Hi everyone, welcome to this breakout session So the vision for this breakout session not that I've ever been to an Apple iPhone announcement events, but you know, they do Apple does their their big You know well polished presentation and then after that all you know They announced a new iPhone and then they let a lot of people come to like You know the secret back room and like be hands-on with a new iPhone and and You know try things out That was the vision for this like let people come here be hands-on with the platform go one-on-one with people who are Really well versed with the accessibility we put in the system You know people who coded stuff and people just know how to use the the blocks and the editor to that Yeah However, there's a lot of you I'm not sure if the logistics of that we're gonna work So we're trying to figure this out on the fly here We are creating a Google sheet where you guys can paste your email addresses And then we will invite you to our alpha environment so you can just get in as a user when you have your laptops and just go to town So that we're getting that set up. I think it is Set up at be bit Lee bit.ly.ly slash NASA alpha There we go NASA alpha all one word no dash. Yep Stacy's in the champion So if you go there go to that Google sheet start throwing your email addresses in and then I think Someone is gonna start inviting y'all with user accounts to the alpha So while we're doing that though, I think we've got a few different mics set up around the room So maybe we could take some open questions now for everyone to hear while we're getting all that set up And then I think after we've taken some questions Then we might kind of squish together in different groups so that all the folks who have Accessibility questions and want to see that in action maybe can go around right with with amber So we can kind of divide and conquer but first questions Want to come up to the mic, please Hi, thank you Quick question. So in Developing your block theme, I guess kind of two-parter. Did you use WordPress core blocks and I guess Question one question two. What was your thought process on like how to develop a particular part of a site? Is it like a pattern a core block a custom block like what was sort of the decision tree? You had to run through to make that decision All right, so there's a lot in that lot a lot of parts to that so Yes, we used core blocks There were some core blocks that we turned off and Then the most interesting thing we did was we had to augment some of the core blocks So the most obvious example is like the image and video blocks. They didn't meet You know the you know captioning specifications and stuff like that that NASA had and wanted So basically we had to augment those things with and kind of figure out a way to layer like our own image block That was kind of built on top of the core image block In far as in terms of what was a pattern and you know, what was a block You know the the HDS atomic design system pretty much Defined like the blocks that we do we were gonna do and one of the key things we had to do was figure out So there's a lot of different post types, you know certain blocks only work on certain post types not other So that was another decision criteria we have we've got post types that are full with basically pulse types And other post types that are, you know, two column post types Or at least layouts and so not all the blocks working that way. They're not all intended for all that use And then the patterns You know As we were talking about in the keynote it was you're giving people when we first put users on this thing that there was like it there were something like 25 custom blocks that brought this design system to life and and It was super overwhelming to them They They really didn't know where to start so then we that's when we started with like the concept of a pattern and the design system kind of like had some specifications for those combinations so we kind of started with that and as we talked about like That was great. That kind of moved people along the content creation user journey And so right now we're at the point of like like all right how do we get them to move past those things and break free and Feel more comfortable starting out with a blank canvas and assembling blocks in unique ways to tell their unique stories. I Don't know exactly how to ask the question Because I manage a team of developers. I haven't written code in a long time. Although I did contribute yesterday. So We have a platform that we build on top of WordPress and we leverage Gutenberg But one of the things that was a challenge for us and we went to using ACF instead as the in-place editor experience Can you talk about did you create a framework for all of those form fields and things like that for the in-place editor and talk a Little bit about how you manage having to create if I remember correctly You have to have to sort of render views one for the render on the front-end web page And then one for you know a component for the back-end editing experience Yeah, I'm kind of looking around for a software developer who could answer that question better than I can So when building a Gutenberg block Right here the in-place editing experience. Did you create your own framework for all of the form fields and things like that to? manage the content editing experience and then talk a little bit about maybe How you handle the the development of the render view for the front-end versus the back-end If I remember correctly you have to sort of build two different versions of every component one for the back-end and one for the front-end Yeah, let me answer that that last part first because that's easier to answer So yes, and yes, so in some blocks we're using both Like the admin present or the the JS presentation for the editing screen and then there's the PHP callback That's rendering for an end in a few cases where it was complex. We opted for server-side render instead. I don't want to say complex In some situations it made sense to have server-side render So we didn't we weren't fighting with a block that was constantly being updated And we found that to be sufficient in most cases And I'm sorry back to the first part you asked if there was a framework for for fields, right? We've created some components internal that we reuse But otherwise no, no, it's it's it's pretty much custom per per block. We roll it out as needed Yeah, but to that end like when I say reusable components There's things like post-selectors that we've we've like iterated on beyond what's in WordPress to you know Focus on different data types and because we're pulling an external content or sharing content being the science site and the primary site there's the need to To treat that block or that that selector in different ways And so that's that's been iterated on and we've created Custom components that we we reuse in a lot of spots. So well, there's not a framework per se There's probably six or eight of those pieces that that make up the bulk of constructing block interfaces Does that answer? Yeah, there can be yeah, it depends on the block and it depends on if there's something similar in the system We can sort of say oh great This is these things are actually the same like we can reuse code here But but no there there is a lot of work per block. Yes. That's accurate 55 it turns out I counted at dinner the other night was shocked Hey you guys, thank you In the keynote you guys talked about some folks using Blocks that you had intended for one purpose for another purpose that was clever and useful and well-received Were there examples where it was not so good and how did you handle that? Yes? But we don't want to name and shame or put up ugly screenshots But yes, right like and I think we we mentioned that that that that was one of the challenges is that with great freedom comes great Responsibility and not everybody right? We have a wide range of different You know familiarity with design principles with the user Experienced best practices. So yes, right? We had folks building some content that was maybe not as pretty right? We had folks building content that wasn't as accessible, but we were And Stacey I know is is busily getting you guys all access but Stacey and her team led an effort to Kind of spot check and QA these different pages and really identify when there was maybe a particular author who was kind of struggling Like we had a lot of people who were just kind of pasting everything into paragraph blocks And we're like we've got other tools for you right you can use other things And so they ended up doing a lot of one-on-one support Building with those users to convert those kind of super text-heavy pages into more block-based things, but but yes, it's it's a challenge How do you manage sort of the backwards compatibility or if you if you have to modify the block in the future? Do you have like unit test build? How are you handling it to make to ensure that if somebody's used a block in an unintended way? It doesn't break if you update or modify it in the future Unfortunately, I didn't hear the beginning of the question Yeah, yeah, we don't always You know, there's there's basically a lot of like the deploying plans end up like including a lot of You know special scripts CLI commands to go back and you know if we have to retrofit something, you know, we're trying not to like Tell content creators they have to do over, you know trying to like evolve their content in a way that is done in a non-obstructive way or something like that so Yeah, we do there's a there's a CLI command that you wrote called like the kitchen sink You run that you run that thing and it basically puts every block on a page for you So we can do you can do some quick testing in that way Does anybody want to try to build a page on the CMS? Oh Okay, people are doing it already great. I have a fun question or a serious question. Which would you prefer? Okay, has anybody worked on the site from space yet? No No, but one of our early integration and consolidation challenges was the space station research explorer, which is an app that shares Experiment results from the space station that the astronauts it's not in WordPress yet But the astronauts on the space station are inputting different imagery data experiment results into this Space station research Explorer tool and that was sitting on the old CMS. We needed to bring it in So not yet on WordPress, but we do have parts of the new site that have information directly Inputed by astronauts, but yeah, we got it. We got to get this on like a little chip and send it up there the source code Good idea BIT.ly Slash NASA Alpha no dash and I hope I got that right So once I think you're in but you don't have a role yet if they can get into the dashboard But don't see anything yet So give us a sec We're granting permissions as we go and we're gonna leave this access up all day Maybe tomorrow as long as you guys don't mess it up too bad So as long as we don't accidentally give anyone admin exactly if we give you admin Don't misuse it because then we will shut it off for everyone. He will ruin ruin the playground for everyone But we'll leave this up today Hopefully tomorrow so that you have plenty of time after this right to dig into your heart's content You can find us we're pretty easy to spot and we can keep answering questions after you get a chance to dig in and so just so there's Something visual to look at here Just so there's a visual to look at here while we're you know at living here and taking questions And I like I invited Amber to come up here and kind of like surf around and show the accessibility checker pro Um capabilities in action as Abby mentioned that was something that we cut from our keynote and it's important here and and you know You may have also seen Amber's Post and press release about how There was there's been some evolutions of the her accessibility checker product that are a direct result of Equalizes digital involvement with this web modernization project Hey guys So I work for a legacy publishing company and we're in the midst of migrating from a legacy CMS To WordPress and I was interested in what your guys experience with the data migration of your content specifically to Gutenberg blocks and So we have all of our article content in XSL on our database and we're wanting to Basically cleanly migrate that and convert that to good Gutenberg blocks without it all coming over as html blocks And so I was wondering if you guys could speak to that migration process and how you guys migrated that content over It was a nightmare. I figured that would be the answer Yeah, I mean at the end of the day like with with With Gutenberg like we all know we can look at what's stored in the database and we can say well How can I make that the destination for what I'm migrating right? And in reality sometimes the data you have doesn't map to what you're going to need in the future So you either need to build the block to accommodate for no values or stuff that you know I mean we've all worked with blocks where you start with the properties are available And then you get in a situation you go well now I need a new block or I need to update this block and now the previous stuff doesn't have the data and you know block air We've all we've all fought with that So on the migration front I think my answer is as close as possible stick to like core blocks because they're a lot easier than Whatever crazy contrived thing you can build and then find a pathway to to grow those up into your design system blocks noting that You know it may be that that core block it has the treatments you need to get to where you need to be it may not But no migration is terrible Yeah, you mentioned about Damn in the presentation so the digital asset management system is it built in the WordPress as a plug-in or something or like it's a For NASA plus right? There's I think are you referring to the reference I made to the images.nasa.gov. Yeah, okay, so NASA has It's called a veil internally so image it stands for audio video imagery library And it operates you can all go to right now images.nasa.gov. So we'll when we were doing Discovery on all this like asking our content creator users. What's the you know? What do you want in the next generation of work masses content management system? You know they all said like hey, I want to be able to easily use images.nasa.gov stuff They were the experience that they were currently doing was they were going there finding the asset they wanted They were downloading it having to manipulate it and then uploading it into the currency mass and their current tools You know they were dealing with Photoshop and all that kind of stuff. So what we did Was basically extend the WordPress media library. So there's an asset management framework out there that was built for integration I think it was for an adobe experience manager integration, but So we were able to augment that I believe I think human may may have been the company that Did a lot of the pioneering work there So it basically be able to basically able to use that open source code Integrated into our solution and essentially what it does is When you don't with the media library, there's essentially another tab that you can you so you're choosing between what's stored locally Within uploaded into the media library or your there's a tab you can select an interface to search for images.nasa.gov and it basically you know retrieves that allows you to put it into your story I also reference to the you know the user experience where people were having to Open up Photoshop locally and start and crop things and find the right focal point by far This is it's not even close by far the most beloved feature and our CMS was You've all seen the cover block and the focal point picker on that thing We applied that thing to every place an image was even like small little, you know circular avatar icons Like you can zoom in and out of those things Find the focal point of that that is by far the most beloved capability from our user community I absolutely love being able to like, you know, manipulate their images and move things around and tweak things thing Just alongside of their contacts opposed to what they were doing previously Which was like, you know pulling it down opening it up in their image editor locally and then putting it back up And just all that stuff was you know, we've all been there. We all know how time-consuming and annoying it is So yeah the which which aspect there was a couple things there Yeah, that's already is open So I mean if you go if you good that's in WordPress core if you go to the cover block I mean all that all that stuff is there you I mean that start start there You know apply it to a cut if you're building a custom block sugar figure out what parts you need there and add on to it I was just gonna add we have a lot of different image libraries across NASA So this images NASA got was kind of step one and I actually our friends I'm looking to see if any owner in the room our friends over at JPL who are building the new science NASA gov Are really leading the way on this front They're trying to consolidate all of these different science image libraries across NASA into one I think believe using AEM and then have that as a direct image source in the CMS So that that job of trying to consolidate all the image libraries and data into one place for our users is a very in progress area But more to come soon. Yep. Okay, perfect Okay Invitation emails aren't going out But if you put your name in the spreadsheet go try to do a password reset with that same email I think probably our like mail logger isn't working As they get as they get the text changes to a lighter color means that we're getting them in so Okay, so we're trying to send the confirmation emails But if you see your name in a lighter color on the spreadsheet go ahead and try a reset password You need the URL don't you? Yeah, it's in the spreadsheet. Yep, the alpha URL is in the spreadsheet. Can we type the alpha password? And if we escape out of I think it's maybe in another tab Yeah, yeah, okay, so here up at the top NASA Make it all big. Yeah, there we go There we go Headings are tough people Okay, so never do naked links no naked links like this don't ever do this, but NASA-gov-alpha.go-bip.net BIT.ly You want to type it? BIT.ly I know BID.ly. Yep. You're good. You're good ly slash NASA alpha all one word Thank you. Nope, NASA alpha. All right more questions. We got a bunch over in the section For this particular environment you're probably running into the two-factor authentication that's built that Honestly WordPress VIP enforces as part of WordPress core However, yes, we do have two-factor authentication that NASA has its own authentication system. It's SAML based Yeah, they're not Because we can't resist basement of course So it's not that's not set up you might actually see if you go to the log-in screen you might see a reference to it Says SAML login and that's not gonna work. But yes We did have to integrate WordPress with NASA's SAML based authentication scheme And there's all sorts of you know like NASA has its own little IT ecosystem unto itself And there's there's aspects of this WordPress project that we've had to integrate with you know things like their single sign-on system Give me another example Abby No, okay The account like the whole process of getting an account has there's a whole ecosystem around that you know Yeah, it's called NASA's account management system Pretty much a material there here though question back there. I have a question around the information architecture So this is obviously quite a feat to consolidate all this historic information and then putting them into custom blocks and building out pages and You know custom post types and whatever else you got going on What thought was given to future-proofing this effort because obviously your last site was what 2016? I mean, I remember 2016. That's not super long ago So, you know and not having to redo this again in five years eight years What how are you handling future-proofing in that code and in your content? That's our big pitch to NASA leadership Right, we're doing this once so that we do not have to do it again in five years, right? Or nine years or however long so To that point, right? I think choosing WordPress not like a custom, you know bespoke CMS But choosing something that's open source that everyone is actively contributing into is a big part of it Another part to kind of future-proof this you spoke about the IA right the information architecture So if you look at our current site You'll see that a lot of the headings in that navigation are kind of like NASA's Campaign-y phrases for stuff like there's moon to Mars and that's all about the Artemis program But a lot of people click that because they want to learn about The moon or Mars and then they get there and it's nothing about that stuff, right? And so NASA's kind of inside lingo You know these different campaigns that we are pushing that we want people to know about right But people are trying to get to a lot more basic stuff than that and they're really having trouble finding it So if you notice on kind of the new beta site and if you're not in the alpha yet You can always go to beta.nasa.gov to see it kind of from the front end You'll see that right. We have a solar system menu. You click on a planet, right? You you go straight there and a lot of those links You'll notice are heading over to the science.nasa.gov beta Because we're really trying to link those two sites as one user experience But that's I think fitting everything into an IA that is topic-based Right and not org structure-based is a huge piece of it and then we have it we're trying to make it really flexible So we're using Parsley analytics lets us look at analytics by category tag. We have stuff tagged with multiple categories So it can be tagged with a NASA center and the science topic It's talking about and the person the scientist who's mentioned in the article so that we can tag stuff multiple ways So that people can find it through multiple routes But we we want we're working with our sister site at science to come up with like a taxonomy governance Pack plan right a process to keep that taxonomy up to date prune out old things that aren't getting new content added hoping to make this a living system not just on the design front and but on the IA as well great question So I have an agency that does website design development for multiple clients And I think like a lot of us we lean on plugins to really kind of make development more rapid Are you guys using plugins in this site? Or did you go custom code everything for more kind of like future-proofing? Well, Amber's plug-in is on it. So that's one Yeah, I think that's why I told you to go drive that thing. Well, no, I didn't mean just mine Oh Yeah, I mean I just didn't know how to answer it. I don't really care So, but yes, the answer is yes, we are using some commercial plugins on their rank math This is the SEO plug-in a couple of dinners open source plugins like the asset management framework that I mentioned The news pack converter is using a lot of our migration processes. That's another open source plug-in But the reality is like we have to build our own And and there's a lot of custom plug-ins and because quite honestly like it's an easy way It's also kind of a deployment strategy to like it's a way to get code on there You know turn it on be able to easily deactivate it without having to like do a rollback as well, too So so it's a mixture of both I want to call out like one plug-in that we just start scrolling by this the ISS virtual tour. So that was a group who was putting together. I think in unity, right an entire Interactive tour of the ISS now like how do we get this into WordPress like let's work with you to build a plug-in for it Right, so this was kind of step one of that of building a plug-in for just that one 3d or interactive thing Our design system calls for a lot more with 3d with interactive So we want to kind of take the next step to make this where anyone can kind of bring one of these unity webGL Items plug-in play it in with review is of course Yeah, it's actually the a perfect example and The poster child right now for that culture of inclusion we want within web mod program You know basically, you know the stakeholders. There's other stakeholders like this across the agency coming to our team being like Hey, we want this capability When can you when can you build this when is it in your roadmap and sometimes those answers aren't what they want to hear It's like well, it's in our roadmap, but it's it's really it's far down the roadmap You know, it's it's not our priority But you know like we there's an invitation like if you have some resources you have some knowledge and you want to build it yourself You know, well, we're happy to consider it review it at it. Make sure it doesn't you know Impact performance or security or those kinds of things and so it's a prime example of a it's a success story quite honestly People might be interested in hearing About some of the thoughts behind, you know, there's a lot of plugins in the site which are custom and Why some of these things are plugins verse in theme and why they are individual plugins first one big one And I don't know if Gary wants to talk about that, but I feel like Sorry What was a question Tell them tell them that share the thought behind Plugins verse theme, right? Yeah with the custom stuff and why because we're looking at this, right? And there's 10 15 Custom boy, it's probably 55 based on our accounts recently. Yeah, so why why custom plugins? Or why so many so there's there's a couple a couple reasons so in some cases exists the ability to put a plugin out there and have Selective environments where we activate a feature So basically think of a plug-in is nothing more than a feature flag and in some cases That's literally all it is it's setting a constant that some other code is is utilizing It's a it's a multi-site, so that's a good point. Yeah, yeah, that's a good call to other other reasons They end up is as plugins is sometimes is isolation We may be starting down the road on something and we're just not sure it's actually what users are gonna want as was mentioned in the Keynote sometimes we build things and it gets in front of people and there was a huge Miscommunication because there's a lot of users There's a lot of layers of communication between what they need and what we're building and the result being there's code That we write and throw away and it's much easier to do that and tear out a single plug-in Then it is to go to your core plug-in or whatnot and and disconnect all that stuff as far as what goes in the theme and what what doesn't You know like we tried to isolate logic as much as possible from the theme to so the theme was just presentation considerations and keep API related related things and other logic and plugins I say try you know it's it's a Sometimes it's just pragmatic like I'm working in this one file. It's it's you know a couple conditionals. Let's go So it's not You know it could be cleaner, but to that end you know we the plugins give us the ability to Isolate bits of logic as opposed to have it all activated Just gonna give a plug quick everyone in the spreadsheet should now have an account So even if you hadn't got an email go ahead and go do a reset password with that same email and you should be able to get in Okay, I think I saw your hand first We're still granting roles and so we'll we're gonna stick around maybe in the hallway to keep answering questions But also keep troubleshooting to make sure everyone get access so Yeah, yeah, I think the answer Yeah, I think I think I'll give it I'll give it an answer through an example Because there's there's a lot of disparate pieces that make it in there And if you if you if you start looking at plugins just some things where you're like This seems like it shouldn't be its own standalone thing But the reality is consolidating all of this content from years you get in situations where you're dealing with strange things So a good example on that is JJ was alluding to SSRE which stands for a space station research Explorer And what SSRE does is they consolidate Reporting from the space station and make it available to researchers around the world So they've got a really strict mandate on what's available and how it's available And they have some design considerations that are external to what's in the HDS present design system spec outside USWDS and The whole thing is baked on this Like Microsoft SQL database and an enormous monolithic JavaScript app that grabs all the research and then renders it on the front end So it's not a decision any of us in this room would make when building it But at the time when they built it it was the right decision and now they're handcuffed by some of these decisions just because of legacy You know stuff so what we were able to do is help them port that into WordPress So there's this you know header and footer of the site that wraps this research Explorer And it was really cool to work with that team because you know, they knew their technology They didn't know WordPress but to to kind of put that in place And given the tooling they needed to move forward has enabled them to be integrated with the site from day one when we go live SSRE won't lose anything And and to you know expose the stuff that they're managed to expose I don't as an entry like your question as far as like cool new tech I think it's indicative of the project though Sometimes our decisions are sort of made for us and we just have to live with what's there and and go with that I'll add a little bit to that like some of the technical decisions we make we're Just not to deviate from WordPress in this massive way like if we're gonna if we're gonna you know again This culture of inclusion of all these developers around the agency We're gonna be successful with that like making sure that it's close to you know WordPress standards and The ability for them to be successful in that way is important to us We have a few minutes left So I have question related to plugins but more on customization side and you know most plugins add functionality But you had to remove some functionalities I saw on core blogs that you don't display some controls Can you like expand on that what you had to do? Why did you do that also related to that? What about using some sort of Roles permission so whether some users are blocks are locked or not and how would you go about that? You want to talk to the roles? So there's I think there's like five active roles in the system that sort of range between administrator and editor and author and Users I mean by and large kind of identify what their needs case are you know the higher up they go the more critical I Folks that approve that give it but the reality is We could have tons and tons of roles, but the use cases are pretty specific There's there's actually some users where the role is created and they have a like one use case So in addition to that they've got some capabilities added to that that one user to handle this single thing that happens within the site Sorry, and what was the other part of the question? I'm mostly interested about controls like removing them, you know like how How far you did about that like whether it's like an Admin could do more or then because we see only a single role right now, right? Yeah, so so on the on the So I guess I answered a couple ways So because we're using SAML on the primary site people are just logging with email address As like as soon as they're they're in the system they enter some subscriber and their role is elevated to what they need At the point they no longer have access to the system SAML doesn't work So they can't log into the site they can't log into anything so there's like a an immediate lockout from a risk perspective there But I mean in those in those five roles we have available it's it's really like what's what's the need the user needs What does the user need to accomplish and then sort of working back from there? What role meets that requirement? It's not a one-size-fits-all type situation There's also some secret roles Yeah, there's some secret roles that are specific to Yeah, really identifying at the Individual user level Like who can make changes to the homepage who can change make changes to the main menu system Yeah, because of just that's just there's just tighter governance around of all that stuff around NASA. All right I think we have one more question Or time for one more question. I should say go ahead There's using blocks in their own way and Apart from the intended design. So is there any framework that we can think of because you know Some are there any constraints that we can build or some kind of communication around a certain block Which tells the user that the intended person the intended use of the block Yeah, so we've certainly tried that Stacy you want to answer that? So when we have a new block that gets released or even just a version update We have multiple channels that we communicate to the users About the new block or update to it We do a blog and a newsletter for our user community because we have you know, what was it 440 users? 436 users in the system and then we also have what we call an open office hours forum And usually what we'll do is a demo in the open office hours to show the users You know, this is how we use this and this is you know kind of the intended use of it and you know Let them you know take it for a test run and you know if we come across a case where maybe it's you know Just completely off the wall then we might reach out to that user and say hey You want to you know, maybe try it this way but really overall You know, we're working with a really amazing group of creatives and they they do really really awesome work with the blocks So it takes just a little bit of training and communication to show them how to use everything So one last thing I'll add to that like you know, you roll out these capabilities and You have a vision for how they're going to be used and there's intention for how they're going to be used but You will have a user or a set of users who will try to explore the outer fringes of what's possible with all that So one thing I would strongly advise you to do is, you know Make that part of your quality control and quality sharing cycles like put put bad data into these blocks Like put the wrong characters in there and see what happens because you know, they are gonna They are gonna try to put you know characters that you don't think we're meant to go in there in those places So all right Thank you all very much for joining and thank you all for being flexible. This wasn't the way we vision this to go But hopefully you got something out of it if we're all around we're all pretty clearly identifiable so If you want to sit down and like look at some code with somebody we can try to do that If you want to get hands-on and with one of us individually, we're happy to just we're approachable and nice people So feel free to do that


Welcome. I have something that I would like to share with you before we start. I have been a great city, spinning in shouts. The sound of the road washed away. The mountain passes through. The streets are gone. The silence is raining. It sits in silence, glint its own. Who in here thinks that this poem was written by a human or an AI? Raise your hand if you think it was an AI. About 25%. Those of you were correct. And in fact, deep learning has gotten so good at generating text descriptions from images that now researchers are starting to create pretty remarkable things. So with that said, we find that creativity is not only for humans. And what do you guys think? What role do you think that AI will have on the fields of art, design, creativity, and what expressions do we see today? Yeah. I mean, since I run a startup called Creative AI, we can see it almost in any creative field. I mean, AI as a kind of broad technology that touches many facets of society. It touches creative expressions from music being generated or semi-generated through interaction with machine systems, art, visuals. We do a lot of visual design. So we just launched here at Slush our first visual generative design to Bloma.ai. So that's visual design, which is already touched by AI. Do you have a specific example that you could mention, perhaps using music? I mean, I'm very much fascinated by finding expressions where it's human in the loop type AI, where it's not the click of a button and you generate something. It's not very interesting. So I mean, even creativity is, I think, not really an interesting concept. I know that's maybe a bit challenging to say. I think what is more interesting to say, what is interesting, I think what's interesting is what is happening. For instance, in the art space, especially in the art space, there's a lot of people trying to work out interesting symbiosis of where AI is just seen as another tool for creative self-expression. And then there's too many examples to mention. There's Mario Klingelmann, a German artist who just won the Lumen Prize, the Gold Award in London. Very prestigious work generated with a bunch of AI models kind of building up slowly the art piece in complexity, like a painting. That has been quite interesting, both from a technical perspective as well as from a visual perspective. And then we also have the art piece that was sold at Christie's now for $432,000, which was a Renaissance piece that was created through a data set of, I think, was 15,000 photos. So what does that mean when AI now has been recognized as an artist? Do you think the AI is an artist itself, or where does the human end and the AI start? Well, first of all, hello. This is fantastic. It feels like I'm on a sort of fortnight level. It isn't. It isn't. Yeah, it's crazy. Where does the, well, I mean, a lot of the stuff that, I should say that I'm a bit of a fraud being up here because my colleagues who actually work in art and machine intelligence at Google, Kenrick McDowell and others, should really be representing and talking about this. But the sort of things that I'm interested in and sort of try and push on is trying to think of your lost question, where does the human end and the machine intelligence begin? That's certainly something that's very pertinent to what I'm trying to do, which is looking at much more at human augmentation or human intelligence augmentation. Human in the loop, as Rolof said. Looking at the ways in which the ways that computers pursue solutions, particularly using sort of, you know, learned systems, machine learning, those sorts of things, augment the ways that humans pursue solutions or novelty or, you know, interesting things. And so looking at that as a partnership, rather than looking at the AI as an othered creature, which I think is part of the problem with the sort of popular conception of AI from the movies and also from the tech industry, is sort of creating these sort of othered creatures that sort of are meant to replace you or, you know, be different from you and you address, rather than thinking of it as an exoskeleton or a, you know, a kind of suite of tools that the human employs to explore new possibilities. And I think that's where AI and creativity does become exciting is when it becomes, you know, something that the human intuition can use to explore things that are outside of human intuition. And I think that's what, you know, learning systems, AI, machine intelligence, whatever you want to call it, can help the human do. So I didn't answer the question about the auction thing. I'll leave that to you. But I do want to pick up on what you said about having AI to be an active collaborator or how you can use AI as a tool in your own creative process as a designer, as an artist, or even as a data scientist. What might that look like? I think, I mean, AI, as we all know, and luckily there's some talks around this, like AI inherently is dependent as a technology on the data you feed it and is inherently biased, right? And we should acknowledge that. In the greatest place, actually, bias can be a very positive thing. You can train inherently an exceptionally stupid system with just one thing really well, which then can actually, in a particular context, can be exceptionally creative and useful. But yeah, but you mentioned, I think what is interesting with Lucas is more seeing AI and people or artists, designers, as a symbiotic relationship, right? As more as another tool, which can be very smart, so it almost could be as an active participant in your creative process as a designer or whatnot, where agency is potentially negotiated between you as a designer, as well as a smart agent or some type of intelligence. Where, I mean, there's the concept, like we discussed this concept shortly, of the centaur versus the butler, centaur being this concept of a Geric Kasparov, right?  The interesting next step is like finding ways how we can work together with computers to as a sport, as a kind of centaur principle. So that's, I think that's a much more humanistic, interesting way of working with these things. Yeah, I mean, a couple of examples. I mean, this isn't really art or cultural products, but, you know, recently the work of colleagues in Google's Accelerated Science program in Google AI working with fusion engineers that they produced a system called the optometrist. And the optometrist is called that because it's a bit like when you go there and they drop the lenses in and go, is it better like this or is it better like that? Is it better like this? Is it better like that? And that's what the computer system can do is it can generate so many different possibilities, then put in front of the human expert and they can go, oh, it's better like that. And so they can follow their sort of, their intuition through this kind of hyperspace of possibility with this kind of rocket boost of the computer system being able to simulate and then give the results of a simulation incredibly quickly to them. So in terms of engineering, architecture, those sorts of things where you're looking for optimal solutions, the sort of center pattern, the sort of, you know, the new version of Steve Jobs's kind of bicycle for the mind is very powerful. In terms of cultural production, often culture is not an optimization problem, right? Apart from perhaps for art dealers who want to optimize the price of things, but generally speaking, we are not entertained by the optimal cultural solution. We are entertained by things that are newer, novel and exciting or recontextualize all things. And that is something which at the moment, learned systems are not terribly good at or do in very predictable ways. But in fact, the sort of center pattern with artists, musicians, sculptors, whatever it might be is really a new material exploration for those creative people to kind of quickly look through, again, in a way, look through these hyperspaces, the things that are interesting and exciting to them. But it's not too different in some ways, but I think there's a very different, the human in the loop of the cultural exploration is looking for a very different thing. They're not looking for the optimal. They're not looking for the result. They're looking for something which speaks to them and maybe speaks to a larger audience. It's like a possibility space we like to call it. So AI can really help you have a possibility space where none of the possibilities are like even necessarily the end thing, but they can really help you as a surprise search. There's actually quite a lot of work in evolutionary algorithm, genetic search, where they even are inspired by what they call surprise search by biological organisms finding surprises and novelty search. And that's a way of almost drilling down on, and again, I speak clearly from my own context, which is in the design world. So within design, a lot of where we all always like to say we're the most creative profession of the world, a lot of our actual work is not very creative at all, unfortunately, and a lot of that kind of work can actually really be augmented by smart AI systems that can really help speed up that part, which is actually not the real thing we're after when we're doing design or when we're trying to be creative. So do you think that AI will be able to replace designers and artists? No, then what role would they have in the creative process? Like what work could you outsource to an AI and what work would creatives use themselves? Well, I don't know, I mean, I think this dialogue comes again from thinking about the AI as an other that you outsource things to, that you sort of give this personhood to, and I think we're pretty far away from that, in most cases, other than we dress up sort of learned systems or complex systems with sort of fake personalities, but we're pretty far away from actually having an artificial other that we can sort of ask questions, have that sort of relationship with, but we can certainly, I think if you sort of, you don't think about outsourcing the job of going from A to B to a bicycle, you're on the bicycle going from A to B, and I think this is where we're at right now with creativity, design, cultural output and AI systems or learned systems. But I think a lot of the work that's happening right now is also crucially to, I think a lot of the work of artists, particularly, is to actually make these dynamics of these complex systems legible to a greater audience. And I think that's the main service I sort of see, kind of, you know, artists like, you know, Refik Anandal or James Bridal kind of doing amazing work right now in terms of like getting, allowing people to have a way to speak about how these things fit into everyday life and might fit into their jobs or their lives. And I think that's like, in terms of AI and creativity right now, there's almost like creativity is, the creative, you know, the artists are almost doing a better job than the technologists of creating a dialogue around these systems. And I know that's a slightly off topic, but I think it's also why they're deliberately playing with things like bias in learned systems to talk about it and expose it and create kind of objects that can be talked about in a wider culture than in perhaps places like Slash. I think it's still early times, right? So like historically, I would separate creativity and creative work as like analog means, where things are analog and we do it ourselves, still with the help of tools, but non-digital tools. Then we have digital tools where we have desktop publishing, we have, you know, it's a camera, et cetera. And then we're at the third stage already for a while, which is that that's kind of simulating the analog with the digital, right? So it's such the digital equivalent of the analog thing. And now we're in the stage where we're actually starting to build more intelligence or our agency into those digital tools, where the tools become much more of an extension with a limited level of agency to them, which is why we're having all the problems we're also having, but also why it's so interesting. So all the problems we're having with AI is going to take over creative jobs is because we don't feel that there's control over these technologies. We don't understand them, but we have to be able to feel that this is actually empowering us. And we also have to be aware of, like the kind of things we actually want to be doing. And so this idea about augmentation versus automation, which is the thing, do we call people or do we replace people? Actually, it really drills down, not to a technical question if we can do this. It should be more like a cultural question or political question, do we want to, right? And that's not an engineering question. That's like a question we all have to answer together. And what are some of the main challenges that you see right now, like with AI in terms of the creative work? Well, yeah, I think that like it's early, so there's not much control. It tends to be very much problem-driven and engineering-driven rather than, and I say this because I studied anthropology. So I'm a failed anthropologist. I started, I studied anthropology for 10 years and then I was miserable at it and so I switched to computer science. But I think it's, yeah, I have no idea where I was going with this, but so it's early and because we don't do the power, yeah. Or like challenges that we see. I mean, and because it's technical, so it's technical-driven and it misses all the soft skills, which we all, which is inherent in startup culture and we have the problems we're having about gender inequality and all of that. I think it's an effect of being like a tech bro culture which is very much engineering-driven. That's something we have to fix and that can only help this system and AI becoming more fine-tuned or augmentative to our own needs as a society rather than as a tech bro group of homies. Agreed. I think the other thing that's lacking right now is, well, it's not lacking it. We're kind of right in the middle of it, but I think there's a sort of tool chain problem, which is it's very hard for people who are not, extremely invested in the sorts of skills to be able to use things like TensorFlow or other platforms to quickly make mistakes and sort of do that on their own time and experiment on their own time. And we're sort of missing that kind of, if you think back to 10, 15, I guess, years ago, the birth of intermediate languages like processing, which were invented by artists, Casey Rees and Ben Fry and others, and platforms like Arduino, which sort of opened up the tech-nearing aspects to new constituencies, which hopefully makes it more inclusive, but also allows those folks to make mistakes on their own time without having to look to the permission of others or look to the time of engineers who perhaps wouldn't be interested in their ideas or what they're trying to express. And I think we're just on the cusp of seeing some really interesting work there. There's work from ITP in New York. There's a platform called ML5, which is building on top of TensorFlow to sort of create these kinds of kind of little libraries and sort of sandboxes that people who are not computer scientists or AI-trained engineers or familiar with machine learning techniques can actually kind of start to get into what this thing works like as a material. And we've just been missing that the last couple of years. I think, you know, never make predictions on a stage or a fortnight level. But, you know, I think by the end of 2019, we'll see a whole bunch more kind of creative middleware for people to start exploring the use of AI systems as a material for all sorts of different expressions. We have a question from the audience. As what do you think AI-based systems like Adobe Sensei, which helps artists to find assets and inspiration from vast cyberspace? So... I haven't experienced it or used it myself. Yeah, I think it's great. You've used it? Okay. I mean, I think Adobe is really investing a lot in kind of trying to find ways of using AI in kind of their tool. So I think of the limitation there, I would say, as, you know, a start a big corporate has, you know, their own customers to appeal to and cannot make like radical changes. But they are building a lot of these interesting things into their existing products. So being able to spend less time on searching through large volumes of images or stock photography to find the kind of content I'm looking for with smart visual search. And there's some startups here at the Boots doing some of those, I saw as well. I think that's like a huge time saver. And it's great, yeah. Matt, I want to go back to your comment like about the systems. Just because I know that you work a lot with like the architecture, like of AI and like, what does that work entail? And like, where do you see some like coming trends?  Because it's what I work on. But I think one of the biggest changes that we're seeing other than, you know, the opening up of the sort of tool chains to people who are not computer science professionals is that we're sort of seeing a rebalancing from the sort of pattern of centralization that we've had over the last 10, 12, 15 years. Almost, you know, the pendulum is not going to swing all the way back.  But, you know, the pendulum is swinging back a little bit more towards decentralization, more towards kind of AI being able to run where the action is on device, in very small devices in sort of very energy efficient ways, very fast efficient ways on, you know, new types of chips and new types of kind of approaches to running machine learning systems on device, which allows you to sort of think about the architecture of how you use machine learning a lot differently. It can happen more locally. It can happen faster, lower latency. It can happen with more agency, you know, for the end user owner of that rather than all, you know, rather than the old pattern of sending, you know, all of the data to some kind of central location for the learning and the inference to happen, the inference can now happen certainly where you are, where the action is happening. But also the learning can happen there as well. And that's kind of, you know, it's what our group works on, but, you know, other, you know, it's prevalent now across pretty much all of the big players in terms of AI that more of this kind of like edge AI is starting to become possible and become powerful as well. And I think that's just really interesting because it starts to make you think very differently about how you might build certain things, whether it's a creative solution or something more around, you know, productivity or the environment or whatever it might be. But it just, it's just a new, again, it's like a new material, it's a new tool. But it helps, you know, it's something that's changes perhaps your base assumptions about how you would architect something. And that's always interesting to me, at least. So, I think. And I think it also connects to what you said earlier about play. So I think the concept of what it allows, like when we go back about that this is a technology which actually should be explored by as many people as possible and try to find what can this mean in a creative context, what can it do, is also being able to make these tools easier to use as one aspect, but also making them usable in more contexts and easier contexts and only somewhere on a big massive GPU, but actually on your phone. It's a super important part of that and it really goes back to a lot of the kind of things we have right now digitally really come from experimentation, right? So Xerox PARC was famous for, invented like desktop publishing and et cetera, was famous for bringing children in, like LMAK was a big fan of the concept of play, like having instead of like doing user testing with like fellow, you know, tech workers, having actually like children coming in and try things out who still have like, you know, an unspoiled mind by what things actually could be and being able to do that for AI, for large, you know, groups of people, I think that's what kind of is the extension of what this new, this kind of, when you said like what is going to happen, like I think that's a progress which I think I hope we'll see more but what this kind of technology definitely makes possible. I think it's, I mean, the more constituencies can be involved in the sort of generation of these things, the better and the more right now we're just at this sort of tip from, you know, it having to be the big companies, it having to be not even startups but like, you know, being these companies which have, you know, very big data sets, very big compute facilities to something which can now work on, you know, Raspberry Pis and I think that at least gives me a little bit of hope for the next 10 years. So, and you know, it means that there's going to be a lot of change which I think is also incredibly exciting. I mean, it's two trends. So we see both trends happening. So there's the trend where as a, like computer scientists, there's the trend where the biggest kind of gains in deep learning from such humans are being made by just blowing up the models, right? Just having bigger, like the largest kind of networks now, they're like, they're literally just like, it's an exponential graph of computation and really minimal gains in accuracy.  But that's kind of how a lot of these things work, unfortunately. But then there's the other trend which you, like, which of course we're a big proponent of which is like actually making things smaller and smarter. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So how do you foresee AI being regulated in the future? Because you did mention that right now, it's mainly like the large corporations like working with AI, but we're starting to see, like, more people use it. Like, should there be like regulation? And if so, what might that be? I can give a very short but maybe a bit radical statement on this. I think like GDPR is one example of like where, we as a tech community essentially have failed to hold ourselves to good standards so that there is regulation which has to force us to do that and then we complain that this regulation is too harsh to a startup. And I think it's just, it's still a very weak way. Like, having the fact that people are allowed to take their data out of your system when they give your personal data, like, not necessarily see what could be wrong with that is maybe for your business model, but it's inherently not the wrong thing. So I think the right kind of constraints and legislation can definitely help with it. So putting as much constraints in there as we feel is the ethical and the just thing to do, I'm a big proponent of that because it forces us also to then to think about creative solutions, about the kind of things we do want to have. This is where I should probably wear my, my views may not be representative of my employer T-shirt, which I should really, I should make those, I'd make a lot of money. I think there's, there are two things really. One is kind of, or three things. One is just right now, you know, the political class and the sort of journalistic class are just getting to grips with kind of the impacts of the changes in technology over the last 20 years or so. So they're running to catch up. And I think, you know, coming back to the point of artists and creative folks kind of helping with the grammar and the legibility of these complex systems is essential. And then I think I'm sort of hopeful because in other areas where engineering and science have had big impacts, we've learned to create ways that society, government and business can actually work safely. And so I think actually thinking more of it almost like a complex engineering safety problem is helpful because we have precedent there. We have precedent over the last 100 years of thinking about these things and looking at how these externalities play out. And right now we're just seem to be at this moment where everybody's kind of, it's dawning on people that is a huge problem with huge externalities, but we don't have, in certain constituencies, we don't have the language to have a good debate. I will need to cut you off there, Matt, but thank you so much and thanks to all of you for coming. Thank you. Thank you, Ron. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you. Thank you. That was good.


not everybody appreciates jokes that make fun of different groups. I mean, it's shocking.  Like I thought everyone just loved ethnic humor or jokes that, but some like really, really smoking heart, intelligent, capable, amazing women hate, hate jokes that make fun of anyone let alone ethnic humor or misogynistic humor. They hate it. And so if I want to attend to my relationships with women like that, I don't make those kind of jokes, right? I just hold back on that part of myself. I God, they're women who are so smoking heart and they so don't like jokes that make fun of anyone. It's like such a dilemma. It's like smoking heart. And yet they just hold so many seemingly to me like completely irrational beliefs. You know, they're into feminism. They're into course of miracles with Marion Williamson. They're into just such nourish kite, kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, astrology. And if I want to attend to my relationship at any level with these smoking heart, brilliant accomplished women, right? I have to take their hero system into account when I interact with them. Practice of a worshipful devotion to living a life of love is those three As is because the three things that we really have control over to some degree is what we can pay attention to. And then we have some control over our attitude. Alan has talked a lot about attitude about having a wholesome attitude. And the other thing is we have some degree of control over our action. So an attitude for a philosophy, a principle that I found is really helping me is to try to have the best possible relations with everyone that I possibly can. And that usually means extending empathy to people. So when people are upset, sending empathy to them generally tends to calm them down and allow space for much more meaningful interaction. So there was a woman outside of the synagogue I was attending, it was just screaming all these, you know, epithets that Jews and I went outside and I said, hey, I'm really interested in what you have to say. And so I listened to her, I empathized with her and we ended up having a great conversation for over an hour, you know, gotten together socially since then. A lot of good things seem to come into my life when I adapt this practice of wanting the best possible relations with everyone that's in my life, you know, even if they're left wing feminists, even if they're gay or they're transgendered or they're, you know, whatever they are, commies, right? I want the best possible relations with communists. It's maybe less than we think that we do, but through some consideration and reflection at least some control of our actions as well. So we control our attitude, we get to control what we pay attention to and we can control our actions. So I'd like to just go through a very... Yeah, I find I can control what I pay attention to. So I limit the amount of misogynistic, you know, misanthropic content that I consume, right? I monitor what I consume because what I listen to, what I read has an influence on me. Very quickly, these three and how we practice this devotional practice of love in our lives that I see that we make this decision to practice. What are we deciding to practice? So I think the first thing in terms of attending is I like to combine the idea of attending with appreciation and I talk about appreciation. Yeah, so when I cultivate appreciation for people, for opportunities and beauty in my life, my life just seems to go so much better and I'm much less likely to say inappropriate things that are inappropriate times for inappropriate people. Should have attending. That is attending with a kind, kind eye. When we attend with appreciation, but we're really... I'll talk a little bit more about appreciation. So one of the Alexander techniques that I use is to let go of everything that I think I know and just look at the world from a place of observing rather than judging. So there's a time for judgment, right? Absolutely times that you have to make judgments, but whenever you make judgments, there's some extra tension and compression that comes with it. So letting go of everything I think I know and just look outside my window and look at the trees and the flowers and the plants and like open up my visual field. So right now I can see both sides of the room simultaneously. When you can see both sides of the room simultaneously, you will automatically move up in your musculature. It verges on the impossible to be compressed, intense and pulled down when you're expanding your field of awareness so that you can see both sides of the room simultaneously as well as everything right in front of you. So the soft kind eye, the observing eye as opposed to the judging self, I find unlocks unnecessary tension in my neck, back, shoulders. But what we're doing is we're ultimately cultivating what Ron Downs calls loving presence or loving awareness. And you see that. I mean, you see that in people who are realized. You see that in Tom, you see that in Alan, you see that in Glenn, you see that in a lot of you who are presenting here that cultivation of this loving awareness. One of the things I love about 12Set programs, 12Set meetings is just how raw, how vulnerable, how honest people are. I just consistently find level of honesty and vulnerability in 12Set meetings that I don't find elsewhere. Someone described 12Set meetings as, you know, God with skin. Right. You know, I hear what God has done in people's lives and it moves me. And that's, and really it's that. That's what we want to try and cultivate. And attending is about being a kind, curious investigator and really looking very, very closely, asking yourself, what is this? What is this? What is this? And really attending from a presence perspective or a mindfulness perspective to our thoughts and our sensations and our emotions, our urges, our understandings, and also our beliefs. I mean, our beliefs, but also our intentions as I attend. And Pige says, you can say anything to a good woman, if you're honest. And I would strongly, strongly, strongly disagree because everyone's coming from a place of hurt and pain and they have a history. They have a love map. They have an erotic template. They have a life situation. And they're going to be all sorts of things that you're, you or I would consider true that, you know, a good loving woman is not going to be after here. Now, if a woman loves you and you have excellent rapport with her, then you're going to be after share more things than with someone who doesn't. So often in a workplace, like there'll be men who are very popular with the women in the workplace and they have a wider variety of things that they can say that if an ordinary person said that the women would just get offended. So I would sigh, you know, 50% with what Pige is saying, but everybody hurts. Everybody's vulnerable. Everybody is unable to hear certain basic truths at time because of their own vulnerability. And the two, as I was reflecting on my last presentation, attending to our intentions is such an important thing. So in terms of the two things that I think are the most important to attend to, there's many things that are important to attend to, but the two that are most important I think is to pain. And I've heard Alan talk about this too as well. In a way, if there's one thing that we could do, it would be to sort of be vigilant to our pain as we go through our day and to really, really be careful because it goes against our reflex, our reflex is to sort of avoid our pain and to react impulsively. Yeah, that's my tendency. I just want to focus on what's good in my life, what I'm grateful for, what's working. So large part of me just wants to distract myself from the pain. So the other day, I saw some friends going off together to social gathering and I wasn't invited. And I thought, oh my God, did I say something inappropriate last time I was at this person's house? You know, am I no longer in the circle of trust? I was incredibly painful. And I don't want to run from that pain. I don't live in it either, but just, you know, recognize that, yeah, that was painful or I could be out on a hike and I could see some acquaintances and suddenly be such a stake in my heart realizing that they would never ask me to accompany them. That the outrageous things I say here are going to rub a lot of people the wrong way. So they're not going to want to include me in their life because they don't think I'm safe. That's painful. They want to sit in the pain forever, but I don't want to avoid it either. But this practice of loving is really reversing that and it's really attending very carefully to whatever pain arises. Because when you look deeply into the pain, I was just rereading a cartilage book, The Power of Knowledge is a very good book. And in his second chapter, he talks about this in different language, but it's sort of the same thing. When you look very... And Pigger says, I have been married for 20 years. I've got a whole rank on this, fair enough. Very, very deeply into this interview pain. You see that at the bottom of it is really oftentimes just an illusion, the illusion of ego, the delusion of ego, the delusion of our unloved ability, the delusion of an excessive fear about our safety. The attachment to a need, as Alan has talked about so much for people, to treat as a certain way to be okay. And really, if you attend very deeply to your pain, oftentimes the pain will dissolve. It just doesn't pay. I find that happens over and over and over again. The second thing to attend to is our intentions, as I mentioned. And our intentions can be unwholesome or wholesome. There can be intentions, for example, again, driven by pain to harm, to manipulate others, driven by this delusion of our unloved ability to get others. Yeah, I often have the intention, I want to command attention. Like, look at me, talk about me, admire me. I mean, that's like, you know, one of the strongest drives in my life, but gets me into quite a lot of trouble. If I instead, you know, attend to my relationships and recognize the people who've been kind and good to me and I'm not nearly as needy for strangers to admire me. Just to love us, which is really, I think part of the awakening of step four and five and six is to realize that it's really our job to love ourselves. I'm reading Ellen's new book, which is just incredible. And he has a chapter in there about... Yeah, so because most of my life, I have not loved myself, right? Because most of my life has been characterized by extreme amounts of self-hatred, self-loathing, self-disgust.  I'm so effed. Like just the other day, I went into the bathroom after I made a significant mistake and I just like cursed at myself for two minutes. And then I said, I'm going to give myself two minutes and just swear at myself, and then I'm going to let it go and move on. But because I had so much self-loathing, self-hatred, I was just driven to try to get acknowledgement and recognition and admiration or at least attention from other people, which led me to doing really extreme things like writing about the pornography industry because that was a very easy way to get attention because thousands of people wanted to know about the inner lives of porn stars. Nobody's coming to rescue us. And it really is that idea that really, in attending to our intentions, to really let go of the intention to try and get somebody else to fix us or love us or make us better. Yeah, various girlfriends have picked that up in me. They would leave my place feeling sore. I just hammered them into the floor. They'd feel exhausted because I was just so emotionally needy. The time together had been all about me and my needs.  No one can do that. And at the same time, to really attend and to really nurture and honor wholesome intentions. And for me, my experience is that I start my day in silent solitude and stillness as much as I can. I have a very busy ADD kind of mind, but to the best I can, when I find myself surrounded in stillness, what arises? Now, I don't always get to start my day in silence and stillness, though it's a goal. I usually don't attend to my email often for the first two hours, don't attend to the news for the first two hours of the day. But even if I can't achieve that, at least set aside some time, even if it's only two minutes for meditation in the morning, just two minutes of meditation I find calms me down and makes me more effective. Advises for me is the experience of love. The experience of love. And if we can attend deeply to our peer awareness, our bare awareness, the quality is the miracle. The amazing mystery of it all is that the quality of our bare awareness is loving. And so if we can really attend to that and attend to the intentions that arise out of that, then we find that we have there are intentions to love ourselves and to love others and to love all of life. So that's a very brief overview of this attending. I really see attending as the foundation of love. And I like that. All right. Here is a piece of satire coming from anybody and their three-legged dog. No, say you cannot bring back Ezra Miller. You can't bring back Ezra Miller. I mean, you'll never be flash again. I do believe Ezra is going to get some jail time, though. Probably six months to a year or a year and a half. We got to get this movie out. There's going to be no press junket.  Thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it. Hi, Jay. There's going to be no premiere. No, they're just going to put out trailers and they're going to put the movie out. They're going to rake in a couple hundred million dollars for it. And then they're going to move on from Ezra and Ezra and never be this thing again. Yeah. People tend to get frustrated when bad people do. That's the real reason that Tucker Why was Tucker Carlson really fired from Fox News? The writer Chadwick Moore, who has written a new biography of Tucker Carlson, thinks he knows the reason and had this to say in a video he made today. Let's watch. I've also seen the monologue that Tucker planned to deliver on Monday, April 24th before his show was abruptly taken off the air. That monologue dealt with, among other things, investigations around January 6th and particularly Ray Epps, the only person captured on video inciting people to violence at the Capitol that day and allegedly an FBI informant who still has not been arrested or charged. Ironically, a good part of the monologue also dealt with the people and forces that are trying to silence him, like AOC and others in government. It has now been reported that his firing was a condition demanded by Dominion as part of the settlement with Fox. Although Dominion has denied this, my sources have intimate knowledge of the situation and they have assured me, even before this news leaked, that that is in fact the truth. So Tucker Carlson retweeted that. He quote-tweeted it with those eyes, you know, the two eyes people do when they look intently at this. So what's the implication here? Well, I think it's, the implication is because Tucker retweeted it, I think that's giving some additional credence to the claim that this might have been having something to do with the Dominion lawsuit. Right. But what are you talking about? And then also that Tucker was planning to do even more coverage of January 6th of the theory, very popular on the right, has not been really, I mean, the theory that that individual Ray Epps, we've talked about this on the show, was an FBI agent that no evidence has come forward to verify that. You can see him on video before the day before the Capitol, urging illegal action, in fact, actually other protesters say, Fed, no, no, no, no, because they know, person urging illegal action in other cases has turned out to be a federal informant. And Ray Epps also that, you know, made statements, perhaps exaggerating, but claiming to have had a really important role in organizing the whole thing. He was then, he was on, well, he was on 60 Minutes, I think.  So, Tucker was gonna do more reporting on that. So, Tucker Carlson obviously has talked at length about Ray Epps in the past. It didn't seem to be an issue for Fox News at that time. I completely get how Tucker retweeting this clip corroborates the theory that it was a dominion lawsuit condition. I'm just a little confused about what we're supposed to read into the content of his Monday remarks, because it did seem like he was making the argument, kind of tacitly, that he was both, both canceled because of the dominion lawsuit, but also because of the content going forward with this taste of Fox News. Telling more to suggesting that I think they were trying to get him off. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just trying to work out what argument is being made. I mean, AOC has to be clear. Multiple times said that letting Tucker be on the air is like a chance of violence. For sure, but if it is the argument that Fox News encodes with AOC, like an agreement, locked arms with AOC, ever being influenced by AOC in any way, and getting rid of Tucker Carlson, or is it that they were afraid of being exposed to additional liability because of taking... Yeah, I think what I'm... Again, what this person's view is, and I don't know whether this is accurate, but it's news, I think that Tucker quote tweeted it. This person is saying that they had to get rid of him because of some handshake from the Dominion lawsuit and then wanted to get rid of him before he was going to deliver this monologue. It'd be interesting to see if he actually does go ahead and deliver the monologue. I mean, just that the fact... Now we can do whatever he wants. Sure. I mean, the fact that he has given so many monologues that I would argue are much more controversial than this one seems to be based on the description and what we know here. Again, who knows? We haven't heard it. Does make me a little skeptical that it's about the particular Monday content as opposed to the Dominion lawsuit because, again, over and over again, what we see is that money talks. The decisions that are being made in terms of how Twitter administers, it's content. The decisions that are being made by other social media companies, the decisions that are being made politically, you know, when you've been the need to mow ears of other authoritarian government. And that... So Twitter was going to go all in with Daily Wire, Daily Wire showing that documentary they released on What is a Woman? And by Matt Walsh. And then Twitter said it went against their standards, that it was hate speech, and that they would, you know, try to throttle its distribution. So Daily Wire seems to be all in bed, had a great deal going with Twitter. Now there are complications. So advertisers, right?  Matt, you know, is cutting against your free speech advocacy, all of these decisions that are being made for financial reasons. And that's not necessarily an indictment. It's just that when we're constantly talking about things in free speech terms or substance terms, and it's really about other kind of decision making, I think it can obscure the story. So I do think there's a world in which Fox News could stand behind everything that Tucker Carlson says, could obviously appreciate it how a remunerative his presence on Fox News has been for years. But at the end of the day, the how many billion dollars again of that they had to pay to Dominion just wasn't worth the squeeze of what Tucker was bringing in until they had to cut ties. Yeah, 787 million, right? That's what the lawsuit was. Yeah, so obviously, right now, Tucker is in dispute with the company. He wants his freedom. He wants to speak. It's been about a month since the firing. I think it's been exactly a month, actually, which also raises that. So in Tucker, there's Chadwick Moore, again, the person who did that video who just watched, has a biography of Tucker coming out. He suggests, and again, I can't verify what his level of access to Tucker was, but the fact that, again, the Tucker account tweeted this suggests to me that there is some level of cooperation or coordination between them. He says he had a lot of access to Tucker and to Tucker staff prior to that. And then as it was happening, as the ouster was taking place, Tucker right now obviously is, you know, he has retained the attorney. He wants a break with Fox. He wants to be able to speak his mind. He said he's launching a show on Twitter. And we should say Fox and Dominion had both denied that the lawsuit required them to ax Tucker. They said that has nothing to do with it. They've not offered a reason beyond that. It's a real interesting time period. So this could be, you know, we've reported previously that Tucker signaled to his allies that they can start speaking out more loudly on his behalf. It's a really interesting time. Yeah, I'm curious from a kind of optics perspective, what does it mean to people? What does it mean to conservatives if Tucker was let go because of Dominion lawsuit versus because of his, because of a difference of... Okay, John Mirsheimer, political science professor says it's not going to make much difference for the Ukraine situation or America's policy towards Ukraine if Donald Trump wins the presidency. The fact is involved. If anything, his polling has declined since he made that statement. But Trump can say, I'll resolve it in 24 hours and he gets away with it because nobody sort of asks him the further questions. And even on CNN, a hostile interviewer only wanted to ask him, do you want Ukraine to win? And he said, I just want people to stop dying and the crowd in New Hampshire broke into innovation. The more central question I think to ask him would be how exactly are you going to do that? Right, indeed. We'll come back to Florida's governor. He's had a big week. But John, I want to bring you in. You're of course known for saying that NATO should take some of the blame for what's happening in Ukraine, but let's pivot specifically to the Republican Party position here. What is the mainstream Republican opinion about Ukraine and how big is this issue going to be the issue of the war in the 2024 election? I think you have to distinguish between the elites and the public. And it's very important to understand that what the public thinks here in the United States just doesn't matter very much. The elites just do what they please. There's no question that there are a lot of doubters in the public, both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side. And it's likely that the number of doubters will grow with time. But the question is, how is that going to affect the elite? And the argument that's being made is that the Republicans are beginning to go soft on Ukraine at the elite level. And that if Donald Trump gets elected, there's a really good chance that he'll pull the plug on the Ukrainians. This is not going to happen, in my opinion. The United States is backing Ukraine to the hilt. And if the United States withdraws its support for Ukraine, its material support, Ukraine is going to collapse. It can't stand up to the Russians. The Russians would win a big victory. It's hard for me to imagine that any American leader, whether it's Donald Trump or Joe Biden, is going to allow that to happen. It's just not going to happen. We are too deeply committed to this war. There's too much Russophobia in the United States. There's too much talk about the fact that this is an existential threat that we're facing with Russia for us to cut and run and allow Ukraine to go under. Furthermore, just think about what the consequences will be for China. My call. Our credibility, people will argue, will be destroyed if we allow Ukraine to lose. So I think Trump talks a good game. All right. So Meersheimer is making the point that personalities don't matter nearly as much in world power politics compared to structural situations. So this is why Meersheimer is much more of a structuralist than someone who pays a great deal of attention to personalities. It really doesn't matter that much. Who's the next president of the United States? Because it's the structure of the U.S. economy and structure of U.S. power politics that's going to run things as opposed to personalities which will usually just have a minor effect. Now, there'd be no Adolf Hitler running Germany in the 1930s and 40s. There would have been no Holocaust. So personalities do sometimes have a dramatic effect. But what he actually does when he's in office, assuming he gets reelected in 2024, is another matter. And I would note here, this is the final point, that Donald Trump, when he ran for president and in his initial few months in the White House, said that he wanted to improve relations with Russia. He viewed Putin as a friend. He wanted to put an end to NATO and get out of Europe. None of that happened. And in fact, what did happen is that in 2017, it was Trump who started arming the Ukrainians. Obama, much to his credit, had the good sense not to harm the Ukrainians. But Trump decided to arm the Ukrainians and we were as tough on the Russians during the Trump administration as we were in any other administration. So Donald Trump can talk all he wants about how he's going to do a 180-degree turn regarding American policy on Ukraine. Yeah, what people say is not necessarily what's important. All right. What people say is not necessarily what's going to happen. Here's more from Misha. Freddie said, I think he's exactly right that Trump views himself as a dealmaker and he thinks that he can move in here and he can talk to Putin, he can talk to Zelensky, he can use pressure on Zelensky and he can cut a deal. The problem that Trump faces is not simply that there would be resistance from the rest of the establishment to be tried to do that. The real problem is there's no deal to be had here. Nobody can figure out what the solution is to shutting this conflict down and there are two reasons for that. One is the territorial issue. The Russians are not going to give back the territory they've conquered and the Ukrainians want that territory back and you can't square that circle. Furthermore, the Russians want Ukraine to be a neutral state and Ukraine wants a security guarantee and that can only come from the West and you can't square that circle. So there is no deal to be had. So there's all this talk these days about using the Chinese as a force or as a moderator to work out some sort of deal. That's not a viable argument because again, it has nothing to do with the Chinese. It's the fact that there's no deal to be had. So Trump can talk to these blue in the face about cutting the deal but there's no deal to be had. But he would and John obviously you're the great expert on international relations so I defer to you on this but he would have leverage. I mean, Americans' power is unrivaled. He would have significant leverage over Ukraine because of the support that America has provided Ukraine and he would have significant leverage over Russia because of the threat that America can pose to Russia and the fact that the war has not been going according to Russia's plan so far. I think you're absolutely right that he would have significant leverage over the Ukrainians. Not total leverage but significant leverage. But I don't believe he'd have any leverage over the Russians. The Russians don't trust the Americans whether it's Trump or Biden as far as they can throw them. And the Russians have a deep-seated interest in taking as much of Ukraine as they can and turning the remaining part of Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state and promises from Donald Trump that they'll work out some sort of meaningful deal and therefore the Russians can make concessions. It's not going to wash. The Russians no longer trust us and they shouldn't trust us. There's also a question about... So, Misha also makes another point that popular opinion doesn't really control foreign policy. Foreign policy is decided by the elites. So, the elites have universally gone in with supporting Ukraine against Russia even though that's dramatically against America's best interests and Americans don't really care that much about what happens in Ukraine. And he uses the analogy of World War I where Woodrow Wilson decided he very much wanted to take America to war but he was concerned that Americans were not particularly interested in entering the war and he was also concerned that the biggest ethnic groups in America were Germans who would obviously not be in favor of going to war with Germany and the Irish who were not fighting in World War I. So, the elites in America had to gin up all these stories of German outrages to try to make a case for going to war in World War I. It was never a particularly popular decision. Now, all these false stories about German outrages in World War I led many people to not trust stories about Germans committing the Holocaust in World War II because they'd been lied to and fooled once. They weren't going to buy it the second time round. Also, Misha makes the point that Japan launched Pearl Harbor because they were being slowly strangled by the U.S. oil sanctions and because Japan could not get the oil and the natural resources that they needed to continue as a viable country, they were being pushed into a hard place. And so, if Russia starts losing in the war against Ukraine, you can't underestimate what they might do including the use of nuclear weapons. Now, Misha says it looks very likely that Russia's going to overwhelmingly take what it wants from Ukraine. It's going to annex the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine and just make them part of Russia that then Ukrainian sympathizers in Russian parts of Ukraine will move to the western part of Ukraine that Russian speakers in the western part of Ukraine will move to the Russian areas of Ukraine and thanks to intense nationalism on both sides, there will be tremendous loathing between Russia and Western Ukrainians and the West for many, many years to come. There's no solution to be had here. Now, it's good news that Russia's winning in the sense that it's not going to make nuclear war more likely. But if Russia gets pushed into a corner, like Japan was pushed into a corner by American sanctions in 1941, then everything including a nuclear war is on the table. Let's get some commentary here from J.F. Gardner. They're always including a link. Click here or go to WhatsApp or do this. When somebody's attempting to direct you off-site to communicate with them, no matter how good it might look, because at some point you'll get one of these and it won't be just like an obvious porn star, bimbo, big tits avatar. It'll be something that is a convincing attempt at social engineering. It might look like one of your friends or something like that. Yeah, I sent someone in Amazon gift card the other day and she was just sure it was some kind of malevolent phishing attempt. That's phishing, P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G. It won't be in broken English. It'll be something that makes you think to respond with them, but they'll be directing you off-site and say, that's the red flag. Be careful of what links you're clicking away with. That's Stephen J.J. who's talking with Clayclaw. Yeah, yeah. And what information you're giving them. Yes, yes, and some of them can be quite convincing. Let's just find out what J.F. had to say here. Hello everyone and welcome to J.F.G tonight, reviving J.J.J. as J.F. I had a nice niece born recently. Very nice, very nice. That is so fun. Young girls are great. They are a lot of work. They are sometimes capricious. They take a lot of effort. You need to show them a lot of things, but in the end you can be very proud of them once they are. The fascinating thing about J.F. is his hairline is receding further and further and further back every single week here. That's just disappearing. All right, educated and raised. So absolutely wonderful that you're going to have a niece, that you have a niece. Also met a lady whose husband had a vasectomy and they tried to reverse it, but couldn't. She was devastated. Oh yeah, vasectomy can have its use, but when you want it to be permanent, don't do vasectomy. Don't do vasectomies for that you intend to own with life. I thought he was going to talk about Twitter. Because it is blown. Is the background noise somehow even frightened the place so that it doesn't pass in the mic? Reviving J.J. as does it get hot in the North Pole? No background noise. Wonderful. Jesus Christ, I thought he was going to talk about Twitter. Oh yeah, if you want this technology, it's the Berenger Composer. It has both an extender and a workforce. Come on guys.  Unbelievable, unbelievable that we still had someone who wanted to mess up things in defiance of Elon Musk. Unbelievable. This is all related to the what is a woman documentary. Of course, personally, I had reviewed it here and I had seen it many months ago when it came out. But the normies may not have had access to it. And there was a whole story where the Daily Wire tried, they contacted Twitter and they set up with the Twitter status team which was very open to this. They set up that they would do a kind of premiere, a free premiere of the movie where you don't have to buy it. It's free on Twitter for a given amount of time. And they had set up that not only would it be on Twitter, there would be a dedicated special page. Daily Wire would pay Twitter and Twitter would give full exposure to the documentary for 10 hours. Everyone visiting Twitter would have an ad or something. They would see the video and they would click on it. So that was a big deal. And it's, I mean, I'm sure that they were willing to do it at low cost for Daily Wire because it's entertaining and it provides an attraction to Twitter. But eventually, if Twitter was to sell such packages to corporations or political parties, that would be millions of dollars. Because, I mean, in terms of exposure, having millions of viewers to something is a miracle. I mean, people are willing to pay a lot for this. But I'm sure that they had offered a very, very good price to Daily Wire because it kind of sets up the whole Twitter thing. You know, it sells a new product that perhaps will attract corporate buyers eventually. But at the last minute, they asked to review the video. They asked to review the video. And they concluded that in the video, there are two instances of misgendering.  That is the harassment that this documentary does. So the trust and safety team cut the grass under the feet of the sales team. The sales team was all Elon-minded and they had made the sale. Basically, this would have been awesome. But they messed it up. Ella Erwin of the trust and safety says, uh-uh. This is not happening. We're not letting misgendering happening in a promoted video on Twitter. And the sales team has told Daily Wire, look, we loved working with you. They had set up, apparently, the whole special page that would host the video. So they had put in some work on it. But they say, sorry, but it's the trust and safety team. They're telling us that would be it. Now, apparently, Elon Musk was not informed of any of this because they started talking about it publicly. And Elon Musk says, well, this was an error of a lot of people at Twitter. Sorry. And he says something very bizarre. He says it will be marked as potentially violating content and will not be associated with ads because advertisers have the right to choose what they are displayed beside. Now, that's a very word worth phrasing. I think Elon is lying here about what is the truth. Anyway, I think we get the gist of it, though. There is difficult. Okay. Paul Kersey had a point here in the chat. Says, why is Eric Adams the current mayor of New York if people move to the right when they're placed in a high crime environment? So this is just one tendency. It doesn't account for everything that's going on in politics. There are just so many random parts of existence. No one theory is going to account for everything. So I'm just talking about generalizable tendencies. Not that these tendencies have a veto over every other possibility and variation in life. Second point is that Eric Adams was the most right-wing alternative of the possible mares of New York City. So people did vote for the most right-wing pro law enforcement of all the possible mares for New York. I mean, the primary opponent to Eric Adams was considerably on his left. Most of his opponents for mayor were far to his left. All right, that's going to do it for me.


Hello, welcome to this public governance knowledge clip. My name is Harold Benink, I'm a professor at the Institute of Governance here at Tilburg University. Public governance is a very interesting academic subject area. It tries to integrate law, economics and politics. And actually as you will see when you read the international newspapers, when you follow the news there are lots of things going on currently in international politics and international economics. What about a potential trade war between the United States and China? What about the situation with Russia, with Iran? What about the situation in the European Union? The rise of populism. These are all very important issues we deal with in our study programs and what makes our program quite unique is that we try to integrate different approaches law, economics and politics. Currently one of the most fascinating stories in Europe is of course the situation in Italy. During the past 20 years or so Italy has been growing very slowly and its debt of the government is very high. It's more than 2 trillion euros, that means 2,000 billion euros and a debt ratio of about 130%. So how is Italy to cope with this? Can Italy implement economic reforms in order to enhance the growth potential of its economy? Is the euro as a single currency perhaps something which is impeding Italy to start growing? In the past Italy did have a national currency, the lira, and then it could implement devaluations in order to restore competitiveness. So we see very different issues about law, about economics and politics. The Italian case will be worthwhile following because Italy had its own problems in terms of economic reforms but also is severely hit by the number of refugees coming in from African countries. And that is something we cannot blame Italy for because it's linked to the geographical location of Italy in southern Europe. So this is an unfolding story for all those students who will start studying at Tilbury University this coming September. I'm pretty sure that this Italian story will unfold and will also play a very important role in the classroom. Because what are we doing in our programs? Because we want to provide you with sound economic knowledge. But on the other hand we want to apply this knowledge and relate it to current issues in international politics and economics and law. So very exciting programs where you can link the academic material, the academic knowledge very much towards happening in our real international world. So we hope to welcome you, to be able to welcome many of you to Tilbury University in September. Thank you very much.