Podcasts about Moon Lake

日月潭花火音樂嘉年華 rì yuè tán huā huǒ yīn yuè jiā nián huá - Sun Moon Lake Music & Fireworks Festival南投 nán tóu - Nantou (a county in central Taiwan)交響音樂會 jiāo xiǎng yīn yuè huì - symphony concert加上 jiā shàng - in addition to; plus高空煙火秀 gāo kōng yān huǒ xiù - high-altitude fireworks show交響樂 jiāo xiǎng yuè - symphonic music倒映在湖面上 dào yìng zài hú miàn shàng - reflected on the surface of the lake壯觀 zhuàng guān - spectacular; magnificent日月潭環湖馬拉松 rì yuè tán huán hú mǎ lā sōng - Sun Moon Lake round-the-lake marathon馬拉松 mǎ lā sōng - marathon自行車嘉年華 zì xíng chē jiā nián huá - cycling festival無人機燈光秀 wú rén jī dēng guāng xiù - drone light show演出 yǎn chū - performance; to perform涼爽 liáng shuǎng - cool and refreshing (weather)Follow me on Instagram: fangfang.chineselearning !

Episode: Best of Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan Welcome to Dr. Mary Travelbest's 5 Steps to Solo Travel Guide for people like you who need extra support traveling (slowly) one at a time. We've been helping women find travel memories since 1993 and traveling solo since 1972. Please share the memories we create and tell a friend about them. I appreciate your feedback and travel questions. FAQ Should I use public transportation abroad?   Episode: Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan    Lesson Learned: Don't schedule everything Day 1   Travel Tip: Trust your gut instincts, if unsure, pivot fast.   FAQ Response:  Should I use public transportation abroad?   Yes, you should try it at least, but not in rush hour with all of your luggage. One way to test it out is to try it early morning, before rushing workers get on, but while it's still light outside.  Most times, you only need a card to swipe, and you can add money to the card when you need to. Your first care purchase is often at a self-service kiosk, and usually there is English translations here. Go for it and try.   Episode: Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan   Special episode: Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan   March 2025 was my first visit to this scenic region, which reminded me of Lake Tahoe, California.  I had to refer to my notes, which could be helpful to you.   Arrive in Taoyuan airport and take the train to the Taipei Main Station and take the HSR train to Taichung City which comes about every 30 minutes and takes about an hour.   Bus to Sun Moon Lake, which comes at least hourly.   The total cost to get there is about $25, and it takes about 3 hours. To drive, you would take about 2.5 hours and save a few dollars.      Where to Stay? There are several hotels and resorts. My room at the Harbor Resort was not ready when I arrived, so I walked around the lake in the meantime. Here are a few other places, the most expensive one listed first. Luxury/Comfort: Fleur de Chine Hotel – thermal spa access, lakeside views, wellness focus Midrange/Solo-Friendly: The Crystal Resort or Hotel Del Lago – walking distance to bike paths and pier Budget/Unique: Sun Moon Lake Youth Activity Center – traditional wooden lodge vibes     Sun Moon Lake Itinerary (4 Days) Day 1 –  Afternoon: Arrive via bus to the (Shoe-is-he) Shuishe Pier area Check in + light walk along the Shuishe Lakeside Trail (flat, peaceful) Evening: Early dinner of local fish and mountain vegetables at Full House Resort Restaurant or a local restaurant nearby. Sunset viewing from Wenwu Temple stairs (lit up at night) local tea tasting at Sun Moon Lake Antique Assam Tea Farm     Day 2 – Biking the Lake & Culture Morning: Rent an e-bike or mountain bike and ride the Sun Moon Lake Cycle Route — voted one of the top cycling paths globally Stop at: Ci'en Pagoda, Xiangshan Visitor Center, and (May-he) Meihe Garden Full loop is ~29km; consider a half-loop if you're feeling leisurely. There are places where you need to dismount and walk it. Some days you may not be able to go the full distance around, so ask. Afternoon: Take the Sun Moon Lake Ropeway (cable car) to the Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village Learn about the Thao, spelled T-H-A-O) and other cultural groups Optional: garden strolls Return via cable car or ferry Evening: Relaxing soak at your hotel's onsen-style hot springs Dinner at The Lalu's Moon Pavilion Restaurant for lakeside fine dining (worth it solo!)     Day 3 – Hiking + Temples Morning: Hike the Maolan Mountain Trail or Tsen Pagoda Trail for panoramic lake views and forest immersion Easy to moderate; solo-safe and well-marked Afternoon: Visit Xuanzang Temple – peaceful with Buddhist relics Snack on local tea eggs and tofu pudding from lakeside stalls Evening: Night market (seasonal, usually in Shuishe or Ita Thao area) – solo-friendly and fun for grazing Optional: Boat cruise at dusk (join a group tour or private hire)     Day 4 – Tea + Departure Optional walk in Xiangshan Forest Trail for one last quiet moment    Safety, Solo Vibes & Tips Taiwan is ranked one of the safest destinations for solo female travelers (source: Global Peace Index) English signage is plentiful in Sun Moon Lake; locals are helpful but modest Google Translate,  and Pleco app help with communication. I used the Line app for texting here. Public bathrooms are clean and common Tap water is not typically drunk directly — use filtered water   Sun Moon Lake Official Website Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village Lesson Learned: Don't schedule everything on Day 1   Leave several ideas for another day. Don't pack everything in right away.  I tried to do that in Paris, but it did not work. I did return and enjoyed the visit much more that time. Imagine you'll be back if you like the destination. Travel Tip: Trust your gut instincts, if unsure, pivot fast.   If you walk into a restaurant, store, or even your hotel and it does not look right, you can trust your gut. Consider a pivot to plan B. Be safe, not sorry.   I want to bring meaning to your future travel. Sign up for the Dr. Travelbest newsletter. We can connect on my websites, Facebook page, group, or Instagram. Find the 5 Steps to Solo Travel series on Amazon. The show notes have more details for you to connect. Please support this podcast with a review. We need your help to help others.   Connect with Dr. Travelbest 5 Steps to Solo Travel website Dr. Mary Travelbest X Dr. Mary Travelbest Facebook Page Dr. Mary Travelbest Facebook Group Dr. Mary Travelbest Instagram Dr. Mary Travelbest Podcast Dr. Travelbest on TikTok Dr.Travelbest onYouTube In the news  

Today, we check in a year after the first Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover special to discuss everything that has changed (there is a lot) in the world of AI. This episode was recorded just after AIE Europe, but before the Cursor-xAI deal.Unsupervised Learning is a podcast that interviews the sharpest minds in AI about what's real today, what will be real in the future and what it means for businesses and the world - helping builders, researchers and founders deconstruct and understand the biggest breakthroughs.Thanks to Jacob and the UL production team for hosting and editing this!Jacob Effron* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobeffron/* X: https://x.com/jacobeffronFull Episode on Their YouTubeWe discuss:* swyx's view from the center of the AI engineering zeitgeist: OpenClaw, harness engineering, context engineering, evals, observability, GPUs, multimodality, and why conference tracks now reveal what matters most in AI* Whether AI infrastructure has finally stabilized: why “skills” may be the minimal viable packaging format for agents, why infra companies have had to reinvent themselves every year, and why application companies have had an easier time surviving model volatility* The vertical vs. horizontal AI startup debate: why application companies can act as the outsourced AI team for enterprises, why some horizontal companies still matter, and why sandboxes may be the clearest reinvention of classic cloud infrastructure for the AI era* The “agent lab” playbook: starting with frontier models, specializing for your domain, then training your own models once you have enough data, workload, and user behavior to justify the cost and latency savings* Why domain-specific model training is real, not just marketing: how companies like Cursor and Cognition can get users to choose their in-house models, and why search, domain specialization, and distillation are becoming more important* Open models, custom chips, and alternative inference infrastructure: why swyx has turned more bullish on open source, why non-NVIDIA hardware is suddenly getting real attention, and why every 10x speedup can unlock new product experiences* What it means to sell to agents instead of humans: why agent experience may mostly just be good developer experience by another name, why APIs and docs matter more than ever, and how pretraining-data incumbents are compounding advantages in an agent-first world* Why memory and personalization may become the next big wedge: today's models mostly reward frequency of mentions, but in the future, swyx expects product choice to be shaped much more by personalized memory systems* The state of the AI coding wars: why coding has become one of the largest and fastest-growing categories in AI, how Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, and Cognition have all ridden the wave, and why the category may still have more room to run* Capability exploration vs. efficiency: why the industry is still in a token-maxing, experiment-heavy phase where people are rewarded for spending more rather than less* Claude Code vs. Codex and the strange stickiness of coding products: why first magical product experiences may matter more than expected, and why the bigger mystery may be why only a few names have emerged as real winners so far* What the end state of the coding market might look like: two major players, a longer tail of niche products, and possible disruption if Microsoft, Mistral, xAI, or the Chinese labs push harder into coding* Where application companies still have room against the labs: why frontier labs are trying to expand into verticals like finance and healthcare, but still leave space for focused companies that own the workflow and the last mile* Why coding may be a preview of every other AI market: the first category to truly go parabolic, the clearest example of foundation model companies colliding with application companies, and a template for how future vertical AI markets may develop* Why AI valuations now feel unbounded: from billion-dollar ARR products built in a year to trillion-dollar market caps, swyx and Jacob unpack how the AI market has broken traditional startup intuitions about scale and durability* Consumer AI vs. coding AI: why ChatGPT's consumer category may have plateaued on frequency and product design, while coding continues to feel like a daily-use category with real momentum* The next product frontier beyond coding: consumer agents, computer use, and “coding agents breaking containment,” with swyx's thesis that 2025 was the year of coding agents and 2026 may be the year they begin to do everything else* Whether foundation models are really killing startup categories: why swyx is less worried for early founders, more worried for mid-size startups and traditional SaaS, and why building something ambitious may now be the best job interview for a frontier lab* AI vs. SaaS and the internal culture war around adoption: the tension between AI-native employees who want to rip out expensive software and skeptics who think quick AI-built replacements create fragile systems* Why traditional SaaS may be under real pressure: swyx's own experience spending six figures on event and sponsor management software, the temptation to rebuild it cheaply with AI, and the broader question of whether teams will trust custom AI-native replacements* Biosafety, security, and frontier model access: why swyx raised biosafety at a dinner with Anthropic's Mike Krieger, why Krieger argued security is the bigger issue, and what restricted model releases reveal about Anthropic vs. OpenAI* The era of giant models: why 10T+ parameter systems may only be a temporary rationing phase before bigger clusters arrive, why labs may increasingly keep their most powerful models private for distillation, and why scale alone no longer feels like a complete answer* Memory as the slowest scaling factor in AI: why context windows have improved far more slowly than people hoped, why million-token context still has not changed most real workflows, and why memory may be the key bottleneck for the next generation of systems* What swyx changed his mind on in the past year: becoming more bullish on open models, more convinced that the top tier of agent startups behaves very differently from the median AI company, and more optimistic about fine-tuning and specialized model adaptation* “Dark factories” and zero-human-review coding: the next frontier after zero human-written code, where models not only write the code but ship it without human review, forcing companies to rethink testing and verification from first principles* Why RL and post-training may matter more than people assumed: even if the resulting models get thrown out every few months, the data, workflows, and domain-specific improvements persist* Synthetic rubrics, Doctor GRPO, and multi-turn RL: why reinforcement learning is becoming much more domain-specific and multi-step than many people realize, opening the door to much deeper customization* The next frontier after coding: memory, personalization, and world models, including why swyx thinks world models matter not just for robotics or gaming, but for giving AI something closer to lived understanding* Fei-Fei Li, spatial intelligence, and the Good Will Hunting analogy: the idea that today's LLMs may know everything by reading it all, but still lack the lived experience that turns knowledge into a deeper kind of intelligenceTimestamps* 00:00:00 Intro preview: AI coding wars, startup pressure, and market structure* 00:00:28 Welcome to the Latent Space × Unsupervised Learning crossover* 00:01:17 What AI builders are focused on now: OpenClaw, harnesses, and infra* 00:04:33 Why AI infra is harder than apps, and where startups can still win* 00:06:39 Should companies train their own models?* 00:09:28 Open models, custom chips, and the new inference race* 00:11:25 Designing products for agents, not just humans* 00:16:49 The state of the AI coding wars in 2026* 00:19:27 Capability exploration, token-maxing, and why coding is going parabolic* 00:21:41 What the end state of the coding market could look like* 00:23:50 Where app companies still have room against the labs* 00:27:02 Why AI valuations and market swings feel unprecedented* 00:28:56 Consumer AI vs. coding AI, and why sticky products still matter* 00:32:28 What the next breakthrough product experience might be* 00:32:53 2026 thesis: coding agents break containment and eat the world* 00:35:27 Are foundation models wiping out startup categories?* 00:37:33 AI vs. SaaS, vibe coding, and internal team tensions* 00:40:01 Biosafety, security, and the politics of restricted model releases* 00:42:19 Giant models, compute constraints, and the limits of scale* 00:44:30 Memory as the real bottleneck in AI* 00:44:57 Why swyx changed his mind on open models* 00:47:44 Dark factories and the future of zero-human-review coding* 00:49:36 Why post-training and RL may matter more than people think* 00:51:50 Memory, world models, and the next frontier of intelligence* 00:53:54 The Good Will Hunting analogy for LLMs* 00:54:21 OutroTranscript[00:00:00] swyx: Isn't that crazy? That number is just mind boggling.[00:00:03] Jacob Effron: What is the state of the AI coding wars today?[00:00:05] swyx: We're in a phase of sort of like capability exploration. The general thesis that I have been pursuing now is that the same way that 2025 was a year coding agents 2026 is coding agents breaking containments to do everything else.[00:00:16] Jacob Effron: Do you worry about the foundation models just getting into a bunch of these startup categories?[00:00:21] swyx: Mid-size startups. Yes.[00:00:23] Jacob Effron: What do you think the end state of this market is[00:00:25] swyx: for the market structure to, to significantly change? There would be[00:00:28] Jacob Effron: today on unsupervised learning. We had a, a fun episode and what's really become an annual tradition, a crossover episode with our friends at Latent space.Swix and I sat down and we talked about everything happening in the AI ecosystem today. What we thought of the various changes at the model layer, what's happening in the infra world, the coding wars, and a bunch of other things. It's a ton of fun to do this with someone I really respect and another great podcaster in the game.Without further ado, here's our episode. Well switch. This is, uh, super fun to be back with another unsupervised learning, uh, latent space crossover episode.[00:01:02] swyx: Yeah,[00:01:02] Jacob Effron: I feel like a lot of places we could start, but you know, one thing I always find fascinating, uh, about the way you spend your time is you obviously are like at the epicenter of this engineering movement and community, and you run these events and conferences and put on these.Awesome talks and, and I think just have a great pulse on the zeitgeist of what's going on.[00:01:16] swyx: Yeah.[00:01:17] Jacob Effron: Maybe to, to start just what are the biggest topics people are thinking about right now?[00:01:21] swyx: Yeah, so I just came back from London, uh, where we did a IE Europe and we're doing roughly one per quarter now, which Yeah, you've[00:01:27] Jacob Effron: really up[00:01:27] swyx: the, hopefully[00:01:28] Jacob Effron: up the, up the pace.[00:01:29] swyx: It's trying. We're trying to match AI speed, youknow?[00:01:30] Jacob Effron: Yeah, exactly. The tops would be completely different, I imagine. Uh,[00:01:33] swyx: yeah. You know, I definitely curate the tracks, like you can see what I think. When you see the track list and the, the speakers that I invite, obviously Open Claw is like the story of the last four or five months, and then be, be just below that.I would consider harness engineering, context engineering to be two related topics in agents and rag. And then there's a long tail of Evergreen stuff like evals, observability, GPUs, uh, and uh, LM infra and just general, just in general. We also have other updates on like multimodality and, uh, generative media, let's call it.Um, but I definitely, the, the first three that I mentioned are top of mind people. Yeah.[00:02:13] Jacob Effron: I think harness is particular like, so interesting. Um, you know, there was this tweet from Harrison Chase, the, the lane chain, CEO, that, that caught my eye recently where he said, you know, it finally feels like we have stability, uh, around the infrastructure for, uh, you know, around ai.And I think what. He basically was implying his like, look over the past two, three years as a company at the epicenter of AI infrastructure, it was a bit like playing whack-a-mole, right? You were constantly moving around with, however, the building patterns were evolving[00:02:36] swyx: for Harrison for sure. Right? Like he's basically had to reinvent the company every year since he started Lang Chain.Right? It was Lang chain, Ang graph and LP agents and like, uh, I think he's like one of the most nimble, adept sharp people about this. Yeah. Yeah.[00:02:49] Jacob Effron: Saying now, now is finally the time stability[00:02:51] swyx: this. Yeah.[00:02:52] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Um, do you buy that or what have you kind of make of that take?[00:02:56] swyx: I think that. It, it's very expensive to say this Time is different sometimes, but when you're just writing code, like it's actually okay to just like try to make a call and I think it may not even matter if this call is right or not.Like I just don't even care that much because you can be right on a thesis, but if you don't, you don't figure out how to monetize the thesis, then who cares if you said something first that said, um, it does feel like, for example. Uh, we went through a lot of different ways of passion packaging integrations up with, uh, with agents.And it feels like we've landed at skills, which is like the minimal viable format. Yeah. Which is just a markdown file, uh, with some scripts attached to it, and I don't see how it can be more simple than that. And so there is some justification for. The stability around harnesses. I feel like there may be more adaptation with regards to maybe like the real time elements or subagents or memory or any of those like agent disciplines, let's call it in, in agent engineering.Uh, but if, if the thesis is that, okay, you just want agents are LMS with tools in the loop with a file system, what they can do. Retrieval with, with skills and all these like standard tooling that now seems to be relatively consensus then probably. That makes sense. Um, I just think like there's no point trying to stake your reputation on this thesis that we're there because if it changes again, just change with it.It's fine.[00:04:33] Jacob Effron: Yeah. It's always, you know, I've always been struck by how that is. Much more challenging for infrastructure companies and application companies. Like obviously I think, yeah. You know, on the application side you've seen, you know, Brett Taylor from Sierra Max, from Lara. Like, they're like, look, we build, you know, what's ahead of the models and we're willing to throw everything out every three months, you know, as the models get better and better.Exactly. Yeah. But the thing you at least have there is you have. Uh, you have an end customer, right? That's like decently sticky. Um, you know, they will mostly stick, you know, they'll, they'll give you a shot at least of, of building these things. What I've always found more challenging, uh, at, at the kind of like, you know, reinvent yourself every three months of the infrastructure layer, it's like, you know, developers are definitely a, a pickier audience maybe than an accounting firm or, uh, you know, a bank.Yeah. And so it's definitely a, a, a more challenging position to be in to, to have to constantly reinvent yourself.[00:05:17] swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and like when they turn, it's like. Very complete. Like, they'll leave to like the, the hot new thing, uh, because there's like no defensibility, I guess. Like e even, even if you are a database, like, uh, people can migrate workloads off databases.Like it's, it's a, it's a known thing. Uh, so I think like basically what we're talking about is the vertical versus horizontal, uh, debate in, in AI startups. And uh, the way I think about it also is just that like when you are. Um, Lara, when you are a bridge, like you are the outsource AI team, right? You, you are, your job is to apply whatever state ofthe art AI methods.[00:05:55] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Like this translation layer between model capabilities and your[00:05:57] swyx: own customers. Yeah. To, to the end customers and like, well, if they didn't have you, they would've to hire in house and they're not gonna hire in house so they have you. And like, I think that's like a reasonable, like very robust to any whatever trends and, and discoveries that people make in, in the engineering layer.I do think like there is, um. It like sort of useful horizontal companies being built, but they're all. Very much like, sort of like the reinventions of classic cloud in the AI era and the, the primary one being sandboxes. Yeah. Um, which like, it's another form of compute guys, like, let's not get too excited about it.But I mean, like the, the workloads are enormous.[00:06:38] Jacob Effron: Right.[00:06:38] swyx: Yeah.[00:06:39] Jacob Effron: It's interesting, and I feel like as, as part of this, you know, the questions that folks are asking around infrastructure, there's a lot around, you know, the extent to which companies should have their own AI teams and what they should be doing in-house.And, you know, uh, I think there's questions around should people be training their own models? Should people be doing, you know, rl, uh, in-house based on the data they have? I feel like, you know, one has to evolve their takes on this every, every three months with paces. But where, where are you at on this today?[00:07:00] swyx: I think, well, I mean actually all models have gone up. Um, and obviously I'm involved in cognition and also cursors doing, doing, uh, a lot of own model training. And I think that that is some part of the, what I've been calling the agent lab playbook, where you start off with the state of the art models from, uh, from the big labs and you, uh, specialize for your domain.But once you have enough workload and enough high quality data from your users, then you can obviously train your own models and like save a lot on cost and latency and all that, all that good stuff. Um, you also get like a marketing bonus of like calling it some fancy name and putting out some research[00:07:38] Jacob Effron: from my seat.I can't tell how much of it is like actual, you know, value that's provided to the end user. And how much of it is that marketing bonus? Right. It seems some combination of the[00:07:45] swyx: I think it's both.[00:07:46] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:07:46] swyx: Um, no, no. There, there actually is real value. Um, and you, you know that for a number of reasons. Like one, even when it's not subsidized, people do choose it as like one of the top four or five.This is both composer two and, uh, suite 1.6 I one of the top five models. Like in a, in a fair market? In a free market, yeah. In a, in a, in a model switch. Or people do choose it and like, it's not subsidized. Like, so that's as good as it gets. Uh, but beyond that, like domain specific models, for example. For search with, with both, which both companies have absolutely makes, makes a ton of sense.Everyone says like, yeah, we should always, always do this. And honestly like, I think the infrastructure for that is becoming easier with, um, like thinking machines tinker thing as well as primary like, uh, lab stuff. Yeah, I mean like, this is one of those like reversal of the, the bitter lesson where you first bootstrap on the large models and the general purpose models to get big.And as you get very well-defined workloads that are just high quantity but not high variance, um, then you just distill down to a smaller model and run that on your own. Right. Which like totally makes sense.[00:08:50] Jacob Effron: What I'm less clear on is the kind of DIY RL use case, which I think is really mostly around, you know, improved, uh, quality for, for different things.Obviously there's probably like more efficient ways to, you know, get a smaller model that's that's faster and cheaper. And it'll be interesting to see whether. You know, obviously you had, you know, uh, two, three years ago this whole case of companies that were, you know, pre-training and claiming better outcomes in, in their domains than getting kind of cooked as each model iteration improved.You know, I wonder whether that's a, a similar story plays out in the, uh, in, in the, our all space. Yeah, for the focus on, on on pure outcomes and quality, not the cost side, which clearly your own models for cost at scale makes a ton of sense.[00:09:28] swyx: I think there are this, there are two sides of the same coin.Like you basically always want to hold, uh, quality constant or trade off a little bit of quality for a drastic decreasing cost. And that's true for everyone. Uh, one element I wanted to bring out, which is very much in favor of open models, is custom chips. So this would be cereus, but also talu. And then there's a huge range of stuff in between.This has been a huge story this past year on just like everything non Nvidia is getting bid up, including like freaking MatX is working for, which is very, which is very rewarding for me, but I think one of those things where like, oh, like the suddenly, because the number of alternative. Hard, uh, hardware is increasing and the inference that you can get is insanely high.Like, um, we're talking thousands of tokens per second instead of less than a hundred. So the trade off for qua quality doesn't hold as much anymore because the speed is so high.[00:10:24] Jacob Effron: Have you seen a lot of companies go all in on the alternative chip?[00:10:26] swyx: So cognition has Yeah. On Cerebras, uh, and, and so has OpenAIUm, uh, and so no, I don't think so beyond that, uh, and that, do you think that's like a, that's mostly, that's foreshadowing of, that's, yeah. I used to be kind of a skeptic in terms of like, okay, so what if I get my inference at a hundred to a hundred tokens per second sped up to 200 tokens per second. It's only two X faster.It's not that big a deal. Um, but when you, uh, I think every 10 x does unlock a different usage pattern. Um, and you, we have proof in Talas and, and some of the others. That you can actually, um, drastically imp improve inference speed and what happens from there? I don't even really know, like it's, it's so hard to predict when entire applications just appear at once.Yeah. Uh, and it also isn't that expensive, right? So like, um, this is one of those things where like, I, I think the, the investment cycle is gonna be multi-year. Um, and I. Would caution people to not dismiss it too, too quickly.[00:11:25] Jacob Effron: Yeah. I mean, one other like infra question I was curious to get your thoughts on is obviously it seems increasingly a lot of the cutting edge infra companies are building for agents as the buyers of their product or users of their product, right?[00:11:35] swyx: Ooh,[00:11:36] Jacob Effron: and[00:11:37] swyx: another huge theme. Yeah. Yeah.[00:11:38] Jacob Effron: And I'm trying to figure out like what. What, what do you have to do differently about selling into agents? Um, are they just the ultimate rational developers? Uh, or is there, you know,[00:11:46] swyx: no, absolutely not. Um, I think they are easily prompt, injected and, uh, very tuned towards like, basically com compounding existing winners.[00:11:57] Jacob Effron: Yeah,[00:11:57] swyx: so like if, like, congrats if you won the lottery for getting into the training data right before 2023, because now you're like installed in there for the foreseeable future. But yeah. Uh, you know, one stat that Versal, uh, CTO Malta dropped at my conference was that there are now, uh, 60% of traffic to Elle's, um, like app arch, like admin app architecture for like configuring versal applications, uh, is bought.It's not, it's not human. Uh, so like your primary customer is agents now. Um, and it's mostly co like mostly coding agents, mostly people using CLI on CP or whatever. But yeah, I mean, I think. More. I, I think step one, if it doesn't exist as an API that agents can use, it doesn't exist. Right, right. Which I think is like, uh, it's a good hygiene thing anyway, to, to make everything API available, but not as like an extra, um.Push on like products, people to not only work on the ui, um, you should probably work on the on SCLI stuff. Beyond that, I think honestly there is like, so I, I come from the sensibility of, I think everything that you are trying to do for agents experience now, which is the term that Matt Bowman and Nullify is trying to coin, is the same thing that you should have been doing for developer experience.That you should have had good docs, you should have had a consistent API, uh, that is. Mostly stateless. Um, you should have, I guess, discoverable or progressive disclosure or like search or like whatever. And so now that people have energy in like finding these customers to do that, that's great. Um, do I believe in.Extending beyond that into something like a EO, um, for gaming The chatbots? Not necessarily, but obviously there's gonna be huge advantages when people who figure out the short term wins. Yeah. And short term wins can compound.[00:13:43] Jacob Effron: Do you think these compounding advantages to like the, the pre-training data cutoff companies, like, you know, obviously over some period of time, I imagine that doesn't persist.And so as you think about like. I dunno, three, four years from now what the, you know, selection criteria end up being. Do you think it still mirrors exactly what you were saying before? Like it's exactly what you should have been doing all along to sell a good product to developers?[00:14:01] swyx: It could be, except that I think in three, four years we'll probably have much better memory and personalization.So then general a EO or GEO doesn't really matter as much. So I think whatever memory or personalization system we end up with will probably d determine what you end up choosing much more. Than, than what is currently the case, which is just frequency of mentions, let's call it. Yeah,[00:14:26] Jacob Effron: yeah.[00:14:26] swyx: Uh, so you just spa quantity and I think that's, I mean, that's something I'm looking forward to.I do think, like, like, you know, I, I think that the fundamental exercise to work through for yourself is if you start a new, um, sort of. Uh, disruptor company. Now there's a, there's a big incumbent that everyone knows, like, like superb base. Super base is like, kind of like the Postgres, like database, uh, incumbent.If you wanna start like new superb base, how would you compete with them? And I don't necessarily have the answer, but I, I, I do think like people, like resend like relatively new. I think they would start like 20, 23 and still there was, there was a recent survey where like, people. Checked what Claude recommends by default.If you just don't prompt it with anything, just say, gimme an email provider and says, resent as in like 70, 70% of each cases. Like the fact that you can get in there with like such a relatively short existence, I think is, is encouraging.[00:15:14] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:15:14] swyx: I do think like. Um, you do want to do whatever it is to, to like to, to get in that Very short mentions this because, um, it's not gonna be 20 of them, it's gonna be like three.[00:15:26] Jacob Effron: No, definitely. It feels like, uh, you know, probably more, more consolidation than ever. Uh, or, or kind of like, you know, uh, a winner take most market than maybe the, the, the physics of go-to market in the past. Yeah. Might have, uh, enabled.[00:15:38] swyx: The other thing also is like, semantic association is gonna be very important, uh, in the sense that like, you want to do like the combo articles where you're like, use my thing with for sale, with blah, blah.And like that all gets picked up in a, in a corpus. And so that's. Probably one thing that you, you wanna do? Well, I don't know what else. Uh, it's, it's, it's, it's one of those things where like, I think I feel, I feel I'm behind, uh, I don't know how you feel about this, but like,[00:16:04] Jacob Effron: I think AI is just everyone constantly feeling like they're behind some, uh,[00:16:08] swyx: yeah.With,[00:16:09] Jacob Effron: I wanna meet the person that doesn't feel behind,[00:16:11] swyx: but like with, with ax, right? Like, so, so like, my, my stance was that exactly what I said before, like everything that you, that you should do for agents is something that you should have done for humans anyway. Yeah. And so. To the extent that you're just getting it more energy to, to do things for agents, great.But like, uh, it's hard to articulate what new thing apart from just like more spam, um, that you should be doing. Anyway, that would be my take right now. Um, I I, I do think like there, there will be more turns at this. I think the personalization turn that is coming, um, will be big. And I don't know what that looks like because like basically we're kind of, we feel kind of tapped out on the memory side of things.[00:16:49] Jacob Effron: Yeah. I, I guess since we last chatted, you know, you, you took this role over at cognition, um, and you've obviously have a, have a front row seat to the AI coding space today. You know, I feel like coding in many ways. You know, people view it as this, like, I mean, besides being like the, the mother of all markets and this massive opportunity, I think it's kinda a preview of like, what's to come for many other spaces.Both. Yeah. You know, I feel like agents are most advanced in coding. I also feel like the, you know, competition between foundation models and application companies, you know, and, uh, mirrors what we may see in other spaces. And so maybe for our listeners, can you just lay out like what is the state of the AI coding wars today?[00:17:25] swyx: Um, it is massive, right? Like, uh, and I don't think necessarily, last time we talked about this, we appreciated the size of what[00:17:32] Jacob Effron: No, I wish we did.[00:17:33] swyx: I state of AI coding wars today, um, both opening eye philanthropic have made it their p serials to competing coding. Um, and. Tropic is like 2.5 billion in a RR just from Cloud Code.The way they recognize a RR is. Opt for debate, uh, open ai. I don't think the, a public number is known, but let's call it 2 billion as well. And then cursor is like, rumored to be 2 billion, you know? And, and those, those are like the public numbers that are known? Yeah. Um, so like huge markets that have just been created in the past one year.Like, like anthropic, just like Claude Code just recently celebrated their one year anniversary, which is, yeah, pretty nice. Um, so, and then I think, like the other thing that I see is there's, there's some other people who are like, oh, here's like the, the sort of relative penetration of, uh, Claude use cases, right?Like, and it's like coding 50% and then legal, whatever. Health, uh, it's like the, the remaining ones. And there was a very popular tweet that was like, okay, I'll look at the, the empty space and all these other use cases. If you are a new founder today, you should be betting on the other stuff because on, on a sort of catch up Yeah.Theory and my. Consider my, my pushback is the same pushback that, uh, I had on app over Google, which is like, well, well why is this time different? Like, why, if it went from let's say 10 to 50% in the past year, why can't I keep going? Uh, and like getting that wrong is actually a very painful one because you could have just did, did the momentum bet.Instead of the mean reversion bed. So I, I, I think that that is the, the state of things now that people are very, very much into psychosis. Um, they're are getting rewarded for spending more rather than spending less. And I think we're not in that phase of efficiency. We're in a phase of sort of like capability exploration.So I think people who are more crazy, who are more. Uh, creative, um, get rewarded comparatively. Yeah.[00:19:27] Jacob Effron: Well, it's interesting. I mean, it feels like behind these like token maxing, leaderboards and whatnot is this, it's like the first phase of this transition from a workforce perspective is you just gotta show your employer like, Hey, I, I use these tools.[00:19:37] swyx: Here's my nu number of tokens I cost, and that's it. They don't care about the quality. Right. It is, uh, maybe distasteful to someone who cares about the craft and, and all that. Um, but directionally everyone just wants you to go up regardless. And so, um, there it is not very discerning. It's, and it's probably very sloppy, but I think it's net fine because we're still probably underusing ai just in generally.Yeah. Um, and so I think that's like very interesting. Like we had on the podcast, uh, Ryan La Poplar from OBI, who spends a billion tokens a day. Yeah. Um, and that's for those county home, it's like something like 10,000 worth, $10,000 worth a day of API tokens. If they, they did market rates, um, and like most of us can't afford that.Yeah. But like. And, and, and probably a lot of what he does is slop.[00:20:25] Jacob Effron: Right.[00:20:25] swyx: But like, he's going to dis, he's like, if there were a new capability, he would discover it first before you because he was, he was trying and you were not trying. Right. And like, you only do things that work like, well, good for you.But like the, the people who are going to discover the next hot thing are living at the edge.[00:20:42] Jacob Effron: Right and increase in living at the edge of just having the compute budget to like run these experiments. I mean, kind of similar to what living at the edge on the research side has always been. You know, it was constrained in many ways by the amount of compute you had to run these experiments.It feels similarly on the, almost on the builder or like actualizing these tools now.[00:20:56] swyx: Yeah. The other thing that's, I mean, very obvious is philanthropic is kind of like the high price premium player. Um, that where, you know. Restricting limits or restricting model releases even is like the name of the game.Whereas Codex is like, come on in guys, use our SDK, use our login and we don't care. We're gonna reset limits. Whatever you do want to try to exploit the subsidies where you can get it. And definitely Codex is super subsidized right now. Gemini also very subsidized. Um, and. Comparatively, like, I think you should make, Hey, I guess while, while that's going on, it's not that bad to be a capabilities explorer on just the $200 a month plan from Cloud Code or from OpenAI.Um, and, uh, I I, I, my sense is that people aren't even there yet.[00:21:41] Jacob Effron: How do you think this, like, market ultimately plays? I mean, it's obviously such a big market that, you know, any slice of that market is interesting for, for anyone going after it. But I think what, what makes people so interesting in the coding market particularly is it feels like it's kind of this.Foreshadowing of what will happen in other, you know, any other kind of application market that the foundation models eventually turn to and are all their models against and gather data around. And so how do you think, you know, like does there end up being room for lots of different kinds of players or like, what do you think the end state of this market is and is that, do you think that's applicable to other markets?[00:22:10] swyx: I feel like there will be, I mean. Status quo is probably the most likely outcome, which is there are two big players and there's a small range of longer tail people that, um, fit other use cases that the, the two big players don't. That feels right to me. I think that, um, for it to, for the market structure to, to significantly change there would be, there needs to be significant change in like the economics or like the, the brand building or like the, the, the, the value propositions of the, of the companies involved and I.Haven't seen any in the last six months that, that have really changed the stories materially. So I feel like they would just keep going until something, something else happens. Something else happens, meaning like Microsoft wakes up and like goes like. Guys, we have GitHub, we have, uh, you know, we, we, we'll, we'll do something much bigger here than other, other than just copilot.Um, and, uh, that would be a big change. Um, MSL has put out a model now, and I was in a breakfast with, uh, Alex Wang, where they were like, yeah, like, we, we really, really want to go after the coding use case. We haven't done anything yet, but like, don't underestimate them. Right. Um, and, and similarly for the Chinese labs.Um, I think they're trying to go after it. Like ZAI is doing stuff. GLM uh, ZI and GLM is same thing. Um, uh, and, and so it's, so like everyone's trying to get a piece of that pie. I, I feel like the, the status quo has been pretty stable for the past, like almost a year I'll say.[00:23:39] Jacob Effron: Yeah. And is the room for the, not like, you know, for, for the application companies more on like the enterprise side or like where do the, where do the, like what surface area do the model companies leave for application companies?[00:23:50] swyx: Yeah, that's a good one. Um. It's very much evolving. Um, it, I, I, I will say because opening I did not have this, the, this level of attention on coding. Yeah. Uh, a year ago. We just don't have that much history. Right. Um, and it seems like, for example, so the big push at Open I now is the Super app. Um, is that a consumer thing?Is that like a products like. Portfolio rationalization thing, how much is that gonna take away attention from coding at the time when they actually do want to put more coding? I think it's, it's very unclear. So I do think like there's, there's all these, like in both big labs, there's. Uh, sorry. Both of the, and, and drop and, and deep minus and XAI are are separate cases.Um, they are trying to see the other time expansion areas. So cloud code for finance. Yeah. Um, uh, cloud cowork, all those, all those things. Whereas I think cursor and cognition are like comparatively just focused on coding and so I, I do think they leave space and I do think for the other verticals that also means the same thing.Right. That, uh, that they're not gonna be that. Um, intensely focused on, on, on that domain. Except for, I, I think I would mark out finance and healthcare as like the next ones, um, that they're clearly going after. Uh, I, I would say comparatively, healthcare seems more thorny. There, there, there've been some announcements about it, but like, I would respect the, the finance work a lot more just because like the, the path to money is a lot clearer.[00:25:12] Jacob Effron: Yeah, no, I mean, obviously like, I, I think, you know, maybe similar to, to the space that's being left in these other domains, you know, there's obviously. Uh, a lot that's required to actually implement these tools in enterprises, uh, versus, you know, maybe just giving them, uh, giving model access to, to folks outta the box.[00:25:27] swyx: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So the, the agent lab thing is like, we'll do the last mile for you. Whereas I think the model labs tend to just trust the model and, and be minimalist about it. Both of them work.[00:25:38] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:25:38] swyx: I, I don't, I don't necessarily think one, uh, beats the other, uh, for every, for every use case. Um, all I, all I do know is that it does seem like.Uh, the large enterprises do want a dedicated partner that isn't just the model labs, which is kind of interesting.[00:25:55] Jacob Effron: We, we've been in this phase of, of pure capability exploration. And so I think nothing has been, you know, better for the large labs, right? I mean, they're always gonna be, uh, uh, the frontier of, of capability exploration.And so I think have a very good relationship with a lot of these enterprises. But ultimately over time, like. The, uh, the incentive structure of these labs is always gonna be maximal, you know, token consumption for, uh, for the end customers they work with. And there's just, I think, so few companies that have actually gotten to massive scale.Maybe coding again is the most interesting. So it's the first space that really is just completely gone, you know? Yeah. You must love it every day. Like absolutely insane. And. I think it[00:26:32] swyx: gets even. Okay. I mean, like, I think we, we say good things about crystal cognition, but the sheer liftoff of like both end UPIC and open ai.‘cause they, they, they have independent valuations. I mean, let's throw an XEI in there because it's now I ping at 1.2 trillion. That number is just mind boggling. Like I, I feel like in normal investing or normal startups, there's kind of like a ceiling market cap or valuation. Totally. That, that like you, you reach and you go like, all right, let's, it's gonna be chiller from now on.And these guys are not slow down. No.[00:27:02] Jacob Effron: Well, I also think the dynamic is fascinating about some of these later stage companies is, is, you know, in the past, I feel like in, in venture world, if you got to a certain level of scale, the question around you was really more a valuation question. And this is like why there was different phase, like, you know, types of venture people did and like the late stage growth people were just incredible at like, you know, a little bit of what's the ultimate market opportunity of this company, but also what's the right way to, to value it.Like we know it's, it's in some bands of an outcome that is like. Sure there's some variance to it, but it's like relatively understood what that bands is and then maybe you get over time surprised to the upside. Whereas any kind of like later, even the labs themselves, any later stage company, the bands of which that company might be worth right now, even in a year or two years are so massive because of how fast the ecosystem changes that it's like.Even for later stage companies, every three months could be an existential level event to the upside to the downside. Yeah. Um, and I think that, like, you are obviously seeing it in the, in the positive with code, which, you know, if you think about a company like philanthropic, you know, that. For a while, it was like unclear if they were going to have access to enough capital, um, to really stay in the, in the race, right?And then coding hit at the exact right time. They had the perfect model for it. They executed brilliantly. Um, and you know, now are, are, you know, uh, you know, one of the most valuable companies in the world.[00:28:13] swyx: Uh, at the same time, I, I don't find, I, I have zero sympathy for opening eye because they're crushing it and they're all rich.You know, this is like a high class champagne problem to have to, uh, to be number two at coding or whatever. Like, who cares? Like, you're, you're doing great.[00:28:27] Jacob Effron: Yeah. It's funny though. I can't even, I mean, you would be closer to this, uh, you know, even that you're in the AI coding space, but it's like a lot of people I talk to think Codex is just as good, if not better than Claude Code.Right. I think one thing that I've been really surprised by, and maybe, maybe Cloud Code is a better product in some ways, I'm curious your thoughts is just in consumer AI with chat GBT. You saw this big first mover advantage, right? Where admittedly today, like, I don't know, Claude Gemini. Great products.Not sure, not abundantly clear chat GBTs any better, but like. People stick with chat, GBT, it's the first thing to introduce them.[00:28:56] swyx: They stay, but they're not growing anymore. I don't know if you've seen[00:28:59] Jacob Effron: Right. But that to me is more of like a, a, a product problem than it is. They're not like, it's not like they've like lost share to someone else.My understanding is the overall problem with consumer AI today is much more of a how do you take this tool and, you know, for, for folks like us, like knowledge workers, it's like this incredible magic tool, but it's not necessarily a daily active use tool for a lot of people around the world today. And what are the like products?It's, it's kind of a category wide problem. Like in coding, for example, like. The entire space has gone parabolic. There may be some relative growth in, uh, in other consumer AI players, but it's not like consumer AI as a category is like going parabolic and they're not capturing most of that thing. I think it's actually the larger problem is much more, hey, the category has kind of hit a bit of a plateau of people haven't figured out how to bring, you know, tons more users on board.Yeah, yeah. Or increase the frequency of those users. And so it seems more of a category wide problem than it is, you know, a massive market share of change. I was gonna draw the comparison to, to the coding space where Claude Co is the first product, obviously, to introduce people to this magical experience.You know, by all accounts, codex is, is pretty damn close to as good, if not better. Um, but like still that first product, you, you would've thought that would not be a super sticky, uh, you know, product surface area. And it actually has, it turns out, I, it feels like the first lab to introduce you and experience really does, uh, keep a lot of, uh, a lot of the focus.[00:30:12] swyx: I, I think. M maybe it's like still, still early days. You know, Chad, BT is like three plus years old and Yeah. Cloud code is only one. Just turned a year. Yeah. So give it time, you know? Yeah. Like, yeah. I mean, definitely sometimes a lot of people have switched from to Codex. Maybe that will keep going. I, it's like really hard to tell.Uh, yeah. I, I, I do, I do think that. Because we are in this like, high volatility, high temperature phase. Um, the loyalty and stickiness to first movers and category creators, I don't think is as high as it might be in some other, uh, areas in our careers that we've looked at.[00:30:47] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Though, I mean, I've been surprised by the cloud code thing.I, I would've thought that, like, in many ways I always worried about the[00:30:52] swyx: enterprise. You think you would've been gone by now?[00:30:53] Jacob Effron: Not gone. But I would've, I I always worried that the, that the consumer business of these companies would be quite sticky. And then the enterprise API business. Uh, was actually like, you know, in some ways like your least loyal buyers, like they would, they would move to,[00:31:05] swyx: right, right.But, but they worked out that it wasn't the enterprise API it was enterprise product.[00:31:09] Jacob Effron: Totally. And maybe that was the, that was the secret that like, but the amount of lock-in or just default behavior that has happened in that space, uh, is, is more than I might've imagined with two products that by all accounts are pretty damn similar.Yeah.[00:31:22] swyx: No fight there. Uh, I will say I do think that Codex is still in like a catch up. Like in terms of personal experience. Um, the only thing I like out of, out of Codex is the, is like Spark and like yeah. Uh, the, I, I feel like the skills integration is a little bit better. I feel like, uh, the, the speed is a bit better.Maybe ‘cause it's in, is written in rust or whatever. Um, very minor things that you like. Almost like telling yourself rather than like objectively assessing between two, two of them. I, I, I do think, like vibes wise, I think that's going on. Um, the, the, you know, I, I feel like the, the missing questions, uh, in, in this whole debate is like, why is this so concentrated in only two names, right?Yeah. Like, um, how, where, like, where is the Gemini? You know, presence, where's the Xai presence? Um, and like they are trying, it's just they haven't made that much progress yet.[00:32:12] Jacob Effron: But what the, what the Claude Co moment does show, and it actually in some ways makes you a little more bullish on the potential for someone else to catch up because it does feel like if you're the first person to introduce some magical net new product experience, that that actually might be stickier than one might have imagined.[00:32:27] swyx: Right, right, right. Okay. Yeah.[00:32:28] Jacob Effron: And so it's, everyone can believe they have shot[00:32:29] swyx: that. What do you think that new product experience might be like? I, I, it's, it's like, and this is a failure of imagination on my part. Like, I always wonder, like, people always say this like, well, the, the thing that will save us is like being first to the next new thing.Like what is it?[00:32:41] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:32:42] swyx: It's like,[00:32:45] Jacob Effron: I dunno, something around like, uh, consumer agent, computer use, like hybrid. I think, obviously, I think we're like scratching the surface on the consumer side.[00:32:53] swyx: So my, my current theory is like the. Open claw is like a vision of things to come.[00:32:58] Jacob Effron: Totally.[00:32:58] swyx: Um, and uh, it's good that O open I has like the association with open claw, but by no means do they have the rights to win it.The general thesis that I have been pursuing now is that the year the same way that 2025 was the year of coding agents, 2026 is coding agents breaking containment to do everything else. Um, and so coding agents continue to still win, but because they generate software and software eats the world, so like, it's kind of like the trans.Associated property of like software, eat the world, coding agents, eat software, therefore coding agents eat the world. Um, which is like an interesting,[00:33:30] Jacob Effron: yeah, and breaking containment always an easier phase phrase in the consumer context than the enterprise one. You've seen people run these really cool, uh, experiments in their own personal lives.I think like,[00:33:37] swyx: yes.[00:33:38] Jacob Effron: Figuring out, you know, how you, obviously everyone's focused, you know, on the enterprise side now around how you create these experiences. I feel like the vibes, you know, people love to have these narratives of like, everything is completely shifted. It's like I actually, you know, open AI.Organizationally, uh, you know, volatility aside is, you know, great products, great team, great models like everyone else in the world is incentivized for there to be. Two, three more. Everyone would love more like great model companies. And so I feel like the, the natural forces of the world revolt when any one company, you know, is too much the star of the show, right?There's so many people in the ecosystem that are incentivized for that not to happen. And so I think I'd be shocked if we don't have. Uh, uh, reversion of vibes, not maybe completely the other way, but at least a little bit more equal at some point over the next six, 12 months.[00:34:24] swyx: I, I think there's just a kind of different stages when, when you talk about the world, one wanting more model companies, I talked think about like the neo labs.[00:34:30] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:34:31] swyx: And I mean, I don't know, is it fair to say none of them have really broken through in the past year?[00:34:35] Jacob Effron: I think that's totally fair,[00:34:37] swyx: which is rough. Um, and well, how are we gonna, how are we gonna grow that diversity in, in, in choice, like. Um, that's, this is it.[00:34:46] Jacob Effron: Yeah. It'll be really interesting to see what, what, what ends up happening with that.And you've seen, you know, folks like Nvidia, you know, very incentivized to make sure there's, there's a broader platform of, of other model providers.[00:34:57] swyx: I think, uh, I don't know people say this, but I, I, I don't think they try it hard. Nvidia tries harder to build neo clouds[00:35:05] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:35:06] swyx: Than neo labs.[00:35:07] Jacob Effron: Well, they try pretty damn hard to build neo Cloud, so[00:35:09] swyx: that's,[00:35:09] Jacob Effron: yeah.[00:35:10] swyx: But like, you know, let's call it like the, the core weaves of the world, much happier place in the, you know, than any neo lab built on top of them.[00:35:18] Jacob Effron: Yeah. That one might argue it's, it's easier to, to enable a neo cloud to be successful than it is. Uh, you can't will a neo lab into existence the same way you, soNvidia[00:35:25] swyx: has more direct control over it.Uh, for sure.[00:35:27] Jacob Effron: What else is kind of catching your eye today on the startup side? I mean, you worry, there's obviously this whole narrative of like, you know, the foundation models, you know, they announced a product and every stock goes down 15%. Like[00:35:36] swyx: Yeah.[00:35:37] Jacob Effron: Do you, do you worry about the foundation models just kind of eating into to a bunch of these startup categories?[00:35:43] swyx: Not really. I, I think actually like. As, uh, there's, there's, okay, there's, there's, there's the, there's the point of view of like being an investor in startups, and there's a point of view of like, do you wanna start something? And I think honestly, like the, the downside for all these is so. Minimal in, in a sense of like, the worst you do is you just get hired into one of these labs anyway.So I, I think the, the market for people who just do things and try things and try to execute in like a competent way, even if like it doesn't work out commercially, even if it just wasn't that great anyway. Like, but like that's your job interview to go into, into one of these things anyway, so, um, I don't feel that.From a, from a very, very small startup perspective, mid-size startups. Yes. Uh, I will say there's been a lot of dead, um, LM Infra, a lot of LM infra consolidation like the, the, uh, lang fuses of the world getting absorbed into, into click house. And I, I think. Like people have maybe worked out the domain specific playbook, uh, and like, I think that's okay.Um, and, and yeah, I'm not that, not that worried about, uh, okay. So, um, I, I would say I'd be more worried about traditional SaaS, like low NPSS. This is the whole AI versus SaaS debate that has, that's been going on. Uh, and, and like literally I'm going through that exact thing in my company where, so I like kind of.Thinking through this on a very visceral, visceral level, right? On one hand you have the people who say you vibe coders don't appreciate the amount of work that goes into A-A-C-R-M and like, yeah, you think you can rip out Salesforce? So did the 30 entrepreneurs before you, right? Like, like, you know, you classically underestimate the things that you don't.Deeply, no. And, and, and target audience is not you. Uh, at the same time, like we have never been able to build software so easily and customize software so easily and like Yeah, you're not gonna use 90% of the things in Salesforce. So like, yeah. What's the typical, so what have you, what[00:37:33] Jacob Effron: have you done internally?[00:37:34] swyx: So we have there the main SaaS that we do for event management and sponsor management. That's, and we paid 200 KA year for that. Not, not huge, but like chunky for, for, for my, my scale. Um, and like, yeah, I could probably spend 2000 and, and build like a custom version of that. Um, the, the, the trick has been dealing with my, the rest of my team and getting them on board.Yeah. ‘cause I'm the most ethical person on my team, but like, I can't make that decision myself. And I think in the same way I've been telling with other CEOs team leaders as well, it's like, well you can be super cloud pilled. You can be super LM psychosis and that you think that's okay, but you like you have to bring your team with you.And I think like there, the sort of widening disparity in LM psychosis in companies is causing real s real riffs because. And on one hand, on one hand, the people who are less AI native are not getting with the picture. They're not, they're actually like behind, they're actually not waking up to the fact that like you, everything you think is necessary is not actually that necessary.And in fact, exactly would be better of you if you just like held your nose and went in and when came out the other side. Yeah, only talking to agents in natural language and like your life would actually be better and you just, you're just like close-minded. There's that perspective. The other perspective is, oh, you vibe coder.You, you did this in a weekend and you got the 80% solution and now the rest of your employees. Have to pick up the rest of your s**t, right, that you, that you thought you were, you were such hot, amazing, uh, uh, at, but like, actually you didn't figure it out. And like, actually LMS are still useless at this and blah, blah, blah.So like, I think there's this huge debate going on in every company right now. Um, and like, um, you know, I have a small microcosm of it, but like, yeah, it, it's making me hesitate to, to pull the trigger. But like I will at some point, it's like maybe I've put it off for one year, but not like five. Yeah, but like, so, so like SaaS is definitely getting squeezed.Um, it does make me wonder, like, I, I do think that there's an opportunity for a more AI native, um, system of record thing that is not just Postgres. Um, or not just MongoDB, although both are very good. Maybe it's like a convex or like people Yeah. Bring up convex a lot. I don't know, like, like, I, I just feel like the sort of quote unquote firebase of, of AI apps isn't really a thing yet.Um, beyond what we have. Uh, which, which is fine. It's, it's, it's just. We could probably start in a more sort of rapid iteration cycle first before scaling up to like a Postgres or MongoDB, which are more sort of old tech. I was at a dinner with, uh, Mike Krieger, the CPO of en philanthropic, and, and he, we were just kind of going around the room going like, what are people most worried about?Yeah. And, uh, for me, uh, I, instead of security, I brought up biosafety. Yeah,[00:40:21] Jacob Effron: classic.[00:40:22] swyx: Um, actually, like I said, it was. Cliche and classic, and the rest of the table were, were like, what do you mean? Someone sitting at home can manufacture a virus that wipes out half of humanity,[00:40:32] Jacob Effron: almost like the OG Jeffrey Hinton.Like, this is why you should be scared.[00:40:35] swyx: I'm like, yeah, like the read the, you know, risk reports. Like this is like the thing. Um, I think, and Mike was just sitting there knowing he was sitting on Mythos and going like, actually it's security. Um, and I think like, um, I think the, there's, there's, part of it is.A very good marketing. Like too good. Yeah, like I would actually advise and topic to tune down the marketing because also it's, it is just a very good model and you don't have to make so many marketing claims around it. At the same time, it is not really a private model. If you give it to 40 companies.Each of whom have like 10,000 employees or whatever. Right. It's not, it's not private, it's, it's like there's bad actors in there.[00:41:18] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully not as, uh, as bad as releasing it widely, but, uh, no, I mean, it's an interesting. You know, it's an interesting case study for how all, I mean, many model releases might, I mean, you know, this might be the first model release that looks like the rest of ‘em from from now on, right?[00:41:31] swyx: It, it, so it's, it's the, there's an overall product strategy, uh, for anthropic of like bundle, uh, you know, restrict access bundle, uh, product with model maybe.Whereas, uh, OpenAI has definitely been a lot more sort of. Philosophically aligned on like, we will just enable access everywhere and we don't know what you, what will come out of it. Right.[00:41:51] Jacob Effron: Right. Though, I mean, this current moment, uh, obviously the cynical take is also just ties to the amount of compute that both companies[00:41:56] swyx: Yeah.Right, right, right. Yeah, I think, I think that's true. I I do think like the, the, this is the, the, the scale, the dawn of like larger than 10 trillion parameter models is very interesting. I don't think it, I think it's a temporary phenomenon because we have much larger compute clusters coming online for everyone over the next like three, five years.It's, and this is like already written in, in the cards.[00:42:18] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:42:19] swyx: So to the extent that like, you know, will we have rationing of models, uh, above 10 trillion, uh, in like two years? I don't think so. I think everyone will have no, we'll just[00:42:29] Jacob Effron: have rationing of the next phase.[00:42:30] swyx: Right. Right. But like, that's as it should be almost like, um.My, my classic example, which I, this is just me theorizing, not anything confirmed by Google. When Google announced Gemini, they actually announced three sizes, which was Flash Pro Ultra. They never released Ultra. They only have Pro and Flash. Um, so my theory is they have ultra sitting in a basement and they just could distilling from it for, for flashing pro.Um, which like, yeah, I mean, I, I actually think that's. As it should be for any lab that they, that they do that.[00:43:02] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Just because those are the models that people actually wanna end up using. And it's just like cost prohibit.[00:43:06] swyx: It is more, yeah, it's cost. Yeah. It's, it's not the want, it's just, just, just the cost.Um, I do think, like, uh, it is interesting that, uh, for a while I was, I was considering the theory that models capped out at two, 2 trillion, and I think that's proving to be wrong. And well then if I'm wrong, how wrong? How wrong am I? Do we do 200 trillion? Do we do two quarter trillion, whatever? Um, and I don't think we have the straight answer to that, but like, uh, it's interesting that we are continuing to scale number of pers when everyone kind of assu like can see that we're not going to get like the next thousand or 1 million x from this paradigm.So like the others, like the alias of the world are working on other. Um, model architecture improvements. We need a different scaling law, I guess, because like, we're, I, I feel like people already already feel like we're tapped out on this. Like the, the end, the end state of this is we turn most of the world into data centers and like, I don't know.I don't know if we want that.[00:44:08] Jacob Effron: Yeah, I mean, uh, if the, if, if, if the return of intelligence are there, maybe, uh, maybe not so bad.[00:44:13] swyx: I, I, I think there, there's just a sheer amount of like, like un scalability that like is wrangling people's sensibilities right now. Um, especially in terms of like context lengths.Um, my classic quote is that context length is like the slowest scaling factor in, in lms.[00:44:30] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:44:30] swyx: Um, we, like, we took maybe. Three years to go from like 4,000 context length to a million and that's about it. Yeah. Like Gemini has had a million token context length for two years now. Um, and no one's using it.Like, so like yeah, it's memory. Memory is probably gonna be the, the biggest limiting constraint on all these things.[00:44:50] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Certainly seems that way. I guess I'm curious over the last year since you recorded last, like what's one thing you've changed your mind on?[00:44:57] swyx: I feel like I was kind of bearish on open models like last year.Um, in a sense of, like, I, I had just done the podcast with an Al[00:45:07] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:45:08] swyx: Of Braintrust where he, and he, I mean, you know, he has a good cross section of all the top AI companies and he says market share of open source is 5% and going down. Um, I think that's changed. I think it's going up. Um, and even if,[00:45:22] Jacob Effron: even though the capability gap does seem to be increasing.Spending on the[00:45:26] swyx: time. It's hard to tell. Yeah, it's, it's really hard to tell. ‘cause like, okay, for, for listeners, capability gap increasing is like on public benchmarks. And let's say you're comparing mythos versus like, I don't know, G-T-O-S-S or like GLM 5.1. And, um, it's, it is really hard to tell. ‘cause even if they were closing, you will also not believe that they were closing that much because it's very easy to gain the benchmarks.Yeah. So you just don't really, really know. Um, all you know is like. Uh, there's somewhat objective open router stats on like what people choose in a free market. And people do choose some of these open models in significant volume, except that a lot of them are heavily discounted. So you need to kind of like price adjust, uh, these things.So even if, even if that were true, which I, I'm not sure, like I, I, I feel like the numbers just up now instead of down. Uh, I think the. Separation between what the top tier agent labs

We've been on a bit of a mini World Models series over the last quarter: from introducing the topic with Yi Tay, to exploring Marble with World Labs' Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson, to previewing World Models learned from massive gaming datasets with General Intuition's Pim de Witte (who has now written down their approach to World Models with Not Boring), to discussing the Cosmos World Model with with Andrew White of Edison Scientific on our new Science pod, to writing up our own theses on Adversarial World Models. Meanwhile Nvidia, Waymo and Tesla have published their own approaches, Google has released Genie 3, and Yann LeCun has raised $1B for AMI and published LeWorldModel.Today's guests have a radically different approach to World Modeling to every player we just mentioned — while Genie 3 is impressive, its many flaws demonstrate the issues with their approach - terrain clipping, noninteractivity (single player, no physics/no objects other than the player move), and maximum of 60 second immersion. Moonlake AI (inspired by the Dreamworks logo) is the diametric opposite - immediately multiplayer, incredibly interactive, indefinite lifetime, capable of MANY different kinds of world models by simulating environments, predicting outcomes, and planning over long horizons. This is enabled by bootstrapping from game engines and training custom agents: In Towards Efficient World Models, Chris Manning and Ian Goodfellow join Fan-Yun in explaining why their approach to efficiency with structure and casuality instead of just blind scaling is sorely needed:SOTA models still show physical or spatial understanding glitches, such as solid objects floating in mid-air or moving “inside” other solid objects.If the goal is to plan for the next action, how often is a high-resolution pixel view necessary for modeling the world? Our bet is that there is a disproportionately large share of economically valuable tasks where such detail is not required. After all, humans with a wide variety of sensory limitations have little difficulty doing almost everything in the world. Furthermore, for a large number of purposes, describing a scene or a situation in a few words of language (“the car's tires squealed as it cornered sharply”) is sufficient for understanding and planning.Experiments also show that humans only partially process visual input in a top-down, task-directed way, often making use of abstracted object-level modeling. In almost all cases, partial representations combined with semantic understanding are sufficient.…If the goal is to facilitate the understanding of causality in multimodal environments, then the world model—whether it is used in the virtual world or the physical world—must prioritize properties such as spatial and physical state consistency maintained over long time periods, and an ability to evolve the world that accurately reflects the consequences of actions. That's what Moonlake is building.Game engines are the right starting point abstraction to efficiently extract causal relationships, and building the interfaces and community (including their new $30,000 Creator Cup) to kickstart the flywheel of actions-to-observations.We were fortunate enough to attend their sessions at GDC 2026 (the Mecca of Game Devs), and were impressed by the huge variety and flexibility of the worlds people were building with Moonlake's tools already! Live videos on the pod.Full Video Pod on YouTube!Timestamps00:00 Benchmarking Gets Hard00:47 Meet Moonlake Founders01:26 Why Build World Models03:12 Structure Not Just Scale05:37 Defining Action Conditioned Worlds07:32 Abstraction Versus Bitter Lesson14:39 Language Versus JEPA Debate20:27 Reasoning Traces And Rendering Layer37:00 Gameplay Over Graphics38:02 Fiction Rules And World Tweaks39:15 Code Engines Beat Learned Priors41:10 Diffusion Scaling Limits43:23 Symbolic Versus Diffusion Boundary46:14 Platform Vision Beyond Games50:24 Spatial Audio And Multimodal Latents54:23 NLP Roots Hiring And Moon Lake NameTranscript[00:00:00] Cold Open[00:00:00] Chris Manning: Think this whole space is extremely difficult as things are emerging now. And I mean, it's not only for world models, I think it's for everything including text-based models, right? ‘cause in the early days it seemed very easy to have good benchmarks ‘cause we could do things like question answering benchmarks.[00:00:20] But these days so much of what people are wanting to do is nothing like that, right? You're wanting to get some recommendations about which backpack would be best for you for your trip in Europe next month. It's not so easy to come up with a benchmark, and it's the same problem with these world models.[00:00:41] Meet the Founders[00:00:41] swyx: Okay. We're back in the studio with Moon Lake's, two leads. I, I guess there's other founders as well, but, sun and Chris Manning. Welcome to the studio.[00:00:54] Fan-yun Sun: Thanks. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having us.[00:00:56] swyx: You've got, you guys have, come burst onto the scene with a really refreshing [00:01:00] new take of mold models.[00:01:01] I would just want to, I guess ask how you, the two of you came together. Chris, you're a legend in NLP and just AI in, in, in general. You're, you're his grad student, I guess[00:01:10] Fan-yun Sun: Actually my co-founder.[00:01:11] swyx: Oh, yeah.[00:01:12] Fan-yun Sun: I should give a lot of credit to my co-founder, Sharon. Yeah. She was, she was actually working with Professor Fe Androgyn and then she ended up working with, Ron and Chris Manning here.[00:01:22] And then, so I got connected through to Chris initially, actually through my co-founder,[00:01:26] What is Moon Lake?[00:01:26] swyx: what is Moon Lake? What, what is, actually, I'm also very curious about the name, but like why going into world models?[00:01:33] Fan-yun Sun: So I was working a lot. With actually Nvidia research during my PhD years on essentially generating interactive worlds to train reinforcement learning agents or embody EA agents.[00:01:44] And then there's two observations. One in academia and one in industry. An industry like folks at Nvidia are actually paying a lot of dollars to purchase these types of interactive worlds, whether it's for the sake of evaluation or training the robots, or policies or models. And [00:02:00] then, in academia, same thing is happening.[00:02:02] And more specifically, when I was actually working with Nvidia on the synthetic data foundation model training project, we were actually generating a lot of these synthetic data and showing that, hey, you can actually, these synthetic data are actually as useful as real world data when it comes to multimodal pre-training.[00:02:16] But then, like I said, there's a lot of dollars being paid out to like external vendors or, or like. Other folks to manually curate these types of data. It was very clear to us that, okay, on our way to, let's call it embody general intelligence models need to learn the consequences behind their actions, which means that they need interactive data and the demand for those types of data are growing exponentially.[00:02:38] But everybody's sort of thinking about it from a pure, say, video generation perspective or something else. But we feel like the true actually opportunity is actually building reasoning models that can do these things, like how humans do these things today. So that's a little bit on the genesis of Moon Lake, and I think the reason I got into world models was partly.[00:02:59] A philosophical [00:03:00] take of the on the world where I like, believe the simulation theory and stuff like that. But on the other, on the other hand, it's really just like, oh, like there's an opportunity there that I feel like nobody's doing it the way I think should be done.[00:03:10] Structure, Not Scale: The Vision[00:03:10] Chris Manning: I can say a little bit about that.[00:03:12] Yeah. So of the overall goal is the pursuit of artificial intelligence and most of my career has been doing that in the language space and that's been just extremely productive. As we all know, the story of the last few years, I don't have to tell about how much we've achieved with large language models, but, uh.[00:03:31] Although they have been extremely effective for ramping language and general intelligence, it's clearly not the whole world. There's this multimodal world of vision, sound, taste that you'd like to be dealing with more than just, language. And then the question is how to do it. And despite, a huge investment in the computer vision space, right, as the research field computer [00:04:00] vision has been for decades, far, far larger than the language space, actually.[00:04:05] I think it's fair. Say that, vision, understanding sort of stalled out, right? You got to object recognition and then progress just wasn't being made right? If you look at any of these, vision language models, it's the language that's doing 90% of the work and the vision barely works. And so there's really an interesting research question as to why that is and at heart, the ideas behind Moon Lake are an attempt to answer that, believing that there can be a really rich connection between a more symbolic layer of abstracted understanding of visual domains, which aren't in the mainstream vision models, which are still trying to operate on the surface level of pixels.[00:04:50] swyx: I think one of your blog posts, you put it as structure, not scale. Is that, a general thesis?[00:04:57] Chris Manning: Yeah. Well, scale is good too.[00:04:58] swyx: Yeah. Scale is good. Too[00:04:59] lot,[00:04:59] Chris Manning: [00:05:00] lots of data is good as well and scale, but nevertheless, you want the structure Yeah. To be able to much more efficiently learn.[00:05:07] swyx: Yeah. The other thing I really liked also is you put out an example of what your kind of reasoning traces look like.[00:05:12] Right. Which you would distill is the word that comes to mind. I don't even think that's a good, good description, but it would involve, for example, geometry, physics, affordances, symbolic logic, perceptual mappings, and what, what have you. But like that, that is the kind of example that involves, let's call it spatial reasoning, role model reasoning as as compared to normal LM reasoning.[00:05:35] Yeah.[00:05:36] Defining World Models vs Video Generation[00:05:36] Vibhu: But also like taking it a step back. So how do you guys define world models? A lot of people see okay, you can do diffusion, you can do video generation. But, you guys put out quite a few blog posts. You put out a essay recently, we can even pull it up about efficient world models. You have a pretty like structural definition here, but for the general audience that don't super follow the space, right.[00:05:55] What's, what's the difference in what we see from like a video generation model to [00:06:00] a world gen A simulator? How do you kind of paint that last[00:06:02] Chris Manning: year? Yeah, so I think this is actually a little bit subtle because, people look at these amazing generative AI video models, SAWA VO three, one of these things, and they think Genie, they think, oh, this is amazing.[00:06:17] This is we've solved understanding the world because you can produce these generative AI videos, but. The reality is that although the visuals do look fantastic, those visuals actually are accompanied by an understanding of the 3D world, understanding how objects can move, what the consequences of different actions are, and that's what's really needed for spatial intelligence.[00:06:49] So I mean, a term we sometimes use is that you need action condition, world models. That you only actually have a world model if you can predict, [00:07:00] given some action is taken, what is going to change in the world because of it. And in particular, that becomes hard over longer time scales. So if you're simply, trying to.[00:07:12] Predict the next video frame. That's not so difficult. But what you actually want to do is understand the consequences, likely consequences of actions minutes into the future. And to do that, you actually much more of an abstracted semantic model of the world.[00:07:32] The Bitter Lesson & Data Abstraction[00:07:32] swyx: Yeah, the question comes where you want to have more structure than is available in just predicting the next token.[00:07:41] And typically, well, let's, let's call it the experience of the last five years has been that is just washed away by scale, right? So what is the right middle ground here that, you don't ignore the bitter lesson, but also you. Can be more efficient than what we're doing today.[00:07:57] Chris Manning: One possibility [00:08:00] is, look, if we just collect masses and masses and masses and masses of video data, this problem will be solved.[00:08:11] Under certain assumptions that could be true, but there are sort of multiple avenues in which it could not be true. The first is what's really essential is understanding the, the consequences of actions producing an action conditioned world model. And if you are simply, collecting observational video data, which is the easy stuff to collect, when you're sort of mining online videos, you don't actually.[00:08:41] Know the actions that are being taken to see how the video is changing. And so if you are never collecting directly actions and you are having to try and infer them from what happened in the observed video, that's not impossible. But it's very [00:09:00] hard and it's not really established that you can get that to work at any scale yet.[00:09:05] And so there's a lot of premium on collecting action condition video data, which is part of why there's been a lot of interest in using simulation so that you can be collecting data where you do know the actions, which isn't quite limited supply, but there's also in the limit of as much data as you could possibly have.[00:09:28] Maybe the problem is eventually solvable, but. Even though we collect huge amounts of text data is always at a great level of abstraction, right? Language is a human designed, abstracted representation where there's meaning in each token and it's representing and abstraction of the world, right?[00:09:51] As soon as you are describing someone as a professor, and as soon as you are saying that they're condescending, right? These are very [00:10:00] abstracted descriptions of the world. It's not at what you're observing as pixel level, and to get to that kind of degree of abstraction, starting from pixels is orders and magnitude of extra data and processing.[00:10:14] And so, although, we absolutely want to exploit, get as much data as possible, use the bitter lesson. Nevertheless, if there are ways in which you can work with five orders of magnitude less data than people working purely from pixels, you're gonna be able to make a lot more progress, a lot more quickly.[00:10:34] And that's the bet here. And so you could just say that's only wanting to be able to, do it more efficiently, do it more quickly, do it more cheaply. But I think it's actually more than that, I think. One should be making the analogy to how human beings work at one level. You know? Yes, we have these high [00:11:00] resolution eyes and we can look and see a scene like a video, but all of the evidence from neuroscience and psychology is that most of what comes into people's eyes is never processed.[00:11:13] Right. That you are doing fairly fine ated processing of exactly what you're focusing on. But as soon as it's away from that of yeah, there's another guy over there that you've sort of only processing top down this very abstracted semantic description of the world around you. And so, that's what human beings are doing.[00:11:33] They're working with semantic abstractions and so. I think it is just the right representation. ‘cause we also have other goals we want to be able to do, real time worlds. So that means there's a limit to how much processing you can do and we want to do long-term planning and consistency. And again, that favors abstraction.[00:11:55] I mean, I guess there was actually a recent. Blog posts that [00:12:00] came out from our Friends of physical intelligence and, they were sort of heading in the same direction they were saying Oh, to the pay[00:12:06] swyx: pay model.[00:12:07] Chris Manning: Yeah. Yeah. To maintain a long term memory of what's happening in the world. So we can, do longer term we actually storing text of what is, been happening in the world.[00:12:19] Right. It is not such a successful strategy of trying to keep it all at a pixel level.[00:12:24] Vibhu: And yeah, I mean, you can see it in video models like that Temporal consistency. We're at a scale of train on, all the video data we have. We have it for maybe 30 seconds, a few minutes. That's not the same as a game state played for half an hour.[00:12:37] Right. I thought you guys break it down pretty well. You have a, you have a blog post about. Building multimodal worlds with an agent. I dunno if you guys wanna talk about this. This is one of the things I read, I[00:12:48] swyx: thought, yeah, it's the thing I talked about with the reasoning chain. Yeah.[00:12:51] Vibhu: So there's like different phases to this.[00:12:53] It seems like it's more of an agent, a scaffold, very different approach than just, type in a prompt and you, you don't have the same consistency. [00:13:00] It also, like, for people that are listening, I, I would highly recommend reading it. It breaks down the problem in a different light, right?[00:13:06] So like, what do you need to consider when you're talking about video, like world game models, right? How would, what do you need to consider? What are the factors? What are the elements? What's the state? So I don't know if you guys have stuff to talk about for this one.[00:13:19] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah. Actually, I wanted to add on a little bit Yeah.[00:13:22] On our previous point, which is just like, change topics so quickly. I, I do feel like sometimes people confuse like, oh, like we're taking an an, an method with abstraction. That means they don't believe in bitter lesson. Like that's just false, right? Like we are believed is a bitter lesson. But then I feel like the question that we always discuss is like, what is the right abstraction level today?[00:13:42] The analogy I like to make is like, let's just say we can encode and decode. Represent all of images, videos, audio and bytes. Then the most bitter lesson approached is to train a next byte prediction model as opposed to the next token prediction model where it's just like, okay, it's natively multimodal, can just, but it's like, yeah, like [00:14:00] to, to Chris's point, it's like the scale and computing you need to achieve that.[00:14:03] So that's why we always come back to like, okay, what is the most efficient way to do it? And reasoning models to the point of this blog post is a showcase of like, Hey, we're actually just like reasoning about the world and reasoning about. The aspects of the world that CAGR that matter for me to learn what I want to learn from this role model.[00:14:21] swyx: Yeah, it's like you're improving the en encoder of whatever you're, trying to model. And like a better representation would just represent the important things in less space. Yeah. Which would just be more efficient.[00:14:33] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah.[00:14:34] swyx: So yeah, I, I, I fully agree that it is not, antagonistic to, bitter lesson.[00:14:38] I do wanna wanna mention one more thing. Is there any philosophical differences with the JPA stuff that, Yun is working on? I gotta go there. You, you, you, you're, you're imagining like some latent abstraction. I'm like, okay, fine. Let's, let's talk about it, right? Like it's an elephant in the room.[00:14:52] Chris Manning: Yeah.[00:14:53] JEPA & Philosophical Differences with LeCun[00:14:53] Chris Manning: There are philosophical differences. Jan Lacoon is a dear friend of mine, but. [00:15:00] He has never appreciated the power of language in particular, or symbolic representations in general. Yarn is a very visual thinker. He always wants to claim that he thinks visually and there are no words, symbols, or math in his head.[00:15:21] Maybe that's true of yarn. It's certainly not the way I think. Um. But at any rate, the world according to yarn is the basic stuff of the, the world and of intelligence is visual and language is just. This low bit rate communication mechanism between humans and it doesn't have much other utility and it's far inferior to the high bit rate video, that comes into your eyes.[00:15:53] And I think he's fundamentally missing a number of important things [00:16:00] there. Think of this evolutionary argument looking at animals, right? That the closest analogies, the things with chimps, right? So chimpanzees, have fairly similar brains to human beings. They have great vision systems, they have great memory systems.[00:16:18] They've got, better memory than we do of short term memories. They can plan, they can build primitive tools that, humans. Massively ahead in what we understand about the world, what we can plan, what we can build. And essentially what took off for us was that humans managed to develop language and that gave a symbolic knowledge, representation, and reasoning level, which just, okay if this sort of vaulting of what could be done with the intelligence in brains.[00:16:59] So the [00:17:00] philosopher Dan de refers to language as a cognitive tool and argues that, humans unique among the creatures in the world have managed to build their own cognitive tools and language is the famous first example. But other things like, mathematics and programming languages are also cognitive tools.[00:17:21] They give you an ability to. Think in abstractions, in extended causal reasoning chains. And that allows you to do much more. And we use that for spatial representation and intelligence and planning and gameplay as well. So we believe, and this is, underlying the specific technologies that Moon Lake is making, that symbolic representations are powerful.[00:17:50] And you want to use that in your understanding of the visual world when you want a causal understanding, when you want to maintain long-term [00:18:00] consistency and prediction. And as I understand it, that's just not in ya Koon's worldview. So I think that's the fundamental philosophical difference. Then there's the specific model.[00:18:11] He's been advancing jpa, that's a reasonable. Research bed is a direction as to, to head for building out a model of the visual world. To my mind, it's sort of one reasonable research bed. It's not really established. It's the best one that everyone should be following,[00:18:32] swyx: at least developed at scale, at Meta.[00:18:34] But it's not just vision, right? Like, I mean, JPA is a, just joint admitting prediction can be applied to anything really. And people have done it. The argument is that there is a latent representation or that is probably more. Suited to the task, then why not let machines do it for us instead of predefining it at all?[00:18:50] And isn't something like a JPA shaped thing the right answer? And if not, why not?[00:18:55] Chris Manning: So I think there's a part of jpa that's right, which is [00:19:00] you do want to have a joint. Embedding that gives you a consistent model of the world. And Jan's argument is you can never get that from auto aggressive language models ‘cause they're sort of left to right churning out one token at a time.[00:19:22] I guess this is where we're the research arguments of the field, I'm not actually convinced that's right. ‘cause although the token production is this auto aggressive, process that's heading, left to right, I guess don't have to be left to right. But anyway, in sequence of tokens we could have right to left Arabic.[00:19:40] But although that's true, all of the weights of the model that are internal to the transformer, they are a joint model of the model's understanding of the world. And so I think you can think of the weights of the model as a form of. Joint representation, [00:20:00] and therefore it is plausible to think that could be the basis of a world model, which avoids, ya's objections.[00:20:10] swyx: I think I follow, and obviously that would touch on what Moon Lake eventually ends up doing as well. Right. Like, which it's hard to tell because you put out the end results, but we don't know the inputs that go into it. So it's, it's, that's something that we have to figure out over time.[00:20:25] Vibhu: Yeah. I mean, I guess this kind of breaks down some of the outputs. Do you wanna walk us through it?[00:20:31] Reasoning Traces & Interactive Worlds[00:20:31] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah. So this, this really just walks us through the reasoning traces of like, okay. So that just say, if we wanna build a world in this context, it's really just a game demo that, that shows the, the variety of interactions that this world model can build.[00:20:45] And yeah, it's really just a reasoning traces of like, okay it prompted to create a bowling game. Like how did it achieve what you saw? That level of causality, interaction and consistency, right? So yeah, this is almost just like a, an example of [00:21:00] like a reasoning traces. Very[00:21:01] swyx: detailed.[00:21:01] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah.[00:21:01] Vibhu: Very, very detailed.[00:21:02] You gotta you don't even realize it, right? Like when a video is generated, what happens when a ball strikes a pin, right? So first, like you, there's audio in that, like audio triggers happens, score increments, the world changes. Like pins have to start dropping. There's a timer that goes on. It's just like very similar to how now we're used to reasoning for language models.[00:21:20] There's a whole state of what happens. So geometry, physics, all this stuff. And then yeah, there's kind of that single prompt. So asset, ation all this stuff. It's like a, it's a nice view to see what's going on.[00:21:32] swyx: I think Sun is also too polite to point out that, both like Google's genie, demos as well as world Labs is marble, do not have interactive worlds.[00:21:41] Fan-yun Sun: That's the benefit of having a reasoning model, right? Like, because you can, you can say, oh, like maybe in this particular context, I want to learn how to bowl. And then you can say, okay, then what is it important when it comes to learning how to bowl? Okay, maybe it's like I need to understand the, the basic of like, physics and I want to throw it over [00:22:00] them.[00:22:00] I wanna know that when I, when it resets it's a new game. So I know that yeah, basically, you know to pick up the ball, you know that ball's gonna cause the pins to fall down. You know that what's important to this particular bowling game is to score and you know that the score corresponds to the number of pins that fell down.[00:22:19] So it's just like, if it's a model that sort of knows what it. Looks like, knows what a bowling game looks like, but doesn't actually allows you to practice over and over again and to understand that, oh, like what it takes to actually get a high score. Then it sort of doesn't actually allow you to learn what you set out to learn within the world model.[00:22:38] And I think this is really just one example of showing like the advantages of the approach that we're taking over most the, let's call it the zeitgeist, is today, when people talk about clinical role models,[00:22:51] Chris Manning: right? So it sort of seems like the question to ask when there's a world model is.[00:22:58] Can I not [00:23:00] only just wander around the world and look at the beautiful graphics, can I interact with the objects in the world and see the right consequences of actions?[00:23:11] Vibhu: And you also understand what the consequences would be if you do something right. So it's not just like, okay, there's one thing if I pick it up, something will happen.[00:23:19] But, there's 50 options and I know I can expect, I can infer what would happen if I do any of them. Right. So very different when you can actually see it play around with it.[00:23:28] swyx: There,[00:23:28] Beyond Unity: Cognitive Tools for World Building[00:23:31] swyx: there's two cheeky elements of that. I mean, the, the, the I guess, less ambitious one is, let's really establish for listeners, why is this fundamentally different than writing Unity code, right?[00:23:40] Like just creating a model to translate a prompt into Unity code[00:23:44] Fan-yun Sun: so there is an underlying physics engine. Yeah. In that sense, there's some overlapping things to Unity, but the way we think about it is like physics engine. Tools or code are cognitive tools like borrowing Chris's term, right? Like tools [00:24:00] that the model can employ as means to an end.[00:24:04] So today maybe you say, okay, in this particular context we care about physics, we care about the long-term causality consequences. Then yes, we deploy it, employ physics engine, and then maybe tomorrow we say, okay, we're we're training that. Just say drones where we only care about really fluid dynamics and the visual aspect of the world.[00:24:25] Then, then yeah, maybe we don't actually, the model actually doesn't have to use a physics engine. Or maybe it employs other types of representation or physics engine to achieve the task. So yes, writing code for Unity is sort of similar to a tool that our A model can employ, but our goal is for a model to take a representation conditioned reasoning.[00:24:46] Approach or process.[00:24:47] swyx: Yeah,[00:24:47] Fan-yun Sun: internally.[00:24:48] swyx: Yeah. Using these things as just like general two calls. Right. Which I think is very interesting. The other more ambitious one is, some kind of recursive element where it becomes multiplayer, right? Like here, there's a single player element, you're not [00:25:00] modeling any other people involved.[00:25:01] And that is a whole other thing.[00:25:04] Fan-yun Sun: But in fact, we can really do multiplayers. Oh yeah, okay. I haven't seen any double situations. So just actually just like prompt our, our model to say, Hey, like configure to multiplayer. Then it'll do like this. You'll be able to configure multiplayer[00:25:16] swyx: great[00:25:17] Fan-yun Sun: persistency database for you.[00:25:18] Easy. Yeah.[00:25:19] Vibhu: So what, what are like some of the current limitations in where we're at? So there's one approach of like, okay, scale up video predictors. Obviously there's data issues. With approaches like this, is it data constraints? What are like the next steps? Is it real time? Like, so there's one side of, write an agent to write Unity code, but okay, I want to be streaming a game real time.[00:25:38] I want to have characters being also like agent, but where, where do we kinda see this scaling up? Right?[00:25:44] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah, there's definitely a data constraint. Like the more data, the, the better. This reasoning model can almost basically act as humans to like operate a variety of tools and softwares to build whatever's necessary.[00:25:57] And then there's a sort [00:26:00] of fidelity constraint, which we're actually solving with another model, which we can talk about later. But it's like, it's not as easy to get to photorealism with the approach that we're taking. But we think there are better solutions to that, which is we can dive into later.[00:26:14] Later.[00:26:15] Vibhu: The one one thing you note here is it's a diffusion model, right? So there's, there's a few approaches, diffusion caution, splatting, yeah, so Ry diffusion model, you guys wanna[00:26:25] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah.[00:26:25] Vibhu: Introduce,[00:26:26] Fan-yun Sun: yeah, totally.[00:26:26] Rie: Neural Rendering & Skins for Worlds[00:26:26] Fan-yun Sun: So within our world modeling framework, we think there are two models that we train, right?[00:26:31] Like, there's the multimodal reasoning model that we just talked about that essentially handles. Mainly the, the causality, the persistency and logic determinism of the world. And then RY is our bet on saying, okay, like while all those model, can take care of all these things that we just talked about, it's limitations compared to existing, say, video models, is that it doesn't have as high of a pixel [00:27:00] ality right off the gate, right?[00:27:02] And EE is to say, Hey, we can actually take whatever persistent representation that we generate with our multimodal reasoning model and learn to restyle it into photo photorealistic styles or arbitrary styles you want. So this model is almost to say, Hey, I'm going to respect the persistency and interactivity of the world that you created, but my only job is to make sure that its pixel distribution is close to what we want.[00:27:29] Vibhu: Yeah.[00:27:30] swyx: Great example right there. You kept the KL divergence.[00:27:33] Fan-yun Sun: Oh. Where,[00:27:34] swyx: no, no. I mean this, this is a, a classic like, how you don't stray too far from the source material as you, you kept the kl, which is Oh yeah. Kind of cool. Yeah.[00:27:43] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah.[00:27:44] swyx: I mean, and the[00:27:44] Chris Manning: difference is, and I mean sun was pointing at this, where sort of saying it's in one way a more difficult path, but a better path that, typically the diffusion models are producing the whole scene and it looks lovely, [00:28:00] but there isn't spatial understanding behind it, which is allowing for the real time graphics gameplay, the spatial intelligence, understanding the consequences of worlds where this is, taking a path where it is assuming an abstracted semantic model of the world's state.[00:28:20] And then the diffusion model is then being used on top of that to produce the high quality graphics.[00:28:27] swyx: Is there an intended practical, or business use for this, or is it like a, like a demonstration of capabilities?[00:28:34] Fan-yun Sun: We actually believe that this is gonna be the next paradigm of rendering. So it's gonna replace how ra raizer, it's gonna replace DLSS today because it not only has these pixel prior that's learned from the world such that you can literally play any game in photo realistic styles, which is a lot of people's desire when they do GTA, right?[00:28:51] Like,[00:28:51] Vibhu: all the mods, all the people adding perfect lighting and all this.[00:28:54] swyx: So[00:28:54] Fan-yun Sun: skins[00:28:55] swyx: for worlds, let's call it[00:28:56] Fan-yun Sun: skins, let's call it skin for worlds. I,[00:28:58] Vibhu: it's also like, you can call it skin, you can call it [00:29:00] customization. You can play it how you want, right?[00:29:01] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah, exactly. And I think another thing that we really pointed out specific specifically in this blog is the programmability of it, right?[00:29:09] So what this means is that this render historically render is always a derivative of the game state, right? You're saying, oh, here's the game state, I'm rendering out a frame. But here I'm saying actually this render can be part of the gameplay loop. I can say something along the lines of, if upon getting 10.[00:29:26] Apples, I'm gonna, my weapon of choice, my bullet's gonna turn into apples. And that's, that's possible because we can say, we can basically dynamically have certain game state trigger the, the preconditions to the render such that the rendering is now part of the game loop too. One thing is to just say, okay, it's, it's, it's the appearance.[00:29:47] But the second thing is also to say there's these novel interactions that are possible because this render now has actually priors of the world.[00:29:57] swyx: It is up to the artist to figure out what to do with it.[00:29:59] Fan-yun Sun: It [00:30:00] is up to the creators. Yes.[00:30:01] swyx: Yeah.[00:30:01] Fan-yun Sun: And I also think that's actually another big argument that we're making and the reason that we're picking, taking the bet we're baking is that a lot of the times, whether it's for embody AI gaming, like you want a layer where human can inject their intentions.[00:30:15] So, for example, let's just say in the context of gaming, it's obviously like my creative intent, but maybe in the context of embodied ai, it's like, oh, like I take this foundational policy and I want to actually fine tune it to deploy in my house. So you want to almost say, inject, have a layer where human can say, oh, here's the distribution of things I want to create to achieve my goal.[00:30:35] And I think 3D graphics as it as it is today, is basic, the layer for people to say, Hey, what do I care about in this world? And it allows, basically human intent to be expressed in these worlds much more explicitly and distributionally as opposed to just saying, Hey, I'm gonna generate like, arbitrary.[00:30:54] And it's like just prompts,[00:30:55] swyx: it's one of those things where like, I think you, you're going to build up a series of models, right? [00:31:00] This is just one of, this is probably like the highest utility or heaviest, frequency one, I don't dunno what to call this. Where like you Yeah. You can immediately drop this in on any game and you don't need anything else that.[00:31:10] That you guys do. But, I, I could see, I could see that I think the, the human intent is something that people are not even used to because we're so used to static worlds or, worlds that just don't react, or, I don't know. It's, it, you're kind of blowing my mind right now with like, I'm, I wonder if you've talked to people at GDC Hmm.[00:31:27] And what are they gonna do with it?[00:31:30] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah. Now the stance that we take on this front is like, we're not gonna be more creative than our users to ship[00:31:35] swyx: it out.[00:31:35] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah. But we wanna make sure that we're building things in a way that really allows them to express their intent.[00:31:41] swyx: The thing that you said about, here's the distribution that I want.[00:31:45] I think text may be too low of a bandwidth to. To really demonstrate, because I, I, there, I'm, I'm probably just gonna want to drop in a bunch of, reference assets and then you can figure it out from[00:31:58] Vibhu: there. But you probably wanna do a, a mixture of [00:32:00] both, right? Like you throw in a few images. I wanted this style.[00:32:02] Yeah. I want it to look like this. So it, it's, it's a mixture, right?[00:32:05] Chris Manning: I, I think it's a mixture. I mean, yeah, I mean there's clearly a visual component of this, and it's not that, everything can be text. ‘cause of course you want to give a visual look, but there's also a massive amount of giving the overall picture of the look of the world and the behavior of things that you can express in a few words of text.[00:32:32] And it be very time consuming and difficult to do via visual means. So I think, yeah, you want a combination of both.[00:32:40] Evaluating World Models[00:32:40] Vibhu: So one question I kind of have is, how do we go about evaluating world models? So like, there's many axes, right? One is like, okay. I have preferences. How well do we adhere to prompts? One is the simulation.[00:32:50] One is like do things, is there core logic that's broken? So coming from we know how to evaluate diffusion, there's fidelity, there's [00:33:00] stuff like that. But what are some of the challenges that most people probably aren't thinking about?[00:33:04] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah, I think this is like a great question and probably one of the hardest questions in role models because like, I think it always comes back to what are you building this role model for?[00:33:13] And depending on your end goal and purpose, the evaluation should defer. So in the context of games, then the most direct way of measuring is how much behind are people actually spending in this world that you create? And if your goal is to say, for example, in the context that we just talked about, like, hey, deploying, deploying action in body, a agent, then your, your end.[00:33:33] Metric is then, okay, after training in these worlds that you generate how robust it is to when you actually deploy to the target environment. But then, it's, it's hard to measure these end metrics. So today people have like these proxy metrics that I call that basically try to measure what we really care about, which is the end metrics, but then frankly it's different for every use case.[00:33:57] Yeah,[00:33:57] Vibhu: which seems like quite a challenge, right? Like in [00:34:00] in language models or video models. Image models, your benchmarks are proxies, right? People aren't actually asking instruction, following tool use questions. They're proxies of how well it will do downstream. But for this, so like, should teams, should companies have their own individual benchmarks outside of games?[00:34:16] If you think of stuff like, okay, video production, movies, stuff like that, that also want to use world models. Should, should they sort of internalize like. Their own proxy. Is this something you guys do? Where, where does that connect[00:34:28] Chris Manning: go? Yeah, I think this whole space is extremely difficult as things are emerging now.[00:34:35] And I mean, it's not only for world models, I think it's for everything including text-based models, right? ‘cause in the early days it seemed very easy to have good benchmarks ‘cause we could do things like question answering benchmarks and could you answer the question based on these documents and the various other kinds of, do pieces of logical reasoning or math.[00:34:58] But again, these are sort of. [00:35:00] And there were sort of visual equivalents of things like object recognition, right? For these small component tasks. These days so much of what people are wanting to do also with language models is nothing like that, right? You're wanting to, have an interaction with the language model and get some recommendations about which backpack would be best for you for your trip in Europe next month.[00:35:25] And it's not the same kind of thing, right? And it's not so easy to come up with a benchmark as to does this large language model give you an effective interaction for guiding you in a good way for shopping, right? So, and it's the same problem with these world models. So if we take the game design case, well success is that a game designer can.[00:35:57] Produce what they are [00:36:00] imagining in a reasonable amount of time. And that's really the kind of macro task. That's a very hard thing to turn into a benchmark and I think a lot of this is actually going to turn into people walking, walking with their feet. Right? I mean, I guess that's what's happening, at the large language model level, right?[00:36:23] When people are choosing to use, GPT five or Gemini or clawed, individuals are trying out these different models and deciding, oh, I like the kind of answers that GT five gives me, or no, I feel like I get more accurate detail from Claude, right?[00:36:43] Vibhu: It's a lot of[00:36:43] Chris Manning: vitech, a lot of people just using it.[00:36:45] It's vibe checking. I realize that, but it's actually whether. People feel it's giving them utility in what they want. Right.[00:36:52] Vibhu: And the the interesting thing there is like a lot of people prefer the visual, right? This looks pretty, which is not the objective of what this is [00:37:00] for, right? It's if a, if a game designer is working on something, they care about the game engine, right?[00:37:04] The state, it's, it can look whatever. You can fix that up later. Or you can have a really good game state and you can quickly edit it to 20. 20 different versions, like Keep State,[00:37:14] Chris Manning: right?[00:37:14] Vibhu: So[00:37:14] Chris Manning: that's a really important distinction, for and for speaking to Moon Lake strength, right? So, yeah, great visuals are lovely to look at for a few seconds, but gains are really all about the concept, the game play.[00:37:33] And a lot of the time that doesn't actually even require great visuals. I mean, there are just lots of very successful games which have relatively primitive visuals, and there are other games where people have spent millions producing photo realistic, visuals, and the game sucks, right? So, keeping those two axes apart is really important in thinking about what's important in a [00:38:00] world model for different uses.[00:38:02] swyx: This conversation is reminding me of some game review and fiction discussions I've, had in my sort of non-AI related life. Some, for some people might know Brandon Sanderson, who's a very famous, fiction author, had, is is a big game reviewer. And he, he's a big fan of video games where you change one thing about a normal what you might assume about, about the world.[00:38:22] For example, Baba is you, I don't know if you might have come across that, where like the rules change as you play the game. And also like where, you can do things like reverse time selectively or like change gravity selectively. And I think this is also reminds, reminds me of other kinds of world models that are created by authors.[00:38:38] Where Ted Chang is, is my typical example where he'll take the world that, you know today, but change one thing about it and, but then create a consistent world based on that. Which is long-winded answer of me to, of. For me to say is it's it easy to create alternative roles that don't exist, but you change one thing and then let's, let's run a whole bunch of people through it to see if it works.[00:38:58] Chris Manning: My first dance will [00:39:00] be, that seems a lot easier and more conceivable to do using Techn technology like Moon Lakes than with some of the other world models out there, where the sun can actually make it happen. I'll let him give a second answer.[00:39:15] swyx: If I guess for you, you're constrained by the game engine tool, right?[00:39:18] Like at the end of the day, that's the, that's the thought, partner that you have. If I ask for something where like, if it never is allowed to reverse time or if gravity only ever works one way, then well that's it. But sometimes gravity might change,[00:39:33] Fan-yun Sun: but it's a lot easier to change with code as opposed to a model that is learned primarily on data of.[00:39:42] Real world and virtual worlds that are, I guess, like for example, junior, like there's actually trained on a lot of real world data and a lot of virtual gaming data, and it's hard to say maybe it's easier to say, okay, I wanna change the visuals in like the time period of, of the world. Like, you can't change gravity, for [00:40:00] example.[00:40:00] Vibhu: I feel like you can to light bounds, right? Everything comes down to like, code is a better way to execute it, but the models aren't that diverse and creative, right? You can say, okay, make gravity slower. It can do that, but it's limited to your representation of how you text it out, right? Like they're, they're only gonna do a few iterations, whereas programmatically, if there's a game engine under the hood, you can kind of go wild, right?[00:40:22] So one of the, I dunno, one of the limitations of most models is that they're very overtrained to one style. Right. And extracting diversity is pretty difficult. At least that's something we've seen.[00:40:35] Fan-yun Sun: I mean, are there examples you have in mind where you Existing models? Yeah. Like it would be easier to do that's not using code.[00:40:43] Certain types of creative intent or like transition state transitions,[00:40:47] swyx: Clipping, other models, other wo models are very good at clipping through things. Clipping my, my, my legs clipping through a rock because it's, it's just, it's just bad. [00:41:00] Like, you would have to struggle very hard with your stuff to actually make that happen.[00:41:04] Which I think is maybe a topic that you actually prepared on, Gian Splatting versus, the other stuff.[00:41:09] Vibhu: Yeah. Yeah. It's just for those not super familiar, right? There's a, there's gian splatting, there is diffusion. Like what works, what scales up. I feel like in February when Soro one came out the blog post was literally titled like,[00:41:21] swyx: you bring it up.[00:41:22] You never know.[00:41:23] Vibhu: World, world, video generation models are world simulators. It's super bitter lesson pilled. Yeah, emer, a lot of it is emergence, right? So, not to go through their blog post, basically their whole thing was as you scale up all this consistency, all this stuff just kind of solves, it's a very simple premise, right?[00:41:41] They just scaled up, diffusion, and from there, this is, this is Feb 2024, how much can we, it's already been two years, which is basically five years. How much more in AI time do we need to just scale up or, or do we hit a data cap? But I think we already talked about this a lot, right? Like this is back to the beginning discussion of what's [00:42:00] appropriate for the time.[00:42:01] And that seems like your approach, right?[00:42:03] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah. The point I'm trying to make is that they're very many, many different types of world simulators and like having a world simulator that can produce pixel coherency is very, very useful for games and, marketing and all these things, but it's not as useful as people think when it comes to causal reasoning.[00:42:25] When it comes to embodied ai. Yeah, like it this title is true. We're not saying that it's, it's like, not a great world simulator, but actually in the blog that we, we, we, we wrote, the bet is more so that there are gonna be disproportionately large share of value of real world tasks or, and virtual tasks where high resolution pixel fidelity is not needed.[00:42:47] Yes. Video models have their values.[00:42:50] swyx: Yeah. This is at the absolute limit of my physics understanding, but one example that comes to mind is basically having to solve like ba the equivalent of a three [00:43:00] body problem in a deterministic Well, where the video models, which is approximated good enough. Yeah.[00:43:08] Right. Like there's, there's some point at which your approach kind of runs into like the you now have to simulate the world. Please, thank you very much. And like you're trying to do that, but only to the extent that the game engine lets you and like game engines cannot do some things.[00:43:23] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah, no, I mean, I think the interesting or more technical question here actually is where do you draw the boundary between.[00:43:32] What's handled with, let's say, diffusion prior and what, when? What's handled with symbolic priors?[00:43:38] swyx: Yes.[00:43:38] Fan-yun Sun: Okay.[00:43:38] swyx: Okay.[00:43:39] Fan-yun Sun: Right. Let's go there. Because this, this boundary can actually be fluid. Like I think like maybe what you're trying to get at is like, okay, people are saying pixel prior, everything. But what we're saying is, okay, there's a boundary that we draw where this is where we think provides the most economical value for the domains and things that we care about today.[00:43:59] [00:44:00] And I actually do think, and it's something that we do internally all the time, which is like, okay, given new equations that we learn or new elements of the world and that we, we learn, or maybe some other knowledge that we acquire in the process of developing the models. Should we still be maintaining this line exactly as it is today?[00:44:22] Or should we move it a little bit left or a little bit right? Right. Like sometimes that we realize that, oh, like maybe customers or, or folks like want certain things that are better handled with preop pryor as opposed to, symbolic prior than,[00:44:34] swyx: yeah. Your, your skin thing is a, is a example moving it, right.[00:44:37] Yeah.[00:44:37] Or left. Yeah,[00:44:37] Fan-yun Sun: exactly.[00:44:38] swyx: I dunno what the, the left right is.[00:44:39] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No the, the model.[00:44:42] swyx: Yes.[00:44:42] Fan-yun Sun: Actually we have a few iterations of them. They're actually at slightly different[00:44:45] swyx: I know boundaries. You should, you should do that. That's a cool dimension to show.[00:44:49] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah.[00:44:50] swyx: Is quantum mechanics the diffusion prior of our world?[00:44:55] Right. It's like that's the boundary of classical mechanics versus quantum. Right? Like, that's it. At one [00:45:00] point God plays dice and the other point doesn't.[00:45:02] Fan-yun Sun: I dunno if Chris, you wanna say it, but I think, I think generally I feel like physics is better with symbol P priors.[00:45:08] Chris Manning: Even quantum physics.[00:45:09] Fan-yun Sun: Even quantum physics.[00:45:11] swyx: Yeah. This is starts against to, MLST territory is, is what I call it, where, he, he likes to get philosophical. We, we we're quite friendly.[00:45:18] Vibhu: I mean, we need to get, we need to get singularity. I heard some of that.[00:45:23] swyx: No, no, I think that is actually really helpful and man, I just want you to productize this like, as a product guy, I'm just like, oh, also[00:45:32] Vibhu: a gamer, I[00:45:33] swyx: wanna, it's like a researcher, like, it's cool.[00:45:35] Like this is a, the theoretical, like you have a very good, I don't know, like the way of thinking about these things, but I just wanna see you like, express it. I do think like your fundamentally things when, when you leave open new tools, like, okay, use, use human intent to incorporate it into how you render.[00:45:52] Artists are gonna have to take like two to three years to figure out what to do with this. And you just don't know.[00:45:57] Chris Manning: Right. But I think, this is, [00:46:00] gives a much more approachable and controllable world for the society, which is the beauty, the beauty of, NLP, that that will enable it to be adopted and used.[00:46:10] And we are very hopeful about that. Yeah,[00:46:13] Fan-yun Sun: yeah. Yeah. I mean, we are, we are very focused actually on commercialization in the sense that like we do, we do really believe in the data flywheel app approach. Yeah. Where, we put this in the hands of the creators and the users and then they will teach us when, what capability our model should improve.[00:46:27] And that's why we are, we are actually, like products and beta[00:46:31] swyx: Yeah. Focusing on gaming. What, what's like the adjacent thing to gaming[00:46:34] Fan-yun Sun: embody adjacent, basically. So maybe we can, we can I'll maybe start with where we see the platform in three years. Yeah. Which is like, okay. The users would tell us what they want to achieve.[00:46:45] The end goal could be, Hey, I just, I wanna make something to teach my kids the value of humility. Or it could be, Hey, I wanna fine tune my, drones to be really good at rescue situations. I could be vacuum robots. I want to like train [00:47:00] my manipulation or like vacuum robot to be very robust to my office, right?[00:47:04] But it's like, whatever it is, scenario robust to[00:47:06] swyx: my office[00:47:07] Fan-yun Sun: or like navigate very robustly in my office. But then it's like, whatever end goal that you want, our role model will say, okay, given what you want to achieve, let me generate a distribution of environments such that I can train and evaluate whatever it is you want.[00:47:24] Yeah. Right. Maybe for the purpose of games, it's just the end simulation and that's the end product for certain policies. It's like I can train it within these environments and then help you see where your policy is failing or not. Yeah. And then, so I think,[00:47:37] swyx: so in that case, much more of a training tool.[00:47:40] Than in other training[00:47:41] Vibhu: evaluation? Both. Right?[00:47:43] swyx: Sure. Same. Same thing.[00:47:43] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah, same thing. I think it's just this role model that allows people to train any policy that can act in any multimodal environments.[00:47:51] swyx: Would it be harder to reward hack? Is there an angle here where it is harder to reward hack? Like it's just, I'll just put it generally because I think that's a, that's obviously a key [00:48:00] problem that a lot of people face when in training agents in these environments, and I don't know, can you solve it?[00:48:07] Chris Manning: I think not necessarily. To the extent that there's a mis specified reward that. It seems like it could be hacked in a more symbolic world or in a more pixel based world. I dunno if Sun's got any thoughts, but I don't think that's really being solved.[00:48:26] swyx: The other thing that comes to mind is just you could just build a better sawa as a video generator model, right?[00:48:31] Because then you, you would move the diffusion, side a bit more further to the right. I think if I got the directionality correct. And that's it.[00:48:40] Vibhu: It's better on domains, right? Like on consistency over now, or for sure it exists versus something doesn't, right.[00:48:46] Chris Manning: So[00:48:46] swyx: yeah. Yeah. Is[00:48:49] Vibhu: is a question more like, like[00:48:51] swyx: I'm just riffing on like, how do you, what can you build, you know?[00:48:54] Oh, with the stuff that you have. I do think that the minor, the academic does go immediately to training [00:49:00] and in eval evaluation, but like art tends to take unusual directions. Like you might end up,[00:49:06] Chris Manning: okay. Yeah. But the question is, can you use this piece of software to develop compelling gameplay and. I don't think you can take SOAR and produce compelling gameplay, right?[00:49:19] If you want to have a world that you can wander around in a bit, you are good. But what are your abilities to have gameplay mechanics implemented the way you'd like them to be and to have things stay, with the long-term history of your gameplay that influences future actions. I think there's just nothing there for that.[00:49:39] swyx: Yeah, I do tend to agree. I, I'm just trying to sort of test the boundaries. I would also make the observation that as AAA games industry has developed the line between what is a movie and what is a game has blurred. And you, you, you do end up basically producing a two hour movie as part of your game.[00:49:57] Fan-yun Sun: No, honestly, there, there's so many actually [00:50:00] applications in adjacent markets that our world model can go into. Yeah. But yeah, it, it's sort of fun to riff, riff on. Although on the execution side, we we, we need to stay focused with like, okay, what are the capabilities we want to unlock over time?[00:50:11] And there's a roadmap for that. But yeah, if we're just riffing on sort of like the possibilities, I feel like, whether it's endless Yeah, it's like classic[00:50:18] swyx: and the embedding for a possibility and endless in my mind, it's very close. Yeah. I do wanna, focus on one, like weird choice. I, I don't know if it's weird.[00:50:28] Maybe I'm, I got something here. Audio, right? You could have just said no audio And audio in my mind has a lot of recursion, whereas in video you can just do recasting and that's much computationally much simpler. Audio just seems way harder. I don't know if you wanna just comment on just the special 3D audio.[00:50:46] Problem. Did you really have to do it? I guess you do to be immersive, but like a lot of people do treat it as like, well, you just stick a, a tt S model on top of[00:50:57] Vibhu: Well, there's a lot more to game audio than [00:51:00] just speech. Right. It's not just[00:51:01] swyx: tts. Yeah. Tts. S Fxt, GM Spatial in my mind Echoes[00:51:06] Chris Manning: Yeah.[00:51:06] swyx: And reflections.[00:51:07] And I, I don't even know what's, what else? I don't know what, what other problems in this space.[00:51:13] Fan-yun Sun: Yeah, I think this point like the, it's sort of a more, more pointing to the benefits of using an game engine as a tool that's available to the model, right? Because like part of the spatial audio is from the code that is underlying the simulation.[00:51:32] And while we do give our model access to other types of audio models as. Tools.[00:51:39] swyx: None of them would be spatial, I think.[00:51:41] Fan-yun Sun: But that's exactly sort of more 0.2. We're giving our model an abstraction or a suite of tools such that it's able to achieve that. And you can argue that sort of spatial is like a, like a emergence out of the, the tools that we and abstraction that we provide to the agents.[00:51:59] And I think that's the beauty of [00:52:00] this, this, this approach is like there's a lot of things kind of like how human's built technology and they're like Lego blocks that build on top of each other. And it's the same thing here. There's gonna be things that sort of just sort of emerges from being able to put these things together in like combinatorially interesting ways,[00:52:14] Chris Manning: right?[00:52:15] So this integrated audio model exploits the understanding and semantics of the Moon Lake world, right? And whereas in general for the Gen AI video models. There's no actual integration across to audio at all, right? That someone might stick some music or stick a soundscape or whatever else on top of their video.[00:52:44] So it's not a silent video, but they're in no way connected into a consistent world model. And there's nothing that's okay. An action is happening in the video. Therefore there should be a sound that's [00:53:00] coming from this part of the visual field.[00:53:03] swyx: Yeah.[00:53:03] Vibhu: Is that different than Sora too? Does it not have audio?[00:53:06] Not to say it's not like[00:53:08] swyx: amazing[00:53:08] Vibhu: isn't a spatial[00:53:09] swyx: audio.[00:53:09] Vibhu: It doesn't,[00:53:10] swyx: no. I've played around it with it enough. It just sounds like someone put an 11 laps voice on top of it and just tried to do the lip sync.[00:53:18] Vibhu: Oh, yeah. I've seen, okay. Generate a dog at the beach and reactions to big wave and move[00:53:23] swyx: around.[00:53:23] It's definitely like, so have the dog, have the dog move away from camera and see if the, the song goes down. It doesn't. ‘Cause they don't have facial audio.[00:53:32] Fan-yun Sun: We do want to basically like we, our moral model, like the one we're training is basically towards the goal of having a combined latent representation across all these different modalities.[00:53:42] Right? Such that it can like reason across these different modalities. So for example, if I close my eyes and like you play a video, you play a sound of like a car skidding away from me. I almost can like, visually extrapolate that trajectory in my mind. And I think that type of capability, we want our model to be able to reason, right?[00:53:59] And that's the reason that [00:54:00] we're sort of taking this multimodal reasoning approach. It's like we want this combine late in space that can[00:54:05] swyx: Yeah. Oh, you said late in space. We like that. Here we have to play the, the bell Every time that someone says late in space, no, you gotta train daredevil one. Where you, you, you, it's only audio, but you have to work out.[00:54:15] Where everything is.[00:54:19] Cool. I I think that that was, that was about it for our Moon Lake coverage. I do think that we have like a couple of, Chris Madden questions on, on IR and, just any, any other sort of attention topics or n NLP topics.[00:54:31] Vibhu: Okay.[00:54:31] swyx: Go ahead.[00:54:32] Chris Manning's Journey: From NLP to World Models[00:54:32] Vibhu: Well, no, I mean, yeah, it's just fun. We talked a bit about how you guys met, but you basically, you, you were like the godfather of NLP per se, right?[00:54:39] You spent the whole career from early embeddings, early early attention. You did 2015 attention for machine translation, everything. You, you had information retrieval, so RAG before rag, we just wanna shout that out and admire a lot of that. Right? So what prompted the switch over to world models?[00:54:56] How, how'd all that come about?[00:54:58] Chris Manning: To some answer it [00:55:00] is, the enthusiasms and creativity of students, but there's a bit of a history there, right? So, yeah. So clearly most of my career has been doing stuff with language and how I got into research was thinking, ah, this is just so amazing how humans can produce speech and understand each other in real time.[00:55:21] And somehow they managed to learn languages from their kids. How could this possibly happen? And so, yeah, starting off I was very focused on language, but as it sort of got into the 2000 and tens, I started, going, I'd been working on question answering, and then I started to get, interest in visual question answering.[00:55:42] And that was an area where it was very noticeable. That the visual understanding was bad. Right. These were the days when like, it sort of seemed like there's almost no visual [00:56:00] understanding. You were just getting answers that came from priors. So, if you asked how many people are sitting at the table, it'd always answer two regardless of how many, how many people you could see in the picture.[00:56:11] And so it seemed like, oh, these models actually aren't able to get semantic information outta

Tallow has been all of the rage in the skincare world. I am loving incorporating this into my skincare routine day and night. I love how natural it is and free of chemicals and artificial fragrances. Sarah Mills-Bailey is the founder of Moon Lake Tallow. She shared how this business started and how it has taken off in just 1 year. There are different essential oils used within the tallow that all have different benefits. You cna purchase either whipped tallow or a tallow balm. Both have the same benefit but just come in two different forms. If you are local you can shop Moon Lake Tallow at the farmers market or the Mentone Market. She also had a website so you can purchase online. Follow along with Moon Lake Tallow! WebsiteInstagramFacebookSupport the showAs always thank you for listening to the podcast! My website is the BEST place to purchase your next itinerary or concierge guide, shop my links, or listen to more episodes of Indulge & Explore. Don't forget to follow along with me on Instagram for great travel content!Leave a review and in the meantime keep indulging and exploring!

Send us a textWelcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. In 1930, the first three books in the Nancy Drew series were published at the same time in order to introduce the world to this brilliant young detective. The Bungalow Mystery is the third of Nancy's adventures. In this episode, we find Nancy Drew and her chum, Helen Corning, who also appeared in the previous adventures, spending time at a camp on the shores of Moon Lake. Another girl, the brave but dejected Laura Pendleton, soon makes their acquaintance. Laura is very interested in hearing about Nancy's success in solving mysteries. But Laura has her own troubles and longs very much for Nancy and Helen's company as she faces her fears. Now sit back, relax, and listen to this story come to life.Listening to audiobooks really does count as reading, and there's no better way to relax than to hear Stories Come to Life! Let me know what you think! Please send an email to me at kluker@marshallpl.org. I'd love to hear from you!

Send us a textWelcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. Nancy Drew really owes a large debt of gratitude to Laura Pendleton, who saved her life out on Moon Lake. So, she is happy to do something to help the girl escape from her cruel guardian. Nancy decides to visit Jacob Aborn and see if she can figure out some way to help Laura. Nancy's resourceful bravery comes in handy as she makes her daring plans!Now sit back, relax, and listen to this story come to life.Listening to audiobooks really does count as reading, and there's no better way to relax than to hear Stories Come to Life! Let me know what you think! Please send an email to me at kluker@marshallpl.org. I'd love to hear from you!

Send us a textWelcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. After learning from the Tophams where the old Crowley clock has been stored, Nancy tried to figure out a way to visit Moon Lake without causing the Tophams to become suspicious. Then she remembered the invitation from her friend, Helen Corning, to visit a camp right on the lakeshore. Delighted, Nancy drove to Moon Lake where she hoped to visit the Tophams' bungalow to search for the clock.Now sit back, relax, and listen to this story come to life.Listening to audiobooks really does count as reading, and there's no better way to relax than to hear Stories Come to Life! Let me know what you think! Please send an email to me at kluker@marshallpl.org. I'd love to hear from you!

Welcome back to Oddities the podcast where no topic is too *~*StRaNgE*~*! This week we have spooky tales and a creature lurking in a strange lake....whats going on beneath the surface? Up next we have a tale of badass women who took over London...who said women can't do it all? They clearly can!Support the showFollow along on social media:FacebookInstagramWebsiteEmail: Oddities.talk@gmail.comHuge shout out to Kyle Head for our awesome new intro! Check out his amazing Music! Thank you Mana Peach for our adorable prattling cows! Check out her designs!Check out Lindsey Bidwell's designs (merch and new logo!)Check out the Moose Cottage! Check out our merch!

Dan Fogler stops by to talk about his fatherhood journey. He shares the life lessons he learned from his kids. In addition, he says how fatherhood has helped him with his career. Dan shares a lot of funny stories about being a dad. After that we talk about his role Jacob Kowalski in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and the family connection to that role. Plus we talk about his role of Melvin Pritcher in The Rainmaker on Peacock. Dan shares his creative process when it comes to acting. Lastly, we finish the interview with the Fatherhood Quick Five.  About Dan Fogler Dan Fogler is an American actor, comedian, writer, and director born on October 20, 1976, in Brooklyn, New York. He is best known for his roles in Broadway productions, including The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which he won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical in 2005. He is known for his role of Jacob Kowalski in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and the sequels to that film. Fogler is also a comic book writer and has created several series, including Moon Lake and Brooklyn Gladiator. He has also written for Marvel Comics and DC Comics. Fogler is married to Jodie Capes Fogler, and the couple has two children together. Make sure you follow Dan on Instagram at @foglersfictions. Plus go to his site to learn more about Dan over at foglersfiction.com. In addiction check out The Rainmaker on Peacock.  Ryder Toys Is This Week's Podcast Sponsor Ryder Toys is a small family owned USA based business operating out of California. What started out as a project in the garage has grown into the #1 ride on toy company in the USA due to innovative designs and experiences. They take pride in providing exceptional products and world class customer service. Their mission is to bring endless joy and radiant smiles to both you and your little one. Through their innovative designs and enchanting experiences, they strive to ignite imagination, spark wonder, and create cherished memories that will last a lifetime. All of their products are backed by smiles guaranteed. For more information go to their site at rydertoys.com.  About The Art of Fatherhood Podcast  The Art of Fatherhood Podcast follows the journey of fatherhood. Your host, Art Eddy talks with fantastic dads from all around the world where they share their thoughts on fatherhood. You get a unique perspective on fatherhood from guests like Bob Odenkirk, Hank Azaria, Joe Montana, Kevin Smith, Danny Trejo, Jerry Rice, Jeff Foxworthy, Patrick Warburton, Jeff Kinney, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Kyle Busch, Dennis Quaid, Dwight Freeney and many more.

Join hosts Becky and Kori for the seventh Nancy Drew PC Game, Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake (2002).regularnancydrew.com patreon.com/regularnancydrewinstagram.com/RegularNancyDrewyoutube.com/@regularnancydrew facebook.com/people/Regular-Nancy-Drew/61558695320536/Music: “Kool Kats” by Kevin MacLeodSpecial Thanks to Ryan Ransom for his Voice Acting skills

[18+] Detectives like to deal in facts and certainties. But those are luxuries, and sometimes you have to live without them...Tonight's story is “Victor Tremblay in: Mystery of Moon Lake” by Pascal Farful, who has been featured in two anthologies by the Furry Historical Fiction Society, and you can find more of his stories on his SoFurry page.thevoice.dog | Apple podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsIf you have a story you think would be a good fit, you can check out the requirements, fill out the submission template and get in touch with us.https://thevoice.dog/episode/18-victor-tremblay-in-mystery-at-moon-lake-by-pascal-farful

Dean is gone, and Oren is left to face whatever lurks beneath Moon Lake. Trapped under an overturned boat, he's dragged toward the depths by something massive beneath the surface.Listen to Mermaid of Moon Lake: Part 1Listen to REI's Wild Ideas Worth Living podcast.This episode is sponsored by REI Co-op. Shop amazing products by REI Co-op in stores or at REI.com.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On a quiet night at Moon Lake, Utah, Dean and Oren spot a figure standing on the rocks at the lake's furthest point—small, still, and shadowy against the water.Listen to Hopkinsville Goblins: Part 1Listen to REI's Wild Ideas Worth Living podcast.This episode is sponsored by Altra. Shop amazing products by Altra in stores or at REI.com.     Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, True Drews!Today we discuss a fan favorite: the 7th HerInteractive Nancy Drew computer game, Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake! I love this game, from the atmosphere, to the story and characters, to the setting and plot! And it's the perfect game to talk about for the Halloween season! I hope you all enjoy this episode

REI's Camp Monsters podcast returns Thursday, September 25th. Get ready for unexplainable sightings at Moon Lake, eerie encounters with goblin-like creatures in Kentucky and more... Register for the Camp Monsters Live show in Denver, Colorado on Saturday, September 20th. Thank you to this season's sponsors: Altra The North Face Brompton MerrellAsicsIllustrations by Tyler Grobowsky

Join David L. Corbo (The Raven) and TopLobsta as they welcome back Reality Czars to the Nephilim Death Squad podcast! In this thrilling episode, we dive deep into:The enduring mystery of Bigfoot in 2025 and why it still fascinates usInterdimensional theories and genetic anomalies behind cryptidsCE-5 meditations and binaural beats to summon the unseenReal-life investigations—from Moon Lake gatherings to CE-Five telepathyThe bizarre Russian fox experiment and ancient Anunnaki geneticsWhether you're a longtime conspiracy buff or a curious newcomer, this episode uncovers hidden truths, spine-tingling experiences, and the occult connections tying it all together. Don't miss our live meetup plans at Moon Lake, Utah, where Bigfoot sightings, UFO lore, and cryptid hunts collide. Hit subscribe and join the squad!☠️ NEPHILIM DEATH SQUAD   Skip the ads. Get early access. Tap into the hive mind of dangerous RTRDs in our private Telegram channel — only on Patreon:

Episode: Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan FAQ Should I use public transportation abroad?   Episode: Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan    Lesson Learned: Don't schedule everything Day 1   Travel Tip: Trust your gut instincts, if unsure, pivot fast.   FAQ Response:  Should I use public transportation abroad?   Yes, you should try it at the least, but not in rush hour with all of your luggage. One way to test it out is to try it early in the morning, before rush-hour workers arrive, but while it's still light outside.  Most of the time, you only need a card to swipe, and you can add money to the card when you need to. Your first care purchase is often at a self-service kiosk, and usually there is English translations here. Go for it and try.   Episode: Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan This scenic region reminded me of Lake Tahoe, California.  If you are coming you will Arrive in Taoyuan airport and take the train to the Taipei Main Station and take the HSR train to Taichung City which comes about every 30 minutes and takes about an hour. Bus to Sun Moon Lake, which comes at least hourly. The total cost to get there is about $25, and it takes about 3 hours. To drive, you would take about 2.5 hours and save a few dollars.      

Shooters and Prospectors (309) 737-3248 https://www.facebook.com/SWShooterSuppliesAndProspecting/ Adventures In Prospecting(A.I.P.) http://www.adventuresinprospecting.com/ XTREME SCOOPS https://www.facebook.com/XTREMEScoops/ TheRingFinders https://theringfinders.com/ BEYOND SIGHT AND SOUND YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk7YDKf4Bxdw0Lwdat9VoRA All Metal Militia on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/AllMetalMilitia/ DetectEd Outdoors https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjLV9vNNhgmPJut2vMq0iNA Crazy Spider Adventures on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsKNJc6jKCnYthGmyp-QYEQ Illinois Iowa treasure hunters Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/251326456035/ BOOT CAMP VIDEOS Night 1 silvers https://m.facebook.com/groups/576627622397397?view=permalink&id=2969793473080788 Night 2 coppers https://m.facebook.com/groups/576627622397397?view=permalink&id=2978808162179319 Night 3 tips, tricks and tweaks https://www.facebook.com/groups/detectamerica/permalink/2985422534851215/ NOKTA WEBSITE https://www.noktadetectors.com/ Midwest refineries https://www.midwestrefineries.com/ All Metal Militia on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT22mRQ_QQ0LfHrZy22IaaA?fbclid=IwAR1s1ma_fkWv9VzBVDKyLF10rQZq2wg0IJwQwJAKP21tWCHMYa7yiIs26l8 The Relic Hunter Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/249978366379006/?ref=share $10K diamond ring return https://theringfinders.com/blog/Josh.Kimmel/2020/10/1-25-1-5-carat-diamond-gold-ring-returned-trf-celina-ohio-potential-replacement-8-10k/?fbclid=IwAR2tULpBnqX3Uwuc7FVRVASecMO0lF0tpxvy8OXbiBNk7bCbdB8W530xBc4 Metal Detecting:- Beyond Sight and Sound https://www.facebook.com/groups/421832374617055 FIND US ON AMAZON AND AUDIBLE https://www.amazon.com/BEYOND-SIGHT-AND-SOUND/dp/B08JJS1FC1 Sapphire and diamond arthritic wedding ring returned https://theringfinders.com/blog/Josh.Kimmel/2021/05/sapphire-diamond-arthritic-wedding-ring-returned-trf-celina-ohio/?fbclid=IwAR10iM9GH2BDcf3BHywNMhvQiyP_g0bHL_360zscykDQfiMK1R3fWe1ZCB0 MDCI Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/259089097602307/ Terry Shannon's website https://terryshannon.com/ Quarter Hoarder YouTube channel https://m.youtube.com/@QuarterHoarder Bark's Detecting Bits on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@barksdetectingbits3298 Ill Digger YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@Ill_Digger BEYOND SIGHT AND SOUND on PodBean https://www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-hbn8z-10fc2c8

Happy (?) new year, listeners. We discuss Chris's journey through the latest Maradonia book that reboots the series entirely, proving that we are all caught in this loop together within the worst timeline. Although not strictly necessary, we recommend listening to the other Maradonia episodes in the following order: Maradonia and the Seven Bridges (Book 1 of the Maradonia Saga/Series) by Gloria Tesch - Episode 11 (2015) Maradonia and the Escape from the Underworld (Book 2 of the Maradonia Saga/Series) by Gloria Tesch - Episode 62 (2019) Maradonia and the Gold of Ophir (Book 3 of the Maradonia Saga/Series) by Gloria Tesch *Patron's Choice* - Episode 63 (2019) The Secret of Moon Lake by Sofia Nova (Gloria Tesch) *Patron's Choice* - Episode 86 (2020) Maradonia and the Law of Blood (Book 4 of the Maradonia Saga/Series) by Gloria Tesch *Patron's Choice* - Episode 87 (2020) Today's episode just includes our usual barnyard language.

日月潭 - rìyuètán - Sun moon lake 經典 - jīngdiǎn - classic 環湖單車道 - huán hú dānchē dào - lakeside bicycle path 湖 - hú - lake 單車道 - dānchē dào - bicycle path 自行車 - zìxíngchē - bicycle 票選 - piàoxuǎn - vote/elected 遊客中心 - yóukè zhōngxīn - visitor center 碼頭 - mǎtóu - pier/wharf 親子車 - qīnzǐ chē - family bicycle 電池助力車 - diànchí zhùlì chē - electric-assist bicycle 搭船 - dā chuán - take a boat 環湖遊船 - huán hú yóuchuán - lakeside sightseeing boat 一圈 - yī quān - a circle 船長 - chuánzhǎng - captain (of a boat) 導覽 - dǎolǎn - guided tour 水社碼頭 - shuǐshè mǎtóu - Shuishe Pier 玄光寺碼頭 - xuánguāngsì mǎtóu - Xuanguang temple pier 伊達邵碼頭 - yīdáshào mǎtóu - Ita Thao Pier 麓司岸 - lùsī'àn - Lusihan, a restaurant 飯飯雞翅 - fàn fàn jīchì - rice rice chicken wings, a famous dish in Lusihan Restaurant 雞翅 - jīchì - chicken wings 手工高麗菜包 - shǒugōng gāolìcài bāo - handmade cabbage buns 香菇茶葉蛋 - xiānggū cháyè dàn - mushroom tea eggs 茶葉蛋 - cháyè dàn - tea eggs 攤子 - tānzi - stall/stand 人氣 - rénqì - popularity 爆棚 - bàopéng - extremely popular 故鄉 - gùxiāng - hometown 咖啡莊園 - kāfēi zhuāngyuán - coffee plantation 製茶廠 - zhì chá chǎng - tea factory 茶園 - cháyuán - tea garden 九族文化村 - jiǔzú wénhuà cūn - Formosan aboriginal culture village 遊樂園 - yóulèyuán - amusement park 以...為主題 - yǐ... wèi zhǔtí - themed as... 九大原住民族文化 - jiǔdà yuánzhù mínzú wénhuà - nine major indigenous cultures 雲霄飛車 - yúnxiāo fēichē - roller coaster 遊樂設施 - yóulè shèshī - amusement facilities 體驗 - tǐyàn - experience 搭纜車 - dā lǎnchē - take a gondola 俯瞰 - fǔkàn - overlook/see from above If you're learning Chinese on your own and want to accelerate your progress, especially when discussing complex topics like technology, social issues, or philosophy with your Taiwanese friends, I'm here to help. In our one-on-one lessons, we will assess your challenges, set clear learning objectives, and work together to boost your Chinese skills. Book a one-on-one trial lesson with me !

We kick off spooooky season with a spooooooooky game (well, at least the first 15 minutes are kinda spooky...) and join Nancy again on another mystery! Get your binoculars and life jackets and get ready for an outdoorsy adventure and discover if the bad guy really was capitalism all along.Texting a podcast? You know it! Send us a message about the pod with a text!Support the showJoin our discord server for updates, feedback, comments, or just to tell us how to be better at games: https://discord.gg/NMSgXNbzCgCheck us out on all the socials:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/comfyclubpod/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@comfyclubpodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ComfyClubPod/

Un compagno di avventure che incontrò sempre volentieri durante il periodo estivo (come quello appena concluso) è sicuramente l'adorabile texano Joe R. Lansdale, autore poliedrico e irresistibile che riesce sempre e comunque a impressionarmi e divertirmi. Parliamo allora di tre opere di Lansdale, così diverse eppure così simili: "L'anno dell'uragano" ci racconta gli orrori della storia passata, "Freddo a Luglio" di una ricerca di un padre e "Moon Lake" della perdita dell'innocenza risalente all'infanzia.

Hi, again, True Drews!Welcome back for Part 4 of our 6 part series, Podcast Sisters Play Nancy Drew!Episode 1 is here on True Drew Podcast and if you need to catch up on Episodes 2 and 3, they are on River Heights Buzz Podcast and Spilling the Tea with Susie respectively!Here are the links for both:Episode #2: Unpopular Opinions and Hot Takes on River Heights Buzz:https://open.spotify.com/episode/4yJOEA2CrjxClczIwthRRo?si=z0IQU-1rRnGkikwNTHgI3g&t=5897Episode #3: Unpopular Opinions and Hot Takes on Spilling the Tea:https://open.spotify.com/episode/5D7oHFyiuy5K7isqWJiiPR?si=iv6ftaRQT6G1t2zVxDaUBgIn today's episode, we discuss the games Captive Curse, Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake, Creature of Kapu Cave, Warnings at Waverly Academy, Curse of Blackmoor Manor and The Silent Spy. We hope you all enjoy this episode! *We didn't do a Fight/Marry/Kill for Warnings at Waverly since the girls are technically teenagers and it didn't feel appropriate!*Stay tuned for links to our last two collaboration episodes, 5 and 6, coming soon!

Bed and Breakfast owner Wayne Wang has spent nearly all his life living in and exploring Sun Moon Lake. He tells I-C-R-T's Hope Ngo why he remains entranced by the area and how best to explore the lake, which international media once described as one of the most beautiful bike trails in the world.

Follow me on: https://www.instagram.com/koala.explorer/ ---- Music credit: The Fountain of Living Waters by Siddhartha Corsus

日月潭景色優美，是國人喜歡來渡假的地方~ 你可以在日月潭騎單車、搭遊船 ，還可以享受日月潭美食喔~ 跟著Judy老師一起聽聽日月潭有多美多好玩吧! Keywords:hometown 家鄉Sun Moon Lake 日月潭prefer 更喜歡go hiking 爬山beach 海邊、海灘ocean 海、海洋fresh air 新鮮空氣wave 海浪what about you? 你呢?air conditioner 冷氣department store 百貨公司shopping 購物wasting 浪費scenery 風景actually 實際上different 不同的so peaceful 如此平靜table car 纜車across 橫渡newspaper article 新聞報導 大朋友、小朋友，今天的英文你學會了嗎？ #每周六、日更新 #歡迎給我們評價及留言喔 ----- Apple｜Spotify｜Google｜KKBOX｜Firstory｜SoundOn 搜尋訂閱：NER Kids -----

We're back on the clock for another Video Game Draft special! This time, it's what we believe to be the greatest games of 2002 that are under the spotlight. As with before, we are joined by KDB from the Gears Intel and First Aid Spray podcasts (among many others), and once again the three of us take turns to draft 10 games each, then find the Metacritic score for all the games, add it all up and the person with the highest total score at the end wins. There are some real corkers to choose from 2002 - Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, GTA: Vice City, Urban Yeti!, Nancy Drew: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake, Jazz Jackrabbit, Resident Evil REmake, and Go! Go! Beckham! Adventure on Soccer Island. Alex is the current reigning champeen. Can anyone stop his march towards greatness, or will he storm into a 2-0-0 lead? Don't forget to tweet us @winnerisyoupod or email awinnerisyoupod@gmail.com - and give us a rating on your podcast app, yeah?

南投位於山區，是台灣唯一沒有靠海的地方。南投住著原住民族- 泰雅族、賽德克族、布農族、鄒族和邵族。泰雅族主要分布在台灣中北部的山區，布農族分布在台灣的東南部，而「日月潭」則是邵族主要生活的地區。原住民有個特別的故事，有一天… 南投Nántóu: Nantou, a county in central Taiwan 泰雅族 Tàiyǎ zú: The Atayal, a Taiwanese indigenous people 賽德克族 Sài dé kè zú: The Seediq, a Taiwanese indigenous people 布農族 Bùnóng zú: The Bunun, a Taiwanese indigenous people 鄒族 Zōu zú: The Tsou, an indigenous people of central southern Taiwan 邵族 Shào zú: The Thao, a small group of Taiwanese indigenous people 分布 fēnbù: to be distributed (over an area) … To keep learning this episode, go here: https://www.taiwanfeng.com/podcast/nantou/ If you're more familiar with simplified Chinese, we also have simplified version for this episode, please visit: https://www.taiwanfeng.com/simplified/podcast-cn/nantou-simplified/ We hope you like our podcast today! Got feedback? We'd love to hear it! Rate us or leave us a review! Learn Chinese Podcast | Learn Advanced Chinese | Chinese Listening Practice | Learn Taiwanese Mandarin

Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. During this time of Covid, many people aren't able to use the library in the same way as in the past. To help bring more stories to more readers, many publishing companies are allowing books that are normally unavailable for copyright reasons to be read out loud and shared with others until December 31st, 2022. The stories that fall under that special permission will all be taken down on that date, so listen now, while they're available! Today's story is shared with permission of Simon and Schuster Publishing Company. Nancy Drew really owes a large debt of gratitude to Laura Pendleton, who saved her life out on Moon Lake. So, she is happy to do something to help the girl escape from her cruel guardian. Nancy decides to visit Jacob Aborn and see if she can figure out some way to help Laura. Nancy's resourceful bravery comes in handy as she makes her daring plans!Now sit back, relax, and listen to this story come to life.Do you have suggestions for other books or stories you'd like to hear? I'd love to communicate with you. Please email me at kluker@marshallpl.org and let me know what you think!

Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. During this time of Covid, many people aren't able to use the library in the same way as in the past. To help bring more stories to more readers, many publishing companies are allowing books that are normally unavailable for copyright reasons to be read out loud and shared with others until December 31st, 2022. The stories that fall under that special permission will all be taken down on that date, so listen now, while they're available! Today's story is shared with permission of Simon and Schuster Publishing Company. As I just mentioned, the time is fast approaching when all the books whose copyright restrictions have been temporarily lifted must be taken down from this podcast. But there are so many other books to share with you! In 2023, any book whose copyright date is 1928 or earlier is in the public domain and is available to be shared without worries of copyright infringement! If you have a suggestion of a book you'd like to hear, please send me an email message so I can consider your choice. I'd love to hear from you! My email is kluker@marshallpl.org. In 1930, the first three books in the Nancy Drew series were published at the same time in order to introduce the world to this brilliant young detective. The Bungalow Mystery is the third of Nancy's adventures. In this episode, we find Nancy Drew and her chum, Helen Corning, who also appeared in the previous adventures, spending time at a camp on the shores of Moon Lake. Another girl, the brave but dejected Laura Pendleton, soon makes their acquaintance. Laura is very interested in hearing about Nancy's success in solving mysteries. But Laura has her own troubles and longs very much for Nancy and Helen's company as she faces her fears. Now sit back, relax, and listen to this story come to life.Do you have suggestions for other books or stories you'd like to hear? I'd love to communicate with you. Please email me at kluker@marshallpl.org and let me know what you think!

Yukoners drive a lot so it's no wonder there's a big push to ditch the gas guzzlers and get on the electric vehicle bandwagon. Shane Andre of Yukon's Energy Solutions Centre answers key questions about EVs and Andrew Hall of Yukon Energy shares how the public utility plans to keep up with increasing demands for clean energy.This episode is sponsored by Air North, Yukon's Airline.

A humid morning

My guest today is actor, comedian, and author, Dan Fogler. Dan has starred in movies such as Balls of Fury and the Fantastic Beasts series of movies. More recently, he stars in The Offer and his Moon Lake anthology for Heavy Metal is being adapted into an animated TV series. We talk about his acting […]

Mark Robinson : Utah Gold, Magical Dirt, Bigfoot, and The Gathering at Moon Lake --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ryan-burns4/support

BOO! Did we spook you? Thanks for tuning in to todays episode. Jesse shares stories shared with him from Reddit and Tessa shares the true and eerie background of Half Moon Lake.Please check us out on Youtube and Instagram! That is where you can see the images we mention in each episode. You guys are all spookily amazing!Insta: @spookysouppodcast

Siamo tornati in Texas, dove dopo la strage alla scuola elementare di Uvalde - nella quale sono rimasti uccisi 19 bambini e due insegnanti - tra qualche giorno si terrà la convention della National Rifle Association: ne abbiamo parlato con Joe Lansdale (scrittore texano, il suo ultimo romanzo è "Moon Lake", pubblicato in Italia da Einaudi editore) e Patrick Blanchfield (Associate Faculty Member del Brooklyn Institute for Research, fa ricerca su diffusione delle armi da fuoco e violenza). Subito dopo siamo tornati in Ucraina, dove la Russia pone un ritiro delle sanzioni come condizione per l'allentamento dei controlli sui carichi di grano custoditi nei porti del Mar Nero: ne abbiamo parlato con l'Ammiraglio Giuseppe De Giorgi (ex Capo di Stato Maggiore della Marina e docente alla Webster University). Infine siamo andati in Afghanistan, dove i giornalisti di Tolo News hanno deciso di andare in onda con i volti coperti per solidarietà alle colleghe donne - costrette a coprire il volto dai talebani - mentre proseguono gli attentati suicidi contro la comunità Hazara: ne abbiamo parlato con Zirak Faheem (caporedattore di ToloNews) e abbiamo sentito le risposte del portavoce dei Talebani Bilal Karimi, raccolte dal giornalista Morteza Pajhwok.

Siamo andati negli Stati Uniti, in Texas, dove dopo la strage alla Robb Elementary School di Uvalde - nella quale sono stati uccisi 19 bambini, due insegnanti e lo stesso attentatore - il paese si interroga ancora una volta sulla cultura delle armi da fuoco e sulla loro diffusione: ne abbiamo parlato con Joe Lansdale (romanziere texano, il suo ultimo libro è "Moon Lake", pubblicato da Einaudi editore), Patrick Blanchfield (ricercatore del Brooklyn Institute of Research, studia il rapporto tra armi da fuoco e sparatorie di massa), Mario Del Pero (professore di Storia internazionale e storia della politica estera americana a Science Po - Parigi) e Roberto Cornelli (Professore di Criminologia nell'Università di Milano-Bicocca, il suo ultimo libro è "La forza di polizia. Uno studio criminologico sulla violenza"). Subito dopo siamo tornati in Ucraina, a Kharkiv, per fare un punto sulla situazione sul campo e sull'avanzata russa in Lugansk con Daniele Raineri (inviato di Repubblica).

Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. During this time of Covid, many people aren't able to use the library in the same way as in the past. To help bring more stories to more readers, many publishing companies are allowing books that are normally unavailable for copyright reasons to be read out loud and shared with others until June 30th, 2022. The stories that fall under that special permission will all be taken down on that date, so listen now, while they're available! Today's story is shared with permission of Simon and Schuster Publishing Company. After learning from the Tophams where the old Crowley clock has been stored, Nancy tried to figure out a way to visit Moon Lake without causing the Tophams to become suspicious. Then she remembered the invitation from her friend, Helen Corning, to visit a camp right on the lakeshore. Delighted, Nancy drove to Moon Lake where she hoped to visit the Tophams' bungalow to search for the clock.Now sit back, relax, and listen to this story come to life.

Qui potete trovare le puntate di PAGINE, la quotidiana rubrica sui libri a cura di Andrea Nanni, in onda su Radio Italia Anni 60 Emilia Romagna.

For this episode, we dive into the seventh game of the series: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake. You can also follow and support us here: https://linktr.ee/realhousewivesofriverheights

DOUBLE DAN EPISODE BAY BEE! Dan Fogler (Fantastic Beasts, The Walking Dead, and Balls of Fury) comes on the show to talk about "Fogler's Fictions" which are his original comics from Heavy Metal magazine.  Dan and Dan talk about Fogler's horror roots, iconic horror hosts, and about the upcoming Moon Lake animated show. We get into the grit and grim on his comic universes. If you thought GateCrashers Dan had big energy...wait till you hear Fogler.

That fun website Emily mentioned: http://www.ataniel.org/drew-dogs5.htm Phone number to dial to get the Easter Egg: 555-7658 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/itslockedpodcast/support

In our Halloween 2021 Bonus Episode, we talk the Nancy Drew Ghost Stories short story The Ghost Dogs of Whispering Oaks (1983), as well as the HERInteractive PC game Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake (2002). Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/regularnancydrew Instagram: instagram.com/RegularNancyDrew Twitter: twitter.com/RegularND YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkUyxPdQx5fCJeTIrGcGqPg Music: “Kool Kats” by Kevin MacLeod "Halloween Ghost Of The Dead Ballerina" by Frank Schröter

Join hosts April and Katie as they travel to different haunted locations around Utah. Better buckle up because along the way, April tells us a local true crime story.  In this episode... April tells us about the cold case of Anthony Adams who was found murdered in his Salt Lake City apartment on November 6, 1978. Katie takes us to Moon Lake in Ashley National Forrest and we learn about the mysteries, legends, and hauntings surrounding the lake. If you have any personal paranormal stories to share (whether they're local or not) we would love to hear about them! Write to us at stories@hauntandcold.com and you could be invited to share your story on our monthly episode "Bring Your Own Boos". We'll supply the drink and you supply the Boos ;) --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/haunt-cold/support

For the first time and entire episode is given over to a single author. And who else but Joe R Lansdale? His latest is Moon Lake but he has dozens of novels, hundreds of short stories, films, TV episodes and more. Eric and Joe engage in a wide-ranging conversation about his storied career. All music is used by permission under the creative commons license. Music in this episode includes: Blueprint by Jahzzar Well And Good by Podington Bear Reckoning by Podington Bear Lock and Key by Silent Partner Skuba Drive by Quincas Moreira Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pour yourself a whisky, grab a seat and listen to the best voice in dark fiction tell you some stories. Our guest is Joe Lansdale author of so many books I can't even begin to list them. Oh, ok, I will. Edge of Dark Water, Paradise Sky, The Bottoms, The Thicket, Fender Lizard … “Bubba Ho Tep”, Cold in July … the entire Hap and Leonard series. And he joins me to talk about his newest, Moon Lake. A tale of dark nostalgia, small town politics and murder set on the banks of a drowned village. It's a sun-soaked, shadow-tinged summer read of the best, and most twisted kind. As much as Joe is nominally on the show to talk about Moon Lake, he's a hard man to pin down to mere self-promotion. He has tales to tell and opinions to offer and you'd better goddamn LISTEN!! We discuss blue collar youth, Texas attitude, and whether having some hardship in life makes you a better writer. He tells me how he comes up with his unique metaphors, and why he defended Stephen King when twitter turned against him.All in all, it's a friendly conversation about the perils of tribalism, why we should all be a little bit more tolerant, and why choosing stupidity is scary as hell.This is a bucket-list interview for me.Enjoy! Moon Lake is published by Mulholland Books on June 22nd.Other books discussed in this episode include:Edge of Dark Water (2012), by Joe R. LansdaleThe Thicket (2013), by Joe R. LansdaleParadise Sky (2015), by Joe R. Lansdale“Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Mans Back,” in High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe. R. Lansdale“On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with the Dead Folks”, in The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (2010)“The Night They Missed the Horror Show”, by Joe R. Lansdale – originally published in Silver Scream, (1988) ed. By David SchowGreat Expectations, (1860), by Charles DickensThe Only Good Indians (2020), by Stephen Graham JonesMongrels (2016), by Stephen Graham Jones Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPodCome talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to talkingscaredpod@gmail.com.Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.

Visit our Patreon page to see the various tiers you can sign up for today to get in on the ground floor of AIPT Patreon. We hope to see you chatting with us in our Discord soon!NEWSMarvel reveals ‘The Death of Doctor Strange.' Image marks ‘Spawn Universe' as huge success with over 200K units soldTodd McFarlane partners with wiip for ‘Sam and Twitch' TV series‘God Country' film coming soon from AfterShock Media & Legendary2021 Eisner Awards nominations announcedHeavy Metal announces horror one-shot ‘Intrusion' for September 22ndZoop, a new crowdfunding platform, launchesBill Willingham's 'Fables' set to return plus Batman vs. Bigby this SeptemberOur Top Books of the WeekDave:The Good Asian #2 (W: Pornsak Pichetshote, Lee Loughridge)Spider-Man: The Spider's Shadow #3 (W: Chip Zdarsky, A: Pasqual Ferry)Nathan:The Good Asian #2 (W: Pornsak Pichetshote, A: Alexandre Tafengki)Spider-Man: Spider's Shadow #3 (W: Chip Zdarsky, A: Pasqual Ferry)Standout KAPOW moment of the week:Nathan - DC Pride #1 (W: Steve Orlando, A: Stephen Byrne)Dave - Spider-Man: Spider's Shadow #3 (W: Chip Zdarsky, A: Pasqual Ferry)TOP BOOKS FOR NEXT WEEKDave: Demon Days: Mariko #1 (W/A: Peach Momoko)Nathan: Ultramega #4 (W/A: James Harren, C: Dave Stewart)JUDGING BY THE COVER JR.Dave: Venom #200 (Arthur Adams variant) Nathan: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #2 (Riley Rossmo variant)Segment: Interview: Dan Fogler - Fishkill - Moon LakeDan, thanks for joining on the AIPT Comics podcast. It's been quite a year to say the least and while conventions and comic shops are opening back up, I'd love to ask, how has your relationship to comics and the creation of comics changed over the last year?With Brooklyn Gladiator, Moon Lake, and Fishkill under your belt, and knowing how you have been reading Heavy Metal since you were 9 or 10, what has it been like making comics for the publisher?Writing for a publisher like Heavy Metal, which always seems to have had a certain bite to them, do you ever feel like you need to go harder or edgier with the work?You're also a screenwriter and director, of course. How does that experience translate into working on a comics script?You've worked with some incredible artists like Simon Bisley, Darick Robertson,  and Ben Templesmith, what is your working relationship like with these artists?Was there a moment, a page or panel, from Fishkill that Templesmith simply blew you away with?Lawrence Blum is listed as the co-creator for Fishkill; what was that collaboration process like?A story like Fishkill blends crime, corruption, drug use, and the filth of the city all into one. Did you have any inspirations in life, film, or other comics that lead to the idea of the series?Obviously Fishkill himself is not someone we should aspire to be. There are a lot of unseemly characters and situations in the story; how do you get in the headspace to write someone like that? What comics are you reading right now?Off Topic Top Shelf: Dan Fogler - mixed martial arts, making movies, The Offer - Francis Ford Coppola

In another unplugged episode, Jimmy talks to actor/writer/singer/director Dan Fogler! We mostly talk about his comics that he wrote Moon Lake, Fishkill and Brooklyn Gladiator. Where did the inspiration come from for these comics? What was it like working with legendary artists Ben Templesmith and Simon Bisley? Are there further entertainment plans for them? Of course, we also talk his acting career. When's Luke back on The Walking Dead? Will Uncle Marv return on The Goldbergs? And what can we expect from Jacob in the next Fantastic Beasts film? A super laid back and fun chat! Many thanks to Dan for taking the time out of his busy schedule. Also, get a hold of us! Thanks for listening!

Dan Fogler talks about how his unique perspective as an actor and filmmaker helps brings Fishkill, Brooklyn Gladiator, and Moon Lake to life. Get 10% Off at Betterhelp.com/DreamerComics with Discount Code "Dreamer" Join Stereo and Follow Omar Spahi at Stereo.com/omarspahi to listen directly to LIVE shows of Dreamer Comics Podcast

In this episode, Lexie talks about the Siren bridge, Fort Peck theatre, Molly's Hollow, Geiser Grand hotel, and Missouri State Penitentiary. Dad talks about Mountain Meadows Massacure, Rock Canyon, Moon Lake, and Frisco the ghost town. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stephen-booth7/support

On this episode, Mark Strigl speaks with guitarist/producer Simone Mularoni of DGM and actor/writer Dan Fogler. Topics with Simone include the new DGM album "Tragic Separation", COVID-19, Italy, Sunstorm, Joe Lynn Turner, Sweet Oblivion, Geoff Tate, Empyrios, Ultra-Violence, his guitars, and much more.DMG's website: www.dgmsite.comTopics with Dan include Brooklyn Gladiator, Heavy Metal Magazine, Simon Bisley, John Miller, Moon Lake, the Heavy Metal movie, Fishkill, the Brooklyn Bridge, Megadeth, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Dave Mustaine, Rattlehead, the Ghoul Screamer, Type O Negative, J. K. Rowling's Fantastic Beast, The Walking Dead, his podcast, Jeff Garlin, and much more.Follow Dan on Twitter: @mrdanfoglerCheck out Heavy Metal Magazine.MarkStrigl.netFollow Mark Strigl on Twitter at these accounts: @talkingmetal & @striglFollow Mark Strigl on Instagram.Support this show by making a PayPal donation.Get bonus content and support Mark on Patreon: www.patreon.com/talkingmetalPlease link through us to make a purchase on Amazon.Support Talking With Mark Strigl Through Amazon US Support Talking With Mark Strigl Through Amazon Canada ---Support Talking With Mark Strigl Through Amazon UK

In this episode, Lexie talks about the Siren bridge, Fort Peck theatre, Molly's Hollow, Geiser Grand hotel, and Missouri State Penitentiary. Dad talks about Mountain Meadows Massacure, Rock Canyon, Moon Lake, and Frisco the ghost town. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Social distancing is so important right now. It’s also stressful, hard, and can feel really frustrating. However, I also think that we can still have FUN while doing it! (Speaking of fun…if you haven’t checked out my summer self-care series yet, go do it! You can find all 5 videos over on my IGTV channel!) In these unprecedented times, I think we could all use a bit of fun in our lives! Also, in my signature training, How to Ditch the Food Guilt + Shame to Gain Confidence + Feel Free, I dive deep on what intuitive eating is and how it could work for you. Whether you’re just starting or could use a refresh, this is for you! Enjoying This Time Back in April my whole family booked our annual trip to Moon Lake, Washington. Our tickets were the cheapest they’ve ever been, and we were so excited! However, as the trip drew newer, we started to feel less confident about actually traveling. Ultimately, my husband and I canceled our tickets in favor of social distancing. It’s what felt right for us, and I know it was a good choice for where we’re at right now. However… Knowing the rest of my family is there without me has created some major FOMO. Plus, this is the first time in my life that I haven’t been able to make it! And even though it’s technically a small thing in light of everything else that’s going on globally, it still felt really hard. Rather than sitting around and moping, however, we decided to get activated and create a plan for enjoying that time we do have. From house projects to furniture set up, we put together a series of activities we can do around our house. We get to feel safe AND have fun together — and that makes what we’re missing in WA feel less heavy. As I record this, a part of me knows I “should” be in Washington with my family. It’s strange not to be, but I also know that I have the choice to enjoy the time I do have here at home! Food Can’t Replace Joy Even though having fun might not feel like it’s that connected with intuitive eating, it absolutely is! When we have fun we are engaging with our lives. We’re present in the moment. And we honor our needs to connect, celebrate, and notice all that is good. When we don’t do that? Sometimes we turn to food instead. If you’re not enjoying your life, you’re going to rely too much on food to fill the gaps. After all, eating is a coping mechanism! If you’re not getting fulfillment and joy from other parts of your life, you’re more likely to turn to food to get what you’re looking for. The reason you eat the way you eat as so many layers! Often, those layers have nothing to do with the actual food we’re eating. They are connected to our emotional needs, our struggles, our pain, and a whole assortment of other things! Right now, over-eating might be a response to social distancing. Rather than feeling guilty or ashamed, you can peel back some of those layers and look for other ways to help yourself get your emotional needs met. (And you can even find ways to have fun while social distancing!) The Foundation of Self-Care A quick note about how vital self-care is in the process of having fun! If you’re not taking care of yourself on regular basis, you won’t have the energy for adding into your life! Exhaustion, fatigue, and overwhelm might be signs that you need to build in a foundation of self-care that will allow you to engage in fun things. The best way to do this is to develop a routine that feels really good for you. This might include journaling, meditating, moving, or connecting with loved ones. Get clarity about what things feel really good in your life, and make sure that you’re building them into your life. You might also look for energy leaks! This week I had to get off social media for a while. Why? I was getting drained and overwhelmed by my social feeds. Taking the week away helped me consider if and how I wanted to add it back into my life. Rather than just slogging forward with my same old patterns, I noticed the issue and took action as a form of self-care! Once your foundation is set, you can up level by adding in fun! 5 Ideas for Adding In FUN While Social Distancing ONE – Take some time to sit down and brainstorm fun ideas. It can be hard to have fun if you’re stuck in a rut, or just watching time pass by. Once you have your list, make a PLAN! Often time passes us by because we don’t plan how we’re going to use it. You can think of this as a sort of summer bucket list. They can be small (eating an ice cream cone while taking a walk), or a bit more time intensive (plan out a summer picnic and take it to your favorite park)! TWO – Make time to connect with the people you love. This is harder than it once was! You might need to be more creative about you can spend time with those you love. If you have nice summer weather, you might be able to create an outdoor space to connect while still staying socially distanced. Another option? Phone dates! I used to visit with my friends while I was going places….but since I’ve hardly been going anywhere lately, I realized I wasn’t connecting with my friends as much anymore. Intentionally planning in phone dates with my friends has been so helpful for my own mental health. You can also try using Zoom or other video chat tools to have larger gatherings! From Beauty Counter parties to birthday parties – find a group and get together. Virtual connections do feel different, but they can be life giving, fun, and exciting all the same. (Listen in to the full show to hear about the childcare pod that we’ve created, which has been another connection point in our lives!) THREE – Projects! Head over to Pinterest and hunt for some new ideas. Personally, I’ve been working on a paint-by-number craft. My husband and I are doing some home projects. We’re starting a garden! I’m even looking into weaving. And, of course, I always love baking. Whether you return to an old hobby or craft, or learn something new, projects can be a huge source of joy and inspiration. Rather than park yourself in front of the TV, you can explore other options that might feel more life giving. Another note: projects don’t have to mean being productive! Finding things that bring you joy are wonderful. Give yourself space to be creative, to try new things, and to explore. Even if that means you end up making something and throwing it away, that’s okay! FOUR – Get outside. Fresh air and nature bring so much joy. You might try taking a walk around the block, finding a local beach, or taking hike. Not into all the activity? Try sitting outside with a cup of tea, or watching the stars from your backyard. Especially if you’ve been working from home, make the extra effort to get outside and breathe some fresh air when you have a chance. FIVE – Plan some day trips! Often we forget how many really neat things are all around us. My family lives in Albany, which doesn’t get super hot in the summer. I realized I was craving that summer heat! After a bit of brainstorming, I thought of a childhood friend whose mom lives in a hot area and has a pool. After a bit of connecting, we got the details sorted out and headed over. It was a blast! She was more than happy to see a family enjoying a pool that she doesn’t often use, and we loved the chance to swim somewhere that felt really safe and enabled us to maintain our social distancing practices! It was close by, it was free, and it was much needed! Maybe you could take a day trip to a park and have a picnic. Could you try picking blueberries or strawberries? Finding a quiet beach front or out-of-the-way trail? You might refer back to your summer bucket list for more ideas. What would you have FUN doing? What would bring joy into your life? Go do it and have fun!

Such a pleasure to talk with Dan Fogler, a.k.a. Luke of The Walking Dead, an engaging guest and a man of many talents. Listen in to hear Dan talk about: Whether he agrees with Luke about the importance of art to the development of human civilization. How he ended up on The Walking Dead. How he feels about Luke’s signature blazer. Whether he’s aware that it seems like the show keeps making us think Luke is about to die. What he thought about the end of The Walking Dead comic series. The upcoming Heavy-Metal-inspired comics that Dan has written, Brooklyn Gladiator (with Simon Bisley of Lobo fame!), Fishkill (with Ben Templesmith of 30 Days of Night!), and Moon Lake. His awesome podcast: DAN FOGLER'S 4d Xperience! Whether Dan considers himself a nerd. The name he chose for Luke’s weapon. You can pre-order Dan’s comics and find out what else he’s up to at foglersfiction.com. Support the show: https://patreon.com/jasonandkaren

Today's book was read at the behest of our patron Ciaran. Thanks so much for supporting the show, Ciaran! Check out our Patreon here to get this and other rewards for yourself. Sofia Nova is the new identity of Gloria Tesch. Free from her father's direct influence, she has written a new book outside of the world of Maradonia (though with some noticeable carry-over, from mermaids to boys who  just love fishing to the art work). While The Secret of Moon Lake isn't something we'd recommend in its current state, this book shows significant improvement over the Maradonia saga. With some re-writes and good editing, this could sit comfortably in the Goosebumps pantheon. Content Warning: In addition to our usual barnyard language, this episode contains a brief discussion of pedophilia as well as sirens and sounds of arrest at the very beginning.

The Great Gildersleeve (1941-1957), initially written by Leonard Lewis Levinson, was one of broadcast history's earliest spin-off programs. Built around Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, a character who had been a staple on the classic radio situation comedy Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve enjoyed its greatest success in the 1940s. Actor Harold Peary played the character during its transition from the parent show into the spin-off and later in a quartet of feature films released at the height of the show's popularity. On Fibber McGee and Molly, Peary's Gildersleeve was a pompous windbag who became a consistent McGee nemesis. "You're a haa-aa-aa-aard man, McGee!" became a Gildersleeve catch phrase. The character was given several conflicting first names on Fibber McGee and Molly, and on one episode his middle name was revealed as Philharmonic. Gildy admits as much at the end of "Gildersleeve's Diary" on the Fibber McGee and Molly series (10/22/40). He soon became so popular that Kraft Foods - looking primarily to promote its Parkay margarine spread - sponsored a new series with Peary's Gildersleeve as the central, slightly softened, and slightly befuddled focus of a lively new family. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/daniel-lantz/message

Welcome to Unlocked, the official podcast of Nancy Drew games by HeR Interactive. Voice over artist Kate Klein joins host Tammy Tuckey to discuss voicing Emily Griffen in "Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake," and more! Visit us: http://www.herinteractive.comFollow us: http://twitter.com/HerInteractive'Like' us: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nancy-Drew-PC-Games/48636754130?ref=nfWatch us: http://www.youtube.com/user/HerInteractiveGamesJoin us: http://www.twitch.tv/nancy_drew_games

Listen, Subscribe, Share the show with a friend. Donate. Help us keep this train rollin!  The Propaganda Report: Actors Dan Fogler (Fantastic Beasts) & Josh Warren (Footloose) Join Us To Discuss THE COVID-CON, 9/11, QANON, EPSTEIN, TESLA, REPTILIANS & MUCH MORE We cover as many conspiracies as you can in two hours and discuss how they might relate to each other and to what's going on in the world right now.  DAN FOGLER is an actor, director, comedian, graphic novelist, and host of DAN FOGLER'S 4d Xperience! podcast. You can see him in Fantastic Beasts (Jacob Kowalski), The Goldbergs (Marvin Goldberg), The Walking Dead (Luke), Don Peyote (Warren), Balls of Fury (Randy Daytona), Secrets & Lies (Dave Lindsey), and much more.  DAN'S LINKS DAN FOGLER'S 4d Xperience! on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-foglers-4d-xperience/id1145191833   Dan's Website  https://www.danfogler.com/   Brooklyn Gladiator  https://www.amazon.com/Brooklyn-Gladiator-TP-vol-00/dp/1988247349   Moon Lake https://www.amazon.com/Moon-Lake-Midnight-Dan-Fogler/dp/1947784188/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&qid=1587627898&refinements=p_27%3ADan+Fogler&s=books&sr=1-5&text=Dan+Fogler   Fogler on Twitter https://twitter.com/mrdanfogler   Don Peyote Trailer  https://youtu.be/Q2tzFyVkfP8   JOSH WARREN is an actor, director, comedian, graphic artist, and CEO of Action Show Studios in Atlanta. You can see him in Footloose (Rich), Trouble With The Curve, M'larky (John M'larky), Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell (Justin), The Righteous Gemstones (Ronald Meyers), and much more.  JOSH'S LINKS Action Show Studios https://www.actionshowstudios.com/   Action Show Studios on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ActionShowStudios/   Action Show Studios on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/actionshowstudios/   Action Show Studios on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOMnneW_vEr8KGo5XqBb_Qw   Josh as Trump Commenting On COVID https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcdOw1kuMSQ   DONATE LINKS If you find value in the content we produce and want to help us keep this train rollin, drop us a donation via Paypal or become a Patreon. (links below) Every little bit helps. Thank you! And thank you to everyone who has and continues to support the show. It’s your support that enables us to continue producing shows. Paypal Patreon SUBSCRIBE LINKS Subscribe on iTunes  Subscribe on Google Play Music Listen on Google Podcasts Listen on Tunein Listen on Stitcher Follow on Spotify Like and Follow us on Facebook Follow Monica on Twitter Follow Binkley on Twitter Subscribe to Binkley’s Youtube Channel https://www.paypal.me/BradBinkley https://www.patreon.com/propagandareport https://twitter.com/freedomactradio https://twitter.com/MonicaPerezShow https://www.youtube.com/bradbinkley    

The 75th episode of the Light Advice Podcast is here! In this episode, Light has her number 1 cousin Paul back on the show. We recorded on the bus so there's gonna be a buzzing sound but I'm pretty sure that you can hear Light and Paul loud and clear. We talk about the trip to Taipei 101, to Taichung, riding the High Speed Rail, visiting Sun Moon Lake, enjoying the Fleur de Chine hotsprings and more! Ready to hear Light's advice? Listen to episode 75 right now! Subscribe to our Podcast and drop us a nice review! It'll help a lot! The Road to 100 is real! 1. Questions for Light? Send it over at www.lightong.com/contact/ or DM her at www.instagram.com/itslightong/ 2. Be sure to leave a 5 star review as it helps Light learn and improve! 3. Want to support Light's future projects? Here's her Patreon www.patreon.com/itslightong 4. Mom's side hustle - www.curves.ph 5. Mom's new YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClw7FPnXYGbshrpnoeC6ZSw - Be sure to subscribe! 6. My New Youtube Channel! Please subscribe! 7. Gear Used For Recording: > ATR 2100 - amzn.to/2EeGg97 > Zoom H4N - amzn.to/2QJnRTq > Presonus iTwo Studio - amzn.to/2EhA5kW > Elgato 4k - amzn.to/2I5Ruvi --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/itslightong/message

After Zoe's dad dies and she and her mom move to New Orleans, all Zoe has to cling to are her dad's Gudi bone flute and the voices in her head.  Where will they lead her?To download, right-click here and then click SaveJoin the Journey Into Patreon to get extra episodes and personal addresses, plus other extras and rewards.Relevant Links:Journey #27 - The King of Rabbits and Moon Lake by Eugie FosterEscape Pod #17 - The Life and Times of Penguin by Eugie FosterEscape Pod #214 - Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast by Eugie FosterPodCastle #28 - The Tanuki-Kettle by Eugie FosterPseudoPod #91 - Caesar’s Ghost by Eugie FosterPseudoPod #428 - When It Ends, He Catches Her by Eugie FosterDrabblecast #214 – The Wish of the Demon Achtromagk by Eugie FosterEugie Foster is a very talented and versitle writer of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and children's lit. Eugie received the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novelette and was named the 2009 Author of the Year by Bards and Sages. Her short story collection, RETURNING MY SISTER'S FACE AND OTHER FAR EASTERN TALES OF WHIMSY AND MALICE, was published by Norilana Books and can be found on her website at eugiefoster.com.  Her works have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, Fantasy Magazine, Apex Magazine, Cricket, and Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show just to name a few.Eugie died on September 27th, 2014 of respiratory failure related to Lymphoma at Emory University in Atlanta. Her story, ”When It Ends, He Catches Her,” published the day before her death, was nominated for the 2015 Nebula Award.Laurice White is a recent theater graduate and long time theater student, and has read stories for Podcastle, Pseudopod, Journey Into..., and for John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey on The End is Nigh and The End is Now, the first two volumes of The Apocalypse Triptych.Theme music: Liberator by Man In SpaceTo comment on this or any episode:Journey on over to the ForumsSend comments and/or recordings to journeyintopodcat@gmail.comTweet us us TwitterPost a comment on Facebook hereComment directly to this post down below

In this episode your favorite host Galaxy chats with the funny and very talented Dan Fogler. Check out Dan in upcoming season 10 of The Walking Dead and in Fantasic Beasts. You can also catch Dan at DragonCon and many more conventions coming up. Please go to New York Comic Con in October, Dan is releasing his new Comic Book for the world to love. For more Dan Fogler follow him on Instagram @DanFogler Dan Fogler made his Broadway debut when he originated the role of William Barfée in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which he won the Theatre World Award for the original off-Broadway production and the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical in 2005 for the original Broadway production. Fogler's first television appearance was in 2002 on FOX's 30 Seconds to Fame as a contestant impersonating Al Pacino. Other television credits include guest starring roles on AMC's The Walking Dead, ABC's The Goldbergs, NBC's Hannibal, CBS' The Good Wife and voice work for FOX's American Dad. Fogler also has had starring roles in ABC's Man Up! and Secrets & Lies. In film, Fogler is most known for his role of Jacob Kolwalski in J.K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Fantastic Beasts The Crimes of Grindelwald. Fogler also starred as Randy Daytona in 2007's Balls Of Fury for Focus Features and had roles in Good Luck Chuck, Fanboys, Take Me Home Tonight, Love Happens, Scenic Route, Europa Report and In Like Flynn. Fogler has also done a variety of voiceover acting in films such as; Horton Hears A Who! along with Steve Carell and Jim Carrey, Disney's Mars Needs Moms, Free Birds and 2008's Kung Fu Panda, with Jack Black and Jackie Chan. Some of Fogler's other projects include starring in the music video for the Type O Negative song "I Don't Wanna Be Me", in which he played a man recording himself on video as he cross-dresses as celebrities including Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. Fogler also wrote and directed the play Elephant in the Room, inspired by Ionesco's Rhinoceros, which was produced by the New York International Fringe Festival in 2007. Fogler has also written and directed Hysterical Psycho (2009) which premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, featuring actors from his theater company Stage 13 where Dan serves as one of the company's Artistic Directors, and Don Peyote (2014) which also saw Fogler in the lead role as Warren Allman, with supporting roles from Josh Duhamel, Anne Hathaway, Topher Grace. Hysterical Psycho was Fogler's first graphic novel. In 2010, Archaia Entertainment published the horror anthology Moon Lake. This collection of stories chronicles the past, present, and future of the most haunted town on Earth: Moon Lake. Fogler is also hard at work on another graphic novel, Brooklyn Gladiator.   For more amazing episodes go to: www.ComicCon-Radio.com   Follow us on Instagram  @ComicConRadio   Please subscribe to Comic Con Radio Always give us 5 stars. Say Hi when you can. Always #WatchLive Please share this episode with the world!   We love you all… Thank you for loving us back!

Got a question or comment? wisconsinsoutdoorexplorer@gmail.com On this week's podcast, I talk about my families first biking adventure around Half Moon Lake in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I'll offer some tips on what you can look for when planning your next biking trip. Chippewa River State Trail - https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/parks/name/chiprivertrail/ Half Moon Lake - https://dnr.wi.gov/lakes/lakepages/LakeDetail.aspx?wbic=2125400 Eau Claire - https://www.eauclairechamber.org/visiting-eau-claire.html Phoenix Park - https://www.visiteauclaire.com/listing/phoenix-park/1898/ www.wisconsinsoutdoorexplorer.com Youtube: http://bit.ly/WOE_YOUTUBE Instagram: http://bit.ly/WOE_INSTAGRAM Facebook: http://bit.ly/WOE_FACEBOOK Twitter: http://bit.ly/WOE_TWITTER Pinterest: http://bit.ly/WOE_Pinterest Podcast: http://bit.ly/WOE_PODCAST  

John Baty is 83 years old. He's a native of Mentone, Alabama, where he still lives, on the property where he and his wife used to run a juke joint years ago. Mr. Baty has a belief that "You can tell it funny, or you can tell it sad..." but that the truth of a story, or history, is the truth, plain and simple. He tells the story of Mentone, Moon Lake, and the people there as it is, not as we would have it. There's the good, the bad, and the ugly, all represented here, but John tells the stories in such a way that even from the bad, the good shines through. That's the way with history. There's always two sides to that coin. The On the Porch segment this week returns to a topic brought up in a previous episode, where my friend Beth and I talked about the proposal to rename the Tri-Cities/Mountain Empire region of Upper East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky. The powers that be, movers and shakers, leaders of the area came to a decision that we'd be henceforth (until the next time) be known as The Appalachian Highlands, which, I must say, has a certain ring to it. I like it, in fact. However, there's a certain sting to the pride of a people when someone tells them their name isn't good enough and needs to be changed. I discuss all this and more this week "On the Porch." You'll want to slow down, sip on some tea, and really take in this week's interview. Don't rush. Sit a spell. Really listen to the living history of an Appalachian Treasure that we have in Mr. John Baty. You'll be glad you did. God bless!

Hey baby, Big Tim hangs out with Alex Gasparini and Simon Nash on this week's episode of THIS WEEK IN CHICKEN SANDWICHES.

On a summer's day in Louisiana, 1913, Sonny Davenport wanders away from his family's vacation home at Half Moon Lake and never returns. Inspired by a true story, Half Moon Lake is a captivating novel about the parent-child bond, identity and what it means to be part of a family.Continue reading

Kirsten Alexander chats about her haunting book Half Moon Lake, set in 1913, Louisiana exploring prejudice, history, privilege & the lengths one will take to find their child. Kirsten explores moral ambiguity and the impact that one's privilege has on others. A haunting read that will keep you awake at night. In 1913, on a summer's day at Half Moon Lake, Louisiana, four-year-old Sonny Davenport walks into the woods and never returns.

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Tell the Phoenix Fox, Tell the Tortoise Fruit by Cynthia So   On the day Sunae turned nine years old, there was no joyful feast. A monster burst from the sea that night and ate five people. The Mirayans gathered upon the shore to watch this, as they did every Appeasement. Sunae’s mother covered Sunae’s eyes, but Sunae still heard the screams. The crunch of brittle bone between teeth. The wet gulp of gluttonous throats. Sunae prayed to the Goddess that the warrior Yomue might rise from the dead and defeat the monster yet again. No warrior came, but a hand grasped Sunae’s and squeezed. A hand as small as her own. When it was over, Sunae’s mother murmured, “Now we will be safe for another ten years.” She removed her hands from Sunae’s eyes, and Sunae flinched from the gore before her. The older children always said that this was why Miraya’s beaches were pink, but she hadn’t been convinced until she saw the sands now drenched with fresh blood. Dark red on dusk pink. Full transcript after the cut:     Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 66 for March 5, 2019. This is your host Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, "Tell the Phoenix Fox, Tell the Tortoise Fruit" by Cynthia So and a poem by Chanter, "The Lamentations of Old Money." This episode is part of the newest GlitterShip issue, which was just released and... is very late. The "Summer 2018" issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and now Gumroad! If you're one of our Patreon supporters, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. For everyone else, it's $2.99, and all of our back issues are $1.49. GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program. This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible and a free audiobook to keep. If you'er looking for an excellent book of short queer stories to listen to, you should check out Bitter Waters by Chaz Brenchley. This book is full of speculative fiction featuring gay men and was awarded the Lambda Award for best LGBT speculative fiction. To download Bitter Waters for free today, go to www.audibletrial.com/glittership -- or choose another book if you're in the mood for something else. Up first, our poem:   Chanter is a proud Wisconsinite who took flight (alas, not literally) from her originating small town, headed for the big city’s more accepting climes and never looked back.  She’s proudly asexual, demisensual, and some flavor of bi- or panromantic that’s as yet proving difficult to define.  She’s also brand squeaky new (emphasis, occasionally, on squeaky) to official publication.  Besides holding down a day job, she’s an active shortwave radio DXer and ham operator, as well as a crowdfunded author currently based mainly on Dreamwidth.       The Lamentations of Old Money by Chanter   Jennifer doesn’t want a white dress. She doesn’t want a church,an altar, a tangle of coast-grown flowers,sisters in matching silk, trained doves, stained glass,twenty overlaid colognes and splintering sunlight,rehearsed organ music andrecorded pop shorthand warbling through weak speakers,biting April breezes, overthought hair and makeup,snow in hardwood aisles. Jennifer doesn’t want a wild time. She doesn’t want hips around shoulders, tools and toys,filthy supplications and hot breath ideas,hours between bedsheets, sticky aftermaths,bruises as tawdry mementos in hard to reach places,hands and mouths, teeth and tongues and fluids,too many entrances,the junctions of legs and legs and legs. Jennifer doesn’t want hard edges. Not for her, leashes, spike heels and bad girl pretense.not for her, the bite of too-demanding fingertipsgrinding at her biceps,cold and bruising at her cheeks,clamped into the flesh of her wrists.Not for her, orders with teeth both behind and in them,whipcracks in voice and deed.Not for her, daddy’s little anything, mommy’s little anything,a schoolgirl’s life, a paddle’s life,princess, flower, whore.Not for her, latex and custom-made chains,iron protocol and a child’s tear-stung punishments,revoked names and Halloween’s expected trappings. Not for her, anonymity.Not for her, all of the spiceand none of the wine to mull with it. What Jennifer wants? Fits on a two-sided coin. One side: Jennifer wants nights asleep in a hayloft, clothes on,with siblings in arms—and black coffee,and cotton-coarse humor, and blood—to her left and right. Jennifer wants a uniform,wants honest lamplight with a wick beneath it,wants a hundred songs and a hand-tuned fiddle,a guitar played at a campfire,laces and burlap, branches and homespun wool,antique language, tactile camaraderie,respected rank and unresented ceremony,world-spanning care so personal it can’t be feigned,so simultaneously subtle and frank that it confuses,so elegant it’s genuine,so casual it’s ancient.“To be fair, that one does drive me utterly mad of an afternoon butGod be good, dear fellow, why wouldn’t I?” Jennifer wants a certain amount of ignored anachronism,wants a world where ‘dear fellow’as affectionate genderless address is just fine,where ‘she’s a good man to have beside you in a fight’is perfectly acceptable wording,but where the phrase ‘man up’ is both soundly off limitsand considered decades or centuries distant, depending;a world where, at the end of the day,it’s quietly acknowledged and otherwise near-forgottenthat oh yes, that one there, she’s a girl.As in woman.As in, see also, dame. Noun.Example I: To go to work for the war efforton the road under cover of darkness,on the air for the BBC,or on the battlefield firing decisive cannon blast volleyslike a real dame. Example II:I’m a girl, and mostly,I prefer other dames to fellas. Mostly.But when I don’t, I kinda have a type? Ahem!” Somewhere, a coin is balancing on its edge. And the flip side: Jennifer wants to write a hundred stories and bind them in hard covers,wants modern skirts to her ankles,comfortable jeans and blue corduroy coat sleeves,wants city streets, steel toes and long hair,near-distant clocktower bells,silver jewelry bought by her own hand, in her own name,a rocking chair made to last for decades,a damn fine radio setup,the solid strength of a wooden door at her backafter she and she - he and she - they and sheafter they’ve crashed through itand, fully clothed, battered it closed behind them. Both sides: Jennifer wants her wrists pressed flat against that wooden door,all benevolent force, all warmth,all welcome gravity, all burgeoning life in orbit,all the steady strength of a starin symbiosis with a planet.Jennifer wants voices and voices and voices,innocent details and muscle-melting,breath-stealing turns of phrase,sound serving as light serving aslodestone to the iron in every millimeter of herexcept, except, for a bare and unbared few. One side: Jennifer wants the wind at her back,a message, a mission, a reason and a warning,miles and miles and miles rolled outunder a sky filled with leaden stars,a purpose and a signal, a gesture,an anticipation of commandthat tenses her like a bowstringbefore—wait, wait, wait for it—rush for it— “Fire!” Both sides: Jennifer wants to be eager,to be teeming under her skin with silver,wants a reason and a cause and a leader who’sfallible by self-description, near-matchless by others’ accounts,wants to thrill to rank, surname, simple designation,wants to know at exactly what she’s aimed,near-precisely what will happen when she hitsand that yes, the trusted, entirely human handsof gravity to a planetare the only hands pulling or perhaps, perhaps,the only hands directing those pulling her string,wants to be entirely, mindfully, consensually willingto be fired like a longbow. And the flip side: Jennifer wants to bringa girlfriend home to her parents,wants to curl into accented wordslike they’re warm compresses and quilts,wants to make promises and keep them,find each others’ keys,play each others’ record collections,brush cat hair off each others’ sweaters,adore and be adored forever,not live together.Jennifer wants to never grow tired of hearing herself say“This is Elaine.” Or “This is Kim.” Or “This is...”“This is my better half.” Both sides: Jennifer wants orders that both delight herand fill her with clean purpose,stoking a fire that consumes every inch of herexcept, except, for the space between her thighs.Jennifer wants the intersectionwhere bravery meets well-placed loyalty.Jennifer wants to know exactly what she’s doing,wants to be utterly sure of her cause,to make up her entire mind, on her own,and then raise her voiceand throw herself into the thing with abandonbecause yes, this is right, this is reason, this is exuberanceand happiness and righteous fury blazing, this isbright history, this is justice, this is-- One coin. With two sides. Jennifer wantsthe rarity that is liking of, love for,acceptance and welcome ofboth the existence and the admissionof her two sides. Even when she’s difficult.Even when she’s horrible.Even when she’s irrational.Even when she’s just, so most people would say,plain off baseline weird. Especially when she’s weird. All of the wine to mull withall of the spiceground by capable hands.Hands ringed in silver. Hands at the ends of corduroy sleeves. The sleeves of a coat that may have,once or twice,been a makeshift pillow in a hayloft. After a night’s ride. After a night’s mission.       Cynthia So is a queer Chinese writer from Hong Kong, living in London. She spent her undergrad crying over poets that have been dead for 2,000 years, give or take. (She’s graduated now, but still crying.) Her short fiction has appeared in Anathema, Arsenika, and Cast of Wonders. She can be found on Twitter @cynaesthete. Zora Mai Quỳnh is a genderqueer Vietnamese writer whose short stories, poems, and essays can be found in The SEA Is Ours, Genius Loci: The Spirit of Place, POC Destroy Science Fiction, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, Strange Horizons, and Terraform. Visit her: zmquynh.com. Rivia is a Black and Vietnamese Pansexual Teen who has a passion for reading, video games and music. She says “I’m gender questioning but also questioning whether or not I’m questioning...Isn’t gender just a concept?” You can hear her vocals on Strange Horizon’s podcast for “When she sings…”   Tell the Phoenix Fox, Tell the Tortoise Fruit by Cynthia So       On the day Sunae turned nine years old, there was no joyful feast. A monster burst from the sea that night and ate five people. The Mirayans gathered upon the shore to watch this, as they did every Appeasement. Sunae’s mother covered Sunae’s eyes, but Sunae still heard the screams. The crunch of brittle bone between teeth. The wet gulp of gluttonous throats. Sunae prayed to the Goddess that the warrior Yomue might rise from the dead and defeat the monster yet again. No warrior came, but a hand grasped Sunae’s and squeezed. A hand as small as her own. When it was over, Sunae’s mother murmured, “Now we will be safe for another ten years.” She removed her hands from Sunae’s eyes, and Sunae flinched from the gore before her. The older children always said that this was why Miraya’s beaches were pink, but she hadn’t been convinced until she saw the sands now drenched with fresh blood. Dark red on dusk pink. She looked at the girl next to her, the girl who was holding her hand, and she saw a determination in those eyes as bright as the moon, as bright as her own. A determination to make sure that this would never happen again. “I’m Oaru,” the girl said. “What’s your name?” Sunae looked down at their clasped hands and told Oaru her name.   The Temple of the Moon Goddess is the most beautiful place on the island. There are no straight lines and sharp angles within, but everything is curved and gentle and swooping. Shades of blue deepen as one enters through the front, the colors of twilight intensifying into midnight, accented by silver and broken up by patches of brilliant white that gleam through the dark. A pool of water from the Moon Lake shimmers in the atrium. Frosty glass cut into lunar shapes hang from the ceiling in long, glittering threads. All of it is flawless craftsmanship, except for the wall of the prayer hall. The hall is perfectly circular. Spanning a semicircle on the wall is a painting of Yomue, splendid in lustrous armor, wielding a sword as black as her hair and an expression as fierce as the sea. The sand of the Mirayan beach is pink beneath her feet, and she glares at the monster that towers over her. Its writhing, many-headed form is etched into the blackness of the night. The moon hangs above them, solemn and full. The other half of the wall is blank, its contents effaced and forgotten. Warrior confronts monster. What’s the rest of the story? Monster leaves island alone for a hundred years. Warrior dies, and monster comes back. It is starved and salivating, with too many teeth. Every ten years, it must be fed. Is that what was on the other half of the wall? Sunae’s mother buys her Carrucean books to read, because Carrucean is an important language to learn well. In Carrucean tales, monsters are always slain. Heroes sometimes journey into foreign lands and kill other people’s monsters for them, and they are rewarded with riches and brides and thrones. Sunae is ten years old, but she knows this: there are Carruceans living in Miraya. Miraya was owned by Carrucea for hundreds of years, and then there was a treaty of some sort not long before Sunae was born, and now Miraya belongs to the Mirayans again. The Carruceans came here to their island. They governed the island and lived here for centuries, but no Carrucean ever killed the monster for them. Yet here they are on the island still, with their wealth, their power. Their Mirayan wives. “Mother, have any Carruceans ever been fed to the monster?” Sunae asks. Her mother frowns. “Can’t we talk about something more cheerful?” Sunae just wants to know how to defeat the monster. If no Carruceans will come to their aid, then who will?   The old Library of Miraya is a burnt husk with a blackened facade, secluded from the town and set into the side of a hill, a little way from the Moon Lake. Sunae doesn’t understand why it hasn’t been torn down to make way for something new when fire ravaged it long ago, but perhaps its remote location preserved it. Evidently the Mirayans of yore prized a peaceful reading environment. Sunae can hear nothing of the bustling town here, only a chorus of birds. She also doesn’t understand why she is letting Oaru drag her into the grim ruins. Inside, the half-collapsed roof lets in some lemony sunlight, but there is an unpleasant smell like overripe tortoise fruit, and rows of charred shelves loom and menace. “It went this way,” Oaru says, and drops to her hands and knees to crawl through a tiny hole in the wall. Sunae sighs and follows. She gets stuck, her shoulders being broader than Oaru’s, but Oaru wrenches her free with a painful yank. She emerges into a cramped and airless space, illuminated only by the glow of the phoenix fox, which is swishing its enormous tail back and forth, sweeping away layers of ash and dust from the wall behind it. Sunae coughs, but Oaru grabs her arm excitedly. “There’s something on the wall!” Oaru leans over the fox and scrubs at the wall with her sleeve, gradually revealing the faded colors of a painting: a woman in an ethereal blue gown, sitting with a brush in her hand. A long scroll of paper unfurls before her, inked in an illegible, swirling script. “Doesn’t that look a bit like Yomue?” Oaru asks. It seems impossible that this serene woman should resemble the powerful warrior in the temple, but she does. It’s in the proud tilt of her jaw, maybe. Sunae reaches out and traces the woman’s chin. She has never been permitted to touch the temple mural, though she has longed to. “What is she doing?” Oaru wonders. “Writing poetry?” Sunae ventures. The phoenix fox smirks at her and stretches lazily before slipping out through the hole in the wall, leaving them in absolute darkness. Oaru yelps, “I’ve got to catch that fox!” She tugs at Sunae’s elbow and Sunae reluctantly goes with her. It’s as much a struggle to get out as it was to get in, and the fox is nowhere to be seen by the time Sunae has wriggled through.   The new Library of Miraya is a clean and functional building, centrally located, right next to the Town Hall. Most of the space is dedicated to Carrucean books, with the Mirayan literature section tucked into a dismal corner. Sunae asks a librarian to help her find Yomue’s poems. “Yomue wasn’t a poet,” the librarian says, puzzled. “But I can recommend poetry from the same time period. Not much of it survived, what with the old Library burning down... But there is some, and it’s very beautiful. Do you know how to read Classical Mirayan, though?” In the end, Sunae walks away from the Library with a few books and a leaflet for free Classical Mirayan lessons. By the time she turns twelve, she has read all the Classical Mirayan poetry that the Library has to offer—and all the modern Mirayan poetry, too. She tries her hand at writing her own poem. She writes about Yomue and the monster. Yomue’s husband, wrongfully convicted of murdering a man, chained to a pillar on the shore, awaiting his execution. Yomue weeping at his feet. The moon trembling in the sky, the Goddess watching. Yomue dressing herself in armor, carefully lacing her breastplate, looping her belt through the buckle. Whetting her sword and sheathing it. Her hair, tied back with a ribbon given to her by her husband. Her boots hitting the ground, her armor jangling. The monster howling, crashing back into the sea where it nurses its wounds for a hundred years. Sunae wins a competition at school with this poem, and gets a shiny badge that she pins to her satchel. She is fourteen, and she writes about nature: trees touching, sands blushing. The ocean embracing the coast. Leaves tender for one another. Mountains asleep next to each other. The moon observing everything. She is sixteen, and Oaru bets a boy she can beat him in a swordfight. Sunae has watched Oaru practise in her garden every week for five years, first with a toy sword, then with a real one; Oaru is graceful and deft with it where Sunae has always fumbled and flailed. Oaru and the boy are wearing white clothes and using wooden swords dipped in red paint; the boy soon looks like a bloody mess and yields, while Oaru is still pristine. “You were amazing,” Sunae says afterwards, as Oaru is cutting into a celebratory tortoise fruit. Oaru waves a slice of it in her face, and Sunae grimaces at its distinct mustiness. “Ew, no thank you.” “How can you not like tortoise fruit?” Oaru says, shaking her head. “Are you even Mirayan?” Sunae sticks her tongue out. “It smells like a sweaty armpit and it tastes even worse.” Oaru eagerly bites into the purple flesh of the fruit. “You should know though, you kind of looked like a tortoise fruit just then, when I wafted it under your nose.” Sunae blinks at the wrinkled skin of the tortoise fruit in horror. “I looked like that? Don’t be so mean!” Oaru laughs and nudges her side. “All right, I’m sorry—but hey, do you think I’ll be good enough to defeat the monster someday?” No. Don’t you dare try. Sunae swallows. Oaru must be the best fighter Miraya has seen in generations. Surely if anyone has a chance to ward off the monster and stop more Appeasements from happening, it’s her. How can Sunae be so selfish as to hold Oaru back for fear of losing her? She says, “You look so much like Yomue in the temple mural when you’re moving with that sword.” Oaru’s breath catches, and Sunae suddenly understands what it is she has really been trying to write poetry about all this time. They are alone in Sunae’s bedroom, and Sunae kisses Oaru. There is tortoise fruit on Oaru’s tongue, cloying and bitter, but Sunae doesn’t scrunch up her nose. She doesn’t mind at all. “That has to be the boldest thing you’ve ever done,” Oaru whispers, her lips soft and purpled, her hair mussed by Sunae’s hands. “I guess you inspired me,” Sunae says, and Oaru grins and grips Sunae’s arms. “Remember that time I tried to catch the phoenix fox?” Sunae nods. Every day she thinks of the painted woman lit by the phoenix-fox fire. The nameless poet buried in the rubble, her face so strangely like Yomue’s. Sunae returned to the shadowy wreckage of the old Library once, but she has grown and can no longer contort herself to fit through that hole in the wall. “I wanted to give the fox to you,” Oaru says. Oh. It is a Mirayan custom for young men to present phoenix foxes to girls they wish to marry. This fact had utterly escaped ten-year-old Sunae, who merely assumed that Oaru wanted the fox as a pretty pet. Sunae raises her eyebrows, stroking Oaru’s cheek with her thumb. “You already wanted to marry me when you were ten?” Oaru shrugs. “I didn’t know then, what it meant. I only knew I wanted to be your friend forever. But now I know what it actually means, for me to want to marry you.” Her eyes are serious, like a cloud veiling the moon. It means we could both be a part of the next Appeasement if anyone finds out. Sunae closes her eyes against the thought and kisses Oaru again. Sunae is eighteen and she is awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Wimmore, one of Carrucea’s world-famous institutions. If she takes the scholarship, she will be absent from Miraya for a year. She will be absent from Miraya on the day of the next Appeasement. Tell me what else there is, she pleads with the impassive image of Yomue on the wall, as everyone else in the prayer hall lifts their cupped hands repeatedly to their faces in the traditional gesture of worship. Tell me. Because if there is more to the story than a swordfight, then maybe she can convince Oaru not to risk her life. And if she has to go to Carrucea to find the answers, she will. At the end of the prayer session, when people are either shuffling off or lingering to socialize, Sunae tells Oaru about the scholarship. “It’s stupid that you have to go to Carrucea to learn more about this island, our island that we’ve been living on our whole lives.” Oaru spits the words, and her frustration echoes in the chambers of Sunae’s heart. “I know.” Sunae wants to run her hands through Oaru’s hair to comfort her, but it would be foolish to show such affection in public. She wants to hold Oaru’s hand, but they are not children anymore. They will not get away with it, not here where everyone can see. “Just promise me that you won’t try and take on the monster when the Appeasement comes. Please. You’re not ready.” I’m not ready. “I promise.” Oaru’s voice sounds fervent with honesty. Sunae hopes she has known Oaru for long enough to tell when she is lying.   The Moon Lake is luminous as a heart that brims full with emotion, and Sunae stands at the edge and dips her toes in. Oaru is naked in the water, moonlight dripping from her hair. Oaru wears a smile like a phoenix fox’s, sly and burning through Sunae. Oaru’s arms are muscled and impatient and open wide. “Come on, Sunae.” Sunae’s fingers hover over the knot that ties the sash around her waist. “You’re breaking the law,” she whispers. Oaru wades closer to Sunae. She lifts the hem of Sunae’s gown and kisses Sunae’s ankles. “We’ve been breaking the law for a long time, tortoise fruit,” she says, her dark eyes looking up into Sunae’s. “When has that ever stopped you?” She leaves wet handprints on the skirt of Sunae’s gown, droplets trickling down the backs of Sunae’s calves. “Who knows when we’ll get to do this again?” I’ll only be away for a year, Sunae thinks, but Oaru’s eyes are darker than fire-scorched walls, and Sunae knows it will be the longest year of their lives. She loosens the knot. Her gown joins Oaru’s in a careless heap on the sandy bank, and soon her body twines with Oaru’s in the water. Mist forms around them, as though the Goddess herself wishes to hide them away from the world.   Let’s skip ahead for a moment. It is Sunae’s nineteenth birthday, and she is chained to a pillar on the pink shore of Miraya. Her lover Oaru is shackled to a different pillar. They cannot touch or kiss each other. The monster is about to rear its ugly heads from the sea, and Sunae is crying, but she is speaking. She is reciting a poem she wrote, and I am watching, as I always have. I am listening. So how did they get here?   Sunae sits on the steps of a lofty sandstone building, shivering in the wind and eating a whole tortoise fruit by herself. She has been studying in Wimmore for four months, and she hasn’t made a single friend. The light in Wimmore is muted and cold, the streets narrow and grey, the houses foreboding and tall. People laugh at her accent. The dresses fashionable here are too tight, and she can never get enough air into her lungs. The air tastes nothing of salt, anyway. She misses the sea. She runs her fingers over the tough, knobbly green rind of the fruit. Her professor had bought it for the class to try—an expensive import from Miraya, not easily purchased. The others in her class had squealed over how disgusting the fruit looked and smelled as Dr. Janner was dissecting it like a corpse, and Sunae thought of Oaru’s teeth tearing into a wedge of tortoise fruit. Oaru’s tongue stained purple by its juice. Sunae had stood up, gathered the massive fruit in her arms as though it were a baby and marched out of the classroom. And now she is sitting on rain-wet stone and chewing miserably. How Oaru would tease her, if Oaru were here. A girl sits down next to her. Talia from her class, with wheat-colored curls flattened in the drizzle. “You really like tortoise fruit, huh?” Talia says. “I hate it,” Sunae says. “Let me try a bit, will you?” Sunae gives her a small slice and she takes a tentative bite. “Hmm, it tastes a lot better than it smells. Definitely not the texture I was expecting, though. It’s... squidgy?” She finishes the slice, throws the rind over her shoulder, and grabs another immediately. Sunae smiles. She thinks it must be the first time she has smiled since she set foot in Wimmore. “You like it more than I do, then.” “So what are you doing out here eating something you hate and crying?” Talia asks, squinting. “Don’t tell me that’s just the rain.” “It’s not just the rain,” Sunae says, rubbing a hand over her face. “It’s just... It’s what a friend calls me. Tortoise fruit.” “An affectionate nickname?” Talia turns the piece of wrinkly rind over in her hand. “Is it a cute boy who’s waiting for you at home?” Sunae hesitates. “Um. Not a boy.” And then, to distract Talia from fixating on that, she launches into an account of everything that’s been overwhelming her. She explains that the next Appeasement is happening soon, and that she has been trying to conduct research into the history and literature of Miraya to see if she can find any clues as to how Yomue defeated the monster last time and why the monster came back, but she still hasn’t found anything useful. “I just want to find another way,” Sunae says. “I don’t want my friend to do anything rash. I don’t want to lose her.” Talia presses her shoulder gently against Sunae’s. “One of my ancestors was part of the first expedition to Miraya. We have an attic full of things left behind by various family members. We’ve never managed to go through all of it properly, but you’re welcome to come and have a look.” This is how Sunae finds herself cross-legged on the dusty floor of Talia’s ridiculously big attic, cross-eyed after three continuous days of rifling through boxes of miscellanea in dim light, unable to believe what she’s looking at. It’s a roughly colored sketch of Yomue the warrior, copied from the temple wall. Sword and monster and moon. And beneath that, a sketch of Yomue again—a woman dressed in the same armor, holding not a sword but a scroll open in her hands. Next to her is something a little like a mirror, or a full moon: a vast circle, shaded in silver. Within it coils a spiral shadow. Sunae isn’t sure how to interpret this, but she knows that this Yomue and the painted poet in the old Library are one and the same. She rummages through the rest of the box which contained the sketches, and her hand touches worn leather. She pulls it out of the box and it falls open on her lap, yellowed pages crammed with neat handwriting. It’s a diary.   “Why do all you rich Carruceans have stuff just lying around in your attic that I’ve only been searching for my entire life?” Sunae mutters under her breath to Talia, who is sitting next to her at this dinner. She clenches her fist around her fork. “Well, at least now you can read Yomue’s poetry!” Talia whispers back. Dr. Sotkin, a dear friend of Dr. Janner, carries on explaining to everyone how he recovered the lost manuscript of Yomue’s poems when he was cleaning out his grandfather’s house after his grandfather recently passed away. Sunae saws away at her chunk of boiled beef. “I’ll be publishing a translation later this year,” Dr. Sotkin announces. Sunae takes a sip of water and a deep breath. “What kind of poetry is it?” she asks, proud of how calm and polite she sounds. “Sadly, it only survives in fragments, but I’ve brought a copy of some of them to share with all of you as a preview.” Dr. Sotkin digs in his bag and retrieves a sheaf of papers. “I believe Dr. Janner told me you can all read Classical Mirayan?” “Some of us better than others,” Talia murmurs to Sunae, and Sunae hides a smile behind her napkin. Some of the boys in their class seem to be getting by with barely any knowledge of Mirayan. Sunae assumes it must be their wealth that passes their exams for them. She takes the sheet that Dr. Sotkin offers to her and scans it quickly. Her mind whirls dizzily and she pushes away her plate and reads the fragment again, more slowly this time. And again. She closes her eyes and envisions the inscrutable moon in the night sky to steady herself. Dr. Sotkin is saying something about a man that Yomue is drinking with. “She compares her love for this man to the Moon Lake—a blessing that glimmers on and on.” Sunae hands the sheet to Talia and holds onto the edge of the table. “Dr. Sotkin,” she says, and she isn’t able to sound calm anymore. Her voice quavers. “I don’t believe Yomue is talking about a man. I know it’s only a fragment, but it’s clear from the grammar that she’s writing about a woman.” Dr. Sotkin frowns. “Did you not hear when I said that this is a love poem?” “Yes, I know, and I believe that Yomue’s beloved is a woman.” “That’s preposterous. It’s simply impossible.” “You think it’s impossible that Yomue loved another woman?” “What you are speaking of is highly illegal and punishable by death, young lady,” Dr. Sotkin sniffs. In both Miraya and Carrucea, yes—Sunae is extremely aware. “Are we to believe that Yomue shared these poems with the public and was not executed for her sins?” “Well, she warded off the monster, so there were no Appeasements—” Dr. Sotkin tugs haughtily at his cravat. “You do realize that it is possible to execute people without feeding them to a monster as you barbarians love to do?” “Love?” Sunae’s voice is shrill to her own ears; drums thunder in her ribcage. “You think we love having to feed people to a monster every ten years to keep it from destroying our whole island?” Dr. Sotkin’s face is pink as the sand on Miraya’s beaches. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” “Yes,” Dr. Janner joins in. “Sunae, your behavior of late has been extremely rude and disruptive and I’m afraid we cannot tolerate this. Dr. Sotkin is the foremost expert on Classical Mirayan and he will not be insulted by your bumbling reading of this poem.” “But she’s right!” Talia protests, jabbing at the sheet of paper. “Dr. Janner, Sunae’s right. Look at this line here.” “It’s all right,” Sunae says, putting her hand on Talia’s arm. “I’m leaving.”   Sunae’s head is still spinning from the fragment of Yomue’s poetry. It was so much like the poems that she has been writing about Oaru, folded into envelopes and sent across the ocean to her lover. One was about the glow of sweat and moon-water on Oaru’s skin, the night they drifted together in the Moon Lake, the last night they spent together. And now, this letter from her mother. She sinks to the floor of the post room and clutches her knees. She is going to be sick. The door creaks open. She looks up and Talia is there. “I’m so sorry,” Talia says. “You were such a fearsome warrior back there, speaking up to Sotkin like that. He’s utterly dreadful. Janner, too. I want to lock them both up in my attic and never let them out. Janner revoked your scholarship but he hasn’t even tried to suspend me.” Sunae stares at Talia and cannot speak. Talia doesn’t know about the letter yet. She thinks Sunae is just upset about what happened at the dinner, but the world is crumbling at Sunae’s feet and Talia has no idea. A smile stretches across Talia’s face. “Can you believe your legendary Yomue’s one of us?” Sunae’s shoulders loosen a little. “One of us?” “One of us,” Talia repeats and holds her hand out to Sunae, and Sunae understands. Instead of taking Talia’s hand, she lifts up the letter and gives it to Talia. Talia reads it and is speechless, too. She sits down next to Sunae and together they watch the flickering light bulb. It is no moon, but it soothes, somehow. Eventually, Talia asks, “When is the next Appeasement? Will you make it back in time?” “If I leave at dawn, I might,” Sunae says, hoarsely. “You’ll be arrested too if you go back, won’t you?” Sunae nods. “But you’re definitely going.” Sunae nods again. “Good luck,” Talia whispers. “If you don’t die, write me a poem. You have my address.” She kisses Sunae’s forehead.   Sunae crosses the ocean home. She prays to the Goddess. She prays to Yomue. She writes.   Which is what brings us here, to Sunae’s nineteenth birthday, and Sunae and Oaru on the beach where they first met ten years ago. “I love you,” Sunae says to Oaru. There is white sea-spray in Oaru’s windblown hair, and if Sunae’s plan doesn’t succeed, she wants this to be the last thing she ever sees. She closes her eyes. The waves lap the shore. Her lungs are full of salt air. The moon caresses her face with its white light. She opens her mouth. The truth comes out. Sunae wrote that silly poem when she was twelve, where I saved my husband from the monster. I laughed when I heard her read it to her classmates. Now she is a much better poet, and she has learnt so much—from sketches and diaries and mistranslated fragments—and this is what she tells the Mirayans. Four hundred years ago, Yomue loved another woman, and they had flowers and wine and stars; they chased phoenix foxes together in the valleys. They ate tortoise fruit and kissed each other’s mouths purple. They wrapped themselves in moonlight. Yomue was skilled with the sword, but even more skilled with words, and she was the Goddess’ favorite. She could not stand by and watch a monster kill more people in her town. She wove a spell out of poetry and enchanted the monster, led it to the Moon Lake where it slumbered for as long as she lived, and longer, because she taught others the poem. But the Carruceans came; they brought their laws with them, and they knew how powerful fear was. How to control a people with it. Fire bloomed in the Library; in the temple, fresh paint dried on the wall. Yomue the poet was erased from history. The monster was awoken, and anyone who caused trouble could be thrown into its devouring jaws. “Now you tell me I cannot love Oaru.   We chase a phoenix fox that Yomue tamed once, Reborn from the ashes of the Library. It hides poems in its fur. Tell the phoenix fox I cannot love Oaru.   We eat tortoise fruit grown from centuries-old trees, Roots as deep as our island. It hides poems in its rind. Tell the tortoise fruit I cannot love Oaru.   We bathe in the Moon Lake Yomue drank from, Water sacred to the Goddess. It hides poems in its bed. Tell the Moon Lake I cannot love Oaru.   Tell the Goddess I cannot love Oaru. Tell Yomue. Tell her and the woman she loved. Go back in time and bind her to this pillar and Tell her she was wrong.”   The monster rises out of the sea, torrents of water cascading from its back. Oaru was arrested because of Sunae’s poetry. Because Oaru’s father found the incriminating poems, because Sunae had sent so many and they overflowed, spilled, flooded Oaru’s room. Poems alight with the memories of all that Oaru and Sunae did together, all the times they were wide-eyed travelers in the landscape of each other’s bodies, all the smoldering hearths they built in the secret corners of each other’s hearts. The monster bellows and the earth quakes and Sunae is not afraid. She knows she is not the first who has been here. She is not the first who has done this.   “Let her tell you she is me. Let her open her mouth and Sing the monster to sleep Again.”   Sunae’s pores still have the magic blessing of moon-water in them, and I am with her. Through her, I sing. I was here, like her. I loved, like her. I fought the monster and won, and she will, too.   If you visit the Temple of Moon Goddess today, you will see this scene painted alongside my mural in the prayer hall: The monster walks spellbound across the island, and the Mirayans walk with it, every one of their faces slack with awe. Sunae leads them, freed from her shackles. She holds Oaru’s hand.   END   “The Lamentations of Old Money" is copyright Chanter 2019. “Tell the Phoenix Fox, Tell the Tortoise Fruit” is copyright Cynthia So 2019. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. You can also pick up a free audio book by going to www.audibletrial.com/glittership or buying your own copy of the Summer 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “Instar" by Carrow Narby.

In which we discuss Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake! Our tumblr: krolmeistersisters.tumblr.com Drinking game referenced: krolmeistersisters.tumblr.com/drinking-game The Nancy Drew computer games are property of HeR Interactive

Malcolm White talks to Delta-based musician John Mohead. After years of touring, during which he played with or opened for the likes of Bob Dylan, Robert Randolph, Little Feat and many others, he returned to Mississippi to focus on his family and open a restaurant on Moon Lake. He recently released a new album, Son of the South. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Wands out! The Boo Crew practices some dark magic with Dan Fogler (Fantastic Beasts / Balls Of Fury) as they talk about his horror film 'Hysterical Psycho', his anthology horror graphic novels Moon Lake, his NEW graphic novel Brooklyn Gladiator and the world of Fantastic Beasts with the sequel coming out later this year. In the Screaming Room-it’s all about FANTASTIC horror comedies on the Boo Crew Podcast Episode Number 12! The Wolf Man is our patronus by the way. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On the debut episode of 1x1 WITH KRISTIAN HARLOFF, Kristian sits down with actor, playwright, director, comedian, podcaster and comic book writer Dan Fogler to talk about his life, his career, his work and what motivates him to tackle as many projects as he does. You might’ve seen Dan in his breakout role on Broadway in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, read his Moon Lake horror compilations or seen him as the lovable and sweet “Jacob Kowalski” in the Fantastic Beasts series. The sequel to that film comes out later this year, but in the mean time you can enjoy Dan’s latest graphic novel Brooklyn Gladiator which he talks about on the show today as well. It’s an enjoyable sit down with one of the most talented people working in the business today. Let us know what you thought of this episode and please remember to subscribe, rate, and comment to this podcast. Follow Kristian: https://twitter.com/KristianHarloffFollow Dan: https://twitter.com/mrdanfoglerFind other great Collider podcasts at http://podcastone.com/network/ColliderWatch our videos at http://youtube.com/collidervideosFor breaking movie and TV news visit http://collider.com

On this new Episode a close friend of the house, a second session of the Argentinian Dj and Producer Sebastian Olano. Seba has produced for many well known labels, including an EP for our sister project Moon Lake Records, his EP in Moon Lake included a remix by Alejandro Vivanco, certainly one of Chile's greatest electronic music producers of all time. Soundcloud: @sebastianolano

On this episode I get to talk with everyones favorite No-Maj from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Dan Fogler! We give our review on the Star Wars: The Last Jedi and talk about Harrison Ford injuries, comic books, Tom Hanks, Fantastic Beasts, projects that Dan has been working on such as his comic book: Brooklyn Gladiator and Moon Lake! and other cool stuff as well!

In the United States, potatoes are the second most consumed item, just behind rice. But when potatoes are thin sliced, fried and salted, they go from being the number two consumed food to the number one snack food of choice. George Crum, also known as George Speck, was born in 1824 in Saratoga Springs, New York to a Native American mother and African American father. When he was a young man, Crum worked as a guide in the Adirondack Mountains and an a Native American trader. Eventually however, he realized he had an exceptional ability to cook, and the culinary arts was his calling. By the summer of 1853, Crum found himself as the head chef at one of Saratoga Spring’s fanciest restaraunts, the Moon Lake Lodge resort, where like many other places, French fries was a famous staple of the menu. Though Crum could make French fries, his specialties were really in his seasoned preparation of wild game like venison and duck, with him not afraid to push the envelope and really experiment with flavors and pairings in the kitchen. In 1853, Crum was in the Moon Lake kitchen creating his famous French fries for a patron. Well apparently, the diner wasn’t happy with way his fries were cut, and sent them back asking for them to be cut thinner. Crum obliged, and cut them thinner. The diner STILL wasn’t happy, claiming the fries were too soggy, and sent the fries back again. According to legend, Crum was a bit more then perturbed and purposefully sliced the new batch of potatoes as thin as he possibly could, and then purposefully fried them as hard and as crunchy as possible. To top the new batch off, he salted them about as heavily as he could and served it up. Crum, despite his reputation for such amazing cuisine, tried to sabotage his own client. But, to Crum’s surprise, the diner LOVED this new creation, and with his new hit… a new snack was born. By 1860, Crum had ventured to open his own restaurant in Malta, New York, invariably called “Crum’s House”. Crum’s restaurant was in ridiculously high demand among tourists to the Saratoga Springs area, and even the wealthy seasonal residents of the area. According to diners, “his prices were that of the fashionable high end New York City restaurants, but the food and service were more than worth it, with everything possible raised on his own small farm, and even his farm got his personal attention whenever he could manage to handle both.” The famed Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt once was obligated to wait over an hour and a half for a meal.” Though United States’ patent law was created with color-blind language to foster and encourage innovation, the patent system consistently excluded these inventors from their due recognition. Because of these uphill battle in getting a patent, George Crum never even attempted to patent his potato chips, or the process for their creation. Eventually potato chips were being mass produced without him receiving any credit. Today, Americans alone consume about 1.5 billion pounds of potato chips each year. George Crum died at the age of 90 in 1914; but his potato chips will forever live on.

We have two interviews for you today; separated by years but united by the common thread of Hollywood and comics. But not comic book movies so much as comics from movie people. First up is Greg's talk with actor/director/comedian/writer Dan Fogler. You'll recognize Dan from "Balls of Fury", "Fanboys", "Take Me Home Tonight", "Hannibal", or "Secrets & Lies", but what you might not know about Dan is that he's written some comics as well. Two volumes of "Moon Lake" have been released by Archaia so far, but he's currently Kickstarting his new project, "Brooklyn Gladiator". They talked about that, what books Dan is currently reading (and there are a LOT of them), what it's like being behind the camera as well as in front of it, and more. Dan also tells just who he passed a joint to at the SNL 40th Anniversary Party, so this one's got something for everyone. If that wasn't enough for you, then Greg's unearthed 2013 talk with writer/director Chad Crawford Kinkle should do the trick. This interview, presumed lost in a hard drive crash, has him talking with Chad about the filmmaker's then-current indie horror movie "Jug Face". Chad lifts the curtain on what goes in to making a film on a reduced budget that still delivers big budget entertainment. They also talk about Chad's comic work, including his graphic novel "Harpe", about the two brothers who were America's first serial killers...back in the 18th century! Greg and Chad talk horror in all forms, and a whole lot more.  Robots From Tomorrow is a weekly comics podcast recorded deep beneath the Earth's surface. You can subscribe to it via iTunes or through the RSS feed at RobotsFromTomorrow.com. You can also follow Mike and Greg on Twitter. This episode is brought to you by Third Eye Comics. Enjoy your funny books.

Dan Fogler comes on the show to talk about his Kickstarter comic, BROOKLYN GLADIATOR. It sounds pretty epic. We also talk about his other comic, MOON LAKE with the Man in the Moon eating space cheese and passing gas. There's even talk of his show on ABC,

In which Matt is joined by Fanboys/Balls of Fury/Man Up's Dan Fogler to jaw about "finding a childhood in Brooklyn", how everything is better on LSD, and Dan's new horror anthology comic Moon Lake!

On this episode, the TSP Crew discusses the Walking Dead spoiling its own storylines, Rob Liefeld's inability to draw two halves of the same face, and Terry Moore's foray into science-fiction, Echo: Moon Lake!

On this episode, the TSP Crew discusses the Walking Dead spoiling its own storylines, Rob Liefeld's inability to draw two halves of the same face, and Terry Moore's foray into science-fiction, Echo: Moon Lake!