Podcasts about Alignment

After building Sacred Rides into one of the top mountain bike adventure companies in the world, Mike Brcic exited the business he had spent 23 years creating. The celebration did not last long. In this episode, Mike shares that the emotional high from the signed purchase agreement and wire transfer lasted about eight hours before the deeper question arrived: Now what? Mike joins Jerome Myers for a powerful conversation about founder burnout, post-exit identity, and the difference between building for achievement and building from alignment. They explore why founders often lose energy when they become disconnected from the customer, the company's purpose, and the work that actually lights them up. Mike also shares how his post-exit journey led him to create Wayfinders, a company that designs immersive experiences to help leaders reconnect with themselves, others, nature, and something larger than achievement. From the mountains of British Columbia to monasteries in Bhutan, this conversation is an invitation to rethink what success means after the exit. Because the real question is not just whether you can sell the business. The real question is: Who will you be when it is gone? Learn more about Mike and Wayfinders: https://way-finders.comTake the Exit Readiness Assessment: https://www.exittoexcellence.com/eraLearn more about Jerome Myers: https://www.exittoexcellence.com #Podcast #EntrepreneurPodcast #FounderStories #LeadershipPodcast #BusinessExit #FounderJourney #LifeAfterExit #Entrepreneurship #PersonalGrowth #BusinessOwner #PurposeDrivenLife #FounderPsychology #MeaningfulSuccess #NextChapter #ExitToExcellence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Aligned for Wealth™, a free 3-part experience designed to help you stop paying the high cost of misalignment. Replays end July 2nd!  ✨ About This Season: The Anatomy of Alignment This season of Redefining Wealth is dedicated to unpacking what alignment really means — not as a buzzword, but as structure. We're dissecting how misalignment impacts each of the Six Pillars of Wealth — FIT, PEOPLE, SPACE, FAITH, WORK, and MONEY — and what it truly costs when we tolerate what drains us. Each episode builds on the last. So subscribe and journey with us as we move from awakening… to redefining… to actualizing.   Episode Summary In this season finale, Patrice reflects on one of the most powerful lessons from the Anatomy of Alignment series: the difference between the price of change and the cost of staying the same. While many people fear the discomfort, grief, uncertainty, or inconvenience that comes with making aligned decisions, Patrice challenges listeners to consider the long-term cost of remaining in situations, relationships, habits, and environments that no longer support who they're becoming. Through personal stories about her health, relationships, home, and recent life transitions, she reveals how misalignment quietly taxes our energy, peace, and potential over time. Ultimately, this episode is an invitation to stop calculating only the immediate price of change and start honestly evaluating the hidden cost of staying the same. Patrice reminds us that alignment often requires temporary discomfort, but misalignment can create years of emotional, spiritual, physical, and financial drain. As she closes out the season, she encourages listeners to embrace the work of alignment, trust the vision they've been given, and choose the version of life that reflects who they are becoming rather than who they used to be.   Questions to Ask Yourself: What am I avoiding because I'm focused on the price instead of the cost? Where in my life am I paying a long-term price for staying the same? What relationship, habit, environment, or commitment no longer aligns with who I'm becoming? What would become possible if I stopped negotiating with misalignment? Am I willing to experience temporary discomfort in exchange for lasting alignment?   Want to Redefine Wealth for Yourself? Start Here:

We're celebrating PFN's birthday by shining a light on the partners who have been part of our journey toward people-first leadership, meaningful work, and purpose-driven impact. This special feature from How'd They Do That? with Skot Waldron captures the heart of their work and the shared mission that brings us together. Enjoy! — Selling does not have to feel like selling. Sometimes, the most powerful business development strategy is simply becoming someone people trust, remember, and want to work with. Skot sits down with Tonille Miller, organizational psychologist, management consultant, executive coach, and author, to unpack how she built a thriving consulting and coaching business through authentic relationship-building instead of traditional sales tactics. Tonille shares how curiosity, generosity, and a "co-elevative" mindset helped her grow a powerful network, attract clients organically, and create work that feels aligned rather than forced. For coaches, consultants, and people-first leaders who want to grow their business without feeling sleazy, this conversation is a reminder that value comes first, trust compounds, and the best opportunities often come from the relationships you nurture long before you need them.   Additional Resources: Connect with Skot on LinkedIn Listen to How'd They Do That? wherever you get your podcasts! Subscribe to the PFN YouTube Channel for daily leadership insights! Follow PeopleForward Network on LinkedIn Learn more about PeopleForward Network   Key Takeaways: Build relationships before you need opportunities. Lead with value, not a sales pitch. Authentic connection can outperform traditional selling. Daily networking habits create long-term momentum. Alignment attracts the right clients.

In this episode of Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill, Dr. Jill Carnahan sits down with Dr. John Demartini, a world-renowned human behavior expert, bestselling author, and founder of the Demartini Institute, to explore the deeper meaning behind physical symptoms and chronic illness. Together, they discuss how symptoms may serve as powerful messages rather than random malfunctions, revealing underlying emotional, psychological, and physiological imbalances. Dr. Demartini shares insights from five decades of research into human behavior, neuroscience, philosophy, and healing, offering a unique perspective on the mind-body connection and the role of purpose, gratitude, and self-awareness in wellness. This thought-provoking conversation challenges conventional views of disease and invites listeners to discover how understanding the body's messages can unlock greater health, resilience, and fulfillment.

Today we're talking about something that can make or break the parenting experience: how we align with our partners in raising our kids. My guest is clinical counselor Martina Nova, author of the new book Same Page Parenting, where she offers a practical framework for helping couples move out of blame and into more honest, connected conversations about parenting. In our conversation, Martina and I explore what gets in the way of alignment, from our own histories and fears to the added layers of neurodivergent parenting, navigating differences around discipline, digital habits, and decision-making, and what it takes to stay connected as our kids grow into adulthood. Martina shares thoughtful questions and practical strategies to help couples better understand each other's perspectives and build a more intentional, collaborative approach to parenting.   About Martina Nova Martina Nova is a Registered Clinical Counsellor based in British Columbia and the founder of NovaCare Therapy. She specializes in working with individuals, parents and couples navigating trauma, ADHD, people-pleasing, and early attachment patterns. Martina helps couples move out of blame and into more honest conversations about parenting, emotional needs, and relationship dynamics. In addition to her clinical work, Martina is an author and educator who creates practical tools to help couples communicate more openly about the realities of family life. Her work highlights how many parenting conflicts are less about discipline strategies and more about the histories, fears, and values each partner brings into parenting. Martina regularly shares mental health education through media, speaking, and social platforms, helping parents feel less alone in the complexities of modern parenting. Things you'll learn from this episode  How intentional communication and aligning values create a stronger foundation for parenting and partnership Why using therapy-informed questions helps parents unpack their upbringing, beliefs, and evolving identities How practical tools like weekly check-ins and family-wide conversations foster connection and collaboration Why recognizing and supporting neurodivergence in both parents and children is essential for healthy dynamics How navigating outside pressures, social media, and autonomy supports long-term trust with kids Why maintaining the parent-child relationship into adulthood requires ongoing reflection, flexibility, and shared tools Resources mentioned  Martina Nova's website, Novacare Therapy Same Page Parenting: Align with Your Partner to Raise Happy, Confident, and Resilient Kids by Martina Nova Novacare Therapy Resources Page Martina Nova on Instagram The Gottman Institute Dr. Ross Greene on Using CPS with Very Young Kids (Tilt Parenting podcast) Dr. Ken Ginsburg on Lighthouse Parenting — Loving Guidance for an Enduring Bond (Tilt Parenting podcast) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most people mistake chemistry for true compatibility in relationships—and pay a steep price for it. Coach Bryan reveals how initial attraction is just the spark, not the fire, and why relying solely on feelings can leave you burnt out or worse, in the wrong relationship. After surviving a hectic two-day, sixteen-hour grind, he drops insights on how chemistry needs to be rooted in deeper understanding, and why information—like shared values, communication, and life goals—is what truly sustains connection.You'll discover:Why chemistry is just the beginning—it's the ignition, not the engine of a lasting relationshipHow attraction can cause you to overlook red flags and why emotional immaturity often disguises itself as loveThe crucial differences between chemistry and compatibility—and how to cultivate both for long-term successWhat to consider beyond physical attraction, including values, hygiene, and conflict resolution skillsWhy compatibility isn't static; it's built through ongoing investment, information, and shared growthIn this late-night deep dive, Coach Bryan emphasizes that true connection is a journey from surface-level sparks to meaningful, compatible bonds. Ignoring the difference may cost you years of heartbreak or missed opportunities for genuine love. Whether you're single, dating, or in a relationship, understanding these dynamics equips you to build relationships that last—beyond just feelings and fleeting attraction.Perfect for singles tired of surface-level chemistry, couples seeking deeper connection, or anyone frustrated by temporary sparks that fizzle out. This episode isn't just about love—it's about learning how to truly understand and invest in the relationships that matter most.Tune in, get real about your standards, and learn why lasting love is less about chemistry and more about compatibility—because your future self will thank you.

In this episode of HAYVN Hubcast, Nancy Sheed talks with Jacqueline Lieberman, founder of BrandCrudo and creator of the Velocity Dinners methodology. Jacqueline shares her perspective on modern brand strategy, explaining why the fundamentals haven't changed despite advances in technology and AI. At the heart of her work is a commitment to uncovering the truth that already exists within organizations rather than inventing new narratives. Jacqueline describes her role as a "truth excavator," helping companies identify the unique qualities that make them different in their marketplace. Through interviews, workshops, and strategic conversations, she helps organizations uncover the often-overlooked differentiators that are deeply embedded in their culture, values, and everyday behaviors. Key points from the conversation include: Brand strategy isn't about creating something new. It's about uncovering what's already true and building a position around a company's authentic strengths. Company culture plays a critical role in brand success. When departments operate with different agendas and perspectives, messaging and momentum suffer. Alignment across the organization is essential. Many companies overlook their most powerful differentiators because they view them as standard operating procedures. An outside perspective often helps reveal what truly sets them apart. Jacqueline's DNA Method focuses on understanding why a company exists, what it stands for, what it won't compromise on, and the behaviors that shape its reputation and growth. AI can be a valuable strategic tool when used as a thought partner rather than a replacement for critical thinking. Jacqueline explains how challenging AI to identify weaknesses in an idea can strengthen positioning and strategy. Through her Velocity Dinners, Jacqueline creates environments where customers and prospects share candid insights that traditional surveys and focus groups often miss. These conversations reveal what truly drives buying decisions and business relationships. Throughout the discussion, Jacqueline emphasizes the importance of human connection, curiosity, and objectivity in uncovering meaningful business insights. Whether working with leadership teams in workshops or facilitating intimate dinner conversations, her approach centers on finding enduring truths that can guide long-term growth. This conversation highlights the power of authenticity in branding and business strategy. Jacqueline demonstrates that the strongest positioning doesn't come from clever marketing campaigns, but from uncovering and embracing the truths already present within an organization. By combining deep human insight, strategic rigor, and thoughtful use of emerging technologies, companies can build brands that are both distinctive and sustainable.  Connect with Nancy LinkedIn  Instagram Website Connect with Jacqueline LinkedIn Instagram Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do your thoughts, actions, and identity feel disconnected from the life you truly want?In this Mindset Coaching episode of Coaching In Session, Michael Rearden explores the concept of internal alignment and why aligning your thoughts, identity, and actions is essential for personal growth, confidence, and long-term fulfillment.Many people want change, but they struggle because their mindset, behaviors, and self-image are working against each other. Michael breaks down the three key steps to achieving internal alignment: auditing your thinking, clarifying your identity, and ensuring your actions reflect the person you truly want to become.This episode dives into the importance of mindset work, the dangers of neglecting internal growth, and why accountability and support are critical throughout the self-discovery journey.If you've been feeling stuck, disconnected, or out of alignment in life, this conversation will help you regain clarity, strengthen your mindset, and begin creating meaningful transformation from the inside out.Your external life changes when your internal world becomes aligned.WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE• What internal alignment really means• Why mindset is critical for personal growth• How to audit your thinking patterns• Why identity shapes your behaviors• How actions reveal your true alignment• The dangers of neglecting internal work• Why support and accountability matter• How to create authentic transformationKEY TAKEAWAYS✅ Internal alignment creates clarity and confidence✅ Strong mindsets still require support and growth✅ Your thoughts influence your reality✅ Identity should align with your values and goals✅ Authentic actions create meaningful change✅ Ignoring internal work leads to stagnation✅ Self-discovery is a lifelong journey✅ Accountability accelerates transformationRESOURCESRead the Full Blog: https://www.revenconcepts.com/internal-alignment-thought-identity-action/EXPLORE MORE WITH MICHAEL REARDENWebsite: https://revenconcepts.com/ Podcast Library: https://coachinginsession.buzzsprout.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/revenconcepts/WORK WITH MICHAEL REARDEN: https://www.revenconcepts.com/Subscribe for weekly mindset coaching, personal development strategies, and transformational conversations designed to help ambitious professionals gain clarity, strengthen confidence, and create lasting internal growth.Send us a MessageSupport the showWebsite: www.Revenconcepts.comEmail: Coachinginsession@gmail.comYoutube: @RevenconceptsDon't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with others who would benefit from it!

The traditional project management Big Three of Scope, Schedule, and Cost are foundational. They are not going anywhere, and they should not. However, those metrics primarily measure the process. If you only look at data on a digital dashboard, you are missing the human element that determines whether a project succeeds or fails.In this episode, we break down how to augment your traditional constraints with four people-focused vital signs that provide a real-time, accurate picture of your team and project health.Alignment: Is everyone actually pulling in the same direction, or are they just checking boxes?Confidence: Does the team genuinely believe the objectives are achievable?Direction to Done: Is the path forward completely clear, or is the finish line a moving target?Stability: Is the operational environment steady, or are shifting priorities causing burnout?By tracking these human indicators alongside your standard constraints, you bridge the gap between software dashboards and real-world execution.Key TakeawaysThe Process vs. People Gap: Why on-time and under-budget projects can still fail if the team is completely misaligned.Augmenting the Big Three: How to layer qualitative human metrics on top of quantitative scope, schedule, and cost data.The 4 Vital Signs Explained: A deep dive into Alignment, Confidence, Direction to Done, and Stability, and how to spot when one is slipping.Leading with Clarity: Practical ways for PMO leaders to pulse check these metrics through direct communication rather than software tracking.Resources MentionedConnect with the Show: peopleprocessprogress.comKeep the Conversation Going: @thekevinpannell on X and InstagramFitness and BJJ Content: Own. Move. Anchor. on YouTubeRead the Book: The Stability Equation: 7 Pillars for a More Balanced LifeGodspeed y'all,Kevin

#429 In this podcast episode, Guy talked with Viola Rose about the collective sense of change happening in the world and why she believed people were being called to live more from the heart. Viola explained how the mind often created reality through duality, while the heart offered a path toward unity, love, and deeper inner peace. She shared practices for moving awareness from the head into the heart and described how this helped people heal trauma, quiet the mind, and live with more ease.  They also discussed the Merkaba, sound healing, the power of the voice, and how nature, vibration, and frequency supported personal transformation.  By the end, Viola reflected that while she did not claim to know all the answers, she had chosen to live with love, service, joy, and trust in the mystery of life. About Viola: I am a "Transformational Sound Artist" and have been combining Music and Healing as "Sound-Healing" in my own inspired way for over 25 years. A Multi-Instrumentalist and inspired Vocalist, I enjoy playing Handpan, Gong, various Flutes, Shamanic drum, Sansula, Didgeridoo, and more. Yet, for sure, my favorite instrument is my voice.  I am a facilitator for Drunvalo Melchizedek's "School of Remembering". I completed my Teacher training with Drunvalo in 2012. Since then I have taught about 100 4-day Awakening The Illuminated Heart workshops to well over 1000 people all over the West coast and Hawaii, and over the last 3 years online as well. I have also shared this information at many transformational festivals and events.  I am also a Certified Gong Practitioner - through Gong Master Metab Benton's school. A Certified Holistic Health Coach - through the Institute of Integrated Nutrition, and a Certified Laughter Yoga teacher - through Laughter Yoga International. Key Points Discussed:  (00:00) - Awakening the Illuminated Heart! (01:18) - Why This Moment Feels Like a Spiritual Precipice (02:18) - Learning to Relax Inside the Tension of Change (03:28) - Why the Heart Matters More Than the Mind Right Now (04:00) - The Mind Creates Duality — The Heart Creates Unity (06:12) - Are We Creating Reality From the Wrong Place? (07:32) - Why Trying to Fix Duality Keeps Us Spinning (08:42) - How to Move Your Awareness From the Head Into the Heart (10:02) - The Mind's Trick: Thinking You're in the Heart When You're Not (11:18) - Living From the Heart Instead of Just Visiting It in Meditation (13:10) - When Life Stops Feeling Like a Rollercoaster and Becomes Grace (14:12) - The Fear of Following the Heart When Your Life Was Built by the Mind (15:00) - The Mind Is a House of Cards Pretending to Be the Master (16:18) - Why Fighting the Mind Can Become Another Trap (18:12) - Guy's Heart-Breathing Breakthrough That Changed Everything (19:32) - LIVE IN FLOW — Experience This Work in Person (20:38) - What the Merkaba Really Is and Why It Matters (22:28) - The Difference Between a Mind-Based and Heart-Based Merkaba (27:00) - Why the Heart May Be the Root of All Healing (36:08) - The Voice as a Direct Transmission of the Soul (38:08) - How Sound Reminds the Body of Its Original Blueprint (40:08) - Protecting Your Frequency in a World That Pulls You Out of Alignment (42:12) - Why "Be in Joy Anyway" Might Be the Simplest Spiritual Practice How to Contact Viola Rose:dreamthenewdream.blogspot.com www.youtube.com/@ViolaRose beyondbeinghuman.org/viola-rose   About me:My Instagram: www.instagram.com/guyhlawrence/?hl=en Guy's websites:www.guylawrence.com.au www.liveinflow.co

Keys Vineyard Church

Keys Vineyard Church

What if the real reason you and your partner keep fighting is not the issue itself, but the way you both see the truth? In today's episode, Emilia and Alan reveal how inaccurate thinking, cognitive distortions, and pride can quietly break trust in a relationship. They share why one partner may be focused on feelings while the other is searching for facts, and how that gap can turn small moments into bigger conflicts.For conscious couples and growth-minded singles, this episode brings a clear look at humility, emotional safety, communication, teamwork, and the courage it takes to stop defending your story and start building something real. Listen now, because love cannot grow where truth keeps getting twisted.Show notes:(3:25) Why accurate thinking matters(5:06) When one partner wants truth(7:11) Feelings versus facts in conflict(8:24) How cognitive distortions hurt love(10:37) Feeling unseen creates more fights(13:47) Humility versus arrogance in relationships(18:07) Courage helps rebuild real teamwork(19:55) Outro____________________________

This fascinating AI driven discussion is far better than the post. They introduce the idea of “dependence” more clearly than I did. They also leverage the concepts using the example of Jazz in a very powerful way. This is one that is a “must listen.” The original article is here:  https://davebrock.substack.com/p/we-keep-falling-out-of-alignment

In a world that constantly encourages us to do more, move faster, and follow someone else's blueprint for success, it's easy to lose touch with the one thing that matters most: ourselves. In this episode, Christina sits down with writer, entrepreneur, and host of The Niche Is You podcast, Matt Gottesman, for a powerful conversation about resonance, alignment, intuition, faith, and what it means to build a life and business without losing yourself in the process. Together, they explore why true resonance comes from embodiment rather than performance, how to trust your intuition in a world full of noise, and why success becomes more sustainable when it's built from authenticity rather than force. They also discuss the role of God in the creative process, the importance of developing a personal relationship with faith, and how learning to surrender control can create more peace, clarity, and alignment. Throughout the conversation, Christina and Matt share personal experiences navigating entrepreneurship, identity shifts, letting go of things that no longer align, and redefining success on their own terms. Whether you're feeling stuck, questioning your next step, or simply looking for a more grounded way to approach life and business, this episode is a reminder that the answers you're seeking may not come from doing more—but from becoming more present to who you already are. In this episode, you'll learn: What resonance really means and why it's more than just a buzzword How authenticity creates deeper connection and alignment Why intuition is one of the most underutilized tools in business and life The difference between forcing outcomes and trusting the unfolding How to cultivate a stronger relationship with God and your inner knowing Why hustle culture often disconnects us from our own wisdom The role nervous system regulation plays in alignment and decision-making How to recognize when something is no longer aligned with your path Why success should be defined on your own terms—not the world's How presence, humility, and surrender can open the door to greater clarity and peace   Guest Links: Writing: mattgottesman.substack.com Podcast: The Niche Is You Website: mattgottesman.com Instagram: @‌mattgottesman Apparel: The Niche Is You Twitter: @‌matt_gottesman Linkedin: /in/mattgottesman   Links: Your Limitless Adventures Group Trips Connect With Me: Instagram: @macs_explore Threads: @macs_exploreaee

Engineering Global Socialism: Ownership, Non-Alignment, and Corporate Culture in a Bosnian Company (Indiana UP, 2026) chronicles the journey of the Bosnian global corporation Energoinvest and its workers from its Yugoslav socialist ideals through decades of dissolution, reconstruction, and post-socialist transformation. Author Anna Calori provides a company-centric window into the business history of socialist globalization during periods of national development, destruction, and rebuilding. Contrary to popular perceptions of "centralized" socialist states, Energoinvest actively shaped trade relations with the Global South, driven by a socialist corporate culture that encouraged competition as well as collective decision-making. Even after Yugoslavia's disintegration in 1992 ended its dreams of a socialist path to globalization, these core characteristics shaped Energoinvest's adaptation to capitalist transformations and made it a key player in the struggle for Bosnia's post-war economic reconstruction. Through oral histories and archival research, Calori reveals how Energoinvest's workers paired the promise of a new model of global integration with their own visions of a working world in which they set the rules of engagement—and how, upon its sale to mostly foreign owners, the marginalization and ethnic homogenization of employee shareholders mirrored changes around citizenship in Bosnia. Now, in the twenty-first century, Energoinvest offers new promises of a post-industrial future, but its often hazy parameters leave workers to rely on the memory of "what could have been" to make sense of change. Tracing the long trajectory of a Yugoslav enterprise through decades of large-scale social change, Engineering Global Socialism presents a historical and sociological moment in which workers' ideas about social and corporate enterprise offered the possibility of a more democratic path to globalization. Anna Calori is Lecturer in Contemporary Economic History at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Filippo De Chirico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Energy History at Roma Tre University. His research focuses on the history of the Italian natural gas sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Your calendar is preaching something.The question is: is it preaching divine assignment… or survival?So many entrepreneurs say they want to be Spirit-led, but their weeks are being discipled by urgency, inboxes, meetings, client needs, and other people's panic.In this episode of The Estherpreneur Podcast, I'm pulling back the curtain on how I actually structure my week as a Kingdom-minded strategist carrying a big vision — not from pressure, performance, or productivity culture, but from stewardship.Because the way you order your time reveals what you believe you are responsible for.And some of what has been filling your calendar was never yours to carry.I'm sharing the weekly rhythm that helps me protect my peace, honor my capacity, create space for deep strategic work, and stay aligned with what God has actually assigned me to build in this season.This is not about becoming more efficient so you can do more.It's about becoming more obedient so you can carry well.If your week has been running you instead of serving the assignment, this conversation will help you pause, reassess, and rebuild your rhythm from a place of clarity.Because urgency may be loud, but it is not Lord.Listen in and don't just take notes. Let the Holy Spirit show you what needs to be reordered.Enjoyed today's episode? Don't just listen, apply what you've learned.The Flourish Daily Planner & Journal was designed to help you align your faith, focus your priorities, and take intentional action each day.Get your copy here:https://www.favorandwealth.com/flourish-daily/The Estherpreneur Podcast is for CEOs, founders, and faith-driven entrepreneurs who are growing, but something feels misaligned. Whether it's your structure, your clarity, or your capacity, this show helps you identify what's off and what to focus on next.Hosted by Edna Harding, author of "The Ugly Side of Sales 2.0" and founder of Favor & Wealth, a business growth strategy firm that helps leaders scale with clarity, structure, and biblical alignment.

Why do so many people wait to feel confident before taking action? In this special Season 9 finale of The Confidence Doc®, Dr. Rukmini Rednam shares one of the most important lessons she's learned as a surgeon, entrepreneur, speaker, and podcast host: Confidence isn't something you achieve after success. Confidence is built through action. In this solo episode, Dr. Rednam explores why confidence is really about alignment, how self-trust is developed, and why waiting until you're "ready" may be the very thing holding you back. If you've been waiting to start the business, book the consultation, take the trip, or pursue your next goal, this episode is for you. In this episode: • Why confidence is not about perfection • The connection between confidence and alignment • How action creates self-confidence • The role of habits in personal growth • Building evidence that you can trust yourself • Why successful people still struggle with confidence • Practical ways to create lasting confidence

Engineering Global Socialism: Ownership, Non-Alignment, and Corporate Culture in a Bosnian Company (Indiana UP, 2026) chronicles the journey of the Bosnian global corporation Energoinvest and its workers from its Yugoslav socialist ideals through decades of dissolution, reconstruction, and post-socialist transformation. Author Anna Calori provides a company-centric window into the business history of socialist globalization during periods of national development, destruction, and rebuilding. Contrary to popular perceptions of "centralized" socialist states, Energoinvest actively shaped trade relations with the Global South, driven by a socialist corporate culture that encouraged competition as well as collective decision-making. Even after Yugoslavia's disintegration in 1992 ended its dreams of a socialist path to globalization, these core characteristics shaped Energoinvest's adaptation to capitalist transformations and made it a key player in the struggle for Bosnia's post-war economic reconstruction. Through oral histories and archival research, Calori reveals how Energoinvest's workers paired the promise of a new model of global integration with their own visions of a working world in which they set the rules of engagement—and how, upon its sale to mostly foreign owners, the marginalization and ethnic homogenization of employee shareholders mirrored changes around citizenship in Bosnia. Now, in the twenty-first century, Energoinvest offers new promises of a post-industrial future, but its often hazy parameters leave workers to rely on the memory of "what could have been" to make sense of change. Tracing the long trajectory of a Yugoslav enterprise through decades of large-scale social change, Engineering Global Socialism presents a historical and sociological moment in which workers' ideas about social and corporate enterprise offered the possibility of a more democratic path to globalization. Anna Calori is Lecturer in Contemporary Economic History at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Filippo De Chirico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Energy History at Roma Tre University. His research focuses on the history of the Italian natural gas sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Engineering Global Socialism: Ownership, Non-Alignment, and Corporate Culture in a Bosnian Company (Indiana UP, 2026) chronicles the journey of the Bosnian global corporation Energoinvest and its workers from its Yugoslav socialist ideals through decades of dissolution, reconstruction, and post-socialist transformation. Author Anna Calori provides a company-centric window into the business history of socialist globalization during periods of national development, destruction, and rebuilding. Contrary to popular perceptions of "centralized" socialist states, Energoinvest actively shaped trade relations with the Global South, driven by a socialist corporate culture that encouraged competition as well as collective decision-making. Even after Yugoslavia's disintegration in 1992 ended its dreams of a socialist path to globalization, these core characteristics shaped Energoinvest's adaptation to capitalist transformations and made it a key player in the struggle for Bosnia's post-war economic reconstruction. Through oral histories and archival research, Calori reveals how Energoinvest's workers paired the promise of a new model of global integration with their own visions of a working world in which they set the rules of engagement—and how, upon its sale to mostly foreign owners, the marginalization and ethnic homogenization of employee shareholders mirrored changes around citizenship in Bosnia. Now, in the twenty-first century, Energoinvest offers new promises of a post-industrial future, but its often hazy parameters leave workers to rely on the memory of "what could have been" to make sense of change. Tracing the long trajectory of a Yugoslav enterprise through decades of large-scale social change, Engineering Global Socialism presents a historical and sociological moment in which workers' ideas about social and corporate enterprise offered the possibility of a more democratic path to globalization. Anna Calori is Lecturer in Contemporary Economic History at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Filippo De Chirico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Energy History at Roma Tre University. His research focuses on the history of the Italian natural gas sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let's have some fun. On today's bonus transmission of The CLS Experience, Craig Siegel delivers a powerful reminder that abundance is not a hustle game, it's a receiving game. Craig challenges the belief that working harder automatically creates greater results and instead explores the idea that money responds to consciousness, alignment, and your capacity to receive. Drawing from the Kabbalistic meaning of the word "receive," he explains why people don't get what they want, they get what they are an energetic match for. Craig dives into the connection between the nervous system and abundance, revealing that life expands at the rate your nervous system feels safe receiving. He encourages listeners to ask for bigger desires, seek divine inspiration, and create a vision so compelling that it naturally expands your capacity to hold more. This episode is a powerful reminder that strategy matters, but consciousness determines what you can sustain, receive, and ultimately create.0:15 Hustle vs Consciousness01:03 Alignment and the Art of Receiving02:55 Your Nervous System Sets the Ceiling03:51 Asking for Bigger Desire05:59 Fear vs Faith With MoneyEarly Bird Tickets now available for our October live event, CLS: Formation HERE:To join our community click here.➤ To connect with Craig Siegel follow Craig on Instagram➤ Order a copy of my new book The Reinvention Formula today! ➤ Join our CLS texting community for free daily inspiration and business strategies to elevate your day, text (917) 634-3796➤ INSTAGRAM➤ FACEBOOK➤ TIKTOK➤ YOUTUBE➤ WEBSITE➤ LINKEDIN➤ X

Alignment in the pipeline business means integration. It also means Alaska's 25% ownership stake could be worth virtually nothing.

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we're joined by Tim Foot, CEO of Slingshot Group. With nearly three decades of ministry and leadership experience having worked with thousands of churches, Tim brings deep insight into one of the most critical drivers of church health: your team. In this conversation, we explore what separates stagnant teams from those that create real momentum and how leaders can shift from survival to remarkable impact. Why teams stall out. // After working with thousands of churches, Tim consistently sees the same patterns: unclear expectations, misaligned priorities, lack of structure, and unspoken tension. Many teams are overly task-driven but underdeveloped relationally. Others don't fully understand how their strengths and weaknesses fit together. The danger of “hero-driven leadership.” // When a church relies too heavily on one standout leader to carry the mission it results in what Tim calls “hero-driven leadership.” While it can produce short-term results, it ultimately leads to burnout, unrealistic expectations, and fragile systems. Leaders often fall into this trap because it feels productive, and even rewarding, to be the one with all the answers. But over time, it limits team development and creates dependency instead of shared ownership. From hero to team. // The future of healthy ministry is team-based leadership. Instead of building ministries around individuals, churches must build systems and cultures where teams thrive together. This requires leaders humbly admitting they don't have all the answers and a willingness to slow down in order to build alignment. When leaders shift from being the “hero” to developing others, they unlock far greater long-term impact. The seven “key signatures” of remarkable teams. // Tim introduces a framework of seven core areas that every healthy team must develop: conviction, message, culture, roles, systems, friction, and risk. These “key signatures” work together like elements in music, providing structure that leads to a strong, unified outcome. Conviction anchors the mission (“why we exist”), while message communicates that mission clearly. Culture shapes how people experience the team, and roles define how individuals contribute. Systems enable growth, friction drives improvement, and risk fuels breakthrough. Why friction is actually healthy. // One of the most counterintuitive ideas Tim shares is that healthy teams need friction. Many leaders try to eliminate tension, assuming harmony equals health. But in reality, the absence of friction often means important issues are being avoided. Healthy friction leads to better ideas, stronger alignment, and greater innovation. The key is ensuring it doesn't become personal. When friction turns relationally destructive, it's unhealthy. But when it stays focused on ideas and outcomes, it becomes a powerful driver of growth. A practical tool for leaders. // To help teams take action, Tim points leaders to a free “team awareness assessment.” This tool helps churches evaluate how they're doing across the seven key signatures, identifying areas of strength and opportunities for growth. It's designed to spark meaningful conversations that lead to real change. A final challenge for leaders. // Tim leaves leaders with a simple but powerful reminder: if your mission matters, your team matters more. Churches often focus heavily on the people they're trying to reach, but neglect the health of the people they're leading alongside. Sustainable, mission-moving ministry requires both. To learn more about Tim's book Reaching for Remarkable: The 7 Key Signatures Behind Every Remarkable Team and take the free team assessment, visit reachingforremarkable.com or explore additional resources at slingshotgroup.org. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I'm grateful for that. If you enjoyed today's show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they're extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: TouchPoint As your church reaches more people, one of the biggest challenges is making sure no one slips through the cracks along the way.TouchPoint Church Management Software is an all-in-one ecosystem built for churches that want to elevate discipleship by providing clear data, strong engagement tools, and dependable workflows that scale as you grow. TouchPoint is trusted by some of the fastest-growing and largest churches in the country because it helps teams stay aligned, understand who they're reaching, and make confident ministry decisions week after week. If you've been wondering whether your current system can carry your next season of growth, it may be time to explore what TouchPoint can do for you. You can evaluate TouchPoint during a free, no-pressure one-hour demo at TouchPointSoftware.com/demo. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Listen, listen, listen, pull in close because today’s conversation, I don’t even know your church, but I know that a large portion of your budget is being spent on the thing we talk about. In fact, lots of churches, it’s like half of their budget. And it’s an even larger portion of the outcome of your ministry. It’s incredibly important what we’re talking about today. And so you do not want to miss this. Rich Birch — And we’ve got an expert that has worked with not tens of, not hundreds of, but literally thousands of of churches like yours and wants to help you take steps forward. Excited to have Tim Foot with us. He has nearly 30 years of experience, which I’m not sure how that’s possible, such a young man, as a leader, pastor, coach, speaker, musician in both Australia and North America, bringing a diverse background to his role as the CEO and president of Slingshot Group. If you’re not aware of who Slingshot Group is, they take the guesswork out of nonprofit and church staffing. He’s recently written a book that I’m excited for you to learn more about. But Tim, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.Tim Foot — Rich, it is so glad, it’s so great to be on with you today. I’m excited about this conversation.Rich Birch — So good. I'm I’m excited for it too. Why don’t you kind of give us a bit of the Tim Foot background? Tell us a little bit about about you and kind of give us the how do we end up here in this conversation today?Tim Foot — Yeah, it’s interesting. I often say to people, I had no idea that I’d be on the other side of the world to where I started doing what I’m doing. But this is what happens, Rich, when you say, keep saying yes to God.Tim Foot — Born and raised Tasmanian, worked as a musician and in ministry in Sydney for 10 years after moving from Tasmania, then relocated to Boulder County, Colorado in 2002, been here for 25 years now in ministry at a great church called Lifebridge Christian Church. Built ministry there for 10 years and went bivocationally started working with the Slingshot Group when there was a handful of us doing a handful of staffing and coaching work and then things exploded.Tim Foot — And I really, really hit my sweet spot and saw how God had been preparing me for so many years to work with teams, love teams, love the strategy of teams, love working with people, love the fact that placing the right leader on the right team exponentially moves the mission forward and affects culture in all kinds of ways.Rich Birch — So true.Tim Foot — And so I’ve had all kinds of roles in Slingshot over the years, now get to lead our team of amazing consultants around the US serving so many, and beyond, serving so many ministries and teams move mission forward.Rich Birch — Love it. I’m so glad that, yeah, this is going to a good conversation. You know, one of the things I want to take advantage of is the fact you’re really an expert. You know, you’ve worked with, you and Slingshot have worked with thousands of churches and organizations, and you you really get a chance to see churches at an interesting inflection point.Rich Birch — You know, often when we’re hiring a team member, bringing someone in or trying to develop our teams, you know, we’re thinking about the future and we’re, we’re taking a step back. And like you say, I do think it’s a transformative inflection point that you’re involved in. Rich Birch — So you’re sitting across the table from a lot leaders, and maybe even some leaders who their mission is stalling. Like things aren’t maybe going as well as we would hope. Are yeah there any patterns in that you’re seeing, are there things that you see time and time again in churches that might be holding us back?Tim Foot — Yeah, I immediately thought of a common question we’ll ask teams when we’re brought in when it comes to needing a new person on the team or helping coach leaders. We’re often brought in in crisis moments, moments of transition, but they’re also moments of incredible opportunity.Tim Foot — And we’ll often ask the question, hey, do you want a painkiller or do you want a vitamin? And so often the the team is thinking they want the painkiller, they want the pain to go away. They want to solve the problem, they want to fill the seat, or they want to break through whatever it is they’re struggling with. But honestly, deep down, they need to start a regimen of vitamins to help them get to a healthy place to move the mission forward.Tim Foot — We often will see an unawareness that the wrong people are around the table. Or an unawareness that they need other leaders around the table to help them move forward, whether it be vocational paid leaders or volunteers.Tim Foot — We’ll often see misalignment and a lack of focus on the right things. Communication misfires around why the mission actually matters. We’ll often teams see teams that are task-driven at the expense of relationships.Tim Foot — And then an unawareness of strengths and weaknesses and how they complement each other, how they help move you forward or how they hold you back. Other patterns are a lack of structure to support the work. Elephants in the room, taboo topics, fear around failure that leads to lack of innovation. So many different patterns we’ll see and be able to diagnose and say, hey, we need to have conversation around that because I think uncorking that will help you accelerate the mission.Rich Birch — That’s cool. One of the things I love by reputation that I love about Slingshot is I love that you’re asking those bigger questions that it’s not just like, okay, how do we get to let’s just, let’s get the next hire done and move on.Rich Birch — It’s like, you know, you’re, you’re trying to ask those bigger questions and which I, that which I think, you know compliment to you and your organization that you’re trying to. Because we know when we need the painkillers, but really we need to take some good vitamins over an extended period of time to make our things more healthy for sure. Hmm.Tim Foot — You know, Rich, when we jumped into staffing work almost 20 years ago now, we had to educate the church on the need to have outside advice around staffing. But it was a lot of art and not as much science.Tim Foot — And now we’ve developed so much science around the art with with things like our candidate match tool. When you’re looking for a leader, you have to align around what you actually want in that new leader. So many teams will say, hey, we need this, this, this, this, this, this. And in the end, they’re looking for a purple unicorn. And that’s not going to help.Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And we’ll talk about that as we get deeper in the conversation.Rich Birch — Right. Yes.Tim Foot — But Rich, last time I looked, unicorns are still mythical creatures. Rich Birch — True. Tim Foot — And so working working out what you actually need… Rich Birch — Right. Tim Foot — …and getting an awareness around alignment with who’s around the table may actually change your idea of what you’re looking for. Alignment is so important in getting an awareness of what our strengths and weaknesses are. Are we focused on the right thing? And are we actually moving the mission forward right now or is it stalled out?Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, that’s good. One of your consultants, that remember once I was in a conversation about that very issue and and you know we had really lofty goals for what we were trying to hire. And and they they walked us through that conversation where it was like, okay, well, let’s let’s think about how many of these people are actually out there.Rich Birch — So and you list off hat half a dozen things that we were looking for and you cut back and you think, well, how many people actually work in the church? How many people have worked as long as we want to work and have had experience that we did and have done the stuff that we want to do?Rich Birch — And you literally get down to like, Well, there might be three people, you know, like, you know, and so anyways, that’s, that’s, that’s so true.Tim Foot — And actually… Rich Birch — You… Yeah, go ahead.Tim Foot — …that’s what we’ll often say. There are maybe three to five people when you have all of these filters in place, they can actually fill this role.Rich Birch — That’s true.Tim Foot — And that’s why you need to focus on ministry and you need to let us focus on finding those people.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s good. That’s great. And yeah, and if there’s three to five and one of them is Jesus, the other is the Holy Spirit. So it’s like, you know, you’re down to just a very few. You… Tim Foot — And Rich, let’s not talk about why many, many teams wouldn’t hire Jesus these days.Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. That’s a whole other topic. that’s That’s great. Now, you’ve said something once that caught my attention, and it’s in my head has been branded to you. And it’s that most of us were trained on a model, a leadership model that nobody named out loud, that everyone, that we’ve all absorbed.Rich Birch — What is that model? You know, what it look like? And I know when you named this, I started seeing this everywhere I looked. I was like, oh, wow, I can see this in multiple different places in myself and in our organization. What what is this model?Tim Foot — Yeah, I mean, the the model we see is hero-driven leadership. It’s when we rely too much on individuals to actually carry the mission. And I think the cracks have happened.Tim Foot — I mean, we’ve seen it, Rich, you and I are similar ages. I think the cracks are happening generationally. The builders and boomers were wired differently for a different time and culture. And us Gen Xers, we can code switch. I mean, we we see we see that happening all the time. And as we stepped into leadership, the cracks started to appear.Tim Foot — I mean, we see it every week. Another leader burning out, doing stupid things because of too much pressure. Then millennials and Gen Z are now leading in a new way that we need to embrace.Tim Foot — And so I think we’re seeing those cracks around that hero dependence, and we’re starting to see the need more than ever to have a team awareness, a holistic approach, or we’re just going to have leaders continue to burn out.Tim Foot — And we sit we see it around unrealistic hiring expectations, a lack of support for great leaders when they’re hired, a lack of development.Tim Foot — Hero dependence is a terrible staffing and growth strategy and becomes a massive trap when it comes to a number of the key focus areas or patterns we’ve seen that healthy teams focus on and move mission forward.Rich Birch — Yeah. See, this is the thing when you, I heard you say that once and it, it literally, I sat up and I was like, oh man, I’ve seen that in my own, you know, my own hiring. I’ve seen that in the way I’ve talked with, you know, I see the leaders around me. You see these people who they’ve kind of built the entire ministry around themselves and they’ve built, it’s like, it doesn’t work if they don’t, it’s like, they’re such a unique individual. They have to lift it all. Rich Birch — But what makes that model so sticky? Like, why do we keep coming back to that? Why? Even if we know like intellectually in our heads, yeah, that’s not a good idea. It feels like we just keep coming back to this same thing time. In fact, we actually reward it. We’ll be like, wow, isn’t that great? This person’s amazing. And we just kind of keep moving on. Why is that?Tim Foot — It’s the shiny object trap. I mean, that that the the shiny object, aka the the talented leader that we think is going to catapult the ministry. Often we see it in in hiring conversations when a particular organization wants to go after somebody that’s been in at a much bigger organization than them. And often that person, if if they can attract them, will come in with a playbook that isn’t uniquely suited to the organization they’re stepping into. Or there aren’t systems to support that new leader and the growth that’s going to happen. And burnout happens at every level. But but we both know, Rich, busy work makes us feel productive. But is it the right work?Rich Birch — That’s so true.Tim Foot — And and we know that we can be ourselves the shiny object. We we want to it feels good to be the hero. It feels good to be the one that’s solving problems. Rich Birch — Sure.Tim Foot — It feels good to be the one that has all the answers. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And I think that’s one of the biggest threats in healthy leadership today is feeling like you have to have all the answers. Because I think one of the most powerful statements from healthy leaders and healthy teams is, hey, we don’t know what to do next. Because it actually opens up the room for new thought. It opens up the room for collaboration. And it opens up the room for teamwork. Tim Foot — But it’s easier to move quick. It’s easier to move quick and be surrounded by people who agree and play it safe.Rich Birch — So true.Tim Foot — And then down the road, we realized that we weren’t growing in every sense of that word. And the mission was stalled out. We know we often have to slow down, re-strategize, look at who’s around the table, work out how we work together to move faster in the long term. We have to be vulnerable to make a team work. And sometimes it requires us to actually help others win than focus on heroes. Tim Foot — I mean, you think about a winning sports team. It’s not about just one person out there doing all the work. We’ve got to work together as a team. You know, it’s it’s it’s how do we work together and have had have less dependence on that shiny object, those standout leaders or those heroes?Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. I love that. I remember years ago, we had a coach come in and as a lead team, and this basically spent a week with us and then, you know, try to help us get better in our leading of our people. And I remember at the end of the week, the leader who we brought in said you answer way too many questions. And I was like what do you mean by that? They’re like, you need to ask more questions and you answer. You’re you’re putting yourself way too much in the middle of all of this and you’re not letting…And I was like, oh that’s a good insight. You know, we’re not raising up other people we’re trying to uh you know make it all about us rather than about our teams. Well, I’d love to talk about your book.Rich Birch — So the title is Reaching for Remarkable: The Seven key signatures behind every Remarkable Team. Let’s start with the word Remarkable. You literally have it twice in your title and subtitle. Why Remarkable? And how does that relate to hero? Because I was like, isn’t that the same thing? Like, isn’t it couldn’t this be reaching for the heroic? So unpack that.Tim Foot — I love that word remarkable. And it’s always been our mission at Slingshot. We build remarkable teams through staffing and coaching because your mission needs a remarkable team to move it forward. Tim Foot — Jesus left us with the most remarkable mission. And but it wasn’t enough. He needed a team to move it forward. And if Jesus needed a team to move it forward, we need to move it forward as a team.Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And so we’ve all got these unique expressions of that remarkable mission. But if that mission matters, your team matters more. Rich Birch — That’s good.Tim Foot — And so when it comes to Remarkable, it’s about the mission. It all comes back to the mission. And we never fully arrive, Rich. We’re always reaching.Rich Birch — That’s good.Tim Foot — We’ve always got to be focusing on the right things, doing the deep work of of of reimagining, reinventing, and re-moving forward to reach for remarkable momentum when it comes to our mission. But we’ve got to focus on the team and the right the right areas to move that mission forward.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. So you actually talk about these, there’s these seven key signatures. Can you take a little bit of time and just unpack those? We won’t be able to get into all of them, but kind of talk us through how does it hang together as kind of a big idea?Tim Foot — Well, give you a little bit of context behind why they’re key signatures. You mentioned it in the intro, in a former life, I was a working musician and I would do solo gigs. It was my tentmaking job to do ministry back in Australia. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — I would work three to five nights a week as a musician. And I always had way more fun working with other musicians in a team setting, because ah a band is essentially a team. And my best experiences, Rich, was when I was on stage with other musicians who were often better than me, but I was leading the band. We all lifted each other. And to achieve remarkable results, there was structure to it.Tim Foot — I mean, you know, there’s structure to music. There’s harmony and there’s rhythm and there’s key signatures. There’s tracks to run on that allow us to have a remarkable output. Rich Birch — That’s good.Tim Foot — And so as I move from that world into team strategy world, team specialist world, building teams world, I realized, hey, there are also tracks to run on as a team to reach for health and reach for remarkable, a remarkable output and remarkable momentum. And so that’s where we came up with these seven key focus areas that we call the seven key signatures behind every remarkable team.Tim Foot — And they’re a pathway, they work together. And I’ll run through them quickly. And then we can unpack what you what you want to unpack with the time that we have left, Rich.Tim Foot — But though, and they’re simple. I mean, these are patterns that I’ve observed over the last 16 years staffing teams, but the last 30 years growing in teams, learning from teams, leading teams. I mean, you and I both grew up in in church, Rich, and I learned a lot of of leadership lessons from being a volunteer on teams in in in my late teens and and early 20s, so much.Rich Birch — Yes, 100%.Tim Foot — But these patterns, this pattern or these key signatures start with number one, conviction. Conviction, which is a shared sense of why you exist and what you’re called to do. It’s the why behind the what. It’s the Simon Sinek. People buy why you do, not what you do. So that’s number one is conviction. Tim Foot — Number two is a message, a compelling and consistent way of communicating what matters most because, Rich, everything communicates. What’s the story our leadership is communicating? What we say, what we don’t say, our actions, our systems and processes. What story is it communicating? That’s number two. Tim Foot — Number three is culture, the values and behaviors that shape the soul of our team. How are people experiencing your ministry organization or your team?Tim Foot — Number four is roles, unique contributions for remarkable impact. Roles that clarify how we work together. Tim Foot — Number five is systems, which is scalable design for remarkable growth. Systems scale our mission. Tim Foot — Number six is friction because healthy friction moves the mission forward. How do we embrace healthy friction for growth? Tim Foot — And then the last one, number seven, and these all build on each other, is risk, which is bold moves that drive remarkable outcomes, initiatives that lead to breakthrough, strategic risk, not blind gamble. So those are the seven.Rich Birch — Love it. And you know friends, i I do think I would highly recommend that you pick up copies of this book. To me, when I when I saw this, to me, this feels like the kind of book that we should read together as a leadership team. Like, hey, let’s pull this together. You know maybe you’re looking for a fall thing to do with your leadership team. This would be a great book for you to pick up and go together. Rich Birch — There’s a couple I would love to tease out a little bit. I’d love you to pull out for us. Help us understand. You differentiate between conviction and message, two different things. I think lots of times we might collapse those into one. Why are they two separate? Help us understand the difference between those two.Tim Foot — Absolutely. Conviction, again, is why we do what we do. Without shared conviction, you won’t move the mission forward. There won’t be a reason behind initiatives. They’ll fall flat. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — There won’t be a reason behind the message you’re communicating. That’s why they’re different. So conviction is what keeps us in on the days we want to quit.Tim Foot — I mean, think about the early church in Acts 4. It’s a great, best example of conviction. Peter declaring in Acts 4:20, we cannot help but speak about what we’ve seen and heard. They didn’t just believe. They acted. It drove every decision.Tim Foot — If the disciples were just compliant, when Jesus ascended, they would have scattered. But because they were convicted, they ah nearly all of them gave their very lives for the mission. Conviction is our North Star. It’s It’s like calling. it’s It’s what keeps you the days, keeps you in it, the days you want to quit. And Rich, we know there’s going to be plenty of days you to quit. Tim Foot — Message, however, is is the story we’re communicating. It’s how we hire, fire, onboard, develop. It’s how we communicate our conviction and our overall mission. And in the book, we list a bunch of traps for each of these seven key signatures. And we can chat about some of the most common traps. But a common trap for for message is assumption. Rich Birch — It’s good.Tim Foot — We assume people understand and care like we understand and care. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And we don’t ask enough questions. I mean, it’s why Jesus’ ministry was full of questions, Rich. Rich Birch — Right. Right.Tim Foot — Because he was he was cementing conviction. I mean, Jesus asked the best questions and rarely gave the answers. He lived the answers and he teased the answers out because that’s what led to conviction. That’s why they build upon each other. Tim Foot — You can’t have a story without conviction. You can’t have a message without conviction. And you can’t have a healthy message unless you are asking the right questions to make sure people are hearing and understanding it. Tim Foot — Did you like like did you understand what I just communicated? What did you just hear that I that I said?Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — Why why are why are you so convicted to by our mission?Rich Birch — Yeah.Tim Foot — Why are you committed to it? So many great questions.Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s good.Tim Foot — The book is full of questions too. I’m a I’m a serial question asker. They used to call me “Quiz” when I was a teenager because I asked so many questions.Rich Birch — Yeah.Tim Foot — And it wasn’t until later that a mentor and co-founder of Slingshot, Stan Endicott—I think you know him, Rich—that he he convinced me that my proclivity for asking so many questions was actually a spiritual gift and not a special need.Rich Birch — Yeah. Tim Foot — Because questions, questions move conversations forward.Rich Birch — Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it’s true. It’s so good. And yeah, as I’ve shifted into full-time coaching, I have found, yeah, like that the the skill of asking a good question, it’s like, you know, I think the best moments I have with the people I’m working with are when we’re, I’m asking questions and they’re discovering, they’re tripping on to their own answers that maybe are a little different even than I would have. But just asking good questions, super important.Rich Birch — Okay. Another one that stood out to me of the, and again, friends, you’re going read all this. Obviously we can’t cover this in just, you know, half an hour conversation. But talk to me about friction, healthy friction. Tim Foot — Yeah. Rich Birch — So I literally have said as an executive pastor, my job was to remove friction from the organization. And so when you say, oh, you lots of us are trying to remove it. I was like, ouch, that’s me.Rich Birch — Because I think that’s, ah you know, I would I want to find places where we’re stuck and say, how do we get those unstuck and push this thing forward? So talk to me about why I’m wrong about friction.Tim Foot — I was there too, Rich. I was absolutely there. But when I get to number six, when we’re speaking on this or teaching on this, I will often say, hey number six is a wait, what? Tim Foot — I thought this was the sign of an unhealthy team. I used to think that. I used to think that the harmonious teams were the healthy ones, that when I walked into a context where there was all harmony with the team, that it was there was healthy, the absence of friction was healthy. But it’s not. It’s a sign of unhealth. Tim Foot — And I’m talking, there’s two kinds of friction, healthy and unhealthy. I’m talking about healthy friction. I mean, you think about a car and how the rubber meets the road, causes friction, moves the car forward. If you don’t have friction in your team, your mission isn’t going on anywhere.Tim Foot — It’s interesting, Zippia workplace survey found out that 76% of employees in the workplace avoid conflict, which is a real problem because healthy friction sharpens and aims teams, while avoiding conflict leads to complacency and stagnation.Tim Foot — Teams where members are passionately embracing friction will not only push through and forward to great results, they’ll attract and retain, which is really important, they’re going attract and retain top leaders. It’s where the mission truly comes alive and evolves to all it can be. Good leaders, rich, know to allow it. They know not to control it, but closely monitor it.Tim Foot — We get to decide if the tension or friction we allow is healthy or unhealthy. We call this the loaded gun of the seven key signatures, because when this gun goes off, it either breaks through a door or a wall that you needed to break through, or somebody gets hurt. And good leaders know how to monitor that and help it break through and not damage other leaders.Rich Birch — Yeah, let’s double click on that. Help me understand. So yeah, I’m going with you. I can see what you’re saying. You know, healthy friction, you know, unhealthy friction, good friction, bad friction. So give me an example. Rich Birch — You walk into it, you’re working with a ah church and there’s some telltale signs of, friction that’s that’s negative, that’s actually pulling the organization back, that’s that could be potentially hurting, or maybe has gone too far, or what’s, I’m not sure the best way to say that. Versus, hey, no, here’s some here’s some good friction that’s actually some good heat here that’s pushing the tires forward. Help us, what does that look like?Tim Foot — When when it becomes personal, Rich, that’s always the way you know it’s trending towards unhealthy. We’ll get to it in a minute, but we’ve got a team assessment on our website now around these seven key signatures, and we talk about unhealthy, inconsistent, functional, remarkable.Tim Foot — Most most teams live in that functional space. If you’re below unhealthy, it’s trending toxic, and that’s when you need ah that’s when you need the 4Sight group and Jenni Catron to come I mean, do some some deep, deep culture work. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — I’m all about our ecosystem. I know you are too, Rich. It’s like when you need the deeper work, then you need the specialist. Rich Birch — Sure, sure.Tim Foot — But right now you’ve got the general practitioner. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.Tim Foot — But but when it gets when it gets personal, you know that that’s unhealthy friction. Rich Birch — That’s good. Right.Tim Foot — And let’s go back to um the the harmony piece. Because that’s one of the traps when it comes to friction. it’s It’s the harmony trap. And it’s like it’s you wanting there to be you know violins and and and and birds singing and for everybody to be loving each other. That’s also a sign that there is unhealthy friction. Rich Birch — Right. Tim Foot — Because there’s things lurking that have been pushed down below the surface that are going to come out sideways that if you had just dealt with it straight away, it actually could have become momentum for your mission. It’s the unspoken influences trap. it’s the It’s the elephants in the room.Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — It’s what everybody’s thinking about, but nobody’s talking about. That’s going to that that’s gonna be insidious and it’s going to chip away at the health of your team. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.Tim Foot — And it’s gonna become unhealthy friction. And so that’s a great question to ask. And that’s in the book too. What’s every thinking about, nobody’s talking about? Because that’s what we need to engage.Tim Foot — Now, if we think that’s going to lead to unhealthy friction, let’s have the the conversations outside of the meeting. So that when we get to the conversations inside of the meeting, we can engage this as healthy friction that will actually address the topic and will move us forward rather than becoming personal and eroding relationships.Rich Birch — That’s good. Yeah, that question, what’s everybody thinking about that nobody’s talking about? That’s powerful. And I can see, yeah, that even even the organizations I’ve led, you can see where there’s seasons where we try to push away that friction. nd that can be just super negative. And it’s like this, we’re all just in la-la land. We’re all just, you know, can see that for sure. Tim Foot —Yeah.Rich Birch — So you wrote this book, you put this resource together. help me understand how you’re hoping it will help our, our churches. You know, I’m picture, I’m a church of a thousand people. Maybe I’m the executive pastor. I’ve got a team of 12 to 15 people on my team. And how how could, how could this be a helpful resource for us?Tim Foot — Well, this I believe this is the most important work we need to be doing, Rich, because if your mission matters, your team matters more. So often we get so focused on the people we’re serving that we forget the people we’re serving with.Tim Foot — And if we’re stalling out mission, mission-wise, then we’re not moving forward. And that’s not and we’re not being obedient to God’s call. And so what I’m hoping is, I mean, personally, our kingdom first principle at Slingshot is to leave teams better than than the way we found them. And the last thing we want to do is place great leaders on unhealthy teams.Tim Foot — So what we’re hoping is that teams are going to focus around these seven alignment areas and start to move mission forward, attract great leaders, retain great leaders. When we place, I mean, I you and I have both had healthy long-term ministries at churches, and it is a massive blessing when you, if God wills it, and you stay somewhere long term. I want other people to experience that. And that happens when the right leaders are placed on the right team.Tim Foot — So what I’m hoping churches do is they take our team awareness assessment on on our website, reachingforremarkable.com, which is attached to slingshotgroup.org. And they get a sense of, okay, where what where might we need attention in these seven key areas? Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s good.Tim Foot — Because it heat maps, it gives you percentages, you can take it as a team. And then to start the real important conversations.Tim Foot — I mean, I’ve been in rooms with this work, Rich, where you start to see teams have conversation around alignment and and teams that were that were stale or leaders that were burnt out start to get a glimmer of hope. Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s good.Tim Foot — That, oh, if we start to have these conversations around these areas, if we walk this pathway, if we focus in these areas where we’re struggling right now, we’re going to start to see results.Tim Foot — I mean, I even think about the key signature of systems. You know, it’s systems that scale remarkable growth. If we’re not building systems to to accommodate the growth that we keep praying for, God’s not going to bring the increase. Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s true. Tim Foot — Because God isn’t going to bring growth if it’s going to hurt us. We have to be building the right kind of systems to support our teams and leaders so that the growth can come. It’s a stewardship issue. Rich Birch — Yes, yep.Tim Foot — So what I’m hoping happens in churches all over the place is that they start to focus on these key signatures and see mission momentum results that moves them forward as an organization.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Why don’t you tell us, you’ve mentioned it, but tell us a little bit more about the team awareness assessment. Give us like a bit of a, you know, you’ve kind of given us an overview there. Give us a little bit more why we should take that test and give us that URL again that we can send people to.Tim Foot — It’s reachingforremarkable.com and it’s it’s literally 10 minutes or less. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And it’s free as a leader. You can jump in and take it or you can sign up and and take it as a team. And it gives you obviously the team percentage on each of these key signatures. but also your own results. And when we’ve worked with real high-performing teams, it’s fascinating to watch these great leaders compare their individual percentage on each of these key signatures with their entire team and just to see alignment start to happen and the right conversations to happen.Tim Foot — Because we want to be able to focus in on where alignment is needed most. It may be real simple, Rich. Most teams live in that functional space. Rich Birch — Sure. Tim Foot — Functional’s fine.Rich Birch — Yeah.Tim Foot — But it’s not going to get remarkable results. Rich Birch — Yeah.Tim Foot — And our mission is too important. We have to focus on team alignment to move it forward.Rich Birch — Yeah. It’s so good. Yeah. I was talking to a a leader recently of a very large church and they were saying, you know, I just feel like, I feel like we got a go Pro. And what he was saying is exactly what you’re saying is like, Hey, we we’re we’re fine. We’re functioning.Tim Foot — Right. Right.Rich Birch — But man, we want to go remarkable. We want to go from just just because we can do this thing week in, week out in their case, have thousands of people show up, tens of thousands of people show up. But it’s like, that’s not enough. We got it. But the mission’s too important. We’re trying to reach people. How do we go remarkable? Which to me, I think picking up a copies of these books as a team would be a great first step. Rich Birch — Where do people, where can people pick this up? Where can they get your book if they’re looking for that? I’m assuming Amazon, but is there anywhere else we want to send them?Tim Foot — No, Amazon’s a place to go. Rich Birch — Yeah, that is the bookseller apparently.Tim Foot — I mean, it’s we know these days where wherever where everybody’s going, Amazon’s the way. And I would just add to Rich that as a leader, you want to know. This is information you want to have.Rich Birch — Yes.Tim Foot — We’ve talked so much about self-awareness. And if we’re in leadership, we need to show up to our team self-awareness. So many profiles. Rich Birch — Yep.Tim Foot — We don’t talk enough about team awareness. You need to know as a leader if you’re moving your mission forward or where you might be stalling out because it’s too important. And these seven things, as I said earlier, Rich, they’re not they’re not rocket science. Tim Foot — I mean, I like to I like to couch it this way: Conviction shapes the heart. Message shapes the voice. Culture shapes the atmosphere. Role shape contribution. Systems shape sustainability. Friction shapes growth. Risk shapes the future. And that’s why I hope you’ll dig into this with us. Rich Birch — Love it. Tim Foot — Because we want to see the kingdom move forward and we want to see churches full of healthy teams that not only great leaders want to come and be part of, great volunteers want to be a part of and help move this forward.Rich Birch — That’s so good. Well, I think that’s a great place to end it. I was like, man, that’s, I’m like, I want to preach. Amen, brother. That’s fantastic. If people were, so we’ll send them to Amazon. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. If people want to track with you or with Slingshot, where do we want to send them online to connect as well?Tim Foot — Slingshotgroup.org is our company website. And there’s a bunch of great stories there. There’s places that you can engage. We would love you to be in our ecosystem. And yeah, you can jump over there to reachingforremarkable.com. And we would love to come alongside you and help you continue to move forward in the unique ways that God has called you to.Rich Birch — Well, Tim, it’s great to see you. Tim Foot — You too.Rich Birch — We were just remarking before, we had dinner together there a couple months ago. That was fun, but it was fun to put the recording on today and connect a little bit. Appreciate you, brother. Thanks so much for being here today.Tim Foot — Thanks for having me, Rich.

If you've been seriously thinking about homeschooling but the questions just keep stacking up , this episode is for you. In part one of this two-part series, I'm kicking off a Top 10 countdown of the questions I hear most from families who are considering making the leap, and I'm giving you my real, honest perspective on every single one of them. In this episode, we explore: Why your homeschool day probably won't look anything like what you're imagining right now Whether homeschooling is actually a full K–12 path, and what that can look like in real life What happens to your homeschool when life moves (literally) The truth about sports and extracurriculars for homeschool students Ready to build a homeschool that actually fits your family? Thinking about homeschooling this fall? Click the link below to join the VIP list for first access and the lowest price available on the Homeschool Launch Blueprint before enrollment opens to the public.

“Seek self-mastery in your own way.” In this episode, Nick reflects on The Mindset & Self-Mastery Show reaching 200 episodes. He shares personal growth, lessons learned, and insights on self-awareness, trauma, purpose, and authenticity. What to listen for: Self-awareness is the most important part of growth and healing Trauma from childhood influences adult life and success Aligning with your purpose leads to fulfillment Consistency and authenticity build a meaningful podcast Incremental steps lead to significant change “I felt like there was a conversation on my heart that needed to be had.” Our calling can sometimes start off as a soft whisper about a conversation you're here to have When we feel like our lives are focusing on specific areas, we have an opportunity to share that with the world in the way that feels most aligned for us “Mindset, self-mastery, and transformation don’t really mean anything if you can’t see them, if you are not self-aware of them.” Without self-awareness, we're not able to see that we even have a problem This challenges us to step back, look at ourselves, and look deeper at our experiences and the feelings and emotions that stem from them About Nick McGowan I'm Nick McGowan, an entrepreneur, podcaster, and mental health advocate, and I’ve been on a 20+ year journey of personal development, learning to master my mindset, emotions, and the art of living with purpose. As a Mindset and Self-Mastery Mentor, I work with ambitious men and women who want to live their most authentic and joyous lives by helping them master their mindset, emotional awareness, and authentic communication. My mission is to empower people to lead lives that feel aligned, grounded, and truly their own. Throughout my career, I've built teams, streamlined systems, and improved client experiences across SaaS, media, marketing, and personal development spaces. Whether I'm leading cross-functional projects, optimizing SEO, Podcasting, designing strategies, or guiding clients through transformation, I bring a hands-on, solution-focused approach to everything I do. I'm also the host of The Mindset and Self-Mastery Show, where my guests and I unpack the stories that shape us, challenge us, and ultimately guide us back to who we are at our core. On this show, we uncover the secret gems others have discovered through trial and error and breakthroughs, so you can fast-track your growth and master your mindset in your pursuit of self-mastery. Check out the latest episode here. With years of podcasting and two decades of marketing experience, I've mastered the storytelling, interview flow, strategy, and technical production that elevate a podcast from “just content” to something truly impactful. Whether you’re a leader looking to amplify your message, a seasoned speaker and podcast host looking to sharpen your edge, or even a beginner who is wondering how to share their message, I mentor thought leaders through every step of having the conversation they’re here to have on this planet. So, what message are you here to share?! https://nickmcgowan.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/thenickmcgowan/ Resources: Check out some of the episodes from the past 100 episodes of the podcast. Exploring The Hidden Links Between Shame, Sexuality, And Religion With Ann Russo Understanding The Five Simple Steps To Achieve Self-Mastery With Utkarsh Narang The Ripple Effect Of Courage: The Story Behind Scare Your Soul With Scott Simon Stop Trying: A New Approach To Success With Carla Ondrasik How To Begin Your Human Optimization Journey With Wei Houng Curiosity As A Tool For Better Relationships With Patrick Boylan And check out some of my favorite books for your journey toward self-mastery. Interested in starting your own podcast or need help with one you already have?Learn how I can help! Learn more about our host, Nick McGowanhttps://nickmcgowan.com/ Thank you for listening! Please subscribe to the show on iTunes and give us a 5-Star review! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mindset-and-self-mastery-show/id1604262089 Listen to other episodes here: https://themindsetandselfmasteryshow.com/ Watch Clips and highlights: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk1tCM7KTe3hrq_-UAa6GHA Guest Inquiries right here: podcasts@themindsetandselfmasteryshow.com Your Friends at “The Mindset & Self-Mastery Show” Click Here To View The Episode Transcript Nick McGowan (00:00)I’ve learned that self-awareness is the most important part of this. People ask me at times, what does mindset mean? What does self-mastery mean? What does transformation mean? Like, what are all those things mean to you? They don’t really mean anything if you can’t see them, if you are not self-aware of them. Nick McGowan (00:26)Hello and welcome to the Mindset and Self Mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan. Today on the show, I’m going to talk about this being my 200th episode of the podcast. When I first started, I had no idea I would get, I don’t know, 40 episodes in, let alone 200. It’s kind of nuts what has happened over the past few years. I’ve had the show now as I record in June. I’ve had the show for four and a half years and I started to plan it maybe Nick McGowan (00:55)a little over five years ago, because it took me about, I don’t know, maybe six, seven months to actually get into this and do it all. But when I really think about it, it actually took me six years, like six whole years to do the podcast. I’d thought about starting a podcast back in probably 2013, 14, something like that. I had a social media marketing company with my ex-in-laws at the time and thought maybe this would be a cool thing to talk about social media. Nick McGowan (01:24)or something, I don’t know. I looked at it as a way of hopefully trying to bring in leads for the business that I had. I’m glad I didn’t start the podcast at that point because getting the leads isn’t what a podcast is all about. Really the whole point to a podcast in my mind and in my opinion is to be able to share the message that’s on your heart with the ideal people who want to hear it and who can benefit from it. People you can impact with the words you say. I think it’s really cool to put it in a nice and Nick McGowan (01:55)kind of silly way that I have anybody that listens to this show, that there’s anybody like you specifically, that you listen to this and you come back for my wit or my sarcasm. I hope that you really keep coming back and tuning in to be able to hear how these conversations go. Not only with my solo episodes, which there’s going to be more of those coming up, but also with the guests. Because what I understand and what I’ve really learned over the past two and a half years is that Nick McGowan (02:24)The people who listen to the show are leaders in what they do. You either own a business or you’re a leader in whatever job you work in, or you’re a leader at home. And maybe it’s all the above. And you know that you’ve done a lot of work, but there’s still more work to do. It’s not about grinding or hustling, but it’s about actually being healthy and aligned with what you’re all about. Over the past two and a half years of doing these past hundred episodes. Nick McGowan (02:54)There’s been so much growth personally. And I like doing these milestone episodes. It’s a little bit of a recap. If you go back and you listen to episode 100, I literally had clips from different episodes that I pulled in. There were a lot of great episodes over the first 100 that I’d done. I gotta be honest, last 100 I’ve done have been so much better than I thought they were going to be. There were only a couple episodes that were recorded or partially recorded that I bailed on or… Nick McGowan (03:22)for stuff that happens. And if you really want to know those stories, shoot me a message. I can share some of that stuff. Some of those things should never have been aired and I’m glad that they weren’t. But I’ve really gotten specific in the people that I bring onto the show because I understand that the core of the show, are three core topics that I talk about. It’s mindset, self mastery and transformation. When I first started the show, I thought mindset, self mastery were the main topics because I was having mental health problems and struggling. Nick McGowan (03:52)because I’d gone through a divorce right before that, before I started the show and was just trying to have these conversations. I felt like there was a conversation on my heart that needed to be had. And I wasn’t sure exactly how it needed to go about it, but it felt right for me to start a podcast. If you have a podcast of your own, you probably get it. If you don’t have a podcast and you’ve been kicking around the idea of it, then explore that. In fact, if you need help or you want some help or want some guidance, Nick McGowan (04:20)Reach out to me. I’ve been doing this for almost five years and have learned an immense amount. And heck, over the past two and a half years with the amount that I’ve learned from the podcast itself, just doing the mechanical podcasting thing, not only just having the conversations with people, the stuff that I learned about the podcasting has been critical in where I’m at now. I have a business where I actually help people who are thought leaders, mission driven and purpose driven business owners who have a mission and purpose on their heart. Nick McGowan (04:49)They’re trying to figure out how to best go about these things. But the podcast itself, I’m going to give you a bit of a behind the scenes in a sense. When I first started the show, I tried to do everything I could. All the social media, the website, the newsletters, like every single thing. And if you’ve been around since then, you know, you saw a lot of that stuff. And if you’re on the show at that point, you probably saw I was making like 10, 15 clips per episode. Some of them are really in context and some of those weren’t because I thought I was playing the game right. Nick McGowan (05:19)by getting all this information out there. I’ve learned over the past two and a half years that that’s not really right. In fact, those of you who don’t know this are gonna know now. So after the first year, maybe a little after the first year, like a couple months or so, I actually had a bit of an existential crisis. I moved from where I was in Florida to New Mexico. I basically went from tropical island living on two golf courses. Nick McGowan (05:47)to the foothills of a mountain, living in a tiny home. And I needed to do that. I also apparently needed to break wide open. So when I went through my existential crisis, I literally folded inside out and back out again. And I basically took about a year, year and a half off from most of life. I kept going with the podcast because I felt it was important, not just for me, but for the… Nick McGowan (06:14)people like yourself who keep showing up and the other people that are out there that can be impacted by these conversations and the message. But I was struggling. I was going through a lot. I had a lot of childhood trauma, abuse, different things that shaped me. And I needed to break myself of those. Over the past two and a half years, I’ve done an immense amount of healing work, an immense amount, more so than I’d ever done in my entire life. And I thought of myself as somebody who was really into. Nick McGowan (06:44)personal development, personal growth, since I was probably 19, but a lot of it was intellectualized and not actually enveloped into my body and somatically tying it together. I didn’t understand what any of that stuff meant until literally two and a half, maybe three years ago. So as I went through the first, I’d say year, year and a half of breaking things down, understanding what I no longer wanted, Nick McGowan (07:12)understanding what I absolutely wanted and being a absolute mess as I went through it. uh You can ask my ex partner, she’ll testify to that. There was an immense amount of stuff that I needed to work through and I needed to get through. And that made every single one of these conversations better. That first hundred episodes and that hundredth episode that I did where I did the recap, I thought maybe I’ll do that again. Maybe that’s the thing I do every hundred episodes. I do a recap with some clips and all. Nick McGowan (07:41)As I look through my episode guide, this 200th episode would have been six hours long, because there were so many incredible conversations. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a bit biased, but I got really specific knowing that I need to be focused on what my core topics are. That also came from me breaking. And if you don’t know this, I took a hiatus off social media. I actually pulled the podcast website down. Nick McGowan (08:09)for a little over a year, maybe a little longer, which note to self, I should never do that again. I screwed up my search engine optimization. I did a lot that I couldn’t actually get back from. needed to start over again. So when I came back to everything and I thought I’m going to put the site back up, I’m going to get a brand new site, I’ll probably get back on social media, but I want to do this all differently. How do I do it? I don’t want to make TikTok videos. I don’t want to point the air things. I don’t want to dance. Nick McGowan (08:37)I don’t want to do any of that. None of that feels actually aligned with me. And if you’re a business owner or you work in any sort of business that’s pushing some of these things and they feel off to you, listen to that, dive into that. Because if it feels off, there’s a reason for that. Maybe you just absolutely don’t want to do it because you see everybody else doing it. Maybe you don’t want to do it because there’s something different. And when I sat there in the middle of the desert and the foothills of a mountain, I was like, well, Nick McGowan (09:05)What do I actually want to do? I want to have deep conversations that actually change lives and not from a cheesy buzzword perspective. You listen to these episodes. I try not to be cheesy or buzzwordy at all. mean, cheesy a little bit at times because of my humor, but in all reality, like I even say to the guests when they get on the whole point of the show is to talk about the tough situations and challenging chapters you’ve been through, focus on mindset, self-mastering, transformation. But I don’t want to hear about your success. Nick McGowan (09:35)In fact, I don’t give a shit about your success. I really don’t. I don’t care about your credentials, none of it. And I’ve had some big people on the show at this point. I tell them, I want to know, and the guests and the audience and you want to know, how did you handle the toughest points of your life? What did you do to get yourself out of it? What about when you had a gun in your hand or you were thinking tonight’s the night where I’m going to end it? How did you get past that and through that? What do you do differently now? Nick McGowan (10:04)Because again, I don’t give a fuck about your success. I want to know about the real things that have tied to that and correlated to now you being successful. And success means different things for different people. If you’re doing what you want to do and you feel aligned in what you’re doing, that’s success to the extreme amount. But other people say if you don’t have billions of dollars or you don’t run some corporation or whatever, then you’re not successful. That’s their worldview. What does your worldview look like? What do you want it to look like? Nick McGowan (10:34)Whatever you want it to be, shape it, shape it that way. So over these past two and a half years, doing these hundred episodes, getting back to what do I really want to do? I want to have these deep conversations. I was intentional about who I brought on to the show. Over the first hundred, it’s a little intentional, but it took probably till about 70, 80 episodes in. Cause I didn’t know, there were things to learn and I had people reaching out to me and people I would meet with and connect with and I’d have them on the show and we’d have Nick McGowan (11:04)great conversation at time, but not like I did over the past hundred episodes. And I suspect that over the next hundred episodes, I’m probably going to be in the same spot where it’s going to be like, man, all of these conversations have just been so incredible. How do I share that or encapsulate that one 20, 30 minute episode or something like that? So I, I ask you and I challenge you to go back through the catalog. Nick McGowan (11:30)past hundred episodes, even go back through the first hundred episodes if you want to. But these past hundred episodes, there were some incredible things that we talked about. One of the biggest things that I’ve learned throughout all of these episodes and the past almost five years doing this and having hundreds of conversations with people, not only on the podcast, but with the clients that I work with who are other podcasters and thought leaders and people that have conversations on their podcasts, as well as networking, different events I go to or classes, et cetera. Nick McGowan (12:00)Let’s learn that self-awareness is the most important part of this. People ask me at times, what does mindset mean? What does self-mastery mean? What does transformation mean? Like, what are all those things mean to you? They don’t really mean anything if you can’t see them, if you are not self-aware of them. Now, you’ve probably heard me joke at different times, and maybe some of you, some of the people who listen get a kick out of it, some maybe don’t. I don’t know, it’s up to you. Nick McGowan (12:27)joked about how self-awareness is like opening a door in a fun house and then there’s 40 other doors. Then you go through one of those and there’s like another 4,000 doors and you’re super aware of all the things that happen and the macro moments and all the things that could turn into something as well as the things that would have pushed you in a different direction in the past or maybe are shaping you these days. But being self-aware, the more self-aware you are, the more self-aware you are. Nick McGowan (12:56)self aware you are, the more fucking self aware you are. And sometimes it sucks because you see things and you’re like, I’m trying to work on these. I’m doing these things, but right now I just don’t want to. But that also brings in its own set of, I don’t want to say problems. I think they’re uh little activities that we kind of go through. And I find myself at times being self aware of a situation, something that I’m working on still. And I can see Nick McGowan (13:25)how I do a thing, why I do a thing. And then I’ll have a bit of a conversation with myself about it to understand what am I exactly trying to get out of it. And there are certain things that I do where I understand like maybe I’m overstimulated with a lot of meetings throughout the day. And I am self aware enough to know I could keep pushing, I could keep doing the thing. could maybe jump back into that project that I started before my couple of meetings or whatever. I could also just grab my guitar. Nick McGowan (13:55)and play for a few minutes. I can also just go walk outside. can go do anything else, but I’m aware in those moments at this point to go, I feel like I’m getting a capacity. What feels more aligned for me to do in the moment? What can I do to take a step out of this? And sometimes it’s happened where it’s like a two, three hour step away. There’ve been times where I’ve gotten in the car and just drove because I’m like, I’m just, I need to get out of my office. Nick McGowan (14:21)I need to get out of my house. I need to get out of the thing that I’m doing and just get out of here and go drive. And I’ll end up, I don’t know, maybe getting a coffee or something or a Yerba and I’ll just keep driving around, experiencing different things, listening to music or whatever. And then I’ll come back and I’ll get back into the projects that I was doia ng. Sometimes it’s five minutes. I’ll grab my guitar and I’ll play around on an idea or I’ll just play a song that I know or play one of my own songs or just riff or whatever. Nick McGowan (14:51)just step myself out of what I was doing to then be able to understand that I have that privilege, I have that space to be able to do that because of the work that I’ve done to be able to get to the point where I’m at. I’m not one of those people that makes billions of dollars, maybe at some point, but I also don’t know if anybody actually really needs that. I think what we really need is to be fulfilled and aligned and to be us at our core. Nick McGowan (15:18)So self-awareness is one of the biggest things that has really stood out to me, not only over the past hundred episodes, but the 200 episodes and all the other conversations that I’ve had. Trauma was another thing that we talked a lot about. I dabbled on that a little bit in the first hundred episodes, but I got really, really, really deep into it on my own and with my practitioners and my coaches that I was working with. That it was inevitable that it came into these conversations. Nick McGowan (15:48)You’ve probably heard me say on different episodes. think a lot of the stuff that we go through as adults really ties back to our childhood. And when people say trauma or childhood trauma, some people will use it as kind of a synonymous thing. Like whatever happened, they just tie it to a childhood trauma. We also as individuals can’t tell them that’s not right. And I say we can’t because it’s not on us to say that something that we experience. Nick McGowan (16:18)or hear about, we go, oh, maybe that’s a small T trauma. To them, that could have been Eiffel Tower sized trauma. You have no idea. You don’t have any idea. We don’t know until we start having conversations with people, which is one of the reasons why I love the podcast. You never know what’s behind somebody’s eyes until you ask and start to have conversation. You build rapport with them to help them feel comfortable to be able to have those conversations. Nick McGowan (16:46)And I think that’s an important thing for all of us to remember that there are times where we need to have those conversations, not only just with ourselves, but there are other people. If you’re going through things and you don’t have somebody to talk to, reach out to me, reach out to a friend, start looking for a therapist that you can reach out to. If finances are difficult, there are programs that can help. If you are unsure of what sort of therapies or modalities or Nick McGowan (17:15)any experiences you can have to be able to help you. I suggest that you just start with something, start moving, have a conversation, try a modality. Over the past two and a half years, I’ve tried a lot of the different stuff that I can. I haven’t licked the ass of a toad yet. I don’t know if I want to get to that point or even ayahuasca or anything like that. I really have been focused on how do I become more self-aware. Nick McGowan (17:44)How do I better manage my mindset and understand what my mindset is actually coming from? And how do I put the intention into the intentional mindset to be able to do things that are really aligned with me? That’s kind of easy to say in a sense. It’s really been difficult to work through and work on. So trauma and self-awareness were two major things that came up over the past, I’d say 200 episodes, but specifically the past 100. Alignment? Nick McGowan (18:13)purpose and expression are the other three that come up. And I clump them all together because when we’re aligned on our purpose, it expresses itself the way that it needs to in this day and age. Let’s think about this podcast and me as the host. If I didn’t have podcasting, I’d have done something different like this. Nick McGowan (18:40)Maybe a hundred or 200 years ago, I’d have been one of those dudes standing on a soapbox on the corner of a street. I don’t know. This is what this looks like right now. In 2026, we have the ability to be able to have our own, in essence, radio show, to be able to share what we want to share. And I think that’s critical for us to understand that this day and age, where the technology is and where things are, this is how Nick McGowan (19:10)It has shaped for me. If you have your own podcast, you get it. Again, if you’re thinking about your own podcast and you’re probably along those lines too of like, this feels right for me to do. I’m not sure what to do next or how to go about it. And again, I challenge you to just start taking steps or reaching out to people like myself or anybody else you know that has a podcast to ask, how do you get started? In fact, when I first got started, hired a consultant company and I asked them, how did you fuck up? What’d you do wrong? So I can do something different. And I still messed up. Nick McGowan (19:39)My first episode, my microphone wasn’t and I’m a musician and an audio file and my microphone wasn’t on. It sounded like I was six rooms away in like my neighbor’s bathroom, but you know, it happens. We got to get through it. So here, here we are 200 episodes later, trauma, expression, alignment, purpose, self-awareness, all of these things tie together. Nick McGowan (20:09)because it’s all about understanding who we are at our core, what is aligned for us and what’s helping us or holding us back from doing the things that we feel called to do. If you’re in a job right now, let’s not talk about a business. Let’s just say you’re in a job. If you’re in a job and you hate it, Nick McGowan (20:32)You’ve probably heard people tell you before, we’ll get a different job. And your first response, at least in your head is probably typically fuck off. I get that. And I’m not here to tell you, go get a different job. I’m here to tell you, look at what you’re doing, what you like of what you are doing, and then start to make at least incremental small steps toward what that could look like for you to do it differently. I don’t think everybody needs to be an entrepreneur. I don’t think everybody’s an entrepreneur at their, at their core. Nick McGowan (21:01)I just don’t, just like, don’t think everybody needs to have a podcast. And there are a lot of people that say everybody’s got a podcast. That’s actually incorrect. There are more podcast guests than there are active podcasts. Yes, there may be a lot of people have had podcasts, but most people don’t go past the 21st episode. In fact, if you have a podcast and you’ve gotten past the 21st episode, you are in the top 1 % of podcasters because most people don’t get past that. Let’s not even look at 2020. Nick McGowan (21:31)when everybody was pushed home because of COVID. And a lot of people were like, I don’t know what to do. So I guess I’ll become a coach and I don’t know who to talk to. So I guess I’ll have a podcast. A lot of those people ended up figuring out this is really hard. And if you don’t have the skills to be able to have the conversations, to put the podcast episodes together, to be able to produce and create everything and get it all out there, or the finances to have somebody help you. lot of those people ended up trailing off. Nick McGowan (22:00)Maybe they got a few episodes in. Maybe they got to 21 episodes, but then they still bailed. That happens. And again, I don’t think a podcast is for everybody. Just like I don’t think a business is for everybody. So if you have a job or if you have a business and you’re thinking, I have to make some changes, I challenge you that you make those changes to you first. And you might hear me say that and go, all right, Nick, I hear you. Don’t give me your leadership bullshit. I’m not trying to give you a leadership bullshit. What I’m trying to give you is Nick McGowan (22:30)accountability and something you can actually do on your own. Because if you’re in a spot right now where you’re like, I don’t like what I’m doing, you’ve probably been in that spot for a little bit. You might’ve even said last year or two years ago, I don’t like this job and here you are two years later. Over the past two and a half years, a lot of things that I didn’t like about myself that I needed to work through and needed to better understand, needed to reframe, needed to actually get the trauma. Nick McGowan (22:59)out of my cells and my being. And there were a lot of things that I didn’t understand that I did actually like, but I thought I shouldn’t do because I’m a 41 year old man, like playing music. Playing music as a hobby is one thing, playing music to write an album, to be able to actually get your music and your art out there is a different thing. It takes more intention. And that’s the thing that I’ve been kicking around for a long time. In fact, I’ve been working on an album for the past, I’d say five years or so. Nick McGowan (23:29vBut last year, right around this time last year, I actually reformatted my music card drive and lost everything. So I had to start it all over again. Yeah, that sucks. And I cried a little bit, not gonna lie. As soon as I figured out, I reformatted everything. There’s no unburning the bridges or the ships. So I had to start all over again. And that, in that little moment, Nick McGowan (23:55)helped me understand all the work that I’d done before that to be able to be in this spot, to then say, right, well, what do I do differently going forward? That self-awareness that was there. So over these past hundred episodes, with all the conversations I’ve had, the biggest thing that I want you to be able to take from this is self-awareness, alignment, and your purpose expression. Be self-aware in everything you do. Don’t drive yourself crazy, but test it bit by bit by bit. Nick McGowan (24:24)what happens at work, what happens at home, what happens while you’re driving, but you start to get a little triggered or a little anxious and start to look at those things a little deeper. Now, if you have a therapist you work with or different modalities that you go through with different practitioners, wonderful. You probably do some of this work. My challenge is just to do more of that and keep at it. Not to say you’re not doing enough, but to be mindful. What? Nick McGowan (24:54)is it that’s deeper than the thing that you’ve been working on that could actually help you heal all the rest of it? And then when you look at your purpose and your purpose expression, understand where we’re at in this day and age and understand what you really love to do and what you feel called inside of you to do. I have to be honest, it’s probably not the most clear thing ever. In fact, most people I’ve talked to about purpose Nick McGowan (25:23)there was always some sort of like glint of what it was, but it wasn’t until I’d say much later in life or as I got deeper into the thing that they were doing, that they really understood why they love what they’re doing, how it makes them feel and what’s leading them to be able to do it. You typically don’t understand that upfront. In fact, the work that I do with my clients, when I work with them through Nick McGowan (25:51)a strategy for their podcast and all. We talk about being able to build out pillar episodes and core episodes that talk about their specific topics. And then a client asked me, well, why don’t I do that upfront? Why do you have me doing that 30, 40, 50 episodes later? Because the amount of work that you have to do to go through that, to then be able to have that conversation because of all the research, all the conversations, all the other things you’ve done along with that. So likewise with you, your business or Nick McGowan (26:21vyour job or your family or wherever you’re at. If there are things that you feel are off or not aligned, then look at those and start to ask yourself, what is it about those things that really get me fired up? What are the things that I do now that can help me do that? As a personal example, over the course of my life, my career, let’s say, I’ve done a lot when it comes to uh sales and marketing and operations. Nick McGowan (26:50)And there’s a kind of Venn diagram of some of the software. Like if you’re in sales or if you’re in customer service, you’re probably familiar with the CRM. I think of it as a customer relationship management piece of software where you can hold accounts, have all the contact info and all that sort of stuff. I also know what it’s like to be able to run giant productions of things specifically from the sales end. Nick McGowan (27:16)and working with operations, marketing, development, all that sort of stuff through different uh situations that I’ve been in, jobs that I’ve had or different clients and projects I’ve worked on over the course of my life. And all of that has helped me with the people that I work with, my clients, my mindset and self-mastering mentees and the podcast mentees, because there’s a bit of a kind of a playground sort of way where we get to be able to play. Nick McGowan (27:45)but I also understand what those boundaries are and what systems have in place and all. And this is something I wouldn’t have been able to do three years ago, let alone five years ago, you know, when I was basically starting this off. So without making this episode much longer, I really appreciate you being here. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you tuning in. I appreciate you sharing. I appreciate when you go, man, what the fuck you just said? I need to do something with that. Nick McGowan (28:14)And I hope you are. really hope you are. And if you’re not, I hope that you do. Even if that’s just talking with yourself a little bit and taking some incremental steps to be able to have conversations with other people. I really want you to be able to walk away from this episode, understanding that the next hundred episodes I’m going to do are going to be better than these past hundred. No shade to the guests or even to myself having these conversations. It’s just only going to get better from here. It’s just going to get more and more. Nick McGowan (28:44)in depth with everything that we get into. So again, thank you. Thank you for your support. Thank you for being with me on this journey. Thank you for being with you on your journey. And if there’s anything I can do to help, anything I can do to support, share resources, please feel free to reach out. If you’re somebody who’s trying to figure out how do you better manage your mindset and how do you seek self mastery in your own way, reach out to me. Nick McGowan (29:13)If you’re somebody who has a message on their heart, just like I do, and you feel there’s a deep purpose and calling to your life, and that podcasting could be a great way to be able to get that out to the world, reach out to me. This is what I do. And I love it because it’s part of my calling to be able to do this. So again, some of the main things that really stood out from the past hundred episodes was self-awareness, purpose, expression, alignment, trauma. Nick McGowan (29:41)all of these things tied together. So again, I appreciate you being with me on this journey. Thank you for listening to this. If there’s anything specific you’d want me to get into or more topics that you’d like me to dive deeper into over the next hundred episodes, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me uh through the website. I check all those. It’s not like it goes to some random customer service person or an admin or anything. It goes directly to me. So I’ll look through all those. Nick McGowan (30:11)and would love to hear from you. So again, if there are things you would love for me to get deeper into or topics that are near and dear to your heart that you’d love me to get into, please send that stuff over. And again, thank you so much for listening and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Nick McGowan (30:31)Thanks for listening to today’s episode. What did you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you enjoyed the episode, please jump over to Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you consume podcasts and subscribe, rate, and leave a five-star review. It’s very much appreciated and also helps other people find the show and experience healing just like us. Please also head over to our website, themindsetandselfmasteryshow.com. Nick McGowan (30:58Nick McGowan)where you can check out all of our episodes and find additional resources to help you manage your mindset as you seek self-mastery. So with that, thank you and remember, your mindset matters and so do you.

Last 4 days before regular tickets sell out at AI Engineer World's Fair - this is the single biggest gathering of AI Engineers, Founders, Leaders, and Researchers in the world. Attendees get >$5000 worth of sponsor credits and talk tracks are looking FANTASTIC. Join us!The AI scaling debate always focuses on the question of “how do we get more GPUs?” but the better question may be: how do we make the most of ones we already have.The fact that a frontier lab like xAI could be running at sub-10% MFU (Model FLOPs Utilization) is just a hint at what the real problem may be.For context, older frontier-scale training runs were already much higher than 10%. GPT-3 was around 21% MFU. Gopher was around 32%. Megatron-Turing NLG was around 30%. PaLM reached around 46%. And our guest Anjney says best-in-class MFU today is closer to 60–70%.It's not necessarily that xAI is uniquely incompetent (it's clear they have talented folks) but rather the priorities may be flipped in the GPU arms race.While GPU access is a bottleneck, simply increasing CapEx won't automatically translate to better models as frontier AI is increasingly a systems problem: scheduling, utilization, networking, kernels, frameworks, data pipelines, parallelism, cluster reliability, and the thousand small decisions that determine whether your theoretical FLOPs become real training progress.From building Discord's developer platform and backing frontier AI companies like Anthropic, Mistral, Black Forest Labs, and Periodic Labs to now building AMP's independent compute grid, Anjney Midha has spent years close to the real bottlenecks of AI scaling. In this episode, Anjney joins swyx at Periodic Labs to unpack why the AI race is not just about buying more GPUs, why 95% utilization would have been considered an outage at Google, and why the next era of AI infrastructure has to be more aligned, more efficient, and more responsible.We go deep on AMP's vision for a compute grid that makes FLOPs flow like megawatts, the difference between full-stack AI labs and horizontal pooling, why AI data centers need community buy-in, and how compute markets could evolve into something closer to an independent system operator. Anjney also explains why DeepMind's unpublished research points to a market failure, why end-of-life prediction remains one of the most important AI applications he has thought about for fourteen years, and why “output maxing” may become a new discipline for frontier systems.We also discuss Anthropic's culture, why “luck favors the prepared mind” in coding models, how Claude cracked coding, why too much capital too early can make AI labs fragile, what Periodic Labs is trying to do with science and superconductors, why great researchers can become great CEOs, and why Silicon Valley is both deeply missionary and deeply mercenary.We discuss:* Why 95% utilization was considered an outage at Google* Why AI infrastructure waste compounds at frontier-lab scale* Why “move fast and break things” does not work for AI data centers* How data center backlash, power grids, and community incentives shape AI scaling* AMP's vision for making FLOPs flow like megawatts* Why compute needs an independent system operator* How interruptible demand and dynamic prioritization worked inside Google* Why DeepMind research hoarding creates negative externalities* AMP's 1.2GW base-load ambition and the need for 6GW of spike capacity* Why end-of-life prediction could become one of AI's most important healthcare applications* Frontier Systems, output maxing, and full-stack alignment* Why APIs and abstraction layers become lossy as organizations scale* Superconductors, standards, and the dream of lossless systems* SF Compute, open protocols, and the future of compute marketplaces* Why non-NVIDIA chips can still benefit from NVIDIA's reference architecture* Trust boundaries and why chip startups need visibility into future model architectures* Why VCs often underestimate researchers as CEOs* Scientists as star athletes of the mind* Why great CEOs need to be confrontational up and down the stack* Why leading the frontier matters more than “winning”* How Anthropic cracked coding* Why culture is fragile, not a permanent moat* Why hardship was a feature, not a bug, for Anthropic* Why Anthropic's P0 was coding from day one* Periodic Labs, physics as the constraint, and technical reality* Silicon Valley mercenaries, missionary teams, and what happens after a breakthroughAnjney Midha* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjney* X: https://x.com/AnjneyMidhaAMP PBC* Website: https://amppublic.com/* X: https://x.com/amppublicTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:09 Why AI Compute Is Being Wasted00:03:17 Responsible Infrastructure and Data Center Backlash00:06:07 AMP Grid: Making FLOPs Flow Like Megawatts00:12:41 Foundry, Frontier Labs, and Research Hoarding00:14:42 Gigawatt-Scale Compute and End-of-Life Prediction00:24:08 Frontier Systems, Output Maxing, and Alignment00:27:38 Compute Markets, SF Compute, and Non-NVIDIA Chips00:32:57 Trust Boundaries, Co-Design, and Researcher CEOs00:38:17 AI Coachella and First-Principles Thinking00:42:43 Leading vs Winning in Frontier AI00:45:54 How Anthropic Cracked Coding00:48:25 Culture, Hardship, and Anthropic's P000:54:03 Periodic Labs, Physics, and Silicon Valley Mercenaries00:56:26 Rishi Valley, Singapore, and Money as a Measure00:58:47 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptIntroduction: Anjney Midha, AMP, and Compute WasteSwyx [00:00:00]: We're in Periodic Labs with Anjney Midha, CEO, founder of AMP. Welcome.Compute Utilization: Node Allocation, MFU, and AlignmentAnjney [00:00:09]: Thanks for having me. At Google, there are two types of utilization usually, right? That you're measuring in these clusters. One is node allocation, and then the other's MFU. Node utilization is usually like what percentage of cards in the data center are just, used, and that, if it's not at, 95%-Swyx [00:00:29]: There is no excuseAnjney [00:00:29]: There's no excuse, right? I think 95% at Google, which is where my co-founder, Seb, came from, he built the Borg, PBorg/GQM scheduler at Google, and there I think 95% was considered an outage, so 96% node utilization is, should be standard. And most single-tenant clusters are not running at that. So that's one. And then MFU should be, I would say the best in class today is somewhere between 60 and 70%. I think this is a leadership question, right? Fundamentally it's an alignment question, which is are the people who are funding the cluster and then deploying the cluster actually aligned? And sometimes theoretically they are, but in practice the number of people in the chain, the supply chain between, the capital and all the way to whoever's managing the cluster and then whoever's measuring what the output is, are just so many, degrees of separation away that, the, The Have you ever heard the radian metaphor, which is at the beginning of an arc, if you have two arcs that are two lines that are just off by a few degrees, that-Swyx [00:01:33]: It spreads outAnjney [00:01:34]: It spreads out, right? Or at scale. And I think what's happening is a lot of cluster implementations and infrastructure, a lot of frontier labs and other teams, that's what's happening, is they're, they initialize the plan, which is kind of like North Star with a team that wants to do good, but then they're, required to scale so fast instead of iteratively that the wastage just compounds really fast at scale. And so I think we know the answer, which is just do iterative bring ups. If you spend time with people who've been in the semiconductor industry or the DSN industry for a long time, this is not new, and I don't think AI should be an excuse. Sure. Something What is new? Okay. We have a lot of new capabilities, but that doesn't mean just abandon common sense. Common sense should always be in fashion. ? AI scaling doesn't change the in fact, if anything, AI scaling should be putting a premium on the value of common sense and infrastructure because the margin of error now is so much lower and the costs of wastage are so much higher. And the cost of wastage, by the way, is not just economic. I'm, obviously I'm, I'm an investor, or I'm an investor by background. Over the last few years now we're running an AI infrastructure business called, AMP. And I think that it's okay to say this time is different on the capabilities front. We are genuinely getting capabilities at, of the, of a kind we haven't had before. That doesn't give you an excuse to say this time is different for everything, especially infrastructure. So look, I love the hacker mindset and the hustler mindset. Now, that's great for the startup mindset, but you remember this moment where Zuck went from saying, “Move fast, break things” to, move-Responsible Infrastructure and Data Center BacklashSwyx [00:03:10]: Fast and stable infrastructureAnjney [00:03:11]: Move fast with stable infrastructure. I think now we need to move fast with, responsible infrastructure. People are going to ask where the impact is. There was a really In our class yesterday, Scott Nolan, who's the founder of General Matter, came by at Stanford to speak about energy bottlenecks. And he had a phenomenal idea. He said, “if you look at the marginal unit economics of compute per hour,” he goes, “let's call it, $4 an hour. If you're having to bring up a new data center in a new community, why not just say we're going to charge 4.50 an hour, and that marginal impact or that marginal increase, we just literally take that and give it to the local community as cash?” I can tell you as a customer of that compute, I would love that. I'd be happy to pay an additional 50 cents per hour at scale.Swyx [00:03:57]: Wow. Yeah.Anjney [00:03:58]: Because if that means the public benefit is so clear to the communities that the data centers are coming up in, I'm going to feel like that compute is much more reliable. Up to 20% of all data centers this year in the US, my understanding is are at risk.Swyx [00:04:13]: Of community backlash?Anjney [00:04:14]: Correct. Of not getting the community support they need to get brought up.Swyx [00:04:19]: Wow. That's a huge number.Anjney [00:04:20]: Yeah. Now, we, I think we should dig into what that number is. I think it's a little bit of overstated. These things can get over-reported, but it-Swyx [00:04:27]: They don't just care about jobs. They care about all the other stuff around it, right? They care about power grid, they care about environments-Anjney [00:04:33]: Power grid, permitting, and so on. And imagine I think if you said there's a new AI deal. If we're bringing up a data center in your community, we're actually going to reduce the cost of your electricity bill. Okay, now we're talking. Right? The community's going, “Okay. Now this is a deal. I feel like a partner in this.” Right now that's not happening. There will be audits, there will be investigations, and when the, when the regulators come, I don't know when it's going to be, the folks who are moving fast and breaking things in the name of AI progress better be prepared. That's certainly not how we're procuring compute. Or we're, we're trying as much as we can to work with partners who have long-term track records. Many of whom, by the way, are not, AI providers. I think this whole idea of neoclouds being somehow this new category is a lot of marketing speak. There are really good, reliable, trusted data center providers in America who've been around 20 plus years. I love those folks. They know how to Sure. Are they sponsoring happy hours at NeurIPS? No. Are they legibly listed in Build? No. Are they hanging out in my, in, situational awareness parties? No. But they're adults. I trust them.Swyx [00:05:44]: They can run LAN. They can run power.Anjney [00:05:45]: They can run LAN, power, and shell. They have credit histories. We sit down, we have a conversations. Many of them live in Silicon Valley. They've, they've had to deal with the boom and bust cycles of the internet, and I love those folks. They are stable infrastructure partners and thinkers. And I think there's a lot of short-term thinking going on in the compute layer, and it's going to catch up to us. It's not going to be good.AMP Grid: Making FLOPs Flow Like MegawattsSwyx [00:06:07]: You talk about aligning incentives, and, I would think that aligning incentives means you have the full stack in one company, which is xAI and OpenAI, right? So you as a standalone infrastructure layer, why are you somehow more aligned to your portfolio companies than people who just own the whole thing?Anjney [00:06:28]: In systems design, right, there's, there's two regimes of, architecture, right? You have integration, and then you have pooling and utilization, right? So the Or rather, the way to increase utilization often is you can do systems integration where you collapse a lot of process into one node, or you can pull out a process from a node and share that amongst various That resource amongst several different nodes. And so we see the AMP grid, which is, the, what, the system we're building here, which is basically a compute grid. We're trying to do for compute what the electric grid-Swyx [00:07:02]: PowerAnjney [00:07:02]: Yeah, what the power grid did for electricity. It-- this is a pooling and utilization layer across clouds, And so we're actually the opposite of a full stack integration like approach.Swyx [00:07:12]: Super horizontal.Anjney [00:07:13]: Where it's much more horizontal and it's, it's multi-cloud, it's multi-silicon. The goal is to try to make FLOPs flow like megawatts, and that is very hard to do today for many reasons. There's stranded pools of compute all over the place and there's no fungibility. And so right now we do it at the level of scheduling, and we often do it at the economic layer. But as we start to announce what we're working on, it's extraordinary like how many folks are coming out of the woodworks and saying, “Hey, I'm actually working on a way to make compute fungible at this part of the stack and that part of the stack.” And as a grid, we'd like all of these folks to participate on the grid. There's, people often ask me, “Andra, are you a new cloud?” And I go, “No, actually neoclouds are suppliers.” sometimes they'll ask, “Are you a venture capital firm?” I go, “No, actually they are, they are demand like sort of off-takers of the grid.” We see ourselves as what's called an independent system operator. So if you study the history of the electric grid, once it became legible to a lot of factories and industrial sort of participants that, hey, actually it turns out pooling is a good idea. We should pool our generators instead of all having a generator running at half capacity in our backyard. There was a need for an independent entity who could coordinate all these parties. Transmission line, power generation, facilities, transmission lines, factories, and that neutral coordination mechanism is very critical. In order-- If you study like the history of grids, the most enduring ones were those that never owned their own assets. They were ones that had, or often started with long-term anchors who are uncorrelated sources of demand, a steel factory, a shoe mill or whatever in a particular town who weren't competitive, where the steel factory want to spike up at night, the shoe mill wanted to spike up during the day. So then you pool and you share, right? So each of you is guaranteed some base load, but then you kind of schedule your spikes to drive a peak utilization across the town. The gold standard, so to speak, historically, has been these utility companies like PJM Interconnect in the northeast of America, where they, over many years became this what's called an ISO, an independent system operator of the grid. So that's how we see ourselves. Economically, that's what we are. From a technical perspective, we started at the scheduling layer because Seb and Mihai, who, run engineering here, built that at-Swyx [00:09:28]: Did your schedulingAnjney [00:09:28]: They did that at Google. And, -Swyx [00:09:32]: And you have infra shops from Discord as well.Anjney [00:09:35]: I have some.Swyx [00:09:35]: I don't know, I don't know if Discord is like the primary identity, but what-whatever, I'm just kind of-Anjney [00:09:39]: No, D-Discord was-Swyx [00:09:40]: Choosing a well-known name.Anjney [00:09:42]: Well, I So I was running the developer platform there. The internal infrastructure I was not responsible for. That was actually a guy by the name of Mark Smith, who was extraordinary. And yes, Discord did pool So Discord is actually a counter example. I had the chance to learn a lot about fully, full stack infra there because-Swyx [00:09:56]: It's the same thing, yeahAnjney [00:09:57]: It's the, it's the other architecture which is, Discord built its own WebRTC vo-voice and video infra. So like Discord did not use-Swyx [00:10:08]: For the calls, yeah.Anjney [00:10:09]: Yeah, did not For communication, Discord did not use third party infra. It was all built in-house. And then the way you maximize utilization was you pool demand from the world's 200 million plus monthly active gamers, right? And so that's, that's how those stacks were constructed. Again, in systems design, the two concepts that keep coming up over and over again are abstraction and composition, right? And-Swyx [00:10:31]: Bundling and unbundlingAnjney [00:10:33]: Bundling and unbundling, abstraction, composition, like verticalization and-Swyx [00:10:36]: HorizontalAnjney [00:10:36]: Horizontalization. So in that sense, AMP is an independent system operator of the grid. We pool demand, we pool supply from a number of partners we trust At about 1.3 gigawatt scale over four years. And then we pool demand from some of the world's best, research labs and so on. We're sitting at one, periodic labs who need extraordinary long-term demand. And the idea is that, each of them is guaranteed base load on the grid, but they can spike up and down flexibly on, for compute, with much shorter timelines as needed. That was roughly the design of the program I came up with at a16z called Oxygen. The same-- That was the same design of the GQM, BorgX, Borg GQM implementation at Google that Mihai and Seb had built. Which was that how do you allow, teams inside of Google, on the internal infrastructure to be guaranteed capacity, for their base workloads? But when they need to spike up on research, how could they ensure that was sufficiently there? And of course, the big innovation that was not discovered, but kind of implemented in the space, this infra space maybe three, four years ago at Google was the idea of interruptible demand, right? Where you just queue up a bunch of jobs and through this like sort of credit system, there can be a bidding mechanism.Swyx [00:11:53]: Like priorities.Anjney [00:11:54]: It's a dynamic prioritization Basically. And jobs can get interrupted based on somebody else who's saying, “what? I have 10 tokens, 10 credits I want to spend on this job.” Another like team lead, research lead is “Genie 3 or whatever is only worth five, credits, and NanoBanana2 is worth 10 credits,” and so the NanoBanana job gets priority. That's a, that's a made up example.Swyx [00:12:15]: It's very real. Brain Marketplace was real. And, we've, we've covered this on the pod with David Luan, who was-Anjney [00:12:20]: Oh, great. OkaySwyx [00:12:20]: Was there. And the criticism is that, well, actually sometimes you need central command to go all in on a thing. And actually sometimes capitalism via credits doesn't work. Not, this is not a criticism of AMP. I'm just saying, this is a thing that has been tried, internally within Google, and it led to Google missing GPT.Foundry, Frontier Labs, and Research HoardingAnjney [00:12:41]: Like, we structured ourself essentially very similarly to Google. We are structured as a holdings company. So, Alphabet holdings is Alphabet holdings, and then they've got these subsidiaries called Google and-Swyx [00:12:51]: Other betsAnjney [00:12:52]: Other bets and so on. We've got, AMP holdings, and we've got our infrastructure business, and then we've got a capital business called Foundry that incubates new frontier AI labs or invests in them as venture capital, like Periodic. We put a few hundred million dollars into Anthropic from our fund earlier this year. So wherever we feel like teams are making progress, especially researchers and so on who've pushed the frontier inside of existing labs like DeepMind, I find, there comes a point where they feel misaligned with the dictatorship of Alphabet holdings. And at that point, sometimes the dictatorship doesn't want them anymore. And they're “Thank you. You've done your job here. You've kind of helped us through the zero to one phase, and for whatever reason, we're going to deprioritize your amazing, omni model or whatever it is, and instead we're going to prioritize coding.” And, I think that's a tragedy, but I get it. They're Sergey and team are running their own business there. But that doesn't mean we the rest of us should sit around waiting for that progress to get unlocked for the rest of the world and humanity. If you think about how much extraordinary research has happened inside of DeepMind over the last 10 years, I, Demis and Sergey and those guys did such a great job. But at the end of the day, so much of that has never seen the light of day?Swyx [00:14:00]: Or they're like papers only, but they never actually shipped it to production or-Anjney [00:14:03]: What's worse is the paper is actually not even being published anymore ‘cause there's a six-month embargo inside of DeepMind, right? We've heard about this where a paper comes out, and then I think there's a six-month embargo window where if anybody on the business team says, “This could be interesting” It's embargoed for life.Swyx [00:14:18]: Exactly. So the stuff that gets published is the stuff that's not good enough.Anjney [00:14:21]: There's an adverse selection problem, basically. Yeah. At this point-Swyx [00:14:25]: It's, it's a common complaint at NeurIPS, by the way, that's “Well, why would I look at the papers that are the trash of GDM?”Anjney [00:14:31]: Again, I think it's a tragedy. I get it. They're running their business, but the rest of the I think there's negative externalities of research being hoarded, and so that'there's a market failure. And somebody needs to unlock that research, and we can't do it on our own. We only have 1.2 gigawatts of compute. That's nothing. That's about $40 billion of cloud spend. We're going to need a lot-Gigawatt-Scale Compute and End-of-Life PredictionSwyx [00:14:51]: By the way, is that's a new number. I haven't, haven't come across that gigawatt number. That's huge.Anjney [00:14:56]: Yeah. And to be clear, we haven't secured all of it. That's how much demand we have started to secure. I think publicly we haven't actually confirmed how much we have for this year. In order-Swyx [00:15:04]: Where do you want to get to?Anjney [00:15:06]: I think the steady state would be that we have a base load pool Of 1.2 gigawatts at all times Of base load capacity. For spike capacity, right now my estimate is we need roughly six gigawatts over the next four years for all our teams to feel like they were able to keep moving the frontier, whatever they're working on, whether it's, like superconductor discovery over here. There's a new investment we're working on right now, which is in the end of life prediction space in healthcare. It's extraordinary how much you can, you can give this was actually my graduate school work. I went to grad school for bioinformatics at Stanford Med. And I know we-Swyx [00:15:40]: Econ, MCS, bio.Anjney [00:15:41]: So my-- I was this really weird cat where, I was never satisfied with my major options. So at one point I was an econ major, then I was a CS major, then I was a MCS major called mathematical computational science, and they decided they were going to end that major. So I took all that coursework, and I applied it to grad school, my graduate degree in bioinformatics, which was the master's program, and then I thought I was going to do a PhD. I never ended up doing it. I dropped out and went to work at Kleiner. But I was lucky enough to apprentice with this professor at, Stanford Med. His name is Nigam Shah, and he was working on end of life prediction. Stanford is one of the only research facilities in America that has a longitudinal patient data set that's larger at scale. I think it's at least 12 million patient lives. The only larger data set is at the VA, the Veterans Affairs, of America. And to do research, like do any deep learning and so on that data set, it was called the STRIDE data set at that time, you had to be a Stanford Med School affiliate, which is why I went and enrolled in the bioinformatics department. End of deep learning was early. Nigam Shah had the visibility-- the vision to see that, you could do end of life prediction to help palliative care. In America, the, over 30% of all Medicare, Medicaid spend, at least at that time, was spent on end of life care. And what's we grew up in Asia, so we all-- Yeah, at least I won't speak for you, but I have A very different relationship with death than I find folks who grew up in America do. In America, spiritually and culturally, especially in Western societies where Christianity, the Christian tradition sort of frames death as this terminal point, there's often a judgment day and so on. The way we view death is with a finality. In Indian culture, in Hindu culture, death is one-Swyx [00:17:35]: Also, he's Buddhist as well.Anjney [00:17:36]: You're Buddhist, yeah. So it's one, it's one step in a journey of many lives, right? And so, I grew up in this city called Chennai in the south of India, and when people die, you dance on the street. There's like a procession where your body is carried to be cremated and your family, like celebrates and there's drums and so on. It's this huge thing. And, It's because the idea is that you're going to be reincarnated. You've been liberated from the responsibilities of this life, and now you're onto your next. It's a new It's like going off to a new college or whatever, right? And so it was so alien to me when I got here as an undergrad- That the medical system works backwards from that assumption that we have to view death as this terminal thing and delay it, postpone it's a bad thing. And so at the time, clinical decision support in the United States was this very primitive field. Even to this day, physicians in the United States often will tell you when you have a terminal disease, this is your, we've diagnosed you, which is great. Our ability to diagnose you is extraordinary. You have somewhere between six months to six years to live. What do you do with that information? The error bars are so high that then you In times of uncertainty, we default to culture, and when the culture is let's-- this is a bad thing, I've got to prolong my life, then you start doing things like And just to, just sort of from a systems perspective, what's going on there is Physicians often feel like they need to provide such high error bars because there's always some uncertainty in end of life diagnosis, and if you provide the wrong Diagnosis or recommendation to your patient, you can be sued for medical malpractice. And then your license can be taken away. It can be catastrophic for your career. In contrast, if in countries where that's not the case, what you often observe is that patients, physicians are quite prescriptive with their recommendation. They say, “Hey, this is your condition. The literature says that you probably have this much time on Earth left. My expert opinion is that you are an outlier or whatever.” And they try to be more prescriptive, and that empowers a patient, right? ‘Cause then a patient can say, “I trust my doctor. They said on average, I have six months to live, but if I do these things, I may have a shot because of my particular predispositions or my genetic history or whatever.” And that empowers you to go about your life in a actually more scientific way than leaning on religion, culture, spirituality, and so on. In contrast, here, because of that medical malpractice sort of thing looming over your head, a physician never gives you a clear recommendation. So instead you say, “Okay, Doc, well, let's try it all.” And then you start a whole regime of drugs and therapies, and then you often spend weeks and weeks in the hospital, and that deteriorates your quality of life. And when that deteriorates your quality of life, you instead of spending your last few days doing the things you love with your family, you're spending it on a hospital bed. And that ends up being thirty percent of Medicare and Medicaid. So it's worse for the patients. The doctors feel terrible. The American taxpayer is paying a huge amount of money. And so this is why Nigam Shah, who was this professor at Stanford, said, “Anjney, if there's “ I kind of sat down with him. I was this young, I'd, I was twenty-one, and I was “I want to work on a big problem.” He's “The big problem is end of life care.” And so we tried to do deep learning to say, to-- So we started trying to run deep learning on these tried patient data sets to say, “Could you have an AI system make a recommendation that is orders of magnitude more precise about how much time you have left once you've been diagnosed with a terminal condition than a human?” And then if we can get that precision to be high enough, then you can empower the patient. And it turns out the tech works. Like it's-- Once you get the data set, like RL works. Honestly, even regression models work. You don't need to get that fancy. At the time, we were just trying, doing like very simple neural nets.Swyx [00:21:54]: Simple solutions, yeah.Anjney [00:21:54]: Today, what we can do with RL is extraordinary. The problem remains then and now is regulatory, because you actually can't shift the burden of the wrong clinical diagnoses from the physician to the AI system. And so at that time, I got quite disillusioned ten years ago for, twelve years ago where, ‘cause I felt I just didn't have the resources to influence regulation. Today, I'm very lucky. I'm in a different place. I've, I'm a lot older, and so I've been spending a lot of time on my next incubation, which is how can we unlock the, patient empowerment by training AI models to do end of life prediction much, with much more precision and ac-Swyx [00:22:37]: Oh, wow. You're still focused on this the whole time.Anjney [00:22:40]: The-- I haven't been able to get, this out of my mind a single day for the last fourteen years. This is the hill I want, I would like to die on. There's two, I would say. What? I actually, I'd prefer not to die.Swyx [00:22:51]: Yeah, exactly.Anjney [00:22:52]: But I think two bipartisan issues, I think two issues that should be bipartisan in America are how do we empower patients to make the right clinical decisions at the end of their life, such that we're reducing the taxpayer burden with science? It's just good old science, and AI can help here. And the second is, net positive data centers, ‘cause I think that's the biggest critical bottleneck on training and good enough AI models to help people at the end of their life. So there's sort of two sides of the, of the same scaling bottleneck curve, but those two, we formed AMP as a public benefit corporation. My wife and I, who you've met, you've met Viv. Her passion is education. Her family is a long line of educators and so on, and, of physicists. And so this class is my attempt to stop being the black sheep of the family and be a, an educator. But if I'm not educating, the thing I would be doing is working, on these two problems, whether on the political spectrum or as a researcher back at, in some lab. And my hope is if anyone's listening to this podcast, if they're passionate about either of those two topics, I'd love to hear from them. We'll, we'll we can share the contact in the show notes, but, we're looking for people to join both of those missions on the, on the political side as well as on the medical side, on the research side.Frontier Systems, Output Maxing, and AlignmentSwyx [00:24:08]: You said, this is a discipline that you want to form. You call it's called variously called Frontier System. It's variously called One Person Frontier Lab. What is the ideal name or shape of this? Like the, what is the mission?Anjney [00:24:24]: Of the class?Swyx [00:24:26]: Of the discipline that you're, exploring, right? I The class is called Frontier Systems. But like for me, maybe one phrase is you're, you're just anti-waste, right? Which is wasting GPUs, wasting in human and Medicare. But is there, is there a broader theme that I'm, that maybe you can encapsulate more succinctly?Anjney [00:24:45]: Yeah. The, from an engineering perspective, it's very simple. It's output maxing. It's the, it's the department of output maxing.Swyx [00:24:51]: Making the most of what we have.Anjney [00:24:52]: Exactly. I'm a huge believer in optimal outcomes. I think both in America and other countries, we are losing our appreciation for nuance, and this is the thing of And AI is the same case, right? Oh, the bitter lesson holds. Okay, fine. But that doesn't mean you just like throw 500 GB300, 500,000 GB300s at your suboptimal model scaling and you waste a bunch of compute. It also doesn't mean that, the most optimal is to have like 50 different architectures where there isn't enough standardization. One of the reasons Anthropic has had extraordinary sort of velocity is ‘cause they picked the transform architecture and said, “This is simple. Let's double down on it,” right? And now luckily there's enough investment going to the space that we can afford other architectures, but at the time, investment was just too fragmented into other architectures, so that arguably unlocked scaling. So I think there's a philosophy. I think we all owe it to ourselves to do output maxing with a new capability called AI on a global level. I think if I was starting a new department at Stanford, depending on how fuzzy or technical I wanted to be, I'd probably call it the Department of Alignment. Like-Swyx [00:25:59]: It's an overloaded termAnjney [00:26:01]: But it is, But alignment really Is a hard problem. And I think when you unlock it, full stack alignment is super hard in any organization and in any system. Like in a, in a venture capital firm, if you can have full stack alignment between your limited partners and your, the founders who are creating the value and ultimately the public that owns the IPO stock, that is a gift that keeps giving. And when you study the history of these systems, when they start off, they usually start out small scale where the feedback loop is actually so tight that there's alignment. And then the more you try to scale, the more division of labor happens, the more specialization happens, and at each step you add abstractions. And wherever there's an API interface, there's like loss. There's communication loss. And so I think a really cool thing would be for us to figure out is there a way for us to have our cake and eat it too as an engineering discipline? Is there a way to actually scale up and scale out Without losing any alignment, without lossy transmission?Swyx [00:27:01]: You mean standards?Anjney [00:27:02]: So standards is one way. The other way is you just have net new capabilities. So like what we're trying to do here is discover new superconductors. A room temperature superconductor would be a lossless transmission mechanism for energy. We would have flying cars. We are right within a few years of having a new room temperature superconductor. So I think those are the two. You either have to standardize On protocols or API specs that allow lossless communication, or you can come up with a whole new capability that unlocks so much abundance, the standardization doesn't matter ‘cause you just unlock net new capacity. This, the, so this is what I spend my days thinking about these days.Compute Markets, SF Compute, and Non-NVIDIA ChipsSwyx [00:27:38]: No, I think every infra person at, who wants scale and wants to output max does eventually end up thinking about this. We don't have time to go into it, but we have done an episode with SF Compute-Anjney [00:27:50]: Oh, coolSwyx [00:27:50]: That is trying to standardize The futures contract for compute. I don't, I don't know how that's going by the way, but like at some point this will be public.Anjney [00:27:57]: Oh, I think Evan is awesome and SF Compute is the kind of effort that I hope we can accelerate because what often happens is these exchanges are very hard to get, they, it's hard to bootstrap them, right? Because they often require-- There's many inefficiencies between parties. There's trust boundary inefficiencies in infrastructure because you don't trust, one part of the stack doesn't trust another part of the stack to give them visibility. There's capital markets inefficiencies, there's operational efficiencies. So if you can inject like a single shock to the system of a ton of compute demand or supply, then you can accelerate, these new flywheels. And so my hope is one day, or soon, if SF Compute needs extra like has excess capacity, they just hook it up to the grid and they get flooded with demand from us. And on the other side, if they have a ton of demand but they don't have supply, they just again hook up to the grid and it's a two-way protocol where they can just hook up to our capacity. And I don't think we're too far from that. Today our working implementation of it is mostly through a group of labs, universities, and a few sort of trusted parties who are, who all feel like they're in alignment to borrow an over sort of used word. But our hope is to just have it be an open protocol that anyone can hook up to on-Swyx [00:29:20]: Hook up for demand or hook up for supply? In primarily demand, it sounds like. Like you-Anjney [00:29:25]: No, bothSwyx [00:29:26]: You would want to offer demand.Anjney [00:29:27]: Both. Yeah. Unfortunately, what's happened in the last six weeks is, we thought we'd have a bunch of excess capacity by the end of this year. It's all gone.Swyx [00:29:37]: It's exploding.Anjney [00:29:38]: It, yeah. It's all gone. And so I have, my text messages are full of friends, we know many of these people, these are founders who've raised billions of dollars in San Francisco going, “Oh, any chance you have like 50 nodes in the next few weeks?”Swyx [00:29:51]: What is the scope for, non-Nvidia, right? You have Lisa Su coming and, Rainer Pope as well. And so There is a lot of demand for, more performance Alternative architectures and all that. At the same time, this hurts your standardization.Anjney [00:30:11]: I don't think so. So actually Rainer's a great example, right? Rainer is a CEO and founder of, MatX. I actually had him by for office hours in the class earlier today, and there was an insight he brought up that I hadn't considered before, which is when they decided to pick the standard For their data center, they picked the NVIDIA reference architecture. So the MatX chips Just plug in to any site that has an NVIDIA bring up planned. And, the-Swyx [00:30:42]: It's just software then. It's, it's not the-Anjney [00:30:44]: A-Swyx [00:30:44]: Hardware.Anjney [00:30:46]: Well, from an input and IO perspective It's the same footprint as an NVIDIA rack.Swyx [00:30:52]: That makes sense.Anjney [00:30:53]: Where they have done, innovated a bunch from what I can tell is on systems co-design. Which is where a lot of the gains are to be had. And so he picked He was “Anjney, we, there's just so much work to do when you're building a new chip company.”Swyx [00:31:08]: Can't fight every front.Anjney [00:31:08]: You just can't fight on every front. So my question to him was, “Well, you're working on this new chip. Their tape-out is next year. What, who are you going to partner with to host the chips?” And he said, “Whoever will host them. That's just not, that's not my focus.” And I said, “But how did you “ you decided back to our earlier systems design question, he decided that, he didn't want to be a full, fully integrated chip provider. The bottleneck they're focused on is the logic die, and they, he feels they can crank out a ton of performance gains through co-design there. But then that means you delegate, to our question earlier, it, you he's the data center provider is a different part of the stack, and so then he's dependent on that part of the ecosystem to host his chips to get the performance gains to the customer. So now you have another abstraction, and you might have loss. So I asked him, “How do you prevent loss?” And back to your point, he said, “I just picked the NVIDIA standard ‘cause I didn't want to Like I wanted to piggyback off of an existing protocol.” And that, what's great about NVIDIA is that reference architecture is known.Swyx [00:32:15]: Open.Anjney [00:32:15]: It's open. They've published it. So Jensen's actually enabled someone like Rainer to build a chip company like MatX, and I don't see them as competitive. The compute demand is so high. Like, I don't I think NVIDIA's not able to meet the demands of production, so we just need more chips. And I think it's very smart what MatX has done, which is say, “We're just going to we're not going to innovate on the data center design ‘cause actually, thank you, Jensen, you've done all the hard work. Where we can innovate is somewhere else.” And I think that's, that's very healthy. I think that's how we unblock new bottlenecks. And my view is these, the, chip teams like MatX, who have arrived at the insight that co-design is the way, The primary bottleneck for them is trust boundary. To do co-design well, you need visibility into the next model generation as soon as possible ‘cause it takes two years to tape out. So if by the time I bring my chip to market, your model architecture's changed, I'm host. Now, when he was inside Google, he was sitting next to the Gemini team. He was on Palm or whatever.Trust Boundaries, Co-Design, and Researcher CEOsSwyx [00:33:19]: His co-founder was the, was one, was one of the Palm guys, I think.Anjney [00:33:23]: Yes. Yes, exactly. So when you're inside the trust boundary of Google, then your systems co-design loop is super tight. When you leave as a founder, one of the biggest risks you take is now you're outside the trust boundary. And so what I love doing is helping chip teams who can help us unlock more capacity for the independent ecosystem access to trust. Because when I If I've been, involved with a lab from day one, and I was lucky enough to work with Anthropic, and then I'm on the board of Mistral and helped Black Forest Labs get started. I think at this point I'm on six or seven different teams.Swyx [00:33:57]: Only six? I feel like my mental number was going to be 13, but yeah, it's-Anjney [00:34:02]: No, I go deep with one at a time.Swyx [00:34:04]: You're founding CEO of Arena.Anjney [00:34:07]: Nah, that was an, that was an-Swyx [00:34:08]: Administrative CEOAnjney [00:34:09]: It was an administrative five-month gig where Whalen and Anastasios were graduating from their PhDs, and they didn't need a product team. So I helped recruit the head of engineering product and design. But Anastasios has always been the CEO of that company. I played a pinch-hitting I'm an intern. I was CEO intern For five months. -Swyx [00:34:33]: I interviewed him, and he's he's very well-spoken. I think he's a debate, former debate, champion. But also very quantitative and mathematical, which is-Anjney [00:34:41]: He-Swyx [00:34:41]: Such a unicorn.Anjney [00:34:43]: See, what's amazing about him? If you look at his output, he's an output maxer. By the time he was graduating from his PhD, which he only graduated last year, he had published more work with a citation count than, people twice his age. But at the same time, he'd already started a project called LLM Arena that was being used by millions of people As a side project. And time and time again, what I've realized is venture capitalists suck at seeing human beings as, dynamic agents where-Swyx [00:35:14]: They want to put you in a boxAnjney [00:35:15]: They want to put you in a box.Swyx [00:35:15]: This is your thing.Anjney [00:35:16]: So the first time I got introduced to Anastasios, somebody had told me “Oh, he's amazing, but he's a researcher.” I was “what? What do you mean he's a researcher?” That's what-Swyx [00:35:28]: Like he's not a CEO, not a founder.Anjney [00:35:29]: Not a CEO, exactly. I was “Are you crazy? Do you Have you met Dario?” Dario's a scientist. He's gone from zero to, what will soon be a trillion-dollar company in four years. Being a CEO, nominally speaking, is not that hard. Being a good CEO is hard. Being a great CEO actually requires a level of performance that scientists who have already published at the top of their field have accomplished. It is super hard to be a competitive scientist. To publish in academia over the last 20, 30 years, to make it to the top of your discipline at a place like Berkeley, you are a star athlete. Like, you are an athlete of the mind, and you perform at the highest levels. And to get there, whether you're, Anastasios or Whalen at Berkeley, or you are Robin, who-Swyx [00:36:23]: BFL, yeahAnjney [00:36:24]: With Black Forest, who created Stable Diffusion, or if you're, like Guillaume at Meta, who created Llama before he started Mistral. The amount of human leadership you have to demonstrate to get the resources, like get the trust of the organization, publish it, put it up. I would just fund researchers all day Right? If who have contributed already to the field. If they've, if they've put SOTA out there, they're, they're star athletes already. If they haven't done SOTA Look, they can still be good CEOs, but then I find the failure mode is that they just don't want to be CEOs, they primarily want to publish, and that's okay, too. One of the things we do with the AMP Grid is we donate excess compute. We have two nonprofits, like university labs. We carved out like a couple thousand H100s. But I do think there's extraordinary research being done on university campuses. My father-in-law's a physicist. He's a professor. Extraordinary work in physics, and we need that. But if you want to be a CEO, what you need to be willing To do is be super confrontational, outside of science. Like within the scientific community, some of the best researchers are very confrontational about their convictions, right? This architecture is right. To be a great CEO, you basically have to be willing to be confrontational up and down the stack.Swyx [00:37:41]: To your own team.Anjney [00:37:42]: To your own team-Swyx [00:37:43]: To customersAnjney [00:37:43]: Hiring, recruiting customers. Well, I would say, Yeah, pretty much to everyone Everybody. Of course-Swyx [00:37:50]: I see, I feel a little bit of that in my own work, but yeah, I can't imagine the stakes that Dario has had to go through. It's, it's pretty insane.Anjney [00:37:56]: No, I don't think the stakes are that different From how you're feeling it, right? Stakes are personal scaling vectors, right? The stakes that seem so low to you, like having this podcast where you can talk to somebody and just have a you're an extraordinary communicator, right? Like already in this conversation, you've pulled more out of me than most people, and I've been on 12 podcasts in the last two weeks.AI Coachella and First-Principles ThinkingSwyx [00:38:17]: I think I, we've just seen each other enough that there's some base trust.Anjney [00:38:20]: There's base trust.Swyx [00:38:20]: And I think, and I know that you, that I've done my homework and like I know that trust is a big deal for you, so.Anjney [00:38:27]: I think trust is about consistency, and you and I have seen each other In the community for years, right? Like, I remember the first time we met was at NeurIPS in New Orleans. I don't know if you remember that, luncheon.Swyx [00:38:38]: Oh my God.Anjney [00:38:39]: Reiko had set up this Reiko's amazing, and he set up this luncheon and-Swyx [00:38:43]: Yeah, I was “Who's this Discord guy?” I'm “Okay.” But-Anjney [00:38:45]: No, you weren't-Swyx [00:38:46]: You were just “You made some investments.”Anjney [00:38:47]: You were much less polite. You were “Who's this VC?” You're like-Swyx [00:38:51]: No, I Was I? Oh my God.Anjney [00:38:53]: It was-Swyx [00:38:53]: I'm so sorryAnjney [00:38:53]: It was visible on your face.Swyx [00:38:54]: I'm so sorry. But you weren't, you weren't The introduction was bad. I was I didn't know who you were.Anjney [00:39:00]: The, see, this is the thing about context, right? Like, but then I think I heard your accent. And I was “Are you-”Swyx [00:39:06]: Singapore, yeahAnjney [00:39:06]: “Are you Singaporean?” And you're “Yeah.” And I said, “I went to high school, JC, in Singapore.” And then the ice broke. But This is the there are in the scientific community, sometimes the stakes are very high for people who haven't had the emotional, what is called EQ Coaching and mentorship, right? Which is like to have scientific impact, you often need to be a extraordinary emotional, like emotionally in tune person with the folks you're trying to influence. And so what comes so naturally to you is actually a super high stakes thing to other people. And so I wouldn't assume that Dario's more stressed out than you. These things are you'd be surprised how similar and small sometimes the problems are to you That some of the world's biggest, leaders are facing. And that's what I've learned from this class. The guest speakers are Sam, Satya, Jensen.Swyx [00:40:01]: AI Coachella.Anjney [00:40:02]: Yeah. It's AI Coachella, right? So we got to get all the headliners, and they're I'm very lucky that some of these people have either mentored me over the years or I've done business with them. And when you, take the performative stuff out and any assumptions you may have about these people that you read in the press or on Twitter, We're all just humans. We're all trying to get along. And what's so special about this moment is AI is forcing, like scaling, the bitter lesson is forcing a lot of people to revise their assumptions for how the world works and go back to first principles or go and educate themselves. So the kind of people I was, I won't name who this person is, but I was at an event last week in Texas and, ran to somebody who said, “Anjney, I came across the class. What do you think about real time action prediction models?” And I was, don't know how happy it made me feel when they asked me that question. I know they've done the work. They've challenged themselves. I'm, they didn't ask me, “What do you think of world models?” They said, “What do you think of n-”Swyx [00:41:04]: Real time action predictionAnjney [00:41:05]: “action, real time action prediction models?” World models, don't get me wrong, are cool and everything, but you and I both know that is a layer of abstraction that is sometimes not usefully precise enough. Right? Ours-Swyx [00:41:16]: There's like four different kinds of world models.Anjney [00:41:17]: Yes, exactly.Swyx [00:41:18]: We've done the part with general intuition, by the way, which is very focused on, -Anjney [00:41:22]: Oh, cool. Yes. I love Pim. Pim is great. And this is what I love about people who've done that level of work. They realize they're not in competition with people who the rest of the world thinks they're in competition with.Swyx [00:41:34]: Because they're not in the category, they're in the specific thing they're trying to do.Anjney [00:41:37]: They're focused on their mission, and they have a systems understanding of the bottleneck they're trying to solve. And when somebody else says, “I'm working on real time, action prediction models too,” Pim goes, “Oh, I love that person. I want, I can learn from them.” But the minute they're “Oh, that person's a world model person,” it's “like which type of world model person?” But mostly they're just trying to figure out if it's a waste of their time, because we don't have enough time. So, Pim, for example, is super, loves this other company I work with we've talked about called Black Forest Labs. And he's mentioned to me multiple times that he's so, He thinks what Flux is doing is really cool. Andy Blattman came by and spoke in the class. And what I find over and over again is for people who do the work, who can be usefully precise enough about like what is actually going on in the world of frontier research, The sense of camaraderie is still well and alive, but it gets lost sometimes when you have to like abstract The technical complexities in, business terms And then the VCs are “How are you different from that world model?” I'm going to say Where do I even start to explain this stuff? And then the misalignment creeps in.Leading vs. Winning in Frontier AISwyx [00:42:43]: This is good. Yeah, I think, people listening get a sense of, what it is like to operate at a real level, like yourself, rather than at, the journalist level, where you have to sort of put everyone in, a rough category and create a narrative of competition, and who's winning today, who's behind.Anjney [00:42:58]: It-- this idea of winning is so Weird to me.Swyx [00:43:03]: You do want to win. You want you want competitiveness.Anjney [00:43:06]: No, I think you want to lead.Swyx [00:43:07]: You want SOTA.Anjney [00:43:07]: No, I think you want to lead. Yes, so you want to push the frontier. You want to push the SOTA. You want to do something that hasn't been done before. You want to capture value, but you don't want to capture so much value that, people think you're unaligned with your mission or trying to do what's best for the world. You want to capture enough value that you can keep innovating, right? And I think that people want to lead, they don't really This idea of winning and losing, again, I love Jensen. He's a, he's a leader. The mindset that he talked about on Dwarkesh's podcast, right? He's “I didn't wake up with a loser mindset.” I think that was awesome, right? Because he's, he's an engineer. Dwarkesh has done the work. So there's at least-- even though the, to me, it was very obvious they're talking about the same thing, they just passed each other. They just had to basically, Jensen has this, five-layer cake abstraction of how the industry works. And Dwarkesh had, I think from that podcast, had more of, a pre-training, mid-training, post-training systems loop concept.Swyx [00:44:04]: It's just a factor of who he talks to, right? Again, it's very clear.Anjney [00:44:06]: It's the systems It's the abstraction, the mental models, the It's the whole-- Dude, so much of the problem in the world is reasoning by analogy. And then the assumptions that are held invisibly.Swyx [00:44:19]: Yeah, I've, I've said, this is actually the best time in human history for first principles thinkers. Because everything you think will happen is actually now coming true.Anjney [00:44:28]: Correct. And the venture capital community is, notorious for this, where people look-- In times of uncertainty, they, cling to axioms that ended up being true from the previous era, and they kind of like proclaim them with confidence as if they're truths, but they're not. And it's very important to see the distinction between a heuristic and an axiom. An axiom can be proven-Swyx [00:44:55]: Like from internal consistency point of viewAnjney [00:44:56]: With internal consistency. A heuristic is a way you kind of a shortcut. And my God, the number of people I have had to put up with over the last few years who proclaim-- use heuristics As axioms to judge people, to judge which companies are going to succeed or the number of people who are “Oh, yeah, Anthropic, they're just training models right now,” but this one continue.Swyx [00:45:22]: Because that's a B2B SaaS?Anjney [00:45:23]: Yeah, the, like Which over the fullness of time, if you squint at it, maybe. But the way you arrive there is so important that you can-- you just, you can dismiss people. Here's what happened, right? What happened is Anthropic basically achieved takeoff in October of last year. That training run-Swyx [00:45:41]: Whatever, three seven?Anjney [00:45:42]: I forget the numbers now, but whatever that checkpoint was-Swyx [00:45:45]: We saw the cognition.Anjney [00:45:46]: Yeah. Right? You probably-- The, to those of us in the community, especially once post-training was done and it was released in December-Swyx [00:45:52]: Yeah. Can I sneak a sneaky question in there? I don't know if you have a perspective, maybe you don't, I just The number one question is how did Anthropic crack coding, right? Because Claude One, Claude Two, okay, like it was part of it, but it wasn't a big deal. And the leading hypothesis, it's a lucky dice roll that was then compounded, right? Like it was like Mildly better, but then they saw it and they were “Okay, let's really invest.”How Anthropic Cracked CodingAnjney [00:46:17]: I had this very annoying teacher. I went to this boarding school called Rishi Valley in India, which is like this, bird preserve. It's like three hundred and fifty acres of bird preserve in rural India, and there was no technology for seven years. There was this teacher, I won't name them, but they would have this-- I hated it every time he said this to me. He was “Luck fa-favors the prepared mind,” which is like a common saying, but the way he delivered it, always grated me, ‘cause he was always I was always one of those kids who got, a good grade without trying very hard. ‘Cause like high middle school is not that hard if you, if you're generally, paying attention and so on. And there was this one time where I-- But then I would get an eighty percent grade, and he would keep pushing me to say “The reason you didn't get the ninety-five plus percent is because you're not that lucky.” And I would say, “What do you mean?” ‘Cause I would think that I deserved that grade, and I would sometimes argue with him. And he'd say, “You didn't have a prepared mind. If you want to get lucky again “ There was basically one time where I got like ninety-five or ninety-six on this, on this subject, and I, now that I felt entitled. I was “Okay, I'm going to keep doing this,” and I didn't. And then he was “Luck favors a prepared mind. You got lucky last time, but you got to stay prepared.” And I didn't understand what he meant. Now, as I'm older, I'm okay, these adults actually knew a thing or two. Anthropic has been the most prepared company for four years. And so then when the right, context data comes in, the right developers start sending in, the right context diffs, Sure, you could say you got lucky, but if you ask me, they're pr-pretty damn prepared with paranoia for like four years. And you have to remember, it was so hard for them to get going early on that they had to do so much more with so much less that you just have to be prepared to be so efficient.Swyx [00:48:06]: Yes. There's numbers on their burn compared to OpenAI. I've, I've written about it, but they are so much more efficient in their, in their tech stack.Anjney [00:48:14]: It's not even It's not funny.Swyx [00:48:14]: Not even close.Anjney [00:48:15]: Yeah. But it's so clear, right? Like how to output max for the world. They have been prepared, and you could call that luck, but Luck favors the prepared mind.Culture, Hardship, and Anthropic's P0Swyx [00:48:25]: This is one of those things that I was going over some of your old lectures and, you were data, people think it's a moat and actually it's culture and actually it's team Actually. And I, it's-- there's different levels of moats, and this is the ultimate one that determines everything else. Which you can then compoundAnjney [00:48:43]: You're saying culture is the ultimate moat? Yeah. But the thing about culture is it's very fragile. So moats, I don't think they're-- there's very few moats I found that are actually moats. They're-- It's, it's a nice concept, but in reality, you have to replenish your culture. Ben Horowitz was, the speaker in CS153 on Tuesday, and I asked him this question about the culture bottleneck in teams because, there are several AI teams-Swyx [00:49:09]: His book, Hard Things About Hard ThingsAnjney [00:49:11]: Hard Thing About Hard Things. But more concretely, there are so many AI labs today that have all the cash they need, they have all the compute they need, and they're still not able to ship anything SOTA. And then you start seeing people leave and so on, and my diagnosis, it's, is it's the culture. And so I asked him, Ben, they're-- He's been one of the most aggressive investors in AI labs. He goes back to this thing which resonates in my mind a lot. It-- When I used to work at a16z, I would, book a conference room, and right outside the conference room, which is closest to the toilet ‘cause it was the fastest way for me to go use the bathroom between Zoom meetings-Swyx [00:49:45]: Oh my God, I'll put maxing my toilet optimization. Okay, never mind.Anjney [00:49:48]: It was not healthy in hindsight, but maybe this is TMI. But anyway, outside that conference on the wall was this quote that was printed that said, “Culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions.” And it's by Bushido, is this, Japanese philosopher. And if you stop taking the actions that demonstrate the mission alignment to what you've said to your team and to your-- the world matters to you, then your culture starts to fray. So it's not actually a moat, I would say. It's a very brittle, fragile thing that requires daily tending to like a garden. But if you figure out the system to keep that garden tended, which I think ultimately comes down to knowing yourself ‘cause you most naturally, if you're authentic and so on, you'll naturally make trade-offs that seem effortless to you, but that reinforce your culture. And then That becomes this very hard thing for other people to catch up to. And at Anthropic, from day one, there was this mission like-- missionary like zeal and belief that, hey, these capabilities will scale. These systems are stochastic, not deterministic. There will be error bars, and until we crack interpretability, there's risk. And at some point, people will go-- stop using Claude just for coding. They'll use it in some mission-critical context where there's-- it'll throw off a bug, and then people are going to come blame them, and they want to be on the right side of history where they said, “Yes, this is a powerful technology. We think it's going to change the world, And we want to be very measured and scientific about the fact that, ‘Hey, guys, these are stats models, statistical models.' That's how statistics works.” ultimately, when you're training neural nets, it is just a statistical system. And I think that Belief that safety is important and that it might seem toy-like in the early days, and sometimes, you could say, “Anjney, they totally over-exaggerated the risk,” like two years ago when they said, “Let's not launch Claude One,” or whatever. Well, okay, maybe in hindsight, but hindsight is twenty/twenty. And at the time, they didn't know how that model would be used, and to them it felt existential if somebody came and said, “You weren't responsible. It-- This wrote a bug.” The liability associated with that is massive. So how do you prevent against that? Well, day in, day out, you say safety. And when you start deviating from that, you have the team hold you accountable, you have the world hold you accountable, and I think that becomes a moat over time. At some point, that moat will get challenged and so on, and then it become fragile. I hope it endures because that's the beauty of having founders run the show, ‘cause they can make really hard trade-offs to do mission alignment. The hardest part is in the earliest days when you don't have a group of people who are going through difficulty, stress, crisis together, then your culture doesn't get defined sharply enough, and that's what I'm worried about right now, is there's so much money going to these labs. There's no hardship. There's no-Swyx [00:52:50]: To anyone who knowsAnjney [00:52:51]: There's no to anyone who knows. And that, in hindsight, was a feature, not a bug for Anthropic. The number of people who said no, the number of people who said, “Sorry, we're all doing investors in OpenAI,” that is competitive difference. It forces you to really understand, what is the hill you want to die on at the expense of everything else. What's the P zero? And there, P zero from day one was coding. The reason, the mechanism system there was if we crack coding, Then we will crack AGI. Our mission is AGI. We want to get there safely. If we focus on codin

A project is marked green on the tracker, the meetings are happening, and the status reports look perfect. Then, the delivery day arrives, and the end users are completely unprepared. What happened?In this premiere episode of People. Process. Progress., veteran IT PMO Director Kevin Pannell breaks down the metric trap of green dashboards and explains why your tracking tools might be hiding massive execution risks. We explore the critical gap between visibility and true human alignment, drawing on historical engineering lessons such as the Challenger disaster and applying them directly to modern white-collar leadership.You will learn why methodology cannot solve human misalignment, why data points are just proxies for reality, and how to use the weekly Stand Up audit to check your unverified assumptions.Stop confusing activity with progress. It is time to double down on the fundamentals of your people, your process, and your outcomes.Key TakeawaysThe Metric Trap: Why a green dashboard only tells you that tasks are being checked, not that your team is actually aligned on the objective.Proxies vs. Reality: Software tools show you the work; real human connection and honest conversations move the work.The Stand Up Audit: How to strip away documentation theater and test whether your stakeholders are actually ready for deployment.The Core Lesson: Visibility is what we see on a screen. Alignment is what happens when real people understand the mission, trust the process, and execute horizontal communication. Never mistake a green status slide for a successful outcome.Connect and Share: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this link with a leader who needs to audit their corporate dashboards this week.

Most SaaS founders in the messy middle are making the same expensive mistake — building first and validating never. In this episode, Jeff Mains sits down with Corinne Kavanagh, founder of CAC Media & Publishing and former Microsoft Azure Data team contributor (part of a team that drove $500M+ in revenue with 76% YoY growth), to unpack what it actually takes to scale past the growth plateau.Corinne shares why your top-of-funnel obsession may be quietly killing your growth, how to validate demand before writing a single line of code, and why a fractional CMO may be the smartest hire you're not making. She also introduces her CARE re-engagement method, her SaaS Marketing Playbook, and the SCALE framework for building an AI-first marketing department without homogenizing your brand.If your business is growing and suffocating at the same time, this episode is for you.Key Takeaways0:24 — Welcome & episode framing: Why the messy middle is where most SaaS companies stall out3:22 — Guest intro: Corinne Kavanagh, founder of CAC Media, fractional CMO firm for SaaS & tech companies4:10 — Startups vs. enterprise: What big companies do differently — and what smaller companies can learn from retail validation models5:12 — Feature prioritization trap: Why founders rush to build before validating demand, and how to use micro-testing ($5–$10 ad spend) to validate before committing resources15:30 — Pre-development checklist: ICP study → messaging tests → distribution partner conversations → pricing research → competitive analysis17:09 — Competitor vs. customer time allocation: Why founders should be "in all channels" — and how AI tools can automate competitive monitoring23:04 — AI modernization in marketing: Efficiency gains without sacrificing brand authenticity — plus the importance of an AI use policy23:49 — Early churn warning systems: The retention play most SaaS teams ignore — and how to re-engage customers before they leave24:24 — The CARE Method: Corinne's re-engagement framework for growing lifetime value and sealing the leaky bucket25:08 — Account-based marketing (ABM): Why a focused list of 100 ideal accounts beats a massive TAM for execution27:01 — Growth plateaus: How to read your revenue chart — what "bubbles" mean vs. a flat line, and what each signals about your acquisition and retention engines29:48 — Aligning marketing, product & sales: Breaking down the wall between sales and marketing through co-invention, shared messaging, and CMO-level integration40:38 — The SCALE Framework: How to build an AI-first marketing department without producing brand slop45:24 — #1 marketing shift for 2026: Stop running your company — start building systems that run it for youTweetable Quotes"You can beat everyone else to market — but if your customer is not ready and chomping at the bit to buy it, it doesn't matter." — Corinne Kavanagh"Stop thinking about top of funnel only. Retention is half the story, and most SaaS companies are ignoring it." — Corinne Kavanagh"A consultant does a drive-by. They drop strategy and leave. That's not how you actually scale." — Corinne Kavanagh"If you're in the feature rat race, step back. Ask yourself: am I creating a category, or just chasing competitors?" — Corinne Kavanagh"Your marketing team should feel responsible for the P&L — not just the pipeline." — Corinne Kavanagh"Don't give sales a playbook and say 'go sell it.' Alignment has to be co-invention, or no one buys in." — Corinne Kavanagh"The most dangerous thing you can do with your runway right now might be shipping the next great feature." — Jeff Mains"Pretend you have a $200M company. What would you stop doing that you're doing right now?" — Corinne KavanaghSaaS Leadership Lessons1. Validate demand before you build — always. Retail companies won't spin up a new product line without marketplace testing. SaaS founders should apply the same discipline. Run micro-ads ($5–$10), talk to a pre-engagement cohort, and confirm that desire is "fiery enough to click the buy button" before writing a line of code.2. Your leaky bucket is as dangerous as an empty funnel. Pouring money into top-of-funnel while ignoring churn is a losing strategy. Build early churn warning systems using platform data (login frequency, monthly active users) and re-engage customers proactively before they silently leave out the back door.3. Bring marketing into R&D — not just into launch. Marketing shouldn't receive a finished product and be told to "figure out how to message it." A CMO-level voice in early R&D conversations means better competitive analysis, more relevant feature decisions, and messaging that actually lands in the marketplace.4. Break down the wall between sales and marketing. The old grudge match — "sales can't close our leads" vs. "marketing gives us garbage" — is a systems failure. Solve it through collaborative co-invention: shared meetings, shared messaging, and shared accountability for what's working.5. Category creation beats feature competition. If you're in a feature rat race with competitors, you've already lost the game. Step back and ask: how do we position ourselves so far apart from the competition that comparison becomes irrelevant? Companies like WooCommerce and GoDaddy didn't win by having more features — they won by creating new categories.6. Systems are your most important 2026 marketing investment. The #1 shift every SaaS founder needs to make: stop running the machine manually. Build systems around what's consuming your time, project forward to what a 100X customer base would require, and install those systems now. That's what gets you out of the messy middle for good.Guest Resourcescc@cac-media.comhttps://cac-media.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/corinnefss/https://www.instagram.com/corinnecava/https://twitter.com/Corinne_C_WAEpisode SponsorThe Futureproof Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfkXKUPZ5xuOqMPR7_gzGybncTtavyR1NThe Captain's KeysSmall Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel'Champion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/SaaS Fuel ResourcesWebsite - https://championleadership.com/Jeff Mains on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkmains/Twitter - https://twitter.com/jeffkmainsFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/thesaasguy/Instagram - https://instagram.com/jeffkmains

Title Why Founders Know the Problem but Still Don't Fix It Show Notes Most founders already know more truth than they are acting on. They know where the business is stuck. They know which issues keep repeating. They know which conversations are overdue. They know which priorities matter most. But awareness is not the same as execution. In this episode of the TriMetric Roadmap Podcast, Scott and Jeff continue the conversation on the TriMetric Flywheel and focus on the part most founder-led companies struggle with: turning insight into disciplined execution. The core issue is not always a lack of information. More often, it is the lack of a system that converts truth into alignment, and alignment into focused action. Scott and Jeff unpack why Business Freedom Advisors uses the rhythm of: Truth → Alignment → Action Truth creates clarity.Alignment creates commitment.Action creates momentum. But the order matters. Many companies jump straight into action because they are busy, ambitious, or already familiar with quarterly execution systems. They set rocks, create goals, and push hard. But if the truth has not been clearly diagnosed, or if the leadership team is not truly aligned, that action often creates more chaos instead of more freedom. The episode also explores why a 13-week cadence creates more urgency than a vague 90-day plan. Within that container, leadership teams identify the three to five Critical Strategic Implementations that matter most, keep them visible weekly, solve the issues that block progress, and turn those solutions into clear to-dos. Jeff adds a powerful metaphor: most teams try to move the boulder by throwing more people and effort at it. But the better approach is to identify the right levers. The levers are the metrics, behaviors, and strategic pressure points that actually move the business forward. For founders who feel stuck, busy, or stretched thin, this episode is a reminder: you do not just need more truth. You need a repeatable system that turns truth into movement. In This Episode Scott and Jeff discuss: Why most founders already know more truth than they act on The difference between awareness and execution How the TriMetric Flywheel connects truth, alignment, and action Why action should be the third step, not the first How misalignment quietly breaks execution Why a 13-week cadence creates urgency How CSIs turn priorities into weekly movement Why issues should come from CSIs, and to-dos should come from issues The importance of identifying levers, not just pushing harder How founders can move from chaos and stuckness toward freedom Key Takeaway Founders do not just need more clarity. They need a system that converts clarity into aligned action, week after week. Call to Action Take the Business Freedom Diagnostic at GetFreedomScore.com and get a simple, immediate snapshot of where your business may be stuck, constrained, or overly dependent on you.

Fan Mail: Tell Wendy how you're saying yes to yourself!In this episode, Wendy sits down with Jan Goss, executive consultant, bestselling author, and founder of Show Up Well Consulting. Jan teaches a comprehensive framework for showing up as your whole, aligned self—not just at work, but at home, in relationships, and in every role you hold. She's spent decades building businesses, raising foster children, and discovering that true success isn't about shiny exteriors. It's about alignment, wholeness, and leading with love.They explore:Why self-love and alignment are the foundation for showing up well everywhereHow love brings cohesion, and the two-degree shifts that help you move toward itWhat it means to show up whole as a parent, partner, executive, and human beingJan's philosophy is simple but radical: all of you is delicious, including the parts you'd rather hide. She talks about facing fear with compassion, making tiny shifts toward alignment, and discovering that love is a universal protocol that works in the boardroom and the bedroom, in parenting and in marriage. The roadblocks are comparison and fear, but the tools are practical: self-discovery and the willingness to show up as yourself, fully aligned, in every relationship that matters.Connect with Jan:Get her book, Bedroom Etiquette: How to Show Up Well Behind Closed Doors: amazon.com/Bedroom-Etiquette-Behind-Closed-Doors/dp/B0DXV7W8S1?tag=syty-20ShowUpWell.comInstagram: instagram.com/showupwellLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/showupwellReferenced in this Episode:A Course in Miracles Links:amazon.com/Course-Miracles-Combined-Quality/dp/1883360242?tag=syty-20marianne.com/acim/apps.apple.com/us/app/acim-remind/id737568020________________________________________________________________________________________Connect with Wendy:LinkedinInstagram: @wendy.harropFacebook: Phineas Wright HouseWebsite: Phineas Wright House PWH Farm StaysPWH Curated Experience and TravelInterested in being a guest on the show? Send your pitch to podcast@phineaswrighthouse.comPodcast Production By Shannon Warner of Resonant Collective Want to start your own podcast? Let's chat!If this episode resonated, follow Say YES to Yourself! and leave a  5-star review. It helps more women in midlife discover the tools, stories, and community that make saying YES not only possible, but powerful.

What if the reason most nonprofit strategic plans fail isn't the strategy itself, but the process behind it?In this week's episode of Nonprofit Nation, Julia sits down with nonprofit consultant, educator, and author Renee Rubin Ross to explore what it truly means to create an inclusive strategic planning process. Drawing from her new book, Inclusive Strategic Planning for Nonprofits, Renee shares why traditional top-down planning often falls short and how organizations can create plans that people actually believe in, support, and implement.Together, they discuss: ✨ Why inclusive planning leads to stronger alignment and better outcomes ✨ The dangers of performative inclusion in nonprofit leadership ✨ How to authentically engage staff, boards, and stakeholders ✨ The difference between strategy that sits on a shelf vs. strategy that drives action ✨ Practical ways small nonprofits can embrace inclusive planning approachesWhether your organization is preparing for a new strategic plan or struggling to implement an existing one, this episode offers thoughtful guidance for building a process that energizes teams instead of exhausting them.

What if the anger, frustration and bitterness you've been suppressing were never the problem?What if they were the signal?In this episode I'm breaking down how your emotions: specifically your self and not-self theme in Human Design as these emotions are your most powerful compass for finding alignment, building wealth and reclaiming your health.I walk you through every energy type, what their not-self theme actually feels like in the body and in life/business, and how to stop managing these emotions and start reading them.We also go into deconditioning the beliefs that taught you your emotions were too much, practical rituals for transmuting emotional energy into clarity, and how your blueprint holds the map to everything you've been searching for.If you've ever felt like your intensity was a flaw: this episode will change that.In this episode:Why anger and frustration are data, not dysfunctionThe not-self theme for every Human Design typeHow to decondition old emotional patterns fastDaily rituals to transmute emotion into creative powerUsing your blueprint to align with your true purposeDownload Your Human Design Blueprint hereGet a 7 Day Free Trial on the Decondition By Design Hypnosis Track here

A journey into the Akashic Records to find your inner joy. A guided meditation with Lorraine Butterfield.Are you stopping yourself from having fun, stepping into joy? What blocks are you harbouring that prevent you from fully embracing joy?On this journey the guides will channel light language sounds and tones to release the blocks to inner joy and open you energy to create a lighter, freer you. Lorraine Butterfield is an energy alignment coach who channels Arcturian angels. She helps people break negative patterns, stress, and anxiety, powerfully supporting them to bring their energy back into Alignment. https://www.lorrainebutterfield.comPlease set the intention to receive then relax and enjoy!Enlightened World Network is your guide to inspirational online programs about the spiritual divinity, angels, energy work, chakras, past lives, or soul. Learn about spiritually transformative authors, musicians and healers. From motivational learning to inner guidance, you will find the best program for you.Check out our website featuring over 200 spirit-inspired lightworkers specializing in meditation, energy work and angel channelinghttp://www.enlightenedworld.onlineEnjoy inspirational and educational shows at http://www.youtube.com/c/EnlightenedWorldNetworkTo sign up for a newsletter to stay up on EWN programs and events, sign up here: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/sl/2TRBaeGEnlightened World Network is now available on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Podbean, Spotify, and Amazon Music.Link to EWN's disclaimer: https://enlightenedworld.online/disclaimer/#lightworkers #angelicmessage #lightsourcing #energyblocks #Arcturian

The Holy Spirit is moving. He's doing a new thing all across the world, and our desire is to be aligned with what He is doing, so that we can experience His outpouring and be conduits of His glory towards others. In this message, we're going to talk about recent prophetic words over our region, as well as the revival call of our city and church, and how we can position ourselves to be a part of this great move of God that is happening.Visit us online at http://www.fathershouseportland.org

In this episode, Natalie sits down with Keren Eldad — coach to some of the world's highest achievers and author of Gilded and the new Gilt Free — to unpack why external success never delivers the safety it promises. Keren shares the three core wounds beneath achievement addiction, the "gilded cage" so many high-achieving women are trapped in, and the surprising income threshold where what you want out of life finally starts to change. You'll learn how to recognize the wound driving your hustle, why "assume everyone likes you" became her most viral piece of advice, and the riptide rule for holding onto success without letting it consume you. If you've ever achieved everything you set out to and quietly wondered why it's still not enough, this episode is the reframe and the way out. Time Stamps:  03:50 The gilded cage: when the shiny life is the trap 07:50 "Yes, we're addicts" — achievement as addiction 15:30 The 3 core wounds behind every overachiever 18:18 The success coach who still spirals when business slows 21:34 The $500K line that changes what you actually want 27:50 "Assume everyone likes you" — the rule that went viral 38:11 The riptide rule for holding onto success 48:28 Why scaling might be the wrong goal entirely 53:46 What real credibility in coaching actually looks like Links & Resources:  Pre-Order The Freedom-Based Business Method. Follow Keren: @coachkeren  Grab a copy of Keren's book - Gilded: Breaking Free from the Cage of Ambition, Perfectionism, and the Relentless Pursuit of More Listen to Natalie on COACHED by Keren Eldad Sign Up For Our Free Weekly Newsletter & Get Insights From Natalie Every Single Week On All Things Strategy, Motherhood, Business Growth + More.  Drop Us A Review On The Podcast + Send Us A Screenshot & We'll Send You Natalie's 7-Figure Operating System Completely FREE (value $1,997).

Hey, it's Katie and I want to welcome you to this special bonus episode. It'll be here for you completely ad-free for the next week so you can get a feel of what it's like to be a PREMIUM member. If you'd like an easy ad-free experience for all of our podcasts - that's over 200 episodes each month, then JOIN PREMIUM today at https://WomensMeditationNetwork.com/premium This guided meditation is here to help you reconnect with yourself, your intuition, and the deeper wisdom within you. As you slow down and breathe, you'll restore trust, clarity, and spiritual alignment. Sometimes all you need is a quiet moment to remember who you are. Love,

Are you living your soul purpose or simply running a business by default? James Ainsworth explores the powerful reframe from business to purpose, sharing how a journey of heartbreak and spiritual growth ignited his passion for freedom and self-acceptance. Hear how firefighting, farming and ecstatic dance became metaphors for growth, and why embracing anxiety and fear can help you align with your soul's calling. If you're ready to push the edges of your comfort zone and find inspiration to live more authentically, you'll find opportunities for alignment. KEY TAKEAWAY "As long as I stay with the idea of purpose, or soul purpose, it allows me to not have to do the typical way of running a business. It's this level of being in presence, allowing stuff to come in and then taking inspired action."    ABOUT THE GUEST – JAMES AINSWORTH James is an embodiment guide, retreat facilitator, and podcast host devoted to helping people reconnect with themselves in a deeper, more honest way. For 16 years, James has walked into burning buildings as a firefighter, forging an intimate relationship with fire — its chaos, destruction and rebirth. Through the Dragon archetype, he channels that same elemental force as purification, truth and sovereignty.   Years of personal breakdowns, relationship initiations, and identity shedding led him into deep inner work, including therapy, men's work, embodiment practices, movement, energy healing, shadow integration, and archetypal exploration. At the heart of James' work is a simple truth: "Transformation doesn't come from becoming someone new, but from embodying who you already are."   CONNECT WITH JAMES AINSWORTH https://www.facebook.com/james.ainsworth.50 https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-ainsworth-4a78b2149/ https://www.james-ainsworth.com https://www.instagram.com/james.ainsworth_podcast/     ABOUT THE HOST - AMY ROWLINSON Amy is a purpose and fulfilment coach, author, podcast strategist and mastermind host who empowers purpose-driven leaders to boost productivity, engagement and meaning in life and work. Through transformational conversations, Amy helps individuals overcome overwhelm and live with clarity, building living legacies along the way.   WORK WITH AMY If you're interested in how purpose can help you and/or your business, please book a free 30 min call via https://calendly.com/amyrowlinson/call    KEEP IN TOUCH WITH AMY Sign up for the weekly Friday Focus - https://www.amyrowlinson.com/subscribe-to-weekly-newsletter    CONNECT WITH AMY https://linktr.ee/AmyRowlinson    BUY AMY'S BOOK (Shortlisted in the 2025 Business Book Awards) * Focus on Why by Amy Rowlinson with George F. Kerr – https://amzn.eu/d/6W02HWu    HOSTED BY AMY ROWLINSON   DISCLAIMER The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast belong solely to the host and guest speakers. Please conduct your own due diligence.  *As an Amazon Associate, Amy earns from qualifying purchases.

Welcome to the weekly podcast of Bethel Family Worship Center. To learn more, visit our website at http://bfwc.net or download the BFWC App (https://www.bfwc.net/mobile-app). To support this ministry and help us continue to reach people all around the world, click here: https://www.elexiogiving.com/App/Giving/bfwc

Invite to the retreat - last 3 spots left or dm me @sundazedkk on insta for more info or email sundazedkk@gmail.com YOSEMITE HIKING HEALING Retreat Invite! https://view.flodesk.com/emails/6a163b2e60857fed3082c477Daily Basis! Love them sm

Season 3 Trailer | Rooted & Rising: What Does It Truly Mean to Live Intuitively?After a year away from the microphone, I'm returning with a new season, a new perspective, and a deeper question:What does it truly mean to live intuitively?Over the last year, I've found myself exploring what happens after the awakening.Not just receiving intuitive guidance.Not just trusting our gifts.But allowing that inner knowing to shape the way we move through our relationships, our healing, our work, our finances, our purpose, and our everyday lives.In this Season 3 trailer, I share the inspiration behind Rooted & Rising and the journey that has shaped this next chapter of the podcast.Together, we'll explore intuition, embodiment, self-trust, nervous system safety, healing, grief, relationships, money, visibility, purpose, and what it truly means to live aligned.This season isn't about having all the answers.It's about exploring the questions.The questions that ask us to grow.The questions that ask us to trust.The questions that bring us back to ourselves.Whether you've been here since the beginning or you're just discovering this podcast, welcome.I'm so grateful you're here.In This Season* Living intuitively in everyday life* Embodiment and self-trust* Healing and personal transformation* Nervous system safety and regulation* Boundaries and relationships* Money and self-worth* Visibility and authenticity* Spirit communication and intuition* Purpose and alignment* Becoming who you truly areAn Intention for Season 3As I begin this new season, I want to share the intention I'm holding for these conversations:I release this season not because I'm certain where it will lead, but because I trust the conversation that wants to emerge.May these conversations reach the people they're meant to reach.May they deepen self-trust.May they invite us home to ourselves.May they remind us that intuition isn't something outside of us to find, but something within us to remember.May we root deeply and rise authentically.Thank you for being here and for walking this journey alongside me.With gratitude,JessicaResources & Ways to Work With Me✨ Free Resources & Meditationshttps://www.jessicameils.com/freebies✨ Learn More & Work With Mehttps://www.jessicameils.com✨ Follow Along on Instagram@peoplecallmejessEnjoying the Podcast?If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who may need these conversations.Your support helps this podcast reach more people and allows this work to continue.Thank you for being here.Root deeply. Rise authentically. Trust yourself along the way.— Jessica MeilsKeywordsLiving Intuitively, Intuition, Self-Trust, Embodiment, Spiritual Growth, Personal Development, Nervous System Healing, Spiritual Medium, Energy Healing, Personal Transformation, Self-Worth, Alignment, Conscious Living, Healing Journey, Purpose, Rooted and Rising, Jessica Meils Podcast, Season 3

Is work-life balance an elusive concept you have yet to master while running your life and neuro biz? In this episode, hosts Erin Gallardo, PT, DPT, NCS and Claire McLean, PT, DPT, NCS discuss the topic with NeuroBiz Coach, Emily Duval Ledger. Many clinicians start businesses to escape traditional job burnout but then recreate the same patterns by overworking and glorifying busyness. In the show we talk about recognizing when "busy" becomes unproductive, using tools like time-blocking, planners, and realistic daily priorities to focus on high-impact tasks and reduce urgency overload, but, really, it is about much more than just "tools." The topic of metacognition—noticing and questioning automatic thoughts about productivity—comes up.  We encourage business owners to listen to signals like dread and frustration, realign work with the clients and tasks that energize you and continually adjust your business models to support long-term well-being for yourself and your team.

Ryan Burklo delves into the essential elements of building wealth, emphasizing the importance of alignment, environment, and mindset. Through engaging personal stories and practical strategies, he illustrates how these factors can significantly shift your financial life. By aligning your goals with your values, creating a supportive environment, and cultivating a positive mindset, Ryan provides a comprehensive guide to transforming your financial journey.   Check out our website:  https://www.builtforlifenotjustwealth.com/ Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@builtforlifenotjustwealth/ Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.quantifiedfinancial.com/subscribe-now Check out our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanburklofinance?igsh=ZTJzN3Jnajd5M2Mw Ryan Burklo's LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanburklo/ Alex Collin's LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandercollins/ For a quick assessment of your current financial life go to: https://www.livingbalancesheet.com/lbsVision/lite/RyanBurklo   #BuiltForLifeNotJustWealth #wealthbuilding #financialalignment #mindset #environment #personalfinance #financialplanning #habits #identity #systems #discipline   Key Topics The role of environment in financial behavior The importance of mindset and beliefs in wealth building Practical steps to create financial systems that remove decision fatigue Chapters 00:00 The Misconception of Wealth Building 02:59 The Role of Environment in Financial Success 05:55 The Importance of Alignment in Financial Goals 09:09 Identity and Accountability in Wealth Building 12:07 Defining Your Financial Future  

From BrahMos exports to semiconductor cooperation, India and countries to its east are recalibrating ties as geopolitical shifts create a need for trusted regional partners.----more----https://theprint.in/diplomacy/india-east-asia-move-beyond-trade-rivalry-towards-strategic-alignment-as-us-china-contest-escalates/2959683/

Today's Devotional "Assignment Brings You Into Alignment"lmjministries.org6/15/26

Definition vs. Assumption: Building Relationships on Clarity Instead of GuessworkWhat if one of the biggest challenges in your relationship isn't a lack of love, attraction, or commitment—but a lack of clarity?In this episode of Concepts and Conversations, Coach Bryan Thomas tackles one of the most overlooked relationship killers: assumptions. Too often, people enter relationships believing that love automatically creates understanding. They assume their partner knows what they need, understands their expectations, shares their values, or sees the future the same way they do. The problem is that assumptions create confusion, and confusion eventually creates conflict.Many relationships struggle not because people have bad intentions, but because they never took the time to clearly define what they were building together. Instead of having conversations about expectations, boundaries, finances, communication styles, family dynamics, faith, and long-term goals, many couples simply assume everything will work itself out. Unfortunately, what is left undefined often becomes the source of frustration later.Coach Bryan explores the critical difference between defining and assuming. Definition creates clarity. Clarity creates understanding. Understanding creates alignment. Without those elements, even two people who genuinely care about each other can find themselves disconnected and disappointed.Throughout this conversation, you'll learn why healthy relationships require investigation rather than imagination. Instead of assuming what someone means, healthy people ask questions. Instead of creating narratives, they seek understanding. Instead of expecting mind-reading, they communicate with intention.Coach Bryan also discusses how assumptions show up in everyday relationships. From money and provision to communication, affection, conflict resolution, and commitment, many couples operate from personal definitions they never communicate. These hidden expectations often become the foundation of arguments because each person believes their perspective is obvious while their partner may have a completely different viewpoint.Drawing from personal experiences, coaching conversations, and real-world relationship dynamics, Coach Bryan explains why behavior often reveals more than words and why alignment requires more than chemistry. Attraction may bring people together, but understanding is what helps them stay together.This episode will challenge you to examine your own relationships and ask important questions:What expectations have I assumed instead of communicated?Have we clearly defined the purpose of our relationship?Do we share the same values and goals?Am I seeking understanding or simply making conclusions?Are we building on facts or assumptions?Whether you're single, dating, engaged, married, or recovering from a past relationship, this conversation provides practical insights that can help you build stronger, healthier connections. You'll walk away with a deeper appreciation for communication, intentionality, and the power of clarity.The strongest relationships are not built on assumptions, guesswork, or unspoken expectations. They are built on honest conversations, shared understanding, and a commitment to continually learning one another.If you're ready to move beyond surface-level connection and build relationships rooted in purpose, clarity, and alignment, this episode is for you.Because love may start a relationship, but understanding is what sustains it.

Jack Burnham discusses China and North Korea's strategic alignment, noting that Xi Jinping's festive visit to Pyongyang signals China's willingness to de-emphasize denuclearization in favor of regional stability and strategic balancing against the US. North Korea, now an "arsenal of tyranny," leverages its military experience from the Ukrainian front lines to strengthen its regime. (5)1919

You already know something is off. The output is there. You're showing up, doing the work, performing at a level other people can see. But underneath all of it, there's a strain you can't quite name — a low-grade exhaustion that has nothing to do with how many hours you slept and everything to do with why you're doing what you're doing. You are working for your identity instead of from it. And no amount of productivity is going to fix a motivation problem. Pentatonix's Kevin Olusola and Donovan Dee Donnell join me today for a riveting conversation. Kevin Olusola, Grammy-winning beatboxer and member of Pentatonix, and Donovan Dee Donnell, life coach, counselor, and co-author of Designed to Succeed, join me for one of the most theologically loaded conversations this show has ever had. Kevin names something with startling precision: he gave up the ghost — not as resignation, but as full surrender to the Father at the Hollywood Bowl in 2022, performing before thousands without needing their applause because his being was finally more secure than his doing. Donovan unpacks the mechanics of fear with the clarity of someone who has lived in both the wreckage and the rebuild, walking us through what he and Kevin call the verify-purify-occupy framework, the three-move sequence for dismantling fear's claim before it ever gains a foothold. Together, they trace a thread that runs from identity through core values, through alignment and its guardrails, to the question every person of purpose will eventually have to answer: What are you willing to die for? This is not a conversation about success. It is a conversation about what happens when your motivation is finally honest enough to be sanctified. It will ask you to do something you have probably been postponing — to go to God with the actual thing, not the acceptable version of it, and let Him work with what is true. Guest Bios Kevin Olusola is a three-time Grammy Award-winning musician and beatboxer best known as a member of Pentatonix, the a cappella group that has amassed nearly five billion streams on YouTube. A Yale University graduate who came within a semester of a pre-med track, Kevin traded the expectations of his immigrant Nigerian-Grenadian family for a music career built on the unconventional combination of classical cello and beatboxing — and paid for that leap in ways that eventually led him to something more costly than a career pivot: a genuine reckoning with why he was performing at all. He is also the founder of Imagine Faith Talk, where his platform merges high-performance principles with a Pentecostal-Charismatic faith, and the author of a solo musical project, Dawn of a Misfit. Donovan Dee Donnell is a life coach, former counselor, and co-author of Designed to Succeed. A self-described introvert with an extrovert's calling, Donovan brings both the rigor of professional coaching and the honesty of someone who has navigated some dark places — including years as a stripper and a long reckoning with what it costs to build a life that isn't afraid of criticism. He is a founding collaborator on the Imagine Faith Talk platform alongside Kevin Olusola, and his coaching work centers on helping people identify the guardrails that protect alignment and do the internal work necessary to keep their motivation honest. Show Partner SafeSleeve designs a phone case that blocks up to 99% of harmful EMF radiation—so I'm not carrying that kind of exposure next to my body all day. It's sleek, durable, and most importantly, lab-tested by third parties. The results aren't hidden—they're published right on their site. And that matters because many so-called EMF blockers on the market either don't work or can't prove they do. We protect our hearts and minds—why wouldn't we protect our bodies too? Head to safesleevecases.com and use the code WINTODAY10 for 10% off your order. Episode Links Show Notes Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here! Invite me to speak at your church or event. Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

In this episode we'll talk about:Why the beginning of alignment almost always feels like something is falling apartHow loss and alignment share the same entry point and why that confuses peopleWhy God's realignment process requires the removal of things you thought were permanentHow to recognize alignment when it's disguised as disruptionWhy the discomfort of transition is evidence of repositioning not punishmentWhat becomes possible when you stop resisting the loss and start trusting the rearrangementAnd more… START HERE…→ Join The Niche Is You® — my Substack (20K+) — Weekly essays, the full workshop library, the private community + the Quarterly Challenges. → https://mattgottesman.substack.com/aboutNEW HERE…→ 6 Days to Clarity Workshop — clarity for your time, energy, money, creativity, work & play. → https://mattgottesman.com/reverse-engineer-your-life (FREE)CONNECT WITH ME…→ Instagram — @mattgottesman→ TikTok — @mattgottesman→ YouTube — @mattgottesmanRESOURCES…→ Write • Design • Build — my Content Creator Studio & OS masterclass (Included when you join my Substack) — Growing the niche of you, your audience, reach, voice, passion & income — CLICK HERE→ Recommended Book List — CLICK HERE→ Apparel — thenicheisyou.comOTHER RELATED EPISODES:Faith Isn't Knowing the Whole Path… It's Taking the Next Honest StepApple: https://apple.co/3MB62IuSpotify: https://bit.ly/4rZw3RN