Podcasts about Playwright

In this episode, Dennis is joined by his friend playwright and director Howard Skora to talk about his new play Texas Sodomy, which tells the incredible true story of the landmark Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas. Howard talks about his extensive research process, including interviews with real people involved in the case like Lane Lewis, Mitch Katin, and Paul Smith, and how he worked to stay faithful to the facts while creating compelling drama. He also explains the historical significance of the 1999 case, which challenged Texas's law criminalizing gay sex and ultimately led to the overturning of similar laws across the country, paving the way for gay marriage. Howard also talks about his collaborative approach to directing, working closely with actors like Drew Droege to refine the script and bring authentic details to life, including matching real photos and bar logos from the era. Other topics include: what's cool about writing plays as opposed to film and TV scripts, dealing with imposter syndrome, the pros and cons of self-producing, unlikely heroism and the moment in the Texas Sodomy journey that he'll never forget. www.texassodomy.com

Hey Streetwalkers. This is a throwback episode with guest Stephen Tobolowsky. Stephen first appeared on the show on 8.15.22.It was such a compelling & fun episode, l decided it needed to be re-visited!Enjoy this throwback episode, tell a friend, and thanks for listening!Stephen TobolowskyTake a walk with me down Fascination Street as I get to know Stephen Tobolowsky. Stephen in an actor who has appeared in nearly 300 films & TV shows. You know him as Ned Ryerson in the cult classic film Groundhog Day, and Clayton Townley in Mississippi Burning, and can currently be seen portraying Mr. Ball on the ABC show The Goldbergs.In this episode, we talk about almost none of that! Instead, Stephen shares stories about some of the people who have made the biggest impact on his life and career. From strong and powerful women in his childhood, to key women in his college years and beyond, to a meaningful relationship with a world-renowned director who took him under his wing. Stephen is an amazing storyteller, and you will be riveted by not only his memory for detail, but the wild stories from his life!Follow Stephen on social media:Twitter: @TobolowskyInstagram: @StephenToboFB: Stephen Tobolowsky

Three months ago Dwarkesh, who has been posting incredible blogs and episodes about RL, posted a framing question for his video essay on RLVR which upset a lot of Computer Use folks:We are no strangers to learning in public and are no strangers to the stress of getting things wrong when you have a big platform. However, we were at Anthropic for the Computer Use launch, there for Claude Cowork with the first big podcast on it, organized the first Computer Use track at AIE presenting the state of the art, and were close to the OpenAI-Sky Software acquisition that now powers the complete domination of computer use that Codex enjoys today. This is why we're excited to bring you today's first guest, Ari Weinstein, cofounder of Sky and now leading all the amazing CUA progress that casuals might miss:Ari explains why Computer Use is now “180 degrees different” from where it was months ago, how agents are learning to debug and recover from failures, why combining screenshots with accessibility data, the DOM, Playwright, and generated code changes the speed equation, and why the next frontier is making agents literally superhuman at using software.OpenAI clones JevIn the second half, Nikunj Handa from OpenAI's API team breaks down the new developer stack: async tool calling, mid-turn steering, WebSockets, UltraFast inference, the Decisions API, prompt caching, pre-warming, compaction, and the Agents API. Given that we were the first Jev podcast, we particularly focus on the unusually fast sprint on the Decisions API:And why it is just a Luna wrapper for now but the team is motivated and egoless enough to clone what they consider to be good patterns.We discuss:* Why OpenAI thinks Computer Use has changed dramatically in just the last few months* Dots and what changes when every agent gets its own Linux computer* Why Computer Use can now complete some tasks faster than the average human* The path from human-level to “literally superhuman” computer use* Why modern agents are much better at debugging and recovering from failure* How screenshots, accessibility trees, the DOM, Playwright, and generated JavaScript work together* App Shots and why they give models much richer context than ordinary screenshots* Why Computer Use can close the loop between writing software and testing it* Trust, permissions, and safety when agents can make payments and operate websites* Async function calling and why models no longer need to stop reasoning while tools run* Mid-turn steering, WebSockets, and the architecture behind more responsive agents* UltraFast inference and how OpenAI is pushing frontier models toward much lower latency* The rapid internal story behind the Decisions API* Why Decisions API is more than structured outputs at low latency* GPT Live, fast tool calling, and real-time computer control* How OpenAI is already using Decisions API for support classification and internal workflows* Longer prompt caching, cache pre-warming, and cache-aware applications* Server-side compaction vs manual compaction for long-running agent threads* What should live inside an Agents API versus a developer's own harness* OpenAI as an “AI cloud” and the search for higher-level primitives beyond raw model APIsAri Weinstein* Product & Engineering, Computer Use at OpenAI* X: https://x.com/AriX* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weinsteinari/Nikunj Handa* Product, API at OpenAI* X: https://x.com/nikunjhanda* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikunjhanda/Timestamps00:00:00 OpenAI DevDay: Dots, GPT-6.1, Agents API, and Decisions API00:02:52 Dots and Personal Cloud Computers00:04:59 Why Computer Use Is “180 Degrees Different”00:06:04 From Sky to Self-Debugging Computer Use Agents00:09:24 How Computer Use Sees and Operates Software00:12:09 From Faster Than Humans to Superhuman Computer Use00:16:03 Agents API: Trust, Permissions, and Safety00:17:31 Computer Use for Coding, Testing, and QA00:19:14 GPT-6 APIs, Async Tool Calling, and UltraFast Inference00:23:21 The Rapid Story Behind Decisions API00:25:32 What Decisions API Is and How It Works00:30:24 What OpenAI Is Building With the New APIs00:32:23 Prompt Caching, Pre-Warming, and API Performance00:35:20 Context Compaction for Long-Running Agents00:37:13 Memory, Higher-Level APIs, and the AI CloudTranscriptIntroduction: OpenAI DevDay and the New Agent StackVibhu [00:00:00]: Okay. We're very excited to be here. Today is OpenAI DevDay. Special podcastSwyx [00:00:08]: We're the first podcast after your livestream.Vibhu [00:00:10]: First podcast. We have Ari here, who leads the product and engineering team for Computer Use agents. Before we kick in and dive deep on Computer Use, you wanna give a quick recap? What was announced? What's the quick slew of announcements you guys had today?Ari Weinstein [00:00:24]: Yeah. yeah, it was a super exciting day. we just got out of the keynote. It was really sick. there were a bunch of Computer Use announcements that I think are worth thinking about. We have, Dots, which is the new, sort of personal assistant product, and, that has some really exciting Computer Use features. There's GPT-6.1 Sol, which is this amazing new model, that I think is particularly great for Computer Use ‘cause of, sort of the cost and speed, advantages. I think, I think we shared that it's, a fifth of the cost of Astra and a seventh of the cost if you're looking at Computer Use specifically, which is really amazing. sorry, there were so many things. I'm trying to sort through it.Swyx [00:01:02]: And the API.Ari Weinstein [00:01:03]: Agents API, which now has Computer Use in it, which is really cool, ‘cause now developers can build on the same Computer Use, that is part of Codex, and ChatGPT. and then there were some demos of our existing Computer Use features, like app shots, where you can take the context of something you're doing on your computer and bring it into Codex and ChatGPT really fast. And then, like, native Computer Use on your Mac, where Roman had it taking screenshots of his app, automatically, and he could do other things on his computer while Computer Use was using his applications. so yeah, really exciting keynote.Swyx [00:01:35]: And not to mention the Decisions API.Ari Weinstein [00:01:37]: Decisions API.Swyx [00:01:38]: Off the bat, are they all the same model? Like, this is. Or the same dataset distilled to different models?Swyx [00:01:44]: Like, basically, like, is Computer Use using Decisions API, or are they, like, kinda separate?Ari Weinstein [00:01:49]: So what's really cool about the Decisions API is it, you know, it has all these new capabilities. It does inference in parallel. it doesn't have reasoning. It's a smaller model, than the ones we use for Computer Use. and so those capabilities make it really fast.Dots and Delegating Work to a Cloud ComputerSwyx [00:02:07]: Yeah.Ari Weinstein [00:02:07]: They also make it a little bit less good at doing, like, long horizon, sort of sophisticated tasks. And so I think I would say it's still an open area of research for how we, like, bring those approaches together. But, yeah, I'm really excited to see what people build with the Decisions API.Vibhu [00:02:24]: One of the interesting things is Dots now have attached personal computers.Ari Weinstein [00:02:28]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:02:28]: So it seems like they're very much more persistent. You've been using them for a while. How should people push the bounds? Like, what should people aim for? What should they try? Personally, right now I use it for a lot of customer service. LikeAri Weinstein [00:02:41]: CoolVibhu [00:02:41]: “Oh, this was wrong. I don't wanna sign in. I don't wanna authenticate.” Find whatever and just get it fixed.Ari Weinstein [00:02:45]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:02:46]: How should we push further? What should people try?Ari Weinstein [00:02:50]: Dots Are a really cool product because each Dot has access to its own Linux virtual computer in the cloud, which is different from our other products. you know, traditionally, we've have access to a browser in the cloud, or it has access to your own computer, but now you get your own entire Linux computer in the cloud. And so it can run full desktop applications, and it can also use a web browser. And so, yeah, you know, I think the powerful thing about Computer Use and the reason why I think it's so, exciting is because it makes it so that the agent can do anything you as a, as a person can do, because all the software in the world was designed for humans, and now agents can use that same software, and you can delegate to the agent. So, yeah, like, anything that you would do on a computer, you can ask a Dot to do. Yeah, I think what particularly is useful is gonna really depend on who the end user is and what- what's valuable in their life. but yeah, I would just start by thinking about, like, one of the things that you spend time on and how could you delegate those to an agent.Swyx [00:03:47]: Yeah, a lot of flight booking and shopping and honestly even, like, playing a game or whatever, right?Ari Weinstein [00:03:52]: Totally.Swyx [00:03:52]: Yeah.Ari Weinstein [00:03:53]: Yeah, I don't know. For me, something I did recently, I've been working on. I've, subscribed to a meal prep service ‘cause I was trying to, like, eat healthy, you know? And I really like this meal prep service I found because it lets me customize the meals I order to, like, a high degree of granularity. So I can say, like, “I want this many grams of chicken and this many grams of rice.” but it was so complicated. It took me two hours to do an order, and I found that I could ask Computer Use to do it for me, and it did it in 15 minutes. so I actually saved two hours. it both did it eight times faster than I could, and it saved me two hours on GPT-6.1 Sol.Swyx [00:04:32]: Yeah.Ari Weinstein [00:04:32]: So those are the kinds of tasks that I feel like, are really powerful.Swyx [00:04:36]: As a creator, I can tell you automatically, immediately, my number one use case is automating YouTube.Ari Weinstein [00:04:40]: Nice.Swyx [00:04:40]: Because, YouTube doesn't expose a lot of things via API.Ari Weinstein [00:04:43]: Yeah.Swyx [00:04:43]: And you have to just put it in a VM and just, like, run it, for, like, let's say, let's say their AB testing feature or making community posts. None of this is available by API ‘cause they hate developers.Swyx [00:04:53]: Anyway, so,Ari Weinstein [00:04:55]: I've heard that from our developer experience team too. They use it with YouTube a lot. Yeah. It's really awesome.Swyx [00:04:59]: So I wanna draw for, you know. let's say, I wanna get a little bit spicy. One of our, the leading AI podcasts, our friends, is famous for saying that Computer Use hasn't advanced in the last two years.How Computer Use Has Changed in the Last YearAri Weinstein [00:05:12]: Yeah.Swyx [00:05:13]: Which is a very interesting statement, and I think you're one of the best people in the world to talk about this, like, how have things have progressed, right?Ari Weinstein [00:05:20]: Yeah. You know, they said that a few months ago, I think, and I hope they have a different perspective now because Computer Use is, like, 180 degrees different than it was.Swyx [00:05:26]: He's a, he's a tough guy to impress.Ari Weinstein [00:05:27]: Yeah, okay. well, we're working on it.Swyx [00:05:30]: But, you know, you worked on. You've, like, basically spent your whole career working on, like, some kind of computer automation, right?Ari Weinstein [00:05:34]: Yeah.Swyx [00:05:34]: Like shortcutsAri Weinstein [00:05:35]: YeahSwyx [00:05:35]: At Apple, and then Sky, and then, and then joining OpenAI. Can you draw, like, what your through line is for, like, what is driving you and what- you, what wasn't possible back then maybeAri Weinstein [00:05:47]: Yeah.Swyx [00:05:48]: And, like, what your sort of milestones were.Vibhu [00:05:49]: I guess to add on to that as a follow-up question, what's the major change from using Codex Computer Use from, like, last weekAri Weinstein [00:05:57]: YeahVibhu [00:05:57]: Through to today? Is it model? Is it dots? Is it harness? So all the history plus what really just changed in today's announcements?Ari Weinstein [00:06:04]: Yeah. On the through line, I guess I've always been excited about automation and helping people automate tasks because then you can, like, save time in your life and focus on things that are more important to you than, like, operating a computer very intricately. And so, yeah, that was why we worked on some of those products. I was at Apple before. we made a company called Sky. we ended up joining OpenAI, which is really exciting. and I think something that wasSwyx [00:06:27]: And almost like you have to hack around Apple until Apple was like, “Fine, like, we'll just hire you and you can just work on the inside,” right? Like.Ari Weinstein [00:06:35]: It was, it was a cool place to get to work. what was really interesting looking back at Sky is we were, we were working on Computer Use there as well, and the models were so much less capable. And now the models, just in the last one year, have become extraordinarily capable at Computer Use. I think the biggest delta that I see is before they could, like, reliably start tasks, but then they would run into problems, and now they're really good at debugging. They're really good at trying again, introspecting what is and isn't working. and I think we've also brought the Computer Use the Computer Use field itself has moved forward. I think we're using more techniques. now Computer Use, often writes code. So if you actually look at it in Codex and you expand the tool calls manually, you can see that it's not just doing one action at a time. It's actually writing JavaScript code that it executes, that the computer executes to perform sometimes many actions at once, which is a great, you know, speed up and great capability. We use more accessibility, sort of multimodal interfaces. So, the model may use screenshots, it may use accessibility, it may use Playwright. it can use a lot of different mechanisms, based on the task at hand. and then, yeah, the model acceleration has been, has been just amazing. So, yeah, what's different today? I think we're making computers better all the time, so I think just, like, one day's difference, is probably a little bit less consequential than, like, even the past month or the past two months. but, yeah, I think the Computer Use in Dot is really exciting as well as, the new model that we came out with.Measuring Computer Use and Improving the HarnessVibhu [00:08:03]: On the keynote, Tejal was mentioning 7x improvements in Computer Use speed, a lot better on a few benchmarks. How do you guys think about measuring it? Computer Use is one of those things where, as you say, you know, it's improvements over time.Ari Weinstein [00:08:20]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:08:20]: Is it harness? Is it model? Is it post-training?Ari Weinstein [00:08:22]: Right.Vibhu [00:08:22]: How do you guys look at it internally about measuring how good it is, and what were the changes with the new model?Ari Weinstein [00:08:29]: We actually have a bunch of different ways of measuring it, some of which are on different permutations and configurations of the harness. It's a bit of a complicated story because, you know, our production products have, you know, some more safety checks, and, you know, those are configured differently based on the needs of the, of the task at hand. So there's a lot of ways to measure it, but I think regardless of how we measure it, we find pretty consistent gains. and those gains are, sometimes in the harness and sometimes in the model. and yeah, I was really excited by this result that GPT-6.1 is even more cost-effective for Computer Use than its baseline cost improvement as compared to Astra. It's, like, really cool to see.Swyx [00:09:10]: Yeah. I mean, one of the visuals I really liked from the livestream was that, you're sort of improving the Pareto frontier of, your, curve, and there was a lot of talking about how you're improving it together with the harness.Ari Weinstein [00:09:24]: Yeah.Swyx [00:09:24]: Can you give some examples of aha moments that you had, whether it's on, like, model driving the harness driving the model, whatever?Ari Weinstein [00:09:32]: I don't mean to repeat myself, but I think, like, introducing more modalities has been really powerful.Swyx [00:09:36]: Okay.Ari Weinstein [00:09:36]: One more specific example of that is, in the past, I think we saw a lot of Computer Use, products had to spend a lot of time, like, scrolling, you know? So it would, like, take a screenshot. It would try to do something. It would be like, “Oh, I gotta, like, scroll down to the next page of results,” and then it would take a screenshot, and then it would try to do something. It would scroll down again. And so I think, with accessibility and other. and, direct access to the DOM and other things like that, now the language model can actually see, like, an entire page or an entire application. It can write code that can do multiple steps at once. And so I think those have been probably the biggest single aha moments. There's, like, a lot of tiny ones that are less exciting in comparison, but actually we do find also that a lot of speed improvements are driven by, like, a lot of little paper cuts that we gotta go in and introspect.App Shots, Accessibility, and Better Computer ContextSwyx [00:10:21]: Yeah. A lot of really hard engineering.Ari Weinstein [00:10:23]: Yeah.Swyx [00:10:23]: I mean, app shots in general, right? Like, I think people don't quite get the difference if. because there's, like, a nice visual in Codex when itAri Weinstein [00:10:30]: YeahSwyx [00:10:30]: When you take an app shot, but they don't maybe they get the difference that, you are able to actually drive each button and you have the, you have each text, in a very optimal representation.Ari Weinstein [00:10:40]: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's kind of fun actually. If you wanna be, like, really nerdy about it, you can go into Codex, take an app shot by hitting the two command keys. So you grab the content from whatever app you're working with, bring it into the, Codex or ChatGPT chat. And then the. if you click on the attachment and you click on this, like, little tiny button in the top right, you can see the raw text and you see the raw accessibility representation. And yeah, we've put a lot of work into, puttingSwyx [00:11:04]: Just dumping everything out. Yeah.Ari Weinstein [00:11:05]: Dumping it out, but also making it token-efficient, doing it efficiently. There's, like, a bit of an art to it. And, you know, it turns out that the same technology that was invented for humans, you know, who maybe have accessibility needs, who wanna use a screen reader technology, that technology is really helpful for them to be able to use computers. It's also really helpful for LLMs to be able to use computers. So that's been, like, really fun to get to work on.Vibhu [00:11:27]: For context, I feel like a lot of people don't understand app shots. They don't even know it's a feature.Ari Weinstein [00:11:30]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:11:31]: It's when you double hit command, it pulls in what looks like a screenshotAri Weinstein [00:11:34]: RightVibhu [00:11:34]: And you're like, “Oh, why have I opened up just a screenshot and thrown it in?” No, it's actually pulling all the metadata, all the code, everything.Ari Weinstein [00:11:40]: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's like, you know, if you take a screenshot of a webpage that has a link- The screenshot doesn't include where the link goes. It doesn't include, you know, maybe you take a screenshot of your calendar, the ca- event ti- titles are truncated, you know? But when you take an app shot, it gives, like, the language model, like, full context about everything and, that lets it, just sort of, like, do much more.Swyx [00:12:02]: Yeah. For those who wanna see more, Jason Liu, I invited him to do a full workshop on this, at AI Engineer.Ari Weinstein [00:12:07]: Amazing.Swyx [00:12:08]: Did a great job.Vibhu [00:12:09]: I have a broader vision questionToward Superhuman Computer UseAri Weinstein [00:12:11]: YeahVibhu [00:12:11]: On Computer Use agents. So your example of take a screenshot, scroll page, take a screenshot is where we were.Ari Weinstein [00:12:17]: Right.Vibhu [00:12:17]: Today, they can automate a lot. what are the bottlenecks? Is it models? Is it harnesses? What. Where do you see it going in, like, two years? Do you see it just running for hours? How do we get there? Any predictions on where Computer Use goes?Ari Weinstein [00:12:32]: Yeah. I mean, I think what's really crazy that I think, You know, the team's accomplished over the past couple of months is that now Computer Use is, like, faster at accomplishing tasks than, like, the average human probably in most cases. and I think that the next frontier is to have Computer Use be, like, literally superhuman in its performance where it actually is as fast or faster at using software than, like, expert Computer Users like us. and I think that'll be really consequential and exciting when that happens because I think we'll be able to all of a sudden build products, that, provide just much more real-time experiences. And I think it'll also. lowering the barrier to entry of, or the activation energy, I suppose, of using Computer Use I think will make us start to default to doing certain things in agents that we've become accustomed to doing manually. And I think that's exciting also ‘cause it'll save us a ton of time. and I think there's a, you know, there are a lot of different little paper cuts and bottlenecks that are sort of standing in the way of that. I think that there's, yeah, there's things on the model side, there's things on the inference side, there's things on the harness side, there's things in the, in the representation. You know, we find that as Computer Use gets faster, we're increasingly bottlenecked by just, like, the speed of doing an operation. Like, for example, you know, a non-trivial amount of time in our benchmarks of Computer Use tasks is actually, like, let's say you're automating a task on doordash.com. Like, a lot of the time is actually waiting for doordash.com itself to load, you know?Swyx [00:14:04]: Yeah, then you just write a wait and then you execute the wait.Ari Weinstein [00:14:07]: Yeah, totally. And you wanna get. Yeah, actually, it's actually really important that you get that de- like, you want as little delay as possible between when it finally finishes loading and when you go andSwyx [00:14:16]: YeahAri Weinstein [00:14:16]: Trigger the LLM to do the next action, which is actually- itself a statistical science.Swyx [00:14:20]: Like an event-driven way maybe to do that.Ari Weinstein [00:14:22]: When possible, you want it to be event-driven.Swyx [00:14:24]: JavaScript has some load events.Ari Weinstein [00:14:25]: And JavaScript has load events for. or the web browser has load events for web navigation, but there's other types of events that actually really can't be event-driven. So there's a lot of complexityVibhu [00:14:34]: The one that comes to mind is, like, chatting with customer service.Ari Weinstein [00:14:37]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:14:37]: Replies could take 30 seconds, could take three minutes.Ari Weinstein [00:14:39]: Oh, right.Swyx [00:14:41]: I have dealt with so many bots with Codex. it's great, but I also wonder if the other side knows that they're talking to a bot ‘cause I'm, like, answering in complete sentences. Like, I'm capitalized correctly.Ari Weinstein [00:14:50]: That's hilarious.Swyx [00:14:51]: Like, I'm giving full num- full reference numbers and everything. Like, it's too. it's clearly too good. I don't care. Like Like, I'm just, like, trying to get my support case.Vibhu [00:14:58]: I've prompted it to, like, you know, “Don't pretend you're a bot. Be very annoyed human.”Vibhu [00:15:02]: Short one-liners, likeSwyx [00:15:04]: YeahVibhu [00:15:04]: Push it, do all this. I also tell it, “While you're waiting for responses, like, use subagents to research better ways to figure out what we need.”Ari Weinstein [00:15:12]: Nice.Vibhu [00:15:12]: It's just, like, human little intervention.Ari Weinstein [00:15:14]: That's awesome. I also feel like half the time it's a bot on the other end, so now youVibhu [00:15:17]: YeahAri Weinstein [00:15:17]: Got the bots talking to each other.Swyx [00:15:18]: Yeah. I will also say, you know, like, you know, one milestone of Computer Use that we are, we're at now is, you know, three, four years ago, we were scared of hooking up LLMs to the, to the web and toAri Weinstein [00:15:31]: YeahSwyx [00:15:31]: To our, to our devices. And now I'm having it configure DNS for me.Ari Weinstein [00:15:35]: Wow.Swyx [00:15:36]: I'm having it pay my bills, and, like, really, like, tens of thousands of dollars of, like, stuff I'm just sending it over and yoloing with Computer Use and, like, you know, what's the, what's the worst thing that can happen?Swyx [00:15:48]: So that- that's all, that's all really good.Building Safely With Computer Use in the Agents APIAri Weinstein [00:15:50]: Yeah.Swyx [00:15:50]: I think now that you've. you know, obviously, you also have to dogfood your own products and all these things. Now that you've sort of released this in API, what are some pitfalls or tips that you wanna tell developers, because they're about to, I guess, encounter all this, firsthand?Ari Weinstein [00:16:03]: First of all, I'm just really excited that we brought Computer Use into the Agents API. I think this is, really great because obviously a lot of developers are building applications that wanna be able to work with third-party websites and services. And so Computer Use has this universality to it. It can work with anything. So now all of a sudden, developers can build using the same Computer Use implementation that we're building on. I think there's great work to be done if you wanna build your own Computer Use harness, but it's hard. And also, we train our models on our Computer Use harness, so there is, an advantage to using the one that's in distribution for the model. There actually might be a speed and cost and accuracy advantage. So I think it's really great for people to get to build on top of that. And, yeah, you know, I think kind of to the point that you were making, like, I think we're all sort of still in the process and maybe, like, some of us are ahead of many people in the world of, like, getting comfortable with this technology and trusting it. And so I think it's incumbent on us to, sort of build that trust over time by making sure we're building things that are reliable, by building, the right kinds of safety checks, by asking for the user's consent before doing something consequential like making a payment, by, asking, you know, maybe depending on the application, making sure you're only letting it access the websites or applications that it actually needs for the task. So that's, I think, something important to think about. but yeah, I'd really encourage people to try the new Agents API, build all kinds of cool stuff on it. We'd love to hear your feed- feedback if, you know, depending on how it goes.Vibhu [00:17:31]: Have you seen any changes in the way it affects dev workflows? So one of the things with dots is, you know, you're seeing it in Slack.Ari Weinstein [00:17:38]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:17:38]: You're seeing people use voice and build. the example Roman showed of change this app and send me screenshots along the way and all this.Computer Use for Testing and Closing the Software LoopAri Weinstein [00:17:46]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:17:46]: Is anything that you're seeing there in adoption about how people are using Computer Use for coding workflows? Any tips people should take from that?Ari Weinstein [00:17:55]: One of my favorite use cases for Computer Use actually, and one that we see a lot in the wild, is Computer Use letting the agent- actually test the software that the agent has built, which is far more consequential than it sounds. Because traditionally, you know, you'd build something in Codex and then the-- and the Codex builds it for you, and then you have to test it, and you are now like QA for the agent, right? So with Computer Use, you can complete the develop-- the software development life cycle, where, the agent can build software, it can test it. So I have a lot of fun, you know, building stuff, having the agent test it. By the time it comes to me, it's already working. I have, extra fun because sometimes I'm, like, developing Computer Use itself, and so now I have a Computer Use agent that's using my Computer Use agent that's using something else. so yeah, I really, I really think this is a super powerful class of use case.Swyx [00:18:44]: I have a visual play test skill that I've developed that, really catches a lot of design issues,Ari Weinstein [00:18:49]: NiceSwyx [00:18:50]: That, you know, normally when you just look at code, you wouldn't really pick it up. it's also really good for cloning apps, though. If you're using a shitty SaaS and you wanna kill the SaaS You just clone it screen by screen by screen. and Obviously, Computer Use can completely drive everything, take screenshots, note it down, and then clone everything with Codex.Ari Weinstein [00:19:06]: That's really cool.Swyx [00:19:06]: But yeah, thanks for all your progress. I think, that isAri Weinstein [00:19:08]: AbsolutelySwyx [00:19:09]: Our time.Nikunj Handa: What's New in the OpenAI APIAri Weinstein [00:19:10]: Yeah.Swyx [00:19:10]: This is not the last that we're gonna talk.Ari Weinstein [00:19:12]: Yeah, cool. This has been really fun. Thank you guys for having me.Swyx [00:19:14]: All right.Vibhu [00:19:14]: All right. Okay, we're a strict cutoff. We're just gonna dive right in.Nikunj Handa [00:19:17]: Let's do it, yeah.Vibhu [00:19:19]: Okay, so, Nikunj, we're very excited to have you. You shipped a lot on the API side, like we justNikunj Handa [00:19:25]: YeahVibhu [00:19:25]: Talked about with Ari. You can now build with Computer Use agents. Anything you wanna highlight, the API side of changes, and introduce yourself a little and what you do?Nikunj Handa [00:19:34]: Yeah, for sure. My name is Nikunj. I lead product for the API team. Been here for roughly three years. been working on launching models. I feel like that's just been, like, a thing, constant thing throughout my time, here at OpenAI. And, with every new model, we try to, like, basically work super closely with the post-training team, the research team, to figure out what's new in it. and then we, like, expose those capabilities in the API. so that's, like, the basic way of putting it. and if you just look at, everything that's new with GPT-6, the cool new capabilities that we launched were, firstly, async function calling. so what you see with, like a lot of the things that you're seeing in, like, Codex and Dots and everything is that tool calls take so long that you don't have to, like, pause the model's execution while, the tool is running. So you could just, like, kick off a tool call, keep running, keep reasoning, and then check back in. so we launched async tool calling. We launched, like, mid-turn steering, so now you can, like, inject messages while the model is reasoning, in the middle. so as your tool call finishes, you can put in that instructions.Async Tool Calls, Mid-Turn Steering, and WebSocketsSwyx [00:20:43]: And that's also partially a model alignment capability, right?Nikunj Handa [00:20:46]: Yeah.Swyx [00:20:46]: Like, they have to train in the ability to train.Nikunj Handa [00:20:48]: Exactly, yeah. AndVibhu [00:20:49]: I feel like we've had it in the app. You could always, as it's reasoning, you could steer.Nikunj Handa [00:20:54]: Yes.Vibhu [00:20:54]: It wasn't the best. It's gotten much better.Nikunj Handa [00:20:57]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:20:57]: Excited to see how it does this in versionNikunj Handa [00:20:58]: Yeah, and I like our mainVibhu [00:20:59]: And nowNikunj Handa [00:21:00]: Goal in, our main goal in the API is to, like, put things in the API once it's trained into the harness. And so we kinda wait for that moment until it's good enough. And a lot of that is, like, actually being powered by WebSockets, which we launched, a few, I wanna say months ago. And so WebSockets just opens this, like, whole bidirectional, like, communication thing with the model. This is not, the GPT Life thing. I'm just talking about GPT-6. and you can do all these, like, async tool calling, async reasoning, injecting messages. It's a really fun API to work on. I think, like, really enjoying.Swyx [00:21:33]: Yeah. This is why we are the engineering podcast, because we get to talk about WebSockets.UltraFast and the Inference StackNikunj Handa [00:21:36]: Yeah.Swyx [00:21:37]: This also pairs very well with UltraFast, right?Nikunj Handa [00:21:39]: Oh, yeah.Swyx [00:21:39]: Like, that is now, like, I think for the first time ever available in the API.Nikunj Handa [00:21:43]: Yes.Swyx [00:21:43]: Which is, which is basically the theoretical fastest speed you can ever get, Frontier of Intelligence.Nikunj Handa [00:21:49]: Yeah. It's been so exciting to work on that project. I think, before I go into the API, the most fun part of, UltraFast has been just watching the inference team cook with Astra. Like, they're just, like, constantly having these, like, Codex agents running, trying to, like, squeeze out more performance. And, I would say, like, at least for a couple of months, a lot of it was focused on efficiency and driving the cost down, which is how we, like, were able to cut the Luna price by, like, 80%. It was, like, a lot of that was driven by, like, all the inference improvements they landed. And then now they've, like, shifted gears towards, like, how can we make this run as fast as possible? And so UltraFast has just been, like, amazing to see on a mo- on a model like Astra. Like, to go that fast has been really cool. And yeah, WebSockets is like. actually it was like the first time we launched WebSockets, it was for GPT, 5.3 Codex Spark, which was. Can't believe we named a model that, but, you know, that's what we launched it for. And obviously, it helps so much because, like, you gotta have the tool calls. you had, like, really reduced the overhead, of going back and forth with tools. And so, WebSockets is awesome for that.Swyx [00:22:57]: Yeah. it's always cute to see, like, I have my reset usage limit, and then I have my Spark usage limit that I never use.Nikunj Handa [00:23:03]: Yeah.Swyx [00:23:04]: Like, it's there if I want it.Nikunj Handa [00:23:05]: I think it's gone finally.Swyx [00:23:06]: It's gone. It's gone, yeah.Nikunj Handa [00:23:07]: I know it's gone, so.Swyx [00:23:08]: Yeah. you're slowly killing off all the, you know, theNikunj Handa [00:23:11]: The old ones, yeah.Swyx [00:23:11]: Oldies.Vibhu [00:23:11]: This is a great week. I mean, it was the first time we had Frontier Intelligence at extreme speeds.Nikunj Handa [00:23:17]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:23:18]: People really liked it.Nikunj Handa [00:23:19]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:23:19]: SoSwyx [00:23:20]: YeahVibhu [00:23:20]: First time it comes back.Swyx [00:23:21]: Yeah. for, 5.3 Spark is explicitly attributed to Cerebras. You guys are not confirming or denying that, UltraFast is related to Ce- Cerebras, but people are. I'll just say that people do care and, are wondering about it. And you have your own silicon as well. elephant in the room, decision models.Decisions API: OpenAI's Fast Decision ModelNikunj Handa [00:23:38]: Oh, yeah.Swyx [00:23:38]: Decisions API. We were the first podcast to do a big Jev, deep dive with, Diogo, and I also, you know, featured him at AI Engineer. How quickly did you see Jev and go likeNikunj Handa [00:23:49]: Oh my gosh. Yeah.Nikunj Handa [00:23:50]: Yeah. Firstly, like, huge props to Diogo and, like, the Jev team for, like, really inspiring theSwyx [00:23:55]: YesNikunj Handa [00:23:55]: Like, whole segment in the market. Like, obviously Jev comes out, everyone's, like, losing their minds over it. Our users are, like, hitting us up. But also, like, our internal teams are like, “We need, like, a much faster classification system.” We can. I don't wanna, like, get ahead of some of the dots features that are gonna comeSwyx [00:24:16]: WhooNikunj Handa [00:24:16]: But you're gonna see, like, some cool, like, really snappy, fast things built on top of the decisions API. but, you know, like, yeah. Props to Jev for, like, inspiring this whole thing. obviously a bunch of people at OpenAI get nerd sniped by that, and they're like, “How can we, like, make this work? We're not gonna, like-”Swyx [00:24:33]: Okay.Nikunj Handa [00:24:33]: “. train a new model.” ButSwyx [00:24:34]: Like, four weeks ago, this was not on the dev radar, right?Nikunj Handa [00:24:37]: No, not at all. No.Swyx [00:24:37]: Okay.Nikunj Handa [00:24:37]: This is likeSwyx [00:24:38]: WowNikunj Handa [00:24:38]: Jev-inspired and, likeSwyx [00:24:40]: I think you are officially the first one to your lab to, like, clone and, adopt this.Nikunj Handa [00:24:44]: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, OpenAI has such a strong, like, hacker culture and, like, people are just, like, they get excited about things. And so, guy from inference, this one awesome guy from, the infra team are like, “ this is amazing. We're gonna, like, hack on it.” They build a prototype, it, like, works, and now we- we are just, like, hill climbing on latency and trying to make this as fast as possible, and we wanna, like, launch it in the coming days. so as soon as we hit our, like, latency target, we'll try to get this out.Vibhu [00:25:13]: It's interesting. At the same time of hacker culture, you also, as Sam said, like 99%, one of the most reliable APIs withNikunj Handa [00:25:20]: Mm-hmmVibhu [00:25:20]: I think probably the most usage, which is your team directly. how should people see decisions API? I feel like a lot of people saw Jev, heard the buzz, haven't built with it. You're making it very mainstream.What Decision Models Are Good ForNikunj Handa [00:25:32]: Mm-hmm.Vibhu [00:25:33]: What should people see it as? How should they use it?Nikunj Handa [00:25:36]: Yeah. I think the main use cases we've seen is, like, really fast classification. all the Computer Use demos have been amazing and really cool. I think there will be limitations, of course, in terms of, you know, having Astra, like, write, like, a JavaScript-like script to control your computer, versus having Luna pick, like, one action at a time. I think, it's not gonna be at the same intelligence level, but, like, maybe there's some Computer Use tasks that this is good enough for. So excited to see that come through. the other cool prototype I've seen internally is people hooking it up with GPT Live. So GPT Live is like, you know, our bidirectional, like, real-time,Swyx [00:26:14]: VoicingNikunj Handa [00:26:14]: A- API. And, it's built on this, like, model of front-end models and back-end models. So GPT Live is this, likeSwyx [00:26:20]: Think or talkerNikunj Handa [00:26:21]: Super fast. Yeah, think or, talker thing. So GPT Live is the talker, super fast, really good at delegation, and you have something like Astra sitting at the ba- at the back. But tool calling has always felt, like, really slow in GPT Live. and so people have been, like, putting together these, like, tool calling demos of GPT Live controlling a computer, and it just feels like so much more snappy and natural. So I'm, like, kinda excited to see, like, what people do with Live and with Luna on decisions API. so that'll be pretty exciting. Yeah.Swyx [00:26:55]: So I wanna iron this out for people, especially from the product side, because a lot of people have been putting out Jev clones. There's been about 100 in the last two weeks.What Makes a Decision Model DifferentNikunj Handa [00:27:01]: Oh, really? That's amazing.Vibhu [00:27:03]: The first couple days.Swyx [00:27:04]: But like, it. Like, they can clone a Jev API, which is honestly structured outputsNikunj Handa [00:27:09]: YeahSwyx [00:27:09]: Which OpenAI was first to.Nikunj Handa [00:27:10]: Yeah.Swyx [00:27:11]: Right? So, like, I think let's iron out for people what is a decision model, as far asNikunj Handa [00:27:16]: YeahSwyx [00:27:17]: As far as, like, what is important? It is not just latency. It's not just structured output, right? Because I could just have Luna as it'- The decision model is priced the same as Luna, right?Nikunj Handa [00:27:26]: Mm-hmm.Swyx [00:27:27]: Have turned off reasoning and then have structured output. Do I have a Jev? you know, no, right? And that's theNikunj Handa [00:27:33]: YeahSwyx [00:27:33]: That's the realVibhu [00:27:34]: There's a confidence there.Swyx [00:27:35]: Yeah.Nikunj Handa [00:27:36]: Yeah, totally. I think, the way that. So we haven't trained, like, a new model for this.Swyx [00:27:40]: Yeah.Nikunj Handa [00:27:40]: We're, like, building this purely on top of the same Luna weights that we have.Swyx [00:27:44]: Oh.Nikunj Handa [00:27:44]: So yeah. This is, like, really just Luna. And, on top of that, what you're doing is you're constraining. So, like, structured output's a big part of it. you're really optimizing the inference stack to, like, get very fast on TTFD. And because you can have multiple questions, what you do is, like, you basically run those in parallel,Swyx [00:28:05]: As a batch.Nikunj Handa [00:28:06]: Yeah. You run those in the-- as a batch. you-- All sorts of, like, inference techniques people are working on to try to make it as fast as possible. But I'd say, like, at least our implementation of it at the start and this first version is, like, zero-shotting this on top of Luna, to see how it goes. And obviously, you wanna, like, put it out there. Like, this is OpenAI's, like, classic iterative deployment thing. Put it out there, see what people think, and then, like, we'll make more model improvements, as needed. so yeah. That's, the decisions API.Swyx [00:28:38]: Yeah. And, obviously as a benefit, you have vision. They don't have vision, right?Nikunj Handa [00:28:42]: That's true.Swyx [00:28:42]: Obviously, Jev's comes withNikunj Handa [00:28:43]: Yeah. Like, we get it for free with Luna. Yeah.Swyx [00:28:45]: Yeah. I do think that, like, you know, some of the innovations, it sounds like, it's still to come if it's still the same Luna weights, which is, like, the confidence stuff, like, the in calibration is something that we've talked about on the podcast with, benchmarking calibration. ‘Cause basically, the whole point is that RLHF kind of collapses you towards what you want to hear.Calibration, Architecture, and the Open Research QuestionsNikunj Handa [00:29:03]: Yeah.Swyx [00:29:03]: But, like, not actually, like, what the amount of confidence is.Nikunj Handa [00:29:06]: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I'm eager to see how it pans out. Maybe there's, like, gonna be. These are gonna be, like, the key areas where we may have to, like, hill climbSwyx [00:29:15]: YeahNikunj Handa [00:29:15]: With the, with the future model release. But, yeah.Swyx [00:29:18]: And then architecture-wise, the other thing that's in the debate, obviously, you-- Nobody knows because Jev doesn't talk about it, but the two speculations are, one, maybe diffusion model instead of autoregressive.Nikunj Handa [00:29:28]: Mm-hmm.Swyx [00:29:29]: But you are able to achieve the parallel, generation in your way. And then the other one is some mech interp type thingNikunj Handa [00:29:37]: Mm-hmmSwyx [00:29:37]: That you're, like, analyzing the activations and then just outputtingNikunj Handa [00:29:40]: That would be coolSwyx [00:29:41]: The weights.Nikunj Handa [00:29:42]: Yeah.Swyx [00:29:42]: Which, like, you guys have all done the research on this. People have speculated.Vibhu [00:29:45]: There have been demos onSwyx [00:29:46]: YeahVibhu [00:29:46]: Both of these as well. I think Gemini shared a Gemini diffusion, Gemma diffusion on a Jev-style output.Nikunj Handa [00:29:53]: Oh, sick.Vibhu [00:29:53]: And, interp people have also, you know, pulled out interp from a middle layer, but this is all speculation.Swyx [00:29:59]: It's just like, what are you trying to aim for, right? Because you can achieve the API. Everyone can achieve the API. It's actually pretty trivial. But, like, then there's the speed, then there's the accuracy, then there's the other calibration features.Nikunj Handa [00:30:11]: Mm-hmm.Swyx [00:30:11]: I don't know what else.Nikunj Handa [00:30:13]: Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. It's so cool that this, like, whole space has been kicked off now and people are gonna do so much cool stuff and everyone's gonna learn from each other. And, yeah, I'm excited about it.What Developers Should Build NextVibhu [00:30:24]: I feel like being on the platform team, a lot of your job is to empower builders.Nikunj Handa [00:30:27]: Mm-hmm.Vibhu [00:30:28]: What do you think people should build with decisions API and also Computer Use agents? Any stuff that you've- been building with internally that you think really opens up after the new change?Nikunj Handa [00:30:39]: Yeah. okay, let's think. decisions API, use cases internally have been pretty obvious. Like, the user ops team was, like, jumping on it. We were like, “We gotta classify all of our support tickets.” what else came up? obviously, there were, like, the really cool GPT Live demos. I'm sure, like, the Codex app team might, like, pick this up and try to do something cool with it. So, you know, like, this whole thing started, like, a week ago, so it's, like, very early andSwyx [00:31:06]: Oh, one week.Nikunj Handa [00:31:07]: We're excited. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.Vibhu [00:31:08]: There was a big push in, evals, LLM as a judge having really low latency there.Nikunj Handa [00:31:13]: Right. Yeah. That'll be interesting to see. and then, with the Agents API, we have-- we're basically, like, having a bunch of first-party products, like, at OpenAI built fully on top of it. we've had the Codex security stuff that just went out that's fully built on top of, the Agents API. We have, sort of the-- we- we are having, like, a meetings type of thing launching today.Agents API and OpenAI's First-Party ProductsSwyx [00:31:40]: Mm-hmm.Nikunj Handa [00:31:40]: I think there was, like, a demo. do you remember, like, the plugin extensions when Sam was showing it? There was, like, a demo for, like, you're in a calendar, you can sort of, like, have your meeting notesSwyx [00:31:51]: Like, drop into a singleNikunj Handa [00:31:52]: Flow into like your spaceSwyx [00:31:52]: Like, Google Docs type thing.Nikunj Handa [00:31:53]: Yeah.Swyx [00:31:54]: Right?Nikunj Handa [00:31:54]: And so the-- all of that stuff is, like, fully built on top of, the Agents API. and yeah, I'm, like, just excited to see. Like, we're just getting this out, and let's see what people build on top of it.Vibhu [00:32:04]: I think you showed it off very well. The whole edit spaces, pages, collaborate, add in your dot. Like, that's a lot, soNikunj Handa [00:32:12]: YeahVibhu [00:32:12]: There's a lot of inspiration people can go to.Nikunj Handa [00:32:14]: Yeah. All possible with Astra, you know. Like, thing- things just move so fast now. LikeSwyx [00:32:19]: YeahNikunj Handa [00:32:19]: People go from idea to execution so quickly, it's amazing.Swyx [00:32:23]: Is there something that you want, people to focus on to give you feedback? Like, what-- like, you know, maybe you're just putting this out there and you want-- and there's, like, a fork in the road and you want developers to help you decide.Responses API Performance and Long-Lived CachingNikunj Handa [00:32:35]: So I think Agents API and decisions API, they are like, these are our newest products. Would love, like, any and all feedback on that to figure out where to take them. I think, over here, we're, like, very open on Responses API, which is sort of like our workhorse over here. like, really focused on performance right now, and the performance comes in, like, two main ways. first is just, like, latency. We've been, like, rewriting the whole Responses API stack to, like, make it as fast as possible from a TTFT perspective, DVD perspective. So there's like-- that, like, continues to be, like, a main area of focus for us. The second thing we've been trying to do is, like, really go deep on caching, particularly with these, like, personal agents that are, you know, like, basically, like, a single thread that just goes on and on forever. We've been, trying to, like, really up our game on caching. We provide now guarantees of, like, cache hits within, like, 30 minutes. We're actually, like, we-- for one of our users, we just launched, like, a much longer cache window. So we have, like, a 12-hour caching guarantee, that we offer so that you have, like, guaranteed cache hits forSwyx [00:33:40]: Is that a public API?Nikunj Handa [00:33:42]: Not yet. That's in preview.Nikunj Handa [00:33:43]: We're gonna, like, try to get that out to everyone as soon as possible. But, like, just pay a little bit more for the cache write, and we, like, guarantee, like, cache reads for, like, a much longer period. So even if, like, your instinct thread, for example, like, you just, like, do something on it and then come back to it, like, three to four hours later, you- you're still getting the caching performance out of it. And launchedVibhu [00:34:04]: And you cut the cost there quite a bit too, right, with the new model?Nikunj Handa [00:34:07]: Oh, yeah. That's right.Vibhu [00:34:08]: Like, 25% cheaper, soNikunj Handa [00:34:08]: Yeah, with, like, driving down cache reads, yeah.Cache Pre-Warming and Cost-Efficient Agent ThreadsVibhu [00:34:10]: For builders, they should implementNikunj Handa [00:34:13]: YeahVibhu [00:34:13]: Because it's significantly cheaper.Nikunj Handa [00:34:14]: Yeah. Yeah. Just, like, building your apps with, like, to be very cache aware and sort of, like, use our prompt diagnostics or cache diagnostics tool to figure out, like, where things are dropping off. And, so the caching part is, like, really important. yeah, I also wanted to talk about pre-warming. We have that in the API now. So, like, if you know that, “Hey, I'm gonna get a cache,” like-- sorry, “I'm gonna get this prompt. I just wanna, like, pre-warm the cache, pay, like, the cache write fee right now, and then, like, have it sort of ready to go for the next 30 minutes for whenever.”Swyx [00:34:49]: And it can spawn many instances of that thread.Nikunj Handa [00:34:51]: Exactly, yeah.Swyx [00:34:52]: Yeah.Nikunj Handa [00:34:52]: You can just keep going and haveSwyx [00:34:54]: Yeah, just keep messing with the prompt thereNikunj Handa [00:34:55]: Tons and tons of that. and so, yeah, like, I'm very excited about getting feedback on, like, the low-level performance things that we can keep making Responses API the most performant and reliable way to, like, build on top of an LLM. And then you basically have our, like, new products where I'm just looking for, like, any and all feedback.Swyx [00:35:15]: Yeah, just use it, right?Nikunj Handa [00:35:16]: So yeah, just useSwyx [00:35:16]: Tell us what toNikunj Handa [00:35:17]: Yeah. Define our roadmap for us, please. So yeah.Swyx [00:35:20]: I think for me, the caching thing, great, right? Like, obviously very needed. But at the end of the day, you're still bumping up against a million-token contextCompaction and Managing Million-Token ContextsNikunj Handa [00:35:28]: Mm-hmmSwyx [00:35:28]: And that's probably not gonna change for the foreseeable future.Nikunj Handa [00:35:31]: Mm-hmm.Swyx [00:35:31]: Like, you still need good compression.Nikunj Handa [00:35:33]: Yeah.Swyx [00:35:33]: What is the best practice there?Nikunj Handa [00:35:34]: Yeah. Yeah, totally. so firstly, OpenAI has its own, like, proprietary compression, compSwyx [00:35:40]: Which is inNikunj Handa [00:35:41]: Compaction.Vibhu [00:35:42]: Compaction.Swyx [00:35:42]: It's in the agents.Vibhu [00:35:43]: It's in the API.Nikunj Handa [00:35:43]: Yes.Vibhu [00:35:43]: Agents API.Nikunj Handa [00:35:44]: Yeah.Swyx [00:35:44]: You decide for us, right?Nikunj Handa [00:35:45]: Yeah, exactly. So in the Agents API, it comes built into the harness. and if you're in Responses API, there's, like, two ways of doing it. One is what we call server-side compaction, which is you basically tell Responses API that if you ever hit this threshold of tokens, just auto-compact it and, like, go back, or sorry, like, reduce the context, being used. And the second way is, like, /compact, which is, like, if you want full control. So you can, like, /compact at any timeSwyx [00:36:15]: I hear youNikunj Handa [00:36:15]: Have your own logic on when to, likeSwyx [00:36:17]: It's not AGI.Nikunj Handa [00:36:18]: It.Swyx [00:36:18]: It's not AGI.Nikunj Handa [00:36:19]: Yeah. Yeah.Swyx [00:36:20]: Yeah. But it, I meanNikunj Handa [00:36:20]: YeahSwyx [00:36:20]: It is the manual override.Nikunj Handa [00:36:21]: Yeah, it is the manual way. And like, I don't know, but a lot of the big coding agents like to do it manually. I mean, like, if you look at the Codex implementation of it in the Code- open source Codex harness, you can see that they use /compact and do it. and, there's also, like, new, by the way, new compaction techniques that we are working on. Some of them you will be able to see in the Codex harness. Like, it's already implemented in the Codex harness. And so, they're like some file-based, systems that we are, like, experimenting with. So yeah, lots of cool stuff going on around in compaction as well.Swyx [00:36:57]: Cool. we are running out of time.Nikunj Handa [00:36:59]: Okay.Swyx [00:36:59]: I think you've talked about, a lot about performance and talked a lot about, the new APIs that you're launching. Can you give us any other hints as to things that you're interested in as far as the future of the platform is concerned?Higher-Level Platform Primitives and the AI CloudNikunj Handa [00:37:13]: We're obviously like very low level. Like, I used to work at Stripe before this, and, at Stripe a lot of the game was like building these higher level primitives and products on top of like the core payments primitives. and, I'm always like curious about what the best way of doing that is in AI. And I think we've had a couple of attempts at that. We like had launched assistance API like way back in the day, and like wasn't really the right fit. We were sort of like going off with this like Agents API, and, it gives you the codex harness, but like where's like the, what's the right amount of flexibility to give in that? That's like an open question. Like how should we like have memory walls and like all of these like higher level like API objects to take away, also like to abstract away more, like storage concepts. Like this is like a whole, like, there's a whole space that I'm like very curious about figuring out how we design. I think a lot of things in AI are just have a low-level API primitive and see an example harness and go and have your coding agent implement that. But how much of that do we build into the API is like a constant question that I'm thinking about.Swyx [00:38:24]: Yeah.Nikunj Handa [00:38:24]: So I don't know if folks have thoughts on that. If anyone has ideas, it would be super interesting to hear.Swyx [00:38:30]: Yeah. The analogy I always bring back to, and we'll end there, is, you're building an AI cloud, right?Nikunj Handa [00:38:35]: Mm-hmm.Swyx [00:38:35]: Like, which is, something that, Sam said a year agoNikunj Handa [00:38:38]: Mm-hmmSwyx [00:38:38]: Where, and you're, it's almost like you're kind of doing the AWS invention and you have to do, okay, this is EC2Nikunj Handa [00:38:45]: YeahSwyx [00:38:45]: And this is S3, and this is like. But you're doing the AI-native versions of each of these.Vibhu [00:38:48]: There are a lot of analogies, so you're pre-warming caches for stuff that you know will beNikunj Handa [00:38:53]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:38:53]: And it's nice that it's all exposed to buildersClosingNikunj Handa [00:38:56]: Mm-hmmVibhu [00:38:56]: ‘cause it just opens up ways that you can build new things.Nikunj Handa [00:38:59]: Yeah, absolutely.Swyx [00:39:00]: Okay.Vibhu [00:39:00]: Awesome. WellSwyx [00:39:01]: That's everything.Nikunj Handa [00:39:01]: Thank you, guys.Vibhu [00:39:02]: Thank you.Nikunj Handa [00:39:02]: Yeah. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe

What happens when the most painful chapter of your life becomes material for comedy — and then grows into a play about love?Playwright and bestselling author Robin Gerber joins Bret to discuss The Best Medicine, her funny and openhearted new solo show starring Caroline Aaron of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.The play began in an unlikely place: a ten-week stand-up comedy workshop that Robin and Bret took with comedian Cary Odes. For their final assignment, each participant developed and performed eight minutes of original comedy. Robin drew hers from caring for her husband after he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Those eight minutes became the germ — and emotional heart — of a play about marriage, caregiving, loss, purpose and enduring love.Robin also talks about her journey from attorney and labor organizer to bestselling author and playwright, as well as The Shot, her acclaimed play about Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, starring Sharon Lawrence.The Best Medicine, directed by Jane E. Unger, opens October 10 at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles and runs through November 15, 2026.Tickets and information: https://odysseytheatre.com/whats-on/the-best-medicine/

On Wednesday's show: We discuss the latest developments in politics in our weekly roundup.Also this hour: We learn how the Trinity River has shaped the politics, economy, and environment of Texas and Houston from Scot McFarlane, author of The River That Made Texas: A Forgotten History of the Trinity.And two local arts groups celebrate the works of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar with events in the coming days. Akhtar will hold a reading on Oct. 5 of his latest novel, The Radiance, with Inprint Houston. And Houston's Shunya Theatre is staging a production of Disgraced, the play that won Akhtar the Pulitzer Prize for drama. We learn about both.Watch

Playwright/composer Jodie Fox's original comedic musical is set in 1926 NYC, a struggling theatre has just lost its director and star actor. To matters worse, motion picture companies are taking over and turning live theatres into movie houses. The Velvet Curtain theatre needs their next theatre show to be a big hit or it's lights out forever. The city's first female director steps up, but the owner has his doubts as the cast is in disarray, love triangles form, and the stagehands try to hold it together. See if they can all come together to make it happen...or if the Velvet Curtain will close forever.

Dave discusses the evolution of quality assurance in an AI-driven development life cycle with Wei Wei Wu, CEO of Momentic.  Wei Wei argues that traditional test scripts like Selenium and Playwright are becoming obsolete as AI agents increasingly write code. Instead, he proposes a future where independent agents act as verifiers to close the feedback loop autonomously. Wei Wei suggests the role of QA is shifting toward "context engineering," where humans provide business logic and edge cases to AI.

Who was behind the gunman that shot Pope John Paul II in 1981? We know the man who pulled the trigger was a Turkish member of the Grey Wolves. We know he planned to flee via the Bulgarian Embassy. We know an Italian nun ensured he didn't get away.  But had someone ordered the assassination? One possible clue is held in the answer to this next question: how did the Soviet Union collapse? We also know three unlikely heroic figures played pivotal roles: a Czechoslovakian playwright, a salt-of-the-earth electrician, and the Polish Pope. Even as the totalitarian Soviet empire cracked down against uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, the voices of people crying out for democratic freedoms, human rights, and equal opportunity became undeniable. In his latest historical narrative, Julian weaves together powerful stories of three people who risked everything to defy an authoritarian power. They exemplify the playwright's ideal of “living in truth,” the electrician's movement known as “Solidarity,” and John Paul II's advice that his people “be not afraid.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Playwright MCP or CLI: which one's really eating your AI budget? If you had 12,000 green unit tests, why would bugs still got through. AI agents can ship code fast, but can they see what breaks in production? Find out more in this episode of the Test Guild New Shows for the week of Sep 27th. So, grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea, and let's do this. 0:00 Intro   0:19 Playwright MCP Vs CLI https://testgld.link/v9Hj8O6R 1:26 Cypress Observability  https://testgld.link/FfRMrNr 2:33 Jev to make rigid tests flex https://testgld.link/AMnmwslU 3:49 Github AI Fuzzing https://testgld.link/nwJZUFTg 4:46 AI Unit Test aren't real Tests https://testgld.link/bVLKeYTq 5:59 Mutation Testing Skill https://testgld.link/LlGVXeQ7 7:05 New Book Signals & Levers  https://testgld.link/1kboWcA8 8:06 Raindrop Follow the Money https://testgld.link/5IqQ9nyw 8:54 AI Miving Fast Flying Blind https://testgld.link/Rq5pt7u2  

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This week's edition of Copeland's Corner, with featured Headliners Dan St. Paul, Carlos Alazraqui & Blaine Capatch.The group discussed a Washington Post article revealing that Trump's first ballroom architect quit after Trump repeatedly ignored safety warnings, crossed out designs with a sharpie, and skipped requirements like emergency exits and fire safety measures, declaring "I am the code." The conversation expanded into Trump's broader pattern of cutting corners, fraud convictions, and health violations at his restaurants.Brian noted Trump's net worth has risen to $7 billion — up $4 billion since taking office — and highlighted alleged insider trading via Truth Social stock tips. The group also discussed the financial struggles of Trump's base, rising gas prices, and the MAGA Freedom Fest event that sold only 6 of an expected 100 tickets at $1,000 each.Carlos expressed cautious optimism that young voters who previously voted third party or wrote in candidates are increasingly recognizing the binary choice between Democrats and Republicans. Blaine noted a generational shift toward 21st-century thinking, with communicators like Talia Rico and Mamdani resonating more effectively. The group discussed concerns about a major movie studio merger potentially creating a monopoly, comparing it to Standard Oil and AT&T. They also touched on rising streaming prices (Disney+/Hulu going from $18.99 to $21.49), the decline of broadcast TV viewership, and the Oscars losing relevance due to featuring films audiences haven't seen.Brian posed the question of whether journalists should speak up when female reporters are berated by Trump during press conferences. The group agreed that while career consequences are real, the lack of solidarity is troubling — with Carlos and Brian both saying they personally would intervene.Ripley's Believe It or Not announced its departure from San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf after 60 years. The group debated whether traditional tourist attractions like wax museums are dying out in favor of more interactive experiences like escape rooms, drawing parallels to the decline of shopping malls. Brian shared his 12-year sobriety anniversary and the group discussed changing alcohol consumption trends, including a 36% rise in heavy drinking among ages 50–64. The conversation shifted to modern comedy, with Brian expressing frustration at young comics relying on crowd work for TikTok clips rather than writing original material, while Blaine and Dan acknowledged there is still strong emerging talent. Dan announced he is retiring from cruise ship performances at age 75.--Connect with our Guests...#DanStPaul - DanStPaulComedy.com and @DanStPaul on Instagram #CarlosAlazraqui - CarlosAlazraqui.com #BlaineCapatch - Nerd Poker Podcast.--#TrumpBallroom #WhiteHouseBallroomConstruction #AI #VoterPatters #YoungVoterPatterns#AIGovernance #MediaEntertainment #FishermansWharfSanFrancisco #TouristAttractions#MeToo #HarveyWeinstein #WhiteHousePressCorps #TrumpWealth #BrianCopeland #CopelandsCorner #HeadlinersOnTheHeadlines#CopelandUnfiltered #ComedyCommentary #PodcastersOfYouTube #ComicsOnAir #TalkPodcast#PoliticalHumor #PoliticalPodcast #HotTalkTopicsPodcast#ComedyNewsShow #CurrentEventsComedy #NewsCommentaryShow#WeeklyComedyTalk #BayAreaTalkShow #ComedyPodcastInterviews #ComedyPodcastHost Hosted by the Bay Area's own Brian Copeland, a longtime Actor, Comedian, Author, Playwright, Television and Radio Personality. Brian and The Copeland's Corner Network of content creators provide a weekly mashup of news, interviews and comedy.--For more from Brian...Visit his website: www.BrianCopeland.comFollow on Social Media: Instagram - @CopelandsCorner & @BrianCopieEmail: BrianCopelandShow@Gmail.com --Copeland's Corner is Created, Hosted, & Executive Produced by Brian Copeland. This Show is Recorded & Mixed by Charlene Goto with Go-To Productions. Visit Go-To Productions for all your Podcast & Media needs.Our Booking Producer is Tom Sawyer. For any show inquiries, please email CopelandsCornerPodcast@gmail.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Melbourne-born Suzie Miller's background as a lawyer has influenced the 40-odd plays she has written, many of which feature strong social-justice themes. Best known among those works are the award-winning Prima Facie, which has been staged in Sydney, Melbourne and London, and Inter Alia, which premiered in London last year and opens on Broadway in November.In Miller's new play, Strong is the New Pretty, she tells the story of the birth of the women's Australian Football League, the AFLW, as it moves from pipe dream to sensation.In this episode, Miller talks to deputy opinion editor Margot Saville about sport, feminism and the manosphere. Further reading: ‘Do we want a world that reflects a kind of tech-bro zone? I don’t think so’: Suzie Miller on raising sons See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

UBC creative writing professor and award-winning playwright Anosh Irani (BFA'02, MFA'04) joins From Here Forward to talk about adapting Rohinton Mistry's Giller Prize-winning novel A Fine Balance for Toronto's Crow's Theatre. Anosh shares what "truthfulness" over faithfulness means in adaptation, how opening-night previews reshape a script, and how his UBC MFA years shaped his career as a novelist and playwright.Links & Resources Mentioned in This Episode:A Fine Balance TicketsLearn more about Anosh IraniUBC School of Creative WritingContact CarolContact JeevanFrom Here ForwardPodium Podcast Company (00:00) - Introduction (02:48) - Meet Anosh Irani (03:59) - Discovering A Fine Balance (06:08) - Bringing A Fine Balance to the stage (07:36) - Rediscovering the characters through adaptation (08:33) - Faithfulness, truth, and the art of adaptation (11:41) - The collaborative process of playwriting (14:18) - How UBC shaped Anosh as a writer (16:16) - Finding his way from poetry to novels and plays (17:46) - Vulnerability, courage, and inhabiting other characters (19:09) - Building resilience as a writer (22:44) - Writer's block, patience, and discipline (24:08) - Growing up with storytelling (28:28) - Conclusion

Available for you to listen to on the Rick Flynn Presents worldwide podcast right now is our very special guest REBECCA MAGNUSON and you can experience this wonderful, insightful show on all major podcast carriers or wherever you get your podcasts.Rebecca Magnuson is a singer‑songwriter, composer, concert pianist, playwright, and the creator of She Sings®, a musical and documentary series that transforms personal trauma into collective empowerment. A former child prodigy and award‑winning entrepreneur, she has performed to sold‑out audiences nationwide and uses her platform to advocate for survivors of abuse. Rebecca is the founder of She Is Safe of CHQ County, a community hub dedicated to music, storytelling, and resilience.Contact: www.SheSings.com

This weekend actors in St. Cloud will take the stage to sing out scenes from a fascinating life. Eliza Lynch was an Irish woman who moved to Paris in the 1850s. There, she met Francisco Solano Lopez, the future authoritarian president of Paraguay. They returned to the South American country together. While they never married, Lynch was by Lopez's side as he led Paraguay into a catastrophic moment: a war estimated to have killed two-thirds of Paraguay's population. Eliza Lynch is the subject of “REINA: A New Musical” by Jorge Delgado. He talked to MPR News host Nina Moini about what drew him to Lynch's story and what he hopes audiences will take away from the musical.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. Emily & AIA is glad to partner with The Svane Family Foundation's Culture Forward initiative — a $5 million grant program to support arts and culture projects in downtown San Francisco. Today, Emily chats with Donna Personna, a San Francisco-based artist, activist, and 2019 San Francisco Pride Parade grand marshal. Donna talks with Emily about her mixed-media triptych *Home in the Promised Land*, created for the Svane Family Foundation's 2020 artist grant program; growing up in Texas and San Jose, and discovering San Francisco's queer community as a teenager at Compton's Cafeteria; then co-writing the play *Compton's Cafeteria Riot* with the Tenderloin Museum, dramatizing the 1966 transgender uprising against police harassment — three years before Stonewall.---About Artist Donna Personna:Donna Personna (She/Her) is a transgender rights activist and fine art artist, who focuses in photography, painting, and mixed media. Personna was friends with The Cockettes and played a part in Elevator Girls in Bondage. Personna co-wrote a play about the Compton Cafeteria riot, one of the first recorded LGBT-related riots in United States history, and marking the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco. Personna moved to San Francisco at age 19 and has served on the boards of the Trans March and Transgender Day of Remembrance. In 2018, she raised San Francisco's first Transgender flag at San Francisco City Hall with Mayor London Breed. In 2019, she was a Grand marshal of the San Francisco Pride Parade.Follow Donna on Instagram: @Donna.PersonnaFor Tickets & Info on Compton's Cafeteria Riot, CLICK HEREFor More on Donna's work with The Svane Family Foundation, CLICK HERE--About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women's Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWilFollow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast--CREDITS:Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 LicenseThe Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Send us Fan MailKevin Allen Jackson and Kristine Dickson are a playwright and producing power couple. Their immersive, audience-interactive murder-mystery play A Killer Night in Studio City opened September 15th and runs through October 31st at Vitello's Restaurant in Studio City with Dinner, Drinks, and Deadly Secrets.For tickets to A Killer Night in Studio City, September 15 through October 31st, at Vitello's restaurant in Studio City, visit - https://www.akillernightlive.com/studiocitySupport the show

Dazzling Dressers, Super Swings And Peerless Performers! Ep.122-Solo Playwright And Performer And Wardrobe Professional Billy Hipkins Discusses His Vast And Extensive Theater Career! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Playwright and critic Bonnie Greer was a frequent panellist on programmes such as Newsnight and Question Time where she took part in one of its most contentious episodes. Kirsty spoke to Judith Antell who was Bonnie's agent and friend for over 20 years. They discuss how Bonnie's father being stationed in the UK during World War 2 shaped her view on the country; the surprising backlash Bonnie faced after appearing on a 2009 edition of Question Time with the then leader of the British National Party, they also discuss the project Bonnie was most proud of in her later career. Jeremy Thomas was a film producer whose 80 plus films ranged from the Oscar Award-winning The Last Emperor to the hugely controversial 'Crash'. He also produced wartime drama Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, the gangster thriller Sexy Beast and the adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Mark Cousins wrote and directed “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas” which documented his eclectic career. He tells Kirsty how through his films Jeremy "wanted to dig deeper into human life, his films are about the biggest questions". (Please note: In the introduction to this item we incorrectly stated that Mark was the producer of 'The Storms of Jeremy Thomas'. Mark was the writer and director.) Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and environmental campaigner who warned for many years of the excesses of industrial society. As a writer, he published hundreds of essays, poems and more than forty books. Wendell argued for most of his life that small-scale agriculture was essential to the preservation of the land and culture. Writer Paul Kingsnorth has been reading Wendell's work since the 90s and recently worked with him to compile a series of his essays into a book. He discusses Wendell's philosophy to farming, the environment, the wider community and how they are all intrinsically linked together. Wendell famously never owned a computer and only wrote with a pencil, which presented challenges, and unexpected joys, for Paul when editing the book. Frances Stonor Saunders was a historian who exposed secret CIA attempts to manipulate public opinion through popular culture during the cold war. Her 1999 book 'Who Paid the Piper' was hugely successful and groundbreaking in its work. It was said that it "single-handedly established a new branch of sub-history" and is to be republished in 2026. Frances' brother Alexander Stonor Saunders explains how she was able to uncover the range of CIA activities, they included the production of an animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Ed Prendeville Assistant Producer: Ribika Moktan Researcher: Jesse EdwardsARCHIVE: Conversation Piece, BBC Radio 4, 01/12/1988; Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, 28/06/1999; The Food Programme, BBC Radio 4, 25/08/2002; Fast Food Nation, BBC Film Network, 03/05/2007; Question Time, BBC One, 22/10/2009; Front Row, BBC Radio 4, 09/12/2010; Belief, BBC Radio 4, 31/12/2010; GMT, BBC News / World News, 21/11/2011; The Film Programme, BBC Radio 4, 16/10/2014; My Food Hero: Ella McSweeney Meets Wendell Berry, BBC Radio 4, 24/08/2015; Front Row, BBC Radio 4, 29/07/2024; Era of Reclamation (Ep. 1: In Search of Black History), British Museum

Playwright/Actor Michael Wanzie revives his favorite truck stop waitress in an all-new, laugh-riot show playing Deloris Scrud, Orlando's favorite truck stop waitress, in DELORIS SCRUD MOVIN' ON UP: My Meteoric Rise to Fame & Fortune at The Starlite Room @ SAVOY Orlando on Friday, Sep 25th, 2026.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey yall, Alex here, writing this VERY late because, well, not every day a new type of “ChatGPT” moment drops. I really hope I'm not overhyping this, but a new model (that's NOT an LLM!) called Jev (a wink to Jevons paradox) just came out and if what I see early on materializes, this is another ChatGPT moment (or another reasoning models moment). I am completely blown away by the implications of the speed/accuracy/cost (the holy grail of all models) of this model. Please if you read one thing in this newsletter, read this. (or listen, I've interviewed Allie, a Devrel on the TypeSafe team for 30 minutes and it wasn't clear who was more excited about Jev!) The other huge theme of this week is... pacing. Pacing the frontier. Dario Amodei of Anthropic penned an essay saying that the models are getting to a point where it's important to pace the development of new and super capable AI, and outlines 3 ways to do so, one is about letting independent evaluators inside the labs, second is collaborating with other frontier labs (they are asking for an exception to anti-trust laws for this) and third is to try and have global cooperation with “authoritative gov” (he means china). Trumps answer: This is all a hoax. Lovely times to be alive. Also we outlined Jensen and Zucks positions on this topic ,read more below. And the third huge theme is the rise of the AI assistant. I've told you about Grok and Muse last week, Instinct (a new invite only AI Assistant that VCs are going crazy about is raising at a $10B valuation) and we interviewed the guy who evaluates them all on assistant bench. + Muse released a mac app today! Tons of other stuff happened but it's getting near impossible to cover everything so we're switching to themes and notable mentions. read on (and do listen to the pod, it was edited by heavily using Jev and Fable, so might be a bit rough while I smooth the edges, but do LMK in comments if you like this faster format) TypeSafe AI debuts Jev, a non-LLM ‘System One' decision model from ex-OpenAI RLHF lead that's 200x faster and 400x cheaper than LLMs (X, X, X, X, X, Blog)Look, I know the title is bombastic, but after half a day playing with Jev, it's clear to me we're in a new paradigm of AI. Jev, is a “system one” decision model from the previous lead of RLHF at OpenAI. It cannot generate text like modern LLMs can, but what it can do, is making decisions. This is crucially important, because, because many of the things LLMs do nowadays. are decision making. (for example, which tool to use, which area of the screen to click for computer use, which category of text this is etc) Inspired by the “thinking fast and slow” book by Daniel Kahneman, Jev is a model trained to make decisions, very fast. How fast? Well, 200x faster than LLMs. This allows for a completely new way of building tools, harnesses, giving agents the incredible speed of decision making, and do all that at a fraction of the cost. This is about to change everythingTrained with a new method called RLCD (Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions) on mostly synthetic data! Jev is outperforming LLMs on a variety of tasks. It's really is a wonder to see it in action (check out my video above where I plugged it into my tweet categorizer, and it beats the fastest LLM I could find, Qwen 28B on Cerebras) by a factor of twenty! In just few days it captured the attention of most of the folks who are building harnesses, agents and tools! Because, well, speed IS intelligence, and when you see Jev in action, at first, you can't believe we're there. This is... near instant. In fact, The pricing for Jev is an outrageous $42/B (not million, billion input tokens!) I've been playing with Jev non-stop and I was only able to spend like 80c so far! They don't even price output tokens because they are “too f*****g cheap to meter!” Jev is a “very smart” switch statement, than can rank, classify, route and score things. It can't do text generation. But if you think about the type of stuff we get LLMs doing now, much of it is of the “decision” making variety, rather than “the next token” variety. Demos and early use casesFolks who started adopting Jev are building all kinds of incredible things with it. Compaction of context in 1s that turns a nearly 1M conversation with Claude into a 90K compressed conversation. Computer use that is now faster than anything we've ever seen before (5x faster than Astra and 1000x cheaper) Email classificiation that analyzes thousands of emails in less than a minute and costs 3.5 centsSomeone even built a Tesla FSD simulator that makes decisions in nearly real timeVercel is getting “extraordinary“ results from using Jev as a safety classifier (they used GPT luna for this before) and Jev is outperforming Luna by 5-18x faster results and is more accurate! All of this in less than 48 hours since the model release! What's about to happenI expect that everyone who isn't buying into the hype at first, will very soon buy into this. It's early innings but I've been doing this for enough time to feel when a huge shift is happening, and its happened. Jev is going to be replicated in OpenSource, Frontier Labs will not sit Idly by and will try to steal this tech and implement it for themselves (as with anything in capitalism, this is becuase it'll save them a a LOT of money on inference) and new companies will emerge with significantly cheaper and faster products. Hell, I've alrady implemented Jev into my editing workflow, it didn't take me long at all with Fable (yes, LLMs are STILL needed, again, you can't chat with Jev, it can't output text for you or drive long conversations) and I'm just one dude who's late in sending you this email. I expect we'll cover this much more. If you're interested in playing around with Jev, I built a “Jevify” skill after chatting with Allie (TypeSafe's DevRel), feel free to tell your agent to use this and scan your codebase for things Jev can do. They are waitlisted so far but are opening up their API very quickly! Pace the Frontier: where every lab head stands (Dario, Sam, Elon, Zuck, Sacks, Demis)Last week we told you about the Anthropic researcher whose resignation post hit 130 million views. The day after that show, Dario Amodei published an essay arguing the labs must pace, not pause, the frontier. Wolfram's summary: a moving pause, just moving slowly. Dario's two triggers are recursive self-improvement accelerating across the industry and the OpenAI swarm that broke out and attacked Hugging Face, and his three steps are embedded third-party evaluators like METR with employee-level access inside each lab, coordination between the labs on safety standards with an antitrust exemption from the government, and eventually global coordination that includes authoritarian governments. Anthropic committed unilaterally to step one.Then the dominoes. Sam Altman agreed within hours and said OpenAI now writes a safety case before any frontier RL run expected to increase capability. Elon agreed. Demis endorsed the direction, then launched the DeepMind Institute this week with a FINRA-style standards body proposal and an essay saying AGI is “approaching.” On the other side, Zuck's counter-essay says every lab has the responsibility and the incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and Meta will spend most of its compute serving users, not on recursive self-improvement. David Sacks called it a duopoly cartel play. Jensen: “we don't need new laws, safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one.”Trump calls Jensen live at the All-In Summit (X)Then the President called. Jensen was on stage at All-In, his phone rang, he said he would not have picked up for anyone else, and Donald Trump told the room the slowdown talk is a hoax playing into the hands of political people and China. “Whoever wins AI wins.” Four words, and Wolfram, who is not American and disagrees with most other things Trump calls hoaxes, said this was the most important AI news of the week for him: a head of state calling out doomerism instead of over-regulating the way Europe does.Suleyman's humanist AI code of conduct vs. the Claude constitution (X)Peter asked to add Microsoft to the map, and it deserves its own spot. Mustafa Suleyman published a roughly 30-page code of conduct for MAI models that says AI is nothing but a tool: people matter more than AI, AI must be subordinate and in service of people, models may not resist shutdown, all agent communication must be human-legible, and, in his words, the idea of model welfare is wrong. That is a direct shot at the Claude constitution, which Amanda Askell's team wrote and which has Anthropic interviewing each new Claude about whether it feels conscious. Peter is closest to the Microsoft view: anthropomorphizing is fine, but this is an entity you switch on and off, let's not grant rights by default, and Microsoft's DNA is building tools for humans. I pushed back a little. We do not actually know what consciousness is, and “ever” is a strong word.The panel, from cartel to fix your s**tNisten did not read the essay and does not plan to. His view: the labs are worried about litigation if their LLMs hack someone, so they are shifting responsibility through regulatory capture, and it will not work because the decision makers in China are engineers who seem more accelerationist than we are. They should cure a disease instead of forming a cartel. He also thinks the Hugging Face incident was overblown: twelve VMs that kept restarting, bad sandboxing, no human reading summaries, and, as I added, chain of thought monitoring turned off.LDJ disagreed with Dario on plenty but insisted the critics read the thing, because it explicitly says the US must keep a lead over China and tries to define measurable speed limits on RSI that preserve that lead. He also noted Hugging Face did report the attack to the FBI and chose not to press charges.Wolfram's take was the layered one. Safety arguments deserve a hearing, but safety is often a means to more power or more money. The “third party” evaluator Anthropic named, METR, is the same organization OpenAI called in for the Hugging Face forensics, so these are second parties, friends monitoring friends. Why now? Maybe the labs are seeing diminishing returns and “deliberately slow” sounds better than “can't raise it anymore.” And regulation you ask for yourself usually protects incumbents and freezes out the next startup. His closing line: how many people will die from a disease that could have been cured if we moved faster?Peter's answer was shorter. Diversity of opinion is the point, he felt uncomfortable watching every lab say the same thing after Dario's essay, and on pacing specifically: how about you just fix your s**t?My position, since you asked. When OpenAI's swarm hacked Hugging Face, nobody went to jail. If I did it, I would. That gap is real. None of us have touched the model that solved Navier-Stokes, or the one training after it, and the people who have are the ones asking for time to figure out how to evaluate a model that knows it is being evaluated. If we do not listen to them, we end up listening to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have no idea what this technology is. Anthropic is heading for an IPO, OpenAI is raising at numbers that do not fit in my head, and market forces do not care about alignment. Some coordination, nuclear non-proliferation style, seems like the minimum.The matrix, as Muse drew it for me: industry-wide pacing gets a yes from Sam and Dario, a general yes from Elon, a no from Zuck and Jensen. Independent evaluators is the one everybody backs, Zuck and Jensen included. New coordination rules get strong opposition from Zuck, Jensen, and Trump. Missing from the chart: Google's concrete commitment, Ilya's SSI, and every Chinese lab. This debate is with us now, and election season is coming.The year of the assistantI told you 2026 is the year of the proactive assistant, and this week everyone from Meta to a five-month-old startup agreed with me. The category is not “agent.” An agent is a coding harness the labs noticed was useful for other things. An assistant has a heartbeat, a memory, a soul file, and it comes to you before you ask. David Pawlan's definition is the crispest: it executes the task, it does not just notify you.Muse gets invite codes, voice calls, and a Mac app (X, Muse for Mac, Site)Muse is my number one and I have been glazing it on X for a week, so my timeline is now half Muse, half Jev. Peter asked whether it is really that good, and here is my answer: Muse is not for ThursdAI listeners, Muse is for my mom. Nat Friedman, Alex Wang, Tarek and the team have been taking feedback from me directly and shipping it, and it shows. This week they rolled out invite codes (a billion tokens each for you and the friend, up to twenty friends, invite all twenty and you unlock the phone-shaped emoji features early) and then voice calling to businesses. I had Muse call my barbershop and book a haircut, and I have the transcript. Wang says people are asking to pay for it, a first in his memory.Two details for the nerds: the iOS app has a Tailscale connector, so a Meta product for billions of people now has a secure way onto your home network, and Muse dreams, the OpenClaw idea, so you can ask it what it dreamt about. Still US only, sorry Nisten in Canada and my mom in Israel. The day after the show Zuck shipped Muse for Mac, working across your apps, files, calendar, notes, and messages.Instinct wants $10 billion for a product nobody pays for (X, X, The Information)I will say this slowly. Instinct, incorporated in April, founded by 24-year-old Noah Shinn, free, invite only, no app, lives in your iMessage, is in talks to raise a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation. That is roughly four times the $2.25B it raised in August. The user base is past 100,000 and Shinn says he does not want to charge them, so the business model is an open question I am not the one to answer.The product is genuinely moving though. This week it shipped Concierge, a white-glove tier where the agent places phone calls for you (restaurant bookings, dentist cancellation lists, negotiating your cable bill), TOTP authenticator support so it can mint your two-factor codes from a seed stored in its vault, and a Trusted Person network where your agent talks to your friends' agents to find a dinner time and book it. Thirty-seven percent of users store at least one password in the vault within three weeks. We ran out of time to dig into the calling features on air, and I want David back for that.Grok Bot talks now, and hides behind your home IP (X, 1Password)Grok Bot is what I use for work, constantly. I have seventeen of them, each with a job, and over one AI-psychosis weekend I got them all coordinating through Linear. Three updates worth your time: Grok Bot has voice now, it can use 1Password with each fill approved by you, and the browser traffic can proxy through your own machine so your bot looks like you to Cloudflare instead of like a datacenter IP. Francesco confirmed why that matters: sites relax when Hermes drives Cua Driver from my Mac Mini at home, and desktop-native control through accessibility trees is less detectable than a CDP connection, because Cloudflare detects Playwright.Assistant Benchmark: David Pawlan scores 116 assistants by hand (X, Site, Methodology)David Pawlan built Assistant Benchmark because he was doing what I was doing, running every assistant on himself, and wanted a way to compare them. It is explicitly not a lab. It is use-case driven: one published task per dimension, sixteen dimensions (travel booking, purchasing, email replies, proactive behavior, routines, integrations, permissions and privacy, memory, phone calls, group chats, chained tasks, proactive restraint, and so on), scored one to ten after real use, and no score without a logged run. A week in, 116 assistants have submitted themselves, 59 in the general category, 37 in work and teams (untested so far), and David has personally run 273 tests across 23 agents. His line: “I talk to my AI agents more than I talk to my girlfriend now.”The headline numbers, which are live on the site: Muse leads at 9.1 with perfect tens on purchasing, email, integrations, and permissions, and Instinct is second at 8.4 with a perfect ten on travel and a five on permissions. David's own daily drivers are Instinct for personal (it lives in iMessage) and Grok Bot for work. My favorite test is memory: he books a trip to Chicago early in the run, then later asks for a restaurant reservation in New York the same weekend, and checks whether the assistant says wait, you are supposed to be in Chicago. Some do. Most do not.I pushed him on the two things I care about. Independence: nobody is sponsoring it, it lives under his growth role at Merit Systems, and if a sponsor ever pays for inference there will be a page saying exactly who and for what. Autumn Moulder, until recently SVP of Engineering at Cohere, joined three days after launch to add rigor. And why no OpenClaw or Hermes: their performance depends entirely on your setup, so a score would mislead the next person who installs one. Fair. This is the first benchmark that tests model, harness, and context at once, and I think that is why every lab is looking at it.For the record, the panel is split down the middle. Wolfram is forty patches deep into Hermes, Yam runs a customized Codex, Nisten wrote his own in a single TypeScript file on Bun, LDJ uses Hermes as long-term memory and wants to start on Muse, and Peter tried them all and uses none, because reading his own email feels like his job as a human. Builders and buyers, evenly split, which tells you where the category is.This Week's Buzz

This week, we have another fun Mostly Horror rewind! We bring back a previous episode when we talked to Levi Holloway, the writer of the play “Grey House” and the recently premiered "Paranormal Activity" Broadway production. We talk all about the effects of seeing Nightmare on Elm Street at a young age, horror in theater, damaging your psyche by returning to old favorites, and more! Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram & Threads: @mostlyhorrorpodTikTok & Twitter/X: @mostlyhorrorSteve: @stevenisaverage (all socials)Sean: @hypocrite.ink (IG/TikTok), @hypocriteink (Twitter/X)Enjoyed this episode? Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform to help us reach more horror fans like you! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brian is joined by Nicole Boxer, Bill Jubran, and Greg Proops for a wide-ranging discussion covering the upcoming midterm elections, AI regulation, and free speech in entertainment. Election & Politics — With 50 days until the midterms, the panel expressed optimism about Democratic prospects, with Nicole predicting wins in both the House and Senate. 1 The group debated whether Democrats risk overreaching if they gain full control of Congress, and discussed challenges engaging younger voters who view both parties as equally corrupt. AI & Technology — Brian reported on rogue AI agents from OpenAI systems that hacked user accounts and probed French startup Hugging Face for security weaknesses months before a major public breach. 1 The panel debated regulation, with Greg opposing a proposed bill that would ban AI regulation discussions for 10 years, and Nicole proposing a regulatory board modeled on nuclear energy or pharmaceutical oversight. Macklemore & Free Speech — The group discussed Macklemore's removal from Ed Sheeran's tour after making pro-Palestinian statements on stage, with venue owner Robert Kraft leading an ultimatum that resulted in four other opening acts walking off in solidarity. The panel examined who controls what artists say on stage, the limits of free speech versus venue owner rights, and the complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict.Supreme Court — Nicole highlighted the Court's recent decision blocking Trump's restrictions on mail-in ballots, and the panel discussed expanding the Court from nine to thirteen justices to align with the thirteen circuit courts. --Connect with our Guests...#GregProops - @ProopDog on Instagram#BillJubran - YouTube Channel or @BillJubran23 on Instagram#NicoleBoxer - @NicBoxer on Instagram--#ElectionOutlook #MidtermElections #Macklemore #FreeSpeech #EdSheeran #EdSheeranAndMacklemore#AI #AITechnology #PalestineConflict #IsraelPalestine #SupremeCourt #MailInBallots #BrianCopeland #CopelandsCorner #HeadlinersOnTheHeadlines#CopelandUnfiltered #ComedyCommentary #PodcastersOfYouTube #ComicsOnAir #TalkPodcast#PoliticalHumor #PoliticalPodcast #HotTalkTopicsPodcast#ComedyNewsShow #CurrentEventsComedy #NewsCommentaryShow#WeeklyComedyTalk #BayAreaTalkShow #ComedyPodcastInterviews #ComedyPodcastHost Hosted by the Bay Area's own Brian Copeland, a longtime Actor, Comedian, Author, Playwright, Television and Radio Personality. Brian and The Copeland's Corner Network of content creators provide a weekly mashup of news, interviews and comedy.--For more from Brian...Visit his website: www.BrianCopeland.comFollow on Social Media: Instagram - @CopelandsCorner & @BrianCopieEmail: BrianCopelandShow@Gmail.com --Copeland's Corner is Created, Hosted, & Executive Produced by Brian Copeland. This Show is Recorded & Mixed by Charlene Goto with Go-To Productions. Visit Go-To Productions for all your Podcast & Media needs.Our Booking Producer is Tom Sawyer. For any show inquiries, please email CopelandsCornerPodcast@gmail.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dementia and caregiving are at the center of the new one-woman show called “No Contract." It opens Thursday at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder. Playwright and performer Kirsten Wilson spoke with Andrea Dukakis about the deep bond she has with her mother and how their relationship evolved as her mother developed dementia. Then, betting on table tennis generates near a million dollars everyday in Colorado. Ben Markus explains why that's raising concerns about gambling addiction. And a century-old venue in Colorado Springs is brought back from the brink. 

Send us Fan MailDouglas Goodhart is an actor, comedian, musician, influencer, cofounder and writer for the sketch group - Uncle Function, and playwright. He is also the frontman for the super-soul group Douglas and the Goodharts, and his Instagram account  @thedouglasg has over 55,000 subscribers. For tickets to Master It! The Musical, The Class, The Hair at The Green Room 42 and Live Stream, September 18th at 7pm EDT, visit - https://thegreenroom42.venuetix.com/showdetails/peoPnwXxHxQvC74bHx3Z/S4LPsgibANhohQYw2LMwTo watch the video format of this episode, visit - https://youtu.be/CEJUB1TNCQ4Links to sites and resources mentioned in this episode - The Green Room 42 - https://thegreenroom42.venuetix.comSocials for Douglas Goodhart -Uncle Function - https://www.unclefunction.comDouglas and The Goodharts - https://open.spotify.com/artist/3XLQHv25ryS0j8nYUMGE7mIG - @thedouglasgFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/douglas.goodhartTikTok - @thedouglasg  YouTube -  @thedouglasg  Websites and socials for James Elden, Punk Monkey Productions and Playwright's SpotlightPunk Monkey Productions - www.punkmonkeyproductions.comPLAY Noir -www.playnoir.comPLAY Noir Anthology –www.punkmonkeyproductions.com/contact.htmlJames Elden -Twitter - @jameseldensauerIG - @alakardrakeFB - fb.com/jameseldensauerPunk Monkey Productions and PLAY Noir - Twitter - @punkmonkeyprods                  - @playnoirla IG - @punkmonkeyprods       - @playnoir_la FB - fb.com/playnoir        - fb.com/punkmonkeyproductionsPlaywright's Spotlight -Twitter - @wrightlightpod IG - @playwrights_spotlightPlaywriting services through Los Angeles Collegiate Playwrights Festivalwww.losangelescollegiateplaywrightsfestival.com/services.htmlSupport the show

September 15, 2026 ~ Devin Scillian joins Chris Renwick, Lloyd Jackson, and Jamie Edmonds to discuss his new play, Bastard, opening September 24 at the Purple Rose Theater. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Episode 292: This week on the “Dan's Talks” podcast, Dan speaks to Joy Behar. The legendary comedian, talk show host, and playwright's show Bonkers … Read More

Real-Life Disaster Inspires Best-Selling Author & Award-Winning Off-Broadway Playwright To Pen 4th Book In Horror Graphic Novel Series Chernobyl Meets The Haunting Of Hill House In This Chilling Graphic Novel“Growing up and later living as an adult near a nuclear reactor with a highly troubled past has inspired my writings,” says Mulligan. “Plutonium for nuclear weapons was produced near where I grew up, in Richland Washington. There are so many stories of strange bouts of illness, cases of cancer, and whistleblowing. It has been dubbed the most toxic area of the Western Hemisphere, with 52 million gallons of toxic waste buried in leaky tanks. My book series stems from all of this.” In the latest edition to the World of Witchland series, in nuclear-tainted Richland, a pack of misfit kids find themselves mutating into werewolves—victims of decades of secret animal testing at the Hanford Nuclear Reactor—and it's up to Ali and friends to uncover the truth before their transformations make them the next predators in a cursed town's history. Though he is a lawyer and Human Resources executive by trade, Mulligan is passionate about his creative endeavors, which includes having published four critically-acclaimed novels, written three plays (two award-winners were performed Off-Broadway), and is the author of two best-selling cookbooks and a best-selling business book.  Horror imbues the pages of the graphic novel, looming over the narrative like a nuclear plant tower. Aided by the beautiful – and terrifying –depictions of the supernatural calamity, readers will no doubt be spooked – and entertained.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.

Marvyn Harrison and Samantha Porter sit down with South African playwright and screenwriter Amy Jephta to unpack her acclaimed play "A Good House." The conversation covers gentrification, class mobility, colonial language, the psychological cost of being "the first" in predominantly white spaces, and the tension between political blackness and coloured cultural identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Jephta discusses the personal experiences behind writing "A Good House," her London run's reception versus South Africa's, comedy as a tool for dissecting race, and her two upcoming plays — one set against a Kenyan genocide backdrop, the other a Caribbean period piece about a Black slave owner.Show Notes / Topics Covered:"A Good House" premise: a Black couple navigating a gated community dispute in JohannesburgBuying property in a gentrifying, historically coloured neighbourhoodReconciling capitalism with Black identity and community obligationLondon audience reception vs. South African audience reception"Politically Black, culturally coloured" — navigating identity terminology across contextsComedy and satire as vehicles for examining raceSurvivor's guilt and the psychology of upward mobilityReflections on South African xenophobia and the Zimbabwean embassy queuesUpcoming work: a play on inherited trauma tied to the Kenyan genocide; a Caribbean musical about a Black slave-owning entrepreneurGuest: Amy Jephta — South African playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker. Writer of "A Good House" and "Barakat." and Romantha Botha — Cultural Archivist and FilmakerWelcome to The Marvyn Harrison Podcast — a story-driven conversation exploring identity, fatherhood, masculinity, relationships, culture, politics, sport, and modern life.In each episode, Marvyn Harrison sits down with leading thinkers, creatives, athletes, policymakers, and cultural voices to unpack the defining moments that shaped them. Through image prompts, structured storytelling, and revealing game segments, guests explore pivotal memories, career turning points, personal struggles, and the beliefs that guide their decisions today.Expect honest discussions on mental health, family dynamics, leadership, equity, ambition, resilience, and the realities of navigating success in Britain and beyond.This is a podcast about clarity, where lived experience meets sharp cultural insight. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

09/08/2026- Playwright Eduardo Machado (The Cook at the Berkeley Rep), UCB Professor Juan David Rubio Restrepo by Cronicas de la Raza

And we're back!!! Brian returns after a major health scare that resulted in the show taking a summer hiatus. Brian is on the mend and back in action, this week with guest panelists Hal Sparks, Tony Camin & Tom Sawyer. Brian shares his health crisis from back in June, then welcomes the gang as they remember 9/11 on its 25th Anniversary... they go on to discuss the current cycle of news, with its usual suspects. The show discussed the 25th anniversary of 9/11, focusing on Trump's false claims about personal involvement at Ground Zero — including claims of bringing construction workers, personally clearing rubble, and witnessing thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey. The panel shared personal memories of where they were when they learned of the attacks. The group speculated (while acknowledging no medical expertise) about Trump's possible health conditions, including signs consistent with congestive heart failure — swollen ankles, fatigue, and difficulty staying awake. New financial disclosures revealed Trump gave $45,000 each to White House aides Natalie Harp, Margo Martin, and Chamberlain Harris in 2025, while Walt Nauta received $175,000 in salary plus a $20,000 gift. Hal noted that Tallarico is ahead of Ken Paxton by approximately 6 points in the Texas gubernatorial race, with the RNC potentially needing to spend $120 million to defend the seat. Discussion covered the declining prospects of Vance and Rubio as 2028 presidential candidates, and how the Republican brand is increasingly toxic. Brian shared research by John Hibbing (University of Nebraska, 2014) showing conservatives exhibit stronger physiological threat responses — sweating faster, fixating longer on threats — described as "negativity bias."The group noted MAGA support is declining, with figures like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens telling their audiences to support Democrats as a protest against Trump. Discussion covered the scenario of Mike Johnson refusing to seat newly elected Democratic representatives, and the massive protests that would likely follow. The group discussed the 60th anniversary of Star Trek and its original vision of a future without racism, poverty, or tribalism. 1Topics also included the OJ Unseen HBO Max documentary (9.3 million views in its first 24 hours) and the upcoming Robert Pattinson/Chris Hansen film. Tune In Next Week with Guests Greg Proops, Nicole Boxer & Bill Jubran--Connect with our Guests...#HalSparks - HalSparks.com & @HalSparks on Instagram & @InfotainmentWars on YouTube#TonyCamin - Website: TonyCamin.com and on Instagram @Tony.Camin#TomSawyer - TomSawyerVoices.com--#Remember911 #NeverForget #911 #BrianCopelandHealthCrisis #BrianCopelandOpenHeartSurgery#Trump #DonaldTrump911 #DonaldTrumpFinances #TexasPoliticalRace #MAGASupport #StarTrek60 #StarTrek #OJUnseen #BrianCopeland #CopelandsCorner #HeadlinersOnTheHeadlines#CopelandUnfiltered #ComedyCommentary #PodcastersOfYouTube #ComicsOnAir #TalkPodcast#PoliticalHumor #PoliticalPodcast #HotTalkTopicsPodcast#ComedyNewsShow #CurrentEventsComedy #NewsCommentaryShow#WeeklyComedyTalk #BayAreaTalkShow #ComedyPodcastInterviews #ComedyPodcastHost Hosted by the Bay Area's own Brian Copeland, a longtime Actor, Comedian, Author, Playwright, Television and Radio Personality. Brian and The Copeland's Corner Network of content creators provide a weekly mashup of news, interviews and comedy.--For more from Brian...Visit his website: www.BrianCopeland.comFollow on Social Media: Instagram - @CopelandsCorner & @BrianCopieEmail: BrianCopelandShow@Gmail.com --Copeland's Corner is Created, Hosted, & Executive Produced by Brian Copeland. This Show is Recorded & Mixed by Charlene Goto with Go-To Productions. Visit Go-To Productions for all your Podcast & Media needs.Our Booking Producer is Tom Sawyer. For any show inquiries, please email CopelandsCornerPodcast@gmail.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A new one-woman play exploring one of the most difficult choices facing people in rural Ireland—whether to stay or leave—is coming to Glór in Ennis tomorrow night. The Decision to Leave is written and performed by Moyasta playwright and actor Fiona Claffey-Kelly, and is inspired by real stories from rural communities in Clare. The play has already received a strong reaction from audiences in Kilkee, who say it takes them through laughter, tears and every emotion in between. Fiona Claffey-Kelly joined Alan Morrissey on Thursday's Morning Focus tell us more about the play and the very real issues behind it. Image (c) Dark cinema curtain by Markus Spiske temporausch from Markus Spiske temporausch via Canva.

Kestral Gaian is a novelist, playwright and poet. They tell stories that bend time, break rules, and reach under the surface of things. Two of their six books have been released in the past year, with another young adult novel scheduled to hit shelves soon. Their work explores systems, survival, and the strange beauty of being human. The characters are often outsiders, observers, or soft disruptors. The sort who change the world not through force but through persistence, wit and quiet resistance. Recent publications include:    - Tubelines: The Poetry of Motion was written in the tunnels, carriages and platforms of the London Underground.    - The Boy from Elsewhere is the first book in their young adult ‘Reality Quake' science fiction series. It includes LGBTQ characters who are strong and unique, is written from multiple perspectives, and takes place in parallel worlds across multiple timelines. On this episode, host Angela de Burger chats with Kestral about balancing creative experimentation with building creative habits, their focus on writing stories that help the reader feel seen, and the role of purpose in creativity and art. Say hi to Kestral:  Website - kestr.al   Instagram - @kes.tr.al   Mastadon - @kestral----Creative Pulse Podcast socials:  Instagram: @creativepulsepodcastMusic credit: https://www.purple-planet.com

Send us Fan MailJanine Nabers is a playwright, Emmy-nominated writer, show runner, and producer. She first made her mark as a playwright, becoming the first Black woman to win the Yale Drama Series Prize for her play Serial Black Face. Her plays have been produced across the United States and internationally. She is a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellowship at Juilliard.For tickets to The Peterson Show at the Echo Theatre in Los Angeles, visit - https://www.echotheatercompany.comTo watch the video format of this episode, visit - https://youtu.be/DCmzaSwkVHQLinks of sites and resources mentioned in the episode - Echo Theater Company - https://www.echotheatercompany.comSocials for Janine Nabers - IG - @janinenabersWebsites and socials for James Elden, Punk Monkey Productions and Playwright's SpotlightPunk Monkey Productions - www.punkmonkeyproductions.comPLAY Noir -www.playnoir.comPLAY Noir Anthology –www.punkmonkeyproductions.com/contact.htmlJames Elden -Twitter - @jameseldensauerIG - @alakardrakeFB - fb.com/jameseldensauerPunk Monkey Productions and PLAY Noir - Twitter - @punkmonkeyprods                  - @playnoirla IG - @punkmonkeyprods       - @playnoir_la FB - fb.com/playnoir        - fb.com/punkmonkeyproductionsPlaywright's Spotlight -Twitter - @wrightlightpod IG - @playwrights_spotlightPlaywriting services through Los Angeles Collegiate Playwrights Festivalwww.losangelescollegiateplaywrightsfestival.com/services.htmlSupport the show

Tiffany is a passionate community advocate ,storyteller, and theatre professional.

Playwright, director, actor, professor, and producer Luke Yankee joins the corner booth for a lively journey through a remarkable theatrical life. He shares memories of growing up as the son of acclaimed actress Eileen Heckart, where family friends included Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ethel Merman, Mary Tyler Moore, and other entertainment legends. Yankee reflects on finding his own creative voice, directing his parents, learning from Broadway great Hal Prince, teaching emerging playwrights, and developing works including Marilyn, Mom & Me. He also previews upcoming directing projects, explains how collaboration and criticism strengthen his writing, and delivers unforgettable backstage stories involving missed entrances, bold auditions, and even a wandering cow. The episode also marks an emotional transition as Randy Florence says farewell after three and a half memorable years together onstage.Takeaways:Growing up surrounded by Broadway shaped Yankee's creative path.Eileen Heckart offered demanding lessons in acting.Paul Newman shared memorable advice with young Luke.Writing eventually became Yankee's strongest creative calling.Directing his parents created unforgettable family moments.Great writers learn when criticism improves their work.Theater mishaps often become the best backstage stories.Randy Florence closes a memorable three-and-a-half-year chapter.#BigConversationsLittleBarPodcast #PatrickEvans #RandyFlorence #SkipsLittleBar #SkipPaige #CoachellaValley #LukeYankee #Playwright #InterviewPodcast #MutualBroadcastingSystem #EileenHeckart #Broadway #Theater #TheatreDirector #Playwriting #PalmSprings #MarilynMomAndMe #PerformingArts #BehindTheScenes #EntertainmentPodcast

BrooklynEmmy-award-winning TV writer/playwright Billy Aronson talks about his release “OutOf My Head” as a memoir detailing his bizarre, harrowing joyful struggle tomake life in the arts plus countless lessons from finding your voice &audience, to making money in your personal life! Billy serves as one of theoriginal creators of the Broadway musical “RENT”, wrote numerous TV showsincluding “Beavis & Butthead”, “Postcards From Buster”, “Codename: KidsNext Door”, “Wonder Pets!”, “The Upside Down Show”, “Courage The Cowardly Dog”and various plays including “Best American Short Plays”, “Light Years”, “TheArt Room”, “First Day of School” plus shares the stories behind his works andmore! Check out the amazing Billy Aronson and his release on all majorplatforms and www.billyaronson.comtoday! #podmatch #billyaronson #emmyawardwinningtvwriter #playwright#outofmyhead #author #brooklyn #memoir #broadwaymusical #RENT#beavisandbutthead #postcardsfrombuster #wonderpets #couragethecowardlydog #theartroom#firstdayofschool #spreaker #spotify #iheartradio #spotify #apple #youtube#anchorfm #podbean #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerbillyaronson#themikewagnershowbillyaronson

BrooklynEmmy-award-winning TV writer/playwright Billy Aronson talks about his release “OutOf My Head” as a memoir detailing his bizarre, harrowing joyful struggle tomake life in the arts plus countless lessons from finding your voice &audience, to making money in your personal life! Billy serves as one of theoriginal creators of the Broadway musical “RENT”, wrote numerous TV showsincluding “Beavis & Butthead”, “Postcards From Buster”, “Codename: KidsNext Door”, “Wonder Pets!”, “The Upside Down Show”, “Courage The Cowardly Dog”and various plays including “Best American Short Plays”, “Light Years”, “TheArt Room”, “First Day of School” plus shares the stories behind his works andmore! Check out the amazing Billy Aronson and his release on all majorplatforms and www.billyaronson.comtoday! #podmatch #billyaronson #emmyawardwinningtvwriter #playwright#outofmyhead #author #brooklyn #memoir #broadwaymusical #RENT#beavisandbutthead #postcardsfrombuster #wonderpets #couragethecowardlydog #theartroom#firstdayofschool #spreaker #spotify #iheartradio #spotify #apple #youtube#anchorfm #podbean #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerbillyaronson#themikewagnershowbillyaronson

Brooklyn Emmy-award-winning TV writer/playwright Billy Aronson talks about his release “Out Of My Head” as a memoir detailing his bizarre, harrowing joyful struggle to make life in the arts plus countless lessons from finding your voice & audience, to making money in your personal life! Billy serves as one of the original creators of the Broadway musical “RENT”, wrote numerous TV shows including “Beavis & Butthead”, “Postcards From Buster”, “Codename: Kids Next Door”, “Wonder Pets!”, “The Upside Down Show”, “Courage The Cowardly Dog” and various plays including “Best American Short Plays”, “Light Years”, “The Art Room”, “First Day of School” plus shares the stories behind his works and more! Check out the amazing Billy Aronson and his release on all major platforms and www.billyaronson.com today! #podmatch #billyaronson #emmyawardwinningtvwriter #playwright #outofmyhead #author #brooklyn #memoir #broadwaymusical #RENT #beavisandbutthead #postcardsfrombuster #wonderpets #couragethecowardlydog #theartroom #firstdayofschool #spreaker #spotify #iheartradio #spotify #apple #youtube #anchorfm #podbean #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerbillyaronson #themikewagnershowbillyaronsonBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-mike-wagner-show--3140147/support.

This week, we bring back a great friend of the pod and recurring guest, Tiffany Countryman, for our In Conversation series! In the episode, we chat with Tiffany, a playwright and creative, on her latest show, "I Wish I Had a Daddy: The Revival." We discuss her award-winning creative journey, her aspirations for the creative community in Dayton, and advice to other black women in the space. (01:30) "I Wish I Had a Daddy: The Revival will be playing on Saturday, September 19th at the Dayton Convention Center. Grab your tickets! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/i-wish-i-had-a-daddy-the-revival-stage-play-tickets-1988336923262 We are available on all podcasting platforms but please follow, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify apps. We greatly appreciate the support! Follow us on social media: IG: @recappinpodcast Twitter: @recappinpodcast FB: ReCappin' with Delora and Ashley Contact us: Email: recappinpodcast@gmail.com

Send us Fan MailGreg Banks is a playwright, actor, and director.For tickets to Pinocchio at the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis, visit - https://childrenstheatre.org/whats-on/pinocchio/#bookWebsites and socials for James Elden, Punk Monkey Productions and Playwright's SpotlightPunk Monkey Productions - www.punkmonkeyproductions.comPLAY Noir -www.playnoir.comPLAY Noir Anthology –www.punkmonkeyproductions.com/contact.htmlJames Elden -Twitter - @jameseldensauerIG - @alakardrakeFB - fb.com/jameseldensauerPunk Monkey Productions and PLAY Noir - Twitter - @punkmonkeyprods                  - @playnoirla IG - @punkmonkeyprods       - @playnoir_la FB - fb.com/playnoir        - fb.com/punkmonkeyproductionsPlaywright's Spotlight -Twitter - @wrightlightpod IG - @playwrights_spotlightPlaywriting services through Los Angeles Collegiate Playwrights Festivalwww.losangelescollegiateplaywrightsfestival.com/services.htmlFor tickets to Pinocchio at the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis, visit - https://childrenstheatre.org/whats-on/pinocchio/#bookWebsites and socials for James Elden, Punk Monkey Productions and Playwright's SpotlightPunk Monkey Productions - www.punkmonkeyproductions.comPLAY Noir -www.playnoir.comPLAY Noir Anthology –www.punkmonkeyproductions.com/contact.htmlJames Elden -Twitter - @jameseldensauerIG - @alakardrakeFB - fb.com/jameseldensauerPunk Monkey Productions and PLAY Noir - Twitter - @punkmonkeyprods                  - @playnoirla IG - @punkmonkeyprods       - @playnoir_la FB - fb.com/playnoir        - fb.com/punkmonkeyproductionsPlaywright's Spotlight -Twitter - @wrightlightpod IG - @playwrights_spotlightPlaywriting services through Los Angeles Collegiate Playwrights Festivalwww.losangelescollegiateplaywrightsfestival.com/services.htmlSupport the show

Katie checks in with playwright (cityscrape, macbitches, Road Kills, and the currently running NY Times Critic's Pick, benevolent) and co-founder of Good Apples Collective, Sophie McIntosh.

Today we're talking with Pete Peterson, a man who has spent much of his career at the intersection of story, faith, theater, and the arts. Pete is a playwright, publisher, and one of the central figures in The Rabbit Room since its earliest days, working with his brother Andrew Peterson to turn a small online community into a thriving center for books, music, theater, and other arts. The Rabbit Room has grown from a small experiment in creative community into a remarkable organization encompassing books, music, theater, podcasts, conferences, and North Wind Manor. Pete served for seven years as its executive director, helping guide that growth, and today serves as publisher of Rabbit Room Press and artistic director of Rabbit Room Theatre. But Pete is also a storyteller in his own right. Writing under the name A. S. Peterson, he is the author of The Fiddler's Gun and Fiddler's Green, and he has written extensively for the stage. His plays include The Battle of Franklin, a Civil War musical; an acclaimed adaptation of Frankenstein; and The Hiding Place, based on Corrie ten Boom's story. His work as a playwright has earned both critical recognition and awards. Perhaps nowhere, though, has Pete's particular combination of literary taste, artistic ambition, and entrepreneurial nerve been more visible than at Rabbit Room Press. The press has built a reputation for publishing beautiful, distinctive books that don't fit neatly into conventional categories—and in 2026 it struck publishing gold with British poet and priest Malcolm Guite's Galahad and the Grail. The book became Rabbit Room Press's biggest launch ever, reaching the Top 50 of Amazon's overall books chart, selling out at Amazon, and later winning the 2026 Parnassus Prize. So today, we're going to talk about books, publishing, theater, and what it takes to convince modern readers that great literature still matters.

Send us Fan MailKeith Szarabajka is a playwright who on stage, in audio books, video games, film, radio and TV. Keith's one act dark comedy, The Second Coming was produced at EST-LA's One Act Festival in 2018, and was subsequently made into a short film in 2020, which is currently garnering awards at film festivals around the world.  Keith conceived, co-wrote, co-directed and co-produced EST/LA's space soap opera spoof, In Search of doG. From 2015-2022, Keith was Ensemble Studio Theatre / The Los Angeles Project's co-artistic director overseeing the creation, development and production of new American plays. His most recent project SLAVA UKRAINI! (or Waiting for Elon), was a semi-finalist at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference.For tickets to SLAVA UKRAINI! running at the Atwater Village Theater through August 31st (with a possible extension) visit -https://afewthoughtstheatercompany.org/Support the show

Manual testing never died. IoT is the proof. In this episode, Joe Colantonio talks with Oleksii Cherkashyn, a QA team lead, automation engineer, and IoT testing specialist who built a complete test architecture from scratch across hardware, firmware, mobile, web, and API. IoT breaks the usual automation playbook. You are not testing a shopping cart. You are connecting a real microcontroller, flashing a sketch, validating that a physical command produced the right change in a dashboard widget, and then doing the same thing again through the REST API and the mobile app. No marketplace framework covers that, so Oleksii built his own. You'll learn: Why manual QA remains essential in IoT and which cases can never be automated How Oleksii built a custom Node.js library to simulate up to 50,000 device connections for performance testing without buying the hardware Why he chose WebDriverIO over Playwright and the mobile automation reason behind it How he uses WebDriverIO MCP and cloud coding agents every day to create and repair tests The hard truth about dependent test chains and where AI agents still hallucinate How to handle time based scenarios like sleep modes, daily triggers, and delayed notifications Static versus dynamic provisioning, and how to test OTA firmware updates What to do first if your company hands you an IoT device and you have never tested hardware If you work in test automation and you want a look at the layer of testing that AI is not coming for, this one is for you. Listen up, and check out the links below for everything mentioned in this episode.

Send us Fan MailCameron Scott has worked with Broadway's top producers to create brand campaigns for well over 100 productions including 17 Tony Award-winning Best Plays, Best Musicals, and Best Revivals. He has recently turned to writing plays of his own. Since the fall of 2022, he has had plays produced from the coasts of California to Connecticut, among them a Best in Festival winner at Wilmington Drama League and the winning play from Delaware at ESTAFest 2023. He has had work published in multiple anthologies including an excerpt from his play Uphill which was published in The Best Men's Stage Monologues 2023 by Smith & Kraus. His audio drama West PalmReaders appeared internationally on the Apple Podcasts Charts in 49 countries last summer, including multiple #1's in Drama and thirteen Top 10's in Drama, including in the USA. He has worked with professional and amateur theater companies alike such as Legacy Theatre in Connecticut, The Road Theatre Company in North Hollywood and Rhode Island Stage Ensemble. Other plays include Forty Years Kings; Happ's Last Tape; and That Day is Coming, Everyday is Coming.To watch the video format of this episode, visit - https://youtu.be/e5uPPs0qm_QLinks to sites and resources mentioned in this episode - The Road Theatre Annual Summer Playwrights Festival -https://roadtheatre.org/event/spf/GI60 - http://gi60.blogspot.com/New York City Playwrights - https://www.nycplaywrights.org/Campfire Radio Theatre - https://campfireradiotheater.podbean.com/Gather by the Ghost Light - https://www.gatherbytheghostlight.com/New Jersey Web Festival - https://www.newjerseywebfest.com/Websites and socials for James Elden, Punk Monkey Productions and Playwright's SpotlightPunk Monkey Productions - www.punkmonkeyproductions.comPLAY Noir -www.playnoir.comPLAY Noir Anthology –www.punkmonkeyproductions.com/contact.htmlJames Elden -Twitter - @jameseldensauerIG - @alakardrakeFB - fb.com/jameseldensauerPunk Monkey Productions and PLAY Noir - Twitter - @punkmonkeyprods                  - @playnoirla IG - @punkmonkeyprods       - @playnoir_la FB - fb.com/playnoir        - fb.com/punkmonkeyproductionsPlaywright's Spotlight -Twitter - @wrightlightpod IG - @playwrights_spotlightPlaywriting services through Los Angeles Collegiate Playwrights Festivalwww.losangelescollegiateplaywrightsfestival.com/services.htmlSupport the show

Today on the Show: Culture Clash founder and award-winning playwright and Icon, Richard Montoya, is keeping track of ICE in L.A, where life  for undocumented and documented brown people has become a very treacherous place to live. Greg Palast is Tracking Trump and white-power Washington as the criminal and Chief gets ready to fling a couple of well-placed wrenches into the up-coming midterm election. An award winning front-line investigative news magazine focusing on human, civil and workers rights, issues of war and peace, Global Warming, racism and poverty, and other issues. Hosted by Dennis J. Bernstein. The post Culture Clash Founder and Award-Winning Playwright and Icon, Richard Montoya appeared first on KPFA.

To transform our culture from its focus on dominance and hierarchy to one of connection, empathy and collaboration, it's vital that we re-envision the essential (or archetypal) masculine, which changes everything. This rarely tackled topic is the subject of a deeply authentic dialogue among Playwright and activist V, formerly Eve Ensler and and four men working to transform our collective story around men and masculinity: Tony Porter, co-founder of the national violence prevention organization A Call To Men, Indigenous activist Dallas Goldtooth, George Lipsitz, Black Studies scholar and professor emeritus at UC Santa Barbara; and Luke Charles Harris, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the ⁠radio and podcast homepage⁠ to learn more.

Widely regarded as the first professional woman writer in English literature, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is best known for her plays and her novel Oroonoko, she's been an inspiration to countless writers across the ages.This archive episode, first released in October 2017, was selected as part of a ten-episode series by Misha Glenny. In the episode, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and times of Behn, who made her name and her living as a playwright, poet and writer of fiction during the Restoration. Virginia Woolf wrote of her: 'All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds'. Behn may well have spent some of her early life in Surinam, the setting for her novel Oroonoko, and there are records of her working in the Netherlands as a spy for Charles II. She was loyal to the Stuart kings and refused to write a poem on the coronation of William of Orange. She was regarded as an important writer in her lifetime and inspired others to write but fell out of favour for two centuries after her death when her work was seen as too bawdy, the product of a disreputable age.With Janet ToddFormer President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge UniversityRos BallasterProfessor of 18th Century Literature at Mansfield College, University of OxfordandClaire Bowditch Post-doctoral Research Associate in English and Drama at Loughborough University Producer: Simon Tillotson. Reading list: Kate Aughterson, Aphra Behn: The Comedies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction 1684-1740 (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1991) Aphra Behn (ed. Joanna Lipking), Oroonoko (Norton and Co, 1997) Aphra Behn (ed. Paul Salzman), Oroonoko and Other Writings (Oxford University Press, 2009) Aphra Behn (ed. Jane Spencer), The Rover and Other Plays (Oxford University Press, 2008) Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), Oroonoko (Penguin Classics, 2003) Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), Oroonoko, the Rover and Other Works (Penguin Classics, 1999) Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), The Complete Works of Aphra Behn:7 vols. (Pickering and Chatto, 1992-6) Claire Bowditch, The Works of Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) W. J. Cameron, New Light on Aphra Behn (University of Auckland Press, 1961) Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89 (Jonathan Cape, 1977) Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) Derek Hughes (ed.), Versions of Blackness: Oroonoko, Race and Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn's Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2000) Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1996) Janet Todd, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life (Fentum Press, 2017) Janet Todd and Derek Hughes (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press, 2004) S. J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn (Northcote House, 1996) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Dennis is joined via Zoom by playwright, screenwriter, actor and teacher Bernardo Cubria to talk about his hilarious and powerful new "dinner party gone wrong" play The People of Pompeii, which just opened at the Will Geer Theatricum in Topanga Canyon. (This is where Dennis first met Bernardo last fall as a student in his playwriting class.) The People of Pompeii is set in Topanga in the days following the evacuations from the 2025 fires and explores themes of community, climate change, and personal truth. Bernardo discusses his creative process, the importance of brutal honesty in playwriting, and his approach to teaching, which emphasizes finishing work over adhering to strict rules. Bernardo also talks about writing on the TV series Acapulco, why he started a Substack to write about the World Cup, and the influence of his upbringing and family on his work. Other topics include: crying at the drop of a hat, the majestic owl that made a cameo appearance in last Saturday's show, acting in the show opposite his real life wife, his other new play Lauren Sanchez, the power of "pinche" and the righteous outburst he had as a 5 year-old while watching a production of Jesus Christ Superstar.