Podcasts about photoshop

This episode looks at bodybuilding before steroids became widespread, arguing that the era is far more useful (and more complicated) than the usual "pure, simple, natty golden age" story. Drs Eric Helms and Conor Heffernan break down how strength sport, judging standards, gym access, and culture shaped physiques from the 1940s through the 1950s. The big takeaway is that early bodybuilding was not a direct comparison to modern natural bodybuilding. The sport was tied to Olympic weightlifting, evaluated with very different criteria, and influenced by training tools and social norms that changed the entire game. Catch new Iron Culture episodes every Tuesday at 5:30 pm eastern time! Be sure to use code "MRR10" for 10% off your order at elitefts.com Iron Culture is proudly presented by the MASS Research Review massresearchreview.com Chapters 0:00 Intro 5:20 The "pre-steroid era" myth 13:48 Using history to break the rules 15:22 When did steroids actually arrive? 29:13 Were the silver-era physiques natural? 32:11 What the average lifter really looked like 39:33 Why old physiques look so different 43:02 Photography before Photoshop 51:37 Inside the Mr. America contest 1:05:27 Training shifts & the Weider–Hoffman rivalry 1:09:21 Equipment & accessibility 1:21:24 Why training volume was limited 1:22:41 The machine age changes everything 1:31:43 How your entry point shapes you 1:37:05 Lessons from the pre-steroid era 1:42:36 The "banned" lifts that were once normal 1:44:50 Wrap-up

Épisode 1502 : En ce moment, il y a une pièce orange dans laquelle Internet fait entrer absolument n'importe qui. Deux personnes côte à côte, un micro suspendu, quelques gestes de rappeurs. Parfois, ce sont des personnages de fiction. Parfois, des footballeurs. Et parfois, Dominique de Villepin et Jacques Chirac.Chirac est mort en 2019. ET pourtant ce mois-ci, on l'a vu rapper. Il porte un costume sombre, se tient dans une cabine orange, et Villepin est à côté de lui. Evidemment, la vidéo est fausse, et tout le monde le sait. Des milliers de personnes l'ont partagée quand même.N'importe qui peut le faire. Mais pour que ce soit drôle, il faut savoir ce que représente cette cabine. Et ce que représente Villepin à l'ONU.Le vrai talent, c'est d'avoir la réfD'abord, c'est quoi un mèmeLe mot date de 1976. Le biologiste Richard Dawkins l'invente dans son ouvrage « Le Gène égoïste ». Il cherche un équivalent culturel du gène : une idée, un air ou un geste qui passe d'une tête à l'autre.Internet a repris le mot et l'a simplifié. Un mème, c'est un gabarit : une image, un son ou une formule qui sert de moule. Chacun le remplit à sa façon. La forme reste la même et le contenu change.Un truc important à savoir : un mème ne se regarde pas, il se reconnaît. Si vous ne connaissez pas le moule, vous ne voyez pas le détournement, et il n'y a rien de drôle.COLORS : Le moule orangeVoici le moule de cet automne. https://www.instagram.com/reels/DdrZMRbsBST/En juin 2022, Quavo et Takeoff, du groupe Migos, chantent « Hotel Lobby » sur COLORS. COLORS, c'est une chaîne YouTube connue pour sa cabine monochrome et son esthétique épurée. Pour être invité dans la cabine, il faut avoir du flow. Quelques mois plus tard, le 1er novembre 2022, Takeoff est tué à Houston.Quatre ans plus tard, en septembre 2026, la vidéo revient partout. Sauf que ce ne sont plus Quavo et Takeoff qui chantent.Comment on fabrique un mème IALa recette est très simple. On prend deux photos de visages. On ouvre une application comme Starrd ou Summrs. Ce sont des Ai Video Generators.On peut aussi se tourner Ves un modèle CapCut. On charge les images et on lance la génération. L'outil garde la chorégraphie, la synchronisation des lèvres et la bande-son d'origine. Il ne change que les têtes.Ça prend quelques minutes, sans caméra, sans montage et sans aucun savoir-faire. Il n'y a rien à apprendre.Autrefois, pour un détournement, il fallait savoir faire du Photoshop, du montage ou de l'imitation. On admirait le travail. Ce travail a disparu.-Avoir la réf est devenue la compétenceQuand fabriquer ne coûte plus rien, la valeur est dans le point de vue. Dans ce que je raconte.L'IA sait exécuter, mais elle ne sait pas quoi rapprocher de quoi. Elle ne sait pas que Villepin à l'ONU et une cabine de Rap peuvent se répondre. Plus que jamais la culture générale est un avantage créatif. Les heures passées sur YouTube, les souvenirs de la télé des années 2000, l'intérêt pour la politique : tout ça devient de la matière première. La personne qui a le plus de références a le plus de choses à rapprocher.…Retrouvez toutes les notes de l'épisode sur www.lesuperdaily.com ! Le Super Daily est le podcast quotidien sur les réseaux sociaux. Il est fabriqué avec une pluie d'amour par les équipes de Supernatifs. Nous sommes une agence social media basée à Lyon : https://supernatifs.com. Ensemble, nous aidons les entreprises à créer des relations durables et rentables avec leurs audiences. Ensemble, nous inventons, produisons et diffusons des contenus qui engagent vos collaborateurs, vos prospects et vos consommateurs. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Could the way you're marketing your rental properties be costing you weeks of vacancy? In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason Hull sits down with Kori Covrigaru, co-founder of PlanOmatic, to discuss how professional listing media can help property management companies lease properties faster, reduce vacancy costs, and attract more owners. Kori shares what he's learned from more than two decades in real estate photography, including why professional photos, floor plans, and 3D tours can make such a difference in today's competitive rental market. They also discuss how outsourcing photography can save your team hours of driving and administrative work, allowing you to grow your portfolio without adding unnecessary overhead. If you're looking for ways to fill vacancies faster, improve your property management brand, and give your team more time to focus on growing the business, this episode is worth a listen. You'll Learn [02:14] Kori Covrigaru's Story and PlanOmatic [04:18] Why Professional Photos Help Properties Lease Faster [06:36] How Better Listings Attract Property Owners [10:03] Scaling Your Business Without Adding Overhead [12:28] How PlanOmatic Works and Integrates With Your Software [15:30] Photography Pricing and Who Pays for It [17:36] How AI Virtual Staging Improves Rental Listings [23:58] Providing Photography Services Across Different Markets [28:31] Building a Client-Focused Business Through Communication Quotables "But the biggest reason why it actually makes sense and there's a high ROI for our customers to use us versus what you described as properties with professional photos lease faster." — Kori Covrigaru Pasted "You attract who you are." — Jason Hull  "It's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know that something is happening." — Kori Covrigaru Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Transcript Jason Hull (00:01) Five, four, three, two, one. All right, we're live. Hey everybody, I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. We are the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. We've been doing this for over 18 years, roughly about now, and we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry.   We are on a mission here at DoorGo to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the BS or eliminate the BS, transform the industry, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, help the best property management entrepreneurs win. And we're particularly genius at three key things: rehabbing property management companies so they make more money, optimizing their growth engines so they add more doors without having to waste money on digital marketing. And we help them figure out and get their ops dialed in so they get more freedom.   Now let's get into the show. Alright, today's guest hanging out with me here is Cory. And Corey, say your last name for me. I'm gonna try it. Kavrigaru. That is an A. Really? What how do you say it? It's Kovrigaru. Kovrigaru. It could be Kovrigaro. It's Roman.   Kori Covrigaru (01:07) That is an A. You got an A. Yeah, it's covrigaro. But you know what? It could be covrigaro. It's Romanian.   I don't speak Romanian. My father and his family were born in Romania. Means bagel maker in Romanian. Yeah, you nailed it. We're off to a good start.   Jason Hull (01:21) Interesting. Okay. He's runs bagel you know, meets bagel maker in Romanian. Okay. All right. Very cool.   Yeah, my brother Bryant actually he runs a property management business. He actually was a Mormon missionary in Romania. So he speaks Romanian. So   Kori Covrigaru (01:37) Wow.   Buona di miniatso. That means good morning. That's about, yeah, the count of 10. We can do it again. That's...   Jason Hull (01:40) There you go. That's more than I ever knew. So now everybody knows. Thank you. All right, cool. So   so Corey is the the co founder of Plan O Matic. And   Kori Covrigaru (01:54) Yes.   Jason Hull (01:55) we're gonna discuss today how high quality listing media can help properties lease faster, reduce vacancy costs, and create a better experience for both owners and prospective residents.   Corey's going to share insights for more than two decades of building one of the nation's largest real estate photography companies and what today's property manager should know about standing out in a competitive rental market. And it has gotten tough to get leasing handled in some markets right now. They've got a lot of inventory, the market shifted, it can be difficult. So we're going to get into that. All right, cool. So   Corey, give us a little background on you so those that are listening can understand what how did you get into entrepreneurism and decide to be crazy like the rest of us and start a business? And like how did this lead to Planomatic? I think it was the short answer is by necessity. I realized early.   Kori Covrigaru (02:48) I think it was the short answer is by necessity. I realized early on   that it was unemployable and in order to provide an income for myself and eventually my family, had to figure   Jason Hull (02:56) And eventually my family.   Kori Covrigaru (02:58) out how to start a business. So I got into Planomatic. I was an entrepreneur major at the first school. I attended SUNY Buffalo my freshman year. played soccer there and transferring to Western Michigan. They didn't have an entrepreneurship major there, but I kind of continued upon that path for myself. And then at some point,   Jason Hull (03:05) Buffalo, my freshman year, I played soccer there, I ended up transferring to Western Michigan. They didn't have an entrepreneurship major there, but I kind of continued upon that path for myself. And then at some   point in college I met someone who had written software or decreased work plans quickly on site, started helping him with his business, and then eventually licensed that software, started my own business, brought my co-founders on board, and then eventually we started using other software, of course. That's how I kind of got into it.   Kori Covrigaru (03:17) In college, I met someone who had written software to create floor plans quickly on site, started helping him with his business, and then eventually licensed that software, started my own business, brought my co-founders on board. And then eventually we started using other software, of course, but that's how I kind of got into it by happenstance.   Jason Hull (03:34) I knew that you know A O B was probably not for   Kori Covrigaru (03:34) But I knew that, know, J-O-B was probably not for me. And   that's what led me to the path I'm on. 22 years.   Jason Hull (03:42) Twenty   two years planomatic. Very cool. Very cool. So cool. So what is Planomatic? Yeah. So Planomatic provides professional photography, floor plans, three D scans, AI virtual staging, and more services to the single family rental property management industry nationwide at speed and at scale. So that's kind of like   Kori Covrigaru (03:50) Yeah. So Plan-O-Matic provides professional photography, floor plans, 3D scans, AI virtual staging, and more services to the single family rental property management industry nationwide at speed and at scale. So that's kind of like our...   you know, if you're familiar with EOS or traction, that's our, that's our elevator pitch. We provide professional photography floor plan, 3D scans, AI virtual for single family rental specifically. We did use to service the for sale by agent space or the traditional real estate agent that sells homes. And we actually pivoted a hundred percent to the single family rental property management industry in   Jason Hull (04:09) You know, if you're familiar with EOS or traction, that's our that's our elevator pitch. We provide photography floor technology scans for single family rentals specifically. We did use to service the for sale by agent space or the traditional real estate agent that sells homes and we actually pivoted a hundred percent to the single family rental, property management industry.   Kori Covrigaru (04:32) 2020, 21, sort of around that time.   Jason Hull (04:36) Okay, okay, got it. So three D scans, pro photography, speed, scale. So for property managers, why is it important to do this stuff well? Why can't they just send out one of their team members that's got an iPhone and just sort of wing it? Okay. Well there's there's a lot are a lot of reasons why that's not the optimal solution.   Kori Covrigaru (04:57) Well, there's a lot. There are a lot of reasons why that's not the optimal solution. Now, look,   I'm not going to say that, you know, it's the same for every property manager and every price range and every market across the U.S. That's not the case. But generally speaking, windshield time is what really cuts into profits.   Jason Hull (05:05) same for every property manager and every price range and every market across the US. But generally speaking, windshield time is is what really cuts into   Kori Covrigaru (05:18) And so what we're able to do is reduce that windshield time. That saves money and makes you more efficient.   We also save a lot of the back office having to download, upload photos, color correct them, download them, sort them, upload them to that folio, build them, rent, find wherever your PMS is. And so we save a ton of time by being integrated with your property management software. But the biggest reason why it actually makes sense and there's a high ROI for our customers to use us versus what you described as properties with professional photos lease faster.   Jason Hull (05:31) Upload photos, color correct them, download them, sort them, upload them, tab folio, building, random, wherever your PMS is. And so we save a ton of time by being integrated with your property management software. But the biggest reason why it actually makes sense and there's a high ROI for our customers to use us versus what you described is properties with professional photos leads   faster.   Kori Covrigaru (05:55) So   we're   able to get out to your property often same day or next day and deliver those assets the day later. So that's like an average of two and a half days from order to delivery when you can have professional leasing photos up on the Zillow platform, up on apartments.com or wherever else you   Jason Hull (05:56) Yeah. We're able to get out to your property often the same day or next day and deliver those assets the day later. So that's like an average of two and a half days from order to delivery and then you can have professional leasing photos up on the Zillow platform, up on Parliament.com, or where   Kori Covrigaru (06:11) may advertise your single family rentals. so by reducing the windshield time and the time it actually takes to get those photos on, we can reduce the time by about 14 days.   Jason Hull (06:12) else you may advertise your scene family rentals. And so by reducing the the windshield time and the time it actually takes to get those photos up, we can reduce the time by about 14 days   and lease that property about 10 days faster once it hits the market with those pro photos.   Kori Covrigaru (06:22) and lease that property about 10 days faster once it hits the market with those pro photos.   Jason Hull (06:27) So two weeks two weeks less. Two weeks less. On average it takes about two weeks from rent ready to get professional listing photos up on the portal. We can do that for you in two to two and half days.   Kori Covrigaru (06:30) Two weeks less on average, takes about two weeks from rent ready to get professional listing photos up on the portal. We can do that for you in two to two and a half days. And   then we can also save your team time so that they're not dealing with going out to   Jason Hull (06:39) And you can also save your team time so that they're not dealing with   Kori Covrigaru (06:42) a property and taking photos and uploading them in the background and doing all that stuff. They can focus on tenants or maintenance issues or communicating with owners or just not have to grow your staff as fast as you grow your business.   Jason Hull (06:47) tenants or maintenance or or communicating with owners or just not have to grow your staff as fast as you grow business.   Got it. So it this gives you leverage, especially during times where leasing gets heavy like the summer and there's an increase in workload and workflow happening, then you can just outsource this piece and get people get really somebody else handling this, which is planomatic, get get photos handled, you know, quickly and get things, you know   Get the property leased a lot faster. Leased a lot faster. I mean it's really at this point it's table sticks, right? In this environment especially.   Kori Covrigaru (07:17) Lease a lot faster. I mean, it's really at this point, it's table stakes, right? In this environment, especially where everything   is so competitive, it's taking a lot more to lease a property. You actually, you need professional   Jason Hull (07:25) Yeah,   Kori Covrigaru (07:28) photos to compete out there. And I really, didn't even mention there is another layer to why it's important to market your properties professionally. That's because that's the first impression that potential owners that may want to hire you see online. I mean, you're dirty laundries out there, right? Like they see how you treat your existing portfolio, your existing.   Jason Hull (07:30) And I I really I didn't even mention there there is another layer to why it's important to market your properties professionally, and that's because that's the first impression that potential owners that may want to hire you see online. Your your very laundry's out there, right? Like they see how you treat your existing portfolio, your existing   Kori Covrigaru (07:47) and the doors that you manage, and they're going to envision their property being in that same spot on your listing page or on your website. And so   Jason Hull (07:47) clients and the doors that you manage, and they're gonna envision their property being in that same spot on your listing page or on your website. Right.   Kori Covrigaru (07:55) you can really elevate your brand and brand yourself professionally by hiring a professional to do your professional property manager. It's like the same reason why you wouldn't recommend an owner or manage their own property. It could work, but it doesn't make sense as far as your time value and what you value, like what's your full-time job.   Jason Hull (07:56) you know, you can really elevate your brand and and and bring yourself professionally by hiring a professional to do the your professional property manager. It's like the same reason why you wouldn't recommend an owner or manage your own property. It could work, you know, it but but it doesn't make sense as far as your time value and what you got you know what's your what's your full time job, right? Let a professional go let them   do it better. That's kind of the way we see it.   Kori Covrigaru (08:16) Let a professional do let them do it better. That's kind of the way we see it.   Jason Hull (08:20) I I think that's a really good point. If you're a property manager listening to this and you're thinking, Well I could just do that myself   You are exactly the problem that frustrates you. These are the investors that are like, I'll just do it myself. You have to have a mindset that it makes sense to outsource to get a better quality product, that it makes sense to get an expert brought in to do expert work. And I love the idea because either you're at the top of your market and you're positioning yourself as the best and you're the best branded and you have the best photos and everything you do is the best, or you got to be the cheapest because in the middle is where you die.   Kori Covrigaru (08:56) Exactly.   Jason Hull (08:56) And that playing the game of being the cheapest and trying to do everything low cost is a great way to have a business that makes you miserable, that isn't fun to run, and isn't very attractive to the best clients. It's gonna attract cheapos. You attract who you are. And so if you want to position yourself mentally, and I coach a lot of clients on this, and if you want to position yourself mentally, you got to get graduate from being a cheapo to maybe a more normal type of buyer. And then you got to graduate from being a normal type of buyer to a premium buyer. And then you can attract everything that you want.   But if you have enough premium buyers, normal buyers, you may turn down or fire a lot of the cheapos and not even work with them. Because the people that care about having nice photos and things looking good also care about things being done well and they probably have more money to spend. They're not   Kori Covrigaru (09:41) Exactly.   Jason Hull (09:41) looking for the cheapest, ugliest option to just get it done. You don't want to be cheap. especially in an area that kind of reverberates across   Kori Covrigaru (09:45) So, yep, I agree. You don't want to be cheap. And especially in an area that kind of reverberates across the   internet that everybody can see your existing clients as well as potential clients. You just don't want that to be your brand's thing. It's like,   Jason Hull (09:54) the internet that everybody can see your existing, you know, clients as well as potential clients. You just don't want that to be your brand's thing.   Kori Covrigaru (10:03) I'm going to cut corners when it comes to marketing your properties, for example. So that's just like the elevate your brand, kind of keep your existing owners, attract new owners. That's one component of the reason why.   Jason Hull (10:07) So that's that's just like to elevate your brand, kind of keep your existing owners, attract new owners. That's one component why.   Yeah, I love it. I mean, nicer photos is nice, but I think for me the benefit as a business owner really is freeing up my team to focus on higher level tasks. They're not being sent out to go be a half ass photographer. So it because it's drive time, going out to do things, they could be getting stuff done, helping onboard new clients, getting the   things done in the office rather than just driving around taking photos. And if they're not really great at it, let an expert do it. So seems to be a no brainer. I'm a business owner   Kori Covrigaru (10:43) And again, I'm a business owner too.   Jason Hull (10:45) too.   Kori Covrigaru (10:46) You might be able to, again, not scale your people as you scale your business. I mean, that's every entrepreneur's dream, right? It's how do I keep my overhead the same as it relates to the revenue, but increase that top line in order to generate more   Jason Hull (10:49) scale your people as you scale your business. I mean, that's every entrepreneur's dream, right? So how do I keep my overhead the same as it relates to revenue, but increase that top line in order to   Kori Covrigaru (11:00) profits, right? So not having that, that, overhead, that permanent W2 employee that's driving around, insured, buying gas while they're, you know, could be doing other things.   Jason Hull (11:02) Not having that that overhead, that permanent W two that's driving around insured, buying gas while they're you know   doing other things, not doing anything at all is is   Kori Covrigaru (11:12) doing anything at all is a high cost.   Jason Hull (11:14) high costs. Yeah. yeah, yeah. You know, like our cars are often just sitting in the driveway, right? Not really doing a whole lot for us, and then we use it occasionally. And but in business you don't want team members, they're just sitting like a car in the driveway. You want them   be productive, getting stuff done and focus on the right things. And so yeah, if you have seasonal work, if photos are just something that happens occasionally, you know, or even pretty regularly, you want to be able to scale without having to just go out and hire. Hiring is one of the most costly things you will ever do. One bad hire usually costs business owners, I find, when we really dig into it, minimum 10 grand. It's 10 grand in opportunity cost, 10 grand in loss   money that's been spent on this team member for about three months before you figure out they're just not going to cut it. And so the less you have to get involved in the hiring piece and you can use a system with experts just when you need it, that is a lot more ideal. Even if it's more expensive to get that thing done, there you don't have that sunk cost of having a team member all the time that you're paying. Exactly. Keep it variable if you can cool. Business in general you can keep   Kori Covrigaru (12:20) Exactly. Keep it variable if you can. In business in general, if you can keep it variable, keep it variable.   Jason Hull (12:24) it variable   Yeah, you you mentioned table sticks. You're talking about the game where the it's who grabs the sticks first? No, it's kind of   Kori Covrigaru (12:32) No, it's kind of like poker,   you know, like required to pay if you're to play the game.   Jason Hull (12:37) Pay if   you're gonna play the game. Okay. Got it. Okay.   Kori Covrigaru (12:41) You up. It's not, you know, if you're playing poker, you have to   ante up. If you're in property management, you have to treat your listing.   Jason Hull (12:47) Got it. I'm obviously   a really seasoned poker pr player. Just kidding. So right, actually, you can tell me if I say it aloud, so I'm looking   Kori Covrigaru (12:51) I hope I get that right. Actually, you put me totally, I say it a lot. So I'm going to look that one up afterwards.   Jason Hull (12:56) at it. All right, cool. So yes, I missed the reference. All right. So very cool. So I I these are some of the benefits. How does Planomatic work? How does this how does this work? G paint the picture. Somebody signs up with you. What's the process? How are they able to leverage you and use you? How does this go?   Kori Covrigaru (13:17) There are a number of ways we are integrated with AppFolio, Buildium, and RentFine. So I integrated what I mean is you register as a Planomatic client, and then you integrate with your property management software. Your portfolio then syncs with our system so you can see   Jason Hull (13:22) Build DM and Redfine. So by integrating what I mean is you register as a priomatic client and then you integrate with your property management software. Your portfolio then syncs with our system.   Kori Covrigaru (13:33) your properties in our system, see what's for rent, what's not for rent, what has professional photos, what doesn't, and make your buying decisions that way with one click. Order photos, order photos, order photos.   Jason Hull (13:36) Rent what has professional photos, what doesn't, make your buying decisions that way with one click, order photos, order photos, order   photos. Yeah. We either dispatch our photography either same day or next day, go out, capture the content, have that content processed and photoshopped, etc., by our team and some tools that we use, and then we sync those assets back with your property management software so you can go ahead and with one click syndicate that property.   Kori Covrigaru (13:43) We then dispatch our photographer either same day or next day, go out, capture the content, have that content processed and photoshopped, et cetera, by our team and some tools that we use. And then we sync those assets back with your property management software so that you can go ahead and with one click syndicate that property as far   as the marketing photos are concerned. They appear in your account ready to go, right sort order with the right captions, the right size.   Jason Hull (14:04) Far as the marketing photos are concerned, they're appear in your account, ready to go, right? Sort order with the right captions, the right   size, etc. And so that entire process from order to delivery is average, you know, averages about two and a half days. and you don't have to download a single thing, like everything just kind of like goes the way it goes. There is another that we've just launched. Actually, this is kind of big news for us, but we've launched the ability to receive work orders now through either property meld or   Kori Covrigaru (14:11) Etc. And so that entire process from order to delivery is average, know, averages about two and a half days. And you don't have to download a single thing. Like everything is kind of like goes the way it goes. There is another way that we've just launched. Actually, this is kind of big news for us, but we've launched the ability to receive work orders now through either property meld or, or   at folio ability and rent finds. So we can actually receive work orders from our customers, just like you order a plumber.   Jason Hull (14:33) Folio ability of our device. We can actually receive work orders from our customers. Just like you order   a plumber to come out to the property, you order Planomatic to shoot photos, we receive that work order, we digest that order automatically, and then two to two and a half days later, you'll find those assets synced with your property management software ready to syndicate in the most ways that we work with our customers. And we do have larger owner operator customers that own their their rentals as well as manage them and those   Kori Covrigaru (14:38) to come out to the property, order PlanoMatic to shoot photos, we receive that work order, we digest that order automatically, and then two to two and a half days later, you'll find those assets synced with your property management software, ready to syndicate immediately. Those are the most organized that we work with our customers. And we do have larger owner operator customers that own their rentals as well as manage them. And those are kind of like we call   them enterprise clients, institutional investors.   Jason Hull (15:04) Clients, institutional investors,   Kori Covrigaru (15:06) They integrate with us in a bit of a unique way. They directly integrate with our platform versus going through property management software because they're typically on either Salesforce or Yardi or some sort of proprietary platform. So those customers have a more direct integration with us. That's pretty much, it's really easy. Just register and go ahead and integrate. You don't have to integrate. You can also just go out and place an order and we'll be there.   Jason Hull (15:07) they integrate with us in a bit of a unique way. They directly integrate with our platform versus going through property management software because we typically want either Salesforce or ERB or some sort of proprietary platform. Okay. Just register and go ahead and integrate. You don't have to integrate the just go out and place an order. Okay. Very cool. And   so if they place an order and you go out there and maybe the tenant   left something or wasn't quite ready. like there's a trash bag in the kitchen or there's something's missing or whatever. The Photoshop guys can kind of get it s that weird thing out or take care of that. It's just AI the thing and it's gone. We don't charge for something like that. We charge for object   Kori Covrigaru (15:44) But as we know today, that's kind of a lasso situation. You just kind of lasso that item. We get rid of those items, and we don't charge for something like that. We charge for object removal that's   bigger. Like if there's a car in the driveway for some reason, or there's a big trash bin, we may charge a little extra   Jason Hull (16:00) Yeah.   Kori Covrigaru (16:00) for that, because that's a little more heavy. But as long as the is vacant, we can take the photos. We can clean up a little bit of a mess.   Jason Hull (16:03) Got it. Okay.   Kori Covrigaru (16:07) It's no big deal. We can do a lot more. can AI virtual stage images, too, but declutter.   Jason Hull (16:12) Okay.   Cool. Got it. I I'm sure people listening to this are like, this sounds great. This sounds really cool, but what is the cost? Is that something you can tell talk about? Yeah, the cost in and right now we we do have a membership program, so it it does impact that and we do have a prepay and save, but Okay. But the cost is a la carte. You don't have to pay like this, you know, per month subscription. It's like literally you have an   Kori Covrigaru (16:23) Yeah, the cost in right now, we do have a membership program, so it does impact that, and we do have a prepay and save, but the cost is a la carte. You don't have to pay like this per door per month subscription. It's like literally you have an order to place with   us. Great. Go on, place one order for photography only. Our minimum there is 10 photos. You can also place an order for photos and 3D tour and a floor plan.   Jason Hull (16:40) place with us, great. Go on place one order for photography only. Our minimum there is ten photos. you can also place an order for photos and three D tour and a floor plan.   Kori Covrigaru (16:50) I believe that photos, know, everything's like for, for 15 photos, a 3d tour and a 2d floor plan. We're talking under 300 bucks per property setting. 270. It's like off the rack, 15 photos, 3d.   Jason Hull (16:51) Okay. I believe that photos, you know, everything's like for f for fifteen photos, a three D tour and a two D floor plan, we're talking under three hundred bucks. Okay. Awesome. Two seventy it's like off the rack.   Yeah, that's great. And this would be easily be something that you could   offer as part of your packages or your offerings and have the owner pay for as part of the leasing process. I was gonna backtrack and say it's free. Right. Right. You should be tweaking your owner and you should be probably marking that up for all the coordination just that you do. I mean it's transparent, but we don't really support the kickbacks or or charging more and saying, you know, tell them it was more or whatever it is, but   Kori Covrigaru (17:19) I was going to backtrack and say it's free. It's free to the property manager, right? Because you should be choosing your owner and you should be probably marking that up for all the coordination, just like you would mark up in the work that you do. mean, of course, transparently, we don't really support kickbacks or charging more and saying, you know, tell them it was more or whatever it is. But yeah, this   is something that most property managers that we work for are starting to change their process, change their owner agreement to make sure that that owner   Jason Hull (17:40) Yeah, this is something that most property managers that we work for are starting to change their process, change their owner agreement to make sure that that owner   Kori Covrigaru (17:49) pays for those marketing photos and it makes sense, right? Because once that owner picks up and leaves and takes their door with them, those photos are then obsolete, right? for the property manager. it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of owners are like, yeah, of course we need professional photos to market my property.   Jason Hull (17:50) pays for those marketing photos and it makes sense, right? Because once that owner picks up and leaves and takes a vote with them, those photos are then obsolete, right? So for the for the property managers. So it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of owners are are like, Yeah, of course we need fashion for this.   Kori Covrigaru (18:04) It's my property.   Jason Hull (18:04) Yeah, obviously.   And then if they can explain everything you just explained about the benefits of this, then to their clients, the then the owners will say, Yeah, no brainer. I should do this. I'll pay the extra money.   I'll pay and mute.   Kori Covrigaru (18:16) That should be in the agreement. mean, that's something, yeah.   Jason Hull (18:20) Got it. Okay, very cool. What else do people typically ask about Planomatic or what what else are am I are we missing? Those that are listening that might usually be curious about.   Kori Covrigaru (18:30) I you know, I don't want to call it a silver bullet because I don't   know that I believe necessarily in silver bullets. Are you, are you with me on the silver bullet thing? All right, good. Just making sure. So AI virtual staging has, has provided us with significant data that shows that it works almost like a silver bullet. mean, properties with AI virtual staging just lease faster. get more showings, more, more.   Jason Hull (18:35) Silver bullets? Are you are you with me on a silver bullet thing? Yeah, yeah. So AI virtual staging has has provided us with significant data that shows that it works almost like a silver bullet. I mean, yeah. Properties with AI virtual staging just lease faster. They get more showings, more   more applications, and it's been kind of wild.   Kori Covrigaru (18:59) and it's been kind of wilder.   That's something that we've seen from our institutional folks. They take a lot more time to research ROI on specific products that we offer. one of the...   Jason Hull (19:02) That's something that we've seen from our institutional folks. They take a lot more time   to research on RLI on specific products that we offer. So everybody knows kind of what staging is, right? If you're selling a home and it's usually a more expensive home, you call a company a staging company and they'll bring a big U-Haul with a bunch of furniture and they'll come and they'll drop it off and they'll put it in, and then you'll have your listing photos taken, right? Because listing photos look so much better.   Kori Covrigaru (19:12) Yeah. So everybody knows kind of what staging is, right? If you're selling a home and it's usually a more expensive home, you call a company, a staging company, and they'll bring a big U-Haul with a bunch of furniture and they'll come and they'll drop it off and they'll put it in. And then you'll have your listing photos taken, right? Because listing photos look so much better with   furniture. Well, for the longest time, we've been able to virtually stage real estate photos. We've had to do it with a human being and that costs a lot. You know, that costs a lot.   Jason Hull (19:32) furniture, well for the longest time we've been able to virtually stage real estate photos. We've had to do it with a human being and that's cost a lot, you know, that   costs a lot more money. But today the advances of AI and we see it all you know commercials on TV and everything, we can virtually stage and by virtual stage I mean s like take a a photo of a vacant room. Yeah. Go go to our staging vendor, a software company, click a button, choose   Kori Covrigaru (19:42) But today, with the advances of AI and we see it all over commercials on TV and everything, we can virtually stage. And by virtually stage, mean, take a photo of a vacant room, go to our staging vendor, a software company, click a button, choose between   Jason Hull (20:00) between various different styles for staging. Okay. And then it actually places that furniture in the image and and you and it looks like s it's scary how real   Kori Covrigaru (20:00) various different styles for staging. And then it actually places that furniture in the image and it looks like it's scary how real it looks.   Jason Hull (20:09) it looks. Right, yeah. And so when you have when they have properties that are are staged or virtually staged, and we label them virtually staged just   Kori Covrigaru (20:11) And so when you have, when you have properties that are staged or virtually staged and we label them virtually staged just to make sure that.   Jason Hull (20:18) to make sure that you've got the virtual staging in the photos. Does this show up in the three D tour or stuff like that? It doesn't show up in the three D tour. It does however show   Kori Covrigaru (20:25) doesn't show up in the 3d tour. does, however, show up   in the photography carousel, of course. And we typically have like a before and after. It allows for the potential renter to envision their lives in that, versus seeing it as an empty box. So naturally there's been more, we've all looked for real estate before and we've clicked through properties and when the photos are bad, it's you kind of move on. Cause like you don't stuff in that mess, right?   Jason Hull (20:31) Got it. I mean we have like a before and after. It it it allows for the potential renter to envision their lives. Right, they can imagine it. Versus seeing it as an empty box. So naturally they're gonna spend more we all looked for real estate before and we've clicked through properties and photos of that it's you kinda move on. Yeah, yeah. You don't withten that mess,   right? When it's nicer photos you stop and and so the the furniture really helps the potential rent to stop spending more time   Kori Covrigaru (20:53) When it's nicer photos, you stop. so the furniture really helps the potential renter stop, spend more time on that listing   and eventually get more showings and more applications.   Jason Hull (21:02) Sure. Yeah. I've moved into places and you know, seeing how they had it decorated before or seeing photos how they decorate it gave me an idea of, we could do something like this, or here's what I want to change. Because you're not starting with just this blank slate and trying to be creative. And so yeah, I think it helps people's imagination so they can picture their life in there. Okay,   Kori Covrigaru (21:23) Yep. It just cause you to stop, you know.   Jason Hull (21:25) cool. And there's you you were citing there's evidence.   that virtual staging significantly increases the results as well. So not just having good photos, but also good photos that are virtually staged, you're now maximizing the the return on this. And the and the virtual staging that that's   Kori Covrigaru (21:41) And the virtual staging, that's really inexpensive.   I think it's 36 bucks for three rooms, if I'm not mistaken.   Jason Hull (21:46) It's thirty six bucks for three rooms. Yeah.   Kori Covrigaru (21:49) So it's like a huge ROI   Jason Hull (21:51) Cool.   Kori Covrigaru (21:52) to order virtual staging on top of your professional photo.   Jason Hull (21:54) Sure, a lot cheaper than real staging.   Kori Covrigaru (21:58) Where'd you go?   Jason Hull (21:59) So yeah, got it. Very cool. anything else that we're missing about Planomatic? Sounds very cool. Yeah.   Kori Covrigaru (22:05) Yeah, no, I mean, I'm again, been an   entrepreneur for about 22 years. We have a high focus on, on client communication and client support. So that's one thing that's like paramount for me. I always tell my team, it's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know something is happening, meaning keep the customer updated. You know, even if we don't have the resolution yet for you, like we'll figure it out or we're working on it. So when you work with us, you really understand those, that's part of our core values. really.   Jason Hull (22:10) we have a high focus on on client communication and client support. So that's one thing that's like paramount for me. I always tell my team it's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know something is happening. Meaning keep the customer updated. Yeah. You know, even if we don't have the resolution yet for you, like we'll figure it out or we're working on it. So what when you work with us, you really understand those that's part of our core values. It   really emulates through the entire organization. So that's really important to us. Our integration, of course, is is really important and allows for   Kori Covrigaru (22:30) emulates through the entire organization. So that's really important to us. Our integration, of course, is really important and allows for our customers to   be able to transact with us. Again, business 101, make it as easy as possible for your customers to transact with you. So we've tried to make that a reality. And then, know, we're business owners, we're a small business, just like you all are, you know, just like you are, Jason, just like our property management clients are. And we just want to...   Jason Hull (22:39) To be able to transact with us, make our business one on one, make it as easy as possible for your customers to transact with you. So we've tried to make that a reality. and then you know, we're we're business owners, we're small business just like just like you all are. We're not just like you are, Jason, just like our our our property management clients are. and   we just wanna be successful in helping our clients make more money and and gain more market share, and and that's what we strive for every day. So we have the same   Kori Covrigaru (22:59) be successful in helping our clients make more money and gain more market share. And that's what we strive for every day. So we have the same struggles,   but same successes that every business owner does. We're not PE-backed or VC-backed.   Jason Hull (23:08) Same struggles, but same successes does with the RP backed or PC backed on P back back.   Got it. So I know there's a lot of people listening that are gonna think, because I hear this all the time, even with with what we do at DoorGrow, will this work in my market? I'm in a big city, will this work in my market? I'm in a small town. How do you source photographers? So before you answer that, I'm gonna share a quick word from our sponsor. So our sponsor today is Vendoroo. So if you're working with   Door grow, you're growing doors, right? And that means you have to keep figuring out how to keep up with the maintenance. So instead of doing that, we recommend that you use Vendoroo to have maintenance figured out for you with AI. Some of our clients are getting 85%, 95% of their maintenance coordination handled by Vendoroo, which is amazing. Vendoroo brings the best practices, workflows, and AI intelligence. They've developed across hundreds of property management operations and puts it into work, into your business.   It's an AI that answers the phone. It troubleshoots with residents. It coordinates vendors. It does follow-up. It drives the work order all the way to completion. It could probably work with Plan O Matic, right? So as you add doors, you don't have to keep reinventing maintenance. Let Vendoroo build your maintenance for you. Like so many of our DoorGrow community members have already done. You focus on growing your doors. Build an AI-first maintenance department that will scale with you forever.   Use Vendoro. Cool. All right. So tell us how do you handle photographers? Because some people are thinking, well, this might be hard in my town. They who do they know in, you know, Podunksville, you know, wherever I'm at, you know. Or they might think I'm in a really big city and maybe photographers, there's challenges with getting good ones and they're so expensive or w whatnot.   Kori Covrigaru (25:01) You hire a team to, you know, to   Jason Hull (25:02) You hire a team to to you know.   Kori Covrigaru (25:04) onboard, to hire, to onboard, maintain these contract photographers nationwide. That's kind of what we've   Jason Hull (25:09) Yeah.   Kori Covrigaru (25:09) done. we've perfected that, almost perfected that. I think one really important thing to note about us is we try to make it as simple as possible for our photographers to work with us from all the software. And it hasn't historically been that way and we're getting closer to it, but what software do they have to download and register for on our system?   Jason Hull (25:13) Almost almost perfected that. Yeah. One really important thing to note about us is we try to make it as simple as possible for our photographers to work with us from all the software and and and it hasn't historically been that way. We'll get any closer to it, but what software do they have to download and register for on our system?   Yeah. what specifics, like how are the instructions given out? What about access to to you know these doors and and I'm not talking about just one method. It's like there are so many different methods.   Kori Covrigaru (25:30) What specifics, like how are the instructions given out? What about access to these doors? And we're not talking about just one method. It's like there are so many different methods. I'm trying to key   box, so there's a key hidden. There's this, there's that. Call this number, get this code, right? So it's just a lot. I mean, we've been doing this since 2004. We've been in the SFR space since 2012, handling hundreds of shoots a day.   Jason Hull (25:41) trying to key box so there's a key hidden there's this there's that call this number get this code right so it's just a lot I mean we've been doing this since 2004 we've been in the SFR space since 2012 handling hundreds of shoots a   day for larger companies and smaller companies and so there's a lot a lot of its experience of just like okay here are all the you know here are all the edge cases this is what you do in this case and also just being available for them to pay them of course enough to make it make sense but we have   Kori Covrigaru (25:56) for larger companies and smaller companies. And so there's a lot of experience of just like, okay, here are all the edge cases. This is what you do in this case. And also just being available for them. You have to pay them, of course, enough to make it make sense, but we have to pay them enough   for the business to operate, right? So it's a very delicate, it's the hardest thing that we do is find quality photographers, educate them, onboard them, maintain them, and then keep them happy.   Jason Hull (26:11) good enough for the business to operate, right? So it's a very delicate it's a har it's the hardest thing that we do is is find quality photographers, educate them, onboard them, maintain them and keep them happy. Yeah. it's   Kori Covrigaru (26:25) It's as tough as it sounds. And it doesn't matter if it's a small market or a huge market. Huge markets with a lot of people have their own challenges. There's traffic, there's cost of living, it's higher. Small markets, you don't have all that, know, it's to find quality people   Jason Hull (26:26) it's as tough as it sounds and and it doesn't matter if it's the small market or a or a huge market, but you huge markets with a lot of people have their own challenges. There's traffic, there's cost of living to hire small markets, you know, have all that you know, hardly fine   Kori Covrigaru (26:41) in the specific industry. it's just, hire the right people to take care of our great network of planet tech.   Jason Hull (26:40) quality people in the specific industry. So it's just hire the right people our great network with planetary. Yeah.   This is some of the magic that you've spent a lot of time dealing with. And I'm sure people that have tried going and getting a photographer, tried doing it themselves, tried editing photos, like that is just so time intensive, so much work. And if you're a business owner doing this stuff, that's the dumbest trade you could ever make. You should offload that, get that off your plate because the speed of you is the speed of the business and the team.   And you should calculate your time as worth the the top line revenue of the company and what that comes out to per hour. And so you should not be doing this stuff. So now another challenge that people deal with, and I don't know if there's a way your system addresses this, but there's been a lot of challenges with scammers stealing photos from people's listings, putting up other listings elsewhere, tricking people into giving money. Is there any way we can combat that through   Kori Covrigaru (27:37) No.   Jason Hull (27:38) the photography?   Kori Covrigaru (27:39) You know, I think with general awareness around how sort of the internet works and how, and the general awareness of what AI   Jason Hull (27:40) But I think with general awareness around how sort of the internet works and how to t and and the general awareness   Kori Covrigaru (27:46) is capable of, I think people are more skeptical these days. I don't think everybody's just sending out checks and routing numbers and checking numbers. Cause we hear, I'll be honest, we hear less noise about it lately. And I think it's around the awareness. Historically, you know, we, we watermark photos. can watermark photos, however you, you know, property   Jason Hull (27:48) skeptical these days, right? Yeah. Everybody's just sending out checks and routing numbers and 'cause we hear we hear less noise about it lately and I think it's awareness. historically, you know, we we watermark photos, we can watermark photos   Kori Covrigaru (28:05) manager wants to watermark photos.   AI today, you can get rid of those watermarks in like a half a second, Free AI account. So man, it's changing rapidly right now. I don't have a recommendation that will just solve all of those problems. think that you have to be very careful. I would still watermark. You have to be careful where you put your images. There are applications out there like...   Jason Hull (28:08) Photos with AI today, you can give rid of those watermarks. Yeah. Yeah. So man, it's it's it's changing rapidly right now. I don't have a a a recommendation that will just solve all of those problems. I think that I mean you have to be very careful. I s I would still watermark, you have to be careful where you put your images. there are there are applications out there like   Kori Covrigaru (28:34) invisible watermarks that you can kind of track across.   Jason Hull (28:35) invisible watermarks and you can add it. Yeah,   I've heard about the invisible watermarks lately. Claude and some of these tools   Kori Covrigaru (28:40) Yeah.   Jason Hull (28:40) are adding invisible watermarks to stuff, to text, to images, to things that are created. So people will go, this was created by AI. Here's where it came from. I think it's a matter of educating your your potential renters. I think it's a lot a lot it's you know still   Kori Covrigaru (28:48) Yeah. I think it's a matter of educating your potential renters. think it's a lot of it's, know, Zillow has to make it,   has to educate their users, right, to make sure that people aren't just going and sending random checks out and putting it all over the listing media and all over your brochure and description. I think it's really important. If you're a renter, don't go on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. Stick to the internet listing services that are, you know, tried and true, I think.   Jason Hull (29:11) stick to the listing services that are you know tried and true.   Kori Covrigaru (29:19) I think that's the most important thing is like just watch where you put your listings, make sure it's reputable.   Jason Hull (29:20) Think that's the most important thing. It's like just watch where you put your listings, make sure it's reputable. Very cool. Love   it. So, Corey, tell us a little bit about the philosophy that you try to instill with your company, with the people that are in your business, like maybe the values that that you guys espouse. Give people a feel for what the culture is like at Planomatic. We are exceptionally client for meaning, I don't like to say no.   Kori Covrigaru (29:41) We are exceptionally client forward, meaning I don't like to say no to clients. I like to ask   more questions and I don't like giving an update without a resolution that's coming up. And I get copied on a lot. I drive my team nuts, Jason. I mean, I drive work because I'll reply to a random support ticket or response from our team. I'll just, I'll.   Jason Hull (30:00) Yeah. I'll reply to a random support ticket or or response from our team and I'll just   Kori Covrigaru (30:08) I'll reach out to that team member and I think there's a better way we could have handled this reply. And if I'm the customer, like, when are you getting back to me?   Jason Hull (30:08) I'll I'll reach out to that team member and say, hey, I think there's a better way we could have handled this reply. If I'm the if one of the customers are like, when are you getting back to me?   Kori Covrigaru (30:15) Right. And I think that's like most important again, it's, better to know, like everybody hears it from me. It's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know that something is happening. And so we have this, we have this phrase we use, we hold the client at the center of the organization, no matter what. one thing I haven't talked about recently, but I think it's really cool. And it's something that we've kind of put in place in 2020 or 2021 is we have personas.   Jason Hull (30:17) And I think that's like the most important. Again, it's it's better to know like everybody hears it from better to know that nothing to not know that something is happening. So we have this we have this phrase we use, we hold the client at the center of the organization no matter what. one thing I haven't talked about recently, but I think it's really cool and it's something that we've we kind of put in place in twenty twenty twenty or twenty twenty-one is   Kori Covrigaru (30:37) our customers, they're real names, right? So we started out with Emma. Emma is our enterprise client. Emma is typically a   Jason Hull (30:37) percent of our customers. They're real names, right? So we start out with Emma. Emma is our enterprise client. Emma is typically   Kori Covrigaru (30:46) single family rental owner operator. Emma raises money through institutional capital, whether that be publicly traded on Wall Street or private equity money or pension plans.   Jason Hull (30:47) A single family rental owner operator. Emma raises money through institutional capital, whether that be publicly traded on Wall Street or private equity money or pension plans.   Emma is usually a customer that uses his own software and integrates directly with our platform. Emma has this National Rental Home Council, Emma Emma. So   Kori Covrigaru (30:57) Emma is usually a customer that uses her own software and integrates directly with our platform. Emma has this National Rental Home Council, Emma, Emma, Emma. And then we have Paul.   Jason Hull (31:09) these are your customer, you've got customer avatars so that when you are building out your products and services.   you are have them in mind and you know these categories of clients or buyers of your services will, you know, maybe perceive it a certain way and the product's geared towards these personalities. That's exactly right. And we we   Kori Covrigaru (31:27) That's exactly right. And we, we talk about   Emma and Paul all day long. It's just natural. Like I'll, I'll be talking to. So Paul, Paul is when we got into,   Jason Hull (31:33) Tell us about Paul. Who's Paul?   Kori Covrigaru (31:37) servicing the third party property manager that manages,   Jason Hull (31:40) Well you're breaking up a little bit. Say that again.   Kori Covrigaru (31:43) when we, when we started servicing the third party property manager, you know, a smaller business that, that manages 50 to up to, you know, a thousand doors.   Jason Hull (31:45) When we when we started servicing the third party property manager, you know, a a smaller business that that manages fifty to up to you know a thousand   doors, that persona was so different, and we named that persona Paul, Paul the property manager. Okay. Paul uses folio or building arm or or rent client or rent manager, right? Paul doesn't own their properties, they have clients. Paul's typically smaller, Paul's usually regional. Paul goes to the n national rental.   Kori Covrigaru (31:55) that persona was so different and we named that persona Paul, Paul the property manager. So Paul uses Azzolio or Bildium or Rentvine or Rent Manager, right? Paul doesn't own their properties, they have clients. Paul's typically smaller, Paul's usually regional. Paul goes to National   Association of Residential Property Management conferences, NARPAM.   Jason Hull (32:15) National Association of Residential Property Management Conferences. Not that   and and so those are important to like know what each customer wants. The real value is that we've like humanized our clients. Yeah. It's no longer client or or you know ACE property management company wants this. No, it's it's Paul. It's it's it like we have these personas, we have these images of what Paul might look like and what Emma might look like. And so it really helps the team   Kori Covrigaru (32:19) And so those are important to know what each customer wants, but the real value is that we've humanized our clients. It's no longer the client or Ace property management company wants this. No, it's Paul. We have these personas, we have these images of what Paul might look like and what Emma might look like. And so it really helps the team   humanize the customer and realize that we're talking to human beings.   Jason Hull (32:44) humanize the customer and and realize that we're we're talking   to human beings. These are real people not just folks behind the screen or whatever it is. Yeah, I love it. Every every small small examples of things that we've done, one of our core values is we create genuine relationships, right? Our customers. We love we love that core value. So everything that we do, it's just like the longer you're in a business, the more you realize that communication and support, how you   Kori Covrigaru (32:48) real people, they're not just folks behind the screen or whatever it is. And so every small examples of things that we've done, one of our core values is we create genuine relationships, right? With our customers. We love that core value. So everything that we do, it's just like the longer you're in business, the more you realize that communication and support and how you, it's not how you   treat the customer when things are going well, it's how you.   Jason Hull (33:13) It's not how you treat the customer when things are   going well, it's how you treat the customer, communicate to the customer when things aren't ideal. How you get back on track. Get the client to say, you know what? That got screwed up really, but they took such good care of me so quickly and they gave me this and they got out back for property that. That's what brings customers back more and more. It's not it's not, you know I I believe. Actually that's what keeps me buying from the same, you know, vendor or from the same board is if I'm treated.   Kori Covrigaru (33:16) treat the customer and communicate to customer when things aren't ideal. How do you get back on track? You get the client to say, you know what, that got screwed up royally, but they took such good care of me so quickly and they gave me this and they got out back to the property that, that's what brings customers back more and more. It's not, it's not, you know, I believe actually that's what keeps me buying from the same, you know, vendor or from the same, or as if I'm treated   with respect and communicated with respect and that's what   Jason Hull (33:45) Yeah, I love that. I think that's a great tip for those listening to map out your ideal customer profile or your ideal client profile. Map out the avatars that you tend to serve. There's usually a small category of clients that are the ones you're really going after that you're serving. this is true in any business. And the more clear and the more you humanize them and the more you realize what their strengths, what their challenges are, what their pains, their frustrations, their concerns are.   And you map this out, the better you're going to be able to do marketing, target them, create your sales presentation, scripts, pitches, whatever you're doing to be more effective and to teach your team about them so they understand these different avatars. And so yeah, we've done the same thing at DoorGro. We have very clear avatars that we target and that we focus on. And yeah, and we gear our products towards directly towards those avatars and what their challenges are. So love that. It's a great tip to share.   and I love the the I the the focus on relationships, which I think is is paramount. So cool. Well Corey, great stuff. Really appreciate you coming on, telling us about Planomatic. How can people find Planomatic and how can they get started? the easiest way is just planomatic.com, just like it's spelled. you can   Kori Covrigaru (34:59) The easiest way is just planomatic.com, just like it's spelled. You can email me always   at k-o-r-i at planomatic.com. You can also find us in the marketplace on Atfolio's marketplace, Buildium's marketplace as well. We're all over Narpoem, so if you come to our show, come find us. We're usually in one of the bigger booths because we're preferred partners with Narpoem. So it's not too hard to find us. Go to our website, check us out, reach out to me. Always happy to hear from classic.   Jason Hull (35:13) in this marketplace as well. We're all over Narbum. So if you come to a show, come find us. we're usually in one of the bigger booths because we're for partners with Narbum. So it's not too hard to find us. Go to our website, check us out, reach out to me.   Always happy to hear from class prospects as well as existing clients. Any feedback anybody has that's another things we ask for.   Kori Covrigaru (35:27) Prospects as well as existing clients any feedback anybody has that's another things we ask for a hell of a lot of feedback often   too much But yeah easy to find and we welcome everybody   Jason Hull (35:36) But yeah, easy to find. Cool,   awesome. Tell them that you heard about them from the DoorGro Show podcast if you see this.   Kori Covrigaru (35:42) Talon, DoorGro, I've got a special coupon if you tell me you heard about us   from the DoorGro show. I'll hook it up.   Jason Hull (35:49) Cool.   Awesome. We appreciate that. So that he'll give you a special deal. All right. Very cool. Well, Corey, thanks for being here. Appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow show. For those that are enjoying this or watch our show, if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take your property management business to that next level. You've been hitting a wall. You've been frustrated for a while. You've tried different marketing channels. You feel like you're just getting sold a bill of goods sometimes. You're just you're frustrated.   Reach out to us at doorgrow.com, we can help. So for a free training on how to get unlimited free leads, text the word leads to 512-648-4608. Also join our free Facebook community just for property management business owners by going to doorgrowclub.com. You can also join that by going to getting our DoorGrow Hub app that is in the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.   And if you want tips, tricks, or ideas and to learn about our offer, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgrow.com/slash subscribe. And if you found this episode even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us out. Until next time, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone, all by yourself. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.  

Earlier this month, world model company Runway introduced GWM Worlds 2, a research preview that “turns high-fidelity video and audio generation into real-time interactive simulation.” Runway calls this an “autoregressive diffusion” model; with autoregressive describing how it generates over time.One new feature in particular caught our eye: WorldPrompt, a proposed input format for specifying a generated world and the actions within it. It allows you to fix some aspects of a simulated environment — including the first frame — and then create a series of timestamped events. The events, or actions, can even be prompted in real-time.To understand the implications of WorldPrompt, we spoke to Kamil Sindi, Runway's CTO, and Robin Kahlow, its Principal Research Scientist for generative video and multimodal AI. We also have exclusive comments from Anastasis Germanidis, co-founder & co-CEO of Runway, courtesy of a podcast swyx and Vibhu did with him.Who's building real-time interactive world models?First, some context about world models that can generate interactive video and audio in real-time.Runway is reportedly valued at $5.3 billion, based on its most recent fund raise of $315 million in February. Its first release, GWM Worlds, was launched last December.Alongside Runway, there are several other notable projects in this domain: Google DeepMind's Genie 3 (which also generates at 720p and 24 fps), Odyssey-2 Pro, and World Labs' RTFM (Real-Time Frame Model). We've summarized their differences in the following table:Given the complexity and massive latency demands of real-time video and audio generation (which we'll get into below), all of the projects listed above have limitations. For instance, Google notes that Genie 3 “can currently support a few minutes of continuous interaction, rather than extended hours.”But as our interviews with Runway show, real progress is being made.The central idea of WorldPromptWorldPrompt, a new feature in GWM Worlds 2, helps differentiate Runway from its competition. You can think of it as a control layer for characters, cameras and the environment. As Kahlow put it, it's a way to “control all the different subjects in the world” — similar to a computer game.“Like, if there's an NPC [Non-Player Character] somewhere, the NPC might walk up to you and say something. So you could achieve the same thing with this kind of model, where you can have very detailed control over everything in the scene.”As the name suggests, WorldPrompt is a prompting mechanism — not a programming language. So, unlike virtual world games like Minecraft or Roblox, GWM Worlds 2 doesn't offer scripting capabilities or the ability to control state. But there's a power to that, as Sindi pointed out.“You can create promptable worlds on-demand with video and audio in sync, across all these different domains and environments. That's not a distant-future hypothetical thing,” he said.But there are also limitations to prompting a world model. We asked how reliably the model would follow an instruction to create, for example, a law of gravity or a certain ability in a character?“Yeah, so it's a research preview,” Kahlow replied. “So it's not perfect, of course, and there are still flaws. It really depends on how difficult the action is. I would say movement works quite reliably.”Sindi added that more training plus scaling the data and models is resulting in “better following.”How a video model becomes a real-time runtimeDespite the current limitations of GWM Worlds 2 — especially if you compare it to pre-designed and scriptable worlds like Minecraft or Roblox — the true promise of world models like Runway is that they'll eventually lead to fully self-generated, real-time games and experiences. Which is an extremely hard engineering problem, as Kahlow reminded us.“There are two challenges. One is making the model not generate a whole clip at once. So instead, you want it to generate frame by frame while you're looking at it. And the other challenge is actually making the generation fast, so you can play it in real time.”GWM Worlds 2 offers real-time interactive worlds streamed in continuous 720p video at 24 frames per second (fps) and audio at 48,000 Hz.Runway achieved this firstly by taking its foundational audio-video generation model and fine-tuning it to the new WorldPrompt format, so the model can follow that. It then post-trains the model to generate autoregressively.“And after that, we work on making it real-time through distillation methods,” Kahlow added.Co-CEO Anastasis Germanidis offered more technical details in our podcast with him. He told us that the process starts from “bidirectional diffusion that basically generates an entire video at once and [makes] it autoregressive.” This allows the model to “generate one frame or a few frames at a time.”Germanidis described two possible forms of distillation in order to make it real-time: distilling a larger model into a smaller one or reducing its diffusion steps. As a general example, he said a model might go from around 50 denoising steps to four, with some quality loss but potentially comparable results.The challenges of real-time generationGermanidis admitted that there were issues with how it generates real-time interactive video.“The biggest challenge with autoregressive models is error accumulation,” he said. “You're feeding generated frames back into the model to generate the next frames, and if there are any small errors, they accumulate over time.”Sindi told us there are also challenges dealing with “infinite generations” of content.“There's all these challenges around what context to keep, what to discard that's not important. And so there's all these optimizations we have to think about, so we're not blowing up our GPU memory.”Another current limitation is long-term memory. “The model does not have perfect memory,” Kahlow said. “That's still an open research problem.”Causality and correctnessWhile performance is the primary challenge for Runway at this time, its world model also has to produce plausible consequences when a user takes different actions.Germanidis used the example of simulating football; he pointed out that online video training data contains more successful goals than failed goal attempts, so a video model might render the first more convincingly.“If I take this action versus this action, you want it to generate equally realistic outcomes,” he told us. “That's, I think, the big gap between video models and world models: that idea of counterfactual generation.”Sindi told us that evaluation gets harder the more complex interactions get.“If you have this multi-prompt, multi-character, multi-scene [environment], how do you really understand what was causal and what was not?”To try and solve that, Runway has some automated verifiable tests. But since GWM Worlds 2 is a research preview, Kahlow noted that doing tests yourself is also advisable — “trying out your model to see what doesn't work is really important.”More than gaming — there are agent use cases tooGaming is the obvious use case for what Runway is building, but there are others. Kahlow mentioned robotics — for example using a simulated environment to test how a robot works.Another, more intriguing, use case is to use it to test agents at scale.“Having thousands of simulated environments is much less challenging if you have a suitable model like GWM Worlds,” Kahlow said.But how does an agent know what's changed in the world — is there a structured state that it can read, or is it just the generated video and audio that it's consuming and understanding?“So there's no structured state here,” Kahlow replied. “It's just observing the same thing you might observe in real life, just [in this case] from cameras.”Sindi noted that GWM Worlds can also be used for “synthetic data generation for agents.”Finally, Germanidis suggested there's potential to use these world models alongside reasoning models.“You're maybe using some reasoning [for] planning of the scene, and then you're passing it into the diffusion head that's actually generating the pixels.”Anastasis Germanidis* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agermanidis/* X: https://x.com/agermanidisTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:05:17 Runway's Origins and the Bet on Generative Video00:12:23 The Stable Diffusion Story00:18:44 Gen-2, Controllability, and the Weekend Hack00:23:02 From Video Generation to World Models00:28:03 Learning From the World, Not Just Language00:35:04 Sora, Runway's Existential Crisis, and Gen-300:39:39 Why Real-Time Video Is Inevitable00:43:06 Interface World Models: Software Without Code00:50:25 The Fully Neural Operating System00:55:11 World Models for Robotics01:02:32 Robot Policies and World Action Models01:07:47 The Lucid Dream Test01:11:41 Video Agents and Omni Models01:23:12 Artists, AI, and Creative Workflows01:27:14 Physical AI and the Future of World ModelsTranscriptIntroduction: Runway, Creative AI, and the Early ThesisSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay, we're here with, Anastassios from Runway, with, me and Vibhu in the studio. Welcome.Anastasis [00:00:08]: Good to be here.Swyx [00:00:09]: Congrats on all your success and progress with Runway. You're opening offices all over the world. Did you envision this when you first started out?Anastasis [00:00:16]: Not quite. I think even when we started, we had this idea that, It was more a matter of when, not if, we were seeing the early generative models of 2016, 2017, and just extrapolating, assuming, we resolution, quality increases predictably over time. There's gonna be a point where most of content will be generated, and that was maybe the initial thesis of Runway was we will need, as a result of those generative models, rethink how creative tools are made. and as we built out the research behind, our generative models, it then became clear that they were useful far beyond that as well.Anastasis' Background: Art, Simulation, and Machine LearningSwyx [00:00:57]: And it is more obvious now with, like, the real-world stuff and the world models that we'll talk about later. I'm just kinda curious how you go from a background in, like, Zocdoc and, computer vision into Runway. Like, take us back to that early conversations with Chris and, whoever else is on your founding team.Anastasis [00:01:14]: I was always splitting through those two worlds. One was the I had my own art practice. I was making a lot of interactive art, I think for a long time. and then on the other side, I was working in startups, and I was working as a ML engineer, as a backend engineer at different companies. I've always been interested in, coding and computation, and especially interested in simulation and brought it back into my early artwork as well. And at the same time, I was interested inSwyx [00:01:43]: The personal site has a few, right?Anastasis [00:01:44]: Yeah.Swyx [00:01:45]: Is there one that we should pull up? Just in case there's something that's like. I just like to go down memory lane.Anastasis [00:01:50]: Yeah.Swyx [00:01:50]: Okay, what is this?Anastasis [00:01:51]: So this was, a project that I made, I think back in 2015, where I built this software that would give, voice instructions to people in a gallery space. So it would coordinate interactions between people. And so it will first give you an identity, like you're an, architect, you're 30 years old, and, you like sports. and then it would match you with another person, and you have this completely generated interaction. language models were not quite there at the time, and so it was it was a mix of some templates and some, like, some Markov chain-generated text, and it would just completely simulate these small talk conversations between, everyone in the gallery space. so was always very fascinated on the one hand with, generative models and, like, the early machine learning work that was being at that time. But at the same time, there was this separate thread of simulation and what it means. Like, what can we learn about humans by creating those very simple models of their interactions and their behavior?Early Generative Art: pix2pix, GANs, and Uncanny ValleyVibhu [00:02:56]: Did you generate the prompts or, the 30-year-old, whatever? Was it you generating them? How'd you, how'd youAnastasis [00:03:03]: Exactly. So the program would just generate- those, from. Yeah, a lot of it would be Mad Libs style of justVibhu [00:03:10]: YesAnastasis [00:03:10]: You have lists of different professions, lists of different,Vibhu [00:03:14]: HobbiesAnastasis [00:03:15]: Personality types, lists of different, ages, things like that. And then it would just combine those things together. And then maybe the next project we go is, Uncanny Valley, Uncanny Road, which wasSwyx [00:03:27]: GansAnastasis [00:03:27]: One of the first projects that, we built with, one of my two co-founders, Chris. This was taking, pix2pixHD, which was one of the early image-to-image models that NVIDIA released back in 2016 or 2017. and it was a model that would take a semantic map of a scene and then generate a photorealistic, let's call it, output. very early days, so it was not very high-fidelity outputs, but it w I think was the first image-generation model that could generate at 1K resolution. And it was all trained on self-driving datasets. So the semantic categories it would support were only, things you would encounter on the road. So it would be pedestrians, traffic signs,Vibhu [00:04:16]: StoplightsAnastasis [00:04:17]: Bikes, stoplights. And so that was one of our first indications that we built this and people were making all this, like, very surreal imagery of, yeah, a million plus a million pedestrians or a million traffic signs or, like, gigantic humans. And it was a indication that you could take a model that was trained on this very boring dataset, essentially, of, like, not that many interesting things happen when you're on the road, and then you can repurpose it and go very out of distribution and make something that was artistically compelling. And that was It's a summary of the thesis of Runway in some ways, that you can take the same generative models, and if you look at them from another direction, if you build interesting tools around them and you give them to artists, they're gonna do things that you don't expect.Vibhu [00:05:02]: Very cool. I like the, UX of it. You're just given an empty canvas, try whatever, do whatever. And then the other one, like, you see everyone with wired headphones? Like, that's, that's a sign that it's, it's veryAnastasis [00:05:16]: The AppleVibhu [00:05:17]: YeahAnastasis [00:05:17]: Apple, your version.Vibhu [00:05:17]: Original ads. Yeah. Take us to today. You've been doing this for seven years at Runway. How have we got to this? Like, how do we go from driving simulator data to all this? And you cover the whole stack of generative media?From Creative Tools to a Research LabAnastasis [00:05:33]: Interestingly, we're almost back in, we're, we're full circle. We're, we're now applying our models and beyond creative tools into real-world scenarios. But it was a, it was a long journey. It was very early on we realized the first version of Runway was a way to easily use the, all the open source model of the day, things like pix2pix to. and give them to artists. That was the initial idea, is those models are too difficult to use if you're not a machine learning engineer. Like, what happens when you give them to artists? Very quickly, we realized we needed to build a research org, inside of Runway, and that happened maybe on year one. And, a lot of the mandate there was. The image-generation models of the time, the video generation models of the time, or there were barely any video generations all the time, but they were not quite there where they could be productionized and brought into tools that would be part of creative workflows. so we need to push the frontier of the research. And so maybe the first four years of Runway, research was almost happening on the background until there was a moment in 2022, with latent diffusion, with, DALL-E 2, where, there was that step function change, and you guys maybe remember around the time.Swyx [00:06:49]: I started in this space because of latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion.Anastasis [00:06:54]: Yeah.Swyx [00:06:54]: Because I was like, “Wow, this is not only, like, feasible, it is doable on consumer hardware.”Anastasis [00:07:01]: Exactly, yeah.Vibhu [00:07:01]: I think the delta is also huge. Like, I learned pix2pix. Like, this was intro to ML, the TensorFlow, like, Jupyter, Google Colab notebooks were like this, and then you have a sudden step function change, with diffusion and whatnot. Any other ones since that. Like, there were clear examples of what early diffusion were to get to here. Any other changes in key technology research?Green Screen, Rotoscoping, and Early RunwayAnastasis [00:07:26]: Between, 2018 when we started and 2022?Vibhu [00:07:29]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:07:29]: So one of the early work that we did in Runway was solving segmentation, image and video segmentation. It was a very important problem because most VFX involves essentially separatingSwyx [00:07:42]: RotoscopeAnastasis [00:07:42]: Subjects. Yeah, rotoscoping. Extremely manual process. Nobody enjoys doing that. and so a lot of the early days of Runway was building this tool. It was called Green Screen, and it was for a long time the main thing that people were using Runway for. It ended up being used in, Everything Everywhere All at Once and a bunch of other high-visibility films and series. But that was essentially, Runway for a long time was a post-production tool until latent diffusion and generat- Gen-1, Gen-2, happened.Swyx [00:08:12]: Cool. let's, let's go past that moment. You've come a long way. Then you started releasing your own models. Maybe describe that journey as well.Scaling Video Models and the Bet on 1,000 A100sAnastasis [00:08:20]: Yeah, so we go to the other point, yeah, in mid-2022 when it became clear that we're doing research at a fairly small scale of compute, and it became clear that, like, scaling laws would apply to, image and video gen in the same way that we're applying to language generation. So we made a big bet, and I think at so at the time, we signed this deal to build a cluster of a thousand A100s, which at the time we were a Series B startup. That was a almost, slightly irrational decision maybe, but we really believed that if we trained a video model at a large scale, we would get, like, a great model at the end. And at the time, the goal or we set the goal around fall of 2022 of what is, what does the latent diffusion, Stable Diffusion moment look like for video? And at the time, the best model of the time was called CogVideo. it was one of the early video models. It was very 256 by 256 resolution, very not very high quality. and so we decided we're gonna build out this cluster, and we're gonna just invest in, like, in building out our own video model. it became clear as we're training Gen-1 that it was difficult to get to fully. we wanted to build text-to-video, but it became clear to us that an easier starting point would be to start from video to video. Because when you have a stronger conditioning, it's, it's an easier problem to restylize an existing video versus generate the video from scratch. And so we released Gen-1 first back in, it was January of, 2023. Yeah.Vibhu [00:10:04]: It's just a fun visual podcast, honestly. Like, if we can see February 2023, what was the state of stuff?Gen-1: Video-to-Video and Depth ConditioningAnastasis [00:10:10]: It's so interesting ‘cause at the time when you see those results, you think this is so incredible, and this is like, it's almost like image generation or video generation is solved. And then you look back a few years after, and it's like, it's It's just like you get used to the results very quickly, with those models. But at the time when we started seeing those results, it was, it felt quite incredible, and the level of, like, quality that you could get. And, so the Gen-1 was a depth-conditioned video model, so it would turn. it would take a input video, it would predict. it would it would first convert it into the depth map, and then we would generate, pixels with a latent diffusion model.Swyx [00:11:01]: Yeah, very effective.Vibhu [00:11:02]: Yeah. I didn't realize how distracting the blog post would be. Sorry.Anastasis [00:11:05]: Yeah, but, one of my favorite examples of on those, on Gen-1 was both, if you go up to mode three or mode two, there was this storyboard use case where people would makeVibhu [00:11:18]: OohAnastasis [00:11:18]: WouldVibhu [00:11:20]: You can mess around with theAnastasis [00:11:20]: Make a city out of books or out of boxes, and then they would shoot a video with their phone and then translate it into a photo-photorealistic output. There was all these ways in which those models were starting to be used for storyboarding and also for really. and then if you go to mode four, like, of taking untextured 3D scenes and then turning them into photorealistic output. So we saw a lot of use cases early on where people that were familiar, were power VFX editors would just take a blender, render, and then they would get translated in with Gen-1 or create a scene in Unity and then take a capture a video of it and then translate into, restylize it. So I still think video to video is powerful. I think we had a recent video-to-video model as well, and it's one of my favorite ways of using those models is essentially using them to use ground truth video as, like, the initial inspiration and then translate into different styles or different outputs.Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, and Open SourceSwyx [00:12:23]: But I think we're gonna go into, like, the rest of Runway and catch people up to speed today. I did wanna cover the, let's call it the Stable Diffusion controversy, or, what happened with Stability AI, whatever. I think there was a two sides of the story. I think there's part of that is a normal thing of, like, people, join and leave companies, but what is the, retrospective now that, there's been some years behind it?Anastasis [00:12:49]: Yeah, it's a very, it's a very long story to go into. I think it wouldSwyx [00:12:53]: Which I remember you wrote a really long post about.Anastasis [00:12:56]: We would probably cover the whole hour to go into it in more detail. But, essentially, there was the latent diffusion paper that came in, I think that was at the end of, 2021. And then Patrick Esser, who was one of the researchers behind, latent diffusion, and he worked at Runway at the time, he built latent diffusion in collaboration with Robin Rumbach and a few other folks back, in the in, CompVis, which was, a labSwyx [00:13:26]: Like a research group, yeah.Anastasis [00:13:27]: And, after releasing the early latent diffusion model, they, essentially they were. the goal was to keep working on versions of the model, scale it up, incorporate new data, incorporate new tasks. And Stable Diffusion was the same model, but trained on more compute, and then with a few more tricks, like a classifier-free guidance paper came at some point, I think in the early 2022. And thatSwyx [00:13:52]: Which, like, was a big prompting improvement.Anastasis [00:13:55]: Yeah.Swyx [00:13:55]:?Anastasis [00:13:56]: That improved results. it was trained on better data, so like, the esthetic subset of LAION, but it was effectively, the same underlying architecture. And there was that big training run, that, happened on Stability's cluster. Stability financed that run. And looking back at that story, I think it was the work to build and train that model was done. It was a, it was a research project. It was done as part of, like, continuation of the latent diffusion work. It then, I think it the model became very successful, and it, I think there were the. And I think as a result of its success, other companies tried to, figure out the commercialization path for it. But for us, it was very important that we try to, we make sure that we. It was meant to be an open source research project, and so the we decided that we should continue releasing versions of it, since that was the original goal of Stable Diffusion, and that led to releasing Stable Diffusion 1.5. There was maybe a day of, a bit of, miscommunication there, but ultimately that was resolved very quickly within hours. so yeah, there wasSwyx [00:15:12]: OkayAnastasis [00:15:12]: Not a niceSwyx [00:15:13]: I just wanted to. you have toAnastasis [00:15:15]: Yeah.Swyx [00:15:15]: You're one of the main players in that journey, and so it's nice to hear from the source of, like, what happened. Yeah.Anastasis [00:15:22]: Yeah. I think it's all, it's all in the past nowSwyx [00:15:26]: YeahAnastasis [00:15:26]: I would say. and, like, both companies, Stability took its own path, Runway took its own path.Swyx [00:15:32]: Yeah. There's still. James Cameron is backing the new Stability, whatever they're doing with the Hollywood studios.Anastasis [00:15:38]: Right.Swyx [00:15:38]: I don't know what they are doing. I think one thing that impresses me, and I'm happy to move on, is that back in the that time, let's say, like 2021, 2022, there was this community of people that you were involved in that was researching all this stuff, right? And, like, from everyone I talked to who was active then, it seemed like it was fairly obvious that somebody would do the hero training run that would produce Stable Diffusion. So, like, I guess the question is, like, you had the you were you had made investments. You were you had the foresight. Is it accurate to say, like, that is reflective of, like, what people were thinking at the time? Or was it still very much like, “Well, we'll use it as, like, a post-production tool or something. I don't know.”? Like, where in the sentiment were we that maybe you can think back to, like, what the community was like back then?The Early Creative AI CommunityAnastasis [00:16:28]: I reminisce and I think very fondly those early years, from like 2018 to 2022, because it was a very small community that, as you said, were very convinced that this was gonna be a big thing. And at the time, anyone who. Because it was such a small circle and, everyone who would, like, be part of that circle and, like, make projects with it would, immediately get, go viral. so likeSwyx [00:16:55]: And you didn't know who they are, right? They're just some name on a, GitHub or Hugging Face somewhere.Anastasis [00:16:59]: Exactly, yeah. So I remember one of the first big viral moments of creative AI was, there was the neural style transfer paperSwyx [00:17:09]: HuhAnastasis [00:17:09]: ThatSwyx [00:17:10]: Something dreaming?Anastasis [00:17:11]: I think it was called neural style transfer.Swyx [00:17:14]: Okay.Anastasis [00:17:14]: There was also Deep Dream, the puppy sliceSwyx [00:17:16]: YesAnastasis [00:17:16]: Which was, also really cool. but, yeah, there was this project that, Jim Kogan, who was an early advisor of Runway and one of those,Swyx [00:17:25]: Marketing guysAnastasis [00:17:26]: Big, creative AI, folks, he literally just, like, showed a video of himself taking the New York Subway and going over the Williamsburg Bridge and then stylized it with, I think in the style of Van Gogh or, like, one, painter. And that was. Like, at the time, that was, like, so cool and it went viral and it was completely revelation to people that you could do this with generative models. And that was only, it was less than. It was maybe 10 years ago. So just, like, as an indication of, like, how quickly things have gone.Vibhu [00:18:02]: It's pretty crazy. Like, even since then, you've got people at every level of the stack. You've got devs, creatives, artists, hobbyists. You've got everyone using it. And for people that tried stuff early, they'll remember how hard it was to use regular diffusion, right? Like, nowadays, you can use your favorite ChatGPT image gen or whatever, give a sentence, get a beautiful output. But diffusion was like, the whole ultra HD, 4K, high resolution. Like, prompting these things was very different. anything you learned on the tooling side, like from the offerings you guys have now, so like creatives, devs, you really took the. Research and brought it to everyone to use. anything interesting there to share?From Gen-2 to Controllable Video GenerationAnastasis [00:18:44]: We had to build the entire model serving infrastructure for video diffusion models. There was nothing else, already, like, because we had Gen-2 was the first text-to-video model, I think, out in the market. So many things that we learn over time. I think the I think the biggest one was, like, we. it was very clear early on that text-to-video was not gonna be the answer. Like, you. Like, people wanted a lot more control than that, and so we invested in, like, control building on top of those models very quickly. how do you use the camera trajectory as control? How do you use an initial input frame as control? So that was a very early learning for us. With text-to-video was, like Gen-2 was an amazing, step function improvement in the quality of video models, but it was used much more in an exploratory way because there was nothing to ground it to. There was no reference that you could bring into it. There was no. You couldn't really control the camera motion. You couldn't control the object motion. And so the first year, in 2023, was really all about what are all the interesting ways in which we can condition those models? And it was a lot of just post-training rounds on top of the base model to figure out, like, what, -- how do people wanna control them? And so there was, like, this quick succession of the we it was called Motion Brush, which was you could, like, you could draw arrows and dictate where things should move in the scene.Vibhu [00:20:09]: That's so cool.Anastasis [00:20:09]: There was camera control that was you could just describe, like, how you want the camera to move in the scene. And because we work with filmmakers from the most of the history of Runway, we immediately got this feedback and got this, decided that this was worth investing in. And so control ability became a big theme, I think, very early on as we were building, as we were building those models. Something fun that I haven't really talked about too much was just how Gen-2 came to be out of Gen-1. So it was a bit strange because we announced Gen-2 two months after Gen-1 andHow Gen-2 Came From a Weekend HackVibhu [00:20:43]: We're accelerating.Anastasis [00:20:44]: It was before Gen-1 was even generally available. But Gen-1 was a depth-to-video model, so it would take a depth map and it would convert it into RGB. and we couldn't get, text or image-to-video to work directly, and that's why we started from depth to video. but, and we had discussions of like, okay, we need to spend the next six months investing in text-to-video, maybe increasing the compute scale or the model scale, like train a larger model. And I had this weekend project idea, which was, what if I take a model that, starts from text input and converts to depth maps and then use Gen-1 to convert the depth maps Into RGB?Vibhu [00:21:29]: It would probably work.Anastasis [00:21:30]: And so Gen-2 was that.Vibhu [00:21:32]: Oh. The hackathon pipeline.Swyx [00:21:35]: The weekend hackathon pipeline.Anastasis [00:21:36]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:21:37]: But it looks good.Anastasis [00:21:38]: And it worked pretty well. there were if you, with the knowledge that it has this, like, two-stage pipeline, you can tell in some cases that the structure of the video looks a bit off because you had to generate the depth first before you go into the output video. But it worked and it allowed us to bring this to our, to users very quickly. But it's now it's interesting because, like, people are coming back to this almost two-stage approach. Like, if you look at the Reve text-to-image model that came a few months ago, it had this planner model that would generate bounding boxes before it fed that into the diffusion transformer.Swyx [00:22:19]: Yeah, Ideogram also the same day.Anastasis [00:22:22]: Yeah.Swyx [00:22:22]: I remember that was very strange that both of them came out the same day with the same exact innovation.Anastasis [00:22:26]: It's a small community, I think.Swyx [00:22:28]: I'm like, this is like, this is completely coincidental, right?Anastasis [00:22:32]: People talk. So yeah, there's, there's definitely something into this approach. And, now, like every single like, video generation model in production uses a complex prompt completion pipeline under the hood. I think that's no secret that there is. ThatSwyx [00:22:48]: Humans are terrible at prompting.Prompt Rewriting, Camera Control, and the Seed of World ModelsVibhu [00:22:51]: I think across the board.Anastasis [00:22:51]: Yes.Vibhu [00:22:52]: But yeah, I think like the original Sora one blog post even told you that what happens after your input is rewriting your prompt. It's much more descriptive about what you would want.Anastasis [00:23:02]: Exactly. I, And there was the DALL-E 3 paper beforehand that, was the first public, description of the fact that synthetic captions and really detailed captions work really well. And then Sora built on that. Yeah, so it was 2023. We were releasing all these updates to Gen-2, like the camera control, Motion Brush. And there was something very interesting about camera control because it was the first time that you felt that instead of, like, you were creating video, you were creating a short video, you were navigating inside the world. And I think camera control was maybe the seed of some of the ideas that we had around world models and really opening up that research direction. We realized, it was this era and this series of, Gen-1 and Gen-2 models really proved to ourselves, yeah, this is theSwyx [00:23:56]: Cool.Anastasis [00:23:57]: So this is not the original camera control. This was the updated camera control on top of Gen-3. But yeah, I think it made those models usable to filmmakers, I would say. The so camera control was very popular. And so we realized, there is one way of seeing those models, which is, you're just as content creation machines, and there is the other way, which is you're. As you're predicting video in order to predict video well, you need to simulate the world in an increasing and increasing capacity. And if scaling laws apply on video, just like they apply on language models, then as we scale the compute that we put into those models, then they're gonna be able to simulate physics, they're gonna be able to simulate human actions and dynamics increasingly well and predictably well. That was the thesis about around our efforts on world models, and we spin up this research group to just focus on the world models and how do we turn the video generation models that we're building into something broader and something that would be useful beyond, also content creation as well.Swyx [00:25:04]: And that was roughly when?Anastasis [00:25:06]: Yeah, so that was inSwyx [00:25:06]: OhAnastasis [00:25:07]: In late 2023.Vibhu [00:25:08]: Interesting. like, I think, a lot of people have been saying a lot of video gen model companies have all pivoted to world models these days, but like, 2023, you're posting it. oneWorld Models: From Video Generation to SimulationSwyx [00:25:21]: It's, it's debatable whether it's a pivot.Vibhu [00:25:23]: Yeah.Swyx [00:25:23]: Like, arguablyVibhu [00:25:24]: YeahSwyx [00:25:24]: That's what you always had to do anyway, right?Anastasis [00:25:26]: It's in a way an expansionVibhu [00:25:28]: YeahAnastasis [00:25:28]: Of the applicationsVibhu [00:25:29]: YeahAnastasis [00:25:29]: Of the models as they become more capable.Vibhu [00:25:31]: The early signs, it seems like the original models you guy had, guys had, people would say it's very not bitter lesson pilled, right? You're adding, rewriting prompts, you're having all these one-off things, but that's just the state of the tech as it was versus the future of as you said, you can scale it up as, we can scale up to world models.Anastasis [00:25:50]: Yeah. So it just became. And if you looked at the outputs of Gen-2Vibhu [00:25:56]: YeahAnastasis [00:25:56]: It was not. I think it was not obvious to people that this would scale to become a general simulator of the world. Like, you had very limited movement, you had, very low fidelity or low resolution, like obvious mistakes in human anatomy, like all kinds of limitations. But it was just, the idea was that's just GPT-two, and GPT-two, it can barely generate, like, coherent sentences. Similar, Gen-2 can barely create coherent video, but if you scale it up, you're gonna. There is no reason why it shouldn't work in a way. It's, And I think that was. That's, that's always the mindset of Runway is like this extrapolation of, like, if, like, even when we started in 2018 and you looked at the results of the day, you need to look more at the trend of, like, where we were in 2018 versus when we were at the, when the first GAN came out in twenty, four 2014 or twenty, fifteen. And, you started from, like, thirty-two by thirty-two images of faces, and then by the time in 2018, you could generate, street images at the 1K resolution. And it was the same with world models, very early signs of something much bigger.Swyx [00:27:08]: Yeah. I was gonna say, like, it's diffusing into focus. Like, if you look at our visible output from year to year, it looks like a diffusion process itself.Anastasis [00:27:17]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:27:17]: Especially watching the early, like, old blog posts, you can really see the choppiness, the details.Anastasis [00:27:24]: Yeah. Like human civilization starting from random noise and thenVibhu [00:27:27]: YeahAnastasis [00:27:27]: Denoising intoSwyx [00:27:28]: Yeah. Just run it a hundred years.Anastasis [00:27:30]: Civilization.Swyx [00:27:30]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:27:31]: That's how you're on track, you're still noising, right?Swyx [00:27:34]: Yeah. I like the way that you guys phrased it when you, announced it in June, which is, oh, that you had a video essay. “The human mind is no longer the center of AI. Our world is.” Right? Which is, let's, let's call it the past five years of LLM-based AI is very much like trying to emulate human preferences and human speech. But now that's, like, mostly solved. I think that's, like, some of the context of your essay, which you also wrote around the time. And now it's like the focus is on modeling the world accurately.Scaling Laws for Video and Why Predicting Pixels MattersAnastasis [00:28:03]: Exactly, yeah. So the way we see it is, there is that, initial mission statement of DeepMind, which is, solve intelligence and then use it to solve everything else. But I think it's starting from everything else, could be valuable of, like, starting from. there is just so much complexity, and detail in the world that in order to. That it's, it's hard to learn directly from just human descriptions of the world. Like, we're assuming that, like, language models learn from everything that humans have written about the world, like our own understanding as of, the twenty twenties. And there is just so much that we don't know and so much that's not captured by existing text, about both the low level dynamics of the world, like we're not describing in detail. if I tell you to describe, like, how do you tie your shoes, that's a very difficult thing to describe in words, but it's very obvious thing to demonstrate. And so I think there's been. And there's, more of X paradox, like we're constantly underestimating all the complexity that goes into very, like, things that we do subconsciously as humans, and we don't even necessarily always have the words to describe them. And so in my mind, the simulating the world and simulating, physics, simulating the dynamics of the world has always been underestimated, compared to, we place too much emphasis on the things that are easy to talk about. but there is just all this complexity and richness of the world that if we just try and train directly on that observational data instead of training on how people describe the world, we would learn something new that we wouldn't otherwise know.Swyx [00:29:54]: You think that the present architectural paradigm is fine? You don't need, like, another layer, like JEPA, like another famous, New York AI leader would say?Anastasis [00:30:05]: We're a very pragmatic research lab. If, we have evidence that an approach works better than the approach that we're taking, then we have no qualms to taking it. We just have seen no indication that video prediction itself doesn't scale. And even if you look now, not just our work, but the work of others, you're seeing in robotics some of the most promising work, starts from video prediction models, and then you adapt them to also the action models, for example. so there is very little evidence that you need something else and that your time is better spent on a novel architectural change compared to improving data and improving the, and scaling the current approach. And so, We don't have any indication that. the, there is that counterargument that I think there was a tweet by Yann LeCun a few days ago that, understanding the dynamics of the world is very different than, generating, cute videos.Swyx [00:31:05]: And your answer is no, they're the same thing.Anastasis [00:31:07]: Yeah, they're the same thing.Swyx [00:31:08]: My cat videos are the same as understanding physics.Anastasis [00:31:11]: Right, because if you wanna generate. video models can cheat and, like, they could you could give, like, successive dif shots of the scene in a way that doesn't require you to simulate difficult physics. There is like, all these different ways in which you can hide the deficiencies of the model, and it's important not to be too tricked by the performance of the current video models. It's easy to, cherry-pick examples and think that video models are further advanced than they are. So there is a lot more work that we need to do to improve those models. But in my mind, very similar to language, and, like, we've. you go from barely coherent sentences to something that, could hold a conversation with a human to something that could can operate autonomously for a day and, like, create entire code bases. And the main difference, there is some architecture improvements along the way, but the main thing is scale. And so it's the same bet for video, and we have no indications that this is saturating. Like, we have benchmarks that we use for measuring the physics of those models, and we see those predictably improve as we scale those models. So there is. If you want to Google up, Physics-IQ, is one of those benchmarks that measures how well does the model perform at solid mechanics or fluid dynamics or optics.Vibhu [00:32:32]: I'm curious if you've seen any emergence, any scaling law around this.Swyx [00:32:37]: Yeah, he's saying there is a scaling law, right?Anastasis [00:32:39]: Exactly.Vibhu [00:32:40]: Yeah,Anastasis [00:32:40]: So the way those models, those benchmarks work is you. the researchers have gone and, like, captured, a few videos that are representative of different physical phenomena, and then you can take the first frame and then pass it through an image-to-video model and then generate a rollout that shows what should happen next. So you have, a ball hanging from the ceiling, and then you use that as input, and then you the model predicts how the ball should fall on the ground. and this measures. we have an intuitive understanding of physics. I know, you can imagine what will happen next if I drop this bottle. So it's measuring that same intuitive physics understanding of those models, and we've measured that at different model scales, and we see, and compute scales, and we see that the score on physics IQ predictably improves. There's other, tricks and techniques that you can make to improve the score even further, but even scale alone helps, in the model learning better physics.Swyx [00:33:40]: My main sympathy with Yann LeCun is the, Plato's cave allegory, right? Like, you're, you're, like, learning on the output of a thing, not the internal process of a thing, and it's very noisy. And, if only you could observe the internals of a thing. It's hard to observe the internals of a human mind, but you can very much observe, or at least we have a whole branch of science and physics that we're ignoring on how to model Physics and movement and, gravity and, other interactions. and we're just, like, throwing away all of that and just saying just scale data, which is very much the lesson of unsupervised learning, but it feels wrong. that's the main idea.Anastasis [00:34:21]: I think the history of machine learning is, at large, it feels wrong.Swyx [00:34:25]: Yeah. It's a bitter lesson, right? Yeah. It's, it's, it's the simple answer to that.Vibhu [00:34:29]: I guess, how much can you scale? So, like, even on, let's say, the video generation side, like, there's one side of video understanding. Video generation, are we still gonna have tools where it's like, I wanna generate two hours, twenty hours? there's a infra way to do it in batches and stitch it together, but, like, do we just keep scaling? Do we just continue long generation consistency, all that at scale? And, like, tying it into where we're at now from we looked at Runway two to four point fiveGen-3, Sora, and Runway's Scaling InflectionAnastasis [00:34:58]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:34:58]: Like, technically, what advancements have we made to today, and then where do you see things still going?Anastasis [00:35:04]: So part of the answer is definitely scale. and that was. We learned that lesson in a big way for with Gen-3. So Gen-3 was the model we released the year after, like in 2024. That was a few months after Sora was released. so yeah, there's an interesting story of that came to be as well. Gen-3 for us was, the first time that we really needed to build. we had to learn all the lessons that the language model world learned in two in three years in the span of a few months. one of the biggest changes of Sora was using diffusion transformers instead of convnets. So a lot of the early, latent diffusion models were all, convnets for the diffusion model part. And the diffusion transformer paper came at some point in 2023, and it showed scaling laws for image, diffusion transformers. And we realized at that point that we needed to invest in infrastructure for model parallelism, for really scaling training to larger than, a few billion parameter models. And we spent maybe the, most of the fall of 2023 building out our infrastructure for distributed training. And we had a lot of false starts and a lot of failure in trying to scale, image and video diffusion transformers. And at that point, February 2024, Sora comes out, and the results areAnastasis [00:36:35]: Very much superior to what Gen-2 could produce. There were a lot of, a lot of chatter on Twitter about Runway. Runway's done. like, there is no way Runway will catch up. And if you remember, also OpenAI in the early twenty-It felt very, like it's aSwyx [00:36:56]: To the moonAnastasis [00:36:57]: It's a formidable opponent now, but at that point, it, they were on the top of their game. nobody could even get close to them. There was maybe Gemini was just the first version of Gemini had just released. So when OpenAI came with Sora and it was such a big jump of like quality, it gave me, there was like an existential crisis for a few hours. But that, I think the amazing thing about Runway and like I think the, we've been around eight years now, which is almost we're dinosaur in AI, and we had to like, we had there was a lot of those moments we had to learn, adapt very quickly and build out skill set in the team that we didn't have. And so, if you ask anyone what is their favorite time at Runway that was there during that time, it was that push in like three months to get to a model better than Sora. and it, we scaled 10x the model scale, the model size and the, compute that we were training on. we figured out model parallelism. We had zero expertise in that. And then we came out with Gen-3 during that summer. So that was a big turning point, I think, for the company where the research org grew very quickly, and we really started pursuing this vision of the general world model, in earnest, I think after Gen-3 was out.Swyx [00:38:12]: Yeah. that's the amazing thing about building when you're building. There's no stack to. You have to invent everything yourself. You have to be completely full stack. Now I think like there are inference specialists like Fal or whatever that can help with like, model serving, and I think you guys work with them as well. but yeah, like it's, it. But at the time, it was just. It's very interesting to think about what you do when Sora comes out and people are questioning whether your company should still exist.Distillation, Turbo Models, and Real-Time VideoAnastasis [00:38:41]: Yeah. And yeah, there was no, there was no VLM of diffusion models. Like, we had to build the whole model serving infrastructure and make things efficient. And a few months after we released Gen-3, we released the Turbo version, which I think was the first step-distilled model in production.Swyx [00:38:56]: That was a whole trend that we covered as well. Yeah.Anastasis [00:38:59]: So that allowed us, to serve those models at the larger scale, ‘cause I think the first version of Gen-3 was quite, expensive to serve.Swyx [00:39:09]: I think the whole like trend in like consistency models, Lightning and, Turbo and all these things somehow didn't really stick around. I don't know if you have any reflections on this. Because at the time, I was like, “Well, everything should start with a distilled model first, and then you can upscale,” right? It. your bigger models just turn into fancy upscalers, but like you should always draft with a smaller model and faster model, right? Because you can get it so quickly, like near real-time.Anastasis [00:39:39]: Yeah. I would not be so sure to say that didn't stick around. I think that, it's, it's likely to. that there is a lot of step-distilled models that are actively used in production. there is still a gap in quality compared to the, non-distilled model. but in my mind, we're still. there is a two to three year offset from language models. So the things that, So it's just a matter of time before there is better distillation techniques. we use. Right now we have a real-time model core character that I think is the largest deployment of real-time video models, that's a step-distilled model, and it's actively being used. It's a very specific use case compared to a general video model. So this is aSwyx [00:40:27]: Very cool, by the way.Anastasis [00:40:27]: This is avatars stuff, right?Swyx [00:40:28]: Consistency, character.Anastasis [00:40:30]: Yeah. So this is a talking avatar, model. we were able to. we optimized the hell out of it, and it generates at 24 FPS, and it's a, it's a step-distilled autoregressive video model. So if we look at our world model direction, a big component of it is starting from the bidirectional diffusion that generates entire video at once and making autoregressive shows. So you generate one frame or a few frames at a time. so there's a lot that goes into that pipeline of getting to a real-time model. It's first you need to make it into a causal autoregressive model, and then you just turn it into. You need to do some additional step distillation to get it to be real-time. and I think that part is just starting. I'll be very surprised if we're, two years from now, we don't primarily use real-time models. To me, real-time video generation is just inevitable that, it has much better user experience, it's much cheaper to serve, and, the quality gap between the base model and the real-time model is only gonna close as we figure out better, distillation techniques. And we made a lot of progress there internally on maintaining the quality of the base model when we distill them.Swyx [00:41:49]: How much of this is transferable? So is it the same base model? Like if you're doing diffusion across the whole sequence and you're converting it to step autoregressive distillation, is this like distillation where you still need to train both, you can use the same base and converter? What's that process like to go from regular model to something that's real-time on a technical level?Anastasis [00:42:11]: So the nice thing about diffusion models is you have, two axes of distillation. So there is the. You can distill to a smaller model, which resembles what you do in LLMs, or you can distill in terms of taking less steps, less diffusion steps. So you could take a model that generates in fifty steps and generate in four steps and get to, You have some performance, degradation, but very often you get comparable outputs. So you can even take the large frontier model and distill it with step distillation and get to a real-time performance, and that's what we've seen. So, depending on the use case, in some cases we might also serve with a smaller model, but in a lot of use cases, we just use theSwyx [00:42:56]: Step distillationAnastasis [00:42:56]: The frontier model, and we're able to make it work in real-time.Swyx [00:42:59]: I think this might be a good time to cut over to his laptop to show off some of the real-time stuff that you're doing.Interface World Models and Neural SoftwareAnastasis [00:43:06]: This is one of the research updates that we did recently. so we've been working and f in getting our general world models to, different applications. one of them that we think is very compelling is using general world models as essentially, an interface, a universal interface to software. This is a version of our world model that's called an interface world model. and the idea is that it essentially, replaces, the, front end of a software application. It renders the pixels directly of an interface and is trained to predict what happens next as a result of, a click or another interaction you have with the interface. So this is all pixels. it's there is no HTML, CSS, React that's powering this interface. This is directly at the output of our real-time, video generation model, and it takes clicks directly as input.Swyx [00:44:09]: And drags, click and drag.Anastasis [00:44:12]: Right. So it supportsSwyx [00:44:13]: Ooh.Anastasis [00:44:14]: Yeah, clicks. It supports drags. it also supports scrolling. and the amazing thing about this is that you can effectively describe in the prompt how you want different elements, like what do you want the behavior of different elements to be. So it's almost you're you can turn, an interface from, markup language description of, like, an HTML interface, and instead you can just describe the interface. if I press this button, I expect this to happen. If I press this button, this should happen. And it's useful, we believe, both for prototyping, for, like, just testing, like, what different interactions would feel like. you can also add audio to it. So it's a video audio generation model. So you get you essentially can describe both what the visual outcome should be of your click and also what the if there is a sound effect that comes out of it. So we believe that's gonna be a much more flexible way of building software. Just render. It just, in why generate the code that generates the pixels? Just generate the pixels directly.Anastasis [00:45:18]: It's the end-to-end philosophy applying applied to front ends.Anastasis [00:45:25]: So we think there is a few interesting use case. So you can build creative tools on top of it.Anastasis [00:45:32]: We think that, for any use case that involves a lot of exploration or, like, educational use case where you wanna learn about a new concept and you want some visualization and like, and open-ended exploration, we think those this is a very powerful, approach. you can imagine new forms of, design, industrial design software that could emerge as a result of those models. And this is all, generated in real-time as well. So, you can build a lot of interesting camera transitions and forms of interaction that are very difficult to build otherwise. And one way in which we evaluate this is what if you try to generate the same interface with Claude by just, prompting Claude, “Here's an image reference of my interface that I made in Figma or that I created somewhere else. create this particular interaction,” which in this case it's, drag that object, upwards. and beyond it being slower, it's also very difficult to capture some interactions by just fully, with just LLMs. So we think that this is likely to be the way that a lot of the future, like, software in the future will be created. and one of the additional benefits is personalization might be a lot easier done with those models. Like, you can essentially try out different prompts based on who is visiting the interface. You can, more easily, prompt engineer the interface to have larger size, text for more accessibility reasons, or you can make this or, like, if you have a particular aesthetic preferences. So we're very excited about this approach. It's early days, and I think we'll need to, make it more cost-effective as well to serve those models ‘cause, running a real-time video model versus just purely rendering HTML, there's -- the computational needs are much higher. but we do see a lot of potential in this approach to building front-end interfaces.Swyx [00:47:47]: So we covered this similar thing with Flipbook before with our, Ethan Hara episode with Groq, video. And yeah, I think it's very engaging visually. I think it's maybe very good for education, but it's it does sound expensive. I think there's an upper bound to how expensive it will be, though, right? Like, the inference cost will go down over time. You'll figure out ways to optimize it. Effectively, when it pauses, you don't you're not receiving human input. You don't have to generate anything, right? So.Anastasis [00:48:14]: Yeah, you could also. Like, in this case, you have ambient motion, so there is parts of the screen that might. if you're let's say you wanna, visit Paris and then you get this interface that allows you to explore.Swyx [00:48:29]: People walking. Yeah.Anastasis [00:48:29]: You have people walking or, like, things happening. But, it's, it's a no Yeah, it makes it more expensive because you need to run the model all the time. Maybe you have some looping mechanism so you don't need to do that. But all those things, I think, is stuff we'll need to figure out.Toward a Fully Neural Operating SystemSwyx [00:48:44]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:48:44]: I think our first consideration is let's make this clearly find some use cases where it's clearly a much more compelling interaction compared to traditional interfaces. And then it's a matter of time before it becomes more cost-effective to serve.Swyx [00:48:58]: Yeah. When it comes to the people walking, I think the approach that makes the most sense to me is Nick.Anastasis [00:49:04]: Nick.Swyx [00:49:04]: Oh, God. I keep messing up their name. With Chris Manning and Fanny Yan. I don't know if you've come across them, where they. Mapped to some game engine. I think it's Unity or something, or Godot. And they you can script some NPC behavior behind that and train on that. Whereas here, you can really imagine whatever you want. Like, that is a UI, right? Like, and it feels, like, more tractable, I guess, to, create a world model of software that is interactable because we have many of examples of that, and you can, do your fancy RL environment stuff on that than it is scaling up to embodied and real-world physical use cases. But this is a nice first step.Vibhu [00:49:43]: Or, there's the opposite of you have, like, one B models, three 50 million parameter language models. It just gets so small that they're just predicting, like, fishes moving.Swyx [00:49:53]: Small models are now 120 B, so.Vibhu [00:49:57]: Ultra mini on device.Vibhu [00:49:58]: But, no, I think it, like, it puts it into perspective, at least the car one for me, like, the applications, right? The amount of work to do that, sure, you only make one model year car per year, but applying this, it's also a cost-saving to have to manually make all this, right? So it opens up a lot of possibilities, too. I'm curious if you extend this out two, three years, so where do you see things going even further?Anastasis [00:50:25]: Effectively, the end game of something like interface world models is you have, a fully neural operating system. So I think, Andrej Karpathy has written about that quite a while back. But it's, You, I think to me it's, it's a bit, it's a bit odd that, we have, for example, with an interaction with an LLM of today, you have this LLM that can talk to you about anything. It can You can take the conversation in any direction. You can It's very general, so it can solve all those different tasks, but you interact with it through a very rigid interface. And so to me, it's just a matter of time before the interface itself becomes learnable and becomes, part of the whole loop of, like, you're not just delivering. You're delivering an application end-to-end, and that means you're delivering the language model, but you're also delivering the render and the pixels and that's also a learnable component. And the concept of applications might not necessarily. I think we'll need to figure out new abstractions for software. the concept of application comes from this idea that you need, separate code bases to describe, to, for, to power each individual, tool and each individual application. But you might think of something a lot more unified if you're. if you have, a video model that's generating the interface as you go. so it can take context from an LLM and allow you to combine different functionalities that traditionally would live in different applications. So it's a, it's a way to solve, software end-to-end, effectively. We also see this as a powerful way to train computer use agents as well. so this is, one way to see this as. And in general, with world models, there is those two directions. One is world models for humans and world models forSwyx [00:52:24]: AgentsAnastasis [00:52:24]: To train agents.Swyx [00:52:25]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:52:25]: And so for every new work of, world models that we do, we have this both uses become possible. So this is a powerful synthetic data generator for training computer use models. It could become, a live, RL environment that you could use to do online RL with a computer use agent, and you can get wide diversity of different interactions, kinds of interfaces, just generated on the fly that, to improve the how robust the, your agent, becomes. So that's the same also with the world models that we're working on for a robotics use case as well.Long Context, Error Accumulation, and Autoregressive VideoSwyx [00:53:02]: Is there a research breakthrough that you're Waiting for that would unlock the next set of use cases that you really wanna pursue?Anastasis [00:53:10]: Long context is a very important one, so being able to maintain consistency for long periods of time, and that depends on the use case. So for our characters model, for example, or for the interface world model, it's easier to maintain long sessions of interaction. If you go into more open-ended worlds that you navigate and you take arbitrary actions in, we, like, there is more the context at which you can and duration which you can generate becomes limited much more quickly.Swyx [00:53:40]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:53:40]: So we see more degradation and error accumulation happening. so the biggest challenge with autoregressive models is error accumulation, is you're feeding generative frames back into the model to generate the next The next frames. And if there is any small errors, they accumulate over time. That's not a new problem. It's a problem that LLMs also have, and we've seen the ability to generate now really long outputs. So it's a solved problem, but it's definitely still a challenge.Swyx [00:54:08]: Yeah. And what is the state of the art? so for Grok, it would be like 10 to 20 seconds of context going in there for video.Anastasis [00:54:16]: With our characters models, we're able to generate up to 30 minutes of video autoregressively.Swyx [00:54:21]: Yeah. But that's just for the avatars.Anastasis [00:54:24]: Yeah. So if we look at, GWM Worlds, which is more our open-ended world exploration model, it's, it's on the order of a few minutes, which is Yeah, soSwyx [00:54:35]: Probably enough for people because you have to cut to the next scene anyway, right?Anastasis [00:54:40]: Yeah, it's not, it's not the ideal game experience if you have to restart every few minutes. So I think. But, I think it's. Yeah, for certain kinds of game experiences, you can work around it.

Matt & Oren talk about how nice it would be to have a career that drives itself. One where you the money keeps coming in. And the hustle is less.You might think cruise control means not caring. But that's not what this episode is about. Matt and Oren want to share some ways to keep caring. Ways to hack your dopamine system to stay motivated, maybe even ambitious.Is that a bad thing?.You already know that “hope” is not a business plan. But how can you deal with the depression, or better put, long lulls in dopamine fixes from landing jobs and being on set?Creating output is definitely one way. And Matt and Oren have a lively chat about whether a short film can help your career as a commercial director. And how you can use a thoughtfully conceived short to your advantage when pitching jobs.You won't want to miss this episode if you've ever wondered, “Am I the only one not working right now?”Help Matt's film: https://wefunder.com/badfeelingJoin the Just Shoot it Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/JustShootItPodMatt's Endorsement: Canva.ai makes decks easier than using Photoshop, Illustrator, and Google Slides.Oren's Endorsement: Intermittent fasting is really effective for weight loss.Just Shoot It is co-hosted by comedy commercial directors Matt Enlow (mrmattenlow.com) and Oren Kaplan (directedbyoren.com). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What can you learn by stepping in front of your own camera? In Camera Shake episode 328, Kersten Luts talks with Mark Rodriguez about self-portrait photography, creative confidence and building images that tell a story.Mark shares how he develops conceptual photography ideas through word prompts and mind mapping, then brings them to life with lighting, costumes, handmade props and Photoshop compositing. We explore why matching perspective, shadows and light direction matters, how he combines different frames, and when starting again is the best creative decision.There's practical photography advice on remote triggers, interval shooting, tethered capture and working between Lightroom and Photoshop. We also discuss the value of photographing yourself, understanding the experience of your subjects, and finding a visual style that feels personal.Along the way, Mark reflects on grief, humour, criticism and the satisfaction of making something yourself. Whether you're an amateur, a working professional, exploring videography or starting a photography business, this conversation offers ideas for developing your craft and approaching portrait sessions with greater intention.Subscribe to Camera Shake for more conversations about photography, filmmaking and creative life, and explore our other photographer interviews for your next dose of inspiration.#photography #portraitphotography #MarkRodriguez #CameraShakePodcast******************************************************************Get Your CAMERA SHAKE MERCH: https://www.kerstenluts.com/camerashake-merch******************************************************************SUPPORT THE PODCAST: www.buymeacoffee.com/camerashake******************************************************************JOIN THE CAMERA SHAKE COMMUNITY for the latest news and some behind the scenes insights: www.camerashakepodcast.com ******************************************************************Check out our sponsor: www.platypod.com******************************************************************THIS WEEK'S LINKS:CONNECT WITH MARK RODRIGUEZCONNECT WITH MARK RODRIGUEZ (GODRIGUEZ)Website: https://www.godriguez.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/godriguezart/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Godriguezart TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@godriguezart Threads: https://www.threads.com/@godriguezart Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/godriguezart.bsky.social YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRodriguez X (Twitter): https://x.com/GodriguezartJOIN THE CAMERA SHAKE COMMUNITY for the latest news and some behind the scenes insights: www.camerashakepodcast.com ======================================CAMERA SHAKE PODCAST ON YOUTUBE:https://www.youtube.com/camerashakeFULL EPISODE 328 ‘Why Self-Portraits Make You a Better Photographer with MARK RODRIGUEZ' IS ALSO AVAILABLE ON: YouTube - https://youtu.be/Hcm3uwnXwygApple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2Y2Lmfm Spotify - https://spoti.fi/304sm2G ======================================FOLLOW US ONInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/camerashakepodcast/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/camerashakepodcastX: https://twitter.com/ShakeCameraKersten's website: www.kerstenluts.comKersten on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerstenluts/https://www.instagram.com/threeheadsinarow/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Did the Tudors really invent medieval fake news, or did the Yorkists get there first? When we think of historical spin, Tudor propaganda usually takes centre stage. But host Paul Bavill sits down live at the Gloucester History Festival with acclaimed medieval historian and author Nathen Amin (House of Beaufort, Son of Prophecy) to completely shatter this dynastic myth. In this fiery live session, Nathen exposes how Henry VII was simply a student of the game, adopting the very political playbook created by the House of York. From medieval Photoshop on parchment rolls and character assassination against Margaret of Anjou to the destruction of parliamentary records, discover how the Yorkists pioneered every trick in the book long before the Tudors ever claimed the throne. Digital Passes & Festival InformationNathen Amin appeared as part of the Gloucester History Festival. Digital passes to catch up on other talks from the festival can be purchased online at https://www.gloucesterhistoryfestival.co.uk. Recommended History Rage EpisodesIf you enjoyed this deep dive into medieval politics, check out these related episodes:Episode 79: Richard III Fanatics with Nathen Amin – Nathen's famous first appearance unleashing his rage on Ricardian myths. Episode 137: Nathen rages that Henry VII should not be the Tudor nobody talks about Guest Info & BooksFollow Nathen Amin and order his books:Website / Books: Find Son of Prophecy, and more at https://uk.bookshop.org/a/10120/9781398133525X (Twitter): https://x.com/nathenaminFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nathenaminauthorConnect, Follow & Support History RageAngry about bad history? Join the movement, follow us, and help keep the rage alive!Support on Patreon: Get early access, exclusive extras, and the coveted History Rage mug at https://www.patreon.com/historyrageListen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast providers. Follow on X (Twitter): https://x.com/HistoryRageFollow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/historyrageVisit the Website: https://www.historyrage.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mentioned in this episodePeopleHelmut Newton — fashion photographer Geoff cites as having briefly worked in the Singapore press before his career took off · WikipediaSteve Jobs — referenced as an example of the "human factor" books Geoff reads about how people become exceptional · WikipediaBooks and readingInside the Mind of a Photographer by Geoff Ang — his book distilling 20 years of workshop material into a guide to the psychological and business side of commercial photography · insidethemindofaphotographer.comTools and productsPhase One digital backs — the medium format system Geoff bought into in the late '90s and still shoots today · phaseone.comSinar 4x5 cameras — the large-format studio camera system he used for high-resolution transparencies · WikipediaDicomed — the dedicated digital retouching system used before Photoshop matured · WikipediaLeica SL3 — his current mirrorless body; Geoff has been a Leica ambassador since the first SL · leica-camera.comFujifilm GFX — his second current system, chosen for faster autofocus at high resolution than his Phase One · fujifilm-x.comApple Vision Pro — discussed as a new, if "selfish," way of viewing photography · apple.comSony Alpha 7R VI — mentioned by Iain as a recent loaner, notable for combining high resolution with strong video specs · Sony product pageGodox — budget lighting-stand brand Geoff cites as part of the barrier-to-entry drop after 2010 · godox.comCompanies and institutionsGeoffStudio — Geoff Ang's studio and portfolio site · geoffang.comProfoto — lighting brand Geoff has been a longtime workshop ambassador for · profoto.comLeica Gallery Singapore — hosted his recent exhibition to launch his book · leica-camera.comPlaces and eventsSingapore — Geoff's home base for his entire career · WikipediaBali — where Geoff lived semi-retired during COVID and wrote much of his book · WikipediaSupport the show on Patreon.More about this show:A camera is just a tool but spend enough time with photographers and you'll see them go misty eyed when they talk about their first camera or a small fast prime that they had in their youth. Prime Lenses is a series of interviews with photographers talking about their photography by way of three lenses that mean a lot to them. These can be interchangeable, attached to a camera, integrated into a gadget, I'm interested in the sometimes complex relationship we have with the tools we choose, why they can mean so much and how they make us feel.

¿Alguna vez has hecho una foto en estudio donde la modelo y el fondo negro se convierten en una sola mancha sin volumen? . En este episodio nos adentramos en la técnica pura de iluminación de retrato para resolver los problemas más frustrantes del fondo oscuro .En este episodio conversamos sobre:El trabajo previo con la modelo: Cómo armar un moodboard efectivo con referencias de vestuario, pose y actitud para que la sesión fluya de forma profesional .El dilema de la luz parásita: Por qué la tela negra se vuelve gris y cómo el uso de paneles de abeja (honeycomb grids) soluciona la dirección de la luz .Paso a paso del esquema de 5 luces: El uso de strip boxes de recorte , la dureza y contraste del beauty dish plateado , la refracción en flex y el relleno frontal a 45° para aportar volumen .Simulación de iluminación 3D: La ventaja de probar tus esquemas digitalmente antes de gastar recursos, tiempo de estudio o batería de los flashes .Flujo de post-producción: Toques esenciales de revelado en Lightroom y ajuste de colorimetría en Photoshop .

Matthew Toffolo interviewed Bruce and Robert, the filmmaking team behind "They Came in Peace." They discussed their collaboration on their fourth animated film together. The directors explained how they reunited after a 40-year separation in junior high school and began working together on animation projects, with Bruce handling music composition and Robert managing the visual animation using Photoshop. They discussed the evolution of their latest film from a 3-minute black-and-white short to a 12-minute color animation with full orchestra music, taking three years to complete. The film serves as an allegory about human narcissism and environmental responsibility, telling the story of Earthling astronauts who invade an alien planet and must eventually help clean up the damage they caused. The filmmakers also shared their plans for future projects, including creating visuals for Bruce's "City of the Future" music piece and potentially working on more abstract animation projects. —- Subscribe to the podcast: https://twitter.com/wildsoundpod https://www.instagram.com/wildsoundpod https://www.facebook.com/wildsoundpod —— Love for you to try the Indy Film Festival AP. • Daily new film festival of the best new films from around the world. New archived festival to watch anytime. • Library of over 500+ award-winning films to watch anytime. Go to https://www.wildsound.ca and sign up for the free 3-day trial. Check out the daily film festival (and previous ones from last month) at https://www.wildsound.ca/browse Always an amazing lineup of films. Inspiring for storytellers.

Ask Me Anything and takeaways of the day featuring Andy, Randy, Beau, and Abe.

Michael Sorg and Katie Dudas are joined by Sam Eitzen, CEO of Snapbar, for a deep dive into how artificial intelligence is changing experiential marketing, trade shows, conferences, brand activations, and the humble photo booth. Sam explains how Snapbar evolved from physically hauling hundreds of photo booths to events into building a web-based platform that lets brands create interactive experiences accessible from an iPad, touchscreen, QR code, or an attendee's own phone. What started as a necessary pandemic pivot has developed into AI photo experiences, highly personalized AI Stories, and new ways for brands to combine entertainment with lead generation. The conversation also gets beyond the AI hype. Sam discusses the unpredictability of image models, why prompt engineering still requires humans, how Snapbar tests and switches between different AI models, and why brands need to understand that generative AI is not simply automated Photoshop. Snapbar's system remains cloud-based, meaning connectivity and third-party model reliability are still real considerations for live events. Topics and products discussed: What experiential marketing actually means: Sam distinguishes traditional broadcast and digital advertising from interactive marketing designed to bring the audience into the experience through participation. Snapbar's origin story: The company began as a side-gig photo booth business before moving from weddings into conferences, trade shows, sporting events, product launches, festivals, and other B2B activations. The pandemic pivot: When physical events disappeared in 2020, a client asked whether Snapbar could bring its photo experiences online. That request became the foundation of the company's current web-based platform. World Cup fan activations: Sam describes branded soccer experiences that let attendees transform themselves into stylized or animated fans and players without improperly copying team intellectual property. QR codes instead of long lines: Experiences can run on event iPads while also letting thousands of attendees participate from their own phones by scanning a QR code. Understanding the audience: A soccer activation that works at the World Cup may flop at a legal conference. Sam says cybersecurity audiences, for example, often respond particularly well to gaming, fantasy, and trading-card concepts. Digital experiences as event swag: The group discusses whether personalized digital content can become an alternative to another pile of branded pens, bottles, and promotional giveaways. Snapbar's planned digital spinner wheel: Sam explains a digital version of the familiar trade-show prize wheel with customizable branding, prize probabilities, inventory management, QR control, redemption codes, and lead capture. The rise of the AI photo booth: Early image generation was unreliable, producing extra arms, heads, and other artifacts. As models improved, AI photo experiences became one of Snapbar's biggest products. AI Stories: Snapbar adds Mad Libs-like personalization to AI-generated experiences, allowing attendees to influence the resulting scene while brands maintain controls over the experience. Taking event tech into unusual environments: Sam recalls activations at music festivals, on boats, and experiences that attendees could even access while traveling because everything is web-based. Working across AI providers: Rather than building its own image models, Snapbar evaluates available third-party systems and can shift between models depending on prompt adherence, realism, animation style, and client needs. Why testing matters: AI models can regress or behave differently after updates. Snapbar's team tests experiences ahead of events, attempts to break them, adjusts prompts, and can intervene while an activation is live. Treat AI like a new team member: Sam suggests thinking of AI less like an infallible machine and more like a new employee that needs context, supervision, defined permissions, and an understanding of what it does well. AI is not automated Photoshop: Clients sometimes expect pixel-perfect control, but generative systems still involve prompting, probabilities, and outputs that cannot always be completely dictated. Why AI may not magically fix event networking: Sam pushes back on the idea that feeding hobbies and job titles into an AI matchmaking system automatically creates meaningful human connections. Event attendees ultimately want genuine personal and professional connection. The danger of easy AI startups: AI makes prototypes and products dramatically easier to build, but that also means competitors can build similar products just as quickly. Distribution becomes the advantage: Sam argues that customer relationships, audience access, SEO/AEO, reputation, and reaching the right buyers become even more important when everyone has access to powerful AI tools. Learn more about Snapbar at https://snapbar.com, which Sam specifically shares at the end of the interview.

Michael Sorg and Katie Dudas are joined by Sam Eitzen, CEO of Snapbar, for a deep dive into how artificial intelligence is changing experiential marketing, trade shows, conferences, brand activations, and the humble photo booth. Sam explains how Snapbar evolved from physically hauling hundreds of photo booths to events into building a web-based platform that lets brands create interactive experiences accessible from an iPad, touchscreen, QR code, or an attendee's own phone. What started as a necessary pandemic pivot has developed into AI photo experiences, highly personalized AI Stories, and new ways for brands to combine entertainment with lead generation. The conversation also gets beyond the AI hype. Sam discusses the unpredictability of image models, why prompt engineering still requires humans, how Snapbar tests and switches between different AI models, and why brands need to understand that generative AI is not simply automated Photoshop. Snapbar's system remains cloud-based, meaning connectivity and third-party model reliability are still real considerations for live events. Topics and products discussed: What experiential marketing actually means: Sam distinguishes traditional broadcast and digital advertising from interactive marketing designed to bring the audience into the experience through participation. Snapbar's origin story: The company began as a side-gig photo booth business before moving from weddings into conferences, trade shows, sporting events, product launches, festivals, and other B2B activations. The pandemic pivot: When physical events disappeared in 2020, a client asked whether Snapbar could bring its photo experiences online. That request became the foundation of the company's current web-based platform. World Cup fan activations: Sam describes branded soccer experiences that let attendees transform themselves into stylized or animated fans and players without improperly copying team intellectual property. QR codes instead of long lines: Experiences can run on event iPads while also letting thousands of attendees participate from their own phones by scanning a QR code. Understanding the audience: A soccer activation that works at the World Cup may flop at a legal conference. Sam says cybersecurity audiences, for example, often respond particularly well to gaming, fantasy, and trading-card concepts. Digital experiences as event swag: The group discusses whether personalized digital content can become an alternative to another pile of branded pens, bottles, and promotional giveaways. Snapbar's planned digital spinner wheel: Sam explains a digital version of the familiar trade-show prize wheel with customizable branding, prize probabilities, inventory management, QR control, redemption codes, and lead capture. The rise of the AI photo booth: Early image generation was unreliable, producing extra arms, heads, and other artifacts. As models improved, AI photo experiences became one of Snapbar's biggest products. AI Stories: Snapbar adds Mad Libs-like personalization to AI-generated experiences, allowing attendees to influence the resulting scene while brands maintain controls over the experience. Taking event tech into unusual environments: Sam recalls activations at music festivals, on boats, and experiences that attendees could even access while traveling because everything is web-based. Working across AI providers: Rather than building its own image models, Snapbar evaluates available third-party systems and can shift between models depending on prompt adherence, realism, animation style, and client needs. Why testing matters: AI models can regress or behave differently after updates. Snapbar's team tests experiences ahead of events, attempts to break them, adjusts prompts, and can intervene while an activation is live. Treat AI like a new team member: Sam suggests thinking of AI less like an infallible machine and more like a new employee that needs context, supervision, defined permissions, and an understanding of what it does well. AI is not automated Photoshop: Clients sometimes expect pixel-perfect control, but generative systems still involve prompting, probabilities, and outputs that cannot always be completely dictated. Why AI may not magically fix event networking: Sam pushes back on the idea that feeding hobbies and job titles into an AI matchmaking system automatically creates meaningful human connections. Event attendees ultimately want genuine personal and professional connection. The danger of easy AI startups: AI makes prototypes and products dramatically easier to build, but that also means competitors can build similar products just as quickly. Distribution becomes the advantage: Sam argues that customer relationships, audience access, SEO/AEO, reputation, and reaching the right buyers become even more important when everyone has access to powerful AI tools. Learn more about Snapbar at https://snapbar.com, which Sam specifically shares at the end of the interview.

Microsoft's record-breaking Patch Tuesday unleashed nearly a thousand fixes, but the bonus story is in the chaos that followed as out-of-band updates and AI-driven bug hunts left admins scrambling to keep up. Windows Patch Tuesday was so buggy Microsoft had to release an emergency fix to address all the issues New Release Preview builds for 24H2/25H2 - I guess we're moving past the features that are also in the initial 26H2 release - New Copilot key remapping feature, they will get it right eventually Five builds across Experimental and Beta channels - All over the map as you'd expect Google releases the Gemini app for Windows Adobe released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027 AnyType is a top-tier Notion alternative and it's about to get very interesting Microsoft previews an October Windows + Surface event that's clearly all about Nvidia - but is this also tied to 26H2 release? HP announces a new Ryzen-based portable workstation with an interesting detail about unified memory Apple announced iPhone 18 Pros, iPhone Duo, Watch 12 + Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and then released its '27 OS updates - And sure whatever AI AI fear-mongering reaches new heights (or new lows): Is this just PR from Big AI to keep the money rolling? Bill Gates says Gates Foundation will donate $1+ billion to solve AI inequality Big AI could solve the PR problems by actually doing something positive for mankind. Just a thought Copilot Work and Copilot Studio get app building capabilities Google will bring MCP to Google Home, in early preview now Mozilla and Mistral partner on Firefox Smart Window AI XBOX and gaming Gears of War: E-Day and more is coming to Game Pass in the second half of September XBOX is going to the Tokyo Game Show and a nice surprise for Kojima fans Valve opens up Steam Frame preorders and it's only $1060! Amazon Prime Gaming and Luna are having a pretty g26ood September Apple is reportedly making an iPhone game controller for some reason Tips and picks Tip of the week: There's a new MSA bypass for Windows 11 Setup App pick of the week: Google Dreambeans RunAs Radio this week: Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradley Brown liquor pick of the week: Art of the Spirits Honored to Serve Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: trustedtech.team/twit

Microsoft's record-breaking Patch Tuesday unleashed nearly a thousand fixes, but the bonus story is in the chaos that followed as out-of-band updates and AI-driven bug hunts left admins scrambling to keep up. Windows Patch Tuesday was so buggy Microsoft had to release an emergency fix to address all the issues New Release Preview builds for 24H2/25H2 - I guess we're moving past the features that are also in the initial 26H2 release - New Copilot key remapping feature, they will get it right eventually Five builds across Experimental and Beta channels - All over the map as you'd expect Google releases the Gemini app for Windows Adobe released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027 AnyType is a top-tier Notion alternative and it's about to get very interesting Microsoft previews an October Windows + Surface event that's clearly all about Nvidia - but is this also tied to 26H2 release? HP announces a new Ryzen-based portable workstation with an interesting detail about unified memory Apple announced iPhone 18 Pros, iPhone Duo, Watch 12 + Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and then released its '27 OS updates - And sure whatever AI AI fear-mongering reaches new heights (or new lows): Is this just PR from Big AI to keep the money rolling? Bill Gates says Gates Foundation will donate $1+ billion to solve AI inequality Big AI could solve the PR problems by actually doing something positive for mankind. Just a thought Copilot Work and Copilot Studio get app building capabilities Google will bring MCP to Google Home, in early preview now Mozilla and Mistral partner on Firefox Smart Window AI XBOX and gaming Gears of War: E-Day and more is coming to Game Pass in the second half of September XBOX is going to the Tokyo Game Show and a nice surprise for Kojima fans Valve opens up Steam Frame preorders and it's only $1060! Amazon Prime Gaming and Luna are having a pretty g26ood September Apple is reportedly making an iPhone game controller for some reason Tips and picks Tip of the week: There's a new MSA bypass for Windows 11 Setup App pick of the week: Google Dreambeans RunAs Radio this week: Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradley Brown liquor pick of the week: Art of the Spirits Honored to Serve Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: trustedtech.team/twit

Microsoft's record-breaking Patch Tuesday unleashed nearly a thousand fixes, but the bonus story is in the chaos that followed as out-of-band updates and AI-driven bug hunts left admins scrambling to keep up. Windows Patch Tuesday was so buggy Microsoft had to release an emergency fix to address all the issues New Release Preview builds for 24H2/25H2 - I guess we're moving past the features that are also in the initial 26H2 release - New Copilot key remapping feature, they will get it right eventually Five builds across Experimental and Beta channels - All over the map as you'd expect Google releases the Gemini app for Windows Adobe released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027 AnyType is a top-tier Notion alternative and it's about to get very interesting Microsoft previews an October Windows + Surface event that's clearly all about Nvidia - but is this also tied to 26H2 release? HP announces a new Ryzen-based portable workstation with an interesting detail about unified memory Apple announced iPhone 18 Pros, iPhone Duo, Watch 12 + Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and then released its '27 OS updates - And sure whatever AI AI fear-mongering reaches new heights (or new lows): Is this just PR from Big AI to keep the money rolling? Bill Gates says Gates Foundation will donate $1+ billion to solve AI inequality Big AI could solve the PR problems by actually doing something positive for mankind. Just a thought Copilot Work and Copilot Studio get app building capabilities Google will bring MCP to Google Home, in early preview now Mozilla and Mistral partner on Firefox Smart Window AI XBOX and gaming Gears of War: E-Day and more is coming to Game Pass in the second half of September XBOX is going to the Tokyo Game Show and a nice surprise for Kojima fans Valve opens up Steam Frame preorders and it's only $1060! Amazon Prime Gaming and Luna are having a pretty g26ood September Apple is reportedly making an iPhone game controller for some reason Tips and picks Tip of the week: There's a new MSA bypass for Windows 11 Setup App pick of the week: Google Dreambeans RunAs Radio this week: Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradley Brown liquor pick of the week: Art of the Spirits Honored to Serve Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: trustedtech.team/twit

Microsoft's record-breaking Patch Tuesday unleashed nearly a thousand fixes, but the bonus story is in the chaos that followed as out-of-band updates and AI-driven bug hunts left admins scrambling to keep up. Windows Patch Tuesday was so buggy Microsoft had to release an emergency fix to address all the issues New Release Preview builds for 24H2/25H2 - I guess we're moving past the features that are also in the initial 26H2 release - New Copilot key remapping feature, they will get it right eventually Five builds across Experimental and Beta channels - All over the map as you'd expect Google releases the Gemini app for Windows Adobe released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027 AnyType is a top-tier Notion alternative and it's about to get very interesting Microsoft previews an October Windows + Surface event that's clearly all about Nvidia - but is this also tied to 26H2 release? HP announces a new Ryzen-based portable workstation with an interesting detail about unified memory Apple announced iPhone 18 Pros, iPhone Duo, Watch 12 + Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and then released its '27 OS updates - And sure whatever AI AI fear-mongering reaches new heights (or new lows): Is this just PR from Big AI to keep the money rolling? Bill Gates says Gates Foundation will donate $1+ billion to solve AI inequality Big AI could solve the PR problems by actually doing something positive for mankind. Just a thought Copilot Work and Copilot Studio get app building capabilities Google will bring MCP to Google Home, in early preview now Mozilla and Mistral partner on Firefox Smart Window AI XBOX and gaming Gears of War: E-Day and more is coming to Game Pass in the second half of September XBOX is going to the Tokyo Game Show and a nice surprise for Kojima fans Valve opens up Steam Frame preorders and it's only $1060! Amazon Prime Gaming and Luna are having a pretty g26ood September Apple is reportedly making an iPhone game controller for some reason Tips and picks Tip of the week: There's a new MSA bypass for Windows 11 Setup App pick of the week: Google Dreambeans RunAs Radio this week: Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradley Brown liquor pick of the week: Art of the Spirits Honored to Serve Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: trustedtech.team/twit

Microsoft's record-breaking Patch Tuesday unleashed nearly a thousand fixes, but the bonus story is in the chaos that followed as out-of-band updates and AI-driven bug hunts left admins scrambling to keep up. Windows Patch Tuesday was so buggy Microsoft had to release an emergency fix to address all the issues New Release Preview builds for 24H2/25H2 - I guess we're moving past the features that are also in the initial 26H2 release - New Copilot key remapping feature, they will get it right eventually Five builds across Experimental and Beta channels - All over the map as you'd expect Google releases the Gemini app for Windows Adobe released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027 AnyType is a top-tier Notion alternative and it's about to get very interesting Microsoft previews an October Windows + Surface event that's clearly all about Nvidia - but is this also tied to 26H2 release? HP announces a new Ryzen-based portable workstation with an interesting detail about unified memory Apple announced iPhone 18 Pros, iPhone Duo, Watch 12 + Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and then released its '27 OS updates - And sure whatever AI AI fear-mongering reaches new heights (or new lows): Is this just PR from Big AI to keep the money rolling? Bill Gates says Gates Foundation will donate $1+ billion to solve AI inequality Big AI could solve the PR problems by actually doing something positive for mankind. Just a thought Copilot Work and Copilot Studio get app building capabilities Google will bring MCP to Google Home, in early preview now Mozilla and Mistral partner on Firefox Smart Window AI XBOX and gaming Gears of War: E-Day and more is coming to Game Pass in the second half of September XBOX is going to the Tokyo Game Show and a nice surprise for Kojima fans Valve opens up Steam Frame preorders and it's only $1060! Amazon Prime Gaming and Luna are having a pretty g26ood September Apple is reportedly making an iPhone game controller for some reason Tips and picks Tip of the week: There's a new MSA bypass for Windows 11 Setup App pick of the week: Google Dreambeans RunAs Radio this week: Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradley Brown liquor pick of the week: Art of the Spirits Honored to Serve Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: trustedtech.team/twit

Microsoft's record-breaking Patch Tuesday unleashed nearly a thousand fixes, but the bonus story is in the chaos that followed as out-of-band updates and AI-driven bug hunts left admins scrambling to keep up. Windows Patch Tuesday was so buggy Microsoft had to release an emergency fix to address all the issues New Release Preview builds for 24H2/25H2 - I guess we're moving past the features that are also in the initial 26H2 release - New Copilot key remapping feature, they will get it right eventually Five builds across Experimental and Beta channels - All over the map as you'd expect Google releases the Gemini app for Windows Adobe released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027 AnyType is a top-tier Notion alternative and it's about to get very interesting Microsoft previews an October Windows + Surface event that's clearly all about Nvidia - but is this also tied to 26H2 release? HP announces a new Ryzen-based portable workstation with an interesting detail about unified memory Apple announced iPhone 18 Pros, iPhone Duo, Watch 12 + Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and then released its '27 OS updates - And sure whatever AI AI fear-mongering reaches new heights (or new lows): Is this just PR from Big AI to keep the money rolling? Bill Gates says Gates Foundation will donate $1+ billion to solve AI inequality Big AI could solve the PR problems by actually doing something positive for mankind. Just a thought Copilot Work and Copilot Studio get app building capabilities Google will bring MCP to Google Home, in early preview now Mozilla and Mistral partner on Firefox Smart Window AI XBOX and gaming Gears of War: E-Day and more is coming to Game Pass in the second half of September XBOX is going to the Tokyo Game Show and a nice surprise for Kojima fans Valve opens up Steam Frame preorders and it's only $1060! Amazon Prime Gaming and Luna are having a pretty g26ood September Apple is reportedly making an iPhone game controller for some reason Tips and picks Tip of the week: There's a new MSA bypass for Windows 11 Setup App pick of the week: Google Dreambeans RunAs Radio this week: Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradley Brown liquor pick of the week: Art of the Spirits Honored to Serve Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: trustedtech.team/twit

Microsoft's record-breaking Patch Tuesday unleashed nearly a thousand fixes, but the bonus story is in the chaos that followed as out-of-band updates and AI-driven bug hunts left admins scrambling to keep up. Windows Patch Tuesday was so buggy Microsoft had to release an emergency fix to address all the issues New Release Preview builds for 24H2/25H2 - I guess we're moving past the features that are also in the initial 26H2 release - New Copilot key remapping feature, they will get it right eventually Five builds across Experimental and Beta channels - All over the map as you'd expect Google releases the Gemini app for Windows Adobe released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027 AnyType is a top-tier Notion alternative and it's about to get very interesting Microsoft previews an October Windows + Surface event that's clearly all about Nvidia - but is this also tied to 26H2 release? HP announces a new Ryzen-based portable workstation with an interesting detail about unified memory Apple announced iPhone 18 Pros, iPhone Duo, Watch 12 + Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and then released its '27 OS updates - And sure whatever AI AI fear-mongering reaches new heights (or new lows): Is this just PR from Big AI to keep the money rolling? Bill Gates says Gates Foundation will donate $1+ billion to solve AI inequality Big AI could solve the PR problems by actually doing something positive for mankind. Just a thought Copilot Work and Copilot Studio get app building capabilities Google will bring MCP to Google Home, in early preview now Mozilla and Mistral partner on Firefox Smart Window AI XBOX and gaming Gears of War: E-Day and more is coming to Game Pass in the second half of September XBOX is going to the Tokyo Game Show and a nice surprise for Kojima fans Valve opens up Steam Frame preorders and it's only $1060! Amazon Prime Gaming and Luna are having a pretty g26ood September Apple is reportedly making an iPhone game controller for some reason Tips and picks Tip of the week: There's a new MSA bypass for Windows 11 Setup App pick of the week: Google Dreambeans RunAs Radio this week: Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradley Brown liquor pick of the week: Art of the Spirits Honored to Serve Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: trustedtech.team/twit

Microsoft's record-breaking Patch Tuesday unleashed nearly a thousand fixes, but the bonus story is in the chaos that followed as out-of-band updates and AI-driven bug hunts left admins scrambling to keep up. Windows Patch Tuesday was so buggy Microsoft had to release an emergency fix to address all the issues New Release Preview builds for 24H2/25H2 - I guess we're moving past the features that are also in the initial 26H2 release - New Copilot key remapping feature, they will get it right eventually Five builds across Experimental and Beta channels - All over the map as you'd expect Google releases the Gemini app for Windows Adobe released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027 AnyType is a top-tier Notion alternative and it's about to get very interesting Microsoft previews an October Windows + Surface event that's clearly all about Nvidia - but is this also tied to 26H2 release? HP announces a new Ryzen-based portable workstation with an interesting detail about unified memory Apple announced iPhone 18 Pros, iPhone Duo, Watch 12 + Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and then released its '27 OS updates - And sure whatever AI AI fear-mongering reaches new heights (or new lows): Is this just PR from Big AI to keep the money rolling? Bill Gates says Gates Foundation will donate $1+ billion to solve AI inequality Big AI could solve the PR problems by actually doing something positive for mankind. Just a thought Copilot Work and Copilot Studio get app building capabilities Google will bring MCP to Google Home, in early preview now Mozilla and Mistral partner on Firefox Smart Window AI XBOX and gaming Gears of War: E-Day and more is coming to Game Pass in the second half of September XBOX is going to the Tokyo Game Show and a nice surprise for Kojima fans Valve opens up Steam Frame preorders and it's only $1060! Amazon Prime Gaming and Luna are having a pretty g26ood September Apple is reportedly making an iPhone game controller for some reason Tips and picks Tip of the week: There's a new MSA bypass for Windows 11 Setup App pick of the week: Google Dreambeans RunAs Radio this week: Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradley Brown liquor pick of the week: Art of the Spirits Honored to Serve Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: trustedtech.team/twit

Microsoft's record-breaking Patch Tuesday unleashed nearly a thousand fixes, but the bonus story is in the chaos that followed as out-of-band updates and AI-driven bug hunts left admins scrambling to keep up. Windows Patch Tuesday was so buggy Microsoft had to release an emergency fix to address all the issues New Release Preview builds for 24H2/25H2 - I guess we're moving past the features that are also in the initial 26H2 release - New Copilot key remapping feature, they will get it right eventually Five builds across Experimental and Beta channels - All over the map as you'd expect Google releases the Gemini app for Windows Adobe released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027 AnyType is a top-tier Notion alternative and it's about to get very interesting Microsoft previews an October Windows + Surface event that's clearly all about Nvidia - but is this also tied to 26H2 release? HP announces a new Ryzen-based portable workstation with an interesting detail about unified memory Apple announced iPhone 18 Pros, iPhone Duo, Watch 12 + Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and then released its '27 OS updates - And sure whatever AI AI fear-mongering reaches new heights (or new lows): Is this just PR from Big AI to keep the money rolling? Bill Gates says Gates Foundation will donate $1+ billion to solve AI inequality Big AI could solve the PR problems by actually doing something positive for mankind. Just a thought Copilot Work and Copilot Studio get app building capabilities Google will bring MCP to Google Home, in early preview now Mozilla and Mistral partner on Firefox Smart Window AI XBOX and gaming Gears of War: E-Day and more is coming to Game Pass in the second half of September XBOX is going to the Tokyo Game Show and a nice surprise for Kojima fans Valve opens up Steam Frame preorders and it's only $1060! Amazon Prime Gaming and Luna are having a pretty g26ood September Apple is reportedly making an iPhone game controller for some reason Tips and picks Tip of the week: There's a new MSA bypass for Windows 11 Setup App pick of the week: Google Dreambeans RunAs Radio this week: Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradley Brown liquor pick of the week: Art of the Spirits Honored to Serve Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: trustedtech.team/twit

A inteligência artificial deixou de ser novidade na fotografia. Quando a tecnologia passa a fazer parte de câmeras, celulares, Photoshop, edição e até do atendimento, o diferencial volta para outro lugar: repertório, posicionamento, história e capacidade de transformar ferramentas em trabalho.Nesta edição do C.A.O.S. Fotográfico, Leo Saldanha analisa a fotografia híbrida, agentes de IA, novos modelos de negócio, marketing e vendas para fotógrafos, preservação de arquivos, impressão, fotografia esportiva e algumas das principais notícias e tendências da semana.Também falamos sobre o Palco 2026 e o Foto Talks 20x20, projeto que prepara fotógrafos para apresentações de 20 imagens com apenas 20 segundos para cada tela; sobre marketing como conexão e generosidade; e sobre a passagem do fotógrafo que vende horas para o profissional capaz de construir projetos, experiências e histórias.Entre os destaques desta edição estão o “negativo digital” nos novos smartphones, ChatGPT e Claude integrados ao DaVinci Resolve, novos usos de acervos fotográficos no treinamento de IA, reconstrução de memórias com inteligência artificial, privacidade de imagens infantis e o retorno do interesse por experiências fotográficas físicas e impressas.Todos os assuntos mencionados estão aqui:https://www.enfbyleosaldanha.com/postsPALCO 2026https://www.enfbyleosaldanha.com/post/palco-2026-fotografos-foto-talksLIVRO MARKETING PARA FOTÓGRAFOS 2026https://www.enfbyleosaldanha.com/post/marketing-para-fotografos-2026-livro-atualizadoMAPA R.U.M.O.Leitura individual do momento atual do negócio, oportunidades e próximos passos.https://www.enfbyleosaldanha.com/post/mapa-rumo-individual-presencial-fotografosNARRATIVEMinha experiência com o Narrative Select e a entrada no Ambassador Crew.https://www.enfbyleosaldanha.com/post/narrative-ambassador-crew-ia-fotografia-brasilESSENCIALConteúdo, análises e acompanhamento sobre IA, mercado, branding, negócios e as transformações da fotografia.https://www.enfbyleosaldanha.com/post/fotograf-ia-essencial-ia-negocios-inovacao-fotografosInscreva-se no canal e acompanhe as próximas edições do C.A.O.S. Fotográfico.Blog:https://www.enfbyleosaldanha.comInstagram Leo Saldanha:@leosaldanha.com.brPatrocínio das melhores plataformas do mercado:https://alboompro.com.br/https://www.fotto.com.br/vender-fotosC.A.O.S. Fotográfico é uma análise sobre criatividade, tecnologia, mercado e negócios da fotografia por Leo Saldanha.

What assets do you actually need to create a bangarang crowdfunding landing page—and ads that convert? Sean is joined by Crowdfunding Nerds team members Jacob Cecil and Donnie to break down the creative assets every board game and RPG creator should have ready before launching a marketing campaign. They explain why a 3D box render is practically non-negotiable, what types of artwork and component shots make landing pages more compelling, and why some of the simplest ad creatives can outperform highly polished productions. They also dig into what they've learned from running and testing crowdfunding ads: thematic artwork, lifestyle photos, quick unboxing videos, GIFs, simple product shots, and even images taken straight from Tabletop Simulator can all have a place in your campaign. They discuss how to design assets for mobile scrolling, why vertical, square, and horizontal formats matter, and how layered Photoshop files can give marketers much more flexibility when creating ads and landing pages. Guest Bios: Jacob Cecil is a member of the Crowdfunding Nerds team who specializes in developing crowdfunding landing pages and turning a game's creative assets into compelling marketing experiences. His work focuses on communicating what a game is, immersing potential backers in its world, and structuring landing pages that turn ad traffic into interested leads. In this episode, Jacob shares practical guidance on box renders, component photography, layered artwork, thematic storytelling, image formats, and even using Tabletop Simulator when a physical prototype isn't available. Donnie Chase is part of the Crowdfunding Nerds team with hands-on experience developing and testing advertising creatives for tabletop crowdfunding campaigns. Through working across board game and RPG campaigns, he's seen firsthand which creative formats consistently attract attention—from box renders and thematic artwork to GIFs, lifestyle photography and simple unboxing videos. In this episode, Donnie breaks down why authentic creative can sometimes outperform polished advertising and how creators can develop assets that better match what board gamers and RPG players naturally respond to. Resources: https://kaganproductions.com/tutorials/ https://stonemaiergames.com/a-new-twist-on-showcasing-our-games-on-facebook/ Connect with Crowdfunding Nerds: Website: https://crowdfundingnerds.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/crowdfundingnerds/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@crowdfundingnerdspodcast

In this week's episode, I take a look back over the last fifteen years and recount how I learned to write quickly. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Stone, Book #5 in the The Ghosts series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: FALLSTONE The coupon code is valid through September 28, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 320 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September 11th, 2026, and today I'm discussing how I learned to write fast. Before we get to all that, we will have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Stone, Book #5 in The Ghosts series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is FALLSTONE. As always, we will include the links and the coupon code in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through September 28th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. For Blade of Visions, which is my main project right now, the rough draft is done, the first editing pass is done, and I'm hoping to start on the second editing pass as soon as I finish recording this episode. So if all goes well and nothing unexpected happens, I very much hope that the book will be out a week from when this episode goes live. So a week from whenever you listen to this, check your favorite ebook store and hopefully Blade of Visions will be there. And of course you can always listen to this podcast and watch my website and social media for other announcements. My secondary project is Elven-Warlock, the seventh book in the Rivah Half-Elven series. I am currently 16,000 words into that. As soon as Blade of Visions is published, Elven-Warlock will then be my new main project and if all goes well, I hope to have that out in October sometime. In audiobook news, as I mentioned last week, Blade of Thieves and Cloak of Worlds should now be available at all the different audiobook stores. Hollis McCarthy is currently recording Cloak of Summoning and we should have some updates on that soon. In a bit of exciting audiobook news from that or related to that, I should mention that Hollis McCarthy was announced as a finalist for Narrator of Distinction for the Professional Audiobook Narrators Association for her work on Cloak of Embers, which was Cloak Mage #10. So if you get a chance, be sure to congratulate Hollis for that if you hang out on my social media pages. So that's where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:25 How I Learned to Write Fast Now let's move on to my main topic, how I learn to write fast. Occasionally I will see a new indie author looking with dismay at how much time it takes to write and expressing the opinion that it must be impossible to write a million words a year without the aid of generative AI. Ha, no. I should point out that I wrote a million words in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 and back then the current AI tech bros were still searching for the big scam that would one day make them rich. They tried crypto and NFTs in the interim. ChatGPT would not be inflicted upon the world until the end of 2022. Admittedly, I didn't write a million new words in 2021, 2022 and 2023, but that was from a combination of personal issues taking up time and illness. I still hit between 800,000 and 900,000 in those three years. In 2024 and 2025, I wrote a million new words. I might or might not hit a million new words in 2026, and it largely depends on how the rest of the year goes. I had to take a lot of time off in spring and summer, and that really slowed me down. I did hit 700,000 words once Blade of Visions was done, so we'll see what happens the remaining four months of the year. But yes, if you're writing full-time, a million words in a year is certainly achievable, though as with all things it takes practice and can be subject to events. With that in mind, I thought I would explain how I was able over time to ramp up to writing a million new words in a year. It was less something I set out consciously to do when I started this in 2011 and more a step-by-step evolutionary process that took several years. By the grace of God, I have been indie publishing for almost 15 and a half years now. So here's the process of how I ended up writing a million words in a year. #1: Tech Writing Back in the second half of the 2000s, I used to do a lot of tech blogging, mostly about Linux, and I also did tech support, which frequently involved writing FAQs and guides for how to connect your Blackberry or Windows Mobile device to the company email or whatever. In retrospect, Blackberry and Windows Mobile were both terrible operating systems, so it's not surprising the iPhone and later Android blew them out of the water. Anyway, tech blogging taught me the value of writing quickly. Back then, you could still make money off Google AdSense, and so if I could write quickly on a tech topic, I could post it, get Google traffic, and then make a little bit of money from Google Ads. Writing FAQs and guides also taught me the value of writing as concisely and as clearly as possible. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said of public speaking that the best approach to public speaking was "be sincere, be brief, be seated", and that's also true of technical guides. Back then, I was working on novels as well, specifically what would end up becoming the first three Caina books, but I never wrote more than a thousand words a day of fiction unless I was bored or I was really inspired, neither of which happened all that often. #2: Soul of Serpents By the end of 2010, I had sworn off trying to get traditionally published and decided to focus on tech blogging, but then I got my first Kindle after Thanksgiving in 2010, and I realized there had to be a way to make money off this thing. This led me to discovering Kindle Direct Publishing, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and the other early self-publishing platforms. I published Demonsouled, Soul of Tyrants, and the first three Caina books, and then I decided I'd write one more Demonsouled book to finish off the story. It always annoyed me to no end that I'd never gotten to write a sequel to Soul of Tyrants, but now that the opportunity was here, I decided that I would have a Demonsouled trilogy and Soul of Serpents would be the last novel I would ever write, which goes to show I may not be that great at telling the future. Soul of Serpents was the first book I ever wrote specifically intended for self-publishing instead of submitting it to legacy publishers. I wrote it over the summer of 2011, and I figured if I wrote 1,500 words a day, I could get the rough draft of the book done by the end of the summer, which I did, and I ended up publishing it at the end of August of that month. That was also why I made Demonsouled and Child of the Ghosts free for the first time, which meant that their sequels started to sell a little bit. I was actually beginning to make a little bit of money off my novels for the first time in my life, which was very exciting. It also meant that I wanted to continue the Demonsouled series past the third book, which leads us to the next phase of our story. #3: Soul of Dragons In the second half of 2011, I was extremely busy. I had a full-time job and I had a part-time job that required a lot of off-the-clock preparation. Despite that, I was determined to write Soul of Dragons, so I pushed onward when I could. This was when I began writing during my lunch break for the first time, but I often didn't get to my 1,500 words a day during lunch. So by the time I got home at the end of the day, which was frequently between 9:00 and 10:00 PM, I would frequently squeeze in my remaining words (sometimes all my words), before I went to sleep, only to wake up at 5:45 AM to go to the gym. This level of workload, as you can imagine, was absolutely exhausting, and I don't recommend it, but I still did it. I think it was necessary to learn to write a novel under a state of extreme strain since that was good practice for the 160 books that would follow Soul of Dragons. If I wrote only when I was perfectly calm and there was nothing else demanding my time or attention, I would never get any writing done at all. I really hate to give career advice to younger people since so much of the advice they receive these days is obsolete at best and malicious and condescending at worst. In economic terms, 2026 might well be another planet compared to 1976 or 2000, but sometimes in life you really do have to put in a maximum effort over a sustained amount of time (even if it's approaching midnight, you have to get up in five hours, and you still have 500 words to go before you can sleep). That said, if at all possible, I would advise only putting in that kind of effort if you're working for yourself and not for an employer that will lay you off the instant the stock price dips slightly. It took a while, but I did it. Soul of Dragons came out in February of 2012 and sold pretty well. By this time, the books were selling well enough that while I didn't want to go full-time, they were providing a nice cushion against the unexpected vagaries of life. My full-time employer was also heading towards trouble, so I decided to keep writing. #4: Ghost in the Storm My next book in early 2012 after finishing Soul of Dragons was Ghost in the Storm. Like with Demonsouled and Soul of Tyrants, I was always disappointed that I never got to continue Caina's story past the end of Ghost in the Blood, and so I was excited to start Ghost in the Storm. Little did I know that Caina's story would continue for another 30 books past that. I wanted to write faster, so I settled on a goal of 3,000 words a day for Ghost in the Storm. I would write as much as I could in the morning, then over my lunch break, and then finish my 3,000 words, hopefully in the evening before I went to bed. I very distinctly recall that in March of 2012, I was in the process of moving to a new apartment. I bought a couch and scheduled it to be delivered that morning at about 10:00 AM. So I took the morning off, brought my laptop and a folding chair to the empty apartment and wrote, and I kept writing and writing, and the couch never showed up. Finally, in exasperation, I had run out of my hours off, so I had to go to work only to get the call at 4:00 PM that the couch guys had finally showed up and needed me to let them in. I begged them to stay where they were, broke the speed limit to get back to the apartment, and arrived just as they were walking back to their truck. Thankfully, I was able to convince them to deliver the couch. As annoying as that day turned out to be, it worked out well because I got the new couch and I also wrote a bunch of Ghosts in the Storm, which ended up coming out towards the end of April 2012. #5: Ghost Aria In summer 2012, I wrote Soul of Sorcery, which was a huge book that took a long time to write, but it was also the first book I ever wrote that made it to any bestseller list of any kind on amazon.com, which was a pleasant milestone. After Soul of Sorcery, I started working on Ghost in the Stone and finished it up in early 2013. For both Soul of Sorcery and Ghost in the Stone, I had stuck to 3,000 words a day. By then, I had started working more on marketing, so I had an email newsletter. It had occurred to me that giving something away for free in the newsletter might be a great way to drive newsletter engagement, and I'd always liked writing short stories back in the 2000s. So why not write a bonus short story related to the book and give it away for free? So that was where Ghost Aria came from. It was the first short story I gave away for free with my newsletter. Since then, I've written hundreds of short stories and given away tens of thousands of them, so I think it was a good decision. #6: Dual projects In 2015, I had the opportunity to write a tie-in novel for a game product, which I wanted to do, yet I hesitated because I was working on Ghost in the Inferno at the time, and I knew Ghost in the Inferno would actually sell and make some money. The tie-in book was a roll of the dice, but it was a good enough opportunity that I wanted to take it, or so it seemed at the time, but I didn't want to stop working on Ghost in the Inferno, so I did both. Ghost in the Inferno was my main project, and the game book was my secondary one where I squeezed out a couple hundred words a day. Once Ghost in the Inferno was done, I finished the game book relatively quickly. Of course, nothing ever came of it. The game company and the book company fell out and then respectively went out of business, and the game tie in book never saw the light of day. I would've been better off not writing the tie in novel, except I gained a valuable skill from the experience. Before that, I had only ever worked on one fiction project at a time. Now I had taught myself to do two at once. Ever since then, I have followed my primary/secondary project model while trying to get as many words down as possible in my primary project, but I also write 250 words or so of my secondary project before I go to the gym in the morning while I'm having my coffee. So when I finish my primary project, I'm usually about 10,000 to 20,000 words into my secondary project, which gets promoted to my new primary project. For example, Blade of Visions is almost done, but my secondary project, Elven-Warlock, is currently at 16,000 words, so that gives everything a nice little speed boost. I suppose this is yet another example of the lesson that if you're going to work really, really hard on something, if possible, you should be working for yourself and not on spec for someone else. Anyway, the primary/secondary project system has been really helpful to me, especially after I went full-time, which we will discuss next. #7: Time for Full-time So that was the paradigm I followed for the next four years from 2012 to 2016. I aimed for 3,000 words a day and mostly kept to it. I usually ended up writing between 500,000 and 600,000 words a year. I finished Demonsouled and The Ghosts and started on Frostborn and Ghost Exile, and then on a whim started writing Cloak Games in 2015 as a secondary project. 27 books later, Cloak Games/Cloak Mage has likewise turned out to be much longer than I thought. Frostborn also really took off in 2016, which was nice. I would've been perfectly content to continue working full-time and writing as a side gig, especially since I no longer had that part-time job because the books were paying better. That said, I knew in the back of my mind I could go full-time if it became necessary, especially if my employer went under or had layoffs. I admit going full-time started to become tempting as I took on more work and responsibilities after the layoffs. From 2012 to 2016, I got up at 4:30 AM every workday so I'd have time to get everything done. Admittedly, that's not a big deal and lots of people have to do that, yet I admit to this day, I still find 4 in the morning the worst time to get up to use the bathroom or to wake up before a long road trip or whatever. Somehow waking up and seeing 4 on the clock just seems so hateful. Ironically, for all the time I spent thinking about layoffs and preparing contingency plans about what I do afterward, I never actually got laid off. In 2016, I ended up needing to move to a new US state for a combination of family and personal reasons, so I had to quit. I thought about finding a new job in the tech field, but decided the time had come to start writing full-time. Since this was now my full-time job, there was no reason not to write as much as possible. In fact, that was probably a good idea if I wanted to eat, and that's when I started to trying to hit a million words a year. #8: The Rest of the 2010s So from 2016 onward, I wrote full-time. I had a million new words in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. I finished Ghost Exile and started Ghost Night, finished Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword and wrote most of Dragontiarna. I finished Cloak Games, started Cloak Mage, and I wrote, I think, the first nine books of Silent Order and also finished Malison. I also started doing self-published audiobooks in 2018 with Child of the Ghosts and Frostborn: The Dark Warden. 2017 was my absolute peak for word count since I hit 1.4 million words that year. Not surprisingly, that was probably my best year of sales ever since I finished Frostborn and started Sevenfold Sword in 2017, but I did hit a million words every year for the rest of the 2010s, including 2020. However, after 2020, there was trouble ahead, and you've probably guessed what it is. #9: Fun with COVID 2020 was a productive year for writing since I reached 1.2 million words and I took some Photoshop classes, which turned out to be really valuable in terms of cover design and creating marketing and ad images. It's pretty rare that I don't use Photoshop for something at least once a day now. However, as it would turn out, my big long-term problem was that the gyms in my local area closed for a long time during COVID, and I never found an adequate replacement for them. I ended up gaining a bunch of weight (with all the related health concerns that causes). In 2021, I only reached 974,000 words. Not a big deal. I thought. I'll hit a million next year. However, that didn't work as well because for a variety of personal health reasons in 2022, I only reached 814,000. I also tried a couple of new things during the early 2020s that really didn't work. In 2021, I published the two Cormac Rogan books, which people liked, but it really didn't have an audience. In 2022, I published the first book of what would become the Stealth & Spells Online trilogy, and that didn't sell very well because I misread the audience for LitRPG. Essentially, the LitRPG market wants Isekai/portal fantasy or system apocalypse type stuff, and I've written a science fiction thriller with LitRPG elements. Then in 2023, I actually got COVID, and that just laid me flat for six weeks. I barely got any work done in May and about half of June, and I realized I was going to have to make some changes. #10: Rivah Half-Elven to the Rescue First of all, I realized that I was doing too much by myself. I thought about stopping audiobooks and the podcast entirely, but instead I hired an audiobook proofer and a transcriptionist/researcher to help with that. Second, I still wanted to try something new. Cormac Rogan and Stealth & Spells hadn't worked all that well, but in April of 2023, I'd written about 8,000 words of what would become Half-Elven Thief. When I got sick over the summer, I stopped working on it to focus on finishing Dragonskull and the Silent Order series, but at the end of 2023, I dusted off the Word file, finished it, and published it in December of 2023. It had a substantially stronger first month than Stealth & Spells, so it was time to embark on the Half-Elven Thief series. #11: The Super Summer of Finishing Things I also realized that I gotten too scattered with five ongoing series at once. I decided to cut it down to three. So in the summer of 2025, I finished The Shield War, Stealth & Spells Online, and Ghost Armor. My ongoing series would be Blades of Ruin, Cloak Mage, and Half-Elven Thief. I wouldn't start on a new series until I finished one of these. From summer 2023 onward, things improved a good deal over 2021 through 2023. Audiobooks were a lot easier to do with an audiobook proofer to do the final listen, so I've done quite a bit more of those. From 2024 to 2026, I got my weight back down to a pre - COVID level with a lot of calorie counting and exercise (aided by sublimating the desire to snack into blowing up space pirates in Starfield). I did hit a million new words in both 2024 and 2025. As I mentioned, I'm not sure if I will hit a million words in 2026 or not. As I said earlier, I had to take a lot of time off this year, and it will depend on how the rest of the year goes, but I think 900,000 will be definitely achievable. #12: So What Have We Learned From All of This? As you can see, while I can write a million words a year, it took a long time to learn how to do it and a lot of practice, and if enough other things demand time and attention in a year, it's not going to happen. I think the biggest keys to writing as many words as possible in a year are persistence and tenacity. There will be many times you don't want to write, like at midnight when I still had 500 words to go on Soul of Dragons before I could go to bed, but you will need to push through and get to it. Maybe you cut back a little on time-wasting activities like TikTok, doomscrolling, and TV, especially TikTok. It is distressing to see people repeating the nonsense they see on TikTok as absolute fact. Or maybe you learn to type on 15-minute bursts in your phone in those odd blocks of time like waiting rooms or being on hold that would otherwise go to waste. I have read interviews with several people who wrote their novels on their phones while taking the train to and from work. Tenacity is also important. If you wait until circumstances are perfect to write, you will never get anything written. Granted, there are times when writing has to take a backseat to more important things in life. That's okay, that's as it should be. If you can't get a thousand words written, aim for 500. If you miss one day, then tomorrow is another day and you can try again. That is also true over a long time scale as well. If I miss writing a million words in one year, well, tomorrow is another day and next year is another year. And of course, thank you for reading all the books. There'd be no point in writing a million words a year if people didn't read them. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.  

A.M. Edition for Sept. 11. The vice president is increasingly looking like a presidential candidate, but some Republicans want Marco Rubio. We wrap up the GOP's midterm convention with a look at Vance's prime-time speech. Plus, investors hold their breath before today's pivotal U.S. inflation report. And we'll look back on 25 years of the global war on terror with WSJ national security correspondents Michael R. Gordon and David S. Cloud. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How do you turn a handful of pixels into one of gaming's most recognisable characters? Recorded live at RetroMessa 2026, Dan and Joe meet illustrator Duncan Gutteridge, whose hand-painted artwork helped define Sonic's European image during SEGA's 16-bit glory years. Duncan recalls reimagining Sonic 2, creating artwork for Sonic 3 and Knuckles, working with airbrushes, phones and fax machines, and enjoying a level of creative freedom that would be almost unthinkable today. He also reveals the fate of his long-lost original Sonic paintings.Amiga Bill Links: Twitch.tv/AmigaBillhttps://YouTube.com/@AmigaBillhttps://AmigaBill.tvTwitch.tvContents:00:00 – The Week's Retro News Stories1:06:00 – Duncan Gutteridge InterviewPlease visit our amazing sponsors and help to support the show:Bitmap Books – https://www.bitmapbooks.comGo to https://surfshark.com/retrohour or use code RETROHOUR at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!Check out PCBWay at https://pcbway.com for all your PCB needsPlayEXPO Blackpool: https://www.playexpoblackpool.com/We need your help to ensure the future of the podcast, if you'd like to help us with running costs, equipment and hosting, please consider supporting us on Patreon:https://theretrohour.com/support/https://www.patreon.com/retrohourJoin our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/GQw8qp8Website: http://theretrohour.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/theretrohour/X: https://twitter.com/retrohourukInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/retrohouruk/Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/theretrohour.comTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/theretrohourShow notesNew Doom-Style Shooter for 3DO:  https://lnk.ua/znInXLNwMGTA Arrives on Amiga:  https://lnk.ua/ERRtnHKLkPortrait Ridge Racer Port:  https://lnk.ua/m0xu68aPxNew 4:3 Retro Gaming Monitor:  https://lnk.ua/PZX3RS7zKLEGO PlayStation 1 Set Revealed:  https://lnk.ua/fAPHMgWXiPortal Demake Arrives on GBA:  https://lnk.ua/QqQkLQGr5

Weinig techaandelen die dit jaar zo'n bumpy ride meemaakten als Oracle. De kwartaalcijfers moesten daar een keer een einde aan maken. De cijfers vielen mee gelukkig; meer winst en omzet dan verwacht. Vooralsnog wordt het aandeel ervoor beloond. Maar voor hoe lang nog? Of kan het tij volgend kwartaal net zo makkelijk weer keren? We gaan het allemaal voor je uitpluizen. Hoor je ook nog over Sam Altman, de ceo van OpenAI. Die maakt zich volgens Bloomberg grote zorgen om wat hij zelf gecreëerd heeft. Zo veel zorgen, dat hij de ontwikkeling van OpenAI wil afremmen. Hij hoopt dat z'n concurrentie dat ook gaat doen. Wat betekent dat voor de AI-revolutie, en voor de beursgang? Ook dat gaan we bespreken. Hoor je ook nog over: Het langverwachte Amerikaanse inflatiecijfer Een spectaculaire bonus voor het personeel van Micron De cijfers van Adobe Bernard Arnault, die is stukken minder rijk dan eerst Te gast: Jean-Paul van Oudheusden van eToro en Markets Are Everywhere BNR Beurs is een journalistiek onafhankelijke productie, mede mogelijk gemaakt door Saxo. Over de makers: Jelle Maasbach is presentator van BNR Beurs en freelance financieel journalist. Zijn favoriete aandeel om over te praten is Disney, maar daar lijkt hij de enige in te zijn. Sinds de eerste uitzending van BNR Beurs is 'ie er bij. Maxim van Mil is presentator van BNR Beurs en journalist bij BNR, waar hij zich focust op de financiële markten en ontwikkelingen in de tech-wereld. Je krijgt hem het meest enthousiast als hij kan praten over ASML, of oer-Hollandse bedrijven zoals Ahold of ABN Amro. Jorik Simonides is presentator van BNR Beurs, economieredacteur en verslaggever bij BNR. Hij wordt er vooral blij van als het een keer níet over AI gaat. Je hoort hem ook in de BNR-podcast Moerdijk: dorp van de rekening. Milou Brand is presentator van BNR Beurs, freelance podcastmaker en columnist bij het Financieele Dagblad. Jochem Visser is presentator van BNR Beurs, maakt Beursnerd XL en is redacteur bij de podcast Onder Curatoren. Vraag hem naar obscure zaken op financiële markten en hij vertelt je waarom het eigenlijk nóg leuker is dan je al dacht. Donner Bakker is presentator van BNR Beurs en economieredacteur bij BNR. Hij volgt macro-economische ontwikkelingen met bovengemiddelde interesse, net als de beursgenoteerde datingapps. Je hoort hem ook in de BNR-podcast All In The Game. Over de podcast: Met BNR Beurs ga je altijd voorbereid de nieuwe beursdag in. We praten je in een kleine 25 minuten bij over alle laatste ontwikkelingen op de handelsvloer. We blijven niet alleen bij de AEX of Wall Street, maar vertellen je ook waar nog meer kansen liggen. En we houden het niet bij de cijfers, maar zoeken ook iedere dag voor je naar duiding van scherpe gasten en experts. Of je nu een ervaren belegger bent of net begint met je eerste stappen op de beurs, de podcast biedt waardevolle inzichten voor je beleggingsstrategie. Door de focus op zowel de korte termijn als de lange termijn, helpt BNR Beurs luisteraars om de ruis van de markt te scheiden van de essentie.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What Portrait Photographers Should Never Retouch asks a question: when does improving an image become changing the person?In this episode of The Camera Shake Photography Podcast, Kersten speaks with Lithuanian portrait photographer and RetouchLab founder Skaistė Gulbinaitė about natural portrait retouching, client confidence and creating photographs that still feel authentic.Skaistė explains why many people dislike photographs of themselves, how phone cameras and beauty filters can distort self-image, and why trust begins long before Photoshop. She shares practical photography advice for directing nervous clients, maintaining flow during a portrait session and using posing, lighting and camera angles instead of reshaping bodies in post-production.The conversation also explores skin retouching, scars, wrinkles, commercial beauty photography and the ethical line between polishing a portrait and erasing someone's identity. Skaistė reveals how repetitive editing inspired her to build RetouchLab, why photographers should keep creative control when using AI, and what she learned from leaving medical school to pursue art and build a photography business.Whether you work in photography, videography or visual content creation, this thoughtful conversation will help you create better client experiences and more honest images.Subscribe for more conversations about photography, creative careers and the business behind the camera.#photography #portraitphotography #SkaisteGulbinaite #CameraShakePodcast******************************************************************Get Your CAMERA SHAKE MERCH: https://www.kerstenluts.com/camerashake-merch******************************************************************SUPPORT THE PODCAST: www.buymeacoffee.com/camerashake******************************************************************JOIN THE CAMERA SHAKE COMMUNITY for the latest news and some behind the scenes insights: www.camerashakepodcast.com ******************************************************************Check out our sponsor: www.platypod.com******************************************************************THIS WEEK'S LINKS:CONNECT WITH SKAISTE GULBINAITESkaistė's photography Instagram: @skaistegulbephotoRetouchLab Instagram: @tryretouchlabRetouchLab website: tryretouchlab.comJOIN THE CAMERA SHAKE COMMUNITY for the latest news and some behind the scenes insights: www.camerashakepodcast.com ======================================CAMERA SHAKE PODCAST ON YOUTUBE:https://www.youtube.com/camerashakeFULL EPISODE 326 ‘What Portrait Photographers Should Never Retouch with SKAISTE GULBINAITE' IS ALSO AVAILABLE ON: YouTube - https://youtu.be/l_Djm-FmD00Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2Y2Lmfm Spotify - https://spoti.fi/304sm2G ======================================FOLLOW US ONInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/camerashakepodcast/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/camerashakepodcastX: https://twitter.com/ShakeCameraKersten's website: www.kerstenluts.comKersten on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerstenluts/https://www.instagram.com/threeheadsinarow/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ghostfacers, Slender Man & the Internet's Darkest Urban LegendA teenage girl is taking selfies and there is something behind her with no face... and a receding hairline. Odd choice.This week the Ghostfacers are back! Ed and Harry roll up in their van chasing clout, filming crime scenes, and generally behaving in ways that have Berly and LA deeply conflicted about two characters they used to love. Meanwhile Sam and Dean are investigating what looks like a monster but turns out to be something far more human and far more depressing. The villains this week murdered people over a declined PTO and an unanswered date request, yet somehow that still isn't the most upsetting thing about this episode.The lore covers Slender Man: where he came from, why he works, and why this episode has almost certainly been quietly pulled from syndication. It started as a Photoshop contest in 2009. It did not stay there.Drop a comment with your thoughts, and if you're enjoying the show, a review helps other fans find their way to the bunker. See you next week. Jerk. Bitch.Sources:https://supernatural.fandom.com/wiki/Thinmanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Manhttps://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27776894https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/30/the-story-of-slenderman-the-internets-own-monster/ Send us your review!Support the showTHANK YOU FOR LISTENING!Denim Wrapped Nightmares is a Supernatural rewatch podcast hosted by Berly and LA, breaking down every episode of the Winchester saga with lore deep-dives plus cast and crew interviews.New episodes every week. Find socials, merch, and more: linktr.ee/dwnpodSubscribe, leave a review, and join the hunt.

Send us Fan MailA lot can happen in two months, and when I finally got back on the mic, I wanted to pick up where life left off, with somebody who's been building quietly and winning loudly. My guest is my son, Bryce Barnett, an award-winning student podcaster, emerging journalist, and graphic designer who's already stacked real accomplishments while most people are still figuring out what they even want to be. We talk like family, but we also get specific about the work: how he started podcasting in high school, how he learned to tell stories that matter, and how he turned creativity into a skill set with results. Bryce breaks down what it felt like to switch high schools after freshman year, the anxiety and identity shake-up that comes with starting over, and the mindset shift that helped him rebuild at Homewood-Flossmoor. We also get into the assumptions people make, especially when you “look like” you should be doing one thing, and why Bryce chose journalism, radio, and podcasting over chasing basketball expectations. If you're navigating a big change, a new school, or a new chapter, this conversation is a real reminder that discomfort can be training, not punishment. Then we go into the creative lane: graphic design. Bryce explains how making podcast cover art on Canva became a gateway into branding, poster design, and eventually Photoshop, plus what beginners should learn first if they want to start designing today. We even have some fun with his WWE fandom and a top five wrestlers debate, before I close with what I'm learning too: purpose, patience, and trusting the long game. Subscribe, share this with someone who's mid-pivot, and leave a review with the one leap of faith you're taking next.Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: The SHITTS Podcast. Follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and iHeart Radio. Subscribe and comment. 

Depois da revolta da puberdade, a relação dos adolescentes com o corpo caminha para a composição de uma imagem, muito talhada por influencers, cultivada pelo grupo e orientada pelas redes sociaisSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Adobe says you can now order changes via platforms like Photoshop or Premiere using messages from colleagues in Slack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

¿Está tu equipo de trabajo programado para convertirse en chatarra digital en apenas tres años? En este episodio de Fotógrafo Pro, John Vargas lanza un manifiesto en defensa de la soberanía de nuestro oficio y analiza de forma crítica cómo la industria tecnológica nos empuja a una devaluación constante y acelerada de nuestras herramientas. Analizamos con lupa técnica los polémicos lanzamientos de esta semana: bajo el capó de los nuevos chips M6 y M5 Ultra de Apple descubrimos si realmente se justifica pagar un sobreprecio masivo por mejoras de rendimiento incrementales de apenas un 20% o 30% en multinúcleo. Si ya tienes una estación de trabajo basada en un chip M4 o M5, pagar esa fortuna anual es una pésima decisión de inversión. ¡Tu hardware actual sigue siendo extraordinariamente capaz! También rendimos un profundo y merecido homenaje al legendario fotógrafo neoyorquino Jay Maisel, fallecido a los 95 años. Recordamos su formación junto a Josef Albers en Yale, su mítica fotografía de Miles Davis para Kind of Blue en 1959, su icónico edificio de seis plantas vendido por 55 millones de dólares en 2015, y cómo su filosofía inquebrantable de la luz, el gesto y el color representa la antítesis de la automatización moderna.Además, desglosamos las novedades técnicas de la semana para proteger tu flujo de trabajo digital y tus finanzas:Adobe Photoshop y la Light Adjust Layer (Capa de Ajuste de Luz): La histórica integración de los algoritmos de exposición no destructivos de Adobe Camera RAW directamente en el lienzo de Photoshop frente a la encrucijada y los automatismos del motor Firefly Image 5.Metabones EFX2 Plus con True PDAF: Cómo el fabricante desafía la obsolescencia impuesta permitiéndote usar tus robustas ópticas reflex Canon EF en cuerpos Fujifilm X con rendimiento de enfoque nativo. Analizamos el Cine Speed Booster Ultra 0.71x2 Plus y las opciones de precios (desde los $99 del Smart Adapter estándar hasta los $699 de la versión Cine), además del plan de actualización física de Metabones para usuarios previos.OM System Pen F2 y la Lomo LC-A: El retorno del fetiche físico de la herramienta con el teaser de la inminente Pen F2 y la coronación de la Lomo LC-A con el legendario Minitar 2 de 32 mm F2.8 como cámara analógica del año en los Premios EISA 2026-2027.No permitas que el marketing devalúe tu criterio profesional. La verdadera fotografía no se calcula en una placa de silicio, se siente en el pecho y se educa en el ojo. Escucha este análisis técnico, defiende tu proceso artesanal y cuéntanos abajo en los comentarios: ¿Cuál es esa decisión visual de la que te sientes más orgulloso en tu trayectoria reciente?

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we revisit our 2017 series on 1999's Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. We're interviewing Riley Cooper, a former colleague of Tim's who had a long career at Crystal Dynamics and worked on the title in level design and combat design roles. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Podcast breakdown: 1:01 Interview 1:07:10 Break 1:07:40 Outro Issues covered: the Universe coming together, getting in, making terrain layers in Photoshop, moving to the next thing, working on the combat, the parts that had to be there, incorporating lateral movement for combat, applying fighting game discipline, not inventing from whole cloth, rebuilding a camera system, design as open source, defensive patents, jamming so much into levels, spectral morphing and lack of follow-ups, blind ambition coming from Amy Hennig, being two weeks from ship for one to two years, time to market vs time to quality, people simply not knowing, jumping between genres, the victory of European labor laws, knowing how to build what you're building, a vacuum of upper management, being able to just make the game, the tension between business and creation, wanting to design without interference, execs who want to play with the toys, "problems down solutions up," wanting appropriate ownership at every level, getting the same letter at the end of two different projects, the feeling at the start vs the feeling in the middle, thoughtful refactoring, starting from the right constraints, locking yourself in a room with a design problem to find the solution, gameplay goes at the speed of thumbs, a sports game that's a video game first, good places to be from. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Lord of the Rings, LucasArts, Solar Eclipse, Legacy of Kain (series), Tomb Raider (series), EA, Need for Speed (series), Sony, Atari 2600, Dave Morse, 3D0, Saturn, Noah Hughes, Amy Hennig, Silicon Knights, Denis Dyack, Seth Carus, Street Fighter 2, Super Mario 64, Jim Conrad, Andrew Hynek, Roberta Williams, Daniel Chayer-Bison, Pete Lake, Microsoft, X-COM, Fallout, Populous, Sean Vesce, Richard Lemarchand, Naughty Dog, Uncharted, Hitman, Hakan Almer, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Next time: TBA! Twitch: timlongojr and twinsunscorp YouTube Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com 

If you need to export multiple layers from Photoshop as individual PNG files, this tutorial walks through a fast way to batch export Photoshop layers without saving each one manually. I demonstrate the workflow using storyboard panels that need to be exported from a PSD and brought into editing software to build an animatic, but the same Photoshop Export As workflow can be useful for designers, animators, storyboard artists, video editors, and anyone working with multiple layers that need to become separate image files.I'll show you how I prepare the Photoshop file before exporting, clean up unnecessary layers and folders, merge anything that needs to remain together, select multiple layers at once, and use Photoshop's Export As feature to export everything in one batch.We also look at how to change the image format, dimensions, scale, width and height, RGB settings, and export destination across all of the selected layers at once.

Episode Summary:Recording live from Brandt's porch during Will's road-trip stop in Minnesota, the guys go behind the scenes on their setup before diving into ElevenLabs' new AI creative studio and the case for AI as history's next great democratizer of art. They swerve into deep-end territory: why human judgment beats "AI slop," Will's AI agent Barry gets sent to Barry Jail, and a spiral into simulation theory and what human purpose looks like as AI absorbs more of the work.Discussions Include:• Recording live from Brandt's porch with clip-on lavs and a DJI Mic Mini, planes and baseball games included• ElevenLabs' new creative studio for AI image-to-video generation, and Brandt's product-launch experiment with it• The historical case for AI as a democratizing force in art and creativity (Photoshop, photography, vibe coding)• Why human judgment and imperfection will keep beating "AI slop," even as generation quality improves• Will's AI agent Barry getting cautiously welcomed into the Meshtastic Discord's new "Barry Jail" channel• A deep-end swerve into simulation theory, privacy, and what human purpose looks like as AI takes on more workQuotable Quotes (Should you choose to share):     "They made a channel called Barry Jail... and he goes, 'All right, showing up for my parole hearing today.'" - Will Curran     "I truly thought to myself, we could be in the Matrix - like, this could really be in the Matrix." - Will Curran     "[The Pope's doctrinal note on AI] wasn't an anti-technology screed - it was just, hey, let's keep the humanity in it. I think that's a legitimate thing to raise." - Brandt Krueger     "That's where the humanity will always win over slop, because humanity will actually bother to either be imperfect on purpose, or decide the level of perfection, the level of realism." - Brandt KruegerThing of the Episode (TOTE):     Brandt: Use AI to make what you already do better     Will: Rolling out Claude Code company-wide

In this episode, Audrey Havey shares her journey from freelancing to co-owning a creative studio with her husband, Justin. They discuss the challenges and strategies of running a small studio, balancing multiple roles, and navigating the evolving creative industry.

Here's a Thought… #2729 with Brooks Jensen A Library of Skies How do you feel about the Sky Replacement tool in Photoshop? Is it a cheat, or a solution? Or, maybe I should rephrase that: When is it a cheat and when an acceptable tool? For my work, I've decided it is a tool I'm willing to use if it is only a matter of timing. If the replacement sky could be possible if only I was there photographing on a different day or time, I won't hesitate to use it. Does this open a Pandora's Box of fakery? Become a member of LensWork Online and have access to all 2700+ Here's a Thought… commentaries.

An AI creative director combines design fundamentals, AI fluency, tool selection, and repeatable workflows to produce better creative work.The boys over at Fast Hour invites a 24-year-old AI creative director to give away her playbook and somehow gets reminded that buying more AI subscriptions does not count as mastery. Jamey Gannon explains why AI is a skill, what top operators do differently, how Midjourney mood boards become brand systems, and why sometimes the smartest AI move is opening Photoshop.Jamey Gannon explains how self-taught design, social media, freelancing, and AI fluency shaped her work as an AI creative director. Jamey Gannon demonstrates Midjourney mood boards, SREFs, Midjourney V8.2 Edit, Krea K2, Claude, Figma, Photoshop, Flora, Nano Banana, and the CXO brand system, including when to build custom tools instead of forcing an existing workflow.---⏱️ Fast Hour00:00 Who is Jamey Gannon?06:43 How Jamey taught herself design at 1512:23 Why Gen Z chases money over job titles15:35 What first freelance clients look like at 1718:43 Why social media is a freelance prerequisite22:16 Freelance math: 20 clients vs one salary24:13 How her sister makes $5K–$10K/month with AI27:08 What is an AI creative director?28:58 What the AI Creative Director course teaches33:05 Is Krea catching Midjourney?35:53 The "easy, fast, cheap" AI lie38:43 Three moments that hooked Jamey on AI42:23 How to build brand mood boards46:00 How one SREF cracked the brand style46:27 Midjourney + Figma: the pixel shader pipeline49:06 When you should not use AI51:53 Two ways to use Midjourney mood boards56:44 What top AI creatives do differently59:44 Build the tool when the workflow doesn't exist1:11:28 Midjourney V8.2 Edit: first live tests1:15:00 What works and what drifts in Midjourney Edit1:20:06 Midjourney Edit vs Nano Banana: identity lock1:21:32 Can Midjourney edit text and fonts now?1:25:23 Can Midjourney's edit model preserve logos and apparel graphics?1:31:05 Is Midjourney inpainting or regenerating?1:34:33 The verdict: using Nano Banana less1:37:34 Where Nano Banana still fits

Send us Fan MailWe're finally back!After a short break, The Riley Black Project returns with a guest who has been dodging us for years: Kristen Thompson of Kristen Thompson Designs.Kristen joins John and Crystal to talk about her journey from corporate work at Lowe's, to Cricut crafts, Etsy digital designs, sublimation tumblers, laser engraving, full wrap tumbler designs, Photoshop mockups, and building a creative business around the products and designs she actually loves making.We get into the real maker-business stuff too: trying new things, getting over the fear of being on camera, learning full wrap tumblers, selling digital laser files, testing designs, using mockups, making finished products, and why entrepreneurship feels amazing and exhausting at the same time.Kristen also shares how she built her Etsy design shop, why she still loves the analytical side of business, and how selling designs to other makers doesn't take away from her finished product business. It can actually help more people bring beautiful cups to life in their own way.Whether you're a laser owner, tumbler maker, Etsy seller, digital designer, creative entrepreneur, or maker trying to figure out what direction to go next, this episode is packed with laughs, business lessons, and real-world maker experience.FB: The KTD Collection - Lasered By KTDIG: @kthompdesignsTikTok: @LaseredByKTDEtsy: kthomplaserdesigns.etsy.comWebsite: KristenThompsonDesigns.comYouTube: @ShesTheReasonIHaveALaserSupport the showIf you enjoy our content, consider supporting us on Patreon!! You can check out the tier options and perks here: https://www.patreon.com/TheRileyBlackProjectCheck out my Linktree for my social media links & all the different things I have to offer! https://linktr.ee/RileyBlack

Success does not always mean moving faster, achieving more, or keeping up with someone else's timeline. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik has built a career across marketing, business development, media, travel, and entrepreneurship, yet some of her biggest lessons have come from learning when to slow down. Stephanie and I explore burnout, wellness, fear, AI, social media, intuition, and why our lives rarely follow a straight path. We talk about doing your best without needing to be the best, trusting your instincts, letting go of what you can't control, and staying open when life changes the plan. I believe you'll find useful ideas here about personal growth, resilience, and creating a life that feels like your own. Highlights: 0:10:15 - How high achievement can lead to burnout, stress, and health issues. 0:16:09 - Learning to control fear instead of letting fear control you. 0:24:30 - How asking, trying, and taking initiative can open new career paths. 0:35:35 - Doing your best matters more than being the best. 0:45:26 - Knowing when to stop pushing and let life unfold. 0:58:37 - Trying more helps you discover what you're capable of. About the Guest: Dr. Stephanie Gutnik is President of tuxedo concepts, providing management consulting and public speaking to organizations across the world. Her focus areas are integrated marketing communications, business transformation and corporate wellness. She is also the author of the children's book, “My Very Best”. Stephanie has spoken globally from Taiwan to Brazil, with notable events including Advertising Week New York and London, Ad Age's Business of Brands in Chicago, Brand Innovators in New York, Possible in Miami and AdAI in Toronto. Her articles and interviews can be found in publications such as Adweek, AdExchanger, Digiday and the Association of National Advertisers. She has also been a juror for the likes of The Drum and Future is Female. As EVP Omnichannel at Wilkins Media, Stephanie has previously held roles as Global Chief Strategy Officer at Billups, Global Head of DOOH at Yahoo, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Programmatic Sales at OUTFRONT Media, and Vice President, Business Development at Broadsign. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Association of New York and Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal. Stephanie graduated with a BA from McGill University and has a MBA and doctorate from Edinburgh Business School. Ways to connect with Dr. Stephanie**:** People can follow me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniegutnik/) Tuxedo concepts (tuxedoconcepts.com). My book is available through Amazon and directly through Book Baby (https://store.bookbaby.com/book/my-very-best) About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson  00:04 What if the biggest thing holding you back isn't what's in front of you, but rather what you believe? Welcome to Unstoppable Mindset, where inclusion, diversity, and the unexpected meet. I'm your host, Michael Hingston, speaker, author, and advocate for inclusion and possibilities. This podcast explores how the beliefs we carry shape the way we live, lead, and connect with others. Each week, I talk with people who challenge assumptions, face adversity head-on, and show what's possible when we choose curiosity over fear. Together, we focus on mindset, resilience, and the small shifts that lead to meaningful change. Let's get started. Hi there! Welcome to another episode of Unstoppable Mindset. We're glad you're with us wherever you happen to be. Hope you're having a good day. Our person that we get to chat with today is Dr. Stephanie Gutnik, Doctor No Less. We'll have to find out about that, but she is is here from Toronto, where right now it's pretty cold because we're recording this on the 30th of January, so it's cold where she is. It's not quite as cold where I live in Victorville, California, but we're doing okay and we'll cope. So Dr. Gutnik is the president of Tuxedo Concepts, and I'm not going to go into any detail about it because I want to leave all that for her. So we'll just do it this way. Stephanie, welcome to Unstoppable Mindset. We're glad you're here. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  01:49 I am so glad to be here. Thank you. Michael Hingson  01:51 Why don't you tell us a little about maybe the early Stephanie growing up and all that? Let's start with that. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  01:57 All right. The early Stephanie grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is even colder than Toronto is this time. So I'm definitely used to snow and negative temperatures, and I just had a wonderful, wonderful upbringing to be in the prairies. You get perspective on a lot in life, and was very close with family, friends, and then very quickly I wanted to discover more of the world, so I left to study at McGill for undergrad, and it's in Montreal, in Canada. And my life took shape around that. I traveled the world. I continued my academic pursuits and certainly climbed my way up in the business world as well. Michael Hingson  02:47 How did travel to various places sort of shape your outlook on things? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  02:54 I've always had the travel bug. Growing up, we would go away to you know different parts of the states and some warmer destinations with a family road trip as well. And then as I got older, it was it was Europe, it was Australia, and I was always very happy to travel alone or with groups of people that I met for the first time. And I was just really curious to see what life was like in other places, and that translated very nicely into my my working reality, where I was largely in marketing and business development throughout my career, and I was with companies at first that were rapidly expanding internationally. So I was able to open an office in China and set a business plan for you know hiring in the Middle East and go to South America and speak and and grow the business. So I'm really grateful because when I meet people now, typically wherever they're from, I can you know pick my favorite food that I ate while I was there, and we have something to smile about and talk about. Michael Hingson  04:04 That's pretty cool. Well, I I haven't traveled as as much as you have, but I've traveled enough, and I enjoy travel. I enjoy going to different places and meeting people and experiencing different customs. And even around the United States, there's so many diverse and different kinds of environments. It's it's pretty fascinating. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  04:25 Very much. Do you have a favorite place in the U.S. Michael Hingson  04:29 Oh, it's still going to be California because the weather's better. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  04:34 I hear you. I Michael Hingson  04:35 my favorite place is probably in the San Diego area because I think it's still the best weather anywhere. It's a temperate climate. It's a good climate. It doesn't really get cold to freezing very often, although it can in the winter. But it warms right up during the day. So I really like San Diego. We enjoyed my wife and I living in San the San. San Francisco area. We lived in a town called Novato, which is in the North Bay of the San Francisco area. We lived there for 12 years, and I enjoyed that too. But San Diego still has the best weather. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  05:12 The air in La Jolla is is delicious. Michael Hingson  05:17 Oh yeah, Speaker 1  05:18 yeah, Michael Hingson  05:19 and and of course that's the whole point. La Jolla is such a nice place, and it's northern San Diego County, and you've got the beach, and you've got the university there, and so many other things that make it a nice place. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  05:32 Very true. Michael Hingson  05:33 Now I live in Victorville, which is kind of up on the high desert of California, so it's not exactly the same. And I never thought I would live here. But we moved here because it was the only property in Southern California when we wanted to move down to be closer to family. It was the only property that we or place where we found property where we could build a home, and we wanted to build a home because my wife was in a wheelchair her whole life, so we wanted to build an accessible home, and that's what we did. So we've been here now. I've been here for well. We moved down in July of 2014. So my gosh, it's going to be 12 years in five months, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  06:13 isn't it? It's funny that you say that because I always find in life there just you find yourself in circumstances that you did not plan, and then they become rather permanent, and you can't really envision your life without that place or that circumstance. Michael Hingson  06:30 I hear you. I agree. And well, and you know, this house is very comfortable. I like it. My wife unfortunately passed away in November of 2022, so it's me, a dog, and a cat, but I enjoy it, and I'm I'm perfectly happy here. I said I never thought I would live in Victorville, but that's okay. That is where I am, and the house is wonderful, so I I'm I'm fine with it. If I had one thing to say about Victorville, it is the drivers up here all think they own the road, and they're as far as I'm concerned. I ought to be able to get a driver's license because I could drive as well as a lot of the people up here. I don't see the problem myself. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  07:12 But up until recently, I hadn't driven a car in like at least 12 years, just from living, you know, in more cosmopolitan cities, and really enjoying a good walk. Michael Hingson  07:24 Yeah, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  07:24 just yeah. Michael Hingson  07:25 But you drive now? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  07:27 No, I've just been behind the wheel to break that. Break that. Michael Hingson  07:31 Just to get into that habit. Yeah. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  07:33 Totally. Yeah. Michael Hingson  07:35 Well, and Toronto, you you can certainly get around Toronto without a lot Of grief, Speaker 2  07:41 totally, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  07:41 yeah. I am. I very much value the ability to live somewhere where you can just run out and pick something up to eat, or you know, see people around you. I think it's important. Certainly, it feeds me. Michael Hingson  07:58 Yeah. So, and I and really, for the most part, enjoyed living in New Jersey and working in New York City. New York City is a great place to be able to get around. It's pretty easy to to travel anywhere in the city, subways and all that. Now, it wasn't as easy for my wife because she was in a wheelchair her whole life, and a lot of subway stations and so on aren't accessible. But one day, it was actually before we moved back there. We were both we were in the city, and my wife wanted to go see the UN, and it turns out that she could go downstairs in the hotel where where we were staying, and I was doing other work. But she was able to get a bus that took her right to where the UN was. She could wheel across the street and take a tour of the United Nations and so on, and then take the bus back home because everything was accessible. So she was really excited about having had the opportunity to do that. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  09:09 I love that. Michael Hingson  09:11 Yeah, I was at. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  09:12 It really is, and it's important. I was at Yahoo for a couple years, running a division there globally, and when I started, it was part of Verizon Media. Yes, Verizon Media, part of Verizon, and the work that groups were doing on accessible features and technology really intrigued me. And you kind of think there should be an element of that at every company producing whatever it is that they're doing because it makes such a difference. Michael Hingson  09:41 Well, when you think about it in terms of, let's say, in the U.S. for example, the Center for Disease Control says that up to 25% of all people have a disability. Now, I disagree with that, and I'll come back to that in a moment. But they say 25% have a disability, and so often. Often companies don't deal with that. They're leaving out 25% of their prospective customers because they don't want to make things accessible. And there is so much evidence to show that companies that do create accessibility get the brand loyalty and they get the business, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  10:21 yeah. Michael Hingson  10:22 And the reason I object to 25% is my belief is everybody has a disability. For most of you, it's light dependence. You all don't do well when the lights go out, unless you happen to have a smartphone or a flashlight or whatever. So I describe disability as a characteristic that everyone has. It's just that it manifests itself differently for different people, but that's that's that's my view on it. And one of these days, we'll get more of society to recognize that there is a lot more that they need to do to to to deal with preventing this whole business of leaving so many people out. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  11:00 I mean, I couldn't agree more with you. By the way, and there's also, you know, call it disability or whatever you want. Everybody has something in their life that you know it either doesn't make it as easy or makes it their own. And so the whole point of you know when you talk about a customer base, really just interacting as humans, it's how do we how do we understand that everybody is dealing with you know one thing and what can we do and you know throughout my throughout my working career I was somebody who like despite being born in Winnipeg I should have been born in Manhattan because my work ethic is one where I'll work day and night and be very happy about it. I walk quickly. I get things done quickly, and so it was. You know, if you if you give me a challenge, I'll do anything to you know fulfill it. And I think what has what I've seen with myself and amongst others in my network, is that that type of personality begets a whole slew of other issues: burnout, health issues, stress. And so, one thing that I developed and have started to take on the road. I know you're a public speaker. I am as well. I call it the wellness workshop, and it's not you know get up at five in the morning and do your yoga and then your 30 minute meditation and then your your 5k run or it really is much more more tangible and certain tips and tricks that we can do when we're on an airplane or you know in a hotel or just in a period where we're feeling overwhelmed, and I really believe that we have to be cognizant of what's going on with each other in the workplace and just in general, and be able to offer some of the these these guidelines to just help everyone, you know, be okay, if you will. Michael Hingson  13:00 One of the things that I have adopted as a pretty hard line way of living is when I'm flying to travel and speak. I don't want to work on the airplane going or coming. Rather, I'll use that time to sort of mentally prepare because when I get off the airplane at a destination, I know I'm on until I get off until I fly out again. There are going to be people who want my attention and all that. So I use that time to relax, and then when I leave again, I don't want to work. I want to be able to kind of unwind. So I like to read and do things like that, but I I use those airplane flights basically as a time to unplug. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  13:49 Yeah, and see, you're being mindful of the space that you need to let yourself unwind and be that much more productive, and have your battery recharged when you're when you're landed. But I think more Michael Hingson  14:01 people should do that. And there are so many different kinds of things that we can do. We collectively, as a society, tend not to be overly introspective. We don't think about things. So something doesn't go right. We consider it a failure. We worry about it. We fret about it. But what we don't do is listen to our own inner voice, and we don't analyze well. So, what was the real problem here? What am I afraid of? What can I do to make sure that this doesn't happen again? We don't ask ourselves those questions. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  14:31 Oh wow! I kind of needed to hear that actually today. So, thank you for bringing that up. You're very right. Michael Hingson  14:37 Is that because you haven't figured out why you live in the snow. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  14:41 I'm working on that. Yeah, there you are. Yeah, cold is actually very good for our vagus nerves. So yeah, Michael Hingson  14:48 well, I it it gets fairly cool here at night. It was down to oh what 27 degrees, so it was like minus. Two or three Celsius a couple of weeks ago here, and but I am I I can keep pretty warm, and when I'm sleeping at night, my cat sleeps right up next to me. She does it because it keeps her warm, but it helps keep me warm too. So I'm not complaining. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  15:19 There you go. Michael Hingson  15:20 But I minus Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  15:21 minus two. By the way, that's beach weather. Michael Hingson  15:24 Yeah, yeah. Well, there you are. Yeah, fine. You go to the beach then. But I, but I think that we we really do need to collectively and individually think about the need to unplug to to not just always do every single thing and that the same way, and then when there's a problem, we don't take time to think about it, which is a real problem. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  15:51 There's also the concept of I don't know if we're raised with this or if at some point we think this is what happens in society, but to think that our lives are almost like a staircase, and that the older we get, the further up the staircase we should be going, is is quite a fallacy. Because again, it you know you're gonna it's just not how it works. Sometimes things stay flat. Sometimes you're gonna go down a few steps. And no, this is called. We're all about the unstoppable mindset here, right? So it really is. If you're falling down a few stairs, what do you do to get back up? I would say, Michael Hingson  16:31 right? Yeah, and that's and that's it. And you have to really look for that answer, which is which is Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  16:40 the issue. So, Michael Hingson  16:41 yeah, go ahead. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  16:42 I was just going to say, like, is that something that people can learn, or is it something that you, you know, is ingrained in you from a younger age? Michael Hingson  16:51 Well, I think that for some people it it may be, and I think, but it is a matter of life. It is a matter of upbringing. I think it is something that people can learn. So during the pandemic, I wrote my book "Live Like a Guide Dog: True Stories for a Blind Person and His Dogs About Being Brave, Overcoming Adversity, and and Moving Forward in Faith. And what I talk about through as the basic premise of the book is that in reality, we can learn to control fear. I will not say we should never be a. We should never say we're not afraid. We should never say that. Oh, I don't ever experience fear. We do experience fear, and it's evidenced in so many ways. But you can either allow fear to overwhelm you and and as I would put it, blind you, or you can learn to control fear. You can learn that fear can be a very powerful tool to help you. And my evidence of that is that I learned so much prior to September 11th about what to do in emergency and other things like that. And all of that clicked in on September 11th. But I realized during the beginning of the pandemic that I'd never taught other people to do the kinds of things that that I do, and that I still tend to do. And so, I wrote "Live Like a Guide Dog" to to try to teach people by using examples that I learned from my eight guide dogs and my wife's service dog about how to live. So, the example I use most often is people. What if everything to death? Well, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if this? What if that? And the reality is, 95% of that will we have no control over, and all we do is create fear and worry because we keep going "What if" about this, and there's nothing we can do about it. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be aware of things, but we don't have to worry about them. We don't have to focus on all the stuff over which we have no control. Dogs don't. What if anything? And I learned that because on September 11th, when we got home, I was going to take my guide dog Rozelle out. I took the harness off, and she ran off and grabbed her favorite tug toy and started playing tug of war with my retired guide dog Linnie. And when I talked to the people, the veterinarians at Guide Dogs for the Blind, where I got Roselle, I talked to them the next day. They said, "Well, did anything threaten her at the World Trade Center? And I said, "No. And they said, "There's your answer. When the harness came off, it was over for her. They don't. They don't. What if? And we should learn that. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  19:27 And she wasn't. She wasn't processing what just happened. She just moved on. Michael Hingson  19:32 She moved on. You know, and and people still today fear it, and they worry about so many Things as I said, the the fact is we should be aware, but it doesn't mean that we have to worry about, especially if we don't have control over it. I rented office space in the World Trade Center in late 1999, early 2000, and. I was able to get office space because there had been a bombing in the World Trade Center in 1993. It wasn't much of a bombing. It was an explosion in a parking lot on the fourth sub sub level of the World Trade Center. So it wasn't the last. Yeah, it wasn't a big thing, but the occupancy rate by the time I was looking for office space, had dropped to 80% and why? If if something were to happen, something would would happen. But people worried about it, and so many people left the World Trade Center, and I thank them for doing that because I got a great rate, and we rented office space there. So fine, but but the fact of the matter is that we worry about so many things over which we just don't have control, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  20:48 right? So you're a bit of a risk taker too in that sense. Michael Hingson  20:51 Well, in a sense, but you know, so there was a bomb that a car something exploded, and I understand that, but was it a true risk to go off and rent space in that building and that complex afterward? Well, is there risk in doing it today with the new complex? The fact of the matter is that there are always going to be things that can happen. the The question is, is it really taking a risk, or are you being silly and putting yourself in harm's way? I won't do that if I can avoid it. But that doesn't mean that I'm not gonna gonna be out there and try to live my life and and help others do the same. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  21:38 That's the biggest thing: not living in fear of of so many different variables, Michael Hingson  21:44 right? So you went to McGill, and you you worked in you graduated with what degrees in business or what? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  21:53 No, I graduated with a bachelor of arts in political science and communications. Okay, I went to McGill thinking that I was going to become a broadcast journalist. I loved the idea of being on camera and in the heat of something going on. And I've been told that I ask a lot of questions, and it's just it comes naturally. I'm very curious, so I love speaking to people and getting their opinions on various things, and then bringing that all together for what hopefully is a representative story of multiple truths, right? And I'm still like that to this day. So everything, if I had you know strength, it would be how do I compile a lot of information and then kind of organize it to to cut certain things out and really get at the crux of whatever it is that we're dealing with. So I loved I loved that. I still do. I had an internship at CTV Montreal, so it was a big news station nationally in Canada. And you know what? It was one of those things where I just didn't feel like a fit for me at that time, and so again, it's what do you do after? Oh, I was entering my my last year of undergrad, and I I thought, okay, maybe I'll just go do a master's because I really loved. I've always loved school, and instead, I got the advice: just go out there and pick something and work a little bit and figure out, you know, what it is that you want to do from there. When you're, I graduated a year early, so I was 21. It is hard to know what you want to do, right? I think a lot of young people find themselves in that position, and instead of, I guess, going back to the idea of fear, instead of being paralyzed by it and not doing anything, just do something, and at least it puts you on some sort of path. So, what did Michael Hingson  23:44 you do? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  23:45 I got lucky. I ended up working for News Corp in Montreal for a couple of years in advertising sales, and that introduced me to the world of advertising. It helped me refine sales sales, you know, efforts and and skills, and I think that understanding how sales work, whatever you do in your life, that's going to come in handy, right? So I was doing that, and I was dealing with agencies and marketers for various different brands, like L'Oreal, for example, Denon, and I liked what they were doing. So then that led me to a job in marketing for a software company, and that's the story: is marketing turned into business development and partnerships, and launching a new tech effort and expanding with that company across the world. And I was able to lean into a lot of writing and speaking, and that's that's how my career evolved. And I did my MBA while I was working for that company, so there were a lot of lots of studying during plane rides. So not quite the unwinding, but it was definitely a break. From the actual work, Michael Hingson  25:02 well, that's fine, and you, you, you've you've done a lot with it. So you got your master's degree. Where did you get that from? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  25:11 That was from Edinburgh Business School. So I did that remotely because I was traveling a lot, and I had a lot of business in the UK. So it made sense to do something around there, and again from there I was recruited to. I built a lot of my own positions while I was at this company, always going, "Oh, this isn't being dealt with. Why don't I take a stab at it and see what happens? Oh, there's a gap here. Let me figure that out. Even you know, the Middle East is one that I like talking about because at the time we were not doing any business there, and I had a hunch that I was like, "Look at all the research. We should be there. We should have a sales rep at least. And the CEO at the time said, "No, no, it's it's not really. I don't agree. So we made a deal for a small amount of money. I was able to figure out my trip and see if I could make a business plan, and so I took a flight from Montreal that had two stops to get there. Lost my luggage, and I know. But on the way back, I mean, long story short, the company now has a thriving business in that region, and while I was there, maybe there's a certain age at which you don't know any better. But I think I've always had this and always will. Is I was raised to understand that if you don't ask, either you don't get or you won't know. So I reached out to the editor of Golf News, which is their biggest paper there? And I said, "Hey, you know, I'm here growing a business in this industry. Can I write an article for you? And he said, "Yes, and it was published. And so stories like that is it kind of defines my life. I always like to figure out what else I could do and and learn from it and push the envelope a little bit. Michael Hingson  27:02 Yeah, sometimes you have to to take a stand. Sometimes you you have to develop your own mental toughness. And when when people disagree, you unless they can really present some strong argument, then you really just need to to push forward. And and clearly that's what you did, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  27:21 yeah. And look, sometimes you're right, and sometimes you're wrong, and that's a learning experience in itself, and that's part of being humbled. And I think that's equally as important. Michael Hingson  27:32 Yeah, and it's all part of the adventure of life. If Speaker 3  27:40 you enjoy Unstoppable Mindset and would like to help us continue bringing these conversations to you each week, we've created a way for you to support the show. Your contribution helps us cover production costs and continue sharing stories, insights, and ideas that inspire people to live with purpose and possibility. If supporting the podcast feels right for you, you'll find the link in the show notes. Thank you for being part of the Unstoppable Mindset Community. Michael Hingson  28:13 What made you decide to get a doctorate? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  28:16 Ah, so after the MBA again, I loved school, and I figured, why not just keep going? And I was moving to New York, and it was my mom who said, "You know what, Steph? Like, you're. I think I was I was 26. She goes, "Just enjoy your life a little bit, and she wasn't wrong. So I took a few years, and after that, it was still at the back of my mind. I still really wanted to continue and take my education as far as I could. So I thought long and hard about what I would want to study for that kind of time. And you know, it's not going to change the world. But I studied the advertising effects of mass media and ones that have been changing as a result of you know the whole media landscape has been digitized, so that's what I did. And actually, the the brand that I worked with for my research is a company out of California called Goodr. So they they make sunglasses, and I worked with their marketing team, and it was just a wonderful experience. And again, it's a different way of thinking. By that point, I was very much an executive, and I had been at private and public companies. And going back to school in that sense and learning, you know, in the business world, everything is about being concise, which I think is a very powerful skill to have. And in academia, you slow things down, and you really look at the whole picture plus all of the small, small details that build it. So, I'm an impatient person, and that definitely took some some work, but I loved the whole process. It wasn't easy, but I'm very happy that I did it. Michael Hingson  30:03 So, when did you get your PhD? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  30:05 I graduated. I want to say two odd years ago, two or three years ago. Michael Hingson  30:11 Congratulations! Well, that's cool. Thank you Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  30:13 very much. Yeah. Michael Hingson  30:15 How how do you think that AI is affecting the the world of media, the world of public relations and marketing, and so on. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  30:27 So, despite working in ad tech, I myself am quite a luddite. I I'm very removed. I don't have too much social media, and usually with technology, unless it really benefits me, I'm not going to be the first. I'm not going to be an early adopter, if you will. So with AI, I appreciate you know the the code and so on that it's built on all of the the knowledge behind it and how it works. And I definitely think there's so many realms in which it's going to help us advance as a society, and I think that with advertising and marketing and media, AI helps take out. It's there's something that preceded it in terms of media buying called programmatic that I've spent a lot of my career dedicated to, and programmatic just really automated media buying and selling, made a little bit easier than picking up the phone and calling two dozen different vendors to put a campaign together, and so with AI, it does that even more so. It just takes out a lot of the more tedious and redundant work from media planners to strategists and helps us understand a little bit better how marketing dollars are actually put to work, and how effective they are in terms of the results that we see. But here's the thing: is as much as AI is going to simplify certain processes, we, at the end of the day, are human beings, and the reason why, as far as I know, nobody's really mastered the stock market yet. It's because we're driven by emotion and we're fickle, and think it takes a lot for a machine to understand how we think and how we work. And so the same thing applies to advertising because for an ad to be effective, it has to strike a chord with humans somehow. So I think that by nature of us being human, the the world of advertising will still have media departments and creative teams, and have to continue to think about you know the strategy behind what it is that we're doing. Michael Hingson  32:34 How about social? What would you say? Well, I I think there's a lot of truth to all that. I think that AI is a tool, and different people will use it in different ways. And I'm not going to even go to the negative aspects of it because the the reality is most anything that we create, somebody will find a way to misuse it, and and I can't worry about that. But I do see the value of AI and the AI technology, in terms of how it can help us codify or create different kinds of aspects of whether it's marketing or or anything else, AI can assist us. But it is a tool, and we're still the humans, and we're going to be the ones that will be in control. I'm not ready to accept that it can take over in the end. I don't think that's going to happen. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  33:28 I'm still. I'm still not even thinking about Michael Hingson  33:32 it. Yeah, I just think I think there are a lot of ways that we can use it. AI has done already a number of really good things for us collectively, and I think that's great. That doesn't mean that we're all going to use it, or that doesn't mean that we'll all use it extremely, well, in an extremely productive way all the time. But it is out there, and I think it's again, it's one of those things that's worth learning about and understanding because it's going to be here. It's not going away, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  34:07 right? Michael Hingson  34:08 How about social media? That's the that's the other one that's become even more pervasive. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  34:14 And social media, again, just by nature of who I am, I am not big on it, and it's not knocking it. I just know that it's not, it's not something that I want to have in my life to the extent that some others do want it in theirs. I'm really good with just doing my own thing and focusing on my little bubble in terms of you know the restaurants that I choose to go to and what food I'm eating and and all of that and with the people who are in my life I love hearing from them directly and getting updates and seeing their pictures so I definitely I use LinkedIn for business I think it's fantastic yeah and it's a wonderful platform to to build a profile and interact with people. Your world that way, and I think that there's a lot of people doing the same with other platforms. And so, when I look at social media from a business perspective, I think it's amazing. And when I look at it from a personal perspective, again, it's not for me, but I I think if people enjoy being on it, that's totally up to them. I can't. I just don't really have the patience to to. I'd rather do something else. I'd rather work on, you know, either my my full time job or my my business is on the side, or go for a walk. Quite frankly. Well, Michael Hingson  35:39 I think again, I'm I'm I'm kind of with you. I think that, especially personally speaking, people who spend hours a day on social media are missing out on so many other kinds of things that would would be even better. And and a lot of that has to do with personal contact with other people, which you don't have. No matter what people may say, you don't have when you're just dealing with communicating through social media. That's not the same. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  36:08 It's true. Plus, there's the element. Yeah, and there's I think people feel pressure, and we see this. It goes both ways, but I do think there's a bit of a pressure to put your best foot forward in a social media environment, right? Whether it's Photoshop or editing or posing for you know a lovely photo when you're not doing great, whatever it might be, and I think that's slowly changing. But for me, it's more. Think we're all just trying to do our best, and you know, I don't. It just doesn't work for me on a personal level. Michael Hingson  36:45 Yeah, I think we should try to be doing our best all the time, anyway. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  36:48 Yeah, that's true. Exactly. We should. Well, that actually leads me to. This is a. You know, I'm. I'm going to go for it. This is a plug. It's. I wrote a book called My Very Best for that reason. Actually, I was going to talk to you about that. Yeah, go Michael Hingson  37:03 ahead. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  37:04 So you know exactly what you're doing. Yeah. And by the Michael Hingson  37:07 way, I would appreciate it because I don't think that you did send me a picture of the book cover that we can put in the the notes, the show notes. I Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  37:14 did, and I will follow up with that again. Thank you so much. It's that was something that I've always wanted to do. When I was younger, my mom tells me about how I used to bring a stack of books over to her to read to me, and I definitely have fond memories of reading books to my sister, who's younger than me. And I've always just loved children's books because they're they're so beautiful in their simplicity and the way that they can frame a young mind into being curious and imagining and learning so much about the world, and so I wanted to definitely write a book about the values that my sister and I were raised with. She told me that she was having our first child about a year ago at this time, and so in that time frame, I was like, "This is the moment. This is when I have to write a book. And so I wrote it for for him and her, my nephew. And it was one thing where I just I started with writing out the the copy, and then I needed to get it illustrated, and then from there I was like, you know what? I've done all this work. Let me let me publish it. And so I just was a big learning experience and so much fun. And I had readings, and I just went to go see it on the shelf at Canada's biggest bookstore called Indigo. And I'm I'm so thrilled. So I wrote it because my parents really-they raised my sister and I to really understand that it's not about being the best; it's about giving something your best effort. Because that way, you know, if you do well, great-you worked really hard to get there. And if you don't do well, you're not going to be wondering, hmm, if I only had tried more, because then you're disappointed with yourself. So it's about setting yourself up to always be proud of who you are, and that's really important to me. Michael Hingson  39:11 Are there any books, other books inside of you that may come on in the future? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  39:14 Oh, well, that one I I'm loving right now. If we consider my thesis, my doctoral thesis, a book, that one will put you to sleep because it's long and quite academic. Many theses Michael Hingson  39:31 will do that. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  39:32 Yeah, and I think I quite like. I can see moving forward the more journalistic style articles. So maybe there are a few of those that address very specific moments or questions. Maybe we'll we'll see some of those come out. And what about you? Given that you are also you're a New York Times bestseller, do you have anything up your sleeve? Michael Hingson  39:53 Not at the moment, but we'll see down the line. But one of the things that that I believe. His and I and I've roused about this even on the podcast a few times. I think that textbooks are so boring, and they shouldn't be. I think that every every textbook that that someone writes ought to have some personal things in it to help draw readers into being more excited about learning more about what's in the textbook. So a physics book is is real lovely, but it's very boring. Why don't Why don't they have Why don't the physicists, the scientists who create those books, put in as part of what they do some stories about their efforts, some stories about the discoveries they've made to really make the books more personal and to draw people in. Publishers don't want that, but the reality is it would really attract, I think, a lot more interest in textbook material. And and the same thing with technical journals and technical manuals. They're so boring, and there's so much more that could be done with them. I think that would would attract people much more than than they do today. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  41:07 There's something about humanizing and adding a little bit of maybe even imperfection. Dare I say, like, hey, this is what happened, and let's be real about the situation. That yeah, makes it more entertaining for sure. Yeah, Michael Hingson  41:20 yeah, which I think makes makes perfect sense, and and it would be I think a wonderful thing to do. Well, maybe we'll have to start a new publishing company and insist that the people who write books for our company do that. Some to think about it. I'm with you. We Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  41:38 can we can offline on that. Michael Hingson  41:40 Yeah, ought to be able to do something with it. Well, so anyway, for you, so you wrote the children's book, and and it's out there. Did you self publish it, or was it published by a company? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  41:53 Yeah, I went through a company based in New Jersey, and they just had the perfect platform and distribution for me, and it really-I would say-around the time that I was 35, which is now when I turned that age, I really started thinking about like you know, okay, our life doesn't have to be cut and paste, and there really is no manual. And I had thought that for most of it, I would look at people that I admire or respect, or people around me, and look at them, evaluate the milestones that they had reached by specific ages, and then I'd look at myself, and you know, sometimes I was feeding those milestones. In my opinion, like I, I worked my way up the corporate ladder very quickly, but there were other ways in which, at the time, I thought I was lagging or, or dare I say, failing, because certain other elements of my life weren't where other people's were, or I thought it should be. So I've been going through a process really of of letting that go, and again, just to your going full circle to what you said earlier, just being a bit more introspective and appreciating that we're all again trying to just do our best here, and nobody's journey is going to look the same. So with that has just come. I've always again I've always wanted to try new things, but it always is. I'll wake up in the morning and go like, you know, what do I want to do today? Who should I reach out to to see if there's some way to collaborate or have a new experience? And it's just made for really fun travels and stories and successes and and learning experiences. And I'm, but I'm working on that. I can say that as much as I want, and I think, you know, it's it's really believing it that is a bit more of an effort. Michael Hingson  43:48 Well, there you go, and you know, it'll it'll be interesting to to see how it all comes out as you go forward. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  43:54 Yeah, did you have that at all throughout yours? As you know, those periods of of Like plateaus, Michael Hingson  44:02 I think probably so, but I but I don't think that I really ever thought that that I was failing. There were times that that things were not happening the way I would like, and usually what I needed to do was to make an adjustment in my attitude to understand why things were going slower or not the way I expected, and sometimes they weren't going the way I expected because I had the wrong expectations. And again, I love introspection, and those are things that I learned along the way. And I also discovered that when I reevaluated and said, "Oh, maybe this really wasn't the right way to do this. Let's look at this. I think that's that's an important thing to do, but I usually find, and I still do, that if something's not working right. Usually, my inner voice, if you will, will tell me what is good, what's working, what's not working, what should be done, and I have to be the one to pay attention to that. and And if I don't, then I can get into trouble. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  45:15 It's amazing how much our our gut instincts really know what's best for us in certain situations, and how sometimes it takes a minute for our brain to to get there too. Michael Hingson  45:29 Yeah. Now, are you a spiritual person at all? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  45:32 Oh, totally. Another good segue. Yes, I believe in the scientific method, obviously. So, so that's that's that. But I am comforted by the idea that there's a lot more to what we're doing here than what is commonly accepted. Michael Hingson  45:50 Yeah, I think I think that's absolutely true, and that gets back to my comment about the inner voice, which is, if you want to say God talking to us or however you want to view it. It doesn't matter. the The point is that I think the information is there if we learn to listen and and accept it. Our our own minds absorb so many things that we tend to forget about, but all that information is there for us to use if we would, but tap into it, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  46:24 yeah, Michael Hingson  46:24 or allow it, or when it and it when it tries to tap us on the shoulder and say do it this way, we need to learn to listen. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  46:32 Ooh, and that's a great point too. Is for people who are used to propelling, you know, things forward, and you had mentioned what's out of our control. That's another really important word that I speak about in wellness and has been given to me. Yeah, do I see a do I see a psychic? Absolutely. I often get the words render because, again, sometimes it's just it's being able to to accept, and I do a little bit of Kabbalah in terms of reading and and learning about how that works. And the the term actually means to receive. So when we look at what we're doing here again, I think you want to put out some energy to put things in motion, and then there's a point where you just have to let life come to you. Michael Hingson  47:21 Well, and I think also it's it's so helpful at night to when when falling asleep, even you want to do something. Ask your ask yourself, what do you think about this? Should I do this? Give me guidance and give me insight as to what works. The more of that we do, the more we develop our mind muscle to be able to get the information and process it and do something with it, and that will help us. But it it has to be a discipline that we create and develop to really work on getting that information and seeking it every day, and listening to what our minds are telling us. I, people probably will get bored with this because I say it often on the podcast, but I talk about Trivial Pursuit. You know the game. How often do we get a question asked on a game, Trivial Pursuit, and we immediately think of an answer, and we go, "Oh, that was just too easy. That can't be it. And we think a little bit more about other options, and we choose a different option. But the first one that we thought about was really the right answer. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  48:33 Yes, Michael Hingson  48:34 exactly. And the point is that happened, and people agree. Now, what do we do about it? Well, we learn to listen to that inner voice. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  48:42 The same thing happens with students, by the way, on exams. Multiple choice is not always that easy because so many students have the tendency to second guess themselves. Michael Hingson  48:53 Yeah, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  48:54 and it's usually that their first instinct was the right answer. Michael Hingson  48:57 Right. Yeah. If they would just but listen and learn; they'll get the right answer by doing that. And and the reality is that I think there are some studies that have been done that people that truly do learn to listen and take those first answers and use them tend to be right a whole lot more often than they otherwise would have been, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  49:21 yeah. Again, trusting our instincts, Michael Hingson  49:25 right? Yeah. So, what kind of projects are you working on now? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  49:30 Oh, well, again, I I'm an EVP at an ad agency, so that's my that's my full time project. EVP. But then I always EVP, Executive Vice President. Michael Hingson  49:40 Oh, EVP. Okay, yeah, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  49:41 yeah. Okay, Michael Hingson  49:42 VP. Okay, got Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  49:43 it. Yeah, with an E. You know, if we're if we're looking at, so that keeps me very busy. And then on the side, I always again, I think it's very important to have an identity outside of work, and this is something that I actually had to learn. Because for a while there, my my job title and so on was my whole life, and you can do have hobbies and so on. The side for me, it has to be more constructive than that. So the other things that I have on the go is I have my company Tuxedo Concepts, where I do all different types of consulting work. I have clients across the world in the world of media through to you know a private equity fund called Links Equity, and I'm actually working on a protein superfood snack right now called Balance Bites. So that's another I'm snacking all the time, and I have a massive sweet tooth, so usually I'm going for like the brownies and the cookies, and I work with the founder of this brand, and they're packed with a lot of nutrients that give me a lot more energy throughout the day. So that is something that I definitely want to bring to more people. Michael Hingson  50:58 Oh, that's exciting! Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  50:59 It lines very nicely with this this whole wellness kick that that I'm trying to bring to others, but not not in the lifestyle that's impractical to some people or makes them you know not even want to think about it. More so again with those ideas of if you're feeling overwhelmed or anxious, splash some cold water on your face, right? Like there's there's certain tips like that that you don't have to go to a yoga studio or sign up for a gym membership. Though you know you should be exploring physical activity. It's what are small things that we can be doing for ourselves to bring us back into the moment. Michael Hingson  51:37 Do you think there are things in your life that that you're not doing that-that you should be doing, or that that you miss. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  51:46 Oh, on a personal level, I feel yeah. At this age, that probably from a family perspective, I should be getting on that. But that is one of those things that is so out of our control, and I find that in those instances, just it's very easy to look at what we don't have and yearn for it, but that can be depressing. So instead, it's it's much more fulfilling to look at what we do have and lean into that. Right? Michael Hingson  52:19 Yeah, I know that when my wife and I got married, we both pretty much thought we knew what we wanted in a partner, and we kept looking until we found it. We found each other, and and that worked. But we were I was 32 and she was 33, so we didn't get married right away, but the other side of it is we met in January of 1982, and we got married in November of 1982 because it clicked. We knew what we wanted, and we saw things in so many ways exactly the same. But there were also times that we disagreed with things. But you communicate. You you work through it, right? Michael Hingson  53:03 So, for example, she didn't want to have children because she felt that that would be kind of hard on her body being in a chair in her case, and I was fine with that. But our our solution to that was we'll be glad to entertain nieces and nephews and things like that because at the end of the day, we can either sell them to the gypsies or send them home, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  53:24 and that's beautiful, right? You still have such a wonderful impact on other people, and that's a thank you for sharing that. And one of my one Michael Hingson  53:34 of our nieces lives about three miles from me, and we see each other all the time. She and her husband, and now their kids are grown and have kids of their own, so we we get to see everybody. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  53:47 That is lovely. What about you? Are there any things that you still have on your bucket list that you'd like to be doing right now? Michael Hingson  53:55 Well, I certainly want to do more speaking because I want to keep that going. I'd like to to travel more, but it's not nearly as fun for me, at least traveling alone. But one of these one of these years, certainly in the next two or so years, I'll probably decide to take a cruise because I love cruising. Yeah, me Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  54:15 too. Michael Hingson  54:16 And I and I can do really fine cruising. I think that's a lot of fun to Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  54:21 do. Definitely. Which which part of the world would you cruise in? Michael Hingson  54:25 You know, I'm pretty open on that. I I first of all, I've been to New Zealand. I'd love to go to Australia, but as far as cruising, I'm pretty open. I'd like to to do a cruise up and down the Mississippi River, but I'd like to to to do some cruising around Europe or other places as well. I think it'd be fun. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  54:46 Yes, I I very much agree. My family went on. I was very fortunate. We did four cruises together, my parents, sister, and I all over the Caribbean and Mexico, and then I did one in South America, and I've done one. In Greece and Turkey, and I also I took a catamaran with about a dozen strangers in Thailand for almost two weeks. Yes, well, because why not? Michael Hingson  55:12 First cruise that we took, Karen was a travel agent at the time, actually, and her family wanted to go on a cruise. We did a two week Trans Panama Canal cruise, that was a lot of fun. Loved it. Then we did a cruise to Mexico, and I think we did another cruise in the Caribbean, and then the last cruise we took was to Alaska, which was a lot of fun. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  55:42 Okay, that is wonderful. Michael Hingson  55:45 Yeah. Was there anything Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  55:45 in Alaska that surprised you? Michael Hingson  55:48 Nothing that surprised me. It was just fun to go for me and and Karen actually. Although it's fun to get off and tour, we're fine if we're just on the ship the whole time, even just because it's the it's relaxing, it's the attitude and and and having fun. But but I would like to go and and cruise some. I think we'll do that sometime in the near future. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  56:13 Well, I mean, I'm all for it. You let me know when you go. Want to go? Yeah, I'm down. Michael Hingson  56:20 Yeah, we'll have to do that. That'd be fun, but yeah, we'll kick off Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  56:24 our textbook company on the cruise. Michael Hingson  56:26 There you go. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  56:27 Multitask Michael Hingson  56:28 books afloat Inc. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  56:30 Love Michael Hingson  56:33 it, but I think there's there's so much to do that you know we'll make it work. So you um um we talked about a little bit, but you really feel that having been in a variety of cities has helped your life perspective. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  56:48 Definitely. Look, the the way that you're just talking about travel, it's the same thing. Where I've lived in four cities and have traveled to many more, and it shapes you certainly when you when you make moves, I moved a couple times for work, for example. You are often finding yourself somewhere where you're alone, and you have to build a whole new community and support system. And sometimes that can be very lonely. And as much as I love spending time with myself, or but I think overall it really proves to you that you can be resilient and you can make you know wonderful things out of situations that you you didn't know what would happen, right? So similar to you not knowing that you would live where you do now, yeah, it's a beautiful testament to what we can do as humans, what we're capable of. Michael Hingson  57:44 Life's an adventure. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  57:46 I know. I love that theory. Michael Hingson  57:48 So, for you, what's been one of your biggest learning lessons over the last year? Since I assume you still believe that you learn all the time, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  57:57 I learn all the time. And again, I think it really is just going back to the spirituality element. Man plans, God laughs. I definitely have thought that there's a lot in my life that I had the ability to plan out. And even when I think things are going in a certain direction, the universe has this fun way of you know establishing a plot twist and seeing how I react to it. So yeah, maybe it's it's not take certain things as seriously and and kind of learn to go with the flow a little bit more. That's the biggest lesson there. Michael Hingson  58:33 Good for you. That's a that's a very important lesson. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  58:37 Yeah. So maybe it's a little bit later in life, but you know, it's never too late for these things. Michael Hingson  58:43 Never. What would be Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  58:44 one of yours? Michael Hingson  58:46 Well, I think for me, spending more time being introspective has has been a great lesson for me, and I've learned to to step back and again not plan so much, as you said. Man plans, God laughs. I don't know. I would say God laughs. God's just patient, and He says, "Go do what you're going to do, and then let me know when you're ready to get real. But you know, I I think there's a lot of truth to that. So for me, I'm just constantly learning to be a little bit more patient, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  59:22 a good one too. Michael Hingson  59:24 So, what kind of advice would you give to an up-and-coming entrepreneur or person about living life? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  59:32 Ah, Speaker 4  59:34 just Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  59:35 do do everything. Do everything that you want to do. Really, would be because I think that like the more that you try, the more you are learning about what you are capable of and who you are as a person. The more different types of people that you meet, the more opportunities that might come your way. And some of it you're not going to like. That's a learning lesson. And some of it. You're going to love. So, if there's, so I would say do all of that, and then the other one is, is make it happen, because nothing will come to you if you are not going after it. And I just said that we have to surrender and let things come to us, but I really believe that there has to be not a manifestation, but really just some intention to push us in a certain direction, and that that hard work is necessary in anything that's really good that comes to us in life. Anything that's good is going to take work. Michael Hingson  1:00:36 The only thing that I would add to that is when you said there are things that might might be happening. That might happen that you don't like. My only comment to that would be: step back and try to figure out why you don't like them, and see if there's really a reason. Because we we we are such a knee jerk reaction society. It's always good to analyze and go, what really is the issue here? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  1:01:00 Yeah, you're so right. Michael Hingson  1:01:02 Well, I want to thank you for being here. This has been absolutely fun. It has now been over an hour, and it's got to be past the beginning of your dinner time. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  1:01:12 It's almost past my bedtime on a Friday night. How about there? You go. Well, Michael Hingson  1:01:17 I really appreciate you doing this and and spending the time with us, and I I've learned a lot, and I hope other people have. If people want to reach out to you, how do they do that? Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  1:01:27 Oh, please reach out on LinkedIn. It's just Stephanie Gutnick. You'll find me. Michael Hingson  1:01:33 Spell that if you would, just to play safe. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  1:01:35 Yes, absolutely. S T E P H A N I E, and the last name is Gutnick. G U T is in Tom and is in Nancy I K. Michael Hingson  1:01:45 So hunt down Stephanie on LinkedIn. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  1:01:49 Stephanie doesn't know who Tom or Nancy are, but she just thought that those would be helpful names. Well, Michael Hingson  1:01:54 there you go. Well, hey, whatever works. Yeah, Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  1:01:57 exactly. Michael Hingson  1:01:58 There you are, Michael. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  1:01:59 Thank you so much. Michael Hingson  1:02:00 It's been a pleasure. Well, I want to thank all of you for being here with us, and hope you've learned some things today, and that you've enjoyed it. Wherever you're monitoring our podcast, please give us a five star review. But even more, or rating, but more important, give us a great review. Reviews are things that people like to see when they're thinking about what podcast to listen to, so we value your reviews greatly. And if you'd like to reach out to me, it's easy. It's speaker, S P E A K E R at Michael Hinkson, M I C H A E L H I N G S O n.com. Love to hear from you. If you know anyone who ought to be a guest on the podcast, let us know. Stephanie, you as well. Always looking for more people, and so I appreciate you doing that. And with that, Stephanie, once more, thanks for being here. This has been fun. Dr. Stephanie Gutnik  1:02:50 Thank you so much. I very much agree. Michael Hingson  1:02:55 Thank you for being here with me on Unstoppable Mindset. I hope today's conversation left you with a fresh perspective, a new insight, or at least something worth thinking about. If you're ready to go deeper into the ideas that shape how we see ourselves and others, I have a free gift for you. Head over to MichaelHingson.com and download my free ebook, Blinded by fear, it explores the invisible beliefs that hold us back and shows you how to reframe them so you can move forward with clarity and confidence. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share this show with someone who can use a reminder that growth starts with mindset. When people think differently, we all move forward together. Thanks again for listening. Keep learning, keep questioning, and keep choosing to live with an unstoppable mindset.

In this episode, Conor and Bryce celebrate the 300th episode fo ADSP by catching up with Sean Parent!Link to Episode 300 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)SocialsADSP: The Podcast: TwitterConor Hoekstra: LinkTree / BioBryce Adelstein Lelbach: Twitter | BlueSkyAbout the Guest:Sean Parent is a principal scientist and software architect for Adobe Photoshop. Sean has been at Adobe since 1993 when he joined as a senior engineer working on Photoshop and later managed Adobe's Software Technology Lab. In 2009 Sean spent a year at Google working on Chrome OS before returning to Adobe. From 1988 through 1993 Sean worked at Apple, where he was part of the system software team that developed the technologies allowing Apple's successful transition to PowerPC.Show NotesDate Recorded: 2026-08-19Date Released: 2026-08-21POD GODCppCastcpp.chatSean Parent - Papers and PresentationsADSP Episode 299: Do We Need Humans in the Loop?NVIDIA CCCLcel-rsStepanov PapersBob TarjanTarjan's strongly connected components algorithmSoylent Green is people!Claude CodeThe Last Emperor - A GentlemanJonathon Blow on the Quality of Software (Software is in Decline)Lean Programming LanguageDafny Programming LanguageCreator of TypeScript: 10x Faster Typescript, Why AI Won't Replace SWEs | Anders HejlsbergautoresearchIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Is your business creating more content with AI… but getting less attention from it?AI has made it ridiculously easy to produce images, ads, social posts, and product visuals. Unfortunately, easy doesn't mean effective. When everyone has access to the same tools, generic prompts tend to produce generic content—and generic content rarely moves the business needle.The solution isn't another 500-word “perfect prompt.” It's giving AI better context, references, brand knowledge, and creative direction—and knowing when human refinement still matters.In this episode of Leveraging AI, Isar Meitis sits down with Aastha Taneja to break down a practical workflow for creating AI-powered visual assets that look intentional, stay consistent with your brand, and are designed to generate engagement rather than simply fill your content calendar.Aastha demonstrates how she combines traditional creative thinking with tools including ChatGPT, Figma, Pinterest, image-generation platforms, and Photoshop. She also explains why she believes businesses should treat AI as an assistant—not outsource the entire creative process to it.In this session, you'll discover:Why so much AI-generated marketing content turns into forgettable “AI slop.”Why better AI creative starts before you write a prompt.How mood boards give AI a far clearer understanding of the visual direction you want.How to feed AI your website, brand assets, SOPs, typography, and existing creative to improve its output.The difference between borrowing a proven format and copying someone else's creative.How to maintain accurate product details when AI image generators get almost everything right—but miss one critical element.How AI can help businesses create high-quality Amazon listing images and other e-commerce assets.How reusable visual workflows can turn a manual creative process into a scalable content system.Aastha Taneja is a creative professional with years of experience developing digital assets for brands and through freelance work. She now combines that traditional design foundation with AI, helping businesses and professionals understand how to use AI tools more effectively for creative work and sharing those methods through corporate training.Her core philosophy is refreshingly practical: AI should amplify good creative thinking—not replace it.Connect with Aastha on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/taneja-aastha/ About Leveraging AIThe Ultimate AI Course for Business People: https://multiplai.ai/ai-course/YouTube Full Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@Multiplai_AI/Connect with Isar Meitis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isarmeitis/ Join our Live Sessions, AI Hangouts and newsletter: https://services.multiplai.ai/eventsIf you've enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!

This January, four big AI × Pharma tools deals were announced at the huge JPM Pharma conference that takes over San Francisco every year. OpenAI-backed Chai Discovery (now worth $4B) was somehow at the heart despite being all of 2 years old. The Science team is proud to bring you the first podcast with cofounder Matt McPartlon and product lead Neil Patil to tell the full story! Editor's note: not to be confused with Chai AI, which was another top pod of ours.Pharma suddenly doing big AI tools dealsFor the non-pharma people, JPM is JP Morgan's annual conference for pharma deal-making that takes over San Francisco for a week in January with hundreds of side events, etc. It's a big thing. Tools deals for pharma are also a big (new) thing: companies that start as AI for Pharma usually end up building their own drug pipelines instead, and the reason is something like this: convincing pharma to use your tool requires proof that your tool works. Proof means good targets, maybe with good clinical validation. If you have that, then it's easier to raise money (with a known, if long path to commercialization) or sell (e.g payment in biobucks) for a specific target than it is to sell to lots of companies on a promise that it will work across their portfolios. The “we'll just partner / build our own drug” optionality proved to be the only good path up until January. What changed? In short, the tools got good enough for drug design teams to trust.Good-enough-to-trust unlocks the ability to scale discovery: get more, better candidates into the lab and animal trials faster. More screening for toxicity, better delivery, etc. This means that what you push to the clinic is more likely to succeed.Tools also unlock new capabilities: mechanisms that are very hard or impossible to develop using lab-based discovery. Designing an antibody that precisely triggers a very specific molecular cascade takes many years of trial and error. Designing bi-specific antibodies (that bind to two different proteins) is similarly difficult. Good design tools can unlock this.RJ: The fact that the quality of the model has jumped means you're enabling things you just plain couldn't do. So it's a step change. It's not an efficiency argument at all, or not so much.Matt: Yeah, exactly. It's kind of interesting, even for us — it took me a while to believe in the thesis, actually. I talked to Josh for months before Chai started... It's like, can I beat a mouse, and then can I do what mice can't do? And then how many levels of interaction can you just keep building on top of that?Everyone playing in the structural / binding space has an angle here, and some will be better than others, but Chai is pointing to a different unlock: getting good molecules right out of the gate (meaning they don't then need as much lab work) means that the iteration time is faster. This turns science into engineering: you can design your systems to reduce friction and hill climb towards one-shotting molecules all the way to the clinic.This, per-se, is not a new thesis: a16z articulated a version of this in 2020. What has changed is that structural models became binding models (how well doesn't this molecule bind to this molecule, aka “binding affinity). Binding models unlock design, which has been steadily improving. Chai's observation is that for engineering problems the best product tends to win, and good technology is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Photoshop for moleculesWith that in mind Chai has invested heavily in partnerships that allow them to learn from their Pharma counterparts. What is kind of cool about working so closely and supporting so many of these partners is we get to really learn about what is the stuff that would be helpful in research. So rather than doing research in a vacuum, based on what would hypothetically be cool, we're able to do informed research based on what our partners have just been organically asking us for help with.— Neil Patil, (Chai product lead)This means better UX, such as a molecule editor that is more like a CAD or graphics design program than a chatbot.Their approach has paid off: since June, Chai has announced three more major deals: Lilly, Novartis, argenx, plus an expansion of their Eli Lily program. This episode is too full of quotable moments for a short blog, so tune in to learn about * Why protein tokens have the highest downstream value of any token * Climbing levels of abstraction as models improve * How Pharma, VC, and research are all just portfolio optimization * How better tech changes the whole portfolio * How relentless focus on simplicity leads to scalePlus much more! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe

THE DEVIL'S LEDGERWeek of August 10, 2026 Apparently, I've spent the last few weeks lying to myself about fall being “just around the corner.” Then the calendar rudely reminds me that it's early August, the sidewalks are hot enough to cook breakfast, and summer is still very much... summering. Hang in there, people. We'll get there eventually. This week on The Devil's Ledger, we begin with The Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week and travel to the wetlands of Southern Maryland, where Kings Landing Park has attracted renewed paranormal attention surrounding a mysterious figure known as Mary. Visitors, staff, and investigators have reported unexplained cries, footsteps without an obvious source, and sightings of a sorrowful young woman dressed in white wandering near the marsh before disappearing among the trees. Then, on The Devil Within, The New Monsters continues with Slender Man, perhaps the perfect case study in how modern folklore can be created before our eyes. We trace the legend from an online Photoshop contest through its explosive growth across the internet and into the horrifying real-world Wisconsin stabbing, asking what happens when millions of people are suddenly able to participate in building a mythology together. Criminal Mischief is taking the week off while Carolyn prepares for another ambitious deep-dive limited series planned for early next year. There's much more coming on that front, so stay tuned. Over on The Slippery, we pull back the mask on one of the strangest double lives in modern true crime: ChiefsAholic. Xaviar Babudar became a familiar sight at Kansas City Chiefs games in his towering gray wolf costume, while authorities say the high-stakes gambler was simultaneously responsible for a string of violent bank robberies across the Midwest. This week, The Slippery follows the police reports and financial trail behind the superfan whose obsession with football, gambling, and an increasingly chaotic lifestyle eventually made him a fugitive. And This Week in Horror, we head to the Italian countryside for Immaculate, starring Sydney Sweeney. Cecilia arrives at an isolated convent expecting a life devoted to faith, only to discover increasingly disturbing miracles, sinister rituals, and secrets buried within the institution around her. Atmospheric, beautifully shot, and steeped in religious horror, this one is definitely worth checking out. Stay cool. Stay hydrated. For God's sake, wear sunscreen. Before long we'll all be complaining that it gets dark at 5:30 and arguing about Halloween candy. Until then, we'll see you somewhere across the Evio Universe.

The Day We Invented a MonsterThe New Monsters – Episode One For thousands of years, humanity has created monsters. But we rarely know who created them. Vampires emerged from centuries of whispered folklore. Werewolves wandered through medieval Europe long before anyone thought to record the first storyteller's name. Ghosts belonged to abandoned houses, forgotten battlefields, and generations of frightened imaginations. Then, in June of 2009, something unprecedented happened. An ordinary graphic designer entered an online Photoshop contest and unknowingly created the first monster whose birth was documented almost frame by frame. His name was Eric Knudsen. The creature he imagined became known as Slender Man. This week on The Devil Within, Branden Morgan begins a three-part investigation into the first great myth of the internet age, exploring how a pair of manipulated photographs evolved into one of the most influential pieces of modern folklore ever created. More importantly... Why were millions of people so eager to believe? This isn't simply the story of Slender Man. It's the story of how the internet became humanity's newest campfire—and how mythology no longer requires centuries to evolve. In This Episode The horrifying 2014 Waukesha stabbing that introduced Slender Man to the world Why every civilization creates monsters The technological and cultural conditions that made Slender Man inevitable The rise of social media, YouTube, Reddit, and collaborative storytelling The Something Awful Photoshop Contest of June 2009 Eric Knudsen (Victor Surge) and the creation of Slender Man Why the monster's faceless design unsettles the human brain The psychology of the "uncanny" How thousands of strangers transformed one image into modern folklore Themes Explored Digital folklore Internet mythology Collective storytelling The psychology of fear Urban legends Horror history Media culture The evolution of folklore Modern monsters Slender Man Creepypasta Featured Topics The 2014 Waukesha case (introductory context) Eric Knudsen (Victor Surge) Something Awful Forums Photoshop Contest (June 8, 2009) The Uncanny Valley Collaborative internet culture Early social media The birth of Creepypasta Digital mythology The story doesn't end with two manipulated photographs. It begins there. Coming Next Week In Episode Two, When Fiction Escaped the Screen, Slender Man no longer belongs to his creator. YouTube filmmakers, artists, gamers, writers, and millions of strangers begin adding new chapters until something extraordinary happens. For the first time in history... we watch folklore evolve in real time. The Devil Within is written and hosted by Branden Morgan. Produced by Evio Creative. Watch full episodes and exclusive content on the Evio Creative YouTube Channel. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the show, leave a rating and review, and share it with someone who loves history, folklore, and the darker corners of human imagination. Your support helps us continue exploring the stories that reveal not only the monsters we create—but why we create them.

Generative AI tools are rapidly evolving, filling social-media platforms with so-called AI slop—from Iranian-produced Lego videos to digitally manipulated campaign imagery in the U.S. In this second installment of Tech News Briefing's three-part series, "AI and the Blurring of Reality," WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen explores how this technology is turbocharging deepfakes and shaping politics. Further Listening: When AI Grandmas Go Viral, What Even Is Reality Anymore? Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The New Monsters: Montauk - Part Three The Monster We Needed The Montauk Monster was never just about a strange carcass lying on a Long Island beach. It was about trust. Why did millions of otherwise rational people immediately believe that a decomposing animal might be the product of secret government experiments? Why did Camp Hero, Plum Island, and decades of Cold War secrecy become inseparable from a single photograph? In the conclusion to our three-part Montauk investigation, Branden Morgan explores the uncomfortable answer: perhaps the creature itself never mattered. What mattered was the world that created it. From MKUltra and government secrecy to the internet's ability to accelerate folklore at unprecedented speed, this episode examines how modern myths emerge—not because people abandon reason, but because uncertainty demands a story. The Montauk Monster wasn't simply another cryptid. It may have been one of the first monsters truly born in the digital age. In This Episode: Why conspiracy theories flourish when public trust erodes The documented legacy of MKUltra and why it changed public perception How real government secrecy gave rise to modern folklore Why Camp Hero and Plum Island became fertile ground for speculation The psychology behind modern conspiracy thinking Why myths evolve faster than facts in the internet era The Montauk Monster as one of the first internet-born cryptids What the legend ultimately reveals about modern America—not biology The Devil Within Theme The greatest monsters are rarely the ones hiding in the shadows. They're the stories we create when certainty disappears. Featured This Week When people stop trusting the institutions that once explained the world, they don't stop believing altogether. They simply begin searching for new explanations. Sometimes those explanations become science. Sometimes history. And sometimes... they become monsters. Camp Hero and its Cold War history Plum Island and the facts behind decades of speculation MKUltra and the unintended birth of modern conspiracy culture How folklore migrated from campfires to message boards Why the internet has become humanity's newest myth-making machine Next Time on The New Monsters The investigation moves from abandoned military installations into an entirely different wilderness: The internet. In 2009, a simple Photoshop contest gave birth to a faceless figure known as Slender Man. He wasn't discovered in ancient folklore or whispered about for generations. He was deliberately created online. Then something extraordinary happened. People began claiming they had seen him. The story spread across forums, videos, games, and social media before culminating in one of the most disturbing crimes of the digital age. We'll examine how fiction escaped the screen, why the human mind embraced the impossible, and whether the internet has become the birthplace of an entirely new kind of mythology. If you're enjoying The New Monsters, please follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts. Watch the video editions and exclusive companion content on the Evio Creative YouTube Channel. Follow @thedevilwithinpod on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube for behind-the-scenes content, historical photographs, and updates on future investigations. Written & Hosted by: Branden Morgan A production of Evio Creative.

In this episode of The GaryVee Audio Experience, I sit down with Laura Desmond, CMO of Adobe, at Cannes 2026 for a Marketing for the Now conversation. We get into why experience maxing — IRL, in real life — is mattering more than ever, why VaynerX bet the farm on becoming an experiential agency, and why AI tools will get commoditized at scale exactly the way big data did. I share the Photoshop history lesson every fearful creative needs to hear, why the human matters more in an AI world, not less, and the jungle-gym career advice every young marketer should be writing down.You'll learn about:• Why Experience Maxing (IRL) Is Mattering More Than Ever• Why the Human Variable Matters More, Not Less• The Humility to Take a Step Backwards