Podcasts about 4X

AI can now identify exactly where your business is losing money. Watch the new AI called "Director of Sales" exponentially grow revenue—without spending a penny more on ads—by systematically finding and fixing bottlenecks in the sales process. In this video, we demonstrate the mathematics of the Sales Process. This is a look at how AI can isolate specific "break points" in your funnel (like a low opt-in rate or missing follow-up) that act as a cap on your income. This is different than just asking ChatGPT for marketing ideas. Most AI guesses based on patterns. This AI analyzes your specific numbers (Traffic, Conversion, LTV) to find the "Lowest Hanging Fruit" that will yield the highest return. You will see the AI audit a sales process, find the part that's leaking money, and then create and help implement a plan that fixes it.

What if the difference between AI mediocrity and breakthrough isn't the tool—it's how you architect your approach? Carter Jensen from The Uncommon Business joins the crew to reveal why most people are stuck "button pushing" while others are unlocking 3X productivity gains. This isn't theory; it's the frontline reality of businesses transforming workflows with the right AI architecture. If you're tired of surface-level AI hype and ready for actionable intelligence on integrating AI into security, compliance, and everyday business operations, this episode delivers. Whether you're Blockbuster or Netflix is up to you.

Happy New Year! You may have noticed that in 2025 we had moved toward YouTube as our primary podcasting platform. As we'll explain in the next State of Latent Space post, we'll be doubling down on Substack again and improving the experience for the over 100,000 of you who look out for our emails and website updates!We first mentioned Artificial Analysis in 2024, when it was still a side project in a Sydney basement. They then were one of the few Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross' AIGrant companies to raise a full seed round from them and have now become the independent gold standard for AI benchmarking—trusted by developers, enterprises, and every major lab to navigate the exploding landscape of models, providers, and capabilities.We have chatted with both Clementine Fourrier of HuggingFace's OpenLLM Leaderboard and (the freshly valued at $1.7B) Anastasios Angelopoulos of LMArena on their approaches to LLM evals and trendspotting, but Artificial Analysis have staked out an enduring and important place in the toolkit of the modern AI Engineer by doing the best job of independently running the most comprehensive set of evals across the widest range of open and closed models, and charting their progress for broad industry analyst use.George Cameron and Micah-Hill Smith have spent two years building Artificial Analysis into the platform that answers the questions no one else will: Which model is actually best for your use case? What are the real speed-cost trade-offs? And how open is “open” really?We discuss:* The origin story: built as a side project in 2023 while Micah was building a legal AI assistant, launched publicly in January 2024, and went viral after Swyx's retweet* Why they run evals themselves: labs prompt models differently, cherry-pick chain-of-thought examples (Google Gemini 1.0 Ultra used 32-shot prompts to beat GPT-4 on MMLU), and self-report inflated numbers* The mystery shopper policy: they register accounts not on their own domain and run intelligence + performance benchmarks incognito to prevent labs from serving different models on private endpoints* How they make money: enterprise benchmarking insights subscription (standardized reports on model deployment, serverless vs. managed vs. leasing chips) and private custom benchmarking for AI companies (no one pays to be on the public leaderboard)* The Intelligence Index (V3): synthesizes 10 eval datasets (MMLU, GPQA, agentic benchmarks, long-context reasoning) into a single score, with 95% confidence intervals via repeated runs* Omissions Index (hallucination rate): scores models from -100 to +100 (penalizing incorrect answers, rewarding ”I don't know”), and Claude models lead with the lowest hallucination rates despite not always being the smartest* GDP Val AA: their version of OpenAI's GDP-bench (44 white-collar tasks with spreadsheets, PDFs, PowerPoints), run through their Stirrup agent harness (up to 100 turns, code execution, web search, file system), graded by Gemini 3 Pro as an LLM judge (tested extensively, no self-preference bias)* The Openness Index: scores models 0-18 on transparency of pre-training data, post-training data, methodology, training code, and licensing (AI2 OLMo 2 leads, followed by Nous Hermes and NVIDIA Nemotron)* The smiling curve of AI costs: GPT-4-level intelligence is 100-1000x cheaper than at launch (thanks to smaller models like Amazon Nova), but frontier reasoning models in agentic workflows cost more than ever (sparsity, long context, multi-turn agents)* Why sparsity might go way lower than 5%: GPT-4.5 is ~5% active, Gemini models might be ~3%, and Omissions Index accuracy correlates with total parameters (not active), suggesting massive sparse models are the future* Token efficiency vs. turn efficiency: GPT-5 costs more per token but solves Tau-bench in fewer turns (cheaper overall), and models are getting better at using more tokens only when needed (5.1 Codex has tighter token distributions)* V4 of the Intelligence Index coming soon: adding GDP Val AA, Critical Point, hallucination rate, and dropping some saturated benchmarks (human-eval-style coding is now trivial for small models)Links to Artificial Analysis* Website: https://artificialanalysis.ai* George Cameron on X: https://x.com/georgecameron* Micah-Hill Smith on X: https://x.com/micahhsmithFull Episode on YouTubeTimestamps* 00:00 Introduction: Full Circle Moment and Artificial Analysis Origins* 01:19 Business Model: Independence and Revenue Streams* 04:33 Origin Story: From Legal AI to Benchmarking Need* 16:22 AI Grant and Moving to San Francisco* 19:21 Intelligence Index Evolution: From V1 to V3* 11:47 Benchmarking Challenges: Variance, Contamination, and Methodology* 13:52 Mystery Shopper Policy and Maintaining Independence* 28:01 New Benchmarks: Omissions Index for Hallucination Detection* 33:36 Critical Point: Hard Physics Problems and Research-Level Reasoning* 23:01 GDP Val AA: Agentic Benchmark for Real Work Tasks* 50:19 Stirrup Agent Harness: Open Source Agentic Framework* 52:43 Openness Index: Measuring Model Transparency Beyond Licenses* 58:25 The Smiling Curve: Cost Falling While Spend Rising* 1:02:32 Hardware Efficiency: Blackwell Gains and Sparsity Limits* 1:06:23 Reasoning Models and Token Efficiency: The Spectrum Emerges* 1:11:00 Multimodal Benchmarking: Image, Video, and Speech Arenas* 1:15:05 Looking Ahead: Intelligence Index V4 and Future Directions* 1:16:50 Closing: The Insatiable Demand for IntelligenceTranscriptMicah [00:00:06]: This is kind of a full circle moment for us in a way, because the first time artificial analysis got mentioned on a podcast was you and Alessio on Latent Space. Amazing.swyx [00:00:17]: Which was January 2024. I don't even remember doing that, but yeah, it was very influential to me. Yeah, I'm looking at AI News for Jan 17, or Jan 16, 2024. I said, this gem of a models and host comparison site was just launched. And then I put in a few screenshots, and I said, it's an independent third party. It clearly outlines the quality versus throughput trade-off, and it breaks out by model and hosting provider. I did give you s**t for missing fireworks, and how do you have a model benchmarking thing without fireworks? But you had together, you had perplexity, and I think we just started chatting there. Welcome, George and Micah, to Latent Space. I've been following your progress. Congrats on... It's been an amazing year. You guys have really come together to be the presumptive new gardener of AI, right? Which is something that...George [00:01:09]: Yeah, but you can't pay us for better results.swyx [00:01:12]: Yes, exactly.George [00:01:13]: Very important.Micah [00:01:14]: Start off with a spicy take.swyx [00:01:18]: Okay, how do I pay you?Micah [00:01:20]: Let's get right into that.swyx [00:01:21]: How do you make money?Micah [00:01:24]: Well, very happy to talk about that. So it's been a big journey the last couple of years. Artificial analysis is going to be two years old in January 2026. Which is pretty soon now. We first run the website for free, obviously, and give away a ton of data to help developers and companies navigate AI and make decisions about models, providers, technologies across the AI stack for building stuff. We're very committed to doing that and tend to keep doing that. We have, along the way, built a business that is working out pretty sustainably. We've got just over 20 people now and two main customer groups. So we want to be... We want to be who enterprise look to for data and insights on AI, so we want to help them with their decisions about models and technologies for building stuff. And then on the other side, we do private benchmarking for companies throughout the AI stack who build AI stuff. So no one pays to be on the website. We've been very clear about that from the very start because there's no use doing what we do unless it's independent AI benchmarking. Yeah. But turns out a bunch of our stuff can be pretty useful to companies building AI stuff.swyx [00:02:38]: And is it like, I am a Fortune 500, I need advisors on objective analysis, and I call you guys and you pull up a custom report for me, you come into my office and give me a workshop? What kind of engagement is that?George [00:02:53]: So we have a benchmarking and insight subscription, which looks like standardized reports that cover key topics or key challenges enterprises face when looking to understand AI and choose between all the technologies. And so, for instance, one of the report is a model deployment report, how to think about choosing between serverless inference, managed deployment solutions, or leasing chips. And running inference yourself is an example kind of decision that big enterprises face, and it's hard to reason through, like this AI stuff is really new to everybody. And so we try and help with our reports and insight subscription. Companies navigate that. We also do custom private benchmarking. And so that's very different from the public benchmarking that we publicize, and there's no commercial model around that. For private benchmarking, we'll at times create benchmarks, run benchmarks to specs that enterprises want. And we'll also do that sometimes for AI companies who have built things, and we help them understand what they've built with private benchmarking. Yeah. So that's a piece mainly that we've developed through trying to support everybody publicly with our public benchmarks. Yeah.swyx [00:04:09]: Let's talk about TechStack behind that. But okay, I'm going to rewind all the way to when you guys started this project. You were all the way in Sydney? Yeah. Well, Sydney, Australia for me.Micah [00:04:19]: George was an SF, but he's Australian, but he moved here already. Yeah.swyx [00:04:22]: And I remember I had the Zoom call with you. What was the impetus for starting artificial analysis in the first place? You know, you started with public benchmarks. And so let's start there. We'll go to the private benchmark. Yeah.George [00:04:33]: Why don't we even go back a little bit to like why we, you know, thought that it was needed? Yeah.Micah [00:04:40]: The story kind of begins like in 2022, 2023, like both George and I have been into AI stuff for quite a while. In 2023 specifically, I was trying to build a legal AI research assistant. So it actually worked pretty well for its era, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. So I was finding that the more you go into building something using LLMs, the more each bit of what you're doing ends up being a benchmarking problem. So had like this multistage algorithm thing, trying to figure out what the minimum viable model for each bit was, trying to optimize every bit of it as you build that out, right? Like you're trying to think about accuracy, a bunch of other metrics and performance and cost. And mostly just no one was doing anything to independently evaluate all the models. And certainly not to look at the trade-offs for speed and cost. So we basically set out just to build a thing that developers could look at to see the trade-offs between all of those things measured independently across all the models and providers. Honestly, it was probably meant to be a side project when we first started doing it.swyx [00:05:49]: Like we didn't like get together and say like, Hey, like we're going to stop working on all this stuff. I'm like, this is going to be our main thing. When I first called you, I think you hadn't decided on starting a company yet.Micah [00:05:58]: That's actually true. I don't even think we'd pause like, like George had an acquittance job. I didn't quit working on my legal AI thing. Like it was genuinely a side project.George [00:06:05]: We built it because we needed it as people building in the space and thought, Oh, other people might find it useful too. So we'll buy domain and link it to the Vercel deployment that we had and tweet about it. And, but very quickly it started getting attention. Thank you, Swyx for, I think doing an initial retweet and spotlighting it there. This project that we released. And then very quickly though, it was useful to others, but very quickly it became more useful as the number of models released accelerated. We had Mixtrel 8x7B and it was a key. That's a fun one. Yeah. Like a open source model that really changed the landscape and opened up people's eyes to other serverless inference providers and thinking about speed, thinking about cost. And so that was a key. And so it became more useful quite quickly. Yeah.swyx [00:07:02]: What I love talking to people like you who sit across the ecosystem is, well, I have theories about what people want, but you have data and that's obviously more relevant. But I want to stay on the origin story a little bit more. When you started out, I would say, I think the status quo at the time was every paper would come out and they would report their numbers versus competitor numbers. And that's basically it. And I remember I did the legwork. I think everyone has some knowledge. I think there's some version of Excel sheet or a Google sheet where you just like copy and paste the numbers from every paper and just post it up there. And then sometimes they don't line up because they're independently run. And so your numbers are going to look better than... Your reproductions of other people's numbers are going to look worse because you don't hold their models correctly or whatever the excuse is. I think then Stanford Helm, Percy Liang's project would also have some of these numbers. And I don't know if there's any other source that you can cite. The way that if I were to start artificial analysis at the same time you guys started, I would have used the Luther AI's eval framework harness. Yup.Micah [00:08:06]: Yup. That was some cool stuff. At the end of the day, running these evals, it's like if it's a simple Q&A eval, all you're doing is asking a list of questions and checking if the answers are right, which shouldn't be that crazy. But it turns out there are an enormous number of things that you've got control for. And I mean, back when we started the website. Yeah. Yeah. Like one of the reasons why we realized that we had to run the evals ourselves and couldn't just take rules from the labs was just that they would all prompt the models differently. And when you're competing over a few points, then you can pretty easily get- You can put the answer into the model. Yeah. That in the extreme. And like you get crazy cases like back when I'm Googled a Gemini 1.0 Ultra and needed a number that would say it was better than GPT-4 and like constructed, I think never published like chain of thought examples. 32 of them in every topic in MLU to run it, to get the score, like there are so many things that you- They never shipped Ultra, right? That's the one that never made it up. Not widely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it existed, but yeah. So we were pretty sure that we needed to run them ourselves and just run them in the same way across all the models. Yeah. And we were, we also did certain from the start that you couldn't look at those in isolation. You needed to look at them alongside the cost and performance stuff. Yeah.swyx [00:09:24]: Okay. A couple of technical questions. I mean, so obviously I also thought about this and I didn't do it because of cost. Yep. Did you not worry about costs? Were you funded already? Clearly not, but you know. No. Well, we definitely weren't at the start.Micah [00:09:36]: So like, I mean, we're paying for it personally at the start. There's a lot of money. Well, the numbers weren't nearly as bad a couple of years ago. So we certainly incurred some costs, but we were probably in the order of like hundreds of dollars of spend across all the benchmarking that we were doing. Yeah. So nothing. Yeah. It was like kind of fine. Yeah. Yeah. These days that's gone up an enormous amount for a bunch of reasons that we can talk about. But yeah, it wasn't that bad because you can also remember that like the number of models we were dealing with was hardly any and the complexity of the stuff that we wanted to do to evaluate them was a lot less. Like we were just asking some Q&A type questions and then one specific thing was for a lot of evals initially, we were just like sampling an answer. You know, like, what's the answer for this? Like, we didn't want to go into the answer directly without letting the models think. We weren't even doing chain of thought stuff initially. And that was the most useful way to get some results initially. Yeah.swyx [00:10:33]: And so for people who haven't done this work, literally parsing the responses is a whole thing, right? Like because sometimes the models, the models can answer any way they feel fit and sometimes they actually do have the right answer, but they just returned the wrong format and they will get a zero for that unless you work it into your parser. And that involves more work. And so, I mean, but there's an open question whether you should give it points for not following your instructions on the format.Micah [00:11:00]: It depends what you're looking at, right? Because you can, if you're trying to see whether or not it can solve a particular type of reasoning problem, and you don't want to test it on its ability to do answer formatting at the same time, then you might want to use an LLM as answer extractor approach to make sure that you get the answer out no matter how unanswered. But these days, it's mostly less of a problem. Like, if you instruct a model and give it examples of what the answers should look like, it can get the answers in your format, and then you can do, like, a simple regex.swyx [00:11:28]: Yeah, yeah. And then there's other questions around, I guess, sometimes if you have a multiple choice question, sometimes there's a bias towards the first answer, so you have to randomize the responses. All these nuances, like, once you dig into benchmarks, you're like, I don't know how anyone believes the numbers on all these things. It's so dark magic.Micah [00:11:47]: You've also got, like… You've got, like, the different degrees of variance in different benchmarks, right? Yeah. So, if you run four-question multi-choice on a modern reasoning model at the temperatures suggested by the labs for their own models, the variance that you can see on a four-question multi-choice eval is pretty enormous if you only do a single run of it and it has a small number of questions, especially. So, like, one of the things that we do is run an enormous number of all of our evals when we're developing new ones and doing upgrades to our intelligence index to bring in new things. Yeah. So, that we can dial in the right number of repeats so that we can get to the 95% confidence intervals that we're comfortable with so that when we pull that together, we can be confident in intelligence index to at least as tight as, like, a plus or minus one at a 95% confidence. Yeah.swyx [00:12:32]: And, again, that just adds a straight multiple to the cost. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.George [00:12:37]: So, that's one of many reasons that cost has gone up a lot more than linearly over the last couple of years. We report a cost to run the artificial analysis. We report a cost to run the artificial analysis intelligence index on our website, and currently that's assuming one repeat in terms of how we report it because we want to reflect a bit about the weighting of the index. But our cost is actually a lot higher than what we report there because of the repeats.swyx [00:13:03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And probably this is true, but just checking, you don't have any special deals with the labs. They don't discount it. You just pay out of pocket or out of your sort of customer funds. Oh, there is a mix. So, the issue is that sometimes they may give you a special end point, which is… Ah, 100%.Micah [00:13:21]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, we laser focus, like, on everything we do on having the best independent metrics and making sure that no one can manipulate them in any way. There are quite a lot of processes we've developed over the last couple of years to make that true for, like, the one you bring up, like, right here of the fact that if we're working with a lab, if they're giving us a private endpoint to evaluate a model, that it is totally possible. That what's sitting behind that black box is not the same as they serve on a public endpoint. We're very aware of that. We have what we call a mystery shopper policy. And so, and we're totally transparent with all the labs we work with about this, that we will register accounts not on our own domain and run both intelligence evals and performance benchmarks… Yeah, that's the job. …without them being able to identify it. And no one's ever had a problem with that. Because, like, a thing that turns out to actually be quite a good… …good factor in the industry is that they all want to believe that none of their competitors could manipulate what we're doing either.swyx [00:14:23]: That's true. I never thought about that. I've been in the database data industry prior, and there's a lot of shenanigans around benchmarking, right? So I'm just kind of going through the mental laundry list. Did I miss anything else in this category of shenanigans? Oh, potential shenanigans.Micah [00:14:36]: I mean, okay, the biggest one, like, that I'll bring up, like, is more of a conceptual one, actually, than, like, direct shenanigans. It's that the things that get measured become things that get targeted by labs that they're trying to build, right? Exactly. So that doesn't mean anything that we should really call shenanigans. Like, I'm not talking about training on test set. But if you know that you're going to be great at another particular thing, if you're a researcher, there are a whole bunch of things that you can do to try to get better at that thing that preferably are going to be helpful for a wide range of how actual users want to use the thing that you're building. But will not necessarily work. Will not necessarily do that. So, for instance, the models are exceptional now at answering competition maths problems. There is some relevance of that type of reasoning, that type of work, to, like, how we might use modern coding agents and stuff. But it's clearly not one for one. So the thing that we have to be aware of is that once an eval becomes the thing that everyone's looking at, scores can get better on it without there being a reflection of overall generalized intelligence of these models. Getting better. That has been true for the last couple of years. It'll be true for the next couple of years. There's no silver bullet to defeat that other than building new stuff to stay relevant and measure the capabilities that matter most to real users. Yeah.swyx [00:15:58]: And we'll cover some of the new stuff that you guys are building as well, which is cool. Like, you used to just run other people's evals, but now you're coming up with your own. And I think, obviously, that is a necessary path once you're at the frontier. You've exhausted all the existing evals. I think the next point in history that I have for you is AI Grant that you guys decided to join and move here. What was it like? I think you were in, like, batch two? Batch four. Batch four. Okay.Micah [00:16:26]: I mean, it was great. Nat and Daniel are obviously great. And it's a really cool group of companies that we were in AI Grant alongside. It was really great to get Nat and Daniel on board. Obviously, they've done a whole lot of great work in the space with a lot of leading companies and were extremely aligned. With the mission of what we were trying to do. Like, we're not quite typical of, like, a lot of the other AI startups that they've invested in.swyx [00:16:53]: And they were very much here for the mission of what we want to do. Did they say any advice that really affected you in some way or, like, were one of the events very impactful? That's an interesting question.Micah [00:17:03]: I mean, I remember fondly a bunch of the speakers who came and did fireside chats at AI Grant.swyx [00:17:09]: Which is also, like, a crazy list. Yeah.George [00:17:11]: Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was something about, you know, speaking to Nat and Daniel about the challenges of working through a startup and just working through the questions that don't have, like, clear answers and how to work through those kind of methodically and just, like, work through the hard decisions. And they've been great mentors to us as we've built artificial analysis. Another benefit for us was that other companies in the batch and other companies in AI Grant are pushing the capabilities. Yeah. And I think that's a big part of what AI can do at this time. And so being in contact with them, making sure that artificial analysis is useful to them has been fantastic for supporting us in working out how should we build out artificial analysis to continue to being useful to those, like, you know, building on AI.swyx [00:17:59]: I think to some extent, I'm mixed opinion on that one because to some extent, your target audience is not people in AI Grants who are obviously at the frontier. Yeah. Do you disagree?Micah [00:18:09]: To some extent. To some extent. But then, so a lot of what the AI Grant companies are doing is taking capabilities coming out of the labs and trying to push the limits of what they can do across the entire stack for building great applications, which actually makes some of them pretty archetypical power users of artificial analysis. Some of the people with the strongest opinions about what we're doing well and what we're not doing well and what they want to see next from us. Yeah. Yeah. Because when you're building any kind of AI application now, chances are you're using a whole bunch of different models. You're maybe switching reasonably frequently for different models and different parts of your application to optimize what you're able to do with them at an accuracy level and to get better speed and cost characteristics. So for many of them, no, they're like not commercial customers of ours, like we don't charge for all our data on the website. Yeah. They are absolutely some of our power users.swyx [00:19:07]: So let's talk about just the evals as well. So you start out from the general like MMU and GPQA stuff. What's next? How do you sort of build up to the overall index? What was in V1 and how did you evolve it? Okay.Micah [00:19:22]: So first, just like background, like we're talking about the artificial analysis intelligence index, which is our synthesis metric that we pulled together currently from 10 different eval data sets to give what? We're pretty much the same as that. Pretty confident is the best single number to look at for how smart the models are. Obviously, it doesn't tell the whole story. That's why we published the whole website of all the charts to dive into every part of it and look at the trade-offs. But best single number. So right now, it's got a bunch of Q&A type data sets that have been very important to the industry, like a couple that you just mentioned. It's also got a couple of agentic data sets. It's got our own long context reasoning data set and some other use case focused stuff. As time goes on. The things that we're most interested in that are going to be important to the capabilities that are becoming more important for AI, what developers are caring about, are going to be first around agentic capabilities. So surprise, surprise. We're all loving our coding agents and how the model is going to perform like that and then do similar things for different types of work are really important to us. The linking to use cases to economically valuable use cases are extremely important to us. And then we've got some of the. Yeah. These things that the models still struggle with, like working really well over long contexts that are not going to go away as specific capabilities and use cases that we need to keep evaluating.swyx [00:20:46]: But I guess one thing I was driving was like the V1 versus the V2 and how bad it was over time.Micah [00:20:53]: Like how we've changed the index to where we are.swyx [00:20:55]: And I think that reflects on the change in the industry. Right. So that's a nice way to tell that story.Micah [00:21:00]: Well, V1 would be completely saturated right now. Almost every model coming out because doing things like writing the Python functions and human evil is now pretty trivial. It's easy to forget, actually, I think how much progress has been made in the last two years. Like we obviously play the game constantly of like the today's version versus last week's version and the week before and all of the small changes in the horse race between the current frontier and who has the best like smaller than 10B model like right now this week. Right. And that's very important to a lot of developers and people and especially in this particular city of San Francisco. But when you zoom out a couple of years ago, literally most of what we were doing to evaluate the models then would all be 100% solved by even pretty small models today. And that's been one of the key things, by the way, that's driven down the cost of intelligence at every tier of intelligence. We can talk about more in a bit. So V1, V2, V3, we made things harder. We covered a wider range of use cases. And we tried to get closer to things developers care about as opposed to like just the Q&A type stuff that MMLU and GPQA represented. Yeah.swyx [00:22:12]: I don't know if you have anything to add there. Or we could just go right into showing people the benchmark and like looking around and asking questions about it. Yeah.Micah [00:22:21]: Let's do it. Okay. This would be a pretty good way to chat about a few of the new things we've launched recently. Yeah.George [00:22:26]: And I think a little bit about the direction that we want to take it. And we want to push benchmarks. Currently, the intelligence index and evals focus a lot on kind of raw intelligence. But we kind of want to diversify how we think about intelligence. And we can talk about it. But kind of new evals that we've kind of built and partnered on focus on topics like hallucination. And we've got a lot of topics that I think are not covered by the current eval set that should be. And so we want to bring that forth. But before we get into that.swyx [00:23:01]: And so for listeners, just as a timestamp, right now, number one is Gemini 3 Pro High. Then followed by Cloud Opus at 70. Just 5.1 high. You don't have 5.2 yet. And Kimi K2 Thinking. Wow. Still hanging in there. So those are the top four. That will date this podcast quickly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love it. I love it. No, no. 100%. Look back this time next year and go, how cute. Yep.George [00:23:25]: Totally. A quick view of that is, okay, there's a lot. I love it. I love this chart. Yeah.Micah [00:23:30]: This is such a favorite, right? Yeah. And almost every talk that George or I give at conferences and stuff, we always put this one up first to just talk about situating where we are in this moment in history. This, I think, is the visual version of what I was saying before about the zooming out and remembering how much progress there's been. If we go back to just over a year ago, before 01, before Cloud Sonnet 3.5, we didn't have reasoning models or coding agents as a thing. And the game was very, very different. If we go back even a little bit before then, we're in the era where, when you look at this chart, open AI was untouchable for well over a year. And, I mean, you would remember that time period well of there being very open questions about whether or not AI was going to be competitive, like full stop, whether or not open AI would just run away with it, whether we would have a few frontier labs and no one else would really be able to do anything other than consume their APIs. I am quite happy overall that the world that we have ended up in is one where... Multi-model. Absolutely. And strictly more competitive every quarter over the last few years. Yeah. This year has been insane. Yeah.George [00:24:42]: You can see it. This chart with everything added is hard to read currently. There's so many dots on it, but I think it reflects a little bit what we felt, like how crazy it's been.swyx [00:24:54]: Why 14 as the default? Is that a manual choice? Because you've got service now in there that are less traditional names. Yeah.George [00:25:01]: It's models that we're kind of highlighting by default in our charts, in our intelligence index. Okay.swyx [00:25:07]: You just have a manually curated list of stuff.George [00:25:10]: Yeah, that's right. But something that I actually don't think every artificial analysis user knows is that you can customize our charts and choose what models are highlighted. Yeah. And so if we take off a few names, it gets a little easier to read.swyx [00:25:25]: Yeah, yeah. A little easier to read. Totally. Yeah. But I love that you can see the all one jump. Look at that. September 2024. And the DeepSeek jump. Yeah.George [00:25:34]: Which got close to OpenAI's leadership. They were so close. I think, yeah, we remember that moment. Around this time last year, actually.Micah [00:25:44]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. Yeah, well, a couple of weeks. It was Boxing Day in New Zealand when DeepSeek v3 came out. And we'd been tracking DeepSeek and a bunch of the other global players that were less known over the second half of 2024 and had run evals on the earlier ones and stuff. I very distinctly remember Boxing Day in New Zealand, because I was with family for Christmas and stuff, running the evals and getting back result by result on DeepSeek v3. So this was the first of their v3 architecture, the 671b MOE.Micah [00:26:19]: And we were very, very impressed. That was the moment where we were sure that DeepSeek was no longer just one of many players, but had jumped up to be a thing. The world really noticed when they followed that up with the RL working on top of v3 and R1 succeeding a few weeks later. But the groundwork for that absolutely was laid with just extremely strong base model, completely open weights that we had as the best open weights model. So, yeah, that's the thing that you really see in the game. But I think that we got a lot of good feedback on Boxing Day. us on Boxing Day last year.George [00:26:48]: Boxing Day is the day after Christmas for those not familiar.George [00:26:54]: I'm from Singapore.swyx [00:26:55]: A lot of us remember Boxing Day for a different reason, for the tsunami that happened. Oh, of course. Yeah, but that was a long time ago. So yeah. So this is the rough pitch of AAQI. Is it A-A-Q-I or A-A-I-I? I-I. Okay. Good memory, though.Micah [00:27:11]: I don't know. I'm not used to it. Once upon a time, we did call it Quality Index, and we would talk about quality, performance, and price, but we changed it to intelligence.George [00:27:20]: There's been a few naming changes. We added hardware benchmarking to the site, and so benchmarks at a kind of system level. And so then we changed our throughput metric to, we now call it output speed, and thenswyx [00:27:32]: throughput makes sense at a system level, so we took that name. Take me through more charts. What should people know? Obviously, the way you look at the site is probably different than how a beginner might look at it.Micah [00:27:42]: Yeah, that's fair. There's a lot of fun stuff to dive into. Maybe so we can hit past all the, like, we have lots and lots of emails and stuff. The interesting ones to talk about today that would be great to bring up are a few of our recent things, I think, that probably not many people will be familiar with yet. So first one of those is our omniscience index. So this one is a little bit different to most of the intelligence evils that we've run. We built it specifically to look at the embedded knowledge in the models and to test hallucination by looking at when the model doesn't know the answer, so not able to get it correct, what's its probability of saying, I don't know, or giving an incorrect answer. So the metric that we use for omniscience goes from negative 100 to positive 100. Because we're simply taking off a point if you give an incorrect answer to the question. We're pretty convinced that this is an example of where it makes most sense to do that, because it's strictly more helpful to say, I don't know, instead of giving a wrong answer to factual knowledge question. And one of our goals is to shift the incentive that evils create for models and the labs creating them to get higher scores. And almost every evil across all of AI up until this point, it's been graded by simple percentage correct as the main metric, the main thing that gets hyped. And so you should take a shot at everything. There's no incentive to say, I don't know. So we did that for this one here.swyx [00:29:22]: I think there's a general field of calibration as well, like the confidence in your answer versus the rightness of the answer. Yeah, we completely agree. Yeah. Yeah.George [00:29:31]: On that. And one reason that we didn't do that is because. Or put that into this index is that we think that the, the way to do that is not to ask the models how confident they are.swyx [00:29:43]: I don't know. Maybe it might be though. You put it like a JSON field, say, say confidence and maybe it spits out something. Yeah. You know, we have done a few evils podcasts over the, over the years. And when we did one with Clementine of hugging face, who maintains the open source leaderboard, and this was one of her top requests, which is some kind of hallucination slash lack of confidence calibration thing. And so, Hey, this is one of them.Micah [00:30:05]: And I mean, like anything that we do, it's not a perfect metric or the whole story of everything that you think about as hallucination. But yeah, it's pretty useful and has some interesting results. Like one of the things that we saw in the hallucination rate is that anthropics Claude models at the, the, the very left-hand side here with the lowest hallucination rates out of the models that we've evaluated amnesty is on. That is an interesting fact. I think it probably correlates with a lot of the previously, not really measured vibes stuff that people like about some of the Claude models. Is the dataset public or what's is it, is there a held out set? There's a hell of a set for this one. So we, we have published a public test set, but we we've only published 10% of it. The reason is that for this one here specifically, it would be very, very easy to like have data contamination because it is just factual knowledge questions. We would. We'll update it at a time to also prevent that, but with yeah, kept most of it held out so that we can keep it reliable for a long time. It leads us to a bunch of really cool things, including breakdown quite granularly by topic. And so we've got some of that disclosed on the website publicly right now, and there's lots more coming in terms of our ability to break out very specific topics. Yeah.swyx [00:31:23]: I would be interested. Let's, let's dwell a little bit on this hallucination one. I noticed that Haiku hallucinates less than Sonnet hallucinates less than Opus. And yeah. Would that be the other way around in a normal capability environments? I don't know. What's, what do you make of that?George [00:31:37]: One interesting aspect is that we've found that there's not really a, not a strong correlation between intelligence and hallucination, right? That's to say that the smarter the models are in a general sense, isn't correlated with their ability to, when they don't know something, say that they don't know. It's interesting that Gemini three pro preview was a big leap over here. Gemini 2.5. Flash and, and, and 2.5 pro, but, and if I add pro quickly here.swyx [00:32:07]: I bet pro's really good. Uh, actually no, I meant, I meant, uh, the GPT pros.George [00:32:12]: Oh yeah.swyx [00:32:13]: Cause GPT pros are rumored. We don't know for a fact that it's like eight runs and then with the LM judge on top. Yeah.George [00:32:20]: So we saw a big jump in, this is accuracy. So this is just percent that they get, uh, correct and Gemini three pro knew a lot more than the other models. And so big jump in accuracy. But relatively no change between the Google Gemini models, between releases. And the hallucination rate. Exactly. And so it's likely due to just kind of different post-training recipe, between the, the Claude models. Yeah.Micah [00:32:45]: Um, there's, there's driven this. Yeah. You can, uh, you can partially blame us and how we define intelligence having until now not defined hallucination as a negative in the way that we think about intelligence.swyx [00:32:56]: And so that's what we're changing. Uh, I know many smart people who are confidently incorrect.George [00:33:02]: Uh, look, look at that. That, that, that is very humans. Very true. And there's times and a place for that. I think our view is that hallucination rate makes sense in this context where it's around knowledge, but in many cases, people want the models to hallucinate, to have a go. Often that's the case in coding or when you're trying to generate newer ideas. One eval that we added to artificial analysis is, is, is critical point and it's really hard, uh, physics problems. Okay.swyx [00:33:32]: And is it sort of like a human eval type or something different or like a frontier math type?George [00:33:37]: It's not dissimilar to frontier frontier math. So these are kind of research questions that kind of academics in the physics physics world would be able to answer, but models really struggled to answer. So the top score here is not 9%.swyx [00:33:51]: And when the people that, that created this like Minway and, and, and actually off via who was kind of behind sweep and what organization is this? Oh, is this, it's Princeton.George [00:34:01]: Kind of range of academics from, from, uh, different academic institutions, really smart people. They talked about how they turn the models up in terms of the temperature as high temperature as they can, where they're trying to explore kind of new ideas in physics as a, as a thought partner, just because they, they want the models to hallucinate. Um, yeah, sometimes it's something new. Yeah, exactly.swyx [00:34:21]: Um, so not right in every situation, but, um, I think it makes sense, you know, to test hallucination in scenarios where it makes sense. Also, the obvious question is, uh, this is one of. Many that there is there, every lab has a system card that shows some kind of hallucination number, and you've chosen to not, uh, endorse that and you've made your own. And I think that's a, that's a choice. Um, totally in some sense, the rest of artificial analysis is public benchmarks that other people can independently rerun. You provide it as a service here. You have to fight the, well, who are we to, to like do this? And your, your answer is that we have a lot of customers and, you know, but like, I guess, how do you converge the individual?Micah [00:35:08]: I mean, I think, I think for hallucinations specifically, there are a bunch of different things that you might care about reasonably, and that you'd measure quite differently, like we've called this a amnesty and solutionation rate, not trying to declare the, like, it's humanity's last hallucination. You could, uh, you could have some interesting naming conventions and all this stuff. Um, the biggest picture answer to that. It's something that I actually wanted to mention. Just as George was explaining, critical point as well is, so as we go forward, we are building evals internally. We're partnering with academia and partnering with AI companies to build great evals. We have pretty strong views on, in various ways for different parts of the AI stack, where there are things that are not being measured well, or things that developers care about that should be measured more and better. And we intend to be doing that. We're not obsessed necessarily with that. Everything we do, we have to do entirely within our own team. Critical point. As a cool example of where we were a launch partner for it, working with academia, we've got some partnerships coming up with a couple of leading companies. Those ones, obviously we have to be careful with on some of the independent stuff, but with the right disclosure, like we're completely comfortable with that. A lot of the labs have released great data sets in the past that we've used to great success independently. And so it's between all of those techniques, we're going to be releasing more stuff in the future. Cool.swyx [00:36:26]: Let's cover the last couple. And then we'll, I want to talk about your trends analysis stuff, you know? Totally.Micah [00:36:31]: So that actually, I have one like little factoid on omniscience. If you go back up to accuracy on omniscience, an interesting thing about this accuracy metric is that it tracks more closely than anything else that we measure. The total parameter count of models makes a lot of sense intuitively, right? Because this is a knowledge eval. This is the pure knowledge metric. We're not looking at the index and the hallucination rate stuff that we think is much more about how the models are trained. This is just what facts did they recall? And yeah, it tracks parameter count extremely closely. Okay.swyx [00:37:05]: What's the rumored size of GPT-3 Pro? And to be clear, not confirmed for any official source, just rumors. But rumors do fly around. Rumors. I get, I hear all sorts of numbers. I don't know what to trust.Micah [00:37:17]: So if you, if you draw the line on omniscience accuracy versus total parameters, we've got all the open ways models, you can squint and see that likely the leading frontier models right now are quite a lot bigger than the ones that we're seeing right now. And the one trillion parameters that the open weights models cap out at, and the ones that we're looking at here, there's an interesting extra data point that Elon Musk revealed recently about XAI that for three trillion parameters for GROK 3 and 4, 6 trillion for GROK 5, but that's not out yet. Take those together, have a look. You might reasonably form a view that there's a pretty good chance that Gemini 3 Pro is bigger than that, that it could be in the 5 to 10 trillion parameters. To be clear, I have absolutely no idea, but just based on this chart, like that's where you would, you would land if you have a look at it. Yeah.swyx [00:38:07]: And to some extent, I actually kind of discourage people from guessing too much because what does it really matter? Like as long as they can serve it as a sustainable cost, that's about it. Like, yeah, totally.George [00:38:17]: They've also got different incentives in play compared to like open weights models who are thinking to supporting others in self-deployment for the labs who are doing inference at scale. It's I think less about total parameters in many cases. When thinking about inference costs and more around number of active parameters. And so there's a bit of an incentive towards larger sparser models. Agreed.Micah [00:38:38]: Understood. Yeah. Great. I mean, obviously if you're a developer or company using these things, not exactly as you say, it doesn't matter. You should be looking at all the different ways that we measure intelligence. You should be looking at cost to run index number and the different ways of thinking about token efficiency and cost efficiency based on the list prices, because that's all it matters.swyx [00:38:56]: It's not as good for the content creator rumor mill where I can say. Oh, GPT-4 is this small circle. Look at GPT-5 is this big circle. And then there used to be a thing for a while. Yeah.Micah [00:39:07]: But that is like on its own, actually a very interesting one, right? That is it just purely that chances are the last couple of years haven't seen a dramatic scaling up in the total size of these models. And so there's a lot of room to go up properly in total size of the models, especially with the upcoming hardware generations. Yes.swyx [00:39:29]: So, you know. Taking off my shitposting face for a minute. Yes. Yes. At the same time, I do feel like, you know, especially coming back from Europe, people do feel like Ilya is probably right that the paradigm is doesn't have many more orders of magnitude to scale out more. And therefore we need to start exploring at least a different path. GDPVal, I think it's like only like a month or so old. I was also very positive when it first came out. I actually talked to Tejo, who was the lead researcher on that. Oh, cool. And you have your own version.George [00:39:59]: It's a fantastic. It's a fantastic data set. Yeah.swyx [00:40:01]: And maybe it will recap for people who are still out of it. It's like 44 tasks based on some kind of GDP cutoff that's like meant to represent broad white collar work that is not just coding. Yeah.Micah [00:40:12]: Each of the tasks have a whole bunch of detailed instructions, some input files for a lot of them. It's within the 44 is divided into like two hundred and twenty two to five, maybe subtasks that are the level of that we run through the agenda. And yeah, they're really interesting. I will say that it doesn't. It doesn't necessarily capture like all the stuff that people do at work. No avail is perfect is always going to be more things to look at, largely because in order to make the tasks well enough to find that you can run them, they need to only have a handful of input files and very specific instructions for that task. And so I think the easiest way to think about them are that they're like quite hard take home exam tasks that you might do in an interview process.swyx [00:40:56]: Yeah, for listeners, it is not no longer like a long prompt. It is like, well, here's a zip file with like a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint deck or a PDF and go nuts and answer this question.George [00:41:06]: OpenAI released a great data set and they released a good paper which looks at performance across the different web chat bots on the data set. It's a great paper, encourage people to read it. What we've done is taken that data set and turned it into an eval that can be run on any model. So we created a reference agentic harness that can run. Run the models on the data set, and then we developed evaluator approach to compare outputs. That's kind of AI enabled, so it uses Gemini 3 Pro Preview to compare results, which we tested pretty comprehensively to ensure that it's aligned to human preferences. One data point there is that even as an evaluator, Gemini 3 Pro, interestingly, doesn't do actually that well. So that's kind of a good example of what we've done in GDPVal AA.swyx [00:42:01]: Yeah, the thing that you have to watch out for with LLM judge is self-preference that models usually prefer their own output, and in this case, it was not. Totally.Micah [00:42:08]: I think the way that we're thinking about the places where it makes sense to use an LLM as judge approach now, like quite different to some of the early LLM as judge stuff a couple of years ago, because some of that and MTV was a great project that was a good example of some of this a while ago was about judging conversations and like a lot of style type stuff. Here, we've got the task that the grader and grading model is doing is quite different to the task of taking the test. When you're taking the test, you've got all of the agentic tools you're working with, the code interpreter and web search, the file system to go through many, many turns to try to create the documents. Then on the other side, when we're grading it, we're running it through a pipeline to extract visual and text versions of the files and be able to provide that to Gemini, and we're providing the criteria for the task and getting it to pick which one more effectively meets the criteria of the task. Yeah. So we've got the task out of two potential outcomes. It turns out that we proved that it's just very, very good at getting that right, matched with human preference a lot of the time, because I think it's got the raw intelligence, but it's combined with the correct representation of the outputs, the fact that the outputs were created with an agentic task that is quite different to the way the grading model works, and we're comparing it against criteria, not just kind of zero shot trying to ask the model to pick which one is better.swyx [00:43:26]: Got it. Why is this an ELO? And not a percentage, like GDP-VAL?George [00:43:31]: So the outputs look like documents, and there's video outputs or audio outputs from some of the tasks. It has to make a video? Yeah, for some of the tasks. Some of the tasks.swyx [00:43:43]: What task is that?George [00:43:45]: I mean, it's in the data set. Like be a YouTuber? It's a marketing video.Micah [00:43:49]: Oh, wow. What? Like model has to go find clips on the internet and try to put it together. The models are not that good at doing that one, for now, to be clear. It's pretty hard to do that with a code editor. I mean, the computer stuff doesn't work quite well enough and so on and so on, but yeah.George [00:44:02]: And so there's no kind of ground truth, necessarily, to compare against, to work out percentage correct. It's hard to come up with correct or incorrect there. And so it's on a relative basis. And so we use an ELO approach to compare outputs from each of the models between the task.swyx [00:44:23]: You know what you should do? You should pay a contractor, a human, to do the same task. And then give it an ELO and then so you have, you have human there. It's just, I think what's helpful about GDPVal, the OpenAI one, is that 50% is meant to be normal human and maybe Domain Expert is higher than that, but 50% was the bar for like, well, if you've crossed 50, you are superhuman. Yeah.Micah [00:44:47]: So we like, haven't grounded this score in that exactly. I agree that it can be helpful, but we wanted to generalize this to a very large number. It's one of the reasons that presenting it as ELO is quite helpful and allows us to add models and it'll stay relevant for quite a long time. I also think it, it can be tricky looking at these exact tasks compared to the human performance, because the way that you would go about it as a human is quite different to how the models would go about it. Yeah.swyx [00:45:15]: I also liked that you included Lama 4 Maverick in there. Is that like just one last, like...Micah [00:45:20]: Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, it is the, it is the best model released by Meta. And... So it makes it into the homepage default set, still for now.George [00:45:31]: Other inclusion that's quite interesting is we also ran it across the latest versions of the web chatbots. And so we have...swyx [00:45:39]: Oh, that's right.George [00:45:40]: Oh, sorry.swyx [00:45:41]: I, yeah, I completely missed that. Okay.George [00:45:43]: No, not at all. So that, which has a checkered pattern. So that is their harness, not yours, is what you're saying. Exactly. And what's really interesting is that if you compare, for instance, Claude 4.5 Opus using the Claude web chatbot, it performs worse than the model in our agentic harness. And so in every case, the model performs better in our agentic harness than its web chatbot counterpart, the harness that they created.swyx [00:46:13]: Oh, my backwards explanation for that would be that, well, it's meant for consumer use cases and here you're pushing it for something.Micah [00:46:19]: The constraints are different and the amount of freedom that you can give the model is different. Also, you like have a cost goal. We let the models work as long as they want, basically. Yeah. Do you copy paste manually into the chatbot? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that was how we got the chatbot reference. We're not going to be keeping those updated at like quite the same scale as hundreds of models.swyx [00:46:38]: Well, so I don't know, talk to a browser base. They'll, they'll automate it for you. You know, like I have thought about like, well, we should turn these chatbot versions into an API because they are legitimately different agents in themselves. Yes. Right. Yeah.Micah [00:46:53]: And that's grown a huge amount of the last year, right? Like the tools. The tools that are available have actually diverged in my opinion, a fair bit across the major chatbot apps and the amount of data sources that you can connect them to have gone up a lot, meaning that your experience and the way you're using the model is more different than ever.swyx [00:47:10]: What tools and what data connections come to mind when you say what's interesting, what's notable work that people have done?Micah [00:47:15]: Oh, okay. So my favorite example on this is that until very recently, I would argue that it was basically impossible to get an LLM to draft an email for me in any useful way. Because most times that you're sending an email, you're not just writing something for the sake of writing it. Chances are context required is a whole bunch of historical emails. Maybe it's notes that you've made, maybe it's meeting notes, maybe it's, um, pulling something from your, um, any of like wherever you at work store stuff. So for me, like Google drive, one drive, um, in our super base databases, if we need to do some analysis or some data or something, preferably model can be plugged into all of those things and can go do some useful work based on it. The things that like I find most impressive currently that I am somewhat surprised work really well in late 2025, uh, that I can have models use super base MCP to query read only, of course, run a whole bunch of SQL queries to do pretty significant data analysis. And. And make charts and stuff and can read my Gmail and my notion. And okay. You actually use that. That's good. That's, that's, that's good. Is that a cloud thing? To various degrees of order, but chat GPD and Claude right now, I would say that this stuff like barely works in fairness right now. Like.George [00:48:33]: Because people are actually going to try this after they hear it. If you get an email from Micah, odds are it wasn't written by a chatbot.Micah [00:48:38]: So, yeah, I think it is true that I have never actually sent anyone an email drafted by a chatbot. Yet.swyx [00:48:46]: Um, and so you can, you can feel it right. And yeah, this time, this time next year, we'll come back and see where it's going. Totally. Um, super base shout out another famous Kiwi. Uh, I don't know if you've, you've any conversations with him about anything in particular on AI building and AI infra.George [00:49:03]: We have had, uh, Twitter DMS, um, with, with him because we're quite big, uh, super base users and power users. And we probably do some things more manually than we should in. In, in super base support line because you're, you're a little bit being super friendly. One extra, um, point regarding, um, GDP Val AA is that on the basis of the overperformance of the models compared to the chatbots turns out, we realized that, oh, like our reference harness that we built actually white works quite well on like gen generalist agentic tasks. This proves it in a sense. And so the agent harness is very. Minimalist. I think it follows some of the ideas that are in Claude code and we, all that we give it is context management capabilities, a web search, web browsing, uh, tool, uh, code execution, uh, environment. Anything else?Micah [00:50:02]: I mean, we can equip it with more tools, but like by default, yeah, that's it. We, we, we give it for GDP, a tool to, uh, view an image specifically, um, because the models, you know, can just use a terminal to pull stuff in text form into context. But to pull visual stuff into context, we had to give them a custom tool, but yeah, exactly. Um, you, you can explain an expert. No.George [00:50:21]: So it's, it, we turned out that we created a good generalist agentic harness. And so we, um, released that on, on GitHub yesterday. It's called stirrup. So if people want to check it out and, and it's a great, um, you know, base for, you know, generalist, uh, building a generalist agent for more specific tasks.Micah [00:50:39]: I'd say the best way to use it is get clone and then have your favorite coding. Agent make changes to it, to do whatever you want, because it's not that many lines of code and the coding agents can work with it. Super well.swyx [00:50:51]: Well, that's nice for the community to explore and share and hack on it. I think maybe in, in, in other similar environments, the terminal bench guys have done, uh, sort of the Harbor. Uh, and so it's, it's a, it's a bundle of, well, we need our minimal harness, which for them is terminus and we also need the RL environments or Docker deployment thing to, to run independently. So I don't know if you've looked at it. I don't know if you've looked at the harbor at all, is that, is that like a, a standard that people want to adopt?George [00:51:19]: Yeah, we've looked at it from a evals perspective and we love terminal bench and, and host benchmarks of, of, of terminal mention on artificial analysis. Um, we've looked at it from a, from a coding agent perspective, but could see it being a great, um, basis for any kind of agents. I think where we're getting to is that these models have gotten smart enough. They've gotten better, better tools that they can perform better when just given a minimalist. Set of tools and, and let them run, let the model control the, the agentic workflow rather than using another framework that's a bit more built out that tries to dictate the, dictate the flow. Awesome.swyx [00:51:56]: Let's cover the openness index and then let's go into the report stuff. Uh, so that's the, that's the last of the proprietary art numbers, I guess. I don't know how you sort of classify all these. Yeah.Micah [00:52:07]: Or call it, call it, let's call it the last of like the, the three new things that we're talking about from like the last few weeks. Um, cause I mean, there's a, we do a mix of stuff that. Where we're using open source, where we open source and what we do and, um, proprietary stuff that we don't always open source, like long context reasoning data set last year, we did open source. Um, and then all of the work on performance benchmarks across the site, some of them, we looking to open source, but some of them, like we're constantly iterating on and so on and so on and so on. So there's a huge mix, I would say, just of like stuff that is open source and not across the side. So that's a LCR for people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.swyx [00:52:41]: Uh, but let's, let's, let's talk about open.Micah [00:52:42]: Let's talk about openness index. This. Here is call it like a new way to think about how open models are. We, for a long time, have tracked where the models are open weights and what the licenses on them are. And that's like pretty useful. That tells you what you're allowed to do with the weights of a model, but there is this whole other dimension to how open models are. That is pretty important that we haven't tracked until now. And that's how much is disclosed about how it was made. So transparency about data, pre-training data and post-training data. And whether you're allowed to use that data and transparency about methodology and training code. So basically, those are the components. We bring them together to score an openness index for models so that you can in one place get this full picture of how open models are.swyx [00:53:32]: I feel like I've seen a couple other people try to do this, but they're not maintained. I do think this does matter. I don't know what the numbers mean apart from is there a max number? Is this out of 20?George [00:53:44]: It's out of 18 currently, and so we've got an openness index page, but essentially these are points, you get points for being more open across these different categories and the maximum you can achieve is 18. So AI2 with their extremely open OMO3 32B think model is the leader in a sense.swyx [00:54:04]: It's hooking face.George [00:54:05]: Oh, with their smaller model. It's coming soon. I think we need to run, we need to get the intelligence benchmarks right to get it on the site.swyx [00:54:12]: You can't have it open in the next. We can not include hooking face. We love hooking face. We'll have that, we'll have that up very soon. I mean, you know, the refined web and all that stuff. It's, it's amazing. Or is it called fine web? Fine web. Fine web.Micah [00:54:23]: Yeah, yeah, no, totally. Yep. One of the reasons this is cool, right, is that if you're trying to understand the holistic picture of the models and what you can do with all the stuff the company's contributing, this gives you that picture. And so we are going to keep it up to date alongside all the models that we do intelligence index on, on the site. And it's just an extra view to understand.swyx [00:54:43]: Can you scroll down to this? The, the, the, the trade-offs chart. Yeah, yeah. That one. Yeah. This, this really matters, right? Obviously, because you can b

Want to get away from the crowds? Want a high mountain lake or stream all to yourself?  The best way to do this is to take a backpacking trip, but you need to prepare more than you would for a car trip or a trip to a lodge. What exactly should you take and what should you leave behind?  What kinds of flies and accessories should you bring? How can you save weight and still have enough gear for a fun fishing trip? Derek Bargaehr [37:36], an experienced fly fisher and backpacker, gives us tips on how to make the most of your next backpacking trip. In the Fly Box this week, we have some questions. A couple of which could only be answered by my co-workers at Orvis so we have responses from both Pete Kutzer, our casting guru and Shawn Brillon, our bamboo rod craftsman. How can I easily estimate how much backing is on my unlabeled reels? A listener relates how some podcast advice on emergers helped him and his son have a successful trip I took a lesson on two-handed casting and it was all done on grass.  Was this wrong? What advice do you have on cleaning the ferrules on bamboo fly rods? Are Orvis bamboo fly rods impregnated? On a tarpon trip, the fish were in deep water so I used a sinking poly leader on my floating line.  Should I have used a full-sinking fly line instead? Is the Albright knot a better knot than the nail knot for attaching a leader to a fly line or backing to a fly line? When connecting pieces of tippet I will normally go up two X sizes, like from 2X to 4X.  Is this wrong? Is it OK to clear a casting lane on a trout stream? What can I do to find bigger trout during the dog days of summer?

Why did drinking feel so motivating? The answer lies in anticipation. Coach Matt explains the neuroscience: Dopamine peaks when a reward is anticipated, not when you take the first sip. This episode reveals how alcohol spikes dopamine up to 4X your normal level, leading to a huge deficit and the "hamster wheel" of drinking. Learn how to consciously cultivate the anticipation of healthier rewards (hobbies, connection, goals) to effectively reprogram your brain, boost your emotional regulation, and move past white-knuckling into effortless freedom.   Download my FREE guide: The Alcohol Freedom Formula For Over 30s Entrepreneurs & High Performers: https://social.alcoholfreelifestyle.com/podcast ★ - Learn more about Project 90: www.alcoholfreelifestyle.com/Project90 ★ - (Accountability & Support) Speak verbally to a certified Alcohol-Free Lifestyle coach to see if, or how, we could support you having a better relationship with alcohol: https://www.alcoholfreelifestyle.com/schedule ★ - The wait is over – My new book "CLEAR" is now available. Get your copy here: https://www.alcoholfreelifestyle.com/clear

The Denver multifamily market just absorbed 9,400 units – about 20% higher than the annual average – while supply continues burning off through 2026. This massive supply wave is creating opportunities for Denver real estate investing 2026 strategies that most investors are missing. Chris Lopez and Richard McGirr, co-founders of Property Llama, break down their 2025 shareholder meeting covering Colorado market divergence, investment strategy shifts, and the company’s evolution into diversified debt fund platforms. With hundreds of Colorado investors served, they reveal what’s working (and what’s not) for Denver real estate investing 2026 and beyond. Market Reality: Single family homes are holding steady with slight declines expected, condos are down 10-20% in recent transactions, and multifamily is trading at 2017 prices with 9 cap returns. Denver ranks in the top 5 hardest-hit metros for rent cuts, with Class A properties offering 3-4 months of concessions that push downward pressure on all rental classes. The supply wave is longer than anticipated, but occupancy is finally trending upward through Q2 2025 data. Cash Flow Strategies for Denver Real Estate Investing 2026: The traditional playbook has fundamentally changed. A room-by-room rental strategy can increase cash flow from $12K to $48K annually on the same property, while selling a rental and investing in 21% debt funds can generate $70K annual income from a property that previously cash flowed $15K. Private lending has emerged as the dominant strategy for Colorado investors seeking 3-4X cash flow increases without tenant management. In This Episode We Cover: Why Denver condos are dropping 10-20% while single family homes hold steady (and what 2026 predictions look like) How the multifamily supply wave created 9 cap opportunities that institutions are now buying The room-by-room rental model that quadruples cash flow (and why most investors won’t do it) Why 1031 exchanges that worked in 2018 now only marginally increase cash flow in 2024 Private lending returns of 12-21% compared to traditional rental property cash flow The active to passive shift happening nationwide (and why single family landlording is ending) How Property Llama found product market fit by focusing exclusively on income funds PL Dynamo 2 fund closure at 99 investor limit and what’s launching Q1 2026 The diversified income fund model with distressed notes, Canadian lending, and commercial opportunities This presentation provides clarity for Denver real estate investing 2026 strategy – whether you’re considering portfolio rebalancing, exploring debt fund diversification, or timing multifamily market entry. Chris and Richard share real client examples, personal portfolio moves (Chris is shifting from 85/15 equity/debt to 50/50), and the due diligence process for upcoming fund launches. Timestamps 00:00 – Welcome & Introduction to Property Llama’s 2025 Event 01:55 – Colorado Single Family vs Condo Market Divergence – Denver Real Estate 2026 Price Trends 02:48 – Colorado Springs Real Estate Trends – Following Denver’s 1-3 Year Lag Pattern 03:55 – Denver Multifamily Supply Wave – Front Range Investment Opportunities Among Crisis 07:14 – Rent Concessions Reality – How Class A Properties Manipulate Colorado Rental Market Data 08:18 – 2026 Market Predictions – Audience Poll on Denver Condo Market Decline & Pricing 13:58 – Room by Room Rental Strategy – 4X Denver Cash Flow Properties Using Co-Living 16:21 – 1031 Exchange Alternatives – Reality Check Comparing 2018 to 2024 Deals 18:00 – Private Lending Real Estate Boom – Active to Passive Investing Shift from Equity to Debt Funds 21:25 – Active to Passive Investing Trend – The End of the Single Family Landlord Era 24:35 – Product Market Fit Journey – How Property Llama Found Focus on Debt Fund Investing Colorado 28:34 – Value-Added Capital Model – Real Estate Portfolio Rebalancing for Debt Funds 31:57 – PL Dynamo 2 Fund Closure – Hitting 99 Investor Limit & Denver Real Estate Investing 2026 Plans 38:00 – Diversified Income Fund Launch – Building Beyond Single Anchor Strategy for Colorado Multifamily Investing Connect with our Hosts Chris Lopez: chris@propertyllama.com Richard McGirr: richard@propertyllama.com Links in Podcast Sign up for the 2026 Portfolio Analysis Mastermind

Linktree: ⁠https://linktr.ee/Analytic⁠Join The Normandy For Additional Bonus Audio And Visual Content For All Things Nme+! Join Here: ⁠https://ow.ly/msoH50WCu0K⁠In this segment of Notorious Mass Effect, host Analytic Dreamz delivers a comprehensive performance and design overview of Whiteout Survival, the blockbuster free-to-play mobile survival strategy game from Century Games.Analytic Dreamz explores the glacial apocalypse setting, core 4X gameplay loop of base-building, resource management, furnace upgrades, hero gacha systems, and intense alliance-based PvP events like State vs. State wars. With over 300 million players worldwide and lifetime revenue exceeding $3 billion in under 2.5 years—including a peak monthly high of $136 million in August 2025—this title stands as a global leader in the SLG genre.Analytic Dreamz examines its aggressive data-driven advertising, rapid growth trajectory, high player ratings of 4.5–4.7 stars, and controversies surrounding pay-to-win mechanics, misleading ads, and monetization pressures.Whether you're a casual survivor or competitive chief, join Analytic Dreamz for an in-depth breakdown of why Whiteout Survival remains a profitable yet divisive mobile phenomenon.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/analytic-dreamz-notorious-mass-effect/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This week in mobile gaming and entertainment:Unity risks another developer revolt with a new Enterprise fee, Warner Bros rejects a $108B Paramount bid in favor of Netflix, and Sensor Tower data shows casino, 4X and Solitaire hybrids dominating both revenue and downloads.What we cover:• Unity's new Enterprise Minimum Commitment Program• Why developers are calling it “blackmail”• How much Unity may charge top studios ($250k–$2M/year)• Netflix vs Paramount: who controls Warner Bros• Why streaming platforms now dictate entertainment power• US vs Global IAP revenue differences• Why 4X dominates globally• Why Solitaire & hybrid mashups are exploding in downloads• DAU charts that reveal ad-monetization giantsGet our MERCH NOW: 25gamers.com/shop--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-2um8eguhf-c~H9idcxM271mnPzdWbipgChapters00:00 — Unity Enterprise fee backlash03:30 — Unity's broken incentives05:20 — Netflix vs Paramount for Warner Bros07:30 — US revenue weather09:00 — Global trends & DAU growth---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me---------------------------------------If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lancaric.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej LancaricDo you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

A shadowed king who hates war leads an “evil” empire with a softer hand than his reputation suggests—and the world still trembles. We dive into Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra, where 4X strategy logic becomes the law of a living isekai: fog of war, resource scarcity, city growth, hero summons, scripted events, and late-game bosses that crash into personal vows and fragile alliances. If you've ever optimized a tech tree at 2 a.m., this story will feel both familiar and unsettling.We unpack Takuto's rise with Atou at his side, the dark elves' loyalty forged through food and trust, and the careful build of Mynoghra from research to production. Isla's arrival as queen of bugs adds domestic muscle and battlefield poise—until a scripted lock forces her sacrifice. That loss cracks the narrative wide open as Caria and Maria transform from attendants into the "Witches of Regret", dispensing ruthless justice on demon generals with powers that read like status effects made real. Along the way, saints clash with witches, brain eaters test diplomacy by terror, and a rogue RPG player snipes the demon lord before fleeing with a censored-name companion, reminding us that systems invite external chaos.What makes Mynoghra stand out is how cleanly it respects game mechanics without hand-waving. The world treats events, classes, and dice as binding rules. Takoto's ethics sharpen under pressure: he rejects needless war, feeds the hungry, and still embraces the clarity of an Ascension victory when Minagura suffers losses. We talk pacing, art choices, boss design, and the show's willingness to commit to consequences. For strategy fans and dark fantasy lovers, it's a compelling blend of empire management, moral ambiguity, and high-stakes combat that earns our 8/10 recommendation.If you enjoyed this breakdown, follow the show, share with a friend who loves 4X strategy games and isekai anime, and leave a quick review so more strategy nerds can find us. What moral line would you draw if the game became your world?Text us for feedback and recommendations for future episodes!Support the showWe thank everyone for listening to our podcast! We hope to grow even bigger to make great things happen, such as new equipment for higher-quality podcasts, a merch store & more! If you're interested in supporting us, giving us feedback and staying in the loop with updates, then follow our ZONE Social Media Portal to access our website, our Discord server, our Patreon page, and other social media platforms! DISCLAIMER: The thoughts and opinions shared within are those of the speaker. We encourage everyone to do their own research and to experience the content mentioned at your own volition. We try not to reveal spoilers to those who are not up to speed, but in case some slips out, please be sure to check out the source material before you continue listening!Stay nerdy and stay faithful,- J.B.Subscribe to "Content for Creators" on YouTube to listen to some of the music used for these episodes!

This week in games, the money moves got messy: Dream Games recalibrates its ambitions, ByteDance keeps loading the mobile war chest, and Arc Games chooses freedom (and spreadsheets) by going independent. We take a look at Where Winds Meet and what it really says about China's next wave of global ambitions, unpack South Korea's newest Blizzard play, and ask the uncomfortable question: how are indie studios actually surviving right now? Spoiler: it's not pretty. On the investor side, VC interest in games keeps cooling, but PlayerUnknown Productions thinks lightning can strike twice. Finally, we zoom out to the battlefield of 4X strategy — the genre's current health, the growing wave of female players, and whether a fresh face like Tile Survive can rewrite the rules. 00:00 Welcome00:22 Introduction and Shills04:26 Dream Games Budget Correction14:06 Bite Dance's Mobile Investments19:22 Arc Games Independence20:52 Where Winds Meet: A New Chinese Game29:17 The South Korea Deal and Blizzard's Business Model31:21 Success and Challenges of Indie Game Studios33:38 VC Investments in Gaming: A Tough Landscape36:12 PlayerUnknown Productions and Their New Game47:37 The State of 4X Strategy Games51:24 The Rise of Female Gamers in 4X Strategy55:48 Tile Survive: A New Contender in 4X Strategy59:56 Conclusion and Future Topics

Roguelites have dominated mobile and Steam for three years — Survivor IO, Vampire Survivors, Habi's new games, and a wave of Steam hits. But the genre is hitting a wall: every run resets too much, and long-term progression is stuck in 2018.In this solo episode, Jakub breaks down the next evolution of the roguelite genre: the imprint system — a mechanic where each run becomes a permanent resource.What you'll learn• Why traditional roguelites suffer from harsh resets• How Uma Musume solved the progression problem with “run → character” imprints• How Chaos Zero Nightmare created a more accessible imprint system• Why deckbuilders (Slay the Spire-style) handle imprints perfectly• Why MegaBong, Bonk roguelites, and Ball X-Pit are missing the key feature• How imprint systems increase retention, investment, and buildcraft• Why the next Western roguelite hit will use this mechanic• Why Habi, Supercell, and 4X devs will adopt it in 2026Key takeawayThe future of roguelites is simple: your best run should never die — it should become your next strongest asset.Get our MERCH NOW: 25gamers.com/shop---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Podcast: Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-2um8eguhf-c~H9idcxM271mnPzdWbipgChapters00:00 — The core problem with roguelites (resets ruin progression)03:10 — Uma Musume: the first full-feature imprint system08:20 — Chaos Zero Nightmare: the streamlined imprint evolution13:10 — Steam roguelites (MegaBong, Ball X-Pit): deep innovation but missing imprint save18:00 — The future: imprint systems will redefine mobile roguelites---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me---------------------------------------If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lancaric.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej LancaricDo you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

En este episodio me senté con Beto Díaz, co-fundador de Kira Financial, para hablar del futuro del dinero y de cómo están construyendo la infraestructura que va a transformar los pagos en Latinoamérica. Conversamos sobre fintech 3.0, remesas digitales, cómo lograron un retorno de 4X, la importancia de adaptarse y el reto de crear equipos que puedan crecer 100 veces.

West Game 2 is the first real King Shot clone built by a Chinese 4X team acquired by Tripledot, layered on top of Frozen City / Whiteout Survival onboarding, and wrapped in Western cowboy aesthetics.In this breakdown, we dive into:• Full onboarding → Lucky Luke opener → King Shot 1:1 copy• Frozen City mechanics, chapter quests, invasion timers• Why 4X innovation happens only in onboarding, not the core• Webshops & D2C: now up to 50% of revenue for some studios• The creative madness: Red Dead cinematics, Idle Lumber, Goblins, Save the Dog, Lens of Jail, ASMR mining, drama Playrix, Sims life-sims, TikTok memes• Why running 1000 creatives in 30 days is “normal” now• And how they cloned King Shot's onboarding in under 7 monthsKey takeawayWest Game 2 is proof: onboarding = everything. Whoever controls the first 10 minutes controls CPI… and 4X revenue.Get our MERCH NOW: 25gamers.com/shop--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-2um8eguhf-c~H9idcxM271mnPzdWbipgChapters00:00 — Why West Game 2 Matters: The First Real King Shot Clone04:20 — Onboarding Breakdown: Lucky Luke → King Shot → Frozen City Mix10:45 — The Chinese Production Engine: 1000 Creatives in 30 Days18:00 — Creative Chaos: Red Dead Cinematics, Goblins, Idle ASMR & More23:30 — The New 4X Meta: Onboarding beats Gameplay + Webshops Rising---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me---------------------------------------If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lancaric.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej LancaricDo you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

As noted earlier, we seem to be having a bit of a space-themed streak at DOS Game Club this year. And it continues with September's game: Ascendancy, a 4X turn-based strategy game from 1995, developed by The Logic Factory. Pick one of the wild and very imaginative alien species featured in this game and get […]

Hey there! I'm Kate from Hello Funnels, and in this episode of The Doing It Online podcast, I'm pulling back the curtain on something that's going to change how you think about funnels forever.I just spent the last six months in deep testing mode—running every possible combination, split-testing ad creative, analyzing conversion data across thousands of funnel visitors.And here's what I discovered: buyer behavior has fundamentally changed.Most sales now happen within the first 1-5 days. Not weeks. Days.If someone doesn't buy from you in that initial window, the chances they'll buy later drop dramatically.Which means if you're still running old-school "long nurture" funnels, you're leaving money on the table.In this episode, I'm sharing the real data, including a hot seat call with a client whose funnel is converting at 9% (more than 4X the industry benchmark) with an average purchase time of less than 24 hours.I'll walk you through why this is happening, what it means for your funnel strategy, and exactly what needs to change if you want your funnels to actually work in today's market.This is the shift that separates funnels that flop from funnels that scale.Let's dive in!Ready to build a funnel designed for today's buyers?Learn more about the Million Dollar Micro Funnel system—the exact framework my clients are using to get 9% conversion rates and sales within 24 hours.

How to 4X your Revenue in 4 Years with Alexis Sikorsky   Most business owners dream about growth, but few know how to scale without chaos. In this episode of Profit Answer Man, Rocky Lalvani talks with Alexis Sikorsky, a strategic advisor who helps founders scale fast and exit strong. Alexis doesn't speak from theory—he built and sold his own Switzerland-based software company, New Access, in a $100M+ private equity deal.   He learned firsthand what it takes to go from exhaustion to exponential growth—and how the right strategy, mindset, and systems can help you 4X your revenue in just four years.   Key Lessons from the Conversation:  Buy, Don't Just Build: Most founders try to grow by grinding harder. Alexis shows why M&A can be a faster, smarter route when done strategically—with the right due diligence and cultural alignment. Don't Confuse Urgent with Important: Entrepreneurs often get stuck fighting fires instead of building vision. The CEO's real job is direction and value creation—not firefighting. Know What You Don't Know: Private equity buyers make money because they see what founders can't. Your blind spots could be worth millions, so get help from people who've done it before. Fire Yourself from the Day-to-Day: If your business can't run without you, it's not scalable—or sellable. Alexis teaches founders to identify the tasks only they can do and delegate the rest. Build a War Chest: Business cycles are inevitable. You need 9–12 months of cash reserves to weather storms and seize opportunities instead of scrambling to survive.   Key Takeaway: What you don't know about your business could be costing you millions. Clarity, cash reserves, and courage to think bigger are what separate sustainable success from burnout.   About Alexis Sikorsky: Alexis Sikorsky is a strategic advisor to founders who are serious about scaling fast and exiting strong. With a nine-figure private equity exit under his belt, Alexis isn't speaking from theory—he's lived the entrepreneurial highs and lows across decades of company building, boardroom negotiation, and international leadership. His flagship book Cashing Out lays out the APEX methodology, a four-part framework (Assess, Plan, Execute, Exit) that demystifies the journey to private equity for founders feeling stuck or overwhelmed by growth and decision fatigue.   Alexis founded, scaled, and sold New Access, a Switzerland-based software company, ultimately closing a $100M+ exit and transitioning into a new chapter as a Special Advisor to ambitious CEOs. Today, through Sikorsky Consulting and KnightScale Partners, he works with growth-stage businesses, typically doing $5M+ in annual revenue, who want to engineer their next chapter or PE exit.   Links: Website: https://www.asikorsky.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexis-sikorsky-consulting/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexissikorsky/   Conclusion: Growth without strategy is just motion. As Alexis shared, success comes when you think like an investor—anticipate risk, build systems, and plan your exit long before you need it.   So, how many seven-figure mistakes are you willing to make? Even six-figure owners can make million-dollar errors without financial clarity. That's why Profit Answer Man exists—to help you keep more of what you earn and build a business that truly serves your life.   #ProfitAnswerMan #BusinessGrowth #PrivateEquity #ScaleYourBusiness #EntrepreneurMindset #MergersAndAcquisitions #CashFlow #ProfitFirst #FinancialFreedom #BusinessStrategy #Leadership   Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@profitanswerman Sign up to be notified when the next cohort of the Profit First Experience Course is available! Profit First Toolkit: https://lp.profitcomesfirst.com/landing-page-page  Relay Bank (affiliate link): https://relayfi.com/?referralcode=profitcomesfirst Profit Answer Man Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/profitanswerman/ My podcast about living a richer more meaningful life: http://richersoul.com/ Music provided by Junan from Junan Podcast Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs.

This month's creative trends episode exposes the real state of mobile UA:We've officially entered the Era of Creative Theft 2.0 - not “heavily inspired,” but direct 1:1 stolen ads, chopped end cards, mirrored clips, watermarks still visible… and nobody cares because they convert 4-5× better.Three mega-trends emerge:1) The “Stolen but Performing” Era• Social casino, idle, 4X… everyone is lifting creatives from other genres.• Teams aren't even recreating the concept - they're copying the whole video, trimming it, mirroring it, or leaving the watermark.• Networks don't police it, platforms don't care, and small studios can't compete with the CPI gap.2) The Golden Age of ASMR / Wood / Cleaning Satisfiers• The “Idle Lumber” effect: anything with chopping, slicing, scrubbing, wood, logs, dust → crushing low CPI.3) The King Shot → Royal Kingdom → Everyone Else Pipeline• King Shot's onboarding + mass battle + RTS-style transitions have reshaped the entire industry's ads.• Royal Kingdom straight-up used the formula for a match-3 playable.• 4X games (Last War, Last Z, Total Battle) are adopting the mass-battle → puzzle fusion.Key takeawayThe best-performing creatives aren't the most original - they're the most optimized. The industry now rewards speed, iteration, theft-based inspiration, and cross-genre pattern-breaking above everything else.Get our MERCH NOW: 25gamers.com/shop--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-2um8eguhf-c~H9idcxM271mnPzdWbipgChapters00:00 — Hook: The “Creative Theft Era” has arrived01:30 — Missing a month & why trends feel different now03:10 — ASMR cleaning & wood: why the motif is everywhere05:20 — Exposed: 1:1 stolen creatives (no end cards, mirrored, trimmed)08:40 — Why theft works: CPI vs LTV beats morals11:50 — The ecosystem problem: no creative police, no consequences14:30 — New industry rule: cross-genre stealing = normal17:40 — King Shot → Royal Kingdom → Everyone copy30:10 — The future: watermark creatives, mirror hacks, and AI hooks43:00 — Wrap-up: where the creative meta goes next---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiarPlease share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

James Lavish, co-managing partner of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and author of The Informationist newsletter, joins Episode 305 of the Julia La Roche Show. In this episode, Lavish explains how the government shutdown has locked nearly $1 trillion in the Treasury General Account, draining liquidity from financial systems and raising concerns about a 2019-style repo crisis as bank reserves fall to dangerous levels. He argues Americans have lost 25% of their purchasing power from 2020 to 2025, and while technology should bring deflation, we instead have persistent 3% inflation because it's necessary to manage $38 trillion in debt through currency debasement. Lavish explains the K-shaped economy where the top 1% gained 8X wealth since 1990 versus 4X for the bottom 50%, noting commercial real estate defaults are spiking and subprime auto lenders are collapsing. When the TGA liquidity eventually floods back into markets, he warns not to mistake it for prosperity—it's currency debasement, which is why he recommends positioning in hard assets like Bitcoin, gold, and real estate. The Fed is trapped between dual mandates with no way out, and while AI stocks may have gotten ahead of themselves risking a market shock, his message is clear: own assets because he's not bullish on the economy, he's bearish on the currency.This episode is brought to you by VanEck. Learn more about the VanEck Rare Earth and Strategic Metals ETF: http://vaneck.com/REMXJuliaLinks: Twitter/X: https://x.com/jameslavish The Informationist: https://jameslavish.substack.com/ The Bitcoin Opportunity Fund: https://www.bitcoinopportunity.fund/ Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction and welcome1:20 - Big picture macro view: Fed battling dual mandates4:30 - Stagflation risk: prices rising as economy rolls over5:10 - Government shutdown removing liquidity from markets7:19 - Treasury General Account (TGA) explained14:21 - 2019 repo crisis explained21:31 - Current concerns about overnight lending market26:18 - Will Fed do QE again?29:03 - Credit markets29:07 - K-shaped economy explained37:08 - Position for currency deterioration38:28 - Why people think 2% inflation is normal40:11 - Lost 25% purchasing power from 2020 to 202540:41 - Technology should bring deflation, not inflation46:30 - Why we need inflation: $38 trillion debt problem50:59 - What's keeping James up at night55:27 - Closing remarks and contact information

We break down Supercell's new twin-stick “boat game” (second alpha): a PvE → PvPvE loop where we farm island quests, haul up to three chests on a fast boat, and can flip a “go bad” switch to steal other players' chests - triggering bounties and protections for non-PK players (revenge respawns).What worksFast, readable boating and clear risk/reward moments when we carry 2–3 chests.A theft moment (“go bad”) that can create highlight-reel clips for UA if tuned right.What doesn't (yet)Flat progression (gear score + light passives/chips) limits long-term goals.Ultra-light economy and shaky matchmaking make the loop feel aimless/punishing.Audience fit feels unclear (Gen-Z, Fortnite-lite vibe vs. strategy/4X loyalists).Market lensSupercell's portfolio still leans on legacy hits; competitors with genre focus + aggressive UA (e.g., strategy/4X) scale more reliably.Without deeper economies, UA-product co-design, and a clearer genre thesis, this boat may never scale past alpha.Key takeawayDepth beats novelty. We need deeper economy + UA-ready moments or this won't sail beyond alpha.Get our MERCH NOW: 25gamers.com/shop--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-2um8eguhf-c~H9idcxM271mnPzdWbipgChapters00:00 Why this alpha matters01:10 Core loop—quests → 3 chests → extract05:00 Twin-stick feel & aiming on mobile07:40 Progression—gear score, passives, chips10:50 “Go bad” theft, bounties, anti-grief15:30 Matchmaking & PvE→PvPvE tension19:10 Economy depth vs. moment-to-moment fun24:20 Portfolio & market reality checks30:30 UA-product integration: what creatives need36:30 What would actually ship (templates & seasons)43:00 Verdict & 2025 predictions---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me---------------------------------------If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lancaric.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric

Interview recorded - 4th of November, 2025On this episode of the WTFinance podcast I had the pleasure of welcoming on Shaun Rein. Shaun is the Founder and Managing Director of the China Market Research Group (CMR), the world's leading strategic market intelligence firm focused on China. During our conversation we spoke about what is happening on the ground in China, the tariff strategy, consolidation in Chinese manufacturing, secular shift in US excellence, End of the American Empire and more. I hope you enjoy!0:00 - Introduction1:49 - What is happening in China?5:29 - Second order tariffs9:42 - Tariff strategy13:11 - China trade unfairness18:04 - Consolidation of China21:19 - More upside in China?23:59 - Secular shift?26:22 - Trade war ending?29:59 - End of the American Empire?Shaun Rein is the Founder and Managing Director of the China Market Research Group (CMR), the world's leading strategic market intelligence firm focused on China. He works with Boards, billionaires, Heads of States, CEOs and senior executives of Fortune 500 & leading Chinese companies, private equity firms, SMEs and long/ hedge funds to develop their China growth, political and investment strategies. Rein authored the international best-sellers "The War for China's Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order," "The End of Cheap China"​ & "The End of Copycat China."​ Publishers Weekly named "Cheap"​ a "Top 10 business book for 2012." The Financial Times called "Copycat"​ "Intriguing" and said of Wallet: “Mr. Rein's insider tales of what it takes to work in contemporary China are insightful...a toolbox for those who want to work with Chinese companies make it a worthwhile read.”Rein is regularly featured in the Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times. He frequently appears on CNN, BBC, MarketPlace, CNBC, Bloomberg, PBS and MSNBC. Rein formerly taught executive education classes for London Business School and was a weekly columnist for CNBC and Forbes. He also wrote a column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Rein is one of the most sought out keynote speakers focused on innovation, consumer trends and the economy in China.Shaun Rein - Website - http://www.cmrconsulting.com.cn/xsyX - https://x.com/shaunreinYouTube -  @shaunrein4708 WTFinance -Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/wtfinancee/Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/67rpmjG92PNBW0doLyPvfniTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wtfinance/id1554934665?uo=4X - https://twitter.com/AnthonyFatseasThumbnail image from - https://basc.berkeley.edu/the-u-s-china-trade-war-whats-next/

Ferenc shares the S&P500 continues to rise despite historically high valuations. As the valuations rise, risk increases. This is driven by emotion, not logic.   Index annuities and life provide unlimited upside potential with no downside market risk. The principle is guaranteed. This ensures you never lose money.    Gains can be locked in at any time. Also, you can set automatic high and low bands to lock in gains.   Ferenc has access to 600+ index options. He has access to proprietary software that includes 1, 3, 5, and 10-year historical returns. This ensures you have the indexes with the highest potential upside and strong track records. Ferenc is typically able to increase index returns 2-4X higher than competitive products because most people do not have the best index options with their index annuity and life products.   If you want more info or compare products contact Ferenc at ferenc@yourpersonalbank.com. The info needed for a no-cost or obligation comparison quote:   1. Age 2. State 3. Amount considering to fund 4. Email

Linktree: ⁠https://linktr.ee/Analytic⁠Join The Normandy For Additional Bonus Audio And Visual Content For All Things Nme+! Join Here: ⁠https://ow.ly/msoH50WCu0K⁠Dive into Segment on Notorious Mass Effect with Analytic Dreamz as we dissect Last War: Survival Game—the 2023 mobile 4X strategy sensation blending zombie apocalypse base building, hero RPG collection, and massive MMO alliance wars. Launched globally by First Fun HK LTD and now published by FUNFLY PTE. LTD., this free-to-play title exploded to over $2B lifetime revenue by Feb 2025, with $1.15B in 2024 alone and peaks of $141M monthly. Android downloads surpass 74M, fueled by viral TikTok/Snapchat ads and Antony Starr's 2024 campaign spiking 12.5M installs. Explore HQ progression to Level 30, resource raids (6 high-reward/day), auto-combat squads, UR heroes like Kimberly and Tesla, and seasonal events (Crimson Plague, Polar Storm). Analytic Dreamz analyzes 4.6★ ratings, P2W whale dominance ($10K+ spends), misleading shooter ads (

Interview recorded - 27th of October, 2025On this episode of the WTFinance podcast I had the pleasure of welcoming back Bob Elliott. Bob is the Co-Founder & CIO of Unlimited Funds. During our conversation we spoke about his outlook on the economy, the AI boom, why households are struggling, Stagflation, markets and more. I hope you enjoy! 0:00 - Introduction0:45 - Outlook on the economy?3:45 - AI boom6:50 - Employment10:18 - Economic data not making sense11:56 - Government shutdown15:36 - Stagflation17:17 - FED actions19:20 - US the strongest economy?20:30 - What does this mean for markets?24:40 - Bond yields26:00 - Losing control of bond market28:57 - Other assets?30:54 - One message to takeaway?Bob Elliott is the Co-Founder, CEO & CIO of Unlimited, which uses machine learning to create index replication ETFs of 2&20 style alternative investments like hedge funds, venture capital & private equity. Prior to founding Unlimited, Bob was a Senior Investment Executive at Bridgewater Associates where he served on the Investment Committee (G7) and created investment strategies across equities, fixed income, credit, exchange rates, and commodities, including many used in the flagship Pure Alpha Fund. He also built and led Ray Dalio's personal investment research team for almost a decade. He's the author of hundreds of Bridgewater's widely read Daily Observations and directly counselled some of the world's foremost policy makers and institutional investor on economic and investing issues. Bob has also served as an advisor and executive at several startups including CircleUp, an investment company focused on early-stage consumer brands. There he revamped the investment strategy for the company's $150mln venture funds leveraging big data approaches to improve decision making. He was also the co-founder of GiveWell, a startup charity evaluator which now directs more than $500mln in annual contributions. Bob holds a BA in History and Science from Harvard. Bob Elliott - Website - https://www.unlimitedfunds.com/X - https://twitter.com/bobeunlimited?s=21&t=bEWfVJjh6KcziPA0zpyEPALinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ttoillebobWTFinance -Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/wtfinancee/Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/67rpmjG92PNBW0doLyPvfniTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wtfinance/id1554934665?uo=4X - https://twitter.com/AnthonyFatseas

Interview recorded - 17th of October, 2025On this episode of the WTFinance podcast I had the pleasure of welcoming back Michael Howell. Michael is the Founder & Managing Director of CrossBorder Capital.During our conversation we spoke about the current liquidity outlook, what is happening in China, whether Main Street and Equities can continue to go up and more. 0:00 - Introduction0:19 - Current outlook on liquidity markets25:20 - China31:14 - Cycles speeding up? 32:50 - Main Street and equities going up? 36:50 - One message to takeaway?Michael Howell is CEO of CrossBorder Capital, a London-based FCA registered, independent research and investment company that he founded in 1996. Previously he was Head of Research for Baring Securities and Research Director of Salomon Brothers Inc, the US investment bank. The liquidity methodology he pioneered monitors cross-border flows and Central Bank behaviour across some 80 countries world-wide. Liquidity flows are a central part of CrossBorder Capital's asset allocation advice, which is currently provided to major global investors, including institutional asset managers, government agencies, Central Banks and endowment funds. Michael has been in financial markets since 1981 and is a regular conference speaker and media commentator. He graduated from Bristol and London Universities with a finance doctorate, specialising in Fixed Income.Michael Howell -Website - https://crossbordercapital.com/X - https://twitter.com/crossbordercapLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-howell-357b1416/?originalSubdomain=ukWTFinance -Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/wtfinancee/Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/67rpmjG92PNBW0doLyPvfniTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wtfinance/id1554934665?uo=4X - https://twitter.com/AnthonyFatseas

What happens when a Chinese studio perfects fake funnels? You get X-Clash - a 4X strategy game disguised as 5 different mini games.

Trail boss Duncan Ferris is on the podcast! Duncan Ferris has lived two MTB lives: from 4X racer and World Cup track builder to shaping the UK's most ridden bike park trails at BikePark Wales. In this episode, Duncan takes us from the Bristol BSX scene, to building World Cup 4X tracks like Schladming, Vigo and Villingen and finally chasing down the National Champs jersey after 20 years. We dive deep into trail building psychology, why braking bumps form where they shouldn't, why variety in a crew is essential and how riders unlock creativity on a trail. Plus Duncan shares the BikePark Wales origin story, the dream project that became Vanta with Red Bull and Laurie Greenland, wild tales of dynamite on trail builds and digging up grenades. We hope you enjoy this episode with one of the true legends of UK mountain biking.  The Ride Companion Christmas Ride at BikePark Wales! Episode Sponsors:-  - Hiplok → Head on over to hiplok.com/trc to claim your exclusive offer and keep YOUR bikes YOURS. - Ride more for less with BPWs weekday uplift bundles. You can treat yourself to a bundle of 2,4,6 or 10 uplifts. Valid for use 12 months from the date of purchase so you can rest assured you can rip the UK's biggest bike park as much as you want! bikeparkwales.com/uplift-bundles Please note: Bundles cannot be used to make multiple bookings on the same date. - WORX Tools → 15% off the full range with code THERIDECOMPANION: uk.worx.com - Looking for a new car or van and don't want to deal with dodgy dealers? Check out cargurus.co.uk Get early access & ad-free episodes → https://www.patreon.com/theridecompanion You can also support our long term partners: - Marin Bikes: marinbikes.com/gb - Focus Bikes: focus-bikes.com - HUEL: Get 15% OFF with code 'RIDE' at huel.com/ - Hiplok: https://hiplok.com/the-ride-companion  - Play Fantasy Downhill at The Race Companion: theracecompanion.com instagram.com/theracecompanion - Get 10% off Troy Lee Designs with code 'theridecompanion' at saddleback.avln.me/c/OzduCWvjtcOr - Athletic Greens: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs at athleticgreens.com/RIDECOMPANION - Compex: Get 20% off with code ‘THERIDECOMPANION' at compex.com/uk/ - Worx: Get 15% off with code ‘THERIDECOMPANION' at worx.com - LAKA: Get 30 days of FREE insurance with code ‘RIDECOMPANION30' at laka.co - HKT Products: Use code ‘PODCAST' for 10% off the entire site. Follow Olly Wilkins Instagram @odub_23 YouTube @owilkins23 The Ride Companion Instagram @theridecompanion YouTube @TheRideCompanion YouTube clips and BTS channel @moreridecompanion Get official Ride Companion merch, find old episodes and more theridecompanion.co.uk

In this Two & a Half Gamers solo episode, Jakub Remiar breaks down how UA product funnels and templatization dominate every major studio playbook - from River Game's $7M/day 4X empire to Habby's action roguelite evolution.

The game-changing insight for scaling a real estate business without massive expense starts right here. Inside this mastermind recap, we expose how top operators use a radical real estate lead conversion strategy to 4X your real estate business volume using the Follow Up Boss system. You don't need to spend more on ads; you need to shift your focus from "salesperson" to real estate owner and implement the right systems.This episode dives deep into the strategic levers that separate the million-dollar operations from the struggling agents. We reveal the secret of the Hybrid agent investor model: a high-profit strategy combining traditional retail with the lightning-fast wholesaling real estate cash flow.Discover the non-obvious operational truths that allow a single team to handle 100 contracts a month:✅ Real estate lead conversion strategy: Learn how optimizing just two levers can instantly multiply your current business volume.✅ The Hybrid Model: Understand why the high profit margins on the investing side (double retail's rip) and the rapid wholesaling cash cycle (36 days) are the key to consistent growth.✅ Systemization: Why the move from a basic IDX website to a modified CRM like Follow Up Boss is the essential next step for real estate business scaling and efficiency. We discuss Follow Up Boss action plan setups for automating deal flow.✅ Future-Proofing: An exclusive look at how top operators are preparing to automate real estate listing coordination with AI, dramatically cutting administrative costs.✅ The Mindset: How to achieve the crucial shift from salesperson to real estate owner mindset for sustained, low-cost growth.Ready to Get more leads & conversion without doing additional marketing even with low website traffic? This is the blueprint for the serious real estate professional.

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, here with our first-ever Patreon podcast episode! We're going to chat about: ⭐️ How we're feeling about the BIG MOVE. ⭐️ How to think about clothes after a significant size change. What even IS your style now?! ⭐️Figuring out fall uniforms! ⭐️ Diet culture in disaster prep. ⭐️ The one thing we wish straight-sized style bloggers would do differently. And so much more! To hear the full conversation, you'll need to be a paid subscriber. Reminder: Substack subscribers, make sure to redeem your gift to read this newsletter for FREE!

After 5+ years working with early and growth stage companies, I created the Customer Insights Roadmap, a 4-phase process that helps founders/CEOs and their teams understand their customers deeply, translate those insights into clear and compelling positioning and messaging, and then scale growth in a way that works for your specific target buyer. It's the exact process I take my clients through and it all starts with the hard work: real conversations with your customers. We run this program and it's not uncommon to see faster sales cycles and even 4X closed won deals.Read about the Customer Insights Roadmap: furmanovmarketing.com/blog/customer-insights-roadmapRead more about the Content Strategy Canvas: furmanovmarketing.com/blog/content-strategyFor more content, subscribe to Building With Buyers wherever you like to listen, let me know what episodes you're into, and don't forget to leave a review if you're lovin' the show.Music by my talented daughter.Anna on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/annafurmanov⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠furmanovmarketing.com⁠⁠⁠⁠One Insight newsletter: ⁠⁠Subscribe⁠

We're all searching for happiness, but what if we've been looking in all the wrong places? In this deeply personal episode, Gabby shares the single most important practice she's learned in over 20 years of sobriety. It's not about a massive breakthrough; it's about the profound power of small, daily miracles. Gabby opens up about her past struggles with addiction and fear to reveal how she built a foundation of unshakeable faith—one prayer, one sign, and one surrendered fear at a time. Discover the simple yet life-changing practice that can carry you through your darkest moments and prove that the Universe always has your back.To mark 20 years of sobriety Gabby is fundraising for an organization close to her heart—McCall Behavioral Health—who work in her local community to help individuals heal from substance use disorders. Gabby will be matching all donations made. If you feel called to support, you can donate here https://mccallbhn.org/Strengthen your faith with Gabby's FREE free meditation to connect with your Spirit Guides: https://bit.ly/40yZD4E Join Gabby for the Trust the Universe 21-day Challenge and learn how to co-create your dream life with the Universe http://bit.ly/4eTlKZxGet Gabby #1 New York Times bestselling book The Universe Has Your Back https://amzn.to/43Byn7oRecommended practice for this episode: gabby coaching members check out the Surrender to the Universe meditation inside your app. Not a member? Try it out for free http://bit.ly/46tnCWT If you feel you need additional support, please consult this list of safety, recovery and mental health resources. Disclaimer: This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from any psychological or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified health professional.Sponsors:Bobbie is offering an additional 10% off your first order with code: GABBY. Visit hibobbie.com for more details.Head over to iRestore.com and use code GABBY for our show's exclusive discounts on the iRestore EliteHead over to eightsleep.com/deargabby and use the code DEARGABBY to get $350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra and a 30 day trial.Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 free months of the Levels annual mebership when you use my link, levels.link/GABBYUse my promo code GABBY and get $20 off at holisticgoddess.com/GABBYThe Fits Everybody collection is available in sizes XXS to 4X. You can shop now at SKIMS.com and SKIMS stores. Select 'podcast' in the survey and be sure to select Dear Gabby in the dropdown menu.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, our guest discussed why retail still outpaces e-commerce 4X. Learn how Amazon-proven brands land on Costco, Target, & Walmart shelves with his insider playbook.   What if your online brand could conquer the retail world, just like it did on Amazon? Join us as we chat with Doug Harding, an expert in navigating the complex transition from online selling to retail dominance. Doug shares invaluable insights into why retail remains a powerhouse, accounting for about 80% of US sales, and how online successes can pave the way for tangible, store-shelf victories. From strategic placement in major retailers like Costco, Walmart, and Target to the essential role of branding and social media in capturing buyer attention, this episode is packed with actionable advice for Amazon sellers ready to make the leap.   We unpack the challenges of retail distribution and explore the sophisticated logistics behind ensuring your product stands out in stores. Doug explains how refining packaging and leveraging distribution partners can smooth the path from online clicks to retail checkout aisles. Discover the financial strategies that can support this shift, including creative financing options like private equity and factoring, which have helped brands like Bertello pizza ovens expand from a Shark Tank pitch to a household name in major retail chains.   For those contemplating retail expansion, we highlight the potential for impressive sales growth and the unique considerations of wholesale cost structures. Our discussion covers the nuances of retail pricing and profit margins, emphasizing the importance of maintaining brand integrity while negotiating store placements. As we explore the opportunities and strategies for retail growth, you'll gain fresh perspectives on why retail is far from dead and how it can be a robust avenue for your business's future success. Tune in for a wealth of wisdom on harnessing retail opportunities and nurturing sustainable business growth. In episode 466 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Doug discuss: 00:00 - The Power of Retail Expansion for Amazon Sellers 04:30 - Changing Perspectives on Online Retail 07:26 - Navigating Retail Distribution Challenges 15:45 - Retail Pull Strategy Implementation Guidance 17:13 - Maximizing Retail Placement and Distribution 20:56 - Understanding Retail Shelf Placement Strategy 24:55 - Packaging Strategies for Retail Success 31:15 - Retail Logistics and Distribution Challenges 37:17 - Subscription Fees and Dominant Retailers 40:50 - Retail Product Launch and Distribution 42:54 - Shark Tank Product Success Story 50:23 - Retail Margin and Cost Structure 57:42 - Margin Analysis in Retail Sales  1:01:16 - Challenges of Online Advertising 1:03:50 - Exploring Retail Opportunities for Growth

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!We are Corinne Fay and Virginia Sole-Smith. These episodes are usually just for our Extra Butter membership tier — but today we're releasing this one to the whole list. So enjoy! (And if you love it, go paid so you don't miss the next one!) Episode 212 TranscriptCorinneToday is a family meeting episode. We're catching up on summer breaks, back to school, and a whole bunch of diet culture news stories that we've been wanting to discuss with you all.VirginiaWe're also remembering how to make a podcast, because we haven't recorded together in like six weeks. And it didn't start off great. But I think we're ready to go now.CorinneSomeone definitely said, “What day is it?”VirginiaIt's hard coming out of summer mode. I don't know if you feel that because you don't have kids, during back to school, but it is a culture shift.CorinneI don't think I feel the back to school thing as much, but I'm still in Maine, and it's actively fall. It's actively getting cold, and I'm just like, what is happening? I feel this pressure to do something, but I'm not sure what? Hibernate?Virginia“Should I buy a notebook? Should I be wearing fleece? I could go either way.” I don't know. It's weird. It is the start of fall. So we are moving into fall mindset. But like, don't rush me, you know? The dahlias bloom till first frost. That's my summer.CorinneSummer is so brief.VirginiaI'm having a lot of clothing feelings right now. I am not in a good place getting dressed, and it is for sure weather related, shoulder season-related. I'm in my annual conundrum of when do the Birkenstocks go away? When must our toes be covered for polite society? Am I showing arms? I just I don't even know how to get dressed. I hate all my clothes. Everything's terrible.CorinneI think this is part of what I'm feeling. I don't have enough warm clothes and I also don't want to buy another pair of sweatpants.VirginiaAnd you're traveling. So you're like, “I have warm clothes at home.” Didn't bring them because you didn't understand, even though you grew up in Maine and should remember that fall starts quite early there.CorinneI need to get it tattooed on my body. Bring a sweater, bring sweatpants.VirginiaWell, to be fair for this Maine trip, you were really focused on your sister's wedding. You had your nephew. You've had a lot going on.CorinneI was very focused on August, and really not thinking about September.VirginiaWill we even exist after? I mean, that's how it always is when you're gearing up for a big event, the post-event doesn't exist.And I don't know if you do the thing where you're like, well, I can deal with that after the big event. And then suddenly it's after the big event. You're like, well, now there's 47 things I need to deal with.CorinneI absolutely do that. Now I'm like, wait. How and when do I get back to New Mexico? Am I going back to New Mexico ever? In which case maybe I do need to buy sweatpants?VirginiaIt's so hard. Even without a wedding —I feel like all summer, because I have pretty skeleton childcare and I'm wanting to take time off, and it's a privilege that our job allows some flexibility like that, so when I get requests to, like, do a podcast, do a special thing. I'm like, “Talk to me in September. I can't do it this summer. Summer mode Virginia can't do anything extra!” And now I've just spent the week saying no to lots of things, because September me can't do it either. That was folly. I should have just said no the first time!That's one of those life lessons I'm always relearning that's really funny. If it's not an instant yes, it's a no. And I so often fall into the trap of it's not an instant yes, so let me kick that can down the curb a little bit, and then then I feel ruder because they come back and I'm like, no, I'm sorry. Actually, we were never going to do that.CorinneAs someone who's been on the other side of that where, like, I'll reach out to someone for the Style Questionnaire, and they'll be like, “Oh, can you ask me in two months?” And then when I reach out in two months, and they're like, “No.”VirginiaTotally. I'm on the other side of it all the time when we're booking podcast guests. So I'm completely aware of how shitty it feels. So I have a resolution. Summer Virginia just has to say no to things and not push it to Fall Virginia. Everyone hold me accountable next summer, because I'm so sorry to everybody I've said no to this week, but September is a real intense parenting month. There are just a lot of moving parts.I get 62 emails a day from the school. The middle school just announced back to school night will be tomorrow. They told us yesterday! One cool thing is, my older kid is in seventh grade now, so I no longer have to scramble for babysitters, which is a real achievement unlocked. Although she's going to realize at some point that she should increase her rates with me.CorinneOh, you pay her!VirginiaFor stuff where I'm going to be out of the house and need her to put her sister to bed. It's one thing, if I'm like, “I'm going to the store, you guys don't want to come.” Fine. You can doodle around at home. And it's not even really babysitting. She's going to ignore her the whole time. But I'm going to be out from 6 to 8pm tomorrow night. I need her to actually make sure her younger sibling gets in pajamas and brushes teeth and, moves towards bed. I'm not expecting them to be in bed when I get home, but I would like them to not be nowhere close.CorinneThat's really sweet.VirginiaPlus we have some big stuff in the works for both Burnt Toast and Big Undies, which we cannot discuss just yet. Yes, I am actively teasing it for you all.CorinneYou're going to bring that up now?! I feel like we should mention it at the end.VirginiaI think we can mention it whenever we feel like? I think they're probably like, “Why are they both doing reader surveys? What's going on?” And we can't say yet, but there's something going on, and it's also requiring a lot of our time and attention.CorinneWe're really busy. But I think it's going to be really good, and everyone's going to love it.VirginiaIn the meantime, though: What are we wearing? Real talk, what are we wearing to get through this weird it's not summer, it's not fall, it's some hybrid state. Are you still wearing open toed shoes? Sandals?CorinneNo, I'm not.VirginiaOkay. Should I stop, too?CorinneI mean, I'm only not because I'm cold. It depends on if you're cold. I also think now is kind of the perfect time for socks with sandals.VirginiaMost of my sandals are something between my toes style. CorinneOh, I was thinking, like, socks with Birkenstocks.VirginiaAh! I do have some of the two strap Birkenstocks, and I don't tend to wear them a lot in summer. Maybe I should experiment!CorinneI feel like, when you wear socks with the two strap Birkenstocks, they become really cozy.VirginiaI don't wear them a lot in summer because I don't have particularly wide feet, and they're a little wide on me. But the sock would solve for that! And they would be cozy… all right, I'm going to experiment with this, as part of my shoulder season style.CorinneI'm still figuring out my fall must haves, which is one of my favorite topics. Although I will say I feel like this year I've seen a lot of people posting like, “I don't want to hear about back to school, or I don't want to hear about fall fashion.”VirginiaI have terrible news for people about this podcast. CorinneI feel it's very light hearted. It could be literally anything like, who cares? We are entering fall, so…VirginiaTime is passing.CorinneI am getting cold. I do want to put on socks with my sandals and sweatshirts.VirginiaTrigger warning for anyone who is not available for a fall fashion conversation.CorinneMaybe by the time this comes out, people will be ready.I know this is like florals for spring, but I'm feeling for fall… brown pants.VirginiaWait, what? You're blowing my mind? You've been feeling brown for a little while. CorinneBrown has been ramping up. I'm wearing brown pants right now.VirginiaIs it one of your colors, as a true spring?CorinneWell, I do think there are definitely some camels. And I think brown is preferable to black. So I'm thinking brown pants instead of black pants.VirginiaOh, I don't even know what I'm thinking about pants. I'm thinking frustration with pants. I have my one pair of jeans that I reliably wear. I think I need to order another pair in case they stop making them. I'm at a scarcity mindset point with those Gap jeans. I mean, they aren't going to stop making them. They've had them for years, but I just feel like I need an insurance policy.CorinneDo you fit other Gap pants, or just the jeans?VirginiaI only buy that one pair of jeans. I mean, I generally try not to shop at the Gap because they do not have a plus size section.CorinneBut they do have some really cute stuff.VirginiaIt's gross though! Make it bigger.CorinneIf it fits you, maybe you should buy it.VirginiaCorinne is like, “Or counterpoint, don't take a stand.”CorinneI'm always sending links to my straight-size sister for stuff at the Gap that I think she should buy.VirginiaThey do have some really cute stuff, but it infuriates me that Old Navy can make plus sizes, and Gap cannot, and Banana Republic really cannot. It's just like, hello, class system, capitalism. It's so revolting.CorinneOh, my God. Do you know what else I'm feeling outraged about? I went thrift shopping here a couple weeks ago, and I found some vintage Land's End that was in sizes that they don't make anymore.VirginiaWow, that's rude.CorinneIt was a 4X! So they used to be way more 26/28 or 28/30. So they also, at some point, kind of cut back.VirginiaThey do, at least legitimately have a section called plus size, though.CorinneThey do, but it clearly used to be bigger.VirginiaNo, no, no. I'm not saying it's great. I am wearing my favorite joggers a lot, because I think I'm really resisting the shift back to hard pants.CorinneHow do you feel about trousers, like a pleated trouser kind of pant?VirginiaIs that comfortable for working from home? A pleated trouser?CorinneWell, I feel like they're comfortable because they're kind of baggy but narrower at the bottom, you know?VirginiaI do love a tapered ankle. I also unpaused my Nuuly. And I did get a blue corduroy pair of pants from them that it hasn't been quite cold enough to wear because shoulder seasons. Corduroy, to me is like a real like we are fully in cold weather fabric. And when it's 50 in the morning, but 75 by lunchtime, am I going to be hot in corduroys? I guess I should just start wearing them and see.CorinneAre they jeans style? VirginiaThey're slightly cropped so that's another reason to wear them now, while I can still have bare ankles. They're slightly cropped and slightly flared, and they're like a royal blue corduroy.They're Pilcro, which is an Anthropologie brand and I know we feel gross about Anthropologie. But when it comes to pants, I think Corinne is saying we can't have moral stances because pants are so hard to find. Other things, yes.CorinneIt's just hard.VirginiaI'm not excited about clothes right now. I want to feel more excited. Maybe I need to think about what my fall must haves are. Maybe I need to make a pin board or something.CorinneI think that's a good idea. Is there anything you're feeling excited about? I remember the last episode you were talking about those Imbodhi pants.VirginiaOh yeah. They've really become lounge around the house pants, and they're great, but they're very thin. Imbodhi feels like a brand you could not wear once it gets cold.Although, the jumpsuit I have from them in periwinkle—which does feel like a very summery color to me—I also got black. And over the summer it felt a little too black jumpsuit. It felt like too formal or something. But I've been enjoying it as a transition piece. I am still wearing it with sandals. I think it would look cute with maybe my Veja sneakers, though, and then layering over my denim shirt from Universal Standard, like open over it.I'm glad we're talking about this, because that's what I'm going to wear to back to school night tomorrow night, which is a high pressure dressing occasion.CorinneI can see that.VirginiaYou don't want to look like you tried too hard, but you also don't want to look like you came in pajamas. Lots of yoga moms, a lot of pressure. Okay, I'm going to wear that black jumpsuit. I'm glad we talked about that. That's been a good transition piece.CorinneYeah, okay, well, speaking of transitions, I want to ask you about something else. Are you familiar with the Bechdel Test?VirginiaYes.CorinneDon't you think we should have a Bechdel test for anti-fatness? And/or diets? Like, does this piece of culture have a fat character who's not the bad guy, or on a weight loss journey, or being bullied for their size?VirginiaOohhh… OK, so what would our terms be? They can't be the fat villain.CorinneWell, I feel like there's one list for anti fatness, and one would be a piece of culture or whatever that doesn't discuss dieting or weight loss. And I don't know if it should all be one under one Bechdel test umbrella, or if it should be two different tests.VirginiaI feel like it's related. Wait, I need to look up the actual Bechdel Test criteria.CorinneIt's like, does the movie have two female characters talking about something other than a man.VirginiaThe work must feature at least two women.They must talk to each other. And their conversation must be about something other than a man.I was just watching Your Friends and Neighbors, that new John Hamm show about super rich people stealing from each other, and it's very entertaining, but it fails the Bechdel test so dramatically. It's got Amanda Peet in it! She's so smart and funny, and all she does is talk about her ex husband and how much she loves him. And I'm just like, fail, fail, fail. Anyway, okay, I love this idea.CorinneSo it's like, does it have a fat character?VirginiaWait, I think it should have more than one fat character.CorinneThat bar is too high. I feel like we have to be able to name something that passes the test. And what are we calling the test? The Burnt Toast Test?VirginiaWe can workshop names in the comments.CorinneWe need a famous fat person to name it after, maybe.VirginiaWell, I guess Allison Bechdel named it after herself. So it could be the Fay test, because you did this. The Corinne Fay test.CorinneOh, God.So it has to have one fat character, they have to talk about something other than weight loss, and they can't be the villain.VirginiaI would like them not to be the sidekick, too. I think it's a central fat character.CorinneCan we name anything that passes?VirginiaShrill by Lindy West. And Too Much. Well, Lena Dunham doesn't totally pass the Bechdel Test, but she passes the fat test.CorinneSee, it gets very complicated. This is intersectionality!VirginiaWe strive for an intersectional world where the shows pass all the tests. This is such an interesting topic. I love this.CorinneI was also thinking about it because on my drive out, I read two of these Vera Stanhope mysteries. Have you read any of these?VirginiaI have not.CorinneThe main detective woman is fat, and I feel like it' mostly fine. Like, 90% of the time they're just talking about her, she's fat, and she's sloppy. She's a sloppy fat person. And then, like, occasionally, there'll be like, a sentence or two where I'm like, Ooh, I didn't like that.VirginiaIt's so deflating when you have something that's seeming good, and then it takes a turn on you real fast.CorinneSo would that pass the the fat Bechdel Test? Or whatever? Probably would.VirginiaBecause it's as good as we can get.CorinneShe's the main character and not talking about dieting, really.VirginiaYeah, wait, so where does it fall apart for you?CorinneI should have brought an example, but I feel like occasionally there will be narration about her, and it's suddenly like, “her body was disgusting,” you know? VirginiaOh God! I was thinking she maybe lumbered, or she sat heavily, or something. And you're like—CorinneYes. She sat heavily, that kind of thing. And I'm like, okay, sure.But occasionally there's just a twinge where I'm like, oh, you do kind of hate fat people.VirginiaI would then like that author to read Laura Lippman's work. Because Laura Lippman—regular Burnt Toasty! Hi, Laura!—has been doing such good work as a thin author to really work on her fat representation. And I just read Murder Takes a Vacation, which is one of Laura's most recent novels, and it's such a good read. Her protagonist, Mrs. Blossom, I believe was previously a side character in other novels who now has her own book. And the way she writes about body stuff in there is like… Laura's been doing the work. She's been really doing the work. It for sure, passes the Fay Fat Test.CorinneThat's awesome.VirginiaSo everyone check that out. And I would like Ann Cleeves to be reading Laura Lippman.Should we talk about airplanes? Are you in a safe space to talk about airplane feelings?CorinneSure. Yes.VirginiaCorinne was just quoted in The Washington Post, which is very exciting, alongside Tigress Osborne, friend of the show, Executive Director of NAAFA, about how Southwest Airlines is changing their passenger of size policy. Do you want to brief us on what's happening there?CorinneSo Southwest has had a policy in which a “customer of size,” meaning a person who doesn't fit between two plane arm rests, can book two seats and be refunded for the second seat. Or you could show up at the airport day of, and ask for two seats. And not have to pay up front and then be refunded.And in the past couple of months, this policy has somehow gotten really wobbly. I've heard all these anecdotal stories about people showing up at the airport and having Southwest tell them, “You're not going to be able to do this anymore.” Like, don't expect to show up and be able to book a second seat. You need to do it in advance. Blah, blah, blah.Now Southwest has come out and said they're changing the policy. They're also implementing assigned seating, which they didn't used to have. So going forward, you are going to have to book two seats in advance, and you will only be refunded if there are empty seats on the plane. Which, when are there ever empty seats?VirginiaThere are never empty seats on the plane? Never happens.I don't understand, because you needed two seats before, you still need two seats. So why does it matter whether there's an empty seat or not? My brain breaks trying to follow the logic.CorinneI think the logic says like they could have sold the second seat to someone else.VirginiaBut then they're not selling seats that work for people who are paying money to be there. Like, they're taking your money, but if you can't fit on the plane, then they just took your money. It's so shady,CorinneAnd people who don't need a whole seat don't pay less.VirginiaOver the age of two, your children do not get discounts for the fact that, they are using a third of a seat. You pay the same price for a child. CorinneYep. It's really sad, and it's making life harder and sadder for a lot of people.VirginiaI'm curious if another airline will step up on this. I think NAAFA has been doing a good job of making noise about this. I think people are putting pressure on them. It will be interesting if someone else realizes this is like a marketing opportunity.CorinneI think, they absolutely will not.VirginiaWell, I'm not naive enough to think someone would do it just because it's the right thing to do. But I'm hoping maybe one of Southwest's direct competitors would realize it's an opportunity.CorinneBut I think that Southwest previously was the that airline. I think they were using that to their advantage, and now I think they've just been like, “It's not worth it.” I think Alaska has the same policy where you can book two seats, and then if there is an empty seat, they'll refund it.VirginiaWell that's great because Alaska flies so many places, people need to go.CorinneWell, if you're in the if you're in the part of the country where I live, they do! But.VirginiaOh! That's good to know.CorinneI think they're more on a competition level with Southwest versus like United or something, right? I don't think United or Delta even has a customer of size policy.VirginiaThey've never cared.CorinneThere's no way to even book a second ticket for yourself, even if you want to just straight up pay for it.VirginiaIt leaves you the option of figuring out if you can afford business class to have a bigger seat. And that makes flying so much more expensive.CorinneRight? And it's also just like, does business class fit everyone? Probably not.VirginiaWell, we're mad about that, but I did, like seeing you in the Washington Post article saying smart things. So thank you. Thanks your advocacy.Let's see what else has been going on… The Guardian had this interesting piece, which I'm quoted in a little bit, by Andrea Javor. She's articulating something I've seen a few people starting to talk about, which is the experience of being on Ozempic and not losing weight from it.And I think this is an interesting kind of under the radar piece of the whole GLP1s discourse. Some folks are non-responders, whether because they stay on a lower dose by choice, and it improves their numbers, but they don't really lose weight, or some folks just don't really lose weight on it. Her piece really articulates her feelings of shame and failure that this thing that's supposed to be a silver bullet didn't work for her.CorinneWhen I started reading the piece, I was extremely confused, because the the author has diabetes, but type one diabetes, and these drugs don't help with type one diabetes. She eventually goes on it, just for weight loss. So what it didn't work for was weight loss, And I think it actually may have ended up helping with her, like A1C, and stuff. I agree that it does a good job of looking at the feelings that come along with that. And I do think, this does happen, and it's not being talked about as as much as it's happening probably.VirginiaIt feels important to highlight it in this moment where we have Serena Williams talking, about her husband's telehealth company and promoting her use of GLP1s. And we had a great chat on Substack chat about the whole Serena Williams of it all. So I won't rehash that whole discourse here. I also think that's a conversation where I want to hear from Black women. Chrissy King wrote an incredible piece. I also really appreciated the conversation that Sam Sanders, Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones had on Vibe Check about it. So, I don't need to get into Serena's personal choices. But it does mean, we have another huge, very admired celebrity pushing into the conversation again to say, “This is this magic trick. This is the thing I was always looking for. It finally worked for me” And we are all vulnerable to that messaging. So it's important to read stories like this one and understand oh, it really doesn't actually work for everybody. Setting aside whether we think people should be pursuing weight loss, this isn't necessarily going to be guaranteed, amazing results. CorinneAnother interesting article that I thought maybe would want to mention is the the one in The Cut about ARFID.VirginiaThis was a great cover story in New York Magazine. The headline is The Monster at the Dinner Table, and it's basically just encapsulating that ARFID has really been on the rise in recent years, and I think a lot of that is just because now we know what it is and we can diagnose it.But it did include a pretty interesting discussion of what causes kids to lose the instinct to eat, what things get in the way of it. Like, it can be trauma, it can be a feature of autism. It can be a choking experience, all sorts of different things.CorinneARFID is one of those conditions that I feel like I barely knew about before TikTok, and then I've just seen so much stuff about it on Tiktok.VirginiaIt only became a diagnosis in 2013, so it's very, very new. My kiddo would have been diagnosed with it, if it was more fully in the vernacular at that point, but it wasn't. So we were just told it was a “pediatric feeding disorder” type of thing. But it was very vague.I think it's great it's getting more attention. Both for kids and adults. It can be such a source of anxiety and shame for parents. It is so much work. It is very difficult, and it's harder than it should be because of diet culture, because of all the pressure put on parents to feed our kids certain ways. The backlash against ultraprocessed foods is really not helping anyone navigate ARFID. I can't underscore that enough, really not helping. No one needs to feel shame about your kid living on chicken nuggets or frozen burritos or whatever it is.CorinneThe amount of stigma against people who eat certain ways is nuts.VirginiaIt's nuts and it's sad.CorinneYeah it's socially isolating.VirginiaIt is harder to share, right? It's very socially isolating, and it's sad for the people around them. Anytime you're navigating eating together with someone with food restrictions, it does create barriers and extra work and more you have to navigate.But if we didn't have that layer of stigma over it, where it's like, it's probably the mom's fault, if only they like more whole foods at home, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, if we didn't have all of that, you could focus just on the logistics are hard enough. You don't need the shame.So many sad topics. Airlines are terrible. Virginia doesn't have any clothes to wear. ARFID is sad. Do we have anything to bring it up?CorinneWell, our exciting news? VirginiaOh, right! We are working on some very fun things.It is exciting to think about new directions that Burnt Toast and Big Undies are going in. So stay tuned. Don't worry, it's not a reality TV show.ButterVirginiaOkay, my Butter is adjacent to the wardrobe frustration conversation. Which is: I have started cutting the collars off a lot of my shirts.To back up: Last month, I'm on vacation in Cape Cod with my sister, and she comes down looking extremely cute. She's wearing a graphic tee tucked into a long maxi skirt. And I was like, “This whole thing is delightful. What's happening here?” And she was like, “Well, this shirt was actually too small for me, but I realized if I just cut the collar off it, it opened up the neck enough that then the shirt, the whole shirt fit better.” And she could still wear this cute shirt. And she said she got the idea from watching Somebody Somewhere, because Bridgett Everett cuts the collars off all her shirts.CorinneOh yes! That was my signature look when I was 18. A Hanes T-shirt with the collar cut off.VirginiaI'm dressing like 18-year-old Corinne, and I'm here for it! But I've realized, frequently a place that something doesn't fit me is my neck. I've talked about feelings about chins and necks. I have many complicated feelings about chins and necks. This is one place where my fatness sits. So the shirt might otherwise fit okay, but it doesn't fit my neck, and then it feels tight and it's a miserable feeling. So at the end of our trip, I wanted to buy a Cape Cod sweatshirt, because there were some really cute sweatshirts. But they were not size inclusive. So I was like, can I make this extra large work? And it was a little small, but I cut the collar off, and now it's okay.And then I did it with my old Harris Walz T-shirt from the election. It was a cute stripe. I just really liked the stripe. And I was like, Oh, I could still wear this if I get the collar off it. And a couple other things. I've just been, like, cutting collars off shirts that are uncomfortable. I'm into it!CorinneI think that's a great Butter. I'm into any kind of clothes modification that will make you wear stuff that you wouldn't otherwise wear.VirginiaIt was a good solution for a couple of things in my closet that I did like, but I was not reaching for. And now I'll use them again. And the key I figured out, because I experimented with a couple ways to cut it, is really just cut right along the seam of the sewed on collar. You might think that's going to not open it up enough, but it will stretch once you start wearing it. you could always cut more if you needed to, but that seems to have done it for me.CorinneOkay, well, I want to recommend a recipe, and I feel like I possibly mentioned this before. I'm staying with my mom, and we've been making this recipe from the New York Times called stuffed zucchini, and it's a really good recipe for if you have a surplus of zucchini, which a lot of people do this time of year. You kind of scoop out the middle of a zucchini and then mix some of that together with, like, sausage, tomatoes, basil, and then put it back in the zucchini and bake it with, like, some crispy breadcrumbs, and it's so good. I can literally, eat a whole zucchini in one sitting. Highly recommend.VirginiaThat sounds amazing. All right. Well, that makes me a little more excited about the season.CorinneYeah, it is a very good time of year for eating. We should have talked more about food maybe?VirginiaThat is a good point. Our tomatoes in the garden are going gangbusters. I've made some great sauces. I'm having a lot of cheese and tomato sandwiches. toasted and not toasted. Delightful.Well, this was a good family meeting catch up. I think we've covered a lot of ground. I'm excited to hear what folks are feeling about their dressing issues, and airlines, all the stuff we got into today.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies—subscribe for 20% off!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Aviv spent months walking construction sites carrying tools for managers just to understand their problems—speaking to customers is "bullsh*t"—you need to work beside them to see reality. His company Buildots had a working AI product that tracked construction progress perfectly, but 90% of users got zero value from it. Until he made one key change that took them from barely surviving to 3-4X yearly growth. He reveals why his first customers had negative margins, how he accidentally underpriced by 10X, and why you should never build a feature until you've proven the value manually in Excel first. After nearly dying, today Buildots does tens of millions in revenue.Why You Should Listen:Why you need to stop talking to customers and start working alongside them.Why one simple change can transform usage and value creation.Why you should prove value without product before writing a single line of code.How to price when you have no idea.Keywords:startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, Buildots, Aviv Leibovici, construction tech, customer development, product-market fit, B2B SaaS, computer vision,00:00:00 Intro00:01:41 From Israeli intelligence to construction tech00:05:03 Working alongside construction managers00:10:20 Understanding the problem00:21:41 First customer deployment disaster00:30:29 COVID and nearly failing00:39:04 The pivot that changed everything00:45:16 Finding product-market fitSend me a message to let me know what you think!

One of our most popular episodes is back—our annual Fall Bucket List: 2025 Edition! Jon and Kris share everything they're looking forward to this season, from timeless traditions to new adventures. Fresh ideas, cozy vibes, and the ultimate guide to making this fall unforgettable. Happy Wednesday__________________________Kristin's Amazon Store FrontJon's Amazon Store FrontJoin all the fun on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow us on Socials:Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠That's The Point ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kristin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TiktokThat's The PointYoutubeKristin's Channel__________________________Head to wayfair.com right now to shop all things home.The Fits Everybody collection is available in sizes XXS to 4X at SKIMS.com and SKIMS stores.Go to shopminnow.com and enter code MEETMINNOW15 at checkout to receive 15% off your first order.Visit Gem.com/THATSTHEPOINT or enter THATSTHEPOINT at checkout for 30% offProduced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What does it take to grow a print shop 4X in just four years? Matt Pasut, owner of Team Outfitters in Sarnia, Ontario, shares how he went from running a marketing agency to scaling a decorated apparel business by blending smart systems, Printavo, AI tools like ChatGPT, and deeply rooted community branding.

In this episode, I talk with Olympic figure skating champion and 4X world champion Scott Hamilton about is medical challenges, blessings, and path through life that led him to a mission of cancer research and treatment.

Today, Jon and Kristin start with their usual life updates before diving into how to make your home feel cozy and curated. After spending the day antiquing and scoring some amazing finds, they share their go-to tips for hunting down special, timeless pieces that elevate your space and make it truly one-of-a-kind__________________________Kristin's Amazon Store FrontJon's Amazon Store FrontJoin all the fun on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow us on Socials:Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠That's The Point ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kristin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TiktokThat's The PointYoutubeKristin's Channel__________________________Visit GoGeviti.com and use code THATSTHEPOINT for 20% off your first 3 months of membership.Visit thisisneeded.com and use code ThatsThePoint for 20% off your first order.The Fits Everybody collection is available in sizes XXS to 4X at SKIMS.com and SKIMS stores.Get $5 off your next order at magicspoon.com/TTPGo to shopminnow.com and enter code MEETMINNOW15 at checkout to receive 15% off your first order.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tonight, on Trackside with Curt Cavin and Kevin Lee, they start the show talking about the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series schedule getting leaked and with the highlights consisting of the loss of Mexico City and the Chicago Street Course, getting races at San Diego naval base and Chicagoland returning, Dover going to an all-star race, Watkins Glen moving to May, and Homestead-Miami going to be the finale. They later talk about how the 2026 IndyCar schedule could conflict with NASCAR’s once it is finally released. In the second segment, they talk about how Christian Lundgaard has established himself as one of the top drivers in his first year at Arrow McLaren. They later talk about Browning Chapman sponsoring Marcus Ericsson at Milwaukee and Nashville. They later talk about the latest in free agency as Marcus Armstrong has resigned with Meyer Shank Racing. To wrap up the first hour of the show, Kevin previews the second hour of the show. To start the second hour of the show, they preview this race weekend in Milwaukee. They also talk more silly season talks between Will Power and David Malukas. In the penultimate segment, they wonder if Alex Palou would’ve been a 4X champion if he switched to Arrow McLaren. They later answer more fan questions. In the final segment, Kevin talks about Chip Ganassi Racing testing at Nashville Superspeedway. Kevin also talks more about this weekend’s schedule from Milwaukee.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Beyond The Claim Podcast #024 - Featuring Tyler Graves Secrets to growing a business fast in 2025 with Tyler Graves, Founder of Ready Stays. Learn how he scaled 4X in 24 months using stoic discipline, sales systems, and relationship-driven growth. In this episode of Beyond The Claim, Vince Perri sits down with Tyler Graves to unpack the strategies that took Ready Stays from a flatlining local business to a national player. Tyler reveals how discipline, resilience, and process-driven leadership fueled massive growth. ✅ What you'll learn: - Secrets to growing a business fast in 2025 - How Ready Stays scaled 4X in just 2 years - The sales process that wins both landlords and displaced families - Stoic philosophy applied to leadership and business growth - Turning setbacks into opportunities for expansion Whether you're an entrepreneur, public adjuster, or service-based business owner, this episode delivers practical strategies you can use to scale smarter and faster.

Welcome back to the show! In this episode, Steve discusses how every dollar invested into a single-family home makes money in 4 entirely separate but symbiotic ways. How is that for an attention grabber? Can you think of another form of investment or money-acquiring system that can boast a 4X multiplier per dollar? Join Steve on today's show and find out that you are surrounded by them! Please remember that Steve is always one email away! Just send your questions, comments, and concerns over to AskSteve@TotalWealthAcademy.com today!

In this powerful episode of the Entrepreneurs United podcast, executive coach and author David Ian Wood (Get Paid For Who You Are) unpacks the mindset shifts and practical tools entrepreneurs need to escape overwhelm and operate like true CEOs.David introduces the concept of our three internal personas—the Worker, the CEO, and the Creative—and explains how most leaders stay stuck in reactive mode instead of making strategic, high-impact decisions. You'll also hear how his revolutionary Whisper.coach AI app delivers real-time feedback on calls, helping you become a better leader, communicator, and coach—without distractions.Plus, David dives into the Pomodoro technique, the difference between time boxing and time blocking, and his transformational model of leading with humility and dignity. He even shares insights from his unexpected venture into pickleball coaching, showing how passion and business can mix in surprising ways.Whether you're looking to 4X your productivity, improve your leadership presence, or leverage AI for growth, this episode delivers actionable insights and fresh thinking for ambitious entrepreneurs.Timestamps: 00:00 Multiple personalities: Worker, CEO, Creative 01:37 David's AI venture: Whisper Coach 06:13 The future of coaching & therapy with AI 11:45 The 4X productivity formula 22:04 Redefining confidence through humility 27:31 Humility vs. dignity in leadership 32:13 Building a business from pickleball 34:50 Daily focus using the Pomodoro technique 37:47 Free tools & final takeawaysListen now to unlock your inner CEO and lead your business with clarity and focus. #EntrepreneursUnited #FocusCEO #WhisperCoach #ProductivityHacks #LeadershipDevelopment

Most Amazon sellers dream of a 4X or 5X exit. But in reality, most Amazon brands sell for just 2.5 to 3.2X. In this episode of Built by Business, Andy breaks down why most exits are capped at a 3X multiple—and what actually moves the needle when it comes to getting paid more for your brand.   If you're thinking about selling your Amazon FBA business, or just want to build a more valuable, scalable brand, this episode gives you the playbook for maximizing valuation.   We'll cover what buyers look for, what kills your multiple, and how to reverse-engineer your business for a premium exit—even if you're not selling anytime soon.   Try Sellerboard FREE for 2-months:  https://sellerboard.com/?p=01393   Get a Free Amazon Brand Audit from the Weavos team: www.weavos.io

You asked, they answered… and may have overshared. Jon and Kristin dive into your Qs and some embarrassing moments along the way. Happy Wednesday! __________________________Kristin's Amazon Store FrontJon's Amazon Store FrontJoin all the fun on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow us on Socials:Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠That's The Point ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kristin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TiktokThat's The PointYoutubeKristin's Channel__________________________Head over to Thrivemarket.com/POINT to get 30% off your first order and a FREE $60 giftFor flavor that pops, TTP chooses Simply Pop. Go to cokeurl.com/simplyPOP to find out where you can try it.Visit Zocdoc.com/POINT to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today.Visit thisisneeded.com and use code ThatsThePoint for 20% off your first order.The Fits Everybody collection is available in sizes XXS to 4X at SKIMS.com and SKIMS stores.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ever feel like you're doing your best to eat healthy, but still feel off—low energy, brain fog, or struggling with stubborn weight? In today's world of processed foods, misleading labels, and so-called “healthy” oils, it's getting harder to separate truth from toxic. But in this episode of The Happy Hustle Podcast, we get real about it all.I sat down with the legend himself—Ben Azadi, 4X best-selling author, international keynote speaker, and founder of Keto Kamp—to talk all things metabolic freedom. Ben is a metabolic health expert and one of the most respected voices in the keto and functional health space. He's also fresh off becoming a New York Times bestselling author, and he's on a mission to help people break free from food lies, reclaim their health, and live vibrantly.This episode hits hard, because let's face it—most of us were never taught how to eat to thrive. And Ben pulls back the curtain on the shady truth behind seed oils, harmful food ingredients, and the medical system's reactive approach to health. What makes this conversation so powerful is that it's not just about the problems—it's about solutions. Real, actionable stuff you can do today to level up your energy, clarity, and vitality.Here are a few key takeaways:You have the power to become the CEO of your health. Ben emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility and tuning in to how your body responds, not blindly following government guidelines or fad diets.Seed oils are slowly killing us. No joke. Ben breaks down the dangers of these highly inflammatory oils and what to swap them out for.The MAHA Movement is changing lives. Ben's initiative is on a mission to educate and empower the masses about true metabolic health and food freedom. It's not just about looking good—this is about saving lives.Read your labels like your life depends on it—because it does. Most food marketed as healthy is loaded with chemicals, sugars, and harmful additives. Ben teaches you how to spot the BS fast.Metabolic freedom = real freedom. When you stabilize your blood sugar, reduce inflammation, and optimize your energy, you unlock a whole new level of performance in business, relationships, and life.This episode is packed with truth bombs. So if you're ready to stop being a slave to broken systems and start living with purpose, vitality, and freedom, then you've gotta check it out.In this episode, we cover:Achieving New York Times Bestseller StatusUnderstanding Metabolic FreedomThe MAHA Movement and Societal Health IssuesThe Importance of Personal ResponsibilityIdentifying Harmful Ingredients in FoodThe Dangers of Seed OilsKey Takeaways for Metabolic FreedomFinal Thoughts and ResourcesWhat does Happy Hustlin mean to you? Ben says Happy Hustler for me is when you have identified your telos, your highest chief aim in life, your, your, purpose. Connect with Benhttps://www.facebook.com/thebenazadi/https://www.instagram.com/thebenazadi/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUh_MOM621MvpW_HLtfkLyQ?sub_confirmation=1https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-azadi-b7122323/https://twitter.com/THEBENAZADIFind Ben on this website: https://benazadi.comConnect with Cary!https://www.instagram.com/caryjack/https://www.facebook.com/SirCaryJackhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/cary-jack-kendzior/https://twitter.com/thehappyhustlehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFDNsD59tLxv2JfEuSsNMOQ/featured Get a free copy of his new book, The Happy Hustle, 10 Alignments to Avoid Burnout & Achieve Blissful Balance https://www.thehappyhustle.com/bookSign up for The Journey: 10 Days To Become a Happy Hustler Online Coursehttps://thehappyhustle.com/thejourney/Apply to the Montana Mastermind Epic Camping Adventurehttps://thehappyhustle.com/mastermind/“It's time to Happy Hustle, a blissfully balanced life you love, full of passion, purpose, and positive impact!”Episode Sponsors:If you're feeling stressed, not sleeping great, or your energy's been kinda meh lately—let me put you on to something that's been a total game-changer for me: Magnesium Breakthrough by BiOptimizers. This ain't your average magnesium—it's got all 7 essential forms that your body needs to chill out, sleep deeper, and feel more balanced. I take it every night and legit notice the difference the next day. No more waking up groggy or tossing and turning all nightIf you're ready to sleep like a baby, calm your nervous system, and optimize your recovery, go grab yours now at bioptimizers.com/happy and use code HAPPY10 for 10% OFF.99 Designs- Need a killer logo, stunning website, or next-level brand design?Stop DIY-ing and start delegating like a boss with 99designs by Vista! Neurable- If you're looking to level up your focus, productivity, and mental wellbeing all at once, do yourself a favor and check out Neurable. You get a special hookup—just use the code HAPPY at checkout and get $100 off.

Here's How the Top 1% Get Agent Referrals On DemandJoin Geoff Zimpfer for a high-impact training where you'll discover the exact system the top 1% are using to attract agent referrals on demand… without begging for coffee meetings or being treated like a vendor.Here's What You'll Learn:How to get in front of the right agents (and actually get a response)What to say to position yourself as a partner, not a vendorHow to turn one agent class into a steady stream of referrals—without doing it all yourselfSeats are limited. Register for the Training HereEpisode Summary:In this exclusive interview, top mortgage influencer Neel Dhingra breaks down exactly how he went from zero social media presence to 4X business growth using content marketing for loan officers. No more cold calling. No more begging agents. Just modern, scalable loan officer marketing strategies that actually work in 2024.What you'll learn:How to get mortgage leads without paid adsThe "cringe before they binge" approach to contentHow to turn Instagram videos into closingsWhy most mortgage pros fail at content—and how to fix itLead gen systems that work while you sleepIf you're ready to stop chasing and start attracting, this conversation is a masterclass in modern marketing for mortgage professionals.Connect With Neel on InstagramFollow Neel on YouTube

I offer no apologies for being a carp evangelist. They live almost anywhere, they are here to stay (they were stocked in many places in North America even before brown trout), and they are the hardest-fighting fish in fresh water. They are also fascinating creatures that can be a challenge to catch—which is why most of us fish with a fly rod. Rick Mikesell [49:05] of Denver is one of the best carp anglers I know and a terrific teacher and he gives us a great introduction on how to pursue these worthwhile fly-rod targets.   In the Fly Box this week, we have some interesting requests, including many questions about leaders and tippet. What fly line should I use on my Helios 2 rod for dry-fly fishing? What can I do to prevent my tippet from kinking? What can you do when small stream trout refuse your fly? I have been using heavier tippet and seem to be doing just as well as with lighter tippet.  What is your take on this? Is there a big difference between various brands of tippet material? Can I just add a tippet ring to my 9-foot 4X leader to make a nymph leader? Should the butt section of my nymph leader be made from fluorocarbon? What should I take on a multi-day fishing trip that I would not normally think of? Why am I foul-hooking so many trout and whitefish this year? What do you think of furled leaders? What rod should I get for my 8-year-old daughter?  What rig should I start her out with? What do you think of Crocs as inexpensive wading shoes? What can you tell me about an older Orvis rod I purchased? How can I tighten the drag on an older spring-and-pawl fly reel? What is the deal with all these multi-fly rigs? Am I missing something by using a single fly? Do people fish for trout with poppers? Do I need sinking agents as well as flotants? At the end of my drift I stripped in a dry fly and got strikes. Should I change my setup and move my flies a bit?

Feeling anxious about the rapid rise of AI? In this timely episode, Gabby channels her spirit guides to offer a unique spiritual perspective on the AI revolution. She offers practical tools to help you move from fear to faith and stay grounded in the midst of massive change. Discover how to strengthen your spiritual foundation and navigate the future with a sense of peace. This episode is a reminder that your inner connection is the one thing no technology can ever replace.Show notesGet Gabby's free Magnetic Energy Meditation to attract your desires. https://bit.ly/4cpCDKbJoin Gabby for the Trust the Universe 21-day Challenge! She'll guide you through her proven practices to surrender control and step into a life of joy, purpose and unshakable faith that the Universe has your back. https://bit.ly/44LFhrHRecommended practice inside the gabby coaching membership: Connect to the Universe Meditation. Not a member? Try it out for free here. https://bit.ly/4bomPH7If you feel you need additional support, please consult this list of safety, recovery and mental health resources. Disclaimer: This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from any psychological or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified health professional.Sponsors:Go to cokeurl.com/simplyPOP to find out where you can try Simply Pop!Use code DEARGABBY at checkout for 15% off your entire order at vionicshoes.com when you log into your account. 1 time use only.Bobbie is offering an additional 10% off your first order with code: GABBY. Visit hibobbie.com for more details.The Fits Everybody collection is available in sizes XXS to 4X. You can shop now at SKIMS.com and SKIMS stores. Select 'podcast' in the survey and be sure to select Dear Gabby in the dropdown menu.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, Jon and Kristin jump into a hilarious debate: what really counts as a red flag? With differing opinions, this hilarious episode is as entertaining as it is revealing. Kristin's Amazon Store FrontJon's Amazon Store FrontJoin all the fun on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow us on Socials:Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠That's The Point ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kristin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TiktokThat's The PointYoutubeKristin's ChannelCLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR PATREON FOR 50% THIS WEEK ONLY USE CODE: CRAWFISH Visit ryleeandcru.com/thatsthepoint and use code THATSTHEPOINT for 15% off your first orderVisit Carawayhome.com/THATSTHEPOINT to get up to 10% off your next purchaseFor flavor that pops, TTP chooses Simply Pop. Go to cokeurl.com/simplyPOP to find out where you can try it.Visit Zocdoc.com/POINT to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today.Visit thisisneeded.com and use code ThatsThePoint for 20% off your first order.The Fits Everybody collection is available in sizes XXS to 4X at SKIMS.com and SKIMS stores.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, we revisit the gut-wrenching story of Marie Versos and her mother, Debbie Cisco, whose lives were brutally taken due to domestic violence. Originally covered in October 2023, this update reveals shocking new details and significant changes to the law that aim to prevent future tragedies. Despite Marie's desperate attempts to escape abuse, the system failed her—and her death, alongside her mother's, exposed major flaws in the legal process. But there's a silver lining. Marie's brother, Alex, has channeled his grief into action, spearheading the Debbie and Marie Domestic Violence Protection Act. Passed in July 2024, this groundbreaking law mandates GPS monitoring for high-risk offenders—something that could have had a different outcome in this story.  We dig into the chilling details, the systemic failures, and how Alex is turning pain into purpose with this law that's already making a difference. Resources for those in need of help: National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (1-800-799-7233) Text "START" to 88788 Visit thehotline.org This is a story of heartbreak, but also of hope—one that shows real change can come from tragedy.   Thank you to this week's sponsors:  Start your risk-free Greenlight trial today at Greenlight.com/moms.  Discover your new trusty favorite from Thrive Causemetics. Luxury beauty that gives back. Right now, you can get an exclusive 20% off your first order at thrivecausemetics.com/MOMS Right now, Skylight is offering our listeners $30 off their 15 inch Calendars by going to Skylightcal.com/MOMS.  Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection available in sizes from XXS to 4X. Check out the Fits Everybody Collection at https://www.skims.com/mysteries  #skimspartner After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you! Select "podcast" in the survey and be sure to select our show in the dropdown menu that follows.