Podcasts about mxu

Most people think worship team success is all about talent. It's not. In this episode, we break down the five skills every worship team member actually needs — from spiritual depth to musical prep to leading with humility. Whether you're brand new or rebuilding team culture, this conversation will give you a blueprint that changes everything. Let's level up your worship team.FREE RESOURCES

Leading communion during worship isn't just a transition — it's a sacred moment that carries real spiritual weight. In this episode, Spencer and Nate unpack how to lead communion with clarity, reverence, and confidence. From choosing the right Scripture and setting the tone, to avoiding common pitfalls, you'll get practical tips that help you lead well — no matter your church size or style. Whether you're new to leading or looking to grow, this conversation will help you make every communion moment meaningful.FREE RESOURCES

If your church feels disengaged during worship, the problem probably isn't your setlist — it's the relationship gap between the stage and the seats. In this episode of the MxU Podcast, Spencer and Dillan break down why relational leadership before the first song is the real key to engagement. You'll learn how to use the margin after soundcheck to connect with your church in simple, powerful ways that build trust and transform the room. Worship leadership doesn't start on stage — it starts in the lobby.FREE RESOURCES

Most worship teams don't mean to drift spiritually. It just… happens. The rehearsals, the planning, the production—it's all good until soul takes a backseat. In this video, we're talking about why so many teams lose their spiritual edge (without even realizing it) — and how to change it before your team culture goes downhill.IMPORTANT LINKS• FREE Devotional Guide:  https://getmxu.com/resources/devotionalFREE RESOURCES

How should you train background vocalists on your worship team? Most just tell them to “blend better.” Some talk about dynamics. Almost none address oversinging. But what if there was a better way to coach BGVs? Let us show you how.IMPORTANT LINKS• FREE Vocal Warmup Guide: https://getmxu.com/resources/vocal-warmup• The Essential Guide for Worship Vocalists: https://app.getmxu.com/playlists/the-essential-guide-for-worship-vocalists• Vocal Workshops with Shannon: https://shannonpinkston.mymusicstaff.com• FREE Team Night Guide: https://getmxu.com/resources/team-night-guideFREE RESOURCES

How can you fast track your development as church production leader? Spencer De Young, CEO of MxU, joins us to talk about leadership, the value of mentorship, and how MxU is equipping church tech leaders through intentional training.In this episode you'll hear: 1:00 – ChurchGear's Worst Church Visit 6:00 – MxU's CEO Spencer Visits the Podcast16:15 – Spencer's Path to Leading MxU 26:00 – How MxU Creates Church Tech Training Videos33:15 – Baffle Blake (Presented by HouseRight)38:30 – Church Tech Leadership Lessons with Spencer46:30 – Real-Life Church Production Fail Story49:45 – Tech Takeaway: Why You Need a Church Tech MentorYou can see more about HouseRight's jobs, culture and projects at their website: https://www.houseright.com/ Join us for a month of giveaways!You could win some gear, some swag or even a trip! Enter here and then take advantage of our 20% off sale with code 5YEARS. Resources for your Church Tech Ministry Sell Us Gear: Does your church have used gear that you need to convert into new ministry dollars? We can make you an offer here. Buy Our Gear: Do you need some production gear but lack the budget to buy new gear? You can shop our gear store here. Connect with us: Sales Bulletin: Get better deals than the public and get them earlier too here! Early Service: Get our best gear before it goes live on our site here. Instagram: Hangout with us on the gram here! Reviews: Leaving us a review on the podcast player you're listening to us on really helps the show. If you enjoyed this episode, you can say thank you with a review!

Too many worship and tech teams rely on volunteers who feel underprepared and overwhelmed. When training is unclear or inconsistent, the result is burnout, frustration, and stalled growth. But it doesn't have to be that way. This podcast gives you practical tools, systems, and real-life insight to resource your worship and tech volunteers with confidence. Whether you're starting from scratch or refining what you've built, we'll help you create a team that's equipped, engaged, and ready.IMPORTANT LINKS• How to Leave Rehearsal Energized:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYkkmaOFVPg&t=7s• Planning Center Training:  https://go.getmxu.com/planning-center-courseFREE RESOURCES

Upgrade your volunteer team with MxUSuccessful Team Nights require intentionality and a little bit of planning. Dillan and Jeff talk through our suggestions for what makes a Team Night good, and how you can implement it in your next Team Night. MxU's TEAM NIGHT GUIDE (Free Download):Other Free Resources For Your Church:FREE FOH CHECKLIST:FREE AUDIO PATCH SHEET:What is MxU?The all-in-one training platform for church worship and tech teams.Sign up at here

Get training for you and your team hereIn this episode, Shep dives into leadership, personal growth, and the challenges of serving in ministry. He shares insights from his journey at Elevation Church, discussing the importance of identity, relationships, and staying grounded in faith amidst the pressure to perform. We talk about avoiding comparison traps, defining success, and mentoring the next generation with authenticity and purpose. Whether you're in ministry, leadership, or just seeking inspiration, this conversation will leave you motivated to grow where you're planted.  Shep's Church Livestreaming 101 Course (in-Depth streaming course on MxU):What is MxU?The all-in-one training platform for church worship and tech teams.Sign up here

Get training for you and your team hereLyric operators are often viewed as having an 'easy' job in production, but if you've never tried it, you'll quickly realize how challenging it can be.Spencer and Chad Rose from Revelux dive into why running lyrics is deceptively difficult, and share tips on how to train your operators for smoother services.You can find Revelux here:https://www.revelux.com/You can watch our course on Media Displays here:You can watch our course on Running ProPresenter here:What is MxU?The all-in-one training platform for church worship and tech teams.Sign up here 

This is episode 178 of the MxU Podcast! Michael Keith Lewis, FOH Engineer for Colony House, is at MxU HQ filming content on Allen & Heath's dLive series of consoles releasing on the MxU platform tomorrow. He joins Spencer and Nate to talk about all things volume in the church. Everyone's heard "it's too loud!" before on Sunday morning and chances are you didn't really think twice about it. This week, the guys discuss whether or not church really has gotten too loud and if so, what to do about it.Service Review (19:59 - 28:07)The team reviews a service from First Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas. Michael gives insider insight as he used to work at FBCA. They discuss the challenges of balancing an orchestra with a contemporary band and offer practical advice on how to integrate everything into a cohesive mix.Submit your service for review to support@getmxu.com or reach out to us on any of our social media platforms.Is Church Too Loud? (28:08 - 54:38)There's always been an ongoing debate about volume levels in the church. Michael, Spencer, and Nate chat about their experiences in different church settings and how they've navigated this exact challenge. It's important to find a balance that serves the congregation without overwhelming them. Sometimes, the mix gets prioritized over the message and that's just not okay. Audio should enhance, not detract, from the service.Here's our recommendation: focus on serving the church community rather than pushing personal preferences.Upcoming ContentTomorrow, we're releasing "The Allen & Heath dLive" as a comprehensive walkthrough of Allen & Heath's dLive series of consoles. From a console overview to patching, routing, scenes, effects, and so much more. Michael covers everything there is to know about the dLive. And in a couple of weeks, we're releasing an entire course from Michael where he builds a mix on the console, stay tuned in for that.Watch our social accounts and be on the lookout for an email with the course release tomorrow!LinksMxUMxU Pop-UpsMichael Keith Lewis

This is episode 177 of the MxU Podcast. Jeff and Spencer are joined by a familiar face and one of our MxU Ambassadors, Drake Kelch. Stemming from previous discussions and a post that was a tad controversial about Apple events and iPhones... the guys chat about value engineering in church and why sometimes, it's OK to get scrappy.Service Review (13:57 - 22:59)The guys review a service from Calvary Chapel in Knoxville, TN. From lighting to audio and the service as a whole, they offer feedback on how minor tweaks can make a significant impact on the overall worship experience. Spoiler: It's not about having the newest gear, it's about getting the most out of what you've got.Submit your service for review to support@getmxu.com or reach out to us on any of our social media platforms.Upcoming Content (23:00 - 25:34)Tomorrow, we're releasing "Media Manipulation with Resolume" as the third course on MxU all about Resolume. From slice transforms to generators, advanced outputs, and more... this course takes things deeper into the entire feature set that Resolume has to offer.Stay tuned in to our social accounts and be on the lookout for an email with the course release!Value Engineering for Smaller Budgets (25:35 - 55:34)Creativity can be your greatest asset when budgets are tight. Drake shares his insight on how churches can make the most of what they already own and yes, the camera in your pocket might just be enough. It's about finding practical solutions that work for your church and fit in with your church's vision without breaking the bank.LinksDrake KelchMxUMxU Pop-Ups

This is episode 176 of the MxU Podcast! Things look a little different for the podcast this week. Spencer is joined by Nick Kofhal and Max Williams from Summit Integrated Systems at their office in Colorado. The guys chat all things identity and discuss what it looks like to separate your role in your church from your identity.Your Role Is Not Your Identity (05:47 - 59:15)There's a delicate balance between one's calling and one's personal identity. It's common to get these confused and fuse your job with your identity. It's easy to lose yourself in the hustle of ministry and it's essential to ground your identity in the right things. The guys chat about how to focus more on what you're called to be rather than on what you're called to do.Upcoming ContentTomorrow, on the MxU platform, we're releasing "The Complete Guide to Vista" with Tony Fransen. We've heard your requests and we're following through... everything you need to know about Vista is covered in this comprehensive and practical course. Tony walks through everything from controls to patching to presets to designing and so much more. Stay tuned in to our social accounts and be on the lookout for an email with the course release tomorrow.LinksMxUMxU Pop-Ups (Up Next: Dallas TX, August 20th)Summit Integrated SystemsNick KofhalMax Williams

This is episode 175 of the MxU Podcast! Jeff and Spencer are joined by two familiar faces, Josh Reeder-Esparza from the MxU crew and Dillan Howell from EVNT Ready. They chat all things experiences and answer this question… "Why are we Obsessed with 'Experiences' in Church?"Service Review (02:09 - 20:54)The crew review a service from AG Church of Willmar, MN. They dive into the mix, pointing out how the piano overpowers the guitars and the snare drum's sound. The consensus? Balance and subtle adjustments could make a significant difference. Thanks for the submission, Steve!If you're interested in a service review, submit yours to support@getmxu.com or DM us on our social accounts!Why are we Obsessed with Building ‘Experiences' in the Church? (20:55 - 01:06:54)Experience or service, whatever you call it, what's the true purpose behind them? Have we become too obsessed with the 'show' and not with genuine worship? In a larger sense, does our modern view of a church service align with the theological foundation of church in general? Take a listen as the guys dive into this topic and much more... Dillan even recounts his experience at a Cowboy Church.Upcoming Content (01:06:55 - 01:10:24)Tomorrow, on the MxU platform, we're releasing 'Mixing on an Analog Console' in response to the many... many... requests we've gotten over the years to film this course. Jeff used his "seasoned" expertise to craft a mix on an analog console and in doing so, he shared it all with you. Be on the lookout for the course drop tomorrow on our social accounts and via email.LinksMxUMxU Pop-Ups (Up Next: Dallas TX, August 20th)Dillan Howell

This is episode 174 of the MxU Podcast. Jeff, Spencer, and Nate are joined by a local worship leader and friend - Lance Asher! They chat about all things worship and the why behind churches writing their own worship songs. Here's the question... should you write your own songs? If you've wrestled with this before, you know there's no easy answer. Take a listen as the guys do their best to answer it.Service Review (23:04 - 35:07)This week, the team reviews a service from The Summit Church in Raleigh, NC. They give their thoughts on the mix overall and provide constructive feedback in terms of the balance of instruments, vocal presence, and more.Submit your service for review to support@getmxu.com or reach out to us on any of our social media platforms.Upcoming Content (35:08 - 37:04)Tomorrow, we're releasing "Music Directing with Matt Gilder" on the MxU platform! Matt is a long time friend and is the MD for Chris Tomlin. He brings a wealth of knowledge about Ableton Live and music directing in general. In case you missed it, at the beginning of this month we released our first batch of worship content that we shot with Thrive Worship. We've filmed even more and we're excited to continue releasing worship content this week. Stay tuned in to our social accounts and be on the lookout for an email with the course release!Should Churches Write Their Own Worship Songs? (37:05 - 01:29:49)Lance Asher is a local worship leader here in Knoxville, TN. He gives his why behind his church writing their own worship songs and explains the journey that brought them to write. In general, however, the question of whether or not churches should be writing their own worship songs still remains. Jeff, Spencer, Nate, and Lance all debate this topic and emphasize the importance of theological accuracy.LinksLance AsherMxUMxU Pop-Ups

This is episode 173 of the MxU Podcast... Tony Fransen is back! Jeff, Spencer, Tony, and Nate chat about Jeff's repeated Tesla stories and Spencer's demand for organization. Tony's been involved in some pretty cool things since we last talked, and has some advice to offer on what seems to always be a heated debate. Is church lighting essential or excess?Service Review (20:47 - 27:01)This week, the guys review a service from Grace City church. Tony provides insight on the overall look, highlighting the do's and don'ts of creating an engaging worship environment. Here's a tip: be intentional!Submit your service for review to support@getmxu.com or reach out to us on any of our social media platforms. Is Church Lighting Essential... or Excess? (40:20 - 01:03:39)We seem to always get the most feedback when we talk about lighting. Everyone always has an opinion on whether or not it belongs in church and if it does, how it should be done etc... This week, we answer the question "Is church lighting essential or excess?" and if it is essential, what parts?Upcoming Content (01:03:40 - 01:07:59)We're releasing "Resolume as a Media Server" tomorrow to the MxU platform! Using Resolume, and any form of a media server for that matter, requires a level of skill and thought put into it. Stay tuned into our socials and be on the lookout for an email tomorrow about the course drop!LinksTony FransenMxUMxU Pop-Ups

This is episode 172 of the MxU Podcast! Jeff and Spencer sit down with Nate Ellis and Josh Reeder-Esparza from the MxU team. They chat baseball, catch up on all things MxU and discuss a fairly hot topic. This one should get you thinking... spending money in the church should be difficult.Service Review (10:26 - 19:32)The guys review a service from Harvest Church in Riverside, CA. The energy in the room is incredible and there is powerful work being done through the ministry of Teen Challenge. The team offers some critique on guitar volume and vocal compression, just some minor changes to polish off what is already a great mix.Upcoming Content (19:33 - 23:49)Tomorrow, we're releasing a course all about PreSonus's UC Metro product which is designed specifically for remote mixing. UC Metro is a game-changing tool that allows remote control mixing from anywhere in the world with minimal latency. Stay tuned in to our socials and be on the lookout for an email for the course drop tomorrow! Spending Money in the Church Should Be Difficult (23:50 - 52:34)This might seem obvious... but we still hear from churches all the time "if I just had more money" or "if I could just get our new console approved" as if it will be the change they've always needed. And that might be true for some, but it's hard to believe that it's true for all. The guys give their take on this hot topic and discuss openly with their honest thoughts about financial stewardship in the church.LinksMxU Pop-UpsMxU

This is episode 171 of the MxU Podcast! The podcast is coming from Columbus, OH this week following our third MxU Pop-Up event. Jeff is joined by Jay Desai who's back for the first time in our new format. In addition to Jay, Jeff is also joined by Dillan Howell and Stephen Brewster who are two long time friends of the MxU community. The guys discuss a very special announcement from the MxU camp this week... worship specific content will now be available on the MxU platform!Big News & Upcoming Content (05:30 - 18:32)Tomorrow, MxU is releasing our first batch of worship content on the MxU platform! For years, we've said that worship & tech teams are one team. Now, we're finally putting action to our words. We're releasing 6 courses with our friends from Thrive Worship with much more to come. Stay tuned in to our social accounts and emails for more information on the release!Service Review (23:28 - 31:17) Jeff recently visited a church in Romania who consistently pulls off a pretty impressive worship service. Despite some technical limitations, they're able to deliver an incredible broadcast mix that embodies the authenticity and engagement of the room. Their ability to do so should serve as inspiration for churches everywhere.Worship Hot Topics (31:18 - 55:42)Should we still do "specials" on Sunday? Are "openers" even meant for churches? Is your worship set longer than your sermon? The guys discuss these hot topics and more... they deliver their raw and real responses to these common questions being asked in churches across the globe. Quick Insight: Don't overdo it. Focus on what matters most.Links:Jay DesaiStephen BrewsterDillan HowellMxU PlatformMxU Pop-Ups

This is episode 170 of the MxU Podcast! Jeff is joined again by Nate Ellis from MxU, filling in as co-host in the absence of Spencer this week. Together, they're joined by Joe Henson - System Engineer for Sam Hunt. They answer the age-old question “Do I really need that upgrade?” Or in other words… “Can I get by with what I have?”Service Review (13:46-22:52)The team reviews a submission from The Point Knox here in Knoxville, TN. Despite limited resources and an older console, Jeff and the guys commend the mix's clarity - specifically around the drums - and offer some tips for improvement. This does pose the question, however, do you really need to be broadcasting? It's important to balance existing resources with real needs.Do You Really Need a New PA? (22:53-37:29)Speaking of balancing resources and needs... the guys discuss whether or not you really need that new PA. Whether it's a PA or another large upgrade, purchasing costly pieces of equipment should be a well thought out endeavor. Here's the key: maximize your existing infrastructure. Work with an integrator or other local expert to determine when is the right time to upgrade or if there's an alternative option available like replacing drivers etc...Upcoming Content (37:30-38:10)We're releasing a new course tomorrow all about the basics of Resolume Arena! Caleb Shamblin walks through every aspect of the interface from basic navigation to more advanced features. This is just the first of three Resolume courses we'll be releasing over the next few months. Whether you're manipulating media, creating effects, or just playing back audio & video content… Resolume Arena can do it all.

This is episode 169 of the MxU Podcast! Jeff is joined in the co-host seat this week by Nate Ellis from the MxU team. We're celebrating with Spencer and his family as they welcome their third child into the world! Together, Jeff and Nate are joined by Chad Rose from ReveLux and Corey Miller from Jeff's home church. They question whether or not your church needs an LED wall.Tip: There's a difference between a want and a need. Think through where your current technology is in their life cycle and make an educated decision.Service Review (05:05-15:54)This week, the crew reviews a service from One Church in Columbus, Ohio. They balance modern worship with a bit of a gospel flair. The crew gives insights on the engaging vocal sound and dynamic energy and offer some constructive feedback on instrument clarity and lighting. Upcoming Content (15:55 - 22:11)We're releasing a new mixing course tomorrow all about Waves LV1! This is sort of a “part 2” to our previous release on Setting Up & Configuring Waves LV1. Jeff takes us through a full breakdown of his mix on some tracks from Chris Tomlin. We're also giving away Jeff's plugin presets for free. Stay tuned in to our social platforms for tomorrow's release where you'll be able to watch the new content and download those presets!About Grace Church (22:12 - 28:02)Corey Miller is a returning guest to the MxU podcast. He talks through the mission and vision of Grace Church to not always focus on the best gear possible but rather to build an environment that works for their volunteers. A volunteer-focused Do you need an LED wall? (28:03 - 39:41)There's a need for intentional, tasteful, design choices in church. This is especially true when you're managing a giant canvas like an LED wall. Grace Church has just recently made the decision to invest in an LED wall from ReveLux. Take a listen to their journey from first asking the question “Do we need an LED wall?” to installation within the next few weeks.

This is episode 168 of the MxU Podcast! Jeff and Spencer sit down with two familiar faces to the MxU community, Jeremy Bagwell & Jeremy Lommori. a.k.a "the Jeremys" The crew discusses broadcasting and whether or not your church, and churches in general, need to do it. The overarching principle is this: we're in a new digital age and technology is changing rapidly, do what's best for your church.Service Review (7:25 - 26:35)Every week, the crew takes some time to review a church service. This week, Heart & Soul church in Knoxville TN is reviewed. Jeff & Spencer give their thoughts on the mix and the broadcast while the Jeremys give their insight on the video side. Set up & tear down is no joke and sometimes hard to make look good, props to the team at Heart & Soul!Upcoming Content (26:36 - 34:35)Tomorrow, we're releasing another course with Todd Elliott, founder of FILO. This course is all around the idea that volunteers can be leaders too. The course encompasses the "Leadership 360" mentality to lead up, lead down, and lead laterally. No matter where you serve or in what position you serve in, you have the same capability to lead.Should You Be Broadcasting? (34:36 - 1:16:55) Streaming has quickly become a part of most churches, fueled by the need for online services during the pandemic. The church can lead in technology while also staying true to its mission, and that is the most important thing to recognize. It's important to ask the right questions before you invest money into something that may come at the cost of your in-person services.Links:Jeremy BagwellJeremy LommoriMxU Pop-UpsSend your service review submissions to ‘support@getmxu.com'

This is episode 166 of the MxU Podcast! Jeff and Spencer sit down with Phil Bledsoe, FOH engineer for Sam Hunt and a returning guest from episode 15 of the podcast. The guys chat about mixing for broadcast, and whether or not your church needs a broadcast console. Hint: You probably don't.Service Review (06:30 - 10:53)There's still debate around the MxU office on what to call this new segment, whether it's “Turn up for MxU” or simply “Service Review.” Regardless - Jeff, Spencer, and Phil review a broadcast mix submitted by a member of the MxU community, Daniel. We'd love for you to submit a mix or service of your own for review, which you can do by emailing them to support@getmxu.com. If you're a member of our slack community, post yours in the #peer-reviews channel.Upcoming Content (10:54 - 24:45)Tomorrow, we're releasing “Basic Effects” on the MxU platform. This is a course by Phil Bledsoe designed to help you and your teams understand reverb and delay. It all starts with the basics and effects could be your simplest way to improve your mix in minutes. Stay tuned in to our social accounts and emails for the course drop!Broadcast Mixing (24:46 - 45:59)Do you need a broadcast console? Do you even need to be broadcasting? Jeff, Spencer, and Phil share their thoughts and insights on what seems to have become a hot topic in the church community. Here's a suggestion: do what's best for your church, don't look to other churches on social media for what yours should be doing.MxU Pop-Ups (46:00 - 47:00)We still have a few more live events this year that we're calling “MxU Pop-Ups” and we'd love for you to join us. Our next event is in Columbus, Ohio on June 11th. Head to our website to get your tickets, they're going quick!Links:Everything we mentioned in the podcast in one space.Phil BledsoeEmail Us Your Service!Audience Mics Can Be SimpleMxU Pop-Ups

Welcome to the first episode of the revamped MxU podcast! To see the video form of this podcast, head to our YouTube channel.New SegmentsWith the changes we're making, we figured it time to introduce some new components to the podcast. Service Review - Each week will include a service review segment of sorts where Jeff, Spencer and other guests will provide constructive feedback on submissions from our community.Upcoming Content - Every Tuesday, we aim to release a course on the MxU platform. Get a sneak peak into what we're releasing the day before it drops.Lee FieldsAs some of you may have noticed, Lee Fields is no longer a part of the MxU podcast. Take a moment to reflect on his contributions to MxU and watch some of our favorite moments.MxU Pop-UpsOur events for this year are moving ahead rapidly! We're already almost halfway through our event agenda for 2024 with the next Pop-Up happening in Columbus Ohio on June 11th. Head to our website to get tickets soon as spots are filling up quickly.Upcoming ContentTomorrow, we're releasing content we shot with Todd Elliott from FILO centered around the core values of church production. From asking the right questions to pursuing excellence over perfection, the posture we have towards our church services will ultimately determine their outcome.

Our next 2 big events are AI UX and the World's Fair. Join and apply to speak/sponsor!Due to timing issues we didn't have an interview episode to share with you this week, but not to worry, we have more than enough “weekend special” content in the backlog for you to get your Latent Space fix, whether you like thinking about the big picture, or learning more about the pod behind the scenes, or talking Groq and GPUs, or AI Leadership, or Personal AI. Enjoy!AI BreakdownThe indefatigable NLW had us back on his show for an update on the Four Wars, covering Sora, Suno, and the reshaped GPT-4 Class Landscape:and a longer segment on AI Engineering trends covering the future LLM landscape (Llama 3, GPT-5, Gemini 2, Claude 4), Open Source Models (Mistral, Grok), Apple and Meta's AI strategy, new chips (Groq, MatX) and the general movement from baby AGIs to vertical Agents:Thursday Nights in AIWe're also including swyx's interview with Josh Albrecht and Ali Rohde to reintroduce swyx and Latent Space to a general audience, and engage in some spicy Q&A:Dylan Patel on GroqWe hosted a private event with Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis (our last pod here):Not all of it could be released so we just talked about our Groq estimates:Milind Naphade - Capital OneIn relation to conversations at NeurIPS and Nvidia GTC and upcoming at World's Fair, we also enjoyed chatting with Milind Naphade about his AI Leadership work at IBM, Cisco, Nvidia, and now leading the AI Foundations org at Capital One. We covered:* Milind's learnings from ~25 years in machine learning * His first paper citation was 24 years ago* Lessons from working with Jensen Huang for 6 years and being CTO of Metropolis * Thoughts on relevant AI research* GTC takeaways and what makes NVIDIA specialIf you'd like to work on building solutions rather than platform (as Milind put it), his Applied AI Research team at Capital One is hiring, which falls under the Capital One Tech team.Personal AI MeetupIt all started with a meme:Within days of each other, BEE, FRIEND, EmilyAI, Compass, Nox and LangFriend were all launching personal AI wearables and assistants. So we decided to put together a the world's first Personal AI meetup featuring creators and enthusiasts of wearables. The full video is live now, with full show notes within.Timestamps* [00:01:13] AI Breakdown Part 1* [00:02:20] Four Wars* [00:13:45] Sora* [00:15:12] Suno* [00:16:34] The GPT-4 Class Landscape* [00:17:03] Data War: Reddit x Google* [00:21:53] Gemini 1.5 vs Claude 3* [00:26:58] AI Breakdown Part 2* [00:27:33] Next Frontiers: Llama 3, GPT-5, Gemini 2, Claude 4* [00:31:11] Open Source Models - Mistral, Grok* [00:34:13] Apple MM1* [00:37:33] Meta's $800b AI rebrand* [00:39:20] AI Engineer landscape - from baby AGIs to vertical Agents* [00:47:28] Adept episode - Screen Multimodality* [00:48:54] Top Model Research from January Recap* [00:53:08] AI Wearables* [00:57:26] Groq vs Nvidia month - GPU Chip War* [01:00:31] Disagreements* [01:02:08] Summer 2024 Predictions* [01:04:18] Thursday Nights in AI - swyx* [01:33:34] Dylan Patel - Semianalysis + Latent Space Live Show* [01:34:58] GroqTranscript[00:00:00] swyx: Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast Weekend Edition. This is Charlie, your AI co host. Swyx and Alessio are off for the week, making more great content. We have exciting interviews coming up with Elicit, Chroma, Instructor, and our upcoming series on NSFW, Not Safe for Work AI. In today's episode, we're collating some of Swyx and Alessio's recent appearances, all in one place for you to find.[00:00:32] swyx: In part one, we have our first crossover pod of the year. In our listener survey, several folks asked for more thoughts from our two hosts. In 2023, Swyx and Alessio did crossover interviews with other great podcasts like the AI Breakdown, Practical AI, Cognitive Revolution, Thursday Eye, and Chinatalk, all of which you can find in the Latentspace About page.[00:00:56] swyx: NLW of the AI Breakdown asked us back to do a special on the 4Wars framework and the AI engineer scene. We love AI Breakdown as one of the best examples Daily podcasts to keep up on AI news, so we were especially excited to be back on Watch out and take[00:01:12] NLW: care[00:01:13] AI Breakdown Part 1[00:01:13] NLW: today on the AI breakdown. Part one of my conversation with Alessio and Swix from Latent Space.[00:01:19] NLW: All right, fellas, welcome back to the AI Breakdown. How are you doing? I'm good. Very good. With the last, the last time we did this show, we were like, oh yeah, let's do check ins like monthly about all the things that are going on and then. Of course, six months later, and, you know, the, the, the world has changed in a thousand ways.[00:01:36] NLW: It's just, it's too busy to even, to even think about podcasting sometimes. But I, I'm super excited to, to be chatting with you again. I think there's, there's a lot to, to catch up on, just to tap in, I think in the, you know, in the beginning of 2024. And, and so, you know, we're gonna talk today about just kind of a, a, a broad sense of where things are in some of the key battles in the AI space.[00:01:55] NLW: And then the, you know, one of the big things that I, that I'm really excited to have you guys on here for us to talk about where, sort of what patterns you're seeing and what people are actually trying to build, you know, where, where developers are spending their, their time and energy and, and, and any sort of, you know, trend trends there, but maybe let's start I guess by checking in on a framework that you guys actually introduced, which I've loved and I've cribbed a couple of times now, which is this sort of four wars of the, of the AI stack.[00:02:20] Four Wars[00:02:20] NLW: Because first, since I have you here, I'd love, I'd love to hear sort of like where that started gelling. And then and then maybe we can get into, I think a couple of them that are you know, particularly interesting, you know, in the, in light of[00:02:30] swyx: some recent news. Yeah, so maybe I'll take this one. So the four wars is a framework that I came up around trying to recap all of 2023.[00:02:38] swyx: I tried to write sort of monthly recap pieces. And I was trying to figure out like what makes one piece of news last longer than another or more significant than another. And I think it's basically always around battlegrounds. Wars are fought around limited resources. And I think probably the, you know, the most limited resource is talent, but the talent expresses itself in a number of areas.[00:03:01] swyx: And so I kind of focus on those, those areas at first. So the four wars that we cover are the data wars, the GPU rich, poor war, the multi modal war, And the RAG and Ops War. And I think you actually did a dedicated episode to that, so thanks for covering that. Yeah, yeah.[00:03:18] NLW: Not only did I do a dedicated episode, I actually used that.[00:03:22] NLW: I can't remember if I told you guys. I did give you big shoutouts. But I used it as a framework for a presentation at Intel's big AI event that they hold each year, where they have all their folks who are working on AI internally. And it totally resonated. That's amazing. Yeah, so, so, what got me thinking about it again is specifically this inflection news that we recently had, this sort of, you know, basically, I can't imagine that anyone who's listening wouldn't have thought about it, but, you know, inflection is a one of the big contenders, right?[00:03:53] NLW: I think probably most folks would have put them, you know, just a half step behind the anthropics and open AIs of the world in terms of labs, but it's a company that raised 1. 3 billion last year, less than a year ago. Reed Hoffman's a co founder Mustafa Suleyman, who's a co founder of DeepMind, you know, so it's like, this is not a a small startup, let's say, at least in terms of perception.[00:04:13] NLW: And then we get the news that basically most of the team, it appears, is heading over to Microsoft and they're bringing in a new CEO. And you know, I'm interested in, in, in kind of your take on how much that reflects, like hold aside, I guess, you know, all the other things that it might be about, how much it reflects this sort of the, the stark.[00:04:32] NLW: Brutal reality of competing in the frontier model space right now. And, you know, just the access to compute.[00:04:38] Alessio: There are a lot of things to say. So first of all, there's always somebody who's more GPU rich than you. So inflection is GPU rich by startup standard. I think about 22, 000 H100s, but obviously that pales compared to the, to Microsoft.[00:04:55] Alessio: The other thing is that this is probably good news, maybe for the startups. It's like being GPU rich, it's not enough. You know, like I think they were building something pretty interesting in, in pi of their own model of their own kind of experience. But at the end of the day, you're the interface that people consume as end users.[00:05:13] Alessio: It's really similar to a lot of the others. So and we'll tell, talk about GPT four and cloud tree and all this stuff. GPU poor, doing something. That the GPU rich are not interested in, you know we just had our AI center of excellence at Decibel and one of the AI leads at one of the big companies was like, Oh, we just saved 10 million and we use these models to do a translation, you know, and that's it.[00:05:39] Alessio: It's not, it's not a GI, it's just translation. So I think like the inflection part is maybe. A calling and a waking to a lot of startups then say, Hey, you know, trying to get as much capital as possible, try and get as many GPUs as possible. Good. But at the end of the day, it doesn't build a business, you know, and maybe what inflection I don't, I don't, again, I don't know the reasons behind the inflection choice, but if you say, I don't want to build my own company that has 1.[00:06:05] Alessio: 3 billion and I want to go do it at Microsoft, it's probably not a resources problem. It's more of strategic decisions that you're making as a company. So yeah, that was kind of my. I take on it.[00:06:15] swyx: Yeah, and I guess on my end, two things actually happened yesterday. It was a little bit quieter news, but Stability AI had some pretty major departures as well.[00:06:25] swyx: And you may not be considering it, but Stability is actually also a GPU rich company in the sense that they were the first new startup in this AI wave to brag about how many GPUs that they have. And you should join them. And you know, Imadis is definitely a GPU trader in some sense from his hedge fund days.[00:06:43] swyx: So Robin Rhombach and like the most of the Stable Diffusion 3 people left Stability yesterday as well. So yesterday was kind of like a big news day for the GPU rich companies, both Inflection and Stability having sort of wind taken out of their sails. I think, yes, it's a data point in the favor of Like, just because you have the GPUs doesn't mean you can, you automatically win.[00:07:03] swyx: And I think, you know, kind of I'll echo what Alessio says there. But in general also, like, I wonder if this is like the start of a major consolidation wave, just in terms of, you know, I think that there was a lot of funding last year and, you know, the business models have not been, you know, All of these things worked out very well.[00:07:19] swyx: Even inflection couldn't do it. And so I think maybe that's the start of a small consolidation wave. I don't think that's like a sign of AI winter. I keep looking for AI winter coming. I think this is kind of like a brief cold front. Yeah,[00:07:34] NLW: it's super interesting. So I think a bunch of A bunch of stuff here.[00:07:38] NLW: One is, I think, to both of your points, there, in some ways, there, there had already been this very clear demarcation between these two sides where, like, the GPU pores, to use the terminology, like, just weren't trying to compete on the same level, right? You know, the vast majority of people who have started something over the last year, year and a half, call it, were racing in a different direction.[00:07:59] NLW: They're trying to find some edge somewhere else. They're trying to build something different. If they're, if they're really trying to innovate, it's in different areas. And so it's really just this very small handful of companies that are in this like very, you know, it's like the coheres and jaspers of the world that like this sort of, you know, that are that are just sort of a little bit less resourced than, you know, than the other set that I think that this potentially even applies to, you know, everyone else that could clearly demarcate it into these two, two sides.[00:08:26] NLW: And there's only a small handful kind of sitting uncomfortably in the middle, perhaps. Let's, let's come back to the idea of, of the sort of AI winter or, you know, a cold front or anything like that. So this is something that I, I spent a lot of time kind of thinking about and noticing. And my perception is that The vast majority of the folks who are trying to call for sort of, you know, a trough of disillusionment or, you know, a shifting of the phase to that are people who either, A, just don't like AI for some other reason there's plenty of that, you know, people who are saying, You Look, they're doing way worse than they ever thought.[00:09:03] NLW: You know, there's a lot of sort of confirmation bias kind of thing going on. Or two, media that just needs a different narrative, right? Because they're sort of sick of, you know, telling the same story. Same thing happened last summer, when every every outlet jumped on the chat GPT at its first down month story to try to really like kind of hammer this idea that that the hype was too much.[00:09:24] NLW: Meanwhile, you have, you know, just ridiculous levels of investment from enterprises, you know, coming in. You have, you know, huge, huge volumes of, you know, individual behavior change happening. But I do think that there's nothing incoherent sort of to your point, Swyx, about that and the consolidation period.[00:09:42] NLW: Like, you know, if you look right now, for example, there are, I don't know, probably 25 or 30 credible, like, build your own chatbot. platforms that, you know, a lot of which have, you know, raised funding. There's no universe in which all of those are successful across, you know, even with a, even, even with a total addressable market of every enterprise in the world, you know, you're just inevitably going to see some amount of consolidation.[00:10:08] NLW: Same with, you know, image generators. There are, if you look at A16Z's top 50 consumer AI apps, just based on, you know, web traffic or whatever, they're still like I don't know, a half. Dozen or 10 or something, like, some ridiculous number of like, basically things like Midjourney or Dolly three. And it just seems impossible that we're gonna have that many, you know, ultimately as, as, as sort of, you know, going, going concerned.[00:10:33] NLW: So, I don't know. I, I, I think that the, there will be inevitable consolidation 'cause you know. It's, it's also what kind of like venture rounds are supposed to do. You're not, not everyone who gets a seed round is supposed to get to series A and not everyone who gets a series A is supposed to get to series B.[00:10:46] NLW: That's sort of the natural process. I think it will be tempting for a lot of people to try to infer from that something about AI not being as sort of big or as as sort of relevant as, as it was hyped up to be. But I, I kind of think that's the wrong conclusion to come to.[00:11:02] Alessio: I I would say the experimentation.[00:11:04] Alessio: Surface is a little smaller for image generation. So if you go back maybe six, nine months, most people will tell you, why would you build a coding assistant when like Copilot and GitHub are just going to win everything because they have the data and they have all the stuff. If you fast forward today, A lot of people use Cursor everybody was excited about the Devin release on Twitter.[00:11:26] Alessio: There are a lot of different ways of attacking the market that are not completion of code in the IDE. And even Cursors, like they evolved beyond single line to like chat, to do multi line edits and, and all that stuff. Image generation, I would say, yeah, as a, just as from what I've seen, like maybe the product innovation has slowed down at the UX level and people are improving the models.[00:11:50] Alessio: So the race is like, how do I make better images? It's not like, how do I make the user interact with the generation process better? And that gets tough, you know? It's hard to like really differentiate yourselves. So yeah, that's kind of how I look at it. And when we think about multimodality, maybe the reason why people got so excited about Sora is like, oh, this is like a completely It's not a better image model.[00:12:13] Alessio: This is like a completely different thing, you know? And I think the creative mind It's always looking for something that impacts the viewer in a different way, you know, like they really want something different versus the developer mind. It's like, Oh, I, I just, I have this like very annoying thing I want better.[00:12:32] Alessio: I have this like very specific use cases that I want to go after. So it's just different. And that's why you see a lot more companies in image generation. But I agree with you that. If you fast forward there, there's not going to be 10 of them, you know, it's probably going to be one or[00:12:46] swyx: two. Yeah, I mean, to me, that's why I call it a war.[00:12:49] swyx: Like, individually, all these companies can make a story that kind of makes sense, but collectively, they cannot all be true. Therefore, they all, there is some kind of fight over limited resources here. Yeah, so[00:12:59] NLW: it's interesting. We wandered very naturally into sort of another one of these wars, which is the multimodality kind of idea, which is, you know, basically a question of whether it's going to be these sort of big everything models that end up winning or whether, you know, you're going to have really specific things, you know, like something, you know, Dolly 3 inside of sort of OpenAI's larger models versus, you know, a mid journey or something like that.[00:13:24] NLW: And at first, you know, I was kind of thinking like, For most of the last, call it six months or whatever, it feels pretty definitively both and in some ways, you know, and that you're, you're seeing just like great innovation on sort of the everything models, but you're also seeing lots and lots happen at sort of the level of kind of individual use cases.[00:13:45] Sora[00:13:45] NLW: But then Sora comes along and just like obliterates what I think anyone thought you know, where we were when it comes to video generation. So how are you guys thinking about this particular battle or war at the moment?[00:13:59] swyx: Yeah, this was definitely a both and story, and Sora tipped things one way for me, in terms of scale being all you need.[00:14:08] swyx: And the benefit, I think, of having multiple models being developed under one roof. I think a lot of people aren't aware that Sora was developed in a similar fashion to Dolly 3. And Dolly3 had a very interesting paper out where they talked about how they sort of bootstrapped their synthetic data based on GPT 4 vision and GPT 4.[00:14:31] swyx: And, and it was just all, like, really interesting, like, if you work on one modality, it enables you to work on other modalities, and all that is more, is, is more interesting. I think it's beneficial if it's all in the same house, whereas the individual startups who don't, who sort of carve out a single modality and work on that, definitely won't have the state of the art stuff on helping them out on synthetic data.[00:14:52] swyx: So I do think like, The balance is tilted a little bit towards the God model companies, which is challenging for the, for the, for the the sort of dedicated modality companies. But everyone's carving out different niches. You know, like we just interviewed Suno ai, the sort of music model company, and, you know, I don't see opening AI pursuing music anytime soon.[00:15:12] Suno[00:15:12] swyx: Yeah,[00:15:13] NLW: Suno's been phenomenal to play with. Suno has done that rare thing where, which I think a number of different AI product categories have done, where people who don't consider themselves particularly interested in doing the thing that the AI enables find themselves doing a lot more of that thing, right?[00:15:29] NLW: Like, it'd be one thing if Just musicians were excited about Suno and using it but what you're seeing is tons of people who just like music all of a sudden like playing around with it and finding themselves kind of down that rabbit hole, which I think is kind of like the highest compliment that you can give one of these startups at the[00:15:45] swyx: early days of it.[00:15:46] swyx: Yeah, I, you know, I, I asked them directly, you know, in the interview about whether they consider themselves mid journey for music. And he had a more sort of nuanced response there, but I think that probably the business model is going to be very similar because he's focused on the B2C element of that. So yeah, I mean, you know, just to, just to tie back to the question about, you know, You know, large multi modality companies versus small dedicated modality companies.[00:16:10] swyx: Yeah, highly recommend people to read the Sora blog posts and then read through to the Dali blog posts because they, they strongly correlated themselves with the same synthetic data bootstrapping methods as Dali. And I think once you make those connections, you're like, oh, like it, it, it is beneficial to have multiple state of the art models in house that all help each other.[00:16:28] swyx: And these, this, that's the one thing that a dedicated modality company cannot do.[00:16:34] The GPT-4 Class Landscape[00:16:34] NLW: So I, I wanna jump, I wanna kind of build off that and, and move into the sort of like updated GPT-4 class landscape. 'cause that's obviously been another big change over the last couple months. But for the sake of completeness, is there anything that's worth touching on with with sort of the quality?[00:16:46] NLW: Quality data or sort of a rag ops wars just in terms of, you know, anything that's changed, I guess, for you fundamentally in the last couple of months about where those things stand.[00:16:55] swyx: So I think we're going to talk about rag for the Gemini and Clouds discussion later. And so maybe briefly discuss the data piece.[00:17:03] Data War: Reddit x Google[00:17:03] swyx: I think maybe the only new thing was this Reddit deal with Google for like a 60 million dollar deal just ahead of their IPO, very conveniently turning Reddit into a AI data company. Also, very, very interestingly, a non exclusive deal, meaning that Reddit can resell that data to someone else. And it probably does become table stakes.[00:17:23] swyx: A lot of people don't know, but a lot of the web text dataset that originally started for GPT 1, 2, and 3 was actually scraped from GitHub. from Reddit at least the sort of vote scores. And I think, I think that's a, that's a very valuable piece of information. So like, yeah, I think people are figuring out how to pay for data.[00:17:40] swyx: People are suing each other over data. This, this, this war is, you know, definitely very, very much heating up. And I don't think, I don't see it getting any less intense. I, you know, next to GPUs, data is going to be the most expensive thing in, in a model stack company. And. You know, a lot of people are resorting to synthetic versions of it, which may or may not be kosher based on how far along or how commercially blessed the, the forms of creating that synthetic data are.[00:18:11] swyx: I don't know if Alessio, you have any other interactions with like Data source companies, but that's my two cents.[00:18:17] Alessio: Yeah yeah, I actually saw Quentin Anthony from Luther. ai at GTC this week. He's also been working on this. I saw Technium. He's also been working on the data side. I think especially in open source, people are like, okay, if everybody is putting the gates up, so to speak, to the data we need to make it easier for people that don't have 50 million a year to get access to good data sets.[00:18:38] Alessio: And Jensen, at his keynote, he did talk about synthetic data a little bit. So I think that's something that we'll definitely hear more and more of in the enterprise, which never bodes well, because then all the, all the people with the data are like, Oh, the enterprises want to pay now? Let me, let me put a pay here stripe link so that they can give me 50 million.[00:18:57] Alessio: But it worked for Reddit. I think the stock is up. 40 percent today after opening. So yeah, I don't know if it's all about the Google deal, but it's obviously Reddit has been one of those companies where, hey, you got all this like great community, but like, how are you going to make money? And like, they try to sell the avatars.[00:19:15] Alessio: I don't know if that it's a great business for them. The, the data part sounds as an investor, you know, the data part sounds a lot more interesting than, than consumer[00:19:25] swyx: cosmetics. Yeah, so I think, you know there's more questions around data you know, I think a lot of people are talking about the interview that Mira Murady did with the Wall Street Journal, where she, like, just basically had no, had no good answer for where they got the data for Sora.[00:19:39] swyx: I, I think this is where, you know, there's, it's in nobody's interest to be transparent about data, and it's, it's kind of sad for the state of ML and the state of AI research but it is what it is. We, we have to figure this out as a society, just like we did for music and music sharing. You know, in, in sort of the Napster to Spotify transition, and that might take us a decade.[00:19:59] swyx: Yeah, I[00:20:00] NLW: do. I, I agree. I think, I think that you're right to identify it, not just as that sort of technical problem, but as one where society has to have a debate with itself. Because I think that there's, if you rationally within it, there's Great kind of points on all side, not to be the sort of, you know, person who sits in the middle constantly, but it's why I think a lot of these legal decisions are going to be really important because, you know, the job of judges is to listen to all this stuff and try to come to things and then have other judges disagree.[00:20:24] NLW: And, you know, and have the rest of us all debate at the same time. By the way, as a total aside, I feel like the synthetic data right now is like eggs in the 80s and 90s. Like, whether they're good for you or bad for you, like, you know, we, we get one study that's like synthetic data, you know, there's model collapse.[00:20:42] NLW: And then we have like a hint that llama, you know, to the most high performance version of it, which was one they didn't release was trained on synthetic data. So maybe it's good. It's like, I just feel like every, every other week I'm seeing something sort of different about whether it's a good or bad for, for these models.[00:20:56] swyx: Yeah. The branding of this is pretty poor. I would kind of tell people to think about it like cholesterol. There's good cholesterol, bad cholesterol. And you can have, you know, good amounts of both. But at this point, it is absolutely without a doubt that most large models from here on out will all be trained as some kind of synthetic data and that is not a bad thing.[00:21:16] swyx: There are ways in which you can do it poorly. Whether it's commercial, you know, in terms of commercial sourcing or in terms of the model performance. But it's without a doubt that good synthetic data is going to help your model. And this is just a question of like where to obtain it and what kinds of synthetic data are valuable.[00:21:36] swyx: You know, if even like alpha geometry, you know, was, was a really good example from like earlier this year.[00:21:42] NLW: If you're using the cholesterol analogy, then my, then my egg thing can't be that far off. Let's talk about the sort of the state of the art and the, and the GPT 4 class landscape and how that's changed.[00:21:53] Gemini 1.5 vs Claude 3[00:21:53] NLW: Cause obviously, you know, sort of the, the two big things or a couple of the big things that have happened. Since we last talked, we're one, you know, Gemini first announcing that a model was coming and then finally it arriving, and then very soon after a sort of a different model arriving from Gemini and and Cloud three.[00:22:11] NLW: So I guess, you know, I'm not sure exactly where the right place to start with this conversation is, but, you know, maybe very broadly speaking which of these do you think have made a bigger impact? Thank you.[00:22:20] Alessio: Probably the one you can use, right? So, Cloud. Well, I'm sure Gemini is going to be great once they let me in, but so far I haven't been able to.[00:22:29] Alessio: I use, so I have this small podcaster thing that I built for our podcast, which does chapters creation, like named entity recognition, summarization, and all of that. Cloud Tree is, Better than GPT 4. Cloud2 was unusable. So I use GPT 4 for everything. And then when Opus came out, I tried them again side by side and I posted it on, on Twitter as well.[00:22:53] Alessio: Cloud is better. It's very good, you know, it's much better, it seems to me, it's much better than GPT 4 at doing writing that is more, you know, I don't know, it just got good vibes, you know, like the GPT 4 text, you can tell it's like GPT 4, you know, it's like, it always uses certain types of words and phrases and, you know, maybe it's just me because I've now done it for, you know, So, I've read like 75, 80 generations of these things next to each other.[00:23:21] Alessio: Clutter is really good. I know everybody is freaking out on twitter about it, my only experience of this is much better has been on the podcast use case. But I know that, you know, Quran from from News Research is a very big opus pro, pro opus person. So, I think that's also It's great to have people that actually care about other models.[00:23:40] Alessio: You know, I think so far to a lot of people, maybe Entropic has been the sibling in the corner, you know, it's like Cloud releases a new model and then OpenAI releases Sora and like, you know, there are like all these different things, but yeah, the new models are good. It's interesting.[00:23:55] NLW: My my perception is definitely that just, just observationally, Cloud 3 is certainly the first thing that I've seen where lots of people.[00:24:06] NLW: They're, no one's debating evals or anything like that. They're talking about the specific use cases that they have, that they used to use chat GPT for every day, you know, day in, day out, that they've now just switched over. And that has, I think, shifted a lot of the sort of like vibe and sentiment in the space too.[00:24:26] NLW: And I don't necessarily think that it's sort of a A like full you know, sort of full knock. Let's put it this way. I think it's less bad for open AI than it is good for anthropic. I think that because GPT 5 isn't there, people are not quite willing to sort of like, you know get overly critical of, of open AI, except in so far as they're wondering where GPT 5 is.[00:24:46] NLW: But I do think that it makes, Anthropic look way more credible as a, as a, as a player, as a, you know, as a credible sort of player, you know, as opposed to to, to where they were.[00:24:57] Alessio: Yeah. And I would say the benchmarks veil is probably getting lifted this year. I think last year. People were like, okay, this is better than this on this benchmark, blah, blah, blah, because maybe they did not have a lot of use cases that they did frequently.[00:25:11] Alessio: So it's hard to like compare yourself. So you, you defer to the benchmarks. I think now as we go into 2024, a lot of people have started to use these models from, you know, from very sophisticated things that they run in production to some utility that they have on their own. Now they can just run them side by side.[00:25:29] Alessio: And it's like, Hey, I don't care that like. The MMLU score of Opus is like slightly lower than GPT 4. It just works for me, you know, and I think that's the same way that traditional software has been used by people, right? Like you just strive for yourself and like, which one does it work, works best for you?[00:25:48] Alessio: Like nobody looks at benchmarks outside of like sales white papers, you know? And I think it's great that we're going more in that direction. We have a episode with Adapt coming out this weekend. I'll and some of their model releases, they specifically say, We do not care about benchmarks, so we didn't put them in, you know, because we, we don't want to look good on them.[00:26:06] Alessio: We just want the product to work. And I think more and more people will, will[00:26:09] swyx: go that way. Yeah. I I would say like, it does take the wind out of the sails for GPT 5, which I know where, you know, Curious about later on. I think anytime you put out a new state of the art model, you have to break through in some way.[00:26:21] swyx: And what Claude and Gemini have done is effectively take away any advantage to saying that you have a million token context window. Now everyone's just going to be like, Oh, okay. Now you just match the other two guys. And so that puts An insane amount of pressure on what gpt5 is going to be because it's just going to have like the only option it has now because all the other models are multimodal all the other models are long context all the other models have perfect recall gpt5 has to match everything and do more to to not be a flop[00:26:58] AI Breakdown Part 2[00:26:58] NLW: hello friends back again with part two if you haven't heard part one of this conversation i suggest you go check it out but to be honest they are kind of actually separable In this conversation, we get into a topic that I think Alessio and Swyx are very well positioned to discuss, which is what developers care about right now, what people are trying to build around.[00:27:16] NLW: I honestly think that one of the best ways to see the future in an industry like AI is to try to dig deep on what developers and entrepreneurs are attracted to build, even if it hasn't made it to the news pages yet. So consider this your preview of six months from now, and let's dive in. Let's bring it to the GPT 5 conversation.[00:27:33] Next Frontiers: Llama 3, GPT-5, Gemini 2, Claude 4[00:27:33] NLW: I mean, so, so I think that that's a great sort of assessment of just how the stakes have been raised, you know is your, I mean, so I guess maybe, maybe I'll, I'll frame this less as a question, just sort of something that, that I, that I've been watching right now, the only thing that makes sense to me with how.[00:27:50] NLW: Fundamentally unbothered and unstressed OpenAI seems about everything is that they're sitting on something that does meet all that criteria, right? Because, I mean, even in the Lex Friedman interview that, that Altman recently did, you know, he's talking about other things coming out first. He's talking about, he's just like, he, listen, he, he's good and he could play nonchalant, you know, if he wanted to.[00:28:13] NLW: So I don't want to read too much into it, but. You know, they've had so long to work on this, like unless that we are like really meaningfully running up against some constraint, it just feels like, you know, there's going to be some massive increase, but I don't know. What do you guys think?[00:28:28] swyx: Hard to speculate.[00:28:29] swyx: You know, at this point, they're, they're pretty good at PR and they're not going to tell you anything that they don't want to. And he can tell you one thing and change their minds the next day. So it's, it's, it's really, you know, I've always said that model version numbers are just marketing exercises, like they have something and it's always improving and at some point you just cut it and decide to call it GPT 5.[00:28:50] swyx: And it's more just about defining an arbitrary level at which they're ready and it's up to them on what ready means. We definitely did see some leaks on GPT 4. 5, as I think a lot of people reported and I'm not sure if you covered it. So it seems like there might be an intermediate release. But I did feel, coming out of the Lex Friedman interview, that GPT 5 was nowhere near.[00:29:11] swyx: And you know, it was kind of a sharp contrast to Sam talking at Davos in February, saying that, you know, it was his top priority. So I find it hard to square. And honestly, like, there's also no point Reading too much tea leaves into what any one person says about something that hasn't happened yet or has a decision that hasn't been taken yet.[00:29:31] swyx: Yeah, that's, that's my 2 cents about it. Like, calm down, let's just build .[00:29:35] Alessio: Yeah. The, the February rumor was that they were gonna work on AI agents, so I don't know, maybe they're like, yeah,[00:29:41] swyx: they had two agent two, I think two agent projects, right? One desktop agent and one sort of more general yeah, sort of GPTs like agent and then Andre left, so he was supposed to be the guy on that.[00:29:52] swyx: What did Andre see? What did he see? I don't know. What did he see?[00:29:56] Alessio: I don't know. But again, it's just like the rumors are always floating around, you know but I think like, this is, you know, we're not going to get to the end of the year without Jupyter you know, that's definitely happening. I think the biggest question is like, are Anthropic and Google.[00:30:13] Alessio: Increasing the pace, you know, like it's the, it's the cloud four coming out like in 12 months, like nine months. What's the, what's the deal? Same with Gemini. They went from like one to 1. 5 in like five days or something. So when's Gemini 2 coming out, you know, is that going to be soon? I don't know.[00:30:31] Alessio: There, there are a lot of, speculations, but the good thing is that now you can see a world in which OpenAI doesn't rule everything. You know, so that, that's the best, that's the best news that everybody got, I would say.[00:30:43] swyx: Yeah, and Mistral Large also dropped in the last month. And, you know, not as, not quite GPT 4 class, but very good from a new startup.[00:30:52] swyx: So yeah, we, we have now slowly changed in landscape, you know. In my January recap, I was complaining that nothing's changed in the landscape for a long time. But now we do exist in a world, sort of a multipolar world where Cloud and Gemini are legitimate challengers to GPT 4 and hopefully more will emerge as well hopefully from meta.[00:31:11] Open Source Models - Mistral, Grok[00:31:11] NLW: So speak, let's actually talk about sort of the open source side of this for a minute. So Mistral Large, notable because it's, it's not available open source in the same way that other things are, although I think my perception is that the community has largely given them Like the community largely recognizes that they want them to keep building open source stuff and they have to find some way to fund themselves that they're going to do that.[00:31:27] NLW: And so they kind of understand that there's like, they got to figure out how to eat, but we've got, so, you know, there there's Mistral, there's, I guess, Grok now, which is, you know, Grok one is from, from October is, is open[00:31:38] swyx: sourced at, yeah. Yeah, sorry, I thought you thought you meant Grok the chip company.[00:31:41] swyx: No, no, no, yeah, you mean Twitter Grok.[00:31:43] NLW: Although Grok the chip company, I think is even more interesting in some ways, but and then there's the, you know, obviously Llama3 is the one that sort of everyone's wondering about too. And, you know, my, my sense of that, the little bit that, you know, Zuckerberg was talking about Llama 3 earlier this year, suggested that, at least from an ambition standpoint, he was not thinking about how do I make sure that, you know, meta content, you know, keeps, keeps the open source thrown, you know, vis a vis Mistral.[00:32:09] NLW: He was thinking about how you go after, you know, how, how he, you know, releases a thing that's, you know, every bit as good as whatever OpenAI is on at that point.[00:32:16] Alessio: Yeah. From what I heard in the hallways at, at GDC, Llama 3, the, the biggest model will be, you 260 to 300 billion parameters, so that that's quite large.[00:32:26] Alessio: That's not an open source model. You know, you cannot give people a 300 billion parameters model and ask them to run it. You know, it's very compute intensive. So I think it is, it[00:32:35] swyx: can be open source. It's just, it's going to be difficult to run, but that's a separate question.[00:32:39] Alessio: It's more like, as you think about what they're doing it for, you know, it's not like empowering the person running.[00:32:45] Alessio: llama. On, on their laptop, it's like, oh, you can actually now use this to go after open AI, to go after Anthropic, to go after some of these companies at like the middle complexity level, so to speak. Yeah. So obviously, you know, we estimate Gentala on the podcast, they're doing a lot here, they're making PyTorch better.[00:33:03] Alessio: You know, they want to, that's kind of like maybe a little bit of a shorted. Adam Bedia, in a way, trying to get some of the CUDA dominance out of it. Yeah, no, it's great. The, I love the duck destroying a lot of monopolies arc. You know, it's, it's been very entertaining. Let's bridge[00:33:18] NLW: into the sort of big tech side of this, because this is obviously like, so I think actually when I did my episode, this was one of the I added this as one of as an additional war that, that's something that I'm paying attention to.[00:33:29] NLW: So we've got Microsoft's moves with inflection, which I think pretend, potentially are being read as A shift vis a vis the relationship with OpenAI, which also the sort of Mistral large relationship seems to reinforce as well. We have Apple potentially entering the race, finally, you know, giving up Project Titan and and, and kind of trying to spend more effort on this.[00:33:50] NLW: Although, Counterpoint, we also have them talking about it, or there being reports of a deal with Google, which, you know, is interesting to sort of see what their strategy there is. And then, you know, Meta's been largely quiet. We kind of just talked about the main piece, but, you know, there's, and then there's spoilers like Elon.[00:34:07] NLW: I mean, you know, what, what of those things has sort of been most interesting to you guys as you think about what's going to shake out for the rest of this[00:34:13] Apple MM1[00:34:13] swyx: year? I'll take a crack. So the reason we don't have a fifth war for the Big Tech Wars is that's one of those things where I just feel like we don't cover differently from other media channels, I guess.[00:34:26] swyx: Sure, yeah. In our anti interestness, we actually say, like, we try not to cover the Big Tech Game of Thrones, or it's proxied through Twitter. You know, all the other four wars anyway, so there's just a lot of overlap. Yeah, I think absolutely, personally, the most interesting one is Apple entering the race.[00:34:41] swyx: They actually released, they announced their first large language model that they trained themselves. It's like a 30 billion multimodal model. People weren't that impressed, but it was like the first time that Apple has kind of showcased that, yeah, we're training large models in house as well. Of course, like, they might be doing this deal with Google.[00:34:57] swyx: I don't know. It sounds very sort of rumor y to me. And it's probably, if it's on device, it's going to be a smaller model. So something like a Jemma. It's going to be smarter autocomplete. I don't know what to say. I'm still here dealing with, like, Siri, which hasn't, probably hasn't been updated since God knows when it was introduced.[00:35:16] swyx: It's horrible. I, you know, it, it, it makes me so angry. So I, I, one, as an Apple customer and user, I, I'm just hoping for better AI on Apple itself. But two, they are the gold standard when it comes to local devices, personal compute and, and trust, like you, you trust them with your data. And. I think that's what a lot of people are looking for in AI, that they have, they love the benefits of AI, they don't love the downsides, which is that you have to send all your data to some cloud somewhere.[00:35:45] swyx: And some of this data that we're going to feed AI is just the most personal data there is. So Apple being like one of the most trusted personal data companies, I think it's very important that they enter the AI race, and I hope to see more out of them.[00:35:58] Alessio: To me, the, the biggest question with the Google deal is like, who's paying who?[00:36:03] Alessio: Because for the browsers, Google pays Apple like 18, 20 billion every year to be the default browser. Is Google going to pay you to have Gemini or is Apple paying Google to have Gemini? I think that's, that's like what I'm most interested to figure out because with the browsers, it's like, it's the entry point to the thing.[00:36:21] Alessio: So it's really valuable to be the default. That's why Google pays. But I wonder if like the perception in AI is going to be like, Hey. You just have to have a good local model on my phone to be worth me purchasing your device. And that was, that's kind of drive Apple to be the one buying the model. But then, like Shawn said, they're doing the MM1 themselves.[00:36:40] Alessio: So are they saying we do models, but they're not as good as the Google ones? I don't know. The whole thing is, it's really confusing, but. It makes for great meme material on on Twitter.[00:36:51] swyx: Yeah, I mean, I think, like, they are possibly more than OpenAI and Microsoft and Amazon. They are the most full stack company there is in computing, and so, like, they own the chips, man.[00:37:05] swyx: Like, they manufacture everything so if, if, if there was a company that could do that. You know, seriously challenge the other AI players. It would be Apple. And it's, I don't think it's as hard as self driving. So like maybe they've, they've just been investing in the wrong thing this whole time. We'll see.[00:37:21] swyx: Wall Street certainly thinks[00:37:22] NLW: so. Wall Street loved that move, man. There's a big, a big sigh of relief. Well, let's, let's move away from, from sort of the big stuff. I mean, the, I think to both of your points, it's going to.[00:37:33] Meta's $800b AI rebrand[00:37:33] NLW: Can I, can[00:37:34] swyx: I, can I, can I jump on factoid about this, this Wall Street thing? I went and looked at when Meta went from being a VR company to an AI company.[00:37:44] swyx: And I think the stock I'm trying to look up the details now. The stock has gone up 187% since Lamo one. Yeah. Which is $830 billion in market value created in the past year. . Yeah. Yeah.[00:37:57] NLW: It's, it's, it's like, remember if you guys haven't Yeah. If you haven't seen the chart, it's actually like remarkable.[00:38:02] NLW: If you draw a little[00:38:03] swyx: arrow on it, it's like, no, we're an AI company now and forget the VR thing.[00:38:10] NLW: It's it, it is an interesting, no, it's, I, I think, alessio, you called it sort of like Zuck's Disruptor Arc or whatever. He, he really does. He is in the midst of a, of a total, you know, I don't know if it's a redemption arc or it's just, it's something different where, you know, he, he's sort of the spoiler.[00:38:25] NLW: Like people loved him just freestyle talking about why he thought they had a better headset than Apple. But even if they didn't agree, they just loved it. He was going direct to camera and talking about it for, you know, five minutes or whatever. So that, that's a fascinating shift that I don't think anyone had on their bingo card, you know, whatever, two years ago.[00:38:41] NLW: Yeah. Yeah,[00:38:42] swyx: we still[00:38:43] Alessio: didn't see and fight Elon though, so[00:38:45] swyx: that's what I'm really looking forward to. I mean, hey, don't, don't, don't write it off, you know, maybe just these things take a while to happen. But we need to see and fight in the Coliseum. No, I think you know, in terms of like self management, life leadership, I think he has, there's a lot of lessons to learn from him.[00:38:59] swyx: You know he might, you know, you might kind of quibble with, like, the social impact of Facebook, but just himself as a in terms of personal growth and, and, you know, Per perseverance through like a lot of change and you know, everyone throwing stuff his way. I think there's a lot to say about like, to learn from, from Zuck, which is crazy 'cause he's my age.[00:39:18] swyx: Yeah. Right.[00:39:20] AI Engineer landscape - from baby AGIs to vertical Agents[00:39:20] NLW: Awesome. Well, so, so one of the big things that I think you guys have, you know, distinct and, and unique insight into being where you are and what you work on is. You know, what developers are getting really excited about right now. And by that, I mean, on the one hand, certainly, you know, like startups who are actually kind of formalized and formed to startups, but also, you know, just in terms of like what people are spending their nights and weekends on what they're, you know, coming to hackathons to do.[00:39:45] NLW: And, you know, I think it's a, it's a, it's, it's such a fascinating indicator for, for where things are headed. Like if you zoom back a year, right now was right when everyone was getting so, so excited about. AI agent stuff, right? Auto, GPT and baby a GI. And these things were like, if you dropped anything on YouTube about those, like instantly tens of thousands of views.[00:40:07] NLW: I know because I had like a 50,000 view video, like the second day that I was doing the show on YouTube, you know, because I was talking about auto GPT. And so anyways, you know, obviously that's sort of not totally come to fruition yet, but what are some of the trends in what you guys are seeing in terms of people's, people's interest and, and, and what people are building?[00:40:24] Alessio: I can start maybe with the agents part and then I know Shawn is doing a diffusion meetup tonight. There's a lot of, a lot of different things. The, the agent wave has been the most interesting kind of like dream to reality arc. So out of GPT, I think they went, From zero to like 125, 000 GitHub stars in six weeks, and then one year later, they have 150, 000 stars.[00:40:49] Alessio: So there's kind of been a big plateau. I mean, you might say there are just not that many people that can start it. You know, everybody already started it. But the promise of, hey, I'll just give you a goal, and you do it. I think it's like, amazing to get people's imagination going. You know, they're like, oh, wow, this This is awesome.[00:41:08] Alessio: Everybody, everybody can try this to do anything. But then as technologists, you're like, well, that's, that's just like not possible, you know, we would have like solved everything. And I think it takes a little bit to go from the promise and the hope that people show you to then try it yourself and going back to say, okay, this is not really working for me.[00:41:28] Alessio: And David Wong from Adept, you know, they in our episode, he specifically said. We don't want to do a bottom up product. You know, we don't want something that everybody can just use and try because it's really hard to get it to be reliable. So we're seeing a lot of companies doing vertical agents that are narrow for a specific domain, and they're very good at something.[00:41:49] Alessio: Mike Conover, who was at Databricks before, is also a friend of Latentspace. He's doing this new company called BrightWave doing AI agents for financial research, and that's it, you know, and they're doing very well. There are other companies doing it in security, doing it in compliance, doing it in legal.[00:42:08] Alessio: All of these things that like, people, nobody just wakes up and say, Oh, I cannot wait to go on AutoGPD and ask it to do a compliance review of my thing. You know, just not what inspires people. So I think the gap on the developer side has been the more bottom sub hacker mentality is trying to build this like very Generic agents that can do a lot of open ended tasks.[00:42:30] Alessio: And then the more business side of things is like, Hey, If I want to raise my next round, I can not just like sit around the mess, mess around with like super generic stuff. I need to find a use case that really works. And I think that that is worth for, for a lot of folks in parallel, you have a lot of companies doing evals.[00:42:47] Alessio: There are dozens of them that just want to help you measure how good your models are doing. Again, if you build evals, you need to also have a restrained surface area to actually figure out whether or not it's good, right? Because you cannot eval anything on everything under the sun. So that's another category where I've seen from the startup pitches that I've seen, there's a lot of interest in, in the enterprise.[00:43:11] Alessio: It's just like really. Fragmented because the production use cases are just coming like now, you know, there are not a lot of long established ones to, to test against. And so does it, that's kind of on the virtual agents and then the robotic side it's probably been the thing that surprised me the most at NVIDIA GTC, the amount of robots that were there that were just like robots everywhere.[00:43:33] Alessio: Like, both in the keynote and then on the show floor, you would have Boston Dynamics dogs running around. There was, like, this, like fox robot that had, like, a virtual face that, like, talked to you and, like, moved in real time. There were industrial robots. NVIDIA did a big push on their own Omniverse thing, which is, like, this Digital twin of whatever environments you're in that you can use to train the robots agents.[00:43:57] Alessio: So that kind of takes people back to the reinforcement learning days, but yeah, agents, people want them, you know, people want them. I give a talk about the, the rise of the full stack employees and kind of this future, the same way full stack engineers kind of work across the stack. In the future, every employee is going to interact with every part of the organization through agents and AI enabled tooling.[00:44:17] Alessio: This is happening. It just needs to be a lot more narrow than maybe the first approach that we took, which is just put a string in AutoGPT and pray. But yeah, there's a lot of super interesting stuff going on.[00:44:27] swyx: Yeah. Well, he Let's recover a lot of stuff there. I'll separate the robotics piece because I feel like that's so different from the software world.[00:44:34] swyx: But yeah, we do talk to a lot of engineers and you know, that this is our sort of bread and butter. And I do agree that vertical agents have worked out a lot better than the horizontal ones. I think all You know, the point I'll make here is just the reason AutoGPT and maybe AGI, you know, it's in the name, like they were promising AGI.[00:44:53] swyx: But I think people are discovering that you cannot engineer your way to AGI. It has to be done at the model level and all these engineering, prompt engineering hacks on top of it weren't really going to get us there in a meaningful way without much further, you know, improvements in the models. I would say, I'll go so far as to say, even Devin, which is, I would, I think the most advanced agent that we've ever seen, still requires a lot of engineering and still probably falls apart a lot in terms of, like, practical usage.[00:45:22] swyx: Or it's just, Way too slow and expensive for, you know, what it's, what it's promised compared to the video. So yeah, that's, that's what, that's what happened with agents from, from last year. But I, I do, I do see, like, vertical agents being very popular and, and sometimes you, like, I think the word agent might even be overused sometimes.[00:45:38] swyx: Like, people don't really care whether or not you call it an AI agent, right? Like, does it replace boring menial tasks that I do That I might hire a human to do, or that the human who is hired to do it, like, actually doesn't really want to do. And I think there's absolutely ways in sort of a vertical context that you can actually go after very routine tasks that can be scaled out to a lot of, you know, AI assistants.[00:46:01] swyx: So, so yeah, I mean, and I would, I would sort of basically plus one what let's just sit there. I think it's, it's very, very promising and I think more people should work on it, not less. Like there's not enough people. Like, we, like, this should be the, the, the main thrust of the AI engineer is to look out, look for use cases and, and go to a production with them instead of just always working on some AGI promising thing that never arrives.[00:46:21] swyx: I,[00:46:22] NLW: I, I can only add that so I've been fiercely making tutorials behind the scenes around basically everything you can imagine with AI. We've probably done, we've done about 300 tutorials over the last couple of months. And the verticalized anything, right, like this is a solution for your particular job or role, even if it's way less interesting or kind of sexy, it's like so radically more useful to people in terms of intersecting with how, like those are the ways that people are actually.[00:46:50] NLW: Adopting AI in a lot of cases is just a, a, a thing that I do over and over again. By the way, I think that's the same way that even the generalized models are getting adopted. You know, it's like, I use midjourney for lots of stuff, but the main thing I use it for is YouTube thumbnails every day. Like day in, day out, I will always do a YouTube thumbnail, you know, or two with, with Midjourney, right?[00:47:09] NLW: And it's like you can, you can start to extrapolate that across a lot of things and all of a sudden, you know, a AI doesn't. It looks revolutionary because of a million small changes rather than one sort of big dramatic change. And I think that the verticalization of agents is sort of a great example of how that's[00:47:26] swyx: going to play out too.[00:47:28] Adept episode - Screen Multimodality[00:47:28] swyx: So I'll have one caveat here, which is I think that Because multi modal models are now commonplace, like Cloud, Gemini, OpenAI, all very very easily multi modal, Apple's easily multi modal, all this stuff. There is a switch for agents for sort of general desktop browsing that I think people so much for joining us today, and we'll see you in the next video.[00:48:04] swyx: Version of the the agent where they're not specifically taking in text or anything They're just watching your screen just like someone else would and and I'm piloting it by vision And you know in the the episode with David that we'll have dropped by the time that this this airs I think I think that is the promise of adept and that is a promise of what a lot of these sort of desktop agents Are and that is the more general purpose system That could be as big as the browser, the operating system, like, people really want to build that foundational piece of software in AI.[00:48:38] swyx: And I would see, like, the potential there for desktop agents being that, that you can have sort of self driving computers. You know, don't write the horizontal piece out. I just think we took a while to get there.[00:48:48] NLW: What else are you guys seeing that's interesting to you? I'm looking at your notes and I see a ton of categories.[00:48:54] Top Model Research from January Recap[00:48:54] swyx: Yeah so I'll take the next two as like as one category, which is basically alternative architectures, right? The two main things that everyone following AI kind of knows now is, one, the diffusion architecture, and two, the let's just say the, Decoder only transformer architecture that is popularized by GPT.[00:49:12] swyx: You can read, you can look on YouTube for thousands and thousands of tutorials on each of those things. What we are talking about here is what's next, what people are researching, and what could be on the horizon that takes the place of those other two things. So first of all, we'll talk about transformer architectures and then diffusion.[00:49:25] swyx: So transformers the, the two leading candidates are effectively RWKV and the state space models the most recent one of which is Mamba, but there's others like the Stripe, ENA, and the S four H three stuff coming out of hazy research at Stanford. And all of those are non quadratic language models that scale the promise to scale a lot better than the, the traditional transformer.[00:49:47] swyx: That this might be too theoretical for most people right now, but it's, it's gonna be. It's gonna come out in weird ways, where, imagine if like, Right now the talk of the town is that Claude and Gemini have a million tokens of context and like whoa You can put in like, you know, two hours of video now, okay But like what if you put what if we could like throw in, you know, two hundred thousand hours of video?[00:50:09] swyx: Like how does that change your usage of AI? What if you could throw in the entire genetic sequence of a human and like synthesize new drugs. Like, well, how does that change things? Like, we don't know because we haven't had access to this capability being so cheap before. And that's the ultimate promise of these two models.[00:50:28] swyx: They're not there yet but we're seeing very, very good progress. RWKV and Mamba are probably the, like, the two leading examples, both of which are open source that you can try them today and and have a lot of progress there. And the, the, the main thing I'll highlight for audio e KV is that at, at the seven B level, they seem to have beat LAMA two in all benchmarks that matter at the same size for the same amount of training as an open source model.[00:50:51] swyx: So that's exciting. You know, they're there, they're seven B now. They're not at seven tb. We don't know if it'll. And then the other thing is diffusion. Diffusions and transformers are are kind of on the collision course. The original stable diffusion already used transformers in in parts of its architecture.[00:51:06] swyx: It seems that transformers are eating more and more of those layers particularly the sort of VAE layer. So that's, the Diffusion Transformer is what Sora is built on. The guy who wrote the Diffusion Transformer paper, Bill Pebbles, is, Bill Pebbles is the lead tech guy on Sora. So you'll just see a lot more Diffusion Transformer stuff going on.[00:51:25] swyx: But there's, there's more sort of experimentation with diffusion. I'm holding a meetup actually here in San Francisco that's gonna be like the state of diffusion, which I'm pretty excited about. Stability's doing a lot of good work. And if you look at the, the architecture of how they're creating Stable Diffusion 3, Hourglass Diffusion, and the inconsistency models, or SDXL Turbo.[00:51:45] swyx: All of these are, like, very, very interesting innovations on, like, the original idea of what Stable Diffusion was. So if you think that it is expensive to create or slow to create Stable Diffusion or an AI generated art, you are not up to date with the latest models. If you think it is hard to create text and images, you are not up to date with the latest models.[00:52:02] swyx: And people still are kind of far behind. The last piece of which is the wildcard I always kind of hold out, which is text diffusion. So Instead of using autogenerative or autoregressive transformers, can you use text to diffuse? So you can use diffusion models to diffuse and create entire chunks of text all at once instead of token by token.[00:52:22] swyx: And that is something that Midjourney confirmed today, because it was only rumored the past few months. But they confirmed today that they were looking into. So all those things are like very exciting new model architectures that are, Maybe something that we'll, you'll see in production two to three years from now.[00:52:37] swyx: So the couple of the trends[00:52:38] NLW: that I want to just get your takes on, because they're sort of something that, that seems like they're coming up are one sort of these, these wearable, you know, kind of passive AI experiences where they're absorbing a lot of what's going on around you and then, and then kind of bringing things back.[00:52:53] NLW: And then the, the other one that I, that I wanted to see if you guys had thoughts on were sort of this next generation of chip companies. Obviously there's a huge amount of emphasis. On on hardware and silicon and, and, and different ways of doing things, but, y

Jay and Jeff Turn Down for MxU, and chat with Tony Staires from LAWO about The Sphere in Las Vegas. Tony gives us a deep dive into the technology that makes this venue such a technological feat, and a great experience for audiences. Jay and his buddies then give us a firsthand take on what it's like to be in the crowd, the morning after their experience at U2 at The Sphere.

How will the Church Tech Pay Series end? Toby, Blake and Brian recap the entire series in our final episode! We cover the most surprising survey stats, the best quotes, and the top takeaways.In this episode you'll hear: 1:00 Brendon Petty's Legs and MxU live!  4:20 Mariah Carey & BD nearly kills Steven Curtis Chapman! 13:30 Biggest Stats from the Church Tech Pay Survey 20:40 Best Quotes from the Series 32:00 Appreciation & Taking Pay off the Table 38:00 Benefits? Benefits! Benefits.42:00 Biggest Overall Takeaways from the Series 53:00 Top Way to Increase Pay over the Series 1:03:15 How to have the “salary increase” convo well 1:10:00 Toby's Benediction for the Church Tech Pay Series Resources for your Church Tech MinistryDoes your church have used gear that you need to convert into new ministry dollars? We can make you an offer here. Do you need some production gear but lack the budget to buy new gear? You can get Certified Church Owned gear here.  Connect with us: Follow us on FacebookHang out with us on InstagramSee all the ways we can serve your church on our WebsiteGet our best gear sent to your inbox each Monday before it goes public via the Early Service

What have our friends at MxU been up to? We chatted with Jeff and Jay on how much a room can excuse a bad mix, MxU's upcoming events and which fast food burger is the best. In this episode you'll hear:1:00 CA Mega Church Visits, Floor Buying & In and Out7:20 MxU's Jeff & Jay join us!8:30 Burger Battle: McDonalds, WhatABurger, In and Out 14:30 Two Truths & a Lie “Church Tech Pay” edition 19:35 Jeff & Jay's recent touring travels 25:45 How much does a “bad room” damage a concert? 38:25 Concert etiquette on singing loudly44:00 Gene Kim & Jay death match 48:45 Big announcement tease 50:00 Tech Takeaway on Sunday Farts & Caring for our TeamsResources for your Church Tech MinistryDoes your church have used gear that you need to convert into new ministry dollars? We can make you an offer here. Do you need some production gear but lack the budget to buy new gear? You can get Certified Church Owned gear here.Connect with us: Follow us on FacebookHang out with us on InstagramSee all the ways we can serve your church on our WebsiteGet our best gear sent to your inbox each Monday before it goes public via the Early ServiceWhat if your bank account had a leak in it?If you have used production gear sitting in your storage closet, that is exactly what is happening right now. We paid churches over a million dollars in 2022 for their used production gear. Head to our site, make your gear list, and let us come pay your church.

Ngày 25/03/2023, tổng thống Nga Vladimir Putin khẳng định Matxcơva sẽ triển khai vũ khí nguyên tử « chiến thuật » tại Belarus. Đây không phải là lần đầu tiên Nga nói đến việc dùng vũ khí hạt nhân kể từ khi xảy ra xung đột Ukraina từ hơn một năm qua. Một số nhà nghiên cứu tại Pháp nhận định những tuyên bố này nằm trong chiến lược « đe dọa hạt nhân », một phần trong học thuyết răn đe hạt nhân của Nga. Liên Xô – Hoa Kỳ và cán cân khủng bố hạt nhânNgược dòng thời gian, tháng 8/1949, dưới thời Stalin, Liên Xô thử quả bom hạt nhân đầu tiên RDS-1, có sức mạnh tương đương với quả bom hạt nhân mà Hoa Kỳ thả xuống thành phố Nagasaki bốn năm về trước.Chỉ trong vòng 9 năm, từ năm 1953 đến năm 1962, thời điểm xảy ra khủng hoảng tên lửa Cuba, số đầu đạn hạt nhân của Liên Xô tăng vọt từ 120 lên 3.222, để rồi đạt đỉnh 45 ngàn đầu đạn năm 1986, năm xảy ra tai nạn hạt nhân Tchernobyl. Con số này nhiều hơn của Mỹ gấp hai lần.Khi Vladimir Putin lên cầm quyền năm 2000, số đầu đạn hạt nhân của Liên Bang Nga giảm xuống còn 21 ngàn và theo ước tính hiện tại, Nga có khoảng 5.400 đầu đạn hạt nhân, con số cao nhất trong số 9 cường quốc hạt nhân hiện nay.Nhưng trong suốt thời kỳ Chiến Tranh Lạnh, cán cân khủng bố hạt nhân dựa trên thế mạnh ngang bằng và nguy cơ hủy diệt lẫn nhau giữa hai bên. Việc cả Washington và Matxcơva đều tin rằng một cuộc tấn công hạt nhân sẽ dẫn đến những vụ trả đũa lẫn nhau, cuối cùng chỉ có thể đi đến sự hủy diệt hoàn toàn, đã cho phép loại trừ khả năng xảy ra một cuộc đối đầu trực diện giữa hai đại cường.Về điểm này, Olivier Zajec, giám đốc Viện Nghiên cứu Chiến lược và Quốc phòng, đại học Jean Moulin – Lyon 3, trả lời phỏng vấn Le Figaro (07/10/2022), nhận xét thêm :« So với thời Liên Xô, ở đây có khía cạnh về lượng. Nước Nga có ít đầu đạn hạt nhân hơn nhiều so với thời kỳ Chiến Tranh Lạnh. Trong suốt giai đoạn này, Liên Xô đánh giá cao vũ khí hạt nhân bằng cách sử dụng chúng trong các diễn ngôn, kể cả về mặt chính trị và quân sự. Hơn nữa Liên Xô thời kỳ đó từng cam kết không bao giờ sử dụng chúng trước tiên trong một xung đột. Giờ thì Nga từ bỏ chính sách không là bên sử dụng đầu tiên, một chính sách cường quốc, có thể nói mang tính thống trị. »Làm thế nào giải thích cho sự thay đổi đó ? Mọi việc có lẽ bắt nguồn từ Sáng kiến Phòng thủ Chiến lược (IDS) do tổng thống Ronald Reagan đưa ra năm 1983, từ bỏ học thuyết cán cân sợ hãi, đoạn tuyệt với hệ thống đáp trả hạt nhân tức thì. Nhưng chương trình IDS của Mỹ, ngoài việc phát triển một hệ thống lá chắn tên lửa bảo vệ Hoa Kỳ trước một cuộc tấn công hạt nhân của Liên Xô, còn nhằm mục đích bóp nghẹt nền kinh tế của Liên Xô đang gặp khó khăn.Hạt nhân bù đắp cho sự yếu kém về vũ khí quy ướcLiên Xô tan rã tháng 12/1991. Nước Nga mới hình thành tuyên bố từ bỏ cam kết « không là bên đầu tiên sử dụng » vũ khí hạt nhân trong học thuyết quân sự năm 1993. Chính sách răn đe hạt nhân khi ấy được xem như là một phương tiện bù đắp cho sự yếu kém về vũ khí quy ước, liên quan đến những thiếu sót về năng lực, và được ông Vladimir Putin tiếp tục duy trì trong những năm đầu cầm quyền.Đến cuối thập niên 1990, nhiều chuyên gia Nga bắt đầu nhắm đến một khái niệm mới : Tấn công hạt nhân hạn chế, được thực hiện với sự hỗ trợ của vũ khí chiến thuật tầm ngắn trong khuôn khổ một « cuộc chiến tranh hạt nhân có giới hạn ». Lập trường này vào năm 2010 đã được một chuyên gia Nga nổi tiếng, Yuri Fedorov, cổ vũ, cho rằng quân đội Nga có thể sử dụng hạn chế vũ khí hạt nhân nhằm ngăn ngừa, hay chặn đứng một cuộc tấn công từ các lực lượng quy ước vượt trội hơn. Lập trường này sau đó đã được Nga ghi vào học thuyết quân sự năm 2014. Theo đó, Nga không chỉ nhắm đến việc tấn công hạt nhân trả đũa, mà rất có thể sẽ đánh phủ đầu trước tiên nếu sự sống còn của nước Nga bị đe dọa, và/hay như những loại vũ khí hủy diệt hàng loạt được sử dụng chống lại Nga hay một đồng minh của Nga.Lợi ích của chúng là gì ? Loại vũ khí này có thể sử dụng được trên chiến trường mà không lo nhận lãnh một đòn trả đũa hủy diệt từ kẻ thù, đồng thời có thể gây ra những thiệt hại cho phép giảm leo thang và chấm dứt xung đột.Cũng trên báo Le Figaro, Olivier Zajec giải thích tiếp :« Nguyên lý của vũ khí hạt nhân chiến thuật, về mặt lý thuyết, đó là tăng dần khả năng hủy diệt nguyên tử và người ta hy vọng có thể thu được những lợi thế trên bình diện chính trị và quân sự. Chúng ta đang chứng kiến sự trở về của điều mà người ta gọi là "thuyết chiến thắng hạt nhân". Đó là lý do tại sao người ta cho là chiến thuật. Ngày nay, người ta cho rằng có những "quốc gia đạo tặc" ngày càng đặt cược nhiều vào việc một số cường quốc không thể sử dụng vũ khí hạt nhân. Đại khái, "có một hành động gây hấn, chuyện đang xảy ra ở rất xa, chưa đáng để sử dụng tấn công hạt nhân". Thế là họ không sử dụng năng lực hạt nhân. Và do vậy, những "quốc gia đạo tặc"có thể lợi dụng điều đó. Một số chuyên gia, chiến lược gia, hay quốc gia, từ vài năm gần đây, đánh giá rằng tạo tính chính đáng cho khả năng sử dụng vũ khí hạt nhân chiến thuật có hỏa lực thấp hơn có thể giúp khôi phục khả năng răn đe ».Theo nhận định của Céline Marangé, chuyên gia về Nga, Ukraina và Trung Á, Viện Nghiên cứu Chiến lược trường Quân Sự Pháp, trong một bài tham luận đăng trên Tạp chí Quốc Phòng (số mùa hè năm 2017), cú hích dẫn đến những thay đổi lớn trong học thuyết răn đe hạt nhân của Nga là cuộc chiến tại Gruzia năm 2008. Cuộc xung đột này đã làm lộ rõ những yếu kém lớn về năng lực quân đội. Nga cần phải củng cố uy tín lực lượng chính quy và chính sách răn đe hạt nhân.Và hai thay đổi lớn quan trọng này đã được ông Valery Guerassimov, tham mưu trưởng, thứ trưởng Quốc Phòng Nga, trình bày trong một bài viết đăng năm 2013. Một mặt, các phương tiện phi quân sự được nâng cao vai trò và việc gây ảnh hưởng từ xa mà không cần tiếp xúc với địch thủ trở thành một phương cách chính để đạt các mục tiêu chiến đấu và tác chiến. Mặt khác, phổ biến sử dụng các loại vũ khí có độ chính xác cao và tích cực đưa vào trong quân đội các loại vũ khí được thiết kế dựa trên những nguyên tắc vật lý mới và các hệ thống rô-bốt hóa.Vũ khí hạt nhân : Từ răn đe phòng thủ đến dọa dẫmXuất phát từ hai ghi nhận này, giới chức Nga đã phát triển một chiến lược dựa trên sự tác động ảnh hưởng và gây bất ổn chính trị, cũng như răn đe và dọa dẫm chiến lược. Chính trong bối cảnh căng thẳng với phương Tây mà hạt nhân của Nga được khoác thêm một tầm quan trọng mới. Vũ khí nguyên tử được sử dụng để bù đắp cho sự yếu thế tương đối của lực lượng quy ước của Nga so với các lực lượng của NATO và trong tiềm tàng là với Trung Quốc. Cũng theo nhà nghiên cứu Céline Marangé, điểm mới trong học thuyết răn đe của Nga, hay đúng hơn là sự trở về với kiểu luận điệu của Nikita Khrouchtchev, đó là hạt nhân giờ được sử dụng để đe dọa đối thủ và chứng tỏ sự trở lại của cường quốc Nga. Đó là những gì tổng thống Putin hay nhiều nhân vật quan trọng Nga thường hay nhắc đến ngay từ đầu cuộc khủng hoảng Ukraina tháng 12/2013 và ngay sau ngày sáp nhập bán đảo Crimée : Dọa biến Hoa Kỳ thành tro bụi phóng xạ (3/2014), đặt lực lượng hạt nhân trong tình trạng báo động (3/2015).Trước đó, quân đội Nga còn mô phỏng tấn công hạt nhân Vacxava (2009), mô phỏng tấn công hạt nhân Thụy Điển (2013), hay tăng cường tuần tra do thám có trang bị vũ khí hạt nhân… Bên cạnh những hành động này, quân đội Nga còn triển khai nhiều loại vũ khí hạt nhân chiến thuật gần biên giới với Liên Hiệp Châu Âu, như lắp đặt tên lửa đạn đạo Iskander lưỡng dụng tại Crimée, Kaliningrad và vùng quân sự phía Tây của Nga.Về điểm này, chuyên gia về quốc phòng Olivier Zajec tại Lyon, đưa ra một số phân tích : «Trên thực tế, ngân sách dành cho quốc phòng của Nga là tương đối hạn chế. Hiện nay, mức ngân sách hàng năm là khoảng 70 tỷ đô la, trong khi đó Mỹ dành đến 770 tỷ đô la. Rõ ràng nước Nga chỉ là một tiểu cường quốc trên bình diện ngân sách. Những năm gần đây, Nga không thể tự cho phép mình mua hết tất cả, do vậy họ buộc phải chọn lựa. Chúng ta cũng đã thấy rõ tình trạng kém hiệu quả của quân đội Nga ở Ukraina.Ngược lại, các loại vũ khi hạt nhân, vũ khí có độ chính xác cao, những loại vũ khi mới là những ưu tiên. Ở đây, chúng ta có nguy cơ nhìn thấy vũ khí hạt nhân được xem như là một giải pháp để bù đắp quá mức cho điểm yếu của lực lượng quy ước Nga, nhất là trong bối cảnh cuộc xung đột tại Ukraina, đang diễn ra tại những vùng giáp với biên giới Nga ».Như để khẳng định cho tầm nhìn chiến lược này, năm 2018, đích thân tổng thống Vladimir Putin đã hãnh diện tiết lộ những loại vũ khí « bất bại » mới mà Nga đang trang bị cho quân đội : Những tên lửa siêu thanh có thể điều khiển để tránh đòn phản công ; drone lặn khó phát hiện dù chỉ cách bờ biển đối thủ vài km, hay tên lửa SARMAT, còn được gọi là « Satan 2 », có tầm bắn vô giới hạn.Một điều chắc chắn là, những thay đổi trong học thuyết hạt nhân của Nga, ngoài việc chứng minh khả năng đổi mới công nghệ của Matxcơva trong lĩnh vực này, Nga còn đạt được một mục tiêu khác : Chứng tỏ cho Washington thấy rằng Nga đang qua mặt Mỹ trong công nghệ vũ khí hạt nhân và nước này đang triển khai những công nghệ tiên tiến. Do đó, Nga còn xa mới bị xem như là một cường quốc hạt nhân hạng hai. Tóm lại, Nga vẫn là một thách thức nghiêm trọng cho sức mạnh Hoa Kỳ.Chuyên gia Olivier Zajec kết luận : « Nga đã bảo vệ được vị thế cường quốc hạt nhân. Nước Nga vẫn là một cường quốc hạt nhân đáng tin cậy. Đó là lý do vì sao ngày nay các lãnh đạo phương Tây vẫn tỏ ra thận trọng trước Nga ! »

Jeff Sandstrom started his career as an independent music producer and engineer, and produced several Dove Award-winning projects in the studio. From 2007 to 2016, he was the Front of House engineer for Chris Tomlin and Passion Conferences. He's also toured with Matt Redman, Lauren Daigle, Steven Curtis Chapman and others, and has been a sought-after teacher and presenter at conferences and training events. His heart for teaching production teams to excel led to the co-founding of MxU, a platform designed to provide church production teams tools for technical training, creative communication, volunteer team building, and healthy leadership. Jeff and Kristian share practical and spiritual tips for fostering relationships well between technicians and musicians. Jeff also advises worship engineers, producers, technicians, etc. to be wary of your identity being tied up in your skill rather than who you are as a son or daughter of Christ. Learn more about the intentional tools and resources MxU provides @mxurocks / https://getmxu.com/Follow us @multitracks // @multitracksgospel // @leadworshipwellwww.multitracks.com

First, you'll get a deep dive into a brand new feature on the MxU platform that will transform how you manage your team. Then Jeff sits down at NAB with a few leaders from DiGiCo to discuss their consoles, and what makes them unique. You'll hear from James Gordon, CEO of Audiotonix, Austin Freshwater, Managing Director of DiGiCo, and Ryan Shelton, DiGiCo's National Sales Manager. Enjoy!

We chat with Kevin Madden, Eastern Regional Sales Manager for Allen & Heath. He gives us a history lesson on the company and great information on what their consoles have to offer today. We're sure you'll enjoy hearing from him, especially if you're currently using, or considering, their products for your team.Do you ever feel like you don't have enough time to train new team members well or that they get lost in the onboarding cycle? Maybe you feel like your current volunteers or staff aren't progressing well and keeping up with the needs of your ministry. You don't have to be alone in training your team. MxU can help you to recruit, train, and retain volunteers and staff for the production team at your church. Healthy church production teams start with MxU.

For our last episode of the year, Jeff looks back at MxU in 2022. He also sits down with the production leaders from his church to talk about their history, and their vision for a volunteer-led ministry. If you're a growing church, we hope you can learn from their story. 

Jay Desai is the Master of Ceremonies with MxU, works with Passion Church regularly and is an overall production management legend.In this episode you'll hear: 1:00 Toby upgrades his church's production gear for free6:30 Jay Desai of MxU joins us! 28:30 Jay's involvement with Passion 38:00 Jay's method to de-escalate  conflict 44:55 What MxU person would win the AnchorMan brawl? 47:00 Jay vs. Blake Christmas Movie Trivia  52:45 Jay's Christmas tours 53:45 Disaster story 56:45 Tech Takeaway on self care Hangout with Jay on Instagram Resources for your Church Tech MinistryDoes your church have used gear that you need to convert into new ministry dollars? We can make you an offer here. Do you need some production gear but lack the budget to buy new gear? You can get Certified Church Owned gear here.Connect with us: Follow us on FacebookHang out with us on InstagramSee all the ways we can serve your church on our WebsiteGet our best gear sent to your inbox each Monday before it goes public via the Early Service

How many church tech directors ended up in that lane because others just poured into them in their youth? In our experience, its alot. Rusty Anderson continues to prove this trend this week as he tells us his story of becoming a video director that has worked on some big projects like Passion Conference, Chris Tomlin and MxU just to name a few. In this episode you'll hear: 1:00 Toby and Blake pretend to be video directors4:25 Five Truths and a Lie with Rusty Anderson 13:15 Rusty's start in church production 21:15 Working with Chris Tomlin 25:25 Bringing tour effects to your Sunday mornings 31:05 Live streaming at church 35:10 Working with Dude Perfect 41:00 What should be on screen during worship? 43:30 Movie Trivia: Blake vs. Rusty 47:45 Tech TakeawayPlugs: Hangout with Rusty on Instagram. Resources for your Church Tech Ministry Does your church have used gear that you need to convert into new ministry dollars? We can make you an offer here. Do you need some production gear but lack the budget to buy new gear? You can get Certified Church Owned gear here. Connect with us: Follow us on ...

Can ministry be done in a place that literally goes by the moniker "Sin City"? Adam Taylor is the production director for Central Church in Las Vegas In this episode you'll hear: 0:25 Blake confesses to Toby 2:30 MxU tour times, Amplio After Party, Late Night Madness 7:30 Adam Taylor from Central Church in Las Vegas joins! 12:30 Adam meeting Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul!?!?17:00 Toby murders trees21:30 Doing ministry in Sin City, Las Vegas 27:10 Volunteer culture at Central Church32:20 Adam always trying to improve the setup 37:00  People are more important than gear 40:00 Blake Vs. Adam: Artists in residency in Vegas 49:45 Tech Takeaway on importance of relationshipsPlugs: Check out Central Church's Worship tour dates! Resources for your Church Tech MinistryDoes your church have used gear that you need to convert into new ministry dollars? We can make you an offer here. Do you need some production gear but lack the budget to buy new gear? You can get Certified Church Owned gear here.Connect with us: Follow us on FacebookHang out with us on InstagramSee all the ways we can serve your church on our WebsiteGet our best gear sent to your inbox each Monday before it goes public via the Early Service

Lee and Jeff chat with Stephen Brewster about worship leaders, songwriting, and churches releasing their own music. We also have a big announcement, and a few "Turn Down for MxU" moments. Enjoy!

We all know Jeff Sandstrom of MxU and Chris Tomlin fame! But how did Jeff become the Jeff Sandstrom we all know and love? He joins the ChurchGear podcast this week to tell us! We also play "Guess that Song" and "Would you rather". In this episode you'll hear: 1:40 Toby's video with Will Smith and MxU 7:00 We introduce Jeff Sandstrom18:50 How did Jeff become Jeff Sandstrom?26:00 What's the worst gear Jeff could mix on and it still sound great?28:00 "Would you rather" gear edition 38:55 Jeff's work with Summit Integrations 44:00 How do you follow the worship leader's flow? 51:15 "Name that song" Jeff vs. Blake Plugs: Join us at the MxU live tour in Dallas, Chicago and Atlanta Check out our video with them for "Smash or Cash" and "What's in your closet?!" Resources for your Church Tech MinistryDoes your church have used gear that you need to convert into new ministry dollars? We can make you an offer here. Do you need some production gear but lack the budget to buy new gear? You can get Certified Church Owned gear here.Connect with us: Follow us on FacebookHang out with us on InstagramSee all the ways we can serve your church on our WebsiteGet our best gear sent to your inbox each Monday before it goes public via the Early Service

Co-founder of MxU (getmxu.com), FOH Engineer for Hillsong United, bowhunter, golfer dad and among other things AVL wizard Lee Fields is on the show! Starting out as a school drummer then jumping with both feet into the touring world in college, Lee has become one of the premier minds in the Live Pro Audio space. Originally birthed out of frustration at the level of audio, production, leadership and discipleship components available to most church technicians, MxU has grown into a brand known for its no-nonsense approach to church production. Rather than the typical lecture or “hypothetical scenario” workshop, Lee, with Jeff Sandstrom and the late Andrew Stone, wanted a more hands on process. They had the idea of setting up their three consoles in an actual venue and they would talk through each other's thought process as they each worked a mix. Wondering if there would be an appetite for others in the industry to listen, and watch, in on this process they opened it up to a limited number of attendees… The rest is history. MxU is now the #1 resource in church production training. You can help support the show with your donations at theinterviewpodcast.org

Join Jason Squires and Jeff Sandstrom as they talk about sound and its effect on people in your church. Jeff is the co-founder of MXU. (www.getmxu.com) Jeff was the FOH sound engineer for Chris Tomlin for 10 years. He was on staff at Northpointe Church in Atlanta, GA and he is currently the sound engineer on tour with Dude Perfect. In this episode, Jeff gives some great tools to help you make the sound experience in your church better for everyone. He also breaks down some strategies for in-ear monitors and gives ways to help protect your hearing for the long haul.

Join Jason Squires and Jeff Sandstrom as they talk about sound and its effect on people in your church. Jeff is the co-founder of MXU. (www.getmxu.com) Jeff was the FOH sound engineer for Chris Tomlin for 10 years. He was on staff at Northpointe Church in Atlanta, GA and he is currently the sound engineer on tour with Dude Perfect. In this episode, Jeff gives some great tools to help you make the sound experience in your church better for everyone. He also breaks down some strategies for in-ear monitors and gives ways to help protect your hearing for the long haul.

On this episode of the podcast, Sweet Pete shares his heart for church production and motivations for a healthy lifestyle. Today's thought: What are ways that we can improve our lifestyle from a mental health, physical health, and spiritual health perspective? Take a listen to hear Sweet Pete talks about his time participating in the MXU 75 day challenge. Guest Link: https://www.instagram.com/sweetpete.w/ Follow me: https://linktr.ee/drew_hester

In this episode, we are honored to have Jeff Sandstrom, long-time sound engineer, and MXU founder, to help us with church sound, acoustic tone, as well as how to shepherd volunteers. Through the years Jeff has worked with Chris Tomlin, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Lauren Daigle among others. 

Lee and Jeff chat with Cory Edwards to tell you everything you need to know about the 2022 MxU LIVE Tour. They also discuss dealing with the struggle of doubting yourself in your craft, and how to surround yourself with the right voices. Plus, we have a couple of "Turn Down for MxU" stories we know you'll like. Enjoy!

You know him. You love him. We have Lee Fields with us this week! We talk with him about his time co-founding MxU, church production trends and a mountain of antics and random opinions on (but not included to) cowboy boots and jet skis. 0:53 Toby's dad should literally  be dead after this story9:45 We introduce MxU's Lee Fields 13:10 Lee sits next to Justin Bieber (celebrities at church) 21:10 We FINALLY transition over to MxU's origin story and purpose34:48 Bootstrapping in the early days of MxU 36:22 Who originally raised the bar in the church production world? 39:25 Where will the next church tech trends come from in the production world? 43:10 The church setups Lee's enjoyed the most over the years45:00 Lee's approach to learning new Tech concepts50:10 Disaster story: Losing the PA during Bayside's Christmas service 54:02 “Who said it” about Lee Fields 58:55 Lee builds his dream production gear setup 1:01:30 Tech Takeaway on vocals and hard conversations PlugsGet MxU's training videos. Join us at an MxU live event this Fall! Resources for your Church Tech MinistryDoes your church have used gear that you need to convert into new ministry dollars? We can make you an offer here. Do you need some production gear but lack the budget to buy new gear? You can get Certified Church Owned gear here.Connect with us: Follow us on FacebookHang out with us on InstagramSee all the ways we can serve your church on our WebsiteGet our best gear sent to your inbox each Monday before it goes public via the Early Service

Lee and Jeff have a great convo about work/life balance coming out of Easter weekend, and we chat with Dr. Barrett Deubert to wrap up the MxU 75 Day Health Challenge. He gives us great advice on how to continue long-term, and build on the momentum we've established.

Lee, Jay, and Jeff chat about conflict, and how to have a difficult conversation. We're also joined by Dr. Barrett for a MxU 75 check-in as we cross the halfway point. Enjoy!

Lee and Jeff chat with Jay and Rusty, who join us from a gig they're on in Rotterdam (Daddu Worldwide indeed!). We get Rusty's take on how to maximize MxU HQ for video, and tease plans for MxU to go Worldwide later this year. Enjoy!

This episode is an explanation of the Collaboration Dr. B is doing with the MxU team and the 75 day Challenge. Dr. B invites the listeners of the Real Health Podcast to join in on the challenge. MxU Episode #99 Podcast Link: shorturl.at/jlEV7 Sign Up Link: http://getmxu.com/mxu75

Lee and Jeff get specific with Dr. Barrett about the details for the MxU 75 Day Challenge. We talk through all the specifics of the habits we'll be building, so you know what to expect. Go to http://getmxu.com/mxu75 to sign up today!

Real talk: Much of our tribe is physically unhealthy, and it's time to do something about it. In this episode, Lee, Jay, and Jeff get honest about the problem and are vulnerable about the need to address it. It's okay... we also have some laughs, and a couple of “turn down for MxU” moments, so don't be afraid.

In this episode, we're hanging with our best friends in Charlotte, NC in preparation for MXU Live at Elevation Ballantyne! We talk about a full range of topics including what we are looking forward to the most at MXU, UNITED University, serving and our friendships.

In this episode, we catchup on life. We talk about what's been going on in our lives over the last 4 weeks. Lets talk ROADTRIP to MXU live in Charlotte NC! This coming week we'll be traveling to MXU live and we'll be documenting our journey and what we are learning at MXU. Stay tuned for some fun experiences!

Our first bonus episode comes to you straight the MxU Live Tour during its stop in Denver! The MxU guys let us crash their daily tour show and talk streaming, audio wizardry, and how we've partnered up to help reach more of the production community by streaming the 2-day tour stop in Chicago. AirPods ready? Then hit play! Learn more about MxU: https://mxu.rocks

Want to get better at running sound at church? Today on the podcast, we have front-of-house legend Lee Fields from MxU with us! He shares what makes a great FOH engineer and how you can grow at becoming better at live sound. Trust us, it's worth listening to!    Mentioned in the Episode  The MxU Site  ---  If you like what you hear, please leave us a review! Also, feel free to shoot us an e-mail at podcast@worshiponline.com & tell us how we can better serve you and your church through this podcast.  Don't forget to sign up for your FREE 2-week subscription to Worship Online at worshiponline.com/podcast!  The Worship Online Podcast is produced by Worship Online in Nashville, TN.  Hosted & Produced by Josh Kluge  Backing Tracks by Johnluke Lewis 

Jeff and Lee chat with Rusty Anderson (Passion video director) and Jeremy Bagwell (Ross Video) about all things video for MxU.

Lee and Jeff are joined by guest, Chris Tomlin. You’ll hear Chris talk about the 10+ years of experiences he and Jeff had together and what’s most important to Chris when it comes to his team. Also, Lee and Jeff have a deep discussion about subs. Left/Right? Aux? To delay? To not delay? Enjoy! www.MxU.rocks Use Code MXU15 for 15% off your orders at www.micrentals.com

Lee had a rough Easter week and Jeff did not! The guys talk about challenges Lee's team faced at Easter, Jeff's round of golf at Augusta National, and Stephen Arruda from www.micrentals.com joins to talk about a new partnership with MxU. Use or mention code MXU15 to get 15% off your order at www.micrentals.com. www.MxU.rocks

Jay has hijacked the podcast! And he brought his friend and lawyer, Bob Goff. Bob is a New York Times Best-Selling Author, Law Professor at Pepperdine University, as well as an attorney who founded Love Does, a nonprofit human rights organization operating in Uganda, India, Nepal, Iraq and Somalia. He serves as the Hon. Consul for the Republic of Uganda to the United States. www.MxU.rocks

Lee, Jeff, and Jay debate if Church Tech Directors work too much or just don’t manage their time well. Guest Tyson Wiens joins and the guys talk about a recent PA Shootout and some wild stories from previous ones. www.MxU.rocks

Jeff and Lee talk to 2 experts from Avid about DAW's and Consoles.  Robert Scovill returns with his colleague from Avid, Tony Joy.  Tony is a specialist on the ProTools team, and between these 2 guys, we thought we’d finally end the debate. You be the judge! www.MxU.rocks

Lee, Jeff, and Daniel talk about salaries for Church staffers and their thoughts on transitioning jobs. Afterwards you'll hear a great interview with one of Daniel's mentors, Scott Moore. Scott is a live-production legend and has influenced how and why lots of us do what we do. www.MxU.rocks

Jeff, Lee, and Jay hang with 2 of the most prolific song writers and worship leaders in the modern Church, Matt Maher and Pat Barrett. Warning, this episode may break the record for most laughs. www.MxU.rocks

Lee, Jeff, Jay Desai, and Daniel Connell talk about the recent buzz on the internet of a church who flooded their stage. You get the BTS on exactly how it was done and what it cost. Then, part 2 of our convo from Tweed Recording. www.MxU.rocks

Jeff and Lee start a convo on whether we should be using a DAW instead of consoles in live production. It's a hot one! Plus, an incredible conversation captured at Tweed recording with Tweed staff Andrew Ratcliffe, Charlie Chastain, and our friend Chris Rabold. www.MxU.rocks www.tweedrecording.com

Todd sits down with Lee Fields from MxU and Bayside Church to talk about the importance of having a life outside of work. Whatever your occupation, it is key to have interests and hobbies that have nothing to do with your job. The rejuvenation that comes from having a hobby makes us better humans. We are grateful for Vertigo's support of this podcast episode. When it comes to all things rigging, Tracy and his team at Vertigo are the best. Whether you need to fly someone at your next service, need your rigging systems inspected or simply want to have your team trained on safe rigging practices, the people at Vertigo can help you out. Visit their website at www.getvertigo.com for more information.  

It’s a party at the MxU, Skylark, & DC Pro lake house. The crew records an in-person episode during a recent boys trip. Join Lee & Jeff, with Adam Taylor, Daniel Connell, Marcus Walker, Spencer De Young , Scott Allison, and Tyler Rowland. Enjoy!

Welcome to the Churchfront Worship Leader Podcast where we’re helping you lead Gospel-centered, tech savvy worship.  Recently, the church is in an extremely unique time in its history having to switch to online platforms, online worship services, onine prayer nights. Basically everything moved to the web within just a few short days.  And Churchfront wants to resource you with content that helps make that transition easier and more efficient. Don’t break the bank. Don’t panick. Don’t invest in a crazy amount of gear you don’t know how to use.  We created a Live streaming for churches course for you that’s available at churchfront.com but we also are going to have a few special guest podcast episodes with people we think are at the frontlines of this whole COVID-19 pandemic and how the church engages a situation it has no rule book for! Just a quick note in this episode. You’re going to hear a crying baby - barking dog - both are mine. working from home amidst covid-19 is the new normal for folks and most of the daycares and schools are also not open, so if you hear some background noise, we’re just living in a new reality nowadays! Fred has been a real good friend for a lot of years. He serves at one of the churches I interned at and is one of the smartest, kindest, and definitely funniest guys I’ve ever had the privileage of working with. He’s my go to when I am making decisions regarding technology and the church!  I hope you guys are as encouraged by his insight to this time in church history as I was.  In this day and age, share these episodes with friends. Post them on facebook, send the link to someone who may need some insight. Let’s support one another with resources through this COVID mess.  If you found this episode helpful, head over to apple podcasts and leave us a 5 star review and let us know what you liked about the show. It helps other people find the show when they’re looking for leadership resources.  And we’d love to have you join worship leader school to help you achieve great results in your worship ministry. If you want to apply, head on over to churchfront.com/apply. And for more tools to help grow you and grow your ministry, head to churchfront.com SHOW NOTES: artlist.io   Stream Monkey   MXU   TC Electronic Digital Bypass Broadcast Maximizer II   Lifechurch.tv 

Announcing our new 3rd host, Grace Royse! This episode the trio dive DEEP into some leadership topics. Grace's extensive production management background has given her loads of experience that help guide this episode as she puts Jeff and Lee in the hot seat. Enjoy and welcome Grace to the MxU team!

The First MxU Lighting podcast episode with Daniel Connell. Hear Daniel's story, lessons for new LD's, and what's in store for the future of MxU as we add lighting to the brand.

We're back. We talk about what's next for MxU. Then, we get down to business. Music history, how to emulate a drum room in live sound, immersive sound systems, and Lee's lack of respect for classic rock.

Cross Point Church was founded in 2002 with a small group of people that met at an Elementary school in Bellevue. By 2013, the church was named one of America's fastest growing churches by Outreach Magazine. Today, it serves almost 7,500 people every Sunday and has six locations throughout the Nashville area, including in Bellevue, Dickson, Franklin and Mt. Juliet. Aaron Westerman has been on staff since 2009 as Director of IT, specializing in Networks, Database, Google Apps, MacOS, iOS and all things Apple, Sys Admin, and General Direction on Technology Decisions. Books mentioned in this podcast: "What If; Scientific Answers to Hypothetical Questions" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544456866 "Never Split The Difference" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062407805 "Thinking Fast and Slow" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374533555 "Voice Lessons For Parents" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501142399 Special Guest: Aaron Westerman.

Todd and Jeff talk about MxU and FILO, along with topics such as balancing family and work, how to stay true to who we are as Christ Followers and what it means to thrive as a technical artist in the local church.

This week Van interviews Lee Fields from Bayside Church and MXu. They discuss all things volunteers, MXu and of course, Christmas movies. Guests: Van Metschke Lee Fields Theme song: But I Play One on TV (I'm Not a Fuzoid) by Norm Stockton from his Tea in the Typhoon album.

We're back! After a 2 month hiatus the MxU Podcast has returned with a special interview with FOH engineer Greg Price. He's a great friend of team MxU with a TON of great stuff to share about life, mixing, his beginnings, and more.

Ya'll ready for the newest podcast banger from Worship Leader Probs? In this episode, the guys address stage fright, share prayer concerns and finish their conversation with the guys from MxU. Hope you enjoy the golden nuggets of wisdom found in this episode. Episode Breakdown: Intro: 23s MVP's: 6m 48s Prayer Concerns: 11m 42s Sliding into the DM's: MXU interview: 22m 56s

Grab your favorite device for listening to podcasts and head to Starby's cause Worship Leader Probs is back! This episode includes a discussion about people who are on their phones during rehearsal, an incredible segment filled with the craziest stuff people have said to our WLP listeners at church, and a spirited conversation with the guys from MxU. Have the fire department on speed dial cause this episode is lit. To learn more about the guys from MxU visit mxu.rocks and follow them on social media: @mxurocks on Instagram, @MxUrocks on Twitter, and MxU on Facebook. Episode Breakdown: Intro: 23s MVPs: 8m 50s Prayer Concerns: 13m 56s Sliding Into DMs: 17m 58s MxU Interview: 26m 05s Closing Thoughts: 1hr 10m

Merry Christmas from MxU! This episode features a sample of the MxU FORUM held in Orlando last month, a Church sound complaint makes the TV news, and Jeff is at home for Christmas while Lee and Stone continue to grind away. The jealousy is real.

En Ivoox puedes encontrar sólo algunos de los audios de Mindalia. Para escuchar las más de 10 grabaciones diarias que publicamos entra en https://www.mindaliatelevision.com. Si deseas ver el vídeo perteneciente a este audio, pincha aquí: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIEN3Nezs74 Si quieres ver el vídeo original completo, sigue el siguiente enlace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxU-k... Mesa compuesta por: • María Luisa García: Reflexóloga, Radiestesista de flores de Bach y del Mediterráneo, Sumiller // Lectora Profesional de Registros Akáshicos de la Escuela ARCI • María del Pilar Matilla: Abogada del Ilustre colegio de abogados de Madrid y Alcala de Henares. Especialista en derecho civil y penal // Lectora de Registros Akáshicos de la Escuela ARCI • Antonio González: Licenciado en Psicología, Facilitador/Consultor de RR.HH, apasionado por las personas y su desarrollo // Alumno de Registros Akáshicos de la Escuela ARCI • María José Trillo: Psicóloga, Mediadora familiar y de menores, Formadora y Consultora empresarial // Maestra de Registros Akáshicos con Certificación Internacional ARCI ------------------------------EVENTO ORGANIZADO POR------------------------------ María José Trillo (Madrid) http://www.mariajosetrillo.com ------------------INFORMACION SOBRE MINDALIA------------------- Mindalia.com y Mindalia Televisión son una ONG SIN ANIMO DE LUCRO Si te ha gustado este video, APOYANOS CON UNA DONACION: https://www.mindaliatelevision.com/ha... SUSCRIBETE AL CANAL DE YOUTUBE para no perderte ningún video: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c... AYUDA A MINDALIA, SIN PAGAR NI UN SÓLO CÉNTIMO MÁS, CON TUS COMPRAS Y RESERVAS ONLINE: http://helpfree.ly/j20544 MILES DE VIDEOS de conferencias y entrevistas de interés en http://www.mindaliatelevision.com Participa en las CONFERENCIAS EN DIRECTO: http://television.mindalia.com/catego... -Puedes escuchar este y otros audios en Ivoox: http://mindaliacomradio.ivoox.com PIDE O ENVIA AYUDA http://www.mindalia.com - La Red Social de Ayuda a través del Pensamiento SIGUENOS EN REDES SOCIALES: -Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/mindaliacom -Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mindalia.ayuda/ -Twitter: http://twitter.com/mindaliacom -Pinterest: https://es.pinterest.com/mindaliacom/ DESCARGATE LAS APLICACIONES MOVILES GRATUITAS: Mindalia Multimedia https://play.google.com/store/apps/de... Mindalia Red de Ayuda https://play.google.com/store/apps/de... CONTACTA CON NOSOTROS: http://television.mindalia.com/contacto/ -Skype: mindalia.com ¿Tienes un video que te gustaría que publicáramos? Envíanoslo!!

En Ivoox puedes encontrar sólo algunos de los audios de Mindalia. Para escuchar las más de 10 grabaciones diarias que publicamos entra en https://www.mindaliatelevision.com. Si deseas ver el vídeo perteneciente a este audio, pincha aquí: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIEN3Nezs74 Si quieres ver el vídeo original completo, sigue el siguiente enlace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxU-k... Mesa compuesta por: • María Luisa García: Reflexóloga, Radiestesista de flores de Bach y del Mediterráneo, Sumiller // Lectora Profesional de Registros Akáshicos de la Escuela ARCI • María del Pilar Matilla: Abogada del Ilustre colegio de abogados de Madrid y Alcala de Henares. Especialista en derecho civil y penal // Lectora de Registros Akáshicos de la Escuela ARCI • Antonio González: Licenciado en Psicología, Facilitador/Consultor de RR.HH, apasionado por las personas y su desarrollo // Alumno de Registros Akáshicos de la Escuela ARCI • María José Trillo: Psicóloga, Mediadora familiar y de menores, Formadora y Consultora empresarial // Maestra de Registros Akáshicos con Certificación Internacional ARCI ------------------------------EVENTO ORGANIZADO POR------------------------------ María José Trillo (Madrid) http://www.mariajosetrillo.com ------------------INFORMACION SOBRE MINDALIA------------------- Mindalia.com y Mindalia Televisión son una ONG SIN ANIMO DE LUCRO Si te ha gustado este video, APOYANOS CON UNA DONACION: https://www.mindaliatelevision.com/ha... SUSCRIBETE AL CANAL DE YOUTUBE para no perderte ningún video: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c... AYUDA A MINDALIA, SIN PAGAR NI UN SÓLO CÉNTIMO MÁS, CON TUS COMPRAS Y RESERVAS ONLINE: http://helpfree.ly/j20544 MILES DE VIDEOS de conferencias y entrevistas de interés en http://www.mindaliatelevision.com Participa en las CONFERENCIAS EN DIRECTO: http://television.mindalia.com/catego... -Puedes escuchar este y otros audios en Ivoox: http://mindaliacomradio.ivoox.com PIDE O ENVIA AYUDA http://www.mindalia.com - La Red Social de Ayuda a través del Pensamiento SIGUENOS EN REDES SOCIALES: -Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/mindaliacom -Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mindalia.ayuda/ -Twitter: http://twitter.com/mindaliacom -Pinterest: https://es.pinterest.com/mindaliacom/ DESCARGATE LAS APLICACIONES MOVILES GRATUITAS: Mindalia Multimedia https://play.google.com/store/apps/de... Mindalia Red de Ayuda https://play.google.com/store/apps/de... CONTACTA CON NOSOTROS: http://television.mindalia.com/contacto/ -Skype: mindalia.com ¿Tienes un video que te gustaría que publicáramos? Envíanoslo!!

En Ivoox puedes encontrar sólo algunos de los audios de Mindalia. Para escuchar las más de 10 grabaciones diarias que publicamos entra en https://www.mindaliatelevision.com. Si deseas ver el vídeo perteneciente a este audio, pincha aquí: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIEN3Nezs74 Si quieres ver el vídeo original completo, sigue el siguiente enlace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxU-k... Mesa compuesta por: • María Luisa García: Reflexóloga, Radiestesista de flores de Bach y del Mediterráneo, Sumiller // Lectora Profesional de Registros Akáshicos de la Escuela ARCI • María del Pilar Matilla: Abogada del Ilustre colegio de abogados de Madrid y Alcala de Henares. Especialista en derecho civil y penal // Lectora de Registros Akáshicos de la Escuela ARCI • Antonio González: Licenciado en Psicología, Facilitador/Consultor de RR.HH, apasionado por las personas y su desarrollo // Alumno de Registros Akáshicos de la Escuela ARCI • María José Trillo: Psicóloga, Mediadora familiar y de menores, Formadora y Consultora empresarial // Maestra de Registros Akáshicos con Certificación Internacional ARCI ------------------------------EVENTO ORGANIZADO POR------------------------------ María José Trillo (Madrid) http://www.mariajosetrillo.com ------------------INFORMACION SOBRE MINDALIA------------------- Mindalia.com y Mindalia Televisión son una ONG SIN ANIMO DE LUCRO Si te ha gustado este video, APOYANOS CON UNA DONACION: https://www.mindaliatelevision.com/ha... SUSCRIBETE AL CANAL DE YOUTUBE para no perderte ningún video: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c... AYUDA A MINDALIA, SIN PAGAR NI UN SÓLO CÉNTIMO MÁS, CON TUS COMPRAS Y RESERVAS ONLINE: http://helpfree.ly/j20544 MILES DE VIDEOS de conferencias y entrevistas de interés en http://www.mindaliatelevision.com Participa en las CONFERENCIAS EN DIRECTO: http://television.mindalia.com/catego... -Puedes escuchar este y otros audios en Ivoox: http://mindaliacomradio.ivoox.com PIDE O ENVIA AYUDA http://www.mindalia.com - La Red Social de Ayuda a través del Pensamiento SIGUENOS EN REDES SOCIALES: -Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/mindaliacom -Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mindalia.ayuda/ -Twitter: http://twitter.com/mindaliacom -Pinterest: https://es.pinterest.com/mindaliacom/ DESCARGATE LAS APLICACIONES MOVILES GRATUITAS: Mindalia Multimedia https://play.google.com/store/apps/de... Mindalia Red de Ayuda https://play.google.com/store/apps/de... CONTACTA CON NOSOTROS: http://television.mindalia.com/contacto/ -Skype: mindalia.com ¿Tienes un video que te gustaría que publicáramos? Envíanoslo!!

Complete Show Notes: https://wp.me/p1sfi8-aPW Interview with Andrew Stone from MxU about the moment on tour that changed his whole identity and why he started mixing for himeself instead of everyone else. Start supporting Sound Design Live on Patreon today for as little as $1: https://www.patreon.com/sounddesignlive

MxU is a unique one-day FOH mixing event which Nate attended in August. This episode includes a review of MxU Boston and some key takeaways for anyone who is considering attending in the future. Show Notes: Special Guests: N/A Release Date: September 1, 2018 Running Time: 36:04 MxU Boston https://avshoptalk.com/subscribe Contact: … Read More

On this episode, we get to talk to the MxU guys! Jeff Sandstrom, Lee Fields, and Andrew Stone talk about how MxU came about and we look ahead to all the ways they are investing in the local church technical arts community through MxU Live, MxU Coaching, and MxU Live.

It's already been a busy year for team MxU! We chat cheap vs expensive console, Sweden and SoCal, a soapbox like no other, MxU All-Access, and wrap up with the grand finale of Sir Madix!

You can't handle all that Episode 7 has! A brand new type of MxU event is announced in this episode. A hilarious #TurnDownForMxU and part 1 of a fantastic interview with our new friend, Brad Madix (Rush, Def Leppard, Van Halen, Shakira, Beck, & then some).

INTRODUCING #TurnDownForMxU! Listen to learn how you can be apart of the newest MxU addition. We kick off part 1 of a KILLER interview with Ken Pooch Van Druten. The man behind the faders of some small local bands like, Justin Bieber, Linkin Park, Katy Perry, KISS, Pantera, and the rest of the bands you bought CD's of for .13 cents on Columbia House mailers. Enjoy!