Podcasts about Neo

Anastasios Angelopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Arena, the real-world evaluation platform that has become a leading referee of the global AI model race. Arena has raised $250 million, with the latest round valuing the company at $1.7BN. Arena recently surpassed $100M ARR just eight months after launching its enterprise offering, powered by more than 30 million monthly users. AGENDA: 00:00 – Intro: "Kimi beat every American model": What Nobody Wants to Admit… 05:20 – Is this the true commoditization of models? Are they just a utility layer now? 07:30 – Do Chinese open source models cannibalize the closed frontier labs? 10:30 – Why has America's open source community lagged so badly behind China? 17:20 – Will Chinese models be banned in the US — and does hosting locally really kill the backdoor risk? 23:20 – Are enterprises really terrified of working with the frontier labs? 27:20 – Why hasn't inference got cheaper — and what happens when Anthropic's "disgustingly high" margins go public? 30:20 – Who should decide if a model is safe to release: the government, a neutral body, or nobody? 33:10 – Are we about to see cyberattacks like we've never seen before? (The fake candidate who passed every interview) 37:00 – 75 Neo labs: what separates the winners from the two-thirds worth nothing? 40:45 – Is data actually a commodity — and can data providers be $100BN companies? 48:00 – Can you be the referee when the players are paying you? (And Arena's real revenue) 50:45 – Will the model providers eat the application layer? Are Harvey, Lagora and Figma in trouble? 54:10 – Quickfire: Why hasn't NVIDIA bounced on the rise of open source, who hits $10 trillion first, and does the compute debt cycle end in insolvency?    

Tonight, we're talking vampires, history's greatest transformation from suspiciously bloated corpse to immortal bisexual aristocrat with a castle, a cape, and absolutely no respect for personal boundaries. We dig into garlic, holy symbols, counting mustard seeds, bricks shoved into mouths, and the alarming number of vampire prevention methods involving someone's severed head near their butt. Then we compare D&D's growing collection of bitey hit-point bags with Pathfinder's bold decision to let you turn almost anything into a vampire. Grab a wooden stake, protect your neck, and remember: the undead pyramid scheme is not a scam if every wight gets eight zombies beneath them. Show Notes Vampires have been haunting folklore for centuries, but before they became wealthy, seductive goth icons, they were mostly blamed on misunderstood decomposition, disease, and humanity's long tradition of confidently inventing explanations for things it did not understand. We explore the regional beliefs surrounding vampires, including animal transformations, compulsive counting, invitations, running water, graveyard horse tests, and the creative methods people used to keep corpses from returning. Apparently, garlic was not enough. Sometimes you needed decapitation, holy water, a brick, and a very specific head-placement strategy. From there, we follow the vampire from folklore through The Vampyre and Dracula, then directly into tabletop gaming. Strahd is examined as D&D's legally distinct Dracula, complete with an Eastern European castle, disposable vampire brides, an unpleasant servant, and an unhealthy obsession with one particular woman. We discuss why vampires make such effective villains, whether they should always be irredeemably evil, and how their intelligence, charisma, resources, and ability to escape make them more interesting than another monster waiting patiently to be reduced to zero hit points. Tyler walks through D&D's increasingly crowded vampire bestiary, including vampire spawn, familiars, mind flayers, Nosferatu, infernalists, wardens, spellcasters, warriors, umbral lords, hopping vampires, and several versions of Strahd. Ash discovers that many updated vampires lost their regeneration and responds with the measured restraint everyone has come to expect. We also uncover the Jiangshi's undead pyramid scheme, where drained victims become wights, wights create zombies, and everyone receives an exciting opportunity to become their own boss. Pathfinder 2e takes a more flexible approach with vampire adjustments that can be applied to nearly any living creature. Want a vampire dwarf, vampire monster, full vampire character, Dhampir, or suspiciously blood-focused animal companion? Pathfinder has paperwork for that. We compare its vampire families, weaknesses, regeneration, player archetypes, unusual feeding options, and the many ways players can embrace eternal life without being reduced to a single edgy species choice. Finally, the Question of the Week asks how to deliver a satisfying campaign ending. The hosts discuss final boss battles, player-driven epilogues, heroic sacrifices, closing character arcs, carrying consequences into future campaigns, and giving everyone enough closure to explain what their character does after saving the world. Tyler also recommends a total party kill, because rocks falling remains the most efficient form of narrative finality. Key Takeaways Vampire folklore varied dramatically between regions, but blood drinking, animal transformations, compulsions, returning corpses, and elaborate burial precautions appeared frequently. Many historical vampire scares were fueled by misunderstandings about decomposition, disease, bloating, and blood appearing around a corpse's mouth. Bram Stoker's Dracula established many of the traits associated with modern vampires, including wealth, sophistication, seduction, immortality, and aristocratic menace. Strahd is essentially D&D's version of Dracula, enhanced with wizard abilities, legendary actions, extensive resources, and enough emotional baggage to fill Castle Ravenloft. Vampires make strong recurring villains because they are intelligent, charismatic, difficult to permanently destroy, and capable of retreating to fight another day. D&D offers numerous vampire variants, but several newer designs reduce them to durable biting monsters, and the removal of regeneration makes them feel less distinct. The Jiangshi can create an expanding hierarchy of wights and zombies, producing what can only be described as an undead pyramid scheme. Pathfinder 2e's vampire adjustments allow GMs to apply vampire abilities to existing creatures instead of relying entirely on separate stat blocks. Pathfinder also provides more vampire-related player options, including the Dhampir heritage, vampire archetype, vampiric companions, and blood-draining spells. A satisfying campaign ending should extend beyond defeating the final boss and give players room to resolve relationships, describe their futures, and address the consequences of their choices. Asking characters what they hope to do after the adventure can help the GM build meaningful rewards and bring long-running stories full circle. Heroic sacrifice can create a powerful bittersweet ending when the choice belongs to the player rather than being forced upon them. Plot holes may be forgotten, but players remember when an old joke, promise, relationship, or seemingly insignificant choice returns during the finale. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Tonight, we're talking vampires, history's greatest transformation from suspiciously bloated corpse to immortal bisexual aristocrat with a castle, a cape, and absolutely no respect for personal boundaries. We dig into garlic, holy symbols, counting mustard seeds, bricks shoved into mouths, and the alarming number of vampire prevention methods involving someone's severed head near their butt. Then we compare D&D's growing collection of bitey hit-point bags with Pathfinder's bold decision to let you turn almost anything into a vampire. Grab a wooden stake, protect your neck, and remember: the undead pyramid scheme is not a scam if every wight gets eight zombies beneath them. Show Notes Vampires have been haunting folklore for centuries, but before they became wealthy, seductive goth icons, they were mostly blamed on misunderstood decomposition, disease, and humanity's long tradition of confidently inventing explanations for things it did not understand. We explore the regional beliefs surrounding vampires, including animal transformations, compulsive counting, invitations, running water, graveyard horse tests, and the creative methods people used to keep corpses from returning. Apparently, garlic was not enough. Sometimes you needed decapitation, holy water, a brick, and a very specific head-placement strategy. From there, we follow the vampire from folklore through The Vampyre and Dracula, then directly into tabletop gaming. Strahd is examined as D&D's legally distinct Dracula, complete with an Eastern European castle, disposable vampire brides, an unpleasant servant, and an unhealthy obsession with one particular woman. We discuss why vampires make such effective villains, whether they should always be irredeemably evil, and how their intelligence, charisma, resources, and ability to escape make them more interesting than another monster waiting patiently to be reduced to zero hit points. Tyler walks through D&D's increasingly crowded vampire bestiary, including vampire spawn, familiars, mind flayers, Nosferatu, infernalists, wardens, spellcasters, warriors, umbral lords, hopping vampires, and several versions of Strahd. Ash discovers that many updated vampires lost their regeneration and responds with the measured restraint everyone has come to expect. We also uncover the Jiangshi's undead pyramid scheme, where drained victims become wights, wights create zombies, and everyone receives an exciting opportunity to become their own boss. Pathfinder 2e takes a more flexible approach with vampire adjustments that can be applied to nearly any living creature. Want a vampire dwarf, vampire monster, full vampire character, Dhampir, or suspiciously blood-focused animal companion? Pathfinder has paperwork for that. We compare its vampire families, weaknesses, regeneration, player archetypes, unusual feeding options, and the many ways players can embrace eternal life without being reduced to a single edgy species choice. Finally, the Question of the Week asks how to deliver a satisfying campaign ending. The hosts discuss final boss battles, player-driven epilogues, heroic sacrifices, closing character arcs, carrying consequences into future campaigns, and giving everyone enough closure to explain what their character does after saving the world. Tyler also recommends a total party kill, because rocks falling remains the most efficient form of narrative finality. Key Takeaways Vampire folklore varied dramatically between regions, but blood drinking, animal transformations, compulsions, returning corpses, and elaborate burial precautions appeared frequently. Many historical vampire scares were fueled by misunderstandings about decomposition, disease, bloating, and blood appearing around a corpse's mouth. Bram Stoker's Dracula established many of the traits associated with modern vampires, including wealth, sophistication, seduction, immortality, and aristocratic menace. Strahd is essentially D&D's version of Dracula, enhanced with wizard abilities, legendary actions, extensive resources, and enough emotional baggage to fill Castle Ravenloft. Vampires make strong recurring villains because they are intelligent, charismatic, difficult to permanently destroy, and capable of retreating to fight another day. D&D offers numerous vampire variants, but several newer designs reduce them to durable biting monsters, and the removal of regeneration makes them feel less distinct. The Jiangshi can create an expanding hierarchy of wights and zombies, producing what can only be described as an undead pyramid scheme. Pathfinder 2e's vampire adjustments allow GMs to apply vampire abilities to existing creatures instead of relying entirely on separate stat blocks. Pathfinder also provides more vampire-related player options, including the Dhampir heritage, vampire archetype, vampiric companions, and blood-draining spells. A satisfying campaign ending should extend beyond defeating the final boss and give players room to resolve relationships, describe their futures, and address the consequences of their choices. Asking characters what they hope to do after the adventure can help the GM build meaningful rewards and bring long-running stories full circle. Heroic sacrifice can create a powerful bittersweet ending when the choice belongs to the player rather than being forced upon them. Plot holes may be forgotten, but players remember when an old joke, promise, relationship, or seemingly insignificant choice returns during the finale. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Before you paste that customer list, that blood test result or that contract into your favourite AI tool, it's worth pausing for a second. Whatever you hand over doesn't just disappear after you get your answer. It sits somewhere, and depending on the tool and the settings, it might be doing more than just answering your question. Most people have never actually checked what happens to their data once it goes in or thought about the difference between what's fine to share and what's better redacted first. In this How I AI episode, Neo and I work through what's actually safe to give AI and what's better left out. We cover how to check your settings so free tools aren't training on your data, how to de-identify sensitive things like health results and contracts, the rules that change once you're at work, and the one question to ask yourself before you upload anything. What you'll learn: How to know if AI is quietly training on the data you give it, and how to switch that off The one question to ask before you upload anything to AI Why work and home should be treated completely differently when it comes to AI What to redact from contracts, spreadsheets and client files before sharing them Where the line sits between using AI as a sounding board and relying on it too much Practical AI tools for productivity and focus Real-world AI workflows used by high performers How to use AI at work without burning out Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams. How I AI is a special series within How I Work where Neo and I explore how high performers are using AI at work to boost productivity, make better decisions and reduce overwhelm. My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai) If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/ Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: Martin Imber See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Play NowEpisode 406 of the Seibertron.com Twincast/Podcast kicks off the show with thoughts on the first image showing the lineup for Blokees Wheels series 4. The crew then digs into San Diego Comic Con 2026 reveals with a huge slate, including but not limited to the Collaborative Grave Digger, Age of the Primes' final wave featuring deluxe class toys such as Breakaway and Alpha Bravo, Studio Series entries like Nautica and Red Alert, and even more such as Energon Universe Shredhead. Discussion then moves to the Tomy Takara reveal of Adamas Machina Magna Regulus before listeners then take center stage as the crew ponders Six Combiners, dioramas, Japanese Beast Wars toy updates and Cyberworld alt-modes. Finally, "Bragging Rights" bring this show to a close.

Welcome to Ranger levels 1 through 4, where you can become a deadly shadow archer, command your own miniature dragon, or sacrifice your entire action so that a flying snake with the structural integrity of wet parchment can participate in combat. In this episode, we explore Favored Enemies nobody tracks, terrain nobody visits, spells competing for the same concentration slot, and the revolutionary discovery that the Ranger becomes significantly better when you replace most of the Ranger. Grab your longbow, release your drake, and prepare to whisper, "Go get 'em, little buddy," moments before your animal companion is killed by incidental damage. Show Notes The Ranger has spent years carrying a terrible reputation, but is the entire class actually bad, or did everyone read the original Beast Master, experience psychic damage, and refuse to look at the class again? In this episode, we begin our journey through the 2014 Ranger from levels 1 through 4. We break down the class's ability scores, armor, weapons, skills, Fighting Styles, spellcasting, and its awkward position somewhere between Fighter, Rogue, and person who remembers to bring enough trail rations. We examine the original Favored Enemy and Natural Explorer features, which are extremely useful when the campaign takes place in one specific biome against one specific enemy and the DM insists that every mile of travel be handled in real time. Then we look at Tasha's optional features, including Favored Foe and Deft Explorer, which give Rangers abilities they might actually use during an adventure. At level 3, the builds split dramatically. Randall embraces the darkness with a Gloom Stalker built around stealth, hand crossbows, and making an alarming number of attacks before the enemy understands that combat has started. Ash chooses the Drakewarden, gaining a durable dragon companion that can attack, support allies, and generally behave like a functional subclass feature. Tyler, meanwhile, voluntarily builds the original Player's Handbook Beast Master. Armed with determination, optimism, and a flying snake that can be eliminated by an aggressively closed door, he attempts to prove that the subclass can work. It technically can, provided your definition of working includes surrendering your action, protecting your pet at all costs, and carrying its body around until the DM allows you to find another one. By level 4, the difference is impossible to ignore. The Gloom Stalker is attacking repeatedly from the shadows, the Drakewarden is firing arrows while a dragon controls the front line, and the Beast Master is pointing toward the enemy and asking his snake to please do something useful. Two Rangers are ready for the next tier of play. One Ranger needs to lie down. Key Takeaways Dexterity is usually the Ranger's best primary ability. It supports ranged and finesse weapons, Armor Class, initiative, Stealth, and several important saving throws without demanding the impossible ability spread required by most Strength builds. The original level-one features are painfully campaign-dependent. Favored Enemy mostly helps with tracking and recalling information, while Natural Explorer becomes relevant only when the party is traveling through the terrain you selected. Tasha's optional features are major improvements. Favored Foe provides extra damage without consuming a bonus action, while Deft Explorer gives the Ranger expertise in a chosen skill and helps it better occupy the party's scout role. Bonus-action management matters. Hunter's Mark, two-weapon fighting, Crossbow Expert, and companion commands can all compete for the same bonus action, so your build needs a clear plan for how its turns will work. Archery remains an excellent Fighting Style. The attack bonus is reliable, useful at every level, and especially valuable for builds planning to use powerful ranged feats later. Ranger spells should provide more than damage. Healing, control, mobility, and utility can offer better value than repeatedly concentrating on Hunter's Mark, especially when Favored Foe can handle shorter fights. Most Ranger subclasses are functional or strong. Gloom Stalker offers excellent opening-round offense, Drakewarden delivers an effective companion, and even Hunter remains playable. The original Beast Master is the feature responsible for much of the class's terrible reputation. The original Beast Master has a brutal action economy. Commanding the companion to attack consumes the Ranger's action, leaving the character watching their pet play D&D on their behalf. Modern companion subclasses demonstrate what Beast Master should have been. The Drake can act through a bonus action, contribute extra damage with its reaction, support the front line, and survive encounters without requiring constant emotional and medical supervision. Your build should have a recognizable combat loop by level 4. Randall attacks rapidly from hiding, Ash fires from range while the Drake fights up front, and Tyler commands a snake while quietly reconsidering every decision that brought him here. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to Ranger levels 1 through 4, where you can become a deadly shadow archer, command your own miniature dragon, or sacrifice your entire action so that a flying snake with the structural integrity of wet parchment can participate in combat. In this episode, we explore Favored Enemies nobody tracks, terrain nobody visits, spells competing for the same concentration slot, and the revolutionary discovery that the Ranger becomes significantly better when you replace most of the Ranger. Grab your longbow, release your drake, and prepare to whisper, "Go get 'em, little buddy," moments before your animal companion is killed by incidental damage. Show Notes The Ranger has spent years carrying a terrible reputation, but is the entire class actually bad, or did everyone read the original Beast Master, experience psychic damage, and refuse to look at the class again? In this episode, we begin our journey through the 2014 Ranger from levels 1 through 4. We break down the class's ability scores, armor, weapons, skills, Fighting Styles, spellcasting, and its awkward position somewhere between Fighter, Rogue, and person who remembers to bring enough trail rations. We examine the original Favored Enemy and Natural Explorer features, which are extremely useful when the campaign takes place in one specific biome against one specific enemy and the DM insists that every mile of travel be handled in real time. Then we look at Tasha's optional features, including Favored Foe and Deft Explorer, which give Rangers abilities they might actually use during an adventure. At level 3, the builds split dramatically. Randall embraces the darkness with a Gloom Stalker built around stealth, hand crossbows, and making an alarming number of attacks before the enemy understands that combat has started. Ash chooses the Drakewarden, gaining a durable dragon companion that can attack, support allies, and generally behave like a functional subclass feature. Tyler, meanwhile, voluntarily builds the original Player's Handbook Beast Master. Armed with determination, optimism, and a flying snake that can be eliminated by an aggressively closed door, he attempts to prove that the subclass can work. It technically can, provided your definition of working includes surrendering your action, protecting your pet at all costs, and carrying its body around until the DM allows you to find another one. By level 4, the difference is impossible to ignore. The Gloom Stalker is attacking repeatedly from the shadows, the Drakewarden is firing arrows while a dragon controls the front line, and the Beast Master is pointing toward the enemy and asking his snake to please do something useful. Two Rangers are ready for the next tier of play. One Ranger needs to lie down. Key Takeaways Dexterity is usually the Ranger's best primary ability. It supports ranged and finesse weapons, Armor Class, initiative, Stealth, and several important saving throws without demanding the impossible ability spread required by most Strength builds. The original level-one features are painfully campaign-dependent. Favored Enemy mostly helps with tracking and recalling information, while Natural Explorer becomes relevant only when the party is traveling through the terrain you selected. Tasha's optional features are major improvements. Favored Foe provides extra damage without consuming a bonus action, while Deft Explorer gives the Ranger expertise in a chosen skill and helps it better occupy the party's scout role. Bonus-action management matters. Hunter's Mark, two-weapon fighting, Crossbow Expert, and companion commands can all compete for the same bonus action, so your build needs a clear plan for how its turns will work. Archery remains an excellent Fighting Style. The attack bonus is reliable, useful at every level, and especially valuable for builds planning to use powerful ranged feats later. Ranger spells should provide more than damage. Healing, control, mobility, and utility can offer better value than repeatedly concentrating on Hunter's Mark, especially when Favored Foe can handle shorter fights. Most Ranger subclasses are functional or strong. Gloom Stalker offers excellent opening-round offense, Drakewarden delivers an effective companion, and even Hunter remains playable. The original Beast Master is the feature responsible for much of the class's terrible reputation. The original Beast Master has a brutal action economy. Commanding the companion to attack consumes the Ranger's action, leaving the character watching their pet play D&D on their behalf. Modern companion subclasses demonstrate what Beast Master should have been. The Drake can act through a bonus action, contribute extra damage with its reaction, support the front line, and survive encounters without requiring constant emotional and medical supervision. Your build should have a recognizable combat loop by level 4. Randall attacks rapidly from hiding, Ash fires from range while the Drake fights up front, and Tyler commands a snake while quietly reconsidering every decision that brought him here. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Neo the GameStop Neckbeard Gatekeeper: https://www.youtube.com/playli... Neo is a gatekeeping neckbeard gamestop employee. He seems to have a bit of a crush on his coworker, and uses his vast gaming knowledge to impress her. Except he doesn't actually know that much about games. Or how to interact with people. Yup, pretty cringe. It doesn't matter what your background is, you always need to treat people like people and not use them simply to get off. Neckbeards seem to learn this lesson particularly slow and it really does make my blood boil... So we must bring it to light so others don't suffer alone. For your fill of neckbeard stories we've got you covered with the freshest weeaboo, niceguy, and neckbeard happenings on reddit. Stick with ReddX for your daily dose of cringe with a side-dish of relatability. You might even feel good for dessert... But who can say? ------------------------------------------------------------ #reddit #neckbeard #gamestop #coworkers #gatekeeping #redditstories Discord: https://discord.gg/Sju7YckUWu Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/daytondo... PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/daytondo... Patreon: http://patreon.com/daytondoes Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/daytond... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReddX... Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReddX... Amazon link to my mic: https://amzn.to/3lInsRR ReddX merch: https://teespring.com/stores/r... Character art: https://twitter.com/DarkleyStu... Creepypasta channel: https://www.youtube.com/Dayton... Gaming channel: https://www.youtube.com/dayton... Wifey's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channe... ------------------------------------------------------------ Playlists: Full neckbeard stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... All neckbeard stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... All legbeard stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... RPG Horror Stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... Weeaboo tales: https://www.youtube.com/playli... ------------------------------------------------------------ Podcasts: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/... Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/reddxy iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/... Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/fe... Spreaker: https://www.spreaker.com/show/... Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podc... Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/us/show... Podcast Addict: https://podcastaddict.com/podc... JioSaavn: https://www.jiosaavn.com/shows... Also on Castbox, Audible, and iHeartRadio! Have you ever met a neckbeard or a nice guy? They are frustrating to deal with, but luckily you aren't alone! These r/neckbeardstories from Reddit are among the top posts of all time and include some of the funniest Reddit stories ever posted on the neckbeard stories subreddit! rSlash NeckbeardStories have all kinds of funny neckbeards in them, but especially the nice guy. And the weeaboo. There is a wide spectrum of neckbeards, and this is but a small slice of it. Listening to ReddX's neckbeard stories playlist is a great experience! These neckbeard stories Top Posts of All Time from Reddit are made for you to enjoy any time you feel like it, so be sure to save my rSlash neckbeard stories playlist to your favorites! While there are many rslash channels that read r/neckbeard stories and r/prorevenge from reddit, each channel has their own way of performing them. Some of the top rSlash entitled parents channels I recommend checking out are the original rSlash, Redditor, fresh, r/Bumfries, VoiceyHere, Mr Reddit, Storytime and Darkfluff. These Reddit story channels inspired me to start my own Reddit story channel, with a focus on Entitled Parents stories and at times going into the r/pettyrevenge and r/choosingbeggars subreddit as well. Because most of my audience prefers Entitled Parents stories of Reddit, I tend to just stick with reading the r/EntitleParents Top Posts of All Time. But I also enjoy getting up close and personal with neckbeards and weeaboos from time to time. Subscribe to ReddX for the freshest daily Reddit content. I post relatable readings of Reddit posts and Reddit stories every single day! Journey with me as I relate these amazing Reddit stories to my personal life journey. I'm greatly inspired by the top reddit posts of all time videos and reddit stories on YouTube which is why I started doing them myself. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... Discord: https://discord.gg/Sju7YckUWu Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/daytondo... PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/daytondo... Patreon: http://patreon.com/daytondoes Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/daytond... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReddX... Merch: https://reddx-shop.fourthwall....

Wizards of the Coast has revealed its plans for the future of Dungeons & Dragons, and apparently the strategy is simple: fix D&D Beyond, return to Gen Con, outsource adventures to people who know what they are doing, cross over with World of Warcraft, and traumatize a convention hall full of children with a Dark Sun trailer featuring a freshly removed spine. Tyler attended the secret briefing and emerged with five pages of notes, several enormous announcements, and absolutely no idea what D&D Icons are. So prepare yourselves for new books, old settings, digital upgrades, live puppies, and enough upcoming content to make your wallet roll a death save. EnWorld: President of WotC Steps Down Forbidden Lands (affiliate link) Show Notes Wizards of the Coast has revealed its roadmap for Dungeons & Dragons through 2027, and Tyler is here to unload everything he learned during an embargoed presentation. We begin at Gen Con, which Wizards plans to turn into the recurring home for its annual D&D announcements. There will be a massive convention presence, live events, streams, adoptable puppies, and something called D&D Icons. Everyone involved seems extremely excited about Icons. Unfortunately, nobody appears capable of explaining what they actually are. D&D Beyond is also getting a substantial overhaul. Wizards plans to introduce tools for finding groups, allow local game stores to advertise events, and form an official partnership with StartPlaying. The mobile app is being redesigned, the character builder and rules engine are being rebuilt, and new DM tools, improved search, and campaign-creation features are somewhere on the horizon. Several details remain vague, partly because the presentation's prerecorded D&D Beyond video stopped working halfway through. Technology! On the video game side, Wizards appears to be pulling back from its plan to release a major game every year. Several projects have reportedly been canceled, but Warlock and Exodus remain in development. Warlock will feature a protagonist whose patron is Tasha, while Exodus is shaping up as a science-fiction RPG with strong Mass Effect energy and a tabletop tie-in that nobody on the podcast entirely understands. The tabletop schedule begins with Arcana Unleashed, a large rules expansion containing eight subclasses, ten backgrounds, twenty-nine feats, thirty-three spells, group patrons, magical factions, forty-seven magic items, and nineteen creature stat blocks. It will also introduce evolving magic items that can grow alongside the characters using them. Its companion campaign, Deadfall, is an espionage-focused adventure running from levels 11 through 20. The characters must save Thay by opposing Szass Tam, which means the situation has become so dire that saving Thay somehow qualifies as the good outcome. The Season of Champions brings a full Dungeons & Dragons crossover with World of Warcraft. The book is being led by longtime D&D designer and Warcraft fan James Wyatt and will include eleven species, six subclasses, iconic locations, recognizable characters, dungeons, monsters designed to provide a raid-like experience, a DM screen, and a map pack with a digital adventure. It will also come in three different editions, allowing Horde and Alliance fans to continue fighting the most important battle of all: which logo belongs on the front of the book. Then comes Dark Sun. Wizards is presenting Athas as the first mature D&D setting, complete with shrink-wrapped books, content warnings, extreme violence, and a trailer that apparently wastes no time separating people from their spinal columns. Dark Sun will receive separate setting and gameplay expansions, a limited-edition Player's Handbook, a new Scion class, a DM screen, maps, and some form of adventure support. The gameplay material alone is expected to approach five hundred pages, suggesting that Wizards is not returning to Athas quietly. Greyhawk will also return during the 2027 Season of Sword and Sorcery. Crown of the Witch Queen is a 160-page adventure featuring Tasha's daughter as its central antagonist, supported by a map pack and DM screen. The final 2027 season, the Season of Rebellion, was announced without details, leaving everyone to speculate angrily until Wizards decides to explain itself. Perhaps the largest long-term change is Wizards' plan for annual setting support produced in partnership with established third-party publishers. Ghostfire Gaming will work on Ravenloft, Visionary Products and Designs will handle Eberron, and Kobold Press will support the Forgotten Realms. Wizards is also developing something with the Hickmans, although details remain scarce. The approach could finally give neglected settings regular adventures and character options, but it also raises questions about outsourcing, quality control, digital-only releases, and whether D&D is about to recreate the overwhelming flood of material from the third-edition era. Despite those concerns, the group is cautiously optimistic. Wizards seems willing to experiment, work with proven creators, support more settings, focus on tabletop products, and admit that maybe trying to become a video game company was not the best use of everyone's time. It could produce an exciting new era for D&D, or it could become an exhausting avalanche of crossovers and subscription content. Either way, Ash will be waiting for the D&D and Family Guy campaign setting so they can finally say they warned us. Key Takeaways Gen Con is becoming D&D's annual announcement hub. Wizards intends to reveal future product roadmaps there instead of relying on scattered online presentations. D&D Beyond is being extensively rebuilt. Planned improvements include group-finding tools, local game-store listings, StartPlaying integration, a redesigned app, a new character builder, a new rules engine, better search, DM tools, and campaign creation. Arcana Unleashed is a major player-focused expansion. It includes subclasses, feats, spells, backgrounds, factions, patrons, dozens of magic items, and new rules for items that evolve with their owners. Deadfall finally supports high-level campaigning. The adventure runs from levels 11 through 20 and sends the party into an espionage conflict against Szass Tam in Thay. The World of Warcraft crossover is a full product line. It includes numerous playable species, subclasses, famous locations, raid-inspired encounters, accessories, digital content, and three different cover editions. Dark Sun is returning without being noticeably softened. Wizards is positioning it as a mature setting with separate lore and gameplay books, graphic content warnings, hundreds of pages of material, and promised adventure support. Greyhawk returns with Crown of the Witch Queen. The adventure will feature Tasha's daughter as the antagonist and lean into a colorful, operatic sword-and-sorcery style. Classic settings may receive annual support. Wizards is partnering with experienced publishers to produce new Ravenloft, Eberron, and Forgotten Realms material, with another Hickman-related project also in development. Third-party partnerships could solve D&D's setting problem. Instead of leaving worlds unsupported for years, specialized publishers can create material while Wizards focuses on core rules and major releases. The biggest risk is content overload. More books, digital releases, partnerships, settings, and crossovers could strengthen the game, but they could also recreate the crowded and difficult-to-navigate release schedule of earlier editions. The overall mood is cautiously optimistic. The announcements suggest that Wizards is taking creative risks, investing in tabletop content, and making decisions that could benefit both players and the wider TTRPG industry. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Wizards of the Coast has revealed its plans for the future of Dungeons & Dragons, and apparently the strategy is simple: fix D&D Beyond, return to Gen Con, outsource adventures to people who know what they are doing, cross over with World of Warcraft, and traumatize a convention hall full of children with a Dark Sun trailer featuring a freshly removed spine. Tyler attended the secret briefing and emerged with five pages of notes, several enormous announcements, and absolutely no idea what D&D Icons are. So prepare yourselves for new books, old settings, digital upgrades, live puppies, and enough upcoming content to make your wallet roll a death save. EnWorld: President of WotC Steps Down Forbidden Lands (affiliate link) Show Notes Wizards of the Coast has revealed its roadmap for Dungeons & Dragons through 2027, and Tyler is here to unload everything he learned during an embargoed presentation. We begin at Gen Con, which Wizards plans to turn into the recurring home for its annual D&D announcements. There will be a massive convention presence, live events, streams, adoptable puppies, and something called D&D Icons. Everyone involved seems extremely excited about Icons. Unfortunately, nobody appears capable of explaining what they actually are. D&D Beyond is also getting a substantial overhaul. Wizards plans to introduce tools for finding groups, allow local game stores to advertise events, and form an official partnership with StartPlaying. The mobile app is being redesigned, the character builder and rules engine are being rebuilt, and new DM tools, improved search, and campaign-creation features are somewhere on the horizon. Several details remain vague, partly because the presentation's prerecorded D&D Beyond video stopped working halfway through. Technology! On the video game side, Wizards appears to be pulling back from its plan to release a major game every year. Several projects have reportedly been canceled, but Warlock and Exodus remain in development. Warlock will feature a protagonist whose patron is Tasha, while Exodus is shaping up as a science-fiction RPG with strong Mass Effect energy and a tabletop tie-in that nobody on the podcast entirely understands. The tabletop schedule begins with Arcana Unleashed, a large rules expansion containing eight subclasses, ten backgrounds, twenty-nine feats, thirty-three spells, group patrons, magical factions, forty-seven magic items, and nineteen creature stat blocks. It will also introduce evolving magic items that can grow alongside the characters using them. Its companion campaign, Deadfall, is an espionage-focused adventure running from levels 11 through 20. The characters must save Thay by opposing Szass Tam, which means the situation has become so dire that saving Thay somehow qualifies as the good outcome. The Season of Champions brings a full Dungeons & Dragons crossover with World of Warcraft. The book is being led by longtime D&D designer and Warcraft fan James Wyatt and will include eleven species, six subclasses, iconic locations, recognizable characters, dungeons, monsters designed to provide a raid-like experience, a DM screen, and a map pack with a digital adventure. It will also come in three different editions, allowing Horde and Alliance fans to continue fighting the most important battle of all: which logo belongs on the front of the book. Then comes Dark Sun. Wizards is presenting Athas as the first mature D&D setting, complete with shrink-wrapped books, content warnings, extreme violence, and a trailer that apparently wastes no time separating people from their spinal columns. Dark Sun will receive separate setting and gameplay expansions, a limited-edition Player's Handbook, a new Scion class, a DM screen, maps, and some form of adventure support. The gameplay material alone is expected to approach five hundred pages, suggesting that Wizards is not returning to Athas quietly. Greyhawk will also return during the 2027 Season of Sword and Sorcery. Crown of the Witch Queen is a 160-page adventure featuring Tasha's daughter as its central antagonist, supported by a map pack and DM screen. The final 2027 season, the Season of Rebellion, was announced without details, leaving everyone to speculate angrily until Wizards decides to explain itself. Perhaps the largest long-term change is Wizards' plan for annual setting support produced in partnership with established third-party publishers. Ghostfire Gaming will work on Ravenloft, Visionary Products and Designs will handle Eberron, and Kobold Press will support the Forgotten Realms. Wizards is also developing something with the Hickmans, although details remain scarce. The approach could finally give neglected settings regular adventures and character options, but it also raises questions about outsourcing, quality control, digital-only releases, and whether D&D is about to recreate the overwhelming flood of material from the third-edition era. Despite those concerns, the group is cautiously optimistic. Wizards seems willing to experiment, work with proven creators, support more settings, focus on tabletop products, and admit that maybe trying to become a video game company was not the best use of everyone's time. It could produce an exciting new era for D&D, or it could become an exhausting avalanche of crossovers and subscription content. Either way, Ash will be waiting for the D&D and Family Guy campaign setting so they can finally say they warned us. Key Takeaways Gen Con is becoming D&D's annual announcement hub. Wizards intends to reveal future product roadmaps there instead of relying on scattered online presentations. D&D Beyond is being extensively rebuilt. Planned improvements include group-finding tools, local game-store listings, StartPlaying integration, a redesigned app, a new character builder, a new rules engine, better search, DM tools, and campaign creation. Arcana Unleashed is a major player-focused expansion. It includes subclasses, feats, spells, backgrounds, factions, patrons, dozens of magic items, and new rules for items that evolve with their owners. Deadfall finally supports high-level campaigning. The adventure runs from levels 11 through 20 and sends the party into an espionage conflict against Szass Tam in Thay. The World of Warcraft crossover is a full product line. It includes numerous playable species, subclasses, famous locations, raid-inspired encounters, accessories, digital content, and three different cover editions. Dark Sun is returning without being noticeably softened. Wizards is positioning it as a mature setting with separate lore and gameplay books, graphic content warnings, hundreds of pages of material, and promised adventure support. Greyhawk returns with Crown of the Witch Queen. The adventure will feature Tasha's daughter as the antagonist and lean into a colorful, operatic sword-and-sorcery style. Classic settings may receive annual support. Wizards is partnering with experienced publishers to produce new Ravenloft, Eberron, and Forgotten Realms material, with another Hickman-related project also in development. Third-party partnerships could solve D&D's setting problem. Instead of leaving worlds unsupported for years, specialized publishers can create material while Wizards focuses on core rules and major releases. The biggest risk is content overload. More books, digital releases, partnerships, settings, and crossovers could strengthen the game, but they could also recreate the crowded and difficult-to-navigate release schedule of earlier editions. The overall mood is cautiously optimistic. The announcements suggest that Wizards is taking creative risks, investing in tabletop content, and making decisions that could benefit both players and the wider TTRPG industry. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Political conflicts related to immigration are thorny enough on their own. The issues and challenges intensify once we add to the mix our warming planet and its relationship to migration, immigration, and human displacement. Two 2024-25 CASBS fellows – Maureen Eger, a sociologist of immigration, and Alice Farmer, a refugee lawyer specializing in climate change and displacement – discuss scholarly and policy dimensions of the climate migration landscape in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Markoff (CASBS fellow, 2017-18). Maureen Eger: USC faculty page | personal website | Google Scholar page | Alice Farmer: LinkedIn page |  Read John Markoff's latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand  (Penguin Random House, 2022). John's next book, expected in 2027, will be published by MIT Press. Referenced in the episode or related works L. Yang, M. Eger, and Link, eds. Migration Stigma: Understanding Prejudice, Discrimination, and Exclusion (MIT Press, 2024) M. Eger and S Valdez, "From Radical Right to Neo-nationalist," European Political Scientist (2019) M. Eger, M. Hjerm, and P. Velasquez, "What is the Liberalizing Potential of Higher Education? An Analysis of Academic Fields and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Across 32 Countries," The British Journal of Sociology (2025) M. O'Brien and M. Eger, "Suppression, Spikes, and Stigma: How COVID-19 Will Shape International Migration and Hostilities toward It," International Migration Review (2020) L. Yang, M. Eger, and B. Link, "The Human Cost of Politicizing Immigration: Migration Stigma, US Politics, and Health," JAMA (2024) A. Farmer and K. Linos, "Tools to Finance Climate Mobility: An Introduction to the Symposium," American Journal of International Law (2025) A. Farmer, "Disasters in Slow Motion: Why Climate Displacement Tests International Legal Frameworks, and What to Do about it," University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law (2026) J. Bittle, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration (Simon & Schuster, 2024) G. Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration will Reshape our World (Macmillan, 2022) A. Lustgarten, On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America (Macmillan, 2024) T. Hale, Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time (Princeton Univ. Press, 2024) Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford UniversityExplore CASBS: website | Bluesky | X | YouTube |LinkedIn | podcast | latest newsletter | signup | outreach​Human CenteredProducer: Mike Gaetani | Audio engineer & co-producer: Joe Monzel

Vahit ve Yaşar dünya gündemini değerlendiriyor.0:00 Sohbet Stüdyo Değişimi7:04 Venezuela Çıkmazı Amerika Saldıracak mı?54:00 Hindistan İnsan İhracatı1:02:44 Yapay Zeka ve İşsizlik Dalgası1:11:38 Humanoid robot Neo 1:35:44 Protein Endüstrisinin Yükselişi1:57:10 Rusya'nın Satranç'ta Geri Kalması2:07:00 Ofiste Geçen Anılar ve Bağışlar

Wir sind zurück aus der Sommerpause! Und das gleich mit einem der wichtigsten Themen für Deutschland überhaupt: Die Krise bei Volkswagen. Standorte stehen auf der Kippe, zehntausende Stellen werden abgebaut. Und doch spricht man vor allem bei der Kernmarke VW von einer möglichen Trendwende. ID.Neo, ID.Cross und vor allem ID.Polo: Die neuen E-Auto-Modelle sind die Hoffnungsträger. Experten und Kund*innen loben: Reichweite und Preise stimmen endlich. Die NDR Info Wirtschaftsredaktion und unsere Korrespondenten im Ausland haben recherchiert, haben mit VW-Vorständen gesprochen, mit Experten, Influencern und Kundinnen und Kunden, auch in den wichtigen Märkten USA und China. Zwischen Euphorie und Krise – schafft Volkswagen die Wende? Darüber sprechen wir in den kommenden drei Folgen "10 Minuten Wirtschaft" - diese Folge startet mit einer Analyse der "Hoffnungsträger", im Studio ist Nicolas Lieven aus der NDR Info Wirtschaftsredaktion. Schreibt uns gerne an wirtschaft@ndr.de! Der Film zur Recherche wird in der ARD-Sendung Plusminus zu sehen sein - am 29.7. um 21:45 Uhr im Ersten oder nach Veröffentlichung in der Mediathek: https://www.ardmediathek.de/sendung/plusminus/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL3BsdXNtaW51cw

(0:00) Intro: Humanoids, Robots, & AI+ (0:57) ANYbotics' Dr. Péter Fankhauser: Why ANYbotics Bet the Company on Four-Legged Robot Dogs, Not Humanoids (13:18) Dr. Péter Fankhauser: China's Armed Robot Dogs Are "Stupid and Risky" — Inside the Terminator Debate (15:01) NEO's Bernt Børnich: Neo Ships in 2026 and Becomes an Open Robot Platform (22:18) Bernt Børnich: Robots Building Robots in Just 3 Years — "Hard Takeoff" (33:45) Boston Dynamics' Amanda McMaster: Spot Is Now the Most Deployed Robot on Earth — Atlas is the Most Capable (42:36) Amanda McMaster: Chinese Robotics Security Risks (47:14) Agility Robotics' Jonathan Hurst: Why "This Time Is Different" for Humanoids After 100 Years of False Starts (58:45) Jonathan Hurst: When Do Robots Outnumber Humans on the Factory Floor? Thanks to our partners for making this possible! AppLovin Ads is AppLovin's AI advertising platform reaching over a billion daily active users across mobile games. Full-screen video ads with a 35-second median watch time. Advertisers are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. AppLovin Ads is now open to all advertisers. Sign up at https://applovin.com/ALLIN  If your work depends on conversations — meetings, deal flow, interviews, customer calls — Plaud helps you capture and organize everything with highly accurate AI-generated notes that are not just simple summaries, but also highlight pain points, key decisions, next steps, and customizable summary templates.  Check out Plaud at https://www.plaud.ai/allin and use code ALLIN for up to 10% off! Which is also available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/43URLff (Code: ALLIN10X) Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@allin  Follow on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect

 New construction can create enormous opportunities for real estate professionals, but many agents avoid it entirely. The information is fragmented. Builders can be difficult to reach. Agents may spend hours researching communities, requesting availability, driving between developments, and assembling information for buyers. For agents interested in working with international clients, the barriers can be even greater. But what happens when agents have a simpler way to present those opportunities? In this Best Of episode, we revisit a conversation with Christian Calusa, a real estate professional and the founder of NEO. Christian explains why so many agents want to sell new construction or work globally but do not know where to begin. You'll also learn: Why many agents avoid selling new construction What prevents real estate professionals from pursuing international buyers How a new agent reportedly turned an Uber conversation into a $10.2 million sale Why a personalized landing page can become a lead-generation tool How agents can build a niche around relocation and new construction Why educating buyers before a property tour can save everyone time How technology can support relationships without replacing the REALTOR®     Guest Bio Christian Calusa is the CEO and Founder of NEO. NEO is the most adopted platform for new construction in Florida and Texas, and is rapidly expanding throughout the U.S. NEO is a unique solution that connects builders, real estate agents, and buyers in one streamlined ecosystem, offering unparalleled access to inventory, marketing tools, and sales enablement, both nationally and internationally. The platform has received multiple awards in various countries, recognizing its innovation, scalability, and impact on the real estate and PropTech sectors. Visit https://www.newestateonly.com/ to learn more or send an email to cc@newrealestateonly.com.   About Your Host Marki Lemons Ryhal is a ​​Licensed Managing Broker, REALTOR®, and avid volunteer.  She is a dynamic keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, both on-site and virtual; she's the go-to expert for artificial Intelligence, entrepreneurship, and social media in real estate. Marki Lemons Ryhal is dedicated to all things real estate, and with 25+ years of marketing experience, Marki has taught over 250,000 REALTORS® how to earn up to a 2682% return on their marketing dollars. Marki's expertise has been featured in Forbes, the Washington Post, Homes.com, and REALTOR® Magazine.   Subscribe, Rate & Review Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm, so our show reaches more people. Thank you!     

Mark crió a la hija de Mary durante 23 años. Hoy, legalmente, no tiene ningún derecho sobre ella. ¿Qué pasa cuando eliges ser padre sin serlo? ¿Cuándo el amor es real pero el papel no existe? En este episodio hablamos con Mary y Mark de Nebulosa, la pareja que ganó Eurovisión con "Zorra", sobre todo lo que nadie te advierte antes de casarte con alguien que ya tiene hijos.

Welcome to Night City, chooms, where the sky is red, the rent is due, your landlord is probably armed, and health care arrives by helicopter only if your credit score has a body count. In this episode, Ash introduces Randall and Tyler to Cyberpunk Red, a game about surviving late-stage capitalism after it bought a katana, installed cyberlegs, and decided empathy was bad for quarterly growth. The internet is dead, the new internet is haunted, corporations have private armies, your apartment is a cargo container, and if you get shot badly enough, your best hope is that Trauma Team thinks your subscription tier is worth the bullets. So chrome up, talk before you glock, and remember: in Cyberpunk, the future is not here to save you. It is here to invoice you. Cyberpunk: RED Core Rulebook (affiliate link) Show Notes This RPGBOT.Podcast Quickstart kicks off our Cyberpunk Red arc, with Ash taking the GM chair and immediately shoving Randall and Tyler into a glittering corporate hellscape where every system has failed except capitalism, which unfortunately got promoted. This is the concepts and themes episode, so before anyone gets to build a tragic little neon goblin with a gun, Ash walks us through the setting, the history, the tone, and the important survival lesson that being cool does not make you bulletproof. The episode starts in peak RPGBOT fashion: no one is ready, Producer Dan scares the cast, Evil RPGBOT becomes a conspiracy board, and the crew somehow detours through Taylor Swift, soccer, the metric system, and America's inability to understand that a third of a pound is bigger than a quarter. Eventually, because someone has to be the adult and it sure is not going to be capitalism, Ash drags everyone into Cyberpunk Red. Cyberpunk Red takes place in 2045, during the Time of Red, after the Fourth Corporate War and the pocket-nuke-sized corporate tantrum that helped turn Night City into a smoldering lesson in why companies should not have militaries. The old Net is gone, rogue AIs lurk behind the Black Wall, and the new Net is a bunch of local data structures that Netrunners have to physically approach because apparently even hacking needed to become a contact sport. Mechanically, the game runs on D10 checks and D6 damage, which sounds friendly right up until someone explains combat. Fights are fast, violent, and deeply uninterested in your character arc. Armor helps until it gets chewed apart. Critical injuries can cost you limbs, senses, or dignity. Death saves are less a dramatic countdown and more a paperwork-light way of saying congratulations, you lived long enough to regret this. Ash also digs into Netrunning, Black ICE, cyberware, humanity loss, and cyberpsychosis. Netrunners are basically hackers with a death wish and a brain cable. Black ICE is corporate malware that wants to delete either your programs or your thoughts. Cyberware lets you replace your sad meat parts with upgrades, but too much chrome can eat away at your humanity until you become less person and more violent product recall. By the end, Cyberpunk Red comes across as stylish, brutal, roleplay-heavy, and aggressively allergic to the idea that anyone is having a good time for free. It is a game about survival, reputation, scarcity, and looking incredible while the world collapses around you. Next up: character creation, where Tyler will almost certainly try to become some kind of cyber-wizard trash gremlin and everyone will pretend to be surprised. Key Takeaways Cyberpunk Red is set in 2045 during the Time of Red, which is what happens when the future catches fire and nobody with money feels personally inconvenienced enough to fix it. The setting is corporate dystopia with the safety rails removed. Governments are weak, corporations are terrifying, and basic human needs have been turned into subscription models with worse customer service. The old Net is dead because a vengeful hacker released digital nightmares into the system. Now the Black Wall keeps the murder-AIs in the internet basement, where they are definitely fine and nothing bad will ever happen. The new Net is localized, which means Netrunners have to get physically close to access points. Hacking is no longer safely done from your couch. Now it comes with floor plans and gunfire. The core system is simple: roll a D10, add your stat and skill, and try to beat the difficulty. The consequences, however, are very committed to ruining your evening. Combat is deadly, fast, and rude. Armor degrades, bullets hurt, and the game strongly encourages the sacred cyberpunk tradition of not starting a gunfight unless you are ready to become street decor. Critical injuries are nasty. Cyberpunk Red does not ask whether you are emotionally attached to your arm before it starts making suggestions. Trauma Team can save you, but only if you can afford the good plan. In Night City, even emergency rescue has premium tiers, because of course it does. Netrunners are terrifying little brain-goblins who can hack systems, fight programs, and potentially ruin someone's cyberware from the inside. They are cool, useful, and absolutely one bad roll away from becoming soup. Cyberware is powerful and stylish, but it has a humanity cost. Replace too much of yourself and the game starts asking whether you are still a person or just a problem with optics. Cyberpsychosis is not just a punishment for wanting cool robot arms. The episode points out that the game treats medical prosthetics and elective combat chrome differently, which gives the system more nuance than just metal parts make you evil. Cyberpunk Red is roleplay-forward. Rent, lifestyle, jobs, reputation, hustle, and survival all matter. You are not just adventuring. You are trying to make it to next month without being evicted, harvested, hacked, shot, or monetized. The next episode moves into character creation using the Edgerunner method, because apparently everyone agreed that dying in Night City should at least be efficient. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati  

Welcome to Night City, chooms, where the sky is red, the rent is due, your landlord is probably armed, and health care arrives by helicopter only if your credit score has a body count. In this episode, Ash introduces Randall and Tyler to Cyberpunk Red, a game about surviving late-stage capitalism after it bought a katana, installed cyberlegs, and decided empathy was bad for quarterly growth. The internet is dead, the new internet is haunted, corporations have private armies, your apartment is a cargo container, and if you get shot badly enough, your best hope is that Trauma Team thinks your subscription tier is worth the bullets. So chrome up, talk before you glock, and remember: in Cyberpunk, the future is not here to save you. It is here to invoice you. Cyberpunk: RED Core Rulebook (affiliate link) Show Notes This RPGBOT.Podcast Quickstart kicks off our Cyberpunk Red arc, with Ash taking the GM chair and immediately shoving Randall and Tyler into a glittering corporate hellscape where every system has failed except capitalism, which unfortunately got promoted. This is the concepts and themes episode, so before anyone gets to build a tragic little neon goblin with a gun, Ash walks us through the setting, the history, the tone, and the important survival lesson that being cool does not make you bulletproof. The episode starts in peak RPGBOT fashion: no one is ready, Producer Dan scares the cast, Evil RPGBOT becomes a conspiracy board, and the crew somehow detours through Taylor Swift, soccer, the metric system, and America's inability to understand that a third of a pound is bigger than a quarter. Eventually, because someone has to be the adult and it sure is not going to be capitalism, Ash drags everyone into Cyberpunk Red. Cyberpunk Red takes place in 2045, during the Time of Red, after the Fourth Corporate War and the pocket-nuke-sized corporate tantrum that helped turn Night City into a smoldering lesson in why companies should not have militaries. The old Net is gone, rogue AIs lurk behind the Black Wall, and the new Net is a bunch of local data structures that Netrunners have to physically approach because apparently even hacking needed to become a contact sport. Mechanically, the game runs on D10 checks and D6 damage, which sounds friendly right up until someone explains combat. Fights are fast, violent, and deeply uninterested in your character arc. Armor helps until it gets chewed apart. Critical injuries can cost you limbs, senses, or dignity. Death saves are less a dramatic countdown and more a paperwork-light way of saying congratulations, you lived long enough to regret this. Ash also digs into Netrunning, Black ICE, cyberware, humanity loss, and cyberpsychosis. Netrunners are basically hackers with a death wish and a brain cable. Black ICE is corporate malware that wants to delete either your programs or your thoughts. Cyberware lets you replace your sad meat parts with upgrades, but too much chrome can eat away at your humanity until you become less person and more violent product recall. By the end, Cyberpunk Red comes across as stylish, brutal, roleplay-heavy, and aggressively allergic to the idea that anyone is having a good time for free. It is a game about survival, reputation, scarcity, and looking incredible while the world collapses around you. Next up: character creation, where Tyler will almost certainly try to become some kind of cyber-wizard trash gremlin and everyone will pretend to be surprised. Key Takeaways Cyberpunk Red is set in 2045 during the Time of Red, which is what happens when the future catches fire and nobody with money feels personally inconvenienced enough to fix it. The setting is corporate dystopia with the safety rails removed. Governments are weak, corporations are terrifying, and basic human needs have been turned into subscription models with worse customer service. The old Net is dead because a vengeful hacker released digital nightmares into the system. Now the Black Wall keeps the murder-AIs in the internet basement, where they are definitely fine and nothing bad will ever happen. The new Net is localized, which means Netrunners have to get physically close to access points. Hacking is no longer safely done from your couch. Now it comes with floor plans and gunfire. The core system is simple: roll a D10, add your stat and skill, and try to beat the difficulty. The consequences, however, are very committed to ruining your evening. Combat is deadly, fast, and rude. Armor degrades, bullets hurt, and the game strongly encourages the sacred cyberpunk tradition of not starting a gunfight unless you are ready to become street decor. Critical injuries are nasty. Cyberpunk Red does not ask whether you are emotionally attached to your arm before it starts making suggestions. Trauma Team can save you, but only if you can afford the good plan. In Night City, even emergency rescue has premium tiers, because of course it does. Netrunners are terrifying little brain-goblins who can hack systems, fight programs, and potentially ruin someone's cyberware from the inside. They are cool, useful, and absolutely one bad roll away from becoming soup. Cyberware is powerful and stylish, but it has a humanity cost. Replace too much of yourself and the game starts asking whether you are still a person or just a problem with optics. Cyberpsychosis is not just a punishment for wanting cool robot arms. The episode points out that the game treats medical prosthetics and elective combat chrome differently, which gives the system more nuance than just metal parts make you evil. Cyberpunk Red is roleplay-forward. Rent, lifestyle, jobs, reputation, hustle, and survival all matter. You are not just adventuring. You are trying to make it to next month without being evicted, harvested, hacked, shot, or monetized. The next episode moves into character creation using the Edgerunner method, because apparently everyone agreed that dying in Night City should at least be efficient. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati  

The AI world has has done a spectacularly bad job of naming things. Agents, GPTs, gems, notebooks, projects, skills - you'll find a completely different word for what is essentially the same kind of tool. Agents in one place, GPTs in another, gems somewhere else. Different names, similar ideas - and no handbook to tell you that. But the tools themselves are not that complicated. Once you know what each one is built to do, knowing which to reach for becomes straightforward. In this How I AI episode, Neo and I cut through the jargon and map out what Agents, Projects, and Skills actually are, how they differ from each other, and which one to reach for depending on what you need to do. How I AI is a special series within How I Work where Neo and I explore how high performers are using AI at work to boost productivity, make better decisions and reduce overwhelm. What you'll learn: Why agents, GPTs, and gems are the same kind of thing (just with different names) When a project is the right choice over an agent What makes a skill different from a long prompt Practical AI tools for productivity and focus Real-world AI workflows used by high performers How to use AI at work without burning out Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams. My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai) If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/ Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: Martin Imber See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Pandemonium, the plane where the wind screams, gravity is a rumor, and every emergency exit has a reasonable chance of dropping you directly into the Abyss. Tyler explains the cosmology, Randall attempts to locate something resembling a usable map, Ash discovers that the wind is made from every scream anyone has ever screamed, and Producer Dan quietly realizes this entire episode will require aggressive noise reduction. Pack darkvision, ear protection, and a backup character. The weather is hostile, the architecture hates you, and even the demons would rather be somewhere else. Show Notes This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, we descend into Pandemonium, the endlessly dark maze of caves where hurricane-force winds carry ancient voices, communication is nearly impossible, and prolonged exposure can leave travelers deaf, insane, or both. The crew explores the plane's four layers, from the enormous caverns of Pandesmos to the narrowing tunnels of Cocytus, the marginally more gravity-compliant Phlegethon, and the sealed chambers of Agathion, where forgotten horrors wait patiently for some adventurer with a shovel and poor judgment. Along the way, we examine Pandemonium's strange inhabitants, exiled gods, nihilistic settlements, bizarre monsters, and oddly specific afterlives. We also follow the River Styx, investigate portals that treat destinations as optional suggestions, and discover a magical shouting spot that lets you insult someone anywhere in the multiverse, provided invisible shadow demons do not eat you first. Finally, the episode turns to using spells against player characters. The hosts discuss why illusion magic becomes terrifying in the hands of a villain, how Pass Without Trace can transform ordinary goblins into a tactical nightmare, and why Dungeon Masters should give enemy spellcasters clever strategies without simply making the players miserable. RPGBOT.Podcast Episodes The Abyss Arborea Archeron Arcadia The Beastlands Bytopia Carceri Celestia Elysium The Ethereal Plane The Feywild Gehenna Hades Hell Part 1 Hell Part 2 Limbo Mechanus Pandemonium Plane of Air Plane of Fire Shadowfell Key Takeaways Pandemonium is an environmental threat before combat even begins. Darkness, deafening winds, madness, and unpredictable gravity can challenge a party without requiring constant monster encounters. The plane contains four layers: Pandesmos, Cocytus, Phlegethon, and Agathion. Each becomes more difficult to navigate, survive, or pronounce. The wind does more than make noise. It carries voices, screams, threats, and other sounds from across history, creating an endless supernatural chorus capable of destroying a traveler's sanity. Navigation is nearly impossible when characters can walk along cave walls and ceilings and rivers can flow in whatever direction they feel like flowing. Most of Pandemonium's inhabitants are exiles, prisoners, refugees, or creatures that arrived accidentally and cannot leave. Nobody appears to have moved there because of the excellent schools. Agathion's sealed pockets make excellent prisons, vaults, and adventure locations for ancient beings that absolutely should not be awakened. The River Styx and Pandemonium's portals provide possible escape routes, but memory loss, random destinations, and ambush predators make every option terrible in a different way. Pandemonium works best when the plane itself feels like the primary antagonist. The monsters should be additional complications, not the only source of danger. Enemy illusionists can create memorable encounters, but Dungeon Masters should apply the same standards to NPC illusions that they apply to player illusions. Smart enemies using stealth, terrain, traps, and spells such as Pass Without Trace can turn supposedly weak creatures into serious threats without artificially increasing their statistics. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to Pandemonium, the plane where the wind screams, gravity is a rumor, and every emergency exit has a reasonable chance of dropping you directly into the Abyss. Tyler explains the cosmology, Randall attempts to locate something resembling a usable map, Ash discovers that the wind is made from every scream anyone has ever screamed, and Producer Dan quietly realizes this entire episode will require aggressive noise reduction. Pack darkvision, ear protection, and a backup character. The weather is hostile, the architecture hates you, and even the demons would rather be somewhere else. Show Notes This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, we descend into Pandemonium, the endlessly dark maze of caves where hurricane-force winds carry ancient voices, communication is nearly impossible, and prolonged exposure can leave travelers deaf, insane, or both. The crew explores the plane's four layers, from the enormous caverns of Pandesmos to the narrowing tunnels of Cocytus, the marginally more gravity-compliant Phlegethon, and the sealed chambers of Agathion, where forgotten horrors wait patiently for some adventurer with a shovel and poor judgment. Along the way, we examine Pandemonium's strange inhabitants, exiled gods, nihilistic settlements, bizarre monsters, and oddly specific afterlives. We also follow the River Styx, investigate portals that treat destinations as optional suggestions, and discover a magical shouting spot that lets you insult someone anywhere in the multiverse, provided invisible shadow demons do not eat you first. Finally, the episode turns to using spells against player characters. The hosts discuss why illusion magic becomes terrifying in the hands of a villain, how Pass Without Trace can transform ordinary goblins into a tactical nightmare, and why Dungeon Masters should give enemy spellcasters clever strategies without simply making the players miserable. RPGBOT.Podcast Episodes The Abyss Arborea Archeron Arcadia The Beastlands Bytopia Carceri Celestia Elysium The Ethereal Plane The Feywild Gehenna Hades Hell Part 1 Hell Part 2 Limbo Mechanus Pandemonium Plane of Air Plane of Fire Shadowfell Key Takeaways Pandemonium is an environmental threat before combat even begins. Darkness, deafening winds, madness, and unpredictable gravity can challenge a party without requiring constant monster encounters. The plane contains four layers: Pandesmos, Cocytus, Phlegethon, and Agathion. Each becomes more difficult to navigate, survive, or pronounce. The wind does more than make noise. It carries voices, screams, threats, and other sounds from across history, creating an endless supernatural chorus capable of destroying a traveler's sanity. Navigation is nearly impossible when characters can walk along cave walls and ceilings and rivers can flow in whatever direction they feel like flowing. Most of Pandemonium's inhabitants are exiles, prisoners, refugees, or creatures that arrived accidentally and cannot leave. Nobody appears to have moved there because of the excellent schools. Agathion's sealed pockets make excellent prisons, vaults, and adventure locations for ancient beings that absolutely should not be awakened. The River Styx and Pandemonium's portals provide possible escape routes, but memory loss, random destinations, and ambush predators make every option terrible in a different way. Pandemonium works best when the plane itself feels like the primary antagonist. The monsters should be additional complications, not the only source of danger. Enemy illusionists can create memorable encounters, but Dungeon Masters should apply the same standards to NPC illusions that they apply to player illusions. Smart enemies using stealth, terrain, traps, and spells such as Pass Without Trace can turn supposedly weak creatures into serious threats without artificially increasing their statistics. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

When investigative journalist Stephen Witt visited Silicon Valley's 1X Technologies to meet a new home robot named Neo, he discovered a device full of contradictions: It was elegantly designed, but often struggled to complete even the simplest of tasks, taking longer than a minute to retrieve a bottle of water. Despite its limitations, more than 10,000 people have placed deposits for the $20,000 android, and Neo is just one of a dozen humanoid robots scheduled for release in the next year. We talk to Witt about the appeal – and challenges – of home robots and how quickly the technology is actually advancing. Guest: Stephen Witt, investigative journalist; author Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent months, the open vs closed, and US vs China discussions on model ownership and sovereign/local AI have heated up to a fever pitch. So it is very very good news that Poolside AI are finally emerging with new models, like Laguna S 2.1, that are beating Thinking Machines' recent release nearly 10 times their size.Poolside's recent tech report got a lot of praise due to their level of detail, and Vibhu first covered Laguna's recent technical report on our paper club:From spending $12 million building language models for code before the world cared to creating a Model Factory that can take a model from pre-training to release in eight weeks, Eiso Kant has spent more than a decade betting that code is the path to AGI. In this episode, the Poolside co-founder joins swyx and Vibhu to explain why ChatGPT felt like vindication, why Poolside embraced open weights and open research, and why he would rather live in a world with 100 foundation model companies than five even if Poolside were one of the five.We go deep on Poolside's Model Factory: the engineering systems behind 10,000–20,000 experiments per month, streaming data directly into training, reproducible experimentation, low-precision compute, and agents that increasingly write code, launch jobs, evaluate results, and modify the pipelines used to train future models. Eiso also unpacks their recent launch Laguna S, why persistence, verification, and backtracking may matter more than raw intelligence, how much capability remains inside smaller models, why reinforcement learning will move earlier into pre-training, and why next-token prediction is still extracting too little from the web.We also discuss model-harness co-design, Poolside's path from coding agents to AGI, why Eiso thinks MCP and traditional tool calls are “stupid,” the real economics behind frontier-model training, Poolside's $500 million raise, open-source AI, regulation, NVIDIA and TSMC's influence, engineering productivity in the agent era, high-agency teams, and hiring at Poolside.We discuss:* How Andrej Karpathy's RNN work inspired Eiso to start building language models for code in 2015* Why Eiso spent four years and $12 million pursuing an idea before the market cared* Why ChatGPT felt like vindication and brought Poolside back to open source* Why Eiso would prefer 100 foundation model companies over an oligopoly of five* The difference between releasing open weights and publishing genuinely open research* Why Poolside deliberately built a global research organization outside the Bay Area talent war* Why model building is ultimately 90% engineering* The Model Factory: Poolside's end-to-end system for rapidly training and improving models* How fewer than 70 researchers run roughly 10,000–20,000 experiments each month* How Poolside moved from six-month model cycles to five- and eight-week launches* Why streaming data directly into training unlocked faster experimentation* How immutable data, versioned code, and reproducibility enable rigorous model research* Why Eiso wants capable researchers to leave their labs and become Poolside's competitors* Why 95% of model building can be reduced to better data or compute efficiency* Laguna S and why persistence, verification, and backtracking can outperform raw intelligence* Why smaller models may handle far more knowledge work than previously expected* Why reinforcement learning will move earlier into pre-training* Why next-token prediction is still failing to extract enough knowledge from the web* Why distillation and environments have become the AI industry's favorite “drugs”* Why mid-training is really an early form of curriculum design* Low-precision training, networking bottlenecks, and the next gains in compute efficiency* Laguna S: 118 billion total parameters, 8 billion active, and eight weeks from training to launch* Why model builders can often evaluate a new checkpoint within its first 30 minutes* Model versus harness: where agent capabilities actually come from* Why Poolside sees coding and long-horizon software tasks as a path to AGI* Why Eiso thinks MCP and traditional tool calls are “stupid”* Why future agents will write scripts instead of choosing from dozens of predefined tools* The case for minimal harnesses, containers, and model freedom* Why Poolside is prioritizing vision but does not expect to work on audio soon* Why language may be the most compute-efficient modality for encoding knowledge and reasoning* The real cost of model development and why the final training run is anticlimactic* The story behind the Poolside name and why it represents refusing to lower ambitions* How Poolside raised $500 million while investors still questioned whether AGI was real* Why intelligence could become the world's most demanded and commoditized resource* When open models may become too capable to release without restrictions* Why unilateral AI safety does not work in a globally competitive environment* How regulation could accidentally lock in an oligopoly of two or three AI companies* NVIDIA, TSMC, and the hardware systems underpinning foundation-model progress* Why reinforcement-learning wall-clock time is one of Poolside's biggest bottlenecks* Why Poolside trains models from scratch instead of simply distilling larger models* How AI changes the way companies should measure engineering productivity* Why agency may become the most important quality for employees in the AI era* How leaders align high-agency people through shared goals and clear constraints* Hiring across research, post-training, pre-training, architecture, evals, and engineering at PoolsideEiso KantLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eisokantX: https://x.com/eisokantPoolside: https://poolside.aiTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:54 Karpathy, RNNs, and Building Code Models Before Transformers00:02:26 The $12M Failure and ChatGPT Vindication00:03:39 Open Source and the Case for 100 Foundation Model Companies00:09:22 Open Weights, Open Research, and Poolside's Global Team00:16:04 The Model Factory: Why Model Building Is 90% Engineering00:20:19 Agents, Automated Experiments, and Early Signs of RSI00:24:04 Streaming Data, Reproducibility, and Scientific Rigor00:30:35 Creating More Foundation Model Companies00:36:07 Laguna S: Persistence vs. Raw Intelligence00:43:01 Reinventing Pre-Training, RL, and Curriculum Design00:52:33 Low-Precision Training and Squeezing More From Smaller Models00:58:37 Model Harnesses, Coding Agents, and the Path to AGI01:09:26 Why MCP and Traditional Tool Calls Are “Stupid”01:13:04 Vision, Multimodality, and Why Language Still Matters01:18:15 Scaling Models and the Real Economics of Training01:20:40 Why Poolside Is Called Poolside and Raising $500M01:27:37 Open Models, AI Safety, and the Risk of an Oligopoly01:33:53 NVIDIA, TSMC, and the Reinforcement-Learning Bottleneck01:41:52 Smaller Models, Distillation, Engineering Productivity, and HiringTranscriptIntroduction: Eiso Kant, Poolside, and Open ModelsSwyx [00:00:00]: All right, we're here in the studio with Eiso Kant from Poolside, together with Vibhu. Welcome.Eiso Kant [00:00:08]: Thanks. Thanks for having me, guys. Good to be here.Swyx [00:00:10]: Yeah, fresh on the plane. You texted me, you were like, “Hey, I'm on my way to SF.” I was like, “You're on a plane right now, right?” Like, hey.Eiso Kant [00:00:16]: I know. After I texted you, I realized that probably coming in with major jet lag was gonna offer some fun experiences today, but let's do it.Swyx [00:00:23]: I mean, I think the thing I would tell guests is that they don't have to prepare that much because if you're truly working on this every single day, then even, like, what you hazily remember is going to be new for a lot of the audience that don't live in your world every day, right? so 10 years ago, you did a talk at Google Slush, talking about the democratization of AI. and, now here you are, like, open sourcing an incredible new model that we're gonna talk about. But I guess, like, what got you into democratization of AI? Like, it's not obvious from your LinkedIn or something.From Karpathy's RNN Post to SourcedEiso Kant [00:00:57]: No, it's not at all. I don't think it's obvious how I got in this space. I owe getting into this space to Andrej Karpathy.Eiso Kant [00:01:05]: In 2015, he wrote an article called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Nets.”Swyx [00:01:10]: Neural Nets, yep.Eiso Kant [00:01:11]: And that article, I read it, and I pivoted my startup at the time overnight to working on RNNs, and later LSTMs and Transformer models to be able to write code. If you go to this article and you scroll down, you can start seeing, like, this was the precursor to what ended up becoming language models. So, at least when he was character-level language models that were starting to predict letters, he has an example out here. There's a little Paul Graham generator, and you can read it, and the text makes sense, but it doesn't. and there's a little-- There's an example of code a little bit further down. Yeah, so Shakespeare.Swyx [00:01:47]: Shakespeare.Swyx [00:01:49]: CoolEiso Kant [00:01:49]: And for some reason, I read this, and I went down the rabbit hole of learning everything I could about RNNs and LSTMs, right? This is Transformer paper. And I had built a completely unreasonable belief, that neural nets should be able to generalize to anything and everything, and that language should be able to generalize, to a lot of things that are intelligent and the ability to write code. And so I started building Sourced, which was a fully open source company trying to build, what we used to call machine learning on code, language models on code. And we spent about four or five years on this, till the end of 2019. And that sounds really cool today, but back then, no one cared.Eiso Kant [00:02:29]: Right? Like, no one cared. We were in the dark. Like, we did things along the way. We tried applying convolutional neural nets to, like, the structure of code. We were. when attention came out, we were applying it to LSTMs, and then the Transformer paper came out. And it - it wasn't obvious, and what we missed throughout that entire journey, that we were on the right track, but we should have just kept scaling up. And today, to all of us, the scaling laws and scaling up seems like the most obvious thing. But having spent four or five years of my life on working on language models on code, it wasn't obvious. So I have a lot of respect to folks at Google and OpenAI and others who took that confidence and kept going. we failed ultimately at the time, and it was, like, biggest failure of my career, right? You blew $12 million of investors' money, which was a lot back then.Swyx [00:03:18]: Yep.Eiso Kant [00:03:19]: You spent, still a lot, but, And you spent years with, like, a group of 40 people just obsessing over this problem. And life took a different turn, And it was, and family became a focus, and I kept my heads down and really, didn't really look at language models for the following two years. big mistake considering Following years are gonna be really interesting. And then ChatGPT came out And it was like a vindication. It's like people started texting me. I found, like, my old, work decks and these old talks. And throughout that whole journey, we,ChatGPT, Vindication, and Returning to Open SourceEiso Kant [00:03:56]: We really had a strong point of view at the time that, like, as you're building more capable intelligence, it should be open and open source.Eiso Kant [00:04:04]: When we started Poolside, that wasn't the case at all, and I wanna be very open about it. When we started Poolside, we were like, there was a premise of two things. One is this technology is not gonna stop compounding in capabilities. I think to most people obvious today, but three-plus years ago when we started, most people were still arguing if these were stochastic parrots or not.Eiso Kant [00:04:23]: And the second was that reinforcement learning was gonna be the biggest driver for LLM capabilities. Today, very obvious. Three years ago, was not an opinion held or direction held at either OpenAI or Google or Anthropic or others. And so people looked down on us a little bit. They were like, “ is this really gonna work?” And so we just started working the problem, and we never really thought about open source again. We just kept our heads down and we built our, like, knowledge, understanding from scratch, right? We didn't roll out of an existing lab. So we picked up the papers and started writing code and figuring things out.Eiso Kant [00:04:59]: And it wasn't until the beginning of this year that me and my founder, Jason, picked up the open source conversation again.Eiso Kant [00:05:07]: And if you go back to some of the early things on our website, it was very straightforward. It was we wanna get to AGI, we wanna support a world of abundance, and we wanna be the first company that gets there.Eiso Kant [00:05:20]: But we started talking at the beginning of this year because it became obvious that the world was going in a direction that was starting to like, pick at us a little bit. Like, it didn't, this didn't happen overnight. It was, like, a little bit we were seeing this and we're like, “Okay, The world's going down a path.” And Throughout this journey, there was something that I used as a, as an analogy or thing. So I said well, if I go back to back in those days, 2015 or 2016, we're working on this, and I picked up a fi book off the shelf, and I was reading the book about 2035. AGI is achieved, and the story would be over the following, decades. And it would have that first chapter where everyone's trying to figure things out. You'd get the chapter of ChatGPT coming out And then you would get to the chapter where the world was at a fork in the road, and the one that it picked was one where three or four or a handful of companies were going to create all of intelligence moving forward.Eiso Kant [00:06:21]: And when I thought about that story, it felt like a dystopian fi book, not a utopian fi book. And the reality is, I'm a utopian fi guy. Like, and so We took a step back and said, “Hey, can we play a role here?” Now it was easy for us to do so because we were not at the frontier.Eiso Kant [00:06:41]: If we were at the frontier, I don't think we could have changed our mind. and I don't mean this like it's when the moment there's too much capital involved, too much expectations, you've built up things, right? We're a small team, just improving and improving. And so we knew that we could make that decision now, but it would be a lot harder to make as we got closer and closer to the frontier and caught up to others. And did a lot of soul-searching and a lot of conversations, and said, “No, this makes sense,” Even if there's big unanswered questions, like how the hell do you build a business model with foundation models about open source? Big open-ended question that we do not fully have the answer to yet, right? At what point do you no longer wanna release open source models because misuse of models has, real potential risks associated with it? how is the government gonna respond to open source? but I think it all just came down to one thing, and I'll stop the monologue, is the fact that I rather live in a world that has 100 foundation model companies than a world that has five, even if I was one of the five. And the smallest and most meaningful contribution we can make for 100 to exist is to open up our research and open up, like, our weights right now and figure out along the way how we can, like, do more.Neo-Labs, Model Choice, and the Token EconomySwyx [00:08:01]: Yeah. I think if anything, over the past three years, that has become a bit more true. you are one of a cohort of Neo labsEiso Kant [00:08:10]: YeahSwyx [00:08:10]: That people are now calling that. And, we're, we're doing this on the day that Thinky launched their, new model and you are outperforming them on their, on some benchmarks that they released, right? Like, they just don't have it yet. so it goes to show that I think, like, this is one of those things where, like, there is room for multiple players, and you are seeing a little bit more of the future. Maybe more like 20, not 100, but, like, you are one of the 20.Eiso Kant [00:08:36]: I really hope so, right? I think we I'm, I'm excited about their release, and I'm excited about everyone releasing because, like, ultimately, like, choice competition is both gonna drive progress in the right direction. But the fact that like, we create models and while we all, drink out of the same well of data effectively, we do introduce very different behaviors and biases in our models. Some are intended biases, some are completely unintended biases.Swyx [00:09:03]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:09:03]: And if we shape up in an ecosystem in the world where open models are gonna be a part of the token economy, like, I don't think there's any question about it anymore Then we want to be able to live in a world where companies, countries, people can choose and say, “Hey, I am most aligned and I trust most this provider for these things.”Swyx [00:09:25]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:09:26]: I think more than just one of the 20 Neo labs, up until recently, most of open source innovation was coming from the Chinese labs, right? So there's the DeepSeek of the West. Is it today? Okay, maybe it's thinking machines reflection, but there aren't many, right? So, one of the things you guys started in France, Europe, but very much now you're taking that American standpoint and more than just that, the point is the Chinese models that we see, they're not super open research. the work you put out is, I think, some of the best. So every few months you get not only frontier models, but also here's a breakdown blog, paper, technical report of here's everything for state of the art to build, frontier intelligence and you're filling that gap too, right? So not just only open weight, not just Western, but also pretty open research.Open Weights vs. Open ResearchEiso Kant [00:10:20]: No, I appreciate it. Look, I think it's, I think it's the most meaningful contribution, right? Weights are a binary. Let's call them what they are. Yes, we can modify them, we can change them, but, like, giving someone the weights does not allow them ultimately to recreate what you're doing, right? And so now there's challenges around releasing data sets, challenges around like releasing certain things, but being able to share your research, like, right, how do we do it? What are the lessons we learned that we spent, tens of thousands of experiments of compute on? I think very much so. One correction though, Vibhu, and I say this because it's been haunting us for quite a few years. We from day zero were an American company.Swyx [00:10:55]: Yeah. They movedPoolside's Global Team and American Company StorySwyx [00:10:56]: To France.Eiso Kant [00:10:56]: So the story once and for all is very. We start as an American company. We have always been an American company, and early on we made a very conscious decision. We said, “We're not gonna hire any researchers in the Bay Area. We're gonna look for talent everywhere else in the world.” and that is everything from Middle Americas, Seattle to, Serbia, and to Taiwan and Singapore and other places. And it was because we took a view that this was gonna become a talent war for this, and I think it has over the years now. Three years ago, that wasn't fully obvious yet. I think today it very much is. And we also realized that, like, some of the world's most capable people with, like, the most interesting, innovative ideas were not just gonna be here. And so it led us to create like a fully remote company. and we ended up opening an office in Paris and London and different places and we have a lot of the team in the US and a lot of team outside. But we always took this view of like, we're an American company, but if we want the best of the best to work with us, we need to take a global view. Now we do also have people here in Silicon Valley, like the company's grown and others, but I think one of the things that, it slowed us down at the beginning, but it has sped us up now, and it's why you're seeing like the progress, I think, on our models and the cadence at which we release, is because we didn't roll out of an existing lab. Right? we didn't, we didn't have a lot of the information that's freely flowing around here at the time. We just took this point of view as like, “Okay, well, let's just work the problem. Let's just go and, like, read the few papers that are out there, and let's just figure this stuff out.” And we made some hilarious mistakes in model training because of that over the yearsEiso Kant [00:12:35]: Like especially in the first 12 months. there's a few that I think still haunt me and scare me. We can talk about them later. but it created a, like, a resiliency and persistency in the team, right? with extremely few people have left us over the years, that, like, told us, “Okay, we can do this.” When we first wrote our first training code base completely from scratch, it wasn't a fork of any open source. It was just like, “Okay, let's build it from scratch.” I remember we had this one moment where we spent three weeks working out an optimizer bug. Like, it was like training just couldn't get stable. We, like, obsessed over it, and we thought, like, maybe we were wrong. Maybe we should have just forked this repo, or we should have. But then when we solved it, I still remember at the time we were like five people in the company. when we solved it, we were like, “Oh, we can do things,” like if we're just willing to work hard. and I think that culture with a very strong engineering bias has helped us, like, get to where we were. And so there's this notion of open source and talent and these things. I think we, We just took different decisions from a different starting point. and I think we are lucky. I do want to definitely call it lucky. And there was a lot of hard work at the team that now, like, that's starting to show up in results.Swyx [00:13:52]: Just ‘cause we probably won't revisit this again, but, and this is a fun recruiting challenge if someone knows the answer. What was the bug? And then we won't tell the solution, but we'An Optimizer Bug and the Value of Building From ScratchEiso Kant [00:14:01]: So the - This - You're gonna test my memory here,Swyx [00:14:04]: Oh, okayEiso Kant [00:14:04]: So but I thinkSwyx [00:14:05]: DirectlyEiso Kant [00:14:05]: I think I can recall. So if you, so if you look at, So if you take like Adam as an optimizer, you have epsilonSwyx [00:14:12]: YeahEiso Kant [00:14:13]: Which is, right, like in the denominatorSwyx [00:14:14]: Momentum and weights. YeahEiso Kant [00:14:15]: Is exactly, in the denominator. And at the time, if I recall, you looked at like the early Llama papers and things like that. People were juicing epsilon, like, quite a bit. Like, they were, like, adding, I don't know if it was E minus four or whatever, like a high value for epsilon.Eiso Kant [00:14:31]: And if you think about this during training, it's like a bit weird and counterintuitive that we're adding noise to our optimizer by just adding effectively, like, a random number in the denominator, right? Like behind the decimal point. And I don't recall the exact bug, but it had - What I remember is once we solved it, we no longer had to juice epsilon as much as, like, was happening in the Llama paper and other places. and it was like one of those fundamental moments where we had trusted this paper that was out there, and we're like, “Oh, no, it has to be this way. It has to have this high value of epsilon.” But it made no sense to us intuitively. Like, why do you have to have this so high? Like, if you're just trying to avoid division by zero, why can't the value be extremely small? and that was like one of those moments where you realize like, okay, finding things out from scratch yourself builds a better intuition. Because the one thing you learn very quickly with model building is that your intuitions that you start with are gonna get beaten up so hard.Eiso Kant [00:15:33]: Right? Like - It's such an experimental science, that the things that seem obvious, you very quickly get to learn, like, you were wrong, and hopefully you figure out why, and sometimes you don't even.Swyx [00:15:45]: Yeah. yeah, so, one of the reasons that you, when you released your new models, Vibhu got really excited. I mean, everyone got really excited. But Vibhu led our paper club on it, and you guys sawEiso Kant [00:15:58]: YeahSwyx [00:15:58]: Obviously. maybe talk through some lessons learned in that, whatever you can disclose. we can focus on the model factory stuff, whatever you think is a good starting point.Model Building as EngineeringEiso Kant [00:16:08]: So I would say that our view from very early on in the company was that model building is ultimately 90% engineering.Eiso Kant [00:16:18]: And I think we all know it in the industry because if you look at where's every researcher spending their time, they're spending their time writing code, right? Looking at data and writing code. And so we said, okay, The state at the moment, like three years ago, was bash scripts and Slurm and spaghetti code bases for training and, like, data pipelines that were patched together. And we looked at this and said, “Well, ultimately, model building is a process.” You're going from raw data, right? Like training raw material, the web, et cetera. you're doing a whole bunch of filtering, cleaning up, transformations, analyzing. These days, that's, far more complex than it was three years ago. then you're training a model, which is effectively a large distributed systems problem, right? Across hardware that has still-- It's become a lot more reliable. It was extremely flaky back then. and now with every new generation, we get our new sets of challenges. And then you go into the next stages, right? There was no training back then, but, like, you got, your post-training and then your reinforcement learning. And so we looked at this and we said, “Well, this looks like an industrialized process. This looks like an end process, that every single part of it has its machinery,” right? If it's your big data pipelines, if it's your crawling ingestion of the web, if it's your, large-scale distributed training, and then you've got your reliability. And we said, “Well, why don't we take some of the world's smartest distributed systems engineers that we knew and make them part of the process of research from day zero?” Not retrofitting it later on, but, like, really from the beginning. And that became our model factory. And so our model factory started with a handful of components. Today, it's thousands of components, and I try to equate it to, if you think about, like, someone who was at the very early days of Foxconn, if they had been there for the following, decade, they would be able to rebuild Foxconn because they saw every decision that led to building that system and all the complexity. If you and I walk into Foxconn today, no chance.The Model Factory and Experiment VelocityEiso Kant [00:18:18]: Right? Because we don't have the lineage and history of decisions that led to that. And so we built early on from the beginning- with a team that really understood that, well, the metric that we are optimizing for is the speed of an idea from a researcher to an experimental result that we can trust to then being part of the next model training.Eiso Kant [00:18:42]: And in the. And because it's such an experimental science, ultimately, in the beginning when it wasn't that complex, you could patch your way around it, right? But now, at any foundation model company, you are running. I mean, we're a small team, right? We're less than 70 researchers, another 35 engineers. and we are running, I haven't checked the latest count, but far more than 10,000, maybe 10 to 20,000 experiments a month that we cut. And so if you look at that scale of every model run that is, like it's ultimately it's, it's you need to be able to trust it as an infra problem. And so what we have now done over the years is gotten really good at that, and just by working it and improving it and obsessing over those end decisions. So now what that means is that you looked up Laguna XS 2 that we launched. It was five weeks from the beginning of training to launch. The model that we're gonna talk about today was eight weeks from start of training, to launch. We started the next model literally yesterday because we now finished the post-training required for the model we're launching, next week or by the time this comes out today. and we move that compute to the much larger Laguna M model that we're now training. And so the model should be an artifact of someone's process. It shouldn't be really a thing in itself. Like, and we treat this like the way you would look at like a SpaceX factory where, yes, the first rocket, really hard to build, but the much harder challenge was building the factory. And now they're rolling off, and no one is really thinking about the next launch anymore. So it's just another launch, it's another launch, another rocket comes off. And that's what we're trying to do with model building.Eiso Kant [00:20:22]: And what has been, which was not planned from day zero, it was in the back of our mind like this will happen one day, is that when you build a really good end model factory with really good APIs and really good engineering systems, Well, what is it perfect for? It's perfect for agents.Agents Inside the Model FactoryEiso Kant [00:20:40]: Because agents are now starting to take over more and more work in our model factory.Vibhu [00:20:43]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:20:44]: So I look at the screens when I walk, like when we're, we come together, in our monthly, we do monthly onsites, and I walk behind people's screens and I stop by and I talk to our researchers. And the default is all of these different agents running on their screen that are writing the code. They're launching the jobs. They're evaluating the results that are coming back from the model runs. They are, making the changes. And we're still in the driver's seat. We're still coming up with the ideas. We're still helping with the debugging. But more and more, and this is right now very profound on the data side of our pipelines in both pre and post and the synthetic data pipelines, it's starting to become more on the architecture side as well. You're starting to see these twinklings of what RSI is gonna look like.Eiso Kant [00:21:27]: And that's. So when we talk about, like to your question about our models, every talk about the model factory, And my coolest example of these things is always that when we kick off a new run, doesn't matter if it's a training like big run or if it's now a post, like one of 10 post-training versions we do for like release or many experiments, is that at any given moment, the changes that somebody made that they had experimental results from the day before make it into that run.Eiso Kant [00:21:57]: So there's not like a cutoff 90 days before. Like no, it's like literally from that moment because we can now trust the machine enough. And then you also have to invest in the reliability. So one of my favorite metrics about like Laguna S is that there was no call events, Right? Like completely zero. And we haven't had a meaningful call event, like something to wake up for, as far as I recall this entire year. now there is one asterisk to that. In usually the first six hours of launching a new model run, something breaks because you set a config wrong, you made a small mistake, et cetera. So that's usually there's a little bit of intervention, but that's always within like call periods, right? Not on call. And I think that's starting to now compound. So the model we're releasing now, I love it. It's amazing, but we're already onto the next one. and I think that's the way it should be.Laguna, Five-Week Builds, and Zero On-Call EventsVibhu [00:22:50]: Hey, I also just wanna point out, so for context, this was like a month ago. we found it in the tech report, so we just came in with, “Okay, new model's dropped. Haven't heard about it.” We wereEiso Kant [00:23:02]: Yeah, we're very used to doing this every few months.Vibhu [00:23:03]: We're, we're very much like, “ okay, look, it's like, on par with Kimi, DeepSeek, whatnot, the small ones, Gemma level. Oh, it's a very cool paper on what goes into building.” And then we hit this page, right? Like literally page two of tech report is, “This process allowed us to build the small model from scratch to delivery within five weeks applying the lessons”. And then I'm like, oh, this paper is not about here's a tech report of benchmarks and here's how many tokens it was trained on. Like for people that wanna dive more from what we're not gonna discuss on the podcast, it's all laid out here, right? FromEiso Kant [00:23:38]: YeahVibhu [00:23:39]: Custom software that agents can use to interface with training code, training data.Eiso Kant [00:23:45]: Yeah. Well, link the paper correctly, so yeah.Vibhu [00:23:47]: Yeah. All that stuff. read the paper here, but,Technical Report Principles and Streaming Training DataEiso Kant [00:23:50]: But I would like to. I love principles, and I think that is a good starting off point for maybe telling some stories. Maybe we can go one by one past the principles. I'll just call out that Dagster just got bought by a Prefect.Vibhu [00:24:01]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:24:01]: Isn't it fun? But yes, I'm very familiar with Dagster. just anything where like they trigger some story.Vibhu [00:24:07]: So, well, I would say, well, experiments code's obvious, but I think one of my favorite things is, I don't know where it is in here, but early on, and I still think this is the case a lot of foundation model companies, people prepare their training data sets, they get packaged up, then they get copied over to a training cluster distributed across all of the nodes, and then training starts.Vibhu [00:24:30]: And we looked at this like three years ago and we were like That makes no senseEiso Kant [00:24:36]: You lose so much time because the moment you have to rematerialize the data set, you have to make a change, you have to fix something, et cetera, you've got all this time of like repackaging it, right? Toca- tokenizing it, repacking it, moving it over to a cluster, then distributing it across the nodes. The bigger your clusters are, you start using fancy like torrent-like algorithms to like distribute your data. So why aren't we streaming data into training? Right? Something that's very common and like just basicVibhu [00:25:00]: Like just in timeEiso Kant [00:25:01]: Just in time, like good computer science like principle. And that was one of the first things that I think unlocked - the model factory. Because the moment you start thinking about, well, a training job, it doesn't matter if it's a big hero run or a small like, post-training experiment, consumes a certain number of tokens per second, right? And it's not a lot, right? From a like a data, moving data perspective. So we said, well, we have our training cluster, and then we've got like our AWS kinda setup where we can build these amazing big data pipelines. We can set things up. We use Spark underneath the hood, like all these things.Vibhu [00:25:36]: But when you say AWS, it's not actual AWS, it's your internal AWS.Eiso Kant [00:25:39]: It's our internal-- No, it's our internal like just running like our infrastructureVibhu [00:25:42]: Site web servicesEiso Kant [00:25:43]: Exactly. Our stuff running on like an AWS account or on like any hardware, right?Vibhu [00:25:47]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:25:48]: And so once we made that shift into I can stream data into training, all of a sudden you realize a lot of things unlock. Because now you don't have to wait for the whole data set to materialize.Immutable Data, Experiments as Code, and Scientific RigorEiso Kant [00:26:00]: You now all of a sudden when you're running data experiments about mixing data, it's a config. Because you've got these data sources that are coming in, and you just - we have this service called Blender that's in the report, where we then say, “Okay, for this run, I want 20% of this source, 10% of this source. I want this much, so many epochs of repetition. I want this to be, shuffled in a certain way,” and your training job can start while the rest of the data is even still materializing. also what it does is because all of this underneath-- So for us, we treated the data layer underneath as like an immutable data layer, and that was really important. Like experiments as code, immutable data layer means that you can always go back and understand literally down to the single token at which cursor it went in on which version of the code.Vibhu [00:26:47]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:26:48]: And it took us a I have to admit, like the first year of Poolside, we understood that engineering had to get great, But we didn't understand yet, that this is ultimately in support of like a good rigorous scientific progress. We were quite a - We were a very small number of people, so a lot of it was YOLO ideas and YOLO runs.Vibhu [00:27:08]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:27:09]: And we built great infra for the YOLO runs. But once we realized that we treated data as immutable and code as always versioned, and you could always track and trace every experiment end to end perfectly, you could repeat everything perfectly, right? You have perfect reproducibility. I can still reproduce runs from two years ago if I wanted to, right? It enables the scientific progress, like the scientific process, and I think that took us probably about a year and a half into the company to figure out. We also had some great hires, like our head of applied research, Nikolai, who joined us from Yandex, who'd been working on language models since like the early 2020s, I think brought that into the company of like, “Hey, we wanna have even more rigor.” And then once we kinda had the combination of like increasingly more capable platform that allowed people to do more, but had this immutability, we were able to start “Okay, every experiment is truly an ablation. We truly need to understand it.” And I think we became much more scientifically rigorous in the last couple of years, and the infra underneath enabled it. and then there's just fun stuff like, andVibhu [00:28:16]: Yeah, a lot of it's fun, like even just the, one, you share all the ablations, two, picking the data sets, right? There's like a random small paragraph in here where it's just like, “Oh yeah, training data, we have some, we have an auto mixer.” it trains eight small models, scales them up, picks the training data set. We don't even need to look at it. I'm like, “Wow, a lot of engineering rigor there.” And there's just, there's just a lot in here.Publishing Research and Giving BackEiso Kant [00:28:40]: Yeah, and it'- and look, and we wanna put out more. Like we, We treat writing papers as something that we haven't earned the right for yet for a long time. So you earn the right to spend time, publishing research once you're at the frontier, because until then, you're catching up, and every minute and hour in this industry matters. Like I obsess over it, not just the wall clock time from idea to result, but just general like time every day that we, waste is one that doesn't allow us to catch up. But in this case, we said, “Okay, we're gonna give ourselves.” I think we gave the team like three or four days while still doing their work, like give everything in there. And to your point earlier, if your stuff, it's easy to like put it out. And so there's so many more things that we wanna talk about over time, and we will definitely start doing. And as we earn more of the right, but also now have like added to our mission that we want more foundation model companies to exist, you'll see us like be way more proactive, and just trying to keep dropping some of those like things that we've learned along the way that can help others like speed up.Vibhu [00:29:40]: Which is the other cool side of this, right? It's, it's not like, back to your point, it's not just here's the benchmarks of our training. If you want to replicate, here's experiments of optimizers, data sets, post-training. you lay out a lot of it here alongside here's your system for how to do it? So it's, it's really like promotingEiso Kant [00:29:59]: No, thank youVibhu [00:29:59]: Other people can do the same.Eiso Kant [00:30:00]: And by the way, I also wanna make clear, right, we have been incredible-- Like we've taken a lot of advantage of the fact of all the open research that others have published, Right? And you mentioned, the Chinese labs, and we I think it's important that there's, from every country and every culture and background, including like Western companies like us, there's different models that come out that people can choose to trust. But I think we do have to give credit where credit's due, right? The incredible Chinese lab have done an amazing job at sharing their research, and we have definitely like been on the receiving end of taking advantage of that. So when you're on the receiving end of something coming to you, I think it's, you also have an obligation to give back.Swyx [00:30:39]: Do you have a favorite or underrated Chinese lab that you wanna shout out? Everyone shout outs DeepSeek.Chinese Labs, Zhipu, and PersistenceEiso Kant [00:30:44]: That's a good question.Swyx [00:30:45]: Moaan obviously for Therapsi. Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:30:48]: Yeah, look, I think, I think obviously everyone's been talking about Zhipu lately, with 5.2. I think what most people don't realize is when they started.Swyx [00:30:59]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:30:59]: Right? They started years before ChatGPT.Swyx [00:31:02]: They just rebranded. YeahEiso Kant [00:31:03]: And so, I've like, I remember how hard it was to work on these things Before the rest of the world got excited about it. And so I have an immense amount of respect for people, who were working on improving models when it wasn't the sexy thing to do, when believing in LLMs, was gonna get you ridiculed. I remember like back in 2016 when we were doing what we'd call, machine learning on code with some of these models. we would-- people would just laugh at us, like they'd be like, “This makes no sense. Like why are you wasting all these, like, millions of dollars on trying to figure this out?” And so I would say they're probably the one that, I think deserves a shout-out, not just because their latest model is very good, but because they fought to get here. And I think, I think every foundation model company it takes time to get here, right? It took us three years to get to the model that we're, that we're now gonna be releasing. and now the time in between the models is coming, is counted in weeks. It's no longer counted in months or years. But this stuff's hard. and if we can make it a little bit easier for the next person, like we should all do so. Because if we don't do so, we're, we've got a small window before models are really impacting recursive self-improvement to a level where catching up otherwise might become unfeasible. And we should try to, in that window, encourage as many labs or however we wanna call them, like to start. And so one of my currentEiso Kant [00:32:36]: Mission, but qualm is like I wanna encourage whoever is a researcher right now who thinks they can tackle this to go and leave and become my competitor.Eiso Kant [00:32:45]: Like start another foundation model company because I think we need it. I think otherwise we're not gonna be in the world where, I don't want to just be the fifth or the sixth company that wins. I wanna look at a world where there's lots of choice.Starting a Foundation Model CompanyVibhu [00:32:57]: What else do people not see in starting a foundation model? it's, there's a lot of compute, there's a lot of capital required, a lot of compute. You lay out model factory and how to do the training, but there's a lot there, right? That's,Eiso Kant [00:33:10]: Well, look, it's, I in turn-- this is an oversimplification, and I always asterisk it with that because it can land a little bit the wrong way in people's minds. But I think you can sum down, And I saw it, 95% of model building to just doing, you're just doing two things. You're improving data or you're improving compute efficiency. And I know that feels like an oversimplification for the incredible, like, Gifted and skilled work people do. But if you really look at it, like what are we doing? We are looking at data, we're generating new data, we're improving data. and the only way to do that is to look at the data, right? That's a big part of foundation model building. And on the other hand, we come up with these incredible breakthroughs in inference, in architecture, and new attention mechanisms. But what are they really doing? They're bringing compute efficiency. Now, we have definitely had some breakthroughs over the years that allow for more model capabilities. But at the limit, if you could train a large enough model, right, like, and you had infinite compute, we probably-- if you had infinite compute, you'd be at AGI probably already tomorrow.Eiso Kant [00:34:12]: Right? Like it's not. And so, and let me say that infinite compute with infinite ability of much faster networking because networking ends up being more of the bottleneck than compute. But, so I do think that's, those are the main things. And to just realize that this is engineering. I think it's become more obvious, but I think for quite a few years, people have held foundation model companies and researchers and others on this pedestal of like you're doing incredible magic or rocket science, or only like, Nobel laureate physicists can do this. And don't get me wrong, there are some really hard problems that need to be solved, but a lot of the work that all of us are doing on a day Is not sitting down trying to solve a math theorem. A lot of the work that we're doing is just really doing the basics right, writing good code, looking at data, improving it, running experiments, looking at plots, trying to see like, hey, trying to shape our intuitions. And a lot more people could be highly capable researchers. and I think that's, it feels far for people to do so. But I've seen in our own company, we've seen engineers become researchers because the model factory allowed them to be, have a much lower hurdle of running experiments and trying things. And one of the guys on our team who started as an engineer building our agents is a legit reinforcement learning researcher now, making real progress. and that happened in the span of like six months. that would've not been what I think most people assumed was possible, a couple of years ago.Swyx [00:35:46]: Yeah. I think one of the interesting moments is when you can self-host, like, if in a programming language, like if you can compile the language in the language, the equivalent is can you use your own tools, right? You have the pool CLI, you have your own models. presumably you're not only using your own models. There's no way. But like, what's that percentage over time?Laguna S, Persistence, and Behavioral GainsEiso Kant [00:36:10]: This is the first model that we're releasing that is starting to meaningfully contribute to our own work. It's not a it's not state-art model yet. Fable and other, they're, they're very capable models, but Laguna S Is really interesting. I'm gonna pull up the quote. Peng Ming, one of our heads of applied research, said something, last week as the model came out about 10 days ago, much better than we had hoped for or expected. And he said, I have the feeling that a lot of the gains in Laguna S come not from more intelligence, but more from different behavior, more verification, less taking things for granted, not declaring victory early, and being way more persistent. And to be honest, those are more predictive than raw intelligence for success in human also to some degree. And this was, he wrote me this on 5th of July on a Sunday, and it's been burned in my brain ever since because the Laguna S model, as you'll see it and why it does so well on benchmarks and why it does so well in using it on a day basis, is that it's just incredibly persistent. It reasons a lot. I do call that out. We have work to do on making it more efficient. We have to work to do on offering different reasoning modes. But this is the model that has been able to do things that I never thought it could do. A hundred eighteen billion 8B active model, which is not that large. It fits on a DGX Spark and still runs at, thirty, forty tokens a second on a Spark, is able to solve Erdős 397 independently. It's able to do complex programming tasks. It's able to. I asked it this morning to make me a Fi scanner without using any external libraries on my Mac, and it's, like, figuring out, like, the core WLAN API by really persistently trying to understand it without access to the internet. And more, I love vibe checking. I've probably spent eight to ten hours a day with this model for the last ten days.Eiso Kant [00:38:05]: I'm not exaggerating. I was on my eleven-hour flight yesterday. I spent ten hours reading trajectories and traces and, like, of the model.Eiso Kant [00:38:12]: And what I take away from it is exactly what Peng Ming said. We are gonna be able to squeeze so much more out of smaller models than I think we had imagined in the industry because, yes, there's intelligence and larger models are more intelligent. Like, no doubt about it. We should continue to scale up. but the behaviors of being really persistent, of being able to backtrack when you're wrong, of, like, understanding how to interact with your environment show us that we can get a lot more out of it. And this, for me, has created a bit of a Question in my mind the last couple of days. If you think about where we're using models today, right? We are using models, say, for knowledge work. Represents twenty-five percent of the global economy, twenty-five trillion dollars of work.Eiso Kant [00:39:00]: As we scale up models and they become more intelligent, we are excited about using them more and more for pushing the frontier of science.Small Models, Knowledge Work, and CommoditizationEiso Kant [00:39:08]: And if you look at the frontier of science, like true breakthroughs in science, they have been linked, they are linked to more intelligence in many places. Einstein figuring out general relativity is able to bring ideas together that other people would have not brought together. And I think one of the many dimensions of intelligence is the ability to do that, and it's something we clearly see that as models get larger and more capable, they're able to pull more ideas and threads together that a smaller model wouldn't be able to.Eiso Kant [00:39:36]: And we're starting to see examples of that in medicine and, like, in bio and other things. But if you think about the majority of knowledge work that we do, and it includes building software. I'm a software developer at heart first and foremost probably, although I probably can't say it that much anymore as I don't write production code in years, is that what makes us good is our persistence. It's our ability to encounter a problem and backtrack and say, “I need to go figure out this bug. I need to go research this. I need to go look at the documentation. I need to, like, try different, five different ways to see, like, if I can solve it.” But it is not necessarily bringing three ideas together from radically different fields. And so if we are now seeing, and I think Laguna S is an example, that we are able to make a relatively small model much more capable than I had definitely predicted or any previous, like, benchmarks had shown for any model remotely this size or even larger, At least on coding tasks, that it's because of the behaviors. And so now the question I have, and I don't have an answer, it is I know at the limit, so infinite model size, right, extremely large model, and the cost of that model is gonna be very expensive to run. We know this, right? So larger model ROI.Eiso Kant [00:40:52]: So I know that at the very limit, I'm not gonna use the world's largest model one day, quadrillion parameter, whatever crazy, like, scale we scale up, to do a basic coding task. Already today, I'm starting to size down for certain tasks.Eiso Kant [00:41:07]: So it means that there is an optimal. It means there's some curve that goes as we go up to model size for knowledge work, at some point we're at the peak, and after that, the return on investment of using a bigger model, just doesn't make sense.Eiso Kant [00:41:22]: Now, I think the question is, before I would have thought that peak was extremely very far away.Eiso Kant [00:41:30]: This model for me is the first sign that Maybe that peak is At a trillion, five trillion, ten trillion. Maybe we can just squeeze way more out of these models. I'm no longer thinking that we need two or three orders of magnitude on the largest models to be able to, solve knowledge work, the accounting, the legal, the code that we write. And so if that holds true, It is an argument for the commoditization of models. It's an argument that open source can win and, like, succeed in this world. And now it's of course a self-serving argument and it's a hopeful argument, but theoretically at the limit it works. We just have to go discover in the next couple of years of how much more we can squeeze out. Now, I do want to put a big asterisk. This does not mean I'm against scaling models. I think we ultimately only succeed if we scale our models as large as our competition. I do not like. I think we should not put our head in the sand and say we're gonna be king of open source small models. I think that's, It's a out. It's trying to be king of your own kingdom, but not realizing what the rest of the world's doing. All of us rather use a smarter, faster, more model. It's a sign of hope. And so I don't wanna overly state this is a good model. We have a long way to go to get to the state-art. But what hopefully people take away when they use this model is that the behaviors inside of it are what push it to be far more capable, less than necessarily the number of parameters.Pre-Training, Mid-Training, and RL Moving EarlierVibhu [00:43:03]: Is that mostly post-training? LikeEiso Kant [00:43:05]: YesVibhu [00:43:05]: Right.Eiso Kant [00:43:06]: It's entirely post-training.Vibhu [00:43:08]: Are we done improving anything on training? Is, like, training done?Eiso Kant [00:43:12]: No.Vibhu [00:43:12]: Okay.Eiso Kant [00:43:13]: SoVibhu [00:43:13]: I just wanted to cover training, and then we go post-trainingEiso Kant [00:43:15]: Training is not done. I mean, look, there's a part of training of just dealing with skill, right? Every new order of magnitude of model skill, you are going to get new things you gotta solve for. That'- but those are ultimately, engineering challenges.Eiso Kant [00:43:31]: I have a, I would say, a not commonly held opinion that reinforcement learning Will move earlier and earlier into training.Vibhu [00:43:42]: Yeah, training.Eiso Kant [00:43:44]: Not even training. Like training today, right, is, like if you look at - So we've been working on this for years already. and I think the best-- I think the first time we saw it out in public was the DeepSeek Zero paper. this is a year and a half ago, I think, if I recall correctly. where, you can Very early on in a model as it starts capable of being able to use language, et cetera, induce reasoning. and so the question that I have is like, we have this- we have the dataset that's the web. and the web, I think we could arguably say probably has The totality of humanity's knowledge somewhere encoded in different places. It's a huge variance degree of quality, from garbage data, and like once you look at training data, you really get humbled of like what the web is, to like, the most greatest scientific papers and best blog posts and like, best transcripts and whatnot.Eiso Kant [00:44:39]: And so now What we are trying to figure out, and have been doing a lot of work on, and it's a place where maybe not as open as we're on other things, but we will become more over time. we've been spending a couple of years really doing research on how can we turn the web into not just next token prediction, but into a way to teach the model to think earlier in its training. and I think there's a huge amount of gold to be found there. I think we are right now in, we've got some drugs in the industry. One of the drugs is distillation. Another drug is, more environments. Like, and they're great, and they make us feel good, and they make the models better, and like we're all addicted to them, and we'll use them, right? in various different ways. and but ultimately, I think we are still barely squeezing out of the web what we should be getting out of the web.Eiso Kant [00:45:33]: I think just next token prediction during training is not enough.Eiso Kant [00:45:36]: AndVibhu [00:45:38]: YeahEiso Kant [00:45:38]: I think we'll see some very interesting things still happen. and that RL in post-training to induce behaviors, to improve things, like I think - the whole world knows how to do this now. I think we're, we're scaling it up. Everyone is. But I wonder if we need to go as far as we're going today with environments. I'm not sure yetVibhu [00:46:01]: You mean we're going too far?Eiso Kant [00:46:02]: I'm, I'm not sure if the path to AGI is justVibhu [00:46:06]: Is more environmentEiso Kant [00:46:07]: More environments.Vibhu [00:46:08]: It seems like a never-ending, “Okay, I want instruction manual for this table, right? Am I gonna environment out building furniture? Or are we just gonna tail end like we need some general solution?”Eiso Kant [00:46:19]: I think there is, I think there's an ability to generalize more from the web. but I also am very encouraged, like when I look at Laguna S and, which is post-training is, well, is the big impact there. and I see like, oh, wait a second, just by making some of these behaviors much better, we're able to get so much more out of it. It just changes a little bit the way you think about intelligence.Vibhu [00:46:40]: Yeah. The analogy people draw often is the RL phase is where you don't learn as much new knowledge. You shiftEiso Kant [00:46:46]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:46:46]: Yeah. So, you shift distribution, and you can have it reason towards what you want. on your point about training, a lot of training is still just continue training in a domain, say medicine, then you do RL. So still justEiso Kant [00:47:00]: It's just better data, right? Like, I mean, training, ooh, I like how we invented this word. Like it's effectively just like,Vibhu [00:47:06]: Second phaseEiso Kant [00:47:07]: It's the second phase of training With like a really dumb way to do a curriculum. But like ultimately, what you'd want is a curriculum from token zero to token 30 whatever or 40 trillion tokens that really truly is the optimal curriculum for the model to learn. But training is essentially a stage curriculum on the web because we do not have to compute, And, effectively to try to ablate the perfect curriculum, right? And so I'm pretty sure that you'll start to see people talking soon about some other term, and there's two or - ‘cause now we do this, right? We talk stage two and stage three and stage four training and like. But ultimately, all we're doing is we're trying to assign a curriculum to the web data that we have to allow the model to learn better. I think at some point, as things get compute, as models get cheaper to run, as the next generations of compute, this will become more of a continuous spectrum. I also think the reason, by the way, you have training and like stage two and stage three is organizational, Right? It'- this is, I think, a thing where-- that we really try to avoid with the model factory is like Training exists because there's a training team now, right? There's people, or like people in training decide to focus on like a training effort. but what you really want is engineering and scale of experiments that allows for a much more continuous spectrum that you don't, you have infinite stages. Now, we're not there. Compute's not there. Organization design is not there for it yet. but I think we'll get there. we'll look back on a couple of years and be like, “Oh my God, it was so cute that we did our training data like this in such a like naïve way. Like we barely ordered it. We didn't really do a good job at likeCurriculum, Auto Research, and New ObjectivesVibhu [00:48:48]: The building that curriculum will get you that in the industry.Eiso Kant [00:48:51]: And I'll confirm that, when I talk to some researchers that this is a lot of the focus now is like how does training change and what is the next objective other than, next token prediction. I assume you don't have the answers, but you have some ideas.Vibhu [00:49:02]: We have some ideas. We're not ready to talk about it yet.Eiso Kant [00:49:05]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:49:05]: We've been working on them for years, and I think that's the one thing that's also like you asked earlier about, like what's not obvious about building a foundation model company is that you are constantly balancing the table stakes work, the recipe worksEiso Kant [00:49:19]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:49:19]: Versus like your, my crazyEiso Kant [00:49:22]: Pure researchVibhu [00:49:22]: Breakthrough.Eiso Kant [00:49:22]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:49:22]: Pure research and finding that balance and adjusting the percentage to it based on where you are in the race is really important.Eiso Kant [00:49:31]: I mean, so like, this is a nice way. I was gonna bring up auto research at some pointVibhu [00:49:35]: YesEiso Kant [00:49:35]: As another Andrej invention, or coinage, which is like, I honestly, like how many objective functions can there be, right? Like just try 1,000 of them, set it running, whatever.Vibhu [00:49:47]: Man, it's alsoEiso Kant [00:49:48]: Like what you're looking for. You're looking for loss curves like that, likeVibhu [00:49:51]: It's also a thing people take bets on, right? When you say more Neo labs, you're doing a version of we'll do foundation models, scale them up, next token predictors. A lot of other Neo labs that we see want to take a completely different approach, right? At some level, you're right. It's all, compute efficiency, and that's the net objective. But some are okay, different architecture, like vastly different amounts of compute spend. So some are different. They're not justEiso Kant [00:50:19]: YeahVibhu [00:50:19]: They're like, 99% not balancing, here's the vanilla and scale up. They're 99% on, here's novel research that'll change everything.Eiso Kant [00:50:27]: And I think, Luke, I think you. It depends when you started as well, right?Pure Research vs. Table StakesVibhu [00:50:30]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:50:30]: When we started, like the novel thing we did was reinforcement learning on code. No long- that's no longer novel by far, but we were like, - that's where we obsessed over when no one believed in RL. So you have to when you start the company, you have to have your own idea. You have to have something that's different that allows you to speed up, right? For us, it was RL to LLMs that later became common, like, Knowledge. But in the beginning, it wasn'tVibhu [00:50:53]: It's cool. this was like your original 2023 blogEiso Kant [00:50:57]: YeahVibhu [00:50:57]: Of purpose.Eiso Kant [00:50:58]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:50:59]: And like you do lay it all out here.Eiso Kant [00:51:01]: We laidVibhu [00:51:01]: The blog is pretty underrated, right? The whole RL on code was very early on.Eiso Kant [00:51:06]: Very early. And even we had to argue with people, like we say here things like to push beyond current capability, to train your own foundation model. We had to argue with people that it mattered that you had your own like, base model. you can fine-tune your way to success, right? major capabilities emerge from training a base model made accurate and useful during fine-tuning.Vibhu [00:51:23]: Which like, for perspective at the time, we knew closed models, OpenAI, Anthropic were huge. The open models we had were like Mistral 7B, a 30B, a 70B.Eiso Kant [00:51:35]: When weVibhu [00:51:35]: YeahEiso Kant [00:51:36]: The date on this thing is wrong. When we published this, it was April 2023. I think this was justVibhu [00:51:42]: YeahEiso Kant [00:51:42]: Happened on a migration, probably found it on archive.org.Vibhu [00:51:45]: Mistral.Eiso Kant [00:51:46]: Mistral had started, we started on the same month, right?Vibhu [00:51:49]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:51:49]: So this wasn't even, there was only, I think, Llama out at the timeVibhu [00:51:52]: SnellEiso Kant [00:51:52]: And that's it, right? And so, but I agree. I think we wan

Tonight, the RPGBOT.Podcast enters the discourse arena, where Paizo is financially bleeding, Archives of Nethys accidentally brought a flamethrower to a contract negotiation, and the internet has already decided who the villain is without reading past the headline. Ash arrives with enough hot takes to melt adamantine, Tyler desperately attempts to preserve nuance, and Randall keeps feeding increasingly tortured metaphors into the Wayback Machine. Grab your popcorn, silence your notifications, and remember: the rules are still free. Everyone can please stop screaming now. UPDATE: Joint announcement from Paizo+AoN on Juy 24th Links Impossible Magic on paizo.com Amazon: Impossible Magic (affiliate link) Paizo Announces Layoffs June 8th Reddit thread with links to support affected people Archives of Nethys announcement July 14th Paizo blog post about Archives of Nethys July 15th AoN FAQ July 17th UPDATE: Joint announcement from Paizo+AoN on Juy 24th More Info Ronald the Rules Lawyer on the Paizo layoffs Show Notes Paizo has ended its eight-year official licensing partnership with Archives of Nethys, and the Pathfinder community reacted with all the restraint and careful consideration of a barbarian discovering Reddit. We break down what is actually changing, what is not changing, and why Archives of Nethys is not being deleted, destroyed, paywalled, or dragged behind Paizo headquarters. The site can still provide Pathfinder and Starfinder rules for free, but it will lose access to most official artwork and will no longer receive books early enough to guarantee new content on release day. To understand why Paizo would make such an unpopular decision, we climb into the Wayback Machine and revisit the Diamond Comic Distributors bankruptcy, millions of dollars in inaccessible Paizo inventory, costly legal disputes, tariffs, financial losses, and the recent layoffs affecting roughly 15 percent of Paizo's staff. Paizo says the Archives of Nethys license required legal, financial, and administrative resources that the company can no longer justify, especially when the expected royalty payments never materialized. We also examine how both sides handled the announcement. Paizo communicated poorly, chose terrible timing, and apparently believed email was the ideal tool for navigating a beloved eight-year partnership during a financial crisis. Archives of Nethys responded emotionally, published its announcement without giving Paizo advance notice, omitted important context about ongoing negotiations and a six-month transition period, and then buried much of the clarification inside a video and forum comments. The result was a community firestorm in which everyone was angry, nobody had the complete story, and Diamond somehow remained the least surprising villain. Ultimately, this is not Paizo attempting a Wizards-style crackdown on free rules access. It is a struggling company cutting expenses while two groups of exhausted people make imperfect decisions under enormous stress. Support Archives of Nethys through Patreon or by disabling your ad blocker, purchase Pathfinder products directly from Paizo when possible, and perhaps give everyone enough time to get on a video call before declaring the death of the entire hobby. Key Takeaways Archives of Nethys is not shutting down. Its existing Pathfinder and Starfinder rules content will remain freely accessible. The major changes are the loss of most official Paizo artwork and the end of early PDF access, meaning new rules may no longer appear on release day. Paizo's decision comes amid severe financial pressure caused by the Diamond bankruptcy, inaccessible inventory, legal expenses, tariffs, losses, and staff layoffs. The license produced no royalties because Archives of Nethys operates through donations, advertising, and unpaid volunteer labor rather than as a profit-making business. Paizo says the relationship still required legal, licensing, financial, and administrative work, including policing unauthorized reuse of artwork taken from the site. Archives of Nethys presented an incomplete version of the situation in its original announcement, including leaving out ongoing negotiations and the six-month grace period for removing restricted artwork. Paizo also deserves criticism for poor communication, bad timing, and allowing an important partnership discussion to stall through email. The backlash was intensified by fear and incomplete information, not by evidence that Paizo intends to eliminate free access to its rules. Both organizations say they remain open to finding another arrangement, and the hosts believe a compromise may still be possible. Fans can support both sides by contributing to Archives of Nethys, disabling ad blockers on the site, and buying products directly from Paizo rather than through Amazon. Tyler proposes that Paizo create an affiliate program so Pathfinder creators can direct customers to Paizo's store while earning revenue and helping more money reach the publisher. The true villain remains Diamond, with capitalism receiving a strong honorable mention. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Tonight, the RPGBOT.Podcast enters the discourse arena, where Paizo is financially bleeding, Archives of Nethys accidentally brought a flamethrower to a contract negotiation, and the internet has already decided who the villain is without reading past the headline. Ash arrives with enough hot takes to melt adamantine, Tyler desperately attempts to preserve nuance, and Randall keeps feeding increasingly tortured metaphors into the Wayback Machine. Grab your popcorn, silence your notifications, and remember: the rules are still free. Everyone can please stop screaming now. UPDATE: Joint announcement from Paizo+AoN on Juy 24th Links Impossible Magic on paizo.com Amazon: Impossible Magic (affiliate link) Paizo Announces Layoffs June 8th Reddit thread with links to support affected people Archives of Nethys announcement July 14th Paizo blog post about Archives of Nethys July 15th AoN FAQ July 17th UPDATE: Joint announcement from Paizo+AoN on Juy 24th More Info Ronald the Rules Lawyer on the Paizo layoffs Show Notes Paizo has ended its eight-year official licensing partnership with Archives of Nethys, and the Pathfinder community reacted with all the restraint and careful consideration of a barbarian discovering Reddit. We break down what is actually changing, what is not changing, and why Archives of Nethys is not being deleted, destroyed, paywalled, or dragged behind Paizo headquarters. The site can still provide Pathfinder and Starfinder rules for free, but it will lose access to most official artwork and will no longer receive books early enough to guarantee new content on release day. To understand why Paizo would make such an unpopular decision, we climb into the Wayback Machine and revisit the Diamond Comic Distributors bankruptcy, millions of dollars in inaccessible Paizo inventory, costly legal disputes, tariffs, financial losses, and the recent layoffs affecting roughly 15 percent of Paizo's staff. Paizo says the Archives of Nethys license required legal, financial, and administrative resources that the company can no longer justify, especially when the expected royalty payments never materialized. We also examine how both sides handled the announcement. Paizo communicated poorly, chose terrible timing, and apparently believed email was the ideal tool for navigating a beloved eight-year partnership during a financial crisis. Archives of Nethys responded emotionally, published its announcement without giving Paizo advance notice, omitted important context about ongoing negotiations and a six-month transition period, and then buried much of the clarification inside a video and forum comments. The result was a community firestorm in which everyone was angry, nobody had the complete story, and Diamond somehow remained the least surprising villain. Ultimately, this is not Paizo attempting a Wizards-style crackdown on free rules access. It is a struggling company cutting expenses while two groups of exhausted people make imperfect decisions under enormous stress. Support Archives of Nethys through Patreon or by disabling your ad blocker, purchase Pathfinder products directly from Paizo when possible, and perhaps give everyone enough time to get on a video call before declaring the death of the entire hobby. Key Takeaways Archives of Nethys is not shutting down. Its existing Pathfinder and Starfinder rules content will remain freely accessible. The major changes are the loss of most official Paizo artwork and the end of early PDF access, meaning new rules may no longer appear on release day. Paizo's decision comes amid severe financial pressure caused by the Diamond bankruptcy, inaccessible inventory, legal expenses, tariffs, losses, and staff layoffs. The license produced no royalties because Archives of Nethys operates through donations, advertising, and unpaid volunteer labor rather than as a profit-making business. Paizo says the relationship still required legal, licensing, financial, and administrative work, including policing unauthorized reuse of artwork taken from the site. Archives of Nethys presented an incomplete version of the situation in its original announcement, including leaving out ongoing negotiations and the six-month grace period for removing restricted artwork. Paizo also deserves criticism for poor communication, bad timing, and allowing an important partnership discussion to stall through email. The backlash was intensified by fear and incomplete information, not by evidence that Paizo intends to eliminate free access to its rules. Both organizations say they remain open to finding another arrangement, and the hosts believe a compromise may still be possible. Fans can support both sides by contributing to Archives of Nethys, disabling ad blockers on the site, and buying products directly from Paizo rather than through Amazon. Tyler proposes that Paizo create an affiliate program so Pathfinder creators can direct customers to Paizo's store while earning revenue and helping more money reach the publisher. The true villain remains Diamond, with capitalism receiving a strong honorable mention. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Send us a Question!MOVIE DISCUSSION: Kathryn joins Melvin for their first-time watch of The Matrix! The two get into its twists and turns, its partnering of action and philosophy, concepts like self-efficacy and self-actualization, and how "The One" is also a part of the whole.Topics:Editor's Note: No Patreon Exclusive discussion! But, I do intend to trim this episode down from its original 1:20:47 length, so if you want to hear the UNCUT version, tune in on Patreon here!Kathryn talks about "that" moment, without spoiling it, and how it completely captured her attention.The Matrix joins many other films in exploring the Gen-X post-capital malaise.Melvin, on what he thinks the Wachowski's were thinking when creating their action set pieces, "We can't just put it on the screen. The audience needs to be there [...] to feel it."A movie that's over 2 hours but actually earns it? Say it ain't so!Melvin keeps learning that he loves stories about self-efficacy and self-actualization, and talks more about why.Kathryn found Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity's allegorical depiction of some biblical figures a little silly, but in a good way, so she shares some thoughts.The mind, the body, and the mind & body together.To be consumptive (willingly participating within the Matrix) and to be productive (actively seeking change without the Matrix)Humanity's intrinsic power.Even if there's "The One", they will always be part of a whole, and that collective is what helps "The One" be who they are.Recommendations:The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft (1936) (Novella)Evil Dead Burn (2026) (Movie) Support the showSupport on Patreon for Unique Perks! Early access to uncut episodes Vote on a movie/show we review One-time reward of two Cinematic Doctrine Stickers & PinsSocial Links: ThreadsWebsiteInstagramLetterboxdFacebook Group 

Small Cap Breaking News You Can't Miss!Here's a quick rundown of the latest updates from standout small-cap companies making big moves today:Great Atlantic Resources Corp. (TSXV: GR)Option partner HM Exploration reported first assays from seven of twelve drill holes at the Pilley's Island Project in Newfoundland, confirming polymetallic VMS mineralization in both the upper and lower sulphide lenses. Hole PI-26-007 returned 23.0 metres of 1.21% copper, 1.67% zinc, 10.67 g/t silver and 0.25 g/t gold, plus a high-grade 0.66-metre interval of 2.45% copper, 92.2 g/t silver and 5.89 g/t gold. Both zones remain open along strike and at depth, preserving expansion potential.Renforth Resources Inc. (CSE: RFR) (OTC: RFHRF) (FSE: 9RR)Renforth updated progress on its wholly owned Victoria nickel-copper-cobalt polymetallic deposit, completing two undercut drill holes that both intersected visual mineralization, and advanced work on its adjacent Parbec gold deposit. The results support continued definition of the open-pit resource as drilling steps out below prior holes.NexMetals Mining Corp. (TSXV: NEXM) (NASDAQ: NEXM)NexMetals reported 11.15 metres of 7.65% copper-equivalent (3.10% copper and 2.21% nickel) at its Selebi Main deposit, highlighting a kilometre-scale trend of thick, high-grade massive sulphides. The intercept is part of a 30,000-metre drill program targeting the emerging Flexure Zone. The grades and widths point to meaningful expansion potential at a past-producing base-metals district.Kingsmen Resources Ltd. (TSXV: KNG) (OTCQB: KNGRF) (FSE: TUY)Kingsmen extended the high-grade Soledad system at depth at its Las Coloradas silver project in Chihuahua, Mexico, cutting 1.4 metres of 641 g/t silver equivalent and confirming continuity over 135 metres of vertical depth. The deepening high-grade zone strengthens the case for a larger silver system as the company advances the project.Gladiator Metals Corp. (TSXV: GLAD) (OTCQB: GDTRF) (FSE: ZX7)Gladiator intersected 32.0 metres of 1.36% copper plus 0.63 g/t gold, including 18.0 metres of 2.12% copper plus 1.06 g/t gold, at its Cub East target, extending high-grade continuity in the zone. The results reinforce the growth potential of Gladiator's Whitehorse Copper project in the Yukon.SAGA Metals Corp. (TSXV: SAGA) (OTCQB: SAGMF) (FSE: 20H)SAGA reported assays from drill holes R-0050 through R-0054 at the Trapper Zone of its Radar titanium-vanadium-iron project in Labrador, with intercepts including 53.07% Fe2O3, 7.68% TiO2 and 0.384% V2O5. South Star Battery Metals Corp. (TSXV: STS) (OTCQB: STSBF)South Star released June operating results from its Santa Cruz graphite plant in Brazil, where run-of-mine feed rose to 4,920 tonnes, roughly 30% above May, while graphite concentrate production doubled month over month. Silver X Mining Corp. (TSXV: AGX) (OTCQX: AGXPF) (F: AGX)Silver X expanded its Red Silver drill program more than five-fold, from 1,200 metres to about 6,650 metres, at its Nueva Recuperada project in Peru, following underground channel sampling that returned 735 g/t silver over 65 metres of strike. Independence Gold Corp. (TSXV: IGO) (OTCQB: IEGCF) (FSE: 625)Independence Gold discovered the new Goofy Vein at its 3Ts gold project in British Columbia, with discovery hole 3TS-26-39 cutting 9.10 metres of 14.70 g/t gold and 36.70 g/t silver. The vein sits about 250 metres west of the Ted-Mint system in a district hosting more than twenty known veins, adding a fresh high-grade target as drilling continues.NEO Battery Materials Ltd. (TSXV: NBM) (OTC: NBMFF)NEO Battery received a purchase order for 10,000 units of its 34Ah drone battery cells from a South Korean pack manufacturer and achieved Korea Certification (KC) for its 11.5Ah product. The order targets e-mobility and drone demand in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The commercial traction and certification advance NEO's move from development toward revenue.

DRWarner Bros.' Zaslav Offers $68 Million to Buy Summer Campnew January 2026 employment agreement$96M: Make-Whole RSU award to CEO Daivd Zaslav of 1,963,465 shares; after January 2 Follow-On Option award of 3,052,734 options because share price is downUnder a new employment agreement executed on June 12, 2025, Zaslav received a special award of 20,898,776 stock options with an exercise price of $10.16 (~$400M). Additionally, on January 2, 2026, he was granted 3,052,734 follow-on stock options with an exercise price of $28.51 (~$40M). To address the higher exercise price of these options compared to the initial grant, Zaslav received 1,963,465 restricted stock units on January 5, 2026 (~$56M).The Compensation Committee: 23 meetings in 2025*Paul A. Gould, 80, 18 years tenureGould and Zaslav worked closely together at Discovery, Inc. for nearly 15 years.David Zaslav took the helm as President and CEO of Discovery, Inc. in January 2007.Paul Gould joined the Discovery, Inc. Board of Directors shortly after, serving as an independent director from 2007 until the company merged with WarnerMedia.Both men belong to the tight-knit professional circle surrounding cable pioneer and billionaire John Malone.Paul Gould has a long history as a trusted director across Malone's web of companies, serving for years on the boards of Liberty Global and Liberty Latin America.David Zaslav has publicly and frequently cited John Malone as his primary professional mentor.Their shared ties to Malone are so closely linked that in 2012, Zaslav partnered with other high-level executives to donate $1 million to the Cable Center specifically to build and name the John Malone Theater.Paul Gould has served as a Managing Director and Executive Vice President at Allen & Company, a premium boutique investment bank deeply embedded in the media and entertainment ecosystem. Through this avenue, Gould and Zaslav connect in two ways:Financial Advisory: Allen & Company has a long history of providing valuation opinions, advisory services, and market analysis for major transactions initiated by Zaslav during his career.The Sun Valley Conference: Allen & Company famously hosts the annual "Summer Camp for Billionaires" in Sun Valley, Idaho. As a prominent media mogul, Zaslav is a regular, high-profile attendee at this event, which is organized by Gould's firm.Kenneth W. LoweKen Lowe is the former Chair/CEO of Scripps Networks Interactive (the former parent company of massive lifestyle brands like HGTV, Food Network, and ID).The Link: In 2018—four years before the Warner Bros. deal even closed—Zaslav orchestrated Discovery's $14.6 billion acquisition of Scripps Networks. As a direct result of that blockbuster cable industry consolidation, Lowe joined Discovery Inc.'s board of directors. He and Zaslav had already been working together closely at the board level for years before the legacy company expanded into WBD.The board of AT&TRichard W. FisherOutside of WBD, Zaslav's connection to Fisher is rooted in Fisher's previous role as a member of the Board of Directors for AT&T. When Zaslav was hammering out the complex transaction to spin WarnerMedia away from AT&T, Fisher was one of the crucial board leaders on the other side of the table who evaluated and signed off on the deal. As part of the closing agreement, Fisher was designated by AT&T to transition directly over to the new WBD board.Debra L. LeeDebra Lee was the longtime Chair/CEO of BET Networks (Black Entertainment Television) from 2006 to 2018.Zaslav and Lee have long-standing commitments to The Paley Center for Media, sharing space as members of its highly prestigious Board of Trustees. Additionally, Lee served on the board of AT&T, meaning she was part of the corporate governance team that initially approved Zaslav's pitch to merge Discovery with WarnerMedia.Geoffrey Y. YangJust like Richard Fisher and Debra Lee, Yang's primary pre-WBD connection to Zaslav comes down to AT&T. Yang sat on AT&T's board during the high-stakes dealmaking window. Because of his background in digital media and venture capital, he was designated by AT&T leadership to transition to the WBD board to help Zaslav steer the newly formed company's streaming and direct-to-consumer technology strategies.The board that ignores Say on Pay votesAt our 2025 Annual Meeting held on June 2, 2025, we held an advisory vote on executive compensation, or "Say on Pay" vote, and a majority of the votes cast by stockholders were cast against our executive compensation program.Our executive compensation program is designed to pay for performance and effectively balance executive and stockholder interests. The Committee considered the outcome of the "Say on Pay" vote from the 2025 Annual Meeting, and while it continues to believe that our executive compensation structure, which includes long-term agreements with each of our NEOs and delivers a significant majority of NEO compensation in performance-based vehicles, is effective in meeting our compensation objectives, it took note of the negative 2025 "Say on Pay" vote when making compensation decisions after the 2025 Annual Meeting.The Dodd-Frank Act: "The shareholder vote … shall not be binding on the issuer or the board of directors of an issuer, and may not be construed as overruling a decision by such issuer or board of directors”Special meeting vote 4/23/26: Say on Pay 83% no6/9 AGM: ShareholdersPaul A. Gould 52% noRichard W. Fisher 31% noDebra L. Lee 32% noKenneth W. Lowe 31% noGeoffrey Y. Yang 31% noZaslav 3% noSay on Pay 84% noStill on boardPaul A. GouldRichard W. FisherDebra L. LeeKenneth W. LoweGeoffrey Y. YangZaslavThe SEC: "The Say-on-Pay … votes are advisory rather than binding ... Unlike a binding vote, advisory votes do not require the company or its board of directors to take a specific action. The company's board of directors may consider advisory votes and may follow up with other communications or dialogue with shareholders as part of its deliberative process in making policy decisions."The workers for being poor1,378 to 1 CEO pay ratio.Andrew M. Cuomo Joins the OKX Board of DirectorsThe worldMen GreedThe U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) In February 2025, OKX pled guilty in a U.S. federal court to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and violating anti-money laundering (AML) laws.The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed that despite OKX having an "official policy" banning U.S. users, the exchange actively pursued U.S. customers and generated hundreds of millions in fees from them.Internal logs showed OKX employees explicitly telling U.S. clients how to bypass the exchange's own blocks—even telling a customer to "just put a random country" during identity verification.The exchange was used to facilitate over $5 billion in suspicious transactions and criminal proceeds, resulting in a staggering $504 million penalty.TrumpTrump has normalized crypto. Is it the path to the next financial collapse?Jon Ossoff Rips RFK Jr.'s ‘Foolish' Cutback To Cyclosporiasis Monitoring: Sen. Jon Ossoff says a cyclosporiasis outbreak spreading nationwide could be harder to track because the Trump administration changed CDC surveillance last year. In a letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ossoff argues that the CDC's FoodNet program (a public health network that monitors infections from multiple pathogens across CDC, USDA, FDA, and 10 states) stopped requiring monitoring cyclospora, and that the administration later made data collection optional at FoodNet sites for most pathogens (except Salmonella and E. coli).Elon Musk"ESG is the devil"A "scam" weaponized by "phony social justice warriors"Vivek RamaswamyThe author of Woke, Inc.founded an entire asset management firm (Strive) designed explicitly to offer "anti-woke" investment options that ignore ESG metrics in favor of pure profit.Ron DeSantisSpearheaded a massive legislative pushback against ESG in Florida, signing bills that banned state and local governments from using ESG factors when investing public funds or issuing bondsArgues ESG is a way to bypass voters and enforce a political agenda through corporate power.Peter ThielCalled ESG a "hate factory" used to control capital and punish companies that don't fall in line with mainstream corporate ideologyTariq Fancy (Former Head of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock)“Whistleblower”Called ESG a "dangerous placebo" that does nothing to actually fix the planet but allows Wall Street to charge higher fees while greenwashing their portfoliosMike PenceArgues that major Wall Street firms use ESG to enforce a radical left-wing agenda on everyday Americans, forcing companies to adopt policies that hurt the domestic energy sector.Glenn Hegar (Texas Comptroller)Created a blacklist of financial companies (including BlackRock) banned from doing business with the state of TexasCalled ESG an "opaque and perverse system" that violates fiduciary dutyAndy Puzder (Former CEO of CKE Restaurants/Hardee's and Carl's Jr.)Argued that forcing companies to focus on social goals instead of profits violates shareholder capitalism and ultimately hurts the economySenator Tom CottonAttacked ESG from a legal and regulatory standpoint. He led a group of Republican senators in warning top U.S. law firms that advising companies to cooperate on ESG goals could open them up to massive federal antitrust violationsSanjai Bhagat (Finance Professor, University of Colorado)Argues that ESG funds don't actually deliver higher returns and that companies in ESG portfolios often have worse compliance records for labor and environmental rules than standard companiesMenI pay my employees $1,000 a month per child for day care. It's one of my ice cream company's best investments.A womanAll womenDEIMolly Moon Neitzelfounder and CEO of Molly Moon's Homemade Ice CreamHer business planwhich included living wages and free health insurance for everyone who worked at least 18 hours a weekMMC-suite promotions now come with three or more jobs - from the article: “When Target named Michael Fiddelke CEO in February 2026, the leadership changes he announced went beyond a standard promotion. Target eliminated its chief commercial officer role and consolidated merchandising authority into a single position, naming Cara Sylvester, previously chief guest experience officer, as the sole chief merchandising officer overseeing product development, assortment design, and partner collaborations.” - WHO DO YOU BLAME??AIIsn't “taking more jobs on” what the promise of AI has been? The article claims “Executives who excel in a specific function are increasingly entrusted with broader operating mandates spanning commercial, technology, operations, finance, or customer strategy” - but really, aren't we just admitting that marketing and sales can be done by a dopey robot?Executive ChairsAs the TOP boys realize they can offload their work by becoming Executive Chair (same salary, fewer hours, no responsibilities!), maybe the CEO class is realizing THEY can stop doing as much if they just give more jobs to underlings? It seems telling the prime example in the article is Target where Brian Cornell still lingers on the board like a boilPay committeesPay committees are handing out massive golden hellos, particularly to CFOs but all c-suite, and they can justify them by “rolling” pointless jobs into a single person, right? BoardsBoards aren't actually paying attention to executives anyway - the data suggests by and large boards in the US are either deferential to the executives (do whatever you want!) or entirely self dealing (highly connected horse trading jobs on other boards!). The result is an indifferent board to actual executive shakeups either way - and CEOs are using indifference to shake up the c-suitesGeneral Mills is recalling nearly 736,000 Pillsbury bread rolls over possible glass - WHO DO YOU BLAME??Public Responsibility Chair Jorge UribeEx “productivity” officer at P&G until he retired in 2015. MBA and bachelor's in “management engineering”, which confused our knowledge typing which pinged off “engineering” to give him Public Safety knowledge, but there's no ACTUAL EVIDENCE he did anything but sales/marketing10 year tenure - longer than the CEO, but not as long as…Longest tenured director and man on Public Responsibility committee Steve OdlandOdland is the CEO of the Conference Board, who does public policy and governance stuff - he was CEO of Office Depot and AutoZone, and came from food (Quaker Oats, Sara Lee)Been on the board 22 years!! Solid job if you can get itBut both Steve and Jorge are tagged as “deferential” in the data (this is an important gig for them), so maybe…CEO Jeff HarmeningWith General Mills since 1994, came from marketing, but was COO - maybe Jeff's job as a director at Toro Company made him too busy to notice the glass? Or, maybe it wasn't their fault at all…RFK Jr: It's not just Taco Bell lettuce and possible glass in Pillsbury rolls: Food and drink recall events reached a 6-year year-over-year high

This week on The FratChat Podcast, we're diving into The BIGGEST Casting What Ifs! From Will Smith almost becoming Neo in The Matrix to Al Pacino nearly playing Han Solo, we count down the wildest alternate casting decisions that could have completely changed movie history. We debate whether Hollywood made the right call, imagine how these iconic films would've looked with different stars, and uncover the behind-the-scenes stories of actors who turned down—or lost—the roles that made someone else a legend. Plus, it's another packed episode with Emails from the Listeners, where we settle a relationship debate after one listener catches her fiancé doing something so disgusting it might derail the wedding. We also tackle whether using AI like ChatGPT makes you "part of the problem," break down a bizarre scam involving rapper Boosie Badazz and a promised presidential pardon, and return with another edition of Not the Drag Queens, exposing yet another youth pastor facing serious criminal charges. Along the way, we riff on Back to the Future, The Lord of the Rings, Hannibal Lecter, MTA horror stories, Taco Bell's parasite outbreak, celebrity casting near-misses, and plenty of the unfiltered comedy that makes FratChat what it is. Got a question, comment or topic for us to cover? Let us know! Send us an email at fratchatpodcast@gmail.com or follow us on all social media: Instagram: http://Instagram.com/FratChatPodcast Facebook: http://Facebook.com/FratChatPodcast Twitter: http://Twitter.com/FratChatPodcast YouTube: http://YouTube.com/@fratchatpodcast Follow Carlos and CMO on social media! Carlos:  IG: http://Instagram.com/CarlosDoesTheWorld YouTube: http://YouTube.com/@carlosdoestheworld TikTok: http://TikTok.com/@carlosdoestheworld Twitter: http://Twitter.com/CarlosDoesWorld Threads: http://threads.net/carlosdoestheworld Website: http://carlosgarciacomedy.com Chris ‘CMO' Moore:  IG: http://Instagram.com/Chris.Moore.Comedy TikTok: http://TikTok.com/@chris.moore.comedy Twitter: http://Twitter.com/cmoorecomedy Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Been a little while but this episode we are taking a Look at the 2nd and final game of TWEWY series, NEO.  A game i was excited for.  This is a game is also connected to the Kingdom hearts series in a way and I am very interested to see how much once KH 4 releases.  Grab some pins and join us as we talk about NEO. Starring Mike Albertin, Phoebe Stanton, Joe Butler, and Dominic.  Dominic's Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/@dissonantwaves7752 A Gamer Looks at 40 - https://agamerlooksat40.com/ Carrying My Cross - https://podcasts.apple.com/pl/podcast/carrying-my-cross-a-faith-journey-podcast/id1865524685 Phoebe's Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/theletsplayprincess Phoebe's Podcast - https://nerdsabroadcast.podbean.com/ Zac's Podcast - https://linktr.ee/absolutelythebest Helena - https://linktr.ee/helhathfury Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/GamesMyMomFound Follow us on Facebook. Instagram - gamesmymomfound_ YouTube  - https://youtube.com/c/GamesMyMomFoundPodcast Discord - https://discord.gg/  

We return to Wizards of the Coast's Villainous Options, now revised after the first round was lovingly pushed down the stairs by public feedback. Some subclasses survived untouched. Some got a makeover. Some were taken behind the shed, especially the Primordial Patron, which had one great idea and the mechanical confidence of a wet napkin. Good news, though: the demon sorcerer finally feels demonic, the Titan Druid is now a proper kaiju tank, and the Hell Knight has upgraded from flaming disappointment to legally playable infernal gambling problem. Show Notes This episode revisits Wizards of the Coast's latest Unearthed Arcana update for Villainous Options, which means the crew returns to the scene of the crime to see what survived the feedback cycle, what got rewritten, and what was quietly removed from the suspect board. The earlier Villainous Options episodes gave us some strong concepts with mixed execution: villainous path feats like the Death Knight and Lich, subclasses like the Titan Druid and Hell Knight, and later options like the Path of Lament Barbarian, Pestilence Cleric, Venom Monk, and the now-defenestrated Primordial Patron Warlock. Some of those were apparently well-liked enough to move forward with little public revision. Others came back covered in red ink and shame. The episode opens by sorting out what is not in the new UA. Path of Lament, Pestilence Cleric, and Venom Monk appear to have landed well enough that they did not need another public pass, though the hosts still have a few lingering concerns about capstones, wording, and whether weaponized sadness is legally distinct from being a barbarian with theater kid energy. The Death Knight and Lich villain paths also seem likely to continue, though Ash remains skeptical that the Lich is as ready as WotC apparently thinks it is. The Primordial Patron, meanwhile, is gone for now, which hurts because the concept rules, but the subclass itself never really delivered on the fantasy of making a pact with an ancient elemental apocalypse. Then the real revisions begin with Circle of the Titan Druid, which gets a much-needed identity check. The old version wanted to be a giant monster but had all the durability of a parade float in a hailstorm. The new version leans harder into tanking: better AC, more temporary hit points, stronger damage scaling, a shorter but more practical Titan form duration, and a capstone swallow ability that finally feels like being eaten by a kaiju instead of being mildly inconvenienced by one. Behemoth and Insectoid both look more playable, with Insectoid getting a strong healing identity, while Leviathan still mostly answers the question, "What if your subclass feature was swimming?" Hell Knight also gets a major facelift, mostly by reducing its dependence on rolling exactly the right number before anything interesting happens. The infernal wounds now feel more like a real subclass engine, with rider effects that happen more consistently and Devil's Luck upgrades when the dice cooperate. It is much better than before, but the table still finds it a little too constrained by resources and a little too enamored with gambling mechanics. It is no longer borderline unplayable, which is progress, but it may still need another pass before it becomes the infernal fighter fantasy everyone clearly wants. The big winner is Demonic Sorcery. The previous version felt like a melee sorcerer with terrible life choices, a bad spell list, and an aura table that made everyone remember why random subclass tables are rarely fun. The revision gives it Abyssal Rupture, a movable sphere of demonic problems that pulls enemies around, creates battlefield control, scales into difficult terrain, and eventually supports summon fiend in a way that finally screams Abyss instead of discount Hexblade with a concussion. The spell list is also dramatically better, replacing nonsense like Hallow and overused Misty Step with options that fit the theme and support the playstyle. It still needs damage scaling on the rupture, but this is the rare UA glow-up where the hosts go from roasting the thing to wanting to play it. The episode also touches on the new feats and epic boons, which range from charming people by picking their pockets to setting better hunting traps to becoming weirdly hard to fool, possess, or kill with necrotic damage. The hosts speculate about what book this material is actually building toward, with possibilities ranging from a renamed Book of Vile Darkness to an evil campaign supplement, a fiendish planar guide, or something tied to the Abyss and Nine Hells. Whatever it becomes, the consensus is cautiously positive: WotC seems to be listening, the revisions are mostly moving in the right direction, and the demon sorcerer finally has enough flavor to stop apologizing for itself. Key Takeaways This UA is a feedback-driven revision of the previous Villainous Options material, not a totally new batch of evil toys. Path of Lament Barbarian, Pestilence Cleric, and Venom Monk appear to have been received well enough that they did not return for major public revision. The Death Knight and Lich villain paths seem likely to continue, though the hosts still think Lich needs more work and Death Knight may get broadened for more martial builds. The Primordial Patron Warlock is gone for now, which is sad because the idea is excellent, but the original execution did not feel like a pact with an elemental world-ending horror. Circle of the Titan Druid is much stronger now and has a clearer role as the tanky kaiju druid. Titan Druid's improved AC, temporary hit points, damage scaling, and better swallow feature make the subclass feel much closer to its fantasy. Behemoth looks solid, Insectoid now has a meaningful healer/tank angle, and Leviathan still feels like the one you pick because the campaign has too much water. Hell Knight is much better because infernal wounds now do interesting things more consistently instead of asking players to roll a six before the subclass becomes fun. Hell Knight still feels too resource-limited and may need another pass, especially if the goal is to make infernal wounds feel like the subclass's real engine. Demonic Sorcery is the standout winner of the revision. The new Abyssal Rupture gives Demonic Sorcery a strong identity built around battlefield control, forced movement, difficult terrain, and demon-flavored chaos. The Demonic Sorcery spell list is dramatically improved and now actually supports the theme instead of asking why a demon sorcerer has Hallow. The hosts like the revised Demonic Sorcery enough that it went from "why would I play this?" to "I would play this immediately." The new feats and epic boons are more mechanically interesting than expected, with a few strong options for social manipulation, traps, protection, and high-level anti-undead or anti-illusion play. The likely future product may be an evil campaign book, a spiritual successor to Book of Vile Darkness, or a broader fiendish/planar supplement. Overall verdict: WotC appears to be listening, the revisions are mostly better, and the villains are finally getting options that do more than look cool while failing their own saving throw. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

We return to Wizards of the Coast's Villainous Options, now revised after the first round was lovingly pushed down the stairs by public feedback. Some subclasses survived untouched. Some got a makeover. Some were taken behind the shed, especially the Primordial Patron, which had one great idea and the mechanical confidence of a wet napkin. Good news, though: the demon sorcerer finally feels demonic, the Titan Druid is now a proper kaiju tank, and the Hell Knight has upgraded from flaming disappointment to legally playable infernal gambling problem. Show Notes This episode revisits Wizards of the Coast's latest Unearthed Arcana update for Villainous Options, which means the crew returns to the scene of the crime to see what survived the feedback cycle, what got rewritten, and what was quietly removed from the suspect board. The earlier Villainous Options episodes gave us some strong concepts with mixed execution: villainous path feats like the Death Knight and Lich, subclasses like the Titan Druid and Hell Knight, and later options like the Path of Lament Barbarian, Pestilence Cleric, Venom Monk, and the now-defenestrated Primordial Patron Warlock. Some of those were apparently well-liked enough to move forward with little public revision. Others came back covered in red ink and shame. The episode opens by sorting out what is not in the new UA. Path of Lament, Pestilence Cleric, and Venom Monk appear to have landed well enough that they did not need another public pass, though the hosts still have a few lingering concerns about capstones, wording, and whether weaponized sadness is legally distinct from being a barbarian with theater kid energy. The Death Knight and Lich villain paths also seem likely to continue, though Ash remains skeptical that the Lich is as ready as WotC apparently thinks it is. The Primordial Patron, meanwhile, is gone for now, which hurts because the concept rules, but the subclass itself never really delivered on the fantasy of making a pact with an ancient elemental apocalypse. Then the real revisions begin with Circle of the Titan Druid, which gets a much-needed identity check. The old version wanted to be a giant monster but had all the durability of a parade float in a hailstorm. The new version leans harder into tanking: better AC, more temporary hit points, stronger damage scaling, a shorter but more practical Titan form duration, and a capstone swallow ability that finally feels like being eaten by a kaiju instead of being mildly inconvenienced by one. Behemoth and Insectoid both look more playable, with Insectoid getting a strong healing identity, while Leviathan still mostly answers the question, "What if your subclass feature was swimming?" Hell Knight also gets a major facelift, mostly by reducing its dependence on rolling exactly the right number before anything interesting happens. The infernal wounds now feel more like a real subclass engine, with rider effects that happen more consistently and Devil's Luck upgrades when the dice cooperate. It is much better than before, but the table still finds it a little too constrained by resources and a little too enamored with gambling mechanics. It is no longer borderline unplayable, which is progress, but it may still need another pass before it becomes the infernal fighter fantasy everyone clearly wants. The big winner is Demonic Sorcery. The previous version felt like a melee sorcerer with terrible life choices, a bad spell list, and an aura table that made everyone remember why random subclass tables are rarely fun. The revision gives it Abyssal Rupture, a movable sphere of demonic problems that pulls enemies around, creates battlefield control, scales into difficult terrain, and eventually supports summon fiend in a way that finally screams Abyss instead of discount Hexblade with a concussion. The spell list is also dramatically better, replacing nonsense like Hallow and overused Misty Step with options that fit the theme and support the playstyle. It still needs damage scaling on the rupture, but this is the rare UA glow-up where the hosts go from roasting the thing to wanting to play it. The episode also touches on the new feats and epic boons, which range from charming people by picking their pockets to setting better hunting traps to becoming weirdly hard to fool, possess, or kill with necrotic damage. The hosts speculate about what book this material is actually building toward, with possibilities ranging from a renamed Book of Vile Darkness to an evil campaign supplement, a fiendish planar guide, or something tied to the Abyss and Nine Hells. Whatever it becomes, the consensus is cautiously positive: WotC seems to be listening, the revisions are mostly moving in the right direction, and the demon sorcerer finally has enough flavor to stop apologizing for itself. Key Takeaways This UA is a feedback-driven revision of the previous Villainous Options material, not a totally new batch of evil toys. Path of Lament Barbarian, Pestilence Cleric, and Venom Monk appear to have been received well enough that they did not return for major public revision. The Death Knight and Lich villain paths seem likely to continue, though the hosts still think Lich needs more work and Death Knight may get broadened for more martial builds. The Primordial Patron Warlock is gone for now, which is sad because the idea is excellent, but the original execution did not feel like a pact with an elemental world-ending horror. Circle of the Titan Druid is much stronger now and has a clearer role as the tanky kaiju druid. Titan Druid's improved AC, temporary hit points, damage scaling, and better swallow feature make the subclass feel much closer to its fantasy. Behemoth looks solid, Insectoid now has a meaningful healer/tank angle, and Leviathan still feels like the one you pick because the campaign has too much water. Hell Knight is much better because infernal wounds now do interesting things more consistently instead of asking players to roll a six before the subclass becomes fun. Hell Knight still feels too resource-limited and may need another pass, especially if the goal is to make infernal wounds feel like the subclass's real engine. Demonic Sorcery is the standout winner of the revision. The new Abyssal Rupture gives Demonic Sorcery a strong identity built around battlefield control, forced movement, difficult terrain, and demon-flavored chaos. The Demonic Sorcery spell list is dramatically improved and now actually supports the theme instead of asking why a demon sorcerer has Hallow. The hosts like the revised Demonic Sorcery enough that it went from "why would I play this?" to "I would play this immediately." The new feats and epic boons are more mechanically interesting than expected, with a few strong options for social manipulation, traps, protection, and high-level anti-undead or anti-illusion play. The likely future product may be an evil campaign book, a spiritual successor to Book of Vile Darkness, or a broader fiendish/planar supplement. Overall verdict: WotC appears to be listening, the revisions are mostly better, and the villains are finally getting options that do more than look cool while failing their own saving throw. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

You see another article. "This platform just changed everything." And suddenly, the AI platform you've been using for months feels completely inadequate. You wonder if you're behind. You wonder if you should switch again. Neo and I have had this conversation more times than we can count, and it's one of the questions we get asked constantly at Inventium AI. Which of the four major AI platforms, Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, should you actually be using? In this How I AI episode, Neo and I walk through the three questions you should ask yourself before committing to any platform, then go through each one in turn to unpack where it shines and where it falls short. By the end, you will have a clear enough picture to make a call, or at least know which one to try next. How I AI is a special series within How I Work where Neo and I explore how high performers are using AI at work to boost productivity, make better decisions and reduce overwhelm. What you'll learn: The three questions to ask before committing to any AI platform Why your data's location could rule out certain options entirely Which platform actually plugs into your daily work apps How pricing models are shifting in ways that could blindside your budget What to weigh before moving your whole company over Practical AI tools for productivity and focus Real-world AI workflows used by high performers How to use AI at work without burning out Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams. My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai) If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/ Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: Martin Imber See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

THE MATRIX RELOADED Humanity's war against the machines continues as Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus fight to free their people from the Matrix, while Neo discovers his growing importance in the fate of mankind. The battle is no longer just about survival, but about understanding the truth behind the world they are trying to escape. Craig, Alan and guest Mark Woodring talk about sweaty community orgies, Mark's first Comicpalooza, the pressure of a follow-up and the movie “Matrix: Reloaded” on this week's Matinee Heroes! Next week the gang talks "Brotherhood of the Wolf" with the added bonus of Mark Dacascos!!

At levels 1 through 4, the 2014 Monk is a beautiful dream: you punch, you kick, you spend ki like a raccoon with a stolen credit card. Then levels 5 through 20 arrive, and suddenly the class asks, "Would you like to stun a dragon, run across a lake, catch a missile, become immune to poison, astral project emotionally, and still somehow worry about running out of ki before lunch?" This episode dives into the Monk's awkward, glorious, high-speed middle and late game, where every turn is a choice between tactical brilliance and blowing your entire budget on Flurry of Blows because punching four times feels spiritually correct. Show Notes In this episode of the RPGBOT.Podcast, the team continues the 2014 DnD 5e Monk breakdown by moving beyond the early levels and into the part of the class where things get weird, fast, and occasionally very effective. Levels 5 through 20 are where the Monk picks up its signature battlefield identity: mobility, disruption, defensive tricks, and the ability to make enemy spellcasters deeply regret standing within sprinting distance. The discussion centers on what Monks actually do well once Extra Attack, Stunning Strike, and higher-level ki features come online. This is not just about throwing more punches. It is about choosing when to spend ki, when to conserve it, which enemies deserve a Stunning Strike attempt, and how to use the Monk's speed to pressure weak points instead of face-tanking like a fighter with worse armor and better hamstrings. The episode also looks at the Monk's scaling problem. The class gains a lot of flavorful and useful features, but its damage can start to lag behind other martial characters unless the player leans into the Monk's strengths. That means playing like a skirmisher, controller, mage-hunter, and mobile problem solver rather than trying to win every fight by standing still and trading hits. By the late game, features like Evasion, Diamond Soul, Empty Body, and improved movement turn the Monk into something incredibly hard to pin down. You may not always be the biggest damage dealer at the table, but you can be the character who crosses the map, ruins the villain's concentration, survives the fireball, and then politely explains that gravity is more of a suggestion than a rule. Key Takeaways Level 5 is the Monk's big glow-up. Extra Attack and Stunning Strike dramatically change how the class plays, giving the Monk real battlefield control instead of just more ways to punch things. Stunning Strike is powerful, but expensive. It can shut down dangerous enemies, but burning ki on every hit is a fast road to becoming a lightly armored commoner with martial arts branding. Monks are skirmishers, not front-line tanks. Their speed, mobility, and defensive tools work best when they pick targets carefully, disrupt key enemies, and avoid getting surrounded. Ki management is the entire game. Flurry of Blows, Patient Defense, Step of the Wind, Stunning Strike, and subclass abilities all compete for the same limited resource, so every choice matters. The Monk is excellent at harassing casters and fragile backline enemies. High movement speed and multiple attacks make the Monk great at reaching enemies who thought they were safely hiding behind the big monsters. Defensive features become a major strength. Evasion, Stillness of Mind, Purity of Body, Diamond Soul, and Empty Body all help the Monk survive effects that can ruin other characters. Damage scaling can be frustrating. The Monk gets more options and survivability, but it may struggle to keep pace with optimized martial builds in raw damage. Ability scores are tight. Monks usually want Dexterity, Wisdom, and Constitution, which makes feats tempting but costly. Late-game Monks are weird in the best way. Running up walls, ignoring poison, surviving saving throws, turning invisible, and resisting damage all support the fantasy of a supernatural martial artist. The best Monk play is tactical, not automatic. The class rewards players who think about positioning, target priority, resource timing, and when not to spend ki just because the button is shiny. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

At levels 1 through 4, the 2014 Monk is a beautiful dream: you punch, you kick, you spend ki like a raccoon with a stolen credit card. Then levels 5 through 20 arrive, and suddenly the class asks, "Would you like to stun a dragon, run across a lake, catch a missile, become immune to poison, astral project emotionally, and still somehow worry about running out of ki before lunch?" This episode dives into the Monk's awkward, glorious, high-speed middle and late game, where every turn is a choice between tactical brilliance and blowing your entire budget on Flurry of Blows because punching four times feels spiritually correct. Show Notes In this episode of the RPGBOT.Podcast, the team continues the 2014 DnD 5e Monk breakdown by moving beyond the early levels and into the part of the class where things get weird, fast, and occasionally very effective. Levels 5 through 20 are where the Monk picks up its signature battlefield identity: mobility, disruption, defensive tricks, and the ability to make enemy spellcasters deeply regret standing within sprinting distance. The discussion centers on what Monks actually do well once Extra Attack, Stunning Strike, and higher-level ki features come online. This is not just about throwing more punches. It is about choosing when to spend ki, when to conserve it, which enemies deserve a Stunning Strike attempt, and how to use the Monk's speed to pressure weak points instead of face-tanking like a fighter with worse armor and better hamstrings. The episode also looks at the Monk's scaling problem. The class gains a lot of flavorful and useful features, but its damage can start to lag behind other martial characters unless the player leans into the Monk's strengths. That means playing like a skirmisher, controller, mage-hunter, and mobile problem solver rather than trying to win every fight by standing still and trading hits. By the late game, features like Evasion, Diamond Soul, Empty Body, and improved movement turn the Monk into something incredibly hard to pin down. You may not always be the biggest damage dealer at the table, but you can be the character who crosses the map, ruins the villain's concentration, survives the fireball, and then politely explains that gravity is more of a suggestion than a rule. Key Takeaways Level 5 is the Monk's big glow-up. Extra Attack and Stunning Strike dramatically change how the class plays, giving the Monk real battlefield control instead of just more ways to punch things. Stunning Strike is powerful, but expensive. It can shut down dangerous enemies, but burning ki on every hit is a fast road to becoming a lightly armored commoner with martial arts branding. Monks are skirmishers, not front-line tanks. Their speed, mobility, and defensive tools work best when they pick targets carefully, disrupt key enemies, and avoid getting surrounded. Ki management is the entire game. Flurry of Blows, Patient Defense, Step of the Wind, Stunning Strike, and subclass abilities all compete for the same limited resource, so every choice matters. The Monk is excellent at harassing casters and fragile backline enemies. High movement speed and multiple attacks make the Monk great at reaching enemies who thought they were safely hiding behind the big monsters. Defensive features become a major strength. Evasion, Stillness of Mind, Purity of Body, Diamond Soul, and Empty Body all help the Monk survive effects that can ruin other characters. Damage scaling can be frustrating. The Monk gets more options and survivability, but it may struggle to keep pace with optimized martial builds in raw damage. Ability scores are tight. Monks usually want Dexterity, Wisdom, and Constitution, which makes feats tempting but costly. Late-game Monks are weird in the best way. Running up walls, ignoring poison, surviving saving throws, turning invisible, and resisting damage all support the fantasy of a supernatural martial artist. The best Monk play is tactical, not automatic. The class rewards players who think about positioning, target priority, resource timing, and when not to spend ki just because the button is shiny. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Patrick examines everything from the use of kneelers at Mass and the history of the Latin rite to misunderstandings about the Traditional Latin Mass and ongoing arguments over tradition and change. He fields heartfelt questions on Eucharistic validity, responds to calls about family suffering, defunct churches turned into mosques, and tensions stirred by new Catholic movements. At every turn, Patrick grounds each response in Church teaching, brings historical clarity, and offers hope to listeners wrestling with confusion or grief. Richard (email) – Can’t we kneel without kneelers? (00:27) James (email) - Would it be fair to say that the SSPX has made an idol of the form of the Mass, that is, the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) form? (01:54) Christy - Son married a pro-SSPX woman who says the Catholic Church is trying to get rid of the Latin mass. (05:24) Andy – At a Redemptoris mater seminary the eucharist is in the form of a cube (11:49) Haydee - My dad just passed away, and he wanted his ashes scattered. I was against this, but my sisters are going through with it. Is it okay to participate with them? (18:02) Martin - I am currently going through a civil divorce and need guidance on how to handle this from a spiritual and Catholic perspective. (23:45) Wayne – My parish closed during Covid and is now being sold to become a Mosque. What do you think of this? (38:36) Thomas - Invalidity of Eucharist on the matter (41:20) Eric - Our diocese is trying to establish the Neo-catechumenal way of tearing off bread for the Eucharist. (43:13)

This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, the hosts ask the eternal tabletop question: what happens when your beloved fantasy RPG grows up, gets a driver's license, discovers firearms, and immediately becomes everyone's problem? We begin with PishPash My Memory is Trash merch, accidental mug design crimes, Pride, wizard bazookas, and Ash's long-simmering legal case against the movie Bright. Then we get to the real issue: how do you let someone fight Tiamat with an Uzi without turning your campaign into a spreadsheet, a war crime, or Shadowrun with the serial numbers filed off? Show Notes In this episode, the RPGBOT crew takes a deep dive into adapting fantasy tabletop RPG systems like D&D and Pathfinder to other technology levels, including modern fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk-adjacent worlds, post-apocalyptic settings, and anything else where a greatsword might have to share table space with a grenade launcher. Tyler walks through the history of previous attempts to drag D&D-style mechanics out of the dungeon and into other genres, including d20 Star Wars, d20 Modern, Star Wars Saga Edition, Star Wars 5e, and the often-forgotten Modern Magic Unearthed Arcana. Along the way, the hosts dig into how those systems handled things like armor, hit points, wounds, vitality, class design, talents, occupations, reputation, and the eternal question of whether getting shot with a blaster should feel worse than being poked with a longsword. The conversation turns into a practical design checklist for anyone trying to run fantasy rules in a modern or sci-fi setting. The big issues are weapons, armor, hit points, movement, vehicles, skills, tools, hacking, currency, magic, classes, monsters, and access to dangerous gear. A gun that does more damage than a sword is easy to write down. Making that gun fun, balanced, available, expensive, illegal, scary, and not immediately campaign-breaking is the actual work. The hosts also wrestle with the big philosophical question: at what point have you changed D&D so much that you should just play a different game? Tyler's rule of changing three major things makes its return, Ash argues for fantasy with modern aesthetics, Randall brings up comet-based magic awakenings and Maximum Overdrive, and everyone briefly imagines what happens when a party of adventurers has to fight a kaiju from inside a tank. Finally, the Question of the Week asks the most important dice-related question possible: what is your favorite die, and which one deserves to be thrown into the sea? Ash defends the d8 and declares war on the foot-stabbing d4. Tyler gives some love to the underappreciated d12. Randall hates the actual d100 because it is basically a tiny chaotic bowling ball that refuses to stop rolling. D20 Modern on DMsGuild (affiliate link) D20 Future on DMsGuild (affiliate link) SW5e Bright RPGBOT.Store DnD 5e modern rules UA "Modern Magic" Dan Helmick's update IMDB Maximum Overdrive Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey Dice Miner (affiliate link) Key Takeaways Adapting fantasy RPGs to modern or sci-fi settings is not just about adding guns. You have to rethink combat assumptions, armor, hit points, movement, skills, equipment, enemies, and the economy. Previous d20-based games offer useful examples. d20 Star Wars experimented with wounds and vitality. d20 Modern used basic classes tied to ability scores, occupations, talents, and advanced classes. Star Wars Saga Edition showed some early design DNA that later appeared in 4e. Firearms and modern weapons change the math quickly. A pistol, rifle, grenade, or blaster can make traditional fantasy damage assumptions look very strange unless the system accounts for armor, accuracy, availability, legality, and consequences. Armor may need to work differently. In a modern game, characters probably are not walking around in plate armor, so armor might reduce damage, resist ballistic attacks, or be replaced partly by class-based defense or plot-armor-style scaling. Hit points can still work, but they need a clear interpretation. They might represent luck, stamina, near misses, tactical positioning, or cinematic survival rather than literal meat points. Vehicles change encounter design. Horses and overland travel are one thing. Cars, motorcycles, tanks, aircraft, and spaceships make movement, chase scenes, distance, and random encounters much more complicated. Skills and tools need updating. Computers, hacking, piloting, driving, engineering, and modern medicine may need to be skills, tool proficiencies, lore-style specialties, or full subsystems depending on how important they are to the campaign. The modern world makes Strength harder to justify unless the game gives it a reason to matter. Close quarters, carrying capacity, melee restrictions, grappling, armor, and specialized builds can help keep strong characters relevant. Classes may need reskinning rather than replacement. A barbarian might become a super-soldier, a rage-serum bruiser, or a minigun-wielding menace. A cleric might serve an ideal, philosophy, cosmic force, AI god, or belief system rather than a traditional deity. Magic can stay magical, become technology, or sit beside technology. Fireball might still be a spell, or it might be a grenade, a rocket launcher, a plasma weapon, or a problem for your insurance provider. Monsters still work if you treat them thoughtfully. Vampires, mind flayers, zombies, kaiju, and the Tarrasque can all survive in modern settings if their defenses, tactics, environment, and narrative role make sense. Access matters. Just because tanks, RPGs, and military hardware exist does not mean the party can buy them at Fantasy Costco. Price, legality, scarcity, black markets, and consequences are balancing tools. Currency may be better handled abstractly. Modern money can become tedious fast, so a wealth stat or resource system may work better than tracking every nickel, dime, credit card, crypto wallet, and suspicious suitcase full of cash. Tyler's three-change rule is a useful warning sign. If you need to make three huge changes to force D&D into another genre, consider whether another RPG already does what you want better. The episode's greatest lesson may be this: you can absolutely kill Tiamat with an Uzi, but first you need to know what that does to armor class, encounter balance, campaign tone, and the local black market. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, the hosts ask the eternal tabletop question: what happens when your beloved fantasy RPG grows up, gets a driver's license, discovers firearms, and immediately becomes everyone's problem? We begin with PishPash My Memory is Trash merch, accidental mug design crimes, Pride, wizard bazookas, and Ash's long-simmering legal case against the movie Bright. Then we get to the real issue: how do you let someone fight Tiamat with an Uzi without turning your campaign into a spreadsheet, a war crime, or Shadowrun with the serial numbers filed off? Show Notes In this episode, the RPGBOT crew takes a deep dive into adapting fantasy tabletop RPG systems like D&D and Pathfinder to other technology levels, including modern fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk-adjacent worlds, post-apocalyptic settings, and anything else where a greatsword might have to share table space with a grenade launcher. Tyler walks through the history of previous attempts to drag D&D-style mechanics out of the dungeon and into other genres, including d20 Star Wars, d20 Modern, Star Wars Saga Edition, Star Wars 5e, and the often-forgotten Modern Magic Unearthed Arcana. Along the way, the hosts dig into how those systems handled things like armor, hit points, wounds, vitality, class design, talents, occupations, reputation, and the eternal question of whether getting shot with a blaster should feel worse than being poked with a longsword. The conversation turns into a practical design checklist for anyone trying to run fantasy rules in a modern or sci-fi setting. The big issues are weapons, armor, hit points, movement, vehicles, skills, tools, hacking, currency, magic, classes, monsters, and access to dangerous gear. A gun that does more damage than a sword is easy to write down. Making that gun fun, balanced, available, expensive, illegal, scary, and not immediately campaign-breaking is the actual work. The hosts also wrestle with the big philosophical question: at what point have you changed D&D so much that you should just play a different game? Tyler's rule of changing three major things makes its return, Ash argues for fantasy with modern aesthetics, Randall brings up comet-based magic awakenings and Maximum Overdrive, and everyone briefly imagines what happens when a party of adventurers has to fight a kaiju from inside a tank. Finally, the Question of the Week asks the most important dice-related question possible: what is your favorite die, and which one deserves to be thrown into the sea? Ash defends the d8 and declares war on the foot-stabbing d4. Tyler gives some love to the underappreciated d12. Randall hates the actual d100 because it is basically a tiny chaotic bowling ball that refuses to stop rolling. D20 Modern on DMsGuild (affiliate link) D20 Future on DMsGuild (affiliate link) SW5e Bright RPGBOT.Store DnD 5e modern rules UA "Modern Magic" Dan Helmick's update IMDB Maximum Overdrive Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey Dice Miner (affiliate link) Key Takeaways Adapting fantasy RPGs to modern or sci-fi settings is not just about adding guns. You have to rethink combat assumptions, armor, hit points, movement, skills, equipment, enemies, and the economy. Previous d20-based games offer useful examples. d20 Star Wars experimented with wounds and vitality. d20 Modern used basic classes tied to ability scores, occupations, talents, and advanced classes. Star Wars Saga Edition showed some early design DNA that later appeared in 4e. Firearms and modern weapons change the math quickly. A pistol, rifle, grenade, or blaster can make traditional fantasy damage assumptions look very strange unless the system accounts for armor, accuracy, availability, legality, and consequences. Armor may need to work differently. In a modern game, characters probably are not walking around in plate armor, so armor might reduce damage, resist ballistic attacks, or be replaced partly by class-based defense or plot-armor-style scaling. Hit points can still work, but they need a clear interpretation. They might represent luck, stamina, near misses, tactical positioning, or cinematic survival rather than literal meat points. Vehicles change encounter design. Horses and overland travel are one thing. Cars, motorcycles, tanks, aircraft, and spaceships make movement, chase scenes, distance, and random encounters much more complicated. Skills and tools need updating. Computers, hacking, piloting, driving, engineering, and modern medicine may need to be skills, tool proficiencies, lore-style specialties, or full subsystems depending on how important they are to the campaign. The modern world makes Strength harder to justify unless the game gives it a reason to matter. Close quarters, carrying capacity, melee restrictions, grappling, armor, and specialized builds can help keep strong characters relevant. Classes may need reskinning rather than replacement. A barbarian might become a super-soldier, a rage-serum bruiser, or a minigun-wielding menace. A cleric might serve an ideal, philosophy, cosmic force, AI god, or belief system rather than a traditional deity. Magic can stay magical, become technology, or sit beside technology. Fireball might still be a spell, or it might be a grenade, a rocket launcher, a plasma weapon, or a problem for your insurance provider. Monsters still work if you treat them thoughtfully. Vampires, mind flayers, zombies, kaiju, and the Tarrasque can all survive in modern settings if their defenses, tactics, environment, and narrative role make sense. Access matters. Just because tanks, RPGs, and military hardware exist does not mean the party can buy them at Fantasy Costco. Price, legality, scarcity, black markets, and consequences are balancing tools. Currency may be better handled abstractly. Modern money can become tedious fast, so a wealth stat or resource system may work better than tracking every nickel, dime, credit card, crypto wallet, and suspicious suitcase full of cash. Tyler's three-change rule is a useful warning sign. If you need to make three huge changes to force D&D into another genre, consider whether another RPG already does what you want better. The episode's greatest lesson may be this: you can absolutely kill Tiamat with an Uzi, but first you need to know what that does to armor class, encounter balance, campaign tone, and the local black market. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

In March, China became the first country to approve an invasive brain-computer interface beyond clinical trials. The implant, called NEO, is now available to some patients with limb paralysis due to a spinal cord injury. Ira talks with Wired staff writer Emily Mullin about the significance of this milestone. Plus, brain implants aren't the only development: China's entire biotech industry has skyrocketed in recent years. A decade ago, about 8% of new drug molecules were discovered in China. Now it's over 40%. And more clinical trials are now being conducted there than in the U.S. or Europe. Ira talks with health policy researcher So-Yeon Kang, who's been following the Chinese pharma industry's meteoric rise. Guests: Emily Mullin is a staff writer at Wired.  Dr. So-Yeon Kang is an Assistant Professor of Health Management and Policy at Georgetown University.  Other episodes you may enjoy: Advances In Brain-Computer Interfaces For People With Paralysis How China Is Driving Down Electricity Costs With Renewables Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that's keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Before the rogues can reach legendary proficiency, the episode must first survive the real high-level threats: Producer Dan being sleepy, Tyler's aggressively early bedtime policy, Ash explaining the freedom of having no kids, a Starfinder boss who walks through space walls, and the devastating possibility that a spider might disrupt Tyler's routine. Once everyone finally remembers this is supposed to be a Pathfinder 2e rogue episode, the party returns to levels 11 through 20, where rogues stop being "sneaky knife people" and become invisible, paralyzing, truth-proof, pants-stealing engines of felony. Show Notes This episode continues the RPGBOT.Podcast Pathfinder 2e rogue build series, picking up at level 11 and carrying the Mastermind, Scoundrel, and Ruffian builds all the way to level 20. Tyler, Ash, and Randall revisit their characters and explore what happens when rogues move beyond "I stab the off-guard guy" and into "I delete actions, rewrite memories, steal impossible objects, ignore magical detection, and turn violence into a pyramid scheme." Tyler's Mastermind continues to lean into Recall Knowledge, ranged support, and battlefield control. His rogue knows things about things, then stabs those things, then tells his friends how to stab those things better. Randall's Ruffian keeps building into the direct approach: intimidation, bleed, debilitating strikes, reactive setups, and the wonderful simplicity of punching someone so effectively that an ally also gets to hit them. Ash's Catfolk Scoundrel doubles down on deception, stealth, social nonsense, and the extremely upsetting power to convince someone that he has secretly been part of their life the whole time. The mid-level progression brings several major rogue upgrades. Critical Debilitation and Bloody Debilitation add nasty new rider effects. Greater Rogue Reflexes turns Reflex saves into a comedy routine where explosions are mostly someone else's problem. Double Debilitation lets rogues stack problems on top of problems. Master Strike gives rogues a terrifying late-game opener that can paralyze, knock unconscious, or kill a target if the dice cooperate. The episode also highlights how wild high-level skill feats become. Reveal Machinations lets Ash emotionally destroy someone by claiming to be their secret dad. Scare to Death lets Randall intimidate people so hard their hearts may simply quit. Legendary Thief opens the door to absurd theft, including the possibility of stealing weapons, armor, or, naturally, pants. Blank Slate makes Ash so good at lying that divination magic simply refuses to perceive him. True Perception gets called out as a must-have, because permanent true sight is extremely hard to argue with. By level 20, everyone converges on Enduring Debilitation because sometimes the correct answer is obvious. Extending a debilitation for a full minute is brutal, especially when it means a boss might lose a third of their actions for most of a fight. The hosts also shout out other capstone-style options like Hidden Paragon, Steel Essence, Perfect Distraction, Reactive Distraction, and Craft Anything, showing that high-level rogues can be invisible legends, impossible thieves, decoy-swapping nightmares, or walking item factories. In classic RPGBOT fashion, the episode is equal parts mechanical breakdown, build advice, and conversational derailment. It is a guide to high-level rogues, but it is also a warning: once a rogue reaches legendary proficiency, the laws of physics, social trust, and basic workplace safety are all optional. Key Takeaways This episode covers Pathfinder 2e rogues from levels 11 through 20, continuing the three builds from Part 1: Tyler's Mastermind, Ash's Catfolk Scoundrel, and Randall's Ruffian. High-level rogues become much more than sneak attackers. They gain stronger saves, better weapon proficiency, powerful debilitations, absurd skill feats, and some truly ridiculous capstone options. Incredible Scout is a strong party-facing general feat because it can improve initiative for the whole group when using the Scout exploration activity. Critical Debilitation is a standout level 12 option because slowed is one of the nastiest conditions in Pathfinder 2e, and even a success can still matter. Bloody Debilitation gives rogues a straightforward damage option by adding significant persistent bleed damage. Greater Rogue Reflexes makes rogues extremely hard to punish with Reflex-based effects, especially combined with their already strong Reflex progression. Leave an Opening is excellent for team damage because it lets an ally make a reactive strike when the rogue critically hits an off-guard target. Double Debilitation lets rogues apply two debilitations at once, but the interaction matters. If one debilitation ends, both end, so sometimes one strong debilitation is better than stacking. Reveal Machinations is one of the funniest skill feats discussed. Ash frames it as convincing an enemy that you have secretly been their father, mentor, or recurring trauma goblin all along. Scare to Death is both mechanically useful and hilarious. Even when it does not kill something outright, frightened conditions are still valuable. Dispelling Slice gives rogues a way to make casters sad by cutting through active magical effects on an off-guard target. Legendary Thief opens up absurd theft possibilities, including stealing things that should be impossible to steal under normal circumstances. Blank Slate is peak Scoundrel nonsense. Ash becomes so good at deception that detection, revelation, and scrying magic can simply fail to notice him. Powerful Sneak makes Sneak Attack more reliable by helping against precision immunity or resistance and improving low sneak attack damage rolls. Master Strike is a terrifying level 19 feature that lets rogues add a major incapacitating effect when they damage an off-guard target. True Perception gets called out as an incredible general feat because constant true sight is useful on almost any character who can qualify. Enduring Debilitation is the big level 20 winner. Making a debilitation last for a full minute can dramatically change a boss fight. Hidden Paragon, Steel Essence, Craft Anything, Perfect Distraction, and Reactive Distraction show how high-level rogues can specialize into legendary stealth, impossible theft, crafting absurdity, or decoy-based nonsense. The Mastermind becomes a knowledge-based support striker, the Ruffian becomes a fear-and-bleed melee bully, and the Scoundrel becomes a deception-fueled social and stealth menace. The real lesson: high-level rogues do not just break into places. They break action economy, memories, magic detection, enemy confidence, and possibly the pants economy. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

You've probably seen Cowork mentioned inside Claude, or perhaps you clocked the headlines when Microsoft folded it into Copilot a couple of weeks ago. Either way, the question people keep asking is simple: how is this actually different from just chatting with Claude? The answer comes down to files, time and money - three things that change quite dramatically once you move from chat to Cowork. In this How I AI episode, Neo and I unpack exactly what Cowork can do that regular chat can't, how to know which one to reach for, and what the new Microsoft version means if you're a Copilot user. How I AI is a special series within How I Work where Neo and I explore how high performers are using AI at work to boost productivity, make better decisions and reduce overwhelm. What you'll learn: What actually changes when Claude can touch files on your own computer The simple test for deciding between Chat and Cowork for any task How Cowork differs from Claude Code, and who each one is really built for Three lesser known Cowork features worth exploring What Microsoft's version of Cowork does differently, and what it costs Practical AI tools for productivity and focus Real-world AI workflows used by high performers How to use AI at work without burning out Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams. My latest book The Energy Game is out now. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai) If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/ Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: Martin Imber See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Monks are supposed to be serene masters of body, mind, and spirit, which is adorable because in 2014 DnD 5e they mostly begin life as a lightly dressed Dex-Wis-Con spreadsheet sprinting toward danger with 10 hit points and a dream. This week, the RPGBOT crew enters the monastery to ask the big questions. Can you punch your way to enlightenment? Is ki a precious spiritual resource or just a tiny battery labeled please do not waste on disappointment? And at levels 1 through 4, are Monks ascending to greatness, or are they simply discovering that inner peace does not count as armor? Show Notes This episode begins the RPGBOT.Podcast's two-part breakdown of the 2014 DnD 5e Monk, starting where every fragile martial arts legend begins: levels 1 through 4. The crew digs into what makes the Monk exciting, frustrating, stylish, and mechanically hungry enough to eat every good ability score on your character sheet. The conversation looks at the Monk's core identity as a fast, unarmored martial character built around Dexterity, Wisdom, and Constitution. That sounds elegant until you realize the class wants all three of those stats immediately, then quietly asks whether you also had room for feats, survivability, and emotional support snacks. From Unarmored Defense to Martial Arts, the early Monk has a lot of cool tools, but not always enough breathing room to use them comfortably. The team also explores the Monk's early features, including Flurry of Blows, Slow Fall, and the looming promise of Stunning Strike. There is plenty to like here, especially for players who enjoy movement, positioning, and the fantasy of solving problems with disciplined violence. But the episode also does not shy away from the class's pain points, including limited weapon options, resource pressure, and design choices that make the Monk feel like it is constantly trying to do three jobs while dressed for yoga. Subclasses also enter the dojo, with discussion of options like Ascendant Dragon, Open Hand, Shadow, Drunken Master, Four Elements, Long Death, Mercy, and Cobalt Soul. Some bring strong flavor, some bring real mechanical value, and some bring the familiar DnD experience of reading a subclass feature and whispering, why would you do this to me? Along the way, the crew talks optimization, multiclassing, race choices, ability score improvements, and how to build a Monk that can actually survive long enough to become the terrifying battlefield blur you imagined. It is a practical, opinionated, and occasionally exasperated look at a class with fantastic vibes, uneven mechanics, and the eternal promise that someday, somehow, punching a dragon in the ankle will be a sound tactical plan. Key Takeaways The 2014 DnD 5e Monk has one of the strongest class fantasies in the game, but the mechanics can struggle to fully support it. Early Monks rely heavily on Dexterity, Wisdom, and Constitution, making them very ability-score dependent right from level 1. Unarmored Defense is flavorful and useful, but it also means the Monk needs strong stats to keep up defensively. Martial Arts gives the Monk its core identity, letting the character fight with speed, flexibility, and style without relying on heavy weapons or armor. Weapon limitations can make early Monk choices feel narrower than expected, especially compared to other martial classes. Ki is powerful but limited, so early Monks need to be careful about when they spend it and when they save it. Flurry of Blows is iconic, but it competes for the same limited resource pool as other Monk tricks. Slow Fall is useful and very funny when it works, especially if your campaign includes cliffs, towers, rooftops, or poor decisions. Stunning Strike is one of the Monk's most famous features, but its effectiveness depends heavily on enemy Constitution saves and ki availability. Subclass choice matters a lot because some Monk subclasses help solve the class's problems, while others mostly hand you a decorative ribbon and a bill. Open Hand and Mercy tend to offer more reliable mechanical value, while subclasses like Four Elements can be harder to recommend without generous table support. Shadow Monk brings strong utility and sneaky fantasy, especially for players who want mobility, stealth, and magical ninja nonsense. Ascendant Dragon adds big style and elemental flavor, giving the Monk a more dramatic combat identity. Drunken Master, Long Death, and Cobalt Soul each offer distinct flavor and tools, but their value depends heavily on campaign style and player expectations. Multiclassing can help some Monk builds, but it can also delay important class features and make an already hungry build even hungrier. Ability Score Improvements are especially important because the Monk often needs raw stats more than flashy feats. Race choice can make a meaningful difference, especially when it supports Dexterity, Wisdom, survivability, mobility, or extra utility. The Monk works best when the player leans into movement, positioning, skirmishing, and selective resource use rather than trying to stand still and trade hits like a Fighter. The class is stylish, mobile, and fun, but it asks the player to manage limitations carefully. The Monk's biggest tragedy is that it looks like a simple punch class, but underneath the robes is a complicated optimization puzzle doing parkour. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

My instant first look at 1X's just-unveiled NEO robot hands. Hot take: they're a massive leap toward truly useful humanoid robots.With 25 degrees of freedom, tendon-driven actuation, tactile sensing, force feedback, and near-human dexterity, these hands can do far more than simple gripping. They can assemble LEGO, pick up tiny screws and coins, plug in a USB-C cable, zip jackets, use tools, sort delicate fruit, and even wash themselves.(Washable robot hands! That's not common.)In this video, I break down what makes these hands fundamentally different from traditional robotic grippers, why backdrivability and force transparency matter, and why hands may be the single most important component of practical humanoid robots.Topics covered:* Why most robot hands are still “numb”* How tendon-driven hands improve dexterity* Force sensing and tactile feedback explained* Precision handling of tiny objects* Strength, durability, and IP68 sealing* Why washable robot hands matter for home robotics* Over-the-air upgrades and the future of NEOIf humanoid robots are going to become useful assistants in homes, warehouses, and workplaces, breakthroughs like this are what will make it possible.

Once the table finally escapes the opening chaos and cat crimes, Tyler, Randall, and Ash dive into Pathfinder 2e rogues, proving that the class is not just a sneaky knife gremlin. It is also a walking toolbox, a social menace, a battlefield problem, and so much more Show Notes This episode begins the RPGBOT.Podcast breakdown of Pathfinder 2e rogues, covering levels 1 through 10 and exploring how the class develops from nimble opportunist into a precision-damage nightmare with more skills than common sense. Tyler, Randall, and Ash each bring a different rogue racket to the table, with Tyler building a Mastermind, Ash building a Scoundrel, and Randall building a Ruffian. The conversation starts with the rogue's core identity: Sneak Attack, off-guard targets, excellent skills, strong Reflex saves, and the sheer absurdity of getting skill increases and skill feats constantly. The hosts explain how Pathfinder rogues differ from their 5e cousins, especially around precision damage, surprise attack, and how off-guard creates the opening rogues need to ruin someone's day. From there, the builds split into very different flavors of criminal excellence. Ash's Catfolk Scoundrel leans into Feint, Deception, diversions, social trickery, and making enemies easier to stab, hide from, or fireball. Tyler's Fetchling Mastermind turns Recall Knowledge into a combat engine, using information as a weapon and building toward automatic knowledge checks, scroll utility, and ranged support. Randall's Human Ruffian takes the direct approach with medium armor, intimidation, two-weapon tricks, gang-up tactics, and eventually debilitation options that make the whole party better at hurting things. Along the way, the hosts cover important rogue build choices including ancestry feats, racket features, armor considerations, weapon selection, class feats, general feats, and the sometimes painful reality that not every tempting rogue feat is worth taking. Twist the Knife gets called out as a trap compared to easier bleed options, while Gang Up, Analyze Weakness, Clever Gambit, Distracting Feint, Dazzling Diversion, Predictive Purchase, and racket-specific debilitations all get time in the spotlight. The episode closes by emphasizing that while these builds are combat-focused, rogues are not limited to combat. With their enormous number of skill feats and skill increases, rogues can be investigators, con artists, diplomats, criminals, spies, consultants, bullies, burglars, or social wrecking balls. In true RPGBOT fashion, the takeaway is clear: you can optimize the stabbing, but you still have plenty of room left to optimize the nonsense. Key Takeaways Pathfinder 2e rogues are skill monsters. They gain more skill increases and skill feats than almost anyone else, making them great in combat, exploration, social encounters, and weird niche problem-solving. Sneak Attack is the rogue's core damage feature, but it depends on the target being off-guard and on using the right kinds of weapons or attacks. Surprise Attack helps rogues get Sneak Attack early in combat by making creatures off-guard if the rogue rolls Deception or Stealth for initiative and acts before them. Rogue rackets dramatically change how the class plays. Scoundrels manipulate enemies with Feint and Deception, Masterminds weaponize Recall Knowledge, and Ruffians use intimidation, armor, and heavier weapons to bully the battlefield. Ash's Scoundrel build focuses on Charisma, Feint, Deception, and making enemies vulnerable through off-guard, dazzled, Reflex penalties, and tactical debilitations. Tyler's Mastermind build turns Recall Knowledge into a combat strategy, using it to make enemies off-guard, trigger extra movement, support allies, and set up extra damage through Analyze Weakness. Randall's Ruffian build leans into durability, melee pressure, medium armor, intimidation, Gang Up, and debilitation options that add weaknesses or penalties to enemies. Medium armor can work for a rogue, especially a Ruffian, but noisy armor is a bad idea if you still want to sneak. Weapon choice matters. Kukris, shortbows, agile and finesse weapons, and qualifying Ruffian weapons all interact differently with Sneak Attack and critical specialization. Analyze Weakness is a strong rogue feat for builds that can reliably identify enemies, adding extra precision-style damage when the rogue wants one hit to matter more. Gang Up is excellent for melee rogues because it makes off-guard easier to trigger without needing perfect flanking positions. Twist the Knife sounds fun, but the hosts flag it as a trap because weapon runes can often provide better bleed damage with less action cost. Debilitating Strike at level 9 is a major rogue power bump, letting Sneak Attack also impose conditions like speed penalties or enfeebled. Level 10 racket-specific debilitations make rogues even nastier. Masterminds gain support-focused options, Ruffians can add damage weaknesses or clumsy, and Scoundrels can shut down reactions or flanking. The builds in this episode are combat-focused, but rogues can easily become outstanding social and exploration characters because they have so many skill feats to spend. Rogues are not just sneaky stabbers. They can be detectives, con artists, crime lords, rich bullies, diplomats, vault testers, information brokers, and every other flavor of charming disaster. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Digital Ocean - do.co/twist Agree.com - agree.com Every.io - every.io.   Today's show: How many startups matter in tech? Fewer than you think. That's why venture capitalists are tripping over themselves to get onto their cap tables, no matter the cost. Why? Footwork's Nikhil Basu Trivedi argues that the Valley has never been more "power-law-pilled" than it is today. Basu Trivedi joined Cendana Capital's Michael Kim and TWiST's Alex Wilhelm to go deep on secondary markets, the state of startup M&A, why the SaaSpocalypse may be temporary, and what could trigger a retrenchment of the AI trade. It's Wednesday, so it's time for our venture capital roundtable to go deep on how VCs are investing today, and where on the horizon they have their eyes fixed! Guest links: Nikhil Basu Trivedi https://x.com/nbt Footwork https://www.footwork.vc/ Michael Kim https://x.com/MKRocks Cendana Capital https://www.cendanacapital.com/ Show links: The USVC-Anduril blowup https://x.com/ankurnagpal/status/2072701195714531398 Kline Hill Cendana Partners https://www.secondariesinvestor.com/kline-hill-and-cendana-raise-400m-for-second-vc-secondaries-fund/ GPTZero's exit https://gptzero.me/news/preserving-whats-human/ Salesforce buys Fin https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/06/15/salesforce-signs-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-fin/ Vercel buys Better Auth https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-acquires-better-auth Figma buys Bud https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/07/figma-acquires-team-behind-a-vibe-coding-app/ Protoge https://withprotege.ai/ Windborne https://windbornesystems.com/ Etched https://www.etched.com/ Lovable's reported raise https://sifted.eu/articles/lovable-300m-13-2bn-valuation Josh Browder https://x.com/Joshuabrowder   Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction: Nikhil Basu Trivedi (Footwork) & Michael Kim (Cendana Capital) 1:59 The Anduril vs. USVC secondary market blowup 4:08 Why Silicon Valley is 'power-law-pilled' 8:23 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 9:37 Information asymmetry in the secondary markets 9:45 Every.io — For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io 15:02 Is SPV fraud smoke or fire? 16:32 Superhuman acquires GPTZero 19:54 Agree.com - Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract-to-cash stack. Go to https://agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life! 21:10 The M&A wave 27:19 The SaaSpocalypse debate 29:59 DigitalOcean - Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. 30:44 Data's moment in the energy → compute → data loop 35:01 Where will AI value accrue? 40:04 What could cause an AI correction? 42:17 Why some companies are "too big to miss" 46:23 China's possible open-weight model ban 53:28 Young founders: Etched, Thiel Fellows, Z Fellows, Neo 55:33 Portfolio spotlight: WindBorne's weather balloons and data moat 58:47 Michael's favorite fund manager: Josh Browder Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp   Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons   Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm   Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis   Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/   Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland   Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis   Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Rostermania or not so much? Breaking down all the biggest changes so far in Aurora, FaZe, G2, HEROIC, FUT, BCG and more!➡️ Follow us for updates: https://twitter.com/HLTVconfirmed

If your organisation has moved its AI licenses onto a per-use plan, every single chat thread your team sends is now adding to a bill. Some companies are already burning through their entire IT budget for AI within the first couple of months of the year, and most staff have no idea their usage is costing anything at all. It doesn't have to be a mystery. There are simple habits, from which model you default to, to what time of day you send your first message, that change how far your usage actually stretches. In this How I AI episode, Neo and I unpack tokenomics, the economics of how you actually use your AI. We get into how usage limits work across the major platforms, why the timing of your first chat each day matters more than you'd think, and what changes once you move from a personal plan to an enterprise one. How I AI is a special series within How I Work where Neo and I explore how high performers are using AI at work to boost productivity, make better decisions and reduce overwhelm. What you'll learn: What tokenomics actually means and why it's suddenly everywhere How Claude's usage window works differently to ChatGPT and Copilot The simple morning habit that changes how far your usage window stretches Why enterprise billing is shifting, and what that means for your team's budget What managers should be doing before token usage gets out of hand Practical AI tools for productivity and focus Real-world AI workflows used by high performers How to use AI at work without burning out Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams. My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai) If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/ Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: Martin Imber See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Forgotten Odysseys, the game where surviving the Trojan War is apparently the easy part. Adam Bradford, also known as BadEye Adam, has created a MÖRK BORG-compatible Greek fantasy nightmare where the gods hate you, the sea hates you, the dice hate you, and sometimes your own party decides that prophecy is just a polite suggestion to commit murder. In this episode, the crew sets sail for home, immediately gets distracted by pork, insults a goddess, and proves that if Odysseus had access to a live Twitch chat, he probably would have died even faster. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/badeye/forgotten-odysseys Show Notes This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, we dive into Forgotten Odysseys, the creation of Adam Bradford, also known as BadEye Adam, and currently funding on Kickstarter. Adam joins the show to talk about building a brutal, mythic Greek journey home from the Trojan War using the bones of MÖRK BORG, then Josh Simons of Broken Door Entertainment takes the helm for a live play demo that immediately proves why sailors should fear gods, storms, wild animals, and shirtless leadership. Adam walks through the inspirations behind the game, from The Odyssey and Bronze Age Greek culture to Blood of Zeus, 300, Xena, and the gloriously doomed charm of MÖRK BORG hacks. The result is a sword-and-sandals survival game where the goal is simple: get home. The problem is Eris, goddess of strife and chaos, who believes you cheated death at Troy and would very much like to correct that oversight. The episode also explores the game's seafaring tests, deadly mishaps, journey map, mythic art direction, character classes, boons, curses, legendary items, and armor system. Then the actual play begins, and the party creates Dome, Demos, and Dephobos, three heroes whose collective survival strategy includes playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on a lyre, hunting boars in a storm, yelling at divine fog, and ultimately fulfilling a betrayal prophecy with alarming efficiency. If you like Greek mythology, doomed sailors, lethal rules-light games, gorgeous art-heavy books, and tabletop sessions where a boar fight becomes the emotional centerpiece of the evening, this one is for you. Key Takeaways Forgotten Odysseys is Adam Bradford's mythic Greek, MÖRK BORG-compatible game about soldiers trying to survive the journey home after the Trojan War. The game is currently on Kickstarter and is published in partnership with Broken Door Entertainment. Adam wrote, illustrated, laid out, and designed the game, giving it a strong personal visual identity inspired by Greek myth, comics, public domain art, and brutal sword-and-sandals drama. The central premise is not "become a hero." It is "get home before the gods, monsters, sea, dice, or your friends kill you." Eris replaces Poseidon as the primary divine antagonist, hunting the characters because they survived when fate said they should have died. The game keeps the deadly, strange, art-heavy spirit of MÖRK BORG while adding Greek myth flavor, seafaring rules, Bronze Age gear, legendary items, boons, curses, and a journey map. Seafaring tests let everyone contribute to survival, whether they are rowing, navigating, inspiring the crew, helming the ship, or playing music to keep the oars in rhythm. Character creation leans into randomness, misery, and personality, which is how the table ends up with Dome, Demos, and Dephobos, three names that sound like they were cursed before the dice even hit the table. The live play shows off the system's fast combat, player-facing rolls, armor tiers, and high stakes, mostly through the sacred Greek tradition of nearly dying to pigs. Demos learns that boars are dangerous, Dephobos learns that prophecy is inconvenient, and Dome learns that leadership is easier when nobody questions why someone was stabbed and thrown into shallow water. The episode is a strong showcase for the game's tone: mythic, deadly, beautiful, ridiculous, and always one bad roll away from becoming a cautionary tale. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

When Neo Langston — D4VD's closest friend and frequent collaborator — posted privately that he's legally clear and has receipts, the posts leaked within hours and became the first real crack in D4VD's inner circle. But a statement analyst who reviewed every word found something more telling than what Neo said: the careful, deliberate absence of any reference to the crime, the person involved, or the fourteen-year-old girl who died.This look back examines Neo's role in the investigation at the time of our reporting — his arrest in Montana for failing to appear before a grand jury, his brief appearance once he was brought in, and the private investigator working on behalf of the family who publicly questioned why someone claiming to have information waited months and a felony arrest before speaking up. We also walk through D4VD's manager's grand jury testimony, which reportedly extended over several days, compared to Neo's approximately forty minutes.The case moved significantly after these events. David Anthony Burke was arrested by LAPD Robbery-Homicide and subsequently charged. The remains of Celeste Rivas Hernandez — a fourteen-year-old girl who had been missing for roughly seventeen months — had been found in the front trunk of a Tesla registered to him. A sealed medical examiner's report, a security hold initiated by LAPD, and tracking data placing Burke in a remote area are all part of the record. Burke has pleaded not guilty. We revisit where things stood at the time of our reporting.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#D4VD #CelesteRivasHernandez #NeoLangston #GrandJury #TrueCrime #DavidBurke #JusticeForCeleste #LAPD #HiddenKillers #TrueCrimePodcast