepare ahead of time?   Links: Stay at Home Chef Smitten Kitchen Kitchn Why (and how) I Became a Work-At-Home Mom – The Frugalwoods A letter to my 22-year-old self – Joel from FI 180

081R | Strategies for decluttering and living with less (reflecting on Cait Flander's interview with us on Monday), life hacks from the community, and a winner for the free ticket to CampFI in Joshua Tree! The ChooseFI community is growing and gaining national attention. How This Couple Saved $1 Million in 11 Years and Became Financially Independent Before 40 Nine Money Podcasts You Should Be Listening To Local Groups are really effective in some parts of the ChooseFI community. Jonathan joined some members of the Richmond local group to purchase a mosquito fogger to share between them. What else could be a shared purchase? Cait Flanders, from Monday’s episode, talked about taking control of your life, and decluttering her whole life. How do you take control of your life? Could you live with less? Why doesn’t Brad use a budget, and how does he still manage his finances well? Why does Brad hope his daughter reads Harry Potter? Voicemail from Kristyn, from fortheloveoftidy.com and the Spark Joy podcast, talks about her FI progress, and tips for decluttering: Map out your ideal living environment; think about how your clutter fits into that. Ask yourself tough questions about the clutter in your life. What is tough about decluttering for Jonathan? How does Kristyn keep track of her “bit-sized wins”? Why did Jonathan finally get rid of his grad-school notes? Voicemail with a suggestion based on advice from The White Coat Investor, to employ children as models for his website, to add legitimate money to his kids’ retirement accounts. Facebook post from Heather about how her son found a job without a car. Message from Louima, who was inspired by Cait’s Monday episode, and is contemplating a reduction of her FI number. Email from Mark with some FI hacks: Food: Choose smaller dishes Put chips, pretzels, etc., in a dish, don’t eat directly from the bag Don’t eat alone: Why Eating Alone May Be Bad for You Don’t eat while watching TV: The Danger of Eating in Front of the TV Finances: Use credit cards for travel rewards Shopping portals – some opportunities to earn 4-10x more points Earny: a price drop protection app Feex.com: finds hidden fees in your investment accounts Update: Brad is working to establish a scholarship for a Treehouse student to learn coding, in partnership with Every Child’s Hope. Winner of the ticket to CampFI in Joshua Tree: Danielle!   Links: The Simple Path to Wealth Design Your Future Freelance to Freedom

Andrew, Aiden, Fabeku, and Jonathan are back with a surprise or two coming your way this episode. We start by catching up, and discussing the events of the past couple of months and end with some amazing questions from our listeners! Check out our past 2 episodes if you haven't yet. Full episodes and ways to connect with the skulls can be found in the links below. *EXPLICIT EPISODE ALERT* Click here to listen to the first chat by Stacking Skulls. Click here to listen to our most recent one.  If you'd like to learn more and sign-up for the Ancestral Magick Course, click here. Find the Stacking Skulls Shirts, and all other types of merch here. If you are interested in supporting this podcast though our Patreon you can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for listening! If you dig this please subscribe and share with those who would like it. Andrew   If you are interested in booking time with Andrew either in Toronto or by phone or Skype from anywhere click here. ANDREW: So, there are two quick things I want to share with everybody before this podcast gets going. The first being, Stacking Skulls now has shirts. That's right: they are on my website. If you go into the product section, you'll see a section for shirts. Or you can just search for Stacking Skulls and you will find them. And secondly, we spent a lot of time talking about ancestors in this course, and coincidentally, or perhaps synchronously, I am running my ancestral magic course, which is an opportunity for everybody to learn some brand new divination tools that I have created so that they can build a tighter relationship with their ancestors, either known or unknown, and start to learn to work some magic with them. So, if you're interested about that, jump over to TheHermitsLamp.com and slide over to the events page, and you'll find it. Without further ado, Stacking Skulls, my friend. [music] Welcome to the podcast, folks. Just to give you a heads up before we start: there were some technical issues with Jonathan's microphone. We've trimmed them and cut it, so it flows, but if you run into anything strange, that would be what was happening. [music] Hey world! We're back: Stacking Skulls. This is the magnificent first show of 2018 with all four of us wonderful wizards in the same place. Thanks for tuning in again. And, if you have not listened to the previous rounds of shenanigans, you may want to go back and do so, or you may want to bypass that entirely. I'll leave that in your hands. You know? But there are two previous episodes or installments of myself, Aidan Wachter, Fabeku, and Jonathan Emmett, and you know, we've gotten together a few times and talked about some things, so I'm going to kind of lead us off, though, with our kind of starting point thing, which is, like, hey folks, what's new in the last three months since we last all hung out together? JONATHAN: I had a microphone up my butt. [laughter] ANDREW: Excellent. Now, the explicit tag! JONATHAN: Next, Aidan's turn. [laughter] AIDAN: You know, this has been like the craziest three months ever. Right after we recorded the last time, my son died, and that was a really huge and transformative thing. And it's hard to describe it anyway, but...there is like a massive massive hole there and loss there, but it was also incredibly beautiful. We were able to get him home from the hospital, so that he died in his back yard, with a bunch of friends and family around. It was easily the most magical and beautiful thing that I've ever seen. And then, I had surgery. And now I'm pretty much recovered from that. And playing catch-up in the shop after those two things, and as of last night I'm now a double grandfather, as Ash's partner, Desi, just had twins last night. And they're beautiful, everybody's good! ANDREW: That's amazing. Yeah. Whenever I've gone through big losses in my life, you know, like two of my brothers died within six weeks of each other... AIDAN: Whoa. ANDREW: And, I always find myself at those times, in, like this sort of liminal space, right? You know? Like where I just sort of end up where I'm like, I feel like I'm constantly in ceremony for some period of time afterwards. And surgery does that, and, you know, I mean, for me, having kids, I don't have any grandkids, but having kids did that. Do you feel like you're still kind of in that, that kind of space? Are you like, sort of living 24/7 in there, or...? AIDAN: It's really wild, because, I think in the last episode, we talked about that I have these kind of death spirits that I've been hanging out with for a couple of years now. And in the week that I think I talked about, how they've gotten really busy, leading up into it. And so, that had become this, like, every night crazy kind of spirit initiations with these kind of hive beings that their thing is death, that I call the sisters. And so, when he, when I found out that his heart had stopped, that they had him on life support, I went in and they were totally waiting for me, and so it was very odd, cause they'd clearly been setting me up for this thing, for a couple of weeks. And so, I went straight in to go find him, where he was, kind of stuck in between, and assist from there. And so, the combination of all of that and then actually flying out, I guess two days before he was, we actually removed him from life support, and going through that process there, it's the most complete thing that's kind of a major event that's happened to me, as far as kind of fully self-contained in a way, of anything that I've ever experienced. So it's very odd, cause in many ways, I just feel really really good, you know, and I'll get hit at points, you know when I've been doing work for Desi and for his babies, there'll be these moments that are very very sad, but it's really just about, I know how much he would have liked to have watched the thing, and met them in the flesh and done that whole thing, that was really important to him, but what I feel like is this huge shift. You know, you have those moments in your life when you can feel like the cogs in the wheels of the machine are always turning, right? And to me, we're always trying to like, smooth that out and gauge where it's going and gauge what the next configuration is going to be. And this feels, in a really crazy way, like it's the smoothest kind of complete snap of things. So that's really what I have more than it being anything else. And like, just mass clarity. So there has been a huge amount of work going on, but it's really been, like there's a ton of stuff that, I don't need that anymore, I don't need to think about that any more, let's do the work to finish that piece off. About things from my childhood, and, you know, social dynamics, magical dynamics, all that stuff. There's been a lot going on, definitely. But so far, it's, you know, it's weird to say, in that situation, that everything seems really good. But it does. ANDREW: Yeah. I mean, it's certainly my experience of... Well, it's one of the reasons for the practice, right? You know? Whether that's Fabeku's The Practice, trademarked, or whether it's just having a practice, right? AIDAN: Yeah. ANDREW: I mean, you know, I think that there are... Ideally we get to these places where there's grief, there's loss, there's whatever, right? And there's the hole, and there's the absence of that person from experiences, and the feelings that come from that, right? But then there's also this capacity to be like, I find myself at various points thinking, other people seem like they feel like I should be way more upset about this... AIDAN: Yeah.... ANDREW: ...than I am, and I have this sort of very deep grounded position around it, where it's not avoidance or denial, cause it's actually almost like a hyper level of looking at it so squarely that it becomes easier to accept it, or to recognize it, and to see the ways in which that is, as you say, maybe that, the moving of the cogs, the machinery of the universe, the inevitability of some kind of fate force or, or just something that is just beyond our control at this point, either way, whether it was destiny or not, you know. AIDAN: Yeah. And I think, yeah, that in spades, and it's really interesting, because it's also, and I'm sure that all of you have had this experience, that we do all this work, kind of in these liminal states, or... ceremonial work or ritual work, not in a ceremonial magic sense necessarily, but just the work dealing with spirit, and dealing with the universe at large, what I call the field, and periodically, there are things that happen that really make you realize you haven't done your work in some places? [laughs] ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: That you're like, “Oh! That smashed me!” Right? And I've had a good number of those. This was the reverse of that. This was like, I got the news about him, I went in, the allies that I work with were like, really sweet, and like, okay, you now know what we've been up to with you, let's go do it, you know? He's here, he's stuck. Let's fade him. And that's the most beautiful thing that I've ever experienced. And to me, it is, it is the, yeah, you can do money magic, you can do attraction magic, you can do whatever, but to me it's that: How is the work assisting your reality in the actual reality that you're in? ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: And this was totally solid. ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: And it remains totally solid. And I feel like at least the people that I've dealt with closely that were close to him all get that, in a way that I've never seen around someone's death before. And I think it is people who were doing the work, and who are... I have this knowledge that I've had since I was a kid, that I kind of realized what historical life expectancy of humans was, and the numbers that even got anywhere close to there, and what infant mortality rates and childhood mortality rates are, and so since I was a little kid, I've had that knowledge of that. Like, this is a totally iffy thing. You don't get to stay, and you don't get to pick when you leave, and far more leave sooner than later. You know? ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And, I've had that. I was in San Francisco, at the kind of height of the AIDS wipeout there, and so that's also, I think, you know, at an early age, I lost a lot of people. And so, it was really interesting seeing this, and going like, this is the most okay I've ever been about having somebody cross over. But I think that that's really tied into the work that I've been doing for the last five or ten years. That I could actually be there with it as it was, and go, okay! This is, me, it doesn't matter what I want here, I'm irrelevant in this situation, so... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: I would help the process that's actually happening, to happen in the way that it's supposed to, you know? But yeah. That's what I've been up to. [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah. Well. It's affirming to hear you talk about it. Do you know what I mean? AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Because, because I think that there are lots of ways in which, especially certain kinds of conversations around magic can feel sort of superficial and transitory, whereas this sort of, the deep work of, I don't know what you would call it, elevating oneself, healing oneself, harmonizing with that universal, the cogs of the universe or whatever, you know, I mean, to me that work has always been the most important work, but it is, except, you know, except when you lose a wheel, you don't notice it, right? Like there's no way to really sort of see it in action, and then when you see it, you're like, “yeah, it's so good that I practiced all that driving with three wheels, cause, one just came off, and now I can stop safely and put something else on there and see what happens next, you know?” So. AIDAN: Right. Well and I think it also syncs into that concept that kind of connects to a question that we had that, in passing, which is this kind of, there is this direct relationship in my mind from what we now are viewing, the pieces that we can see of it, anthropologically, as shamanism, right, which is this, to me, this epic chain, of shamanism and magic and sorcery and whatever you want to call it, spirit work, that goes back as far as we go back. And I think that this kind of thing is the root of it, you know, it's about... The reasons for all the kind of death mysteries are not because there's some way out of it! [laughs] ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: It's just, this is a reality that is the most prevalent reality other than the birth one, right? And that's that, the wild thing about this to me is that, you know, he's gone now three months almost exactly, and his children are now here as of yesterday. And I think they're going to have a really... They have a fantastic mom, who has a fantastic network of people, and I think they're going to have really fantastic lives, and yeah, there'll be that piece that they didn't get, but he's like, he's an epic, mythic creature for anybody who kind of has watched this, it's like, and I don't know that that's a benefit or a drawback, to grow up with that! [laughs] Without getting to see some of the grungier sides of it as a kid. Yeah. But, they're going to be special people. They've got special people all around them. ANDREW: Yeah. JONATHAN: You know, I was kind of thinking, while you were talking there, it kind of makes you wonder if he had to leave so that they could be born, in a way. I mean, just, the surrounding, everything surrounding the situation of how it just kind of happened, it really was no warning of any sort or anything, I mean it just kind of happened. It just, it makes you wonder, you know? I think about weird stuff like that. But it does kind of feel like he had to go so they could be here. You know, it's kind of a change of energy or exchange of... the... AIDAN: Mmmhmm. No, I totally, you know, it's one of those things that again, we never get to have those answers in any… JONATHAN: Right. AIDAN: …definable way, but the thing that I saw, through the time that I was out there when he was in the hospital and then when we brought him home, and had, I don't know, there must have been 20 or more of us in the back yard with him... …Was, you could see the transformation happening on all of those people. While it was happening, I was like, either you could see that there was a way in which this thing was a huge gift to all those people, to see someone's death happening and it being processed by the people close to them into my mind, the most beautiful way that you could hope for, you know? JONATHAN: When I was 12, I think I was 12, I was pretty young, anyway, my grandfather, loved this man dearly, he was just one of the coolest guys in the world. He taught shop in east Wichita, in, you know, some of the toughest parts of town, and he was Native American to top it off, so you know he probably didn't get treated very well, but he was just such a good man, it was hard for me to let him go, but… I was 12, and he had a death rattle, and I don't know if people are familiar with... It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's not pretty to listen to... And I remember my parents left, and I was just there in the room with him by myself, and our preacher at the time, she wasn't really a preacher, more of a spiritual leader, came by and we were talking, and he started having the death rattle again, and she went to get a nurse and he died. And that was my first experience with death, at such a young age, and it was... It didn't devastate me, like, "oh, I saw somebody die, now my world's over," it was just, it was kind of fascinating, but you know, it broke my heart, because it was my grandfather. So, I kind of understand that, I mean, it's an interesting process to watch someone actually leave [static] you know and that was [static] on several... AIDAN: You're breaking up... ANDREW: Yeah, turn off, your microphone's suffering from what you've done to it, it's going in and out, my friend. JONATHAN: Is it? I broke it. AIDAN: In and out! I see how it is. JONATHAN: How's that? [laughs] ANDREW: It's good. JONATHAN: So, I should keep my microphone out of my butt. Anyway... ANDREW: Let's [laughs], on the segue of Jonathan's problematic microphones, what's going on with you, Fabeku? FABEKU: Yeah, it was... it's been kind of an interesting few months, you know, it was holiday stuff, and you know, weird, I'm not, I don't love holidays anyway, but this one was a little weird. You know, my mom's getting older, and has some health stuff going on and that's been...not so great, and with that, there's some weird cognitive stuff that's starting to happen, and I think it's interesting, cause I was relating in a different way to what Aidan was talking about with... You know, it's been interesting to kind of look at that cycle of her, she's in her eighties, and, you know, kind of getting to that phase where things are becoming kind of difficult and problematic, and it's interesting, kind of watching the other people around her, and kind of their stuff that's happening with that, and you know, the kind of the... the sadness, which I get, but kind of the panic and the fear and the weirdness and that kind of thing... Had a chance to talk with her a little bit in the busyness of the holidays, just kind of where she's at, and it was interesting, like she, she mostly felt okay with things, until everybody started freaking out, and then she got kind of fucked up and worried about it, and you know, so we talked a little bit about that, kind of managing other people's shit, and you know, we talked about ancestor stuff, and it's interesting, cause she, I mean, her background couldn't be any more different than mine in some ways. She grew up in a super religious Pentecostal home and music was "of the devil" and, you know, all of that kind of stuff, so, we have pretty different philosophical takes on things, but, yeah. We, it was a good conversation, we got to talk about the ancestors and kind of crossing in a good way and being met by the ancestors and you know, I, we talked about kind of my practices with that a little bit, and I asked if she was all right with me kind of working with the ancestors to, you know, kind of do what they need to do so when it's her time, you know, it can be as smooth of a transition as possible and, you know, it's again, like this is, it's a weird conversation to have with somebody. But to me, like we've been talking about, this is why we do this work, you know, I'm all for money magic, I'm all for all of this other stuff, that's fantastic, and, you know, when there's giant life shit like this, yeah, these are the moments when I feel really super grateful that we do what we do, and we have this stuff available to us. You know for me, it, I was thinking about this a few days ago, how these practices become, at least for me, these shock absorbers. You know? It's not that it prevents shit from happening, but when it happens, it allows us to stay more oriented and more coherent than we would be otherwise, and, you know, then if that extends out to the people around us, then we can help them get or maintain a better sense of coherence and orientation, and that's a pretty remarkable thing, to me. ANDREW: I think it's such a significant point of view, right? Because so many people lose faith because they do stuff, religiously or spiritually or magically or whatever, and then some life thing comes along and they're like, “why did this not get prevented?” Right? You know? And then they falter because of that, right? You know? Like I remember, a day and a half before my second brother passed away, I was divining with the Orishas, right? And I came on this really bad sign, right? Basically, a sign of unexpected things and tragedies that shake your whole world all the way down to your foundations, right? And so, I did what I do when stuff like that shows up. I basically called all the people who are important, you know? And I knew that he was going through a hard time, and so I called him, and I was like, "dude, come to my house, come over here, you know, I know you're out doing whatever, but, like, come over here, you know, after work, come over here, I'll come pick you up, come over here," right? And he decided not to, you know? And then that, ultimately, that decision that he made led to his passing, you know? And you know, there are these flags that I think that are there that warned that something's coming, right? You know? Like, gird your loins, put on your armor, get ready, shit's going to get shaken up, but it's rarely ever as clear cut as anything else, and to me that doesn't diminish my faith in these processes, because the warnings and the advices of that reading carried me through that time in a way that I could have been, it could have been so much worse for me, without that, you know? So. Yeah. AIDAN: Yeah. It was interesting, when I went out to Athens, I took out a deck of cards that I had just got and decided I was going to take that with me, to be my thing, and I'm not a big diviner, I don't, if I do a reading a week, that's a lot for me. And, as I was moving through, whether this was on the plane, or off by myself getting dinner at some point, and there was a sum process coming up, I would ask the cards to show me what would help me. ANDREW: Hmm. AIDAN: It would give me these readings that I would interpret in some particular way, at that moment, and I would invariably be completely wrong, but having that information in my head, and expecting things to go a particular way, was like the most perfect "assistance" I could ever get, which was what I basically had asked for. I didn't say, "what's actually going on?", I said, you know, "what should I have in my head, or in my mind, going into this situation," and they would give me something, and that was an incredibly useful tool, it was very, it wasn't accurate to what events actually happened, but it was totally dead accurate to what attitude I should approach each of those situations with. And so, I do think it's very interesting, that, I talk a lot about the biggest issue with magic is our kind of limited perceptual abilities. It's like... And when we're first starting out, that can seem like we're totally disabled until you kind of figure out how it works for you, you know. But I totally see that side of it. It's becoming more able to communicate or understand communication, even if it's not perfect. FABEKU: Yeah, I think that's an interesting point. I think that, you know, I, to me, that goes along with this thing that, cause I, I do divine a lot, like that's kind of one of my things, and I think since starting that, well, since starting it and fucking up a lot and misunderstanding and misapplying things, since then, my thing has been, how do I continue to expand my bandwidth for this connection and this communication, whatever it is, particularly around blind spots, things I don't want to see, difficult news, outcomes that aren't what I want, you know, times that I've misunderstood something and then shit goes totally sideways from that, you know, how do I expand my ability to stay connected and stay in communication when those things are happening? Because to me that's when it really matters, right? I think that… AIDAN: Yeah, absolutely. FABEKU: You know, if just suddenly, if we use that bandwidth and it goes dark, what then? So, for me, it's, you know, how do we, how do we keep that capacity as full and accessible as we can, when we really need it? You know. I think that's, it's not easy, but I think that's pretty critically important work. AIDAN: Yeah. ANDREW: Yeah, that's kind of, you know, I used to do a lot of readings about life and the future and whatever, and I still do when I'm planning and stuff like that, but, like, my regular readings, which are like, maybe two or three times a week these days, are: How do I keep myself in the zone? How do I get back to the zone? How do I move out of this sort of out of sorts-ness that I'm feeling back to being centered and grounded and aligned? You know? AIDAN: Yeah! ANDREW: And that's like, essentially the question, as much as there is a question, right? That's the question, and that's always the question. It's not really about anything else or anybody else or whatever, it's like, what do I do internally, to, you know, to be in, like, full on mode today, or as close to full on mode as possible, you know? AIDAN: Mmmhmm. FABEKU: Yeah. I get that. I like that, that idea of, you know, what do I need to do to stay aligned? And I think that's the thing, I think a lot of times it does come down to asking better questions, right? Because I think probably the last significant experience I had with that, about a year and a half ago, I had surgery, and, it was supposed to be, kind of a not, I mean kind of a big deal but not a big deal, and, you know, before I did some divinations with it, a couple of people did some divinations for me, everything was fine, all good, in and out, easy peasy, don't sweat it— That's not at all how it went, right? Everything that could have gone wrong did, and then some, and it was crazy. It was, it went sideways in ways that really could have been incredibly catastrophic beyond what it was, and as I was in the hospital thinking about this, you know, I think it could have been easy to, like you said, Andrew, get pissed or kind of lose faith, that wait, I read this, and other people read this, and everything was supposed to be fine, and I almost fucking died, like what's the deal? ANDREW: Yeah. FABEKU: But instead where I landed with this is, what if I had asked different questions? What if I had asked better questions? Instead of, you know, "what's the outcome of the surgery?" but instead like you're saying, "how do I navigate this?” You know, “what do I need to do to move through this in an aligned way?" That would have been a different thing, and I think it would have been infinitely more useful to me, in that moment, than the questions that I had asked on the front end, because I was super anxious about it, and so I think that led me to asking questions that were, I think, reasonable, but probably not the smartest and most helpful questions that I could have asked. ANDREW: The "tell me it's all going to be okay" reading… FABEKU: For sure, absolutely. ANDREW: ...Is 100 percent human and like we all do it, right? Like, but yeah, there's a lot more to kind of say, than that, maybe? And, I also think though, like, you know, when you, one of the things that happens when you divine, with, like, the Orishas and stuff is, in many situations we ask if the reading is closed now, are we done, right? But we don't say, like, is this perfect? You know, we don't say whatever. We say a phrase that essentially translates to "has everything that needs to be said been said?" Right? Or "has everything that can be said been said?" Right? And it's like, that's it, right? Did we miss anything? No, we covered it all? Okay. And then beyond that, it's inherently not part of the conversation or it couldn't have been part of the conversation, you know, and that's an awkward thing to accept in the beginning for people, I think, right? FABEKU: For sure. ANDREW: They want perfection of their spirit. FABEKU: Yeah. AIDAN: I think it also sinks in, there's a, I think it's at the end of Njáls saga, there's this really incredibly graphic vision of the Valkyries as the weavers of fate, and they're weaving in bloody intestines, with like a head as the weight, and spears as the shuttle rods, and beating it with spears, and this is after this whole book of lots of really violent death. And one of the things that I got from that was that they're really saying like, you know, our obsession with fate as humans is always about the survival of the body. We try and, you know, unless we really move to somewhere else, and they were basically saying, this is all blood and guts, here in the body. This is where it goes for everybody, right? And so, I do think that that approach that both would be given that you were talking about Andrew is, it's what I'm learning with divination, is, that's where I get good help, is: “Yeah, show me the face that I would put forward to walk through this next room?” ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: And I get really good information that's hard to describe, but, oh, yeah, I know that guy, right? You get used to your visitors in the cards, and you go, I know that guy, I know who I am when I'm that guy, and so I can try and approach this, like...that guy. Or I can look for that woman. Like who's fulfilling that role? And then I'll listen to them. You know, it's usually, it's very frequently that the cards tell me that I should pay attention to the next thing that my wife says more than I might want to. [laughter] ANDREW: That's the challenge of living with an oracle, right? AIDAN: [laughs] Absolutely! ANDREW: Yeah. FABEKU: Well, and I think what's interesting about the conversation is that when we move to the place where we're asking questions that are beyond our own sort of vantage point or unlimited concerns, and I think we open it up to get answers that not only come from that place but that can move us past those places, right? If my focus is only, “okay, tell me everything's going to be okay,” that's a very brief and kind of limited conversation. But, “how do I navigate this?” That moves me past that, and I think it makes us available to the inside perspective, ideas, whatever it is, that we're not going to get if we're asking those questions that are more limited and kind of in the box. ANDREW: Yep. Well, and let's be honest, from the point of view of the universe, the sun going supernova is okay, right? FABEKU: [laughing] Exactly! ANDREW: It's all okay, there are other suns, there are other universes, there are other whatever... FABEKU: Right. Yeah. AIDAN: When I was going through a super rough spot, about ten years ago, my mom sent me a card that I always loved that said "everything will be okay in the end; if it's not okay, it's not the end!" [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: I mean totally, like yeah, it's okay, you knew you weren't going to stay here, so what's the issue? ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Absolutely. Well, you know, it's interesting, I mean, so, in thinking about what I might want to share about kind of what's been going on for me in the last stretch of time, it's interesting how thematic it all is, right? So, one of the big things of my last year, was my mom had surgery, she had her hip replaced back in August, and then she, three days later, fell and shattered her femur, right? And so, in December, she went home after spending four and a half or five months or whatever it was in various facilities kind of getting tuned up, you know? And, so it's been this journey of like watching her go through these things and, you know, watching her go through these things, where it's like, you know, she's no spring chicken, she's my mom, so she's got a few years on me, and it's like, this could be the end, this could be the moment, right, and kind of as we were talking about sitting with that squarely and trying to look at the real reality of these situations… So, you know, that's been going on, and then the other thing that has been sort of flowing with me a lot, is you know, Saturn and its retrogrades, and its switching into Capricorn, and all of this astrological energy that's been going on has been something that I've been really feeling intensely. You know, I mean, over the last while, for sure, being a Sagittarius, and you know, it's now left my sign and so on, but also, this transition to Capricorn, whereas other times I've been like, “aaah, I don't like you Saturn, you've fucked me a lot,” this time I was like, you know what, I was listening to, I think it was Austin Coppock and Gordon White talk about it, and he was just like, throwing out lists of things that are positive in this kind of placement stuff. And he talked about, like, the dead, and stuff, and I was like, yeah, that's really where I need to kind of sit with my energy, you know, and step more into working with that and living with that and feeling that, you know? And it's just very, it's a carry-over of all of these things we've been talking about, right? It's kind of taking ownership of my relationship with the dead and with death itself, but with the dead more so, and how foreign that is to kind of almost anybody else that I know, you know what I mean, like, even people I know who are mediums, I feel like, I feel like often it's not quite the same. You know, I was writing about it one time, a while ago, and I was like, what is a good word for the magic that comes from a deep love and devotion to the dead, and from their reciprocal love that comes from there? You know, and I don't have a good word for that, but, you know, there's just something very particular about what's going on these days. Later today, as part of kind of culminating a work that I started at that transition of Saturn into Capricorn, I'm going to sort of finish making the shrine pieces that I started consecrating then, so that I can continue to do this work and stuff, but it's very apropos of this conversation, right? This sort of life and real like life and death stuff, right? You know, and, kind of like our conversation, I might go to this work for prosperity and I might go to this work for other things, but it's really about living continuously in some form of connection and awareness of that mystery, and sort of constantly honoring that mystery, cause ultimately it's one we'll all be initiated into, but yet it can also be such a source of power and life while we're alive, too. So. AIDAN: Yeah. ANDREW: Yeah. FABEKU: Yeah, you know, as you're talking about that, it reminds me, and I feel this a lot, and I don't think I had words for it until I just heard you talk about what you did, but when I'm doing magic, especially certain kinds, again, especially work with the ancestors, there's this intimacy to it, right? It's like it feels like there's this very direct, intimate, uniquely personal at the same time kind of big and cosmic intimacy that's happening through this interface, right? It's like this direct interaction with these things that are really at the core of being human. Again sure, you know, money, sex, relationships, attraction, all of that, human, right, but if you strip all of that away, the end of it, there's life and there's death and there's love. Right? That's what's there. And when we're engaged in these practices where we're working at that foundational level, there's this incredible profound intimacy to it that I think is pretty remarkable. Yeah, and I don't think I had the words for that until I just listened to you talk, Andrew. AIDAN: That's one of those... And that's an interesting thing, I was doing work with Fabeku the last two years, where this thing, this kind of connection with the dead and communion with the dead and being a part of this structure of these, like the creatures that I, or the beings that I met, the allies, the sisters. Where the thing that happened right before Ash died was that they basically brought me into their thing, like they really are, I don't know if I have a better description, they're a collective, but I think of them as like hive beings. And, when they brought me in, the thing that was so interesting was that from their perspective, how beautiful this stuff is, that they're like, “yeah, you guys do this other thing, in between when you're dead,” but it's this transition in and out of when you're dead that has got all of this potency and all of this beauty and where you don't have all of the, this kind of weight of inculturation on you… ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: ... was how I interpreted how they were kind of running through me. And I think that that has to have been a more normal perspective that somehow, we kind of, and maybe this is just as we kind of figured out how to not lose half of the children or something, you know, and we're raising an expectation that barring something weird, you make it to a reasonable age or something. My sense is that if you're in a whatever kind of hunter-gatherer tribal thing, that vision of death has to be so different than the one that we carry now in 2017 America, and that's a bit of what I've felt has been going on with me the last couple of years as well, has been this really strong connection to this, like this is the, it's a thing I don't think I could teach much about, you know, but... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: ...it's the most important aspect of what I do, I think, is like... ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: I go into and spend time in, and they show me all these things that I genuinely have no words for, but that are really natural normal things. Yeah, it's fascinating. ANDREW: I had this dream, oh, maybe six months ago, where I was up on this high mountain range, like maybe in the Himalayas or somewhere, and I was in a graveyard, and there were these three eternal beings that were there. And I was there because, in the dream, because I wanted to be initiated into their mystery and under- and know what they know. And they basically said, “well, you've come all this way, all you have to do is give us the sacrifice, and we'll initiate you.” And then, what they asked me for was to surrender everything that I have ever known, or everything that I knew, and get rid of it. And then they would welcome me into their mysteries. And in the dream, I reached into my body and drew out this little blue box that was the sum total of all of my knowledge and knowing, and I gave it to them, or put it on the earth, and they accepted it and then proceeded into the dream further, so. I think that there are these really, places that inherently transcend our knowing, right? Or at least our knowing in a conventional sense, for sure. Well, so, we did as we usually do--oh hey! [musical entrance] AIDAN: Streaker! JEN: Hey! [laughter] JONATHAN: That felt dirty. ANDREW: So, for those people listening-- JONATHAN: Put your clothes on, Jen! ANDREW: We were chatting and joking around in the chat room about Jen streaking through our performance here, and I thought, how funny would it be, to have Jen just jump in for a minute. So, hey Jen, what's going on? JEN: Hey! FABEKU: Hey, Jen! Holy shit. JEN: Yeah... AIDAN: Awesome to see you. JEN: Good to see you guys too. ANDREW: Yeah! So, we've just been talking about death and super heavy stuff for like a long time, so what's going on, what have you got, you were going to bring a question in. JEN: Well, there was one question I had for Aidan. It started on his little request for questions, but it was about, like any advice or stories working with plant or animal allies. I see a lot of things sort of being appropriated of, you know, my spirit animal is this, my power animal is that, and it makes me wonder, like, you know, did you choose that because you happened to like that animal, or what? you know and so maybe just stories about your experiences with this way of working. AIDAN: Mmmhmm. Well I have two that are kind of relevant, and the first one is from a long time ago. And my girlfriend and I were up at Mount Shasta where many weird things have happened for me, and this was early on in my meditation practice and I was probably, I think I was 20. And it was super beautiful, we were up in the meadow up on the mountain, and I just went and found a rock out in the sun and sat down. It was sitting kind of like, this was before I could sit full lotus, so somehow crosslegged with my hands on my knees, and I'm sitting there, and I space out, and I can feel like this pull, in like two totally different directions, I've got my eyes closed, and I couldn't kind of translate what was up about this pull in two different directions and what, when I opened my eyes, I looked down, and one of my hands, and I don't remember which one any more, has like five of these big blue butterflies on it, and the other one has maybe 25 flies on it. There's like no cross-mingling. They're not doing anything. They're just hanging out. And I must have spent a half hour with them and they never switched places and nobody ever left until I was gone. And they were, all of the other butterflies that you could see were collecting all the salt and sweat off my skin, I couldn't really tell what the flies were doing. And I've never known anything other than that, it was just, this was this thing that happened. And it was one of those events that changed things, as most of the Shasta events did for me. And then, I think, I don't know, I mean, I laugh at my spirit at the kind of idea of spirit animals because my deep ties into non-asatru kind of freaky shamanic Odin stuff have me always and always have had me working with wolves and ravens. Which are like, super cool, right? And so you go, that's just bullshit, if I was viewing them as power animals. But as you know, cause you've got the book, there are these forms that I've learned over time to shift into in the trance world, and they just allow me to have different perceptions of what's going on. And so, that's my main experience with it is that I have these shapes that I can shift into, that like if I'm getting freaked out by something, if I move into the kind of raven shape, its perspective of what's going on is utterly different than mine. It doesn't have this human view, it doesn't have human concerns, and the same thing with that kind of wolf form, and this has kind of been breeding a lot in the last year or so, where, I'm not necessarily anything like a human now when I'm in the other spaces. And it just allows a lot of freedom that is lacking other times. But I don't have, yeah, the whole idea of the spirit animal thing, I don't really get that, I don't know what that is. But I think you can work with those shapes or at least I can work with those shapes. In ways that are very beneficial. ANDREW: I don't really, I mean I also don't really work with animals in that kind of way, or maybe I do and just my way of talking about it doesn't line up so that I recognize what other people are talking about as being the same but maybe it is the same. But you know for me there are these things that happen that are really significant, you know, and so I was out in the woods and this albino turkey came out of the woods. Completely white, right? And like it came out, it hung out, and we were like sort of five feet from each other and we sort of had this exchange where aside from where I was like, "holy shit, this is a really weird bird, what is going on here?", once I settled in and figured out what it was... 'Cause it was really big, right? Turkeys are not small animals, right? Especially later in the summer, right? And I was just like, oh, what's going on, and so I connected with that very intensely and then there was another time when I saw an albino porcupine and that was very intense, and then the only thing that ever sort of segues into me feeling sort of more a lasting connection with them versus sort of like a message connection is, I had this dream that everybody was freaking out because there were fishers in the woods, which are these sort of wild and ferocious animals, you know, they're known for like eating cats and other stuff and are considered fairly dangerous. They're sort of the honey badgers of our part of the world, right? JEN: [laughs] ANDREW: And in the dream, I was like, don't worry, they won't bother me, and I went out and I just sat down and this albino fisher came out of the woods and curled up in my lap and sat there and we just hung out. And then a few weeks later, somebody who knew nothing about the dream gave me a fisher skull, and so, it's one of the few skulls that I keep around to stack. But you know... AIDAN: [laughs] ANDREW: But even that became part of work that I do with another spirit, which is actually the spirit of a person who has passed on and it's sort of, there's a connection there, it's sort of an avatar of that person, as opposed to necessarily being the animal in and of itself, so. JONATHAN: I actually got my spirit animal from a-- can you guys here me now? ALL: Yeah. JONATHAN: I actually got my-- I was named, and was told at the time what my spirit animal was, by a Lakota Sioux medicine woman. So that's my lineage on that, and I've had that verified by people that didn't know me, later in life, of the total number of people that I walk with, the spirit that I walk with, and the animals that are around, so I kind of believe what she says, you know. I work with him a lot, and not really, kind of like what Aidan was saying, really ask him to do things or handle things for me that I can't, or that I don't know how to handle. Or to work with me on shapeshifting and stuff like that; however, ironically, I laughed when Aidan said wolves and ravens, 'cause I do the same thing with both wolves and ravens, is I do a lot of shapeshifting with ravens because of their perspective is higher than mine, so I can see it from a different level. And it's just fucking fun, so, that's just kind of my, that's how I've always kind of worked with animals, it wasn't really so much as they guiding me but kind of just walking together, now, just kind of living life and learning from them, 'cause they have so much information, if people can actually just do it. [laughs] Did you know that wolves can talk? [?] Oh yeah! [?] Hey my door's knocking, hold on. JEN: [laughing] Maybe it's a wolf! ALL: [laughing] JONATHAN: Probably should, tell me to get off the phone... [?] Albino porcupine, you keep your distance! JEN: Right? FABEKU: So, you know, I guess what I would add to it, I think, I get what you mean, Jon, when you're saying things get a little appropriated at times. I think really what I would say, this to me goes to the necessity to do our work and to deal with our own shit, I think in any of these practices, 'cause, I think for me, some of the pieces that feel problematic around this, they're, when I hear people talk about it, it feels very utilitarian in a way that the element of relationship seems missing, right? It's kind of like the way people would talk about a tool. Like, you know, I'm gonna do this with a hammer and I'm gonna do this with my spirit animal, and I get that, and I mean listen, people start where they start and it's fine but I think that you know, for me, it becomes problematic when we look at these things as tools or objects, right? Like for me it really is like, where's the relationship? how do I more clearly relate to them? And I feel like if we relate to them as things or tools then I think at best it's a really limited thing and at worst it's probably I think it moves us into almost working with some kind of distortion or echo of the actual thing, right, because we're not really, there's not a clear and real relationship happening, so I think the utilitarian thing is weird and I think the other element of doing the work is, you know, I think that, I know a lot of people that have come to these practices as ways of filling holes in themselves, and maybe not so consciously, so the fact that everybody seems to have an eagle as a totem, and kind of the same way that like in a past life everybody was a king or a queen or whatever the fuck. It's like yeah, probably not... JEN: Cleopatra, usually, always good! FABEKU: So I think, it's like... ANDREW: Jonathan Emmett was the one true Cleopatra, so we know that everyone else... FABEKU: That's been covered, right? But I think the thing is that if we don't deal with those gaps and those holes and that shadow and that pain and we end up filling them with things that are probably not accurate or not really there, and then we start basing a whole lot of shit on top of it, and to me that stuff becomes really problematic. So, this, really I guess my contribution would be, you know I think we just have to be conscious of and then clean up our own shit before we drag it into the practice and then start mistaking that for some kind of spiritual or magical reality that it probably is not. So. ANDREW: Yeah. And once we've built some structure up then it's really hard to knock that down. FABEKU: For sure, yeah. ANDREW: ...work at it, right? And so. But. Yeah. AIDAN: Yeah, I think that, that's kind of, to me, if you're working with kind of a spirit view and a spirit world, for me the biggest thing was to just slow the fuck down and like go, okay, if I've got somebody that's talking to me, that's good, I don't need to go hunting for sombody else and I can see, will this person talk to me about other things, or will they introduce me to other things? So even like in the, in my, the main zone that I go to when I'm doing trance work, the allies are like, the first allies that I met are like intermediaries, and they're like, there's stuff that doesn't move around and so, if you don't go to where they are, it doesn't matter how much you call to them, and so if I roll in, and I get the ally that's not being particularly helpful but that's hanging out, it's like, okay, would you like to take me somewhere else? And they're like, finally, dumbass! And then I can follow them and they'll be like, "go into the scary fucking cave," or whatever it is that's going on. And that's the , but that's about time, and depth, but I do think that there's the, or even the idea that I'm going to travel through different space and ask to meet the allies there, that might take a long time. There's a space that I go into now, that's finally opening up, and it's like, this has an animal in it, I forgot about it, and there's this big-assed elk thing, that could give a fuck and a rat's ass about me, and I show up, and it just looks annoyed, like, oh, it's you again. It's like dude, whatever, if you want to open this up a little bit, that'd be cool, and it's like, not now, later. ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: And that to me is the stuff that I get, we've talked about this a little bit before on here, with the four of us, is, if it's all running super smooth and like clockwork, it's probably not super real, Or, there's [inaudible] that's creating myths, 'cause to me, it's like, it just doesn't go that way! And I could be fucked up, I could just be a mess, and... JEN: Well something that motivated my question was in northern California around 2010 I went to a find your power animal workshop, which was a lot of drum trance journeys and when we went in, to find our power animals, I got buried in ivy for 15 minutes, there was nothing, and everybody was having these stories and they were like, yeah, and then this elephant took me to the bottom of the ocean, and a squirrel, and then landed on the back of a tiger, and then we had this unicorn that was in space, and it was like, uh, I was buried in an ivy, with nothing, and they're like you have a power plant! And I was like okay, power plants, and every other journey I was actually working with plant allies and not animals, and I was the only person there, and I was like, and lots of intense things were happening, but it wasn't an animal, it was like, and it surprised me, because everyone had these fantastic creatures, and it was like " I just got the plant kingdom," you know. [cross-talking] FABEKU: What I think's interseting about that, and this is when I talk about, and I talk about it more of like allies or the others, right, because I think that like, the languaging, and we were talking about this earlier in the conversation about the kind of the questions that we bring to divination, like, this is where language becomes problematic, right, because people usually talk about power animals or whatever it is, fine, but there's a million other options for allies, right? Plants, stones, weird alien creatures, that as far as I can tell aren't here, and but when I've had conversations like that with people, sometimes they act really surprised, like what do you mean, there's a plant person that you work with, or a stone person, there are animals! And it's like well, okay, AND... ANDREW: Can't go wrong with a magic space pickle! FABEKU: There we go! I claim that as my ally, the magic space pickle, right? But... ANDREW: Yep. FABEKU: I get that, I think that sometimes we create these kind of needless and unhelpful limitations that really shape our experience because of what we bring to it that okay, I'm going to go meet an ally, and they said power animal so it has to be a power animal, I think that, I don't love that, I think that that stuff gets us super sideways, so when we end up with ivy, we think, what the fuck is happening, right? Like it's somehow a problem that it's really not, so. ANDREW: Yeah. And really like, you know, what if it's burdock, or what if it's, you know, plantain, or what if it's like, some other sort of amazing magical plant that's in your neighborhood that's like the weeds that grow in the driveway in the lane weights, right? That doesn't mean that it's not profound and magical and powerful and a lot of the plants that I work with are, if they're not Afri-Cuban stuff that I'm working with for part of my religious practice, they're predominantly things that grow here or that I grow myself and you know, there's, to me there's some of the most wonderful magic is like being able to go out in my back yard here at the shop and be like, yup, a bit of this, a bit of that, pull this guy's roots, go down to the ravine, dig up a litle of this, grab this out of the swampy spot and next thing you know you've got something good, and I mean I think that there's such a, and not an origin, but there's such a cult around like, mandrake, and like all these sort of, the witch herbs, and I'm like, those don't grow here, those aren't my plants, those aren't part of my orbit, you know, and I remember not so much in recent times but like when I was getting going, kind of having some feels about some of these things that everybody else was doing and working with and I'm like, nah, I don't think so, I think I'm gonna work with the basil some more, I think that plant's really kicking it up for me, and it's like, you know, it doesn't have to be everything else either, right? And ivy's great, right? That stuff overcomes everything, right? That'll rip your bricks apart if you allow it to go too far, right? That's pretty strong. FABEKU: One of my favorite magical plants is kudzu, love it. Never met it until I moved to North Carolina, it was all over the fucking place, and I was totally taken by it. We were driving down the road and I was like, what is that? and the person that we were with was like, "Oh, fuck, it's kudzu, it's terrible, it's this," and I'm like, no, there's something to that plant, and I literally wanted to stop on the side of the road and walk over and just touch the plant to figure out what the fuck was going on. I super dig kudzu for magic stuff. Super dig it. And, I think to get to that place that you're talking about, Andrew, I think that this goes back to we have to clean up our shit, irght? Like if we don't feel like enough and we feel like it has to be big and weird and exotic and flashy, we're not gonna say, I'm working with kudzu! It's gonna have to be mandrake or you know, whatever it is, and so again, like you said, not that those aren't powerful, but if we're led there because there's coherence, cool. If we're led there because we're trying to fill a hole, and mandrake feels like an easier plug for it than dandelion, not great. Right? And I can't believe we're conna end up kind of skewed and sideways as a result of it. and, not only that, but missing some really powerful that otherwise, we could build relationships with these allies and do some pretty amazing work with them, so. AIDAN: I think that that sinks in really kind of beautifully to, yeah, it's like we're enculturated to all sorts of things, just as the nature of being social humans, and so, for some people that's, you know you know, I guess, you know that you are meant to be with the head cheerleader from the time you enter sixth grade, and you know that you are going to have this particular life, which shuts down all of these options, right? And this happens in spiritual practice all the time too. This is to me the kind of beauty of chaos magic and also where it goes horribly awry, is to me the idea of chaos magic is like, you don't have to know where this is going. You don't have to be looking at what happened in the 1800s or in the 1500s or in 900s or in the written record. If this is a natural practice, which is why I dislike the term occultism--occultism seems to me to always be kind of referencing things that are hidden, when I think most of it's like shit that we just forgot how to do. Nobody hid it. But yeah, and then there's just all of this possibility. The most powerful thing that I've been given is this weird little nine sentence charm that changes all the time, and it's peculiar, and it sounds really really witchy, but it's also so retardedly, "The Craft," or something. JEN: Oh my gosh, I want you to say it... AIDAN: I can't take it seriously, right? JEN: [laughing] AIDAN: But it does this beautiful thing, and it's like a joke, I think, from my allies, like they've given me this coded language, like this is how you get from here to here, and every time I go to do it, I'm like, this is so silly, it's like, and it's being open to this stuff, and realizing that these are language systems that we're overlaying upon experience that's not happening in the body in the normal sense, and so doesn't really exist. And so yeah, you go into the other world and you meet the space pickle, why not? Who... You don't think that that didn't happen to somebody before, just because it isn't written down? We've been here for a long fucking time, somebody has had serious relationships with the spirits before. There is no doubt. ANDREW: Lucky, lucky somebodies! JEN: Head cheerleaders! AIDAN: And it's probably Jon... ANDREW: Uh-huh. [laughter] FABEKU: When in doubt... AIDAN: Nice! [laughs] ANDREW: Cool. JEN: Well, thanks for letting me crash your party for a minute; I'll... ANDREW: Thanks for jumping in, Jen! AIDAN: That was awesome! JEN: I'll end my streak now. And let you get back to it... [?]: Whew.... JEN: See you guys later! ANDREW: See ya! AIDAN: See ya! ANDREW: All right, so we have this list of questions here; I feel like some of them we've already kind of touched on. You know, I mean, yeah. So, I guess, KJ Sassypants wants to know, what's the weirdest or wackiest thing that's ever happened to you in a magical or shamanic context? I'm afraid to ask Jon... [laughter] ANDREW: Anyone got anything that you'd like to share? We can't hear you, Jon. Jon, I see you talking, but I don't hear you. [laughter] FABEKU: While he sorts that out, yes, weird, god, where do I start, shit! So, a couple of weeks ago, I did some like hunting tracking magic stuff, right? It was very specifically like had my eyes focused on a very specific target, and -- so for me, after I do work, I'm usually paying attention to , you know, just what's happening in th world, sort of looking for omens and signs and confirmations and things-- and I was sitting at the window, with the cat, looking out, and, all of a sudden... So there's this family of hawks that lives maybe 100 yards across the street-- This was just within a couple of days of doing the magic-- All of a sudden, out of the tree, like a fucking bullet, this hawk flies out and catches some small bird mid-flight and literally rams it into the window that I'm sitting in front of and then flies off back to the tree, right, and I'm like, well, you know, as far as omens for hunting magic go, that's sort of terrifying and pretty rad at the same time, so, um yeah, it's probably not the weirdest, but the most recent bit of weirdness, that's for sure, so. ANDREW: I -- I can't hear you now. AIDAN: Try, Jon. You got it! You're good! JON: That was it? AIDAN: You're good! You got it! JON: Can you hear me now? ALL: Yeah. JON: Okay, was that the question about the paranormal, when I said could I use the paranormal reference? ANDREW: Sure! Use whatever you got! JON: Okay. So the weirdest probably thing, I was doing a reading on a house in Carthage and we've had -- hi, kitty -- we've had some instance of a pretty dark entity -- I don't like to use demonic because I think that's a bad word, and I think it's wrong -- more of just probably not ever human, type entity, anyway. So, we're doing an investigation one night, and we had a group there doing a tour, and I spotted this entity, 'cause it likes to hang out on the stairwell, and, so I'm trying to coax it down and to come talk to me, like I wanted to get it to talk-- well, it did. And pretty much threw me for a loop for about, I don't know, six months. To where I was a little bit off my rocker for about six months. And honestly, the you know I, it engulfed the upper part of my body, to where a person two foot away from me couldn't see me from the waist up. And, I still couldn't tell you what it was. I can tell you that it never was alive, I know that for a fact, I know that it was never in corporeal form of any sort, but yeah, I walked out of the house, I had to get away for a little bit, when it lifted, and I was freed from it, for lack of a better word, I walked outside, and I sat down on the ground, and I tried to ground as best I could ground, but I was not entirely in my body for at least 30 minutes there, but mentally it was a trip for probably about six months. So, it was a little bit of an interesting deal, but what brought me back into my body was kind of a funny story was, there's these big, not cedar trees, juniper trees in the front yard, they're huge, and I put my hand up on the juniper tree and an ant bit me, and that popped me back into my cells, so it was kind of an interesting, interesting ordeal. But yeah, I still couldn't tell you what that thing was. But I'd like to go back and work with it, but the last couple times I've been there, he hasn't shown up. So. ANDREW: Maybe it's following you around, Jon. JON: Boring ass-- ANDREW: What's that behind you? [laughter] JON: No, that's a cat! [laughter] Probably. ANDREW: I mean, so many things, but like, one of the things that I often do is like, if I'm doing certain kinds of cleansings for people, I'll take the tools and pieces that I've used in the cleansing, and I'll take them into the ravine system here, you know, and there are spots where I dispose of that stuff so the spirits that are there, and the earth that's there can just take that back and it can go away, and not just pass on to anybody else, and so, it was frozen, like stuff was frozen when I was there, right? And it was sort of, freezing rain and snow was coming down, and so I went down into the ravine and you know it's like this, we live in a big city, right, so it's like this lit path, and I go off of that and off into the hills and the woods around there a bit, and to the spot where I go and get rid of stuff, or one of the places, and it's all fine, I do the work, it feels fine, and I turn around to leave, and as I'm walking out, this like two dozen white moths emerged from somewhere and followed me, like they were just around me and they just emerged even though it was freezing out, and they followed me as I walked out onto the path and stuff, and they followed me along the path for a ways, before they sort of drifted back off into the woods, and it was one of those things that when they were gone I was like, did I hallucinate that? What's going on? But yeah I took it as the success of the work and the spirit of the forest kind of clearing everything away for me as I was leaving, you know, but... What have you got for us, Aidan? AIDAN: There's a few to pick from, and I'm sorting to see which one is the most acceptable. Um. Yeah, probably my third, I think it's the third kind of major initiation that I had was the summer that Ash was conceived, me and his mom stayed up at a relative of her's house on the lake. And there was a, we stayed in a bedroom that was like the guest bedroom, it was up this stairwell, and this was like a really beautifully made but kind of cabin built place on this lake in Washington State. And we were there for quite a while, but I was out paddling around in the canoe on this little lake and I don't know what i did, but I knew at the point that I did it that I had upset the lake, and this is really a little bit before I got enough into magic to be thinking this way. I had some practices I was doing, but I hadn't kind of developed any world view where this would make sense until after this event, but. In some way I knew that I had pissed off the lake and I had best get home. And t

02:21 - Jonathan: How do you calculate a value price? “The Magic Formula” ROI (Return on Investment) Upwork Agencies and Value Pricing 15:42 - Philip: How do I specialize? Vertical/Horizontal Specialization How do you validate that a vertical is big enough to support your business? The Forktruck Repair Company Invoice Checking Company Example 29:45 - Jonathan: How do you get paid 100% up-front?   Picks The Consulting Pipeline Podcast: The One Thing I've Never Heard Anywhere Else About How to Do a Great Interview (Jonathan) Bomber Jacket Cord Roll (Jonathan) Freeze (Philip)

02:21 - Jonathan: How do you calculate a value price? “The Magic Formula” ROI (Return on Investment) Upwork Agencies and Value Pricing 15:42 - Philip: How do I specialize? Vertical/Horizontal Specialization How do you validate that a vertical is big enough to support your business? The Forktruck Repair Company Invoice Checking Company Example 29:45 - Jonathan: How do you get paid 100% up-front?   Picks The Consulting Pipeline Podcast: The One Thing I've Never Heard Anywhere Else About How to Do a Great Interview (Jonathan) Bomber Jacket Cord Roll (Jonathan) Freeze (Philip)

In this episode, we do a little music-appreciation of Clark's theme and break down the reveal of the starship. We explore Jonathan's background and his parenting.  Finally we look at a deleted scene shared by Costner. Featuring clips with Hans Zimmer, Dylan Sprayberry, Katie Couric & Bryant Gumbel, Diane Lane and Kevin Costner. We touch on the following questions: What does Clark's theme say about the Kents? How does Zimmer relate to Superman? How could the Kents have hidden the ship? Why didn't the government come and take the ship? What kind of access to information did Jonathan have? Why is Jonathan skeptical of the government? Why does Jonathan think the world will fear extraterrestrials? Why did Jonathan tell people to go for the overpass? What is the significance of Kansas State? What cues does Man of Steel take from Superman Earth One? What would Jor-El think of Jonathan? How did Jonathan deal with Clark's emotions? What kinds of values could Jonathan teach Clark as a farmer? Why did they cut Jonathan fishing with Clark? ...and more! Check out more of our new video series. Man of Steel Myths: Metropolis Was Annihilated - YouTube Clark Should Have Used Super Speed - YouTube Web: ManOfSteelAnswers.com Twitter: @mosanswers Subscribe: iTunes / RSS / Stitcher / YouTube Proud member of the Superman Podcast Network! Software Generated Transcript

Speaker: Prof. J. Leonard Abstract: This talk will have two parts. In part one, we will review recent progress in mobile robotics, focusing on the problems of simultaneous mapping and localization (SLAM) and cooperative navigation of mobile sensor networks. The problem of SLAM is stated as follows: starting from an initial position, a mobile robot travels through a sequence of positions and obtains a set of sensor measurements at each position. The goal is for the mobile robot to process the sensor data to compute an estimate of its position while concurrently building a map of the environment. We will present SLAM results for several scenarios including land robot mapping of large-scale environments and undersea mapping using optical imaging sensors. We will also describe work on cooperative navigation for networks of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous sea-surface vehicles (ASVs). In the second part of the talk, we will provide an overview of MIT's entry in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. The goal of this effort was to produce a car that can drive autonomously in traffic. Our team developed a novel strategy for using a large number of many inexpensive sensors, mounted on the vehicle periphery, and calibrated with a new cross-modal calibration technique. Lidar, camera, and radar data streams are processed using an innovative, locally smooth state representation that provides robust perception for real-time autonomous control. A resilient planning and control architecture has been developed for driving in traffic, comprised of an innovative combination of well-proven algorithms for mission planning, situational planning, situational interpretation, and trajectory control. The performance of our system in the NQE and race events will be reviewed, and ideas for future research will be discussed. For more information, see http://grandchallenge.mit.edu Joint work with Seth Teller, Michael Bosse, Paul Newman, Ryan Eustice, Matthew Walter, Hanumant Singh, Henrik Schmidt, Mike Benjamin, Alexander Bahr, Joseph Curcio, Andrew Patrikalakis, Matt Antone, David Barrett, Mitch Berger, Ryan Buckley, Stefan Campbell, Alexander Epstein, Gaston Fiore, Luke Fletcher, Emilio Frazzoli, Robert Galejs, Jonathan How, Albert Huang, Karl Iagnemma, Troy Jones, Sertac Karaman, Olivier Koch, Siddhartha Krishnamurthy, Yoshi Kuwata, Keoni Maheloni, David Moore, Katy Moyer, Edwin Olson, Andrew Patrikalakis, Steve Peters, Stephen Proulx, Nicholas Roy, Daniela Rus, Chris Sanders, Seth Teller, Justin Teo, Robert Truax, Matthew Walter, and Jonathan Williams.

Speaker: Prof. J. Leonard Abstract: This talk will have two parts. In part one, we will review recent progress in mobile robotics, focusing on the problems of simultaneous mapping and localization (SLAM) and cooperative navigation of mobile sensor networks. The problem of SLAM is stated as follows: starting from an initial position, a mobile robot travels through a sequence of positions and obtains a set of sensor measurements at each position. The goal is for the mobile robot to process the sensor data to compute an estimate of its position while concurrently building a map of the environment. We will present SLAM results for several scenarios including land robot mapping of large-scale environments and undersea mapping using optical imaging sensors. We will also describe work on cooperative navigation for networks of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous sea-surface vehicles (ASVs). In the second part of the talk, we will provide an overview of MIT's entry in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. The goal of this effort was to produce a car that can drive autonomously in traffic. Our team developed a novel strategy for using a large number of many inexpensive sensors, mounted on the vehicle periphery, and calibrated with a new cross-modal calibration technique. Lidar, camera, and radar data streams are processed using an innovative, locally smooth state representation that provides robust perception for real-time autonomous control. A resilient planning and control architecture has been developed for driving in traffic, comprised of an innovative combination of well-proven algorithms for mission planning, situational planning, situational interpretation, and trajectory control. The performance of our system in the NQE and race events will be reviewed, and ideas for future research will be discussed. For more information, see http://grandchallenge.mit.edu Joint work with Seth Teller, Michael Bosse, Paul Newman, Ryan Eustice, Matthew Walter, Hanumant Singh, Henrik Schmidt, Mike Benjamin, Alexander Bahr, Joseph Curcio, Andrew Patrikalakis, Matt Antone, David Barrett, Mitch Berger, Ryan Buckley, Stefan Campbell, Alexander Epstein, Gaston Fiore, Luke Fletcher, Emilio Frazzoli, Robert Galejs, Jonathan How, Albert Huang, Karl Iagnemma, Troy Jones, Sertac Karaman, Olivier Koch, Siddhartha Krishnamurthy, Yoshi Kuwata, Keoni Maheloni, David Moore, Katy Moyer, Edwin Olson, Andrew Patrikalakis, Steve Peters, Stephen Proulx, Nicholas Roy, Daniela Rus, Chris Sanders, Seth Teller, Justin Teo, Robert Truax, Matthew Walter, and Jonathan Williams.