Podcasts about PIM

Wenn das alte System noch funktioniert, aber nicht mehr mitwächst, wird es Zeit für Veränderung. In dieser Folge des Handelskraft Digital Business Talk spricht Franzi Kunz mit Daniel Sous von BYK Chemie über den Weg vom integrierten PIM-Modul hin zu einem modernen Produktportal mit MACH-Architektur. Die Daten kommen weiterhin aus dem PIM, lassen sich heute aber schneller, übersichtlicher und flexibler bereitstellen. Außerdem geht es um die Fragen hinter der Technik: Wie entsteht Akzeptanz für Neues?Was braucht gutes Change Management? Und warum sind Prozesse, Schnittstellen und Kommunikation oft entscheidender als die Architektur selbst? Außerdem in der Folge: warum das alte Produktportal an seine Grenzen kamwie das neue Setup technisch aufgebaut ist welche konkreten Verbesserungen es im Arbeitsalltag bringt was Unternehmen bei solchen Projekten unbedingt mitdenken sollten Plus: eine der anschaulichsten MACH-Erklärungen überhaupt.

Van het rode kraanwagentje van Pluk van de Petteflet tot de zwart-witte silhouetten van Jip en Janneke: wie is er niet opgegroeid met de iconische illustraties van Fiep Westendorp? Zo'n 150 originele tekeningen zijn deze zomer te zien in het Rijksmuseum.  Wie was Fiep Westendorp, en hoe werkte ze? Hoe komt het dat haar werk na 70 jaar nog altijd immens populair is?  Janine Abbring gaat in gesprek met conservator Marian Cousijn en kunsthistoricus Gioia Smid, schatbewaarder van het werk van Fiep Westendorp en jarenlang goede vriendin van haar. De tentoonstelling Fiep Westendorp met zo'n 150 originele tekeningen in 2 zalen is te zien van 19 juni t/m 13 september 2026.

Verslag van een exotisch festival is voor Osmium - de zwaarste podcast in het Nederlands - bijna net zo'n vaste prik als afleveringen over jaarlijstjes en publieksprijzen. Na een betonnen safari in Manchester, parkeren tussen de beren in Roemenië en gastronomische verzetjes in Kortrijk, wordt reikhalzend uitgekeken naar de bestemming van de Osmium metalvakantie van 2026. Die hoge verwachtingen rusten dermate zwaar op de schouders van babbelaars Niels en Pim dat ze de handdoek maar in de ring gooien en besluiten thuis te blijven. Nu de bestemming dus Indoornesië en Tuinzania blijkt te zijn, wordt gezocht naar manieren om de festivalweide de huiskamer in te halen. De redding komt in de vorm van de liveplaat, wellicht het minst besproken muzikale format in Osmium. Het blijkt echter een rijke voedingsbodem voor interessante discussies. Is het de ultieme meetlat waarlangs bands gekeurd dienen te worden of is het juist het zwarte gat van een discografie? Hoe belangrijk is bijbehorend beeld, merkbaar publiek en degelijke opnamekwaliteit? Hoe rekbaar is het begrip anno 2026 wanneer liveregistraties ook verschijnen in de vorm van studio-opname, livestream of telefoonvideo met bonusvinger voor de lens? Daarmee verschuift de vraag van waar Osmium dit jaar naartoe gaat naar wat er overblijft als je een concert van zijn plek, publiek en moment losweekt. Een aflevering over aanwezig zijn zonder ergens heen te gaan. Met beeldmateriaal door Ruth Mamphuys en muziek van Crouch. Onderwerpen: Crouch - Vidal (00:00) Welkomstwoord over het zelf saneren van asbestplaten (00:15) Introductie van de onderwerpen (04:06) Waarom niet naar een buitenlands zomerfestival dit jaar? (05:13) Live albums: wat vinden wij daarvan? (13:00) Live albums: video versus audio opnames (22:52) Live albums: voorbeelden van goede live opnames (34:29) Live albums: live opnames in studio setting (40:42) Live albums: bootlegs (45:59) Live albums: de conclusie (48:48) Pim's (bonus) luistertip: The Black Keys - Peaches, de terugkeer van extra belegen kaas in muzikale vorm (52:44) Pim's echte luistertip: Crouch - Breaking The Catatonic State, noise rock uit de Church Of Ra die vooroordelen rechtzet (55:21) Niels' gecombineerde luister- en concerttip: Archspire - Too Fast To Die, compleet geschifte techdeath uit Canada dat in Doornroosje en Kavka Zappa speelt in het najaar (58:28) Pim's concerttip: Iron Maiden in de Ziggo Dome, ga je helden zien nu het nog kan, ook al kan dat niet omdat het uitverkocht is (1:06:28) Shout-outs (01:12:30) Links: The Black Keys Bandcamp Crouch Bandcamp Archspire Bandcamp Archspire in Doornroosje Archspire in Kavka Zappa Iron Maiden in Ziggo Dome op ticketswap Ruth Mampuys (Ruth-Less Photography website en Facebook)

A tense confrontation results in Khorek unleashing their rage. But with out the support of Pim'wei, their anger may be their undoing. You're in for a bloody episode, as our heroes learn more about what lies beyond the dome of Sapphires.Sapphire Doom Appendix (Blog Posts and the Map are here!): https://www.getoutofdepth.com/blog/sapphire-doom-appendixCome join us on Patreon! Free members are welcome, and will receive monthly updates about our work. Paid members get access to exclusive behind the scenes content for every season of Out of Depth Plays. If you want to connect with us, the best place to do it is by going to: https://www.patreon.com/getoutofdepthFeaturing:Jae K. RenfrowGail Renfrow as Khorek DoharDavid Jackson as Pim'weiTara Bouldrey as Loy____________________________________Website: https://www.getoutofdepth.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/getoutofdepthTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/out_of_depth_____________________________________Learn more about Knave 2e: https://questingblog.com/knave-2e/Disclaimer:"Out of Depth Plays: Sapphire Doom" is an independent production of Out of Depth and is not affiliated with Questing Beast LLC._____________________________________SFX licensed by https://www.soundstripe.comSound design and musical score by Jae._____________________________________

 Any kind of RF interference at a call site will diminish connections to cell phones and cause poor service which leads to customer complaints. Unlike active interference from nearby antennas, PIM, or passive intermodulation interference, can be caused by many elements in and around a cell site on a tower. These conditions make PIM hard to detect and mitigate.  Drew Martin, Sales Engineer-Interference with Valmont Telecom speaks with John Celentano, Inside Towers Business Editor about PIM – what it is, how to detect it and how to minimize it.  Support the show

Wat als vertrekken uit Nederland niet gaat over vluchten, maar over wakker worden?Steeds meer mensen voelen het.Nederland verandert. De lasten stijgen. De vrijheid krimpt. Huizen worden onbetaalbaar. Kinderen groeien op in systemen waar steeds meer ouders vragen bij stellen.Maar wat doe je als je voelt: dit klopt niet meer voor mij?Pim van Rijswijk is voor de derde keer te gast bij Wijsdom. Vorig jaar sprak hij nog over zijn plannen om Nederland deels achter zich te laten. Inmiddels woont hij met zijn zoon en vriendin in Spanje, leeft hij vrijer, reist hij meer en heeft hij zijn zoon uit het Nederlandse schoolsysteem gehaald.In dit gesprek spreken we over vertrekken, vrijheid, ouderschap, thuisonderwijs, Spanje, cultuur, systeemdenken en de vraag hoe je je voorbereidt op een toekomst die steeds onzekerder voelt.Ook bespreken we MVO op 12 juni, met het thema Prepare Today: een event voor ondernemers en bewuste mensen die zich willen voorbereiden op wat komen gaat — financieel, juridisch, praktisch én mentaal.Gebruik kortingscode MVO-WIJSDOM voor 20% korting op je ticket.Want misschien is de belangrijkste vraag niet:waar wil je naartoe?Maar: waar wil je niet langer in vast blijven zitten?Laat in de reacties weten: zou jij Nederland ooit willen verlaten?⏳ HoofdstukkenHost: Sanae OrchiGast: Pim van Rijswijk

To celebrate the big 250, we're joined by special guest and part-time Phil of the Future historian, Ian from Slay! A Queer Buffy Podcast. We discuss the episode "My Way" where Phil shrinks down to help Keely live her pop star fantasies, and Pim has to raise a flour sack with a junior Republican. Plus, our thoughts on Hocus Pocus 3 getting announced, Hayden Panettiere and Joshua Bassett's memoirs, and Sabrina at the Met Gala. ----- Follow The Time Mousechine: ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ian: Slay! A Queer Buffy Podcast Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wild Sovereign Soul co-founder and soul guide, Lian Brook-Tyler, explains what death has always been trying to teach us about the art of really living, drawing on three of her own encounters with death, including fifteen years of chronic pain and panic attacks, that ultimately changed everything. This episode is Lian's All The Everything show… her solo space where she dives deeply into a theme that is alive for her, which, if you know her, could be literally anything - explored through the lenses of science, spirituality and story - hence the name of the show! In this episode, Lian shares the story of her own three encounters with death, a violent attack in her youth that left her braced against life for fifteen years, the sudden and complicated death of her father, and a shamanic burial initiation. She weaves through the science of near-death experiences, including findings from Dr. Pim van Lommel's eight-year longitudinal study and Raymond Moody's landmark research, which found that across cultures, ages, and belief systems, only two things consistently emerged as what truly mattered. She also looks honestly at what modern culture has done by removing death from daily life, how a death-denying world dismantles genuine choice, and why sovereign living may not be possible until we stop trying to pretend we have more time than we do. She closes with a simple daily practice, a few minutes each morning to ask what this day would mean if it were the last ordinary one. Listen if you find yourself putting something important off until conditions feel more right, or if you know what your life is calling for but keep finding reasons not to move toward it yet. We'd love to know what YOU think about this week's show. Let's carry on the conversation… please leave a comment wherever you are listening or in any of our other spaces to engage. What you'll learn from this episode: Why the life review described consistently across near-death experience research points to only two things as mattering, and what that means for the choices available to you today How a culture that removes death from daily life creates a sovereignty wound, and the way genuine self-directed choice depends on facing what we most want to avoid What happens when you spend a night buried in the earth, facing the prospect of death, and the quality of aliveness that becomes available on the other side of it Resources and stuff Lian spoke about: Make sure you're subscribed to our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@WildSovereignSoul), subscribed to our Moonly News email list (/moonly) and/or are a member of our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/bemythicalcommunity) and we'll let you know when the next one is happening. Register your interest for the upcoming Wild Sovereign Soul journey here (/wss). Share what showed up for you listening to this show, including any questions, either in the Be Mythical facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/bemythicalcommunity) or in UNIO (https://www.unioacademy.com). Join UNIO, The Community for Wild Sovereign Souls: (https://www.unioacademy.com/)This is for the old souls in this new world… Discover your kin & unite with your soul's calling to truly live your myth. Wild Sovereign Soul Join our mailing list: https://www.wildsovereignsoul.com/moonly UNIO: The Community for Wild Sovereign Souls : https://www.wildsovereignsoul.com/unio Go Deeper: https://www.wildsovereignsoul.com/godeeper Follow us on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1694264587546957 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wildsovereignsoul YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WildSovereignSoul Thank you for listening! There's a fresh episode released each week here and on most podcast platforms - and video too on YouTube. If you subscribe then you'll get each new episode delivered to your device every week automagically. (that way you'll never miss a show).

Seizoen 6, aflevering 7 van “Kunnen we het maken?” In de vorige aflevering waren we in Heerenveen, in de Fijn Wonen-fabriek van Van Wijnen. Daar spraken we met Hilbrand Katsma over woningen die uit de fabriek rollen, en hoe industrieel bouwen kan bijdragen aan het oplossen van het woningtekort en het verduurzamen van de bouw. We blijven in deze aflevering bij het onderwerp van innovatie en duurzaamheid maar benaderen het vanuit een compleet ander perspectief. In deze aflevering gaan we het hebben over het donorskelet, een concept waarbij bestaande constructies worden hergebruikt als basis voor nieuwe gebouwen. In plaats van slopen en opnieuw bouwen, kijken we naar wat er al staat, en hoe we dat slim kunnen inzetten voor de toekomst. Daarover is vandaag met Pim Peters, directeur van IMd, te gast. IMd is een ingenieursbureau dat vooroploopt in circulair ontwerpen en hergebruik van constructies, waarbij Pim zich al jaren bezighoudt met dit onderwerp. Hij is een van de drijvende krachten achter het denken in donorskelet en hergebruik. We zullen vragen zoals: “Hoe werkt zo'n donorskelet in de praktijk en wat zijn de ervaringen? Wat vraagt het van ontwerpers en constructeurs? En is dit een niche, of juist een belangrijke stap richting een circulaire bouwwereld?” bespreken en natuurlijk zal Pims ervaring de revue passeren. Geïnteresseerd in de inzichten van de directeur van IMd over het donorskelet? Beluister het allemaal in deze aflevering van “Kunnen we het maken?”

Waardeer je onze video's? Steun dan Café Weltschmerz, het podium voor het vrije woord: https://www.cafeweltschmerz.nl/doneren/In dit gesprek spreekt Shohreh met ondernemer Pim van Rijswijk, initiatiefnemer van de MVO Masterclass voor Ondernemers. Pim waarschuwt voor een mogelijke forse daling van de huizenprijzen en stelt dat veel signalen wijzen op een grote correctie in de komende jaren.Volgens hem is dit het moment om na te denken over het beschermen van je vermogen, financiële weerbaarheid en een plan B in onzekere tijden.Een scherp en prikkelend gesprek over risico's, voorbereiding en verantwoordelijkheid.https://www.mvo-dsvv.nl/---Deze video is geproduceerd door Café Weltschmerz. Café Weltschmerz gelooft in de kracht van het gesprek en zendt interviews uit over actuele maatschappelijke thema's. Wij bieden een hoogwaardig alternatief voor de mainstream media. Café Weltschmerz is onafhankelijk en niet verbonden aan politieke, religieuze of commerciële partijen.Wil je meer video's bekijken en op de hoogte blijven via onze nieuwsbrief? Ga dan naar: https://www.cafeweltschmerz.nl/videos/Wil je op de hoogte worden gebracht van onze nieuwe video's? Klik dan op deze link: https://bit.ly/3XweTO0

This week I'm reading from Ingrid Honkala's book 'Dying to See the Light: A Scientist's Guide to Reawakening (Without Nearly Dying)' What if the greatest awakening of your life did not require dying… but remembering? Opening with forewords by pioneering near-death experience researchers Dr. Pim van Lommel and Dr. Eben Alexander, Dying to See the Light bridges science, spirituality, and firsthand experience to reveal a deeper understanding of consciousness and the true nature of life. For centuries, humanity has searched for answers to life's deepest questions: Why are we here? What is consciousness? What lies beyond the limits of the physical world? In this powerful and deeply personal book, scientist and near-death experiencer Ingrid Honkala, PhD, shares the insights gained through multiple near-death experiences and a lifetime of inner exploration. Blending scientific understanding with spiritual wisdom, she reveals a profound truth: The Light we seek has always lived within us. More than a story, this book is a practical guide to awakening. Through simple yet transformative reflections and practices, you will learn how to: Reconnect with your inner awareness and presence Transform suffering into growth and wisdom Cultivate forgiveness, self-love, and inner peace Navigate life with clarity, trust, and purpose This is not a book about dying. It is a guide to living with greater clarity, wisdom, and love. The Light you are searching for is already within you. Are you ready to remember? Bio I was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, where I lived with my parents and three sisters. Although I grew up in the mountains my love for the ocean started when my parents brought me to see it for the very first time at the age of four. I perceived it as a huge blanket and told my mom that some day I was going to find what was hidden under it. At five I told my dad, “When I grow up I am going to become a marine scientist.” I pursued my dream and went to college where I graduated as a Marine Biologist and later continued my graduate studies until I got a Ph.D. in Marine Sciences with emphasis in Biological Oceanography. My passion for my career had brought me to be a very successful scientist in this field. Since I was very little my parents discovered that my learning abilities were astonishing but that was not all. Later they also discovered that I could see and hear things that no one else could. All this seemed to be tied up with the aftermath of a near-death experience (NDE) where I drowned at the age of two. Not long after, I started to communicate with Beings of Light who have guided me through a journey of miracles, not just around the world but also through the barriers of time. With them I have been able to access past life experiences of myself and others, and future events. As I grew up and remembered my drowning, I could never get away from the question, “How could I have seen my body lifeless if I was still alive?” This experience made it clear to me that there was an existence beyond the body. Before I was quite three, I was gifted with knowing that I have existed for a very long time. In fact, I have come and gone in different realms many more times. https://www.ingridhonkala.com/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GDQF9T2W https://www.pastliveshypnosis.co.uk/https://www.patreon.com/ourparanormalafterlifeMy book 'Verified Near Death Experiences' https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXKRGDFP Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stell dir vor, dein nächster Produktkatalog steht an. Mal ehrlich: Der Stress fängt nicht im Layout an, sondern viel früher. Unklare Produktauswahl zwischen Vertrieb und Produktmanagement. Datenjagd über PIM, Excel, Mails und lokale Ordner. Grafik, die ohne saubere Templates alles von Hand baut. Marketing, das in PDFs kommentiert, die niemand mehr nachverfolgen kann. Und kurz vor Druck dann doch noch „eine letzte kleine Änderung“. Genau diese sechs Phasen: Produktauswahl, Datenbeschaffung, Layout, Inhalte einpflegen, Freigabe, Finalisierung seziert Markus Nause in dieser Folge. Aus 15 Jahren Agentur, Druckerei und Druckvorstufe weiß er, wer in welcher Phase warum struggelt und wie Dynamic Publishing daraus einen durchgängigen, automatisierten Prozess macht.Mit Host Franzi Kunz spricht er darüber:- warum viele Unternehmen in der Produktkommunikation digital denken, aber im Printprozess noch im DTP von gestern hängen- wie klar definierte Rollen & Templates Monate in Wochen verwandeln- wie eine einzige „Worst-Case“-Katalogseite zeigt, ob sich der Einstieg für euch lohnt- und warum das alles deutlich mehr ist als „PIM to Print“.Für alle, die endlich weg wollen von: „Wir machen das halt schon immer so – dauert ewig, nervt extrem und kostet zu viel.“

Voor het vijfde jaar op rij is Osmium - de zwaarste podcast in het Nederlands - aanwezig op het Roadburn festival. In die tijd hebben Niels en Pim als vaste babbelaars van alles geprobeerd om de aflevering erover fris te houden. Brakke dagboeken, zelfverzonnen fantasiefestivals, combinatiebezoeken met Paaspop... Voor de uitverkochte editie van 2026 besluiten ze een nieuw perspectief aan boord te halen en redacteur Friso opnieuw uit te nodigen (een unicum!), nadat hij vorige zomer al te horen was in de aflevering over het Alcatraz festival. Zodoende hoor je in deze Osmium ook de perspectieven van iemand die al sinds 2008 naar Roadburn gaat. Uiteraard staat het drietal uitvoerig stil bij specifieke optredens die zorgden voor een lach of een traan (of allebei), maar bij een intrigerend evenement als Roadburn kan een holistisch perspectief niet ontbreken. Hoe was de balans en reikwijdte van de line-up? Is het nog wel zo ongedwongen? Hoeveel experimenten kan je aan op een dag? Waar komt de kracht van een optreden vandaan? In het verleden is Osmium kritisch geweest over de slogan “redefining heaviness”, maar het festival zet in ieder geval aan tot denken. En na deze editie lijkt zelfs voorzichtig geconcludeerd te worden dat het festival de post-coronavisie definitief heeft waargemaakt... Met beeldmateriaal door Ruth Mamphuys en muziek van Inter Arma. Onderwerpen: Inter Arma - The Cavern (00:00) Introductie over the holy trinity van voorverpakte toetjes (00:20) Achterstallig onderhoud over Angine De Poitrine (02:39) Achterstallig onderhoud over band merch (04:30) Introductie van Osmium's eerste terugkerende gast Friso (06:07) Friso's geschiedenis en band met Roadburn (08:35) Tops van Roadburn 2026 (19:18) Flops van Roadburn 2026 (41:20) Bredere reflecties op Roadburn 2026 (56:13) Shout-outs (01:24:44) Links: Roadburn festival Ruth Mampuys (Ruth-Less Photography website en Facebook)

Een bonusaflevering: nabeschouwen op de razendsnelle Boston Marathon, voorbeschouwen op de Londen Marathon (onder de 2 uur?), en tekst en uitleg bij twee mooie dagen in mei voor de echte liefhebbers.We hebben het over John Korir, de Boston-winnaar die ons het belang van traag lopen in trainingen leert. Over Abdi Nageeye en zijn tevredenheid ondanks een eenentwintigste plaats. Waarom een aparte loopstijl soms niet zegt, let maar op Helen Obiri en Eilish McColgan in Londen. En we gaan er eens goed voor zitten zondag. We vragen ons namelijk af of er onder de 2 uur wordt gelopen met Jacob Kiplimo en Sabastian Sawé aan de start.En, tot slot: aandacht voor twee mooie bijeenkomsten in mei rond het boek De mooiste marathon. Het grote mediacircus is begonnen! *Kom op zaterdagochtend 2 mei tussen 10u30 en 12u allemaal naar atletiekvereniging PAC Rotterdam. Pim zal in zijn natuurlijke habitat zijn boek De mooiste marathon verkopen, en waar gewenst boeken signeren en voorzien van een persoonlijke boodschap. *Meld je via rotterdam@run2day.nl aan voor de woensdagavond vanaf 19u op 20 mei. Tachtig man kunnen in de zaak van Eric live luisteren naar Marathon Rotterdam-anekdotes van Bijl&Brommert. Uiteraard aan de hand van het boek, die avond aan te schaffen.Support the show: https://krant.nl/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

L'ensemble des liens utiles : Envie de vous inscrire à Yaniro Minute ? 1 conseil par newsletter. 1mn de lecture ? C'est ici : https://www.yaniro.co/yanirominuteEnvie d'envoyer à vos managers la version auto-administrée de notre formation au management ? C'est ici : https://yanirowiki.co/kitEt pour retrouver les meilleures pratiques RH directement dans notre Yaniro Wiki c'est ici : https://yanirowiki.co/Résumé de l'épisode

This week I am talking to Ingrid Honkala about her book 'Dying to See the Light: A Scientist's Guide to Reawakening (Without Nearly Dying)' What if the greatest awakening of your life did not require dying… but remembering? Opening with forewords by pioneering near-death experience researchers Dr. Pim van Lommel and Dr. Eben Alexander, Dying to See the Light bridges science, spirituality, and firsthand experience to reveal a deeper understanding of consciousness and the true nature of life. For centuries, humanity has searched for answers to life's deepest questions: Why are we here? What is consciousness? What lies beyond the limits of the physical world? In this powerful and deeply personal book, scientist and near-death experiencer Ingrid Honkala, PhD, shares the insights gained through multiple near-death experiences and a lifetime of inner exploration. Blending scientific understanding with spiritual wisdom, she reveals a profound truth: The Light we seek has always lived within us. More than a story, this book is a practical guide to awakening. Through simple yet transformative reflections and practices, you will learn how to: Reconnect with your inner awareness and presence Transform suffering into growth and wisdom Cultivate forgiveness, self-love, and inner peace Navigate life with clarity, trust, and purpose This is not a book about dying. It is a guide to living with greater clarity, wisdom, and love. The Light you are searching for is already within you. Are you ready to remember? Bio I was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, where I lived with my parents and three sisters. Although I grew up in the mountains my love for the ocean started when my parents brought me to see it for the very first time at the age of four. I perceived it as a huge blanket and told my mom that some day I was going to find what was hidden under it. At five I told my dad, “When I grow up I am going to become a marine scientist.” I pursued my dream and went to college where I graduated as a Marine Biologist and later continued my graduate studies until I got a Ph.D. in Marine Sciences with emphasis in Biological Oceanography. My passion for my career had brought me to be a very successful scientist in this field. Since I was very little my parents discovered that my learning abilities were astonishing but that was not all. Later they also discovered that I could see and hear things that no one else could. All this seemed to be tied up with the aftermath of a near-death experience (NDE) where I drowned at the age of two. Not long after, I started to communicate with Beings of Light who have guided me through a journey of miracles, not just around the world but also through the barriers of time. With them I have been able to access past life experiences of myself and others, and future events. As I grew up and remembered my drowning, I could never get away from the question, “How could I have seen my body lifeless if I was still alive?” This experience made it clear to me that there was an existence beyond the body. Before I was quite three, I was gifted with knowing that I have existed for a very long time. In fact, I have come and gone in different realms many more times. https://www.ingridhonkala.com/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GDQF9T2W https://www.pastliveshypnosis.co.uk/https://www.patreon.com/ourparanormalafterlifeMy book 'Verified Near Death Experiences' https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXKRGDFP Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

De oorlog in Iran heeft niet alleen vervelende economische gevolgen, zoals hoge energieprijzen. De spanningen zorgen er ook voor dat de relatie met de Verenigde Staten verandert. Dat kan grote gevolgen voor de Europese veiligheid hebben. In deze Haagse Zaken bespreken politiek verslaggevers Pim van den Dool en Steven Derix de consequenties van de oorlog in Iran. Kan Europa echt nog rekenen op steun van de Verenigde Staten onder Trump? En worden de banden met Israël minder hecht, nu een meerderheid van de Tweede Kamer een verdrag met dat land wil opschorten?Gast: Pim van den Dool, Steven DerixPresentatie: Erik van der WalleRedactie: Lotteke BoogertMontage: Pieter BakkerHeb je vragen, suggesties of ideeën over onze journalistiek? Mail dan naar onze redactie viapodcast@nrc.nl.Lees verder:Korte klap en ieder voor zich: uit angst voor protesten kiezen EU-landen in energiecrisis voor makkelijke maatregelenNa einde blokkade wacht mijnenjagers in de Straat van Hormuz een intensieve klusDe onzekerheid regeert in de Straat van Hormuz, zelfs nu Iran de zeestraat zegt te heropenenZie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For forty years, near-death researchers built their models almost entirely on adult testimony. A new literature review just revealed the oversight: only 8 studies in four decades directly included children as subjects - despite children regularly surviving cardiac arrests and reporting experiences every bit as vivid as adults.What those children report is startling in its implications. They share the structural features of NDEs - the tunnel, the light, the out-of-body sensation - but none of the cultural overlay that fills adult accounts. No life reviews. No deceased relatives. No religious figures shaped by their tradition. The researchers describe children's accounts as more "raw" - less mediated by a lifetime of cultural expectation.

We blikken terug op de 45ste editie van de Marathon Rotterdam. Halen de anekdotes op, van tachtigjarige helden, tot de nationaal kampioenen Filmon Tesfu en Mikky Keetels en de kramp in de hamstrings van Pim. Sportief manager Michel Butter schuift uiteraard aan. Luister naar verhalen over vreugde en verdriet, omgaan met en reflecteren op een mindere dag, de maakbaarheid van een goede marathon en de onvoorspelbaarheid van de 42 kilometer en 195 meter. Pak 10 procent korting bij Upfront met de code pacer10 Ga naar runwithren.com/depacer voor 30 dagen gratis REN Pak 20 procent korting bij Ever Ready via everready.nl met de code pacer20Support the show: https://krant.nl/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

What if the real secret to business growth is not creativity but competition? I sat down with Chris Dreyer, founder of Rankings.io, who built one of the fastest-growing legal marketing companies by mastering SEO, niche focus, and relentless execution. Chris shares how his early work ethic shaped his path, why he chose the highly competitive personal injury space, and how treating business like a math-based game helped him scale. You will hear how content, reviews, and authority drive Google rankings, why most lawyers misunderstand marketing, and how narrowing your focus can actually expand your results. I believe you will find this useful as Chris shows how discipline, data, and consistency can turn any business into an unstoppable force. Highlights: 00:56 – How early work and family habits built a strong work ethic05:00 – Why taking the hardest job created resilience and grit12:12 – How serving people helped develop communication and confidence24:22 – Why choosing a competitive niche leads to greater success37:08 – What it takes to rank at the top of Google consistently51:16 – How doing free work early builds skill and long-term growth Bottom of Form About the Guest: Chris Dreyer is the CEO and Founder of Rankings.io, the category-defining SEO agency built exclusively to help elite law firms and personal injury lawyers dominate Google's organic search results. Under his leadership, Rankings.io has become synonymous with measurable results, helping attorneys secure life-changing cases through visibility at the exact moment potential clients are searching for help. The company has achieved what few in the legal marketing space ever have, earning a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for eight consecutive years, proof of both sustained growth and relentless execution. Beyond Rankings, Chris is a builder of platforms and a voice of authority in legal marketing and entrepreneurship. He is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of Niching Up: The Narrower the Market, the Bigger the Prize, where he details how focus creates outsized impact. He is also a seasoned real estate investor and the host of the Personal Injury Mastermind podcast, where he interviews top attorneys and business leaders shaping the future of law. His influence extends across respected councils and networks, including the Forbes Agency Council, Rolling Stone Culture Council, Business Journals Leadership Trust, Fast Company Executive Board, and Newsweek Expert Forum, cementing his reputation as both a practitioner and thought leader. Chris's path to entrepreneurship has been unconventional yet relentlessly instructive. Once a world-ranked collectible card game competitor, he carried that same strategic mindset into business. After earning a History Education degree, his first professional role was as a detention room supervisor, hardly glamorous, but it provided the unstructured time that sparked his obsession with digital marketing. He began experimenting with affiliate sites and, at his peak, managed more than 100 properties simultaneously. This side hustle soon eclipsed his day job, propelling him into full-time entrepreneurship. When affiliate marketing's golden age waned, Chris pivoted into legal SEO and quickly carved out a niche. Along the way, he also became a top-ranked online poker player, honing skills in risk management and probability that would serve him well in scaling his companies. Today, Chris runs Rankings.io with the same competitive fire he once brought to cards and poker, driven to outthink, outwork, and outlast the competition. His mission is simple: help the best personal injury law firms win more cases, build enduring legacies, and dominate their markets. Ways to connect with Chris**:** website: rankings.io https://x.com/chrisdreyerco https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisdreyerco/ https://www.facebook.com/chrisdreyerco https://www.instagram.com/chrisdreyerco/ 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/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ 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 Hingson, 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 everyone, and welcome to another edition of unstoppable mindset. Today, our guest is Chris Dreyer. Chris, Chris has formed a company called rankings.ai. And I'm going to let him describe what all that is about. And he's done some pretty interesting things with it. It has been on inks top 5000 companies, growing companies for the past eight years. Eight years is a long time, which is pretty cool. So I'm sure he's got lots of adventures and lots of stories to talk about. So Chris, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're Chris Dreyer  01:35 here. Yeah, thanks for having me, Michael. I'm excited to chat. Michael Hingson  01:39 Well, let's start with kind of the early Chris growing up and all that, and see where we go from there. It sounds Chris Dreyer  01:45 good to me. So yeah, Michael Hingson  01:46 let's go. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Yeah, school and all that stuff. Chris Dreyer  01:51 Okay, yeah, let me, let me, and then you just cut me off at any point, because I can be a long Michael Hingson  01:55 talker the so can I? I Chris Dreyer  01:56 know what you mean. I, I grew up in a very small city, elkville, Illinois, my high school had 100 people in it. I was a graduating class of 28 I grew up, I would say it's kind of weird. My mom and dad, if they heard me say poor, would not love me saying poor, but I we weren't. We were certainly at the bottom of middle class or the upper or poor. I had a lot of chores. I every single weekend, I cleaned a law office with my mom or did something at the farmers market. So and at the time, it wasn't work. It was just what we did as a family, right? I didn't even understand it. We had, we didn't have city water. We had to get a truck and bring in our water, and we had well water, right? And in my family, and that was, that was early on, right? My dad was a milk carrier. My mom was a cook and and ultimately, they did better over the years and made more money. But it started off, it was a lot, a lot of grit, perseverance, working hard. And I like to share that, because my parents work ethic is very strong, very dependable, very consistent. And that's kind of where I got my drive. But that's, that's kind of how I grew up, small, small town, you know, a lot of side hustles with the parents. And once I went to college, I got that, that shock of, oh, here's a whole bunch of go from 100 to, you know, 20,000 Yeah, it's a bit of a shock there. 03:35 Where'd you go to college? Chris Dreyer  03:36 Yeah, I went to SIU, Southern Illinois University. There in Carbondale, Illinois. I actually live in Carbondale today. And, you know, I went to college. I was always had that entrepreneurial bug, and, but I went to college, it was kind of to make mom and dad happy to get that degree and, but I just knew that I was going to own my own business. And I kind of had that conversation with them out of the gate, but so I was a terrible student. Partied a lot, you know, chase the women, so to speak, and but somehow, ended up with a degree, got a job at a high school as their JV basketball coach, and I started doing internet marketing on the side to make a little extra money because I had some downtime. And by the end of my second year teaching, I was making about four times the amount doing that that I was teaching. So that was kind of my sign, and to go pursue that full time, and that's what I did. That's when I left to do affiliate marketing and digital marketing full time was after Michael Hingson  04:41 that second year, of course. Now the real question is, you were chasing the women? Did any of them 04:44 chase you? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Just Michael Hingson  04:49 want to make sure it's reciprocal here. Yeah, that's that's pretty cool, though. And I was going to ask you, and you sort of answered it, about your workout. Ethic and so on. I find that if people do grow up in an environment where they're working and they appreciate what they do get and the amount of work that they do, and they develop a strong work ethic, or their parents have it, they generally do as well, although sometimes there's some rebellions, but still, ultimately, the right stuff shows through. Chris Dreyer  05:24 Can I tell just a brief story about that? My mom, when I turned 16, it was like, you're getting a job, son, right? And it was not, we had, we were fine without, but it was like, so she took me to this place. It was called Ken's antiques, and they used to do the semi truck deliveries of aluminum, and I used to go to auctions and unload furniture. And I asked her, I was like, Why did you take me there? Well, you know, why didn't you take me to the mall? Why didn't you know to go work at a the buckle or the gap or something, you know, why did you take me? There she goes. Well, I knew if you could, if you could succeed here, you'd be fine anywhere, because it was the hardest job that I could think of. And I was like, Oh, really, thanks, Mom. Like, send me to the to the hardest job that you could think of and see if I could thrive. And I did well there. But that just kind of goes to show you the mindset that my mom had racing me, which also kind of, you know, attached to me as well. Michael Hingson  06:26 Yeah, well, and I can appreciate course, now looking back on it, of course, but I can appreciate what she said, because if you can survive in one place, and you can if it's if it is a tough job and you approach it the right way, then you'll probably be good anywhere, and there you go. Chris Dreyer  06:47 Yep, yep, to her credit, it was a very tough job. It is as still to this day, the hardest job from a physically demanding perspective that I had, but, but yeah, and it was good. It built resilience, you know, kind of helped me get that that put that true grit on and yeah, so that's kind of my background. Michael Hingson  07:08 I never did really work at a job growing up, my brother did. He worked at a restaurant and so on and bus tables and did other things. But I remember, when he got his first job, he went and applied at a at a restaurant, and the owner or manager, I guess probably both said, so, you know, we'll, we'll consider you. Would you do us a favor? There's some weeds out in the in the front, would you go pull those? And he said, within about a half hour, he got the whole place completely cleaned up of weeds. And the boss came out and said, You did all of that. And my brother said, Yeah. And guy said, You're hired. You know, amazing, you know, because my brother didn't even realize, I think at first, that that was really a test, but it was, and of course, he passed, which was cool. That's a great story, but I never got really to do much work. I kind of was more the intellectual guy in the family, and finding jobs would have been a little bit more of a challenge for me. I did do some babysitting, but that was about all I could do. I've been blind my whole life, and a lot of the jobs that were available in Palmdale, where I grew up in Southern California, were not jobs I was going to realistically be able to do anyway, but I could babysit, and that worked out pretty well. Yeah, yeah. So I mainly studied, Chris Dreyer  08:41 love it. So So studied. Can I? Can I do the reverse interview? What's some of your your top motivational books, business books? Because I'm sure you've got some that just pop top of the dome. Well, sort of, kind Michael Hingson  08:55 of, I really have a slightly different idea about that, but I'll tell you, I've read a number of the main books in the whole motivational and and management world. One Minute Manager is a book I appreciate a great deal. And I also like Dale Carnegie books like How to Win Friends and Influence People. But for me, I point out, and even to this day point out that I've learned more about teamwork and trust and leadership from working with eight Guide Dogs for the last 61 years than I ever learned from all the management and leadership books and everything else that's out there, mainly because working with dogs, you have several things that are An issue, first of all, respecting them and the job that they do, knowing that you're really forming a team with a guide dog, where each member of the team has a job to do. So in my case, the dog, and the case of people who use guide dogs, the purpose of the dog is to make sure that we walk safely as. We're walking somewhere, but my job is to know where to go and how to get there, and then I have to learn how to communicate that to the dog, and also be the leader of the pack in the truest sense of the word, which also means that if the dog is upset, or there is any kind of an issue with the dog, I have to figure out what that is, and I have to read what is going on so that I understand that and can then figure out what is occurring and make sure that the dog stays happy so it's you. There's so much to learn about trust, and one of the main things I've learned over the years is while dogs do, I think love unconditionally, unless they're just so badly traumatized by somebody for some reason they don't trust unconditionally. But the difference between dogs and people is that dogs are open to trust a whole lot more than we are. We have just had so many things go on. We read we bought them in the newspapers, we see it on the news and so on. Nobody trusts anyone. The feeling is basically everyone has their own hidden agenda, and so you can't trust anyone. And so there's very little communications today. There's very little real interaction. And people, by definition, don't trust. Dogs are open to trust, and you can earn their trust, and likewise, they get to and can earn your trust, and it is a it is a combination and kind of thing. So what I really learn when I go to get a new guide dog every time is I'm learning how to form a team with this other dog who doesn't speak the same language I do, who doesn't think the way I do. But I have to figure out what this dog does, what this dog is all about, and I'm the one that has to become the leader of the of the team and make things work. So I think that working with a dog is a lot more of a practical experience kind of thing than just reading about whatever there is to read about in books and so on. So that's why I say that. I think I've learned a lot more by working with dogs than I ever got from all the management books in the world, any of the Tony Robbins books, or any Chris Dreyer  12:07 of those. I love, every bit of that I just I was on x the other day, and it was talking about the the new CEO for Starbucks, right? Because the former CEO was McKinsey trained, right, but didn't have any actual experience at the helm. And then they brought back the former CEO of Taco Bell over to Starbucks, and the stock immediately shot up because of the application aspect of it. He had, he had done the job and been in the grind. So it's kind of interesting, kind of corollary there. But yeah, thank you for sharing. I was really intrigued, and I had to jump in and and ask, Michael Hingson  12:45 Oh, fair question, and then this is a conversation, so nothing wrong with asking questions on either side. So it's perfectly fine to to be able to do that well, so what did you do right out of college? Chris Dreyer  12:59 Right out of college, the one thing I'll tell you that I still to this day, I call myself an introvert. I don't think that, you know, introvert, extrovert. I think we have the tendencies at all times to be either one, right? But I think for me, I was more shy, but I built a lot of friends because I played sports and I knew them in college, and then they met, they introduced me to their friends. Because you got to imagine, when I had a class of 28 kids, it's like super small community versus, you know, everybody I'm interacting through their connections and their extended connections. So through college, I'd say the main education thing I got was, I did get a job waiting tables for three years, and so I got a lot of client service training, dealing with people having a ton of conversations through that, through my through my job, and also through my personal relationships with my friends and and other, you know, Students at the University, but so I think that kind of helped, helped me succeed afterwards, but afterwards, really, when I student taught at Heron, they saw my work ethic. They saw a shoe up, that I showed up, that I listened and I took action. So they, they hired me immediately, and I did the same when I was a JV basketball coach. I never missed a practice. Was always on time. Really tried to develop the kids and bring the most out of them, treated the parents well, and so I think that's what I did well, and it kind of put me in the position to have time to learn internet marketing. So I think that's kind of how it all started, Michael Hingson  14:47 when I was getting my teaching credential at UC Irvine, and I also got my master's degree in physics from there. But I student taught at the local high school, at University High School, and I student. Taught two classes. One was a physics class, and it was kind of for they called it dumbbell physics, but you know, it was kids who were sort of interested in science, but really didn't know where they wanted to go. But the other class was algebra one, and I remember one day I was teaching, and one of the students asked a question, and I didn't know the answer to it, and I probably should have, but I didn't. But what I said was, I don't know the answer right off, tell you, what do you mind if I look at it tonight, get you the answer and bring it back tomorrow. And the kid who was an eighth grader, actually accelerated, so it was high school algebra one, but he was from the eighth grade. He said, Sure, so I went home and found the answer in the book, when I should have known that, but anyway, came back in the next day, and even before I could say anything, he said, Mr. Hingson, I went home and got the answer, and I said, Well, come up and write it on the board. And one of the things that I did with with all of my classes when, of course, we had blackboards and all that, back in those days, I would want a student to come up and be the board writer, because they write a lot better than I do. And so we, we had pretty good competitions of people who wanted to write on the board. They all thought it was kind of fun, and I did spread that wealth around, but Marty came up and I said, now you got to explain what you're writing. And he had actually found the answer, which was cool, but my master teacher was also the football coach, and when I first told Marty and the rest of the class, I don't know the answer, but I will get it after class was over, Mr. Redmond said you did something that's absolutely amazing and was absolutely the right thing to do, and most people wouldn't do it. And that was you admitted you didn't know the answer, but you would go get it rather than trying to blow smoke, because these kids can see through that in a second. And he said, So you did the right thing, and I've always felt that's the way to do it. If I don't know the answer, I'll go figure it out, but I will also tell you that I don't know the answer, and you can decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I think it's a good thing, to be honest, Chris Dreyer  17:22 I couldn't agree more. Michael Hingson  17:25 And so it was fun. And and what the the other part of the story, and I think I've told it a couple times on the podcast, is 10 years later, I was at the Orange County Fairgrounds, and this kid comes up to me, Well, he was, he didn't sound like a kid anymore. And he said, Mr. Hingson, do you know who this is? Deep voice. And I went, No, not right off. And he said, I'm Marty. I'm the guy that was in your algebra class 10 years ago. Nice to be remembered, but, but he he also just remembered what happened. And I think he even said it was so cool that I was honest with him about it, which was, you know, a life lesson anybody should learn. Chris Dreyer  18:09 That's incredible. That's incredible. So Michael Hingson  18:10 it was a lot of fun. Well, so you student taught and so on, but eventually you ended up deciding to go into the entrepreneur world. But you also were a card collector, right? A game collector, yeah. Chris Dreyer  18:25 And in high school, I played this collectible card game. I played a combination of two. I mean, most people are familiar with Magic, The Gathering, but I also played this other game called Legend of five rings. And both, you know, the collectible card games, but they're really math based games based upon advantage and and, you know, you so now it's applicable to today. I can look at any whether it's Pokemon or whatever card game there is. It's, it was very, you know, it's force based, you know, benefits to attack and things like that. It attributes everything. But anyways, I played it competitively, and I was a top I was a world ranked player at one time. I won four state championships or CO days. No one had done that at the time in a two consecutive years, and it was just a top player, and when you get to the top, you become friends with the other top players, and then you talk strategy and and that even takes you to an even higher level. And so I did that, you know, for many years, competed all over the country. It was a great experience. And so, yeah, that in my house. My dad very so he had, he was a civil engineer. He has an engineer degree, but he was traveling. He was on the railroad at all times, and he wanted to stop traveling, so he accepted this job as a mail carrier so he could stay put. And. Yeah, and that's what he did. He retired as a mail carrier, but, you know, a top math expert to the to the point where there would be conversations where you could, like, I couldn't understand him, right? He couldn't understand himself, right? And, and, and there's many conversations in different aspects of this. But when we played games, whether it was Yahtzee or monopoly or whatever, every game, there was a math based lesson to it, like, which dice you rolled for advantage at Yahtzee, which ones to hold after the first roll. Poker games, pitch games, Rummy, every single game it was, it was game theory. It was math on what was the precise the best role, like Monopoly, the best properties and the probability to get an orange property over other properties and and how much you should spend at certain points of the game. And I realized saying that outline that's that that's not normal. Some people just play yatse and roll the dice and they roll what they want, and some people play Monopoly and just buy the properties they want. That was not how games were played in my household, and it was very applicable to poker and to the collectible card games. Michael Hingson  21:22 Yeah. So how often did you want to buy Boardwalk and Park Place? Chris Dreyer  21:28 Not often. But I mean, so there. That was just how I was brought up. And yeah, and it turned into a lot of what I do today. Michael Hingson  21:42 Actually, I always like free parking. We had a thing where any money and and any kind of thing that you had to pay on all went into the free parking pot. So getting free parking was always fun. Oh yeah, but yeah, I hear what you're saying. I love monopoly and love to even play it against the computer, which was always a kind of a neat thing to do, but played Monopoly against other members of my family. Some we actually made a Well, we took a regular Monopoly board, and I think my father outlined the entire board and all the squares using elmer's glue so that we had raised lines for me to look at. Then we also did things to mark the paper money so I could tell what bills I had and and so on, and even Braille the cards. And I still have that game to this day, very neat, which is kind of cool, but monopoly spun. Chris Dreyer  22:36 Yeah, there's a lot of games that you know, there's no winner. You take my wife wants to play Scrabble all the time, and I'm like, there's just not a winner in Scrabble. Because if I challenge you on a word, and I'm right, you're wrong. You're mad if I beat you, you know, and then if I lose, it's not fulfilling for me. That's one of those games. There's no winner. Michael Hingson  23:02 I have a friend who plays Scrabble with his mother all the time, and and he, I think he loses more than he wins, but he's always proud when he beats her. And he's almost 60, so you know, she's, she's older than he is, but they, they play and have a lot of fun with Scrabble. Chris Dreyer  23:21 That's incredible. That's Michael Hingson  23:22 great. Yeah, it is kind of cool. But anyway, so you eventually decided to go off and go into the entrepreneurial world, and you started your company, or went well, when did you actually start the company? Chris Dreyer  23:37 Started the company officially in 2013 it was attorney rankings.org, that was the original name. Now it's rankings.io, I worked at a few agencies previously, while I was also doing the affiliate marketing, and kind of got to see the agency world of providing, you know, the professional services space. And after working at a few agencies. Thought that I could do it right. I got the confidence from the competence, and that's when I launched it. 2013 we've always been focused on legal. The difference today is primarily, we're focused on a sub niche of legal for personal injury law. And, you know, we work with other practice areas, criminal defense, family law, etc. But really personal injury is the is 85% of our business. Michael Hingson  24:27 So what is it that rankings.io? Does, Chris Dreyer  24:31 yeah, we do digital marketing. We do search engine optimization now, AI search, we do pay per click paid social web design. A lot of performance marketing, I would say more performance, less creative and branding. And that's what we do. We work with the top, the biggest pi firms, personal injury law firms in the country. We're in chiefs, I think every state we work with about. 250 law firms across the country. Michael Hingson  25:03 What made you decide to focus on law in the beginning? Chris Dreyer  25:09 Yeah, I'll say a few reasons. One, I had an experience working with attorneys, and I liked working with them. So there was the like component when I worked at an agency, I had a few firms that would I spoke with, and I enjoyed it. The second thing was, if I'm being honest, the status like I wanted to tell my parents that I did marketing for lawyers, and not just, you know, any industry. And then the other thing is, is I'm very, very, very competitive, and I kept seeing and hearing these reports about more and more attorneys going to law school and and just all this competition for legal and the thing that I differ you hear a lot of coaches and mentors. They'll say, hey, go to the blue ocean. You know, everyone's read the blue ocean book, or, you know, Peter thiel's zero to one, and everyone thinks so, go where there's no competition. And I'm like, That's fine if you're Elon or Peter Thiel or Zuckerberg creating something new, but if you're going into an existing category, you want to go where there is competition, because it demands expertise, and that's the way that I've looked at it. Like, you take the agency perspective, I don't want to go to, you know, lawn care, SEO like, do they really want to do search engine optimization? Do they really have a ton of competition? Maybe that's not a great example. But you get my point where, if you go into the city, there's a ton of personal injury law firms, but there's only a few that can rank at the top. And there's, they're all trying to gather cases from one another, so they want an expert to help them, you know, get that visibility. And that's, that's the mindset that Michael Hingson  26:58 went into it. What strikes me is interesting, though, is that with all of that, you bring a very competitive level to what you do. And I'm not sure that I find that a lot of people necessarily even do that, so you consider even search engine optimization to be a very competitive thing, I don't want to say sport, but you consider it all about competition, and you want to really bring the best and the most significant aspects of it to what you do. And that clearly has to show up when you're talking about Inc ranking you in the top companies for eight years in a row. Chris Dreyer  27:47 Yeah, it's very status orientation. You know, that's why I like working with trial attorneys. There's a winner and loser in court, and there's only one top position in Google or on these llms, and it's, who's gonna win, who's the best? Yeah, and it's right there for everyone. Here's here's the tally. Everyone can see who's the best. And I've always loved that. I think I heard a podcast recently by John Morgan. He's the founder of Morgan, Morgan, right? Of course. And you know, he's always a character and funny to listen to, but, yeah, he talks about being insatiable. Like, how did you grow this? He's like, Well, I'm insatiable. I I want to continue to grow. And for me, it's, it's the exact same thing. It's like, I'm insatiable. We hit a milestone. I want the next milestone. It is the game that I'm playing. I am playing like my hobby is my business. I enjoy it. I look forward to a Monday. It rewards me mentally. I enjoy the people I work with. And that's that's how we're at you know, Inc, 5008 years in a row, we'll definitely be on the ninth year next year, due to our growth this year. And it's that's just, that's just how I treat it. It's just a big game. And, you know, like any game, you play Sim City, whatever, you get a little bit more money, you get a little bit more buildings, right? You do a little bit better, you hire more talent, you expand your capabilities, and you just, if you don't stop, you're going to Michael Hingson  29:22 continue to grow. But it's a game in the mathematical sense, and it's it's a game in the the productive sense of what you're trying to do is, isn't the game just, although you obviously have to have fun in what you do, otherwise you wouldn't enjoy doing it. But it's a game in the mathematical sense of the word, oh, 100% Chris Dreyer  29:44 and so many people don't understand what I'm about to say. But like, every move that you make is a move based upon leverage in some capacity, yeah, and you take, because our time is all limited. You take. I'll give you some examples, like from a from a distribution perspective, hosting my podcast or being on your podcast is going to have more listeners than if I go speak on stage, if I go speak on stage now that that has its own benefits of authority and and different you know, belly to belly relationships from a trust perspective, but from a distribution perspective, I would be better off doing more podcasts than I would speaking on stage, sure. So there's an advantage there, right? And then there's also advantages through pricing arbitrage, and it's if, if I hire labor and talent in in the Midwest, and I pay them above average fees and salaries, and I pay my employees well, but compare that to New York or California. And I think some people, you know, these are things that they don't talk about, but when you start to look at leverage closely, it's everywhere. Capital, economies of scale, if I you know, there's leverage based upon my my buying power in certain areas, and that's what I look for. It's an interesting way to make decisions. Is based upon that leverage component. Michael Hingson  31:20 Do you think that that works in other kinds of arenas, other than just what you do? Chris Dreyer  31:27 Oh, I won 1,000% yes, yeah. It works in you could see it. You know, the closest would be, closest arena would be sports. There's so many, whether it's the salary caps or the talent of one person's labor based, you know, what they can do from a utilization or capacity versus another one's people talk about it on the business side of like, you know, You have one software programmer is worth, potentially 1,000x another one just because of that individual's capabilities. So it's literally everywhere, and it's also dissecting different scenarios into fractional leverage. So I'll take give you a different way of thinking about this. Is like, you take a an SEO specialist, a top tier SEO specialist might be 100 200 grand, right, technician, right? But you you break down their capabilities into the smaller parts. You know someone that just writes, someone that just does the title tags and the website, and someone that just does the links and that, like you can assemble, that individuals that that superstars talent through the FRAC breaking it down from a fractional perspective. It's just a big game of puzzles and how you get there and you look at like what your competitors are doing and how you can, I wouldn't say, exploit in a negative way, but, but what I mean is how you can take advantage in a positive way to to help your business succeed, right? Michael Hingson  33:15 Well, do you so if, if you're playing a game like football, of course, everybody, every team, wants to crush the other team, and it's all about winning and beating the heck out of the other guy. Is that really the way you view it, in terms of the game, as you play it, and do you enjoy being able to just crush the competition? Or is it a different mindset than that? Chris Dreyer  33:42 That's a really good question, because I am an abundance mindset. I don't think everything is a zero sum game. It's, I'll tell you something super nerdy. I was talking to my chief of staff the other day that he's we're big gamers, big nerds. And he, we were talking about Warhammer 40k and the dwarves in that game have a book of grudges. So anybody that that goes against the dwarves, they they're listed in the book of grudges, right? Yeah. And it's like all the dwarves are trying to, you know, right? This wrong. And I kind of look like that. I'm like, treat people respect like, you know, abundance zero, you know, like, abundance mentality. Do the referral thing until it's like, okay, you've done X, Y and Z, and I could give you examples of x, y, z, and it's like, okay, well, you're not my friend. You're not my ally, so now you are a true competitor by all since you know, by all definitions, right? That's how I've treated it. Michael Hingson  34:48 And so it isn't the joy of just beating everybody in sight. No, which is different, which is cool, because certainly. I would, I would also bet, though, that you have people who are competitors, but they're not unfriendly, so you can absolutely, yeah, you can develop Chris Dreyer  35:10 working relationships. Rattle off, and we have great conversations. We're friends, and people are surprised when they see us, and we're friendly, and it's like, no, it's like, we have families, we have life. We want to do good work. We want to and it's so you can absolutely have that too. Yeah. Michael Hingson  35:27 Why did you decide to specifically choose personal injury Chris Dreyer  35:33 for me? And it's this is turning into the math conversation. But really, I looked at our revenue, and it was like over 70% of our revenue. Was from less than 50% of our clientele. And it was a clear directional signal to pursue this area. And that's it was the math like, these are our best clients. They pay the most, they stay the longest we could do the best work. Also the PI space is the Super Bowl. Is the major leagues. In the legal arena, it's, it's very difficult to rank. There's a lot of competition versus, you know, I get a family law attorney. I don't care what market you're in, Los Angeles, it's like a sneeze to get them the number one or two? Yeah, it's and I like that. I like the competition. I like having to work at it and be creative and think about different things to try to obtain that top position. Michael Hingson  36:33 Yeah, well, so I would, I would presume that John Morgan's happy with you. Chris Dreyer  36:40 I, you know, I had Dan Morgan as a keynote for my 2024 conference, his son. And I haven't personally talked to John. I think he's well, he says he's retired, but he's not really retired, yeah, right. The I couldn't work with Morgan and Morgan, I can have a great relationship with them, but I can't work with them because they're in every market, and my I would, they would be my only client, so that's why, but certainly have a great relationship. I've got a text relationship with Dan, but yeah, they, I think they do everything in house. Michael Hingson  37:20 Anyways, you don't want to be the consularity for Morgan and Morgan, in other words, Chris Dreyer  37:25 your only client, right, right? That would put a lot of risk on the old client concentration problem, Michael Hingson  37:33 and it would, but still. So what does it mean for a law firm to dominate Google's organic search. And I guess the other question is, why is that the legal battleground that personal injury lawyers can't really ignore? Chris Dreyer  37:53 There's, there's so much here. Okay, where do I go? That's a lot of take. You take any channel, broadcast television has been the main vehicle for channel for distribution. It's the lowest CPMs cost per 1000. The distribution is very wide, because an individual doesn't know typically, when they're going to be in an accident, right? So you got to have a lot of reach and touch a lot of individuals. There's also radio and billboards. But typically, even if they watch you on television or hear you on the radio or what have you, they still convert. They go to Google to make that conversion that go to the website. Typically, it's not always and and things are changing due to these llms and the native experiences on platform. But even today, it's still the final destination before they contact a firm. So it's really important that you show up at the top of Google to capture all of those opportunities that you've advertised for in other mediums. Michael Hingson  39:09 How do you do that? Chris Dreyer  39:12 Well, so you know, I'll say, I'll try to simplify for the audience. Let's just keep it really, think of like a Venn diagram of, you know, the three circles overlaying and you've got the middle. You have to do all three. The first one is you have to have excellent content. You have to have, you know, if you're an auto accident attorney, you have to have content about auto accidents. You have to have, you know, you have to have content that targets phrases and words that consumers will search for, right? It starts with the content. It has to be thematically and topically relevant. Has to be excellent content. The second component would be related to. Views. You got to get Google reviews to show up on in the LSA, the local services ads location, you have to get reviews to show up in Google Map Pack. You need reviews now on Yelp to show up on and be discovered on these different llms, particularly a chat GPT. And just due to how okay for the SEO nerds listening, let me explain, because typically when you get reviews on Yelp and when you get reviews or recommendations on Facebook, they aggregate that information to other sites, which is then the listicles that form the basis of discovery for these llms. So you got to have a review background. So content reviews and then links. Google, the way that they differentiated, again, way against lo AOL was they use links as a categorization method. So if you're trying to win an election, you want to get as many votes as possible. If you're trying to win the first page of Google, you want to get as many high quality links as possible. High quality being authoritative, relevant, trustworthy, you know, sites that get a lot of traffic, so you need great content, lot of reviews and links. That is the very 8020, high end summer summary of of how to rank in Google search and on the llms, yeah. Michael Hingson  41:24 Well, and how does LinkedIn fit into what you do? Chris Dreyer  41:29 LinkedIn is a bit different. I you know LinkedIn more B to B platform. I think if you're a business attorney or a B to B firm, it's an excellent channel. I use it from a distribution perspective. I get a lot of reach. I get a lot of followers on there. A lot of attorneys congregate on there. And it's a great, you know, channel for recruiting talent, and it's cited frequently if you have some type of reputation perspective that you want to control around your name. LinkedIn typically ranks in one of the top three positions for your name if you have your profile set up properly. So yeah, it's, it's, it's got great distribution from a leverage perspective, and, you know, has other applications as well. Michael Hingson  42:15 If you were starting a law firm today, or you were advising someone who's starting a law firm, how would you deal with and start their marketing efforts? How would you organize marketing for them? Chris Dreyer  42:28 Yeah, in the beginning I would, I would do almost all performance marketing. I would not do. I would do very little with brands, because you need to get on your your cash acceleration cycle is very poor. From a PI perspective. I'm always thinking from an injury law firm perspective, because, you know, if you get an auto accident case by the time they get treatment and go through the whole process, you know, it could be 12 to 18 months before you get paid. So you know, I would think about performance marketing, Facebook ads, Google ads, LSA, SEO, a lot of the ads platforms that are, you know, very performance driven. That would be the majority of my investment. Facebook ads. So in a vacuum, you know, different markets are, there's different channels that are more effective. But in a vacuum, I would say today, right now, Facebook ads would be the best platform, the best channel for that, Michael Hingson  43:29 because so many, because it has such a high volume of viewers, or what Chris Dreyer  43:34 they're well, it's just the cost per lead. The amount that you pay on that platform to reach your target prospect is going to be cheaper than say, you go to Google ads and you're paying $600 a click for a phrase, or, you know, it's just now, there's, again, this is in a vacuum. There's very effective Google Ad strategies you can get, you know, creative with performance, Max campaigns and and different strategies. But I would say just in general, Facebook ads out of the gate would be one that I would start with, and I would start the SEO early, just because it takes time to develop. Michael Hingson  44:14 Yeah, well, that makes sense, and it does take a long time, and I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand how all of that works, but it's still something that they should, should deal with Chris Dreyer  44:28 1,000% and, you know, it's, it's a game of, it's a long game, but it, you know, even SEO can be on a shorter time horizon, if, if You're, like, if you target Car Accident Lawyer in that phrase and that segment, then sure, yeah, 12 to 18 months is, you know, you know, even two years before you start to get some visibility. But you target dog bites, you target, you know, some other case types that aren't as competitive like you can get traction sooner. Michael Hingson  45:00 Hmm, well, and that kind of brings up the question you You talk a lot about, and you wrote a book about niche. Why is it that going into like a smaller niche can yield sort of a greater opportunity, or by narrowing focus, you're creating bigger opportunities? Why is that? So? Chris Dreyer  45:22 What comes top of mind? Some of the biggest, the most important reason is it all centers around this word focus. When you focus in a single area, you become better. Well, because you were better, you can you can at your you can charge more because you're worth it. The other thing is, is when you focus on a single area, you you can create, create repeatable processes, and everything is not bespoke when it comes in. So you can set up your internal productization of a certain area. You it makes training easier by immersion. So there's a lot of benefits, even even the perception aspect of it, right? So when you think of like, who's better, a generalist versus a brain surgeon, you think a brain surgeon is a specialist. And you think, Well, who do you think, just offhand, whose fees would be higher? Well, you think the brain surgeon would would charge higher fees. And so from a perception perspective, and when you're thinking about trust, the that's the other one, right? You would think from a trust perspective, they would be more qualified because they're in this certain area. So, and when we're trying to convert someone in sales, it's always a conversation based upon trust. So those are some of the main advantages, the one heavy, heavy disadvantage. Disadvantage is Tam, total addressable market. It's you focus on personal injury. You're at 50, 60,000 firms. You focus on all law firms. United States, you're at 400,000 law firms. So there's trade offs for you know, there's pros and cons on both sides well Michael Hingson  47:03 and and that makes sense, but there is a lot of merit to the to the whole concept of specializing, and you've proven it with what you do, and you continue to be pretty successful about it. And then that makes a lot of sense, but you also do something else that I think is interesting. You've written a book, niching up, you've got a podcast, you have other things that you do, and, of course, just the company itself, but you put all of that together, and all of that not only has to help your brand, but it makes you more visible in the marketplace overall. Don't you think? Chris Dreyer  47:42 Yeah, it certainly does, and it is our flywheel, right? It's somebody that's on my podcast could be a potential quote in my book, and I have a personal injury lawyer marketing book, right? And there's quotes from the pod. I have now a quarterly magazine that goes out. We could cherry pick a couple episodes, you know, to include in the magazine. We have retreats that are quarterly. They're, they're in person that, because we have a community, they're easier to to fill. We have a yearly event for personal injury law firms called, you know, Pim con. So it's all this, this flywheel that kind of compounds over time due to the community aspect, Michael Hingson  48:25 but people obviously react well to it, because you continue to be successful. Chris Dreyer  48:32 Yeah, and I think the biggest thing for me is I am I am not the the expert. I am bringing on the experts in their field, the people that are eating their own dog food, so to speak, right? They're practicing what they preach. It is, I can orchestrate a great conversation because I know the space and can ask very specific questions based upon my knowledge. But I'm bringing on, you know, Dan Morgan's on the pod. I've had, let's see Morris Bart. You know, I've had frank Azar in Colorado. I've had the biggest of the big pi attorneys on sharing what works for them, which, which is very valuable, because it's not, you know, some, you know, a consultant or me or whoever, speaking about like, Oh, this is how you can grow a law firm. It's no this is the owner of a law firm explaining how he or she is growing their law firm right, Michael Hingson  49:31 and providing that advice for other people, which also helps you gain trust, which is pretty cool. What's the best way for an attorney who wants to stand out to truly build authority in the market? Chris Dreyer  49:50 Well, if you're if you're b Look, okay, so there's a couple types of firms. If you're a trial attorney and you want to get peer referrals, I would say. See, I would say start a podcast would be one of the best ways, you know, interview your peer, interview other attorneys around the country, talk shop, you know, speak at C les. You know, do the those types of aspects it, you know, a podcast. I'm not saying it's not good for B to C, but it's, it has to be a different type of podcast. So I think, I think B to B, if you're a litigation attorney, a podcast would be great if it's B to C. That's, that's tricky. I think I think probably social media in some capacity, but really it's just sharing your knowledge on a platform and being consistent. Michael Hingson  50:51 Yeah, consistency counts for a lot, and it is something you can you can show is being relevant in almost any kind of business. I mean, look at McDonald's. One thing you can generally tell about McDonald's is that their quarter pounder is going to taste the same everywhere, and it's going to be the same and, and, and companies and people can learn a lot by seeing a company that truly develops that level of trust, 51:24 yeah, couldn't agree more. Michael Hingson  51:26 And that's pretty important to do, to be able to get someone who is going to earn that trust by vigorously working to earn that trust. And so there's something to be said for that, needless to say, so you've built a very large company. What would you say are some of the pivotal moments that sort of helped shape your trajectory? I know you've talked about some things, but what, what kind of really, are the things that stand out that really helped you create all of that? Chris Dreyer  52:00 I think in the beginning, I did a lot of free work, and had to prove my work, prove my abilities. I think so many people just want to charge a lot out of the gate. And I think there's when you do things for people, they're more willing to reciprocate. And it from an application perspective, it makes you better. So I did a lot of free work early, a ton of free work. I took a lot of jobs or contracts that maybe not, maybe for certain, that I wouldn't take today, that were just not perfect, but like they were my opportunities that I didn't, you know, let them pass by. I think hiring the right people, having super high standards is incredibly important, people that share your values. In the beginning, I used to, every time I heard a speech or taught speech speaker talk about culture values, I used to kind of roll my eyes and say I just didn't get to get to work, right? But now I know it's more important than ever that they share my values, right? Because they're important to me, and that's how you move forward. And I think the other one, if I had to say, the bigger I get, the more important good data, is to make decisions like, if I just don't have good data, it's very difficult. I'm just guessing and and the better the data, the better decisions well. Michael Hingson  53:32 So the the other thing that comes to mind when you talked about doing a lot of free work and jobs that you wouldn't necessarily take today, I don't know how much it really entered into your mindset, but think of all the knowledge you gathered by doing that that you might not have ever gotten. Yeah. Chris Dreyer  53:49 I mean, that's true, and a lot of other people wouldn't have done those jobs, so that's kind of some unique perspectives. Michael Hingson  53:56 Yeah, I when I hired sales people, one of the first things I always told them was, you're coming into this be a student for at least the first year. Don't hesitate to ask questions of your customers, because they're not if you gain their trust at all. They're not in it to see you fail. They want you to succeed, but they want to be able to trust you. And so there's a lot to be said for being a student, asking questions and learning from that. I agree. I agree, which makes a lot of sense. What's the biggest misconception that lawyers typically have about marketing? Chris Dreyer  54:33 They underestimate how many dollars and what it takes for someone to actually be memorable or build a brand. I talked to, I heard Alex hermosi talking recently about, you know, no one really knew who Jennifer Lawrence was before the mockingbird movie, and they spent $50 million on advertising for that movie. And then, oh, suddenly, everyone knows who she is. But it took $50 million To do so. I think a lot of times people think they oversaturate a channel when they haven't even scratched the possibilities or the capabilities of a particular channel. Michael Hingson  55:10 How do you help lawyers break through that misconception? I agree with what you're saying. I hear it a lot, in so many ways, but how do you break through that and get them to understand the value. Chris Dreyer  55:22 It's a dance, yeah, you know, I try to get them to look at the blended cost to acquire a case, as opposed to, you know, the CAC to LTV ratio, versus trying to pinpoint each individual channel and but it is try to try to solve with data and proof over, you know, guesses, but or promises, but it is always a song and dance. Michael Hingson  55:52 The data and proof is out there. If people can learn to look for it, it's, it's, the reality is, mostly it's not a guess, but you have to know where to look or learn how to find the data to be able to get the answers that you need to demonstrate that marketing is just as valuable as anything else. I mean, there's so many strong lessons about marketing. We talked about Morgan and Morgan, but think about it, he's out there doing TV commercials all the time, and I'm sure that that's helping his company. He and Ultima continuing to to grow, and now they got the boys all in it. And the reality is they've demonstrated that they understand something about what marketing is all about. I remember back a long time ago when it was taboo for lawyers to even advertise. And then a couple of companies out here started to do it. And finally, people realized there's a lot of value in marketing. Chris Dreyer  56:50 Absolutely. And Michael, I should have said this in advance. I've got a I got a hard stop, I got a I got a hat, I got a client call here in two minutes. Michael Hingson  56:59 Well, then let me just ask, is there anything else that you want to add? Or how can people reach out to you if they'd like to do that? Chris Dreyer  57:06 Well, first of all, I really enjoyed our conversation, so thank you for having me. Yeah, you know, for anybody that has a question or wants to connect with me, the best way to get in touch with me is by email. I'm an inbox zero guy. It's Chris, C, H, R, i s@rankings.io I'm most active on LinkedIn. You'll just do a search for Chris Dreyer, and you'll find me cool. Michael Hingson  57:29 Well, I want to thank you for being here, and I want to thank all of you for tuning in today, wherever you are, I'd love to hear from you. Love your thoughts on the podcast. Give us an email at Michael h i at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, i, b, e.com, also, you can listen to any of our podcasts. They're all available. And you can find us at Michael hingson.com/podcast and you can see and hear all the episodes that you want from there. Please give us a five star review and great rating wherever you're listening and watching us, we value it a lot. And if you know anyone who you think might be able to be a good guest, love to hear from you. Chris, you as well. If you know anybody else who you think ought to be a guest, I'd love to definitely get your help to bring them on, because we're looking for all the people who want to come on and show that we're all more unstoppable than we think. But again, I want to just thank you for being here today. Chris Dreyer  58:20 Thank you, Michael. I really enjoyed it. Michael Hingson  58:26 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 Michael hingson.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 you.

Wie de winnaars van de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen wil zien, kan het best naar rechts kijken. De grootste winnaar, Forum voor Democratie, zit zelfs in de extreemrechtse hoek waar racistische en antidemocratische denkbeelden niet geschuwd worden.In deze Haagse Zaken bespreken politiek journalisten Pim van den Dool, Marko de Haan en Guus Valk de uitslagen van de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen. Je hoort over de ruk naar rechts, het succes van lokale partijen en de uitkomsten van het opinieonderzoek van Ipsos I&O en de uitkomsten van het opinieonderzoek van Ipsos I&O, waarin kiezersstromen en thema's van deze verkiezingen zijn. onderzocht. Wat vertellen deze verkiezingen ons over de kiezer en de landelijke politiek? Lees hier meer informatie over de Marc-Chavannes-prijs Gasten: Marko de Haan, Guus Valk & Pim van den Dool Presentatie: Erik van der Walle Redactie & productie: Iris Verhulsdonk & Lotteke Boogert Montage: Gal Tsadok-Hai Heeft u vragen, suggesties of ideeën over onze journalistiek? Mail dan naar onze redactie via podcast@nrc.nl.Verder lezen en luisterenPodcast Vandaag - FVD's opmars: zo wordt extreemrechts gedachtegoed normaalHoofdredactioneel commentaar - Normaliseer het ondemocratische gedachtengoed van FVD niet verderZo stemde NederlandFVD wint fors, lokale partijen blijven het grootstZie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wie de winnaars van de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen wil zien, kan het best naar rechts kijken. De grootste winnaar, Forum voor Democratie, zit zelfs in de extreemrechtse hoek waar racistische en antidemocratische denkbeelden niet geschuwd worden.In deze Haagse Zaken bespreken politiek journalisten Pim van den Dool, Marko de Haan en Guus Valk de uitslagen van de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen. Je hoort over de ruk naar rechts, het succes van lokale partijen en de uitkomsten van het opinieonderzoek van Ipsos I&O en de uitkomsten van het opinieonderzoek van Ipsos I&O, waarin kiezersstromen en thema's van deze verkiezingen zijn. onderzocht. Wat vertellen deze verkiezingen ons over de kiezer en de landelijke politiek?Lees hier meer informatie over de Marc-Chavannes-prijs Gasten: Marko de Haan, Guus Valk & Pim van den Dool Presentatie: Erik van der Walle Redactie & productie: Iris Verhulsdonk & Lotteke Boogert Montage: Gal Tsadok-HaiHeeft u vragen, suggesties of ideeën over onze journalistiek? Mail dan naar onze redactie via podcast@nrc.nl.Verder lezen en luisterenPodcast Vandaag - FVD's opmars: zo wordt extreemrechts gedachtegoed normaalHoofdredactioneel commentaar - Normaliseer het ondemocratische gedachtengoed van FVD niet verderZo stemde NederlandFVD wint fors, lokale partijen blijven het grootstZie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Paul Buitink spreekt met Ab Flipse en Pim van Rijswijk over de groeiende belastingdruk, box 3, emigratie en de onzekere toekomst van Nederland.Ab stelt dat de omstreden nieuwe box 3-belasting er uiteindelijk gewoon zal komen. Hij verwacht dat de overheid in de komende jaren steeds meer grip zal krijgen op ons inkomen. Volgens hem heeft de overheid het geld hard nodig: “Dat geld gaan ze binnenharken.” Maar bij wie gaat de overheid dat geld halen?Pim legt uit dat het grootste bezwaar tegen de nieuwe box 3-maatregel is dat belasting wordt geheven over ongerealiseerde winst. Hoe kun je daar het beste mee omgaan en je belastingdruk verlagen?Is dit een goed moment om je huis in Nederland te verkopen? En kun je een briefadres in Nederland aanhouden als een soort geitenpaadje? Pim legt uit hoe dit werkt. Ook bespreken ze de voordelen van emigratie en hoe je dit het beste kan aanpakken.Tot slot bespreken ze de situatie in het Midden-Oosten, Agenda 2030 en MVO 2026.Bekijk het programma van MVO 2026: https://www.mvo-dsvv.nl/ Kortingscode: MVO-HOLLANDGOLDOverweegt u om goud en zilver aan te kopen? Dat kan via de volgende website: https://bit.ly/3xxy4sYTimestamps00:00 Intro02:03 Masterclass voor Ondernemers05:38 Box 3, Belastingdruk & BV21:28 Huis verkopen & Briefadres Nederland27:40 Voordelen Emigratie41:10 Midden-Oosten46:18 MVO 202653:01 Agenda 21 & Agenda 2030Twitter:@Hollandgold:   / hollandgold  @paulbuitink:   / paulbuitink  Let op: Holland Gold vindt het belangrijk dat iedereen vrijuit kan spreken. Wij willen u er graag op attenderen dat de uitspraken die worden gedaan door de geïnterviewde niet persé betekenen dat Holland Gold hier achter staat. Alle uitspraken zijn gedaan op persoonlijke titel door de geïnterviewde en dragen zo bij aan een breed, kleurrijk en voor de kijker interessant beeld van de onderwerpen. Zo willen en kunnen wij u een transparante bijdrage en een zo volledig mogelijk inzicht geven in de economische marktontwikkelingen. Al onze video's zijn er enkel op gericht u te informeren. De informatie en data die we presenteren kunnen verouderd zijn bij het bekijken van onze video's. Onze video's zijn geen financieel advies. U alleen kunt bepalen hoe het beste uw vermogen kunt beleggen. U draagt zelf de risico's van uw keuzes.Bekijk onze website: https://www.hollandgold.nl

The firms dominating local search today didn't get there by accident. They earned it one review at a time. When Jerry Bowman launched his firm in Colorado, he quickly realized he couldn't compete with the mega firms spending millions on advertising. Instead of trying to outspend them, he focused on something different: client service, community impact, and building a reputation that people could see online. On this episode of PIM, you'll learn: Why boutique firms can beat mega firms by out-servicing them. How pro bono work creates a referral and review pipeline.  Why firms must build strong systems before scaling case volume. If you like what you hear, hit Subscribe. We do this every week. Buy tickets for PIMCON 2026: pimcon.org Subscribe to our newsletter: newsletter.rankings.io  Get Social! Personal Injury Mastermind (PIM) powered by Rankings.io is on Instagram | YouTube | TikTok

Most law firms stall between $2M and $4M in revenue,not because they can't get cases, but because the founder never makes the shift from attorney to CEO. Michael Kelly built his Boston-based firm into a high-growth operation by focusing on three things most lawyers ignore: systems, accountability, and elite talent. On this episode of PIM, you'll learn: How one great COO can completely change the trajectory of a firm. What it looks like to actually run your law firm on data. Why culture problems can quietly hold back growth. How Michael thinks about intake, AI, and never missing a lead. If you like what you hear, hit Subscribe. We do this every week. Buy tickets for PIMCON 2026: pimcon.org Subscribe to our newsletter: newsletter.rankings.io  Get Social! Personal Injury Mastermind (PIM) powered by Rankings.io is on Instagram | YouTube | TikTok

Voor de laatste keer in deze driedelige miniserie komt de GOAT aan het woord. De allerlaatste lessen die je écht van Buffett moet kennen. En hoe je ze toepast! Want zomaar wat cherrypicken in zijn strategie, dat zit er niet in. Aan bod komen onder andere bedrijfsrisico en hoe belangrijk het is om verder te kijken dan alleen het bedrijf: ook de sector moet je goed kennen. Daarnaast is Pim heel trots op zijn nieuwe functie in de PDT: de X-ray voor etf-beleggers. Milou heeft het meteen uitgeprobeerd – en schrok zich een hoedje. ► Uitgebreide show notes en achtergrondinformatie: https://jongbeleggendepodcast.nl/214-grote-beleggers-warren-buffett-deel-3 ► Word Vriend: https://portfoliodividendtracker.com ► Updates via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jongbeleggen ► Mijn volledige portfolio: https://app.portfoliodividendtracker.com/p/jongbeleggen 1) We maken gebruik van programmatic advertising, wat inhoudt dat we geen invloed hebben op de spots die in de podcast worden afgespeeld. Dit is vergelijkbaar met tv, YouTube, radio en de krant, uiteraard met uitzondering van de advertenties die we zelf hebben ingesproken. 2) Deze podcast is 100% expertise-vrij en alleen geschikt voor amusementsdoeleinden. De inhoud mag niet worden beschouwd als financieel advies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Send a textWhat looks glamorous on the outside often hides complicated truths underneath. In this episode, the hosts unpack the fascination with the Kennedy family, especially the relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and why their story still resonates today. Beyond celebrity intrigue, the conversation explores deeper themes like identity, pressure, media scrutiny, and the cost of living in the public eye.Listeners are reminded that fame does not equal perfection. Even people who appear to “have it all” are navigating insecurity, relationship struggles, grief, and expectations. The episode also highlights the importance of trusting your instincts, protecting your personal boundaries, and holding people accountable in relationships. A powerful takeaway is that public perception rarely reflects private reality, and comparison can distort how we see our own lives.The story of a young Girl Scout overcoming rejection to break cookie-selling records reinforces another key message: find your tribe. Surrounding yourself with supportive people can unlock confidence, purpose, and success.Overall, this episode blends pop culture, personal reflection, and life lessons about resilience, authenticity, and choosing the right people to walk alongside you.Pim's Cookie Store: https://digitalcookie.girlscouts.org/scout/pim391562Pim's TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@lifeofapimEpisode Highlights:(0:00) Intro(0:56) Florida trip and life updates(3:22) Trending stories and headlines discussion(6:10) Epstein case and personal experiences(12:42) Kennedy fascination and cultural impact(14:40) Carolyn and JFK Jr. relationship beginnings(22:41) Marriage, media pressure, and public scrutiny(27:14) Relationship struggles and tragic flight(29:20) Is there a Kennedy curse?(33:15) Grit person of the week story(36:00) OutroSupport the showFollow us: Web: https://girlsgonegritty.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/girlsgonegritty/ More ways to find us: https://linktr.ee/girlsgonegritty

Maandag is het zover. Dan staat de koning met de ministersploeg van premier Rob Jetten op het bordes. Volgens informateur Rianne Letschert moesten het bewindslieden worden die zichzelf kunnen wegcijferen. Omdat het kabinet niet op een meerderheid kan rekenen in beide Kamers, zou die bescheidenheid nodig zijn om steun bij de oppositie te verwerven. Politiek redacteuren Pim van den Dool en Lamyae Aharouay kijken in deze aflevering van Haagse Zaken hoe bescheiden deze ministersploeg is en hoe deze bewindslieden op hun post zijn terechtgekomen. Ook bespreken Pim en Lamyae hoe de nieuwkomers worden ingewerkt en wat de belangrijkste adviezen zijn die zij te horen krijgen. Verder lezen: ‘U bent als kandidaat-bewindspersoon geheel verantwoordelijk voor de eigen integriteit', staat in het handboek voor bewindspersonen Sjoerdsma staat op een Chinese sanctielijst, maar die is vooral ‘symbolisch' en ‘opportunistisch' Het kabinet-Jetten is rond: de nieuwe ministers en staatssecretarissen Op de allereerste vergadering nog voor de beëdiging moet je als aanstaand minister meteen scherp zijnAspirant-ministers moeten vooral zichzelf screenen Gasten: Lamyae Aharouay & Pim van den Dool Presentatie: Erik van der Walle Redactie & productie: Iris VerhulsdonkMontage: Pieter Bakker Heeft u vragen, suggesties of ideeën over onze journalistiek? Mail dan naar onze redactie via podcast@nrc.nl.Zie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Na eindeloos de beste bedrijven bestudeerd te hebben, tijd om dat eens om te draaien. Invert! Hoe falen de allerbeste bedrijven? Twee termen van twee denkers om dat beter te begrijpen in deze aflevering: creatieve destructie (Schumpeter) en disruptieve innovatie (Christensen). Relevant, zeker in tijden waarin AI alles en iedereen gaat ‘disrupten’ – als we de koersdalingen moeten geloven. Pim heeft op een bierviltje uitgerekend of Adyen nu duur of goedkoop is, en we moéten (vrij letterlijk) het over Box-3 hebben… ► Uitgebreide show notes en achtergrondinformatie: https://jongbeleggendepodcast.nl/213-disruptieve-innovatie ► Word Vriend: https://portfoliodividendtracker.com ► Updates via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jongbeleggen ► Mijn volledige portfolio: https://app.portfoliodividendtracker.com/p/jongbeleggen 1) We maken gebruik van programmatic advertising, wat inhoudt dat we geen invloed hebben op de spots die in de podcast worden afgespeeld. Dit is vergelijkbaar met tv, YouTube, radio en de krant, uiteraard met uitzondering van de advertenties die we zelf hebben ingesproken. 2) Deze podcast is 100% expertise-vrij en alleen geschikt voor amusementsdoeleinden. De inhoud mag niet worden beschouwd als financieel advies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pim in Pittsburgh has special needs and has absolutely dominated the sale of Girl Scout cookies selling over 100k boxes this year! STORY: https://www.wdjx.com/this-6-year-old-girl-scout-sold-over-100000-boxes-of-cookies-in-one-season/

TWS News 1: Pim the Champion – 00:26 Commuter Stories – 3:25 TWS News 2: Curling Behavior – 8:03 Knowingly Wearing a Stain – 11:16 TWS News 3: Customer Service Stop Its – 17:31 Elon Musk Comments – 20:29 Monday School: Lead, Follow, & Get Out of the Way – 25:33 Rock Report: Stay In Your Lane – 28:54 Signs You’re Getting Old – 32:34 You can join our Wally Show Poddies Facebook group at www.facebook.com/groups/WallyShowPoddies This podcast is crowd funded - that means that you help make it possible. If you like it and want to support it, give here.

Shan's weekend recap in Oklahoma. Who will be franchise tagged in the NFL which begins today. PP in the morning: Pim has taken over as the greatest girl scout cookie seller ever.

Welcome to Episode 220 of the Tangential Inspiration Podcast.  We have three stories that are sure to help fill you with inspiration.  Teresa talks about a jungle guardian in Equador who is on a mission to save endangered plants.  Then there is the story of Pauli Murray, a brilliant legal mind who worked behind the scenes to fight racism and sexism.  And finally, there is the heartwarming story of Pim, who is on her way to selling the most Girl Scout cookies in history, and she is only 6 years old.  Come and refresh your soul, with a quick dip into our pool of inspiration.   #BeKind #WeStandWithUkraine We would love to hear from you. Send us your comments or even your own inspirational stories at tangentialinspiration@gmail.com. Follow us on our social media: Website: tangential-inspiration.com Instagram: tangentialinspirationpodcast Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tangentialinspiration Twitter: https://twitter.com/TangentialInsp1   Produced and Edited by Craig Wymetalek

Het coalitieakkoord is rond. De partijleiders van D66, VVD en CDA presenteerden vrijdag hun plannen voor de komende kabinetsperiode. De woningnood en de stikstofcrisis moeten snel worden aangepakt en de krijgsmacht krijgt er miljarden bij. Tegelijkertijd wordt er gesneden in de zorg en de sociale zekerheid.Grote plannen, maar ze komen van een minderheidskabinet dat die plannen nog langs een kritische oppositie moet loodsen. De grote vraag is dus: wat is het akkoord op dit moment waard?In deze Haagse Zaken hoor je van vijf redacteuren van de Haagse redactie over de plannen van de aanstaande coalitie: hoe stevig is dit akkoord werkelijk en waar zitten de politieke pijnpunten? En wat betekent dit voor de komende regeerperiode?Gasten: Lamyae Aharouay, Petra de Koning, Marko de Haan, Oscar Vermeer en Pim van den DoolPresentatie: Erik van der WalleRedactie & productie: Ilse Eshuis, Ignace Schoot en Iris VerhulsdonkMontage: Pieter BakkerHeeft u vragen, suggesties of ideeën over onze journalistiek? Mail dan naar onze redactie via podcast@nrc.nl.Zie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Het coalitieakkoord is rond. De partijleiders van D66, VVD en CDA presenteerden vrijdag hun plannen voor de komende kabinetsperiode. De woningnood en de stikstofcrisis moeten snel worden aangepakt en de krijgsmacht krijgt er miljarden bij. Tegelijkertijd wordt er gesneden in de zorg en de sociale zekerheid.Grote plannen, maar ze komen van een minderheidskabinet dat die plannen nog langs een kritische oppositie moet loodsen. De grote vraag is dus: wat is het akkoord op dit moment waard?In deze Haagse Zaken hoor je van vijf redacteuren van de Haagse redactie over de plannen van de aanstaande coalitie: hoe stevig is dit akkoord werkelijk en waar zitten de politieke pijnpunten? En wat betekent dit voor de komende regeerperiode?Gasten: Lamyae Aharouay, Petra de Koning, Marko de Haan, Oscar Vermeer en Pim van den DoolPresentatie: Erik van der WalleRedactie & productie: Ilse Eshuis, Ignace Schoot en Iris VerhulsdonkMontage: Pieter BakkerHeeft u vragen, suggesties of ideeën over onze journalistiek? Mail dan naar onze redactie via podcast@nrc.nl.Zie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

De chantage van wereldmachten is een directe bedreiging voor vrije westerse landen. Dat was de boodschap van de Canadese premier Mark Carney in het Zwitserse Davos. Een nieuwe wereldorde, waar ook de Nederlandse politiek mee te maken krijgt. In deze Haagse Zaken bespreekt Erik van der Walle de Nederlandse houding in de wereldpolitiek met Pim van den Dool en Steven Derix. Je hoort hoe het demissionaire kabinet-Schoof zich tot nu toe heeft opgesteld, hoe de Tweede Kamer daarop reageert en welke rol Nederland vervult op het wereldtoneel. Gasten: Steven Derix en Pim van den Dool Presentatie: Erik van der Walle Redactie & productie: Iris VerhulsdonkMontage: Pieter BakkerHeeft u vragen, suggesties of ideeën over onze journalistiek? Mail dan naar onze redactie via podcast@nrc.nl.Verder lezen & luisterenPodcast Vandaag met Lamyae Aharouay - De crisis in de PVVDefensieminister Brekelmans: geen weet van concessies aan Trump over GroenlandZie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nu het jaar écht is afgesloten, is het de hoogste tijd voor een terugblik op 2025. Het jaar van Trumps handelstarieven, een zwakke dollar en natuurlijk AI – kortom, een hobbelig jaar. Reflectiemodus AAN. Wat waren de prestaties, hoe hebben we gehandeld en wat zijn de nieuwe inzichten? Pim zette de leuke feitjes op een rij en construeerde een “what-if”-scenario: heeft zijn handelen meer kwaad dan goed gedaan in de laatste vijf jaar? Zijn bevindingen zijn onthutsend. Plus een belletje met de hoofddeveloper van PDT over het AI-kantelpunt, dat in de loop van kerst bereikt werd… ► Uitgebreide show notes en achtergrondinformatie: https://jongbeleggendepodcast.nl/210-beleggingsjaar-2025 ► Word Vriend: https://portfoliodividendtracker.com ► Updates via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jongbeleggen ► Mijn volledige portfolio: https://app.portfoliodividendtracker.com/p/jongbeleggen 1) We maken gebruik van programmatic advertising, wat inhoudt dat we geen invloed hebben op de spots die in de podcast worden afgespeeld. Dit is vergelijkbaar met tv, YouTube, radio en de krant, uiteraard met uitzondering van de advertenties die we zelf hebben ingesproken. 2) Deze podcast is 100% expertise-vrij en alleen geschikt voor amusementsdoeleinden. De inhoud mag niet worden beschouwd als financieel advies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Even though we're only five days into the new year, one of the standout shows for 2026 is the ABC adaptation of Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia. This glorious animation carries a stop motion vibe as it invites us into a version of suburbia, one where deep sea divers roam the streets and single mums try to keep their family together.We follow Klara and Pim and their mum Lucy, voiced with beautiful attentiveness and care by Geraldine Hakewill. The focus is on the kids, but each time they return home, Lucy is there to tend to them and to set up their new life in outer suburbia.In the following interview, recorded ahead of the shows launch on ABC, Geraldine talks about the creative process of voicing Lucy, about how her varied roles throughout her career have influenced what choices she makes as a storyteller, and much more.Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia is currently on ABC iView. Head along and give it a watch, it's a great show for kids and adults alike.If you like this chat with Geraldine, then make sure to check out my earlier conversation with Shaun Tan, or consider becoming a paid subscriber to listen to the conversation with director Noel Cleary. To join up and help keep the Curb independent, visit thecurb.com.au/subscribe where you can support us from as little as $2 a month. Even if you're unable to financially support us, join up to our free newsletter where you'll be able to read my annual Best Australian Films of 2025 list when it goes up on 6 January.Sign up for the latest interviews, reviews, and more via https://www.thecurb.com.au/subscribe/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Even though we're only five days into the new year, one of the standout shows for 2026 is the ABC adaptation of Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia. This glorious animation carries a stop motion vibe as it invites us into a version of suburbia, one where deep sea divers roam the streets and single mums try to keep their family together.We follow Klara and Pim and their mum Lucy, voiced with beautiful attentiveness and care by Geraldine Hakewill. The focus is on the kids, but each time they return home, Lucy is there to tend to them and to set up their new life in outer suburbia.In the following interview, recorded ahead of the shows launch on ABC, Geraldine talks about the creative process of voicing Lucy, about how her varied roles throughout her career have influenced what choices she makes as a storyteller, and much more.Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia is currently on ABC iView. Head along and give it a watch, it's a great show for kids and adults alike.If you like this chat with Geraldine, then make sure to check out my earlier conversation with Shaun Tan, or consider becoming a paid subscriber to listen to the conversation with director Noel Cleary. To join up and help keep the Curb independent, visit thecurb.com.au/subscribe where you can support us from as little as $2 a month. Even if you're unable to financially support us, join up to our free newsletter where you'll be able to read my annual Best Australian Films of 2025 list when it goes up on 6 January.Sign up for the latest interviews, reviews, and more via https://www.thecurb.com.au/subscribe/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A beszélgetés a rendszerváltás utáni magyar irodalomkritika alakulását vizsgálja: hogyan formálódott meg a kritika nyelve és intézményrendszere a demokratikus nyilvánosság keretei között, és miként változott a negatív kritika megítélése az elmúlt évtizedekben. De szó lesz a digitális tér, az algoritmikus környezet hatásáról, vagyis a kritika jövőjéről is. Vendégünk Mohácsi Balázs költő, kritikus, irodalomtörténész, továbbá Balajthy Ágnes irodalomtörténész, kritikus, a Debreceni Egyetem oktatója, valamint Modor Bálint, a Digitális Irodalmi Akadémia szerkesztője, a PIM-ben működő KKDSZ (Közgyűjteményi és Közművelődési Dolgozók Szakszervezete) alapszervezet titkára.—Támogasd a Partizánt!https://www.partizan.hu/tamogatas—Csatlakozz a Partizán közösségéhez, értesülj elsőként eseményeinkről, akcióinkról!https://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/maradjunk-kapcsolatban—Legyél önkéntes!Csatlakozz a Partizán önkéntes csapatához:https://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/csatlakozz-te-is-a-partizan-onkenteseihez—Iratkozz fel tematikus hírleveleinkre!Kovalcsik Tamás: Adatpont / Partizán Szerkesztőségi Hírlevélhttps://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/iratkozz-fel-a-partizan-szerkesztoinek-hirlevelereHeti Feledyhttps://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/partizan-heti-feledyVétóhttps://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/iratkozz-fel-a-veto-hirlevelere—Írj nekünk!Ha van egy sztorid, tipped vagy ötleted:szerkesztoseg@partizan.huBizalmas információ esetén:partizanbudapest@protonmail.com(Ahhoz, hogy titkosított módon tudj írni, regisztrálj te is egy protonmail-es címet.)Támogatások, események, webshop, egyéb ügyek:info@partizan.hu

Nicholas of Cusa was a 15th-century philosopher, theologian, and mathematician whose ideas anticipated modern science and philosophy. In this video, we explore his life, key works, and radical concept of “learned ignorance,” as well as his views on infinity, knowledge and religious diversity. Discover why this forgotten medieval thinker still matters today.Find me and my music here:https://linktr.ee/filipholmSupport Let's Talk Religion on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/letstalkreligion Or through a one-time donation: https://paypal.me/talkreligiondonateSources/Recommended Reading:Bond. H. Lawrence (edited and translated by) (1997). "Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings". Classics of Western Spirituality Series. Paulist Press.Hopkins, Jasper (translated by) (1986). "NICHOLAS OF CUSA'S DE PACEFIDEI AND CRIBRATIO ALKORANI". Second edition. THE ARTHUR J. BANNING PRESS MINNEAPOLIS.McGinn, Bernard. "The Presence of God" Series, in several volumes. Perhaps the best and most comprehensive introduction to Christian mysticism. Published by Crossroad Publishing Co.Valkenberg, Pim (2011). "Sifting the Qur'an: Two Forms of Interreligious Hermeneutics in Nicholas of Cusa". In "Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe", Currents of Encounter Online, Volume: 40. Brill. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wij van Jong Beleggen wurmen ons natuurlijk met plezier tussen al het familiegeweld, met een kers(t)verse aflevering. Ditmaal: mental models. Denk aan circle of competence, maar ook het lollapalooza-effect. Het zijn denkregels waarmee over beleggen kunnen nadenken, situaties begrijpen en beslissingen nemen. Pim pikt er drie uit om nader te bestuderen: intuition pumps. Boende rationalist en de focusing illusionist. Ook goed nieuws voor de Belgen die door meerwaardebelasting wanhopig 2026 tegemoet treden… PDT to the rescue! ► Uitgebreide show notes en achtergrondinformatie: https://jongbeleggendepodcast.nl/209-mentale-modellen ► Word Vriend: https://portfoliodividendtracker.com ► Updates via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jongbeleggen ► Mijn volledige portfolio: https://app.portfoliodividendtracker.com/p/jongbeleggen 1) We maken gebruik van programmatic advertising, wat inhoudt dat we geen invloed hebben op de spots die in de podcast worden afgespeeld. Dit is vergelijkbaar met tv, YouTube, radio en de krant, uiteraard met uitzondering van de advertenties die we zelf hebben ingesproken. 2) Deze podcast is 100% expertise-vrij en alleen geschikt voor amusementsdoeleinden. De inhoud mag niet worden beschouwd als financieel advies. ► Voor boekhoudtips én een extra lange gratis proefperiode, ga naar moneybird.nl/jongbeleggen. ► Ga naar Incogni.com/JongBeleggen voor 60% korting. ► Geef jezelf 3 tellen en bij twijfel klik weg. Deze aflevering is in samenwerking met De Rijksoverheid. Kijk voor meer informatie over online oplichting op laatjenietinterneppen.nl.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In deze eindejaarsaflevering van Haagse Zaken nemen we tijd voor een terugblik op 2025. Het was het jaar van niet één maar twee kabinetsvallen, de ingelaste verkiezingen met bijbehorende campagne en een NAVO-top in Den Haag. En er gebeurde nog veel meer. Geheel volgens traditie kijkt de politieke redactie van NRC tijdens het kerstreces terug op het afgelopen jaar. In deze extra lange aflevering vertellen de redacteuren over de opvallendste politieke momenten van 2025.Gasten: Emma Vos, Rosa Uijtewaal, Marko de Haan, Wafa Al Ali, Titia Ketelaar, Erik van der Walle, Lamyae Aharouay, Petra de Koning, Oscar Vermeer, Christiaan Pelgrim, Steven Derix, Irith Fuks, Pim van den Dool & Folkert Jensma Presentatie: Guus Valk Redactie & productie: Iris VerhulsdonkMontage: Pieter BakkerHeeft u vragen, suggesties of ideeën over onze journalistiek? Mail dan naar onze redactie via podcast@nrc.nl.Zie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

3 Incredible Proofs of Heaven: What Global Near Death Experiences Reveal. Imagine Heaven John Burke. ACU Saturday Series.  Watch this video at- https://youtu.be/vxnmDhs6Nrg?si=Jx4MuPcZR-UdWUV4 Imagine Heaven Podcast with John Burke 61.6K subscribers 111,168 views Dec 6, 2024 Imagine Heaven Podcast Episodes What if Heaven is more real than we ever imagined? And what will it be like? John Burke has spent over 40 years researching 1000+ near-death experiences (NDEs) and wrote the New York Times bestseller Imagine Heaven, with over 1 million copies sold. In this video, you will hear from many of the people John interviewed from around the globe as he explores 3 incredible proofs of Heaven that skeptics have not explained. He also shows ways that NDEs and the Bible correlate. From verifiable out-of-body observations to blind individuals seeing for the first time and encounters with the same God of light and love across nations, these stories challenge and inspire us with the reality of life after death. Discover how these extraordinary experiences transcend cultures, religions, and expectations, offering compelling evidence that Heaven exists. Watch now to explore these fascinating global accounts that defy conventional science and provide hope for what lies beyond. All video interviews conducted by John Burke are used with permission. Watch the full Joe Rogan and Dr. Michael Shermer 2-hour video here. The quote used starts at 13:35: https://www.youtube.com/live/x2qwRJT4WGY Watch the full Dr. Pim van Lommel 1-hour interview here:    • Consciousness Beyond Death | Dr. Pim van L...   Read Heidi Barr's full story here: https://a.co/d/4VZx2yE Read Santosh Acharjee's full story here: https://a.co/d/41mSYYQ Read Swidiq (Cedric) Kanana's full story here: https://a.co/d/6xBcpLN ------------------------- Stay Connected

Geld uitgeven is een kunst, als we Morgan Housel mogen geloven. Eentje die slechts weinigen beheersen. In zijn nieuwe boek The Art of Spending Money legt de schrijver uit hoe je ervoor zorgt dat je de baas wordt over je geld, in plaats van andersom. Pim en Milou delen de lessen die hen het meest aanspreken. In gesprek over onafhankelijkheid, het minimaliseren van toekomstige spijt, en is het leven nu kort of juist lang?! Wat in ieder geval duidelijk is: personal finance is meer personal, dan finance. Verder een bescheiden kerstoproepje en op zijn pad naar een meer geconcentreerd portfolio, deed Pim ook nog wat transacties… ► Uitgebreide show notes en achtergrondinformatie: https://jongbeleggendepodcast.nl/208-geld-voor-nu-of-voor-later ► Word Vriend: https://portfoliodividendtracker.com ► Updates via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jongbeleggen ► Mijn volledige portfolio: https://app.portfoliodividendtracker.com/p/jongbeleggen 1) We maken gebruik van programmatic advertising, wat inhoudt dat we geen invloed hebben op de spots die in de podcast worden afgespeeld. Dit is vergelijkbaar met tv, YouTube, radio en de krant, uiteraard met uitzondering van de advertenties die we zelf hebben ingesproken. 2) Deze podcast is 100% expertise-vrij en alleen geschikt voor amusementsdoeleinden. De inhoud mag niet worden beschouwd als financieel advies. ► Voor boekhoudtips én een extra lange gratis proefperiode, ga naar moneybird.nl/jongbeleggen. ► Ga naar Incogni.com/JongBeleggen voor 60% korting. ► Geef jezelf 3 tellen en bij twijfel klik weg. Deze aflevering is in samenwerking met De Rijksoverheid. Kijk voor meer informatie over online oplichting op laatjenietinterneppen.nl.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What happens when the brain flatlines - yet consciousness continues?In this episode of Mind-Body Solution, Dr Tevin Naidu speaks with world-renowned cardiologist and pioneering near-death experience (NDE) researcher Dr Pim van Lommel. His groundbreaking Lancet study remains one of the most rigorously documented clinical investigations into NDEs - and its implications challenge our deepest assumptions about the mind, the brain, and the nature of reality.We explore:• The medical evidence for consciousness during cardiac arrest• Why the brain cannot account for NDEs• The transceiver/filter model of consciousness• Out-of-body perceptions verified during resuscitation• Why materialism may be scientifically untenable• The long-term personality transformation following NDEs• Implications for neuroscience, medicine, ethics, and the mind-body problem• What dying actually feels like• Why Pim now views death as “a transition, not an end”This is one of the most comprehensive, medically grounded explorations of non-local consciousness available today. Whether you're a skeptic, scientist, philosopher, or simply curious, this conversation forces a radical re-examination of what consciousness is.TIMESTAMPS:(00:00) – Introduction(01:00) – Consciousness & Near Death Experiences (NDEs)(05:06) – Findings from the landmark 2001 Lancet study(09:10) – Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) & verified accounts(10:42) – Consciousness beyond the brain: receiver model(19:25) – Memory, identity & self without the body(20:25) – Universal NDE elements & what they imply(29:08) – Critics, skeptics & scientific resistance(31:23) – Why consciousness cannot be measured(32:46) – Monism? Dual-aspect? Idealism? Pim's stance(35:56) – Implications for medical ethics & end-of-life care(37:56) – Deathbed phenomena & after-death communication(42:08) – Telepathy, remote viewing & “non-local” psychology(45:24) – Quantum physics: analogy not explanation(48:28) – The next generation of researchers(50:06) – What death really is and isn't(51:27) – Is there purpose to the universe?(54:42) – Psychedelics vs NDEs: crucial differences(58:00) – Where does Pim believe he will go after death?(1:01:20) – Final reflectionsEPISODE LINKS:- Pim's Website: https://pimvanlommel.nl/en/- 2001 Lancet Study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(01)07100-8/abstract- Consciousness Beyond Life: https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Beyond-Life-Near-Death-Experience/dp/0061777250CONNECT:- Website: https://mindbodysolution.org - YouTube: https://youtube.com/@MindBodySolution- Podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/mindbodysolution- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drtevinnaidu- Facebook: https://facebook.com/drtevinnaidu - Instagram: https://instagram.com/drtevinnaidu- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/drtevinnaidu- Website: https://tevinnaidu.com=============================Disclaimer: The information provided on this channel is for educational purposes only. The content is shared in the spirit of open discourse and does not constitute, nor does it substitute, professional or medical advice. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of listening/watching any of our contents. You acknowledge that you use the information provided at your own risk. Listeners/viewers are advised to conduct their own research and consult with their own experts in the respective fields.

World models are rapidly becoming AI's next frontier, and in this episode we break down why. Host, Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, sits down with Pim de Witte, founder of General Intuition and Medal, to explore how billions of gameplay videos can power a new class of embodied agents. Pim explains the fundamental gap between language models, which describe the world, and world models, which simulate the world, capturing how objects and agents move, react, and evolve in space and time. The conversation digs into why video games are an ideal training ground, including but not limited to consistent first-person perspectives, action labels (if you design your data set that way), and optical fidelity that platforms like YouTube can't provide.Pim walks through General Intuition's technical approach, why cross-game training unlocks more human-like behavior, and the specific limitations still unsolved, such as multiplayer consistency, long-horizon coherence, and the cost of large-scale inference. They explore what studios can expect from embodied agents: bots trained on human behavior that they hope to be tunable by designers and ideal for developers who want to embrace and build around this tech to either develop new game genres or make it a bedrock of their production process. If you are interested in learning about a company with a unique approach to world models and embodied agents, this is a must-listen to close out 2025. We'd like to thank Lysto for making this episode possible! Lysto is revolutionizing how game development teams collect and act on real player feedback with its AI-powered playtesting insights. Learn more about how you can get bias-free feedback at https://lysto.gg/?utm_source=naavik&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=adIf you like the episode, please help others find us by leaving a 5-star rating or review! And if you have any comments, requests, or feedback shoot us a note at podcast@naavik.co. Watch the episode: YouTube ChannelFor more episodes and details: Podcast WebsiteFree newsletter: Naavik DigestFollow us: Twitter | LinkedIn | WebsiteSound design by Gavin Mc Cabe 

From building Medal into a 12M-user game clipping platform with 3.8B highlight moments to turning down a reported $500M offer from OpenAI (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-offered-pay-500-million-startup-videogame-data) and raising a $134M seed from Khosla (https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/16/general-intuition-lands-134m-seed-to-teach-agents-spatial-reasoning-using-video-game-clips/) to spin out General Intuition, Pim is betting that world models trained on peak human gameplay are the next frontier after LLMs.We sat down with Pim to dig into why game highlights are “episodic memory for simulation” (and how Medal's privacy-first action labels became a world-model goldmine https://medal.tv/blog/posts/enabling-state-of-the-art-security-and-protections-on-medals-new-apm-and-controller-overlay-features), what it takes to build fully vision-based agents that just see frames and output actions in real time, how General Intuition transfers from games to real-world video and then into robotics, why world models and LLMs are complementary rather than rivals, what founders with proprietary datasets should know before selling or licensing to labs, and his bet that spatial-temporal foundation models will power 80% of future atoms-to-atoms interactions in both simulation and the real world.We discuss:* How Medal's 3.8B action-labeled highlight clips became a privacy-preserving goldmine for world models* Building fully vision-based agents that only see frames and output actions yet play like (and sometimes better than) humans* Transferring from arcade-style games to realistic games to real-world video using the same perception–action recipe* Why world models need actions, memory, and partial observability (smoke, occlusion, camera shake) vs. “just” pretty video generation* Distilling giant policies into tiny real-time models that still navigate, hide, and peek corners like real players* Pim's path from RuneScape private servers, Tourette's, and reverse engineering to leading a frontier world-model lab* How data-rich founders should think about valuing their datasets, negotiating with big labs, and deciding when to go independent* GI's first customers: replacing brittle behavior trees in games, engines, and controller-based robots with a “frames in, actions out” API* Using Medal clips as “episodic memory of simulation” to move from imitation learning to RL via world models and negative events* The 2030 vision: spatial–temporal foundation models that power the majority of atoms-to-atoms interactions in simulation and the real world—Pim* X: https://x.com/PimDeWitte* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pimdw/Where to find Latent Space* X: https://x.com/latentspacepodFull Video EpisodeTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction and Medal's Gaming Data Advantage00:02:08 Exclusive Demo: Vision-Based Gaming Agents00:06:17 Action Prediction and Real-World Video Transfer00:08:41 World Models: Interactive Video Generation00:13:42 From Runescape to AI: Pim's Founder Journey00:16:45 The Research Foundations: Diamond, Genie, and SEMA00:33:03 Vinod Khosla's Largest Seed Bet Since OpenAI00:35:04 Data Moats and Why GI Stayed Independent00:38:42 Self-Teaching AI Fundamentals: The Francois Fleuret Course00:40:28 Defining World Models vs Video Generation00:41:52 Why Simulation Complexity Favors World Models00:43:30 World Labs, Yann LeCun, and the Spatial Intelligence Race00:50:08 Business Model: APIs, Agents, and Game Developer Partnerships00:58:57 From Imitation Learning to RL: Making Clips Playable01:00:15 Open Research, Academic Partnerships, and Hiring01:02:09 2030 Vision: 80 Percent of Atoms-to-Atoms AI Interactions Get full access to Latent.Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

From building Medal into a 12M-user game clipping platform with 3.8B highlight moments to turning down a reported $500M offer from OpenAI (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-offered-pay-500-million-startup-videogame-data) and raising a $134M seed from Khosla (https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/16/general-intuition-lands-134m-seed-to-teach-agents-spatial-reasoning-using-video-game-clips/) to spin out General Intuition, Pim is betting that world models trained on peak human gameplay are the next frontier after LLMs. We sat down with Pim to dig into why game highlights are “episodic memory for simulation” (and how Medal's privacy-first action labels became a world-model goldmine https://medal.tv/blog/posts/enabling-state-of-the-art-security-and-protections-on-medals-new-apm-and-controller-overlay-features), what it takes to build fully vision-based agents that just see frames and output actions in real time, how General Intuition transfers from games to real-world video and then into robotics, why world models and LLMs are complementary rather than rivals, what founders with proprietary datasets should know before selling or licensing to labs, and his bet that spatial-temporal foundation models will power 80% of future atoms-to-atoms interactions in both simulation and the real world. We discuss: How Medal's 3.8B action-labeled highlight clips became a privacy-preserving goldmine for world models Building fully vision-based agents that only see frames and output actions yet play like (and sometimes better than) humans Transferring from arcade-style games to realistic games to real-world video using the same perception–action recipe Why world models need actions, memory, and partial observability (smoke, occlusion, camera shake) vs. “just” pretty video generation Distilling giant policies into tiny real-time models that still navigate, hide, and peek corners like real players Pim's path from RuneScape private servers, Tourette's, and reverse engineering to leading a frontier world-model lab How data-rich founders should think about valuing their datasets, negotiating with big labs, and deciding when to go independent GI's first customers: replacing brittle behavior trees in games, engines, and controller-based robots with a “frames in, actions out” API Using Medal clips as “episodic memory of simulation” to move from imitation learning to RL via world models and negative events The 2030 vision: spatial–temporal foundation models that power the majority of atoms-to-atoms interactions in simulation and the real world — Pim X: https://x.com/PimDeWitte LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pimdw/ Where to find Latent Space X: https://x.com/latentspacepod Substack: https://www.latent.space/ Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction and Medal's Gaming Data Advantage 00:02:08 Exclusive Demo: Vision-Based Gaming Agents 00:06:17 Action Prediction and Real-World Video Transfer 00:08:41 World Models: Interactive Video Generation 00:13:42 From Runescape to AI: Pim's Founder Journey 00:16:45 The Research Foundations: Diamond, Genie, and SEMA 00:33:03 Vinod Khosla's Largest Seed Bet Since OpenAI 00:35:04 Data Moats and Why GI Stayed Independent 00:38:42 Self-Teaching AI Fundamentals: The Francois Fleuret Course 00:40:28 Defining World Models vs Video Generation 00:41:52 Why Simulation Complexity Favors World Models 00:43:30 World Labs, Yann LeCun, and the Spatial Intelligence Race 00:50:08 Business Model: APIs, Agents, and Game Developer Partnerships 00:58:57 From Imitation Learning to RL: Making Clips Playable 01:00:15 Open Research, Academic Partnerships, and Hiring 01:02:09 2030 Vision: 80 Percent of Atoms-to-Atoms AI Interactions