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The Complete History And Strategy Of TikTok

We take Acquired to the Old Town Road to cover the amazing story behind the biggest global sensation of 2019 — and the highest valued private startup in the world — TikTok. How did a mid-30 year old UX architect at enterprise software giant SAP wind up creating Gen Z’s favorite social app that’s now rivaling Instagram in global MAU? Why is a 2017 merger of two Chinese companies being branded a US national security threat and retroactively placed under review by CFIUS? And perhaps most importantly, why is TikTok such an important product & technology innovation that all of us should be learning from? Tune in for all the answers!

— Podcast Transcript | 1440 Magazine | December 8, 2019

TikTok Logo

Ben: Welcome to Season 5 Episode 8 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I am the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and early-stage venture fund in Seattle.

David: And I'm David Rosenthal and I am a general partner at Wave Capital, an early-stage venture firm focused on marketplaces based in San Francisco.

Ben: And we are your hosts. Today, we’ll tell the story of the most valuable tech startup in the world, ByteDance. You may not have heard of it, but you have almost certainly heard of their most popular product, Douyin, or wait, if you're a Western audience, I mean TikTok. Valued close to $80 billion, this privately-held venture-backed Chinese company has completely changed how a generation of teens and 20-somethings globally use their phones.

Another fun way to introduce TikTok, what is this machine learning-based social media app that skyrocketed the then-unknown Lil Nas X to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for 17 weeks, the longest of any song in history with his breakout track Old Town Road?

David: I’m so pumped. After doing this research, I finally know what the hot challenge was.

Ben: David, how on earth can this app create such a universal sensation for so many people at once to skyrocket it to number one like this? This is something that no other social media app has been able to accomplish.

David: Not in quite a long time. The other fun thing that we're not going to talk as much about on the episode but to say upfront to also just build the Acquired human suspense here, you, of course, know who assigned the $78 billion or $79 billion valuation to ByteDance, right?

Ben: Is it Sequoia China? They were an early investor?

David: No, SoftBank.

Ben: Oh.

David: Sequoia China wasn’t their early investor.

Ben: Oh, boy, I can't wait for this.

David: Yeah, the hits keep on coming, although this one actually is a hit.

Ben: Indeed. Listeners, the way we'll be telling this story is through ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of another China-based company, Musical.ly, so join us on this journey of ByteDance acquiring Musical.ly to create the TikTok that we know today.

We have a special announcement that we're excited to share with you. we showed it on the last episode. We are doing a live episode in Seattle. It will be on December 17th with the co-founder and CEO of Convoy, Dan Lewis, discussing the origin story of the company, disrupting the trucking industry, and valued last month at $2.7 billion. You can click the link in the show notes or go to acquired.fm/liveshow to reserve your ticket.

Lastly, before we dive in, I want to thank the sponsors of all of Season 5, Silicon Valley Bank. Earlier this week, I caught up with our sponsor so let's dive in for a little Q&A.

Thanks to SVB, and now, on to TikTok.

David: Indeed, on to TikTok. To start history and facts, we're going to go all the way back to the 1920s and Charlie Chaplin. No, I'm kidding, although if we really, really wanted to give it the full Acquired treatment, we would do that. But no. Of course, I was referring to the great performer, the performing arts, and the origins of showbiz, Charlie Chaplin, but no.

We pick up the story relatively recently (this time by Acquired standards) in 2012, not in China but in the San Francisco Bay Area with a man, and not a young man as we so often talked about on this show, but a man named Alex Zhu who is in his mid 30s. He's from China originally.

Ben: I love that’s like not a young man to you.

David: Hey, I mean, I just turned 35 so I definitely don't feel like a young man anymore, but in comparison to what we're about to talk about, you might think that TikTok or Musical.ly, if you knew it initially, incarnation would have been started by a teenager or an Evan Spiegel-like character. But no, not at all as we will see. In many ways, Alex is the anti-Evan Spiegel. He's in his mid-30s and he's working as a UI designer at the European enterprise software giant, SAP, hotbed of consumer mobile social app innovation.

Ben: Oh, yeah, totally. The SAP mafia of social network startups.

David: Indeed. This is actually his second stint with SAP. At this point, Alex has a long career in enterprise software and after his second stint at SAP (he’s working there for about a year), he's just been appointed as an in-house futurist at SAP, focused specifically on the future of education. You can just see Musical.ly jumping right off the page here.

Ben: I think I saw some tweet years ago that said, “If you have the word digital in your title, then you have the right job at the wrong company.” I think that might be the same thing for futurists.

David: Yeah. Why is it a little bit like enterprise companies have futurists?

Ben: I think Google does [...] that Google is the chief futurist or something?

David: Oh, I don't know, maybe. I'll have to look that up. Alex's new role as futurist (and he says this on his LinkedIn profile which we’ll link to in the show notes), it's quite amazing. He says his job was to research the future trends of education and learning, specifically identify opportunities for breakthrough innovation and social impact and convert ideas into prototypes and applications.

What did this mean at the time in 2012? I remember this super clearly, I was about to start business school at Stanford. What was all the rage, both in the tech world and in the education world, were MOOCs. Coursera and Udacity had just launched (both of them out of Stanford), raised tons of money, and they were going to digitize universities, learning, and education, and bring it all online.

Both of them are still around, but neither of them would go on to realize the potential that everyone thought they had at the moment or at least, not in a near-term timeframe. Interestingly though, it was actually an enterprise software company to you that would go public and become quite a large company that would help existing schools manage their online degree programs.

Actually, my old undergrad classmate, Jeremy Johnson, who's now the CEO of Andela was one of the cofounders of that. It was enterprise software. You could paint a story why it made sense for Alex to be working on this within SAP. As he gets deeper and deeper into it, he becomes really convinced that there are a couple of problems with the way MOOCs and online education is being approached at that time and he was totally right.

The biggest one, as he digs in is that nobody finishes the courses. Not only nobody finishes the courses, nobody even finishes a single video of a single lecture, they're just too long for most people unless you're in an actual degree program where you have to. Students at colleges barely stay awake through lectures, who's going to watch a whole course of their own free will and volition?

Ben: Yeah, reflecting back on it, I think if I'm going to watch even the Khan Academy type stuff, it's going to be like one video at a time and maybe not even the whole video.

David: Yeah, you're going to spend five minutes or less on there. As he comes to this realization, he thinks, “Maybe the way to attack this is to make the videos short-form instead of long-form, these educational videos,” and he realizes, “Look, this is not something that an enterprise software company like SAP is going to really be equipped to tackle here,” so he is passionate about the space, though, and he does decide to start a company on the side outside of SAP while he's still working there.

Ben: He’s going to take his futurism talents elsewhere.

David: Exactly. At least, according to his LinkedIn, he does stop being a futurist at SAP. He goes back to working on other normal projects as a UI designer and actually stays at the company (according to his LinkedIn) for quite a few years to come. On the side, he's working on realizing this opportunity and he calls up an old friend back in China, Louis Yang, who he had worked with at another company back in China, and they started a company called Cicada Education, a real auspicious name.

Ben: Like a bug?

David: I believe so, at least, that is how it's spelled.

Ben: I know where you grew up there were cicadas in Ohio, every 15 years or something, these gnarly bugs like for two weeks of summer.

David: Yeah, same where I grew up in Pennsylvania and then especially in New Jersey going to college, it did not make you want to study.

Ben: Or name a company after them.

David: So far, this is an interesting compelling story. There are a few twists here, but it sounds like your typical Bay Area startup story on the surface. But when you peel back the onion a little bit, there's a couple of really unique things going on for the time. One, the dual China and US headquarters of the company.

Alex stays in the Bay Area, he’s still working at SAP there, Louis is back in China. This is not done at the time. I remember starting to invest in companies when I joined Madrona at this time. Remote teams period are like a no-no for venture capitalists and startups, let alone cross-continent, cross-border, cross-cultural remote teams is just crazy, but these guys have a little bit of experience with that, or at least, Alex does.

After undergrad, he first worked at China Pages in China as a designer and then he spent three years at WebEx where I believe—I can't verify for sure—he reported up to Eric Yuan.

Ben: Wow, founder and CEO of Zoom.

David: Of Zoom. Zoom would leverage this model (as we covered on the Zoom episode), to amazing success. Eric also did within WebEx (of having engineering back in China and all over the world, really) while having go-to-market based in the Bay Area.

After WebEx, Alex joined SAP, then left SAP and went to an insurance software company called eBao. That's where he met Louis, who was the best PM there. They worked together briefly there before Alex went, rejoined SAP, and moved to the Bay Area. He calls up Louis, this really talented PM who he's worked with before, they go out, and they raise $250,000. Ben, you actually know the folks that they raised this angel money from, right?

Ben: Yeah. One of the firms there is China ROC Capital Management, a great cross-border China-US firm that’s important to this story has a Palo Alto office.

David: Yeah. They're at the forefront of this crazy idea of building cross-border companies and the idea is that they're going to take Alex's insight and get experts across a wide variety of domains from peer education to professionals, to create these short 3–5 minute videos explaining a subject that they know really well.

They raised money, they started working on this. As you can imagine, it's not super compelling. After the pivot of Musical.ly, Alex says, “The day we released this application to the market, we realized it was never going to take off. It was doomed to failure.” The name Cicada may have had—

Ben: Yeah, something to do with it. To have one thing so right in short-form video and one thing so wrong in delivering education in an entertainment-type format in that short-form video, it's remarkable how they really, really deeply keyed into a trend but didn't exactly nail it the first time.

David: Yeah, Alex says, “It's hard for a new startup to fight against human nature. It's better to follow human nature,” and especially in short-form video, education is not just going to really compel somebody to open up an app on their phone. That's the big thing that they get wrong with Cicada, but the other thing that they get wrong, and this really goes on to inform Musical.ly and TikTok, is the videos took way too long to create and they were way too hard.

Cognitively, if you're an expert trying to convey the essence of a subject in 3–5 minutes, you can't. You could do that if you spend a lot of time organizing and figuring out how to convey information, but also just like the tools—remember, this is back in 2012–2013—within the product to create these compelling videos are way, way, way too immature for this to go mainstream.

Ben: Yeah. If you think back, 2014 was probably the iPhone 6s that [...].

David: No, I think that was the iPhone 6.

Ben: Or let's put an OS number on it. That would have been iOS 7 just came out.

David: Yeah, 2014 was the iPhone 6 and iOS 7 or 8. This means back in the Cicada days, you're working with, at best, an iPhone 5s which is the small screen. As much as I love and miss that thing, creating video content on that was going to be super hard.

Ben: Yeah, and it was only the third generation of Retina phones, so there are still lots of phones out there that are the 320x480 or whatever it was.

David: Yeah, totally. We're now in the spring of 2014. They've burned through most of the $250,000 that they raised, but Alex is at least part-time on this.

Ben: And I think he's hanging out a lot at the China ROC office in Palo Alto, and importantly leads to him taking Caltrain rides.

David: Yeah. I believe he was also probably working for SAP’s campus down in Palo Alto at the time too, spending some portion of his time there. They decided to take another swing at this. As you said, he is famously commuting down from San Francisco to the Peninsula (as so many people do), and often he takes Caltrain to avoid the traffic.

One day, he's thinking about the failure of Cicada, thinking about what they want to pivot into, and take a swing at next based on what they learn, and he sees a group of teenagers on the train. They're playing with their phones and they're doing it together. He starts observing them like, “Oh, what are these kids doing? Maybe I can learn something.”

Interestingly though, the stereotype at the time, remember the adults or the older partners at Madrona talking about this like, “Oh kids, they just sit on their phones, they don't talk to each other, they're not social, and everything is digital,” but that's not what's happening at all. These kids are collaborating together, they're talking, they're chatting, they're being loud, they're not parallel playing, they're using their phones but they're doing things together physically on them.

What are they doing? They're taking selfie videos. They have one person who's making the video, another person is finding music on their phone to play in the background to put a score to the video, then other people are creating graphics and digital overlays that they're going to put on top of the video, narrate all together a story about their time on the train together, and then they're posting it out to other social media, to Instagram, to Twitter, to Facebook.

Alex realizes like, “Oh, wow, this is actually a perfect use case for all this tech that we've built and for short-form video. Look at these lengths that these kids are going through to create this content here on the train together. What if we made one app that made it really easy for all this to happen? That would be cool.”

Ben: Yeah, and important here to know about Alex is there are lots of different founder archetypes, he's really the product person/designer archetype where part of the reason that he was able to raise that initial little seed money is really he's able to not only design beautiful products but observe problems in the world that can be solved with technology. The thing that we're seeing here when you're thinking to yourself how was it a good idea to pivot when deciding, “Should we pivot? Should we not?” Alex was uniquely good at observing problems, and with little resources, figuring out how to solve that problem with technology.

David: Yeah. Louis actually talks about this later, he says, “We changed the product quickly from the education-video app to do an experiment. What if we just provide some music in the product to allow people to quickly shoot a video with music? Will they feel very confident about what they create? If they feel excited about it, will they share it?” This is interesting. He says, “We created the prototype very quickly and we tried to launch in China, in Japan, in Europe, and in the US, we just wanted to see, we were not sure which country was going to pick it up really quickly but we had a gut feeling that it should be the US, the US is a music country, everyone there is so into music and the US is the center of pop culture worldwide. We got that gut feeling but we still decided to try it worldwide. We just really stood in the App Store, created some keywords for people to search for it, and the result is yeah, in the US, people automatically started picking it up.”

Ben: Fascinating. I did not know that was a hunch of why they did it in the US.

David: Yeah. That's the official story of the launch of Musical.ly. As far as we know, we have no contradictory evidence that anything else was different, but there were two other apps that were blowing up at the same time that probably had a pretty big influence on the direction.

Ben: Dubsmash?

David: No, Dubsmash actually launched right around the same time as Musical.ly, they were pretty concurrent but had a big influence on the direction that Musical.ly decided to go.

Ben: Snapchat?

David: No, not Snapchat. One is in the US and one is in China, one is Vine. Remember Vine?

Ben: Oh, yeah, Twitter’s biggest mistake.

David: Oh, man, such a tragedy. Doing this research reminded me of it. Vine was acquired by Twitter pre-launch back when the team was still working on the product and Jack Dorsey saw the potential for this and just loved it and so they acquired the company in January 2013 before they launched the product. Vine (I'm sure lots of our US listeners will remember this) was 6-second looping videos and music and lip-synching was a key use-case on Vine.

Ben: Yeah, it was lip-synching and NBA replays.

David: Yeah, such a good platform for sports replays. Users loved it and it had priority distribution on Twitter, but especially teenagers. This story presages TikTok so exactly. There was this Canadian teenager who goes by Ruth B, who goes viral after posting a short clip of herself singing a few lines that she just made up about Peter Pan on Vine. It ends up turning it into a full song, gets a record deal, makes the Billboard top 100 charts.

This should have been a sign to Twitter that there's something really interesting happening on this platform, but Twitter was going through its IPO at this time, they had crazy management drama, they didn't have enough resources to invest in it.

Ben: Ultimately shut it down.

David: Platform just peters out, yeah, and they ultimately shut it down. Lots of people saw what was going on here. I have to imagine that Alex and Louis did and this had a big influence on the direction of Musical.ly.

Ben: Alright, what's the second one?

David: The second one back in China is an app that's still a super large company today called Kuaishou. That was actually started in 2011 as a gift-maker tool in China. They’ve raised money from Morningside Ventures originally. It didn't go super well (they were just a utility), so they brought in one of their advisors and angel investors to take over as CEO, this guy named Su Hua. Su had worked at both Google and Baidu and he pretty quickly transforms Kuaishou into a short video platform. This is the first big short-video platform in China and it starts taking off like wildfire.

Ben: Wasn’t Morningside also the first money into ByteDance?

David: That's a good question. They might have been. They're really good early-stage venture folks in China. Interestingly, Kuaishou starts taking off not among what you think of is the normal audience for tech products in China, which is wealthy middle- and upper-class tier-one city urban elites, Kuaishou takes off in the rural areas with the 80% of the country that is still living in the provinces and are getting their first smartphones around this time. Kuaishou is just for people to make videos and talk about their daily lives.

There's a great 2017 tech note article that talks about their strategy and this says it's a really authentic place where people can be themselves and show their lives. The way that it all works is the content that people see is not driven by who you are or who you follow, it's driven by an algorithm. It gets to know what you like and it recommends videos that other people make to you that just find their way to you. You don't have to go out and find influencers, find topics, it just starts to get to know you and it surfaces all this interesting stuff much like other companies that we're going to see in a minute here.

Ben: There's one other interesting thing to note on why it blew up in America. In America, this notion of lip-syncing has always been like a thing people knew about, it's not like there was a dedicated video platform for it but it was like a popular thing to sing along with the music and famously, there have been some big debacles where even pop artists were lip-synching their own songs and got called out for that. This is a bit later but just to drive the point home on lip-syncing as a cultural phenomenon in the US but not China at the time, there was actually a TV show called Lip Sync Battle.

David: Oh, yeah. That is going to come up in a second here.

Ben: All right. I won't spoil it too much, but you got to understand at this time that this is really unique for a Chinese technology company to be building a product that is most popular in the US market. This was pretty unheard of and makes total sense when you think about the cultural differences of where it could be appreciated.

David: Yeah. The super cool thing is the team learned their way into this. We're still in 2014 when they make this pivot and they launch the MVP of Musical.ly. Now they're already thinking about music clearly, but the name of the app as being a key feature, but it was more Vine and Kuaishou than it was what we think of Musical.ly and TikTok today. It was a broad short-form video platform.

They launched it and they do a couple of really interesting things. Louis talked in that quote about the name of the app and doing app store optimization. This was a point in time when the app store, particularly the iOS App Store, started really prioritizing search terms, I don't know if you remember, Ben, a bunch of apps and Musical.ly does this more than anyone.

Ben: Keyword stuffing?

David: Yeah, stuff a ton of keywords into their titles. The title of the app is like, “Musical.ly-make videos for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook with music with your friends, have fun like blah-blah-blah.” That just goes on and on and on, they stuff all these keywords in there and that's what starts getting the initial download traffic that the app is getting in the US. This is where, based on that, they start to learn a couple of things and this eventually leads to the big breakthrough of Lip Sync Battle.

They operate for a few months, the app’s growing, they're getting really good retention and usage, people that are downloading it and trying it are sticking with it, but they're not hitting a rocket ship growth yet. So they started digging into their data and they realized that on Thursday nights in the US, every Thursday night, there's a big spike in downloads.

They started going on the app trying to figure out why. They've always been really good about staying close to their users. They have lots of user research groups that they do to this day. Alex talks about how he creates fake accounts and just goes into first, Musical.ly, and now TikTok, and interacts with users just try to get a sense of what's going on and why they're using it. They realize that it’s because of the Lip Sync Battle TV Show which airs Thursday nights in the US on the Paramount network.

I had totally forgotten about this, but Lip Sync Battle is actually a spin off from the Jimmy Fallon Show. Jimmy started doing this as a skit on the Jimmy Fallon show, and then he went and he pitched it with a couple other producers to NBC as its own show. NBC turned it down but Paramount picked it up and it became a huge hit. People love it.

Ben: That’s awesome. I had no idea of the history of that.

David: Yeah.

Ben: Did they mention Musical.ly at all in that? Or was is just like people getting inspired from the show that they—

David: No. It’s back to the App Store optimization. They had put lip sync in the title of a bunch of versions of the app. After the show ends, people just go on and search the App Store for “lip sync” and Musical.ly is what pops it.

Ben: Makes total sense.

David: Yeah. Super cool. It’s now in spring of 2015 when they realize this is happening. Because growth has been slow, they decide on a couple of things. One, we need to make a decision and go all in on a particular use case, like classic enterprise software crossing the chasm-type problem of you have a broad platform that ultimately will be useful for lots of different things, but in the beginning you have to have one very specific use case to knock down that first bowling pin of why people are going to use the product.

They realized that they need to have one killer feature that they really prioritize in the app. This is where a confluence and of a bunch of things come together. They changed the onboarding flow to make it clear that Musical.ly is really great at helping you create lip sync videos. Two, they then start sending users regular notifications, like daily notifications with challenges of lip sync videos that they can create using the app. This starts driving people to keep coming back. People are coming back and consuming content but this starts driving people to come and create content on a more than a weekly basis.

This is the origin of challenges that ultimately the Yeehaw Challenge would be one of the biggest stuff that would help drive Old Town Road, but that’s still to come. And then the product model is super cool. If you think about Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, even Snapchat, all the successful Western social networks up to this point, the content that you see is based on who you follow. When people log onto the app and create accounts for the first time, who are they follow?

Ben and I were chatting before the show, we’ve been paying with TikTok over the past couple of days and Ben here were like, “I went in, I followed a bunch of my friends and none of them have any videos.” On TikTok and on Musical.ly, before that it didn’t matter. This is what they take from Kuaishou back in China. Because the content that the app surfaces for you is based on an algorithm of what it thinks you’re going to like completely regardless of who you follow. When you’re a new user onboarded for the first time, it prioritizes content that you have no connection to. That makes it super different from other apps but also this incredible opportunity.

Ben: Yeah. It’s about finding the content fit with your interest, not the person fit, like a person that you know, and not your own perceived content fit. It’s not like I would tell you that I like SciFi. What’s actually become quite clear to me from TikTok is what TikTok has learned. I like prank videos and I like extreme sports things. I’ve been using TikTok for a year and didn’t follow anyone and I followed people this week and didn’t improve my experience at all. It’s still the same stuff from people who I’ve never met that is just very well-tailored to me at this point.

David: Totally. Once they make this changes in the Spring of 2015, the apps just takes off like a rocket ship. Two months later, on July 6, it’s number one in the US iOS App Store. Since then, Musical.ly and then its successor, TikTok, has never fallen out of the top 40 apps, which is pretty incredible. This is the beginning of the rise that puts it not just onSnapchat trajectory, but now well beyond to Instagram and even potentially bigger.

There’s a really great talk that he did, Greylock and our friends at GGV, main venture investors in Musical.ly. There’s a great talk that Alex does with Josh Elman at a Greylock product event that’s on YouTube. We’ll link to it in the show notes; you should definitely go watch it. He talks about the philosophy behind this product decision and how it leads to Musical.ly really having a chance to become a social platform instead of just a utility.

Remember we talked about Vine. Dubsmash was out there at this point in time. There are a bunch of other competing apps, but what is it about Musical.ly that makes it special, it’s the Ruth B story from Vine. It’s allowing somebody who’s a nobody, who’s brand new to the platform, doesn’t have any special advantages like a celebrity or an influencer, they’re just somebody who has talent. If they put that quality content on a platform because of this recommendation algorithm, platform’s able to find it, surface it to a bunch of people, and make those creators who actually have talent really successful.

That’s what this becomes over time, and what TikTok has become is this really interesting two-sided network effect of a creator side and a consumer side, of which there’s a lot of overlap, but they’re actually pretty different. It’s a lot more like YouTube than it is like Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook.

On the creator side, even more than YouTube, really what it is, is it’s like a digitization of American Idol or America’s Got Talent, which is you’ve got these people who have aspirations to show their talents, whatever it is, whether it’s extreme sports videos, or comedy, or singing, or music. They believe that the platform, even if they don’t have a following today, if they make something great and they put it on the platform, there’s a chance that they’ll get discovered.

Ben: Yeah. The interesting thing about this is—two points I want to make—one, in apps where the expectation was set originally that I’m going to express interest in who I care about and then I get to follow them. I get really annoyed later when that promise is broken. Twitter starts doing the algorithmic timeline, Facebook starts to limit organic distribution and makes you pay for exposure if you’re a brand. There’s always things where you start to feel like they’re really messing with what the brand promise was here.

TikTok from the very beginning is, “We are going to show you what we think is the most engaging for you, and we make no promises.” Yeah, sure there’s that following tab, but that’s not where you live. You live on the tab where it’s, “Hey this is what we think you most like.”

David: The for you tab, which is like the explore tab on Instagram that nobody goes to.

Ben: Right. So, their algorithm is not public, but there’s been some really, really nice speculation by a great medium post by Matt Schlicht, where he talks about his experience dribbling stuff out and trying to reverse engineer the algorithm a little bit on TikTok. This is flashing forward a little bit, but I think it’s important to really understand what it’s doing.

It’s like it’s always AB testing. The vast majority of what you’re being shown is things that TikTok thinks you will like based on your previous viewing and liking history. Mixed in there is every video gets the waters tested. They can see how engaging is this. It looks for what is the conversion ratio from view to like. What’s the conversion ratio from view to finish viewing. That determines how it spreads wider and wider and wider.

It’s important to have a basic understanding of how the algorithm works. When we say things like, the platform truly rewards and spreads the most objectively liked or objectively good, talented videos, that’s actually what it’s doing.

David: It’s even more than this. As I was doing research and thinking about what made Musical.ly successful more than its peers at the time and what’s made TikTok such an incredible global phenomenon, it really is bringing back to the American Idol analogy. It’s like a personalized American Idol for every single consumer on the app.

In American Idol, it’s just a flat TV show. What can the producers go out and find from talent all across the country that’s going to have the broadest mass market appeal? Because they have to show that one single TV show across the entire audience.

On TikTok though, they can have all of these content and all of these niches and have the personalized algorithmic feed for each consumer. They’re able to take so much more content, talent, and creators, and make them successful because they only need to find their niche audience. They don’t even need to go find it anymore. TikTok is finding it for them.

Ben: Fascinating but important in knowing that you don’t need to find your own audience and you’re relying on TikTok finding it for you, it means you don’t get to form that direct relationship with that audience. It’s not necessarily going to lead to a follow or something where they’re going to see your next piece of content. You may be a flash in the pan if that’s your best and only great video. It truly rewards the venture investing philosophy espoused by Sequoia early on, you’re only as good as your last investment.

David: Yeah, or your last TikTok video. Let’s talk about what success for creators on TikTok means. This is another area where the platform is really different from the existing social networks that’s come before them. Alex gives a great talk on YouTube at a Greylock event. Greylock, our friends at GGV were the main venture investors behind Musical.ly before it was acquired and became TikTok.

In his talk, Alex has this analogy of building the social network of Musical.ly to being like founding and building a country, a nation. He says, “At first, you find the new world, the new land, and you have nothing. You just have a land. You just have real estate. You need to attract people to come to that land and to attract the people, you need to show them a path to success, you need to create this image of your new land of being a land of opportunity. The way that you do that is some version of a path to wealth creation, because ultimately it’s an economy that a country runs on a political economy and it’s the same thing with the social media platform.”

Alex says, “When users first come to a new social media platform, the first thing they’re looking for is fame.” That’s a stand-in for an economy. It’s like a proxy people believe once they have fame they can get money. He says, “But that’s not enough. Once they have the fame, they have to monetize. The platform that can generate the biggest revenue streams for it’s biggest users, that’s the one that will stick around.”

He says the way that they did this at Musical.ly is first, you centralize your economy. You make sure you put your hand on the scale. You make sure that some of those initial people that are on the platform, those initial creators, the ones with the most talent that you are subjectively judging as the arbiters of the platform, you make sure that they get rich.

Alex doesn’t talk a lot about how Musical.ly does this, but ByteDance with TikTok in China, just start paying content creators and people who are creating the best content, they pay them more money. They invite them to exclusive events and they get all sorts of perks. And they broker introductions between them and marketers and advertisers who are going to want to sponsor their content, either directly or through the platform.

That’s the first step. Then Alex talk about—this is a really amazing insight—he says, “Then though, you have to take a second step which is decentralizing.” You start with the centralized economy where you’re making sure that some people succeed, but then though you have to pull back and decentralize because if you want to keep attracting new creators—this is where Facebook and Instagram have really failed to make this step—you have to ensure that there really is an opportunity for everyone, that there’s the equivalent of the American dream.

If you’re someone who is new to the platform, you have to believe that there’s a real chance that you’d get discovered and that you can find success even though you’re starting from a cold start. This actually is back to the American Idol analogy. This is why the algorithm and the algorithmic feed within Musical.ly and then TikTok is so important. It makes it so different from Instagram.

Ben: Wow. There’s a lot there, but it’s a pretty interesting analogy to the criticism of America right now that the American dream has failed and actually, once you’re out one end of the pole or the other, you tend to stay there. You could see people arguing that our country needs an equivalent TikTokification.

David: Also, quite ironic that this vision is coming from a cross-border US and Chinese startup. The thing gets acquired by and becomes part of the largest startup in China. The two subpoints that he makes about this need to decentralize is one, exactly what you said Ben. You need to have true social and economic mobility within the platform. But just as important too (and it’s your point about making money), you need a viable middle class. Of course you’re going to have the elite, the upper class, the Little Nas X, people who become just so much bigger than anyone whom we could have ever imagined, but you also need viability for the middle.

There’s going to be people who just don’t have talent and then they won’t make it. But there are going to be people who have a few successes or have a relatively small niche. How do you help them succeed? This is something that the platform hasn’t fully, fully figured out in the West. We’re going to talk about this a bunch more as we go through the rest of the episode.

Ben: Yeah. It’s really interesting. There’s another point that’s important to hit on that’s part of Musical.ly’s success here. They really do something pretty innovative in overhauling the app to be all in on lip synching because they’re able to allow people to be a little bit creative and get a lot of output, which was kind of the magic of Instagram when it started. You could be a crappy photographer and put a cool filter on it and then no matter what, it was going to look cool. It very much rings true of the way to bootstrap a network, which is come for tool, stay for the network.

People were creating in Musical.ly because it could create a good product with little effort and sharing it everywhere else. Musical.ly watermarked every single one of those videos and made it very easy to share it everywhere else. If there’s one big difference to know between Musical.ly then and TikTok now, Musical.ly really grew organically because people we're sharing their creations that were far easier to make than you would think everywhere they possibly could.

David: Yeah. This aspect of Musical.ly’s growth is a page straight out of the Playbook of Instagram which did this exact same thing in the early days.

Ben: That applies for Twitter.

David: Yeah, exactly, was make a really, really great utility that need the content you were creating as a creator look much better in a very easy manner. Was hipstamatic the straight utility competitor to Instagram?

Ben: Yup.

David: Yeah, and then provide that really easy sharing functionality. Really it was Twitter that Instagram grew at the back of, and then Twitter shut them off the platform, but it was already too late.

Ben: Smash and grab, job accomplished.

David: Yeah. Musical.ly does the same thing on that front. Now, by 2016, Musical.ly is on fire. They have 10 million DAU and over 90 million users up from 10 million the year before in 2015. They’re grown 10X, close to 9X in 2016. There’s also something else very interesting going in the year 2016 in social network land. There’s a bunch of things that we’ve covered on this show. But 2016 is the year that Facebook and Mark Zuckerburg are trying to crack into China.

I think this was the year he made his annual challenge two-fold. One, he was going to learn Mandarin, and two he was going to go jogging all around the world. There was this famous moment I had totally forgotten about until doing research for this episode where he goes jogging through Tiananmen Square with a bunch of Chinese Communist party officials, and he’s working super, super hard.

At this point, Facebook is still on its exponential growth curve. They’ve acquired Instagram and Zuck is looking at China and seeing the billion people there. Renren is around, but nobody has really become the Facebook equivalent of China at this point. WeChat is still in its infancy. He thinks this is going to be the next big market for Facebook.

Ben: As we would see that did not quite turned out.

David: It did not quite turn out. In fact quite the opposite. But 2016, this is the WhatsApp acquisition has happened, markets tried to buy Snapchat several times, he’s acquired Instagram, he’s acquired Oculus. What’s the Facebook Playbook for entering this adjacent large markets? It’s acquisition.

I did not know this until yesterday. But it’s been reported that in August of 2016, Zuck invites Alex. Alex moved back to Shanghai at this point to be full time with the product and engineering team in China. Zuck invites Alex to come meet with him in Menlo Park and expresses an interest in acquiring Musical.ly. Apparently the next month in October of 2016, a whole team from Facebook goes out and visits Musical.ly headquarters in Shanghai. There’s serious acquisition talks going on between the companies. Just imagine what would have been if this had happened.

Ben: Yeah, which is crazy. It’s crazy to go to China because a very large part of the business was being run out of LA at this point.

David: Yes, Sta. Monica.

Ben: Sta. Monica office, there was a North America GM. Another Alex, Alex Hoffman who was running that so well that the perception by most American using this was this is not a Chinese app. I’m not using something not built here. I’m using a social media app like any other. I think that the product team in Sta. Monica had a lot to do with that.

David: Totally, but of course, Alex and Louis are the co-CEOs of the company. Apparently acquisition talks were quite serious but the deal falls apart and hasn’t been reported why, I don’t know if it was regulatory concerns.

Ben: I don’t think it was price.

David: Yeah, seems unlikely it was price.

Ben: Looking at a $20 billion pick up of WhatsApp. I don’t think it was price.

David: Yeah. We now enter 2017. Musical.ly is still on fire from a growth perspective. They’ve just come out of these discussions with Facebook, with renewed resolve to be an independent company and continue growing not as part of Facebook. The big priority for that year that the team that Alex and Louis decide on is to launch and grow back in their homeland, in China.

I remember they had launched the initial experiment in a bunch of countries including China, but then they’ve totally deprioritized and focused on the West. First in the US and then had grown throughout North America and Europe. But in China, it was a different story and it was a different story for a couple of reasons. One, because everything is different in China. If anyone, if any kind of Western social network or Western-adopted social network is positioned to succeed in China, you would think it was Musical.ly because the founders are Chinese and at least half of the company more than half of the company is based there.

But there are a couple of things that are different. One, the business model for content is very successful in China but very different from how it is in the West. In the West, almost all media companies from traditional media companies through all the social media companies monetized their advertising. In China, the advertising market at this point was not yet anywhere near the level of maturity that it is in the West. Instead, direct monetization is the most powerful business model for social lapse in China.

Ben: Which wasn’t something I realized until we did that Tencent episode. I realized that really, Tencent invented the modern video game business model and a lot of were content in the West is shifting.

David: Virtual goods, gifting, tipping, payments being a huge part of that, and a revenue generator for the platforms. But the gifting and tipping is really, really interesting. Now I’m back to what we are talking about a minute ago with the management of the economy of the network effect between creators and consumers on a platform like Musical.ly and TikTok. The China business model is actually really elegant way to do that. If you allow for virtual goods, gifting and tipping that the consumers can show their appreciation to the creators for any given piece of content or a series of pieces of content, and then those creators are able to exchange those gifts, convert it in part or whole into actual cash, now you can start to make a living and build a middle class on a platform.

This is happening in China and Kuaishou is the pioneer of this. Remember, Kuaishou’s user base is primarily rural, so advertising, ecommerce companies and the like, don’t really have all that much interest. This is pre-Pinduoduo days (which we should definitely cover on another episode), but don’t have all that much interest in reaching these audiences. Instead, they’re able to monetize through this direct monetization. That’s one big thing. Musical.ly has to figure out how to navigate this new business model or different business model in China.

Two, though (and this is going to become much more important as we get towards the end of the story) any time you talk about a media business in China, whether social or otherwise, you are operating in a very, very different political environment than you are in the West. We touched on this a little bit in the Tencent episode. Tencent and ByteDance is going to come in here in a minute.

Basically, any content company—platform or non-platform—in China employs thousands and thousands of censors that are going through all the content, working with the Chinese Communist Party, making sure that the content on the platform is upholding the laws of the party but even the wishes of the party that is super different from a Western social network, be it Facebook, Instagram, or Musical.ly at the time where anything goes.

In late 2017, after working on this for most of the year having this be the major priority in the company, Louis gives the talk at a GGV even where he—imagine he must be a pretty funny guy—says, “I regret not having entered into China’s market earlier. Now I can hear vibrating sounds everywhere making me uncomfortable.” Most Western listeners aren’t going to get what he means there, but by “vibrating sounds everywhere making me uncomfortable” he’s referring to Douyin, which is at this point has been launched by the number one content company in China, most valuable startup in the world, ByteDance. And Douyin means literally vibrating sound or shaking music.

Ben: It’s important to know, too, ByteDance before Douyin was doing very well with Toutiao. I mean, hundreds and millions of users. This is the best news and information technology company in China. When they see this Musical.ly thing is taking off in the US, they’re not effective at entering China, and the world is starting to shift where this short-form video thing that maybe didn’t make sense a couple of years ago in China does makes sense now, it’s effectively a fast follow where ByteDance is like, “Cool, we’ll leverage all have from Toutiao to go and build Douyin, which is going to look a lot like Musical.ly does in the US. We’re going to launch that here in China and beat them to their own country.”

David: Yeah. This is basically ByteDance’s version of Instagram stories here. A word about ByteDance, which we’ve referred to a bunch in this episode. Toutiao, which Ben just alluded to, up until this point was the core app of the company and the biggest and most important product. So what is Toutiao and why does this make ByteDance such a formidable competitor to Musical.ly?

Basically, you could think of Toutiao like Apple News on steroids. Toutiao literally means headlines. It is a news and content aggregation app. Maybe more like Flipboard back in the day. But unlike Apple News or Flipboard or whatever, people spend an insane amount of time on it and like you mentioned, an incredible portion of China, something like half of the internet users of China are daily active users of Toutiao.

More importantly, really early on, ByteDance realized with Toutiao that they couldn’t be limited by formats. They have text and news on there, but they also have photos. They also have long-form video and they also have short-form video. Short-form video within Toutiao is a big driver of engagement and content with the app.

The other really key thing about ByteDance and the reason why they have succeeded above so many of their competitors in China is that their algorithmic recommendations, just like we we're talking about with Musical.ly that made Musical.ly so interesting and different, are the best in the world. They have the best AI technology to quickly suss out personalization for any given user about what they’re going to like and then go scour this immense vast corpus of content that they’re bringing in to Toutiao every single day to find the very best stuff that you’re going to love across all different types of formats.

Ben: Yup and all vetted. Thousands and thousands of censors employed by the company to make sure that that aggregated content going to users is vetted.

David: Yeah. Talk about emote here and a super easily accessible adjacent market for Toutiao and ByteDance to get into is pure short-form video. They’re seeing the super success on Musical.ly in the West. Now, ByteDance has always talked about having aspirations of expanding beyond the Chinese market and being one of the first of the new generation of Chinese internet companies that is going to be a global company. They see what’s going on with Musical.ly and they say, “Okay, this is the perfect Instagram stories, be a copier and fast-follow model for us here.”

The other reason why this is appealing to them is, we talked a minute ago about monetization models in China and advertising versus direct monetization. ByteDance has direct monetization and is capable of that within their products as well. But they’re also the first company that’s really starting to crack the advertising market in China. Again, it gets back to this super sophisticated algorithm which gets to know users’ preference. Just like Facebook advertising where they know you so well, they can recommend content to you, they can also recommend ads to you.

Arguable I would say with Facebook, it’s better recommending ad content than it is at organic content because so much of the way in the algorithm is who you know and who you follow as opposed to Toutiao and ByteDance. ByteDance over the past couple of years has been turning this algorithm into advertising, too, and they’re really starting to build for the first time, a digital advertising market in China.

Ben: Yeah, and what’s important to know here is they launched Douyin that’s going swimmingly in China. Musical.ly frankly is scared at this point because they’re like, “Okay we sat around and missed China for too long. Now, we’re probably going to get beat there.” But similarly, Douyin is launched as TikTok in the US. It does not go well in the US. Musical.ly got this passionate, large, organically-built user base.

Again, I think it’s easy to gloss over the importance of feeling like it’s a native app for your country. There’s not a lot of people using WeChat in the US. Certainly the Chinese version doesn’t feel like it’s for people in the US because it’s not, and the American version is so stripped down that it doesn’t feel right either, but Musical.ly really did. That’s a huge piece of that through the Sta. Monica office. TikTok versus Musical.ly in the US to the extent that you want to win this market, at least so far going to be Musical.ly.

David: It’s interesting. The parallels to Facebook behavior with competitors are so apt here. First, ByteDance copied Musical.ly domestically in China with Douyin. That launched at the end of 2016. Nine months later, in the Fall of 2017, Douyin already has a 100 million users and they’re serving over a billion video views a day. They’ve got this amazing technology that they lifted right out of Toutiao better than anything Musical.ly has.

Two, they’ve got this incredible scale but they’ve got the distribution relationship with consumers from Toutiao. They’re plugging Douyin within Toutiao to all their users. At this point, all the platforms (and especially the Chinese platforms) are super smart to the distribution hack of sharing all your content on to other platforms and then exfiltrating these users. There’s no way that ByteDance is going to let Musical.ly come in into the same thing on Toutiao, they’re going to do it.

We’re now in the Fall of 2017. And that’s when ByteDance launches TikTok and takes Douyin internationally. No, it doesn’t get anywhere near the amount of traction that Musical.ly has. But it’s not really a full test. It’s more like a toe in the water.

Ben: Shot across the bow, too.

David: Yeah. It’s a shot across the bow. We’re now towards the end of 2017. Musical.ly has been struggling mightily in this big effort for the year to enter China, so they’re ready to re-entertain acquisition talks. I don’t know, I don’t believe Facebook was involved in this round but Kuaishou, the original short-form video platform in China, and Tencent are really interested in acquiring the company at this point in time.

Remember, Tencent is a big investor and an acquirer of content all around the world, not just in China. Owner of Riot Games, League of Legends, investor in Epic Games and Fortnight and so many other things.

Ben: And actually, amazingly, when you look over at ByteDance, somehow that company has never taken investment from Tencent or Alibaba.

David: No. Or Baidu, I believe. I think they are the first independent startup out there.

Ben: Yeah, that was the big first generation of the Chinese tech giants, was those thee. And every other one that we’ve covered that’s been a recent.

David: Xiaomi, Meituan, Pinduoduo. I believe Pinduoduo all took money from one of those three, the BAT, the big three in China.

Ben: ByteDance is much more a traditional venture funded mega unicorn.

David: Yeah. And think about Tencent, which of the BAT is ByteDance the biggest threat to, at least right now. It’s Tencent for sure and WeChat.

Ben: TikTok is Tencent’s miss. When you think about what each of those three companies were and their lose US allegory, you have Alibaba being the Amazon, you have Baidu being the Google, and you have Tencent being the Facebook-Twitter. It’s sort of the social. For both ByteDance and Musical.ly to come up developed in China under their nose and end up being today an $80 billion valuation company, is the first big credible threat to Tencent.

David: Yeah. Tencent is really motivated and interested in potentially acquiring Musical.ly. And that’s where shot across the bow from ByteDance launching TikTok internationally right around this time is super important. Once the dust settles, it’s announced on November 10th, 2017 that ByteDance, not quite sure Tencent is acquiring Musical.ly for between $800 million and a billion dollars. The exact number wasn’t announced, but it’s really interesting. You got to think about what drove that decision to sell to ByteDance. You have to think it’s the power of thinking about wow, look at these two platforms do together.

Alex actually takes some time off, but then comes back in and he is now running TikTok, all of TikTok within ByteDance and Louis, I believe, stays on fully all the way through ByteDance, but also if we were to sell and presumably sell for equity definitely to Kuaishou, potentially to Tencent, too, to one of these other companies, and we know now that we are going to have this direct competitor from ByteDance and TikTok all around the world, what kind of slog is that going to be?

Ben: It's a great point. It's interesting to know, too, the scale of both of these platforms at the time of the acquisition. It's like, what do they get for 800 to a billion? Musical.ly had 100 million monthly active users at this point and because of the scale of China, TikTok/Douyin had 500 million monthly active users. They're buying a big company at this point, not necessarily in terms of people or revenue, but that is a thing that tons of people around the world, and really the Western world use all the time.

David: Yeah. We'll get into this maybe [...] forward, but what happened otherwise a little bit. You have to imagine that Musical.ly didn't have a ton of leverage at this point in time because Facebook is already out. We don't know what happened, but unlikely that there's going to be an acquirer. You've got Tencent and Kuaishou interested. Tencent is probably the biggest point of leverage, but Bytedance is executing a build-or-buy right in front of them. There's very little imaginable path that Musical.ly either on its own or as part of Tencent is going to win as a big standalone network here.

Ben: Billions sounds like a big number and it was only up a little bit from the post money on the last round, but when you think about it, it's only $10 per monthly active user. When you think about what does Facebook make off a monthly active user per year in the U.S? It's like $25-$30. So, to be able to go and pick up what might be the next generation of social networks and get those users in perpetuity for $10 ahead, it's a steal.

David: Yeah, totally. They do the acquisition. Initially, Musical.ly and TikTok stay separate but then clearly this makes so much sense. Partway through 2018, they merged the platforms. They renamed Musical.ly as TikTok.

Ben: They don't. This is the craziest thing. I could not believe that this is how it worked because here's what I thought. You buy this and you already have the app installed in everyones phone. You deprecate the old TikTok in the Western world and you just rename Musical.ly to TikTok and boom.

David: Interesting. I assumed that's what they did.

Ben: Me too, and I can't quite figure it out why they did it the other way, but here's what they did. They dupe the backend database. So, they basically said, "If you have a Musical.ly account then when you log into the next generation of TikTok that we'll be putting in the App Store soon, you're entire account will be maintained, so your same credentials and everything.” But they actually created a new and combined app, put it in the App Store as TikTok and told everyone to go download it and say, "Download it and log in."

David: Interesting. You have to go download a new app. Musical.ly didn’t auto convert into TikTok?

Ben: I’m 90% sure. I love anyone to check my research on this and [...]

David: That is actually crazy. If that's the case, then everybody did migrate.

Ben: Here's the nutty thing. Bytedance spent a $1.5 billion over the next several months doing a massive ad campaign in the Western world for TikTok. They spent more than the actual acquisition in advertising dollars to make sure that they made a huge splash. Not only with new users and saying, "Hey, you should go check out this new TikTok app. It's great," but ensuring that all of the existing users moved over from Musical.ly.

David: I think we've seen this on a couple of episodes now, certainly on Disney Plus, our most recent episode. I think it's tempting as a technology company and especially as a social media company, but really any tech company, any consumer facing tech company to think that product and growth hacky distribution is always the key to success. That's wrong.

It's the key to success in the early days, when you are figuring out product/market fit and getting early growth, but then once you’re passed that point and you’re trying to go mainstream, you need to be spending and spending smartly marketing dollars. You need to be doing it on a scale that is going to get you to break through.

This is what Disney had done with other content forever, that they are doing with Disney Plus. This is what Netflix does, this is what Amazon does, this is what Facebook does, and this is importantly what Bytedance did in China, and had raised enough money to be able to do, learn the playbook there, and now they are running around the world.

Ben: Absolutely.

David: They merged the platforms in 2018. That's crazy. I didn't know that's all they did there. By the end of 2018, the combined platforms Douyin and TikTok have 500 MAU worldwide which is more than 2X Snap and already 50% of Instagram. It's the most downloaded app in the iOS App Store for all of 2018. Of course, downloads don't translate to retain users but still pretty impressive. Users spend an average of 52 minutes a day in the app which I believe is significantly higher than any other social network out there. This year, in 2019, TikTok has another 300 million MAU to get this to 800 million MAU total worldwide. They are approaching Facebook and Instagram scale here.

Before we wrap up history facts, we can't not talk about the coda here with Facebook and US, and China and everything going on between the countries and indeed between these companies right now. As we all know, 2019 hasn't exactly been a banner year for US and China political relations and we talked about this a lot in the first episode of the season on our Huawei episode. In January 2019, the think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics comes out and says that TikTok is a "Huawei-sized problem." I was thinking about this during our Huawei Episode. It could be potentially larger than a Huawei-sized problem in terms of a national security threat to the US.

Particularly, for many, many reasons, but one specific use case is that lots of military personnel use TikTok. There are many videos of people in western militaries, they are using it and TikTok is getting their location data, their facial data, biometric data through that, which the company is owned by Bytedance which is a Chinese Company. If the Chinese government were to request that data from Bytedance, even if they didn't want to give it to them, they would legally be forced to comply and give that data to the Chinese government.

Ben: This news changes everyday so this may even change by the time we even release this episode. The Bytedance executives are regularly asked this question and regularly say,"Oh no, we won't do that." But as you say, you would be legally—

David: They may want not to do that. Alex has talked about this. For the version of TikTok in the western countries, not Douyin, the data is actually stored in the U.S. I believe on AWS, on Amazon servers on the US. There’s that, but again, legally, it's owned by Bytedance. Would they have to give that data to the Chinese government if they ask for it?

Then this becomes even more acute in Spring of 2019 and through the summer and through today when the protest in HongKong start and interestingly, they're blowing up on social media all around the western world, particularly on Twitter and so much discussion of it everywhere, but interestingly, not so much on TikTok. Then people start asking the question, "Why aren't people talking about the HongKong protest on TikTok?" Is it because what TikTok says, "Hey, this is a platform for goofing off. This is for making fun, entertaining content," or is it because TikTok is censoring post about the protest?

Ben: Yup. So listeners, as you can imagine, it makes some US politicians uneasy and saying,"Wait a minute, this is a thing that's taking off our country. Surely, this must be subjected to CFIUS review."

David: The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which we talked about several times on this show.

Ben: Yeah. If a foreign entity wants to come in and buy a massive AI company or a massive defense company. It makes sense that the government would say,"Well, let us look at this first." We have this really interesting scenario here where these are both Chinese companies. One with the presence of the US, but tons of users in the US and now close to two years after this acquisition got done, there's now politicians calling to institute [...].

David: Yeah. Formally, a CFIUS review has been opened on the Musicl.ly acquisition which is two years ago, it's already closed in the past, but when it was done, there was no CFIUS review. I mean, (a) because I think people weren't really thinking about this at that time, but also (b) as you say, it was a Chinese company. Super interesting.

I mentioned Facebook. I think you know that all of what we said is true and these are really serious questions and potential problems and things for TikTok, the US government, the Chinese government, Bytedance, and all of the ecosystem to grapple with. At the same time, conveniently, who is out there fanning the flames of this fire and the controversy? Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Remember, 2016, Facebook almost bought Musical.ly and their number one priority, Zuck’s number one priority for that year was figure out how to enter China. Here we are in 2019, and Facebook is completely out of China and proud of it because they are under tons of political pressure (to put it mildly) here in the US. They also now have this emerging threat to their social network hegemony in the west with 800 million monthly active users in TikTok. November 2018, a year ago, Facebook launched Lasso which is their TikTok competitor.

Ben: Their latest attempt to make a really jank independent app that's a copy of.

David: Super jank, fails miserably. Then in 2019, this controversy really starts to grow. Just a couple months ago, in October, Zuckerberg gives a speech at GeorgeTown University where he calls out all Chinese-owned social media in general about these issues around national security, around privacy, and around censorship. But he specifically calls out TikTok and Bytedance as a national security threat and a threat to western values and ways of life.

He may not be wrong, this are super, super important questions but it's also a really convenient misdirect from the equally valid and important questions about Facebook's role in influencing elections, Facebook's own role in free speech, et cetera. It's against the backdrop of all of this that the CFIUS review does get extensiated this month, going back and relooking at this Musical.ly acquisition. It would be really interesting to see what happens. This is probably going to take more than a couple months. Heading into 2020, if CFIUS were to rule to try and reverse retroactively this acquisition, what would happen?

Ben: How can the US force two Chinese companies to uncombine? I guess there's US shareholders of Musical.ly and lots of them. Maybe even more than 50%. I have to assume its more than majority owned by venture investors given the four rounds that they did.

David: It's really interesting, going back to benefits true of what you said about how they integrated Musical.ly and TikTok and if they actually used the TikTok app, the core infrastructure, and migrated Musical.ly onto it. It seems crazy from a product decision, but I wonder if they were thinking about this, if this is now going to be an argument of a potential US. governmental review. This is TikTok. This was never Musical.ly.

The last piece of the puzzle here that we are definitely going to watch play out, a year ago when Facebook launched Lasso (which you've never heard off), it failed miserably. But just a couple of weeks ago at the beginning of November in 2019, Facebook and Instagram launched a test of a new feature in Brazil, in the Brazilian market that they are calling Reels. Just like when they launched stories and copied Snapchat, this is a much more fully-featured TikTok competitor in a new tab, natively within Instagram, so we'll see how that performs. The plot thickens.

It's interesting, one of the reasons we spent a lot of time talking about the core of how the product operates at Musical.ly and TikTok and the algorithmic recommendation, is (1) because that's the secret to the company's success, but (2) it may end up being the moat that protects them here from Instagram copying them. When you think about Snapchat, when Instagram copied stories, it was the same network model on Snapchat as this on Instagram of I'm following, I'm interacting with people I know, or people I care about, or influencers, or whatever. Here, it's not. Is Instagram going to be able to recreate algorithmic feed within Instagram? We'll see.

Ben: That's a great question. Maybe fundamentally different in the way that stories fit in nicely, this may not fit in so nicely.

David: Yeah. All right, acquisition category?

Ben: For listeners who are new to the show, we like to categorize an acquisition whether it's a people acquisition, technology, product, business line, asset, or other. I actually call this one an asset acquisition where the asset they were acquiring was the audience. They were buying distribution instead of paying to build their own distribution. I don't have enough context to know if they actually needed to buy the product or not. I looked at this more like buying distribution.

David: At some point, I can't remember which episode, maybe it was Zillow and Trulia, we added consolidation as a category. I think that's where I would go here.

Ben: It's born [...] when you add more nodes to the network.

David: Yeah. Even with all the differences we talked about, at the end of the day, this was the same product here, with different versions of it, but the same, filling the same need and use case. Just like Zillow and Trulia, or Rover and DogVacay, by being able to consolidate these two companies and these two user bases on both the creator and the consumer side, they were able to drive a lot more scale and network effect sooner.

Ben: I definitely buy that, which I'm going to hold my comments on until grading.

David: All right, the suspense builds.

Ben: I think we pretty much covered what would have happened otherwise. Do you want to go into playbook?

David: Yeah. The biggest thing for me is that I had no idea about all of these dynamics underlying how Musical.ly, TikTok, and Bytedance work, and this really orthogonal view to how all other western social networks operate in having content, being driven by the actual content, and algorithms recommending it as opposed to the people making it. I think this is a huge trend that is super important for entrepreneurs to be thinking about across all types of content companies.

Ben: Absolutely. I would dive into that, but I want to take one step back first and say the way to emerge as a new social network, there's a narrative violation here, whether or not you like the term narrative violation.

David: Yes, I love how Acquired finally made the New York Times for narrative violations. Amazing. Thanks, Erin.

Ben: A narrative violation for sure happening right now is that you can't create a new consumer social network like, “Sorry, we live in the post-Facebook world and that's not happening,” and yet, TikTok did. So, what happened? The way that I was thinking about this is initially, to emerge as a social network and sort of “the one,” it was simple. You could just enable people to communicate with each other with messages or whatever, wallpost, and show information about themselves. Things like basic Friendster or early Facebook. This was very primitive creative expression. It was basically just a communication channel. But the way to disrupt that world is to create a new canvass for people to easily be creative within.

This comes a little bit from Eugene Wei’s theory from this amazing post, Status as a Service, but you basically need a canvass that enables people to be creative without doing a lot of work and to have a large amount of variance in what can be created, because this will facilitate a new generation of creating, sharing, following, and thus TikTok was able to be explosive in growth by nailing the format of this new method for creative expression.

You can consider that basically like an amplifier for the work that one has to put in on what they can get out the other side. By enabling this new format, this new canvass that you have the ability to paint on and be more creative than you thought you can be, it naturally attracts people to it. Then you can bootstrap a new network on top of that. TikTok is about sharing with anyone where Facebook and Instagram where about sharing with friends.

David, this is where I want to bring in your point. There's a much higher K-factor or the viral coefficient when the content can get distributed to that much larger group. This really gets to your point of winner take all. It's really like diving into Metcalfe's Law, which is that aphorism that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users in a system or equals N squared. The flaw in applying this to the Facebooks of the world is that with something like Facebook, it's not actually N squared because when a new person I don't know joins Facebook, it's extremely unlikely that it actually increases the value for me. But with TikTok, that's not true.

David: It actually is N squared.

Ben: Yeah, this is a totally new type of network effect that we are looking at, that actually acts as a global system instead of a whole bunch of stitched-together bifurcated personalized systems.

David: As you were saying that, I actually think this trend and theme is even bigger than we've been talking about because for the last 15 years, the phrase “social network” has meant a technology-driven platform with a personal connections on it. It's just been like the friend model of Facebook, the follow model of Twitter, or Snap, or Instagram, or whatever.

It's just this implicit assumption that all social networks are based on relationships between people, but that's not at all what TikTok is. In many ways, YouTube is much more similar to this, too. The relationships are about the content and it's about relationships. It's one to many relationships between creators and consumers and unlike YouTube though, on TikTok, a much higher percentage of consumers also become creators.

Nowhere near 100%, not as high as Instagram but much much higher than YouTube because the barriers to creation is much lower because of the short-form format versus the long-form format on YouTube. Actually, I think you could make one of two arguments. Either that this represents a wholesale rethinking of what “social media” is or it's a different category altogether.

It's not social media, it's pure media, like UGC driven media and to this narrative violation of you can't create a new social network, maybe that's sort of true. If you think about how Snap came on the scene and competed with Facebook, it was a competing social network. It's just that they found a separate network of users, in younger users that weren't attracted to Facebook, but it was a substitute product and same with Instagram.

This is not that. It really isn't. Even though most of the users are young right now, that is not going to be the case forever. This is a network that's going to have a broad universal appeal just like YouTube because it's not about the people, it's about the content, and they can find the best content for you whether you're 9 or 90.

Ben: What you are really seeing is the purest distillation of social network versus social media in a way that we blur them together before. This is very much a social media, really not a social network, whereas if you look at something like Facebook, it's much more [...].

David: It's a social network.

Ben: Why TikTok has been so explosive is it's all the benefits of YouTube like true social media where someone creates content and it could benefit literally anyone around the world, not just their little community of people that they are friends with, but it's also the best of Facebook or Twitter where it satisfies that instant gratification, short-form, in-the-moment, bite-sized content.

David: Yeah. I love YouTube. We got to redo that episode because we were so wrong. But I'm never going to whip out YouTube while I'm standing in line waiting to check out at the register, but I might whip out TikTok because all of the videos are 15 seconds or less.

Ben: Yup, which actually this is a double-edged sword. This leads to my bear cases on [...] and there's a bear case that is SoftBank-invested, which is it's own bear case, and you can also say $80 billion valuation—

David: In Bytedance.

Ben: Yes, but the one that is more based on fundamentals, is...

Facebook has been entrenched in my life since 2005 or 2006 because it carries all the people I have ever met with me. And yeah, a lot of them fall off the network -- and maybe some moved over to Instagram and don't post on Facebook -- but that's based on a really solid bedrock of important things in my life.

With TikTok being so much about instant gratification -- and me not really knowing any of the people I follow -- will it actually have that sort of staying power that Facebook has had by having that social network that's important to you?

David: I think that's a really good question.

Ben: And to get back to our previous conversation, maybe social media has higher short-term value because of the incredible propagation, but social networks have more long-term staying power.

David: I think it is even more important for TikTok and other potential social media networks like it, certainly like Toutiao to constantly refresh with new fresh relevant content because that's the lifeblood. If the firehose of new content creation that is coming into TikTok everyday, if that dips or dries up, then the algorithms aren't going to have amazing new content to recommend to people and the value of the library of old content probably gets stale much more quickly than the value of digitizing your relationships with all your friends.

Ben: Which means the better comp here is actually YouTube than Facebook.

David: Yeah, totally.

Ben: Grading?

David: Let's do it.

Ben: I have a take. I was thinking about this before jumping on. The task of grading, if we think of ByteDance will make back the billion dollars they spent on Musical.ly with their current business model, it's tricky to back into that based on CPMs or average revenue they make today per user. To take a different angle at it, I want to talk about an episode we haven't done which is Facebook buying WhatsApp.

Without doing any research, I preliminarily think that's going to be an A and the major reason being Facebook seems to have a monopoly on being the dominant social network. That allows them to be the best marketing channel in the world to reach consumers targeted by demographic or interest. If you think about it, before TikTok there were six social networks with over a billion users. I looked this up a few minutes ago, it's in order: Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Instagram. This is global.

Facebook owns four of the six billion plus person social network or social media properties. If you take that lens on it, Facebook, which is a $200 billion market cap company only having to drop 10% of their entire enterprise value to protect against the greatest threat to them out there, it's actually still a fantastic move at that time even if they are not monetizing WhatsApp now. It's basically now a $20 billion insurance policy to allow them to keep printing that $20 billion in net income that they generate every year.

Bringing it back to Musical.ly, which is only a billion dollar acquisition, and if you believe that that was essential to enable TikTok to become the insane platform that it is today, somewhere between half a billion and a billion MAU. David, I think you estimated it at like 800 million.

David: Eight Hundred million, even though assuming nothing major changes, it will be a billion soon.

Ben: Yeah, it seems like a no brainer that it will be this sort of first legitimate challenger to Instagram, which is really what Snap was supposed to be but fell short of with only 300 million monthly.

David: But then again, I think the difference is, yes, Snap’s network effect was relegated to a specific demographic of people. I think there's a chance that's different for TikTok.

Ben: I think you are right. I think that's why if you take the top down market view and analyze it based on buying a ticket to attend that billion dollar social network dance, I absolutely think it was a fantastic purchase and probably one that will go down in history as one of the best ever, if (1) TikTok can hold on and can actually, to the point that we are talking about earlier, create lasting value, to have staying power, to be able to make sure that even though they don't really own those personal relationships that are an important part of your life on an ongoing basis, and (2) really start to turn on the gas and monetize like Facebook has been able to.

David: So, you are an A?

Ben: I'll say A.

David: Okay. I have one overarching caveat to all of this. I'm also going to be an A, but one overarching caveat which is all depending on what happens with the CFIUS review, that could throw a huge wrench in everything here.

Ben: It could be multiple of billions of dollars of lighting money on fire.

David: Totally. We are going to grade this just from a peer business perspective, assuming that there was no review of it happening when the acquisition was done over the last couple of years and let's assume that the acquisition doesn't get reversed. That's it. I'm also an A for, I'm not an A+ though, so I'm an A because for two reasons.

One, this is what makes Bytedance exciting. All of these dynamics, that's the reason why it was and is the highest valued startup privately held company in the world. They would have been completely fine without Musical.ly, but I think they would have had a very hard time penetrating into the West. They would have been able to expand outside of China into other Asian countries but getting into the West and specifically into the U.S. in such a big and quick way, would have been really hard. This is their path to do that one.

Two, as we talked about in acquisition category for consolidation, just generally for these two products in the space, combining them is going to allow them to grow much faster and with far fewer road blocks. Again, it all goes back to the flywheel effect between content that the creators are creating and the consumers consuming that content, and kneading the firehose of new compelling content by getting all of it all around the world onto the same platform. That's really going to drive things much faster.

I think it's not an A+ though, because to me, an A+ is like this one company and this one acquisition created a new category like an Instagram. Facebook was not going to succeed at doing Instagram on it's own, I forget what their clone was called. They needed to buy the company (where Apple and Next). I think that's why I'm not an A+, but with the caveat of CFIUS, totally agree I'm an A.

Ben: Cool. Do you want to do our first carve-out in a while?

David: Yeah, let's do it. I've got two saved up. One because we haven’t done it in a while and two, for the holidays. My first carve-out is the Nintendo Switch Lite. I bought it when it came out and it's awesome. I haven't owned a video game console in years, but I'm travelling for Thanksgiving so listeners, if my audio call is a little bit on this one, I apologize. It's just been so great. I played no new games on it. I just bought Breath of the Wild on Black Friday, but haven't played it yet.

Ben: You shared this with me a couple of weeks ago that you have a switch and you've only played the classic Nintendo games.

David: I've only been playing Super Nintendo games and then I bought a few. There are a bunch of both Indie titles and reissued games on previous consoles in the Nintendo EShop that are all so good. I'm not even that excited to play Breath of the Wild, I'm just enjoying going back and playing like Super Metroid, Castlevania, and all of these stuff. That's one.

My second carve out is Jenny and I were with my family for Thanksgiving and we went out last night and saw the movie Knives Out with Daniel Craig. I knew very little about it. I wasn't expecting it to be awesome, but it was really fun. Super great holiday movie, really well done.

Ben: I got to see it. Mine actually has to do with this episode, but I won't tell you how until the end so I'm going to recommend a Nine Inch Nails album from 2008.

David: I know where you are going on about this.

Ben: I remember discovering this in college. First of all, I'm a big Trent Reznor fan and a lot of the harder, more classic Nine Inch Nails stuff has when you’re really going to have some good speakers around and rock out. Unbelievable live shows. All of the soundtracks that he's done with Atticus Ross, including Social Network, Gone Girl, and most recently Watch Men have been awesome. He released this album called Ghost I-IV. It's a four disk album and it's actually my favorite music to work to. It's sort of deconstructed tracks, they are very minimalist tracks, and it's great to put it on think music.

My two favorite tracks on it are Track 26 on Ghost III, Track 29 on Ghost IV. You should go play both of those right now on Spotify because they are great, but the one I recommend today is Track 34 from Ghost IV which is the sample that is the base of the beat in Old Town Road.

David: So great. We'll link in the show notes. The New York Times did an awesome both a text piece and also a video reporting that is on YouTube, where they go and interview the producer in the Netherlands who used the sample and made the beat. It's so good.

Ben: It's awesome. It's one of the things where I always knew listening to Old Town Road, I know something like what this beat is but I never put two and two together and then watching that New York Times video, I was like, "No way. It's actually Trent Reznor under this whole thing." I just thought that was the coolest thing.

David: Amazing. Trent Reznor and Billy Ray Cyrus, Lil Nas X, and Tiktok. I’m thinking of the name of the producer from the Netherlands. But anyway, that is a true 2019 moment, if there ever was one.

Ben: Absolutely. All right, listeners. That is all for today. If you liked this episode or anything that we've done, please don't be shy about sharing it on social media or leaving us a review on Apple Podcast. We haven't mentioned that for a while, but it's an awesome way to help the show grow.

I learned recently that the iTunes charts are actually dictated by the number of subscribers per unit of time in the Apple Podcast app, so if you listen in a different app and you want to help us bumped up the charts, you should go and click subscribe in Apple Podcast. I think we are starting to get into that territory where we’re getting a bunch of nice organic traffic from people looking for new technology shows to listen to and seen us on the chart. Thank you so much for doing that, or leaving a review, or sharing with us. We really deeply appreciate you helping to grow the show.

David: By the way, if you are an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur and you’re thinking about making the TikTok for a podcast, get in touch with us.

Ben: David, I have so many; email you after this.

David: Awesome.

Ben: If you want to go deeper on any company-building topics, you should consider becoming an Acquired Limited Partner. You can click the link on the show notes or go to glow.fm/acquired and all new listeners get a seven day free trial. Lastly, if you want to join us with Dan Lewis at the Convoy Live Show here in Seattle, that link is at acquired.fm/liveshow. With that, thank you to Silicon Valley Bank and we will see you next time.

David: See you next time.

— Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

— Transcript: (disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)

#TikTok #China 🇨🇳#United States 🇺🇸#Podcast #Transcript

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hunterartemis · 4 years ago

Text

Media Bias (Avengers X Alien!Reader)

It was a request from anonymous reader and since I have limited experience with tagging, I am going to quote the person’s request here:

“ Hi can you please do Avengers x reader where the reader is like Starfire from og teen titans (but the reader is green and the blasts are blue) and the Avengers go on a talk show and the host is being very mean to her. Thanks”

So, dear anonymous. I hope you enjoy!“

Words: a whopping 4100

Y/n, open the door” I heard Sam thudding away on my door as I buried myself in the layers of blanket and put the air condition humid enough to cause a mini monsoon.

“Go away Wilson and leave me alone--” I bellowed on top of my voice.

“Y/n it’s been more than 7 hrs, you got to come out... whatever happened in the morning you gotta let it go--”

“I don’t wanna let it go... I am a national embarrassment--”

You must be thinking, what is the situation you’ve been dragged into. Let me pause there and rewind 17 hours back to give you a complete understanding which lead to this complete mess.

People think our story ended and sealed with Thanos never got to see what we go through in the New York penthouse. With the ongoing Pandemic on board, people are desperate to see us even more, as if it is the new Thanos and we are to defeat it. There is no greater sense of helplessness than playing the puppet of courage without doing anything. So whoever wrote that “after the defeat of big bad, the heroes rejoice” was a big idiot.

And thus, I found myself awake after hours, sitting alongside the broad glass panel that showed the completely stopped-in-time, shining in the dark cityscape of once bustling New York. A fleeting sense of desolation plagued me as I remember my own world in the verge of extinction. My breath almost stopped in the great worry of my fellow living being in this planet; the one who saved me from destitution--

“y/n, is that you?”A calm and concerned paternal voice broke the train of my thought. I sharply looked behind my shoulder to see a disheveled figure of man standing in the dark. By the tousled curls and the slouched hem of the sweatpants, I knew was Bruce.

“Urh, you startled me!” I said with a dismissive voice. I felt almost embarrassed to realize what I was thinking moments ago. I took a deep breath and tried to compose myself.

“It’s you who startled me y/n, what are you doing up so late?” Bruce said with a groggy voice rubbing his eyes rather irritatingly. “We have an important event to attend tomorrow first thing in the morning” he slowly moved towards from the shadowy part of the room to the path of dimmed light from the glass panel and spared a long glance at my face. The way he looked at me sometimes irritated me, because it was an inalienable fact that he fell into the same category of humans who express an unhealthy obsession with my kind: a scientist.

“It’s not like I enjoy staying up like you Lowly Human...I am as stressed for tomorrow as you are!” I tore my face from his ken to express my displeasure. In reply, he sighed disappointedly, which sounded patronizing in my already agitated mind.

“I wish you’d stop insulting my specie whenever you get upset...” he gently put his hand in my shoulder, but soon he withdrew and stepped back. “And what is that god-awful smell?”

Any female whether she is human or not is very sensitive to criticism, especially about how she appears, thus Bruce’s comment was not only offensive but hurtful as well. I could not restrain my anger and annoyance anymore, and I stood up sharply to face him “I just happen to wet myself in the rain yesterday at my detour downtown and it turns out it has too much sulphuric acid and it is peeling my skin away... right before when I am about to go up close on television.” My hand subconsciously moved up to my cheek, where flakes were forming in my otherwise jade smooth skin. “And you are telling me to stop insulting your specie... I will when you unicellular cretins will stop ruining your own environment—“ I folded my arms defensively, gazing away from Bruce’s face “--as if I don’t get ridiculed enough for my chrorophyllic skintone, and now I am shedding like a common reptile.”

“Alright alright I am sorry...” Bruce threw up his arms defensively, and his small paces back and forth showed his discomfort more than anything, “do you want something for your skin, CeraVe or something? I can fetch you some ice if you want?”

His apologetic gesture made my whole effort defeated; but my pride disrupted me from being apologetic “Forget it... as if those human manures would work on my skin—“ I heaved a sigh and looked at him again “must we do the thing? I mean I am not the only alien that set foot on earth in this decade, why must I be walked around like a showdog in front of all the people?”

For some moments Bruce did not answer me. I almost thought he was ignoring me, but then I realised that he must be contemplating on every word he wanted to say and every word that was running through his brilliant mind. Out of anyone in the team, Bruce was the visual hole, the less than heroic material: even with the Hulk. And for this, the society made sure that he would be self conscious for the rest of his life for his other identity. My annoyance almost melted to sympathy when I heard him speak in a rather frustrated voice.

“Y/N, I know that you are stressed about this and frankly I hate this stuff too, but this is very important for the people: for your people as well as ours. Not all things that come from the space are benign and people need reassurance that you are not hostile. I hate this too, but it is for the greater good!”

“Greater good, greater good... it is always for the greater good!” The same old daily whining of lofty agenda made me sick “I am sick and tired of these Brucie, I don’t want to do this anymore... I am tired about people asking me weird questions and cretins posing as scientists trying to push probes on me the first chances they get-- I wish I could just disappear with the portal that brought me in this cursed place!“

Bruce came closer and grabbed my shoulders gently “Don’t say that y/n... otherwise we wouldn’t have the means to counterattack all those aliens—“ my silence might have given him the cue that he wasn’t doing a very good job at convincing. His wavering eyes fixed on my face once again as he spoke “okay, here is a deal: how about it is the last time you appear in public, hm? Once you satisfy them that you are part of the team, I swear people will leave you alone... they left the Hulk alone too once they understood that he is one of the good guys!”

“No but...“

“No ifs and buts... go, and have some sleep. Let me look in the lab if we have some squalanes and peptide solutions lying around—“ he said with a paternal affection and disappeared into the dark passage which lead to his room

“Thanks Brucie you are the best—“

I couldn’t help but to smile a little. Humans!

...

“This is a bad idea I am telling you--“ I told Bruce with an hushed tone as the makeup artist went on with a puff on my face for the millionth times. The rest of my team was behind me, getting the same attentions to their dismay. I could tell Bucky was downright uncomfortable as his makeup artist had a hard time getting not distracted by his bionic arm; and Wanda was downright glaring at the man who kept flicking the brush on her nose.

“relax y/n, you are smart and you are friendly, you are going to ace this and trust me people are going to love you--“ Bruce said with gritted teeth to make sure no one could tell what he was saying. He almost flinched as some of the powder made into his nose and the makeup artist followed him up with a q-tip.

“My face is itchy...“ I whispered again, trying not to gouge my face out with my nails as the powder sat on the flaky part of the cheek. If this wasn’t a studio I would have scratched my face like a lunatic and ended up as someone who was attacked by a bear in the mountains. And I was glad that I was standing beside Bruce who knew how not to go overboard with the things. Clint would have brushed them off, Wanda and Bucky would have panicked, and Sam’s gestures no matter how genuine would have made me laugh.

“Wanda already told the makeup artist to spray you with Squalane, your face isn’t half as bad as it were yesterday night“ Bruce then went on politely gesturing the makeup artist to spray the stuff Bruce brought from the lab in a clear bottle, and the look on the Makeup Artist’s face was between annoyance and bursting into tears.

“Brucie...“ “I don’t wanna mess it up--“ I said nervously as we walked into the couch and settled with the others.

“Trust me you won’t... “ Bruce graciously consoled me.

The cameraman cued and we were all gestured to look into the main camera as the lights in front of us adjusted accordingly. Within all hustle and bustle, the host walked in like a royalty, and by the looks of his face and those following him with makeup and refreshment, he had a really bad morning.

“We will go on air in 3, 2 and 1”

“Good Morning America, this is your host Justin Fallon and welcome to another episode of The Early Show. Today we have with us some really special guests. You might know them from News, the murals, the comics and the Merchs please welcome our own global superheroes: The Avengers. Welcome to our show” the host said with an uncomfortable friendliness and turned towards us.

"Thanks for having us with you" Sam answered graciously, with a little awkwardness. I could understand why; it was always Tony, Steve and Natasha who spoke in public. After such a terrible loss, he is struggling to fill up their shoes for the sake of our public image. He had been wrapped up into a pretty bad controversy recently for succeeding as Captain America and it had a pretty bad toll on him—to the point his speech kind of went from cheerful to composed in an unnatural way.

"It’s been way too long since our morning couch looked so colorful and it surely brightens up the day.” The host said with an obligatory politeness. Although the term was innocent enough but it seemed not so—I instantly froze up and million things started flying inside my head: was I looking good enough, is my patches showing under the layers of power and squalane. Turns out it was not me alone. From the corner of my eye I could sense the tension behind me from Clint and Bucky and I know it was different than mine. The host must have wanted the old team, and looked like he was stuck with the mediocre leftovers.

“Thank you...“ Sam replied.

“So here you guys are after averting the big wipeout crisis, in the quiet and chilling, so how does it feel to be in the pensive from being hyperactive all the time?“

“Well, at first it did feel kind of boring and lack luster, but slowly we are adjusting to it. With the ongoing Pandemic crisis I think we just have to adjust to the situation. In a way, I think we are all helping each other by staying inside and recuperating.” Sam answered diplomatically.

“That’s so nice” the interviewer said quite curtly and then changing the topic he sharply turned to Doctor Banner “I know of all you people Dr. Banner will find this Lockdown Leisure slightly more comforting, isn’t that so Doctor Banner?”

Wait, what was that? Was that even normal? Sam was sitting in the front and after him Bucky, then Wanda and then Bruce. Should not he come gradually? Breathe... maybe I am reading too much into this. Keep a friendly face, don’t think too much... the entire nation is watching... this is the one time I have to do things right! It’s for me, my team who housed me and my people.

I had to give props to Bruce for managing things calmly despite his claims about public speaking. He politely replied “Well theoretically it should be but it’s not like causes of anger cannot exist within the so called peaceful environment if you think about it, but I am glad you showed your concern” and like a pro, reached out to the glass in front of him to sip some water—like some real celebs in talk shows.

“Isn’t that true! So Solaris, how does it feel to be surrounded by the icons of the earth?”

I wasn’t really ready for the sudden attention. For a second I blanked out completely and gaped my mouth like a complete idiot. My stupefied face must have been quite prominent because the host tried to laugh it off lightly to divert the attention. I am still wrapping my head around the fact how some humans work so beautifully under so much attention—If I could choose between blasting off alien armies and speaking in talk shows, I will take the aliens instead.

“I..I--It’s quite fun... there is never a dull moment with them--“ I manage to utter, and thankfully it wasn’t a gurgling sound from a deep abyss.

“The thing is, being the most newest member, you sort of have a mystery around you, the kind of a Blue Comet sort--“

“Oh thank you— “ great going me, like a real talk show celeb—keep it up!

“So why don’t we break that down... Solaris, is that true that you came from a whole another galaxy which is not Milky Way?” the Talk show host asked, reading from a small piece of card.

Finally, something I can talk about all day: stars, planets and galaxy. I will have to slay this, I chanted inside and replied after drawing a breath “Yes that’s true. I am from Planet Auriga from Pleiades system. Our Sun is Alcyone, the second brightest star right after Aldebaran. You people call our system Taurus Constellation--”

“--so much astrophysics, take notes kids they might ask you at the NASA interview.“ the talk show host interrupted. It annoyed me greatly because I could finish the words I worked so hard to speak confidently. So that’s how Bruce must feel all the time when people interrupted him when he explains things. However the host went on as if nothing happened “For a near human creature in this planet, do you identify more with the Professor X’s troop or with the Avengers?”

Near human creature? My race is literally the most Superior in all of galaxy.

“I don’t really understand what you mean...” I said as politely as I could manage.

“I mean isn’t it hard to fit in when you are the only alien in the group--“

The flippant remark was rude and I tried not to wrap my head around it. I recalled Bruce’s words to keep cool and maintain a neutral face replied : “I mean I am not the only one, Thor is also not of the earth and he is a darling to be around. Alien or not I think I have learned a lot about myself and the ways of earth by spending time with this wonderful people?“

I could hear the audience clapping and cheering with my reply. A surge of pride swept across my chest and I smiled slightly at the audience.

“How sweet--“ the host said, keeping with the cheerful mood “as the outer world people are coming into the planets, we think a lot of things are shifting, do you find it hard to cope into the earth from where you come from--“

Finally, a thoughtful question, I made a solid eye contact with the host and replied “No, the atmosphere is pretty much the same in Auriga, but I think humans can do a lot better taking care of the environment. I know for a fact that millions of planets and their lifeforms were extinct because of excesses I see on earth.”

The thoughtfulness of the host was only for so long “The girl’s been around... if you know what I mean—“ he commented with a little wink, and from the audience’s laugh I knew he didn’t mean something polite or mildly positive. After the laughter subsided, he turned again to me “I dig the midnight blue hair... it is so contradictory and yet it works“ he complimented “because you know scale and hair are not something we see very often in our planet--“

Excuse me, what was that supposed to mean?

“--so tell me are the lapis cascades all natural? I mean they are not dyed at all?”

“No they are not... the special keratin bond that reflect the blue pigment of the natural light but they are actually transparent—“ I added objectively.

“So that means in the right lighting you don’t need to mow the bush—“ the host said with a curved smile on his lips, and the audience went on laughing in the same manner they did moments ago.

Even under the blowing airconditioner, I started t feel really warm around my neck “I really don’t know what you mean; you are making any sense at all! Do you guys need special light to mow the bush, do you do in the solstices or during the eclipses—“ this time I didn’t hide the fact that I was annoyed.

“--she is really really funny you guys--“ the host again smiled and acted like I was a stone wall and my reaction didn’t register in his mind at all. “So you are saying you don’t mow your bush at all?“

“I live in a New York Penthouse, there is no bush--“ honestly if this wasn’t a dumb talk show, I would have taught this impudent human a lesson.

The host looked a little uncomfortable as our eye contact lasted for several seconds. He cleared his throat and went on “Okay you guys, she just clarified that there is no bush, so let’s move on to your...your look... I am so fascinated by it, it’s so reptile chic--“

What’s your fascination with cold blooded animals? Are you asking to die like one?

“Um, thanks...?!”

“So how do you manage to maintain this--“

That was honestly the last straw. This host is impolite and rude and he leeches off the discomfort of his talk show host. When this realisation hit, all my self-control and self preservation went out of the window. The vacuum was replaced by the sheer annoyance towards the host who deliberately mistreated us since the beginning.

“Do you think that’s how I live, maintaining my skin and mowing the bush--“ my pitch rose from my previous composed tone “I mean what kind of questions are these?“

The host was still wearing his phony smile on his face, but I could see the colour slightly draining off his face “No I was just asking, because the audience wants to know--“

“I think the audience is smart enough to understand that they cannot get the green skin on natural blue hair, so can you move on to a more sensible question?“ I answered heatedly and defensively at the same time, and as I spoke I felt the aura of tension shifting from discomfort to sheer panic.

“Y/n... don’t do this--” I heard Bucky whisper very faintly from above.

“Solaris, don’t get me wrong, but we don’t always get a green-skin hottie on the morning couch, don’t be offended!” he said while he gestured covertly to cut the camera on the other side. I have to give this man an applause , I could tell he had busted all his courage but he kept the face of nonchalance too good to be true—no wonder he sat on this chair for so long.

“What’s your obsession with the skin colour?—“ I said heatedly as I stood up from my seat “Don’t you dare cut the camera... don’t you dare! Do you think you humans are the epitome of beauty from which point everyone in the galaxy should confirm? I am sick of this... Everyone, I am so sorry for your wasted time but no more of this!”

“Solaris--“ this time it was Sam’s voice that implored me from the sides. For a split second I felt bad for him, because as Captain America, he would have to take the heat from the public. But I was at the point of no return. If I back out now, I would be called a pushover and I would have to endure that image for the rest of my life in the earth.

“You know what, as you are so obsessed with my looks, I would love to show you another thing of mine that is blue--”

Blast

So long story short, Solaris goes to a morning talk show, Solaris encounters a rude host and Solaris blasts him with her Blue Sun Beam. Biggest disaster ever!

The thudding outside the door would not stop, and honestly their over attention was getting on my nerves “honestly, why don’t you go away... what are you, my royal nanny?”

“Very funny Solaris... now come out and get some food--” this time it was Bucky who spoke. Although he was the shortest to reply, but it made me well up. He had the shittiest history amongst all of us: hunted, betrayed, manipulated and now sidelined—how can I see my problems bigger than him.

“How can I... I ruined everything, all the reputation you built throughout the year, I blew it up within 3 minutes, how can I show my face to you guys! I was supposed to be the superior being--“

A moment of silence followed. But then the old familiar calm voice spoke from the other side

“y/n... It’s not about superior or inferior, you were just very very honest with your feeling! sometimes it’s good for the public, sometimes it is not. I mean look at me--I have struggling with my anger all my life and god knows the stuff I have wrecked in Hulk state. It’s okay to make a mistake... no one blames you!”

“Ha ha right...“ I replied sarcastically, feeling mad about how well Bruce understood my situation.

“Honestly, the way you acted today... Tony would have been proud!”

I could not hold myself anymore. All the feeling that has been plaguing me until now: embarrassment, guilt, confusion, sadness... all came down like a thundering rain with that one statement. I rushed and slammed the door open and jumped on Bruce to embrace him into a tight hug. At first I could tell Bruce was taken aback, but soon his firm arms snaked under my back to hold me tightly.

“I am so sorry... I ruined you all--“ I hid my face in Bruce’s shoulder. Suddenly I felt a gentle pat on my back, I straightened up and looked, it was Sam. His awkward cautionary expression was gone and he looked cherry as the old days “As Captain America, I cannot condone your behaviour, but as Sam... well, that jerk deserved it--“ he reached for his pocket and took out his cellphone “and hundred thousand people in New York agree with you“

I looked at him with a curious expression as he gave me his phone. When I looked at it, it was a tabloid video that had the clip of me blasting the host and it had—

“Stars in galaxies!... 100K likes?” I exclaimed

“And look down, there are comments too--” Bucky scrolled down from behind my shoulder to descend to the white space.

That jerk deserves it, he was literally harassing her...You go Solaris #MeToo

Solaris is so cool, I wish I was as cool as her.

Ugh, I hate that morning show host, if I was in her place I would have thrown him off the stark tower, #SunQueen

Racists never change, and We stan our color positive hero #SolarisRocks

Humans...

...

Okay, that took a lot of time because at first I didn’t know how to work on the request, then I had to go back and forth and rewrite most of it two times because I wasn’t convinced it was good. So I sincerely hope it’s good because I am freaked out as hell.

I also gave reader a name because she is inspired by an alien character in TeenTitans called “Starfire”. So I call her Solaris, and was constantly reminded of Solar of Mamamoo (TMI)

I don’t hate on Fallon, I just used his name because it is recognisable by American public and I also had to see a lot of Jimmy Fallon’s show to write about the Talk Show plot. I was also greatly inspired by Naomi Campbell, RDJ and Nicki Minaj’s interviews.

#avengers x reader #alien reader #skin color #teen titans og #starfire inspired #yay I got a request #rude talk show imagine #avengers x reader imagine

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thewitchsstudy · 5 years ago

Text

An Old Opinion Research Essay

Made this last school year. It’s about MLMs (Multi-level Marketing) and why I think they should be illegal

Thousands of dollars. You don’t make thousands, you pay thousands. You don’t sell thousands, you recruit thousands. You don’t get paid to work, you pay to work. Welcome to MLMs, the most unethical world of business where everything is a scam. It deserves to be banned, gone from the reach of the people who run them. For the safety of the workers.

MLMs- Multi-level Marketing- companies pop up a lot in the modern day. Have you ever gotten a Facebook message from somebody, likely with an eye bleeding amount of emojis, claiming to know you from somewhere pitching a product? That’s an MLM worker, no doubt. While most see them as annoying at worst, these companies that these workers come from have been proven, as from testimony by former workers, the FTC, and multiple state lawsuits, to have destroyed finances, careers, friendships, and lives while breaking the law. Many have been accused of or been charged with illegal activity- operating a pyramid scheme.

Any amount of research will bring up how horrible some companies can get. Being repulsed at the practices is one thing, but how do we prevent them from harming workers? I argue a full ban on the practice. With already tight regulations and monitoring by the FTC, MLMs are in hot water. Still, illegal pyramid schemes manage to bypass the law and operate until it’s too late (hello Advocare, like your lawsuit?). The best way to deal with MLMs is simply banning the practice.

Bans may not be the best, but they can be necessary. Prepare to feel a mix of shame, disguise, anger, and bitter hopelessness for humanity.

Corporate can be a dictator. Many people, including former workers, heavily argue the point that many MLMs are morally and legally wrong. They have no base pay and hide under a “make as much as you want” claim. In reality, workers buy products from the company to sell to consumers, and when they don’t sell, often due to the terrible quality and horrible company reputation, they are essentially being paid under minimum wage with negative wage counts! Financial reports show that, during a year in an MLM, the majority percent of employees lost money, some broke even with joining packages and product costs (which cost thousands of dollars), and less than 5% made money, and less than 1% reached or exceeded the annual national minimum wage ($15,080)

In addition, workers who quit MLMs are often shamed by supervisors and friends still in the company. They get harassed online through texts and Facebook for breaking free. Friendships are broken in split seconds. Lives are left fragments of what they once were. Families fight and argue and refuse to communicate with each other due to associating with these companies. A video by Vice News, which is highly recommended to watch, tells the stories of women who have left MLMs and the shame that was placed on them. In addition to their terrible financial situation, it documents how much shame was put on these women who are left friendless, leaving friends for the company and leaving the company with fake “friends”. MLM workers are encouraged to sell to family and friends, and one worker has stated that “every conversation turned into a sales pitch”. Any human would leave a friend who did that.

On the other hand, people argue that MLM products are legit and that they are perfectly legal and not pyramid schemes. They say that, without legal action, MLMs are fine to operate. They argue that a pyramid scheme is a solid definition that requires many boxes to be checked, and that MLMs don’t check enough. They may call them “Anti-pyramids”, which is a funnel and shows more on the top than the bottom and the money still goes to the one guy on the bottom and that’s still a horrible business model for a dozen reasons, but that’s beyond the point. These could have good backing to them. When the research is done, however, even on social media, these people are often corporate workers who run these MLMs and bank millions or other workers (who many call “Huns”) who are in denial about their workplace being a scam (they may also be arguing this case even if they understand the truth).

It is also important to understand that the other side will defend their word with flamethrower and shield, even if the flamethrower is a knockoff that doesn’t even work and the shield is a sad excuse for a thing made of atoms. Workers post pictures online of their new “expensive” things they bought with money from their “job”. Many have debunked these as fakes, including noted images of clearly empty bags that were supposedly filled with stuff (classic fake-rich tactic right there). This is easily found, since if the poster refuses to show a top view or take the items out, you don’t trust that anything is in the bag. Many in the Anti-MLM community realize and share their findings on how the evidence and claims made by these people are next to nothing in value. It makes them incredibly petty and decays their point. Like rotting flesh.

Most of that evidence is little slaps to MLMs. The big problems come when states start suing them. Oh, yeah, MLMs from Advocare to Young Living to LulaRoe have been sued for years. States, ranging from Idaho to California, have accused these companies of operating illegal pyramid schemes. Warehouses have sued LulaRoe over not receiving payment for storage. LulaRoe has been sued over cross-state taxation (taxing buyers in states with no tax who purchase from workers in states with tax). Federal government agencies have reprimanded MLMs as well, most noticeably in a case against Young Living where a man died in a distillery due to severe safety code violations, such as lack of training and not providing respirators in the high-chemical environment. Note, these are only some well-known companies and their well-known lawsuits.

Deception is rampant in MLMs, and consumers are being lied to almost constantly. Young Living used to claim a Seed to Seal standard and having 100% pure essential oils. Not only was it revealed that they source from multiple farms, which makes the Seed to Seal claim highly unlikely, independent lab tests show birch and jasmine oils produced by the company were, in fact, synthetic. Worse, one study done by the State of California showed higher than acceptable levels of a chemical known for producing cyanide inside the body in Young Living’s oils. This was not mentioned anywhere by Young Living- not on the bottle, not online, not anywhere, which is an offense in California. They were, like previously, sued over this serious health and safety matter since they sold their products in the state.

It should be obvious that Young Living’s products are not the most trustworthy, regardless of your opinion on essential oils. That could be applied to all MLM products. LulaRoe leggings are notorious for ripping, even in the first wear. Herbalife’s powders and mixes, especially their soup reportedly, have been called by people such as John Oliver as tasting “like wood shavings” (this was a continued joke in his televised segment on Multi-level Marketing, another good watch for more info). When looking at prices, such as LulaRoe leggings costing $30+ bucks for a quality $10 Walmart leggings with better, non eye-bleeding designs far surpass, the word “scam” pops up in New York City lights.

John Oliver in his segment also went into detail on how, while distributors lose thousands on MLMs they work for, their founders and CEOs can afford meetings that I can only describe as an 80s metal concert if everybody there was on some serious drugs. Some things that occur range from overly enthusiastic live announcers, CEOs coming out as “Welcome to the Jungle” plays, and screaming at the grave of a man named Joe Nobody, dated 1952- about how much he could’ve done with his life if he had just joined his MLM. Are laughing out loud at the thought of all this? It’s real, and you can find the Joe Nobody clip and more in the John Oliver episode online. It’s on-the-floor-laughing levels of ridiculous. One can only imagine being at any MLM meeting, host, worker, or random guy, in person is an accurate simulation of an acid trip for all parties involved.

How does this add up to a pyramid scheme? With the previously stated knowledge in mind, look at the employees. Those Facebook messages from before? Those can be recruitment messages. These often target mothers, those of color, and those of specific religions depending on the MLM. For example, LulaRoe often has single or unemployed mothers as distributors. On its website, the FTC notes that promises of extravagant lifestyles, wealth, and “high-pressure tactics” during recruiting are prominent red flags for any business. Guess who milks these until the cow runs red? MLM recruiters. While I don’t trust Reddit for factual info often, there are credible accounts of this practice on such subreddits as r/AntiMLM and r/LuLaNo.

The big problem is that MLMs may pay their employees for recruitment. The FTC says that “Your recruits, the people they recruit, and so on, become your sales network, or ‘downline’. If the MLM is not a pyramid scheme, it will pay you based on your sales to retail customers, without having to recruit new distributors”. The way it often works when a Pyramid Scheme is in place is that those higher up in the pyramid get a percent of commission from those they have recruited, those recruit’s recruits, and so on. Pyramid schemes require active participation for this often only check, which requires more money for products that will never sell and, as the saying goes, “get left in a garage.” The FTC notices this is a practice utilized by pyramid schemes. A former LulaRoe (funny how LulaRoe pops up so much) worker high up on the corporate ladder on the previously mentioned Vice News clip claims to have been receiving these commissions, with checks from the company proving it. MLMs have systems of ranks, which are often named after anything from crystals to management positions, and guess what those more than not focus on? How many people you recruited. Higher up you are, the higher percent of commission, the more money you get.

That, fellow readers, are the bones of pyramid schemes. You don’t grow a business with a stable customer base and happy employees, you make more people fall into it and destroy their lives. Former work testimonies say that supervisors actively encourage recruiting over selling. It’s a cycle of new and quitting members.

It should be obvious. Horrible quality, product not worth the price, constant lying to consumers, lawsuits galore, and the foundation of a pyramid scheme and its culture are what make MLMs scams, unethical and borderline illegal. We, as consumers and workers, should call for a ban on this business model to protect sales and underclass workers from a practice that harbors illegal schemes. If a company wishes to grow, it should in an ethical way that isn’t a pyramid scheme coverup! The FTC says that pyramid schemes “can look remarkably like legitimate MLM business opportunities” and so taking part in any MLM is a risky venture to the highest degree. Even legit MLMs have the same issues as pyramid schemes, since the lack of buying due to terrible reputation causes equal wage and financial issues as stated earlier. MLM and pyramid scheme operators milk money from their employees. As Bo Burham’s song “Repeat Stuff” says, they’ll “stop beating this dead horse when it stops spitting out money.” We need to stop them from beating the dead horse of MLMs so they can’t collect the money it spits out at them. And the best way to get rid of a dead horse is to bury it.

Bury the horse, they cannot get the money. Will you grab a shovel and start burying it, or will you watch as people continue to beat it?

#thewitchsstudy #mlms #antimlm #anti mlm #mlm scam #essay #research #research papers #opinion papers #school papers #please do not think I am against gay people when I say I am antiMLM #I mean the business practice not lgbt #hell I am lgbt #studyblr

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orokinarchives · 6 years ago

Text

Nora Night Dialogue

(Nightwave hype image)

Nightwave focuses on one particular story at a time, termed a "Series", beginning with The Wolf of Saturn Six as Series 1. While a Series is running, Nora presents a list of Acts, or challenges, for the Tenno to complete. Completing Acts will reward Nightwave Standing. Nora will give rewards upon reaching certain tiers of Standing (every 10.000 Standing), including a special currency which can be used to purchase rotating offerings. The Standing and currency are particular to each Series and expire when the Series ends.

Radio Scanner

Nora Night will occasionally broadcast messages over the Radio Scanner in the Tenno's Orbiter.

(generic)

"Hey there, Dreamers. You hearin' me? I know you are. No need to say anythin'. A hand in yours, a voice for the speechless, a bedtime story for the sleepless. The name's Nora Night, and I got somethin' to say, sweet things. Nightwave is coming."

"A voice in the night, a half-remembered dream, rising to the surface of your consciousness, from backbrain to forebrain, a sound to a vision, pullin' up and… knockity-knock. Hello, Dreamers. Let's get to know one another."

"Hey, Dreamers. We are up and ready to party."

"To all of you driftin' out there in the black, mark the frequency. The time has come to act together. To open our eyes and gaze with utmost clarity past the present and into a future we create. Shoulder-to-shoulder. Mark the frequency."

"An echo, from long ago: 'For ten years I have been polishing this sword. Its frosty edge has never been put to the test. Now, I am holding it and showing it to you, sir: Is there anyone suffering from injustice?' Keep livin', Dreamers."

"In a world like this, it can be hard to have hope, when the man owns the system and the system serves to save the man, from us. But I'm here, Dreamers. To help you pierce that false fog. We'll chase it away with acts of beauty and – succeed or fail – face the foe, eyes open. As someone once said: 'If nothing saves us from death, may love at least save us from life.'"

"Acts of defiance, acts of generosity, acts of sacrifice… this is how we turn this system 'round. I'll take you there, Dreamers. I'll bring you back."

"Hey there, Dreamers. The Devil is home and the shades are up. That's right… it's just you and me, passin' each other slow and with a nod sayin' all that needs sayin'. I'm Nora Night, sayin'… you live with wolves, you better act like one."

"It can be tough as a kid. All sorts of people have it over you. People will kill you inside, kill you and forget your name. You grow up. They grow old. You remember. They don't. They just keep doing what they've always done, only to someone else. Then, one day, they call you friend. And you wait. And you wait. You wait 'til they can't trust you any more than they do. And then you ask them if they enjoyed their dinner. And, looking into their panicked eyes as they gasp their last, you tell them your name. And you nod. 'Yeah', your eyes say to theirs. 'That was me'. And then you leave. And the System is a better place. Be smart, Dreamers."

(events)

"Nora has it on good authority that Rail pirates are hungry after a cold weekend, sweet thing. Check your mags and keep the gas tanks full."

"Well, bad news, foodies: the Corpus are scrapping plans to bioengineer food from hazardous waste. Diners reported everything tasted like vermink… then exploded. Back to the lab, you crazy kids."

"Ah, Nef Anyo ain't best pleased by the actions of some of our friends. [deep sigh] Keep your heads down, Solaris United, and steer clear of Officer Friendly."

"Now, I hear remarked that Nef's obelisk is lit up for another of the big man's showcases, parties, soirées, whatever. On the invite list is anybody who is anybody, and nobody who is nobody. Even Nora Night didn't get an invite. Shame on you, Nef Anyo, for I am delightful."

"Grineer Galleons kickin' up dust all the way from Venus to Pluto. Watch your backs, people."

"A little bird tells me that nasty ol' Nef Anyo's got somethin' up his sleeve for the good people of Fortuna. But I have it on good authority help is on the way. Keep the faith, people. Sunshine is just around the corner."

"Well, it's early where Nora is, and, as she wipes the sleep from her eyes, she wonders… does Unum ever leave that Tower? Can she leave that Tower? Who is she? What is she? Someone in Cetus must have answers. Come on, sweet things. Give it up."

"On this cold and lonely eve, spare a thought for tractor jockeys, Rail agents, and lone travellers making their way. Trying to bring a little joy to people's lives, one shipment at a time."

"Nora has it on good authority that the enterprising Corpus are clearing out ice out of newly-discovered tunnels. For what purpose, she wonders?"

"Well, it's a lazy night between the stars for you and me, while out there, the System is still on fire. Grineer on Corpus, Corpus on Infested – and in between, the little people like you and me, well, we're just tryin' not to get stepped on. Here's to us, Dreamers."

"Nora here. The Red King is at the dance. But listen… as you drift between the stars, Nora wants you to know you ain't alone. Mm-mm. We're all of us a kinda family out here, ain't we? All of us. The multitudes. Driftin' and listenin'. But you need to remember: It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep may be. It never troubles the wolf."

"Somethin's out there, Dreamers. Nora can feel it. Pullin' at her waters like the moon pulls the tides. Somethin' big, an' somethin' old. It knows us. What will it say, I wonder, the day it steps up to our door and knocks?"

"We're out of the night and into the dawn. Still hangin' on in a System on fire, thanks to the good work of people like the Tenno. That's a thank-you, from Nora to you. Wherever you are."

(personal)

"Do you feel the next world press close, on these late nights, Dreamers? Nora does. She feels the presence of those she lost, the great and the good. Gods and ghosts. We are watched – bet on it – by those who dwell in the direction we cannot point to."

"Flattery, flattery charges my battery. Some people ask where they can send me gifts. Some want to take me out to dinner. One lonesome ol' Rail agent even asked Nora to marry him. Nora ain't the marryin' kind, but thank you. Was in love once. With a man. Face of an angel, morals of a chainsaw. We all have a type, don't we? Against which we must be forever on guard. But damn, he looked good in a suit."

"Dreamers, it's on these long and quiet nights I ask myself: How could I do more, and do it better? And then, something I read a long time ago whispers in my ear: 'All human activities are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure. Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.' And, Dreamers, I pour myself a drink."

"People ask me if it gets lonely out here. I say, lonely? Naw. I got all the company I need. I got you, sweet things. Ain't nothin' for Nora in the real world, 'cept trouble. Trouble, and a few yahoos she could box for a century without a tea break."

Opening Nightwave

"Now, just in case some of you ain't doin' all this outta the kindness of your hearts…."

"Nora's got the goods for one lucky Dreamer. Who's it gonna be?"

"Now, y'might be wonderin' if I'm holdin' back on y'all. Hmm, Dreamers…."

"Nora is all about incentivisin'."

"Who have we got on the line? Oh yeah, I don't have a line."

"Always a pleasure."

"What's on your mind, Dreamers?"

"It's that time again, Dreamers."

"Welcome."

"Shall we?"

"Hey."

(upon viewing Episode 1 of a series) "Greed. Brutality. Oppression. True stories, all, and the System is full of them. Dreamers? You listening? The System needs you performing your good deeds for the day. Nora needs it. Needs you to act. To change things. Hear the news, Dreamers. Hear it, or be it. Your call. Because in Nora's System, no good act goes unrewarded. This is Nora Night. You're listening to Nightwave."

(when the Tenno reaches Rank 1, variant) "Well well, looks like things are kickin' off."

(when the Tenno reaches Rank 1, variant) "And we are away."

(when the Tenno reaches Rank 1, variant) "Nora wants to reach out to all of you and say: welcome to the family."

(when the Tenno advances in rank, variant) "Nora sleeps better knowing her Dreamers are out there, workin' to lift us up."

(when the Tenno advances in rank, variant) "Don't stop believin', Dreamers."

(when the Tenno advances in rank, variant) "You keep bein' you, Dreamers."

(when the Tenno reaches Rank 15, variant) "We got as many miles behind us as we do before us, but, Dreamers, we got this."

(when the Tenno reaches Rank 15, variant) "Sometimes the end never seems further than when you're halfway there. But I'm here to tell you all that you got this thing beat."

(when the Tenno reaches Rank 30, variant) "Some are born to greatness. Some have greatness thrust upon them. The rest of us, we just have to work at it. You all know who you are."

(when the Tenno reaches Rank 30, variant) "Never doubt yourselves, Dreamers. This System's up for grabs, and we are comin' for it with both hands, yes we are."

(when the Tenno reaches Rank 30, variant) "Ain't no stoppin' someone who knows their worth. Nora's feelin' good about the state of things tonight, yes she is."

Exiting Nightwave

"Let's get back to it."

"Til then."

"Ta ta, lovelies."

"It's time for Nora to say goodnight."

"You know it."

"Let's check what's next."

"And we're out."

"That's all we have time for."

"Comin' up next."

"That's all from me."

"Yeah."

Completing Act

"Ladies and gentlemen, listeners of all ages, I present to you, walking amongst us, the once and future badass!"

"Dreamers, I have for you a tale of triumph over adversity. Of one person actin' true to their truest self."

"Word's comin' in of so many of you bein' your best selves. Nora is just beside herself with admiration."

"Things seem tough, Nora knows, but believe: though it's going outta style, there are people workin' to make this System a better place."

"Dreamers, Dreamers, Dreamers! There just is no holding you back!"

"Get comfy, Dreamers; one of our own believes they are the equal of our foe and, baby, they are actin' like it."

"You wanna hit those high notes, you gotta mean it."

"If it's useful, do it."

"Any y'all see the feeds light up? It's goin' down, kids."

"Well, well, well. Looks like some serious crud is going down out there. Here's to you, anonymous troublemaker."

"From little things big things grow, Dreamers. I believe in you all."

"Many things have been taken from us, it's true. But Fortune favours the bold… and there ain't none so bold as people with nothin' to lose.

"You're making waves, Dreamers. I can feel it."

Nightwave series

Series 1: The Wolf of Saturn Six (27 Feb 2019 – 19 May 2019)

Intermission (12 June 2019 – 05 July 2019)

Series 2: The Emissary (06 July 2019 – current)

[Navigation: Hub → Dialogue → Nora Night]

#warframe #dialogue #lore #nora night #nightwave #radio legion #wolf of saturn six #radio scanner #orokin archives

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reportwire · 3 years ago

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Episode 198: How to Analyze Food Sensitivity Results w/ Detective Ev How to Analyze Food Sensitivity Results w/Detective Ev

Introduction [00:00:00] Detective Ev: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show on analyzing results for food sensitivity testing. We are continuing our series where we go over live lab results. Today will be a little quicker and I will be by…

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agilenano · 5 years ago

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Agilenano - News: Why SQLite succeeded as a database (2016)

Brought to you by This week we talked with Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, about its history, where it came from, why it succeeded as a database, how it’s development is sustainably funded, and how it’s the most widely deployed database engine in the world. 84 minutes Recorded Apr 30, 2016 Published Apr 30, 2016 Download (60MB) Toptal – Join the best, or hire the best engineers and designers! Email Adam ([email protected]) for a personal introduction to our friends at Toptal. SQLite Home Page GDBM fopen(3) - Linux manual page Bruce Perens - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Welcome back everyone. This is the Changelog and I am your host, Adam Stacoviak. This is episode 201 and today Jerod and I are talking to Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite. We talked to Richard about the history of SQLite, where it came from, why it succeeded as a database, how its development is sustainably funded and also how it’s the most widely deployed database engine in the world. Our first sponsor of the show today is our friend at Toptal. And you know if you’ve been listening to show that we love Toptal and one of the interesting things about Toptal is being able to take control of your career, being able to work on technologies you’re going to work with, being able to work with the companies you want to work with, choosing your own salary, being able to travel. I talked to Asael Arenas, the Community Manager for Toptal in South America and I was blown away by what this guy had to say, so take a listen. “To be tied to a desktop these days is something that is not necessary for developers. If there are still developers - and I’m sure there are a lot of developers who’re still tied to their desktops, I will let them know about Toptal, about this company that will give you the opportunity to drive your own career. You can decide how much time you want to work, how much you want to earn, where you want to work from, when you want work. So what else? All that is possible.” Alright, that was top Toptal’s Community Manager for South America, Asael Arenas. He’s living a dream, he’s traveling the world, he’s getting paid, he’s doing what he wants, he’s choosing his own path, and if that’s what you want to do call up on Toptal, toptal.com. Tell them that Changelog sent you. If you want a personal introduction, email me [email protected]. And now on to the show. Hey everyone here, today we’re joined by Richard Hipp. Now, Jerod, this is a deep topic because SQLite or SQLite (different pronunciation) - we’ll debate that during the show - is such a prolific, widely-used technology. This is something you pointed out, in terms of this technology to kind of interest you, so maybe we should open up with why, why did it interest you so much? Why it interested me was basically for the ubiquity of it. You know, it’s one of those technologies… I think, I’ve said before on the show - I think it was the cURL show - we were coming to software development around the year I guess 2001, 2002… Anything that predates my inception into software, I just kind of assumed it always existed. And so this is one of those programs that I just haven’t thought about in the historical context, until I saw something like an article, I think the Guardian article which was actually written back in 2007 but still seemed pretty poignant until this day, and got to just reading about… You know, I knew what the technology was, but reading about the technology and how many - I mean it’s just like in almost every device in the world. And it’s public domain, super interesting. So I said, “Oh, we gotta get this guy on the show”, and Richard, thanks so much for joining us. So here’s the way we kick off the show - diving a little deeper, especially Richard to someone like you, who’s got a deep, rich history of software development; kind of figuring out where they came from, what made them get into technology in the first place. So take us back to as early as you want to that got your influence, that got your feet wet in technology. What were the first steps that got you into software development? [] When I was in the 9th grade, I saw all a Teletype connected with an acoustic coupler 110-baud modem to a mainframe computer. And I said, “I’ve got to learn to program that.” And I went to the school library and I checked out every single book about computers in my high school library, all three of them, and I read them cover to cover that night. And I got an account on that little computer and started programming away in BASIC. Saved up my money… Shortly after that, the Apple I came out, and I was about to buy the Apple I and the Apple II came out. And I bought just the motherboard for an Apple II. Got it. Had to build my own keyboard, my own power supply, sorted it altogether. The first board I got didn’t work. I called up Apple, they put me through the technical support and Steve Wozniak answers the phone. ..and said, “Oh, yeah. Send it back. We’ll send you another board.” They sent me another motherboard and that one worked. That’s how I got started in computers, trying to write programs in 4K of RAM, and that 4K included the video memory. So that’s how I got started. I went to university, studied Electrical Engineering, didn’t do anything with computers for a while. Coming out of university with a master’s degree, I took job at Bell Labs, and the first thing they did was sit me down in front of a console, running Unix, and I learned Unix and C, and work there for a few years, quit, went back to graduate school, came out of graduate school in 1992. Back then getting a tenure track position was really, really hard. There were hundreds of candidates for any open position, and I was not the best candidate. My application was near the bottom of the stack, and so I just started my own company, just developing bespoke software, solving hard problems for people. That company has been in business now for 24 years. In the course of doing that one time we had a problem where we needed a database engine. We were using Informix. The customer said [\] Informix and, you know, that’s a big hassle to set up and stuff for development purposes. We needed something simple. We used Postgres for a while, that worked well for development. But it was read-only, the database was read-only, and I thought why can’t we just read this database directly off of the disk? And so I just said, “Well, I’ll write my own database engine.” So I wrote SQLite and I got to be real popular, and here we are. That might be the purest love at first sight type of a story in terms of technology I’ve ever heard. It was just like I saw it and I thought, “I’m gonna go get every book from the library I possibly can and I’m gonna do this.” Yeah, that was a lot of fun, playing with computers in high school, but I stayed away from computers all through college. It should also give anybody that’s new, I guess, you should say - it’s the easiest way to say it - some inspiration, because you cared so much that you created your own hardware to access the motherboard that you had bought from Apple. To me, that’s determination. That’s the purest, simple version of determination I’ve ever seen, because… By any means necessary, you had to. Right? You didn’t … Yes, that’s all you had to do. And, you know, we didn’t have computer monitors of any type. You had to video output, you had to modulate it to RF, into the RF range and hook it into the antenna wires on a TV set. And of course, with the limited resolution a TV set, the whole screen was 40-characters wide and 24 lines long. We thought it was magic. It was the most amazing thing in the world. [] Well, take us back to that. Share with us if you can, Richard, a magic – a story of a magic moment then. Since it’s such magic to you, if you can remember back to those times when you were first enamored by this thing - what story can you share that sticks out most to you about something magical? You know, it’s hard to say… There’s just something magical about making things work. I’ve always liked building things from scratch and making things work. That goes back in my family, my father’s the same way. When he builds things… My father is sort of the original maker. You see the makers now, but modern makers, they always have computers built in. The things my father makes usually involve an internal combustion engine of some sort. But it’s the same idea. I just do it with abstractions on a computer screen. Writing programs is a really, really interesting thing, because we can build entire worlds out of just pure thought stuff. We don’t have raw materials, it’s just pure ether, and it materializes, and it becomes a whole other world. That makes me think of a very specific domain where that other world comes into the real world, which I think nowadays is somewhat considered a solved problem, but I think probably you faced, at least when you were getting started, which is printing. Do you have any memories of the early days of printers? I mean, did you have to write your own drivers? How did printers originally…? Yeah. We just… I didn’t print things out. [laughs] It’d go up on the screen and you’d write it down. Printing was not an option. I looked at ways of making my own printer. You know, they had daisy-wheel printers that would print things, but that was a lot of money and I didn’t have any money back then. You’re thinking 1977, the Apple II motherboard costs $600. That was just the motherboard, and that’s $600 in 1977. Jimmy Carter was President of the United States. That would be like paying thousands of dollars today for just the motherboard, and it had 4K of memory on it. Printers were ridiculously expensive. I did manage to get a hold of a used electric typewriter and I played around trying to figure a way to get that to be my printer, but it turned out that that electric typewriter was mostly mechanical, there was not much electrical interface to it. So that didn’t work out well. I would figure out a way to hook up an internal combustion engine to this electric typewriter exactly… Yes. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned that you went away from computers in college and I read that you got a philosophy degree, or you got a Doctor of Philosophy from Duke… Can you talk about your college years and why did you move away from software and then why did you move back? Well, so as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, I did electrical engineering, and I stayed away from software because I think that was easy. I knew how to do that already, and I wanted to learn new stuff. So I did digital signal processing, which in the early 1980s was a really phenomenal thing. This was brand new stuff. Now everything is digital, but back then it was just the beginning of the digital age. [] I’d never taken him a computer programming class until I went to Duke in graduate school, and I studied in the Department of Computer Science there. It was computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and my thesis was on a speech recognition system and a dialogue system. I figured really cool ways, I devised some really cool things for resolving elliptical utterances and anaphora. It was interesting work, but once I left - I did that for five years at Duke and left that and never looked back. I haven’t done anything with it in two and a half decades. Maybe eventually. I’m not in any hurry. You know, people get really enamored by AI and that sort of thing these days, but I lived in it for five years and I still think that a lot of the hype is just that, it’s hype. I think the Alpha Go situation - I don’t know if you have to speed on any of that, with the AI program beating the Go champion. That was a significant event. And the IBM thing, the Watson thing - that was significant. These were significant, but still there’s a long way to go. The material available to people these days compared to what I had is enormous. I mean, what I wouldn’t have given when I was in graduate school to have this Internet full of text that I could study. Just getting a corpus of text to use for analysis was really, really hard in the ‘80s. Whereas now you can trivially download gigabytes of it, and that helps. It is moving the field forward. But if you read newspapers and magazines, you’ll think that HAL 9000 is just around the corner, but I don’t think so. Yeah, I think from those seeing it from the inside. Even though, as you said, the major milestones and we are daily making advancements, but as people who work in software day in and day out, I think we definitely see a different angle at that the world of software advancement than other people … We still have trouble getting graphical user interfaces, right? Let alone something, you know, that understands itself and is self-aware. I mean, forget it. Yeah. So I read an interesting tidbit on your Wikipedia page which – I don’t even know if the fact itself most is interesting… I mostly want talk about it because it said there’s a citation needed, and I thought, “Can a podcast be a citation?” If so, we can get one right here. You can confirm or deny this, and we can go on and edit Wikipedia when we’re finished with this call. It says, “He married Ginger G. Wyrick on April 16, 1994, changed the name of his company to Hipp, Wyrick & Company, Inc, and signed all stock over to his new bride.” I did. She’s is the president of the company. It turns out I had to buy half of that stock back from her at one point. Yeah. We were working for a company and of course I was the prime on that company, and they insisted that I be a significant shareholder in the company. So we went out to eat, we declared a business meeting and I handed her a $50 bill and took 50 shares of stock. Ginger is a musician, so we are yin and yang. She’s very prolific, and all of her stuff comes through the same company. She’s the president. I am Head of Research. Yeah, why not? It seemed like a fun thing to do, and I was excited about getting married. You know, I thought getting a PhD was hard… You know, convincing Ginger to marry me was the biggest thing I ever accomplished. Way harder than writing the most widely-used database engine in the world. I had a similar move, but not quite as profound as yours. I incorporated my consultancy as well, and you do have to name, just for legal reasons, board of directors and all these things. And I made Rachel, my wife, the treasurer of the company. Just figured there was some poetic [\] to that. But I think president would have won me more brownie points, for sure. Alright. Well, we can go edit Wikipedia, Adam. We can add the citation and say “Refer to this time stamp of this episode.” Since we’re on the note of Wikipedia, is there any sort of heading there - I haven’t scanned it fully - that debates how you pronounce the technology? How do I pronounce the name of the product? I say S-Q-L-ite, like a mineral. But I also hear a lot people say, “Sequel lite and SQL lite.” You know, I don’t care. Whatever comes off of your tongue easily is fine with me. Right, just use it. That’s the only thing, that’s it. But the official correct way is S-Q-L-ite? Hm, like a mineral. Were you playing on the word “light”, or were you just playing on mineral…? Many people pointed out to me that I’m not good at marketing. My marketing person would have picked a better name. Yeah, it’s funny, because in our pre-call, when Adam and I were just kind of talking about this call, I thought you had pretty decent marketing, didn’t I, Adam? I said you do a pretty good job. I even like your little tagline, “Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose any three.“That appeals to me as a nerd. I didn’t come up with that. That’s something that … No, somebody put that on the mailing list; who it is, is lost in the sands of time. If you’re listening please, please call me and tell me, remind me what your name is. But somebody said, “Hey, why don’t you put that on the website? I said, “That’s great”, and I put it there. So that one’s not due to me. Do you recall when you put that on there and has it been any sort of like real driving force, or has it been something that just entertains Jerod? It’s been there for over a decade. We haven’t messed with it. Everybody likes it, it’s a cute little line. It is. Well, I think we want to talk about SQLite. I’m gonna try my best to pronounce it that way for you. I’ve called it “Sequel Lite” just because… Even SQL and sequel are, you know… You pick which one you want to say, I guess. Seriously, call it what you’re used to calling it. But we wanna talk about it, we wanna talk about its history. You mentioned kind of its inception a little bit, but we wanna draw down on that, and then we’ll get into the technical features. We’ll talk about the ubiquity, the community that you’ve built around it, the business that kind of is there that supports it, all sorts of things. We’ll take a quick break and when we get back, we’ll talk about all those things and more. We’ll be right back. Alright, we are back with Richard Hipp and we are talking about SQLite - I can’t say it my way anymore, I have to say yours … I can’t make myself do it naturally, even though you’ve told me to do so. Yes. So let’s talk about its origin. You mentioned that it came out of a specific need in your consulting. We know that it was around the year 2000, that was about the time that it became a product. Maybe that was 1.0, I’m not sure, but give us the reason… Go deep on the reason of why you started a brand new thing, why it needed to exist. You mentioned that you had Postgres as an option, but this made more sense for a particular customer or the circumstance. Give us that genesis story. So the customer… They were using Informix for the database engine. The problem that I was working on, it was a really interesting problem. We had to solve an NP-complete problem, which of course we couldn’t solve, but we could do really good approximations and that’s what it was about. It was a really, really cool product and I was a contractor, but I was sort of leading the design. Anyway, we put this thing out in the field for testing, and it was in an industrial site, and the people were operating the equipment. They would sometimes power cycle the machine that it was running on, and when it would come back up, Informix database sometimes would not come up, and this was a configuration problem, that’s all it was. There was nothing wrong with Informix. They just hadn’t installed it right. When in the database it didn’t come up, the users would double click on my application. I would try and connect to the database and wouldn’t be able to, and I would pop up a dialog box that says, “I’m sorry, I can’t connect to the database.” And course, it wasn’t my problem, but my application painted the dialogue box, so I got the support call. And I thought “This is not a good thing. I’m not in the database business.” Being a database guy is never part of my career goal, and so what can I do about this? And I thought, “Well look, the way we’re using this database - it’s read-only, at least us, and it’s very, very slowly changing otherwise. If the computer is healthy enough to bring up my application, why can’t I read the data directly off of disk? Why do I have to go through a server to get to my data?” There was a funding interruption, I had couple months off and I thought, “Hey, I’m just gonna go and cobble together a really quick and simple database engine that just does a few very simple SQL commands, insert the lead, update and select.” No joints, wasn’t trying to be efficient… All I needed to do was pull stuff off of a disk in that memory. And I put it out there and… I’ve been doing open source for years before this, putting things on my website, and people would find my thing – or well, you know, I’d put things on my website and it’d get like five downloads per year, or something like that. I’d figured this would be just another one of those things, but for whatever reason it really resonated with people. I remember seeing on Net News, somebody had this really exciting post on Net News about, “Wow! I have an SQL database engine running on my palm pilot. This is no joke.” Of course, whenever people get excited about your software, an ego boost kicks in any you’re like, “I’m gonna work on this and make it a little bit better.” Yeah, so that was motivation to kind of work when I had the opportunity. The first version, it used GDBM as the storage engine, which is the GNU Database Manager. It’s a hashing-based database, which is [\]. And so SQLite version one was GPL. It was also hash-based, and I wanted to expand SQLite to be able to do range queries. For that you need an ordered storage engine that orders the keys, basically a B-tree. I looked at Berkeley DB, which was the big thing at the time, and I spent a couple days studying the documentation and I realized that the documentation was sufficiently vague that I was gonna have to write test programs to find out enough detail to make this work. I thought, “It’s gonna be easy for me just to write my own B-tree storage engine”, so I did, and that was SQLite version two. That got to be really popular. Yeah. The first release of version 2.0 came out just a couple days after the 9/11 event… But that got to be really popular, and before long I started getting phone calls, and I got a phone call from Motorola. I don’t know if you remember, but back then Motorola was the world’s leading manufacturer of cell phones. And they said, “Hey, we wanna put SQLite on all our cell phones, but we need you to make some enhancements for us. Can we bring you on contract to make these enhancements and to support it?” I said, “Sure, of course.” I hung up the phone and felt “Wow! You mean you can make money off of open source software?” Who knew…? And I had to figure out some kind of pricing structure. We put together a contract and it wasn’t for a lot of money, but for me at the time I thought it was all the money in the world. I hired some people and we made some changes, and that went great. Then AOL contacted me and said, “Hey, we want some enhancements.” And AOL needed to be able to handle binary data. SQLite version 2 can only handle text data. So AOL said, “Hey, we’ll give you some money, fix it to handle binary data.” So we did. Once again, I was able to hire some people… I got Dan Kennedy working for me at that point. He’s from Australia, and he has been working for me ever since. We started SQLite 3 - I think that was in 2004, about this time in 2004. Once SQLite 3 got out, it got loaded into everybody’s products, and it just grew and grew. I was still doing bespoke software for various companies back then, but within a few years I stopped that and we now just do full-time supporting and maintaining SQLite for companies around the world. I like that, it’s very kind of organic. You’re kind of adding big customer to big customer, each one brings you on a contract to add some features, and so the overall product gets better. You mentioned the first version was GPL, and it’s public domain now. Let’s put that on hold. I want to talk about it specifically soon, but I want to get to the ubiquity, because you said Motorola came in and they wanted to put in their phones - that’s a lot of phones, and now you have AOL and then you start to add all these other ones. [] If we go to the website now, there’s a page which was the one that I just sent to Adam, and I was like, “We gotta talk about this.” Because I knew that it was in like every Linux basically, but I didn’t realize it’s on every android device, every iPhone, iOS device, Mac, every Windows 10 machine, so that pretty much covers all computers there. You know, we’re using Skype to talk, it’s inside of Skype. It’s in iTunes, it’s in DropBox, it’s in TurboTax. ..It’s embedded into languages, PHP and Python have it. Even television sets and set-top cable boxes… Most of the uses, I don’t even know about. People write me and say, “Hey, I was messing with this or that and the other and I found this SQLite database file. Did you know they’re using your software?” No. [laughter] I’m glad they are. I’m glad they’ find it useful. It’s used in most everything. I think… It’s impossible to tell, but I think that SQLite is probably… There are more instances of SQLite in use every day than all other database engines combined. Clearly, the other database engines make a lot more money for their creators, but I get the usage award. And I also think that SQLite is probably the second most widely used software component in the world behind zlib. I haven’t been able to identify anything else that I think might be used more than SQLite. Yeah, it’s a little bit scary, a little bit intimidating. It’s gotta make your decisions weigh on you more when you’re like, “Well, it’s gonna affect everybody.” It does, it changes your whole perspective. The way I look at software today versus the way I looked at it 15 years ago is very different because of that. So let’s talk about why. I mean, I think I have a good guess at why it’s so widely distributed, but as you said, there were many other database engines out there, many that are very good, even Postgres, which you say you use as kind of a reference implementation of at least the SQL stuff. But why is SQLite so ubiquitous? What do you attribute it to, personally? I would believe your opinion more than mine. I don’t know. I put it out there and people really liked it. I’m flattered that they like it. The team and I worked really hard to make it a solid product that stays true to what it is; the goal is that it just works. It should be in the background, it’s not something that you have to think about. It’s there when you need it, and it’s gonna work. It’s like a utility. You don’t think about, you know, the people at the water works, so when you turn the spigot, fresh water comes out. That’s an amazing thing, and we want SQLite to be just like that. It’s just there and you take it for granted. That’s how I think… I would think that like just like that; my first experience with it was Ruby on Rails, and as soon as you get Rails going it’s using that, and there’s no need for something extra. You could add it if you wanted extra, if you need different things, but it came with it. And just the fact that it was so simple, a single file that you can copy and move it around as you wanted to. It seems to me like the access and barrier is so low to use it, it’s so simple, and everything else has so many hoops to go through. [] Yeah. We try and keep it simple. Now one of our earliest patrons was Symbian. The company made the operating system that – and they were [\] and that was operating system on all the phones sold all over the world, except for the United States. They never really penetrated the US market. But this was in I think 2005, Symbian needed a database for their operating system, and apparently they had a big bake-off where they got 10 different embedded database engines - they told me about this later - SQLite was one of them and they competed them: seven commercial, three open. The other nine, they actually brought in engineers from that company to help tune it for their tests, where they ran tests on it and then they said that SQLite won the bake-off. And they called me up and said, “Hey, can you come over for a meeting?” “Sure.” So I flew over and it was – we had a meeting on Thanksgiving Day. They don’t do Thanksgiving in London, apparently. But then they had the Mayflower. [laughter] That’s a good reason. They were the Mayflower. There you go. So apparently there was a bake off and we did well in the competition. I don’t know what the criteria was, but apparently we were very competitive against the other databases. And more recently - and I won’t name this other company - I’ve heard the same thing about another company. I won’t name them because they’re still current and actively using it, I just don’t want to embarrass them… But they also had a bake-off and chose SQLite. So apparently we win the competitions, and I don’t know why or how, because there’s a lot of really good products out there and I don’t know why we happen to win, if it’s luck or providence, I don’t know. But we do try to keep it small and simple - we solve a problem and that seems to resonate with a lot of people. How about the embedded aspect? It’s not client-server, which I think plays to its simplicity, as Adam said. There’s less to setup, less to get started, there’s less moving pieces to break. I think you said that Informix situation where there was a configuration problem, but it was trying to connect to some server, or something. Yeah. As far as I know, SQLite is the only SQL database engine that is not client-server. The other embedded SQL database engines, like MySQL embedded and so forth, they start a separate thread which is the server. So they don’t have a server’s process, but they do have a server thread, as far as I know. And, you know, why didn’t I do a server thread or something like that? Well, you know, it was easier not to is one reason. Another reason is that, you know, I’m not a database person. I didn’t know I was supposed to. Nobody told me. [laughter] Oh, that’s rich, right there. No one told you, you had to. No one told me that that’s what you’re supposed to do, and so I just sat around and thought, “Well, how can I do this?” and the way I did it seemed to make sense to me, so that’s what I did. Somebody had said before that you stumble on the best things in the world through accidents. It speaks to your curious heart going back to your original story, which is how you got into this in the first place was complete curiosity. And maybe that’s a good thing. Richard Hipp:. Yeah. I learned a lot about SQL just writing SQLite, which is kind of scary but true. It’s just humorous in light of how widely deployed it is in the entire world, and it’s like, “Wow, you’re not really a database guy.” [] Especially when early on when I was writing it in and I had come across something and I went, “How is this supposed to work?” and I had to go ask people, “What’s it’s supposed to do when you do this?” [laughter] So we’ve got just a few minutes before the break, but something just dawned on me, that given what you had just said, something that a lot of software developers deal with today is this notion of imposter syndrome, where they don’t belong. And given the fact that you never thought you were supposed to be a database guy or whatever, the story is… But yet as Jerod mentioned and now that everyone else knows how ubiquitously SQLite is used, have you ever dealt with or had to get over serious impostor syndrome? Has it ever been something where you’re like, I don’t belong here in this database world? Well no, not really. But that just goes back to my personality. I don’t really belong in any little group. I don’t fit in very well anywhere, I’m sort of a weird person. Eclectic, we’ll say that. So no imposter syndrome ever around, you know, not supposed to be a database guy, but yet you have … You have won all of the bake-offs, so that kind of destroys imposter syndrome when you keep winning all the competitions, I guess. Well, I meant personally; less technology, more personal. No, it’s intimidating when I’m invited to talk to groups of database experts. It can be a little bit scary because these guys know – they have been studying databases their whole life, that’s their passion. And for me it just sort of happened. One day I was going along solving hard problems, and the next thing you knew I’m a database guy. What happened? Well, it’s a hard problem. Well, I think not knowing any better is a great way to renew yourself into success in many situations. And it seems like whether you meant to or you stumble upon a lot of good design decisions, which really does set it apart from other database engines… Like you said, you’re the only one that is that way, it allows it to be distinct. And I think you said you’re not much of a marketing guy, because the name is troublesome, but I think the name does indicate a lot about it, which is to say this is light and it is simpler and it’s different than those other things. The other thing that’s really different and probably helps with adoption is the fact that you put it in the public domain, which is the ultimate form of open source. We’re gonna tee that up, I wanna talk about in detail. We do have another break to take, so we’ll take that now. And then on the other side we’ll talk to you about why you made it public domain, what the implications were that is public a domain, and then how you still sold some licenses against it anyway, which I think is hilarious. So let’s take that break and we’ll be right back. Alright, we are back and we are definitely going to talk about licensing and the public domain side of this. But before we get to that, I think we could actually cover some more of its technical merits. We talked about how some of the stuff was providential, or you stumbled upon perhaps some of SQLite’s advantages over other database engines in certain contexts, but we shouldn’t short come all of its technical merits. [] I think what our listeners could probably use help with is knowing the clean lines when it comes to comparing and contrasting from a MySQL or from a Postgres or from anything that you choose, Richard. Could you just kind of enumerate for us a few things that make SQLite different? Well, from the perspective of somebody who’s just using a database engine, one thing that’s very different is the type system that we use. SQLite really started life as a Tcl extension, Tcl being the programming language, the Tcl/Tk. The project I was working was working on was written in Tcl/Tk and so SQLite began as a Tcl extension and as a scripting language, like Perl or Python, where you can put any type of value you want in a variable. So a variable might hold a string, a number, a byte array or whatever. So I made SQLite the same way, where just because you’ve declared a column of a table to be text doesn’t mean you can’t put integer in there, or just because you declared a column in the table to be a short int, why not put a 2-megabyte blob there? So what? It’ll do that. This takes a lot of people by surprise. The way SQLite works - it’s completely compatible with other databases. Where it causes problems is that people do their initial development work for say on Ruby on Rails app and they’re doing it with SQLite, and they take advantage of this flexibility in typing that SQLite provides without realizing it. And then they get ready to go to production and they switch over to Postgres or my MySQL, and those systems don’t do that and then suddenly their application breaks. For example, they might’ve declared a varchar 40, and they didn’t realize they were putting strings in there that were longer than 40 characters. People have criticized SQLite about this. They say it’s weakly typed and the other systems are strongly typed. I think those are [\] terms. I prefer to say that SQLite is flexibly typed and that those other systems are rigidly typed or judgmentally typed. But it’s a criticism. That seems like a point of contention, because … I mean I can see both sides, because if I want this to be a varchar 40 and you let me put anything in there, then why did I declare it to be a varchar 40 in the first place? You know what I’m saying? Yeah, exactly. If you say it’s a varchar 40 and you an integer there, it will change it into text. Or if you have a comment that’s declared integer and you try to put text in it, it looks like an integer and it can be converted without loss. It will convert and store it as an integer. But if you try and put a blob into a short int or something, there’s no way to convert that, so it just stores the original and it gives flexibility there. And this is useful in a lot of cases, because sometimes you just have a miscellaneous column in a table that you might need to store lots of different things in. And in traditional database systems you actually have to have multiple columns, one for each possible data type, whereas in SQLite you put it all in one column. So it works well. And for that matter, with SQLite you don’t have to give the column a type at all. You can just say, CreateTable T1 (a,b,c) and then you’ve got a table with three columns named a, b and c and you put whatever you want there. [] That’s just for flexibility purposes, I see. Well, it flows directly out of the scripting language traditions. You don’t declare types for variables in Tcl; you didn’t used to do it in Python, I guess you can do it some, now. You don’t do it in JavaScript… You just say it’s a var. Yeah. I mean, I guess some of that leads to what I know as, you know, scripting roots from the web development perspective, which is where Adam and I are mostly coming from. And I think Ruby on Rail wasn’t my first exposure to SQLite, but it definitely was one of my first like using it, you know, more than just on the surface. And there’s this feeling or there’s this general, I don’t know what you call it, a consensus that like it’s for development purposes but when you get to production it’s foolish to use it in production, because it’s – I don’t want to call it a toy because it’s used in production more than any other thing out there, but I think that sense of it, where it will allow certain data in because your users will put in, which you didn’t expect - I think that’s probably where that feeling comes from, do you agree? I had the same thoughts honestly, Jerod. I thought that because it’s sort of a getting started thing with Ruby on Rails, and as I said that’s my first exposure with it, I kind of… And no downplay, because that’s why we have this show, that’s why we have people like Richard on this show to come and debunk big myths likes this, because someone may not ever think that SQLite is worth anything, because it’s just a beginner or just a starter thing it. But that was not exactly my thought; my thought was that it’s just for getting started. No, it’s definitely for more than that. Now for a website where you’ve got a lot of right concurrency, you need to move to a client-server database engine because you need that server process there to coordinate the concurrency. Yeah, the connection before laying this stuff. There’s just no way to do that in a serverless database like SQLite. So for so many things you don’t have that concurrency. You’ve just got a single actor or one or two actors accessing at a time; it’s not a factor, and SQLite works great in those situations. It’s where you get into big concurrency that it breaks down. Yeah. I mean, just take the example of what we talked about earlier where it’s inside of the Skype client. Well, I have my own and you have your own, and Adam has his own, and there’s no reason to have – – a server in that case. It’s completely usable right there. So that plays to its strength. So again, it’s the right tool for the job – One of our sayings is that, “We don’t compete against Oracle, we compete against fopen.” I like that one too. You’ve got lots of good taglines. Here’s another aspect of it that I think is a technical thing, which is probably pretty poignant considering recent events and the greater JavaScript community with dependencies: it doesn’t have any. So listen to this quote from the website, “All of the deliverable code in SQLite has been written from scratch.” It goes on to talk about how there’s no third-party code, everything is in there, there’s nothing that has a different license besides the public domain, which again we’ll get into. Tell us about that decision. [] Well, this – it does relate closely to the public domain thing. I’m just one of these people… I don’t like dependencies. I really like to statically link things, because with dynamic linking you just never know what version of a library you’re gonna link in a runtime, and if you’re delivering many copies of this, there will be some users who will come up with a bad version of a DLL or a shared library. Then they’ll call you for support and it’s really hard to debug if you don’t know what they’re running. And then, yeah, with upstream libraries and that sort of thing you’re – there’s a dependency there that just makes life a little bit harder. Sometimes it works better to build your own tools. I know a lot of people say that you should never reinvent the wheel; the hacker credo is “Steal the code, don’t rewrite it.” I understand the point of view, but I’ve always been sort of the person that I’m more willing to write it myself. So rather than find a different SQL database engine that would work better than Informix, I just wrote my own. And the text editor that I used to write SQLite is one that I wrote myself. No… I think I put it out there a couple of times. It’s nothing… It does what I want. I cannot imagine anybody else… Yes. It does what I want, and I cannot imagine anybody else finding it useful for anything. But rather than use Bison or Yacc for the language parser in SQLite, I wrote my own parser generator called Lemon. When we needed to beef up the development processes for SQLite and put more rigor in them… It was originally using CVS, because in 2000 CVS was just cutting-edge, state-of-the-art stuff that was really cool. But we needed to move something better and I looked at Mercurial and Git, and they weren’t gonna meet my needs, so rather than trying to work around this problems, I just wrote my own version control system. Now, that’s reinventing the wheel right there. I just tend to do that a lot. I tend to write my own stuff more than other people would. That’s either a failing or a virtue, depending on your point of view I guess. When you mentioned your own version control - that’s Fossil correct? Yeah. So Fossil SCM is a tool which Richard has written and another one that we’ve had people request us actually to talk to you about. We don’t have time for it, but we might have you back to talk about it. Interestingly, it does have a dependency which is SQLite. So I guess it depends on you’re writing a library versus an application. Right? All of the SQLite source code is managed by Fossil, and Fossil uses SQLite. And you can ponder that recursion at your leisure. Right. Well, it shows you can depend on yourself too, that you’re internally trusting, not externally trusting. There you go. Do you think that this mindset you have with writing your own stuff… Because now, as we talked about the barrier to entry, today I think people tend to lean on others because they’re sort of bootstrapping themselves into developer world. They didn’t go to school or they typically didn’t go to school or they did go to school; it’s like a boot camp, or something like that. And that’s not the downplay that whatsoever, it just means that they don’t have the breadth of experience that you do. Well, yeah. They’ve got so much more to learn than I had to learn in 1977. There’s just so much information out there. And I’ve been doing this for so long, and it seems natural to me, but I’ve been doing it for decades, and I’ve been constantly learning that entire time. So yeah, I don’t know what – if you’re starting out, you’ve got to build on what other people are doing. I don’t see any other way to do it. How would you start? Say you want to become a software developer with zero knowledge today, and you are looking for a starting point. What would you try? [] Well, I would probably try the wrong thing. [laughter] But if I were to advise people… One thing that I see is everybody’s flocking toward integrated development environments and I want to encourage new developers to get really familiar with the command line and shell prompt. If you’re on Windows, that’s fine. Certainly get familiar with Bash on Unix. I see so many people coming out of school, they’re new programmers, and they cannot operate without pointing and clicking, and somehow that limits their level of understanding. I make the analogy, if I go to a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, I can go to the market and I can point at things and we can make hand gestures and I can buy food to eat and stuff, but I cannot start a business or carry on a deep conversation about the meaning of life and the relationship of God and man. For that, I have to speak their language. And it’s the same with computers. If you’re just pointing and clicking, that’s great if you’re a casual observer or if you’re a user and you don’t want to spend the time to learn this foreign language. But if you really wanna get deep, you’ve got to learn the language. Once you do learn the language, it’s much easier to communicate that way, much easier. So I encourage people starting out, go low level and do things from the command line rather than depending on point and click GUIs. Well, some good news that came out of Microsoft’s Build conference today is that they have partnered with Canonical to bring Bash to Windows. I was thinking right after this podcast I’m going to figure out how to get that on my Windows machine. I’d seen something, Jerod, in our tweet stream, but I hadn’t got that news yet. We tend to stay timeless with our shows versus timely, but why did they do this? You know, that’s the new Microsoft - they’re embracing open source, they’re embracing Linux, they want to be more developer-friendly and so they’re having kind of a first-party user mode Linux executables in Windows 10; I haven’t read beyond that. So all I saw was a Verge article, but everybody is pretty excited just about… They have the purpose to bring the Bash command line to Windows and not in some sort of virtual machine. First-party user mode. Well, that’s funny too because I’m looking at our tweet stream, because I haven’t opened up Tweet box on this show with you, recording this. There’s one that says as a response to our tweet “April fool’s.” I know that April fool’s is just around the corner, but not that kind of corner. This is real. We gotta be careful on April Fool’s day not to be, because I know we tweeted that out. We’re gonna make sure that our stories are legit. I’m pretty sure this one’s real. Okay, so we’ve covered the technical, some intricacies, and we’ll probably go deeper into that, but we are inside a time limit. I definitely wanna get to your take on licensing. So you started off GPL, but that sounded like because you had a dependency that was perhaps GPL back in the day. And for a long time it’s been public domain. And I think the piece in The Guardian which said basically, the subtitle was “Richard Hipp’s database is used by some of the biggest names in IT, but he has not made a penny from it”, And its whole emphasis was this aspect of you giving it away not just GPL or even LGPL, but like “This belongs to the public.” So tell us your decision behind that, and then we’ll probably take a break and then we’ll talk more about it on the other side. [] Sure. Well, just to correct The Guardian article, it was correct when it came out but, I mean, we’ve got a business built around this now. Yeah, and they didn’t mention consultancy in that. So that was 2007, but it was just… It peaked their interest, so… Yes. So when I ditched the dependency on the GPL to GDBM library and wrote my own, it was all my code at that point, and I could put whatever license I wanted in it. And I thought I wanted a much more liberal license so people could just toss this into their application and not have to worry about it. And I looked at the BSD license and I looked at the MIT license and I thought, “You know, really, what’s the point?” Why not just say, “Hey, it’s public domain” and put it out there? And that what I did. That was a little bit of a tough decision. That’s kind of letting your baby go because you’re casting it into the wind and hope that it does well. Also at the time I did not realize, having lived my whole life in the United States, which is, you know, under British common law, where the public domain is something that’s recognized. I did not realize that there were a lot of jurisdictions in the world where it’s difficult or impossible for someone to place their works in the public domain. I didn’t know. So that’s a complication. And for that reason some companies started to say, “Hey, we need to buy a license anyway”, so we made this product available. “We’ll sell you a license for SQLite.” We do our best to talk them out of it and explain they don’t need this, but for a lot of people it’s cheaper to pay the fee and get the license than it is to convince their lawyers that they don’t need one. So that’s one way that we have, you know, making a little bit of money to fund continuing development. It’s more than just a license, though, it’s also a warranty of title. The document we send them represents and warrants that all, every byte of source code is an original work that we control, it came from us. In other words, they are not bits and pieces that we just pulled off of the Internet, that might be contaminated with licenses that you don’t know about. And if you are doing a large project with potential legal exposure, you wanna make sure that you really can use this without incurring possible are lawsuits down the road. Maybe Google wishes that they had thought more about Java before they put it in the Android. They don’t want… Ten years down the road, if their product’s a big hit they don’t want somebody coming back and say, “Oh, that SQLite actually had stolen some code from us and so now you have to pay a license to us.” So just to protect their portfolio and their product, a lot of companies are eager to pay us that money. So that works well, that’s nice. It’s a nice little supplement of income so I can hire some people, and we can work full time on SQLite and not have to do other things on the side just to keep food on the table. That’s excellent. I think we wanna to drill down on that a little bit more, because you have the license, you also have an encryption, you have some extensions that you sell. Interestingly, there’s even a test harness which seems to be an annual thing. These seem to be like their products that exist because they’ve been specifically requested, right? But let’s hold that off, Richard, we do have to take our final break, and we’ll hold that for the close of the conversation. So we’ll be right back and we’ll talk money and licensing next. We’ll be right back. Alright, we are back. Richard, before the break we were talking about the public domain aspect of the project, the fact that you do sell licenses because often times it’s cheaper to buy a license than to convince your lawyers that you don’t need one. And also because public domain isn’t recognized in some provinces, which I wasn’t unaware of as well. I’m sure that one took you by surprise. As I mentioned, these seem like they’re on-demand type of things, they don’t seem like fully-fleshed out product ideas. I would be questionable if you could make a living off of what you have here. You also have some support from sponsors. Can you talk to us about all different ways that you guys stay afloat? Right. So back in 2007 when Symbian was starting to put SQLite in all their phones, they came to the same realization… At that time it was just me working on it pretty much. Dan was helping me on a part time basis. But they realized that if this is a critical part of their infrastructure, they needed to make sure my business was sustainable. So they said, “Look, Richard, you need to set up a consortium or a foundation to provide support for your developers so that you can work on it full time.” They told me they wanted to increase the bus factor of SQLite. The bus factor being the number of people who have to be hit by a bus to cause all development to stop. And they were concerned about that, because I was kind of the only person at the time. So we started working out this idea of the SQLite consortium, which would be companies that would sponsor us to keep the project going. And somehow Mitchell Baker at the Mozilla Foundation got wind of this and said, “Oh, Richard, let me show you how to do this.” And so I got with her and she really – she knows how to set this up, and we really did everything according to her specs and started the SQLite consortium. So companies which are typically large companies that really depend on SQLite as part of their product, they just pay us an annual fee. We do support them, they can always pick up the phone and an engineer will be on their site as quickly as possible if that ever comes up. But really the purpose of it is that they want to make sure that the product is sustainable, it continues to be supported and doesn’t become orphanware, because they depended on it. We charge a substantial fee, but from their point of view it’s half an engineer, so it’s cheap for them. It gives us working capital and allows us to just go and operate and really constantly improve SQLite. And based on those funds, we’ve done dramatic improvements in reliability and performance, because we have the freedom to work on it constantly all the time. So the SQLite consortium is what’s really allowed us to keep SQLite going and to keep the current and real and vibrant. [] We started working… The other products, you’re right, are a one-time thing for the most part, the encryption extension. When people buy the encryption extension, we actually just give them a password so that they can log into our version control system, and it’s forever. They can download the source code whenever they want, whenever they need it and constantly stay up to date. They don’t have to ever have to renew. We sell support contracts for people, but that’s not a big money maker. Our bread and butter is our patrons, our SQLite Consortium members. It seems to be opposite of what I would expect, though. I mean, I guess as a foundation or as a consortium you would expect at some point that… I mean, a lot of open-source businesses build themselves around some sort of support or pro version, and instead you’ve built it on the good will, and I guess that’s what the membership is really about. It’s about, as you said, a patron model versus a support-driven or support sales model or something like that. It really is more of a patron model. People have built businesses around an annual support subscription or something like that. To make that work, I think you have to have a sales staff. Yeah, and plus I wouldn’t know how to do that. One of the reasons people really like working with this is we are a 100% engineering shop. There’s no sales talk. When you talk to somebody at our company, you’re getting direct no-nonsense talk with an engineer; you’re not talking to sales people. And that’s different. And that’s not to knock the sales aspect of things. I understand that, and you have to do that in a lot of occasions, and those people work really hard, but we’re just doing it a little bit differently. You mentioned, maybe it was during the break, you quoted something from the article about how people tell me I could have made a lot of money on this if I had any business sense. And I believe them, I probably could have. By hiring some sales people, I could probably make a lot of money, get rich. But you know what, we make enough. It’s not a lot. I’m driving a 10-year-old Civic, but that’s fine. That’s all I need. You know, everybody - I’m getting off-topic - has this threshold where they get enough money. When you have nothing, you wanna make money, everybody wants that. But at some point you get enough money, so “Okay, now I have enough money, now other things become more important. Family, free time, working in the community, charities… Whatever.” And that threshold is different for different people. Some people, they don’t reach that threshold until they get into the billions, other people reach it at a few tens of thousands. Me and the people that are on the team, our thresholds are kind of low, so we’re okay. I’m not sure if you mentioned it directly, but just out of curiosity, how big is your team, your company? What type of a group of people are being supported by it? Right now we’ve got to tree other engineers working on it. Dan Kennedy, he’s Australian. He has been with me for a long time and he has written major portions of it. He’s been instrumental in doing all of the full text search and the archery and lots of other things like that. Joe Mistachkin’s in the Seattle area and he handles all the Microsoft ends of things, which is an enormous, enormous job. Then we’ve got Mike Owens, who wrote one of the books about SQLite. Right now Mike is full-time employed with somebody else and so he’s just handling our website and taking care of all of that, making sure all that work smoothly for us, but he’s still on the team. [] We did have Shane Harrelson. He’s the guy that invented the amalgamation. SQLite is delivered as a single great big source file, almost 200,000 lines of code, but that makes it really convenient to use because you’ve just got one source file that you drop into your application and compile it with the rest and then you’ve got a database engine. But we don’t edit that one great big source file, we have hundreds of individual source files and they get pulled together in just the right order to build this amalgamation. And Shane is the one who invented that force. He took a job with another company, he’s not with us anymore. We still hear from him from time to time, he’s still a big user. So that’s the whole team. It’s a small team. It’s interesting to hear who’s involved based on the fact that this is what keeps you, as you said before, employed and so SQLite having this patron model, it’s interesting to hear who’s involved. Because becoming a member, supporting this consortium is supporting those folks… …still there or not in some sort of way to kind of keep this thing do what it needs to do. Exactly. It’s been a really, really, really fun journey for us. Really, it has. We hope to keep this going for a long time. Well, since you mentioned a long time… Do you have a plan? You said in the breaks you’ve got some sort of long-term plan, but you didn’t go in the detail. What’s the plan for SQLite? What can those who use it now expect 50 years from now? Well, at some point surely some new technology is going to come along and SQLite will cease to be an important thing for new products. I don’t know when that’s going to happen - it could be next week, it could be in 20 years. I just don’t know. For example, people are really excited now about the new persistent memory that doesn’t lose power when you power down, and there are various types of that, and that could be very disruptive to the whole database industry. But because SQLite is so widely used, we expect it to be used in legacy for many, many years. A few years ago when Airbus had contacted us - they use SQLite in the A350, Avionics - they asked, “We need you to support this for the life of our airframe, which is 40 years.” So we said, “Oh sure, we’ll support it through 2050.” So we sort of set up the company with the idea that we’re going to try and keep it going through the year 2050. The expectation is that at some point the usage will begin to die down and our role will become more of just maintain legacy, but we anticipate keeping it going for another - what is that, 34 years? Why 2050? Just because it’s a nice round number? Well, that’s 40 years from the date that Airbus contacted us. And they said the life of their airframe was 40 years, so that’s where we came up with that number. That’s a big, big airplane. I don’t know if anybody’s ever seen that thing. In pictures it doesn’t do it justice, but to see it face to face… It’s ginormous. I wouldn’t imagine being the pilot flying that thing, let alone being the database powering it. [laughter] I don’t know what we do inside the – it’s the A350, not the A380 by the way. Okay, okay. That gives a little slack to you then, but that’s still big. Yeah, it’s still big. I don’t know what we do in there, I don’t think it’s in safety-critical applications. I think they use it to log maintenance activities, so that when the airplane lands, the ground crew can just get a print out of what needs to be fixed. [] Right. On that note, I mean is there any other really interesting places where this database is used? I mean, that’s something I didn’t expect to hear on this show. Is there anything else, any other places you’ve seen it used or know about its uses that’s just like, “Wow! That’s interesting.” Or even ways it’s used? You know, if you had given me a little prep, I could probably have given you a list. I hear about this stuff all the time, but nothing else comes to mind. Airbus is a pretty cool thing. That’s an on the fly question because the Airbus example threw me for a loop. I didn’t expect… I mean, I guess it would make sense, but it’s such a well-known aircraft. That’s a big deal. Sure. Bloomberg, the news agency and the biggest provider of Wall Street data in the world, all of their stuff goes through SQLite, or at least our parser. They took the front end of SQLite, the SQL parser and code generator and execution engine, and chopped off the data storage engine and include their own enterprise scale, massively concurrent, a multi data center storage engine on the backside. All of Bloomberg goes through that, which I think is pretty amazing. Since you’ve been in open source for a while, maybe you can help us kind of look back at the last couple of decades. What are some of the most interesting or biggest changes you’ve seen happen in the community, in open source, in the way software is delivered throughout the years? What are some of the most interesting things that you’ve seen happen that really got you excited about where we’re heading? Well, you know, back in the old days they didn’t call it open source. I guess it was Bruce Perens who invented that term. How long ago was that? Was that in the late ‘90s? Back in the day we were just handing a software around and we didn’t have a word for it. And so even just coming up with a word, open source, that was a huge step. I think it was Bruce Perens that came up with that, but we’d have to research it. It says that he created the open source definition. Yeah. So yeah, that was after… Linux started though Linux Kernel, so back in the ‘90s was when that happened. So that was big, and even think about when SQLite got started, we didn’t have broadband like we have today. I remember one of our early patrons was AOL and they were still sending out CD-ROMs to your mailbox that you get online for what? $5 a month or something, with your dial-up modem. That’s the way the world rolled when this whole thing started. We lose sight of how much the world has just changed in this past 10 years. Now everybody has broadband, it’s taken for granted. Now, everybody has a cell phone. When SQLite first came out there were cell phones, but we didn’t have the smartphones that you have today. Right. That’s still a lot to think about that. I was just on a separate podcast being interviewed, and I was in retrospect talking about how the iPhone was the very first cell phone I’ve ever owned, because I grew up not very well off, I grew up poor. So to finally make enough money to own a cell phone, I actually worked for people to get a cell phone then rather than buy my own, so I just sort of leveraged that as long as I could. You know, I guess I was just sort hedging my best against it, but man, you know, it’s crazy to think about when cell phones became prolific, that’s an interesting fact there. [] Yeah, and the iPhone just revolutionized the world. Its design, the fact that you had the complete screen, it had the LCD covering the whole screen - that was a radical idea at the time I saw. I was able to see some of their early prototypes of android phones and they all looked like BlackBerrys with a little tiny screen at the top and a great big keyboard. But when the iPhone came out, that all changed. So now everybody has a smartphone, it’s ubiquitous, everybody has broadband, Wi-Fi’s everywhere, and this has opened up a communications revolution. It’s really easy to go online and download whatever code you want, it’s really easy to search. We have Google, and people take Google for granted, but you just type things into your search engine and you can find whatever you want instantly. Twenty years ago you couldn’t do that at all, and that has completely changed the world. But we do it so much every day that we now take it for granted. I guess since we have you thinking about the future to a degree, because you’re [\] and you’ve probably got a long list of things that you’re really interested in, I’m curious… We have a couple closing questions we tend to ask on this show. Sometimes we omit them when we run out of time, but I figured that this one at least is a good fit for you. So the question is “What’s on your open-source radar?” but you can frame it however you like. It can be a technology radar. You know, given your expansive history, you may rather just write it yourself rather than use somebody else’s, but for that odd day that you want to use someone else’s stuff, what’s on your radar that you would like to play with if you had a free weekend and you didn’t have to do anything with SQLite? I wrote the version-control system Fossil and I learned a lot about version control with that. I’d really like to try the follow-on system that improves upon it and is kind of a Git killer. And I’ve sketched out a design, but have had no time to work on it. I’ve often said that email - it’s everywhere, everybody depends on it, but setting up an email system is really hard, and the world needs a really simple-to-use email system that you just drop in place and it just works. That would be fun to work on. I would definitely see something like that. You’re the right kind of person to do that because one, you’re not afraid to just jump into a place where you’re not exactly the database guy as you’ve said before, so you’re comfortable being in a touchy territory. And it’s true, because everyone leans on some sort of cloud service to do it. Everyone I know somehow leverages either Gmail or Gmail for Businesses, Google for Businesses or whatever, and that’s the way to do it. There’s a lot of people who are ruling their own solution using Ansible or something like that that. They’re using somebody else’s known ways of doing things to deliver something that’s their own solution to the server. But I would agree with that, however I have zero technical ability to follow you there, but I will be a user. I will be a user for sure. Well, I’ve been saying that for years. I haven’t found those free cycles to do that yet. So, Jerod, he also said something else that peaked my interest for the future show that we’ll have with him on Fossil, he said “Git killer.” Can you believe he said that? Git has done a lot of good, but I mean look at it, Git is the version-control system that everybody loves to hate. I have an extensive collection of people ranting against how awful Git is. And truth, they’re mostly right and yet we continued to use it. That amazes me. I don’t understand why that is. There are better alternatives that exist today and it’s not hard to design things that are way better than anything that exists today. It’s just a matter of sitting down and spending a month or two and writing the code. [] So answer this for me then… We’re not gonna talk deeply about Fossil now because that’s a future show, but to tee up some sort of teaser or interest, is Fossil in its current form a Git killer or can it be given, like you said, the month or two months of additional work to kind of get there and just sit down focusing on it? Is it ready to be that now? No, in my opinion Fossil is better than Git, but the difference is not enough to overcome the additional learning curve of learning a new system that’s slightly different. So it’s just an incremental improvement, it’s not a disruptive improvement. And I think to really overcome… Because Git has huge, huge traction now. Everybody uses it. We have GitHub. In order to overcome that incredible installed base, you’ve got to have something that is revolutionary. Well, I mean even Mercurial has had this problem, right? I mean, Facebook gave it the best name brand to as a social proof mechanism to get people to switch, and yet no one’s switching in droves. It’s a hard problem, and I’ve got a list of features I think that would go a long way toward getting to the Git killer, but it’s just a matter of sitting down and implementing them, and that takes time, and something like a version-control system really has to be right, because if it messes up and you lose source code people get really upset. Yes, yes definitely. Well, that’s definitely a teaser for a future show on Fossil, but I guess before we close is there anything else you want to mention before we tail out? No, I think we’ve covered a lot of stuff. You know, we could talk for days on SQLite about technical aspects, but in a one-hour show I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. Well, it’s certainly interesting to hear your entrance into software development technology. I hope the listeners can appreciate how pivotal that kind story is to have on this show. It’s so interesting too to have someone like yourself with such deep and rich history, and also unafraid to just not use what’s there and write your own. That to me is pretty interesting, so to live up to that and be inspired by that and share that back with all the listeners who love this show, that’s so awesome. I thank you and Jerod thanks you of course too for your time to come on this show and share that. Then also what you do with giving back in public domain and all the things we covered on the show, that’s phenomenal. So we’ll leave it there. Thank you for having me. You all have been great, I really appreciate it. Well, fantastic. Listeners, you know we love you. Thank you so much for listening to this; members who support us, you’re phenomenal; our sponsors, we love you. Fellas, that’s it for this show, so let’s say goodbye. Our transcripts are open source on GitHub. Improvements are welcome. 💚 [ comments ]

Agilenano - News from Agilenano from shopsnetwork (4 sites) https://agilenano.com/blogs/news/why-sqlite-succeeded-as-a-database-2016

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cicatrixtwigs · 8 years ago

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Buffyversary

Well. Holy crap. 20 years of Buffy. 20. YEARS.

Let me talk to you about what Buffy means to me.

I'm a "first wave" millennial. I was born in 1985. My formative years were spent on the internet before that was a normal thing to do. It was the great unknown.

I didn't get into Buffy at the start. When it started airing on BBC2, I didn't pay much attention. I watched one episode (I think The Witch) after some urging by a friend. I'd always been into the supernatural. I played VTM (predominantly online, in Yahoo chat - "The Vampyres Tavern", under the "Romance" chat rooms). I read predominantly fantasy. I think it was mostly my friends that ended up influencing me to start watching just as season 2 kicked off.

By the end of that season, I was hooked.

I'm not sure what it was the spoke to me. The fighting? Yes, i love people kicking ass. The language? Buffyisms stay with me until this day. The characters? None of them were what you'd expect. They played against stereotype. It was awesome.

I remember being aggressively pissed off that my boyfriend at the time booked this wonderful valentines date... because it was the day Once More With Feeling first aired. Luckily for him, he also recorded it for me.

I was a totally Bangel shipper, but i never heard the term "bangel" until about 5 years after the show ended. It was just "Buffy/Angel". It was a miraculous love.

I had a bit of a ritual. Friday nights. All lights in the living room off. Me, a bottle of pepsi, and a box of jaffa cakes. I demanded silence. I got SO MAD when my parents or brothers interrupted. That was MY TIME. Dork.

I will never forget when I realised spoilers were bad for me. I devoured Buffy spoilers, but for some reason didn't do the same for Angel. Then "The Trial" aired. At the end of that episode, Drusilla makes a shock return, siring Darla. I was jumping up and down. I was PSYCHED. And then I realised that if i'd know that was coming, i'd have not experienced the same feeling. I swore off spoilers from that day, and never returned.

Buffy was also my first Internet Fandom. I'd been around nerdy spaces on the net for years by this point - at 14 i was a chat room/forum vet, already moderating a bunch - but all about role playing. I tried to get into The Bronze forum a few times. I never really felt welcome. It seemed mostly americans, so spoileriffic. Somehow i found this Buffy fansite, "Anywhere But Here", and on that board i found my people. It was a good mix of people from the UK and America. It was pretty queer centric, being run by a straight woman and a gay man, and i found my confidence to talk openly with those people about being bisexual before i was ready to talk to my real life peers. I had 3 amazing friends, all females from the UK, and we formed "The Wiccan Watchers". Yeah, we were a bit of a clique, but i dont think in a nasty way. We just liked having our own special thing. We wrote fanfic together. I met my first "internet strangers" in a trip to Devon, where all of us teenage girls finally got to meet.

My mum had to phone the other girls mum before she let me go. So embarrassing.

I'll always remember drinking tequila with nectarines instead of lemon, because thats what we had, and it was yummy.

I'll also always remember beeing deeply suspicious that the BTVS writers were lurking on ABH. Particularly after things we wrote started appearing in the show. I screamed at my TV when Giles and Willow discussed the wiccan coven in Devon.

We had awards ceremonies for board members. I hosted. I wrote a song for one. It was based on the Sarah Michelle Gellar/ Jack Black 2002 MTV movie awards intro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okcp0AVsPD0

We were the coolest.

We all went off to university, me last of all, in 2003 (i was the baby). We grew away from ABH. A few people moved on to become Browncoats, myself included. I got care packages from my Buffy friends. I sent care packages to my Buffy friends. They were more than "internet friends".

Buffy was still airing. Angel was still airing. But not for long.

Being a cusp millennial - let me tell you about my internet. At home, i had broadband. In my halls of residence, i had dial up. That you had to pay for, on TOP of the charge you had to pay to use your phone line to begin with - oh yes, i paid for my landline phone like with a pre-paid card. Now, i cant even imagine it. Luckily, being a nerd and having nerdy roommates, i found a dealer. A guy from the computer studies class who would download eps of Buffy and Angel on the lab broadband and burn them off for me. Excellent. I still had my backup though... Box sets. 6 seasons of BTVS on VHS. 4 season of Angel. That was about... 57 VHS tapes. They were my security blanket. They went with me wherever i went. Absolute NIGHTMARE for my parents who had to ferry me up and down the country during breaks.

Thank god for DVD’s. Then Digital Downloads. SO MUCH EASIER.

My Buffy friends also set my dating criteria. I'd had a couple of bad ones. They told me i wasn't allowed to date anyone until they met specific criteria, including loving StrongBad from Homestar Runner, and of course, Buffy.

That night i had a "one night stand" with the hot goth nerd i'd been sporadically flirting with. We joked around about strongbad. The next day we spent the whole day in bed watching Buffy, until i kicked him out without even a phone number to go on.

13 years later, we have a mortgage. He's still a hot nerd. We still make each other cry laughing, and still lie around watching cult TV. Funny how life works out.

My Buffy Friends have done well by me.

While my life drew me away from internet fandom, Buffy was ever a presence in my life. Once i was on MTV as a selected group of Whedon nerds. The producer tried to give us "kooky" facts like "I've watched Buffy 5 times!". 5 times? Laughable. 50 maybe. We all sort of cut in and gave true facts - mine being that i was writing my dissertation on intertextuality in the works of Joss Whedon. She gave us the startled blink that only non nerdy people can when faced with SHEER GEEK and was like "... oh, Okay. Wow they are better than what we came up with."

That is the one time i met Joss. I got a hug. I'm terrible at meeting people i admire. Its just an impossibly huge task to be faced with someone who changed your life but doesn't even know you. I always say something fucking stupid. This time, i just got a hug. It was good.

I try not to regret anything, but there is one thing in my life i do regret. At the Serenity premiere in London, i had a ticket for the after party. My partner was with me. We had to catch a train. I couldn't justify abandoning him and going. Luckily... one of my Buffy Friends was there. One of my original ABHers. I gave him my ticket.

He danced with Joss. I am full of raging jealousy. I'm also full of joy that if i couldn't go, another life long Buffy friend could.

I haven't even mentioned Anya yet. Oh, how i love Anya. Anya was the first TV character i ever encountered that i felt was speaking my language. I mean, she's an ex vengeance demon, so i'm not sure what it says about me...

But... seriously. Video below. My everlasting spirit animal.

It gives me ridiculous nerdy joy that my nieces both have an accidental Anya link... 1) Born on the 4th July, 2) Called... Anya.

I like to think that Buffy made me who i am today. And who i am is a kick ass woman.

We can all live by the wisdom of the Buffyverse, and it will make the world a better place.

"Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are." - Whistler in "Becoming (Part 1)" - Buffy the Vampire Slayer

youtube

#Buffy The Vampire Slayer #BTVS

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firoz857 · 2 years ago

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Overcoming Challenges, Embracing AI, and Finding Authenticity in Business with Lexi Hartman

Video link : https://youtu.be/62QDHfv3JB8?si=tLxRbkTivoLjMpCR

Welcome to another episode of 'Live in the Lab' with your host, Keith Bilous. In this thought-provoking episode, we dive into the heart of entrepreneurship, personal growth, and the role of artificial intelligence in content creation. Join Keith and his guest, Lexi Hartman, a serial entrepreneur, bilingual content creator, and lifelong equestrian, as they explore: How to overcome feeling stuck in your career and finding a sense of community. The role of AI, particularly chat GPT, in revolutionizing content creation and overcoming creative blocks. The ethical implications of AI and the necessity for transparency in its usage. The parallels between equestrianism, business, and life - revealing the importance of resilience, self-competition, and mindset control. How to navigate imposter syndrome and the power of community in overcoming personal and professional challenges. Whether you're an athlete transitioning into a new phase of life, an entrepreneur facing a career crossroads, or simply someone seeking inspiration, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical advice. Tune in to discover how to harness your potential, embrace change, and create sustainable success in your personal and professional life. Don't miss this chance to expand your horizons and get motivated to transform your life! Listen to 'Live in the Lab' with Keith Bilous - where retired athletes and business enthusiasts find a sense of community and inspiration.

youtube

#Youtube

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elainescookingforthesoul · 5 years ago

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TRANSCRIPT for Episode 1.03 "Fran & Sidney's Hot & Spicy Black Bean Burgers" (PART 1/2)

ACT I

[INTRO MUSIC]

ELAINE: Hello again, and welcome to Elaine's Cooking Podcast for the Soul, the cooking show for survivors and thrivers. Yes, these nutrient-dense recipes are achievable in today's modern, bustling--some might say panicked and post-apocalyptic--world...Listeners, change is perhaps the only true constant that life offers. We who have lived through this nuclear-missile-infused year know this all too well. Like a sputtering flame that has not succumbed to ember, so too does our remaining civilization fight for oxygen, frantically dancing for survival. These drastic transformations are as grim as they are inevitable. But my favorite kind of change takes place in the kitchen with the help of my trusty one-quart saucepan! I'm honored you've chosen to experience this particular change with me. I'm your host, Elaine Martínez. Let's get cooking!

[MONOTONE SIREN IN DISTANCE]

ELAINE: Oops! Folks, I don't know if you can hear the siren going off in the background, but please rest assured that it is simply a drill of some kind. The real duck and cover alarm hits at a low d-flat that is just--

[SIREN LOWERS TO A LOW D-FLAT]

ELAINE: Like that! Luckily, here at the LA Dental Clinic we have some measures in place to protect ourselves in the case of a nuclear event. They certainly helped get me through the first one. I think I'll just gather up my equipment--there we go, arms are very full, but I think I can make it in one trip--oops, dropped my one-quart saucepan--

[PAN CLANGS]

ELAINE: --And let's retreat back to the tech lab.

[KNOCK AT DOOR]

SIDNEY: Fran, over here. Is anyone in there?

FRAN: I think I see someone moving. Hey! You've gotta let us in!

ELAINE:Just a moment, listeners.

[CLATTERING OF EQUIPMENT SET DOWN]

[DOOR BELL JINGLES]

ELAINE: Hi, can I help--oh! Excuse me!

SIDNEY: Oh my god, please, you should be excusing us! This is like the tenth place we've tried. Thank you thank you thank you!

FRAN: You are, for real, our hero. Sidney and I were just practicing tennis at the park and saw the missile zip over Runyon Canyon.

SIDNEY: Yeah, I just delivered a killer return and then the sky just went from its usual gunmetal grey to...what would you call it, Fran?

FRAN: Thick yellow.

SIDNEY: Right, thick yellow. Then the alarms started.

ELAINE: Oh my. Here, put these on.

FRAN: A bullet-proof vest? You think that's, like, necessary?

ELAINE: They're radiation vests. Dental technicians use them whenever people get x-rays.

FRAN: Oh, nice.

SIDNEY: You've got a saferoom, Doc?

ELAINE: Grab some of this cooking stuff and follow me.

[RECORDING STOPS, RESUMES]

[LAUGHING]

[TENNIS BALLS BOUNCE IN BACKGROUND]

ELAINE: Sorry for the interruption, listeners. It looks as though both me and my new young friends have had some good fortune in finding one another. I had not been able to book a guest due to the most recent 24-hour curfew in place, and these two happened to need shelter while this pesky nuclear event unfolds. Twice in one year! So inconvenient. Anyway, we're here with Sidney and Fran, who are tossing around a couple tennis balls!

SIDNEY: Fran! Stop bouncing!

[BALLS STOP BOUNCING]

SIDNEY: Hi! Sidney here. Fran and I host our own podcast, actually.

FRAN: It's called "We're Not Dating."

SIDNEY: Because everyone assumes we are.

FRAN: And we're totally not.

SIDNEY: Fran is like my best friend!

FRAN: Yeah! That's what they've said many times and why I wanted to do the podcast so bad. For like, irony.

SIDNEY: We're not dating guys! Hahaha.

FRAN: No...we're not. Lawl, right?

ELAINE: Well, that's great! Friendship is probably among our most valuable resources these days, after food and water. Speaking of which, you guys said you'd be willing to help me out today with a recipe I've been working on!

SIDNEY: Crossover episode!

FRAN: Woot wooooot!

ELAINE: Just to paint our listeners a little picture, we are situated in the tech lab-slash-break room here at the LA Dental Clinic. It's a little cramped back here. Sidney and Fran are sitting snugly on the narrow counter to the right of the handwashing sink here, heads slightly tilted to fit under the cabinet that holds a couple of chipped mugs, an open bag of sugar-free mints, and a jar full of left-behind tongue rings we've had to ask people to take out before they go through the x-ray machine.

FRAN/SIDNEY: Ew./Nice.

SIDNEY: What? Mints rule.

ELAINE: I'm perched on a stool with my laptop perched on me, and between us is a three-foot-high stainless steel cart usually used for transporting dental equipment around the office, which I've just now cleared and revamped to help us with our cooking! It is now complete with critical cooking utensils like bowls and spatulas, and topped with our trusty hot plate. Phew, that was a lot of exposition.

FRAN: Don't forget to mention this model of a set of teeth. I think it likes you, Sid. Mwwwwa!

SIDNEY: I'm closer to dating these fake chompers than I am to dating Fran!

FRAN: You're so funny, Sidney. Like you'd even date me if I asked! Boy, it's very, um, hot in here. Especially with all this gear on.

ELAINE: I suppose it may seem like overkill, but these heavy vests, plus the rubber gloves pulled over our scalps may save us from some severe radiation exposure. Or maybe they won't. Who really knows?

FRAN: I like it. Maybe this will be my prom look. Would you go with me if I looked like this, Sidney?

SIDNEY: Omg can you imagine if we went together?

FRAN: Yeah...people would probably be like "We knew you were dating!"

ELAINE: You guys do really seem to get along and enjoy one another.

SIDNEY: I'm so glad you get it, Elaine! Everyone is like, so weird about perfectly platonic friendships.

FRAN: They're always so dumb, saying we're totally perfect together or whatever. Stupid.

ELAINE: Well, as long as you guys are on the same page...Listen, we've taken a little extra time with the side chatter this time around, which has been admittedly refreshing after all the isolation, but if you're up for it, I'd love to keep workshopping this recipe! It's a hot and spicy black bean burger.

SIDNEY: That's perfect because Fran is hot!

FRAN: And Sidney's spicy!

ELAINE: And I guess that makes me the burger. I am so glad to have company as the worst of the radiation passes. Last time I didn't see anyone for six days!

FRAN: Yeah, at least we're here with each other.

ELAINE: Awww...oh, you meant Sidney.

FRAN: And you, too! Yeah, I totally meant you as well...it's Elaine, right?

ELAINE: That's right. Now, Sidney, Fran, will you do the honors of reading off the ingredients I've arranged here on the second shelf of this novel cooking cart?

FRAN: We've got one can of refried black beans.

SIDNEY: And then we have one packet of...taco seasoning question mark? We're doing burgers, though, right?

ELAINE: The seasoning packet is just a fast and easy way to achieve a certain flavor. Otherwise, I'd concoct a more curated mix of chili powder, onion powder, garlic powder, oregano, cayenne, and salt and pepper. As it is, the taco seasoning packet is serviceable.

FRAN: I get it. It's like looking at something you've seen all your life in a completely different way.

ELAINE: Exactly, Fran.

SIDNEY: A jar of minced garlic, a can of chipotle in adobo. Anything else?

FRAN: Uh...I also see some flour. Is that part of this? I can't be a part of any bread-making activities. They brought in my pop last week, and he hasn't been the same since.

SIDNEY: Well, that's because he's, you know...

FRAN: Dead, sure. Like I said, he really hasn't been the same. Mind you, he was baking bread, so law enforcement officers had no choice.

ELAINE: Oh my...should we...unpack that?

SIDNEY: We're saving it for our own podcast. Tune in next week on "We're Not Dating: Sad Edition"

FRAN: Sidney's right. Our audience is prepared for that kind of heavy stuff, and anyway I'm not quite ready to open that can of worms. Speaking of which, do you have a can opener?

ELAINE: I sure do, it's right...here! Listeners, now that we know our ingredients and are about to go on a can-opening spree, maybe it's a good time for a little break. When we return, we'll create this high-protein veggie burger option with my hip new friends, Sidney and Fran.

SIDNEY: We're not dating, guys!

[MUSICAL TRILL]

END OF ACT I

INTERLUDE/AD BREAK

ELAINE

Water shortage gotcha down? Is your husband constantly coming home thirsty? Kids antsy from another school day cancelled? Sounds like you could use a Bucket. A Bucket is a handy device that can store up to five gallons of loose water that you can use any time. Simply fill the bucket from whatever source you have--whether that be from the tap on a good day, or from the toilet tank on one of those dreary ones--and enjoy! Bucket can even provide hours of entertainment for your little ones when empty. Don't forget, water must be boiled for five minutes, or sit with four halazone tablets per gallon for an hour before consumption. Bucket can be used to transport snow and ice indoors for the lucky folks up north, or to transport water home on Ration Distribution Day for the rest of us. Buckets can be found behind warehouses, at the Home Depot locations that have not been burnt to the ground, and in almost abandoned public school's janitor closet. Just walk right in and Bucket can be yours! Go get Bucket.

(sped up in post)

Bucket is to be used with adult supervision, water not included.

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ultralifehackerguru-blog · 7 years ago

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New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/quick-guide-every-major-character-westworld/

A quick guide to every major character on 'Westworld'

Warning: Spoilers ahead for “Westworld” season two, episode two.

“Westworld” has more characters and storylines than the average viewer can keep up with, so we’ve assembled a handy character list for your Sunday nights. Here you’ll find all the significant hosts and employees of Westworld, and what they got up to on the first season.

We’ll update this slideshow as new characters are introduced each week, but for now the spoilers only cover through the first and second episodes of season two.

Let’s dive in.

View As: One Page Slides

First up — Dr. Robert Ford.

Played by Anthony Hopkins.

John P. Johnson/HBO

Ford was Westworld’s park director and one of its co-founders. The process for creating and programming the hosts is all based on his team’s original research conducted over 30 years ago.

On the first season finale, Ford was shot and killed by a host named Dolores.

Ford also build a young host-version of himself who lives in the park.

This is also Robert Ford.

HBO

This host speaks with a blend of Roberts old and young voice, and is coded to continue representing Ford in the park.

Dolores Abernathy is the oldest host in Westworld.

Played by Evan Rachel Wood.

HBO

Since she’s the oldest park host, that means Dolores was created over 35 years prior to the events in “Westworld.”

Stubbs says that she’s been updated so many times “she’s practically brand new.” Dolores was one of the first hosts to get close to sentience. By the end of the first season, it appeared as if she was finally self-aware when she shot and killed Ford.

Arnold was Ford’s original partner and co-creator of the hosts.

Arnold is played by Jeffrey Wright.

HBO

Arnold was the one who began experimenting with bootstrapping consciousness into the hosts. Dolores was his first test subject. He created a “maze” inside the park to help lead Dolores into self-awareness and to spur the creation of a subconscious mind in her.

He eventually decided Westworld shouldn’t open, because the hosts were starting to become sentient. Arnold programmed Dolores to kill all of the other hosts as well as himself in an effort to sabotage the park.

Bernard Lowe is a host Ford built in the image of Arnold.

Also played by Jeffrey Wright.

John P. Johnson/HBO

Bernard was Ford’s right-hand man, a host who is the the Head of Behavior and a programming specialist. Bernard was programmed to think he was human, but over the course of the first season he learned the truth.

Karl Strand is the head of operations at Delos.

Played by Guståf Skarsgard.

HBO

He’s a no-nonsense kind of man who was sent by the Delos company to fix the mess in the parks after Ford’s new bloody plot wreaked havoc.

Elsie Hughes is a Behavior Specialist who worked under Bernard Lowe.

Played by Shannon Woodward.

HBO

Elsie helps with coding, debugging, and processing the hosts as they receive updates. She was working with Bernard to investigate host glitches when she disappeared. Now we’re not sure where in the park she is, but we’re pretty sure she’s alive.

Antoine Costa is a technician who is not missing, but is helping Strand analyze the hosts in the field.

Played by Fares Fares.

John P. Johnson/HBO

He first appeared on the second season premiere, where he extracted a cortical storage device from a host and showed the Delos team the video footage kept there.

Ashley Stubbs is the Head of Security for Westworld.

Played by Luke Hemsworth.

John P. Johnson/HBO

Stubbs has a healthy level of skepticism when it comes to the hosts following their programming, and tends to take on potentially risky retrieval missions himself.

Maling in a new Delos security personnel character.

Played by Betty Gabriel.

John P. Johnson/HBO

She also first appeared on the opening episode of the second season, where she found Bernard and helped Strand keep the new system in order.

Lee Sizemore is the ambitious Head of Narrative at the parks.

Played by Simon Quarterman.

HBO

Most of the storylines and dialogue you see the hosts act out in the park are all Sizemore’s design and script. He was helping the Delos board smuggle data out of the park by the end of the first season.

Theresa Cullen was the Head of Quality Assurance.

Played by Sidse Babett Knudsen.

HBO

It was Cullen’s job to make sure the guests are happy and the hosts are behaving according to regulations. But Theresa was secretly helping the Delos board smuggle data out of the park.

Ford had Bernard kill Theresa on his orders and make the murder look like an accident.

Charlotte Hale is the executive director of Delos and Westworld’s board.

Played by Tessa Thompson.

John P. Johnson/HBO

Her friendly demeanor gives way to a stern and calculating woman who has been smuggling data out of the Westworld park. Though she hadn’t yet revealed specific details about the data on the first season, we’re sure her secrets will eventually come out.

Maeve Millay is one of the first newly sentient hosts in Westworld.

Played by Thandie Newton.

John P. Johnson/HBO

Maeve was the madam of the Marisposa — a saloon/brothel in Sweetwater. Now she’s the most powerful host in the park, and has the ability to control other hosts with voice commands.

Felix Lutz is one of the Livestock Management employees.

Played by Leonardo Nam.

HBO

It’s Felix’s job to patch up the hosts after they’ve been shot, stabbed, or otherwise incapacitated. But Felix “borrowed” a coding console from the behavior department and wound up helping Maeve change her core programming and enabling her to escape.

Sylvester is Felix’s partner in the Livestock Manufacturing lab.

Played by Ptolemy Slocum.

HBO

He had no patience for Felix’s experiment with coding, but was roped into the Maeve-escape plot after she threatened his life.

Clementine Pennyfeather was one of the host prostitutes working at the Mariposa under Maeve.

Played by Angela Sarafyan.

John P. Johsnon/HBO

She specialized in finding newcomers and welcoming them to Westworld. But after Charlotte and Theresa used Clementine as a scapegoat host in a failed experiment, Clementine was lobotomized.

Teddy Flood is another host with a troubled past and a penchant for gunslinging.

Played by James Marsden.

John P. Johnson/HBO

He often accompanies guests on bounty hunts, or tags along with his programmed love — Dolores. Teddy’s primary directive is finding and helping Dolores, though his good-natured side can be manipulated via coding.

Angela is a host we’ve seen in two roles — a greeter for new guests and as a henchman for Dolores.

Played by Talulah Riley.

John P. Johnson/HBO

She’s one of the oldest hosts in the park, along with Dolores and Teddy. She’s currently acting as a rallying point for the other rebelling hosts who will support Dolores (as “Wyatt”).

Akecheta is another of the original hosts in the park.

Played by Zahn McClarnon.

HBO

He went with Angela to first pitch Westworld to Logan Delos.

Major Craddock is another host, though his current role is as a dangerous leader in the Confederado.

Played by Jonathan Tucker.

HBO

We saw this host first appear at the party with Angela and Akecheta, but he was without a mustache then. Later, Dolores meets this host while he’s in his solider narrative.

Logan Delos is a powerful businessman who was looking to increase his company’s stake in Westworld.

Played by Ben Barnes.

John P. Johnson/HBO

Logan is an ambitious and impetuous bad boy who loves indulging in his vices while visiting Westworld. The scenes featuring Logan on the first season all took place around 30 years prior to “current day” on “Westworld.”

James Delos is Logan’s father and the titan of industry.

Played by Peter Mullan.

HBO

James is a no-nonsense man who seems impatient with his son. But James’ daughter, Juliet is dating another promising young man.

William is Logan’s future brother-in-law and his coworker.

Played by Jimmi Simpson.

HBO

William came to the park with Logan to celebrate their future lives as in-laws. But by the time they left, William decided to usurp Logan’s role in the company and go work with James directly.

The Man in Black is William, but in “present day.”

Played by Ed Harris.

John P. Johsnon/HBO

William transformed into the Man in Black by the end of the first season. By current day on the show, William is one of the most powerful Delos board members. His wife (Logan’s sister) has committed suicide, and after their daughter blamed William for her death he returned to Westworld to confront his demons.

Juliet is Logan’s sister and James’ daughter, and eventually William’s wife.

Played by Claire Unabia.

HBO

Juliet marries William and they have a daughter, Emily, together.

Lawrence/El Lazo is a host who spent most of season one with William.

Played by Clifton Collins Jr.

John P. Johnson/HBO

He’s referred to by other hosts as an outlaw due to his criminal group run under the name El Lazo. Lawrence is a sardonic host who often winds up tagging along with William on his dangerous adventures.

Hector Escaton is the “bad boy” host of Westworld .

Played by Rodrigo Santoro.

HBO

Hector is a bandit who travels with a group of loyal followers and periodically tries to rob the Mariposa Saloon. He teamed up with Maeve after she showed him the truth about how the park works and their role in it.

Armistice is Hector’s host companion and fellow gunslinger.

Played by Ingrid Bolsø Berdal.

HBO

Armistice has a deadly shot and a gigantic snake tattoo covering her body — the relic of a tormented past. She also joined Maeve’s escape mission and is becoming more self aware.

(C)

#HBO #Lifestyle #tv shows #Westworld

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clarenceomoore · 7 years ago

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Voices in AI – Episode 36: A Conversation with Bill Mark

Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

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In this episode Byron and Bill talk about SRI International, aging, human productivity and more.

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Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm. I’m Byron Reese. Today our guest is Bill Mark. He heads up SRI International’s Information and Computing Sciences Division which consists of two hundred and fifty researchers, in four laboratories, who create new technology and virtual personal assistants, information security, machine learning, speech, natural language, computer vision—all the things we talk about on the show. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT. Welcome to the show, Bill.

Bill Mark: Good to be here.

So, let’s start off with a little semantics. Why is artificial intelligence, artificial? Is artificial because it’s not really intelligence, or what?

No, it’s artificial, because it’s created by human beings as opposed to nature. So, in that sense, it’s an artifact, just like any other kind of physical artifact. In this case, it’s usually a software artifact.

But, at its core, it truly is intelligent and its intelligence doesn’t differ in substance, only in degree, from human intelligence?

I don’t think I’d make that statement. The definition of artificial intelligence to me is always a bit of a challenge. The artificial part, I think, is easy, we just covered that. The intelligence part, I’ve looked at different definitions of artificial intelligence, and most of them use the word “intelligence” in the definition. That doesn’t seem to get us much further. I could say something like, “it’s artifacts that can acquire and/or apply knowledge,” but then we’re going to have a conversation about what knowledge is. So, what I get out of it is it’s not very satisfying to talk about intelligence at this level of generality because, yes, in answer to your question, artificial intelligence systems do things which human beings do, in different ways and, as you indicated, not with the same fullness or level that human beings do. That doesn’t mean that they’re not intelligent, they have certain capabilities that we regard as intelligent.

You know it’s really interesting because at its core you’re right, there’s no consensus definition on intelligence. There’s no consensus definition on life or death. And I think that’s really interesting that these big ideas aren’t all that simple. I’ll just ask you one more question along these lines then. Alan Turing posed the question in 1950, “Can a machine think?” What would you say to that?

I would say yes, but now we have to wonder what “think” might mean, because “think” is one aspect of intelligent behavior, it indicates some kind of reasoning or reflection. I think that there are software systems that do reason and reflect, so I will say yes, they think.

All right, so now let’s get to SRI International. For the listeners who may not be familiar with the company can you give us the whole background and some of the things you’ve done to date, and why you exist, and when it started and all of that?

Great, just a few words about SRI International. SRI International is a non-profit research and development company, and that that’s a pretty rare category. A lot of companies do research and development—a fewer than used to, but still quite a few—and very few have research and development as their business, but that is our business. We’re also non-profit, which really means that we don’t have shareholders. We still have to make money, but all the money we make has to go into the mission of the organization which is to do R&D for the benefit of mankind. That’s the general thing. It started out as part of Stanford, it was formerly the Stanford Research Institute. It’s been independent since 1970 and it’s one of the largest of these R&D companies in the world, about two thousand people.

Now, the information and computing sciences part, as you said, that’s about two hundred and fifty people, and probably the thing that we’re most famous for nowadays is that we created Siri. Siri was a spinoff of one of my labs, the AI Center. It was a spinoff company of SRI, that’s one of the things we do, and it was acquired by Apple, and has now become world famous. But we’ve been in the field of artificial intelligence for decades. Another famous SRI accomplishment would be Shakey the Robot, which was really the first robot that could move around and reason and interact. That was many years ago. We’ve also, in more recent history, been involved in very large government-sponsored AI projects which we’ve led, and we just have lots of things that we’ve done in AI.

Is it just a coincidence that Siri and SRI are just one letter different, or is that deliberate?

It’s a coincidence. When SRI starts companies we bring in entrepreneurs from the outside almost always, because it would be pretty unusual for an SRI employee to be the right person to be the CEO of the startup company. It does happen, but it’s unusual. Anyway, in this case, we brought in a guy named Dag Kittlaus, and he’s of Norwegian extraction, and he chose the name. Siri is a Norwegian women’s name and that became the name of the company. Actually, somewhat to our surprise, Apple retained that name when they launched Siri.

Let’s go through some of the things that your group works on. Could we start with those sorts of technologies? Are there other things in that family of conversational AI that you work on and are you working on the next generation of that?

Yes, indeed, in fact, we’ve been working on the next generation for a while now. I like to think about conversational systems in different categories. Human beings have conversations for all kinds of reasons. We have social conversations, where there’s not particularly any objective but being friendly and socializing. We have task-oriented kinds of conversations—those are the ones that we are focusing on mostly in the next generation—where you’re conversing with someone in order to perform a task or solve some problem, and what’s really going on is it’s a collaboration. You and the other person, or people, are working together to solve a problem.

I’ll use an example from the world of online banking because we have another spinoff called Kasisto that is using the next-generation kind of conversational interaction technology. So, let’s say that you walk into a bank, and you say to the person behind the counter, “I want to deposit $1,000 in checking.” And the person on the other side, the teller says, “From which account?” And you say, “How much do I have in savings?” And the teller says, “You have $1,500, but if you take $1,000 out you’ll stop earning interest.” So, take that little interaction. That’s a conversational interaction. People do this all the time, but it’s actually very sophisticated and requires knowledge.

If you now think of, not a teller, but a software system, a software agent that you’re conversing with—we’ll go through the same little interaction. The person says, “I want to deposit $1,000 in checking.” And the teller said, “From which account?” The software system has to know something about banking. It has to know that a deposit is a money transfer kind of interaction and it requires a from-account and a to-account. And in this case, the to-account has been specified but the from-account hasn’t been specified. In many cases that person would simply ask for that missing information, so that’s the first part of the interaction. So, again, the teller says, “From which account?” And the person says, “How much do I have in savings?” Well, that’s not an answer to the question. In fact, it’s another question being introduced by the person and it’s actually a balance inquiry question. They want to know how much they have in savings. Now, when I go through this the first time, the reason I do this twice is that when I went through it the first time, almost nobody even notices that that wasn’t an answer to the question, but if you try out a lot of the personal assistant systems that are out there, they tend to crater on that kind of interaction, because they don’t have enough conversational knowledge to be able to handle that kind of thing. And then the interaction goes on where the teller is providing information, beyond what the person asked, about potentially losing interest, or it might be that they would get a fee or something like that.

That illustrates the point that we expect our conversational partners to be proactive, not just to simply answer our questions, but to actually help us solve the problem. That’s the kind of interaction that we’re building systems to support. It’s very different than the personal assistants that are out there like Siri, and Cortana, and Google which are meant to be very general. Siri doesn’t really know anything about banking, which isn’t a criticism it’s not supposed to know anything about banking, but if you want to get your banking done over your mobile phone then you’re going to need a system that knows about banking. That’s one example of sort of next-generation conversational interaction.

How much are we going to be able to use transfer learning to generalize from that? You built that bot, that highly verticalized bot that knows everything about banking, does anything it learned make it easier now for it to do real estate, and then for it to do retail, and then all the other things? Or is it the case that like every single vertical, all ten thousand of them are going to need to start over from scratch?

It’s a really good question, and I would say, with some confidence, that it’s not about starting over from scratch because some amount of the knowledge will transfer to different domains. Real estate has transactions, if there’s knowledge about transactions some of that knowledge will carry over, some of it won’t.

You said, “the knowledge that it has learned,” and we need to get pretty specific about that. We do build systems that learn, but not all of their knowledge is picked up by learning. Some of it is built in, to begin with. So, there’s the knowledge that has been explicitly represented, some of which will transfer over. And then there’s knowledge that has been learned in other ways, some of that will transfer over as well, but it’s less clear-cut how that will work. But it’s not starting from scratch every time.

So, eventually though you get to something that could pass the Turing test. You could ask it, “So, if I went into the bank and wanted to move $1,000, what would be the first question you would ask me?” And it would say, “Oh, from what account?”

My experience with every kind of candidate Turing test system, and nobody purports that we’re there by a long shot, but my first question is always, “What’s bigger, a nickel or the sun?” And I haven’t found a single one that can answer the question. How far away is that?

Well, first just for clarity, we are not building these systems in order to pass the Turing test, and in fact, something that you’ll find in most of these systems is that outside of their domain of expertise, say banking, in this case, they don’t know very much of anything. So, again, the systems that we build wouldn’t know things like what’s bigger, the nickel or the sun.

The whole idea of the Turing test is that it’s meant to be some form of evaluation, or contest for seeing whether you have created something that’s truly intelligent. Because, again, this was one of Turing’s approaches to answering this question of what is intelligence. He didn’t really answer that question but he said if you could develop an artifact that could pass this kind of test, then you would have to say that it was intelligent, or had human-like behavior at the very least. So, in answer to your question, I think we’re very far from that because we aren’t so good at getting the knowledge that, I would say, most people have into a computer system yet.

Let’s talk about that for a minute. Why is it so hard and why is it so, I’ll go out on a limb and say, easy for people? Like, a toddler can tell me what’s bigger the nickel or the sun, so why is it so hard? And what makes humans so able to do it?

Well, I don’t know that anyone knows the answer to that question. I certainly don’t. I will say that human beings spend time experiencing the world, and are also taught. Human beings are not born knowing that the sun is bigger than a nickel, however, over time they experience what the sun is and, at some point, they will experience what a nickel is, and they’ll be able to make that comparison. By the way, they also have to learn how to make comparisons. It would be interesting to ask toddlers that question, because the sun doesn’t look very big when you look up in the sky, so that brings in a whole other class of human knowledge which I’ll just broad-brush call book learning. I certainly would not know that the sun is really huge, unless I had learned that in school. Human beings have different ways of learning, only a very small sample of which have been implemented in artificial intelligence learning systems.

There’s a Calvin and Hobbes, where his dad tells Calvin that it’s a myth that the sun is big, that it’s really only the size of a quarter. And he said, “Look, hold it up in the sky. They’re the same.” So, point taken.

But, let me ask it this way, human DNA is, I don’t know, I’m going to get this a little off, but it’s like 670MB of data. And if you look at how much that’s different than, say, a banana, it’s a small amount that is different. And then you say, well, how much of it is different than, say, a chimp, and it’s a minuscule amount. So, whatever that minuscule difference in code is, just a few MBs, is that, kind of, the secret to intelligence? Is that a proof point that there may be some very basic, simple ways to acquire generalized knowledge, that we just haven’t stumbled across yet that, but there may be something that gives us this generalized learner, we can just plug into the Internet and the next day it knows everything.

I don’t make that jump. I think the fact that a relatively small amount of genetic material differentiates us from other species doesn’t indicate that there’s something simple out there, because the way those genes or the genetic material impacts the world is very complex, and lead to all kinds of things that could be very hard for us to understand and try to emulate. I also don’t know that there is a generalist learner anyway. I think, as I said, human beings seem to have different ways of learning things, and that doesn’t say to me that there is one general approach.

Back in the Dartmouth days, when they thought they could knock out a lot of AI problems in a summer, it was in the hope that intelligence followed a few simple laws, like how the laws of physics explain so much. It’s been kind of the consensus move to think that we’re kind of a hack of a thousand specialized things that we do that all come together and make generalized intelligence. And it sounds like you’re more in that camp that it’s just a bunch of hard work and we have to tackle these domains one at a time. Is that fair?

I’m actually kind of in between. I think that there are general methods, there are general representations, but there’s also a lot of specific knowledge that’s required to be competent in some activity. I’m into sort of a hybrid.

But you do think that building an AGI, generalized intelligence, that is as versatile as a human is theoretically possible I assume?

Yes.

You mentioned something when we were chatting earlier that a child explores the world. Do you think embodiment is a pathway to that, that until we give machines away, in essence, to “experience” the world, that that will always limit what we’re able to do? Is that embodiment, that you identified as being important for humans, also important for computers?

Well, I would just differentiate the idea of exploration from embodiment. I think that exploration is a fundamental part of learning. I would say that we, yes indeed, will be missing something unless we design systems that can explore their world. From my point of view, they may or may not be embodied in the usual sense of that word, which means that they can move around and actuate within their environment. If you generalize that to software and say, “Are software agents embodied because they can do things in the world?” then, yeah, I guess I would say embodiment, but it doesn’t have to be physical embodiment.

Earlier when you were talking about digital assistants you said Siri, Cortana and then you said, “Oh, and Google.” And that highlights a really interesting thing that Amazon named theirs, you named yours, Microsoft named theirs, but Google’s is just the Google Assistant. And you’re undoubtedly familiar with the worries that Weizenbaum had with ELIZA. He thought that this was potentially problematic that we name these devices, and we identify with them as if they are human. He said, “When a computer says, ‘I understand,’ it’s just a lie. There’s no ‘I,’ and there’s nothing that understands anything.” How would you respond to Weizenbaum? Do you think that’s an area of concern or you think he was just off?

I think it’s definitely an area of concern, and it’s really important in designing. I’ll go back to conversational systems, systems like that, which human beings interact with, it’s important that you do as much as possible to help the human being create a correct mental model of what it is that they’re conversing with. So, should it be named? I think it’s kind of convenient to name it, as you were just saying, it kind of makes it easier to talk about, but it immediately raises this danger of people over-reading into it: what it is, what it knows, etcetera. I think it’s very much something to be concerned about.

There’s that case in Japan, where there’s a robot that they were teaching how to navigate a mall, and very quickly learned that it got bullied by children who would hit it, curse at it, and all these things. And later when they asked the children did you think it was upset, was it acting upset? Was it acting human-like or mechanical? They overwhelmingly said it was human-like.

And I still have a bit of an aversion to interrupting the Amazon device—I can’t say its name because it’s on my desk right next to me—and telling it, “Stop!” And so I just wonder where it goes because, you’re right, it’s like the Tom Hanks’ movie Castaway when his only friend was a soccer ball named “Wilson” that he personified.

I remember there was a case in the ‘40s where they would show students a film of circles and lines moving around, and ask them to construct stories, and they would attribute to these lines and circles personalities, and interactions, and all of that. It is such a tempting thing we do, and you can see it in people’s relationships to their pets that one wonders how that’s all going to sort itself out, or will we look back in forty years and think, “Well, that was just crazy.”

No, I think you’re absolutely right. I think that human beings are extremely good at giving characteristics to objects, systems, etcetera, and I think that will continue. And, as I said, that’s very much a danger in artificial intelligence systems, the danger being that people assume too much knowledge, capability, understanding, given what the system actually is. Part of the job of designing the system is, as I said before, to go as far as we can to give the person the right idea about what it is that they’re dealing with.

Another area that you seem to be focused on, as I was reading about you and your work, is AI and the aging population. Can you talk about what the goal is there and what you are doing, and maybe some successes or failures you’ve had along the way?

Yes, indeed, we are, SRI-wide actually, looking at what we can do to address the problem, the worldwide problem, of higher percentage of aging population, lower percentage of caregivers. We read about this in the headlines all the time. In particular, what we can do to have people experience an optimal life, the best that is possible for them as they age. And there’s lots of things that we’re looking at there. We were just talking about conversational systems. We are looking at the problem of conversational systems that are aimed at the aging population, because interaction tends to be a good thing and sometimes there aren’t caregivers around, or there aren’t enough of them, or they don’t pay attention, so it might actually be interesting to have a conversational system that elderly people can talk to and interact with. We’re also looking at ways to preserve privacy and unobtrusively monitor the health of people, using artificial intelligence techniques. This is indeed a big area for us.

Also, your laboratories work on information security and you mentioned privacy earlier, talk to me, if you would, about the state of the art there. Across all of human history, there’s been this constant battle between the cryptographers and the people who break the codes, and it’s unclear who has the upper hand in that. It’s the same thing with information security. Where are we in that world? And is it easier to use AI to defend against breaches, or to use that technology to do the breach?

Well, I think, the situation is very much as you describe—it’s a constant battle between attackers and defenders. I don’t think it’s any easier to use AI to attack, or defend. It can be used for both. I’m sure it is being used for both. It’s just one of the many sets of techniques that can be used in cybersecurity.

There’s a lot of concern wrapped up in artificial intelligence and its ability to automate a lot of work, and then the effect of that automation on employment. What’s your perspective on how that is going to unfold?

Well, my first perspective is it’s a very complex issue. I think it’s very hard to predict the effect of any technology on jobs in the long-term. As I reflect, I live in the Bay Area, a huge percentage of the jobs that people have in the Bay Area didn’t exist at all a hundred years ago, and I would say a pretty good percentage didn’t exist twenty years ago. I’m certainly not capable of projecting in the long run what the effect of AI and automation will be. You can certainly guess that it will be disruptive, all new technologies are disruptive, and that’s something as a society we need to take aboard and deal with, but how it’s going to work out in the long-term, I really don’t know.

Do you take any comfort that we’ve had transformative technologies aplenty? Right, we had the assembly line which is a kind of artificial intelligence, we had the electrification of industry, we had the replacement of animal power with steam power. I mean each of those was incredibly disruptive. And when you look back across history each one of them happened incredibly fast and yet unemployment never surged from them. Unemployment in the US has always been between four and ten percent, other than the depression. And you can’t the point and say, “Oh, when this technology came out unemployment went briefly to fourteen percent,” or anything like that. Do you take comfort in that or do you say, “Well, this technology is materially different”?

I take comfort in it in the sense that I have a lot of faith in the creativity and agility of people. I think what that historical data is reflecting is the ability of individuals and communities to adapt to change and I expect that to continue. Now, artificial intelligence technology is different, but I think that we will learn to adapt and thrive with artificial intelligence in the world.

How is it different though, really? Because technology increases human productivity, that’s kind of what it does. That’s what steam did. That’s what electricity did. That’s what the Industrial Revolution did. And that’s what artificial intelligence does. How is it different?

I think in the sense that you’re talking about, it’s not different. It is meant to augment human capability. It’s augmenting now, to some extent, different kinds of human activity, although arguably that’s been going on for a long time, too. Calculators, printing presses, things like that have taken over human activities that were once thought to be core human things. It’s sort of a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.

One interesting thing about technology and how the wealth that it produces is disseminated through culture, is that in one sense technology helps everybody—you get a better TV, or better brakes in your car, better deodorant, or whatever—but in two other ways, it doesn’t. If you’re somebody who sells your labor by the hour, and your company can produce a labor-saving device, that benefit doesn’t accrue to you it generally would accrue to the shareholders of the company in terms of higher earnings. But if you’re self-employed, or you buy your own time as it were, you get to pocket all of the advances that technology gets you, because it makes your productivity higher and you get all of that. So, do you think that the technology does inherently make worse the income-inequality situation, or am I missing something in that analysis?

Well, I don’t think that is inherent and I’m not sure that the fault lines will cut that way. We were just talking about the fact that there is disruption and what that tends to mean is that some people will benefit in the short-term, and some of the people will suffer in the short-term. I started by saying this is a complex issue. I think one of the complexities is actually determining what that is. For example, let’s take stuff around us now like Uber and other ride-hailing services. Clearly that has disrupted the world of taxi drivers, but on the other hand has created opportunities for many, many, many other drivers, including taxi drivers. What’s the ultimate cost-benefit there? I don’t know. Who wins and loses? Is it the cab companies, is it the cab drivers? I think it’s hard to say.

I think it was Niels Bohr that said, “Making predictions is hard, especially if they’re about the future.” And he was a Nobel Laureate.

Exactly.

The military, of course, is a multi–trillion-dollar industry and it’s always an adopter of technology, and there seems to be a debate about making weapon systems that make autonomous kill decisions. How do you think that’s going to unfold?

Well, again, I think that this is a very difficult problem and is a touchpoint issue. It’s one manifestation of an overall problem of how we trust complex systems of any kind. This is, to me anyway, this goes way beyond artificial intelligence. Any kind of complex system, we don’t really know how it works, what its limitations are, etcetera. How do we put boundaries on its behavior and how do we develop trust in what it’s done? I think that’s one of the critical research problems of the next few decades.

You are somebody who believes we’re going to build a general intelligence, and it seems that when you read the popular media there’s a certain number of people that are afraid of that technology. You know all the names: Elon Musk says it’s like summoning the demon, Professor Hawking says it could be the last thing we do, Bill Gates says he’s in the camp of people who are worried about it and don’t understand why other people aren’t was, Wozniak, the list goes on and on. Then you have another list of people who just almost roll their eyes at those sorts of things, like Andrew Ng who says it’s like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, the roboticist Rodney Brooks says that it’s not helpful, Zuckerberg and so forth. So, two questions: why, among a roomful of incredibly smart people is there such a disagreement over it, and, two, where do you fall in that kind of debate?

Well, I think the reason for disagreements, is that it’s a complex issue and it involves something that you were just talking about with the Niels Bohr quote. You’re making predictions about the future. You’re making predictions about the pace of change, and when certain things will occur, what will happen when they occur, really based on very little information. I’m not at all surprised that there’s dramatic difference of opinion.

But to be clear, it’s not a roomful of people saying, “These are really complex issues,” it’s a roomful of people were half of them are saying, “I know it is a problem,” and half of them saying, “I know it is not a problem.”

I guess that might be a way of strongly stating a belief. They can’t possibly know.

Right, like everything you’re saying you’re taking measured tones like, “Well, we don’t know. It could happen this way or that way. It’s very complicated.” They are not taking that same tone.

Well, let me get to your second question, we can come back to the first one. So, my personal view, and here comes this measured response that you just accused me of is, yes, I’m worried about it, but, honestly, I’m worried about other things more. I think that this is something to be concerned about. It’s not an irrational concern, but there are other concerns that I think are more pressing. For example, I’m much more worried about people using technology for untoward purposes than I am about superintelligence taking over the world.

That is an inherent problem with technology’s ability to multiply human effort, if human effort is malicious. Is that an insoluble problem? If you can make an AGI you can, almost by definition, make an evil AGI, correct?

Yes. Just to go back a little bit, you asked me whether I thought AGI was theoretically possible, whether there are any theoretical barriers. I don’t think there are theoretical barriers. We can extrapolate and say, yes, someday that kind of thing will be created. When it is, you’re right, I think any technology, any aspect of human behavior can be done for good or evil, from the point of view of some people.

I have to say, another thing I think about when we talk about super intelligence, I was relating it to complex systems in general. I think of big systems that exist today that we live with, like high-speed automated trading of securities, or weather forecasting, these are complex systems that definitely influence our behavior. I’m going to go out on a limb and say nobody knows what’s really going on with them. And we’ve learned to adapt to them.

It’s interesting, I think part of the difference of opinion boils down to a few technical questions that are very specific that we don’t know the answer to. One of them is, it seems like some people are kind of, I don’t want to say down on humans, but they don’t think human abilities, like creativity and all of that are all that difficult, and machines are going to be able to master that. There’s a group of people who would say the amount of time between one of these systems being able to self-improve is short, not long. I think that some would say intelligence isn’t really that hard, but there’s probably a few breakthroughs. You stack enough of those together and you say, “Okay, it’s really soon.” But if you take the opposite side on those—creativity is very hard, intelligence is very hard—then you’re, kind of, in the other camp. I don’t doubt the sincerity of any of the parties involved.

On your comment about the theoretical possibility of a general intelligence, just to explore that for a moment, without any regard for when it will happen—we understand how a computer could, for instance, measure temperature, but we don’t really understand how a computer, or I don’t, could feel pain. For a machine to go from measuring the world to experiencing the world, we don’t really know that, and so is that required to make a general intelligence, to be able to, in essence, experience qualia, to be conscious, or not.

Well, I think that if we’re truly talking about general intelligence in the sense that I think most people mean it, which is human-like intelligence, then one thing that people do is experience the world and react to it, and it becomes part of the way that we think and reason about the world. So, yes, I think, if we want computers to have that kind of capability, then we have to figure out a way for them to experience it.

The question then becomes—I think this is in the realm of the very difficult—when, to use your example, a human being or any animal experiences pain, there is some physical and then electrochemical reaction going on that is somehow interpreted in the brain. I don’t know how all of that works, but I believe that it’s theoretically possible to figure out how that works and to create artifacts that exhibit that behavior.

Because we can’t really confine it to how humans feel pain, right? But, I guess I’m still struggling over that. What would that even look like, or is your point, “I don’t know what it looks like, but that would be what’s required to do it.”

I definitely don’t know what it looks like on the inside, but you can also look at the question of, “What is the value of pain, or how does pain influence behavior?” For a lot of things, pain is a warning that we should avoid something, touching a hot object, moving an injured limb, etcetera. There’s a question of whether we can get computer systems to be able to have that kind of warning sensation which, again, isn’t exactly the same thing as creating a system that feels pain in any way like an animal does, but it could get the same value out of the experience.

Your lab does work in robotics as well as artificial intelligence, is that correct?

Right.

Talk a little bit about that work and how those two things come together, artificial intelligence and robots.

Well, I think that, traditionally, artificial intelligence and robotics have been the same area of exploration. One of the features of any maturing discipline, which I think AI is, is that various specializations and specialty groups start forming naturally as the field expands and there’s more and more to know.

The fact that you’re even asking the question shows that there has become a specialization in robotics that is seen as separate from, some people may say, part of, some people may say, completely different from, artificial intelligence. As a matter of fact, although my labs work on aspects of robotics, other labs within SRI, that are not part of the information computing sciences division, also work on robotics.

The thing about robotics is that you’re looking at things like motion, manipulation, actuation, doing things in the world, and that is a very interesting set of problems that has created a discipline around it. Then on top of that, or surrounding it, is the kind of AI reasoning, perception, etcetera, that enables those things to actually work. To me, they are different aspects of the same problem of having, to go back to something you said before, some embodiment of intelligence that can interact with the real world.

The roboticist Rodney Brooks, who I mentioned earlier, says something to the effect that he thinks there’s something about biology, something very profoundly basic that we don’t understand which he calls, “the juice.” And to be clear, he’s 100% convinced that “the juice” is biology, that there’s nothing mystical about it, that it’s just something we don’t understand. And he says it’s the difference between, you put a robot in a box and it tries to get out, it just kind of runs through a protocol and tries to climb. But you put an animal in a box and it frantically wants out of that box—it’s scratching, it’s getting agitated and worked up—and that difference between those two systems he calls “the juice.” Do you think there is something like that that we don’t yet know about biology that would be beneficial to have to put in robots?

I think that there’s a whole lot that we don’t know about biology, and I can assure you there’s a huge amount that I don’t know about biology. Calling it “the juice,” I don’t know what we learn from that. Certainly, the fact that animals have motivations and built-in desires that make them desperately want to get out of the box, is part of this whole issue of what we were talking about before of how and whether to introduce that into artifacts, into artificial systems. Is it a good thing to have in robots? I would say, yes. This gets back to the discussion about pain, because presumably the animal is acting that way out of a desire for self-preservation, that something that it has inherited or learned tells it that being trapped in a box is not good for its long-term survival prospects. Yes, it would be good for robots to be able to protect themselves.

I’ll ask you another either/or question you may not want to answer. The human body uses one hundred watts and we use twenty of that to power our brain, and we use eighty of it to power our body. The biggest supercomputers in the world use twenty million watts and they’re not able to do what the brain does. Which of those is a harder thing to replicate? If you had to build a computer that operated with the capabilities of the human brain that used twenty watts, or you had to build a robot that only used eighty watts that could mimic the mobility of a human. Which of those is a harder problem?

Well, as you suggested when you brought this up, I can’t take that either/or. I think that they’re both really hard. The way you phrased that makes me think of somebody who came to give a talk at SRI a number of years ago, and was somebody who was interested in robotics. He said that, as a student, he had learned about the famous AI programs that had become successful in playing chess. And as he learned more and more about it, he realized that what was really hard was a human being picking up the chess piece and moving it around, not the thinking that was involved in chess. I think he was absolutely right about that because chess is a game that is abstract and has certain rules, so even though it’s very complex, it’s not the same thing as the complexities of actual manipulation of objects. But if you ask the question you did, which is comparing it not to chess, but to the full range of human activity then I would just have to say they’re both hard.

There isn’t a kind of a Moore’s law of robotics is there—the physical motors and materials and power, and all of that? Is that improving at a rate commensurate with our advances in AI, or is that taking longer and slower?

Well, I think that you have to look at that in more detail. There has been tremendous progress in the ability to build systems that can manipulate objects that use all kinds of interesting techniques. Cost is going down. The accuracy and flexibility is going up. In fact, that’s one of the specialty areas of the robotics part of SRI. That’s absolutely happening. There’s also been tremendous progress on aspects of artificial intelligence. But other parts of artificial intelligence are coming along much more slowly and other parts of robotics are coming along much more slowly.

You’re about the sixtieth guest on the show, and I think that all of them, certainly all of them that I have asked, consume science fiction, sometimes quite a bit of it. Are you a science fiction buff?

I’m certainly not a science fiction buff. I have read science fiction. I think I used to read a lot more science fiction than I do now. I think science fiction is great. I think it can be very inspiring.

Is there any vision of the future in a movie, TV, or book, or anything that you look at and say, “Yes, that could happen, that’s how the world might unfold”? You can say Her, or Westworld, or Ex Machina, or Star Trek, or any of those.

Nope. When I see things like that I think they’re very entertaining, they’re very creative, but they’re works of fiction that follow certain rules or best practices about how to write fiction. There’s always some conflict, there’s resolution, there’s things like that are completely different from what happens in the real world.

All right, well, it has been a fantastically interesting hour. I think we’ve covered a whole lot of ground and I want to thank you for being on the show, Bill.

It’s been a real pleasure.

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his upcoming book The Fourth Age, to be published in April by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Pre-order a copy here.

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babbleuk · 7 years ago

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Voices in AI – Episode 31: A Conversation with Tasha Nagamine

Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

In this episode, Byron and Tasha talk about speech recognition, AGI, consciousness, Droice Lab, healthcare, and science fiction.

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Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by Gigaom. I’m Byron Reese. Today our guest is Tasha Nagamine. She’s a PhD student at Columbia University, she holds an undergraduate degree from Brown and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Columbia. Her research is in neural net processing in speech and language, then the potential applications of speech processing systems through, here’s the interesting part, biologically-inspired, deep neural network models. As if that weren’t enough to fill up a day, Tasha is also the CTO of Droice Labs, an AI healthcare company, which I’m sure we will chat about in a few minutes. Welcome to the show, Tasha.

Tasha Nagamine: Hi.

So, your specialty, it looks like, coming all the way up, is electrical engineering. How do you now find yourself in something which is often regarded as a computer science discipline, which is artificial intelligence and speech recognition?

Yeah, so it’s actually a bit of an interesting meandering journey, how I got here. My undergrad specialty was actually in physics, and when I decided to go to grad school, I was very interested, you know, I took a class and found myself very interested in neuroscience.

So, when I joined Columbia, the reason I’m actually in the electrical engineering department is that my advisor is an EE, but what my research and what my lab focuses on is really in neuroscience and computational neuroscience, as well as neural networks and machine learning. So, in that way, I think what we do is very cross-disciplinary, so that’s why the exact department, I guess, may be a bit misleading.

One of my best friends in college was a EE, and he said that every time he went over to like his grandmother’s house, she would try to get him to fix like the ceiling fan or something. Have you ever had anybody assume you’re proficient with a screwdriver as well?

Yes, that actually happens to me quite frequently. I think I had one of my friends’ landlords one time, when I said I was doing electrical engineering, thought that that actually meant electrician, so was asking me if I knew how to fix light bulbs and things like that.

Well, let’s start now talking about your research, if you would. In your introduction, I stressed biologically-inspired deep neural networks. What do you think, do we study the brain and try to do what it does in machines, or are we inspired by it, or do we figure out what the brain’s doing and do something completely different? Like, why do you emphasize “biologically-inspired” DNNs?

That’s actually a good question, and I think the answer to that is that, you know, researchers and people doing machine learning all over the world actually do all of those things. So, the reason that I was stressing a biologically-inspired—well, you could argue that, first of all, all neural networks are in some way biologically-inspired; now, whether or not they are a good biologically-inspired model, is another question altogether—I think a lot of the big, sort of, advancements that come, like a convolutional neural network was modeled basically directly off of the visual system.

That being said, despite the fact that there are a lot of these biological inspirations, or sources of inspiration, for these models, there’s many ways in which these models actually fail to live up to the way that our brains actually work. So, by saying biologically-inspired, I really just mean a different kind of take on a neural network where we try to, basically, find something wrong with a network that, you know, perhaps a human can do a little bit more intelligently, and try to bring this into the artificial neural network.

Specifically, one issue with current neural networks is that, usually, unless you keep training them, they have no way to really change themselves, or adapt to new situations, but that’s not what happens with humans, right? We continuously take inputs, we learn, and we don’t even need supervised labels to do so. So one of the things that I was trying to do was to try to draw from this inspiration, to find a way to kind of learn in an unsupervised way, to improve your performance in a speech recognition task.

So just a minute ago, when you and I were chatting before we started recording, a siren came by where you are, and the interesting thing is, I could still understand everything you were saying, even though that siren was, arguably, as loud as you were. What’s going on there, am I subtracting out the siren? How do I still understand you? I ask this for the obvious reason that computers seem to really struggle with that, right?

Right, yeah. And actually how this works in the brain is a very open question and people don’t really know how it’s done. This is actually an active research area of some of my colleagues, and there’s a lot of different models that people have for how this works. And you know, it could be that there’s some sort of filter in your brain that, basically, sorts speech from the noise, for example, or a relevant signal from an irrelevant one. But how this happens, and exactly where this happens is pretty unknown.

But you’re right, that’s an interesting point you make, is that machines have a lot of trouble with this. And so that’s one of the inspirations behind these types of research. Because, currently, in machine learning, we don’t really know the best way to do this and so we tend to rely on large amounts of data, and large amounts of labeled data or parallel data, data corrupted with noise intentionally, however this is definitely not how our brain is doing it, but how that’s happening, I don’t think anyone really knows.

Let me ask you a different question along the same lines. I read these stories all the time that say that, “AI has approached human-quality in transcribing speech,” so I see that. And then I call my airline of choice, I will not name them, and it says, “What is your frequent flyer number?” You know, it’s got Caller ID, it should know that, but anyway. Mine, unfortunately, has an A, an H, and an 8 in it, so you can just imagine “AH8H888H”, right?

It never gets it. So, I have to get up, turn the fan off in my office, take my headset off, hold the phone out, and say it over and over again. So, two questions: what’s the disconnect between what I read and my daily experience? Actually, I’ll give you that question and then I have my follow up in a moment.

Oh, sure, so you’re saying, are you asking why it can’t recognize your—

But I still read these stories that say it can do as good of a job as a human.

Well, so usually—and, for example, I think, recently, there was a story published about Microsoft coming up with a system that had reached human parity in speech recognition—well, usually when you’re saying that, you have it on a somewhat artificial task. So, you’ll have a predefined data set, and then test the machine against humans, but that doesn’t necessarily correspond to a real-world setting, they’re not really doing speech recognition out in the wild.

And, I think, you have an even more difficult problem, because although it’s only frequent flyer numbers, you know, there’s no language model there, there’s no context for what your next number should be, so it’s very hard for that kind of system to self-correct, which is a bit problematic.

So I’m hearing two things. The first thing, it sounds like you’re saying, they’re all cooking the books, as it were. The story is saying something that I interpret one way that isn’t real, if you dig down deep, it’s different. But the other thing you seem to be saying is, even though there’s only thirty-six things I could be saying, because there’s no natural flow to that language, it can’t say, “oh, the first word he said was ‘the’ and the third word was ‘ran;’ was that middle word ‘boy’ or ‘toy’?” It could say, “Well, toys don’t run, but boys do, therefore it must be, ‘The boy ran.'” Is that what I’m hearing you saying, that a good AI system’s going to look contextually and get clues from the word usage in a way that a frequent flyer system doesn’t.

Right, yeah, exactly. I think this is actually one of the fundamental limitations of, at least, acoustic modeling, or, you know, the acoustic part of speech recognition, which is that you are completely limited by what the person has said. So, you know, maybe it could be that you’re not pronouncing your “t” at the end of “eight,” very emphatically. And the issue is that, there’s nothing you can really do to fix that without some sort of language-based information to fix it.

And then, to answer your first question, I wouldn’t necessarily call it “cooking the books,” but it is a fact that, you know, really the data that you have to train on and test on and to evaluate your metrics on, often, almost never really matches up with real-world data, and this is a huge problem in the speech domain, it’s a very well-known issue.

You take my 8, H, and A example—which you’re saying that’s a really tricky problem without context—and, let’s say, you have one hundred English speakers, but one is from Scotland, and one could be Australian, and one could be from the east coast, one could be from the south of the United States; is it possible that the range of how 8 is said in all those different places is so wide that it overlaps with how H is said in some places. So, in other words, it’s a literally insoluble problem.

It is, I would say it is possible. One of the issues is then you should have a separate model for different dialects. I don’t want to dive too far into the weeds with this, but at the root of a speech recognition system is often things like the fundamental linguistic or phonetic unit is a phoneme, which is the smallest speech sound, and people even argue about whether or not that these actually exist, what they actually mean, whether or not this is a good unit to use when modeling speech.

That being said, there’s a lot of research underway, for example, sequence to sequence models or other types of models that are actually trying to bypass this sort of issue. You know, instead of having all of these separate components modeling all of the acoustics separately, can we go directly from someone’s speech and from there exactly get text. And maybe through this unsupervised approach it’s possible to learn all these different things about dialects, and to try to inherently learn these things, but that is still a very open question, and currently those systems are not quite tractable yet.

I’m only going to ask one more question on these lines—though I could geek out on this stuff all day long, because I think about it a lot—but really quickly, do you think you’re at the very beginning of this field, or do you feel it’s a pretty advanced field? Just the speech recognition part.

Speech recognition, I think we’re nearing the end of speech recognition to be honest. I think that you could say that speech is fundamentally limited; you are limited by the signal that you are provided, and your job is to transcribe that.

Now, where speech recognition stops, that’s where natural language processing begins. As everyone knows, language is infinite, you can do anything with it, any permutation of words, sequences of words. So, I really think that natural language processing is the future of this field, and I know that a lot of people in speech are starting to try to incorporate more advanced language models into their research.

Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. So, I ran an article on Gigaom, where I had an Amazon Alexa device on my desk and I had a Google Assistant on my desk, and what I noticed right away is that they answer questions differently. These were factual questions, like “How many minutes are in a year?” and “Who designed the American flag?” They had different answers. And you can say it’s because of an ambiguity in the language, but if this is an ambiguity, then all language is naturally ambiguous.

So, the minutes in a year answer difference was that one gave you the minutes in 365.24 days, a solar year, and one gave you the minutes in a calendar year. And with regard to the flag, one said Betsy Ross, and one said the person who designed the fifty-star configuration on the current flag.

And so, we’re a long way away from the machines saying, “Well, wait a second, do you mean the current flag or the original flag?” or, “Are you talking about a solar year or a calendar year?” I mean, we’re really far away from that, aren’t we?

Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. You know, people really don’t understand how even humans process language, how we disambiguate different phrases, how we find out what are the relevant questions to ask to disambiguate these things. Obviously, people are working on that, but I think we are quite far from true natural language understanding, but yeah, I think that’s a really, really interesting question.

There were a lot of them, “Who invented the light bulb?” and “How many countries are there in the world?” I mean the list was endless. I didn’t have to look around to find them. It was almost everything I asked, well, not literally, “What’s 2+2?” is obviously different, but there were plenty of examples.

To broaden that question, don’t you think if we were to build an AGI, an artificial general intelligence, an AI as versatile as a human, that’s table stakes, like you have to be able to do that much, right?

Oh, of course. I mean, I think that one of the defining things that makes human intelligence unique, is the ability to understand language and an understanding of grammar and all of this. It’s one of the most fundamental things that makes us human and intelligent. So I think, yeah, to have an artificial general intelligence, it would be completely vital and necessary to be able to do this sort of disambiguation.

Well, let me ratchet it up even another one. There’s a famous thought experiment called the Chinese Room problem. For the benefit of the listener, the setup is that there’s a person in a room who doesn’t speak any Chinese, and the room he’s in is full of this huge number of very specialized books; and people slide messages under the door to him that are written in Chinese. And he has this method where he looks up the first character and finds the book with that on the spine, and goes to the second character and the third and works his way through, until he gets to a book that says, “Write this down.” And he copies these symbols, again, he doesn’t know what the symbols are; he slides the message back out, and the person getting it thinks it’s a perfect Chinese answer, it’s brilliant, it rhymes, it’s great.

So, the thought experiment is this, does the man understand Chinese? And the point of the thought experiment is that this is all a computer does—it runs this deterministic program, and it never understands what it’s talking about. It doesn’t know if it’s about cholera or coffee beans or what have you. So, my question is, for an AGI to exist, does it need to understand the question in a way that’s different than how we’ve been using that word up until now?

That’s a good question. I think that, yeah, to have an artificial general intelligence, I think the computer would have to, in a way, understand the question. Now, that being said, what is the nature of understanding the question? How do we even think, is a question that I don’t think even we know the answer to. So, it’s a little bit difficult to say, exactly, what’s the minimum requirement that you would need for some sort of artificial general intelligence, because as it stands now, I don’t know. Maybe someone smarter than me knows the answer, but I don’t even know if I really understand how I understand things, if that makes sense to you.

So what do you do with that? Do you say, “Well, that’s just par for the course. There’s a lot of things in this universe we don’t understand, but we’re going to figure it out, and then we’ll build an AGI”? Is the question of understanding just a very straightforward scientific question, or is it a metaphysical question that we don’t really even know how to pose or answer?

I mean, I think that this question is a good question, and if we’re going about it the right way, it’s something that remains to be seen. But I think one way that we can try to ensure that we’re not straying off the path, is by going back to these biologically-inspired systems. Because we know that, at the end of the day, our brains are made up of neurons, synapses, connections, and there’s nothing very unique about this, it’s physical matter, there’s no theoretical reason why a computer cannot do the same computations.

So, if we can really understand how our brains are working, what the computations it performs are, how we have consciousness; then I think we can start to get at those questions. Now, that being said, in terms of where neuroscience is today, we really have a very limited idea of how our brains actually work. But I think it’s through this avenue that we stand the highest chance of success of trying to emulate, you know—

Let’s talk about that for a minute, I think that’s a fascinating topic. So, the brain has a hundred billion neurons that somehow come together and do what they do. There’s something called a nematode worm—arguably the most successful animal on the planet, ten percent of all animals on the planet are these little worms—they have I think 302 neurons in their brain. And there’s been an effort underway for twenty years to model that brain—302 neurons—in the computer and make a digitally living nematode worm, and even the people who have worked on that project for twenty years, don’t even know if that’s possible.

What I was hearing you say is, once we figure out what a neuron does—this reductionist view of the brain—we can build artificial neurons, and build a general intelligence, but what if every neuron in your brain has the complexity of a supercomputer? What if they are incredibly complicated things that have things going on at the quantum scale, that we are just so far away from understanding? Is that a tenable hypothesis? And doesn’t that suggest, maybe we should think about intelligence a different way because if a neuron’s as complicated as a supercomputer, we’re never going to get there.

That’s true, I am familiar with that research. So, I think that there’s a couple of ways that you can do this type of study because, for example, trying to model a neuron at the scale of its ion channels and individual connections is one thing, but there are many, many scales upon which your brain or any sort of neural system works.

I think to really get this understanding of how the brain works, it’s great to look at this very microscale, but it also helps to go very macro and instead of modeling every single component, try to, for example, take groups of neurons, and say, “How are they communicating together? How are they communicating with different parts of the brain?” Doing this, for example, is usually how human neuroscience works and humans are the ones with the intelligence. If you can really figure out on a larger scale, to the point where you can simplify some of these computations, and instead of understanding every single spike, perhaps understanding the general behavior or the general computation that’s happening inside the brain, then maybe it will serve to simplify this a little bit.

Where do you come down on all of that? Are we five years, fifty years or five hundred years away from cracking that nut, and really understanding how we understand and understanding how we would build a machine that would understand, all of this nuance? Do you think you’re going to live to see us make that machine?

I would be thrilled if I lived to see that machine, I’m not sure that I will. Exactly saying when this will happen is a bit hard for me to predict, but I know that we would need massive improvements; probably, algorithmically, probably in our hardware as well, because true intelligence is massively computational, and I think it’s going to take a lot of research to get there, but it’s hard to say exactly when that would happen.

Do you keep up with the Human Brain Project, the European initiative to do what you were talking about before, which is to be inspired by human brains and learn everything we can from that and build some kind of a computational equivalent?

A little bit, a little bit.

Do you have any thoughts on—if you were the betting sort—whether that will be successful or not?

I’m not sure if that’s really going to work out that well. Like you said before, given our current hardware, algorithms, our abilities to probe the human brain; I think it’s very difficult to make these very sweeping claims about, “Yes, we will have X amount of understanding about how these systems work,” so I’m not sure if it’s going to be successful in all the ways it’s supposed to be. But I think it’s a really valuable thing to do, whether or not you really achieve the stated goal, if that makes sense.

You mentioned consciousness earlier. So, consciousness, for the listeners, is something people often say we don’t know what it is; we know exactly what it is, we just don’t know how it is that it happens. What it is, is that we experience things, we feel things, we experience qualia—we know what pineapple tastes like.

Do you have any theories on consciousness? Where do you think it comes from, and, I’m really interested in, do we need consciousness in order to solve some of these AI problems that we all are so eager to solve? Do we need something that can experience, as opposed to just sense?

Interesting question. I think that there’s a lot of open research on how consciousness works, what it really means, how it helps us do this type of cognition. So, we know what it is, but how it works or how this would manifest itself in an artificial intelligence system, is really sort of beyond our grasp right now.

I don’t know how much true consciousness a machine needs, because, you could say, for example, that having a type of memory may be part of your consciousness, you know, being aware, learning things, but I don’t think we have yet enough really understanding of how this works to really say for sure.

All right fair enough. One more question and I’ll pull the clock back thirty years and we’ll talk about the here and now; but my last question is, do you think that a computer could ever feel something? Could a computer ever feel pain? You could build a sensor that tells the computer it’s on fire, but could a computer ever feel something, could we build such a machine?

I think that it’s possible. So, like I said before, there’s really no reason why—what our brain does is really a very advanced biological computer—you shouldn’t be able to feel pain. It is a sensation, but it’s really just a transfer of information, so I think that it is possible. Now, that being said, how this would manifest, or what a computer’s reaction would be to pain or what would happen, I’m not sure what that would be, but I think it’s definitely possible.

Fair enough. I mentioned in your introduction that you’re the CTO of an AI company Droice Labs, and the only setup I made was that it was a healthcare company. Tell us a little bit more, what challenge that Droice Labs is trying to solve, and what the hope is, and what your present challenges are and kind of the state of where you’re at?

Sure. Droice is a healthcare company that uses artificial intelligence to help provide artificial intelligence solutions to hospitals and healthcare providers. So, one of the main things that we’re focusing on right now is to try to help doctors choose the right treatment for their patients. This means things like, for example, you come in, maybe you’re sick, you have a cough, you have pneumonia, let’s say, and you need an antibiotic. What we try to do is, when you’re given an antibiotic, we try to predict whether or not this treatment will be effective for you, and also whether or not it’ll have any sort of adverse event on you, so both try to get people healthy, and keep them safe.

And so, this is really what we’re focusing on at the moment, trying to make a sort of artificial brain for healthcare that can, shall we say, augment the intelligence of the doctors and try to make sure that people stay healthy. I think that healthcare’s a really interesting sphere in which to use artificial intelligence because currently the technology is not very widespread because of the difficulty in working with hospital and medical data, so I think it’s a really interesting opportunity.

So, let’s talk about that for a minute, AIs are generally only as good as the data we train them with. Because I know that whenever I have some symptom, I type it into the search engine of choice, and it tells me I have a terminal illness; it just happens all the time. And in reality, of course, whatever that terminal illness is, there is a one-in-five-thousand chance that I have that, and then there’s also a ninety-nine percent chance I have whatever much more common, benign thing. How are you thinking about how you can get enough data so that you can build these statistical models and so forth?

We’re a B2B company, so we have partnerships with around ten hospitals right now, and what we do is get big data dumps from them of actual electronic health records. And so, what we try to do is actually use real patient records, like, millions of patient records that we obtain directly from our hospitals, and that’s how we really are able to get enough data to make these types of predictions.

How accurate does that data need to be? Because it doesn’t have to be perfect, obviously. How accurate does it need to be to be good enough to provide meaningful assistance to the doctor?

That is actually one of the big challenges, especially in this type of space. In healthcare, it’s a bit hard to say which data is good enough, because it’s very, very common. I mean, one of the hallmarks of clinical or medical data is that it will, by default, contain many, many missing values, you never have the full story on any given patient.

Additionally, it’s very common to have things like errors, there’s unstructured text in your medical record that very often contains mistakes or just insane sentence fragments that don’t really make sense to anyone but a doctor, and this is one of the things that we work really hard on, where a lot of times traditional AI methods may fail, but we basically spend a lot of time trying to work with this data in different ways, come up with noise-robust pipelines that can really make this work.

I would love to hear more detail about that, because I’m sure it’s full of things like, “Patient says their eyes water whenever they eat potato chips,” and you know, that’s like a data point, and it’s like, what do you do with that. If that is a big problem, can you tell us what some of the ways around it might be?

Sure. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff in these health records, but what we try to do is—instead of biasing our models by doing anything in a rule-based manner—we use the fact that we have big data, we have a lot of data points, to try to really come up with robust models, so that, essentially, we don’t really have to worry about all that crazy stuff in there about potato chips and eyes watering.

And so, what we actually end up doing is, basically, we take these many, many millions of individual electronic health records, and try to combine that with outside sources of information, and this is one of the ways that we can try to really augment the data on our health record to make sure that we’re getting the correct insights about it.

So, with your example, you said, “My eyes water when I eat potato chips.” What we end up doing is taking that sort of thing, and in an automatic way, searching sources of public information, for example clinical trials information or published medical literature, and we try to find, for example, clinical trials or papers about the side effects of rubbing your eyes while eating potato chips. Now of course, that’s a ridiculous example, but you know what I mean.

And so, by augmenting this public and private data together, we really try to create this setup where we can get the maximum amount of information out of this messy, difficult to work with data.

The kinds of data you have that are solid data points, would be: how old is the patient, what’s their gender, do they have a fever, do they have aches and pains; that’s very coarse-level stuff. But like—I’m regretting using the potato chip example because now I’m kind of stuck with it—but, a potato chip is made of a potato which is a tuber, which is a nightshade and there may be some breakthrough, like, “That may be the answer, it’s an allergic reaction to nightshades. And that answer is so many levels removed.

I guess what I’m saying is, and you said earlier, language is infinite, but health is near that, too, right? There are so many potential things something could be, and yet, so few data points, that we must try to draw from. It would be like, if I said, “I know a person who is 6’ 4” and twenty-seven years old and born in Chicago, what’s their middle name?” It’s like, how do you even narrow it down to a set of middle names?

Right, right. Okay, I think I understand what you’re saying. This is, obviously, a challenge, but one of the ways that we kind of do this is, the first thing is our artificial intelligence is really intended for doctors and not the patients. Although, we were just talking about AGI and when it will happen, but the reality is we’re not there yet, so while our system tries to make these predictions, it’s under the supervision of a doctor. So, they’re really looking at these predictions and trying to pull out relevant things.

Now, you mentioned, the structured data—this is your age, your weight, maybe your sex, your medications; this is structured—but maybe the important thing is in the text, or is in the unstructured data. So, in this case, one of the things that we try to do, and it’s one of the main focuses of what we do, is to try to use natural language processing, NLP, to really make sure that we’re processing this unstructured data, or this text, in a way to really come up with a very robust, numerical representation of the important things.

So, of course, you can mine this information, this text, to try to understand, for example, you have a patient who has some sort of allergy, and it’s only written in this text, right? In that case, you need a system to really go through this text with a fine-tooth comb, and try to really pull out risk factors for this patient, relevant things about their health and their medical history that may be important.

So, is it not the case that diagnosing—if you just said, here is a person who manifests certain symptoms, and I want to diagnose what they have—may be the hardest problem possible. Especially compared to where we’ve seen success, which is, like, here is a chest x-ray, we have a very binary question to ask: does this person have a tumor or do they not? Where the data is: here’s ten thousand scans with the tumor, here’s a hundred thousand without a tumor.

Like, is it the cold or the flu? That would be an AI kind of thing because an expert system could do that. I’m kind of curious, tell me what you think—and then I’d love to ask, what would an ideal world look like, what would we do to collect data in an ideal world—but just with the here and now, aspirationally, what do you think is as much as we can hope for? Is it something, like, the model produces sixty-four things that this patient may have, rank ordered, like a search engine would do from the most likely to the least likely, and the doctor can kind of skim down it and look for something that catches his or her eye. Is that as far as we can go right now? Or, what do you think, in terms of general diagnosing of ailments?

Sure, well, actually, what we focus on currently is really on the treatment, not on the diagnosis. I think the diagnosis is a more difficult problem, and, of course, we really want to get into that in the future, but that is actually somewhat more of a very challenging sort of thing to do.

That being said, what you mentioned, you know, saying, “Here’s a list of things, let’s make some predictions of it,” is actually a thing that we currently do in terms of treatments for patients. So, one example of a thing that we’ve done is built a system that can predict surgical complications for patients. So, imagine, you have a patient that is sixty years old and is mildly septic, and may need some sort of procedure. What we can do is find that there may be a couple alternative procedures that can be given, or a nonsurgical intervention that can help them manage their condition. So, what we can do is predict what will happen with each of these different treatments, what is the likelihood it will be successful, as well as weighing this against their risk options.

And in this way, we can really help the doctor choose what sort of treatment that they should give this person, and it gives them some sort of actionable insight, that can help them get their patients healthy. Of course, in the future, I think it would be amazing to have some sort of end to end system that, you know, a patient comes in, and you can just get all the information and it can diagnose them, treat them, get them better, but we’re definitely nowhere near that yet.

Recently, IBM made news that Watson had prescribed treatment for cancer patients that was largely identical to what the doctors did, but it had the added benefit that in a third of the cases it found additional treatment options, because it had virtue of being trained on a quarter million medical journals. Is that the kind of thing that’s like “real, here, today,” that we will expect to see more things like that?

I see. Yeah, that’s definitely a very exciting thing, and I think that’s great to see. One of the things that’s very interesting, is that IBM primarily works on cancer. It’s lacking in these high prescription volume sorts of conditions, like heart disease or diabetes. So, I think that while this is very exciting, this is definitely a sort of technology, and a space for artificial intelligence, where it really needs to be expanded, and there’s a lot of room to grow.

So, we can sequence a genome for $1,000. How far away are we from having enough of that data that we get really good insights into, for example, a person has this combination of genetic markers, and therefore this is more likely to work or not work. I know that in isolated cases we can do that, but when will we see that become just kind of how we do things on a day-to-day basis?

I would say, probably, twenty-five years from the clinic. I mean, it’s great, this information is really interesting, and we can do it, but it’s not widely used. I think there are too many regulations in place right now that keep this from happening, so, I think it’s going to be, like I said, maybe twenty-five years before we really see this very widely used for a good number of patients.

So are there initiatives underway that you think merit support that will allow this information to be collected and used in ways that promote the greater good, and simultaneously, protect the privacy of the patients? How can we start collecting better data?

Yeah, there are a lot of people that are working on this type of thing. For example, Obama had a precision medicine initiative and these types of things where you’re really trying to, basically, get your health records and your genomic data, and everything consolidated and have a very easy flow of information so that doctors can easily integrate information from many sources, and have very complete patient profiles. So, this is a thing that’s currently underway.

To pull out a little bit and look at the larger world, you’re obviously deeply involved in speech, and language processing, and health care, and all of these areas where we’ve seen lots of advances happening on a regular basis, and it’s very exciting. But then there’s a lot of concern from people who have two big worries. One is the effect that all of this technology is going to have on employment. And there’s two views.

One is that technology increases productivity, which increases wages, and that’s what’s happened for two hundred years, or, this technology is somehow different, it replaces people and anything a person can do eventually the technology will do better. Which of those camps, or a third camp, do you fall into? What is your prognosis for the future of work?

Right. I think that technology is a good thing. I know a lot of people have concerns, for example, that if there’s too much artificial intelligence it will replace my job, there won’t be room for me and for what I do, but I think that what’s actually going to happen, is we’re just going to see, shall we say, a shifting employment landscape.

Maybe if we have some sort of general intelligence, then people can start worrying, but, right now, what we’re really doing through artificial intelligence is augmenting human intelligence. So, although some jobs become obsolete, now to maintain these systems, build these systems, I believe that you actually have, now, more opportunities there.

For example, ten to fifteen years ago, there wasn’t such a demand for people with software engineering skills, and now it’s almost becoming something that you’re expected to know, or, like, the internet thirty years back. So, I really think that this is going to be a good thing for society. It may be hard for people who don’t have any sort of computer skills, but I think going forward, that these are going to be much more important.

Do you consume science fiction? Do you watch movies, or read books, or television, and if so, are there science fiction universes that you look at and think, “That’s kind of how I see the future unfolding”?

Have you ever seen the TV show Black Mirror?

Well, yeah that’s dystopian though, you were just saying things are going to be good. I thought you were just saying jobs are good, we’re all good, technology is good. Black Mirror is like dark, black, mirrorish.

Yeah, no, I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen, but I think that’s presenting the evil side of what can happen. I don’t think that’s necessarily realistic, but I think that show actually does a very good job of portraying the way that technology could really be integrated into our lives. Without all of the dystopian, depressing stories, I think that the way that it shows the technology being integrated into people’s lives, how it affects the way people live—I think it does a very good job of doing things like that.

I wonder though, science fiction movies and TV are notoriously dystopian, because there’s more drama in that than utopian. So, it’s not conspiratorial or anything, I’m not asserting that, but I do think that what it does, perhaps, is causes people—somebody termed it “generalizing from fictional evidence,” that you see enough views of the future like that, you think, “Oh, that’s how it’s going to happen.” And then that therefore becomes self-fulfilling.

Frank Herbert, I think, it was who said, “Sometimes the purpose of science fiction is to keep a world from happening.” So do you think those kinds of views of the world are good, or do you think that they increase this collective worry about technology and losing our humanity, becoming a world that’s blackish and mirrorish, you know?

Right. No, I understand your point and actually, I agree. I think there is a lot of fear, which is quite unwarranted. There is actually a lot more transparency in AI now, so I think that a lot of those fears are just, well, given the media today, as I’m sure we’re all aware, it’s a lot of fear mongering. I think that these fears are really something that—not to say there will be no negative impact—but, I think, every cloud has its silver lining. I think that this is not something that anyone really needs to be worrying about. One thing that I think is really important is to have more education for a general audience, because I think part of the fear comes from not really understanding what AI is, what it does, how it works.

Right, and so, I was just kind of thinking through what you were saying, there’s an initiative in Europe that, AI engines—kind of like the one you’re talking about that’s suggesting things—need to be transparent, in the sense they need to be able to explain why they’re making that suggestion.

But, I read one of your papers on deep neural nets, and it talks about how the results are hard to understand, if not impossible to understand. Which side of that do you come down on? Should we limit the technology to things that can be explained in bulleted points, or do we say, “No, the data is the data and we’re never going to understand it once it starts combining in these ways, and we just need to be okay with that”?

Right, so, one of the most overused phrases in all of AI is that “neural networks are a black box.” I’m sure we’re all sick of hearing that sentence, but it’s kind of true. I think that’s why I was interested in researching this topic. I think, as you were saying before, the why in AI is very, very important.

So, I think, of course we can benefit from AI without knowing. We can continue to use it like a black box, it’ll still be useful, it’ll still be important. But I think it will be far more impactful if you are able to explain why, and to really demystify what’s happening.

One good example from my own company is that in medicine it’s vital for the doctor to know why you’re saying what you’re saying, at Droice. So, if a patient comes in and you say, “I think this person is going to have a very negative reaction to this medicine,” it’s very vital for us to try to analyze the neural network and explain, “Okay, it’s really this feature of this person’s health record, for example, the fact that they’re quite old and on another medication.” That really makes them trust the system, and really eases the adoption, and allows them to integrate into traditionally less technologically focused fields.

So, I think that there’s a lot of research now that’s going into the why in AI, and it’s one of my focuses of research, and I know the field has really been blooming in the last couple of years, because I think people are realizing that this is extremely important and will help us not only make artificial intelligence more translational, but also help us to make better models.

You know, in The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke is training on Dagobah with Yoda, he asked him, “Why, why…” and Yoda was like, “There is no why.” Do you think there are situations where there is no why? There is no explainable reason why it chose what it did?

Well, I think there is always a reason. For example, you like ice cream; well, maybe it’s a silly reason, but the reason is that it tastes good. It might not be, you know, you like pistachio better than caramel flavor—so, let’s just say the reason may not be logical, but there is a reason, right? It’s because it activates the pleasure center in your brain when you eat it. So, I think that if you’re looking for interpretability, in some cases it could be limited but I think there’s always something that you could answer when asking why.

Alright. Well, this has been fascinating. If people want to follow you, keep up with what you’re doing, keep up with Droice, can you just run through the litany of ways to do that?

Yeah, so we have a Twitter account, it’s “DroiceLabs,” and that’s mostly where we post. And we also have a website: www.droicelabs.com, and that’s where we post most of the updates that we have.

Alright. Well, it has been a wonderful and far ranging hour, and I just want to thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

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from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2018/01/23/voices-in-ai-episode-31-a-conversation-with-tasha-nagamine/

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glittership · 8 years ago

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Episode #45 — "The Pond" by Aimee Ogden

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Episode 45 is part of the Summer 2017 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

The Pond

by Aimee Ogden

Laura almost misses the first message.

A screaming match with Sana has driven her out into the frost-rimed evening. The baby’s cries and Sana’s frustrated shushing chase her across the yard; Ifrah is not an easy infant like her brother was. Laura and Sana’s relationship is not an easy one like it was back when Christopher was born, either.

Laura stops to cram her skis onto her feet only once she is far enough away to shut out the sounds from the house. Her only illumination comes from the headlamp clipped to her hat; the moon hides behind thick, dull clouds. It would have been so easy to race past the windswept pond without a second glance. But the headlamp glints on the dull frozen surface, and two stark words etched beneath catch and hold her eye: HELLO MOMMY.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Hello! This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Today we have another GlitterShip original and a poem. Our poem today is “A Seduction by a Sister of the Oneiroi” by Hester J. Rook, and our original story is “The Pond” by Aimee Ogden.

If you enjoy this story and would like to read ahead in the Summer 2017 issue, you can pick that up at glittership.com/buy for $2.99 and get your very own copies of the winter and spring 2017 issues as well.

Finally, the GlitterShip Year One anthology is still on sale in the Kindle and Nook stores for $4.99, and you can pick up the paperback copy for $17.95.

Hester J. Rook is an Australian writer and co-editor of Twisted Moon magazine, a magazine of speculative erotic poetry (twistedmoonmag.com). She has previous prose and poetry publications in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Liminality Magazine, Strangelet and others. She’s on Twitter @kitemonster and you can find her other work on her site http://hesterjrook.wordpress.com/.

A seduction by a sister of the Oneiroi

Hester J. Rook

The night is velvet warm, mosquito pricked. There is prosecco through my tongue and pear juice sticky down my wrists. Her mouth is sugar rich and cream softened, velvet dipped in moonlight. “We are goddesses already,” she is wine voiced and dusk cloaked, autumn leaves behind eyes translucent as cathedral glass. “My heart is wraithlike sour, bitter as lemon rind and my realm soft-surreal and afraid. But you you taste of marzipan at sunset earthen-toed and iron scented, like a storm. A goddess already.” She ties back her dream-soaked curls and lights up each star, palm raised high and fingertips aflame. “Come back with me.” And, fizzy-tongued and plum sweetened, I do.

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester. Nowadays, she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work has also appeared in Apex, Shimmer, and Cast of Wonders. Aimee lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where you can find her at the gym, in the garden, with a faceful of cheese curds at the local farmer’s market, or, less messily, just on Twitter: @Aimee_Ogden.

The Pond

by Aimee Ogden

Laura almost misses the first message.

Snow crunches when she hits her knees beside the pond. Her ankles twist under the torque of the skis, but she is paralyzed by the cruelty carved into those two words. Her heart throbs in her chest. Which of the neighbor’s teenage children could have, would have done such a thing?

In spite of herself, she reaches out and puts one hand on top of the words. Through her thin gloves, she can’t feel the ridges that the prankster’s knife should have left in the ice. Impossible. She lays both hands flat over the words, squeezes her eyes shut, as if her hands can erase what has been done.

When she opens her eyes and parts her fingers, the words are gone.

Relief and panic wrestle for control inside Laura’s chest. After this awful year, is she finally losing her mind? Maybe the heat from her hands has melted the ice and erased the words.

As she struggles for a grasp on reason, new lines appear in the spaces between her fingers. Her hands curl into claws around the new letters: ARE YOU MAD AT ME?

And Laura is lying on her side on the ice crooning to a carved question from a dead little boy: “No, baby, no, sweetheart, never. Never. Never.”

When she finally drags herself to her feet, there is a long, shallow indentation in the ice from the warmth of her body, and pink light seeps over the horizon. Her body is stiff and cold, and there have been no more messages but those first two, but there is a smile on her face as she walks back to the house.

Sana emerges from the bedroom with crusty eyes and mussed hair as Laura tiptoes up the stairs. “Were you up all night?” she hisses, and Laura shrugs. “Well, I hope you got your head clear. You can have the bathroom first; I need to go make the baby a bottle.”

“Thanks,” says Laura, and Sana gives her a look that cuts deep, probing for insincerity under that solitary syllable. Whatever she finds, she grunts, and brushes past Laura onto the stairs.

Laura turns the shower on as cool as she can tolerate and stands beneath it as long as she can. The more alive she feels, the more distance stretches between her and Christopher. She wants that space to shrink down again, to a few narrow inches of ice. A distance measured in inches is still too far, but it’s better than the entire universe.

She ignores Sana’s first bangs on the door, but when Sana shouts that she’ll be late for work, she finally kills the flow of water and reaches for a towel. Her fingers, still half numb from her night on the ice, only start to tingle with life when she finally steps out and begins to rub herself dry with a towel.

Her office at the back of the hospital lab is a welcome refuge from home. No noise here, except the distant chatter of the technologists out front and the regular whir of the pneumatic tube. Reports to write and biopsies to result: this one cancerous, this one benign, this one missing margins and in need of re-sectioning. No patients to see today, and Laura has mastered the art of speaking to the techs as little as can be politely managed. Right now she can only deal with small chunks of humanity: a twenty-millimeter cube of breast tissue, a fraction of a gram of liver, a two-minute update on a test result from Dave or Xue.

When she arrives at home, both Sana and the baby are napping: Ifrah in her swing and Sana sprawled along the length of the couch. Dark rings are smeared under her eyes, and a half-eaten bowl of instant soup cools on the floor beside her. Her full, hard breasts stretch the fabric of her stained shirt, either she or Ifrah will wake soon to make sure the baby gets fed. The puckered, soft flesh of her belly peeks out from under the hem of her shirt, too, a sight Laura is both disgusted by and grateful for. Sana has carried both of their children. To Laura, the development of a fetus, pushing and groping for space inside its mother’s viscera, is too much like the growth of a tumor, unseen and unknowable and somehow obscene.

She slips out the back door without a sound.

There are more words etched into the pond today. Laura is almost running by the time she gets close enough to read them: DO YOU MISS ME?

She gets down to her knees more carefully today than yesterday, afraid of breaking the ice under her weight. “I miss you more than anything. You took my heart with you when you left us.” Can he hear her? Laura seizes a stick poking up through the snow, but it’s too soft to scratch the surface. Panic sets her heart thumping wildly in her chest as the question melts back into the ice, but then new shapes form. I MISS YOU TOO, MOMMY.

The words pour out of Laura then, memories of family weekends and long vacations, favorite meals, books shared under the covers on quiet Saturday mornings. And of that fearful diagnosis, the one that Laura understood long before either Sana or Christopher could.

When she finally lapses into silence, the pond is as blank as the cloudless sky. The words skitter out a line at a time, scattershot with hesitation. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.

And Laura kisses, just ever so briefly, the frozen surface of the pond, as if she can force her love through the layer of ice with the pressure of her lips.

Sana is on her hands and knees beside the couch, scrubbing spilled soup out of the carpeting. She looks up at the creak of the door as Laura steps inside. “There’s dinner in the fridge,” she says. “I didn’t know when you’d be home. Did you…” The rag twists between her hands. “Did you have a good day at work?”

“It was fine.” Ifrah is on her belly on a blanket on the floor, grunting as she works to lift her head off the floor to watch what Sana is doing. Laura puts a teddy in front of her so the baby has something to look at as she walks past to the kitchen.

She takes a plate of cold morgh polou with her into the office. Out in the living room, Sana is reading to the baby, one of those tiresome books with an ounce of story stretched over a pound of pages. Laura shuts the door and sits down at the computer, where she opens a private browsing session.

There are thousands, millions of hits for people claiming to have been contacted by the dead, but Laura can’t find anything comparable to her experience. Sad, desperate people reading messages from lost loved ones into lost-and-found objects, oddly-timed sounds, piles of soggy tea leaves. She closes tabs one by one until she’s only left with a blinking cursor on an empty search engine field. She types: how to bring back the dead.

Sana is already in bed by the time Laura turns off the computer and trudges upstairs. She unbuttons her pants and slides out of her bra in the hallway before sneaking into the bedroom and slipping beneath the covers. But Sana rolls over anyway, putting her mouth beside Laura’s ear. “I’m worried about you.” Her whisper is too soft to disturb the baby, but blunt enough to batter at Laura’s heart. “I know this time of year is hard for you. It’s hard for me, too.”

“I’m fine.” She could tell Sana about the pond. She could tell Sana what she saw on the Internet. She doesn’t. This secret is all hers, twisting darkly in the corners of her heart. “We’ll all be fine. I promise.”

“Laura, I think you should—”

“You’ll wake the baby.” Laura knots her hand in the blankets and pulls them with her as she turns onto her side. The warmth of Sana’s body lingers behind her, and then she curls away from Laura, turning toward the corner where the bassinet rests.

A pink-fingered dawn is reaching through the blinds when Laura wakes. Her alarm won’t go off for two more hours; she turns it off and crawls out of bed anyway. The blankets are tangled around Sana, who has been up and down feeding the baby during the night. Laura tucks a flap of the comforter over her wife’s bare feet, and pulls jeans and a sweater from the pile of clean laundry on the dresser before slipping out of the bedroom and down the stairs.

A greeting is waiting for her on the surface of the pond. GOOD MORNING MOMMY.

She sits cross-legged in front of it and traces each letter with one gloved fingertip. “Good morning, baby,” she says, and yawns curling steam out into the morning air.

YOU’RE TIRED.

“Yes. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

BECAUSE OF THE BABY?

Laura flinches. Neither of them has made any mention of Ifrah till now, nor Sana either. “No … no more than usual. I was up late, that’s all. We don’t have to talk about the baby. I have something I want to tell you about.”

But the words on the ice drive all the air out of the lungs, all the air out of the space around her. DID YOU HAVE HER AS A REPLACEMENT FOR ME?

No, thinks Laura, and her mouth silently shapes the word. But her finger traces a different word on the surface on the ice: YES.

There is no answer from the pond. Laura shifts as the cold gnaws at her ankles. “We thought … we thought we needed someone to take care of. To keep us from falling apart without you. She doesn’t fill the hole that you left.” And Ifrah isn’t enough to keep Laura and Sana from falling apart, either, but Laura can’t make herself say that aloud. “We missed you so much. We were so lonely.”

I’M LONELY TOO.

Tears burn Laura’s cheeks. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m so sorry. But baby, listen, I have an idea, I was doing some research, on how we can be together again.”

YOU’LL COME WITH ME?

“No…” Laura drags the back of her hand across her face, trailing tears and snot. “No, honey, I think it’s possible that I can bring you back here. To live with us. Me and Mama Sana and—and the baby.”

COME WITH ME. The words repeat themselves: COME WITH ME. COME WITH ME. COME WITH ME. The lines crisscross and fold back on themselves until they are unreadable.

“Christopher!” The palm of a tiny hand slams into the ice right beneath Laura’s knees, making her scream. She scrambles backward off the ice, falling elbow deep into the snow just as the ice cracks under the place where she was sitting. “Stop!”

The words vanish, leaving only the white lightning-strike pattern of cracks behind.

Laura stands alone in the yard with her arms wrapped around herself until the sun heaves itself up over the horizon. Then she puts her head down and hurries back to the house.

She spends the day at work responding to Xue and Dave in odd monosyllables. Her queue of specimens grows and grows while she buries herself in a new set of web searches, fruitless ones. When she looks up, the lights are off in the front of the lab and she is alone. There’s no amount of research that can give her the answers she’s asking for, and there’s nothing on the Internet that can make her accept what she already knows in the pits of her heart.

The house is dark when she comes in: no cries from Ifrah, no kitchen clattering or TV noise. She finds Sana in the office, scribbling on a pad of paper. The grocery list, maybe, or a list of chores for her and Laura to ignore. Laura clears her throat. “I’m going out.”

Sana’s head bobs up, and a tremulous smile swims onto her face. “Okay,” she says. “Everything is going to be all right, Laura. You know that, right?”

“Sure.” Laura looks away. “I’ll see you in a little while.”

She makes one stop before going out to the pond. She stands at the water’s edge, and the weight in her hands reassures her that what she is doing is right.

MOMMY?

Laura hefts the axe and brings it down into the ice.

The impact judders her arms up to the shoulders. The impact crater left by the axe head is like a broken mirror, reflecting spiderwebs of words: MOMMY NO, MOMMY NO, MOMMY NO. She raises the axe again, brings it back down, chops until she can see gray water between the floating chunks of ice. She is in water up to her knees as she reaches the center of the pond, her feet are numb. Everything is numb. But she keeps working until a scream splits her in half.

It’s not the child’s scream she expected. It’s the scream of a woman grown. She turns to see Sana, clutching a shawl around her shoulders with one hand and holding the baby carrier in the other. She’s staring at the axe in Laura’s hands. “What did you do?”

Laura fumbles her way into a lie about being afraid of the ice growing thin and the neighbor’s kids falling through. But Sana’s eyes are wide and unseeing, and the words die in Laura’s mouth. “What did you do,” Sana repeats. “What did you do?”

She drops the carrier and runs into the pond. But not toward Laura, and Laura’s name is not the one she cries out as icy water splashes up to her knees, to her thighs. Ice floes in miniature batter around her waist, deeper than this little fish pond has any right to be. Laura reaches out for her, but Sana chooses instead the embrace of the water. She disappears beneath the surface.

Laura climbs up onto the bank. The ripples in the water grow still. The broken bits of ice tinkle gently together. In her carrier, Ifrah pumps her little red fists and wails.

But the pond is silent.

END

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “Nostalgia” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.

Episode #45 — “The Pond” by Aimee Ogden was originally published on GlitterShip

#dead children #horror #oneiroi #original #poem #GlitterShip #lgbtq fiction #queer fiction #short stories #science fiction and fantasy #podcast

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livefreeshop · 8 years ago

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After a few weeks off, it's finally time for another podcast episode!

In today's episode, I share an interview I did with Grant Baldwin from TheSpeakerLab.com.

Grant is something that I have known for a few years now. In fact, he is one of the few online entrepreneurs that has actually had lunch with my where I live, in Richland, WA! There's usually no reason for people to stop by the Tri-cities (unless you live here), so my in-person meetups with other entrepreneurs is usually pretty sparse.

Grant is someone that knows the speaking game inside and out. He has been a professional speaker for years and now teachers others how to book their own speaking gigs.

So, during the interview we discuss these 2 aspects of his business: how to actually get booked as a speaker (and get paid for it) and second, how he has build the training side of his business and how that is going.

As a quick summary, Grant Baldwin shares that he makes over six figures speaking at events. However, his business as a whole will be close to crossing the seven figure mark when you add in his training courses.

I was fascinated with how Grant has building the training side of his business through Facebook ads and webinars. So, if you have a training product (or are thinking about creating one), there is a great discussion about how you can grow that part of your business.

During the course of the episode, Grant shares a few resources:

TheSpeakerLab.com – where you can learn more about Grant or join his training programs.

MySpeakerFee.com – A speaker fee calculator that can show you how much you should expect to make when speaking.

FreeSpeakerWorkshop.com – Grant's free webinar training that teaches you “How To Start Booking (And Getting Paid For) Speaking Engagements Without Having An Existing Platform Or Being Sales-y”

Overall, I hope you enjoy the interview with Grant! He shares some excellent tips for how to break into the speaking business if you are interested in that. He also shares some great insights for how he's grown a significant education business (teaching others how to become speakers).

Enjoy!

Read the Full Transcript Below

Click Here to Expand the Full Podcast Transcript

Spencer:Hey everyone, welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Spencer Haws from nichepursuits.com. Today, I have Grant Baldwin on the podcast from thespeakerlab.com.

Grant is someone that I met a few years ago actually in person. We went to lunch together a couple of times here in the Tri-Cities as he was traveling through town for speaking engagements. Grant has been a full time speaker speaking at 60 to 70 events a year for a number of years and has really perfected the art of speaking.

In the podcast, we dive into how he got started speaking and more importantly how others can get paid to speak. However, I’m also fascinated by the success he’s had with his speaking course called Booked and Paid to Speak. This online course has allowed him to speak much less and increase his overall income significantly. Grant shares all the details about how he’s made that course so successful through webinars and Facebook ads. With that, let’s jump into the interview.

Hey Grant, it’s good to chat with you again. It’s been a few years actually. We met in person. We actually went out to lunch here in the Tri-Cities a couple of different times. It’s been three or four years ago. Back then, it was before you had even started thespeakerlab.com. What were you doing back then and then we’re going to dive into what’s changed a little bit.

Grant:Yeah. Long story short, I used to be a pastor for a little while. I was doing some speaking in that setting, in that context and then got into just speaking outside of that world and then speaking at a lot of different high schools, colleges, different conferences, and events.

For several years, I was doing that full time. I was speaking at 60, 70 events a year all over primarily the U.S. and loved it. It was a lot of fun. The challenge of speaking is it doesn’t scale very well meaning that you’re one person in one and one time talking to one audience. While you’re there, you can’t really talk to anybody else. The nature of it is you have to get on a plane to go collect the check. There are parts that I like but part of I didn’t like. I didn’t like being away from the family.

I remember a buddy saying, it’s a high paying, manual labor job. We get paid really well for speaking and doing what we do but again, there is manual labor involved with it. Then a couple of years ago, I wanted to start making that transition and shift. I think we connected right before that time because I had a couple of gigs up in your area. I don’t know if you get many people, tourists passing through up in the Tri-Cities area.

Spencer:Not usually, not too often.

Grant:Eastern Washington, I remember being up there a couple of times for gigs.

Spencer:As I recall, that was a transition period for you because you’re definitely speaking but we also have chatted about some other ideas that you obviously didn’t pursue. You were very involved in travel. I think you had talked about maybe doing some travel website or travel hacking. You probably are still very much collecting points in that sort of thing.

Grant:Still geek out on that stuff.

Spencer:Yeah, yeah. I think it was very much a transition time, three, four years ago for you. What happened? What made you decide to start The Speaker Lab?

Grant:Yeah. Like I said, I was at a point where I was doing as many gigs as I wanted to do. My busiest year, I did about 70 gigs. It was charging on the upper end of what I felt comfortable with in that particular market. At that point, the options are basically, “All right, you can just do this for the next 10, 20, 30 years or whatever and that’s your career.” Which should be great, there are plenty of speakers that do that. For me, I felt I was looking for a new challenge, I was looking for a new mountain to climb, just pivoting to a different market where I could charge a little bit more, didn’t seem to scratch the edge, and wasn’t super exciting.

At that point, I was having a lot of people that were asking me about speaking, they were intrigued with speaking. The people are asking in different context. Some people would say, “You’re a speaker, how did you get into that? That’s interesting.” Maybe, they wanted to do it and just weren’t really sure what to do or for them they just thought it was interesting. It was just fascinating, unique type of career. They just wanted to know more about it.

That time basically is our first step towards the online space is we started a podcast called How Did You Get Into That? Where we basically interviewed people who were doing unique, interesting, fascinating types of career, just hearing how did they get started. I remember, we interviewed you on that show.

We were just interviewing unique types of careers and positions but people continued to ask me a lot about speaking. At that time, I had a small little training thing a couple years back for speakers and helping them get started. Basically, I was like, “Alright, let’s pull that out, dust that off, and update it in an online course type of setting. See if we can promote and sell that.” That’s actually what we did. At this point, about two and a half years ago or so we created a course that’s become Booked and Paid to Speak. That’s been our main bread and butter since then.

We started just figuring out, all right how do you do webinars for this? How do you drive traffic to it? How do you sell it? How do you deliver the course? All those just nuances and variables there. Basically, we started doing that and then that really took off. As the number of course sales that we had were increasing and the online side of business was increasing, I was personally decreasing the number of speaking gigs that I was doing.

At this point, at the time of this recording, I’ll do 5 to 10 gigs this year, which is a huge, huge difference from doing 70 just a couple of years ago. What’s been fun though, what’s been really interesting is even though this year I will do 5 to 10 gigs versus 70 a couple of years ago, our revenue has basically more than doubled. It really just allows a much more scalable opportunity to do something online versus having to get on a plane.

I really still enjoy speaking, the one hour. I did a gig just couple of nights ago at the time of this recording. It was a blast. The 45 minutes, hour you’re on stage, it’s amazing. You also spend a lot of time in airports, airplane, hotels, sitting backstage, and just waiting. If I could just teleport, show up, speak, and go home, that’ll be awesome. Until that shows up, then we’ll keep doing the online stuff.

Spencer:That’s right, yeah. I want to actually dive into the two areas of your business. One is how do you book paid speaking gigs and then the other is how have you made The Speaker Lab so successful? We’ll dissect both of those. For those listeners that maybe are interested in becoming a speaker and booking those gigs, what is your top tip for booking a paid speaking gig?

Grant:One of the cool things, just to zoom out for a second, about speaking is that there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Meaning that I was doing 70 events a year and I was speaking full time. I know plenty of people who do more events than that. I know plenty of people who do far less.

Spencer, you’re an example of maybe someone who would say, “You know what, I got a good thing going. I have no desire to do 70 events a year but I’d love to do 5 events or 10 events. It’s just fun, it builds credibility, it’s a way to network and connect with other people, it’s a way to potentially in certain type of events to sell products, they can generate revenue. There are a lot of reasons. I think speaking makes sense for a lot of different people in a lot of different industries. You just gotta figure out what the win is for you and what makes sense for you of how speaking could fit into the business.”

That being said, there’s a couple key questions I think are really important that people have to answer. These are the pieces that people if you don’t get right, it’s really hard to book speaking engagements, because most people come at speaking and they come at it from the perspective of, “I just want to speak. I want to speak to anyone and everyone. What do you want me to talk about? I can talk about anything and everything you want me to talk about.” That just doesn’t work.

Really, it’s no different than, Spencer if you’re teaching about building a website or a blog, I know you teach niche sites. You could say, “I’m going to do a blog about parenting. It’s for everybody. It’s for any type of parent.” You may do okay with that, but really the way that you become a really strong blog is like, “I did a thing for a blog for parents that their first child is under a year old and how do you deal with that.” A really specific niche type of thing.

Well then at that point, it’s a heck of alot easier to find readers, and to find your audience, to find potential people that would be a good fit for your site. The exact same thing is true with speaking. If you try to be this generalist and you try to be everything to everybody, it’s just not going to work. You got to be really, really clear about not only what it is that you speak you about and who it is that you speak to, but you also have to be clear about where those people gather, who are the actual buyers for the types of events that you might be interested in speaking with.

Just because you’re passionate about a subject or a topic, or just because there’s something that you’re interested in, doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a market for it. You may say, “I am passionate about teaching underwater basket weaving.” That’s adorable but it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are massive events that are gathering around that subject or topic.

Again, not only do you have to be clear about who you speak to, what you speak about, but also that there’s an actual market for that subject or topic and that there’s events and organizers that are actually hiring speakers to come talk about that.

Spencer:Yeah. That makes sense. Definitely niching down and finding your focus is going to make things a lot easier. At that point, how do you reach out? I know some speakers just speak for free, others get paid. How do you cross that threshold into getting paid to speak? What’s your approach to reaching out to event organizers? What do you do there?

Grant:First of all I think there’s a misconception around speaking for free. I think it’s perceived as negative, this bad thing. The reality is actually speaking for free can be a good thing. The importance though is you have to be clear about why you’re doing it.

Don’t just speak for free for the heck of it. If you want to do something for a friend, throw in a favor, that’s one thing. Just as a business model, speaking for free just out of the goodness of your heart, that just doesn’t work. That’s a great way to go broke real quick. It’s no different than any other service. If you just said, “Hey, I just want to offer my service for free forever and ever.” That’s not a business. You’re just being an overly nice person who’s broke.

You have to be clear, if you’re going to speak for free, why you’re doing it. As some quick examples, it might make sense to speak for free because it’s an event that you wanted to attend anyway, or you wanted to get the practice, or let’s say you have some of the product or service that you offer on the backend. Speaking for free is ultimately lead generation.

For example, we have someone who went through our Booked and Paid to Speak training program. Their primary business is actually a coaching business. They use speaking primarily as lead generation for their coaching business. He was telling me he had generated $372,000 in revenue from their coaching business but it all comes from free speaking engagements.

On the surface, you’d be like, “Oh, you speak for free. Yeah, you’re not a real speaker.” That free speaking, very strategic, lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue in a different part of his business. Again, all that to say, it can make sense to speak for free. Again, as long as you’re clear on why you’re doing it.

Having said all that is just a background there. I found a potential event. I think I would be a good fit for it, what would I do at that point? One of things that I recommend is that you start by focusing on conferences, events, groups, and organizations that are already looking for a speaker.

Let’s say you’re interested in speaking at a certain conference or an event, they’re already most likely planning on hiring a speaker. You don’t have to convince them to hiring a speaker. They’re already looking for one. You’re providing a solution to the problem that they already have. The key though is you want to make sure that you’re providing a specific solution to the problem that they have.

Meaning that again, I live in the Nashville area. If I say the Nashville Home Gardener’s Association, there’s a conference, or I don’t, whatever. I don’t know anything about gardening, I don’t know squat about that. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to reach out and say, “Hey, I ate a tomato one time. You should have me come speak.” I have to make sure that I’m speaking on something related to what they’re looking for and is a good fit for their potential audience.

Again, that goes back to what we’re talking about that first stage, that first step, is being really clear about who you speak to, what you speak about so that then you can start identifying who those potential events are. Again, once you identify what some potential events, conferences, one of the best ways to start is just reaching out with a cold email.

One mistake that a lot of speakers make is they send this 98 paragraph email about why they’re so awesome and why they should hire them to come speak. Just don’t do that. Think about it again from your own perspective. If someone was reaching out to pitch you for something, how is it that you would want to receive that email? What would make you want to open it? What would make you intrigued to read it or to respond to it?

Oftentimes, that means it’s going to be a very, very short and sweet. The means, it’s going to be a very, very personal to them and not this generic copy and paste email that you send to 100 other people. Just a few of those little things.

One thing I always like to do in that initial email is I like to ask a specific question, something that makes it really easy for them to reply to. If I just send an email and say, “Hey, I’m a speaker. I saw that you hire speakers. If you ever need anything, let me know.” There’s nothing for them to respond to, there’s no reason for them to reply, there’s no need to start a conversation there.

But if I ask something very, very specific and if I say something like, “I came across your Nashville Gardening Conference in October. It looks amazing. I was curious when you’ll start reviewing speakers for the event.” That’s a very specific question, that’s personal, it’s direct to them, and it’s really easy for them to reply to. They may say, “Hey, we’re going to start reviewing speakers in a couple weeks if you are free to circle back with us then.” They may say, “Hey, unfortunately we already hired someone.” The reality is this can be a bit of a numbers game and that a lot of those emails will just go completely unreplied to.

Just again, just initially, especially, is you’re just going to be knocking on some doors in a virtual setting and trying to get some traction there. Once you start doing more events, it’s a lot easier to get additional events. You can do a lot of word of mouth, you can do a lot of repeat, a lot of referrals. A lot of business can come from actually networking, connecting with other speakers that speak on a similar subject or topic.

The way that most events work, I’ll give you a great example. I spoke at an event two days ago. The event went great. Actually, they had me six years ago at the exact same event. Afterwards, I was talking with the client and they said, “Hey, you’re awesome. We’ll give you a shot in four or five years and we’ll go from there.” Because most events, they want different speakers. They don’t want the same speaker every time. They want the audience to turn over a little bit before they bring some speaker in.

For him to say, “Hey, we’ll talk to you in four or five years.” I want to continue to maintain that relationship with that client. What would be smart on my part would be, “You know what, I know you’re not going to have me back for four or five years. In the meantime, you’re going to need another four or five speakers. Let me introduce you to Spencer. Spencer is a friend of mine. I’ve seen him speak. He’ll be awesome for your event.” If you show up and you kill it, that makes me look good. It can be used to build my relationship with that event planner.

There’s a lot of that that exist in the industry as well, of just speakers referring speakers to for their other events that I already did so they’re not going to have me back for a while or the types of events where they have a bigger or smaller budget than what my fee is so I’m able to refer another speaker that might be a better fit. There’s a lot of that that exist, where just networking with other speakers can be really valuable as well.

Spencer:Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure it’s one of things that once you’re in the industry, once you’re looking for different opportunities, a lot of things start to come out of the woodwork, just like anything. Once you start networking and marketing your business, opportunities start to happen a little bit more than when you first get started.

Grant:Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s really true. A lot of it in the beginning is you’re planting seeds. I think again, it’s no different than any other service based business where you’re just planting seeds. The more seeds you’re planting, eventually, it’s going to be leading to something. You may feel like I’m throwing a lot of seed out there and I’m looking at the dirt, and I’m not seeing anything happen. That doesn’t necessarily mean nothing is happening. Maybe something is happening, you just can’t see it below the surface.

There are times where I’ve emailed clients or talked with clients and followed up with them for years. Maybe it took couple of years before they finally booked me. That’s just the way that that one happen to work out. There are other times where I’m re-speaking at an event. The wife of the National Director for this organization happened to be in the audience at the smaller regional event. She immediately calls her husband and says, “Hey, you need to have Grant come speak at a national conference.” You can’t plan on that. I didn’t know that she was going to be in the audience.

Those types of things happen when you’re continually speaking on a regular basis and continue to spread that seed. I tend to find that that good things happen.

Spencer:How much can new speakers expect to make per speech? One gig, somebody that doesn’t have a lot of experience, just getting started, how much can they make in speaking fees?

Grant:Speaking fees can feel a bit like this big mysterious black box. We’ll demystify it a little bit here. First of all, I’ll give you the short answer. If people are interested, this is totally free, you can go check out myspeakerfee.com. It’s a calculator we put together that basically you answer a couple of questions about a specific event that you might be speaking at. It will spit back a number. It really tries to demystify and simplify it.

Let me give you some context and then I’ll give you some ranges. There are a lot of variables that go into it. One big variable is going to be your experience level. If you’re a band new speaker, you’ve never really spoke before, and you’re not as good as someone who’s been doing this for several years, you typically know you won’t able to be to charge as much.

Another variable is going to be the industry that you’re speaking in. You can charge more in some industries versus others. You could charge more speaking to corporations as opposed to non-profits. You can charge more speaking to colleges versus high schools. The particular market or industry you’re speaking in has a huge variable.

Your marketing materials is a big factor. Meaning your stuff, your website, your theme of video, those type of materials, they need to look sharp, they need to look professional. Whether we admit it or not, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, people judge books by their cover. If your website sucks, then people are going to assume that you suck as a speaker. That may not be right, that may not be fair or accurate but we all do it. You need to make sure that your stuff looks professional, looks sharp. That doesn’t mean that you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars. Again, it needs to look professional. It needs to look sharp.

Another factor would be how far away the event is. For example, I’m a lot more likely to take a lower fee for something that happens to be here in Nashville versus if I got to fly halfway across the country. It’s a lot of travel or it’s just the place I don’t really want to go. Some of those are different factors. Those are variables as well.

Another variable would be if you are selling product. I’ll give you an example, one buddy just couple of days ago who was working with a speaker, who has a high end offer of something that they sell. He spoke at a big event, a well-known event, and he sold a million dollars’ worth of product at the event. For him, it makes sense to speak for free because he is going to clean up on the backside. Some of it depends on those types of variables. All that to say again, there are a lot of variables that go into it. Again, I’d encourage people to just check out myspeakerfee.com, that’ll help.

Again, let me give you some ranges. For most speakers who are getting started, most speakers are going to fall within $1,000 to $5,000 range, between $1,000, $5,000. Again, lot of variables within that. Between $1,000 and $5,000. For speakers who’ve been doing this for a little while, if you’re speaking let’s say in the corporate space or in association space or entrepreneur space, sometimes you can charge between $5,000 and $10,000.

Professional speakers who are speaking corporate, who have been doing this for a little while, they’re going to be $10,000 to $20,000. Then you’re going to have professional speakers, some that are like B list celebrities, best-selling authors, athletes, stuff like that. It’s going to be like $20,000, $30000 or so. It can go up drastically from there. There’s going to be big name speakers that are $50,000, $75,000, $100,000, which just sounds absurd and crazy but that’s the going rate.

I’ll give you this quick side. A speaker buddy told me this couple of years ago. He said, “Your fee is in relation to how long it takes to explain who you are to their boss.” For example, if I’m in charge of hiring a speaker and I go to my boss, for example with the event and I say, “Hey, we want to hire Oprah.” It needs zero explanation. Therefore, she’s going to be able to charge an exorbitant rate. Versus if they say, “Hey, I want to hire this guy name Grant. He’s a good speaker. I saw him speak one time, I’ve seen some videos, I came across his podcast, or blog.” The longer you have to explain, the more your fee drops.

Again, the bottomline again, I definitely encourage people to check out myspeakerfee.com. I think that’ll definitely help.

Spencer:Yeah. That’s a great resource. I was actually checking it out while you’re talking there. It has a lot of different factors, pretty cool. People can check that out for sure.

I want to ask one more question about speaking and then I do want to talk about Speaker Lab just a little bit. I know this is a huge discussion in it of itself. Do you have any one tip that you can give for giving a great speech? What should people be thinking about if they want to put together a speech that is memorable, that people will be inviting them back? What makes a great speech?

Grant:You’re right, there are definitely several factors. I think telling stories is really, really powerful and effective. I think using humor is really powerful and effective. I think one of the best things that anybody can do though is practice, prepare, and rehearse.

Whenever we see a great speaker, oftentimes we assume, “Oh, they’re just good. They just wing it. They just got up and chaffed from the hip there. Yeah, they just made it up as they went and it just turned out to magically be really, really good.” I promise you, it does not work like that. They spent hours and hours and hours practicing, rehearsing, going over it.

If you ever watch a stand-up comedian, if you see a special on Netflix or something, I promise you, they didn’t just, “We’re just going to hop up on stage and speak for, tell some jokes, hopefully people find it funny, and it’s all going to work together.” It’s just doesn’t work like that. They have gone over and over and over that material so many times, so polished, and so dialled in.

For example, if I was going to tell a story right now or the story that is something that would tell on stage, it would be really polished and dialled in. Why? Because I’m not making it up, because I’ve told it hundreds of times, because I know exactly how to time it, and exactly how to tell the punchline. All of that, all of those factors just because I have a lot of practice with that.

I think the more you speak, the more comfortable you become. I think that if you want to do well as a speaker and you got maybe an event coming up or something in mind that you want to speak at, the best thing you can do is really spend a lot of time practicing it, going over your material, working on your talk itself, so that when you get up, you feel a lot more confident, you feel a lot more comfortable, you’re not glued to your notes, you’re not trying to memorize the script buy you just really know the material and you know where you’re going with it, and it’s not something that you thought about 30 minutes before you walked up on stage. I think the more you practice and go over it, the better off you’ll be.

Spencer:Yeah, great tip. Absolutely, that makes sense. I do want to dive into The Speaker Lab. Obviously, you mentioned this before, this has become a big part of your business, so you don’t have to speak at 60 or 70 events a year. Are you willing to share any numbers or just give listeners an idea of the success that you’re having with The Speaker Lab, whether that’s a number of students or just whatever you’re willing to share there.

Grant:Yeah. For contacts sake, when I was speaking full time, we were doing about $300,000, $350,000 or so in revenue per year. That was again doing around 70 events a year. At this point, we’ve cut way back and we’ll do 5 to 10 events. This year, we’ll do close to $1 million in revenue, maybe cross that million mark. It’s a huge, huge difference in terms of I’m doing a fraction of the speaking gigs that I was doing and yet we’ll double or triple what we’ve been able to do in terms of revenue. Yeah, definitely, it’s been a different model but definitely much more scalable at this point.

Spencer:Yeah, absolutely. Congrats man, that’s huge. I heard to the grapevine, actually I was talking with Steve Chou not too long ago.

Grant:You know Steve?

Spencer:Yeah. Steve is a great guy. I was just at his conference, Sellers Summit, just earlier, well it’s last month. Great event. He was talking about just how well you’ve done with webinars. That was eye opening to him. Now I know he does a lot more webinars. Why do you like webinars so much?

Grant:I remember I was on Steve’s podcast a while back. We’d talked about a bunch before and I kept on like, “Dude, you got to do webinars. You got to do webinars.” He’s like, “Yeah, I don’t know.” For his credit, he had his autoresponder sequence setup that just works really, really well and just sold at autopilot in the background. I said, “Dude, webinars just work.” We just talked it through in depth of what to do. I remember he did this first webinar I think he did $60,000 in revenue, in sales. He was like, “Okay, I’m a believer now.”

First of all, webinars just work. I mean they really do. They just work really, really well especially if you are selling some type of product or course that’s going to be above $500 to $1,000 range. Even from $1,000 up to $2,000 or so you can go on some webinars. Webinars are really a great way to not only teach and to give away some of your best materiel content to share some success stories. But then to say, “Hey listen, we’re just scratching the surface.” Right now, someone who’s interested in speaking, we’ve given several things that they can go ahead and do and implement but the reality is there are a lot we haven’t even touched on. You just don’t have time for it.

It’s an opportunity to say, “Hey, if you want to go deeper in this, if you want more information, if you want more support and training, here’s this resource, here’s this tool, here’s this coaching opportunity that we have that people can learn more about and take a next step with.”

Webinars are just really, really effective for that not only teach but then also to run and present some type of offer to take a next step with you.

Spencer:Are you doing all your webinars live or do you have some evergreen recorded webinars in there?

Grant:We do a lot at both actually. I would highly recommend, if you were someone who’s saying, “Okay, I’m intrigued by doing webinars. I’m just going to record it and set it on autopilot, and set it and forget it.” That doesn’t work really well. I recommend that if you’re going to do webinars, you need to do a bunch live at first. The reason being is you want to be really comfortable on webinars. Webinars, they’re not overly complicated but it’s a different piece. You want to do it a few times just to get the feel for and get the hang of it.

The other thing too, and this is very similar to creating a speech. When you’re creating a speech and you’re just sitting there, working on your presentation or your talk, how you think the audience is going to respond, it’s just an educated guess. You just don’t know. Is this going to work? Is this going to resonate with people?

If I’m working on a new story, I may get up and deliver it. I think it’s going to work, I think it’s going to go well but then I’m going to able to see in real time, this is working or this is not working. It’s the exact same thing with a webinar. You may deliver the webinar and be like, “You know what, this seems to really resonate with people just based on the chat or people had a bunch of questions about this. Maybe something here was unclear and I need to improve that. By the time I made the offer, this seemed confusing to people or this didn’t work.”

Each time you do a live webinar, it allows you the opportunity to tweak it, make adjustments, and improve on it. By the time it’s really dialled in and you’ve done a lot of live webinars, then your offer, the pitch, the presentation, the teaching, the intro, all those pieces are really well thought through. You know that they’re really well polished. By the time you turn it on evergreen, then you know this moment is the best possible webinar that I could do. It makes a lot more sense to put it on evergreen versus again, I’m just throwing up something up there, hope it works, and hope it converts. You really want to test it in a live setting and then make adjustments from there before you eventually make it evergreen.

Spencer:If people want to watch one of your webinars to either learn about speaking or just to dissect what’s working really well on your webinar, on your pitch, that sort of thing, where can they go to do that, to watch those?

Grant:To kill two birds with one stone go to freespeakerworkshop.com. At this point, at the time that this is recording, that link goes to automated webinar registration page so people can walk through that exact. I encourage people to do it. Even if you’re just not interested in speaking at all, you can opt in and just walk through that to see what the email sequences are like, those pre-impose, what the webinar structure is like.

I still do that today with other people as I’ll opt in for something just to walk through, to see what the emails are like, to see what the webinars like, to see how they present something. I’ll always just pull on some ideas from, “Oh, here’s something we could do, here’s something we could try, here’s how we can change the offer.”

Literally just yesterday, I saw something on someone’s webinar. I was like, “Oh, that’s a really clever idea. We should totally implement.” This is a simple thing we could implement in our automated webinar. I think just paying attention to what other people are doing can definitely lead to some good ideas.

Spencer:Yeah, I agree. I’ve done that a lot. I’ve watched either other webinars or just gone through email sequences. You can pick up a lot of great tips from other marketers or just people selling products in general. I encourage people to do that. How are you driving most of the traffic to Speaker Lab?

Grant:A lot of it at this point is through Facebook ads. I guess to take a step back, when we first created Booked and Paid to Speak, I was like, “Okay, how are we going to sell this?” I think this is really important to think through, because most people are like, “All right, I want to create a course, or I want to write a book, or I want to have some type of thing that I want to sell.” But they don’t really think through how they’re going to sell it. I promise you, the model of if you believe that they will come does not work. Nobody cares about your things. You have to really think through how are you going to sell it.

The two most common options are going to be, to do some type of the big launch thing, where’s it’s this big open close launch for a week or so and you do that a couple of times a year. I was personally never super intrigued by that. That just felt very, very stressful to me. I felt like you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If something goes wrong, which things tend to go wrong in tech space, it could really screw you over from a financial perspective. I wasn’t super interested in that.

One thing that I had seen people do is people were doing a lot of these live webinars and they’re doing an evergreen type of format where you’re doing the webinar, you’re making an offer, but you’re also going to do pretty much the exact same thing the next week or in a couple of weeks or something. I’ve seen some people do similar things to that so we decided that’s what the model we wanted to do.

We were doing a lot of Facebook ads from the beginning. We still do a lot of Facebook ads. We have a more organic traffic now from this point. Most of the stuff that we do drives people to the webinar. Even people go to the myspeakerfee.com, that will help them to figure out what their speaking fee is. At the end of that, after they complete that, we’re asking them if they want to register for the automated webinar. A lot of what we try to do tries to drive people to the webinar itself whether organic or paid.

Man really, if you’re going to do paid, it’s really a numbers game. I think it helps a ton to do a lot of live webinars to know basically what your numbers are. I’ll give you a quick example. Let’s just say hypothetically, it cost you $5 to get someone to register for your webinar. Let’s say you spent $500 and you have 100 people that register for your webinar. You know of the 100 people that you’re going to have, you’re going to have let’s say a 25% show up rate. You had 100 people, you have spent $500, $5 a lead, you had 100 people register, but only 25 of them are actually going to be on the webinar. You know from the past that let’s say two of them are going to actually buy, whatever that conversion rate works out to. Two of the actual 25 people are going to buy. If you’re selling let’s say $1,000 course, that’s $2,000 from the $500 that you started with.

What you got to do though is you have to do several webinars in that type of context to figure out what those numbers are. I know generally that if we put $1 in, we’re usually going to get around $3 to $4 out. That’s from a lot of tweaking and just knowing those numbers. How do we improve the registration rate? How do we improve the show up rate? How do we improve the conversion rate? How do we improve the conversion rate on the follow up sequence? We add in a down sell sequence as well.

Basically, the more you know those numbers and you know that when I put $1 into ads, it’s going to come back and this may come back as $1.50 or $2, or some people are $10 or $20, depending on what you’re offering. If you know those numbers, then Facebook ads could be really, really, really profitable. But again, you have to not only know the numbers but you have to have some type of system and funnel in place ultimately that sells that you know converts and you know works.

Spencer:What type of Facebook ads have you found worked best for you? Are you doing video ads that take people directly to the webinar landing page or some other sequence?

Grant:When we first started doing webinars, I was doing most of the ads myself. Partly just because I wanted to figure it out, I wanted to learn how do you actually do an ad and what’s the difference between the campaign and an ad, setting an ad.

At this point though, we’ve had a couple different contracts that worked with us. We got one guy we’ve been working on for a while now. He does all the nuances in terms of just targeting, of turning on ad sets, turning off ad sets of what’s working, what’s not working. He’s really in the nitty-gritty.

I can tell you though that we try a variety of different things. One thing that works really well for us currently is doing a lot of look-alike audiences. We’ll take a list of the buyers for our course. We will upload it to Facebook and just tell Facebook, “Find us more people like this.” Facebook just knows an insane amount of information about us. It’s able to say, “Here are all the behaviours and different criteria and factors of these people that bought. Let’s go try to find more people like that and show the ads to them.”

Facebook, ideally, wants you to be successful because if you are successful, you will spend more money with them. I know for us, we spent a lot of money on Facebook. As long as it keeps working, we will continue to spend money on Facebook ads.

We do a lot of look-alike audiences. We do some retargeting so if people go to our site, I think we’ve all experienced that, you go to a site, then you see the ads chasing you around later. We do some of that with retargeting ads as well. We do kind of a two-step process where we’ll run traffic to our ads to a piece of content whether that’s a written blog post or one that we’ve been doing for a little while now is I did a 15 minute Facebook Live couple months ago. Basically just walking through a step by step process of finding and booking speaking engagements. We have people that will view that and it costs us about $0.02 per view currently, which is pretty minimal. And then we will retarget people that have watched a certain amount of that video.

There are several things to try. I think the biggest thing I would say with Facebook ads is the same thing I’d say with webinars is that you really have to try, you have to be willing to test, and you have to know that what maybe working for Spencer may not work for Grant and vice versa and for anybody else. You have to try couple different things knowing that it’s an experiment and you’re tweaking and improving as you go, and then hopefully, you will be able to find the right combination that make sense and works for you.

Spencer:Any other tips that you’d like to share either for speaking or what’s made your course so successful?

Grant:In speaking I would say get really clear on how speaking fits into your business and what make sense for you. Again, like I said, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. You can speak a lot, you can speak a little. It’s really a blank slate of what makes sense. I think again that speaking can be used for most entrepreneurs on their business in one way or another.

Even if you’re speaking at something for free, if you go to an event and you’re seeing someone on stage, that’s the speaker, you’re going to ascribe a certain amount of credibility with that person. There’s a certain level of respect that goes along with, “Oh, that’s a legit thing to be a speaker at a conference or an event.”

There are a lot of speakers who may speak just primarily from that same point. It’s just good for brand building. It’s good for credibility and recognition in the industry or in the space that they’re speaking in. Again, I think speaking makes sense for everyone. I think it can actually look different for everyone.

In terms of the online stuff that we’ve been doing, I think part of the reason that the funnel that we have and the course that we have has done well, is because we’re solving a really specific problem. It’s not saying, “This course is going to teach you everything and anything you need to know about speaking, about how to write a speech, or how to find speaking engagements, about all this.” Really, it’s about how to find and book speaking engagement. It’s a very specific thing. We don’t really even talk about anything in there about creating your talk. We touch on it briefly but that’s not really what it’s about.

The same thing with if you’re teaching how to do niche sites, you’re teaching something very, very specific. There’s a specific need and a specific pain point that people have. We can get into a lot there on how to actually go about doing that. I think really getting clear about what’s ultimately the problem that you’re solving and making sure you’re creating your material around that to solve a specific problem for a specific person and specific audience, that’s what everything that can really do well and sell well and not just someone that create this generic product or course. I just throw it out there just because I see other people doing that. I just don’t think that that works well if you’re not solving a specific problem for a specific audience.

Spencer:Excellent tips. I appreciate you coming on the podcast. You share a lot of great strategies I think the people can take away that have been listening here. We’ve mentioned a couple of different URLs. How can people follow along with you or where would you like to send listeners now?

Grant:Yeah. Just to recap those URLs. If people are wondering how much should I charge for a speaking engagement, go to myspeakerfee.com. If people are interested in going to one of our trainings, webinars about how to find and book speaking engagements, go to freespeakerworkshop.com. If people are interested in just the speaking topic, you can definitely check out thespeakerlab.com. There’s free podcast, there’s lots of blog post, and lots of just free resources. People can check out all about speaking, speaking industry and how to find and book speaking engagements. Yeah, definitely check those out.

Spencer:Perfect. Thanks Grant, I appreciate your time very much.

Grant:You bet, Spencer. I enjoyed hanging out with you brother.

Spencer:Yup, thanks a lot.

The post Podcast 128: The Business Behind Getting Paid to Speak at Events with Grant Baldwin appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

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