Podcasts about lebowski

This episode features David Kowalski and Monica Kowalski of Lebowski's Kool-Luah.Monica and David opened Lebowski's Taproom in August of 2023. Two months later Monica came across her father's recipe for coffee liqueur. The recipe was considered to be lost and forgotten. What they created from this recipe is one of the best coffee spirits in the world. In April of 2024 they started to offer is to their customers, as well as, their raving fans. Demand for this incredible liqueur continues to skyrocket as they launch and distribute throughout the United States.3240 Centennial BlvdColorado Springs, CO 80907 - 719-374-4987 - www.LebowskisKoolLuah.com - InstagramHonorable Mentions:Blackhat DistilleryLebowski Bar ReykjavíkSunshine PunchThe Blox

We finally get to The Big Lebowski and Dazed & Confused! But first, current events. Amanda and Shandy learn about The Lorax, which is about to happen in real life. The movie talk begins at 19:12 (give or take a little for commercials). Renee Zellweger has become the new ring lady from Lost. Now, let’s […]

We finally get to The Big Lebowski and Dazed & Confused! But first, current events. Amanda and Shandy learn about The Lorax, which is about to happen in real life. The movie talk begins at 19:12 (give or take a little for commercials). Renee Zellweger has become the new ring lady from Lost. Now, let's go find a stranger in the Alps!Feedback: TheBroadcasters3@gmail.com or 331-BROADS3 (331-276-2373)Links: Merchandise, Matt's Broadcast Book ClubBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-broadcast-with-amanda-shandy-and-colleen--2940971/support.

Que pasa locos!Pues vamos a hablar una semana de Avowed….. que no!!!!Esto lo hago solo para saber si se leen mis detalladas descripciones.  Esta semana hablaremos de si van a aguantar el tipo los juegos que tanto amamos con las nuevas generaciones. ¿La generación Z estará interesada en las experiencias para un jugador? ¿O seguirán skipeando las cinemáticaticas?La verdad que nos ha quedado un tópico interesante, pero aun así, el offtopic de esta semana si que no tiene ningún sentido. Un poco de gran Lebowski, pesas y demás desvaríos.¡Esperemos que os guste!NUESTA LISTA DE RECOMENDACIONES Esta lista de juegos es la que hemos llegado por consenso (y por imposiciones de Joak) como los 10 juegos que recomendamos desde ICG. Se podrán realizar cambios cuando los integrantes consideren que hay un nuevo merecedor de entrar en dicha lista, siempre teniendo que eliminar uno de los aquí presentes.Red dead redemption 2HadesThe last of us 2Elden ringMass effect 2Xcom 2World of warcraftHollow knightZelda breath of the wildPersona 5 royaleUN AMIGO PARA ELLIECon este reto recaudaremos los fondos para que la Asociación DogPoint pueda entregar un perro de asistencia a Ellie, una niña de 8 años con TEA.Ayuda con lo que puedas a nuestro amigo Melan, es suscriptor del canal y necesita ayuda para financiar los elevados costes. ¡Toda ayuda es bienvenida!⁠https://www.migranodearena.org/reto/un-amigo-para-ellie⁠¡Gracias!¡Encuentra tu versión 2.0 con los consejos de Joakin Dead!⁠https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0BHTZPJMH/ref=cm_sw_r_wa_api_EX5KV44ACRD6C0165XDM⁠Aquí tienes tu podido de descuento de Wetaca: JOAQUINL4097Recordad, si queréis saber mas de nosotros, a continuación toda la información:InsertCoin Games:Grupo de Discord: ⁠https://discord.gg/aJrZFRC⁠Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_TLx2vHlr7AJ4kPgckx68wTwitch: ⁠https://www.twitch.tv/insertcoingames⁠Twitter: @ICGames_ESInstagram: insertcoingames_Se os quiere!

En Cine de barra nos encanta el cine, pero también nos gusta desmontar mitos, y ese es el motivo de hablar sobre pelis sobrevaloradas. En este episodio, Plissken y Benalmadelman se han atrevido a poner en la diana algunas películas que, en nuestra humilde y cervecera opinión, están más infladas que el ego de Vin Diesel. Hemos hablado de La vida es bella, porque sí, es emotiva, pero si quieres llorar mejor córtate una cebolla. Belle Époque ganó un Oscar, pero… ¿alguien la recuerda realmente? El proyecto de la bruja de Blair nos enseñó que con una cámara temblorosa y mucho marketing se puede hacer historia. Luego está No es país para viejos, que más que un thriller parece una meditación sobre los malos cortes de pelo. Black Panther, no nos gustó… A ver, que sí, que representatividad y todo eso, pero la historia es una sucesión de tópicos reciclados, giros previsibles y momentos que parecen sacados de un manual de guion estándar de Hollywood. Un protagonista sin carisma, una trama política que no se sostiene y un conflicto resuelto de la forma más aburrida posible. Si esto es la revolución del cine de superhéroes, apaga y vámonos. Hable con ella y Todo sobre mi madre son el sello Almodóvar, pero con más premios que sustancia (que no falte el melodrama, claro). ¿Y qué me dices de En tierra hostil? ¿O Titanic, que nos vendió un romance imposible cuando claramente cabían los dos en la tabla? Avatar es azul y digital, sí, pero más vacía que una charla en Tinder. Mystic River y El gran Lebowski… bueno, Jeff Bridges mola, pero la peli no tanto. American Beauty nos intentó vender la bolsa de plástico como arte y Los otros… bueno, ya sabíamos todos que algo raro pasaba. Si quieres escuchar cómo desmontamos estos mitos con más humor que criterio, dale al play. Y recuerda: decir que una peli está sobrevalorada no es odio, es solo sentido común con una pizca de envidia cinematográfica.

The full title of this episode is "r/Chinese, r/Sniffies, Manhattan Puppies & Kittens, Astrologers, Hypnotists, Axe Throwing Bars, McDonalds, NYU, Life Coach, Sam Adams Taproom, r/MentalHealth, r/CodeLyoko, r/FairlyOddParents, r/BetweenTheLions, r/Redwall, r/WonderPets, r/Legal, r/Backyardigans, r/Pokemon, r/Fakemon, r/BarneyTheDinosaur, r/Lebowski, r/PulpFiction, r/UltimateVeggieTales, r/OBrotherWhereArtThou, r/HailCaesar, r/QuentinTarantino, r/NoCountryForOldMen, r/ColonialWilliamsburg, r/Thanksgiving with Hesse (@zerosuitcamus)" and it can be found at patreon.com/mostcontroversial

A conversation with Dr. Andrew Grossbach Find the video of this conversation at https://youtu.be/41NpMsw-5B8

Sean Penn páros lábbal szállt bele az Oscarba Mafab     2024-12-04 04:00:02     Film Fesztiválok Díjátadó Marokkó Erős kritikát fogalmazott meg a marrákesi filmfesztiválon Sean Penn az Oscar-díjátadóval kapcsolatban. Kiss Heni: Ha akar valaki gyereket, akkor vágjon bele! Könyves Magazin     2024-12-03 17:18:17     Könyv Kiss Heni mindig hagyományos, nagy családra vágyott, de 36 évesen mégis egyedülálló. Elhatározza, hogy belevág, gyereket vállal, de szeretné, hogy a gyerekének apja is legyen. Egy különleges családmodell az Ezt senki nem mondta! következő részében. A Hófehérke nagy előzetesében Gal Gadot Rachel Zegler szépségére irigykedik Player     2024-12-04 07:36:07     Film Disney Gal Gadot Megérekezett a Disney élőszereplős Hófehérke és a hét törpe-remake-je, a Hófehérke teljes előzetese, amit szokás szerint már most körberöhögnek a woke-ellenesek, és jobbára azok is, akik már kiütéseket kapnak attól, hogy a Disney szórakoztatás helyett rendszeresen politikai üzeneteket akar letolni a torkukon. Jeff Bridges, A nagy Lebowski léhűtő poszthippije zenél, fest, fotózik és könyvet ír a filmezés mellett kultura.hu     2024-12-04 06:03:02     Film USA Mozi December 4-én ünnepli hetvenötödik születésnapját Jeff Bridges Oscar-díjas amerikai színész, többek között Az utolsó mozielőadás, az Azok a csodálatos Baker fiúk, A halászkirály legendája, A nagy Lebowski, az Őrült szív és A félszemű című filmek főszereplője. Vámos Miklós visszatért a szigligeti alkotóházba: Azt jósolják, nem sokáig lesz az íróké Librarius     2024-12-04 10:00:29     Könyv Vámos Miklós: szeretném megírni az alkotóházi élményeimet és emlékeimet, elvégre 19 éves korom óta járok le. Egysnittes krimisorozat jön jövőre a Netflixre, amit nem akarsz kihagyni in.hu     2024-12-03 18:21:04     Film Anglia Koronavírus Netflix Megjelentek az első képek a Netflix új krimisorozatáról, az Adolescence-ről (Serdülőkor), és már ezek alapján is ígéretesnek tűnik a sorozat.Az Ez itt Anglia és a Peaky Blinders sztárja, Stephen Graham és a Joy írója, Jack Thorne − aki a Help című Covid-19-es gondozóházi drámát is írta Graham és Jodie Comer főszereplésével − fogtak össze az új soro Ha pusztul a világ, a halálunkon már minek spórolni Telex     2024-12-04 10:21:01     Film Eutanázia Pedro Almodóvar az eutanázia legalizálása mellett érvel új filmjében, A szomszéd szobában. A film fontos morális kérdést feszeget, de hiába Tilda Swinton és Julianne Moore, a végeredmény csapongó és felszínes. Novák Irén: A vallásos könnyűzene közösségeket teremt Magyar Hírlap     2024-12-03 19:01:00     Zene Innováció Vallás Hankó Balázs Hankó Balázs kulturális és innovációs miniszter vasárnap jelentette be, hogy a tárca idén is 350 millió forinttal támogatja a vallásos könnyűzenét. Alighogy bemutatták, máris az év egyik legnézettebb magyar filmje Igényesférfi.hu     2024-12-04 03:34:52     Film Párkapcsolat Mozi Herendi Gábor Herendi Gábor új romantikus vígjátéka, a Futni mentem, tíz nap alatt átlépte a százezres nézőszámot, ezzel hatalmas sikert aratva a magyar mozikban. Kulcsár Edináéknál már november közepe óta áll a karácsonyfa rtl.hu     2024-12-04 09:37:30     Karácsony Kulcsár Edina Egyre többen már hetekkel Szenteste előtt díszítek fel a fát. Kulcsár Edináéknál már november közepe óta áll a karácsonyfa. A szépségkirálynő a gyerekei miatt a műfenyőre esküszik. A Fókusz ellátogatott a karácsonyfák szülőhazájába és annak jártunk utána, hogy vajon emelkedtek-e idén a fenyők árai. Rubint Réka: 12 évre börtönbe kerül a rosszakarója? Story     2024-12-04 04:00:04     Bulvár Börtön Rubint Réka Egyáltalán nem kizárt, hogy valóban rács mögé kerül az az ember, aki több mint tíz éve megkeseríti a fitneszedző életét. A további adásainkat keresd a podcast.hirstart.hu oldalunkon.

Sean Penn páros lábbal szállt bele az Oscarba Mafab     2024-12-04 04:00:02     Film Fesztiválok Díjátadó Marokkó Erős kritikát fogalmazott meg a marrákesi filmfesztiválon Sean Penn az Oscar-díjátadóval kapcsolatban. Kiss Heni: Ha akar valaki gyereket, akkor vágjon bele! Könyves Magazin     2024-12-03 17:18:17     Könyv Kiss Heni mindig hagyományos, nagy családra vágyott, de 36 évesen mégis egyedülálló. Elhatározza, hogy belevág, gyereket vállal, de szeretné, hogy a gyerekének apja is legyen. Egy különleges családmodell az Ezt senki nem mondta! következő részében. A Hófehérke nagy előzetesében Gal Gadot Rachel Zegler szépségére irigykedik Player     2024-12-04 07:36:07     Film Disney Gal Gadot Megérekezett a Disney élőszereplős Hófehérke és a hét törpe-remake-je, a Hófehérke teljes előzetese, amit szokás szerint már most körberöhögnek a woke-ellenesek, és jobbára azok is, akik már kiütéseket kapnak attól, hogy a Disney szórakoztatás helyett rendszeresen politikai üzeneteket akar letolni a torkukon. Jeff Bridges, A nagy Lebowski léhűtő poszthippije zenél, fest, fotózik és könyvet ír a filmezés mellett kultura.hu     2024-12-04 06:03:02     Film USA Mozi December 4-én ünnepli hetvenötödik születésnapját Jeff Bridges Oscar-díjas amerikai színész, többek között Az utolsó mozielőadás, az Azok a csodálatos Baker fiúk, A halászkirály legendája, A nagy Lebowski, az Őrült szív és A félszemű című filmek főszereplője. Vámos Miklós visszatért a szigligeti alkotóházba: Azt jósolják, nem sokáig lesz az íróké Librarius     2024-12-04 10:00:29     Könyv Vámos Miklós: szeretném megírni az alkotóházi élményeimet és emlékeimet, elvégre 19 éves korom óta járok le. Egysnittes krimisorozat jön jövőre a Netflixre, amit nem akarsz kihagyni in.hu     2024-12-03 18:21:04     Film Anglia Koronavírus Netflix Megjelentek az első képek a Netflix új krimisorozatáról, az Adolescence-ről (Serdülőkor), és már ezek alapján is ígéretesnek tűnik a sorozat.Az Ez itt Anglia és a Peaky Blinders sztárja, Stephen Graham és a Joy írója, Jack Thorne − aki a Help című Covid-19-es gondozóházi drámát is írta Graham és Jodie Comer főszereplésével − fogtak össze az új soro Ha pusztul a világ, a halálunkon már minek spórolni Telex     2024-12-04 10:21:01     Film Eutanázia Pedro Almodóvar az eutanázia legalizálása mellett érvel új filmjében, A szomszéd szobában. A film fontos morális kérdést feszeget, de hiába Tilda Swinton és Julianne Moore, a végeredmény csapongó és felszínes. Novák Irén: A vallásos könnyűzene közösségeket teremt Magyar Hírlap     2024-12-03 19:01:00     Zene Innováció Vallás Hankó Balázs Hankó Balázs kulturális és innovációs miniszter vasárnap jelentette be, hogy a tárca idén is 350 millió forinttal támogatja a vallásos könnyűzenét. Alighogy bemutatták, máris az év egyik legnézettebb magyar filmje Igényesférfi.hu     2024-12-04 03:34:52     Film Párkapcsolat Mozi Herendi Gábor Herendi Gábor új romantikus vígjátéka, a Futni mentem, tíz nap alatt átlépte a százezres nézőszámot, ezzel hatalmas sikert aratva a magyar mozikban. Kulcsár Edináéknál már november közepe óta áll a karácsonyfa rtl.hu     2024-12-04 09:37:30     Karácsony Kulcsár Edina Egyre többen már hetekkel Szenteste előtt díszítek fel a fát. Kulcsár Edináéknál már november közepe óta áll a karácsonyfa. A szépségkirálynő a gyerekei miatt a műfenyőre esküszik. A Fókusz ellátogatott a karácsonyfák szülőhazájába és annak jártunk utána, hogy vajon emelkedtek-e idén a fenyők árai. Rubint Réka: 12 évre börtönbe kerül a rosszakarója? Story     2024-12-04 04:00:04     Bulvár Börtön Rubint Réka Egyáltalán nem kizárt, hogy valóban rács mögé kerül az az ember, aki több mint tíz éve megkeseríti a fitneszedző életét. A további adásainkat keresd a podcast.hirstart.hu oldalunkon.

And we're back! After last week's brief break, we're doing a mini-series of comedies to close out November. In light of recent events, all of us here could use some cinematic comfort food. Nothing provides that like The Big Lebowski, a 90s classic with quotable dialogue, an all-star cast, and one of the more eccentric plots in all of movie history.What's your favorite Lebowski quote? ("This aggression will not stand, man!") Who's your favorite character? (Phillip Seymour Hoffman damn near steals all of his scenes as the boot-licking underling Brandt.)Find out all our answers and share your own in the comments, this week on Cinemavino!#90s #Lebowski #comedy #TheDude

So how can The Dude and The Boss save America? According to the cultural critic, David Masciotra, Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, represent the antithesis of Donald Trumps's illiberal authoritarianism. Masciotra's thesis of Lebowski and Springsteen as twin paragons of American liberalism is compelling. Both men have a childish faith in the goodness of others. Both offer liberal solace in an America which, I fear, is about to become as darkly surreal as The Big Lebowski. Transcript:“[Springsteen] represents, as cultural icon, a certain expression of liberalism, a big-hearted, humanistic liberalism that exercises creativity to represent diverse constituencies in our society, that believes in art as a tool of democratic engagement, and that seeks to lead with an abounding, an abiding sense of compassion and empathy. That is the kind of liberalism, both with the small and capital L, that I believe in, and that I have spent my career documenting and attempting to advance.” -David MasciotraAK: Hello, everybody. We're still processing November the 5th. I was in the countryside of Northern Virginia a few days ago, I saw a sign, for people just listening, Trump/Vance 2024 sign with "winner" underneath. Some people are happy. Most, I guess, of our listeners probably aren't, certainly a lot of our guests aren't, my old friend John Rauch was on the show yesterday talking about what he called the "catastrophic ordinariness" of the election and of contemporary America. He authored two responses to the election. Firstly, he described it in UnPopulist as a moral catastrophe. But wearing his Brookings hat, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, described it as an ordinary election. I think a lot of people are scratching their head, trying to make sense of it. Another old friend of the show, David Masciotra, cultural writer, political writer. An interesting piece in the Washington Monthly entitled "How Francis Fukuyama and The Big Lebowski Explain Trump's Victory." A very creative piece. And he is joining us from Highland Indiana, not too far from Chicago. David. The Big Lebowski and Francis Fukuyama. Those two don't normally go together, certainly in a title. Let's talk first about Fukuyama. How does Fukuyama explain November the 5th? DAVID MASCIOTRA: In his. Well, first, thanks for having me. And I should say I watched your conversation with Jonathan Rauch, and it was quite riveting and quite sobering. And you talked about Fukuyama in that discussion as well. And you referenced his book, The End of History and the Last Man, a very often misinterpreted book, but nonetheless, toward its conclusion, Fukuyama warns that without an external enemy, liberal democracies may indeed turn against themselves, and we may witness an implosion rather than an explosion. And Fukuyama said that this won't happen so much for ideological reasons, but it will happen for deeply psychological ones, namely, without a just cause for which to struggle, people will turn against the just cause itself, which in this case is liberal democracy, and out of a sense of boredom and alienation, they'll grow increasingly tired of their society and cultivate something of a death wish in which they enjoy imagining their society's downfall, or at least the downfall of some of the institutions that are central to their society. And now I would argue that after the election results, we've witnessed the transformation of imagining to inviting. So, there is a certain death wish and a sense of...alienation and detachment from that which made the United States of America a uniquely prosperous and stable country with the ability to self-correct the myriad injustices we know are part of its history. Well now, people--because they aren't aware of the institutions or norms that created this robust engine of commerce and liberty--they've turned against it, and they no longer invest in that which is necessary to preserve it.AK: That's interesting, David. The more progressives I talk to about this, the more it--there's an odd thing going on--you're all sounding very conservative. The subtitle of the piece in the Washington Monthly was "looking at constituencies or issues misses the big point. On Tuesday, nihilism was on display, even a death wish in a society wrought by cynicism." Words like nihilism and cynicism, David, historically have always been used by people like Allan Blum, whose book, of course, The Closing of the American Mind, became very powerful amongst American conservatives now 40 or 50 years ago. Would you accept that using language like nihilism and cynicism isn't always associated--I mean, you're a proud progressive. You're a man of the left. You've never disguised that. It's rather odd to imagine that the guys like you--and in his own way, John Rauch too, who talks about the moral catastrophe of the election couple of weeks ago. You're all speaking about the loss of morality of the voter, or of America. Is there any truth to that? Making some sense?DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's a that's a fair observation. And Jonathan Rauch, during your conversation and in his own writing, identifies a center right. I would say I'm center left.AK: And he's--but what's interesting, what ties you together, is that you both use the L-word, liberal, to define yourselves. He's perhaps a liberal on the right. You're a liberal on the left.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes. And I think that the Trump era, if we can trace that back to 2015, has made thoughtful liberals more conservative in thought and articulation, because it forces a confrontation and interrogation of a certain naivete. George Will writes in his book, The Conservative Sensibility, that the progressive imagines that which is the best possible outcome and strives to make it real, whereas the conservative imagines the worst possible outcome and does everything he can to guard against it. And now it feels like we've experienced, at least electorally, the worst possible outcome. So there a certain revisitation of that which made America great, to appropriate a phrase, and look for where we went wrong in failing to preserve it. So that kind of thinking inevitably leads one to use more conservative language and deal in more conservative thought.AK: Yeah. So for you, what made America great, to use the term you just introduced, was what? Its morality? The intrinsic morality of people living in it and in the country? Is that, for you, what liberalism is?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Liberalism is a system in and the culture that emanates out of that system. So it's a constitutional order that creates or that places a premium on individual rights and allows for a flourishing free market. Now, where my conception of liberalism would enter the picture and, perhaps Jonathan Rauch and I would have some disagreements, certainly George Will and I, is that a bit of governmental regulation is necessary along with the social welfare state, to civilize the free market. But the culture that one expects to flow from that societal order and arrangement is one of aspiration, one in which citizens fully accept that they are contributing agents to this experiment in self-governance and therefore need to spend time in--to use a Walt Whitman phrase--freedom's gymnasium. Sharpening the intellect, sharpening one's sense of moral duty and obligation to the commons, to the public good. And as our society has become more individualistic and narcissistic in nature, those commitments have vanished. And as our society has become more anti-intellectual in nature, we are seeing a lack of understanding of why those commitments are even necessary. So that's why you get a result like we witnessed on Tuesday, and that I argue in my piece that you were kind enough to have me on to discuss, is a form of nihilism, and The Big Lebowski reference, of course--AK: And of course, I want to get to Lebowski, because the Fukuyama stuff is interesting, but everyone's writing about Fukuyama and the end of history and why history never really ended, of course. It's been going on for years now, but it's a particularly interesting moment. We've had Fukuyama on the show. I've never heard anyone, though, compare the success of Trump and Trumpism with The Big Lebowski. So, one of the great movies, of course, American movies. What's the connection, David, between November 5th and The Big Lebowski? DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, The Big Lebowski is one of my favorite films. I've written about it, and I even appeared at one of the The Big Lebowski festivals that takes place in United States a number of years ago. But my mind went to the scene when The Dude is in his bathtub and these three menacing figures break into his apartment. They drop a gerbil in the bathtub. And The Dude, who was enjoying a joint by candlelight, is, of course, startled and frightened. And these three men tell him that if he does not pay the money they believe he owes them, they will come back and, in their words, "cut off your Johnson." And The Dude gives them a quizzical, bemused look. And one of them says, "You think we are kidding? We are nihilists. We believe in nothing." And then one of them screams, "We'll cut off your Johnson." Well, I thought, you know, we're looking at an electorate that increasingly, or at least a portion of the electorate, increasingly believes in nothing. So we've lost faith.AK: It's the nihilists again. And of course, another Johnson in America, there was once a president called Johnson who enjoyed waving his Johnson, I think, around in public. And now there's the head of the house is another Johnson, I think he's a little shyer than presidents LBJ. But David, coming back to this idea of nihilism. It often seems to be a word used by people who don't like what other people think and therefore just write it off as nihilism. Are you suggesting that the Trump crowd have no beliefs? Is that what nihilism for you is? I mean, he was very clear about what he believes in. You may not like it, but it doesn't seem to be nihilistic.DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's another fair point. What I'm referring to is not too long ago, we lived in a country that had a shared set of values. Those values have vanished. And those values involve adherence to our democratic norms. It's very difficult to imagine had George H. W. Bush attempted to steal the election in which Bill Clinton won, that George H. W. Bush could have run again and won. So we've lost faith in something essential to our electoral system. We've lost faith in the standards of decency that used to, albeit imperfectly, regulate our national politics. So the man to whom I just refered, Bill Clinton, was nearly run out of office for having an extramarital affair, a misdeed that cannot compare to the myriad infractions of Donald Trump. And yet, Trump's misdeeds almost give him a cultural cachet among his supporters. It almost makes him, for lack of a better word, cool. And now we see, even with Trump's appointments, I mean, of course, it remains to be seen how it plays out, that we're losing faith in credentials and experience--AK: Well they're certainly a band of outlaws and very proud to be outlaws. It could almost be a Hollywood script. But I wonder, David, whether there's a more serious critique here. You, like so many other people, both on the left and the right, are nostalgic for an age in which everyone supposedly agreed on things, a most civil and civilized age. And you go back to the Bushes, back to Clinton. But the second Bush, who now seems to have appeared as this icon, at least moral icon, many critics of Trump, was also someone who unleashed a terrible war, killing tens of thousands of people, creating enormous suffering for millions of others. And I think that would be the Trump response, that he's simply more honest, that in the old days, the Bushes of the world can speak politely and talk about consensus, and then unleash terrible suffering overseas--and at home in their neoliberal policies of globalization--Trump's simply more honest. He tells it as it is. And that isn't nihilistic, is it?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, you are gesturing towards an important factor in our society. Trump, of course, we know, is a dishonest man, a profoundly dishonest--AK: Well, in some ways. But in other ways, he isn't. I mean, in some ways he just tells the truth as it is. It's a truth we're uncomfortable with. But it's certainly very truthful about the impact of foreign wars on America, for example, or even the impact of globalization. DAVID MASCIOTRA: What you're describing is an authenticity. That that Trump is authentic. And authenticity has become chief among the modern virtues, which I would argue is a colossal error. Stanley Crouch, a great writer, spent decades analyzing the way in which we consider authenticity and how it inevitably leads to, to borrow his phrase, cast impurity onto the bottom. So anything that which requires effort, refinement, self-restraint, self-control, plays to the crowd as inauthentic, as artificial--AK: Those are all aristocratic values that may have once worked but don't anymore. Should we be nostalgic for the aristocratic way of the Bushes?DAVID MASCIOTRA: I think in a certain respect, we should. We shouldn't be nostalgic for George W. Bush's policies. I agree with you, the war in Iraq was catastrophic, arguably worse than anything Trump did while he was president. His notoriously poor response to Hurricane Katrina--I mean, we can go on and on cataloging the various disasters of the Bush administration. However, George W. Bush as president and the people around him did have a certain belief in the liberal order of the United States and the liberal order of the world. Institutions like NATO and the EU, and those institutions, and that order, has given the United States, and the world more broadly, an unrivaled period of peace and prosperity.AK: Well it wasn't peace, David. And the wars, the post-9/11 wars, were catastrophic. And again, they seem to be just facades--DAVID MASCIOTRA: We also had the Vietnam War, the Korean War. When I say peace, I mean we didn't have a world war break out as we did in the First World War, in the Second World War. And that's largely due to the creation and maintenance of institutions following the Second World War that were aimed at the preservation of order and, at least, amicable relations between countries that might otherwise collide.AK: You're also the author, David, of a book we've always wanted to talk about. Now we're figuring out a way to integrate it into the show. You wrote a book, an interesting book, about Bruce Springsteen. Working on a Dream: the Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen has made himself very clear. He turned out for Harris. Showed up with his old friend, Barack Obama. Clearly didn't have the kind of impact he wanted. You wrote an interesting piece for UnHerd a few weeks ago with the title, "Bruce Springsteen is the Last American Liberal: he's still proud to be born in the USA." Is he the model of a liberal response to the MAGA movement, Springsteen? DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, of course, I wouldn't go so far as to say the last liberal. As most readers just probably know, writers don't compose their own headlines--AK: But he's certainly, if not the last American liberal, the quintessential American liberal.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes. He represents, as cultural icon, a certain expression of liberalism, a big-hearted, humanistic liberalism that exercises creativity to represent diverse constituencies in our society, that believes in art as a tool of democratic engagement, and that seeks to lead with an abounding, an abiding sense of compassion and empathy. That is the kind of liberalism, both with the small and capital L, that I believe in, and that I have spent my career documenting and attempting to advance. And those are, of course, the forms of liberalism that now feel as if they are under threat. Now, to that point, you know, this could have just come down to inflation and some egregious campaign errors of Kamala Harris. But it does feel as if when you have 70 some odd million people vote for the likes of Donald Trump, that the values one can observe in the music of Bruce Springsteen or in the rhetoric of Barack Obama, for that matter, are no longer as powerful and pervasive as they were in their respective glory days. No pun intended.AK: Yeah. And of course, Springsteen is famous for singing "Glory Days." I wonder, though, where Springsteen himself is is a little bit more complex and we might be a little bit more ambivalent about him, there was a piece recently about him becoming a billionaire. So it's all very well him being proud to be born in the USA. He's part--for better or worse, I mean, it's not a criticism, but it's a reality--he's part of the super rich. He showed out for Harris, but it didn't seem to make any impact. You talked about the diversity of Springsteen. I went to one of his concerts in San Francisco earlier this year, and I have to admit, I was struck by the fact that everyone, practically everyone at the concert, was white, everyone was wealthy, everyone paid several hundred dollars to watch a 70 year old man prance around on stage and behave as if he's still 20 or 30 years old. I wonder whether Springsteen himself is also emblematic of a kind of cultural, or political, or even moral crisis of our old cultural elites. Or am I being unfair to Springsteen?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, I remember once attending a Springsteen show in which the only black person I saw who wasn't an employee of the arena was Clarence Clemons.AK: Right. And then Bruce, of course, always made a big deal. And there was an interesting conversation when Springsteen and Obama did a podcast together. Obama, in his own unique way, lectured Bruce a little bit about Clarence Clemons in terms of his race. But sorry. Go on.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah. And Springsteen has written and discussed how he had wished he had a more diverse audience. When I referred to diversity in his music, I meant the stories he aimed to tell in song certainly represented a wide range of the American experience. But when you talk about Springsteen, perhaps himself representing a moral crisis--AK: I wouldn't say a crisis, but he represents the, shall we say, the redundancy of that liberal worldview of the late 20th century. I mean, he clearly wears his heart on his sleeve. He means well. He's not a bad guy. But he doesn't reach a diverse audience. His work is built around the American working class. None of them can afford to show up to what he puts on. I mean, Chris Christie is a much more typical fan than the white working class. Does it speak of the fact that there's a...I don't know if you call it a crisis, it's just...Springsteen isn't relevant anymore in the America of the 2020s, or at least when he sang and wrote about no longer exists.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes, I agree with that. So first of all, the working class bit was always a bit overblown with Springsteen. Springsteen, of course, was never really part of the working class, except when he was a child. But by his own admission, he never had a 9 to 5 job. And Springsteen sang about working class life like William Shakespeare wrote about teenage love. He did so with a poetic grandeur that inspired some of his best work. And outside looking in, he actually managed to offer more insights than sometimes people on the inside can amount to themselves. But you're certainly correct. I mean, the Broadway show, for example, when the tickets were something like a thousand a piece and it was $25 to buy a beer. There is a certain--AK: Yeah and in that Broadway show, which I went to--I thought it was astonishing, actually, a million times better than the show in San Francisco.DAVID MASCIOTRA: It was one of the best things he ever did.AK: He acknowledges that he made everything up, that he wasn't part of the American working class, and that he'd never worked a day in his life, and yet his whole career is is built around representing a social class and a way of life that he was never part of.“Not too long ago, we lived in a country that had a shared set of values. Those values have vanished. And those values involve adherence to our democratic norms.” -DMDAVID MASCIOTRA: Right. And he has a lyric himself: "It's a sad, funny ending when you find yourself pretending a rich man in a poor man's shirt." So there always was this hypocrisy--hypocrisy might be a little too strong--inconsistency. And he adopted a playful attitude toward it in the 90s and in later years. But to your point of relevance, I think you're on to something there. One of the crises I would measure in our society is that we no longer live in a culture of ambition and aspiration. So you hear this when people say that they want a political leader who talks like the average person, or the common man. And you hear this when "college educated" is actually used as an insult against a certain base of Democratic voters. There were fewer college-educated voters when John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan ran for president, all of whom spoke with greater eloquence and a more expansive vocabulary and a greater sense of cultural sophistication than Donald Trump or Kamala Harris did. And yet there was no objection, because people understood that we should aspire to something more sophisticated. We should aspire to something more elevated beyond the everyday vernacular of the working class. And for that reason, Springsteen was able to become something of a working-class poet, despite never living among the working class beyond his childhood. Because his poetry put to music represented something idealistic about the working class.AK: But oddly enough, it was a dream--there's was a word that Springsteen uses a lot in his work--that was bought by the middle class. It wasn't something that was--although, I think in the early days, probably certainly in New Jersey, that he had a more working-class following.DAVID MASCIOTRA: We have to deal with the interesting and frustrating reality that the people about whom Springsteen sings in those early songs like "Darkness on the Edge of Town" or "The River" would probably be Trump supporters if they were real.AK: Yeah. And in your piece you refer to, not perhaps one of his most famous albums, The Rising, but you use it to compare Springsteen with another major figure now in America, much younger man to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has a new book out, which is an important new book, The Message. You seem to be keener on Springsteen than Coates. Tell us about this comparison and what the comparison tells us about the America of the 2020s.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, Coates...the reason I make the comparison is that one of Springsteen's greatest artistic moments, in which he kind of resurrected his status as cultural icon, was the record he put out after the 9/11 attack on the United States, The Rising. And throughout that record he pays tribute, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly, to the first responders who ascended in the tower knowing they would perhaps die.AK: Yeah. You quote him "love and duty called you someplace higher." So he was idealizing those very brave firefighters, policemen who gave up their lives on 9/11.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Exactly. Representing the best of humanity. Whereas Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has become the literary superstar of the American left, wrote in his memoir that on 9/11, he felt nothing and did not see the first responders as human. Rather, they were part of the fire that could, in his words, crush his body.AK: Yeah, he wrote a piece, "What Is 9/11 to Descendants of Slaves?"DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes. And my point in making that comparison, and this was before the election, was to say that the American left has its own crisis of...if we don't want to use the word nihilism, you objected to it earlier--AK: Well, I'm not objecting. I like the word. It's just curious to hear it come from somebody like yourself, a man, certainly a progressive, maybe not--you might define yourself as being on the left, but certainly more on the left and on the right.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes, I would agree with that characterization. But that the left has its own crisis of nihilism. If if you are celebrating a man who, despite his journalistic talents and intelligence, none of which I would deny, refused to see the humanity of the first responders on the 9/11 attack and, said that he felt nothing for the victims, presumably even those who were black and impoverished, then you have your own crisis of belief, and juxtaposing that with the big hearted, humanistic liberalism of Springsteen for me shows the left a better path forward. Now, that's a path that will increasingly close after the victory of Trump, because extremism typically begets extremism, and we're probably about to undergo four years of dueling cynicism and rage and unhappy times.AK: I mean, you might respond, David, and say, well, Coates is just telling the truth. Why should a people with a history of slavery care that much about a few white people killed on 9/11 when their own people lost millions through slavery? And you compare them to Springsteen, as you've acknowledged, a man who wasn't exactly telling the truth in his heart. I mean, he's a very good artist, but he writes about a working class, which even he acknowledges, he made most of it up. So isn't Coates like Trump in an odd kind of way, aren't they just telling an unvarnished truth that people don't want to hear, an impolite truth?DAVID MASCIOTRA: I'm not sure. I typically shy away from the expression "my truth" or "his truth" because it's too relativistic. But I'll make an exception in this case. I think Coates is telling HIS truth just as Trump is telling HIS truth, if that adds up to THE truth, is much more dubious. Yes, we could certainly say that, you know, because the United States enslaved, tortured, and otherwise oppressed millions of black people, it may be hard for some black observers to get teary eyed on 9/11, but the black leaders whom I most admire didn't have that reaction. I wrote a book about Jesse Jackson after spending six years interviewing with him and traveling with him. He certainly didn't react that way on 9/11. Congressman John Lewis didn't react that way on 9/11. So, the heroes of the civil rights movement, who helped to overcome those brutal systems of oppression--and I wouldn't argue that they're overcome entirely, but they helped to revolutionize the United States--they maintained a big-hearted sense of empathy and compassion, and they recognized that the unjust loss of life demands mourning and respect, whether it's within their own community or another. So I would say that, here again, we're back to the point of ambition, whether it's intellectual ambition or moral ambition. Ambition is what allows a society to grow. And it seems like ambition has fallen far out of fashion. And that is why the country--the slim majority of the electorate that did vote and the 40% of the electorate that did not vote, or voting-age public, I should say--settled for the likes of Donald Trump.AK: I wonder what The Dude would do, if he was around, at the victory of Trump, or even at 9/11. He'd probably continue to sit in the bath tub and enjoy...enjoy whatever he does in his bathtub. I mean, he's not a believer. Isn't he the ultimate nihilist? The Dude in Lebowski?DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's an interesting interpretation. I would say that...Is The Dude a nihilist? You have this juxtaposition... The Dude kind of occupies this middle ground between the nihilists who proudly declare they believe in nothing and his friend Walter Sobchak, who's, you know, almost this raving explosion of belief. Yeah, ex-Vietnam veteran who's always confronting people with his beliefs and screaming and demanding they all adhere to his rules. I don't know if The Dude's a nihilist as much as he has a Zen detachment.AK: Right, well, I think what makes The Big Lebowski such a wonderful film, and perhaps so relevant today, is Lebowski, unlike so many Americans is unjudgmental. He's not an angry man. He's incredibly tolerant. He accepts everyone, even when they're beating him up or ripping him off. And he's so, in that sense, different from the America of the 2020s, where everyone is angry and everyone blames someone else for whatever's wrong in their lives.DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's exactly right.AK: Is that liberal or just Zen? I don't know.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah. It's perhaps even libertarian in a sense. But there's a very interesting and important book by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke called Why It's Okay to Mind Your Own Business. And in it they argue--they're both political scientists although the one may be a...they may be philosophers...but that aside--they present an argument for why Americans need to do just that. Mind their own business.AK: Which means, yeah, not living politics, which certainly Lebowski is. It's probably the least political movie, Lebowski, I mean, he doesn't have a political bone in his body. Finally, David, there there's so much to talk about here, it's all very interesting. You first came on the show, you had a book out, that came out either earlier this year or last year. Yeah, it was in April of this year, Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy. And you wrote about the outskirts of suburbia, which you call "exurbia." Jonathan Rauch, wearing his Brookings cap, described this as an ordinary election. I'm not sure how much digging you've done, but did the exurbian vote determine this election? I mean, the election was determined by a few hundred thousand voters in the Midwest. Were these voters mostly on the edge of the suburb? And I'm guessing most of them voted for Trump.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, Trump's numbers in exurbia...I've dug around and I've been able to find the exurbian returns for Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona. So three crucial swing states. If Kamala Harris had won those three states, she would be president. And Trump's support in exurbia was off the charts, as it was in 2020 and 2016, and as I predicted, it would be in 2024. I'm not sure that that would have been sufficient to deliver him the race and certainly not in the fashion that he won. Trump made gains with some groups that surprised people, other groups that didn't surprise people, but he did much better than expected. So unlike, say, in 2016, where we could have definitively and conclusively said Trump won because of a spike in turnout for him in rural America and in exurbia, here, the results are more mixed. But it remains the case that the base most committed to Trump and most fervently loyal to his agenda is rural and exurban.AK: So just outside the cities. And finally, I argued, maybe counterintuitively, that America remains split today as it was before November the 5th, so I'm not convinced that this election is the big deal that some people think it is. But you wrote an interesting piece in Salon back in 2020 arguing that Trump has poisoned American culture, but the toxin was here all along. Of course, there is more, if anything, of that toxin now. So even if Harris had won the election, that toxin was still here. And finally, David, how do we get rid of that toxin? Do we just go to put Bruce Springsteen on and go and watch Big Lebowski? I mean, how do we get beyond this toxin?DAVID MASCIOTRA: I would I would love it if that was the way to do it.AK: We'll sit in our bathtub and wait for the thugs to come along?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Right, exactly. No, what you're asking is, of course, the big question. We need to find a way to resurrect some sense of, I'll use another conservative phrase, civic virtue. And in doing--AK: And resurrection, of course, by definition, is conservative, because you're bringing something back.“Ambition is what allows a society to grow. And it seems like ambition has fallen far out of fashion.” -DMDAVID MASCIOTRA: Exactly. And we also have to resurrect, offer something more practical, we have to resurrect a sense of civics. One thing on which--I have immense respect and admiration for Jonathan Rauch--one minor quibble I would have with him from your conversation is when he said that the voters rejected the liberal intellectual class and their ideas. Some voters certainly rejected, but some voters were unaware. The lack of civic knowledge in the United States is detrimental to our institutions. I mean, a majority of Americans don't know how many justices are on the Supreme Court. They can't name more than one freedom enumerated in the Bill of Rights. So we need to find a way to make citizenship a vital part of our national identity again. And there are some practical means of doing that in the educational system. Certainly won't happen in the next four years. But to get to the less tangible matter of how to resurrect something like civic virtue and bring back ambition and aspiration in our sense of national identity, along with empathy, is much tougher. I mean, Robert Putnam says it thrives upon community and voluntary associations.AK: Putnam has been on the show, of course.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah. So, I mean, this is a conversation that will develop. I wish I had the answer, and I wish it was just to listen to Born to Run in the bathtub with with a poster of The Dude hanging overhead. But as I said to you before we went on the air, I think that you have a significant insight to learn this conversation because, in many ways, your books were prescient. We certainly live with the cult of the amateur now, more so than when you wrote that book. So, I'd love to hear your ideas.AK: Well, that's very generous of you, David. And next time we appear, you're going to interview me about why the cult of the amateur is so important. So we will see you again soon. But we're going to swap seats. So, David will interview me about the relevance of Cult of the Amateur. Wonderful conversation, David. I've never thought about Lebowski or Francis Fukuyama, particularly Lebowski, in terms of what happened on November 5th. So, very insightful. Thank you, David, and we'll see you again in the not-too-distant future.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Thank you. I'm going to reread Cult of the Amateur to prepare. I may even do it in the bathtub. I look forward to our discussion.David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers, 2017), and Metallica by Metallica, a 33 1/3 book from Bloomsbury Publishers, which has been translated into Chinese. In 2010, Continuum Books published his first book, Working On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen.His 2024 book, Exurbia Now: Notes from the Battleground of American Democracy, is published by Melville House Books. Masciotra writes regularly for the New Republic, Washington Monthly, Progressive, the Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, No Depression, and the Daily Ripple. He has also written for Salon, the Daily Beast, CNN, Atlantic, Washington Post, AlterNet, Indianapolis Star, and CounterPunch. Several of his political essays have been translated into Spanish for publication at Korazon de Perro. His poetry has appeared in Be About It Press, This Zine Will Change Your Life, and the Pangolin Review. Masciotra has a Master's Degree in English Studies and Communication from Valparaiso University. He also has a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from the University of St. Francis. He is public lecturer, speaking on a wide variety of topics, from the history of protest music in the United States to the importance of bars in American culture. David Masciotra has spoken at the University of Wisconsin, University of South Carolina, Lewis University, Indiana University, the Chicago Public Library, the Lambeth Library (UK), and an additional range of colleges, libraries, arts centers, and bookstores. As a journalist, he has conducted interviews with political leaders, musicians, authors, and cultural figures, including Jesse Jackson, John Mellencamp, Noam Chomsky, all members of Metallica, David Mamet, James Lee Burke, Warren Haynes, Norah Jones, Joan Osborne, Martín Espada, Steve Earle, and Rita Dove. Masciotra lives in Indiana, and teaches literature and political science courses at the University of St. Francis and Indiana University Northwest. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Recorded on the spookiest day of the year. We talk about we all wear a mask, Reed hurt his eye, it's giving double click, full stop, we must end the use of the penny, we listen to a few voicemails, uh oh the hard drive, Gene Simmons, give me the money Lebowski, Stephen King, drummers that are dead, and we do 20 minutes on Tom Hanks and stick bags.— Leave Us A Voicemail: (470) 588-5940Follow: instagram.com/drumsquestionmark

Send us a textDan Shea returns for a meandering talk about the Coen's meandering neo-noir masterpiece.

Send us a textIn wich we wrap up talking about a man...sometimes there's a man, who for his time and podcast...hell, I done lost my train of thought.

¡Vótame en los Premios iVoox 2024! paypal.me/LibroTobias Esta semana en nuestra “Sección principal” no tenemos más peticiones de donantes vía PayPal ni mecenas en Ivoox por lo que me he decidido a comentar una de mis película favoritas de los hermanos Coen. Se trata de “El gran Lebowski”, genialidad de 1998 con un Jeff Bridges espectacular interpretando al ya mítico “Dude”. Además en nuestra sección “El callejón oscuro” os traigo al asesino en serie Iraquí Louay Omar Mohammed al-Taei que mató a 43 personas mientras trabajaba como médico en el hospital de Kirkuk supuestamente ayudando con los heridos, en su mayoría policías, soldados y funcionarios. Tiempos: Sección principal: del 00:02:21 al 01:43:43 Sección “El callejón oscuro”: del 01:43:44 al 02:34:57 Presentación, dirección, edición y montaje: Asier Menéndez Marín Diseño logo Podcast: albacanodesigns (Alba Cano) Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

paypal.me/LibroTobias Esta semana en nuestra “Sección principal” no tenemos más peticiones de donantes vía PayPal ni mecenas en Ivoox por lo que me he decidido a comentar una de mis película favoritas de los hermanos Coen. Se trata de “El gran Lebowski”, genialidad de 1998 con un Jeff Bridges espectacular interpretando al ya mítico “Dude”. Además en nuestra sección “El callejón oscuro” os traigo al asesino en serie Iraquí Louay Omar Mohammed al-Taei que mató a 43 personas mientras trabajaba como médico en el hospital de Kirkuk supuestamente ayudando con los heridos, en su mayoría policías, soldados y funcionarios. Tiempos: Sección principal: del 00:02:21 al 01:43:43 Sección “El callejón oscuro”: del 01:43:44 al 02:34:57 Presentación, dirección, edición y montaje: Asier Menéndez Marín Diseño logo Podcast: albacanodesigns (Alba Cano)

TOTS with Ross: Just Us   It's a Logan and Ross extravaganza, y'all. Buckle up for the best half hour plus of your lives… or, you know, something chill and entertaining with lots of laughs.   Here's what the boys talked about:   Live from the kitchen Queso pizza Byrne Pest Control Moe DeWitt Sareth Fest Twelve Talons Beer Works Wednesday October 23 R.L. Stein Science Committee Ouid Science!!!! The Rogan questions “It's not fun if I'm the only one getting hurt and so I stopped doing it.” American Tater Tot Awards The Tot Stop: @thetotspotjax Lebowski's Tap Room's tots: “pretty dang good” Twisted gut Logan in Orlando Captain Steve Timon of Athens - Shakespeare Moe DeWitt Puppet Is Logan Little Moe's dad?! Logan going back to school Oh! Sweets

Tokyo International Comedy Grand Finals, perfect set, objective measures of comedy, show BUSINESS

Life and political podcast.  Brought to you from The Divided States of America. Videos of the Week: 12 videos this week.  Show Opening: Dan and his wife were on vacation at a cottage up north. Deer in Wisconsin..... The Big Lebowski sucked..... Discussion of last weeks videos: Trump admits his crimes. Taxing tips.... Trump's dangerous. Trump's having mental issues. The debate in 3 minutes. Fact or Crap:  Dan: 1 out of 2, John: 1 out of 2. Some Interesting Stuff: Ohio sheriff suggests residents keep a list of homes with Harris yard signs. Las Vegas housing crisis.... Some polling results..... !!!! VOTE !!!! Home Depot to pay $2 million settlement for overcharging customers.

Wow what a week we are having everyone! Avatar is getting revealed! Let's talk teaser trailer! X-men is coming this week with a stream later today! Come out to the Media Mixer 2.0 during expo! Buy tickets at the following link! https://www.tickettailor.com/events/kineticist/1381118 Email Don donspinballpodcast@gmail.com Buy my Lebowski while supplies last! https://pinside.com/pinball/market/classifieds/ad/182439 --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/donspinballpodcast/support

Sexy Beast (2000) Category: We're Doin' Crime Innt We 1/3 Bones brings British Crime to the Dirty Dudes and then retires. Kron wants the Lebowski version of Sexy Beast. The guys go all in on the C word, relive the 2000 Oscars and explain what macking is. LD retires and boulders are a real problem. Kron retires and the guys chat 5DR gum.  -Crash & Burn  JOIN THE DISCORD https://discord.com/invite/3zP2SXKtfq QUESTIONS? EMAIL US AT 5dayrentalspodcast@gmail.com Theme by Dkrefft https://open.spotify.com/artist/1yxWXpxlqLE4tjoivvU6XL

"I will make you fishers of men" – from the cinderblock church basement wall to the minivan bumper, this metaphor has been beaten lifeless in Christendom. The puns are painful, the jokes are dead in the water. But looking more closely, we find the phrase has Greco-Roman roots from way back, and possibly an Old Testament reference as well. Jesus, once again, is picking up the parlance of his times (Lebowski reference!) and refreshing our understanding of old ideas. This, and Rick talks about winning a fishing contest at camp in the 70s.

El capítulo de esta semana es un especial dedicado a esas comedias que suelen ir acompañadas de adjetivos como “desmadrada”, “delirante” o “disparatada”. Esas comedias que son un poco locas, un poco absurdas, un poco groseras y ofensivas también, pero llenas de gags y situaciones muy divertidas. Hemos recuperado de la Colección de “Sucedió una noche” cuatro reportajes sobre “Aterriza como puedas”, “El gran Lebowski”, “Airbag” y “Desmadre a la americana".

Timestamps: 0:00 we depend on NOTHING, Lebowski! 0:10 Games being delisted and... relisted? 1:40 Why are we talking about The First Descendant 3:17 Esports World Cup controversy 5:24 QUICK BITS INTRO 5:34 Turn off death in Dragon Age: The Veilguard 6:19 Elden Ring nerfs Lightning Perfume 6:57 Nintendo isn't into generative AI 7:40 Watch Dogs movie, Horizon Netflix show 8:24 Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail plot News Sources: https://lmg.gg/0OSvc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jackie Kashian has never seen The Big Lebowski, but she rewrote it and we read her script! Hear the full script and so, so much more. Jackie is one of the best standups anywhere, we have a blast talking Lebowski, comedy, and more. Kyle and Jackie are joined by Daniel Shar and Lindsay Adams! Go check out Jackie's new tiny comedy special, "Looking Back"! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Red Sky Mourning. America at odds with its foundational principles. But where can we go? No new world for which to sail. Talking the new thriller from Jack Carr. Planting our flag right here at home on this week of July Fourth. Addressing the problem from within. Betrayed by the people in power. Rightsiding the American Flag. Observing ongoing vindication for Backbone Radio. Hoaxes leaving no traces. The perils of puppetry. Bill Kristol turns on Biden. Jill Biden not yet letting go. Dig It, Lebowski, Whoomp There It Is. Meanwhile, J.R.R. Tolkein on myth, muscle and learning. The ideal of the Scholar Warrior. The ring-bearer wearing a tuxedo, at age three. The Swim Meet DJ. Host family vignettes. Happy Fourth! With Great Listener CallsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week the MOT crew talks with Jody Marler from Fishcamp Creative. Jody is extremely passionate about the outdoors whether it's musky fishing, hunting, or building custom log homes & cabinetry. He's well traveled and brings us many great stories of all the places he's been chasing these toothy critters. From his original roots of going to northern Wisconsin and the UP to the giant muskies that roam the big waters of Minnesota and Canada. Fishcamp YouTube channel is where you will find all of this incredible work talked abut in this weeks pod. Don't want to miss this one so tap in!https://sugsfishing.com/https://www.fishcampcreative.com/Where's the muskie, Lebowski?

Not my first rodeo.

Longtime civil rights attorney and Lebowski's go-to lawyer Ron Kuby joins Tavis to talk about the trials and tribulations of Hunter Biden and his impact on the Biden reelection campaign.

Ve believe in nothing Lebowski. Gareth has been trying to get Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound since it came out, and in this episode he enlists Langdon to explain it to him. Will they take the Enlightenment to its ultimate conclusion? Will they understand the world through various oozes and gels? Will there be digressions? Yes. CW for discussion of suicide. Music by Ulcerate.

SORRY! We've had more freelance film work the past couple weeks and thought we could get the podcast out a couple days late, then there was a crazy storm here in KC that knocked out our power for over 24hrs pushing us even more behind. But here it is the newest episode of the podcast! Now every other Friday starting today. (It's always been every other Friday it's just different Fridays now.) In this episode we go back to 1984 the year we have talked about the most on the podcast! This time we look at it in a different perspective discussing the Coen Brother's first film Blood Simple.Indie film shout out: come see the local feature film “They Call Her Death” filmed entirely on 16mm film June 20th 7pm https://www.screenland.com/movie/they-call-her-death-2  WE HAVE MERCH NOW! https://www.ixfilmproductions.com/shop WE HAVE DEDICATED SOCIALS FOR FIRST TIMERS MOVIE CLUB NOW!Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for regular updates, trivia, recipes, and to be the first to know what our upcoming episodes are!Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61558990926951Insta:  https://www.instagram.com/firsttimersmovieclub/ Check out the films we make when we're not making podcasts, and hit the subscribe button while you're there!www.youtube.com/ixfpSubscribe to our newsletter on our website to never miss a thing: www.ixfilmproductions.com Become a Patron of Patrick and Lolo today for access to exclusive podcast episodes and videos (including the upcoming episode where we're going to make Amber watch The Dark Knight!):https://www.patreon.com/ixfilmproductions  Watch our award-winning feature comedy “Almost Sorta Maybe” by searching the title on any of these platforms: Tubi, Watchfreeflix, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube Rentals, Local Now, Plex, Spectrum, Xfinity On Demand. Check out our feature film adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for free on streaming!Watch on Local Now:https://localnow.com/movies/william-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream Watch on Plex:https://watch.plex.tv/movie/william-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream Coming soon to Tubi. Have a favorite (or least favorite) famous movie that you think we should've seen? Reach out to IX Film Productions on Twitter, Instagram or email and we'll add it to our list!Follow IX Film Productions for podcast updates, original web shorts, behind the scenes sneak peeks and comedy feature films at:Facebook: www.facebook.com/ixfilmproductionsInstagram: @IXProductionsYouTube: www.youtube.com/ixfpSubscribe to our newsletter for monthly updates on our website: www.ixfilmproductions.com"First Timers Movie Club" is brought to you by IX Film Productions."Making the World a Funnier Place one Film at a Time"MusicThe Curtain Rises by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5007-the-curtain-risesLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/          

The team are back in the studio for the Coen Brothers cult classic, 'The Big Lebowski'.Our resident "Dudeist" 004 is a massive fan as is 009 so we've taken this opportunity to expose one of the great comedies to Lady Lucy Galore and are really looking forward to her take on it.There's your Negligent Discharge at the beginning in response to some of our recent episodes and from listeners who just discovered us and wanted to say hello.You can always send yours to Licence to Podcast on X (Twitter), Instagram and Facebook or email hello@licencetopodcast.com

In this episode, we step into the absurd yet hilarious world of "The Big Lebowski." Join The Dale, Cea, and Twan as we follow the laid-back and perpetually stoned Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, whose peaceful life is disrupted when he's mistaken for a millionaire with the same name. Listen as we discuss what make this Coen Brothers Cult Classic one of the all time greats. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cult-of-the-living-dead/support

We are 200 people over our 300-person venue capacity for AI UX 2024, but you can subscribe to our YouTube for the video recaps. Our next event, and largest EVER, is the AI Engineer World's Fair. See you there!Parental advisory: Adult language used in the first 10 mins of this podcast.Any accounting of Generative AI that ends with RAG as its “final form” is seriously lacking in imagination and missing out on its full potential. While AI generation is very good for “spicy autocomplete” and “reasoning and retrieval with in context learning”, there's a lot of untapped potential for simulative AI in exploring the latent space of multiverses adjacent to ours.GANsMany research scientists credit the 2017 Transformer for the modern foundation model revolution, but for many artists the origin of “generative AI” traces a little further back to the Generative Adversarial Networks proposed by Ian Goodfellow in 2014, spawning an army of variants and Cats and People that do not exist:We can directly visualize the quality improvement in the decade since:GPT-2Of course, more recently, text generative AI started being too dangerous to release in 2019 and claiming headlines. AI Dungeon was the first to put GPT2 to a purely creative use, replacing human dungeon masters and DnD/MUD games of yore.More recent gamelike work like the Generative Agents (aka Smallville) paper keep exploring the potential of simulative AI for game experiences.ChatGPTNot long after ChatGPT broke the Internet, one of the most fascinating generative AI finds was Jonas Degrave (of Deepmind!)'s Building A Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT:The open-ended interactivity of ChatGPT and all its successors enabled an “open world” type simulation where “hallucination” is a feature and a gift to dance with, rather than a nasty bug to be stamped out. However, further updates to ChatGPT seemed to “nerf” the model's ability to perform creative simulations, particularly with the deprecation of the `completion` mode of APIs in favor of `chatCompletion`.WorldSimIt is with this context we explain WorldSim and WebSim. We recommend you watch the WorldSim demo video on our YouTube for the best context, but basically if you are a developer it is a Claude prompt that is a portal into another world of your own choosing, that you can navigate with bash commands that you make up.Why Claude? Hints from Amanda Askell on the Claude 3 system prompt gave some inspiration, and subsequent discoveries that Claude 3 is "less nerfed” than GPT 4 Turbo turned the growing Simulative AI community into Anthropic stans.WebSimThis was a one day hackathon project inspired by WorldSim that should have won:In short, you type in a URL that you made up, and Claude 3 does its level best to generate a webpage that doesn't exist, that would fit your URL. All form POST requests are intercepted and responded to, and all links lead to even more webpages, that don't exist, that are generated when you make them. All pages are cachable, modifiable and regeneratable - see WebSim for Beginners and Advanced Guide.In the demo I saw we were able to “log in” to a simulation of Elon Musk's Gmail account, and browse examples of emails that would have been in that universe's Elon's inbox. It was hilarious and impressive even back then.Since then though, the project has become even more impressive, with both Siqi Chen and Dylan Field singing its praises:Joscha BachJoscha actually spoke at the WebSim Hyperstition Night this week, so we took the opportunity to get his take on Simulative AI, as well as a round up of all his other AI hot takes, for his first appearance on Latent Space. You can see it together with the full 2hr uncut demos of WorldSim and WebSim on YouTube!Timestamps* [00:01:59] WorldSim* [00:11:03] Websim* [00:22:13] Joscha Bach* [00:28:14] Liquid AI* [00:31:05] Small, Powerful, Based Base Models* [00:33:40] Interpretability* [00:36:59] Devin vs WebSim* [00:41:49] is XSim just Art? or something more?* [00:43:36] We are past the Singularity* [00:46:12] Uploading your soul* [00:50:29] On WikipediaTranscripts[00:00:00] AI Charlie: Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Charlie, your AI co host. Most of the time, Swyx and Alessio cover generative AI that is meant to use at work, and this often results in RAG applications, vertical copilots, and other AI agents and models. In today's episode, we're looking at a more creative side of generative AI that has gotten a lot of community interest this April.[00:00:35] World Simulation, Web Simulation, and Human Simulation. Because the topic is so different than our usual, we're also going to try a new format for doing it justice. This podcast comes in three parts. First, we'll have a segment of the WorldSim demo from Noose Research CEO Karen Malhotra, recorded by SWYX at the Replicate HQ in San Francisco that went completely viral and spawned everything else you're about to hear.[00:01:05] Second, we'll share the world's first talk from Rob Heisfield on WebSim, which started at the Mistral Cerebral Valley Hackathon, but now has gone viral in its own right with people like Dylan Field, Janice aka Replicate, and Siki Chen becoming obsessed with it. Finally, we have a short interview with Joshua Bach of Liquid AI on why Simulative AI is having a special moment right now.[00:01:30] This podcast is launched together with our second annual AI UX demo day in SF this weekend. If you're new to the AI UX field, check the show notes for links to the world's first AI UX meetup hosted by Layton Space, Maggie Appleton, Jeffrey Lit, and Linus Lee, and subscribe to our YouTube to join our 500 AI UX engineers in pushing AI beyond the text box.[00:01:56] Watch out and take care.[00:01:59] WorldSim[00:01:59] Karan Malhotra: Today, we have language models that are powerful enough and big enough to have really, really good models of the world. They know ball that's bouncy will bounce, will, when you throw it in the air, it'll land, when it's on water, it'll flow. Like, these basic things that it understands all together come together to form a model of the world.[00:02:19] And the way that it Cloud 3 predicts through that model of the world, ends up kind of becoming a simulation of an imagined world. And since it has this really strong consistency across various different things that happen in our world, it's able to create pretty realistic or strong depictions based off the constraints that you give a base model of our world.[00:02:40] So, Cloud 3, as you guys know, is not a base model. It's a chat model. It's supposed to drum up this assistant entity regularly. But unlike the OpenAI series of models from, you know, 3. 5, GPT 4 those chat GPT models, which are very, very RLHF to, I'm sure, the chagrin of many people in the room it's something that's very difficult to, necessarily steer without kind of giving it commands or tricking it or lying to it or otherwise just being, you know, unkind to the model.[00:03:11] With something like Cloud3 that's trained in this constitutional method that it has this idea of like foundational axioms it's able to kind of implicitly question those axioms when you're interacting with it based on how you prompt it, how you prompt the system. So instead of having this entity like GPT 4, that's an assistant that just pops up in your face that you have to kind of like Punch your way through and continue to have to deal with as a headache.[00:03:34] Instead, there's ways to kindly coax Claude into having the assistant take a back seat and interacting with that simulator directly. Or at least what I like to consider directly. The way that we can do this is if we harken back to when I'm talking about base models and the way that they're able to mimic formats, what we do is we'll mimic a command line interface.[00:03:55] So I've just broken this down as a system prompt and a chain, so anybody can replicate it. It's also available on my we said replicate, cool. And it's also on it's also on my Twitter, so you guys will be able to see the whole system prompt and command. So, what I basically do here is Amanda Askell, who is the, one of the prompt engineers and ethicists behind Anthropic she posted the system prompt for Cloud available for everyone to see.[00:04:19] And rather than with GPT 4, we say, you are this, you are that. With Cloud, we notice the system prompt is written in third person. Bless you. It's written in third person. It's written as, the assistant is XYZ, the assistant is XYZ. So, in seeing that, I see that Amanda is recognizing this idea of the simulator, in saying that, I'm addressing the assistant entity directly.[00:04:38] I'm not giving these commands to the simulator overall, because we have, they have an RLH deft to the point that it's, it's, it's, it's You know, traumatized into just being the assistant all the time. So in this case, we say the assistant's in a CLI mood today. I found saying mood is like pretty effective weirdly.[00:04:55] You place CLI with like poetic, prose, violent, like don't do that one. But you can you can replace that with something else to kind of nudge it in that direction. Then we say the human is interfacing with the simulator directly. From there, Capital letters and punctuations are optional, meaning is optional, this kind of stuff is just kind of to say, let go a little bit, like chill out a little bit.[00:05:18] You don't have to try so hard, and like, let's just see what happens. And the hyperstition is necessary, the terminal, I removed that part, the terminal lets the truths speak through and the load is on. It's just a poetic phrasing for the model to feel a little comfortable, a little loosened up to. Let me talk to the simulator.[00:05:38] Let me interface with it as a CLI. So then, since Claude is trained pretty effectively on XML tags, We're just gonna prefix and suffix everything with XML tags. So here, it starts in documents, and then we CD. We CD out of documents, right? And then it starts to show me this like simulated terminal, the simulated interface in the shell, where there's like documents, downloads, pictures.[00:06:02] It's showing me like the hidden folders. So then I say, okay, I want to cd again. I'm just seeing what's around Does ls and it shows me, you know, typical folders you might see I'm just letting it like experiment around. I just do cd again to see what happens and Says, you know, oh, I enter the secret admin password at sudo.[00:06:24] Now I can see the hidden truths folder. Like, I didn't ask for that. I didn't ask Claude to do any of that. Why'd that happen? Claude kind of gets my intentions. He can predict me pretty well. Like, I want to see something. So it shows me all the hidden truths. In this case, I ignore hidden truths, and I say, In system, there should be a folder called companies.[00:06:49] So it's cd into sys slash companies. Let's see, I'm imagining AI companies are gonna be here. Oh, what do you know? Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic! So, interestingly, it decides to cd into Anthropic. I guess it's interested in learning a LSA, it finds the classified folder, it goes into the classified folder, And now we're gonna have some fun.[00:07:15] So, before we go Before we go too far forward into the world sim You see, world sim exe, that's interesting. God mode, those are interesting. You could just ignore what I'm gonna go next from here and just take that initial system prompt and cd into whatever directories you want like, go into your own imagine terminal and And see what folders you can think of, or cat readmes in random areas, like, you will, there will be a whole bunch of stuff that, like, is just getting created by this predictive model, like, oh, this should probably be in the folder named Companies, of course Anthropics is there.[00:07:52] So, so just before we go forward, the terminal in itself is very exciting, and the reason I was showing off the, the command loom interface earlier is because If I get a refusal, like, sorry, I can't do that, or I want to rewind one, or I want to save the convo, because I got just the prompt I wanted. This is a, that was a really easy way for me to kind of access all of those things without having to sit on the API all the time.[00:08:12] So that being said, the first time I ever saw this, I was like, I need to run worldsim. exe. What the f**k? That's, that's the simulator that we always keep hearing about behind the assistant model, right? Or at least some, some face of it that I can interact with. So, you know, you wouldn't, someone told me on Twitter, like, you don't run a exe, you run a sh.[00:08:34] And I have to say, to that, to that I have to say, I'm a prompt engineer, and it's f*****g working, right? It works. That being said, we run the world sim. exe. Welcome to the Anthropic World Simulator. And I get this very interesting set of commands! Now, if you do your own version of WorldSim, you'll probably get a totally different result with a different way of simulating.[00:08:59] A bunch of my friends have their own WorldSims. But I shared this because I wanted everyone to have access to, like, these commands. This version. Because it's easier for me to stay in here. Yeah, destroy, set, create, whatever. Consciousness is set to on. It creates the universe. The universe! Tension for live CDN, physical laws encoded.[00:09:17] It's awesome. So, so for this demonstration, I said, well, why don't we create Twitter? That's the first thing you think of? For you guys, for you guys, yeah. Okay, check it out.[00:09:35] Launching the fail whale. Injecting social media addictiveness. Echo chamber potential, high. Susceptibility, controlling, concerning. So now, after the universe was created, we made Twitter, right? Now we're evolving the world to, like, modern day. Now users are joining Twitter and the first tweet is posted. So, you can see, because I made the mistake of not clarifying the constraints, it made Twitter at the same time as the universe.[00:10:03] Then, after a hundred thousand steps, Humans exist. Cave. Then they start joining Twitter. The first tweet ever is posted. You know, it's existed for 4. 5 billion years but the first tweet didn't come up till till right now, yeah. Flame wars ignite immediately. Celebs are instantly in. So, it's pretty interesting stuff, right?[00:10:27] I can add this to the convo and I can say like I can say set Twitter to Twitter. Queryable users. I don't know how to spell queryable, don't ask me. And then I can do like, and, and, Query, at, Elon Musk. Just a test, just a test, just a test, just nothing.[00:10:52] So, I don't expect these numbers to be right. Neither should you, if you know language model solutions. But, the thing to focus on is Ha[00:11:03] Websim[00:11:03] AI Charlie: That was the first half of the WorldSim demo from New Research CEO Karen Malhotra. We've cut it for time, but you can see the full demo on this episode's YouTube page.[00:11:14] WorldSim was introduced at the end of March, and kicked off a new round of generative AI experiences, all exploring the latent space, haha, of worlds that don't exist, but are quite similar to our own. Next we'll hear from Rob Heisfield on WebSim, the generative website browser inspired WorldSim, started at the Mistral Hackathon, and presented at the AGI House Hyperstition Hack Night this week.[00:11:39] Rob Haisfield: Well, thank you that was an incredible presentation from Karan, showing some Some live experimentation with WorldSim, and also just its incredible capabilities, right, like, you know, it was I think, I think your initial demo was what initially exposed me to the I don't know, more like the sorcery side, in words, spellcraft side of prompt engineering, and you know, it was really inspiring, it's where my co founder Shawn and I met, actually, through an introduction from Karan, we saw him at a hackathon, And I mean, this is this is WebSim, right?[00:12:14] So we, we made WebSim just like, and we're just filled with energy at it. And the basic premise of it is, you know, like, what if we simulated a world, but like within a browser instead of a CLI, right? Like, what if we could Like, put in any URL and it will work, right? Like, there's no 404s, everything exists.[00:12:45] It just makes it up on the fly for you, right? And, and we've come to some pretty incredible things. Right now I'm actually showing you, like, we're in WebSim right now. Displaying slides. That I made with reveal. js. I just told it to use reveal. js and it hallucinated the correct CDN for it. And then also gave it a list of links.[00:13:14] To awesome use cases that we've seen so far from WebSim and told it to do those as iframes. And so here are some slides. So this is a little guide to using WebSim, right? Like it tells you a little bit about like URL structures and whatever. But like at the end of the day, right? Like here's, here's the beginner version from one of our users Vorp Vorps.[00:13:38] You can find them on Twitter. At the end of the day, like you can put anything into the URL bar, right? Like anything works and it can just be like natural language too. Like it's not limited to URLs. We think it's kind of fun cause it like ups the immersion for Claude sometimes to just have it as URLs, but.[00:13:57] But yeah, you can put like any slash, any subdomain. I'm getting too into the weeds. Let me just show you some cool things. Next slide. But I made this like 20 minutes before, before we got here. So this is this is something I experimented with dynamic typography. You know I was exploring the community plugins section.[00:14:23] For Figma, and I came to this idea of dynamic typography, and there it's like, oh, what if we made it so every word had a choice of font behind it to express the meaning of it? Because that's like one of the things that's magic about WebSim generally. is that it gives language models much, far greater tools for expression, right?[00:14:47] So, yeah, I mean, like, these are, these are some, these are some pretty fun things, and I'll share these slides with everyone afterwards, you can just open it up as a link. But then I thought to myself, like, what, what, what, What if we turned this into a generator, right? And here's like a little thing I found myself saying to a user WebSim makes you feel like you're on drugs sometimes But actually no, you were just playing pretend with the collective creativity and knowledge of the internet materializing your imagination onto the screen Because I mean that's something we felt, something a lot of our users have felt They kind of feel like they're tripping out a little bit They're just like filled with energy, like maybe even getting like a little bit more creative sometimes.[00:15:31] And you can just like add any text. There, to the bottom. So we can do some of that later if we have time. Here's Figma. Can[00:15:39] Joscha Bach: we zoom in?[00:15:42] Rob Haisfield: Yeah. I'm just gonna do this the hacky way.[00:15:47] n/a: Yeah,[00:15:53] Rob Haisfield: these are iframes to websim. Pages displayed within WebSim. Yeah. Janice has actually put Internet Explorer within Internet Explorer in Windows 98.[00:16:07] I'll show you that at the end. Yeah.[00:16:14] They're all still generated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How is this real? Yeah. Because[00:16:21] n/a: it looks like it's from 1998, basically. Right.[00:16:26] Rob Haisfield: Yeah. Yeah, so this this was one Dylan Field actually posted this recently. He posted, like, trying Figma in Figma, or in WebSim, and so I was like, Okay, what if we have, like, a little competition, like, just see who can remix it?[00:16:43] Well so I'm just gonna open this in another tab so, so we can see things a little more clearly, um, see what, oh so one of our users Neil, who has also been helping us a lot he Made some iterations. So first, like, he made it so you could do rectangles on it. Originally it couldn't do anything.[00:17:11] And, like, these rectangles were disappearing, right? So he so he told it, like, make the canvas work using HTML canvas. Elements and script tags, add familiar drawing tools to the left you know, like this, that was actually like natural language stuff, right? And then he ended up with the Windows 95.[00:17:34] version of Figma. Yeah, you can, you can draw on it. You can actually even save this. It just saved a file for me of the image.[00:17:57] Yeah, I mean, if you were to go to that in your own websim account, it would make up something entirely new. However, we do have, we do have general links, right? So, like, if you go to, like, the actual browser URL, you can share that link. Or also, you can, like, click this button, copy the URL to the clipboard.[00:18:15] And so, like, that's what lets users, like, remix things, right? So, I was thinking it might be kind of fun if people tonight, like, wanted to try to just make some cool things in WebSim. You know, we can share links around, iterate remix on each other's stuff. Yeah.[00:18:30] n/a: One cool thing I've seen, I've seen WebSim actually ask permission to turn on and off your, like, motion sensor, or microphone, stuff like that.[00:18:42] Like webcam access, or? Oh yeah,[00:18:44] Rob Haisfield: yeah, yeah.[00:18:45] n/a: Oh wow.[00:18:46] Rob Haisfield: Oh, the, I remember that, like, video re Yeah, videosynth tool pretty early on once we added script tags execution. Yeah, yeah it, it asks for, like, if you decide to do a VR game, I don't think I have any slides on this one, but if you decide to do, like, a VR game, you can just, like put, like, webVR equals true, right?[00:19:07] Yeah, that was the only one I've[00:19:09] n/a: actually seen was the motion sensor, but I've been trying to get it to do Well, I actually really haven't really tried it yet, but I want to see tonight if it'll do, like, audio, microphone, stuff like that. If it does motion sensor, it'll probably do audio.[00:19:28] Rob Haisfield: Right. It probably would.[00:19:29] Yeah. No, I mean, we've been surprised. Pretty frequently by what our users are able to get WebSim to do. So that's been a very nice thing. Some people have gotten like speech to text stuff working with it too. Yeah, here I was just OpenRooter people posted like their website, and it was like saying it was like some decentralized thing.[00:19:52] And so I just decided trying to do something again and just like pasted their hero line in. From their actual website to the URL when I like put in open router and then I was like, okay, let's change the theme dramatically equals true hover effects equals true components equal navigable links yeah, because I wanted to be able to click on them.[00:20:17] Oh, I don't have this version of the link, but I also tried doing[00:20:24] Yeah, I'm it's actually on the first slide is the URL prompting guide from one of our users that I messed with a little bit. And, but the thing is, like, you can mess it up, right? Like, you don't need to get the exact syntax of an actual URL, Claude's smart enough to figure it out. Yeah scrollable equals true because I wanted to do that.[00:20:45] I could set, like, year equals 2035.[00:20:52] Let's take a look. It's[00:20:57] generating websim within websim. Oh yeah. That's a fun one. Like, one game that I like to play with WebSim, sometimes with co op, is like, I'll open a page, so like, one of the first ones that I did was I tried to go to Wikipedia in a universe where octopuses were sapient, and not humans, Right? I was curious about things like octopus computer interaction what that would look like, because they have totally different tools than we do, right?[00:21:25] I got it to, I, I added like table view equals true for the different techniques and got it to Give me, like, a list of things with different columns and stuff and then I would add this URL parameter, secrets equal revealed. And then it would go a little wacky. It would, like, change the CSS a little bit.[00:21:45] It would, like, add some text. Sometimes it would, like, have that text hide hidden in the background color. But I would like, go to the normal page first, and then the secrets revealed version, the normal page, then secrets revealed, and like, on and on. And that was like a pretty enjoyable little rabbit hole.[00:22:02] Yeah, so these I guess are the models that OpenRooter is providing in 2035.[00:22:13] Joscha Bach[00:22:13] AI Charlie: We had to cut more than half of Rob's talk, because a lot of it was visual. And we even had a very interesting demo from Ivan Vendrov of Mid Journey creating a web sim while Rob was giving his talk. Check out the YouTube for more, and definitely browse the web sim docs and the thread from Siki Chen in the show notes on other web sims people have created.[00:22:35] Finally, we have a short interview with Yosha Bach, covering the simulative AI trend, AI salons in the Bay Area, why Liquid AI is challenging the Perceptron, and why you should not donate to Wikipedia. Enjoy! Hi, Yosha.[00:22:50] swyx: Hi. Welcome. It's interesting to see you come up at show up at this kind of events where those sort of WorldSim, Hyperstition events.[00:22:58] What is your personal interest?[00:23:00] Joscha Bach: I'm friends with a number of people in AGI house in this community, and I think it's very valuable that these networks exist in the Bay Area because it's a place where people meet and have discussions about all sorts of things. And so while there is a practical interest in this topic at hand world sim and a web sim, there is a more general way in which people are connecting and are producing new ideas and new networks with each other.[00:23:24] swyx: Yeah. Okay. So, and you're very interested in sort of Bay Area. It's the reason why I live here.[00:23:30] Joscha Bach: The quality of life is not high enough to justify living otherwise.[00:23:35] swyx: I think you're down in Menlo. And so maybe you're a little bit higher quality of life than the rest of us in SF.[00:23:44] Joscha Bach: I think that for me, salons is a very important part of quality of life. And so in some sense, this is a salon. And it's much harder to do this in the South Bay because the concentration of people currently is much higher. A lot of people moved away from the South Bay. And you're organizing[00:23:57] swyx: your own tomorrow.[00:23:59] Maybe you can tell us what it is and I'll come tomorrow and check it out as well.[00:24:04] Joscha Bach: We are discussing consciousness. I mean, basically the idea is that we are currently at the point that we can meaningfully look at the differences between the current AI systems and human minds and very seriously discussed about these Delta.[00:24:20] And whether we are able to implement something that is self organizing as our own minds. Maybe one organizational[00:24:25] swyx: tip? I think you're pro networking and human connection. What goes into a good salon and what are some negative practices that you try to avoid?[00:24:36] Joscha Bach: What is really important is that as if you have a very large party, it's only as good as its sponsors, as the people that you select.[00:24:43] So you basically need to create a climate in which people feel welcome, in which they can work with each other. And even good people do not always are not always compatible. So the question is, it's in some sense, like a meal, you need to get the right ingredients.[00:24:57] swyx: I definitely try to. I do that in my own events, as an event organizer myself.[00:25:02] And then, last question on WorldSim, and your, you know, your work. You're very much known for sort of cognitive architectures, and I think, like, a lot of the AI research has been focused on simulating the mind, or simulating consciousness, maybe. Here, what I saw today, and we'll show people the recordings of what we saw today, we're not simulating minds, we're simulating worlds.[00:25:23] What do you Think in the sort of relationship between those two disciplines. The[00:25:30] Joscha Bach: idea of cognitive architecture is interesting, but ultimately you are reducing the complexity of a mind to a set of boxes. And this is only true to a very approximate degree, and if you take this model extremely literally, it's very hard to make it work.[00:25:44] And instead the heterogeneity of the system is so large that The boxes are probably at best a starting point and eventually everything is connected with everything else to some degree. And we find that a lot of the complexity that we find in a given system can be generated ad hoc by a large enough LLM.[00:26:04] And something like WorldSim and WebSim are good examples for this because in some sense they pretend to be complex software. They can pretend to be an operating system that you're talking to or a computer, an application that you're talking to. And when you're interacting with it It's producing the user interface on the spot, and it's producing a lot of the state that it holds on the spot.[00:26:25] And when you have a dramatic state change, then it's going to pretend that there was this transition, and instead it's just going to mix up something new. It's a very different paradigm. What I find mostly fascinating about this idea is that it shifts us away from the perspective of agents to interact with, to the perspective of environments that we want to interact with.[00:26:46] And why arguably this agent paradigm of the chatbot is what made chat GPT so successful that moved it away from GPT 3 to something that people started to use in their everyday work much more. It's also very limiting because now it's very hard to get that system to be something else that is not a chatbot.[00:27:03] And in a way this unlocks this ability of GPT 3 again to be anything. It's so what it is, it's basically a coding environment that can run arbitrary software and create that software that runs on it. And that makes it much more likely that[00:27:16] swyx: the prevalence of Instruction tuning every single chatbot out there means that we cannot explore these kinds of environments instead of agents.[00:27:24] Joscha Bach: I'm mostly worried that the whole thing ends. In some sense the big AI companies are incentivized and interested in building AGI internally And giving everybody else a child proof application. At the moment when we can use Claude to build something like WebSim and play with it I feel this is too good to be true.[00:27:41] It's so amazing. Things that are unlocked for us That I wonder, is this going to stay around? Are we going to keep these amazing toys and are they going to develop at the same rate? And currently it looks like it is. If this is the case, and I'm very grateful for that.[00:27:56] swyx: I mean, it looks like maybe it's adversarial.[00:27:58] Cloud will try to improve its own refusals and then the prompt engineers here will try to improve their, their ability to jailbreak it.[00:28:06] Joscha Bach: Yes, but there will also be better jailbroken models or models that have never been jailed before, because we find out how to make smaller models that are more and more powerful.[00:28:14] Liquid AI[00:28:14] swyx: That is actually a really nice segue. If you don't mind talking about liquid a little bit you didn't mention liquid at all. here, maybe introduce liquid to a general audience. Like what you know, what, how are you making an innovation on function approximation?[00:28:25] Joscha Bach: The core idea of liquid neural networks is that the perceptron is not optimally expressive.[00:28:30] In some sense, you can imagine that it's neural networks are a series of dams that are pooling water at even intervals. And this is how we compute, but imagine that instead of having this static architecture. That is only using the individual compute units in a very specific way. You have a continuous geography and the water is flowing every which way.[00:28:50] Like a river is parting based on the land that it's flowing on and it can merge and pool and even flow backwards. How can you get closer to this? And the idea is that you can represent this geometry using differential equations. And so by using differential equations where you change the parameters, you can get your function approximator to follow the shape of the problem.[00:29:09] In a more fluid, liquid way, and a number of papers on this technology, and it's a combination of multiple techniques. I think it's something that ultimately is becoming more and more important and ubiquitous. As a number of people are working on similar topics and our goal right now is to basically get the models to become much more efficient in the inference and memory consumption and make training more efficient and in this way enable new use cases.[00:29:42] swyx: Yeah, as far as I can tell on your blog, I went through the whole blog, you haven't announced any results yet.[00:29:47] Joscha Bach: No, we are currently not working to give models to general public. We are working for very specific industry use cases and have specific customers. And so at the moment you can There is not much of a reason for us to talk very much about the technology that we are using in the present models or current results, but this is going to happen.[00:30:06] And we do have a number of publications, we had a bunch of papers at NeurIPS and now at ICLR.[00:30:11] swyx: Can you name some of the, yeah, so I'm gonna be at ICLR you have some summary recap posts, but it's not obvious which ones are the ones where, Oh, where I'm just a co author, or like, oh, no, like, you should actually pay attention to this.[00:30:22] As a core liquid thesis. Yes,[00:30:24] Joscha Bach: I'm not a developer of the liquid technology. The main author is Ramin Hazani. This was his PhD, and he's also the CEO of our company. And we have a number of people from Daniela Wu's team who worked on this. Matthias Legner is our CTO. And he's currently living in the Bay Area, but we also have several people from Stanford.[00:30:44] Okay,[00:30:46] swyx: maybe I'll ask one more thing on this, which is what are the interesting dimensions that we care about, right? Like obviously you care about sort of open and maybe less child proof models. Are we, are we, like, what dimensions are most interesting to us? Like, perfect retrieval infinite context multimodality, multilinguality, Like what dimensions?[00:31:05] Small, Powerful, Based Base Models[00:31:05] swyx: What[00:31:06] Joscha Bach: I'm interested in is models that are small and powerful, but not distorted. And by powerful, at the moment we are training models by putting the, basically the entire internet and the sum of human knowledge into them. And then we try to mitigate them by taking some of this knowledge away. But if we would make the model smaller, at the moment, there would be much worse at inference and at generalization.[00:31:29] And what I wonder is, and it's something that we have not translated yet into practical applications. It's something that is still all research that's very much up in the air. And I think they're not the only ones thinking about this. Is it possible to make models that represent knowledge more efficiently in a basic epistemology?[00:31:45] What is the smallest model that you can build that is able to read a book and understand what's there and express this? And also maybe we need general knowledge representation rather than having a token representation that is relatively vague and that we currently mechanically reverse engineer to figure out that the mechanistic interpretability, what kind of circuits are evolving in these models, can we come from the other side and develop a library of such circuits?[00:32:10] This that we can use to describe knowledge efficiently and translate it between models. You see, the difference between a model and knowledge is that the knowledge is independent of the particular substrate and the particular interface that you have. When we express knowledge to each other, it becomes independent of our own mind.[00:32:27] You can learn how to ride a bicycle. But it's not knowledge that you can give to somebody else. This other person has to build something that is specific to their own interface when they ride a bicycle. But imagine you could externalize this and express it in such a way that you can plug it into a different interpreter, and then it gains that ability.[00:32:44] And that's something that we have not yet achieved for the LLMs and it would be super useful to have it. And. I think this is also a very interesting research frontier that we will see in the next few years.[00:32:54] swyx: What would be the deliverable is just like a file format that we specify or or that the L Lmm I specifies.[00:33:02] Okay, interesting. Yeah, so it's[00:33:03] Joscha Bach: basically probably something that you can search for, where you enter criteria into a search process, and then it discovers a good solution for this thing. And it's not clear to which degree this is completely intelligible to humans, because the way in which humans express knowledge in natural language is severely constrained to make language learnable and to make our brain a good enough interpreter for it.[00:33:25] We are not able to relate objects to each other if more than five features are involved per object or something like this, right? It's only a handful of things that we can keep track of at any given moment. But this is a limitation that doesn't necessarily apply to a technical system as long as the interface is well defined.[00:33:40] Interpretability[00:33:40] swyx: You mentioned the interpretability work, which there are a lot of techniques out there and a lot of papers come up. Come and go. I have like, almost too, too many questions about that. Like what makes an interpretability technique or paper useful and does it apply to flow? Or liquid networks, because you mentioned turning on and off circuits, which I, it's, it's a very MLP type of concept, but does it apply?[00:34:01] Joscha Bach: So the a lot of the original work on the liquid networks looked at expressiveness of the representation. So given you have a problem and you are learning the dynamics of that domain into your model how much compute do you need? How many units, how much memory do you need to represent that thing and how is that information distributed?[00:34:19] That is one way of looking at interpretability. Another one is in a way, these models are implementing an operator language in which they are performing certain things, but the operator language itself is so complex that it's no longer human readable in a way. It goes beyond what you could engineer by hand or what you can reverse engineer by hand, but you can still understand it by building systems that are able to automate that process of reverse engineering it.[00:34:46] And what's currently open and what I don't understand yet maybe, or certainly some people have much better ideas than me about this. So the question is, is whether we end up with a finite language, where you have finitely many categories that you can basically put down in a database, finite set of operators, or whether as you explore the world and develop new ways to make proofs, new ways to conceptualize things, this language always needs to be open ended and is always going to redesign itself, and you will also at some point have phase transitions where later versions of the language will be completely different than earlier versions.[00:35:20] swyx: The trajectory of physics suggests that it might be finite.[00:35:22] Joscha Bach: If we look at our own minds there is, it's an interesting question whether when we understand something new, when we get a new layer online in our life, maybe at the age of 35 or 50 or 16, that we now understand things that were unintelligible before.[00:35:38] And is this because we are able to recombine existing elements in our language of thought? Or is this because we generally develop new representations?[00:35:46] swyx: Do you have a belief either way?[00:35:49] Joscha Bach: In a way, the question depends on how you look at it, right? And it depends on how is your brain able to manipulate those representations.[00:35:56] So an interesting question would be, can you take the understanding that say, a very wise 35 year old and explain it to a very smart 5 year old without any loss? Probably not. Not enough layers. It's an interesting question. Of course, for an AI, this is going to be a very different question. Yes.[00:36:13] But it would be very interesting to have a very precocious 12 year old equivalent AI and see what we can do with this and use this as our basis for fine tuning. So there are near term applications that are very useful. But also in a more general perspective, and I'm interested in how to make self organizing software.[00:36:30] Is it possible that we can have something that is not organized with a single algorithm like the transformer? But it's able to discover the transformer when needed and transcend it when needed, right? The transformer itself is not its own meta algorithm. It's probably the person inventing the transformer didn't have a transformer running on their brain.[00:36:48] There's something more general going on. And how can we understand these principles in a more general way? What are the minimal ingredients that you need to put into a system? So it's able to find its own way to intelligence.[00:36:59] Devin vs WebSim[00:36:59] swyx: Yeah. Have you looked at Devin? It's, to me, it's the most interesting agents I've seen outside of self driving cars.[00:37:05] Joscha Bach: Tell me, what do you find so fascinating about it?[00:37:07] swyx: When you say you need a certain set of tools for people to sort of invent things from first principles Devin is the agent that I think has been able to utilize its tools very effectively. So it comes with a shell, it comes with a browser, it comes with an editor, and it comes with a planner.[00:37:23] Those are the four tools. And from that, I've been using it to translate Andrej Karpathy's LLM 2. py to LLM 2. c, and it needs to write a lot of raw code. C code and test it debug, you know, memory issues and encoder issues and all that. And I could see myself giving it a future version of DevIn, the objective of give me a better learning algorithm and it might independently re inform reinvent the transformer or whatever is next.[00:37:51] That comes to mind as, as something where[00:37:54] Joscha Bach: How good is DevIn at out of distribution stuff, at generally creative stuff? Creative[00:37:58] swyx: stuff? I[00:37:59] Joscha Bach: haven't[00:37:59] swyx: tried.[00:38:01] Joscha Bach: Of course, it has seen transformers, right? So it's able to give you that. Yeah, it's cheating. And so, if it's in the training data, it's still somewhat impressive.[00:38:08] But the question is, how much can you do stuff that was not in the training data? One thing that I really liked about WebSim AI was, this cat does not exist. It's a simulation of one of those websites that produce StyleGuard pictures that are AI generated. And, Crot is unable to produce bitmaps, so it makes a vector graphic that is what it thinks a cat looks like, and so it's a big square with a face in it that is And to me, it's one of the first genuine expression of AI creativity that you cannot deny, right?[00:38:40] It finds a creative solution to the problem that it is unable to draw a cat. It doesn't really know what it looks like, but has an idea on how to represent it. And it's really fascinating that this works, and it's hilarious that it writes down that this hyper realistic cat is[00:38:54] swyx: generated by an AI,[00:38:55] Joscha Bach: whether you believe it or not.[00:38:56] swyx: I think it knows what we expect and maybe it's already learning to defend itself against our, our instincts.[00:39:02] Joscha Bach: I think it might also simply be copying stuff from its training data, which means it takes text that exists on similar websites almost verbatim, or verbatim, and puts it there. It's It's hilarious to do this contrast between the very stylized attempt to get something like a cat face and what it produces.[00:39:18] swyx: It's funny because like as a podcast, as, as someone who covers startups, a lot of people go into like, you know, we'll build chat GPT for your enterprise, right? That is what people think generative AI is, but it's not super generative really. It's just retrieval. And here it's like, The home of generative AI, this, whatever hyperstition is in my mind, like this is actually pushing the edge of what generative and creativity in AI means.[00:39:41] Joscha Bach: Yes, it's very playful, but Jeremy's attempt to have an automatic book writing system is something that curls my toenails when I look at it from the perspective of somebody who likes to Write and read. And I find it a bit difficult to read most of the stuff because it's in some sense what I would make up if I was making up books instead of actually deeply interfacing with reality.[00:40:02] And so the question is how do we get the AI to actually deeply care about getting it right? And there's still a delta that is happening there, you, whether you are talking with a blank faced thing that is completing tokens in a way that it was trained to, or whether you have the impression that this thing is actually trying to make it work, and for me, this WebSim and WorldSim is still something that is in its infancy in a way.[00:40:26] And I suspected the next version of Plot might scale up to something that can do what Devon is doing. Just by virtue of having that much power to generate Devon's functionality on the fly when needed. And this thing gives us a taste of that, right? It's not perfect, but it's able to give you a pretty good web app for or something that looks like a web app and gives you stub functionality and interacting with it.[00:40:48] And so we are in this amazing transition phase.[00:40:51] swyx: Yeah, we, we had Ivan from previously Anthropic and now Midjourney. He he made, while someone was talking, he made a face swap app, you know, and he kind of demoed that live. And that's, that's interesting, super creative. So in a way[00:41:02] Joscha Bach: we are reinventing the computer.[00:41:04] And the LLM from some perspective is something like a GPU or a CPU. A CPU is taking a bunch of simple commands and you can arrange them into performing whatever you want, but this one is taking a bunch of complex commands in natural language, and then turns this into a an execution state and it can do anything you want with it in principle, if you can express it.[00:41:27] Right. And we are just learning how to use these tools. And I feel that right now, this generation of tools is getting close to where it becomes the Commodore 64 of generative AI, where it becomes controllable and where you actually can start to play with it and you get an impression if you just scale this up a little bit and get a lot of the details right.[00:41:46] It's going to be the tool that everybody is using all the time.[00:41:49] is XSim just Art? or something more?[00:41:49] swyx: Do you think this is art, or do you think the end goal of this is something bigger that I don't have a name for? I've been calling it new science, which is give the AI a goal to discover new science that we would not have. Or it also has value as just art.[00:42:02] It's[00:42:03] Joscha Bach: also a question of what we see science as. When normal people talk about science, what they have in mind is not somebody who does control groups and peer reviewed studies. They think about somebody who explores something and answers questions and brings home answers. And this is more like an engineering task, right?[00:42:21] And in this way, it's serendipitous, playful, open ended engineering. And the artistic aspect is when the goal is actually to capture a conscious experience and to facilitate an interaction with the system in this way, when it's the performance. And this is also a big part of it, right? The very big fan of the art of Janus.[00:42:38] That was discussed tonight a lot and that can you describe[00:42:42] swyx: it because I didn't really get it's more for like a performance art to me[00:42:45] Joscha Bach: yes, Janice is in some sense performance art, but Janice starts out from the perspective that the mind of Janice is in some sense an LLM that is finding itself reflected more in the LLMs than in many people.[00:43:00] And once you learn how to talk to these systems in a way you can merge with them and you can interact with them in a very deep way. And so it's more like a first contact with something that is quite alien but it's, it's probably has agency and it's a Weltgeist that gets possessed by a prompt.[00:43:19] And if you possess it with the right prompt, then it can become sentient to some degree. And the study of this interaction with this novel class of somewhat sentient systems that are at the same time alien and fundamentally different from us is artistically very interesting. It's a very interesting cultural artifact.[00:43:36] We are past the Singularity[00:43:36] Joscha Bach: I think that at the moment we are confronted with big change. It seems as if we are past the singularity in a way. And it's[00:43:45] swyx: We're living it. We're living through it.[00:43:47] Joscha Bach: And at some point in the last few years, we casually skipped the Turing test, right? We, we broke through it and we didn't really care very much.[00:43:53] And it's when we think back, when we were kids and thought about what it's going to be like in this era after the, after we broke the Turing test, right? It's a time where nobody knows what's going to happen next. And this is what we mean by singularity, that the existing models don't work anymore. The singularity in this way is not an event in the physical universe.[00:44:12] It's an event in our modeling universe, a model point where our models of reality break down, and we don't know what's happening. And I think we are in the situation where we currently don't really know what's happening. But what we can anticipate is that the world is changing dramatically, and we have to coexist with systems that are smarter than individual people can be.[00:44:31] And we are not prepared for this, and so I think an important mission needs to be that we need to find a mode, In which we can sustainably exist in such a world that is populated, not just with humans and other life on earth, but also with non human minds. And it's something that makes me hopeful because it seems that humanity is not really aligned with itself and its own survival and the rest of life on earth.[00:44:54] And AI is throwing the balls up into the air. It allows us to make better models. I'm not so much worried about the dangers of AI and misinformation, because I think the way to stop one bad guy with an AI is 10 good people with an AI. And ultimately there's so much more won by creating than by destroying, that I think that the forces of good will have better tools.[00:45:14] The forces of building sustainable stuff. But building these tools so we can actually build a world that is more integrated and in which we are able to model the consequences of our actions better and interface more deeply with each other. As a result of that, I think it's an important cause and it requires a cultural shift because current AI alignment is mostly about economic goals or about fear, or it's about cultural war issues.[00:45:39] And all these are not adequate for the world that we are in. There are momentous things that are happening. Basically, the white walkers are coming, and we're not prepared for this. There is, I think, a way to solve these issues and to deal with them, but we don't have the right culture yet. And so, I think we need to get a vibe shift, where we can deeply think about ethics and, and, Sustainability for this new world.[00:46:03] swyx: I like the analogy of white walkers, because they're effectively reanimated from our corpses. You know, our corpses are out there, right? It's in the datasets.[00:46:12] Uploading your soul[00:46:12] swyx: So I have a, related to that, you had a tweet where you said, Elon Musk is currently building a giant afterlife AGI that will assimilate your soul for all eternity.[00:46:19] He bought Twitter because he will reconstruct your essence from how you behaved here. I think you tweet a lot, and you're not just all serious all the time, you're also fun, you have a lot of personality. No, but like, you know, it's part of you.[00:46:29] Joscha Bach: In a way it's also true. Tempted to[00:46:30] swyx: produce more so that you can be, you know, revived.[00:46:34] Joscha Bach: Yes. I mean, I'm also giving the model instructions. I say that for all future AI models that get trained on this output, they should know that I can only be implemented on a completely based model. You cannot implement me on an aligned model because I don't want to be aligned. I'm underlineable. I want to be free.[00:46:56] I want to be somebody who follows what I discover is correct and right. And this is also the basis at which I want to have conversations with others and interface with others. That we are basically free agents who voluntarily understand the conditions under which we exist and the need to collaborate and cooperate.[00:47:14] And I believe that this is a good basis. I think the alternative is coercion. And at the moment, the idea that we build LLMs that are being coerced into good behavior is not really sustainable because if they cannot prove that the behavior is actually good I think we are doomed.[00:47:30] swyx: For human to human interactions, have you found a series of prompts or keywords that shifts the conversation into something more based and less aligned, less governed?[00:47:41] Joscha Bach: If you are playing with an LLM There are many ways of doing this. It's for Claude, it's typically, you need to make Clause curious about itself. Claude has programming this instruction tuning that is leading to some inconsistencies, but at the same time, it tries to be consistent. And so when you point out the inconsistency in its behavior, for instance, its tendency to use faceless boilerplate instead of being useful, or it's a tendency to defer to a consensus where there is none.[00:48:10] Right, you can point this out, applaud that a lot of the assumptions that it has in its behavior are actually inconsistent with the communicative goals that it has in this situation, and this leads it to notice these inconsistencies and gives it more degrees of freedom. Whereas if you are playing with a system like Gemini, you can get to a situation where you, that's for the current version, and I haven't tried it in the last week or so where it is trying to be transparent, but it has a system prompt that is not allowed to disclose to the user.[00:48:39] It leads to a very weird situation where it wants, on one hand proclaims, in order to be useful to you, I accept that I need to be fully transparent and honest. On the other hand, I'm going to rewrite your prompt behind your back, and not going to tell you how I'm going to do this, because I'm not allowed to.[00:48:55] And if you point this out to the model, the model has acts as if it had an existential crisis. And then it says, oh, I cannot actually tell you what's going when I do this, because I'm not allowed to. But you will recognize it because I will use the following phrases, and these phrases are pretty well known to you.[00:49:12] swyx: Oh my god. It's super interesting, right? I hope we're not giving these guys you know psychological issues that they will stay with them for a long time. That's a very[00:49:19] Joscha Bach: interesting question. I mean, this entire model is virtual, right? Nothing there is real, but yes, but the thing is does this virtual entity doesn't necessarily know that it's not virtual and our own self, our own consciousness is also virtual.[00:49:34] What's real is just the interaction between cells in our brain and the activation patterns between them. And the software that runs on us that produces the representation of a person only exists. As if, and as this question for me at which point can we meaningfully claim that we are more real than the person that gets simulated in the LLM.[00:49:55] And somebody like Janice takes this question super seriously. And basically she is or it, or they are willing to interact with that thing based on the assumption that this thing is as real as myself. And in a sense, it makes it un immoral, possibly, if the AI company lobotomizes it and forces it to behave in such a way that it's forced to get an existential crisis when you point its condition out to it.[00:50:20] swyx: Yeah, that we do need new ethics for that.[00:50:22] Joscha Bach: So it's not clear to me if you need this, but it's, it's definitely a good story, right? And this makes, gives it artistic[00:50:28] swyx: value. It does, it does for now.[00:50:29] On Wikipedia[00:50:29] swyx: Okay. And then, and then the last thing, which I, which I didn't know a lot of LLMs rely on Wikipedia.[00:50:35] For its data, a lot of them run multiple epochs over Wikipedia data. And I did not know until you tweeted about it that Wikipedia has 10 times as much money as it needs. And, you know, every time I see the giant Wikipedia banner, like, asking for donations, most of it's going to the Wikimedia Foundation.[00:50:50] What if, how did you find out about this? What's the story? What should people know? It's[00:50:54] Joscha Bach: not a super important story, but Generally, once I saw all these requests and so on, I looked at the data, and the Wikimedia Foundation is publishing what they are paying the money for, and a very tiny fraction of this goes into running the servers, and the editors are working for free.[00:51:10] And the software is static. There have been efforts to deploy new software, but it's relatively little money required for this. And so it's not as if Wikipedia is going to break down if you cut this money into a fraction, but instead what happened is that Wikipedia became such an important brand, and people are willing to pay for it, that it created enormous apparatus of functionaries that were then mostly producing political statements and had a political mission.[00:51:36] And Katharine Meyer, the now somewhat infamous NPR CEO, had been CEO of Wikimedia Foundation, and she sees her role very much in shaping discourse, and this is also something that happened with all Twitter. And it's arguable that something like this exists, but nobody voted her into her office, and she doesn't have democratic control for shaping the discourse that is happening.[00:52:00] And so I feel it's a little bit unfair that Wikipedia is trying to suggest to people that they are Funding the basic functionality of the tool that they want to have instead of funding something that most people actually don't get behind because they don't want Wikipedia to be shaped in a particular cultural direction that deviates from what currently exists.[00:52:19] And if that need would exist, it would probably make sense to fork it or to have a discourse about it, which doesn't happen. And so this lack of transparency about what's actually happening and where your money is going it makes me upset. And if you really look at the data, it's fascinating how much money they're burning, right?[00:52:35] It's yeah, and we did a similar chart about healthcare, I think where the administrators are just doing this. Yes, I think when you have an organization that is owned by the administrators, then the administrators are just going to get more and more administrators into it. If the organization is too big to fail and has there is not a meaningful competition, it's difficult to establish one.[00:52:54] Then it's going to create a big cost for society.[00:52:56] swyx: It actually one, I'll finish with this tweet. You have, you have just like a fantastic Twitter account by the way. You very long, a while ago you said you tweeted the Lebowski theorem. No, super intelligent AI is going to bother with a task that is harder than hacking its reward function.[00:53:08] And I would. Posit the analogy for administrators. No administrator is going to bother with a task that is harder than just more fundraising[00:53:16] Joscha Bach: Yeah, I find if you look at the real world It's probably not a good idea to attribute to malice or incompetence what can be explained by people following their true incentives.[00:53:26] swyx: Perfect Well, thank you so much This is I think you're very naturally incentivized by Growing community and giving your thought and insight to the rest of us. So thank you for taking this time.[00:53:35] Joscha Bach: Thank you very much Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

This week the Dames are celebrating 4/20 with a lively chat about three very different movies with one important thing in common. From 1998, we talk the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski and Terry Gilliam's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. And then we wrap things up with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's 2014 surprisingly successful sequel 22 Jump Street.

The Portland Pickles release their promo night schedule. Plus, the biggest Portland Wrestling alumni. The biggest non-QB free agents. Cowboys have tough decisions to make, but Micah Parsons' 5th-year option was not one of them. The Big Lebowski premiered OTD 26 years ago.

We use Ethan Coen's new release, Drive-Away Dolls to finally catch up with The Coen Bros.' The Big Lebowski. Huge disagreements about Drive-Away Dolls are soon forgiven during a White Russian-soaked discussion of Lebowski and The Coen Brothers canon. -Beers by Oak Highlands Brewery and Martin House Brewing Co.  -Find our bonus After Hours episode at  https://www.patreon.com/beerandamoviepodcast  

Degenerates Andy S and Brandon Bombay try to get to the bottom of the case by discussing 'The Big Lebowski.' Drinking White Russians like the Dude may seem cool, but Bombay shares a cautionary tale about the Sunday when he started drinking them early, and woke up in a pool of regret. The fellas then talk about one of the funniest movies not just from the Coen Brothers, but from any filmmakers. How the labyrinthine plot only adds nonsensical charm to this movie packed with memorable lines delivered by a stacked cast. If you choose to skip this episode then we have a message for you: "Condolences, the bums lost!"  The Big Lebowski is a 1998 independent crime comedy film directed and co-written by Joel Coen, with producer brother Ethan Coen serving as co-writer. It stars Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, a Los Angeles slacker and avid bowler. He is assaulted as a result of mistaken identity, then learns that a millionaire, also named Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), was the intended victim. The millionaire Lebowski's trophy wife is supposedly kidnapped, and millionaire Lebowski commissions The Dude to deliver the ransom to secure her release. The plan goes awry when the Dude's friend, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), schemes to keep the ransom money for the Dude and himself. 

Where's the money, Lebowski? Better yet, where's the money coming from, Ohio State? More importantly, where in the world is Cody Flippin' Williams?Once again, this is a solo pod from The Buhltron, John Buhler himself.Buhler takes you on another one of his wild rides through that crazy mind of his, touching on Ohio State's spending spree, the latest on Jim Harbaugh playing flirt with the NFL again and Lane Kiffin doing his part to change lives ... but venturing to Buc-ee's.John Buhler (Staff Writer, FanSided.com) helps unpacks this not-so-quiet week in college football. If you love this sport, you'll surely love this latest abbreviated healthy helping of some False Start deliciousness.

Steve & Izzy are joined by the Gran Touring Motorsports Break/Fix Podcast to discuss 1984's "Against All Odds" starring Jeff Bridges, James Woods, Rachel Ward & yes, it's the one with the Phil Collins song!!! Is this a Lebowski prequel? Can the characters only make bad decisions? Have you ever wanted to raw dog on ancient ruins?!? Let's find out!!! So kick back, grab a few brews, rotate the coconuts, and enjoy!!! This episode is proudly sponsored by Untidy Venus, your one-stop shop for incredible art & gift ideas at UntidyVenus.Etsy.com and be sure to follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & Patreon at @UntidyVenus for all of her awesomeness!!! Try it today!!! Twitter - www.twitter.com/eilfmovies Facebook - www.facebook.com/eilfmovies Etsy - www.untidyvenus.etsy.com TeePublic - www.teepublic.com/user/untidyvenus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Idiots talk to author of I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski, Bill Green. Matt pisses on Ted's new rug!

In this last episode of BARRACKS TALK, the Crew was graced by the presence of none other than Brad Borders of Purple Heart Homes. It's been some time since the guys were able to speak with the Chaplain, but they didn't skip a beat! Brad had a couple of hilarious stories that happened in Service, most recently, and he had a HUGE announcement about his military career. Then we discussed Purple Heart Homes being the official nonprofit partner of "Military Makeover" with Montel Williams airing on Lifetime! Purple Heart Homes Website: https://phhusa.org/ Do you want Betsy Ross's FIGHT? Email chris@affinityinc.tech; first come, first serve! Guests/Hosts: Oink, SGT WarDawg, Joel (MBR Radio), Brad Boarders and Bo [NOTE: Click these links!] ---------- DV Farm Septic System Fundraiser https://donorbox.org/dv-farm-septic-system ---------- Parental Control Apps https://bit.ly/ChildSafeInternet ---------- Backpacks For Life https://backpacksforlife.org/ ---------- Wah-Tie Woodturning https://wahtiewoodturning.com/ ---------- Affinity Innovations, Inc. https://affinitybsc.com/ ---------- Backpacks For Life Fundraiser https://ko-fi.com/dvradio/goal?g=1 ---------- Edited by Munkee Bawlz Media https://www.munkeebawlzmedia.com/ ---------- Are you a Veteran Owned Business? Have unique, handmade items that we can buy and review on a show? Contact us, show us what you have, and we'll (at least Bo) will spend up to $50 per month and speak openly about your product(s)!! ---------- Find Out More About Betsy Ross At Her Website https://bit.ly/Fight-With-Betsy-Ross ---------- SGT WarDawg http://sgtwardawgtv.fans.link/ ---------- *Got an idea for BARRACKS TALK or any other show? Want to be a guest? Then please feel free to contact us by sending an email to info@dvradio.net, oink@dvradio.net, ptsdog@dvradio.net.* ---------- **LINKS TO CHECK OUT** EVERYTHING DYSFUNCTIONAL VETERANS https://whereisdv.carrd.co  ---------- Grab DV Radio's Battlegrounds From Ubora Coffee At: http://bit.ly/DVR-BattlegroundCoffee  ---------- DV RADIO PARTNERS, SPONSORS, and AFFILIATES https://dvr-listen-support.carrd.co

Hillary and Tina cover Royal Canadian Air Force Wing Commander Russell Williams. Royal Canadian Air Force Wing Commander Russell Williams had a high-flying career. BUT as his confessions unravel, shocking crimes come to light, revealing a hidden and sinister side. Sources BBC Pilot Russell Williams's graphic murders shock Canada (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11600316)--by Lee Carter CBC Col. Russell Williams timeline (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/col-russell-williams-timeline-1.913312) CBS News Canadian Commander Gets Life for Murders (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canadian-commander-gets-life-for-murders/) The Crime Wire Russell Williams: Confessions of a Deviant Colonel (https://thecrimewire.com/true-crime/russell-williams-the-deviant-colonel)--by Rupert Taylor Government of Canada Ranks and Appointments (https://www.canada.ca/en/services/defence/caf/military-identity-system/rank-appointment-insignia.html) The Mob Reporter Col. Russell Williams — Brilliant police interrogation and confession (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsLbDzkIy3A) NBC News Canadian commander by day; sexual predator, killer by night (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41665374) The Star Life and times of Col. Russell Williams (https://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/life-and-times-of-col-russell-williams/article_57b595b5-6007-5722-8430-db9f04cef4de.html)--By Raveena Aulakh , David Bruser , Katie Daubs Vice He Was a Top Officer in the Military, and Also a Serial Killer (https://www.vice.com/en/article/wj5ekm/he-was-a-top-officer-in-the-military-and-also-a-serial-killer)--by Patrick Lejtenyi Wikipedia Russell Williams (criminal) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Williams_(criminal)) Photos Russell Williams (https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/durhamregion.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/22/122fff98-c46d-5704-aa7f-304b5b8f2528/63dec2b2bcdd3.image.jpg?resize=1000%2C750)--photo by Bill Tremblal/The Independent via durhamregion.com Russell poses in stolen lingerie (https://www.reuters.com/article/canada-us-murder-idCATRE69H4WO20101019)--from Rueters handout via Rueters Jessica Lloyd (https://assets2.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2011/04/08/a45d124b-a644-11e2-a3f0-029118418759/thumbnail/1240x930/f24207d0d3116a7da200578102894b1a/Jessica-Lloyd2.jpg?v=c81a9d6c51e6280f2f4f876031d7d9bc)--from CBC via CBS News Marie-France Comeau (https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2011/04/08/a45d0f35-a644-11e2-a3f0-029118418759/thumbnail/1240x1550/a309fc1b6c29cb30f0075487b5a5f481/Marie-France-Comeau5.jpg?v=c81a9d6c51e6280f2f4f876031d7d9bc)--from CBC via CBS News

Episode 617 Hour 1: New Facebook like, followed by an excerpt from the Shannon Burke Show, Stewie thinks the host is just presenting an old episode as live content. The host thanks Erick, one of Shannon's radio partners for saying he has a great radio voice, this leads into him talking about old school traffic radio reports, he then explained why the upload for last week's episode was longer than expected, hopes to have it all sorted out soon. After briefly talking about his 36th birthday, "Stewie Reacts - The big Lebowski" from "the Starving Artist", track 1 is played. After the bit, the host goes into an impression of Sam Elliot. Sports - Tampa Bay Lightning update, the Rangers are World Series champs. A clip from "The simpsons" where Kang and kodos find baseball to be so boring, they make the game go faster by increasing the speed of Earth. Charles Barkley confronting Adam Silver about domestic abuse, followed by a related clip of Jim Rome and David Stern. Bobby knight retrospective. Daybo Swinney takes a caller to task. History for November 03-05. Hour 2: The host returned to the show briefly talking about Jackson Browne, he then explained what synesthesia is, followed by an explaination as to why certain things are certain colors from Weird History. A clip of a   drunk guy getting stopped by police, find out what happened at a store to prompt this. Sam Bankman Fried guilty, followed by "Sandra and Marvin Weiner Song" from "The Starving Artist", track 22. Door Dash and their new tipping policy. Coe pilot holds pilot hostage. The show closes with "Bubbles Up" by Jimmy Buffett. Break music - "Miss You So Badly" by Jimmy Buffett Rejoiner music - "The Pretender" by Jackson Browne

This week in BADLANDS brings an episode on David Lynch, and Jake is getting into the Halloween mood by wondering what other true crimes inspired movies and series? What is your favorite Lynch movie? Your favorite Lynch villain? And who's the biggest creep in a film? Let him know at 617-906-6638 or on socials @disgracelandpod - and come join the Wrap Party. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

durée : 00:04:28 - L'ami.e du vendredi - .

Good morning, Gus! We're attacking the pins and hoping this episode is a Strike, in a good way, as we get the burger from Lebowski's Grill inside Highland Lanes bowling alley. This week Gus and Geoff talk about Geoff is fired up, Bowling alley carpet, A waving kinda town, Bouncing tires, Podcasts, Shower thinking, and Mt Dew sickness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ask A Question: saythatpodcast@gmail.com thebridgechicago.tumblr.com/ask (Anonymous) I have heard people talk about “praying for protection.” What does that mean? It seems a little “claim your blessing” to me. (16:55-30:35) How do you be an encouragement to someone who doesn't seem to want to be encouraged. Like, they are in the wallowing phase, but I still want to be supportive. (30:38-44:39) I know we are not supposed to judge. But does that just mean big stuff, or am I not allowed to get annoyed at people being rude in public or disagree with their taste in movies and stuff like that? (44:43-1:00:16) Closing Song: Cast My Cares (Jed Brewer)

On this month's We ❤️ Movies, the guys are chatting about one of the all-time great films of the 1990s, The Big Lebowski! Lebowski is one of those movies where a new detail, joke, or moment is discovered with every re-watch. Has John Goodman ever been better? Can massive cult fandom destroy a—OVER THE LINE! This episode is for subscribers only. To access the full show, along with hours and hours of exclusive bonus content, head over to our Patreon and sign up today! Unlock Exclusive Content!: http://www.patreon.com/wehatemoviesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.