Podcasts about Snipes

This week Black on Black Cinema finally gives Sugar Hill (1994) the deep analysis it deserves. Directed by Leon Ichaso and written by Barry Michael Cooper — the architect behind New Jack City and Above the Rim — Sugar Hill is the second and most emotionally dramatic entry in Cooper's Harlem Trilogy. Wesley Snipes as Roemello Skuggs, a high-level Harlem drug dealer who wants out. He's got money, power, a woman he loves in Melissa (Theresa Randle), and a future waiting for him if his volatile brother Raynathan (Michael Wright) and the game itself will let him leave.We break down what makes Sugar Hill flawed but still underrated. Cooper's layered screenplay that tries to give Roemello genuine intellectual depth (Georgetown scholarship-eligible, chess player, art collector), Michael Wright's explosive performance as the brother who can't escape the past, and Leon Ichaso's atmospheric direction that turns Harlem into a character of its own. Terence Blanchard's jazz-inflected gives the film a serious connection to Spike Lee's own work. Clarence Williams III steals scenes effortlessly, and Ernie Hudson has a good time as a villain this time around.We discuss why it got overshadowed by New Jack City, how it works to keep the idea of Wesley Snipes being one of the coolest dudes in this era. Sugar Hill has its flaws from scenes that in hindsight are oddly placed (potentially post edit bay issues), some characters who aren't as explored as actual human beings, but there is still something here worth talking about and the effort of making a gentlemen gangster film with the same actor who was notorious for playing one of the most brutal gangsters in the 90s era is something to admire here.Black on Black Cinema is a long-running podcast featuring in-depth Black movie reviews and frank conversations that matter to the Black community. We review Black films across every genre — from Black horror and Black sci-fi to indie dramas, comedies, and blockbuster action. Covering filmmakers like Spike Lee, Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, and more. Hosted by Jay, Micah, Terrence, and T'ara. Featured on RogerEbert.com. A TNP Studios production. New episodes weekly on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major platforms. For more TNP Studios content, check out The Nerdpocalypse (movie & TV news), Look Forward (progressive politics), and Dense Pixels (video game news).

The EU is finally using its teeth on Chinese e-commerce — and the auction landscape is already shifting. Mike and Chris break down what falling CPCs in Europe mean for your accounts, why the July 1st customs change could matter more than any fine, and the playbook for grabbing market share before the window closes.Then: a major Google Marketing Live feature almost nobody is talking about. Google's new AI Performance Insights and the "Share of Voice" metric in Merchant Center finally show your product visibility inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini — across both organic and paid. We cover what it does, where it lives, and the one big gap Google still leaves wide open.In this episode: • Why the EU crackdown on Temu, Shein & AliExpress is a sign of what's coming • Average CPCs dropped ~2.3% in May 2026 — and up to 5% in some categories • The July 1st customs exemption change and what it does to Chinese sellers' margins • The playbook: tROAS as a signal, AI Max search, demand-led growth & smart bidding exploration • JoyBuy — the unregulated Chinese player to watch • Google's new AI Performance Insights & Share of Voice metric in Merchant Center • The black box that still remains: campaign-level dataGrowing Ecommerce is brought to you by smec (Smarter Ecommerce). Learn more at smarterecommerce.com.

Black on Black Cinema announces our next film review: Sugar Hill (1994), directed by Leon Ichaso and written by Barry Michael Cooper; the second film in his legendary Harlem Trilogy alongside New Jack City and Above the Rim. Wesley Snipes stars as Roemello Skuggs, a high-level Harlem drug dealer who decides to walk away from the life to start fresh with his girlfriend Melissa (Theresa Randle), only to discover that leaving isn't something the game allows. Co-starring Michael Wright, Clarence Williams III, Ernie Hudson, and Abe Vigoda.Then we get into it: Reparations for Black Americans. We agree it should happen, the historical, economic, and moral case is ironclad. But what does repayment actually look like in practice? Direct cash payments? Targeted investment? Tax free benefits? Educational and business funds? And who qualifies for it? Is it just direct descendants of enslaved people only, or a broader class of Black Americans impacted by systemic racism? We break down the competing frameworks, the political obstacles, and what an honest reparations conversation looks like beyond the talking point.Black on Black Cinema is a long-running podcast featuring in-depth Black movie reviews and frank conversations that matter to the Black community. We review Black films across every genre — from Black horror and Black sci-fi to indie dramas, comedies, and blockbuster action. Covering filmmakers like Spike Lee, Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, and more. Hosted by Jay, Micah, Terrence, and T'ara. Featured on RogerEbert.com. A TNP Studios production. New episodes weekly on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major platforms. For more TNP Studios content, check out The Nerdpocalypse (movie & TV news), Look Forward (progressive politics), and Dense Pixels (video game news).

Meta has overtaken Google in ad budgets - and for ecommerce advertisers, that changes everything.It means Google is on the offensive. It means the pressure to split your budget between platforms is about to intensify. And it means that if you're not set up correctly on Google's AI surfaces right now, you're already losing ground to competitors who are.In this episode of Growing Ecommerce, Mike Ryan (smec's Head of Ecommerce Insights) and Chris share firsthand takeaways from GML 2026 — both the San Francisco and Dublin events — with unfiltered takes on what actually matters for your campaigns.What we cover:→ Google vs. Meta: The "War of the Titans" and why Google's messaging to advertisers is getting aggressive→ AI Max for Shopping: Why standard shopping campaigns may have limited eligibility in AI surfaces→ New AI-native ad formats: Conversational discovery ads, feed-based text ads, and why the line between shopping and search is collapsing→ Ask Advisor: A great idea — but oversold to an irresponsible degree (Mike's take)→ Universal Cart: Multi-retailer, cross-platform checkout — and Google's Amazon moment→ What the shift to agentic commerce means for how you monetize clicksCut through the hype. Know what to act on.

Google just dropped a PMax special — and there's a lot to unpack.In this episode of Growing Ecommerce, Mike Ryan and Chris break down three major updates reshaping how ecommerce advertisers run Performance Max and Shopping campaigns in 2025:1. Network exclusions for PMax: You can now opt out of Search Partner Network AND Google Display Network directly inside PMax. Years in the making, and a massive lever for both performance and brand safety. We walk through why it matters, when to use it, and how to check your own data first.2. Shopping Performance View: A new level of product-level reporting coming to PMax and Demand Gen campaigns via the Google Ads API. See performance by brand, category, product type, and item ID — the same parity you get in standard Shopping. Huge for anyone who's tried and failed to understand feed performance inside Max.3. AI Max for Shopping: The biggest one. Google is rolling out an optional AI layer for standard Shopping campaigns with three features:- Text customization: Google rewrites your product titles dynamically per query- Final URL expansion (FUE): Google picks landing pages from your site — including category pages- Optimal format selection: Text ads can now appear inside your Shopping campaignsWe discuss what this means for advertisers who run standard Shopping for control, whether there's real redundancy with Search and PMax, the campaign overlap and CPC escalation risk, and why Mike thinks this is actually bigger than AI Max for Search.Standard Shopping: confirmed not dead. Google is investing in it.Growing Ecommerce is brought to you by smarter ecommerce (smec) — helping online retailers optimize paid search through AI-powered software and human PPC expertise.#PerformanceMax #PMax #GoogleShopping #AIMaxForShopping #GoogleAds #EcommerceMarketing #PPC #SearchPartnerNetwork #GoogleAdsUpdates #PaidSearchAbout Smarter Ecommerce (smec):Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

In this episode of Growing Ecommerce, Mike Ryan and Chris Scharmueller dive into the much-anticipated updates to the OpenAI ads platform and break down Google's staggering Q1 earnings report.While OpenAI has finally transitioned their ad platform from a primitive Excel spreadsheet to a proper User Interface, their highly publicized shift to a CPC model is raising major red flags. We break down the math behind their highly constrained $3 to $5 max CPC range, revealing how it mathematically equates to the exact same astronomical $60 effective CPM they originally launched with. We discuss why advertisers should demand more transparency and control before shifting their performance budgets to ChatGPT.We also unpack Google's unstoppable Q1 momentum. With a massive $110 billion in revenue and an 80% spike in earnings per share, Google is silencing the "death of Search" narrative. We explore their impressive 19% core Search growth, the staggering 63% surge in Google Cloud that is heavily outpacing AWS and Azure, and why Google's massive $180 billion CapEx guidance for 2026 solidifies their dominance in the AI arms race.Key Takeaways:• The OpenAI Ad Trap: Don't be fooled by OpenAI's new CPC bidding model. By forcing advertisers into a strict $3 to $5 CPC range, the platform is essentially maintaining its premium $60 effective CPM under a disguise. Advertisers should hold off on shifting performance budgets until real incrementality and transparency are proven.• Search is Still Thriving: Despite the ongoing narrative that AI will kill traditional search engines, Google's core Search product grew by 19% year-over-year. The search giant's core advertising flywheel remains the most reliable engine for ecommerce growth.• Google Cloud is Winning the AI War: Google Cloud (GCS) achieved a staggering 63% year-over-year growth, heavily outpacing Amazon AWS (28%) and Microsoft Azure (39%). Powered by deep Gemini integration and proprietary TPUs, Google's vertical integration puts them in a unique position to dominate the next decade.Resources & Links:• Access all our webinars, reports, and playbooks in our Knowledge Hub: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/knowledge-hub/ • How is your industry stacking up in the market? Find out with smec's Google Ads Benchmarks: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/smec-market-observer/About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

It's the first Major Pain of Season 10 of Where's That Bar Cart. But Nick is being grumpy about the PGA Championship happening in May, so he has something up his sleeve. Listen/Watch to our discussion on Guyanese golfers, and Snipes & Kite.Thanks to Comedy Records and to each and every one of you who listens, watches, and supports our podcast. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel @ComedyRecords. Also, head to foretra.com and use the promo code NICKDURIE for discounts on amazing golf gear. Swing well out there.Follow us at:- @wheresthatbarcart- linkt.ree/wheresthatbarcart- @dpurcomic- @montymofoscott- @nickdurie- @comedyrecordsMusic by Devin BatesonThank you to Comedy Records

If you enjoy this episode, we're sure you will enjoy more content like this on The Occult Rejects.  In fact, we have curated playlists on occult topics like grimoires, esoteric concepts and phenomena, occult history, analyzing true crime and cults with an occult lens, Para politics, and occultism in music. Whether you enjoy consuming your content visually or via audio, we've got you covered - and it will always be provided free of charge.  So, if you enjoy what we do and want to support our work of providing accessible, free content on various platforms, please consider making a donation to the links provided below.  Thank you and enjoy the episode!Links For The Occult Rejectshttps://linktr.ee/theoccultrejectsOccult Research Institutehttps://www.occultresearchinstitute.org/Cash Apphttps://cash.app/$theoccultrejectsVenmo@TheOccultRejectsBuy Me A Coffeebuymeacoffee.com/TheOccultRejectsPatreonhttps://www.patreon.com/TheOccultRejectsFull show-notes bibliographyCore EEG and oscillationsAbubaker, M., & Dankaerts, W. (2021). Working memory and cross-frequency coupling of neuronal oscillations. *Frontiers in Psychology, 12*, 742860.Axmacher, N., Henseler, M. M., Jensen, O., Weinreich, I., Elger, C. E., & Fell, J. (2010). Cross-frequency coupling supports multi-item working memory in the human hippocampus. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107*(7), 3228–3233.Jensen, O., & Mazaheri, A. (2010). Shaping functional architecture by oscillatory alpha activity: Gating by inhibition. *Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4*, 186.Rayi, A., et al. (2022). Electroencephalogram. *StatPearls*. StatPearls Publishing.StatPearls / NCBI Bookshelf. (2024). Introduction to electroencephalography (EEG). *NCBI Bookshelf*.Theta, alpha, beta, gamma, and controlCavanagh, J. F., & Shackman, A. J. (2015). Frontal midline theta reflects anxiety and cognitive control: Meta-analytic evidence. *Journal of Physiology-Paris, 109*(1–3), 3–15.Eisma, J., et al. (2021). Frontal midline theta differentiates separate cognitive control strategies while still generalizing the need for cognitive control. *Scientific Reports, 11*, 14641.Jensen, O., Bonnefond, M., & VanRullen, R. (2012). An oscillatory mechanism for prioritizing salient unattended stimuli. *Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16*(4), 200–206.Lundqvist, M., Herman, P., & Miller, E. K. (2018). Working memory: Delay activity, yes! Persistent activity? Maybe not. *Journal of Neuroscience, 38*(32), 7013–7019.Sleep architecture, spindles, and memoryCaporro, M., Haneef, Z., Yeh, H.-J., Mohamed, F. B., & Levin, H. S. (2012). Functional MRI of sleep spindles and K-complexes. *Clinical Neurophysiology, 123*(2), 303–309.Chen, P., Miao, X., Chen, J., et al. (2023). The devastating effects of sleep deprivation on memory: Lessons from rodent models, aging, and Alzheimer's disease. *Frontiers in Neuroscience, 17*, 1151639.Ng, T., et al. (2025). Bayesian meta-analysis reveals the mechanistic role of slow oscillation-spindle coupling in sleep-dependent memory consolidation. *eLife, 13*, RP101992.Patel, A. K., et al. (2024). Physiology, sleep stages. *StatPearls*. StatPearls Publishing.Páez, A., Gillman, S. O., Dogaheh, S. B., et al. (2025). Sleep spindles and slow oscillations predict cognition and biomarkers of neurodegeneration in mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. *Alzheimer's & Dementia, 21*, e14424.Hypnagogia, N1, and dream incubationHorowitz, A. H., Esfahany, S., Boyle, M. R., et al. (2023). Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance. *Scientific Reports, 13*, 5055.Lacaux, C., Andrillon, T., Bastoul, D., et al. (2021). Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot. *Science Advances, 7*(50), eabj5866.Meditation, prayer, chanting, and yoga nidraDatta, K., Mallick, H. N., Tripathi, M., Ahuja, G. K., & Deepak, K. K. (2022). Electrophysiological evidence of local sleep during yoga nidra practice in young male volunteers. *Frontiers in Neurology, 13*, 910794.Dobrakowski, P., Błaszkiewicz, M., & Skalski, S. (2020). Changes in the electrical activity of the brain in the alpha and theta bands during prayer and meditation. *International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17*(24), 9567.Gao, J., Leung, H. K., Wu, B. W. Y., Skouras, S., & Sik, H. H. (2019). The neurophysiological correlates of religious chanting. *Scientific Reports, 9*, 4262.Kaur, C., & Singh, P. (2015). EEG derived neuronal dynamics during meditation: Progress and challenges. *Advances in Preventive Medicine, 2015*, 614723.Lomas, T., Ivtzan, I., & Fu, C. H. Y. (2015). A systematic review of the neurophysiology of mindfulness on EEG oscillations. *Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 57*, 401–410.Hypnosis and suggestionJensen, M. P., Adachi, T., & Hakimian, S. (2015). Brain oscillations, hypnosis, and hypnotizability. *American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 57*(3), 230–253.Kirenskaya, A. V., Novototsky-Vlasov, V. Y., Chistyakov, A. V., & Zvonikov, V. M. (2011). Waking EEG spectral power and coherence differences between highly hypnotizable and low hypnotizable subjects. *International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 59*(2), 144–164.Mendoza, M. E., & Capafons, A. (2024). Neural correlates of hypnosis: A systematic narrative review. *Frontiers in Psychology, 15*, 1327738.Ritual rhythm, trance, and synchronyHuels, E. R., Kim, H. S., Lee, U., & Mollaahmetoglu, O. M. (2021). Neural correlates of the shamanic state of consciousness. *Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15*, 610466.Mogan, R., Fischer, R., & Bulbulia, J. A. (2017). To be in synchrony or not? A meta-analysis of synchrony's effects on behavior, perception, cognition and affect. *Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 72*, 13–20.Tarr, B., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2016). Silent disco: Dancing in synchrony leads to elevated pain thresholds and social closeness. *Evolution and Human Behavior, 37*(5), 343–349.Entrainment, binaural beats, fatigue, and overloadGoodman, S. P. J., et al. (2025). Approaches to inducing mental fatigue: A systematic review and meta-analysis of (neuro)physiologic indices. *Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 170*, 105957.Ingendoh, R. M., Posny, E. S., & Heine, A. (2023). Binaural beats to entrain the brain? A systematic review of the effects of binaural beat stimulation on brain oscillatory activity, and the implications for psychological research and intervention. *PLOS ONE, 18*(5), e0286023.Snipes, S., et al. (2024). Extended wakefulness alters the relationship between EEG theta and alpha bursts and behavioural outcome. *European Journal of Neuroscience, 60*(8), 6268–6284.Xiang, C., et al. (2024). A resting-state EEG dataset for sleep deprivation. *Scientific Data, 11*, 406.Parkinson's disease and pathological betaAsadi, A., et al. (2022). The origin of abnormal beta oscillations in the parkinsonian corticobasal ganglia circuit. *Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16*, 823719.Paulo, D. L., et al. (2023). Corticostriatal beta oscillation changes associated with cognitive function in Parkinson's disease. *NPJ Parkinson's Disease, 9*, 202.Ancient sleep, dreams, and Asclepian healingAskitopoulou, H. (2015). Sleep and dreams: From myth to medicine in ancient Greece. *Journal of Anesthesia History, 1*(3), 70–75.Kapotsis, G., & Steiropoulos, P. (2025). Sleep incubation [enkoimesis] in medical practice at Asclepieia of Ancient Greece — the Ancient Greek sleep medicine. *Sleep Medicine, 130*, 85–89.Pavli, A. (2024). Asclepieia in ancient Greece: pilgrimage and healing. *Journal of Integrative Medicine and Research, 3*(2), 100119.Also want to remind people about the website, if you're into reading we have tons of information by multiple contributors, and we got t-shirts up on the site if you're interested. Fun fact, the art is all based on the eyeball. A

In this episode of Growing E-commerce, Mike Ryan and Chris Scharmueller dive into the end of an era: Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are officially dying.While Google's new AI Max for Search currently sits at a tiny 1.5-2% adoption rate, the mandatory migration of all DSA campaigns by September will trigger an instant hockey-stick growth curve. We explain exactly what you need to expect from this sunset, how the auto-migration handles broad match and URL expansion by default, and why advertisers need to start testing AI Max immediately before the Q4 holiday crunch.We also unpack the diverging automation strategies of the tech giants and the catastrophic drop in Meta Advantage+ adoption. After peaking at 40%, its cost share has nosedived to a concerning 20%. We discuss why this downward trend calls Mark Zuckerberg's "fully automated" vision into question. Plus, we explore the latest Meta Pixel updates and why Meta wants a feed-less future while Google doubles down on structured data.Key Takeaways:The AI Max Hockey Stick: Do not be fooled by the current low adoption rate of AI Max for Search. Once the legacy DSA campaigns (which currently hold about 15% cost share) are auto-migrated in September, AI Max will become a dominant and highly relevant campaign type overnight.Meta's Automation Problem: Advantage+ adoption is on a multi-quarter decline, dropping to just 20% cost share. Without substantial product improvements, Meta will struggle to achieve the fully automated, hands-off advertising ecosystem it envisioned.The Feed vs. Feed-less Divide: Meta is attempting to offload feed management by using AI to scrape landing page data directly via the Meta Pixel. Conversely, Google relies heavily on detailed data feeds to ground its AI and maintain quality control.Resources & Links:Access all our webinars, reports, and playbooks in our Knowledge Hub: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/knowledge-hub/How is your industry stacking up in the market? Find out with smec's Google Ads Benchmarks:https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/smec-market-observer/ About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Abolition without imagination is incomplete. Happy 5 years, BMU! Episode Links:The Communion CollectiveHere's the Story (Part of the Student Affairs Now Podcast)Blacktivism in the AcademyHow to Think Constellationally (TEDx Talk by Alex C. Lange)Prentis Hemphill's IG post on building community with traitors to patriarchy.How Europe Underdeveloped AfricaChris and JT's paper on rest

Abolition without imagination is incomplete. Happy 5 years, BMU! Episode Links:The Communion CollectiveHere's the Story (Part of the Student Affairs Now Podcast)Blacktivism in the AcademyHow to Think Constellationally (TEDx Talk by Alex C. Lange)Prentis Hemphill's IG post on building community with traitors to patriarchy.How Europe Underdeveloped AfricaChris and JT's paper on rest

In this episode of Growing Ecommerce, Mike Ryan and Chris Scharmueller break down the latest shifts in the battle for AI dominance and the future of online shopping.We analyze the quiet death of OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). With major tech giants—including ACP co-founder Stripe, as well as Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon—joining Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) Tech Council, we explore what this consensus means for the future of e-commerce standards and why these companies chose to back Google's infrastructure over ChatGPT.We also look at where ChatGPT's outbound traffic is actually going. With 20% of its e-commerce referrals landing on Amazon—and roughly 30% of its overall referrals directing users right back to Google or YouTube—we question the long-term impact on user experience and whether OpenAI is just feeding the monopolies it is trying to disrupt.Plus, we cover Google's rollout of "AI mode" to Chrome users in the US, featuring a new side-by-side browsing experience, and discuss the looming threat of mass arbitration facing Google in the wake of its 2024 antitrust loss.Resources & Links:Access all our webinars, reports, and playbooks in our Knowledge Hub: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/knowledge-hub/How is your industry stacking up in the market? Find out with smec's Google Ads Benchmarks:https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/smec-market-observer/ About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Both the Democratic and Republican gubernatorial debates hosted by the Atlanta Press Club on Georgia Public Broadcasting aired Monday evening, and aside from the notable difference between the two hours - substantive policy conversations vs "who can out-Trump the other" - some other notable moments were worth zeroing in on.Former state Senator Jason Esteves took the first hard swipe at the presumptive frontrunner, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, over the death of Secoriea Turner during her term. He and Senator Derrick Jackson took aim at former GOP lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan for his role in the state of the state currently, and Mike Thurmond presented a novel approach to tax relief: reducing and/or eliminating the state's income tax - a regressive tax. On the right, it was more "Jones v. Jackson" sniping, often with surrogate assistance from attorney general Chris Carr and even secretary of state Brad Raffensperger weighing in on both. The bombshell of the night came as the billionaire Rick Jackson found himself unable to refute their being undocumented people hired on his behalf, which Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones pounced on - unable to resist using the slur "illegals," of course.With me to discuss it all is Atlanta-based political consultant Andrew Heaton.

Google just quietly won the agentic commerce war — and most ecommerce retailers haven't even noticed. In this episode of Growing Ecommerce, Mike Ryan and Chris break down the three UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) updates Google just shipped, why OpenAI's ACP is already falling behind, and the structural advantages that make Google's lead almost impossible to catch.If you run Performance Max campaigns, sell on Google Shopping, or want to understand where ecommerce is headed in the AI era — this is the episode that connects the dots.Inside this episode:The 3 new UCP capabilities that just went live: cart building, catalog capability, and identity linking — and why "boring" updates matter more than hypeWhy OpenAI's ACP dropped to single-item checkout while Google moved aheadThe Walmart Sparky chatbot inside ChatGPT — the workaround that proves OpenAI's pipeline is brokenHow Google Pay and Google Wallet quietly lock retailers into a walled gardenGoogle's flywheel: how the shopping graph + audience graph + structured knowledge graph data create a moat LLMs can't replicateWhy this time is different from Buy on Google's 2018 failure — and what changed in Google's leverage over retailersWhy pipeline-based agents (UCP) will win over browser-based agents — and how this is really the logical endpoint of headless commerceThe only thing that could realistically stop Google: regulatorsTopics covered: UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol, agentic commerce, Performance Max, PMax, Google Shopping, AI mode, ChatGPT shopping, OpenAI ACP, agentic checkout, Google Pay, Google Wallet, headless commerce, Merchant Center, knowledge graph, shopping graph, Walmart Sparky, AI overviews, conversational attributes.About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

In this episode of Growing E-commerce, Mike Ryan and Chris Scharmueller unpack two massive stories highlighting the current realities—and potential delusions—of the tech and retail sectors.First, we discuss the quiet and staggering fall of Allbirds. Once a Silicon Valley staple and D2C darling valued at a massive $4 billion, the sustainable shoe company has reportedly sold for a fraction of that cost. We explore what their trajectory tells us about the overestimation of the D2C model and why the fundamentals of traditional retail still matter.Then, we dive back into the OpenAI ad platform. OpenAI recently released a bullish projection: they expect their ad business to cross $100 billion in revenue by 2030. We take a critical look at the current state of their ad interface—which currently resembles Google Ads from a decade ago—and discuss why hitting that revenue target will require an unprecedented, disruptive evolution of their product.Key Takeaways:The D2C Reality Check: Allbirds' massive devaluation highlights a broader trend: many D2C brands were valued as high-growth tech companies rather than traditional retailers. As market conditions shift, the core competencies of traditional retail—and the value of retail middlemen—are becoming apparent again.OpenAI's Steep Climb: While OpenAI projects a massive $100 billion ad business by 2030, their current platform is rudimentary. It operates on a flight-based approach with a fixed $60 CPM and relies on basic keyword matching, limiting its appeal primarily to large brand advertisers rather than the performance-focused mass market needed for that scale of growth.The Comparability Problem: OpenAI's ad platform will inevitably be compared to highly sophisticated, always-on ecosystems like Google Ads and Meta. To capture significant market share and reach their revenue goals, OpenAI must evolve beyond a basic UI and deliver a product that proves strong incrementality and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).Resources & Links:Access all our webinars, reports, and playbooks in our Knowledge Hub: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/knowledge-hub/How is your industry stacking up in the market? Find out with smec's Google Ads Benchmarks:https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/smec-market-observer/ About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Dizzy SenZe is a Bronx, NY native and a world class freestyle rapper, emcee, songwriter and multimedia artist. She's part of the cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony Award winning Broadway show, Freestyle Love Supreme. She has won several NY freestyle competitions and she's known as a lyrical assassin. She won the Snipes' Battle Champs MC Championship and the Freestyle Emcee World Championship. She has engineered for companies like Nickelodeon and Interscope Records. She's photographed artists and companies like Sesame Street. She has shared the stage with Kendrick Lamar. And she provides custom raps. She does a “live” freestyle rap during the interview! My featured song is “New York City Groove”, from the album Made In New York by my band Project Grand Slam. Spotify link. —----------------------------------------------------------- The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries! Click here for All Episodes  Click here for Guest List  Click here for Guest Groupings  Click here for Guest Voices Click here to Subscribe  Click here to receive our Email Updates Click here to Rate and Review the podcast —---------------------------------------- CONNECT WITH DIZZY:www.facebook.com/dizzySenze —--------------------------------------- ROBERT'S NEWEST RELEASE:“MI CACHIMBER ALL STARS” is the new, expanded version of Robert's single, “Mi Cachimber”, which he wrote for his father. Featuring Camila Cortina on Rhodes and Xito Lovell on trombone in addition to Benny Benack III and Dave Smith on flugelhorn, and Project Grand Slam's rhythm section. CLICK HERE FOR OFFICIAL VIDEO CLICK HERE FOR ALL LINKS —-------------------------------------- ROBERT'S RECENT RELEASE: “MA PETITE FLEUR STRING QUARTET” is Robert's recent release. It transforms his jazz ballad into a lush classical string quartet piece. Praised by a host of classical music stars. CLICK HERE FOR YOUTUBE LINK CLICK HERE FOR ALL LINKS —--------------------------------------- Audio production: Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films   Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast: Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com   Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music: Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com    

Send us Fan MailEric and Neil tackle the very fun and entertaining Sylvester Stallone movie, Demolition Man. We both were surprised how much we liked it after not seeing it in ages. Stallone and Snipes are both having a great time. Grab Some Taco Bell and join us! 

One Week Out, the Mock Is On Seven days before the 2026 NFL Draft in Pittsburgh, the Detroit Lions Podcast fired up a full seven-round mock. The simulator ran on the consensus board at normal speed. Every trade offer was rejected to keep the exercise clean, even though the host admitted he would take several of them in real life. Tennessee, Buffalo, and Philadelphia dangled packages with future second-round picks. Tempting, but declined. The board fell largely as expected into the teens. The goal was simple. Track how the Detroit Lions might act when real choices appear. Concrete roster needs. Scheme fits. Red flags. All in play. Round 1: OT Over CB Temptations The Lions sifted through a cluster that included Raymond McCoy, Dylan Spielman, Keldrick Falk, Caden Proctor, Akeem Mezzadore, and Caleb Lomu. McCoy brought one season of pristine outside-corner tape at Tennessee, but the knee history and whispers about a degenerative issue cooled enthusiasm. The Lions already live with that kind of concern at safety with Kirby Joseph. Pass. Edge was surveyed for a complement to Aidan Hutchinson. A prototype was on the board, but Mezzadore did not fit that vision. Avion Terrell offered coverage polish yet carried a lighter frame than ideal. Caleb Lomu drew praise for movement skills and zone-friendly run blocking, but the sense was Detroit would not value him as highly. Caden Proctor held appeal, just not as the apple of their eye. The pick landed where positional value and board scarcity intersected. Blake Miller, offensive tackle. Take the pillar now, develop the ceiling with Fraley, and avoid forcing an offensive need later when the board thins. After 17: Runs, Snipes, and Offers Once Miller was in, chips fell fast. McCoy came off the board. Proctor went to Houston. Gabe Vaki vanished. Then the sting. TJ Parker, a player with real Lions interest, disappeared just before 50. More trade calls arrived in the 50s with swaps that included moving down for extra Day 2 capital. Again, declined for the sake of the exercise. Round 2 Watch: Corner Takes the Lead The Lions scanned offense and saw little they liked. Eli Stowers at tight end did not move the needle, especially with contested-catch concerns. A running back like Jadarian Price was not in play. Defense answered. Chris Johnson, an outside corner, fit cleanly and immediately jumped to the top of the conversation. Malachi Lawrence offered intrigue. Kayla Banks carried a foot injury that complicated the calculus. The takeaway was clear. By grabbing an offensive tackle early, Detroit preserved flexibility while the second-round board tilted defense. Cornerback rose to the front, with outside traits that align with how the Lions want to play on the perimeter. Health flags matter. Scheme fit matters more. One week out, this mock framed both with clarity. #detroitlions #lions #detroitlionspodcast #nfl #blakemiller #chrisjohnson #mockdraft Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Johnny Spoiler got invited to a big movie premiere… last minute… in the desert… with no plus one. What could possibly go wrong? Anxiety? Check. Suspicious dating-app logistics? Check. Potential “this sounds like a true crime documentary” vibes? DOUBLE check.This week, we're riding straight into chaos with Gallowwalkers—Wesley Snipes' cursed drifter epic that feels like Blade wandered into a Sergio Leone fever dream. Undead showdowns, vampire energy, samurai vibes, and one seriously haunted production story (yes, including Snipes' real-life legal drama mid-shoot). PLUS:Return of the Living Dead sequel (NOT a remake )Avatar: The Last Airbender movie leak dramaNicolas Cage back in Lords of War“4 Kids Walk Into a Bank” might be the wildest premise of 2026 Johnny breaks it all down with that signature sarcastic, film-nerd chaos:Is Gallowwalkers a hidden gem… or a cursed relic? (Hint: Binge Later, partner.) Fan shoutouts, cult movie love, and a staff pick that involves Zac Efron, Craigslist dates, and absolute wedding destruction. Johnny Spoiler verdict:“Tastes like a beach episode. Plays like a haunted spaghetti western.” Hit play, grab your V8 Energy https://amzn.to/3Q6ArQDand remember:Don't go home… you can't stay here… go watch ALF.#JohnnySpoiler #BingeWatchersPodcast #Gallowwalkers #MoviePodcast #HorrorComedy #WesleySnipes

Is the “Zero-Click” shopping era finally here, and are European retailers ready for a three-way war between Amazon, Temu, and JD.com's Joybuy?In this episode of Growing Ecommerce, Mike Ryan and Chris Scharmueller unpack a huge week in e-commerce. First: Meta's new Stripe partnership for in-app checkout. With OpenAI and Google both struggling to make native checkout work, can Meta finally crack the “zero-click” model and keep shoppers fully inside its platform?Then comes the real clash of the titans. JD.com has launched Joybuy in Europe, going straight after Amazon and Temu. We share exclusive Google Ads data showing how aggressively Joybuy is already outranking incumbents. But unlike Temu, Joybuy isn't just burning cash for growth. It's building a sustainable base and investing in local logistics, making it a serious hybrid threat.Finally, Mike shares updated market penetration numbers for Amazon and Temu across Europe. The picture is clear: Amazon dominates wealthy Western European markets, while Temu has seized the Central and Eastern European markets Amazon largely ignored.

OpenAI is facing a projected $25 billion shortfall, and their attempt to monetize ecommerce is already falling apart.In this episode of Growing Ecommerce, Mike Ryan and Chris Scharmüller ask the billion-dollar question: Is the dream of "agentic commerce" already dead on arrival? While the media celebrates OpenAI's early $100 million in ad revenue, the math tells a much darker story. Their projected 2026 burn rate sits between $14 and $25 billion. To survive, they need a massive, highly profitable ad network—but their recent retail experiments are failing the test.We break down why ChatGPT quietly killed off its new "Shopping Research" feature (hint: consumers won't wait minutes for an AI to fetch product recommendations). We also reveal the shocking data from Walmart's early checkout test within ChatGPT, where in-app conversions were three times lower than standard website traffic.If ChatGPT wants to steal budget from Google Ads and Meta, they have to prove they can actually drive profitable sales. Right now, the data suggests users simply aren't ready to let an AI agent do their shopping.Key Takeaways & SEO Insights:The Revenue Reality: Generating $100M in two months is impressive, but with Capital Expenditures (CapEx) skyrocketing to compete with Google and Microsoft, OpenAI's projected losses are staggering. Advertising is their most obvious path to close that gap.Speed vs. Quality in E-commerce: OpenAI shut down its specialized post-trained shopping model because generating deep product analyses took too long. In retail, friction kills adoption.The Conversion Crisis: Early tests with major retailers like Walmart showed that instant checkouts within ChatGPT converted at a rate 3x lower than traditional website traffic. If they can't drive efficiency, advertisers won't shift their budgets.The Scraping Band-Aid: OpenAI's reliance on scraping Google Shopping data for product recommendations shows they are still heavily dependent on their biggest competitor to power their agentic commerce dreams.Resources & Links:Access all our webinars, reports, and playbooks in our Knowledge Hub: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/knowledge-hub/How is your industry stacking up in the market? Find out with smec's Google Ads Benchmarks:https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/smec-market-observer/ About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Ever wonder what the biggest e-commerce brands are discussing behind closed doors? We are opening up the vault.

The Edmonton Oilers never trailed in this game and killed off a Vegas powerplay in overtime before Evan Bouchard scored his 20th goal of the season to earn the bonus point. Ryan Rishaug, Jason Strudwick & Rob Brown break it all down.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Is the "clash of the titans" coming for your profit margins, and is Google about to take away your website traffic? In this episode of Growing E-commerce, Mike Ryan and Chris Sharma tackle two massive, existential shifts threatening the traditional online retail playbook.First, we dive into the aggressive European expansion of Chinese e-commerce giants. While JD.com (Joybuy) and SHEIN are making aggressive moves, Temu is completely taking over. We break down the official monthly active user data, revealing that Temu now commands a 40% overall market share in Europe – including a staggering 71.1% market share in Poland and 44% in Germany. Are European retailers simply becoming collateral damage in this war of attrition?Then, we unpack a recently granted Google patent that sounds like a sci-fi nightmare for marketers. The patent outlines a system where Google evaluates your landing page, and if it doesn't meet their qualitative standards, they will generate an AI replacement landing page within the ad ecosystem. We discuss what this means for the loss of your tracking data, zero-click purchases, and the ultimate "PMax-ification" of Google Ads.

Sugar, how you get so fly?Sugar HillWesley Snipes is a drug dealer at the top of the heap. His brother rolls with him, and they run the neighborhood. But then those dirty Italians try to cause problems and it's all in jeopardy. Sounds like it's time to move and start over, but maybe that's not the path. What do I know, I clean toilets and wait for my kids to fall asleep so I can feel alive again.Is this good? Is this easily the best acting from Snipes this time around? Is Clarence Williams III cuban, b? Tune in!#wesleysnipes #sugarhill #clarencewilliams #podcast #filmography

More innocent people killed in Democrat sewers - have you had enough yet?! PLUS, Henry Olsen, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, discusses the recent Illinois election and how the Democrats have turned even further to the left, but not totally Progressive - yet. And William Supple Jr., PhD, author of the new book Cancer is a Parasite: Kill it with the Safe, Over-the-Counter Antiparasitic Fenbendazole, tells Shaun that there is a legitimate cure to cancer and thanks to the Think-For-Yourself medical movement more people are ditching barbaric cancer treatments and trying fenbendazole. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Best Ball Breakfast returns with 2 more entries in the Big Board contest and the first one in the Bigger Board on Underdog Fantasy. Pete had to learn about the fabled "QB Window" in these pre-NFL Draft contests in a big way. Join the Deposit Kingdom bracket challenge. Free to enter, $2500 in prizes.⁠☕ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Become a "Best Ball Value Hounds" Youtube member⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for access to weekly DFS After Dark shows & a private DFS Discord channel

Why did OpenAI quietly kill its shopping feature, and what does it mean for the future of Google Ads?

Hey, look, it's one of those high concept movies!Demolition ManSylvester Stallone gets framed by villain Wesley Snipes and gets frozen in ice jail for his crime. Wesley gets frozen, also! But? In that nice future where everyone he knows is dead, Stallone gets unfrozen, doesn't want to build a snowman, and has to fight and capture also unfrozen Snipes. Is this movie good? It does have Denis Leary in it, so maybe that's a plus for you. Sandra Bullock is real cute. That bag of trash Rob Schneider has a few scenes. Your mileage may vary on this one, but if you were a tween when it came out on video, you probably watched it 42 times.#sylvesterstallone #wesleysnipes #sandrabullock #denisleary #podcast #filmography

Episode #6: Bruce Collins interviews Eddie Snipes.The Bruce Collins Show is “A modern old-time variety show for people who like smart comedy and serious conversation.” FACEBOOK PAGE- https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063502484288TAMPA BAY OBSERVER- https://tampabayobserver.com/former-am-radio-host-revives-classic-broadcasting-format-on-youtube-after-family-caregiving-hiatus/The Insider Weekly- https://theinsiderweekly.com/former-am-radio-host-brings-old-time-broadcasting-back-to-youtube/

If you want to know how your peers are actually handling the grind, the Google Ads updates, and the "AI takeover," this episode is a must-watch. We recorded a special edition of Growing Ecommerce live from SMX Munich! Host Mike Ryan is joined by Wijnand Meijer (Co-founder & CEO at TrueClicks) and Frederick Vallaeys (CEO at Optmyzr) to dive deep into the freshly released Global State of PPC 2026 Report.This isn't just another PDF to gather dust in your downloads folder. Driven by the team at TrueClicks and supported by top industry partners, it's an unfiltered reality check for the entire paid search industry. With 1,300+ respondents spilling the tea across 60+ charts and 14,000 words, we unpack the hard insights on agency billing, Performance Max workarounds, and why AI isn't saving us as much time as the tech bros promised.The Complexity Struggle: 53% of practitioners say managing PPC is harder than it was two years ago.Agency Operations: Agencies managing over $1M/month are doing so with 20% fewer people. Yet, 1 in 5 agencies still charge by billable hours (with heavy geographical differences: only 4-12% in the US/AUS vs. 25% in Europe).The PMax Paradox: 48% complain about a lack of granular control, leading to workarounds like standard shopping hybrids (37%) and feed-only builds (17%). Despite this, 65% are satisfied with their PMax results.The AI Elephant in the Room: On average, professionals report saving only 5.2 hours a week using AI. Furthermore, 70% state that quality and accuracy (hallucinations) are their biggest AI hurdles.The Tool Stack: Surprisingly, 62% of respondents don't use paid third-party tools for analysis or optimization, relying entirely on native interfaces and spreadsheets.Resources & Links:Read the full, unfiltered report for free at: www.ppcsurvey.comA massive thank you to Wijnand Meijer and the TrueClicks team for driving this monumental effort.Shoutout to all the fellow partners for making this happen: DataFeedWatch by Cart.com, God Tier Ads, Hero Conf, Optmyzr, Producthero, SMX Advanced Europe, Swydo, TrueClicks, and Smarter E-commerce (smec).Learn more about Smarter E-commerce: smarter-ecommerce.comAbout Smarter Ecommerce (smec):Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

In this episode of Growing E-commerce, Mike Ryan and Chris from Smarter Ecommerce (smec) tackle the massive news that DSA's time on Earth is limited. With DSA going the way of the dinosaurs, Google is pushing advertisers toward AI Max for Search. But is it actually a worthy replacement?To find out, Mike breaks down the findings from his brand-new 18-page report, The Ultimate Guide to AI Max. After analyzing 1 year of data across more than 600 Google Ads search campaigns, the numbers tell a nuanced story about incrementality versus efficiency.We cover exactly what AI Max is, how it overlaps with PMax and Broad Match, and the real cost of those "incremental" conversions. If you are a heavy DSA user, this is the exact data you need to start planning your migration strategy!

The reception to our recent post on Code Reviews has been strong. Catch up!Amid a maelstrom of discussion on whether or not AI is killing SaaS, one of the top publicly listed SaaS companies in the world has just reported record revenues, clearing well over $1.1B in ARR for the first time with a 28% margin. As we comment on the pod, Aaron Levie is the rare public company CEO equally at home in both worlds of Silicon Valley and Wall Street/Main Street, by day helping 70% of the Fortune 500 with their Enterprise Advanced Suite, and yet by night is often found in the basements of early startups and tweeting viral insights about the future of agents.Now that both Cursor, Cloudflare, Perplexity, Anthropic and more have made Filesystems and Sandboxes and various forms of “Just Give the Agent a Box” cool (not just cool; it is now one of the single hottest areas in AI infrastructure growing 100% MoM), we find it a delightfully appropriate time to do the episode with the OG CEO who has been giving humans and computers Boxes since he was a college dropout pitching VCs at a Michael Arrington house party.Enjoy our special pod, with fan favorite returning guest/guest cohost Jeff Huber!Note: We didn't directly discuss the AI vs SaaS debate - Aaron has done many, many, many other podcasts on that, and you should read his definitive essay on it. Most commentators do not understand SaaS businesses because they have never scaled one themselves, and deeply reflected on what the true value proposition of SaaS is.We also discuss Your Company is a Filesystem:We also shoutout CTO Ben Kus' and the AI team, who talked about the technical architecture and will return for AIE WF 2026.Full Video EpisodeTimestamps* 00:00 Adapting Work for Agents* 01:29 Why Every Agent Needs a Box* 04:38 Agent Governance and Identity* 11:28 Why Coding Agents Took Off First* 21:42 Context Engineering and Search Limits* 31:29 Inside Agent Evals* 33:23 Industries and Datasets* 35:22 Building the Agent Team* 38:50 Read Write Agent Workflows* 41:54 Docs Graphs and Founder Mode* 55:38 Token FOMO Culture* 56:31 Production Function Secrets* 01:01:08 Film Roots to Box* 01:03:38 AI Future of Movies* 01:06:47 Media DevRel and EngineeringTranscriptAdapting Work for AgentsAaron Levie: Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and does it for you, and you may be at best review it. That's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work.We basically adapted to how the agent works. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution. Right now, it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this ‘cause you'll see compounding returns. But that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: Welcome to the Lane Space Pod. We're back in the chroma studio with uh, chroma, CEO, Jeff Hoover. Welcome returning guest now guest host.Aaron Levie: It's a pleasure. Wow. How'd you get upgraded to, uh, to that?swyx: Because he's like the perfect guy to be guest those for you.Aaron Levie: That makes sense actually, for We love context. We, we both really love context le we really do.We really do.swyx: Uh, and we're here with, uh, Aaron Levy. Welcome.Aaron Levie: Thank you. Good to, uh, good to be [00:01:00] here.swyx: Uh, yeah. So we've all met offline and like chatted a little bit, but like, it's always nice to get these things in person and conversation. Yeah. You just started off with so much energy. You're, you're super excited about agents.I loveAaron Levie: agents.swyx: Yeah. Open claw. Just got by, got bought by OpenAI. No, not bought, but you know, you know what I mean?Aaron Levie: Some, some, you know, acquihire. Executiveswyx: hire.Aaron Levie: Executive hire. Okay. Executive hire. Say,swyx: hey, that's my term. Okay. Um, what are you pounding the table on on agents? You have so many insightful tweets.Why Every Agent Needs a BoxAaron Levie: Well, the thing that, that we get super excited by that I think is probably, you know, should be relatively obvious is we've, we've built a platform to help enterprises manage their files and their, their corporate files and the permissions of who has access to those files and the sharing collaboration of those files.All of those files contain really, really important information for the enterprise. It might have your contracts, it might have your research materials, it might have marketing information, it might have your memos. All that data obviously has, you know, predominantly been used by humans. [00:02:00] But there's been one really interesting problem, which is that, you know, humans only really work with their files during an active engagement with them, and they kind of go away and you don't really see them for a long time.And all of a sudden, uh, with the power of AI and AI agents, all of that data becomes extremely relevant as this ongoing source of, of answers to new questions of data that will transform into, into something else that, that produces value in your organization. It, it contains the answer to the new employee that's onboarding, that needs to ramp up on a project.Um, it contains the answer to the right thing to sell a customer when you're having a conversation to them, with them contains the roadmap information that's gonna produce the next feature. So all that data. That previously we've been just sort of storing and, and you know, occasionally forgetting about, ‘cause we're only working on the new active stuff.All of that information becomes valuable to the enterprise and it's gonna become extremely valuable to end users because now they can have agents go find what they're looking for and produce new, new [00:03:00] value and new data on that information. And it's gonna become incredibly valuable to agents because agents can roam around and do a bunch of work and they're gonna need access to that data as well.And um, and you know, sometimes that will be an agent that is sort of working on behalf of, of, of you and, and effectively as you as and, and they are kind of accessing all of the same information that you have access to and, and operating as you in the system. And then sometimes there's gonna be agents that are just.Effectively autonomous and kind of run on their own and, and you're gonna collaborate and work with them kind of like you did another person. Open Claw being the most recent and maybe first real sort of, you know, kind of, you know, up updating everybody's, you know, views of this landscape version of, of what that could look like, which is, okay, I have an agent.It's on its own system, it's on its own computer, it has access to its own tools. I probably don't give it access to my entire life. I probably communicate with it like I would an assistant or a colleague and then it, it sort of has this sandbox environment. So all of that has massive implications for a platform that manage that [00:04:00] enterprise data.We think it's gonna just transform how we work with all of the enterprise content that we work with, and we just have to make sure we're building the right platform to support that.swyx: The sort of shorthand I put it is as people build agents, everybody's just realizing that every agent needs a box. Yes.And it's nice to be called box and just give everyone a box.Aaron Levie: Hey, I if I, you know, if we can make that go viral, uh, like I, I think that that terminology, I, that's theswyx: tagline. Every agentAaron Levie: needs a box. Every agent needs a box. If we can make that the headline of this, I'm fine with this. And that's the billboard I wanna like Yeah, exactly.Every agent needs a box. Um, I like it. Can we ship this? Like,swyx: okay, let's do it. Yeah.Aaron Levie: Uh, my work here is done and I got the value I needed outta this podcast Drinks.swyx: Yeah.Agent Governance and IdentityAaron Levie: But, but, um, but, but, you know, so the thing that we, we kind of think about is, um, is, you know, whether you think the number 10 x or a hundred x or whatever the number is, we're gonna have some order of magnitude more agents than people.That's inevitable. It has to happen. So then the question is, what is the infrastructure that's needed to make all those agents effective in the enterprise? Make sure that they are well governed. Make sure they're only doing [00:05:00] safe things on your information. Make sure that they're not getting exposed. The data that they shouldn't have access to.There's gonna be just incredibly spectacularly crazy security incidents that will happen with agents because you'll prompt, inject an agent and sort of find your way through the CRM system and pull out data that you shouldn't have access to. Oh, weJeff Huber: have God,Aaron Levie: right? I mean, that's just gonna happen all over the place, right?So, so then the thing is, is how do you make sure you have the right security, the permissions, the access controls, the data governance. Um, we actually don't yet exactly know in many cases how we're gonna regulate some of these agents, right? If you think about an agent in financial services, does it have the exact same financial sort of, uh, requirements that a human did?Or is it, is the risk fully on the human that was interacting or created the agent? All open questions, but no matter what, there's gonna need to be a layer that manages the, the data they have access to, the workflows that they're involved in, pulling up data from multiple systems. This is the new infrastructure opportunity in the era of agents.swyx: You have a piece on agent identities, [00:06:00] which I think was today, um, which I think a lot of breaking news, the security, security people are talking about, right? Like you basically, I, I always think of this as like, well you need the human you and then there you need the agent. YouAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: And uh, well, I don't know if it's that simple, but is box going to have an opinion on that or you're just gonna be like, well we're just the sort of the, the source layer.Yeah. Let's Okta of zero handle that.Aaron Levie: I think we're gonna have an opinion and we will work with generally wherever the contours of the market end up. Um, and the reason that we're gonna have an opinion more than other topics probably is because one of the biggest use cases for why your agent might need it, an identity is for file system access.So thus we have to kind of think about this pretty deeply. And I think, uh, unless you're like in our world thinking about this particular problem all day long, it might be, you know, like, why is this such a big deal? And the reason why it's a really big deal is because sometimes sort of say, well just give the agent an, an account on the system and it just treats, treat it like every other type of user on the system.The [00:07:00] problem is, is that I as Aaron don't really have any responsibility over anybody else's box account in our organization. I can't see the box account of any other employee that I work with. I am not liable for anything that they do. And they have, I have, I have, you know, strict privacy requirements on everything that they're able to, you know, that, that, that they work on.Agents don't have that, you know, don't have those properties. The person who creates the agent probably is gonna, for the foreseeable future, take on a lot of the liability of what that agent does. That agent doesn't deserve any privacy because, because it's, you know, it can't fully be autonomously operated and it doesn't have any legal, you know, kind of, you know, responsibility.So thus you can't just be like, oh, well I'll just create a bunch of accounts and then I'll, I'll kind of work with that agent and I'll talk to it occasionally. Like you need oversight of that. And so then the question is, how do you have a world where the agent, sometimes you have oversight of, but what if that agent goes and works with other people?That person over there is collaborating with the agent on something you shouldn't have [00:08:00] access to what they're doing. So we have all of these new boundaries that we're gonna have to figure out of, of, you know, it's really, really easy. So far we've been in, in easy mode. We've hit the easy button with ai, which is the agent just is you.And when you're in quad code and you're in cursor, and you're in Codex, you're just, the agent is you. You're offing into your services. It can do everything you can do. That's the easy mode. The hard mode is agents are kind of running on their own. People check in with them occasionally, they're doing things autonomously.How do you give them access to resources in the enterprise and not dramatically increased the security risk and the risk that you might expose the wrong thing to somebody. These are all the new problems that we have to get solved. I like the identity layer and, and identity vendors as being a solution to that, but we'll, we'll need some opinions as well because so many of the use cases are these collaborative file system use cases, which is how do I give it an agent, a subset of my data?Give it its own workspace as well. ‘cause it's gonna need to store off its own information that would be relevant for it. And how do I have the right oversight into that? [00:09:00]Jeff Huber: One thing, which, um, I think is kind interesting, think about is that you know, how humans work, right? Like I may not also just like give you access to the whole file.I might like sit next to you and like scroll to this like one part of the file and just show you that like one part and like, you know,swyx: partial file access.Jeff Huber: I'm just saying I think like our, like RA does seem to be dead, right? Like you wanna say something is dead uhhuh probably RA is dead. And uh, like the auth story to me seems like incredibly unsolved and unaddressed by like the existing state of like AI vendors.ButAaron Levie: yeah, I think, um, we're, I mean you're taking obviously really to level limit that we probably need to solve for. Yeah. And we built an access control system that was, was kind of like, you know, its own little world for, for a long time. And um, and the idea was this, it's a many to many collaboration system where I can give you any part of the file system.And it's a waterfall model. So if I give you higher up in the, in the, in the system, you get everything below. And that, that kind of created immense flexibility because I can kind of point you to any layer in the, in the tree, but then you're gonna get access to everything kind of below it. And that [00:10:00] mostly is, is working in this, in this world.But you do have to manage this issue, which is how do I create an agent that has access to some of my stuff and somebody else's stuff as well. Mm-hmm. And which parts do I get to look at as the creator of the agent? And, and these are just brand new problems? Yeah. Crazy. And humans, when there was a human there that was really easy to do.Like, like if the three of us were all sharing, there'd be a Venn diagram where we'd have an overlapping set of things we've shared, but then we'd have our own ways that we shared with each other. In an agent world, somebody needs to take responsibility for what that agent has access to and what they're working on.These are like the, some of the most probably, you know, boring problems for 98% of people on, on the internet, but they will be the problems that are the difference between can you actually have autonomous agents in an enterprise contextswyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: That are not leaking your data constantly.swyx: No. Like, I mean, you know, I run a very, very small company for my conference and like we already have data sensitivity issues.Yes. And some of my team members cannot see Yes. Uh, the others and like, I can't imagine what it's like to run a Fortune 500 and like, you have to [00:11:00] worry about this. I'm just kinda curious, like you, you talked to a lot like, like 70, 80% of your cus uh, of the Fortune 500, your customers.Aaron Levie: Yep. 67%. Just so we're being verySEswyx: precise.So Yeah. I'm notAaron Levie: Okay. Okay.swyx: Something I'm rounding up. Yes. Round up. I'm projecting to, forAaron Levie: the government.swyx: I'm projecting to the end of the year.Aaron Levie: Okay.swyx: There you go.Aaron Levie: You do make it sound like, like we, we, well we've gotta be on this. Like we're, we're taking way too long to get to 80%. Well,swyx: no, I mean, so like. How are they approaching it?Right? Because you're, you don't have a, you don't have a final answer yet.Why Coding Agents Took Off FirstAaron Levie: Well, okay, so, so this is actually, this is the stark reality that like, unfortunately is the kinda like pouring the water on the party a little bit.swyx: Yes.Aaron Levie: We all in Silicon Valley are like, have the absolute best conditions possible for AI ever.And I think we all saw the dke, you know, kind of Dario podcast and this idea of AI coding. Why is that taken off? And, and we're not yet fully seeing it everywhere else. Well, look, if you just like enumerated the list of properties that AI coding has and then compared it to other [00:12:00] knowledge work, let's just, let's just go through a few of them.Generally speaking, you bring on a new engineer, they have access to a large swath of the code base. Like, there's like very, like you, just, like new engineer comes on, they can just go and find the, the, the stuff that they, they need to work with. It's a fully text in text out. Medium. It's only, it's just gonna be text at the end of the day.So it's like really great from a, from just a, uh, you know, kinda what the agent can work with. Obviously the models are super trained on that dataset. The labs themselves have a really strong, kind of self-reinforcing positive flywheel of why they need to do, you know, agent coding deeply. So then you get just better tooling, better services.The actual developers of the AI are daily users of the, of the thing that they're we're working on versus like the, you know, probably there's only like seven Claude Cowork legal plugin users at Anthropic any given day, but there's like a couple thousand Claude code and you know, users every single day.So just like, think about which one are they getting more feedback on. All day long. So you just go through this list. You have a, you know, everybody who's a [00:13:00] developer by definition is technical so they can go install the latest thing. We're all generally online, or at least, you know, kinda the weird ones are, and we're all talking to each other, sharing best practices, like that's like already eight differences.Versus the rest of the economy. Every other part of the economy has like, like six to seven headwinds relative to that list. You go into a company, you're a banker in financial services, you have access to like a, a tiny little subset of the total data that's gonna be relevant to do your job. And you're have to start to go and talk to a bunch of people to get the right data to do your job because Sally didn't add you to that deal room, you know, folder.And that that, you know, the information is actually in a completely different organization that you now have to go in and, and sort of run into. And it's like you have this endless list of access controls and security. As, as you talked about, you have a medium, which is not, it's not just text, right? You have, you have a zoom call that, that you're getting all of the requirements from the customer.You have a lot of in-person conversations and you're doing in-person sales and like how do you ever [00:14:00] digitize all of that information? Um, you know, I think a lot of people got upset with this idea that the code base has all the context, um, that I don't know if you follow, you know, did you follow some of that conversation that that went viral?Is like, you know, it's not that simple that, that the code base doesn't have all the knowledge, but like it's a lot, you're a lot better off than you are with other areas of knowledge work. Like you, we like, we like have documentation practices, you write specifications. Those things don't exist for like 80% of work that happens in the enterprise.That's the divide that we have, which is, which is AI coding has, has just fully, you know, where we've reached escape velocity of how powerful this stuff is, and then we're gonna have to find a way to bring that same energy and momentum, but to all these other areas of knowledge work. Where the tools aren't there, the data's not set up to be there.The access controls don't make it that easy. The context engineering is an incredibly hard problem because again, you have access control challenges, you have different data formats. You have end users that are gonna need to kind of be kind of trained through this as opposed to their adopting [00:15:00] these tools in their free time.That's where the Fortune 500 is. And so we, I think, you know, have to be prepared as an industry where we are gonna be on a multi-year march to, to be able to bring agents to the enterprise for these workflows. And I think probably the, the thing that we've learned most in coding that, that the rest of the world is not yet, I think ready for, I mean, we're, they'll, they'll have to be ready for it because it's just gonna inevitably happen is I think in coding.What, what's interesting is if you think about the practice of coding today versus two years ago. It's probably the most changed workflow in maybe the history of time from the amount of time it's changed, right? Yeah. Like, like has any, has any workflow in the entire economy changed that quickly in terms of the amount of change?I just, you know, at least in any knowledge worker workflow, there's like very rarely been an event where one piece of technology and work practice has so fundamentally, you know, changed, changed what you do. Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and [00:16:00] does it for you, and you may be at best review it.And even that's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work. We basically adapted to how the agent works. Mm-hmm. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution.The rest of the economy is gonna have to update its workflows to make agents effective. And to give agents the context that they need and to actually figure out what kind of prompting works and to figure out how do you ensure that the agent has the right access to information to be able to execute on its work.I, you know, this is not the panacea that people were hoping for, of the agent drops in, just automates your life. Like you have to basically re-engineer your workflow to get the most out of agents and, uh, and that, that's just gonna take, you know, multiple years across the economy. Right now it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this.‘cause [00:17:00] you'll see compounding returns, but that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: I love, I love pushing back. I think that. That is what a lot of technology consultants love to hear this sort of thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. First to, to embrace the ai. Yes. To get to the promised land, you must pay me so much money to a hundred percent to adopt the prescribed way of, uh, conforming to the agents.Yes. And I worry that you will be eclipsed by someone else who says, no, come as you are.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And we'll meet you where you are.Aaron Levie: And, and, and and what was the thing that went viral a week ago? OpenAI probably, uh, is hiring F Dees. Yeah. Uh, to go into the enterprise. Yeah. Yeah. And then philanthropic is embedded at Goldman Sachs.Yeah. So if the labs are having to do this, if, if the labs have decided that they need to hire FDE and professional services, then I think that's a pretty clear indication that this, there's no easy mode of workflow transformation. Yeah. Yeah. So, so to your point, I think actually this is a market opportunity for, you know, new professional services and consulting [00:18:00] firms that are like Agent Build and they, and they kind of, you know, go into organizations and they figure out how to re-engineer your workflows to make them more agent ready and get your data into the right format and, you know, reconstruct your business process.So you're, you're not doing most of the work. You're telling agents how to do the work and then you're reviewing it. But I haven't seen the thing that can just drop in and, and kinda let you not go through those changes.swyx: I don't know how that kind of sales pitch goes over. Yeah. You know, you're, you're saying things like, well, in my sort of nice beautiful walled garden, here's, there's, uh, because here's this, here's this beautiful box account that has everything.Yes. And I'm like, well, most, most real life is extremely messy. Sure. And like, poorly named and there duplicate this outdated s**tAaron Levie: a hundred percent. And so No, no, a hundred percent. And so this is actually No. So, so this is, I mean, we agree that, that getting to the beautiful garden is gonna be tough.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: There's also the other end of the spectrum where I, I just like, it's a technical impossibility to solve. The agent is, is truly cannot get enough context to make the right decision in, in the, in the incredibly messy land. Like there's [00:19:00] no a GI that will solve that. So, so we're gonna have to kind of land in somewhere in between, which is like we all collectively get better at.Documentation practices and, and having authoritative relatively up-to-date information and putting it in the right place like agents will, will certainly cause us to be much better organized around how we work with our information, simply because the severity of the agent pulling the wrong data will be too high and the productivity gain of that you'll miss out on by not doing this will be too high as well, that you, that your competition will just do it and they'll just have higher velocity.So, uh, and, and we, we see this a lot firsthand. So we, we build a series of agents internally that they can kind of have access to your full box account and go off and you give it a task and it can go find whatever information you're looking for and work with. And, you know, thank God for the model progress, but like, if, if you gave that task to an agent.Nine months ago, you're just gonna get lots of bogus answers because it's gonna, it's gonna say, Hey, here's, here are fi [00:20:00] five, you know, documents that all kind of smell like the right thing. And I'm gonna, but I, but you're, you're putting me on the clock. ‘cause my assistant prompt says like, you know, be pretty smart, but also try and respond to the user and it's gonna respond.And it's like, ah, it got the wrong document. And then you do that once or twice as a knowledge worker and you're just neverswyx: again,Aaron Levie: never again. You're just like done with the system.swyx: Yeah. It doesn't work.Aaron Levie: It doesn't work. And so, you know, Opus four six and Gemini three one Pro and you know, whatever the latest five 3G BT will be, like, those things are getting better and better and it's using better judgment.And this sort of like the, all of these updates to the agentic tool and search systems are, are, we're seeing, we're seeing very real progress where the agent. Kind of can, can almost smell some things a little bit fishy when it's getting, you know, we, we have this process where we, we have it go fan out, do a bunch of searches, pull up a bunch of data, and then it has to sort of do its own ranking of, you know, what are the right documents that, that it should be working with.And again, like, you know, the intelligence level of a model six months ago, [00:21:00] it'd be just throwing a dart at like, I'm just, I'm gonna grab these seven files and I, I pray, I hope that that's the right answer. And something like an opus first four five, and now four six is like, oh, it's like, no, that one doesn't seem right relative to this question because I'm seeing some signal that is making that, you know, that's contradicting the document where it would normally be in the tree and who should have access.Like it's doing all of that kind of work for you. But like, it still doesn't work if you just have a total wasteland of data. Like, it's just not, it's just not possible. Partly ‘cause a human wouldn't even be able to do it. So basically if a, if a really, really smart human. Could not do that task in five or 10 minutes for a search retrieval type task.Look, you know, your agent's not gonna be able to do it any better. You see this all day long. SoContext Engineering and Search Limitsswyx: this touches on a thing that just passionate about it was just context engineering. I, I'm just gonna let you ramble or riff on, on context engineering. If, if, if there's anything like he, he did really good work on context fraud, which has really taken over as like the term that people use and the referenceAaron Levie: a hundred percent.We, we all we think about is, is the context rob problem. [00:22:00]Jeff Huber: Yeah, there's certainly a lot of like ranking considerations. Gentech surgery think is incredibly promising. Um, yeah, I was trying to generate a question though. I think I have a question right now. Swyx.Aaron Levie: Yeah, no, but like, like I think there was this moment, um, you know, like, I don't know, two years ago before, before we knew like where the, the gotchas were gonna be in ai and I think someone was like, was like, well, infinite context windows will just solve all of these problems and ‘cause you'll just, you'll just give the context window like all the data and.It's just like, okay, I mean, maybe in 2035, like this is a viable solution. First of all, it, it would just, it would just simply cost too much. Like we just can't give the model like the 5,000 documents that might be relevant and it's gonna read them all. And I've seen enough to, to start believing in crazy stuff.So like, I'm willing to just say, sure. Like in, in 10 years from now,swyx: never say, never, never.Aaron Levie: In, in 10 years from now, we'll have infinite context windows at, at a thousandth of the price of today. Like, let's just like believe that that's possible, but Right. We're in reality today. So today we have a context engineering [00:23:00] problem, which is, I got, I got, you know, 200,000 tokens that I can work with, or prob, I don't even know what the latest graph is before, like massive degradation.16. Okay. I have 60,000 tokens that I get to work with where I'm gonna get accurate information. That's not a lot of tokens for a corpus of 10 million documents that a knowledge worker might have across all of the teams and all the projects and all the people they work with. I have, I have 10 million documents.Which, you know, maybe is times five pages per document or something like that. I'm at 50 million pages of information and I have 60,000 tokens. Like, holy s**t. Yeah. This is like, how do I bridge the 50 million pages of information with, you know, the couple hundred that I get to work with in that, in that token window.Yeah. This is like, this is like such an interesting problem and that's why actually so much work is actually like, just like search systems and the databases and that layer has to just get so locked in, but models getting better and importantly [00:24:00] knowing when they've done a search, they found the wrong thing, they go back, they check their work, they, they find a way to balance sort of appeasing the user versus double checking.We have this one, we have this one test case where we ask the agent to go find. 10 pieces of information.swyx: Is this the complex work eval?Aaron Levie: Uh, this is actually not in the eval. This is, this is sort of just like we have a bunch of different, we have a bunch of internal benchmark kind of scenarios. Every time we, we update our agent, we have one, which is, I ask it to find all of our office addresses, and I give it the list of 10 offices that we have.And there's not one document that has this, maybe there should be, that would be a great example of the kind of thing that like maybe over time companies start to, you know, have these sort of like, what are the canonical, you know, kind of key areas of knowledge that we need to have. We don't seem to have this one document that says, here are all of our offices.We have a bunch of documents that have like, here's the New York office and whatever. So you task this agent and you, you get, you say, I need the addresses for these 10 offices. Okay. And by the way, if you do this on any, you know, [00:25:00] public chat model, the same outcome is gonna happen. But for a different kind of query, you give it, you say, I need these 10 addresses.How many times should the agent go and do its search before it decides whether or not, there's just no answer to this question. Often, and especially the, the, let's say lower tier models, it'll come back and it'll give you six of the 10 addresses. And it'll, and I'll just say I couldn't find the otherswyx: four.It, it doesn't know what It doesn't know. ItAaron Levie: doesn't know what It doesn't know. Yeah. So the model is just like, like when should it stop? When should it stop doing? Like should it, should it do that task for literally an hour and just keep cranking through? Maybe I actually made up an office location and it doesn't know that I made it up and I didn't even know that I made it up.Like, should it just keep, re should it read every single file in your entire box account until it, until it should exhaust every single piece of information.swyx: Expensive.Aaron Levie: These are the new problems that we have. So, you know, something like, let's say a new opus model is sort of like, okay, I'm gonna try these types of queries.I didn't get exactly what I wanted. I'm gonna try again. I'm gonna, at [00:26:00] some point I'm gonna stop searching. ‘cause I've determined that that no amount of searching is gonna solve this problem. I'm just not able to do it. And that judgment is like a really new thing that the model needs to be able to have.It's like, when should it give up on a task? ‘cause, ‘cause you just don't, it's a can't find the thing. That's the real world of knowledge, work problems. And this is the stuff that the coding agents don't have to deal with. Because they, it just doesn't like, like you're not usually asking it about, you're, you're always creating net new information coming right outta the model for the most part.Obviously it has to know about your code base and your specs and your documentation, but, but when you deploy an agent on all of your data that now you have all of these new problems that you're dealing withJeff Huber: our, uh, follow follow-up research to context ride is actually on a genetic search. Ah. Um, and we've like right, sort of stress tested like frontier models and their ability to search.Um, and they're not actually that good at searching. Right. Uh, so you're sort of highlighting this like explore, exploit.swyx: You're just say, Debbie, Donna say everything doesn't work. Like,Aaron Levie: well,Jeff Huber: somebody has to be,Aaron Levie: um, can I just throw out one more thing? Yeah. That is different from coding and, and the rest [00:27:00] of the knowledge work that I, I failed to mention.So one other kind of key point is, is that, you know, at the end of the day. Whether you believe we're in a slop apocalypse or, or whatever. At the end of the day, if you, if you build a working product at the end of, if you, if you've built a working solution that is ultimately what the customer is paying for, like whether I have a lot of slop, a little slop or whatever, I'm sure there's lots of code bases we could go into in enterprise software companies where it's like just crazy slop that humans did over a 20 year period, but the end customer just gets this little interface.They can, they can type into it, it does its thing. Knowledge work, uh, doesn't have that property. If I have an AI model, go generate a contract and I generate a contract 20 times and, you know, all 20 times it's just 3% different and like that I, that, that kind of lop introduces all new kinds of risk for my organization that the code version of that LOP didn't, didn't introduce.These are, and so like, so how do you constrain these models to just the part that you want [00:28:00] them to work on and just do the thing that you want them to do? And, and, you know, in engineering, we don't, you can't be disbarred as an engineer, but you could be disbarred as a lawyer. Like you can do the wrong medical thing In healthcare, you, there's no, there's no equivalent to that of engineering.Like, doswyx: you want there to be, because I've considered softwareJeff Huber: engineer. What's that? Civil engineering there is, right? NotAaron Levie: software civil engineer. Sure. Oh yeah, for sure. But like in any of our companies, you like, you know, you'll be forgiven if you took down the site and, and we, we will do a rollback and you'll, you'll be in a meeting, but you have not been disbarred as an engineer.We don't, we don't change your, you know, your computer science, uh, blameJeff Huber: degree, this postmortem.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, so, uh, now maybe we collectively as an industry need to figure out like, what are you liable for? Not legally, but like in a, in a management sense, uh, of these agents. All sorts of interesting problems that, that, that, uh, that have to come out.But in knowledge work, that's the real hostile environments that we're operating in. Hmm.swyx: I do think like, uh, a lot of the last year's, 2025 story was the rise of coding agents and I think [00:29:00] 2026 story is definitely knowledge work agents. Yes. A hundredAaron Levie: percent.swyx: Right. Like that would, and I think open claw core work are just the beginning.Yes. Like it's, the next one's gonna just gonna be absolute craziness.Aaron Levie: It it is. And, and, uh, and it's gonna be, I mean, again, like this is gonna be this, this wave where we, we are gonna try and bring as many of the practices from coding because that, that will clearly be the forefront, which is tell an agent to go do something and has an access to a set of resources.You need to be responsible for reviewing it at the end of the process. That to me is the, is the kind of template that I just think goes across knowledge, work and odd. Cowork is a great example. Open Closet's a great example. You can kind of, sort of see what Codex could become over time. These are some, some really interesting kind of platforms that are emerging.swyx: Okay. Um, I wanted to, we touched on evals a little bit. You had, you had the report that you're gonna go bring up and then I was gonna go into like, uh, boxes, evals, but uh, go ahead. Talk about your genetic search thing.Jeff Huber: Yeah. Mostly I think kinda a few of the insights. It's like number one frontier model is not good at search.Humans have this [00:30:00] natural explore, exploit trade off where we kinda understand like when to stop doing something. Also, humans are pretty good at like forgetting actually, and like pruning their own context, whereas agents are not, and actually an agent in their kind of context history, if they knew something was bad and they even, you could see in the trace the reason you trace, Hey, that probably wasn't a good idea.If it's still in the trace, still in the context, they'll still do it again. Uhhuh. Uh, and so like, I think pruning is also gonna be like, really, it's already becoming a thing, right? But like, letting self prune the con windowsswyx: be a big deal. Yeah. So, so don't leave the mistake. Don't leave the mistake in there.Cut out the mistake but tell it that you made a mistake in the past and so it doesn't repeat it.Jeff Huber: Yeah. But like cut it out so it doesn't get like distracted by it again. ‘cause really, you know, what is so, so it will repeat its mistake just because it's been, it's inswyx: theJeff Huber: context. It'sAaron Levie: in the context so much.That's a few shot example. Even if it, yeah.Jeff Huber: It's like oh thisAaron Levie: is a great thing to go try even ifJeff Huber: it didn't work.Aaron Levie: Yeah,Jeff Huber: exactly.Aaron Levie: SoJeff Huber: there's like a bunch of stuff there. JustAaron Levie: Groundhogs Day inside these models. Yeah. I'm gonna go keep doing the same wrongJeff Huber: thing. Covering sense. I feel like, you know, some creator analogy you're trying like fit a manifold in latent space, which kind is doing break program synthesis, which is kinda one we think about we're doing right.Like, you know, certain [00:31:00] facts might be like sort of overly pitting it. There are certain, you know, sec sectors of latent space and so like plug clean space. Yeah. And, uh, andswyx: so we have a bell, our editor as a bell every time you say that. SoJeff Huber: you have, you have to like remove those, likeswyx: you shoulda a gong like TPN or something.IfJeff Huber: we gong, you either remove those links to like kinda give it the freedom, kind of do what you need to do. So, but yeah. We'll, we'll release more soon. That'sAaron Levie: awesome.Jeff Huber: That'll, that'll be cool.swyx: We're a cerebral podcast that people listen to us and, and sort of think really deep. So yeah, we try to keep it subtle.Okay. We try to keep it.Aaron Levie: Okay, fine.Inside Agent Evalsswyx: Um, you, you guys do, you guys do have EVs, you talked about your, your office thing, but, uh, you've been also promoting APEX agents and complex work. Uh, yeah, whatever you, wherever you wanna take this just Yeah. How youAaron Levie: Apex is, is obviously me, core's, uh, uh, kind of, um, agent eval.We, we supported that by sort of. Opening up some data for them around how we kind of see these, um, data workspaces in, in the, you know, kind of regular economy. So how do lawyers have a workspace? How do investment bankers have a workspace? What kind of data goes into those? And so we, [00:32:00] we partner with them on their, their apex eval.Our own, um, eval is, it's actually relatively straightforward. We have a, a set of, of documents in a, in a range of industries. We give the agent previously did this as a one shot test of just purely the model. And then we just realized we, we need to, based on where everything's going, it's just gotta be more agentic.So now it's a bit more of a test of both our harness and the model. And we have a rubric of a set of things that has to get right and we score it. Um, and you're just seeing, you know, these incredible jumps in almost every single model in its own family of, you know, opus four, um, you know, sonnet four six versus sonnet four five.swyx: Yeah. We have this up on screen.Aaron Levie: Okay, cool. So some, you're seeing it somewhere like. I, I forget the to, it was like 15 point jump, I think on the main, on the overall,swyx: yes.Aaron Levie: And it's just like, you know, these incredible leaps that, that are starting to happen. Um,swyx: and OP doesn't know any, like any, it's completely held out from op.Aaron Levie: This is not in any, there's no public data which has, you know, Ben benefits and this is just a private eval that we [00:33:00] do, and then we just happen to show it to, to the world. Hmm. So you can't, you can't train against it. And I think it's just as representative of. It's obviously reasoning capabilities, what it's doing at, at, you know, kind of test time, compute capabilities, thinking levels, all like the context rot issues.So many interesting, you know, kind of, uh, uh, capabilities that are, that are now improvingswyx: one sector that you have. That's interesting.Industries and Datasetsswyx: Uh, people are roughly familiar with healthcare and legal, but you have public sector in there.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Uh, what's that? Like, what, what, what is that?Aaron Levie: Yeah, and, and we actually test against, I dunno, maybe 10 industries.We, we end up usually just cutting a few that we think have interesting gains. All extras, won a lot of like government type documents. Um,swyx: what is that? What is it? Government type documents?Aaron Levie: Government filings. Like a taxswyx: return, likeAaron Levie: a probably not tax returns. It would be more of what would go the government be using, uh, as data.So, okay. Um, so think about research that, that type of, of, of data sets. And then we have financial services for things like data rooms and what would be in an investment prospectus. Uhhuh,swyx: that one you can dog food.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. [00:34:00] So, uh, so we, we run the models, um, in now, you know, more of an agent mode, but, but still with, with kinda limited capacity and just try and see like on a, like, for like basis, what are the improvements?And, and again, we just continue to be blown away by. How, how good these models are getting.swyx: Yeah, I mean, I think every serious AI company needs something like that where like, well, this is the work we do. Here's our company eval. Yeah. And if you don't have it, well, you're not a serious AI company.Aaron Levie: There's two dimensions, right?So there's, there's like, how are the models improving? And so which models should you either recommend a customer use, which one should you adopt? But then every single day, we're making changes to our agents. And you need to knowswyx: if you regressed,Aaron Levie: if you know. Yeah. You know, I've been fully convinced that the whole agent observability and eval space is gonna be a massive space.Um, super excited for what Braintrust is doing, excited for, you know, Lang Smith, all the things. And I think what you're going to, I mean, this is like every enter like literally every enterprise right now. It's like the AI companies are the customers of these tools. Every enterprise will have this. Yeah, you'll just [00:35:00] have to have an eval.Of all of your work and like, we'll, you'll have an eval of your RFP generation, you'll have an eval of your sales material creation. You'll have an eval of your, uh, invoice processing. And, and as you, you know, buy or use new agentic systems, you are gonna need to know like, what's the quality of your, of your pipeline.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: Um, so huge, huge market with agent evals.swyx: Yeah.Building the Agent Teamswyx: And, and you know, I'm gonna shout out your, your team a bit, uh, your CTO, Ben, uh, did a great talk with us last year. Awesome. And he's gonna come back again. Oh, cool. For World's Fair.Aaron Levie: Yep.swyx: Just talk about your team, like brag a little bit. I think I, I think people take these eval numbers in pretty charts for granted, but No, there, I mean, there's, there's lots of really smart people at work during all this.Aaron Levie: Biggest shout out, uh, is we have a, we have a couple folks at Dya, uh, Sidarth, uh, that, that kind of run this. They're like a, you know, kind of tag tag team duo on our evals, Ben, our CTO, heavily involved Yasha, head of ai, uh, you know, a bunch of folks. And, um, evals is one part of the story. And then just like the full, you know, kind of AI.An agent team [00:36:00] is, uh, is a, is a pretty, you know, is core to this whole effort. So there's probably, I don't know, like maybe a few dozen people that are like the epicenter. And then you just have like layers and layers of, of kind of concentric circles of okay, then there's a search team that supports them and an infrastructure team that supports them.And it's starting to ripple through the entire company. But there's that kind of core agent team, um, that's a pretty, pretty close, uh, close knit group.swyx: The search team is separate from the infra team.Aaron Levie: I mean, we have like every, every layer of the stack we have to kind of do, except for just pure public cloud.Um, but um, you know, we, we store, I don't even know what our public numbers are in, you know, but like, you can just think about it as like a lot of data is, is stored in box. And so we have, and you have every layer of the, of the stack of, you know, how do you manage the data, the file system, the metadata system, the search system, just all of those components.And then they all are having to understand that now you've got this new customer. Which is the agent, and they've been building for two types of customers in the past. They've been building for users and they've been building for like applications. [00:37:00] And now you've got this new agent user, and it comes in with a difference of it, of property sometimes, like, hey, maybe sometimes we should do embeddings, an embedding based, you know, kind of search versus, you know, your, your typical semantic search.Like, it's just like you have to build the, the capabilities to support all of this. And we're testing stuff, throwing things away, something doesn't work and, and not relevant. It's like just, you know, total chaos. But all of those teams are supporting the agent team that is kind of coming up with its requirements of what, what do we need?swyx: Yeah. No, uh, we just came from, uh, fireside chat where you did, and you, you talked about how you're doing this. It's, it's kind of like an internal startup. Yeah. Within the broader company. The broader company's like 3000 people. Yeah. But you know, there's, there's a, this is a core team of like, well, here's the innovation center.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And like that every company kind of is run this way.Aaron Levie: Yeah. I wanna be sensitive. I don't call it the innovation center. Yeah. Only because I think everybody has to do innovation. Um, there, there's a part of the, the, the company that is, is sort of do or die for the agent wave.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And it only happens to be more of my focus simply because it's existential that [00:38:00] we get it right.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: All of the supporting systems are necessary. All of the surrounding adjacent capabilities are necessary. Like the only reason we get to be a platform where you'd run an agent is because we have a security feature or a compliance feature, or a governance feature that, that some team is working on.But that's not gonna be the make or break of, of whether we get agents right. Like that already exists and we need to keep innovating there. I don't know what the right, exact precise number is, but it's not a thousand people and it's not 10 people. There's a number of people that are like the, the kind of like, you know, startup within the company that are the make or break on everything related to AI agents, you know, leveraging our platform and letting you work with your data.And that's where I spend a lot of my time, and Ben and Yosh and Diego and Teri, you know, these are just, you know, people that, that, you know, kind of across the team. Are working.swyx: Yeah. Amazing.Read Write Agent WorkflowsJeff Huber: How do you, how do you think about, I mean, you talked a lot about like kinda read workflows over your box data. Yep.Right. You know, gen search questions, queries, et cetera. But like, what about like, write or like authoring workflows?Aaron Levie: Yes. I've [00:39:00] already probably revealed too much actually now that I think about it. So, um, I've talked about whatever,Jeff Huber: whatever you can.Aaron Levie: Okay. It's just us. It's just us. Yeah. Okay. Of course, of course.So I, I guess I would just, uh, I'll make it a little bit conceptual, uh, because again, I've already, I've already said things that are not even ga but, but we've, we've kinda like danced around it publicly, so I, yeah, yeah. Okay. Just like, hopefully nobody watches this, um, episode. No.swyx: It's tidbits for the Heidi engaged to go figure out like what exactly, um, you know, is, is your sort of line of thinking.Sure. They can connect the dots.Aaron Levie: Yeah. So, so I would say that, that, uh, we, you know, as a, as a place where you have your enterprise content, there's a use case where I want to, you know, have an agent read that data and answer questions for me. And then there's a use case where I want the agent to create something.And use the file system to create something or store off data that it's working on, or be able to have, you know, various files that it's writing to about the work it's doing. So we do see it as a total read write. The harder problem has so far been the read only because, because again, you have that kind of like 10 [00:40:00] million to one ratio problem, whereas rights are a lot of, that's just gonna come from the model and, and we just like, we'll just put it in the file system and kinda use it.So it's a little bit of a technically easier problem, but the only part that's like, not necessarily technically hard, it is just like it's not yet perfected in the state of the ecosystem is, you know, building a beautiful PowerPoint presentation. It's still a hard problem for these models. Like, like we still, you know, like, like these formats are just, we're not built for.They'reswyx: working on it.Aaron Levie: They're, they're working on it. Everybody's working on it.swyx: Every launch is like, well, we do PowerPoint now.Aaron Levie: We're getting, yeah, getting a lot, getting a lot of better each time. But then you'll do this thing where you'll ask the update one slide and all of a sudden, like the fonts will be just like a little bit different, you know, on two of the slides, or it moved, you know, some shape over to the left a little bit.And again, these are the kind of things that, like in code, obviously you could really care about if you really care about, you know, how beautiful is the code, but at the end, user doesn't notice all those problems and file creation, the end user instantly sees it. You're [00:41:00] like, ah, like paragraph three, like, you literally just changed the font on me.Like it's a totally different font and like midway through the document. Mm-hmm. Those are the kind of things that you run into a lot of in the, in the content creation side. So, mm-hmm. We are gonna have native agents. That do all of those things, they'll be powered by the leading kind of models and labs.But the thing that I think is, is probably gonna be a much bigger idea over time is any agent on any system, again, using Box as a file system for its work, and in that kind of scenario, we don't necessarily care what it's putting in the file system. It could put its memory files, it could put its, you know, specification, you know, documents.It could put, you know, whatever its markdown files are, or it could, you know, generate PDFs. It's just like, it's a workspace that is, is sort of sandboxed off for its work. People can collaborate into it, it can share with other people. And, and so we, we were thinking a lot about what's the right, you know, kind of way to, to deliver that at scale.Docs Graphs and Founder Modeswyx: I wanted to come into sort of the sort of AI transformation or AI sort of, uh, operations things. [00:42:00] Um, one of the tweets that you, that you wanted to talk about, this is just me going through your tweets, by the way. Oh, okay. I mean, like, this is, you readAaron Levie: one by one,swyx: you're the, you're the easiest guest to prep for because you, you already have like, this is the, this is what I'm interested in.I'm like, okay, well, areAaron Levie: we gonna get to like, like February, January or something? Where are we in the, in the timelines? How far back are we going?swyx: Can you, can you describe boxes? A set of skills? Right? Like that, that's like, that's like one of the extremes of like, well if you, you just turn everything into a markdown file.Yeah. Then your agent can run your company. Uh, like you just have to write, find the right sequence of words toAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: To do it.Aaron Levie: Sorry, isthatswyx: the question? So I think the question is like, what if we documented everything? Yes. The way that you exactly said like,Aaron Levie: yes.swyx: Um, let's get all the Fortune five hundreds, uh, prepared for agents.Yes. And like, you know, everything's in golden and, and nicely filed away and everything. Yes. What's missing? Like, what's left, right? LikeAaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: You've, you've run your company for a decade. LikeAaron Levie: Yeah. I think the challenge is that, that that information changes a week later. And because something happened in the market for that [00:43:00] customer, or us as a company that now has to go get updated, and so these systems are living and breathing and they have to experience reality and updates to reality, which right now is probably gonna be humans, you know, kinda giving those, giving them the updates.And, you know, there is this piece about context graphs as as, uh, that kinda went very viral. Yeah. And I, I, I was like a, i, I, I thought it was super provocative. I agreed with many parts of it. I disagree with a few parts around. You know, it's not gonna be as easy as as just if we just had the agent traces, then we can finally do that work because there's just like, there's so much more other stuff that that's happening that, that we haven't been able to capture and digitize.And I think they actually represented that in the piece to be clear. But like there's just a lot of work, you know, that that has to, you just can't have only skills files, you know, for your company because it's just gonna be like, there's gonna be a lot of other stuff that happens. Yeah. Change over time.Yeah. Most companies are practically apprenticeships.swyx: Most companies are practically apprenticeships. LikeJeff Huber: every new employee who joins the team, [00:44:00] like you span one to three months. Like ramping them up.Aaron Levie: Yes. AllJeff Huber: that tat knowledgeAaron Levie: isJeff Huber: not written down.Aaron Levie: Yes.Jeff Huber: But like, it would have to be if you wanted to like give it to an Asian.Right. And so like that seems to me like to beAaron Levie: one is I think you're gonna see again a premium on companies that can document this. Mm-hmm. Much. There'll be a huge premium on that because, because you know, can you shorten that three month ramp cycle to a two week ramp cycle? That's an instant productivity gain.Can you re dramatically reduce rework in the organization because you've documented where all the stuff is and where the answers are. Can you make your average employee as good as your 90th percentile employee because you've captured the knowledge that's sort of in the heads of, of those top employees and make that available.So like you can see some very clear productivity benefits. Mm-hmm. If you had a company culture of making sure you know your information was captured, digitized, put in a format that was agent ready and then made available to agents to work with, and then you just, again, have this reality of like add a 10,000 person [00:45:00] company.Mapping that to the, you know, access structure of the company is just a hard problem. Is like, is like, yeah, well, you just, not every piece of information that's digitized can be shared to everybody. And so now you have to organize that in a way that actually works. There was a pretty good piece, um, this, this, uh, this piece called your company as a file is a file system.I, did you see that one?swyx: Nope.Aaron Levie: Uh, yes. You saw it. Yeah. And, and, uh, I actually be curious your thoughts on it. Um, like, like an interesting kind of like, we, we agree with it because, because that's how we see the world and, uh,swyx: okay. We, we have it up on screen. Oh,Aaron Levie: okay. Yeah. But, but it's all about basically like, you know, we've already, we, we, we already organized in this kind of like, you know, permission structure way.Uh, and, and these are the kind of, you know, natural ways that, that agents can now work with data. So it's kind of like this, this, you know, kind of interesting metaphor, but I do think companies will have to start to think about how they start to digitize more, more of that data. What was your take?Jeff Huber: Yeah, I mean, like the company's probably like an acid compliant file system.Aaron Levie: Uh,Jeff Huber: yeah. Which I'm guessing boxes, right? So, yeah. Yes.swyx: Yeah. [00:46:00]Jeff Huber: Which you have a great piece on, but,swyx: uh, yeah. Well, uh, I, I, my, my, my direction is a little bit like, I wanna rewind a little bit to the graph word you said that there, that's a magic trigger word for us. I always ask what's your take on knowledge graphs?Yeah. Uh, ‘cause every, especially at every data database person, I just wanna see what they think. There's been knowledge graphs, hype cycles, and you've seen it all. So.Aaron Levie: Hmm. I actually am not the expert in knowledge graphs, so, so that you might need toswyx: research, you don't need to be an expert. Yeah. I think it's just like, well, how, how seriously do people take it?Yeah. Like, is is, is there a lot of potential in the, in the HOVI?Aaron Levie: Uh, well, can I, can I, uh, understand first if it's, um, is this a loaded question in the sense of are you super pro, super con, super anti medium? Iswyx: see pro, I see pros and cons. Okay. Uh, but I, I think your opinion should be independent of mine.Aaron Levie: Yeah. No, no, totally. Yeah. I just want to see what I'm stepping into.swyx: No, I know. It's a, and it's a huge trigger word for a lot of people out Yeah. In our audience. And they're, they're trying to figure out why is that? Because whyAaron Levie: is this such aswyx: hot item for them? Because a lot of people get graph religion.And they're like, everything's a graph. Of course you have to represent it as a graph. Well, [00:47:00] how do you solve your knowledge? Um, changing over time? Well, it's a graph.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And, and I think there, there's that line of work and then there's, there's a lot of people who are like, well, you don't need it. And both are right.Aaron Levie: Yeah. And what do the people who say you don't need it, what are theyswyx: arguing for Mark down files. Oh, sure, sure. Simplicity.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Versus it's, it's structure versus less structure. Right. That's, that's all what it is. I do.Aaron Levie: I think the tricky thing is, um, is, is again, when this gets met with real humans, they're just going to their computer.They're just working with some people on Slack or teams. They're just sharing some data through a collaborative file system and Google Docs or Box or whatever. I certainly like the vision of most, most knowledge graph, you know, kind of futuristic kind of ways of thinking about it. Uh, it's just like, you know, it's 2026.We haven't seen it yet. Kind of play out as as, I mean, I remember. Do you remember the, um, in like, actually I don't, I don't even know how old you guys are, but I'll for, for to show my age. I remember 17 years ago, everybody thought enterprises would just run on [00:48:00] Wikis. Yeah. And, uh, confluence and, and not even, I mean, confluence actually took off for engineering for sure.Like unquestionably. But like, this was like everything would be in the w. And I think based on our, uh, our, uh, general style of, of, of what we were building, like we were just like, I don't know, people just like wanna workspace. They're gonna collaborate with other people.swyx: Exactly. Yeah. So you were, you were anti-knowledge graph.Aaron Levie: Not anti, not anti. Soswyx: not nonAaron Levie: I'm not, I'm not anti. ‘cause I think, I think your search system, I just think these are two systems that probably, but like, I'm, I'm not in any religious war. I don't want to be in anybody's YouTube comments on this. There's not a fight for me.swyx: We, we love YouTube comments. We're, we're, we're get into comments.Aaron Levie: Okay. Uh, but like, but I, I, it's mostly just a virtue of what we built. Yeah. And we just continued down that path. Yeah.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And, um, and that, that was what we pursued. But I'm not, this is not a, you know, kind of, this is not a, uh, it'sswyx: not existential for you. Great.Aaron Levie: We're happy to plug into somebody else's graph.We're happy to feed data into it. We're happy for [00:49:00] agents to, to talk to multiple systems. Not, not our fight.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: But I need your answer. Yeah. Graphs or nerd Snipes is very effective nerd.swyx: See this is, this is one, one opinion and then I've,Jeff Huber: and I think that the actual graph structure is emergent in the mind of the agent.Ah, in the same way it is in the mind of the human. And that's a more powerful graph ‘cause it actually involved over time.swyx: So don't tell me how to graph. I'll, I'll figure it out myself. Exactly. Okay. All right. AndJeff Huber: what's yours?swyx: I like the, the Wiki approach. Uh, my, I'm actually

If you stare at that kettle, you'll never reach the...Boiling Point!Here's a movie neither of us thought we'd seen. But we both had. That's not a good sign at all. Wesley Snipes is a secret service agent who just had his partner murdered. Dennis Hopper and Viggo Mortensen are responsible. What's he gonna do? Karate kick a door and act inappropriately with his wife, that's what!This is our second run of Snipes! If you're into it, there's ten more audio episodes from last year? Maybe longer ago? I have no idea. Rate, review, subscribe. If you post a review somewhere like Apple, mention what movie you want us to do in the review, cause we'll do it!#wesleysnipes #dennishopper #viggomortensen #boilingpoint #podcast #filmography

Is ROAS a flawed metric for Google Ads? According to acclaimed ecommerce experts Mike Ryan and Christian Scharmüller, using Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) as your primary "North Star" metric creates a dangerous "Revenue Trap." Because ROAS measures revenue rather than actual margin, it creates an "air gap" that ignores the law of diminishing returns, ultimately hurting the profitability of mature Google Ads campaigns.In this episode of Growing eCommerce, the hosts break down how to properly use ROAS as a bidding signal and explore the latest transparency updates to Google's Performance Max (PMax) campaigns.The Problem with ROAS as a Profit Proxy: Many advertisers use ROAS as a stand-in for profit. However, as campaigns scale, incremental returns flatten out. A 600% ROAS does not guarantee your next ad dollar will yield the same profit margin.ROAS is a Communication Vessel, Not Just a Goal: Setting a blanket ROAS target across multiple campaigns is a strategic mistake. ROAS is actually your primary bidding signal and pacing tool to steer Google's algorithms.Dynamic vs. Static Targeting: Advertisers should move away from adjusting ROAS based on "gut feeling" and adopt a scientific, data-driven approach based on specific campaign constraints.Resources & Expert LinksFREE smec Advanced Channel Report Script: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/google-ads-scripts/pmax-channel-insights/About Mike Ryan:Based in Austria and originally from Boston, Mike Ryan is the Head of Ecommerce Insights at Smarter Ecommerce (smec) with over ten years of experience in retail and PPC landscape. With a robust background spanning retail operations, product management, and digital ads, Mike leverages his multidisciplinary expertise to drive data-informed strategies that help online retailers optimize their performance in an increasingly competitive market.About Christian Scharmueller:As a seasoned veteran in the PPC and Ecommerce space, Christian Scharmüller serves as the CCO & Managing Director of Smarter Ecommerce. With over 12 years of experience at the forefront of ad tech, Christian is a sought-after speaker at major industry events, including SMX and OMR, where he shares insights on high-level e-commerce strategy and the future of retail media.About Smarter Ecommerce (smec) Smarter Ecommerce (smec) helps e-commerce brands scale profitably with AI-driven PPC automation—optimizing for business outcomes while keeping strategic control in the hands of marketers. The platform activates first-party data (e.g., margins, CLV, core business metrics) to automate campaign optimization toward profitability and efficient growth, with transparent insights that reduce manual work and free teams for strategic oversight. As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages €500M+ in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients, including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport. Follow smec for performance marketing insights: Website: smarter-ecommerce.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh Newsletter: smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/ Instagram: instagram.com/smarterecommerce

In this episode of Growing eCommerce, Mike Ryan and Chris debunk three persistent myths that are still holding retailers back in 2026. While everyone is distracted by the hype of UCP and Agentic Commerce, many accounts are bleeding efficiency due to outdated structures like the "Heroes & Zombies" matrix and one-dimensional margin buckets.We break down why these old-school tactics create self-fulfilling prophecies of failure and share what sophisticated retailers are doing instead to balance volume, margin, and the new reality of AI-driven search.In this episode, we cover:The "Zero Click" Wake-Up Call: Why the shift to walled gardens means you need to fix your tactical basics now before the ecosystem changes forever.Myth #1: Heroes & Zombies: Why classifying low-volume products as "zombies" is a logical flaw that starves your potential growth engines. We explain the danger of using historical data to doom new products.Myth #2: Margin Buckets: Why segmenting campaigns by gross margin % (e.g., 0-5%, 5-10%) is dangerous. Mike shares data showing how this ignores conversion volume and pricing strategies, leading to "death by optimization."Myth #3: PMax vs. Standard Shopping: It's no longer an either/or decision. We discuss the rise of hybrid setups and why Standard Shopping is actually gaining cost share again.Key Takeaways:Don't rely on single-dimensional data: Grouping products solely by ROAS or Margin % ignores critical context like seasonality, price competitiveness, and absolute profit.Standard Shopping isn't dead: Even Google is now advocating for hybrid use cases, such as using Standard Shopping for query filtering or specific inventory control.+1The "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy": If you put a new product in a "zombie" campaign with low budget because it has no data, it will never get data. You need a multi-dimensional scoring strategy.About Mike RyanBased in Austria and originally from Boston, Mike Ryan is Head of Ecommerce Insights at Smarter Ecommerce (smec). With 10+ years in retail and PPC, and experience across retail operations, product management, and digital advertising, he helps online retailers turn data into strategies that improve performance in a highly competitive market.About Christian ScharmüllerChristian Scharmüller is CCO & Managing Director at Smarter Ecommerce and a long-time expert in PPC and e-commerce. With 12+ years in ad tech, he's a regular speaker at major industry events such as SMX and OMR, sharing insights on e-commerce strategy and the future of retail media.About Smarter Ecommerce (smec) Smarter Ecommerce (smec) helps e-commerce brands scale profitably with AI-driven PPC automation—optimizing for business outcomes while keeping strategic control in the hands of marketers. The platform activates first-party data (e.g., margins, CLV, core business metrics) to automate campaign optimization toward profitability and efficient growth, with transparent insights that reduce manual work and free teams for strategic oversight. As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages €500M+ in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients, including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport. Follow smec for performance marketing insights: Website: smarter-ecommerce.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh Newsletter: smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/ Instagram: instagram.com/smarterecommerce

* Follow Jonathan on Instagram.*Follow Jonathan's wonderful podcast, Black Men Can't Jump on Instagram.*Pre-order Jordan's new Web of Venom comic.*Catch Jesse and Judge John Hodgman LIVE for Night Court at the Bell House in NYC on March 6th and 7th!*See Jordan Morris at Collector's Paradise on February 22 where he'll be signing Predator comics!*Check out a Predator Double Feature with Jordan Morris at the Friday Cinema on February 26th!*Catch Jordan at Books with Pictures in Eugene, Oregon on February 28th where he'll be signing copies of Predator!*Join Jordan Morris and the Doughboys Live at The Aladdin Theater on February 28 or on March first at the Neptune Theatre.* Celebrate 25 years of Bullseye!* Order Jordan's new Predator comic: Black, White & Blood!* Order Jordan's new Venom comic!* Donate to Al Otro Lado.* Purchase signed copies of *Youth Group* and *Bubble* from Mission: Comics And Art! ~ NEW JJGo MERCH ~Get  Bronto Dino-Merch!Get our ‘Ack Tuah' shirt in the Max Fun store.Grab an ‘Ack Tuah' mug!The Maximum Fun Bookshop!Follow the podcast on Instagram and send us your dank memes!Check out Jesse's thrifted clothing store, Put This On.Follow producer, Jordan Kauwling, on Instagram.Thank you to Engineer Gabe Mara!

Fear the 'Fro heads into All-Star break with vibes at a high point.  Bob breaks down Sam Merrill's fantastic night, where he poured in 32 points and 9 triples, which overshadowed another perfect night from Jarrett Allen.  The mailbag is stocked, and we empty the clip before the All-Star Weekend festivities.

UCP (Universal Context Protocol) is a new infrastructure layer aiming to standardize “agentic commerce.” It breaks ecommerce into modular capabilities (“Lego bricks”) so AI agents can negotiate tasks like product discovery, checkout, and payments across platforms.This has become an infrastructure war: Google is pushing UCP as an open-source standard versus OpenAI's ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) and Anthropic's MCP (Model Context Protocol). Big retailers such as Walmart and Zalando are already experimenting with UCP right now.In this episode of Growing Ecommerce, Mike Ryan and Christian Scharmüller unpack what “Agentic Commerce” means as AI shifts from generating text to taking actions in online shops—and what that implies for your data feed strategy.In this episode, we cover:• The Rise of UCP: how agents “negotiate” capabilities like discovery and checkout—similar to early standards wars (e.g., electricity).• Adoption Reality Check: will consumers let AI buy their sneakers? Mike forecasts ~10% of UCP-based transactions within 2 years; Chris estimates ~5%.• The Protocol War: how partnerships with giants (Walmart, Zalando) help Google try to win the standard.• New Merchant Responsibilities: to reduce hallucinations, Google plans 10–12 new feeds/attributes, pushing more structured-data work back to retailers.About the hosts:Mike Ryan (Austria; originally Boston) is Head of Ecommerce Insights at Smarter Ecommerce (smec), with 10+ years in retail and PPC.Christian Scharmüller is CCO & Managing Director at smec, a long-time PPC/ecommerce leader and frequent speaker (e.g., SMX, OMR).Smarter Ecommerce (smec) helps e-commerce brands optimize PPC with AI-driven automation focused on profit and business outcomes, leveraging first-party data like margins and LTV.Follow smec for more performance marketing insights:LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhSubscribe for more actionable eCommerce insights!#eCommerce #GoogleAds #UCP #AgenticCommerce #AI #DigitalMarketing #RetailTrends #GoogleMerchantCentersmec is a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, managing €500M+ in ad spend and driving €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue across 350+ global retail clients (incl. THG, Snipes, REWE, Intersport).More:Website: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/Why it matters: if agents become the new storefront, whoever sets the protocol shapes access to customers, data standards, and product visibility—so feed quality and structured attributes really matter.About smec (Smarter Ecommerce): At smec - Smarter Ecommerce, we specialize in transforming business goals into optimized ad campaigns. With over 16 years of experience in Google & Microsoft Ads, our intelligent software and expert services help retailers achieve superior results. We're committed to giving you the tools and insights needed to stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of digital advertising. Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights: smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

(00:00)Intro (13:39)PWHL w/Peter (29:26)Nonsense w/Olivia (33:07)NCAA w/Olivia (52:49)Pipes & Snipes

For decades, Roger Snipes was a titan in the natural bodybuilding world, winning prestigious titles like Mr. UK and Mr. Britannia. His brand was built on high performance with a physique that pushed the limits of natural athleticism. However, recently, a life-threatening health crisis forced him to rebuild his body and identity from the feet up. Facing a Life-Threatening Crisis  What Roger initially dismissed as simple back pain revealed a metastatic tumor and serious blood clots. He underwent a brutal chemotherapy process that caused sensory overload and extreme physical depletion.  Throughout the ordeal, Roger's mindset was one of surrender, believing his suffering would inspire others who had lost hope. He documented this health journey to build a community centered on the power of resilience. Rebuilding After the Crash  While Roger defeated the cancer markers in a short timeframe, he was left with clinically low testosterone levels. He suffered from depression, debilitating brain fog, and a complete lack of motivation.  To reclaim his health, this lifetime natural athlete made the difficult decision to begin Testosterone Replacement Therapy. The results were almost immediate, lifting his brain fog and allowing him to regain significant muscle and strength. Shifting Toward Holistic Longevity  The battle changed Roger's perspective on "hustle culture" and extreme physical training habits. He backed off from redlining every session, instead adopting a philosophy of leaving "a little bit in the tank."  His new approach prioritizes stress management and longevity over pure aesthetic perfection. Meditation and prayer are now essential pillars of his routine to support and ground his nervous system. Empowering Others Through Resilience  Roger's mission has pivoted toward helping those who feel "broken," including men dealing with low testosterone and physical limitations. He uses his "Optimize Life Health Plan" to guide others toward lasting resilience and functional health. By sharing his story, he encourages individuals to get to know themselves deeply to make the best-informed health decisions. His journey proves that anyone can change and leverage even the most difficult circumstances for personal growth.   In this podcast you will discover... The harrowing transition from being an elite natural athlete to a cancer survivor. How Roger navigated the brutal physical and sensory toll of intensive chemotherapy. The reality of living with "Low T" and the decision-making process behind starting TRT. Why abandoning "hustle culture" is essential for long-term health and stress management. The role of spiritual training and meditation in modern physical recovery. Practical advice for rebuilding your identity and fitness after a major health crisis.   EPISODE RESOURCES: snipes15 - Discount off first order on bioptimizers.co.uk Instagram Facebook X  

The latest episode of the Getting Smart Podcast dives into Kentucky's innovative "United We Learn" initiative, which emphasizes community-driven education, competency-based learning, and local accountability systems. Host Rebecca Midles is joined by Sarah Snipes, Director of Innovative Learning at the Kentucky Department of Education; Karen Perry, Executive Director at the Center for Next Generation Leadership; and David Cook, former Director of Innovative Learning, to discuss how Kentucky is building sustainable systems of education transformation. Together, they explore the importance of trust, collaboration, and shared vision in creating vibrant learning experiences for every student. Tune in to hear how Kentucky's efforts are inspiring education leaders nationwide, and learn why this model could be a blueprint for other states. Outline (00:00) Introduction & Guest Roles (06:30) Building Networks & Partnerships (16:03) Creating Shared Vision (26:34) Portrait of a Learner Process (32:47) District Models & Implementation (36:00) Sustainability & Looking Ahead Links Read the full blog here Watch the full blog here David Cook LinkedIn Sarah Snipes LinkedIn Karen Perry LinkedIn Previous blog by Stephanie and David  

-Jalen Snipes is an endurance athlete, realtor and advocate for resilience whose purpose was shaped by early exposure to service and sacrifice.-As a child, Jalen's home was struck by lightning and caught fire, requiring firefighters and first responders to put their lives on the line to protect his family. That experience sparked a lifelong commitment to give back to those who serve in high risk, high consequence roles.-As an endurance athlete, Jalen has completed multiple ultramarathons and has used long distance challenges as a platform for service. He recently ran 150 miles to raise $13,000 for North Carolina firefighters, translating sustained physical effort into tangible community impact.Support the North Carolina Firefighter Fund:ncfirefightersfund.comBuilding Homes for Heroes:https://www.buildinghomesforheroes.org/Download the O2X Tactical Performance App:app.o2x.comLet us know what you think:Website - http://o2x.comIG - https://instagram.com/o2xhumanperformance?igshid=1kicimx55xt4f 

Kevin SnipesIG

Jeremy Roenick and Tim Peel welcome Joel Quenneville back to the show after his return to coaching in Anaheim. They discuss the team's young players, including Leo Carlsson and Cutter Gauthier, and how they're building a strong team culture. The conversation also touches on the importance of goaltending, penalty killing, and the challenges of winning in today's NHL. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week we've got Eugene Chang in the hot seat to see if he can make our connections. Listen in and play along! Here are today's clues:  1. Jack, a sure bet for Snipes?, noire, beans.  2. flower, child, a place to return?, Adventures.  3. leather, sausage, a language for romance?, a purveyor of matrimonial soups and cookies?.  4. a friendly automaton, Fox, Park, a Suited princess?. 

You can now text us anonymously to leave feedback, suggest future content or simply hurl abuse at us. We'll read out any texts we receive on the show. Click here to try it out!Christopher Walken, Larry Fishburne, and Abel Ferrara's moral abyss of a movie. This week, the dads descend into King of New York, the neon-slick crime drama that turns Manhattan into a fever dream of violence, power, and warped justice.Walken plays Frank White, a freshly released drug lord who wants to “give back” — but only by murdering every rival and funding a hospital with blood money. His crew? Mostly Black. His moral compass? Bent beyond repair. His dance moves? Still pure Walken.What we coverCrime and capitalism: Frank's twisted logic — kill the competition, save the city.The Walken mystique: Dead eyes, slick hair, spontaneous robot dances.Larry Fishburne's “Jimmy Jump”: One of the great chaotic sidekicks — all swagger, coke, and AK-47s.Cops vs crooks: Caruso and Snipes as furious detectives who decide to skip due process and go full vigilante.Ferrara's vision: A New York that's nihilistic, sweaty, and corrupt from top to bottom.The politics of power: Race, class, loyalty, and the delusion of doing “good” through evil.The ending: Blood, subways, and one of Walken's best death scenes — calm, eerie, inevitable.Why listen?Because it's peak Bad Dads territory: a film that's stylish, sleazy, and morally bankrupt, yet impossible to look away from. We argue about whether Frank's warped Robin Hood act has any truth to it, trade notes on 1990s cop-movie chaos, and try to work out how this didn't end every actor's career.

I had the unique opportunity to chat with author and tuba master Joshua Cutchin in person, as he was in my vicinity due to a presentation that he was giving at Paracon in KC. We met where he was staying and sat down to have a lovely conversation about his latest book, "Fourth Wall Phantoms: Reflections on the Paranormal, Narrative, and Fictions Becoming Fact", imbuing creations with autonomy, fictional characters appearing in the 3D, archetypes, retrocausality, ex nihilo, narrative, wondertales, our inner 12-year-olds, egregores, tulpas, metalepsis, and mucho more!   Joshua's website: https://www.joshuacutchin.com/    Find The Melt on… Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-2365404 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMeltPodcast Check out our merch at: https://the-melt.creator-spring.com/   Music by The Godawful Joy: https://thegodawfuljoy.bandcamp.com/releases and Matt Presti: https://www.mattpresti.com/music.html