Podcasts about which i've

The Latent Space crew will be at NeurIPS on Tuesday! Reach out with any parties and papers of interest. We have also been incubating a smol daily AI Newsletter and Latent Space University is making progress.Good open models like Llama 2 and Mistral 7B (which has just released an 8x7B MoE model) have enabled their own sub-industry of finetuned variants for a myriad of reasons:* Ownership & Control - you take responsibility for serving the models* Privacy - not having to send data to a third party vendor* Customization - Improving some attribute (censorship, multiturn chat and chain of thought, roleplaying) or benchmark performance (without cheating)Related to improving benchmark performance is the ability to use smaller (7B, 13B) models, by matching the performance of larger models, which have both cost and inference latency benefits.Core to all this work is finetuning, and the emergent finetuning library of choice has been Wing Lian's Axolotl.AxolotlAxolotl is an LLM fine-tuner supporting SotA techniques and optimizations for a variety of common model architectures:It is used by many of the leading open source models:* Teknium: OpenHermes, Trismigestus, CollectiveCognition* OpenOrca: Mistral-OpenOrca, Mistral-SlimOrca* Nous Research: Puffin, Capybara, NousHermes* Pygmalion: Mythalion, Pygmalion* Eric Hartford: Dolphin, Samantha* DiscoResearch: DiscoLM 120B & 70B* OpenAccess AI Collective: Manticore, Minotaur, Jackalope, HippogriffAs finetuning is very formatting dependent, it also provides prompt interfaces and formatters between a range of popular model formats from Stanford's Alpaca and Steven Tey's ShareGPT (which led to Vicuna) to the more NSFW Pygmalion community.Nous Research MeetupWe last talked about Nous at the DevDay Recap at the e/acc “banger rave”. We met Wing at the Nous Research meetup at the a16z offices in San Francisco, where they officially announced their company and future plans:Including Nous Forge:Show NotesWe've already covered the nuances of Dataset Contamination and the problems with “Open Source” in AI, so we won't rehash those topics here but do read/listen to those if you missed it.* Axolotl GitHub and Discord* The Flan paper and dataset* StackLlama model and blogpost* Multipack paper* Our episode with Tri Dao* Mamba state space models - Tri Dao and Albert GuTimestamps* [00:00:00] Introducing Wing* [00:02:34] SF Open Source AI Meetup* [00:04:09] What is Axolotl?* [00:08:01] What is finetuning?* [00:08:52] Open Source Model Zoo* [00:10:53] Benchmarks and Contamination* [00:14:29] The Case for Open Source AI* [00:17:34] Orca and OpenOrca* [00:23:36] DiscoLM and Model Stacking* [00:25:07] Datasets and Evals over Models* [00:29:15] Distilling from GPT4* [00:33:31] Finetuning - LoRA, QLoRA, ReLoRA, GPTQ* [00:41:55] Axolotl vs HF Transformers* [00:48:00] 20x efficiency with StackLlama and Multipack* [00:54:47] Tri Dao and Mamba* [00:59:08] Roadmap for Axolotl* [01:01:20] The Open Source AI CommunityTranscript[00:00:00] Introducing Wing Lian[00:00:00] ​[00:00:00] swyx: Welcome to Latent Space, a special edition with Wing Lien, but also with our new guest host, Alex. Hello, hello. Welcome, welcome. Again, needs no introduction. I think it's like your sixth time on Latent Space already. I think so, yeah. And welcome, Wing. We just met, but you've been very prolific online. Thanks for having me.[00:00:30] Yeah. So you are in town. You're not local. You're in town. You're from Minneapolis?[00:00:35] Wing Lian: Annapolis. Annapolis. It's funny because a lot of people think it's Indianapolis. It's I've got Minneapolis, but I used to live out at least in the San Francisco Bay Area years ago from like 2008 to 2014. So it's fairly familiar here.[00:00:50] swyx: Yep. You're the maintainer of Axolotl now, which we'll get into. You're very, very prolific in the open source AI community, and you're also the founder of the Open Access AI Collective. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Maybe we can go over a little bit of your backgrounds into tech and then coming into AI, and then we'll cover what[00:01:06] Wing Lian: happens and why you're here.[00:01:08] Yeah. So. Back on tech, so I started years ago, I started way back when I was scraping, Apartment websites for listings and then, and then building like SEO optimized pages and then just throwing Google AdSense on it.[00:01:24] And that got me through like college basically. Is[00:01:27] swyx: that decent money? And what year[00:01:28] Wing Lian: was this? Like 2004, 2005. Yeah, that's decent money. It's like thousand bucks a month. But as a college student, that's like. Gravy. Really good money, right? So, and then there's just too much competition It's just sort of like died off. I was writing stuff in like Perl back then using like like who nobody hosted anything on Perl anymore, right? Still did a little bit more like computer tech support and then software, and web more professionally.[00:01:54] So I spent some time working on applications in the blood industry. I came out to San Francisco for, I was at SGN, so Social Gaming Network, as a startup. They started doing, with Facebook apps, and then they pivoted into doing mobile apps. And then, from there, I spent time.[00:02:14] I've quite a few more startups since then and in the last few years I've been in the music space So like I was at United Masters for a while and then past year I've been at SoundCloud, but not doing that anymore and now that I have a lot more time It's just like all right.[00:02:30] We're going full bore on axolotl and we're gonna we're gonna crush AI So yeah,[00:02:34] SF Open Source AI Meetup[00:02:34] swyx: totally you so you're here in town for the open source. Yeah, I meet up that we had yesterday Yep, yeah, that was amazing. Yeah, it was a big collection. Olama, Noose Research, Alignment Lab, Anyone else that I missed? I mean, Jeremy Howard is his own thing.[00:02:47] Yeah.[00:02:49] And Alex, you're also there. You love to bring SF to the world. Your takes?[00:02:55] Alex Volkov: It's incredible that we recorded a Thursday Eye episode after that one. And LDJ, who's usually co hosts Thursday Eye, just like briefly mentioned, Oh yeah, I talked about it.[00:03:04] Like, I saw Karpathy, and then I talked to Jeremy Howard, and the guy from Mistral came in, and it's like, He's talking about all these, titans of industry, basically, that outside of SF, You just don't meet casually hanging out in the same space. You can't, pull somebody. He ran into the Laylow from Mistral, he ran into him while, drinking water.[00:03:20] He didn't even know he was there. It's just, that type of stuff is really hard to find outside of SF. So, absolutely, absolutely great. And also, presentations from Alignment Labs, presentations from News Research, news issues, talked about. Forge, and some of[00:03:33] swyx: the other stuff they announced. We can say now they're officially a company.[00:03:36] I met Technium.[00:03:37] He[00:03:37] Alex Volkov: came over here. He didn't want to get recorded. But maybe.[00:03:41] Wing Lian: We'll wear him down at some point. Yeah, I'm excited for Forge. They've positioned it as this agentic sort of framework where it's just Drag and drop things and, fill in text with where you want to inject different variables and it opens up all of these potentials for data pipelines now, right?[00:03:56] And using your own local LLMs and not relying on GPT 4 or anything like that. Yeah, yeah,[00:04:02] swyx: good stuff. Okay, so let's maybe go into the Axolotl origin story and then we have, we have some intro or background.[00:04:09] What is Axolotl?[00:04:09] swyx: To do on like the open source model universe and also on fine tuning, but maybe just, since you're talking about your personal journey, what was your personal journey into[00:04:18] Wing Lian: axolotl?[00:04:19] Yeah, so my personal journey started like back in mid March, completely unrelated to AI and axolotl. And it really started, I fell while skiing, I torqued. Great 3 MCL sprain and being sort of like an active person that can no longer be active because the two, couldn't play soccer, because that is requires to have having knees until I, it's healed.[00:04:42] So I. I decided I needed to find something to do to take up my free time. And that became, well, let's learn how to train in, these language models. It was everywhere. So I was like, all right, I'm just going to sit down, learn. I think I used like other, I think I was using like Alpacalora.[00:05:00] Cause I think the Alpaca paper had just came out, come out then. So I was like using Alpacalora repo and sort of like learning how to use like. None of us were like GPU rich back then, and none of us, most of us still we're still all GPU poor, but I was doing what was it, like 4 bit, Alpaca Lord, there was like a 4 bit version where we were doing quant, or 8, no, 8 bit quantizations, and then I think they had released QLOR a little bit later, and I think right when, before QLOR came out, I was already starting to do fine tunes, but having this need to sort of like mix data sets together, and If you've ever looked at all the various different datasets available on HuggingFace, they all have various different prompt formats, and, it's sort of a nightmare, and then I think the other piece is if you've ever tried to fine tune, at least Back then probably the ecosystem's a little better now.[00:05:54] Everybody required that you say, alright, you put your hyperparameters as command line arguments. And so it's always like, well, I now have to go copy and paste my previous thing and to change things out. And I really wanted it. to be in a YAML file because it was more portable and reproducible.[00:06:09] So I was doing that and then the QLOR paper came out. Tim Dettmer announced that and then somebody looked it up for me yesterday and it's like between that announcement it took us seven days to get that integrated into Axolotl, right? Which is like, it's not. I wouldn't say it's really fast, but in a manner that, is in a, a reusable framework, I think it was quite the accomplishment then.[00:06:33] And so we started, picking up traction with people there. And then it's just been building models, and then just iterating what my needs are. So, yeah. Excellent. Yeah. I[00:06:44] Alex Volkov: want to ask, for folks who are listening who never heard of Axolotl, now do you describe how you got there?[00:06:49] Can you, how do you summarize this for folks who maybe haven't fine tuned anything. They know about open source LLM exists, they maybe know like LLAML, what's XLR for somebody who doesn't know. I've never heard of a data set curation[00:07:01] Wing Lian: creation before. We sort of have to take a step back and understand that, when you've got these language models, you have what I think most people refer to as like base models, also known as like foundational models, right?[00:07:15] Where some benefactor, whether it's Meta or Mistral or whoever, has gone and spent all this money. To train these models on huge corpuses of text, right? And these, these corpuses, they're generally good across lots of different things, but they're really good at just saying, talking on and on and on, but they're not good at, following instructions or having chats or anything like that.[00:07:40] So, when you think about fine tuning, it's like Saying, all right, we have this really sort of good generalized, text completion thing, and I want to turn it into something that I can talk to or have, follow instructions. So, I think fine tuning is probably best defined in like that.[00:07:58] swyx: Okay, got it.[00:07:59] And we actually[00:08:01] What is finetuning?[00:08:01] swyx: Do want to make sure that we have like an overall introduction to fine tuning for people because again like trying to make sure that we bring everyone along in this, in this journey. We already went into Loras and QLoras without explaining what[00:08:12] Wing Lian: they are. Oh yes, yes, sorry.[00:08:14] swyx: And so I will put things in my words and you can correct me as, as, as my I'll be the village idiot here.[00:08:21] So, so fine tuning is basically sort of grabbing an open source model off the shelf, and then basically doing further training on it with a custom dataset of your own. Primarily, people use it, think about it as fine tuning for JSON output, or fine tuning for a style of response. Let's say you wanted to tell jokes, or be funny, or be short, or whatever.[00:08:43] Just the open source AI community has really fine tuned in all sorts of different manner. I think we'll go over those those things now. Let's go over those things now, and then we'll talk about fine tuning methods.[00:08:52] Open Source Model Zoo[00:08:52] swyx: So there's a universe of people who fine tune stuff. Yesterday in your slides, you had, I'll just list some of these and then we'll maybe go through some of them, right?[00:08:59] So Technium is personally leading Open Hermes, which is I think the sort of premier model out of the news. news community. There's OpenOrca, which you had a hand in. News, the news research itself also has Capybara and Puffin and all the others. There's Pygmalion, which I've never messed with.[00:09:14] Eric Hartford, I am aware of his Uncensored Models and his Samantha Models. Disco Research with Disco LM. And then you personally have done Manticore, Minotaur, Jackalope, and Hippogriff. What should people know about all these names? Being part of AI Twitter is seeing all these things and going dude, I'm being DDoS'ed by all these things and I don't know how different they are.[00:09:32] What should people know? Yeah, so[00:09:34] Wing Lian: I think on a lot of these models, generally, we like to think of those as sort of general models, so If you think about it, what is GPT 4, what is Chad GPT? It's a good general model, and then, One of the services I think that OpenAI offers is like these fine tunings where you're a business and you have very specific business use cases and you might fine tune for that use case.[00:10:00] All of these models are really just general use case that you can then go and maybe Fine tune another lore over it for your use cases, but they tend to be good. With good being relative, it's open source. Open source AI is still sort of is infancy. So, good is, it's pretty reasonable.[00:10:18] It's probably still better than most, high schoolers at answering questions and being able to like figure things out and, and reasoning skills and math and those sorts of things, right?[00:10:27] swyx: And also as measured on the Hugging[00:10:29] Wing Lian: Face leaderboard. Yes, well, that's like a whole other discussion, right, there's a whole other, group of people who, and I, I mostly agree with them that, benchmarks can be, are pretty bogus these days, LM says, I think they published something recently where, even if you think the dataset's not contaminated, you can go and, find contamination And maybe we should step back and say what contamination is, right?[00:10:53] Benchmarks and Contamination[00:10:53] Wing Lian: So we have all of these data, when you go and do these benchmarks, there's a specific data set where there are these questions and usually it's multiple choice. And what can happen is, well, sometimes someone It puts the question, maybe maliciously, maybe accidentally, into the training dataset, and now the, the, your model knows how to answer the test questions really well, but it doesn't, it hasn't generalized the ability to actually do that[00:11:20] Alex Volkov: right.[00:11:21] We've seen some folks competitively announce models that are like the best at that leaderboard, but then it's, it's quite obvious that, In open source? Yeah, and in that leaderboard, for Hugging Face specific, I don't know if LMCs, if that had suffered, but we, there's been some models that seem to have been competitively trained and some leakage happened into their,[00:11:41] swyx: like, supposal.[00:11:43] I understand, once there's been a credible assertion, Hugging Face actually does take them down, right? Yeah, yeah,[00:11:48] Alex Volkov: which is really hard to know, right?[00:11:50] swyx: It's really hard to know, sometimes it's like a pure accident,[00:11:52] Alex Volkov: it's oh, oops. You're going through a mixer. I think, a responsible So acknowledgement, that this kind of happened to you is also important.[00:11:58] I saw LDJ from news research can acknowledge that. Because many of these datasets are collections of other datasets. There's a bunch of people are baking, basically. It's alchemy. Right. And so sometimes you don't know. Sometimes you pull an open source dataset and they announce, oh, you know what, actually, the MMLU benchmark which we used to Specifically identify models that did go into this data set, that then went into that data set.[00:12:22] So sometimes it's actually an accident and folks take it down. But I've seen some competitive folks who want to put their name out there because people are starting to notice which is the top[00:12:30] swyx: model. For those who want a fun take on this so the file one dataset. FindOne model from Microsoft was accused of being contaminated.[00:12:37] And I saw this joke paper that was fantastic. It was called, training on the test set is all you need. It's a super small model that just memorizes everything. It was fantastic. So yeah, contamination, I think we've actually covered it in a previous episode before. So we're good. But again, I want to give people a map into the open source AI model, the universe.[00:12:57] And Alex, you can also jump in here because you guys have spent a lot more time with them than I have. So, what should people know about Technium? What should people know about Noose? And then we can go down the list. Yeah,[00:13:05] Wing Lian: I think so. I think if we start with, Technium. When you talk to him, he's gonna say, I think, I think his response is that he wants to build GP4 on his laptop, right?[00:13:14] So, very, very good at building general models. I think with Noose, Noose Research, they're looking at more, sort of, More, more research focused things, like their Yarn models, I don't, I don't, they didn't actually train their, they have their own trainer for their Yarn models, but So they did not use Xlato for that one?[00:13:30] They didn't use that, but like Is that, you don't have support for it? I think we do support Yarn, I think, I'd have to double check that answer. Yeah, I'm just kind of curious what you can and cannot support, and Yeah, I mean, Yarn is supportable, it's basically, I think it's just replacing, I think, the rope part of that, so Yeah, not, not a big deal.[00:13:48] Yeah, it's not a big deal, it's just I haven't gotten to it, not enough people have asked, I think a lot of people have asked for other things, so it's just, squeaky wheel, right? I think at the end of the day, people are like building these data sets and I think if you sort of map things chronologically, these make more sense because it's like, how do we incrementally improve all of these models?[00:14:07] So a lot of these models are just incremental improvements over the last thing, right? Whether it is sort of through methods of how do we, how did we curate the data set? How did we improve the quality of the data set? So, you maybe LDJ talked about it right on I think for, for Capybara and Puffin, like how those, those were very specific dataset curation techniques that he works on.[00:14:29] The Case for Open Source AI[00:14:29] Alex Volkov: So there's, folks are doing this for dataset curation. Folks are doing this for skillset building as well. Definitely people understand that open source is like very important, especially after the, the, the, the, the march, the debacle, the OpenAI weekend that we all had. And people started noticing that even after developer day in OpenAI, the APIs went out.[00:14:48] And then after that, the whole leadership of the company is swiftly changed and people, there was worries about, you know. How can people continue building AI products based on these like shaky grounds that turned attention definitely to Technium at least in open RMS I started seeing this more and more on Twitter, but also other models and many companies They're gonna start with open AI just to get there quick, and then they they think about okay Maybe I don't want to share my knowledge.[00:15:13] Maybe I don't want to sign up for Microsoft. Maybe they will change their terms and conditions so What else is out there? They turned to other companies. Up until yesterday, Google was nowhere to be found. We've talked about Gemini a little bit before in a previous And you can tune in[00:15:26] swyx: to[00:15:26] Alex Volkov: Thursday Eye.[00:15:26] Yeah, you can tune in to Thursday Eye. We covered the Gemini release a little bit. And but many are turning into the open source community and seeing that Meta released and continues to release and commit to open source AI. Mistral came out and the model is way smaller than LLAMA and performs Significantly better.[00:15:43] People play with OpenRMS, which is currently techniums based, news researched, sourced, axolotl trained OpenRMS, I assume, right? And then they play with this and they see that, okay, this is like GPT 3. 5 quality. We had GPT 4. 5 birthday just a week ago. A week ago, a year ago, a week ago, we never, interacted with these models of this caliber.[00:16:04] And now there's one open source, one that's on my laptop, completely offline, that, I can continue improving for my use cases. So enterprises, companies are also noticing this. And the open source community folks are building the skill set, not only the data sets. They're building the actual kind of, here's how we're going to do this, with Axelotl, with these data sets.[00:16:21] The curation pieces. Now. Interesting. There's like recipes of curation. The actual model training is kind of a competitive thing where people go and compete on these leaderboards that we talked about, the LMC arena, and that recently added open air and recently added open chat and a bunch of other stuff that are super cool.[00:16:37] The hug and face open source leaderboard. And so there's a competitive aspect to this. There's the open source. Aspect to this, like Technium says, I want GPT 4 on my laptop. There's the, let me build a skill set that potentially turns into a company, like we saw with Noose. Noose just, started organizing, a bunch of people on Discord, and suddenly, they're announcing their company.[00:16:54] It's happening across all these modalities, and suddenly all these people who saw these green pastures and a fairly quick way to, hey, here's a cool online community I can, start doing cool stuff with. You mentioned the same in the beginning, right? Like, after your accident, what's cool, let me try this out.[00:17:08] Suddenly I start noticing that there's a significant movement of interest in enterprising companies into these areas. And, this skill set, these data sets, and this community is now very Very important, important enough to create an event which pulls in Andrei Karpathy from OpenAI to come and see what's new Jeremy Howard, like the event that we just talked about, people are flying over and this is just a meetup.[00:17:28] So, definitely, the community is buzzing right now and I think Axelot is a big piece as well.[00:17:34] Orca and OpenOrca[00:17:34] Wing Lian: Cool. Maybe we can talk about like Orca real quick, Orca, OpenOrca rather, I think there was a lot of buzz when, the first Orca paper came out. And just briefly, what is Orca? Yeah, Orca was basically having traces of like chain of thought reasoning, right?[00:17:48] So they go and they, they distill sort of GPT 4. They take, they take a sampling of data from the Flan dataset. Maybe we can like add some show notes in the Flan dataset. Yeah, but we've covered it. Okay, cool. Use GPT 4 to say, all right, explain this in a step by step reasoning, right?[00:18:06] And then you take that and you, they train the model and it showed, very good improvements across a lot of benchmarks. So OpenOrca was sort of the open reproduction of that since Microsoft Research never released that particular data set. And going back to sort of the Hugging Face leaderboard thing, those models did really well.[00:18:23] And then I think, so sort of the follow up to that was SlimOrca, right? I think Going into and building the OpenOrca dataset, we never really went in and, validated the actual answers that GPT 4 gave us, so what we did was one from OpenChat actually cross referenced the original Flan, the original Flan response, the human responses, the correct answers with the dataset, and then I went and took it and sent all of, both of them to GPT 4 and said, is this answer mostly correct, right?[00:18:54] Yeah. And then we were able to filter the dataset from, At least of the GPT 4 only answers from like 800, 000 to like 500, 000 answers or rows and then, and then retrain the model and it had the same performance as the original model to within I think, 0. 1 percent here about, and 30 percent less data.[00:19:13] So, yeah. Okay.[00:19:15] swyx: Interesting. So, I mean, there's, there's so much there that I want to highlight, but yeah. Orca is interesting. I do want people to know about it. Putting chain of thought into the data set like it's just makes a ton of sense one thing I think it would be helpful for people to scope thing these things out is how much data are we talking about when when you When people are fine tuning and then how much time or resources or money does it take to train to fine[00:19:36] Wing Lian: tune?[00:19:37] Yeah, so I think there's a little bit of overlap there with sort of like fine tuning techniques, but let's say Orca and I think even Hermes, they're both relatively large data sets like 10 billion tokens. Yeah. So large data sets being or the original Orca was, or the original open Orca was 800,000 rows.[00:19:55] I believe it was somewhere in the ballpark of like a gigabyte of data, of gigabyte, of text data. And I, I don't. I believe, Hermes was, is like a quarter million rows of data, I don't know the actual byte size on that particular one. So, going and training a, let's, let's say everybody's training 7 billion Mistral right now, right?[00:20:15] So, to tri I, I believe to fine tune 7 billion Mistral on, let's say, 8 A6000s, which have 48 gigabytes of VRAM, I believe, It takes about 40 hours, so 40, and then that's, depending on where you get your compute, 40 times 6, so it's like 500 to fine tune that model, so, and, and that's assuming you get it right the first time, right?[00:20:44] So, you know.[00:20:45] swyx: Is, is that something that X. Lotto handles, like, getting it right the first[00:20:48] Wing Lian: time? If you talk to anybody, it's like you've probably tried at least three or four runs or experiments to like find the right hyperparameters. And after a while you sort of have a feel for like which, where you need your hyperparameters to be.[00:21:04] Usually you might do like a partial training run, do some benchmark. So I guess for Al Farouk, whether you're going by his. This is Jeremy, he's, his actual name, or his twitter handle. He released the Dharma dataset, which is basically a subset of all the benchmarks. And Axolotl actually supports, you know taking that subset and then just running many benchmarks across your model every time you're doing an evaluation so you can sort of like see sort of relative it's not going to be the actual benchmark score, but you can get ideas alright, is this benchmark improving, is this benchmark decreasing, based on, you know Wait,[00:21:39] swyx: why don't you run the full benchmark?[00:21:41] What, what, what The[00:21:42] Wing Lian: full benchmarks take Take a long time. Significant, yeah, significant amount of time. Yeah. And Okay, so that's like[00:21:48] swyx: mini MMLU. Yeah. Like,[00:21:49] Wing Lian: mini BigBench or whatever. Yep, exactly.[00:21:51] Alex Volkov: It's really cool. We, when I joined Web2Masters just recently, and one of the things that I try to do is hey I'm not, I'm a software engineer by trade, I don't have an MLE background, But I joined a company that does primarily MLE, and I wanted to learn from the community, Because a lot of the open source community, they use weights and biases, And the benchmark that you said that Pharrell did, remind me of the name, sorry.[00:22:13] Dharma? Dharma, yeah, yeah. So Luigi showed me how Dharma shows inside the dashboard. In Wi and Biases dashboard and so you can actually kinda see the trending run and then you can see per each kind of iteration or, or epoch or you can see the model improving trending so you can on top of everything else.[00:22:29] The wi and biases gives like hyper parameter tracking, which like you, you started with common line and that's really hard to like remember. Also the Dharma data set, like the quick, the mini orca mini, you mini many different things. It's pretty cool to like visualize them as well. And I, I heard that he's working on a new version of, of Dharma, so Dharma 2, et cetera.[00:22:47] So hopefully, hopefully we'll see that soon, but definitely it's hard, right? You start this training around, it said like 40, 50 hours. Sometimes, sometimes it's like your SSHing into this machine. You, you start a process, you send it with God and you just go about your day, collecting data sets, and then you have to return.[00:23:04] And the whole process of instrumentation of this is still a little bit like squeaky but definitely. Tuning performance, or like grabbing performance in the middle of this, like with Dharma and some other tools, is very helpful to know that you're not wasting precious resources going somewhere you shouldn't go.[00:23:21] Yeah.[00:23:22] swyx: Yeah. Very cool. Maybe I'll, I'll, before we go into like sort of more details on fine tuning stuff, I just wanted to round out the rest of the Excel autoverse. There's, there's still Eric Hartford stuff. I don't know if you want to talk about Pygmalion, Disco, anything that you know about[00:23:35] Wing Lian: those, those things.[00:23:36] DiscoLM and Model Stacking[00:23:36] Wing Lian: Yeah, I think like one of the, definitely one of the more interesting ones was like the Disco 120b, right? Yeah, I know nothing about it. Yeah. So, so. Alpen from Pygmalion AI, right, so they, so Pygmalion is a sort of a, it's, it's, they have their own community, a lot of it is based around, roleplay models, those sorts of things, and Alpen, like, put together, merged together Llama270B, so, and Alpen, like, put together, merged together Llama270B, so, I don't remember how he stacked them together, whether he merged the layers in between. There's a whole, there's a whole toolkit for that by Charles Goddard, where you can like take a single model and like stack them together or multiple models merge.[00:24:18] That's like a whole other talk and a whole other tool set, but was able to create this 120. Billion parameter model out of a LAMA two 70 B. And then I believe the, yeah, disco is a fine tune of, of the, the, the sort of the base one 20 B is, I believe Goliath one 20 B. So, and, and what are the[00:24:37] swyx: headline results that people should know about[00:24:39] Wing Lian: disco?[00:24:39] I think for the headline results, I, I've, I haven't played with it personally because it's. It's a very large model and there's a lot of GPU, right? But, like, from what I've heard anecdotally, it performs really well. The responses are very good. Even with, like, just, even the base model is a lot better than, Llama70b.[00:24:57] So, and we, I think generally everybody's like, we would all love to fine tune Llama70b, but it's just, it's so much, it's so much memory, so much compute, right?[00:25:07] Datasets and Evals over Models[00:25:07] Wing Lian: I[00:25:07] Alex Volkov: want to touch on this point because the interesting thing That comes up out of being in this ecosphere and being friends with open source folks, tracking week to week state of the art performance on different models.[00:25:19] First of all, a lot of the stuff that the folks do a couple of weeks ago, and then something like Mistral comes out, and a lot of the stuff back then, Doesn't technically make sense anymore. Like the artifacts of that work, the actual artifacts, they don't no longer make sense. They're like lower on the on, on the hug and face leaderboard or lower on LM CS leaderboard.[00:25:36] But some of the techniques that people use, definitely the datasets. The datasets keep traveling, right? So open airmen, for example, is the dataset. The tum cleaned up for only. Open sourceable data that previously was just Hermes. And that, it was previously used to train Lama. And then once Mistral came out, it was used to train Mistral.[00:25:54] And then it became significantly better on the 7b base Mistral. So the data sets keep traveling, keep getting better a little bit here and there. And so the techniques improve as well. It looks like both things are simultaneously true. The artifacts of a month and a half ago. The, the actual models themselves, it's great the hug and face has them, because not every company can keep up with the next weeks', oh, I, I'll install this model instead, sell this model instead.[00:26:19] But the, the techniques and the, the dataset keep improving as we go further, and I think that's really cool. However, the outcome of this is that for a long time. For many, many people, including us, that we do this every week. We literally talk with people who release these models every week. It's really hard to know.[00:26:36] So, there's a few aspects of this. One, I think, like you said, the bigger model, the 70B models, you actually have to have somebody like Perplexity, for example, giving you access to the 70B really fast. Or you have to, like, Actually, find some compute, and it's expensive, especially for the bigger models. For example Falcon 180B came out, like the hugest open source model.[00:26:56] How do you evaluate this if you can't run it? Nobody liked it. It's really, so first of all, nobody liked it, but secondly, only the people who were able to find compute enough to run inference on this, they only had like, I can't run this on my laptop, and so that's why it's much easier, something like OpenRMS 7 to be, 7B, it's much easier, because you can run this on your MacBook.[00:27:14] It's much easier to evaluate. It's much easier to figure out the vibes, right? Everybody talks about the vibes as an evaluation check. If you're plugged in enough, if you follow the right people, if they say pretty much the same things all independently, then you run into a problem of whether they're repeating, and their stochastic parents are repeating the same thing, or they actually evaluated themselves.[00:27:31] Yeah, you never know. But, you never know, but like, I think on a large enough scale on Twitter, you start getting the feel. And we all know that like, OpenRMS is one of the top performing models, benchmarks, but also vibes. And I just wanted to highlight this vibes checks thing because you can have the benchmarks, you can have the evaluations, they potentially have contamination in them, potentially they not necessarily tell you the whole story because some models are good on benchmarks, but then you talk to them, they're not super helpful.[00:28:00] And I think it's a combination of the benchmarks, the leaderboards, the chatbot, because LMSys, remember, their ranking is not only based on benchmarks, it's also people playing with their arena stuff. People actually like humans, like, get two answers. I think they completely ignore benchmarks. Yeah, and then They only do ELO.[00:28:18] Oh, they do ELO completely, right? So that, for example, is just like people playing with both models and say, Hey, I prefer this one, I prefer that one. But also there's like some selection bias. The type of people who will go to LMCs to play with the models, they're a little bit specific in terms of like who they are.[00:28:33] It's very interesting. There's so many models. People are doing this in this way, that way. Some people are doing this for academic rigor only to test out new ideas. Some people are actually doing this like the Intel fine tunes of Mistral. Intel wanted to come out and show that their hardware approach is possible, Mistral, etc.[00:28:51] And it's really hard to know, like, what to pick, what to use. And especially on the bigger models, like you said, like the Llama 70B, the Falcon 180B. It's really because, like, who has the compute to validate those? So I would mention that, like, use with caution. Like, go and research and see if the biggest model that just released was actually worth the tokens and the money you spend on it.[00:29:12] To try and, if you're a business, to integrate it.[00:29:15] Distilling from GPT4[00:29:15] swyx: Since you said use of caution, I'll bring in one issue that has always been in the back of my mind whenever I look at the entire universe of open source AI models, which is that 95 percent of the data is derived from GPC 4, correct?[00:29:30] Which technically you can't use for commercial licenses,[00:29:34] Wing Lian: right?[00:29:35] swyx: What is the community's stance on this kind of stuff?[00:29:40] Wing Lian: I think from the community stance, like I feel like a lot of us are just experimenting, so for us, it's like, we're not going and building a product that we're trying to sell, right?[00:29:49] We're just building a product because we think it's interesting and we want to use it in our day to day lives, whether or not we try and integrate it. Personal use, yeah. Yeah, personal use, so like, as long as we're not selling it, yeah, it's fine. But[00:30:01] swyx: like, I as a company cannot just take OpenHermes and start serving[00:30:05] Alex Volkov: it and make money on it.[00:30:06] OpenHermes you can. Because the opening of OpenHermes, I think, is a clean up. That did after the regular Hermes, please folks, check your licenses before you listen to podcasts and say, Hey, I will tell you though, you could say the same thing about OpenAI. You could say the same thing kind of makes sense, where OpenAI or StabilityAI trains their diffusion model on a bunch of pictures on the internet, and then the court kind of doesn't strike down Sarah Silverman, I think, or somebody else, who came and said, hey, this has my work in it, because of the way how it processes, and the model eventually builds this knowledge into the model, and then it doesn't actually reproduce one to one what happened in the dataset.[00:30:45] You could claim the same thing for open source. Like, we're using And by we, I mean the, the open source community that I like happily report on uses GPT 4 to rank, for example, which is the better answer you, you, that's how you build one, one type of data set, right? Or DPO or something like this, you, you basically generate data set of like a question and four answers, for example, and then you go to GPT 4 and say, Hey, smartest model in the world right now, up to Gemini Ultra, that we should mention as well.[00:31:11] Which one of those choices is better? But the choices themselves are not necessarily written with GPT 4. Some of them may be, so there's like full syntactic datasets. But there's also, datasets are just ranked with GPT 4. But they're actually generated with a sillier model, or like the less important model.[00:31:25] The lines are very blurry as to what type of stuff is possible or not possible. And again, when you use this model that's up on Hug Face, the license says you can use this. OpenAI is not going to come after you, the user. If anything, OpenAI will try to say, hey, let's prevent this, this type of thing happening, and the brain, but I honestly don't think that they could know even, not that it makes it okay, it's just like, They also kind of do this with the Internet's archive, and also, I think that some of it is for use.[00:31:55] You use models to help you augment tasks, which is what GPT 4 lets you do.[00:32:00] swyx: Yeah, the worst thing that OpenAI can do is just kick you off OpenAI. That's because it's only enforced in the terms of service.[00:32:05] Alex Volkov: Sure, but just like to make sure, to clarify who they're going to kick out, they could kick out like News, for example, if news are abusing their service, a user of the open source, fully Apache 2 open source, for example, They won't get kicked out if they use both, just because they use both.[00:32:22] I don't believe so. I don't think OpenAI has a claim for that.[00:32:25] swyx: Well, we're not lawyers, but I just want to mention it for people to know it's an issue.[00:32:30] Wing Lian: And one of the things, like, I talked to someone recently, and I think that they also are like interested in it, but also to the point of like, right, if I use a model trained on data, using GPT for data, But I use that model to then regenerate new data.[00:32:46] Is that model, is that data okay? So like you start going down this whole rabbit hole. So yeah. All right.[00:32:53] swyx: Fantastic. Cool. Well, I think that's roughly highlights most of the open source universe. You also have your own models. Do you want to shout out any one of them? Yeah.[00:33:01] Wing Lian: I mean, I think like, I think Early on, Manicore got a lot of love.[00:33:04] I think it was mostly popular in, like, the roleplay communities. It was, it tended to be pretty truthful. It tended to be, like, have relatively good answers, depending on who you ask, right? But, I think for me, it was just, Releasing models was a way to try and, like, continue to build out the product, figure out what I needed to put into the product, how do I make it faster, and, if you've got to, like, go and debug your product, you may as well have it do something useful.[00:33:29] Awesome. So, yeah.[00:33:31] Finetuning - LoRA, QLoRA, ReLoRA, GPTQ[00:33:31] swyx: Okay, and then maybe we'll talk about just fine tuning techniques. So this is going to be a little bit more technical than just talking about model names and datasets. So we started off talking about LoRa, QLoRa. I just learned from your readme there's ReLoRa. Which I've never heard about.[00:33:45] Could you maybe talk about, like, just parameter efficient fine tuning that whole, that[00:33:50] Wing Lian: whole journey, like, what people should know. Yeah, so with parameter efficient fine tuning, I think the popular ones, again, being, let's, we'll start with lore, right? So, usually what you do is you freeze all the layers on your base, on the base model, and then you, at the same time, you sort of introduce additional Oh, this is tight.[00:34:08] No. You introduce, another set of layers over it, and then you train those, and it is done in a way that is mathematically possible, particularly with LORs that you can, then you, you, When you, when you train the model, you, you run your inputs through the base model, whose weights are frozen, but you, then you also run it through the additional weights, and then at the end you combine the weights, and then, and then, or you combine the weights to get your outputs, and then at the end, and when you're done training, you're left with this other set of weights, right, that are completely independent, and And then from that, what you can do is, some person smarter than I figured out, well, oh, they've done it in such a way that now I can merge these weights back into the original model without changing the architecture of the model, right?[00:35:03] So, so, that tends to be, like, the go to, and You're training much fewer parameters so that when you do that, yes, you still need to have all of the original weights, but you have a smaller gradient, you have a smaller optimizer state, and you're just training less weights, so you can tend to train those models on, like, much smaller GPUs.[00:35:27] swyx: Yeah. And it's roughly like, what I've seen, what I've seen out there is roughly like 1 percent the number of parameters that you're trading. Yeah, that sounds about right. Which is that much cheaper. So Axelotl supports full fine tune, LoRa, QLoRa,[00:35:40] Wing Lian: Q. Yes. So, so QLoRa is, is very similar to LoRa. The paper was, if I remember correctly, the paper was Rather, traditionally, most people who did Loras were, were, they were quant, they were putting the model weights in 8 bit, and then fine tune, parameter efficient fine tuning over the Lora weights, and then with QLora, they were quantizing all of those, they were then quantizing the weights down to 4 bit, right, and then I believe they were also training on all of the linear layers in the model.[00:36:15] And then with ReLore, that was an interesting paper, and then, I think, like, it got implemented. Some people in the community tried it, tried it out, and it showed that it didn't really have the impact that the paper indicated that it would. And from what I was told recently, that they re I guess they re released something for Relora, like, a few weeks ago, and that it's possibly better.[00:36:44] I personally haven't had the time. What was the[00:36:46] swyx: main difference,[00:36:47] Wing Lian: apart from quantization? I don't know. Okay. What was the main difference, sorry?[00:36:49] swyx: Apart from quantization, right? Like,[00:36:50] Wing Lian: Qlora's thing was, like, we'll just drop off some bits. With Relora, what they did was, you would go through, you would define some number of steps that you would train, like, your Lora with, or your Qlora.[00:37:01] Like, you could do Like, ReqLore, if you really wanted to, you would, you would train your LoRa for some number of steps, And then you would merge those weights into your base model, and then you would start over. So by starting, so, then by starting over, The optimizer has to find, like, sort of, re optimize again, and find what's the best direction to move in, and then do it all again, and then merge it in, do it all again, and theoretically, according to the paper, doing ReLore, you can do parameter efficient fine tuning, but still have sort of, like, the performance gains of doing a full fine tuning, so.[00:37:38] swyx: Yeah, and[00:37:39] Wing Lian: GPTQ? And GPTQ, so it's, I think with GPTQ, it's very similar to, more similar to QLore, where you're, it's mostly a quantization of the weights down to like 4 bit, where GPTQ is a very, is a specific methodology or implementation of quantization, so. Got it.[00:37:57] Alex Volkov: Wang, for, for folks who use Axolotl, your users, some people who maybe, Want to try it out?[00:38:03] And do they need to know the differences? Do they need to know the implementation details of QLora versus ReLora? Or is it okay for them to just know that Axolotl is the place that already integrated them? And if that's true, if that's all they need to know, how do they choose which method to use? Yeah,[00:38:22] Wing Lian: so I think like, I think most people aren't going to be using ReLora.[00:38:25] I think most people are going to be using either Lora or QLora. And I think they should have it. They should have an understanding of why they might want to use one over the other. Most people will say that with Qlora, the quality of the final model is not quite as good as like if you were to do a LoRa or a full fine tune, right?[00:38:44] Just because, you've quantized these down, so your accuracy is probably a little off, and so that by the time you've done the Qlora, you're not moving the weights how you would on a full fine tune with the full parameter weights.[00:38:56] Interesting.[00:38:57] swyx: Okay, cool. For people who are more interested, obviously, read the papers. I just wanted to give people, like, a high level overview of what these things are. And you've done people a service by making it easy for people to try it out. I'm going to, I'm going to also ask a question which I know to be wrong, but I'm curious because I get asked this all the time.[00:39:15] What is the difference between all these kinds of fine tunes[00:39:17] Wing Lian: and RLHF? Okay, between all of these sorts of fine tunes and RLHF. So all of these sorts of fine tunes are based, are, ideally, this, they are taking knowledge that the base model already knows about, and presenting it in a way to the model that you're having the model answer like, Use what it already knows to sort of answer in a particular way, whether it's, you're extracting general knowledge, a particular task, right?[00:39:44] Instruct, tune, chat, those sorts of things. And then generally with RLHF, so what is, let's go back, what is it? Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. So if we start with the human feedback part, What you're doing is you generally have, you have like a given prompt and then you, maybe you have one, maybe you have two, I think, like if you look at with Starling, you have like up to what, seven different, seven different possible responses, and you're sort of ranking those responses on, on some sort of metric, right, whether the metric is how much I, I might like that answer versus or I think with like starling is like how how how helpful was the answer how accurate was the answer how toxic was the answer those sorts of things on some sort of scale right and then using that to go back and like sort of Take a model and nudge it in the direction of giving that feedback, to be able to answer questions based on those preferences.[00:40:42] swyx: Yeah, so you can apply, and is it commutative? Can you apply fine tuning after and onto an RLHF model? Or should the RLHF apply, come in afterwards,[00:40:54] Wing Lian: after the fine tune? Um, I, yeah, I don't know that there's There's been enough research for one way or another, like, I don't know.[00:41:02] That's a question that's been asked on Discord. Yeah, like, I definitely would say I don't know the answer. Go and try it and report back to me and let me know so I can answer for the next guy.[00:41:10] swyx: It's shocking how much is still unknown about all these things. Well, I mean, that's what research is for, right?[00:41:16] Wing Lian: So actually I, I think I saw on the top of a leaderboard, it was a, it was a mytral base model, and they didn't actually fine tune it. They, or they, they just did RLH, they did like an RLHF fine tune on it using like, I don't, I don't recall which dataset, but it was like, and it benchmarked really well.[00:41:37] But yeah, you'd have to go and look at it. But, so it is interesting, like going back to that, it's like. Traditionally, most people will fine tune the model and then do like a DPO, PPO, some sort of reinforcement learning over that, but that particular model was, it seemed like they skipped like the supervised fine tuning or Scott.[00:41:55] Axolotl vs HF Transformers[00:41:55] swyx: Cool. One thing I did also want to comment about is the overall, like, landscape, competitive landscape, I don't know. Hugging Face Transformers, I think, has a PFT module.[00:42:05] Wing Lian: Yeah, yeah, the PEFT, the Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning, yep. Is that a competitor to you? No, no, so we actually use it. We're just a wrapper over sort of, sort of the HuggingFace stuff.[00:42:15] So, so that is their own sort of module where They have, taken the responsibility or yeah, the responsibility of like where you're doing these parameter efficient fine tuning methods and just sort of like, it is in that particular package where transformers is mostly responsible for sort of like the modeling code and, and the trainer, right.[00:42:35] And then sort of, there's an integration between the two and, there's like a variety of other fine tuning packages, I think like TRL, TRLX, that's the stability AI one. Yeah, I think TRL likes the stability, yeah, Carper, and TRL is a hugging face trainer. Even that one's just another wrapper over, over the transformers library and the path library, right?[00:43:00] But what we do is we have taken sort of those, yes, we've We also use that, but we also have more validation, right? So, there are some of us who have done enough fine tunes where like, Oh, this and this just don't go together, right? But most people don't know that, so like Example?[00:43:19] Like, people want to One and one doesn't go together. I don't have an example offhand, but if you turn this knob and this knob, right? You would think, all right, maybe this will work, but you don't know until you try. And then by the time you find out it doesn't work, it's like maybe five minutes later, it's failed.[00:43:34] It's failed in the middle of training or it's failed during the evaluation step. And you're like, ah, so we've, we've added a lot of, we've added a lot more validation in it. So that like, when you've, you've created your configuration, you run it through and now you say. The validation code says this is probably not right or probably not what you don't, not what you want.[00:43:52] So are you like a, you[00:43:53] swyx: do some linting of your YAML file?[00:43:56] Wing Lian: There, I guess you could call it linting, it's sort of like Is there a set of rules out[00:44:00] swyx: there somewhere? Yeah, there's a set of rules in there. That's amazing, you should write documentation like This rule is because, this user at this time, like, ran into this bug and that's what we invested in.[00:44:10] It's like a good collection[00:44:11] Wing Lian: of knowledge. Yeah, it is, and I guess like, if you really wanted to, like, figure it out, I guess you could, like, git blame everything, and But, yeah, it's, so, I think that's always a useful thing, it's like Because people want to experiment but they don't, people will get frustrated when you've experiment, you're experimenting and it breaks and you don't know why or you know why and you've just gone down the rabbit hole, right?[00:44:37] So, so I think that's one of the big features that's, that I think I find important because it's It prevents you from doing things you probably shouldn't have, and it, and sometimes we will let you do those things, but we'll try and warn, warn you that you've done that.[00:44:50] I[00:44:51] Alex Volkov: have a follow up question on this, actually, because yesterday we hung out to this open source event, and I spent time by you a couple times, like when people told you, oh, XLR, I use XLR, it's super cool, and then the first thing you asked is, like, immediately, like, what can we improve?[00:45:04] And yes, from multiple folks, and I think we talked about this a little bit, where there's It's a developer tool. It's like a machine learning slash developer tool. Your purpose in this is to help and keep people, as much as possible, like, Hey, here's the best set of things that you can use right now. The bear libraries are, or the bear trainer, for example, is a bear trainer.[00:45:28] And also, maybe we should talk about how fast you're implementing these things. So you mentioned the first implementation took a week or so. Now there's a core maintainer group, right? There's like, features are landing, like Qlora, for example. Neftune, I don't know if that's one example of something that people potentially said that it's going to be cool, and then eventually, like, one of those things that didn't really shake out, like, people quickly tested this out.[00:45:48] So, there's a ton of Wait, Neftune is cancelled? I don't know if it's fully canceled, but based on vibes, I heard that it's not that great. So like, but the whole point that I'm trying to make with Neftune as well is that being existing in the community of like XLR or like, I don't know, even following the, the GitHub options or following the Discord, it's a fairly good way to like, learn these, Kind of gut feelings that you just, you just said, right?[00:46:14] Like where this, maybe this knob, that knob doesn't work. Some of these are not written down. Some of these are like tribal knowledge that passes from place to place. Axel is like a great collection of many of them. And so, do you get That back also from community of folks who just use, like, how do you know who uses this?[00:46:30] I think that's still an issue, like, knowing if they trained with XLR or should they add this to things? Talk about, how do you get feedback and how else you should get feedback?[00:46:38] Wing Lian: Yeah, I mean, most of the feedback comes from the Discord, so people come in and , they don't get a training running, they run into, like, obscure errors or, errors that That's a lot of things that maybe, maybe as a product we could catch, but like, there's a lot of things that at some point we need to go and do and it's just on the list somewhere.[00:46:58] Right that's why when people come up, I'm like, what, what were your pain points? Because like, as a developer tool, if you're not happy with it, or you come in and in the first, Takes you 30 minutes and you're still not happy. You leave the tool and you may, you might move on maybe to a better tool, maybe to, one with less frustration, but it may not be as good, right?[00:47:17] So I'm trying to like, figure out, all right, how can I reduce all this frustration? Because like for me, I use it every day for the most part, right? And so I am blind to that, right? Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. . I just know, I, I go do this, this, and this. It pretty much mostly works, right? But, so I don't have sort of that, alright, that learning curve that other people are seeing and don't understand their pain points.[00:47:40] Yeah,[00:47:40] Alex Volkov: you don't have the The ability to onboard yourself as a new user completely new to the whole paradigm to like get into the doors of like, Oh, no, I don't even know how to like ask about this problem or error.[00:47:53] swyx: Cool. The last few things I wanted to cover was also just the more advanced stuff that you covered yesterday.[00:48:00] 20x efficiency with StackLlama and Multipack[00:48:00] swyx: So I'll just, caution this as like, yeah, this is more advanced. But you mentioned Stackllama and Multipack. What are they[00:48:06] Wing Lian: and what should people know? Yeah, so, so, Stack Llama was, that paper came out, so Stack Llama I think was like, two, two, two separate, two separate concepts that they announced, so the first one was They being hugging face.[00:48:20] Yeah, sorry, yes, they being hugging face, so the first one being sort of like, this idea of packing, like some packing sequences together, so like, if we think about training data, right, your training data is, let's say, to keep the math easy, let's say your training data is 500, We, we, we, we will use the terminology words.[00:48:39] Let's say your training data is 500 words long, and let's say your, your context length, you know how much data your, that your model can accept is like, or that you want feed into your model. It's, let's say, we won't use tokens again, we'll we'll use it is it's 4,000 tokens, right? So if you're training at 4K Con or four 4,000 4K contacts and you're only using 500 of it, you're sitting like with the other 1500.[00:49:05] 3, 500 words that you're not using, right? And typically that's either filled with these PAD tokens, so I think I made the analogy last night that it's like having sort of like a glass here you fill it up with a shot of liquor and then you're and that's your training data and then you just fill it up with more water and those are your PAD tokens and it's just, it doesn't do much, right?[00:49:27] It's still the same thing, but you still have to go through all of that to go through all your training data. And then, so what Stack Llama showed was you could just sort of take your training data, append the next row of training data until you filled that entire 4k context, so in this example, right, with 500 words to 4k, that's 8 rows of training data.[00:49:48] But, the problem with that is, is that with a lot of these transformer models, they're very much relying on attention, right? So, like, if you now have this sequence of words that now, in order for the, the model has seen all of these other words before, right? And then it sees another set of words, another set of words, but it's learning everything in context of all the words that it's seen before.[00:50:13] We haven't corrected the attention for that. And just real quickly, since I said that that paper was two concepts, the other one was, I believe it was like a reinforcement learning, but outside the scope of this. So going from that, I implemented that early on because I was like, Oh, wow, this is really great.[00:50:29] And. Yes, because it saves you a bunch of time, but the trade off is a little bit of accuracy, ultimately, but it still did pretty well. I think when I did Manicore, I think it used sort of that concept from Stack Llama of just sort of appending these sequences together, right? And then sort of the next evolution of that is Multipack, right?[00:50:51] So, there was a separate paper on that, it was, I believe it was referenced, it got referenced in the Orca paper, where you could, you could properly mask those out using like a, I think it was like a lower block triangular attention mask, and then sort of, so, So, there's that. I did try implementing that, manually recreating that mask, but then one from the OpenChat, so he was helping with OpenOrca as well, and he had done an implementation of Multipack, and where he used FlashAttention, so FlashAttention So that was released by TreeDAO, and it was this huge performance gain.[00:51:35] Everybody uses it now, even the Transformers library now, they've taken all of these, like, people are taking all of these models and sort of like, making it compatible with FlashAttention. But in Flash Tension, there is one particular implementation that lets you say, Well, I'm sending you all of these sequences like you would in Stack Llama, But let me send you another, another, Set of information about, this is where this set of sequences is, this is where the second set of sequences is.[00:52:06] So like, if it was like, 500 words long, and you stacked them all together, you would just send it a row of information that was like, 0, 500, 1000, 1500, etc, etc, out to 4000. And it would know, alright, I need to break this up, and then run the forward pass with it. And then it would be able to, and it was much more, much more performant.[00:52:29] And I think you end up seeing like 10x, 20x improvements over sort of, I mean, I think FlashAttention was like a 2x improvement, and then adding that with the Multipack, you start to see like, depending on, how much data you have, up to like a 20x improvement sometimes. 20x. 20x. Wow. Yeah.[00:52:48] And I only know the 20x because I, like, before last night, I was like, I re ran the alpaca, I looked up the alpaca paper because it was like, I just need a frame of reference where somebody did it, and I think they used eight A100s for three hours, and they said it cost them 100. I don't, I don't think eight A100s cost, I don't know how much it costs right now.[00:53:14] But I ended up rerunning it. Usually a dollar an hour, right? Yeah, so eight. The cheapest is like a[00:53:18] Alex Volkov: dollar, a dollar an hour for one.[00:53:20] Wing Lian: Yeah, so that's still like 24, 25. But maybe if you're going on Azure, maybe it's like, maybe it's 100 on Azure. I mean, it used to be more expensive, like, a year ago.[00:53:31] Yeah, and then, so I re ran it with sort of like, I turned on all of the optimizations just to see what it would be. And like, and usually Multipack is the biggest optimization, so Multipack with Flash Detention. And it, I think I spun it up on 8 L40s, and it ran, and I didn't let it run all the way through, I just grabbed the time, the estimated completion time, and it was like 30 minutes, so it would have cost like 4 or 5 to run the entire, like, reproduce the alpaca paper, right?[00:54:00] Which is crazy. It's crazy. 20x,[00:54:02] Alex Volkov: yeah. I want to ask about, like, you said you turned on all the optimization. Is that the yaml file with xlodl, you just go and like check off, like, I want this, I want that? Yeah, yeah,[00:54:10] Wing Lian: so there's like one particular yaml file in there, That, there's one particular YAML file in there that's like, it's under examples, llama2, fft, optimize.[00:54:20] So, I think someone had created one where they just turned, they put in all of the optimizations and turned them on. I mean, it actually, it does run, which is like, sort of surprising sometimes, because sometimes, you optimize this, optimize this, and sometimes they just don't work together, but, yeah.[00:54:36] Just turn the knobs on, and like, fine tuning should really just be that easy, right? I just want to flip the knob and move on with my life and not figure out how to implement it.[00:54:47] Tri Dao and Mamba[00:54:47] Alex Volkov: Specifically, the guy behind FlashAttention came up with something new. You want to talk about this a little bit? You want to briefly cover Mamba?[00:54:53] Yeah, let's talk about Mamba. Let's talk about Mamba. So, what is Mamba?[00:54:57] Wing Lian: Oh, gosh. I

Join Jen and guest Kelly Cutchin discuss foreign currency exchange in the real estate market. Stay tuned to learn more.   ____________________ Hey everyone. Welcome back to Mortgage Lending Mastery. I am so delighted that you have joined us today. I just want to start out by saying, please write a review today. We love reviews, we love if you take just a quick moment to scroll down after you are done listening and give us a five star review. Write a great comment about our guests and what you learned from her today, it means so much. Last but not least please subscribe to our YouTube channel. I said last but not least, but one more thing we have our Virtual Limitless event in October, I will be speaking in Las Vegas from my hotel room because I am travelling to Hawaii. Make sure you go and sign-up for that. The link to register is below. My guest today, Kelly joined money Corp team based out of Orlando, FL in 2006. She is an expert in what we are going to be talking about today. She has held various positions with the company she took on the role of the country manager. Which I've never heard of that title, Kelly, that is a new one. Please welcome to the show Kelly. ... ____________________ Join the Mortgage Lending Mastery Community Today: YouTube Facebook Instagram Jenduplessis.com Linkedin LinkedTree Book a Strategy Call with Jen TODAY! ____________________

Tony Baer, Principal at dbInsight, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his definition of what is and isn't a database, and the trends he's seeing in the industry. Tony explains why it's important to try and have an outsider's perspective when evaluating new ideas, and the growing awareness of the impact data has on our daily lives. Corey and Tony discuss the importance of working towards true operational simplicity in the cloud, and Tony also shares why explainability in generative AI is so crucial as the technology advances. About TonyTony Baer, the founder and CEO of dbInsight, is a recognized industry expert in extending data management practices, governance, and advanced analytics to address the desire of enterprises to generate meaningful value from data-driven transformation. His combined expertise in both legacy database technologies and emerging cloud and analytics technologies shapes how clients go to market in an industry undergoing significant transformation. During his 10 years as a principal analyst at Ovum, he established successful research practices in the firm's fastest growing categories, including big data, cloud data management, and product lifecycle management. He advised Ovum clients regarding product roadmap, positioning, and messaging and helped them understand how to evolve data management and analytic strategies as the cloud, big data, and AI moved the goal posts. Baer was one of Ovum's most heavily-billed analysts and provided strategic counsel to enterprises spanning the Fortune 100 to fast-growing privately held companies.With the cloud transforming the competitive landscape for database and analytics providers, Baer led deep dive research on the data platform portfolios of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, and on how cloud transformation changed the roadmaps for incumbents such as Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Teradata. While at Ovum, he originated the term “Fast Data” which has since become synonymous with real-time streaming analytics.Baer's thought leadership and broad market influence in big data and analytics has been formally recognized on numerous occasions. Analytics Insight named him one of the 2019 Top 100 Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Influencers. Previous citations include Onalytica, which named Baer as one of the world's Top 20 thought leaders and influencers on Data Science; Analytics Week, which named him as one of 200 top thought leaders in Big Data and Analytics; and by KDnuggets, which listed Baer as one of the Top 12 top data analytics thought leaders on Twitter. While at Ovum, Baer was Ovum's IT's most visible and publicly quoted analyst, and was cited by Ovum's parent company Informa as Brand Ambassador in 2017. In raw numbers, Baer has 14,000 followers on Twitter, and his ZDnet “Big on Data” posts are read 20,000 – 30,000 times monthly. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as Strata Data and Spark Summit.Links Referenced:dbInsight: https://dbinsight.io/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at RedHat.As your organization grows, so does the complexity of your IT resources. You need a flexible solution that lets you deploy, manage, and scale workloads throughout your entire ecosystem. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform simplifies the management of applications and services across your hybrid infrastructure with one platform. Look for it on the AWS Marketplace.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Back in my early formative years, I was an SRE sysadmin type, and one of the areas I always avoided was databases, or frankly, anything stateful because I am clumsy and unlucky and that's a bad combination to bring within spitting distance of anything that, you know, can't be spun back up intact, like databases. So, as a result, I tend not to spend a lot of time historically living in that world. It's time to expand horizons and think about this a little bit differently. My guest today is Tony Baer, principal at dbInsight. Tony, thank you for joining me.Tony: Oh, Corey, thanks for having me. And by the way, we'll try and basically knock down your primal fear of databases today. That's my mission.Corey: We're going to instill new fears in you. Because I was looking through a lot of your work over the years, and the criticism I have—and always the best place to deliver criticism is massively in public—is that you take a very conservative, stodgy approach to defining a database, whereas I'm on the opposite side of the world. I contain information. You can ask me about it, which we'll call querying. That's right. I'm a database.But I've never yet found myself listed in any of your analyses around various database options. So, what is your definition of databases these days? Where do they start and stop? Tony: Oh, gosh.Corey: Because anything can be a database if you hold it wrong.Tony: [laugh]. I think one of the last things I've ever been called as conservative and stodgy, so this is certainly a way to basically put the thumbtack on my share.Corey: Exactly. I'm trying to normalize my own brand of lunacy, so we'll see how it goes.Tony: Exactly because that's the role I normally play with my clients. So, now the shoe is on the other foot. What I view a database is, is basically a managed collection of data, and it's managed to the point where essentially, a database should be transactional—in other words, when I basically put some data in, I should have some positive information, I should hopefully, depending on the type of database, have some sort of guidelines or schema or model for how I structure the data. So, I mean, database, you know, even though you keep hearing about unstructured data, the fact is—Corey: Schemaless databases and data stores. Yeah, it was all the rage for a few years.Tony: Yeah, except that they all have schemas, just that those schemaless databases just have very variable schema. They're still schema.Corey: A question that I have is you obviously think deeply about these things, which should not come as a surprise to anyone. It's like, “Well, this is where I spend my entire career. Imagine that. I might think about the problem space a little bit.” But you have, to my understanding, never worked with databases in anger yourself. You don't have a history as a DBA or as an engineer—Tony: No.Corey: —but what I find very odd is that unlike a whole bunch of other analysts that I'm not going to name, but people know who I'm talking about regardless, you bring actual insights into this that I find useful and compelling, instead of reverting to the mean of well, I don't actually understand how any of these things work in reality, so I'm just going to believe whoever sounds the most confident when I ask a bunch of people about these things. Are you just asking the right people who also happen to sound confident? But how do you get away from that very common analyst trap?Tony: Well, a couple of things. One is I purposely play the role of outside observer. In other words, like, the idea is that if basically an idea is supposed to stand on its own legs, it has to make sense. If I've been working inside the industry, I might take too many things for granted. And a good example of this goes back, actually, to my early days—actually this goes back to my freshman year in college where I was taking an organic chem course for non-majors, and it was taught as a logic course not as a memorization course.And we were given the option at the end of the term to either, basically, take a final or  do a paper. So, of course, me being a writer I thought, I can BS my way through this. But what I found—and this is what fascinated me—is that as long as certain technical terms were defined for me, I found a logic to the way things work. And so, that really informs how I approach databases, how I approach technology today is I look at the logic  on how things work. That being said, in order for me to understand that, I need to know twice as much as the next guy in order to be able to speak that because I just don't do this in my sleep.Corey: That goes a big step toward, I guess, addressing a lot of these things, but it also feels like—and maybe this is just me paying closer attention—that the world of databases and data and analytics have really coalesced or emerged in a very different way over the past decade-ish. It used to be, at least from my perspective, that oh, that the actual, all the data we store, that's a storage admin problem. And that was about managing NetApps and SANs and the rest. And then you had the database side of it, which functionally from the storage side of the world was just a big file or series of files that are the backing store for the database. And okay, there's not a lot of cross-communication going on there.Then with the rise of object store, it started being a little bit different. And even the way that everyone is talking about getting meaning from data has really seem to be evolving at an incredibly intense clip lately. Is that an accurate perception, or have I just been asleep at the wheel for a while and finally woke up?Tony: No, I think you're onto something there. And the reason is that, one, data is touching us all around ourselves, and the fact is, I mean, I'm you can see it in the same way that all of a sudden that people know how to spell AI. They may not know what it means, but the thing is, there is an awareness the data that we work with, the data that is about us, it follows us, and with the cloud, this data has—well, I should say not just with the cloud but with smart mobile devices—we'll blame that—we are all each founts of data, and rich founts of data. And people in all walks of life, not just in the industry, are now becoming aware of it and there's a lot of concern about can we have any control, any ownership over the data that should be ours? So, I think that phenomenon has also happened in the enterprise, where essentially where we used to think that the data was the DBAs' issue, it's become the app developers' issue, it's become the business analysts' issue. Because the answers that we get, we're ultimately accountable for. It all comes from the data.Corey: It also feels like there's this idea of databases themselves becoming more contextually aware of the data contained within them. Originally, this used to be in the realm of, “Oh, we know what's been accessed recently and we can tier out where it lives for storage optimization purposes.” Okay, great, but what I'm seeing now almost seems to be a sense of, people like to talk about pouring ML into their database offerings. And I'm not able to tell whether that is something that adds actual value, or if it's marketing-ware.Tony: Okay. First off, let me kind of spill a couple of things. First of all, it's not a question of the database becoming aware. A database is not sentient.Corey: Niether are some engineers, but that's neither here nor there.Tony: That would be true, but then again, I don't want anyone with shotguns lining up at my door after this—Corey: [laugh].Tony: —after this interview is published. But [laugh] more of the point, though, is that I can see a couple roles for machine learning in databases. One is a database itself, the logs, are an incredible font of data, of operational data. And you can look at trends in terms of when this—when the pattern of these logs goes this way, that is likely to happen. So, the thing is that I could very easily say we're already seeing it: machine learning being used to help optimize the operation of databases, if you're Oracle, and say, “Hey, we can have a database that runs itself.”The other side of the coin is being able to run your own machine-learning models in database as opposed to having to go out into a separate cluster and move the data, and that's becoming more and more of a checkbox feature. However, that's going to be for essentially, probably, like, the low-hanging fruit, like the 80/20 rule. It'll be like the 20% of an ana—of relatively rudimentary, you know, let's say, predictive analyses that we can do inside the database. If you're going to be doing something more ambitious, such as a, you know, a large language model, you probably do not want to run that in database itself. So, there's a difference there.Corey: One would hope. I mean, one of the inappropriate uses of technology that I go for all the time is finding ways to—as directed or otherwise—in off-label uses find ways of tricking different services into running containers for me. It's kind of a problem; this is probably why everyone is very grateful I no longer write production code for anyone.But it does seem that there's been an awful lot of noise lately. I'm lazy. I take shortcuts very often, and one of those is that whenever AWS talks about something extensively through multiple marketing cycles, it becomes usually a pretty good indicator that they're on their back foot on that area. And for a long time, they were doing that about data and how it's very important to gather data, it unlocks the key to your business, but it always felt a little hollow-slash-hypocritical to me because you're going to some of the same events that I have that AWS throws on. You notice how you have to fill out the exact same form with a whole bunch of mandatory fields every single time, but there never seems to be anything that gets spat back out to you that demonstrates that any human or system has ever read—Tony: Right.Corey: Any of that? It's basically a, “Do what we say, not what we do,” style of story. And I always found that to be a little bit disingenuous.Tony: I don't want to just harp on AWS here. Of course, we can always talk about the two-pizza box rule and the fact that you have lots of small teams there, but I'd rather generalize this. And I think you really—what you're just describing is been my trip through the healthcare system. I had some sports-related injuries this summer, so I've been through a couple of surgeries to repair sports injuries. And it's amazing that every time you go to the doctor's office, you're filling the same HIPAA information over and over again, even with healthcare systems that use the same electronic health records software. So, it's more a function of that it's not just that the technologies are siloed, it's that the organizations are siloed. That's what you're saying.Corey: That is fair. And I think at some level—I don't know if this is a weird extension of Conway's Law or whatnot—but these things all have different backing stores as far as data goes. And there's a—the hard part, it seems, in a lot of companies once they hit a certain point of maturity is not just getting the data in—because they've already done that to some extent—but it's also then making it actionable and helping various data stores internal to the company reconcile with one another and start surfacing things that are useful. It increasingly feels like it's less of a technology problem and more of a people problem.Tony: It is. I mean, put it this way, I spent a lot of time last year, I burned a lot of brain cells working on data fabrics, which is an idea that's in the idea of the beholder. But the ideal of a data fabric is that it's not the tool that necessarily governs your data or secures your data or moves your data or transforms your data, but it's supposed to be the master orchestrator that brings all that stuff together. And maybe sometime 50 years in the future, we might see that.I think the problem here is both technical and organizational. [unintelligible 00:11:58] a promise, you have all these what we used call island silos. We still call them silos or islands of information. And actually, ironically, even though in the cloud we have technologies where we can integrate this, the cloud has actually exacerbated this issue because there's so many islands of information, you know, coming up, and there's so many different little parts of the organization that have their hands on that. That's also a large part of why there's such a big discussion about, for instance, data mesh last year: everybody is concerned about owning their own little piece of the pie, and there's a lot of question in terms of how do we get some consistency there? How do we all read from the same sheet of music? That's going to be an ongoing problem. You and I are going to get very old before that ever gets solved.Corey: Yeah, there are certain things that I am content to die knowing that they will not get solved. If they ever get solved, I will not live to see it, and there's a certain comfort in that, on some level.Tony: Yeah.Corey: But it feels like this stuff is also getting more and more complicated than it used to be, and terms aren't being used in quite the same way as they once were. Something that a number of companies have been saying for a while now has been that customers overwhelmingly are preferring open-source. Open source is important to them when it comes to their database selection. And I feel like that's a conflation of a couple of things. I've never yet found an ideological, purity-driven customer decision around that sort of thing.What they care about is, are there multiple vendors who can provide this thing so I'm not going to be using a commercially licensed database that can arbitrarily start playing games with seat licenses and wind up distorting my cost structure massively with very little notice. Does that align with your—Tony: Yeah.Corey: Understanding of what people are talking about when they say that, or am I missing something fundamental? Which is again, always possible?Tony: No, I think you're onto something there. Open-source is a whole other can of worms, and I've burned many, many brain cells over this one as well. And today, you're seeing a lot of pieces about the, you know, the—that are basically giving eulogies for open-source. It's—you know, like HashiCorp just finally changed its license and a bunch of others have in the database world. What open-source has meant is been—and I think for practitioners, for DBAs and developers—here's a platform that's been implemented by many different vendors, which means my skills are portable.And so, I think that's really been the key to why, for instance, like, you know, MySQL and especially PostgreSQL have really exploded, you know, in popularity. Especially Postgres, you know, of late. And it's like, you look at Postgres, it's a very unglamorous database. If you're talking about stodgy, it was born to be stodgy because they wanted to be an adult database from the start. They weren't the LAMP stack like MySQL.And the secret of success with Postgres was that it had a very permissive open-source license, which meant that as long as you don't hold University of California at Berkeley, liable, have at it, kids. And so, you see, like, a lot of different flavors of Postgres out there, which means that a lot of customers are attracted to that because if I get up to speed on this Postgres—on one Postgres database, my skills should be transferable, should be portable to another. So, I think that's a lot of what's happening there.Corey: Well, I do want to call that out in particular because when I was coming up in the naughts, the mid-2000s decade, the lingua franca on everything I used was MySQL, or as I insist on mispronouncing it, my-squeal. And lately, on same vein, Postgres-squeal seems to have taken over the entire universe, when it comes to the de facto database of choice. And I'm old and grumpy and learning new things as always challenging, so I don't understand a lot of the ways that thing gets managed from the context coming from where I did before, but what has driven the massive growth of mindshare among the Postgres-squeal set?Tony: Well, I think it's a matter of it's 30 years old and it's—number one, Postgres always positioned itself as an Oracle alternative. And the early years, you know, this is a new database, how are you going to be able to match, at that point, Oracle had about a 15-year headstart on it. And so, it was a gradual climb to respectability. And I have huge respect for Oracle, don't get me wrong on that, but you take a look at Postgres today and they have basically filled in a lot of the blanks.And so, it now is a very cre—in many cases, it's a credible alternative to Oracle. Can it do all the things Oracle can do? No. But for a lot of organizations, it's the 80/20 rule. And so, I think it's more just a matter of, like, Postgres coming of age. And the fact is, as a result of it coming of age, there's a huge marketplace out there and so much choice, and so much opportunity for skills portability. So, it's really one of those things where its time has come.Corey: I think that a lot of my own biases are simply a product of the era in which I learned how a lot of these things work on. I am terrible at Node, for example, but I would be hard-pressed not to suggest JavaScript as the default language that people should pick up if they're just entering tech today. It does front-end, it does back-end—Tony: Sure.Corey: —it even makes fries, apparently. There's a—that is the lingua franca of the modern internet in a bunch of different ways. That doesn't mean I'm any good at it, and it doesn't mean at this stage, I'm likely to improve massively at it, but it is the right move, even if it is inconvenient for me personally.Tony: Right. Right. Put it this way, we've seen—and as I said, I'm not an expert in programming languages, but we've seen a huge profusion of programming languages and frameworks. But the fact is that there's always been a draw towards critical mass. At the turn of the millennium, we thought is between Java and .NET. Little did we know that basically JavaScript—which at that point was just a web scripting language—[laugh] we didn't know that it could work on the server; we thought it was just a client. Who knew?Corey: That's like using something inappropriately as a database. I mean, good heavens.Tony: [laugh]. That would be true. I mean, when I could have, you know, easily just use a spreadsheet or something like that. But so, I mean, who knew? I mean, just like for instance, Java itself was originally conceived for a set-top box. You never know how this stuff is going to turn out. It's the same thing happen with Python. Python was also a web scripting language. Oh, by the way, it happens to be really powerful and flexible for data science. And whoa, you know, now Python is—in terms of data science languages—has become the new SaaS.Corey: It really took over in a bunch of different ways. Before that, Perl was great, and I go, “Why would I use—why write in Python when Perl is available?” It's like, “Okay, you know, how to write Perl, right?” “Yeah.” “Have you ever read anything a month later?” “Oh…” it's very much a write-only language. It is inscrutable after the fact. And Python at least makes that a lot more approachable, which is never a bad thing.Tony: Yeah.Corey: Speaking of what you touched on toward the beginning of this episode, the idea of databases not being sentient, which I equate to being self-aware, you just came out very recently with a report on generative AI and a trip that you wound up taking on this. Which I've read; I love it. In fact, we've both been independently using the phrase [unintelligible 00:19:09] to, “English is the new most common programming language once a lot of this stuff takes off.” But what have you seen? What have you witnessed as far as both the ground truth reality as well as the grandiose statements that companies are making as they trip over themselves trying to position as the forefront leader and all of this thing that didn't really exist five months ago?Tony: Well, what's funny is—and that's a perfect question because if on January 1st you asked “what's going to happen this year?” I don't think any of us would have thought about generative AI or large language models. And I will not identify the vendors, but I did some that had— was on some advanced briefing calls back around the January, February timeframe. They were talking about things like server lists, they were talking about in database machine learning and so on and so forth. They weren't saying anything about generative.And all of a sudden, April, it changed. And it's essentially just another case of the tail wagging the dog. Consumers were flocking to ChatGPT and enterprises had to take notice. And so, what I saw, in the spring was—and I was at a conference from SaaS, I'm [unintelligible 00:20:21] SAP, Oracle, IBM, Mongo, Snowflake, Databricks and others—that they all very quickly changed their tune to talk about generative AI. What we were seeing was for the most part, position statements, but we also saw, I think, the early emphasis was, as you say, it's basically English as the new default programming language or API, so basically, coding assistance, what I'll call conversational query.I don't want to call it natural language query because we had stuff like Tableau Ask Data, which was very robotic. So, we're seeing a lot of that. And we're also seeing a lot of attention towards foundation models because I mean, what organization is going to have the resources of a Google or an open AI to develop their own foundation model? Yes, some of the Wall Street houses might, but I think most of them are just going to say, “Look, let's just use this as a starting point.”I also saw a very big theme for your models with your data. And where I got a hint of that—it was a throwaway LinkedIn post. It was back in, I think like, February, Databricks had announced Dolly, which was kind of an experimental foundation model, just to use with your own data. And I just wrote three lines in a LinkedIn post, it was on Friday afternoon. By Monday, it had 65,000 hits.I've never seen anything—I mean, yes, I had a lot—I used to say ‘data mesh' last year, and it would—but didn't get anywhere near that. So, I mean, that really hit a nerve. And other things that I saw, was the, you know, the starting to look with vector storage and how that was going to be supported was it was going be a new type of database, and hey, let's have AWS come up with, like, an, you know, an [ADF 00:21:41] database here or is this going to be a feature? I think for the most part, it's going to be a feature. And of course, under all this, everybody's just falling in love, falling all over themselves to get in the good graces of Nvidia. In capsule, that's kind of like what I saw.Corey: That feels directionally accurate. And I think databases are a great area to point out one thing that's always been more a little disconcerting for me. The way that I've always viewed databases has been, unless I'm calling a RAND function or something like it and I don't change the underlying data structure, I should be able to run a query twice in a row and receive the same result deterministically both times.Tony: Mm-hm.Corey: Generative AI is effectively non-deterministic for all realistic measures of that term. Yes, I'm sure there's a deterministic reason things are under the hood. I am not smart enough or learned enough to get there. But it just feels like sometimes we're going to give you the answer you think you're going to get, sometimes we're going to give you a different answer. And sometimes, in generative AI space, we're going to be supremely confident and also completely wrong. That feels dangerous to me.Tony: [laugh]. Oh gosh, yes. I mean, I take a look at ChatGPT and to me, the responses are essentially, it's a high school senior coming out with an essay response without any footnotes. It's the exact opposite of an ACID database. The reason why we're very—in the database world, we're very strongly drawn towards ACID is because we want our data to be consistent and to get—if we ask the same query, we're going to get the same answer.And the problem is, is that with generative, you know, based on large language models, computers sounds sentient, but they're not. Large language models are basically just a series of probabilities, and so hopefully those probabilities will line up and you'll get something similar. That to me, kind of scares me quite a bit. And I think as we start to look at implementing this in an enterprise setting, we need to take a look at what kind of guardrails can we put on there. And the thing is, that what this led me to was that missing piece that I saw this spring with generative AI, at least in the data and analytics world, is nobody had a clue in terms of how to extend AI governance to this, how to make these models explainable. And I think that's still—that's a large problem. That's a huge nut that it's going to take the industry a while to crack.Corey: Yeah, but it's incredibly important that it does get cracked.Tony: Oh, gosh, yes.Corey: One last topic that I want to get into. I know you said you don't want to over-index on AWS, which, fair enough. It is where I spend the bulk of my professional time and energy—Tony: [laugh].Corey: Focusing on, but I think this one's fair because it is a microcosm of a broader industry question. And that is, I don't know what the DBA job of the future is going to look like, but increasingly, it feels like it's going to primarily be picking which purpose-built AWS database—or larger [story 00:24:56] purpose database is appropriate for a given workload. Even without my inappropriate misuse of things that are not databases as databases, they are legitimately 15 or 16 different AWS services that they position as database offerings. And it really feels like you're spiraling down a well of analysis paralysis, trying to pick between all these things. Do you think the future looks more like general-purpose databases, or very purpose-built and each one is this beautiful, bespoke unicorn?Tony: [laugh]. Well, this is basically a hit on a theme that I've been—you know, we've been all been thinking about for years. And the thing is, there are arguments to be made for multi-model databases, you know, versus a for-purpose database. That being said, okay, two things. One is that what I've been saying, in general, is that—and I wrote about this way, way back; I actually did a talk at the [unintelligible 00:25:50]; it was a throwaway talk, or [unintelligible 00:25:52] one of those conferences—I threw it together and it's basically looking at the emergence of all these specialized databases.But how I saw, also, there's going to be kind of an overlapping. Not that we're going to come back to Pangea per se, but that, for instance, like, a relational database will be able to support JSON. And Oracle, for instance, does has some fairly brilliant ideas up the sleeve, what they call a JSON duality, which sounds kind of scary, which basically says, “We can store data relationally, but superimpose GraphQL on top of all of this and this is going to look really JSON-y.” So, I think on one hand, you are going to be seeing databases that do overlap. Would I use Oracle for a MongoDB use case? No, but would I use Oracle for a case where I might have some document data? I could certainly see that.The other point, though, and this is really one I want to hammer on here—it's kind of a major concern I've had—is I think the cloud vendors, for all their talk that we give you operational simplicity and agility are making things very complex with its expanding cornucopia of services. And what they need to do—I'm not saying, you know, let's close down the patent office—what I think we do is we need to provide some guided experiences that says, “Tell us the use case. We will now blend these particular services together and this is the package that we would suggest.” I think cloud vendors really need to go back to the drawing board from that standpoint and look at, how do we bring this all together? How would he really simplify the life of the customer?Corey: That is, honestly, I think the biggest challenge that the cloud providers have across the board. There are hundreds of services available at this point from every hyperscaler out there. And some of them are brand new and effectively feel like they're there for three or four different customers and that's about it and others are universal services that most people are probably going to use. And most things fall in between those two extremes, but it becomes such an analysis paralysis moment of trying to figure out what do I do here? What is the golden path?And what that means is that when you start talking to other people and asking their opinion and getting their guidance on how to do something when you get stuck, it's, “Oh, you're using that service? Don't do it. Use this other thing instead.” And if you listen to that, you get midway through every problem for them to start over again because, “Oh, I'm going to pick a different selection of underlying components.” It becomes confusing and complicated, and I think it does customers largely a disservice. What I think we really need, on some level, is a simplified golden path with easy on-ramps and easy off-ramps where, in the absence of a compelling reason, this is what you should be using.Tony: Believe it or not, I think this would be a golden case for machine learning.Corey: [laugh].Tony: No, but submit to us the characteristics of your workload, and here's a recipe that we would propose. Obviously, we can't trust AI to make our decisions for us, but it can provide some guardrails.Corey: “Yeah. Use a graph database. Trust me, it'll be fine.” That's your general purpose—Tony: [laugh].Corey: —approach. Yeah, that'll end well.Tony: [laugh]. I would hope that the AI would basically be trained on a better set of training data to not come out with that conclusion.Corey: One could sure hope.Tony: Yeah, exactly.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to catch up with me around what you're doing. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Tony: My website is dbinsight.io. And on my homepage, I list my latest research. So, you just have to go to the homepage where you can basically click on the links to the latest and greatest. And I will, as I said, after Labor Day, I'll be publishing my take on my generative AI journey from the spring.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to this in the [show notes 00:29:39]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Tony: Hey, it's been a pleasure, Corey. Good seeing you again.Corey: Tony Baer, principal at dbInsight. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment that we will eventually stitch together with all those different platforms to create—that's right—a large-scale distributed database.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Show notes and Transcript Avi Yemini is an Aussie dynamo. He brought his energy and determination to speak truth to the world, first through TR news and now heads up Rebel News Australia as the Chief Oz correspondent. He joins us to discuss his newly published autobiography "A Rebel From The Start: Setting The Record Straight".  Working with Tommy Robinson and then with Ezra Levant has made him a target for the legacy media and political authorities, a lot has been written about Avi and the establishment have sought to neutralise him by demonising him.  None of this has worked and in this book he tells his story for the first time.  This is Avi as you have not seen or heard him before, giving the other side to the media's lies. Avi Yemini is the Australia Bureau Chief for Rebel News. He's a former Israeli Defence Force marksman turned citizen journalist. Avi's most known for getting amongst the action and asking the tough questions in a way that brings a smile to your face. A Rebel From The Start Avi Yemini: Setting the Record Straight Available in paperback or e-book from... https://www.rebelfromthestart.com/ and Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rebel-Start-Setting-Record-Straight/dp/B0C91KG18N/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=avi+yemeni&sr=8-1  Connect with Avi... X:                   https://twitter.com/OzraeliAvi GETTR:         https://www.gettr.com/user/ozraeliavi TELEGRAM:  https://t.me/AviYeminiOfficial Instagram:    https://www.instagram.com/ozraeliaviyemini/ Rebel News: https://www.rebelnews.com/ Interview recorded 20.7.23 *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more... https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Please subscribe, like and share! Transcript (Hearts of Oak) Hello Hearts of Oak and welcome to another interview with Avi Yemini joining us once again and we're looking at his book A Rebel From the Start. Avi Yemini setting the record straight and there is a lot to set straight. He has been in the target hairs of the media, of the government, of the legal system and we obviously go into his background, big family, troubled difficult background and how he pulled his life together partially through the military and joining the Israeli military and how that really made him. And then on the journalism side, obviously working with Tommy and then working with Rebel, with Ezra, and how he's been a voice of reason during the COVID tyranny. He's been my go-to source certainly for Australian issues and he has been fearless. He has faced punishment for that. We look in the legal battles that he's faced, not only the media attacking his family and how he's had to defend them and fight for his kids. But also how he has gone through the courts and got the Victorian authorities to issue an apology for how they treated him as he was reporting on the news. Lots. I know you love listening to Avi, who is a little Aussie dynamo. Avi Yemini, it is wonderful to have you back with us again. Thanks so much for joining us today. (Avi Yemini) Thanks for having me, mate. Not at all. It's been ages but obviously you have a book out which is telling your story. A rebel from the start, Avi Yemini setting the record straight and a lot's been written about you. You've been the target of many attacks and there's a lot to set straight. It is available in the UK. It is available anywhere on the website but also directly on Amazon. Those are your handles on Twitter and rebelfromthestart.com you can buy directly there or as I said on Amazon or anywhere else. Avi, first of all can I ask you why you put pen to paper. You're busy, you do so much stuff, you seem to be everywhere, filming, finding stories, working hard for Rebel there in Australia. It takes a lot of time and discipline, I guess, to set everything else aside and actually put pen to paper. So what made you actually write the book? Yeah, absolutely. Look, writing is difficult for me especially. I found it really hard, but, it was a project that I set myself to because for so many years now, probably six, seven years, they've been writing about me. And over the last few years, especially the last four or five years, some of those issues I wasn't even able to answer. So you had these people dragging my name through the mud, smearing me and whilst knowing I can't even respond. So finally, when I could respond to those issues, I thought, I'm going to write my entire story from beginning to end or till current to essentially set the record straight. So it's called A Rebel From The Start because that's pretty much as you read from day one, I was pretty much a rebel. The subtitle is setting the record straight because I'm finally, you finally get the chance to actually hear my story from me, somebody who's actually lived the entire story instead of people that want to cherry pick little bits that they've, managed to find that suits their version of me, that they want people, they want to portray. Right back to the beginning, you're obviously the first chapter and it does fit you, a born attention seeker. You're a big character, you enjoy the limelight and your videos show, you kind of use that to your advantage. You play on that and you connect with the audience using that. But I mean, really big family born into, you had issues with many things. Do you want to touch on that? Because your story is a story of actually struggling in areas and then actually changing your life and turning it round. Yeah, it's good. Look, you know what I find interesting about this conversation is I can tell you've actually read it. A lot of people that are talking about my book online especially they obviously haven't read it because they point to parts where they're trying to embarrass me and shame me on issues. Dude, I talk all about it. Yeah, that's how I started. I grew up in an ultra-orthodox family. I was born the night my family moved to Melbourne. I'm the 10th child of 17 children, the need for attention was probably started off as a survival mechanism and into my, you know, adult life. At times it was, it certainly helped me. Other times it got me into a bit of trouble. And I guess probably the same is true within my media career. It's, I do enjoy it. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I don't and enjoy the limelight, I love it. And sometimes it gets me into trouble and at other times that willingness and happiness to be in front of the camera when others may not be works to what I'm doing to my job. But you, one of the chapters, and I remember when this was happening, one of the chapters, was guilty of wanting my kids. I can vividly remember different parts of your life played publicly, you're getting so much flack for so many things, but part of it was, you kind of personal life and your kids, and when the media bring in family, it is particularly hurtful. Tell us about that?  Yeah look, those are one of the issues that I'm referring to where the media cherry-picked and that the media sat there through my criminal trial and they knew what was going on. And they decided to pick certain aspects to report in a really outlandish way that made it easy, you know, any rational good person would hate, when you run a headline, Avi Yemini found, or pleads guilty to assaulting ex-wife. It's pretty horrible stuff. Now they left out all the context around it. Some of it you're not allowed to report, but other parts of it you are certainly allowed to report. And I think sometimes when you know the whole story then, and if you're not allowed to report the parts that gives context, then maybe it's the kind of story you should let the private life be the private life, unless somebody is really a bad person. Look, I had to deal with that smear for years, silently, and you know, it's probably one of those things, as they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Having to shut up is not in my nature, but it taught me to shut up and just cop it and to learn that, you know, no matter what they say about you, if you know the truth and they're not going to get to define you. Now after so many years I get to say, I get to have my say about that specific issue, the truth of that story is, I've never hit a woman in my life, let alone my ex-wife. I'm just not that kind of person. It was a relationship breakdown at the end. In fact, it was when I started a new relationship that this whole thing came up and that there's this kind of formula that women use. And I'm not alone. I know that there are many men, especially here in Australia. And I imagine probably also where you are, where the system, because of historically, the way that the awful way that so many women were treated, that the pendulum has swung all the way the other way, that now a man is guilty until proven innocent. And the problem with that is when you throw children into the mix, suddenly you're left with having to defend yourself, but also trying to get your kids. And so, if my kids weren't involved in all that, then I would happily, I'm not a person that's afraid of court. And you can, there's a lot of things you can say about me, but I ain't scared of a courtroom and I would happily fight to clear my name on things. But as soon as you attach my kids to it, so in short, while you have an open domestic violence case, you ain't getting your kids. So you have two ways of shutting down a domestic violence matter. One is plead guilty to what was essentially a summary offense at the lowest level of offending, the lowest crime that comes with a penalty of a fine. Even if you didn't commit it, plead guilty to it, close that domestic violence matter and get your kids. Or you can spend a couple of years trying to clear your name. And then whether you clear it or not, at the end of it you can fight to see your kids again. To me, it's a no brainer. You know, if I went back in time, I'd plead guilty to the same crime again because my kids matter more than my pride. That's essentially what this became, because I knew it was going to play out in public. It was whether, and I didn't even weigh it up because at the end of the day, it didn't matter to me. All I wanted was my kids and not only for my sake, but for their sake. But if you have to put it between your pride and your children, I think any good parent would pick their children. And I did it then and I would do it again. It is sad that we live in a society that that's where it's become. And I know that some of the intentions behind the way the system was structured was well intended. It was to protect vulnerable women. But unfortunately, I know in Australia that's true, and I imagine where you are as well, is a system that is abused by vindictive ex-partners. And in my case, it was when I started a new relationship, and you can read the full story in my book. But here I am today, for the first time, being able to tell people, no, what you hear about me, and that's the thing that I noticed over this period is I had people that have followed me for years and they would get on, you know, when my detractors would attack me with those labels and those smears and call me all sorts of horrible names, the one thing I am not. You'd have supporters who would either defend me by minimizing domestic violence or, you know, saying you haven't heard the other side of the story, which I guess that's probably the most accurate, or saying it didn't happen, whatever. And you also had a lot of people that probably followed my work and thought, oh, he has a nasty past. I think for the first time, now people can actually read my entire story and make up their mind for themselves instead of listening to either reporters who want to see nothing, nothing less than my complete destruction or the other side, my political opponents, people who view me as the enemy. And remember before they had that false domestic violence, I was the Jewish Nazi. So these are people that'll use anything to try bring down the person because they can't argue the message. And you know, to my supporters, I've been grateful to see them fighting for me and even when a lot of people would have taken my silence as an admission of guilt. There were those out there trying to defend me using, without any information, without any information. But now people can know the truth and know that, no, you haven't either been defending a domestic violence abuser, you haven't been defending somebody that has at least, I have a past, and we talk about my past in the book. Are just not like that. And, you know, I wouldn't feel, I know how so many must have felt because I wouldn't have felt comfortable defending or following somebody with potentially, potential domestic violence, you know, offenses and or somebody that's horrible to women. I wouldn't want to be known as that. So this has been for me a big weight off my chest and my shoulders. Well, the media and I've come to the conclusion they are scum and I didn't actually think I would use terms as strong as that to describe media politicians. But what, because this was even before you were with Rebel, this was yeah, this was before that time. So what, what was it that you had done that so pissed off the media because they went for you and who the hell cares about some guy called Avi in a court and yet they had you in their crosshairs. Yeah look, aligning yourself and working with people, enemies of the state, I think been on your show a number of times, that probably didn't help. And look, anyone that dares to speak out about issues that goes against the grain, against the narrative is going to become a target by those that it threatens. And yeah, I understand I'm a massive threat to the mainstream establishment, the legacy media as just as much as I'm a big threat to the political class. You know, those that have always traditionally held all the power do not want to see the rise of uncontrollable attention seekers like me. Fair point, yeah. Yeah, I wanna ask you about military because I wanted to join the Air Force, it didn't happen, but I enjoyed kind of my time, University Air Squadron, all that being drilled into, and I have friends who it's been the making of them in the military. And that seemed to be you. How did you end up going all the way to Israel and join the military? Why and how did that kind of set you up for the future? Look, I think I talk about it in the book, but it was, I was always, it was kind of in the back of my mind. I was, I had two older brothers that served and obviously my mom's whole family's there. My uncle died in the, in serving the IDF. So you know, it's deep rooted, but for me at that time in my life, I was actually, I signed up. They didn't know that, but I signed up from rehab. I was just getting off heroin and I was trying to sort my life out. And I knew that I had to kind of make some dramatic change not to fall into the same habit. So I chose the, in fact, I did go to one of the, I forgot what they call them, the Australian Army information sessions or whatever. And I remember at the time they were talking about applying and criminal histories and you know, I spent my whole teenage years in and out of the justice system. So I realized this was going to be a bit, a much harder road to go down. And then on top of that, I, when I thought of the Australian army, I thought, well, if I am deployed, I'm going to be fighting someone else's war. Whereas if I can go and join the Israeli army, at least I'll be fighting to protect my own family, my own people. So I signed up from rehab and the rest is history. And I certainly had an interesting service. I want to jump onto the media side, because obviously I first came across you when you were working with Tommy, with TR News and then you moved over and started with Rebel. Im still wearing his t-shirt.  Yeah, I see that. I actually caught up with Ezra the other week. He was in London, so we had a good catch up. Rebel has been perfectly placed, I guess, with all the chaos of the last three years, and you've been right in the middle of that in one of the worst countries for the restrictions and controls and mind control of at every level that we've seen the last three years. How has that played out because it was, you weren't expecting a worldwide lockdown but certainly Rebel has grown massively in Canada on the back of being the one free speech news channel that will speak out, and you've been able to do that in Australia. Tell us about how that has panned out over the last three years. Yeah, it's interesting. So I joined Rebel officially, I did a couple of gigs, even while I was working for Tommy as freelance, up until then, but I joined on the 3rd of September of 2020. It was during a lockdown. And the 5th of September 2020, I went to report on a lockdown protest that was, and I was taken down to the ground by police and you know, it was, it was a bizarre time to be doing what we're doing and, but it just set, it was just so perfect. It was my second day at Rebel and I was arrested, surrounded and arrested. I thought that we're actually joking at the time when the commanding officer kind of came up to me. I thought he was bantering and I just couldn't believe what was happening. But it set me up for the rest, you know, the rest of what we were doing or Rebel in Australia. It really put us on the map with regards to being on the front line of citizen journalism in a time where the mainstream media had just lost their way. They were not speaking truth to power. They were actually just regurgitating the government's official lines. And they were happy there, cheering on the lockdowns, cheering on every single crazy totalitarian move that the government was making. And then you had little me and then also at the time you had somebody like Rukhshan who were in his studio. So don't judge Rukshan, Rukshan actually does good work. He just failed in his studio. He's sitting behind the screen laughing at me. So you had the, you know, even Rukshan. Rukshan was nobody before then. He wasn't working for anything. He was a wedding photographer, and I think he was pretty average at that too. And then he's laughing behind you. So for those of you on that side of the world, Rukshan's actually not. You actually can read about Rukshan in the book, but you know, that was my journey through Rebel and I think, Rebel was perfectly placed because they, unlike when I worked for Tommy, Rebel had the ability and the means and the will and the teams to take on these fights. So when I worked with Tommy, it was probably a few months before. Actually it was, it was January, 2020 when I was first arrested and that was while I still working for Tommy. And there was nothing I could really do to fight back, even though I knew it was unlawful, the arrest, there was nothing I could do because Tommy was having his own dramas and he was fighting his own, putting out his own fires. And the cops didn't realize that I'd signed up with Rebel because that was actually my first official day in the field for Rebel. So they thought they'll take me down and get rid of me, give me a move on order and I'll just have to cop it like I did the last time. But little did they know that I had joined Rebel and Rebel's first response was, sue them. We're suing them. And we did end up not only suing them for that one, we sued them for that, we sued them for the one when I worked for Tommy and then one more that they still thought they could get away with it, within that year, I think it was. No, January 2021. So for three arrests. And they ended up having to, you know, issue that grovelling apology. How is that? I can imagine Ezra jumping up and down with glee when you're arrested. You're thinking, oh, oh crap. And he's thinking, yes, because he's thinking about how the audience see that and making that story. But yeah, I mean, going through.  I don't think, look, I don't think he gets excited. I think, I think one of the things that I've learned from Ezra is he's always said, look at every situation and make lemonade from lemons. Just turn it into a positive. And that's the truth. When you're taken down like that and authorities standing over you with a boot on your neck and trying to intimidate and scare you, most people would cave. In fact, if I wasn't with Rebel, I'd probably be stuck and would have to. So we look at those situations and we say, hold on, how can we flip this script? How can we turn it on them? And that's exactly what we did. And not only does it, it ended up backfiring so badly for the state because not only did we fight and win, but them acting like that did the one thing they were trying to avoid. And why were they targeting me? Why did they want me to move out of that situation? Because they didn't want the world to see, they didn't want our things to go viral showing what they were doing. That you had militarized police trying to enforce health. Like it sounds crazy now when you go over it, but they didn't want people to see that. They wanted people to see the filtered reports by the mainstream media, which was reporting, you had a handful of crazy conspiracy theorists that were putting us all at risk. They didn't want you to see that police, the state in the name of health, were fully dressed in riot gear with crazy armour in these bulletproof trucks were kettling, like bringing the group of peaceful protesters, forcing them into groups where they one by one picked them off and violently arrested and processed. They didn't want people seeing that. So they arrested me thinking that'll get, and tried to move me on, thinking that that will get rid of the problem. But all that did was it attracted worldwide attention. It gave us the audience that they so desperately didn't want us to have. And it created the basis of our campaigns, which were fight the fines and pushing back. And we started all these campaigns off the back of that because people knew we were willing to stand up and fight. And not only from the safety of our studios, but in fact, on the street in front of everyone. That's why we were successful at what we did because we talked the talk but we also walked the walk. I think watching it because I was looking at what's happening across Europe because the UK were, actually in a much more favourable position. We didn't have the levels of evils with other governments but it was your reporting that actually turned me to what's happening in Australia and I was able to from the UK was able to catch up with Australia because of what you were putting out and you ended up, I think, for many people in Europe, being the go-to person for understanding what was happening down under. What was the other response from media? Were there other alternative media that were putting it out or was it?  Yes, there was Rukshan at the time. If you ever watched any of the live feed, that was the rogue wedding reporter who they basically stopped him from being able to work. So he started live streaming and really giving his, he was narrating the protest, craziest protest, but Rukshan is this really calm immigrant is the best way to describe him. Is that the best way? Yeah. He says, yes, he's Sri Lankan. He's not, he was really calm when you watched his, if you go back onto Facebook and he would get 20, 30, 40 at points, there was like 60,000 people watching live scenes unfolding here in Melbourne, because the whole world was tuned in to see what was happening. So really, at the time there was the in Melbourne, there was the two of us, there was me that was doing these reports. So we would go out there, capture, talk to people, talk to the police, engage police are, you know, at points stand between the police and the protesters and challenge the police when they were overstepping. And often seeing, you know, certainly after they'd seen us winning in courts and things like that, they, you know, they would, step back and stand down. And then you had Rukshan that was doing these live, full live streams and just giving his commentary on what was unfolding in front of him. Weren't you banned? Was it New Zealand you were banned from? You were so dangerous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was, they banned me from New Zealand and they used that rubbish, I don't know what you want to call it, the conviction that didn't meet the threshold. It was an absolute farce. But the funny thing is because it was an anti-government, it was that freedom movement that were running a protest over the weekend and we went down there. Well, we planned to go there. I got to the airport, they stopped me from even boarding the plane. The Qantas staff looked at, you know, they got this alert on my passport. It was the craziest thing. They said to me they'd never seen it. But the funniest thing from that whole story was as it unfolded, as, you know, the next day the prime minister was asked about it, acted like it had nothing to do with their government and, you know, freedom of information. Well, first we got an Interpol leak that proved that they that they were actually targeting us before even knowing why, if we were coming there, they just knew we were coming to report on this protest and they wanted to stop us and they were trying to get information. They were looking for criminal convictions so that they could use it as an excuse to ban us. And then later on Freedom of Information requests showed they were conspiring on the back and everything they were saying was a complete lie. And the real reason they wanted to stop us in their words was my propensity of inciting people with opposing views. Which I've memorized that line because it's so funny to think that a so-called democracy. Who take themselves seriously, really used, that was their basis to block somebody, an Australian, so their closest ally from coming in because I might incite somebody with other views. And through all of that, it was also, it was desire, it all came out first because the media were egging on the government. And I thought at the time, I told people, I go, watch, I'm gonna fight this to the end, but they're not gonna go to court. Cause yet what you have to do is, you have to, to be able to go to court, you've actually got to get, So I got refused at the border with essentially what's called a visa waiver around the world. But to be able to go to court and challenge it, you've got to get refused the actual visa. And I said, when I saw the freedom of information request, I go, there's no way these guys are going to court because I'll have the, now the former prime minister on the stand. And now she can't lie, especially because we have all the evidence. So I knew they were going to approve it. But they dragged their feet for almost a year in the hope that by the time I'm approved, I'm not really going to have something to do there. And if they would have let me in that weekend, I would have done a few reports, interviewed a few people. The protests had ended up being a bit of a fizzle, and I would have been gone in a few days. It would have been whatever. Now, a year later, when they had nothing else they could drag out, they approved it. And I know that they were assuming and hoping that it's all said and done. There's no real reason for me to go back. And if I go back, it's going to be even less of a thing than it was then. Little did they know that I'd just finished writing my book. And I thought there could be nowhere more appropriate for me to launch this book than the censorship capital of the West, if not the world. And so that's why I'm launching it there. And I love it because hook, line and sinker and my detractors in New Zealand, they're so angry that I'm coming after being originally banned. They don't care about all the other reasons. They don't even care that if the tables are turned, if they really want to see people banned because of their political views, they don't realize that the next government that can be conservative will ban their people. They don't care. They're not interested. All they, they're so full of hate. All they wanted to see was me banned. And they're getting so angry about it that they're even saying that my book should be banned. And I absolutely support their, their endeavours. And as long as they keep getting angry about it and talking about it, that's better for me, because I think when you start to tell people they're not allowed, that's what we saw through COVID. If you tell people they're not going to be allowed to read this book, and this is to your entire audience, you guys are not allowed to read this book. Whatever you do, do not go to rebel fromthestart.com and buy this book. When you tell people they're not allowed to do something, they suddenly want to do it. I'll tell you a little secret. Before COVID, I was a massive germaphobe. I'm still a germaphobe, but I was a massive germaphobe. I remember when COVID first started. I fell for the narrative at first. I thought people were crazy who didn't fall for it in the first month or so. I remember when people started washing their hands and using the alcohol thing on their hands. And I was so happy because finally the world was catching up with me. Everybody was clean for once. And then the government said, we've got to start doing this thing. I was like, nah, give me some germs. Give me those germs. I'm not going to wash my hands now because you tell me. It's the same idea. So I encourage my New Zealand haters to keep telling people that I'm this bad, evil monster and my book should be burned. In fact, I think they should buy many copies to do an official book burning in New Zealand. It went, I think I read on Rebel News that it had gone to the top in Australia and New Zealand in the first day. That's what negative publicity does, I guess. Absolutely. Yeah, number one, it was for almost a week, number one, Australia, New Zealand. And I'm sure it'll get there again when, close to the date of the launch, which is in August. But to your viewers, watch your space, because I don't mind that part of the world. Very well. Last, I just want to ask you to finish about how it makes you feel about living in Australia, because I watch it from the UK and it makes me angry. And I'm not living in that totalitarian state. I have friends in Austria and Germany and Europe, and they've struggled with mandatory lockdowns, mandatory jabs, everything, being cut off from families. You probably had it, yeah, literally worse than anyone, maybe short of across the water with, with horsey face over in New Zealand. But how does that make you feel? Because it seems as though you, whatever's thrown at you, it just makes you stronger and more up for the fight. Yeah, look, I don't, I'm not somebody that believes in giving up and running away. So, and it's not, I can't leave. So maybe I'm just justifying it. Talk to me in five years, six years when my kids are old enough that I don't, I'm not bound to one place, but for now, I'm glad that I'm here to fight on because, uh, I think if we let Australia fall, if we let first Victoria and every other state fall, and we, there is no, if there is no opposition, then the rest, there's going to be nowhere safe in the way it's going to be safe where? So it's better to stay and fight for freedom where you are for everyone else.  Absolutely well let me just bring it up once again the people can see it, there it is, Rebel From The Start Avi Yemini, setting the record straight. Get it on as I said on Amazon or get it directly on the website rebelfromthestart.com. Avi, thank you so much for your time. Always great to talk to you, love what you do. You're a absolute dynamo there. So thanks for coming on and sharing with our viewers about your book. Thanks for having me mate. Till next time.

  So this is a bit of a strange episode. It's a kind of gratitude meditation, in public. Which I've never really done before! But the idea is to take the theory Matt laid out in the pro-active gratitude episode and lay it out with respect to the bread. To go deep and acknowledge all those factors that conspire to make our lives possible.   And to do so not just when they go wrong (oops I broke my ankle, so grateful for my body…) but while they are still humming along.   Show Links: Voicemail:  https://www.speakpipe.com/10khshow Email: info@10kh.show Podcast website: http://momentumlab.com/podcast Momentum Lab: http://www.momentumlab.com   Fully Ital Sourdough Bread Recipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w12kQ54EpnQ&t=0s   About our sponsor: 10,000 Heroes is brought to you by Momentum Lab.    I normally refer to Momentum Lab as an experiment-based coaching program or a goal accelerator.   But it's beyond that. It's a deep investigation into Purpose, Vision, and what it takes to achieve our goals in every area of life.   If you're interested in falling in love with who you are, what you're doing, or what you're surrounded with, there's two roads:   Accepting what is Transforming your situation   We help you do both.    The best way of learning more is to sign up for our weekly email: (Momentum) Lab Notes   http://momentumlab.com/podcast  

This week the Government is going to announce that it's getting tough on kids not turning up to school. And for all the talk about truancy being a “complex issue” —which, to be fair, it is— the Government is going to try and tackle it with a bit of the good old fashioned enforcement. Which will mean the return of state truancy officers. We haven't had government or state truancy officers for more than 10 years in New Zealand. Schools themselves have truancy officers but this is, generally, someone who has keeping tabs on school attendance as part of their main job. But come whenever, the Government is going to hire its own truancy officers. Or “attendance officers” as they will be known. But whatever they call themselves, it'll be their job to suss out the kids not turning up at school on a regular basis and do what it takes to get these kids back in class. In some respects, the term “truancy” is a bit one-size-fits-all because you can be truant if you're just wagging school and hanging out with your mates, and you can be truant if you're in a family that's really struggling financially and —if you're old enough— you might be out of school working a job to bring money into the household. This became a real issue during COVID —especially in areas like South Auckland— where the adults who normally earned the money found themselves out of a job and so, once the lockdowns ended, some kids just didn't go back to school because they needed to work to support the family. Which isn't all that different from years back when some kids had to leave school to get a job so they could make a contribution. I've heard a lot of stories where that happened. But back to 2023, and the Government has decided it's going to try to do something about truancy and is bringing back the truancy officers. But, unlike the old days when kids might have wagged school for a day or so to go fishing or might have given up school altogether because of their family's financial situation, truancy in 2023 can be put down to all sorts of reasons. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said on Newstalk ZB this morning that 40 percent of New Zealand parents think it's acceptable for children to be out of school for one week per term. Or, as he put it, away from school for a total of 52 weeks during the whole time they're at school. Some of them will be the parents that really brass-off teachers and principals and take their kids away on overseas holidays during term time. Schools love those parents, don't they? But also among those parents who think kids being away from school is fine, will be the ones who don't actually rate school and education all that highly. They might have had a pretty bad school experience themselves, or they've become lost in drug and alcohol addictions and don't really care what their kids get up to. Or they're involved in gangs and think the kids are far more useful out committing crimes than going to class. And it's these parents that get all the attention, don't they? Attention in terms of the public going nuts about kids not turning up at school. Although, the outcome is the same, isn't it? Whether you're off on a six-week holiday overseas or off breaking into cars and houses - the outcome is the same. You're not at school. But it'll be the so-called “hopeless ones” who probably end up getting all the attention and support from the new truancy officers once the Government has them up and running. Which I've got no problem with. Our kids are all out of school now but I can remember, when they were in high school especially, getting text messages from the office pretty quickly if they were away from class. Generally, this happened if we'd forgotten to call or email saying they weren't going to be in. And I really had the impression that school was on top of the whole absentee thing. But, of course, there would have been and will still be parents who don't bother even replying to the text messages about their kids not being at school, and these are the ones that the Government or the Ministry of Education will have in its sights.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello!! When I started this podcast 18 months ago Turia Pitt was at the top of my wish list - she's an international inspiration - and here we are. Turia Pitt is grit and hard work. She's also the queen of mindset and a firm believer that anyone can run. In 2011, at the age of 24, Turia was a fitness junkie with her dream job as a successful mining engineer, when she was caught in an out-of-control grassfire while competing in a 100km ultramarathon in Western Australia. It was several hours before medical help arrived and Turia was air-lifted out of the remote desert barely alive, with full thickness burns to 65 percent of her body. Turia lost seven of her fingers and spent over six months undergoing excruciating rehab.The doctors didn't expect Turia to survive, never mind walk, run, or be independent again.But in what is truly a story of triumph over the unimaginable, Turia has gone on to complete two ironman competitions, written best selling books, and become a mum with her partner Michael to two young boys.Turia has also helped hundreds of women (mostly mums!) learn to run themselves through her program RUN with Turia. Which I've done - twice - and truly loved it. I chat with Turia from her new home up in Far North Queensland, about mindset, motherhood and making new friends as an adult. Turia is really funny and we bond over our love of margaritas and our often eccentric dads who taught us to always “just have a go” and “never give up”.Turia reminds us about why it's so important to fill our own cup and put our own needs first, and to be ok with imperfection and being a beginner all over again.SHOW NOTES:If you want to join the next round of Turia's running program, Run With Turia, head to her website turiapitt.com/run and sign up. Doors open soon!Turia's Instagram @turiapittTuria's Facebook @turiapitt

Red rag to a bull. That's what the suggestion from the Teaching Council that te reo Māori may eventually become mandatory for teachers has been. But no surprises there. Because we live in a country where some people go nuts over some weather presenters on TV using what they consider to be too much of the Māori language and we live in a country where people get all hot and bothered about New Zealand being called Aotearoa. And where people talk a whole load of nonsense about boycotting Whittaker's chocolate because Whittaker's has got the nerve to print a bit of te reo on the wrapper of one of its chocolate bars. Which is one sure sign that civilisation, as we know it, is going downhill isn't it? Te reo on a chocolate wrapper. Well, it is as far as some people are concerned. And, in reality, the chocolate bar thing is probably the closest we're ever going to get to having the Māori language “rammed down our throats” - as some people like to say. Although, eating chocolate isn't mandatory, so I don't think we can even say that. So when you get an outfit representing the teaching profession saying that it's likely one day all teachers will need to know the Māori language, it seems to be natural for some people to start banging on about the kids needing to learn the basics first. And referring to te reo as if it's some sort of add-on or nice-to-have. “Stick to the Three Rs” - reading, writing, ‘rithmetic. That's a common one isn't it? Which I've always thought is a bit of an odd way of talking about education when one of the so-called “Rs” actually starts with “A”. It's A-rithmetic. Not ‘rithmetic. And another one starts with "W". But, anyway, you get my gist. Now, as far as I'm concerned, what the Teaching Council is saying makes perfect sense. Of course teachers are going to have to up their game on the te reo front. And that's not because it's the right thing to do, or because it's politically correct, or because it's fashionable. Or whatever other reason those anti it might want to throw around. Teachers are going to at least be proficient in all things Māori because it's not 1975 anymore and, in the years to come (if not already), te reo is going to be just as much a part of literacy in this country as anything else. Now I don't speak te reo. I did a course through work a few years ago - it ran for a few weeks - and, to be honest, I struggled with it. But it doesn't mean that I don't recognise the value of learning the language. And I probably did the course as much out of curiosity as anything else. But kids growing up today and the kids to come don't have that luxury. Te reo Māori is not going to be a nice-to-have in the years to come. It's going to be essential. It's a fact. You don't have to love the idea if you don't love it. But, at the very least, we all have to recognise that - in the future - if you want to be considered literate in this country, then sticking your head in the sand when it comes to te reo Māori isn't going to be an option. And that's why what the Teaching Council is saying shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If anything, we should be applauding the Teaching Council for saying it. If your child or grandchild wants a job in the public sector, they'll go straight to the front of the queue if they speak te reo. If your child or grandchild wants to work for some of the big legal and engineering firms, or in the health sector, they'll go straight to the front of the queue if they speak te reo. If your child or grandchild wants to get into politics - again, they'll be at the front of the queue if they can speak te reo. If that wasn't the case, then you wouldn't have people like National Party leader Christopher Luxon learning te reo, would you? That's why the Teaching Council is saying what it's saying. It's just being realistic and saying what's going to be needed if we want a teaching profession that can truly prepare our kids for the real world of tomorrow. The sooner we get our heads around that, the better. Because, as far as I'm concerned, being literate in this country isn't always going to be about reading and writing and speaking English, and nothing else. It's also going to be about familiarity - at the very least - with te reo Māori which, I needn't remind you, is an official language of Aotearoa New Zealand.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Finding yourself between jobs can be frustrating—whether you were fired, laid off, or just had to step away of your own choosing. But it can also present some opportunities. Let's discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that you need to consider if you're between jobs. Important Links Website: http://www.yourplanningpros.com Call: 844-707-7381 ----more---- Transcript Of Today's Show: Speaker 1: Back here for another edition of the podcast. It's Planned With The Tax Man with Tony Mauro and myself. And we're going to talk about planning considerations if you find yourself between jobs for whatever reason that might be, whether it's being fired, laid off, had to step away of your own choosing. We've seen this great resignation over the last year, lots of people just choosing to leave jobs or look for something different. And when it comes to getting closer to retirement, how might this affect things? So let's say 50 plus, some people are doing this. They have walked away or are being forced to walk away or whatever the case is. So we're going to talk about some challenges and opportunities that you might want to consider if you find yourself with a gap between jobs, again of your own choosing or not of your choosing.   Speaker 1: So Tony, what's going on, my friend? How are you?   Tony Mauro: I'm doing great. Just back off the road from a little vacation out in Napa.   Speaker 1: Well you probably ran into some of this then because service industry for sure is very, very volatile, lots of people moving constantly.   Tony Mauro: I was. And it's fun to talk to people around different parts of the country and just kind of hear their stories. But from out there what I did tend to see is there's a lot of people 50 and over, like you were saying, that have left tech jobs in the Bay area and San Jose and this and that, just kind of got out of the rat race for whatever reason.   Speaker 1: Right. Burn out, whatever. Right.   Tony Mauro: Yeah. Just sick of it. Were making good money and now all of a sudden they're pouring wine and they're just talking to people and [crosstalk 00:01:35].   Speaker 1: But they may not have the stress.   Tony Mauro: Yeah. They don't have the stress.   Speaker 1: Yep.   Tony Mauro: And of course the money's not the same, but I think this going on all over the country.   Speaker 1: Definitely.   Tony Mauro: I mean, we see it here in the Midwest where it's hard to find employees. Hospitality industry is really hurting. And so I thought it would be fun to talk about a little bit from that standpoint.   Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's a great place to start. Is it time for a new career? Are you burnt out? Again, whether you wanted to leave or they wanted you to leave, either way maybe it's a chance, an opportunity, to get into something that is less stressful. Maybe it's a whole new field. Like you said, maybe you've been in tech and you're like, "Heck with that, man." I just want to, whatever. I just want to work at a dog grooming place and just pet dogs all day. Whatever, right?   Tony Mauro: Yeah. I mean, when I was in the corporate world, it's been a long time because I've been out on my own a long time, but I think you should always have this in the back of your pocket. Always be thinking a little bit, if they asked me to leave or I was laid off, what am I going to do rather than facing it when it happens. Hopefully you've got an emergency fund, but that's another conversation. But, yeah. I mean, for a lot of people, again just talking to people last week, it really was just "I'm going to go do something else." In their case, burnt out, they're getting a little older, COVID is got them thinking about longevity and things and they seemed very happy. I think on the big picture though, everybody's doing that. Nobody could find any employees, but.   Speaker 1: There's a downside. Yeah, and I want to talk about some of those. You mentioned the emergency fund. If you are making a change, hopefully COVID did teach us if you got laid off for a while or whatever the case is, you've got to have some funds available to sustain yourself in between there.   Tony Mauro: Yeah. You absolutely have to. It's one of the first things we talk about with clients is that, assuming they're in the workforce, work with them to try to build that even as they go. Because in the corporate world, you never know. And even for people like me in business for yourself, I still think you need one because you don't know when your business is all of a sudden not going to be attractive.   Speaker 1: Or have a dry spell. Yeah, exactly.   Tony Mauro: Yeah, or people don't want your product or service anymore and then you're out too.   Speaker 1: Any stage, in any I guess decade of life maybe is a good thing. Whether you're 20, 30, 40, 50, you got to have some money set aside, a little bit, something to help yourself out in the event that happens. Well, you mentioned working for yourself. That is what has definitely happened for many people since COVID. Some have said, again we're trying to look at this through the lens of 50 plus, okay? So you know what it, yeah. I don't want to go back to the office. I don't want to be exposed to potentially whatever, or I'm using an excuse because I'm just tired. I'm finally tired of the rat race and I've always wanted to have my own thing. You said you were in the corporate world, but you've been working for yourself for a number of years.   Tony Mauro: I have. For me, it was always, well, I always could do it better and I think that's what a lot of entrepreneurs end up doing, but.   Speaker 1: You got to have the right spirit, the mindset for sure.   Tony Mauro: You got to have the right mindset. But at 50 plus especially, you probably do have, in certain cases if you're willing to work at it a little bit, a skillset to do things that 25, 30 year olds may not have and [crosstalk 00:04:50] consulting.   Speaker 1: It could be a blessing in disguise. Could be consulting. Yeah, very good.   Tony Mauro: All kinds of things. It could be just something that's been a hobby for you or maybe even a side hustle that you are making a little bit of money on that you want to take full time. I think in today's economy, especially in the gig type of economy and I just told my son this, that 25 years ago, 30 years ago when I was doing it, brick-and-mortar locations and things like that were hopping. Now, I think that's hard, hard to do in today's economy. Not impossible, but I think something you got to think about before you leap into that full time.   Tony Mauro: But again, a lot of 50 pluser's I'm seeing are going to work in less stressful jobs. But the ones that go out on their own, they want to do service type stuff where they're not a lot of overhead, a lot of inventory to keep track of, complex dealings. But that certainly would be something to talk to your advisor, go out and get some advice on before you make that leap I would say full time. Because so many people come into my office of all gamuts and I have what I call discovery calls with them all the time and they've thought about it and they're under capitalized. They have no plan. And we try to talk to them through some of this and they don't have it. And nobody's teaching this.   Speaker 1: Well, that's true too.   Tony Mauro: So I would definitely get some advice on that but it is fun to think about.   Speaker 1: Well, those are a couple of, I guess, the mental or emotional angles to ponder in this conversation on the podcast. Let's look at some of the financial ones. We touched on the emergency fund for sure, having some sort of a base to bounce from, if you will. But what are you going to do about health insurance? Okay, so if you find yourself walked out the door or you walked out the door, if they were covering your health insurance, Tony, what's your options now?   Tony Mauro: Yeah. Now what? Because you don't want to go without this.   Speaker 1: Again, 50 plus conversation, right? You got a long way to go to get the Medicare.   Tony Mauro: You got a long way to go. So you're going to have Cobra until you find something new for a while, that could be expensive but at least you've got some options there. You've got the marketplace as well, which is the government program. If your spouse is working, they might be able to get you on their plan.   Speaker 1: That's a good point.   Tony Mauro: If not, then you've got to go out and buy some health insurance. It's going to be expensive. And the coverage probably isn't going to be very good, but at least probably would cover some major medical, but definitely [crosstalk 00:07:16].   Speaker 1: And that comes back to that emergency fund. Right? Because if you're paying for this yourself, that's going to be dipping into this whatever funds that you may have. Maybe it's going to be dipping into some retirement accounts you've built. So maybe a conversation then, Tony, is this a good time to roll that 401k over? It probably is whether you left or were walked out the door, should be no reason to leave that money behind.   Tony Mauro: Yeah. I would say most of the time we talk to clients about moving it into and rolling it into an IRA. It's going to give you a lot more control, a lot more flexibility, meaning that your investment pool has expanded greatly other than just that company's batch of mutual funds. And it could be a lot of things as well, could be might not be that efficient, in other words, the expenses are kind of high.   Speaker 1: Right, yeah.   Tony Mauro: And you can't really, like I say to me, I want to have more control over it about what comes in, what comes out. Maybe you want to buy some stocks or bonds at some point, so generally we advise that. But we want to take a look because maybe it's worth leaving there, but you got to look at that.   Speaker 1: I would say most times, is it a fair statement to say, most times it is not beneficial to leave it there just for those number of reasons you've already left?   Tony Mauro: I would say, yeah. Most times it's probably not.   Speaker 1: Well, the options typically in our 401ks through a company, it's whatever the company's set up with the sponsoring plan and they're not going to be nearly as wide as something you can do with your own IRA.   Tony Mauro: Exactly.   Speaker 1: I mean, it's just an infinitely more possibilities. So definitely something else to ponder, make sure that you're rolling that over into something you've got better control over.   Speaker 1: Maybe you get lucky enough, Tony. I just saw a story not long ago about one of these, I believe it's one of these crypto companies out in the California way that was really tired of the negativity. Obviously we've seen a lot of this in our society here lately. There was a lot of, I don't know, it's become fashionable or whatever to brow beat the employers over your ideologies, whatever they may be if you don't feel like your company is treating a certain thing the way you want it to. And this particular gentleman just said, "You know what? I've had enough. So here's what we're going to do. If you're not happy working here for whatever reason about the company's culture," he was offering a severance. He was saying, "I'm going to pay you a severance to leave, go find something else that does make you happy." So whether it's an interesting situation like that again or you've been asked to leave or whatever the case is, you may have a severance option, which is kind of like a pension option. They may say, "Hey, we're going to give you an X amount of money. Here's the door or you can take the monthly payment." So what's the best option? How do you go through that process?   Tony Mauro: Yeah. And it's another thing that you need to get with your advisor, your tax advisor, your financial advisor, or one and the same to talk about it. Here in Des Moines, we have several large employers and this happens a lot. They'll just consolidate departments and say, especially that mid-management, "Okay you're out. We're going to give you a year's worth of pay. Here you go. And out you go." And a lot of times, they're willing to break it up into monthly installments over the year or you can take it all at once, but that money's all going to be taxable. So you've got to decide, A, how I'm going to pay taxes on that? Am I going to use this to live while I'm looking for a job? Which I've seen some people do. They kind of take a year off because, well, they don't need the money. Others, they had to double dip. They say, "Well, I'm going to go out and find something right away. And then this is just extra money for me," which is tremendous. And they could use that somewhere else in their portfolio or whatnot.   Tony Mauro: But it's important to think about this when this comes up. Because if it's large I look at it from a tax standpoint, first of all, and say okay, you got to at least put aside the money for the tax or have them withhold it because that's going to be important. Plus I think what a lot of people don't realize is if it's lump sum it could bump them into a much higher tax bracket all of a sudden, and if they don't withhold the right amount, they're going to be [crosstalk 00:11:25].   Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's a double whammy. Right? So if it bumps you, they don't hold it. They just give you the funds because you're going to have to pay it at the end of the tax year and you don't have a good emergency fund, you wind up spending it and then the tax bill comes due, ouch. So, yeah.   Tony Mauro: Yeah, I've had that happen twice to people with well over a $100,000 dollars and they didn't have them take out the tax. Kind of took the year off, spend it, and then they had a large, large tax bill. Had to go into a payment plan with the IRS because they had no money to pay it and they had no funds set aside to pay it, so important to get with an advisor on that one.   Speaker 1: Very much so, it's a great point there. Thanks Tony, for bringing that up. Glad, I mean, not that happened to the folks, but that real world experience to kind of share. So final one here, taxes, you mentioned it so let's finish on that note. What kind of tax planning should you be doing? Does it make a difference when you're separated, Tony, like calendar wise? Are there tax implications to think of, just even if there wasn't a severance, just from a they let me go ... Okay let me throw out a scenario, I guess. So they let me go in May, let's say. And you now decide to roll over the 401k that you had at the company and maybe even do some conversions on some of that money into a Roth or something because you didn't have one. Would that create a taxable scenario or could it?   Tony Mauro: Roth conversions, which I like, it's going to create some sort of tax change if you will. I mean, because basically you're taking pre-tax money, converting it to taxable, paying the tax on it then and then it's tax free of course in the Roth.   Speaker 1: And based on when you left, your income might be lower for that calendar year or higher?   Tony Mauro: Or higher.   Speaker 1: Okay.   Tony Mauro: Depending if you got a severance. So if it's lower then what we try to do is work with the clients to fill up the existing tax rate and not go over that and say, look-   Speaker 1: The steps, right?   Tony Mauro: Let's stop now because otherwise you're going to be wasting tax dollars and then do the rest next year or a little bit next year, a little bit next year type of thing if you're doing rollovers. So there are some strategies out there that you can take advantage of. You have to get some money and pay as little as tax as possible for the opportunity for it to grow tax free forever. And so I think that there's those types of things going, that's one thing. The other thing too, is like I mentioned previously, is if you do get a lump sum, it could throw you into a very high tax bracket which might require some planning and or withholding as well. So definitely want to keep it in mind.   Speaker 1: We should probably do a podcast on the steps of the tax, because you were talking about filing up a certain bracket.   Tony Mauro: You should. Yeah.   Speaker 1: Yeah, because I don't think most of us don't understand that on how it works. Right? So if you're in a 22% tax bracket, it's not necessarily everything you make is at 22% correct?   Tony Mauro: That's right, because it's progressive. And so while it starts low, what we mean by filling up the bracket is in the 22% bracket depending on your filing status, goes from X amount of income up to X amount of income. And so every last dollar earned or taxed is going to be taxed in that bracket, so we try to fill up that bracket but not go over. So in other words, more of your money's going to get taxed at the next highest level.   Speaker 1: Right.   Tony Mauro: And so we want to kind of keep that to a minimum to save taxes, but it's better shown than talked about. It's a lot easier when we put it on a screen.   Speaker 1: That's true. It is tougher to maybe do it on a podcast where we're trying to walk through it because it can get a little convoluted there, so it might be a little tougher to do. But we'll work on trying to break something down that makes a little sense from the audio standpoint.   Speaker 1: All right, well there you go. So there is some things to ponder. If you find yourself between jobs, for whatever case, whatever the case might be, whether you choose to or they choose to or whatever. And a lot of people have been doing that. We've had a lot of folks, crazy numbers over the last 18 months, walking away from jobs and doing different things. Multiple reasons why obviously since the pandemic. So if you need a little help, if you need a little planning, if you find yourself or you're thinking about, "Hey, I'm thinking about stopping the rat race at 52 or 50 or something but I can't retire yet, but I want to go into business for myself or I want to see if I can step down to a less stressful job," make sure that you're working with a qualified professional, like Tony and his team at Tax Doctor, Inc, so they can help you through some of these questions, some of these conversations, looking at some of this stuff. Especially if we can get some planning in place, it's going to go a long way. He is an EA and a CFP of 20 plus years, like 25 years about now, somewhere now in that neighborhood now, right?   Tony Mauro: Yeah. 25. Yeah.   Speaker 1: Yeah. So been doing this a while. So, if you need some help folks reach out to Tony Mauro at Tax Doctor Inc. Find him online at yourplanningpros.com. That is yourplanningpros.com. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You can find that info there as well, Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Stitcher, all that good stuff. Tony, thanks for hanging out. Good conversation. Thanks for sharing some good tips. I appreciate it.   Tony Mauro: All right, we'll talk to you next time.   Speaker 1: We'll catch you next time here on Plan With The Tax Man with Tony Mauro.   Disclaimer: Securities offered through Avantax Investment ServicesSM. Member FINRA, S.I.P.C. Investment advisory services offered through Avantax Advisory Services. Insurance services offered through an Avantax affiliated insurance agency.

TRACK YOUR TIME: figure out where it goes. Get clear on what Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-goals are important + what can wait + what can be delegated or eradicated completely. Learn to prioritize and put things in order from highest urgency + priority to lowest + learn to eat the frog - a method that was put on the map by Brian Tracy in his book but basically it says to take on the worst, biggest task first thing in the morning. Which I've always tried to do, because otherwise I just wont - and its a game changer. Create a priorities list and get it all on paper so you can start ticking them off and visualizing the progress.Be picky about what you say yes to. Remove anything non-essential. Meetings that can be emails, Try focus strategies = no phone, no distractions, special work space + ritual. Binaural beats or focus music is also a great vibe for work spaces. Attempt mono-tasking but don't be afraid to “batch” like with like. Schedule, allot + delegate appropriate amounts of times for things. This means start AND end times. Limiting work can limit burn out. If you're really flowing - fine, but know when to cut and return. Your flow will return too, if you give it time to breathe. INCLUDING REST: Get enough sleep but not too much. Planning ahead or using time tools like the Pareto/pomodoro/time segmenting can help Set yourself up for success in any way you can. I'm a big fan of the night before optimization moment: if I need to do laundry the next day, I will set everything I need to do it, including dirty laundry, quarters, soap, and dryer balls near the door so it's ready for when I am ready in the morning. Half ass it and keep coming back to it if you're not happy with it til it's to your liking. Half assing it twice is basically a full ass in some cultures. Plus who can afford a full ass right now? In this economy? Seriously - Focus, Take it seriously. Learn to like it. Make a nice space + associate work with work .If can share this with a friend (or enemy) that you think would benefit from it, that would truly be a game changer. Subscribe to the newsletter at www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.com or visit our patreon for highly exclusive bonus content. Support our sponsors, because they support us (which supports the accessibility of this daily content). Honestly, though, thank you for simply being here. for existing. it really means more than you know. luhh ya.The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained or presented is for general information purposes only. All content is presented on an "as-is" basis. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Episode 105 Maggots! Bloodletting! Graverobbers! Decapitated ducks! Cornflakes! This episode has it all! Join us on this wild ride through the history of Western Medicine as we look at the breakthroughs, setbacks, prejudices, and methodology behind it.    Support this podcast on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/DowntheWormholepodcast   More information at https://www.downthewormhole.com/   produced by Zack Jackson music by Zack Jackson and Barton Willis    Transcript  This transcript was automatically generated by www.otter.ai, and as such contains errors (especially when multiple people are talking). As the AI learns our voices, the transcripts will improve. We hope it is helpful even with the errors.   Zack Jackson 00:04 You are listening to the down the wormhole podcast exploring the strange and fascinating relationship between science and religion. This week our hosts are   Kendra Holt-Moore 00:14 Kendra Holt-Moore, assistant professor of religion at Bethany College, and my most recent ailment was a concussion from a snowboarding fall,   Zack Jackson 00:28 Zack Jackson, UCC pasture and Reading, Pennsylvania, and my most recent ailment was COVID.   Rachael Jackson 00:36 Rachel Jackson, Rabbi Agoudas, Israel congregation Hendersonville, North Carolina, my most recent ailment is real, pretty bland, but irritating nonetheless. It's just a headache. But it was one of those headaches that I couldn't get rid of a headache for no reason. And I felt like oh my god, I'm just old, I now just get headaches.   Ian Binns 01:01 And Ben's Associate Professor of elementary science education at UNC Charlotte. And my most recent ailment is arthritis in my right hand, where this part is where the thumb comes down and connects to the wrist. It is definitely confirmed no longer early onset arthritis. So yeah, that was fun.   01:26 Why did you why did you ask her this question?   Ian Binns 01:29 For two reasons. One, because we just passed your birthday, Rachel. So celebration.   Rachael Jackson 01:38 Your old everything hurts. Just adding the parenthetical aside, Everybody Hurts from REM is an amazing song from 1992. And it's younger than   Ian Binns 01:50 I am interested. No, yeah, no, that was out before? No. When were you born again, Kendra. 1991. See, so   01:58 nothing hurt, then. I was fresh.   Ian Binns 02:05 The second reason that we're asking this question is because we're starting our new mini series, our next mini series on healing. So for today, I'm gonna give a just a very quick crash course, in kind of the history of healing from a science perspective. And I will let our listeners know that my background and understanding this is definitely more than the western science. So please, if anyone hears this and says, hey, you've left out some cultures, historical cultures that I do apologize for that. But as I said, this is gonna be very brief. So we could do several episodes just on the history of medicine. But so anyway, so I kind of wanted to just give some general, interesting things that have occurred over time. And then we wanted us to be able to get into a conversation about, like medical treatments, for different ailments, as well. But some of our understanding of the history of medicine goes all the way back to prehistoric times. And this is where I think it will come into play throughout our series as well, of how different cultures used to attribute different types of magic or religion to ailments, you know, maybe it was something to do with evil spirits or something like that. But you know, supernatural origin versus more of a natural origin of reason for different ailments. But one of the things that we know from the discovery of different prehistoric skulls is that they would actually drill a hole into the skull of the victim, because they believe that that the speculation is and then we actually see this occurred in more recent human history that it would release the disease. And so that was one thanks, you mean patient? Did I sit victim, you get saved. Because you know, if   Zack Jackson 03:54 you're going to your show, and your hands   Ian Binns 03:56 are gonna drill during prehistoric times, and you're gonna knock a hole into the person's skull, they may end up being the victim. Right? So, so yeah, there you go. And then now we were going to jump ahead to ancient Egypt, when we start actually seeing some evidence of written evidence of different types of treatments and medicine. One examples from the what was called the Smith Papyrus, written in 1600 BCE, right around there. But it was actually we believe it was a copy of a text from much earlier, so roughly 3000 BCE, but in that particular Papyrus, that's now I think, in New York. It contained 48 case studies. There was no theory for anything, but it was an observation and kind of a recording of what it is that they knew. So the case studies were all written, same way, the title, the examination, so what they're observing, and then the diagnosis, and then the treatment, and then they will have a glossary for terms. But again, they were still be speculation about what role Old Evil forces or spirits play in the cause of diseases. And then we're gonna jump ahead more to ancient Greece. And this is where many people may have heard of Hippocrates, of Coase Brahm, circa BCE, or for 20 BC, he was one of the first people who kind of focused on natural explanations trying to move away from supernatural explanations. And he was one of the people who came up with the idea of the four humors, which those are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. And if you are healthy, that means the four humors are in balance, if you were not healthy, that means something was off, one of the humors was off. And so this is where we start getting the idea of bloodletting. So for example, if someone had a fever, it was due to an abundance of blood. And so they would do bloodletting as a way to cure the fever. But still, at this time, and again, I'm skipping over a lot of people. They learned different things with anatomy, but they were only allowed to dissect animals, because at the time, it was illegal to dissect humans. At which time, still 420 BCE. So this is still the BCE era, ancient,   Zack Jackson 06:13 ancient really, that sounds more like a Christian hang up than agree. Yeah. Well, and actually to   Ian Binns 06:17 this, and trying to prepare for today's episode, I did see in some of the more ancient eastern cultures of like Hinduism, and from the early early stages of that, that they were also not allowed to cut into the human body and dissect human bodies either. So this is not just in that area. But yeah, you're right, because, Zack, as you just said, that we see that all the way up into the 1500s that they weren't supposed to be dissecting humans in in Europe, for example, but they did not necessarily figure out the reason or the causes of the different parts of the body that they were removing from the body. So when it came to anatomy, who the Egyptians from my from my understanding, or my off on that, which I find that's   Zack Jackson 07:01 fine, it depends. The the Ebers papyrus and again, all these papyrus papyrus papyrus Pappa Ria, I don't know if the plural is. The Papyrus is they are named after the the hippopotami Yes, sorry. They're all happy to discover they're all named there. No, not the Discover. They're named after the white guys who bought it at auction and then brought it back to their country. So, you know, all of Egyptian treasures are in Europe or America somewhere instead of where they belong. But anyway,   Ian Binns 07:35 yeah, the Smith Paul Bader is probably wasn't named for a guy named Smith all that back then.   Zack Jackson 07:40 Right now Pharaoh Smith. No, that's not really an Egyptian name. But the Ebers papyrus was in 1550 BCE, and it had a really detailed explanation of the heart and the entire circulatory system. It was a bit wrong in some of the ways in that they thought that the the heart pumps all fluids. So that includes urine and semen as well as as blood, but they understood the purpose of of the blood going through the muscles and the veins and the arteries and all of that they actually also had some psychiatric conditions that were tied up in conditions of the heart. And they mentioned like dementia and depression, which were problems of the heart because they would dissect people after they died and look at the quality of their ventricles and all of that. So they didn't know what the brain was. They thought that was garbage. But the heart was the center of   Ian Binns 08:37 all thank you for correcting me, Zack, I forgot about that Papyrus. Papyrus? popularized by Bob Yes, go ahead, Rachel.   Zack Jackson 08:46 Papyrus hippopotami   Rachael Jackson 08:47 I was just going to add that because things are because things are so ancient, we tend to forget that there was we say Egyptian. We're looking at 1000s and 1000s of years when we say Ancient Egypt, so 1500 BCE is kind of the middle right? Middle late kingdom, right? This is the these are the new kingdoms. Were this is not, these are not the ones that built those giant pyramids. That's 1000 years earlier that they did that. So I think when we when we talk about that we should do a little bit of justice and say, hey, it would sort of be like saying, hey, all Englanders life for all time, right? Well, that's just been 2000 years like it's at some point. So just to add to that piece and same thing with the the Greek piece or the ancient Greek has been around for a very long time. That's that's the history not the   Zack Jackson 09:45 speaking of the history piece to in about in the 1200s or so BCE, there was this mysterious Bronze Age collapse in which these massive societies, the ancient Egyptians, the Mycenaeans, all the the the Hittite They just they just collapsed. And we're not entirely sure why possibly the sea peoples possibly climate change, possibly a million other things, aliens, if you watch the History Channel, but all of these amazing societies, the Minoans, another one, they all just disappeared. And so you see later Greek society and later Egyptian society, then trying to make sense of the fact that there are these ancient ruins that are massive, and they just assume that ancient heroes built them, which is where a lot of the mythology comes from. But so like this sort of understanding of anatomy and health was probably somewhat lost in going into the period that now you're talking about where people aren't allowed to dissect. So we see them now because we found the papyrus, but they may not have had them   Ian Binns 10:46 as well. So Zach, you mentioned, you know, of that massive loss of civilization around that timeframe? And you mentioned your seafaring people to a man, are you talking about Atlantis there, buddy?   Zack Jackson 11:01 I am actually the Minoans. We're probably the source of the Atlantean myth as far as   Ian Binns 11:07 because wasn't Plato, one of the first ones to talk about it. Plato was the first one to write right about that we have documentation.   Zack Jackson 11:14 It's an Egyptian story that Plato heard and wrote about that there's this island nation that was super advanced in technology and in society, and then they angered Poseidon, right, and then they were wiped out by the sea for their iniquities. And so that lines up really nicely with the Minoan people who were on Crete, who at the time, I mean, we're talking 1500 BCE. Further back had like three storey buildings with hot and cold running water, and indoor plumbing. They had amazing art and architecture. They were they they were doing things that 1000s of years later, people hadn't discovered. And then they were just they were hit by this massive tsunami after the oh, what's that, that place in Greece that everyone goes on vacation with the beautiful blue waters of Santorini the volcano there exploded and caused caused dust it caused tsunamis and basically wiped out their society and in the Mycenaeans conquered them, and then the Bronze Age collapse. So we forgot all about them for 1000s of years, but they were probably the inspiration of Atlantis. It's not aliens, sorry. It's probably just Minoans. It's a bummer. Yeah, well, this has been Zach ruins mythology for you.   Kendra Holt-Moore 12:31 A new segment? I love that. Yeah, exactly.   Ian Binns 12:33 You could just splice this out and move it to the end. So let's get back to because I think while we're doing this to it's interesting, you all I am going to be focusing mostly on how we start to see more of a focus on natural phenomena, natural explanations and a scientific approach to medicine, that you still do see, you know, and like Apocrypha as being one of the individuals again from 420 BCE, trying to move away from Supernatural that even with the work of Hippocrates, that it did not drive out, like the rivals, you know, long that more traditional forms of healing up to that point, those those are traditional forms of healing belief and practice that those still existed. So it's not like when his work and and his contemporaries, you know, and then actually, there's speculation that Hippocrates was multiple people. It was not one. And so, just because of that, though, it did not drive out this the more traditional ways of belief and practices all say, so then I'm going to jump ahead roughly 500 years to Rome, and Galen. So Galen was a individuals from 129, to circa 200 CE. And he really started getting into this notion of we need to rely on the world of our senses. And but he still accepted the idea of the four humors that was originally proposed by Hippocrates. He recognized the arteries contain blood and not merely air, he also showed how the heart sets blood in motion, but he did not have an idea about the whole notion of circulation, blood circulation, but he was he did start figuring out that, you know, the heart did move things at least a little bit. We definitely see evidence with control experimentation with Galen key focus on on anatomy, but again, at the timeframe, dissection of humans was illegal. And so his work was focusing on animals, their section of animals, and it's his work. That actually kind of stayed when you think about Western culture and Western medicine, kind of was the prevailing view of how things were done until the 1500s. was actually the reason why I remember that so much is with that part, because his work was occurring rather right around the time of Ptolemy, when he talked about astronomy, and that stayed around for roughly the same Not a time till you know, Copernicus work. So it was kind of all those things started happening right around the same time. So now again, you know, my apologies for leaving out multiple cultures that I want to jump ahead again now to Medieval and Renaissance Europe. And so as I said galas, views kind of held strong until roughly the 1500s. And this is when we see Andreas alias, emerge. And yes, there were others before him, but he was one of the first ones to really get into dissection of humans. I think he had he was a person who had students who were grave robbers, because it was still illegal at the time. But he realized that we needed for anatomy, we needed a better understanding and body so he would have his students would become grave robbers and steal the bodies, and then they would do special dissections, you know, for like a show. I mean, there were many, many people watching, but they would have lookouts to make sure that they weren't doing anything, they wouldn't get caught.   Zack Jackson 15:58 Do you put them back? I don't know that after you're done? No.   16:02 I would hope so. Yeah,   Ian Binns 16:03 you think so?   Rachael Jackson 16:04 I would think so. Not just think so.   Ian Binns 16:08 Yeah. Then apparently he was a very skilled Dissector. And he felt like you know, it was they had to move away from Galen and his views. And don't forget, you know, I said, you know, we're jumping time. This was 1400 years later. So Galen, his views held strong for a long time. But he did a lot of dissection of humans. And his scientific observations and methods, with these facilities show that Galen can no longer be regarded as the final authority. And so that's when we start to see and again, this is also aligned with the time of the Renaissance. That's when we start seeing movement away from more ancient understandings when it comes to science, to medicine, for example, he believed in the importance of empirical knowledge, independent observation and experimentation. So this alias is really into those types of things. I don't know if he was ever caught. I have to look into that one. Yeah,   Zack Jackson 17:04 well, now he Oh, yeah. You blew his cover, man.   Ian Binns 17:07 Sorry, sorry, everybody. But what's interesting is even when that was occurring, we were also still seeing some people who were holding on to the idea that, you know, while experimentation is important that we still need to Paracelsus was one of them. I think I'm saying that correct. He presents the idea that humans are the ultimate ends of God's creation. So the ultimate form he held on is something called a chemical philosophy, which is a Christian philosophy. But it was not very widely accepted at the time, because as I've already said, this is the time of the Renaissance. So we're trying to move away from those types of explanations. And so he was still around, but he was trying to blend the two, between experimentation, but also to hold into the importance of God and humans kind of being the ultimate form. And then the next person I want to talk about before we start really going into different types of ailments stuff, just because of, as I said, the history as William Harvey, he was 15, seven 816 57. So he advanced medicine even further, because of careful observation, experimentation, he really focused on collecting more evidence. And this is when we really start to see what we now think of as experimentations. So, you know, control experimentation manipulate in nature, so he can see something that normally would not be seen, he came up with the theory of the circulation of blood of blood. So we started trying to have a better understanding how blood circulated throughout the body. And again, you know, he still was someone who did believe in the impact of a designer, but he really focused on the more natural explanations.   Zack Jackson 18:46 It's interesting that you say that he he discovered the circulation of the blood when we just said that 3000 years earlier, the Egyptians knew about the circuit. Oh, you're right.   Ian Binns 18:56 Yeah. Yeah, and plumbing, and plumbing,   19:02 plumbing, our own and in the world, but it   Ian Binns 19:05 is fascinating historical texts still hold us like William Harvey is one of the people who really did that.   Zack Jackson 19:11 Well, God forbid, they credited an African for exactly discovering yessing.   Ian Binns 19:17 And so just because of, you know, because I really want us to get into conversations around like different types of treatments we see throughout history for different ailments. You know, this was the time of the Renaissance. When you start moving past that. I mean, you as we've seen, we've discussed throughout on this show, in the past about the history of science and how scientific advancements just took off during this timeframe. Incredibly fast, right. And it was the same for medical medical advancements, too. And so we continue to see lots of different changes over time to the point where we are to our today, but what I really want to focus on unless someone wants to talk more about other history is getting into these treatments that we see throughout history. If we can   Zack Jackson 19:59 Yeah, That's absolutely yeah, you're chomping at the bit over there. You want to talk about about some some trees.   Ian Binns 20:05 So because one of my hat, like asthma, so asthma used to be treated, it was treated by smoking.   Zack Jackson 20:16 Oh, yes, smoking pipe of   Ian Binns 20:19 tobacco or cigar has the power of relieving a fit of asthma, especially in those not accustomed to it,   Zack Jackson 20:26 which I thought was really amazing custom to tobacco.   Ian Binns 20:29 That was this. That was the argument being presented is amazing. Yeah. There's an when when ish was this it was more like the 1800s.   20:39 Oh, recent.   Zack Jackson 20:40 Yeah. Well, counterpoint. No, that is not don't don't smoke, if you have so please   Ian Binns 20:47 understand that these are old, not accurate. There's a another thing with the whole idea of smoking. Yeah. For Your Health. This is. Back in the late 19th, early 20th century, I found a site talks about these different types of treatments out there smoking, for your health, asthma cigarettes. Yeah. So and they were this is an advertisement, not recommended for children under six. That was nice. But they were actually called asthma cigarettes. And they effectively treat asthma hay fever, foul breath, all diseases of throat, head colds, canker sores, bronchial irritations. So yeah, so that was a good thing.   Zack Jackson 21:30 Well, so when you're talking 19th, and 20th century, and these are like some crazy, wacky solutions for things like when they would give cocaine to children for their cough, and all of that. That's not entirely like saying that the ancient Romans used electric eels to cure hemorrhoids. Which, which is real? Well, when we're in the 19th and 20th centuries, a lot of these are the companies understood the awful things that their, their their products did to people, but they made marketing false advertisements to sell these addictive things to people. You know, the Bayer Corporation knew all about the addictive qualities of cocaine and still pushed it as a as a simple pain reliever, because they could get people addicted to it. And like those sorts of predatory capitalism has existed for the past couple of 100 years with with pharmaceuticals, and we are paying that price now with the opioid epidemic. So when the smoking industry in the 1800s, they didn't understand that it gave cancer, obviously, but they knew it wasn't good. Yeah, no, those advertisements are intentionally misleading, because there was no oversight.   Ian Binns 22:49 Well, and earlier, I referred to bloodletting. And, you know, was talking about, you know, ancient, ancient Greece, you know, and for 400 BCE, bloodletting did not just end then, bloodletting was something that was continued for a very long time, for centuries. And   Rachael Jackson 23:06 right, and I believe, and I have not fact check this. So someone else has please correct me or collaborate, whichever it might be. I said, No, we're doing stuff about presidents. And a little factoid that I heard was that George Washington got a fever, just like you're saying in and at that time. It's George Washington, early, early 19th century, and he got a fever. And so they decided to do bloodletting. And they did bloodletting twice on him. So much, so that he died. Oh, good. I have not, I have not double checked that fact. But I also haven't seen anything to contradict it. So yeah, take that with a grain of salt as it may. But that was, it was all the way up until George Washington is when they were really still using this as a technique to cure people from things like fevers, which are very, very dangerous, but unless you have something to just take down the fever, you're either gonna live it or you're like, or you're not.   Zack Jackson 24:12 Yeah, the Constitution Center. Constitution. center.org says that that process of bloodletting probably let about 40% of his blood supply, right. So you can't really make it through a sickness with 40% of your blood supply.   Rachael Jackson 24:28 Right. So imagine I mean, think about when you donate blood do the three of you donate blood any on a regular or at all ever works. I   Ian Binns 24:37 grew up in Europe. Right? Yeah, Mad Cow Disease just because people don't know.   Rachael Jackson 24:43 Yeah. Yeah. Zack, do you ever   Zack Jackson 24:48 know I don't I don't I mostly have issues with needles. Yeah, exactly. What me not to   Rachael Jackson 24:53 Yeah, don't do that. better for everybody that you don't go to the hospital for donating blood.   Kendra Holt-Moore 24:58 Drive was can So I think because of a COVID related thing, but I would like to, but I haven't.   Rachael Jackson 25:06 Yeah, yeah, it's one of those like really simple, really useful things that if a person is healthy and no guilt, no judgment. For anyone that does or doesn't, you can do it every 56 days, and they take about a leader. And generally speaking, people, adults have five to six leaders. And they say, Okay, you're gonna feel queasy, don't do any weightlifting, don't do anything strenuous for a minimum of 24 hours. Like, you've got to just take it real easy, and you have to be healthy when you donate, because your body needs every blood cell that it has when it's healthy, or when it's sick. And when it's healthy. Yeah, we've got an extra 20%. So let's give it away. But if you take more than that, you're not going to survive very well. And then if you take more than that, and you're sick, your body has no ability to fight off the diseases, right? We talk about blood cells all the time, and the white blood cell counts and red blood cells. And how do we think we were just talking about the circulation system? Right, the circulatory? How do you think all of those good anti me when your immune system actually gets to these infections through your bloodstream? And if you don't have a good flowing bloodstream? Right, if this is August, after a rough summer, it's not happening.   Zack Jackson 26:29 So I know that in modern medicine, they still do use leeches, there are medical legions, and they're usually used to drain excess blood or like, you know, pooling of blood and hematoma hematomas. Is that the thing? Because it's, it's sanitary. And it's easier. And if people are willing to have a leech on him for a while, then it's great. But like, historically, bloodletting has been around for very   Ian Binns 26:56 long, 1000s and 1000s. Like,   Zack Jackson 27:00 it must have worked at least a little bit, or else they wouldn't have kept doing it. Right.   Rachael Jackson 27:06 But don't you think correlation and causation comes into play here. But people get people get better, regardless of what we tried to do them. And so just because someone got better doesn't mean that what we did to them made them better? Well, so   Zack Jackson 27:23 like, there's an old remedy, in which if you got bit by a snake, you would take a duck and put its butt on the wound, and then cut its head off. And then while the bite is on the wound, and the thought was that it would suck out the poison,   Ian Binns 27:37 the dung Would Suck out the poison.   Zack Jackson 27:40 Yes, yes. Yes. Everyone knows this wanted   Ian Binns 27:42 to make that claim. I'm quite excited about that.   Zack Jackson 27:47 Like that. That didn't stick. Yeah. But like draining people have their a painful procedure that is gross, and makes me feel queasy thinking about that stuck around for 1000s of years where like, is there any kind of medical benefit? Like even in obviously not in Washington's case, like if you have an infection, don't get rid of your blood? But like, what that stimulates SIBO antibodies to then like go to the wound, or like adrenaline to help boost the system? What? Are any of you familiar with any positives of blood lead? I   Kendra Holt-Moore 28:28 not? I'm not answering this question to like, describe physiological processes, but the placebo effect is extremely powerful. Like in just the study of medicine, like contemporary researchers, there are some who have done a lot of really interesting work on placebo effects. And obviously, like, we don't have the same kind of data to, like, you know, like double, double blind study results of placebo effects for like, ancient practices, ancient cultures, but I think, you know, cross culturally, all human societies, we all do things that, you know, as Rachel said, we can't really like tie a causation thread between those practices and healing in a definitive way, but a lot of what we do, we do for like cultural or, you know, comfort reasons. And even that is like different than placebo, which, in a lot of cases, like the placebo effect does actually change. Like it does lead to physiological changes. And it's kind of like weird and mysterious, but I think that I think that's not something to take for granted or under appreciate. Because, you know, I think even like early psychological studies showing, you know, if you're in a situation shift where you're around like comforting, familiar people and a comforting, familiar environment, you just fare better. Like even if we're not talking about injury, you fare better in terms of your, like mental health, mental well being, which translates to sometimes like physical well being. And that, you know, those are, those are things that are, I think, often considered, like, non essential pieces of the healing process. But, but yet, we we all, you know, like there are studies to show that people care about a doctor's bedside manner. People care about having, you know, chaplains come into hospital settings to, to support people and that that, that does facilitate something real in terms of healing. But it's it's just not, there's not like a clear, like, hard scientific way of describing that necessarily, but I that it's not to say that it's like not important also.   Rachael Jackson 31:04 Yeah, I would, I would add that, you know, you were just talking to Kendra about hospitals. But also previous to that you were saying, in places where people are surrounded and around things that they're comfortable with, the best healing happens when you're not in a hospital. Right. Hospital is no place for a sick person. I mean, and I mean, that my dad, my dad, was now a doctor said that, to me, it's like, that makes perfect sense. Because to really, unless you're really sick, and you can't be at home, being at home is your best chance of getting better. And I'm using that word intentionally, right, getting closer to a cure and your sense of normal, faster than being in a hospital, and that hospitals are there for the very, very sick people who cannot be at home for whatever reason. So it's one of those other reasons like stay away from a hospital. Also, they just have a lot of germs still stay away from a hospital. Unless, again, you have no other alternative. And so, you know, to answer Zach's question there too, I think the idea of Zack, you were kind of recoiling from the achiness of leeches. And I wonder, are the bloodletting perspective? I wonder if part of the causation and the correlation might be, you're now treating a person differently. You're giving them advantages. Maybe you're giving them more soup, maybe you're giving them more fluids? Maybe you're treating them differently, because Oh, it's so serious that we have to call a doctor in or whoever, whatever their title was, whoever was giving the leeches, the priests perhaps, right, that now they're so different that their everydayness is being being treated differently. You give them the extra blanket, you give them the soup, you take them outside, like whatever it is, that that's really what's happening. And so yes, the leeches are helping but only as a secondary issue.   Zack Jackson 33:08 That reminds me of the correlation causation argument around the increased health of religious people. We've heard that those numbers thrown around a lot that people who regularly are connected to religious communities are healthier live longer than people that don't. Right. Yeah. And the argument from the religious perspective is that well, faithful people have God, and God heals you. And prayer works. And so prayer prayer for people are healthy people. When the opposite argument is then yeah, the opposite argument is that, well, you're connected to a religious community, you've got people that care for you, you've got people that come by There's comfort, there's there's connection, there's soup delivered to your door every day. And those intangibles are what caused the the health and the healing. Yeah,   Kendra Holt-Moore 33:58 and the direction of the correlation is not always clear, if you're looking at like study results. So if you're healthy and able bodied, to like get to your church, or synagogue or whatever, then you can, you can do that. But you were already healthy from the starting point. Whereas if you're like chronically ill and unable to get out of bed, then maybe you don't go to a religious service, because you're not able to but the starting point, the kind of direction of behavior was influenced by the status of your health rather than, like the status of your religiosity. And that that whole like body of literature is like, really, really vast. And it is really interesting, but it's a good, good examples to bring up when we're talking about correlation.   Ian Binns 34:48 Yeah. But Zack, you asked earlier about, you know, why did bloodletting last for so long? I mean, there is, you know, I just started remembering that there are certain Um, chronic diseases, blood diseases that people will have, or blood cancers that will have where it will produce too much either iron and their blood or too much red blood cells. And the way they do that, the way that one of the treatments for that is a phlebotomy and so, which is the removal of amount, a specific amount of blood, it's more than just going in and doing a donation, for example. And so I and that is done for medical purposes, like my dad used to have to do that, because of a blood disease that he had. And so, I saw I started very quickly looking at what is the difference between bloodletting and phlebotomy? And some of this is just saying that bloodletting was a therapeutic practice that started in antiquity, but that there still flub a lot. Phlebotomy is another way of saying bloodletting   35:57 is, when you go rolled, it's phlebotomist. Correct? It's the person that takes   Ian Binns 36:01 control now than it used to be. Right. Yeah.   36:03 Or at least, we think it's   Ian Binns 36:07 yes.   Zack Jackson 36:08 Yeah. So one of the things I wanted, so I want to be cautious about to when we talk about old, older treatments, you know, the cutting off the duck's head and how ridiculous it is, or the how they used to use urine to whiten their teeth. You know, stuff, stuff like that, where we can easily look back at those folksy unintelligent people and say, My goodness, aren't we so intelligent? Today, we have science and science has given us all the answers. And those of you who might be listening at home or have people in your lives, who you've talked to about sorts of things, well, then, you know, get kind of, rightly upset at the sort of hubris of that, that there's there's medicine, and then there's alternative medicine, and alternative medicine is based just on placebo and fantasies and dreams. And real medicine is based on science and truth. And I think Modern medicine is wonderful. And it has given us so much more trust in the process and understanding the why of things work. But that a lot of what we have in modern medicine is based on traditional medicine. You know, the ancient Ancient Egyptians knew that if you had pain, or inflammation or fever that you could chew on birch bark, and it would reduce those things. And it wasn't until much later that that's how we got aspirin now, or I think of penicillin just comes from what mold. And how many of like indigenous cultures will watch the way that nature interacts with itself. And then we'll gain lessons from that, you know, watching what this animal eats when they eat it. And then using that and applying that and finding that those things work. And only much, much, much, much later do we discover the scientific rationale for it. And we're seeing sort of a resurgence in the past couple of decades of people taking indigenous medicines seriously and looking for like the whys of why these things have stuck around for so long. And lots of times discovering that there is there is wisdom behind these traditions. And the whole colonial Western mindset of it's our way, or it's just fantasy is not all that helpful.   Rachael Jackson 38:36 Thank you for that perspective, I think we do need to, you know, recognize our own bias. And also recognize, you know, as we're sort of talking about the with the tobacco industry, that there's a lot of push with marketing, and there's a lot of issues in those ways that we're all very susceptible to that came out of this trusting of the scientific process. And just because it's old, doesn't mean it is old and unscientific doesn't mean that it's not also helpful. Right. So putting that caveat also,   Zack Jackson 39:10 sometimes they are awful. Do the old things, you know, like we if you have syphilis at home, do not inject mercury into your urethra, because that does not work. Right, despite the fact that Blackbeard did it. And   39:27 well, and I think too, are there other are there other? Oh, sorry. Yeah. Well,   Ian Binns 39:31 just real quick, you know, you talk about this, and I think this will be, you know, what you're just discussing, Zach, you know, and wanting to be respectful. And one of the people I hope to get on the show sometime is David distinto, who wrote the book, how God works. And in this particular book, I mean, he is talking in some situations about healing, you know, and says early on, I'm not finished yet but you know, it's says I realized that the surprise of my colleagues and I felt when we saw evidence of religions benefits was a sign of our hubris. Born of a common notion among scientists, all of religion was superstition, and therefore could have little practical benefit is that learned and as this book shows, spiritual leaders often understood in ways that we can now scientifically confirm how to help people live better lives. And so that he is someone I really, you know, reach out to him see if we can get him on the show, because I think that's some interesting research he's done to show. You know, what is it we're learning now? And how it's applicable to helping others but another one I wanted to bring up was the notion of maggot therapy.   40:44 Oh, yes, yeah. Which I've done a little bit   Ian Binns 40:47 here, but if you know more, please, but   Zack Jackson 40:51 which I now say it Rachel hates bugs.   40:57 I do leeches all day long. But maggots.   Zack Jackson 40:59 I got this don't talk about   Ian Binns 41:01 this great book called strange science, wonderful. All these cool things in here, but one of them is pages on maggot therapy. And it says it sounds like something from a horror film fat cream colored maggots eating their way through infected sores and wounds. It's not its medicine. Rachel, says Rachel right there. Since it's so sad since ancient times, doctors have used Magus to prevent wounds from getting infected, and the 1940s Antibiotics replace maggots. But bacteria adapted and started to become resistant to antibiotics. And now we get the return of the maggots. Maggots work by secreting digestive enzymes that feed on dead tissue. Those enzymes also killed bacteria and a wound and speed up healing. Doctors are placed between 203 100 maggots on a wound then cover it maggots and all with mesh beneath the mesh the maggots feed for 48 to 72 hours. When they're done, the doctors remove them. wounds that haven't healed for months even years often respond quickly to maggot medicine. And I really am hopeful this is a video clip we need to share of the wonderful reactions we're seeing from both Rachel and Kendra   Rachael Jackson 42:25 I'm just gonna be real public about this. If I'm ever in a situation where I'd not have a wound that heals and the only thing that could cure me is Maga therapy. Just put me out of my misery. Just don't   Zack Jackson 42:38 just go to   Rachael Jackson 42:42 the blog, the blog and I'm like, kill the maggots like don't even just all amputate or that's I respect people that go through that so much. I'm not one of them. I think that never having that issue.   Kendra Holt-Moore 42:54 You can put the maggots on me but then also punch me in the face and knock me out.   43:02 Alright, so I'll be dead and Kendra will be unconscious. Yeah. And South could be loving every minute.   Zack Jackson 43:09 As well of bugs. Sorry. Yeah.   43:11 All right, Ian, where are you? Where do you fall on this this highly nutritious   Zack Jackson 43:14 to after they're done? Yeah, he's just you can just kill them and dry them and then eat them and then you get all your personal flesh. Then you get the nutrients back. Well should you   43:28 cook in your body,   Zack Jackson 43:34 because they know either way you deal with with insects. You take the insects you suffocate them in a box of carbon dioxide so you don't squish them or anything. Then you take them out and you dehydrate them and then you crush them into a powder and add that into your food. That's the best   Ian Binns 43:50 way to by any chance interview all seasons we're talking about maggots.   Zack Jackson 43:55 Can we continue for the rest of the episode? Rachel?   Ian Binns 44:00 Yes, that's another video clip needs to be shared of Rachel doing the gagging reflex each time I talk about maggots. She's like well   Kendra Holt-Moore 44:09 I feel bad for Rachel.   44:11 Like I don't I'm not queasy, but now I guess I   Ian Binns 44:15 will. So let's let's get into another discussion. Then. Kellogg's cornflakes. Now I'd found a very   Kendra Holt-Moore 44:21 good transition away from dear listener.   Zack Jackson 44:27 Now that's a segue   Ian Binns 44:28 dear listener. So when I mentioned Kellogg's cornflakes prior to recording, both Rachael and Kendra have perked up and seemed to know more information about this than I did. And so I will only share the very little bit of information I have but please reach and Kindle Kendra jump in and tell us what you know about the Kellogg's cornflakes but from what I have read is that Jay is Kellogg one of the people who developed Kellogg's cornflakes he was a medical doctor and health activist and he created the cornflakes. He was one of the people who created any hope that they would prevent sexual urges or more specifically to inhibit the urge to masturbate. And so Rachel, Kendra, you reacted earlier what what did you know? Because this took me by complete surprise because it didn't work. So   Kendra Holt-Moore 45:14 I was gonna say, Rachel, you go because I have to go it's like noon. I don't really have that much to add, either. I just I know that that is a statement.   Ian Binns 45:26 Do we not want to then talk about the very last one about hysteria before Kendra leaves?   Rachael Jackson 45:29 We can keep talking about it. I think she's she's got it. Yeah, I   Kendra Holt-Moore 45:32 mean, I'm gonna say Good. Might have to, like 30 seconds thing   Ian Binns 45:35 for anyone to tell us about hysteria. Kendra. Wow.   Zack Jackson 45:36 Don't eat cornflakes. Just stick with Cheerios. Cheerios make you horny. So you know that's   Ian Binns 45:44 the science apparently   Kendra Holt-Moore 45:45 bowl of cereal if you feel nothing.   Zack Jackson 45:50 Just cereal? If you want to feel nothing at all.   Kendra Holt-Moore 45:55 Land bland, bland cereal for a bland, bland sex life. That's Sorry. All right, see you later.   46:06 Cool. J cereal.   Zack Jackson 46:09 So what kind of what kind of like sexy breakfast? Was he trying to?   Ian Binns 46:13 I don't know. Rachel, can you help us out?   Rachael Jackson 46:16 So I think I'm in the same same boat of it was a factoid that I very much knew and held on to. But beyond that, I don't have a whole lot of information. I mean, the idea is, you know, everyone has breakfast. And so to prevent those urges in the morning, which and also just let's just clarify something here. When they say masturbation, they really mean men. Yeah, I'm sorry. Nobody, nobody. Yeah. Right. And so basically throughout time, and this was a religious issue. And so it wasn't a doctor issue. It was a religious issue of male masturbation is against God, going all the way back to some genesis of Don't spill your seed and, and Leviticus and stuff like that. But it's bad idea to spill your seed and that got translated into don't masturbate. And so as a religious idea, and if you look at men, generally speaking, I think we were talking about this maybe a couple of weeks ago to in the morning, men generally have more of how to say this, erect penises based on what was going on in the evenings, and the dreams and their inability to regulate their own erections. And so if that's the first thing you do in the morning to stop that have cold, dry cereal. Well, something that's bland,   Zack Jackson 47:56 and I will, let's also say, Kellogg, as a human, Mr. Kellogg himself was a bit of an anti sex fanatic, that the man was married, and still never had sex, and wrote books about how he and his wife never had sex. And they lived in separate bedrooms, and they adopted their children. And that sex pollutes the body. And it's the worst thing in the world. And so, like, this guy was afraid of his body, right? And again, not want anyone else's body. Yeah, he   Rachael Jackson 48:28 did this in a religious context. He didn't do it just because he was asexual and thought everyone else shouldn't be too. Yeah, I'm not a sexual anti-sex. So   Ian Binns 48:37 I will say this. And so I did look it up. And so and, you know, this is now I'm getting this from Snopes. And you know, there could be good or bad things getting things. So but according to snopes.com, so the claim, what is the you know, the Kellogg's cornflakes were originally created an effort to discourage American consumers from masturbating. And as you said, Rachel, it's male, actually, so it should say that the rating is mostly false. And so what this they're saying what is true is that the creation of cornflakes was part of JH Kellogg's broader advocacy for a plain bland diet without referring to cornflakes in particular, Kellogg elsewhere recommended a plain bland diet as one of several methods to discourage masturbation. So can I guess that was a people just put that together?   Zack Jackson 49:34 Can I just read a little quote from one of his books, please do other way. So he talks about onanism, which Rachel alluded to is a story of Odin from where we're in Scripture, are we? That is that is where he's supposed to consummate this.   49:55 So this is the story of this is in Genesis in Judah Genesis. Yeah. This is   Zack Jackson 50:01 and where he's supposed to impregnate his brother's widow, and then spills the seed on the ground because   Rachael Jackson 50:08 he doesn't want to because he wants the child to be his own and not be his brother's his dead brother's wife's son, and therefore all the dead brother's property goes to him and he doesn't then have a son. So instead of doing that, they just like,   Zack Jackson 50:26 so then God knocks him out. Right, so, so he talks about onanism. So when he talks about onanism, he's talking about masturbation. He says neither plague nor war nor smallpox have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism. Such a victim dies literally by his own hand. Yeah, such a victim dies literally by his own answer. You must have been so happy with that line. Can you imagine him writing that out? And he's like, Oh, this is a killer. This is good. This is good. This is good. He dies by his own hand. Oh, I gotta show this to someone.   Rachael Jackson 51:04 Yeah. Also, let's just add to who this person was. He spent 30 years of his life dedicated to promoting eugenics.   Ian Binns 51:15 Yes, he did. So near the end of his life,   Rachael Jackson 51:18 whether or not there was the direct cornflakes is for masturbation, it was promoted by a person who was anti sexual and pro eugenic to donate. You know, that's the history   Zack Jackson 51:33 of cornflakes. Yeah. Meanwhile, recent research has found that for most people, sex is actually super healthy. For a person's like continued health and well, being mentally, physically, emotionally, releases all kinds of amazing hormones and good things into your body. And like a lot of religions throughout history have have have recognized that have seen, like Judaism, spiritual ecstasy, like orgasm is like spiritual ecstasy. That's like the moment of connection to the divine. This breaking forth between the natural and the the supernatural. And this thin place and spirituality have, like, celebrated that. And I think we're coming back around to that. That's a good thing. Right? Oh, Christianity is still lagging far, far, far behind. Thank you some combination of Plato and Augustine, but we're getting there. You know,   Rachael Jackson 52:37 maybe it's kind of like Plumbing. Right? They had an ancient Egypt, and then it took like, one or 2000 years to come back. Yeah.   Zack Jackson 52:48 Yeah. Yeah. So   Rachael Jackson 52:49 you know, your plumbing. Yeah. Not quite, not quite that way. But no, my Jewish comment, my Jewish comment was that Judaism sees, and by Judaism, big broad stroke brush using right here, normative ancient orthodoxy style, Judaism saw sex only within a marital heterosexual concept. But inside those boundaries, yay, more of it. Also, it's a double mitzvah, it's a doubly good thing to do on Shabbat, the day that we're supposed to be the highest connected to God. And this was one of the ways to be even more connected to the Divine was through sex with your spouse. And I was thinking, as you're talking about Kellogg to how they didn't have sex, even though they were married. One of the things in an ancient Catawba marriage document, given it to the wife was written that if the husband doesn't fulfill his side of the contract, because, well, he doesn't or he's dead, then she gets XY and Z things, you know, 50 chickens, a sheep or whatever. Depends on what she's worth old widows and or excuse me, old, divorcees are worth nothing. But beyond that. One of the stipulations in there is how often they have to have sex, how often the husband must provide sex to his wife, not the other way around. And it listed how frequent so a day trader was like, once a week at a minimum, right, but a merchant, every three to say they had a donkey driver that was once a month and then a camel driver was once every three months because they recognize that if your camel driver, you're you're gone for a very long time, so don't punish them. And then they had like, and then because these are scholars writing this and I don't know what their problem was, they just want to have sex with each other instead of their wives. They said, Oh, like every seven years. Is all your seven years. Yeah, like it was ridiculous, how often or how not often they had To have sex so that they could go to the go to their rabbi's house and study with him for years on end, and then just come back once every few years have sex with the wife and then go again. So yeah, so having, like having sex in the religious concept again, and that very narrow first understanding of sis heterosexual marriages, has kind of made sex positive in Judea. Yeah. Yeah.   Ian Binns 55:30 So I know because you know, we are approaching the hour. But I do want to at least because, you know, we talked about before recording. And it's a chance for me to get all my giggles out around this idea of hysteria. Your giggles out most of my giggles. But this was something that I do remember hearing about, you know, at one point about female hysteria. And there's different articles that I have found that talk about, you know, because even there were films about it, or there was a film about it, and play. And so the idea was that, and thankfully, I'm gonna keep fumbling this. But Rachel introduced us to a really cool person, I want to do a shout out for sigh babe on Facebook. does some really interesting stuff. I'm really excited about Reading more about her. But what's interesting is that the argument is, is that hold on, let me pull my thing up, and just be easier. It was believed or this is the argument that in the Victorian era, doctors treated women diagnosed with hysteria, which is no longer a diagnosis, by the way, by genital stimulation to induce an orgasm. This hysteria was supposed to be a buildup of fluid in the woman's womb. And doctors assumed that since men and Jackie lated, and felt better that it stood to reason this would work for when women. Apparently, you know, there was multiple, you know, ideas of what was it that the different symptoms that people would have, obviously, if they were experiencing hysteria, and so this was the way to go was this manual massage. But a text came out in 1999. From and I believe that toss are doing more research for this this episode. A historian wrote this book that came out in 1989. And in that she argued that this was the reason why the vibrator was invented, was to make it so that it was easier for the doctors having to treat women for hysteria. I'm just saying that Oh, nice. But you know. So, yeah, and found out that that actually is not accurate. A more recent paper from last couple years has come out showing that this is actually inaccurate, that there is no evidence whatsoever suggests that women are treated for hysteria, by doctors bringing them to orgasm in their offices. So, or that this was the reason why vibrators were invented. But again, a medical treatment. That was something that took off based on one historians perspective, and or book, and then others kind of pushed back on it was fascinating. And we can share these in show notes or something. But in Reading about this particular ailment, and this suppose a treatment Amad. Yes. And suppose the treatment, there was interesting to read about how this particular historian of technology kind of has backpedal a little bit. And so well, no, I didn't mean I meant it more as a hypothesis, not a yes, this is the way it was. But then, you know, when you actually look at the writing shows, that's not actually how it was presented in the text itself. But it still took off, right? Because it was, I mean, when you think about it, this sounds kind of funny. And so it took off, people listen to it and   Rachael Jackson 59:13 right, because also, you know, God forbid, somebody creates something for women's pleasure, simply for women's pleasure,   Ian Binns 59:21 right? And that's actually there's no reason at the very beginning. It's a disturbing insight, implying that vibrators succeeded not because they advance you know, pleasure, but because they saved labor for male physicians.   Rachael Jackson 59:35 Right? So again, yeah, simply for women that has nothing to do with the man right gets co opted into a story of oh, those poor men, just poor, poor doctors, or in a really awful way of the abuse, the potential abuse of Doc Just taking advantage of their women patience, and showing that it's okay. None of this is ever okay.   Ian Binns 1:00:11 But even there, I mean, you can easily go online and find   1:00:17 trying to find their, you know, articles   Ian Binns 1:00:18 to support that this will that it was used for this as as recent 2019. Right. Yeah.   Rachael Jackson 1:00:28 So no, no your sources correct. And use some good thinking. And if you're going to Google things, feel free to use private browsing. Yes.   Zack Jackson 1:00:39 And if your interest the scientific method, you know, and you're feeling a little hysterical, just want to try it out. See if it works for you. That's in your hypothesis. Thank you. Science is just messing around and taking notes right so.   1:01:04 Wash your hands first.   Ian Binns 1:01:05 And after. Okay, that's all I got.   Zack Jackson 1:01:13 Thank you, doctor. Doctor, doctor.  

Today to Kick Off the Month of May, Our Start of Experiencer Month, We have Special Guest "Nathan Vallo" who will be telling his story for the first time ever, exclusively on our show! This has been a much anticipated episode, and im sure will blow you away. Nathan came face to face with a cube like object that was between 30-40 feet long, and came only 50 feet away from him. This was only the beginning of what Nathan was about to see! Get ready for an experience of a life time, So Strap on those Seat Belts, Were Going for a Ride!! Nathan's Bio: I'm a single dad of 3 daughters. I have a bachelor's degree in mass communications. I love physics and quantum mechanics. Which I've been studying for 20+ years. I currently run the embroidery department at a graphic arts studio here in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Prior to my experience I always had a fascination with astronomy and cosmology. But I was with the mainstream thought on extraterrestrials. They surely exist however the distances are just too great to ever overcome to be visiting earth. That all changed in June 2018. NEW MERCH AND SWAG STORE FOR ALL THINGS "UFO ENCOUNTERS WORLD WIDE" - https://www.storefrontier.com/ufoencountersworldwide DONATE/SPONSOR THE SHOW AT - https://paypal.me/JessePmufonFI - IT WILL HELP KEEP THE SHOW GOING, PLUS YOU GET A "SHOUT OUT" ON THE SHOW AND A PLACE ON THE WEBSITE! SPONSORED BY: "GYPSY DAZE ORIGINALS" CLOTHING LINE NOW AVAILABLE ON ETSY, HAND MADE CLOTHES MADE IN THE USA AND NEW MYSTERY BOXES, SUPPORT SMALL BUSINESS AND "ALL THINGS UFO" FACEBOOK GROUP CONTACT ME: TWITTER - @AATPEAK WEBSITE - UFOENCOUNTERSWORLDWIDE.WORDPRESS.COM EMAIL - UFOENCOUNTERSWORLDWIDE@GMAIL.COM PROJECT BATTECH 404 INFORMATION: WEBSITE - PROJECTBATTECH404.WORDPRESS.COM

My goal in this podcast — Christian meditation for a bigger life — is to help 21st century Christians in the always distracted digital age — to connect with God with our whole being and sense that embodied connection in each present moment throughout our day. And I think most of us as Christians are often living these unconsciously anxious and tense lives with a kind of bifurcated connection with our own soul and a fragmented connection with God. Where our “Christian faith” has become primarily about certain beliefs about our future rather than an embodied experience right now with the real God who created this entire universe. My story 6 years ago… I read a book by a psychologist that worked at Stanford Medical Center that led to my attending a 6-day clinic in Northern California with the author and his team, along with 10 other attendees, where, among other things, we learned and practiced his protocol for meditation and relaxation.  His method of meditation was not tied to any kind of spirituality. Mainly just focusing on relaxing your entire body at once and focusing your mind on feeling your entire body relax as you continue a slow rhythm of breathing. Pretty basic, but effective in rebooting the central nervous system from a sympathetic (limbic system fight or flight) to a parasympathetic (calm and free of tension and stress). But since then, I've also read lots of books by various neurologists on the brain and body connection and other books by Buddhist authors on meditation, and I've used lots of various audio meditations by all kinds of meditation instructors — lots of Progressive Relaxation or body scan techniques. Almost all of them are tied to a Buddhist spirituality. Buddhists have discovered something real and beneficial, but they've misinterpreted the meaning of it. It's not dissolving the illusion of the self and becoming one with the collective consciousness or Being of the universe, but rather helping our mind re-integrating our soul with our body. There is a transcendence to that that is felt as a mystical experience because we are spiritual beings.  But all of these techniques for meditation, while still helpful, were missing the kind of true spiritual experience in meditation and contemplation that the Bible talks about when it talks about meditation.  So I decided to try to integrate the two. Which I've been doing now for about two years. Taking the best of the non-spiritual kind of meditation protocol I learned in California, along with the best of various mindfulness or Buddhist meditation techniques — and integrating those with previous ways I've meditated on Biblical images of my connection with God. And it has made a huge difference in my life. And it's what I want to help you do in these podcast episodes.  I want to give you the basic structure I use for this kind of Christian meditation. Eventually — once you learn the basic structure — you can even do it for a three to five-minute meditation to do easily and quickly at home, at work, before an important meeting, when you're stuck in traffic, or anytime you have a pain or anxiety flare.  You can do it lying flat on your back, or sitting in a chair or sometimes I do it even while walking. It works. Although not in the same way as if I'm lying down. But something is always better than nothing. And it's a great practice to learn to do whenever you can, wherever you are. I'm going to do it longer in this episode by explaining and giving you more time to learn what to focus on. So I'm going to record this episode and then the next episode will be a shorter Christian meditation without much explanation that you can use whenever.  But with practice you can do it as quickly as you need to in any moment. But setting aside a longer time to do it each day (20-30 min) will make a much bigger difference not only in your central nervous system but in your sense of walking with God...

My goal in this podcast — Christian meditation for a bigger life — is to help 21st century Christians in the always distracted digital age — to connect with God with our whole being and sense that embodied connection in each present moment throughout our day. And I think most of us as Christians are often living these unconsciously anxious and tense lives with a kind of bifurcated connection with our own soul and a fragmented connection with God. Where our “Christian faith” has become primarily about certain beliefs about our future rather than an embodied experience right now with the real God who created this entire universe. My story 6 years ago… I read a book by a psychologist that worked at Stanford Medical Center that led to my attending a 6-day clinic in Northern California with the author and his team, along with 10 other attendees, where, among other things, we learned and practiced his protocol for meditation and relaxation.  His method of meditation was not tied to any kind of spirituality. Mainly just focusing on relaxing your entire body at once and focusing your mind on feeling your entire body relax as you continue a slow rhythm of breathing. Pretty basic, but effective in rebooting the central nervous system from a sympathetic (limbic system fight or flight) to a parasympathetic (calm and free of tension and stress). But since then, I've also read lots of books by various neurologists on the brain and body connection and other books by Buddhist authors on meditation, and I've used lots of various audio meditations by all kinds of meditation instructors — lots of Progressive Relaxation or body scan techniques. Almost all of them are tied to a Buddhist spirituality. Buddhists have discovered something real and beneficial, but they've misinterpreted the meaning of it. It's not dissolving the illusion of the self and becoming one with the collective consciousness or Being of the universe, but rather helping our mind re-integrating our soul with our body. There is a transcendence to that that is felt as a mystical experience because we are spiritual beings.  But all of these techniques for meditation, while still helpful, were missing the kind of true spiritual experience in meditation and contemplation that the Bible talks about when it talks about meditation.  So I decided to try to integrate the two. Which I've been doing now for about two years. Taking the best of the non-spiritual kind of meditation protocol I learned in California, along with the best of various mindfulness or Buddhist meditation techniques — and integrating those with previous ways I've meditated on Biblical images of my connection with God. And it has made a huge difference in my life. And it's what I want to help you do in these podcast episodes.  I want to give you the basic structure I use for this kind of Christian meditation. Eventually — once you learn the basic structure — you can even do it for a three to five-minute meditation to do easily and quickly at home, at work, before an important meeting, when you're stuck in traffic, or anytime you have a pain or anxiety flare.  You can do it lying flat on your back, or sitting in a chair or sometimes I do it even while walking. It works. Although not in the same way as if I'm lying down. But something is always better than nothing. And it's a great practice to learn to do whenever you can, wherever you are. I'm going to do it longer in this episode by explaining and giving you more time to learn what to focus on. So I'm going to record this episode and then the next episode will be a shorter Christian meditation without much explanation that you can use whenever.  But with practice you can do it as quickly as you need to in any moment. But setting aside a longer time to do it each day (20-30 min) will make a much bigger difference not only in your central nervous system but in your sense of walking with God...

My goal in this podcast — Christian meditation for a bigger life — is to help 21st century Christians in the always distracted digital age — to connect with God with our whole being and sense that embodied connection in each present moment throughout our day. And I think most of us as Christians are often living these unconsciously anxious and tense lives with a kind of bifurcated connection with our own soul and a fragmented connection with God. Where our “Christian faith” has become primarily about certain beliefs about our future rather than an embodied experience right now with the real God who created this entire universe. My story 6 years ago… I read a book by a psychologist that worked at Stanford Medical Center that led to my attending a 6-day clinic in Northern California with the author and his team, along with 10 other attendees, where, among other things, we learned and practiced his protocol for meditation and relaxation.  His method of meditation was not tied to any kind of spirituality. Mainly just focusing on relaxing your entire body at once and focusing your mind on feeling your entire body relax as you continue a slow rhythm of breathing. Pretty basic, but effective in rebooting the central nervous system from a sympathetic (limbic system fight or flight) to a parasympathetic (calm and free of tension and stress). But since then, I've also read lots of books by various neurologists on the brain and body connection and other books by Buddhist authors on meditation, and I've used lots of various audio meditations by all kinds of meditation instructors — lots of Progressive Relaxation or body scan techniques. Almost all of them are tied to a Buddhist spirituality. Buddhists have discovered something real and beneficial, but they've misinterpreted the meaning of it. It's not dissolving the illusion of the self and becoming one with the collective consciousness or Being of the universe, but rather helping our mind re-integrating our soul with our body. There is a transcendence to that that is felt as a mystical experience because we are spiritual beings.  But all of these techniques for meditation, while still helpful, were missing the kind of true spiritual experience in meditation and contemplation that the Bible talks about when it talks about meditation.  So I decided to try to integrate the two. Which I've been doing now for about two years. Taking the best of the non-spiritual kind of meditation protocol I learned in California, along with the best of various mindfulness or Buddhist meditation techniques — and integrating those with previous ways I've meditated on Biblical images of my connection with God. And it has made a huge difference in my life. And it's what I want to help you do in these podcast episodes.  So I want to give you the basic structure I use for this kind of Christian meditation. Eventually — once you learn the basic structure — you can even do it for a three to five-minute meditation to do easily and quickly at home, at work, before an important meeting, when you're stuck in traffic, or anytime you have a pain or anxiety flare.  You can do it lying flat on your back, or sitting in a chair or sometimes I do it even while walking. It works. Although not in the same way as if I'm lying down. But something is always better than nothing. And it's a great practice to learn to do whenever you can, wherever you are. I'm going to do it longer in this episode by explaining and giving you more time to learn what to focus on. So I'm going to record this episode and then the next episode will be a shorter Christian meditation without much explanation that you can use whenever.  But with practice you can do it as quickly as you need to in any moment. But setting aside a longer time to do it each day (20-30 min) will make a much bigger difference not only in your central nervous system but in your sense of walking with God

My goal in this podcast — Christian meditation for a bigger life — is to help 21st century Christians in the always distracted digital age — to connect with God with our whole being and sense that embodied connection in each present moment throughout our day. And I think most of us as Christians are often living these unconsciously anxious and tense lives with a kind of bifurcated connection with our own soul and a fragmented connection with God. Where our “Christian faith” has become primarily about certain beliefs about our future rather than an embodied experience right now with the real God who created this entire universe. My story 6 years ago… I read a book by a psychologist that worked at Stanford Medical Center that led to my attending a 6-day clinic in Northern California with the author and his team, along with 10 other attendees, where, among other things, we learned and practiced his protocol for meditation and relaxation.  His method of meditation was not tied to any kind of spirituality. Mainly just focusing on relaxing your entire body at once and focusing your mind on feeling your entire body relax as you continue a slow rhythm of breathing. Pretty basic, but effective in rebooting the central nervous system from a sympathetic (limbic system fight or flight) to a parasympathetic (calm and free of tension and stress). But since then, I've also read lots of books by various neurologists on the brain and body connection and other books by Buddhist authors on meditation, and I've used lots of various audio meditations by all kinds of meditation instructors — lots of Progressive Relaxation or body scan techniques. Almost all of them are tied to a Buddhist spirituality. Buddhists have discovered something real and beneficial, but they've misinterpreted the meaning of it. It's not dissolving the illusion of the self and becoming one with the collective consciousness or Being of the universe, but rather helping our mind re-integrating our soul with our body. There is a transcendence to that that is felt as a mystical experience because we are spiritual beings.  But all of these techniques for meditation, while still helpful, were missing the kind of true spiritual experience in meditation and contemplation that the Bible talks about when it talks about meditation.  So I decided to try to integrate the two. Which I've been doing now for about two years. Taking the best of the non-spiritual kind of meditation protocol I learned in California, along with the best of various mindfulness or Buddhist meditation techniques — and integrating those with previous ways I've meditated on Biblical images of my connection with God. And it has made a huge difference in my life. And it's what I want to help you do in these podcast episodes.  So I want to give you the basic structure I use for this kind of Christian meditation. Eventually — once you learn the basic structure — you can even do it for a three to five-minute meditation to do easily and quickly at home, at work, before an important meeting, when you're stuck in traffic, or anytime you have a pain or anxiety flare.  You can do it lying flat on your back, or sitting in a chair or sometimes I do it even while walking. It works. Although not in the same way as if I'm lying down. But something is always better than nothing. And it's a great practice to learn to do whenever you can, wherever you are. I'm going to do it longer in this episode by explaining and giving you more time to learn what to focus on. So I'm going to record this episode and then the next episode will be a shorter Christian meditation without much explanation that you can use whenever.  But with practice you can do it as quickly as you need to in any moment. But setting aside a longer time to do it each day (20-30 min) will make a much bigger difference not only in your central nervous system but in your sense of walking with God

Drums Along the CongoWiki links:Mokele-mbembephantoms and monstersSound effect credits: https://freesound.org/people/IchBinJager/https://freesound.org/people/jamesrodavidson/https://freesound.org/people/nickerick03/Loose Transcript:Wooo hooo Welcome back everybody, to Nightmare Now, I'm your Host Erik Byrne and if this is your first night terror with us, welcome aboard, please keep arms and legs severed or otherwise, inside the podcast at all times. Today we're getting into a subject near and dear to my heart, Cryptozoology, or is it palentology? Or just zoology? I guess it depends on the evidence we can pull together and a certain willingness to suspend disbelief. If you're not willing to suspend disbelief, I'm glad you're still listening. We're gonna get into some more true historical stuff next week. Probably. Basically as I predicted would happen as a chronic procrastinator I have completely squandered the buffer I had by prerecording the first few episodes. I figured hey I'll throw a few in the tank and it'll give me a bit of time to really knock it out of the park and give me time to go on vacation or something later but I guess (F--k it we'll do it live!) So here we are, merely a day or two ahead of airtime. My laptop is throwing up errors, my fan died, not any of you guys, just the little USB one that keeps me cool in the Airquotes “Studio”. It's really just a glorified closet, and if you want to see a picture come say hi on our instagram page @nightmare.now it'll be there. Speaking of which, with this being the first recording post launch I am flabbergasted with the amazing response I've gotten, I hit 100 Downloads within the first week, I have a bunch of people checking out the instagram and twitter and I get texts from a few listeners within hours of an episode releasing. Thanks mom! For links to all that social media bulls--t and how to get in touch with me check out the icons at nightmarenow.com and pretty please gimme those juicy 5 star ratings and reviews wherever you're listening it helps out a ton.With all that housekeeping out of the way finally we can lumber in to today's topic. I'd cue the jurassic park theme here but the real nightmare would be john williams copyright claim on my show and nobody wants that.  Maybe I'll pull a vanilla Ice in post and add a high hat cymbal to exonerate myself from any kind of intellectual property infringement. (insert track) That's better. I'm gonna do my best movie trailer voice now. It's amazing how annoying your voice sounds on a recording versus in the reverberations of your own skull, but it's something I'll just have to live with. Here we go: BWAAAA IN A WORLD. EXACTLY LIKE TODAY'S WORLD BECAUSE IT IS TODAYS WORLD BWAAAAATHERE ARE SECRETS ANCIENT SECRETS BWAAAAALYING IN WAIT WAITING TO BE REVEALED. SECRETS 66 MILLION YEAR IN THE MAKING(for copyright reasons) BWAAADEEP IN THE CONGOLESE JUNGLE,IN THE DEPTHS OF LAKE TELEA BEAST SLUMBERS BWAAATHIS TUESDAYMOKELE-MBEMBE RISES ONCE MORE (ROAR)TO APPEAR ON A PODCAST(BWAAA) That's right folks we have a real treat set up for you today, we're looking at Mokele-mbembe, the god beast and potential surviving dinosaur, or colony of dinosaurs deep in the jungle in the heart of Africa. Our main source today is the book drums along the congo where journalist and explorer rory nugent documents his own personal quest to get a glimpse at the beast itself. I'll throw a link in the show notes if you want to check it out yourself, it's not a long read and it's a fun little swashbuckling on site adventure through the jungle.Who, or what is mokele-mbembe though? There are accounts from westerners all the way back in 1776 when french missionaries found huge unexplainable footprints in the congo. Before you say anything, it's bigger feet than bigfoot, he's gonna get his own episode or two later. Later on mokele-mbembe was first reported widely in the western world in 1909  by a zoologist named Carl hagenbeck in his book beasts and men, soon after picked up by the washington post in 1910. I managed to find the news article actually, that'll be in the notes but it describes the possibility of a half elephant half dragon monster. Later zoological expeditions heard terrifying thunderous sounds and roars in the region and still others found clawed footprints  larger than an elephants. Elephants are present in this region but they don't have claws. Mokele-mbembe means “one who stops the flow of rivers” in the local language of lingala. The congo river basin and lake tele is certainly a more ancient, more primordial area of the planet. Featuring giant prehistoric ferns and temperatures that never really drop below seventy degrees and rarely come out of the high eighties. Fahrenheit for you non yanks, that's 26 to 28 degrees celsius. I need to be conscious of my global audience now that we're world wide, according to my analytics we've got listeners in france, india, sweden, the uk, new zealand, canada and here at home across the US. Thank you all! The humidity hovers around 85-100 percent, making it incredibly muggy all the time. Huge jungle trees stretch to form distinct layers of jungle in the canopy, mid canopy and the ground. As a biologist I found all this stuff super fascinating when rory covered it in drums along the congo, where you have, you know, a hundred square feet of jungle forest and effectively three or more different ecosystems the higher into the trees you go. Different amounts of sunlight, heat and whole separate sets of species populate each zone. In the interest of not making a three hour show just about jungle ecosystems I'll refer to this stuff only where it's relevant, or horrifying, as you'll see later once we get into the jungle parasites and other dangers just to get out to lake tele to even try to find mokele mbembe, man that's fun to say. So even before we get our boots wet in a neverending crocodile infested mire, get arrested by congolese authorities, get attacked by poisonous snakes or leopards, (for more about why big cats are scary check out episode one!) and become riddled with malaria, we have to know what we're even looking for. Now, descriptions of mokele-mbembe have varied over time but the central concept is usually the same. He, or she I suppose, is effectively a sauropod dinosaur. For those of you who weren't as obsessed with paleontology as I was when I was a kid. And still am, let's be honest, sauropods are the big long neck dudes. Tons and tons of flesh and muscle in a lumbering body, a huge tail, and a head atop a ridiculously long neck. Little foot for my land before time fans out there. So mokele mebembe basically fits that description. A sauropod dinosaur ranging in size from a hippopotamus to a towering thirty five feet tall or so. After that general description we kind of have a pick and choose smorgasbord of trims and upgrade packages for it. Many accounts describe a single sharp tusk or horn, picture something like a narwhal for that. Among those accounts it uses the tusks to poke around and slice off it's alleged favorite food, the malombo fruit. It's kind of like a cross between a soft coconut and a lemon. They grow on vines. Other less herbivorous accounts depict mokele mbemebe spearing hippos, elephants, leopards, crocs  and especially people on its tooth and drowning them in its waters. Don't piss it off I guess. Most descriptions agree that he's a brownish, greyish or rusty color, but beyond that some say it's scaly, some say slimy and still others say it has short slick fur like a seal. I don't think anyone has been able to get close enough to touch it and live to tell the tale though. After that you start to get out to the more fringe descriptions, like a line of sharp spines along its spine. Along with spikes at the end of its muscular tail. The locals mention that it has deep blood red eyes too.Mokele-Mbembe lives in and around lake tele, and also supposedly in underground caves in the region. Now I love this idea, I'm definitely going to do a future episode on the accounts of hollow parts deep within the earth supposedly housing mammoths and dinosaurs and other crazy s--t, it's one of my favorite parts of esoteric crypto lore and I have some cool books on that stuff kicking around somewhere. Anyway, the lake, caves and perhaps most importantly the rivers is where mokele mbembe makes its home. It uses the rivers to get around, because they snake throughout the entire region and give access to it's full territory and malombo fruits without it having to knock down a ton of trees and stomp through the forest. Skeptics would point to this as a convenient lack of evidence, but generally, f--k skeptics. Live a little. Or listen to the more accurately historically sourced episodes.  Some people say it's a physical, undeniable biological creature, a relic from the late jurassic period. Obviously it wouldn't live that long and would have to breed or otherwise reproduce until now. The climate and jungle ecosystem could technically support such a creature, maybe not at the upper range of its size descriptions but certainly at a large elephant size. It wouldn't have many if any natural predators and other animals have survived relatively unchanged for much longer and are taken for granted. Obviously we have the living fossil coelacanth, but think too about other animals. Sharks, alligators and crocodiles, other species of fish and lizards. Some stuff survives and justs gets smaller. The animal kingdom goes the same way as freakin ipods. You got the big prehistoric chunkers that could hold eight songs and eventually you get the ipod mini. Same applies to dinosaurs. It's science. What's the alternative though? To a living fossil? Local tribes and even more developed settlements in the area revere mokele-mbembe as a god-beast. A Spirit of the jungle and river. In a survey done in 1980, over half of the respondents there reported that they were christians, but even 90 percent of them reported seeing a witch doctor at least twice each year. This is a region dominated by ancient tradition and a lot of the voodoo stuff that us Americans attribute to Haiti and the Caribbean really originate here. I won't dive too deep into that today because I've got a whole episode planned on haitian voodoo and the zombie phenomena there where I'll go more in depth on all that craziness. Scopolamine is a helluva drug though I'll give you that much as a little teaser. But anyway the people, in this region especially of the congo, believe that spirits control everything. There's spirits for water, for air, for weather, for food, for guns, for love, for life, for the trees, for the sky, for the spring, for the animals, for families, you f--king name it. So many people consider mokele-mbembe to be either a spirit given form or some sort of spirit flesh hybrid. In a way we're all spirit flesh hybrids aren't we? This could explain certain lacking physical evidence even in the face of numerous eyewitness accounts.There's one part in the book we're rory and his guide are talking about death and spirits and the like that really made me laugh where he's talking to his guide, and the guide is upset because they receive news that a guy in a neighboring village has died. Turns out it's worse that it's the guides enemy than if it was his friend because now his family is gonna get cursed by the dead guys family and accused of spirit murder because they'll think his family cursed the dead guy. Rory asked him if they did curse the dead guy and he's just like “hell yeah we did, f--k that guy!” turns out the congolese justice system isn't exactly the most efficient machine around so most people turn to spirits and voodoo curses in lieu of litigation. In short, even among the christian or undecided population of the congo, old traditions based around fetishes voodoo and witch doctors carry a hell of a lot of importance in peoples day to day lives.I've also heard people describe the loch ness monster and other more dinosaurian cryptids as ghosts of dinosaurs so that's a fun third option for the people playing along at home, I don't really think that's the case here but their guess is as good as mine.  Then of course there's the possibility of it all being bullsh-t entirely but if that's the case I'm out a show. Towards the end I'll probably throw in some skeptical explanations just to be fair and balanced. For the purposes of the rest of the show however, I think we'll be looking at it as if it truly is a lost dinosaur lineage, avoiding capture and death deep in the jungle for millions of years. I think now is as good a time as any to paraphrase rory nugent's  trip through the congo, mostly because his book was the highest rated and available on kindle versus a lot of the more referenced texts on mokele-mbembe being out of print or prohibitively expensive. WHAT ARE THE PUBLISHING COMPANIES HIDING? THE PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW! So my man rory has listed himself as a journalist slash explorer, personally I would lead with explorer but that's just me. He takes a couple of courses in jungle survival and spends a night in central park without getting mugged basically. After that it's basically off to the races. Imagine a cutaway to to an indiana jones cutaway with the planes and the bum ba dumm dumm ba ba daaa, man I'm really trying to get sued by john williams today huh? So you see the plane flying across the atlantic, maybe the plane stops in france and then pops down to africa. Into the southwest region of the congo. He starts taking pictures of birds and s--t because he's into that kind of thing and is immediately arrested  for being a capitalist spy. He's apparently got a high enough charisma roll to talk himself out of it, if you'll forgive the expression, I started a dnd game with a few friends so that stuff has been at the front of my mind. It helps because it's another more creative energy keeping me sane while I slave away as a lab analyst. Why do you think I started this show anyway? So Rory gets arrested and basically for the remainder of his trip he is assigned chaperones for his time in the congo. Kind of like the pope episode a few weeks back I really don't want to get into the politics of the Congo and why they're worried about capitalist spies. Suffice to say that Russians, Cubans and the Chinese had a pretty big hand in the development of the present day congo. As far as I knew about the Congo before I started researching this episode was the sh--y Congo movie from 1995 with the gray cannibal apes, a cyborg gorilla and tim curry almost saying the N word. That movie and like twenty eight pages of joseph conrad's heart of darkness. I'll finish it someday. Luckily I learned a lot about the region and culture and potentially fake monsters dwelling within it. Again we're a global show. Rory gets assigned a chaperone and there's a lot of great scene with this dude, Ambroise constantly busting his balls because truth be told he doesn't want to be hanging around babysitting this dumb mundele, that's the word for insincere whitey in lingala, all day long. He's giving him s--t about how if he has to go into the jungle he gets overtime and stuff, and this expedition is gonna help finance his new refrigerator. He gets into all kinds of little adventures in the capital of the congo, brazzaville while he's trying to secure a travel permit to get to the wild northern region where mokele-mbembe supposedly lives. And he completely confirms the westaboo trope. In every non american country there's always a few people that base their whole identity on american culture, they do a great version of this in that show welcome to sweden. In fact there's this whole subculture over in sweden called the raggare that go all out for 1950s americana. I really hope that they've committed heinous crimes or something so I have an excuse to cover them. Anyway rory meets all kinds of people obsessed with american movies from 20 years earlier and more importantly the huge sporting event that was the rumble in the jungle. A famous boxing match between george foreman and muhammad ali that ali won in a big upset in 1974 in zaire. Which eventually becomes the democratic republic of the congo. Some people were so obsessed that they had the entire radio broadcast memorized. The fact that rory had once shook hands with ali, was actually a huge help in securing those permits. Even still there were times when he had to wait in a sweltering office for nine hours only to have the secretary be like, ssss ahhh, the paperwork guy isn't in today cest la vie huh? Eventually he acquires the permit and ships up north. Not before getting a blessing from a witch doctor near brazzaville. The witch doctor told him what to do and he said OO EE OOOH AAHHH AHH TING TANG WALLA WALLA BING BANG. not really, just as soon as anyone mentions a witch doctor some MKULTRA programming from the alvin and the chipmunks movie kicks in and that's all I can think of, the old one not the weird uncanny valley cgi ones. He would've been better off with the s--tty gimmick song though because what really happened to get the witch doctor's blessing was much worse. He had to strip down, and no it's not brazzersville perverts, nobody was stuck in a washing machine. He had to strip down and the witch doctor screamed and spit in his face and dumped a fanta bottle of crocodile oil and honey all over him, again modern society and ancient tradition clashing with the fanta bottle, I love it. This concoction was an invitation to every winged insect within a mile to crawl around on him and suck up the honey and by extension any evil spirits. You know with a bunch of parasitic wasps crawling around my dick and balls I'd probably take my chances with the evil spirits. I guess it's better than having robert liston operate on you. Unfortunately for ambroise and his fridge though they said f--k you and your overtime and sent him off with a dude named innocent. Him and innocent take a plane north to impfondo and fly over this city that I would love to do some more research on that's just a bunch of barges lashed together and stacked on top of each other in the congo river. The pilot has a little extra fuel and flies them over lake tele so they get the aerial view before touching down on a tiny airfield in the jungle. From above tele is a serene black lake surrounded by a black mire with twisted and gnarled trees on all sides. Through the swamp weaves dozens of inlets and rivers and coves, all potentially housing the lost sauropod. They say they haven't had anyone fly in in over six months because the airfield is only usable if it doesn't rain for three days, a rare occurrence in the jungle. They are effectively stuck there and locked in once they land and their pilot takes off. It's a hundred and eighteen degrees when they touch down and from here on out it's all on foot or by canoe. Rory has some pens and pencils and bubble gum to offer the children of the villages and the tribes and everyone one of them is just like f--k off, cash or nothing. I love that juxtaposition he encounters in all these villages. Like it's still a primitive way of life but not untouched like out on sentinel island or anything like that. So there's people fishing with spears and clutching voodoo fetishes but at the same time they're wearing nike tracksuits and Rams Super bowl champions two thousand two hats, sorry tflo if you're listening, at least you got yours this year! One of the biggest parts of the cargo they're lugging around is literally crates of liquor and pounds of salt, because the traditional gift to a tribal chief is a handful of salt and a bottle of booze. He brings a whole crate of scotch to each village to get in with them and that leads into more than a few hangover style shenanigans where he wakes up suspended in a tree or in a pile of wriggling fish. But hey? When in rome right? They pick up a couple of jungle guides and other people on their quest whilst they go around placating all the surrounding village with booze and cigarettes. Eventually they hop in some canoes and hit the river towards lake tele, but not before being scammed five or six times by different villages.In one of the first major outings on the canoes they run into a giant crocodile that they annoy with a thrown spear. After getting hit with a spear the croc takes a beeline at the canoe and innocent hits it in the neck with another spear at the last possible moment. If he hasn't realized it by now, rory sees that the travel through the jungle aint gonna be a walk in central park. Of course they cook and eat the croc because at this point they need to hunt for food. Speaking from personal experience, alligator tastes like, well, it unironically tastes like chicken. Just a rubbery, greasy chicken. According to the book, the crocodile didn't taste much different.After this the book reminds me of a game of amazon trail. It was like the oregon trail but instead of dying of dysentery in a covered wagon, you got eaten by piranhas in a canoe. I know I know, the amazon is in south america and the congo is in africa but many of the same principles apply, give me a break ok? Eventually they hit a few random encounters with a poachers canoe and try to scare off a poacher by just blasting their ak-47 into the air. He's apparently not around, it's more tense in the story but it's not really important to the mokelembembe plot. Later on down the river they see a jaguar lapping up water and  even see a pair of pygmies hiding in the water watching them, using reeds to breathe. That's scary as f--k. They could just pop out and hit you with a blow dart and eat you. Maybe they wouldn't eat you but nugent recalls tales he read in his youth about the yakas in this region that would kill and eat people traveling through this region. I've got a couple of episodes planned about cannibals, in fact I originally had an idea for a podcast about cannibals called to serve man, but f--k that would be depressing right? That tangent is basically just to illustrate how f--king scary it is to run into the more remote and warlike tribes out there in the jungle. It's one thing to sit in a closet and make jokes and talk s--t but it's another thing entirely to glide through the water in canoe, trying to remain silent as you see small humans watch you through yellowed eyes, under the river water like you're in the f--king dead marshes in middle earth. Good lord that's terrifying. Eventually he runs into a few brits doing their own expedition to lake tele for a geological survey and to see if they can find any new species or what have you and they're led by this dude colonel rothermel, and I'm basically picturing rourke from disney's atlantis, just some former military guy leading a bunch of nerds through a hostile environment. I know at least a few of my listeners will know exactly what I mean. The brits are one their way back from the lake and they pretty much laugh their asses off at the fact that rory and innocent are looking for mokele mbembe and offer to offload some of their equipment. Here rory talks about some other expeditions to lake tele throughout the last few hundred years. I think it's worth doing the same The brits didn't see s--t. Back in the eighties a guy named roy mackal went out there and got a picture of it… that got ruined by water. He was also some kind of young earth creationist, and his book was like thirty bucks so I wasn't getting that. Later on another expedition that partially inspired rory's came back and gave a presentation in new york, and much to everyone's quote unquote surprise, their only pictures were also… ruined by water.  At this point I'm like what the f--k, why are we reading this still but I'm here for the jungle adventure, I'm also locked in because I don't have another topic prepped. And I believe god damn it! There's dinosaurs out there! At least according to hundreds of schizo blogspot pages I came across, and they can't all be wrong right? Finally they come to the last, sort of “civilized” village. And with a little help from scotch and salt they narrowly secure a vote to allow them into the deepest part of mokele mbembe's sacred lair. One of my favorite parts of this exchange is when innocent translates what the village council says after the vote. He's just like “They ask mokele-mbembe not to kill us and thank us for the booze.” right on. Rory asks the witch doctor in that village if mokele-mbembe might be a goddess rather than a god and he just laughs in his face and is like no way mudele!The group of six gatherers their last bit of supplies and gets ready for weeks in the wilderness by foot and canoe. They sit through one coming of age ritual in a village and head off, with only one village saying that they should go home, the rest effectively sponsoring their quest. Here, and several other spots in the book, he talks about skin borers. Disturbingly matter of factly. These are parasites that burrow into your skin and get into the bloodstream. I'll quote the book here holy f--k.“These worms begin life no larger than a match head, but given the right conditions, they can grow to the size of a small snake within the leg, their growth arrested only by knee joints and ligaments. Eventually they eat through the calf and exit from the skin just below the knee.” He never gives a proper name for these parasites so I really couldn't find anything more about them, skin borers just comes up with a bunch of wood boring beetles on google. Compared to parasites that eat your f--king knees, they're well, boring. I've got a great book on parasites I'll eventually do an episode on, sarah you don't need to listen to that one, it's fine, I understand. They continue on playing another few days of congo trail, avoiding death by malaria, and nile crocodiles and skin borers. The only food some nights is fried grubs like they're in the f--king lion king, Slimy, yet satisfying. A lot of disney this episode huh? Other nights they've got monkey or crocodile, with one of the guides making sure to make a slurry of the brains for desert. He says it's the only way to gain the creatures power and spirit. With that I feel entirely vindicated in trying to convince people that eating the eyes of the lobster is the only way to gain it's grip strength for all these years. To my gym bro listeners, monkey brain protein shakes? Yes or no? Let me know at nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.com! One thing that he goes out of his way to mention is identifying monkeys by their vibrant scrotums. I felt it was worth including because we've had a lot of scrotum talk on this show, why stop now?Watching the monkey cook kind of gives me the impression of a cartoon where people are trapped on a deserted island and you envision your compatriots as succulent hams. Rory describes the monkey skin tightening over the fire and looking more humanlike and more tasty each minute. The jungle really can change a mofo. They eat all kinds of crazy s--t out in the jungle, monkeys, hogs, monkey's hogs, snakes, Which I've also eaten and taste like greasy chicken, grubs, plants and more. They use dirt for seasoning, I might have to try that next time I do pulled pork.One day rory goes off on his own to collect some butterflies and look at birds and he hears a huge roar and a bunch of small trees being knocked over. This is effectively the climax of the book so buckle the f--k up. He starts joggin through the muck and mire of the swamp around lake tele. After whatever monster is tearing through the trees. When he eventually catches up to it he sees a massive heaving grey and black creature grabbing at some fruit. It's a f--king silverback gorilla. It looks at him inquisitively, perhaps sensing a primate kinship, and then roars, he gets the hell out of there and runs headfirst into a forest clearing where everything is freakishly quiet. Within seconds five pygmies surround him from the underbrush. Yellowed teeth and eyes glaring from behind armed, presumably poisoned crossbows, spears and blowguns. They're only four and a half feet tall, one on one he might have a chance to whack one and get out but not surrounded. All his memories of stories of cannibals and mutilations come flooding back and he tries to reason with them by pointing to a bird he recognizes and flapping his arms. They hoot and holler at him. He slowly pulls out a harmonica and plays a s--y bit of piano man for them which they seem to like and hands off the harmonica to the one that seems to be the leader, who blows a few sour notes into it and smiles.This likely saved his life, so follow up on at least one creative pursuit or two in your life. Get that charisma score up! While screwing around with the harmonica, they didn't immediately murder him. He notices the leader has an infected cut on his foot and pulls out his medical kit to try to treat him on his knees. Immediately negotiations go sour when he tries this, the leader shrieks and kicks him in the throat. Rory backs up slowly and desperately tries to show them the bird sitting in the tree. I s-t you not this is how he escapes: he flaps his arms like a lunatic and points at the bird, they all finally look and he just takes off running. Literally LOOK OVER THERE! POCKET SAND! Jesus christ I hope he brought extra pants because I would be s--tting myself, running through the jungle hearing the whoops and shrieks get further and further behind you. They know the jungle but 3 foot legs can only carry you so f--king far. He's still lost too! After tracking the gorilla he lost his way and wandered until nightfall. Forcing him to sleep alone in the jungle. I can't believe he could even sleep. The next morning he awakes with a lungfish flopping against his face. That means water is nearby! He finally makes it back to his canoe and finds the rest of the group the next morning. With one more monkey brain protein shake they finally reach the shores of lake tele. After spending a little time on the shore they see something far off break the surface of the water. Like a periscope breaching the ocean. The group goes wild and they all fall to their knees, rory goes crazy too, offering them ten, then fifteen thousand francs to get him closer in the canoes. They ignore the offer and tell them to shut the f--k up and get on his knees, this is the moment. Innocent tells him the others are cursing him and to go for it so rory gets in one of the unoccupied canoes and shoves off towards the anomaly. He gets ten, twenty, thirty feet out when he hears an unmistakeable sound (CERCHICK) the rest of the group has their weapons trained on him and innocent. Rory snaps two blurry ( of course they're blurry) photographs and comes back to shore. One of the guides, Gabriel, admonishes him. “God can approach man, but man NEVER approaches GOD. He would have killed us all.” After he got back to shore the whole group was just relaxed again. No mention about the fact that they were in a mexican f--king standoff five seconds ago. They all watched the beast about a half a mile away for seven minutes and thirty two seconds before it submerges again. I'll put that picture in the shownotes. After that it's basically denouement, de new maw? I honestly am less confident in that word than I am in all the local lingala words. Let's unpack. First. I'm pissed nobody got speared by mokele mbembe's tusk, so that was kind of a let down. Second I can't get f--king oo ee ooo ahh ting tang wall walla bing bang out of my head. Maybe I'll cover that in the parasite episode. Third. One of my favorite stories about mokele-mbembe I couldn't find a good place to shoehorn in yet that I want to make sure I mention. So one of the BBC expeditions back in the seventies made a much more cordial contact with the pygmies. They showed them a book of animal pictures and they're flipping through them and they're like leopard, hippo, elephant, crocodile sure sure we see that s-t all the time, and then they show a picture of a moose and they're like WHAT THE F--K IS THAT THING! Later on after showing a gorilla and a few other monkeys, they throw in an apatasaurus and they just are like matter of factly yeah that's a gorilla that's mokele-mbembe. I love that, they have no modern schooling, they can recognize all the animals in their region and a f--king dinosaur like it's nothing and then they see a moose or bear and they think it's the devil. They treat mokele-mbembe like a foregone conclusion. Sigh.. I guess I gotta cover the skeptical point of view. I'm fine cutting that off for a brief second to shill for a minute. I'm so grateful for all of you guys listening truly madly deeply. I'm living the dream and swearing on the radio, nobody tell my boss. We're already starting to build a community across social media and s--t, but I've got some homework for you guys before next week. Last week I think I asked you to subscribe wherever you listen.This week I want you to throw me a 5 star rating wherever you're listening. I work hard on the show! If you want to give me less than five stars I guess you can keep that to yourself or email me at nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.com to tell me how to improve, I'm always looking for feedback! Next week I'm gonna ask you to share the show with your friends and family or something crazy.Brr I just blacked out for thirty seconds, must have been the marketing persona taking over. Anyway, why might moklele-mbembe not be real slash alive. A lot of the arguments overlap with nessie, it's very tough to keep a breeding population going for 65 million years, especially without turning up any bodies. But taking that apart, this is an animal with potential mystical powers so we can just that to any of the rest of the debunking the deboonkers points. Furthermore, many large animals are capable of burying there dead. Look no further than elephant graveyards, a wild phenomena on its own. Let alone in the jungle with potentially the fastest natural decomposition in the world. As for the breeding cycle I have no earthly idea. Dinosaurs lay eggs generally I guess, maybe in the caves? Another option is literally seeing an elephant in the water. From far off a trunk could be a neck and they're a greyish brown color. Fair enough. They still don't have claws like the found footprints. Lastly the stories of mokele-mbembe might have been unfairly signal boosted. Remember the pokemania of the 90's or later on in twenty sixteen when pokemon go first came out? That was basically the late eighteen hundreds but for dinosaurs. Everyone and their grandma wanted to see dinosaurs. Because the first dinosaur bones had only recently been found. Maybe I'll cover the bone wars, that's a really interesting story in and of itself. Oh and one more thing, I couldn't really fit this anywhere else, but there are tales from some of the tribes and villages that a few pygmies managed to spear and kill a dinosaur. Everyone that ate the meat died though. Kind of anticlimactic, kind of hilarious. Anyway, I'll leave it up to you to decide if dinosaurs still walk the earth, at least until I cover the texas pteranodons. Heh. I've got a huge smile across my face. I love this s--t! Until next week, I'd say sweet dreams, but we all know it's only gonna be nightmares now! 

Sophia Prater is a UX design consultant and chief evangelist of object oriented UX, a methodology that helps teams tackle complex design challenges. In this conversation, we discuss OOUX and how it differs from other methodologies. Download episode 63 Show notes @sophiaux on Twitter Rewired (Sophia's consultancy) Ooux.com The Object Oriented UX Podcast Object-Oriented UX, by Sophia Prater (A List Apart article) Double Diamond Object Oriented UX Podcast, episode 10: Information Archaeology with Ren Pope Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) The Elements of User Experience, by Jesse James Garrett (pdf) Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design, by Austin Henderson and Jeff Johnson Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Sophia, welcome to the show. Sophia: Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here! Jorge: Well, I'm excited that you're joining us as well. For folks who might not know you, would you mind please introducing yourself? About Sophia Sophia: Yeah, sure. I'm a user experience designer. I was based out of Atlanta, Georgia, but I recently did a COVID move up to the north Georgia mountains. I am here in the beautiful... the bottom of the Appalachian Mountains. Kind of where the Appalachian trail starts. I'm very close to that. I got into UX in 2009, which was a great time to be entering the field and really kind of what I'm known for is Object-Oriented UX. I wrote an article back in 2015 in "A List Apart." I had about, I guess, 15 minutes of fame on the internet where that article was one of the top articles for "A List Apart" for the year. It got retweeted and tweeted thousands of times. I was very nervous to publish that article, because I did feel like I was turning the UX process — at least, what I considered the traditional UX process — I was sort of turning it on its head or turning it inside out. And I was really worried that people were going to throw tomatoes at me. But it really resonated with people, which was very encouraging to me. I continued, pounding on this process that I had just started to use in my work and slowly over the years, it came to be that people would come to me as a consultant. I started my own... I finally left the corporate world. I had been at cnn.com as a UX designer. That was my only internal role, but I've been at a whole lot of agencies. And I started my own consultancy in 2014 and within a few years, that became what I was known for. So, companies would come to me to specifically get this type of UX design, Object-Oriented UX. And then I started teaching it, and I started teaching it at workshops. First at conferences, and then I started teaching workshops within companies. So, companies would bring me in. I recently had Facebook bring me in. I've had MasterCard, Credit Karma... a lot of big, exciting companies bring me in to train their team on Object-Oriented UX. So, really that's 100% of my world now, is Object-Oriented UX. It is teaching it, delivering it to my clients, teaching it within the context of teams. Coming into a company... doing that online now. Used to do that in person; doing that all online. Spending a lot of time in Mural, moving sticky notes around there. And now I also teach individuals through a certification program that I was just getting off the ground right before COVID hit in March of last year. So now we're about a little over a year and we're in the middle of the fourth cohort of the OOUX certification program. Object-Oriented UX Jorge: Well, that's great. And we'll get into what Object-Oriented UX is in a moment, but I'm wondering why you think that the idea resonated so much with folks. Sophia: Well, I think it resonated so much, the same reason it still resonates today. Is because this is a way to break down complexity. And I think traditionally, we break down complexity by verb, traditionally. By the actions we think about. What are all the things that a user needs to do in the system? And we can get into more of the why around this, but it's a much cleaner way to break down complexity by the noun as opposed to the verb. And I think a lot of user experience designers are thrown in — especially new user experience designers — are thrown into incredibly complex situations, domains. My first project is a user experience designer, I still remember. It was with Blue Cross Blue Shield. And I was going to be designing a system for people that would design insurance packages. It was within insurance. It was a business tool within insurance, and I knew nothing about insurance. And I came on and I was expected to have wireframes by Friday. And I think that that is such a common struggle for user experience designers: they come in and wireframes are immediately expected of them. If they're working in an Agile environment, they're kind of like a wireframe factory or a feature factory. Just churn out those wireframes without a whole lot of time to gain understanding of the structure of the system. Really get an idea of the business rules and get into those business rules in a way that is collaborative and visual. I think that that's what resonated so hard for people is they saw a way out of that. They saw a way out of that rat race or that struggle of constantly having to deliver wireframes and then having these conversations around the structure. You have stakeholders and engineers. You have the engineer reverse engineering, the wireframe to get the data model out of it, and then you have your stakeholders reverse engineering, the wireframe to try to get the business rules out of it. And then what you end up with is you end up with a whole lot of re-work because the wireframe is usually going to be wrong. And so, then you do the, what I call the "Bring me a rock game," where you're like, "Oh, okay, that rock is too big or too bumpy." Like, "Let me go get you a smaller, smoother rock!" And you go and say like, "Oh, is this the type of rock you're looking for?" So, a lot of times information architecture, which is so important, but as you know, often in our industry and the user experience design industry, we don't do enough of that information architecture. And I think that this is a way to do information architecture in a visual way and in a collaborative way. So, you can bring your engineers and you can bring your stakeholders in and you can all sort of explore the complexity together and break down the complexity together and get out of that surface-level design work, where you're just moving wireframes around. And if you don't have that deep understanding of the system, you're just going to be moving the deck chairs around. You're going to be moving UI around. You're not going to be making systemic change. And at the end of the day, UX designers are incredibly idealistic people. We want to make big change. We want to solve big problems, but if we can't figure out how to get out of that moving the deck chairs around on the sinking Titanic, then work isn't very much fun and we don't have a lot of meaning from it either; you can't draw a lot of meaning from it. Jorge: I'm going to try and articulate it back to you to see if I'm getting it correctly, but the idea that there is a way for designers to work at a higher level of abstraction than how these things manifest in more tangible ways. How then does Object-Oriented UX fill that gap? Or asked another way, how do you introduce folks to what Object-Oriented UX is? Sophia: Yeah, okay. So, what Object-Oriented UX is — And I want to differentiate Object-Oriented UX versus what I call the ORCA process — so, Object-Oriented UX is a philosophy; a philosophy that is based in the fact that people think in objects. And there is a lot of interesting research on that, that we can get into, if you want to ask about that, on cognition and how people think and how people understand the world. And a lot of that is based in objects. So, for the philosophy part of it for Object-Oriented UX, if we say, "this is a philosophy that respects and acknowledges the fact that people think in objects. And to gain an understanding of an environment, you really need to understand what that environment is made up of. What are the objects that make up that environment? And thus, we need to make that clear in our digital environments, just like they're clear in our physical environments." So, Object-Oriented UX is all about defining what your objects are, figuring out what those are, what are the objects in the user's mental model, in the business model, those really valuable things. Objects And I need to kind of take a step back, I think, and define what is an object. I'm very specific when I talk about what an object is. An object is a thing that has value to the user. So, when I say objects, I'm not talking about your navbar or your calendar picker or your dropdown. All those things are valuable, but they are a means to an end. And I often say no user is coming to your site for your calendar picker. It could be the best calendar picker in the whole world, but that's not what they're coming for. They're coming for the event, or they're coming for the people that they can invite to the event. So, an object is going to have... I use the acronym SIP. It's going to have structure, it's going to have instances, and it's going to have purpose. So OOUX is all about saying, "okay. If we know that our users think in objects and just human beings think in objects — not just our developers — human beings think in objects, and to be able to gain understanding, you need to understand what the objects are in that system. And to understand what the objects are we need a certain level of consistency and recognizability to our objects." As the designers of these environments, if we don't get super clear on what our objects are, there's no way — there's just absolutely no way in hell that we're going to be able to translate that to our end users. We're just not! If we can't get it straight on our team and we can't get it straight among ourselves, then that's going to create a lot of communication problems internally, which is a problem that I hear all the time. We've got everybody on the team coming together. And some people, depending on what department you're in or what your role is, you've got the same object, the same thing being called two or three different things and different objects being called the same thing. And you're trying to design complex software. So just getting on the same page internally is going to be absolutely intrinsic to making sure that it's clear to your end users. So, one kind of, I guess... not metaphor, but like journey that I could take you on, Jorge, and the listeners, is: imagine going into a coffee shop. And it's a coffee shop you've never been to. You walk into this coffee shop, but this is like, this is a funky coffee shop. Maybe it's a coffee shop in Amsterdam or something. And you walk into this coffee shop, and you can't tell the difference between the tables and the chairs, and the people. Like you know that there are tables and chairs and people there, you can see the things, but you can't tell the difference between them. And you can't actually tell the relationships between them either. You can maybe like, with intense concentration, you identify a chair, but you can't tell what table goes with what chair, right? Or you can identify a chair, but you can't understand the status of that chair. Is that chair occupied or unoccupied? That would be a very difficult environment to navigate and to function in, yet we create digital environments like that all the time where it's difficult for users to understand, what are the valuable things to me here? What can I do to these things? How do these things relate? What are these things in context of this place? And what is the structure of these things? What is the status of these things? What are the attributes of these things? And that kind of gets into the ORCA process, which stands for: objects, relationships, CTA's, which is calls-to-action, and attributes. And that's the process that I use in my work, and I teach to design really awesome object-oriented user experiences. Jorge: This analogy of the coffee shop is an interesting one, because I can contemplate it in the abstract, but in my real world experience, I've never been in a coffee shop where I can't tell the chairs from the tables or what have you. So, it does feel like a discussion that can get abstract quickly. And I'm wondering how do you draw the bounds around an object? Like how do you determine that something is a table in your systems so to speak. Sophia: Right. and that is actually, I mean, saying, "Oh, we need to figure out what the things are." That's so much easier said than done. And that is a huge part of the ORCA process. We actually iterate on it, to say, "all right, how do we figure out what these things are?" And that is all going to come from research. So, the ORCA process is definitely a "garbage in, garbage out" process. You've got to have good research coming into it. I often say that this is a good process for synthesizing your research before you get into design. If you think about the double diamond, you can literally see the weak link between the double diamond, right? Like, what happens after you get through research and then you just start sketching stuff — you just start designing. There needs to be something that happens between research and design, where you are synthesizing that research into structure and into information architecture. And the ORCA process is just this really kind of like... it's like a meat grinder. Like you just throw the research in and... so when I was interviewing Ren Pope, he used the term "information archeology." And I love that. I feel like that's a lot of what this process helps you do is that information archeology, where you're taking all that research and you're analyzing that research to figure out what are your objects, what are the relationships between the objects, what can users do to the objects, and what are their attributes? And specifically with objects, like knowing, is a table a thing in this particular system that we're designing and in this environment that we're designing? One of the first activities that we do is called "noun foraging." It's really fun. You take all that research, user interviews, interviews with your stakeholders, competitive analysis, analytics as well, of course current site audit, content audit as well is great to have if you have access to that. So, you're taking in all this research and you're looking for the nouns, and you're looking for the nouns that get used over and over and over again. And you're looking for synonyms like, "Oh! Are these the same thing or are these not the same things?" And then that turns into conversations to have with your stakeholders. For example, I was working with a company called Blood Relay and basically what they do is they take blood samples... they're software, but they help facilitate blood samples being taken from the hospital to the lab and then getting the analysis back to the hospital. So, it's pretty complex business software with all the complexity that you get in healthcare and the healthcare industry. And when I was doing my noun foraging, I kept hearing the words "sample" and "product." Sample and product. Sample — product. And they were being used interchangeably. They were being used interchangeably by the business. They were being used interchangeably on the marketing site. They were being used interchangeably on the actual software in places. And one of my big jobs in the beginning was to figure out, are these actually the same thing or are these two different things? Is there actually a relationship between these things and that came with conversations with the experts, right? So how do you define a product? How do you define a sample? Are these... and it turns out they are two separate things, and many products can be taken from a sample. So, you have that one-to-many relationship there. And that's so important to define. If I'm going to be designing software for this, I need to understand the difference between those and reinforce the truth of the world through that user interface. Visualizing systems Jorge: What I'm getting from your description of Object-Oriented UX is that it's not just articulating the domain as a series of nouns and relationships between them, but also expressing it in a sort of visual way, right? That allows people to get a shared understanding of that domain. Is that right? Sophia: Right. Yeah, and that gets into some of the artifacts that we produce in the ORCA process. So, you know, Object-Oriented UX, you could use any methodology to say that eah, we need to define what the objects are, and we need to make them super clear within the interface. So, we don't get into that coffee shop scenario." Where, you know, if I'm designing software for a teacher, which, I did a lot of work in EdTech. If I'm designing software for a teacher and the important things for that particular problem domain that we're trying to solve for, are students' lessons, standards and parents, let's say. I want that teacher to open up that application and to immediately recognize those things. To immediately recognize the relationships and say like, "oh, okay. Yeah, this is just... this is how my world is." And then be able to do really amazing things. Have x-ray vision into those things. Have connections in a way that's super meaningful, and then to be able to do things to those objects that are more difficult in the real world without that tool, or that you know, it's just absolutely impossible to do without that tool. Jorge: That step of articulating the understanding of the domain visually is not to be underestimated. It's a huge part of it. I'm certainly always on the lookout for new ways of doing it because it's so hard to do. I find that a lot of folks have a hard time thinking at that more abstract level. Sophia: Yeah. And when you get into something like a system model or domain model, conceptual model. Basically, when you have lots of bubbles and arrows going? Entity relationship diagram, right? Which we do that work. That's part of the process. We build... I call it a system model, but it's basically an ERD. It often turns into a bowl of spaghetti, and it gets a little bit difficult to track, especially when there's multiple types of relationships between two objects. Then what do you do? Do you have multiple arrows, or do you have multiple labels on the same arrow? I mean, God forbid your system has 17 objects in it, which if you're working in electronic healthcare records, if you're working in insurance... I have worked with tools before, or these, you know, these digital systems that we've had double digits of objects and that entity relationship diagram kind of breaks down. What also breaks down is if you try to start putting attributes in there. Which I've seen done before, where you actually blow out that ERD so it's not just your objects. You actually put your operations and your attributes into that document. That gets really crazy. If you have an object that has 60 attributes, again, just the visualization of being able to show: what are the things, what are the relationships, what are the things made of. I don't necessarily think that diagram is the best way to visualize that and to do it in a collaborative way where everybody can be involved, your engineers can be involved, and especially your business folks. Getting those people involved early is gold. It's magic. Because that's when they're going to be the most useful. So, I hear this all the time: One of my main problems... this is just a recurring theme when I've asked people, like, "What is the most annoying thing about practicing UX design?" Managing stakeholders. I hear that over and over again, and even that word, "managing" stakeholders. We should be leveraging our stakeholders. Our stakeholders and our subject matter experts... usually our stakeholders hopefully are some sort of breed of subject matter expert, at least from the business side. We want to be extracting all that knowledge from their minds, and we need to be doing that early on. But what happens is we try to show them wireframes, or we present diagrams to them instead of getting them to co-create diagrams with us and to really feel heard early on in the process. And the thing is, is, your stakeholders are not trained and they're not good at giving you feedback on your wireframe. And it's very easy. You're conflating presentation and content basically, which we know not to do. We've known that for a long time, not to do that. And yet we still do that, and we still expect quality feedback from our stakeholders when they're looking at structure and design all at once. Design collaborations Jorge: I'm glad you dropped the word co-create in there because as you were talking, I was thinking that the way that I approach the relationship with stakeholders is — or I try to at least — is as a collaboration, right? Where you engage their mind, expertise, their drivers, in the process of designing the thing. And to your point, for a complex system, that needs to start way before you're ready to put things down at the screen level. But there's this dilemma that it's hard to understand the implications of decisions until you see them reflected in something more tangible. Sophia: Yeah, and I think that it's an uphill battle. Let's just say, I mean, they want, often, "they," stakeholders, business folks... they want to see the pictures. They want to see what does it actually going to look like? And I think we've trained them to want to see that. Just because we haven't figured out a really good way to involve stakeholders early doesn't mean it's not possible. I've seen success across so many of my students in bringing stakeholders in early by using the object mapping methodology and going through this process of figuring out... it's just it's color-coded sticky notes! That's really all it is. So, in really nicely organized columns. And it's scalable too. If you have 20 objects, that's okay. If you have 60 attributes on an object, that's okay, too. It really does scale nicely and gives you that sort of bird's eye view of the system. I mean, the other thing that's just so important and not just for feedback, but it's so important to get your stakeholders involved early and your product owners — whoever those people, those decision makers are — on determining scope and timeline and budget. Because when you have a subject matter expert/stakeholder — I'll use those terms interchangeably, even though they're not always — I know they're not always, but if they're this close, if they've been working in the industry for 15 years or something and they say, "Oh, we're gonna create this new feature, we're gonna redesign this part of the product," it's difficult for them to really see the complexity and to understand the complexity. And if we can bring them on board with the complexity and also help elucidate assumptions, help them realize where are we making assumptions about our users… So, I was mentioning before that the input of this process is research, right? And we start with the noun foraging and going through all that research, figuring out the nouns, and we're also looking for attributes at the same time. The ORCA process is a really great gauntlet too, to realize, you need to get kicked back to research. You're not ready to start designing yet because you're designing on too many assumptions. It pulls all those questions from the future where you might be figuring them out when you're in high-fidelity wireframes or something like that. Or God forbid, you're in production where you're figuring out some of these really sticky pieces of business rules. So, this is a tool to help bring all those questions from the future, and make sure that your stakeholders potentially are coming up with those questions too through the process. They're right there with you. They're in the weeds, hands dirty, figuring out some of those questions, and this is going to be able to help you sell more research. Because selling research by saying, "We need to find out more about the user" — that is a really hard sell right there. That's super vague. "Oh, we need to get to know our user." "Great. Okay. Can we just design this product?" But if your stakeholder herself or himself says, "Oh, we don't really understand if... does a doctor work at multiple locations or does a doctor only work at one location? What's the relationship between a doctor and a location? We're assuming that the doctor only has one location, but we're actually not sure how much our doctors are moving around from location to location. Put that in a parking lot." That goes in your user interview transcript, okay? And so, it's the actual stakeholder or the businessperson that has gotten invested in those questions. This is how you sell additional research by getting really specific about what are those questions that need to be asked. OOUX and information architecture Jorge: What you're describing seems very familiar to me, as an information architect, and I'm wondering... I revisited the A List Apart article in preparation for our conversation today, and I got the sense from that article that one of the distinctions between this methodology and something like information architecture is perhaps that... I'm going to use air quotes now, like "traditional information architecture" is more oriented towards content-heavy systems. And I'm thinking of like Jesse James Garrett's elements diagram, right? That is split into what he called information-oriented systems versus task-oriented systems. Would it be fair to say that this is more applicable to the task-oriented systems in that duality? Sophia: So, yeah. I see where you're coming from. The naming around this is coming from… my background is in industrial design. I actually started as a product designer, designing refrigerators for Electrolux. Didn't last long in that career, but that's my background. And then I, again, like going back to the timing, so my very first job as a UX designer was in 2009. This is where Jesse James Garrett would have been like, "We're all UX designers." Right? So, that had already happened. I didn't find out about information architecture until years later. Okay, because just thinking about the timing of when I'm coming into this, I'm coming into it from a user experience perspective and also working on, yes, task-heavy products. So, if you think about, you could even — and I often tell people — you can think about an object... The way I define an object, you can think about it as a content type. Now, I don't like the word "content type." I know this is going to be like controversial, but I prefer the term object, because if I'm working on a system — let's say for used car salesmen to manage their sales and their inventory — a vehicle is not a content type. A vehicle is a thing in a parking lot that is connected to customers, that is connected to sales events, that is potentially connected to other salespeople. Which salesperson sold this car? A salesperson isn't a content type. These are all actual things manifested in the real world and that we are using metaphor to reflect in our user interface. That said, I have used Object-Oriented UX for 100% content sites. So, if we think back to the elections in 2012, when... that's how this all started, I was doing my very first responsive design for CNN election results. That was a lot of data viz, but that was all content. There was no user interaction there; it was all content. And that is actually... I guess the crucible for how I started thinking this way. OOUX and conceptual models Jorge: I'm familiar with another approach to this that I think is similar in at least in intent not in the form it takes, which is the one that I often refer to folks when talking about this stuff and it comes from Jeff Johnson and Austin Henderson's book, Conceptual Models. There you go; you've got it! Not fit for radio, but you're holding up the book cover to the camera. And I'm just wondering if you could speak to the differences between those approaches. Sophia: Yeah, I think they kind of feed each other. I looked back over my notes on Conceptual Models, and most of it I'm underlining and I'm happy faces and check marks in the margins here. There were a couple of places where I like vehemently scribbled question marks. And like, "No, no, no!" But it's little things. I mean, if you think about a concept, the difference between a concept and an object. So, a concept can be... it just feels too... I don't know, the work that we do can often feel very ephemeral, very like it's… You just don't have something good and solid to hold onto. And the objects are these like anchors of understanding and getting super clear on what those objects are and making sure that you have really good lines around them. And actually, like one of the best things that we do in the process is make a glossary, like actually define these things. Concepts though can like be a little squishy. Like financial literacy could be a concept, not an object though, right? The object might be like financial literacy quiz or something like that, you know? Or privacy can be a concept. Also, how Johnson and Henderson described building a conceptual model and what a conceptual model is versus the information that is captured in an object map. The conceptual model they describe it... it's kind of this chicken and egg thing. So, they look at task analysis first and build a conceptual model from the task analysis. I'm kind of the opposite: I tend to like to figure out what are the objects in this environment, in this domain, and hone in on the problem domain, sure. Get those big picture goals on what we are actually trying to do here. But then figure out, "Okay, what are the things in this environment?" And then think about the tasks. What is it? What does a user need to do to those things? And we that's the "C" of ORCA: the calls-to-action. So, what actions — what are the affordances? — what actions does that object offer users? And that's how you get into the task. It's splitting hairs a little bit, but Johnson and Henderson do start off with that task analysis. Sometimes from research, if there's already user stories, we are analyzing user stories coming in. But if those aren't there, there's actually a point in the process that you can get user stories out of the ORCA process. So really just how concept is defined. Also, do you start with a task and then get the objects? I prefer to get the objects and then get the tasks. Start with the nouns. Start with those things and get really solid and clear on those and then figure out what the users want to do with them. Jorge: I'm hearing two things there. One is that the idea of an object is easier to relate to then the idea of a concept, because concepts can be much more vague and more abstract. And the other, which — and by the way, I find both of these ideas really intriguing — the other is that, in some ways, starting with the objects might be a bit more open-ended than starting with the tasks. Because with a collection of objects, you're not necessarily enabling any one particular task; you could enable a myriad tasks, right? There's a collection of objects, and people can do things when they have several objects at their disposal — as opposed to thinking, "What do people want to do?" and then, "What objects do we need, or concepts do we need to enable that?" Sophia: There's just so many fewer assumptions on figuring out what the objects are. Because you can go... I mean, if you can do ethnographic research, great. But going and doing your research again, going back to the teacher example, it doesn't matter what software I'm designing. Like, a teacher's world is made up of students, lessons, classes, standards, parents, other teachers — that's just the truth. And that's another thing Johnson and Henderson talk about the conceptual model being how the user thinks about the system and the task. And I am kind of a broken record when I'm talking about... I'm trying to find the truth of the system. I am trying to find — no pun intended — but like, the objective truth. If I go back to the CNN elections example, if I'm going to build a conceptual model of how people think about elections that's going to be very different than what I would call a system model, which is going to be just the truth of the system. I went in in 2012, I built a system model and I use the exact same system model in 2016 because our electoral college had not changed. We still had candidates. We had states. We had races. And we had results. And we had ballot measures. Those things did not change. And the relationships between those things actually wasn't even up to the user. That's just the truth of the world. It's just our job to communicate what are these things and how do these things relate — versus, I think that the conceptual model is a valid thing to do, and that it would've behooved us to make a conceptual model of how people think about elections. But that's going to be different than what I would call the system model. Jorge: I'm hating the fact that we're running out of time here, because this conversation is getting really meaty. When you brought up the phrase "objective truth," again, you can see this on the podcast, but I think my eyebrows shot up. Well, what you're describing there as a conceptual model is what I usually understand as a mental model. And we might have mental models that map to greater or lesser degree to what I understand of as the conceptual model, which is this set of relationships that you're describing, that I understand as standing together — regardless of what different people might think of them or how different people might understand them. Sophia: In some systems... I mean, there's not just that objective truth, you have to go and figure out, like, what are the users actually want. So, if I had to think about a doctor, is a doctor related to one location in this particular context, or is a doctor related to zero to many locations. Maybe some doctors don't have a location at all associated with them. Some doctors are going to have three locations associated with them. So that's going to come from the users and like, what is the truth of the user? You know, again, it comes back to that objective truth and sort of balancing the objective truth of the business and the objective truth of what is happening with those users and what those users actually want and need. And then there's also the back and forth of like how much do we need to create an idea in the user's head? If this is a completely new thing, how do we reinforce that business model and how the business works so it's very, very clear to the users how these things work together. And then do we kind of go back the other way and really understand then the user's mental model of these things and reflecting it back in the system. So it is that kind of... it's a balancing act, for sure. Closing Jorge: Well, thank you. That helps clarify it quite a bit. And I still feel like we have more to talk about and I'm hoping that we'll be able to do so again at some point. For now, where can folks follow up with you? Sophia: Probably the best, easiest place is ooux.com. So, if you go to ooux.com, and there's a green button, says something like, "Join the fam," or "Get involved," or something like that. I forgot what it says. All the good stuff is there. There's an Object-Oriented UX happy hour, so that would be a meetup — an online meetup. There is a podcast, the Object-Oriented UX podcast, newsletter, and of course the certification course as well. But just go to ooux.com and you'll find it. Also, @sophiavux is my Twitter. Jorge: Well, fantastic. I'll link all those from the show notes. Thank you so much, Sophia, for being on the show. Sophia: Thank you so much for having me.

We're on a mission to help one million people RISE by 2030 - join the movement at www.myrise.co.uk We love board games in my house. We have a Lockdown 3 Board Game League going on at the moment. I've knocked up an Excel sheet to track it (partly as I love Excel). You put in the date and the game name than a placing in the column for each family member. It then automatically works out how many took part, assigns points and updates the league tables. There are two leagues going on. One that is total number of points scored and one for average game placing. With some cold, hard cash on the line – dependant on placings at the end of this lockdown. I've always loved games. I have many fond memories of being baby sat at my Granny's and me and my sister playing Granny, and her friend Mrs Fearn at cards and Scrabble. Being at my Uncle Bill's and everyone squeezed round the table in his lounge playing Newmarket, Donkey or Rummy. My Dad mildly annoying people by going out in one go. Or (always correctly) saying stuff like “You can go, you picked up the seven of hearts three rounds ago”. My wife loves games too. We've both always encountered a similar thing when we've played games. As has my sister. “Wow, I didn't know we were ‘trying'” “Somebody takes this a bit seriously” Or similar. Which I've never really understood. If you're playing a game, how can you not play it to win? What are you doing otherwise? Losing on purpose? Perfectly fine at times when playing with a child to help them learn a game and build confidence in it. But in a normal game, if you're going to play it, how do we play it without trying to win? I came to a realisation recently. When people say stuff like that, it's to make losing the game less of “a thing”. “If I'm not trying, it doesn't matter if I lose”. For me, losing a game is completely irrelevant. I'll play to win, but if I don't, that's fine. I don't play to win because I fear losing………… But because I'm ok with it. I'm sure you've started to see the parallel here. It's tempting to do the same in other areas of life. To not play to win because we fear losing / failing. Or, more likely, because we fear being seen to fail. After all we fail at stuff every day, don't we? How many days do we do absolutely everything we would've liked to, exactly as we wished? Very few, if any. We fail all the time. And we're fine with that. But, it's that being seen to fail. To proclaim an intent to do something then to be seen to not do it. Whether that be a board game or anything else. To say we're going to go for a workout, then not. To have it be known we're trying to lose weight. And not. The publicly setting a goal for our work or business. And not making it happen. Even just not setting a specific plan for the coming week. Telling ourselves “I know what I need to do, I just need to do it”. Because that then not happening doesn't really even register. Setting an actual plan can feel risky. There's potential for it not happening. We've stuck out neck out somewhat. Raised our head above the parapet. It starts to feel like like yet “another thing”. And it can be tempting to not do it. Because we don't want to feel we've “failed” – or be seen to have “failed”. But, chances are, we'd do “more” by setting that goal. By trying to win. Shoot for the moon and fall short in the stars as they say. Being happy to “lose” means we're more willing (and more likely) to “win”. Much love, Jon ‘Beck' Hall

I've got another fine gentleman to introduce you to, Brandon Knight. Brandon has lived a life devoted to spiritual development and psychology for over 20 years now, traveling and learning from some of the best psychological, metaphysical, and Shamanic practitioners in their respective fields.He currently supports his wife, Kelley Knight, in the overall operations and forward culture of Modern Mystic Shop in Atlanta, Georgia. Which I've been too! It's a beautiful shop with the most incredible crystals, artwork and spiritual goodies all sourced from local, small business owners and a lot of them are women too! If you are ever in Atlanta I encourage you check it out!Brandon and I talk a lot about spiritual command and really getting in the driver seat of your life, he talks about how to harness different energies (even what appear to be the “darker” energies like the goddess Kali) if we truly want to transform. If you are thirsty for transformation this episode may get you thinking in new ways and get you inspired to build a support system of people around you to help you with your transformation!

In today's episode, we're going to show you how to work from home teaching English online. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn: Hey, y'all. On today's show, we're going to show you how to work from home teaching English online. Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online, and now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right. Let's get started. Shane: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited for this episode, because we are kicking off a new series here on The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, all about different ways to work from home and make money online. You know, Jocelyn and I and the community ... We have a lot of trainings about a lot of different things you can do online. You can offer goods, you can offer services, you can offer digital products, you can offer physical products, you can do coaching, but most of our focus is on membership-based websites. Now, I- Jocelyn: And essentially becoming a business owner. Shane: Yeah. And when you become a business owner, that can mean a lot of different things you have to learn and a lot of different responsibilities. You got to build a website, you got to manage your brand, you got to manage your social media presence, you got to create courses and content, and that can be very overwhelming for people. And a lot of people have asked us, "What are some other ways to work from home? What are some other ways to make money online? What are some other ways to live the flipped lifestyle, to get to control my schedule, to get to work when I want to and be more available for my family and for my kids?" So that's where this series came from. We are going to be bringing on a number of guests who make money online and work from home in different ways such as creating and selling courses or even owning and operating a membership. And our first guest in this series is Jocelyn's friend Gina. Gina, welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Gina: Thank you. Jocelyn: Yes, we are excited to talk to you today. And Gina's actually someone who I know in real life. We used to work together a few years ago. And of course, we were Facebook friends, and I see she is always posting cool stuff about her job. And I sent her a message not too long ago, and I said, "Would you be willing to come onto our podcast and talk about what it is that you're doing?" So let's get into that just a little bit. Tell us a little bit about you and your family and what it is that you are doing online. Gina: Okay. I have a large family. I have eight kids at home, and I teach ... Well, English as a second language to Chinese children at home. So I have been doing that a little over a year now, and it is the best job I have ever had. Shane: I bet. Gina: It is. Shane: It's probably the best break you've ever had, as well. Gina: It is, actually, and most people would think you want to be with kids more, but yes. And I actually get up at three, four in the morning to do that. It's just an awesome job. Shane: So what is your background? Okay, we're going to get into teaching English as a second language online. So you actually do this live, right? This actually happens online? Gina: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Shane: Okay. So what is- Gina: Yes. Shane: What is your background? What were you doing before the eight children arrived or you did this online? Gina: In the midst of it. I was ... Actually, I worked at the school, and my degree is in psychology, so I had started working on my Masters a little bit, but it wasn't in teaching. And you do not have to have a teaching degree to do this, but you do need to have a degree. But I did work at the school for about six ... A little over six years, and it just ... It wasn't a lot of money. The flexibility wasn't as great. Although I was off during the summer. But I decided to stay home when my youngest one was born, and I wasn't sure what I was going to do when she got school-aged, but I knew I wanted to go back to work but wasn't sure about finding a job that was flexible enough for me to take off if I needed to ... if my kids were sick or if there was doctor's appointments or that would also compensate me for my degree. So I kind of looked into stay-at-home jobs. A lot of them were data entry. A lot of them were this and that, and I stumbled upon this, and it was just like, "Wow." I mean, it was a life-changing decision for me. Jocelyn: Yeah, that's awesome. And what Gina didn't mention is that ... Of course, we live in a super small area, so even though you've gone to college, even though you have a degree, it's not always easy to find good jobs, and particularly ones that are flexible. And that's why a lot of people work at the school system, and I suspect that's why you worked for the school system as well. Gina: Absolutely, yes it was. It was so when the kids were off, I would be off. I would have my summers off and that kind of thing. But in this situation, when I found this job, it was ... I just make my own hours, and I'm actually ... I start around five o'clock in the morning. I could work all night if I wanted to, but I start around four or five. I end around 10 am, and I'm done for the day, and I get paid really well to do that, and I get to teach children and love what I do, and I get to do it at home in my pajamas, and I don't have to get out- Shane: Without ... You don't need a shower. Just get up. Do whatever you want. Make your coffee, right? Gina: You know what, it doesn't ... Yes. It doesn't matter if I've had a shower. Nobody knows. So it's great. It's great. Shane: What does something like this pay? Let's talk about the job first. So you said you get up in the morning, and you literally are working with these kids that are in China, I guess, teaching them English. So are you on a Skype call? Is it a group call with a bunch of kids? Is it one-on-one? What are you actually doing during these hours that you're working? Gina: Well, the company that I work for will ... They do the curriculum and they do everything, so there's no paperwork on my end or anything like that. So I am one-on-one with the students. So it's only one-on-one with this particular company. And I get up, and it's like you have a teacher's portal. So you log in to the teacher's portal. I am not that tech savvy, so it's okay. But I have learned a lot, and they will walk you through ... You know, with workshops and different things to help you, but you ... It's almost like you're FaceTiming someone, but it's the student on the other end, and they are in Beijing, and ... A lot of them are in Beijing, because it's the whole country of China, so there's different cities and areas, and I have 25 minutes that I teach one student, and one class is 25 minutes long. Gina: So you teach them that ... It's a slideshow, so it pulls up on the teacher's portal. All you do is log into your classroom. They have booked your class. You don't have to do anything other than just open the times that you want to teach and that you're available, and then the company is actually the one that talks to the parents, because they can speak Chinese. I do not speak Chinese. And they book the classes for you, and all you do is you have an app. You can check who's booked your classes. You log in at the time that you have chosen to open up, and the student's right there in front of you. Shane: That's amazing. So it's like having a business, but you don't have to go find your own leads. They just find them for you and they book your calendar, and there's so many kids over there doing this, you probably just always have a booked calendar, right? Gina: Oh, you do. In the very beginning, it's almost ... You get a couple here and there trickle in. And then once they start giving you good reviews, then you just get more, and then they can ... Now I have so many wanting to book me that I can't keep up with it, and I have to close slots. It's very ... And the kids. You build a connection with the families and with the kids, and then I also ... WeChat is what it's called over in China. They don't have Facebook. But you can talk back and forth with the parents, because a lot of them do speak English, and you just get to know. You have a good rapport with the family. And I have a family that actually wants to come visit over here. Jocelyn: Oh, that is so cool. Gina: So it is very ... They send you videos. They'll say, "Look what we did today," and I have built so many connections across the world just over this job. It's pretty unbelievable. Jocelyn: Yeah, that is awesome. And you do have a little bit of autonomy as far as the way that you present the material, right? Because I know I've seen some of your videos where you've worn princess crowns and different types of things. Shane: Just fun stuff. Gina: Yeah. You do. Because the girls and boys ... They like different things, and you are to give them a reward. That's their motivation. So as you're doing the lesson, you will say, "Great job," and you give them a star, and it's digital. And they also have a ton of digital Snapchat kind of things. You can make yourself have bunny ears, and just ... It's kind of something fun. It gets the kids laughing, relaxed, comfortable, then they learn better. And anyway, they do have rewards. I'll do princesses. I can put on ... You get a crown and I'll put it on myself. Or you get earrings, and they're kind of like, "Wow, beautiful." And it's just a great connection to have as they're learning English. And they pick up quick. Shane: Tell me about the hours, then. So you do it really in the morning, but you also have a huge family, so you've got ... I can't keep up with two kids. I don't know how you're doing ... I have to be honest, you just became one of my ... We have a Mount Rushmore of awesome parents, people that have seven or more kids. You are now on the Mount Rushmore of these parents. But- Gina: Well, thanks. Shane: Did you pick the early hours, or it's just really necessary to do that because of the time zone differences, or a little of both? Gina: No, it's a little of both, maybe, but ... You have ... It's a 12-hour time zone difference, so when it's 8 AM here, it's 8 PM there. Now in China, they do ... When they get home from school, they do lessons. They have English lessons. Almost every family. It's unbelievable. But there are over 60,000 teachers that teach for this company. So they have ... They'll come home, and they'll do a class, which is just 25 minutes. So you can open up spots anywhere from 7:30 PM at this time here all the way until 10 AM. So if you want to teach from 7:30 PM until 11 ... Which it doesn't work for me, because my kids, that's bed time. But you can do that, or you can get up early like I do and teach from four to 10, or you can teach from midnight to four. It's your choice, and I have no problem getting booked at any time during, because there's always even preschool ... Because the kids were age ranged from three years old ... Yes. Some of them speak better English than my four-year-old here, but ... Shane: That's what happens in Kentucky. I'm just saying. Gina: It is, I know. It's really bad. So ... But from three all the way to 16. So you do have kids that aren't in school yet that can take a 10 AM morning class in China, and it's 10 PM our time. So you create your own schedule on what works for you, and that's why it's so great. Shane: Wow. So if you're going to be out of town or something, you can just basically block off, "I'm not going to be ..." If you're going on vacation, you can just say, "Hey, guys, I'm not going to be able to do it this week," or you literally could just bring your computer if you wanted to and do it from anywhere. You just have to have your laptop with you. Gina: There are many teachers that work for this company that actually travel around the world and teach. There is a teacher that I know that lives in Switzerland, actually, and she doesn't really live there, but she is staying there right now, and she is traveling around, and she just has her laptop. All you need is your laptop. Shane: That's amazing. Gina: So you can go anywhere. Yes it is. Shane: See, that's what we see. We call it "the flipped lifestyle." There's a lot of funny stuff of how we got that name, but what we really mean is the world tells us "You have to have a 9-5. You've got to be sitting in your desk. You have to follow the rules. You've got to build this life exactly like we say it has to be," and we're like, "No, you could literally flip that upside down and live however you want. If you want to get up at 5 AM and work and make money online, you can do it. If you want to live in Switzerland and travel Europe, all you need is your laptop. If you want to be like us, we work from home or anywhere we travel. That's what we do. We just bring our laptop with us." That's what the flipped lifestyle is. That's why we're bringing this new series in, is we want people to realize that there is unlimited opportunity to make a living online. There's unlimited opportunity to build the exact schedule you want. Shane: Like this morning ... We stayed up really late last night. My brother was in town, and I think it was like 10:30 or 11 before we even laid down. So we slept in a little bit this morning. We got up, we did a member call with about 45, 50 people at nine o'clock. We stopped and went and hung out with the kids. I rode my exercise bike, and Jocelyn made a phone call. And then Jocelyn just took off her robe as she was sitting down for this podcast interview. I'm in sweatpants and a t-shirt and flip-flops right now, and we got on the call with you. And then the next thing will be ... The next thing that Jocelyn's going to homeschool co-op next. So then we'll come back, go to a basketball game, and then maybe I'll do a little work before bed tonight. It's just amazing the life you can build because we have this crazy tool like the internet that can connect us with an entire other country that doesn't even speak our language. It's amazing. Gina: It's so ... It is amazing, because I can be teaching a student, and it's dark there, and I can show them my window and say, "Look here," and they're like, "Oh my goodness." It's amazing, because the crickets are chirping in China, and I am teaching this. Or I can be in the evening at a basketball game, and I can open some classes at 10 PM, 10:30, and I'm like, "Well, I got to go because I got to teach a couple classes," and I can pull in 10 minutes before my class starts, get on my laptop and teach and make money for an hour or two. I just get to choose that. And we have talked many times in our family ... Eventually, if the kids get older, we would like to move to North Carolina where my family is. Well, a typical job that you would have ... "What am I going to do? I've got to apply somewhere? I've got to see if I can transfer." But you know what? I don't have to worry about that, because I could go anywhere, and- Shane: Your job comes with you. Gina: I don't have to ever leave. Shane: Right. Your job comes with you, basically. Gina: Yes. So I can go anywhere. I can go on vacation. When I go on vacation, I can close it out like you had asked. I make my schedule two weeks in advance. If I know something's coming up, I just don't open those slots, so they're not available to students to book. But if something happens, you can cancel. You can cancel things. They like you not to, but. But if you're going on vacation, you just don't open slots. So you get to control that. It's amazing. It really is. Shane: Yeah. What's amazing about hearing your story is it's so different than what we do. Because we have a lot ... I feel like we have a lot more moving parts, but it's also other stuff that we like to do. I like to go out and try to find new clients. I like to ... The lead-generation part is something that I really dig. That's my jam. That's what I like to do. But you were kind of like, "I don't want to own this whole business. I just want to be a part of something that I can control my schedule." And there's so much flexibility and freedom to just build whatever you decide. You don't have to do what me and Jocelyn do. You can do what Gina does. You don't have to do what Gina does. You can build it like another way. Jocelyn: Yeah, and I just ... I have loved watching all of the stuff that you post. It's very obvious to me that this is something that you just really, truly enjoy. Tell people about your set-up, where it's at, because I get a kick out of that too. Gina: I am in the laundry room. So I actually sit right by the washer and dryer, and I just have a little desk and my laptop, and a bunch of my kids toys' are different props. Which I've not spent any money on actually, but a whiteboard. And nobody sees what's around. Now I will say that there have been times that I have had the dryer going, and it goes ... My kids are like, "I hear something." I'm like, "It's the dryer." And they think it's so funny. Shane: That is hysterical. Gina: But yeah, I teach from the laundry room, and it's just ... I can go anywhere. Sometimes I can take my laptop and move it with my camera and show them Christmas decorations that we do with the Christmas tree, and they're like, "Whoa." Shane: Do you just shine them at a wall or something so it looks like you're ... [crosstalk 00:16:59]. Jocelyn: Well, she has decorations. Shane: Oh, like behind you. So you've got the ... So it's just like a set. It reminds me of ... You know what's his name, Bear Grylls, Man Vs. Wild? You ever seen that show where the guy- Gina: No. Shane: Okay, so there's this show called Bear Grylls: Man Vs. Wild. He goes out into the wilderness, and he's like, "Here's how you survive in the Arctic," and "Here's how you survive a volcano," and all this stuff. Jocelyn: He drinks urine and all this. Shane: Yeah, he drinks urine and eats spiders and all this crazy stuff. He looks like he's actually out in the wilderness, but I watched this expose on him one time, and there was this one where he looks like he's climbing a mountain, and they pan back, and he's laying flat, and they just turned the camera sideways so it would look like he's climbing the mountain. And there's a road right behind him. And you're like, "I'm teaching in my classroom, but I'm really doing laundry at the same time." Gina: Yeah, it is essentially kind of the same, because I have a board behind me, and it's got the ABCs and it's got some of my things. But honestly, three feet over is a pile of towels and a bunch of clothes. Shane: So how- Gina: Dirty clothes. Shane: So tell us again, how much can someone expect basically to make an hour during this? Now, this particular job, the company that you're working for does require a degree, some kind of college degree, right? Gina: Yes. You have to have some kind of college degree and at least two years' teaching experience. Now you don't have to be a teacher in the classroom. Two years' teaching experience could be homeschooling. It can be coaching if your ... It can be Vacation Bible School. It can be Sunday School classes. Shane: Just working with kids basically. Gina: Anything like that. Yes, some kind of teaching. That's what you need in order to get the job. However, what you make is ... Everybody's brought in around about the same amount give or take 50 cents or a dollar an hour, but you make about 20-25 dollars an hour, depending on the class you teach. So if a student books you within 24 hours, you've opened a slot, it's not been booked, and you only have 24 hours to prepare for that class ... Which you really don't have to prepare, honestly. But you only have 24-hour notice. You get an extra couple dollars on the hour. So if it's a class that is ... It just depends on which kind of class you teach on how much you're getting paid. So it's sometimes 22 an hour, sometimes it's 24, sometimes it's 20. It fluctuates depending on what you were hired in at. Shane: But it's over 20. That's insane. Gina: Oh, absolutely. Yes. Shane: Jobs in our area ... And I know in a lot of areas, you can't just go out and get a 20-dollar-an-hour job. That just doesn't happen. And to be able to do it online, to do it from home, control your schedule, and ... I mean, if you just got ... If you only work 20 hours a week, that's like four or five hundred dollars a week in extra money for your family. $2,000 a month. You said something like ... You said homeschool. I was just imaging the millions of homeschoolers that are out there that are looking for ways to make money. What an amazing experience to teach kids English in China, and your kids might even get to talk to them and meet someone from abroad and understand that the world is a bigger place. Gina: Oh, absolutely. Yes. You can do that, and I mean, yes. And with teaching ... There are lots of teachers that homeschool, actually. There's a Facebook group with this company where you can support one another, talk about different things, and there's homeschooling teachers, and there's teachers that travel, and there's teachers that ... with this company, and so it's such a neat experience to be able to control it all and do what you want to do and like I said, not have to get dressed. You don't have to worry about gas money, clothes money, lunch money. You're right there. It's ... You can ... Shane: That's something that we often talk about with each other, the hidden benefits of working for yourself, and especially if you can work from home. Because you don't realize how much of your life gets poured into traveling from point A to B, or how much gas money you actually spend until you don't have to spend gas money anymore, and you don't realize even the time just to get ready every day, just to prepare your food, just to leave work to go to lunch or ... Man, you get two, three hours of your life back every single day just from working from home that you can then pay forward to your kids, pay forward to your spouse, or even invest back into yourself. Jocelyn: Yeah, and I know that you do a lot of volunteering at school and you're very involved in your kids' lives outside of at home, which is really cool. Gina: Yes, and I don't know that I would be able to do that if I was doing a nine to five desk job. I'm absolutely positive, I wouldn't be able to do as much. I don't feel- Shane: Let me ask you this. Gina: Go ahead. Shane: Could you ever go back to a nine to five job now? Gina: No. No. I wouldn't. Shane: Emphatically no, right? Gina: I absolutely wouldn't. Nope. And I've had people ask me, and I actually even tried at one point to maybe try to do another job and then this. But of course, I was hired because I was getting up extra early, but it was just draining. It was getting up, getting ... I don't know, I've been spoiled, okay? And I make good money doing this, and it's just great. And my husband will sometimes say, "Oh, I need to get a sick day, or do this," and I'm thinking, "Sorry," because I don't have to ask anyone for a sick day. I hate that. I don't have to ask permission for anything, because I'm my own boss. So if I'm not feeling well, then I don't open classes. It's just that easy. Shane: This is an interesting take, too, because a lot of people are learning that those college degrees they may have gotten ... Some people are going to have a college degree in history, but not a teacher. They can't be a schoolteacher. Or somebody might have a degree in business, like a general business degree. Jocelyn: Like me. Shane: Like- Gina: Or psychology. Shane: Or psychology. There you go. And they're having trouble finding a job. But now you have something that any college degree could apply for and you could go to and you could do. Gina: Yes. I actually ... They do provide workshops, and they're all free. So once you're hired, you can take different things to get certified in different levels, and it's just free education that they help you attain while you're teaching. So I kind of feel like ... I know many teachers now, and actually one in particular, that is retiring soon, and she cannot wait, because she loves to teach, but she feels like that you can't teach as much now in the classroom as you could because of the testing and the paperwork and the discipline that you have and the classroom to deal with, where she does this on the side, and she said, "I cannot wait to retire, because I get to do this all of the time, and make extra income, and I get to be home, and I get to do what I love because it's ..." We don't do curriculum and paperwork and such like that. We do our own thing. You get to do what you love. It's just- Shane: And you get to work one-on-one with students. That's what's amazing to me. Because that's the joy I got as a ... When I was a teacher and a football coach, that was where the joy came from, where it's the one-on-one interactions with the kids, and when you're really just throwing stuff at the group, it's not as fun, because the kid's sleeping in the back, got to fill out the papers ... But it's amazing you can just have these one-on-one interactions with these kids, get to know them, and what a difference. If you teach 20 kids a week, you're teaching 20 kids to speak a second language. Who knows what doors that's going to open up for not only them but the world just interacting back and forth. Gina: Oh, it is. And it's very interesting, because they are very disciplined and diligent about their education over there. So they are ... They ask you questions. The parents ... And feedback ... will ask you things like, "Little Johnny is throwing tantrums," and they like to spank, and they're very hard on them. Gina: So it's just like, "What do you suggest to help?" And sometimes I'm like, "Winston, he's only three. It's okay. He's doing well." But ... Shane: They're so competitive there, they're probably freaking out. And ... Gina: They are. They are. Shane: It's amazing to me, too. A lot of people ask us, "How ... ?" Some people actually want to go down the "entrepreneur" route, the "business ..." "I want my own business, I want everything else," but when they're starting out, they're not making enough extra money to pay for things like website hosting or to pay for advertising, or ... They always say, "I just don't have enough money," and we're like, "There's a lot of other things you can do online to make money. What if you taught five classes a week, made 100 extra dollars a week, 400 extra dollars a month to invest in the other thing that you want to build? There's just no excuse. Jocelyn: Yeah, that's a ... It's a great side-hustle, as people say, just start it up, work as many hours as you can, maybe it would give you the opportunity to quit your nine to five job. Gina: It could, because I tell you, that happens a lot. What I've seen is ... You will think, "Oh ..." Because when I started, I thought, "I'd just like to make an extra 500 a month." And that was my goal. Well now, I can pull in almost 2,000 a month, and it's just working part time. So it's money that's been able to give me to do things with the family and vacations that I would not have been able to do before and I would have had to have worked full-time at a desk job to make what I'm making now and still have the flexibility. Shane: So let me ask you this. So what are ... ? So for someone who is thinking to themselves, "Look, I want to make money online. I want to work from home. I know that we can change our family's future and all this opportunity is in front of me," and they say, "I do want a business, maybe. Maybe I don't want to grow a business. Maybe ... I don't know exactly what I want yet, but this sounds amazing." So what are three to five tips to get started in this? Just how to succeed in it, just preparing your degree, you just fill out an application, do you just ... What are your tips for success for someone who's going into this? How can they stay organized? How can they set it up? What kind of computer do they ... ? Whatever. Just what do they need? Gina: Right. You really all too begin with you need is like a headset, which ... I just got a $25 headset at Walmart. But a headset, a whiteboard just from the dollar store and a computer. I had a hard ... I didn't have a laptop when I first started. The computer was as large as my washer, almost. It was just awful. It was ... You can have that. You would fill out online the application. It's just a basic information and YouTube videos is what I went through. There were YouTube videos of some teachers that worked there, and they, as part of their ... another business that they do, and you ... They kind of walk you through the lessons that they teach, so you can get an idea of what you would be doing, what they look for. Gina: It kind of walks you through the introductory lessons, like showing flashcards and rewards, so you can feel comfortable even before you would do an interview. Because the interviews are live, so when you first fill out an application, they will send you an email. They would say, "You want to do a little live interview." It's like five, 10 minutes, and it's over the internet, like FaceTime, like a class would be. And they send you the link and you can schedule the time, and you can do a little interview telling them about yourself, and then you'd move on to teaching a lesson, and they send you those materials and you can ... I would say watching YouTube, talking to other teachers, joining the Facebook group for this company and feeling around with other people's experiences. Shane: So do they ... So you actually do do an ... How ... You do do an interview with the company, and then you move on to actually teaching. Gina: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Shane: So if someone started today, how long would it take them, basically, to teach their first class, theoretically? Gina: Theoretically. It takes them as long as they would like it to take them, honestly. Some of them go really fast through it. Some of them, I think, have a lot of anxiety on teaching a lesson, and so they book their time. I know a couple who have ... I was hired pretty quick, but some will say, "Okay, I don't want to schedule. I'm not ready for two or three weeks." Some it's been months, and they're still not hired, because they keep canceling their- Shane: But in theory, if they ... Yeah, if they wanted to, they could say, I can apply, I can do my interview, go teach my first course within a couple weeks, basically. Gina: I would give yourself maybe about a month for all of it, just because once you first ... Even if you're hired within a week or a week and a half, with setting up everything, then you want to open your slides, and sometimes it takes a couple weeks or a week or two to get bookings, because you got to do your profile, you have to do a little video of yourself, like "Hey, I'm Teacher Gina," and tell them about where you're from. So to just create all of that and get booked, I would say max about a month. Shane: Yeah. There's always a barrier to entry. If you want this job, if you want to make money, if you want anything good to happen in your life, there's a barrier of entry, because if it was easy, everybody would do it. Gina: Well, right. Shane: You've got eight kids. You've got a family. You had to go through the process, and if you could do it, I would say anybody with less than eight kids ... So that's what- Gina: Absolutely. And I did my interview at 1 AM when I knew no one would bother me, and I scheduled it at that time, and yes, it is ... The first month, I made $10. So I thought ... Everybody starts out somewhere. But it was $10 I didn't have, and then the next month, it was like 500, and then the next month, it was 1700, and then it was ... So it kept increasing to where now, whatever I open gets booked automatically, and it's a fun job. It's amazing that- Shane: Do you have a waiting list or something? You said you're just over ... You can book any slot you wanted. Can the teachers refer to each other? If you have a friend, can you be like, "Oh, I don't have any slots, but my friend Jill does," or whatever. Or like ... Gina: Unfortunately, no. I would love that, though. We have talked about that before. It would be great. If there are different parents and families that have different ... that like different teaching styles, so that's where this company is the liaison between the teachers and the parents. They will ... There are people called LPs which are called Learning Partners, and they speak Chinese and English, and they will facilitate back and forth, "This teacher is really animated," and then "This teacher's more of a low key," because you don't have to be a certain personality. Everybody has different likes. Gina: So they kind of book ... You can't refer another teacher because there's no communication, really, between when they book. Now, there are called priority bookings, and the priority bookings are where the parents can say, "She doesn't have this slot open, but I really would love for my child to be taught at five," and they can send it to you, and you can say yes or no. You can say, "No, I'm sorry. I just don't want to get up that early." You can say whatever you want. Shane: What's crazy is there's a billion people in China. You know what I'm saying? There's no shortage of students. That's like 20, 30 thousand people per teacher that's doing it now. What'd you say, 60,000 people or something like that? Gina: There's over 60,000 teachers right now, yeah. Shane: And even that's not close to enough to serve a billion people. So you couldn't book everybody's schedule, even if you wanted to. It's just a matter of- Gina: You couldn't. Shane: ... system, you know? Gina: No, you couldn't. And there's just ... There's so ... The kids ... They're actually expanding now to 300 more countries, so it's an expanding business that's going to be other countries. It's not just going to be China. So it's just ... They're constantly ... They push, push, push to refer friends, or if you know anybody that has ... that's interested because the interview process can be a little grueling, but it's cake once you get hired. Shane: Yeah. It's just getting over the obstacle, and once you get past the speed bump, it's smooth sailing from there. Gina: Absolutely. Yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes it is. That's what I tell people. It's just so worth it. It really is. I ... My husband will say, "Are you teaching again?" And I'm like, "I think it's almost addicting," and I've never had a job where I feel like- Shane: Well, they send you money for sitting in your laundry room. Gina: Yeah. Shane: Pretty awesome. Gina: I know. Shane: Let's be realistic Gina: I'm like, "Sorry, going to the laundry room." Shane: That's what we tell everybody about online business, is it's hard in the beginning. There is a barrier to entry to all of these things, like different ways to make money online. But gosh, the reward is something that didn't even exist for humanity 20 years ago. That's what people don't get is like this is the first time in human history a life like this was possible, and it's crazy to just waste away in the way we've done it for the first 10,000 years when you could do it the way you can do it now. Jocelyn: For sure. And we ... I mean, we definitely want people to be able to get more information from you, so what we're going to do is we are going to set up a page- Shane: Yup. It's at flippedlifestyle.com/teachingenglish, and that's all one word. So T-E-A-C-H-I-N-G-E-N-G-L-I-S-H. Flippedlifestyle.com/teachingenglish, and if you are someone who is stuck right now and you don't know what you want to do next- Jocelyn: Yeah, if this sounds appealing to you- Shane: If you're looking at making a little money to support the bigger business that you're building, maybe to get some ad revenue going, pay for hosting- Jocelyn: Or maybe you just don't want to be business owner. Like it's just not something that really appeals to you, but the idea of making some extra money is something that really appeals to you. Shane: Then go to flippedlifestyle.com/teachingenglish, and we will have more information there, and we will connect you directly to Gina. So she's the expert. She knows about this field. We're so thankful, Gina, that you came on the show and were so transparent and just giving your time away to us to tell people about this opportunity. So we will connect you with Gina, and she will guide you and tell you how you maybe can get online, teach a few classes today, and make 20, 25 bucks an hour that you can use however you ... So again, that's flippedlifestyle.com/teachingenglish. And you can get all that information. Jocelyn: All right. We are going to wrap this up for today. Gina, thank you so much for your time, and sharing your experience. Gina: Thank you. Jocelyn: It's been awesome to talk to you, and I can't wait to hear about your next adventures with your students. Gina: Thank you so much, guys. Thank you. Shane: All right, guys. That wraps up another episode of The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. What an amazing opportunity and story that we heard today from Gina, being able to work in your laundry room and talk to kids on the other side of ... literally, on the other side of the planet, exactly 12 time zones away, and make money online. Make money anywhere in the world, be able to make more time for your kids and your family. There's so many opportunities to make money online and work from home right now. It's crazy not to explore all of your options. We cover a lot of options, how to make money online and work from home inside of the Flip Your Life community. We would love to have you in our community so you can explore all the different opportunities and options and find your path to change your family's future. Shane: To learn more about the Flip Your Life community, go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, all one word. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-Dlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. And you can learn about all of the courses, coaching, and community options that we have available for you. Our mission is to help you start an online business, make money online, work from home, and flip your family's life just like we did. We can't wait to see you inside. That's all the time we have for this week. Until next time, get out there. Do whatever it takes. Live your life. Jocelyn: Bye. Links and resources mentioned on today's show: Click here for more information on how to teach English online Flip Your Life Community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what's possible for your family! Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month! https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife