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Usama Dakdok is the founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He is the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992.President Donald Trump is in the Middle East working out numerous agreements. Some of the actions he's taken are concerning to a number of individuals. This includes the lifting of sanctions against Syria, the signing of a $142 billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia, a $1.2 trillion dollar economic commitment with Qatar and the offered gift from Qatar to provide a jumbo jet to serve as Air Force One.Meanwhile, this morning the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on nationwide injunctions including the injunction on ending what is known as "birthright citizenship." It's a move that the Council on American Islamic Relations calls, "dangerous and unconstitutional." The issue of birthright citizenship and its implications for Islam in the U.S. is just the beginning as Usama also turned his attention to the Abraham Accords, the EU providing 11 million dollars to highlight the contributions of the Qur'an and Islam to European civilization, a Canadian Islamic scholar who praised children who die for Islam (Jim provided audio), the latest concerning the exclusive Islamic city taking shape near Dallas and special news for listeners in Pennsylvania and Florida.
Usama Dakdok is the founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He is the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992.President Donald Trump is in the Middle East working out numerous agreements. Some of the actions he's taken are concerning to a number of individuals. This includes the lifting of sanctions against Syria, the signing of a $142 billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia, a $1.2 trillion dollar economic commitment with Qatar and the offered gift from Qatar to provide a jumbo jet to serve as Air Force One.Meanwhile, this morning the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on nationwide injunctions including the injunction on ending what is known as "birthright citizenship." It's a move that the Council on American Islamic Relations calls, "dangerous and unconstitutional." The issue of birthright citizenship and its implications for Islam in the U.S. is just the beginning as Usama also turned his attention to the Abraham Accords, the EU providing 11 million dollars to highlight the contributions of the Qur'an and Islam to European civilization, a Canadian Islamic scholar who praised children who die for Islam (Jim provided audio), the latest concerning the exclusive Islamic city taking shape near Dallas and special news for listeners in Pennsylvania and Florida.
Hafsah bint Umar رضي الله عنهم (S14) Umar رضي الله عنه fixed a 10,000 dirham stipend for our mothers (رضي الله عنهم) - except Aisha رضي الله عنها, she recieved 12,000. Umar رضي الله عنه said: “For she was more beloved to the Messenger ﷺ”. Umar رضي الله عنه gave 3,500 Dirhams to Usama Ibn Zayd (رضي الله عنهم) and gave 3,000 to his own son, Abdullah رضي الله عنه. Abdullah asked Umar (رضي الله عنهم) why he did this, to which Umar replied: “Zayd [i.e Ibn Haritha رضي الله عنه] was more beloved to our Messenger ﷺ than your father. Usama رضي الله عنه was more beloved to our Messenger ﷺ than you [i.e Abdullah Ibn Umar رضي الله عنهم]. I will prefer the Messenger's ﷺ beloved over my beloved!”. Umar رضي الله عنه showcasing the peak of iman - loving our Messenger's ﷺ family over his own. Abdullah Ibn Abaas رضي الله عنهم: “Speak often of Umar, for you will mention justice. When you mention justice, you mention Allah (s.w.t)”. Aisha (رضي الله عنها): “Beautify your gatherings with salaam upon the Messenger ﷺ, and by speaking of Umar رضي الله عن
We brought on our buddy Moe Yaqub to discuss the recent terror attack in Pahalgam, and the likelihood of India and Pakistan going to war. And, more controversially, we talk about Usama hating SINNERS.
Our Google Ads Aficionados share their experiences with Google's generative AI, and spoiler: the results aren't great. This includes the lack of control over Google's automatic asset creation tool. They also talk about other AI developments like Grok, the AI model by Elon Musk. Watch this video as Colby, Usama, and Glen discuss (with skepticism and excitement) the future of marketing with AI.Connect with The Google Ads Aficionados on LinkedIn:Usama Khan: / usama-khan-mk Colby Doyle: / colbycdoyle Glen Wilson: / glenmwilson Curry, Cheese, and Vegemite: The Google Ads Aficionados videos: • Curry, Cheese, & Vegemite: The Google... Related videos:
Wawa, I'm Gonna Git U Sucka, Jenn's Blaotian family, scandalous For You Pages, creating new Bengali stereotypes. Patreon for the full ep.
Usama Dakdok is founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He's the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992.The infiltration of Islam continues in the U.S. This past February, Crosstalk warned listeners about the formation of "EPIC City" near Dallas, Texas (EPIC stands for East Plano Islamic Center). The city will eventually have exclusive Islamic grocery stores, schools, elderly assistance centers and more.Just a few weeks ago, the Houston Chronicle wrote about thousands of Muslims that gathered at the Sugarland, Texas, town square for what organizers said was the largest, open air Iftar celebration in the region. Then at the end of March, the White House sponsored an Iftar dinner. There's also a CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) linked event that hopes to place Muslim-Americans in federal jobs. These efforts prove how Islam is affecting America. Next on their agenda is an event set to take place on April 28th-29th. That's when the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations is hosting the 10th annual National Muslim Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C. The event will bring in Muslim leaders, activists, as well as constituents from all across America. The goal is to directly engage with members of Congress as they promote the theme: Defending rights. Shaping policy.
Usama Dakdok is founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He's the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992.The infiltration of Islam continues in the U.S. This past February, Crosstalk warned listeners about the formation of "EPIC City" near Dallas, Texas (EPIC stands for East Plano Islamic Center). The city will eventually have exclusive Islamic grocery stores, schools, elderly assistance centers and more.Just a few weeks ago, the Houston Chronicle wrote about thousands of Muslims that gathered at the Sugarland, Texas, town square for what organizers said was the largest, open air Iftar celebration in the region. Then at the end of March, the White House sponsored an Iftar dinner. There's also a CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) linked event that hopes to place Muslim-Americans in federal jobs. These efforts prove how Islam is affecting America. Next on their agenda is an event set to take place on April 28th-29th. That's when the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations is hosting the 10th annual National Muslim Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C. The event will bring in Muslim leaders, activists, as well as constituents from all across America. The goal is to directly engage with members of Congress as they promote the theme: Defending rights. Shaping policy.
The bros accidentally invited their literal arch enemy Jeffrey Goldberg into their group chat plans to bomb Yemen lollll. Full ep on patreon!
We got one of the hands-down funniest dudes in town, Usama Siddiquee, in the Mad House this week! Maddy and Usama go way back, to a time when stand up comedy was pre-internet and meant bombing in three different boroughs every night =] . Now, fresh off a new hilarious Don't Tell special, Usama talks being on TV, his and Maddy's similar upbringings, South Asian insults, and more! Call the FUPA Hotline: (347) 480-9006Check out Usama's special 'Usama Bin Laughin'':https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3NH-WEGUGIFollow Usama:https://www.instagram.com/usamastandsup/?hl=enFollow Maddy:https://www.instagram.com/somaddysmith/?hl=enhttps://www.tiktok.com/@somaddysmith?lang=enAll tour dates: https://maddysmithcomedy.com/Want more Mad House?!Go to https://gasdigitalnetwork.com/ to subscribe!Use promo code MAD to save big on your membership :)Get early access to our weekly episodes on Tuesdays, along with EXCLUSIVE episodes every Thursday.UPCOMING STAND UP DATES:4/4-4/5 AUSTIN, TX4/11-4/12 CARY, NC4/17 NEW YORK, NY4/30 PHILADELPHIA, PA5/1-5/3 TULSA, OK5/4 OKLAHOMA CITY, OK6/27-6/28 FORT COLLINS, COProducer: Caroline MazzeiSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Usama has some family fun in LA, Zelensky gets mogged, and more--full episode is on Patreon!
In this episode we talk to Dr. Usama Bilal of Drexel University about Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and Difference-in-Differences (DiD), two quasi experimental methods that fall under the instrumental variables framework which we discussed in previous episodes. We talk about what RDD is, the different types (fuzzy vs sharp) and what we are actually estimating (LATE vs CACE). We talk about the bias vs variance tradeoff in how far from the threshold we choose to draw inferences. We talk about the assumptions that are needed for these methods to give valid estimate of effects. Then we talk about DiD and how this is a form of RDD with a second group that does not experience the discontinuity as a control. And we talk about the additional assumptions needed for this approach (e.g. parallel trends).
The rise of AI tools is evident more than ever this 2025. While some still fear AI replacing the workforce, our Google Ads Aficionados highlight the use of AI tools as assistants rather than replacements in digital marketing. In this video, Usama, Colby, and Glen share promising AI tools marketers can use to enhance processes, automate research, and streamline content production. They also discuss the competitive advantage that can result in the early adoption of AI tools and other benefits. Watch this video to learn more.Connect with The Google Ads Aficionados on LinkedIn:Usama Khan: / Colby Doyle: / Glen Wilson: / Curry, Cheese, and Vegemite: The Google Ads Aficionados videos: • Curry, Cheese, & Vegemite: The Google... Related videos:
I det här oviktiga avsnittet av Frågeklådan, som tidigare bara funnits på Podme, diskuterar Niclas & Jonatan sniglars tendens att förvåna, en bisarr jacuzzi-upplevelse, om det är lättast att se om någon är hårdrockare eller bög, en önskan som skulle bli verklighet samtidigt för alla på jorden, öl-häng med Usama bin Ladin, hur man velat att dokumentären om ens eget liv skulle se ut – och mycket mer! Hjärndöda frågor får meningslösa svar – haka på!Vi finns numera även på Podme! Det betyder att du hittar alla våra avsnitt, helt reklamfritt, i Podme-appen. Signa upp dig på podme.com – de första 14 dagarna är gratis. Ladda sedan ner appen i Appstore eller Google Play.
We unpack Kendrick spiking the ball in Drake's endzone, and Usama getting brutally roasted by black comics.
Before setting a CPC cap on your Google Ads campaigns, dive into our Google Ads Aficionados' insights. They talk about the importance of understanding Google's algorithm before CPC capping, the trends and factors that impact CPC, the approach and bid strategies Usama, Colby, and Glen recommend to generate demand depending on your budget, and more. Watch this video now.Connect with The Google Ads Aficionados on LinkedIn:Usama Khan: / usama-khan-mk Colby Doyle: / colbycdoyle Glen Wilson: / glenmwilson Related videos:
Usama Dakdok is founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He is the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992. With his knowledge of Islam, he founded The Straight Way of Grace Ministry. Usama speaks fluent Arabic and has translated the Qur'an into English. He is the author of Exposing the Truth about the Qur'an and Exposing the Truth About Jihad and the booklets, The Violent Truth about Islam and The Straight Way to Eternal Life. For many years Usama has traveled the country to equip the church to minister to Muslims and to warn Americans about the deceptive methods being used that lead many into the cult of Islam.Long-time Crosstalk listeners know that on past programs, Usama Dakdok has issued warning after warning concerning the growing influence and possible takeover of America by Islam. More proof of this has come forth as there's been the announcement of the formation of EPIC City near Dallas, Texas. EPIC stands for: East Plano Islamic Center. This city is where developers claim they will serve the evolving needs of Muslims. In fact, it's being called a game-changer, not just for Dallas, but for the Western world.The goal is not simply a bunch of neighborhood homes but instead they'll offer a full school facility (pre-K through high school), a community college/university, grocery stores and elderly assistance facilities.
Usama Dakdok is founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He is the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992. With his knowledge of Islam, he founded The Straight Way of Grace Ministry. Usama speaks fluent Arabic and has translated the Qur'an into English. He is the author of Exposing the Truth about the Qur'an and Exposing the Truth About Jihad and the booklets, The Violent Truth about Islam and The Straight Way to Eternal Life. For many years Usama has traveled the country to equip the church to minister to Muslims and to warn Americans about the deceptive methods being used that lead many into the cult of Islam.Long-time Crosstalk listeners know that on past programs, Usama Dakdok has issued warning after warning concerning the growing influence and possible takeover of America by Islam. More proof of this has come forth as there's been the announcement of the formation of EPIC City near Dallas, Texas. EPIC stands for: East Plano Islamic Center. This city is where developers claim they will serve the evolving needs of Muslims. In fact, it's being called a game-changer, not just for Dallas, but for the Western world.The goal is not simply a bunch of neighborhood homes but instead they'll offer a full school facility (pre-K through high school), a community college/university, grocery stores and elderly assistance facilities.
Hueck, Carsten www.deutschlandfunk.de, Büchermarkt
Hueck, Carsten www.deutschlandfunk.de, Büchermarkt
The free livestreams for AI Engineer Summit are now up! Please hit the bell to help us appease the algo gods. We're also announcing a special Online Track later today.Today's Deep Research episode is our last in our series of AIE Summit preview podcasts - thanks for following along with our OpenAI, Portkey, Pydantic, Bee, and Bret Taylor episodes, and we hope you enjoy the Summit! Catch you on livestream.Everybody's going deep now. Deep Work. Deep Learning. DeepMind. If 2025 is the Year of Agents, then the 2020s are the Decade of Deep.While “LLM-powered Search” is as old as Perplexity and SearchGPT, and open source projects like GPTResearcher and clones like OpenDeepResearch exist, the difference with “Deep Research” products is they are both “agentic” (loosely meaning that an LLM decides the next step in a workflow, usually involving tools) and bundling custom-tuned frontier models (custom tuned o3 and Gemini 1.5 Flash).The reception to OpenAI's Deep Research agent has been nothing short of breathless:"Deep Research is the best public-facing AI product Google has ever released. It's like having a college-educated researcher in your pocket." - Jason Calacanis“I have had [Deep Research] write a number of ten-page papers for me, each of them outstanding. I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD-level research assistant, and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, or maybe more. Except Deep Research does the work in five or six minutes.” - Tyler Cowen“Deep Research is one of the best bargains in technology.” - Ben Thompson“my very approximate vibe is that it can do a single-digit percentage of all economically valuable tasks in the world, which is a wild milestone.” - sama“Using Deep Research over the past few weeks has been my own personal AGI moment. It takes 10 mins to generate accurate and thorough competitive and market research (with sources) that previously used to take me at least 3 hours.” - OAI employee“It's like a bazooka for the curious mind” - Dan Shipper“Deep research can be seen as a new interface for the internet, in addition to being an incredible agent… This paradigm will be so powerful that in the future, navigating the internet manually via a browser will be "old-school", like performing arithmetic calculations by hand.” - Jason Wei“One notable characteristic of Deep Research is its extreme patience. I think this is rapidly approaching “superhuman patience”. One realization working on this project was that intelligence and patience go really well together.” - HyungWon“I asked it to write a reference Interaction Calculus evaluator in Haskell. A few exchanges later, it gave me a complete file, including a parser, an evaluator, O(1) interactions and everything. The file compiled, and worked on my test inputs. There are some minor issues, but it is mostly correct. So, in about 30 minutes, o3 performed a job that would take me a day or so.” - Victor Taelin“Can confirm OpenAI Deep Research is quite strong. In a few minutes it did what used to take a dozen hours. The implications to knowledge work is going to be quite profound when you just ask an AI Agent to perform full tasks for you and come back with a finished result.” - Aaron Levie“Deep Research is genuinely useful” - Gary MarcusWith the advent of “Deep Research” agents, we are now routinely asking models to go through 100+ websites and generate in-depth reports on any topic. The Deep Research revolution has hit the AI scene in the last 2 weeks: * Dec 11th: Gemini Deep Research (today's guest!) rolls out with Gemini Advanced* Feb 2nd: OpenAI releases Deep Research* Feb 3rd: a dozen “Open Deep Research” clones launch* Feb 5th: Gemini 2.0 Flash GA* Feb 15th: Perplexity launches Deep Research * Feb 17th: xAI launches Deep SearchIn today's episode, we welcome Aarush Selvan and Mukund Sridhar, the lead PM and tech lead for Gemini Deep Research, the originators of the entire category. We asked detailed questions from inspiration to implementation, why they had to finetune a special model for it instead of using the standard Gemini model, how to run evals for them, and how to think about the distribution of use cases. (We also have an upcoming Gemini 2 episode with our returning first guest Logan Kilpatrick so stay tuned
Pranav shaves his head, Why weren't Guyanese Indians invited to the jonestown cult? Also, hecklers at the mango bae show.
See pictures and read more on materiallyspeaking.comA sculptor and painter born in Damascus, Usama tells of the impact of being brought up in Syria and of continuously dealing with people from different religions with diverse ways of looking at things. Usama's studio space, and home, is tucked away in the shadow of the statuario marble quarries. Usama bought the space in this historic marble area because he felt an urgency to build a stone amphitheatre there. Initially he dismissed the land because he feared flooding. But he worked non-stop his first winter to build his theatre. He tells us about his childhood and how it informed the person he's become. His uncles are both sculptors and their books on marble, in his grandmother's library, inspired him from a young age. First he studied art in Damascus, where he carved in wood, and then he came to Carrara to study sculpting in marble. Usama talks about his relationship with nature and his love of plants. He grew up in Syria with a family garden of fruit and vegetables, and always loved working in nature. He has planted many trees and plants in his Carrara home.Many of Usama's pieces are inspired by immigration There's a wall of marble blocks sculpted with luggage handles, straps and zips. He tells how immigrants who used to carry lots of luggage now find their luggage has become much smaller, sometimes even just a mobile phone.Usama created a series of sculptures of women depicting the life of women in the Middle East and their freedom to travel around. His sculptures explore how women have sometimes been transformed by religion into more of an icon than a person, and how this can also become a prison. However, they often find virtual freedom through the internet.This piece is a woman on one side and on the other side a horse, her hair represents an extension of her thoughts.Usama loves teaching and sharing his skills whilst allowing his students to develop their own personalities in their work.alnassar.itinstagram.com/alnassarsculpture
Dive into the challenges of tracking Google Ads conversions and how to deal with them in this episode of Curry, Cheese, and Vegemite. Our Google Ads Aficionados talk about the common issues with conversion tracking and one unique issue Usama recently encountered. They then discuss the importance of tracking correct data, how to do so, and how to use that data to optimize your campaigns. They also talk about the future of AI and the possible changes it can make for data analysis and the future of marketing with AI in 2025. Watch the video now.Connect with The Google Ads Aficionados on LinkedIn:Usama Khan: / usama-khan-mk Colby Doyle: / colbycdoyle Glen Wilson: / glenmwilson Related videos:
Dive into the challenges of tracking Google Ads conversions and how to deal with them in this episode of Curry, Cheese, and Vegemite. Our Google Ads Aficionados talk about the common issues with conversion tracking and one unique issue Usama recently encountered. They then discuss the importance of tracking correct data, how to do so, and how to use that data to optimize your campaigns. They also talk about the future of AI and the possible changes it can make for data analysis and the future of marketing with AI in 2025. Watch the video now.Connect with The Google Ads Aficionados on LinkedIn:Usama Khan: / usama-khan-mk Colby Doyle: / colbycdoyle Glen Wilson: / glenmwilson Related videos:
Usama Dakdok is the founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He is the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992. With his knowledge of Islam he founded The Straight Way of Grace Ministry. Usama speaks fluent Arabic and has translated the Qur'an into English. He's the author of Exposing the Truth about the Qur'an and Exposing the Truth About Jihad and the booklets, The Violent Truth about Islam and The Straight Way to Eternal Life. For many years Usama has traveled the country to equip the church to minister to Muslims and to warn Americans about the deceptive methods being used that lead many into the cult of Islam.On Monday's Crosstalk, Jim interviewed Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy. While discussing national security threats against the U.S., Jim referenced an article from Newsmax that came out this past Sunday. In the article, terrorists were calling for New Year's Eve attacks to take place on a global scale. Jim emphasized that this didn't mean they would happen but that there was a call for such activity to happen.Then early on New Year's Day, terrorism struck New Orleans. A man drove a truck into a large crowd. 15 people are said to have been killed with many others injured. The alleged suspect is Shamsud-Din Jabbar.Interestingly, the mayor of New Orleans called this a terrorist attack, yet the FBI initially said it's not.
Usama Dakdok is the founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He is the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992. With his knowledge of Islam he founded The Straight Way of Grace Ministry. Usama speaks fluent Arabic and has translated the Qur'an into English. He's the author of Exposing the Truth about the Qur'an and Exposing the Truth About Jihad and the booklets, The Violent Truth about Islam and The Straight Way to Eternal Life. For many years Usama has traveled the country to equip the church to minister to Muslims and to warn Americans about the deceptive methods being used that lead many into the cult of Islam.On Monday's Crosstalk, Jim interviewed Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy. While discussing national security threats against the U.S., Jim referenced an article from Newsmax that came out this past Sunday. In the article, terrorists were calling for New Year's Eve attacks to take place on a global scale. Jim emphasized that this didn't mean they would happen but that there was a call for such activity to happen.Then early on New Year's Day, terrorism struck New Orleans. A man drove a truck into a large crowd. 15 people are said to have been killed with many others injured. The alleged suspect is Shamsud-Din Jabbar.Interestingly, the mayor of New Orleans called this a terrorist attack, yet the FBI initially said it's not.
If you're preparing for a major sales event or you feel your Black Friday ads could have been better, our Google Ads Aficionados are here to help! Usama, Colby, and Glen share effective strategies to optimize Google Ads campaigns even before the sale begins. Watch the video now. Connect with The Google Ads Aficionados on LinkedIn:Usama Khan: / Colby Doyle: / Glen Wilson: / glenmwilson 0:00 Intro1:02 The Google Ads Aficionados: Google Ads Strategies Before Launching a Sale2:47 Get the basics right5:45 Prime the audience early9:27 Portfolio Bid and Budget Strategy
In this episode of Curry, Cheese, and Vegemite: The Google Ads Aficionados, Usama, Colby, and Glen dive into John Moran's Shopping Feeder Strategy that resulted in a revenue increase of 127.81%. This strategy uses a low tROAS Shopping campaign alongside of a higher tROAS Performance Max feed only campaign with only that one product. Watch this video as our Google Ads experts share their results with the strategy and explain how running other campaigns alongside PMax can help boost sales.John Moran's LinkedIn post about the Shopping Feeder Strategy: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnmo...Related videos:
Our hilarious buddy and cutie pie Harshil tells us all about his career with Penn Masala--the addictions, sordid affairs, violent in-fighting. Hahaha JK it was mad chill. He also tells us about a time Usama challenged a Penn Masala singer to a contest and tried to mog him at UT Austin.
Usama Dakdok is Founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He is the speaker on the daily radio broadcast Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992. With his knowledge of Islam, he founded The Straight Way of Grace Ministry. Usama speaks fluent Arabic and has translated the Quran into English. He is the author of Exposing the Truth about the Qur'an, Exposing the Truth About Jihad, The Violent Truth about Islam and The Straight Way to Eternal Life. For many years Usama has travelled the country to equip the church to minister to Muslims and to warn Americans about the deceptive methods being used that lead many into the cult of Islam.While many have falsely called Islam "a religion of peace," Islam continues in its threats against Israel, Europe and the United States of America. And yet Islam is viewed by many as just being another religion.Some erroneously teach that the god of Islam and Jehovah God are one in the same. Don't be deceived. They are not one in the same.Rapes and sexual assaults continue rampantly in the name of Allah. There are so-called "honor killings" from Muslims against their own family members who leave the teachings of Islam. Threats continue against Jews, Christians and nations that have not surrendered to the teachings of Islam. Usama Dakdok has been trying to awaken many out of their slumber on this issue.
Usama Dakdok is Founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He is the speaker on the daily radio broadcast Revealing the Truth About Islam. Born and raised in Egypt, Usama learned about Islam just as every other student does in a Muslim country. He also studied for a university degree in Egypt which included the study of Sharia, which is Islamic law. He first came to America in 1992. With his knowledge of Islam, he founded The Straight Way of Grace Ministry. Usama speaks fluent Arabic and has translated the Quran into English. He is the author of Exposing the Truth about the Qur'an, Exposing the Truth About Jihad, The Violent Truth about Islam and The Straight Way to Eternal Life. For many years Usama has travelled the country to equip the church to minister to Muslims and to warn Americans about the deceptive methods being used that lead many into the cult of Islam.While many have falsely called Islam "a religion of peace," Islam continues in its threats against Israel, Europe and the United States of America. And yet Islam is viewed by many as just being another religion.Some erroneously teach that the god of Islam and Jehovah God are one in the same. Don't be deceived. They are not one in the same.Rapes and sexual assaults continue rampantly in the name of Allah. There are so-called "honor killings" from Muslims against their own family members who leave the teachings of Islam. Threats continue against Jews, Christians and nations that have not surrendered to the teachings of Islam. Usama Dakdok has been trying to awaken many out of their slumber on this issue.
In these last few days, many of the companions explicitly disregarded the prophet's instructions in order to secure political power after his demise. The prophet had attempted to prevent their schemes by instructing many of the senior companions to leave Medina with Usama ibn Zayd, so that Imam Ali could assume leadership without interference, but many delayed and made excuses.Some hypocrites were known, but others were skilled at hiding their hypocrisy as proven by the failed assassination attempt.In the even known as "The Calamity of Thursday", while Prophet Muhammad lay on his death bed he decided to take an extra step to explicitly document the his successor and asked for something to write to leave a message "after which you'll never go astray."However, a group of companions who were around him at the time, including Umar, realized that the prophet was planning to document his succession plan and started to strongly object and shout, prompting Prophet Muhammad to order them to leave.The lecture analyzes the various Sunni sources which indicate that the opposition group, which Umar was part of, started saying prophet was "going insane."The fact that these people were willing to sling mud on the prophet's sanity showed to the prophet the futility of writing down his will later. If he were to do so, those people would cast the same aspersions on the prophet's will, casting doubts on his sanity during every instance where he designated Imam Ali as his successor. This could be potentially stretched back all the way to revelation, and the spread of such slander would put people's belief in Islam itself at risk.Lecture notes available at http://www.why-quran.org/?p=796.Subscribe at http://www.why-quran.org/subscribe to watch the lectures live and participate in the Q&A at the end of each class.Video recording of this lecture + Q&A available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBxvKOHjZcM&list=PLpkB0iwLgfTat-Pgh4W3WFmupPamiC9UT.
The Prophet's death was impending, and he had commanded all his companions to join Usama ibn Zayd's army to go fight the Romans. Usama was a young man, and many companions chaffed at being put under the leadership of something that age. The prophet, while sick, had to rebuke them to send them back to the army.Despite his illness, the Prophet would still go lead prayer at the masjid. After the prayer he summoned some sahaba who were supposed to have left with Usama, including Abu Bakr and Umar asking "Why have you delayed obeying my order?" and heard back feeble answers in response. He scolded them, repeatning the instruction to join the army.Another day, the Prophet was too ill to lead salaat, and Aisha and Hafsa each suggested their fathers, Abu Bakr and Umar, lead the salaat instead. The Prophet realized those men were still in town and that these two women were eager to promote their own fathers. He scolded the two saying "Stop, for you are like the female companions of Yusuf"The Abu Bark and Umar containued to stay in Medina until the Prophet's demise, ignoring his orders to leave.Lecture notes available at http://www.why-quran.org/?p=792.Subscribe at http://www.why-quran.org/subscribe to watch the lectures live and participate in the Q&A at the end of each class.Video recording of this lecture + Q&A available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQhfMdDYZok&list=PLpkB0iwLgfTat-Pgh4W3WFmupPamiC9UT.
The pod is back gang! After a brief hiatus on account of Tucker facing insurmountable financial difficulties we have overcome all odds and returned with an absolute banger. The handsome Usama Siddiquee is on the show this week and we get into it. We talk growing up ugly, trying to find a woman, how it has effected us as adults and blah blah blah. Give it a listen and follow Usama on socials @usamastandsup.Thanks again for listeninggg
In this episode of the Podiatry Legends Podcast, host Tyson Franklin interviews Usama Anwar and Zahra Chouthy, owners of Podiatry For All in Mauritius. They discuss their unique journey from the UK to Mauritius, highlighting the challenges and rewards of practising podiatry in a country with limited services. The conversation covers cultural insights, the importance of educating doctors and the local population about podiatry, and their personal stories and experiences, making this episode both informative and heartwarming. More detailed notes can be found on the Podiatry Legends Podcast website - https://www.podiatrylegends.com If you have any questions about this podcast episode or are looking for a speaker for an upcoming event, please email me at tyson@podiatrylegends.com, and we can discuss the range of topics I cover. PODIATRY MARKETING MASTERCLASS - LIVERPOOL MON. 3RD FEBRUARY, 2025 BOOKINGS - https://www.tysonfranklin.com/events/podiatrymarketingUK Do you have questions about your podiatry business, team, personal goals and career direction? If you do, I'm here to help in any way I can. I recommend following the link below to my calendar and scheduling a free 30-minute Zoom call. I guarantee that after we talk, you will have far more clarity on what is best for you, your business and your career. My SCHEDULE – https://calendly.com/tysonfranklin/podmeeting30 FACEBOOK GROUP Podiatry Business Owners Club – https://www.facebook.com/groups/podiatrybusinessownersclub Check out my YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@TysonFranklin MY BOOK is available on AMAZON It's No Secret…There's Money in Podiatry – https://amzn.to/3JhO9cz
Från 2021. Berättelsen om hur världens mäktigaste land letade över hela jorden för att hitta världens mest eftersökte terroristledare. Nya avsnitt från P3 Dokumentär hittar du först i Sveriges Radio Play. Sent en natt lyfter två militärhelikoptrar från den amerikanska basen i Afghanistan. De åker mot staden Abbottabad, där Usama Bin Ladin ska finnas. Det har tagit USA tio år att hitta dit.Sökandet efter terroristenElitsoldaterna är väl förberedda, ändå kraschar en av helikoptrarna vid landningen. Hemma i USA har jurister förberett flera sätt att rättfärdiga operationen – som i själva verket är minst sagt tveksam när det gäller internationell lag.Medverkande: Cindy Storer, fd analytiker på amerikanska underrättelsetjänsten, CIA. Will Chesney, fd elitsoldat som medverkade under räden i Abbottabad. Peter Bergen, journalist som intervjuade Usama Bin Laden 1997. Andreas Utterström, USA-expert. Saeed Shah, journalist baserad i Pakistan. Joby Warrick, författare.En dokumentär av: Love Lyssarides. Producent: Lars Truedson/ Tredje Statsmakten. Exekutiv producent: Jon Jordås. Dokumentären är producerad 2021.
If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you might have heard our ElevenLabs-powered AI co-host Charlie a few times. Text-to-speech has made amazing progress in the last 18 months, with OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode (aka “Her”) as a sneak peek of the future of AI interactions (see our “Building AGI in Real Time” recap). Yet, we had yet to see a real killer app for AI voice (not counting music).Today's guests, Raiza Martin and Usama Bin Shafqat, are the lead PM and AI engineer behind the NotebookLM feature flag that gave us the first viral AI voice experience, the “Deep Dive” podcast:The idea behind the “Audio Overviews” feature is simple: take a bunch of documents, websites, YouTube videos, etc, and generate a podcast out of them. This was one of the first demos that people built with voice models + RAG + GPT models, but it was always a glorified speech-to-text. Raiza and Usama took a very different approach:* Make it conversational: when you listen to a NotebookLM audio there are a ton of micro-interjections (Steven Johnson calls them disfluencies) like “Oh really?” or “Totally”, as well as pauses and “uh…”, like you would expect in a real conversation. These are not generated by the LLM in the transcript, but they are built into the the audio model. See ~28:00 in the pod for more details. * Listeners love tension: if two people are always in agreement on everything, it's not super interesting. They tuned the model to generate flowing conversations that mirror the tone and rhythm of human speech. They did not confirm this, but many suspect the 2 year old SoundStorm paper is related to this model.* Generating new insights: because the hosts' goal is not to summarize, but to entertain, it comes up with funny metaphors and comparisons that actually help expand on the content rather than just paraphrasing like most models do. We have had listeners make podcasts out of our podcasts, like this one.This is different than your average SOTA-chasing, MMLU-driven model buildooor. Putting product and AI engineering in the same room, having them build evals together, and understanding what the goal is lets you get these unique results. The 5 rules for AI PMsWe always focus on AI Engineers, but this episode had a ton of AI PM nuggets as well, which we wanted to collect as NotebookLM is one of the most successful products in the AI space:1. Less is more: the first version of the product had 0 customization options. All you could do is give it source documents, and then press a button to generate. Most users don't know what “temperature” or “top-k” are, so you're often taking the magic away by adding more options in the UI. Since recording they added a few, like a system prompt, but those were features that users were “hacking in”, as Simon Willison highlighted in his blog post.2. Use Real-Time Feedback: they built a community of 65,000 users on Discord that is constantly reporting issues and giving feedback; sometimes they noticed server downtime even before the Google internal monitoring did. Getting real time pings > aggregating user data when doing initial iterations. 3. Embrace Non-Determinism: AI outputs variability is a feature, not a bug. Rather than limiting the outputs from the get-go, build toggles that you can turn on/off with feature flags as the feedback starts to roll in.4. Curate with Taste: if you try your product and it sucks, you don't need more data to confirm it. Just scrap that and iterate again. This is even easier for a product like this; if you start listening to one of the podcasts and turn it off after 10 seconds, it's never a good sign. 5. Stay Hands-On: It's hard to build taste if you don't experiment. Trying out all your competitors products as well as unrelated tools really helps you understand what users are seeing in market, and how to improve on it.Chapters00:00 Introductions01:39 From Project Tailwind to NotebookLM09:25 Learning from 65,000 Discord members12:15 How NotebookLM works18:00 Working with Steven Johnson23:00 How to prioritize features25:13 Structuring the data pipelines29:50 How to eval34:34 Steering the podcast outputs37:51 Defining speakers personalities39:04 How do you make audio engaging?45:47 Humor is AGI51:38 Designing for non-determinism53:35 API when?55:05 Multilingual support and dialect considerations57:50 Managing system prompts and feature requests01:00:58 Future of NotebookLM01:04:59 Podcasts for your codebase01:07:16 Plans for real-time chat01:08:27 Wrap upShow Notes* Notebook LM* AI Test Kitchen* Nicholas Carlini* Steven Johnson* Wealth of Nations* Histories of Mysteries by Andrej Karpathy* chicken.pdf Threads* Area 120* Raiza Martin* Usama Bin ShafqatTranscriptNotebookLM [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, we're here today as guests on Latent Space. It's great to be here, I'm a long time listener and fan, they've had some great guests on this show before. Yeah, what an honor to have us, the hosts of another podcast, join as guests. I mean a huge thank you to Swyx and Alessio for the invite, thanks for having us on the show. Yeah really, it seems like they brought us here to talk a little bit about our show, our podcast. Yeah, I mean we've had lots of listeners ourselves, listeners at Deep Dive. Oh yeah, we've made a ton of audio overviews since we launched and we're learning a lot. There's probably a lot we can share around what we're building next, huh? Yeah, we'll share a little bit at least. The short version is we'll keep learning and getting better for you. We're glad you're along for the ride. So yeah, keep listening. Keep listening and stay curious. We promise to keep diving deep and bringing you even better options in the future. Stay curious.Alessio [00:00:52]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Residence at Decibel Partners. And I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:01:01]: Hey, and today we're back in the studio with our special guest, Raiza Martin. And Raiza, I forgot to get your last name, Shafqat.Raiza [00:01:10]: Yes.Swyx [00:01:10]: Okay, welcome.Raiza [00:01:12]: Hello, thank you for having us.Swyx [00:01:14]: So AI podcasters meet human podcasters, always fun. Congrats on the success of Notebook LM. I mean, how does it feel?Raiza [00:01:22]: It's been a lot of fun. A lot of it, honestly, was unexpected. But my favorite part is really listening to the audio overviews that people have been making.Swyx [00:01:29]: Maybe we should do a little bit of intros and tell the story. You know, what is your path into the sort of Google AI org? Or maybe, actually, I don't even know what org you guys are in.Raiza [00:01:39]: I can start. My name is Raisa. I lead the Notebook LM team inside of Google Labs. So specifically, that's the org that we're in. It's called Google Labs. It's only about two years old. And our whole mandate is really to build AI products. That's it. We work super closely with DeepMind. Our entire thing is just, like, try a bunch of things and see what's landing with users. And the background that I have is, really, I worked in payments before this, and I worked in ads right before, and then startups. I tell people, like, at every time that I changed orgs, I actually almost quit Google. Like, specifically, like, in between ads and payments, I was like, all right, I can't do this. Like, this is, like, super hard. I was like, it's not for me. I'm, like, a very zero-to-one person. But then I was like, okay, I'll try. I'll interview with other teams. And when I interviewed in payments, I was like, oh, these people are really cool. I don't know if I'm, like, a super good fit with this space, but I'll try it because the people are cool. And then I really enjoyed that, and then I worked on, like, zero-to-one features inside of payments, and I had a lot of fun. But then the time came again where I was like, oh, I don't know. It's like, it's time to leave. It's time to start my own thing. But then I interviewed inside of Google Labs, and I was like, oh, darn. Like, there's definitely, like—Alessio [00:02:48]: They got you again.Raiza [00:02:49]: They got me again. And so now I've been here for two years, and I'm happy that I stayed because especially with, you know, the recent success of Notebook LM, I'm like, dang, we did it. I actually got to do it. So that was really cool.Usama [00:03:02]: Kind of similar, honestly. I was at a big team at Google. We do sort of the data center supply chain planning stuff. Google has, like, the largest sort of footprint. Obviously, there's a lot of management stuff to do there. But then there was this thing called Area 120 at Google, which does not exist anymore. But I sort of wanted to do, like, more zero-to-one building and landed a role there. We were trying to build, like, a creator commerce platform called Kaya. It launched briefly a couple years ago. But then Area 120 sort of transitioned and morphed into Labs. And, like, over the last few years, like, the focus just got a lot clearer. Like, we were trying to build new AI products and do it in the wild and sort of co-create and all of that. So, you know, we've just been trying a bunch of different things. And this one really landed, which has felt pretty phenomenal. Really, really landed.Swyx [00:03:53]: Let's talk about the brief history of Notebook LM. You had a tweet, which is very helpful for doing research. May 2023, during Google I.O., you announced Project Tailwind.Raiza [00:04:03]: Yeah.Swyx [00:04:03]: So today is October 2024. So you joined October 2022?Raiza [00:04:09]: Actually, I used to lead AI Test Kitchen. And this was actually, I think, not I.O. 2023. I.O. 2022 is when we launched AI Test Kitchen, or announced it. And I don't know if you remember it.Swyx [00:04:23]: That's how you, like, had the basic prototype for Gemini.Raiza [00:04:26]: Yes, yes, exactly. Lambda.Swyx [00:04:28]: Gave beta access to people.Raiza [00:04:29]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember, I was like, wow, this is crazy. We're going to launch an LLM into the wild. And that was the first project that I was working on at Google. But at the same time, my manager at the time, Josh, he was like, hey, I want you to really think about, like, what real products would we build that are not just demos of the technology? That was in October of 2022. I was sitting next to an engineer that was working on a project called Talk to Small Corpus. His name was Adam. And the idea of Talk to Small Corpus is basically using LLM to talk to your data. And at the time, I was like, wait, there's some, like, really practical things that you can build here. And just a little bit of background, like, I was an adult learner. Like, I went to college while I was working a full-time job. And the first thing I thought was, like, this would have really helped me with my studying, right? Like, if I could just, like, talk to a textbook, especially, like, when I was tired after work, that would have been huge. We took a lot of, like, the Talk to Small Corpus prototypes, and I showed it to a lot of, like, college students, particularly, like, adult learners. They were like, yes, like, I get it, right? Like, I didn't even have to explain it to them. And we just continued to iterate the prototype from there to the point where we actually got a slot as part of the I.O. demo in 23.Swyx [00:05:42]: And Corpus, was it a textbook? Oh, my gosh.Raiza [00:05:45]: Yeah. It's funny. Actually, when he explained the project to me, he was like, talk to Small Corpus. It was like, talk to a small corpse?Swyx [00:05:51]: Yeah, nobody says Corpus.Raiza [00:06:00]: It was like, a small corpse? This is not AI. Yeah, yeah. And it really was just, like, a way for us to describe the amount of data that we thought, like, it could be good for.Swyx [00:06:02]: Yeah, but even then, you're still, like, doing rag stuff. Because, you know, the context length back then was probably, like, 2K, 4K.Raiza [00:06:08]: Yeah, it was basically rag.Raiza [00:06:09]: That was essentially what it was.Raiza [00:06:10]: And I remember, I was like, we were building the prototypes. And at the same time, I think, like, the rest of the world was. Right? We were seeing all of these, like, chat with PDF stuff come up. And I was like, come on, we gotta go. Like, we have to, like, push this out into the world. I think if there was anything, I wish we would have launched sooner because I wanted to learn faster. But I think, like, we netted out pretty well.Alessio [00:06:30]: Was the initial product just text-to-speech? Or were you also doing kind of, like, synthesizing of the content, refining it? Or were you just helping people read through it?Raiza [00:06:40]: Before we did the I.O. announcement in 23, we'd already done a lot of studies. And one of the first things that I realized was the first thing anybody ever typed was, summarize the thing. Right?Raiza [00:06:53]: Summarize the document.Raiza [00:06:54]: And it was, like, half like a test and half just like, oh, I know the content. I want to see how well it does this. So it was part of the first thing that we launched. It was called Project Tailwind back then. It was just Q&A, so you could chat with the doc just through text, and it would automatically generate a summary as well. I'm not sure if we had it back then.Raiza [00:07:12]: I think we did.Raiza [00:07:12]: It would also generate the key topics in your document, and it could support up to, like, 10 documents. So it wasn't just, like, a single doc.Alessio [00:07:20]: And then the I.O. demo went well, I guess. And then what was the discussion from there to where we are today? Is there any, maybe, intermediate step of the product that people missed between this was launch or?Raiza [00:07:33]: It was interesting because every step of the way, I think we hit, like, some pretty critical milestones. So I think from the initial demo, I think there was so much excitement of, like, wow, what is this thing that Google is launching? And so we capitalized on that. We built the wait list. That's actually when we also launched the Discord server, which has been huge for us because for us in particular, one of the things that I really wanted to do was to be able to launch features and get feedback ASAP. Like, the moment somebody tries it, like, I want to hear what they think right now, and I want to ask follow-up questions. And the Discord has just been so great for that. But then we basically took the feedback from I.O., we continued to refine the product.Raiza [00:08:12]: So we added more features.Raiza [00:08:13]: We added sort of, like, the ability to save notes, write notes. We generate follow-up questions. So there's a bunch of stuff in the product that shows, like, a lot of that research. But it was really the rolling out of things. Like, we removed the wait list, so rolled out to all of the United States. We rolled out to over 200 countries and territories. We started supporting more languages, both in the UI and, like, the actual source stuff. We experienced, like, in terms of milestones, there was, like, an explosion of, like, users in Japan. This was super interesting in terms of just, like, unexpected. Like, people would write to us and they would be like, this is amazing. I have to read all of these rules in English, but I can chat in Japanese. It's like, oh, wow. That's true, right? Like, with LLMs, you kind of get this natural, it translates the content for you. And you can ask in your sort of preferred mode. And I think that's not just, like, a language thing, too. I think there's, like, I do this test with Wealth of Nations all the time because it's, like, a pretty complicated text to read. The Evan Smith classic.Swyx [00:09:11]: It's, like, 400 pages or something.Raiza [00:09:12]: Yeah. But I like this test because I'm, like, asking, like, Normie, you know, plain speak. And then it summarizes really well for me. It sort of adapts to my tone.Swyx [00:09:22]: Very capitalist.Raiza [00:09:25]: Very on brand.Swyx [00:09:25]: I just checked in on a Notebook LM Discord. 65,000 people. Yeah.Raiza [00:09:29]: Crazy.Swyx [00:09:29]: Just, like, for one project within Google. It's not, like, it's not labs. It's just Notebook LM.Raiza [00:09:35]: Just Notebook LM.Swyx [00:09:36]: What do you learn from the community?Raiza [00:09:39]: I think that the Discord is really great for hearing about a couple of things.Raiza [00:09:43]: One, when things are going wrong. I think, honestly, like, our fastest way that we've been able to find out if, like, the servers are down or there's just an influx of people being, like, it saysRaiza [00:09:53]: system unable to answer.Raiza [00:09:54]: Anybody else getting this?Raiza [00:09:56]: And I'm, like, all right, let's go.Raiza [00:09:58]: And it actually catches it a lot faster than, like, our own monitoring does.Raiza [00:10:01]: It's, like, that's been really cool. So, thank you.Swyx [00:10:03]: Canceled eat a dog.Raiza [00:10:05]: So, thank you to everybody. Please keep reporting it. I think the second thing is really the use cases.Raiza [00:10:10]: I think when we put it out there, I was, like, hey, I have a hunch of how people will use it, but, like, to actually hear about, you know, not just the context of, like, the use of Notebook LM, but, like, what is this person's life like? Why do they care about using this tool?Raiza [00:10:23]: Especially people who actually have trouble using it, but they keep pushing.Raiza [00:10:27]: Like, that's just so critical to understand what was so motivating, right?Raiza [00:10:31]: Like, what was your problem that was, like, so worth solving? So, that's, like, a second thing.Raiza [00:10:34]: The third thing is also just hearing sort of, like, when we have wins and when we don't have wins because there's actually a lot of functionality where I'm, like, hmm, IRaiza [00:10:42]: don't know if that landed super well or if that was actually super critical.Raiza [00:10:45]: As part of having this sort of small project, right, I want to be able to unlaunch things, too. So, it's not just about just, like, rolling things out and testing it and being, like, wow, now we have, like, 99 features. Like, hopefully we get to a place where it's, like, there's just a really strong core feature set and the things that aren't as great, we can just unlaunch.Swyx [00:11:02]: What have you unlaunched? I have to ask.Raiza [00:11:04]: I'm in the process of unlaunching some stuff, but, for example, we had this idea that you could highlight the text in your source passage and then you could transform it. And nobody was really using it and it was, like, a very complicated piece of our architecture and it's very hard to continue supporting it in the context of new features. So, we were, like, okay, let's do a 50-50 sunset of this thing and see if anybody complains.Raiza [00:11:28]: And so far, nobody has.Swyx [00:11:29]: Is there, like, a feature flagging paradigm inside of your architecture that lets you feature flag these things easily?Raiza [00:11:36]: Yes, and actually...Raiza [00:11:37]: What is it called?Swyx [00:11:38]: Like, I love feature flagging.Raiza [00:11:40]: You mean, like, in terms of just, like, being able to expose things to users?Swyx [00:11:42]: Yeah, as a PM. Like, this is your number one tool, right?Raiza [00:11:44]: Yeah, yeah.Swyx [00:11:45]: Let's try this out. All right, if it works, roll it out. If it doesn't, roll it back, you know?Raiza [00:11:49]: Yeah, I mean, we just run Mendel experiments for the most part. And, actually, I don't know if you saw it, but on Twitter, somebody was able to get around our flags and they enabled all the experiments.Raiza [00:11:58]: They were, like, check out what the Notebook LM team is cooking.Raiza [00:12:02]: I was, like, oh!Raiza [00:12:03]: And I was at lunch with the rest of the team and I was, like, I was eating. I was, like, guys, guys, Magic Draft League!Raiza [00:12:10]: They were, like, oh, no!Raiza [00:12:12]: I was, like, okay, just finish eating and then let's go figure out what to do.Raiza [00:12:15]: Yeah.Alessio [00:12:15]: I think a post-mortem would be fun, but I don't think we need to do it on the podcast now. Can we just talk about what's behind the magic? So, I think everybody has questions, hypotheses about what models power it. I know you might not be able to share everything, but can you just get people very basic? How do you take the data and put it in the model? What text model you use? What's the text-to-speech kind of, like, jump between the two? Sure.Raiza [00:12:42]: Yeah.Raiza [00:12:42]: I was going to say, SRaiza, he manually does all the podcasts.Raiza [00:12:46]: Oh, thank you.Usama [00:12:46]: Really fast. You're very fast, yeah.Raiza [00:12:48]: Both of the voices at once.Usama [00:12:51]: Voice actor.Raiza [00:12:52]: Good, good.Usama [00:12:52]: Yeah, so, for a bit of background, we were building this thing sort of outside Notebook LM to begin with. Like, just the idea is, like, content transformation, right? Like, we can do different modalities. Like, everyone knows that. Everyone's been poking at it. But, like, how do you make it really useful? And, like, one of the ways we thought was, like, okay, like, you maybe, like, you know, people learn better when they're hearing things. But TTS exists, and you can, like, narrate whatever's on screen. But you want to absorb it the same way. So, like, that's where we sort of started out into the realm of, like, maybe we try, like, you know, two people are having a conversation kind of format. We didn't actually start out thinking this would live in Notebook, right? Like, Notebook was sort of, we built this demo out independently, tried out, like, a few different sort of sources. The main idea was, like, go from some sort of sources and transform it into a listenable, engaging audio format. And then through that process, we, like, unlocked a bunch more sort of learnings. Like, for example, in a sense, like, you're not prompting the model as much because, like, the information density is getting unrolled by the model prompting itself, in a sense. Because there's two speakers, and they're both technically, like, AI personas, right? That have different angles of looking at things. And, like, they'll have a discussion about it. And that sort of, we realized that's kind of what was making it riveting, in a sense. Like, you care about what comes next, even if you've read the material already. Because, like, people say they get new insights on their own journals or books or whatever. Like, anything that they've written themselves. So, yeah, from a modeling perspective, like, it's, like Reiza said earlier, like, we work with the DeepMind audio folks pretty closely. So, they're always cooking up new techniques to, like, get better, more human-like audio. And then Gemini 1.5 is really, really good at absorbing long context. So, we sort of, like, generally put those things together in a way that we could reliably produce the audio.Raiza [00:14:52]: I would add, like, there's something really nuanced, I think, about sort of the evolution of, like, the utility of text-to-speech. Where, if it's just reading an actual text response, and I've done this several times. I do it all the time with, like, reading my text messages. Or, like, sometimes I'm trying to read, like, a really dense paper, but I'm trying to do actual work. I'll have it, like, read out the screen. There is something really robotic about it that is not engaging. And it's really hard to consume content in that way. And it's never been really effective. Like, particularly for me, where I'm, like, hey, it's actually just, like, it's fine for, like, short stuff. Like, texting, but even that, it's, like, not that great. So, I think the frontier of experimentation here was really thinking about there is a transform that needs to happen in between whatever.Raiza [00:15:38]: Here's, like, my resume, right?Raiza [00:15:39]: Or here's, like, a 100-page slide deck or something. There is a transform that needs to happen that is inherently editorial. And I think this is where, like, that two-person persona, right, dialogue model, they have takes on the material that you've presented. That's where it really sort of, like, brings the content to life in a way that's, like, not robotic. And I think that's, like, where the magic is, is, like, you don't actually know what's going to happen when you press generate.Raiza [00:16:08]: You know, for better or for worse.Raiza [00:16:09]: Like, to the extent that, like, people are, like, no, I actually want it to be more predictable now. Like, I want to be able to tell them. But I think that initial, like, wow was because you didn't know, right? When you upload your resume, what's it about to say about you? And I think I've seen enough of these where I'm, like, oh, it gave you good vibes, right? Like, you knew it was going to say, like, something really cool. As we start to shape this product, I think we want to try to preserve as much of that wow as much as we can. Because I do think, like, exposing, like, all the knobs and, like, the dials, like, we've been thinking about this a lot. It's like, hey, is that, like, the actual thing?Raiza [00:16:43]: Is that the thing that people really want?Alessio [00:16:45]: Have you found differences in having one model just generate the conversation and then using text-to-speech to kind of fake two people? Or, like, are you actually using two different kind of system prompts to, like, have a conversation step-by-step? I'm always curious, like, if persona system prompts make a big difference? Or, like, you just put in one prompt and then you just let it run?Usama [00:17:05]: I guess, like, generally we use a lot of inference, as you can tell with, like, the spinning thing takes a while. So, yeah, there's definitely, like, a bunch of different things happening under the hood. We've tried both approaches and they have their, sort of, drawbacks and benefits. I think that that idea of, like, questioning, like, the two different personas, like, persists throughout, like, whatever approach we try. It's like, there's a bit of, like, imperfection in there. Like, we had to really lean into the fact that, like, to build something that's engaging, like, it needs to be somewhat human and it needs to be just not a chatbot. Like, that was sort of, like, what we need to diverge from. It's like, you know, most chatbots will just narrate the same kind of answer, like, given the same sources, for the most part, which is ridiculous. So, yeah, there's, like, experimentation there under the hood, like, with the model to, like, make sure that it's spitting out, like, different takes and different personas and different, sort of, prompting each other is, like, a good analogy, I guess.Swyx [00:18:00]: Yeah, I think Steven Johnson, I think he's on your team. I don't know what his role is. He seems like chief dreamer, writer.Raiza [00:18:08]: Yeah, I mean, I can comment on Steven. So, Steven joined, actually, in the very early days, I think before it was even a fully funded project. And I remember when he joined, I was like, Steven Johnson's going to be on my team? You know, and for folks who don't know him, Steven is a New York Times bestselling author of, like, 14 books. He has a PBS show. He's, like, incredibly smart, just, like, a true, sort of, celebrity by himself. And then he joined Google, and he was like, I want to come here, and I want to build the thing that I've always dreamed of, which is a tool to help me think. I was like, a what? Like, a tool to help you think? I was like, what do you need help with? Like, you seem to be doing great on your own. And, you know, he would describe this to me, and I would watch his flow. And aside from, like, providing a lot of inspiration, to be honest, like, when I watched Steven work, I was like, oh, nobody works like this, right? Like, this is what makes him special. Like, he is such a dedicated, like, researcher and journalist, and he's so thorough, he's so smart. And then I had this realization of, like, maybe Steven is the product. Maybe the work is to take Steven's expertise and bring it to, like, everyday people that could really benefit from this. Like, just watching him work, I was like, oh, I could definitely use, like, a mini-Steven, like, doing work for me. Like, that would make me a better PM. And then I thought very quickly about, like, the adjacent roles that could use sort of this, like, research and analysis tool. And so, aside from being, you know, chief dreamer, Steven also represents, like, a super workflow that I think all of us, like, if we had access to a tool like it, would just inherently, like, make us better.Swyx [00:19:46]: Did you make him express his thoughts while he worked, or you just silently watched him, or how does this work?Raiza [00:19:52]: Oh, now you're making me admit it. But yes, I did just silently watch him.Swyx [00:19:57]: This is a part of the PM toolkit, right? They give user interviews and all that.Raiza [00:20:00]: Yeah, I mean, I did interview him, but I noticed, like, if I interviewed him, it was different than if I just watched him. And I did the same thing with students all the time. Like, I followed a lot of students around. I watched them study. I would ask them, like, oh, how do you feel now, right?Raiza [00:20:15]: Or why did you do that? Like, what made you do that, actually?Raiza [00:20:18]: Or why are you upset about, like, this particular thing? Why are you cranky about this particular topic? And it was very similar, I think, for Steven, especially because he was describing, he was in the middle of writing a book. And he would describe, like, oh, you know, here's how I research things, and here's how I keep my notes. Oh, and here's how I do it. And it was really, he was doing this sort of, like, self-questioning, right? Like, now we talk about, like, chain of, you know, reasoning or thought, reflection.Raiza [00:20:44]: And I was like, oh, he's the OG.Raiza [00:20:46]: Like, I watched him do it in real time. I was like, that's, like, L-O-M right there. And to be able to bring sort of that expertise in a way that was, like, you know, maybe, like, costly inference-wise, but really have, like, that ability inside of a tool that was, like, for starters, free inside of NotebookLM, it was good to learn whether or not people really did find use out of it.Swyx [00:21:05]: So did he just commit to using NotebookLM for everything, or did you just model his existing workflow?Raiza [00:21:12]: Both, right?Raiza [00:21:12]: Like, in the beginning, there was no product for him to use. And so he just kept describing the thing that he wanted. And then eventually, like, we started building the thing. And then I would start watching him use it. One of the things that I love about Steven is he uses the product in ways where it kind of does it, but doesn't quite. Like, he's always using it at, like, the absolute max limit of this thing. But the way that he describes it is so full of promise, where he's like, I can see it going here. And all I have to do is sort of, like, meet him there and sort of pressure test whether or not, you know, everyday people want it. And we just have to build it.Swyx [00:21:47]: I would say OpenAI has a pretty similar person, Andrew Mason, I think his name is. It's very similar, like, just from the writing world and using it as a tool for thought to shape Chachabitty. I don't think that people who use AI tools to their limit are common. I'm looking at my NotebookLM now. I've got two sources. You have a little, like, source limit thing. And my bar is over here, you know, and it stretches across the whole thing. I'm like, did he fill it up?Raiza [00:22:09]: Yes, and he has, like, a higher limit than others, I think. He fills it up.Raiza [00:22:14]: Oh, yeah.Raiza [00:22:14]: Like, I don't think Steven even has a limit, actually.Swyx [00:22:17]: And he has Notes, Google Drive stuff, PDFs, MP3, whatever.Raiza [00:22:22]: Yes, and one of my favorite demos, he just did this recently, is he has actually PDFs of, like, handwritten Marie Curie notes. I see.Swyx [00:22:29]: So you're doing image recognition as well. Yeah, it does support it today.Raiza [00:22:32]: So if you have a PDF that's purely images, it will recognize it.Raiza [00:22:36]: But his demo is just, like, super powerful.Raiza [00:22:37]: He's like, okay, here's Marie Curie's notes. And it's like, here's how I'm using it to analyze it. And I'm using it for, like, this thing that I'm writing.Raiza [00:22:44]: And that's really compelling.Raiza [00:22:45]: It's like the everyday person doesn't think of these applications. And I think even, like, when I listen to Steven's demo, I see the gap. I see how Steven got there, but I don't see how I could without him. And so there's a lot of work still for us to build of, like, hey, how do I bring that magic down to, like, zero work? Because I look at all the steps that he had to take in order to do it, and I'm like, okay, that's product work for us, right? Like, that's just onboarding.Alessio [00:23:09]: And so from an engineering perspective, people come to you and it's like, hey, I need to use this handwritten notes from Marie Curie from hundreds of years ago. How do you think about adding support for, like, data sources and then maybe any fun stories and, like, supporting more esoteric types of inputs?Raiza [00:23:25]: So I think about the product in three ways, right? So there's the sources, the source input. There's, like, the capabilities of, like, what you could do with those sources. And then there's the third space, which is how do you output it into the world? Like, how do you put it back out there? There's a lot of really basic sources that we don't support still, right? I think there's sort of, like, the handwritten notes stuff is one, but even basic things like DocX or, like, PowerPoint, right? Like, these are the things that people, everyday people are like, hey, my professor actually gave me everything in DocX. Can you support that? And then just, like, basic stuff, like images and PDFs combined with text. Like, there's just a really long roadmap for sources that I think we just have to work on.Raiza [00:24:04]: So that's, like, a big piece of it.Raiza [00:24:05]: On the output side, and I think this is, like, one of the most interesting things that we learned really early on, is, sure, there's, like, the Q&A analysis stuff, which is like, hey, when did this thing launch? Okay, you found it in the slide deck. Here's the answer. But most of the time, the reason why people ask those questions is because they're trying to make something new. And so when, actually, when some of those early features leaked, like, a lot of the features we're experimenting with are the output types. And so you can imagine that people care a lot about the resources that they're putting into NotebookLM because they're trying to create something new. So I think equally as important as, like, the source inputs are the outputs that we're helping people to create. And really, like, you know, shortly on the roadmap, we're thinking about how do we help people use NotebookLM to distribute knowledge? And that's, like, one of the most compelling use cases is, like, shared notebooks. It's, like, a way to share knowledge. How do we help people take sources and, like, one-click new documents out of it, right? And I think that's something that people think is, like, oh, yeah, of course, right? Like, one push a document. But what does it mean to do it right? Like, to do it in your style, in your brand, right?Raiza [00:25:08]: To follow your guidelines, stuff like that.Raiza [00:25:09]: So I think there's a lot of work, like, on both sides of that equation.Raiza [00:25:13]: Interesting.Swyx [00:25:13]: Any comments on the engineering side of things?Usama [00:25:16]: So, yeah, like I said, I was mostly working on building the text to audio, which kind of lives as a separate engineering pipeline, almost, that we then put into NotebookLM. But I think there's probably tons of NotebookLM engineering war stories on dealing with sources. And so I don't work too closely with engineers directly. But I think a lot of it does come down to, like, Gemini's native understanding of images really well with the latest generation.Raiza [00:25:39]: Yeah, I think on the engineering and modeling side, I think we are a really good example of a team that's put a product out there, and we're getting a lot of feedback from the users, and we return the data to the modeling team, right? To the extent that we say, hey, actually, you know what people are uploading, but we can't really support super well?Raiza [00:25:56]: Text plus image, right?Raiza [00:25:57]: Especially to the extent that, like, NotebookLM can handle up to 50 sources, 500,000 words each. Like, you're not going to be able to jam all of that into, like, the context window. So how do we do multimodal embeddings with that? There's really, like, a lot of things that we have to solve that are almost there, but not quite there yet.Alessio [00:26:16]: On then turning it into audio, I think one of the best things is it has so many of the human... Does that happen in the text generation that then becomes audio? Or is that a part of, like, the audio model that transforms the text?Usama [00:26:27]: It's a bit of both, I would say. The audio model is definitely trying to mimic, like, certain human intonations and, like, sort of natural, like, breathing and pauses and, like, laughter and things like that. But yeah, in generating, like, the text, we also have to sort of give signals on, like, where those things maybe would make sense.Alessio [00:26:45]: And on the input side, instead of having a transcript versus having the audio, like, can you take some of the emotions out of it, too? If I'm giving, like, for example, when we did the recaps of our podcast, we can either give audio of the pod or we can give a diarized transcription of it. But, like, the transcription doesn't have some of the, you know, voice kind of, like, things.Raiza [00:27:05]: Yeah, yeah.Alessio [00:27:05]: Do you reconstruct that when people upload audio or how does that work?Raiza [00:27:09]: So when you upload audio today, we just transcribe it. So it is quite lossy in the sense that, like, we don't transcribe, like, the emotion from that as a source. But when you do upload a text file and it has a lot of, like, that annotation, I think that there is some ability for it to be reused in, like, the audio output, right? But I think it will still contextualize it in the deep dive format. So I think that's something that's, like, particularly important is, like, hey, today we only have one format.Raiza [00:27:37]: It's deep dive.Raiza [00:27:38]: It's meant to be a pretty general overview and it is pretty peppy.Raiza [00:27:42]: It's just very upbeat.Raiza [00:27:43]: It's very enthusiastic, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Even if you had, like, a sad topic, I think they would find a way to be, like, silver lining, though.Raiza [00:27:50]: Really?Raiza [00:27:51]: Yeah.Raiza [00:27:51]: We're having a good chat.Raiza [00:27:54]: Yeah, that's awesome.Swyx [00:27:54]: One of the ways, many, many, many ways that deep dive went viral is people saying, like, if you want to feel good about yourself, just drop in your LinkedIn. Any other, like, favorite use cases that you saw from people discovering things in social media?Raiza [00:28:08]: I mean, there's so many funny ones and I love the funny ones.Raiza [00:28:11]: I think because I'm always relieved when I watch them. I'm like, haha, that was funny and not scary. It's great.Raiza [00:28:17]: There was another one that was interesting, which was a startup founder putting their landing page and being like, all right, let's test whether or not, like, the value prop is coming through. And I was like, wow, that's right.Raiza [00:28:26]: That's smart.Usama [00:28:27]: Yeah.Raiza [00:28:28]: And then I saw a couple of other people following up on that, too.Raiza [00:28:32]: Yeah.Swyx [00:28:32]: I put my about page in there and, like, yeah, if there are things that I'm not comfortable with, I should remove it. You know, so that it can pick it up. Right.Usama [00:28:39]: I think that the personal hype machine was, like, a pretty viral one. I think, like, people uploaded their dreams and, like, some people, like, keep sort of dream journals and it, like, would sort of comment on those and, like, it was therapeutic. I didn't see those.Raiza [00:28:54]: Those are good. I hear from Googlers all the time, especially because we launched it internally first. And I think we launched it during the, you know, the Q3 sort of, like, check-in cycle. So all Googlers have to write notes about, like, hey, you know, what'd you do in Q3? And what Googlers were doing is they would write, you know, whatever they accomplished in Q3 and then they would create an audio overview. And these people they didn't know would just ping me and be like, wow, I feel really good, like, going into a meeting with my manager.Raiza [00:29:25]: And I was like, good, good, good, good. You really did that, right?Usama [00:29:29]: I think another cool one is just, like, any Wikipedia article. Yeah. Like, you drop it in and it's just, like, suddenly, like, the best sort of summary overview.Raiza [00:29:38]: I think that's what Karpathy did, right? Like, he has now a Spotify channel called Histories of Mysteries, which is basically, like, he just took, like, interesting stuff from Wikipedia and made audio overviews out of it.Swyx [00:29:50]: Yeah, he became a podcaster overnight.Raiza [00:29:52]: Yeah.Raiza [00:29:53]: I'm here for it. I fully support him.Raiza [00:29:55]: I'm racking up the listens for him.Swyx [00:29:58]: Honestly, it's useful even without the audio. You know, I feel like the audio does add an element to it, but I always want, you know, paired audio and text. And it's just amazing to see what people are organically discovering. I feel like it's because you laid the groundwork with NotebookLM and then you came in and added the sort of TTS portion and made it so good, so human, which is weird. Like, it's this engineering process of humans. Oh, one thing I wanted to ask. Do you have evals?Raiza [00:30:23]: Yeah.Swyx [00:30:23]: Yes.Raiza [00:30:24]: What? Potatoes for chefs.Swyx [00:30:27]: What is that? What do you mean, potatoes?Raiza [00:30:29]: Oh, sorry.Raiza [00:30:29]: Sorry. We were joking with this, like, a couple of weeks ago. We were doing, like, side-by-sides. But, like, Raiza sent me the file and it was literally called Potatoes for Chefs. And I was like, you know, my job is really serious, but you have to laugh a little bit. Like, the title of the file is, like, Potatoes for Chefs.Swyx [00:30:47]: Is it like a training document for chefs?Usama [00:30:50]: It's just a side-by-side for, like, two different kind of audio transcripts.Swyx [00:30:54]: The question is really, like, as you iterate, the typical engineering advice is you establish some kind of test or benchmark. You're at, like, 30 percent. You want to get it up to 90, right?Raiza [00:31:05]: Yeah.Swyx [00:31:05]: What does that look like for making something sound human and interesting and voice?Usama [00:31:11]: We have the sort of formal eval process as well. But I think, like, for this particular project, we maybe took a slightly different route to begin with. Like, there was a lot of just within the team listening sessions. A lot of, like, sort of, like... Dogfooding.Raiza [00:31:23]: Yeah.Usama [00:31:23]: Like, I think the bar that we tried to get to before even starting formal evals with raters and everything was much higher than I think other projects would. Like, because that's, as you said, like, the traditional advice, right? Like, get that ASAP. Like, what are you looking to improve on? Whatever benchmark it is. So there was a lot of just, like, critical listening. And I think a lot of making sure that those improvements actually could go into the model. And, like, we're happy with that human element of it. And then eventually we had to obviously distill those down into an eval set. But, like, still there's, like, the team is just, like, a very, very, like, avid user of the product at all stages.Raiza [00:32:02]: I think you just have to be really opinionated.Raiza [00:32:05]: I think that sometimes, if you are, your intuition is just sharper and you can move a lot faster on the product.Raiza [00:32:12]: Because it's like, if you hold that bar high, right?Raiza [00:32:15]: Like, if you think about, like, the iterative cycle, it's like, hey, we could take, like, six months to ship this thing. To get it to, like, mid where we were. Or we could just, like, listen to this and be like, yeah, that's not it, right? And I don't need a rater to tell me that. That's my preference, right? And collectively, like, if I have two other people listen to it, they'll probably agree. And it's just kind of this step of, like, just keep improving it to the point where you're like, okay, now I think this is really impressive. And then, like, do evals, right? And then validate that.Swyx [00:32:43]: Was the sound model done and frozen before you started doing all this? Or are you also saying, hey, we need to improve the sound model as well? Both.Usama [00:32:51]: Yeah, we were making improvements on the audio and just, like, generating the transcript as well. I think another weird thing here was, like, we needed to be entertaining. And that's much harder to quantify than some of the other benchmarks that you can make for, like, you know, Sweebench or get better at this math.Swyx [00:33:10]: Do you just have people rate one to five or, you know, or just thumbs up and down?Usama [00:33:14]: For the formal rater evals, we have sort of like a Likert scale and, like, a bunch of different dimensions there. But we had to sort of break down what makes it entertaining into, like, a bunch of different factors. But I think the team stage of that was more critical. It was like, we need to make sure that, like, what is making it fun and engaging? Like, we dialed that as far as it goes. And while we're making other changes that are necessary, like, obviously, they shouldn't make stuff up or, you know, be insensitive.Raiza [00:33:41]: Hallucinations. Safety.Swyx [00:33:42]: Other safety things.Raiza [00:33:43]: Right.Swyx [00:33:43]: Like a bunch of safety stuff.Raiza [00:33:45]: Yeah, exactly.Usama [00:33:45]: So, like, with all of that and, like, also just, you know, following sort of a coherent narrative and structure is really important. But, like, with all of this, we really had to make sure that that central tenet of being entertaining and engaging and something you actually want to listen to. It just doesn't go away, which takes, like, a lot of just active listening time because you're closest to the prompts, the model and everything.Swyx [00:34:07]: I think sometimes the difficulty is because we're dealing with non-deterministic models, sometimes you just got a bad roll of the dice and it's always on the distribution that you could get something bad. Basically, how many do you, like, do ten runs at a time? And then how do you get rid of the non-determinism?Raiza [00:34:23]: Right.Usama [00:34:23]: Yeah, that's bad luck.Raiza [00:34:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:34:25]: Yeah.Usama [00:34:26]: I mean, there still will be, like, bad audio overviews. There's, like, a bunch of them that happens. Do you mean for, like, the raider? For raiders, right?Swyx [00:34:34]: Like, what if that one person just got, like, a really bad rating? You actually had a great prompt, you actually had a great model, great weights, whatever. And you just, you had a bad output.Usama [00:34:42]: Like, and that's okay, right?Raiza [00:34:44]: I actually think, like, the way that these are constructed, if you think about, like, the different types of controls that the user has, right? Like, what can the user do today to affect it?Usama [00:34:54]: We push a button.Raiza [00:34:55]: You just push a button.Swyx [00:34:56]: I have tried to prompt engineer by changing the title. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:34:59]: Changing the title, people have found out.Raiza [00:35:02]: Yeah.Raiza [00:35:02]: The title of the notebook, people have found out. You can add show notes, right? You can get them to think, like, the show has changed. Someone changed the language of the output. Changing the language of the output. Like, those are less well-tested because we focused on, like, this one aspect. So it did change the way that we sort of think about quality as well, right? So it's like, quality is on the dimensions of entertainment, of course, like, consistency, groundedness. But in general, does it follow the structure of the deep dive? And I think when we talk about, like, non-determinism, it's like, well, as long as it follows, like, the structure of the deep dive, right? It sort of inherently meets all those other qualities. And so it makes it a little bit easier for us to ship something with confidence to the extent that it's like, I know it's going to make a deep dive. It's going to make a good deep dive. Whether or not the person likes it, I don't know. But as we expand to new formats, as we open up controls, I think that's where it gets really much harder. Even with the show notes, right? Like, people don't know what they're going to get when they do that. And we see that already where it's like, this is going to be a lot harder to validate in terms of quality, where now we'll get a greater distribution. Whereas I don't think we really got, like, varied distribution because of, like, that pre-process that Raiza was talking about. And also because of the way that we'd constrain, like, what were we measuring for? Literally, just like, is it a deep dive?Swyx [00:36:18]: And you determine what a deep dive is. Yeah. Everything needs a PM. Yeah, I have, this is very similar to something I've been thinking about for AI products in general. There's always like a chief tastemaker. And for Notebook LM, it seems like it's a combination of you and Steven.Raiza [00:36:31]: Well, okay.Raiza [00:36:32]: I want to take a step back.Swyx [00:36:33]: And Raiza, I mean, presumably for the voice stuff.Raiza [00:36:35]: Raiza's like the head chef, right? Of, like, deep dive, I think. Potatoes.Raiza [00:36:40]: Of potatoes.Raiza [00:36:41]: And I say this because I think even though we are already a very opinionated team, and Steven, for sure, very opinionated, I think of the audio generations, like, Raiza was the most opinionated, right? And we all, like, would say, like, hey, I remember, like, one of the first ones he sent me.Raiza [00:36:57]: I was like, oh, I feel like they should introduce themselves. I feel like they should say a title. But then, like, we would catch things, like, maybe they shouldn't say their names.Raiza [00:37:04]: Yeah, they don't say their names.Usama [00:37:05]: That was a Steven catch, like, not give them names.Raiza [00:37:08]: So stuff like that is, like, we all injected, like, a little bit of just, like, hey, here's, like, my take on, like, how a podcast should be, right? And I think, like, if you're a person who, like, regularly listens to podcasts, there's probably some collective preference there that's generic enough that you can standardize into, like, the deep dive format. But, yeah, it's the new formats where I think, like, oh, that's the next test. Yeah.Swyx [00:37:30]: I've tried to make a clone, by the way. Of course, everyone did. Yeah. Everyone in AI was like, oh, no, this is so easy. I'll just take a TTS model. Obviously, our models are not as good as yours, but I tried to inject a consistent character backstory, like, age, identity, where they work, where they went to school, what their hobbies are. Then it just, the models try to bring it in too much.Raiza [00:37:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:49]: I don't know if you tried this.Raiza [00:37:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:51]: So then I'm like, okay, like, how do I define a personality? But it doesn't keep coming up every single time. Yeah.Raiza [00:37:58]: I mean, we have, like, a really, really good, like, character designer on our team.Raiza [00:38:02]: What?Swyx [00:38:03]: Like a D&D person?Raiza [00:38:05]: Just to say, like, we, just like we had to be opinionated about the format, we had to be opinionated about who are those two people talking.Raiza [00:38:11]: Okay.Raiza [00:38:12]: Right.Raiza [00:38:12]: And then to the extent that, like, you can design the format, you should be able to design the people as well.Raiza [00:38:18]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:18]: I would love, like, a, you know, like when you play Baldur's Gate, like, you roll, you roll like 17 on Charisma and like, it's like what race they are. I don't know.Raiza [00:38:27]: I recently, actually, I was just talking about character select screens.Raiza [00:38:30]: Yeah. I was like, I love that, right.Raiza [00:38:32]: And I was like, maybe there's something to be learned there because, like, people have fallen in love with the deep dive as a, as a format, as a technology, but also as just like those two personas.Raiza [00:38:44]: Now, when you hear a deep dive and you've heard them, you're like, I know those two.Raiza [00:38:48]: Right.Raiza [00:38:48]: And people, it's so funny when I, when people are trying to find out their names, like, it's a, it's a worthy task.Raiza [00:38:54]: It's a worthy goal.Raiza [00:38:55]: I know what you're doing. But the next step here is to sort of introduce, like, is this like what people want?Raiza [00:39:00]: People want to sort of edit the personas or do they just want more of them?Swyx [00:39:04]: I'm sure you're getting a lot of opinions and they all, they all conflict with each other. Before we move on, I have to ask, because we're kind of on this topic. How do you make audio engaging? Because it's useful, not just for deep dive, but also for us as podcasters. What is, what does engaging mean? If you could break it down for us, that'd be great.Usama [00:39:22]: I mean, I can try. Like, don't, don't claim to be an expert at all.Swyx [00:39:26]: So I'll give you some, like variation in tone and speed. You know, there's this sort of writing advice where, you know, this sentence is five words. This sentence is three, that kind of advice where you, where you vary things, you have excitement, you have laughter, all that stuff. But I'd be curious how else you break down.Usama [00:39:42]: So there's the basics, like obviously structure that can't be meandering, right? Like there needs to be sort of a, an ultimate goal that the voices are trying to get to, human or artificial. I think one thing we find often is if there's just too much agreement between people, like that's not fun to listen to. So there needs to be some sort of tension and build up, you know, withholding information. For example, like as you listen to a story unfold, like you're going to learn more and more about it. And audio that maybe becomes even more important because like you actually don't have the ability to just like skim to the end of something. You're driving or something like you're going to be hooked because like there's, and that's how like, that's how a lot of podcasts work. Like maybe not interviews necessarily, but a lot of true crime, a lot of entertainment in general. There's just like a gradual unrolling of information. And that also like sort of goes back to the content transformation aspect of it. Like maybe you are going from, let's say the Wikipedia article of like one of the History of Mysteries, maybe episodes. Like the Wikipedia article is going to state out the information very differently. It's like, here's what happened would probably be in the very first paragraph. And one approach we could have done is like maybe a person's just narrating that thing. And maybe that would work for like a certain audience. Or I guess that's how I would picture like a standard history lesson to unfold. But like, because we're trying to put it in this two-person dialogue format, like there, we inject like the fact that, you know, there's, you don't give everything at first. And then you set up like differing opinions of the same topic or the same, like maybe you seize on a topic and go deeper into it and then try to bring yourself back out of it and go back to the main narrative. So that's, that's mostly from like the setting up the script perspective. And then the audio, I was saying earlier, it's trying to be as close to just human speech as possible. I think was the, what we found success with so far.Raiza [00:41:40]: Yeah. Like with interjections, right?Raiza [00:41:41]: Like I think like when you listen to two people talk, there's a lot of like, yeah, yeah, right. And then there's like a lot of like that questioning, like, oh yeah, really?Raiza [00:41:49]: What did you think?Swyx [00:41:50]: I noticed that. That's great.Raiza [00:41:52]: Totally.Usama [00:41:54]: Exactly.Swyx [00:41:55]: My question is, do you pull in speech experts to do this? Or did you just come up with it yourselves? You can be like, okay, talk to a whole bunch of fiction writers to, to make things engaging or comedy writers or whatever, stand up comedy, right? They have to make audio engaging, but audio as well. Like there's professional fields of studying where people do this for a living, but us as AI engineers are just making this up as we go.Raiza [00:42:19]: I mean, it's a great idea, but you definitely didn't.Raiza [00:42:22]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:24]: My guess is you didn't.Raiza [00:42:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:26]: There's a, there's a certain field of authority that people have. They're like, oh, like you can't do this because you don't have any experience like making engaging audio. But that's what you literally did.Raiza [00:42:35]: Right.Usama [00:42:35]: I mean, I was literally chatting with someone at Google earlier today about how some people think that like you need a linguistics person in the room for like making a good chatbot. But that's not actually true because like this person went to school for linguistics. And according to him, he's an engineer now. According to him, like most of his classmates were not actually good at language. Like they knew how to analyze language and like sort of the mathematical patterns and rhythms and language. But that doesn't necessarily mean they were going to be eloquent at like while speaking or writing. So I think, yeah, a lot of we haven't invested in specialists in audio format yet, but maybe that would.Raiza [00:43:13]: I think it's like super interesting because I think there is like a very human question of like what makes something interesting. And there's like a very deep question of like what is it, right? Like what is the quality that we are all looking for? Is it does somebody have to be funny? Does something have to be entertaining? Does something have to be straight to the point? And I think when you try to distill that, this is the interesting thing I think about our experiment, about this particular launch is first, we only launched one format. And so we sort of had to squeeze everything we believed about what an interesting thing is into one package. And as a result of it, I think we learned it's like, hey, interacting with a chatbot is sort of novel at first, but it's not interesting, right? It's like humans are what makes interacting with chatbots interesting.Raiza [00:43:59]: It's like, ha ha ha, I'm going to try to trick it. It's like, that's interesting.Raiza [00:44:02]: Spell strawberry, right?Raiza [00:44:04]: This is like the fun that like people have with it. But like that's not the LLM being interesting.Raiza [00:44:08]: That's you just like kind of giving it your own flavor. But it's like, what does it mean to sort of flip it on its head and say, no, you be interesting now, right? Like you give the chatbot the opportunity to do it. And this is not a chatbot per se. It is like just the audio. And it's like the texture, I think, that really brings it to life. And it's like the things that we've described here, which is like, okay, now I have to like lead you down a path of information about like this commercialization deck.Raiza [00:44:36]: It's like, how do you do that?Raiza [00:44:38]: To be able to successfully do it, I do think that you need experts. I think we'll engage with experts like down the road, but I think it will have to be in the context of, well, what's the next thing we're building, right? It's like, what am I trying to change here? What do I fundamentally believe needs to be improved? And I think there's still like a lot more studying that we have to do in terms of like, well, what are people actually using this for? And we're just in such early days. Like it hasn't even been a month. Two, three weeks.Usama [00:45:05]: Three weeks.Raiza [00:45:06]: Yeah, yeah.Usama [00:45:07]: I think one other element to that is the fact that you're bringing your own sources to it. Like it's your stuff. Like, you know this somewhat well, or you care to know about this. So like that, I think, changed the equation on its head as well. It's like your sources and someone's telling you about it. So like you care about how that dynamic is, but you just care for it to be good enough to be entertaining. Because ultimately they're talking about your mortgage deed or whatever.Swyx [00:45:33]: So it's interesting just from the topic itself. Even taking out all the agreements and the hiding of the slow reveal. I mean, there's a baseline, maybe.Usama [00:45:42]: Like if it was like too drab. Like if someone was reading it off, like, you know, that's like the absolute worst.Raiza [00:45:46]: But like...Swyx [00:45:47]: Do you prompt for humor? That's a tough one, right?Raiza [00:45:51]: I think it's more of a generic way to bring humor out if possible. I think humor is actually one of the hardest things. Yeah.Raiza [00:46:00]: But I don't know if you saw...Raiza [00:46:00]: That is AGI.Swyx [00:46:01]: Humor is AGI.Raiza [00:46:02]: Yeah, but did you see the chicken one?Raiza [00:46:03]: No.Raiza [00:46:04]: Okay. If you haven't heard it... We'll splice it in here.Swyx [00:46:06]: Okay.Raiza [00:46:07]: Yeah.Raiza [00:46:07]: There is a video on Threads. I think it was by Martino Wong. And it's a PDF.Raiza [00:46:16]: Welcome to your deep dive for today. Oh, yeah. Get ready for a fun one. Buckle up. Because we are diving into... Chicken, chicken, chicken. Chicken, chicken. You got that right. By Doug Zonker. Now. And yes, you heard that title correctly. Titles. Our listener today submitted this paper. Yeah, they're going to need our help. And I can totally see why. Absolutely. It's dense. It's baffling. It's a lot. And it's packed with more chicken than a KFC buffet. What? That's hilarious.Raiza [00:46:48]: That's so funny. So it's like stuff like that, that's like truly delightful, truly surprising.Raiza [00:46:53]: But it's like we didn't tell it to be funny.Usama [00:46:55]: Humor is contextual also. Like super contextual is what we're realizing. So we're not prompting for humor, but we're prompting for maybe a lot of other things that are bringing out that humor.Alessio [00:47:04]: I think the thing about ad-generated content, if we look at YouTube, like we do videos on YouTube and it's like, you know, a lot of people like screaming in the thumbnails to get clicks. There's like everybody, there's kind of like a meta of like what you need to do to get clicks. But I think in your product, there's no actual creator on the other side investing the time. So you can actually generate a type of content that is maybe not universally appealing, you know, at a much, yeah, exactly. I think that's the most interesting thing. It's like, well, is there a way for like, take Mr.Raiza [00:47:36]: Beast, right?Alessio [00:47:36]: It's like Mr. Beast optimizes videos to reach the biggest audience and like the most clicks. But what if every video could be kind of like regenerated to be closer to your taste, you know, when you watch it?Raiza [00:47:48]: I think that's kind of the promise of AI that I think we are just like touching on, which is, I think every time I've gotten information from somebody, they have delivered it to me in their preferred method, right?Raiza [00:47:59]: Like if somebody gives me a PDF, it's a PDF.Raiza [00:48:01]: Somebody gives me a hundred slide deck, that is the format in which I'm going to read it. But I think we are now living in the era where transformations are really possible, which is, look, like I don't want to read your hundred slide deck, but I'll listen to a 16 minute audio overview on the drive home. And that, that I think is, is really novel. And that is, is paving the way in a way that like maybe we wanted, but didn'tRaiza [00:48:24]: expect.Raiza [00:48:25]: Where I also think you're listening to a lot of content that normally wouldn't have had content made about it. Like I watched this TikTok where this woman uploaded her diary from 2004.Raiza [00:48:36]: For sure, right?Raiza [00:48:36]: Like nobody was goin
Our buddy Shafi Hossain talks about his childhood in Bangladesh, starting comedy in Albany, looking up to Usama as a kid, and his new special NOT FROM HERE--out now on YouTube!!!
PART THREE: FINDING BIN LADEN. On May 2, 2011, officials with a “need to know” monitored the highly sensitive US operation against the most wanted terrorist in the world in real time. But for a CIA officer named Kevin watching that night, the mission against Al Qaeda's seniormost leader had a uniquely personal resonance. Because as a young Navy officer working in the Pentagon, he had nearly died on September 11th, 2001. Sustaining extensive injuries in the attack, he was rushed to Walter Reed Medical Center, where doctors were unsure whether he would survive; later, in recovery, he would flatline twice. But his story was far from over. Because Kevin would overcome his injuries, join the CIA, and ultimately take his place on the CIA team tracking down the terrorist leader who oversaw the attacks: Usama Bin Laden. And on this special, three-part episode of The Langley Files, Kevin returns to CIA Headquarters to share his incredible journey.In this third and final part of FILE 018, Kevin's story comes full circle. As the clock ticks down to perhaps the most famous special forces mission in history, Kevin shares with you a one-of-a-kind, insider's look at the final chapter of the search for Bin Laden. Hear what it was like in one of the designated centers watching the operation unfold live, the unique role Kevin played in the aftermath of the raid--and about the first phone call he made upon learning its outcome, to a person he met on September 11th, 2001. It's the powerful conclusion to a part of this story that's never been told--until now.Look Inside FILE 018 – Part Three: Kevin discussed the extreme secrecy in which the mission against Usama Bin Laden was planned, but you can now see a replica of the model of Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound that was used to prepare for the operation: Model of Abbottabad Compound - CIA. It stands today in the CIA Museum. US forces recovered an enormous amount of material from Bin Laden's compound—and you can see much of it for yourself here, after public releases by the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the interest of transparency and to enhance public understanding. The materials were sent all the way from Abbottabad to the United States for analysis—and you now know the CIA officer who brought key portions of it back to Langley just days after the raid.
PART TWO: JOINING CIA'S MANHUNT. On May 2, 2011, officials with a “need to know” monitored the highly sensitive US operation against the most wanted terrorist in the world in real time. But for a CIA officer named Kevin watching that night, the mission against Al Qaeda's seniormost leader had a uniquely personal resonance. Because as a young Navy officer working in the Pentagon, he had nearly died on September 11th, 2001. Sustaining extensive injuries in the attack, he was rushed to Walter Reed Medical Center, where doctors were unsure whether he would survive; later, in recovery, he would flatline twice. But his story was far from over. Because Kevin would overcome his injuries, join the CIA, and ultimately take his place on the CIA team tracking down the terrorist leader who oversaw the attacks: Usama Bin Laden. And on this special, three-part episode of The Langley Files, Kevin returns to CIA Headquarters to share his incredible journey.In Part Two, Kevin recounts returning from the hospital - and what he did next. First, turn his focus to understanding the events behind the attacks, by serving as an investigator for the 9/11 Commission. Then, turn his focus to tracking down and stopping future threats - by joining the CIA. It's the chapter of his story that will see him join CIA's HVT1 Team - the CIA team tracking down High Value Target #1. If you've ever wondered what the search for Bin Laden was like inside the team spearheading it, you won't want to miss this episode.Look Inside FILE 018 – Part Two: Are you interested in a career as the kind of “high-tech CIA detective” that Kevin described? Check out the Agency's Targeting Officer role here. Kevin just shared with you a firsthand, insider's account of a pivotal chapter in CIA's search for Usama Bin Laden. You can read more about that search—and see photos of the AC1 compound for yourself—here.
PART ONE: SURVIVING 9/11. On May 2, 2011, officials with a “need to know” monitored the highly sensitive US operation against the most wanted terrorist in the world in real time. But for a CIA officer named Kevin watching that night, the mission against Al Qaeda's seniormost leader had a uniquely personal resonance. Because as a young Navy officer working in the Pentagon, he had nearly died on September 11th, 2001. Sustaining extensive injuries in the attack, he was rushed to Walter Reed Medical Center, where doctors were unsure whether he would survive; later, in recovery, he would flatline twice. But his story was far from over. Because Kevin would overcome his injuries, join the CIA, and ultimately take his place on the CIA team tracking down the terrorist leader who oversaw the attacks: Usama Bin Laden. And on this special, three-part episode of The Langley Files, Kevin returns to CIA Headquarters to share his incredible journey. In Part One, Kevin recounts his experiences on 9/11: the US Navy service that led to his posting at the Pentagon, his fight to survive amid the chaos of the attack, and how a stranger saved his life on that dark day. You may have heard of some of the people involved in the search for Usama Bin Laden, but you haven't yet heard this part of the story—until now.Look Inside FILE 018:A memorial to those lost on September 11th, 2001 stands on the grounds of CIA's Headquarters in Langley, VA: a steel column from World Trade Center Building Six that still carried the smell of smoke from that day over a decade later. You can read about that solemn tribute here. Kevin discussed following news of the United States' response to the 9/11 attacks as he recovered from his injuries; CIA played a key role in that response, with a legendary CIA team “first in” on the ground in Afghanistan just 15 days after the attack. The helicopter that carried that team now sits at CIA Headquarters at Langley, Virginia, but you can see it here.Johnny Micheal Spann, a CIA paramilitary officer serving in that initial Agency response to the 9/11 attacks, was the first American killed in combat in Afghanistan. His last act was to warn a CIA colleague of imminent danger, helping that colleague get to safety. You can read about Johnny's story and sacrifice here. A sign in Afghanistan honoring him still resides at the CIA Museum today.
We sit down with director Shuchi Talati to discuss her film "Girls Will Be Girls" (Winner of the Sundance Audience Award!)--Premiering the weekend of 9/13/24 in NYC--the movie is great and this episode is hilarious as she didn't expect Pranav and Usama to enjoy such a sensitive, artful film! We did! You should go see it on the weekend of 9/13!!! Follow @girlswillbegirls_themovie on Instagram!
As we approach the 23rd anniversary of the terror attacks on 9/11, Jason revisits a moving conversation with former U.S. Navy SEAL Rob O'Neill. Rob discusses the lessons he learned growing up in Montana and his experience being part of the 2011 mission to kill Usama Bin Laden. He also gives a harsh critique of the Biden administration's hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. Later, Jason reflects on the anniversary and where the nation stands today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Usama Dakdok is the founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He's the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. He speaks fluent Arabic and has translated the Qur'an into English. He is the author of Exposing the Truth about the Qur'an and Exposing the Truth About Jihad and the booklets, The Violent Truth about Islam and The Straight Way to Eternal Life. Yesterday the decision was finalized by Vice President Kamala Harris to choose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. Walz is an aggressive supporter of abortion and the LGBTQ agenda. However, on this edition of Crosstalk, Jim and Usama took a look at another side of the ticket as it relates to the issue of Islam. Beginning with Harris, you'll hear from her own words her support for Islam as she notes how we must reject phrases like "radical Islamic terror" and "illegal alien". What she fails to recognize, and as Usama explained, there are six verses in the Qur'an where Allah calls himself a terrorist because he terrorized the infidels. This is consistent with the 1,450 years of terrorism history from this religion, yet when Usama and others speak the truth about Islam, they're accused of preaching hate. Her running mate, Tim Walz, has also been a promoter of Islam. You'll understand why when you hear an audio clip from the governor himself. In spite of the national security implications of Islam that Usama has warned about many times over the years, Governor Walz expressed his support, even going so far as desiring to host the first Iftar celebration at the governor's residence. There's much more to hear, including input from listeners nationwide.
Usama Dakdok is the founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He's the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. He speaks fluent Arabic and has translated the Qur'an into English. He is the author of Exposing the Truth about the Qur'an and Exposing the Truth About Jihad and the booklets, The Violent Truth about Islam and The Straight Way to Eternal Life.- -Yesterday the decision was finalized by Vice President Kamala Harris to choose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. Walz is an aggressive supporter of abortion and the LGBTQ agenda. However, on this edition of Crosstalk, Jim and Usama took a look at another side of the ticket as it relates to the issue of Islam. --Beginning with Harris, you'll hear from her own words her support for Islam as she notes how we must reject phrases like -radical Islamic terror- and -illegal alien-. What she fails to recognize, and as Usama explained, there are six verses in the Qur'an where Allah calls himself a terrorist because he terrorized the infidels. This is consistent with the 1,450 years of terrorism history from this religion, yet when Usama and others speak the truth about Islam, they're accused of preaching hate. --Her running mate, Tim Walz, has also been a promoter of Islam. You'll understand why when you hear an audio clip from the governor himself. In spite of the national security implications of Islam that Usama has warned about many times over the years, Governor Walz expressed his support, even going so far as desiring to host the first Iftar celebration at the governor's residence. --There's much more to hear, including input from listeners nationwide.
Usama Dakdok is the founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry. He's the speaker on the daily radio broadcast, Revealing the Truth About Islam. He speaks fluent Arabic and has translated the Qur'an into English. He is the author of Exposing the Truth about the Qur'an and Exposing the Truth About Jihad and the booklets, The Violent Truth about Islam and The Straight Way to Eternal Life.- -Yesterday the decision was finalized by Vice President Kamala Harris to choose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. Walz is an aggressive supporter of abortion and the LGBTQ agenda. However, on this edition of Crosstalk, Jim and Usama took a look at another side of the ticket as it relates to the issue of Islam. --Beginning with Harris, you'll hear from her own words her support for Islam as she notes how we must reject phrases like -radical Islamic terror- and -illegal alien-. What she fails to recognize, and as Usama explained, there are six verses in the Qur'an where Allah calls himself a terrorist because he terrorized the infidels. This is consistent with the 1,450 years of terrorism history from this religion, yet when Usama and others speak the truth about Islam, they're accused of preaching hate. --Her running mate, Tim Walz, has also been a promoter of Islam. You'll understand why when you hear an audio clip from the governor himself. In spite of the national security implications of Islam that Usama has warned about many times over the years, Governor Walz expresed his support, even going so far as desiring to host the first Iftar celebration at the governor's residence. --There's much more to hear, including input from listeners nationwide.
Usama's "special fast", Jains rescuing goats on Eid, Om Prakash and Mujahid's tragic sex-change love story.
Tonight, my special guest is New York best-selling author Mike Rothmiller, who's here to discuss his book Secrets, Lies and Deception. This book was featured on Fox News. Did President Clinton know the 9-11 attack was coming? After reading this book, many will conclude he did. If you don't believe in government conspiracies, this book will change you forever. Throughout the book, the governments own top-secret documents details their conspiracies to commit assassinations and much more. New York Times Bestselling author and former LAPD Intelligence Detective Mike Rothmiller has spent decades painstakingly scouring various governmental archives in the United States and England to obtain these shocking and sometimes appalling pieces of history which are virtually unknown to the masses. When his analysis is combined with these formerly top-secret documents the book presents a startling, eye-opening encyclopedia of secrets, lies and deception carried out at the highest levels of government. Here's a small sample of what is disclosed in this book: Did you know there are top-secret telephone transcripts of President Bill Clinton discussing Iraq's WMDs and Usama bin Laden's planned attacks on the United States years before 9/11 occurred? Did you know about the CIAs top-secret search for Noah's Ark? Do you know what Hitler's bizarre sexual practices were? Did you know about the plot to assassinate the President of Mexico? Did you know that President Abraham Lincoln had a gay lover? Did you know that within hours of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson and others were secretly conspiring to dictate the outcome of the official investigation before it started? Did you know of the multi-nation assassination team which murdered people in Washington DC? Or, that the Vietnam War was waged for the prestige and influence of the president and the CIA never believed the war could be won? How about the top-secret plan to use nuclear bombs in Vietnam? Did you know that nuclear bombs have been lost? Did you know that the CIA stole a Soviet satellite for examination and the Soviets never knew? And, the Top-Secret 9/11 commission 28 page document implicating Saudi government officials in the attack. And never before revealed is the shocking conspiracy involving the DEA, FBI, DOJ, CIA and Dept. of State to ignore the United States federal indictment of a major Mexican cocaine trafficker and allow him to freely travel throughout the United States and continue his smuggling operation. Follow Our Other ShowsFollow UFO WitnessesFollow Crime Watch WeeklyFollow Paranormal FearsFollow Seven: Disturbing Chronicle StoriesJoin our Patreon for ad-free listening and more bonus content.Follow us on Instagram @mysteriousradioFollow us on TikTok mysteriousradioTikTok Follow us on Twitter @mysteriousradio Follow us on Pinterest pinterest.com/mysteriousradio Like us on Facebook Facebook.com/mysteriousradio
We discuss the recent reconstruction of the famous Buddhist institution of Nalanda University, how it's ugly, and other educational scandals currently plaguing India. More wild stuff behind the patreon!
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