Podcasts about and gen z

Send us a textThe boys are in the building! Z-Bird gets into the Masters. Shedeur Sanders visits the Steelers Facility.  Will Pittsburgh renew TJ Watts contract?  And Gen Z starts doing "Home Cafes" to avoid spending money on Coffee. Walmart is locking up steaks to prevent theft. The fish are on drugs and swimming faster up stream. Two friends split lottery winnings after 30 year promise. And a family has a shocking conclusion to their funeral.All that and more on this week's episode of Greenfield's Finest Podcast.Check out our upcoming events, social media, and merch sale at the link below ⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/GFP Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/7viuBywVXF4e52CHUgk1i5 Produced by Lane Media ⁠https://www.lanemediapgh.com/

Americans are now queerer than ever! A new Gallup poll shows 9.3% of folks now identify as something other than straight—up from 7.6% in 2023. And Gen Z? A whopping 23%!Party!While it seems like the country's getting more conservative, people's sexuality and gender identity says otherwise. Joining us today is the self-proclaimed ‘lesbian on the weekends'-- the West Side comedy queen of raunch, Tiny Thickemz, along with her comedy partner in life and onstage, OhJay Lamont. Together they host ‘Love is Blind' at Chicago's Laugh Factory, where real couples do joint stand-up sets about their relationships—LIVE on stage, TONIGHT FEB 27!FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM:★ instagram.com/thickemztiny★ instagram.com/ohjay_lamont★ instagram.com/faustofernos★ instagram.com/marcfelionPlus-- • What's the best place in Chicago to buy loose items?• A big fat beaver on Chicago's Southside becomes an overnight celebrity. • Pope Francis is in the hospital in critical condition. • Republicans are upset with the Super Bowl winners, the Philadelphia Eagles, for skipping a fast food meal with the President at the White House."• We look back at the lives of Roberta Flack, best known for her hit song ‘Killing Me Softly,' and Lynne Marie Stewart, beloved as Miss Yvonne—the Most Beautiful Woman in All of Puppetland on Pee-Wee's Playhouse—both of whom passed away this week. 

Steve Caplin says that in 2 days, AI solved a problem that took Imperial College scientists 10 years. But it also caused a massive gaffe in a staggeringly expensive Super Bowl ad. He discusses new e-ink developments including outdoor posters, a tablet, a minimal phone and a gaming console. The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop output has been digitised. There's a high-tech bookmark. Italy is getting tough with fake TripAdvisor reviews which are damaging tourism. You should take your tablets with milk not water in future. And Gen Z is having problems hearing, but it's neurological and caused by noise-cancelling headphones say audiologists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

According to a new survey, one in five young adults can't change a light bulb. And Gen Z'ers are spending more than $1,500 a year calling in pros to do basic jobs they could probably do themselves.

For democracy to endure, democratic institutions and values must be passed from one generation to the next. And there's plenty of good news about how Gen Z—the youngest and most diverse generation of voters—is engaging in politics. Young people are participating and voting at levels at least equal to previous generations. But there are reasons for concern too: Many Americans are growing up in civic deserts, without access to political associations or other forms of collective action. Many of Gen Z are struggling to find a stable political home in the two-party system. And Gen Z is also experiencing a mental health crisis, which is interrelated in complex ways to declines in associational life and political alienation. Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg is the Newhouse Director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), which aims to expand pathways to civic learning and engagement. Kawashima-Ginsberg also serves on the boards of March for Our Lives and Rhizome. Ruby Belle Booth started at CIRCLE as a Diverse Democracy Fellow, then transitioned to working as Election Coordinator, and is now a Researcher. She contributes to CIRCLE'S Growing Voters report and the Young Leaders Learning Community. Booth was also a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. https://circle.tufts.edu/

As carmakers work to get fully self-driving cars on the road, they have to think about the ethical dilemmas that the vehicles might face. While supporters say the tech will make driving safer, autonomous cars may still have to choose between hitting an animal or swerving into traffic. Brett Berk joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how companies are grappling with these issues. And Gen Z-ers are supposed to be "digital natives.” So why can so few of them touch-type?  Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's right BoomXer fans, we are NOT sponsored by the Fartist. Jimmy has a non-superpower and a girl named Gladys. Could it be "Two Men Down", Shari doesn't think so. Who is Jacque Strappe? And Gen Z women don't congregate under the steeple...

Corporate America is giving mixed signals on the consumer. We'll round up the latest company commentary and speak with Lidl's US CEO about what he's seeing on the food inflation front. Plus, Beyond Meat's CEO joins us for his first live TV interview since the depths of the pandemic. We'll wrap up the company's disappointing quarterly results and look ahead to what's next. And Gen Z is increasingly choosing trade schools over traditional 4-year colleges. We'll speak with the CEO of one publicly traded company that's benefitting from that boom.

An update on "Middle School Days of Our Lives".....is Bill's son dealing with a broken heart?!? It appears as if the engagement between Megan Fox and MGK is off. People forget to do WHAT five times a week?!? Travis Kelce's guilty pleasure appears to be "Love Is Blind". Riley called in for some Group Therapy....is it a red flag that his girlfriend has planned a solo vacation that excludes him? Also, Millenials are taking credit for improving marriage! How, exactly? And Gen Z seems to be "poking" on Facebook, why are they doing that? Plus, Battle of the Burbs and what did you catch on fire? 

The Adult Baby Diaper Lover community is getting a spa. Tucker Carlson gets burned by Putin and gets a new nickname from Bridget. Taylor Swift is a deep state plant. And Gen Z discovers loud budgeting. For more content, including the unedited version of Dumpster Fire, BTS content, writing, photos, livestreams and a kick-ass community, subscribe at https://phetasy.com/ 0:00 - Introduction 0:50 - What Is Happening? 4:54 - Join Phetasy 5:57 - America's Too Fat For A Civil War 9:25 - Sheath Underwear 10:25 - Russia So Russian 15:05 - Sprained My Eyes 19:18 - Capitalism Always Wins 22:46 - Weather 24:13 - WOMEN! 26:12 - We're All Gonna Die 28:02 - Gen Z Discovers 30:17 - Dumpster Diving 32:41 - Breaking Bridget 37:55 - Phetasy News 40:00 - The Internet Is Glorious ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to our sponsors Sheath Underwear - Check out Sheath's ingenious dual pouch system and save 20% with the code DUMPSTER---------------------------------------------------------------------- Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.phetasy.com/subscribe

Daniel Herriges has been one of my favorite reads on the Strong Towns site for many years. He has thoughtful, in-depth pieces on many subjects, notably housing. Now, he has co-authored a new book with Chuck Marohn called “Escaping the Housing Trap.” We discuss the book, and much more, including my guest appearance in the book.New feature: transcript belowFind more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Kevin K (00:02.704)Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. Thanks for listening. I've got a special guest here today, somebody who has been one of my favorite reads for many years now. Daniel Herrigus is here joining us. And Daniel, it's great to see you.Daniel Herriges (00:24.11)Great to be here, Kevin. Thank you.Kevin K (00:25.85)We're going to talk a lot about housing today and housing itself is obviously, it's probably one of the most, been one of the most talked about topics nationally inside the urban planning and development world and outside that world as well, probably for at least a decade as housing costs have really exploded in a lot of places in the country. So it's a very, very common conversation piece.And a lot of it is often frustrating and confusing to talk about. So into this, Daniel Steps, he's actually been writing about this for some time on the Strong Towns website and writing really great pieces. And now he is the co -author of a new book with Chuck Marrone called Escaping the Housing Trap, which comes out, when does it come out Daniel?Daniel Herriges (01:21.494)April, April 23rd.Kevin K (01:23.152)April 23rd, okay. So I'm really, really looking forward to this. I think Daniel and I have probably learned from each other quite a bit in things that we've talked about and written about. And so I'm really, I'm excited to have this conversation and kind of dive deeper a little bit into the general topic of housing and his perspective and the book's perspective on it.So Daniel was kind enough to share with me a little bit of the introduction. And I say that just because I've marked a few notes to help me direct the conversation a little bit. Housing is so broad as a topic. There's about a thousand different places you can go. And I really like how you laid it out here in the beginning. But I do want to start with just kind of one piece that I think is really fundamental that I just highlighted here a couple of sentences.And I know probably for strong towns readers, this will sound familiar, but I just think it's important to emphasize this and repeat it because, and have you expand on it. But you talk about central to this approach is that recognition that cities are complex systems. They are shaped by countless decisions made by millions of individuals over time with interconnections that are challenging to trace or fully grasp. When attempts are made to simplify.or ignore this inherent complexity in organizing urban life, challenges and disruptions arise. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on that and why do you think that's so fundamental to this conversation?Daniel Herriges (03:04.526)Yeah, well, it's something that's been it's been fundamental to the Strong Towns conversation for a long time, as I think anybody who's read the blog and is familiar with our work knows. And I do think it's central to to grasping what's really gone wrong. You know, it's it's funny, I would talk to people casually, you know, old friends and stuff in the process of writing this book, and they'd say, well, what's new in your life? And I'd say, well, I'm co -writing this book with my boss and.It's about the housing crisis. And an old high school friend of mine, I remember I'm sitting down for coffee with him, and I said, I'm writing a book about the housing crisis. And he goes, oh, cool. Wait, which one? I've never talked to anybody who like, I say housing crisis and they scoff at the idea like, oh no, there isn't a housing crisis. But people's understandings of what that means are incredibly varied because of exactly what you're saying and what you pulled out of the intro to the book. That what,Kevin K (03:41.84)Hahaha.Kevin K (03:49.776)Yeah.Daniel Herriges (04:02.03)really we try to organize the narrative around in this book is we have this massive paradigm shift in the 20th century in how we house ourselves as a society in the US. And to a lesser extent, Canada, I think throughout the Anglosphere, you can see commonalities, but we have this massive paradigm shift alongside sort of the broader paradigm shift that we've talked about as the suburban experiment at Strong Towns.starting in the mid 20th century and really upending the way we finance housing and all sorts of urban development, the way we finance it, the way we plan it and regulate it, and our cultural assumptions about it. And what that really amounts to, at the core of that paradigm shift, is this very modernist, this very 20th century idea that we can solve, we can permanently solve the messiness of the city.that we can permanently solve these tensions that exist around, well, how is your neighborhood going to change and evolve? Are you going to be uncomfortable with that change? Are people going to be displaced? Is the character going to change? How are you going to finance housing? Is it going to be a struggle? Are you going to have to make sacrifices? This idea emerges for a number of reasons that we can delve deeper into that, well, we can solve all these problems now. In a modern, prosperous society, we're going to have mass.middle class prosperity, we're going to have mass homeownership. It's going to be an economic engine. It's going to be the the foundation of everything good in society. We're going to build, we're going to plan neighborhoods that are better than the places people have lived in the past. It's all going to be scientific and orderly and optimized. And through that, we can deliver kind of a permanently prosperous society. And this is the vision that emerges through the 1930s into the middle of the century.And looking back now, decades later, we can really see the cracks in that vision. And those cracks look like a whole bunch of different things breaking. And to most people, housing crisis means the affordability crisis, which is especially acute in certain kind of high cost regions of the country. So a lot of the discourse around, quote unquote, the housing crisis, initially starts to come out of places like New York City, like San Francisco, like Boston, and it's all about, well, nobody can afford the rent anymore.Daniel Herriges (06:26.926)But we paint, I think, a picture of it that's inclusive of that, but broader than that. Because there are all sorts of ways in which housing is just broken. We're not building the right kinds of housing for people's needs. We're not building it in the right places. A lot of people are squeezed. They're overly indebted. They're making huge sacrifices in terms of how they live their life or where they can live their life. We're not happy. We've largely lost faith that...the development industry is going to be responsive to community needs and is going to give us products that really amount to the kind of communities we want to live in. Things are just, they're fundamentally broken in a lot of ways that don't necessarily tie up with a bow into a really neat package. Like, well, this is the definition of the housing crisis and this is the thing that's wrong. So I think the messy city is a great place to be having this conversation because it's kind of a messy book, and deliberately so, because it tries to get at all of these different facets of, well, what is the paradigm that emerged with the suburban experiment? And then what are all these sort of cascading consequences of it that have led to the situation we're in today?Kevin K (07:45.36)So let me give you some of the, just right off the top, let's maybe get the grumpy old man questions out of the way. I'll give you some of the grumpy old man questions. Well, so one of them is, well, you know, you're mostly talking about cities in certain parts of the country where they just make it really hard to build anything, and that's why housing is so expensive. And...Daniel Herriges (07:52.846)Hahaha.Kevin K (08:09.968)Also, you know, when I was a young person, we shared bedrooms. My starter home was an 800 square foot house and you expect a 2000 or 2400 square foot house. And it's really just expectations have changed.Daniel Herriges (08:29.166)Yeah, so that's two great kind of grumpy old man questions to use your parlance there. Yeah, I think that in terms of sort of the geographic question, the loudest voices in the discourse tend to be from these places that are really kind of exceptional, San Francisco, New York. But the sense that there's a housing crisis is much, much broader and more widespread than that. It just manifests a little bit differently.Kevin K (08:32.016)I'm good for those.Daniel Herriges (08:56.654)I think that you hear it and you see it in Kansas City where you are. I mean, I'm certainly aware of some of the stories of, you know, some of the tenant activism that has come out of Kansas City, people who really are finding their housing situation, the options available to them, finding it to be dire. I think that in every city, there are issues where there are these mismatches and these spillovers in terms of where really should we be building housing and what kind of product should we be building?versus what are we building? You have neighborhoods that are mired in stasis, that are mired in disinvestment for decades. They've got really good bones, they're good places, they have a lot of historic character, they have people who deeply love them, but places that just can't catch a break. At the same time, you've got these building patterns happening maybe out on the suburban fringe that are...I mean, they're financially ruinous, which is a core thing we've talked about at length at Strong Towns. They're producing more liabilities than they are revenue for the communities that they're in. But they're also mismatched with where the demand really is, especially among younger people who want to move into home ownership. So even in a place like Kansas City, where if you look at aggregate, like metro area statistics, like housing is a bargain there compared to on the coasts.And even if you look at relative to local wages, which are certainly lower than in a San Francisco or New York, it's still better. Home prices in Northern California are 10 times median income. Where you are, it might be four times. But there are still people who are stretched and who are squeezed. There are neighborhoods where there is a shortage of decent housing in good condition that meets the needs of people there. There's definitely a shortage ofwalkable urban places. I'm sure that there are places that people are getting pushed out of. And then there are these mismatches that are really pervasive all over the country from small towns to mid -size and big metros, where, for example, one statistic that I find myself repeating a lot, and I learned this from Ali Thurmond -Quinlan, who I know you know, Kevin, fantastic incremental developer in Arkansas. She does this great presentation about how,Daniel Herriges (11:19.15)Two thirds of American households are made up of one or two people. And yet 88 % of the new homes that are built have three bedrooms or more. It's that kind of thing that plays into the housing crisis where like we keep churning out this really, really limited range of products, these monocultures. And often it's, you know, the suburban tract home in a cornfield where the financing is in place, the institutional arrangements are in place. We've made it really, really easy.to keep churning that out. But even within a relatively small geography, you can have housing shortages in other places. You can have real problems with people being able to access close -in neighborhoods, close to jobs, close to amenities, or housing that is the right size and configuration for what they actually need, where they are in life.Kevin K (12:11.472)Let's dive into the starter home piece of that a little bit because I just know you've written about that extensively in the past and I think about like my own situation. When I look at the houses my parents owned when – either before I was born or shortly after I was born, they were very modest houses. I think when I was born in 1969, at that point –Daniel Herriges (12:15.758)Mm -hmm. Yeah.Kevin K (12:39.632)When I was born, we had four kids and I think we lived in a three bedroom ranch with a basement in Omaha, a pretty small place. And then we're able to get a little bit bigger place, probably more like a four bedroom or so. But I mean, really for most of my childhood, we shared bedrooms as kids. And there's certainly, I know as a parent today, there's a vastly different expectation.on the part of my other parents, on the part of kids, about what constitutes an appropriate house for a family. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and just how that all has changed so much over the years.Daniel Herriges (13:19.758)Right. Right.Daniel Herriges (13:26.414)I think the expectations are in a feedback loop with these other kind of institutional factors that are affecting what we build and what we don't build and what options are out there. So I think, I hear what you're saying and I think there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, I look at my family, I got two young children and would sharing a bedroom be the worst thing in the world for them? No, but even when we like, when we go on vacation somewhere, when we...go stay with in -laws and there's the prospect that they're gonna have to sleep in the same room. It's like, oh God, they won't get any sleep. They'll keep it to like, but it's really alien to like what we've assumed is just like the basic, like this is how you're supposed to live as a middle -class American family. And I think there has been that shift. I think it's also the case though that like the kind of starter home you're talking about, like you even look at the old photos of Levittown or those early sort of mass production suburbs.in the 1950s, like we're not building those anymore. Houses like that, almost nothing is built that's on that scale. There are institutional factors that play into that. I mean, there are regulatory factors like minimum lot sizes in a lot of communities. There are things that we've done that basically make it uneconomic to build smaller homes on smaller lots. And then, you know, combine that with this cultural expectations question. I think there's a little bit of chicken and egg there.I do think though that maybe not in the context of families with children specifically, but there is a huge amount of demand out there for maybe a different version than what you're thinking of in the 50s, the leave it to beaver kind of era, but there's a huge amount of demand out there for what we might call a starter home today. It just looks different. My wife and I, when we were in our 20s,starting out not making a lot of money, we didn't own a lot of stuff. We lived in backyard accessory dwelling units, backyard cottages behind a larger single family home. And these were all homes that had been built in like the 1930s. So they were kind of grandfathered into a zoning code that doesn't allow them anymore. We were lucky to find these, they were fantastic. I mean, they were the right sized living arrangement for where we were in life. We weren't ready to be homeowners. Maybe in a different era, we might've been homeowners at that age, I don't know.Daniel Herriges (15:47.566)But a very small home for a modest rent, like that was perfect. In big high cost cities, you see there's a lot of push to, can we do more micro apartments? Can we do sort of a modernized version of the single room occupancy where amenities like the kitchen are shared? There is demand out there for this stuff. I think that the new version of it needs to be allowed to evolve. And I think it will.Kevin K (16:18.704)Yeah, I think you could see this even when you look to, you know, I think a lot about some of the things that the author Joel Gourault wrote years ago. He wrote a couple of books that I really loved, but one of them was called Edge City. And he came up with this whole notion of the favored quarter, that if every metro area has like a quarter, if it's a pie, there's a quarter of it that just has better.demographics, better reputation, whatever, than the other parts of the metro area. And I think if you look in some of those favored quarters that have those subdivisions still from the 1940s and 50s, the very small Cape Cod homes and others that were built in that era, it's amazing how you, I think it validates what you're talking about. There's incredible demand for those. Those areas have really continued to be.desirable places to live for young families, even though they're much smaller homes than they might buy on the edge. And in the unfavored quarters, you don't see as much of that. They've had a lot more decline. And that speaks to other factors. But there's clearly this interest in demand still for the people will make that trade off to have a smaller place, you know, regardless if it's in an area they want to be in.Daniel Herriges (17:47.15)Yeah, the thing that's tough is that that stuff is getting bid up really fast in a lot of cities to the point where it's not really a viable starter home option for a lot of people. I mean, those old like Cape Cod, you know, those houses, you find them in California now. Like you're paying two million dollars for one of those. It's valued for the land underneath it. And often it's going to be torn down and replaced with a much larger home. But I mean, my wife and I, when we did buy our house in Sarasota, Florida, where we lived until...on the middle of last year, we bought in the neighborhood, like we really prized the location. We wanted to be somewhere where she could walk to work, where we only had to own one car, where we were close to downtown, close to walkable parts of the city that we liked. And we bought in the neighborhood that was sort of the last bastion of affordable home ownership in that it is these really modest houses. A lot of them are under a thousand square feet. But the prices have run up like crazy just in the...in the seven years since we made that purchase. We couldn't have gone back and bought that house today, the one that we just sold last year. And the notion that like this is a viable option for working class families, I mean, that's gone. Like it's a working class neighborhood that is transitioning really fast because anywhere, like you said, where the location is desirable, when we have an overall scarcity, small homes, big homes, it doesn't matter, they're gonna be bid up.Kevin K (19:11.472)How much in your writing or thinking about this has the impact of kind of just shifting demand for like more urban or walkable places? How does that play a role in exactly what you talked about there with Sarasota where, you know, we had a few decades of really going gung -ho with building suburbia and then all of a sudden we've had this major shift in interest and demand in the last couple of decades.on the part of all age groups, but especially younger people. And yet those new places haven't built much housing at all. So what do you see? How do you see that? Is that like a major factor in what people are talking about in terms of the pain they're feeling?Daniel Herriges (19:58.926)I think that shift is huge and I think it's underappreciated. I think it's actually hard to quantify because you got another kind of chicken and egg thing, right? Where people, I mean, you hear the contrarians right now. Like there are a lot of voices saying there's been this big shift and millennials are much more pro -urban than older generations were. And Gen Z is even more pro -urban than that. People want to live in walkable places, centrally located places. They don't want to do all this driving like.And then you see the confrarians come back and say, well, actually, millennials are all having kids and buying homes out in the suburbs. And it's kind of like, well, they're, do you know that that's what they want or are they buying where they can afford? And there's probably a bit of both in a lot of cases, but I think that the notion of revealed preference gets really tricky here. Does the fact that 10 ,000 more times, 10 ,000 times more people buy Camrys than Lexuses, does that mean that everybody likes the Camry more as a car?That's probably 10 ,000 is probably not the factor there. I'm positive it's not, but I needed a number real quick. But like there's suppose it revealed preference is going to be shaped by what the market makes available. You know, in Sarasota, there are tons of great kind of single family, quote unquote, homes that are occupied by families. They're occupied by a bunch of 20 something roommates who work in the service industry and they're crowding into a house because that's how they can afford the rent.Not, it's not because that's the way those people would prefer. Like that's the ideal living arrangement for people at that stage in life and in kind of a roommate situation. It's because that's all that there is. So I think, yeah, I think that there is evidence of a really profound shift and where it's showing up is not so much in where people currently live or what they're buying, what they're renting. It shows up to some extent in preference surveys that you'll hear from like the National Association of Realtors, like.Oh, 42 % of Americans would rather have a smaller house in a walkable neighborhood than a larger house in a place they have to drive. But more than that, it's showing up in prices. It's showing up in the way some of these preferred locations are being bid up. Despite being older housing, smaller housing, maybe lower quality, you look at price per square foot and it becomes really obvious that the places where people will pay a premium for less house tend to be walkable, really well -located locations withDaniel Herriges (22:23.406)with access to some urban amenities. We're just beginning to re -legalize more of that pattern. So there's gonna be a big lag in how much of this is actually being built and how are people actually living. One thing we talk about in the book is that I think a bunch of people's assumptions about the housing market were shaped during this really anomalous era, you know, post -post -World War II and the era of kind of urban decline, where from the 1970s through the 1990s, you had had massive suburban flight out of core cities in almost every metro in America. You had huge amounts of vacant real estate, even in New York, even in Manhattan, you had huge vacancy rates. And so the city became this place that, if that was when your attitudes were shaped, you thought like...this is a place, this is affordable, this is where the artists go to get their cheap studio space, this is where the people who are kind of on the margins of society, the city is where they go to live and they live this cool bohemian life. And so the most important policy priority is preventing the decline of these places. Let's do really rigid historic preservation, let's zone them in amber, let's try to protect this environment. Nobody was thinking about large -scale gentrification, nobody was thinking aboutpeople actually being displaced en masse from these urban locations. That wasn't on the radar in the late 20th century. I think there has been an absolute sea change now where in some ways the policies that we established in that era now are really, really biting us because we essentially locked down a bunch of what remained of our pre -suburban kind of built environment.And now there's this massive demand for these places and there's this need to change. And the only lever we have is, well, let's pick pockets of it and let's allow mass scale redevelopment, like giant five over one buildings, you this wholesale sort of wiping clean. Like we're struggling with, oh, wait a minute, now there's actually all this demand for what used to be like sort of the fringe oddball.Kevin K (24:25.104)Yeah.Daniel Herriges (24:41.068)Bohemian choice. I don't know.Kevin K (24:42.672)Yeah. It's funny how that kind of infects people's brains in so many respects. And I know that because I'm old enough to have lived in my part of the city when it was still pretty rough and pretty cheap. And I know a lot of people and friends who were older than me in that era who did exactly as you described. They were able to buy these incredible historic homes or buildings for next to nothing.And they have a vision of the way things were in that era as like they haven't really changed all that much. And I've often talked about it. They went from being basically no demand neighborhoods to now a lot of them are high demand, but they're still kind of using that like no demand thinking about how to solve problems. And it's like, I'm sorry, it's just, it's a different world now.Kevin K (25:38.96)So I want to piggyback a little bit on this. There's another sentence here, a couple sentences I picked up on that you wrote that I'd like to just kind of talk about, because I thought this was really insightful. You said, those who set housing policy often do not understand housing finance. Those who focus on finance are often oblivious to the effects of land use policy. These conversations, housing finance and land use policy, occur in separate circles.and are often insufficiently informed by each other. I really like the way that you talk about that. It certainly resonates with my experience. I wonder if you could expand a little bit more on how you've seen that play out.Daniel Herriges (26:21.838)Yeah, you can kind of witness it. If you go on Twitter, which I refuse to call X, but you can actually see the separate conversations happening in real time, depending on kind of who you follow and who's responding to those conversations, you can see that there are people who are interested in land use policy and zoning in housing development. A lot of them are associated with things like the Yes in My Backyard movement, and they're talking about housing in one set of terms.Kevin K (26:29.588)Likewise.Daniel Herriges (26:51.47)And, but then you go and you follow people who analyze the financial markets and they're looking at the housing market in the sense of what is happening with housing as an asset class. And they like, it's literally like they're speaking different languages. It's these people aren't in conversation with each other. Like they're literally not in each other's replies, but they're also it's different metrics. It's different assumptions about like, what even is quote, quote unquote, the housing market? Are we talking about,housing as a financial product, mortgages and their secondary, their derivatives as a financial product. Are we talking about the homes that people live in and the rents that they pay? And it's a really funny divide. And that divide, the stage was set for that through the policy decisions made in the 20th century to create a mass market in federally supported, federally insured.long -term mortgages and to make that the foundation of how we're going to house people in this country. And what we did was we created a system where increasingly housing was the foundation of the financial system. It was also the foundation of a bunch of other things. It became the foundation of local government's ability to fund their own operations. So many things are riding on housing prices going up and up and up.And if you talk to someone in that finance world, what is a housing crisis? A housing crisis is 2008. A housing crisis is when housing prices crash and it brings the economy with it. And fears of a housing crisis mean, well, we're afraid that building is going to slow down and prices are going to slump and rents are going to slump and it's going to have all these cascading effects on the financial system. If you go talk to a bunch of yimbies in San Francisco, what is a housing crisis? Well, duh, a housing crisis when people can't pay their rent.There is a really fundamental tension that is deeply ingrained in our society because we expect housing to do two contradictory things. We expect it to be a reliable, secure source of shelter for everyone who needs shelter, which is everyone. We also expect it to be this sort of indefinitely appreciating financial asset. Not necessarily like your home, though often your home, but...Daniel Herriges (29:18.446)more broadly, the housing market as a whole needs to go up and up and up or things break. That is the fundamental, you know, the book is titled Escaping the Housing Trap. That is fundamentally what the housing trap is. It is this contradiction that we haven't grappled with that a whole bunch of us need housing prices to fall and a whole bunch of us are also going to suffer if housing prices fall.Kevin K (29:42.224)Yeah. How have you, I'm just curious, how have you been able to talk to people in your own community or at the local level? Do you engage, especially for the dozen or so years you lived in Sarasota, did you engage with housing activists or people who are trying to shape local housing policy and talk about this perspective that you bring about?the housing trap and the different perspectives and motivations.Daniel Herriges (30:16.078)I did, you know, I had the chance in Sarasota to talk with a wide variety of people from kind of community and neighborhood activists to local elected officials, chamber of commerce types. I can't say I was super successful at influencing the conversation there. I would try to plant seeds when I talk to people, because I think that there's a lot of lack of understanding of even the contours of the issue. Like, I guess I'd tell you two stories here kind of related to that, and I'll try not to ramble.When I was in planning school, I had to do a summer internship and I did mine. I went to grad school up in Minneapolis, but then I went back to Sarasota where my wife lived for the summer and I did my internship in the county planning department. I think at this point, it's been far enough, you know, it's been enough years that I can say this and I don't have to worry about who I might be offending by saying this, but they tasked me as part of my planning internship with doing some kind of internal research, internal white papers basically on.best practices for promoting affordable housing. Because by 2016, they understood Florida is growing really fast. We have a housing crisis. We don't have enough housing. Rents are skyrocketing. But the prevailing thinking was so undeveloped about like even the terms of the conversation. So like I'm I'm trying to put together this research on, you know, what what levers do we have as the local government, as the county government to promote affordable housing?And I'm thinking of it in terms of how do we promote housing affordability, you know, get supply and demand aligned, remove zoning related obstacles to the production of more inexpensive housing, the production of housing where there's high demand. And then there's also this conversation about sources of subsidy and how do we get purpose -built affordable housing built. And that's all well and good. I went into one meeting where I'm supposed to like briefly summarize some of these results. And I realized sitting at this table, like 20 minutes in,it kind of dawns on me and a couple of the other planners that half the people at this table think that we're there to talk about homelessness. And they're they're baffled by everything coming out of my mouth and out of the, you know, the other planners' mouths because we're talking about zoning and they're like, but, you know, we what we really want to talk about is we've got this handful of vacant lots that the county owns and can we partner with any of the providers who Salvation Army or Habitat or both? And all of a sudden it's kind of like, wait a minute.Daniel Herriges (32:42.734)we're talking about affordable housing, we're not talking about homelessness. And they're like, I thought they were the same. Like, people are really way more, if you're immersed in kind of urbanist debates or just thinking about these issues, like the average person, including the average local policymaker, is way closer to square one than you think they are. So I saw that in Florida that like the everybody who was elected to office there had this sense that, well, we got to do something about affordable housing.and they didn't have the slightest clue how to think holistically about housing affordability as an issue in their community. Like, literally it was like, who can we partner with to get a small amount of subsidy delivered to one nonprofit that's gonna build a few homes? No sense of the scale of the problem or really, you know, the problem as a basic issue of what do we allow the market to build? And when you...That conversation has grown and Sarasota is, I think it's behind the curve, but I think they are tackling some of these broader questions of like, what does it say in our zoning code and how does that affect what gets built and what can't get built? There's still this mentality that's really, really ingrained. And it goes back to what I was saying about kind of that 1970s through 1990s, that defensive mentality of cities are.You know, we've got suburban flight and urban neighborhoods have suffered decline and they've suffered stagnation. And the thing we need to do is hold the line and protect them. We're not even worried about overwhelming demand. We can't even conceive of that. So I sat in this meeting once. I was asked to come by the president of my neighborhood association and it was a handful of neighborhood advocates and then a local elected official and a couple of city staff. And we're talking about missing middle housing because they were considering a.zoning code change to allow a modest amount of what's called the missing middle. Essentially in some neighborhoods in Sarasota where only single family homes were allowed to be built, they were gonna allow up to four units on a residential lot. And the question is, how broad will this be and what are the parameters of it be? And I'm listening to these people who work for the city and they're saying, well, I'm just concerned that this needs to be tightly, tightly regulated to prevent abuses. So.Daniel Herriges (35:06.478)You know, what if, what if people build multiple units and then they Airbnb them? Well, we got to make sure we have provisions that they can't turn them into short -term rentals. And, you know, what if, what if someone builds a fourplex and, you know, there are loud parties there and it's a nuisance to the neighbors. So, okay, we got to have special, um, provisions to, you know, maybe there's more landscaping screening or a bigger setback or something, but we got to make sure it won't be a nuisance to the neighbors. And well, you know, the goal of this is to provide more housing for our downtown workforce in our restaurants and stores. And.But what if the people who are living in this housing, what if they're vacationing snowbirds? What if they're not our workforce? Well, can we put a provision into the lease? You know, if you want to build multiple units on this lot, maybe you should be required to put a provision into the lease that the person living there must be employed in downtown Sarasota. Like these were literally the things being thrown out in this conversation. It needs to be tightly, tightly regulated to make sure it does exactly what we think it should do. And, um,You know, I pointed out and I think it largely fell on deaf ears. Like, do we say any of this stuff about new single family houses? Well, no, we don't. It's only this prospect of something that is a change in the existing pattern, you know, God forbid. But the funny thing that happened in this conversation was it kind of reached a natural lull and people are just sort of shooting the breeze for a while. And it's mostly a bunch of like neighborhood association presidents in Sarasota who are people in their 60s and 70s.They've moved down to enjoy the Florida sunshine and they're all from somewhere else. Everyone in Florida is from somewhere, pretty much. And the gentleman to my left starts talking about his childhood in Fall River, Massachusetts. And he, you know, lived on this wonderful street and it was full of triple -decker houses where you've got the family that owns it is probably living in one of the units and they have a couple tenants. And there was this restaurant on the ground floor of an apartment building on the corner and he used to love it.this idyllic picture of just kind of traditional, missing middle urbanism. And other people chimed in and they had similar childhood experiences. And the person who kept saying tightly, tightly regulated, chimes into the conversation and turns out that one of her family members, I don't remember if it was father or grandfather, but had owned a triple decker in Massachusetts. And it had been a stepping stone into building some wealth and joining the middle class and being homeowners in an affordable way.Daniel Herriges (37:31.402)had nothing but fond things to say about this. And so they all have these really positive experiences with real missing middle housing in the real world. And then the conversation goes back to the topic at hand and immediately a switch flips and it's, anyway, yeah, this is all great. I love this stuff. I think we should allow the missing middle. I just think it needs to be tightly, tightly regulated. So there's this huge disconnect. There's this huge sort of loss aversion that people have.Kevin K (37:53.296)Ha ha ha ha.Daniel Herriges (38:01.006)And this disconnect between like the stuff we're talking about as urbanists, the kind of things that have been illegal for a long time in most places that we're talking about allowing again, they're not alien to Americans. People have been to places that have this development pattern, they've seen it, and they largely have positive impressions of it. And the question is, how do you get past that wall with people? When I would talk with people in Sarasota, I would always point out like,because there were a lot of similar fears about an ordinance to allow backyard accessory dwelling units. And I would point out that the one neighborhood in Sarasota that has a lot of existing accessory dwelling units, it was built in the 1920s and 30s, it is one of the wealthiest, one of the nicest, one of the universally thought most charming, successful neighborhoods in Sarasota. Everybody loves this place. Everybody is simultaneously terrified of what could go wrong.Kevin K (38:57.84)Ha ha.Daniel Herriges (38:57.902)if we allowed more places like it to be built today.Kevin K (39:00.464)Yeah, we can't have any of that. It's clearly way too desirable. I think that's a great segue into this other piece, another piece here that really caught my eye in your introduction where you talked a little bit about James C. Scott's book, Seeing Like a State and his ideology of high modernism. And so just a couple of quick sentences on that where he said, high modernism consists of a strong belief in the scientific perfectibility of society. The high modernist seeks to rendercomplex social phenomena, discrete, legible, and measurable in order to prescribe solutions through rational scientific management. And then later how you said we believed we could devise permanent solutions to problems that had bedeviled city dwellers forever. So I mean, I love that. It kind of speaks to something that I've thought a lot about as well. And one of the more...of all the fascinating changes that we made in the 20th century, really one of the least talked about is just exactly this that you highlighted there was this adoption of that everything in society could be categorized and scientifically managed and that that was the right approach. But I think what you point out here is that it also had tons of consequences.Daniel Herriges (40:22.51)Mm -hmm.Yeah, in the more historical portion of the book, I got to do a lot of research on the origins of American zoning for this book. And you really see that underlying ideology in the way people talk about it. The earliest attempts at residential zoning came from a really good place. They largely came from progressive public health reforms in the late 19th and early 20th century. People looking at squalid conditions in tenements and like...Kevin K (40:33.68)Lucky you.Kevin K (40:53.488)Mm -hmm.Daniel Herriges (40:53.71)People are getting sick, these buildings are catching on fire, what can we do? And so there are some really obvious reforms that take shape that, okay, we're gonna require a little more space between buildings so light and air can get in, we're gonna require firewalls. But then you very quickly see that morph into a tool that can be used not for sort of urgent public health and safety needs, but for either to address circumstances that...frankly, kind of really elitist reformers deem morally objectionable. You see anti -immigrant sentiment play into it. You see a lot of things, but you see this notion that, well, now that we have this tool of we can regulate the form and the arrangement of buildings in the city, hey, this is great. We can designate whole neighborhoods where apartment houses aren't allowed because we think that apartment houses are going to be a deleterious impact on the moral well -being of the neighborhood, on the children who are going to play with God knows who.Um, a mere parasite. Take advantage of the, I can't, I can't quote the whole thing from memory, but yeah, take advantage of the pleasant residential character in the neighborhood, but degrade that character at the same time. You can find tons of quotes like that and you can find it from the same reformist figures who were involved in sort of the anti -tenement struggles. So it's really easy, I think, to moralize about figures of the past and to judge them by what we know in the present.Kevin K (41:51.312)What were they described as in the Euclid decision, like parasites? Yeah.Daniel Herriges (42:21.326)And I'm doing a little bit of that right now. And I do try to be disciplined about not doing that. You have to understand that these people thought they were doing good and they were products of their time. And that in some ways they were doing good. But what you see is that these regulatory tools, whether the intentions were good to begin with or not, they've metastasized into this notion that now we're going to order the entire urban landscape and we're going to strictly separate uses from each other.residential zone over here and the apartment the higher density apartment zone over here and the commercial over here. And it becomes this thing that's less about you know well we can really articulate the the urgent public purpose here the urgent health and safety issue and more about well of course we should do this of course we should diligently plan every aspect of the city to ensure that it's harmonious and works well and.And so it gets put to all sorts of purposes where each one in isolation might make sense. The rationale for building setback requirements might make sense in isolation. The rationale for parking mandates, especially at a certain time in history, might have made sense in isolation. There's often a very concrete problem that the planners of the day are trying to address. You lump all of it together, and now we've got this system that we've inherited that has just become this multi -headed hydra.The zoning chapter of the book starts with an anecdote about Somerville, Massachusetts, which I'm indebted to Daniel K. Hertz, who's a housing scholar for this. But the illegal city of Somerville was a blog post that Hertz initially wrote back in 2015 based on a study that Somerville's own planning department did where they found that in a city of 80 ,000 people, there were only 22 conforming lots. There were only 22 lots in the entire city of Somerville where...What was standing on that lot, if it burned down today, you could get a permit to rebuild it tomorrow. Like, that's insane. And nobody who initially contributed to the spread of zoning, nobody foresaw that outcome. But we have a broken paradigm.Kevin K (44:26.448)And I think most lay people especially have no idea how crazy that's gotten. And I think the house that I live in now is actually a non -conforming lot for the zoning that we live in. And it's pretty amazing how that has metastasized so much. I wonder, and I also do appreciate what you're talking about. I do feel like sometimes it's easy to cast dispersions on.I mean, I think if you went back in time, you would find that it was often many, most of the smartest and most idealistic people of those generations who were really doing what they felt was the right thing to do to make better places and have a better society. And we have a hundred years of hindsight now to look at those things. And it's, so we have a lot of easier way to look at what's worked and what hasn't. But...I really do think that a lot of it had good intentions behind it that we don't talk about. One thing I want to hit on while I have you is, you know, now that you're back in Minnesota and you left Florida, which is a very high growth state, and I'm not sure how fast growth Sarasota and that region is in particular compared to other parts of Florida. But...Daniel Herriges (45:50.166)extremely.Kevin K (45:53.52)How do you perceive these issues, especially some of the housing issues being different in really fast growth places like the Sunbelt versus here in the Midwest, Kansas City and Minneapolis are both growing metropolitan areas, but they grow very modestly. Although I think the Twin Cities probably grows faster than most people realize, but they're still by comparisons of Sunbelt cities, they're slower growing.Daniel Herriges (46:18.67)Yeah. The issues of people struggling to afford rent or to find a home in the kind of place they want, I mean, those exist in both kinds of places. I do think there are some really key kind of contextual differences in the Sunbelt. I mean, Sarasota, that region is home to two of the three fastest growing master planned communities in the US. Number one is the villages, which is the 55 plus.Kevin K (46:47.92)Yeah. Sure. Yeah.Daniel Herriges (46:48.43)like Metro at this point outside of Orlando, but then two and three are both in Greater Sarasota. So incredible amounts of in -migration from other parts of the US, incredible rate of growth. And so it gives you the opportunity to make big mistakes really quickly. Like from my perspective, I mean, driving around on the suburban fringe of Sarasota is kind of this horrifying scene of just like, okay, here's two more square miles that have been clear cut that weren't clear cut last month, and they're going to be subdivisions and.We can replicate our bad mistakes really, really quickly. But we can also, there's a whole bunch of energy that can go towards like making things better. You know, you just like, when you're growing, there are resources to be spread around. I think there's a zero sum element to the conversation in slow or no growth places that becomes a little bit more challenging where like, you know, I'm...I would love to see a whole bunch of urban revitalization in St. Paul where I live now. I can think of specific spots around the city that have just sort of languished for decades, you know. Big giant vacant lots that were vacant when I was a little kid and are still vacant. And it's kind of like, when is somebody going to do something here? And it's like, well, when are enough people going to move to St. Paul to make it economically viable for somebody to, quote unquote, do something with all of this land? And I'm dying to see it happen.And I think the kind of opportunities are different. I was in Charlotte for the Congress for New Urbanism, along with the Strong Towns National Gathering last May. And in Charlotte, it's incredible. They've built this light rail line and at like three different stops on the one light rail line, there are entire high density mixed use neighborhoods popping up out of full cloth. And it's just like, how on earth is there this much money going like...And nothing like that is going to happen here. And we kind of have to resign ourselves to like, we're not going to see these miraculous things just emerge from the dirt. But what's possible in, you know, the kind of environment where you don't have the cataclysmic money so much, you don't have the, you know, real estate isn't the same kind of like just omnipresent giant business as it is in somewhere like Florida or somewhere like North Carolina.Daniel Herriges (49:14.958)What you have is opportunities for incremental developers who are resourceful and a little bit scrappy. And if, especially if local government can find the way to support people who want to be the one to buy that vacant lot in their neighborhood and put up something cool on it, remove the barriers in the way of that person, help them connect with each other, learn from each other, access financing. Cool things can happen from the bottom up.in places where, you know, from a 30 ,000 foot view, they're not growing or exploding in the same way. And that's something that I get really excited about. It's something that the last third of our book is really heavily devoted to. Kevin, you're actually in the book. I don't know if you knew this. You are credited with the term swarm for talking about, you know, having a whole bunch of small scale developers.Kevin K (50:00.432)Uh oh, I didn't know that.Kevin K (50:05.464)Ha ha ha ha.Daniel Herriges (50:11.598)building within existing neighborhoods, within the existing fabric of our cities, as opposed to the current large developer, large site led model of how we build housing. But that's to the extent that we have a prescription for what needs to happen, that's at the core of it, is we need to cultivate and enable and support the swarm of.up, you know, infill developers working at small scales, often people working with property they already own and live on or in the neighborhood where they live, to start to thicken up the places that we already have where we do need housing, doing backyard cottages, doing vacant lot infill, doing small apartment buildings, mixed use projects. And the places where we see that happening, where we see like some snowballing momentum with a community of people doing the small scale development work,It's not the San Francisco's of the world. Nobody can afford to do it there. It's not the big Sunbelt cities. It's not Sarasota. It's not Charlotte. It's not Nashville. Those places are a little more mired in this like kind of suburban experiment mindset. That's really, really hostile to anyone other than a big entrenched developer. Where we see it happening is it's in South Bend, Indiana, which we discuss a lot in the book. It's in Memphis, Tennessee. It's in these poorer places, these disinvested places where there's a huge amount of opportunity to bring them back.But it's going to happen through kind of scrappy people working, you know, working in the cracks and the seams of what's already there.Kevin K (51:43.408)Yeah, I was going to ask you, you know, it's always dangerous to give kind of generic advice in a book or on a podcast. And I want people to buy the book. So we don't want to give away everything here. But what else might you tease that you talk about in the book as potential avenues for people to look at? And is it mostly focused like at the local level or do you talk about like national?Daniel Herriges (51:58.542)Hahaha.Kevin K (52:13.476)changes as well.Daniel Herriges (52:16.174)I think the national aspect is there in talking about the housing finance system and the history of how it's developed. A lot of the historical stuff meant to set the context. I think we deliberately shy away from offering federal policy prescriptions. True to the bottom -up emphasis of strong towns. What you're gonna get out of this book, if you go in looking for the solution to the housing crisis, you're gonna be disappointed.In fact, our publisher wanted us to have the Strong Towns solution to the housing crisis be the subject of the book. And we fought them on it. We said, no, it's the Strong Towns response to the housing crisis. We don't have a solution for you, but we have avenues to pursue. And those avenues are local. I think there's a lot that is within the power of local governments to jumpstart and to help snowball and sometimes just to get out of the...Kevin K (52:50.128)Oh, there you go.Daniel Herriges (53:13.102)of the paradigm shift that really needs to happen. I'm not gonna spoil it, I want people to buy the book. Believe it or not, much more than you want people to buy the book, I want people to buy the book. There's some stuff, and some things that Chuck came up with that I was kind of blown away by, like it's never occurred to me that this is a policy tool we could use, but there's some really good practical advice for local leaders.Kevin K (53:22.416)I'm sure you do.Daniel Herriges (53:41.838)local developers, local governments in particular, to not be helpless at the hands of these overbearing market forces. The housing market, capital H, capital M, is this thing that just goes up and up and up forever. But how can we get out of the clutches of that? And how can we enable bottom -up solutions to actually proliferate in our communities from people who are invested in our communities?Kevin K (54:07.696)Great. That's great. Daniel, what else is next up for you? I presume you're going to keep writing. Are you going to become a small developer at some point?Daniel Herriges (54:17.71)Uh, not out of the question. I will never say it's out of the question, because small developers are kind of... Small developers are kind of my heroes. I've got the bug, you know? I go, I'm out and about around the city, I'm walking, I'm riding my bike, and I'm constantly looking at some derelict or vacant lot and saying, well, what could be there? And who's gonna do it? And like, I get excited about that. I'm probably not becoming a small developer anytime soon. I don't know that I have the risk tolerance or the constitution for it.Kevin K (54:18.672)I ask I try to I try to ask everybody that and put and nudge peopleKevin K (54:36.272)Shush, shush, shush.Daniel Herriges (54:47.598)Definitely gonna keep writing. I write every week just about for Strong Towns and we'll see what else comes next. But I'm really excited to have finished this book and for the world to get to read it.Kevin K (54:58.96)Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'll certainly buy it myself and look forward to finding out where I am in the book. That's interesting to hear. So always fascinating. So Daniel, as we wrap up, do you have a favorite messy city or messy neighborhood that you want to talk about?Daniel Herriges (55:07.406)HeheheDaniel Herriges (55:17.614)Oh man, that's a really good question.Kevin K (55:19.952)That's why I ask it.Daniel Herriges (55:23.906)That's why you ask it.Kevin K (55:24.91)Yeah.Daniel Herriges (55:33.774)I got too many favorite messy places. The places that I go to is just my favorite kind of urban places are often not particularly messy. They're just the shining examples, like Savannah's historic district of just like, man, if we could just do this all day every day, that would be great. But I do appreciate messiness. I appreciate kind of ad hoc places where people are doing what they can with what they have.Honestly, you see a lot of that outside the US. It's been a while since I've left the country and I feel like I'm due to find a chance to travel. I am fascinated by cities in the global south. I lived in Quito, Ecuador for a little less than a year when I was younger and the tolerance for messiness there is like super cool. Like if you want to do something, you kind of go out and do it, largely because like the state doesn't have the capacity to stand in your way, but...Kevin K (56:18.704)Oh wow.Daniel Herriges (56:34.776)There is like an ad hoc transportation system in Quito that I went my first two months that I lived there I went looking fruitlessly over and over for like a system map where I could see all the bus routes and where they go I finally realized that there wasn't one There was no such thing because these are just private operators and they run a bus and they'd slap a bunch of signs on the front windshield of neighborhoods that that bus served and you paid a quarter and you got on and You kind of had to figure it out through trial and errorKevin K (56:47.44)Ha ha.Kevin K (57:01.968)Yeah, that's the...Daniel Herriges (57:03.086)But it was this incredibly adaptive system. You could get anywhere once you figured out how to use these informal buses. But same things like informal forms of like the lowest bar to entry development. You would see street vendors all over the place. Like that's the entry stage restaurant. You know, you set up a little shack in the park, or let's shack a little stand, and you sell like skewered meats in the park. And eventually you get a brick and mortar space. And you like, I love that kind of thing.There's an energy and an excitement that it's almost totally absent from North American cities.Kevin K (57:36.784)Yeah, actually, I just read a really great article that Chris Arnod just published, I think this week, on the very topic. And he even talked about Quito, Ecuador. And he was comparing the experience as a bus rider there versus being a bus rider in Los Angeles or a lot of other American cities. And just completely echoed almost everything you just said, which is very true. Yeah. Yeah, he's a brilliant writer. So.Daniel Herriges (57:43.5)Mm -hmm.Daniel Herriges (57:53.294)YeahDaniel Herriges (57:58.382)Yeah, I read that same article, it was great. I always love his writing.Kevin K (58:04.624)Well, Daniel, thanks so much for all this. It's really great to catch up and look forward to getting the book and engaging more and talking about these issues. So appreciate your time.Daniel Herriges (58:09.486)Thank you.Daniel Herriges (58:16.398)Totally, I will tell your listeners, housingtrap .org is the one stop shop if you wanna, you can pre -order the book from there, you can get links to places you can do it, you can also learn about hosting an event to talk about some of these issues. So.Kevin K (58:30.244)Terrific, terrific. And could also find you on the Strongtown site and on social media. All right. All right, Daniel. Thanks again. Take care.Daniel Herriges (58:35.796)Absolutely.Daniel Herriges (58:40.078)Thank you, Kevin. Take care. 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Americans' faith in the value of higher education is faltering.Unlike our global peers, the U.S. is seeing a steady decline in college enrollment and graduation rates, especially among young men. Since 1992, the sticker price for four-year private colleges has almost doubled and more than doubled for four-year public colleges, even after adjusting for inflation. Student debt is paralyzing. And Gen Z is watching. About half believe a high school diploma is sufficient to “ensure financial security.”What can higher education do?Macalester College President Emeritus Brian Rosenberg has some thoughts — but he admits, many in academia won't like them. His provocative new book is “Whatever It Is, I'm Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education,” and he joins host Kerri Miller this week for a discussion that names those things. Is it possible for colleges and universities to stay relevant and adapt to a changing world?Guest:Brian Rosenberg is president emeritus of Macalester College and is currently a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His new book is “Whatever It Is, I'm Against It:” Resistance to Change in Higher Education.”Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, on the heels of Trump's win in the Iowa caucus, the Left has been very clear about its plan if Trump wins the presidency again. they have now announced, openly, a deep state plot to usurp his authority. Also, disturbing images reveal that the CEO of United Airlines is a drag queen in his spare time. But does that matter? Yes it does. And Gen Z often complains that they have it much worse, economically, than their parents and grandparents did. Is that true? And if so, what do we make of it? Finally, a group of exhibitionists in Phoenix hold something called No Pants Light Rail Day. Which is exactly what it sounds like.  Ep.1294 - - -  DailyWire+: Become a DailyWire+ member to gain access to shows, documentaries, movies and more: https://utm.io/ueMfc Unlock your Bentkey 14 day free trial here: https://bit.ly/3GSz8go Shop my merch collection here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj  - - -  Today's Sponsors: Ramp - Now get $250 off when you join Ramp. Go to http://www.ramp.com/WALSH  ZipRecruiter - Rated #1 Hiring Site. Try ZipRecruiter for FREE!http://www.ZipRecruiter.com/WALSH  - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Rv1VeF Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3KZC3oA Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eBKjiA Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RQp4rs

Today's show is a must-listen if you have children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren or folks in your ministry who are a part of Gen Z categorized as those between the ages of 12 and 26. Heather's guest, Jessie Cruickshank, has been studying the older set of this generation since they were in middle school. She has a Master's degree from Harvard in experiential education and has studied how our brains work and learn best. Here's where we go today: Generation Z looks different: More than 50% are biracial. This is changing the way they see and think about race. And Gen Z doesn't mind having more than one "tag" in this arena. We talk about how this may change the standard of beauty in the future. This generation has more anxiety because they've grown up in a more volatile and complex world and they're aware of so many things that are completely out of their control. They have a "precocious" awareness of the world. Many of those Jessie interviewed admitted to crying at night. Gen Z has more social experiences through the phone, so they're missing the regulation impact of being with people in person. Gen Z doesn't prefer the "tech" solution. They prefer non-zoom in-person communications compared to tech connections. Be gracious for how awkward this may be for them, they haven't had enough practice here. The lack of agency Gen Z has felt, has led to a great desire to speak into things, as an agent, with an opinion that matters (even if there's still some maturing to do.) Asking them questions and offering options is the best way to invite them into the conversations. What does Gen Z dream about? You'll be amazed by Jessie's startling answer here. Learn more about Jessie on her website: https://www.whoology.co Connect with Jessie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/who_ologist/ Ready to stop stressing over body image? Check out Heather's brand new book: The 40-Day Body Image Workbook, available wherever Christian books are sold. (Amazon affiliate link. A tiny portion of your purchase (at no additional cost to you) will go to support this ministry.) Join the Body Image Freedom Framework Online Course and Coaching Program - Watch for a special discount coming soon! Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

The political landscape was shaken up today when former Vice President Mike Pence announced his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. While the reasons behind his decision are still unclear, this surprise announcement has left many political pundits speculating about the fate of the Republican Party in the upcoming election. In other news, the newly appointed Snow White, Brett Cooper, has been making headlines as the new Snow White. And Gen Z as predicted are resorting to easy cash grab jobs.

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the entertainment industry has been brainwashing millions of children for years without any real resistance from conservatives. Disney has been at the forefront of this indoctrination, and the Right hasn't done anything about it but complain. But this week that finally changed. Also, Nikki Haley defends Palestinian refugees. Only half of them are terrorist sympathizers, she says. A gun store employee is charged with murder after shooting a man who stole from the cash register. And Gen Z thinks it invented the concept of going for a walk. Ep.1244 - - -  Click here to join the member exclusive portion of my show: https://utm.io/ueSEm  - - -  DailyWire+: Check out the new Bentkey Shop here: https://bit.ly/3S1zZSL Represent the Sweet Baby Gang by shopping my merch here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj  - - -  Today's Sponsors: Tommy John - Get 20% OFF your first order: https://tommyjohn.com/WALSH Grand Canyon University - Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University: https://www.gcu.edu/ ZipRecruiter - Rated #1 Hiring Site. Try ZipRecruiter for FREE!http://www/.ZipRecruiter.com/WALSH  - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Rv1VeF Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3KZC3oA Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eBKjiA Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RQp4rs

Over the last 10 years or so, I've also just gotten some really good mentors in my life. People who have modeled for me what it looks like to be confident and comfortable in your own skin, to know who you are, intimately, such that, you could just live that out, shed those maybe people pleasing tendencies that some of us carry, the need to be acknowledged and celebrated, to be seen. ++++++++++++++++ Tommy Thomas: Our guest today is Dr. Arthur Satterwhite. Arthur is the Vice President for Strategy at Young Life. Prior to Young Life Arthur was with the American Bible Society where he served as Manager of Strategic Partnerships and the Leader of Strategy for ABS's largest ever domestic initiative. He took his BS in Business Administration from Monmouth University, his MA in Religious Education from New York Theological Seminary, and his Doctor of Strategic Leadership from Regent University. Let's pick up on that conversation. [00:00:59] Tommy Thomas: Before we dive too deep into your professional career, take me back to your childhood. What was it like growing up? [00:01:08] Arthur Satterwhite: Yeah, for what it's worth, you and your listeners, I'm a Jersey boy through and through.  Don't hold it against me. I was born, 1983 was a good year, I'll just say. My mom is also originally from New Jersey. My dad was originally from Ohio then found his way to New Jersey and grew up in Somerset. Which most people probably have never heard of, Rutgers, New Brunswick, it was right there around the corner. I had a good upbringing. Solid, middle class, suburban community, really diverse. My mom was devout in her faith. My dad as well. But my mom was, one of those if you're not in the church, you're up to no good. Much of my childhood was spent in the church most nights, whether that was Bible study, youth group, choir, attending choir with my mom. When I graduated high school, I left my faith behind.  I had so many questions.  I was never fully atheist, but I was firmly agnostic. Ironically, as a millennial, you spend most of that time in the church. But when I ended up graduating high school, I left my faith behind as well. For as much time as I spent in the church, I still had so many questions that it felt like the church, or at least the church that I was going to at the time, was giving me default answers like, hey, just forget about it. You don't need to know that. Just have faith, just trust in the Lord. And, for the curious, insatiable learner that I am, that wasn't enough. So, when I went up to college, I was never fully atheist, but I was firmly agnostic. I felt like there was something there.  But what I was hearing and getting from the church just wasn't enough and it wasn't really until my early career that I came back to exploring and finding my faith. [00:02:49] Tommy Thomas:  What was the greatest gift your parents gave to you? [00:02:54] Arthur Satterwhite: Oh man. My dad and I joke about it to this day. One of the lessons that he has instilled into me, that's carried through most of my life is if you're grown up enough to make grown up decisions, then you're grown up enough to deal with grown up consequences, I remember him saying that to me as early as five and six years old. Advice from my dad – if you are grown up enough to make grown up decisions, then you're grown up enough to deal with grown up consequences. And that's been something that has been a theme throughout my life. Before you make a decision, be confident and comfortable that you're willing to endure whatever consequences or implications may come for that decision. That I would even point to as one of the really early formative introductions to strategy for me, as I now have the privilege of leading Young Life as the VP of Strategy, the idea alone of understanding a decision and the consequences or implications of that decision is critical to strategy. My mom, God bless her. She passed about two years ago now. Her legacy lives long and large in me. I am fruit of her. She actually said that to me, you know a few years back. She was like, I formed you, I just need you to know that and the tendrils and the tentacles, the intentionality. One of the things thatI look back on fondly, I was always busy, if I wasn't in the church then I was in some sort of sport. I played soccer, basketball, baseball, you name it I probably tried it. I was in the choir. I played an instrument. And it was in that same conversation. She's like, I just need you to understand the strategy intentionality. I wanted to make sure that one, you weren't in these streets getting into trouble. But then two, I wanted you to be exposed and have a varied experience such that as you started to wrestle with who am I and what am I called to bring and do to this world? You had a broad experience to pick from instead of a narrow experience that sort of maybe forced you in a certain direction. So, I appreciate that and that's something that I've again continued to carry on into my adulthood. I love broad, diverse experiences exposing myself in a lot of ways because you learn from the broader which also helps you focus on what matters. [00:05:06] Tommy Thomas: How'd you decide on which college to go to and how'd you pick a major? [00:05:12] Arthur Satterwhite: So, soccer was my thing, if the church was, maybe a cultural space, a safe space, soccer was my church. Growing up I started at age four, I had the privilege to travel the world. Play at some of the elite spaces for youth soccer at the time with many of the folks who are now professional or coaching. And when it came down to graduating high school, whereas a lot of my family went to HBCUs like Howard. I had one goal in mind coming out of high school. I wanted to be a professional soccer player, so I followed the college scholarship money to Monmouth University on the Jersey shore. I was going to be a professional soccer player. I went where they gave me scholarships.  I ended up at Monmouth University in the Jersey shore. Ironically didn't leave the state. So when I say I'm Jersey through and through, it's down to even my undergrad. And it was a brilliant time. I started my undergrad thinking I was going to play soccer.  If soccer didn't work out, I'll be a sports therapist. But yeah, after my first year and realizing that I'm no good at biology, I pivoted into the business and really the thinking at the time was like, what can you do? Because I didn't know who I wanted to be beyond the soccer player at the time. What can you do that would have the broadest application and serve you through the rest of your life? So again, that strategic thinking when you went into what major? So, I ended up doing business and marketing because business is universal in any industry. In any space, you have to understand business and then being able to market or sell or communicate is also just a life skill. So, if I couldfocus on that, then, say soccer doesn't pan out, then I could figure out what does. And I didn't have the skill set and education to be successful. [00:06:48] Tommy Thomas: Staying with soccer for a minute, what was the biggest lesson you learned from team sports? [00:06:53] Arthur Satterwhite: The team. I would say, how to exist within the team, how to be successful and to partner and collaborate with teams. I do honestly believe it's a lost art. Even at our organization, we're talking about, what does collaboration look like and how do we do that? An organization that's 80 plus years old, history has been steeped in kind of. We send people to go to be with kids. There is this sense, even a cultural drive to be that hero to go and take the ministry by the horns. That is your personal burden - to go and serve that community, not just in our organization, but in many organizations, there is an underappreciation for collaboration if not really a lack of understanding or experience even collaborating. So, when I look back at my soccer career - the 20 something years that was a key lesson that I took away from that, that has carried throughout my life. I see the value and the potential of a team. I understand what it means to be the player in a team, right? We've all seen those teams that are not really teams, but really a group of all stars. You think about maybe some of these recent, U.S. Olympic basketball teams that haven't been as successful, versus those early Dream Teams that were able to come together and take these unique, diverse talents and somehow fit them together to be more than the whole the individual could bring it by themselves. Soccer taught me about coming together, taking each player's unique and diverse talents, and somehow fitting them together to be more than the individual could bring. That's what soccer taught me. Our team was never the best team in the nation or even the state, but I had the privilege of being on teams with really great coaches who were able to take our unique, diverse talents that together we were able to take down some of the bigger teams and bigger names in youth soccer. [00:08:48] Tommy Thomas: When you think about the coaches in your life what's the greatest lesson you think you learned from a coach? [00:08:55] Arthur Satterwhite: Coaching, like leadership, is not about you. I had the privilege, like I said, sitting at the feet of just some really great coaches. I think of a Scott Byrd, my high school soccer coach, Robert McCourt, my college coach, my father, who was my coach when I was much younger, Malcolm Murphy, who was a coach for several of my youth teams. The consistent theme through each of these coaches was it wasn't just about the W. Of course, they wanted to win, and they wanted us to win. A good soccer coach develops and prepares the players to be able to achieve their potential, whether it's in the game of soccer or in life. But for them it was really more about the development. They saw their role, their position, as the success of their position, as that these young boys, eventually men would be developed and prepared to be men, and to be able to really achieve their potential, whether that's in the game of soccer or in life. That's the role and that's carried forward for me in leadership where my leadership philosophy is like, the role of the leader, it's not about you. It's about the people that you are blessed and privileged to serve for whatever season or chapter that is your call to serve them. How do you call them, take that cast of characters, call them to pull and bring their gifts to the table such that they can continue to grow and be more? Realize their potential and that the team or organization can be the beneficiary of that impact. ++++++++++++++++++++ [00:10:24] Tommy Thomas: Let's change gears to your early career, the first time you ever had a staff reporting to you.  What do you remember? [00:10:30] Arthur Satterwhite: Oh man, you're pulling me back. First time I ever had staff reporting to me. It's tricky. There's the official staff. Early in my career, my first career before I got into ministry, first in American Bible Society I started off in real estate property management working in New York city. Which is a really fun, chaotic space. Started first on the development side, but then moved to the rental side. And early in my career, my leaders, supervisors, showed me a great favor. They saw something in me. And while I didn't necessarily have direct reports in the way of the staff in our buildings who often reported to the supers or your resident managers that live there. A lot of them really deferred that leadership to me because one of my superpowers has always been people development. So I ended up, of course, doing what does that scheduling look like? And just doing a lot of that, care for our staff in our buildings. But it really taught me at an early age. Yes, you have your objectives and your goals as an organization. Part of how you motivate people to help you achieve those goals is by caring for them by putting them first. So that idea of servant leadership. I forget her name at the moment, but the former CEO of Popeye's, (Cheryl Bachelder) has done some really great work in writing on this, just talking about serving leadership is often misunderstood. It's like we serve for the sake of service. Sure. But because that leadership is part of it, it should lead to some sort of goal or the outcome or impact. And I learned that early on where I was successful to motivate people to help us achieve more. Whether that was getting the building launched on time, creating exceptional experiences for our residents, whatever it was by caring for them, by putting our staff first, by letting them know that they were more than just an asset of the organization, but that they were people that we wanted to pour into and see continue to improve and grow. It wasn't until American Bible Society where I'd say I started to get into formal line leadership where it was interesting. It was a new experience, but at the same time it wasn't because I had been doing it in practice for several years already. And the challenge for me, I would say then, even still today, is I often find myself leading amidst change - leading in the margins, leading in spaces that are either forming or transitioning. I haven't yet had the luxury of just stepping into a space that it was just completely stable. I envy those leaders. So, I've always had to work with my teams and do that forming and norming work, that early work of what does it look like to cast vision to galvanize people to stack hands on a vision and move in a direction? But then at the same time, help them see clearly where and how not just their role, but their unique gifts and calling aligns with a vision, directly contributes vision for the whole. And I think because of that experience in that background, that's been something that I think is I had to say here, I think these are my superpowers, right? I can't lift 500. I can't turn invisible. But the one thing, the few things that I do believe I've gotten really good at is building culture, casting vision and talent and team development. [00:14:00] Tommy Thomas: At what time in your career did you get comfortable in your leadership skin? [00:14:04] Arthur Satterwhite:   Do we ever? Most don't. Exactly. I think there's always a little bit of imposter syndrome that every leader carries. And I think that comes with the burden of leadership, that responsibility you carry that you're short of being a full-on narcissist. You're concerned. I don't want to mess it up. I don't want to mess it up for the organization. I don't want to mess these people up. They're in my care. I don't want to mess up.  Can I do this? I'll say my doctoral journey was hugely formative. And it was through that process I learned a lot about myself. But, combined with that, I also, over the last, oh, wow, it's 2023. I can't believe it's 2023. Over the last 10 years or so, I've also just gotten some really good mentors in my life. People who have modeled for me, what does it look like to be confident and comfortable in your own skin, to know who you are intimately such that, you could just live that out, shed those maybe people pleasing tendencies that some of us carry, the need to be acknowledged and celebrated, to be seen. Some of that, as I've seen them and now trying to model in my own leadership. You don't need to please the world, and you don't draw affirmation from the world as you get clear and comfortable and confident in your own skin, knowing who you are, and yes, whose you are, your priorities, your sense of worth, the things that give you life. It's only been in the past 5-6 years that I have gotten to a place where I know who I am, what I can do, and what I am good at. And I would say it's really only been in the last, five or six years as I came through my doctoral experience. I feel like I've gotten to a place where I know who I am. I know what I can do and what I'm good at. And I also know what I can't, and I don't try to. And again, given my preference for collaboration, I think it's been a beautiful thing that's helped me to better collaborate and invite people to the table. [00:16:01] Tommy Thomas: What was the best piece of advice a mentor has given you thus far? [00:16:08] Arthur Satterwhite: I won't cuss on your podcast, but I had a mentor and this was early in my doctoral process to where I was learning so much and I was so excited about what I was learning and being able to put it into practice at the organization I was serving at the time that I just started showing up in meetings like this book says, and this leader says, Oh, here's this Bye. Bye Theory and this framework.  Why aren't we doing these things? And one day he just pulled me aside and he was like, stop being a, you're filling the blank, wait, what? And he was like, dude, we all know you're smart. No, we get it. We're excited. You're going through this and we're eager to listen. You have to leave room for others. Yeah, you don't have to over explain everything and,use all these sources and everything. You just be real, and that punch in the nose really forced me to reflect on where's that coming from? And it was my own sense of insecurity. And really wanting to be seen as an authority, and I've consistently throughout my entire career, again, as a millennial, but as a millennial who has been consistently elevated, at a rapid pace, I've always found myself to be the youngest in the room. And at most times, especially in these spaces that I've had the privilege to serve, I'm usually one of, if not the only person of color in that room. And those are hard places to be the super minority, in those spaces. And having experienced, I won't say full on discrimination, based on those things, but definitely treated differently because of those things. As my mom and dad said, at an early young age, son, you're always going to have to work harder. You're always going to have to be better. You're always going to have to be smarter. And that's something that carried forward, which, yes, helped me to achieve at high levels, but then also on some degree, maybe created a little bit of a complex that, again those words from that mentor in that moment helped me to really snap out of it. Man, you don't have to prove yourself to anybody but the Lord. Are you doing this for others affirmation and acknowledgement, or are you doing this for the Lord, for the purpose or better opportunity that you and your talents and gifting could bring or could be a catalyst to create? So, a lot of it really did shift, in these last 10 years or so, as I got really comfortable and confident in who I am, understanding and knowing my identity, therapy helps doing that work. But just being really intentional about Lord, who have you created me to be, called me to be, and where and how can I live that out so that I can add the greatest value to your kingdom? ++++++++++++++++++++ [00:19:02] Tommy Thomas: Back in your American Bible Society experience, you were Senior Manager of Youth and Millennial Engagement. Now you probably work with, if not the largest, one of the largest youth engagement organizations in the world. Let's go to some, and I know it's sometimes dangerous to generalize generational differences. So if I go too far there you push back on me because you're more seasoned in that than I am. But I'm just thinking about, in your office today you probably have baby boomers. You've probably got some Gen Xers, you've got some Millennials and you might have some Gen Z people. What are you observing about those four generations, if you will, in terms of how they work as a team? How they view teamwork? [00:19:49] Arthur Satterwhite: It's a great question. And there's been lots of books written, just in the last decade alone, which by the way, millennials, it's our time to shine right now. We went from being the problem child to, now it's those Gen Z kids over there. Soon it'll be, Gen Alpha. So, I'm sure Gen Z, don't worry. We'll take our eyes off you soon. Yeah, I would say it's a really opportunistic time, but also very difficult time in many workspaces and faith spaces, because this is the first time in history that we've had this many generations existing together in one space. I would say opportunistic time, but also very difficult time in many workspaces and faith spaces, because this is the first time in history that we've had this many generations existing together in one space. You have the eldest generation, the greatest generation, right? The heels of the world war, many are dying off sadly. But many are still in our spaces, even in the workplace in some places. But then you also, now at the youngest, you have Gen Z coming along. And then they're starting to enter into the workforce and want to put their stamp on. So you got the eldest generation boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials. And Gen Z - five generations existing together each with their own generational culture that has been formed by the unique experiences that they've been exposed to. ·  The Greatest Generation exposed to the World War, ·  Millennials and Gen Xers, exposed to 9-11 and terrorism, ·  Boomers, the Flower Power generation, and ·  Gen Z, the first to be digitally native. Those are very distinct generational influences, that again, if you haven't done that work to develop your cross-cultural competency, or what David Livermore calls cultural intelligence, think about emotional intelligence. It's all about our ability to successfully navigate social context and situations in healthy ways. Self-awareness, self-regulation, cultural intelligences, our ability to navigate different distinct cultural spaces. And sadly, there is not a lot of work being done or enough work, I'll say, being done in that space, especially to the generational differences and distinctions. Think about it, right? Why do we make the young generation at the time, the target? Older generations like, oh, they don't have work ethic or, oh, they don't get this, back in my day.  There's fear in that because all the generations sense the change that a younger generation is bringing. But it's also just a lack of understanding. Why are they different? Why are their values so distinct from mine? Why are they pressing in, right? You think about Gen Z and millennials to agree and just things like the climate and justice, right? Some of the narratives and headlines of this time speak to what these younger generations have a heart and a value for and you think about older generations. Like I think of my father and my uncle, man, they were just like, look, your job is to go to work, work hard, you put money on the table and come home. They valued work, they valued work ethic, they valued professionalism, and it's not that younger generations don't value those things, they just look different. And younger generations, it's not that the older generations before believe and valued was bad it was just informed by their time.  I like to push my communities to the opportunity of how do we build bridges between one another so that we can hear and learn from one another? What I love about my mentoring relationships, it's not just mentoring one way where the more seasoned experience, usually typically older than me, that person is pouring into me, they don't see me as a glass that's half empty that they got to fill up. No, I'm a glass that's half full. And this needs to be a mutually beneficial relationship. So, they're mentoring me, and I'm reverse mentoring them. And together, we're learning, we're growing. And by extension, as we all tend to be in leadership spaces, our teams, and the organizations we represent are made better. I think that's the opportunity for many workplaces, but also faith spaces. When you think about the church - it has always been generationally diverse. But there are some who would point back to the early to mid 1900s,all of a sudden, we're starting to segregate our churches. They'd always been segregated by race. That goes back farther, but I'm talking about by generation. All of a sudden, we got youth ministry and children's ministry and, no longer kids sitting in the sanctuary with the parents. And suddenly, we've got young adult ministry over here and this ministry over there. And by segregating our communities, we actually diminished our capacity to navigate those generationally or culturally different spaces together as one community. [00:24:37] Tommy Thomas: Is there anything you can cite either from ABS or Young Life that either of those organizations are doing well in creating this culture of communication between the generations? [00:24:49] Arthur Satterwhite: Yeah, cheers to my current organization, Young Life. I don't think this is overly braggadocious to say. I think we are one of the best, if not the best out there, that's doing relational ministry. The core of what we do, our modus operandi, healthy adults in the lives of kids. Which by the way, the research points to that. The surgeon general of the U.S. has so many studies that talk about the value of the relationship between a healthy adult and the life of kids and how the positive benefits of that reduce at-risk behavior, so many different things. That's been our modus operandi for 80 plus years. That's what we do. Young Life exists to introduce adolescents to Jesus and help them grow in their faith. And that's really about adults who are called to go to do life on life ministry with kids to earn the right to be heard, right? We don't start with, hey, here's our five steps of evangelism. We simply show up. Whether that's at the football game or the coffeehouse, we show up and we genuinely just want to build relationship with young people with the understanding and knowledge that at some point during that relationship they're going to be curious. Why do you do this? Why do you care about me? Why do you love me? And that's just an open-door opportunity for us to say because Jesus first loved me. And because I'm called to be like my daddy, to be like my Jesus, that means I'm called to love you. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Next week we'll continue this conversation with Arthur Satterwhite. Our focus will be Diversity Equity and Belonging. Links & Resources JobfitMatters Website Next Gen Nonprofit Leadership with Tommy Thomas Young Life Website Satterwhite Company Arthur referenced the writing/work of Cheryl Bachelder – former CEO of Popeye's Chicken.  Here are a couple of references to her work: Leaders – “Former CEO of Popeyes Used Servant Leadership to Save the Company” Harvard Business Review – “The CEO of Popeyes on Treating Franchisees as the Most Important Customers” Entrepreneurial Leaders Network – Cheryl Bachelder – “Dare To Serve”   Connect tthomas@jobfitmatters.com Follow Tommy on LinkedIn Follow Arthur on LinkedIn

What the NBA can teach us about Generation Alpha and the Future for Churches. Coach Tibbs, from the New York Knicks is widely considered the least favorable coach to play for, amongst NBA Players. Why is that? And what can we learn from his style? And how do the idea of "Player Coaches" change how we view interacting with Generation Alpha moving forward? Watch the Video on our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g Hang out on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick ShowNotes & Transcripts: http://www.hybridministry.xyz/053 FREE E-Book: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/hybridministry SHOWNOTES NBA Article: https://sportsnaut.com/tom-thibodeau-coach-players-least-like-to-play-for/amp/ 6 Things We can Learn: https://joinhandshake.com/blog/employers/6-things-gen-z-wants-from-their-job/ Gen Z Coping Mechanisms: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ra73jZJKw-dxIXxkZZfY-9RF5V0TH4RF/view?usp=sharing Honesty as a Faith Value: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WaZbfMyIZUCUPYIx4joBkMvC2-hoJ-Ez/view?usp=sharing Justice Motivated Generation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wYwsRP3-p5_gExKS0g3L6UDOFhL4H149/view?usp=sharing TIMECODES 00:00-03:07 Intro 03:07-10:33 Nobody Wants to Play for Tom Thibodeau, why? 10:33-20:26 6 Things we can learn from the Next Generation 20:26-28:25 3 Learnings for us as the Church 28:25- Outro TRANSCRIPT Nick Clason (00:02): Well, hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry podcast. My name is Nick Clason, sipping coffee with you on this beautiful Monday morning. Nick Clason (00:17): And if you're just listening to this, you're missing out cuz you didn't get to see me drink out of my beautiful Ohio mug, which I would, uh, widely consider to be my home state. Anyway, in this episode, I am excited to, uh, talk to you about a, a really weird kind of topic a little bit, uh, but I'm gonna talk to you about my learnings from NBA head coaches and the shift that is happening with the next generation. And so what I mean by that is we are going to dive in a little bit. There was a recent study that came out, um, from the Athletic, uh, I'm a big basketball fan, you guys probably know that about me. Um, there's a big study that came out about the worst coach, the, the coach that the players would least want to play for. And that was fascinating to me because what that signified was that is that coach was a very old school coach. Nick Clason (01:09): What that signified to me was that this means that there is a shifting in the way that people are, are having things be done, and there's a shifting in the way that people want things, frankly, to be done. And so because of that, uh, I wanted to inspect that just a little bit. It's like, what is going on there? So that's what we're gonna be diving into and talking about. But before we do, I just wanna remind you that you can follow me over on YouTube. We have a full YouTube channel with I post daily shorts as well as a weekly podcast, full length video. Um, it's complete with overlays and statistics. And more and more we're diving into statistics and things like that. And so if you hear something of, what was that again, it will more than likely be over on YouTube. Uh, and on that section of the video also, it could, um, if it's not there, it definitely will be over at Hybrid Ministry xyz. Nick Clason (02:01): And for this episode, it's slash 0 5 0 because we are on episode. Can you believe it? Episode 50. Crazy. I know. Um, also wanna remind you that if you would be so kind, we would love a rating, um, or a review, just sign into your Apple Podcast app. If you've been listening for any length of time, it would mean the world to us to have a little review, to hear from the people, uh, about what's helpful, what's beneficial, um, and what you like about this show. Um, and as a token of our appreciation, we will give you our 100% completely free ebook on how to know if you've even ruined your church's TikTok account. By the way, your church probably should be on TikTok. And so if you're not yet, head to the link in the show notes and grab your 100% completely free ebook unknowing if you have ruined your church's TikTok account. Nick Clason (02:56): But without any further ado, let's dive into what I have learned from NBA head coaches about the upcoming shifting and new generation that's upon us. So what have we learned from the NBA and their head coaches? Like I said, big basketball fan basketball nut over here. And so there was a recent survey done. It was a player survey. They surveyed, um, as many players as they could, I think something like 500 players. Um, and they asked was the coach that you would mo least like to play for and the overwhelming winner. And in that response was, um, Tom Tebeau of the New York Knicks. And so if you're not a basketball person, lemme try to paint the picture for Tibs. He's sort of this rough and tumble like old school kind of player. Um, uh, a good example of this, like a reason why is there is a guy drafted a couple years ago. Nick Clason (03:50): I'm a I'm, I'm personally have an affinity for him because he's from the University of Dayton, which again, I would, I would widely consider Dayton, Ohio, Cincinnati, Ohio, that sort of like southwest Ohio region, my hometown. I lived there for, uh, more than half of my life, my wife born and raised there. And so that also helped kind of tie my roots back to there. Anyway, Obi Toppin was a player who played for the University of Dayton. He was drafted to the New York Knicks and Tom Tido or, uh, nicknamed Tibs doesn't play rookies. Like he just doesn't. And so what's funny is Tido had really big and good success, uh, over in Chicago. Uh, you might remember Derek Rose, he was an mvp. Uh, rose played for tdo. Well, a couple years back when they drafted Obie Toin, he had Rose who's like the ghost of himself cuz he's had like multiple knee surgeries. Nick Clason (04:40): Uh, and Taj Gibson, who's like just this older mid thirties player and those guys are getting all of the playing time. Tdo often plays his players, uh, upwards of 40 something minutes and there's only 48 minutes available in a basketball game. And so he really just like locks in on his, the players that he likes and drives them hard into the ground and they just play a lot. Now you might be thinking like if you want playing time, isn't tid the guy? And yeah, that may be the case, but in recent years, N B A players have taken on more of a, uh, slower approach and a little bit more of like a self-care type approach. Kawhi Leonard has made this famous, he, uh, was traded away from the Spurs because he, he wasn't recovering fast enough because he needed more time to help heal his body. Nick Clason (05:29): In fact, Kawhi Leonard, uh, does these things where he, uh, and it is made famous by him, but now a lot of players do it. It's called load management. And so if there's like a back to back game where like they play one night and they also play the next night, he won't play the next night, um, just to preserve and take care of his body to make sure that one, he's fresh for himself, but two, that he's fresh for the playoffs. See, with Tom Tipo, almost all that stuff is out the door. And in the, in the nineties the nba, there was sort of this mentality, this like bad boys' mentality. Like you, you gotta like get in there, be rough and tumble. Uh, they, they refereed the game very differently. You could be a lot more aggressive and dramatic with your contact and the way that you played. Nick Clason (06:14): And I just, I say all that to say is that Tom Thibodaux will be a great coach, I think in that era, the Bad Boys era of 1990s basketball with the Detroit Piston and Joe Dumars and Isaiah Thomas and Bill Lamb beer and Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls. But it's 2023 now and the game has changed and it's a much more fluid offensive game. I mean, if you're, again, if you're a basketball person, hang with me if you're not. Cuz we're gonna get to some of the implications of this cuz this is the only like real basketball section right here. But like the, the New Age Warriors, they have completely changed the game. And they don't even run with a traditional center like Draymond Green, who's only like six foot eight, six foot nine. Draymond Green is running their, uh, center position, their tallest player on the floor, and they have five guys out who can all shoot. Nick Clason (07:00): You got like Clay Thompson and Steph Curry and Andrew Wiggins and Jordan Poole and all these guys with Draymond in the middle, the only guy who really can't shoot, but he's short and he's helping facilitate and kicking the ball all to all these places and it's much more fluid. And what's interesting is that you got their coach, Steve Kerr, who came in and completely reinvented and, and brought the game to the way that the players wanted it to be. Now if you're sitting here listening and you're a church leader, you're a pastor or you're a business owner, you're thinking, well that generation, like they need this next generation. They need to chill out. They need to stop being so, uh, soft and needing things their way. And here's the the thing I would just say to you like, yes, maybe that is true if they come to work for you and your business, but what do we see? Nick Clason (07:47): What, like look around post covid, look at every like donut shop, every drive through every burger place. Like people are not coming back to work. Why? It's not because they don't want to. It's not actually, it probably is because they don't want to, right? But it's not cuz they don't wanna work, they just don't wanna work there. They don't wanna work for you. They want to work for themselves and make money. I recently heard a podcast of this, a 19 year old kid who's out on TikTok making millions and billions of dollars and thousands and thousands of followers, and he will probably never go flip a burger over at Burger King. And so while we can be like those kids, they need to learn this, this, and this, they're not learning that in a traditional workplace. They're out there hacking it for themselves. And so here's the thing, if you are a church leader specifically, or a business owner, you have this generation who's out here kind of paving their own way, hacking it for themselves. Nick Clason (08:48): If you want that generation a part of your organization, you can't be like the nba, uh, or you can't be like Tom Tito of the nba where you just keep doing it your own way because that's the way you've always done it, right? In fact, you need to shift your thinking to start figuring out how you can accommodate that generation. Not because the church is about serving and self, self-serving and and selfishness and all, not, it's not about those things, I get it. But if you are a follower of Jesus, you have a mandate to reach every generation with the message and the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that includes generation Z. And by the way, soon to be generation alpha, who is already starting to graduate into our youth ministry next Sunday, we promote our fifth graders into our sixth grade and fifth grade is not considered Generation Z. Nick Clason (09:42): They're considered generation alpha. So what that means is our, our current youth ministry and current college and young adult ministry that is Gen Z. So pastor, if you're still trying to figure out how to reach millennials, I'm a millennial. I'm mid thirties. Like they're already the majority of our workforce. They are our current parents of younger kids. You need to start figuring out if you wanna reach younger generations. It has shifted. And Gen Z has a very different mindset than a millennial. It can be similar in some ways, but it is different. And so what can we learn? What has the NBA shown us? So I, I came across an article about six things that Generation Z is looking for in their next workplace. So let's power through those different six things and take a look at what we can learn from them. Nick Clason (10:34): All right? So this is article, it's from Handshake blog. I'll throw the link in the show notes. I thought it was interesting. I'm gonna give them the credit for all of this cuz they did all the work on it. But I just wanted to provide a little bit of commentary cuz we're not a workplace like employment podcast, we're a ministry podcast. So I, I would say if you're a pastor or church leader listening to this, there are two ways to kind of think about this way. Number one is think about this from the generations of people that are a part of your ministry. But way number two is think about this from the people that you employ at your church. If you want to grow younger and have younger people, younger congregation and younger staff specifically, and particularly younger staff, I want to encourage you to think about it this way. Nick Clason (11:18): So number one, generations Z is looking for compensation that affords work life balance. 70% of Gen Z survey respondents say that pay and or compensation is the most important factor again, right? Let's look back to our NBA analogy. Kawhi Leonard doesn't wanna play all 82 regular season games. He wants to play in the playoffs. No, granted, he doesn't even play in the playoffs anymore. If you're not a basketball person, you don't get that reference, but that's another conversation for another day. But the reality is Gen Z is looking for a better work-life balance. They've looked at their older millennials, gen X parents, grandparents, whoever working in the workforce, and they don't wanna work that 40 hour a week grind. If you spend any amount of time on social media or TikTok, you see people saying like, make six figures in like five hours a day of work. Nick Clason (12:09): Like that is the major hook out there because that's what people want. Is it realistic? I don't know. I think a lot of those things probably require a lot of work and at least a lot of like hustle on the front end. But the reality is they're looking for something that will help serve them to live a more full life. Not because they're lazy, not because they don't wanna work, but because they realize that it's not all about work. The other thing, the second thing is that they want clarity into career paths and internal mobility options. 71% of respondents expect to be promoted between six months to a year and a half. 64% attend career events to ensure that there are growth and development opportunities. What does this mean for a church? Well first of all, if you're employing them at a church, they wanna look around and see if there's ways to move up. Nick Clason (12:56): What do most churches do? Most churches don't have ways to move up. In fact, one of the times I left one of my jobs is I was, me and the senior pastor, we were the only two full-time pastors on staff. And I looked around and I said, there is no way that I'll ever get a chance to move up here. Like it. We have to hire like an adult discipleship pastor. We'll have to hire, um, an executive pastor. We'll have to hire, um, a college ministry, uh, pastor or associate. Like, I will not get a chance to move up until we make several other hires. And, and at the trajectory at that point, I had been working there for five years. I was like, that is not going to happen anytime soon. And the same, I would say is gonna be true of generation Z in working for your church, but also attending your church. Nick Clason (13:43): How, where can they insert themselves into leadership? If leadership is only reserved for old people, old, like of a certain ethnicity, people maybe like look around at your leadership board. What is the youngest elder that you have? The, there's a stat out there. I don't know where it's from so I can't credit it, but, um, I think it might be from like some church growth type stuff. They say that a church congregation generally is within 10 years on either side of the senior pastor's age. So if you have a 55 year old senior pastor, you are most well-positioned to reach 45 to 65 year olds. Think about that. Now, how are you gonna reach a 25 year old? Well, that's a youth pastor's job. Not really. A youth pastor's job is to help serve the kids of the 45 to 65 year olds that are being brought to the church in most cases. Nick Clason (14:37): And that's, you know, 11 to 18 year olds, not 25 year olds. Well, we'll make him be in charge of college ministry too. A that's a gigantic job. I'll tell you that as a youth pastor. But b uh, oftentimes I heard this analogy one time. Um, my, my, a friend of mine, he worked for GE and he said that GE used to be in the dishwasher business and they gave cheap, crappy dishwashers to, uh, apartment complexes. Like they struck a deal and they just, they, they served the majority of apartment complexes and they were GE dishwashers and they sucked. He said, and he said they always broke. And he said because of that, because most people would start out in their first apartment with a crappy GE dishwasher, they all had a bad taste of GE because all their dishwashers broke. And he said, is that what's going on in college ministry? Nick Clason (15:27): They get the bottom of the barrel, the lowest rung they don't often get, um, like their own minister or like paid full-time staff person or anything like that. And if they do get a paid person, it's like a very, very part-time person who's basically a glorified small group leader. Is that why young people are leaving the church in droves because they're getting the lowest wrong bottom of the barrel? And why do they get that? Probably because they're the least, uh, generous in contributions in giving. And so, I hate to say this, but if churches are looking like an ROI thing, like the lowest ROI from like financial gifts is coming from the young adult ministry. That being said, they're the future of your church. So if you don't find a way to invest in them, they're not gonna be there in the years to come when the 45 to 65 to 75 to 85 year olds are no longer living in your church and, and giving in your church. Nick Clason (16:18): So how are you gonna reach and help pro promote and provide inroads for that generation to promote up into leadership? The third thing is they're looking for a modernized approach to benefits with an emphasis on flexibility and mental health. This goes with what we've been talking about a little bit before. 73% of survey respondents said that benefits is the number one reason why they would stick with an employer. Healthcare is the most important benefit of that. Um, according to 76% of the respondents and 73% said that they are looking for a flexible schedule. I would say that that flexible schedule piece, that's where this hybrid idea comes from, right? Like one of the main things about this hybrid kind of ministry in-person and digital is flexibility. Can we provide flexibility in how people can grow in their faith? Number four, they're looking for community culture and collaboration, even in remote settings. Nick Clason (17:15): Strong peer relationship. 63% say, um, feeling a part of the organization and 57% are key early reasons why early talent would choose to stay with an employer. Does your, does your church offer younger generations? Community culture and collaboration? If you're set up, like most churches, you offer a program, Hey, we got the young adult college ministry, it meets on Sunday morning during the second service. So that there it is, right? And does that community actually act like a community? Those are the questions I think that we as church leaders should be asking ourselves. Number five, um, committing publicly to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. 55% of respondents say that a commitment to D E I B um, is extremely important when evaluating an employer. They're looking for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. That's really valuable to Generation Z. So again, I'll say, look at your board. Nick Clason (18:20): Go to your staff page. Is there diversity, diversity? Is there equity? Is there inclusion? Is their belonging shown there? If not, they're going to be looking for a church staff or church leadership that embraces those values. And then finally, number six, accountability. Actually, lemme go back before I say that. Uh, I had a, uh, an intern a couple years ago at church and diversity was really important to him. And we tried really, really hard to hire this kid. He was a, he was a stud man, he was a rockstar. And, um, he his like number one or number two, knock on knock, wanting to come to our church. Uh, one, he was from la we were in Chicago. So like, that was a big one. But the number one a or maybe even more than that, but he wouldn't say it or I mean, he, he was honest with us. Nick Clason (19:09): But, uh, the other thing he was like, just basically saying was like, there is no diversity here. Um, and he was like, and I don't mean diversity with door greeters and people on the platform, I mean diversity in leadership. And I mean, it was a profound statement and one that honestly, I don't even know that that trickled up to upper level leadership. Like I don't know if that, that that phrase ever got there, but the reality of it is like, that's what he was looking for and he didn't see it and he didn't see a path forward to it. And we lost out on an amazing, talented, you know, kid. So that's just another example. All right, number six, accountability on the environment, sustainability and social responsibility. 70% of generations, these survey respondents, they attend career events to ensure the role and responsibilities aligned with their interests and values. Nick Clason (20:01): 51% attend to ensure that the company aligns with their interests and values. So these are the things that matter to them and these are the things that they're looking for, yes, in workplaces. So if they wanna work at your church, but also in organizations that they're gonna choose to attach themselves to. So with that being said, I have three kind of takeaways, three learnings I think that are important for us as a church to understand and to explore. Let's dive in. Learning. Number one, 51% of generations, these say that their ultimate goal in life is happiness. Now, before you're like, that's not what a Christian's goal should be, I agree with you. Uh, I agree that a Christian's goal should be love and joy and peace, patience, and the fruits of the spirit. But if our target audience is saying that over half of them are looking for happiness, how are we going to help facilitate some of that for them? Nick Clason (20:55): Listen to some of these things too. A lot of this is, uh, from survey from Barna, um, of people, generation Z and some of their coping mechanisms. Okay? So just think about this in light of your church, and I'm not, I'm not giving commentary or creating like a, a roadmap or a like thing that you should do as a result of this. This is more just interesting coping mechanisms, the way that Generation Z is choosing to spend their time. So, um, the most common coping mechanisms are connected with non-family members at 45% connected with family 20%, and with music at 18%. So here are some of their quotes, TikTok, they're people feeling the same way as me, the ma, and that makes me feel less lonely. Um, another one, I will disappear into a world of my own, whether one I make myself or one that has already been created already, like books, shows or games doing one of my hobbies such as writing or violin, a good beat and a song I find solace in social media. Nick Clason (22:01): I like to be alone sometimes because it's peaceful and it's zen to me. I like to have conversations with the important people in my life by opening up to them, I receive positive affirmation, validation that I am not alone. I like to do comforting activities, reading fantasy books. I like to imagine myself as the main character because they're usually the ones with the perfect life. Sitting down to a single player game with a good story, looking in the mirror and saying, affirmations, getting on my bike and going for a ride. I like to send memes to my friends and then we will discuss them sleeping until the loneliness goes away. I watch videos of concerts on my phones playing with my many pets. They are my world. Those are some of the most common coping mechanisms out of generation Z. And I just wonder if we read those as older church leaders and think those sound ridiculous, maybe. But how are we showing up in some of these ways for our younger attenders that we're looking to reach and have be a part of our church? Nick Clason (23:13): Uh, idea number two that I think we as church should be, uh, at least aware of is honesty is one of the most important things as it pertains to generation Z, especially teenagers, but generation Z as a whole. I mean, we saw that right in that handshake art they want not only good pay, but they want transparency in pay. Like that is what's most important. So in a recent Barna study, um, these five categories we're given to, to Gen Z and to teenagers about what's important, what what, um, traits are important as it pertains to belief. And those were being correct, being knowledgeable, being open to new ideas, being curious, and being honest. The number one far and away, um, area that was most important was being honest. So we have, uh, broken down different categories, all of Gen Z teenagers and young adults. So I'm gonna read to you the, the statistics of each of those from those three categories. Nick Clason (24:19): So in being correct, only 8% of all of Gen Z cared about it. 6% of teens cared about it, and 9% of young adults cared about it being knowledgeable. 21% of the entire scope of Gen Z cared about it. 16% of teens cared about it, and 24% of young adults cared about it being open to new ideas. 28% of Gen Z cared about it. 29% of teenagers cared about it, and 28% of young adults cared about it being curious. 11% of Gen Z cared about it. 7% of teenagers cared about it, and 13% of young adults cared about it. But being honest, 32% of Gen Z cared about it. 41% of teenagers cared about it, and 25% of young adults cared about being honest. Honesty with one's belief is of utmost importance to Gen Z and specifically and especially to teenagers. So how can we create an environment in our organizations, in our churches that are more open and more honest? Nick Clason (25:14): The final area that I think that matters for churches is that churches, uh, or, um, gen Z young adults, they care about justice, they care about equality, they care about diversity. So some of the top ways that churches can address injustice, this is what, um, justice motivated, justice oriented and justice neutral generation Z um, categorizes said, all right, so they said that, uh, encouraging people to address injustice, 31% of justice motivated 28% of justice oriented and 18% of justice neutral said that the number one way that people could, um, address this was to simply walk into it, right? Go towards the injustice, the top ways that the church can do it. Other, other, like options that were given to them in the survey were by advocating for meaningful change, by welcoming people into a local church, by creating relationships with people who are experiencing injustice. Nick Clason (26:17): And by teaching that the Bible encourages special kindness to people who are experiencing injustice. So again, of those last four, the one that was most highly selected was simply by addressing it. So church leaders, church social media people, youth pastors, whoever's listening to this, the generation that's not a part of your church is mostly looking for you to address areas of injustice. I know that it's a difficult area to wade into. I know that it's polarizing. I know that it can get political and you can tick off some of the 65 year old members who sit all day and watch, um, news media and they'll tell you that this is an agenda from the left or an agenda from the right. But the reality is this is what's important to our younger congregate congregants and congregation members. So what are we gonna do? How are we gonna reach them and honesty and openness and justice motivation and helping them experience, um, what they would view as happiness. Nick Clason (27:26): Like these are the things that they are looking for. How can we as a church lean into this and help create the types of environments that these types of people go to? Because if we're not careful, we're gonna become like Tom Tido, head coach of the New York Knicks, who's outta touch, who no one wants to play for, and no one wants to go be a part of the team. Like literally the majority of the NBA players don't want to go play for him. Is that the way that younger generations, young adults and Gen Z is looking at your church and your church right now? I'm just gonna be honest, your church can get away with keeping on doing things the way that they've always been done because the majority of the people that you off or a pastor, uh, senior pastor are gonna surround themselves with are going to be the people that say it and do it, and are okay with the way that things have always been done. Nick Clason (28:21): And that may work for you for the next five or 10 years. But what about in 10, 15, 20 years when Generation Z is no longer 1920, but they're 25 30 and they've, they haven't been in your church for the last 10 years because you haven't done anything to help reach them and they're off experiencing faith in some other community in some other way. See, here's the reality. Gen Z is not out on Jesus. They are out on institutionalized faith and religion. And I think it's because of some of these reasons. I hope you found this episode helpful. I know in a a few ways it stepped on my toes. I just wanna encourage you, don't give up, keep leaning in the, the, the next generation needs you. And if you are the only person in your church advocating for hybrid, remember that is the value of the next generation. Nick Clason (29:14): We, and you and I, we may not have all the answers and that's okay. But what we are doing is we are trying our best to figure out the best way to create flexibility, honesty, co coping mechanisms, justice-oriented content that's going to help make our church one that a younger person is at least aware of and at least excited about being a part of. Thanks so much for hanging in there. Love to have you part of this journey. Make sure you head to the, uh, uh, show notes for, uh, full transcripts of this, uh, show notes, links, resources, all that type of stuff. I'll have some of those, those graphs and the stats that I've mentioned. All of that is available in the show notes. Go ahead there, leave a rating or a review. We would love to talk with you, love to see you over on YouTube or on my TikTok. But until next time, and as always, stay hybrid.

We already know you should adjust your influence and persuade people how they want to be persuaded.  This is true for personality, culture, and especially age.  So, do you know how to adapt to Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z?   Here is a quick reference guide of what to adjust for each generation. Cutting back on social media reduces anxiety, depression, loneliness Generational Differences in Workforce This is just the tip of the iceberg on how to adapt and persuade each generation.  It is essential to understand the why of each generation, how they think, and the do's and don'ts of the influence process for each target audience.  Join me for this week's podcast on How Do You Sell And Adapt To Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, And Gen Z? and you will discover exactly how to understand each generation and how to adapt to each generation.  

From Genuine to Synthetic, The Rise of AI DJs in Radio also Generation Z and their growing affinity for government surveillance, where they trade their freedom for a cozy sense of safety (scroll down for the description) Join the sub club ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Checkout the NEW website ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MikeyPodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Tap to Connect with me on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Personal ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Personal ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Support the show and grab some merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Save 20% at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HigherElevation.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ with promo code MIKEY Need help accessing this podcast? Tap this ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HELP⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ___________________________________ Prepare to be taken back as we delve into the ever-evolving landscape of radio, where human DJs are being replaced by synthetic voices. Alpha Media, a radio broadcaster in Portland, has shocked the industry by introducing AI Ashley, a robotic version of their midday host. This move has sparked a conversation about the loss of genuine human charm and connection in radio. And Gen Z, I've got some stats about their love for government surveillance, their unique perspectives on free speech, and their unwavering trust in politicians NOTES Mikey explores the recent news of Alpha Media replacing their midday host with an artificial intelligence version of herself, named AI Ashley. He highlights the lack of genuine human connection and emotion in AI DJs, emphasizing the hollow and generic experience they provide. Mikey shares his thoughts on the industry's shift towards soulless, preprogrammed content and the potential consequences for listeners. He plays clips of AI Ashley to showcase the eerie, emotionless nature of her voice, contrasting it with the vibrant and authentic voices of human DJs. Mikey invites listeners to ponder the importance of genuine personalities behind the mic and reflect on the magic they bring to radio. Join Mikey on this hilarious and thought-provoking episode as he delves into the strange world of AI DJs and its implications for the future of radio. Mikey takes a humorous approach as he uncovers Generation Z's growing affinity for government surveillance. He shares statistics revealing their willingness to sacrifice freedom for a sense of safety, including the shocking 15% in favor of installing surveillance cameras in their homes. Age group breakdowns show the contrasting opinions, with elders above 65 having only 5% in favor of surveillance. Racial differences are explored, with a quarter of Hispanics and a third of African Americans supporting a surveillance state compared to lower percentages among Caucasians and Asians. Mikey pokes fun at Generation Z's preference for a virtual utopia, where unity and avoiding diverse perspectives take precedence. The subjective definition of hate speech is discussed, where anything offensive to one person is considered hate speech. Generation Z's unwavering trust in politicians is critiqued, highlighting their belief in politicians as the ultimate problem solvers. The episode combines humor, sarcasm, and insightful commentary to entertain and inform listeners about the implications of these societal trends. #TheMikeyPodcast #RoboDJs #GenerationZ #SurveillanceObsession #RadioShift #AuthenticityMatters #IllusionOfSafety #HateSpeech #PoliticianWorship #BigBrotherTakingOver

A Fox News producer was caught on an undercover camera spilling the beans about the real reason Tucker Carlson was ousted from the network. If this is accurate, this is a lot bigger than we realized. Plus, Joe Biden gives a commencement address saying the biggest threat to our country is white supremacy, and Liz breaks down why this is now more than just a regular Biden Trope. And Gen Z has a new breakup method called "delicate dumping." What the heck is that? This is The Liz Wheeler Show. -- Support American manufacturing and elevate your pickleball game with Bird Pickleball Paddles by GRIP6 at https://birdpickleball.com. -- Save over 70% off Genucel's most popular package: https://genucel.com/liz. -- Download the free Upside app to start saving money on your first tank of gas today. Use promo code LIZ5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Nick talks about the lastest Generation Z findings, the cultural and generation gap that is growing in our churches. And answers the ultimate question, is Gen Z deconstructing their faith? And if so, what do we do about that? Show Notes & Transcripts: http://www.hybridministry.xyz/044 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick FREE E-Book: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook RECENT GEN Z STATS *GEN Z * 70% are spiritually open TRAITS Correct 6% Teens 8% All Gen Z 9% Young Adults Knowledgeable 16% Teens 21% All Gen Z 24% Young Adults Being Honest 41% Teens 32% All Gen Z 25% Young Adults Being Open to New Ideas 29% Teens 28% All Gen Z 28% Young Adults Being Curious 7% Teens 11% All Gen Z 13% Young Adults 51% HAPPINESS IS VERY IMPORTANT Happiness Looks Like 43% Success 23% Education 20% Family 8% Spiritual 6% Health TIMECODES 00:00-02:46 Intro 02:46-06:32 A BeReal Generation vs. an Instagram Generation 06:32-11:37 The Latest Gen Z Statistics 11:37-18:52 Church & Workplace Implications of these Cultural Trends and Shifts 18:52-21:49 Gen Z Still Likes Jesus, just not our Church 21:49-22:44 Outro TRANSCRIPT Nick Clason (00:00): Hey, what is up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry Show. I am your host, Nick Clason, excited to be with you. And in this episode, we are going to talk about the workplace gap and generational gap between older generations and younger generations, specifically generation Z and those that have come before them. And also, I want to pull out some principles that I think might be true about what that means for you and your local church and how they're the, the gap is causing a riff in potentially church attendance. But before we do, I just want to say thanks for being here. If you're on YouTube, hit that subscribe and notification button, that like button. If you're on TikTok, give us a follow. And if you are just listening in your podcast catcher, I wanna let you know that you can head to hybridministry.xyz for all of your podcast needs, including show notes and transcripts. Nick Clason (01:00): We will link all of the notes to everything, uh, all the links, everything that we're talking about. And, uh, all of the, uh, transcript is there for you, 100% completely free of charge. We also wanna let you know that LinkedIn, the show notes, both on YouTube and in your podcast, our free ebook, have I already ruined my church's TikTok account. That will be available for you. Again, free of charge. Just hit that subscribe button and sign up for that email list. We'd love to give that to you as a free gift and our token of appreciation. Uh, and also, without any further ado, if you are able, willing, or, uh, have any sort of interest in letting us know, this would be great. We would love a five star rating or review that would really help us out, that would help us get index in the search for all these things on podcast. Nick Clason (01:47): All those things matter, and they're just, they would just be a small token of appreciation from you to us for all that we do. Um, but again, we are just thankful and thrilled to be here. So without any further ado, let's dive into the workplace generation gap conundrum. Hey, what's up, hybrid ministry fam, thanks for watching this or listening to this. Hey, I just wanna drop a quick note and let you know about halfway through, uh, the audio recording. Somehow my audio got corrupted. You'll notice a drastic drop off in quality some way through. Sorry about that. You're still gonna be able to hear it cuz I was recording it on my phone just like I'm doing this little announcement right here, right now. So this'll be able to hear it. It's just not the best, it's not our favorite quality level. We'll get it back, you know, we'll figured out the issue. Nick Clason (02:40): Um, but just wanna give you that quick disclaimer. Heads up. Hope you still enjoy the rest of the episode. So if you have been paying any bit of attention recently, you know that the social trends have been shifting. We all know that TikTok has grown in immense popularity. All of what Congress and the US is trying to do with it, it's grown in immense popularity. So much so that some of our more, um, legacy platforms like Facebook and Instagram have adopted many of the AI features that are available in TikTok. But another trend that I've noticed recently, uh, is the trend of the, the social media app. B real bre has been, uh, launched recently, um, within a year or so I would say. And Gen Z and current teenagers have gone crazy for it, at least in my anecdotal experience. And they're using it. Nick Clason (03:37): And if you don't know what B Real is, it's basically an app that one time a day says it's time to be real. But they, uh, you know, you can, you can, it has like dual meaning like cuz BRE is also another thing that you use in like film or whatever, but it says it's time to be real and they just take a picture of what you're doing wherever you are, right there in that moment. You have two minutes to post it, you can post late and that's what a lot of people do. But it's really just like a once daily posting app. It's not the curated feed and the beautiful like Brazilian vacation photo pictures that we would get in the old school, Instagram and Facebook, right? So that was a lot more curation and now Gen Z is leaning a lot more towards just like, this is how it is, this is what it is, take me for me, it is what it is, take it or leave it. Nick Clason (04:29): Like that's essentially right? Like that's essentially, uh, what they, uh, have kind of leaned into. And I think it's fascinating shift this like perfect polished, kind of curated down to this like little more nitty gritty just as I, as I am, take me or leave me for who I am. That's kind of what BeReal is. That's kind of why I think TikTok shifted too. And one of the things that's interesting is burial is where you follow friends, but they only post one time a day. There's like not as much pressure on social media on the curation of it. And I just, I think that that's a trend. I think that that's, uh, a, a way, a thing that Gen Z is attempting to adopt less curation, more just realness, more rawness, more authenticity. Um, and meanwhile like, uh, take, uh, Instagram, Facebook, and some of those more legacy platforms, millennials and up, that's not as much the priority in fact, or it hasn't been, you know, and as they've shifted into reels, which is much more discovery based, more raw, more quick cuts and more like entertainment based. Nick Clason (05:36): Um, like you would go on on TikTok or any of the other platforms, shorts, reels, and you would watch something, it's like 98% or, or something like that. 90% of what you actually watch and consume is not from people that you know. So that's not really a social media anymore. It's honestly much more of like a entertainment platform you get on TikTok at the end of the night or whenever you do to be entertained. So the actual sociability is happening on apps like be real and other, just more like basic, very like nitty gritty, not a lot of bells and whistles type of thing. And I think that there's an attraction to that. And so, uh, I I just, I think that's one, one interesting shift that I'm noticing in the generation gap. I wanna also look at the workplace gap here in a minute and how I think that that plays out for you and your church. Nick Clason (06:29): But first I have some new stats I got from Barna. So let's dive in to those recent stats from Barna on Gen Z. Um, found some of these interesting, just wanted to share them with you. According to Gen Z or according to Barna, 56% of Generation Z claim to be Christians, which might be higher than you thought it was. I think that there's sort of a notion out there that Gen Z is deconstructing, gen Z is rethinking their faith, but 56% still claim and classify themselves as Christians. Granted, I know there's, you know, all kinds of different things on spectrum. You may claim to be a Christian, is it nominal y or whatever, whatnot. The thing that's staggeringly high though is Gen Z considers, uh, only TW or 25% of Gen Z consider themselves to have no faith at all. And here's the the crazy thing, right? Nick Clason (07:19): Like that is, that's the part that is alarmingly high I believe because that is the highest of any other generation by a lot. So US adults, according to US adults only 13% say that they have no faith. And the next highest, um, like breakdown age demographic thing is millennials and they're at 15%. Gen X is at 13%, boomers at 8%, elders at 5%, all of that under not saying that they don't have, uh, faith. And so here's the thing is that while you and I, if we're older and not generation Z, we may look at that and we may be like, wow, that that's alarming. And they are definitely deconstructing and that may be the label that we give to it. But what's interesting is that they surveyed Gen Z gr deeper. And these five words were the words that most defined and clarified their spiritual journey. Nick Clason (08:12): And they were these words, number one, they're spiritually growing. That was 39% of the population checked that, uh, number two, they're spiritually open, 35%, they're spiritually curious, 32% they are, um, spiritual in general, uh, 29%. And then they are spiritually exploring 27%. So like I said, we might have that classification as like, man, you're deconstructing what they call it a different word. And I, that was a very, very, um, uh, important learning, at least for me. I was like, okay, we're freaking out about it. And they're like, no, I'm just open. I'm just exploring. I'm just growing. I'm just checking things out. That was how they would describe it. Uh, big bucket of that, 70% of Gen Z claim to be spiritually open. 70%, that's a large stat. Um, and then furthermore, to expound upon that and that this is where I think this really gets interesting and important for churches is that these were some of the traits that, uh, the survey asked Gen Z, what do you want in your, um, church? Nick Clason (09:20): What do you want in your religious institution? What are the key things you're looking for? The first question, are you looking for it to be correct? 6% of teens said that they were looking for their religion to be correct. 8% of all Gen Zs said that and 9% of young adults said that. Not very high, right? Are you looking for it to be knowledgeable? Are you looking for people in your religious institutions or people around to be knowledgeable? 16% of teens said, yeah, I'm looking for them to be knowledgeable. 21% of all Gen Zs said, yeah, I'm looking for them to be knowledgeable and then 24% of young adults, so I'm looking for them to be knowledgeable. You can see that jump right from teenager to young adult. Once you become an adult, you're like, I do want someone to know something, right? To help me out. Nick Clason (10:02): Uh, this one was the, the highest, the highest on the graphs. You had different graphs of all these different, um, characteristics. Being honest, this is the highest one. 41% of teens want their religious institution. To be honest, 32% of all Gen Z ask for that. And 25% of young adults want honesty, want authenticity, right? Back to be real honesty, authenticity, the real you being open to new ideas. That was another category. 29% of teens want that. 28% of all Gen Z, 28% of young adults. And finally, curiosity, that one was lower with 7% of teens wanting to be curious. 11% of all Gen Z and 13% of young adults. And so they're looking for honesty, they're looking for transparency, they're looking for realness. Okay? Furthermore, and this is the last bit of the stats before we dive into what I think are pot, some potential implications for this. Nick Clason (10:55): 51% of Gen Z say that happiness is very important to them. They are looking for happiness. Well, you know, once, once they heard that stam in this like Barna kind of collab thing where they are sharing these statistics, one other person's put in the chat, how do you define happiness? And they ask that question, they're like, what does happiness look like to you? So 43% say it looks like success and, and they used images for them to choose. So that success image was a guy holding money. That's what 43% say, happiness looks like. Successful man holding money where 23% say education is happiness. 20% say family, 8% say spiritual and 6% say health. All right? So what does all that mean? Let's dive into it and check it out. Okay? So I think that there's a workplace shift that needs to happen. Covid ushered a lot of this stuff in and your church is probably in a different spot than it was pre covid, but it may not be fully there where generation Z is interested. Nick Clason (11:56): Cuz here's the thing, whether this matters to you on paper or not, you are going to need to start hiring generation Z by the year 2025, which at the time of the podcast recording is only a year and a half away. Millennials and Gen Z are going to make up the majority of the American workforce. That may or may not be true in your context and in your church, but the fact is, if you're catering to boomers and Xers in the workplace, just because this is the way we've always done it and they need to get over it and they need to get used to it, that may not be your most effective strategy moving forward. And it may not bite you right in the year 2025, but 2026 rolls around 20 27, 20 28, and you're trying to recruit new young talent and they're just not interested in coming to work for your church or your organization. Nick Clason (12:43): Why is that the case? Here are some thoughts I have based off of this research and just some things I've observed in the last couple of years that I think might be contributing to it. So the first is this, the time off conversation and or the work life balance conversation. These are wide sweeping generalities, I understand it. And so if you're like, Hey, I'm a Gen Xer and that's not true of me. I'm saying by and large wide sweeping, um, I work for a boss, he's Gen X, he is phenomenal at giving me time off, taking care of me, making sure I have balance, work life balance, all those things. But he will of his own admission and, and own accord say that he is a workaholic and he will push it to the limit. And so, uh, that is something that is of the older generation, much more the norm. Nick Clason (13:36): They're looking for people who are gonna work hard and give it their all and bust it. And while that may be true, and that may even be what's necessary at times, that is not the natural disposition of millennials and Gen Z, I'm a millennial and I I am friends with and work with a lot of people that are Gen Z. I don't think that they're lazy and don't wanna work. I just simply think that they are more aware of their work life balance. They've looked to their older parents or wiser people in their life and they've seen how they've approached work and they have not, they don't want to fall to those same, you know, pitfalls that they've seen over time. So work-life balance, PTO rhythms, taking time off vacation. I have a coworker, she's Gen Z and this is her first job. And so she's been with us, um, at our job for the, about the same amount of time that I've been working there, eight months or so. Nick Clason (14:32): And this is her first time with like a true weekend, but she has to come back for Sundays. Sundays are not a weekend anymore, but we get Fridays off. And so she will often try to get out of the office a little bit early on a Thursday and she will often take a trip somewhere, go meet some friends, you know, whatever. So she's leaving at like two o'clock, three o'clock, hitting the road, getting there on Thursday night, hanging out. Like, and that's important to her. And so there was a Thursday night commitment that she had and she's like, I can't do that. And it was like, because this is my weekend. I need my weekend to explore, to have fun. And that's just like, I think most older generations would be like, no, you have to work yet to stay here until five. Like, that's the rules. Nick Clason (15:16): And I just think that that that's a shift that is happening and that's probably an adaptation that I would say is gonna need to take place in the workforce. Uh, also flexible in workspaces, like remote working should be able to be a thing. Now I get it. If you're at church and you're in ministry, you know, just how valuable and important like in-person face-to-face meetings are. If you're gonna disciple somebody, if you're gonna grab coffee with a leader, if you're gonna sit down and have breakfast with a couple and you're counseling them, like all those things are valuable. But there's a lot of computer work, there's a lot of email based work, there's a lot of like software things that can take place via remote work. And you don't have to be 100% completely in the office, your butt in a chair because the natural like tendency for that is like everyone's here. Nick Clason (16:06): And so if anyone needs anything, we just pop in and out of people's offices. There are tools nowadays, there's slack, there's as much as I hate it, there's Microsoft teams, there are chat based features that you can stay in touch and you don't have to have a quote unquote office or hallway or pop in type conversation. Why do we do that? I think we do that because it's comfortable, it's familiar to the way it's always been done, but the tools are there and they're probably a little bit more effective on, uh, efficiency workflow, getting people like, you know, in and outta conversations as opposed to like, Hey, how are you? And that conversation taking an extra 10, 15, 20 minutes, there's value in those things, no doubt. But generation Z and millennials are looking for more flexible workspaces if they can get their job done while out, while also being on vacation somewhere so that they can work for a few hours, they can close their laptop and then they can go and have fun on vacation. Nick Clason (17:03): If we are so tight and stringent and say, no, you have to be here in the office, that's not gonna lend itself well to that flexible workspace and that first one, that time off that work life balance. The other trend, the other thing that I'm kind of noticing is that the older generations, uh, Xers and boomers, they're holding on longer, they're working later, they need the money to retire, they still need the income. And this one I think is big, is because while Gen Z is pursuing happiness, uh, corporate work environment may not be the cure or key to their happiness, but if it is, especially in church, they may say like, well, I'm looking for purpose and the church helps bring me that purpose. I want to be a part of a church. However, there are older generations that are still hanging on and that are still working. Nick Clason (17:54): So the question is, while we want to hire younger people, where is the space for them to come into your organization attached to it, take ownership of something and begin working toward any sort of authority in your organization because you have people already holding those most important positions. And that's gonna get tricky, especially if you got those people sitting there and and holding those most important positions. Where are they going to lay down and pave away for generation Z to come in and take opportunity? The last thing I think is that Gen Z is very concerned and rightly so about their mental health, about their mental state, about their mental wellbeing, making sure that those things are taken care of, that they're important. And so your organization, if you're bringing in millennials and Gen Z, consider finding a way to help prioritize their mental health, make counseling a part of a employment benefit for them, um, and for, you know, a thing that you offer to them. Nick Clason (18:56): So I have one last idea, let's check it out on the other side, right? So here's my conclusion. Gen Z, well, 25% would claim that they don't have faith. I think one of the things I've noticed in my experience is that generation Z, they still love and like Jesus a lot. In fact, in this Barna co lab, they sat down and talked with two guys who were Gen Z business owners. And what shocked me and was just an interesting thing that I noticed, uh, they didn't necessarily say this, they're a part of their church, but they're Christians running a Christian organization, not doing it through the local church. So my question to myself in that moment was, if Gen Zers, like these are passionate about faith, passionate about God, they love going to things like, you know, passion, these people, they were in the event business as well. Nick Clason (19:51): They love going to those things, but we're not seeing them in our churches, both on the workplace side or the attendance side. Do they like Jesus and just not like the way that we do our church? I think church has a propensity right now to feel very institutionalized. And I think that that, that if that rubbed you the wrong way, and especially if you're older and you're listening to it and you're like, my church isn't institutionalized, this is what we've been doing it for years. While that may be true, the way that we've been doing church for years is American, not necessarily New Testament. The New Testament church looked very different from the American church. So are you doing church like the Bible or are you doing church like America? And there's nothing wrong with doing church like America unless it's not effective in reaching the next generation. Nick Clason (20:36): And in that case, that's where it becomes an issue. And so I think both from older generations holding on from workplaces not being very friendly to Generation Z, millennials and those with that type of mindset and the fact that there's just not as much space for Generation Z to, to go into these spaces, they're creating them over here to look more New Testament, to look more authentic, to look more be real, to have more community, to have more places to lean in as opposed to coming to your institutionalized church. Because if they're not there in the seats from eight 30 to nine 30, then we consider them deconstructing. And that just may simply not be true. They might just be open to exploring new ways, new, new ideas, new places to engage with these things. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're out on Jesus. It just might mean that they're out on you. So what shifts might you need to take place? What stats have you heard that you're like now that's interesting and that might change some of the way we do things because before long, millennials and generations here are going to make up the majority of our workforce. They are Gen Z is not just teenagers in your youth group, they're graduating college now. They are looking for a church to attach to. Is your church friendly to them and what they need? Or is your church stuck dogmatically to the way that things have always been done? Nick Clason (21:59): Well thanks guys so much for hanging out in this episode. Thrilled to have you with us. Don't forget everything that you need is gonna be available to you in the show notes. Make sure that you like, make sure that you comment, make sure that you subscribe, rating, review, all those things. Glad to be with you. If you find this helpful, we would love to continue to create and produce content like this for you. So all that stuff helps keep us going as well as head to hybridministry.xyz Click on the contact form and if you have questions, submit them there to us. We would love to start taking some questions, answering some of your questions and giving back to y'all and letting you know what our perspective is on certain hybrid things, digital, social marketing, communications, generation Z, all the above. Let us know on those topic. But until next time, and as always, stay.

Ceci disapproves of Adam's hiking shoes for his upcoming trip. Also, what's happening to Tik Tok? And Gen Z loves bright colors. That and more on this week's episode!

ICYMI: Later, with Mo'Kelly Presents – Thoughts on PETA's offer to get the Wienermobile repaired so long as they go vegan, Disney employees petition pushing back against working in person four days a week AND Gen Z burnout on KFI AM 640 – Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app

Wayne Resnick sits in for Bill Handel. Politics played a big role in compounding hostage Paul Whelan's family's grief - Wayne tells you who you should be mad at. The Holiday Travel Rush has a new name. And Gen Z loves three things, and the entertainment industry intends to exploit them to the very end.

It is Election Day! David van Camp is our hero for the effort he had to go through to vote. And Gen Z likes to eat mor chikin!

It is Election Day! David van Camp is our hero for the effort he had to go through to vote. And Gen Z likes to eat mor chikin!

Did you know millennials are the most burned-out generation, with 59% experiencing some symptoms of burnout? And Gen Z burns out much faster than any other generation: they went from 47% to 58% in just a year?! Recovering from burnout is never easy. But it shouldn't be that hard as well. Chelsea learns from the burnout recovery expert herself, KC Rossi, on how to get over getting burned out from grinding and hustling hard, while still keeping yourself in the game. On this week's episode, Chelsea sits down with KC to discuss: Steps to recovering from burnout and perfectionism, creating white space in your calendar The "Do Now, Think Later." kind of attitude in dealing with problems in a business Choosing long-term partners for long-term business partnerships and how to make sure that the relationship and business partnership would stay intact while finding balance and boundaries in the dynamics Choosing long-term partners for long-term business partnerships and how to make sure that the relationship and business partnership would stay intact while finding balance and boundaries in the dynamics What is adrenal fatigue? What are the symptoms? How do you know you have it? How do you know it's going to be a problem? Having the mindset that success is a long haul Advice to listeners - "Give yourself so much self-grace and compassion and understand that it's really integrating into your body again and feeling what normal is, what breathing is supposed to be like." "Neutrality is not gonna come from external circumstances, but what you can control is your own nervous system in the way of what type of coming, balancing, grounding practices do you have in place that you can control, and we can control what's in our own mind, and we have the autonomy to control our own body. So when it comes to those fundamentals of sleep, and movement, are you doing those to attain vitality?" - KC Rossi CONNECT WITH KC: Free Mini-Training || Know Thyself … and Lead!: https://www.kcrossi.com/lead Work with Kc: https://www.kcrossi.com/shine Women Developing Brilliance® — The Spirit of Business Podcast: rb.gy/duluw8 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KcRossiInc/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/my.coach.kc/ YouTube: http://4kcr.com/yt CONNECT WITH CHELSEA: Website Instagram Mic Drop Waitlist 1:1 Coaching Open - apply right here. **NEW** Leave a voice note to the pod! https://anchor.fm/in-my-non-expert-opinion/message Research mentioned: Stats on burnout Burnout syndrome article Show transcription

ADQ has taken over ownership of the Etihad Aviation Group. Plus they have also acquired 57% of Starzplay Arabia, in collaboration with E-Vision - we speak to Maaz Sheikh of Starzplay about their growing popularity & confidence. Plus, we speak to Bayanat's chief financial officer ahead of the firm's IPO on Friday. And Gen Z is now properly hitting the malls - what does it mean for retail? We speak to Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne, President and CEO, ESW Americas and former CEO of Emaar Malls.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Travel Expert Johnny Jet joins the show to talk Holiday travel - when's it best to pack your bags for vacation? Actress Angelina Jolie is the latest woman to be compared to Amber Hears by social media creators that are chasing any and all celebrity-related scandals. And Gen Z, alongside Millennials, are reframing their layoffs by stripping away the shame and pointing the blame finger at the companies that let them go.

In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials, and Millennials responding with a curt, “OK, Boomer.” What do we make of this, and is it anything new? These are questions Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London, addresses in his latest book, Generations – Does when you're born shape who you are? (published as The Generation Myth in the United States). In this Social Science Bites podcast, Duffy offers some key takeaways from the book and his research into the myths and stereotypes that have anchored themselves on generational trends. “My one-sentence overview of the book,” Duffy tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is that generational thinking is a really big idea throughout the history of sociology and philosophy, but it's been horribly corrupted by a whole slew of terrible stereotypes, myths and cliches that we get fed from media and social media about these various differences between generations. My task is not to say whether it's all nonsense or it's all true; it's really to separate the myth from reality so we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.” One thing he's learned is that the template for generational conflict is fairly standard over time, even if the specifics of what's being contested are not. “The issues change,” he explains, “but the gap between young and old at any one point in time is actually pretty constant. … We're not living through a time of particularly ‘snowflake,' ‘social justice warrior' young people vs. a very reactionary older group – it's just the issues have changed. The pattern is the same, but the issues have changed.” Taking a look at climate change, for example, he notes that there's a narrative that caring young people are fighting a careless cadre of oldsters unwilling to sacrifice for the future good. Not so fast, Duffy says: “The myth that only young people care about climate is a myth. We are unthinkingly encouraging an ageism within climate campaigning that is not only incorrect, but it is self-destructive.” That example, he notes, adds evidence to his contention that “the fake generational battles we have set up between the generations are just that – they are fake.” In the podcast, Duffy outlines the breakdowns his book (and in general larger society) uses to identify cohorts of living generations: Pre-war generation, those born before the end of World War II in 1945. Duffy says this could be broken down further – the so-called Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, for example – but for 2022 purposes the larger grouping serves well. Baby Boomers, born from 1945 to 1965 Generation X, 1966 to 1979 (This is Duffy's own generation, and so, with tongue in cheek, he calls it “the best generation”!) Millennials, 1980 to around 1995 And Gen Z, ending around 2012 He notes that people are already talking about Generation Alpha, but given that generation's youth it's hard to make good generalizations about them. These generation-based groupings are identity groups that only some people freely adopt. “We're not as clearly defined by these types of groupings as we are by, say, our age or educational status or our gender or our ethnicity.” His research finds between a third and half of people do identify with their generation, and the only one with “a real demographic reality” (as opposed to a solely cultural one) is the Baby Boomers, who in two blasts really did create a demographic bulge. Duffy, in addition to his work at King's College London, is currently the chair of the Campaign for Social Science, the advocacy arm of Britain's Academy of Social Sciences. Over a 30-year career in policy research and evaluation, he has worked across most public policy areas, including being seconded to the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit. Before joining KCL he was global director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute. His first book, 2018's The Perils of Perception – Why we're wrong about nearly everything, draws on Ipsos's own Perils of Perception studies to examine how people misperceive key social realities.

Tonight on the Last Word: An archivist's letter details the back and forth with Donald Trump's lawyers over the retrieval of classified documents before the Mar-a-Lago search. Also, NBC News projects Rep. Jerry Nadler defeats Rep. Carolyn Maloney in the New York Democratic primary. And Gen Z activist Maxwell Alejandro Frost wins the Democratic primary for Florida's 10thCongressional District. Mark Zaid, Glenn Kirschner, Harry Litman, Steve Kornacki, Rep. Eric Swalwell, John Heilemann and Maxwell Alejandro Frost join Lawrence O'Donnell.

Drug abuse has been an issue that really all generations have had to deal with. And Gen Z is no different.Drug abuse has been an issue that really all generations have had to deal with. And Gen Z is no different.But what should we tell our teens about using drugs, and what should we mention about our own history with drugs?Dr. Gary Kirkilas is back to help us discuss drugs with our teens and young adults. He is a pediatrician in Phoenix, Arizona with a unique mobile practice, as well as a spokesperson for the AAP.He'll tell us all about what age to start talking about drugs, how to approach these conversations, and what the future of legalization means for teenage drug use in this encore episode from February 2021.

Drug abuse has been an issue that really all generations have had to deal with. And Gen Z is no different.Drug abuse has been an issue that really all generations have had to deal with. And Gen Z is no different.But what should we tell our teens about using drugs, and what should we mention about our own history with drugs?Dr. Gary Kirkilas is back to help us discuss drugs with our teens and young adults. He is a pediatrician in Phoenix, Arizona with a unique mobile practice, as well as a spokesperson for the AAP.He'll tell us all about what age to start talking about drugs, how to approach these conversations, and what the future of legalization means for teenage drug use in this encore episode from February 2021.

Two things to know toda The recession planning conversation, outlined AND Gen Z talks and searches in a whole new way   Do you want to get the show on your podcast app or the written versions of the stories? Subscribe to the Business of Tech: https://www.businessof.tech/   Support the show on Patreon:  https://patreon.com/mspradio/   Want our stuff?  Cool Merch?  Wear “Why Do We Care?” - Visit https://mspradio.myspreadshop.com   Follow us on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mspradionews/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mspradionews/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mspradio/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28908079/  

The annual number of anti-LGBTQ bills filed has skyrocketed over the past several years, from 41 in 2018 to 240 and counting in the first three months of this year. Half of these bills are targeting transgender people specifically. At the same time, surveys of the general public show over 70% say they support same-sex marriage and laws preventing discrimination across the LGBTQ community. And Gen Z are proudly and loudly identifying with both gender and sexual fluidity. How do we square these two realities? In this episode, Talk Policy to Me reporter Amy Benziger dives into how the rise in representation of people from across the gender and sexual spectrum in media, business, and government has caused a policy backlash by the old guard to solidify their conservative base.  Our guests include Fran Dunway, Founder of TomboyX; Corey Rose, a student at UC Berkeley Journalism School and former reporter for South Florida Gay News; and Pau Crego, Executive Director of the SF Office of Transgender Initiatives.

The future of commerce is being built all around us, and while so much of the industry changes on a daily basis, there are still some fundamental truths that anchor brands and allow them to find success in the digital and retail worlds. On this roundtable episode of Up Next in Commerce, I got to dig into exactly what those foundational elements are with Mike Black, the CMO of Profitero, and Diana Haussling, the VP and General Manager of Digital Commerce at Colgate-Palmolive.This was such a great discussion that touched on so many different topics that brands big and small should be paying attention to. For example, what are the three key levers that influence ecommerce sales? How should you be developing KPIs that will actually mean something and lead to more profitability and growth? Why is omnichannel the way of the future and what channels should companies be investing in? Mike and Diana have the answers, which they have gathered through long and impressive histories in the ecommerce world — Mike worked at Staples and Nielsen, and Diana has held roles at places like Campbell's, General Mills, and Hersheys. These two really know their stuff and they were so much fun to talk to. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!  Main Takeaways:Pulling the Right Levers: There are three basic levers that influence ecommerce sales: availability, findability, and conversion tactics. If you can't ensure that you reliably have products to offer people, that those people have an easy way to find the products, and that they are given reasons to actually make a purchase, you won't be able to grow or increase profits. You Reap What You Sow: Being a first-mover on any platform is one of the investments that has the highest potential payoffs. Companies that took Amazon and Instacart seriously from the get-go have created a huge advantage for themselves in the ecommerce space. By having a head start in one place, you also free yourself up to explore elsewhere while your competition tries to keep up in the first spot you've already dominated.You Want Them to Want You: As a brand, you have to firmly establish a value proposition to present to customers, especially when you are trying to extract information or gather data about them. Give customers concrete reasons to want to engage with your brand and earn their trust so that they are more likely to keep coming back. Then use the data they give you to provide even better experiences and products over and over.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hello, everyone. And welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today, we are back with an awesome round table with some amazing folks. First up, we have Diana Haussling, who currently serves as the VP and General Manager of Digital Commerce at Colgate-Palmolive. Welcome.Diana:Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited for this conversation.Stephanie:Me too. And next we have Mike Black, who's the CMO of Profitero. Mike, welcome to the show.Mike:Thank you very much. Also, very excited.Stephanie:Yeah. This is going to be a good one. I can just feel it. I can see the energy between you guys. I can see you got a lot to say. So, it's going to be a good one. So, I would love to start as I always do with a bit of background so people know who we're chatting with. So, Diana, maybe if you could start with… I see you have a long history in the world of CPG work for… I mean the most well-known brands that I can think of, and I was hoping if you can kind of go through that journey a bit?Diana:Yeah. So, I've been lucky enough to work at four major CPG organizations. I cut my teeth with Hershey in sales and really was able to understand, not only retail, but direct customer selling. Moved over to General Mills where I stiffed my toe in the water in marketing. Loved working on those brands and getting a taste of a larger organization. And then I shifted to Campbell's where I spent the bulk of my time. Campbell's will always have a special place in my heart.Diana:I spent a lot of times there, ping-pong back and forth between marketing and sales. I created a couple of roles for myself. One of which was the lead of e-commerce, where I established the e-commerce organization there before leaving and coming to my new love, Colgate-Palmolive. Super excited to be part of the Colgate family. I lead a digital commerce team called the Hive. It had that name before I got there. But I'm attributing it to the Beyonce now that I'm there.Stephanie:I love that.Diana:I'm so super excited to be at Colgate. There's just a ton of energy and growth around e-commerce and our primary focus is on digital transformation which is a perfect segue for this conversation.Stephanie:Yes. I can't wait to get into that. All right, Mike, a bit about you.Mike:Yeah. So, I started my career in retail. I started my first real job was at Staples, the office products company. And I was responsible for public relations there. Opening new stores in different markets, and really got a firsthand look at how retailers, traditional retailers were being disrupted by e-commerce. The time that I was at Staples was right at the time that Amazon started to make its ways. And I could see the impact of that just in the way that Staples was going to market, and they started to really dial up their own e-commerce efforts to combat.Mike:So, it was really interesting to see that pivotal moment inside from a retailer, classic brick and mortar retailer go through that transformation. So, I started my career there, then I started working in startups. And I eventually found my way to Nielsen. So, I worked in the part of Nielsen where we tested new product innovations for CPGs and worked in their measurement and analytics. And while I was at Nielsen, that's my first exposure to e-commerce and first exposure to this new emerging space of analytics.Mike:And I knew this was the place I wanted to be. It was in the e-commerce space, the intersection of e-commerce and data analytics, and that led me to Profitero where I am now. And we're getting to work with smart people like Diana who is someone I listen to her speak, and then I take notes. And then I sort of borrow some of her wisdom, and she's someone I'm always learning a lot from.Diana:Right back at you, Mike. And if you don't follow him on LinkedIn, you should, because he leads all social for Profitero, which isn't in his CMO title.Stephanie:Wow. I like this. Diana's like your hype woman. So, this is a good match we have here.Mike:The feeling is mutual.Stephanie:Yeah. That's awesome. So, Diana, I mean I'm thinking about you starting an e-commerce team at Campbell's. And then coming to Colgate where they already kind of have one set up, and I'd love to hear a bit about what is it like now versus then? Because I can just imagine you being like, “This is important everyone and I need some budget for it and this is going to be a thing.” Whereas now, it's like obvious. Like, “Yeah. Jump in. Let's go deep and spread the word.”Diana:Yeah. I think, and I'm sure this will ring true to a lot of my fellow CPGers and the struggle on the e-commerce business. If you're at an organization, and this is a completely new space, but you have leadership that definitely sees the potential and the opportunity, it really becomes on you to not only operationalize, but really help leaders understand how to translate e-commerce, how to translate digital to a P&L, to growth projectors, to a strat plan. All those things CPG people are really comfortable with.Diana:And then also to really think about not only what your org needs to be like to get things off the ground, but where it needs to go in the next three years. And typically, you're not in the position where the organization truly understands how to make that work. So, there is a kind of this hybrid role that digital commerce folks have to play in emerging organizations where they're really helping folks navigate, what IT support do I need? What supply chain support do I need? Where should everything sit?Diana:And you can do it on your own, but you can also partner. So, there's a number of groups you can partner with. I happen to know that Profitero has done a lot in this space, and they have, basically, a journey for organizations that you can leverage. But it really is like starting from scratch and building a case for growth. I think the biggest question that you get when it comes to just starting up in an organization is how is this incremental to the business?Diana:And my pushback to that always is, it's not about incrementality. Incrementality is a bonus. It really is all about protecting your base business, going where consumers are going, and ensuring that you future proof your organization for the reality of what our new world is, which is omni. It's slightly different when you come into an organization like Colgate who already has a established e-commerce team or Center of Excellence.Diana:I definitely feel like I came to the land of the willing. Everyone, from the top down, is really excited and energized by the space. And that it's energizing, but it also means you have to redirect all of those good intentions and positive energy to the right focus and the right goal. So, some of the work when you're in a more established organization is really, how do I harness all of those resources when they are abundant? And make sure they're spent in the right places and they deliver. Because there's going to come a time where leadership is going to look back on that cash that they threw in e-commerce, and they're going to say, "What did I get for it?" And you better have delivered on it.Diana:I think the other piece is making sure you understand how to integrate across the organization. It's important to have a strong center, but it's even more important to make sure everybody understands the role that they play in digital, in e-commerce regardless of if they're on the badass teams like the Hives of the world.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean the one thing I hear a lot of brands struggling with though are around metrics. I mean from working at bigger companies in the past, I've seen people kind of come up with KPIs in a way that, it's kind of made up. Stephanie:So, when thinking about big and small brands thinking through like KPIs and metrics, feels like kind of a messy world where when you get to the bigger organizations, some of them can start to feel like they're just kind of being forced. Like, "Oh, see, we have it. And if you look in three years, maybe it's like not even relevant. And then the smaller companies are like, "Well, how do we even start?"Stephanie:And so, I'm wondering, how do you go about even thinking about developing KPIs, thinking about brand building, thinking about conversions. Is there some kind of allocation you had going into it of like, "Here's what should be spent on just holding down the fort, and here's what should be spent on acquiring new customers and thinking through the LTV and everything."Diana:For me, that's a marriage between two points. It's the external data and viewpoint. So, where do you have an actual right to win? Where are the white space opportunities? And where are their growth that you're not getting your fair share of? Really understanding that industry landscape is really critical to forming your strategy.Diana:What you want to avoid is just forming a strategy that's based off of internal goals and objectives, because you may not be able to deliver against that. It's a marriage between the two. Then, it's getting really clear internally on what winning looks like. There is a high cost to acquisition, but there also is a huge penalty if you don't ride the momentum and the wave of growth while it's happening.Diana:I use Skype and Zoom during the pandemic as an example of that. Skype had a foothold on the industry. Zoom came in out of nowhere and won the pandemic. You don't want to be Skype. So, how do you ensure that you position yourself and your brands, so you not only understand what the CEO and the board wants you to deliver, but also you're pushing on what are the right levers in order to get there? Because your brick and mortar business is not going to mirror your e-commerce business. It's going to be slightly different.Diana:And then you have to understand those points where there's intersection. So, right now, we're seeing growth across all modalities or modes of shopping. So, there is this real digital impact on the physical brick and mortar footprint. And the onus is on the digital commerce team to make sure they understand what that impact can do, and they're not only influencing the KPIs that drive e-commerce, but they're helping the brick and mortar business understand the KPIs they need to maintain competitive edge. But also to hold their shelf space, their promo space, and their capacity within the total retailer environment.Mike:Yeah. Just to build on what Diana said. I've noticed a shift just in vocabulary and positioning in the last probably three months with e-commerce leaders. They used to really talk about e-commerce as e-commerce, and it was really about winning in that channel. And I've noticed this language shift towards now repositioning around this idea of digitally influenced sale, and taking credit for all the work that you do online that drive sales.Mike:And you think about it, most, and it's true. Most shopping experiences are happening much… Even if you go in a store, you're researching online, you're looking at content. You're doing a search to see if it's even available at your local Target. And what comes up in that digital experience is going to dictate whether you go to that store or not. So, it's just so much more impact that I think goes into your e-commerce that I don't think e-commerce leaders were really fairly taken credit for. But I noticed this, Diana, you probably… And it sounds like you're starting to speak this languages.Mike:It's like almost every sale is digitally influenced now. And so, that investment, I think it breaks down the barriers between the brick and mortar teams when they start to realize that their success isn't independent. It isn't just e-commerce and I don't have to care about it. Actually, will have a full cycle, and you see some retailers, really, I believe the sticking point comes when you have a retailer like Walmart who starts to say, "Hey, you have to talk to me in the language of omnichannel."Mike:And now, when they set that tone and being as influential as you are, I see them starting to drive this different consensus. So, I think the metrics have changed in some ways, the language has changed and I think we're starting to reframe that it isn't just e-commerce, but just commerce now. And I think that's going a long way.Stephanie:Yeah. That is why we label the podcast, Up Next in Commerce, because we knew, we saw the writing on the wall, so just several notes, we were first. So, how are you going about even thinking about that tracking? I mean if you're saying a sale is digitally influenced, in my head I'm like, "How? How would you even know that?" So, what are some ways, either Mike that you see brands kind of attacking that problem or Diana, how's Colgate thinking about that?Diana:Mike, you got this one. This is your [crosstalk].Mike:Yeah. I'd say like basically, I mean the way that we think about your metrics really goes down to the levers, right? The levers that influence your sales in e-commerce, really comes down to like three basics. And there's some, the one is the first lever. Most important is that you're available. So, that your product is even listed and it's not out of stock. That was a major issue last year, and a lot of brands are still feeling that repercussion, and that has a lot of impact.Mike:So, if you go to Amazon, and you're looking for a particular product, it's not there. You better believe consumers are going to switch, and we saw that switching, and that switching is very painful online, because the loyalty can go, and then you don't have that repeat. So, first and foremost you think about, "Okay, we got to be available." It's just like being in store. You got to have the product there on the shelf.Mike:Then, the next big lever is being findable. And that's what's really interesting, when you're in a traditional store, you walk into a store, you knew that your product, you sold it in at the beginning of the year, the planogram. That, yeah, your product was going to be on the shelf, and they're just going to replace it. But in the digital store that changes every day, and we've done like 24-hour video views of search results on Amazon, and the products are just changing constantly shifting.Mike:And so, findability is really being keen to what terms your customers going to search for, and then being there all the time in the top of the results, and we have seen that if you're not on page one, and sometimes not even in page, in the first five spots, you might as well not even be there, because you're not findable. So, that's like your second lever.Mike:And then your third is really about your conversion levers. Having that content and having those reviews, and that's probably one of the most transferable things between the online and the offline experience, because there's so much discovery and learning and research is being done, and that's one of the things that Amazon has done a great job and recognized, they've given consumers so much real estate, so much space. Places for videos, place for content.Mike:And I think most of us, if we're going to look for a new product, we're going to start on Amazon. We're going to soak in that information and make informed decisions. So, if you look at it, it's all right. Well, my end game has got to be available. I got to be findable, showing them a search. I have to have good content. And then if those things are true, you start to gather metrics, and that's actually what Profitero is doing is we're able to help brands understand across all the sites you're selling. Are they available? Are they findable? Are they converting? And ultimately what we know is if you pull those levers, and you optimize those levers, your sales are going to grow, and you're going to outpace the competition.Mike:And to Diana's point, the very, very important thing that grounds all this is having a sense of your competitive growth, because you need to be able to define, like Diana said, not define success in your own terms. But you have to be able to see how your competitors are growing in that category, and if you look at 2020, everybody grew, pat yourself on the back. But if you knew that your competitor grew at like 2x or 3x, that's a wake-up call, there's something you're not doing that they're doing. And so, it's really important that you balance those tactical levers of the shelf with just this overall having sales metrics and not just looking at your own. And these are all data points that are now available through technology and Diana can speak about how they're actioned.Diana:Yeah. I would say the digital commerce starter kit is definitely, first and foremost, digital shelf health and discipline. That's a game changer. If you're not winning there, and you're not going to win, we spend so much time as marketers really focusing on our packaging and understanding the importance and the value of packaging.Diana:Well, in this new world, the digital shelf is your new packaging. It's your new end cap. It's your new aisle. So, how do you think about digital shelf and the discipline there really is going to translate into your competitive set, because now consumers can define what that competitor set is. It's going to really define your conversion rates. Does your content help consumers really understand how to use your product?Diana:And it's also going to impact your ratings and reviews. Does your content enable your consumers to have the experience that they're expecting when they see you online? So, it really does fuel all of the potential for your growth. And I said once you have that starter kit up and running, then you really have to take a step back, and think about, what are the other KPIs? We tend to really focus on marketing and sales when it comes to digital commerce. But this game is won and lost with supply chain, IT, and finance.Diana:So, starting back with supply chain, IT, and finance and setting yourself up to be profitable, to be deliverable, and to be flexible is really how you can break away from the pack.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. What are some surprises? And maybe Mike this is a question for you. What are some surprising platforms or channels when you're talking about, everyone did well, but some brands maybe did double or triple compared to other ones? What are some surprises there that you're seeing or things that are happening right now, you're like, "This platform's kind of popping up or people are pulling off of this one?"Mike:Yeah. Well, just specifically in terms of platforms, I think, well, in terms of like retail platforms, I think part of it is I think last year was really about the relevance of certain platforms jumped up. So, I think most brands that took e-commerce seriously, took Amazon very seriously from the get-go, I think last year Instacart became the platform that everyone's, especially in CPG space said, "Okay, this is serious now." People were going there first and foremost, it was a lifeline in terms of getting delivery.Mike:And suddenly now, what that creates is an opportunity to be first in market. And I think there's an advantage with any platform to be the first mover, and there's reasons why. Amazon's a good example of a platform that favors brands that have good sales history. So, if you excelled, really, if you were like the first let's say pet brand a couple years ago to rock Amazon, what happened is that you were excelling at all your execution, your sales are going up, and you start to organically just get higher placement, because Amazon favors brands that are relevant.Mike:And so, if you're really selling, they're going to give you that top space. And you see that same dynamic in Instacart, and in grocery too, because what happens is on a grocery site, people usually buy groceries off a list. And so, the first time they place orders on an Instacart or grocery, they're building their list. And then the next time it's a reordered list. So, there's a huge advantage to be a first mover on a platform and to build that purchase history, because it drives your repeat rates.Mike:And so, what we saw last year was just a lot of brands stepping up, and saying, "You know what? We're going to capitalize this. We're going to be early. We're going to invest in ads. You were going to get it, get that top of mind share." And I think they're going to reap the rewards now for the rest of year. So, you can look at it from a platform perspective, sometimes being first to market on these platforms, taking e-commerce seriously can give you a long-term sustainable advantage.Stephanie:I wonder if consumers are changing because of this past year or two, it seems like consumers are looking for the newer thing, the D2C company that's kind of like just saw it on Instagram. I feel like even myself, I go to Amazon, I see a lot of brands that I know. I'm kind of like, "Ah, keep scrolling." I've known of these brands for 10 years. Of course, they're number one. They've been around a long time. Let me find this deodorant that just popped up. Oh, cool. It's natural. It has all the things that I want, but it might be pretty far down or I'm even getting to a place where I'm kind of skeptical that Amazon might not even have it. And I might just need to go to the website or maybe go to, I don't know, Target and browse through and try and find it. What are you guys thinking around that?Diana:I love everything that you're saying there, but the insights background in me is super excited around the fact that we all went through a life change at the same time. So, if you think about that, typically, when you have a baby, your consideration set changes, your lifestyle changes, which are open too. New households with second babies tend to buy a washing machine within that first week that they bring that baby home, because they're like, "Crap, I'm not dealing with all this laundry on my own."Diana:But we all went through that change, collectively had a baby at once and changed how we operate, how we think, what we're open to, what our consideration set is. So, insights teams out there should be real hype right now, because it's an opportunity for them to really take a deep dive in and rethink brand positioning and audiences. So, exactly what you're talking about, people are more open or more exposed or they realize how connected they are to certain brands, and then they were willing to go direct to that brand to purchase those items to ensure that they were getting, and they're going to sign up for subscription because they're not going to be out of that brand like they were, toilet paper, those first few weeks of the pandemic.Diana:So, I think it's a huge opportunity for brands to really think through, really around who your audience is, your target audience is? Are you capturing them? So, this is your defense strategy. Am I getting them? They're switching from platform to platform. I was getting them when they were going in the brick and mortar store, am I getting them when they're going into Instacart? Is my item showing up? So, making sure you're getting that first basket because the first basket is everything.Diana:Then, there should be a real acquisition strategy. Who do I have the right to go after because now they're open to me, they're open to my brand or they're open to new things and ideas? And that's where brands can really leverage their suite of their portfolio to really drive that cross shop. So, I think this is a huge opportunity if brands jump on it to really connect with consumers. I never used to work out before the pandemic, but then when I was stuck at home, in the same room that I sleep in, and then working in. I was like, "Well, I need to do something."Diana:Peloton got me. I don't like working out. I like the community. I like the gamification. I want to pretend that I'm one of their instructors with the jewelry on and super cool. And I'm not, so they totally got me. And now I'm working out three days a week. That's a whole habit that I never had before, and so it's just ripe for opportunities for brands to not only grow within their traditional channels, but to acquire new consumers in new channels.Stephanie:Yeah.Mike:Yeah. Just to build on that. There's no single consumer anymore, and there's no single retailer. I think there's, me personally in my own house, takes… We shop at eight different retailers to stock our house now online. There's certain things that Target does well, there's certain things Amazon does well. There's certain missions, when I'm in discovery mode like you described, yeah. When I want to go find something and be inspired, I might look at Amazon.Mike:When I have a mission where I just need to stock up, I might go to Walmart. I might go to BJ's or Costco. So, what's really interesting and what's really challenging is you can't just… The brands that are going to win are the ones that can do this well at scale effectively. They recognize that their consumer is everywhere, that they're shopping for different, in different occasions. Convenience, different factors, and they realize like you have to be everywhere, you want to be available and you want to show up.Mike:And I think that's the next play, and that's what makes omnichannel really exciting is you have those brands that maybe nailed Amazon, and they're comfortable, but the next level of this game is, all right, now we have to operationalize this at scale across all our retailers teams, and those brands that are on top of that in making those driving that change, internally to be there everywhere. Those are going to be the ones are going to pick up that market share in the next year, and next two years.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean how do you think about for brands needing to be everywhere? I mean I'm thinking about like you said, the shopper, when I'm at Costco, I'm in a different mindset. And I might want to see a slightly different version of a product whereas when I'm on Amazon or when I'm in Target which feels higher end maybe than a Walmart. How would you think about a brand should handle that now that they have to be everywhere, but also have very different consumers everywhere in a different mindset depending on where they're shopping?Diana:I mean that's where portfolio roles and retailers segmentations really come into play. It's not the sexy work, but it's the work that has to be done. And it can't just be done at a very high level anymore, it really has to be done at the SKU level, because there are some multi-packs they're going to pop in certain modalities at certain retailers, there's some SKUs that just have a better fit. The brand teams that are able to really get that portfolio role and customer segmentation right are going to be able to invest to win, because as retail media costs grow, the cost of service grow, dollars, that bucket of dollars hasn't gotten any bigger. So, it's about being smarter about how and where you invest and really thinking thoroughly through how what you're expecting to get from that dollar.Diana:So, sometimes it's going to be a ROAS, sometimes it's going to be data, sometimes it's going to be something else. But really having clear business objectives for every dollar that's spent.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. Mike, anything to add?Mike:Yeah. No. I think, Diana, like portfolio strategy is it's funny like there's been this like sea change I think when early stages of e-commerce or at least my observation, there's so much excitement that you get the marketing teams are just spending dollars, right? It's about growth. We're just going to buy some ads. And then all of a sudden, you see this diminishing returns. All of a sudden the things you were spending ads on, oh, they're always out of stock or they're getting de-listed.Mike:And that's a symptom and really it's like this idea, and you mentioned Diana, it's like marketing and supply chain are the best friends in the e-commerce. It's a weird thing because I'm a marketer, and you think, but it has to be because unless… You almost have to flip the funnel. And I thought it's like you got traffic, you get conversion. And then you get to like profitability. You have to flip it. And I think that's the flip now is thinking about your portfolio from consumer dimension, profitability dimension across your retailers. If you don't set those clear lines up, you don't set that definition up, this has a downstream effect.Mike:And you see this a lot on retailers where it's like, "Okay. Well, I have the same products everywhere, so what happens?" Well, if Walmart drops the price, Amazon drops prices and suddenly that thing that you're spending ad dollars on, you can't even, it's not even there. So, I think this is like the next generation is like almost like, "All right, let's break it back. Let's work backwards now. Let's start fresh, and let's build that from the portfolio."Mike:And then, once we make that clean, we're just going to see this uplift and our cost to serve, our cost of marketing is going to be super-efficient versus just throwing dollars at it without a strategy.Diana:That's not just for the manufacturers. I also feel really strongly that that benefits the retailers. They don't want to comp prices back and forth. They want a unique value proposition for their consumers. So, how can you help the retailers achieve their objectives? If Kroger's going after young households, and young families, what's your solution to help them go after them? If Target's going after the black consumer, how are you helping them capture as many black guests as possible? How are you really thinking about not only the strategy, so it benefits you, so it also really does align with your retailer strategy?Diana:That's how you create a win-win scenario, and you avoid the competitive pricing pressures that we're all experiencing right now.Stephanie:Yeah. How do you find a good partnership with these retailers? Because I'm sure when they have so many brands they're working with and everyone probably wants to talk with them a little bit differently, and they have different ways that they want to help them or work with them, how do you think a successful partnership looks like or what does that structure look like?Diana:I think this is why the digital commerce space has to exist in this kind of hybrid world, because I feel like marketers take a really consumer human first mindset. Sales people tend to be very like sales for sales focus. In the middle you have to be this hybrid. I do take a customer first approach to an extent because you have to understand your customer strategies. Target's earnings call just came out this week or last week, and they talked about how 90% of all their sale is digital or physical are coming from stores.Diana:That's an insight for me to strategy. So, if I want to win at Target, I've got to understand how they tick, how they operate, and how I can help support their strategies, and their executions. So, it's really that intersection between, what our brand teams are trying to accomplish? Our sales teams targets, and our retailer strategies, and where we can actually play.Diana:From a Colgate-Palmolive perspective, I'm not going to be able to help them win in every single element of their strategy. But there are areas that I am going to be able to help them lead or give them a perspective that can influence other sections. And I think the more and more we play those roles, the more valuable that you show up to a retailer, the more inclined they are to partner with you.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean I feel like that's a life principle. You just did your research on the brand, the company, you looked at their investor reports, you look into the background of the people, and instantly they're like, "Oh, you kind of already know that I don't have to bring you up to here, you're already here." So, now we can get going, which is awesome.Diana:Basically all can be boiled down to the same dynamics of the dating relationship. Sometimes you go to the sporting event because your significant other likes it, and then sometimes they go to the thing that you want because you like it. And then if you have a mixture of alcohol and sports, you got me. So, there you go.Stephanie:I love that. I love that. Cool. Well, the one thing I want to kind of touch on too is around the world of marketing right now. So, I've talked with some brands that have had to kind of always work in a scrappy mindset. One of them was Anheuser-Busch where they're like, "Yeah. We can't ever have this one-to-one relationship. We always have to do other things to be able to reach our customers because we actually can't directly talk to them."Stephanie:And it makes me think brands like that might be pretty far ahead with all these changes to ads and privacy and retargeting and all that. What are you guys thinking is kind of like what are brands missing right now? What should they be doing to continue to have a close relationship with their customers and not lose out when they lose access to a big ad pull that maybe they're not going to have anymore?Diana:For me, I think it's a balance. I think you have to think about your consumer touch points across the board. Everyone's talking about the cookieless environment that's looming. We're all hoarding data. But I don't know how actionable everyone's making it. So, I think it's really around taking a step back and what's your learning agenda.Diana:You want to connect with consumers, but what's the value proposition for them? What's the benefit? And I think brands really have to think about and understand, if I'm connecting with consumers, what value am I providing them? And why should they give me their information? Why should they want to connect and engage with me? And if you haven't established that, then you haven't earned the right to have their information or their contact, because it really is all around creating a delightful experience for them.Diana:I think understanding all of the data inputs that you have and really thinking hard around, how do you leverage them to feed strategies, not with just within the silos of the space? But how do you integrate them so you're feeding your traditional media strategy with your D2 insights? You're feeding your supply chain strategy with some of the ratings and reviews that you found, even your R&D innovation.Diana:So, it's really around being mindful and thoughtful about all the touch points that you have and being able to action against them. But I think for most retailers and manufacturers, if you don't have a strategy to think about how you're going to leverage your data, and you haven't, you're going to miss the boat, because everybody's gearing up, and it's what's happening now if you want to stay ahead going forward.Mike:Yeah. And just to build on that. I think totally it depends on the consumer and what's relevant. But I mean generally, I think what I'm seeing from some brands a little bit of higher level thinking in terms of how they're engaging with consumers, even on social media. I noticed there was a time period where I would go on Instagram and I saw these ads. They're very tactical. There's just like these product ads like, "Okay, buy this widget, buy this thing."Mike:And you still see these display ads, but then I've seen a lot more ads are just more, they're helpful, their content. I'm a pet owner and I wasn't going through my feed and I saw those, it was an ad, but it was from a pet company, and it was really supposed to be like how do you, what are the attributes of a healthy pet? It was kind of an interesting, intrigued me. I have an aging pet, so I just think there's a lot more creativity, you can't… I think it's easy in e-commerce to get very operational, but you can't underestimate the power of creative and how important creative is.Mike:And I think there's a lot of brands that I've seen challenger brands that are leveraging humorous videos. They're really doing things viral on YouTube, they're building a personality around their brand. They're getting up on TikTok. They're leveraging every touch point they can at the top of the funnel to build, to be creative, to stand out. And now what that's doing for them is now they're training consumers to go to Amazon and type their branded, not type a general category keyword.Mike:So, I think what's happening is the mediums are changing, maybe it's not television maybe it's not that, but there's so many more tools for marketers and very agile to still tell stories. And so, I think storytelling is going to be, has always been important. And I think that brands that are going to invest in that and make sure that they're using all these other new platforms these video platforms are going to really be well positioned for the long term.Diana:Yeah. And I think what I heard from you too is this authenticity. And what consumers are really looking for because I feel like now especially within Instagram, people want to be sold to, to an extent, but they want to be sold to for me. I want you to understand who I am, what I want to see and deliver it to me the way that I want to." But I think people are also really looking for real content. So, a lot of the slick and shiny campaigns that work on TV, are not going to work in social. So, really understanding who your consumer is and how to speak to them in an authentic way. But also be able to convert them in three seconds or less.Diana:So, how do you make that from something content, how do you really think about making it real? Especially if you're talking to Gen Z, how do you talk to them so it feels like they're talking to their peer group in a very authentic way? Is really critical. And then, how do you make it every single touch point the opportunity for consumers to buy? Because the funnel as we know it, has really collapsed in a lot of places and consumers are coming in and out as they choose, and if you're not able to make your social shoppable. Then, you're really going to miss a lot of opportunities to drive conversion and acquire new audiences.Stephanie:Yeah. And I love the idea around storytelling. I mean that's kind of what our whole company's been built around is like this is what humans look for. And I think there's this really big opportunity in companies that have been around for a long time, like Colgate-Palmolive. I think since 1806, the story behind that maybe has not really been around of like, how was it founded?Stephanie:I mean we had on UPS the other day, and we were kind of going through the history of UPS. I'm like, "Whoa. They need to talk about this more." I mean founded by like a 19-year-old guy, and here's how like it even started with this bike delivery. They were on their bikes delivering things, and what it is today and all the pivots they've had to go through. And I think kind of getting back to those storytelling routes, especially for the more historical brands not only will kind of… I mean people want to hear those stories. I just don't think big brands tell it enough in a way that connects with people now.Mike:Colgate was the original startup.Stephanie:See?Mike:Right?Stephanie:This is what I want. This is the connection I need.Mike:1800 startup brand, right? That's a challenging brand.Diana:Well, you talk about purpose driven brands. I do think a lot of these more established CPTs don't really know how to tell that story. I think there was a time period and several years ago when like it was just something you didn't do, and if I look back on all the organizations I worked at that do a lot of good for the communities in which they serve, that wasn't the story that you told. It wasn't like the thing. But now people are expecting brands to have a purpose, and they are using their dollars to determine if that purpose is worthy or not.Diana:So, if you're not talking about it, then you're not going to get those dollars. And Gen Z is not having it at all. They expect you to stand up and not just talk the talk, they want to see you walk the walk and they also want to see what your executive leadership team looks like.Diana:And I think consumers are also expecting the role of big corporations has shifted. How are you making this world better? How are you involved in social justice? What is your role? I'm super proud of Colgate for launching a recyclable toothpaste tube that then they gave the technology to everybody in the industry, so now everyone can do it. Those are the type of we're here for the good of the planet, we're here for the good of society, and we're going to be good corporate citizens and contribute to that. That's what the consumers want, and those are the stories that larger CPGs have to start telling.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. So, when thinking about, earlier we're mentioning like you kind of have to be everywhere. And one thing that I also wanted to get into was all around agencies. We've had on amazing companies, one, was this company avocados from Mexico, and they talked about we've been like the number two or three commercial in the Super Bowl, and we have all these crazy things that we do that really drive, not only conversions, but awareness of our brand and they're selling avocados.Stephanie:They said our agencies are the ones that really, we vet them. They're amazing. They helped us get here, and I'd love to hear your take on, in a world where you have to be everywhere, how do you find agencies to work with that'll help get you there?Diana:For me, I've worked with so many great agencies along the way. And what I found is for me agencies are always an extension of my team. I'm expecting them to push us to make us better. I also really want to empower them to bring us awesome, creative, and make us feel really uncomfortable, because that's when you know you're onto something, especially when your boardroom feels really uncomfortable. That's when you know you're really onto something.Diana:But I think in this new digital commerce age, it's important to have an integrated agency model, because there are different agencies that are good and serve a purpose for different things. You do need those major creative campaigns, and yes, the Super Bowl is still important to some brands, but there's kind of the day-to-day operations, and also the ability to really think about digital commerce and the integration with shopper marketing and understanding how different retailer dynamics works, and how to leverage the data that's critical.Diana:So, agencies that not only know media, but know performance marketing but also understand retailers are really going to rise to the top right now, especially as more and more media dollars are shifting to retail media. Now those agencies that can work together, so from the big campaign to the Super Bowl ad and bring it all the way back to the Kroger, the Walmart, or the Target. Now that is just perfect.Mike:Yeah. I mean agencies from my point of view are, they are an extension and what they're often doing is they're acting on the data and insights that maybe a e-commerce team isn't equipped to act on yet. And so, I think the best agencies are the ones that make data their differentiation. So, for example, you could have a handful of agencies are all really good at spending your ad dollars. But there will be a select few agencies that know how to get that extra edge from some data, maybe it's incorporating some out of stock data or competitive search data, and you want to find those agencies are always pushing the boundary for you.Mike:They're not just managing on the basic models of ROAS, but they're actually looking at, what are these new things we could do? A test and learn, how do we advanced your ROI? Actually show that the ads are growing market share. How can they use data? And I think that's going to be a big differentiator, especially since digital shelf data, e-commerce data, it's still new for a lot. But I think you're going to see the separation where you find these agencies that are data-led, data centric, and I think there's a huge opportunity. To Diana's point, where first wave of digital agencies were very Amazon focused. There's such a huge gap in skill set right now in like the traditional shopper marketing for digital commerce that I think agency are perfect position to start becoming your extension of your Walmart, your Walmart digital operators, your Target.Mike:I think that's where you're going to see a lot of agencies flourish is where the maturity to actually pull those levers still isn't there. They can come in and be leaders. So, I look at agency on two dimensions who is really driving digital data driven decisions, who are ones that I can really scale with beyond just the Amazons but into that next tier flywheel that I want to go. Who's going to lead me there, lead my thinking, and help me be the market share leader on that next platform?Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. Are there any tests that you do when hiring agencies that you're like, "This will let me know if you're what I need, if you're well-rounded, if you can kind of plug in with other agencies and cover everything?"Mike:Well, we work with a lot of agencies. We don't hire them but we partner with them. So, one of the things that we do when we… We've tried to build an ecosystem at Profitero of like-minded agencies that are data-led. And one of the things that we're trying to do is make our data accessible to all these agencies to be able to do things. So, what I've seen is agencies that are really going to, that show the most promise is the ability to be willing to do some test and learn stuff, to pick up some data points from the digital shelf and say, "Hey, we're going to try this."Mike:We're going to say instead of just putting our ad dollars across every product spread it evenly on Amazon, we're going to actually shift and we're going to stop spending on the products that aren't converting well, and we're going to shift it to these products that are converting well. We're just going to shift it up and we're going to try to see what happens. So, for me, for my perspective the agencies that we've been vetting and really partnering with and saying that these are best of class are the ones that are showing that competency and that ability just to try some different things and experiment and find a model that they can repeat.Diana:Yeah. I would say when I think about it from a digital commerce perspective, especially from retail media. I'm really looking for an agency that not only understands media, but they also understand the impact on sales. So, if you think about Amazon and getting the flywheel going, if you're pushing ROAS, if you're pushing certain levers that impacts your profitability, it impacts a lot of your negotiation power with Amazon. So, you need to be able to keep your ROAS to where it needs to be in your other traditional media KPIs while keeping top line going, which can be expensive.Diana:So, that's very critical. So, having somebody that understands that. Also, someone that understands the nuances and the inner workings of Walmart from a media perspective but also that my sales team then needs to go to a buyer or a DMM and sell this program in, to not only get more, whether it's more displays or get them engaged and excited about it. But it's not just a pure media place. So, an agency that understands that from a digital commerce perspective is really critical.Diana:Then, when it comes to more of our traditional content and execution, I like to do what I call media to shelf. So, regardless of who the partner is and most agencies can do this. It's how you can integrate and work with other agencies. So, the idea can come from either side, either the traditional creative agency, the digital commerce agency, the shopper agency. But how do you take the lane that you play in and make the concept work across all? So, how do you take that idea and make it so much bigger? Because our funding models are not changing, our buckets are not getting any bigger. So, we have to make every dollar work harder.Diana:So, I need a traditional media plan that not only drives awareness, but also can pull through to the digital or physical shelf. And I would say a measure of good traditional agency, for me, it's make or break by the creative director. They really do enable the work to either deliver on the brief or exceed our expectations and deliver on our business objective.Stephanie:Yeah. Love that. All really good points. All right, with a couple minutes left, I want to shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce commerce cloud. This is where I have a question, and you have one minute or less to answer. Are you ready? And I'll just kind of go back. Both have to answer the same question, so.Diana:Oh, boy.Stephanie:All right. Diana, you first. What's one thing you don't understand today that you wish you did?Diana:I don't understand why sales and marketing are so separate. I wish I could understand why each side didn't understand the other, but hopefully one day, we will be able to create, take the healthy tension and build a stronger digital commerce organization as a result.Stephanie:I love that. You and a lot of other companies, so. All right, Mike.Mike:Bitcoin.Stephanie:All right. You haven't even looked into it yet? I feel like now's the time to get in.Mike:I've tried and I get so confused, but I just have this fear. I have this waving fear of missing out, but then I realized that people are losing a lot of money too. I just don't understand how it works.Diana:I want to do over.Stephanie:I liked yours. What? You want to do over, Diana?Diana:I want a do over. You know what I don't understand? Why can't we have side parts anymore? I don't understand that. I like the side part. It fits my face frame. Why is that not cool anymore?Stephanie:Man, I feel like we can have more. Let's just stay on this question, so many things. All right. Next one. Something wise my elders taught me. Mike, you first.Mike:Something wise my elders taught me. Man, sorry. I totally blanked on that one. So, can you ask that question again?Stephanie:Yeah. Something wise my elders taught me.Mike:Yeah. I'd say that really it was hard work. That just sounds kind of lame. But I learned pretty early that no one's going to give you anything in this world, and you have to work really hard, and my dad was one of the hardest working people I know. He was an auto body worker and put in a lot of hours and really kind of like taught me this blue collar approach that I try to bring to my work. I love working. I've always learned to work hard and I try to always ground myself in that work ethic whatever I do. So, that's something that my elders taught me.Stephanie:I love that. All right. Diana, you're up.Diana:So, for me, I'm a black woman in America and a first generation from Caribbean parents, so it's really about using my voice and my power to have the courage to make space for people who look like me or people who don't have their voices heard. So, I'm really grateful for having parents, but also ancestors that taught me and showed me how to do that. YStephanie:Yeah. I love that. All right. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be? Diana, you're up.Diana:Oh, shoes.Stephanie:A podcast on shoes?Diana:Yeah. My podcast would be on shoes and it would be Sarah Jessica Parker.Stephanie:My space right-Diana:It would really just be for me and a way to get new shoes.Stephanie:I'm so confused.Diana:Literally the whole angle of the podcast would be to get free shoes.Stephanie:Just need shoes. [crosstalk]. Okay. Who would your first guest be?Diana:Sarah Jessica Parker.Stephanie:Okay. I love it. All right. Mike, you can't top that one, but if you want to try, what would your podcast be about and who would your first guest be?Mike:Cannabis.Stephanie:Okay.Mike:And it would be probably, I don't know, Willie Nelson.Stephanie:What would you guys be talking about or would you [crosstalk]-Mike:I'm fascinated by the business of cannabis. So, it's something that I've studied for a while. I started to do a little bit of research on it back in Nielsen, and this was like way ahead. But I'm fascinated by how an industry can just go so mainstream. How can one part be so regulated, then all of a sudden go mainstream? And I'm fascinated by brand building in that space and how brands are building, and even like huge bevel companies are getting in this space now. So, we're like fascinated about the entrepreneurs in that space, the ecosystem of that space, and if I had a separate podcast that was totally unrelated to anything I did, it would be about that, because I think that's like, that and Bitcoin, those are two booming things right now.Stephanie:You could just blend them all together.Mike:Yeah. Right.Stephanie:I thought you would say you would be in it for the free weed. Yeah. Give me free weed.Mike:Samples, yeah.Stephanie:Diana's shoes.Diana:Yeah.Stephanie:Lobby sitting pretty.Mike:Right.Stephanie:So, I'll send you Bitcoin for the first time, and then you'll have to go deep into the wormhole.Mike:Yeah. I'm really opening my heart on this podcast.Stephanie:That is why you're here. That's why you're here. All right. And then, the last one. I want to know how you guys stay on top of your industry. So, maybe, Mike, you first. What are you reading? Newsletters? Is it books, podcasts? What do you do?Mike:LinkedIn. I basically follow a set of people. On LinkedIn there's a group of about 15 to 20 people that I just trust that curate. They curate on a regular basis all the breaking news that I could just go to LinkedIn and I know that at any given moment, I'm going to find something that's really interesting on a different perspective. Yeah. That's my go-to. I wake up in the morning and look at LinkedIn. And then I think about, "Okay, what could I do to add value to LinkedIn that day?"Mike:And LinkedIn has become one of these like platforms that I managed my life around. I never thought it would be like that. But it's become like a valuable news source for me.Stephanie:That's awesome. All right. Diana, how about you? How do you stay on top of everything?Diana:For me, I'm fueled by curiosity. So, similar to Mike, I'm on LinkedIn. He's in my top 20 list of people that I follow that I get content from. I listen to a ton of podcasts, this one also. I am an avid reader of papers and research. So, whether it's from Kantar, Profitero, [inaudible], Edge, you name it, you've got to stay on top of it.Diana:And then it's really about networking. So, I have this mantra like I'll say yes. So, if somebody invites me to a round table, I'm going to go. If it's a bad experience I don't go back. But like I found this small community of e-commerce and digital commerce folks that I can just call or text or get information from. And a really cool thing that a bunch of women in e-com started is basically women of e-commerce, and it's a group of 25 of us, and we connect on a regular basis. But we also bought, each brought in a mentee. So, it's just ripe for learning, and Sarah Hofstetter, the president of Profitero is one of the members as well. But it's just such a great place to feed my curiosity.Stephanie:I love that. I see only more of that happening, these micro groups popping up. I know that that was something that I started experiencing here which is like women all being part of like a group text, which I was like, "Is this going to be too much?" And now, I'm like, "This is the best text thread I've ever been in." And it probably wouldn't have happened prior to this past year or two. That's amazing.Stephanie:Well, Mike, Diana, this has been such a fun round table. We'll definitely have to have you back for round two, because I'm sure a lot will change quick in a matter of months. But where can people find out more about you? Mike, maybe let's start with you.Mike:LinkedIn.Stephanie:Of course. And then, you just go to Diana [crosstalk]Mike:Yes. If you want to find me, you want to talk to me, that's the place to go. I'll be pretty responsive.Stephanie:Yes. All right. Diana.Diana:You can find me on LinkedIn as well.Stephanie:Cool. All right. Well, thank you guys so much for joining. It's been a pleasure having you.Diana:Thank you so much for having me.Mike:Thank you.

A recent Pew Research Center report pegged YouTube as the most popular and fastest-growing social media platform, reaching 81% of US adults in 2021 — up from 73% in 2019. And Gen-Z? 90% of them watch one or more videos on the platform every month!But, enrollment professionals have struggled to effectively use YouTube for student recruitment — and it's time that changes. On this week's episode of Fanatical Fridays, Zach offers a crash course on YouTube advertising for enrollment marketers. Tune in to the show to generate ideas and insight into how to leverage different ad formats and audience types to increase your school or program's brand awareness.Learn more about this episode and about our sponsors in our show notes.

Ellen Degeneres is ending her show after 19 seasons, and almost as many controversies. We’ve got new revelations about why former Bachelor Colton Underwood decided to come out. AND Gen Z is bringing Emo back. We’re breaking that down with Pauline Woodley. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com