#atp i think we just have Too Much Information to zero in on what the show’s doing so any real predicitons from me are GONE. kenji only

[coredrill]

the eighth death drive is kenji murasame

[cleromancy]

YEAH LIKE... I DON'T THINK THERES ENOUGH EXPLORATION OF JASON AS SIR NEVER-MET-A-FIRE-HE-COULDNT-THROW-KEROSENE ON. the makes it worse guy!!! bc like Jason CAN be so completely earnest but thats on rarer occasions, most of the time he's an absolute cunt. and he is playing mind games like you wouldn't believe, jason would be winning the chess match even WITHOUT eating the pieces but baby he just does it for the love of the game!!!!

and honestly im really interested in like. the juxtaposition btwn that and jason being a little bit obsessed with tim in the way where. god, post-resurrection jason is SO lonely and SO unwell about it. and like i said originally all these comics are bad to the point where I don't necessarily expect other people to incorporate them into their interpretation of jason so if someone wants to be like "actually i think jason should think tim sucks and be deeply unimpressed with him" ykw thats fair. but i mean. god. okay i mentioned all of these in my original post but im going to actually post panels now to talk about hang on. (atp im less in conversation with the person im reblogging from and more just rambling again lmao, sorry)

but god i do think its SO funny that canon post crisis jason actually thinks pretty highly of tim, the guy he repeatedly wipes the floor with

teen titans:

like. okay so first of all I understand that jason having delved into fucking tim drake lore to find this out was not an active characterization choice, it was bad writing. jason knows this bc the reader knows it. but in-universe this is not like. common knowledge. talias opinion on tim drake begins and ends with "spends too much time on those computers of his." he could access various peoples files on tim but to extrapolate this level of *correct* information from what ppl would feasibly write down or even know in the first place? HES THOUGHT ABOUT THIS A LOT.

AND HE DOESNT BELIEVE ITS POSSIBLE BC HE THINKS ITS JUST SO. VERY. IMPRESSIVE. its so goofy like its sooooo goofy!!!!!

compels me though.

gonna be honest. i just don't think jasons capable of being normal about that. and then he ends the comic being like "well im just going to think about this a regular amount." let me know how that works out for you baby

"hes good" [footage not found]

like...when did you suss that out jay? was it before or after you beat the ever loving crap out of him?

robin:

this is also like. immediately before and after two things im just like heehoo i dont see it. (the first being wanting to use kids as fodder and the second being tim saying jason thinks like a blunt instrument, although the second one honestly i can still work with. tim thinking jasons a moron is funny, honestly, and itd be fun to see a version of robin 177 where tim gets his ass royally kicked for underestimating him after YEARS of mentally rewriting his understanding of jasons robin years so his imagined narrative conveniently supports Jason not being good enough). god honestly this arc was almost as much of a trash fire as bftc. fucking ulysses pulled the red robin suit out of the dumpster jason left it in to go harangue tim, which i had completely forgotten about

anyway

jasons so fucking annoying. god bless.

(side note: i love that "still." like. jason is taking the adoption and name change *exactly* as seriously as it deserves and also zeroing RIGHT in on a weak spot. classic jason.)

bftc:

and tim proceeding to hit jason with the crowbar... this is a good fucking ship. i fucking wish these comics were good

AND I MEAN-- i only read as much into the picture wall in lost days as i do bc i already ship it but like. its there. it sure is fucking there.

anyway what we have here is like. the Jason-Liker's Dilemma, where its like we have to cherry pick through bad comics and massively inconsistent characterization to decide what we'll incorporate into our personal canon and this is really one of those where. even though the actual canon is pretty clear that jason thinks highly of tim and keeps seeking him out im not going to argue with anyone who wants to be like "postcrisis jason hated him actually" bc like. whos to say, maybe the comics youre pretending exist would have actually been good instead of bad.

but to ME these instances took root in my brain and now im just like. jason todd wants to crack tim open like an otter with an oyster jason wants to crawl inside him like a tauntaun jason needs to get RIGHT UP IN THERE and figure out what the fuck his deal is. and i think it is very interesting to contemplate how he would go about doing this if given the opportunity.

this is getting way too long....... im just going to send it. lol

the fact that preboot jason never found out tim took jason red robin costume once he "got fired" (-tim, only in the privacy of his own head)/"graduated" (-dick, well-meaning)/"got thrown out with the other garbage" (-damian, hilarious)/"left" (-tim out loud, ignoring them both)

the way tim (reliable narrator) was like. yeah this costume is already tainted and i have to be willing to do morally gray things to prove bruce is alive. so thats why im wearing it. because its tainted. this is the most logical course of action and also the only reasonable explanation i retroactively landed on for a decision i already made

tim also having no way of knowing what the universe jason GOT THAT COSTUME IN WAS LIKE OR WHAT BRUCE DID FOR JASON IN THAT UNIVERSE

and its like well MY interpretation is that. yeah of course he wants to take on one of the outcast's identities to bring bruce back. and then of course hes going to just hang it up when bruce comes back because hes going to stop feeling like an outcast just as soon as bruce comes back and everything goes back to normal. This definitely doesnt signify a major change in the status quo or his role in the family (he *is* still family they signed the papers and everything, they gave him the name, it wasnt just pity its real hes still family he *is*, he hasn't been cast out, he *hasnt*) or his priorities or-- its temporary. when bruce comes back everything is going to be better and he wont need this suit anymore and hes going to hang it up just as soon as he stops feeling this way and everything is going to be fine.

smash cut to bruce upon his return doling out one (1) hug and immediately fucking off on a globe trotting vanity project and Tim just left staring after him like Oh. okay

(and like bruce was never like. going to be able to magically fix anything even if he *had* any interest in doing so. this was not a reasonable expectation tim had. some of the shit tim is losing his absolute marbles over does not actually even *need* to be "fixed." to be excessively clear.)

anyway i think jason "do you really think youre that good" "so work *with* me" "join me. be my robin" todd deserved the chance to really gleefully dig his fingers into every single one of those sore spots. GO FOR IT JASON. MAKE HIM WORSE

also like. god battle for the cowl was so unserious on every possible level but can you imagine if dick at the time had been like "i still cant figure out how he GOT OUT OF PRISON. he used the jla codes! how did he even get those!" and tim (guy who gave jason the fucking codes in robin 182) was just like

yeah. weird

[muertawrites]

new to the fandom (as in the gifs and all my moots crossing over got me, haven’t even watched the show, zero desire to watch the source material bc i don’t have the time, my information is literally from fics and wiki atp) & i mostly read the ao3 fics so im not too exposed to the cheerleader cliche (and the ones i do know have a bit more depth to the reader so it evens out) but i did see it a few times on here and just giggled like. the whole ‘cheerleader who’s not like other girls but still very much a stereotype but she’s not bc she likes this complete opposite metalhead who’s everything she isn’t and it still works!!1!1!!!1!!’ thing reminds me of wattpad & ff.net fics back in the 2010’s. like it’s kinda silly to me cause im like are we not past this thinking but then i look at the authors and the majority are like 18-19 and fresh out of high school in that weird period where they’re adults but still with that high school maturity & mentality and it makes a lot of sense…if that makes sense? don’t get me wrong it’s still not my cup of tea (while i do subscribe to the eddie has a corruption kink bandwagon there are lots of other ways than just bad boy meets the cheerleader to go about it) but i look at the demographics of who’s writing it & go ohhhh…that’s why.

that plus usually when i see those it’s usually accompanied with some traits that are definitely not meant for a different audience (i.e. the amount of times ive came across the pale skin descriptor alone on here is wild & i just click out immediately— lowkey it’s what drove me to ao3 in the first place lol) so i tune out immediately. really hard to read a fic where you can’t connect with reader at all </3

i could go on abt some other issues ive noticed but this is long enough i am so sorry for rambling anyways tl;dr 0/10 troupe where are the fics where he’s with some weird drama club nerd or a complete band geek where is the vARIETY!

oh yeah, it's definitely an "i'm still a child but am trying so hard to be nuanced and mature by writing about weird kinks i heard about online" thing. like honey you're just a baby. i'm 26 and i still feel like a child. enjoy your immaturity while you still can bc people are not nice to you once you hit 25.

and dude. tell me about the specific descriptors thing omfg. i'm so fair i get sunburnt watching fucking fireworks and the whole ✨my pale skin✨ thing makes me shudder. personality traits are easier to overlook because 1) people are very complex and have many different aspects to their personalities and 2) it's hard to write character interactions against a blank slate. but physical descriptors are just. like listen i know we're all projecting here but it's no fun if you make people feel excluded.

i really don't think people understand how fucking technically complex self-insert fiction is to write. don't believe anyone who says fanfic isn't valid / doesn't take talent. it does.

[jacewilliams1]

What pilots can teach the world about managing risk

When talk around the dinner table turns to Covid-19 these days (and it seems to quite often), I find myself increasingly using the language of risk management, as if I were evaluating a tricky go/no-go decision in an airplane. If any pilots are around, they usually nod quietly, while non-pilots look mystified or just roll their eyes. I’m certainly not suggesting pilots are experts on infectious diseases or the right people to manage a public health crisis, but I do believe the lessons learned by the aviation industry over the last 50 years have something to offer as we think about life in a world of risk.

But first, let me be clear what I mean by risk management, because that term has become such a buzzword recently that it has lost almost all meaning. In previous articles, I have lamented the “risk management-industrial complex” that has emerged to promote expensive and complicated solutions to non-existent problems. What I’m talking about here is not a document or an app, but a way of thinking, one that most pilots develop during flight training and their initial experience as a private pilot. While you may not realize it, you probably think about potential problems, the probability of those problems occurring, what options you have for avoiding them, and if the end goal is worth it.

That sounds a lot like the decision-making process we are all using right now, whether it’s how to open up a restaurant or whether to go on a vacation. In aviation as in public health, information is never complete and the stakes are high, so decisions are rarely easy. And yet doing nothing is not a long term strategy—staying in bed all day is no way to live life. So how do we balance our impulsive nature and the tendency to fall into analysis paralysis? When making difficult aviation decisions, I think it’s helpful to lean on some core principles of a risk management mindset.

1. Life is not risk-free. This one is obviously true but many people pretend it’s not. The reality is that all of life has risk, even in America in 2020. The chance of being killed by a saber tooth tiger or starving because of a bad harvest are much lower than they were in the past, but you can still get hit by a drunk driver or drown in a bathtub (yes, it happens every year). For pilots, GPS navigators and datalink weather make it very hard to get lost or stumble into a thunderstorm, but flying is certainly not completely safe.

This isn’t a sign of failure. Trying to eliminate all risk is time-consuming, expensive, frustrating, and ultimately impossible. Past a certain point, it’s counterproductive. That doesn’t mean we should all be fatalists and take up BASE jumping, but it does mean we should recognize what success looks like: low risk or managed risk, not zero risk.

2. You can’t reduce risk if you don’t quantify it. Given that life is inherently risky, the key is to think systematically about your exposure, then try to quantify the risks involved. This is much easier said than done, because intuition quickly takes over—we notice headline-making tragedies more than the everyday threats that really kill. You don’t have to spend weeks buried in NTSB reports (or medical journals), but you should try to be specific. “That sounds bad” or “that’s scary” are statements about emotion, not risk. How bad or how scary? For example, your chance of stalling on initial climb may not be exactly 74% higher than losing your engine on takeoff, but it’s worth the effort to calculate a range of probabilities. Which one is really more likely?

You don’t need a formula to know that cloud is trouble.

Just don’t get carried away with the math. In spite of what a Flight Risk Assessment Tool might suggest, risk isn’t an exact science that can be boiled down to an algorithm or a score. As psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has observed, there’s a difference between risk (“If risks are known, good decisions require logic and statistical thinking”) and uncertainty (“If some risks are unknown, good decisions also require intuition and smart rules of thumb”). Usually it takes both of these approaches to make the best decision.

I think this model works for pilots just as well as it does for doctors or insurance underwriters. Consider which threats are knowable and which ones deserve your attention: the FAA’s well known PAVE checklist is a start but it’s only a start. You know your airplane and your experience level best, so think honestly about what risks might be part of your next flight and remember that the probability of an event happening matters much more than the number of possible events. That is, a high chance of problem happening should count for far more than an extremely low chance of 20 different ones happening.

Having quantified those risks, it’s then much easier to make a game plan to mitigate the ones that matter. Start with the most likely or the most lethal risks, then walk through your available options for avoiding the problem altogether or at least building in some safety margins. This can mean canceling of course, but also altering the route, changing the departure time, reducing the passenger load, or even bringing along another pilot.

3. Habits and systems catch errors. Humans almost never perform flawlessly, so safe pilots (and airlines) expect errors to happen. Likewise, there is no single safety tool that can prevent accidents, so the right answer is an array of procedures and tools to catch those errors before they become a major threat. Belt and suspenders? Yes please.

This is where Gigerenzer’s concept of uncertainty comes in. Hopefully you’ve considered all the obvious risks. But what if you encounter an unforecast gray cloud an hour into your flight? What if your airspeed indicator shows 10 knots fast on final approach, even though everything “feels” normal? You don’t have time to run probabilities and there are no FARs that tell you what to do, but hopefully your own personal rules of thumb kick in: we avoid ugly clouds and we go around if the approach isn’t stabilized on one mile final.

This mindset applies to technology too. Every few years, a new miracle cure is proposed for aviation accidents. Medicine had its hydroxychloroquine moment recently; aviation has had its moments too, from moving map GPS navigators to sophisticated autopilots with a level button to angle of attack indicators. These are wonderful tools (I fly with all of them!) but individually they are merely pieces of the puzzle. Only when combined with good training, thoughtful safety habits, and good maintenance can they can create a safer way to fly.

4. Complacency kills. Richard Collins always said that, no matter how many hours were in your logbook, it was the next hour that counted. That was his way of staying vigilant, because Mother Nature and Murphy’s Law do not care whether you’re a student pilot or an ATP. A threat is a threat.

Experience is certainly valuable for a pilot, but only if you learn the right lessons from your logbook. If you took off 300 lbs. overweight and made it over the fence at the end of the runway, does that mean you can do it again or that you got lucky? Likewise, if you haven’t caught Covid-19 by now, does that mean you never will? Be careful about phrases like, “it worked last time” and “it hasn’t happened yet.”

This brings to mind a great line from the 1995 movie La Haine: “Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good… so far so good… so far so good. How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!”

Part of being a professional pilot means having the discipline to use the checklist, every time.

The antidote to this dangerous attitude is a combination of perspective and discipline. The perspective part means staying focused on the ultimate goal. As pilots, our goal isn’t just to fill in the blanks of a weight and balance form or perform a preflight walk around; it’s to complete a flight safely. Going through the motions should be a red flag.

The discipline part means following the rules, even if you’ve done it 1,000 times already. A great example is the near religious use of checklists by pilots (admit it: you use them around the house too). Airline captains most definitely know how to start the engine or configure the airplane for takeoff, but they follow the checklist anyway. They know that routines, while occasionally inconvenient, also keep you safe. After all, those habits and systems mentioned above only work if they are in place for every flight.

5. It’s all about the risk-reward tradeoff. Some people are horrified at the idea of willingly accepting additional risk in life, but we do it every day when we decide to speed by 10 mph or eat sushi. If the reward is valuable enough to offset the increase in risk, the tradeoff is perfectly rational.

The same goes for general aviation. When I fly my family on vacation in a four-seat piston airplane, I am taking on more risk than the same trip on Delta. The numbers show this quite clearly. But I’m hardly a thrill-seeker by nature: I have never been skydiving, I don’t drive motorcycles, and I don’t even like to gamble. I fly myself not because I think I’m invincible but because I believe I can drive down the risk (with good training, equipment, maintenance, and procedures) and maximize the reward (land closer to our destination, have a more flexible schedule, and simply have more fun).

These tradeoffs are what general aviation risk management is all about. Scud running under an 800 foot overcast at night just so I can get a $100 hamburger? That’s a terrible risk-reward equation. Flying to visit family on a clear day over familiar terrain? That’s worth it. We all make these decisions every time we fly; the best pilots are explicit about them.

Humans are not naturally gifted at this type of thinking; most of us hate talk of unknown risks and potentially deadly tradeoffs. That’s because our minds are, in evolutionary terms, still optimized for an agrarian lifestyle of 5,000 years ago. We are well suited to distinguishing a predator from a plant, but none of our human hardware is made for flying airplanes in the clouds at 170 knots. That doesn’t mean our job is hopeless, only that we need to train ourselves to think the right way and then consistently apply this mindset. Gut instincts just aren’t enough.

The post What pilots can teach the world about managing risk appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/06/what-pilots-can-teach-the-world-about-managing-risk/

[cristinajourdanqp]

Dear Mark: Alcohol and LDL, Liverwurst, Coffee and Milk, Kid Snacks, and High Carb Questions

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering 14 questions. The first concerns the effect of alcohol intake on LDL. Does it increase it or lower it (or both)? Next, what’s the best liverwurst to eat? After that, I discuss whether drinking coffee with milk makes the coffee antioxidants useless, followed by a quick list of good snacks for kids. The last ten questions concern cycling high-carb feeds on low-carb diets. They all come from one reader, and they’re very specific and well-constructed.

Let’s go:

Mark, I truly appreciate the blog. I’d like to know your thoughts on the correlation, if any, between alcohol consumption and high cholesterol (particularly LDL). I’ve been following an 80-20 Primal lifestyle for about 4 years, but have had stubbornly high cholesterol levels to the point where my PCP wants to put me on a statin. Thanks again for all you do!

Full-on alcoholics tend to have shockingly low LDL levels. This isn’t good; LDL particles, remember, serve important immune functions. But the relationship seems to hold at more moderate levels of intake, too. In middle-aged Japanese men, for example, alcohol intake predicted lower LDL levels.

Alcohol also increases HDL levels, even acutely—just a single dose of alcohol increases it. 

This jibes with the usually protective association between alcohol intake and heart disease, whether it’s postmenopausal women, Spanish men, or German adults.

Of course, there’s evidence that your genetics determine the effect of alcohol on LDL. In folks with the ApoE2 gene, alcohol lowers LDL. In those with the ApoE4 gene, alcohol increases it.

Mark, I would like to know if liverwurst is an ok way to get some organ meat, is it primal? My wife and I can’t stand organs by themselves, so I thought this may be a way to get some and we like it. I would guess that there are varying qualities and types, so guidance on how to pick would be great. I also enjoy scrapple, same question, is it primal and how to choose the best.

Best liverwurst I’ve ever had comes from US Wellness. It’s 50% beef trim, 20% liver, 15% heart, 15% kidney. All grass-fed. They also have a braunschweiger that’s 60% trim and 40% liver.

Traditional scrapple was great: pig parts, buckwheat (not a grain, not wheat), and bone broth cooked down into sort of a pork polenta that’s chilled and pan-fried. These days, scrapple is more of a mixed bag, since you get it in restaurants and they’ve started using wheat flour and cornmeal instead of buckwheat. If you’re trying to avoid wheat flour—as you probably should—the trick is finding a place that makes scrapple with buckwheat and/or cornmeal.

Or just make your own.

Hi Mark, almost every month I hear new conflicting information about whether coffee is healthy or not. What are your current thoughts on coffee and is it true that the antioxidants in coffee lose their power when consumed with milk?

My stance on coffee is resolute: It is a public good. It’s fueled revolutions and scientific discoveries. Just imagine the wondrous developments that’d result if the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians had used coffee. Or what if the Mongols had adopted coffee drinking after sacking Baghdad—would we all be drinking fermented mare milk, eating saddle meat (or not), and getting around on horseback? Fun to think about.

As to milk binding the antioxidants and rendering them useless, I wouldn’t worry. A 2010 study found that only non-dairy creamer slowed the absorption of coffee polyphenols. Real milk added to coffee had no effect. Even then, the non-dairy creamer only delayed the appearance of the polyphenols in the blood. They still got there. It just took them awhile.

I would like to see more recipes for primal snacks for my kids…and me too!. It breaks my heart to see them devour a bag of Oreos and then deal with the resulting poor behaviour.

I can do a comprehensive post in the future, but for now, some easy grab-and-go options you might not have considered.

Jerky. A classic.

Epic Bars are pretty good. Great ingredients, almost exclusively grass-fed/pastured animals. They don’t shy away from fat. A mix of sweet-savory and savory flavors.

Aforementioned US Wellness liverwurst and braunschweiger. Get those kids to eat liver.

Hard boiled eggs.

Olives.

Cheese. Hard, aged ones travel well.

Yogurt.

Pork rinds. Make sure you get the ones cooked in their own fat. Beware vegetable oils in the ingredients list.

Apples.

Carrots.

Also, just trust your kids. They’re usually more adventurous than we assume. You’d be surprised what happens when you plop a cross section of a cow femur loaded with roasted marrow in front of a 5 year old.

Hey Mark, I would like to know know more about how to properly utilize carb-cycling (CC) while integrating intermittent fasting (IF). 1. With CC how do you determine which days to crank up carbs? Every day you lift? Only on Heavy lift days? 2. Do you lose the carb-feed benefits window if you lift in the morning, then fast until noon? 3. Carbs at night when training only in the mornings? Are they effective? 4. What about carb sources with high fat with carb cycling? 5. How many grams of fat allowed on a high carb day? 6. Are there better fat sources than other on high carb days? 7. Is there a specific time of day to eat the limited fat on high carb days? 8. How to determine which carbs are right for you? Sweet potatoes, white potatoes? Rice? Any experiments? 9. Should you have carbs on rest days while Carb Cycling? If so, how many grams? 10. Should fat ever be mixed with carbs? Why or Why not?

That was quite a series of questions. I’ll do a quick run through and maybe expand in the future.

Only on heavy/intense days. Long hike? Stay low-carb; you’re burning almost all fat (or that should be the goal). CrossFit WOD? Carb-up. Heavy squats? Carb-up. Short (5-10 second) sprints with plenty of rest in between, where you’re truly going all out and getting full recovery? Stay low-carb; you likely burned primarily ATP-PC, not glycogen. High-intensity intervals with shorter rest periods that leave you gasping? Carb-up.

You’ve got some time. Insulin-independent glucose uptake increases for around 2 hours after exercise. Insulin sensitivity increases for at least 16 hours after exercise.

Try “sleeping low.” This works best training in the afternoon or early evening. You go into the evening/early evening workout with carbs in your system. This should be a glycogen-depleting workout. You eat a low-carb or zero-carb (or fast) post-workout meal, then go to sleep. Wake up, and do some easy cardio without eating. A brisk hike, some easy cycling, maybe a short jog, always staying in your aerobic HR zone. You’ll get really good at burning fat this way. After the morning workout, eat some carbs.

Unless you’re just a workhorse, expending a ton of energy, training every day, veering close to burning out, you’ll have better luck with keeping your high-carb days relatively lower-fat.

Around 15-20% of total calories. Try for less. You may get better results that way.

PUFAs seem to have a more neutral effect on insulin resistance in the presence of carbs than other fats. Get a “balanced” intake, rather than leaning heavily toward one or the other. Butter, avocados (or avocado oil), almonds, and salmon is a better combo than butter, butter, butter, and butter.

No, it doesn’t matter if you keep it relatively low.

Robb Wolf has been pushing continuous glucose monitoring to track how different carb sources affect your blood glucose minute-to-minute. He’s getting great results. CGMs are prescription only, but I think that’s due to change in the near future. You could also do classic blood glucose prick tests at 1, 2, and 3 hours after your meals.

Keep carbs between 30-150 grams on rest days, depending on how low you enjoy going.

Fat and carbs are delicious together. That’s one reason to eat them—sheer pleasure. It’s also an argument against eating them: We’re liable to eat way too much. If you can keep from going crazy, you’re reasonably active, and you’re happy with your body composition (or its trajectory), fat and carbs are fine together. Fat and carbs become trouble when we eat too many of them at one time, like eating a half plate full of mashed potatoes loaded with butter and cream.

That’s it for this week, folks. Thanks for reading and be sure to help out with your own input down below.

[fishermariawo]

Dear Mark: Alcohol and LDL, Liverwurst, Coffee and Milk, Kid Snacks, and High Carb Questions

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering 14 questions. The first concerns the effect of alcohol intake on LDL. Does it increase it or lower it (or both)? Next, what’s the best liverwurst to eat? After that, I discuss whether drinking coffee with milk makes the coffee antioxidants useless, followed by a quick list of good snacks for kids. The last ten questions concern cycling high-carb feeds on low-carb diets. They all come from one reader, and they’re very specific and well-constructed.

Let’s go:

Mark, I truly appreciate the blog. I’d like to know your thoughts on the correlation, if any, between alcohol consumption and high cholesterol (particularly LDL). I’ve been following an 80-20 Primal lifestyle for about 4 years, but have had stubbornly high cholesterol levels to the point where my PCP wants to put me on a statin. Thanks again for all you do!

Full-on alcoholics tend to have shockingly low LDL levels. This isn’t good; LDL particles, remember, serve important immune functions. But the relationship seems to hold at more moderate levels of intake, too. In middle-aged Japanese men, for example, alcohol intake predicted lower LDL levels.

Alcohol also increases HDL levels, even acutely—just a single dose of alcohol increases it. 

This jibes with the usually protective association between alcohol intake and heart disease, whether it’s postmenopausal women, Spanish men, or German adults.

Of course, there’s evidence that your genetics determine the effect of alcohol on LDL. In folks with the ApoE2 gene, alcohol lowers LDL. In those with the ApoE4 gene, alcohol increases it.

Mark, I would like to know if liverwurst is an ok way to get some organ meat, is it primal? My wife and I can’t stand organs by themselves, so I thought this may be a way to get some and we like it. I would guess that there are varying qualities and types, so guidance on how to pick would be great. I also enjoy scrapple, same question, is it primal and how to choose the best.

Best liverwurst I’ve ever had comes from US Wellness. It’s 50% beef trim, 20% liver, 15% heart, 15% kidney. All grass-fed. They also have a braunschweiger that’s 60% trim and 40% liver.

Traditional scrapple was great: pig parts, buckwheat (not a grain, not wheat), and bone broth cooked down into sort of a pork polenta that’s chilled and pan-fried. These days, scrapple is more of a mixed bag, since you get it in restaurants and they’ve started using wheat flour and cornmeal instead of buckwheat. If you’re trying to avoid wheat flour—as you probably should—the trick is finding a place that makes scrapple with buckwheat and/or cornmeal.

Or just make your own.

Hi Mark, almost every month I hear new conflicting information about whether coffee is healthy or not. What are your current thoughts on coffee and is it true that the antioxidants in coffee lose their power when consumed with milk?

My stance on coffee is resolute: It is a public good. It’s fueled revolutions and scientific discoveries. Just imagine the wondrous developments that’d result if the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians had used coffee. Or what if the Mongols had adopted coffee drinking after sacking Baghdad—would we all be drinking fermented mare milk, eating saddle meat (or not), and getting around on horseback? Fun to think about.

As to milk binding the antioxidants and rendering them useless, I wouldn’t worry. A 2010 study found that only non-dairy creamer slowed the absorption of coffee polyphenols. Real milk added to coffee had no effect. Even then, the non-dairy creamer only delayed the appearance of the polyphenols in the blood. They still got there. It just took them awhile.

I would like to see more recipes for primal snacks for my kids…and me too!. It breaks my heart to see them devour a bag of Oreos and then deal with the resulting poor behaviour.

I can do a comprehensive post in the future, but for now, some easy grab-and-go options you might not have considered.

Jerky. A classic.

Epic Bars are pretty good. Great ingredients, almost exclusively grass-fed/pastured animals. They don’t shy away from fat. A mix of sweet-savory and savory flavors.

Aforementioned US Wellness liverwurst and braunschweiger. Get those kids to eat liver.

Hard boiled eggs.

Olives.

Cheese. Hard, aged ones travel well.

Yogurt.

Pork rinds. Make sure you get the ones cooked in their own fat. Beware vegetable oils in the ingredients list.

Apples.

Carrots.

Also, just trust your kids. They’re usually more adventurous than we assume. You’d be surprised what happens when you plop a cross section of a cow femur loaded with roasted marrow in front of a 5 year old.

Hey Mark, I would like to know know more about how to properly utilize carb-cycling (CC) while integrating intermittent fasting (IF). 1. With CC how do you determine which days to crank up carbs? Every day you lift? Only on Heavy lift days? 2. Do you lose the carb-feed benefits window if you lift in the morning, then fast until noon? 3. Carbs at night when training only in the mornings? Are they effective? 4. What about carb sources with high fat with carb cycling? 5. How many grams of fat allowed on a high carb day? 6. Are there better fat sources than other on high carb days? 7. Is there a specific time of day to eat the limited fat on high carb days? 8. How to determine which carbs are right for you? Sweet potatoes, white potatoes? Rice? Any experiments? 9. Should you have carbs on rest days while Carb Cycling? If so, how many grams? 10. Should fat ever be mixed with carbs? Why or Why not?

That was quite a series of questions. I’ll do a quick run through and maybe expand in the future.

Only on heavy/intense days. Long hike? Stay low-carb; you’re burning almost all fat (or that should be the goal). CrossFit WOD? Carb-up. Heavy squats? Carb-up. Short (5-10 second) sprints with plenty of rest in between, where you’re truly going all out and getting full recovery? Stay low-carb; you likely burned primarily ATP-PC, not glycogen. High-intensity intervals with shorter rest periods that leave you gasping? Carb-up.

You’ve got some time. Insulin-independent glucose uptake increases for around 2 hours after exercise. Insulin sensitivity increases for at least 16 hours after exercise.

Try “sleeping low.” This works best training in the afternoon or early evening. You go into the evening/early evening workout with carbs in your system. This should be a glycogen-depleting workout. You eat a low-carb or zero-carb (or fast) post-workout meal, then go to sleep. Wake up, and do some easy cardio without eating. A brisk hike, some easy cycling, maybe a short jog, always staying in your aerobic HR zone. You’ll get really good at burning fat this way. After the morning workout, eat some carbs.

Unless you’re just a workhorse, expending a ton of energy, training every day, veering close to burning out, you’ll have better luck with keeping your high-carb days relatively lower-fat.

Around 15-20% of total calories. Try for less. You may get better results that way.

PUFAs seem to have a more neutral effect on insulin resistance in the presence of carbs than other fats. Get a “balanced” intake, rather than leaning heavily toward one or the other. Butter, avocados (or avocado oil), almonds, and salmon is a better combo than butter, butter, butter, and butter.

No, it doesn’t matter if you keep it relatively low.

Robb Wolf has been pushing continuous glucose monitoring to track how different carb sources affect your blood glucose minute-to-minute. He’s getting great results. CGMs are prescription only, but I think that’s due to change in the near future. You could also do classic blood glucose prick tests at 1, 2, and 3 hours after your meals.

Keep carbs between 30-150 grams on rest days, depending on how low you enjoy going.

Fat and carbs are delicious together. That’s one reason to eat them—sheer pleasure. It’s also an argument against eating them: We’re liable to eat way too much. If you can keep from going crazy, you’re reasonably active, and you’re happy with your body composition (or its trajectory), fat and carbs are fine together. Fat and carbs become trouble when we eat too many of them at one time, like eating a half plate full of mashed potatoes loaded with butter and cream.

That’s it for this week, folks. Thanks for reading and be sure to help out with your own input down below.

[watsonrodriquezie]

Dear Mark: Alcohol and LDL, Liverwurst, Coffee and Milk, Kid Snacks, and High Carb Questions

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering 14 questions. The first concerns the effect of alcohol intake on LDL. Does it increase it or lower it (or both)? Next, what’s the best liverwurst to eat? After that, I discuss whether drinking coffee with milk makes the coffee antioxidants useless, followed by a quick list of good snacks for kids. The last ten questions concern cycling high-carb feeds on low-carb diets. They all come from one reader, and they’re very specific and well-constructed.

Let’s go:

Mark, I truly appreciate the blog. I’d like to know your thoughts on the correlation, if any, between alcohol consumption and high cholesterol (particularly LDL). I’ve been following an 80-20 Primal lifestyle for about 4 years, but have had stubbornly high cholesterol levels to the point where my PCP wants to put me on a statin. Thanks again for all you do!

Full-on alcoholics tend to have shockingly low LDL levels. This isn’t good; LDL particles, remember, serve important immune functions. But the relationship seems to hold at more moderate levels of intake, too. In middle-aged Japanese men, for example, alcohol intake predicted lower LDL levels.

Alcohol also increases HDL levels, even acutely—just a single dose of alcohol increases it. 

This jibes with the usually protective association between alcohol intake and heart disease, whether it’s postmenopausal women, Spanish men, or German adults.

Of course, there’s evidence that your genetics determine the effect of alcohol on LDL. In folks with the ApoE2 gene, alcohol lowers LDL. In those with the ApoE4 gene, alcohol increases it.

Mark, I would like to know if liverwurst is an ok way to get some organ meat, is it primal? My wife and I can’t stand organs by themselves, so I thought this may be a way to get some and we like it. I would guess that there are varying qualities and types, so guidance on how to pick would be great. I also enjoy scrapple, same question, is it primal and how to choose the best.

Best liverwurst I’ve ever had comes from US Wellness. It’s 50% beef trim, 20% liver, 15% heart, 15% kidney. All grass-fed. They also have a braunschweiger that’s 60% trim and 40% liver.

Traditional scrapple was great: pig parts, buckwheat (not a grain, not wheat), and bone broth cooked down into sort of a pork polenta that’s chilled and pan-fried. These days, scrapple is more of a mixed bag, since you get it in restaurants and they’ve started using wheat flour and cornmeal instead of buckwheat. If you’re trying to avoid wheat flour—as you probably should—the trick is finding a place that makes scrapple with buckwheat and/or cornmeal.

Or just make your own.

Hi Mark, almost every month I hear new conflicting information about whether coffee is healthy or not. What are your current thoughts on coffee and is it true that the antioxidants in coffee lose their power when consumed with milk?

My stance on coffee is resolute: It is a public good. It’s fueled revolutions and scientific discoveries. Just imagine the wondrous developments that’d result if the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians had used coffee. Or what if the Mongols had adopted coffee drinking after sacking Baghdad—would we all be drinking fermented mare milk, eating saddle meat (or not), and getting around on horseback? Fun to think about.

As to milk binding the antioxidants and rendering them useless, I wouldn’t worry. A 2010 study found that only non-dairy creamer slowed the absorption of coffee polyphenols. Real milk added to coffee had no effect. Even then, the non-dairy creamer only delayed the appearance of the polyphenols in the blood. They still got there. It just took them awhile.

I would like to see more recipes for primal snacks for my kids…and me too!. It breaks my heart to see them devour a bag of Oreos and then deal with the resulting poor behaviour.

I can do a comprehensive post in the future, but for now, some easy grab-and-go options you might not have considered.

Jerky. A classic.

Epic Bars are pretty good. Great ingredients, almost exclusively grass-fed/pastured animals. They don’t shy away from fat. A mix of sweet-savory and savory flavors.

Aforementioned US Wellness liverwurst and braunschweiger. Get those kids to eat liver.

Hard boiled eggs.

Olives.

Cheese. Hard, aged ones travel well.

Yogurt.

Pork rinds. Make sure you get the ones cooked in their own fat. Beware vegetable oils in the ingredients list.

Apples.

Carrots.

Also, just trust your kids. They’re usually more adventurous than we assume. You’d be surprised what happens when you plop a cross section of a cow femur loaded with roasted marrow in front of a 5 year old.

Hey Mark, I would like to know know more about how to properly utilize carb-cycling (CC) while integrating intermittent fasting (IF). 1. With CC how do you determine which days to crank up carbs? Every day you lift? Only on Heavy lift days? 2. Do you lose the carb-feed benefits window if you lift in the morning, then fast until noon? 3. Carbs at night when training only in the mornings? Are they effective? 4. What about carb sources with high fat with carb cycling? 5. How many grams of fat allowed on a high carb day? 6. Are there better fat sources than other on high carb days? 7. Is there a specific time of day to eat the limited fat on high carb days? 8. How to determine which carbs are right for you? Sweet potatoes, white potatoes? Rice? Any experiments? 9. Should you have carbs on rest days while Carb Cycling? If so, how many grams? 10. Should fat ever be mixed with carbs? Why or Why not?

That was quite a series of questions. I’ll do a quick run through and maybe expand in the future.

Only on heavy/intense days. Long hike? Stay low-carb; you’re burning almost all fat (or that should be the goal). CrossFit WOD? Carb-up. Heavy squats? Carb-up. Short (5-10 second) sprints with plenty of rest in between, where you’re truly going all out and getting full recovery? Stay low-carb; you likely burned primarily ATP-PC, not glycogen. High-intensity intervals with shorter rest periods that leave you gasping? Carb-up.

You’ve got some time. Insulin-independent glucose uptake increases for around 2 hours after exercise. Insulin sensitivity increases for at least 16 hours after exercise.

Try “sleeping low.” This works best training in the afternoon or early evening. You go into the evening/early evening workout with carbs in your system. This should be a glycogen-depleting workout. You eat a low-carb or zero-carb (or fast) post-workout meal, then go to sleep. Wake up, and do some easy cardio without eating. A brisk hike, some easy cycling, maybe a short jog, always staying in your aerobic HR zone. You’ll get really good at burning fat this way. After the morning workout, eat some carbs.

Unless you’re just a workhorse, expending a ton of energy, training every day, veering close to burning out, you’ll have better luck with keeping your high-carb days relatively lower-fat.

Around 15-20% of total calories. Try for less. You may get better results that way.

PUFAs seem to have a more neutral effect on insulin resistance in the presence of carbs than other fats. Get a “balanced” intake, rather than leaning heavily toward one or the other. Butter, avocados (or avocado oil), almonds, and salmon is a better combo than butter, butter, butter, and butter.

No, it doesn’t matter if you keep it relatively low.

Robb Wolf has been pushing continuous glucose monitoring to track how different carb sources affect your blood glucose minute-to-minute. He’s getting great results. CGMs are prescription only, but I think that’s due to change in the near future. You could also do classic blood glucose prick tests at 1, 2, and 3 hours after your meals.

Keep carbs between 30-150 grams on rest days, depending on how low you enjoy going.

Fat and carbs are delicious together. That’s one reason to eat them—sheer pleasure. It’s also an argument against eating them: We’re liable to eat way too much. If you can keep from going crazy, you’re reasonably active, and you’re happy with your body composition (or its trajectory), fat and carbs are fine together. Fat and carbs become trouble when we eat too many of them at one time, like eating a half plate full of mashed potatoes loaded with butter and cream.

That’s it for this week, folks. Thanks for reading and be sure to help out with your own input down below.

[milenasanchezmk]

Dear Mark: Alcohol and LDL, Liverwurst, Coffee and Milk, Kid Snacks, and High Carb Questions

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering 14 questions. The first concerns the effect of alcohol intake on LDL. Does it increase it or lower it (or both)? Next, what’s the best liverwurst to eat? After that, I discuss whether drinking coffee with milk makes the coffee antioxidants useless, followed by a quick list of good snacks for kids. The last ten questions concern cycling high-carb feeds on low-carb diets. They all come from one reader, and they’re very specific and well-constructed.

Let’s go:

Mark, I truly appreciate the blog. I’d like to know your thoughts on the correlation, if any, between alcohol consumption and high cholesterol (particularly LDL). I’ve been following an 80-20 Primal lifestyle for about 4 years, but have had stubbornly high cholesterol levels to the point where my PCP wants to put me on a statin. Thanks again for all you do!

Full-on alcoholics tend to have shockingly low LDL levels. This isn’t good; LDL particles, remember, serve important immune functions. But the relationship seems to hold at more moderate levels of intake, too. In middle-aged Japanese men, for example, alcohol intake predicted lower LDL levels.

Alcohol also increases HDL levels, even acutely—just a single dose of alcohol increases it. 

This jibes with the usually protective association between alcohol intake and heart disease, whether it’s postmenopausal women, Spanish men, or German adults.

Of course, there’s evidence that your genetics determine the effect of alcohol on LDL. In folks with the ApoE2 gene, alcohol lowers LDL. In those with the ApoE4 gene, alcohol increases it.

Mark, I would like to know if liverwurst is an ok way to get some organ meat, is it primal? My wife and I can’t stand organs by themselves, so I thought this may be a way to get some and we like it. I would guess that there are varying qualities and types, so guidance on how to pick would be great. I also enjoy scrapple, same question, is it primal and how to choose the best.

Best liverwurst I’ve ever had comes from US Wellness. It’s 50% beef trim, 20% liver, 15% heart, 15% kidney. All grass-fed. They also have a braunschweiger that’s 60% trim and 40% liver.

Traditional scrapple was great: pig parts, buckwheat (not a grain, not wheat), and bone broth cooked down into sort of a pork polenta that’s chilled and pan-fried. These days, scrapple is more of a mixed bag, since you get it in restaurants and they’ve started using wheat flour and cornmeal instead of buckwheat. If you’re trying to avoid wheat flour—as you probably should—the trick is finding a place that makes scrapple with buckwheat and/or cornmeal.

Or just make your own.

Hi Mark, almost every month I hear new conflicting information about whether coffee is healthy or not. What are your current thoughts on coffee and is it true that the antioxidants in coffee lose their power when consumed with milk?

My stance on coffee is resolute: It is a public good. It’s fueled revolutions and scientific discoveries. Just imagine the wondrous developments that’d result if the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians had used coffee. Or what if the Mongols had adopted coffee drinking after sacking Baghdad—would we all be drinking fermented mare milk, eating saddle meat (or not), and getting around on horseback? Fun to think about.

As to milk binding the antioxidants and rendering them useless, I wouldn’t worry. A 2010 study found that only non-dairy creamer slowed the absorption of coffee polyphenols. Real milk added to coffee had no effect. Even then, the non-dairy creamer only delayed the appearance of the polyphenols in the blood. They still got there. It just took them awhile.

I would like to see more recipes for primal snacks for my kids…and me too!. It breaks my heart to see them devour a bag of Oreos and then deal with the resulting poor behaviour.

I can do a comprehensive post in the future, but for now, some easy grab-and-go options you might not have considered.

Jerky. A classic.

Epic Bars are pretty good. Great ingredients, almost exclusively grass-fed/pastured animals. They don’t shy away from fat. A mix of sweet-savory and savory flavors.

Aforementioned US Wellness liverwurst and braunschweiger. Get those kids to eat liver.

Hard boiled eggs.

Olives.

Cheese. Hard, aged ones travel well.

Yogurt.

Pork rinds. Make sure you get the ones cooked in their own fat. Beware vegetable oils in the ingredients list.

Apples.

Carrots.

Also, just trust your kids. They’re usually more adventurous than we assume. You’d be surprised what happens when you plop a cross section of a cow femur loaded with roasted marrow in front of a 5 year old.

Hey Mark, I would like to know know more about how to properly utilize carb-cycling (CC) while integrating intermittent fasting (IF). 1. With CC how do you determine which days to crank up carbs? Every day you lift? Only on Heavy lift days? 2. Do you lose the carb-feed benefits window if you lift in the morning, then fast until noon? 3. Carbs at night when training only in the mornings? Are they effective? 4. What about carb sources with high fat with carb cycling? 5. How many grams of fat allowed on a high carb day? 6. Are there better fat sources than other on high carb days? 7. Is there a specific time of day to eat the limited fat on high carb days? 8. How to determine which carbs are right for you? Sweet potatoes, white potatoes? Rice? Any experiments? 9. Should you have carbs on rest days while Carb Cycling? If so, how many grams? 10. Should fat ever be mixed with carbs? Why or Why not?

That was quite a series of questions. I’ll do a quick run through and maybe expand in the future.

Only on heavy/intense days. Long hike? Stay low-carb; you’re burning almost all fat (or that should be the goal). CrossFit WOD? Carb-up. Heavy squats? Carb-up. Short (5-10 second) sprints with plenty of rest in between, where you’re truly going all out and getting full recovery? Stay low-carb; you likely burned primarily ATP-PC, not glycogen. High-intensity intervals with shorter rest periods that leave you gasping? Carb-up.

You’ve got some time. Insulin-independent glucose uptake increases for around 2 hours after exercise. Insulin sensitivity increases for at least 16 hours after exercise.

Try “sleeping low.” This works best training in the afternoon or early evening. You go into the evening/early evening workout with carbs in your system. This should be a glycogen-depleting workout. You eat a low-carb or zero-carb (or fast) post-workout meal, then go to sleep. Wake up, and do some easy cardio without eating. A brisk hike, some easy cycling, maybe a short jog, always staying in your aerobic HR zone. You’ll get really good at burning fat this way. After the morning workout, eat some carbs.

Unless you’re just a workhorse, expending a ton of energy, training every day, veering close to burning out, you’ll have better luck with keeping your high-carb days relatively lower-fat.

Around 15-20% of total calories. Try for less. You may get better results that way.

PUFAs seem to have a more neutral effect on insulin resistance in the presence of carbs than other fats. Get a “balanced” intake, rather than leaning heavily toward one or the other. Butter, avocados (or avocado oil), almonds, and salmon is a better combo than butter, butter, butter, and butter.

No, it doesn’t matter if you keep it relatively low.

Robb Wolf has been pushing continuous glucose monitoring to track how different carb sources affect your blood glucose minute-to-minute. He’s getting great results. CGMs are prescription only, but I think that’s due to change in the near future. You could also do classic blood glucose prick tests at 1, 2, and 3 hours after your meals.

Keep carbs between 30-150 grams on rest days, depending on how low you enjoy going.

Fat and carbs are delicious together. That’s one reason to eat them—sheer pleasure. It’s also an argument against eating them: We’re liable to eat way too much. If you can keep from going crazy, you’re reasonably active, and you’re happy with your body composition (or its trajectory), fat and carbs are fine together. Fat and carbs become trouble when we eat too many of them at one time, like eating a half plate full of mashed potatoes loaded with butter and cream.

That’s it for this week, folks. Thanks for reading and be sure to help out with your own input down below.

[digitalinnovator]

It’s been a busy March, as Mobile World Congress dovetailed right into SXSW, just a week later. This year I thought I’d write up high-level learnings from both, as digital and tech professionals continue to fight to keep up with the frenetic pace of our marketing and cultural landscape.

Overall, my observation is that we are well on the way toward building the foundation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The way that we will live our lives in the next 100 years will make our current day lifestyles look incredibly archaic. However, instead of delving into predictions of the macro changes in civilization and world economy – I’m going to focus in on what marketers can find most useful. Are you ready? Here we go.

Application to Person (ATP) infrastructure is in development.  

The digital marketing evolution is as follows: In the 2000s, we interacted with consumers through laptops and browsers, in the 2010s it has been through phones and apps, and in 2017 we are seeing the dawn of messaging and bot interaction.

Why now? According to Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO of HubSpot, the reason why it’s happening now is that: 1) AI and natural language capabilities have rapidly improved, which allows us to do things we simply could not even 2 years ago, and 2) the human adoption of messaging is there, so we already have platform with scale waiting for great applications.

 "Bots are the most important advancement in the last 20 years." - Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO of HubSpot

As I listened to various experts, including entrepreneur Chris Messina, the consensus is that bots will not replace sites, rather they will augment them. We are still in very early days, with the biggest problem being discoverability. In other words, how will consumers find your bot, and how will they understand what it can do?

For brands ready to dabble in this space (which I highly recommend), my advice is to start simple, think about how to on-board your customers, and make your bot the shortest distance between their question and your answer. Most of the branded bots today are rudimentary, similar to the first websites online (remember what Amazon used to look like?), so it’s a good time to experiment while expectations are low. Most brands are focused on bots as it relates to service. If your bot is powered by AI and you release too early, what happens to a brand if that bot goes rogue? Start simple.

However, interestingly one of the most popular bots to date has been a “chit chat” bot. Mitsuku gets a few hundred thousand queries a day and can be accessed via Skype. She can tell jokes, tell you stories, play games and argue. It’s an early example that shows how a brand could start to bring to life a personality – which in the future should include text/speech to visual response (i.e., chart, video, audio) and feature branded acoustical design (i.e., voice, sounds).

Another thing to keep in mind is that most companies just don’t have the stack to support a sophisticated multi-modal approach (i.e., deployed across site, messaging chatbot, and voice/IVR). To do this, a company needs to have one database and un-siloed content, (Adobe is working on a solution, called Sensei). If you haven’t started to plan this out – start now.

In addition, it’s important to note that everything in this ecosystem is being developed right now, including: adtech, content tech, data tech, analytics tech, commerce/payment tech, and basic standards (i.e., XMPP and APIs). One major difference in the development in this area is that, unlike the democratization of the open web before, the silicon monoliths are much more in control as they hold the keys to natural language and deep learning processing, among other things. And companies like Google and Facebook are working furiously on tools for developers, but again, it is still very early days. I also hear rumors of Facebook working on a metabot of some sort, which could serve as a search engine or be a bot that represents your interests and talks to all other bots – a super bot. Imagine a bot that learns how to interact with you, instead of you learning how to interact with a site or app. In developing nations, we are starting to see another pattern of interest, which is - just like consumers skipped the laptop and went straight to phone, it looks like they may skip the internet and go right to bots for brand interaction.

Hopefully you find all of this useful as you start to think about how to evolve from the click, to the touch, and into the conversation.

The Autonomous Vehicles (AV) industry is arriving sooner than you think.

So BMW was the first to put a SIM card in the car, and they now have 8 million connected cars. As a brand, it’s interesting because if you’ve positioned yourself as “The Ultimate Driving Machine” and in the near future people may not be driving – what’s the pivot?

Well, according to BMW, the pivot is to move from the car at the center of the strategy to the person at the center, and to become an internet company. And then, to redesign the interior concept and focus on the car as a platform. Lastly, to start to diversify the finance business strategy, as personal car loans start to decrease in the future.

I heard similar sentiment from Ford, which seems to be thinking about positioning as a transportation partner. I start to envision car companies with fleets where you can buy a subscription service, with different package levels. This would make car companies more like direct competitors to Uber. Make no mistake, every single car company is well “down the road” planning for this – with BMW promising its “Intel inside” fleet starting this year.

Like the ATP infrastructure, the AV industry infrastructure is very much underway. For example, Qualcomm unveiled their Drive Data Platform which will be able to collect and analyze vehicle data quickly, and their Snapdragon 820Am (automotive processor).

But another layer necessary to bring this to life is mapping technology that is accurate down to the centimeter. Thus, HD map making data is coming from companies like TomTom. And others are joining the mix, like start-up Sensat, a company from a civil and nuclear engineering perspective, that can “digitizing the world” – essentially creating a "copy" of the world with ones and zeros, tagging everything physical down to centimeter accuracy.

After that you’d probably need another key variable to be sophisticated – weather. And of course, companies like AccuWeather are investing in their MinuteCast data to provide minute by minute detailed information (i.e., rain intensity), now mile by mile so that they can provide this information back to the car companies. Imagine, “…you are approaching black ice in 3, 2, 1”.

Another layer that is necessary is uber-fast connectivity, so that we can enable V2X communications – think vehicle to infrastructure (i.e., smart city), vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to pedestrian, vehicle to media, etc. The Telecom companies are now significantly investing in 5G to dramatically improve speed.

And so, you can start to envision a reality that is not too far in the future. Manik Gupta, Head of Product & Maps at Uber talked about maps as essentially a data ecosystem that also contains ETA (based on traffic, road closures, speed), routes, fare commerce – all in the “map”. From a cultural perspective, he mentioned in a session that if you have 2 billion cars on the road, and every car was shared, we’d only need 10% of the cars we have today. He said, “If you think about it, 96% of the time, your car is sitting idle. And, 10% of millennials have either given up or have not even bought a car.”

So if that’s true, it starts to paint an interesting future. Imagine what we will do with all of the empty parking lots? Maybe turn them into green spaces or allow our cities to become denser as it opens up real estate opportunities. And what will we do with our garages? But further, it starts to show the level of massive disruption around the car industry and adjacent industries. Take for example the insurance industry. What will happen if risk of vehicle injury or death is reduced dramatically, and individual car ownership decreases significantly?

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution is the underpinning.

At this point, you’re starting to get a sense of the massive shifts we will be experiencing in the near future. And of course, both of these developments are possible because they will be built on an AI layer. However, AI is such a huge topic, it will need to be its own separate post. Instead I’ll include a few takeways I found particularly interesting.

One keynote I listened to was Son Masayoshi, the CEO of SoftBank. In his talk, he mentioned that he will be putting together $100 Billion in investment money specifically set aside for AI, and to put that in perspective the entire venture capital value worldwide is approximately $65 Billion.

 “I’m doing this because in 30 years, AI will surpass mankind intelligence. Imagine that the average IQ is 100, and the hardware of our brains will not increase. But in 30 years, AI will have the equivalent of a 10,000 IQ. It will fundamentally change our lives in ways we cannot imagine. And we will need an entirely new infrastructure – in chips, security, and fast connectivity.” - Son Masayoshi, CEO of SoftBank

You can watch his keynote here; I highly recommend it. As I think about the impact, just like the car industry, advancements in AI will start to transform and disrupt many other sectors. And so, the Fourth Industrial Revolution begins.

Conclusion

At Mobile World Congress and SXSW, there were so many other specific topics covered, like Rich Communication Services (RCS), Security through Biometrics, and Mesh vs. Cloud… but perhaps I’ll cover those in the near future. The upside of the significant changes discussed here are the immense B2B2C and B2B2B2C opportunities abound as these new industries emerge.

And there were plenty of interesting creative advancements too. Like how Disney intends to use all of these new applications to create magic for their fans. So with that, I’ll leave you with a quote from a long-time Disney employee.

 “This is going to be a decade of staggering innovation." - Jon Snoddy, SVP of Walt Disney Imagineering R&D

I agree.