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fWotD Episode 3163: Al-Muti' Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia's finest articles.The featured article for Thursday, 1 January 2026, is Al-Muti'.Abū ʾl-Qāsim al-Faḍl ibn al-Muqtadir (913/14 – September/October 974), better known by his regnal name of al-Mutīʿ li-ʾllāh (lit. 'Obedient to God'), was the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad from 946 to 974, ruling under the tutelage of the Buyid emirs.Al-Muti's reign represented the nadir of the Abbasid caliphate's power and authority. In previous decades, the secular authority of the caliphs had shrunk to Iraq, and even there had been curtailed by powerful warlords; with the Buyid conquest of Baghdad, it was now abolished entirely. Al-Muti' was raised to the throne by the Buyids and was effectively reduced to a rubber-stamp figurehead, albeit with some vestiges of authority over judicial and religious appointments in Iraq. The very fact of his subordination and powerlessness helped restore some stability to the caliphal institution: in stark contrast to his short-lived and violently deposed predecessors, al-Muti' enjoyed a long and relatively unchallenged tenure, and was able to hand over the throne to his son al-Ta'i'.Al-Muti's prestige as the nominal leader of the Muslim world sharply declined during his tenure. Regional rivals to the Buyids delayed their recognition of al-Muti's caliphate, seeing in him only a Buyid puppet, and his inability to respond effectively to Byzantine advances tarnished his reputation. More importantly, the rise of Shi'a regimes across the Middle East directly challenged Sunni and Abbasid predominance. The Buyids themselves were Shi'a, but they retained the Abbasid caliphate out of expedience. Further west, the expanding Fatimid Caliphate posed a direct ideological and political challenge to the Abbasids. During al-Muti's reign, the Fatimids conquered Egypt and started to expand into the Levant, threatening Baghdad itself.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:21 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 2026.For the full current version of the article, see Al-Muti' on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm neural Stephen.

The People's Liberation Army began to carry out an inter-service exercise surrounding Taiwan Island on Monday, according to a military spokesman.据一名军方发言人介绍，人民解放军于周一开始在台湾岛周边开展多军兵种联合演习。Senior Colonel Shi Yi, spokesman for the PLA Eastern Theater Command, said on Monday morning that his command has launched the "Justice Mission 2025" exercise, which involves its ground, air, naval, missile, and other forces.解放军东部战区新闻发言人施毅大校周一上午表示，战区已启动代号为“正义使命—2025”的演习，参演力量包括陆军、空军、海军、火箭军等多种兵力。"The operation includes air and sea patrols, suppression of hostile forces, blockade of critical ports and zones, and battlefield periphery deterrence, and is intended to test our forces' joint combat capabilities," he said.他说，此次行动涵盖空中与海上巡逻、压制敌对力量、封锁关键港口和区域以及战场周边慑控，旨在检验部队的联合作战能力。Aircraft and warships will conduct exercises near the Taiwan Island from multiple directions while units from different PLA branches will simulate joint strikes, the spokesman noted, adding that these moves will examine the troops' capabilities in rapid, all-dimensional deployment and omnidirectional blockade and control.发言人指出，解放军航空兵和海军舰艇将从多个方向在台湾岛附近开展演练，不同军兵种部队将模拟实施联合打击，这些行动将检验部队快速、全维度部署以及全方位封锁与控制能力。Shi stressed that this is a stern warning against "Taiwan independence" separatists and external forces attempting to interfere in the Taiwan question and is a legitimate and necessary action to safeguard China's sovereignty and national unity.施毅强调，此举是对“台独”分裂势力及企图干涉台湾问题的外部势力发出的严正警告，是维护国家主权和国家统一的正当且必要行动。His command also published a themed poster titled "Shield of Justice, Smashing Illusion".其所在战区还发布了主题海报《正义之盾，粉碎幻象》。The latest military action comes in the wake of the United States' announcement earlier this month about its large-scale arms sale package planned for Taiwan that totals $11.1 billion.此次最新军事行动是在美国本月早些时候宣布拟向台湾地区出售总额达111亿美元的大规模武器装备计划之后采取的。The plan was unveiled on Wednesday, covering eight items, including HIMARS rocket systems, howitzers, Javelin anti-tank missiles, Altius loitering munition drones, and parts for other equipment.该计划于周三公布，涵盖八个项目，包括“海马斯”火箭系统、榴弹炮、“标枪”反坦克导弹、“阿尔蒂乌斯”巡飞弹无人机以及其他装备的相关零部件。The Chinese government said the move has seriously violated the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques, interfered in China's internal affairs, and undermined China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.中国政府表示，此举严重违反一个中国原则和中美三个联合公报，粗暴干涉中国内政，损害中国的主权和领土完整。It has announced countermeasures against some US companies and executives involved in the arms sale plan.中方已宣布对参与该军售计划的部分美国企业及其高管采取反制措施。inter-service exercise /ˌɪntərˈsɜːrvɪs ˈeksərsaɪz/多军兵种联合演习Eastern Theater Command /ˈiːstərn ˈθɪətər kəˈmænd/东部战区joint combat capabilities /dʒɔɪnt ˈkɑːmbæt ˌkeɪpəˈbɪlɪtiz/联合作战能力large-scale arms sale package/ˈlɑːrdʒ skeɪl ɑːrmz seɪl ˈpækɪdʒ/大规模军售方案countermeasures /ˈkaʊntərˌmeʒərz/反制措施

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast. AI agents are your next customers. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/vEdq8rpBM3I In this data-rich keynote, Jay McBain deconstructs the tectonic shifts reshaping the $5.3 trillion global technology industry, arguing that we are entering a new 20-year cycle where traditional direct sales models are obsolete. McBain explains why 96% of the industry is now surrounded by partners and how successful companies must pivot from “flywheels and theory” to a granular strategy focused on the seven specific partners present in every deal. From the explosion of agentic AI and the $163 billion marketplace revolution to the specific mechanics of multiplier economics, this discussion provides a roadmap for navigating the “decade of the ecosystem” where influence, trust, and integration—not just product—determine winners and losers. Key Takeaways Half of today's Fortune 500 companies will likely vanish in the next 20 years due to the shift toward AI and ecosystem-led models. Every B2B deal now involves an average of seven trusted partners who influence the decision before a vendor even knows a deal exists. Microsoft has outpaced AWS growth for 26 consecutive quarters largely because of a superior partner-led geographic strategy. Marketplaces are projected to grow to $163 billion by 2030, with nearly 60% of deals involving partner funding or private offers. The “Multiplier Effect” is the new ROI, where partners can make up to $8.45 for every dollar of vendor product sold. Future dominance relies on five key pillars: Platform, Service Partnerships, Channel Partnerships, Alliances, and Go-to-Market orchestration. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Keywords: Jay McBain, Canalys, partner ecosystem, channel chief, agentic AI, marketplace growth, multiplier economics, B2B sales trends, tech industry forecast, service partnerships, strategic alliances, Microsoft vs AWS, distribution transformation, managed services growth, SaaS platforms, customer journey mapping, 28 moments of truth, future of reselling, technology spending 2025, ecosystem orchestration, partner multipliers. T Transcript: Jay McBain WORKFILE FOR TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: Just up from, did you Puerto Rico last night? Puerto Rico, yes. Puerto Rico. He dodged the hurricane. Um, you all know him. Uh, let him introduce himself for those of you who don’t, but just thrilled to have on the stage, again, somebody who knows more about what’s going on in, in the, and has the pulse on this industry probably than just about anybody I know personally. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: J Jay McBain. Jay, great to see you my friend. Alright, thank you. We have to come all the way. We live, we live uh, about 20 minutes from each other. We have to come all the way to Reston, Virginia to see each other, right? That’s right. Very good. Well, uh, that’s all over to you, sir. Thank you. [00:00:35] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you so much. [00:00:36] Jay McBain: I went from 85 degrees yesterday to 45 today, but I was able to dodge that, uh, that hurricane, uh, that we kind of had to fly through the northern edge of, uh, wanna talk today about our industry, about the ultimate partner. I’m gonna try to frame up the ultimate partner as I walk through the data and the latest research that, uh, that we’ve been doing in the market. [00:00:56] Jay McBain: But I wanted to start here ’cause our industry moves in 20 year cycles, and if you look at the Fortune 500 and dial back 20 years from today, 52% of them no longer exist. As we step into the next 20 year AI era, half of the companies that we know and love today are not gonna exist. So we look at this, and by the way, if you’re not in the Fortune 500 and you don’t have deep pockets to buy your way outta problems, 71% of tech companies fail over the course of 10 years. [00:01:30] Jay McBain: Those are statistics from the US government. So I start to look at our industry and you know, you may look at the, you know, mainframe era from the sixties and seventies, mini computers, August the 12th, 1981, that first IBM, PC with Microsoft dos, version one, you know, triggered. A new 20 year era of client server. [00:01:51] Jay McBain: It was the time and I worked at IBM for 17 years, but there was a time where Bill Gates flew into Boca Raton, Florida and met with the IBM team and did that, you know, fancy licensing agreement. But after, you know, 20 years of being the most valuable company in the world and 13 years of antitrust and getting broken up, almost like at and TIBM almost didn’t make payroll. [00:02:14] Jay McBain: 13 years after meeting Bill Gates. Yeah, that’s how quickly things change in these eras. In 1999, a small company outta San Francisco called salesforce.com got its start. About 10 years later, Jeff Bezos asked a question in a boardroom, could we rent out our excess capacity and would other companies buy it? [00:02:35] Jay McBain: Which, you know, most people in the room laughed at ’em at the time. But it created a 20 year cloud era when our friends, our neighbors, our family. Saw Chachi PT for the first time in March of 2023. They saw the deep fakes, they saw the poetry, they saw the music. They came to us as tech people and said, did we just light up Skynet? [00:02:58] Jay McBain: And that consumer trend has triggered this next 20 years. I could walk through the richest people in the world through those trends. I could walk through the most valuable companies. It all aligns. ’cause by the way, Apple’s no longer at the top. Nvidia is at the top, Microsoft. Second, things change really quickly. [00:03:17] Jay McBain: So in that course of time, you start to look at our industry and as people are talking about a six and a half or $7 trillion build out of ai, that’s open AI and Microsoft numbers, that is bigger than our industry that’s taken over 50 years to build. This year, we’re gonna finish the year at $5.3 trillion. [00:03:36] Jay McBain: That’s from the smallest flower shop to the biggest bank. Biggest governments that Caresoft would, uh, serve biggest customer in the world is actually the federal government of the us. But you look at this pie chart and you look at the changes that we’re gonna go through over the next 20 years, there’s about a trillion dollars in hardware. [00:03:54] Jay McBain: There’s about a trillion dollars in software. If you look forward through all of the merging trends, quantum computing, humanoid robots, all the things that are coming that dollar to dollar software to hardware will continue to exist all the way through. We see services making up almost two thirds of this pie. [00:04:13] Jay McBain: Yesterday I was in a telco conference with at and t and Verizon and T-Mobile and some of the biggest wireless players and IT services, which happen to be growing faster than products. At the moment, there is more work to be done wrapping around the deal than the actual products that the customer is buying. [00:04:32] Jay McBain: So in an industry that’s growing at 7%. On top of the world economy that’s grown at 2.2. This is the fastest growing industry, and it will be at least for the next 10 years, if not 2070 0.1% of this entire $5 trillion gets transacted through partners. While what we’re talking to today about the ultimate partner, 96% of this industry is surrounded by partners in one way or another. [00:05:01] Jay McBain: They’re there before the deal. They’re there at the deal. They’re there after the deal. Two thirds of our industry is now subscription consumption based. So every 30 days forever, and a customer for life becomes everything. So if every deal in medium, mid-market, and higher has seven partners, according to McKinsey, who are those seven people trying to get into the deal? [00:05:25] Jay McBain: While there’s millions of companies that have come into tech over the last 10 to 20 years. Digital agencies, accountants, legal firms, everybody’s come in. The 250,000 SaaS companies, a million emerging tech companies, there’s a big fight to be one of those seven trusted people at the table. So millions of companies and tens of millions of people our competing for these slots. [00:05:49] Jay McBain: So one of the pieces of research I’m most proud of, uh, in my analyst career is this. And this took over two years to build. It’s a lot of logos. Not this PowerPoint slide, but the actual data. Thousands of people hours. Because guess what? When you look at partners from the top down, the top 1000 partners, by capability and capacity, not by resale. [00:06:15] Jay McBain: It’s not a ranking of CDW and insight and resale numbers. It is the surrounding. Consulting, design, architecture, implementations, integrations, managed services, all the pieces that’s gonna make the next 20 years run. So when you start to look at this, 98% of these companies are private, so very difficult to get to those numbers and, uh, a ton of research and help from AI and other things to get this. [00:06:41] Jay McBain: But this is it. And if you look at this list, there’s a thousand logos out of the million companies. There’s a thousand logos that drive two thirds of all tech services in the world. $1.07 trillion gets delivered by a thousand companies, but here’s where it gets fun. Those companies in the middle, in blue, the 30 of them deliver more tech services than the next 970. [00:07:08] Jay McBain: Combined the 970 combined in white deliver more tech services. Then the next million combined. So if you think we live in an 80 20 rule or maybe a 99, a 95 5 rule, or a 99 1 rule, we actually live in a 99.9 0.1 parallel principle. These companies spread around the world evenly split across the uh, different regions. [00:07:35] Jay McBain: South Africa, Latin America, they’re all over. They split. They split among types. All of the Venn diagram I just showed from GSIs to VARs to MSPs, to agencies and other types of companies. But this is a really rich list and it’s public. So every company in the world now, if you’re looking at Transactable data, if you’re looking at quantifiable data that you can go put your revenue numbers against, it represents 70 to 80% of every company in this room’s Tam. [00:08:08] Jay McBain: In one piece of research. So what do you do below that? How do you cover a million companies that you can’t afford to put a channel account manager? You can’t afford to write programs directly for well after the top down analysis and all the wallet share and you know exactly where the lowest hanging fruit is for most of your tam. [00:08:28] Jay McBain: The available markets. The obtainable markets. You gotta start from the community level grassroots up. So you need to ask the question for the million companies and the maybe a hundred thousand companies out there, partner companies that are surrounding your customer. These are the seven partners that surround your customer. [00:08:48] Jay McBain: What do they read, where do they go, and who do they follow? Interestingly enough, our industry globally equates to only a thousand watering holes, a thousand companies at the top, a thousand places at the bottom. 35% of this audience we’re talking. Millions of people here love events and there’s 352 of them like this one that they love to go to. [00:09:13] Jay McBain: They love the hallway chats, they love the hotel lobby bar, you know, in a time reminded by the pandemic. They love to be in person. It’s the number one way they’re influenced. So if you don’t have a solid event strategy and you don’t have a community team out giving out socks every week, your competitors might beat you. [00:09:31] Jay McBain: 12% of this audience loves podcasts. It’s the Joe Rogan effect of our industry. And while you know, you may not think the 121 podcasts out there are important, well, you’re missing 12% of your audience. It’s over a million people. If you’re not on a weekly podcast in one of these podcasts in the world, there’s still people that read one of the 106 magazines in the world. [00:09:55] Jay McBain: There are people that love peer groups, associations, they wanna be part of this. There’s 15 different ways people are influenced. And a solid grassroots strategy is how you make this happen. In the last 10 years, we’ve created a number of billionaires. Bottom up. They never had to go talk to la large enterprise. [00:10:15] Jay McBain: They never had to go build out a mid-market strategy. They just went and give away socks and new community marketing. And this has created, I could rip through a bunch of names that became unicorns just in the last couple of years, bottoms up. You go back to your board walking into next year, top down, bottom up. [00:10:34] Jay McBain: You’ve covered a hundred percent of your tam, and now you’ve covered it with names, faces, and places. You haven’t covered it with a flywheel or a theory. And for 44 years, we have gone to our board every fourth quarter with flywheels and theory. Trust me, partners are important. The channel is key to us. [00:10:57] Jay McBain: Well, let’s talk at the point of this granularity, and now we’re getting supported by technology 261 entrepreneurs. Many of them in the room actually here that are driving this ability to succeed with seven partners in every deal to exchange data to be able to exchange telemetry of these prospects to be able to see twice or three times in terms of pipeline of your target addressable market. [00:11:26] Jay McBain: All these ai, um, technologies, agentic technologies are coming into this. It’s all about data. It’s all about quantifiable names, faces, and places. Now none of us should be walking around with flywheels, so let’s flip the flywheels. No. Uh, so we also look at, and I sold PCs for 17 years and that was in the high times of 40% margins for partners. [00:11:55] Jay McBain: But one interesting thing when you study the p and l for broad base of partners around the world, it’s changed pretty significantly in this last 20 year era. What the cloud era did is dropped hardware from what used to be 84% plus the break fix and things that wrap around it of the p and l to now 16% of every partner in the world. [00:12:16] Jay McBain: 84% of their p and l is now software and services. And if you look at profitability, it’s worse. It’s actually 87% is profitability wise. They’ve completely shifted in terms of where they go. Now we look at other parts of our market. I could go through every part of the pie of the slide, but we’re watching each of the companies, and if you can see here, this is what we want to talk about in terms of ultimate partner. [00:12:43] Jay McBain: Microsoft has outgrown AWS for 26 straight quarters. They don’t have a better product. They don’t have a better price, they don’t have better promotion. It’s all place. And I’ll explain why you guess here in the light green line. Exactly. The day that Google went a hundred percent all in partner, every deal, even if a deal didn’t have a partner, one of the 4% of deals that didn’t have a partner, they injected a partner. [00:13:09] Jay McBain: You can see on the left side exactly where they did it. They got to the point of a hundred percent partner driven. Rebuilt their programs, rebuilt their marketplace. Their marketplace is actually larger than Microsoft’s, and they grew faster than Microsoft. A couple of those quarters. It is a partner driven future, and now I have Oracle, which I just walked by as I walked from the hotel. [00:13:31] Jay McBain: Oracle with their RPOs will start to join. Maybe the list of three hyperscalers becomes the list of four in future slides, but that’s a growth slide. Market share is different. AWS early and commanding lead. And it plays out, uh, plays out this way. But we’re at an interesting moment and I stood up six years ago talking about the decade of the ecosystem after we went through a decade of sales starting in 1999 when we all thought we were born to be salespeople. [00:14:02] Jay McBain: We managed territories with our gut. The sales tech stack would have it different, that sales was a science, and we ended the decade 2009, looking at sales very differently in 2009. I remember being at cocktail parties where CMOs would be joking around that 50% of their marketing dollars were wasted. They just didn’t know which 50%. [00:14:23] Jay McBain: And I’ll tell you, that was really funny. In 2009 till every 58-year-old CMO got replaced by a 38-year-old growth hacker who walked in with 15,348 SaaS companies in their MarTech and ad tech stack to solve the problem, every nickel of marketing by 2019 was tracked. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot, driving this industry. [00:14:50] Jay McBain: Now, we stood up and said the 28 moments that come before a sale are pretty much all partner driven. In the best case scenario, a vendor might see four of the moments. They might come to your website, maybe they read an ebook, maybe they have a salesperson or a demo that comes in. That’s four outta 28 moments. [00:15:10] Jay McBain: The other 24 are done by partners. Yeah, in the worst case scenario and the majority scenario, you don’t see any of the moments. All 28 happen and you lose a deal without knowing there ever was a deal. So this is it. We need to partner in these moments and we need to inject partners into sales and marketing, like no time before, and this was the time to do it. [00:15:33] Jay McBain: And we got some feedback in the Salesforce state of sales report, which doesn’t involve any partnerships or, or. Channel Chiefs or anything else. This is 5,500 of the biggest CROs in the world that obviously use Salesforce. 89% of salespeople today use partners every day. For the 11% who don’t, 58% plan two within a year. [00:15:57] Jay McBain: If you add those two numbers together, that’s magically the 96% number. They recognize that every deal has partners in it. In 2024, last year, half of the salespeople in the world, every industry, every country. Miss their numbers. For the minority who made their numbers, 84 point percent pointed to partners as the reason why they made their numbers. [00:16:21] Jay McBain: It was the cheat code for sales, so that modern salesperson that knows how to orchestrate a deal, orchestrate the 28 moments with the seven partners and get to that final spot is the winning formula. HubSpot’s number in separate research was 84% in marketing. So we’re starting to see partners in here. We don’t have to shout from the mountaintops. [00:16:44] Jay McBain: These communities like ultimate Partner are working and we’re getting this to the highest levels in the board. And I’ll say that, you know, when 20 years from now half of the companies we know and love fail after we’re done writing the book and blaming the CEO for inventing the thing that ended up killing them, blaming the board for fiduciary responsibility and letting it happen. [00:17:06] Jay McBain: What are the other chapters of the book? And I think it’s all in one slide. We are in this platform economy and the. [00:17:31] Jay McBain: So your battery’s fine. Check, check, check, check. Alright, I’ll, I’ll just hold this in case, but the companies that execute on all five of these areas, well. Not only today become the trillion dollar valued companies, but they become the companies of tomorrow. These will be the fastest growing companies at every level. [00:17:50] Jay McBain: Not only running a platform business, but participating in other platforms. So this is how it breaks out, and there are people at very senior levels, at very big companies that have this now posted in the office of the CEO winning on integrations is everything. We just went through a demographic shift this year where 51% of our buyers are born after 1982. [00:18:15] Jay McBain: Millennials are the number one buyer of the $5 trillion. Their number one buying criteria is not service. Support your price, your brand reputation, it’s integrations. The buy a product, 80% is good as the next one if it works better in their environment. 79% of us won’t buy a car unless it has CarPlay or Android Auto. [00:18:34] Jay McBain: This is an integration world. The company with the most integrations win. Second, there are seven partners that surround the customer. Highly trusted partners. We’re talking, coaching the customer’s, kids soccer team, having a cottage together up at the lake. You know, best men, bate of honors at weddings type of relationships. [00:18:57] Jay McBain: You can’t maybe have all seven, but how does Microsoft beat AWS? They might have had two, three, or four of them saying nice things about them instead of the competition. Winning in service partnerships and channel partnerships changes by category. If you’re selling MarTech, only 10% of it today is resold, so you build more on service partnerships. [00:19:18] Jay McBain: If you’re in cybersecurity today, 91.6% of it is resold. Transacted through partners. So you build a lot of channel partnerships, plus the service partnerships, whatever the mix is in your category, you have to have two or three of those seven people. Saying nice things about you at every stage of the customer journey. [00:19:38] Jay McBain: Now move over to alliances. We have already built the platforms at the hyperscale level. We’ve built the platforms within SaaS, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, HubSpot. Every buyer has a set of platforms that they buy. We’ve now built them in cybersecurity this year out of 6,500 as high as cyber companies, the top five are starting to separate. [00:20:02] Jay McBain: We built it in distribution, which I’ll show in a minute. We’re building it in Telco. This is a platform economy and alliances win and you have alliances with your competitors ’cause you compete in the morning, but you’re best friends by the afternoon. Winning in other platforms is just as important as driving your own. [00:20:20] Jay McBain: And probably the most important part of this is go to market. That sales, that marketing, the 28 moments, the every 30 days forever become all a partner strategy. So there’s still CEOs out there that believe platform is a UI or UX on a bunch of disparate products and things you’ve acquired. There’s still CFOs out there that Think platform is a pricing model, a bundle model of just getting everything under one, you know, subscription price or consumption price. [00:20:51] Jay McBain: And it’s not, platforms are synonymous with partnerships. This is the way forward and there’s no conversation around ai. That doesn’t involve Nvidia over there, an open AI over here and a hyperscaler over there and a SaaS company over here. The seven layer stack wins every single time, and the companies that get this will be the ones that survive this cycle. [00:21:16] Jay McBain: Now, flipping over to marketplaces. So we had written research that, um, about five years ago that marketplaces were going to grow at 82% compounded. Yeah, probably one of the most accurate predictions we ever made, because it happened, we, we predicted that, uh, we were gonna get up to about $85 billion. Well, now we’ve extended that to 2030, so we’re gonna get up to $163 billion, and the thing that we’re watching is in green. [00:21:46] Jay McBain: If 96% of these deals are partner assisted in some way, how is the economics of partnering going to work? We predicted that 50% of deals by 2027. Would be partner funded in some way. Private offers multi-partner offers distributor sellers of record, and now that extends to 59% by 2030, the most senior leader of the biggest marketplace AWS, just said to us they’re gonna probably make these numbers on their own. [00:22:14] Jay McBain: And he asked what their two competitors are doing. So he’s telling us that we under called this. Now when you look at each of the press releases, and this is the AWS Billion Dollar Club. Every one of the companies on the left have issued a press release that they’re in the billion dollar club. Some of them are in the multi-billions, but I want you to double click on this press release. [00:22:35] Jay McBain: I’m quoted in here somewhere, but as CrowdStrike is building the marketplace at 91% compounded, they’re almost doubling their revenue every single year. They’re growing the partner funding, in this case, distributor funding by 3548%. Almost triple digit growth in marketplace is translating into almost quadruple digit growth in funding. [00:23:01] Jay McBain: And you see that over and over again as, as Splunk hit three, uh, billion dollars. The same. Salesforce hit $2 billion on AWS in Ulti, 18 months. They joined in October 20, 23, and 18 months later, they’re already at $2 billion. But now you’re seeing at Salesforce, which by the way. Grew up to $40 billion in revenue direct, almost not a nickel in resell. [00:23:28] Jay McBain: Made it really difficult for VARs and managed service providers to work with Salesforce because they couldn’t understand how to add services to something they didn’t book the revenue for. While $40 billion companies now seeing 70% of their deals come through partners. So this is just the world that we’re in. [00:23:44] Jay McBain: It doesn’t matter who you are and what industry you’re in, this takes place. But now we’re starting to see for the first time. Partners join the billion dollar club. So you wonder about partnering and all this funding and everything that’s working through Now you’re seeing press releases and companies that are redoing their LinkedIn branding about joining this illustrious club without a product to sell and all the services that wrap around it. [00:24:10] Jay McBain: So the opening session on Microsoft was interesting because there’s been a number of changes that Microsoft has done just in the last 30 days. One is they cut distribution by two thirds going from 180 distributors to 62. They cut out any small partner lower than a thousand dollars, and that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s over a hundred thousand partners that get deed tightening the long tail. [00:24:38] Jay McBain: They we’re the first to really put a global point system in place three years ago. They went to the new commerce experience. If you remember, all kinds of changes being led by. The biggest company for the channel. And so when we’re studying marketplaces, we’re not just studying the three hyperscalers, we’re studying what TD Cynic is doing with Stream One Ingram’s doing with Advant Advantage Aerosphere. [00:25:01] Jay McBain: Also, we’re watching what PAX eight, who by the way, is the 365 bestseller for Microsoft in the world. They are the cybersecurity leader for Microsoft in the world and the copilot. Leader in the world for Microsoft and Partner of the Year for Microsoft. So we’re watching what the cloud platforms are doing, watching what the Telco are doing, which is 25 cents out of every dollar, if you remember that pie chart, watching what the biggest resellers are converting themselves into. [00:25:30] Jay McBain: Vince just mentioned, you know, SHI in the changes there watching the managed services market and the leaders there, what they’re doing in terms of how this industry’s moving forward. By the way, managed services at $608 billion this year. Is one and a half times larger than the SaaS industry overall. [00:25:48] Jay McBain: It’s also one and a half times larger than all the hyperscalers combined. Oracle, Alibaba, IBM, all the way down. This is a massive market and it makes up 15 to 20 cents of every dollar the customer spend. We’re watching that industry hit a trillion dollars by the end of the decade, and we’re watching 150 different marketplace development platforms, the distribution of our industry, which today is 70.1% indirect. [00:26:13] Jay McBain: We’re starting to see that number, uh, solidify in terms of marketplaces as well. Watching distributors go from that linear warehouse in a bank to this orchestration model, watching some of the biggest players as the world comes around, platforms, it tightens around the place. So Caresoft, uh, from from here is the sixth biggest distributor in the world. [00:26:40] Jay McBain: Just shows you how big the. You know, biggest client in the world is that they serve. But understand that we’re publishing the distributor 500 list, but it’ll be the same thing. That little group in blue in the middle today, you know, drives almost two thirds of the market. So what happens in all this next stage in terms of where the dollars change hands. [00:27:07] Jay McBain: And the economics of partnering themselves are going through the most radical shift that we’ve seen ever. So back to the nineties, and, and for those of you that have been channel chiefs and running programs, we went to work every day. You know, everything’s on fire. We’re trying to check hundred boxes, trying to make our program 10% better than our competitors. [00:27:30] Jay McBain: Hey, we gotta fix our deal registration program today, and our incentives are outta whack or training programs or. You know, not where they need to be. Our certification, you know, this was the life of, uh, of a channel chief. Everybody thought we were just out drinking in the Caribbean with our best partners, but we were under the weight of this. [00:27:49] Jay McBain: But something interesting has happened is that we turned around and put the customer at the middle of our programs to say that those 28 moments in green before the sale are really, really important. And the seven partners who participate are really important. Understanding. The customer’s gonna buy a seven layer stack. [00:28:09] Jay McBain: They’re gonna buy it With these seven partners, the procurement stage is much different. The growth of marketplaces, the growth of direct in some of these areas, and then long term every 30 days forever in a managed service, implementations, integrations, how you upsell, cross-sell, enrich a deal changes. So how would you build a program that’s wrapped around the customer instead of the vendor? [00:28:35] Jay McBain: And we’re starting to hear our partners shout back to us. These are global surveys, big numbers, but over half of our partners, regardless of type, are selling consulting to their customer. Over half are designing architecting deals. A third of them are trying to be system integrators showing up at those implementation integration moments. [00:28:55] Jay McBain: Two thirds of them are doing managed services, but the shocking one here is 44% of our partners, regardless of type, are coding. They’re building agents and they’re out helping their customer at that level. So this is the modern partner that says, don’t typecast me. You may have thought of me in your program. [00:29:14] Jay McBain: You might have me slotted as a var. Well, I do 3.2 things, and if I don’t get access to those resources, if you don’t walk me to that room, I’m not gonna do them with you. You may have me as a managed service provider that’s only in the morning. By the afternoon I’m coding, and by the next morning I’m implementing and consulting. [00:29:33] Jay McBain: So again, a partner’s not a partner. That Venn diagram is a very loose one now, as every partner on there is doing 3.2 different business models. And again, they’re telling us for 43 years, they said, I want more leads this year it changed. For the first time, I want to be recognized and incentivized as more than just a cash register for you. [00:29:57] Jay McBain: I want you to recognize when I’m consulting, when I’m designing, when you’re winning deals, because of my wonderful services, by the way, we asked the follow up question, well, where should we spend our money with you? And they overwhelmingly say, in the consulting stage, you win and lose deals. Not at moment 28. [00:30:18] Jay McBain: We’re not buying a pack of gum at the gas station. This is a considered purchase. You win deals from moment 12 through 16 and I’m gonna show you a picture of that later, and they say, you better be spending your money there, or you’re not gonna win your fair share or more than your fair share of deals. [00:30:36] Jay McBain: The shocking thing about this is that Microsoft, when they went to the point system, lifted two thirds of all the money, tens of billions of dollars, and put it post-sale, and we were all scratching our heads going. Well, if the partners are asking for it there, and it seems like to beat your biggest competitors, you want to win there. [00:30:54] Jay McBain: Why would you spend the money on renewal? Well, they went to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and the people who lift trillions of dollars of pension funds and said, if we renew deals at 108%, we become a cash machine for you. And we think that’s more valuable than a company coming out with a new cell phone in September and selling a lot of them by Christmas every year. [00:31:18] Jay McBain: The industry. And by the way, wall Street responded, Microsoft has been more valuable than Apple since. So we talk in this now multiplier language, and these are reports that we write, uh, at AMIA at canals. But talking about the partner opportunity in that customer cycle, the $6 and 40 cents you can make for every dollar of consumption, or the $7 and 5 cents you can make the $8 and 45 cents you can make. [00:31:46] Jay McBain: There’s over 24 companies speaking at this level now, and guess what? It’s not just cloud or software companies. Hardware companies are starting to speak in this language, and on January 25th, Cisco, you know, probably second to Microsoft in terms of trust built with the channel globally is moving to a full point system. [00:32:09] Jay McBain: So these are the changes that happen fast. But your QBR with your partners now less about drinking beers at the hotel lobby bar and talking dollar by dollar where these opportunities are. So if you’re doing 3.2 of these things, let’s build out a, uh, a play where you can make $3 for every dollar that we make. [00:32:28] Jay McBain: And you make that profitably. You make it in sticky, highly retained business, and that’s the model. ’cause if you make $3 for every dollar. We make, you’re gonna win Partner of the year, and if you win partner of the year, that piece of glass that you win on stage, by the time you get back to your table, you’re gonna have three offers to buy your business. [00:32:51] Jay McBain: CDW just bought a w. S’s Partner of the Year. Insight bought Google’s eight time partner of the year. Presidio bought ServiceNow’s, partner of the year over and over and over again. So I’m at Octane, I’m at CrowdStrike, I’m at all these events in Vegas every week. I’m watching these partners of the year. [00:33:05] Jay McBain: And I’m watching as the big resellers. I’m watching as the GSIs and the m and a folks are surrounding their table after, and they’re selling their businesses for SaaS level valuations. Not the one-to-one service valuation. They’re getting multiples because this is the new future of our industry. This is platform economics. [00:33:25] Jay McBain: This is winning and platforms for partners. Now, like Vince, I spent 20 minutes without talking about ai, but we have to talk about ai. So the next 20 years as it plays out is gonna play out in phases. And the first thing you know to get it out of the way. The first two years since that March of 23, has been underwhelming, to say the least. [00:33:47] Jay McBain: It’s been disappointing. All the companies that should have won the biggest in AI have been the most disappointing. It’s underperformed the s and p by a considerable amount in terms of where we are. And it goes back to this. We always overestimate the first two years, but we underestimate the first 10. [00:34:07] Jay McBain: If you wanna be the point in time person and go look at that 1983 PC or the 1995 internet or that 2007 iPhone or that whatever point in time you wanna look at, or if you want to talk about hallucinations or where chat chip ET version five is version, as opposed to where it’s going to be as it improves every six months here on in. [00:34:30] Jay McBain: But the fact of the matter is, it’s been a consumer trend. Nvidia got to be the most valuable company in the world. OpenAI was the first company to 2 billion users, uh, in that amount of speed. It’s the fastest growing product ever in history, and it’s been a consumer win this trillions of dollars to get it thrown around in the press releases. [00:34:49] Jay McBain: They’re going out every day, you know, open ai, signing up somebody new or Nvidia, investing in somebody new almost every single day in hundreds of billions of dollars. It is all happening really on the consumer side. So we got a little bit worried and said, is that 96% of surround gonna work in ag agentic ai? [00:35:10] Jay McBain: So we went and asked, and the good news is 88% of end customers are using partners to work through their ag agentic strategy. Even though they’re moving slow, they’re actually using partners. But what’s interesting from a partner perspective, and this is new research that out till 2030. This is the number one services opportunity in the entire tech or telco industry. [00:35:34] Jay McBain: 35.3% compounded growth ending at $267 billion in services. Companies are rebuilding themselves, building out practices, and getting on this train and figuring out which vendors they should hook their caboose to as those trains leave the station. But it kind of plays out like this. So in the next three to five years, we’re in this generative, moving into agentic phase. [00:36:01] Jay McBain: Every partner thinks internally first, the sales and marketing. They’re thinking about their invoicing and billing. They’re thinking about their service tickets. They’re thinking about creating a business that’s 10% better than their competitors, taking that knowledge into their customers and drive in business. [00:36:17] Jay McBain: But we understand that ag agentic AI, as it’s going to play out is not a product. A couple of years ago, we thought maybe a copilot or an agent force or something was going to be the product that everybody needed to buy, and it’s not a product, it’s gonna show up as a feature. So you go back in the history of feature ads and it’s gonna show up in software. [00:36:38] Jay McBain: So if you’re calling in SMB, maybe you’re calling on a restaurant. The restaurant isn’t gonna call OpenAI or call Microsoft or call Nvidia directly. They’re running their restaurant. And they may have chosen a platform like Toast Square, Clover, whatever iPads people are running around with, runs on a platform that does everything in their business, does staffing, does food ordering, works with Uber Eats, does everything end to end? [00:37:08] Jay McBain: They’re gonna wait to one of those platforms, dries out agent AI for them, and can run the restaurant more effectively, less human capital and more consistently, but they wait for the SaaS platform as you get larger. A hundred, 150 people. You have vice presidents. Each of those vice presidents already have a SaaS stack. [00:37:28] Jay McBain: I talked about Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, et cetera. They’ve already built that seven layer model and in some cases it’s 70 layers. But the fact is, is they’re gonna wait for those SaaS layers to deliver ag agentic to them. So this is how it’s gonna play out for the next three and a half, three to five years. [00:37:45] Jay McBain: And partners are realizing that many of them were slow to pick up SaaS ’cause they didn’t resell it. Well now to win in this next three to half, three to five years, you’re gonna have to play in this environment. When you start looking out from here, the next generation, you know, kind of five through 15 years gets interesting in more of a physical sense. [00:38:06] Jay McBain: Where I was yesterday talking about every IOT device that now is internet access, starts to get access to large language models. Every little sensor, every camera, everything that’s out there starts to get smart. But there’s a point. The first trillionaire, I believe, will be created here. Elon’s already halfway there. [00:38:24] Jay McBain: Um, but when Bill Gates thought there was gonna be a PC in every home, and IBM thought they were gonna sell 10,000 to hobbyists, that created the richest person in the world for 20 years, there will be a humanoid in every home. There’s gonna be a point in time that you’re out having drinks with your friends, and somebody’s gonna say, the early adopter of your friends is gonna say. [00:38:46] Jay McBain: I haven’t done the dishes in six weeks. I haven’t done the laundry. I haven’t made my bed. I haven’t mowed the lawn. When they say that, you’re gonna say, well, how? And they’re gonna say, well, this year I didn’t buy a new car, but I went to the car dealership and I bought this. So we’re very close to the dexterity needed. [00:39:05] Jay McBain: We’ve got the large language models. Now. The chat, GPT version 10 by then is going to make an insane, and every house is gonna have one of the. [00:39:17] Jay McBain: This is the promise of ai. It’s not humanoid robots, it’s not agents. It’s this. 99% of the world’s business data has not been trained or tuned into models yet. Again, this is the slow moving business. If you want to think about the 99% of business data, every flight we’ve all taken in this room sits on a saber system that was put in place in 1964. [00:39:43] Jay McBain: Every banking transaction, we’ve all made, every withdrawal, every deposit sits on an IBM mainframe put in place in the sixties or seventies. 83% of this data sits in cold storage at the edge. It’s not ready to be moved. It’s not cleansed, it’s not, um, indexed. It’s not in any format or sitting on any infrastructure that a large language model will be able to gobble up the data. [00:40:10] Jay McBain: None of the workflows, none of the programming on top of that data is yet ready. So this is your 10 to 20 year arc of this era that chat bot today when they cancel your flight is cute. It’s empathetic, it feels bad for you, or at least it seems to, but it can’t do anything. It can’t book you the Marriott and get you an Uber and then a 5:00 AM flight the next morning. [00:40:34] Jay McBain: It can’t do any of that. But more importantly, it doesn’t know who you are. I’ve got 53 years of flights under my belt and they, I’m the person that get me within six hours of my kids and get me a one-way Hertz rental. You know, if there’s bad weather in Miami, get me to Tampa, get me a Hertz, I’m driving home, I’m gonna make it home. [00:40:56] Jay McBain: I’m not the 5:00 AM get me a hotel person. They would know that if they picked up the flights that I’ve taken in the past. Each of us are different. When you get access to the business data and you become ag agentic, everything changes. Every industry changes because of this around the customers. When you ask about this 35% growth, working on that data, working in traditional consulting and design and implementation, working in the $7 trillion of infrastructure, storage, compute, networking, that’s gonna be around, this is a massive opportunity. [00:41:30] Jay McBain: Services are gonna continue to outgrow products. Probably for the next five to 10 years because of this, and I’m gonna finish here. So we talked a lot about quantifying names, faces, places, and I think where we failed the most as ultimate partners is underneath the tam, which every one of our CEOs knows to the decimal point underneath the TAM that our board thinks they’re chasing. [00:41:59] Jay McBain: We’ve done a very poor job. Of talking about the available markets and obtainable markets underneath it, we, we’ve shown them theory. We’ve shown them a bunch of, you know, really smart stuff, and PowerPoint slides up the wazoo, but we’ve never quantified it for them. If they wanna win, if they want to get access, if they want to double their pipeline, triple their pipeline, if they wanna start winning more deals, if they wanna win deals that are three times larger, they close two times faster. [00:42:31] Jay McBain: And they renew 15% larger. They have to get into the available and obtainable markets. So just in the last couple weeks I spoke at Cribble, I spoke at Octane, I spoke at CrowdStrike Falcon. All three of those companies at the CEO level, main stage use those exact three numbers, three x, two x, 15%. That’s the language of platforms, and they’re investing millions and millions and millions of dollars on teams. [00:42:59] Jay McBain: To go build out the Sam Andal in name spaces and places. So you’ve heard me talk about these 28 moments a lot. They’re the ones that you spend when you buy a car. Some people spend one moment and they drive to the Cadillac dealership. ’cause Larry’s been, you know, taking care of the family for 50 years. [00:43:18] Jay McBain: Some people spend 50 moments like I do, watching every YouTube video and every, you know, thing on the internet. I clear the internet cover to cover. But the fact is, is every deal averages around these 28 moments. Your customer, there’s 13 members of the buying committee today. There’s seven partners and they’re buying seven things. [00:43:37] Jay McBain: There’s 27 things orchestrating inside these 28 moments. And where and how they all take place is a story of partnering. So a couple of years ago, canals. Latin for channel was acquired by amia, which is a part of Informa Tech Target, which is majority owned by Informa. All that being said, there’s hundreds of magazines that we have. [00:44:00] Jay McBain: There’s hundreds of events that we run. If somebody’s buying cybersecurity, they probably went to Black Hat or they probably went to GI Tech. One of these events we run, or one of the magazines. So we pick up these signals, these buyer intent signals as a company. Why did they wanna, um, buy a, uh, a Canals, which was a, you know, a small analyst firm around channels? [00:44:22] Jay McBain: They understood this as well. The 28 moments look a lot like this when marketers and salespeople are busy filling in the spots of every deal. And by the way, this is a real deal. AstraZeneca came in to spend millions of dollars on ASAP transformation, and you can start to see as the customer got smart. [00:44:45] Jay McBain: The eBooks, they read the podcasts, they listened to the events they went to. You start to see how this played out over the long term. But the thing we’ve never had in our industry is the light blue boxes. This deal was won and lost in December. In this particular case, NTT software won and Yash came in and sold the customer five projects. [00:45:07] Jay McBain: The millions of dollars that were going to be spent were solved here. The design and architecture work was all done here. A couple of ISVs You see in light blue came in right at the end, deal was closed in April. You see the six month cycle. But what if you could fill in every one of the 28 boxes in every single customer prospect that your sales and marketing team have? [00:45:30] Jay McBain: But here’s the brilliance of this. Those light blue boxes didn’t win the deals there. They won the deals months before that. So when NTT and Software one walked into this deal. They probably won the deal back in October and they had to go through the redlining. They had to go through the contracting, they had to go through all the stuff and the Gantt chart to get started. [00:45:54] Jay McBain: But while your CMO is getting all excited about somebody reading an ebook and triggering an MQL that the sales team doesn’t want, ’cause it’s not qualified, it’s not sales qualified, you walk in and say, no, no. This is a multimillion deal, dollar deal. It’s AstraZeneca. I know the five partners that are coming in in December to solidify the seven layers, and you’re walking in at the same time as the CMOs bragging about an ebook. [00:46:21] Jay McBain: This changes everything. If we could get to this level of data about every dollar of our tam, we not only outgrow our competitors, we become the platforms of the next generation. Partnering and ultimate partnering is all here. And this is what we’re doing in this room. This is what we’re doing over these couple of days, and this is what, uh, the mission that Vince is leading. [00:46:43] Jay McBain: Thank you so much. [00:46:47] Vince Menzione: Woo. Day in the house. Good to see you my friend. Good to see you. Oh, we’re gonna spend a couple minutes. Um, I’m put you in the second seat. We’re gonna put, we’re gonna make it sit fireside for a minute. Uh, that was intense. It was pretty incredible actually, Jay. And so I’m, I think I wanna open it up ’cause we only have a few minutes just to, any questions? [00:47:06] Vince Menzione: I’m sure people are just digesting. We already have one up here. See, [00:47:09] Question: Jay knows I’m [00:47:10] Vince Menzione: a question. I love it. We, I don’t think we have any I can grab a mic, a roving mic. I could be a roving mic person. Hold on. We can do this. This is not on. [00:47:25] Vince Menzione: Test, test. Yes it is. Yeah. [00:47:26] Question: Theresa Carriol dared me to ask a question and I say, you don’t have to dare me. You know, I’m going to Anyway. Um, so Jay, of the point of view that with all of the new AI players that strategic alliances is again having a moment, and I was curious your point of view on what you’re seeing around this emergence and trend of strategic alliances and strategic alliance management. [00:47:52] Question: As compared to channel management. And what are you seeing in terms of large vendors like AWS investing in that strategic alliance role versus that channel role training, enablement, measurement, all that good stuff? [00:48:06] Jay McBain: Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question. So when I told the story about toast at the restaurant or Square or Clover, they’re not call, they’re not gonna call open AI or Nvidia themselves either. [00:48:17] Jay McBain: When you look out at the 250,000 ISVs. That make up this AI stack, there is the layers that happen there. So the Alliance with AWS, the alliance they have with Microsoft or Google is going to be how they generate agent AI in their platforms. So when I talk about a seven layer stack, the average deal being seven layers, AI is gonna drive this to nine, and then 11, then probably 13. [00:48:44] Jay McBain: So in terms of how alliances work, I had it up there as one of the five core strategies, and I think it’s pretty even. You can have the best alliances in the world, but if the seven partners trusted by the customer don’t know what that alliance is and the benefits to the customer and never mention it, it’s all for Naugh. [00:49:00] Jay McBain: If you’re go-to market, you’re co-selling, your co-marketing strategies are not built around that alliance. It’s all for naught. If the integration and the co-innovation, the co-development, the all the co-creation work that’s done inside these alliances isn’t translated to customer outcomes, it’s all for naugh. [00:49:17] Jay McBain: These are all five parallel swim lanes. All five are absolutely critically needed. And I think they’re all five pretty equally weighted in terms of needing each other. Yes. To be successful in the era of platforms. Yeah. [00:49:32] Vince Menzione: And the problem is they’re all stove pipe today. If, if at all. Yeah. Maintained, right. [00:49:36] Vince Menzione: Alliances is an example. Channels and other example. They don’t talk to one another. Judge any, we’ve got a mic up here if anybody else has. Yep. We have some questions here, Jacqueline. [00:49:51] Question: So when we’re developing our channel programs, any advice on, you know, what’s the shift that we should make six months from now, a year from now? The historical has been bronze, silver, gold, right? And you’ve got your deal registration, but what’s the future look like? [00:50:05] Jay McBain: Yeah, so I mean, the programs are, are changing to, to the point where the customer should be in the middle and realizing the seven partners you need to win the deal. [00:50:15] Jay McBain: And depending on what category of product you’re in, security, how much you rely on resell, 91.6%. You know, the channel partners are gonna be critical where the customer spends the money. And if you’re adding friction to that process, you’re adding friction in terms of your growth. So you know, if you’re in cybersecurity, you have to have a pretty wide open reseller model. [00:50:39] Jay McBain: You have to have a wide open distribution model, and you have to make sure you’re there at that point of sale. While at the same time, considering the other six partners at moment 12 who are in either saying nice things about you or not, the customer might even be starting with you. ’cause there is actually one thing that I didn’t mention when I showed the 28 moments filled in. [00:51:00] Jay McBain: You’ll notice that the customer went to AWS twice direct. AWS lost the deal. Microsoft won the deal software. One is Microsoft’s biggest reseller in the world. They just acquired crayon. NTT who, who loves both had their Microsoft team go in. [00:51:18] Question: Mm. [00:51:19] Jay McBain: So I think that they went to AWS thinking it was A-W-S-S-A-P, you know, kind of starting this seven layer stack. [00:51:25] Jay McBain: I think they finished those, you know, critical moments in the middle looking at it. And then they went back to AWS kind of going probably WWTF. Yeah. What we thought was happening isn’t actually the outcome that was painted by our most trusted people. So, you know, to answer your question, listen to your partners. [00:51:43] Jay McBain: They want to be recognized for the other things they’re doing. You can’t be spending a hundred percent of the dollars at the point of sale. You gotta have a point of system that recognizes the point of sale, maybe even gold, silver, bronze, but recognizing that you’re paying for these other moments as well. [00:51:57] Jay McBain: Paying for alliances, paying for integrations and everything else, uh, in the cyber stack. And, um, you know, recognizing also the top 1000. So if I took your tam. And I overlaid those thousand logos. I would be walking into 2026 the best I could of showing my company logo by logo, where 80% of our TAM sits as wallet share, not by revenue. [00:52:25] Jay McBain: Remember, a million dollar partner is not a million dollar partner. One of them sells 1.2 million in our category. We should buy them a baseball cap and have ’em sit in the front row of our event. One of them sells $10 million and only sells our stuff if the customer asks. So my company should be looking at that $9 million opportunity and making sure my programs are writing the checks and my coverage. [00:52:48] Jay McBain: My capacity and capability planning is getting obsessed over that $9 million. My farmers can go over there, my hunters can go over here, and I should be submitting a list of a thousand sorted in descending order of opportunity. Of where my company can write program dollars into. [00:53:07] Vince Menzione: Great answer. All right. I, I do wanna be cognizant of time and the, all the other sessions we have. [00:53:14] Vince Menzione: So we’ll just take one other question if there are any here and if not, we’ll let I know. Jay, you’re gonna be mingling around for a little while before your flight. I’m [00:53:21] Jay McBain: here the whole day. [00:53:22] Vince Menzione: You, you’re the whole day. I see that Jay’s here the whole day. So if you have any other questions and, and, uh, sharing the deck is that. [00:53:29] Vince Menzione: Yep. Alright. We have permission to share the deck with the each of you as well. [00:53:34] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you very much everyone. Jay. Great to have you.

With his Christmas air-strikes on Nigeria, Trump is blundering into a conflict fundamentally driven by desertification related to the very climate change that he denies, and which now threatens democratic rule throughout the West African region. And while the Muslim-Christian sectarian strife that Trump hypes is a large element of the situation, the violence has gone both ways—and also targeted Muslim minorities such as Shi'ites, and even indigenous Jews. Furthermore, making Christians the perceived beneficiaries of imperialist intervention is only likely to exacerbate the tensions and make Christians more of a target. In Episode 310 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes an in-depth and unsparing look. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 60 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 61!

I had the grand opportunity to cover the 50th Aniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival.  With animation being one of my favourite topics in the world, I am grateful that I was able to join this epic conversation and now share it with you. :) DIALOGUES: Creative Visions in Animated Feature Films is a specific TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) event/panel where acclaimed directors like Domee Shi (Pixar's Elio), Mamoru Hosoda (Belle, Summer Wars), and Momoko Seto (Dandelion's Odyssey) discuss balancing artistic vision with studio realities, creative authorship, and the future of bold animation, showcasing diverse global perspectives. This dialogue offers insights into the challenges and triumphs of making visionary animated features, featuring both indie and major studio voices.  From intimate, auteur-driven projects to collaborations with major studios, discover how directors Domee Shi (Elio), Momoko Seto (Dandelion's Odyssey), Mamoru Hosoda (Scarlet), and Kid Koala (Space Cadet) balance artistic integrity with industry realities, and what it takes to make animated films that captivate audiences and spark global imaginations. Join us for a candid conversation about creative authorship, industry pressures, and the evolving space for bold, visionary animation. Domee Shi began as a story intern at Pixar Animation Studios in 2011 and was soon hired as a story artist on the Academy Award–winning Inside Out. She went on to work on The Good Dinosaur, Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4. In 2015, she was greenlit to write and direct Bao, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short. She made her feature directorial debut with 2022's Oscar-nominated Turning Red and most recently co-directed Elio, released June 2025. Born in Chongqing, China, and raised in Toronto, Shi now lives in Oakland, California. Momoko Seto was born in Tokyo and lives in Paris. She studied at Le Fresnoy - National Studio of Contemporary Arts. Her short film series Planet includes Planet Z (11) and Planet Sigma (15). The winner of the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes Critics' Week, Dandelion's Odyssey (25) is her feature film debut. Mamoru Hosoda was born in Toyama, Japan. He has worked on numerous animated series and directed the features One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island (05), The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (06), Summer Wars (09), Wolf Children (12), The Boy and the Beast (15) which played at the Festival, Mirai (18), and Belle (21). Scarlet (25) is his latest film. Kid Koala (Eric San) is a Montreal-based DJ, composer, and graphic novelist. He directed Space Cadet, his first animated feature based on his graphic novel, which premiered at the Berlinale and will have its North American Premiere at TIFF 50. Known for genre-defying albums and live shows, he has also scored acclaimed films, series, and video games. Moderator Theresa Scandiffio is the Associate Dean of Animation and Game Design at Sheridan College. Prior to joining Sheridan, Scandiffio led archival and curatorial projects at museums, festivals, and universities in Toronto, Chicago, and Orlando. From 2010–2020, Scandiffio was a member of the programming team that launched the Toronto International Film Festival's year-round home, TIFF Lightbox, where she led the Learning, Heritage, and Community Outreach divisions. Scandiffio served as an Ontario delegate for the 2015 Governor General Canadian Leadership Conference and was a 2017 Civic Action DiverseCity Fellow. She received her PhD in Cinema and Media studies from the University of Chicago. Key Participants & Films Mentioned: Domee Shi: Elio (Pixar) Momoko Seto: Dandelion's Odyssey (Indie/Artistic) Mamoru Hosoda: Scarlet (Japan's Studio Chizu) Kid Koala: Space Cadet (Independent)  Themes Explored: Creative Authorship vs. Industry: How directors maintain their unique style within large production environments. Industry Pressures: Navigating financial and commercial demands in animation. Evolving Landscape: The growing space for unique, visionary animation. Global Perspectives: Highlighting both auteur-driven projects and major studio collaborations.  Stay connected with me here:  https://www.instagram.com/shesallovertheplacepodcast

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast. AI agents are your next customers. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode, Vince Menzione sits down with SHI leaders Joseph Bellian and Stefanie Dunn, alongside Microsoft's Marcus Jewett, to dissect SHI's massive evolution from a traditional Large Account Reseller (LAR) to a strategic Global Systems Integrator (GSI). They explore the cultural and operational shifts required to move from a transaction-heavy model to a services-led approach, highlighting their alignment with Microsoft's MSEM methodology, the implementation of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), and their cutting-edge work with AI Labs and Agentic AI. Key Takeaways SHI has evolved from a transactional powerhouse into a Global Systems Integrator (GSI) focused on services and outcomes. The organization implemented the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to align vision, people, and data across sales and delivery. SHI serves as “Customer Zero” for Microsoft AI, implementing Copilot internally to better guide customers. The partnership mirrors Microsoft's MSEM methodology to ensure seamless co-selling and customer success lifecycles. SHI's AI Labs in New Jersey provides a secure environment for clients to build and test custom AI solutions. The shift requires moving from a “Hulk” (strength/sales) mindset to a “Tony Stark” (brainpower/strategy) mindset. Key Tags: SHI International, global systems integrator, Microsoft services, Joseph Bellian, Stefanie Dunn, Marcus Jewett, AI labs, agentic AI, MSEM methodology, entrepreneurial operating system, digital transformation, customer zero, copilot implementation, solution provider, cloud migration, data governance, services led growth. Ultimate Partner is the independent community for technology leaders navigating the tectonic shifts in cloud, AI, marketplaces, and co-selling. Through live events, UPX membership, advisory, and the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® podcast, we help organizations align with hyperscalers, accelerate growth, and achieve their greatest results through successful partnering. Transcript:Transcript: Joseph Bellian – Stefanie Dunn – Marcus Jewett WORKFILE AUDIO [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: We’ve got it. So it is interesting how these sessions kind of follow each other. Hopefully you’re seeing kind of a flow from marketplaces and the conversation about how to be a really great ISV to how an ISV took and built a channel strategy and how they integrated alliances and channels together. [00:00:16] Vince Menzione: Well, we have an, we have another really great example here to talk through. I have this, uh, incredible like background. Like I’m a hundred years old, basically. I don’t even want to tell anybody that. But, uh, I got to work with this organization way back in my days at Microsoft. They are, they were and are one of the top, I’ll call them, they were classically a reseller company. [00:00:40] Vince Menzione: They one of the largest, we call ’em large account resellers back in the day. Uh, their leader built a multi-billion dollar organization. I’m gonna let them talk through who they are today, but we have an opportunity to talk about transformation. From that lens now too, like how does an organization that’s really good at doing one thing evolve, transform and take advantage of these tectonic shifts we’re seeing? [00:01:03] Vince Menzione: So, uh, we’ve got some incredible leaders. I’m gonna have them come up on stage. And everybody introduced themselves from SHI and also from Microsoft. And we’re gonna have a really great conversation today. Great to have you. [00:01:26] Vince Menzione: So I’m gonna let, I’m gonna let you guys introduce yourselves because, uh, everybody knows you as DJ Marco Polo. So we’re gonna, we’ll start with you over in the far end, Marcus. Okay. Vince, I, [00:01:36] Marcus Jewett: I’ll try to be shy. [00:01:37] Vince Menzione: No, [00:01:37] Marcus Jewett: uh, hi everyone, my name is Marcus Jut, I am the Global Partner Development Manager for the SHI partnership. [00:01:43] Marcus Jewett: Uh, I have been overseeing this partnership for just under 12 years. Wow. So I have seen the evolutional journey of this partner and really proud of where they, uh, have matured their business and the partnership with Microsoft. [00:01:57] Stefanie Dunn: Thank you. Oh. [00:01:58] Marcus Jewett: Is there, is yours on? Oh, [00:02:00] Vince Menzione: mines [00:02:00] Stefanie Dunn: on. Hi, I am Stephanie Dunn, a director of Microsoft Services at SHI. [00:02:07] Stefanie Dunn: And it is an, it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to have Marcus as our PDM and, uh, Joe and Vince, uh, very, very happy to be here. Um, and I lead our Microsoft Services sales, uh, area. So across, uh, cloud AI business transformation and, uh. And, uh, data and ai. [00:02:28] Joseph Bellian: Great, great to have you, Stephanie. Thank you. [00:02:30] Joseph Bellian: Joe. Joe Bellion. I’m the VP of Microsoft Alliances and programs. Uh, I’ve been here at SHI for about eight months now, but been in and around the partner ecosystem for about a decade. Uh, I think of my organization of like kind of two aspects. So leading the charge around alliances, aligning our field sellers and specialists with Microsoft, as well as the, the programs backend incentives and operations. [00:02:51] Joseph Bellian: But, um, the real focus is driving the go to market strategy here at SHI. [00:02:55] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So great. So I started to allude to this earlier about like traditional, one of the top three or four companies actually. And we used to use the term, uh, LSP back in the day, or lar, we’ve got several iterations. Microsoft’s gone through several iterations of that name. [00:03:11] Vince Menzione: Marcus knows all of them probably by heart. Tell us what was the impetus to change the organization? Become more like a ser, a services led company as opposed to a transaction led organization? [00:03:21] Joseph Bellian: Yeah, absolutely. Throw one more acronym. SSP. SSP, that was another one. So, uh, solution provider. Um, but, uh, yeah, I, I’d say probably a couple things. [00:03:29] Joseph Bellian: Um, one, the big one, no news to anybody in the room and online as well. The shift with EAs, director of Microsoft, as well as, uh, the whole CSP hero motion. So we do recognize that opportunity, uh, to have services attached, to engage with our clients as well as our joint partnerships with Microsoft, uh, with services out in the field. [00:03:48] Joseph Bellian: Uh, the second one, probably the biggest one is our clients. Hearing out our clients that shift. Um, we’re talking about ai, ai, everything, AI services. Uh, we’re now in the whole era of agentic ai. What does that mean? How do you take advantage of those offerings? And so we recognize that, that our clients are spending millions of dollars with the Microsoft products, but how do you take advantage of that investment and maximize it in their environment? [00:04:13] Joseph Bellian: And so having services to help navigate those complex solutions, that’s where we’re, we’re leaning in. [00:04:18] Vince Menzione: So what did it take to change? Transformation doesn’t come easy. There’s mindset. There’s all these cultural changes that need to happen. From your perspective, both of your perspectives, what did it take internally for this change to happen? [00:04:31] Joseph Bellian: Yeah. Um, so if you, if you heard of the entrepreneurial operating system EOS Yes. And we’ve adopted that internally. Um, if you’re not familiar, it kind of comprises of six components. So vision, people, data, um, process. Issues and, um, uh, traction. So I apologize, that’s, uh, but take, take that model and put it into our business of what we did. [00:04:57] Joseph Bellian: Um, so two kind of twofold. One, moving our entire services practice organization under one, one operating rhythm, um, under Jordan Ello, our CTO. So pre-sales and delivery. So looking at that, the how we go to market with our services, single vision. Uh, single process. So it’s consistent as we’re engaging not only through our partners, but through our clients, but then also on the other side of the house, our Microsoft practice, having all of our resources under one roof so that it’s a single way we go to market. [00:05:28] Joseph Bellian: Aligning our go to market strategy, one-to-one with Microsoft. Why it, it does two things. One, it allows us to be very clear of how we are going to market to our clients, but it allows us to partner even better with our Microsoft counterparts. Yeah, when, when Microsoft, it’s always ever changing. You’re familiar, every six months to a year solution plays and the go-to-market strategy changes, uh, we’re there at the forefront in ensuring that we have our solutions mapped a hundred percent so that we can just co-sell together. [00:05:58] Joseph Bellian: Break down those walls. Let’s do more together. [00:06:00] Vince Menzione: And, uh, geographically you were sep, your teams were separated. You have a big operation in Texas. You also have a big New Jersey operation, which was where the company was founded, in fact. So I’d love to get the perspective on this, Marcus. From your perspective, like what did it do, what was it like before and what did it become? [00:06:17] Marcus Jewett: Oh yeah, let’s go back in the way back machine to 12 years ago. Um, it was a different partner, a different operating model, uh, in those early days. And this is really when we started to move customers from on-premises to more cloud-based subscription technologies. Uh, SHI was always just an incredible selling machine. [00:06:36] Marcus Jewett: If they could not do anything, they could always sell. And for any of you who are familiar with the Marvel movies, um. I, I, I, I use a reference internally with them. SHI was always like the Hulk root for strength. You know, you tell ’em to go sell something, Hulk Smash, they can knock that out. Well, as we really needed these partners to evolve and really help our customers with their technologies, whether it’s driving adoption, monthly active usage, consumption. [00:07:02] Marcus Jewett: We needed them to be more like Tony Stark, right? We needed the brain power, and so over the last, let’s call it five or six years, SHI has continued to invest in their Microsoft practice. They went from an organization that was really focused on management of EA acquisition of new Microsoft logo. To continuing to develop that muscle, but also investing in ways to help customers through their managed services, through their professional services. [00:07:28] Marcus Jewett: And it’s been a, a journey. Right? SHI is a large organization. For a long time they were Microsoft’s largest partner. And from a transactional build revenue perspective, and they still are in many ways, but we really needed them to demonstrate that they could help our, their customers, our shared customers take full advantage of all of the entitlements and the technology they, that they’ve purchased from us. [00:07:50] Marcus Jewett: And that’s really where the evolution has been with SHI when I first started, uh, this is like, God, 12 years ago, there were 20 people that were Microsoft centric resources that really were focused on. Customer acquisition and net new logos. And today that organization from a sales perspective is over 150 sellers. [00:08:09] Marcus Jewett: Wow. That are just focused on Microsoft. So that CSP, they, they fill the top of the funnel for services to help drive program utilization. And that’s not even talking about the dedicated services resources that works under Stephanie. So it’s been. An incredible journey. Microsoft has invested in SHI and in turn, SHI has invested into Microsoft. [00:08:31] Marcus Jewett: They’ve basically taken their approach in terms of how they go to market with Microsoft, and they’ve mirrored that almost like how Joe and I are wearing the same jacket. That’s really how they’ve aligned their, their go to market strategy, really making it a mirror where they take it. They’ve taken our Microsoft M methodology. [00:08:50] Marcus Jewett: And they’ve essentially adopted it and made it their own. So now when our sellers are talking with SHI sellers, they’re speaking the same language. [00:08:58] Vince Menzione: You’re teeing it up beautifully for your conversation with Stephanie here. Stephanie, I want to hear like how you’ve done all those things. ’cause it’s really your organization that’s focused on this, right? [00:09:06] Stefanie Dunn: Yeah, absolutely. So for us it’s all about shared outcomes. It we’re listening to the. Customer. We’re listening to Microsoft and we’ve really taken that to heart. Uh, the customer is at the center of every single thing that we do. I know all of us as partners. That’s really our vision, likely, and the reason why we’re here is our customers. [00:09:26] Stefanie Dunn: But really understanding how to take advantage of that partnership and build something incredible. And it is transformative. Uh, you know, we started as a licensing powerhouse, as Marcus alluded to, and now we’re going deep into services. So we’re aligning to co-sell motions. We’re aligning to the, the industries. [00:09:46] Stefanie Dunn: Uh, we’re creating marketplace offers. We’ve got our programs, uh, tied to all of our services offerings. And so when we look at the broader ecosystem, we see the vision of Microsoft. Uh, we’ve hired the right people, we’ve put the right processes into place, and we have the technology expertise in-house to really share. [00:10:08] Stefanie Dunn: In the journey with our customers and leading them. [00:10:11] Vince Menzione: And you know, you talk about like solution plays. You talked about industry. People don’t always recognize this when you talk to Microsoft sellers. They’re very focused on the industry they’re in, and you have to have those conversations that, this came up earlier, but we never got into this. [00:10:25] Vince Menzione: But you’re aligning your solution plays, you’re aligning your conversations to be very like healthcare and education, all those different markets, right? [00:10:32] Stefanie Dunn: We are. We are, which is very new for SHI in the services industry, and so you know, we’re taking our CSP plays. Um, our licensing plays and really saying, well, what can you do with that? [00:10:43] Stefanie Dunn: Right. You know, how can we advise you? And then we, we dig into the actual industry verticals to, to get tactical with them. You know, it’s, it’s about providing the strategy. It’s about providing the extra hands. They all need extra hands. They, you know, our, our customers need us. As an extension of their team. [00:11:01] Stefanie Dunn: And so for us it’s really important to dig into that and, and be, and be that, that listening ear and you know, that expert in the room for them, uh, from advisory standpoint. And so all of our se services sellers are advisors as well. They’re not selling a product, they’re not selling, uh, something individual. [00:11:19] Stefanie Dunn: We are selling to. Fill and fulfill their goals and business outcomes, which is extremely unique, I will say, because we do have that end to end. So it does start with the licensing. It starts with assessing what you really have, meeting with those advisors, and then putting together a roadmap to help them. [00:11:37] Stefanie Dunn: Understand. Okay, well this is what it’s gonna take to get you here. Here’s our, uh, we love reverse timelines at SHI and so, um, it’s d minus din and so this is where you wanna go and this is when you wanna get there. So this is how we’re gonna help you, uh, along that roadmap. [00:11:53] Vince Menzione: I am gonna put you on the spot here with m Sem. [00:11:55] Vince Menzione: ’cause I think Microsoft finally laid out a process a couple years ago for you to like line up to, ’cause you were doing one piece of it before. Do you want to talk about m how em plays in here and how SHI is leveraging it? [00:12:07] Marcus Jewett: Right. So, uh, across our SEM stages, there are five different stages, and this is the customer journey from these, you know, pre-sales, scoping, uh, engagements with customers all the way through delivery. [00:12:19] Marcus Jewett: And then of course, like that customer success lifecycle and managed services. Again, this was not a language or a way that SHI really approached their business. Again, it was very much like, let’s. Get the customer to purchase on an EA or let’s renew the customer. And then once that cycle was complete, then it, it was almost like adding fries. [00:12:38] Marcus Jewett: Would you like some services with your ea? Right. And, uh, it took a, it took a while, right? Some very, uh, difficult conversations, but we were able to find, finally get the right people in the room to make the right investments. And now when you think about how SHI goes to market, they don’t necessarily leverage the term SEM internally, but. [00:12:59] Marcus Jewett: All of their customer methodologies or their sales methodologies in terms of how they service their customers aligns perfectly. Even when we get into the descriptive part of building out our, uh, partner business plan, we did that across every stage of the M SEM methodology. So that we can ensure that the teams at SHI are in perfect alignment with the teams at Microsoft. [00:13:20] Marcus Jewett: So, uh, I’m, I’m really excited about how we’ve been able to mature the practice and how SHI is now 100% aligned with Microsoft across all of our solution areas, whether it’s. Security, you know, cloud and infrastructure or AI business solutions. There’s a very mirrored approach to how we support customers. [00:13:39] Marcus Jewett: Yeah. I want [00:13:40] Vince Menzione: to double click on the AI component. You know, we were up here earlier, Irwin and I were up here talking about being a frontier firm, and I’ll open it up to all, all of you to individually answer this. I know, Marcus, you have some insights here about the ai. You mentioned AI already. But also to Stephanie and Joe about how you’re taking AI and modern work and workplace and, and, and, and addressing this market specifically. [00:14:07] Vince Menzione: Where, where, where do we wanna start there? [00:14:09] Joseph Bellian: Yeah. One big one. Um, if you’re not familiar, we have ai, an AI labs, um, onsite, uh, lab, and based out of Jersey, one of our headquarters. So on the forefront of the AI technology, but the real focus there is being able to meet with our clients and obviously joint partnerships, um, to build and develop solutions safe, um, offline in a safe, secure environment. [00:14:33] Joseph Bellian: Because let’s be honest, I mean, ai, it’s moving fast and, and we, we, we need to ensure that our data’s secure. Um, and there’s a lot of risk out there. And so we are partnering, um, um, out there with Nvidia and other other providers, um, but specifically with Microsoft in the cloud, um, and securing that environment. [00:14:51] Joseph Bellian: So AI Labs, bringing our clients in, building custom solutions, the area of a jet AI’s here. It’s [00:14:57] Vince Menzione: there. It is here. Yeah, it is here, Stephanie. [00:15:00] Stefanie Dunn: Thank you. Yes, and I’ll just add, uh, for, for our customers, they need to make sure that their foundation is right. You know, they’re coming from maybe all different other clouds. [00:15:09] Stefanie Dunn: They’ve, you know, got multi-tenant really understanding what their structure looks like, and then. Creating that secure foundation. So we’ve got a lot, you know, we do a lot around, uh, just full M 365 migrations and then into understanding the identity and the security baseline under that, making sure that that’s correct. [00:15:29] Stefanie Dunn: And then we can start journeying into some of these other conversations. Data governance, data engineering, uh, all that is extremely important. We have an entire dedicated team, uh, within services sales. Pre-sales with essays or solution architects and delivery, uh, as well as just the project management. [00:15:48] Stefanie Dunn: And, and it’s just this full life cycle to understand where are you and we need to make sure that, that your structure’s built correctly or else it’s never gonna succeed. So a little bit, we take it back to the foundation level, I’ll just say from a customer, uh, engagement perspective to make sure that what they wanna do, they can do securely. [00:16:06] Marcus Jewett: Very cool. I, I’d like to add one other piece there. Um, you know, obviously to Joe’s point earlier, like if anyone says they know exactly what the AI journey will look like for most customers in six months, they’re probably not telling you the truth. Right? This is, we’re, we’re building the plane in the air. [00:16:22] Marcus Jewett: But, uh, one thing Microsoft has really built a foundation on is looking at our partners. And the ones who have adopted AI internally, especially Microsoft Technologies, and we call it Customer zero, right? Ensuring working with partners who have invested in their internal usage of Microsoft AI technology. [00:16:41] Marcus Jewett: So it’s all the various flavors of copilot. Rolling it out and implementing it across their organizations and building their own internal use cases, which they can go in turn and use to go help drive successful engagements with their end customers. So SHI has also been one of our, uh, brightest partners when it comes to that customer Zero journey. [00:17:01] Marcus Jewett: Uh, and it’s something I’m very, very proud of to see. Uh, we’re leveraging the, the use cases and the learnings our SHI is to really go out there and help customers navigate through their own. Uh, complexities of their AI journey as well. So, uh, my kudos to SHI as customer. Zero. Very proud of you and opera feels great. [00:17:20] Marcus Jewett: And you’re [00:17:20] Vince Menzione: providing support engineering, organ organization that supports this function? [00:17:24] Marcus Jewett: Oh, absolutely. As a globally managed partner, I mean, we’re, we’re gonna always be there to help our partners through the journey, right? So whether they need internal readiness or technical support, uh, whether it’s workshops, however we can help the partners best. [00:17:38] Marcus Jewett: Uh, position and posture themselves to go help customers with these, uh, AI engagements. Uh, we’re, we’re there to invest. Uh, we’ve invested in SHI for the last several years across, uh, ai, and we will continue to do so. [00:17:52] Vince Menzione: So what’s the message for the partner community, Joe, that, that, like, how should they perceive you? [00:17:57] Vince Menzione: How should they think about you? Should they, how should they think about engaging with you? Okay. [00:18:02] Joseph Bellian: Yeah, so I mean, obviously we’re an SSP, we’re never gonna, we’re never gonna, um, lose that, that accreditation with Microsoft. But the, the real focus of what we wanna be recognized as A-G-S-I-A global systems integrator, um, being able to engage our clients jointly, co-selling together and meeting them where they’re at across their digital journey. [00:18:21] Joseph Bellian: Uh, we have the capabilities to handle their licensing and understanding the complex matrix in their environment, their IT infrastructure. But being able to have a solution for every part of the journey of where they’re at, because every client’s in a different situation. Yeah. So, so in reality, it’s A-G-S-I-A global systems integrator, being able to engage across their journey. [00:18:42] Vince Menzione: So that’s a, did everybody hear that? ’cause I, I heard that for the first time. That’s a very different perception of the, of the previous organization and getting there. Uh, and you also, I remember this from the transactional side of the business. You were at the very type, at the top of the pyramid, right? [00:18:56] Vince Menzione: Yeah. You handled some of the largest corporations in the, in the world. Yeah. And you know companies as well as organizations like government, governmental organizations across different markets as well. [00:19:07] Joseph Bellian: Yep. A hundred percent. [00:19:08] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So GS. Yeah. [00:19:11] Marcus Jewett: And it’s really important to, for SHI to, to develop that GSI muscle. [00:19:15] Marcus Jewett: Uh, you mentioned at the beginning, Joe, that Microsoft, uh, we have various routes to market. Uh, one of those routes to market, uh, especially in the enterprise space or in our strategic space, is for customers to procure direct. Uh, SHI has longstanding relationships with those customers, and as these customers renew their agreements into a direct model with Microsoft, the way they stay engaged and add value to these prop, uh, to these customers is through their services, their professional services, their managed services. [00:19:42] Marcus Jewett: So going back to Joe’s Point around really defining themselves as a, uh, A GSI, that is also an SSP has been paramount to their overall transformational journey and their overall success. [00:19:55] Vince Menzione: And you also work, so I would assume you work with some of the ISVs in the room too. Yeah, I would think there’s some really great relationships or synergies. [00:20:01] Vince Menzione: Is that, is that an area of muscle you’ve been building out or, yeah, it’s battle, it’s an opportunity. [00:20:06] Joseph Bellian: I mean, I, I believe you have a segment coming up as well on it, um, around NPO. Um, and so there’s a, there’s a play in every motion from services, play services attached through ISVs, your SaaS offers. Um, we do recognize that that’s an opportunity. [00:20:18] Joseph Bellian: Uh, we’re having great success when you look at the marketplace, um, through the multi private party offers. Um, it allows us to expand our footprint and take, uh, take advantage of those relationships and co-sell together. So, absolutely. Wow. [00:20:30] Vince Menzione: Very cool. So you’re gonna be around most of the day today? Yes. I hope. [00:20:34] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. So for the partners that are in the room, I think that great conversations with both of you, Stephanie and Joe, and, uh, great conversation. Is there anything else we wanna share with everyone? [00:20:46] Marcus Jewett: Uh, no. It’s just, I would, I would leave you all with the fact that, again, uh, for every partner. Uh, make certain that you, you’re finding a way to differentiate yourself and tell your story. [00:20:57] Marcus Jewett: Uh, you may be doing some amazing work, uh, but if you’re not finding ways to, to tell that story and make certain your customers, and for me, Microsoft, make certain that, that the Microsoft teams you’re working with have very clear understanding of what your capabilities are today, then you may be missing the mark. [00:21:13] Marcus Jewett: I, I, I use this analogy all the time. Uh, the largest retailer on the planet. Who is it? Come on, help me out. I’m sorry. Largest retailer. Box Box. Walmart. Walmart, that’s right. You can turn on a television on any given day and you will still see a Walmart commercial. So yes, tell your story. Yes, very [00:21:34] Joseph Bellian: smart move. [00:21:34] Joseph Bellian: And one more, um, I just wanna make sure I land out there, is the success and where we go from here. Um, it’s this right here in the room. Um, us partnering together, bringing the partner ecosystem together. Um, in reality, we’re not competing together. We should be collaborating together and working together, um, in our client’s joint environments. [00:21:52] Joseph Bellian: Microsoft says it well, it’s that one Microsoft story. It’s that better together story and the more we can work together, the more success we’ll have together. [00:22:00] Vince Menzione: Awesome. I want to thank you so much for your sponsorship and for being here. Uh, big news here, I think it should be like on the front page of the partner ecosystem journal that you’re now, you’re now GSII think that that says quite, that says volumes to, to the community out there. [00:22:15] Joseph Bellian: Yeah. [00:22:15] Vince Menzione: Thank you. [00:22:15] Joseph Bellian: Absolutely. [00:22:16] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you both for joining us. So great to have you both. Thank you. Thank you, Marcus, to have you as well. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you very much Stephanie. So great. So great to spend time with you. Thank you. And this.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Shi'nanigans Podcast. As always I want to thank you all for being supportive and kicking it with me when we see each other again and again. You are awesome! In this episode we are talking about being consistant,, for real this time. 2025 is ending and we need to go into 2026 with positve intentions. From now on we are teaching people how to better interact with us. Do not accept disrespect in any form. The holidays are here and what we are not going to do is go into debt showing people we love them. If you have to take out a loan, get rid of the person, just playing. Find other ways to show love and affection and appreciation, this economy is not letting us be great.Lastly, if you a veteran and have a disabilty rating, use it!! As a disabled veteran myself, I have requested pain management tools. I have the Stim machine, the back maasager, massage parlor passes, the calmigo hyperventalation system and I just asked for the virtual reality headset for relaxation, migraine and pain relief. Help is there for us.See ya next week Send us a textSupport the showInstagram: @shar1ta_Facebook: Sha RitaYouTube: SharitaTwitter: @5har1taTwitch: TygyrlillyTikTok: Tygyrlilly

A silly question today- if you were to add together all of the X chromosomes of all of the people in the world, what would their total mass be? To answer this, we are going to have to estimate the mass of an X chromosome, examine how many cells are in a human body, and just how many people there are in the world...Sources for this episode:Bhartiya, A., Batey, D., Cipiccia, S., Shi, X., Rau, C., Botchway, S., Yusuf, M. and Robinson, I. K. (2021), X-ray Phytography Imaging of Human Chromosomes after Low-Dose Irradiation. Chromosome Research 29: 107-126.Ross, M. T., et al. (2005), The DNA sequence of the human X chromosome. Nature 434: 325-337.Sender, R., Fuchs, S. and Milo, R. (2016), Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body. PLoS Biology 14(8): e1002533.Tartaglia, N., Cordeiro, L., Howell, S., Wilson, R. and Janusz, J. (2010), The Spectrum of the Behavioural Phenotype in Boys and Adolescents 47,XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome). Pediatric Endocrinology Reviews 8(1): 151-159.Author unknown, Bionumbers (date unknown), Mass of X and Y chromosomes (online) (Accessed 14/12/2025).Author unknown, Worldometer, (date unknown), World Population Clock (online) (Accessed 14/12/2025).Author unknown, UNICEF (date unknown), How many children are there in the world? (online) (Accessed 14/12/2025).

Friday Juma KhutbaDecember 5th, 2025- Canada's Liberal government may remove the “religious exemption” from hate speech laws in Section 319(3)(b) of the Criminal Code.- Bill C-9 aims to amend the Criminal Code regarding hate propaganda, hate crime, and access to religious/cultural places.- The current exemption protects good-faith expressions or arguments based on religious beliefs or texts from prosecution.- NCCM warns this change could criminalize sermons or discussions from the Qur'an, Bible, Torah, Bhagavad Gita, or Guru Granth Sahib.- Canada has historically protected good-faith theological discourse; removing this risks censorship of faith and scholarship.- Without the exemption, reciting religious texts, teaching, or quoting scriptures could lead to investigation or criminal charges.- Muslims support hate speech laws against incitement to violence but oppose removing the good-faith religious exemption.- Advocates are encouraged to join NCCM's letter-writing campaign to defend religious freedom and promote justice.- Religious freedom defenders are united: Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Bar Association, CMPAC, United Church of Canada, and ~50 other organizations.- United public opposition may prevent the removal of the exemption.- Example of interfaith unity: Pope Leo's trip to Turkey and Lebanon focused on peace and dialogue with Muslims and Christians.- Shi‘a representation in Lebanon: Shaykh ‘Ali al-Khaṭib welcomed the Pope on behalf of the Supreme Islamic Shi‘a Council.- Shaykh ‘Ali emphasized Islamic principles of human fraternity and equality from the Prophet Muḥammad and Imam ‘Ali.- He highlighted that true religion promotes peace, honour, and dignity, and conflicts in religion misrepresent faith.Donate towards our programs today: https://jaffari.org/donate/Jaffari Community Centre (JCC Live)

This episode we look at many of the natural events and talk about those observing and writing things down, and why they may have wanted to do so. For more, check out our podcast blogpage:  https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-139   Rough Transcript: Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua and this is episode 139: Observing the "Natural" World. Members of the Onmyou-ryou, dressed in the official robes of their office, sat around in their observation tower, measuring the location of the stars.  They kept their light to a minimum, just enough so that they could write down their observations, but not so much that it would destroy their vision.  As they looked up, suddenly they saw a strange movement: a streak through the sky.  They waited, and observed, and then there was another, and another after that.  It was as if the stars themselves were falling from the heavens.  They watched as it seemed that the constellations themselves were melting and falling apart.  Quickly they scribbled down notes.  Tomorrow, with the light of day, they would consult various sources to see just what it could mean.  For now, their role was simply to observe and record.   Welcome back, everyone.  It is the height of holiday season in the US as I record this, and in our narrative we are in the middle of the reign of Ohoama, aka Temmu Tennou, who came to power in 672 and who has been shoring up the Ritsuryo state instigated by his late brother, Naka no Oe, aka Tenji Tennou.  We have talked in recent episodes about how Ohoama put a lot of the state under the control of members of the royal family, or at least those with claims to royal blood, and how he had also begun work on the Chronicles—the very works that we have been using to try and understand the history of this and earlier periods.   It seems clear that Ohoama and his cohorts were doing their best to solidify their control and, in the process, create what they felt was a modern state, leveraging the continental model, but not without their own local flavor.  After all, they were also investing in the kami based rituals of state and specifically in Ise shrine, which they claimed as an ancestral shrine for their lineage. This episode, let's dig into another thing that was getting reported around this time.  And that is… science!  Or at least observations of the world and indications of how people were interacting with it. Before going into the subject, I want to acknowledge that "science", or "Kagaku" in modern Japanese, may not look like what we think of as "science" today.  The word "Kagaku" itself appears to come about in the late Edo period, and became associated with the western idea of "Science" in the Meiji period.  Today we think of it as observations, yes, but also testing via the scientific method. I think it might be more appropriate to categorize a lot of earlier science under a term like "learning" or "study", and it seems to have encompassed a wide range of topics of study, some of which we would include as "science" and some which we might refer to more as "arts".  There is also a very fine line with religion and philosophy as well. From a modern perspective, I think one could fairly argue that "science"—particularly the so-called "hard" sciences—refers to something that can be empirically tested via the scientific method.  So you can see something, form a hypothesis, create a test, and then that test should produce the same results no matter who conducts it, assuming you account for the variables. And please don't @ me about this… I know I am simplifying things.  This isn't a podcast about science unless we are talking about the social sciences of history and archaeology. In contrast to our modern concept of science, much of what we see in the Asuka era is built around using our reasoning to arrive at the truth of something.  In cases where we are dealing with clearly physical phenomena that have observable causes and effects, this can lead to remarkably reliable results.  One example of this is calendrical science—it isn't that hard to observe the passing of days and seasons.  Even the rotation of the earth and the movements of stars and even something with as large a period as comets could be observed and tracked, especially if you had centuries of data to comb through.  In fact, they often would predict things that it turns out they couldn't, themselves, see.  They could predict that an eclipse would occur, for example, even when that eclipse was only visible somewhere else.  And they didn't have to calculate gravitational pull, mass, or distances between different heavenly bodies for that to occur. Similarly, in the agricultural sphere: you had so many people who observed the seasons and would figure out new ways of doing things.  It doesn't take an understanding of chlorophyl to know that plants generally do better when exposed to sunlight. I believe the leap happens when you get to things that go beyond purely observable means.  Sickness, for example—how do you explain viruses or germs without equipment like microscopes to see what our eyes alone cannot?  And if such "invisible" things could cause so much damage, then why could there not be other "invisible" elements, such as kami and boddhisatvas?  And as humans we are driven to make connections.  It is one of the things that has driven our technological innovation and rise, but it is also something that can easily go awry.  Like when you are sitting in a dark house, alone, and you hear a noise.  Rationally, you might know that houses settle and creak, but that doesn't necessarily stop your brain from connecting it with thoughts that someone must be in the house making that noise. Or even how we make judgments based on nothing more than how someone talks or what they look like, because our brains have made connections with those things, for good or ill. A large part of the rationalization that was accomplished in Asian thought had to do with concepts of Yin and Yang, the negative and the positive, the dark and the light.  This was thought of as a kind of energy—qi or ki—that was embedded in things.  We discussed this somewhat back in episode 127, because yin yang theory, along with the five element theory, known as Wuxing or Gogyou in Japanese, became embedded in the idea of the calendar.  Why was summer hot, except that it was connected with an excess of fire energy?  And the cold, dark days of winter would be associated with an excess of water, naturally. I should note that while this is one of the more comprehensive philosophical systems in use, it was not the only means by which various phenomena and effects were rationalized.  After all, it had to be imposed on a framework of how the world otherwise worked, and descriptions of the world came from a variety of places.  There was, for example, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, or Sanhaijing, which detailed the world as envisioned in the period before the Qin dynasty, although there were occasional updates.  The Sanhaijing  described regular plants and animals in the same breath as gods and monsters.  There were also various buddhist sutras, which brought their own cosmological view of the universe that had to be squared with other visions, including those passed down locally describing the archipelago as the "Reed Plain" and giving particular importance to eight of the islands—though which eight depends on which variant of the creation myth you are referencing. To categorize the study of the natural—and what we would consider the supernatural—world around them, the Ritsuryou set up specific bureaus.  One of these was the Onmyou-ryou, the Bureau of Yin-yang, also known as the Onyo no Tsukasa.  This Bureau oversaw divination, astronomy, time, and calendars.  At its head was the Onmyou-no-kami.  Below them were the various scholars studying the core subjects, as well as technical practitioners to carry out the rites and divination. On the continent, priority was generally given to astronomical and calendrical studies, and many of the more magical practices or rituals would fade away, likely because there were local Taoist institutions who could take up much of that work.  In Japan, however, it seems that the calendrical studies tended to ossify, instead, while onmyoji came to fill a role not just for the state but also among the population for divination and other such practices.  Even into the Edo period one could find private onmyoji, and the Bureau itself lasted until the very beginning of the Meiji period. Another important institution of the Ritsuryo government for learning was the Daigakuryou, the Bureau of Great Learning.  Students of Japanese may recognize the term "Daigaku" referring, today, to universities. The original concept for the Daigaku-ryou, or Daigaku no Tsukasa, was focused on the study of those things that were considered perhaps a bit more practical and necessary to anyone who might want a political career.  Since this was founded on concepts of Confucian government, it is little wonder that it was originally designed to focus on Confucian studies, among other things.  This fits into the idea of a supposed meritocracy, where one's education was part of the examination.  You may recall from Episode 115 we talked about the National University in Chang'an, which is likely something that the Daigaku Ryou could only ever dream of becoming. Early arts taught at the Daigaku Ryou included the Confucian classics, mathematics, writing, and Chinese pronunciation.  These were all things that you would need to know to become a part of the bureaucracy The idea of a school may have been born along with the early institution of the government, with mention as early as 671, in the last year of Naka no Oe's reign, but we don't have it clearly established in the code until later.  Full operations may have been somewhat delayed due to the tumultuous events of Ohoama's accession to power in 672, but we do see it explicitly mentioned in the year 675.  On the first day of the year we are told that Students from the Daigaku Ryou, along with students from the Onmyou-Ryou and from the Gaiyaku Ryou, the Bureau of External Medicine; along with the Woman of S'ravasti, the Woman of Tara, Prince Syeonkwang of Baekje, and Silla labourers offered presents of drugs and various rarities. We talked about the first two, the Daigaku-ryou and the Onmyou-ryou, but the Gaiyaku Ryou doesn't seem to have a lot of information out there beyond this mention.  Later there would a "Ten'yaku Ryou", or Bureau of Medicine, established in the code.  Since we don't have any extant codes from this period beyond what was written down in the Nihon Shoki, we don't know for certain what the Gaiyaku-ryou was , and it is possible that the Gaiyaku-Ryou was a precursor to the Ten'yaku Ryou.  "GAI" means "outside" or "external", leading me to wonder if this referred to external medicine in contrast to internal medicine, or if it meant medicine or drugs from outside teh archipeloago. I would point out that these students are found with the Woman of S'ravasti, or Shae; the Woman of Tara; a Baekje prince and Silla labourers.  In other words, they were all people from outside of the archipelago.  This is not entirely surprising as it was from outside that much of the learning was coming into the country. "Yaku" or "Kusuri", which can be translated as either "Drugs" or "medicine", could refer to a number of things.  How effective they were is somewhat questionable. Almost certainly some of them had confirmed medicinal efficacy, but others may have been thought to have been effective due to things like their connection to the five elements, or wuxing, theory. For example, something red might be assumed to have a warming effect because of the presumed presence of the fire element.  And the power of the placebo effect no doubt made them seem at least partially effective.  Consider, for example, how many people will swear by certain remedies for the common cold when all it really does is distract you, or perhaps make you a bit more comfortable, until the symptoms pass on their own. A more certain science was probably that of Astronomy, which we've mentioned a few times.  The passage of the stars through the sky was something that could be easily observed.  There is a theory that some of the first lines in the Yijing, or book of changes, may actually be a description of the changing of seasons as different aspects of a given constellation rise over the horizon, and the placement of certain stars would help in the adjustment of the lunar calendar, since the moon's orbit does not match up exactly with the solar year, and year the solar year was quite important to things like agriculture and even sailing to the mainland. This all makes 675 a seemingly banner year for science, as four days after the presentation of medicine to the throne, the government erected a platform by which to observe the stars.  This wouldn't need to be much—it could have been an earthen mound, or just a tower, from which one could get above the ground, presumably see over any buildings, to the horizon.  Granted, Asuka might not be the best place for such observations, with the nearby mountains meaning that the true horizon is often obstructed.  Nonetheless, it may have been enough to make calculations. Astronomy platforms, or Tenmondai, would continue to be used up until at least the Meiji period.  Without a telescope, observations were somewhat limited—though they also didn't have the same level of light pollution that we have today.  Remember, many woke just before dawn and went to sleep not too long after the sun went down, which only makes sense when you are living in a place where creating light, while doable, also ran the risk of burning your entire house to the ground. It is worth noting that the sky for the ancient Japanese was likely quite different than what most of us see when we look up, unless you are fortunate enough to live in a place with very little light pollution.  For many of those living today in the cities and suburban landscape, go outside at night and you might see the moon and some of the brightest stars, but for most of the ancient Japanese, they would look up and see the heavenly river, the Amakawa, or Milky Way.  They would have looked up at a sky glittering with myriad dots of light, as well as planets and more.  It was both familiar and strange—something one saw regularly and yet something that was also extremely inaccessible. Astronomical observations would have been important for several reasons, as I've mentioned.  They would have been used to keep the calendar in check, but they would also have likely been used to help calibrate the water clock, which helped to tell time.  Of course, going back to the five elements and yin yang theory, it is also believed that the energy, the qi or ki, changed with the seasons and the movements of the stars and planets—planets were not known as such, of course, but their seemingly erratic movements compared to bright lights in the sky meant they were noticed and assigned values within the elemental system. One of the things that came with the changing seasons, the heavenly movements, and the flow of ki was a concept of "kata-imi", literally directional taboos.  There were times when certain directions might be considered favorable or unfavorable for various actions.  This could be something as simple as traveling in a given direction.  In the centuries to come this would spawn an entire practice of kata-tagae, or changing direction.  Is the north blocked, but you need to travel there, anyway?  Well just go northwest to say hello to a friend or visit your local sake brewery, and then travel due east.  Ta-da!  You avoided going directly north!  There were also mantra-like incantations that one might say if they had to travel in an inauspicious direction to counteract the concept of bad influences. This also influenced various other things, and even today you will often see dates where a year and month might be followed by simply the character for "auspicious day" rather than an actual day of the month. So observing the heavens was important, and it was also important that they tostudy the works of those on the continent, whose records could help predict various astronomical phenomena.  Except that there was one tiny problem:  I don't know if you've noticed, but Japan and China are in two different locations.  Not all astronomical phenomena can be observed from all points of the globe.  The Northern Lights, for example, are rarely seen in more southerly latitudes, and while eclipses are not too rare, a total eclipse only impacts certain areas of the earth, along relatively narrow paths. I mention this because it isn't always clear if the records we get in the Nihon Shoki are about phenomena they directly observed or if they are taking reports from elsewhere and incorporating them into the narrative.  One such event is the comet of 676. The entry in the Nihon Shoki tells us that in the 7th lunar month of the 5th year of Temmu Tennou, aka 676 CE, a star appeared in the east that was 7 or 8 shaku in length.  It disappeared two months later. We've mentioned some of this before, but the sky was divided up into "shaku", or "feet", though how exactly it was measured I'm not entirely sure.  It appears to be that one foot was roughly 1.5 degrees of the sky, give or take about a quarter of a degree, with 180 degrees from horizon to horizon.  So it would have been about 10 to 12 degrees in the sky.  Another way to picture it is if you hold out your arm towards the object, and spread your index and little finger, it would probably fit between those two points.  This comet hung around for some time, and a great part about a comet like this is that it was viewable from multiple locations.  After all, as the earth turned, different areas were exposed to the comet as it passed through our part of the solar system.  Thus we have records of it from not just the Nihon Shoki:  We also find it in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, where it was thought to have foretold the end of Bishop Wilfred's control of Northumbria.  We also see it in Tang, Silla, and Syrian sources. These sources aren't always in complete agreement.  For one thing, they noted when they first saw it, which might have been impacted by local conditions.  And then conversion between lunar and solar calendars can also sometimes get in the way.  Roughtly speaking, we have the Nihon Shoki providing dates of somewhere from about August or September of 676, on the Western calendar, to October or November. Tang sources put it from 4 September to 1 November.  Silla Chronicles claim that it first appeared in the 7th lunar month, so between August and September.  A Syrian Chronicle notes a comet from about 28 August to 26 October in the following year, 677, but this is thought to have been a mistake.  European sources generally seem to claim it was seen in August and lasted for three months.  All of these sightings put it at roughly the same time. Working with that and with known comets, we think we actually know which comet this is:  The Comet de Cheseaux also known as the Comet Klinkenberg-Cheseaux.  And I should mention this is all thanks to a research paper by M. Meyer and G. W. Kronk.  In that paper they propose that this is the comet with the designation of C/1743 X1, or the common names I just mentioned.  If so, based on its trajectory, this comet would have been visible in 336, 676, 1032, 1402, 1744, and is next predicted to show up in 2097.  And no, those aren't all exactly the same amount of time.  It is roughly every 350 years or so, but with the movements of the solar system, the planets, and various gravitational forces that likely slow or speed up its movement, it doesn't show up on exactly regular intervals.  Still, it is pretty incredible to think that we have a record of a comet that was seen the world over at this time, by people looking up from some very different places. Comets were something interesting for early astronomers.  They may have originally been seen as particularly ominous—after all, in the early eras, they were hardly predictable, and it would take years to get enough data to see that they were actually a somewhat regular occurrence.  In fact, it is likely that early astronomers were able to figure out eclipse schedules before comets.  Still, they seem to have come to the realization that comets were in fact another type of natural and reoccurring phenomenon.  That isn't to say that they didn't have any oracular meaning, but it did mean they were less of an obvious disturbance of the heavenly order. We have another comet mentioned in the 10th lunar month of 681, but that one seems to have had less attention focused on it, and we don't have the same details.  Then in the 8th lunar month of 682 we have an entry about a Great Star passing from East to West—which was probably a shooting star, rather than a comet.  Comets, for all that they appear to be streaking across the sky thanks to their long tails, are often relatively stable from an earthbound perspective, taking months to appear and then disappear again. Then, on the 23rd day of the 7th month of 684 we get another comet in the northwest.  This one was more than 10 shaku in length—about 15 degrees, total, give or take.  Given the date, we can be fairly confident about this one, as well: it was the famous Halley's comet.  Halley's comet is fascinating for several reasons.  For one, it has a relatively short period of about 72 to 80 years, though mostly closer to 75 to 77 years in between sightings.  The last time it visited the earth was in 1986, and it is expected back in 2061.  Halley's comet has been recorded since the 3rd century BCE, and, likely because of its short period, it was the first periodic comet to be recognized as such.  There are other periodic comets with short periods, but many of them are not visible with the naked eye.  Halley's comet is perhaps the most studied comet, given its regular and relatively short periodicity.  It is also connected to the famous writer, humorist, and essayist, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain.  He was born only a few days after the comet reached perihelion in 1835 and died a day after it reached the same point again in 1910, and while he may not have visited Japan in his lifetime, it was a period of great change both in his home country of America and in Japan.  America, of course, would undergo a Civil War over the issue of slavery in the early 1860s, and shortly after that Japan would have its own civil war in the form of the Meiji Revolution.  And while he never visited—and translation could only do so much to capture the art of his prose—Mark Twain's works were apparently quite influential in Japan in the early 20th century. Of course, comets were just one of the celestial phenomena to be observed.  The astronomers were interested in just about anything happening in the sky.  We have accounts of both solar and lunar eclipses, and not necessarily full eclipses either.  We even have notice of the movement of some planets, such as in 681, when they noted that the planet mars "entered" the moon. Obviously the astronomers weren't recording every raincloud that came through—at least not in the main chronicles—but they did capture a fair number of events.  They did record particularly memorable storms.  For instances, in the 8th lunar month of 675 there was a storm that is said to have caused sand to fly and which then damaged houses.  This sounds like a wind storm without rain—after all, if there was rain, you would expect that the sand would have been wet and tamped down.  It is possible to have hurricane level winds without the rain.  While typhoons typically bring rain, especially as they usually build up their strength at sea, it is possible to have the winds alone, as I've experienced, myself, in Tokyo.  This most likely happens in an isolated area—there is water and rain somewhere, but the typhoon can be large, so parts of it may only get the wind and little or no rain.  I wonder if something like that happened in this instance.  It is also possible that this record refers to actual sand being brought across from the continent.  In some instances, sand can be lifted up from as far away as Mongolia and carried all the way to Japan, though it is pretty rare. And it wasn't just wind and sand.  We get accounts of hail coming down as large as peaches, torrential rainstorms, and even ash, likely from a volcanic eruption that was otherwise unrecorded.  There are also accounts of snow, though typically recorded in times where you wouldn't expect to see it, such as the third lunar month, which would mean snow in late April or early May. Mostly these storms are mentioned in terms of how they affected the immediate fortunes of the living, but sometimes storms did even more damage.  In 682, for example, a hoar-frost was reported in both Shinano and Kibi in the 7th lunar month.  On its own, this probably wouldn't have been worth mentioning, but the chroniclers add that because of storms the "five grains had not formed".  So storms had diminished the crops and the hoar-frost was apparently the killing blow.  The harvest that year would be lean, and it would not be a happy time for many that winter. And then, just as important as what was happening was what was not.  There are several mentions of droughts, particularly towards the end of Spring, early Summer.  This is traditionally a drier period, and if it is too dry it could harm the harvest.  And so the government was expected to find a way to bring the rain—a tall order, the general resolution to which seems to be prayers and rituals designed to bring rain.  In a place like Japan, I suspect that it was usually just a matter of time before the prayers were "successful", thus reinforcing their presumed efficacy. Some of the things that they recorded were a bit more mysterious.  For example, in the second lunar month of 680 we are told that a sound like drums was heard from the East.  There are many things this could theoretically be, from rumbles of thunder to some other phenomenon, though the following year we have a note about thunder in the West, so theoretically they knew the difference between thunder and drums.  Later that same year, 680, we are told that there was a "brightness" in the East from the hour of the dog to the hour of the rat—about 8pm to midnight.  Was this some kind of aurora?  But wouldn't that have been in the north, rather than the east?    Could it have been some kind of lightning?  But that is a long time for a lightning storm to hang around.  And there are other strange things, some of which seem impossible and we have to doubt.  For example, in 684 they said that, at dusk, the seven stars of the Big Dipper drifted together to the northeast and sank.  Unless they are just recording the natural setting of the stars of the big dipper.  Certainly, over time the constellation appears to rotate around the north star, and it dips down to or below the horizon in the autumn months.  So were they just talking about the natural, yearly setting of the stars, or something else? There may be some clues in that the 11th lunar month, when that was recorded, we see several other heavenly phenomena recorded.  Two days after the Big Dipper set, at sunset, a star fell in the eastern quarter of the sky that we are told was as large as a jar.  Later, the constellations were wholly disordered and stars fell like rain.  That same month, a star shot up in the zenith and proceeded along with the Pleiades until the end of the month.  While this sounds like shooting stars and a possible meteor shower, a later commenter suggested that this was all a heavenly omen for the state of the court, showing the "disordered" state of the nobility at this time.  Of course, this was also a year and change before the sovereign's eventual passing, so there is also the possibility that the Chroniclers were looking at events later and ascribing meaning and importance after the fact. In another account of something seemingly wonderous: in 682 we are told that something shaped like a Buddhist flag, colored like flame, was seen by all of the provinces and then sank into the Japan sea north of Koshi.  A white mist is also said to have risen up from the Eastern mountains. There are various things that could be going on here.  It strikes me that the white mist could be a cloud, but could also be something volcanic.  And the flame colored prayer flag makes me think about how a high cloud can catch the light of the rising or setting sun.  That could look like a flag, and can seem extremely odd depending on the other conditions in the sky. Or maybe it was aliens. Okay, it is unlikely that it was aliens, but I think that these do give an idea of the kinds of records that were being made about the observed phenomena.  Obviously the Nihon Shoki is recording those things that were considered particularly significant for whatever reason.  This could just be because it was something odd and unexplained, or perhaps it was more well known but rare.  It may have even had religious connotations based on some aspect, like evoking the image of Buddhist flags.  And it is possible that it was thought to have had significant impact on events—perhaps even an impact that isn't clear to us today, many centuries removed from the events. Some things were clear, however.  Lightning strikes are often mentioned specifically when they strike something of note.  In 678, we are told that a pillar of the Western Hall of the New Palace was struck by lightning, though apparently the building itself survived.  Then, in 686, Lighting appeared in the southern sky with a large roar of thunder.  A fire broke out and caught the tax cloth storehouse of the Ministry of Popular affairs, which immediately exploded in flames.  After all, a thatched roofed, wooden building filled with kindling in the form of cloth—and likely a  fair amount of paper and writing supplies to keep track of it all—sounds like a bonfire waiting to happen.  There were reports that the fire had actually started in Prince Osakabe's palace and then spread to the Ministry of Popular Affairs from there. It is also worth noting that recording of such events was still somewhat new to the archipelago as a whole. They were learning from the continent, but also defining their own traditions. Observations of natural phenomena weren't just relegated to celestial occurrences or weather.  After all, there was something else that one could observe in the sky:  birds.  Now this wasn't your average bird-watching—though I'm not saying that there weren't casual birders in ancient Japan, and if we ever find someone's birding diary from that era I think that would be so cool.  But there were some things that were significant enough to be mentioned. For example, in 678 we get a report of "atori", or bramblings.  Bramblings are small songbirds which are found across Eurasia.  Notably they are migratory, and are known to migrate in huge flocks especially in the winter time, and sure enough on the 27th day of the 12th month we are told that the bramblings flew from the southwest to the northeast, covering the entire sky.  This makes me think about some of the other mass migrations that used to occur that have largely been reduced significantly due to habitat loss, disruption to traditional migratory routes, and other population pressures on various bird species.  Still, having so many birds that it blocked out the sky certainly seems a significant event to report on.  We later see a similar account in 680, with the flock moving from southeast to northwest.  Given the location of Asuka it sounds like they were flocking in the mountains and heading out over the Nara Basin, perhaps seeking food in another mountainous area. In 682, the birders were at it again.  This time, around midday on the 11th day of the 9th lunar month, several hundreds of cranes appeared around the Palace and soared up into the sky.  They were there for about two hours before they dispersed.  Once again, cranes are migratory and known to flock.  Cranes are also known as a symbol of long life and joy—and I can understand it.  Have you ever seen a flock of cranes?  They are not small birds, and they can be really an incredible sight.  Flocks of cranes themselves were probably not that rare, and it was no doubt more about so many gathering around the palace which made it particularly special. It wasn't just birds in the sky that were considered important symbols, though.  Birds often are noted as auspicious omens.  Usually strange birds, plants, or other such things are found in various provinces and presented to the throne.    So in 675, Yamato presented auspicious "barn-door fowl", likely meaning a fancy chicken.  Meanwhile, the Eastern provinces presented a white falcon and the province of Afumi presented a white kite.  Chickens are associated with the sun and thus with the sun goddess, Amaterasu, and albino versions of animals were always considered auspicious, often being mentioned in Buddhist sources.  Later, in 680, we see a small songbird, a "Shitodo", also described as white, and probably albino, sent to the court from nearby Settsu. Then, in 681 there is mention of a red sparrow.  Red coloration is not quite the same as albinism, though it is something that does occur at times, when the brownish coloration comes out more red than brown, and I suspect this is what we are talking about.  This is most likely just a recessed gene or genetic mutation, similar to causes for albinism, but just in a different place in the DNA.  As for why it was important:  I'd first and foremost note that anything out of the ordinary (and even some ordinary things) could be considered a sign.   Red was also seen as an auspicious color, so that may have had something to do with it as well.  And then there is the concept of Suzaku, the red bird of the south.  Suzaku is usually depicted as an exotic bird species of some kind, like how we might depict a phoenix.  But it was also just a "red bird", so there is that, and perhaps that was enough.  Not that this red sparrow was "Suzaku", but evoked the idea of the southern guardian animal.  A year prior, in 680, a red bird—we aren't told what kind—had perched on a southern gate, which even more clearly screams of the Suzaku aesthetic. It is probably worth noting here that in 686, towards the end of the reign, not that anyone knew it at the time, Ohoama decided to institute a new nengo, or regnal period.  It was called Shuuchou—red or vermillion bird—and it likely referred to Suzaku.  This nengo was cut short, however, with Ohoama's death that same year.  Nengo were often chosen with auspicious names as a kind of hope for the nation, so clearly "red bird" was considered a good thing. A month after the red sparrow, Ise sent a white owl, and then a month after that, the province of Suwou sent a red turtle, which they let loose in the pond at the Shima palace.  Again, these were probably just examples of animals seen as auspicious, though they would have likely been recorded by the Onmyou-ryou, who would have likely combed through various sources and precedents to determine what kind of meaning might be attached to them. Color wasn't the only thing that was important.  In 682, the Viceroy of Tsukushi reported that they had found a sparrow with three legs.  There are numerous reasons why this could be, but there is particular significance in Japan and Asia more generally.  A three legged bird is often associated with the sun Andusually depicted as a black outline of a three legged bird inside of a red sun.  In Japan this was often conflated with the Yata-garasu, the Great Crow, which is said to have led the first mythical sovereign, Iware Biko, to victory in his conquest of Yamato.  Thus we often see a three legged crow depicted in the sun, which was an object of particular veneration for the Wa people from centuries before.  And I suspect that the little three-legged sparrow from Tsukushi  I suspect that this had particular significance because of that image. Animals were not the only auspicious things presented to the throne.  In 678, Oshinomi no Miyatsuko no Yoshimaro presented the sovereign with five auspicious stalks of rice.  Each stalk, itself, had other branches.  Rice, of course, was extremely important in Japan, both from a ritual and economic sense, so presenting rice seems appropriate.  Five stalks recalls things like the five elemental theory—and in general five was consider a good number.  Three and five are both good, prime numbers, while four, pronounced "Shi", sounds like death and is considered inauspicious.  Three, or "San" is sometimes associated with life, and five is associated with the five elements, but also just the fact that it is half of ten, and we have five fingers on one hand and in so many other ways, five is regarded as a good number in much of Asia. That the stalks had multiple branches likely referred to them bearing more than the usual amount of rice on them, which seems particularly hopeful.  Certainly the court thought so.  In light of the auspicious gift, all sentences of penal servitude and lower were remitted.  In 680, Officials of the Department of Law gave tribute of auspicious stalks of grain, themselves.  I'm not sure, in this case, that it was all that they hoped, however, as that began three days straight of rain and flooding. A year earlier, in 679, we are told that the district of Ito, in Kii, immediately south of Yamato, sent as tribute the "herb of long life".  We are told that it "resembled" a mushroom—probably meaning it was a mushroom, or maybe something formed into a mushroom shape.  But the stem was about a foot long and the crown was two spans, about 6 feet in diameter.  This is pretty incredible, and I have to wonder if there is a bit of exaggeration going on here. Another tribute was a horn found on Mt. Katsuraki.  It branched into two at the base, was united at the end, and had some flesh and hair still attached, about an inch in length.  They claimed it must be horn or a Lin, or Kirin, sometimes referred to as an Asian unicorn—a mythical creature considered to be quite auspicious and benevolent.  This was on the 26th day in the 2nd lunar month of the year 680, probably around March or April.  I highly suspect that what they found was an oddly shaped bit of antler from  a buck whose antlers had begun to come in and which might have been taken out by wolves or bears or something else altogether.  The fact that the ends were said to be fused together could just be referring to some kind of malformation of the antlers.  The fur and flesh could mean that the antlers were still growing—antlers would probably just be coming in around early spring time.  Still, there is no telling how long it was there, so it could have been from the previous year as well.  Attributing it to a kirin seems a bit of a stretch, but it was clearly something unusual. Animals and plants were recorded in tribute, but also when something odd happened.  Fruiting out of season was one such occurrence, which we've seen elsewhere in the chronicles as well.  There was even a record when the famous Tsuki tree outside of Asukadera had a branch fall down.  Presumably it was a large and noticeable branch, and by now this appears to have been a tree with a bit of age to it that had seen a lot, so it makes sense it got a mention. Finally, we go from the heavens to the earth.    Perhaps the most numerous observations in the Chronicles were the earthquakes.  We've noted in the past that Japan is extremely active, volcanically speaking, so it makes sense that there are multiple accounts of earthquakes each year, especially if they were compiling reports from around the country.  Most of these are little more than just a note that there was an earthquake, but a few stand out. The first is the 12th lunar month of 678.  We are told that there was a large earthquake in Tsukushi—modern Kyushu. The ground split open to the width of about 20 feet for more than 30,000 feet.  Many of the commoners' houses in the area were torn down.  In one place there was a house atop a hill, and though the hill crumbled down the house somehow remained intact.  The inhabitants had apparently been home and must have been oblivious, as they didn't realize anything had happened until they woke up the next morning. Again, probably a bit of hyperbole in here, but if we think back to things like the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, where large areas of land shifted noticeably along the fault lines, it is likely that this was a similar or even more catastrophic event.  And here I'll give a quick plug for Kumamoto, which is still working to rebuild from the earthquake, and if you ever get a chance, I recommend a visit to the Kumamoto Earthquake Memorial Museum or Kioku, where you can see for yourself just how powerful mother nature can be. Another powerful earthquake was mentioned in the 10th lunar month of 684.  If the earthquake in Tsukushi had hit mostly agricultural areas, based on the description, this seems to have hit more populated regions.  We are told that it started in the dark of night, the hour of the boar, so about 10pm, give or take an hour.  The shaking was so bad that throughout the country men and women cried out and were disoriented—they could not tell east from west, a condition no doubt further hindered by the dark night sky.  There were mountain slides and rivers changed course, breaking their banks and flooding nearby areas.  Official buildings of the provinces and districts, the barns and houses of the common people, and the temples, pagodas, and shrines were all destroyed in huge numbers.  Many people and domestic animals were killed or injured.  The hot springs of Iyo were dried up and ceased to flow.  In the province of Tosa, more than 500,000 shiro of cultivated land sank below sea level.  Old men said that they had never seen such an earthquake.  On that night there was a rumbling noise like that of drums heard in the east—possibly similar to what we had mentioned earlier.  Some say that the island of Idzu, aka Vries Island, the volcanic island at the entrance of Edo Bay, increased on the north side by more than 3,000 feet and that a new island had been formed.  The noise of the drums was attributed to the gods creating that island. So here we have a catastrophic quake that impacted from Iyo, on the western end of Shikoku, all the way to the head of Edo Bay, modern Tokyo.  This appears to be what seismologists have labelled a "Nankai Trough Megathrust Earthquake".  Similar quakes have occurred and are predicted to occur in the future., along a region of Japan from the east coast of Kyushu, through the Seto Inland Sea, including Shikoku, through the Kii peninsula and all the way to Mt. Fuji.  The Nankai Trough, or Southern Sea Trough, is the area where the continental shelf drops down, and where the Philippine tectonic plate slips underneath the Eurasian—or more specifically the Amuric—plate.  As these plates move it can cause multiple events all along the trough at the same time.  Since being regularly recorded, these quakes have been noted every 100 to 150 years, with the last one being the Showa Nankai quakes of 1944 and 1946. For all of the destruction that it brought, however, apparently it didn't stop the court.  Two days after this devastating quake we are told that Presents were made to the Princes and Ministers.  Either they weren't so affected in the capital, or perhaps the date given for one of the two records is not quite reliable.  Personally, I find it hard to believe that there would be presents given out two days later unless they were some form of financial aid.  But what do I know?  It is possible that the court itself was not as affected as other areas, and they may not have fully even grasped the epic scale of the destruction that would later be described in the Chronicles, given the length of time it took to communicate messages across the country. Which brings us back to the "science" of the time, or at least the observation, hoping to learn from precedence or piece out what messages the world might have for the sovereign and those who could read the signs.  While many of the court's and Chronicler's conclusions may give us pause, today, we should nonetheless be thankful that they at least decided to keep notes and jot down their observations.  That record keeping means that we don't have to only rely on modern records to see patterns that could take centuries to reveal themselves.  Sure, at this time, those records were  still a bit spotty, but it was the start of something that would be remarkably important, and even though these Chronicles may have been focused on propaganda, the fact that they include so many other references are an incalculable boon to us, today, if we can just see to make the connections.  And with that, I think I've rambled enough for this episode.  We still have a couple more to fully cover this period. Until then, if you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website,  SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  

Recorded April 27, 2025 This week Nate and Ryan decided to play another game. So Ryan, perhaps foolishly, surveyed a number of listeners, coworkers, students, and whoever else he could corner, and he asked them the important fundamental questions of human existence—questions like "what song gets stuck in your head" or "which is the best muppet?" Then he invited Keith, Nash, Shi, Sylvain, and Terence to join Nate in trying to figure out how people responded, in the 100% definitely, legally-distinct game, "Colleague Clash". Connect with us Become a member: myhilltodieon.com/members Email: myhilltodieon@gmail.com Reddit: r/MyHillToDieOn Mastodon: @myhilltodieon@mastodon.social Instagram: @myhilltodieon Threads: @myhilltodieon X: @myhilltodieon Theme by Michael AD https://soundcloud.com/michael-ad/the-deep-end used with permission

Hour 2 of the Big Show w/ Matt Rose & Brent Krahn is on demand! To kick off the hour the guys are joined by SN baseball Columnist, Shi Davidi! Shi takes the guys through the Blue Jays record signing of Dylan Cease! Then the guys discuss the Blue Jays further off season plans and their odds of retaining Bo Bichette.(23:27) Later on, the guys are joined as they are every Friday by NHL Insider, Frank Seravalli! Frank gives his rebuttal to Michael Bublé calling him out. Then the guys get into The Canucks newest soap opera, the Flames Front office and much more!The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate. Get full Flames games and great shows like Quick 60: The Stamps Show, Wranglers Watch and more ON DEMAND.

In this episode, SHI and SoftwareOne delve into the critical role of relationship management in ITAM, emphasising its significance in fostering collaboration and facilitating change. We also discuss how embracing relationship management, including effective change management—can enhance communication, build trust, and create a more inclusive environment. Join us as we explore actionable strategies to develop these essential soft skills and elevate the impact of ITAM in today's dynamic business landscape. "We're in a unique position where we have so much data, and we influence all the business. It is the backbone of any business, and they spend millions on it. It's getting that message across that, we could really drive value with our item knowledge and experience and the data we have." - Jayne Frank-Kelly, SHI

From 18th century London to the promise of a global cure: the 200-year history of Parkinson's disease. To mark the release of our 'Ask the MD' conversation with The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, and to welcome a new influx of listeners, we're sharing one of our very first episodes, first aired in August 2024. Watch our full 'Ask the MD' interview, focused on lifestyle strategies for boosting brain health, on the foundation's website: https://www.michaeljfox.org/news/lifestyle-strategies-boost-brain-health-ask-md-video  Parkinson's, a neurodegenerative disorder most commonly characterized by tremors and other motor symptoms, is so complex, many medical professionals are starting to classify it as a group of diseases, rather than a single disease. In this episode, we explain those complexities, including: • The motor symptoms (e.g. cogwheel rigidity, bradykinesia) and non-motor symptoms (e.g. depression, sleep disorders) • How the industrial revolution may have brought about environmental factors which contribute to Parkinson's • The differences and similarities between Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's • How Parkinson's manifests in our brains • Why one nurse was able to detect Parkinson's through smell • The neurogenetics of Parkinson's, and the ethical quandaries of evolving genetic technology • Why lifestyle — nutrition, exercise, etc. — is so key to preventing and managing Parkinson's Joining us for this extensive conversation are three incredible guests: • Dr. Rachel Dolhun, Senior Vice President of Medical Communications at The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research • Dr. Michael Okun, evolutionary biologist, movement disorders specialist, and Director of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases • Dr. Matthew Farrer, neurogenetics expert and Professor Of Neurology at the University of Florida 'Your Brain On' is hosted by neurologists, scientists, and public health advocates Ayesha and Dean Sherzai. SUPPORTED BY: the 2026 NEURO World Retreat. A 5-day journey through science, nature, and community, on the California coastline: https://www.neuroworldretreat.com/  'Your Brain On... Parkinson's' • SEASON 6 • EPISODE 4 (SEASON 3 REUPLOAD) ————— LINKS Dr. Rachel Dolhun: At the Michael J. Fox Foundation: https://www.michaeljfox.org/bio/rachel-dolhun-md-dipablm  'Ask the MD' series: https://www.michaeljfox.org/ask-md  The Michael J. Fox Foundation on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@michaeljfoxfoundation/videos  Dr. Michael Okun: At the University of Florida: https://neurology.ufl.edu/profile/okun-michael/  The book 'Ending Parkinson's Disease': https://endingpd.org/  The Norman Fixel Institute: https://fixel.ufhealth.org/ Dr. Matthew Farrer: At the University of Florida: https://neurology.ufl.edu/profile/farrer-matthew/ ————— References: Bloem, B. R., Okun, M. S., & Klein, C. (2021). Parkinson's disease. The Lancet, 397(10291), 2284-2303. Morris, H. R., Spillantini, M. G., Sue, C. M., & Williams-Gray, C. H. (2024). The pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease. The Lancet, 403(10423), 293-304. Dorsey, E., Sherer, T., Okun, M. S., & Bloem, B. R. (2018). The emerging evidence of the Parkinson pandemic. Journal of Parkinson's disease, 8(s1), S3-S8. Dorsey, E. R., Okun, M. S., & Tanner, C. M. (2021). Bad Air and Parkinson Disease—The Fog May Be Lifting. JAMA neurology, 78(7), 793-795. Tsalenchuk, M., Gentleman, S. M., & Marzi, S. J. (2023). Linking environmental risk factors with epigenetic mechanisms in Parkinson's disease. npj Parkinson's Disease, 9(1), 123. Reynoso, A., Torricelli, R., Jacobs, B. M., Shi, J., Aslibekyan, S., Norcliffe‐Kaufmann, L., ... & Heilbron, K. (2024). Gene–Environment Interactions for Parkinson's Disease. Annals of Neurology, 95(4), 677-687. Golsorkhi, M., Sherzai, A., & Dashtipour, K. The Influence of Lifestyle on Parkinson's Disease Management. In Lifestyle Medicine, Fourth Edition (pp. 919-924). CRC Press. Sherzai, A. Z., Tagliati, M., Park, K., Pezeshkian, S., & Sherzai, D. (2016). Micronutrients and risk of Parkinson's disease: a systematic review. Gerontology and geriatric medicine, 2, 2333721416644286. ————— FOLLOW US  Join NEURO  Instagram: @thebraindocs Website: TheBrainDocs.com More info and episodes: TheBrainDocs.com/Podcast

Dissention in the Kree Empire is made known this week. The Supreme Intelligence was up to something the whole time! The Shi ar complete their plan and its up to The Avengers to stop them in time!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Friday Juma KhutbaNovember 21st, 2025The sermon opens by reminding believers to maintain God-consciousness and seek protection from spiritual pitfalls.The global Shia community is commemorating the martyrdom of Lady Fatima al-Zahra (a), whose short life left a profound and lasting impact on Islamic history.Many non-Muslims first drawn to the tragedy of Karbala end up discovering Fatima (a), which becomes a turning point in their spiritual journey.Christopher Clohessy, a Catholic priest, was led to Fatima (a) through his research on Imam Husayn, finding deep parallels between Fatima and Mary in Christianity.A Hindu convert to Islam also found his final spiritual pull through studying the life of Lady Fatima (a).Even within the Arab world, seekers have embraced Shi‘ism after being moved by the eloquence and conviction of Fatima's sermons, especially her arguments on inheritance rights.Fatima's powerful words in her khutbah—challenging injustice and affirming Qur'anic truth—have transformed hearts and guided many towards recognizing her spiritual authority.She is described as a “furqan,” a divine standard that separates truth from falsehood.The second sermon highlights a section of Fatima's speech explaining the spiritual and social wisdom behind various Islamic rituals.These include faith as purification, prayer as removal of arrogance, charity as growth, fasting as sincerity, justice as unity, obedience to the Ahlul Bayt as protection from division, and many other ethical foundations culminating in pure monotheism.Donate towards our programs today: https://jaffari.org/donate/Jaffari Community Centre (JCC Live)

Han enade Kina och banade väg för ett av historiens största imperier. En man som byggde murar, brände böcker och närde en omöjlig dröm om att lura döden. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radios app. Redaktionen för det här avsnittet är:Elina Perdahl – programledare och manusEmilia Mellberg – research, manus och producentZardasht Rad – scenuppläsareViktor Bergdahl – ljuddesign och slutmixMedverkar gör också Bengt Pettersson, sinolog, författare och översättare av Sima Qians verk om den förste kejsaren. Vill du veta mer om Kinas första kejsare? Här är några av böckerna som ligger till grund för avsnittet: Kinas förste kejsare av Sima Qian i översättning av Bengt PetterssonTerrakottaarmén : Kinas förste kejsare och en nations födelse av John ManFörste kejsaren av Kina av av R.W.L. Guisso, Catherine Pagani och David Miller

Welcome back, Marvelers, as we continue our cosmic sojourn! This week, we present Gladiator (the mohawk one, not the buzzsaw one). Is he a true hero of the Shi'ar Empire or just another space fascist? You decide!

Iran remains a major threat to Israel and the United States – with clear ambitions to expand its influence and terror activity into the Western hemisphere, said Danny Citrinowicz, a former IDF military intelligence officer and Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast. Those ambitions were recently highlighted when a U.S. official revealed an advanced plan by Iran to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Mexico, using a base of operations in Venezuela. The official said the plot was foiled earlier this year. “Venezuela is the hub” of Iran’s activity in the region, Citrinowicz said, adding that Tehran is developing relationships with other South American countries with a sizable Shi’ite Muslim population and “controlled by the left” in the hope of uniting against a common enemy: the United States and its allies. “Iran can find a mutual language with every country that opposes the West,” he said. In his conversation with host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Citriowicz also discussed Iran’s renewal of its nuclear capabilities, as reported by the New York Times, and the potential Israeli response to the prospect that they appear to be increasing their missile capabilities to the point where they can rain thousands more explosives on Israel than they did in June’s 12-day war. “We’re in a very risky and unstable situation, and I don't think we’ve seen the last of the clashes between Israel and Iran.” Read more: What the Next Israel-Iran Missile War Will Look Like The Israeli Influence Operation Aiming to Install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran Israeli FM: Iran Tried to Attack Multiple Israeli Embassies and Diplomats, Not Only Envoy in Mexico Paradox of Success: Israelis Fail to See That the Next Iran War Will Be Worse Opinion by Danny Citrinowicz | How a Historic Israel-Iran Non-aggression Pact Could Change the Middle EastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greetings and SalutationsHope all is well with you and we finally have survived another government shutdown. In this episode, we are giving a well deserved congratulations to Anthony Austin Brown on the upcoming November 29th release of his first comedy special titled, Almost There on YouTube. We then talked about the chisme of open mics and why comics don't go support. Comics rarely support anything if it isn't benefiting them in some kind of way. We need to stop that.Did you attend the Military Comedy Festival in San Antonio? I had to bail, because the government shutdown and there were no funds and I have been sick for the longest two weeks ever.As always, like, subscribe, share and thank you for your continued support of the Shi'nanigans Podcast!!Send us a textSupport the showInstagram: @shar1ta_Facebook: Sha RitaYouTube: SharitaTwitter: @5har1taTwitch: TygyrlillyTikTok: Tygyrlilly

The MLB GM Meetings are well underway in Las Vegas, and with a lot of offseason shopping to be done, where do the Blue Jays stand with the biggest free agents? Sportsnet's Ben Nicholson Smith joins Sho Alli and Daniele Franceschi from the lobby of the Cosmopolitan Hotel to discuss the Jays and how they are perceived with other teams around the league (1:25). Afterwards, Sho and Daniele discuss the prospects of bringing back Bo Bichette, and where the Jays could dabble with the free agent market for starting pitchers. Plus, John Schneider finished second in voting for AL Manager of the Year - was it a snub (31:19)? Ben and Shi's Article: https://www.sportsnet.ca/mlb/article/blue-jays-drawing-early-attention-at-gm-meetings-theyre-in-every-market/ Ben on starting pitching: https://www.sportsnet.ca/mlb/article/pitching-appears-to-be-emerging-as-blue-jays-winter-priority/ The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Sports & Media or any affiliates.

Authorities in Yunnan province said a 3-year-old boy seen crawling naked in a video which went viral online is in stable health and living safely with his parents, following an investigation that found no evidence of abuse, trafficking or illegal profit-making, according to China Central Television on Tuesday.中央电视台周二报道，云南省有关部门表示，经调查未发现虐待、拐卖或非法牟利证据，此前一段视频中裸身爬行的 3 岁男童目前健康状况稳定，正与父母安全生活。The boy, nicknamed Ping ping, was filmed on Oct 15 crawling unclothed at a highway service area in Shi mian county, Sichuan province, while his parents were on a family road trip.该男童小名平平（化名），10 月 15 日其父母驾车举家出行时，有人在四川省石棉县某高速公路服务区拍到他裸身爬行。The footage triggered a heated online debate, with questions raised over whether the child was being mistreated or even trafficked.这段视频引发网友热烈讨论，有人质疑孩子是否遭到虐待，甚至是否被拐卖。Local authorities in Nan jian county, Dali Bai autonomous prefecture, where the family resides, launched an investigation the following day along with provincial level officials.该家庭户籍地为大理白族自治州南涧县，当地部门于次日联合省级官员启动调查。The team found the family in Sichuan on Oct 18 and persuaded them to return home to Nan jian county on Oct 21. Medical professionals conducted physical and psychological assessments of the family, confirming that their two children were unharmed.10 月 18 日，调查组在四川找到该家庭，10 月 21 日劝说其返回南涧县家中。医疗专业人员对该家庭进行了身体和心理评估，确认两个孩子均未受伤害。Ping ping has since adapted well to daily routines, according to a local caregiver who has accompanied him since mid-October. Videos from a nearby kindergarten show him playing and laughing with other children.据 10 月中旬起陪伴平平（化名）的当地照护人员介绍，平平（化名）目前已很好地适应日常生活。附近幼儿园的视频显示，他正与其他孩子一起玩耍、欢笑。Officials also verified that Ping ping and his younger brother are the biological children of their parents, surnamed Li and Wan.工作人员还核实，平平（化名）与其弟弟均为李某、万某夫妇的亲生子女。The couple, who have not yet registered their marriage, have now received official birth certificates for the boys, and local authorities are processing household registration.这对夫妇尚未办理结婚登记，目前已为两个孩子领取了正式出生证明，当地部门正为其办理户口登记。Li explained that Ping ping had eczema and sometimes disliked wearing clothes in warm weather, adding that the boy's crawling behavior was a playful imitation of the family's pet dog, according to the CCTV report on Tuesday.据央视周二报道，李某解释称，平平（化名）患有湿疹，在天气暖和时有时不愿穿衣服；他还表示，孩子爬行的行为是在模仿家中宠物狗玩耍。viral音标：/ˈvaɪrəl/翻译：adj. （视频、信息等）在网上快速传播的；病毒的trafficking音标：/ˈtræfɪkɪŋ/翻译：n. 非法交易（尤指人口、毒品）eczema音标：/ˈeksɪmə/翻译：n. 湿疹（一种皮肤炎症）

Shi Davidi, Sportsnet's senior MLB columnist, joins JD to reflect on the comments from Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins and offers his read on why the President and General Manager didn't offer many meaningful thoughts (11:00). JD asks Shi about potential parallels between signing Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, what may sway Bichette, if the Jays payroll is expected to grow, Shane Bieber opting in, not being married to Jeff Hoffman as the closer in 2026, and which of the Jays starting pitchers may play a role next season. JD ends the week with his thoughts on the new Hockey Canada jerseys. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Sports & Media or any affiliates.    

Ben and Brent dive into the second hour of today's show with more Maple Leafs thoughts. They question if Craig Berube seems worried about his club, if he's feeling the heat, and if there are any doubt about the team making the playoffs. Later, the boys take a look at Baseball America's projections for some free agent contracts this offseason. How much work do the Blue Jays have to do, and will it prohibit them from resigning Bo Bichette? Shi Davidi (25:55), Sportsnet MLB insider, joins the conversation to share his takeaways from the Blue Jays' World Series run. He dives into Toronto's growth as a baseball city, how to capitalize on this momentum to make sure it isn't a one-time thing, and the ripple effects of this World Series on the upcoming CBA negotiations. Shi also checks in on the Jays' chances to re-sign Bichette and Shane Bieber, how Bichette has changed his perception in Toronto, and how much time fans need before revisiting Game 7.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Sports & Media or any affiliates.

（本期内容纯属虚构，全部来源于没有任何根据的臆想。另：嘉宾外号本来就叫志龙与本期节目内容无关。）这世上如果没了娱乐圈，我们该失去多少乐子和吐槽 / 谈资与社交光怪陆离 / 难以置信 / 勾心斗角 / 哀叹惋惜……明星，才是这个世纪最大的「消费品」。所以，一个有八卦有狗血的「娱乐圈名利场」，是再好不过的故事发生地。大爆综艺节目《白莲花真人秀》已经邀请圈内各界艺人到此展现「真实的人性」。不管你是流量千万的网红，还是海外拿奖的影后；是三起三落的劣迹艺人，还是私生活混乱的隐婚偶像；就算你是怀揣表演梦想结果被富商圈养的娱乐圈新人，都有机会在这个节目里名声鹊起，跻身顶流。只可惜，在节目即将收官，各路媒体云集之时，一具Shi体出现在节目里。「艺人老师们，只要你们能在这两个小时内想明白事情的来龙去脉，对明白台词，咱们的节目就能继续，你们的人气也能继续暴涨。「怎么样，是不是很划算?「来吧，给我一个凶手。」—————————————————————本期主播：Skywang，比利，任小之本期嘉宾：志龙节目收听平台：网易云音乐/ 小宇宙App/微博音频/Podcasts/ B站Bilibili/ 喜马拉雅/ 荔枝FM/ QQ音乐/微博生活视频：小红书/微博（全平台同名：哎哟嚯Radio）TB店铺：哎哟嚯Radio周边小店投稿邮箱：AYHRadio@Hotmail.com商务合作：AYHRadio@Hotmail.com——————————————————————哎哟嚯Radio最新付费节目《老虎、疯子与谋杀》现已上架！《老虎、疯子与谋杀》是一档四期特别播客节目，围绕一起真实事件展开：私人动物园主、宗教式“动物保护者”、断臂员工、前毒枭、花臂保镖、失语的崇拜者……他们组成了一出群魔乱舞的社会实验。在这片看似自由、实则野蛮的土地上，每个人都在扮演自己的主角，直到真相爆炸、命运翻转，有人入狱，有人消失，有人继续营业。我们将拆解事件的来龙去脉，深入探讨背后更复杂的问题：是什么样的社会和文化土壤，孕育出这一群“疯子”？当谋杀与老虎同笼，谁才是真正的掠食者？而我们这些坐在收听位置上的观众，又为何如此着迷于他们的崩坏人生？疯狂是真的，谋杀是真的，老虎也是真的。您听到的不只是故事，也是一场文明失控的现场直播。首期免费试听：236「哎哟嚯！老虎、疯子与谋杀【1】养虎还需看主人，疯子咬人不认人！」后续剧集：237「哎哟嚯！老虎、疯子与谋杀【2】大火烧不尽秘密，战争再次升级！」238「哎哟嚯！老虎、疯子与谋杀【3】总统梦？老虎债！天降救兵！爱人离去？」239「哎哟嚯！老虎、疯子与谋杀【4】野性的终章！背叛、卧底，疯子到底疯没疯？」——————————————————————哎哟嚯Radio最新周边T恤现已上架淘宝：哎哟嚯Radio周边小店！感兴趣可以前去看看哦～————————————————————节目都听完了没得可听怎么办？哎哟嚯Radio付费系列节目「哎哟嚯！小王聊书之聊斋系列！」或许能帮你度过闲暇时光！我们精选了聊斋志异中的6则长篇3则短篇故事，首期节目免费试听，欢迎大家前去捧场！

Want to listen to this episode ad-free? Visit our Patreon! Welcome true believers to X-Men Horoscopes where each week our host Lodro Rinzler is in conversation with a special guest to discuss the X-Men issue that aligns with a significant month and year from their life and what that issue reveals about their future. Current X-writer Tim Seeley is on the pod talking about the Astonishing X-Men Infinity comic and Rogue: Savage Land! Also: the X-Men are on vacation which is code for teaming up with leprechauns and fighting ambiguously gay super villains,  everyone's favorite odd couple Black Tom Cassidy and the Juggernaut. Also in this episode: Zaladane is a primeval fantasy world witch Exploring Rogue's childhood Tim is made up of Archie and Vampirella comics Absolutely buff leprechauns Eric the Red is a middle manager for the Shi'ar Empire Lodro dated a neuronic tangler in college Colossus does not want you to call Storm a broad Lodro's bad Russian accent Every castle in Ireland has plasma guns All this plus Wolverine's real name reveal as done by a leprechaun. What does any of this mean for Tim's future? Tune in to find out! -- Tim Seeley is one of those “slash” people…a writer-slash-artist. He has drawn a number of different comicbook series including G.I JOE, HALLOWEEN, WILDCATS and EXSANGUINE. His writing work includes New York Times bestselling HACK/SLASH, NIGHTWING, BATMAN ETERNAL, MONEY SHOT and the critically acclaimed REVIVAL. Fans of this show likely know him best for his work writing ROGUE: SAVAGE LAND and the ongoing infinity comic ASTONISHING X-MEN. He has also done consultation work for Cacao Barry, artist Hebru Brantley and Dreamworks Animation, and is an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago. He resides in Chicago, Illinois with his wife and daughter, and works athomewhere he is never far from his 80s action figure collection. Find him over on Instagram here. -- More of Lodro Rinzler's work can be found here and here and you can follow the podcast on Instagram at xmenpanelsdaily where we post X-Men comic panels...daily. Have a question or comment for a future episode? Reach out at xmenhoroscopes.com. Want to listen to these episodes early/ad-free and get your own X-Men Horoscope read/an awesome t-shirt? Check out our brand-new patreon! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dearest Listeners,We write from our recording studio's trenches. The air is thick and oppressive. The relentless heat tests our resolve. Our studios, once creative havens, now resemble the crannies of camels. The temperature rises each hour, and so do tempers. We are tired–Listeners—bone-tired, the kind that settles deep into one's soul. Yet we press forward, driven by our duty to document the absurd. Julian hasn't fared well; the heat has frayed his nerves, making him snap at small provocations. Sophie has started doing karaoke and wears strange accents. Trace is... indescribable. We all persist, for absurdity waits for no one, and neither shall we. Onward to the 100th And a Halfth.Your faithful servants of nonsense, warmed like croissants, but unbroken.QUESTIONSJulian: "Why glasses thick and contact lenses not thick?" from SaffTrace: "Would eating lab grown human meat be considered cannibalism?" from Ellen featuring Simone Giertz (Her own YouTube channel, Yetch Store, formerly, Queen of Shi*ty Robots)Trace: "Is there a universal geographic coordinate system for the human body? If so, where is the Prime Meridian located on the body? Is it even necessary to assign a name to every square centimeter of the body?" from Yusuke featuring Patrick Kelly (PatKellyTeaches on YouTube)Julian: "Would I be cold if I was covered in thermal paste?" from ShaneTrace: "How large would I need to be for noticeable lag in real life?" from Jori featuring Amy Shira Teitel (VintageSpace on YouTube, on Twitch theSpaceVixen)Do you have an absurd question? Maybe it's a silly idea that popped into your head, a shower thought about the nature of reality, or a ridiculous musing about your favorite food? Whatever your question, we want to answer it—tell us!HOW TO ASK A QUESTION

Dr. Ilia Shumailov - Former DeepMind AI Security Researcher, now building security tools for AI agentsEver wondered what happens when AI agents start talking to each other—or worse, when they start breaking things? Ilia Shumailov spent years at DeepMind thinking about exactly these problems, and he's here to explain why securing AI is way harder than you think.**SPONSOR MESSAGES**—Check out notebooklm for your research project, it's really powerfulhttps://notebooklm.google.com/—Take the Prolific human data survey - https://www.prolific.com/humandatasurvey?utm_source=mlst and be the first to see the results and benchmark their practices against the wider community!—cyber•Fund https://cyber.fund/?utm_source=mlst is a founder-led investment firm accelerating the cybernetic economyOct SF conference - https://dagihouse.com/?utm_source=mlst - Joscha Bach keynoting(!) + OAI, Anthropic, NVDA,++Hiring a SF VC Principal: https://talent.cyber.fund/companies/cyber-fund-2/jobs/57674170-ai-investment-principal#content?utm_source=mlstSubmit investment deck: https://cyber.fund/contact?utm_source=mlst— We're racing toward a world where AI agents will handle our emails, manage our finances, and interact with sensitive data 24/7. But there is a problem. These agents are nothing like human employees. They never sleep, they can touch every endpoint in your system simultaneously, and they can generate sophisticated hacking tools in seconds. Traditional security measures designed for humans simply won't work.Dr. Ilia Shumailovhttps://x.com/iliaishackedhttps://iliaishacked.github.io/https://sequrity.ai/TRANSCRIPT:https://app.rescript.info/public/share/dVGsk8dz9_V0J7xMlwguByBq1HXRD6i4uC5z5r7EVGMTOC:00:00:00 - Introduction & Trusted Third Parties via ML00:03:45 - Background & Career Journey00:06:42 - Safety vs Security Distinction00:09:45 - Prompt Injection & Model Capability00:13:00 - Agents as Worst-Case Adversaries00:15:45 - Personal AI & CAML System Defense00:19:30 - Agents vs Humans: Threat Modeling00:22:30 - Calculator Analogy & Agent Behavior00:25:00 - IMO Math Solutions & Agent Thinking00:28:15 - Diffusion of Responsibility & Insider Threats00:31:00 - Open Source Security Concerns00:34:45 - Supply Chain Attacks & Trust Issues00:39:45 - Architectural Backdoors00:44:00 - Academic Incentives & Defense Work00:48:30 - Semantic Censorship & Halting Problem00:52:00 - Model Collapse: Theory & Criticism00:59:30 - Career Advice & Ross Anderson TributeREFS:Lessons from Defending Gemini Against Indirect Prompt Injectionshttps://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14534Defeating Prompt Injections by Design. Debenedetti, E., Shumailov, I., Fan, T., Hayes, J., Carlini, N., Fabian, D., Kern, C., Shi, C., Terzis, A., & Tramèr, F. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18813Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threatshttps://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignmentSTOP ANTHROPOMORPHIZING INTERMEDIATE TOKENS AS REASONING/THINKING TRACES!Subbarao Kambhampati et alhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09762Meiklejohn, S., Blauzvern, H., Maruseac, M., Schrock, S., Simon, L., & Shumailov, I. (2025). Machine learning models have a supply chain problem. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22778 Gao, Y., Shumailov, I., & Fawaz, K. (2025). Supply-chain attacks in machine learning frameworks. https://openreview.net/pdf?id=EH5PZW6aCrApache Log4j Vulnerability Guidancehttps://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/apache-log4j-vulnerability-guidance Bober-Irizar, M., Shumailov, I., Zhao, Y., Mullins, R., & Papernot, N. (2022). Architectural backdoors in neural networks. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.07840Position: Fundamental Limitations of LLM Censorship Necessitate New ApproachesDavid Glukhov, Ilia Shumailov, ...https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/glukhov24a.html AlphaEvolve MLST interview [Matej Balog, Alexander Novikov]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9nAosXrJw

In this episode I am joined by Dr Francisco José Luis, scholar of Indo-Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion trained at the Sorbonne, Paris and SOAS, London. Francisco recalls his upbringing and education in Luxembourg; details his rigorous academic training in classical languages such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit; and laments what he sees as the rise of idealogical indoctrination in modern education Francisco discusses his PhD in pre-reformist Sikhism, his years of field work living in the Punjab, and expresses his love of the German intellectual tradition. Francisco reveals the influence of Neoplatonism in Islamic theology and mysticism, describes his own turn to Shiʿi Islam, and explains why he believes that even today there is a living lineage of Neoplatonism that stretches directly back to Plotinus. … Video version: https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep327-neoplatonic-mystic-dr-francisco-jos-luis Also available on Youtube, iTunes, & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast'. … Topics include: 00:00 - Intro 01:01 - Upbringing in Luxembourg 02:56 - Classical education 04:28 - Learning Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit 08:03 - Germanic intellectual tradition and WW2 12:37 - Advantages of an anti-American education 15:06 - Critical thinking and intellectual independence 17:04 - Boomer educators and idealogical indoctrination 20:59 - German literature 22:56 - Post WW2 culture shock and the boomer revolution 27:20 - Vatican II and loss of trust 30:35 - Filling education gaps 32:06 - A deeply pagan Catholic 35:21 - Meditation practice and interest in Neo-Vedanta 37:52 - Studying two masters degrees simultaneously at the Sorbonne 39:57 - Rigorous training in Sanskrit 43:56 - MA theses in French literature and pre-reform Sikhism 45:20 - PhD at SOAS in pre-reformist Sikh monastic orders 46:48 - Living among the Sikh community and learning Punjabi 49:54 - Young Sikh's interest in pre-reformist religion 50:54 - Death threats from Sikhs 53:00 - Changes in Sikhism 55:20 - Tradition religious music of Sikhism and other pre-reformist features 01:00:18 - Neo-traditionalist Sikh movements in the UK and India 01:03:59 - Falling in love with Shiʿi Islam 01:10:16 - Conversion to Islam? 01:11:45 - Shi'ism as a personal practice 01:13:23 - Cultural barriers against European converts 01:16:12 - Neo-Platonic Vajrayanism 01:17:43 - Mysticism perceived as a threat 01:21:48 - Neoplatonic influence on Islam 01:27:28 - Surprising Neo-Platonic features of Islamic mysticism 01:33:30 - Metempsychosis in Islam 01:37:16 - Francisco is a Neoplatonist 01:43:08 - Vajrayana and Shiʿi inner alchemy and dream yoga 01:50:43 - Islamic tummo … To find our more about Dr Francisco José Luis, visit: - https://www.instagram.com/hludvig_tradicionalista For more interviews, videos, and more visit: - https://www.guruviking.com Music ‘Deva Dasi' by Steve James

Shi**in' Me !? by Rotten Apple Productions

We continue our conversation about the history and interaction of Christianity and Islam with Dr. Wafik Wahba of Tyndale University in Toronto, Canada. We will be discussing more highlights from Wafik's latest book Global Christianity and Islam - Exploring History Politics and Beliefs. Wafik will also give us a concise overview about the differences between how Christians and Muslims understand the Person of Jesus. From Dr. Wahba's website at Tyndale University: Dr. Wahba first came to Tyndale as adjunct professor of theology in 1998, having previously taught contextualized theology at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt, as well as having pastored churches in Chicago and Toronto. Dr. Wahba has taught theology and intercultural studies in the United States, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America. Dr. Wahba is one of 31 contemporary reformed theologians who have contributed to The Future of Reformed Theology, edited by Willis, David & Welker, Michael, (Eerdmans, 1999). Dr. Wahba has also published in Zur Zunkunft Der Reformierten Theologie, (Neukirchener Verlag, 1998). He co-led the unit on Theological Education for Mission at the 2004 Forum of Lausanne Committee in Pattaya, Thailand and is one of the authors of “Effective Theological Education for World Evangelization” Lausanne Occasional Paper No. 57, (May 2005). Dr. Wahba serves on the Board of Directors for several international Christian organizations. Related Links: Access additional Watchman Fellowship resources related to this week's podcast:  Watchman book: What the Qur'an Really Teaches about Jesus, by James Walker Watchman Fellowship's 4-page Profile on Islam by James Walker:www.watchman.org/Muslim   Watchman Fellowship 4-page Profile on Shi'a Islam by Dr. Mike Edens: www.watchman.org/Shia  Watchman Fellowship 4-page Profile on Ahmadiyya Islam by Eric Pement: www.watchman.org/Ahmadiyya   Watchman Fellowship 4-page Profile on The Bahai Faith by Robert Pardon: www.watchman.org/Bahai  Watchman Fellowship's complete Profile Notebook demo video: www.watchman.org/Demo   Additional ResourcesFREE: We are also offering a subscription to our 4-page bimonthly Profiles here: www.watchman.org/Free.PROFILE NOTEBOOK: Order the complete collection of Watchman Fellowship Profiles (around 700 pages -- from Astrology to Zen Buddhism) in either printed or PDF formats here: www.watchman.org/notebook. SUPPORT: Help us create more content like this. Make a tax-deductible donation here: www.watchman.org/give.Apologetics Profile is a ministry of Watchman Fellowship For more information, visit www.watchman.org © 2025 Watchman Fellowship, Inc.

Hour 2 of the Big Show with George Rusic & Matt Rose is on demand! To kick off the hour, the guys are joined by Shi Davidi! Shi gives the latest insights on the Blue Jays and his thoughts on how the Jays are preparing for a postseason run.  (20:50) Later on,  NHL insider Frank Seravalli joins the show. Frank tells us what he is hearing on Rasmus Andersson contract negotiations, some injury news around the league, players who are in need of a contract, Connor McDavid's contract situation, Kaprizov's negotiations with the Wild and more!The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.    

Decision-making is a key aspect of being a manager, and a complex mix of skills, experiences, judgments and instincts. So how do you help your managers make smarter decisions at work? In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, our own Dr Anna Barnett reveals insights from our new report 'The empathy problem: Balancing emotion in decision-making', part of our Building Better Managers series. We discuss: Whether managers are more inclined to delegate difficult tasks than those they think will be achieved Why too much empathy is a problem in decision-making How to build emotionally intelligent managers. During the discussion, Anna referenced the following papers: Maas, V. S., & Shi, B. (2023). ‘The effects of target difficulty and relative ability on managers' delegation decisions'. Management Accounting Research, 60, 100851. Kaiser, R. B. (2024). 'Has empathy really become more important to leadership since the COVID-19 pandemic?'. Consulting Psychology Journal. To read all of our reports, visit mindtools.com/thought-leadership/reports For more from Mindtools and Kineo, visit mindtools.com. There, you'll also find details of our new face-to-face and virtual workshops, each aligned to our Manager Skills Assessment. Like the show? You'll LOVE our newsletter! Subscribe to The L&D Dispatch at lddispatch.com Connect with our speakers If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn: Ross Dickie Dr Anna Barnett Ross Garner

Ben and Brent kick off this hour by teeing up the Blue Jays upcoming series against the Red Sox with the American League East in the balance. Should Toronto treat this like a playoff series? The guys discuss Kevin Gausman's security as the team's Game 1 postseason starter, before getting into Anthony Santander's rehab progress and what we need to see from him to confidently slot him into the lineup. Later, they take a closer look at some Ryder Cup storylines including Team Europe deciding not to take any money for the event, how that portrays the American side, and the big players to watch for heading into the weekend. Shi Davidi (25:27), Sportsnet Blue Jays Insider, shifts the conversation back to baseball as the Jays prepare to battle Boston at Rogers Centre. Shi shares his expectations for the series at hand, the status of Bo Bichette and Santander, Eric Lauer's ideal role in October, and what he makes of the team's rotation decisions.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Sports & Media or any affiliates.

The history of Christianity and Islam has a long and complex history spanning several centuries, from Christians living among Muslims in Baghdad during the Golden Age of Islam to the Crusades and on into the 21st century. What does the future hold for Christian and Islamic relations? On the next two episodes of the Profile, we will be talking with an expert in the fields of Christianity and Islam, Dr. Wafik Wahba about his new book Global Christianity and Islam - Exploring History Politics and Beliefs. Wafik will give us a comprehensive overview of how Christianity and Islam have engaged and clashed since Islam emerged in the 7th century A.D. From Dr. Wahba's website at Tyndale University: Dr. Wahba first came to Tyndale as adjunct professor of theology in 1998, having previously taught contextualized theology at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt, as well as having pastored churches in Chicago and Toronto. Dr. Wahba has taught theology and intercultural studies in the United States, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America. Dr. Wahba is one of 31 contemporary reformed theologians who have contributed to The Future of Reformed Theology, edited by Willis, David & Welker, Michael, (Eerdmans, 1999). Dr. Wahba has also published in Zur Zunkunft Der Reformierten Theologie, (Neukirchener Verlag, 1998). He co-led the unit on Theological Education for Mission at the 2004 Forum of Lausanne Committee in Pattaya, Thailand and is one of the authors of “Effective Theological Education for World Evangelization” Lausanne Occasional Paper No. 57, (May 2005). Dr. Wahba serves on the Board of Directors for several international Christian organizations. Related Links: Access additional Watchman Fellowship resources related to this week's podcast:  Watchman book: What the Qur'an Really Teaches about Jesus, by James Walker Watchman Fellowship's 4-page Profile on Islam by James Walker:www.watchman.org/Muslim   Watchman Fellowship 4-page Profile on Shi'a Islam by Dr. Mike Edens: www.watchman.org/Shia  Watchman Fellowship 4-page Profile on Ahmadiyya Islam by Eric Pement: www.watchman.org/Ahmadiyya   Watchman Fellowship 4-page Profile on The Bahai Faith by Robert Pardon: www.watchman.org/Bahai  Watchman Fellowship's complete Profile Notebook demo video: www.watchman.org/Demo   Additional ResourcesFREE: We are also offering a subscription to our 4-page bimonthly Profiles here: www.watchman.org/Free.PROFILE NOTEBOOK: Order the complete collection of Watchman Fellowship Profiles (around 700 pages -- from Astrology to Zen Buddhism) in either printed or PDF formats here: www.watchman.org/notebook. SUPPORT: Help us create more content like this. Make a tax-deductible donation here: www.watchman.org/give.Apologetics Profile is a ministry of Watchman Fellowship For more information, visit www.watchman.org © 2025 Watchman Fellowship, Inc.

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history's most legendary groups. One was a Shi'ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels. In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin's dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations. Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history's most legendary groups. One was a Shi'ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels. In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin's dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations. Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history's most legendary groups. One was a Shi'ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels. In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin's dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations. Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history's most legendary groups. One was a Shi'ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels. In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin's dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations. Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Most people think of the I Ching as a fortune-telling book. In this episode, we explore the Taoist view that time itself is non-linear — past, present, and future already coexist. That perspective explains why divination is possible and why Shi (the Sage's alignment with time and place) matters.Taoist Master Mikel Steenrod and Morgan Boatman look at how coins, sticks, and bones act as tools to bypass bias, and how the I Ching historically guided generals, nobles, and spiritual adepts. Finally, we share a simple framework — Circumstance, Action, Outcome (CAO) — that makes the I Ching practical for modern decisions about health, love, and life direction.If you're curious about Taoism, divination, or the deeper meaning of “being in the right place at the right time,” this conversation offers both history and usable insight.

In this podcast, Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, sits down with Ariel Hayes of SHI International to discuss the company's role in the technology reseller industry, their AI initiatives, and their strategic partnerships. SHI International is a major national reseller offering a wide range of hardware, software, and services. Ariel explains that SHI not only supports customers from a procurement perspective but also provides consulting and service delivery to help businesses adopt new technologies effectively. A key focus for SHI is its continued investment in AI. In April of this year, the company opened an AI and cybersecurity lab at its headquarters in New Jersey. The lab is designed to support customers by providing AI assessments, strategic roadmaps, and tailored solutions to navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Ariel also highlights SHI's strong relationship with VMware and Broadcom, calling VMware a “top focus partner” for SHI. Ariel emphasizes that SHI dedicates resources to ensure its customers understand and maximize the technologies they invest in, with VMware being an essential part of that strategy. To learn more visit shi.com.

داستان عراق، کشور مهم بزرگی که محل تولد تمدن بشریه ولی هنوز یک قرن هم نیست که کشور شده.متن: زهره سروش‌فر، علی بندری | ویدیو و صدا: حمیدرضا فرخ‌سرشتبرای دیدن ویدیوی این اپیزود اگر ایران هستید وی‌پی‌ان بزنید و روی لینک زیر کلیک کنیدیوتیوب بی‌پلاسکانال تلگرام بی‌پلاسمنابع و لینک‌هایی برای کنجکاوی بیشترکتاب «The Modern History of Iraq» اثر Phebe Marr و Ibrahim Al-Marashiکتاب «The Land between Rivers» اثر Burtle Bullکتاب «Inventing Iraq» اثر Toby Dodgeکتاب «From Mesopotamia to Iraq» اثر Hans J. Nissen و Peter Heineمهاجرت علمای عتبات به ایران؛ بازتاب و پیامدهای آن از حجت فلاح توتکار و محسن پرویشIraq Country Studiesپان عربیسمIraq vi. Pahlavi PeriodIraq x. Shi'ites of IraqBoundaries iv. With IraqIraq (1932-Present)پیمان سعد آبادIraq under Saddam HusseinU.S. withdrawal and the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Shi'ar threat draws near! In New X-Men #123, Jean Grey takes center stage, hosting a high-profile media event at the Xavier Institute just as an intergalactic assault looms overhead. 

Hour 3 of the Big Show with Matt Rose and GVP is on demand! to kick off the hour the guys are joined by the Host of Flames Talk on Sportsnet 960 the FAN, Pat Steinberg! Pat tells us about what he's been getting up to this summer whilst he's been away on Vacation. We then touch on some Flames off season topics.(22:28) later on the guys are joined by Sportsnet Blue Jays Writer Shi Davidi, Shi helps us preview this big series with the LA Dodgers! Then we do the Speargrass Golf Show with Olympian Cassie Campbell-pascal! Cassie tells us about the current state of her golf game and how excited she is to be involved in the Legends of Hockey at the Rogers Charity Classic!The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we talked with Erica Korb from the University of Pennsylvania about her work on BRD4 and the histone variant H2BE, which influences synaptic genes and neuronal activity. Dr. Korb discusses the focus of her lab, which centers on epigenetic mechanisms impacting gene regulation in neurons. Her research primarily examines histone biology and its connection to neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disabilities. Dr. Korb expounds on the collaborative environment at UPenn's Epigenetics Institute, emphasizing how the rich diversity of research topics fosters innovative ideas and projects within the community. Reflecting on her earlier work from her postdoctoral studies, Dr. Korb discusses her first significant findings regarding the protein BRD4. This work demonstrated BRD4's role in mediating transcriptional regulation crucial for learning and memory processes. She explains how disrupting this protein's function in neurons hindered critical gene activations required for memory formation in mice. This foundational understanding opened avenues for exploring the broader implications of chromatin regulation in various neurodevelopmental conditions. Transitioning into her current research endeavors, Dr. Korb reveals how she aims to expand her focus beyond Fragile X syndrome. With her lab now investigating multiple chromatin regulators implicated in various forms of autism spectrum disorders, she describes a recent project where RNA sequencing exposed substantial overlaps in gene expression changes associated with five distinct chromatin modifiers, each contributing uniquely to neuronal function while collectively demonstrating sensitivity to chromatin disruptions. A significant portion of the discussion centers around Dr. Korb's unexpected exploration into how COVID-19 intersects with chromatin biology through a phenomenon known as histone mimicry. Leveraging bioinformatic tools during the pandemic, her lab discovered that certain viral proteins mimic histone sequences, which may lead to altered transcriptional outputs in host cells. This coincidental finding illustrates both the creative adaptability needed in scientific research and the importance of collaborative efforts across disciplines to uncover new insights. The conversation also delves into Dr. Korb's recent work regarding the histone variant H2BE, initiated by one of her graduate students. She explains how prior research only recognized H2BE's expression in the olfactory system, yet her lab has demonstrated its significant role in regulating synaptic genes and memory formation throughout broader neuronal contexts. Notably, they identified a single amino acid change that influences H2BE's function in chromatin accessibility and gene transcription, emphasizing its potential evolutionary conservation across species. In terms of H2BE's role, Dr. Korb elucidates that its activity is integral in response to extracellular stimuli, particularly within the context of neuronal activation. Intriguingly, they found that H2BE expression decreases in reaction to long-term neuronal stimulation, suggesting a complex mechanism of homeostatic plasticity crucial for regulating neuronal activity levels. This research not only advances understanding of chromatin dynamics but also holds implications for neuronal health and disease mechanisms.   References Feierman, E. R., Louzon, S., Prescott, N. A., Biaco, T., Gao, Q., Qiu, Q., Choi, K., Palozola, K. C., Voss, A. J., Mehta, S. D., Quaye, C. N., Lynch, K. T., Fuccillo, M. V., Wu, H., David, Y., & Korb, E. (2024). Histone variant H2BE enhances chromatin accessibility in neurons to promote synaptic gene expression and long-term memory. Molecular cell, 84(15), 2822–2837.e11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2024.06.025 Korb, E., Herre, M., Zucker-Scharff, I., Gresack, J., Allis, C. D., & Darnell, R. B. (2017). Excess Translation of Epigenetic Regulators Contributes to Fragile X Syndrome and Is Alleviated by Brd4 Inhibition. Cell, 170(6), 1209–1223.e20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.07.033 Kee, J., Thudium, S., Renner, D. M., Glastad, K., Palozola, K., Zhang, Z., Li, Y., Lan, Y., Cesare, J., Poleshko, A., Kiseleva, A. A., Truitt, R., Cardenas-Diaz, F. L., Zhang, X., Xie, X., Kotton, D. N., Alysandratos, K. D., Epstein, J. A., Shi, P. Y., Yang, W., … Korb, E. (2022). SARS-CoV-2 disrupts host epigenetic regulation via histone mimicry. Nature, 610(7931), 381–388. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05282-z Feierman, E. R., Paranjapye, A., Su, S., Qiu, Q., Wu, H., & Korb, E. (2024). Histone variant H2BE controls activity-dependent gene expression and homeostatic scaling. bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology, 2024.11.01.620920. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.11.01.620920   Related Episodes Neuroepigenetic Mechanisms and Primate Epigenome Evolution (Boyan Bonev) DNA Methylation Alterations in Neurodegenerative Diseases (Paula Desplats) The Role of Histone Dopaminylation and Serotinylation in Neuronal Plasticity (Ian Maze)   Contact Epigenetics Podcast on Mastodon Epigenetics Podcast on Bluesky Dr. Stefan Dillinger on LinkedIn Active Motif on LinkedIn Active Motif on Bluesky Email: podcast@activemotif.com

It was great to have our partners from Shi-awela Safaris and Lodge on with us. With the incredible hunts that the Goldfinch's and all the other guests have been having, it was time to get them on from over in their incredible parts of the world. We are excited to talk about many thing from Stephen's most recent hunts to John D's latest hunts himself. Which include a management hunt for elephants in Zimbabwe. You do not want to miss this great story that we share and you can go make your own stories with our official safari partner. We will be happy to share all the info and you can also checkthem out and get your own trip set upto make mempries of your own by visiting their website at www.shiawela.com Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/trilogy-outdoors--5441492/support.

In Part I we looked at the political events leading up to the formation of the Shi'a. In Part II we see that it did not take long for things to get very esoteric. Come for the programmatic esoteric hermeneutics, stay for the occult sciences.

We pick up from our last episode, where geopolitics and esotericism met in the crucible of Roman, Sassanian, and Arab political struggles. Ahab Bdaiwi threads the labyrinth of the earliest historical sources for the birth of the movement within Islām which came to be known as the Party of ‘Alī, or the Shi‘ā.