Podcasts about before covid

On this Holiday weekend, we dig in the crates for a forgotten episode from the OGA Podcast days. Shout out to Tony from Shirt/Pod Caviar. As veterans, this is a top tier episode for Tony and I. Before Covid, before the AI, before the end times… there was The One Graham Army Podcast and Pod Caviar. Enjoy, Generals! Watch The Ministry Of Silly Talk On Youtube. Tweet

With Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Wealth.com Rafael Loureiro on why estate planning is shifting from a static legal exercise to an AI-powered, advisor-led planning process. In Summary Estate planning has traditionally operated outside the core advisor workflow—handled through attorneys, revisited infrequently, and often disconnected from the broader client relationship. Louis speaks with Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder and CEO of Wealth.com, about how AI is beginning to change that model. The conversation explores how advisors can use tools like Ester to surface planning gaps, stay ahead of client changes, and deliver a more continuous planning experience. For advisors, the broader implication is strategic: as investment management becomes increasingly commoditized, integrated planning and ongoing coordination may become a far more meaningful differentiator. The Storyline Most advisors already discuss estate planning with clients. The challenge is what happens next. In many cases, the process still moves outside the advisor relationship: clients are referred to an attorney, documents are created, and the estate plan becomes something revisited only after a major life event or liquidity event forces an update. Louis and Rafael explore why that structure is starting to break down. Rafael's own estate planning experience following the sale of Emailage to LexisNexis exposed how fragmented the process could feel, even for highly engaged clients working with sophisticated advisors. That experience ultimately became the foundation for Wealth.com and its AI-powered planning platform, Ester. The discussion focuses less on AI as a headline topic and more on how it changes advisor workflow in practice—from document interpretation and planning summaries to surfacing next actions and helping advisors stay proactively engaged as client circumstances evolve. For advisors thinking about the future of planning, the conversation raises a larger question: if financial planning itself becomes increasingly standardized, where does the next layer of differentiation come from? Topics Covered Continuous estate planning AI-powered advisor workflows com and Ester Advisor-led estate planning Family office-style client service Trust and estate attorney collaboration Estate planning for mass affluent clients AI agents in wealth management Dynasty Financial Partners integration Advisor differentiation beyond investment management > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why did Rafael decide to build Wealth.com? (06:04) Rafael explains how his own estate planning experience after a liquidity event exposed major disconnects between advisors, attorneys, and clients. Why did Wealth.com choose an advisor-led model instead of direct-to-consumer? (14:28) The platform was designed around the belief that advisors (not marketing campaigns) are best positioned to initiate estate planning conversations with clients. What does “continuous estate planning” actually mean? (20:13) Rafael describes a system where client life changes, tax events, and asset activity can trigger proactive advisor engagement rather than periodic document reviews. How does Ester move beyond document summarization? (32:30) The platform now identifies planning opportunities, prepares tasks and reports, and increasingly helps advisors automate portions of the planning workflow. Why are enterprise firms and large banks adopting platforms like Wealth.com? (24:57) Many firms were already producing estate planning summaries manually for ultra-high-net-worth clients. AI allows those capabilities to scale much more efficiently. How should advisors think about the role of trust and estate attorneys going forward? (26:50) Rafael argues that AI enhances – not replaces – the attorney relationship by improving efficiency and reserving more sophisticated matters for specialized legal expertise. What may differentiate advisory firms as planning becomes more commoditized? (38:02) The discussion points toward responsiveness, coordination, personalization, and deeper client integration as the next major competitive layer for advisors. Key Takeaways Rafael believes estate planning is shifting from a one-time legal exercise to a continuous planning process supported by AI and advisor engagement. Wealth.com was intentionally built as an advisor-first platform rather than a direct-to-consumer business. Ester's AI capabilities now extend beyond summarization into identifying planning gaps, surfacing opportunities, and preparing advisor workflows. Many firms are using estate planning as a way to deepen relationships and expand into more family-office-style service models. AI may allow advisors to serve more clients while maintaining a higher level of personalization and responsiveness. Trust and estate attorneys remain critical for complex situations, but AI can improve efficiency and help clients arrive better prepared. Advisors who fail to expand beyond investment management risk competing in an increasingly commoditized landscape. https://youtu.be/BDI6XbEz_4E Quotable Moments “When AI moves from simply organizing information to helping drive decisions, estate planning stops being a periodic task.” “Investment management is becoming table stakes. Financial planning is becoming table stakes.” “Why does it have to be that way? Now with AI, why can we not have continuous estate planning?” “It is the intangibles.” “My goal is to empower the advisor.” Related Resources Human Intelligence in the Age of AI: Why Recruiters Still MatterArtificial intelligence can analyze firms and deals. It can't replace the insight and advocacy that help advisors make the right move. The Future of Prospecting: How AI Is Powering the Next Era of Advisor GrowthFINNY Co-Founder Eden Ovadia shares how AI is transforming advisor prospecting: automating outreach, matching advisors with ideal clients, and freeing time for deeper human connection. A forward-looking conversation on what growth will look like in the next era of wealth management. Rafael LoureiroCo-Founder and CEO Rafael Loureiro is a technology entrepreneur and product-focused executive with more than 20 years of experience across startups, growth-stage companies, and Fortune 500 organizations. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Wealth.com, a leading estate and tax planning platform powered by proprietary AI and purpose-built for financial institutions. Under his leadership, Wealth.com has expanded into a comprehensive planning platform, embedding deterministic AI to deliver precise, auditable outcomes across estate and tax workflows. Prior to founding Wealth.com, Rafael served as Chief Technology Officer at Emailage, a global fraud prevention SaaS company acquired by RELX in 2020. He is a member of the Forbes Finance Council and has been recognized across the industry, including CEO of the Year honors and Forbes' Top AI Founders to Watch. Originally from France and raised in Brazil, Rafael now resides with his family in the Phoenix metro area. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com A conversation with Louis Diamond and Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com. It’s a conversation with Rafael Loureiro, the firm’s Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer. I’m Louis Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wire house, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned, and each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: In the wealth management world, estate planning has largely lived in a separate lane. It’s a topic advisors may raise with clients then hand off to an attorney and eventually a set of documents come back, filed away, rarely revisited, and often disconnected from the rest of the planning process. That structure has been in place for a long time and for the most part, it’s gotten unquestioned, but when you step back, it creates a gap between what do clients expect from their advisor and what actually gets delivered when it comes to estate planning. Rafael Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Wealth.com, ran straight into the gap after a planning event of his own which should have been a coordinated process, felt fragmented, manual, and surprisingly opaque. And likewise, I recall the same type of disjointed experience in my own estate planning process. It’s experiences like these that became the starting point for building Wealth.com. What makes this story interesting isn’t just that they’re using AI but how they’re using it inside the estate planning process, and it’s how AI allows the model itself to change from a one-time legal event to something that evolves alongside the client, from static documents to a system that can actually interpret, update, and surface what matters, from a disconnected handoff to something the advisor can actively lead. In my conversation with Rafael, we get into how that plays out in practice, how tools like Ester move from summarizing estate documents to identifying gaps, to prompting next steps, and eventually preparing action on behalf of the advisor, because when AI moves from simply organizing information to helping drive decisions, estate planning stops being a periodic task and starts to look more like a continuous part of the advice process. So let’s dive in. Rafael, thank you for coming on our show today. Rafael Loureiro: My pleasure, Louis. Thank you for having me here. Louis Diamond: Of course. Let’s jump in and in researching you and speaking to you in the past, I got to admit, you had a very different path into the wealth management industry probably than anyone I’ve ever interviewed. So can you walk us through your background briefly and early professional endeavors? Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. The accent that you hear is Brazilian. So I’ve been in the US for 25 years. I’m a software engineer by trade, came here as a HMB, been involved with different companies over the years and then most recently before Wealth.com. I was a chief technology officer with a fraud prevention company, nothing to do with wealth management, but by selling that company, it’s how the Wealth.com story started. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And I was referring to also some of your early career endeavors even before founding your last company, if you’re comfortable sharing that. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been involved with four different startups in different spaces. One of them was in, if you remember all the way back to 2008, the real estate prices, the first startup with foreclosures. So when houses went into foreclosures, me and my partner, we created a system to index that. I also had work on a photo album company. It became a lifetime business. It’s still running. I was the CTO and I did my share of consulting. I used to work for Accenture, Avanade, and then a home builder Fortune 500 companies. So I have a ton of experience in the technology space before Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And you mentioned the last business that you started that I believe sold to LexisNexis. Can you walk through what that business was? Rafael Loureiro: Yeah. So I did not start the business. I joined the business before Series A. The person that started the business, Rei Carvalho, he’s actually Wealth.com chairman. So the team is still together. The US, San Francisco, New York, offices in Sydney, Singapore, London. We serve clients like Coinbase, grew very fast and then got acquired by LexisNexis in 2020 during peak COVID. Think about, we literally signed the documents, popped the champagne on March 2020. No vaccine. Louis Diamond: Oh, my God. Rafael Loureiro: We literally popped the champagne and we all went back home to work from home because that was the guy that’s from LexisNexis. Through that experience, selling a company, one thing you usually do, it’s a big liquidity event and estate planning is always related to big moments. You get married, someone in your family die, you have a new kid, you have a liquidated event. So I work with a financial advisor. They’re amazing. They helped me with financial planning, wealth management, saved me a lot of money insurance. But when it was time to do the estate planning, Louis, my experience was, “Hey, Rafael, we always work with this lawyer, go talk to the lawyer.” And then it was a completely broken process. First, because it was COVID and I had to go see the lawyer face-to-face. That was weird right there. Second, because I was expecting the lawyer to know everything about me because my advisor knows everything about me, know about my life situation, know about liquid event, know about my kids, rental houses, everything and then the engineer. I know what I told the lawyer, but do I know for sure that everything I told the lawyer end up in the document? No, I don’t. Long story short, otherwise it is a long story, we’re having a virtual coffee. I don’t know if you remember everyone, big beard, long hair, everyone working from home, and then somehow all the Emailage C-level team and founders, the co-founders, we start complaining about state plan. Even another example, my chairman, the Wealth.com chairman, Emailage CEO, Rei Carvalho, he was like, “Hey, Rafael, I’m done with the summer heat in Arizona. I’m moving to Denver. I’m going for cooler weathers.” Literally the moment he moved to Denver, he gets a call from his estate planning lawyer, welcome him to Denver and saying, “Hey, we need to update your documents. “But I just spent thousands of dollars creating my documents.” “Yeah, but you live in a new state, you have to optimize your documents.” At that moment, Louis, we’re like, “Where there’s a problem, there is an opportunity,” and the company was born. Louis Diamond: I find the best company origin stories, it’s you have that, you have a personal experience or a moment where you have a realization that there’s a problem that you have that others might have as well, so let’s create a business around solving this problem. It was legitimately at that point, it wasn’t a long burn, we’re going to research, we’re really going to think about this, it was just all of the core team that was fortunate enough to have a big liquidity event were complaining and commiserating about a similar problem on estate planning and then that launched into, let’s build a company, let’s build a platform, a product to solve this problem? Rafael Loureiro: Yes and no. We saw the opportunity. We had just finished selling a company. It takes a lot from you and your family to create a company and to sell a company. Before we started a new company, we said, “Hey, look, we feel like there is something here, but let’s do the proper groundwork, make sure that the market is right, that there is a need that it’s not only us complaining about these.” I’m going to say that we spend a good three month, we have vision document together, doing a market research and then we got excited. Literally my wife who was not super excited in the beginning said, “You guys just sold a company. You’ve been racing 100 miles an hour for the last seven, eight years and you guys going to do this again.” But I love it. It’s part of my DNA. I love the challenge. I love to build and it is a big problem. When you look at the US market, 67% of the population don’t have estate planning. You have to ask yourself, why? Is that because it costs too much money? Is that because people don’t know enough about estate planning that they don’t do it? Is that because people don’t have to think about that? So the opportunity is there. We did the groundwork. We got the team together, at least some of our eight players. We went to Altus Capital, that’s the same venture firm that led the Emailage series B and we said, “Look, we have a vision, we have a team and we believe the market is ready for it. There is no dominant player and it is blue ocean.” And then they gave us the initial funding, them and my chairman, and then we went from having an idea to launching the product in May 2022. Louis Diamond: Wow, that’s amazing. Before we dive into the rapid growth and what the platform looks like, et cetera, can you just give us a quick overview of what Wealth.com looks like today? Who are you serving? Who are you selling to and where does it fit into an advisor’s value proposition or their advice stack, if you will? Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. So Wealth.com we empower financial advisors to provide a family office experience to their clients starting with estate planning and tax planning. What I’m trying to solve, Louis, is my situation. I want my financial advisor to be the hub of my needs. So if the need is financial planning, wealth management, insurance, estate planning, tax planning, I need my financial advisor to be aware of all these verticals, right? Because I know if something happens to one of us, my financial advisor is my person. He or she’s going to get my call from my wife and say, “Hey, am I all right?” I want to empower the financial advisor with all the tools to provide that family office experience to their client. So that’s first, we started by providing doc migration. So think of this, you are mass affluent client, between half a million dollars all the way to 10 million dollars. You don’t have your revocable trust, your will, your power of attorney, your advanced healthcare directive, your guardianship documents. We do that. We create those documents. You go to the workflow on the Wealth.com platform if you have an advisor, I need to make that clear, we’re not direct to consumer business. You have to have an advisor. So you go to that workflow and at the end of the workflow, you get the documents. Those are legally optimized, all the documents. The document you get in California is going to be completely different from the document you get in New York, from the document you get in Florida. I just want to make that point clear. What we noticed, Louis, working with these advisors is if you look at the average advisor, if you look at his or her book of business, 80% is mass affluent. So think lawyers, doctors, firemen, 20% high net worth. Usually the high net worth clients, ultra-high network clients, they already have the documents. They already paid $20,000 to have those documents draft and we were not doing anything for them. So in 2022, we had that light bulb moment even before LLMs. OpenAI launched in 2022, we actually used the Bertha model before OpenAI, but I know I’m digressing. Let me get back here. So I was not doing anything for these high net worth, ultra-high net worth clients. So we had this idea, what if we use AI to read their existing plans, all their grants, LATs, all this sophisticated irrevocable trust, connect to all their assets and then provide a summary of everything they have in place? So that was the idea in 2022. Can we do it? And we did it and that became Ester and that became our family office experience. So just to summarize, we help the advisor clients regardless where they fall in the wealthy spectrum. They don’t have the estate planning documents, we create them. If they already have the estate planning documents, we use AI to read this documents, summarize them and provide insight and observations. “Hey, here are ways that you can optimize these documents.” That’s what we do. Louis Diamond: It’s so valuable. I wish I met you a month ago because I went through a very expensive estate planning exercise with an estate planning attorney and my own personal experience is exactly the same that you had. It’s expensive. I have no idea what I was signing. It was a long questionnaire and it wasn’t driven necessarily by my advisor. They gave me the idea to get updated estate plans, but it was a disconnected process. So this makes a ton of sense. I think let’s pull on the thread of being a direct to advisor company rather than trying to pull an end around the advisor and going directly to a consumer. Why was that an important design decision for you? Because I would assume the total adjustable market might be a little bit bigger if you’re going direct to a retail client that may or may not have an advisor versus going directly to a business, an RIA, a wealth management firm, et cetera. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah. What we notice working within these spaces, something triggers you to do your estate planning. I’m not going to ask why you decide to do yours now, but usually it’s related to death in the family, a kid going to college, you buy a new house, you have a new baby, you’re getting married, you get a divorce. Direct to consumer, you have to find the client at that moment for them to consider estate planning as an important thing to do. There’s actually surveys. I think Fidelity put a survey out, that says family is the main reason why people do estate planning. And the second reason is the advisor. So if you work with a financial advisor, most likely he or she’s going to make you do your estate planning. So we did not want to be on the direct to consumer place spending millions and millions of dollars in marketing. We’d rather spend millions and millions of dollars in AI and technology and serve the advisor and empower the advisor to have this conversation and go to you and say, “Hey, Louis, how is it possible that you don’t have your estate planning document? Let’s do this now.” And I know this is uncomfortable. There’s another survey that came out recently saying that some of the advisors don’t want to talk about that. It’s still a hard subject to approach, but we have to have this conversation. Louis Diamond: I would say it almost sounds like an advisor not wanting to talk about their fees. Let’s not talk about that because it’s uncomfortable and no one wants to hear about it. Rafael Loureiro: Oh, you have to have it because they saw a huge lack of education. For example, one thing that we come across all the time, and I know it’s minor, is kids going to college. “Oh yeah, my daughter’s going to college. I don’t have to do anything.” Yeah, you do. She needs an advanced healthcare directive because if you don’t have one and something happens to her, you cannot just go to the hospital and ask for information. They won’t give it to you. We need to educate our clients. We need to do a better job. And I think advisors play that role and we want to empower them to talk about estate planning and tax planning. Louis Diamond: It makes sense. It’s a brilliant strategy because instead of advisors selling against Wealth.com as like, “I can do better and I have a estate planning guy I can refer you to,” it’s you’re working alongside them and you rely upon the advisor to provide the education to be the trigger moment. And I know again, from personal experience, if my advisor didn’t suggest that I should update my estate planning documents because I moved states, I wouldn’t have done it. It’s not like a fun thing to do. It’s an expense, et cetera. So that makes a ton of sense. You’re partnering with the hub or the influencers, if you will, of who’s driving estate planning in this country. It’s a great strategy. Rafael Loureiro: And you said something very important and I want to highlight, the world is very different after COVID. Before COVID, some of these advisors, all their clients were in the same city. I had one estate planning lawyer to help my clients, right? But now with after COVID or during COVID, people moved. “Oh yeah, I’m not living in a farm. Oh, I moved to Montana. Montana is beautiful. I saw Landman or Yellowstone. Now I’m leaving Montana. Landman is in Texas.” How? Now you don’t have estate planning lawyer in Texas. You don’t have estate planning lawyer in Montana. With the right partnership with Wealth.com, now you can serve all your clients regardless where they are in the US because we are present in every jurisdiction and we have lawyers in every jurisdiction. So we empower you to serve clients regardless where they are in the US. Louis Diamond: Very cool. And how about the pricing model? You don’t have to say what it costs, but is it one license that a firm is buying on behalf of their entire client base or is there an incremental cost for each client? And I’m throwing a lot at you. And then third part of the question is, are you seeing advisors charge directly for the Wealth.com estate planning output or are folks wrapping it into their fee as just a value added service as part of their planning and comprehensive wealth management process? Rafael Loureiro: Very good question. My goal, our goal, has always been we want to make estate planning available, democratized estate planning, make it more accessible to the population. So the way we charge is we charge the advisor annual recurring fee. We do not charge per document. I want you to provide estate planning to all your clients. That’s our goal. I don’t want you to think, oh, but that’s going to cost me money. No, all your clients set them all up with estate planning. Are they charging? It depends. So the way I’m going to say this is, I’m going to say that 60% of my advisors are charging not for the documents because they’re not lawyers, they’re charging to help educate you on estate planning. You as a client, you have to go to the process yourself to get the documents. So that’s where an advisor would send an invitation to Wealth.com. You and your wife or your partner, you’re going to go to the workflow and you’re going to get the document at the end. But the advisor is going to set up a call with you, the advisor is going to help you collect the documents. The advisor is going to educate you why estate planning is important. And some of them are charging for this. Some of our advisors, more on the high net worth, alternate high net worth space, you already charge a very good fee to provide your service so they probably provide Ester output, I should say, as a value added service. It depends on the use case. Louis Diamond: Makes sense. So I’ve heard you talk in interviews about a major gap in estate planning between client expectations and what a client is expecting, hoping to get with estate planning, especially when it comes to interacting with their financial advisor and what is actually fundamentally delivered by advisors. So I’m curious, why is there a gap and why do you think that gap has existed for so long? Is it as simple as people don’t like talking about death and it’s expensive or is there a deeper answer? Rafael Loureiro: I think it’s all of the above and your experience is amazing. You pretty much, you are the typical client. You took long to do it. It costs you a lot of money. You’re now like, next time you have to do an update, you’re going to wait five to 10 years to do it because we spend thousands of dollars to get it updated. Why does it have to be like that? And now with AI, and that’s what I think is going to change a lot in the next five years, is why can we not have continuous estate planning? What I mean by that is work with your advisor. I have connection to all your assets. I have connection to CRM. I have connection to your bank account. If you give me access, I don’t need password, but you can actually connect all your assets, I have connection to the portfolio management platform. So as you live your life, as you get married, as you buy a property… You finally decide to buy a property in Tahoe, I get these pings and then I can empower your advisors to say, “Hey, go talk to Louis and say, hey, it’s time to update your estate plan.” Or a rental property outside your home state in California, you need to update your… Or he has just crossed a tax threshold or he just got married or he just had a new beneficiary. My goal is to empower the financial advisor to provide more and more value to this relationship. I’m not trying to replace the financial advisor, but I’m trying to empower him or her to give you more value so him or her becomes more critical for your relationship. Why people haven’t done estate planning I think is a lack of education, is the fear of the cost. “Oh, I have to talk to a lawyer. Oh my gosh, that’s going to cost me $5,000.” I want to make this easier. I want to make this simple. I want to empower the advisor to demystify estate planning and tax planning, make it more accessible, bring the estate planning more to the middle. What I mean by that is why is this estate planning exclusive to the high net worth, ultra-high net worth? Because in that space, 90% of the people have estate planning, 90% of the people. It’s the fear of the cost, I think, and then people don’t want to think about that. Louis Diamond: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. Yeah. It very much sounds like it’s a win-win. It’s like a next best action type event where you’re giving an advisor on a silver platter a way to add value, which is what I think every advisor wants to do and then it’s a massive value add to the end client. My guess is you don’t have much friction in delivering those sorts of insights to advisors that they can then deliver to their clients. Rafael Loureiro: I would say if you’re not doing it, there is a big risk. You’re going to lose your clients to people that are doing it and they are providing the family office experience. Yeah. Louis Diamond: Yeah. What about the competitive landscape for Wealth.com, whether it’s other FinTechs that are attempting to do something in the space or even just the legacy advisor, the estate planning attorney in town or an advisor’s preferred T&E attorney. How do you think about the competitive landscape in the trust and estate world today? Rafael Loureiro: There are competitors. From day zero when we came in, there were competitors. I don’t see an incumbent. I think now we have became the incumbent. I think there is a segment of the market, just to paint a picture, one third of the advisors are going to retire in the next 10 years. So there is a segment in the market where to your point, they already work with a estate planning lawyer. That’s not a bad thing. They’re like, “Oh yeah, I get leads from this lawyer. My clients are all located in my neighborhood. I don’t need to provide out of state estate planning,” then we’re not going to get there.” But at the same time, if you look at our growth, we’ve been growing and that’s why we just raised a series B, our growth is out there to prove it, we’ve been tripling the company size every year. There’s a need, there’s a demand. Financial advisors are waking up. They are in a very competitive market. They need to provide more to the clients because I feel like investment management, it is becoming table stakes. Financial planning, it is table stakes. So what else can I offer my clients? And that’s why you see some advisory firms offering BillPay. I file your taxes. I’ll get your estate planning done. You got to differentiate yourself. We’re seeing the need. If you look at our penetration, we have now 2,000 firms on the platform and the firms go from independent, a small SMB advisor with one or two advisors in the office, all the way to the top three, three out of the top five banks in the US. We are there, right? Louis Diamond: Wow. It’s interesting. Let’s talk about that. So on the bank side, it’s typically not a segment that is ripe for technological disruption or external tools like this to come in and make a dent. How are banks and very large platforms thinking about Wealth.com? Is it a similar kind of buying journey or decision that an individual RIA or an individual advisor would make or is it a little bit different? Rafael Loureiro: It’s a little bit different. So without mentioning names, these banks, some of these banks that work with high net worth, ultra-high net worth clients, they were providing this summary report that Ester put together, they were, before Esther, but it was taking them 30 to 50 hours. All human labor to put one together, Excel, Visa, PowerPoint, 30 to 50 hours. Even to these very expensive, very wealthy clients, they were only doing once a year. “Hey, here’s your report.” “Oh yeah, but I just sold the house in St. Barts. Can I get a new update?” “No. Next year you’re going to get the update.” I’m not even kidding. It was serious. So they were doing the work, but it was all labor-intensive. Now with Wealth, a much better output, I should say, it’s take minutes. And instead of only reserving these to the very, very wealthy clients, now they can go downstream and offer this to their mass affluent clients and then high net worth clients. They’re all seeing the need. They’re all waking up because they were doing the work, but it was all labor-intensive, like I said, all manual before and they want to automate. Louis Diamond: Very interesting. I definitely want to spend some time talking about Ester. You mentioned it a few times, but before that, I’d say two very real strategic areas that a firm might take on when it comes to estate planning. The first one is a lot of very successful advisors, they cultivate amazing COI referral relationships with attorneys and usually the attorneys are T&E attorneys for obvious reasons. Have you gotten pushback or have you seen that because of Wealth.com, these advisors now are referring less business to these high-powered trust and estates attorneys and then they’re not able to grow their business as much in return. That’s one question if you can weigh in. Rafael Loureiro: I have not heard that. And just to clarify, I think with Wealth, having Wealth as part of your tool framework, you’re going to be able to serve more clients and still leverage your trust estate attorney. And I’ll explain how. For example, we know how to stay our lane. So let’s say you go into the workflow and as part of the workflow, you say, “Hey, I have a special needs child.” At that moment we say, “Stop. Let me put you in touch with a lawyer.” You can decide to use your own lawyer or you can use one of in our network. We have lawyers in every jurisdiction, but it’s up to you. We focus on the revocable trusts and the wealth. If your client requires something more sophisticated, you can still use Wealth.com to map out the client’s situation using Ester. You’re going to be able to see everything they have in place at that moment and then use your relationship, your trust and estate lawyer to make the document update. So I think what we are doing is reserving the most complex case for the trust and estate lawyer if a document needs update, but I don’t think you are breaking that relationship. That relationship will stay there and you’re still going to have that lead exchange, but I don’t have any numbers to answer your question. Louis Diamond: I think that makes sense. It’s not like with Wealth.com, at least not yet. It’s not like there isn’t a role for a T&E attorney and especially for more complex esoteric type situations, an advisor could still refer some of their relationships to a T&E attorney, but they’ll come armed with better information. And also with more clients getting involved with estate planning, there’s also conceivably more opportunities that they can refer out to an estate planning attorney in turn. Rafael Loureiro: Can I use that? You did a much better job than I did. Exactly. Exactly what you said. The difference is now your advisor, your clients are going to be much better informed, that they know exactly what they need from the lawyer. So yeah, 100%. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And then the other one, which is I’d say less commonplace, but it’s a trend. The trend, and you hit on it, that as investments are becoming commoditized or not as differentiated, advisors are being called on to offer more and more services, whether it’s tax preparation in-house or bill pay or picking up clients’ dry cleaning, et cetera. But I think a big area that I’ve seen firms invest in is an in -house trust and estate attorney. Do you think Wealth.com is taking some of the sizzle out of that in-house service or is it just different? Is it two different use cases? Rafael Loureiro: It’s two different uses cases and we actually sell to that use case where if you have your trust estate attorneys in-house, we actually leverage them and they become users on the platform. Going back to my previous answer, now with Wealth.com, you’re going to be able to serve more clients with estate planning. You can actually route some of the use cases back to your trust estate team through Wealth.com. They do whatever they have to do and then you’re able to serve more clients. An example, trust and estate lawyers, they had to read the documents before Wealth.com. They would spend countless hours reading a hundred-page documents. Now with Esther, we do the summarization. We show your trust estate team where all the information was extracted. So instead of reading one document per hour, you’re going to be able to read three documents per hour and visualize the client estate plan and be able to optimize it because we’ve provided insights and suggestions and then the trust and estate lawyer can provide their own and say, “Hey, no, I agree with this one,” or “I think we should also do this.” I think you’re going to optimize the use of your trust estate team. You’re not going to get rid of them. No. Louis Diamond: It’s more so you’re automating the high value differentiated work. It also kind of sounds like, I don’t know when eMoney or MoneyGuidePro came into the mainstream, but it’s almost a difference between a paraplanner for a firm, manually creating pie charts in Excel and PowerPoint and analyzing a bunch of stuff and then eMoney and MoneyGuidePro and NaviPlan and all these companies come about and all of a sudden a lot of the work is automated. And it’s not like a paraplanner is out of work. They just become the experts, the users of the platform and they can allocate their attention to higher value, more bespoke work rather than we’ll say more of the factory kind of below the line things that was taking up a lot of their time. Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. I like to use the analogy of the shoemaker. In the past, the shoemaker would make one shoe. It would be a beautiful shoe, but he would make one shoe a week or every two days. Now you have specialized agents. All that agent does is read estate planning documents. All that agent does is enriching the documents with insight and observations and looking to all the legal law changes that happened recently. So now you’re able to still make the same high quality shoe, but just at a higher volume. And you have a lot of dedicated workers doing one thing and doing one thing extremely well. So my goal is to empower the shoemaker. My goal is to empower the advisor and with a thousand analysts, a thousand paraplanners. So just making my job more efficient. Louis Diamond: I love it. You fit in Ester a good bit. It seems fairly clear what Ester’s doing. Sounds like an amazing value add. Just given the pace of AI innovation and I don’t think anyone knows where it’s going, but what are you most excited about Ester being able to do either now or in the future and what’s the vision if you can project out a year, which seems like an eternity in AI time, what’s on the dream board for what Ester’s going to be able to do for your Wealth.com clients? Rafael Loureiro: As a technologist, I love this question. I see AI in three distinct phases. You had the first phase of Ester in 2022, 2023 when we launched, which was summaries. It was amazing summarizing data. Some of these clients, Louis, think about this, some of these clients, they have 13 documents in place. They had every type of irrevocable trust you can imagine plus a revocable trust in place. They had very complicated assets, very complex assets. So Ester was amazing in summarizing. That was phase number one. Phase number two is now being able to augment. You read the data, you see an opportunity and you create a task that’s right there in front of the advisor saying, “Hey, I think you should reach out to this client and include this report with some of these observations. Click this button if you agree.” You still involve the advisor, the human is still in the loop. And that’s what we are with Ester right now. We do that. We assess the data, we see the opportunity, we involve the advisor, advisor get involved and say, “Yes, let’s do this,” and click a button, an email is triggered, our report is attached. Here we go. The third phase and that’s coming next and very soon is now you have an agent acting on the behalf of the advisor. I still want to make sure, and I want to make this very clear, I don’t want to get myself in trouble, the devices always evolve, but you have all these specific agents, that’s tax planning agent, that’s the estate planning agent, work independently, connected to the world, extremely well-trained with thousands and thousands of documents that we’ve seen over the years, finding opportunities, creating the tasks, creating the emails, creating the report, having everything ready to go, just waiting for the advisor to say, “Do it.” And we do this enough to the point where the advisor is going to say, “All right, you don’t need my permission anymore to do this specific task. Go.” You connect to the IRS, you download the text transcript, you crunch to this data, you create a report and it’s ready to go. The other thing too is I want to be able, my goal in the next year, a year and a half, is I want to continue estate planning. Up to this point, estate planning has been exactly like you described. You go to a lawyer, you pay thousands and thousands of dollars and those documents start collecting dust in a shelf somewhere while you live your life. And being from this space, that’s not how it works. There is new legislation being passed OBBA became like you crossed tax threshold, you have liquidated events, you get married, you get divorced, you buy real estate property, so on and so forth and that document is already stale. Why does it have to be that way? Now with AI, now with the technology we have in place, it won’t be. I promise you. Louis Diamond: Very cool. That’s exciting. That sounds like the perfect evolution of AI from summary, just here’s something you can read quickly to suggesting action, to then taking action. It does seem like the flow that it’s been and I’m sure there’s 15 other flows from here that we don’t even know yet. Or you probably do because you’re in this, but for me, I can’t even imagine what phase four and five are going to look like for you. Rafael Loureiro: Yes, it’s exciting. Louis Diamond: Definitely is. I saw, when I was doing some research for this that Wealth.com announced a fairly major strategic partnership with Dynasty Financial Partners, embedding Ester into their Dynasty desktop. What do you think this partnership says about where the business is going and how do you expect advisors to really take advantage of this in practice? Rafael Loureiro: It was a new development. We’re super excited about the Dynasty Financial Partnership. Before, if you look at before this partnership, we would have to empower advisor one by one with a Wealth.com license. With this partnership with Dynasty, every advisor in the Dynasty family or using the Dynasty desktop is going to be able to use Ester. So they’re going to be furnished with an AI intelligence that they can ask any estate planning questions, they can get tax planning questions answered. They’re going to be able to upload their clients’ estate planning documents and get a summary with opportunities, with everything that they can do for those estate planning documents. I think it fits perfectly well for enterprise IRAs, wire houses, this solution. Instead of doing one by one, you can actually have AI for all your advisors at once answering their most basic questions and taking action. That’s literally like the agents I was trying to describe. So that’s just the first step in that direction and we’re super excited about this. Louis Diamond: Very cool. Let me ask you another one. So you said earlier that as investment management becomes more commoditized that advisors not only have to offer more services and provide more value, but they also have to differentiate from the advisor or the firm across the street to provide more family office services, if you will. But let’s say, and this will be great for you, Wealth.com becomes like air that everyone’s breathing. It almost becomes like financial planning tool, e-Money. It’s commonplace. Now it’s commoditized across the space, it’s not a differentiator anymore to offer financial planning. As Wealth.com expands more firms work with the platform, what do you think is the next layer or next level of differentiation that your clients then can point to if it’s no longer maybe a couple of years from now that we use Wealth.com that we help with estate planning? Rafael Loureiro: Wow, that’s an interesting one, and approach my wife and bring ideas and suggestions. For me, if I can make that happen where the financial advisor is helping with my taxes, so when it’s tax time, we just have to have a one-hour meeting and we’re ready to click a button and have everything done, that can help me with BillPay. And think about like high net worth and ultra-high net worth people where it becomes extremely complicated to do BillPay properly because you have to pay from the right account, from the right trust. If they can take this off my plate so I can focus 100% in my business and my family, it’s mission accomplished. If that means that they’re going to walk my dog to make this happen, I know I’m exaggerating here, but pick up my laundry like the example you use, I think you’re going to have to do this. That in my mind is how these financial advisors survive the AI revolution. It is that personal relationship. It’s knowing me well. It’s spending more time with me than once a quarter. And with AI, with the right AI, and I know AI, there’s a lot of smoke in this space and very little fire, but with the right agents, with the right workflows, one advisor is going to be able to serve more than a hundred clients. Because right now the ratio is a hundred clients per advisor, maybe you’re going to be able to serve like 200, 250 well. Serve them well, knowing them well, knowing them personally. I think that’s going to happen in the next couple of years. Louis Diamond: I think that’s right. It’s more so like the intangibles that an advisor has. Their secret sauce isn’t going to be necessarily we offer these seven things. It’s going to be, I really get you. I understand you. It’s the advisor’s personal relationship and empathy with that client and all the years that they’ve known them. And then it’s just using all these different tools to aid that relationship. It kind of sounds like that’s what you’re saying. It’s all the other stuff that advisors do that might be different today, over time, people catch up and that becomes commoditized similar to we offer financial planning and that’s a differentiator. Now it’s, if they don’t offer financial planning, it’s a problem. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah, 100%. You got it. Yes, it is the intangibles. That’s perfect. Louis Diamond: Okay. I got two more questions for you. What’s one thing you wish more advisors understood about estate planning that they still miss today? Rafael Loureiro: I think there is an education component. Just deploying Wealth.com and expecting is going to work with your clients. It’s not like that. You need to be willing to have the conversation like your advisor did it with you. You need to have the tough call and say, “Hey, are you ready? Do you have estate planning in place? Why not?” And then having that conversation. Louis Diamond: And I would imagine too, it’s also cool, I got all these documents so instead of it getting locked in the safe or locked in the drawer, it’s also incumbent on the advisor to explain the documents. “Hey, these are a bunch of stuff in here that whatever, we don’t have to get into, but here’s the four key things about this document that you should understand. The power of attorney we’ve nominated is your father-in-law. Your proceeds are going to get distributed one-third to your son, a quarter to your daughter,” et cetera. It’s going to be those things and translating the documents into real words that clients are going to understand. Rafael Loureiro: 100%. That is critical because I’m a software engineer, I’m not equipped to be reading a hundred pages document and trying to understand everything that’s there without … Now with AI, you can actually ask Claude to summarize and Gemini to summarize it, but that was not the case three years ago. So that education component is critical. And some of my advisors are actually very successful, I should say. A smaller firm in this case, I’m not going to say the names, I don’t have that permission to say their name, but they are actually doing these estate planning webinars as a lead generation. Because clients are curious about this. Sometimes if you don’t ask them, you’re never going to know, but they’re probably very curious about estate planning. They’re probably very concerned they don’t have the documents in place. Even the ones that have the documents, they’re probably concerned that they need an update and they haven’t done it. So by doing this webinar, they feel more comfortable just going to the event. They know they’re not going to be the center of attention and then asking a question or hear people asking questions. Some of my most successful clients are actually using webinar as a lead generation to explain state planning. Louis Diamond: It’s a great idea. It’s like you’re empowering the advisor to talk more about estate planning. It’s no longer this bugaboo that was too complex or not in their swim lane. It’s empowering them to lead with, it sounds like. Rafael Loureiro: 100% Louis Diamond: Amazing. And last question, if you were an ambitious advisor building a new firm from scratch today, what would you tell them to focus on to create a more durable, harder to replicate future-proof business? Rafael Loureiro: That’s a great question because the factory floor of a hundred years ago, is no longer work. If you have a chance to start from the beginning, it’s a new world. It’s a new world for companies like ours. Even for companies like ours that are in the bleeding edge of technology, everything is changing with AI. How I organize my teams is changing with AI. So I would say select Wealth.com. No, that’s … I’m kidding. I’m kidding, but yes, I’ll say select the right tools, use AI properly, it’s no longer a headcount game. I’m not saying you’re not going to need help, you’re going to need help, but make sure the tools are talking to each other because it is a new age. It’s an agent about speed, about being able to offer more service quicker, about increasing the relationship, the intangibles, to your point. It’s no longer once a quarter call to your clients. So if I had the chance to do everything again, if I had a chance even to start Wealth.com again, it’s different how you organize your team in this age of AI. AI is going to be bigger than the industrial revolution. Trust me, the shockwave is huge. To your point earlier in this call, we’re getting a big jump every month. It’s no longer every year, every month there is something new coming from AI. So if you start your firm again, select the right partners, select the right tools and then hit the ground running. Louis Diamond: Perfect. That’s amazing. Rafael, this has been so fun. I learned a ton from you. You just have a way of storytelling and I absolutely love the why behind Wealth.com, the personal experience that probably a lot of listeners have had as the light bulb moment. And instead of just complaining about it, you actually took action and now are creating the future of estate planning, empowering advisors to offer estate planning to their clients, getting more folks in this country set up with trust and estates and wills, et cetera. So I think it’s amazing what you’re doing and I’m very excited to continue to watch your success. Rafael Loureiro: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunities and just to do a final plug, estate planning, tax planning, stay tuned. There is more coming. Louis Diamond: There we go. Thanks so much. Rafael Loureiro: Thank you. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? is a book written with you in mind it’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook. Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com A conversation with Louis Diamond and Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com. It’s a conversation with Rafael Loureiro, the firm’s Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer. I’m Louis Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wire house, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned, and each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: In the wealth management world, estate planning has largely lived in a separate lane. It’s a topic advisors may raise with clients then hand off to an attorney and eventually a set of documents come back, filed away, rarely revisited, and often disconnected from the rest of the planning process. That structure has been in place for a long time and for the most part, it’s gotten unquestioned, but when you step back, it creates a gap between what do clients expect from their advisor and what actually gets delivered when it comes to estate planning. Rafael Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Wealth.com, ran straight into the gap after a planning event of his own which should have been a coordinated process, felt fragmented, manual, and surprisingly opaque. And likewise, I recall the same type of disjointed experience in my own estate planning process. It’s experiences like these that became the starting point for building Wealth.com. What makes this story interesting isn’t just that they’re using AI but how they’re using it inside the estate planning process, and it’s how AI allows the model itself to change from a one-time legal event to something that evolves alongside the client, from static documents to a system that can actually interpret, update, and surface what matters, from a disconnected handoff to something the advisor can actively lead. In my conversation with Rafael, we get into how that plays out in practice, how tools like Ester move from summarizing estate documents to identifying gaps, to prompting next steps, and eventually preparing action on behalf of the advisor, because when AI moves from simply organizing information to helping drive decisions, estate planning stops being a periodic task and starts to look more like a continuous part of the advice process. So let’s dive in. Rafael, thank you for coming on our show today. Rafael Loureiro: My pleasure, Louis. Thank you for having me here. Louis Diamond: Of course. Let’s jump in and in researching you and speaking to you in the past, I got to admit, you had a very different path into the wealth management industry probably than anyone I’ve ever interviewed. So can you walk us through your background briefly and early professional endeavors? Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. The accent that you hear is Brazilian. So I’ve been in the US for 25 years. I’m a software engineer by trade, came here as a HMB, been involved with different companies over the years and then most recently before Wealth.com. I was a chief technology officer with a fraud prevention company, nothing to do with wealth management, but by selling that company, it’s how the Wealth.com story started. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And I was referring to also some of your early career endeavors even before founding your last company, if you’re comfortable sharing that. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been involved with four different startups in different spaces. One of them was in, if you remember all the way back to 2008, the real estate prices, the first startup with foreclosures. So when houses went into foreclosures, me and my partner, we created a system to index that. I also had work on a photo album company. It became a lifetime business. It’s still running. I was the CTO and I did my share of consulting. I used to work for Accenture, Avanade, and then a home builder Fortune 500 companies. So I have a ton of experience in the technology space before Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And you mentioned the last business that you started that I believe sold to LexisNexis. Can you walk through what that business was? Rafael Loureiro: Yeah. So I did not start the business. I joined the business before Series A. The person that started the business, Rei Carvalho, he’s actually Wealth.com chairman. So the team is still together. The US, San Francisco, New York, offices in Sydney, Singapore, London. We serve clients like Coinbase, grew very fast and then got acquired by LexisNexis in 2020 during peak COVID. Think about, we literally signed the documents, popped the champagne on March 2020. No vaccine. Louis Diamond: Oh, my God. Rafael Loureiro: We literally popped the champagne and we all went back home to work from home because that was the guy that’s from LexisNexis. Through that experience, selling a company, one thing you usually do, it’s a big liquidity event and estate planning is always related to big moments. You get married, someone in your family die, you have a new kid, you have a liquidated event. So I work with a financial advisor. They’re amazing. They helped me with financial planning, wealth management, saved me a lot of money insurance. But when it was time to do the estate planning, Louis, my experience was, “Hey, Rafael, we always work with this lawyer, go talk to the lawyer.” And then it was a completely broken process. First, because it was COVID and I had to go see the lawyer face-to-face. That was weird right there. Second, because I was expecting the lawyer to know everything about me because my advisor knows everything about me, know about my life situation, know about liquid event, know about my kids, rental houses, everything and then the engineer. I know what I told the lawyer, but do I know for sure that everything I told the lawyer end up in the document? No, I don’t. Long story short, otherwise it is a long story, we’re having a virtual coffee. I don’t know if you remember everyone, big beard, long hair, everyone working from home, and then somehow all the Emailage C-level team and founders, the co-founders, we start complaining about state plan. Even another example, my chairman, the Wealth.com chairman, Emailage CEO, Rei Carvalho, he was like, “Hey, Rafael, I’m done with the summer heat in Arizona. I’m moving to Denver. I’m going for cooler weathers.” Literally the moment he moved to Denver, he gets a call from his estate planning lawyer, welcome him to Denver and saying, “Hey, we need to update your documents. “But I just spent thousands of dollars creating my documents.” “Yeah, but you live in a new state, you have to optimize your documents.” At that moment, Louis, we’re like, “Where there’s a problem, there is an opportunity,” and the company was born. Louis Diamond: I find the best company origin stories, it’s you have that, you have a personal experience or a moment where you have a realization that t

A tabletop exercise with 26 countries and a hantavirus outbreak: Coincidence or PSYOP? Peter Breggin MD & Ginger Breggin Mon May 11 The Breggin Hour Health, Political, Transportation https://mega.nz/file/0hI0zJAC#bg9CYz81VQXIHfuzjCKVtWsJtxeY2AWPhuBjD0QUfEc   The news hit my inbox, and I had that “here we go again” sinking feeling. Before Covid hit in 2020, there were a number of “simulation exercises” –often called tabletop exercises—supposedly to prepare countries and health agencies in the event of a large disease outbreak. Senior author Peter R. Breggin, MD, and I had tracked down and identified a number of what we called Pandemic Predictions and Planning Events” that we researched and exposed in our book COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey. Now it looked like the same deadly program was about to repeat. Jon Fleetwood, Substack author and independent investigative journalist, announced this week: “WHO Runs Pandemic Simulation ‘Exercise Polaris II.” He declared, “26 countries, 600 emergency experts, and more than 25 global health agencies and response networks participate in WHO's expanding multinational outbreak simulation.” Almost as though planned, reports of a deadly disease outbreak on board the cruise ship, Hondius, began circulating. Confirmation came days later that the disease strain was indeed the Andes virus strain of the Hantavirus (which has evidence of human-to-human spread). Meanwhile, several dozen people have left the ship and are now being tracked so contact tracing can occur. Despite the fear factor being ramped up in the media, WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove stated Wednesday that the Hantavirus outbreak is not the next COVID pandemic. I believe this provides deniability cover for WHO, while contributing to the public confusion about the threat of Hantavirus, which will drive public opinion toward accepting global oversight (read “control”) of health matters. Our show this week featured Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Breggin interviewing journalist Alex Newman about the World Health Organization's pandemic simulations and globalist threats to national sovereignty. We discussed findings from a December 2, 2024, House committee report on COVID-19 origins and nursing home policies, while Newman explained how various totalitarian forces cooperate through international organizations to expand power using pandemic preparedness as justification. The conversation emphasized the importance of recognizing these threats as intentional rather than accidental and concluded with a discussion of Newman's upcoming book and the role of faith in preserving liberty. When Peter Breggin and I researched our book, we discovered events like these were harbingers of the COVID operation, which was  launched in early 2020 and led to the first-ever nearly universal lockdown of nations, resulting in demolished economies, demoralized, gaslit citizens, and ultimately millions of deaths and disabling adverse effects around the world from the so-called mRNA “Covid vaccines.” We recognized the attack on individual freedoms and liberty in the first couple of months of 2020 and went to work to uncover the real story. COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey Peter and I researched, wrote, and published the first comprehensive book on the COVID era, documenting evidence for the laboratory release of COVID, identifying Dr. Fauci's early lies to the U.S. Senate, and his extensive collaborations with other globalists and billionaires. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), stated that when our book COVID-19 and the Global Predators came out, “No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under the cover of false public health policies.” In our Covid book, we reviewed and debunked the totalitarian rules and regulations enforced all over the world in the name of public health, including the mass murder in New York State when Governor Cuomo sent sick patients into uninfected nursing homes, resulting in mass disease spread. Asking the obvious next question—who is behind this disaster? — We found and exposed Bill Gates and his master plan that implemented Operation Warp Speed in 2015-2017. Gates, along with a rogue's gallery of other predatory globalists, was identified and exposed in part three of our book. Drawing on his extensive experience as a medical-legal expert in over 100 trials in the US and Canada, Dr. Breggin assembled a chapter titled “Bill of Particulars against Dr. Anthony Fauci.” As the possibility of Fauci's formal accusation grows closer, we hope that Federal investigators will be made aware of Dr. Breggin's suggested outline and summary of possible charges against the evil perpetrator. We completed the COVID-19 and the Global Predators book by mapping out how we, citizens, can recover our liberty. Documentation included in this book includes an extensive Chronology as well as over 1100 endnotes and an extensive index. So, is it over yet? There is always that sweet, soft, naive streak in me (Ginger) that expects that once the exposure of the evil and the crime is complete, it will be fixed. Justice will be served. The mRNA “vaccines” will be abolished, victims will be cared for, and such a dreadful time will not happen again. But then the years fly by, and I set aside the soft part of me, take a deep breath, and get ready for the next onslaught. We are seeing signs now that the next pandemic operation is being considered. The psychological manipulations continue, and pressure will be put on the public to demand a global health authority, because a global health authority equals global control. We have seen this program already with COVID—Dr. Breggin and I mapped out the plan in our COVID-19 and the Global Predators book. We all need to refresh our memories about what happened—how world control was seized—and work to prevent any future recurrence. Our guest, Alex Newman, CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media, is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, speaker, investor, nationally syndicated radio host, and consultant who “seeks to glorify God in everything he does.” The list of international and national magazines and newspapers to which he has contributed articles reads like a who's who of news. Alex Newman's latest book is Indoctrinating Our Children to Death. Primary author: Ginger Breggin See also: How the fear of death and illusion of freedom turn us into accomplices to evil WHO threatens us with “Disease X” to push the Pandemic Treaty! It's time to get out of the US and the WHO UN and WHO: Stooges of the global rapists of humanity…   ______   Learn more about Dr. Peter Breggin's work: https://breggin.com/   See more from Dr. Breggin's long history of being a reformer in psychiatry: https://breggin.com/Psychiatry-as-an-Instrument-of-Social-and-Political-Control   Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, the how-to manual @ https://breggin.com/a-guide-for-prescribers-therapists-patients-and-their-families/   Get a copy of Dr. Breggin's latest book: WHO ARE THE “THEY” - THESE GLOBAL PREDATORS? WHAT ARE THEIR MOTIVES AND THEIR PLANS FOR US? HOW CAN WE DEFEND AGAINST THEM? Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey Get a copy: https://www.wearetheprey.com/   “No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under cover of false public health policies.”   ~ Robert F Kennedy, Jr Author of #1 bestseller The Real Anthony Fauci and Founder, Chairman and Chief Legal Counsel for Children's Health Defense.  

Episode #533: “Before COVID-19 and before the Myanmar coup, I thought that ‘memory of war' meant only World War Two inside Myanmar. But after 2021, I realized for local people the condition is like a war now.”Hitoshi Kameyama, a Japanese photographer, first came to Burma in 2005 on a photography tour. Expecting a repressive environment, he was instead struck by the warmth and friendliness of local people. This impression drew him back repeatedly, and he eventually made more than 25 trips before the pandemic, building close ties by photographing villagers and returning later with prints for them.Myanmar's political opening after 2011 allowed greater freedom for photographers and journalists. While Japanese companies began investing, Kameyama focused on documenting memories of the Japanese occupation in World War Two. He was inspired by encounters with elderly villagers who recalled both suffering and small gestures of kindness from Japanese soldiers. In one case, a woman whose brother had been killed by soldiers still preserved a grenade and other wartime objects for decades, hoping they might be returned to Japan. Such stories led to his book Burma Myanmar Memories of War 2019–2024.The pandemic and the 2021 coup forced him to expand the project beyond historical memory. Unable to enter Myanmar, he traveled to India and Thailand, where refugees had fled. He visited Mae Sot clinics, schools, and camps, meeting displaced families and injured resistance fighters. His work began to connect past and present, showing how conflict continues to shape lives.Many of his images highlight this continuity: a child playing with a Japanese helmet, a tiny tank carried into Chin State by soldiers, ceremonies where survivors still gather to honor the dead, and a 2012 community meeting once seen as ordinary but later understood as a fleeting sign of democracy.Kameyama is critical of Japanese businesses that continue to operate in Myanmar, arguing that profits inevitably aid the junta. Reflecting on two decades of engagement, he stresses that personal bonds matter more than politics. As he put it, “It's important to me, this personal relationship with the Myanmar people.”

We need a final Holy Ghost revival to sweep the final ones into the Kingdom of God, as promised in the prophecies of Joel! Prophecy is unfolding fast, and in a different way to what most expected. I will speak more about this here in the UK, because it seems to me that the most neglected prophet is Joel, but all my life I have been greatly influenced by him. Before Covid, we filled the Westminster Central Hall in London to overflowing with more than 2,000 people to pray for our nation. It's in my heart – if God tells me – to fill it again for prayer, prophecy and healing miracles. But I will only do it if He tells me. I must listen to His Voice! Features a 1-minute live extract from Revive Now! David Hathaway's Day of Prayer and Revival Increase In Me performed by Steve and Velveta Thompson Move Holy Spirit performed by Vinesong

Before COVID mandates… There were Anthrax mandates. 

Before COVID-19 hit the US in 2020, Tammie Osborne spent over a dozen years as an in-demand nationwide healthcare technology executive and consultant, on the road nearly every week. Tammie knew she needed to uncover a new 'normal', one she hoped to find in a coworking space. She soon learned, however, that her corner of Middle Tennessee didn't offer what she envisioned. So, in true entrepreneur fashion, she discovered a new passion: to create that which she was seeking and build a place where busy women could be productive without distraction, continue to grow professionally, socialize, and even exhale. The Sapphire Suite in Franklin, TN is fashioned as a destination—a thoughtful, welcoming place where women can crush their task lists and conquer new frontiers in a dynamic, nurturing environment of like-minded women. In this place, female strengths, intuition, and potential are organically recognized and nurtured; and women will always be made to feel both supported and inspired. In episode 655 of the Fraternity Foodie Podcast, we find out what drew Tammie into healthcare, what was the moment she know that she needed to build something new, how you know when it's time to pivot, why designing a co-working space was so important in Middle Tennessee, how we can design spaces where people feel safe, supported, and inspired, how organizations can balance productivity and social culture, how college students can seek out mentors without feeling intimidated, what nobody told her about starting a business, and why you shouldn't feel pressure to have your whole career mapped out. Enjoy!

Some conversations just leave you smiling the whole way through, and this was definitely one of them.In this week's episode I'm joined by the wonderful Ami Yeasmin @ami_bisbrooke_artisans. If you already follow Ami online, you'll know exactly what I mean when I say she brings so much joy into the world. Her energy is infectious. But behind that joy is a story of resilience, heartbreak, healing and learning to truly live in the present moment.Before COVID, Ami and her husband were running a thriving sourdough bakery together after leaving their previous careers. Life was busy, exciting and growing quickly. But in a short space of time everything changed. Her marriage broke down, and soon after Ami was diagnosed with cancer.What followed was one of the most difficult periods of her life.But it also became the beginning of something new.During her recovery, Ami began thinking deeply about joy. Not the big, once in a lifetime kind of happiness we're often told to chase, but the small everyday moments that remind us we're alive. The kind of joy we can choose, even when life feels messy or uncertain.One symbol that carried her through that time was a pair of red boots she promised herself she would wear when she was strong enough again. Those red boots eventually led to something unexpected… dancing.What started as a spontaneous moment dancing in public after cancer treatment has become Ami's way of spreading joy and reminding people that it's never too late to express yourself, take up space and live fully in the moment.This conversation is honest, uplifting and full of beautiful reminders about self-acceptance, forgiveness and learning to shine as you are.​Ami's journey from teacher to running a successful sourdough bakery• The impact COVID had on their lives and relationship• Navigating separation later in life• Receiving a cancer diagnosis and the emotional toll of treatment• Letting go of people pleasing and learning true self-acceptance• Why Ami believes joy is something we can choose every day• The story behind her red boots• How dancing in public became a powerful act of healing• Why shining as yourself gives others permission to do the same“When you shine from the source of yourself, you give other people permission to shine too.”If you enjoy this episode, please do share it with someone who might need a little reminder that joy can still be found, even in the most unexpected places.Keep being fabulousRachel x

Why This Year's Influenza Outbreak Demands Your Attention Virginia finds itself in the dark red zone on the CDC's influenza activity map, signaling a "very high" level of flu cases sweeping across the Commonwealth. This alarming development prompts Janet Michael, host of The Valley Today, to reach out to Dr. Jeff Feit for an urgent conversation about protecting communities during this particularly aggressive flu season. Dr. Feit, who serves as Valley Health's Chief Population and Community Health Officer and Chief Medical Information Officer, brings a unique perspective to the discussion. As a family physician who spent twelve years practicing in Page County before moving into healthcare leadership, he understands both the clinical realities of influenza and the broader public health implications facing Virginia's communities. An Early and Aggressive Start The numbers tell a concerning story. Currently, Virginia ranks in the second-highest category out of twelve gradients measuring influenza-like illness (ILI). In contrast, this time last year, the state sat three categories lower. Moreover, while last season's flu activity peaked in mid-February, this year's surge arrived much earlier, catching many residents off guard. "We're overshooting," Dr. Feit explains, noting that the CDC tracks ILI rather than confirmed diagnoses because not everyone gets tested. This measurement captures people presenting with observable flu symptoms—body aches, fevers, headaches, nausea, and congestion—providing a more accurate picture of community spread than test results alone. Furthermore, the tracking method resembles the wastewater monitoring used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of counting individual cases, health officials measure the percentage of people walking through medical facilities who display flu-like symptoms, offering insight into how prevalent the virus has become in communities across Virginia. Understanding the Viral Landscape Influenza doesn't exist in isolation this winter. Instead, three major respiratory viruses circulate simultaneously: seasonal flu, COVID-19, and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus). While COVID-19 shows less seasonal predictability in its first five years, influenza remains decidedly seasonal, arriving in late fall and lasting through early spring. RSV, once simply categorized as "just another cold" in adults, now receives more attention because healthcare providers can test for it easily. In young children, however, RSV causes serious illness and can lead to scarring that triggers asthma symptoms for years. Consequently, the medical community now tracks RSV alongside flu and COVID as part of the winter respiratory illness trio. Dr. Feit emphasizes the importance of basic prevention strategies that became politicized during the pandemic but remain scientifically sound. "Before COVID, we used to say obvious things like, 'Hey, it's respiratory season. Wash your hands a lot,'" he notes. He recommends being conscious of shared surfaces—particularly those signature pens at pharmacies—and washing hands before touching your face, since that's how respiratory viruses typically enter the body. The Flu Shot: Separating Fact from Fiction Each year, scientists formulate a new trivalent flu vaccine targeting the three strains they predict will dominate six months ahead. Typically, two components target Influenza A (the more severe form) and one targets Influenza B. This year, concerns have emerged about whether the vaccine adequately matches the circulating H3N2 variant, though early studies from other countries suggest typical protection levels remain intact. Nevertheless, Dr. Feit stresses that vaccine effectiveness exists on a spectrum rather than as an all-or-nothing proposition. "Very few things in the world are about all or none," he explains. "We live in a world of probabilities." While the flu shot prevents illness roughly 40-50% of the time, it proves even more effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths—outcomes that matter most. The CDC recommends flu vaccination for everyone over six months old. Additionally, people over 65 should receive a stronger formulation, though the regular vaccine still provides protection if the enhanced version isn't available. The vaccine remains widely accessible at pharmacies, doctor's offices, urgent care centers, and other convenient locations. Debunking the "Flu Shot Gives You Flu" Myth One persistent misconception continues to discourage vaccination: the belief that flu shots cause influenza. Dr. Feit tackles this myth head-on, explaining that most flu vaccines contain inactivated virus, making it impossible to contract influenza from the injection. Recipients may experience arm pain or occasionally feel unwell due to their immune system's response, but they cannot develop actual flu from the standard shot. However, one exception exists. The nasal spray flu vaccine contains a live attenuated (weakened) virus, which can occasionally cause mild flu symptoms. For this reason, Dr. Feit recommends the injectable vaccine over the nasal spray. Many people who claim they "got the flu from the flu shot" likely experienced one of two scenarios: either mild immune system activation that caused temporary discomfort, or they contracted a different respiratory virus around the same time. True influenza, Dr. Feit emphasizes, rarely gets confused with other illnesses once you've experienced it. Recognizing Real Influenza "The way you know somebody has the flu as a doctor is they walk in and they say, 'I feel like I got hit by a truck,'" Dr. Feit shares. This vivid description captures the severity that distinguishes influenza from common colds. Classic influenza symptoms include severe body aches, high fever, chills, and intense headaches. Patients often report that even their hair hurts due to scalp sensitivity. Unlike a cold, which typically causes congestion and mild discomfort, influenza renders people truly miserable for about a week. Importantly, influenza poses serious risks beyond discomfort. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed millions, notably affected many young, healthy people. Scientists theorize this occurred either because strong immune responses proved deadly or because older individuals possessed partial immunity from a previous flu strain decades earlier. Regardless of the mechanism, the historical lesson remains clear: influenza can kill, and it doesn't discriminate by age. The Critical 48-Hour Window When flu symptoms strike, timing becomes crucial. Antiviral medications prove highly effective against influenza, but only if taken within the first 48 hours of symptom onset. Therefore, anyone who spikes a fever and experiences severe body aches should seek medical attention within 24 hours to receive these medications and recover faster. Without antiviral treatment, patients typically suffer through a miserable week before gradually improving. However, approximately 5% of flu patients develop a dangerous complication: bacterial pneumonia. Dr. Feit describes this as a "double hump illness"—patients get sick, start recovering, feel better for a while, then suddenly spike another fever and develop a cough. This pattern signals bacterial pneumonia requiring different treatment. Virtual Care and Modern Solutions Valley Health continues developing virtual care options that balance convenience with diagnostic accuracy. Dr. Feit acknowledges the challenge: clinically distinguishing flu from COVID, RSV, or bacterial sinus infections without point-of-care testing proves difficult. The organization works toward a hybrid model where virtual consultations can direct patients to drop-in testing locations. "The doctor on your phone might say, 'Hey, I think this is probably COVID. Why don't you stop in our clinic and get tested and then we can treat you,'" Dr. Feit explains. During peak flu season, however, virtual diagnosis becomes more reliable. When influenza saturates the community and a patient presents with classic symptoms—102-degree fever, headache, severe body aches—the probability of influenza reaches approximately 95%, making treatment without testing more reasonable. Beyond Conventional Medicine While discussing prevention, Dr. Feit offers a measured endorsement of one herbal remedy: elderberry extract. Unlike vitamin C megadosing, which lacks solid evidence despite historical claims, elderberry extract has demonstrated effectiveness against influenza virus in test-tube studies conducted in Israel. The preparation, sold as Sambucol in the United States, represents the one herbal supplement Dr. Feit feels comfortable recommending for flu prevention, though he notes the evidence base remains limited. Looking Ahead: Rural Health Transformation Beyond immediate flu concerns, Dr. Feit shares exciting news about long-term community health improvements. Virginia recently received the first installment of a five-year Rural Health Transformation Grant, part of a $50 billion federal fund. The Commonwealth expects to receive nearly $1 billion over five years, money that will support rural healthcare infrastructure, provider training, and innovative technology solutions for transportation-challenged populations. This funding represents a silver lining in challenging times, offering resources to address food insecurity, housing instability, and healthcare access in Virginia's most vulnerable communities. Taking Action Now As flu season intensifies across Virginia, Dr. Feit's message remains clear: get vaccinated if you haven't already, practice basic hygiene, and seek prompt medical attention if symptoms develop. The vaccine won't change to match any viral evolution this season, so waiting no longer makes sense. For those around pregnant women, vaccination becomes even more critical, as pregnancy significantly increases flu severity. Similarly, families should consider that vaccination reduces household transmission—meaning perhaps only one or two family members get sick instead of everyone, allowing healthy members to care for ill ones. Ultimately, this flu season serves as a reminder that respiratory viruses remain serious public health threats requiring both individual action and community-wide prevention efforts. By understanding the science, recognizing symptoms early, and accessing treatment promptly, Virginians can navigate this challenging season more safely.

Elaine Sanchez joins co-host Carol Zernial and host Ron Aaron to talk about managing caregiver anger and the three "F's" of flipping out on this edition of Caregiver SOS. About Elaine Elaine Sanchez is a caregiver speaker and author of the unflinchingly honest and surprisingly funny book, “Letters from Madelyn, Chronicles of a Caregiver". Before COVID, Elaine spoke at healthcare and caregiving conferences across the U.S. When all of her conferences for 2020 were canceled due to the pandemic, she had a video production studio built, transitioned to virtual speaking, and developed the CaregiverHelp Support Group Program. This program is unique in that it is video-based, and all of the sessions are focused on helping people manage the emotional stress of caregiving. The program can be delivered at live, in-person meetings, on platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, or as a self-paced program online. Elaine’s passion for helping people manage the emotional stress of caring for those who cannot care for themselves came from her own extensive experience of caring for family elders. Hosts Ron Aaron and Carol Zernial, and their guests talk about Caregiving and how to best cope with the stresses associated with it. Learn about "Caregiver SOS" and the "Teleconnection Hotline" programs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Callum Gracie, founder of Otto Media and GIAI, is an expert in SEO & AI. On this podcast he shares an inspiring journey from professional musician to SEO & AI expert. Before COVID-19, Callum worked as a trumpet player and manager for The Bake Boys Band in Australia, booking over 500 events annually and managing approximately 100 creative professionals. When the pandemic hit, Callum lost everything due to severe Australian lockdowns that restricted events to 30-40 people. This crisis forced a career pivot into DJing (which was more pandemic-resistant as a one-person show) and eventually into digital marketing, where Callum now leads a team that has grown from 2 to 12 people in just 12 months.Summary of the PodcastThe Evolution of SEO in the AI AgeCallum emphasised that traditional SEO tactics are becoming less effective as AI transforms how people search for information. Key points about this evolution:People can now get answers directly from AI tools without visiting websitesTechnical SEO remains important as a foundation but is no longer enoughContent marketing and authentic storytelling are becoming crucial differentiatorsDigital PR is increasingly valuable - getting mentions from authoritative sources helps establish credibility with AI systemsBusiness owners should focus on the EEAT guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust)Optimize for Bing, not just Google, as ChatGPT uses Bing's search API to find relevant informationLeveraging AI for Business GrowthCallum shared several practical applications of AI for business:Used ChatGPT to analyze and improve sales funnels for clientsCreated AI-generated promotional imagery (including a branded vehicle with local landmarks) for a client websiteDeveloped AI workflows with a data scientist partner to analyze complex datasetsUsed AI to identify target journalists and publications for digital PR effortsCreated project-specific AI agents that understand brand voice and specific business needsClient Selection PhilosophyCallum emphasised the importance of working with the right clients:"Find your ideal client...figure out who you like"Turns away more potential clients than acceptedSeeks partnership relationships with deep trust and common goalsValues clients who are excited about the work and aligned with the company's approachFocuses on being "relentlessly honest" with both clients and oneselfAction Items[ ] Implement EEAT guidelines on websites to establish credibility (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust)[ ] Consider optimising for Bing search in addition to Google[ ] Focus on getting reputable publications and websites to mention and link to your business[ ] Incorporate authentic storytelling and personal elements into marketing content[ ] Explore how AI can automate repetitive customer communications (like annual service reminders)Future of MarketingGraham described the current moment as a "gold rush" for AI implementation in marketing. Callum agreed but suggested Australian businesses are generally a few years behind the US and UK in adoption. The most successful approach combines authentic content marketing with strategic digital PR, focusing on building relationships with journalists and creating shareable stories that demonstrate expertise and build authority. The Next 100 Days Podcast Co-HostsGraham ArrowsmithGraham founded Finely...

Hello and welcome back to our monthly breakdown of Halifax's real estate stats!May 2025 was BUSY!! Recorded a new all time high sales price, an eye watering $636,592!! (which is up from $614,548 in April 2025)Here's the interesting thing though. If you've been following real estate at all over the past 5 years, I'm sure you've heard the following phrase. "it's a supply problem, not enough homes and too many buyers."Well, in May 2025 Halifax recorded it's highest level of inventory since February 2020, that's right, BEFORE COVID!!2.8 Months of Inventory. In May 2025, Halifax recorded it's highest level of units for sale since June 2020, that's right 5 YEARS AGO!1156 units for sale.To put this into context. The lowest level of months of inventory was 0.3 months, and the lowst level of units for sale recorded was 183 total units. Both of those were in February 2022, which most people consider to be the peak of Halifax's worst real estate market in recorded history. So we are getting units BACK. But prices are going up?What gives?Jason Paul902-220-7357jason@infinityrealestategroup.ca@jasonpaulhalifaxrealtor902-22To 

Over the past three decades, Matthew Stafford has successfully built several businesses across various industries, including Concrete, Brick and Mortar Locations, POD, and Software-based ventures. Matthew, the Managing Partner of Build Grow Scale and an equity owner of some in-house eCommerce brands, has mentored thousands of store owners through paid eCommerce groups and live events. His experience has also allowed him to help hundreds of ecommerce brands scale past the million-dollar mark - with many hitting the $10 million mark. To top it off, he's been speaking on stages about eCommerce optimization for the past seven years! Before COVID-19, BGS hosted the largest yearly eCommerce-focused event in North America - BGS LIVE. What you will learn How optimizing your eCommerce site can double your revenue without increasing traffic. Why asking customers what almost stopped them from buying can unlock major sales growth. How simple changes to checkout forms can reduce abandoned carts and boost conversions. Why AI is reshaping traffic strategies and what it means for your eCommerce business. How top eCommerce brands use customer experience to drive repeat sales and long-term success.

In this episode of Through My Eyes, Ralph Renzulli interviews United States Marine Corps Vietnam Veteran Charlie Tipton.Before COVID, Renzulli had started a series of interviews with Little Falls Vietnam Veterans. The show was produced by The Creative Outpost and was filmed at the Little Falls Library in the China room. Thirteen episodes were completed before the program was shuttered. Initially, it was only Little Falls Vets, but he thought if someone was willing to do it, why not Ilion, Mohawk, Herkimer, Dolgeville, Fort Plain, or Canajoharie? "Anyone willing to do it," he stated.Renzulli has expanded it to include any veteran from World War II through Afghanistan. "I don't know how many people we have around here who have participated in those wars, but there have to be quite a few.”If you are interested in being the show, you can email Ralph at ⁠rrenzul1@twcny.rr.com⁠.

Productivity is at all all-time low in New Zealand. Possibly not the most uplifting thing you've heard this morning, but sadly, it's true. In the year ending March 2023, New Zealand saw a drop in labour productivity by 0.9%, marking one of the biggest falls in recent years.  As a nation, we've struggled for decades to improve our productivity levels, despite politicians of all shapes and colours promising solutions. One of our leading economists, Doctor Eric Crampton, describes productivity nicely. He says the economy as being a bit like a commercial kitchen. If you take the same set of workers, equipment, and ingredients, and reconfigure the kitchen so that everything runs more smoothly and more patrons can be served, that's a productivity increase. Coming up with new and tastier recipes using the same amount of ingredients and effort - that's also a productivity increase. For economists, productivity isn't about making everyone work harder. It's instead about finding better ways of doing things, better processes, and discovering new products and services that provide more value for the same amount of time, effort, and materials. So… because we appear to be consistently useless in the productivity kitchen, once again, we're talking about get rich quick schemes for New Zealand. And at the coalface of all the desperation to do better, to make more money and to get New Zealand back in the black - is mining. So what's mining worth to New Zealand? Mining makes a significant contribution to the New Zealand economy, particularly in the regional areas where mining takes place. 7,000 people are employed in the extractives sector and the economic contribution is $2.61 billion to GDP annually. It's fair to say that mining products make a major contribution to New Zealand and its economy. But how does that compare to tourism? Mining is all about taking, exploiting the land and digging your way to the bottom of a limited commodity. Before COVID-19, tourism was New Zealand's largest export industry and delivered $40.9 billion to the country. 40.9 billion - compared to mining with 2.61. Tourism made a significant positive impact on many of our regional economies supporting employment by directly employing 8.4 percent of the New Zealand workforce. Mining employs about 7000 people. It's pretty obvious that those numbers could well and truly be increased for mining if we completely lost our collective marbles and allowed more of the massive overseas owned companies to come here and ‘dig baby dig' or 'drill baby drill' - or to expand on what they're already doing. What's more obvious to me though, is the yet to be realised ability to increase tourism numbers, to get more people interested in coming to New Zealand with their strong currencies, deep pockets, and desire to buy what we have on offer. We have to remember that one of the key reasons why tourists want to come here, is that we haven't yet completely destroyed the ecological aspects that make this great nation so unique and desirable. News travels fast - and if we expand upon the very businesses that have left parts of the world looking like a post-apocalyptic movie set, then we effectively kill the kiwi that consistently lays the very large golden eggs. Do we want to be compared to the Pilbara Region of Western Australia? It's time we thought about the longevity of tourism and the very limited lifespan of mining, so that we can collectively orchestrate the best path forward economically. For all New Zealanders, not just those who scratch the backs of politicians, with the questionable expectations that follow. Tourism is the closest we'll ever get to making New Zealand rich with the ‘take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints' ethos. There's no way the same can be said for mining. No matter how the industry tries to dress the concept up. Stick it in high heels, give it a coat of makeup, or a designer dress - it's still ugly. Any increase to mining is quite literally a race to the bottom. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As you probably picked up from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon's State of the Nation speech on Thursday, 2025 is apparently all about financial growth and saying ‘yes'. Those are two trends I am trying to adopt in our house for 2025 as well, especially saying ‘yes' when I ask someone to do something... I digress, back to the nation. Before COVID-19, tourism was New Zealand's largest export industry, so it's clear why the Prime Minister and his newly minted Economic Growth Minister Nicola Willis have identified it as a priority area for the country to earn more. Data released in January reveals that in the year ending November 2024, visitor numbers increased to 3.26 million, an increase of 360,000 from the previous year, and 86 percent of pre-pandemic levels. So, the numbers are going in the right direction, but international tourism still remains our second highest export. There is more work to do! New Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston is the fifth minister to hold the portfolio in five years - so some stability in the portfolio is a good place to start. Nicola Willis has suggested the new Minister will look at how funding is currently being used, the visa processing system, and marketing campaigns. All good places to start - although you'd have hoped this happened when the coalition came to power over a year ago. The Minister will also be looking at how funding from the international visitor levy is being spent, after the levy increased from $35 to $100 in October last year. Increasing levies, adding user charges and targeted taxes on visitors has been recommended by MBIE in the past as a way to fund tourism - and we have seen DOC increase hut and campsite fees and the trialling of car parking charges at Punakaiki, Franz Josef Glacier, and Aoraki Mount Cook. But what about the visitor bed tax? Perhaps a crude idea in 2020 when hotels were empty; but with the industry recovering - is it time to resurrect the idea? Auckland Council has long advocated to central Government that some form of bed night levy or tax is required to support funding major events, destination marketing and visitor attractions. If one is not implemented by the middle of this year, there will be a budget gap to fund major events. The Government is not buying into the idea that tourism needs infrastructure support. In their view, if regions get more tourists then they can deal with it themselves. When it comes to one of our busiest tourist spots, the Government is very quick to point out that Queenstown is getting a $250 million roading upgrade. But that's not enough. As Queenstown mayor Glyn Lewers told me on Early Edition this week - “I'd welcome more tourists if there is a proviso that the infrastructure to support and accommodate more tourists and visitors is accounted for”. He pointed out Queenstown's airport needs to be better staffed with more customs and security staff to function well as an international airport. We all want growth and a thriving tourism industry. But we also want it to be sustainable - avoiding the degradation and overcrowding of our wilderness, pressure on infrastructure, and communities carrying the cost. So, if the Government wants growth - and tourism back in the number 1 export earner spot - it should perhaps consider putting in a little bit more so it can get more out. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

January is a month often filled with new gym membership, NFL playoffs, and even snow. Before COVID, we didn't associate it with debilitating and devastating illnesses, but COVID-19 changed that. In January of 2020, “Joyful” Joni Gold was the fourth person in her small community to get covid and, for her, this month will never be the same. Living in Los Osos, California with a population of 14,485, Joni faced life-threatening challenges. In a community with few medical providers, she needed quality care. As someone in a nation with little understanding of the disease, she needed advice and support. Now, living with long covid, Joni talks about her experience and how her spirituality helps her live with her disability. On top of hearing from jovial Joni, we have a commentary from Pushing Limits collective member Adrienne Lauby on COVID, unity, and Mr. Trump. Stay tuned! This episode of Pushing Limits is written and produced by Jacob Lesner-Buxton. It is hosted and edited by Denny Daughters. Joni Gold The post Long Covid in a Small Town – Pushing Limits – January 24, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

In this episode of Through My Eyes, Ralph Renzulli interviews Vietnam Veteran Bruce Hartness, who served as an infantry soldier in the Army from May 1967 until May 1968. He said that he hadn't paid attention to the war when he was in school, but when he graduated, he was drafted six months later. “I had never really thought about it,” but when he got the notice, he said it felt sudden, startling, and eye-opening. Hartness grew up in Holland Patent but most recently is a Dolgeville resident. He said that he had never really talked about his experience to anyone before this and that after coming home, it was probably one of the reasons he got into drugs. Before COVID, Renzulli had started a series of interviews with Little Falls Vietnam Veterans. The show was produced by The Creative Outpost and was filmed at the Little Falls Library in the China room. Thirteen episodes were completed before the program was shuttered.Initially, it was only Little Falls Vets, but he thought if someone was willing to do it, why not Ilion, Mohawk, Herkimer, Dolgeville, Fort Plain, or Canajoharie? "Anyone willing to do it," he stated. Renzulli says he intends to expand it to any Veteran - from World War II through Afghanistan. "I don't know how many people we have around here who have participated in those wars, but there have to be quite a few.” If you are interested in being the show, you can email Ralph at ⁠rrenzul1@twcny.rr.com⁠. Editor's Note: Bruce is very soft-spoken, and we've done the best we could to boost his portion of the audio. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/studio25/support

HVAF's food, clothing, and hygiene pantry is open for veterans on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM. Before COVID, we were seeing around 100 veterans per month. Now, we're seeing more than double, with a record high in July of 258 veterans. As we see an increase in visits, donations to our pantry are more critical than ever before. Thankfully, we have many partners around the community that help us stock the pantry. One of them is Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana, who helps keep our shelves full of essential food items. Today on Roger That, you will meet Gleaners CEO Fred Glass. Fred became the president and CEO of in 2022, and it's the largest food bank in Indiana and part of the national Feeding America Network.   SHOW NOTES: Podcast questions? Topic ideas? E-mail Lauren: LVCarpenter@hvaf.org Sign up to receive our e-mails: https://hvafofindiana.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=84c1e98757e710e154ef48517&id=35b0d23a76   Follow us on social media: @hvafofindiana Are you a veteran needing help? Contact us today: 317-951-0688https://www.hvafofindiana.org/i-need-help/ Fred Glass' bio: https://www.gleaners.org/fred-glass/ More on Gleaners' programs: https://www.gleaners.org/our-programs/ Get involved with Gleaners: https://www.gleaners.org/volunteer/ Get involved with HVAF's pantry: https://www.hvafofindiana.org/take-action/ More information on HVAF's pantry: https://www.hvafofindiana.org/our-mission/pantry/ Map the Meal Gap 2022 results: https://www.gleaners.org/map-the-meal-gap-2022-data-shows-sharp-rise-in-food-insecurity/

Denise Musselwhite is the founder of Tech and Thrive. She is a dynamic person that is memorable. We have been connected through a number of Women's groups that focus on technology. One of the words she shared to describe herself is Deliberate, and the definition of this word means to carefully think or talk something through. Slow and measured, the pace of this kind of careful decision making. As the daughter of immigrants to the US she learned to move through life with a heavy focus on her serving her clients. She believes this  is essential for success for her clients as well as her own business.     She grew up in an entrepreneurial family that focused on service. She helped her family by translating technical writing into Spanish for her parents.    When thinking through what she wanted her career to be, she knew it would be in technology.  She was the first gen in her family to attend college and started with Valencia College when it was a 2-year college.    As a woman in technology and working her way to become a Chief Information Officer, she represents less than 2% of the workforce as a latina woman in the tech world. She started her own business because she grew up watching her family be entrepreneurs. She went back to get her masters degree when she turned 45 and focused her master's thesis on the barriers that hold women back in their careers. Before COVID, she discovered that stem careers focused more on men rather than women. Women are still not represented in technology leadership roles. Only 26% are leaders in the tech world. Less than 3% Latinas make it to the top of the tech leadership.   When asked what is the best mentoring advice you want to share with our listeners? Her response was that in order for you to accelerate your own growth and development you have to understand who you are and decide who you are. If you allow someone to decide who you are for you. One needs to understand what you need and a strategy with a plan of action to move towards your strengths   We hope you enjoy this week's episode of The Intern Whisperer. The Intern Whisperer Podcast is brought to you by Employers 4 Change - Increasing #Skills #DiversityEquityInclusion #recruitment and #management for #interns and #employees alike.  Apply today to be an #Employer4Change that invests in #intern #talent and #employees.   Want a break? Play Intern Pursuit Game on Steam.    Thank you to our sponsor Cat 5 Studios. Podbean: https://internwhisperer.podbean.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8c_T19-pyfghVuAEbOMmHg     Follow us on our social channels  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/employers4change   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/employers4change   X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/employer4change   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/employers4change   #iHeartRadio #ApplePodcasts #Spotify #Podbean #YouTube #Employers4Change #E4C #internships #radio #podcast #innovation #employers #smallbusiness #business #FutureOfWork #ValenciaCollegeRadio 

Reported cases of people with pertussis -- or "whooping cough" -- are increasing in the United States and back to pre-pandemic levels. Before COVID, there were about 10,000 cases a year in the U.S. Now, the CDC reports, there have been nearly 9,000 cases so far this year. WRAL Health Reporter Grace Hayba shares what health officials are recommending, especially ahead of a new school year.

Dr. Anthony Fauci served under seven U.S. presidents. Before COVID-19, he fought the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Ebola, and Zika. Reset's Sasha-Ann Simons sits down with Fauci to discuss his new memoir, his “nightmare” that came true, and what really went on behind the scenes between him and the Trump Administration.

Phil Soper, president and chief executive officer, Royal LePage, discusses why renters still want to buy a home despite the costs. Video interview can be seen here. Phil Soper PRESS RELEASE TORONTO, June 20, 2024 /CNW/ – One third of Canadians live in rental accommodations, and that figure has been gradually increasing in recent years, as affordability challenges in the resale market persist. According to a recent Royal LePage survey, conducted by Hill & Knowlton, 27 per cent of Canadians who currently rent their home say they plan to purchase a property in the next two years. Among those aged 18 to 34, that figure jumps to 40 per cent. Meanwhile, 69 per cent of renters say they do not plan to buy a home in the near future. Among them, more than half (54%) do not feel their income will be sufficient to afford a property in the area where they wish to live (61% among respondents aged 18 to 34). “The rental sector is not immune to the significant affordability challenges stemming from Canada's acute housing shortage. High mortgage rates have made it difficult for many to purchase a home, forcing some to move into, or remain longer than planned, in the rental market,” said Phil Soper, president and chief executive officer, Royal LePage. “Despite a short-lived decline in prices and demand for rental units during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the available supply of rental properties in most major markets remains ultra low.” Of renters who say they plan to buy within the next two years, half (50%) say they will have a down payment of less than 20 per cent. Twenty-six per cent say they will put 20 per cent down, while 15 per cent say they will have a down payment of more than 20 per cent. In Canada, mortgage insurance is required for homes purchased with less than 20 per cent down. When asked how they will come up with their down payment, 53 per cent of respondents said they will use savings accumulated over the years, while 46 per cent said they will take advantage of the First Home Savings Account (FHSA), and 29 said they will draw on their RRSPs using the Home Buyer's Plan (HBP). Twenty-five per cent said they will use a financial gift from family or an inheritance. Respondents were able to select more than one answer. Forty-four per cent of renters planning to purchase in the next two years believe they will be able to afford a home in their current city of residence, while 37 per cent do not. Among those who don't believe they can buy in their current location, 40 per cent say they will have to travel more than 50 kilometres to buy within their budget, while 21 per cent believe they will have to search for a property within a 31-50 kilometre radius and 18 per cent say they would need to look within a 16-30 kilometre radius. Only 9 per cent of respondents are confident they could buy within 15 kilometres of their current location. According to the Royal LePage 2024 Most Affordable Canadian Cities Report, 50 per cent of people living in the greater regions of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, say they would consider relocating to a more affordable city, if they were able to find a job or work remotely. Among renters in these regions, 60 per cent say they'd be willing to relocate, while 45 per cent of current homeowners say they would consider it. “We know that Canadians widely consider home ownership a worthwhile long-term investment and a quintessential part of the Canadian dream. So much so, that many are willing to relocate in order to make their home ownership dreams a reality. This is especially true for young Canadians and those who have remote work flexibility. I believe we will continue to see migration from southern Ontario and high-priced regions in B.C. to more affordable markets across the country in the future,” said Soper. Nearly a third of renters hoped to buy prior to signing their lease Before signing or renewing their current lease, 29 per cent of Canadian renters say they considered purchasing a property. Among them, 41 per cent say the lack of a sufficient down payment led to their decision to rent instead. “While a third of Canadian adults are currently renting, and there are families who are perfectly content doing so, the desire for home ownership remains strong among a large portion of this segment of the population. Our latest research reveals that a material number of renters wish to transition to home ownership. Understandably, the greatest barrier to entry is the ability to drum up the initial capital for a down payment,” continued Soper. When asked about the motivating factors behind their decision to continue renting rather than buy, approximately one third of respondents said they were waiting for interest rates (33%) and property prices (30%) to decrease. Twenty-two per cent said they are continuing to rent while saving for a down payment, and 20 per cent said they did not qualify for a mortgage. Respondents were able to select more than one answer. “Earlier this month, the Bank of Canada announced its first rate cut in more than four years. Falling borrowing costs will lower the threshold to qualify for a mortgage, helping renters become owners. However, this creates a double-edged sword. Increased competition as they enter the market will put additional pressure on property values. While some will wait for home prices to become more reasonable, Canada's housing shortage will leave them waiting indefinitely,” added Soper. Rising rents and low vacancy rates Nearly four in ten Canadian renters (36%) spend up to 30 per cent of their net income on monthly rental costs. Meanwhile, roughly the same amount of renters (37%) spend between 31 and 50 per cent of their income on rent, and 16 per cent spend more than 50 per cent. In Canada's most expensive housing markets, Vancouver and Toronto, the proportion of renters who spend more than half of their income on rental costs increases to 27 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively. That figure dips to 10 per cent in Montreal. According to the latest Rental Market Report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the average rent nationally for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 8.0 per cent higher than a year prior. Vacancy rates sat at 1.5 per cent and 0.9 per cent, respectively, for purpose-built rental buildings and condominium apartments. “From coast to coast, Canadians are struggling with housing affordability in the wake of one of the most aggressive interest rate hike campaigns in history. Across many regions, rental demand vastly exceeds supply, making affordable housing a challenge. The housing industry and government must collaborate on innovative solutions to increase inventory, including rentals, and support those most impacted by these escalating market conditions,” concluded Soper. The 2024 federal budget, released on April 16th, announced several measures intended to more effectively protect tenants and strengthen their path to buying real estate. In addition to a renewed commitment to incentivize purpose-built rental buildings, a highlight was the creation of the Canadian Renters' Bill of Rights, which proposed a national standardized lease agreement and the disclosure of a property's rental price history. In addition, and perhaps most intriguing, this bill also proposed a recommendation for financial institutions to allow tenants to report their rental payment history to credit bureaus in order to better their credit scores, thereby strengthening their future mortgage applications. Royal LePage 2024 Canadian Renters Report – Data Chart: rlp.ca/2024-Canadian-Renters-Report-Chart ATLANTIC CANADA In Atlantic Canada, 28 per cent of renters say they considered buying a property rather than renting before signing or renewing their lease. Looking ahead, 22 per cent say they plan to purchase a property in the next two years, while 59 per cent will not. “The rental market is shifting. Construction of purpose-built rental properties has drastically increased as the city's population continues to grow. Government programs and development incentives have encouraged the creation of new rental supply in Halifax. Newer buildings tend to attract newcomers who are not able to qualify for a mortgage right away, but want a high-quality place to live as they get established,” said Scott Moulton, sales representative, Royal LePage Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “We saw a wave of residents from Ontario and other parts of the country come to the East Coast during the height of the pandemic. And, as was the case in the resale market, rental prices were also pushed up as demand swelled. This mass migration has since died down.” Moulton added that institutional landlords are the predominant supplier of rental stock in the Halifax region, particularly downtown. Rising interest rates have not had a profound impact on property management companies who have been able to cope with elevated costs compared to smaller-scale or individual landlords. According to the latest Rental Market Report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the average rent in Halifax for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 11.0 per cent higher than a year prior. The vacancy rate in purpose-built rental buildings remained extremely low at one per cent. Among renters living in Atlantic Canada, 29 per cent spend up to 30 per cent of their net income on monthly rent costs, while 38 per cent spend between 31 and 50 per cent of their income, and 24 per cent spend more than 50 per cent. “There is a desire to build rental supply in Halifax, but permitting and application approvals are both time consuming and expensive,” said Moulton. “More rental inventory is required to ease the region's housing supply shortage, but it will take many years for such buildings to be completed.” Royal LePage 2024 Canadian Renters Report – Data Chart: rlp.ca/2024-Canadian-Renters-Report-Chart QUEBEC July 1st is known as moving day in Quebec, the province with the highest percentage of renters per capita in Canada.5 Leading up to this date, 28 per cent of Quebec renters say they considered buying a property rather than renting before signing or renewing their lease. Among them, 42 per cent say they are waiting for property prices to go down, 41 per cent are holding off for interest rates to decrease, and 37 per cent say the lack of a sufficient down payment led to their decision to rent instead. Respondents were able to select more than one answer. Looking ahead, 22 per cent say they plan to purchase a property in the next two years, while more than half (58%) will not. Of those planning to purchase, 40 per cent believe they will be able to afford to buy a property in their current city of residence. Of those not planning to purchase a property in the next two years, 51 per cent say it is because they do not believe their income will allow them to afford the property they desire. “The results of this survey highlight the challenges faced by Quebec renters in the current context of a housing supply shortage,” said Geneviève Langevin, residential and commercial real estate broker, Royal LePage Altitude in Montreal. “However, the desire to become a homeowner persists for many, despite the financial obstacles, which is encouraging since this trend will continue to put pressure on public policy-makers to create housing that meets demand and population growth.” According to the latest Rental Market Report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the average rent in Montreal for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 7.9 per cent higher than a year prior.6 Vacancy rates sat at 1.5 per cent and 1.3 per cent, respectively, for purpose-built rental buildings and condominium apartments. While 2023 saw record low housing starts in Quebec, CMHC expects the province to see a more vigorous increase than elsewhere in Canada in 2024.7 However, new residential developments will remain too few to meet growing demand. “The gradual easing of interest rates, which began with the first cut in the Bank of Canada's key lending rate on June 5th, should stimulate construction in the rental market. However, this expected increase in housing starts will not have an immediate impact on the province's housing supply,” said Langevin. “I'm pleased to see that the various levels of government have begun to think together about alternatives for rapidly increasing housing supply. Unfortunately, the results of these concerted efforts will take time to materialize.” Royal LePage 2024 Canadian Renters Report – Data Chart: rlp.ca/2024-Canadian-Renters-Report-Chart ONTARIO In Ontario, 30 per cent of renters say they considered buying a property rather than renting before signing or renewing their lease. Among them, 47 per cent say the lack of a sufficient down payment led to their decision to rent instead. Twenty-eight per cent say they are waiting for property prices to go down, while 26 per cent are holding off for interest rates to decrease. Respondents were able to select more than one answer. Looking ahead, 31 per cent say they plan to purchase a property in the next two years, while nearly half (49%) will not. Of those planning to purchase, 43 per cent believe they will be able to afford to buy a property in their current city of residence. Of those not planning to purchase a property in the next two years, 61 per cent say it is because they do not believe their income will allow them to afford the property they desire. “For many, renting is an inevitable step on the path to home ownership, as saving to buy a home in one of Canada's most expensive cities can take many years,” said Gillian Ritchie, broker, Royal LePage Real Estate Services Ltd. in Toronto. “In recent years, we have noticed a much-needed increase in purpose-built rental supply in the city. Currently, Toronto's rental market is flush with one- and two-bedroom condos for lease, but does not have an adequate inventory of decent larger units or freehold rental accommodations. This has made it increasingly difficult for families to find suitable rental housing, whether they are waiting for the right time to buy a home or are looking for a temporary residence amid relocation or renovations.” Ritchie added that young professionals and students make up a large part of Toronto's renter demographic. Walkability is a top priority for renters attending post-secondary institutions, while others desire access to amenities, entertainment and their place of work. According to the latest Rental Market Report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the average rent in Toronto for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 8.7 per cent higher than a year prior.8 Vacancy rates sat at 1.5 per cent and 0.7 per cent, respectively, for purpose-built rental buildings and condominium apartments. By comparison, the average rent in Ottawa for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 4.0 per cent higher than a year prior. Vacancy rates sat at 2.1 per cent and 0.4 per cent, respectively, for purpose-built rental buildings and condominium apartments, according to CMHC. Among renters living in Ontario, 35 per cent spend up to 30 per cent of their net income on monthly rent costs, while 36 per cent spend between 31 and 50 per cent of their income, and 18 per cent spend more than 50 per cent. “Many investors bought rental units at the onset of the pandemic amid the record-low interest rate environment, and took advantage of low borrowing costs by purchasing multiple properties. As mortgage carrying costs have materially increased over the last two years, we have noticed some investors offloading their units, potentially reducing available rental stock,” noted Ritchie. “Meanwhile, new developments are bringing more inventory to the rental market and putting downward pressure on prices in some communities. With rates now on the decline, we anticipate that many current renters will step into the resale market as the threshold to qualify for a mortgage begins to ease. However, further rate cuts are needed for this trend to fully materialize.” Royal LePage 2024 Canadian Renters Report – Data Chart: rlp.ca/2024-Canadian-Renters-Report-Chart MANITOBA & SASKATCHEWAN In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, 44 per cent of renters say they considered buying a property rather than renting before signing or renewing their lease. Looking ahead, 36 per cent say they plan to purchase a property in the next two years, while 34 per cent will not. “The pandemic was a pivotal turning point for the rental market. Before COVID-19, one-bedroom rentals were in high demand. Now, as working from home has become more common, renters' need for more space has grown. However, the desire to be close to downtown and have access to conveniences both within their neighbourhood and their rental buildings remains strong,” said Laura Foubert, sales representative, Royal LePage Dynamic Real Estate in Winnipeg, Manitoba. “Winnipeg rental prices have increased over this past year as landlords and property managers aim to make up for price freezes implemented during the pandemic. Meanwhile, incentives like move-in bonuses, parking spots and top-tier amenities, are being offered on new developments to attract quality, long-term tenants.” Foubert added that many current renters are downsizers who have sold their homes and chosen to rent to avoid the upkeep of home ownership – many have no intention of buying another property. According to the latest Rental Market Report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the average rent in Winnipeg for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 4.4 per cent higher than a year prior.9 Vacancy rates sat at 1.8 per cent for both purpose-built rental buildings and condominium apartments. By comparison, the average rent in Regina for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 7.9 per cent higher than a year prior. Vacancy rates sat at 1.4 per cent and 1.8 per cent, respectively, for purpose-built rental buildings and condominium apartments, according to CMHC. Among renters living in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, 50 per cent spend up to 30 per cent of their net income on monthly rent costs, while 36 per cent spend between 31 and 50 per cent of their income, and nine per cent spend more than 50 per cent. “Some individuals are renting until they buy their first home, while others are renting purely because they enjoy the simplicity and convenience of the lifestyle,” said Foubert. “Demand for rentals is expected to remain strong for the foreseeable future.” Royal LePage 2024 Canadian Renters Report – Data Chart: rlp.ca/2024-Canadian-Renters-Report-Chart ALBERTA In Alberta, nearly a third of renters (29%) say they considered buying a property rather than renting before signing or renewing their lease. Looking ahead, 27 per cent say they plan to purchase a property in the next two years, while 45 per cent will not. “The rental segment has been in transition these past few years. We came out of a balanced market that had healthy vacancy levels and robust demand, and headed into a crunch starting in the spring of 2022. We are now in a scenario where multiple offers on rental properties are being seen more frequently, a new phenomenon in Calgary,” said Andrew Hanney, sales representative and property manager, Royal LePage Mission Real Estate in Calgary. “Demand for rentals in Alberta has been coming from all directions, including residents relocating from Ontario and British Columbia in search of a lower cost of living. One-bedroom apartments have some of the highest vacancy rates, as many renters are choosing to live in larger units with roommates in order to lower their monthly living expenses. This has created difficulties for families looking for multi-bedroom rental options.” Hanney added that purpose-built rentals were common in the 1980s and 1990s, but faded from popularity as developers focused their attention on building condominiums for ownership. Now, developers are creating purpose-built rentals once again, in response to increased market demand and a series of new government incentives. According to the latest Rental Market Report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the average rent in Calgary for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 14.3 per cent higher than a year prior.10 Vacancy rates sat at 1.4 per cent and 1.0 per cent, respectively, for purpose-built rental buildings and condominium apartments. By comparison, the average rent in Edmonton for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 6.4 per cent higher than a year prior. Vacancy rates sat at 2.4 per cent and 2.5 per cent, respectively, for purpose-built rental buildings and condominium apartments, according to CMHC. Among renters living in Alberta, 39 per cent spend up to 30 per cent of their net income on monthly rent costs, while 34 per cent spend between 31 and 50 per cent of their income, and 17 per cent spend more than 50 per cent. “Many young Albertans look at housing differently – for those who do not want the responsibility of home ownership, renting is an intentional choice, one that suits their needs and lifestyle,” noted Hanney. “However, there remains an important cohort of Albertans for whom renting makes the most financial sense, while they save up to buy a home. As interest rates continue to fall, we will see more tenants move out of rentals and into home ownership.” Royal LePage 2024 Canadian Renters Report – Data Chart: rlp.ca/2024-Canadian-Renters-Report-Chart BRITISH COLUMBIA In British Columbia, 26 per cent of renters say they considered buying a property rather than renting before signing or renewing their lease. Looking ahead, 27 per cent say they plan to purchase a property in the next two years, while 52 per cent will not. “With a boost in rental supply in Vancouver, competition in this segment is improving, although affordability remains a challenge for tenants facing some of the highest rental prices in the country. Still, demand to live in one of Canada's most popular cities remains consistent,” said Nina Knudsen, property manager,11 Royal LePage Sussex in North Vancouver. “Empty nesters and working professionals make up a significant portion of our renter demographic, as do tenants who are landlords themselves. It is not uncommon for renters to buy an investment property in a less expensive market and lease it out while they continue to save towards the purchase of a primary residence.” Knudsen added that tightening provincial legislation on rentals has caused some would-be landlords to step out of the market, a potential challenge for the creation of rental supply. According to the latest Rental Market Report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the average rent in Vancouver for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 8.6 per cent higher than a year prior.12 Vacancy rates sat at 0.9 per cent for both purpose-built rental buildings and condominium apartments. By comparison, the average rent in Victoria for a two-bedroom unit in October 2023 was 7.9 per cent higher than a year prior. The vacancy rate in purpose-built rental buildings sat at 1.6 per cent, according to CMHC. Among renters living in British Columbia, 23 per cent spend up to 30 per cent of their net income on monthly rent costs, while 42 per cent spend between 31 and 50 per cent of their income. Twenty-five per cent of renters spend more than 50 per cent of their net income on rent, well above the national average of 16 per cent. “As interest rates have increased over the past two years, higher monthly carrying costs have put considerable strain on entrepreneurial landlords, prompting some to offload their units onto the resale market,” said Knudsen. “With rates now beginning to trend downward, some investors may be seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. However, the most recent rate cut by the Bank of Canada will not be enough to encourage those landlords from selling their properties if further cuts are not made in the near future.” Royal LePage 2024 Canadian Renters Report – Data Chart: rlp.ca/2024-Canadian-Renters-Report-Chart Royal LePage resources for aspiring homeowners: To help aspiring homeowners, Royal LePage has published a number of online resources available at the following links: From renter to homeowner: Your complete guide to home ownership in a competitive real estate market 8 new housing policies announced in the 2024 federal budget Real estate terminology 101 Expert Q&A: What you need to know about buying a property pre-construction 6 tips for a seamless moving day Saving for your first home? Here's what you need to know about Canada's First Home Savings Account (FHSA) What is the Home Buyers' Plan? Get matched with Your Perfect Neighbourhood! About the Survey Hill & Knowlton used the Leger Opinion online panel to survey 1,506 Canadians, aged 18+, who rent their primary residence. The survey was completed between June 7th and June 10th, 2024. Representative sampling was done across all provinces (Atlantic provinces were aggregated). Weighting was applied to ensure representation between and within provinces, according to 2021 household renter census figures. No margin of error can be associated with a non-probability sample (i.e., a web panel in this case). For comparative purposes, though, a probability sample of 1,506 respondents would have a margin of error of ±3%, 19 times out of 20. About Royal LePage Serving Canadians since 1913, Royal LePage is the country's leading provider of services to real estate brokerages, with a network of approximately 20,000 real estate professionals in over 670 locations nationwide. Royal LePage is the only Canadian real estate company to have its own charitable foundation, the Royal LePage® Shelter Foundation™, which has been dedicated to supporting women's shelters and domestic violence prevention programs for 25 years. Royal LePage is a Bridgemarq Real Estate Services® Inc. company, a TSX-listed corporation trading under the symbolTSX:BRE. For more information, please visit www.royallepage.ca. Mario Toneguzzi Mario Toneguzzi is Managing Editor of Canada's Podcast. He has more than 40 years of experience as a daily newspaper writer, columnist, and editor. He was named in 2021 as one of the Top 10 Business Journalists in the World by PR News – the only Canadian to make the list. He was also named by RETHINK to its global list of Top Retail Experts 2024. About Us Canada's Podcast is the number one podcast in Canada for entrepreneurs and business owners. Established in 2016, the podcast network has interviewed over 600 Canadian entrepreneurs from coast-to-coast. With hosts in each province, entrepreneurs have a local and national format to tell their stories, talk about their journey and provide inspiration for anyone starting their entrepreneurial journey and well- established founders. The commitment to a grass roots approach has built a loyal audience on all our social channels and YouTube – 500,000+ lifetime YouTube views, 200,000 + audio downloads, 35,000 + average monthly social impressions, 10,000 + engaged social followers and 35,000 newsletter subscribers. Canada's Podcast is proud to provide a local, national and international presence for Canadian entrepreneurs to build their brand and tell their story #business #CanadasNumberOnePodcastforEntrepreneurs #entrepreneurs #entrepreneurship #Homeownership #Homes #Housing #RealEstate #small business

What truly drives your business's success? Is it your product, or is it YOU?Join us this episode as we explore the heart of what makes your business thrive: your personal touch. Before COVID, it was all about in-home parties and genuine connections. Then, the pandemic hit, and we had to adapt with online parties and social media. But something got lost along the way: the real YOU.As we navigate the present, it's time to ask: Do you still have the grit to adapt? Your clients love you and crave that personal connection. So, let's rediscover how to show them YOU. Pick up the phone, go live, host a party, and connect like never before.Tune in for success stories and tips on how to keep your business flourishing by being authentically you. Rediscover your grit and let's thrive together!  #YoAdrienneTalks #BusinessSuccess #PersonalTouch #AuthenticConnections #CustomerCare #Grit #DirectSales #PodcastFor Coaching information - https://yoadriennetalks.com/Come visit the Yo Adrienne Talks Communityhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/160183006086769

Before Covid, few of us had ever been subjected to a quarantine. But that experience effectively isolated us in a bubble. In a spiritual sense, sometimes believers are constantly isolated from the world in a self-imposed quarantine. We don't want to be OF the world so we try not to be IN the world. Today on A NEW BEGINNING, Pastor Greg Laurie points out how that neglects one of our most important responsibilities. It's the kick off of a new series in Acts called The Upside-Down Life. Harvest Crusade 2024 --- Listen on harvest.org --- Learn more and subscribe to Harvest updates at harvest.org . A New Beginning is the daily half-hour program hosted by Greg Laurie, pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Southern California. For over 30 years, Pastor Greg and Harvest Ministries have endeavored to know God and make Him known through media and large-scale evangelism. This podcast is supported by the generosity of our Harvest Partners.Support the show: https://harvest.org/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before Covid, few of us had ever been subjected to a quarantine. But that experience effectively isolated us in a bubble. In a spiritual sense, sometimes believers are constantly isolated from the world in a self-imposed quarantine. We don't want to be OF the world so we try not to be IN the world. Today on A NEW BEGINNING, Pastor Greg Laurie points out how that neglects one of our most important responsibilities. It's the kick off of a new series in Acts called The Upside-Down Life. Harvest Crusade 2024 --- Listen on harvest.org --- Learn more and subscribe to Harvest updates at harvest.org . A New Beginning is the daily half-hour program hosted by Greg Laurie, pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Southern California. For over 30 years, Pastor Greg and Harvest Ministries have endeavored to know God and make Him known through media and large-scale evangelism. This podcast is supported by the generosity of our Harvest Partners.Support the show: https://harvest.org/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before COVID, few of us had ever been subjected to a quarantine. But that experience effectively isolated us in a bubble. In a spiritual sense, sometimes believers are constantly isolated from the world in a self-imposed quarantine. We don???t want to be OF the world, so we try not to be IN the world. Today, Pastor Greg Laurie points out how that neglects one of our most important responsibilities. It???s the kick off of a new series in Acts called The Upside-Down Life.Support the show: https://harvest.org/resources/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before Covid, WWE and UFC were key to push the envelope of MMA in China, now, independent promotion companies like Middle Kingdom Wrestling are left to pick up the momentum. Featuring- Adrian Gomez: Middle Kingdom Wrestling - FounderTo go further- Middle Earth episode  #65 China's winter sports market : How to get 300 million snow enthusiasts?- Middle Earth episode #51 Pop Mart : How to Make an Addictive Toy (featuring Yang Yaling)With thanks to Yang Yaling of Following the yuan for co-producing the episode and Middle Kingdom Wrestling for poster's picture.Middle Earth is made by China Compass Productions and hosted by Aladin Farré. If you have a China-themed cultural project, like shooting your next documentary, or are looking for a specific talent, please get in touch! Chinese speaker? Follow our Bilibili account 阿拉丁_说电影

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Dear EA, please be the reason people like me will actually see a better world. Help me make some small stride on extreme poverty where I live -- by the end of 2024., published by Anthony Kalulu, a rural farmer in eastern Uganda. on April 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This message is for everyone in the global EA community. For all the things that have been said about EA over the recent past -- from SBF to Wytham Abbey to my own article on EA in 2022 (I have a disclaimer about this at the very bottom of this message) -- I am asking the global EA community to help me make only one small stride on extreme poverty where I live, before 2024 ends. Let's make up for all the things that have been said about EA (e.g., that EA doesn't support poor people-led grassroots orgs in the global south), by at least supporting only one poor people-led grassroots org in a part of the world where poverty is simply rife. Be the reason people like myself will actually see a better world, and the reason for people like us to actually see EA as being the true purveyor of the most good. FYI: I come from a community that purely depends on agriculture for survival. For this reason, the things that count as producing "the most good" in the eyes of people like me, are things like reliable markets for our produce etc, as opposed to things like mosquito nets, deworming tablets etc that EA might view as creating the most good. About me: My name is Anthony, a farmer here in eastern Uganda. My own life hasn't been very easy. But looking at people's circumstances where I live, I decided not to sit back. Some clue: Before COVID came, the World Bank said (in 2019), that 70% of the extreme poor in Sub Saharan Africa were packed in only 10 countries. Uganda was among those ten countries. Even among those 10 countries, according to the World Bank, Uganda still had the sluggishiest (i.e., the slowest) poverty reduction rate overall, as shown in this graph. Even in Uganda: Eastern Uganda, where I live, is Uganda's most impoverished, per all official reports. Our region Busoga meanwhile, which has long been the poorest in eastern Uganda, has since 2017 doubled as the poorest not just in eastern Uganda, but also in Uganda as a whole. In 2023, The Monitor, a Ugandan local daily, said: "Busoga is the sub-region with most people living in a complete poverty cycle followed by Bukedea and Karamoja. This is according to findings released in 2021/2022 by Mr Vincent Fred Senono, the Principal Statistician and head of analysis at the Uganda Bureau of Statistics". Even in Busoga itself, our two neighboring districts Kamuli & Buyende, being the furthermost, remotest area of Busoga on the shores of Lake Kyoga, have the least economic activity, and are arguably Busoga's most destitute. In short, while Uganda as a country is the very last in Sub Saharan Africa in terms of poverty reduction, our region Busoga is the worst in Uganda, and even in Busoga, our 2 twin districts Kamuli & Buyende, being the remotest, are simply the most miserable. Help us see some good before 2024 ends: I am asking the global EA community to help the Uganda Community Farm (the UCF), a nonprofit social enterprise that was founded by me, to accomplish only two goals before 2024 ends. Please be the reason people like us will actually see a better world. Goal one: Size of Long Island. That's, expanding the UCF's current white sorghum project to cover every village in Kamuli & Buyende - a 3,300 sq km region the size of Long Island (New York). Since 2019, the UCF has trained many rural farmers in Kamuli & Buyende, in eastern Uganda, on white sorghum. Our goal right now, is to expand this work and cover every village in Kamuli & Buyende, with white sorghum. Kamuli & Buyende are two neighboring districts in Busoga, Uganda's most impoverished reg...

The earth is not flat. Vaccines work and they don't make you magnetic. Global warming is real. Covid is airborne. But you will hear a great deal to the contrary, too, from vaccine and climate deniers, flat-earthers, and plenty of conspiracy theorists willing to die on the hill of their chosen belief. Why? What happened? I thought it might be interesting to do a little time travel. What if we looked a book arguing for science and the humanities to join forces and stop science misinformation… BEFORE Covid. Heck, before Twitter was much of thing, even. Before the social media monoliths we explored in Cory Doctorow's recent work. Let's go all the way back to 2009—when I was still a graduate student—and revisit a collaboration between a journalist and a scientists: Unscientific America. We'll talk live to Sheril Kirschenbaum, host of SERVING UP SCIENCE on PBS, executive director of ScienceDebate, a national nonprofit that encourages politicians to address science and innovation, and director of The Energy Poll at The University of Texas at Austin. A prolific writer and scientific thinker, she brings a lot to the table when it comes to getting science on the ballot (and into the public). How has Unscientific America changed? What do we make of this new, science denying world? Bring your questions and your debate hat and let's get political! Only on PBC. Episode was recorded live March 14, 2024. Follow us on Twitter (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@peculiarBC⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠), Facebook (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠facebook.com/groups/peculiarbooksclub⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠), Instagram (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@thepeculiarbookclub⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠), and Youtube (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/PeculiarBookClub⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)!

Before Covid and certain political changes, the business world was relatively normal with buyer confidence where it needed to be for businesses to thrive. But things quickly changed as lockdowns, inflation and other politics started changing the way people view the world, dramatically lowering buyer confidence. People contracted, preparing for worst case scenarios. Times have changed and so sales techniques need to change too.On March 23 - 25, 2024, there's a virtual event that will dive deep into what these new times look like, how it got here and most importantly, how you can achieve greatness using new techniques that appeal to the hearts and minds of people in a post Covid world.Soar Live is about making people, businesses, and entrepreneurs uncensored, unleashed, and unstoppable. It's a 3 day event to activate greatness, help you discover your purpose and achieve your dream life. You'll discover what's stopping you and how to get back into your flow. You'll be made aware of changes in the world and marketplaces including the top 5 reasons VSL and webinars stopped working, and the top organic strategies that don't cost money that actually bring in clients. Also, people are recklessly preaching AI but users don't realize what they're losing in the process. Over these 3 days you'll learn how to intelligently use AI in a way that maintains your unique message so that you don't fall into the sea of AI copy.Soar and Roar costs only $333. For more info and to register, go to https://www.soarandroar.com/soarlive.Visit eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

https://Art2Life.com - Austyn has completed art residencies all over the world. She landed in a residency at the Mendocino Art Center right before Covid hit. Before Covid, the majority of her work was black and white and ornate. She'd sculpt solid and draw with an ebony pencil on the surface.  Her time in Mendocino allowed her to crystalize what she wanted her art to convey. She shifted toward bright dominant colors and hasn't looked back. In this conversation, Austyn shares how her global experiences have helped her channel her art, what her creative process looks like, and what she hopes to accomplish in the future. ================================ LISTEN IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN… How Covid transformed Austyn's work [3:35]  Austyn's creative process [9:29] What's influenced Austyn's work [20:10]  What's on the horizon for Austyn [24:40]  ================================ RESOURCES MENTIONED The Art of Your Life Free Workshop: https://a2lworkshop.com/5-days-workshop/ Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will: https://www.amazon.com/Determined-Science-Life-without-Free/dp/0525560971 Austyn's show at the COVA Gallery in the Netherlands: https://www.instagram.com/covagallery/ ================================= CONNECT WITH AUSTYN TAYLOR Austyn's website: http://www.austyntaylor.com/ See Austyn's sculptures on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/austynaustynaustyn/ ============================= CONNECT WITH NICHOLAS WILTON AND ART2LIFE: Get the Free COLOR TIPS PDF: https://workshop.art2life.com/color-tips-pdf-podcasts/  Follow the Sunday Art2Life Vlog: https://art2life.lpages.co/sign-up-for-the-a2l-vlog/  Follow Nicholas Wilton's Art on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicholaswilton/  Follow Art2Life on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/art2life_world/?hl=en  Subscribe on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Art2Life

Ben Broussard, Chief of External Affairs for Catholic Charities of Acadiana, joins us to discuss the nonprofit's mission. Since 1973, Catholic Charities has worked to provide essential services to the most vulnerable people in our community who experience hunger, homelessness and poverty. A separate nonprofit organization from the Diocese of Lafayette, many services are 100% donor funded and others are buttrosed through grants from government and private organizations. The organization has traditionally taken care of our most vulnerable neighbors through outreach efforts for disaster response, as well St. Joseph Diner, St. Joseph Shelter for Men, St. Michael Center for Veterans, the Stella Maris Center, and the Monsignor Sigur Center. In the past several years, other critical services have been added to Catholic Charities' umbrella of services including The Emily House in 2018, which offers an emergency shelter for homeless women and children. They have also added new responsibilities by taking over the Immigration Services and Deaf Action Center formerly run by the Diocese of Lafayette, as well as assuming management of FoodNet Food Bank and Rebuilding Together Acadiana.  In 2019, Catholic Charities also became entrepreneurs by taking over ownership of Crossroads Catholic Bookstore, which is now known as Crossroads Collective.  "I feel that all of us are called to do something for our neighbor who stands to suffer. It is easy to think about it during the cold weather or a disaster, but in someone's every day disaster or situational crisis, they also need help." The recent extreme cold snap in January 2024 has presented a challenge to the organization as our community's homeless population has risen dramatically. And then, the ancient heating system in St. Joseph's Diner broke on January 15, 2024, and needs to be entirely replaced. Day in and day out, Catholic Charities is here for our community. It's time for more of us to be there for them. A quick background on Ben Broussard: for eleven years, Ben previously worked as Chief of External Affairs for the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association with the late Don Briggs. His heart was always in sync with service to others, so when Kim Boudreaux, Executive Director of Catholic Charities, approached him to serve with her organization, Ben's temperament and ability to mobilize the troops when needed was a ready fit. Ben is an articulate and passionate spokesperson for Catholic Charities and is inclusive in his call for help in whatever way concerned community members feel they can step up. You do not need to be Catholic to be involved, nor do you need to be an active church-going member of any congregation. "The entirety of the 70501 zip code in Lafayette is a food desert. We have very vulnerable clientele come in and St. Joseph Diner is one thing they can bet on, that they can get a meal there. It is very much a very volunteer-centric operation with many volunteers coming in throughout the day." On any given day, Catholic Charities' St. Joseph Diner feeds 700 to 800 meals.....breakfast, lunch and dinner, seven days per week. On any given night, Catholic Charities also houses about 160 people, including men, women, children and Veterans. With the recent deep freeze, Lafayette Fire Chief Robert Benoit gave the OK for more people to be sheltered than would normally be allowed by law to accommodate the dire need for a warm space. Catholic Charities' permanent housing program has traditionally been an extremely successful tool to help our homeless population get back on their feet in a stable environment while dealing with the underlying causes that led to homelessness, such as addictions, mental illness, physical disabilities, etc. Before COVID, Lafayette's occupancy rates were at about 80% and Catholic Charities could work with landlords to negotiate affordable rates for their clients. Now, in the aftermath of Hurricanes Laura, Delta and Ida,

Before Covid, Most Americans couldn't imagine the staggering loss of life that earlier generations experienced during epidemics of smallpox, diphtheria, polio and other fatal infectious diseases. We've been living in a golden age since WWII, when widespread use of vaccines and antibiotics eradicated the biggest killers and doubled life expectancy. But the catch-22 of medical discovery is that over time, we collectively forget the horror of the diseases from which we were saved. Today, a look at our never-ending quest to escape contagion. We also talk about the myth of ‘Patient Zero' and a lunar pandemic that never happened. GUESTS:  Richard Conniff: National Magazine Award-winning writer for Smithsonian magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. He's  also a former Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent book is Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape From Contagion. Leyla Mei: New York City-based writer and medical historian. She has a PhD in American history and writes about disease, risk and race.  Dagomar DeGroot: Associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. His work has appeared in Aeon magazine, The Conversation, and The Washington Post, among other outlets.  His most recent book, Ripples in the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Humanity's Place in the Solar System, will be published in 2024.  The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode.  Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, Cat Pastor, and Lily Tyson contributed to this show, which originally aired on June 22, 2023.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friend! Does it really matter whether you show up to your life looking and feeling like yourself? Is it really a problem for you to feel self-conscious? After all, doesn't everybody?   I think it does matter, and in this episode I'm going to give you a glimpse into my personal life to explain why and then I'll share some personality-based tips to give you a boost.   But first I want to invite you to grab my free wardrobe planning workbook, The Wardrobe Pyramid. you can download at the link below, or on my website Signature Style Systems.   Before Covid, because of some things going on in local politics, there were alot of people talking loud about the best strategies for getting people off the streets and integrated back into society. At the time, I was volunteering with a local recovery program and the hero was parking next to a train trestle and getting to know one of the residents there.   Then in one day driving through town and seeing the people walking across the street with all the earthly possessions, I had two realizations: 1) I could do more. There was so much need and I could do more. 2) Pretty much anybody, in any job, could do it such a way as to improve the life and the chances of others. And not just specific others, my vision is universal flourishing. I honestly believe we need everyone contributing at their greatest point of impact to solve the mammoth problems we have: homelessness, cancer, global warming. Loneliness.   So, what has that to do with you feeling self-conscious about how you look? For years, I was not seen as who I am and therefore I didn't attract opportunities that were inline with my gifting. I looked like a generic mom, so people asked me to babysit.   And I wasted alot of time and money on shopping for clothes that I didn't end up feeling like myself in. So my why is for you to be able to waste less of your life on shopping and trying to make outfits and to have more time to do more important things, and more impact by being seen for who you truly are.   Ready to begin to discover your Style DNA? Visit my website: SignatureStyleSystems.com. Thinking about a capsule wardrobe? Grab the workbook: The Wardrobe Pyramid and discover what clothes you really need for your lifestyle. Just want to take the first step in getting your wardrobe systematized? Get a bite-size closet project in your inbox every week.

From an outsider's perspective, Jason Wise, director of the SOMM movies and founder of SOMM TV, has been able to find stories in the world of wine that interest a broad audience. To control more of the content pipeline and how the shows are distributed, Jason founded SOMM TV. Using "Somm" as more of a curator, SOMM TV has wine at its core and covers food, travel, and other alcohol, making it appealing to a broad (and younger) audience. Learn more about the business of wine films in this episode of XChateau! Detailed Show Notes: SOMM movie (2012) - Genesis of the movieMade when he was fresh out of film school (where he didn't focus on documentaries)Met Brian McClintic, who asked him to watch their tasting practiceJason found the practice similar to a sporting eventMet Ian Cauble and found his determination to become a Master SommelierThe success of the filmThe obsessive personalities made the filmBuilds to an actual event (the MS exam)The wine industry was ready for something like the movieNot a "wine film," a different way of looking at wineIntroduced a new group of people who can tell you what to drink (vs magazines)Documentaries became popular with NetflixNot made by wine people, the outsider perspective made it enjoyable for outsidersMedia business modelMovies usually have a distributorTheaters are a big marketing arena for wineiTunes - make a % of revenueNetflix - pays the distributor a fixed fee; if put on the 1st page, it can reach millions of people. It often pays based on what it costs to make. They can own rights outright or rent the filmAmazon - get paid 6+ months after it's up, get a tiny cut of incremental revenueYouTube - don't make any money onCreated SommTV to control more steps in the business model - more control of content pipeline, partnerships, and a place to premiere new films (e.g., SOMM 4)Before Covid - events were a big part of the businessMedia platformsHulu - Jason's favorite, takes the biggest swings in contentStars - has the best moviesNetflix - very careful; content is very similar to each other; often licenses something then makes their version if it works (e.g., Uncorked is a similar series to Somm)Cost of making filmsBig range - SOMM 2 ~$100k vs ~$850k for another wine film made by someone elseDocumentaries - can be millions, when there's real music, at least $500kDo not pay people to be in the filmSommTV business modelEmployees on salary, which is unusual in film90% original contentIt started with originals and, now, trying to license other contentFocused on wine, food, and alcohol; food is going to be a big partIt started the streaming service because it's an underserved audience, and wanted to super-serve themContent pipeline - they would ideally love to have new content every dayHundreds of thousands of subscribers (as of Jan 2022) - believes the potential audience is in the millions"Somm" is defined by Jason as someone who curates - wine at the center, but food, travel, etc…surrounding itPricing - $6/month, $50/yearLower cost doesn't necessarily mean more subscribersTechnology - a mix of own-developed and 3rd party apps; the goal is to bring the technology in-houseSommTV subscribersYounger, usually 24-37 years old (~70%), middle classScreenings/events - more varied audience52% male, 48% female - women growing fastKey markets - US largest by far, UK, Brazil, Nordic countries (not allowed in Iran or China) Get access to library episodes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Restaurant owners on Valencia Street — at one time one of the most popular streets in San Francisco — are saying that crime, drug abuse and low tourism are killing business, according to a recent article. "If you took me back before I signed the lease, I would have opened somewhere else," restaurant owner Rafik Bouzidi said. "Before COVID there was no way in hell you could find an available space on Valencia Street," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Now it seems like another restaurant shuts down every week," he said. Support the show

Tony Fauci was running a test on Covid strains in Montana before the pandemic began. We are just now learning about this, and not from the US press. There is an upside to this, which is that Fauci is personally responsible for many people realizing that the pharmaceutical complex has been lying to us for years. Under oath, the godfather of vaccines admitted to using experimental vaccines on orphans, female prisoners and their babies, and a million people under colonial rule. But, he's not the worst. The so-called godmother of vaccines said she was bullied into admitting the truth, that her study had nothing proving that these injections do not cause autism. We also discuss the evidence of vaccine deaths: the case is closed.What does God's Word say? Isaiah 1:23 Your rulers are rebelsAnd companions of thieves;Everyone loves a bribeAnd chases after rewards.They do not defend the orphan,Nor does the widow's plea come before them.Mark 10:42-45 And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”Episode 1,195 Links:REVEALED: Anthony Fauci-run lab in MONTANA experimented with coronavirus strain shipped in from Wuhan a year BEFORE Covid pandemic beganBREAKING: "Died Suddenly" is being caused by the COVID vaccines; I have the data. OR=2.22 p=.005. In other words, the debate is over. The "safe and effective" COVID vaccines are responsible for the increase in "died suddenly" events. No doubt about it anymore.Stanley Plotkin “The Godfather of Vaccines. When he is under oath he has to speak the unspeakable. I have more coming your way shillsFormer Pfizer VP Dr. Mike Yeadon tells Dr. Drew that the mRNA COVID vaccines were deliberately designed to cause blood clots and attack the immune system.A sweeping ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates for employees of private Texas businesses is on its way to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk, carrying a $50,000 fine for employers who punish workers for refusing the shot.Covid Villain Profile: Peter DazsakWe've followed the money and identified how Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money.@RepJamesComer lays out the money trailI ask @GavinNewsom about the lessons learned from COVID.What do we do right/wrong? Did we shut down schools too long?"We allowed local control. In some cases, yes they waited too. In other cases, they didn't."He says the state had little ability to determine that.Watch the “Godmother of Vaccines” Vaccinologist Dr. Kathryn Edwards wilt before your eyes during a deposition in preparation for a vaccine injury trial. The issue at hand is, how can the government and its pharmaceutical company interlocutors assert their products do not cause autism, if the proper studies have never been conducted in order to prove that?4Patriots https://4patriots.com Protect your family with Food kits, solar generators and more at 4Patriots. Use code TODD for 10% off your first purchase. Alan's Soaps https://alanssoaps.com/TODD Use coupon code ‘TODD' to save an additional 10% off the bundle price. American Financing https://americanfinancing.net Visit to see what American Financing can do for you or call 866-887-2275 BiOptimizers https://bioptimizers.com/todd Use promo code TODD for 10% off your order. Bonefrog https://bonefrog.us Enter promo code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your subscription. Bulwark Capital http://KnowYourRiskRadio.com Find out how Bulwark Capital Actively Manages risk. Call 866-779-RISK or visit KnowYourRiskRadio.com Patriot Mobile https://patriotmobile.com/herman Get free activation today with offer code HERMAN. Visit or call 878-PATRIOT. SOTA Weight Loss https://sotaweightloss.com SOTA Weight Loss is, say it with me now, STATE OF THE ART! Sound of Freedom https://angel.com/freedom Join the two million and see Sound of Freedom in theaters July 4th. GreenHaven Interactive https://greenhaveninteractive.com Digital Marketing including search engine optimization and website design.

BestPodcastintheMetaverse.com Canary Cry News Talk #685 11.03.2023 - Recorded Live to 1s and 0s WHEAT AND TARE ORE | Devil Comet, Israel MAGA Fallout, Fauci Findings, Alien Abyss Deconstructing Corporate Mainstream Media News from a Biblical Worldview Declaring Jesus as Lord amidst the Fifth Generation War!  The Show Operates on the Value 4 Value Model: http://CanaryCry.Support      Join the Supply Drop: https://CanaryCrySupplyDrop.com                                  Submit Articles: https://CanaryCry.Report                           Submit Art: https://CanaryCry.Art              Join the T-Shirt Council: https://CanaryCryTShirtCouncil.com Resource: Index of MSM Ownership (Harvard.edu)                    Resource: Aliens Demons Doc (feat. Dr. Heiser, Unseen Realm) Tree of Links: https://CanaryCry.Party         This Episode was Produced By: Executive Producers Sir LX Protocol V2 Knight of the Berrean Protocol*** Dwight B***   Producers of Treasure Shana M Sir Marty K Knight of the Wrong Timeline Malik W Dame Gail Canary Whisperer and Lady of X's and O's DrWhoDunDat Sir Morv Knight of the Burning Chariots Veronica D Sir Casey the Shield Knight Sir Scott Knight of Truth   Art Producers for Episode 685 will be properly thanked on Episode 686!   CLIP PRODUCER Emsworth, FaeLivrin, Joelms, Laura   TIMESTAPERS Jade Bouncerson, Morgan E   CanaryCry.Report Submissions JAM   REMINDERS Clankoniphius   SHOW NOTES/TIMESTAMPS Podcast = T - 4:10 from D-Live                                HELLO, RUN DOWN 7:10 V / 3:00 P DEVIL WORSHIPPERS/CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM/PSYOP/WW3 8:22 V / 4:12 P Headline: Mysterious "devil comet" that looks like Millennium Falcon to flyby Earth 2024 (Salon) *MAGA and Christian Nationalism: Bigger threat to America than Hamas could ever be (Salon) → Officials eye legislation to strip citizenship, residency from terror supporters (Times of Israel) → Resource: CCR 159 - The Truth about Christian Nationalism   DAY JINGLE/V4V/EXEC. 34:49 V/ 30:39 P   FLIPPY 55:05 V / 50:55 P Robots are servicing short-staffed restaurants. But what happens to the human waiters? (ZD Net)   COVID/FAUCI 1:08:34 V / 1:04:24 P REVEALED: Anthony Fauci-run lab in MONTANA experimented with coronavirus strain shipped in from Wuhan a year BEFORE Covid pandemic began (DailyMail)    NEPHILIM UPDATE 1:17:30 V / 1:13: 20 P Anomalies Deep Inside Earth Are Wreckage of Crashed Alien World, Scientists Propose (Vice)    SPEAKPIPE/TALENT/TIME 1:26:55 V / 1:22:45 P V4V/TIME END

Connecticut judge OVERTURNS Democrat Primary, orders new mayoral primary after surveillance videos show possible ballot stuffing, Anthony Fauci-run lab in MONTANA experimented with coronavirus strain shipped in from Wuhan a year BEFORE Covid pandemic began , and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan joins the show. Check Out Our Partners: Patriot Mobile: Go to https://www.PatriotMobile.com/Benny and get FREE Activation Allegiance Gold: Go to http://www.protectwithbenny.com/ and get up to $5,000 in free silver with a qualifying purchase Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every superhero has an origin story.  Superpodcasts do, too.  Guys of a Certain Age was born in Robbie's brain - those around him are not sure if it was before or after he was bitten by a radioactive Mississippi mosquito.  Then the idea was shared with Art and Jay over lunch in those glorious golden years, somewhere around 2019 B.C. (Before Covid.).  And the rest is broadcasting history.   On this epic episode which The Guys mostly agreed would be milestone number 250, they tell the story of starting, share favorite episodes, and even talk a bit about what comes next.   Unfortunately, a majority of the Geeks of the Week have to do with endings: two out of the three are obituaries.  Thank goodness Robbie had updated news of a rebirth of one of his favorite movies.  If you haven't listened to the previous 249 episodes, don't worry - this is not Ahsoka.  

Preventative maintenance with Emily SchmittAs of February 2, 2021 - Emily Schmitt, a third-generation family member, was been promoted to Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel. She leads the legal, human resources, communications, strategic planning, and administrative functions of the company. Emily earned a bachelor's degree in business management from Iowa State University in 2008, and went on to earn a Juris Doctorate from the University of Iowa College of Law with high honors in 2011.  After graduating she began working for Sukup Manufacturing Co. in Sheffield, Iowa as corporate counsel.Schmitt is the granddaughter of founder Eugene Sukup and daughter of current president and CEO, Steve Sukup.As the only lawyer at Sukup — which employs more than 500 people — she plays a vital role providing legal counsel at all levels of the company.When said out loud, what does preventative maintenance mean to you?In your role, why is it important to be thinking ahead?How far do you see yourself thinking ahead?Does that change depending on the situation or time of year?Emily Schmitt has fond memories of walking to the Sheffield, Iowa, office after school, playing good-natured pranks on staff members who felt like family. How did growing up around the company help you gain perspective for the role you currently have?Would you compare the childhood perspective you gained to that of a kid growing up on a farm?TELL US ABOUT THE FAMILY MEMBERS INVOLVED AT SUKUP AND HOW YOU WORK TOGETHER.I work with my husband on a daily basis. My two kids are known as the recycling directors. Before COVID, they would take a wagon around and fill it up with everybody's recycling and collect some candy. My brother-in-law, my dad – oftentimes we work five days a week. What is the key to keeping family and work tougher but separate?  We have listeners that right in wanting the solution to not being mad or resentful at a parent or a sibling involved in the farm or business.DID YOU ALWAYS KNOW YOU WANTED TO COME BACK TO THE COMPANY FOR YOUR CAREER?What would you say to our listener who is currently in school or college or working off the farm that is trying to find their fit in the family business?In your role as CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER AND GENERAL COUNSEL. Is this where you were able to have a real focus on the future of the company and what needs to get taken care of now for growth to happen in the future?In 2019 Emily was named to the business record 40 under 40.  One of the main reasons what the preventative maintenance she does with the Sukup Employees.Giving employees purpose. Getting to know the employees further ingrains my dedication to them and the company. An interesting fact about Schmitt: She created a jewelry line in high school, Gems by Em. She is using jewelry to help residents of Haiti.What do you do to tackle the tasks each day knowing that each day will be different?What is your key to prioritizing?How does this help with stress and your mental health?How do you get things done quickly when relying on other people? Do you have any tricks that have helped you become better at thinking further ahead?What do you think about the phrase “Don't assume you know what others need”Don't be afraid to ask for feedback or insightPerseveranceThe business world is a highly unpredictable and stressful environment. It's all up to specific individuals and their ability to learn and reach their goals despite the uncertainty around them. Anything else you'd like to share with our listeners?What do you enjoy most about working with and for farmers?Summary & Challenge

It's In the News, a look at the top stories and headlines from the diabetes community happening now. Top stories this week: a new pilot program will allow some pharmacists to prescribe CGMs, Georgia becomes the latest state to pass a law securing Glucagon for schools, new info about COVID-19 and new cases of T1D, insulin pump infusion set and skin reaction study, does kombucha tea lower blood glucose and more! Moms' Night Out early bird specials will end soon for Texas and Rhode Island!  Please visit our Sponsors & Partners - they help make the show possible! Take Control with Afrezza  Omnipod - Simplify Life Learn about Dexcom  Find out more about Edgepark Check out VIVI Cap to protect your insulin from extreme temperatures Learn more about AG1 from Athletic Greens  Drive research that matters through the T1D Exchange The best way to keep up with Stacey and the show is by signing up for our weekly newsletter: Sign up for our newsletter here Here's where to find us: Facebook (Group) Facebook (Page) Instagram Twitter Check out Stacey's books! Learn more about everything at our home page www.diabetes-connections.com  Reach out with questions or comments: info@diabetes-connections.com Transcription: Hello and welcome to Diabetes Connections In the News! I'm Stacey Simms and these are the top diabetes stories and headlines happening now XX In the news is brought to you by AG1. AG1 helps you build your health, foundation first. XX New pilot program to allow pharmacists to prescribe CGMs. This comes from the American Pharmacists Association Foundation, with support from Helmsley Charitable Trust. While many patients with diabetes may not even have access to a primary care physician, the average person interacts with their community pharmacist 12x more often than their primary care provider. The program will launch in 20 community pharmacy practices across the U.S. There will be a 90-day enrollment period followed by 12 months of monitoring and management https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230720044367/en/The-APhA-Foundation-launches-patient-enrollment-for-a-program-to-expand-access-to-pharmacist-provided-continuous-glucose-monitoring-CGM-devices-and-services XX We told you recently about Mobi's approval, that's Tandem's tiny pump, billed as the world's smallest durable automated insulin delivery system. Convatec Group now saying they've partnered with Tandem on a new five-inch infusion set for the Mobi. Not a lot more information than that, but interesting because while Convatec makes infusion sets for just about every tubed pump, last year, Tandem acquired another infusion set developer, Capillary Biomedical. https://www.outsourcing-pharma.com/Article/2023/07/18/Convatec-to-manufacture-new-infusion-set-for-Tandem-Diabetes-Care XX New law in Georgia to make sure all schools have emergency glucagon on hand and that it can be used for any student. House Bill 440 took effect on July 1, 2023. It will allow public and private schools in Georgia to acquire and keep a supply of glucagon. It allows prescribers to provide standing orders or prescriptions for ready-to-use glucagon to schools so that this medication can be rapidly administered to students in an emergency. Schools will also be able to work directly with glucagon manufacturers or third-party suppliers to obtain the products for free or at fair market or reduced prices. In 2018 a school nurse in Illinois used another students glucagon on a different study having an emergency, breaking the law. It's since been changed in Indiana and now, in Georgia. Disclaimer: the state rep who sponsored this bill, Doug Stoner is married to my dear friend Trip Stoner who lives with type 1. https://www.thegeorgiavirtue.com/georgia-legislature/georgia-bill-to-help-schools-treat-hypoglycemic-emergencies-becomes-law/ XX I think most of us know this but good to see research on it. A new study shows skin reactions at insulin pump infusion sites are common among people with type 1 diabetes who use the devices and can lead to delivery failure. researchers at the University of Washington, in Seattle, used biopsies and noninvasive imaging to compare insulin pump sites with control sites in 30 patients. They found Several differences were found at pump sites in comparison with control sites, including fibrosis, inflammation, eosinophils, a disease-fighting white blood cell which indicated an allergic reaction here. The inflammatory response, they say, "may result in tissue changes responsible for the infusion site failures seen frequently in clinical practice." Nearly all patients (93.3%) reported itchiness at the site, and 76.7% reported skin redness. While the researchers think preservatives in the insulin or the makeup of the infusion sets are probably to blame, they admit they don't really understand it fully yet. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/995068 XX Very large new study seems to confirm that the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a jump in cases of type 1 diabetes in children and teenagers. This study pooled data from 17 previous studies and looked at 38-thousand people under the age of 19. They found the incidence of type 1 was about 14-percent higher during 2020, the first year of the pandemic, than in the previous year. The incidence rose higher still in the second year of the pandemic, up 27% from 2019. Before COVID-19, the incidence of type 1 diabetes in children was rising at a steady rate of around 2–4% a year. The meta-analysis did reaffirm that children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes tended to present with more severe forms of disease during the pandemic than before. The incidence of diabetic ketoacidosis, a potentially life-threatening complication of new-onset type 1 diabetes, rose by 26% from 2019 to 2020, probably because people were hesitant or unable to seek emergency care when early symptoms appeared. It's still unclear what triggered the sudden increase in diabetes and how long the trend might persist. It's also important to keep in mind that a few researchers have spoken out that they believe the increase sounds implausible. And that Studies from Finland7, Scotland8 and Denmark9 could not directly link coronavirus infections to the increase in type 1 diabetes. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02322-0 XX Commercial – AG1 XX New research shows the best time to predict childhood type 1 diabetes is ages 2-6, when screening detects 80-percent of future cases. Research shows screening children ages 2-6 best predicts childhood type 1 diabetes, successfully detecting 80% of future cases. Early screening also leads to more timely treatment, better health outcomes, and less diabetes distress. These researchers reviewed findings that screened 90-thousand children under the age of 6 and 32-thousand children under 18. These researchers emphasized the need to work towards the adoption of universal screening at the state government, payer, and healthcare provider levels. https://diatribe.org/early-diabetes-screening-kids-can-improve-quality-life XX Very small pilot study suggesting that kombucha reduces blood glucose levels in adults with type 2. I'm including this because you'll likely hear a lot about it.. but keep in mind, the sample size was too small for statistical significance. A total of 12 participants with type 2 diabetes were randomly assigned to consume 240 mL of either a kombucha product or placebo daily with dinner for 4 weeks. They then waited 8 weeks and switched to the other product for another 4 weeks. Kombucha significantly lowered average fasting blood glucose – on average from 164 to 116. Kombucha tea is a fermented drink made with tea, sugar, bacteria and yeast. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/995035 XX Afon, a Welsh based company, is working on a non-invasive glucose sensor that has the potential to revolutionize the way blood glucose levels are monitored. We've heard these types of promises before, but are yet to see something materialise into a real-world product. With the development of optical sensors in the early 2010s, the concept of using technology to monitor glucose levels in a non-invasive manner was first brought up. Light is used by these sensors to obtain signals from beneath the skin. For several years, there has been discussion about incorporating such technology for glucose monitoring by smartwatches. Afon adopts an entirely different approach. Its blood glucose sensor is called Glucowear. It is an RF sensor that fits under the base of the wrist. The gizmo uses radio frequencies to obtain signals from beneath the skin. Unlike optical sensors this technology provides real-time monitoring with no time lag. Hoping for a 2024 launch date The company stated that they hope to have the device on the market by early 2024. This is an extremely optimistic goal given the stringent requirements imposed by health regulators. There is no information available on how well Afon is progressing with regulatory approval, and the company's website makes no mention of the regulatory process. So far the Afon Blood Glucose Sensor has undergone three rounds of testing at Profil, a world-renowned diabetes research center in Germany. A multi-phase trial of this technology will be conducted at Swansea University's Joint Clinical Research Facility (JCRF) later in 2023. There will also be other multi-site trials before the device hits retail in 2024. Glucowear delivers real-time continuous glucose monitoring through its wireless integration with a smart device. Designed to be placed under a user's smartwatch, the sensor allows the said device to serve as an integral part of the monitoring system. Afon promotes the Glucowear as a comfortable wearable and ensures that the painless CGM has a battery lifespan of up to 14 days when fully charged. https://gadgetsandwearables.com/2023/07/24/afon-blood-glucose-sensor/ XX https://www.medpagetoday.com/popmedicine/cultureclinic/105707 XX On the podcast next week.. talking to Justin, better known as DiabeTech, who was diagnosed with T1D by TikTok! Last week I talked to the author of Sweeite! That's In the News for this week.. if you like it, please share it! Thanks for joining me! See you back here soon.  

Despite the United States accounting for around 5% of the world's population, it houses nearly a quarter of the world's prison population. This often discussed metric begins to make sense when examining the major cities like Los Angeles, New York and others, where things like poverty and mental illness are often considered “crimes.” Host Robert Scheer digs into this phenomenon in Los Angeles on this week's episode of Scheer Intelligence with Melissa Camacho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California.“First of all, it has to do with the criminalization of poverty, the criminalization of mental illness. What are we talking about? These are people who are innocent at this moment and they have not had any day in court,” Scheer expressed. Together, Scheer and Camacho discussed the recent small victories in L.A. county, where subhuman conditions set for detainees have gradually improved, including new limits on how long detainees can be held at inmate reception centers and how long they can be chained to chairs and benches. Camacho explained that the fight for the improvement of these conditions has been ongoing with the ACLU for over 50 years.Before this recent victory, detainees would be subject to environments people often associate with third world countries. “[Detainees] were getting stuck in the [inmate reception center] for days at a time, and those who were the sickest were stuck on the front bench, chained to the front bench for literally 24, 48, 72 [hours]. I talked to somebody who had been on the front bench for 99 hours,” Camacho said.Camacho also mentioned the efforts to control the levels of overpopulation often experienced at these jails. “Our L.A. County jails are authorized to hold around 12,400 people, but they consistently operate above that level, 14,000, 15,000. Before COVID, it was up to 17,000,” Camacho said. As a resident of Los Angeles, Scheer describes how he sees and knows that most of the time, the people who are getting arrested are part of the thousands of houseless people who line the streets of the city.

Before Covid, Most Americans couldn't imagine the staggering loss of life that earlier generations experienced during epidemics of smallpox, diphtheria, polio and other fatal infectious diseases. We've been living in a golden age since WWII, when widespread use of vaccines and antibiotics eradicated the biggest killers and doubled life expectancy. But the catch-22 of medical discovery is that over time, we collectively forget the horror of the diseases from which we were saved. Today, a look at our never-ending quest to escape contagion. We also talk about the myth of ‘Patient Zero' and a lunar pandemic that never happened. GUESTS:  Richard Conniff is a National Magazine Award-winning writer for Smithsonian magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. He's  also a former Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent book is Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape From Contagion. Leyla Mei is a New York City-based writer and medical historian. She has a PhD in American history and writes about disease, risk and race.  Dagomar DeGroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. His work has appeared in Aeon magazine, The Conversation, and The Washington Post, among other outlets.  His most recent book, Ripples in the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Humanity's Place in the Solar System, will be published in 2024.  The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, we are living in a world where access to all of the knowledge of humanity is getting easier, faster, and more accessible to all. This means that know what and how to ask questions to obtain the required answers have become a skill onto itself. On this episode, we have a dialogue with Jon Berghoff about the power of questions, and how to know if you're asking the right questions. Jon Berghoff is the founder of XCHANGE Approach, a company that delivers legendary group learning experiences designed to blow open exponential thinking, and exponential results. Jon's a living legend for a reason, and he's a ton of fun. We promise you; your brain will thank you for listening to this dialogue today. You're listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let's go. Jon Berghoff on creating an experience where people feel safe The conversation starts off with a question for Jon, particularly on how he could create successful digital events in a world where people don't fully subscribe to them yet. Jon shares that he drew his drive from his own experience back in high school, where he felt like he was left out and was disconnected for other people. In time, he realized that breaking through this disconnect is one of the important details in getting people excited for conversations, meetings, or on his case, digital events. Because they have a place where they feel safe and where they feel they belong. Jon Berghoff on the role of questions The next part of the dialogue focuses on the importance of asking the right questions and creating meaningful experiences in meetings and gatherings. Christopher recognizes that a company's success is attributed to asking the right questions, listening, and creating a positive experience, and Jon is an expert at asking questions and creating a safe environment. They then talk about the difficulty of adapting to a rapidly changing world and how it relates to ineffective meetings. Jon emphasizes the importance of designing meetings that address complex issues and move away from the notion that a few people have all the answers. The Ego-centric design of meetings The conversation then shifts to the ego-centric design in meetings and conversations. Christopher observes that some meetings have the feel of dictatorial ego-centric events in which a few people present their vision and have all the answers. Jon agrees and explains that many meetings are unconsciously designed with an ego-centric approach, in which either a few people have all the answers or participants are more concerned with convincing each other of their own ideas. They do, however, recognize the need to tap into collective intelligence and shift the paradigm to engage everyone's thinking. Jon emphasizes the importance of questions in this process, stating that the world's complexity requires less emphasis on having all the answers and more emphasis on asking the right questions. He refers to John Kelly's view that future intelligence will be measured by the ability to ask the right questions rather than what one knows. To hear more from Jon Berghoff and the power of questions in today's knowledge-driven world, download and listen to this episode. Bio Jon Berghoff is the founder of the XCHANGE Approach, a scientific approach to unlocking collective wisdom in any group. These are extraordinary times, which call for exponential conversations. Which is why innovative leaders have run to XCHANGE as the solution for bringing together companies, communities, customers in powerful ways. Before COVID-19, XCHANGE was leaned on by companies like Facebook, BMW, Costco, to facilitate powerful, large-scale conversations... when the stakes were highest. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, change agents of every type: coaches, consultants and thought leaders... are using XCHANGE to create connection,

Before COVID more and more children around the world were receiving their routine vaccinations on time and in full. But COVID severely interrupted that progress. Now, we are seeing lagging indicators of interrupted childhood vaccinations in the form of outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases like measles and diphtheria.  To reverse this trend a number of global health entities have joined forces for what they call “The Big Catch-up” to boost vaccination among children following declines driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. joining me to discuss trends in routine childhood vaccinations around the world, the impact of COVID 19 on those trends and what can be done to restore progress is Dr. Ephrem Lemango, associate director of immunization at UNICEF headquarters in New York.       

Blyss Young is a seasoned home birth midwife who has so much knowledge, experience, and a special heart for VBAC. Blyss hosts her own podcast, Birthing Instincts, alongside her cohost Dr. Stuart Fischbein where they normalize physiologic birth outside of the hospital.We asked our VBAC community what questions you have for a midwife who supports home births after Cesarean and Blyss has answers! You will leave feeling inspired, educated, supported, and loved for whatever your birthing choices may be after listening to this beautiful discussion. We absolutely adore Blyss and know you will too!Additional LinksBlyss' WebsiteHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsThe VBAC Link Facebook CommunityFull Transcript under Episode DetailsMeagan: Hello, hello women of strength. It is Wednesday. Actually, it's Monday the day of this episode and we are coming at you with another Cesarean Awareness Episode. I am so excited to be doing extra episodes this month. Today we have our friend Blyss Young. You guys, if you don't follow her and her podcast with Dr. Stu, you need to do that right now. Push pause and go find them because they are amazing. They are a wealth of knowledge. They just make me smile. I feel like every time I'm done listening to an episode, my face hurts because I've just been smiling. Really, though. I remember I fell in love with Blyss and Stu years and years ago. We've been so fortunate to have them on the podcast before and Blyss agreed today to be on the podcast blessing you again with her wealth of knowledge and answering some of your questions. We put out in The VBAC Link Community, “What questions do you have for a midwife?” and we got quite a few surrounding home birth. I know this might sound like a really heavy month of talking about home birth because Julie and I got a little salt at the beginning of April talking about a home birth but it's just such an important topic that a lot of people don't know is an option. Review of the WeekSo we're excited to dive into today's episode with cute Blyss but of course, I have a review of the week that I would like to read. The title says, “Thank You” and it's from cara05. It says, “I just wanted to drop a review and say thank you. Because of listening to some of your podcasts, I felt empowered to talk to my OBGYN about skipping the repeat Cesarean in the event that I go past my due date. This was something I had in my head that I really wanted. Opting for induction to still try for a VBAC was important. She was and just over all of this so supportive.” Sorry, that was a little weird for me to read.“She was so supportive of the idea and totally on board which helped me get more excited about championing–” Blyss, I can't read this morning. Sorry, Cara. “--this VBAC so thank you.” Oh, man. This is where Julie always would come in handy. She would really read reviews really well. So going on and having her VBAC. Congrats, Cara, for feeling empowered and that you were able to talk to your OBGYN. This is something that is so important whether you are a VBAC mom or not. We want to have a good relationship with our provider and we want to make sure that we can have those tough conversations. When they may be suggesting induction or a repeat Cesarean for going past your due date, but if something in your heart is telling you no or you are seeing the evidence and you're like, “That doesn't feel right,” have those conversations. I encourage you to have those conversations with your providers. I mean, is there anything that you would say to that as well with being a provider in the world? I feel like as a provider in my head, I would want someone to tell me their thoughts and feelings. Blyss: My relationship with my clients is very intimate. Meagan: It is. Blyss: Yeah. One of my teachers, Elizabeth Davis, who wrote Heart and Hand is a longtime midwife and teacher. She talks about the more we do prenatally, the less we have to do in labor. So I feel like that relationship that we have and hearing the internal landscape of the client is so important because when we are in labor, our body responds. Our hormones respond to feeling safe and having trust and being able to really relax. That's true for every one of my clients but especially with my VBAC clients because they have another level of trauma many times that they are having to go with. That could be their experience that happened in the hospital or maybe they were transported from a home birth and had a Cesarean. And then there's that level of, “Does my body really work? Can I trust my instincts?” So the more that we can dialog about those things and start to really pull that apart and work with them prenatally, I feel like the better chances we have in having that successful experience. Meagan: Yeah, absolutely. I will never forget it. I transferred to my midwife at 24 weeks with my third, my son, my VBAC baby. I just remember looking forward to those days when I got to go see my midwife because I would be feeling angst and hearing all of the static in the world. I remember just walking and she would always greet me with a hug and say, “How are you doing today? What do we need to talk about?” We talked. We dissected those fears and really talked about the things that were going through my mind at that time. I remember always leaving, going with a weight on my shoulders and leaving just feeling refreshed and more connected to her. Blyss: Yeah. Meagan: I think it's important. I know that it's hard in the system because we have providers that are restricted on time. They have so many patients. They've got bogged schedules. They're tired so it's a little harder for them to be more intimate, but I still encourage our listeners to have those conversations, to let them know where you're at so like you said, you can work through it prenatally so that during the birth, those things aren't coming up. We talk about that in our course. VBAC can be different and need more time prenatally. So yeah. If we don't do those things ahead of time, it can definitely impact us during labor. Blyss: Yeah. You know, expect that kind of care. You're not getting that kind of care if you're not feeling the way that you just described when you leave your provider's office. Start to think about what it is that you really want. I know not everybody has the option to either financially or because of availability be able to work with a midwife necessarily, but plan to have somebody on your team that you do feel can support you that way whether it's a doula or maybe doing some concurrent care with a midwife in your area where she can hold the space for you and give you those positive feelings that can help prepare you for your delivery.Meagan: Absolutely. Talking about that, I did dual care for just a little bit as I was debating a little bit and figuring out logistics. Just doing dual care made me feel so much better. I would go to one place and hear one thing and then go to the other and have to work through that. She did have the time and the resources to provide me with that comfort. I love it. Q&A with Blyss YoungMeagan: Okay, well like I said, we have some questions and I think they are really good questions from our listeners. We'll just dive into those if you don't mind and then feel free if we need to stagger away from them on any other topics or passions. This is one of the questions actually that was put in. We talked about this right before we jumped on. What is a CPM versus CNM or a licensed midwife? There are so many questions that people ask. There is a myth that CPMs are not qualified or able to handle VBAC and especially HBAC. I feel like this is the big myth. If you wouldn't mind, could we debunk this a little bit? I don't necessarily agree with that. Blyss: Yeah. I think it all comes down to what you feel aligns best with your values. Just so you understand a little bit about how we're trained. Certified professional midwives, our licensing body is different across the United States. This is one of the problems with our systems whereas we look at other European countries where midwives are integrated into the medical system, we don't really have it together in that way here in the States. The licensure is different from state to state depending on the local jurisdiction. CPMs' certification is our national certification. I practice here in California so when I take my board exams, I'm licensed by the medical board. It's the same licensing board that licenses OBs that gives me my exams. I take my exam and I take the CPM and the LM. That may not be the case across the country. We learn our bookwork and then we have an apprenticeship. We work side by side with midwives or doctors to learn our hands-on skills and then we take a board exam similar to many doctors and nurses and people like that who have this professional capacity. A CNM is a certified nurse midwife. They are licensed by the nursing board and they become nurses first and then have their specialty added to it of midwifery. As professional midwives, all we train for is out-of-hospital birth. That is our specialty. We specialize in low-risk, normal, healthy pregnant moms and their babies. A mom who has had previous Cesarean labor and delivers exactly the same as any other mom. They have an increased consideration because they have this scar so the integrity of risk has been affected but other than that, everything is exactly in terms of their pregnancy and their labor and delivery. We absolutely are champions for these moms being able to have and experience a vaginal delivery for the healing of all of that trauma that we talk about. And also because of your long-term health as a woman who is delivering maybe multiple babies in your lifetime, it's actually much better for you to be able to have a vaginal delivery than to continue to go and have Cesareans. The benefits for the baby of being able to pass through the biome and have those mechanics that help empty their lungs as they are delivered and all of those things that the baby benefits from having physiologic birth. We are champions for that for these moms and for these families because we know. There are some things that we watch for in case there is a uterine rupture or dehiscence as we would say where the scar opens a little bit. There are things that will be a little bit different than a mom who has not had a previous surgery, but other than that, this mom is just a mom who is pregnant and wants to have her baby. So we're absolutely skilled to be able to support that. If you look at the statistics of success because a mom who has had a previous Cesarean is a TOLAC. She is desiring to have a trial of labor after a Cesarean. I lost my train of thought. Meagan: You are just fine. You were just talking about uterine rupture. We have a small increased risk but we are just having a baby as well so at home we have to pay attention to uterine rupture and dehiscence and things like that. There are signs and then you were going to the statistics. Blyss: Yeah, there are signs that we are skilled to be able to look for. Meagan: Yeah. Statistically, uterine rupture happens at 0.4-1%. It's pretty minimal but having someone who is trained in out-of-hospital birth is a little bit different but it doesn't mean that anyone is less qualified to support someone giving birth after having a previous Cesarean or previous Cesarean. Blyss: Oh, yeah. So what I was going to say and where I lost my train of thought was the statistics in terms of success so actually having that vaginal delivery is much higher out of the hospital with a midwife than it is in the hospital. That is something to consider as well. If that's your desire, you want to put yourself in a situation where you're going to have the best possible support to be able to have the vaginal birth that you are desiring. Meagan: Absolutely. That's what Julie and I spoke about at the beginning of April kicking this special episode series of home birth and the chances of success outside of the hospital. We talked about how I want to say it was 18% of people may transfer. Tell me if you know the stat. I think it was 18 or so percent. But within that 18% of transfers, it was usually exhaustion, needing an epidural, or maybe we've got some scar tissue or something that we can't work through, it's a failure to progress, and maybe we need something else if we can't get a homeopathic way to work. I want to say that was what we found. Is that approximately what you would say?Blyss: That's not my statistic. Meagan: Well, yeah. Your statistic is low.Blyss: I would say for a mom attempting to have a vaginal delivery after a Cesarean is the same statistic as a mom who is attempting a first-time delivery. We treat them in the same way in a lot of ways because they haven't had that pushing phase. They haven't pushed a baby out. Their labor depending on how far they dilated in their previous labors is going to give us some information as well. If a woman got all the way to 10 and was pushing her baby out and then they for whatever reason decided that a Cesarean was appropriate, her labor is going to be more like a multip, so someone who has labored except for that pushing phase. And someone who maybe didn't ever get to have labor– you're raising your hand. Meagan: Yep. Blyss: Or I think one of the questions that is coming up is that you only dilated to so far and you're not sure if you're going to be able to get past that point? Those moms are going to be treated more similarly to a mom who has never had labor before. We are going to support them in that way. You have to really, I think this is what we don't understand. A lot of the studies and statistics that are done when you're looking things up or hearing about things are from a medical perspective. They're from medical perspectives. The way that they treat– and I was a doula for many years before I owned a center. I was a doula for many years before I started doing a private home birth practice. I know what it looks like in the hospital to support a VBAC. I've been there with them. Your provider and their faith in you and the way that you are treated by the nursing staff and all of that has a huge impact on your ability to be able to labor and progress normally. We are mammals so our bodies are going to respond the same way a cat or a dog or a cow who wants to go and be off by themselves and have privacy and not feel like they're being watched. Your hormones respond to that. Labor moving straightforwardly in a normal way is affected by you feeling that way. That's what I was saying when we were talking about the different licensure. It really depends on where you're going to feel the most comfortable but you want to have a team that really believes in you and makes you feel, as we were talking about in the beginning, relaxed, comfortable, and empowered because those are the things that are going to affect your body progressing normally. Meagan: Absolutely. Absolutely. As a doula, I've supported VBAC clients both in and out of the hospital but there are times where there is a lot of pressure and angst that is created. That is not helping our labor. Julie and I mentioned it in our episode. We have to think about it like we wouldn't give birth in the same place where we conceived. We don't conceive in front of a whole bunch of people with bright lights on a bed with things strapped to our bodies, right? Blyss: Right. Meagan: But then we do give birth this way. It's just something to be mindful of for sure. Blyss: I didn't get a chance to say that my statistics for first-time moms are a little bit higher than for moms who have already had a vaginal delivery. That statistic is about 10%. As you pointed out, the majority of those are not emergent transports. Those are transports where we are ready for something a little bit different. Again, this is when even midwives have a different level of comfort in terms of how they care for you. I don't transfer someone to the hospital because I'm ready for them to go. I transfer people to the hospital unless there is a medical indication. If there's a medical indication then obviously, I'm like, “Okay, we need to go,” but in terms of this exhaustion and wanting something different and maybe wanting to rest and get an epidural or get access to Pitocin to augment the labor, those kinds of things, for me, if everything is looking great medically, then this is the mom's choice. This is not something that I'm going to make that decision for her. I had a mom the other day. This didn't happen to be a VBAC mom, but just in a normal labor. She had the pushing instinct. It went away. We labored with her for another nine hours because she had a lip and then she pushed her baby out. All of the doulas who were with us were talking about how if that happened in the hospital, that mom probably would have definitely been augmented, definitely not left alone, given a lot of pressure, a lot of vaginal exams, and then probably would have ended up having a Cesarean or a “failure to progress.” But what that mom needed was rest. She needed to eat. She needed to feel like she was ready for the next level of her labor. It was a very mental thing for her we believe. That's not something that is always given either at home or in the hospital. Sometimes, especially, I was just talking to a VBAC mom right before we got on the phone because she went in to see if she could get a consult with a backup doctor in her local area. I sent her to the most common doctors that are supportive of transport. This doctor said, “No doctor in their right mind would back up a mom attempting to have a vaginal delivery at home.” And this is the best we've got. We got on the phone and we were talking about her feelings about all of that because she would really love to know if she's going to have a repeat Cesarean, she would really like to know the person with who she's having a Cesarean. Meagan: Totally. That's one of the reasons why I did it. Blyss: Yeah. That's a reasonable thing to desire but what she's finding out is that she might not have that option and just being in that doctor's office, she said that the nurse came in and said, “Can you take off your pants so we can do a pap smear?” She said, “I'm not coming in for a pap smear.” Just that was a perfect example of being treated like every other person and not being individualized. This woman was coming in for a consult. But it solidified her desire, “This is why I'm not going into the hospital again. If I need it, then it's a good option but it's not something that I'm feeling like I want to choose.” It's just solidifying her desire to have this out-of-hospital experience. Meagan: Absolutely. I think for those who are doing dual care, it's important to still learn the stats and the facts because they can sometimes inflate these numbers and these statistics then you are left thinking, “Wait, am I making the right choice?” My provider told me, “Good luck, no one is going to want you out there.” It was a little different than what she was told but very similar. No one was going to want me out there. It made me question, “Why? Am I that scary of a patient?” That's just not a good feeling and it's not how you should be feeling during pregnancy and especially not during birth. I'm going to lead into one of the first questions that were actually written. Why is there so much backlash around HBAC? When we were talking about backlash, I think it really just means so much hate and distrust about HBAC. I mean, do you find that a lot of people are coming to you saying, “Everyone's telling me not to do this,” or maybe they're even scared? I feel like maybe by the time they come to you, they are confident in their decision, but do you ever have any clients come to you who are still unsure?Blyss: I think that people can be in care and still feel a little unsure. There is part of the process of just unraveling the experience that you had last time and being with somebody who consistently says, “Everything looks good. You're doing great,” and just normalizing the experience of having a joyful pregnancy. The mom that I just talked to, she's like, “There are risks in everything.” I think that's true too. You can look at a statistic that says, “You have a 1% chance of having this happen,” and you can try and say, “I want to try and take that risk down to zero.” Obviously, there is risk in everything. You can't have no risk, but there are people who look at it and go, “I have a 99% chance of having success.” Meagan: That's what we say. Flip it and be like, “I have a 90.9 or 99% chance of full success.” It's like, “Well, dang. That means I'm pretty high up there.” Blyss: Yeah. That's probably how you look at life in general. So if you're wanting to flip the script for yourself not just about this particular instance but about how you look at life in general because you talk about how the birth of your child is just one day. You're actually going to be raising this baby and they're going to have all kinds of risks. Do you want to spend the rest of that time with this child being worried all of the time about what possibly could happen or do you want to enjoy what life has in store for you? That's a lifestyle thing, but you can have a transformative experience and you have this thing in your life that people are looking at. They are projecting onto you their own fear. You have the ability to ground yourself in your own belief about how you are wanting to take control of not just this delivery but your life in general. I think it can help you move into feeling more confident about your choices in general. Meagan: Absolutely. I think you just nailed it right there. A lot of the time, the people that are feeding the backlash are people that have experienced an unfortunate circumstance or have experienced something personal. They are feeding it out there to the world because that's where they're at. Blyss: Yeah, or not. Or they haven't had any. Meagan: Or they haven't. Exactly, yeah. Blyss: You know, I had a mom one time in my care who was attempting to have an HBAC. Her previous doctor was sending me the records. She was transferring out of care. She was like, “This is so dangerous. How are you going to know how the baby is doing? How are you going to know the signs?” She didn't even know what we do at a home birth. She didn't know that we monitor the baby, that we have all kinds of medications, and the ability to be able to manage things at home. I think a lot of times, there is just ignorance too. There is just not an understanding of the role that midwives play. We're not doing a seance with our incense and our Birkenstocks and just hoping for the best. We actually have been trained to know what to look for. Because we do normal all day every day, that's our specialty. When something is not normal, it stands out. It's like a bad nook. You're like, “Huh. This is not normal.” If there's something going on with the mom's uterus during labor and delivery, there are going to be signs. There's going to be pain in between the contractions near the site that's unusual. There might be bleeding that's unusual. The baby's heart tone might be unusual. The patterns of her labor might be a little bit funky. There are a lot of things that will stand out to us as “This is not normal labor progressing. Something is going on.” If you're being conservative and it's a question mark, “Huh. Does this mean that something is happening with the scar?” then you can conservatively transport to the hospital and be monitored continuously because we use intermittent monitoring. Maybe nothing. Maybe you'll have a vaginal delivery at the hospital, but you have the ability to do that and not wait for something catastrophic to happen. You have plenty of time to get there and do the more conservative management of this labor just in case. Meagan: Right. One of the questions was, what are the stats of transfer for an emergency? Again, everyone's stats might be a little bit different, but what she is saying is that there are signs that indicate a change of plan before there is a crazy emergency.Blyss: Right. Meagan: I do think that what you are saying is that she didn't know what the care was. It circles back to the backlash. I think that a lot of people don't.My mom said some really crazy things. Years later, it wasn't until I really understood the mental process of my mom and everything. She was saying those things out of fear, the unknown, and uncertainty. She didn't know what out-of-hospital birth looked like because she only knew what Cesarean birth looked like. It's so important to learn those things and learn those signs but know like Blyss said, that it's not usually even just one. Blyss, you would know way more than I do. But from my experience, there are usually a couple of symptoms. It's not usually one. It's like, “Okay, we've got this, this, and this” or “We've got this happening. Let's transfer. Let's take a plan of action.”Blyss: Yeah. You were talking about my cohost, Dr. Stuart Fischbein, and one of the things he says– he was a doctor in the hospital for many, many, many years and has now been providing out-of-the-hospital support for families for 12 years now. He has the benefit of both worlds. He talks about when we say that a uterus has a rupture, we imagine a tire bursting on the freeway where it's all of a sudden a pop. But usually what it is, is what we call dehiscence. There's a little opening in the uterus. Oftentimes, that can go without having any real incidence and the only way they would know that happened is if they went in and did another surgery. So a lot of times those things will heal on their own. I think you were saying there's a 6.2% out of the people that do have a dehiscence or a rupture that have something really catastrophic that can happen. The statistics are really on your side but you have to be the one who makes that decision to say, “I would really just rather have another Cesarean,” or “I really want to try,” because there is such a high statistic of having success.One of the things that I was saying to this mom earlier is what I notice and I would consider myself a specialist in VBAC. I really love caring for these women. One is because I feel like their options are limited especially in the area that I am in. There is actually a ban on VBACs in the local hospital where they would deny these women pain relief if they came in to try and have a vaginal delivery. The women in my area are driving 40 minutes to go to a hospital in another town to be able to have this support. I feel really honored to provide this option for people who desire that. It's really important to me. And, I was transported in my first delivery and had a forceps, an instrument delivery. I didn't end up having a C-section. But when I had my vaginal delivery on my own at home after that, the triumph of reclaiming my body and knowing that my body wasn't broken and that it was just a mismanagement of my labor that led to that. I know what it's like for these women to be able to have that redemptive birth after the surgery. What I notice with VBACs is that they're totally straightforward and normal just like another mom giving birth which I talked about earlier or they come really fast. It's like the uterus knows, “I can't do this for very long. I need to be super effective.” I actually just had a woman who had a VBAC after two Cesareans with me and it was so fast that I didn't make it. That's how fast it was. I was so happy for her and her husband because he's a paramedic and he caught the baby and it was absolutely amazing. I was on the phone and on my way there. All the work that we did to prepare her for this and she just popped that baby out like she had done it her whole life. Or we might have a labor that meanders. The uterus is wise in that way too. It's like, “I need to be really conservative with my energy.” So you might have these contractions that are really far apart. Just like I did in that birth when I was telling you that we gave her nine hours to try to have that lip back, nothing was wrong. We weren't getting any signs that anything was wrong. If you're a mom attempting to have a vaginal birth after a Cesarean and you have labor like that, you want somebody with you who is going to honor and respect that your body is progressing, it's just going to take a little bit longer because the integrity of that scar, the uterus knows, “I just need to be smart about this.” If you augment that labor or push that body past what it's saying it can do, that's when you can have a problem. Meagan: Yeah. I love that you said that because I was one of those where my uterus tinkered around for a little bit. I had a 42-hour-long labor. I was like, “This is never going to happen,” but it did and I'm so grateful for that. I think that's just what my uterus needed. It needed to take its time and then it was 6-10 hours to get baby out really quickly. It just took a long time to get there. Blyss: You said you hadn't had labor before, right? Meagan: I labored like a first-time mama. I only went to a 3. My water broke before contractions really started so it had to kick in. There was a lot. Blyss: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes first-time laborers can be that way. I tell my families to be prepared for three days. That's normal. That's normal labor for a first-time dilation and delivery. I don't think that's what you're going to hear from a medical provider because they don't know normal. They only know what they decide as being normal so most of those labors get augmented in some way. Either they're induced or they give them Pitocin at some point or they just call it and say, “Your body's not doing this so we're just going to give you a Cesarean.” Meagan: Yeah. That's what happened with my second. They were like, “Oh, it's just not going to happen.” It hadn't been very long. So it does happen. Another question was going into failure to progress. If we didn't want to transfer and if there was no need to transfer but maybe we're getting tired and we're trying to progress at home, obviously we know time is our best friend. Time, trust, and faith in our body, and sometimes it is going to sleep, getting some food, and maybe doing a fear clearing. I truly believe, I've seen it so much through my own doula work and my own personal self and through the podcast and everything, that clearing your mental fears during labor can change our pattern just like that. It's crazy. But for home birth midwives, are there things that they can do to help things progress? In the hospital, we talked about how you are more likely to be augmented with Pitocin or something like that. Maybe they'd break your water. But are there things that you can do out-of-hospital to avoid a transfer because it's not really necessary at that point but to help progression if we're starting to get tired and things like that?Blyss: Well, I think that when you do have that scar, you want to be mindful of pushing the body like I said. I'm not against augmenting a VBAC but it's something to really give really good informed consent and talk through. I would probably lean more toward, “Let's sleep. Let's take the pressure off. Let's figure it out.” If you're in early labor, sometimes you can take a Benadryl and maybe even have half a glass of wine. Sometimes that can help you sleep. If you're in full-blown labor, it's a little bit harder to do. But like you said, maybe having a conversation about, “Is there something that you're afraid of? Are there people at birth that are nervous and that's affecting you?” Sometimes you have too many people there too early. Your mind can be wanting to take care of those people like, “Gosh, this is taking forever. I feel bad that my midwife is here and that my mom is here.” Send people home. Keep one person there just in case, but clear it out. You can refresh the space. If you've been in labor at home for a long time, sometimes you just change the smells. Clean up a little bit. Meagan: Go outside. Blyss: Go outside. We send our mama outside barefoot in the grass in her backyard. Those things can be really healing. I send people on walks all of the time. I know it's really hard. You don't want to get your clothes on and go outside but this is going to be really good because it takes your mind off of it. Also, going back to that hormone flow, you want to increase oxytocin so do things that can do that. Maybe put on a funny movie and get distracted that way. Maybe you and your husband can go and get in the shower together. You can have a little bit of making out and a little bit of nipple stimulation. If your bag is intact, I know this sounds totally crazy, but I've had people actually have sex and it's very effective. Or if you have a toy or something. I just saw a post the other day talking about how masturbating during labor can bring on the sensation of being able to relax a little bit more. Meagan: I've had a client do that. Blyss: Yeah, totally. Meagan: It totally worked. He did it for her but it totally worked. I was like, “I don't know what you just did and I don't need to know the details.” I was like, “Why don't we all leave? Why don't we grab some lunch? You guys do your thing.” We came back and it was business. Baby was coming. I mean, seriously, baby came three hours later. It can work, yeah. Blyss: Totally, 100%. One of the other things you can do is have a dance party. Change up the music. You don't need the spa music and Hypnobirthing or something the whole time. Put on some fun music and laugh. Shake your booty a little bit. All of these things can be really helpful. Doesn't that sound much better than laying in a hospital bed being monitored and strapped? Meagan: Or hooking up to a pump?Blyss: Yeah. So facilitating oxytocin is another one that can be really, really helpful. But you know, midwives have homeopathy. We have herbs. Our big gun is castor oil. Those things can be utilized. I think it's just a matter of really talking it through. The first thing I would always recommend is respecting the body and respecting that there's a reason why it's having a challenge. If labor really can't get going and you're really tired, then the hospital might be the appropriate place because that again might be your body telling you, “This may not feel the right way for my uterus. There might be something else going on that the uterus is protecting itself from working too hard and causing that scar to maybe not keep its integrity.” Meagan: Yeah. That's a really good point. I want to talk about how you did transfer. You weren't a VBAC. You have transferred. I want our listeners to know that if a transfer takes place, that's okay. That is okay. You're not failing because you left and changed your plan. There is no giving up because you decided that you wanted an epidural. There's no failing in that. It doesn't need to be negative is what I'm trying to say. A lot of the time, people writing in are a home birth turned Cesarean and feel totally deflated like they failed. That's just not how it is. It's not how it is. You are doing an amazing thing. You are birthing a baby. You are birthing a child out of your body. You are giving birth and you are becoming a mother to a human being. It doesn't really matter how you do it or if the plan has to change but like Blyss said, sometimes we need to tune in and say, “What is our body saying right now?” Is our body saying that we need to do nothing? Is our body saying that we need to do something? I think that is one thing that we need to remember. I think sometimes too that people think, “Oh, home birth midwives will do everything they can to avoid a transfer.” I really disagree with that. Yes, they are going to help you get the birth that you want. They are going to do everything they can and they are passionate, but I'm telling you right now listeners, or an OB that helps at home too. We know that those exist with Stu and I think there are some others. They're not going to just do something for themselves. They're not just going to keep you. “You can't leave. Nope. You can't leave because you're going to change my statistic.” It's just not going to be. It's important for you to remember that you are going to be safe. They are going to have these discussions with you and it's okay for you to have those discussions if you're feeling like you need to transfer. If your intuition is saying, “Something is not feeling right,” and not feeling like you are giving up, failing, or disappointing anybody because you're not. You're doing what's best for you. Blyss: Yeah. Again, going back to the work that you do prenatally is going to really help you in labor. The more that you can tune into your own body and know what's important to you and what you need as a sovereign person, the more you're going to be able to tune into that in labor. You don't want to be handing over your power to a provider. You want to be the one who is in charge of what's happening to yourself. They may give you information and consult with you about how things are going from their expertise, but ultimately, it's about you being the one who's saying, “This is really what I want and this is what my body is telling me.” You don't want to just wait until you get into labor to do that. You want to practice that throughout your whole pregnancy. I think that is a really important piece. And yep. Thank God we have medical advances. What I find with my clients is if we end up transferring, we've done all of these things. They've had great prenatal care. They've been able to talk and process all of these things. If they're going to have a repeat Cesarean, what they would like to do differently this time that they learned from their last experience? So if they get to that point, they know that they did everything that they could to give themselves the best chances and they feel empowered throughout the process. I think that the most important thing is that you feel like you weren't bullied or made to do something and that each step of the way, you are making a choice that feels right for you and your family. As human beings, we deserve that for everything. We deserve to be able to make these choices for ourselves. Meagan: Yeah, and I think with being able to make those choices and to feel that empowerment to be able to do that, even if the outcome isn't what we planned on, we're going to have an overall better view from that experience because we aren't going to feel like birth happened to us. We're more likely to feel like we were the active participant in our journey and the leader or the driver in the seat and have a better postpartum experience.Blyss: Yeah. And welcome to life, right? Meagan: Yeah. Blyss: Our lives don't turn out exactly the way that we planned. We ultimately have to meet life on life's terms and know that we are not in control of every single thing that happens. It's how you respond and how you move forward through a challenge that really makes you who you are and gives you the life experience that you want to have because labor and birth and being a mom is the greatest lesson in not being in control of things. It's an important one. It's a really important one. The only thing that you can really have control over is going in and deciding, “I'm going to deliver on this day and have a repeat Cesarean.” That is within your control. But if you are really wanting to trust your body and to have a physiologic birth experience, you have to be willing to let go of that control and ride the waves and see where it takes you and meet each moment with the best that you've got at that time. Meagan: Yes. Oh, I love that. I love that. Ride the waves. That is the perfect ending. I have one more question but I want to just end on that. Ride the waves. Ride the waves. Trust your body. So if I'm having an out-of-hospital birth, what should I be asking? Are there specific questions I should ask my midwife? Do I have qualifications? Are there certain things where you would say, “You're probably not a good candidate for a VBAC at home?” Are there any final tips that you would give as people are researching this option and talking to people?Blyss: Yeah, I think it goes back to what we were saying in the beginning. How do you feel when you are in this person's presence? That's a big one. Telling your story to them, telling them how you feel and what you are desiring this time and then just really feeling into do you feel that this is somebody that you want to have by your side? Ask them about their experience with VBACs. Ask them what would be the situation in which they would require a transport or that they would want to transport? See if that aligns with how you are feeling about this decision and what you would want from a provider. Maybe ask their statistics how many VBACs they have done. What is their transfer rate? When did they transfer with those people? I think that's all really important and how comfortable are they? Are you a mom who has had multiple Cesareans? How comfortable are they with those risks and do you feel aligned with what it is that they are sharing with you about their philosophies? I think that is a big part. Again, your provider and how they feel and how they approach things whether it's in the hospital with an OB or a certified nurse midwife or at home with a CPM, their feelings about it and their trust in this process is going to have a huge impact on your experience because they are going to bring those fears or concerns into the birth room or into your pregnancy and you don't need that. You need someone who believes in you 100% and when you're with them, you feel better than when you got there. That's what you're looking for. If you don't have those options available in your area, find somebody who can provide that for you virtually or find a doula who can be there with you as a continuity of care that you do have that connection and trust and faith with. I feel like that is probably the most important part of the process. Meagan: Absolutely. That's what I was looking for. I had a lot of questions at my visits but ultimately, one of the biggest things I was looking for was how I felt in their presence, their confidence in me, my confidence in them, and yeah. I mean, I liked to know what would happen if I needed to transfer or what would they be looking at to make me transfer so I would know, “Okay, this is happening. She talked about transfer,” but overall, I needed to know that that person was in my corner because I had never been in anybody else's corner if that makes sense. I was in my own corner with my first two babies and I didn't want to feel that way again because it's a very lonely corner. Blyss: Yeah, yeah. The only contraindication would be a classical incision. Other than that, I think that it's just about exploring what the risks are. Let's say it's a short interval or something like that. I think giving true informed consent to that family and making sure they understand the increased potential risk, if this is an option that they want, I would rather be able to support them in this option than send them to the hospital if that's not necessary or having those people maybe do an unassisted birth because no one's willing to support them. That's me. Not all providers feel that way but I believe if this is something that you've researched, you understand the risks, and this is what you're desiring, you deserve to have somebody there by your side. That's what we're there for. Birth is meant to happen with nobody around just like a mammal. We're designed to survive. Our babies are designed to survive. You don't actually need anybody with you, but when you hire somebody to be there by your side, we are there to be able to help you decide when it is time to get support or be able to step in and offer that medical support if needed. So if someone never wants to deal with any kind of complication that may potentially arise in childbirth, you probably shouldn't be a provider because that's our job. We're the ones who are supposed to step in calmly and help you make a decision that's going to keep you and your baby healthy. Like you were saying earlier, us keeping you home when you don't want to stay home, none of us want to have a bad outcome. We don't go to work thinking that we want to force somebody to stay home and have a bad outcome. We all want the same thing, a healthy mom and a healthy baby. For us, there's that additional layer of transformation, elation, joy, rights of passage, and having the family have an experience of understanding that this is how we were meant to deliver our babies. Meagan: I have feelings about the healthy mom, healthy baby. Just like you were saying, I add to it. Healthy mom, healthy baby, and a good experience. That's going to look different for everyone. I hope that as you are listening to this episode, you know you have options. You have options. I know sometimes Blyss talked about financially or maybe even location-wise, you are feeling that those options are stripped or you are feeling restricted. I understand that and I know it sucks. But don't ever hesitate to explore your options or maybe look for those virtual support meetings and things like that. Or maybe drive 40 minutes because deciding what is best for you is most important. Here at The VBAC Link and Blyss, I'm going to speak for you, there's no judgment in the way you birth. There's no judgment. We just want you to have a good experience and know your options. Blyss: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. I love you and as I said, I love supporting families in general but I have a special place in my heart for VBAC moms and for the work that you are doing so thank you so much for inviting me to have this conversation. I am available for people to come out to Santa Barbara if they feel like they don't have options which I know is not for everybody. I'm also happy to do consults with people over the phone if they just need somebody who can tell them that they can do this. Meagan: Yes, I know it sounds crazy that I'm going to go to another state and have a baby, but you guys, people do it. Before COVID, I had a Russian clientele. People from Russia would come to the states here to Utah. Think about how far that is. It's not super crazy. A lot of the time, people are like, “It's a lot of money. It's a lot of effort. It's a lot of this.” You guys, this is one day in your life that will impact you forever. It really will. I will never forget my births. Money will come and go but your experience will stick with you. Blyss: Forever. Meagan: So if you can make it work, if you have a VBAC ban, or you are restricted or something like that, check out Blyss. Check out midwives in the next state over. Look at these options. Expand your ideas. Expand your ideas and know that you have options. Blyss: Yeah. Take back your power. Meagan: Take back your power. Take back your power and know that it's okay. It's okay to do something that seems weird. People are going to be like, “What are you doing?” but it's okay to do that. Blyss: And that's how change happens. If we all do the same thing, no one is ever able to see that this is possible. You deserve that. You deserve to listen to your own heart and your own instincts and what your soul is telling you is right for you. That's okay if it's not right for everybody. Meagan: Yes. Absolutely. Just like we were talking about earlier, there are going to be different outcomes and that's okay if that wasn't your outcome or if that wasn't your choice. We have people who after learning about VBAC and the statistics, the risk is too much for them and that is okay. That's okay. ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan's bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Amelia Wilcox is the Founder and CEO of Nivati, a platform designed to make access to mental health solutions easier for employees. They have been recognized as one of the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the US twice and have raised $5.7M to date. Nivati also provides flexible work to 1200 practitioners, including counselors and coaches, across North America and is used by 11,000+ employees in 60+ companies. Before Covid, Amelia ran Incorporate Massage, one of the fastest-growing companies in the US multiple years in a row, providing onsite massage services to 4,000+ corporate clients. Within ten days of the pandemic and their clients shutting down, Incorporate Massage revenues went from $6M to $0, and she had to think fast and find a new need to serve. After talking to Incorporate massage clients, she realized there was an enormous need around mental health, which her company was uniquely positioned to solve better and faster than anyone else, and that's how Nivati was born. Amelia has received many entrepreneurship awards, including being named one of the 2021 Women in Business to Watch by Startup Weekly.More Info: NivatiSponsors: Master Your Podcast Course: MasterYourSwagFree Coaching Session: Masterleadership.orgSupport Our Show: Click HereLily's Story: My Trust ManifestoSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/masterleadership. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Before COVID, few of us had ever been subjected to a quarantine. But that experience effectively isolated us in a bubble. In a spiritual sense, sometimes believers are constantly isolated from the world in a self-imposed quarantine. We don't want to be OF the world so we try not to be IN the world. Today on A NEW BEGINNING, Pastor Greg Laurie points out how that neglects one of our most important responsibilities. It's the kick off of a new series in Acts called The Upside-Down Life. Listen on harvest.org --- Learn more and subscribe to Harvest updates at harvest.org. A New Beginning is the daily half-hour program hosted by Greg Laurie, pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Southern California. For over 30 years, Pastor Greg and Harvest Ministries have endeavored to know God and make Him known through media and large-scale evangelism. This podcast is supported by the generosity of our Harvest Partners.Support the show: https://harvest.org/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.