Podcasts about collaborative

  • 5,591PODCASTS
  • 8,589EPISODES
  • 37mAVG DURATION
  • 2DAILY NEW EPISODES
  • Mar 2, 2026LATEST
collaborative

POPULARITY

20192020202120222023202420252026

Categories



Best podcasts about collaborative

Show all podcasts related to collaborative

Latest podcast episodes about collaborative

The Finish Line Podcast
Jeff Latture, Senior VP of Barnhart Crane & Rigging, on Multiplying Impact Through Strategic Collaborative Giving (Ep. 180)

The Finish Line Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2026 48:27


Jeff Latture serves as Executive Vice President at Barnhart Crane and Rigging and as chairman of Strategic Resource Group, but his journey into collaborative generosity began long before boardrooms and grant strategies. Growing up in Arkansas, he watched his parents come to genuine faith, yet it was later in Dallas through a vibrant church community and a pivotal sermon from Bill Bright, that his faith became personal. A simple conversation with his future wife about missions planted an early vision: if they could not go, perhaps they could send. God reshaped that vision when He closed the door to starting their own business and instead led Jeff to Barnhart, a company committed to investing its profits in the Great Commission. Over three decades, Jeff has helped cultivate GROVE, Barnhart's internal collaborative giving team, and advance a mutual fund model of ministry through the Strategic Resource Group. He has learned that wise generosity requires shared mission, deep relationships, patient trust, and a willingness to surrender control. Collaborative structures, clear strategy, and long-term partnerships have multiplied Kingdom impact across frontier regions. This conversation offers a thoughtful vision for pursuing obedience, discernment, and deeper partnership in your own stewardship journey. Major Topics Include: Give collaboratively, not independently Build trust through long-term relationships Shifting from transactions to partnerships Organize giving around focused teams Leveraging business wisdom for Kingdom impact Investing in ministry capacity and health How to balance metrics with Spirit-led discernment Surrendering control in stewardship QUOTES TO REMEMBER “What I really wanted in starting a business was to be in control. And God wasn't going to let me have that.” “He said, I'll let you serve the ones in control, but I'm not going to let you be the ultimate steward.” “We would never have thought ever that we would have the viewpoint that we have for what God's doing around the world. But it just started one relationship and one gift at a time.” “Giving together is way better than trying to do it on your own.” “You just learn faster in a group than you can by yourself.” “It's our secret sauce is doing things together and getting the thinking of many people pointing the same direction.” “A good collaborative will cost you something. You have to give up some rights for a collaborative to work.” “Knowing the heart of the leader is the most important thing.” “It's very relational. We like to measure things. We're a bunch of engineers. But it's really the relationships that drive us.” “If we'll go to God first and really lean in to listening to what Scripture says and what the Holy Spirit is saying before we make those funding decisions, somehow it comes out with a better result.” “My personal experience over 30 years, He will do far more than you can ever imagine with the things that He's given you.” LINKS FROM THE SHOW Alan Barnhart (see our past interview here) When Helping Hurts (see our interview with coauthor Brian Fikkert) Mission Increase Strategic Resource Group The India Alliance IllumiNations Bible Translation Alliance (see our interview with Todd Peterson or John Chesnut) MacLellan Foundation (see our interview with Director of Generosity, John Cortines) Mergon Doug Cobb, Founder of The Finishing Fund (see our past interview here) Achieve Alliance BIBLE REFERENCES FROM THE SHOW Matthew 28:19–20 | The Great Commission “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Esther 4:14 | For Such a Time as This “For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” TAKE A STEP DEEPER On the Finish Line podcast, we are all about stories, seeing how God draws us into generosity over a lifetime.  But sometimes these stories can leave us thinking, “What's that next step look like for me?” That's exactly why we've launched a whole new podcast called Applied Generosity which explores the full landscape of the generous life across 7 different dimensions of generosity.  Applied Generosity helps make sense of the hundreds of stories we've shared on the Finish Line Podcast to help you find that best next step. If you've been inspired by these stories and want to take things to the next level, check out Applied Generosity anywhere you listen to podcasts or at appliedgenerosity.com.

Anthony Plog on Music
Ammiel Bushakevitz: A celebrated pianist, collaborative artist, and chamber musician whose journey through classical music has taken him across six continents.

Anthony Plog on Music

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 28, 2026 85:00


Ammiel Bushakevitz is a celebrated pianist and chamber musician whose journey through classical music has taken him across six continents, performing in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall, among many more. Born in Jerusalem and raised in South Africa, he discovered his passion for music early on, later studying in Leipzig and Paris under renowned teachers. Ammiel has a particular affinity for the art song, collaborating with leading vocalists and releasing multiple award-winning recordings, including the ambitious project to record all of Schubert's piano works by 2028.In this engaging conversation with Tony, Ammiel reflects on his deep connection to Schubert's music, exploring themes of joy and melancholy that resonate in the composer's works. He shares personal anecdotes about his musical journey, the evolution of his interpretations, and the importance of musical spontaneity in live performances. With insights into the nuances of piano playing and his collaborative experiences with singers, Ammiel's reflections reveal the profound impact of music on both his life and artistry.

Regeneration Rising
Episode 54 - Building a Collaborative Meat Business

Regeneration Rising

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2026 34:42


In this episode, host Kristina chats with Jaimie Stoltzfus, owner of Cowgirl Meat Co. in Big Timber, Montana. Jaimie discusses nuances of her business including how she makes shipping meat worthwhile, the partnerships that support her work, and her marketing strategies. She also talks about her experiences working her way up from ranch hand to ranch manager and other roles that helped her as a business owner now.

The PAWsitive Choices Podcast
You Aren't Failing, Your Brain is Just Full (The Pom-Pom Jar)

The PAWsitive Choices Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 26, 2026 19:43


Are you beating yourself up for dropping your New Year's resolutions? Are you losing your patience over tiny things and feeling guilty about it? It's not because you're failing—it's because your brain is at capacity.In this episode, we are talking about self-compassion, cognitive capacity, and how to give yourself (and your kids) grace when the demands of your environment exceed what you feel like you can handle. I'm introducing the "Brain Capacity Jar" and sharing how you can apply these practical SEL tools to your own life and classroom.

Nightside With Dan Rea
NightSide News Update 2/25/26

Nightside With Dan Rea

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 26, 2026 39:42 Transcription Available


During our continued news hour coverage on NightSide, discussed the latest news coming out of Red Sox Spring training in Florida!8:05PM: Voices of Hope Upcoming event - Bruins Alumni vs Chelmsford/Westford Police Hockey Game to Fight Cancer on March 7th from 6pm to 10pm at the Warrior Ice Arena Guest: Greg Chastain - founder and President of Voices of Hope - a registered, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) organization with more than 150 active volunteer members who share a passion for the performing arts and a desire to join the fight against cancer by raising awareness and funds for cancer research. 8:15PM: The latest news on Red Sox Spring Training down in Florida. Guest: Tim Healey – Boston Globe Sports Reporter 8:30PM: Youth anxiety, depression, suicidality, chronic absenteeism, and concerning school behaviors are all higher than ever. Why so many kids are struggling, why traditional discipline makes things worse, and how schools can transform their approach to become proactive, collaborative, and helpful. Guest: Dr. Ross Greene - Clinical child psychologist, former Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry faculty member (for over 20 years) and New York Times bestselling author. Also, the originator of the innovative, evidence-based approach called Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) - the evidence-based, trauma-informed, neurodiversity affirming model of care that helps caregivers focus on identifying the problems that are causing concerning behaviors in kids and solving those problems collaboratively and proactively. 8:45PM: The cleanup from the storm continues, and WBZ reporter Jared Brosnan was in the thick of it.Guest: Jared Brosnan – WBZ NewsRadio reporterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ones Ready
Ops Brief 129: Daily Drop - 24 Feb 2026 - B-21 Acceleration, A-10 Farewell, and a $4.5B Bomber Push

Ones Ready

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2026 28:28


Send a textThis Daily Drop covers multiple days of movement across the force—and there's a lot to unpack.The Army is integrating AI into doctrine writing, launching drone competitions, and standing up a rapid soldier innovation office. The Navy is chasing new anti-radar missile capability while looking at sailor burnout and at-sea tour changes. The Marine Corps is digitizing the battlefield and pushing hard on mental health messaging.The Air Force? It's a mix of progress and pain. The A-10 depot mission at Hill is officially ending. The B-21 Raider just got a $4.5B acceleration deal targeting 2027. Collaborative combat aircraft are entering armed testing. AI is moving into air operations centers.Space Force is arguing for faster expansion after real-world operational demand in Iran and Venezuela highlighted capability gaps.Plus: VA disability rule backlash, Medal of Honor news, fraud indictments, pet PCS warnings, and why abandoning your dog makes you a terrible human.No hype. Just what's moving.⏱️ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro and sponsor 02:00 Army using AI in doctrine development 04:00 Drone warfighter competition 06:00 Delayed Purple Heart recognition 08:00 Rapid soldier innovation office 10:30 Pet PCS warning to Korea 12:30 Navy anti-radar missile requirement 14:30 Sailor burnout and at-sea tour review 16:30 Marine digital battlefield push 18:00 Mental health leadership appeal 20:30 A-10 depot mission ends 22:00 B-21 acceleration contract 24:00 Collaborative combat aircraft testing 26:00 Space Force expansion push 28:00 VA disability rule halted 30:00 Medal of Honor recognition

TILT Parenting: Raising Differently Wired Kids
TPP 491: A Conversation with Dr. Ross Greene About the Kids Who Aren't Okay

TILT Parenting: Raising Differently Wired Kids

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2026 38:16


Dr. Ross Greene's work has profoundly shaped how so many of us think about kids' behavior and what they actually need from the adults in their lives, so I'm thrilled to welcome him back to the show to talk about his brand new book, The Kids Who Aren't Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in Schools. Together, we explore the urgent need to reimagine how we support children in schools, especially as mental health concerns continue to rise. We dig into the importance of recognizing developmental variability, why meeting kids where they are is non-negotiable, and how current behavior-focused systems miss the real problems underneath. Ross also highlights the role parents and caregivers can play in advocating for meaningful change. About Dr. Ross Greene  Ross W. Greene, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and the originator of the innovative, evidence-based approach called Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS), as described in his influential books The Explosive Child, Lost at School, Lost & Found, and Raising Human Beings. He also developed and executive produced the award-winning documentary film The Kids We Lose, released in 2018. Dr. Greene was on the faculty at Harvard Medical School for over 20 years, and is now founding director of the non-profit Lives in the Balance. He is also currently adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech and adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Dr. Greene has worked with several thousand kids with concerning behaviors and their caregivers, and he and his colleagues have overseen implementation and evaluation of the CPS model in countless schools, inpatient psychiatric units, and residential and juvenile detention facilities, with dramatic effect: significant reductions in recidivism, discipline referrals, detentions, suspensions, and use of restraint and seclusion. Dr.Greene lectures throughout the world and lives in Freeport, Maine. Things you'll learn from this episode  How kids today are facing unprecedented challenges that require new ways of thinking and responding Why developmental variability matters and why every child needs support tailored to their unique profile How schools can create more supportive ecosystems by using proactive rather than reactive approaches Why behavior is often a late signal of unmet expectations, not the problem itself How managing expectations and understanding root causes can reduce concerning behaviors Why parents' advocacy and the Collaborative & Proactive Solutions model can transform how children are supported in education Resources mentioned The Kids Who Aren't Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in Schools by Dr. Ross Greene Never Too Early: CPS with Young Kids (documentary) The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children by Dr. Ross Greene Lives in the Balance (Dr. Greene's website) The B Team (Facebook group) Lost at School: Why Our Kids With Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them by Dr. Ross Greene Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child by Dr. Ross Greene Lost and Found: Helping Behaviorally Challenge Students (and While You're At It, All the Others by Dr. Ross Greene The Kids We Lose (documentary) How to Parent Angry and Explosive Children, with Dr. Ross Greene (Tilt Parenting podcast) Ken Wilbur Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Optimal Relationships Daily
2915: Want a Better Relationship? Work on Collaborative Communication by Dr. Lisa Firestone of PsychAlive on Mutual Understanding

Optimal Relationships Daily

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2026 9:19


Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2915: Dr. Lisa Firestone explores how collaborative communication can transform romantic relationships by fostering empathy, shared understanding, and emotional safety. She breaks down practical tools, like attuned listening, separating past triggers from present conflicts, and repairing after ruptures, that help couples feel truly known and supported. Learning to communicate with vulnerability and calm creates a stronger, more resilient bond built on trust and teamwork. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.psychalive.org/want-a-better-relationship-work-on-collaborative-communication/ Quotes to ponder: "Collaborative communication does not just refer to the words that come out of our mouths. Rather, it encompasses all the intricate ways we communicate through tone, expression, body signals, etc." "Communicating collaboratively means taking actions that draw our partner out and trying to understand an interaction from their perspective." "Our communication will always (and pretty much only) go more smoothly when we learn tools to calm down within ourselves."

Optimal Relationships Daily
2915: Want a Better Relationship? Work on Collaborative Communication by Dr. Lisa Firestone of PsychAlive on Mutual Understanding

Optimal Relationships Daily

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2026 9:19


Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2915: Dr. Lisa Firestone explores how collaborative communication can transform romantic relationships by fostering empathy, shared understanding, and emotional safety. She breaks down practical tools, like attuned listening, separating past triggers from present conflicts, and repairing after ruptures, that help couples feel truly known and supported. Learning to communicate with vulnerability and calm creates a stronger, more resilient bond built on trust and teamwork. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.psychalive.org/want-a-better-relationship-work-on-collaborative-communication/ Quotes to ponder: "Collaborative communication does not just refer to the words that come out of our mouths. Rather, it encompasses all the intricate ways we communicate through tone, expression, body signals, etc." "Communicating collaboratively means taking actions that draw our partner out and trying to understand an interaction from their perspective." "Our communication will always (and pretty much only) go more smoothly when we learn tools to calm down within ourselves."

Keen On Democracy
No, It's Not Only Social Media: Ross Greene on Why Our Kids Aren't Okay

Keen On Democracy

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2026 35:07


"We didn't have to grow up with that." — Ross Greene, on school shootingsOne of the most persistent worries these days is that our kids aren't okay. With most of the blame, of course, now being placed on the ubiquity of social media. But psychologist Ross W. Greene, author of the bestselling Lost at School, has a new book out today called The Kids Who Aren't Okay which doesn't place all the blame on social media. Indeed he argues that if we focus only on the internet, we'll fail to understand the broader psychological struggle that many of our kids face today.It's not that Greene is in total denial about the destructive nature of social media. But none of his leading reasons for today's crisis in schools are associated with technology. His top three:●      School shootings●      High-stakes testing●      Zero-tolerance policies with a focus on punishment rather than empathyThe new book, Greene impishly promises, has things in it that will offend just about anybody on both the left and right. He calls out teacher unions for failing to support legislation against restraints and seclusions—pinning kids to the ground, dragging them to locked rooms. And he criticizes both parties for bipartisan policies that have made it harder for educators to educate.The definition of good teaching, Greene insists, is meeting every kid where they're at. Standard testing is exactly the opposite. If you try to treat everybody exactly the same, he warns, you will meet nobody where they're at. We need to get busy teaching kids how to collaborate on solving problems, he says—otherwise they'll turn out like us—only worse. Five Takeaways●      Social Media Isn't in the Top Three: Greene's top factors making it harder to be a kid: school shootings, high-stakes testing, and zero-tolerance policies. If we focus only on social media, he says, we'll miss the rest of the picture.●      We're Still Pinning Kids to the Ground: Schools still use restraints and seclusions—pinning kids down, dragging them to locked rooms. Legislation has been available since 2011. The two largest teacher unions have yet to support it.●      High-Stakes Testing Is the Opposite of Good Teaching: Good teaching means meeting every kid where they're at. Telling every kid they have to get over the same bar by the end of the school year is exactly not what the doctor ordered.●      Fairness Means Treating Every Kid Differently: If you try to treat everybody exactly the same, you will meet nobody where they're at. Meeting each kid where they are isn't unfair to the rest—it's fair to everyone.●      This Book Will Offend Just About Anybody: Greene calls out both political parties, teacher unions, and policies on both sides of the aisle. Somebody's got to wade in, he says. Somebody's got to call it. About the GuestRoss W. Greene, PhD is the author of Lost at School and The Explosive Child. He is the founder of the nonprofit Lives in the Balance and the inventor of the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions approach. He has worked with nearly 3,000 kids and their caregivers.ReferencesBooks mentioned:●      The Kids Who Aren't Okay by Ross W. Greene — his new book on reimagining support, belonging, and hope in schools.●      Lost at School by Ross W. Greene — his bestselling earlier work on kids with behavioral challenges.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: The kids who aren't okay (01:17) - Are most kids struggling? (02:51) - Top three factors: Not social media (04:11) - Is this an American problem? (05:15) - Distrust of authorities—even PhDs (06:47) - Which kids are struggling most? (08:04) - Where's the cultural rebellion? (09:55) - Helicopter parenting (11:34) - Wading into the culture wars (13:00) - Restraints and seclusions: We're still pinning kids down (15:10) - Were schools always this punitive? (17:23) - Why teachers are underpaid and leaving (18:57) - Public vs. private schools (19:59) - Is this about money? (21:07) - Every kid is different (24:06) - The problem with 'fairness' (26:27) - Medication: Not black and white (28:34) - Social media: Correlational, not causal (31:54) - What happens to kids who aren't okay?

The Straight Flush
Ep. 52 - Collaborative Delivery 101 Series: The Owner's Perspective (Part 1 of 3)

The Straight Flush

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2026 46:39


This episode kicks off a three-part "Collaborative Delivery 101" series that details the perspectives, benefits, and experiences of water industry professionals that have taken the plunge into this alternative pathway to project delivery.In this episode, our series host Jim Good (Parkview Advisors) sits down with Bruce Husselbee (HRSD) to share the owner's perspective on collaborative delivery.

Advocacy is Medicine
HR1 and Title X: Reproductive Health Collaborative Nebraska

Advocacy is Medicine

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2026 38:04


Join Dr. Libby Crockett as she talks with Joanna Murray and Cleo Zagurski from the Reproductive Health Collaborative, Nebraska to learn about Title X in the State of Nebraska and how HR1 affects the delivery of reproductive healthcare in our state.Reproductive Health Collaborative Nebraska Advocacy Ask: Contact your U.S. Senators and Representative and urge them to reach out to HHS and demand the immediate release of the Title X - Year 5 non-compete continuation application and guidance. Nebraska stands to lose over $2 million dollars for the coming year if Title X funding is not released, which will lead to possible clinic closures and Nebraskans not receiving life-saving preventative care. Senator Fischer's Office: 202-224-6551 Senator Ricketts' Office: 202-224-4224Representative Flood's Office: 202-225-4806 Representative Bacon's Office: 402-938-0300 Representative Smith's Office: 308-384-3900 Reproductive Health Collaborative Nebraska Links: https://rhcnebraska.org/https://incontrolnebraska.com/Link to HR1 - One Big Beautiful Bill Acthttps://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1If you have questions or answers, please email us at contact@nebraskaallianceforphysicianadvocacy.org   Please check out our website at: https://nebraskaallianceforphysicianadvocacy.org/Nebraska Alliance for Physician Advocacy   Follow on social media: @NEAllianceforPhysicianAdvocacy on Instagram https://www.facebook.com/neallianceforphysicianadvocacy on Facebook The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the speakers and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their employers or any other organization or entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute professional medical, legal, or financial advice. If you have a specific concern, please consult with a qualified professional.

Collaborative With Spencer Krause
Collaborative with Spencer Krause - E188 - Ethan Nicholas (Network Builder)

Collaborative With Spencer Krause

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2026 34:34


Join me as I speak with the founder of the Pittsburgh Business Exchange, Ethan Nicholas about the origins of the Pittsburgh Business Exchange, growing the organization, renting a castle, and more. If you are available on March 18th 2026 from 6-9pm ET and want to go to a great event with a lot of friendly and powerful people, register for the Great Gathering on the Pittsburgh Business Exchange website. Liked this episode and want to see or hear more? Please subscribe to Collaborative with Spencer Krause today. You'll get notified every time a new episode releases, and it's the best way to support the channel! Businesses looking to outsource difficult robotics engineering problems should consider SKA Robotics. They sponsor this podcast and solve some of the most difficult robotics engineering problems in the world. Companies looking for premium space in Pittsburgh should consider renting in Rockwell Park. Located in Pittsburgh's hip Point Breeze Neighborhood, Rockwell Park features over 800,000 square feet of high-end industrial, retail, and office space. Contact Icon Development Group to learn more.

Collaborative With Spencer Krause
Collaborative with Spencer Krause - E188 - Ethan Nicholas (Network Builder)

Collaborative With Spencer Krause

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2026 34:34


Join me as I speak with the founder of the Pittsburgh Business Exchange, Ethan Nicholas about the origins of the Pittsburgh Business Exchange, growing the organization, renting a castle, and more. If you are available on March 18th 2026 from 6-9pm ET and want to go to a great event with a lot of friendly and powerful people, register for the Great Gathering on the Pittsburgh Business Exchange website. Liked this episode and want to see or hear more? Please subscribe to Collaborative with Spencer Krause today. You'll get notified every time a new episode releases, and it's the best way to support the channel! Businesses looking to outsource difficult robotics engineering problems should consider SKA Robotics. They sponsor this podcast and solve some of the most difficult robotics engineering problems in the world. Companies looking for premium space in Pittsburgh should consider renting in Rockwell Park. Located in Pittsburgh's hip Point Breeze Neighborhood, Rockwell Park features over 800,000 square feet of high-end industrial, retail, and office space. Contact Icon Development Group to learn more.

The Dad Edge Podcast (formerly The Good Dad Project Podcast)
Collaborative & Proactive Solutions with Your Children that Don't Require Punishment featuring Dr. Ross Greene

The Dad Edge Podcast (formerly The Good Dad Project Podcast)

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2026 59:24


In this powerful conversation, I sit down with Dr. Ross Greene, clinical psychologist and creator of the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS) model, to unpack why traditional rewards and punishments often make behavior worse — not better. We dive deep into why "because I said so" stops working, what your child's frustration is actually communicating, and how to shift from authoritarian control to collaborative leadership that builds trust, accountability, and critical thinking.   If you've ever thought, "Why is this not working anymore?" this episode will give you a radically different lens — and practical tools you can use immediately.     Timeline Summary [0:00] Why power struggles are so common in parenting [2:00] Introducing Dr. Ross Greene and the CPS model  [6:17] Why rewards and punishments don't solve the real problem  [8:33] Concerning behavior as a frustration response  [12:04] The 3-step collaborative problem-solving process explained  [16:19] Real-life example: solving teeth brushing battles with a 3-year-old  [30:56] Curfew conflict and how to navigate teenage resistance  [37:16] How collaborative parenting builds critical thinking  [41:56] Why authoritarian parenting may cause long-term harm  [47:06] Developmental variability — why every child is different  [49:23] Why noncompliance is informative, not defiance  [56:31] Accountability through collaboration — not punishment      Five Key Takeaways Concerning behavior is a signal, not a character flaw. It communicates an unsolved problem.  Rewards and punishments modify behavior — they don't solve the underlying issue.  The 3-step CPS process (Empathy, Define Adult Concern, Invitation) reduces conflict and builds trust.  Noncompliance is information. It tells you an expectation may exceed your child's current skill set.  Collaborative leadership builds accountability, emotional regulation, and critical thinking.      Links & Resources Dad Edge Alliance Preview Call: http://thedadedge.com/preview Dad Edge Business Boardroom (Mastermind): https://thedadedge.com/mastermind Dr. Ross Greene — Lives in the Balance (Free Resources): https://livesinthebalance.org Episode Show Notes & Resources: https://thedadedge.com/1442   Closing Remark   If this episode challenged how you think about discipline, accountability, and leadership at home, don't just sit on it — put it into practice. Try the empathy step tonight. Lead with curiosity. Solve one unsolved problem.   If this conversation impacted you, please rate, review, follow, and share the podcast. The way we parent today shapes the leaders of tomorrow.   From my heart to yours — go out and live legendary.

Dreamvisions 7 Radio Network
Awakening to True Happiness with David Hoffmeister: Healing Is a Collaborative Endeavour

Dreamvisions 7 Radio Network

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2026 57:27


Healing Is a Collaborative Endeavour In this "Mission Accomplished" Saturday morning movie session, David Hoffmeister uses a mini-movie to illuminate a radical spiritual breakthrough: the realization that our innocence is already complete. The narrative, condensed from multiple action films, serves as a powerful metaphor for the ego's complex plots and the Holy Spirit's swift undoing of them.  David focuses on two pivotal metaphysical themes: The Illusion of Time and Control: Drawing on A Course in Miracles Lesson 158, David explains that "time is a trick, a sleight of hand." He emphasizes that the ego uses the past and future to distract us from the Holy Instant, where our safety lies. By letting go of the need to control the "script" of our lives, we discover that the mission of salvation is already accomplished through the Atonement. Transcending the Ego's Distractions: The session explores how the mind is often fooled into believing it is a separate, physical entity at the mercy of external circumstances. David invites us to "peer behind the curtain" and see that all conflict—whether a nuclear threat on screen or a personal grievance—is merely a projection of a split mind. Through his commentary, David guides listeners to hear the gentle whisper of Jesus saying, "Mission Accomplished," allowing us to surrender our worries and judgments in favor of the happiness that is our natural inheritance. These gatherings take place every weekend in February and March 2026 and include teachings, films, music, panel discussions, and live Q&A sessions with David Hoffmeister. Ready to join the adventure? Register for the upcoming retreats for free here: https://programs.the-christ.net/courses/the-way-of-the-mystic To participate online in a Movie Gathering, join our online community: https://programs.the-christ.net/courses/membership-weekly-online-movie-gatherings Join our online community:  https://programs.the-christ.net/products/communities/tribe-of-christ If you are interested to know more about David Hoffmeister and Living Miracles events, here is more information:  https://circle.livingmiraclescenter.org/events. Read A Course in Miracles online here: https://acourseinmiraclesnow.com/ Learn more about David Hoffmeister here: https://davidhoffmeister.com

This Helps with Marlon Morgan
54. Ron Ivey, Part 2 | Human Flourishing in the Age of AI

This Helps with Marlon Morgan

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2026 70:33


In Part 2 of this conversation, Marlon and Noēsis Collaborative Founder & CEO Ron Ivey shift their focus to what comes next. They explore what it means to design AI in service of human flourishing, unpack the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and wrestle with questions about suffering, belonging, and what it actually means to be human. As we close out the season, this episode turns toward agency, hope, and the choices still in front of us. Learn about the imapct of AI on Youth Well-Being: aiandyouthimpact.org Keep up with the work of Ron Ivey and Noēsis Collaborative: noesiscollaborative.org

The Holiness Today Podcast
Stan Reeder and Nate Gilmore connect with Julie O'Hara, director of the Preaching Collaborative

The Holiness Today Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2026 51:00


This podcast episode features Julie O'Hara, director of the Preaching Collaborative. She details how the Collaborative fosters "effective evangelistic preachers" through peer cohorts and feedback, emphasizing that preaching should invite people to their "next yes" to Jesus.   Lifelong Learning Code: 28473 Click here to learn about Lifelong Learning.

Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell
Your Workplace Culture Is Your Growth Engine with Marcia Beckner

Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2026 38:16


What if the biggest barrier to your fundraising success isn't your strategy or your donor list — but your workplace culture?In this insightful episode, I sit down with Marcia Beckner, a nationally recognized nonprofit founder, CEO mentor, culture strategist, and host of the Nonprofit CEO SPARK podcast. Marcia is the creator of the Culture CARES® Framework, a proven model for helping nonprofit leaders build healthy, inclusive, and empowering organizational cultures where everyone can thrive — and where fundraising can flourish.Marcia shares her powerful personal journey, beginning with a life-altering ovarian cancer diagnosis in her 20s that led her to found MyLifeLine Cancer Foundation. Under her leadership, the organization grew nationally and eventually merged with a global nonprofit, reaching over 300,000 cancer patients and families.Today, Marcia works with mission-driven leaders across the country to tackle a commonly overlooked truth: your culture is your growth engine. Without alignment, even the best fundraising strategies fall flat. But when leadership, values, and strategy are united? Teams thrive. Revenue grows. Burnout fades.

The County 10 Podcast
Bootstrap Collaborative’s Jett Odle chats 2026 Startup Challenge [LISTEN]

The County 10 Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2026 12:02


(Fremont County, WY) – The Bootstrap Collaborative’s Startup Challenge returns to Fremont County and applications are open now! Jett Odle joined the County 10 Podcast this week to discuss what the challenge is, how you can pitch your business ideas and a new “moonshot” competition for folks with especially big business dreams! For more information on the Bootstrap Collaborative, click here. For more information on the Startup Challenge, click here. To hear our conversation with Jett simply hit play below or find the County 10 Podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts!

startups collaborative wy bootstrap odle startup challenge challenge listen
successfulstylistacademy
#141 Marketing for Beauty Professionals: Client Retention & Salon Growth

successfulstylistacademy

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2026 41:23


In this episode of the Successful Stylist Academy podcast, Ambrosia Carey dives into the real challenges beauty professionals face with social media marketing and the pressure to constantly create content. She explores the psychological burden of social media, how marketing psychology affects decision-making, and why relying solely on Instagram or TikTok can create instability in your beauty business. Ambrosia shares practical marketing strategies for sustainable business growth, emphasizing client retention, referral systems, and Google reviews as foundational drivers of salon success. She challenges listeners to rethink their approach to marketing and consider whether their business could thrive without social media dominating their strategy. If you're a stylist or salon owner looking to build a more grounded and profitable beauty business, this conversation will shift your perspective. Get 2 months of GlossGenius Gold or Platnium for FREE with code SUCCESSFUL: http://glossgenius.com/successfulstylist Enjoy our Marketing Guide Freebie: https://small-kiwi-98108.myflodesk.com/ke6k90nlq2 Join the SSA LAB Membership Waitlist here: https://small-kiwi-98108.myflodesk.com/gnfbcgfrjq Key Takeaways: 1. If social media disappeared tomorrow, would your beauty business still grow? 2. Many beauty professionals feel overwhelmed by the constant pressure of social media marketing. 3. Client referrals account for 62% of new clients, making relationship building essential. 4. Google reviews significantly impact client bookings and salon visibility. 5. Focusing on client retention creates more sustainable business growth than chasing new followers. 6. Social media should complement your marketing strategy, not control it. 7. Authentic content builds stronger engagement than perfection-driven posting. 8. Collaborative efforts and community support expand your reach without algorithm pressure. 9. Tracking key business metrics helps beauty professionals make informed decisions. 10. Long-term salon success comes from systems, referrals, and meaningful client relationships. Take 15% off our favorite skincare line, Pharmagel with code SSA15: https://pharmagel.net/?ref=SSA15 Find us on Instagram for more buisness tips: https://www.instagram.com/successfulstylistacademy/ If you prefer video: https://youtube.com/@successfulstylist?si=-GLeHybcbHMmkq0t  

Minnesota Now
Minneapolis artist aims to speak to hard times, give hope in collaborative concert

Minnesota Now

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2026 8:50


Minneapolis poet, musician and activist Joe Davis and his band, The Poetic Diaspora, is preparing a long lineup of musicians to celebrate Black music and poetry. Their show, “Diaspora: On the Rise” is set for Feb. 21 at 7 p.m. at Northrop Auditorium in Minneapolis. Davis joined MPR News host Nina Moini to talk about showing up for his community as an artist in hard times, expression through poetry and the musicians he's working with to celebrate the work he's done with his band.

Women Road Warriors
The Power of Building Collaborative Relationships

Women Road Warriors

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2026 52:01 Transcription Available


What if the real key to success isn't hustle — but collaboration?In this compelling episode of Women Road Warriors, Shelley Johnson and Kathy Tuccaro explore The Power of Collaborative Relationships with leadership expert and author Leslie Grossman. A visionary in women's leadership development, Leslie is the Faculty Director of the Women's Leadership Program at The George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership, a Senior Fellow, executive coach, and founder of five businesses.For years, women have been told to push harder, compete smarter, and climb alone. Leslie offers a different path — one rooted in courage, executive presence, trusted relationships, and intentional collaboration.Drawing from her groundbreaking book Circles of Collaboration, she reveals how women can access mentorship and sponsorship, create inclusive professional networks, and build authentic relationships that accelerate career growth. She also shares insights from her transformative framework, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Women, showing how collaboration fuels confidence, influence, and momentum.If you're ready to shift from solo striving to shared success, this conversation will change how you think about leadership, connection, and power.Because when women collaborate, they don't just advance — they transform industries.

The Scholars' Circle Interviews
Scholars’ Circle – Health care disparities on the basis of race in the U.S.- February 15, 2026

The Scholars' Circle Interviews

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 16, 2026 58:00


Health care outcomes in the U.S. differ substantially depending on race. How much are health care discrepancies based on structural and historical racism? What needs to change to promote health justice in the U.S. and what kinds of policies are needed to promote this change? How important is diversity of health care providers in building a more just healthcare system? [ dur: 58mins. ] Keisha Ray teaches Bioethics and Humanities as a tenured associate professor in Texas. She is the author of Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People’s Health. Ruqaiijah Yearby is the Judge Clifford Scott Green Chair in Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. She is also Co-Founder of the Institute for Healing Justice & Equity and one of the Co-Founders of the Collaborative for Anti-Racism & Equity. She is the book chapter author of “Gender Bias, Mental Health Inequities, and Health Justice” in the book Mental Health Equity. Dylan H. Roby is the Chair and Professor of Health, Society, and Behavior at UC Irvine. He is the co-author of Ending Structural Racism in the US Health Care System to Eliminate Health Care Inequities. This program is produced by Doug Becker, Ankine Aghassian, Maria Armoudian, Anna Lapin and Sudd Dongre. Health, Politics and Activism,  Medicine , Racism

Spot Lyte On...
Stephen Vitiello: The Punk Attitude of Collaborative Sound Art

Spot Lyte On...

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2026 49:16


Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Stephen Vitiello.Stephen is an electronic musician and media artist. His sound installations are in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon. He's worked with Pauline Oliveros, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Joan Jonas. By day, he teaches Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.Stephen's latest project is Trinity, a collaborative album with Lawrence English, who you heard on last week's show. Each of Trinity's five tracks brings in a different third musician: Brendan Canty from Fugazi, Chris Abrahams from The Necks, Marina Rosenfeld, Aki Onda, and the late Steve Roden. The album came out last November.Stephen shares how this project came together, what it's like to work with each of these artists, and how he's built a career turning everyday sounds into sonic experiences.(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello's album Trinity)–Dig DeeperArtist and AlbumVisit Stephen Vitiello at stephenvitiello.com and follow him on Soundcloud, Instagram, and BandcampPurchase Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello's Trinity from American Dreams, Bandcamp, or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choicePrevious collaborations: Acute Inbetweens (2011) and Fable (2014) with Lawrence EnglishStephen Vitiello & Brendan Canty: Second (with Hahn Rowe)Trinity CollaboratorsLawrence English and Room40 RecordsBrendan Canty - drummer (Fugazi, The Messthetics)Chris Abrahams - pianist (The Necks)Marina Rosenfeld - turntablist and composerAki Onda - electronic musician and sound artistSteve Roden - late sound artist and visual artistWorld Trade Center ProjectWorld Trade Center Artist Residency - Lower Manhattan Cultural CouncilWorld Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd (1999)Bright and Dusty Things - album featuring WTC recordingsStephen Vitiello: Listening With Intent - documentary by ABC-TV AustraliaEducational InstitutionVCU Kinetic Imaging - Virginia Commonwealth UniversityKinetic Imaging Graduate Program at VCUInfluences and Collaborators MentionedNam June Paik - video art pioneerPauline Oliveros - composer and accordionistRyuichi Sakamoto - composer and musicianFred Frith - guitarist and composerIkue Mori - drummer and electronic musician (DNA)Maryanne Amacher - sound artist and composerR. Murray Schafer - composer and writer on acoustic ecologyRobin Rimbaud (Scanner) - electronic musicianColin Newman - Wire guitarist and vocalistTaylor Deupree - 12k Records founderKey Venues and InstitutionsThe Kitchen - New York performance spaceElectronic Arts Intermix - video art distributorAnthology Film Archives - New York cinemaMASS MoCA - Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary ArtThe High Line - New York elevated parkWhitney Museum of American Art - 2002 BiennialMuseum of Modern Art - Soundings exhibition (2013)Punk and No Wave ReferencesFugazi - influential post-hardcore bandDNA - no wave bandThe ClashNo Wave movement - late 1970s NYCMusic Theory and PracticeFluxus movement - experimental art movementJohn Cage and prepared pianoAmbisonic audio - spatial sound formatDolby Atmos - immersive audio formatArticles and InterviewsSteve Roden and Stephen Vitiello conversation in Bomb magazineThe Collaborative Recent History of Stephen Vitiello - Fluid Radio interview-Dig into this episode's complete show notes at podcast.thetonearm.com–• Did you enjoy this episode? Please share it with a friend! You can also rate The Tonearm ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. • Subscribe! Be the first to check out each new episode of The Tonearm in your podcast app of choice. • Looking for more? Visit podcast.thetonearm.com for bonus content, web-only interviews + features, and the Talk Of The Tonearm email newsletter. You can also follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, and LinkedIn. • Be sure to bookmark our online magazine, The Tonearm! → thetonearm.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

PAC's All Access Pass Podcast
Seeing Access Through a Shared Lens: Using the Patient Access Collaborative's Group Assessment to Understand the Current State

PAC's All Access Pass Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2026 38:16


What if patient access isn't just an operational problem—but a shared organizational belief system?In this episode of All Access Pass, host Chris Profeta, Senior Director of Research and Analytics at the Patient Access Collaborative, sits down with Austin Loomis, AVP of Ambulatory Access and Analytics, Mandy Newman, MAAL, Vice President of Ambulatory Operations, and Catherin Mims, MD, Vice President and Associate Chief Physician Executive for the Ambulatory Practice at OU Health. Together, they unpack a new evolution of the Patient Access Framework: a group-based assessment that captures how access is perceived across an entire organization.With more than 20 leaders—from finance and HR to physician chairs and executive leadership—participating in the assessment, OU Health gained a rare, enterprise-wide view of access. The conversation explores what happens when those perspectives align, where they diverge, and why those gaps often represent the greatest opportunities for system improvement. Along the way, the group reflects on why access blind spots persist, how shared language changes strategy, and what it means to truly measure access as an enterprise responsibility.Tune in to hear how group assessments can surface hidden friction, strengthen cross-departmental alignment, and turn access from a siloed function into a shared organizational priority—covering the evolution of the Patient Access Framework, the rationale behind group scoring, leadership alignment, organizational blind spots, and practical insights for system-level access improvement.Woodcock, E., Profeta, C. A framework for patient access management: consensus from a Delphi panel of US health system leaders. BMC Health Serv Res 25, 524 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-025-12561-8https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12913-025-12561-8

Spotlight On
Stephen Vitiello: The Punk Attitude of Collaborative Sound Art

Spotlight On

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2026 49:16


Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Stephen Vitiello.Stephen is an electronic musician and media artist. His sound installations are in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon. He's worked with Pauline Oliveros, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Joan Jonas. By day, he teaches Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.Stephen's latest project is Trinity, a collaborative album with Lawrence English, who you heard on last week's show. Each of Trinity's five tracks brings in a different third musician: Brendan Canty from Fugazi, Chris Abrahams from The Necks, Marina Rosenfeld, Aki Onda, and the late Steve Roden. The album came out last November.Stephen shares how this project came together, what it's like to work with each of these artists, and how he's built a career turning everyday sounds into sonic experiences.(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello's album Trinity)–Dig DeeperArtist and AlbumVisit Stephen Vitiello at stephenvitiello.com and follow him on Soundcloud, Instagram, and BandcampPurchase Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello's Trinity from American Dreams, Bandcamp, or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choicePrevious collaborations: Acute Inbetweens (2011) and Fable (2014) with Lawrence EnglishStephen Vitiello & Brendan Canty: Second (with Hahn Rowe)Trinity CollaboratorsLawrence English and Room40 RecordsBrendan Canty - drummer (Fugazi, The Messthetics)Chris Abrahams - pianist (The Necks)Marina Rosenfeld - turntablist and composerAki Onda - electronic musician and sound artistSteve Roden - late sound artist and visual artistWorld Trade Center ProjectWorld Trade Center Artist Residency - Lower Manhattan Cultural CouncilWorld Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd (1999)Bright and Dusty Things - album featuring WTC recordingsStephen Vitiello: Listening With Intent - documentary by ABC-TV AustraliaEducational InstitutionVCU Kinetic Imaging - Virginia Commonwealth UniversityKinetic Imaging Graduate Program at VCUInfluences and Collaborators MentionedNam June Paik - video art pioneerPauline Oliveros - composer and accordionistRyuichi Sakamoto - composer and musicianFred Frith - guitarist and composerIkue Mori - drummer and electronic musician (DNA)Maryanne Amacher - sound artist and composerR. Murray Schafer - composer and writer on acoustic ecologyRobin Rimbaud (Scanner) - electronic musicianColin Newman - Wire guitarist and vocalistTaylor Deupree - 12k Records founderKey Venues and InstitutionsThe Kitchen - New York performance spaceElectronic Arts Intermix - video art distributorAnthology Film Archives - New York cinemaMASS MoCA - Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary ArtThe High Line - New York elevated parkWhitney Museum of American Art - 2002 BiennialMuseum of Modern Art - Soundings exhibition (2013)Punk and No Wave ReferencesFugazi - influential post-hardcore bandDNA - no wave bandThe ClashNo Wave movement - late 1970s NYCMusic Theory and PracticeFluxus movement - experimental art movementJohn Cage and prepared pianoAmbisonic audio - spatial sound formatDolby Atmos - immersive audio formatArticles and InterviewsSteve Roden and Stephen Vitiello conversation in Bomb magazineThe Collaborative Recent History of Stephen Vitiello - Fluid Radio interview-Dig into this episode's complete show notes at podcast.thetonearm.com–• Did you enjoy this episode? Please share it with a friend! You can also rate The Tonearm ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. • Subscribe! Be the first to check out each new episode of The Tonearm in your podcast app of choice. • Looking for more? Visit podcast.thetonearm.com for bonus content, web-only interviews + features, and the Talk Of The Tonearm email newsletter. You can also follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, and LinkedIn. • Be sure to bookmark our online magazine, The Tonearm! → thetonearm.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast — CodeGen, Agents, Computer Vision, Data Science, AI UX and all things Software 3.0

This podcast features Gabriele Corso and Jeremy Wohlwend, co-founders of Boltz and authors of the Boltz Manifesto, discussing the rapid evolution of structural biology models from AlphaFold to their own open-source suite, Boltz-1 and Boltz-2. The central thesis is that while single-chain protein structure prediction is largely “solved” through evolutionary hints, the next frontier lies in modeling complex interactions (protein-ligand, protein-protein) and generative protein design, which Boltz aims to democratize via open-source foundations and scalable infrastructure.Full Video PodOn YouTube!Timestamps* 00:00 Introduction to Benchmarking and the “Solved” Protein Problem* 06:48 Evolutionary Hints and Co-evolution in Structure Prediction* 10:00 The Importance of Protein Function and Disease States* 15:31 Transitioning from AlphaFold 2 to AlphaFold 3 Capabilities* 19:48 Generative Modeling vs. Regression in Structural Biology* 25:00 The “Bitter Lesson” and Specialized AI Architectures* 29:14 Development Anecdotes: Training Boltz-1 on a Budget* 32:00 Validation Strategies and the Protein Data Bank (PDB)* 37:26 The Mission of Boltz: Democratizing Access and Open Source* 41:43 Building a Self-Sustaining Research Community* 44:40 Boltz-2 Advancements: Affinity Prediction and Design* 51:03 BoltzGen: Merging Structure and Sequence Prediction* 55:18 Large-Scale Wet Lab Validation Results* 01:02:44 Boltz Lab Product Launch: Agents and Infrastructure* 01:13:06 Future Directions: Developpability and the “Virtual Cell”* 01:17:35 Interacting with Skeptical Medicinal ChemistsKey SummaryEvolution of Structure Prediction & Evolutionary Hints* Co-evolutionary Landscapes: The speakers explain that breakthrough progress in single-chain protein prediction relied on decoding evolutionary correlations where mutations in one position necessitate mutations in another to conserve 3D structure.* Structure vs. Folding: They differentiate between structure prediction (getting the final answer) and folding (the kinetic process of reaching that state), noting that the field is still quite poor at modeling the latter.* Physics vs. Statistics: RJ posits that while models use evolutionary statistics to find the right “valley” in the energy landscape, they likely possess a “light understanding” of physics to refine the local minimum.The Shift to Generative Architectures* Generative Modeling: A key leap in AlphaFold 3 and Boltz-1 was moving from regression (predicting one static coordinate) to a generative diffusion approach that samples from a posterior distribution.* Handling Uncertainty: This shift allows models to represent multiple conformational states and avoid the “averaging” effect seen in regression models when the ground truth is ambiguous.* Specialized Architectures: Despite the “bitter lesson” of general-purpose transformers, the speakers argue that equivariant architectures remain vastly superior for biological data due to the inherent 3D geometric constraints of molecules.Boltz-2 and Generative Protein Design* Unified Encoding: Boltz-2 (and BoltzGen) treats structure and sequence prediction as a single task by encoding amino acid identities into the atomic composition of the predicted structure.* Design Specifics: Instead of a sequence, users feed the model blank tokens and a high-level “spec” (e.g., an antibody framework), and the model decodes both the 3D structure and the corresponding amino acids.* Affinity Prediction: While model confidence is a common metric, Boltz-2 focuses on affinity prediction—quantifying exactly how tightly a designed binder will stick to its target.Real-World Validation and Productization* Generalized Validation: To prove the model isn't just “regurgitating” known data, Boltz tested its designs on 9 targets with zero known interactions in the PDB, achieving nanomolar binders for two-thirds of them.* Boltz Lab Infrastructure: The newly launched Boltz Lab platform provides “agents” for protein and small molecule design, optimized to run 10x faster than open-source versions through proprietary GPU kernels.* Human-in-the-Loop: The platform is designed to convert skeptical medicinal chemists by allowing them to run parallel screens and use their intuition to filter model outputs.TranscriptRJ [00:05:35]: But the goal remains to, like, you know, really challenge the models, like, how well do these models generalize? And, you know, we've seen in some of the latest CASP competitions, like, while we've become really, really good at proteins, especially monomeric proteins, you know, other modalities still remain pretty difficult. So it's really essential, you know, in the field that there are, like, these efforts to gather, you know, benchmarks that are challenging. So it keeps us in line, you know, about what the models can do or not.Gabriel [00:06:26]: Yeah, it's interesting you say that, like, in some sense, CASP, you know, at CASP 14, a problem was solved and, like, pretty comprehensively, right? But at the same time, it was really only the beginning. So you can say, like, what was the specific problem you would argue was solved? And then, like, you know, what is remaining, which is probably quite open.RJ [00:06:48]: I think we'll steer away from the term solved, because we have many friends in the community who get pretty upset at that word. And I think, you know, fairly so. But the problem that was, you know, that a lot of progress was made on was the ability to predict the structure of single chain proteins. So proteins can, like, be composed of many chains. And single chain proteins are, you know, just a single sequence of amino acids. And one of the reasons that we've been able to make such progress is also because we take a lot of hints from evolution. So the way the models work is that, you know, they sort of decode a lot of hints. That comes from evolutionary landscapes. So if you have, like, you know, some protein in an animal, and you go find the similar protein across, like, you know, different organisms, you might find different mutations in them. And as it turns out, if you take a lot of the sequences together, and you analyze them, you see that some positions in the sequence tend to evolve at the same time as other positions in the sequence, sort of this, like, correlation between different positions. And it turns out that that is typically a hint that these two positions are close in three dimension. So part of the, you know, part of the breakthrough has been, like, our ability to also decode that very, very effectively. But what it implies also is that in absence of that co-evolutionary landscape, the models don't quite perform as well. And so, you know, I think when that information is available, maybe one could say, you know, the problem is, like, somewhat solved. From the perspective of structure prediction, when it isn't, it's much more challenging. And I think it's also worth also differentiating the, sometimes we confound a little bit, structure prediction and folding. Folding is the more complex process of actually understanding, like, how it goes from, like, this disordered state into, like, a structured, like, state. And that I don't think we've made that much progress on. But the idea of, like, yeah, going straight to the answer, we've become pretty good at.Brandon [00:08:49]: So there's this protein that is, like, just a long chain and it folds up. Yeah. And so we're good at getting from that long chain in whatever form it was originally to the thing. But we don't know how it necessarily gets to that state. And there might be intermediate states that it's in sometimes that we're not aware of.RJ [00:09:10]: That's right. And that relates also to, like, you know, our general ability to model, like, the different, you know, proteins are not static. They move, they take different shapes based on their energy states. And I think we are, also not that good at understanding the different states that the protein can be in and at what frequency, what probability. So I think the two problems are quite related in some ways. Still a lot to solve. But I think it was very surprising at the time, you know, that even with these evolutionary hints that we were able to, you know, to make such dramatic progress.Brandon [00:09:45]: So I want to ask, why does the intermediate states matter? But first, I kind of want to understand, why do we care? What proteins are shaped like?Gabriel [00:09:54]: Yeah, I mean, the proteins are kind of the machines of our body. You know, the way that all the processes that we have in our cells, you know, work is typically through proteins, sometimes other molecules, sort of intermediate interactions. And through that interactions, we have all sorts of cell functions. And so when we try to understand, you know, a lot of biology, how our body works, how disease work. So we often try to boil it down to, okay, what is going right in case of, you know, our normal biological function and what is going wrong in case of the disease state. And we boil it down to kind of, you know, proteins and kind of other molecules and their interaction. And so when we try predicting the structure of proteins, it's critical to, you know, have an understanding of kind of those interactions. It's a bit like seeing the difference between... Having kind of a list of parts that you would put it in a car and seeing kind of the car in its final form, you know, seeing the car really helps you understand what it does. On the other hand, kind of going to your question of, you know, why do we care about, you know, how the protein falls or, you know, how the car is made to some extent is that, you know, sometimes when something goes wrong, you know, there are, you know, cases of, you know, proteins misfolding. In some diseases and so on, if we don't understand this folding process, we don't really know how to intervene.RJ [00:11:30]: There's this nice line in the, I think it's in the Alpha Fold 2 manuscript, where they sort of discuss also like why we even hopeful that we can target the problem in the first place. And then there's this notion that like, well, four proteins that fold. The folding process is almost instantaneous, which is a strong, like, you know, signal that like, yeah, like we should, we might be... able to predict that this very like constrained thing that, that the protein does so quickly. And of course that's not the case for, you know, for, for all proteins. And there's a lot of like really interesting mechanisms in the cells, but yeah, I remember reading that and thought, yeah, that's somewhat of an insightful point.Gabriel [00:12:10]: I think one of the interesting things about the protein folding problem is that it used to be actually studied. And part of the reason why people thought it was impossible, it used to be studied as kind of like a classical example. Of like an MP problem. Uh, like there are so many different, you know, type of, you know, shapes that, you know, this amino acid could take. And so, this grows combinatorially with the size of the sequence. And so there used to be kind of a lot of actually kind of more theoretical computer science thinking about and studying protein folding as an MP problem. And so it was very surprising also from that perspective, kind of seeing. Machine learning so clear, there is some, you know, signal in those sequences, through evolution, but also through kind of other things that, you know, us as humans, we're probably not really able to, uh, to understand, but that is, models I've, I've learned.Brandon [00:13:07]: And so Andrew White, we were talking to him a few weeks ago and he said that he was following the development of this and that there were actually ASICs that were developed just to solve this problem. So, again, that there were. There were many, many, many millions of computational hours spent trying to solve this problem before AlphaFold. And just to be clear, one thing that you mentioned was that there's this kind of co-evolution of mutations and that you see this again and again in different species. So explain why does that give us a good hint that they're close by to each other? Yeah.RJ [00:13:41]: Um, like think of it this way that, you know, if I have, you know, some amino acid that mutates, it's going to impact everything around it. Right. In three dimensions. And so it's almost like the protein through several, probably random mutations and evolution, like, you know, ends up sort of figuring out that this other amino acid needs to change as well for the structure to be conserved. Uh, so this whole principle is that the structure is probably largely conserved, you know, because there's this function associated with it. And so it's really sort of like different positions compensating for, for each other. I see.Brandon [00:14:17]: Those hints in aggregate give us a lot. Yeah. So you can start to look at what kinds of information about what is close to each other, and then you can start to look at what kinds of folds are possible given the structure and then what is the end state.RJ [00:14:30]: And therefore you can make a lot of inferences about what the actual total shape is. Yeah, that's right. It's almost like, you know, you have this big, like three dimensional Valley, you know, where you're sort of trying to find like these like low energy states and there's so much to search through. That's almost overwhelming. But these hints, they sort of maybe put you in. An area of the space that's already like, kind of close to the solution, maybe not quite there yet. And, and there's always this question of like, how much physics are these models learning, you know, versus like, just pure like statistics. And like, I think one of the thing, at least I believe is that once you're in that sort of approximate area of the solution space, then the models have like some understanding, you know, of how to get you to like, you know, the lower energy, uh, low energy state. And so maybe you have some, some light understanding. Of physics, but maybe not quite enough, you know, to know how to like navigate the whole space. Right. Okay.Brandon [00:15:25]: So we need to give it these hints to kind of get into the right Valley and then it finds the, the minimum or something. Yeah.Gabriel [00:15:31]: One interesting explanation about our awful free works that I think it's quite insightful, of course, doesn't cover kind of the entirety of, of what awful does that is, um, they're going to borrow from, uh, Sergio Chinico for MIT. So he sees kind of awful. Then the interesting thing about awful is God. This very peculiar architecture that we have seen, you know, used, and this architecture operates on this, you know, pairwise context between amino acids. And so the idea is that probably the MSA gives you this first hint about what potential amino acids are close to each other. MSA is most multiple sequence alignment. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. This evolutionary information. Yeah. And, you know, from this evolutionary information about potential contacts, then is almost as if the model is. of running some kind of, you know, diastro algorithm where it's sort of decoding, okay, these have to be closed. Okay. Then if these are closed and this is connected to this, then this has to be somewhat closed. And so you decode this, that becomes basically a pairwise kind of distance matrix. And then from this rough pairwise distance matrix, you decode kind of theBrandon [00:16:42]: actual potential structure. Interesting. So there's kind of two different things going on in the kind of coarse grain and then the fine grain optimizations. Interesting. Yeah. Very cool.Gabriel [00:16:53]: Yeah. You mentioned AlphaFold3. So maybe we have a good time to move on to that. So yeah, AlphaFold2 came out and it was like, I think fairly groundbreaking for this field. Everyone got very excited. A few years later, AlphaFold3 came out and maybe for some more history, like what were the advancements in AlphaFold3? And then I think maybe we'll, after that, we'll talk a bit about the sort of how it connects to Bolt. But anyway. Yeah. So after AlphaFold2 came out, you know, Jeremy and I got into the field and with many others, you know, the clear problem that, you know, was, you know, obvious after that was, okay, now we can do individual chains. Can we do interactions, interaction, different proteins, proteins with small molecules, proteins with other molecules. And so. So why are interactions important? Interactions are important because to some extent that's kind of the way that, you know, these machines, you know, these proteins have a function, you know, the function comes by the way that they interact with other proteins and other molecules. Actually, in the first place, you know, the individual machines are often, as Jeremy was mentioning, not made of a single chain, but they're made of the multiple chains. And then these multiple chains interact with other molecules to give the function to those. And on the other hand, you know, when we try to intervene of these interactions, think about like a disease, think about like a, a biosensor or many other ways we are trying to design the molecules or proteins that interact in a particular way with what we would call a target protein or target. You know, this problem after AlphaVol2, you know, became clear, kind of one of the biggest problems in the field to, to solve many groups, including kind of ours and others, you know, started making some kind of contributions to this problem of trying to model these interactions. And AlphaVol3 was, you know, was a significant advancement on the problem of modeling interactions. And one of the interesting thing that they were able to do while, you know, some of the rest of the field that really tried to try to model different interactions separately, you know, how protein interacts with small molecules, how protein interacts with other proteins, how RNA or DNA have their structure, they put everything together and, you know, train very large models with a lot of advances, including kind of changing kind of systems. Some of the key architectural choices and managed to get a single model that was able to set this new state-of-the-art performance across all of these different kind of modalities, whether that was protein, small molecules is critical to developing kind of new drugs, protein, protein, understanding, you know, interactions of, you know, proteins with RNA and DNAs and so on.Brandon [00:19:39]: Just to satisfy the AI engineers in the audience, what were some of the key architectural and data, data changes that made that possible?Gabriel [00:19:48]: Yeah, so one critical one that was not necessarily just unique to AlphaFold3, but there were actually a few other teams, including ours in the field that proposed this, was moving from, you know, modeling structure prediction as a regression problem. So where there is a single answer and you're trying to shoot for that answer to a generative modeling problem where you have a posterior distribution of possible structures and you're trying to sample this distribution. And this achieves two things. One is it starts to allow us to try to model more dynamic systems. As we said, you know, some of these structures can actually take multiple structures. And so, you know, you can now model that, you know, through kind of modeling the entire distribution. But on the second hand, from more kind of core modeling questions, when you move from a regression problem to a generative modeling problem, you are really tackling the way that you think about uncertainty in the model in a different way. So if you think about, you know, I'm undecided between different answers, what's going to happen in a regression model is that, you know, I'm going to try to make an average of those different kind of answers that I had in mind. When you have a generative model, what you're going to do is, you know, sample all these different answers and then maybe use separate models to analyze those different answers and pick out the best. So that was kind of one of the critical improvement. The other improvement is that they significantly simplified, to some extent, the architecture, especially of the final model that takes kind of those pairwise representations and turns them into an actual structure. And that now looks a lot more like a more traditional transformer than, you know, like a very specialized equivariant architecture that it was in AlphaFold3.Brandon [00:21:41]: So this is a bitter lesson, a little bit.Gabriel [00:21:45]: There is some aspect of a bitter lesson, but the interesting thing is that it's very far from, you know, being like a simple transformer. This field is one of the, I argue, very few fields in applied machine learning where we still have kind of architecture that are very specialized. And, you know, there are many people that have tried to replace these architectures with, you know, simple transformers. And, you know, there is a lot of debate in the field, but I think kind of that most of the consensus is that, you know, the performance... that we get from the specialized architecture is vastly superior than what we get through a single transformer. Another interesting thing that I think on the staying on the modeling machine learning side, which I think it's somewhat counterintuitive seeing some of the other kind of fields and applications is that scaling hasn't really worked kind of the same in this field. Now, you know, models like AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold3 are, you know, still very large models.RJ [00:29:14]: in a place, I think, where we had, you know, some experience working in, you know, with the data and working with this type of models. And I think that put us already in like a good place to, you know, to produce it quickly. And, you know, and I would even say, like, I think we could have done it quicker. The problem was like, for a while, we didn't really have the compute. And so we couldn't really train the model. And actually, we only trained the big model once. That's how much compute we had. We could only train it once. And so like, while the model was training, we were like, finding bugs left and right. A lot of them that I wrote. And like, I remember like, I was like, sort of like, you know, doing like, surgery in the middle, like stopping the run, making the fix, like relaunching. And yeah, we never actually went back to the start. We just like kept training it with like the bug fixes along the way, which was impossible to reproduce now. Yeah, yeah, no, that model is like, has gone through such a curriculum that, you know, learned some weird stuff. But yeah, somehow by miracle, it worked out.Gabriel [00:30:13]: The other funny thing is that the way that we were training, most of that model was through a cluster from the Department of Energy. But that's sort of like a shared cluster that many groups use. And so we were basically training the model for two days, and then it would go back to the queue and stay a week in the queue. Oh, yeah. And so it was pretty painful. And so we actually kind of towards the end with Evan, the CEO of Genesis, and basically, you know, I was telling him a bit about the project and, you know, kind of telling him about this frustration with the compute. And so luckily, you know, he offered to kind of help. And so we, we got the help from Genesis to, you know, finish up the model. Otherwise, it probably would have taken a couple of extra weeks.Brandon [00:30:57]: Yeah, yeah.Brandon [00:31:02]: And then, and then there's some progression from there.Gabriel [00:31:06]: Yeah, so I would say kind of that, both one, but also kind of these other kind of set of models that came around the same time, were kind of approaching were a big leap from, you know, kind of the previous kind of open source models, and, you know, kind of really kind of approaching the level of AlphaVault 3. But I would still say that, you know, even to this day, there are, you know, some... specific instances where AlphaVault 3 works better. I think one common example is antibody antigen prediction, where, you know, AlphaVault 3 still seems to have an edge in many situations. Obviously, these are somewhat different models. They are, you know, you run them, you obtain different results. So it's, it's not always the case that one model is better than the other, but kind of in aggregate, we still, especially at the time.Brandon [00:32:00]: So AlphaVault 3 is, you know, still having a bit of an edge. We should talk about this more when we talk about Boltzgen, but like, how do you know one is, one model is better than the other? Like you, so you, I make a prediction, you make a prediction, like, how do you know?Gabriel [00:32:11]: Yeah, so easily, you know, the, the great thing about kind of structural prediction and, you know, once we're going to go into the design space of designing new small molecule, new proteins, this becomes a lot more complex. But a great thing about structural prediction is that a bit like, you know, CASP was doing, basically the way that you can evaluate them is that, you know, you train... You know, you train a model on a structure that was, you know, released across the field up until a certain time. And, you know, one of the things that we didn't talk about that was really critical in all this development is the PDB, which is the Protein Data Bank. It's this common resources, basically common database where every biologist publishes their structures. And so we can, you know, train on, you know, all the structures that were put in the PDB until a certain date. And then... And then we basically look for recent structures, okay, which structures look pretty different from anything that was published before, because we really want to try to understand generalization.Brandon [00:33:13]: And then on this new structure, we evaluate all these different models. And so you just know when AlphaFold3 was trained, you know, when you're, you intentionally trained to the same date or something like that. Exactly. Right. Yeah.Gabriel [00:33:24]: And so this is kind of the way that you can somewhat easily kind of compare these models, obviously, that assumes that, you know, the training. You've always been very passionate about validation. I remember like DiffDoc, and then there was like DiffDocL and DocGen. You've thought very carefully about this in the past. Like, actually, I think DocGen is like a really funny story that I think, I don't know if you want to talk about that. It's an interesting like... Yeah, I think one of the amazing things about putting things open source is that we get a ton of feedback from the field. And, you know, sometimes we get kind of great feedback of people. Really like... But honestly, most of the times, you know, to be honest, that's also maybe the most useful feedback is, you know, people sharing about where it doesn't work. And so, you know, at the end of the day, it's critical. And this is also something, you know, across other fields of machine learning. It's always critical to set, to do progress in machine learning, set clear benchmarks. And as, you know, you start doing progress of certain benchmarks, then, you know, you need to improve the benchmarks and make them harder and harder. And this is kind of the progression of, you know, how the field operates. And so, you know, the example of DocGen was, you know, we published this initial model called DiffDoc in my first year of PhD, which was sort of like, you know, one of the early models to try to predict kind of interactions between proteins, small molecules, that we bought a year after AlphaFold2 was published. And now, on the one hand, you know, on these benchmarks that we were using at the time, DiffDoc was doing really well, kind of, you know, outperforming kind of some of the traditional physics-based methods. But on the other hand, you know, when we started, you know, kind of giving these tools to kind of many biologists, and one example was that we collaborated with was the group of Nick Polizzi at Harvard. We noticed, started noticing that there was this clear, pattern where four proteins that were very different from the ones that we're trained on, the models was, was struggling. And so, you know, that seemed clear that, you know, this is probably kind of where we should, you know, put our focus on. And so we first developed, you know, with Nick and his group, a new benchmark, and then, you know, went after and said, okay, what can we change? And kind of about the current architecture to improve this pattern and generalization. And this is the same that, you know, we're still doing today, you know, kind of, where does the model not work, you know, and then, you know, once we have that benchmark, you know, let's try to, through everything we, any ideas that we have of the problem.RJ [00:36:15]: And there's a lot of like healthy skepticism in the field, which I think, you know, is, is, is great. And I think, you know, it's very clear that there's a ton of things, the models don't really work well on, but I think one thing that's probably, you know, undeniable is just like the pace of, pace of progress, you know, and how, how much better we're getting, you know, every year. And so I think if you, you know, if you assume, you know, any constant, you know, rate of progress moving forward, I think things are going to look pretty cool at some point in the future.Gabriel [00:36:42]: ChatGPT was only three years ago. Yeah, I mean, it's wild, right?RJ [00:36:45]: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one of those things. Like, you've been doing this. Being in the field, you don't see it coming, you know? And like, I think, yeah, hopefully we'll, you know, we'll, we'll continue to have as much progress we've had the past few years.Brandon [00:36:55]: So this is maybe an aside, but I'm really curious, you get this great feedback from the, from the community, right? By being open source. My question is partly like, okay, yeah, if you open source and everyone can copy what you did, but it's also maybe balancing priorities, right? Where you, like all my customers are saying. I want this, there's all these problems with the model. Yeah, yeah. But my customers don't care, right? So like, how do you, how do you think about that? Yeah.Gabriel [00:37:26]: So I would say a couple of things. One is, you know, part of our goal with Bolts and, you know, this is also kind of established as kind of the mission of the public benefit company that we started is to democratize the access to these tools. But one of the reasons why we realized that Bolts needed to be a company, it couldn't just be an academic project is that putting a model on GitHub is definitely not enough to get, you know, chemists and biologists, you know, across, you know, both academia, biotech and pharma to use your model to, in their therapeutic programs. And so a lot of what we think about, you know, at Bolts beyond kind of the, just the models is thinking about all the layers. The layers that come on top of the models to get, you know, from, you know, those models to something that can really enable scientists in the industry. And so that goes, you know, into building kind of the right kind of workflows that take in kind of, for example, the data and try to answer kind of directly that those problems that, you know, the chemists and the biologists are asking, and then also kind of building the infrastructure. And so this to say that, you know, even with models fully open. You know, we see a ton of potential for, you know, products in the space and the critical part about a product is that even, you know, for example, with an open source model, you know, running the model is not free, you know, as we were saying, these are pretty expensive model and especially, and maybe we'll get into this, you know, these days we're seeing kind of pretty dramatic inference time scaling of these models where, you know, the more you run them, the better the results are. But there, you know, you see. You start getting into a point that compute and compute costs becomes a critical factor. And so putting a lot of work into building the right kind of infrastructure, building the optimizations and so on really allows us to provide, you know, a much better service potentially to the open source models. That to say, you know, even though, you know, with a product, we can provide a much better service. I do still think, and we will continue to put a lot of our models open source because the critical kind of role. I think of open source. Models is, you know, helping kind of the community progress on the research and, you know, from which we, we all benefit. And so, you know, we'll continue to on the one hand, you know, put some of our kind of base models open source so that the field can, can be on top of it. And, you know, as we discussed earlier, we learn a ton from, you know, the way that the field uses and builds on top of our models, but then, you know, try to build a product that gives the best experience possible to scientists. So that, you know, like a chemist or a biologist doesn't need to, you know, spin off a GPU and, you know, set up, you know, our open source model in a particular way, but can just, you know, a bit like, you know, I, even though I am a computer scientist, machine learning scientist, I don't necessarily, you know, take a open source LLM and try to kind of spin it off. But, you know, I just maybe open a GPT app or a cloud code and just use it as an amazing product. We kind of want to give the same experience. So this front world.Brandon [00:40:40]: I heard a good analogy yesterday that a surgeon doesn't want the hospital to design a scalpel, right?Brandon [00:40:48]: So just buy the scalpel.RJ [00:40:50]: You wouldn't believe like the number of people, even like in my short time, you know, between AlphaFold3 coming out and the end of the PhD, like the number of people that would like reach out just for like us to like run AlphaFold3 for them, you know, or things like that. Just because like, you know, bolts in our case, you know, just because it's like. It's like not that easy, you know, to do that, you know, if you're not a computational person. And I think like part of the goal here is also that, you know, we continue to obviously build the interface with computational folks, but that, you know, the models are also accessible to like a larger, broader audience. And then that comes from like, you know, good interfaces and stuff like that.Gabriel [00:41:27]: I think one like really interesting thing about bolts is that with the release of it, you didn't just release a model, but you created a community. Yeah. Did that community, it grew very quickly. Did that surprise you? And like, what is the evolution of that community and how is that fed into bolts?RJ [00:41:43]: If you look at its growth, it's like very much like when we release a new model, it's like, there's a big, big jump, but yeah, it's, I mean, it's been great. You know, we have a Slack community that has like thousands of people on it. And it's actually like self-sustaining now, which is like the really nice part because, you know, it's, it's almost overwhelming, I think, you know, to be able to like answer everyone's questions and help. It's really difficult, you know. The, the few people that we were, but it ended up that like, you know, people would answer each other's questions and like, sort of like, you know, help one another. And so the Slack, you know, has been like kind of, yeah, self, self-sustaining and that's been, it's been really cool to see.RJ [00:42:21]: And, you know, that's, that's for like the Slack part, but then also obviously on GitHub as well. We've had like a nice, nice community. You know, I think we also aspire to be even more active on it, you know, than we've been in the past six months, which has been like a bit challenging, you know, for us. But. Yeah, the community has been, has been really great and, you know, there's a lot of papers also that have come out with like new evolutions on top of bolts and it's surprised us to some degree because like there's a lot of models out there. And I think like, you know, sort of people converging on that was, was really cool. And, you know, I think it speaks also, I think, to the importance of like, you know, when, when you put code out, like to try to put a lot of emphasis and like making it like as easy to use as possible and something we thought a lot about when we released the code base. You know, it's far from perfect, but, you know.Brandon [00:43:07]: Do you think that that was one of the factors that caused your community to grow is just the focus on easy to use, make it accessible? I think so.RJ [00:43:14]: Yeah. And we've, we've heard it from a few people over the, over the, over the years now. And, you know, and some people still think it should be a lot nicer and they're, and they're right. And they're right. But yeah, I think it was, you know, at the time, maybe a little bit easier than, than other things.Gabriel [00:43:29]: The other thing part, I think led to, to the community and to some extent, I think, you know, like the somewhat the trust in the community. Kind of what we, what we put out is the fact that, you know, it's not really been kind of, you know, one model, but, and maybe we'll talk about it, you know, after Boltz 1, you know, there were maybe another couple of models kind of released, you know, or open source kind of soon after. We kind of continued kind of that open source journey or at least Boltz 2, where we are not only improving kind of structure prediction, but also starting to do affinity predictions, understanding kind of the strength of the interactions between these different models, which is this critical component. critical property that you often want to optimize in discovery programs. And then, you know, more recently also kind of protein design model. And so we've sort of been building this suite of, of models that come together, interact with one another, where, you know, kind of, there is almost an expectation that, you know, we, we take very at heart of, you know, always having kind of, you know, across kind of the entire suite of different tasks, the best or across the best. model out there so that it's sort of like our open source tool can be kind of the go-to model for everybody in the, in the industry. I really want to talk about Boltz 2, but before that, one last question in this direction, was there anything about the community which surprised you? Were there any, like, someone was doing something and you're like, why would you do that? That's crazy. Or that's actually genius. And I never would have thought about that.RJ [00:45:01]: I mean, we've had many contributions. I think like some of the. Interesting ones, like, I mean, we had, you know, this one individual who like wrote like a complex GPU kernel, you know, for part of the architecture on a piece of, the funny thing is like that piece of the architecture had been there since AlphaFold 2, and I don't know why it took Boltz for this, you know, for this person to, you know, to decide to do it, but that was like a really great contribution. We've had a bunch of others, like, you know, people figuring out like ways to, you know, hack the model to do something. They click peptides, like, you know, there's, I don't know if there's any other interesting ones come to mind.Gabriel [00:45:41]: One cool one, and this was, you know, something that initially was proposed as, you know, as a message in the Slack channel by Tim O'Donnell was basically, he was, you know, there are some cases, especially, for example, we discussed, you know, antibody-antigen interactions where the models don't necessarily kind of get the right answer. What he noticed is that, you know, the models were somewhat stuck into predicting kind of the antibodies. And so he basically ran the experiments in this model, you can condition, basically, you can give hints. And so he basically gave, you know, random hints to the model, basically, okay, you should bind to this residue, you should bind to the first residue, or you should bind to the 11th residue, or you should bind to the 21st residue, you know, basically every 10 residues scanning the entire antigen.Brandon [00:46:33]: Residues are the...Gabriel [00:46:34]: The amino acids. The amino acids, yeah. So the first amino acids. The 11 amino acids, and so on. So it's sort of like doing a scan, and then, you know, conditioning the model to predict all of them, and then looking at the confidence of the model in each of those cases and taking the top. And so it's sort of like a very somewhat crude way of doing kind of inference time search. But surprisingly, you know, for antibody-antigen prediction, it actually kind of helped quite a bit. And so there's some, you know, interesting ideas that, you know, obviously, as kind of developing the model, you say kind of, you know, wow. This is why would the model, you know, be so dumb. But, you know, it's very interesting. And that, you know, leads you to also kind of, you know, start thinking about, okay, how do I, can I do this, you know, not with this brute force, but, you know, in a smarter way.RJ [00:47:22]: And so we've also done a lot of work on that direction. And that speaks to, like, the, you know, the power of scoring. We're seeing that a lot. I'm sure we'll talk about it more when we talk about BullsGen. But, you know, our ability to, like, take a structure and determine that that structure is, like... Good. You know, like, somewhat accurate. Whether that's a single chain or, like, an interaction is a really powerful way of improving, you know, the models. Like, sort of like, you know, if you can sample a ton and you assume that, like, you know, if you sample enough, you're likely to have, like, you know, the good structure. Then it really just becomes a ranking problem. And, you know, now we're, you know, part of the inference time scaling that Gabby was talking about is very much that. It's like, you know, the more we sample, the more we, like, you know, the ranking model. The ranking model ends up finding something it really likes. And so I think our ability to get better at ranking, I think, is also what's going to enable sort of the next, you know, next big, big breakthroughs. Interesting.Brandon [00:48:17]: But I guess there's a, my understanding, there's a diffusion model and you generate some stuff and then you, I guess, it's just what you said, right? Then you rank it using a score and then you finally... And so, like, can you talk about those different parts? Yeah.Gabriel [00:48:34]: So, first of all, like, the... One of the critical kind of, you know, beliefs that we had, you know, also when we started working on Boltz 1 was sort of like the structure prediction models are somewhat, you know, our field version of some foundation models, you know, learning about kind of how proteins and other molecules interact. And then we can leverage that learning to do all sorts of other things. And so with Boltz 2, we leverage that learning to do affinity predictions. So understanding kind of, you know, if I give you this protein, this molecule. How tightly is that interaction? For Boltz 1, what we did was taking kind of that kind of foundation models and then fine tune it to predict kind of entire new proteins. And so the way basically that that works is sort of like instead of for the protein that you're designing, instead of fitting in an actual sequence, you fit in a set of blank tokens. And you train the models to, you know, predict both the structure of kind of that protein. The structure also, what the different amino acids of that proteins are. And so basically the way that Boltz 1 operates is that you feed a target protein that you may want to kind of bind to or, you know, another DNA, RNA. And then you feed the high level kind of design specification of, you know, what you want your new protein to be. For example, it could be like an antibody with a particular framework. It could be a peptide. It could be many other things. And that's with natural language or? And that's, you know, basically, you know, prompting. And we have kind of this sort of like spec that you specify. And, you know, you feed kind of this spec to the model. And then the model translates this into, you know, a set of, you know, tokens, a set of conditioning to the model, a set of, you know, blank tokens. And then, you know, basically the codes as part of the diffusion models, the codes. It's a new structure and a new sequence for your protein. And, you know, basically, then we take that. And as Jeremy was saying, we are trying to score it and, you know, how good of a binder it is to that original target.Brandon [00:50:51]: You're using basically Boltz to predict the folding and the affinity to that molecule. So and then that kind of gives you a score? Exactly.Gabriel [00:51:03]: So you use this model to predict the folding. And then you do two things. One is that you predict the structure and with something like Boltz2, and then you basically compare that structure with what the model predicted, what Boltz2 predicted. And this is sort of like in the field called consistency. It's basically you want to make sure that, you know, the structure that you're predicting is actually what you're trying to design. And that gives you a much better confidence that, you know, that's a good design. And so that's the first filtering. And the second filtering that we did as part of kind of the Boltz2 pipeline that was released is that we look at the confidence that the model has in the structure. Now, unfortunately, kind of going to your question of, you know, predicting affinity, unfortunately, confidence is not a very good predictor of affinity. And so one of the things that we've actually done a ton of progress, you know, since we released Boltz2.Brandon [00:52:03]: And kind of we have some new results that we are going to kind of announce soon is kind of, you know, the ability to get much better hit rates when instead of, you know, trying to rely on confidence of the model, we are actually directly trying to predict the affinity of that interaction. Okay. Just backing up a minute. So your diffusion model actually predicts not only the protein sequence, but also the folding of it. Exactly.Gabriel [00:52:32]: And actually, you can... One of the big different things that we did compared to other models in the space, and, you know, there were some papers that had already kind of done this before, but we really scaled it up was, you know, basically somewhat merging kind of the structure prediction and the sequence prediction into almost the same task. And so the way that Boltz2 works is that you are basically the only thing that you're doing is predicting the structure. So the only sort of... Supervision is we give you a supervision on the structure, but because the structure is atomic and, you know, the different amino acids have a different atomic composition, basically from the way that you place the atoms, we also understand not only kind of the structure that you wanted, but also the identity of the amino acid that, you know, the models believed was there. And so we've basically, instead of, you know, having these two supervision signals, you know, one discrete, one continuous. That somewhat, you know, don't interact well together. We sort of like build kind of like an encoding of, you know, sequences in structures that allows us to basically use exactly the same supervision signal that we were using to Boltz2 that, you know, you know, largely similar to what AlphaVol3 proposed, which is very scalable. And we can use that to design new proteins. Oh, interesting.RJ [00:53:58]: Maybe a quick shout out to Hannes Stark on our team who like did all this work. Yeah.Gabriel [00:54:04]: Yeah, that was a really cool idea. I mean, like looking at the paper and there's this is like encoding or you just add a bunch of, I guess, kind of atoms, which can be anything, and then they get sort of rearranged and then basically plopped on top of each other so that and then that encodes what the amino acid is. And there's sort of like a unique way of doing this. It was that was like such a really such a cool, fun idea.RJ [00:54:29]: I think that idea was had existed before. Yeah, there were a couple of papers.Gabriel [00:54:33]: Yeah, I had proposed this and and Hannes really took it to the large scale.Brandon [00:54:39]: In the paper, a lot of the paper for Boltz2Gen is dedicated to actually the validation of the model. In my opinion, all the people we basically talk about feel that this sort of like in the wet lab or whatever the appropriate, you know, sort of like in real world validation is the whole problem or not the whole problem, but a big giant part of the problem. So can you talk a little bit about the highlights? From there, that really because to me, the results are impressive, both from the perspective of the, you know, the model and also just the effort that went into the validation by a large team.Gabriel [00:55:18]: First of all, I think I should start saying is that both when we were at MIT and Thomas Yacolas and Regina Barzillai's lab, as well as at Boltz, you know, we are not a we're not a biolab and, you know, we are not a therapeutic company. And so to some extent, you know, we were first forced to, you know, look outside of, you know, our group, our team to do the experimental validation. One of the things that really, Hannes, in the team pioneer was the idea, OK, can we go not only to, you know, maybe a specific group and, you know, trying to find a specific system and, you know, maybe overfit a bit to that system and trying to validate. But how can we test this model? So. Across a very wide variety of different settings so that, you know, anyone in the field and, you know, printing design is, you know, such a kind of wide task with all sorts of different applications from therapeutic to, you know, biosensors and many others that, you know, so can we get a validation that is kind of goes across many different tasks? And so he basically put together, you know, I think it was something like, you know, 25 different. You know, academic and industry labs that committed to, you know, testing some of the designs from the model and some of this testing is still ongoing and, you know, giving results kind of back to us in exchange for, you know, hopefully getting some, you know, new great sequences for their task. And he was able to, you know, coordinate this, you know, very wide set of, you know, scientists and already in the paper, I think we. Shared results from, I think, eight to 10 different labs kind of showing results from, you know, designing peptides, designing to target, you know, ordered proteins, peptides targeting disordered proteins, which are results, you know, of designing proteins that bind to small molecules, which are results of, you know, designing nanobodies and across a wide variety of different targets. And so that's sort of like. That gave to the paper a lot of, you know, validation to the model, a lot of validation that was kind of wide.Brandon [00:57:39]: And so those would be therapeutics for those animals or are they relevant to humans as well? They're relevant to humans as well.Gabriel [00:57:45]: Obviously, you need to do some work into, quote unquote, humanizing them, making sure that, you know, they have the right characteristics to so they're not toxic to humans and so on.RJ [00:57:57]: There are some approved medicine in the market that are nanobodies. There's a general. General pattern, I think, in like in trying to design things that are smaller, you know, like it's easier to manufacture at the same time, like that comes with like potentially other challenges, like maybe a little bit less selectivity than like if you have something that has like more hands, you know, but the yeah, there's this big desire to, you know, try to design many proteins, nanobodies, small peptides, you know, that just are just great drug modalities.Brandon [00:58:27]: Okay. I think we were left off. We were talking about validation. Validation in the lab. And I was very excited about seeing like all the diverse validations that you've done. Can you go into some more detail about them? Yeah. Specific ones. Yeah.RJ [00:58:43]: The nanobody one. I think we did. What was it? 15 targets. Is that correct? 14. 14 targets. Testing. So we typically the way this works is like we make a lot of designs. All right. On the order of like tens of thousands. And then we like rank them and we pick like the top. And in this case, and was 15 right for each target and then we like measure sort of like the success rates, both like how many targets we were able to get a binder for and then also like more generally, like out of all of the binders that we designed, how many actually proved to be good binders. Some of the other ones I think involved like, yeah, like we had a cool one where there was a small molecule or design a protein that binds to it. That has a lot of like interesting applications, you know, for example. Like Gabri mentioned, like biosensing and things like that, which is pretty cool. We had a disordered protein, I think you mentioned also. And yeah, I think some of those were some of the highlights. Yeah.Gabriel [00:59:44]: So I would say that the way that we structure kind of some of those validations was on the one end, we have validations across a whole set of different problems that, you know, the biologists that we were working with came to us with. So we were trying to. For example, in some of the experiments, design peptides that would target the RACC, which is a target that is involved in metabolism. And we had, you know, a number of other applications where we were trying to design, you know, peptides or other modalities against some other therapeutic relevant targets. We designed some proteins to bind small molecules. And then some of the other testing that we did was really trying to get like a more broader sense. So how does the model work, especially when tested, you know, on somewhat generalization? So one of the things that, you know, we found with the field was that a lot of the validation, especially outside of the validation that was on specific problems, was done on targets that have a lot of, you know, known interactions in the training data. And so it's always a bit hard to understand, you know, how much are these models really just regurgitating kind of what they've seen or trying to imitate. What they've seen in the training data versus, you know, really be able to design new proteins. And so one of the experiments that we did was to take nine targets from the PDB, filtering to things where there is no known interaction in the PDB. So basically the model has never seen kind of this particular protein bound or a similar protein bound to another protein. So there is no way that. The model from its training set can sort of like say, okay, I'm just going to kind of tweak something and just imitate this particular kind of interaction. And so we took those nine proteins. We worked with adaptive CRO and basically tested, you know, 15 mini proteins and 15 nanobodies against each one of them. And the very cool thing that we saw was that on two thirds of those targets, we were able to, from this 15 design, get nanomolar binders, nanomolar, roughly speaking, just a measure of, you know, how strongly kind of the interaction is, roughly speaking, kind of like a nanomolar binder is approximately the kind of binding strength or binding that you need for a therapeutic. Yeah. So maybe switching directions a bit. Bolt's lab was just announced this week or was it last week? Yeah. This is like your. First, I guess, product, if that's if you want to call it that. Can you talk about what Bolt's lab is and yeah, you know, what you hope that people take away from this? Yeah.RJ [01:02:44]: You know, as we mentioned, like I think at the very beginning is the goal with the product has been to, you know, address what the models don't on their own. And there's largely sort of two categories there. I'll split it in three. The first one. It's one thing to predict, you know, a single interaction, for example, like a single structure. It's another to like, you know, very effectively search a space, a design space to produce something of value. What we found, like sort of building on this product is that there's a lot of steps involved, you know, in that there's certainly need to like, you know, accompany the user through, you know, one of those steps, for example, is like, you know, the creation of the target itself. You know, how do we make sure that the model has like a good enough understanding of the target? So we can like design something and there's all sorts of tricks, you know, that you can do to improve like a particular, you know, structure prediction. And so that's sort of like, you know, the first stage. And then there's like this stage of like, you know, designing and searching the space efficiently. You know, for something like BullsGen, for example, like you, you know, you design many things and then you rank them, for example, for small molecule process, a little bit more complicated. We actually need to also make sure that the molecules are synthesizable. And so the way we do that is that, you know, we have a generative model that learns. To use like appropriate building blocks such that, you know, it can design within a space that we know is like synthesizable. And so there's like, you know, this whole pipeline really of different models involved in being able to design a molecule. And so that's been sort of like the first thing we call them agents. We have a protein agent and we have a small molecule design agents. And that's really like at the core of like what powers, you know, the BullsLab platform.Brandon [01:04:22]: So these agents, are they like a language model wrapper or they're just like your models and you're just calling them agents? A lot. Yeah. Because they, they, they sort of perform a function on behalf of.RJ [01:04:33]: They're more of like a, you know, a recipe, if you wish. And I think we use that term sort of because of, you know, sort of the complex pipelining and automation, you know, that goes into like all this plumbing. So that's the first part of the product. The second part is the infrastructure. You know, we need to be able to do this at very large scale for any one, you know, group that's doing a design campaign. Let's say you're designing, you know, I'd say a hundred thousand possible candidates. Right. To find the good one that is, you know, a very large amount of compute, you know, for small molecules, it's on the order of like a few seconds per designs for proteins can be a bit longer. And so, you know, ideally you want to do that in parallel, otherwise it's going to take you weeks. And so, you know, we've put a lot of effort into like, you know, our ability to have a GPU fleet that allows any one user, you know, to be able to do this kind of like large parallel search.Brandon [01:05:23]: So you're amortizing the cost over your users. Exactly. Exactly.RJ [01:05:27]: And, you know, to some degree, like it's whether you. Use 10,000 GPUs for like, you know, a minute is the same cost as using, you know, one GPUs for God knows how long. Right. So you might as well try to parallelize if you can. So, you know, a lot of work has gone, has gone into that, making it very robust, you know, so that we can have like a lot of people on the platform doing that at the same time. And the third one is, is the interface and the interface comes in, in two shapes. One is in form of an API and that's, you know, really suited for companies that want to integrate, you know, these pipelines, these agents.RJ [01:06:01]: So we're already partnering with, you know, a few distributors, you know, that are gonna integrate our API. And then the second part is the user interface. And, you know, we, we've put a lot of thoughts also into that. And this is when I, I mentioned earlier, you know, this idea of like broadening the audience. That's kind of what the, the user interface is about. And we've built a lot of interesting features in it, you know, for example, for collaboration, you know, when you have like potentially multiple medicinal chemists or. We're going through the results and trying to pick out, okay, like what are the molecules that we're going to go and test in the lab? It's powerful for them to be able to, you know, for example, each provide their own ranking and then do consensus building. And so there's a lot of features around launching these large jobs, but also around like collaborating on analyzing the results that we try to solve, you know, with that part of the platform. So Bolt's lab is sort of a combination of these three objectives into like one, you know, sort of cohesive platform. Who is this accessible to? Everyone. You do need to request access today. We're still like, you know, sort of ramping up the usage, but anyone can request access. If you are an academic in particular, we, you know, we provide a fair amount of free credit so you can play with the platform. If you are a startup or biotech, you may also, you know, reach out and we'll typically like actually hop on a call just to like understand what you're trying to do and also provide a lot of free credit to get started. And of course, also with larger companies, we can deploy this platform in a more like secure environment. And so that's like more like customizing. You know, deals that we make, you know, with the partners, you know, and that's sort of the ethos of Bolt. I think this idea of like servicing everyone and not necessarily like going after just, you know, the really large enterprises. And that starts from the open source, but it's also, you know, a key design principle of the product itself.Gabriel [01:07:48]: One thing I was thinking about with regards to infrastructure, like in the LLM space, you know, the cost of a token has gone down by I think a factor of a thousand or so over the last three years, right? Yeah. And is it possible that like essentially you can exploit economies of scale and infrastructure that you can make it cheaper to run these things yourself than for any person to roll their own system? A hundred percent. Yeah.RJ [01:08:08]: I mean, we're already there, you know, like running Bolts on our platform, especially on a large screen is like considerably cheaper than it would probably take anyone to put the open source model out there and run it. And on top of the infrastructure, like one of the things that we've been working on is accelerating the models. So, you know. Our small molecule screening pipeline is 10x faster on Bolts Lab than it is in the open source, you know, and that's also part of like, you know, building a product, you know, of something that scales really well. And we really wanted to get to a point where like, you know, we could keep prices very low in a way that it would be a no-brainer, you know, to use Bolts through our platform.Gabriel [01:08:52]: How do you think about validation of your like agentic systems? Because, you know, as you were saying earlier. Like we're AlphaFold style models are really good at, let's say, monomeric, you know, proteins where you have, you know, co-evolution data. But now suddenly the whole point of this is to design something which doesn't have, you know, co-evolution data, something which is really novel. So now you're basically leaving the domain that you thought was, you know, that you know you are good at. So like, how do you validate that?RJ [01:09:22]: Yeah, I like every complete, but there's obviously, you know, a ton of computational metrics. That we rely on, but those are only take you so far. You really got to go to the lab, you know, and test, you know, okay, with this method A and this method B, how much better are we? You know, how much better is my, my hit rate? How stronger are my binders? Also, it's not just about hit rate. It's also about how good the binders are. And there's really like no way, nowhere around that. I think we're, you know, we've really ramped up the amount of experimental validation that we do so that we like really track progress, you know, as scientifically sound, you know. Yeah. As, as possible out of this, I think.Gabriel [01:10:00]: Yeah, no, I think, you know, one thing that is unique about us and maybe companies like us is that because we're not working on like maybe a couple of therapeutic pipelines where, you know, our validation would be focused on those. We, when we do an experimental validation, we try to test it across tens of targets. And so that on the one end, we can get a much more statistically significant result and, and really allows us to make progress. From the methodological side without being, you know, steered by, you know, overfitting on any one particular system. And of course we choose, you know, w

The RPGBOT.Podcast
PULP CTHULHU: How to Play 3 Actual Play - A Reasonable Plan Ruined by Order

The RPGBOT.Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 12, 2026 61:33


There are two ways to learn a tabletop RPG: read the rulebook… or get shot at on a collapsing train while chasing occult Nazis across North Africa. In this RPGBOT.Quickstart actual play of Pulp Cthulhu, the crew demonstrates how cinematic pulp RPG sessions actually unfold — complete with relic thefts, hypnotized enemies, catastrophic dice rolls, and a physics-defying jetpack solution. If you've ever wondered how Call of Cthulhu actual play gameplay, learning Pulp Cthulhu through play, or tabletop RPG session flow examples look in the wild, this episode shows you — loudly, chaotically, and probably while someone is falling off a cliff. Show Notes This installment of the RPGBOT Quickstart actual play series transitions from theory into demonstration, showcasing how to learn Pulp Cthulhu gameplay mechanics through live play. Following prior episodes on system concepts and character creation, the cast introduces their pulp-era investigators — including an eccentric engineer and a circus-trained occult bruiser — tasked by an FBI occult task force to intercept Nazi relic hunters in 1935. The scenario begins aboard a desert-bound train headed toward a meeting with archaeologist Iowa Roberts, where the party examines a mysterious artifact that functions like a supernatural compass pointing toward the mythical desert city tied to forbidden lore. Their investigation is interrupted when the rival occult agent Scarlet Arachnus steals the relic during a catastrophic derailment, throwing the game immediately into cinematic action and demonstrating combat initiative, skill rolls, and survival mechanics in Call of Cthulhu actual play. Escaping a precariously hanging train car, the players confront armed enemies, navigate terrain hazards, and showcase mechanical problem-solving through teamwork and skill checks — highlighting how dice outcomes shape narrative consequences. The action continues across exposed train cars with firefights against heavily armed foes, illustrating tactical movement, cover usage, and pulp-style heroics. After surviving the encounter and sabotaging the collapsing train, the group scavenges supplies, uncovers clues, and discovers evidence of a larger occult plot: a map referencing desert pillars and connections to mythic texts associated with forbidden knowledge. Realizing they've handed the artifact to their enemies, they pivot to pursuit — commandeering and repairing a damaged vehicle, demonstrating mechanical repair gameplay and collaborative skill usage. The session concludes with the party navigating across the desert using improvised technology to track tire marks toward their adversaries — emphasizing exploration and skill-driven storytelling in tabletop RPG actual play teaching examples. Overall, this consolidated episode functions as a practical tutorial on how actual play sessions model rule application, improvisation, and narrative escalation, blending cinematic pulp action with procedural gameplay instruction. Key Takeaways Actual play is an effective way to learn Pulp Cthulhu rules and gameplay flow in context Character introductions reinforce narrative hooks and mechanical identity Skill checks drive storytelling outcomes — success and failure both move plot forward Combat showcases initiative, cover, and pulp-action pacing Environmental hazards highlight survival and problem-solving mechanics Collaborative play enables creative solutions beyond strict rules Resource scavenging and clue discovery reinforce investigation gameplay Vehicle repair and navigation demonstrate non-combat system depth Narrative escalation illustrates long-form campaign structure Session ends with forward momentum toward mythos investigation and pursuit Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

In The Money: Personal Economics, Information for the Everyday Investor, and A Weekly Market Analysis
The Bottom Line 2-12-26 with Heather Johnson President CEO of Waypoint Collaborative former Commissioner of DECD

In The Money: Personal Economics, Information for the Everyday Investor, and A Weekly Market Analysis

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 12, 2026 33:16


This weeks "Bottom Line " with special guest Heather Johnson President and CEO of Waypoint Collaborative, and former Comissioner of the Department of Economic Community Development for the State of Maine.

Michigan's Big Show
* Paul Hamelin, Owner of Verterra Winery in Leland, member of the Michigan Wine Collaborative

Michigan's Big Show

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 12, 2026 8:31 Transcription Available


RPGBOT.Podcast
PULP CTHULHU: How to Play 3 Actual Play - A Reasonable Plan Ruined by Order

RPGBOT.Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 12, 2026 61:33


There are two ways to learn a tabletop RPG: read the rulebook… or get shot at on a collapsing train while chasing occult Nazis across North Africa. In this RPGBOT.Quickstart actual play of Pulp Cthulhu, the crew demonstrates how cinematic pulp RPG sessions actually unfold — complete with relic thefts, hypnotized enemies, catastrophic dice rolls, and a physics-defying jetpack solution. If you've ever wondered how Call of Cthulhu actual play gameplay, learning Pulp Cthulhu through play, or tabletop RPG session flow examples look in the wild, this episode shows you — loudly, chaotically, and probably while someone is falling off a cliff. Show Notes This installment of the RPGBOT Quickstart actual play series transitions from theory into demonstration, showcasing how to learn Pulp Cthulhu gameplay mechanics through live play. Following prior episodes on system concepts and character creation, the cast introduces their pulp-era investigators — including an eccentric engineer and a circus-trained occult bruiser — tasked by an FBI occult task force to intercept Nazi relic hunters in 1935. The scenario begins aboard a desert-bound train headed toward a meeting with archaeologist Iowa Roberts, where the party examines a mysterious artifact that functions like a supernatural compass pointing toward the mythical desert city tied to forbidden lore. Their investigation is interrupted when the rival occult agent Scarlet Arachnus steals the relic during a catastrophic derailment, throwing the game immediately into cinematic action and demonstrating combat initiative, skill rolls, and survival mechanics in Call of Cthulhu actual play. Escaping a precariously hanging train car, the players confront armed enemies, navigate terrain hazards, and showcase mechanical problem-solving through teamwork and skill checks — highlighting how dice outcomes shape narrative consequences. The action continues across exposed train cars with firefights against heavily armed foes, illustrating tactical movement, cover usage, and pulp-style heroics. After surviving the encounter and sabotaging the collapsing train, the group scavenges supplies, uncovers clues, and discovers evidence of a larger occult plot: a map referencing desert pillars and connections to mythic texts associated with forbidden knowledge. Realizing they've handed the artifact to their enemies, they pivot to pursuit — commandeering and repairing a damaged vehicle, demonstrating mechanical repair gameplay and collaborative skill usage. The session concludes with the party navigating across the desert using improvised technology to track tire marks toward their adversaries — emphasizing exploration and skill-driven storytelling in tabletop RPG actual play teaching examples. Overall, this consolidated episode functions as a practical tutorial on how actual play sessions model rule application, improvisation, and narrative escalation, blending cinematic pulp action with procedural gameplay instruction. Key Takeaways Actual play is an effective way to learn Pulp Cthulhu rules and gameplay flow in context Character introductions reinforce narrative hooks and mechanical identity Skill checks drive storytelling outcomes — success and failure both move plot forward Combat showcases initiative, cover, and pulp-action pacing Environmental hazards highlight survival and problem-solving mechanics Collaborative play enables creative solutions beyond strict rules Resource scavenging and clue discovery reinforce investigation gameplay Vehicle repair and navigation demonstrate non-combat system depth Narrative escalation illustrates long-form campaign structure Session ends with forward momentum toward mythos investigation and pursuit Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

The New Music Business with Ari Herstand
DIY Band Couch on World Tours, Self Managing, and Fan Building

The New Music Business with Ari Herstand

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2026 95:14


This week on the New Music Business podcast, Ari sits down with Tema Siegel and Zach Blankstein of the band Couch. Tema is the singer and Zach is the guitarist/manager of this seven-piece soul-pop band from Boston. Their explosive live shows and fully DIY approach have helped them sell out major venues across the country. Formed from lifelong friendships and built during the pandemic, Couch has grown into a globally touring act while self-producing their acclaimed debut album 'Big Talk'.In this episode, Tema and Zach break down how they built an engaged fanbase without label support, the logistics of touring as a seven-member group, and the creative and vulnerable writing process behind 'Big Talk'. Ari dives into their ad strategy, their partnership with the Salt Lick Incubator, how they secured major support tours with Lake Street Dive and Cory Wong, and what it takes to balance musicianship, management, and sustainable growth as an independent band in 2025. http://instagram.com/couch.theband07:16 – Adding the seventh member & early chemistry09:15 – Touring as an introvert and finding group balance12:19 – Managing a 12-person touring party16:34 – How fans are reacting to the new songs live18:22 – How the band uses VIP sections to build superfans19:40 – Collaborative songwriting process & Temma's Notes app22:19 – “Middleman” and the band's unexpected EDM influence26:22 – Self-producing the entire album & working with mixers27:15 – Living in Boston and breaking out beyond the local scene32:56 – Growing during the pandemic while in separate cities36:32 – Early viral video & their online strategy40:07 – How Couch finances the band with day jobs41:24 – Why Zach became their in-house manager55:52 – Opening for Cory Wong & Lake Street Dive58:44 – Deep dive into their ad strategyEdited and mixed by Peter SchruppMusic by Brassroots DistrictProduced by the team at Ari's TakeOrder the THIRD EDITION of How to Make It in the New Music Business: https://book.aristake.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Destination On The Left
463. Group Travel Trends for 2026: Voices from the ABA Marketplace in Reno Part 1, with Nicole Mahoney

Destination On The Left

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2026 57:32


This episode of Destination on the Left is a special roadshow edition recorded live at the American Bus Association's Marketplace 2026 in Reno, Nevada. I'm joined by a fantastic group of industry leaders to hear first-hand how collaboration is playing a critical, mission-driven role in the future of group travel, moving beyond a "nice-to-have" and becoming essential for success. My guests discuss the economic impact of group travel and the importance of restoring cross-border connections between the U.S. and Canada, to creative regional itineraries, and share ideas for navigating the political and economic headwinds facing the industry. What You Will Learn in This Episode: How ABA's leadership is addressing current challenges in group travel, including restoring the crucial relationship between the U.S. and Canada Why collaboration between industry partners, including operators, suppliers, associations, and destinations, is mission-critical for the future of group travel Trends are shaping group travel in 2026 and beyond, such as the rise of experiential itineraries, smaller group sizes, and the impacts of major events like the FIFA World Cup and MA250 How regional and cross-border partnerships are creating unique travel experiences and tour products that benefit entire ecosystems, not just individual destinations Collaborative initiatives, such as Tour in 64 are demonstrating the value of teamwork How industry organizations like ABA can accelerate personal and professional growth The Future of Group Travel is Collaboration The ABA 2026 Marketplace is filled with optimism, but nobody shies away from today's realities. Fred Ferguson sets the stage by underscoring the economic importance of group travel—$158 billion in economic output and 800,000 jobs in North America. The entire travel flywheel, operators, destinations, restaurants, and attractions, only spins when everyone works in sync. Fred Ferguson and Terry Fischer both stress that now, more than ever, strategic alliances and industry unity are essential for lasting impact. It's no longer enough to operate in silos. As Terry puts it, "It takes a village," and internal and external collaboration are the most important ingredients in weathering disruptions, from politics to pandemics. Collaboration in Action My guests also share what deep collaboration looks like in practice. Across the group travel ecosystem, leaders are getting creative. We hear how DMOs are embracing regionalism, and Todd Read from SoIN Tourism and Whitney Lubbers of Dubois County described how Tour in 64, a partnership among destinations along Interstate 64, helps smaller markets punch above their weight. By pooling marketing budgets, sharing top experiences, and even jointly running an ABA booth, collective impact outweighs any competition for hotel nights. With mega-events like the FIFA World Cup and MA250 (America's 250th anniversary) on the horizon, Stacey David detailed how municipalities, nonprofits, small businesses, and big attractions can co-create fan zone festivals that benefit everyone. Every stakeholder has a seat at the table for shared successes. The Power of Relationships The ABA conference is a great way to build relations, get involved, and engage with others in the travel and tourism industry. Jim Warren of Anderson Vacations credits strong partnerships as the industry's lifeblood, helping everyone survive the inevitable economic and political storms. Those connections are formed and deepened at conferences like ABA Marketplace. Investments in community, from Women in Buses initiatives to association days, make all the difference for newcomers and veterans alike. Leaders are putting collaboration-first strategies in place—whether it's regional joint marketing, creating new products, or advocating for the sector at the policy level. Resources: Fred Ferguson: https://www.buses.org/staff/fred-ferguson-mba-ms/ Terry Fischer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terry-fischer-31895b122/ Patricia Cowley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pcowley/ Jim Warren: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-warren-1b2b59187/ Stacey David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacey-david-940a214/ Todd Read: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-read-182ab73a/ Whitney Lubbers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitney-lubbers-07374360/ We value your thoughts and feedback and would love to hear from you. Leave us a review on your favorite streaming platform to let us know what you want to hear more o​f. Here is a quick tutorial on how to leave us a rating and review on iTunes!

Resume Assassin presents Recruiting Insider
7 Things I Look For on Every Resume (Ex-Amazon Recruiter)

Resume Assassin presents Recruiting Insider

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2026 21:06


FREE RESOURCES & TOOLS:Join my newsletter for weekly job search and career tips you won't find anywhere else: https://www.resumeassassin.com/newsletter/ (Get instant access to my free ATS-friendly resume template)Resume Assassin: www.resumeassassin.com - Professional resume writing services and career coaching to land your dream roleResume Sidekick: www.resumesidekick.io - AI-powered resume optimization tools that help you beat Applicant Tracking SystemsLand Your Dream Job Course: https://academy.resumeassassin.com - My complete step-by-step system including the 2-Hour Job Search method, resume templates, LinkedIn optimization, and interview strategiesCONNECT WITH ME:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mary-southernInstagram: @resumeassassinTikTok: @resume_assassin_maryEPISODE TEASER I used to read 50-100 resumes a day at Amazon. Most of them had good metrics, clean formatting, all the "right" stuff. But they still didn't get interviews.Turns out, there are seven specific things recruiters scan for that nobody talks about. Not the obvious stuff!! The hidden signals that separate the "maybe" pile from the "interview immediately" pile.That's what this video is about. Let's get into it.TIMESTAMPS0:00 - Intro: Why your "good" resume isn't getting interviews2:15 - Signal #1: Evidence of decision-making under ambiguity5:30 - Signal #2: The "scope creep" signal8:20 - Signal #3: Recovery stories (not just success stories)11:10 - Signal #4: The velocity indicator13:45 - Signal #5: Collaborative tension navigation16:20 - Signal #6: Scale language18:40 - Signal #7: Self-directed learning evidence21:15 - Recap & next steps

Speak Up
Collaborative approach to school assessment & reports S8E2

Speak Up

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2026 44:29


In this week's episode, we explore how speech pathology reports can better support students when they're written through a collaborative lens. SPA's Nathan Cornish-Raley is joined by Dr Sharon Klieve and Dr Hannah Stark from the University of Melbourne to unpack insights into teacher perspectives, accessible report writing, and practical recommendations that make a difference in classrooms. They highlight how collaboration, clarity, and context can transform reports from paperwork into tools for inclusion and learning. Free access to transcripts, as well as a full list of resources and references for this podcast, is available via the SPA Learning Hub (https://learninghub.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/). You will need to sign in or create an account. For more information, please see our Bio, or for further enquiries, email speakuppodcast@speechpathologyaustralia.org.au Speech Pathology Australia acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of lands, seas and waters throughout Australia, and offers our respect to Elders, across all times and places. The Speak Up podcast recognises the central role of yarning and oral storytelling in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, how this translates to knowledge translation, and that colonisation has interrupted these practices of Language and knowledge sharing. The Speak Up podcast acknowledges the need for truth-telling and deep listening, the central role that Language plays in connecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People with Culture, Country, and Community, and the interwoven nature of health, and social and emotional wellbeing. We recognise that the Traditional Owners of the Lands across Australia have been here since time immemorial, and that their sovereignty over this land, was never ceded. Disclaimer: © (2026) The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited. All rights reserved. Important Notice, Please read: The views expressed in this presentation and reproduced in these materials are not necessarily the views of, or endorsed by, The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited (“the Association”). The Association makes no warranty or representation in relation to the content, currency or accuracy of any of the materials comprised in this recording. The Association expressly disclaims any and all liability (including liability for negligence) in respect of use of these materials and the information contained within them. The Association recommends you seek independent professional advice prior to making any decision involving matters outlined in this recording including in any of the materials referred to or otherwise incorporated into this recording. Except as otherwise stated, copyright and all other intellectual property rights comprised in the presentation and these materials, remain the exclusive property of the Association. Except with the Association's prior written approval you must not, in whole or part, reproduce, modify, adapt, distribute, publish or electronically communicate (including by online means) this recording or any of these materials.

Empowering Professionals in Aging
Navigating Family Dynamics: Collaborative Caregiving and Support

Empowering Professionals in Aging

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2026 62:16


As individuals age, family relationships often shift—sometimes creating stress, misunderstandings, or conflict around care decisions. Older adults may find themselves at the center of complex family dynamics, especially when health or independence becomes a concern. This podcast episode explores how older adults and their families can work together to maintain respect, communication and mutual support through these transitions.

KNBR Podcast
2.5: Forever Young Foundation Hero Of The Week - RISE

KNBR Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2026 5:53 Transcription Available


RISE is a nonprofit dedicated to bridging educational and opportunity gaps in East Palo Alto through culturally responsive, family-centered programs for children from birth through high school. Its initiatives include early childhood and literacy support, afterschool academic enrichment, and tutoring and personal growth programs for middle and high school students. RISE also leads the Little Blue House Birth-5 Collaborative, a community hub where nonprofits across San Mateo County work together to better serve families with young children.Tune in each week on KNBR as we spotlight incredible individuals and organizations making a difference in the Bay Area with the Forever Young Foundation Hero of the Week.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Designer Within
91: What Holds Interior Designers Back: Sourcing Fear, Pricing Pushback, and Building Better Systems with Heather McManus

The Designer Within

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2026 51:46 Transcription Available


Interior design can feel isolating, and sourcing can feel risky, especially when clients shop online and question your pricing. In this episode, John McClain sits down with interior designer Heather McManus to talk about what actually holds designers back, how collaboration can change the game, and why transparent systems are the key to better sourcing, better margins, and less burnout.In this episode, we coverWhy fear of mistakes keeps designers small, especially with sourcing and procurementWhat to say when a client finds the same item online for lessHow Designers Collaborative started and why buying power mattersHow shared vendor access can increase creative freedom and profitabilityBurnout, inspiration days, and how to recharge without “checking out” of your businessLinks and resourcesFor more information on Heather McManus and The Designer's Collaborative:https://heathermcmanus.com/https://thedesignerscollaborative.com/https://www.instagram.com/thedesignerscollaborative/Text Me a Message!_____________________________________________________________________________________FREE VIDEO TRAINING DIRECT FROM JOHN:Design feels natural.The business side doesn't.Join this free 39-minute training for interior designers and learn the 3 secrets to building a profitable, stress-free design business without burnout or chaos.

No Guilt Mom
How to Co-Parent Without Fighting (Even With a Difficult Ex) with Gabriella Pomare

No Guilt Mom

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2026 36:24


If you're co-parenting after separation or divorce, you've probably realized something no one really prepares you for: The relationship doesn't end… it just changes shape. And suddenly, every text about pickup times, school forms, or “did you send the sweatshirt back?” feels emotionally loaded. Not because you're arguing about sweatshirts—but because separation brings grief, fear, anger, and unfinished emotional business into everyday communication. In this episode of the No Guilt Mom Podcast, I'm joined by Gabriella Pomare, family lawyer, award-winning author of The Collaborative Co-Parent, and co-parenting advocate. We talk about what actually works when communication breaks down—especially if your ex is difficult, high-conflict, or completely uncooperative. Because co-parenting isn't about being friends. It's about structure, boundaries, and emotional safety for your kids—without you carrying the entire emotional load. What You'll Learn in This Episode 1) Why communication falls apart after separation (even when you both love your kids) Gabriella describes separation as a “nervous system earthquake.” When you're grieving the life you thought you'd have, messages don't land neutrally anymore. Even something as small as “you're running late” can feel like criticism, control, or a power struggle. 2) The difference between “moving on” and actually healing You can look fine on the outside—working, dating, functioning—and still feel your body spike the moment your ex's name shows up on your phone. Healing is when you can respond instead of react, stop trying to win, and read a neutral message without creating a high-conflict story in your head. 3) What collaborative co-parenting really means (and what it doesn't) Collaborative co-parenting doesn't mean you're best friends or agree on everything. It means consistently making decisions through a child-centered lens, with clear systems that reduce emotional volatility—especially in high-conflict situations. Often, that looks less emotional and more business-like. 4) Boundaries that actually work—and how to handle it when they're crossed Boundaries aren't rules you force on your ex. They're commitments you make to yourself. Gabriella explains how to stop engaging with emotional bait, rehashing the past, and escalating conversations—without creating more conflict. 5) A practical tool for high-conflict co-parenting: communication apps If your ex sends long, hostile messages or constantly pulls you into conflict, Gabriella recommends using a co-parenting app like OurFamilyWizard to: keep communication child-focused reduce harassment and message flooding create clear boundaries and documentation shift communication from emotional to logistical 6) The 4 pillars of co-parent communication Gabriella's framework for reducing conflict: Listen → Pause → Reflect → Respond The hardest part? The pause. Because when emotions are high, the instinct is to respond quickly and win. The pause is what breaks the cycle. 7) What kids need most to feel safe across two homes Kids don't need perfect parents. They need predictability, stability, and emotional safety. When kids know what's happening, who's picking them up, and that they're not responsible for adult emotions, they feel more secure—even across two households. Quick Favor (It Helps More Moms Find This Parenting Support) If this episode helped you feel less alone, would you take 30 seconds to leave a review for the No Guilt Mom Podcast? Reviews help other overwhelmed moms find this parenting support when they need it most. Resources Mentioned Our Family Wizard co-parenting app Gabriella Pomare's book: The Collaborative Co-Parent Join the No Guilt Mom Circle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This Helps with Marlon Morgan
53. Ron Ivey | What We're Losing to Social AI - Part 1

This Helps with Marlon Morgan

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2026 71:35


Ron Ivey is a researcher and advisor working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human flourishing, and social connection. He is the founder of Noēsis Collaborative, where he works with policymakers, technologists, and researchers to ask how technology can truly support human well-being. In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Ron joins Marlon to outline the current landscape. Together, they explore social AI, loneliness, and de-skilling, setting the stage for Part 2, our season finale, focused on meaningful solutions and the path forward. Learn more about Ron Ivey and Noēsis Collaborative: noesiscollaborative.org

Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Using Pinterest as a collaborative branding discovery tool

Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 4, 2026 32:43


When I first learned about Work Play Branding, I instantly loved their business model, but what made me fall in love with them even more is how they are creatively using Pinterest as a collaborative tool with their clients. To surface the clients' ideals in photos and pictures, to be able to support their photographers and designers to give the clients exactly what they are looking for. We're going to dive into an interview with their founder and CEO Lyrik Fryer. WorkPlay Branding —-------Here are some helpful links from the podcast:

Joe DeCamara & Jon Ritchie
Eliot Shorr-Parks: The Eagles Offense Will Be Collaborative

Joe DeCamara & Jon Ritchie

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 3, 2026 12:44


Eliot Shorr-Parks joins the 94 WIP Morning Show to discuss the way the Eagles offense will look next season.

Making Money Personal
5 Ways to Show Love Without Touching Your Credit Card - Money Tip Tuesday

Making Money Personal

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 3, 2026 5:41


We're always looking for ways to save you all money, and with Valentine's Day right around the corner, it's so easy to go over budget, that is, if you even had one anyway. For those trying to dial back a little on spending this year, we're sharing a few ways to celebrate Valentine's Day without having to take out that credit card.    Links: Check out TCU University for financial education tips and resources! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter! Learn more about Triangle Credit Union Transcript: Welcome to Money Tip Tuesday from the Making Money Personal podcast.  Valentine's Day often comes with a lot of pressure—lavish dinners, expensive gifts, and grand gestures that can leave your wallet feeling less than romantic. But here's the truth: love doesn't have to come with a price tag. In fact, some of the most meaningful ways to show you care cost absolutely nothing. If you're looking to celebrate without swiping your credit card or maybe minimizing its use, here are five heartfelt ideas that prove thoughtfulness beats extravagance every time.   The Power of Personal Touch  Nothing says “I love you” quite like words straight from the heart. Instead of buying a pricey card, write a heartfelt letter or even a poem. Share your favorite memories, what you appreciate most about your partner, and your hopes for the future. Often it's easy to splurge on candies or flowers, but if you're cutting back on buying things this year, making something from the heart can be just as nice.    Trying something like a handwritten note feels personal and timeless—something they can treasure for years. Besides a handwritten letter or note, crafting something unique from scratch can be just as meaningful. For the creative folks, browse through ideas online from a site like Pinterest where you'll find plenty of thoughtful homemade Valentine's crafts and gifts for your special someone.   Quality Time Over Price Tags  Sometimes, the best gift is your undivided attention. Plan a tech-free evening where you both disconnect from screens and focus on each other. Screens are often distractions from the present moment, robbing us of the true value that comes with being together.   Make the holiday more special by offering your undivided attention and just spending time together. If you're unsure what to do, try an idea like cooking a meal together using what you already have in the pantry. You could also take a walk under the stars and talk about your dreams, or you might enjoy dusting off a board game or card deck for some friendly competition. Quality time strengthens emotional bonds and creates lasting memories—no receipt required.   Acts of Service Speak Volumes Love isn't just about words; it's about actions. Doing something that makes your partner's life easier can be incredibly romantic.   There are many times in life when acts of service are the perfect gift. For those who are busy and don't have time to tackle common daily tasks, they can build up and cause much uneasiness or stress. For many loved ones this Valentine's Day, something simple like an act of service might just be the perfect gift they'd been hoping for.     One idea could be to make your significant other breakfast in bed. You could tackle a chore they've been dreading or even organize a space they use often, like their desk or closet. To up the stakes and gain points, pick one task the night before and surprise them by morning.   Acts of service are beautiful gifts because they show thoughtfulness and effort, which often means more than any store-bought gift.   Create Something Together  Shared creativity can be a powerful bonding experience. Instead of buying something, make something together. If you know your significant other is crafty and values building or creating, this may be the perfect Valentine's Day gift.    You could curate a playlist of songs that remind you of each other. You might enjoy baking cookies or trying a new recipe together or you could even start a photo album or scrapbook of your favorite moments. Collaborative projects create fun, laughter, and a sense of accomplishment—plus, you'll have a keepsake to look back on.   Memory-Making Experiences Experiences often outshine material gifts. Plan a free adventure that gets you out of your routine. Depending on where you live, this option might be teeming with possibilities.    If the weather is good, go for a nature walk or hike in a local park. Check out free museum days or community events going on in the area. If you'd prefer not to leave the house, have a picnic at home or in your backyard with homemade snacks. Shared experiences deepen your connection, give you stories to tell for years to come, and will be worth their weight in memories.    Love isn't measured in dollars—it's measured in effort, thoughtfulness, and time. This Valentine's Day, skip the stress of overspending and focus on what really matters: making your partner feel valued and appreciated. Try one (or all) of these ideas and see how meaningful a no-cost celebration can be.   Have a budget-friendly Valentine's idea not mentioned in this tip? Go ahead and share it with your family, friends, or on social media—you might inspire someone else to celebrate love without breaking the bank.  If there are any other tips or topics you'd like us to cover, let us know at tcupodcast@trianglecu.org. Also, remember to like and follow our Making Money Personal Facebook and Instagram to share your thoughts. Finally, remember to look for our sponsor, Triangle Credit Union, on Facebook and LinkedIn.           Thanks for listening to today's Money Tip Tuesday. Check out our other tips and episodes on the Making Money Personal podcast. 

DSP Talk
Embracing Dignity of Risk: Shedding Our Selfish Fear

DSP Talk

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 3, 2026 28:17


Christopher Lyons is the CEO of AIM Services Incorporated, a role he has held since 2018. With a rich background as a trial attorney, Christopher has over 25 years of legal experience across various U.S. jurisdictions. He has also served in the New York State Office for People with Developmental Disabilities and has worked as national counsel for a major human services insurance program. Christopher has significantly expanded AIM's reach, supporting over 4,000 individuals across the state. He is well-versed in topics like dignity of risk, provider liability, and standards of care in human services.Episode Summary:In this thought-provoking episode of DSP Talk, host Asheley Blaise engages with Christopher Lyons, CEO of AIM Services Inc., to delve into the often overlooked right of "dignity of risk." This episode explores how individuals in the developmental disabilities field can benefit from embracing risks rather than being shielded by fear and liability concerns. Christopher extensive knowledge and experience to this discussion, making this episode a must-listen for anyone involved in the caregiving and support sectors.The discussion unveils a transformative approach to person-centered support that prioritizes autonomy and self-determination over traditional, risk-averse paradigms. Christopher emphasizes the importance of recognizing individuals with disabilities as unique people entitled to their agency and capable of making decisions involving risk. Through illustrative examples and legal insights, he effectively advocates for a shift from a control-focused model to a supportive one, empowering individuals to lead fulfilling lives. The episode also includes practical insights into moving away from a risk-averse culture towards one that champions dignity and autonomy.Key Takeaways:The concept of "dignity of risk" involves balancing safety and the rights of individuals with developmental disabilities to make autonomous choices, even if that involves risk.A paradigm shift from agency-driven to person-driven models is essential for supporting autonomy and fostering genuine inclusion for individuals with disabilities.Legal liability should not overshadow the importance of supporting individuals to experience life fully, learn from failures, and achieve personal success.Collaborative decision-making, transparency, and documentation are vital for balancing risk and ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned on supporting individual autonomy.Notable Quotes:"At the core of our human dignity is our ability to own our own successes, to have the results of our choices, our free will.""It's not just enough to invite somebody to the table. You have to believe they belong there.""We are not a guarantor of the safety of the people we support.""Never say no, always say how, and then work through that together.""Support isn't control; it's support. Shed your selfish fear."Resources:AIM Services Inc. WebsiteThe Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)Olmstead RightsTune in to this enlightening episode for a thorough understanding of how embracing dignity of risk can lead to richer, more autonomous lives for individuals in the developmental disabilities community. Subscribe for more insightful discussions on DSP Talk, where every episode aims to redefine support systems for the betterment of the community. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Catholic Health USA Podcast
A Collaborative Model for Community-Based Wellness

Catholic Health USA Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 3, 2026 23:09


Health Calls Season 6, Episode 10 highlights Healthspan Nevada County, an innovative community‑based wellness model redefining whole‑person care. Host Brian Reardon and Executive Producer Josh Matejka talk with Dr. Scott Neeley, president and CEO of Dignity Health's Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital, about how this collaborative approach strengthens community health beyond traditional clinical care.Rooted in four pillars—movement, food, connection, and youth development—the Healthspan model brings together nonprofits, arts organizations, schools, and health leaders to prevent chronic disease and promote long‑term wellness. Dr. Neeley explains why community connection, healthy environments, and shared purpose play a critical role in improving health outcomes. Health Calls is available on the following podcast streaming platforms:Apple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeLearn more about The Catholic Health Association of the United States at www.chausa.org.

SBS Japanese - SBSの日本語放送
Art on Toast: Collaborative creations with food - SASAMANA - 食材と向き合い共に作り上げる「Art on Toast」、 佐々木愛実

SBS Japanese - SBSの日本語放送

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 3, 2026 13:14


SASAMANA (Manami Sasaki) is an artist and designer based in Tokyo. Her pandemic-era breakfast rituals have been elevated into art, culminating in the recent publication of an art book 'Art on Toast. ' Manami also holds workshops both domestically and internationally. She recently spent three months in Melbourne. - 東京のアーティストでデザイナーの佐々木愛実(まなみ)さん。コロナ禍の取り組みがアートに昇華し、SASAMANAとして活動しています。このほどアート本を出版し、国内外でワークショップも開きます。3カ月過ごしたメルボルンの話も聞きました。

Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive
Episode Summary 08: What Is Collaborative Parenting? Real Parent Story

Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 2, 2026 27:16 Transcription Available


When you started parenting, you probably had ideas about the kind of parent you wanted to be. Maybe you imagined patient bedtimes and peaceful mornings. Then reality hit, and you found yourself doing things you swore you'd never do. Parent Maile Grace knows this feeling well. In this conversation, she shares how her parenting values have shifted since her daughter was born. She talks about moving away from strategies like timeouts that seemed to work in the moment but didn't align with what she truly wanted for her relationship with her child.  You'll hear how she supports her kids when they're fighting instead of jumping in to fix everything, and why building connections with neighbors matters more to her now than having a perfectly organized home. If you've ever wondered whether collaborative parenting actually works in real life, this episode gives you a peek into one family's experience. Questions this episode will answer What is collaborative parenting? Collaborative parenting means working with your child to solve problems instead of using punishments or rewards to control their behavior. It involves understanding what your child is struggling with and finding solutions that work for everyone. What are parenting values? Parenting values are the principles that guide how you want to raise your children and the kind of relationships you want to build with them. They often include things like respect, connection, autonomy, and understanding. How do children solve problems? Children learn problem-solving skills when adults support them through conflicts rather than immediately fixing things. They practice identifying their own feelings and what matters to them, then working together to find solutions. What is collaborative problem solving? Collaborative problem solving is an approach where parents help children navigate challenges by exploring what's hard for everyone involved and creating solutions together, rather than imposing consequences or rewards. How much sibling fighting is normal? Sibling conflicts are a regular part of childhood. Instead of trying to eliminate fighting completely, parents can focus on supporting children through these moments to help them develop problem-solving and relationship skills. Why is parent collaboration important? When parents work collaboratively with children, kids learn to understand their own feelings and what matters to them. This approach builds stronger relationships and helps children develop skills they'll use throughout their lives. What you'll learn in this episode How one parent's values shifted from wanting a "well-behaved" child to prioritizing connection and understandingWhy some common parenting strategies work in the short term but can damage relationships over timeA real example of how collaborative problem-solving looks when siblings are fightingHow to support children in working through conflicts without immediately stepping in to fix things

The ACDIS Podcast: Talking CDI
Collaborative CDI initiatives and special projects

The ACDIS Podcast: Talking CDI

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 28, 2026 31:41


Today's guest is Amy Callinan, MSN, RN, CCDS, educator, clinical documentation integrity, at Presbyterian Healthcare Services, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Our intro and outro music for the ACDIS Podcast is “medianoche” by Dee Yan-Kay and our ad music is “Take Me Higher” by Jahzzar, both obtained from the Free Music Archive. Have questions about today's show or ideas for a future episode? Contact the ACDIS team at info@acdis.org. Want to submit a question for a future "listener questions" episode? Fill out this brief form!  CEU info: Each ACDIS Podcast episode offers 0.5 ACDIS CEU which can be used toward recertifying your CCDS or CCDS-O credential for those who listen to the show in the first four days from the time of publication. To receive your 0.5 CEU, go to the show page on acdis.org, by clicking on the “ACDIS Podcast” link located under the “Free Resources” tab. To take the evaluation, click the most recent episode from the list on the podcast homepage, view the podcast recording at the bottom of that show page, and click the live link at the very end after the music has ended. Your certificate will be automatically emailed to you upon submitting the brief evaluation. (Note: If you are listening via a podcast app, click this link to go directly to the show page on acdis.org: https://acdis.org/acdis-podcast/collaborative-cdi-initiatives-and-special-projects) Note: To ensure your certificate reaches you and does not get trapped in your organization's spam filters, please use a personal email address when completing the CEU evaluation form. The cut-off for today's episode CEU is Sunday, February 1, at 11:00 p.m. Eastern. After that point, the CEU period will close, and you will not be eligible for the 0.5 CEU for this week's episode. Today's sponsor: Today's show is brought to you by the 2026 ACDIS Pocket Guide, available to order today! Learn more by clicking here: https://bit.ly/3V1Z0gQ ACDIS update: Apply to serve on an ACDIS board or committee by January 31! (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/January-2026-Committees) Submit your articles to the March/April edition of the CDI Journal by February 1! (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/CDI-journal) Make sure to take advantage of the ACDIS conference room block rate by March 27! (https://bit.ly/4qeFWdh) Register for the 2026 ACDIS conference, and the associated pre-conference events, today! (https://bit.ly/4qeFWdh)

Amplify Your Success
Episode 475: The Unfair Visibility Advantage of Collaborative Community

Amplify Your Success

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 26, 2026 21:07


At a certain level of expertise, more effort stops being the differentiator. Proximity becomes the lever that accelerates opportunity. If you've ever wondered why some experts seem to attract opportunities effortlessly while others work twice as hard for half the traction, this episode will connect the dots. The key factor is rarely how good you are, how much experience you have, or how well positioned your authority is – it's the environment they are operating in. In episode 475 of Amplify Your Success podcast, I break down why experts inside collaborative communities like curated masterminds and The Rising Tide Collective have a powerful and often overlooked advantage. We explore how opportunities actually move in the market, why visibility accelerates through trust amongst connections, which activates an unfair advantage that no amount of solo effort can replicate. This conversation is not about networking harder or joining more groups (especially the free online FB groups that become overly saturated.) It's about understanding how aligned communities can create shared visibility, compound credibility, and open doors that are difficult to access alone. If you are an expert who wants more referrals, higher-level conversations, and opportunities that feel aligned rather than forced, this episode will help you see what really creates traction at the next level.   Key Takeaways:  [00:00] Why opportunity is rarely about effort and more often about relationships with the right people. [02:41] How collaborative communities quietly accelerate trust and visibility. [04:58] The difference between being visible alone and being visible through shared momentum. [07:12] Why referrals and opportunities flow faster inside aligned communities. [09:36] How collaboration removes friction from visibility and relationship building. [12:04] Why many experts stall by trying to grow in isolation. [14:27] What makes a community expansive instead of an energetic drain. [17:10] How shared values and contribution create compound opportunity. [19:45] Why experts who win consistently are rarely doing it alone.   Resources Mentioned in This Episode: The Rising Tide Collective is an online community where experts and leaders come together to co-create visibility opportunities and aligned collaborations that lift everyone up. Each month you can participate in our signature mini-minds, a curated connection space, showcase your business, and gain access to tools to build powerful, profitable partnerships. If you're ready to lead at your next level, apply for membership at MelanieBenson.com/Collective.