Podcasts about persuasive technology lab

DAMIONMLK Day:Incoming Walmart CEO John Furner:Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy reminds us blahblahblah. During our annual MLK Day Celebration, we reflected on blahblahblah. We care for people. Blahblahblah We strive to be honest, fair, and courageous. And we put others first in the work we do to help people live better.When we lead with care, show respect and do what's right, we honor Dr. King's legacy through action and continue building a Walmart that reflects our purpose and values.Walmart: $27,408,854, the fiscal 2025 annual total compensation of our median associate was $29,469, and the ratio of these amounts was 930:1.By 11:14 AM: He has earned $29,469 (the median worker's entire year of labor).Total Earnings by MLK Day: ~$1,425,000That $1.4 million is equivalent to the lifetime earnings of 48 median Walmart associates (assuming each works for one year at $29,469)As of January 20, 2026, the combined net worth of the Walton family has reached a historic $513.4 billion, according to the latest Bloomberg and Forbes data.As of January 2026, the Walton family collectively receives approximately $3.4 billion per year in dividends from Walmart.Per Day: The family earns roughly $9.27 million every day just by owning the stock.Per Hour: They earn about $386,000 per hour, 24 hours a day.King was literally campaigning for a living wage in Memphis when he was shot by the FBI. your move, walmart CEO John Furner WHO DO YOU BLAME?WestJet reverses cramped seating layout after viral videos show passengers' knees pressed against seats.In the reconfigured layout, which rolled out in late October on select Boeing 737s, space between rows was reduced to 28 inches to accommodate an extra row of seats. WestJet also made economy class seats non-reclinable, offering passengers the option to pay extra for adjustable seats.In a news statement, the company said it will reverse what it called the "densified seating" by removing the additional row of seats.WHO DO YOU BLAME?Samantha (Sam) Taylor was appointed WestJet Group Executive Vice-President and Chief Experience Officer March 2025. Sam joined Sunwing in March 2020 as Chief Marketing Officer. Sam's portfolio is accountable for critical touch points in the guest journey and includes leading all Marketing, Guest Experience and Contact Centres for WestJet and Sunwing Vacations. MMStakeholders!Customers: WestJet's rollout of the reconfigured seats has sparked widespread outrage among travelers and even crew members.Employees: Reuters reported that pilots and flight attendants have raised concerns over the new configuration's comfort and safety, specifically whether passengers could safely evacuate the plane in an emergency due to the confined seating.Journalists: Reuters reported that pilots and flight attendants have raised concerns over the new configuration's comfort and safety, specifically whether passengers could safely evacuate the plane in an emergency due to the confined seating.Labor Unions: Alia Hussain, president of the union local representing WestJet cabin personnel, said: "It created a hostile working environment for us as cabin personnel."Onex Corporation, WestJet's publicly traded ownersWhich is really founder and board Chair Gerry Schwartz (annual Chair fee of $1 million), who maintains 100% control of the Multiple Voting Shares (MVS) of Onex Corporation, which effectively grants him 60% of the total voting power in the company.This control allows him to elect 60% of the members of Onex's Board of Directors. While he also personally holds a significant portion of the Subordinate Voting Shares (SVS)—roughly 11.3% as of late 2024—the primary mechanism of his control is the MVS class.All stupid U.S. dual class dictatorships who do not do this!!The "Sunset" Provision: In May 2023, Onex shareholders approved a plan to implement a "sunset" on these special voting rights. Under this agreement, Schwartz's multiple voting rights are scheduled to expire three years after the effective date of the amendment (roughly May 2026).Current Status: As we are currently in early 2026, Schwartz remains the controlling shareholder. Upon the "Event of Change" later this year, the Multiple Voting Shares will convert into Subordinate Voting Shares, and he will lose his absolute control, shifting the company toward a more traditional governance structure.Matt Damon says Netflix wants to make action movies differently to account for shorter attention spansHow the art of filmmaking is being subvertedThe "Say What You Do" Rule: Writers are frequently being told to eliminate subtext. In traditional filmmaking, if a character is sad, you show them staring at a cold cup of coffee. Now, streamers often request that the character explicitly say, "I'm just so sad right now," or have another character ask, "Why are you so sad?"The Reason: If you are looking at your phone during a silent, emotional shot, you miss the story. If the character says it out loud, you can follow the plot without looking at the screen.Heightened Audio Cues: If you've noticed that modern movies have very aggressive sound design—sudden loud bangs, dramatic musical stings, or high-pitched notification-like sounds—it's often intentional.The "Audio Hook": These sounds act like a "ping" to pull your eyes back from your phone to the TV. It's a literal alarm clock for your attention.The "First 10 Minutes" Mandate: In the past, a movie could have a "slow burn" opening (think 2001: A Space Odyssey). Today, Netflix and other streamers use data that shows exactly when a user hits the "Back" button.The Note: Writers are told that a "major event" (an explosion, a death, or a massive hook) must happen within the first 2 to 5 minutes. If the "inciting incident" happens at the 20-minute mark, the data shows they will lose 30% of the audience to TikTok.Centered Framing: Cinematographers are increasingly being told to keep the "important" action in the center of the frame.The Reason: This makes the content easier to view on a mobile device if the user decides to switch from the TV to their phone, or if they are watching a cropped "clip" of the movie on social media later.Increased "Recapping": Have you noticed characters summarizing what just happened more often?The "TikTok Brain" Fix: Because people are multitasking, they often lose the thread of the plot. Streamers now encourage dialogue like, "So, let me get this straight, we have to get the key from the vault before the guard returns in five minutes?" It's a recap for someone who tuned out for the last three minutes.WHO DO YOU BLAME?Netflix: Ted Sarandos & Greg Peters (Co-CEOs of Netflix), Reed Hastings, Jay HoagDrug CEOs (re: The Algorithm): Passive Viewing: Data shows that up to 94% of people use a phone while watching TV.TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew: TikTok is widely considered the pioneer of the "Short-Form Video" era. Its algorithm is specifically designed to provide "intermittent reinforcement" (like a slot machine), which studies suggest can reduce the ability to focus on long-term tasks.Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Zuckerberg pivoted Facebook and Instagram (Reels) to aggressively compete with TikTok. Critics argue this transition turned a platform for connection into one of "passive scrolling" that further erodes focus.YouTube CEO Neal Mohan: Under his leadership, YouTube Shorts was launched to capture the short-attention-span market. Even YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has recently warned that these short videos are "shrinking kids' attention spans."Smartphones: Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs MMStanford: The "Father of Persuasive Tech": B.J. FoggStanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, run by B.J. Fogg, taught many of the founders and early employees of Instagram and Facebook.The "Fogg Behavior Model" taught engineers how to use "triggers" and "rewards" to change human behavior through software. He provided the scientific framework that allowed tech companies to treat the human brain like hardware that could be "hacked" for maximum engagement.Trump calls NYSE Dallas expansion plans 'unbelievably bad' for New York: Trump says move poses 'big test' for newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani. WHICH HYPOCRISY DO YOU BLAME?The Free Market BullshitTrump and Texas leaders have long championed the freedom of businesses to flee blue-state regulations. However, now that a prestigious icon like the NYSE is actually expanding to Dallas, Trump has pivoted to calling it "unbelievably bad" for New York.The Anti-Woke /Anti-ESG scaremongeringTexas frames itself as a "Sanctuary from Socialism," yet the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) is being used to bypass ESG transparency. While railing against woke mandates, these leaders are creating their own ideological silos—demanding a protected market where management isn't held accountable by shareholders for social or environmental impacts.Texas AG Ken Paxton described BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard as an "investment cartel" that was "illegally controlling national energy markets" and "squeezing more money out of hardworking Americans."Paxton sent a formal warning to Larry Fink and other CEOs, stating that their "radical environmental policies" and "race-based quotas" (DEI) would face severe enforcement actions if they prioritized "politics over consumers."Lead by example: Trump quits NYC and Musk's Dexit to Y'all StreetThroughout his 2024 campaign, Trump consistently compared New York unfavorably to states like Florida and Texas: as an example, he pointed to the lack of state income tax in Florida as a reason why "everyone is leaving New York." Elon Musk's Dexit from Delaware/California is sold as a strike for freedom, yet his empire is built on nearly $40 billion in government subsidies and contracts. He moved to Texas to escape over-regulation (re: his pay package and people being mad about nooses in his factories) while simultaneously heading the most over-regulatory body ever: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).Leader name calling and scaremongeringTrump's pre-bromance attacks on New York's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani (communist lunatic" and a "Marxist"). Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson (UPenn, Harvard, Princeton): "un-American socialist impulse" and explicitly marketed Dallas as a "sanctuary from socialism" for businesses looking to Dexit New York. The Elite vs. Common Man NonsenseDespite bullshit Y'all Street populist framing, the Texas Stock Exchange is backed by the world's most powerful financial titans. There is no common man victory here; it is the CEO class moving the financial capital to a jurisdiction with fewer labor protections and less oversight.The Big Four Anchor InvestorsBlackRock: (managing ~$14 trillion), despite being the primary target of "anti-woke" and anti-ESG rhetoric from the same politicians who support the TXSE.Citadel Securities: Led by Ken Griffin, this firm executes roughly 1 in 4 of all stock trades in the U.S. Left Chicago for Miami.J.P. Morgan Chase: Jamie Dimon. Joined in 2025 during a $90 million funding round and holds an observer seat on the board.Charles Schwab: handles over 50% of U.S. retail stock orders.MATTWalmart International CEO Kath McLay to step down - WHO DO YOU BLAME?Half exiting CEO Doug McMillonMcLay was under McMillon her entire tenure at WalMart, raised to CEO of the international divisionClearly a protege - passed over for the new CEO?Incoming CEO John FurnerThe white guy who became CEO is such an interesting new story, but Furner started as a sales clerk and has been with the WALTONS a long time through Sam's Club as CEO, another Walton jointFurner/McMillon/Walton family named David Guggina CEO of Walmart US (passing McLay), Chris Nicholas replace McLay, Seth Dallaire was made chief growth officer… rounding out an all male promotion cycle of new execs - no women in major positionsMaybe McLay read the tea leaves - women got chief legal and chief of people, like everywhere else, but leave the big jobs to the swinging dicks.The compensation and management development committee, who according to the company charter, ir responsible to “periodically review and recommend to the full Board succession planning practices for the Company's CEO and other executive officers.”Carla Harris (chair) - black woman with “multicultural” in her job description at Morgan Stanley who apparently didn't apply “multiculturalism” to Walmart executive search?Marissa Mayer - yes, THAT Marissa Mayer, who is on the board of Starbucks with Brian Niccol and AT&T where Randall Stephenson was CEOBrian Niccol - CEO of Starbucks, with no conflict by having Marissa Mayer on the same boardRandall Stephenson - ex CEO of AT&T, with no conflict of interest by having Marissa Mayer on the board. Also on the board - Tom Horton, ex CEO of American Airlines who was… CFO of AT&T under StephensonShishir Mehrotra - who worked at Google via YouTube when… Marissa Mayer worked there (she was in search/maps)Kath McLay, who just couldn't cut it at Walmart anymoreAn SEC official has said (implied) you don't HAVE to vote your proxies as an investor - WHO DO YOU BLAME?Brian Daly, who gave a speech titled (Re)Empowering Fiduciaries in Proxy Voting on Jan 8 in which he argued that not voting doesn't necessarily violate fiduciary dutyGamblers: “Not voting makes sense in many situations. Look, for example, at quantitative and systematic managers, who often operate models that merely seek exposures to identified sources of alpha.”Index investors: “But it may be appropriate for these categories of investment advisers (and the Boards that exercise oversight over this function) to consider whether taking positions on fundamental corporate matters, or on precatory proposals, is consistent with their investment mandates.”Hedging himself: “So, there is no stock answer to the “Must I vote?” question... Instead, it is important that advisers and clients have a fair amount of latitude to decide what works in their individual cases.”Threatening using proxy advisors: “And if we are raising issues for consideration, I will also mention, because the President did, that there is real concern out there that habitual adherence to a proxy consultant's recommendations could pull an adviser into a Section 13(d) group.”Investors, because no matter what Brian Daly suggests, investors almost never vote against management and neither do proxy advisors, so what the fuck are we talking about?Cost, because Daly points out, “And in assessing proposed votes, investment advisers might utilize the Fiduciary Interpretation's concept of a “reasonable inquiry into the client's objectives.” If an investment adviser routinely follows a proxy advisor's stock recommendations without a tailored engagement or independent analysis, is this “reasonable inquiry?” Maybe, but it is certainly worth thinking about. And, to go back to the first question, if the voting process is so burdensome that it requires extensive external resources, why is the adviser voting at all?”John Chevedden, along with Jim McRitchie, without whom we have maybe half the shareholder rights as SP500 companies, and who the no-action data is now showing is disproportionately getting responses for exclusion from the SEC (as if to double down on the idea that we can ignore those commie socialists entirely, but we want to tell you explicitly you're totally legally cool and there's no threat if you exclude Chevedden). Chevedden might be the reason investors were voting at all - maybe now they won't have to?

About Jason Hreha:Jason Hreha is a behavioral scientist and entrepreneur specializing in applying behavioral science to solve business challenges. After studying neuroscience at Stanford and conducting research in BJ Fogg's Persuasive Technology Lab, Jason has spent 15 years developing Behavioral Strategy, a methodical approach for turning research into actionable business solutions. As Global Head of Behavioral Science at Walmart, he established and led the company's first behavioral science team, and he also founded Dopamine and co-founded Kite.io, later acquired by Quixey. As CEO of Persona, Jason transforms talent assessment through research-backed psychometric tools that predict employee performance and fit, and his book Real Change challenges conventional approaches to habits through science-based frameworks. Jason's work has been cited in Atomic Habits and featured in Inc.com, Knowledge at Wharton, and BigThink, and he continues to advise organizations on applying behavioral science for innovation and growth. In this episode, Dean Newlund and Jason Hreha discuss:Understanding how core personality traits drive leadership effectivenessExploring why emotional stability underpins real emotional intelligenceExamining the limits of adult personality change and what that means for teamsRecognizing how interpersonal friction often comes from mismatched stylesConsidering how AI models express measurable personalities that shape user behavior Key Takeaways:Identify your own trait profile using a validated Big Five assessment so you can play the leadership “hand” you actually have instead of chasing traits you do not possess.Reduce conflict by assuming others cannot easily change their styles and instead adapt your expectations so collaboration becomes easier and less personal.Strengthen your culture by clarifying norms, incentives, and strategic consistency so the environment aligns behavior without needing personality change.Use AI tools more effectively by understanding their default personality traits and adjusting your prompts or model choice to complement—not mirror—your own tendencies. "It's hard to be emotionally intelligent if you're angry or upset or annoyed or freaked out.” — Jason Hreha Connect with Jason Hreha:  Website: https://www.personatalent.com/Blog: https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/Book: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0CVCZ2VR9YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thebehavioralscientistLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hreha/ & https://www.linkedin.com/company/personatalent/X (Twitter): https://x.com/jhreha & https://x.com/PersonaTalentFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/choosepersona/Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.behavioral.scientist   See Dean's TedTalk “Why Business Needs Intuition” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEq9IYvgV7I Connect with Dean:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgqRK8GC8jBIFYPmECUCMkwWebsite: https://www.mfileadership.com/The Mission Statement E-Newsletter: https://www.mfileadership.com/blog/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deannewlund/X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/deannewlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/MissionFacilitators/Email: dean.newlund@mfileadership.comPhone: 1-800-926-7370 Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

Summary:  The rapid rise of AI is transforming industries at an unprecedented pace, creating both challenges and opportunities for innovation. With technology this powerful, pure progress is not enough. We have a responsibility to be intentional about about how we build it, power it, and use it, to ensure it drives positive outcomes and a more sustainable future. Today, we're sitting down with Rahul Mewawalla, the President and CEO of Mawson Infrastructure Group, a rapidly evolving digital infrastructure services company that trades on NASDAQ under the symbol MIGI. Rahul has been a CEO for over a decade, leading numerous technology companies, including household names like Yahoo, Nokia, and General Electric. Rahul has served on the boards of six NASDAQ-listed companies, two of which he chaired. He led San Francisco's Innovation and Technology Program in collaboration with the White House and the Executive Office of the President, served as a Special Government Employee with the U.S. Department of Defense, and was an advisor to Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab. Rahul has had a front-row seat to four major technology waves—the internet, mobile, cloud, and AI—giving him tremendous perspective on today's rapidly evolving landscape In this episode, Rahul explores how companies are joining forces to address AI's soaring energy demands—and what it means for the future of digital infrastructure. He delves into the evolving partnership between technology firms and energy providers, the growing role of nuclear and carbon-neutral power in sustaining AI's expansion, and why cross-industry collaboration is essential for long-term success.Highlights:Rahul discusses what initially drew him to digital infrastructure (3:18)Mawson's strategic shift from cryptocurrency mining to AI infrastructure (6:01)Key components and functions in an AI technology stack (8:34)Rahul's perspective on the transformative AI wave and growing investment around it (11:29)Rahul describes what the PJM market is (13:44)Investment in nuclear energy (15:30)Rahul discusses Mawson's management team and leadership strategy (17:50)Mawson's announcement of a major AI co-location agreement (19:51)Rahul explains why industry collaboration is essential for scaling AI infrastructure (21:49)Mawson's total addressable market and maintaining a competitive edge (23:25)How Rahul balances leadership and innovation (24:58)The future innovations and business opportunities Rahul sees for Mawson (26:53)Links:Rahul Mewawalla on LinkedInMawson Infrastructure on LinkedInMawson Infrastructure WebsiteICR LinkedIn ICR Twitter ICR Website Feedback:If you have questions about the show, or have a topic in mind you'd like discussed in future episodes, email our producer, marion@lowerstreet.co.

Van streaks en sociale bevestiging tot het inspelen op schuldgevoelens: het moderne internet is geoefend geworden in het trekken, en vooral het vasthouden, van je aandacht. Waarom? Omdat Facebook, Instagram, Netflix en al die anderen aan je aandacht geld verdienen. Dit verdienmodel moet anders, vindt Groene-redacteur Koen Haegens. Ook zelf brengt Koen vaak meerdere uren van zijn dag door op zijn smartphone, scrollend door zijn Twitter-tijdlijn terwijl hij eigenlijk iets anders zou willen doen. Hoe gaan de nieuwe tijdslurpers van het internet te werk? Zijn ze nog te stoppen? Koen Haegens spreekt er deze week over met Kees van den Bosch in de podcast van De Groene Amsterdammer.Productie: Kees van den Bosch en Roza Ybema

About FrankFrank Chen is a maker. He develops products and leads software engineering teams with a background in behavior design, engineering leadership, systems reliability engineering, and resiliency research. At Slack, Frank focuses on making engineers' lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, in the Developer Productivity group. At Palantir, Frank has worked with customers in healthcare, finance, government, energy and consumer packaged goods to solve their hardest problems by transforming how they use data. At Amazon, Frank led a front-end team and infrastructure team to launch AWS WorkDocs, the first secure multi-platform service of its kind for enterprise customers. At Sandia National Labs, Frank researched resiliency and complexity analysis tooling with the Grid Resiliency group. He received a M.S. in Computer Science focused in Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford. Frank's thesis studied how the design / psychology of exergaming interventions might produce efficacious health outcomes. With the Stanford Prevention Research Center, Frank developed health interventions rooted in behavioral theory to create new behaviors through mobile phones. He prototyped early builds of Tiny Habits with BJ Fogg and worked in the Persuasive Technology Lab. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA. Frank researched networked systems and image processing with the Center for embedded Networked Systems. With the Rand Corporation, he built research systems to support group decision-making.Links: Slack: https://slack.com “Infrastructure Observability for Changing the Spend Curve”: https://slack.engineering/infrastructure-observability-for-changing-the-spend-curve/ “Right Sizing Your Instances Is Nonsense”: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/right-sizing-your-instances-is-nonsense/ Personal webpage: https://frankc.net Twitter: @frankc TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com. Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Several people are undoubtedly angrily typing, and part of the reason they can do that, and the fact that I know that is because we're all using Slack. My guest today is Frank Chen, senior staff software engineer at Slack. So, I guess, sort of… [sales force 00:00:53]. Frank, thanks for joining me.Frank: Hey, Corey, I have been a longtime listener and follower, and just really delighted to be here.Corey: It's one of the weird things about doing a podcast is that for better or worse, people don't respond to it in the same way that they do writing a newsletter, for example, because you receive an email, and, “Oh, well, I know how to write an email. I can hit reply and send an email back and give that jackwagon a piece of my mind,” and people often do. But with podcasts, I feel like it's much more closely attuned to the idea of an AM radio talk show. And who calls into a radio talk show? Lunatics, and most people don't self-describe as lunatics, so they don't want to do that.But then when I catch up with people one-on-one or at events in person, I find out that a lot more people listen to this show than I thought they did. Because I don't trust podcast statistics because lies, damn lies, and analytics are sort of how I view this world. So, you've worked at a bunch of different companies. You're at Slack now, which, of course, upsets some people because, “Slack is ruining the way that people come and talk to me in the office.” Or it's making it easier for employees to collaborate internally in ways their employers wish they wouldn't. But that's neither here nor there.Before this, you were at Palantir, and before this, you're at Amazon, working on Amazon WorkDocs of all things, which is supposedly rumored to have at least one customer somewhere, but I've never seen them. Before that you were at Sandia National Labs, and you've gotten a master's in computer science from Stanford. You've done a lot of things and everything you've done, on some level, seems like the recurring theme is someone on Twitter will be unhappy at you for a career choice you've made. But what is the common thread—in seriousness—between the different places that you've been?Frank: One thing that's been a driver for where I work is finding amazing people to work with and building something that I believe is valuable and fun to keep doing. The thing that brought me to Slack is I became my own Slack admin, [laugh] when I met a girl and we moved in together into a small apartment in Brooklyn. And she had a cat that, you know, is a sweetheart, but also just doesn't know how to be social. Yes, you covered that with ‘cat.' Part of moving it together, I became my own Slack admin and discovered well, we can build a series of home automations to better train and inform our little command center for when the cat lies about being fed, or not fed, clipping his nails, and discovering and tracking bad behaviors. In a lot of ways this was like the human side of a lot of the data work that I had been doing at my previous role. And it was like a fun way to use the same frameworks that I use at work to better train and be a cat caretaker.Corey: Now, at some point, you know that some product manager at Amazon is listening to this and immediately sketching notes because their product strategy is, “Yes,” and this is going to be productized and shipping in two years as Amazon Prime Meow. But until then we'll enjoy the originality of having a Slack bot more or less control the home automation slash making your house seem haunted for anyone who didn't write the code themselves. There's an idea of solving real world problems that I definitely understand. I mean, and again, it might not even be a fair question entirely. Just because I am… for better or worse, staggering through my world, and trying—and failing most days—to tell a narrative that, “Oh, why did I start my tech career at a university, and then spend time in ad tech, and then spend time in consulting, and then FinTech, and the rest?” And the answer is, “Oh, I get fired an awful lot, and that sucked.”So, instead of going down that particular rabbit hole of a mess, I went in other directions. I started finding things that would pay me and pay me more money because I was in debt at the time. But that was the narrative thread that was the, “I have rent to pay and they have computers that aren't behaving properly.” And that's what dictated the shape of my career for a long time. It's only in retrospect that I started to identify some of the things that aligns with it. But it's easy to look at it with the shine of hindsight and not realize that no, no, that's sort of retconning what happened in the past.Frank: Yeah, I have a mentor and my former adviser had this way of describing, building out the jankiest prototype you can to prove out an idea. And this manifested in his class in building out paper prototypes, or really, really janky ideas for what helping people through technology might look like. And I feel like it a lot of ways, even when those prototypes fail, like, in a career or some half baked tech prototype I put together, it might succeed and great, we could keep building upon that, but when it fails, you actually discover, “Oh, this is one way that I didn't succeed.” And even in doing so, you discover things about yourself, your way of building, and maybe a little bit about your infrastructure, or whatever it is that you build on a day-to-day basis. And wrapping that back to the original question, it's like, well, we think we're human beings, right, we're static, but in a lot of ways we're human becomings. We think we know what the future might look like with our careers, what we're building on a day-to-day basis, and what we're building a year from now, but oftentimes, things change if we discover things about ourselves, the people we work with, and ultimately, the things that we put out into the world.Corey: Obviously, I've been aware of who Slack is, for a long time; I've been a paying customer for years because it basically is IRC with reaction gifs, and not having to teach someone how to sign into IRC when they work in accounting. So, the user experience alone solved the problem.Frank: And you've actually worked with us in the past before. [laugh]. Slack, it's the Searchable Log for all Content and Knowledge; I think that backronym, that's how it works. And I was delighted when I had mentioned your jokes and you're trolling [a folk 00:07:00] on Twitter and on your podcast to my former engineering manager, Chris Merrill, who was like, oh, you should search the Slack. Corey actually worked with us and he put together a lot of cool tooling and ideas for us to think about.Corey: Careful. If we talk too much, or what I did when I was at Slack years ago, someone's going to start looking into some of the old commits and whatnot and start demanding an apology, and we don't want that. It's, “Wow, you're right. You are a terrible engineer.” “Told you.” There's a reason I don't do that anymore.Frank: I think that's all of us. [laugh]. An early career mentor of mine, he was like, “Hey, Frank, listen. You think you're building perfect software at any point in time? No, you're building future tech debt.” And yeah, we should put much more emphasis on interfaces and ideas we're putting out because the implementation is going to change over time, and likely your current implementation is shit. And that is, okay.Corey: That's the beautiful part about this is that things grow and things evolve. And it's interesting working with companies, and as a consultant, I tend to build my projects in such a way that I start on day one and people know that I'm leaving with usually a very short window because I don't want to build a forever job for myself; I don't want to show up and start charging by the hour or by the day, if I can possibly avoid it. Because then it turns into eternal projects that never end because I'm billing and nothing's ever done. No, no, I like charging fixed fee and then getting out at a predetermined outcome, but then you get to hear about what happens with companies as they move on.This combines with the fact that I have a persistent alert for my name, usually because I'm looking for various ineffective character assassination from enterprise marketing types because you know, I dish it out, I should certainly be able to take it. But I found a blog post on the Slack engineering blog that mentioned my name, and it's, “Aw, crap. Are they coming after me for a refund?” No, it was not. It was you writing a fairly sizable post. Tell me more about that.Frank: Yeah, I'm part of an organization called Developer Productivity. And our goal is to help folk at Slack deliver services to their customers, where we build, test, and release high quality software. And a lot of our time is spent thinking about internal tooling and making infrastructure bets. As engineers, right, it's like, we have this idea for what the world looks like, we have this idea for what our infrastructure looks like, but what we discover using a set of techniques around observability of just asking questions—advanced questions, basic questions, and hell, even dumb questions—we discover hey, the things that we think our computers are doing aren't actually doing what they say they're doing. And the question is like, great. Now, what? How can we ask better questions? How can we better tune, change, and equip engineers with tooling so that they can do better work to make Slack customers have simple, pleasant, and productive experiences?Corey: And I have to say that there's a lot that Slack does that is incredibly helpful. I don't know that I'm necessarily completely bought into the idea that all work should happen in Slack. It's, well, on some level, I—like people like to debate the ‘should people work from home? Should people all work in an office?' Discussion.And, on some level, it seems if you look at people who are constantly fighting that debate online, it's, “Do you ever do work at all?” on some level. But I'm not here to besmirch others; I'm here to talk about, on some level, what you alluded to in your blog post. But I want to start with a disclaimer that Slack as far as companies go is not small, and if you take a look around, most companies are using Slack whether they know it or not. The list of side-channel Slack groups people have tend to extend massively.I look and I pare it down every once in a while, whenever I cross 40 signed-in Slacks on my desktop. It is where people talk for a wide variety of different reasons, and they all do different things. But if you're sitting here listening to this and you have a $2,000 a month AWS bill, this is not for you. You will spend orders of magnitude more money trying to optimize a small cost. Once you're at significant points of scale, and you have scaled out to the point where you begin to have some ability to predict over months or years, that's what a lot of this stuff starts to weigh in.So, talk to me a bit about how you wound up—and let me quote directly from the article, which is titled, “Infrastructure Observability for Changing the Spend Curve,” and I will, of course, throw a link to this in the [show notes 00:11:38]. But you talk in this about knocking, I believe it was orders of magnitude off of various cost areas within your bill.Frank: Yeah. The article itself describes three big-ish projects, where we are able to change the curve of the number of tests that we run, and a change in how much it costs to run any single test.Corey: When you say test, are you talking CI/CD infrastructure test or code test, to make sure it goes out, or are you talking something higher up the stack, as far as, “Huh, let's see how some users respond when, I don't know, we send four notifications on every message instead of the usual one,” to give a ridiculous example?Frank: Yeah, this is in the CI/CD pipelines. And one of these projects was around borrowing some concepts from data engineering: oversubscription and planning your capacity to have access capacity at peak, where at peak, your engineers might have a 5% degradation in performance, while still maintaining high resiliency and reliability of your tests in order to oversubscribe, either CPU or memory and keep throughput on the overall system stable and consistent and fast enough. I think, with spend in developer productivity, I think, both, like, the metrics you're trying to move and why you're optimizing for it at any given time are, like, this, like, calculus. Or it's like, more art than science in that there's no one right answer, right? It's like, oh, yeah—very naively—like, yeah, let's throw the biggest machines most expensive machines we can at any given problem. But that doesn't solve the crux of your problem. It's like, “Hey, what are the things in your system doing?” And what is the right guess to capitalize around how much to spend on your CI/CD [unintelligible 00:13:39] is oftentimes not precise, nor is this blog article meant to be prescriptive.Corey: Yeah, it depends entirely on what you're doing and how because it's, on some level, well, we can save a whole bunch of money if we slow all of our CI/CD runs down by 20 minutes. Yeah, but then you have a bunch of engineers sitting idle and I promise you, that costs a hell of a lot more than your cloud bill is going to be. The payroll is almost always a larger expense than your infrastructure costs, and if it's not, you should seriously consider firing at least part of your data science team, but you didn't hear it from me.Frank: Yeah. And part of the exploration on profiling and performance and resiliency was, like, around interrogating what the boundaries and what the constraints were for our CI/CD pipelines. Because Slack has grown in engineering and in the number of tests we were running on a month-to-month basis; for a while from 2017 to mid 2020, we were growing about 10% month-over-month in test suite execution numbers. Which means on a given year, we doubled almost two times, which is quite a bit of strain on internal resources and a lot of dependent services where—and internal systems, we oftentimes have more complexity and less understood changes in what dependencies your infrastructure might be using, what business logic your internal services are using to communicate with one another than you do your production.And so, by, like, performing a series of curiosity-driven development, we're able to both answer, at that point in time, what our customers internally were doing, and start to put together ideas for eliminating some bottlenecks, and hell, even adding bottlenecks with circuit breakers where you keep the overall throughput of your system stable, while deferring or canceling work that otherwise might have overloaded dependencies.Corey: There's a lot to be said for understanding what the optimization opportunities are, in an environment and understanding what it is you're attempting to achieve. Having those test for something like Slack makes an awful lot of sense because let's be very clear here, when you're building an application that acts as something people use to do expense reports—to cite one of my previous job examples—it turns out you can be down for a week and a majority of your customers will never know or care. With Slack, it doesn't work that way. Everyone more or less has a continuous monitor that they're typing into for a good portion of the day—angrily or otherwise—and as soon as it misses anything, people know. And if there's one thing that I love, on some level, seeing change when I know that Slack is having a blip, even if I'm not using Slack that day for anything in particular, because Twitter explodes about it. “Slack is down. I'm now going to tweet some stuff to my colleagues.” All right. You do you, I suppose.And credit where due, Slack doesn't go down nearly as often as it used to because as you tend to figure out how these things work, operational maturity increases through a bunch of tests. Fixing things like durability, reliability, uptime, et cetera, should always, to some extent, take precedence priority-wise over let's save some money. Because yeah, you could turn everything off and save all the money, but then you don't have a business anymore. It's focused on where to cut, where to optimize in the right way, and ideally as you go, find some of the areas in which, oh, I'm paying AWS a tax for just going about my business. And I could have flipped a switch at any point and saved—“How much money? Oh, my God, that's more than I'll make in my lifetime.”Frank: Yeah, and one thing I talk about a little bit is distributed tracing as one of the drivers for helping us understand what's happening inside of our systems. Where it helps you figure out and it's like this… [best word 00:17:24] to describe how you ask questions of deployed code? And there a lot of ways it's helped us understand existing bottlenecks and identify opportunities for performance or resiliency gains because your past janky Band-Aids become more and more obvious when you can interrogate and ask questions around what is it performing like it used to? Or what has changed recently?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: It's also worth pointing out that as systems grow organically, that it is almost impossible for any one person to have it all in their head anymore. I saw one of the most overly complicated architecture flow trees that I think I've seen in recent memory, and it was on the Slack engineering blog about how something was architected, but it wasn't the Slack app itself; it was simply the [decision tree for ‘Should we send a notification?' 00:18:17] and it is more complicated than almost anything I've written, except maybe my newsletter content publication pipeline. It is massive. And I'll throw a link to that in the [show notes 00:18:31] as well, just because it is well worth people taking a look at.But there is so much complexity at scale for doing the right thing, and it's necessary because if I'm talking to you on Slack right now and getting notifications every time you reply on my phone, it's not going to take too long before I turn off notifications everywhere, and then I don't notice that Slack is there, and it just becomes useless and I use something else. Ideally, something better—which is hard to come by—moderately worse, like, email or completely worse, like, Microsoft Teams.Frank: I tell all my close collaborators about this. I typically set myself away on Slack because I like to make time for deep, focused work. And that's very hard with a constant stream of notifications. How people use Slack and how people notify others on Slack is, like, not incumbent on the software itself, but it's a reflection of the work culture that you're in. The expectation for an email-driven culture is, like, oh, yeah, you should be reading your email all the time and be able to respond within 30 minutes. Peace, I have friends that are lawyers, [laugh] and that is the expectation at all times of day.Corey: I married one of those. Oh, yeah, people get very salty. And she works with a global team spread everywhere, to the point where she wakes up and there's just a whole flurry of angry people that have tried to reach her in the middle of the night. Like, “Why were you sleeping at 2 a.m.? It's daytime here.” And yeah, time zones. Not everyone understands how they work, from my estimation.Frank: [laugh]. That's funny. My sweetheart is a former attorney. On our first international date, we spent an entire day-and-a-half hopping between WiFi spots in Prague so that she could answer a five minute question from a partner about standard deviations.Corey: So, one thing that you link to that really is what drew my notice to this—because, again, if you talk about AWS cost optimization, I'm probably going to stumble over it, but if you mention my name, that's sort of a nice accelerator—and you linked to my article called Why “Right Sizing Your Instances Is Nonsense.” And that is a little overblown, to some extent, but so many folks talk about it in the cost optimization space because you can get a bunch of metrics and do these things programmatically, and somewhat without observability into what's going on because, “Well, I can see how busy the computers are and if it's not busy, we could use smaller computers. Problem solved,” versus, the things that require a fair bit of insight into what is that thing doing exactly because it leads you into places of oh, turn off that idle fleet that's not doing anything is all labeled ‘backup,' where you're going to have three seconds of notice before it gets all the traffic.There's an idea of sometimes things are the way they are for a reason. And it's also not easy for a lot of things—think databases—to seamlessly just restart the thing and have it scale back up and run on a different instance class. That takes weeks of planning and it's hard. So, I find that people tend to reach for it where it doesn't often make sense. At your level of scale and operational maturity, of course, you should optimize what instance classes things are using and what sizes they are, especially since that stuff changes over time as far as what AWS has made available. But it's not the sort of thing that I suggest as being the first easy thing to go for. It's just what people think is easy because it requires no judgment and computers can do it. At least that's their opinion.Frank: I feel like you probably have a lot more experience than me, and talked about war stories, but I recall working with customers where they want to lift-and-shift on-prem hardware to VMs on-prem. I'm like, “It's not going to be as simple as you're making it out to be.” Whereas, like, the trend today is probably oh, yeah, we're going to shift on-prem VMs to AWS, or hell, like, let's go two levels deeper and just run everything on Kubernetes. Similar workloads, right? It's not going to be a huge challenge. Or [laugh] everything serverless.Corey: Spare me from that entire school of thought, my God.Frank: [laugh].Corey: Yeah, but it's fun, too, because this came out a month ago, and you're talking about using—an example you gave was a c5.9xlarge instance. Great. Well, the c6i is out now as well, so are people going to look at that someday and think, “Oh, wow. That's incredibly quaint.”It's, you wrote this a month ago, and it's already out of date, as far as what a lot of the modern story instances are. From my perspective, one of the best things that AWS has done in this space has been to get away from the reserved instance story and over into savings plans, where it's, “I know, I'm going to run some compute—maybe it's Fargate, maybe it's EC2; let's be serious, it's definitely going to be EC2—but I don't want to tie myself to specific instance types for the next three years.” Great, well, I'm just going to commit to spending some money on AWS for the next three years because if I decide today to move off of it, it's going to take me at least that long to get everything out. So okay, then that becomes something a lot more palatable for an awful lot of folks.Frank: One thing you brought up in the article I linked to is instance types. You think upgrading to the newest instance type will solve all your challenges, but oftentimes it's not obvious that it won't all the time, and in fact, you might even see degraded resiliency and degraded performance because different packages that your software relies upon might not be optimized for the given kernel or CPU type that you're running against. And ultimately, you go back to just asking really basic questions and performing some end-to-end benchmarking so that you can at least get a sense for what your customers are doing today, and maybe make a guess for what they're going to do tomorrow.Corey: I have to ask because I'm always interested in what it is that gives rise to blog posts like this—which, that's easy; it's someone had to do a project on these things, and while we learn things that would probably apply to other folks—like, you're solving what is effectively a global problem locally when you go down this path. It's part of the reason I have a consulting business is things I learned at one company apply almost identically to another company, even though that they're in completely separate industries and parts of the world because AWS billing is, for better or worse, a bounded problem space despite their best efforts to, you know, use quantum computers to fix that. What was it that gave rise to looking at the CI/CD system from an optimization point of view?Frank: So internally, I initially started writing a white paper about, hey, here's a simple question that we can answer, you know, without too much effort. Let's transition all of our C3 instances to C5 instances, and that could have been the one and done. But by thinking about it a little more and kind of drawing out, while we can actually borrow a model for oversubscription from another field, we could potentially decrease our spend by quite a bit. That eventually [laugh] evolved into a 70 page white paper—no joke—that my former engineering manager said, “Frank, no one's going to [BLEEP] read this.” [laugh].Corey: Always. Always, always. Like, here's a whole bunch of academically research and the rest. It's like, “Great. Which of these two buttons do I press?” is really the question people are getting at. And while it's great to have the research and the academic stuff, it's also a, “Great we're trying to achieve an outcome which, what is the choice?” But it's nice to know that people are doing actual research on the back end, instead, “Eh, my gut tells me to take the path on the left because why not? Left is better; right's tricky friend.”Frank: Yeah. And it was like, “Oh, yeah. I accidentally wrote a really long thing because there was, like, a lot of variables to test.” I think we had spun up 16-plus auto-scaling groups. And ran something like the cross-section of a couple of representative test suites against them, as well as configurations for a number of executors per instance.And about a year ago, I translated that into a ten page blog article that when I read through, I really didn't enjoy. [laugh]. And that template blog article is ultimately, like, about a page in the article you're reading today. And the actual kick in the butt to get this out the door was about four months ago. I spoke at o11ycon rescources which you're a part of.And it was a vendor conference by Honeycomb, and it was just so fun to share some of the things we've been doing with distributed tracing, and how we were able to solve internal problems using a relatively simple idea of asking questions about what was running. And the entire team there was wonderful in coaching and just helping me think through what questions people might have of this work. And that was, again, former academic. The last time I spoke at a conference was about a decade earlier, and it was just so fun to be part of this community of people trying to all solve the same set of problems, just in their own unique ways.Corey: One of the things I loved about working with Honeycomb was the fact that whenever I asked them a question, they have instrumented their own stuff, so they could tell me extremely quickly what something was doing, how it was doing it, and what the overall impact on this was. It's very rare to find a client that is anywhere near that level of awareness into what's going on in their infrastructure.Frank: Yeah, and that blog article, right, it's like, here's our current perspective, and here's, like, the current set of projects we're able to make to get to this result. And we think we know what we want to do, but if you were to ask that same question, “What are we doing for our spend a year from now?” the answer might be very different. Probably similar in some ways, but probably different.Corey: Well, there are some principles that we'll never get away from. It's, “Is no one using the thing? Turn that shit off.” That's one of those tried and true things. “Oh, it's the third copy of that multiple petabyte of data thing? Maybe delete it or stuff in a deep archive.” It's maybe move data less between various places. Maybe log things fewer times, given that you're paying 50 cents per gigabyte ingest, in some cases. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot to consider as far as the general principles go, but the specifics, well, that's where it gets into the weeds. And at your scale, yeah, having people focus on this internally with the context and nuance to it is absolutely worth doing. Having a small team devoted to this at large companies will pay for itself, I promise. Now, I go in and advise in these scenarios, but past a certain point, this can't just be one person's part-time gig anymore.Frank: I'm kind of curious about that. How do you think about working with a company and then deprecating yourself, and allowing your tools and, like, the frameworks you put into place to continue, like, thrive?Corey: We're advisory only. We make no changes to production.Frank: Or I don't know if that's the right word, deprecate. I think… that's my own word. [laugh].Corey: No, no, it's fair. It's a—what we do is we go in and we are advisory. It's less of a cost engagement, more of an architecture engagement because in cloud, cost and architecture are the same thing. We look at what's going on, we look at the constraints of why we've been brought in, and we identify things that companies can do and the associated cost savings associated with that, and let them make their own decision. Because it's, if I come in and say, “Hey, you could save a bunch of money by migrating this whole subsystem to serverless.”Great, I sound like a lunatic evangelist because yeah, 18 months of work during which time the team doing that is not advancing the state of the business any further so it's never going to happen. So, why even suggest it? Just look at things that are within the bounds of possibility. Counterpoint: when a client says, “A full re-architecture is on the table,” well, okay, that changes the nature of what we're suggesting. But we're trying to get away from what a lot of tooling does, which is, “Great. Here's 700 things you can adjust and you'll do none of them.” We come back with a, “Here's three or four things you can do that'll blow 20% off the bill. Then let's see where you stand.” The other half of it, of course, is large scale enterprise contract negotiation, that's a bit of a horse of a different color. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it. If folks want to hear more about what you're up to, and how you think about these things. Where can they find you?Frank: You can find me at frankc.net. Or at me at @FrankC on Twitter.Corey: Oh, inviting people to yell at you at Twitter. That's never a great plan. Yeash. Good luck. Thanks again. We've absolutely got to talk more about this in-depth because I think this is one of those areas that you have the folks above a certain point of scale, talk about these things semi-constantly and live in the space, whereas folks who are in relatively small-scale environments are listening to this and thinking that they've got to do this.And no. No, you do not want to spend millions of dollars of engineering effort to optimize a bill that's 80 grand a year, I promise. It's focus on the thing that's right for your business. At a certain point of scale, this becomes that. But thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Frank: Thank you so much, Corey.Corey: Frank Chen, senior staff software engineer at Slack. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that seems to completely miss the fact that Microsoft Teams is free because it sucks.Frank: [laugh].Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Welcome to another episode of The Modern Moron!  I have a very, VERY special guest lined up for you in this edition.  Someone I’ve known my entire life, we’ve been through a lot together.  My guest is… me.  Sorry, I couldn’t get someone lined up for this week.  Whatever.  Don’t judge me. Okay, we’re going to start off light and breezy and work towards dead serious.  In my return to this podcast, not that anyone noticed I left… a few of you did though and thank you… but I would really rather not discuss politics anymore.  Unfortunately that has become extremely difficult, so rather than treat politics as taboo, I’m going to try… TRY to just be curious about it.  I got into a huge argument with the Senator over this… the Senator being my most regular guest on this program.  I’m sure I’m not alone in saying friendships have been lost and certainly changed over the political climate both in this country and globally.   We’ve lost the ability to listen to an opinion other than our own, process it and come to an informed state of mind that is not completely RED or completely BLUE or BLACK or WHITE or RAINBOW.  It doesn’t have to be all one color.  Please see an article I will post at the end of the description from the L.A. Times titled “The Decline and Fall of Nuance”.  Sadly, some of you may not do so simply because the L.A. Times represents something that has ZERO value to you.  All information should have some value.  Take all the information… turn it into knowledge… and then maybe we can apply it in the world with some wisdom and compassion.  See what I did there?  I’m so fucking Zen I can’t believe it. By the way in that article, the author recalls seeing a woman at a Black Lives Matter protest with a sign that read, “Not all blacks are criminals.  Not all whites are racists.  Not all cops are bad.  Ignorance comes in all colors.”  How great would it be if we had a march or a sit-in with that as the central message. Documentary recommendation… : The Biggest little farm on Hulu.    The husband is a wildlife camera operator…. The wife is a personal chef, with a focus on healthy wholesome food.  The husband, I believe was covering a property owner who had literally hundreds of animals, mainly cats and dogs, she was sheltering on her property.  It was a public health issue and they had to gather all of these animals that were in some horrible living conditions. The couple adopted one of the dogs from this situation.  They truly rescued it.  While they were at work the dog barked constantly to the point they got evicted.  So they went for their dream of having a farm so they could keep the dog, whose life they had saved.   Very interesting how becoming farmers doesn’t always mean growing and nurturing all life.  They have chickens.  The chickens lay eggs.  The eggs provide one of their main sources of income… until the coyotes start slaughtering the chickens.  They tried everything to deter the coyotes until they had killed literally hundreds of chickens.  Tried everything except shooting the coyotes. So finally the farmer felt like he was left with no choice.  He grabbed the shotgun and killed one of the coyotes.  Cross fade from the image of the dead coyote to the image of the dog whom they rescued from being killed… his name was Ross.  And it was a great poignant moment where they guy admitted there was some hypocrisy involved.  He had raised some baby pigs, became attached to them and then had to sell them off to market.  He had to put down sheep in the pasture that had become so injured that nothing could be done other than to kill the poor animal.   You may say, eat a plant based diet and there won’t be that problem.  Well there were plenty of problems with other critters, specifically insects and snails specifically that were destroying their crops. We have become sooooo unbelievably spoiled when we walk into our grocery stores and can pick up a styrofoam package with any kind of meat or seafood we want practically.  And we take it for granted, at least I do.  We loose perspective, at least i do.  Multiple times a day, I lose perspective and get pissed or disgusted that my problems are not going away immediately, forgetting that the quality of my problems are luxuries compared to a vast number of people. My first colonoscopy - Human jet ski and the water coming out of my ass was astounding.  Despite the discomfort of drinking a gallon of that swill there was something good about being cleaned out from head to ass.  I literally had nothing in me.  Starting fresh… what was going to be the first thing I put in my body after it being completely clean as a whistle. I know this is gross to some, but it shouldn’t be gross to this demographic.  Even to my gals out there who listen and at one point in  your life you were like, “ew, this guy’s gross with all the diarrhea talk and colonoscopy-isms.  But when you hit our demographic?  Sorry for the pun, but “shit gets real”.   What was I talking about? My colonoscopy prep and that wonderful experience, that’s what I was talking about.  If they’re going to send you a gallon of that stuff to drink knowing that your going to become a human water turbine, they might as well send some jumper cables as well so we can generate some electricity from all that naturally created water pressure.   Another reason why we can talk about this - I can talk about this to you, is because it’s just you and me right now, right?  Probably anyway… if you are one of the rare few, let’s use the word privileged.  It’s just you and me… no audience is listening to this in a group.  Just me and you… nothing to be embarrassed or uncomfortable about, right? Once I was in and wearing a fabulous gown that doesn’t tie in the back because they don’t want you to tie it in the back, I got my sedagive, and I was out like a light, didn’t wake up until the recovery room/ group patient farting chamber and I was done.  The prep was the worst part. Next Item... DOCUMENTARY ASSIGNMENT - “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix I haven’t been this adamant about a documentary you need to watch since ‘The Great Hack’ and if you still haven’t watched that documentary about what happened during the 2016 election, sorry to say this but shame on you.  Do you want it to happen again?  Do you enjoy burying your head in the sand?  Strike that… burying your head in the sand does have it’s appeal in the short term.  You have got to watch the Great Hack on Netflix and when you’re finished with that as uncomfortable and inconvenient as it may be, you absolutely have to watch The Social Dilemma.  Don’t watch both in the same day though, that would overload your circuits. For now, here are some of the people interviewed at length for this documentary: First up is Tristan Harris Wikipedia Page Biography - raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by a single mother. Later on, he studied computer science at Stanford University while interning at Apple Inc., then embarked on a master's degree at Stanford, where he joined a company called Persuasive Technology Lab. Harris studied the psychology of behavior change.  Tristan was classmates with one of Instagram’s founders, Kevin Systrom, and helped create a demo app with the other founder, Mike Krieger. In 2007, Harris dropped out of the master's program at Stanford.  He launched a startup called Apture, which was focused on bringing instantaneous search to content on the web.  Google acquired Harris’ company Apture in 2011 and he ended up working on Google Inbox.  His Opinions on technology use - While working at Google in 2013, Harris sent around a presentation to a handful of coworkers which was titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention”. In that presentation, Harris suggested that Google, Apple and Facebook should “feel an enormous responsibility” to make sure humanity doesn't spend its days buried in a smartphone.  The 141-slide deck was eventually viewed by tens of thousands of Google employees and sparked conversations about the company's responsibilities long after he left the company.  IN his presentation he discussed five human vulnerabilities:   Bad forecasting - The first vulnerability highlighted by Harris was ″bad forecasting,” where alert messages don’t clearly explain what the user is about to give up in terms of their attention. For instance, Facebook might show a notification that you were tagged in a photo. While this alert might suggest you’d quickly “see a photo,” you’re probably going to actually spend 10 minutes on Facebook.    “Intermittent variable rewards” - This is the idea that users keep performing an action in hopes of getting a possible but unlikely reward. Harris called this type of behavior the “most addictive and hardest to stop,” just like playing slot machines in casinos. His example: constantly refreshing an app like Twitter or Facebook to see new content from friends. “We spend lots of time -- are we getting the same value back?” he asks, before suggesting that Silicon Valley should design “to minimize the presence of intermittent variable rewards and reduce addictions.” “Loss-aversion” or the “fear of missing out” or FOMO as the kids call it.Because we’re constantly afraid of missing an alert -- like a major event (and what are we calling a major event these days?  When was the last time a Kardashian wiped their ass? -- we are continuously checking our phones as if running on a treadmill, Harris said. He suggested designers should “design to give users confidence that they can disconnect more often and not miss something important.” Fast and slow thinking - Harris suggested that creating tech that’s too frictionless takes away our human ability to “consider before acting.” Our phones buzz, so we take them out of our pockets without even thinking about it, for example. Harris suggested designers should “leave enough friction for users to pause and consider” their actions.   Stress and altered States - Here, Harris warned that certain actions we take with tech products force us out of a healthy state of mind. For instance, Harris said, we stop breathing while we check our email and that our sympathetic nervous system is activated, our liver dumps glucose and cholesterol into our blood and our heart rates increase “preparing us for a fight or flight response.” He said designers should instead design apps to minimize stress and calm people. Yes, designers should.  The companies they work for should.  But that’s not why companies are in business.  When does the ethical behavior of a company become more important that profits?  OR as most companies would say although maybe off the record, when should the consumer take responsibility for what they buy?  You would probably get a different answer from different companies.  Whole foods might give you a different “off the record” answer than say, Monsanto or Exxon/Mobile.  Should there be any regulation to protect us Morons from ourselves or is it Mike Brady again with the Caveat Emptor.  Remember I hauled that one out in Episode 38!  Titled: “Facebook & Free Speech, I'm with Mark Zuckerberg, Caveat Emptor & The Brady Bunch, Pixar's Wall-E & Costco Chickens. How about that?  We were talking about Facebook again. Wasn’t that a fun trip down memory lane?  Okay, I wanna wrap this up because there is so much more to talk about relating to this documentary.  I will end with this clip from Tristan Harris where he talks about computers and the software or apps that we use and how they were tools.  He compares that tool like any carpenter’s tool and how the apps we use today are very different types of tools… MANIPULATION BASED ENVIRONMENTS - that’s what most of our social networking apps are on our smartphones that we have with us 24/7.  And I’m sure you realize all your favorite flavors of News are all on social media as well, vying for your eyeballs. Once again that was Tristan Harris who is a design ethicist with a non-profit organization he founded called “Time Well Spent”.  The documentary is called “The Social Dilemma”, it’s on Netflix and it is a must watch.  Think of it like taxes or picking up your dog’s poop when you take them for a walk.  It’s gross but you gotta do it.  We’ll definitely talk more about this.  Until next time… Sources: Op-Ed: America has a terrible case of the screaming memes - Los Angeles Times (mediabiasfactcheck.com: Left-Center Biased based on editorial positions that favor the left and High for factual reporting due to a clean fact check record) Google’s new focus on well-being started five years ago with this presentation - The Verge (Techpublication skewed left-center as opposed to far left) Google employee warned in 2013 about five psychological vulnerabilities that could be used to hook users - MSNBC (moderately to strongly biased liberal.  MIXED on factual reporting) "The Social Dilemma:" Lies Spread 6x Faster Than Truth on Social Media | Amanpour and Company - PBS | Amanpour and Company | YouTube

Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the author of 6 books, including New York Times bestseller Digital Minimalism. His writing focuses on the impact of new technology and social media on our ability to be productive and lead satisfying lives. Not surprisingly, his research suggests we’re becoming less connected and getting less done as technology permeates every moment of our day. For this podcast, I got to sit down face to face with Cal to discuss his ideas on digital minimalism. He describes how big business has manipulated us into constantly checking our phones, and is now profiting off of our attention. We discuss the consequences of pervasive technology, and the damaging effect it can have on our drive to create and connect with others in meaningful ways.  Fortunately, Cal also has a solution for turning your attention back to the things that really matter. Here’s the outline of this interview with Cal Newport: [00:00:35] Cal's background. [00:02:18] Book: So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, by Cal Newport. [00:02:54] Book: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport. [00:03:43] Book: Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport. [00:04:17] Joshua Fields Millburn; The Minimalists Podcast, featuring Christopher Kelly and Dr. Tommy Wood: Health Problems. [00:04:42] Brad Stulberg; Podcast featuring Brad; Book: The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life, by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. [00:05:39] Book: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. [00:06:37] The myth of preexisting passion. [00:07:50] We didn't sign up for this. [00:08:32] Why we’re always looking at our phones. [00:12:26] Social media as an arms race for your attention. [00:13:56] Evolutionary psychology; attention engineers. [00:14:29] BJ Fogg's Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford. [00:14:56] Tristan Harris; Adam Alter. [00:15:52] Effects of intermittent reinforcement on behavior and dopamine. [00:16:47] Video: Dopamine Jackpot! Sapolsky on the Science of Pleasure. [00:17:19] Minimalism; Marcus Aurelius; Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden); Voluntary Simplicity; Marie Kondo. [00:19:01] Digital hoarding. [00:24:17] Digital decluttering: Stepping away from optional personal technology for 30 days. [00:26:29] Book: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. [00:28:27] Boredom as a drive that gets us to do things that have meaning and value. [00:32:24] Book: Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, by John Cacioppo. [00:33:11] Book: Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude, by Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin. [00:38:58] Connection vs communication. [00:44:56] Josh Turknett’s Intelligence Unshackled Podcast; Podcast with Josh: The Migraine Miracle. [00:46:30] The effects of technology on biology. [00:48:55] Digital Declutter Experiment for 30 days: step away, you get back in touch with what matters, use that as the foundation for very carefully rebuilding your digital life. [00:53:44] Conversation office hours. [00:57:46] Craftsman's approach to deciding whether or not to use a tool. [01:02:18] Article: Neuroscientists can predict decisions 11 seconds before we make them, based on this study: Koenig-Robert, Roger, and Joel Pearson. "Decoding the contents and strength of imagery before volitional engagement." Scientific reports9.1 (2019): 3504. [01:02:45] Will this have any impact? What's next? [01:05:31] Apple Screen Time reports. [01:08:30] Upcoming book: A World Without Email (tentative title). [01:15:15] Cal's website.

The Sunday Times tech correspondent brings on Tristan Harris, founder of the Centre for Humane Technology, on becoming a tech critic (2:00), leaving Google (6:20), how 2016 woke up the world (8:00), being at the Persuasive Technology Lab in Stanford (9:00), the “Time Well Spent” movement (12:00), why it’s hard to remake the “attention economy” (14:25), the conspiracy correlation matrix (18:05), the danger of Facebook Groups (19:15), the slow awakening amongst rank and file techies (22:45), why he is confident things can change (27:25), Apple as the Federal Reserve of the Attention Economy (28:15), living in a downgraded world (31:25), and the plan (34:10). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Does this sound familiar? You try to add a new habit and for a while, it goes well....until life gets in the way. The new exercise routine gets pushed aside when work gets busy. Your vow to keep the house clean slowly goes down the (messy) toilet. Having your child read/do chores/cook/ over the summer goes nowhere because he is so darn resistant. On today's show, we have a leading expert who shows us that building new habits doesn't need to be hard. No, it can actually be easy, rewarding, and even fun (his words). We're just going about it the wrong way. BJ Fogg is director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, focusing on methods for creating habits and behavior change. He spends half his time in industry and the other half teaching at Stanford. He got his start focusing on how to change behavior utilizing mobile phones and over the years, improving health has become a theme. In December of 2011, Fogg created the Tiny Habits method. His Tiny Habits program has helped over 40,000 people create sustainable and lasting habits. He shares his wisdom and after listening to this episode you'll never look at behavior change the same way again. Highlights from the Show: The three components of behavior that must occur for that behavior to become a habit. The best way to stop a bad behavior and add a positive one, and why adding new behaviors is a better approach. How to add new behaviors using the Tiny Habits Method, and why it is incredibly useful for helping children form positive habits. Top misconceptions about behavior change that hold people back (and why it's easier to create habits than people think). Why it's so hard to create a habit abound something you don't want or see as painful. The most important question to ask: “where does this new behavior fit naturally in my day?” How our culture misleads us into believing transformational change is better than incremental change when clearly it's the other way around. Why effective behavior change is like growing a plant and has nothing to do with willpower.

On this episode of The Living Experiment, we're talking about “Addiction” — what that phenomenon is all about, and how to address the sometimes-subtle dependencies that may show up in your own life. We address everything from physical and psycho-emotional attachments to food, exercise, emotional drama and social media to entrenched end-of-day drink rituals — even porn. We also help you reflect on the dynamics that can drive your own addictive tendencies, so you can start to shift them in ways that work for you. Episode Highlights: Our all-purpose definition of addiction (3:10) Cool neuroscience — the pharmacy inside your brain (7:00) How the biochemicals associated with stress feed our dependencies (8:35) Figuring out the root causes of addiction, and noticing how our culture helps create them (15:00) The connection between addiction and lack of human connection  (19:50) Breaking the addictive cycle with mindful practices and conscious choices (22:00) The satisfaction problem — why it's hard to get "enough" porn, doughnuts, and social media (28:45) The connection between women's "food" issues and a lack of sensual satisfaction (31:00) How guilt and shame drive self-destructive behaviors (33:10) Shifting our addictive tendencies (37:20) The importance of tracking the outcomes of your choices (39:30) This week's experiments (41:55) Weekly Experiments: Dallas suggests: Why do you do what you do? Identify your addictions. Using our definition of addiction, take a look at your own behaviors. Do they make your life better? Are you doing them even though they're harming you? Pilar suggests: Challenge your daily alcohol ritual, and observe your attachments. If you usually have a drink after work, first sit down with a glass of water and just reflect on how you are presently feeling (body and mind). Then notice how it might feel to do without the wine, beer or cocktail on this particular day. What does the drink represent? What are the feelings that come up when you even consider withholding it? Share the love! Each week we offer you a few life-shifting experiments to try on your own. We'd love to hear how they turn out, and what insights they provoke! Connect with The Living Experiment on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and share your stories with us there. Resources   Bruce K. Alexander's Rat Park addiction studies. The fun and fascinating little animated video Pilar referenced: "Addiction - In a Nutshell"by Kurzgesagt. BJ Fogg's behavior-change work at Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab. Judson Brewer's research at Yale on using mindfulness to treat addiction: "You're Already Awesome. Just Get Out of Your Own Way!" TEDx Talk; and his Huffington Post blog. Dallas's blog post, "Porn, Shame, and Doughnuts". Dallas's More Social, Less Media program (helpful for exploring your relationship with technology). Pilar's video interview with Alexandra Jamieson, author of Women, Food, and Desire. The Sipping Point, an article on women and drinking by Gabrielle Glaser from Experience Life Potential Adverse Cardiovascular Effects of Excessive Endurance Exercise via Mayo Clinic Proceedings. PLUS … Sign up for our newsletterso you can stay up to date with us and get notified when a new episode is available. Subscribe to The Living Experiment on iTunes so you automatically get new episodes when they come out. Sponsor link: Check out Brian Johnson's “Habits 101” Master Class for FREE.

Robin Zander is an educator, author, and strategist. With a diverse background ranging from management consulting to circus performance, he has spent his career working with individuals and companies to improve performance. He is a member of BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford-founded Design for Dance conference.

Behavior change is a step-by-step process, and psychologist and innovator Dr. BJ Fogg guides designers and researcher with “The Behavior Wizard,” which maps routes to the 15 ways to achieve behavior change. With specific health targets, whether it be to “eat quinoa for the first time” or “to stop smoking permanently,” his model outlines techniques to stop or decrease behaviors that are unhealthy or start or increase more healthful habits. Fogg is the Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford and has taught the course Creating Health Habits with Social & Mobile Technologies, where students gained expertise in using technology to create habits in everyday people. He speaks in the 2011 Global Health Series organized by the Stanford Global Health Center in partnership with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/b.j._fogg_2011_stanford_healthcare_summit

Dr. B.J. Fogg is the founder and director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, where he also teaches Computer Science. Learn how Mass Interpersonal Persuasion can apply to your Public Relations efforts.