Podcasts about risd

Toy designer and RISD professor Cas Holman shows how rediscovering play can help adults build resilience, spark creativity, and forge deeper connections in an achievement-focused world.In this revealing conversation about her book "Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity," Holman shares practical ways to embrace uncertainty through play and explains why putting down our phones might be the first step toward reclaiming our natural capacity for joy.You can find Cas at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode, you'll also love the conversations we had with Debbie Millman about designing a life through creativity and story.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

About France Brunel  France Brunel is a Brooklyn- and Paris-based holistic interior designer and founder of Yoom, a studio and editorial platform at the intersection of design and well-being. With a background from RISD and studies in yoga and Ayurveda, she helps women create spaces that support sleep, focus, connection, intimacy, intuitive eating and overall well-being. Summary In this engaging conversation, Christine Martin speaks with France Brunel, a holistic interior designer, about her journey from industrial design to creating spaces that promote well-being. They discuss the integration of yoga and Ayurveda into design, the importance of creating environments that support mental health, and the cultural influences on design philosophy. France shares her insights on entrepreneurship, the challenges she faces, and the importance of community and support in building a business. The conversation emphasizes the need for personalized design that reflects individual values and lifestyles, and offers advice on how to create a fulfilling life and business.   Takeaways The environment we live in significantly impacts our well-being. Design should support our wellness goals and daily lives. Cultural influences shape our approach to interior design. How building a business aligns with personal values and lifestyle. Community and mentorship are crucial for success in entrepreneurship. Chapters 00:00 Connecting Through Creativity 03:56 Robin's Prop Styling Journey 07:19 The Impact of Writing a Book 12:40 Taking care of a parent with Dementia 16:12 Manifesting Dreams and Goals 24:41 Creating Content on the SheDESIGNS Mexico Retreat 27:54 Advice for Designing a Life You Love 30:39 Leave room for surprises 33:40 Thanks for listening!   Where to find France: YOOM France on IG   Join our community! Follow this podcast and share with a friend! In the world of podcasts, reviews are everything! Please rate and review this episode on your favorite platform.  Visit our website to get the latest on episodes, behind the scenes info, and upcoming events & retreats.  Say hi on the gram!

Have you ever completely messed up a marathon? Or maybe you're thinking about running one and want to avoid the common mistakes? RISD grad Alen Yen says he's been “bad” at marathons for more than a decade. But he stuck with it and finally figured out how to conquer the 26.2 miles. He joins host Edward Fitzpatrick to share what he's learned in a new book called “50 Ways to F*** Up a Marathon! An amateur's guide to #marathonfails.” Tips and ideas? Email us at rinews@globe.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

More than 50 years ago, in a Providence apartment, some of the band members of Talking Heads recorded an early demo of what would eventually become their hit, "Psycho Killer." Over the years, that recording eventually made its way to RISD. And on Friday, fans can finally hear it. The track is included in a new collection of demos and live recordings from the band called "Tentative Decisions." Talking Heads Drummer Chris Franz and RISD Assistant Provost for Academic Engagement Margot Nishimura join host Christopher Gavin to talk about the recording. Tips and ideas? Email us at rinews@globe.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Subscribe!!!Full Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfofppTiRUZza7kewuD4rnI8hvhfQ4_INAlso available in audio only formats at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theartprofessorspodcastOriginal art available on Etsy https://www.etsy.com/shop/studiotwelvehundredMailing lists:All Things Art: https://mailchi.mp/3a849c5b3194/zims-art-mailing-listAll Things YouTube: https://mailchi.mp/89e310208900/sign-upSupport:Tip Link - https://streamlabs.com/thezimvideo1/tipYouTube Member - https://www.youtube.com/thezimvideo/joinPatreon - https://www.patreon.com/thezimPaypal - https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/creatorzimVenmo - https://venmo.com/thezimEtsy - https://www.etsy.com/shop/studiotwelvehundredDonate Ethereum - 0x34814104Bb1d6579569Ef7463CeFaa94Ec2cDe44NFT's - https://rarible.com/thezimYoutube - https://www.youtube.com/thezimvideoBlueSky - https://bsky.app/profile/thezimvideo.bsky.socialDiscord - https://discord.gg/7wbUFVxJ8fStream my music: Now All No Wall EPSpotify: https://found.ee/UCKKdApple Music: https://found.ee/cHRkRChannel Merch:https://www.etsy.com/listing/1402151936/zim-2023-exclusive-t-shirthttps://www.amazon.com/s?rh=n%3A7141123011%2Cp_4%3AtheZimhttp://thezim.com/#art #podcast

In this episode of Talk Nerdy, Cara is joined by founder and chief designer of the toy company Heroes Will Rise and a former Professor of Industrial Design at RISD, Cas Holman. They discuss her new book, Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity. Follow Cas: @casholman

René Camarillo is a Mexican-American craftsperson from East Los Angeles whose practice resists the hierarchies of the art world. Trained in apparel design at LA Trade Tech, fiber and material studies at Cal State LA, and textiles at RISD, Camarillo positions weaving and garment-making as acts of cultural inheritance, labor, and community survival rather than commodities of privilege. In this conversation, Camarillo reflects on rejecting the label of “artist,” his experience with exploitation in fashion and sweatshops, and the deep political stakes of textiles in shaping both history and everyday life. The dialogue explores craft versus fine art, sustainability, gentrification in Lincoln Heights and El Sereno, and the importance of teaching weaving, dyeing, and self-reliance through Grow Lincoln Heights and his brand Dust of Course. With a Fulbright in Japan to study indigo farming, Camarillo embodies a practice that is at once monastic, technical, and communal—insisting on fundamentals in a moment dominated by spectacle and commodification.

Designer and creative leader Lucy Holmes traces a life shaped by letters and by people. From hand drawing alphabets at RISD to orchestrating typographic rhythm through major museums, she reveals how the most resonant design often disappears so visitors can be fully with the work. Holmes describes turning words upside down to see relationships rather than read them, printing and pinning, tracing and testing, until a single word on a wall feels inevitable. Designing permanent galleries means thinking in decades, choosing people and stories over brittle technology. The result is quiet clarity, composed for the present and built to meet the future.

My guest for this episode is multi-talented, multi-media artist Martin Venezky. We discuss graphic design, collage and, of course, photography. All of this while pondering the challenges of staying curious as you move through life, and learning new things, no matter how old you are. Really enjoyed this conversation; I hope you do, too.

Shepard Fairey is an artist, activist, and founder of OBEY. We chat with him from his office in Los Angeles about World Series traffic, aesthetic appreciation in Charleston, SC, we thread the needle between Nexus, by Yuval Noah Harari, and Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning, political scapegoating, how to start a revolution in 2025, how to navigate political activism without getting too overboard, Rage With The Machine, RISD shows in the 80s, working with Space Invader and Damien Hirst, and which jail was the most chill. instagram.com/obeygiant twitter.com/donetodeath twitter.com/themjeans howlonggone.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if boredom is the birthplace of your teen's creativity—and your sanity? And what if your own playfulness is the most powerful “parenting tool” you're not using? In this episode, internationally recognized play designer and RISD professor Cass Holman (creator of the RIGAMAJIG and author of Playful) shows us why free play—play that's freely chosen, personally directed, and intrinsically motivated—is essential for teens and adults. We talk about releasing judgment, embracing possibility, and reframing success (hint: it's not the perfect selfie at the summit). Cass explains why boredom matters, how “consuming” play (scrolling) differs from “generative” play (making), and offers practical ways moms can invite more low-pressure play into everyday life—without becoming their teen's cruise director. Guest bio paragraph:Cass Holman is an internationally recognized designer, educator, and play advocate. A longtime professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Cass created RIGAMAJIG, a large-scale building kit used in thousands of schools and museums, and is featured on Netflix's Abstract: The Art of Design. Their new book, Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity, distills two decades of designing for play, leading workshops at places like Google, Disney, and Nike, and collaborating with child-development experts to help all of us—kids, teens, and adults—reconnect with true play. Three takeaways: Boredom is productive. Letting teens linger in boredom helps them notice what they actually need and choose self-directed, creative action. Reframe success. Swap “Did we reach the top?” for “Did we connect?”—and watch stress melt while curiosity rises. Model, don't manufacture. You don't need to entertain your teen; be playful yourself. Release judgment, embrace possibility, and let “good enough” be great. Learn more at: https://casholman.com/ Follow at https://www.instagram.com/casholman/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of 40 Plus: Gay Men, Gay Talk, Rick sits down with author Cas Holman - author, creative designer, and playful instigator, to explore the power of playfulness in adult life—and why it matters more than ever for gay men over 40. From family life to queerness to creativity, Cas shares insights from their new book and personal journey, reminding us that joy isn't childish—it's essential. 3 Key Takeaways From This Episode: Why playfulness boosts creativity, happiness, and adaptability in adulthood. How to reclaim your “play voice” and let go of judgment. Practical ways LGBTQ+ men can embrace possibility and stay open to joy. About Cas Cas Holman is the founder and chief designer of the toy company Heroes Will Rise and a former professor of Industrial Design at RISD. Cas travels the globe speaking about playful learning, the design process, and the value of play in all aspects of life. She has shared her perspective in workshops and seminars with teams at Google, Nike, LEGO Foundation, Disney Imagineering, and art museums around the world. Some of her designs include toys like Rigamajig and Geemo, as well as play experiences at the High Line and the Liberty Science Center. Cas lives in Brooklyn and designs from her studio in the Catskills, New York. Connect With Cas Website Instagram Hey Guys, Check This Out! Are you a guy who keeps struggling to do that thing? You know the thing you keep telling yourself and others you're going to do, but never do? Then it's time to get real and figure out why. Join the 40 Plus: Gay Men Gay Talk, monthly chats. They happen the third Monday of each month at 5:00 pm Pacific - Learn More! Also, join our Facebook Community - 40 Plus: Gay Men, Gay Talk Community Break free of fears. Make bold moves. Live life without apologies

Send us a text* Free screening Weds Oct 8th at RISD, 6:30pm*Bill Bartholomew welcomes Ruth Leitman, Director "No One Asked You"Comedian Lizz Winstead and her team of activists crisscross the U.S. to break stigma and support abortion clinic staff. Support the show

Lisa Davidson is an ironworker with Local 377 San Francisco. Her team currently does ironwork on the Golden Gate Bridge. But we'll get to that. In this episode, S8 E3, meet and get to know Lisa. I first did that back in May at our Keep It Local art show at Babylon Burning (thanks, Mike and Judy!). Someone at the party that night approached me to let me know that there was a person there who works on the best bridge in the world (fact) and that I should meet them. I love when people really get me. Right away, I was drawn in by Lisa's warmth, charm, and sense of humor. And so we sat down outside in Fort Mason in early August and Lisa shared her life story. She was raised feeling like she had complete freedom. It was something Lisa didn't realize at the time, but looking back, it became clear to her. She was raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, in a liberal household. Her grandparents lived in Boston itself, and she loved visiting them when she was a kid. Her grandfather ran a tchotchke store in town called House of Hurwitz, and Lisa says that the place had a big influence on her outlook. It was located on the edge of what they call, to this day, the “Combat Zone” (think: red-light district). Her “wheelin' and dealin'” grandpa sold mylar balloons to the Boston Gardens for events held there. He told young Lisa that she could blow up balloons and that that could be her future. Lisa has a brother four years younger than she is. Her dad was an electrician. One of his clients was a lithograph press in Boston. He'd sometimes get paged for a job and have to leave his family, although Lisa now wonders whether he just wanted to get away from time to time. When she was a senior in high school, her parents divorced, despite being a very loving couple up to that point. She says her mom was “crazy in an I Love Lucy way. She was raised in the Fifties the way many young women at that time were, in a way that did its best to stifle any creativity. Suffice to say that her mom had fun decorating the house Lisa grew up in. Despite her and her family's Jewishness, Lisa revolted and wanted to go to Catholic school or just become a preppy L.L. Bean-type kid. She of course regrets rejecting the norms of her family nowadays. It was what it was. The family was more culturally Jewish than religious, though, something Lisa says was a huge influence on who she's become as an adult. She graduated high school and went to college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It wasn't Ivy League, but it was (and is) something of a preppy school. Where Lisa grew up, there was an expectation that kids would go to college, and so she went. It wasn't super far from home, but it wasn't close either. Her parents did suggest that Lisa maybe go to art school. But in her family, it was the kid dismissing that idea. “That's a not real school,” young Lisa told them. She liked sports. At Amherst, she joined the crew team. She liked the competition and how good of shape it got you in. She liked it, but it was a lot of pressure. She graduated, took a year off working odd jobs, then dove into art school. So next up was Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She was surprised she got in, and even navigated a bit of impostor syndrome. Surprised by the school's acceptance of her and feeling somewhat intimidated by other artist students, Lisa ended up doing printmaking. Rather than aiming for a master's degree, she sought a second bachelor's. Her studies had her spending a lot of time in the school's foundry, where she discovered welding. She loved it. During her time back in Amherst, she'd heard of a guy who was going to Alaska. (Lisa and I go off-topic into our shared distaste for camping at this point in the conversation.) Back to the Alaska story, her mom was fully supportive and even took her shopping at an Army Navy store. She went there and worked in canneries through the summer between her junior and senior years at Amherst. While she was up north, doing jobs all over the state, she met folks from California. From the stories they told her, it became a place she wanted to go. But first, RISD. In Rhode Island, she met a guy from Danville in the East Bay. When his family learned of her interest in our state, they invited Lisa to spend a summer with them, which she did. And she and her friend came to The City as often as they could. After those few months, she knew that California—and specifically, The Bay—was for her. She needed to go back and finish that second round of college in Rhode Island, and she did. After that, Lisa “beelined it” back to Oakland. She found work in a prop shop making sculptures out of foam with a chainsaw. Check back this Thursday for Part 2 with Lisa Davidson. We recorded this podcast at Equator Coffee in Fort Mason in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Hey listeners... So, last weekend we had the privilege and the honor of recording from this year's Dark Arts Festival. This time the festival took place at RISD (the venerated Rhode Island School of Design). Brought to you by our good friend (and Friend of the Show), Josh Dahlin of The Horror Depot...the festival brought together, vendors, artists, authors, side-show performers, drag queens, oddities, and much much more in an all-inclusive and diverse space to celebrate the weird and wonderful world of horror, creativity and community. We were fortunate enough to get to talk to film-makers, paranormal investigators, artists and performers. It was a rainy and miserable late-summer New England day but, all that rain certainly didn't dampen anyone's spirits as we, and everyone else had a helluva lot of fun and you can check it all out by listening in ths very episode!

Welcome to the SYNC Your Life podcast episode #335! On this podcast, we will be diving into all things women's hormones to help you learn how to live in alignment with your female physiology. Too many women are living with their check engine lights flashing. You know you feel “off” but no matter what you do, you can't seem to have the energy, or lose the weight, or feel your best. This podcast exists to shed light on the important topic of healthy hormones and cycle syncing, to help you gain maximum energy in your life.  In today's episode, I interview the author of the new book, "Stress Nation," Justin Hai.  Justin is the co-founder of several award-winning wellness companies, including Alastin Skincare (acquired by Galderma), GLO Pharmaceuticals, and Rebalance Health. With a background in industrial design (RISD) and an MBA from Pepperdine, Justin blends creative vision with real science—holding multiple U.S. patents and has presented to NASA and the Pentagon. He is a featured expert in the upcoming Amazon Prime documentary sHEALed and a passionate advocate for redefining wellness through the lens of hormonal balance, sleep science, and stress mastery. In STRESS Nation, Justin explores how our tech-obsessed culture is disrupting cortisol—the “Master Hormone”—and leaving us sleepless, anxious, and hormonally imbalanced. With humor, science, and cultural insight, he unpacks how devices meant to improve our lives are actually rewiring our biology, especially for overlooked groups like menopausal women. This mission became personal when his wife Jojo was diagnosed with Cushing's syndrome, launching Justin into deeper research on cortisol's role in daily health. Justin offers not only an urgent wake-up call but also actionable strategies to reclaim calm, restore hormonal balance, and improve sleep in a world addicted to constant input. His story is ideal for shows exploring health, tech culture, performance, or the mind-body connection. You can find Justin here: Rebalance Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rebalancehealth/ (22k Followers) Justin Instagrarm: https://www.instagram.com/justin_a_hai/ (1.2k Followers) Justin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinhai/ (1.8k Followers) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebalancehealthofficial/ (5.3k Followers) TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rebalancehealth His book, Stress Nation, can be found on Amazon here. To learn more about the SYNC™ course and fitness program, click here. To listen to the podcast on fed vs. fasted workouts, click here. To learn more about virtual consults with our resident hormone health doctor, click here. If you feel like something is “off” with your hormones, check out the FREE hormone imbalance quiz at sync.jennyswisher.com.  To learn more about Hugh & Grace and my favorite 3rd party tested endocrine disruption free products, including skin care, home care, and detox support, click here. To learn more about the SYNC and Hugh & Grace dual income opportunity, click here. Let's be friends outside of the podcast! Send me a message or schedule a call so I can get to know you better. You can reach out at https://jennyswisher.com/contact-2/. Enjoy the show! Episode Webpage: jennyswisher.com/podcast

Send us a textJustin Hai, co-founder of Rebalance Health, is a wellness innovator and sought-after speaker blending industrial design expertise (RISD) with an MBA from Pepperdine to pioneer science-backed solutions for hormonal balance, sleep, and stress mastery.Featured in the upcoming Amazon Prime documentary sHEALed, Justin's new book Stress Nation: Escape the Technology Trap, Eliminate Stress, and Reclaim Rest, launching in September 2025, reveals how tech-driven lifestyles are disrupting cortisol—what he calls the “Master Hormone”—and provides practical, research-based strategies to restore calm, resilience, and peak performance.Inspired by his wife's Cushing's syndrome diagnosis, he combines personal experience, deep research, and cultural insight to help audiences transform their health and thrive in today's overstimulated world.Justin offers not only an urgent wake-up call but also actionable strategies to reclaim calm, restore hormonal balance, and improve sleep in a world addicted to constant input. His story is ideal for people exploring health, tech culture, performance, or the mind-body connection.Find Justin at-https://rebalancehealth.com/https://www.stressnationbook.com/Find Boundless Body at- myboundlessbody.com Book a session with us here!

It's our 100th episode of the show, we've got on some big suits, we're flopping around on the ground, and we're screaming nonsense about James Brown. We talk about Jonathan Demme's documentary debut (sort of his first film, if you think about it) STOP MAKING SENSE, the live performance film from Talking Heads. We draw some oblique strategy cards, get into the band's history, Chris Frantz' bizarre book, David Byrne's good book, RISD kids, boomers playing on easy mode, Brian Eno, Lou Reed eating ice cream with a heroin spoon, John Cale, The Modern Lovers, Demme at the edge with Swing Shift, Joe Viola's return, Jordan Cronenweth also returning, Hal Ashby's insane editing rig. Then we close out with a little listening party, chatting about one of the best concert films ever. Thanks everyone for listening to us for 100 eps, and 2 years!! Here's to 100 more Follow Altmania: https://altmaniapod.com https://estebannoel.com DEMME ARCHIVE Support us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/altmania

Our guest is ⁠Suzie Shin⁠, a designer, educator, and artist who moved to Chicago after studying at RISD, drawn by the city's community of small design studios and creative collaboration.In this episode, Suzie speaks with host ⁠Christian Solorzano⁠ about her journey from aspiring illustrator to discovering her voice through collage and color. She shares insights about her analog-to-digital design process, where handmade work becomes the foundation for larger-scale projects, and how she creates parameters that allow for intuitive flow.Suzie discusses her experience as a new typography instructor at DePaul University and how persistence led to her internship at the renowned Chicago studio, Thirst. She opens up about her current collaboration with Rick Valicenti on an Alexander Girard exhibition in Columbus, Indiana, and how Girard's approach to color and joy influences her own pursuit of work.The conversation explores Suzie's creative philosophy—using collage as a thinking tool rather than an end goal—and her current transition away from traditional graphic design toward fine art and textiles. She reflects on finding balance between making and documenting, the challenges of graphic design's increasing association with marketing, and what grounds her outside the studio: reading, cooking, and learning to quilt.

Send us a textBill Bartholomew welcomes Dara Benno, an artist and Providence-based designer focused on addressing critical challenges, including environmental issues; she is also a Strategic Design + Research Fellow at RISD. Her design practice is centered around social impact and climate action. Her work focuses on how creative practice can influence change and how as a society, we can exercise imagination to work toward creating a better future. She moved from attending her local farmers market weekly to joining this program at URI and even planned a zero waste trivia night for the program. She says this experience was a kickstarter for her. Support the show

Today, Ceri is joined by Laleh Khorramian, painter, printmaker, animator and textile artist, whose work spans drawing, light, costume and collage. Laleh reveals the roots of her creative life, from drawing under duress to discovering Van Gogh in Costco. Laleh shares how growing up between cultures shaped a dual sense of self that still informs her work.   She explains how she rebuilt her practice and sense of self after cancer diagnoses and found her way back when the work felt lost. Whether you are building a sustainable practice, navigating reinvention or reclaiming your identity in your work, this episode is for you.   The Artist Mastermind Circle: Ready to stop second-guessing and start building momentum in your art career? Apply for the next Artist Mastermind Circle a six-month coaching programme for mid-career artists who are serious about growing their confidence, income, and opportunities. Apply by 21 July at https://cerihand.com/artist-mastermind-circle/ to take the next bold step.   KEY TAKEAWAYS   ·        Take notice of what you see, feel and dream, they are what you are destined to create. ·        Let go of shame about the things you get wrong and accept support.   BEST MOMENTS   “I became aware of that. It was okay, if it reflected me, it's okay. Actually, this is I'm, I'm the artist. It's that that work is what it is because of me, because I made it, and there's my voice in particular is important to what's happening there.”   “you have to sometimes become something very outside yourself. You have to create skills that you didn't know you had or think you could summon, including acceptance.”   “So you make something in response to a person or a character. Yeah, very often it's not someone I know it's, very often it's, it's a, it's a character, it's a, it's a, I think there's all constantly an ongoing opera in my mind.”   ABOUT LALEH   Laleh Khorramian (b. Tehran, raised in Florida) is multi-award-winning artist with degrees from RISD, SAIC, and Columbia University. Her work spans animation, painting, lighting, and textile art.   She exhibits internationally including at MoMA PS1, Times Square and the Saatchi Gallery. Her awards include the Vasseur Artists' Award and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant.   Laleh created LALOON - an ongoing project of hand-painted garments, gowns and costumes in NY.   https://www.lalehkhorramian.com https://www.instagram.com/lalehkhorramian   PODCAST HOST BIO   With over 30 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.   Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? Join today!   https://cerihand.com/membership   Build Relationships The Easy Way Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network,"  offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly and build the confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world today.   https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network   Book a Discovery Call Today To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at hello@cerihand.com   This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

Rætt er við Önnu Elvíru Herrera Þórisdóttur og Hauk Gunnarsson um stöðu atvinnuflugnáms á Íslandi. Námið hefur um langt skeið verið olnbogabarn í kerfinu og menntunin ekki verið metin að neinu leyti til eininga á háskólastigi eins og víða tíðkast í skólum í nágrannalöndunum. Nú hillir undir breytingar og allt útlit fyrir að Háskólinn á Bifrös muni í fyrsta sinn bjóða nám þar sem atvinnuflugmannsskírteinið er metið til eininga. Haukur og Anna segja gríðarleg sóknarfæri til staðar fyrir háskólasamfélagið að vinna í auknum mæli með þessari stóru atvinnugrein, þar sem mikil þörf og eftirspurn er eftir sérfræðingum á ýmsum sviðum til starfa.

Grace and Alvina revisit the "bucket lists" they created in 2005, see what they've already crossed off, and create updated lists. For the Fortune Cookie segment, they talk about some recent changes at Scholastic Publishing. And then, Alvina tells Grace about the new book WHAT IF WE... by Eugenia Yoh and Vivienne Chang. And they end as they always do with what they're grateful for. See complete show notes at www.bookfriendsforever.com. Click here to become a Patreon member: https://www.patreon.com/Bookfriendsforever1. See info about Grace's new book "The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon": https://linktr.ee/gracelinauthor. Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bookfriendsforever_podcast/

Episode 478 / Butt JohnsonButt Johnson (b.1979, Ramapo, New York) earned a BFA in painting from RISD and received a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship in 2010. His work is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS and the RISD Museum. He is a founder and partner in the Klaus von Nichtssagend (Neek-saa-gundt) Gallery in New York. He has exhibited at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at George Washington University, the Abrons Art Center and CRG Gallery, both in New York.The Canopy Program is now accepting applications for the 2025-2026 cohort cycle -  led by faculty mentors Amir H. Fallah, Sharon Butler, Catherine Haggarty, Meg Lipke, Clare Grill, and Jessica Dickinson. Founder and executive director Catherine Haggarty will be hosting information sessions where all questions can be answered - to RSVP, learn more and apply by July 26thplease visit www.nyccritclub.com www.nyccritclub.comIG is @nyccritclub and @the_canopy_program_

Have you ever had a moment when everything you thought you knew about your path suddenly shifted? In today's episode, I sit down with textile artist Qualeasha Wood, whose innovative work bridges digital imagery with traditional craft techniques. She reveals the unexpected moments that led her from a completely different path into textile art. Qualeasha also shares the profound encounter that changed the trajectory of her art practice. Through stories about family, creativity, and finding her authentic voice, Qualeasha offers powerful insights for any artist navigating their creative journey. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Qualeasha Wood and Her Art Journey 02:57 The Impact of Family and Community on Creativity 06:06 Early Influences and the Search for Representation in Art 08:53 Navigating the Art World: From Discouragement to Discovery 11:47 Finding a Medium: The Shift from Illustration to Printmaking 15:02 The Role of Textiles in Qualeasha's Artistic Expression 18:08 The Influence of Faith Ringgold and Career Shifts 21:09 Exploring Printmaking and the Intersection of Art and Identity 24:35 The Journey into Textile 27:50 Exploring Identity through Art 32:08 The Evolution of Artistic Mediums 37:12 Navigating Graduate School Decisions 41:00 Redefining Success in Art 47:35 Legacy and Impact through Textiles   Connect With Qualeasha: Website: Qualeasha's Website Instagram: Qualeasha Wood Support the Show Website: Martine SeverinFollow on Instagram: Martine | This Is How We CreateSubscribe to the Newsletter: Martine's Substack This is How We Create is produced by Martine Severin. This episode was edited by Santiago Cardona and Daniel Espinosa. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Leave a review Follow us on social media Share with fellow creatives  

Join me as I sit down with the remarkable Jen White, founder of Drawing from Memory, a thriving creative agency she's been running for over 20 years. In this captivating conversation, Jen takes us through her unconventional journey from a rural Vermont childhood to becoming a successful entrepreneur who built her business from the ground up. Jen shares her early experiences growing up in a traditional New England family where money was never discussed, her bold decision to attend boarding school at 14, and how she pieced together her first business while bartending in Vermont after graduating from RISD. We explore her strategic move to Colorado with just one cornerstone client, her savvy real estate investments that started with only $1,500, and the creative partnership with her husband that has shaped both their personal and financial decisions. Throughout our discussion, Jen opens up about the realities of entrepreneurship, from learning to price her services to navigating the challenges of raising two kids while running a business. She shares valuable insights on teaching financial literacy to her children, experimenting with alternative wealth-building strategies, and her surprising contemplation of leaving her successful 24-year business to work for a corporation. This episode is packed with practical wisdom for creative entrepreneurs, insights on building wealth through strategic investments, and honest reflections on the intersection of creativity, business, and family life. Key Topics: How to price your creative services when you have no experience or market reference points Building a business through word-of-mouth marketing while working other jobs to support yourself Making strategic real estate investments with minimal capital and turning small investments into long-term wealth Navigating finances as a couple when one partner is an entrepreneur with irregular income Teaching kids about money through transparency and real-world budgeting exercises Alternative wealth-building strategies beyond traditional employment, including buying and scaling small businesses When and why a successful entrepreneur might consider leaving their business for corporate employment Connect with Jen online: Website: https://drawingfrommemory.com/   Find more from Syama Bunten: Instagram: @syama.co, @gettingrichpod Website: https://syamabunten.com/ Download Syama's Guide to Getting Rich: www.syamabunten.com Big Delta Capital: www.bigdeltacapital.com

Talking with HSURAE, artist, educator, bio-researcher on embodied questions, the art of making glass phantom limbs, mirror box therapy as speculative philosophy, and why the body is already a site of perpetual augmentation. On weaving high heels out of softened bone, gut microbiome colonialism, intergenerational sequencing with her grandmother, karaoke as mistranslation engines, and the limits of empathy as pedagogical virtue. On scar tissue as kintsugi, feces as a portal to human agency, and fibroblasts growing on glass not as object but as time-bound collaborator. Exploring tongue-based sight devices, bone extracts spun into jewelry, human ears grown on arms, and why all bodies are partially disabled, already entangled in the flows of medical devices, nationhood, and post-human speculation. On the ecological horrors of processing ultra-purified water, the irreducibility of artificial intelligence as an aesthetic quality, prayer rituals for semiconductor droughts, and what it means to make “Taiwanese art” in the age of AI. Also: on collecting rocks, deep time, and the slow, sacred practice of stitching of identity and memory into human hair.On SpectrumsThis dichotomy between abled bodies and disabled bodies is not necessary or a helpful differentiation - all of our bodies are essentially disabled or disability is something that all of us would have to come to terms with earlier or later. I see it really as a flow instead of distinct categorizationsOn Art for Generating QuestionsI studied occupational therapy and I worked as a therapist… but during that time I would visit art museums by myself. And in those visits I found that there was a sort of opening or space within art that seemed to be like inviting curiosity, inviting questions, and experimentation that I, I had not encountered in my previous studies… But there were moments during my education to study to be a therapist where I found myself asking questions that were unanswerable or coming up to the limits of empirical reasoning... I wasn't trying to look for answers, really. I was looking for a space where I could ask more questions… On Ultra Pure Water TSMC alone accounts for 38% of the country's daily water usage.And it's not even enough. They still like purchase water from construction sites, for example, because the creation of AI chips requires like thousands of washing with what's called ultra pure water. So it's like water that is a thousand times pure than tap water.On the SpiritualI collect rocks wherever I go, and I wouldn't say I worship the rocks, but that seems to be the closest spiritual practice in my life.Visit hsurae.com/ for more information. Postscript from Rae:Regarding the Phantom Limb Series: It came together with the help of many: TAs, classmates, faculty at RISD. In glassblowing, especially with large or experimental forms, it's almost never a solo effort. There's an improvised choreography in the hot shop, and I leaned heavily on that. At the time, I didn't always know how to properly credit that kind of fluid, mutual support. But over the years, I've become more intentional about acknowledging those contributions.That ethos continues in my current work. Two of my ongoing projects are being developed under a loose, evolving collective called Lythologies. It's not a fixed group, but rather a dispersed, flexible way of holding collaboration, one that shifts and grows with each project.Also, I wanted to highlight two upcoming exhibitions:* Stories Written by the Sky, NTMoFA, Taiwan (10/25–12/14) (* Human Machine, EWERK Luckenwalde, Germany (9/20–12/14)Selections and images of some of Hsurae's pieces discussed during interviewAll photos credit: hsurae.com/ Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Send us a textThis week, Wes and Todd talk with visual poet, Monica Ong. Monica discusses her early journey with art, getting her MFA from RISD, integrating poetry with her visual art practice, experimentation & play, her first book “Silent Anatomies”, her poem "The Attic", sculptural types of poems, her interest in astronomy, process & evolution of the work, the blurring of boundaries & thinking outside of the box, the importance of connection, design being rooted in the lyric and narrative, her family history and how it influences her work, Buddhism and her practice, routine, balancing family and work, being an example to her son and young people, phases of the making, creating a user experience, insomnia, curiosity & questions, identity, philosophy, her new book “Planetaria”, “The Star Gazer”, asterisms,  her poem “Lunar Volvelle”, her micropress “Proxima Vera”, when it's time to publish a book , being awarded a United States Artists Fellowship, her poem " Jade Insomnia", and the importance of support.Join us for a fabulous conversation with Monica Ong!Check out Monica's work at her website -  www.monicaong.comVisit Monica's micropress, Proxima Vera, at www.proximavera.comFollow Monica on social media:Instagram - www.instagram.com/proximavera/@proximavera

In this episode of The Photo Detective, host Maureen Taylor welcomes Emily Banas, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the RISD Museum, to explore the captivating world of French wallpaper. Their discussion centers on The Art of French Wallpaper Design exhibition, diving into the artistry, craftsmanship, and cultural legacy behind these historical wall coverings.The RISD Museum's collection of 18th and 19th-century French wallpaper—originally acquired in 1934—is showcased for the first time in decades, highlighting woodblock-printed designs from 1770–1840.The collection was assembled by French artist Charles Ard and American author Francis Wilson Ard, who sourced wallpapers for famed interior decorator Nancy McClelland.Visitors learn about the intricate woodblock printing method, with some designs requiring up to 20 blocks. A reproduction project by Delphi Paper Hangings brings these methods to life.Related Episodes:Episode 255: The Power of Knitting: History, Healing, and Resilience in Loretta Napoleoni's BookEpisode 241: The Threads of Life: Unraveling the Rich Tapestry of Sewing with Author Clare HunterLinks:The Art of French Wallpaper DesignSign up for my newsletter.Watch my YouTube Channel.Need help identifying family photos? Check out The Family Photo Detective ebookHave a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.About My Guest:Emily Banas is the Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island where she has been working since 2015. Her recent exhibitions span from design works on paper and contemporary enamelwork to historic wallpaper, reflecting a broad, interdisciplinary approach examining form, style, material, and use across 18th to 21st century decorative arts, craft, and design. She earned an MA in decorative arts, design history and material culture from the Bard Graduate Center in 2015, and an MA in art history and museum studies, with a concentration in decorative arts and design, from Georgetown University in 2012.About Maureen Taylor:Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective® helps clients with photo related genealogical problems. Her pioneering work in historic photo research has earned her the title “the nation's foremost historical photo detective” by The Wall Street Journal and appearances on The View, The Today Show, Pawn Stars, and others.   Learn more at Maureentaylor.com I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. Support the show

Season 4 will feature interviews with Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH, Hanson Cheng BArch 16, Miguel Lastra MFA 22 CR, JooHee Yoon 11 IL, Lindsay Degen 10 TX, and Vincent Brathwaite 05 ID. Supported by the RISD Alumni Association.   Pulling on the ThreadRISD Alumni on Instagram

We are calling for the world's best AI Engineer talks for AI Architects, /r/localLlama, Model Context Protocol (MCP), GraphRAG, AI in Action, Evals, Agent Reliability, Reasoning and RL, Retrieval/Search/RecSys , Security, Infrastructure, Generative Media, AI Design & Novel AI UX, AI Product Management, Autonomy, Robotics, and Embodied Agents, Computer-Using Agents (CUA), SWE Agents, Vibe Coding, Voice, Sales/Support Agents at AIEWF 2025! Fill out the 2025 State of AI Eng survey for $250 in Amazon cards and see you from Jun 3-5 in SF!Coreweave's now-successful IPO has led to a lot of questions about the GPU Neocloud market, which Dylan Patel has written extensively about on SemiAnalysis. Understanding markets requires an interesting mix of technical and financial expertise, so this will be a different kind of episode than our usual LS domain.When we first published $2 H100s: How the GPU Rental Bubble Burst, we got 2 kinds of reactions on Hacker News:* “Ah, now the AI bubble is imploding!”* “Duh, this is how it works in every GPU cycle, are you new here?”We don't think either reaction is quite right. Specifically, it is not normal for the prices of one of the world's most important resources right now to swing from $1 to $8 per hour based on drastically inelastic demand AND supply curves - from 3 year lock-in contracts to stupendously competitive over-ordering dynamics for NVIDIA allocations — especially with increasing baseline compute needed for even the simplest academic ML research and for new AI startups getting off the ground.We're fortunate today to have Evan Conrad, CEO of SFCompute, one of the most exciting GPU marketplace startups, talk us through his theory of the economics of GPU markets, and why he thinks CoreWeave and Modal are well positioned, but Digital Ocean and Together are not.However, more broadly, the entire point of SFC is creating liquidity between GPU owners and consumers and making it broadly tradable, even programmable:As we explore, these are the primitives that you can then use to create your own, high quality, custom GPU availability for your time and money budget, similar to how Amazon Spot Instances automated the selective buying of unused compute.The ultimate end state of where all this is going is GPU that trade like other perishable, staple commodities of the world - oil, soybeans, milk. Because the contracts and markets are so well established, the price swings also are not nearly as drastic, and people can also start hedging and managing the risk of one of the biggest costs of their business, just like we have risk-managed commodities risks of all other sorts for centuries. As a former derivatives trader, you can bet that swyx doubleclicked on that…Show Notes* SF Compute* Evan Conrad* Ethan Anderson* John Phamous* The Curve talk* CoreWeave* Andromeda ClusterFull Video PodLike and subscribe!Timestamps* [00:00:05] Introductions* [00:00:12] Introduction of guest Evan Conrad from SF Compute* [00:00:12] CoreWeave Business Model Discussion* [00:05:37] CoreWeave as a Real Estate Business* [00:08:59] Interest Rate Risk and GPU Market Strategy Framework* [00:16:33] Why Together and DigitalOcean will lose money on their clusters* [00:20:37] SF Compute's AI Lab Origins* [00:25:49] Utilization Rates and Benefits of SF Compute Market Model* [00:30:00] H100 GPU Glut, Supply Chain Issues, and Future Demand Forecast* [00:34:00] P2P GPU networks* [00:36:50] Customer stories* [00:38:23] VC-Provided GPU Clusters and Credit Risk Arbitrage* [00:41:58] Market Pricing Dynamics and Preemptible GPU Pricing Model* [00:48:00] Future Plans for Financialization?* [00:52:59] Cluster auditing and quality control* [00:58:00] Futures Contracts for GPUs* [01:01:20] Branding and Aesthetic Choices Behind SF Compute* [01:06:30] Lessons from Previous Startups* [01:09:07] Hiring at SF ComputeTranscriptAlessio [00:00:05]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol AI.Swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we're so excited to be finally in the studio with Evan Conrad from SF Compute. Welcome. I've been fortunate enough to be your friend before you were famous, and also we've hung out at various social things. So it's really cool to see that SF Compute is coming into its own thing, and it's a significant presence, at least in the San Francisco community, which of course, it's in the name, so you couldn't help but be. Evan: Indeed, indeed. I think we have a long way to go, but yeah, thanks. Swyx: Of course, yeah. One way I was thinking about kicking on this conversation is we will likely release this right after CoreWeave IPO. And I was watching, I was looking, doing some research on you. You did a talk at The Curve. I think I may have been viewer number 70. It was a great talk. More people should go see it, Evan Conrad at The Curve. But we have like three orders of magnitude more people. And I just wanted to, to highlight, like, what is your analysis of what CoreWeave did that went so right for them? Evan: Sell locked-in long-term contracts and don't really do much short-term at all. I think like a lot of people had this assumption that GPUs would work a lot like CPUs and the like standard business model of any sort of CPU cloud is you buy commodity hardware, then you lay on services that are mostly software, and that gives you high margins and pretty much all your value comes from those services. Not really the underlying. Compute in any capacity and because it's commodity hardware and it's not actually that expensive, most of that can be sort of on-demand compute. And while you do want locked-in contracts for folks, it's mostly just a sort of de-risk situation. It helps you plan revenue because you don't know if people are going to scale up or down. But fundamentally, people are like buying hourly and that's how your business is structured and you make 50 percent margins or higher. This like doesn't really work in GPUs. And the reason why it doesn't work is because you end up with like super price sensitive customers. And that isn't because necessarily it's just way more expensive, though that's totally the case. So in a CPU cloud, you might have like, you know, let's say if you had a million dollars of hardware in GPUs, you have a billion dollars of hardware. And so your customers are buying at much higher volumes than you otherwise expect. And it's also smaller customers who are buying at higher amounts of volume. So relative to what they're spending in general. But in GPUs in particular, your customer cares about the scaling law. So if you take like Gusto, for example, or Rippling or an HR service like this, when they're buying from an AWS or a GCP, they're buying CPUs and they're running web servers, those web servers, they kind of buy up to the capacity that they need, they buy enough, like CPUs, and then they don't buy any more, like, they don't buy any more at all. Yeah, you have a chart that goes like this and then flat. Correct. And it's like a complete flat. It's not even like an incremental tiny amount. It's not like you could just like turn on some more nodes. Yeah. And then suddenly, you know, they would make an incremental amount of money more, like Gusto isn't going to make like, you know, 5% more money, they're gonna make zero, like literally zero money from every incremental GPU or CPU after a certain point. This is not the case for anyone who is training models. And it's not the case for anyone who's doing test time inference or like inference that has scales at test time. Because like you, your scaling laws mean that you may have some diminishing returns, but there's always returns. Adding GPUs always means your model does actually get. And that actually does translate into revenue for you. And then for test time inference, you actually can just like run the inference longer and get a better performance. Or maybe you can run more customers faster and then charge for that. It actually does translate into revenue. Every incremental GPU translates to revenue. And what that means from the customer's perspective is you've got like a flat budget and you're trying to max the amount of GPUs you have for that budget. And it's very distinctly different than like where Augusto or Rippling might think, where they think, oh, we need this amount of CPUs. How do we, you know, reduce that? How do we reduce our amount of money that we're spending on this to get the same amount of CPUs? What that translates to is customers who are spending in really high volume, but also customers who are super price sensitive, who don't give a s**t. Can I swear on this? Can I swear? Yeah. Who don't give a s**t at all about your software. Because a 10% difference in a billion dollars of hardware is like $100 million of value for you. So if you have a 10% margin increase because you have great software, on your billion, the customers are that price sensitive. They will immediately switch off if they can. Because why wouldn't you? You would just take that $100 million. You'd spend $50 million on hiring a software engineering team to replicate anything that you possibly did. So that means that the best way to make money in GPUs was to do basically exactly what CoreWeave did, which is go out and sign only long-term contracts, pretty much ignore the bottom end of the market completely, and then maximize your long-term contracts. With customers who don't have credit risk, who won't sue you, or are unlikely to sue you for frivolous reasons. And then because they don't have credit risk and they won't sue you for frivolous reasons, you can go back to your lender and you can say, look, this is a really low risk situation for us to do. You should give me prime, prime interest rate. You should give me the lowest cost of capital you possibly can. And when you do that, you just make tons of money. The problem that I think lots of people are going to talk about with CoreWeave is it doesn't really look like a cloud platform. It doesn't really look like a cloud provider financially. It also doesn't really look like a software company financially.Swyx [00:05:37]: It's a bank.Evan [00:05:38]: It's a bank. It's a real estate company. And it's very hard to not be that. The problem of that that people have tricked themselves into is thinking that CoreWeave is a bad business. I don't think CoreWeave is explicitly a bad business. There's a bunch of people, there's kind of like two versions of the CoreWeave take at the moment. There's, oh my God, CoreWeave, amazing. CoreWeave is this great new cloud provider competitive with the hyperscalers. And to some extent, this is true from a structural perspective. Like, they are indeed a real sort of thing against the cloud providers in this particular category. And the other take is, oh my gosh, CoreWeave is this horrible business and so on and blah, blah, blah. And I think it's just like a set of perception or perspective. If you think CoreWeave's business is supposed to look like the traditional cloud providers, you're going to be really upset to learn that GPUs don't look like that at all. And in fact, for the hyperscalers, it doesn't look like this either. My intuition is that the hyperscalers are probably going to lose a lot of money, and they know they're going to lose a lot of money on reselling NVIDIA GPUs, at least. Hyperscalers, but I want to, Microsoft, AWS, Google. Correct, yeah. The Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Does Google resell? I mean, Google has TPUs. Google has TPUs, but I think you can also get H100s and so on. But there are like two ways they can make money. One is by selling to small customers who aren't actually buying in any serious volume. They're testing around, they're playing around. And if they get big, they're immediately going to do one of two things. They're going to ask you for a discount. Because they're not going to pay your crazy sort of margin that you have locked into your business. Because for CPUs, you need that. They're going to pay your massive per hour price. And so they want you to sign a long-term contract. And so that's your other way that you can make money, is you can basically do exactly what CoreWeave does, which is have them pay as much as possible upfront and lock in the contract for a long time. Or you can have small customers. But the problem is that for a hyperscaler, the GPUs to... To sell on the low margins relative to what your other business, your CPUs are, is a worse business than what you are currently doing. Because you could have spent the same money on those GPUs. And you could have trained model and you could have made a model on top of it and then turn that into a product and had high margins from your product. Or you could have taken that same money and you could have competed with NVIDIA. And you could have cut into their margin instead. But just simply reselling NVIDIA GPUs doesn't work like your CPU business. Where you're able to capture high margins from big customers and so on. And then they never leave you because your customers aren't actually price sensitive. And so they won't switch off if your prices are a little higher. You actually had a really nice chart, again, on that talk of this two by two. Sure. Of like where you want to be. And you also had some hot takes on who's making money and who isn't. Swyx: So CoreUv locked up long-term contracts. Get that. Yes. Maybe share your mental framework. Just verbally describe it because we're trying to help the audio listeners as well. Sure. People can look up the chart if they want to. Evan: Sure. Okay. So this is a graph of interest rates. And on the y-axis, it's a probability you're able to sell your GPUs from zero to one. And on the x-axis, it's how much they'll depreciate in cost from zero to one. And then you had ISO cost curves or ISO interest rate curves. Yeah. So they kind of shape in a sort of concave fashion. Yeah. The lowest interest rates enable the most aggressive. form of this cost curve. And the higher interest rates go, the more you have to push out to the top right. Yeah. And then you had some analysis of where every player sits in this, including CoreUv, but also Together and Modal and all these other guys. I thought that was super insightful. So I just wanted to elaborate. Basically, it's like a graph of risk and the genres of places where you can be and what the risk is associated with that. The optimal thing for you to do, if you can, is to lock in long-term contracts that are paid all up front or in with a situation in which you trust the other party to pay you over time. So if you're, you know, selling to Microsoft or something or OpenAI. Which are together 77% of the revenue of CoreUv. Yeah. So if you're doing that, that's a great business to be in because your interest rate that you can pitch for is really low because no one thinks Microsoft is going to default. And like maybe OpenAI will default, but the backing by Microsoft kind of doesn't. And I think there's enough, like, generally, it looks like OpenAI is winning that you can make it's just a much better case than if you're selling to the pre-seed startup that just raised $30 million or something pre-revenue. It's like way easier to make the case that the OpenAI is not going to default than the pre-seed startup. And so the optimal place to be is selling to the maximally low risk customer for as long as possible. And then you never have to worry about depreciation and you make lots of money. The less. Good. Good place to be is you could sell long-term contracts to people who might default on you. And then if you're not bringing it to the present, so you're not like saying, hey, you have to pay us all up front, then you're in this like more risky territory. So is it top left of the chart? If I have the chart right, maybe. Large contracts paid over time. Yeah. Large contracts paid over time is like top left. So it's more risky, but you could still probably get away with it. And then the other opportunity is that you could sell short-term contracts for really high prices. And so lots of people tried that too, because this is actually closer to the original business model that people thought would work in cloud providers for CPUs. It works for CPUs, but it doesn't really work for GPUs. And I don't think people were trying this because they were thinking about the risk associated with it. I think a lot of people are just come from a software background, have not really thought about like cogs or margins or inventory risk or things that you have to worry about in the physical world. And I think they were just like copy pasting the same business model onto CPUs. And also, I remember fundraising like a few years ago. And I know based on. Like what we knew other people were saying who were in a very similar business to us versus what we were saying. And we know that our pitch was way worse at the time, because in the beginning of SF Compute, we looked very similar to pretty much every other GPU cloud, not on purpose, but sort of accidentally. And I know that the correct pitch to give to an investor was we will look like a traditional CPU cloud with high margins and we'll sell to everyone. And that is a bad business model because your customers are price sensitive. And so what happens is if you. Sell at high prices, which is the price that you would need to sell it in order to de-risk your loss on the depreciation curve, and specifically what I mean by that is like, let's say you're selling it like $5 an hour and you're paying $1.50 an hour for the GPU under the hood. It's a little bit different than that, but you know, nice numbers, $5 an hour, $1.50 an hour. Great. Excellent. Well, you're charging a really high price per GPU hour because over time the price will go down and you'll get competed out. And what you need is to make sure that you never go under, or if you do go under your underlying cost. You've made so much money in the first part of it that the later end of it, like doesn't matter because from the whole structure of the deal, you've made money. The problem is that just, you think that you're going to be able to retain your customers with software. And actually what happens is your customers are super price sensitive and push you down and push you down and push you down and push you down, um, that they don't care about your software at all. And then the other problem that you have is you have, um, really big players like the hyperscalers who are looking to win the market and they have way more money than you, and they can push down on margin. Much better than you can. And so if they have to, and they don't, they don't necessarily all the time, um, I think they actually keep pride of higher margin, but if they needed to, they could totally just like wreck your margin at any point, um, and push you down, which meant that that quadrant over there where you're charging a high price, um, and just to make up for the risk completely got destroyed, like did not work at all for many places because of the price sensitivity, because people could just shove you down instead that pushed everybody up to the top right-hand corner of that, which is selling short-term. Contracts for low prices paid over time, which is the worst place to be in, um, the worst financial place to be in because it has the highest interest rate, um, which means that your, um, your costs go up at the same time, your, uh, your incoming cash goes down and squeezes your margins and squeezes your margins. The nice thing for like a core weave is that most of their business is over on the, on the other sides of those quadrants that the ones that survive. The only remaining question I have with core weave, and I promise I get to ask if I can compute, and I promise this is relevant to SOF Compute in general, because the framework is important, right? Sure. To understand the company. So why didn't NVIDIA or Microsoft, both of which have more money than core weave, do core weave, right? Why didn't they do core weave? Why have this middleman when either NVIDIA or Microsoft have more money than God, and they could have done an internal core weave, which is effectively like a self-funding vehicle, like a financial instrument. Why does there have to be a third party? Your question is like... Why didn't Microsoft, or why didn't NVIDIA just do core weave? Why didn't they just set up their own cloud provider? I think, and I don't know, and so correct me if I'm wrong, and lots of people will have different opinions here, or I mean, not opinions, they'll have actual facts that differ from my facts. Those aren't opinions. Those are actually indeed differences of reality, is that NVIDIA doesn't want to compete with their customers. They make a large amount of money by selling to existing clouds. If they launched their own core weave, then it would be a lot more money. It'd make it much harder for them to sell to the hyperscalers, and so they have a complex relationship with there. So not great for them. Second is that, at least for a while, I think they were dealing with antitrust concerns or fears that if they're going through, if they own too much layers of the stack, I could imagine that could be a problem for them. I don't know if that's actually true, but that's where my mind would go, I guess. Mostly, I think it's the first one. It's that they would be competing directly with their primary customers. Then Microsoft could have done it, right? That's the other question. Yeah, so Microsoft didn't do it. And my guess is that... NVIDIA doesn't want Microsoft to do it, and so they would limit the capacity because from NVIDIA's perspective, both they don't want to necessarily launch their own cloud provider because it's competing with their customers, but also they don't want only one customer or only a few customers. It's really bad for NVIDIA if you have customer concentration, and Microsoft and Google and Amazon, like Oracle, to buy up your entire supply, and then you have four or five customers or so who pretty much get to set prices. Monopsony. Yeah, monopsony. And so the optimal thing for you is a diverse set of customers who all are willing to pay at whatever price, because if you don't, somebody else will. And so it's really optimal for NVIDIA to have lots of other customers who are all competing against each other. Great. Just wanted to establish that. It's unintuitive for people who have never thought about it, and you think about it all day long. Yeah. Swyx: The last thing I'll call out from the talk, which is kind of cool, and then I promise we'll get to SF Compute, is why will DigitalOcean and Together lose money on their clusters? Why will DigitalOcean and Together lose money on their clusters?Evan [00:16:33]: I'm going to start by clarifying that all of these businesses are excellent and fantastic. That Together and DigitalOcean and Lambda, I think, are wonderful businesses who build excellent products. But my general intuition is that if you try to couple the software and the hardware together, you're going to lose money. That if you go out and you buy a long-term contract from someone and then you layer on services, or you buy the hardware yourself and you spin it up and you get a bunch of debt, you're going to run into the same problem that everybody else did, the same problem we did, same problem the hyperscalers did. And that's exactly what the hyperscalers are doing, which is you cannot add software and make high margins like a cloud provider can. You can pitch that into investors and it will totally make sense, and it's like the correct play in CPUs, but there isn't software you could make to make this occur. If you're spending a billion dollars on hardware, you need to make a billion dollars of software. There isn't a billion dollars of software that you can realistically make, and if you do, you're going to look like SAP. And that's not a knock on SAP. SAP makes a f**k ton of money, right? Right. Right. Right. Right. There aren't that many pieces of software that you could make, that you can realistically sell, like a billion dollars of software, and you're probably not going to do it to price-sensitive customers who are spending their entire budget already on compute. They don't have any more money to give you. It's a very hard proposition to do. And so many parties have been trying to do this, like, buy their own compute, because that's what a traditional cloud does. It doesn't really work for them. You know that meme where there's, like, the Grim Reaper? And he's, like, knocking on the door, and then he keeps knocking on the next door? We have just seen door after door after door of the Grim Reeker comes by, and the economic realities of the compute market come knocking. And so the thing we encourage folks to do is if you are thinking about buying a big GPU cluster and you are going to layer on software on top, don't. There are so many dead bodies in the wake there. We would recommend not doing that. And we, as SF Compute, our entire business is structured to help you not do that. It's helped disintegrate these. The GPU clouds are fantastic real estate businesses. If you treat them like real estate businesses, you will make a lot of money. The cloud services you can make on that, all the software you want to make on that, you can do that fantastically. If you don't own the underlying hardware, if you mix these businesses together, you get shot in the head. But if you combine, if you split them, and that's what the market does, it helps you split them, it allows you to buy, like, layer on services, but just buy from the market, you can make lots of money. So companies like Modal, who don't own the underlying compute, like they don't own it, lots of money, fantastic product. And then companies like Corbeave, who are functionally like really, really good real estate businesses, lots of money, fantastic product. But if you combine them, you die. That's the economic reality of compute. I think it also splits into trading versus inference, which are different kinds of workloads. Yeah. And then, yeah, one comment about the price sensitivity thing before we leave this. This topic, I want to credit Martin Casado for coining or naming this thing, which is like, you know, you said, you said this thing about like, you don't have room for a 10% margin on GPUs for software. Yep. And Martin actually played it out further. It's his first one I ever saw doing this at large enough runs. So let's say GPT-4 and O1 both had a total trading cost of like a $500 billion is the rough estimate. When you get the $5 billion runs, when you get the $50 billion runs, it is actually makes sense to build your own. You're going to have to get into chips, like for OpenEI to get into chip design, which is so funny. I would make an ASIC for this run. Yeah, maybe. I think a caveat of that that is not super well thought about is that only works if you're really confident. It only works if you really know which chip you're going to do. If you don't, then it's a little harder. So it makes in my head, it makes more sense for inference where you've already established it. But for training there's so much like experimentation. Any generality, yeah. Yeah. The generality is much more useful. Yeah. In some sense, you know, Google's like six generations into the CPUs. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. Maybe we should go into SF Compute now. Sure. Yeah.Alessio [00:20:37]: Yeah. So you kind of talked about the different providers. Why did you decide to go with this approach and maybe talk a bit about how the market dynamics have evolved since you started a company?Evan [00:20:47]: So originally we were not doing this at all. We were definitely like forced into this to some extent. And SF Compute started because we wanted to go train models for music and audio in general. We were going to do a sort of generic audio model at some points, and then we were going to do a music model at some points. It was an early company. We didn't really spec down on a particular thing. But yeah, we were going to do a music model and audio model. First thing that you do when you start any AI lab is you go out and you buy a big cluster. The thing we had seen everybody else do was they went out and they raised a really big round and then they would get stuck. Because if you raise the amount of money that you need to train a model initially, like, you know, the $50 million pre-seed, pre-revenue, your valuation is so high or you get diluted so much that you can't raise the next round. And that's a very big ask to make. And also, I don't know, I felt like we just felt like we couldn't do it. We probably could have in retrospect, but I think one, we didn't really feel like we could do it. Two, it felt like if we did, we would have been stuck later on. We didn't want to raise the big round. And so instead, we thought, surely by now, we would be able to just go out. To any provider and buy like a traditional CPU cloud would sell offer you and just buy like on demand or buy like a month or so on. And this worked for like small incremental things. And I think this is where we were basing it off. We just like assumed we could go to like Lambda or something and like buy thousands of at the time A100s. And this just like was not at all the case. So we started doing all the sales calls with people and we said, OK, well, can we just get like month to month? Can we get like one month of compute or so on? Everyone told us at the time, no. You need to have a year long contract or longer or you're out of luck. Sorry. And at the time, we were just like pissed off. Like, why won't nobody sell us a month at a time? Nowadays, we totally understand why, because it's the same economic reason. Because if you if they had sold us the month to month or so on and we canceled or so on, they would have massive risk on that. And so the optimal thing to do was to only to just completely abandon the section of the market. We didn't like that. So our plan was we were going to buy a year long contract anyway. We would use a month. And then we would. At least the other 11 months. And we were locked in for a year, but we only had to pay on every individual month. And so we did this. But then immediately we said, oh, s**t, now we have a cloud provider, not a like training models company, not an AI lab, because every 30 days we owed about five hundred thousand dollars or so and we had about five hundred thousand dollars in the bank. So that meant that every single month, if we did not sell out our cluster, we would just go bankrupt. So that's what we did for the first year of the company. And when you're in that position. You try to think how in the world you get out of that position, what that transition to is, OK, well, we tend to be pretty good at like selling this cluster every month because we haven't died yet. And so what we should do is we should go basically be like this broker for other people and we will be more like a GPU real estate or like a GPU realtor. And so we started doing that for a while where we would go to other people who had who was trying to sell like a year long contract with somebody and we'd go to another person who like maybe this person wanted six months and somebody else on six months or something and we'd like combine all these people. Together to make the deal happen and we'd organize these like one off bespoke deals that looked like basically it ended up with us taking a bunch of customers, us signing with a vendor, taking some cut and then us operating the cluster for people typically with bare metal. And so we were doing this, but this was definitely like a oh, s**t, oh, s**t, oh, s**t. How do we get out of our current situation and less of a like a strategic plan of any sort? But while we were doing this, since like the beginning of the company, we had been thinking about how to buy GPU clusters, how to sell them effectively, because we'd seen every part of it. And what we ended up with was like a book of everybody who's trying to buy and everyone is trying to sell because we were these like GPU brokers. And so that turned into what is today SF Compute, which is a compute market, which we think we are the functionally the most liquid GPU market of any capacity. Honestly, I think we're the only thing that actually is like a real market that there's like bids and asks and there's like a like a trading engine that combines everything. And so. I think we're the only place where you can do things that a market should be able to do. Like you can go on SF Compute today and you get thousands of H100s for an hour if you want. And that's because there is a price for thousands of GPUs for an hour. That is like not a thing you can reasonably do on kind of any other cloud provider because nobody should realistically sell you thousands of GPUs for an hour. They should sell it to you for a year or so on. But one of the nice things about a market is that you can buy the year on SF Compute. But then if you need to sell. Back, you can sell back as well. And that opens up all these little pockets of liquidity where somebody who's just trying to buy for a little bit of time, some burst capacity. So people don't normally buy for an hour. That's not like actually a realistic thing, but it's like the range somebody who wants, who is like us, who needed to buy for a month can actually buy for a month. They can like place the order and there is actually a price for that. And it typically comes from somebody else who's selling back. Somebody who bought a longer term contract and is like they bought for some period of time, their code doesn't work, and now they need to like sell off a little bit.Alessio [00:25:49]: What are the utilization rates at which a market? What are the utilization rates at which a market? Like this works, what do you see the usual GPU utilization rate and like at what point does the market get saturated?Evan [00:26:00]: Assuming there are not like hardware problems or software problems, the utilization rate is like near 100 percent because the price dips until the utilization is 100 percent. So the price actually has to dip quite a lot in order for the utilization not to be. That's not always the case because you just have logistical problems like you get a cluster and parts of the InfiniBand fabric are broken. And there's like some issue with some switch somewhere and so you have to take some portion of the cluster offline or, you know, stuff like this, like there's just underlying physical realities of the clusters, but nominally we have better utilization than basically anybody because, but that's on utilization of the cluster, like that doesn't necessarily translate into, I mean, I actually do think we have much better overall money made for our underlying vendors than kind of anybody else. We work with the other GPU clouds and the basic pitch to the other GPU clouds is one. So we can sell your broker so we can we can find you the long term contracts that are at the prices that you want, but meanwhile, your cluster is idle and for that we can increase your utilization and get you more money because we can sell that idle cluster for you and then the moment we find the longer, the bigger customer and they come on, you can kick off those people and then go to the other ones. You get kind of the mix of like sell your cluster at whatever price you can get on the market and then sell your cluster at the big price that you want to do for long term contract, which is your ideal business model. And then the benefit of the whole thing being on the market. Is you can pitch your customer that they can cancel their long term contract, which is not a thing that you can reasonably do if you are just the GPU cloud, if you're just the GPU cloud, you can never cancel your contract, because that introduces so much risk that you would otherwise, like not get your cheap cost of capital or whatever. But if you're selling it through the market, or you're selling it with us, then you can say, hey, look, you can cancel for a fee. And that fee is the difference between the price of the market and then the price that they paid at, which means that they canceled and you have the ability to offer that flexibility. But you don't. You don't have to take the risk of it. The money's already there and like you got paid, but it's just being sold to somebody else. One of our top pieces from last year was talking about the H100 glut from all the long term contracts that were not being fully utilized and being put under the market. You have on here dollar a dollar per hour contracts as well as it goes up to two. Actually, I think you were involved. You were obliquely quoted in that article. I think you remember. I remember because this was hidden. Well, we hid your name, but then you were like, yeah, it's us. Yeah. Could you talk about the supply and demand of H100s? Was that just a normal cycle? Was that like a super cycle because of all the VC funding that went in in 2003? What was that like? GPU prices have come down. Yeah, GPU prices have come down. And there's some part that has normal depreciation cycle. Some part of that is just there were a lot of startups that bought GPUs and never used them. And now they're lending it out and therefore you exist. There's a lot of like various theories as to why. This happened. I dislike all of them because they're all kind of like they're often said with really high confidence. And I think just the market's much more complicated than that. Of course. And so everything I'm going to say is like very hedged. But there was a series of like places where a bunch of the orders were placed and people were pitching to their customers and their investors and just the broader market that they would arrive on time. And that is not how the world works. And because there was such a really quick build out of things, you would end up with bottlenecks in the supply chain somewhere that has nothing to do with necessarily the chip. It's like the InfiniBand cables or the NICs or like whatever. Or you need a bunch of like generators or you don't have data center space or like there's always some bottleneck somewhere else. And so a lot of the clusters didn't come online within the period of time. But then all the bottlenecks got sorted out and then they all came online all at the same time. So I think you saw a short. There was a shortage because supply chain hard. And then you saw a increase or like a glut because supply chain eventually figure itself out. And specifically people overordered in order to get the allocation that they wanted. Then they got the allocations and then they went under. Yeah, whatever. Right. There was just a lot of shenanigans. A caveat of this is every time you see somebody like overordered, there is this assumption that the problem was like the demand went down. I don't think that's the case at all. And so I want to clarify that. It definitely seems like a shortage. Like there's more demand for GPUs than there ever was. It's just that there was also more supply. So at the moment, I think there is still functionally a glut. But the difference that I think is happening is mostly the test time inference stuff that you just need way more chips for that than you did before. And so whenever you make a statement about the current market, people sort of take your words and then they assume that you're making a statement about the future market. And so if you say there's a glut now, people will continue to think there's a glut. But I think what is happening at the moment. My general prediction is that like by the winter, we will be back towards shortage. But then also, this very much depends on the rollout of future chips. And that comes with its own. I think I'm trying to give you like a good here's Evan's forecast. Okay. But I don't know if my forecast is right. You don't have to. Nobody is going to hold you to it. But like I think people want to know what's true and what's not. And there's a lot of vague speculations from people who are not that close to the market actually. And you are. I think I'm a closer. Close to the market, but also a vague speculator. Like I think there are a lot of really highly confident speculators and I am indeed a vague speculator. I think I have more information than a lot of other people. And this makes me more vague of a spectator because I feel less certain or less confident than I think a lot of other people do. The thing I do feel reasonably confident about saying is that the test time inference is probably going to quite significantly expand the amount of compute that was used for inference. So a caveat. This is like pretty much all the inference demand is in a few companies. A good example is like lots of bio and pharma was using H100s training sort of the bio models of sorts. And they would come along and they would buy, you know, thousands of H100s for training and then just like not a lot of stuff for inference. Not in any, not relative to like an opening iron anthropic or something because they like don't have a consumer product. Their inference event, if they can do it right. There's really like only one inference event that matters. And obviously I think they're going to run into it. And Batch and they're not going to literally just run one inference event. But like the one that produces the drug is the important one. Right. And I'm dumb and I don't know anything about biology, so I could be completely wrong here. But my understanding is that's kind of the gist. I can check that for you. You can check that for me. Check that for me. But my understanding is like the one that produces the sequence that is the drug that, you know, cures cancer or whatever. That's the important deal. But like a lot of models look like this where they're sort of more enterprising use cases or they're so prior to something that looks like test time inference. You got lots and lots of demand for training and then pretty much entirely fell off for inference. And I think like we looked at like Open Router, for example, the entirety of Open Router that was not anthropic or like Gemini or OpenAI or something. It was like 10 H100 nodes or something like that. It's just like not that much. It's like not that many GPUs actually to service that entire demand. But that's like a really sizable portion of the sort of open source market. But the actual amount of compute needed for it was not that much. But if you imagine like what an OpenAI needs for like GPT-4, it's like tremendously big. But that's because it's a consumer product that has almost all the inference demand. Yeah, that's a message we've had. Roughly open source AI compared to closed AI is like 5%. Yeah, it's like super small. Super small. It's super small. Super small. But test time inference changes that quite significantly. So I will... I will expect that to increase our overall demand. But my question on whether or not that actually affects your compute price is entirely based on how quickly do we roll out the next chips. The way that you burst is different for test time.Alessio [00:34:01]: Any thoughts on the third part of the market, which is the more peer-to-peer distributed, some are like crypto-enabled, like Hyperbolic, Prime Intellect, and all of that. Where do those fit? Like, do you see a lot of people will want to participate in a peer-to-peer market? Or just because of the capital requirements at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter?Evan [00:34:20]: I'm like wildly skeptical of these, to be frankly. The dream is like steady at home, right? I got this $15.90. Nobody has $15.90. $14.90 sitting at home. I can rent it out. Yeah. Like, I just don't really think this is going to ever be more efficient than a fully interconnected cluster with InfiniBand or, you know, whatever the sort of next spec might be. Like, I could be completely wrong. But speaking of... I mean, like, SpeedoLite is really hard to beat. And regardless of whatever you're using, you just like can't get around that physical limitation. And so you could like imagine a decentralized market that still has a lot of places where there's like co-location. But then you would get something that looks like SF Compute. And so that's what we do. That's why we take our general take is like on SF Compute, you're not buying from like random people. You're buying from the other GPU clouds, functionally. You're buying from data centers that are the same genre of people that you would work with already. And you can specify, oh, I want all these nodes to be co-located. And I don't think you're really going to get around that. And I think I buy crypto for the purposes of like transferring money. Like the financial system is like quite painful and so on. I can understand the uses of it to sort of incentivize an initial market or try to get around the cold start problem. We've been able to get around the cold start problem just fine. So it didn't actually need that at all. What I do think is totally possible is you could launch a token and then you could like subsidize the crypto. You could compute prices for a bit, but like maybe that will help you. I think that's what Nuus is doing. Yeah, I think there's lots of people who are trying to do things like this, but at some point that runs out. So I would, I think generally agree. I think the only thread in that model is very fine grained mixture of experts that can be like algorithms can shift to adapt to hardware realities. And the hardware reality is like, okay, it's annoying to do large co-located clusters. Then we'll just redesign attention or whatever in our architecture to distribute it more. There was a little bit buzz of block attention last year that Strong Compute made a big push on. But I think like, you know, in a world where we have 200 experts in MOE model, it starts to be a little bit better. Like, I don't disagree with this. I can imagine the world in which you have like, in which you've redesigned it to be more parallelizable, like across space.Evan [00:36:43]: But assuming without that, your hardware limitation is your speed of light limitation. And that's a very hard one to get around.Alessio [00:36:50]: Any customers or like stories that you want to shout out of like maybe things that wouldn't have been economically viable like others? I know there's some sensitivity on that.Evan [00:37:00]: My favorites are grad students, are folks who are trying to do things that would normally otherwise require the scale of a big lab. And the grad students are like the worst pilots. They're like the worst possible customer for the traditional GPU clouds because they will immediately turn if you sell them a thing because they're going to graduate and they're not going to go anywhere. They're not going to like, that project isn't continuing to spend lots of money. Like sometimes it does, but not if you're like working with the university or you're working with the lab of some sort. But a lot of times it's just like the ability for us to offer like big burst capacity, I think is lovely and wonderful. And it's like one of my favorite things to do because all those folks look like we did. And I have a special place in my heart for that. I have a special place in my heart for young hackers and young grad students and researchers who are trying to do the same genre of thing that we are doing. For the same reason, I have a special place in my heart for like the startups, the people who are just actively trying to compete on the same scale, but can't afford it time-wise, but can afford it spike-wise. Yeah, I liked your example of like, I have a grant of 100K and it's expiring. I got to spend it on that. That's really beautiful. Yeah. Interesting. Has there been interesting work coming out of that? Anything you want to mention? Yeah. So from like a startup perspective, like Standard Intelligence and Find, P-H-I-N-D. We've had them on the pod.Swyx [00:38:23]: Yeah. Yeah.Evan [00:38:23]: That was great. And then from grad students' perspective, we worked a lot with like the Schmidt Futures grantees of various sorts. My fear is if I talk about their research, I will be completely wrong to a sort of almost insulting degree because I am very dumb. But yeah. I think one thing that's maybe also relevant startups and GPUs-wise. Yeah. Is there was a brief moment where it kind of made sense that VCs provided GPU clusters. And obviously you worked at AI Grants, which set up Andromeda, which is supposedly a $100 million cluster. Yeah. I can explain why that's the case or why anybody would think that would be smart. Because I remember before any of that happened, we were asking for it to happen. Yeah. And the general reason is credit risk. Again, it's a bank. Yeah. I have lower risk than you due to credit transformation. I take your risk onto my balance sheet. Correct. Exactly. If you wanted to go for a while, if you wanted to go set up a GPU cluster, you had to be the one that actually bought the hardware and racked it and stacked it, like co-located it somewhere with someone. Functionally, it was like on your balance sheet, which means you had to get a loan. And you cannot get a loan for like $50 million as a startup. Like not really. You can get like venture debt and stuff, but like it's like very, very difficult to get a loan of any serious price for that. But it's like not that difficult to get a loan for $50 million. If you already have a fund or you already have like a million dollars under your assets somewhere or like you personally can like do a personal guarantee for it or something like this. If you have a lot of money, it is way easier for you to get a loan than if you don't have a lot of money. And so the hack of a VC or some capital partner offering equity for compute is always some arbitrage on the credit risk. That's amazing. Yeah. That's a hack. You should do that. I don't think people should do it right now. I think the market has like, I think it made sense at the time and it was helpful and useful for the people who did it at the time. But I think it was a one-time arbitrage because now there are lots of other sources that can do it. And also I think like it made sense when no one else was doing it and you were the only person who was doing it. But now it's like it's an arbitrage that gets competed down. Sure. So it's like super effective. I wouldn't totally recommend it. Like it's great that Andromeda did it. But the marginal increase of somebody else doing it is like not super helpful. I don't think that many people have followed in their footsteps. I think maybe Andreessen did it. Yeah. That's it. I think just because pretty much all the value like flows through Andromeda. What? That cannot be true. How many companies are in the air, Grant? Like 50? My understanding of Andromeda is it works with all the NFTG companies or like several of the NFTG companies. But I might be wrong about that. Again, you know, something something. Nat, don't kill me. I could be completely wrong. But the but you know, I think Andromeda was like an excellent idea to do at the right time in which it occurred. Perfect. His timing is impeccable. Timing. Yeah. Nat and Daniel are like, I mean, there's lots of people who are like... Sears? Yeah. Sears. Like S-E-E-R. Oh, Sears. Like Sears of the Valley. Yeah. They for years and years before any of the like ChatGPT moment or anything, they had fully understood what was going to happen. Like way, way before. Like. AI Grant is like, like five years old, six years old or something like that. Seven years old. When I, when it like first launched or something. Depends where you start. The nonprofit version. Yeah. The nonprofit version was like, like happening for a while, I think. It's going on for quite a bit of time. And then like Nat and Daniel are like the early investors in a lot of the sort of early AI labs of various sorts. They've been doing this for a bit.Alessio [00:41:58]: I was looking at your pricing yesterday. We're kind of talking about it before. And there's this weird thing where one week is more expensive of both one day and one month. Yeah. What are like some of the market pricing dynamics? What are things that like this to somebody that is not in the business? This looks really weird. But I'm curious, like if you have an explanation for it, if that looks normal to you. Yeah.Evan [00:42:18]: So the simple answer is preemptible pricing is cheaper than non-preemptible pricing. And the same economic principle is the reason why that's the case right now. That's not entirely true on SF Compute. SF Compute doesn't really have the concept of preemptible. Instead, what it has is very short reservations. So, you know, you go to a traditional cloud provider and you can say, hey, I want to reserve contract for a year. We will let you do a reserve contract for one hour, which is the part of SFC. But what you can do is you can just buy every single hour continuously. And you're reserving just for that hour. And then the next hour you reserve just for that next hour. And this is obviously like a built in. This is like an automation that you can do. But what you're seeing when you see the cheap price is you're seeing somebody who's buying the next hour, but maybe not necessarily buying an hour after that. So if the price goes up. Up too much. They might not get that next hour. And the underlying part of this of where that's coming from the market is you can imagine like day old milk or like milk that's about to be old. It might drop its price until it's expired because nobody wants to buy the milk that's in the past. Or maybe you can't legally sell it. Compute is the same way. No, you can't sell a block of compute that is not that is in the past. And so what you should do in the market and what people do do is they take. They take a block. A block of compute. And then they drop it and drop it and drop it and drop into a floor price right before it's about to expire. And they keep dropping it until it clears. And so anything that is idle drops until some point. So if you go and use on the website and you set that that chart to like a week from now, what you'll see is much more normal looking sort of curves. But if you say, oh, I want to start right now, that immediate instant, here's the compute that I want right now is the is functionally the preemptible price. It's where most people are getting the best compute or like the best compute prices from. The caveat of that is you can do really fun stuff on SFC if you want. So because it's not actually preemptible, it's it's reserved, but only reserved for an hour, which means that the optimal way to use as of compute is to just buy on the market price, but set a limit price that is much higher. So you can set a limit price for like four dollars and say, oh, if the market ever happens to spike up to four dollars, then don't buy. I don't want to buy that at that price for that price. I don't want to buy that at that price for that price for an hour. But otherwise, just buy at the cheapest price. And if you're comfortable with that of the volatility of it, you're actually going to get like really good prices, like close to a dollar an hour or so on, sometimes down to like 80 cents or whatever. You said four, though. Yeah. So that's the thing. You want to lower the limit. So four is your max price. Four is like where you basically want to like pull the plug and say don't do it because the actual average price is not or like the, you know, the preemptible price doesn't actually look like that. So what you're doing when you're saying four is always, always, always give me this compute. Like continue to buy every hour. Don't preempt me. Don't kick me off. And I want this compute and just buy at the preemptible price, but never kick me off. The only times in which you get kicked off is if there is a big price spike. And, you know, let's say one day out of the year, there's like a four dollar an hour price because of some weird fluke or something. If there are other periods of time, you're actually getting a much lower price than you. It makes sense. Your your average cost that you're actually paying is way better. And your trade off here is you don't literally know what price you're going to get. So it's volatile. But your actual average historically has been like everyone who's done this has gotten wildly better prices. And this is like one of the clever things you can do with the market. If you're willing to make those trade offs, you can get a lot of really good prices. You can also do other things like you can only buy at night, for example. So the price goes down at night. And so you can say, oh, I want to only buy, you know, if the price is lower than 90 cents. And so if you have some long running job, you can make it only run on 90 cents and then you recover back and so on. Yeah. So what you can kind of create as like a spot inst is what other the CPU world has. Yes. But you've created a system where you can kind of manufacture the exact profile that you want. Exactly. That is not just whatever the hyperscalers offer you, which is usually just one thing. Correct. SF Compute is like the power tool. The underlying primitives of like hourly compute is there. Correct. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I've often asked OpenAI. So like, you know, all these guys. Cloud as well. They do batch APIs. So it's half off of whatever your thing is. Yeah. And the only contract is we'll return in 24 hours. Sure. Right. And I was like, 24 hours is good. But sometimes I want one hour. I want four hours. I want something. And so based off of SF Compute's system, you can actually kind of create that kind of guarantee. Totally. That would be like, you know, not 24, but within eight hours, within four hours, like the work half of a workday. Yes. I can return your results to you. And then I can return it to you. And if your latency requirements are like that low, actually it's fine. Yes. Correct. Yeah. You can carve out that. You can financially engineer that on SFC. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think to me that unlocks a lot of agent use cases that I want, which is like, yeah, I worked in a background, but I don't want you to take a day. Yeah. Correct. Take a couple hours or something. Yeah. This touches a lot of my like background because I used to be a derivatives trader. Yeah. And this is a forward market. Yeah. A futures forward market, whatever you call it. Not a future. Very explicitly not a future. Not yet a futures. Yes. But I don't know if you have any other points to talk about. So you recognize that you are a, you know, a marketplace and you've hired, I met Alex Epstein at your launch event and you're like, you're, you're building out the financialization of GPUs. Yeah. So part of that's legal. Mm-hmm. Totally. Part of that is like listing on an exchange. Yep. Maybe you're the exchange. I don't know how that works, but just like, talk to me about that. Like from the legal, the standardization, the like, where is this all headed? You know, is this like a full listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or whatever? What we're trying to do is create an underlying spot market that gives you an index price that you can use. And then with that index price, you can create a cash settled future. And with a cash settled future, you can go back to the data centers and you can say, lock in your price now and de-risk your entire position, which lets you get cheaper cost of capital and so on. And that we think will improve the entire industry because the marginal cost of compute is the risk. It's risk as shown by that graph and basically every part of this conversation. It's risk that causes the price to be all sorts of funky. And we think a future is the correct solution to this. So that's the eventual goal. Right now you have to make the underlying spot market in order to make this occur. And then to make the spot market work, you actually have to solve a lot of technology problems. You really cannot make a spot market work if you don't run the clusters, if you don't have control over them, if you don't know how to audit them, because these are super computers, not soybeans. They have to work. In a way that like, it's just a lot simpler to deliver a soybean than it is to deliver it. I don't know. Talk to the soybean guys. Sure. You know? Yeah. But you have to have a delivery mechanism. Your delivery mechanism, like somebody somewhere has to actually get the compute at some point and it actually has to work. And it is really complicated. And so that is the other part of our business that we go and we build a bare metal infrastructure stack that goes. And then also we do auditing of all the clusters. You sort of de-risk the technical perspective and that allows you to eventually de-risk the financial perspective. And that is kind of the pitch of SF Compute. Yeah. I'll double click on the auditing on the clusters. This is something I've had conversations with Vitae on. He started Rika and I think he had a blog post which kind of shone the light a little bit on how unreliable some clusters are versus others. Correct. Yeah. And sometimes you kind of have to season them and age them a little bit to find the bad cards. You have to burn them in. Yeah. So what do you do to audit them? There's like a burn-in process, a suite of tests, and then active checking and passive checking. Burn-in process is where you typically run LINPACK. LINPACK is this thing that like a bunch of linear algebra equations that you're stress testing the GPUs. This is a proprietary thing that you wrote? No, no, no. LINPACK is like the most common form of burn-in. If you just type in burn-in, typically when people say burn-in, they literally just mean LINPACK. It's like an NVIDIA reference version of this. Again, NVIDIA could run this before they ship, but now the customers have to do it. It's annoying. You're not just checking for the GPU itself. You're checking like the whole component, all the hardware. And it's a lot of work. It's an integration test. It's an integration test. Yeah. So what you're doing when you're running LINPACK or burn-in in general is you're stress testing the GPUs for some period of time, 48 hours, for example, maybe seven days or so on. And you're just trying to kill all the dead GPUs or any components in the system that are broken. And we've had experiences where we ran LINPACK on a cluster and it rounds out, sort of comes offline when you run LINPACK. This is a pretty good sign that maybe there is a problem with this cluster. Yeah. So LINPACK is like the most common sort of standard test. But then beyond that, what you do is we have like a series of performance tests that replicate a much more realistic environment as well that we run just assuming if LINPACK works at all, then you run the next set of tests. And then while the GPUs are in operation, you're also going through and you're doing active tests and passive tests. Passive tests are things that are running in the background while somebody else is running, while like some other workload is running. And active tests are during like idle periods. You're running some sort of check that would otherwise sort of interrupt something. And then the active tests will take something offline, basically. Or a passive check might mark it to get taken offline later and so on. And then the thing that we are working on that we have working partially but not entirely is automated refunds, which is basically like, is the case that the hardware breaks so much. And there's only so much that we can do and it is the effect of pretty much the entire industry. So a pretty common thing that I think happens to kind of everybody in the space is a customer comes online, they experience your cluster, and your cluster has the same problem that like any cluster has, or it's I mean, a different problem every time, but they experience one of the problems of HPC. And then their experience is bad. And you have to like negotiate a refund or some other thing like this. It's always case by case. And like, yeah, a lot of people just eat the cost. Correct. So one of the nice things about a market that we can do as we get bigger and have been doing as we can bigger is we can immediately give you something else. And then also we can automatically refund you. And you're still gonna experience it like the hardware problems aren't going away until the underlying vendors fix things. But honestly, I don't think that's likely because you're always pushing the limits of HPC. This is the case of trying to build a supercomputer. that's one of the nice things that we can do is we can switch you out for somebody else somewhere, and then automatically refund you or prorate or whatever the correct move is. One of the things that you say in this conversation with me was like, you know, you know, a provider is good when they guarantee automatic refunds. Which doesn't happen. But yeah, that's, that's in our contact with all the underlying cloud providers. You built it in already. Yeah. So we have a quite strict SLA that we pass on to you. The reason why

In this candid and richly layered episode, Emily sits down with artist and actress Jemima Kirke for a conversation that unfolds with wit, depth, and honesty. Best known for her role as Jessa in HBO's Girls, Jemima is also a RISD-trained painter whose work explores vulnerability, womanhood, and identity through a deeply personal lens.Jemima opens up about the nuances of balancing visibility in the film world with the more private act of painting, the impact of motherhood on her creative process, and why she remains uninterested in pleasing anyone but herself when it comes to making art.The interview was photographed by the inimitable Matthew Tully Dugan, who captured Jemima at home—images as intimate and magnetic as the conversation itself.As always, The Art Career Podcast is brought to you by a small but passionate team. These unscripted, heartfelt dialogues are made possible by a community that values art, storytelling, and truth. Thank you for being here.Jemima Kirke is a British-American actress and visual artist. She rose to prominence for her role as Jessa Johansson on the HBO series Girls, and has since starred in acclaimed projects such as Conversations with Friends, Maniac, and Sex Education. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Jemima's first love is painting—her figurative works often exploring themes of intimacy, identity, and the complexities of womanhood. Her art has been exhibited in both the U.S. and the UK, and she continues to cultivate a multidisciplinary practice that defies easy categorization.

Randy talks with Artist/Painter/Musician Sebastian Blanck about his early days at RISD, playing in Black Dice, Injuries, inspiration and abstraction. https://sebastianblanck.com/ https://www.milesmcenery.com/artists/sebastian-blanck https://www.instagram.com/sebastianblanck/?hl=en

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. In this episode, Emily features Daisy Nam, the director and chief curator at the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts. Daisy discusses her journey from growing up in Los Angeles to her roles at prestigious institutions like NYU, Columbia, Harvard, and Marfa Ballroom. She shares insights on the significance of art spaces in cities, her love for art books, and memorable exhibitions, particularly the current 'Steady' sculpture show involving artists Esther Partegas and Michelle Lopez. Daisy highlights the unique aspects and challenges of working in the contemporary art world, emphasizing the importance of maintaining art spaces and building partnerships within the art community. Daisy also shares her personal experiences and perspectives on art and nature in Northern California.About Curator Daisy Nam:Daisy Nam is the director and curator of CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art in San Francisco, which opens their new galleries on the expanded campus in Fall of 2024. Previously, she was at Ballroom Marfa, a contemporary art space dedicated to supporting artists through residencies, commissions, and exhibitions, first as the curator in 2020 and then the director and curator in 2022. From 2015–19, she was the assistant director at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, managing the administration  and organizing programs, exhibitions, and publications. From 2008–2015, she produced seven seasons of talks, screenings, performances, and workshops as the assistant director of public programs at the School of the Arts, Columbia University.Curatorial residencies and fellowships include: Marcia Tucker Senior Research Fellow at the New Museum, New York (2020); Bellas Artes, Bataan, Philippines (2020); Surf Point in York, Maine (2019); Gwangju Biennale Foundation, Korea (2018). She holds a master's degree in Curatorial and Critical Studies from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in Art History and Cinema Studies from New York University. She has taught at RISD, and lectured at Lesley University, Northeastern, SMFA/Tufts, SVA as a visiting critic. She co-edited a publication, Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts withPaper Monument in 2021.CLICK HERE to learn more about Daisy. CLICK HERE to connect to The Wattis InstituteCLICK HERE to get more info about the Wattis exhibition 'STEADY' --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

More and more in today's fashion industry, women are the ones in charge and designing for themselves instead of for some unrealistic societal ideal. Kimberly Becker is doing this and going a step further for women's rights with her brand K. Becker. In episode 111, hear how politics, feminism, and sustainability guide her work and how she's using fashion to give back to causes that support women across the globe. Kimberly started this journey as a Textile Major at RISD. After graduating, she worked in the garment district of Manhattan for about a decade off and on – beginning at Liz Claiborne, and then moving to upholstery fabric design, always focused on designing the fabrics. Kimberly's time at Liz Claiborne gave her priceless experience, both about how the business was run and also in getting exposure to the suppliers and manufacturers from around the world. Fast forward 25 years and she is creating art focused on women's rights. Her House Dresses and Dolls for Change were both discussions about how women are still facing an uphill battle in the world. Someone asked her why she wasn't designing clothing. They loved the way the dolls Kimberly was making were dressed. It took about 6 months for Kimberly to find the courage to try. That decision was life-changing. She's one year in and the brand is settling into the collection and message she feels fits what she was aiming for. K.Becker is a collection of sustainable pretty things that fit and flatters real women's bodies. Empowering women is vital. When we feel beautiful we are a force. All clothing is sewn in NYC, and knit in Brooklyn and the company is an all-women team. Kimberly donates 5% of all profits to women-focused causes. In this episode, you'll learn: The two sides of feminism in fashion and where Kimberly sees both in the industry today How politics and women's rights activism sparked the idea for K. Becker Why Kimberly moved away from describing her brand as petite The thing that Kimberly asks her focus groups of women to bring The balance between being too corporate and too personal as a brand The core message and values that guide K. Becker How Kimberly met her factory and patternmaker The importance of consistency Why Kimberly doesn't like to use blended fiber materials How Kimberly's background in textiles influences her fabric and apparel design decisions People and resources mentioned in this episode: K. Becker website (use code "Fitting20" for a 20% discount!) K. Becker Instagram Kimberly's email Kimberly's LinkedIn Jane Hamill - Fashion Brain Academy - fashion business coach Do you want fashion business tips and resources like this sent straight to your inbox? Sign up for the How Fitting newsletter to receive new podcast episodes plus daily content on creating fashion that fits your customer, lifestyle, and values.

Hannah Lupton Reinhard's paintings always have a consistency in intent, and yet an interpretation of intention seems to be flexible for some, perhaps even malleable. The theme of moving goal posts to secure your own meaning is rife in modern society, perhaps more so than ever as we all have the unique ability to erase our own history so easily. We all, at the touch of a button, can share and manipulate our opinions, often in an instant. I don't know if we, as a collective, were ready for this, and we are struggling. We are angry. We are confused. Reinhard has been making paintings about being Jewish since her time at RISD, has explored Jewish "displacement, diaspora, and the weight of inherited identity." In her celebratory work, she speaks of something quite universal: the complex idea of home and, as she notes from the philosopher Judith Butler, "that cohabitation—living among and alongside others—is central to Jewishness itself." As war in the Middle East began to explore, her work was being re-evauluated, her inclusive opinions causing her anger from her community and re-reading of her artwork that was never her intention. It brought out broader conversations about coexistence, and how a proudly Jewish artist can criticize Zionism while remaining as proud of her heritage as ever? In this conversation on the Radio Juxtapoz podcast, Evan Pricco speaks with Reinhard at Rusha & Co just as her solo show, Are We Here Yet? was opening. They spoke about how the fires in Los Angeles gave her work an extra dimension, finding identity in art school and how she painted through a major shift in her public life and how it caused a uncertainty in her private life. (Editor's note: Click here to see imagery that connects with the conversation, a gives context for some of Reinhard's older works)Radio Juxtapoz' Unibrow podcast is hosted by Juxtapoz editor, ⁠⁠⁠Evan Pricco⁠⁠⁠. Episode 155 was recorded in Los Angeles on February 12, 2025 Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@radiojuxtapoz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠

Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Coral & Tusk founder, Stepahnie Housley. Stephanie is someone whose work beautifully embodies the art of storytelling through collecting and creativity and her journey is nothing short of inspiring. Growing up in the Ohio Valley, she cultivated a deep appreciation for nature and found objects—traits that became the foundation for her unique creative voice. After studying textile design at RISD, she spent 15 years as an interior textile designer in New York City. But in 2007, with a single embroidery machine in her Brooklyn apartment, Stephanie took a leap of faith and started Coral & Tusk, a brand now celebrated for its spirited embroidered textiles and home goods.What sets Coral & Tusk apart is the magic of Stephanie's process: every design begins as her original hand-drawn illustration before being meticulously translated to cloth. Today, Stephanie calls the mountains of Wyoming home—a setting that feels perfectly aligned with Coral & Tusk's celebration of nature and imagination.We delve into the idea of collecting with your eyes first, how her latest book, In Stitches, offers a window into her collections and creative process, and three of my favorite designs from the book and the stories behind them. So without further adieu, Stephanie Housley, founder of Coral & Tusk, for Collectors Gene Radio. 25% Off Code - CGxCoral25Coral & Tusk - https://coralandtusk.com/ CollectorsGene.com - https://collectorsgene.com/

Hiten Sonpal is the CEO of RISE® Robotics, an industrial technology company headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, specializing in sustainable motion control solutions for heavy machinery. He discusses the innovative technology behind their electric actuation system, Beltdraulic™, which offers significant advantages over traditional hydraulic systems. He also shares insights into the commercialization journey of their products, the importance of leadership in navigating organizational priorities, and the balance between having a clear vision and adapting to uncertainty in business. Hiten emphasizes the value of proving their technology's effectiveness to potential customers and the growing demand for electrification and autonomy in robotics. Links: Show notes: http://brandonbartneck.com/buildingbetter/hitensonpal Edison Manufacturing Exchange: https://brandonbartneck.substack.com/publish/home linkedin.com/in/brandonbartneck/ https://www.riserobotics.com/ https://wefunder.com/riserobotics Takeaways Beltdraulic™ technology is more efficient than hydraulics. The actuator is three times as fast and 80% lighter than hydraulics. Commercialization involves cutting scope and focusing on key products. Leadership requires articulating what not to do to increase speed. The market demand for electrification is growing due to legislation. Proving value to customers is essential for adoption. The technology is designed to be easy to integrate into existing systems. Energy efficiency and cost reduction are key benefits of their technology. Bio: Hiten Sonpal is the CEO of RISE® Robotics, bringing over two decades of experience in robotics, automation, and product innovation. He contributed to generating $2B+ in revenue and shipping 9M+ units at iRobot, scaled deployments 3x at Electric Sheep Robotics, and launched SaaS and hardware products at Robin. As an advisor to Graze Robotics and Main Street Autonomy, Hiten continues to shape the future of technology and automation. With a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Evansville and an ongoing MS in Computer Science at Georgia Tech (‘28), Hiten is passionate about revolutionizing industrial machinery. At RISE, he is leading efforts to replace traditional hydraulics with sustainable, high-efficiency belt technology while fostering a culture of innovation and impact. About RISE: RISE® Robotics is an industrial technology company headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, specializing in sustainable motion control solutions for heavy machinery. Founded in 2011 by graduates of MIT and RISD, RISE has developed the patented Beltdraulic™ system, a fluid-free alternative to traditional hydraulics. This innovative technology uses lightweight, steel-reinforced belts to deliver high-efficiency performance, reducing machine weight, lowering operational costs, and minimizing environmental impact. RISE is increasing machine productivity while supporting global sustainability goals. Backed by The Engine, Greentown Labs, and Techstars, RISE is redefining what's possible in industrial motion control. Building Better Building Better with Brandon Bartneck is focused on the people, products, and companies that are creating a better tomorrow, often in the transportation and manufacturing sectors. This show was previously called the Future of Mobility podcast. I aim to have real, human conversations to explore what these leaders and innovators are doing, why and how they're doing it, and what we can learn from their experiences. If you care about making an impact then this show might be for you. Topics include manufacturing, production, assembly, autonomous driving, electric vehicles, hydrogen and fuel cells, impact, leadership, and more. Edison Manufacturing and Engineering: Edison is your low volume contract manufacturing partner, focused on assembly of complex mobility and energy products that don't neatly fit within traditional high-volume production methods.

Wednesday, November 20, 2024 Hoover Institution | Stanford University On behalf of the Hoover Applied History Working Group, Dr. Niall Ferguson welcomes Anthony Gregory to vibrantly discuss his recent book, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State. ABOUT THE TALK This special book talk discovers how the 1930s redefined law and order, transforming liberalism and reshaping American government itself. We remember the New Deal as foundational to modern liberalism, but its crucial role in building the law-and-order state has gone neglected. This HAHWG seminar will look to Franklin Roosevelt's war on crime for lessons on how political legitimacy relies on enforcement authority and consider the implications for today's fraught politics of law and order. The book is available for purchase here. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Anthony Gregory is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, at Stanford University. He is a legal and policy historian of the American state. He was previously an assistant professor in residence at Rhode Island School of Design's Department of History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences. He earned his PhD in History at the University of California Berkeley, where he trained as an Americanist studying politics and law, and spent two years as a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University's Political Theory Project before beginning at RISD. Gregory is the author of multiple academic publications on national security, constitutionalism, and legal theory and is currently working on modern American liberalism and criminal justice, particularly on how the New Deal war on crime legitimated and transformed U.S. governance.

Heather E. McGowan is a keynote speaker and author of The Empathy Advantage and The Adaptation Advantage with deep experience in the Future of Work field. She describes the importance of empathy with AI's growing influence and fostering a connected, resilient, and adaptable workforce. Heather discusses how AI can transform cognitive work and why leaders must shift from relying on their own expertise to harnessing collective intelligence. She explains how the promise and tacit agreement of work has changed, leading to younger generations' focus on mission, impact, and mentorship.     TAKEAWAYS   [02:35] Interested in human behavior and art, Heather goes to RISD to study industrial design.   [04:00] Heather learns to ask the right question – is the process, not the product, that matters.   [04:54] Observing people helps Heather identify unarticulated needs, as seen with the Swiffer.   [06:21] Heather designs various products then does an MBA to bridge design and business.   [07:36] Her mentor's influence directs her towards ESG-focused private equity work.   [09:49] Integrating design and business, Heather works in academia for several years.   [10:50] Heather starts defining how work is changing for her academic and corporate clients as the Future of Work emerges.   [12:24] Challenging the concept of having to take single discipline courses before collaborative studies.   [13:00] The importance of having a common mindset around problem solving.   [13:31] Using basic systems thinking to understand the impact of solutions.   [14:33] Interesting reactions to mixed-year participation in courses.   [15:25] How people responded to integrated design-thinking projects.   [16:15] Heather gets delayed positive feedback to their innovative approach.   [16:39] Insights from Heather's experiences in education such as getting people to think propositionally.   [17:00] The genesis of the Adaptation Advantage book.   [17:45] The impact of set occupational identity and the rigid 'education-career-retire' model.   [18:26] Lifelong learning with learning and careers overlapping not sequential stages.   [18:55] Retirement is not good for us, now that life expectancy has increased.   [19:30] The AARP starts to focus on people's ‘next' or ‘encore' chapter rather than ‘retirement'.   [20:46] Heather's research and writing focuses on Future of Work tacit vs explicit knowledge.   [21:17] Explicit knowledge can be automated, while tacit knowledge needs human interaction.   [22:15] AI as a “third lens” for understanding human cognition and expanding our capabilities.   [23:39] Heather warns that over-reliance on automation risks atrophying our skills.   [24:59] The benefit of enhancing cognitive capabilities, not just reducing costs.   [26:16] The long broken agreement about work between employers and employees.   [27:38] Gen Z seeks mission, meaningful work, and mentorship since there is no job security.   [28:04] Empathy is necessary to connect with employees and understand their mentoring needs.   [28:55] Leaders must not rely on individual intelligence but shift to collective intelligence.   [30:34] Heather predicts AI will disrupt cognitive work much like electrification disrupted labor.   [31:28] Heather connects rising polarization with declines in socialization and greater loneliness.   [32:08] How our brains are shaped for agitation because of our solitude.   [33:00] Workplaces serving as essential social trust-building spaces.   [34:32] Leaders must build trust through authenticity, logic, and empathy.   [35:30] The compelling letter Airbnb's CEO wrote to employees being laid off.   [37:36] Being transparent about the challenges of fast-changing circumstances.   [38:16] Human-centered policies which optimize for thriving employees improve retention and financial performance.   [40:45] When leaders reach a very senior level in organizations their empathy decreases.   [42:47] Heather encourages reweaving the social fabric to foster collaborative exploration.   [44:16] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: Talk with coworkers about shared values. Ask how they're doing, if they're getting enough sleep, if they're working on a project that is meaningful to them. Share experiences where you've been able to bounce forward, not back. Your job is to help your team adapt to change and become the next best version of themselves.       RESOURCES   Heather McGowan on LinkedIn Heather's website Leading the Day After article Sven Hansen and the Reliance Institute Letter from Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, to employees Frances Frei, HBS Professor       QUOTES   “We need to start taking longer strides and putting greater visions out there and say it's going to be hard, but it's going to be worth it."   "Trust comes down to three things. Authenticity, logic, and empathy. So authenticity is do people experience the real you? Do they feel like you're giving them the honest approach when you're delivering things to you, or are you putting on a Persona? Logic is, do you have a sound theory of what you're asking people to do? Ability to communicate, a division of where the organization is trying to go? And then do you demonstrate that you care what that work means to the individual?"   “Now, most leaders are leading teams of people who have skills and knowledge they do not have at least some of them, and it may not even be within their group. So you can't lead with Individual intelligence, you have to lead with collective intelligence. You cannot get collective intelligence without empathy. So that's the first piece of how we need to lead differently.”   “If we only use technology to replace what humans currently do, it's a race to the bottom. If we only let humans get lazy by using ChatGPT, we will lose. What we need to do is ‘Where is the ability to enhance? Where can I become better? Where can I make my organizational capacity stronger, greater, more resilient?”   “The promise and the agreement on work, the tacit agreement we've had for work has changed. It really became the last promise for the Boomers was ‘I trade my loyalty to an organization for the security of employment'. That promise has been broken for many decades, But the organizations that are still expecting that loyalty, that be it not providing that promise of security, have to realize they have to provide something else.”   “I think what Gen Z is pushing for, which I think a lot of folks are on board with, is instead, I know I'm not going to get security. So I want three things. I want mission. I want to be part an organization that's trying to do something big and hard and meaningful. I want to be part of something bigger than myself essentially. I want meaningful work.”

Brenton Duhan grew up between North Carolina and Kandern, Germany--home to two distinct and rich pottery traditions. Brenton studied at Brown University and RISD in Providence, practiced museum exhibit design in DC, and gave tours and made ceramics in New Orleans before moving to New Haven, Connecticut. Brenton is currently maintaining a ceramic practice while studying architecture at Yale University. http://ThePottersCast.com/1069

Jia Sung is a Singaporean Chinese artist and educator whose practice spans painting, artist books, textiles, printmaking, writing, and translation. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert conventional archetypes of femininity, queerness and otherness. Her recent work explores threads of ecofeminism, ethnoecology, the ecological capacities of the body, invasive species as family, and the potentials of collective and constant human transformation through interspecies dynamics. Her approach draws from that of the Chinese zhiguai tradition, that genre of ‘strange tales' cannot be translated directly through the lens of horror. The supernatural, the monstrous, the spiritual, seep into the tidy confines of ordinary existence, often humorous, arbitrary, smearing at the boundaries of our reality and then slinking away just as rapidly. Here is shapeshifter, here is trickster, things that inhabit liminal space and refuse to be held in place or form; the profane invades the interior, wilderness enters the domestic space, phenomena defy causation and morality, creature refutes taxonomy. Topics Discussed In This Episode:  Jia's childhood, early influences, and why she chose to dedicate her life to the arts (00:06:14) Formative books, films, and mythologies for Jia, Jennifer, and Yoshino (00:08:05) Art as a lifestyle and sketching/journaling as a form of expression (00:15:52) Jia explains her experiences going to RISD (00:17:03) Teaching art and guiding students – Jia shares her approach to teaching, focusing on personal expression over technique (00:18:46) Returning to unfinished work (00:22:42) Balancing chaos and creativity – reflections on how emotional turmoil can fuel or take away from creative work (00:28:11) Identity, ego, and output in art – how artists' identities are tied to their creative output and the challenges that brings (00:33:32) Discussing various levels of consciousness (00:40:44) Challenges of art school and institutional expectations – Jia reflects on the pressures and baggage that come from a formal art education (00:43:48) Breaking away from art jargon and structured critique to find a personal voice (00:54:27)  Lightheartedly discussing astrology (01:04:04) The Artist Decoded Tarot and Jia's “The Trickster's Journey” tarot (01:10:27) Discussing the potential future of AI (01:18:17)  Jia's advice to her younger self (01:30:41) Episode co-host: Jennifer Sodini artistdecoded.com jia-sung.com instagram.com/jiazilla

Please welcome Chris Baer to the Clocking Out podcast. Chris Baer is the founder of the Mandala Institute, an organization that helps leaders create humanistic and innovation culture in teams and companies. He is an expert on innovation strategy, engaging and growing talent through coaching, as well as design methodologies.Chris is also a co-founder of Sunstone Therapies, an early-stage medical company dedicated to alleviating emotional distress in patients through trial psychedelic therapies. Chris also played a key role in the creation of the Bill Richard's Center for Healing, a state of the art facility designed expressly for psychedelic therapy in the medical setting.Prior to Mandala and Sunstone, Chris served as Vice President of Global Leadership Development and Learning Experience at Marriott International overseeing talent and executive development. In other Marriott roles, Chris led customer experience initiatives encompassing brand and digital consumer product development. Contributions included brand creation (Moxy), brand revitalization (Marriott Hotels), and customer experience strategy and execution (the Ritz-Carlton), as well as the development of Marriott's enterprise innovation framework.Prior to Marriott, Chris led an international marketing firm, and consulted to Fortune 100's on digital strategy, product management and user experience.Formally trained as an industrial designer at RISD, Chris employs design methodologies to business challenges and has brought design thinking to executives and their product teams globally.Chris holds a leadership coaching certification from Georgetown University's Institute for Transformational Leadership (cohort 45), and coaches top executives seeking to bring forth transformation within themselves, their enterprises and beyond.An internationally acclaimed artist, Chris is also a contemporary abstract painter and creates works in glass and mixed media.Chris lives in Washington DC with his family.Visit: www.Mandala.InstituteConnect with Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cdbaer/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Mandala-Chris-Baer Follow Careerminds: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/careermindsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/careerminds/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CareermindsYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@CareermindsVisit Raymond's website: https://www.raymondlee.co/Order Clocking Out: A Stress-Free Guide to Career Transitions: https://www.amazon.com/Clocking-Out-Stress-Free-Career-Transitions/dp/1586446541 Follow Raymond: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondmlee/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/raymondlee.coTiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clockingoutpodX: http://twitter.com/hrentrepreneurYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@clockingoutwithraymondlee/videosBecome a guest on Clocking Out: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeSTQmww_Gvld1zfLzTmS16PDfZvltFna7Gh6iSYehL-maUvA/viewform

Our guest this week is Annie Kairaba, founder of Rwanda Initiative for Sustainable Development (RISD). We discuss her personal journey and what makes Rwanda's civil society unique. We also delve into the role civil society can play in resolving conflicts like those in Eastern DRC.Listen to the Long Form with Sanny Ntayombya podcast on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/rw/podcast...Listen to the Long Form with Sanny Ntayombya podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7HkkUi4...Follow Long Form with Sanny Ntayombya on Twitter: https://x.com/TheLongFormRwFollow Long Form with Sanny Ntayombya on Instagram: / thelongformrw  Follow Long Form with Sanny Ntayombya on TikTok: /   / longformrw  Follow Sanny Ntayombya on Twitter: https://x.com/SannyNtayombya About Long Form with Sanny Ntayombya:The Long Form with Sanny Ntayombya is a weekly podcast intent on keeping you up to date with current affairs in Rwanda. The topics discussed range from politics, business, sports to entertainment. If you want to share your thoughts on the topics I discuss use the hashtag #LongFormRw on Twitter and follow us on Twitter and Instagram on our handle @TheLongFormRwBe a part of the conversation.

ABOUT DANNY KIM: 20+ years of vehicle architecture & prototype development. Inventor w/ 65 issued int'l patents, 22 USPTOs. Focus of HBS case study: Industrial design & sustainable transportation. Former Land Rover mechanic, machinist, woodworker, welder, and vehicle integrator. Reed College, UCB, RISD, & Media Lab. LINKS: LIT MotorsWefunder Flickr Instagram YouTube TOOLS: 0:00 – Intro 1:19 – 48″ Margining steel lead screw shaft Rockwell 52 (AKA Handy File) 7:48 – Spectrum 375 Plasma Cutter (1/2″ lightsaber “Scissors') 14:35 – Edwards 65 Ton Ironworker 16:07 – Miller MIG Welder 23:58 – Maybe cardboard would be a prototyping tool 23:49 – LIT Motors prototype Watch on YouTube   For show notes and transcript visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/danny-kim-inventor/

Joe Gebbia's journey began in Georgia, where his early interest in sports led him to work as a ball boy for the Atlanta Hawks. However, his true passion lay in art, earning him the nickname "art guy" in school as he spent countless hours drawing from comic books. This passion led him to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he discovered industrial design and the work of Charles and Ray Eames. A pivotal moment came when a professor doubted his art project, but Joe secured school funding and proved the professor wrong, showcasing his early entrepreneurial spirit.At RISD, Joe met Brian Chesky, and he felt an instant connection, believing they would create something significant together. After graduation, Joe moved to San Francisco and convinced Brian to join him, leading to the creation of Airbnb. Faced with skepticism and rejection from investors and law firms, Joe drew on his art background to reframe challenges as opportunities. This resilience paid off as Airbnb became a global phenomenon, changing how people travel and connect.Joe's journey at Airbnb taught him invaluable leadership lessons and underscored the importance of creativity and innovation. His artistic sensibility helped him approach problems with a fresh perspective, leading to the creation of Samara, a venture focused on reimagining home design. After Airbnb went public, Joe branched Samara out as a separate company, recognizing the potential in the Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) space.Beyond Airbnb, Joe relocated to Austin, Texas, becoming a minority owner of the San Antonio Spurs and aligning his entrepreneurial pursuits with his passion for sports. Committed to making a positive impact, Joe is passionate about causes such as homelessness and environmental sustainability. He also helped establish the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, reflecting his commitment to fostering creativity and innovation. Joe Gebbia's story is one of resilience, creativity, and a relentless pursuit of dreams, inspiring others to embrace their passions and challenge the status quo.*The Founder Hour is brought to you by Outer. Outer makes the world's most beautiful, comfortable, innovative, and high-quality outdoor furniture - ALL from sustainable materials - and is the ONLY outdoor furniture with a patented built-in cover to make protecting it effortless. From teak chairs to fire pit tables, everything Outer makes has the look and feel of what you'd expect at a 5-star resort, for less than you'd pay at a big box store for something that won't last. For a limited time, get 10% off at www.liveouter.com/thefounderhour. Terms and conditions apply.Customers are flocking to your store—do you have a reliable point-of-sale system? Shopify POS is your retail command center, handling payments, inventory, and more. Choose from hardware options like smartphone, tablet, or Shopify's POS Go device. With award-winning support, Shopify helps you succeed every step of the way. Get started with a $1/month trial at www.shopify.com/founderhour.Still using your personal phone number for your startup in 2024? OpenPhone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for your team with an app that works on both phone and computer. It integrates with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, and offers AI-powered call transcripts and summaries. Plus, your whole team can access the same number. Start at $15/user/month, but The Founder Hour listeners get 20% off for 6 months. Visit https://www.openphone.com/founder to start your free trial!Stressed, sleepless, or need a health boost? Try Magnesium Breakthrough from BiOptimizers! It's the only supplement with 7 types of magnesium, each with unique benefits like muscle recovery, heart health, and energy production. All-natural, vegan, and gluten-free. Visit www.bioptimizers.com/founderhour and use code FOUNDERHOUR for 10% off. ***Follow The Founder Hour on:Instagram | www.instagram.com/thefounderhourTwitter/X | www.x.com/thefounderhourLinkedIn | www.linkedin.com/company/thefounderhourYouTube | www.youtube.com/@thefounderhour

Think about the skills needed to create a paint color which matches a cat's coat and another which transforms the steel I-Beams of a major transit hub. That describes the color chops of Architectural Color Consultant Eve Ashcraft. She came to NYC after attending RISD and with her unique color skills became the creator of Martha Stewart's original paint line as well as  the color-meister of Moynihan Train Hall in NYC. Through the decades, her prowess in the field and her client base grew to include esteemed commercial clients and countless residential home owners. Meet Eve and hear about her journey through the world of color.

Debi Cornwall is a multimedia documentary artist who returned to visual expression after a 12-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Her work explores the performance of power, citizenship and identity through still and moving images, sound, testimony, and archival material.While completing a degree in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Debi studied photography at RISD. After working for photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Sylvia Plachy, as an AP stringer, and as an investigator for the federal public defender's office, she attended Harvard Law School and practiced as a wrongful conviction attorney for more than a decade, also training as a mediator. Exhaustive research and negotiation were critical to her advocacy and remain integral to her visual practice.Debi was awarded the 2023 Prix Elysée, a biennial juried contemporary photography prize created by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland with the support of Parmigiani Fleurier. The award enabled her to complete Model Citizens, now a book in English and French editions (Radius/Textuel) and an exhibition at the 2024 Rencontres d'Arles festival. She is also a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Individual Artist Grantee in film, a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in photography, and inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award winner. Debi's work has been profiled in publications including Art in America, European Photography Magazine, British Journal of Photography, the New York Times Magazine, and Hyperallergic, and is held in public and private collections around the world.Debi has published two previous books, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay and Necessary Fictions. She is also an ICP faculty member, teaching students how to plumb deeper layers in their work, and consults independently with artists developing long-term projects. In episode 235, Debi discusses, among other things:Winning the Prix ElyséeHer path into a legal career in civil rightsThe ightbulb moment that took her to Guantanamo BayWorking around restrictions imposed“The performance of American power”Her secoond book Necessary FictionsHer films Pineland/Hollywood and Jade HelmHer latest book Model Citizens Website | Instagram“I don't think it's a thread in the work so much as something that I'm really sitting with personally and creatively, but I have this advocate self who is outraged and frustrated at what is happening in our societies. And I have a trained mediator in me, which is more consistent with my creative approach, who thinks none of this changes unless we can really talk to each other across these divides; unless we can accept each other's humanity and hear each other. Because that isn't happening.” Become a full tier 1 member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of previous episodes for £5 per month.For the tier 2 archive-only membership, to access the full library of past episodes for £3 per month, go here.

We're taking the summer off and will be republishing some of our favorite episodes from the archives through August. This episode originally aired October 28, 2020. — Alicia Cheng is a founding partner of the New York design studio MGMT and the author of the book This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot. She previously worked as a designer for Method, was a co-design director at the Cooper Hewitt, and is currently an external critic for the MFA program at RISD. In this episode, Jarrett and Alicia talk about how the design of ballots can teach us about the United States's uneasy relationship with voting, mixing design history with American history, and how research feeds her design practice. Alicia is currently the design director at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. — Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm/165-alicia-cheng. 
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Bill Bartholomew discusses some of the big issues of the day, including Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo's visit to Newport for the groundbreaking of a new NOAA facility, RISD students join the worldwide campus protests and the cost of Washington Bridge project balloons to nearly half a billion dollars.Support the Show.