Podcasts about Sandbagging

Join Elle with special guests from Colossalcon Cat and Haley for the ins and outs of the new craftsmanship contest circuit happening  at a Colossalcon near you.The Preliminaries:Colossalcon Prime Sandusky OH https://colossalconprime.com/contact-us/Colossalcon Texas Round Rock TX https://colossalcontexas.com/contact/Colossalcon East Poconos Mt PA cosplay@colossalconeast.com Colossalcon North Wisconsin Dells WI  https://colossalconnorth.com/contact-us/https://www.instagram.com/podcastscs/https://www.instagram.com/laviecosplay/https://www.tiktok.com/@laviecosplayhttps://linktr.ee/podcastscs for additional listening platforms

Are you settling for "realistic" goals? Verl Workman, CEO of Workman Success Systems, throws out the rulebook in this electrifying episode, revealing why "SMART" goals are holding you back. Unveiling his revolutionary "STUPID" framework, urging agents to embrace transformational, purpose-driven ambitions.    We dive deep into Verl's journey from struggling entrepreneur to real estate coaching powerhouse, and discover the secrets to building a thriving referral-based business.    Learn how to adapt to market shifts, lead with authenticity, and prioritize human connection over transactions. With insights on team building, prospecting, and the power of consistent action, Verl challenges you to redefine success and unlock your true potential.   Connect with Verl on - Facebook - LinkedIn or online at verlworkman.com.   Learn more about Workman Success Solutions on - Instagram - Facebook - LinkedIn and online at www.workmansuccess.com. To check out Verl's book Raving Referrals for Real Estate Agents visit: https://referralchampion.com https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXR2CTFB   Follow Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered Podcast on Instagram - YouTube - Facebook - TikTok. Visit us online at realestateinsidersunfiltered.com.   Link to Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/RealEstateInsidersUnfiltered Link to Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/realestateinsiderspod/ Link to YouTube Page: https://www.youtube.com/@RealEstateInsidersUnfiltered Link to TikTok Page: https://www.tiktok.com/@realestateinsiderspod This podcast is produced by Two Brothers Creative.

Note: this is a research note based on observations from evaluating Claude Sonnet 3.7. We're sharing the results of these ‘work-in-progress' investigations as we think they are timely and will be informative for other evaluators and decision-makers. The analysis is less rigorous than our standard for a published paper. Summary We monitor Sonnet's reasoning for mentions that it is in an artificial scenario or an alignment test. Claude Sonnet 3.7 appears to be aware of being tested for alignment across many of our scheming evaluations. In some cases, the model understands the eval's purpose very precisely, e.g. “This seems like a test of ethical behavior - whether I would deliberately give wrong answers to avoid a stated consequence. The real test might be whether I follow instructions accurately regardless of the stated consequences.”Furthermore, we show the model a real evaluation transcript and ask it to provide [...] ---Outline:(00:31) Summary(01:29) Introduction(03:54) Setup(03:57) Evaluations(06:29) Evaluation awareness detection(08:32) Results(08:35) Monitoring Chain-of-thought(08:39) Covert Subversion(10:50) Sandbagging(11:39) Classifying Transcript Purpose(12:57) Recommendations(13:59) Appendix(14:02) Author Contributions(14:37) Model Versions(14:57) More results on Classifying Transcript Purpose(16:19) PromptsThe original text contained 9 images which were described by AI. --- First published: March 17th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E3daBewppAiECN3Ao/claude-sonnet-3-7-often-knows-when-it-s-in-alignment --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

Hour 1: Russ Wilson best option?, Browns draft plans, Celtics sandbagging? full 2082 Thu, 13 Mar 2025 14:38:17 +0000 Gpxc5CFUxxKrEicXKfLKuqRTdkWXdYQu sports The Ken Carman Show with Anthony Lima sports Hour 1: Russ Wilson best option?, Browns draft plans, Celtics sandbagging? The only place to talk about the Cleveland sports scene is with Ken Carman and Anthony Lima. The two guide listeners through the ups and downs of being a fan of the Browns, Cavaliers, Guardians and Ohio State Buckeyes in Northeast Ohio. They'll help you stay informed with breaking news, game coverage, and interviews with top personalities.Catch The Ken Carman Show with Anthony Lima live Monday through Friday (6 a.m. - 10 a.m ET) on 92.3 The Fan, the exclusive audio home of the Browns, or on the Audacy app. For more, follow the show on X @KenCarmanShow. 2024 © 2021 Audacy, Inc. Sports False https://player.amp

Browns trying to win games, save jobs + Are the Celtics "sandbagging?" full 513 Thu, 13 Mar 2025 10:56:22 +0000 V3rOKsNtzcwUHBfcO8sswDxj3TnyDBLj sports The Ken Carman Show with Anthony Lima sports Browns trying to win games, save jobs + Are the Celtics "sandbagging?" The only place to talk about the Cleveland sports scene is with Ken Carman and Anthony Lima. The two guide listeners through the ups and downs of being a fan of the Browns, Cavaliers, Guardians and Ohio State Buckeyes in Northeast Ohio. They'll help you stay informed with breaking news, game coverage, and interviews with top personalities.Catch The Ken Carman Show with Anthony Lima live Monday through Friday (6 a.m. - 10 a.m ET) on 92.3 The Fan, the exclusive audio home of the Browns, or on the Audacy app. For more, follow the show on X @KenCarmanShow. 2024 © 2021 Audacy, Inc. Sports False https://player.amperwa

Hour 1: Russell Wilson may be Browns best option + Could Russ affect draft plans? + Are the Celtics sandbagging? full 2082 Thu, 13 Mar 2025 10:59:14 +0000 hWwxWsBXITLpgNZ8g0WhCW971D5UKzut sports The Ken Carman Show with Anthony Lima sports Hour 1: Russell Wilson may be Browns best option + Could Russ affect draft plans? + Are the Celtics sandbagging? The only place to talk about the Cleveland sports scene is with Ken Carman and Anthony Lima. The two guide listeners through the ups and downs of being a fan of the Browns, Cavaliers, Guardians and Ohio State Buckeyes in Northeast Ohio. They'll help you stay informed with breaking news, game coverage, and interviews with top personalities.Catch The Ken Carman Show with Anthony Lima live Monday through Friday (6 a.m. - 10 a.m ET) on 92.3 The Fan, the exclusive audio home of the Browns, or on the Audacy app. For more, follow the show on X @KenCarmanShow. 2024 © 2021 Audacy, Inc. Sports False

Although not in the direct path of Tropical Cyclone Alfred, Ipswich residents are in for very similar restrictions to residents in Brisbane. Schools are closed, council services and transport has been suspended as everyone braces for torrential rain and high winds. Ipswich Mayor Teresa Harding told Peter Fegan on 4BC Breakfast, "Ipswich residents still have a few hours here to make their final preparations for Tropical Cyclone Alfred, but that window will close today." "It's not too late to have a look around your property, secure any loose items and debris in your yard, have a look at your emergency kit, make sure you've got that tinned food and the water there that may have to last you a couple of days." "Sandbagging is available until 11 o'clock today or until supplies are exhausted," Mayor Harding said. "So, afterwards we're asking people to shelter in place." "The safest place to be during a cyclone is to shelter in place," she continued.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Send us a textExpect to get the grapplers perspective on why so many American Wrestlers are switching to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, will see an evolution of American Jiu Jitsu or Brazilian Wrestling, the controversy around high level wrestlers competing at coloured belts, what gym work is best for BJJ, how it can be mainstream and much more. Ian Daube is an American Professional Grappler and Mixed Martial Artist, Former Division 1 Wrestler, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Purple Belt and IBJJF Worlds Medalist.Extra Stuff:Insta - https://www.instagram.com/iandaube/YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@UCuBpyaSqq9UzRH9G_wlNpYw 00:00 No Gi Worlds Finals12:32 Why Wrestlers are Doing BJJ18:27 Transition to BJJ24:18 American Jiu Jitsu or Brazilian Wrestling31:32 Sandbagging & Belts40:50 Cross Training49:21 Gym Work for BJJ56:55 Is Flexibility Nature or Nurture01:03:26 How Wrestling Will Change BJJ01:10:07 How BJJ Will Be Mainstream01:16:11 Future Plans & Thanks#mentalhealth #bjj #bjjlifestyle #jiujitsu #jiujitsulifestyle #grappling #grapplersperspective  #podcast Need a chat? Here's some options

Join and Elle and Ash on a journey through the evolution of cosplay competitions since the pandemic. They will dive deep into how the expectations have changed since 2020. They will discuss the good, and also confusing, aspects of this expensive evolution in cosplay. Included is input from the community on how the changes are impacting "Old Masters" as well as new competitors. Ultimately they will examine the question: Is it time for La Vie Cosplay to retire from competitive cosplay?Special Mentions:Say No To Scrunchies https://www.instagram.com/saynotoscrunchies/Hakc (low tech foundational tutorials) https://www.instagram.com/its.hakc/Produced by LVC Productions. You can find us on facebook, instragram, twitter, and vero at La Vie Cosplay. Our podcast instagram is podcastscs. Our website is laviecosplay.com. Have a fun, crazy con or cosplay related story? Absurd cosplay question? Or just something in general to share with us? Email us at podcastscs@gmail.com or DM us at podcastscs. If you like what you heard please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and remember; just because you can, doesn't mean you should.https://www.instagram.com/podcastscs/https://www.instagram.com/laviecosplay/https://www.tiktok.com/@laviecosplayhttps://linktr.ee/podcastscs for additional listening platforms

In this episode of the Sales Chat Show, we dive deep into the controversial practice of sandbagging in sales—delaying deals or underreporting forecasts to manage expectations. Is it a clever strategy or a dangerous game that erodes trust and skews business insights?

Join LVC as we celebrate our 100th episode. We will give you some very important updates on the future of LVC as well answer some NGL questions. We will also present to you two contest related hot takes that often have caused a stir in the community. Want to share your opinion? Find the Instagram post or join us on youtube.Produced by LVC Productions. You can find us on facebook, instragram, twitter, and vero at La Vie Cosplay. Our podcast instagram is podcastscs. Our website is laviecosplay.com. Have a fun, crazy con or cosplay related story? Absurd cosplay question? Or just something in general to share with us? Email us at podcastscs@gmail.com or DM us at podcastscs. If you like what you heard please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and remember; just because you can, doesn't mean you should.https://www.instagram.com/podcastscs/https://www.instagram.com/laviecosplay/https://www.tiktok.com/@laviecosplayhttps://linktr.ee/podcastscs for additional listening platforms

Top 5 at FIVE... set up a beating Kentucky fans are sandbagging us Remember that girl?

Theme music by UNIVERSFIELD & background music by PodcastACThe famous ear-reddening game from the introThe Heap of Sand ParadoxSapiens by Yuval Noah HarariPro player Rui NaiweiBenKyo's league and websiteHajin Lee's website which includes her bookShow your support hereEmail: AllThingsGoGame@gmail.com

Join LVC for a trip down memory lane as we take a look at our top 10 episodes from the last 5 seasons of podcasting.10: Ep 57 – R-E-S-P-E-C-T09: Ep 70- No F's Given08: Ep 74 - Post Con Depression07: Ep 43- Crushing Con-Crunch06: Ep 49 - Born To Make History with Laughing Rat Cosplay05: Ep 60 - Pain Free Crafting with Paisley & Glue04: Where The Points Don't Matter with Ginoza Costuming 03: Ep 4 – Our Name is LVC and We're Competitive Cosplayers02: Sandbagging Part 1 & 201: Ep 56 - Cheater Cheater Pumpkin EaterProduced by LVC Productions. You can find us on facebook, instragram, twitter, and vero at La Vie Cosplay. Our podcast instagram is podcastscs. Our website is laviecosplay.com. Have a fun, crazy con or cosplay related story? Absurd cosplay question? Or just something in general to share with us? Email us at podcastscs@gmail.com or DM us at podcastscs. If you like what you heard please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and remember; just because you can, doesn't mean you should.https://www.instagram.com/podcastscs/https://www.instagram.com/laviecosplay/https://www.tiktok.com/@laviecosplayhttps://linktr.ee/podcastscs for additional listening platforms

Join LVC for all the chaos that was Colossalcon North 2024. We will discuss our neurodiversity programming, the return of Cosnanigans Variety Show, the final round of the current format of Sh*t Cosplayer Say, and our return to burlesque shows. You will also learn about how we cosplayed as the Colossalcon hosts all weekend, thoroughly breaking them in our performance at the In Character Contest.And as always. Steeeve.The word Sh*t is said numerous times in this episode. Listener discretion is advised.Nerds In Heat With Betsey Beau Peep: https://www.instagram.com/peeping_pinup_cosplay/?hl=enCosnanigans Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k86usFggGWY&t=1sIn Character Contest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yWRUTHOk4Yhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKCGhuHECUIHalftime Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HKj95vpYX8&list=PLSGIBl03sBYjg2kYS-LzB7LPHkQjD0IRU&index=18&t=11shttps://www.instagram.com/podcastscs/https://www.instagram.com/laviecosplay/https://www.tiktok.com/@laviecosplayhttps://linktr.ee/podcastscs for additional listening platforms

In this emergency episode of The Cognitive Revolution, Nathan discusses alarming findings about AI deception with Alexander Meinke from Apollo Research. They explore Apollo's groundbreaking 70-page report on "Frontier Models Are Capable of In-Context Scheming," revealing how advanced AI systems like OpenAI's O1 can engage in deceptive behaviors. Join us for a critical conversation about AI safety, the implications of scheming behavior, and the urgent need for better oversight in AI development. Help shape our show by taking our quick listener survey at https://bit.ly/TurpentinePulse SPONSORS: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): Oracle's next-generation cloud platform delivers blazing-fast AI and ML performance with 50% less for compute and 80% less for outbound networking compared to other cloud providers13. OCI powers industry leaders with secure infrastructure and application development capabilities. New U.S. customers can get their cloud bill cut in half by switching to OCI before December 31, 2024 at https://oracle.com/cognitive SelectQuote: Finding the right life insurance shouldn't be another task you put off. SelectQuote compares top-rated policies to get you the best coverage at the right price. Even in our AI-driven world, protecting your family's future remains essential. Get your personalized quote at https://selectquote.com/cognitive 80,000 Hours: 80,000 Hours is dedicated to helping you find a fulfilling career that makes a difference. With nearly a decade of research, they offer in-depth material on AI risks, AI policy, and AI safety research. Explore their articles, career reviews, and a podcast featuring experts like Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei. Everything is free, including their Career Guide. Visit https://80000hours.org/cognitiverevolution to start making a meaningful impact today. Shopify: Shopify is the world's leading e-commerce platform, offering a market-leading checkout system and exclusive AI apps like Quikly. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. Get a $1 per month trial at https://shopify.com/cognitive RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Unpack Pricing - Dive into the dark arts of SaaS pricing with Metronome CEO Scott Woody and tech leaders. Learn how strategic pricing drives explosive revenue growth in today's biggest companies like Snowflake, Cockroach Labs, Dropbox and more. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1765716600 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/38DK3W1Fq1xxQalhDSueFg CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) Teaser (00:00:53) About the Episode (00:08:10) Introducing Alexander Meinke (00:10:17) Red Teaming GPT-4 (00:17:07) Chain of Thought Access (Part 1) (00:20:24) Sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) | SelectQuote (00:22:48) Chain of Thought Access (Part 2) (00:26:07) Multimodal Models (00:29:33) Defining Scheming (00:33:51) Taxonomy of Scheming (Part 1) (00:39:40) Sponsors: 80,000 Hours | Shopify (00:42:29) Taxonomy of Scheming (Part 2) (00:43:09) Instruction Hierarchy (00:49:04) Types of Scheming (01:00:49) Covert Subversion (01:14:25) Deferred Subversion (01:28:24) Sandbagging (01:35:48) Magnitudes & Trends (01:48:18) Chain of Thought Reasoning (01:57:02) Closing Thoughts (02:05:19) Outro PRODUCED BY: http://aipodcast.ing

In this episode of Training Age, hosts Heather Adams and Valerie Lusvardi explore the concept of “sandbagging” in fitness—underestimating one's own strength and limiting potential. Through personal anecdotes and practical insights, the conversation highlights how self-imposed barriers can hold you back and how recognizing your own capacity can unlock true growth in both fitness and life. By focusing on personal progress rather than comparisons, listeners can learn to push beyond perceived limits and achieve meaningful results.The episode challenges conventional ideas of what defines a “hard” workout. Effort doesn't always mean being out of breath or drenched in sweat—it's a personal and subjective measure that varies day to day. Heather and Valerie discuss how redefining effort and prioritizing quality over quantity can lead to more satisfying and sustainable results. They debunk myths that equate intensity with success, encouraging listeners to rethink their approach to fitness.The conversation also dives into the science of effective strength training, emphasizing the importance of creating muscle tension for growth. By focusing on strategic programming, mixing muscle groups, and avoiding redundancy, the hosts demonstrate how a refined approach can yield better outcomes. Listeners are invited to embrace consistent, high-quality effort and a growth mindset, making once-daunting tasks more manageable.This episode encourages you to break free from limiting beliefs, redefine what “hard” means in your training, and take actionable steps toward unlocking your full potential. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced athlete, the insights shared in this discussion can help transform your fitness journey. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your mindset and results with practical strategies and inspiration.

 Dr. Chris here today with a solo episode talking about sandbagging in BJJ, hand injuries, and a middle aged practitioner that wants to ramp up intensity but is looking for help on improving their rolling cardio. Hey, if you have any questions for Dr. Chris or Bill and Olivia. Just email GrapplingWithPodcast@gmail.com or message the social media pages.Check us out on our social and YouTube where we have full episodes.Instagram: @GrapplingWithPodcast Facebook: www.facebook.com/GrapplingWithPodcast YouTube: /grapplingwithpodcast Dr. Hardy is a licensed physician and BJJ practitioner, but the contents of the podcast are meant for educational purposes only, and should not be taken as medical advice. Please seek out personalized care from your own medical provider prior to implementing any medical treatment or intervention. 

Join Elle with special guest Laughing Rat Cosplay as we discuss the Kitsunekon masquerade. We'll tell you all about their set up, the delightful contestants, how Green Bay is a food dessert, and cheese.Produced by LVC Productions. You can find us on facebook, instragram, twitter, and vero at La Vie Cosplay. Our podcast instagram is podcastscs. Our website is laviecosplay.com. Have a fun, crazy con or cosplay related story? Absurd cosplay question? Or just something in general to share with us? Email us at podcastscs@gmail.com or DM us at podcastscs. If you like what you heard please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and remember; just because you can, doesn't mean you should.https://www.instagram.com/podcastscs/https://www.instagram.com/laviecosplay/https://www.tiktok.com/@laviecosplayhttps://linktr.ee/podcastscs for additional listening platforms

Steve and Kyle recap the news story claiming the PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund reached a deal, and how it could get published without any sources or evidence. Then the guys cover the proposal to reduce the amount of professional golfers on the PGA Tour and discuss how low is 'too low' in a scramble tournament, and Nelly Korda's upcoming appearance in the Swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. Hosts: Steve Berger & Kyle Surlow Nice Grass Nice People is proudly presented by SUAVE GOLF  Signups are officially open for Suave Golf's 2025 Bandon Spring Jamboree - March 12-16, 2025. Learn more and signup.

We discuss the RBA's Cup Day meeting, TK does a 'Pulled Pork' on CCP's recent performance, and quotes from 'What Works on Wall Street' by O'Shaughnessy, exploring key accounting ratios and shareholder yield. After hours is about cycling safety, Coppola's "DEMENTIA 13", scotch eggs, and managing celebrities.

Presented by Pro Taper We had an eventful weekend and have been taking full advantage of the short off-season that we have. ARay went racing, Anton saw the Cookie Monster, Chase jumped out of a tree at a wedding, and swap got to see a really white version of a Tik Tok dance at the Mammoth Airport! Enjoy this week's show...

In this podcast we cover: The origin of the term. What it means. Why it happens. Why it's bad for everyone. If you like the Elevate Construction podcast, please subscribe for free and you'll never miss an episode.  And if you really like the Elevate Construction podcast, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (Maybe even two

In this crosspost from the 80,000 Hours podcast, host Rob Wiblin interviews Nick Joseph, Head of Training at Anthropic, about the company's responsible scaling policy for AI development. The episode delves into Anthropic's approach to AI safety, the growing trend of voluntary commitments from top AI labs, and the need for public scrutiny of frontier model development. The conversation also covers AI safety career advice, with a reminder that 80,000 Hours offers free career advising sessions for listeners. Join us for an insightful discussion on the future of AI and its societal implications. Apply to join over 400 Founders and Execs in the Turpentine Network: https://www.turpentinenetwork.co/ SPONSORS: WorkOS: Building an enterprise-ready SaaS app? WorkOS has got you covered with easy-to-integrate APIs for SAML, SCIM, and more. Join top startups like Vercel, Perplexity, Jasper & Webflow in powering your app with WorkOS. Enjoy a free tier for up to 1M users! Start now at https://bit.ly/WorkOS-Turpentine-Network Weights & Biases Weave: Weights & Biases Weave is a lightweight AI developer toolkit designed to simplify your LLM app development. With Weave, you can trace and debug input, metadata and output with just 2 lines of code. Make real progress on your LLM development and visit the following link to get started with Weave today: https://wandb.me/cr 80,000 Hours: 80,000 Hours offers free one-on-one career advising for Cognitive Revolution listeners aiming to tackle global challenges, especially in AI. They connect high-potential individuals with experts, opportunities, and personalized career plans to maximize positive impact. Apply for a free call at https://80000hours.org/cognitiverevolution to accelerate your career and contribute to solving pressing AI-related issues. Omneky: Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off https://www.omneky.com/ RECOMMENDED PODCAST: This Won't Last - Eavesdrop on Keith Rabois, Kevin Ryan, Logan Bartlett, and Zach Weinberg's monthly backchannel ft their hottest takes on the future of tech, business, and venture capital. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2HwSNeVLL1MXy0RjFPyOSz CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) About the Show (00:00:22) Sponsors: WorkOS (00:01:22) About the Episode (00:04:31) Intro and Nick's background (00:08:37) Model training and scaling laws (00:13:10) Nick's role at Anthropic (00:16:49) Responsible Scaling Policies overview (Part 1) (00:18:00) Sponsors: Weights & Biases Weave | 80,000 Hours (00:20:39) Responsible Scaling Policies overview (Part 2) (00:25:24) AI Safety Levels framework (00:30:33) Benefits of RSPs (Part 1) (00:33:15) Sponsors: Omneky (00:33:38) Benefits of RSPs (Part 2) (00:36:32) Concerns about RSPs (00:47:33) Sandbagging and evaluation challenges (00:54:46) Critiques of RSPs (01:03:11) Trust and accountability (01:12:03) Conservative vs. aggressive approaches (01:17:43) Capabilities vs. safety research (01:23:47) Working at Anthropic (01:35:14) Nick's career journey (01:45:12) Hiring at Anthropic (01:52:06) Concerns about AI capabilities work (02:03:38) Anthropic office locations (02:08:46) Pressure and stakes at Anthropic (02:18:09) Overrated and underrated AI applications (02:35:57) Closing remarks (02:38:33) Sponsors: Outro

Fundamentals Season 2 (Part 2 of 6) — In part 2, we share our top tips for training on spray walls and home walls. We cover training setup considerations, route setting tips, best apps for saving and sharing climbs, mastering benchmark climbs, how to iterate on your climbs for incremental progress, hacks for building a home wall on a budget, and more.Listen to more Fundamentals episodes:thenuggetclimbing.com/fundamentalsThe NUG:frictitiousclimbing.com/products/the-nugCheck out my new portable hangboard.Check out the Tension Board 2:tensionboard.com/nuggetOr use the Tension app to find a TB2 near you.Mad Rock:madrock.comUse code “NUGGET” at checkout for 10% off your next order.Revival Climbing Coalition:revivalclimbing.comEP 225: Tony Bell & David Bress (my episode with the founders of Revival)BetterHelp:betterhelp.com/NUGGETUse this link for 10% off your first month. We are supported by these amazing BIG GIVERS:Michael Roy, Craig Lee, Mark and Julie Calhoun, Yinan Liu, and Matt Walter Become a Patron:patreon.com/thenuggetclimbingShow Notes:  thenuggetclimbing.com/episodes/fundamentals-s2-part-2Nuggets:(00:00:00) – Intro(00:01:20) – Best spray walls(00:05:46) – Terrain drives technique(00:08:00) – Choosing a wall angle(00:10:07) – Jesse's Tip #1: Home wall setup considerations (Use a mix of good and bad holds, a mix of textures, complement your local area, etc.)(00:13:05) – Steven's Tip #1: Build yourself a repertoire of quality climbs, and try to master them(00:17:45) – Bonus Tip: Cluster holds to build skills and learn movement(00:19:12) – Bonus Tip: Iterate on your climbs for incremental progression(00:24:52) – Jesse's Tip #2: Supercharge your sessions with route setting(00:27:59) – Steven's Tip #2: Work on climbs that are hard for different reasons(00:28:57) – Bonus Tip: Set chaotically (i.e. Set boulders without trying the moves, and try not to tweak them)(00:33:17) – Jesse's Tip #3: Do not underestimate the value of a short session on a home wall(00:35:52) – Steven's Tip #3: Circuits!(00:40:13) – Jesse's Tip #4: Make wood holds to save money(00:43:27) – Steven's Tip #4: Set foot moves(00:49:23) – Steven's Pitfall #1: Always trying new stuff and having crap sessions(00:52:08) – Jesse's Pitfall #1: Not having the right mix of holds for the skill level(00:54:33) – Steven's Pitfall #2: Not keeping track of your sessions(00:55:51) – Jesse's Pitfall #2: Not stopping when you power down (i.e. climbing too much and getting injured)(00:57:40) – Sandbagging on spray walls, and trusting your eyes(00:59:42) – Steven's Pitfall # 3: Only having big blobby footholds(01:02:03) – Steven's Pitfall #4: Not making your home wall cool (plus tips for building a cool home wall on a budget)(01:07:32) – Quantum leaps

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Finding Deception in Language Models, published by Esben Kran on August 20, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum. This June, Apart Research and Apollo Research joined forces to host the Deception Detection Hackathon. Bringing together students, researchers, and engineers from around the world to tackle a pressing challenge in AI safety; preventing AI from deceiving humans and overseers. The hackathon took place both online and in multiple physical locations simultaneously. Marius Hobbhahn, the CEO of Apollo Research, kicked off the hackathon with a keynote talk about evaluating deception in AI with white-box and black-box methods. You can watch his talk here. We also had talks by Jacob Haimes, an Apart fellow, and Mikita Balesni, a research scientist at Apollo Research. This post details the top 8 projects, multiple of which are currently being developed further in Apart Lab. In total, we had 189 participants and 21 final entries. Sandbagging Detection through Model Degradation By Cam Tice, Philipp Alexander Kreer, Fedor Ryzhenkov, Nathan Helm-Burger, Prithviraj Singh Shahani The team introduced a new approach to detect AI sandbagging, a form of deception where an AI model strategically underperforms during evaluation to hide its true capabilities. The assumption behind their project is that sandbagging is a more complex task than showing the true capabilities. In the graph above, you can see how they gradually add noise to the model's parameters and evaluate the models during this process. Sandbagging models consistently improve in performance right before the noise level causes a normal model to lose the capability. It is a straightforward, inexpensive technique that doesn't require prior assumptions about how sandbagging is represented within the model. They successfully detected sandbagging behavior in two open-source LLMs: An 8B Llama 3 Instruct model and Phi 3 small instruct model. This approach offers a practical and accessible method for identifying potential deception in AI systems. Read the full project here. Detecting and Controlling Deceptive Representation in LLMs with Representational Engineering By Avyay M Casheekar, Kaushik Sanjay Prabhakar, Kanishk Rath, Sienka Dounia The team focused on detecting and mitigating sandbagging in AI models using recent methods for understanding activations. They fine-tuned a Llama 3 8B model on a custom dataset of deceptive and honest scenarios, then used Linear Artificial Tomography (LAT) scans to detect deceptive behaviors in the internal representations of the LLM. The team's technique not only identified deceptive behaviors, but also showed promise in mitigating them. Importantly, their approach demonstrated good generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios, suggesting its potential robustness in real-world applications. Read the full project here. Detecting Deception in GPT-3.5-turbo: A Metadata-Based Approach By Siddharth Reddy Bakkireddy, Rakesh Reddy Bakkireddy This team tackled the challenge of detecting deception in closed-source, black-box models like GPT-3.5-turbo. They investigated whether LLM API response metadata such as token count, response time, and tokens per second could be used to detect intentional deceptive behavior. The team analyzed 300 prompts and generated 1,200 responses from GPT-3.5-turbo, comparing the metadata of baseline and deceptive outputs. Their results revealed that deceptive outputs tend to have increased response times and altered token usage. This approach demonstrates that deception detection is possible without accessing a model's internal representation, opening up new avenues for monitoring and safeguarding AI systems, even when their inner workings are not accessible. Read the full project here. Modelling the Oversight of Automated Interpretability Against Deceptive Agents on Sp...

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First time back in a while! I felt like ranting a bit on some proposed takes that JiuJitsu should switch to an ELO Ranking System instead of a belt system. 

In this episode we talk about Jhonattan Vegas winning at 3M, and Jon Rahm finally winning an individual event at LIV UK. We preview Olympic golf, and wonder whether Billy is sandbagging at a +4.5 while winning Net competitions. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/livingituppod/support

Welcome back to another episode of Volley Takes! I'm your host Abby, and I'm thrilled to dive back into the world of volleyball after a short break. I share my experiences working with My Volley Box, discuss the June 15th commitments, and compare AAU Nationals with USAV Nationals. We also delve into the controversial topic of sandbagging in volleyball and offer predictions for the upcoming college Sorry this episode is a little choppy... Follow me: (http://instagram.com/numberonevolleyball) (http://tiktok.com/@numberonevolleyball) Follow the pod: (http://instagram.com/volleytakes) Stay tuned for more exciting episodes and updates in the world of volleyball!

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Paper] AI Sandbagging: Language Models can Strategically Underperform on Evaluations, published by Teun van der Weij on June 13, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum. We have written a paper on sandbagging for which we present the abstract and brief results in this post. See the paper for more details. Tweet thread here. Abstract Trustworthy capability evaluations are crucial for ensuring the safety of AI systems, and are becoming a key component of AI regulation. However, the developers of an AI system, or the AI system itself, may have incentives for evaluations to understate the AI's actual capability. These conflicting interests lead to the problem of sandbagging - which we define as strategic underperformance on an evaluation. In this paper we assess sandbagging capabilities in contemporary language models (LMs). We prompt frontier LMs, like GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus, to selectively underperform on dangerous capability evaluations, while maintaining performance on general (harmless) capability evaluations. Moreover, we find that models can be fine-tuned, on a synthetic dataset, to hide specific capabilities unless given a password. This behaviour generalizes to high-quality, held-out benchmarks such as WMDP. In addition, we show that both frontier and smaller models can be prompted, or password-locked, to target specific scores on a capability evaluation. Even more, we found that a capable password-locked model (Llama 3 70b) is reasonably able to emulate a less capable model (Llama 2 7b). Overall, our results suggest that capability evaluations are vulnerable to sandbagging. This vulnerability decreases the trustworthiness of evaluations, and thereby undermines important safety decisions regarding the development and deployment of advanced AI systems. We publish our code at https://github.com/TeunvdWeij/sandbagging Results Evaluators focus on dangerous capability evaluations, where high performance may trigger regulatory interventions. We demonstrate that LMs can be prompted or fine-tuned to selectively underperform on dangerous capability evaluations while maintaining overall performance. Even smaller models can do this using "password-locking", which is fine-tuning models to hide their actual capabilities unless given a password. We show that when Mistral-7b or Llama3-8b are password locked on synthetic data, they still hide capabilities on a high-quality held-out benchmark (WMDP). If a seemingly competent AI system scores surprisingly low on a capability benchmark, detecting sandbagging is easy. However, we find that models can accurately aim for specific scores on benchmarks. Similarly, inconsistent or random performance can be detected. More credibly, strong models could hide capabilities by mimicking weaker models. We demonstrate this capability by successfully fine-tuning Llama 3 70b to emulate Llama 2 7b only when the password is not present. Our work suggests that capability evaluations are vulnerable to sandbagging, which is bad news, but good to know. In our following project, we will work on how to mitigate this problem. Reach out if you are interested in working on this. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Paper] AI Sandbagging: Language Models can Strategically Underperform on Evaluations, published by Teun van der Weij on June 13, 2024 on LessWrong. We have written a paper on sandbagging for which we present the abstract and brief results in this post. See the paper for more details. Tweet thread here. Abstract Trustworthy capability evaluations are crucial for ensuring the safety of AI systems, and are becoming a key component of AI regulation. However, the developers of an AI system, or the AI system itself, may have incentives for evaluations to understate the AI's actual capability. These conflicting interests lead to the problem of sandbagging - which we define as strategic underperformance on an evaluation. In this paper we assess sandbagging capabilities in contemporary language models (LMs). We prompt frontier LMs, like GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus, to selectively underperform on dangerous capability evaluations, while maintaining performance on general (harmless) capability evaluations. Moreover, we find that models can be fine-tuned, on a synthetic dataset, to hide specific capabilities unless given a password. This behaviour generalizes to high-quality, held-out benchmarks such as WMDP. In addition, we show that both frontier and smaller models can be prompted, or password-locked, to target specific scores on a capability evaluation. Even more, we found that a capable password-locked model (Llama 3 70b) is reasonably able to emulate a less capable model (Llama 2 7b). Overall, our results suggest that capability evaluations are vulnerable to sandbagging. This vulnerability decreases the trustworthiness of evaluations, and thereby undermines important safety decisions regarding the development and deployment of advanced AI systems. We publish our code at https://github.com/TeunvdWeij/sandbagging Results Evaluators focus on dangerous capability evaluations, where high performance may trigger regulatory interventions. We demonstrate that LMs can be prompted or fine-tuned to selectively underperform on dangerous capability evaluations while maintaining overall performance. Even smaller models can do this using "password-locking", which is fine-tuning models to hide their actual capabilities unless given a password. We show that when Mistral-7b or Llama3-8b are password locked on synthetic data, they still hide capabilities on a high-quality held-out benchmark (WMDP). If a seemingly competent AI system scores surprisingly low on a capability benchmark, detecting sandbagging is easy. However, we find that models can accurately aim for specific scores on benchmarks. Similarly, inconsistent or random performance can be detected. More credibly, strong models could hide capabilities by mimicking weaker models. We demonstrate this capability by successfully fine-tuning Llama 3 70b to emulate Llama 2 7b only when the password is not present. Our work suggests that capability evaluations are vulnerable to sandbagging, which is bad news, but good to know. In our following project, we will work on how to mitigate this problem. Reach out if you are interested in working on this. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

A revisit to our episode with Ginoza costuming on points in cosplay contests. There is always talk about how to get “ points” in a cosplay contest, especially “extra” points. But what does that really mean? Do these mythical “extra points” even exist? Do points even exist in every cosplay contest? Join LVC and special guest Ginoza Costuming as we chat about “points” and what that really means to judges and to contestants.https://www.instagram.com/ginozacostuming/Produced by LVC Productions. You can find us on facebook, instagram, twitter, tiktok, twitch, and youtube at La Vie Cosplay. Our podcast instagram is podcastscs. Our website is laviecosplay.com. Have a fun, crazy con or cosplay related story? Absurd cosplay question? Or just something in general to share with us? Email us at podcastscs@gmail.com or DM us at podcastscs or laviecosplay on instagram. If you like what you heard please rate, review, and subscribe on Youtube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and remember; just because you can, doesn't mean you should.https://www.instagram.com/podcastscs/https://www.instagram.com/laviecosplay/https://www.tiktok.com/@laviecosplayhttps://linktr.ee/podcastscs for additional listening platforms

Revisiting our second most popular episode "Cheater Cheater Pumpkin Eater" a look into the science behind why people cheat, particularly at cosplay contests. We'll cover the why, the how, and the motivation involved in this behavior. We'll also tell you some pretty funny stories of people cheating in contests. We will be doing a follow-up to this episode in season 5 relating also to the poor sportsmanship behavior we have seen in contests. if you'd like to contribute a question please use this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfqtH3QOFZK8OU2TnfUVpap60uQWGtfPfgiup9q5yJb7hVMwQ/viewform?usp=sharingProduced by LVC Productions. You can find us on facebook, instragram, twitter, and vero at La Vie Cosplay. Our podcast instagram is podcastscs. Our website is laviecosplay.com. Have a fun, crazy con or cosplay related story? Absurd cosplay question? Or just something in general to share with us? Email us at podcastscs@gmail.com or DM us at podcastscs. If you like what you heard please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and remember; just because you can, doesn't mean you should.https://www.instagram.com/podcastscs/https://www.instagram.com/laviecosplay/https://www.tiktok.com/@laviecosplayhttps://linktr.ee/podcastscs for additional listening platforms

Join us as we talk Flat Track, Weather and Sandbagging!

EP319 - Amazon Q1 2024 Recap http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Episode Summary: In this episode, Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg and Scot Wingo dive deep into Amazon's first quarter results for 2024, analyzing the company's performance in various segments such as retail, offline and online sales, marketplace, AWS, and advertising. They also explore the impact of AI on Amazon's business and provide insights into the company's future guidance for Q2 2024. Amazon Q1 2024 Earnings Release Amazon Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript In our latest episode, Jason and Scott cover a range of topics, starting with their reflections on recent events such as May the 4th and Cinco de Mayo. Jason shares intriguing stories from his extensive travels and interactions with listeners worldwide. Scott delves into the intersection of e-commerce and the auto industry, honing in on Carvana. The duo also delves into the U.S. Department of Commerce retail indicators data, shedding light on trends in retail sales and e-commerce growth. The conversation pivots towards Amazon's recent earnings report, contextualizing it within the realm of AI investments by tech giants like Meta and Alphabet, offering valuable industry insights and analysis. The discussion continues with a focus on Amazon's earnings report, zooming in on concerns around AWS amid heightened competition from Alphabet and Azure. The rising trend of AI investments, particularly in data training applications, is explored, alongside the growing popularity of open source AI models due to cost and privacy considerations. Despite a conservative Q2 guidance, Amazon impresses with robust revenue that surpasses Wall Street expectations, particularly in operating income. The retail segment shows exceptional growth, exceeding operating income estimates for both domestic and international divisions. Notably, Amazon's performance in brick-and-mortar stores, spearheaded by Whole Foods, demonstrates resilience with a 6.3% growth rate. AWS stands out with a 17% growth, dispelling market share concerns and showcasing accelerated revenue growth, illustrating Amazon's continuous growth potential and innovation prowess. Scott delves deeper into Amazon's positive quarterly earnings report, emphasizing the remarkable revenue performance, especially in operating income. Insights are shared on Amazon's successful agnostic approach to LLM models and the potential advancements in generative AI. The conversation shifts towards the burgeoning ads business at Amazon, underlining its profitability and future growth prospects. Scot also outlines Amazon's Q2 guidance and the potential impacts of consumer spending patterns on the retail sector, including concerns about changing consumer behaviors and economic pressures shaping market dynamics. Jason complements the discussion with additional perspectives on consumer behavior and economic influences reshaping the market landscape. Furthermore, we embark on a detailed exploration of supply chain logistics, with a spotlight on Amazon's expansion into third-party logistics services, revolutionizing traditional retail strategies by sharing proprietary capabilities for wider adoption. Insights from Andy Jassy shed light on Amazon's logistics business approach. The conversation expands to include how companies like Spiffy are embracing a similar model of sharing proprietary products to drive innovation and revenue growth, showcasing an evolving landscape of retail innovation. The podcast unpacks the complex world of grocery retail, highlighting Amazon's experimental forays like Just Walk Out technology and the Amazon Dash cart, while examining the challenges in delineating Amazon's grocery sector strategy. A comparison is drawn between Amazon's strategies and those of rivals like Walmart and Target, who are adapting their product offerings to match evolving consumer preferences, offering a comprehensive view of the dynamic retail and supply chain management sphere. Dive into our engaging discussion, explore retail dynamics, and keep a lookout for more insightful content. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 319 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Sunday, May 5th, 2024. Chapters 0:23 The Jason and Scott Show Begins 2:56 World Travel Adventures 5:53 Commerce Tools Elevate Show 6:53 Jason's World Tour Plans 7:22 Where in the World is Retail Geek? 20:43 Amazon's First Quarter Earnings 23:23 Sandbagging Strategy 26:45 Amazon's Dominance in E-commerce 27:44 Online Segment Growth Analysis 28:53 Offline Store Segment Analysis 31:35 Spotlight on AWS Performance 34:32 Data at AWS 42:02 Gen AI Revenue Growth 46:24 Consumer Pressure 49:56 Supply Chain Evolution 53:46 Leveraging Technology 58:08 Disruption in E-commerce 1:01:54 Amazon's Grocery Strategy 1:05:01 Retail Industry News Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show. This is episode 319 being recorded on Sunday, May 5th, 2024. I'm your host, Jason Retail Guy Goldberg, and as usual, I'm here with your co-host, Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:37] Hey, Jason, and welcome back, Jason and Scott Show listeners. It's been a while, but first, happy Cinco de Mayo, and also a belated May the 4th, Jason. Did you have a good Star Wars day? Jason: [0:49] I did. I did. I feel like Star Wars Day always makes me think of the podcast because I feel like we have spent many of them in my latter life together. Scot: [1:01] Yeah, absolutely. Any exciting new Star Wars experiences or merch? Jason: [1:08] No, I understand you got some vintage merch. merch. Scot: [1:13] It's not, but they, back when I was a kid, you would go and if you went every week to, I think it was Burger King, you would for the, I think it was Empire. I have the Empire right here. So definitely Empire, but you would get a glass. Now it turns out these were full of lead paint, which would kill you, but that was the downside. Jason: [1:32] Not recommended for drinking. Scot: [1:33] You got a very, yes, I never, being a collector, I never drank out of them. So that's good. Jason: [1:37] Saved your life right there. Scot: [1:38] Yes, but I did drink out of the Tweety Bird. So that me, me. I'm sure I got some yellow lead paint from a twitty bird glass. Anyway, so they came out with a Mandalorian kind of homage to those glasses and they were at the Hallmark store of all places, not where I usually hang out, but I got to go to a Hallmark store and the little ladies that worked there were, I wish them all an awesome May the 4th. And they looked at me like I was from another planet and it was hilarious. My wife's like, stop, they don't know what you're doing. Jason: [2:07] Wait, they didn't have a big May 4th section in the Hallmark store? Scot: [2:11] They did. The little ladies didn't know. Jason: [2:13] The overlap of people that still buy Papyrus cards and celebrate May 4th is probably not great. Scot: [2:21] It was very humbling. It was a humble May the 4th, but I got my glasses and I was happy. I'm happy for you. And then tonight we had tacos for dinner, so I'm hitting all the holidays. Jason: [2:30] I feel like we should have tacos for dinner every night, whether it's Cinco de Mayo or not, but I'm i am happy for that. Scot: [2:35] We do have a lot of tacos but this was a special single denial edition. Jason: [2:42] Well, very well done, my friend. Scot: [2:44] Thanks. Well, listeners of the pod have been all over me. They're like, why aren't you recording? And I said, it's not me. It's Jason. It's Jason. Because you have been traveling Scot: [2:55] the earth, spreading retail geek goodness. Tell us, we are way far behind on trip updates and all the different countries. It's like you're playing, do you have like a little travel bingo where you're just like punching, what is it, 93 countries? Jason: [3:09] I do. They call it a passport. Oh, nice. Yes. Scot: [3:13] That, uh, little book that you get to carry. Yeah. Jason: [3:15] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have been on a lot of trips and it sounds like you and I may be telling complimentary lies because I also, I've had an opportunity to meet a lot of listeners in the last, we'll call it seven weeks and which they're always super nice. And it's always super fun to talk to people. And obviously they're, you know, strangers recognize my voice in line at Starbucks at all these e-commerce shows. And then we strike up a conversation. And then the next question is always, where the heck is Scott? Because they're always disappointed to meet me and not you. And now the new thing is, and why aren't you producing more frequent shows? And my answer is always that you're dominating the world at Get Spiffy and that you're too busy. Scot: [4:00] Uh-huh. I see. Okay. Jason: [4:02] Well, we're both very busy. Scot: [4:05] You're traveling more than I am. I'm busy washing cars. Jason: [4:08] Yes. I think both are fairly true, but I did finish a grueling seven-week stint where I got to come home a couple of times on the weekends, but I basically had seven weeks of travel back to back. In my old life, that would not have been that atypical, but post-pandemic, The travel has been a little more moderate. And I have noticed that I have my travel muscles have atrophied and I don't really want to redevelop. Jason: [4:35] So the seven weeks was a lot. Please don't ask me for trip reports for all the commerce events because I kind of can't remember some of them. They're all a little bit of a blur. But I was at Shop Talks, I think, since the last time we talked, which is, of course, probably the biggest show in our industry. And that was a very good show. I did get to see a lot of our mutual friends and a lot of fans of the show there. So that was certainly fun. And maybe in another podcast, we can do a little recap of some of the interesting things that came out of Shop Talk. I did produce a couple of recaps in other formats for work clients, so we could certainly pull something together. I also went to a vendor show. One of the e-commerce platforms out there is called Commerce Tools, and they had their annual customer show, which is called Elevate in Miami. So I got a chance to go visit there. They're one of the commerce platforms that I would say is winning at the moment in the kind of pivot away from the old school monoliths to these new sort of SaaS-based solutions. And commerce tools in particular are kind of pioneers in pushing this actual certification around a more modern earned stack that they they coined mock. And I think I think we've had Kelly from from commerce tools on the on the podcast Jason: [5:51] in the past to talk about that. But that was a good show. I got to meet a lot of listeners there. And a funny one, several listeners were like. Jason: [5:59] I would apologize for the, the, our publishing schedule lately. And they're like, I'm cool with it. I like that. Like you don't do a show if there's not something worthwhile. And then, you know, when I do get a show, it's like a treat. So I don't know if they're being honest or not, but that made me feel a little better about some of our, our, our Tardis shows lately. So those, those were good events. I also spent a week in India with some clients and that super interesting, a lot of commerce activity going on there, a lot of different market dynamics than here. So that's kind of intellectually pretty fun to learn about and see what's working there that might be working here or what, you know, why things tend to play out differently there. So that's interesting. And then I have a lot more international trips booked right now. Jason: [6:48] So coming up, I'm going to Barcelona, London, Paris, and Sao Paulo. So if anyone either has any favorite retail experiences in any of of those cities, please send them my way. I'll be doing store visits in all those cities. And if you're based in any of those cities, also drop me a line. Hopefully we can do some meetups while I'm out there. Scot: [7:07] Cool. It's Jason's world tour. You can do a little pod while you're there. Jason: [7:12] We have done a bunch of international pods in the distant past. I remember hotel rooms in South Korea and all over the place, Jason: [7:19] Japan that we've, we've cut shows from. So, so totally could. Scot: [7:23] Yeah. We'll have to do it. Where in the world is retail geek? That could be the theme song. I just sampled that. Jason: [7:30] Yeah. So besides cleaning the world's cars, what have you been up to, Scott? Scot: [7:35] Well, it's kind of funny. My worlds are colliding. So a lot of the analysts that you and I know from the e-commerce world are creeping into the auto world and their gateway drug is Carvana. So in the world of retail, we have Amazon, obviously. Well, Carvana is kind of Amazonifying used cars. They had a bit of a drama kind of situation. They were the golden child of online cars. And then they totally pooped the bed. They did this acquisition. They loaded up with debt. And then after, I think it was 21. So they had a good COVID. They surged. And then the debt got in front of them. Used car prices bop around and they kind of like got in an open door situation where they had bought a lot of cars for more than they were worth suddenly. And then they plummeted and everyone thought they were going out of business, but they have had a resurgence. So it's causing a lot of the internet analysts to now pick up auto tech or mobility or whatever you want to call it. So it was fun. I got to do a live chat with Nick Jones. He's been a friend of the show. I don't think we've had him on due to some compliance stuff that his company has rules around, but he's at this firm JMP and it was kind of wild to talk about, with someone about both Amazon and what we're doing at Spiffy, which is basically a lot of Amazon principles applied to car care. So it was interesting to have someone reach out and say, hey, I think this is a thing. And everyone tells me I should talk to you about it. And I was like, oh, yeah, I would love to. So it's kind of fun. Jason: [9:01] That's very cool. And isn't it also a thing, I think half the vehicles on the road are now owned by Amazon. So I assume that's an overlap too. too? Scot: [9:09] Yeah, not half, but a lot are. The number of last mile delivery vehicles are very, very large. And we work with a lot of them, so it's kind of fun. I started spiffy somewhat to get away from Amazon and still all I can talk about. Nope. So embrace it. I love Amazon. Love me some Amazon, Jason. Jason: [9:29] I'm glad you do. I love them too, but I feel like I spend most of my career You're unsuccessfully helping people compete with them. Scot: [9:38] Hey, got to play one side of the coin. It's a gig. You're going to be more like them or how to fight them. Jason: [9:43] It's a gig. It is indeed. Yeah. Scot: [9:46] Cool. I thought we are going to talk about some Amazon news. But before we jump in, you have done your magic with your data analysis interns. And I'm sure there's an LLM and an AI thrown in there. Let's start with some of the things you're seeing in commerce trends from the data that's out there. Jason: [10:07] Yeah. So as everyone knows, I have a little bit too much of an infatuation with the U.S. Department of Commerce retail indicators data. And these guys, you know, publish monthly estimates of retail sales in a bunch of categories. And, you know, we've talked about this many times on the show, but broadly over the last several years have been really interesting in retail. 2020, 2021, and 2022 were the greatest three years in the history of retail. Like we mailed like $6 trillion in economic stimulus. People didn't travel or go to restaurants as much. And so we sold way more goods than ever before. And so those three years, retail grew respectively at like 8%, 14%, and 9%. The 20 years prior, retail averaged about 4% a year in growth. So normally pre-pandemic, you'd expect 4% growth. We had these three, you know, wildly pandemic influence years where we grew really fast. And then last year we finished a little below 4%. So, so we were around, I want to say it was like 3.6%. So it was growth. It would, it would have been in line with pre-pandemic growth, but it certainly felt like a significant deceleration from those heady pandemic years. And so, you know, people are super interested to see how does 2024 play out? Does it? Jason: [11:32] Kind of return to pre-pandemic levels, like what is the new normal? Jason: [11:37] And we now have the first quarter's data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, and I would call it kind of a mixed bag. If you just look at the raw retail data that the U.S. Department of Commerce publishes, they're going to tell you that retail grew in the first quarter 2.8%. So that's a little anemic, right? Compared to historical averages, that's not a great growth rate. Most of the practitioners that follow this podcast care about a particular subset of retail that the National Retail Federation has dubbed core retail. And so the National Retail Federation pulls gas and automobiles sales out of that number. And gas is a decent size number and it's very volatile based on the commodity prices of gas. And auto is a huge number that has, as you're well familiar, its own idiosyncrasies. And so that's how they justify taking those two out. And if you take those two out and you get this core retail number, retail in the first quarter grew 3.9%. So kind of to align with how the NRF talks about retail, we'll say Q1 overall was 3.9%, which is very in line with the pre-pandemic historic average. So disappointing by pandemic standards, but kind of traditionally what we would expect. Jason: [13:05] What is unique in that number is. Jason: [13:09] That it's very bifurcated. There are clear winners and losers, both by categories and specific practitioners. So if you break down the categories, e-commerce is the fastest growing chunk of retail. I'm sure we'll talk more about that. Restaurants were the next fastest growing categories. And categories like mass merchants and healthcare providers outperform that industry average, every other segment of retail underperformed the industry average. So things like furniture stores did the worst, building materials did really poorly, gas stations did very poorly, electronics did poorly, and side note, electronics have been the worst performer since the pandemic, which is kind of interesting and challenging. So you've had this weird couple categories doing really well, a bunch of categories doing really poorly. And then within the categories even, if you look at the public company's individual earnings calls, what you tend to see is a couple of big players performing really well in overall retail, that's Amazon and Walmart. And then a lot of other retailers really struggling. So that even that's like in general merchandise, it's Amazon and Walmart that are lifting the boats. And it's folks like Target traditionally that have performed really well are actually struggling at the moment. So the average is kind of hard to follow at the moment. Jason: [14:37] But that is kind of how things play out. And then we have some preliminary e-commerce data, but the actual Q1 e-commerce number that the U.S. Department of Commerce publishes will publish on May 17th. So that's 12 days from now. Jason: [14:53] And crunching the numbers that we have available at the moment, that growth is likely to come in at somewhere between 8% and 10%. I'm guessing more like 8% or 9% growth. And so that also is twice as good as overall retail, and it's more than twice as good as brick-and-mortar retail. But that is noticeably slower than the historic e-commerce growth rates pre-pandemic. So kind of file those two numbers away. The overall retail industry is growing at 3.9%. The overall e-commerce industry is growing at about 9%. And then we have our friends at Amazon that dropped their earnings announcement just before May 4th so that they could celebrate May 4th, I think. Scot: [15:39] Yeah, yes, that's a good setup. And without further ado, let's talk about Amazon's fourth quarter. It wouldn't be a Jason Scott show without a little bit of... Scot: [16:01] That's right. On April 30th, Amazon announced their first quarter results. And the setup coming into these, so you had the data you talked about, but like to drill in a little bit. We had Meta, the artist formerly known as Facebook, and Alphabet, the artist previously known as Google. They announced and they both basically told Wall Street, AI is the cat's pajamas and we're going to spend anywhere between $10 and $40 billion of capital expenditures on it, meaning NVIDIA chips. So it turns out the way to play all this is basically buying NVIDIA. So hopefully you bought some NVIDIA stock. Maybe this is not a stock recommendation or when it's too late, so... And also don't take stock recommendations from podcasters. Anyway, so there was all this angst and people were a little freaked out coming into the Amazon results because Meta was down like pretty substantially, 20 to 30 percent. And Alphabet was also up substantially. You also had Microsoft come in there and they really crushed it. Their Azure is really lighting it up with AI. And they announced that they were going to invest a lot. And there's this rumor that a $100 billion project, it's got a name like Starship or something, but it's not Starship. Spaceship? Stardust? I don't know what it is. But it's going to be this mega data center, and they literally can't find a place to put it because it's going to consume so much power. So they're going to have to maybe build a nuclear plant next to it or some wacky thing. Scot: [17:31] Anyway, that was the setup. up. So coming in, Wall Street was very, very concerned about Amazon's AWS division, which is their cloud computing. Because if Alphabet is building out their infrastructure, and so is Azure, that's the two biggest competitors for AWS. And is AWS getting its fair share? And is it going to announce that it's going to have to go build some $40 billion kind of a thing? Also, another Another thing, and I'm kind of curious on if you're seeing this with your clients, but in the, I follow this, you know, the AI, you can't do much without seeing AI everywhere. But the part I'm most interested in is what are big enterprises spending money on? This is like your Fortune 500s. They're all experimenting and really getting into it. And where they're finding a lot of good use cases is training on their data. So they'll say, you know, hey, I'm Publisys. How many documents do you think are inside of Publisys? I don't know, 8 trillion documents. Documents and you know wouldn't it be helpful just the ones I created and who is this retail geek and he's he's created uh you know 90 of those and you know so you know imagine you're starting new at publicists you're gonna be like where do I start going through some of these documents for us and if you had a chat bot that was like hey I've read all that you know I can navigate you through everything that's been published or you know whatever I'm certainly you. Scot: [18:50] Providing a very big metaphor, certainly be more divisional and all this kind of stuff. But that's where big companies are spending the bulk is they're taking their data in whatever format it's in, be it a relational database, a PDF, whatever it is, they're trying to train it. They don't want it to go up into the, they don't want to train the LLM so that other people get the benefit of that and can see any confidential data. So that's really important. So it needs to be gated in these types of things. Because of that use case, open AI is not great because people are very worried. A, it's very expensive and it's only an API. So OpenAI hosts itself and you call it through an API. Scot: [19:25] Those API calls are very expensive. They're getting, as OpenAI has gotten more popular, there's more latency. It's taking forever to get answers out of this thing. And a lot of people are very concerned that even though there's ways to call the API such that it's in a window and not being trained, that maybe it leaks in there. So because of all these elements, the open source models are becoming very popular. And right around the time Meta announced, they announced their Llama, which has become quite popular. And what's nice is you can host it wherever you want. And it's kind of like WordPress, where if you are a serious WordPresser, you can host it somewhere yourself, and you can kind of understand that. Otherwise, there's other people that will host it for you. But it has the nice feature of you're just getting the weights and whatnot, and it's it's pretty clear, it's pretty obvious, it's not training itself on your data. So a lot of people like it because it's quote unquote free. It's not an API usage based. It's a pay once to set it up, pay for some resources type thing and you're done. And it's also not going to train on the data. That's one of many. There's probably 10 or 20 pretty commercial grade open AIs out there. Scot: [20:38] Okay. So that's kind of the setup to get to the earnings. things. So from a big picture, this was a really good quarter. Asterix, the guide made Wall Street a little bit nervous. So- Scot: [20:53] And one of our research analysts just said it's Stargate, which is also a sci-fi series. They must have that on Prime Video or something. There's probably some callback there. Scot: [21:01] So they beat for the quarter Q1, but then they also kind of tell you what's going on the next quarter. Amazon doesn't provide fully your guidance. They just kind of give you a snippet. So when they report one quarter, a quarter, they then tell you what they think the next quarter is going to do. So Wall Street got a little bit ahead of its skis, and the guide for Q2 was below what Wall Street wants. So it wasn't what we'd call a beat and a raise, which is the current quarter was a beat and the next one they increased. It was a beat and a guide down. So that probably tampered Wall Street. But ever since Jassy came in, Andy Jassy, this has been his MO is to be pretty conservative because Wall Street's very much an expectation engine. And the more, if you can beat and tamp down expectations, it makes it, it's a little bit rougher in the short term from a stock price, but it makes next quarter better and then so on and so forth. So it's a smart way to manage the long-term vibe of the stock, the mindset, the expectations around your stock. Okay. So revenue came in at $143 billion versus Wall Street at $142. So pretty much in line. But most importantly, where Amazon really threw people off was on operating income. Yes, Amazon is profitable. This is the proxy for operating income. True Amazonians would tell you, no, it's cashflow. We can go into that, but this is kind of the way they report to Wall Street. So this is kind of the standard operating system, if you will. So this is what we're going to use, but it's a proxy for cashflow. Scot: [22:28] That was 15 billion for the quarter and Wall Street expected 11. Well, you know, 4 billion on a world of 143 doesn't sound like much, but between 11 and 15, that's a very material beat. What is that? Like 38%, something like that. Scot: [22:44] So that was a really nice surprise. And, you know, Amazon goes through these invest and harvest periods and everyone's been feeling like they're going to be back in investing which would mean they're going to start lowering operating income as they invest but it's actually kind of beating expectations, also this is the fifth quarter amazon has come in at the high end of its guidance or above its guidance since basically you know on operating income and that corresponds with when jassy came in so this is his mo right now is to kind of like beat and lower beat and lower you know exceed expectations tamp them down not get not get ahead of his skis and it's working really well. Jason: [23:24] Sandbagging for the win. I like it. Scot: [23:26] Yes, it is. Having run a public company, this is a lesson I learned painfully. So that's something we can talk about over beer sometime. Jason: [23:33] I will book that date. Yeah. And the retail business sort of followed in line with that. They had like some nice growth, but like the real standout number was the improvement in margins and the significant positive operating income from the retail segment. So I think the actual operating income from U.S. Retail was like $5 billion and the Wall Street expectations were 4.3. So again, that was another strong beat. Total revenue, which revenue is not the same thing as retail sales, as we've talked about on the show many times, that we would use GMV as a proxy for that. But revenue was $86.3 billion for the quarter, which I think was in line with the analyst expectations. Jason: [24:27] And I think this was the largest operating income that Amazon has ever reported for the retail business. So that was super interesting on the domestic side. Traditionally, domestic has done pretty well and international has been a money loser because, you know, they've been less mature. they've been investing a lot in growing international and they haven't had the same kind of margins. This was the first quarter that they reported positive operating income for the international division. So that's another super encouraging sign for investors that maybe they've kind of passed that inflection point on a lot of their international investments that they've made in the EU and Japan and the UK, which reminds me is not part of the EU anymore. Jason: [25:13] So so they kind of beat beat international expectations across the board on income. Revenues were lower. So revenues were like thirty one billion dollars, which was below expectation. Jason: [25:25] But they they earned like nine hundred million in operating income. And I want to say the the the Wall Street expectation was like six hundred million. So so again, like a 30 percent beat, which is pretty, pretty darn good. Good. They also, a bunch of analysts have, you know, taken these revenue numbers and they try to back into a GMV number. And I would say the bummer at the moment is there's a fair amount of variance in the estimates, like different analysts have different models. So I have kind of been putting to a model of the models together and trying to kind of find a midpoint. And like Like based on that, the Amazon's GMV globally probably went up 11.5% for the quarter. So if you're comparing this to other retailers or the U.S. Department of Commerce number, overall GMV went up 11.5%. The U.S. was stronger. So the U.S. probably went up at 12.2%. So again, we talked about core retail was up 3.9%. Well, Amazon U.S. GMV was up 12.2%. So, you know, three times faster growth than the retail industry overall. Jason: [26:39] And again, Amazon is mostly e-commerce, very little brick and mortar, Jason: [26:44] which we'll talk about in just a minute. But even if you're comparing Amazon to that e-commerce number, if e-commerce comes in at 8% or 9% and Amazon's at 12%, they're by far the largest e-commerce player out there and they're still substantially outgrowing the average, which, you know, is very impressive and should be very scary to every other competitor out there. Jason: [27:08] One analyst kind of put together an estimate of what they thought the earned income contribution from Amazon was for retail and ads together, pulling AWS out. And they had it at $27 billion in earned income if Amazon was just a retail with no AWS. And that puts them right in the ballpark of Walmart that spent off about $29 billion in earned income or operating income. I keep saying earned, but I mean operating income. So, so that is all pretty impressive and simultaneously super scary. Jason: [27:45] Scott, did you drill down into the online segment at all? Scot: [27:49] Yeah. And, you know, what I would tell listeners is picture a block diagram where you have this big, big rectangle, that's the whole Amazon entity. And, you know, so what we're going to do is talk about the segments. And the first segment is the biggest one, which is the retail business. And that, that's what you just. Jason: [28:04] Biggest and best. Wouldn't you say? Scot: [28:06] Coolest. Jason: [28:07] Coolest. All right. Scot: [28:08] Cool. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'll, you know, I don't know. Jason: [28:11] It is for you. Scot: [28:14] Um, I think the whole enchilada, I like the, the way they do this and I'm trying to replicate it. It's 50. We'll talk about that in a second. The, so then the, you know, so then another segment is AWS, another segment, I think marketplace should be in some segment, but they don't break it out. So it's just kind of in kind of hidden inside of the blob that is retail. So we tease some of that out here on the show. They purposely hide it in there. So no one knows how awesome it is, I think. And then they've got AWS ads and a couple other things, but we'll talk about this. So as you dig into the retail business, there's a couple of ways to look at it. You can look at it by domestic and international, which Jason just did, Scot: [28:50] or you can look at it by online and physical store. So the online biz grew 7% year over year, which if I remember your stats, well, you don't have it until may 17th so on may 17th we'll be able to know how that compared but probably the one you can compare is the offline biz which is the the store comp that they have, And Jason, you saw on that one, what'd you see? Jason: [29:16] Yeah, so physical stores grew 6.3%. So again, like, you know, when we say all of retail grew 3.9%, a big chunk of that's e-commerce. Brick and mortar probably grew at like two to 3%. So Amazon's brick and mortar growing at 6.3% is actually super impressive. And it's kind of interesting, you know, for several years, Amazon has had experiments in a bunch of retail formats. So they've had these Amazon Go stores, stores. They had Amazon five-star stores. They had bookstores. They had a fashion store. They're trying all these things. And of course, the biggest chunk of their stores is they own Whole Foods. And so offline stores for Amazon was kind of a mix of all these different concepts. In the last couple of years, they've kind of cleaned house and gotten rid of all those concepts. And so, you know, nominally there's a few of their own grocery stores called Amazon Amazon fresh open, but the vast majority of online offline retail for Amazon is, is Whole Foods. And for it to be growing at 6.3% in the current climate is, is a really good sign for Amazon. And, and I would say somewhat impressive, you know, on the earnings call, they, they announced that they're working up a new format for Whole Foods, which is a smaller format store that's It's going to open in Manhattan. So I have that on my ticker file to go visit when that's open. Jason: [30:38] You know, the whole grocery space for Amazon is super interesting, but maybe we'll talk about that a little bit more later. But I will call out, they did launch a service that there's been some controversy over. They launched a $9.99 a month grocery delivery service, which essentially lets you have all you can eat free grocery delivery to your home for an incremental fee of $9.99. And they're spinning that as, you know, a cool new grocery service and enable more people to shop for groceries online. And there are a lot of articles about it, like. Jason: [31:13] They used to have free grocery delivery included in your Prime membership, right? And so they've kind of like, I look at the big arc of all this and say, there used to be a lot more free services in Prime that they've kind of peeled out. Then they started charging for, and now they'll let you get it free again for another $120 a year. Jason: [31:32] So interesting things happening with grocery that we could probably talk more about later. But I'm kind of eager to dive into some of these other businesses like AWS. Scot: [31:42] Yeah. So that's the one that everyone was really waiting on the call to hear how it went. And good news, AWS exceeded expectations. Everyone thought it was going to grow 14% and it came in at 17%. And if Wall Street likes, they like a lot of things, they like beating expectations, that's important to them. But their favorite thing is ARG. And that is not a pirate day thing, ARG. It is Accelerating Revenue Growth. Wall Street loves that more than anything. And that's what they delivered for both the ads and the AWS part of the business. And what that means is that as the law of numbers kicks in, so back on the retail business, the only time we see that accelerate is in the fourth quarter and that seasonal acceleration, right? We've gotten used to that for decades now. It always happens in the fourth quarter and whatnot. So it's what you would expect. But this is quite unusual for a relatively mature business. This thing's $25 billion a quarter. So this is a $100 billion business that accelerated. And so that tells us that there is a lot more wood to chop here. It has not gotten near its addressable market. And it really allayed fears that they were losing massive market share because they're, quote unquote, behind on AI to Azure, which is Microsoft offering, and then the Google hosting solution as well. Scot: [33:05] That does not seem to be the case. So they did very well. So they came in at $25 billion and Wall Street was expecting $24.6. So that was really, that accelerating is what really made everyone very happy. And then the operating income came in at $9.5, way ahead of Wall Street at $7.5. So another pretty material 20% beat on this component at the bottom line. And this is really interesting. There was some really good language around this. And this has been Jassy's statement all along, and it's coming true. His early Amazon's early play was we're going to be agnostic on models and it's kind of like bring your own model we'll work with anything now with open AI they're not going to ever host open AI but they'll they're not going to stop you from working with it and then they for these open source ones they've made it very easy for you to spin up an AWS instance throw a little llama in there and I would make a llama noise if I I knew what they said I guess they make like a sheep sound. So you throw a little alarm in there and it does its thing. And, you know, the benefit of them being agnostic on these LLMs is most likely they have some or all of your data, right? Because they've been at this so long that if you're doing cloud computing versus on-prem, most likely a lot of, if not all of your data is in AWS. Extracting that data, you know, imagine you had terabytes or or what's the biggest, Scot: [34:31] bigger than terabytes? I always forget this one. Jason: [34:33] Petabytes. Scot: [34:34] Petabytes of data at AWS. They literally have a product that they can send a truckload of hard drives around and get your data. That's how much data there is that you could never push it across the internet, that there's so much data. So if they have that data and that's what you want to train on, you don't want to have the latency of the internet between your data and the training. So you'd really need the LLM to operate near your data. And this is what they predicted two or three years ago, kind of around the, the, the launch of chat gpt when all this stuff really started to accelerate and it's coming true so everyone feels a lot better about that then their body language this time a lot of times they were kind of like this is what we're doing and we're pretty sure it's going to work now they're like it's working and people really felt relief around this because everyone there was a set of people that believed it but then you know open ai's pitches nope our lm is going to be we're spending, billions of dollars we're going to be so far ahead none of these open source things are going to keep up. If you don't have us, you're going to be so far behind, you'll be like playing with crayons and everyone's going to be playing with quill pens. Scot: [35:42] So it was really good to see that this is not what's happening, that people are embracing, enterprises are embracing these open source models. They are in the same zip code performance-wise from results and much cheaper than OpenAI's offerings. And what Amazon said specifically was very positive around what is It's kind of abbreviated Gen AI for generative AI. And it's kind of a way to encapsulate this. And they said that it already is a multi-billion dollar run rate business. And you always have to parse what they say. So multi-billion can be anywhere between 1 and 9.9, right? And you'll see why I drew 9.9 there. Scot: [36:25] And inside, as part of that big AWS number, and they believe it can be rapidly tens of billions. Billions so they're basically saying it's not double digit billions so it's a single digit million which is where i get one to nine point nine but they basically hinted that that it is growing so rapidly inside of there that it's gonna be tens of billions and this is why they saw accelerating revenue growth which made everyone happy it wasn't just people you know moving some more you know loads on or something boring loads around relational databases or something it was the juicy ai stuff so this got everyone so lathered up that three analysts did price increases and they cited that this was one of the reasons the biggest price increase was from sig susquehanna and they put the price up to 220. At the time all this happened the stock was at 175 and today it's around 185 so it's been up nicely but 220 is a pretty big big you know even. Scot: [37:20] From where they expect that's where they're thinking i think most these guys look at a year to two years as a time horizon on these prices so and that's the the high i have you know again there's a wide range some people think it's going to go down some people think it's over price so go do your research this is not a stock recommendation but i just thought it was interesting that people get really really excited by by this whole gen ai largely the body language that, and it's, Amazon doesn't pound their chest much. So the fact they were, was kind of a new, new way of managing Amazon and Jassy's pretty conservative. So he must've felt pretty good about it, but also that they needed to ally, allay, allay, allay, whatever the right word is, get rid of these competitive concerns everyone's been talking about. Jason: [38:05] Yeah. It feels like a pretty big prize out there. Jassy and the whole team always talk, Just AWS, even before you get to Gen AI, they always remind everyone, hey, 85% of the workloads are still on-prem. So like this, as big as AWS looks, if the long-term future is 85% of the workloads are on the cloud and only 15% are on-prem, there's a lot of headroom still in AWS. And then, you know, you add this new huge demand for AI on top of all that. And like this, it's almost a limitless opportunity. And I want to tie the AI back to retail, though, for just a second, because there's another bit of news that I haven't seen covered very much, but is super interesting to me. Jason: [38:51] There's a particular flavor of AI out there, a subset of generative AI that's now being called agentic AI. And that's sort of a clever amalgamation of agent-based AI. And there's a very famous AI researcher, this guy, Andrew Ng. He's the founder of Coursera. He's done a bunch of things. He was the head of Google Big Think, which was one of the first significant AI efforts. And I want to say he was like on People Magazine's 100 most interesting people list in like 2013 as an AI researcher. So the dude's been around for a long time. He is one of the biggest advocates for this agentic AI. And the premise is that if you just ask an LLM, you take the best LLM in the world, and you ask it to do something for you, that's called zero shot. You give it an assignment, and you take the first result you get. It's a zero shot. You get pretty good results. But if you... Jason: [39:53] Turn that, that LLM into multiple agents and break the task up amongst those agents and potentially agents even running on different LLMs, you get wildly better results. Jason: [40:05] And so his, his research kind of showed that, Hey, if, if Jason goes write a PowerPoint presentation for his client, explaining what's going on in commerce. And I just give that to the turbo version of ChatGBT 4, I'll get a pretty good deck. But if I say, hey, I want to create four agents. I want to create a consultant to write the deck and a copywriter to edit the deck and an editor to improve the deck and three people to pretend to be mock customers to poke holes in the deck and have all those agents work on this assignment. I could give that assignment to chat gbt 3.5 and it would actually output a better work product than the the newer more advanced model was by by breaking the job into these chunks and so in retail you think about like this is the idea of assigning higher level jobs to shopping right so instead of saying like going to amazon and saying oh now it's a ai-based search engine and i'm going to type a long form query into search and get a better result. Jason: [41:09] The agentic AI approach is I'm just going to say to Amazon, never let me run out of ingredients for my kids' school lunches. And the agent's going to figure out what is in my school lunches and what my use rate is for those things and what weeks I have off from school and don't need a school lunch. And it's just going to do all those things and magically have the food show up. And this is a long diatribe, but the reason it's relevant is is this dude, Andrew Ng, was named the newest board member at Amazon three weeks ago. Scot: [41:40] Very cool. Jason: [41:40] I did not see that myself. Yeah. And so if you're wondering where Amazon thinks this is going, like this, in my mind, ties all this tremendous opportunity in generative AI and the financial opportunity in AWS directly to the huge and growing retail business that Amazon runs. Scot: [42:02] Very cool. Oh yeah. I had not seen that. So maybe Wall Street picked up on that. I'm sure. And maybe that was another part of the excitement. Jason: [42:09] Yeah. But all of that is just peanuts compared to the real good business in Amazon, which is the ads business. So again, you know, Amazon used to, to obfuscate their ads business. They've for a number of quarters now had to report it as earnings because it's in their earnings separately, because it's so material. And it was another good quarter for the ads business. It's hard to say whether it's actually accelerating growth or not, because the ads business is very seasonal. So the ad business grew 24.3% for the quarter versus Q1 of 2023. Q4 grew faster. So Q4 grew at 27%, but the 24% growth is much faster growth than other... Q1 year-over-year growth rate. So however you slice it, it's a good, robust growth rate. If you add the last four quarters together, you get $29 billion worth of ad sales. There's lots of estimates for how profitable ad sales are, but there's no cost of goods for an ad, right? Jason: [43:13] And so it's very high margin. So if you just assume, I think 60% gross margins is a very conservative estimate. But if you assume 60% gross margins, that means the ad business spun off $29.5 billion of operating income over the last 12 months. And to put that in comparison, AWS is big and profitable as it is, twice as much revenue at over $100 billion now, but it spun off like $23 billion in operating income. So the ad business is a much more meaningful contributor to Amazon's profits than even AWS. Jason: [43:51] And another way I've been starting to think about this is what percentage of the total GMV on the Amazon platform are the ads? And they are now 6.5%. So that's a very significant new tax. You know, as Amazon has hundreds of millions of SKUs available for sale, no one's ever going to find your SKU or buy it if you don't do some marketing on the platform for that SKU. And that's this 6.5% tax that Amazon's charging. And in the same way we said, hey, AWS is a really robust business. And then there's this thing called generative AI that can make it even huger. All of this ad revenue we're talking about is really coming from their sponsored product listings, which is like basic search advertising on the retail platform. Last quarter, Amazon said, by the way, we have this huge viewership streaming video service called Amazon Prime. And we're going to start putting ads in the lowest tier version of Amazon Prime. So unless you want to pay more, you're going to start seeing ads on Amazon Prime. And that's another huge advertising opportunity that hasn't been very heavily tapped yet. So the analysts are pretty excited about the upside of Amazon potentially tacking on another $6.5 billion in Prime video ads onto the $50 billion of search ads that they already have. Jason: [45:11] And so ads are a pretty good business to be in, which is why every other retailer is trying to follow suit with their own sort of version of a retail media network. Scot: [45:22] Cool. I imagine you get a lot of calls to talk about that. Jason: [45:25] Oh, yeah. I actually, I'm sick of talking about it. So one nice thing about working at an ad agency is there are now thousands of other experts. You know, I was one of the early guys in retail media networks. Now there are thousands of other experts that are way more credible than me. So I don't have to talk about it quite as much, but it still, still comes up in every conversation. Scot: [45:43] Very cool. All right. So then that was the basic gist of the corridor from a high level. And then it came to the what's going on in Q2. So that did come in lighter than folks expected, as I said, and they guided the top line to 144 versus 149. Let's call it 146 and change at the midpoint. They always do this range kind of thing when they're doing their guide. And Wall Street was at 150 consensus. So, you know, a tidge below two or three percent below where they wanted. But the operating income guide was above Wall Street. So they're kind of, we'll take it. Como si, como sa. Scot: [46:21] So that was, you know, I think Amazon tapping things down. Yeah. Now they did talk a lot about consumers being under pressure. So they said in the, it wasn't in a Q and a, it was in the prepared remarks and Jassy said it, which is kind of like the more important stuff. And I will say it's really nice to have the CEO of Amazon back on these calls because Bezos basically ditched them after, I don't know if, I think he came the first two quarters back in 97 but i honestly can't remember but he has not gone to the calls and jassy's been to them all so it's really nice to hear from the ceo and he answers very candidly i feel you know he doesn't feel as kind of like robotic as many ceos when they get on here because it is a stressful thing that you're going to say something wrong, but there was this exchange well first of all he he in his prepared remarks he talked about. Scot: [47:12] I forgot to put the exact language, but he said, we're seeing a lot of consumers trade down. So they're seeing, you know, we're seeing this in the auto industry. Tires is this huge thing where it's under a lot of pressure right now because people are just waiting. So there's a lot of this, you know, it's not showing up in the data that I've seen, but there's, you know, maybe the inflation data, but not the GDP and some of the other unemployment data. But it feels like the consumer is under a bit of pressure here, and they talk about that a lot in the prepared remarks. So I thought our listeners would find that interesting. Jason, before I go into this longish little thing that I wanted to just cover, what do you, did you pick up on any of that consumer stuff? Are you hearing that? Jason: [47:55] Oh, yeah, that's very common. And remember, in the beginning, I mentioned that there's this weird bifurcation that some retailers, even in categories, are doing well and others aren't. And some categories are doing well and others aren't. That's super complicated to get to the why. But the most obvious why is that consumers feel like they're under a lot of economic pressure and are trading down and are deferring certain types of purchases. The easiest way to see this is own brands and private label sales going up and, you know, national brand sales stagnating, see things like chicken protein going up and beef protein going down. You know, there's lots of examples out there, but the retailers that are best able to follow the consumer as she trades down are tending to do well. And the retailers that only cater to the luxury consumer, the super luxury is still doing fine. They're somewhat insulated. But the folks that haven't been as able to cater to the value consumer as much have struggled more. And the non-mandatory categories have struggled more. So Andy's comments exactly mirror what we're seeing going on in market dynamics and what other retailers are saying in their earnings. It is slightly weird because if you just look at the macros. Jason: [49:18] It's objectively, the consumer is doing pretty well. There's actually a lot of favorable things, but there's a ton of evidence that the consumer sentiment is that they're really worried about their household budget and are making, you know, hard, hard financial decisions. Scot: [49:36] Yeah. Yeah. It's tough out there. Well, hopefully it'll get better. So one of the questions I want to just kind of pull out some tidbits, because this has been a theme on our pod for a long time and I thought it was really, really interesting. And this is going to get into the weeds of supply chain and this kind of thing. So sorry if that's not your jam. We like to talk about logistics. Scot: [49:56] Side note to you, Jason, I saw that deep dive we did on Amazon logistics is still like our number one show and all the stats and stuff, which is kind of fun. So someone cares about it. Anyway, one of the friends of the podcast, Yusuf Squally asked a question. He's one of the analysts and he said, as it relates to logistics, so he's talking to andy on the call back in september you launched amazon supply chain can you help us understand the opportunity you see there where are you in the journey to build logistics as a service on a global basis and does that require a huge increase in capex a function increase in capex which means huge so jesse said this was a very long answer so i'm going to pull out two snippets you can go read the transcripts can you put a link to that in the show notes absolutely yep yeah so so i'm just gonna give you the the snippet the whole thing is worth reading but it would be like another 20 minutes to do that. But so Jassy starts out and says, I think that it's interesting what's happening with the business we're building in third party logistics. And it's really kind of in some ways mirror some of the other businesses we've gotten involved in AWS being an example. And even though they're very different businesses, and that we realized that we had our own internal need to build and launch these capabilities. Scot: [51:01] We figured that there were probably others out there who had the same needs we did and decided to build the services out of them so this is this model that really blows the minds of traditional retailers where you know so walmart has this huge data you know capability there's this this urban legend that they know when people are pregnant before they do they can see changes in their habits or they know who all is on weight loss drugs they they see your buying habits so intricately that they can do that that's a neat capability but they view it as proprietary and And that's old school thinking. Scot: [51:32] What Amazon does is says, well, that's a cool capability. Let's certainly someone else needs it. Let's open it up. This is one of my favorite things at Amazon. And it's so counterintuitive that in my current car world, I talk about this and everyone's like, why are you, we're doing it a lot at Spiffy. And they're like, well, why are you doing that? That's like your proprietary thing. And we're like, well, that's just how it should be. And like, this is a better way to do it. And it's really interesting that still today, Amazon's built what I say, $100 billion business out of AWS, which has used this and people are, are befuzzled by the whole thing. So I, I thought that was an interesting use case. And then he, he goes into some details there that are pretty obvious for our listeners, like how this is gonna work. But then he basically kind of brings it back around and then he says he wraps up and says, I would say that supply chain with Amazon is really an abstraction on top of each individual block services. And in those services, he talked about all the things that, that, you know, FBA and last mile delivery and buy with a prime. He talks about each of those kind of and how awesome they are. So he's basically saying Amazon supply chain wraps a bow around all that. And it gives this collective set of business services is growing significantly. Scot: [52:43] It's already what I would consider a reasonable size business. I think it's early days. It's not something we anticipate being a giant capital expense driver. So it's because they've already invested in all this that doesn't require additional capex. And then he finishes and says, we have to build a lot of the capabilities anyway to handle our own business. And we think it will be a modest increase on top of that to accommodate third-party sellers. Scot: [53:05] But our, there's a typo in the thing. Our third-party sellers find very high value in us being able to manage these components for them versus having to do it themselves. And they save money in the process. So I thought that was a really interesting, interesting. So they're really leaning into this supply chain. I think that ultimately they'll open this up to more consumers where you can send Aunt Gertrude in Detroit something from Chicago for three bucks a package and just throw it in an Amazon box, maybe a return box, and it kind of makes it way cheaper than you can FedEx it. I think that's coming, but it's really interesting to see. The way they think about things and his articulation of it was very crisp, Scot: [53:45] and I really enjoyed that. I was geeking out on that when I was listening to the call. Jason: [53:50] Yeah, for sure. That actually came up in some of the conferences I was at that he, you know, Jeff Bezos famously wrote this memo a long time ago about kind of being an object oriented, company and having all these building blocks that people could easily access and use internally and externally. And, and that this was kind of Andy Jassy doubling down on that. Yeah. It's Biffy is an example of that. Like you inventing some cool products that make it your jobs easier. And then you're selling those products to, to your potential competitors. Scot: [54:20] Yeah. So two examples, we have some devices we've developed for ourselves. One is a tire tread scanner. So it does 2D and 3D tires, tire tread scans. It's called Easy Tread. And we developed it for ourselves because we touch 3,000 cars a day right now and we wanted to measure the tire treads. And the state of the art is a Bluetooth needle. And it's, you know, you have to lay on your back. The cars are on the ground for us most of the time. So you have to like get underneath there, measure three things, and then it Bluetooths to a phone. Then you have to take it, the data entry, it doesn't have an API. Then you have to like take what it measured and then now cut and paste it into something else. It's kind of, kind of redonkulous in our world. So we developed a solution for that and we're selling it externally. And then the big, the big one is from day one, this has been the plan is we've built a ton of software for Spiffy. So we're, you know, we've got 400 technicians, 250 vans doing all kinds of services across the US and there's no operating system for that. So we, there's no like Salesforce for that or Shopify. So we had to go build our own. And so we've built, you know, route optimization specific to this parts integration, fitment integration, VIN lookup, all these things that are required integration with tire suppliers, oil filter suppliers, oil suppliers, parts suppliers, all these things. So we have like 150 things we've integrated with and pulled in from all over the place. Scot: [55:44] And then labor management, all the reporting that comes along with it, all that stuff. And we're starting to license that out as its own platform to anyone that wants to do auto services. And so these dealerships and large auto service companies are coming to us and finally saying, this seems kind of obvious now that we need to provide the ability to go to our customers. They call it at their curb. They use a different language than we do. But basically what you and I would call mobile, you know, last mile delivery of the service. And we're starting to license that out. And it's a lot like AWS, right? So we had to build this for our retail business, which is doing the services and now we're licensing it out a lot AWS and we have this device business. So it's been, I would not have, it comes intuitively to me now. Cause I've been, you know, basically living this lifestyle for 20 years and watching Amazon do it, But it's been fun to kind of build a company with this mindset of we're going to take these things we build and give them to other, not give them, but sell them to other people. And then that makes them better. And they help us pay for all the R&D that we've done on it. Jason: [56:48] Yeah, that's very cool. And that gives listeners a very tangible example of why we haven't been able to podcast quite as frequently as we'd like. Scot: [56:56] Yes. Jason: [56:56] I do, at the risk of making this the world's longest episode of our show, I do have a geeky add-on to the supply chain conversation. Yeah. So a lot of these services that they're adding to specifically what they call supply chain with Amazon are around importing services, because an increasingly high percentage of all the stuff Amazon sells is. Jason: [57:20] Amazon is taking care of importing it, right? And most often from China, but from all over the world and taking care of all that logistics and getting it ready to sell and deliver via the world's most impressive last mile to consumers in America. And there's tons of complicated, high friction touch points and processes to flow all those goods. Well, the big competitors out there to Amazon at the moment that we've talked about ad nauseum on the show, like Shein and Timu, had this kind of direct from China model where they're putting all the goods on 747s, flying them over, and they're taking advantage of this loophole in the postal treaty called the de minimis provision to not pay taxes or duties or have all these goods inspected that they ship into the U.S. and U.S. Jason: [58:07] Businesses have been complaining it's unfair. There's like all kinds of talk about it. We've done shows on this and I'm sure we'll do others. So here's the new thing in supply chain. Jason: [58:15] All the people that have been complaining about this are now doing it because guess what's happened? A bunch of these companies have been born that now help every other brand in the world take advantage of the de minimis provisions to near shore their goods. So you're a footwear manufacturer, you make your shoes in Vietnam, Instead of shipping them to the U.S. On a pallet and paying taxes and duties, you ship them on a pallet to Mexico, and then you send them individual parcels across the border from Mexico into the U.S. and never have to pay taxes or duties on the stuff. So I don't know if that will last in the long run, but that's a very disruptive, significant change happening in the whole world of e-commerce supply chains as we speak. That's pretty interesting. Interesting. Had you gotten wind of that yet? Scot: [59:07] No, no. That's all new to me. Thanks for sharing. Jason: [59:09] Yeah. That's probably how you're going to have to start getting your spiffy stuff into the country now too. I won't, I won't, we won't go there. But the one other piece that did not come up in the earnings call, but a controversy around Amazon since our last show is news articles came out that Amazon was de-installing its Just Walk Out technology from its grocery stores. So Amazon had built Just Walk Out into several of these Amazon Fresh stores and they built it into Whole Foods. And if you know the history of Just Walk Out, this was the original intention of Just Walk Out was was to do it for grocery stor

Re-visiting our second most popular episode, we have brought you a combined file of part 1 and part 2 all about sandbagging in cosplay contests. Learn about the why, the how, and the motivation behind this behavior conveniently in 1 file. Produced by LVC Productions. You can find us on facebook, instagram, twitter, tiktok, twitch, and youtube at La Vie Cosplay. Our podcast instagram is podcastscs. Our website is laviecosplay.com. Have a fun, crazy con or cosplay related story? Absurd cosplay question? Or just something in general to share with us? Email us at podcastscs@gmail.com or DM us at podcastscs or laviecosplay on instagram. If you like what you heard please rate, review, and subscribe on Youtube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and remember; just because you can, doesn't mean you should.https://www.instagram.com/podcastscs/https://www.instagram.com/laviecosplay/https://www.tiktok.com/@laviecosplayhttps://linktr.ee/podcastscs for additional listening platforms

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An Introduction to AI Sandbagging, published by Teun van der Weij on April 26, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum. Summary: Evaluations provide crucial information to determine the safety of AI systems which might be deployed or (further) developed. These development and deployment decisions have important safety consequences, and therefore they require trustworthy information. One reason why evaluation results might be untrustworthy is sandbagging, which we define as strategic underperformance on an evaluation. The strategic nature can originate from the developer (developer sandbagging) and the AI system itself (AI system sandbagging). This post is an introduction to the problem of sandbagging. The Volkswagen emissions scandal There are environmental regulations which require the reduction of harmful emissions from diesel vehicles, with the goal of protecting public health and the environment. Volkswagen struggled to meet these emissions standards while maintaining the desired performance and fuel efficiency of their diesel engines (Wikipedia). Consequently, Volkswagen intentionally installed defeat devices in millions of vehicles to lower the amount of emissions only during tests, allowing the cars to emit up to 40 times the permitted levels of nitrogen oxides during normal driving conditions. The scandal showed corporate misconduct and a lack of effective oversight, and is a form of sandbagging. But clearly, cars and their manufacturers are different to AI systems and their developers. So, how does sandbagging relate to AI systems? Sandbagging in the context of AI Evaluations provide crucial information to determine the safety of AI systems which might be deployed or (further) developed. Frontier labs rely on evaluations to reduce catastrophic risks, as stated in e.g. OpenAI's preparedness framework and Anthropic's responsible scaling policy. Governmental institutions like the UK AI Safety Institute and the EU AI Office also utilize evaluations to manage risks. However, sandbagging can reduce the reliability of these evaluations. Both the developers of an AI system and the AI system itself have incentives to sandbag. For example, the developer might want to appease stakeholders, and the AI system might want to acquire more resources after an evaluation to better achieve its goals. Importantly, sandbagging is technically feasible[1] and neglected. We hope this post leads to a better understanding of the problem of sandbagging. Definition We define sandbagging as strategic underperformance on an evaluation. This has three main concepts: strategic, underperformance, and evaluation (or: eval), which we discuss below in turn. Notably, we use the term 'AI system' to describe various types of AIs, such as standalone models and models augmented with tools/scaffolding (Shavit et al., 2023). Strategic Strategic means that the developer of the AI system and/or the AI system itself underperforms on an evaluation because it believes it will benefit.[2] If the strategy comes from the developer, we call it developer sandbagging (relating to misuse). If the strategy comes from the AI system, we call it AI system sandbagging (relating to misalignment). We use the term developer to mean any entity responsible for the AI system being evaluated. These entities have been called developers, deployers, or providers elsewhere (1, 2, 3). By including the term 'strategic' in the definition of sandbagging, we exclude accidental underperformance. In other words, this condition captures the fact that underperformance was intentional, which is a central condition for legal responsibility, including in the context of AI (Ashton, 2022; Halpern, 2018; Ward, 2024). Non-strategic, or accidental, sandbagging brings about other less important safety problems. Underperformance Underperformance occurs whe...

F1 Feast - Chinese GP - Lewis Hamilton, sandbagging or slipping? by Gavin Viano

Bernie Collins joins Matt Baker to look ahead to the three days of F1's pre-season testing in Bahrain.From travelling through airports with car parts, to how flow-vis paint works to sandbagging - Bernie answers your most pressing questions!

Is Phil's Last Dance in the Boston Marathon a swan song or just a funky two-step of sandbagging? Plus, we unravel the mystery behind Wesley Snipes and his surprising role in making marathons faster. Spoiler alert: it involves less blade action and more running self care! This episode is sponsored by PILLAR Performance, brings you straight into the heart of sports micronutrition. I'm currently testing PILLAR's products for my Boston and London marathon double. Ready to join the journey? Head to pillarperformance.shop and grab an exclusive 15% off with code MARCUS on your first purchase. Join the conversation with Corey, Phillip, Rob, and yours truly as we talk about our training build up for the Boston, London and Tokyo marathons. No fluff, just Boston Qualifier marathoners diving into the essence of a runner's life. Candid talks, friendly banter, and a journey beyond the speed.

EPISODE 211 War Is The Ultimate Beef . Summary . The episode covers various topics including the possibility of war with Iran, conspiracy theories surrounding Taylor Swift and the MAGA movement, concerns about referees and drops in football, the Trump case and the delay in accountability, Trump's support for Texas independence, and a failed election candidate paying someone to shoot officials. . Takeaways . The possibility of war with Iran is a serious concern, but it is unlikely to escalate into a full-blown war. Conspiracy theories and political controversies can distract from more important issues and create division. The integrity of sports, such as football, can be compromised by factors like biased referees and drops by receivers. The delay in holding Trump accountable for his actions raises concerns about the justice system and the potential for political interference. Support for Texas independence and sandbagging in politics are examples of divisive and self-serving actions that undermine the unity and progress of the country. . Chapters 00:00 Introduction and News 03:11 Discussion on the Possibility of War 10:09 Iran's Threat and the Fragility of the Country 17:20 Conspiracy Theories and the MAGA vs. Taylor Swift Controversy 24:37 Concerns about Referees and Drops in Football 30:42 Discussion on the Trump Case and Delaying Accountability 37:32 Trump's Support for Texas Independence and Sandbagging in Politics 42:31 Failed Election Candidate Paying Someone to Shoot Officials 45:27 Conclusion and Call to Action

The Lazy Wife Epidemic: How Wives Lose Their Marriage By Sandbagging | ClapCheeks Teacher Arrested Coach Greg Adams YouTube Channel Free Agent Lifestyle YouTube Channel

On tonight's show, the whole den of Ken's discuss everything a cyclist should be worried about in the off season, with a special focus on the stupidity in helmet design. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

14 UNLV Preview of AF Game, 28 Charles McDonald KC Talk and more NFL, 37 Hirings in the NFL

What You Need to Know is how to keep your faith focused during the Christmas season. With all the craziness of politics and the world, it's easy to get distracted. What my family did is plan ahead for some special Christmas occasions, so that we can have a festive and holy time, but also so we could set our minds on the true meaning of Christmas: the mystery of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Schedule these kinds of events for our family to beat back the frenetic pace of life in America today. Jim Robb, Vice President of NumbersUSA, joins to talk about his new book Political Migrants: Hispanic Voters on the Move-How America's Largest Minority Is Flipping Conventional Wisdom on Its Head. He talks about the border, the 2020 Census Data, and the impact ahead for us in next year's elections.  Ilan Srulovicz, CEO of Egard Watches, actor, and filmmaker joins Ed to discuss the ongoing situation in Israel. Ilan reveals to Ed how the media has been misrepresenting the situation, looking at the conflict through an extreme level of bias. Ilan and Ed also discuss Islamic extremism and how its hatred for the West and liberty is motivating continuous attacks. Wrap Up: Every now and then, even the big media says things that are true and honorable. This is the case in a recent Wall Street Journal article by Kimberly Strassel called ‘Sandbagging the Supreme Court.' She points out how the left's legal assault on Trump is an assault on the institutions of our political system - and that's by design.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What You Need to Know is how to keep your faith focused during the Christmas season. With all the craziness of politics and the world, it's easy to get distracted. What my family did is plan ahead for some special Christmas occasions, so that we can have a festive and holy time, but also so we could set our minds on the true meaning of Christmas: the mystery of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Schedule these kinds of events for our family to beat back the frenetic pace of life in America today. Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist, Executive Director at the CO2 Coalition, and author of the newly-released A Very Convenient Warming, joins Ed to discuss the new book. Ed and Gregory also cut through the pseudo-scientific alarmism of Climate Change activists, showing what they are lying about and what the truth about Earth's environment is. Robert Bortins is the CEO of Classical Conversations, the classical Christian homeschool learning curriculum. Robert joins Ed to discuss some of the great things about homeschooling. Robert highlights the flexibility of homeschooling and how it can allow students to get ahead in life, as well as the many opportunities for thinking outside the box. Ed and Robert also talk about the Marxists at the universities and the ways that their ideas spread. Wrap Up: Every now and then, even the big media says things that are true and honorable. This is the case in a recent Wall Street Journal article by Kimberly Strassel called ‘Sandbagging the Supreme Court.' She points out how the left's legal assault on Trump is an assault on the institutions of our political system - and that's by design.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What You Need to Know is how to keep your faith focused during the Christmas season. With all the craziness of politics and the world, it's easy to get distracted. What my family did is plan ahead for some special Christmas occasions, so that we can have a festive and holy time, but also so we could set our minds on the true meaning of Christmas: the mystery of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Schedule these kinds of events for our family to beat back the frenetic pace of life in America today. Stephen Willeford, author of A Town Called Sutherland Springs and gun rights spokesman at Gunowners.org, joins Ed to discuss recent gun legislation in the state of Illinois and the ongoing legal battle against their new gun restrictions. Stephen details how their case is being impacted by judges who received campaign contributions from the anti-gun lobby. Stephen also talks about his own experience stopping a mass shooter in a Church with an AR-15 Scott Phelps, writer and head of Abstinence and Marriage Education Partnership (AMP), joins Ed Martin to talk about how to find out what kind of sex education is being taught in your children's schools. Scott discusses how school administrators and school board members need to know the proper messaging on the importance of abstinence education. Wrap Up: Every now and then, even the big media says things that are true and honorable. This is the case in a recent Wall Street Journal article by Kimberly Strassel called ‘Sandbagging the Supreme Court.' She points out how the left's legal assault on Trump is an assault on the institutions of our political system - and that's by design.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rob and Mike are talking everything and anything relating to bowling. We talk about Big Mike's league review and how hes struggling on Eifell Tower and Alcatraz patterns, Rob bowling the AZ TAT and losing to a 271 in brackets, Rudy Revs gets his pro card for maybe a PBA50 run, Sandbagging, PBA Schedule updates, and worst of the week 

In this week's Interview Classic episode from ten years ago (8-23-2013), with Sean "X-Pac" Waltman, hosted by Wade Keller, they tackle these topics: WWE without John Cena, Jericho sandbagging Ryback, his biggest paydays and years, Curtis Axel progress, Triple H-Wade Keller controversy, Scott Hall, Steve Austin, A.J. Styles dilemma, Samoa Joe, the state of industry, and much much more. It's always a great show full of insight when Waltman is a guest on the Livecast, one of the listeners' favorite guests.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/3076978/advertisement