Podcasts about companies

The first full trading week of 2026 got off to a caffeinated start. Today on Motley Fool Money, Rick Munarriz, with analysts Nick Sciple and Jon Quast, dive into the investing implications behind the capturing of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro over the weekend. There's also a look at the bounce-back potential of Duolingo and Lululemon in 2026, as well as predictions for Disney in the coming year. They unpack: - What the shake-up in Venezuela means for investors. - Reasons why Duolingo and Lululemon can bounce back after plummeting 46% each in 2025. - How likely are Rick's four predictions for Disney in 2026 to pan out. Companies discussed: CVX, XOM, MELI, DUOL, LULU, DIS, WBD, NFLX Host: Rick Munarriz, Jon Quast, Nick Sciple Producer: Anand Chokkavelu Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We're committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Josh Halliday, who works on training super intelligence with frontier data at Turing. The conversation explores the fascinating world of reinforcement learning (RL) environments, synthetic data generation, and the crucial role of high-quality human expertise in AI training. Josh shares insights from his years working at Unity Technologies building simulated environments for everything from oil and gas safety scenarios to space debris detection, and discusses how the field has evolved from quantity-focused data collection to specialized, expert-verified training data that's becoming the key bottleneck in AI development. They also touch on the philosophical implications of our increasing dependence on AI technology and the emerging job market around AI training and data acquisition.Timestamps00:00 Introduction to AI and Reinforcement Learning03:12 The Evolution of AI Training Data05:59 Gaming Engines and AI Development08:51 Virtual Reality and Robotics Training11:52 The Future of Robotics and AI Collaboration14:55 Building Applications with AI Tools17:57 The Philosophical Implications of AI20:49 Real-World Workflows and RL Environments26:35 The Impact of Technology on Human Cognition28:36 Cultural Resistance to AI and Data Collection31:12 The Bottleneck of High-Quality Data in AI32:57 Philosophical Perspectives on Data35:43 The Future of AI Training and Human Collaboration39:09 The Role of Subject Matter Experts in Data Quality43:20 The Evolution of Work in the Age of AI46:48 Convergence of AI and Human ExperienceKey Insights1. Reinforcement Learning environments are sophisticated simulations that replicate real-world enterprise workflows and applications. These environments serve as training grounds for AI agents by creating detailed replicas of tools like Salesforce, complete with specific tasks and verification systems. The agent attempts tasks, receives feedback on failures, and iterates until achieving consistent success rates, effectively learning through trial and error in a controlled digital environment.2. Gaming engines like Unity have evolved into powerful platforms for generating synthetic training data across diverse industries. From oil and gas companies needing hazardous scenario data to space intelligence firms tracking orbital debris, these real-time 3D engines with advanced physics can create high-fidelity simulations that capture edge cases too dangerous or expensive to collect in reality, bridging the gap where real-world data falls short.3. The bottleneck in AI development has fundamentally shifted from data quantity to data quality. The industry has completely reversed course from the previous "scale at all costs" approach to focusing intensively on smaller, higher-quality datasets curated by subject matter experts. This represents a philosophical pivot toward precision over volume in training next-generation AI systems.4. Remote teleoperation through VR is creating a new global workforce for robotics training. Workers wearing VR headsets can remotely control humanoid robots across the globe, teaching them tasks through direct demonstration. This creates opportunities for distributed talent while generating the nuanced human behavioral data needed to train autonomous systems.5. Human expertise remains irreplaceable in the AI training pipeline despite advancing automation. Subject matter experts provide crucial qualitative insights that go beyond binary evaluations, offering the contextual "why" and "how" that transforms raw data into meaningful training material. The challenge lies in identifying, retaining, and properly incentivizing these specialists as demand intensifies.6. First-person perspective data collection represents the frontier of human-like AI training. Companies are now paying people to life-log their daily experiences, capturing petabytes of egocentric data to train models more similarly to how human children learn through constant environmental observation, rather than traditional batch-processing approaches.7. The convergence of simulation, robotics, and AI is creating unprecedented philosophical and practical challenges. As synthetic worlds become indistinguishable from reality and AI agents gain autonomy, we're entering a phase where the boundaries between digital and physical, human and artificial intelligence, become increasingly blurred, requiring careful consideration of dependency, agency, and the preservation of human capabilities.

Here is a FAQ Video on the Courses: https://youtu.be/0F7imrzjXWs Here is a deep dive into which course is best for you: https://youtu.be/JM_jgS8M-iU https://www.b2bRevenue.com - Get Your Free E-Book on How Companies make Decisions. FAQ: 1 YEAR ACCESS, PAY MONTHLY OR ANNUALLY NOT A SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE HOURS EVERY  OTHER WEEK VIA ZOOM. 1 HOUR GROUP Q&A. UNLIMITED 1-ON-1'S  ARE FREE AS LONG AS THEY CAN BE SHARED IN THE COURSE. 1-ON-1 ARE FULL ACCESS ON DAY ONE - NOTHING IS GATED OR TIME RELEASED. ALL CONTENT IS VIDEO BASED AND SELF PACED I RECOMMEND TAKE COURSE ONCE WITHOUT NOTES OR APPLYING IT SO YOU UNDERSTAND THE BIG PICTURE FIRST. THEN TAKE AND APPLY IT STEP BY STEP. YOU START WHEN YOU WANT AND GO AS FAST OR SLOW AS NEEDED.   Email me additional questions: briangburns@me.com     — SAMPLE EMAIL TO EXPENSE THE COURSE MGR,   I have been listening to the brutal truth about sales podcast for X months and it speaks to the issues we face.   They currently offer a course that includes video instruction, group Q&A and One-on-One coaching. I'm committed to my own personal development and would like your help in expensing the course.   It would pay for itself if I closed only one new deal of $X value.   Please let me know by Friday if I can move forward with this 1 year course.   Thanks, ME Here are some student interviews from the courses:      ———————————————————————————————————— Audible 30 day Free Trial: http://www.audibletrial.com/BrutalTruth  

US equity futures point to a positive open today, with Asian markets broadly higher and European equities trading mostly firmer. Focus is on the heightened geopolitical tensions after American forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Potential systematic moves largely revolve around crude oil. The longer term price outlook seems skewed to the downside. Asia equities set Venezuela developments to one side and continued their AI-inspired rally, while focus in Europe is on oil companies.Companies mentioned: Cisco Systems, L3Harris Technologies, Paramount Skydance, Warner Bros Discovery

In this episode of Run the Numbers, CJ Gustafson sits down with Gordon Coyle, a 40-year commercial insurance veteran, to demystify one of the most anxiety-inducing topics for founders and CFOs: business insurance. Drawing on decades of experience with startups, scaleups, and regulated industries, Gordon breaks down what leaders need to know about D&O, E&O, cyber, and general liability, why investor pressure is rising, and where “cheap and easy” online policies fail when real risk hits. Through real-world examples, they explore how claims arise, how defense costs erode limits, why cyber insurance is as much about response as reimbursement, and how to balance budget, risk tolerance, and peer benchmarks—treating insurance as a critical layer of protection, not a box-checking exercise.—SPONSORS:Abacum is a modern FP&A platform built by former CFOs to replace slow, consultant-heavy planning tools. With self-service integrations and AI-powered workflows for forecasting, variance analysis, and scenario modeling, Abacum helps finance teams scale without becoming software admins. Trusted by teams at Strava, Replit, and JG Wentworth—learn more at https://www.abacum.aiBrex is an intelligent finance platform that combines corporate cards, built-in expense management, and AI agents to eliminate manual finance work. By automating expense reviews and reconciliations, Brex gives CFOs more time for the high-impact work that drives growth. Join 35,000+ companies like Anthropic, Coinbase, and DoorDash at https://www.brex.com/metricsMetronome is real-time billing built for modern software companies. Metronome turns raw usage events into accurate invoices, gives customers bills they actually understand, and keeps finance, product, and engineering perfectly in sync. That's why category-defining companies like OpenAI and Anthropic trust Metronome to power usage-based pricing and enterprise contracts at scale. Focus on your product — not your billing. Learn more and get started at https://www.metronome.comRightRev is an automated revenue recognition platform built for modern pricing models like usage-based pricing, bundles, and mid-cycle upgrades. RightRev lets companies scale monetization without slowing down close or compliance. For RevRec that keeps growth moving, visit https://www.rightrev.comRillet is an AI-native ERP built for modern finance teams that want to close faster without fighting legacy systems. Designed to support complex revenue recognition, multi-entity operations, and real-time reporting, Rillet helps teams achieve a true zero-day close—with some customers closing in hours, not days. If you're scaling on an ERP that wasn't built in the 90s, book a demo at https://www.rillet.com/cjTabs is an AI-native revenue platform that unifies billing, collections, and revenue recognition for companies running usage-based or complex contracts. By bringing together ERP, CRM, and real product usage data into a single system of record, Tabs eliminates manual reconciliations and speeds up close and cash collection. Companies like Cortex, Statsig, and Cursor trust Tabs to scale revenue efficiently. Learn more at https://www.tabs.com/run—LINKS:Gordon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordoncoyle/The Coyle Group: https://thecoylegroup.com/CJ on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.com—RELATED EPISODES:The Coyle Group - Business Insurancehttps://www.youtube.com/@TheCoyleGroupNY—TIMESTAMPS:00:00:00 Preview and Intro00:01:53 Sponsors — Abacum | Brex | Metronome00:05:39 Interview Begins with Gordon Coyle00:06:23 Gordon Coyle & The Coyle Group00:07:21 Explaining Insurance on YouTube00:08:40 Turning Education into Inbound Leads00:09:40 Content as a Pull Strategy00:10:53 Insurance Complexity for Tech Founders00:13:28 Why Investors Require D&O Insurance00:14:09 What D&O Covers and Why It Matters00:15:50 Sponsors — RightRev | Rillet | Tabs00:20:19 Who D&O Covers and Rising Investor Pressure00:22:37 D&O Limits and Cost Tradeoffs00:23:21 Panic Calls and Late D&O Purchases00:24:39 How Defense Costs Erode Coverage00:25:31 Common D&O Claims and Employment Risk00:27:08 D&O vs E&O Explained00:29:12 Cyber Insurance and Social Engineering00:31:59 AI's Impact on Cyber Risk00:33:50 Real-World Ransomware Stories00:34:17 Cyber Insurance as Money and Response00:35:29 Business Email Compromise Scams00:39:43 Why Tech Still Needs General Liability00:41:16 What a BOP Covers00:42:32 Convenience vs Proper Coverage00:44:29 Surprising General Liability Claims00:46:45 Insurance Costs for Startups00:47:36 Higher Costs in High-Risk Industries00:48:26 Balancing Budget, Risk, and Coverage00:50:39 PEOs, Workers' Comp, and EPLI00:54:39 Choosing the Right Insurance Partner00:56:42 End Credits#RunTheNumbersPodcast #StartupFinance #BusinessInsurance #RiskManagement #CyberRisk This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cjgustafson.substack.com

Panic, paranoia, and spectacularly stupid predictions! This episode of History's Greatest Idiots (featuring Mandy Gardner from the History Obscura Podcast) explores Y2K, the millennium bug that convinced the entire world that civilization would collapse at midnight on January 1st, 2000, leading to the most expensive non-event in human history.The Technical Problem: Back in the 1960s and 70s, when computer memory cost a fortune, programmers saved space by writing dates with two digits instead of four (65 instead of 1965). Nobody thought about what would happen when 1999 became 2000. Would computers think it was 1900? Would banks collapse? Would planes fall from the sky? Would nuclear missiles accidentally launch? These were genuine questions people were asking in 1998.The Media Frenzy: By 1999, reasonable concerns about bank systems had spiralled into headlines like "Will your pacemaker stop working at midnight?" and "Could nuclear power plants explode?" Governments didn't help. Bill Clinton established a Y2K council. Britain spent £396 million (equivalent purchasing power of £9 billion today). Countries stockpiled fuel, food, and medical supplies as if they were preparing for war. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan compared it to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ed Yardeni predicted a 70% chance of a worldwide recession. Experts warned that elevators would trap people, traffic lights would fail, water treatment plants would shut down, prison doors would automatically unlock, and planes would literally fall from the sky.The Survival Industry: Y2K preppers made pandemic preppers look casual. People bought generators (manufacturers couldn't keep up), mountains of tinned food, warehouses of bottled water, gold, and guns (sales spiked 700% in some US areas). Companies sold Y2K survival kits for $2,500 containing a year's freeze-dried food. An entire industry monetised fear. Products got "Y2K Compliant" stickers, including toasters that didn't know what year it was anyway.The Price Tag: Worldwide spending reached $300-600 billion. That's more than the Apollo moon landings and Manhattan Project combined. The US alone spent $100 billion. Some COBOL programmers charged $1,000 per hour ($1800 in 2025 money) just checking old code. With that money, we could have ended world hunger for years, eradicated malaria, or provided universal water and sanitation globally.New Year's Eve 1999: Airlines grounded flights. Russia put nuclear forces on high alert with Yeltsin in a command center (drinking vodka). Emergency teams stood ready worldwide. Some families withdrew all their money and moved to remote cabins with six months of supplies. As midnight hit New Zealand, then Asia, then Europe, reporters sounded increasingly disappointed that nothing was going wrong.The Anticlimax: The complete list of significant Y2K problems: slot machines in Delaware stopped working, some bus ticket machines failed in Sheffield and Australia, a few credit card terminals had issues for hours, and the US Naval Observatory website displayed January 1, 19100. That's it. No planes crashed. No nuclear war. No apocalypse. Just slot machines in Delaware that nobody noticed because it's Delaware.The Aftermath: People with 500 tins of beans couldn't exactly return them ("the apocalypse was cancelled"). Politicians claimed credit for preventing disaster by spending billions. We'll never know if the preparations prevented catastrophe or if the problem was massively overblown, making it the geopolitical equivalent of Lisa Simpson's tiger-repelling rock.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/HistorysGreatestIdiots⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/historysgreatestidiots⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/historysgreatestidiots⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Artist: Sarah Chey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.fiverr.com/sarahchey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Foster Alumni Share What They Listen For When They  Interview Job Candidates Every fall and winter, MBA students gear up for behavioral interviews with an understandable mix of anticipation and anxiety. We spend hours coaching them on frameworks, stories, and delivery. But nothing beats hearing directly from the people on the other side of the table. On this encore episode of Conversations on Careers and Professional Life, I brought together four Foster MBA alumni—now at Accenture, Google, Walmart, and Goldman Sachs—to share what they actually listen for when evaluating candidates. I spoke with each of them separately, but their messages converged with remarkable clarity.  Here are the big themes. 1. Preparation isn't optional—it's the floor, not the ceiling. Every alum highlighted the same point: the "Tell me about yourself" question is guaranteed. If you can't deliver a clear, structured, thoughtful answer, it signals a lack of intention. Adam Schmidt (Accenture) put it plainly: "This is a question you know is coming." Preparation demonstrates respect for the interviewer's time and respect for your own story. It's the discipline before the performance. 2. Authenticity beats perfection. Several alumni talked about sensing whether an answer felt honest, grounded, and human. Authenticity arises from knowing your stories well enough that you can speak naturally—not recite. Skylar Brown (Goldman Sachs) shared that authenticity often shows up in how candidates pause, think, and connect their experiences to the role. Over-scripted answers flatten your personality; thoughtful ones reveal how you'll show up as a colleague. Stoic reminder: focus on what is within your control—your preparation and your presence—not the outcome. 3. Your impact matters more than the résumé lines. At Google, Sam Eid looks for patterns that reveal how a candidate operates on a team. One of his sharpest insights: candidates who talk only in "I" form look self-centered, but candidates who talk only in "we" form leave interviewers wondering what they actually did. He advises framing a story around: The opportunity or challenge What the team achieved Your specific contribution What wouldn't have happened without you That last piece is gold. It's also how Google evaluates internal performance. 4. "Why this company?" must show you've done real homework. The alumni were unanimous: generic answers tank candidates. You should be able to articulate: What differentiates the company How its mission or values connect to you Who you've spoken with and what you learned Why this role aligns with your future trajectory Claire Herting (Nintendo, ex-Walmart) noted that specific, thought-out answers signal maturity and genuine motivation—not simply chasing the brand name. 5. Cultural fit isn't code for conformity—it's awareness. Companies want to see that you understand the environment you're entering and how you'd contribute to it. Whether it's humility, customer obsession, collaboration, or intellectual curiosity, your stories should reflect the behaviors that matter most at that organization. Not by forcing it, but by choosing experiences that naturally align. 6. The biggest mistakes happen before the interview. One of the most useful insights came from Skylar Brown: many candidates cast too wide a net. When you're interviewing for 20–40 roles you don't genuinely want, your answers sound hollow. Depth beats breadth. Focus creates authenticity. The bottom line Across industries and roles, alumni interviewers value the same things: Clear thinking Genuine enthusiasm Self-awareness A structured approach to storytelling A real understanding of the company and role Behavioral interviews aren't about trick questions—they're about surfacing who you are, how you work with others, and how you make an impact. If you're preparing for interviews this season, the wisdom from these alumni is a powerful compass.

It's a new year full of LEGO! Over 150 new sets just came out, Kpop Demon Hunters may be getting some sets, and a LEGO engine that reaches 14,000 RPMs! That and more on this week's Bricking LEGO News!FOLLOW my YouTube channel: Back 2 BrickSet Review: 77256 Time Machine from Back to the FutureRebrickable Review: Mini Modular Buildings - the full set of 21 for 2025 by ChristromansPokemon Summer 2026One Piece 2026Kpop Demon HuntersBoxing Day dealsLOTRSkipping 2026January 2026Birthday cakeFarming with LEGOPolybagsStranger Things SOLD OUTAir-powered technic engine - YouTube.comRichmond factory build updatex-ray mythCES 2026 Minifigure Factory Chinese New YearOut of stock day 1Thank you, Patrons! - Bellefonte Bricks Studio, Jimmy Tucker, David, Paul Snellen, Lee Jackson, Pop's Block Shop, Steve Miles, David Support the showSee some of the designs I've built - REBRICKABLE.COMHead over to Back2brick.com for links to the latest LEGO set discounts!Support the podcast through our affiliate links AND join the Back 2 Brick Patreon!Have a question? Want to be a guest? Send me a message!backtobrick@gmail.comBack 2 Brick Podcast is not an affiliate nor endorsed by the LEGO Group.LEGO, the LEGO logo, the Minifigure, and the Brick and Knob configurations are trademarks of the LEGO Group of Companies. ©2025 The LEGO Group.

2026's first primary is just two months away. Both parties are trying to get voters to believe in their ability to address the affordability crisis. Republicans are combatting President Trump's conflicting perspective on the economy. Democrats are hoping to solidify their voice for voters after struggling to find a message that connected with them in 2024. Our panel breaks down which races could help define their identities - and reshape Congress - in the year ahead.Online prediction markets have reintroduced election betting to the American public. Companies like Kalshi and Polymarket have grown in popularity for allowing users to wager on everything from wars to the weather - as well as elections. Now, major media outlets are looking to embed their odds into their news coverage. Is there any upside to gamifying politics?As one listener writes, admitting when you're wrong is a key part of engaging with politics. So where did our panel miss the mark in 2025?

Not all customers are created equal—and treating them as if they are is one of the most common and costly mistakes organizations make. Companies often pride themselves on "great service for everyone," yet fail to recognize that limited resources require intentional allocation. Consider how you might categorize your companies service philosophy as Scott and I discuss The Value of Ranking Your Customers and other terrific tidbits on Episode 701 of the Winning at Selling podcast. Johnny Franchise - https://www.johnnyfranchise.com  Book: Great Leaders Make Sure Monday Morning Doesn't Suck:  https://www.amazon.com/Great-Leaders-Monday-Morning-Doesnt/dp/B0B8F7W838/ref=sr_1_1 Eric Harkins - https://ericharkins.com/ Keystone Club Class - https://mnsales.com/keystone/ Offerings Page - https://mnsales.com/offers Bill Hellkamp – See my LinkedIn profile and send me an invite Visit my website: http://www.reachdev.com/ Scott "Professor Plum" Plum – See my LinkedIn profile and send me an invite Visit my website: https://www.mnsales.com  

"The Hobby Lawyer" Paul Lesko is back.    Today's Hobby Court Cases: Numerous card companies suing each other.   Paul joins us to discuss some interesting hobby related court cases.   Follow us on Social Media:  Website:https://www.sportscardnationpo....com https://linktr.ee/Sportscardna... Merch shop:https://sports-card-nation.pri...   To eliminate pre & post-roll adshttps://www.spreaker.com/podca...

The lesson Austin Lyons says he will take away from 2025 is the deep ties AI has to the CapEx story. Companies like Nvidia (NVDA) and TSMC (TSM) are juggernauts he expects to benefit as AI spending accelerates in 2026. When it comes to growing TPU competition from Alphabet (GOOGL), he doesn't see it serving as a perfect substitute to Nvidia's GPUs. Austin later taps Apple's (AAPL) AI story, or lack thereof, and how it serves as a company bull case. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Options involve risks and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading, read the Options Disclosure Document. http://bit.ly/2v9tH6DSubscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

Jaeden & Jamie discuss the latest trends in AI funding, focusing on companies that raised over $100 million in March 2025. They highlight significant investments in AI infrastructure and drug discovery, showcasing the growing interest and potential in these sectors. The conversation emphasizes the impact of major players like OpenAI and the emergence of innovative companies in the AI landscape.Our Skool Community: https://www.skool.com/aihustleGet the top 40+ AI Models for $20 at AI Box: ⁠⁠https://aibox.aiSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Another profitable year is in the books for investors. Whether you invested in 2025 or are looking to get started, this episode is for you! Our hosts discuss some of the reasons why people struggle to make those New Year's resolutions work, and share tips on how they've built frameworks that can help you build a plan that works for you. Never made a resolution? Neither has one of today's hosts! Companies discussed: LMND, NVDA, AMD, CELH, SHOP, DG Host: Jason Hall, Jon Quast, Dan Caplinger Producer: Anand Chokkavelu Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We're committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chanel Rose, founder of Closeium, a sales enablement and revenue infrastructure agency that helps successful service based businesses grow without adding more work to their plate.Through modernized messaging, stronger sales systems, and both inbound and outbound lead mechanisms, Chanel helps agencies, financial firms, and professional service companies stay relevant, increase their reach, and build predictable revenue they can rely on.Now, Chanel's shift from high stakes political strategy to building million dollar revenue systems demonstrates how the same skills used to win campaigns can also build companies that thrive.And while expanding Closeium, hiring, delegating, and learning to slow down after years of operating like a political war room, she is stepping into the higher level she always knew she could reach as a founder.Here's where to find more:https://www.linkedin.com/in/chanelrose________________________________________________Welcome to The Unforget Yourself Show where we use the power of woo and the proof of science to help you identify your blind spots, and get over your own bullshit so that you can do the fucking thing you ACTUALLY want to do!We're Mark and Katie, the founders of Unforget Yourself and the creators of the Unforget Yourself System and on this podcast, we're here to share REAL conversations about what goes on inside the heart and minds of those brave and crazy enough to start their own business. From the accidental entrepreneur to the laser-focused CEO, we find out how they got to where they are today, not by hearing the go-to story of their success, but talking about how we all have our own BS to deal with and it's through facing ourselves that we find a way to do the fucking thing.Along the way, we hope to show you that YOU are the most important asset in your business (and your life - duh!). Being a business owner is tough! With vulnerability and humor, we get to the real story behind their success and show you that you're not alone._____________________Find all our links to all the things like the socials, how to work with us and how to apply to be on the podcast here: https://linktr.ee/unforgetyourself

Jesse Cole, famously known as the man in the yellow tux, is a master of reinvention, joy, and building unforgettable fan experiences. As the owner of the Savannah Bananas, Jesse has transformed a struggling baseball club into a global phenomenon by shattering norms and prioritizing fun above all else. Driven by a deep belief in bringing people together and creating moments of joy, he's become a leading business thinker, author, and inspiring mentor dedicated to showing leaders how to turn customers into raving fans. With innovation at his core, Jesse's contagious energy and commitment to doing the remarkable make him a blueprint for entrepreneurs and changemakers everywhere. Takeaways: Normal gets normal results — Jesse preaches that following industry standards only yields average outcomes; it's bold, memorable actions that set you apart and drive remarkable success. Micro-reinvention matters — You don't need to overhaul everything at once; continuous, small innovations across touchpoints can reshape experiences and build superfans. Lead with gratitude and values — Companies that embody gratitude and consistently put their “fans” (internally and externally) first, even at a cost, build stronger, more loyal communities. Sound Bytes: “No one gets excited about normal. They get excited about memorable.” “The only way you can be great is if you're willing to get through the messy to get to the great.” “If you do what everyone else is going to do, you're going to get the same results as everyone else.” Connect & Discover with Jesse: Website: Find Your Yellow Tux Website: thesavannahbananas LinkedIn: YellowTuxJesse Instagram: @YellowTuxJesse X: @YellowTuxJesse YouTube: @yellowtuxjesse Book: Find Your Yellow Tux           Fans First           Banana Ball

They say New Year resolutions mean nothing.And honestly… they're right.It's just another morning.The alarm goes off.There's still a New Year hangover.And life? Life asks you to log in, swipe in, show up.Nothing magically changes on January 1st.No reset button.No life update.No new version unlocked.But here's the thing—that's exactly why the New Year still matters.Not because it's aesthetic.Not because it's Instagrammable.Not because of the “new year, new me” energy.The New Year is a checkpoint.In 2025, we talked a lot about intentional living, soft life, work-life balance, AI doing the heavy lifting, and vibe over grind.But behind all those trending words, one question stayed uncomfortable:Did you actually move forward?Last year, we planned a lot.We saved ideas.We made vision boards.We consumed motivation like content—short, fast, and forgettable.Now this is the moment to audit yourself.A personal year-end review.What happened as planned?What didn't?What patterns repeated?What excuses felt “valid” but kept you stuck?Vision boards don't work without execution.Manifestation doesn't work without motion.Clarity without action is just overthinking with better words.Companies close their financial year on March 31.But people like us?We close ours on December 31.This isn't about resolutions.It's about ownership.2026 doesn't need a new version of you.It needs a more honest one.Build yourself.Create the action plan.Start now.

1855 kicks off with a bombshell AP investigation revealing how Silicon Valley giants IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, and more spent decades building China’s surveillance state. Also covered, malicious Chrome extensions stealing credentials from 170+ sites, Microsoft’s ambitious Rust migration plans, China’s combat-ready humanoid robot, and Japan restarting the world’s largest nuclear plant. -Want to be a Guest on a Podcast or YouTube Channel? Sign up for GuestMatch.Pro -Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes $11.99 – For a New Domain Name cjcfs3geek $6.99 a month Economy Hosting (Free domain, professional email, and SSL certificate for the 1st year.) Promo Code: cjcgeek1h $12.99 a month Managed WordPress Hosting (Free domain, professional email, and SSL certificate for the 1st year.) Promo Code: cjcgeek1w Support the show by becoming a Geek News Central Insider Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens episode 1855 with a bombshell. The Associated Press released a major investigation into Silicon Valley’s role building China’s surveillance state. Companies like IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, and Oracle sold technologies for facial recognition and predictive policing. These tools enabled mass detention in Xinjiang. Cochrane expressed horror at the findings and emphasized American companies’ complicity in human rights abuses. Next, the podcast covered serious browser security concerns. Two malicious Chrome extensions had been stealing credentials from over 170 websites for years. Cochrane stressed the need for caution when installing plugins. He also highlighted how attackers exploit trusted extensions through manipulative tactics. Additionally, Cochrane discussed Microsoft’s ambitious plan to replace all C/C++ code with Rust by 2030. The company faces ongoing security challenges from memory safety issues in legacy languages. However, he noted this remains a research project rather than an official goal. Still, the move reflects broader industry trends toward Rust adoption. The episode then featured GitHub Universe 2025’s most influential open-source projects. Cochrane remarked on how the development landscape continues to evolve. TypeScript has emerged as a dominant language alongside new tools that streamline workflows. Meanwhile, advancements in humanoid robotics took center stage. Engine AI unveiled its T800 combat-ready humanoid robot with impressive features. The company even released a viral video of the robot kicking its CEO to prove authenticity. Following this, Cochrane covered the Blackbird flying car prototype. This eVTOL innovation showcases paradigm-shifting propulsion technology. It could transform urban transportation in the coming decades. The podcast also reviewed Android Central’s best smartphones of 2025. OnePlus 15 claimed the top spot thanks to its impressive specs and consumer-focused features. Furthermore, Cochrane addressed a controversial topic: Anna’s Archive scraping Spotify’s entire library. He expressed mixed feelings about the situation. On one hand, artists and the music industry face real harm. On the other, questions about digital preservation and access deserve consideration. Finally, the episode explored groundbreaking brain simulation research. Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer enabled unprecedented neural modeling. This marks a significant step toward understanding neurological diseases. Cochrane wrapped up by discussing Japan’s plans to restart the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant. Local residents remain concerned about safety despite government approval. The decision reflects Japan’s shifting energy strategy post-Fukushima. As the episode closed, Cochrane wished listeners a Happy New Year. He encouraged self-reflection and thanked everyone for tuning in throughout the year. Show Links Silicon Valley’s Role in Building China’s Surveillance State Two Chrome Extensions Caught Secretly Stealing Credentials from Over 170 Sites Microsoft to Replace All C/C++ Code With Rust By 2030 This Year’s Most Influential Open Source Projects EngineAI Unveils T800: Combat-Ready Humanoid Targets Mass Production Aviation Startup Shares Incredible Video of Prototype EV’s Maiden Takeoff Flight Android Central’s Best of 2025: Phones Pirate Archivist Group Scrapes Spotify’s 300TB Library This Breakthrough Brain Simulation Captures a True Brain at Work Japan Prepares to Restart World’s Biggest Nuclear Plant The post Money over Ethics: Silicon Valley and China’s Police State #1855 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Corporate success is often measured by growth and diversification, but for many conglomerates, being too big leads to a "conglomerate discount." This is the moment when the boardroom turns to corporate separation—the strategic process of intentionally breaking a business apart to create massive new shareholder wealth.In this episode of Corporate Finance Explained on FinPod, we break down why companies spin off divisions, how finance teams manage the disentanglement, and the real-world consequences of these billion-dollar maneuvers.What is a Corporate Spinoff?A spinoff occurs when a parent company takes a business unit or division and separates it into a brand-new, independent, publicly traded company.The Mechanism: Existing shareholders of the parent company automatically receive shares in the new entity.The Tax Benefit: These deals are typically structured to be tax-free for both the corporation and the investor, making it a premier tool for reorganization.The 5 Strategic Drivers: Why Break Up?Eliminating the "Conglomerate Discount": The market often penalizes highly diversified firms because analysts struggle to value a mix of slow-growth and high-growth assets. A spinoff creates a "Pure Play" company that the market can value more accurately.Strategic Focus: Different businesses have conflicting needs. Separation allows a management team to focus purely on their unique product cycles and R&D requirements (e.g., J&J spinning off Kenvue to separate stable consumer goods from high-risk pharma).Capital Structure Optimization: A spinoff allows for a customized balance sheet. A high-growth unit can start with a clean, debt-free slate to fund expansion, while the mature "cash cow" parent can take on more leverage.Regulatory & Activist Pressure: Antitrust concerns or pressure from activist investors often force management to divest units that are perceived as dragging down the total valuation.Preparation for Sale: It is significantly easier to sell a clean, standalone company than a messy division tangled in a larger corporate structure.The Operational Challenge: Assessing the "Carve-Out"Executing a spinoff is an incredibly complex process that often takes years of financial engineering:Carve-Out Financials: Finance teams must reconstruct what the business would have looked like if it had always been independent, projecting standalone revenue, margins, and cash flow.Stranded Costs: These are expenses the parent company is stuck with after the spinoff departs (e.g., half-empty headquarters or oversized software licenses). If not managed, these can destroy the expected value unlock.Transition Service Agreements (TSAs): Temporary lifelines where the parent provides HR or IT support to the new company for a fee until the spinoff can build its own infrastructure.Tax Risks (The Morris Trust): Strict IRS rules dictate that the spinoff must remain independent for a specific period. If the new company is acquired too quickly, it can trigger a catastrophic tax bill for the parent company.Case Studies: Billions UnlockedeBay and PayPal: PayPal was a high-growth fintech innovator being valued like a slow online marketplace. Once spun off, its market cap skyrocketed as it gained the freedom to partner with eBay's competitors like Amazon. IBM and Kyndryl: By spinning off its slow-growing legacy infrastructure business, IBM transformed into a "cleaner" tech growth play focused on Cloud and AI. DowDuPont: A massive "merger to split" strategy where the giants merged with the explicit goal of then breaking into three focused companies: Agriculture (Corteva), Materials (Dow), and Specialty Products (DuPont).

Donate (no account necessary) | Subscribe (account required) Join Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA Operations Officer, as he dives into today's top stories shaping America and the world. In this New Year's Eve Headline Brief of The Wright Report, Bryan delivers major economic updates, exposes collapsing green energy narratives, explains the White House's aggressive new asylum strategy, and revisits the explosive Somali fraud scandal in Minnesota that is now dominating national politics. He closes with a reflection on truth, power, and why elites work so hard to stop Americans from asking hard questions. Good News for Your Wallet: Pending home sales jumped 3.3 percent in November, the strongest showing in three years, driven by rising wages and lower mortgage rates. Rents are falling across most major cities, creating the most renter-friendly market in at least a decade. HUD data shows that two-thirds of rental demand came from the foreign-born, meaning deportations and self deportations are directly increasing housing supply and lowering prices for native born Americans. The Cheap Labor Myth Collapses: After more than two and a half million illegal migrants have left the country, GDP and wages are rising while rents and crime fall. Bryan argues Americans were lied to for decades by elites who claimed cheap foreign labor was necessary. The data now shows the opposite, and he calls the moment revolutionary. Green Energy Reality Check: China's renewable energy boom is largely a mirage, with many wind and solar projects never connected to the grid. Beijing is simultaneously expanding coal plants across Southeast Asia. Global wind speeds and solar efficiency are declining, and Japan is restricting solar farms for environmental and aesthetic reasons. Bryan says the global green movement is now in retreat. Trump's New Asylum Strategy: The White House is canceling large numbers of asylum claims and sending others to third countries like South Sudan or Palau while cases are reviewed. The administration says most asylum claims are fraudulent and designed to exploit loopholes. Democrats accuse Trump of abandoning human rights. DOJ Targets DEI Programs: The Justice Department is using the False Claims Act to pressure federal contractors to dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Companies must either eliminate DEI or face massive fines for defrauding the government. Universities Face a Financial Shake-Up: The Trump administration wants universities and venture capital firms to share profits from taxpayer-funded research. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is pushing for equity stakes or cash returns when patents are commercialized. Elon Musk Enters the Midterm Fight: Despite past clashes with Republicans, Elon Musk says he will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help the GOP keep Congress. He cites fears of Democrat censorship, economic control, and what he calls ideological extremism. Minnesota's Somali Fraud Scandal Explodes: Federal investigators say Somali-run nonprofits defrauded taxpayers of at least nine billion dollars through fake daycares, autism services, food programs, and Medicaid scams. Money funded luxury lifestyles, Islamist terror groups, and Democratic campaigns. Governor Tim Walz halted earlier investigations after activists accused the state of racism. A Somali academic told the New York Times that fraud is culturally encouraged, a statement Walz has avoided addressing. Bryan explains why Elon Musk now calls the governor "Traitor Tim." A New Year's Reflection: Bryan closes by urging listeners to reject elite deflections and keep demanding the truth. He argues that the real battle ahead is not left versus right, but truth versus lies, and promises that this podcast will continue to challenge power with facts, logic, and reason in the year ahead.   "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32     Keywords: pending home sales rent decline deportations, cheap labor myth wages GDP, China coal expansion fake green energy, Trump asylum third country policy, DOJ False Claims Act DEI, university patent profit sharing Lutnick, Elon Musk GOP midterms funding, Minnesota Somali fraud nine billion dollars, Tim Walz investigation, al Shabaab terror funding

It's the final Rule Breaker Investing podcast of 2025, and the year ends as it always does—with your Mailbag. David shares his annual year-forward market call, then works through listener notes that capture the heart of the Foolish journey. We hear from a father investing alongside his seven-year-old son, an investor who audited his own selling history and discovered just how early he'd stepped off some great rides, and Fools thinking carefully about contribution timing, position sizing, and excellence that keeps winning. Along the way, David revisits core ideas like letting winners run, being a “for” person, and ultimately answers the question that brings the year full circle: How do you know—really know—Am I a Fool? Companies mentioned: CRWD, NFLX, RKLB, SPOT, TSLA Host: David GardnerProducer: Bart Shannon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reach Out Via Text!In this episode of the Growing Green Podcast, Jeremiah breaks down the exact hiring process he uses inside Growing Green Landscapes to consistently attract better people and avoid costly bad hires. He walks step by step through building a professional job ad, using a pre interview questionnaire to filter candidates, and structuring interviews that save time while improving decision making. Jeremiah also explains where most contractors go wrong when they rush hiring decisions and how breaking the process can cost you money, morale, and momentum. The episode finishes with practical guidance on offers, onboarding, training, and setting new hires up for long term success. This is a must listen for any owner who feels stuck being the bottleneck in their business and wants a repeatable system for building a stronger team. Link to download the free doc and register for roundtable-https://stan.store/GrowingGreenLandscapesSupport the show 10% off LMN Software- https://lmncompany.partnerlinks.io/growinggreenpodcast Signup for our Newsletter- https://mailchi.mp/942ae158aff5/newsletter-signup Book A Consult Call-https://stan.store/GrowingGreenPodcast Lawntrepreneur Academy-https://www.lawntrepreneuracademy.com/ The Landscaping Bookkeeper-https://thelandscapingbookkeeper.com/ Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/growinggreenlandscapes/ Email-ggreenlandscapes@gmail.com Growing Green Website- https://www.growinggreenlandscapes.com/

Here are the questions:What did I accomplish in 2025?What fun things happened?What were my greatest disappointments?What did I learn?What intention will make me most successful in 2026?What one word will be my focus in 2026?How do I limit myself and how can I stop?What inner qualities would I like to nurture?What external outcomes will demonstrate that these inner qualities are deepening? What's my “why”?Some resources for you:Project more confidence and credibility with my free tips: 9 Words to Avoid & What to Say Instead: Words to Avoid | Karen LaosMy book “Trust Your Own Voice”: https://karenlaos.com/book/Connect with me:Website: https://www.karenlaos.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karenlaosofficial  Episodes also available on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEwQoTGdJX5eME0ccBKiKng/videos About me:Many years ago I found myself tongue-tied in a boardroom, my colleagues and executives staring at me. My stomach in my throat, I was unable to get the words out (in spite of being in a senior leadership role). Then, I heard my boss shut down the meeting. My heart sank. I was mortified. She pulled me aside and said, "You didn't trust your gut. You could've tabled the meeting like I did."Why didn't that option occur to me in the moment? Why did I feel like I needed permission?That was the day I set out to change. I began a journey of personal growth to discover the root of the problem. Once I did, I wanted every woman to experience that same freedom.I'm now on a mission to eradicate self-doubt in 10 million women in 10 years by giving them simple strategies to speak up and ask for what they want in the boardroom and beyond, resulting in more clients, job promotions, and negotiation wins.Companies like NASA, Netflix, Google, and Sephora have been propelled toward more effective communication skills through my signature framework, The Confidence Cocktail™.This is your invitation to step into your most confident self so you can catapult your career! Karen Laos, Communication Expert and Confidence Cultivator, leverages 25 years in the boardroom and speaking on the world's most coveted stages such as Google and NASA to transform missed opportunities into wins. She is fiercely committed to her mission of eradicating self-doubt in 10 million women by giving them practical strategies to ask for what they want in the boardroom and beyond. She guides corporations and individuals with her tested communication model to generate consistent results through her Powerful Presence Keynote: How to Be an Influential Communicator. Get my free tips: 9 Words to Avoid & What to Say Instead: https://karenlaos.com/words-to-avoid/ Connect with me:Website: https://www.karenlaos.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karenlaosofficial Facebook: Ignite Your Confidence with Karen Laos: https://www.facebook.com/groups/karenlaosconsultingLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenlaos/Episodes also available on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEwQoTGdJX5eME0ccBKiKng/videosMy book “Trust Your Own Voice”: https://karenlaos.com/book/

Jamie and Jaeden discuss the top companies that have raised over $100 million in funding in 2025, focusing on the growing importance of AI infrastructure, healthcare innovations, and advancements in legal tech. They highlight specific companies, their funding rounds, and the unique problems they aim to solve, emphasizing the potential for growth in these sectors.Our Skool Community: https://www.skool.com/aihustleGet the top 40+ AI Models for $20 at AI Box: ⁠⁠https://aibox.aiSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Vice President of Information Technology for the Southwestern Family of Companies, Ed Solima, and Training and Development Manager for Southwestern Consulting, Chad Rothermich, examine recent changes in AI and other tech, and offer an in-depth use case as well as some guiding principles for vetting potential tools and vendors, engaging stakeholders in your operation, integrating into existing systems, and even using AI to learn about AI.

2025 has officially become the year of AI — and the pace isn't slowing down.In this episode of Liftoff, we sit down with Michael Palmer, CEO & Chief Scientist of Taos Research Corporation and author of the new book Agentify: The Art, Science, and Engineering of Successful AI Agents. Michael brings decades of experience spanning Silicon Valley startups, venture capital at Kleiner Perkins, and leadership roles at Yahoo and U.S. Bank, where he led AI, data, and digital transformation.We dive deep into how AI agents are evolving beyond simple prompts into systems with real agency, autonomy, and initiative — and what that means for startups, enterprises, and solopreneurs alike. Michael explains why vertical focus matters, how companies should rethink org structures in an AI-first world, and why the next billion-dollar company might be built by just one person and a fleet of AI agents.If you're a founder, operator, or builder trying to understand what's next in AI — this conversation is essential listening.

Shelly Palmer has spent 45 years watching technology reshape every industry—from writing news themes for CBS to consulting with every major media company on AI strategy. On this year-end recap, he cuts through the noise with one devastating observation: 2025 was the year everyone talked about AI while almost nobody actually used it. Executives shook their heads knowingly in meetings, pontificated about capabilities the models don't yet have, and parroted nonsense they read from other people who knew nothing. But when you asked one innocent question, they crumbled.In the News: CES 2026 shapes up with Nvidia sponsoring two full days of AI training. Samsung is skipping the main floor for a massive offsite activation. Sony brings no electronics—only Honda's experimental vehicles. The TCL and Chinese companies' presence hinges on tariff policy. The innovation series breakfast that Shelly runs is becoming an official CES event after a decade of independence.The conversation spirals into deeper territory: $3 trillion in government money is stacked behind AI development. The U.S. explicitly states it must beat China to AGI—making this the Manhattan Project of our lifetime. Shelly walks through what he's seen in successful companies (leadership using the tech, paid "Tech Tuesdays" for AI experiments, cross-discipline teams with SecOps and legal at the table) versus the chaos of places with no process. He breaks down what's real—drone warfare, cybersecurity applications, robotics—versus what's hot air. And he makes a case that won't be killed by AI itself, but by militarized applications and the geopolitical arms race we're already in.5 Key Takeaways from Shelly:Leadership belief and hands-on use are non-negotiable. Companies winning with AI have senior leaders who actually use the technology. When the CEO walks into an LT meeting saying "I built this agent over the weekend," everyone else starts experimenting too.The recipe for AI success has three ingredients: leadership belief, paid time to experiment (Tech Tuesdays/Thursdays with real budgets), and cross-discipline teams (SecOps, legal, compliance, risk) paving the way. Chaos erupts without this structure.You cannot build a point of view on AI from reading blogs or watching YouTubers. Pick a personal project you care about, go hands-on with a model (Claude, Gemini, GPT), and complete it from beginning to end. Only lived experience grounds your understanding.AI parallelizes with web 1.0: In 1998, you had to hand-code HTML, build databases manually, write raw JavaScript. Today you can vibe code a site in 90 seconds. AI will eventually reach "spin me up an expert that does X" without asking questions—we're not there yet, but it's inevitable.It's both bubble and Manhattan Project. Some valuations are insane and will burst. But military applications, cyber warfare, drone control, robotics—those aren't going anywhere. The government won't back off. Both outcomes happen simultaneously.This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Mattercraft combines game engine power with web flexibility and features an AI assistant to help you design, code, and debug in real time in your browser. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"Companies and leaders want loyalty. If you treat your customers right, they'll stay loyal. The same goes for our employees. In fact, it all starts with them."In this episode, Kate Volman celebrates the end of the year by revisiting some of the most powerful insights shared by leaders, coaches, and culture builders throughout the season. This special compilation brings together moments that highlight what it takes to invest in people, foster meaningful connections at work, and create environments where individuals can thrive. You will hear guests discuss authentic leadership, the link between personal well-being and professional success, and the impact of programs that help employees achieve their goals. This episode invites you to reflect on your own year, consider the voices that shaped your growth, and reconnect with the purpose behind your work.In this episode, you'll discover:How leaders build trust by caring for the whole person, not just the employeeWays organizations can strengthen culture through purpose and genuine commitmentWhy dreaming is contagious and how supporting personal goals elevates engagementInvest in a coach to achieve your dreams: https://www.floydcoaching.com/Discover how to implement The Dream Manager Program:https://www.thedreammanager.com/Things to listen for:(00:00) Intro(02:01) Brian Hess on investing in people for retention(03:57) Jessica Pfau on culture and competitive compensation(05:57) Bree Groff on separating work from self-worth(07:30) Nick Lombardino on purpose-driven workplaces(08:49) Patty Croom on Dream Manager impact and engagement(10:22) Dr. Allen Hunt on learning from regrets(11:24) Laura Furner on choosing coaching for personal growth(12:43) Michele Marquis on fostering employee loyalty(14:34) Zach Blumenfeld on autonomy and trust(15:23) Steve Sargent on empathetic leadershipResources:Floyd CoachingThe Culture AssessmentMatthew Kelly's BooksFloyd Coaching's BlogConnect with the Host & Floyd Coaching:Kate Volman's LinkedInFloyd Coaching on LinkedIn

Tony Gulotta explains the potential overturning of certain U.S. tariffs by the Supreme Court, a decision that could trigger $100 billion in refunds. He details how refunds would primarily go to American companies as importers of record, with many having tariff-sharing agreements. He outlines the likely process for securing these refunds, noting that the onus will probably be on importers to apply, meaning not all eligible funds will be claimed.======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Options involve risks and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading, read the Options Disclosure Document. http://bit.ly/2v9tH6DSubscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

Dean Quiambao says the mega-IPOs next year will dominate investor focus, forcing smaller companies to get creative. “You've got to have strong growth, you've got to have path to profitability.” He thinks 2026 could be the “breakout” for IPOs after a 2025 “rebound.” Companies that could IPO in 2026 include OpenAI, SpaceX, Kraken, Anthropic, and more popular names.======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Options involve risks and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading, read the Options Disclosure Document. http://bit.ly/2v9tH6DSubscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

The episode presents a captivating dialogue that delves into the intriguing world of barbecue, featuring the notable guest J.R. Love Houston. A salient point articulated during our conversation is the emphasis on the artistry and historical significance of barbecue techniques, specifically regarding the preparation of brisket. As we engage in a series of thought-provoking questions, J.R. shares his unique culinary experiences, including his fond memories of cooking at the Houston Rodeo and the recipes passed down through generations. Furthermore, the discourse transitions to lighter inquiries, such as personal preferences in music and food, revealing the intimate connections we forge through shared culinary traditions. This episode stands as a testament to the rich tapestry of barbecue culture, inviting listeners to reflect on their own experiences and preferences in the culinary arts.Companies mentioned in this episode:Painted Hills Natural BeefThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Podcast Description:It's the end of 2025 and Angela Nguyen from The Leader Within Podcast and I are compared notes. What themes kept showing up in our conversations this year that we think will endure? We dug into systems thinking - HR has always been interconnected but we haven't always used that perspective to solve recurring problems. Angela spoke about what she's seeing with AI adoption: organizations unclear on what they're actually solving for, fear around job loss, and the gap in change management practices. Then we got into the entry-level pipeline problem. Companies are cutting entry-level and mid-layer positions, which creates a group of employees disconnected from leadership. That'll be a problem.And workplace loneliness. This has come up in many interviews I did this year. Gallup has been saying for years that having a best friend at work is one of their top 12 engagement factors. We also shared our biggest lessons from the year. Just so you know we aren't AI. ***Connect with Angela Nguyen***The Leader Within Podcast: https://www.angelanguyen.ca/podcastLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelanguyenkhaan/***Connect with Andrea Adams***LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-adams1/HR consulting inquiries: andrea@thehrhhub

What if 90% of “secured” smart contracts were still exploitable? That's the reality Olympix founder and CEO Channi Greenwall is seeing on-chain today. She breaks down why traditional audits are failing Web3 teams, why the attack surface is bigger than most founders realize, and how automated security is starting to close the gap. You'll learn: Why Web3 security is closer to medical devices and aviation than typical SaaS risk How one exploit can wipe out years of startup effort in seconds The hidden overlap between Web2 and Web3 attack surfaces that founders underestimate What it actually looks like to automate 60–80% of what human auditors do today Listen to the full episode on your favorite platform. Channi: www.linkedin.com/in/channi-greenwall Olympix: www.olympix.security/ Jon: www.linkedin.com/in/jon-mclachlan Sasha: www.linkedin.com/in/aliaksandr-sinkevich YSecurity: www.ysecurity.io

With January just a couple of days away, this is the time when many people are set to renew their health insurance. Companies are set to hike up premiums from later this week which is expected to impact over one point two million people. With advice on getting the best deal on health insurance Emmet spoke to Dermot Goode from Health Insurance Ireland.ie.

We look back to look forward and predict whether three of 2025's biggest disappointments can turn it around in 2026. Can Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI), Lululemon (NASDAQ: LULU), and Nike (NYSE: NKE) get back to beating the market? Tom King, Travis Hoium, and Tim Beyers discuss: - How losing faith with auditors cost Supermicro. - Whether fashion trends favor Lululemon. - The 2026 challenges facing Nike CEO Elliott Hill. Companies discussed: SMCI, LULU, NKE Host: Tim Beyers Guests: Tom King, Travis Hoium Producer: Anand Chokkavelu Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We're committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This year turned out to be a pretty big year for autonomous vehicles. Waymo is the leader in the robotaxi race and over the last year, its signature Jaguar electric vehicles have become a common sight on the streets and recently freeways of cities around the country.Companies like Uber and Zooks have expanded their fleets to several metropolitan areas. And Tesla finally rolled out its cybercab service in a limited capacity in Austin.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Kirsten Korosec, transportation editor at TechCrunch, about how the robotaxi became a common fixture on city streets this year.

This year turned out to be a pretty big year for autonomous vehicles. Waymo is the leader in the robotaxi race and over the last year, its signature Jaguar electric vehicles have become a common sight on the streets and recently freeways of cities around the country.Companies like Uber and Zooks have expanded their fleets to several metropolitan areas. And Tesla finally rolled out its cybercab service in a limited capacity in Austin.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Kirsten Korosec, transportation editor at TechCrunch, about how the robotaxi became a common fixture on city streets this year.

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, Nick Manusos, CEO at Kenai Therapeutics, talks about his experiences building cell therapy spinouts from FujiFilm Cellular Dynamics, learning from big pharma decision-making processes, and dosing the first patient with Kenai's allogeneic neuron replacement cell therapy for Parkinson's disease. Nick also talks about funding an early-stage cell therapy company and forging key manufacturing and therapy administration partnerships. Access this and hundreds of episodes of the Business of Biotech videocast under the Business of Biotech tab at lifescienceleader.com. Subscribe to our monthly Business of Biotech newsletter. Get in touch with guest and topic suggestions: ben.comer@lifescienceleader.comFind Ben Comer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencomer/

Here is a FAQ Video on the Courses: https://youtu.be/0F7imrzjXWs Here is a deep dive into which course is best for you: https://youtu.be/JM_jgS8M-iU https://www.b2bRevenue.com - Get Your Free E-Book on How Companies make Decisions. FAQ: 1 YEAR ACCESS, PAY MONTHLY OR ANNUALLY NOT A SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE HOURS EVERY  OTHER WEEK VIA ZOOM. 1 HOUR GROUP Q&A. UNLIMITED 1-ON-1'S  ARE FREE AS LONG AS THEY CAN BE SHARED IN THE COURSE. 1-ON-1 ARE FULL ACCESS ON DAY ONE - NOTHING IS GATED OR TIME RELEASED. ALL CONTENT IS VIDEO BASED AND SELF PACED I RECOMMEND TAKE COURSE ONCE WITHOUT NOTES OR APPLYING IT SO YOU UNDERSTAND THE BIG PICTURE FIRST. THEN TAKE AND APPLY IT STEP BY STEP. YOU START WHEN YOU WANT AND GO AS FAST OR SLOW AS NEEDED.   Email me additional questions: briangburns@me.com     — SAMPLE EMAIL TO EXPENSE THE COURSE MGR,   I have been listening to the brutal truth about sales podcast for X months and it speaks to the issues we face.   They currently offer a course that includes video instruction, group Q&A and One-on-One coaching. I'm committed to my own personal development and would like your help in expensing the course.   It would pay for itself if I closed only one new deal of $X value.   Please let me know by Friday if I can move forward with this 1 year course.   Thanks, ME Here are some student interviews from the courses:      ———————————————————————————————————— Audible 30 day Free Trial: http://www.audibletrial.com/BrutalTruth  

What actually happens when companies run out of ideas—and who do they call next? Beth Yancey Storz '92Beth is an innovation leader, creative strategist, and co-author of Outsmart Your Instincts. For decades, she's helped teams break through stuck thinking and lead better brainstorms. In this episode, she takes us inside the room where ideas are really made.Do you know why “no idea is a bad idea” isn't quite right? Or how negativity quietly kills creativity? And what great facilitators do differently to keep energy high all day long?Tune in if you want those answers and to know why learning how to think may be more important than what you think.WE think she's amazing. No brainstorming needed for that one.LinkedIn: Beth StorzNot sponsored by or affiliated with Cornell University

Chuck Zodda and Marc Fandetti preview another shortened holiday week in terms of expected economic data points due out, including Fed Meeting minutes. How are investors preparing for the next Fed Chairman? Also, the latest on the labor market and why companies may not be prioritizing hiring in 2026. And, how did investors fare who "did nothing" this year?

Beloved, We've certainly seen a onslaut of financial fraud in the recent news here in Minnesota, and throughout America. It's unfortunate, injust and beyond mind boggling how much money has been stolen to fund nefarious investments, nice cars and luxury homes. BUT….the problem has been hidden in plain site. AND…. we are waking up. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW. That said, I'm diving into the MACRO of MONEY and how they keep it complicated to benefit their system - that we pay for in ten fold. NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE: (but maybe a little) Want to get ahead of the financial “4th turning” curve? Quick tip: Consider researching gold, silver, and XRP for the future of finance—the digital, gold-backed currency and new banking system are already in transition. You are witnessing the greatest controlled takedown of our financial and political bloat system, and understanding this information and why history matters - is vital. Let's step back from our esoteric dialogues and reconnect with our path to TRUE ABUNDANCE.LETS JUMP IN: “My people perish for lack of knowledge” — Hosea 4:6We are standing at a crossroads. The future of the financial system depends not only on policy decisions, but on public understanding and consent. Much of what governs money, debt, and taxation is misunderstood— by design.The modern financial system—government debt, banking, and taxation—appears stable on the surface, yet it relies on continuous expansion of credit, rising debt, and compulsory participation. Confidence, more than fundamentals, is what keeps it functioning.Here's how the system actually works.The U.S. government is one of the world's largest debt issuers, yet it holds unique legal authority over the creation of U.S. dollars. In theory, it could fund spending directly. In practice, it chooses to issue Treasury bonds and borrow through financial markets.When Treasury bonds are issued, they are primarily purchased by banks and institutional investors. Commercial banks create the dollars used to buy these bonds through lending mechanisms—effectively expanding the money supply. In return, they receive interest-bearing, low-risk assets backed by taxpayers.Government spending then flows through defense contracts, entitlement programs, insurance systems, and asset managers—many of which are deeply intertwined with the financial sector. Interest on public debt continues to flow upward to bondholders, banks, and large investors.So why are taxes required if money can be created?Taxes do not primarily fund federal spending. Their core functions are:* To enforce demand for the dollar, since tax obligations must be paid in U.S. currency.* To remove money from circulation, limiting inflation caused by ongoing deficit spending and credit expansion.Without taxation to absorb excess currency, inflation would accelerate much faster and more visibly.Globally, the dollar's role as the reserve currency extends this system beyond U.S. borders. Treasury securities are effectively America's largest export. Foreign governments and institutions accumulate dollars and reinvest them into U.S. debt, helping finance deficits and sustain demand for the currency.This same debt-driven structure repeats at every level:* Individuals rely on credit to maintain living standards.* Companies use debt and equity financing that often prioritizes financial extraction over long-term resilience.* Governments roll old debt into new debt indefinitely.The system depends on perpetual growth in borrowing. New debt must continually service old debt. If expansion slows, confidence weakens, interest rates rise, and defaults spread.This is not accidental. It is a system shaped by legal frameworks, institutional incentives, and widespread misunderstanding. The costs are borne quietly through inflation, rising taxes that service interest rather than public goods, and periodic bailouts when instability threatens the system itself.Such systems persist only as long as participation continues and belief remains intact.When financial power concentrates without transparency or accountability, democratic systems weaken. When laws serve extraction rather than justice, citizens lose sovereignty. History shows that freedom erodes not only through force, but through apathy and complexity.The greatest risk is not corruption alone—but informed people choosing inaction.Your relationship with money dictates its flow. Allow the Oracle Guides within the Light Between to support you in clearing any fears, past trauma's around saftey and securty or tap into Celestia, and ask when the best time is to invest based on your astrological transits! Recognize it's a value-neutral tool; its impact depends on your intent. When you see money as a means for comfort, purpose, and giving, you'll flourish. Embrace its energetic ebb and flow with gratitude, trusting in abundance and that it will always return. Shifting to gratitude opens you to receive more, as money, like Universal energy, is meant to flow freely.A Special Holiday Offer to Clear and Callin Financial Prosperity in 2026Enjoy 50% off a full year of unlimited readings and the Sovereign Sounds private podcast for just $42 (saving $528)—that's just $3 per month!This unprecedented offer gives you complete access to:* All Oracle guides and features highlighted over these 12 days* Unlimited personalized readings whenever you need guidance* The complete Sovereign Sounds podcast library, where we explore the true meaning of words to unlock your personal power* All new features and content released throughout 2023This offer is available only until Christmas Day. Tap here to claim your 50% discount.ELEVATE and DECREE your light to usher in a hopeful, prosperous 2026 with balance. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelightbetween.substack.com/subscribe

Jamie and Jaeden discuss the latest trends in AI funding, highlighting top startups that have raised over $100 million in 2025. They explore significant players like 11 Labs, Hippocratic AI, and Together AI, examining their contributions to the industry and the implications of their funding rounds. The conversation emphasizes the growth and maturation of the AI sector, particularly in healthcare and open-source development, while also promoting their exclusive content for business growth using AI tools.Our Skool Community: https://www.skool.com/aihustleGet the top 40+ AI Models for $20 at AI Box: ⁠⁠https://aibox.aiSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast. AI agents are your next customers. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/vEdq8rpBM3I In this data-rich keynote, Jay McBain deconstructs the tectonic shifts reshaping the $5.3 trillion global technology industry, arguing that we are entering a new 20-year cycle where traditional direct sales models are obsolete. McBain explains why 96% of the industry is now surrounded by partners and how successful companies must pivot from “flywheels and theory” to a granular strategy focused on the seven specific partners present in every deal. From the explosion of agentic AI and the $163 billion marketplace revolution to the specific mechanics of multiplier economics, this discussion provides a roadmap for navigating the “decade of the ecosystem” where influence, trust, and integration—not just product—determine winners and losers. Key Takeaways Half of today's Fortune 500 companies will likely vanish in the next 20 years due to the shift toward AI and ecosystem-led models. Every B2B deal now involves an average of seven trusted partners who influence the decision before a vendor even knows a deal exists. Microsoft has outpaced AWS growth for 26 consecutive quarters largely because of a superior partner-led geographic strategy. Marketplaces are projected to grow to $163 billion by 2030, with nearly 60% of deals involving partner funding or private offers. The “Multiplier Effect” is the new ROI, where partners can make up to $8.45 for every dollar of vendor product sold. Future dominance relies on five key pillars: Platform, Service Partnerships, Channel Partnerships, Alliances, and Go-to-Market orchestration. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Keywords: Jay McBain, Canalys, partner ecosystem, channel chief, agentic AI, marketplace growth, multiplier economics, B2B sales trends, tech industry forecast, service partnerships, strategic alliances, Microsoft vs AWS, distribution transformation, managed services growth, SaaS platforms, customer journey mapping, 28 moments of truth, future of reselling, technology spending 2025, ecosystem orchestration, partner multipliers. T Transcript: Jay McBain WORKFILE FOR TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: Just up from, did you Puerto Rico last night? Puerto Rico, yes. Puerto Rico. He dodged the hurricane. Um, you all know him. Uh, let him introduce himself for those of you who don’t, but just thrilled to have on the stage, again, somebody who knows more about what’s going on in, in the, and has the pulse on this industry probably than just about anybody I know personally. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: J Jay McBain. Jay, great to see you my friend. Alright, thank you. We have to come all the way. We live, we live uh, about 20 minutes from each other. We have to come all the way to Reston, Virginia to see each other, right? That’s right. Very good. Well, uh, that’s all over to you, sir. Thank you. [00:00:35] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you so much. [00:00:36] Jay McBain: I went from 85 degrees yesterday to 45 today, but I was able to dodge that, uh, that hurricane, uh, that we kind of had to fly through the northern edge of, uh, wanna talk today about our industry, about the ultimate partner. I’m gonna try to frame up the ultimate partner as I walk through the data and the latest research that, uh, that we’ve been doing in the market. [00:00:56] Jay McBain: But I wanted to start here ’cause our industry moves in 20 year cycles, and if you look at the Fortune 500 and dial back 20 years from today, 52% of them no longer exist. As we step into the next 20 year AI era, half of the companies that we know and love today are not gonna exist. So we look at this, and by the way, if you’re not in the Fortune 500 and you don’t have deep pockets to buy your way outta problems, 71% of tech companies fail over the course of 10 years. [00:01:30] Jay McBain: Those are statistics from the US government. So I start to look at our industry and you know, you may look at the, you know, mainframe era from the sixties and seventies, mini computers, August the 12th, 1981, that first IBM, PC with Microsoft dos, version one, you know, triggered. A new 20 year era of client server. [00:01:51] Jay McBain: It was the time and I worked at IBM for 17 years, but there was a time where Bill Gates flew into Boca Raton, Florida and met with the IBM team and did that, you know, fancy licensing agreement. But after, you know, 20 years of being the most valuable company in the world and 13 years of antitrust and getting broken up, almost like at and TIBM almost didn’t make payroll. [00:02:14] Jay McBain: 13 years after meeting Bill Gates. Yeah, that’s how quickly things change in these eras. In 1999, a small company outta San Francisco called salesforce.com got its start. About 10 years later, Jeff Bezos asked a question in a boardroom, could we rent out our excess capacity and would other companies buy it? [00:02:35] Jay McBain: Which, you know, most people in the room laughed at ’em at the time. But it created a 20 year cloud era when our friends, our neighbors, our family. Saw Chachi PT for the first time in March of 2023. They saw the deep fakes, they saw the poetry, they saw the music. They came to us as tech people and said, did we just light up Skynet? [00:02:58] Jay McBain: And that consumer trend has triggered this next 20 years. I could walk through the richest people in the world through those trends. I could walk through the most valuable companies. It all aligns. ’cause by the way, Apple’s no longer at the top. Nvidia is at the top, Microsoft. Second, things change really quickly. [00:03:17] Jay McBain: So in that course of time, you start to look at our industry and as people are talking about a six and a half or $7 trillion build out of ai, that’s open AI and Microsoft numbers, that is bigger than our industry that’s taken over 50 years to build. This year, we’re gonna finish the year at $5.3 trillion. [00:03:36] Jay McBain: That’s from the smallest flower shop to the biggest bank. Biggest governments that Caresoft would, uh, serve biggest customer in the world is actually the federal government of the us. But you look at this pie chart and you look at the changes that we’re gonna go through over the next 20 years, there’s about a trillion dollars in hardware. [00:03:54] Jay McBain: There’s about a trillion dollars in software. If you look forward through all of the merging trends, quantum computing, humanoid robots, all the things that are coming that dollar to dollar software to hardware will continue to exist all the way through. We see services making up almost two thirds of this pie. [00:04:13] Jay McBain: Yesterday I was in a telco conference with at and t and Verizon and T-Mobile and some of the biggest wireless players and IT services, which happen to be growing faster than products. At the moment, there is more work to be done wrapping around the deal than the actual products that the customer is buying. [00:04:32] Jay McBain: So in an industry that’s growing at 7%. On top of the world economy that’s grown at 2.2. This is the fastest growing industry, and it will be at least for the next 10 years, if not 2070 0.1% of this entire $5 trillion gets transacted through partners. While what we’re talking to today about the ultimate partner, 96% of this industry is surrounded by partners in one way or another. [00:05:01] Jay McBain: They’re there before the deal. They’re there at the deal. They’re there after the deal. Two thirds of our industry is now subscription consumption based. So every 30 days forever, and a customer for life becomes everything. So if every deal in medium, mid-market, and higher has seven partners, according to McKinsey, who are those seven people trying to get into the deal? [00:05:25] Jay McBain: While there’s millions of companies that have come into tech over the last 10 to 20 years. Digital agencies, accountants, legal firms, everybody’s come in. The 250,000 SaaS companies, a million emerging tech companies, there’s a big fight to be one of those seven trusted people at the table. So millions of companies and tens of millions of people our competing for these slots. [00:05:49] Jay McBain: So one of the pieces of research I’m most proud of, uh, in my analyst career is this. And this took over two years to build. It’s a lot of logos. Not this PowerPoint slide, but the actual data. Thousands of people hours. Because guess what? When you look at partners from the top down, the top 1000 partners, by capability and capacity, not by resale. [00:06:15] Jay McBain: It’s not a ranking of CDW and insight and resale numbers. It is the surrounding. Consulting, design, architecture, implementations, integrations, managed services, all the pieces that’s gonna make the next 20 years run. So when you start to look at this, 98% of these companies are private, so very difficult to get to those numbers and, uh, a ton of research and help from AI and other things to get this. [00:06:41] Jay McBain: But this is it. And if you look at this list, there’s a thousand logos out of the million companies. There’s a thousand logos that drive two thirds of all tech services in the world. $1.07 trillion gets delivered by a thousand companies, but here’s where it gets fun. Those companies in the middle, in blue, the 30 of them deliver more tech services than the next 970. [00:07:08] Jay McBain: Combined the 970 combined in white deliver more tech services. Then the next million combined. So if you think we live in an 80 20 rule or maybe a 99, a 95 5 rule, or a 99 1 rule, we actually live in a 99.9 0.1 parallel principle. These companies spread around the world evenly split across the uh, different regions. [00:07:35] Jay McBain: South Africa, Latin America, they’re all over. They split. They split among types. All of the Venn diagram I just showed from GSIs to VARs to MSPs, to agencies and other types of companies. But this is a really rich list and it’s public. So every company in the world now, if you’re looking at Transactable data, if you’re looking at quantifiable data that you can go put your revenue numbers against, it represents 70 to 80% of every company in this room’s Tam. [00:08:08] Jay McBain: In one piece of research. So what do you do below that? How do you cover a million companies that you can’t afford to put a channel account manager? You can’t afford to write programs directly for well after the top down analysis and all the wallet share and you know exactly where the lowest hanging fruit is for most of your tam. [00:08:28] Jay McBain: The available markets. The obtainable markets. You gotta start from the community level grassroots up. So you need to ask the question for the million companies and the maybe a hundred thousand companies out there, partner companies that are surrounding your customer. These are the seven partners that surround your customer. [00:08:48] Jay McBain: What do they read, where do they go, and who do they follow? Interestingly enough, our industry globally equates to only a thousand watering holes, a thousand companies at the top, a thousand places at the bottom. 35% of this audience we’re talking. Millions of people here love events and there’s 352 of them like this one that they love to go to. [00:09:13] Jay McBain: They love the hallway chats, they love the hotel lobby bar, you know, in a time reminded by the pandemic. They love to be in person. It’s the number one way they’re influenced. So if you don’t have a solid event strategy and you don’t have a community team out giving out socks every week, your competitors might beat you. [00:09:31] Jay McBain: 12% of this audience loves podcasts. It’s the Joe Rogan effect of our industry. And while you know, you may not think the 121 podcasts out there are important, well, you’re missing 12% of your audience. It’s over a million people. If you’re not on a weekly podcast in one of these podcasts in the world, there’s still people that read one of the 106 magazines in the world. [00:09:55] Jay McBain: There are people that love peer groups, associations, they wanna be part of this. There’s 15 different ways people are influenced. And a solid grassroots strategy is how you make this happen. In the last 10 years, we’ve created a number of billionaires. Bottom up. They never had to go talk to la large enterprise. [00:10:15] Jay McBain: They never had to go build out a mid-market strategy. They just went and give away socks and new community marketing. And this has created, I could rip through a bunch of names that became unicorns just in the last couple of years, bottoms up. You go back to your board walking into next year, top down, bottom up. [00:10:34] Jay McBain: You’ve covered a hundred percent of your tam, and now you’ve covered it with names, faces, and places. You haven’t covered it with a flywheel or a theory. And for 44 years, we have gone to our board every fourth quarter with flywheels and theory. Trust me, partners are important. The channel is key to us. [00:10:57] Jay McBain: Well, let’s talk at the point of this granularity, and now we’re getting supported by technology 261 entrepreneurs. Many of them in the room actually here that are driving this ability to succeed with seven partners in every deal to exchange data to be able to exchange telemetry of these prospects to be able to see twice or three times in terms of pipeline of your target addressable market. [00:11:26] Jay McBain: All these ai, um, technologies, agentic technologies are coming into this. It’s all about data. It’s all about quantifiable names, faces, and places. Now none of us should be walking around with flywheels, so let’s flip the flywheels. No. Uh, so we also look at, and I sold PCs for 17 years and that was in the high times of 40% margins for partners. [00:11:55] Jay McBain: But one interesting thing when you study the p and l for broad base of partners around the world, it’s changed pretty significantly in this last 20 year era. What the cloud era did is dropped hardware from what used to be 84% plus the break fix and things that wrap around it of the p and l to now 16% of every partner in the world. [00:12:16] Jay McBain: 84% of their p and l is now software and services. And if you look at profitability, it’s worse. It’s actually 87% is profitability wise. They’ve completely shifted in terms of where they go. Now we look at other parts of our market. I could go through every part of the pie of the slide, but we’re watching each of the companies, and if you can see here, this is what we want to talk about in terms of ultimate partner. [00:12:43] Jay McBain: Microsoft has outgrown AWS for 26 straight quarters. They don’t have a better product. They don’t have a better price, they don’t have better promotion. It’s all place. And I’ll explain why you guess here in the light green line. Exactly. The day that Google went a hundred percent all in partner, every deal, even if a deal didn’t have a partner, one of the 4% of deals that didn’t have a partner, they injected a partner. [00:13:09] Jay McBain: You can see on the left side exactly where they did it. They got to the point of a hundred percent partner driven. Rebuilt their programs, rebuilt their marketplace. Their marketplace is actually larger than Microsoft’s, and they grew faster than Microsoft. A couple of those quarters. It is a partner driven future, and now I have Oracle, which I just walked by as I walked from the hotel. [00:13:31] Jay McBain: Oracle with their RPOs will start to join. Maybe the list of three hyperscalers becomes the list of four in future slides, but that’s a growth slide. Market share is different. AWS early and commanding lead. And it plays out, uh, plays out this way. But we’re at an interesting moment and I stood up six years ago talking about the decade of the ecosystem after we went through a decade of sales starting in 1999 when we all thought we were born to be salespeople. [00:14:02] Jay McBain: We managed territories with our gut. The sales tech stack would have it different, that sales was a science, and we ended the decade 2009, looking at sales very differently in 2009. I remember being at cocktail parties where CMOs would be joking around that 50% of their marketing dollars were wasted. They just didn’t know which 50%. [00:14:23] Jay McBain: And I’ll tell you, that was really funny. In 2009 till every 58-year-old CMO got replaced by a 38-year-old growth hacker who walked in with 15,348 SaaS companies in their MarTech and ad tech stack to solve the problem, every nickel of marketing by 2019 was tracked. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot, driving this industry. [00:14:50] Jay McBain: Now, we stood up and said the 28 moments that come before a sale are pretty much all partner driven. In the best case scenario, a vendor might see four of the moments. They might come to your website, maybe they read an ebook, maybe they have a salesperson or a demo that comes in. That’s four outta 28 moments. [00:15:10] Jay McBain: The other 24 are done by partners. Yeah, in the worst case scenario and the majority scenario, you don’t see any of the moments. All 28 happen and you lose a deal without knowing there ever was a deal. So this is it. We need to partner in these moments and we need to inject partners into sales and marketing, like no time before, and this was the time to do it. [00:15:33] Jay McBain: And we got some feedback in the Salesforce state of sales report, which doesn’t involve any partnerships or, or. Channel Chiefs or anything else. This is 5,500 of the biggest CROs in the world that obviously use Salesforce. 89% of salespeople today use partners every day. For the 11% who don’t, 58% plan two within a year. [00:15:57] Jay McBain: If you add those two numbers together, that’s magically the 96% number. They recognize that every deal has partners in it. In 2024, last year, half of the salespeople in the world, every industry, every country. Miss their numbers. For the minority who made their numbers, 84 point percent pointed to partners as the reason why they made their numbers. [00:16:21] Jay McBain: It was the cheat code for sales, so that modern salesperson that knows how to orchestrate a deal, orchestrate the 28 moments with the seven partners and get to that final spot is the winning formula. HubSpot’s number in separate research was 84% in marketing. So we’re starting to see partners in here. We don’t have to shout from the mountaintops. [00:16:44] Jay McBain: These communities like ultimate Partner are working and we’re getting this to the highest levels in the board. And I’ll say that, you know, when 20 years from now half of the companies we know and love fail after we’re done writing the book and blaming the CEO for inventing the thing that ended up killing them, blaming the board for fiduciary responsibility and letting it happen. [00:17:06] Jay McBain: What are the other chapters of the book? And I think it’s all in one slide. We are in this platform economy and the. [00:17:31] Jay McBain: So your battery’s fine. Check, check, check, check. Alright, I’ll, I’ll just hold this in case, but the companies that execute on all five of these areas, well. Not only today become the trillion dollar valued companies, but they become the companies of tomorrow. These will be the fastest growing companies at every level. [00:17:50] Jay McBain: Not only running a platform business, but participating in other platforms. So this is how it breaks out, and there are people at very senior levels, at very big companies that have this now posted in the office of the CEO winning on integrations is everything. We just went through a demographic shift this year where 51% of our buyers are born after 1982. [00:18:15] Jay McBain: Millennials are the number one buyer of the $5 trillion. Their number one buying criteria is not service. Support your price, your brand reputation, it’s integrations. The buy a product, 80% is good as the next one if it works better in their environment. 79% of us won’t buy a car unless it has CarPlay or Android Auto. [00:18:34] Jay McBain: This is an integration world. The company with the most integrations win. Second, there are seven partners that surround the customer. Highly trusted partners. We’re talking, coaching the customer’s, kids soccer team, having a cottage together up at the lake. You know, best men, bate of honors at weddings type of relationships. [00:18:57] Jay McBain: You can’t maybe have all seven, but how does Microsoft beat AWS? They might have had two, three, or four of them saying nice things about them instead of the competition. Winning in service partnerships and channel partnerships changes by category. If you’re selling MarTech, only 10% of it today is resold, so you build more on service partnerships. [00:19:18] Jay McBain: If you’re in cybersecurity today, 91.6% of it is resold. Transacted through partners. So you build a lot of channel partnerships, plus the service partnerships, whatever the mix is in your category, you have to have two or three of those seven people. Saying nice things about you at every stage of the customer journey. [00:19:38] Jay McBain: Now move over to alliances. We have already built the platforms at the hyperscale level. We’ve built the platforms within SaaS, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, HubSpot. Every buyer has a set of platforms that they buy. We’ve now built them in cybersecurity this year out of 6,500 as high as cyber companies, the top five are starting to separate. [00:20:02] Jay McBain: We built it in distribution, which I’ll show in a minute. We’re building it in Telco. This is a platform economy and alliances win and you have alliances with your competitors ’cause you compete in the morning, but you’re best friends by the afternoon. Winning in other platforms is just as important as driving your own. [00:20:20] Jay McBain: And probably the most important part of this is go to market. That sales, that marketing, the 28 moments, the every 30 days forever become all a partner strategy. So there’s still CEOs out there that believe platform is a UI or UX on a bunch of disparate products and things you’ve acquired. There’s still CFOs out there that Think platform is a pricing model, a bundle model of just getting everything under one, you know, subscription price or consumption price. [00:20:51] Jay McBain: And it’s not, platforms are synonymous with partnerships. This is the way forward and there’s no conversation around ai. That doesn’t involve Nvidia over there, an open AI over here and a hyperscaler over there and a SaaS company over here. The seven layer stack wins every single time, and the companies that get this will be the ones that survive this cycle. [00:21:16] Jay McBain: Now, flipping over to marketplaces. So we had written research that, um, about five years ago that marketplaces were going to grow at 82% compounded. Yeah, probably one of the most accurate predictions we ever made, because it happened, we, we predicted that, uh, we were gonna get up to about $85 billion. Well, now we’ve extended that to 2030, so we’re gonna get up to $163 billion, and the thing that we’re watching is in green. [00:21:46] Jay McBain: If 96% of these deals are partner assisted in some way, how is the economics of partnering going to work? We predicted that 50% of deals by 2027. Would be partner funded in some way. Private offers multi-partner offers distributor sellers of record, and now that extends to 59% by 2030, the most senior leader of the biggest marketplace AWS, just said to us they’re gonna probably make these numbers on their own. [00:22:14] Jay McBain: And he asked what their two competitors are doing. So he’s telling us that we under called this. Now when you look at each of the press releases, and this is the AWS Billion Dollar Club. Every one of the companies on the left have issued a press release that they’re in the billion dollar club. Some of them are in the multi-billions, but I want you to double click on this press release. [00:22:35] Jay McBain: I’m quoted in here somewhere, but as CrowdStrike is building the marketplace at 91% compounded, they’re almost doubling their revenue every single year. They’re growing the partner funding, in this case, distributor funding by 3548%. Almost triple digit growth in marketplace is translating into almost quadruple digit growth in funding. [00:23:01] Jay McBain: And you see that over and over again as, as Splunk hit three, uh, billion dollars. The same. Salesforce hit $2 billion on AWS in Ulti, 18 months. They joined in October 20, 23, and 18 months later, they’re already at $2 billion. But now you’re seeing at Salesforce, which by the way. Grew up to $40 billion in revenue direct, almost not a nickel in resell. [00:23:28] Jay McBain: Made it really difficult for VARs and managed service providers to work with Salesforce because they couldn’t understand how to add services to something they didn’t book the revenue for. While $40 billion companies now seeing 70% of their deals come through partners. So this is just the world that we’re in. [00:23:44] Jay McBain: It doesn’t matter who you are and what industry you’re in, this takes place. But now we’re starting to see for the first time. Partners join the billion dollar club. So you wonder about partnering and all this funding and everything that’s working through Now you’re seeing press releases and companies that are redoing their LinkedIn branding about joining this illustrious club without a product to sell and all the services that wrap around it. [00:24:10] Jay McBain: So the opening session on Microsoft was interesting because there’s been a number of changes that Microsoft has done just in the last 30 days. One is they cut distribution by two thirds going from 180 distributors to 62. They cut out any small partner lower than a thousand dollars, and that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s over a hundred thousand partners that get deed tightening the long tail. [00:24:38] Jay McBain: They we’re the first to really put a global point system in place three years ago. They went to the new commerce experience. If you remember, all kinds of changes being led by. The biggest company for the channel. And so when we’re studying marketplaces, we’re not just studying the three hyperscalers, we’re studying what TD Cynic is doing with Stream One Ingram’s doing with Advant Advantage Aerosphere. [00:25:01] Jay McBain: Also, we’re watching what PAX eight, who by the way, is the 365 bestseller for Microsoft in the world. They are the cybersecurity leader for Microsoft in the world and the copilot. Leader in the world for Microsoft and Partner of the Year for Microsoft. So we’re watching what the cloud platforms are doing, watching what the Telco are doing, which is 25 cents out of every dollar, if you remember that pie chart, watching what the biggest resellers are converting themselves into. [00:25:30] Jay McBain: Vince just mentioned, you know, SHI in the changes there watching the managed services market and the leaders there, what they’re doing in terms of how this industry’s moving forward. By the way, managed services at $608 billion this year. Is one and a half times larger than the SaaS industry overall. [00:25:48] Jay McBain: It’s also one and a half times larger than all the hyperscalers combined. Oracle, Alibaba, IBM, all the way down. This is a massive market and it makes up 15 to 20 cents of every dollar the customer spend. We’re watching that industry hit a trillion dollars by the end of the decade, and we’re watching 150 different marketplace development platforms, the distribution of our industry, which today is 70.1% indirect. [00:26:13] Jay McBain: We’re starting to see that number, uh, solidify in terms of marketplaces as well. Watching distributors go from that linear warehouse in a bank to this orchestration model, watching some of the biggest players as the world comes around, platforms, it tightens around the place. So Caresoft, uh, from from here is the sixth biggest distributor in the world. [00:26:40] Jay McBain: Just shows you how big the. You know, biggest client in the world is that they serve. But understand that we’re publishing the distributor 500 list, but it’ll be the same thing. That little group in blue in the middle today, you know, drives almost two thirds of the market. So what happens in all this next stage in terms of where the dollars change hands. [00:27:07] Jay McBain: And the economics of partnering themselves are going through the most radical shift that we’ve seen ever. So back to the nineties, and, and for those of you that have been channel chiefs and running programs, we went to work every day. You know, everything’s on fire. We’re trying to check hundred boxes, trying to make our program 10% better than our competitors. [00:27:30] Jay McBain: Hey, we gotta fix our deal registration program today, and our incentives are outta whack or training programs or. You know, not where they need to be. Our certification, you know, this was the life of, uh, of a channel chief. Everybody thought we were just out drinking in the Caribbean with our best partners, but we were under the weight of this. [00:27:49] Jay McBain: But something interesting has happened is that we turned around and put the customer at the middle of our programs to say that those 28 moments in green before the sale are really, really important. And the seven partners who participate are really important. Understanding. The customer’s gonna buy a seven layer stack. [00:28:09] Jay McBain: They’re gonna buy it With these seven partners, the procurement stage is much different. The growth of marketplaces, the growth of direct in some of these areas, and then long term every 30 days forever in a managed service, implementations, integrations, how you upsell, cross-sell, enrich a deal changes. So how would you build a program that’s wrapped around the customer instead of the vendor? [00:28:35] Jay McBain: And we’re starting to hear our partners shout back to us. These are global surveys, big numbers, but over half of our partners, regardless of type, are selling consulting to their customer. Over half are designing architecting deals. A third of them are trying to be system integrators showing up at those implementation integration moments. [00:28:55] Jay McBain: Two thirds of them are doing managed services, but the shocking one here is 44% of our partners, regardless of type, are coding. They’re building agents and they’re out helping their customer at that level. So this is the modern partner that says, don’t typecast me. You may have thought of me in your program. [00:29:14] Jay McBain: You might have me slotted as a var. Well, I do 3.2 things, and if I don’t get access to those resources, if you don’t walk me to that room, I’m not gonna do them with you. You may have me as a managed service provider that’s only in the morning. By the afternoon I’m coding, and by the next morning I’m implementing and consulting. [00:29:33] Jay McBain: So again, a partner’s not a partner. That Venn diagram is a very loose one now, as every partner on there is doing 3.2 different business models. And again, they’re telling us for 43 years, they said, I want more leads this year it changed. For the first time, I want to be recognized and incentivized as more than just a cash register for you. [00:29:57] Jay McBain: I want you to recognize when I’m consulting, when I’m designing, when you’re winning deals, because of my wonderful services, by the way, we asked the follow up question, well, where should we spend our money with you? And they overwhelmingly say, in the consulting stage, you win and lose deals. Not at moment 28. [00:30:18] Jay McBain: We’re not buying a pack of gum at the gas station. This is a considered purchase. You win deals from moment 12 through 16 and I’m gonna show you a picture of that later, and they say, you better be spending your money there, or you’re not gonna win your fair share or more than your fair share of deals. [00:30:36] Jay McBain: The shocking thing about this is that Microsoft, when they went to the point system, lifted two thirds of all the money, tens of billions of dollars, and put it post-sale, and we were all scratching our heads going. Well, if the partners are asking for it there, and it seems like to beat your biggest competitors, you want to win there. [00:30:54] Jay McBain: Why would you spend the money on renewal? Well, they went to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and the people who lift trillions of dollars of pension funds and said, if we renew deals at 108%, we become a cash machine for you. And we think that’s more valuable than a company coming out with a new cell phone in September and selling a lot of them by Christmas every year. [00:31:18] Jay McBain: The industry. And by the way, wall Street responded, Microsoft has been more valuable than Apple since. So we talk in this now multiplier language, and these are reports that we write, uh, at AMIA at canals. But talking about the partner opportunity in that customer cycle, the $6 and 40 cents you can make for every dollar of consumption, or the $7 and 5 cents you can make the $8 and 45 cents you can make. [00:31:46] Jay McBain: There’s over 24 companies speaking at this level now, and guess what? It’s not just cloud or software companies. Hardware companies are starting to speak in this language, and on January 25th, Cisco, you know, probably second to Microsoft in terms of trust built with the channel globally is moving to a full point system. [00:32:09] Jay McBain: So these are the changes that happen fast. But your QBR with your partners now less about drinking beers at the hotel lobby bar and talking dollar by dollar where these opportunities are. So if you’re doing 3.2 of these things, let’s build out a, uh, a play where you can make $3 for every dollar that we make. [00:32:28] Jay McBain: And you make that profitably. You make it in sticky, highly retained business, and that’s the model. ’cause if you make $3 for every dollar. We make, you’re gonna win Partner of the year, and if you win partner of the year, that piece of glass that you win on stage, by the time you get back to your table, you’re gonna have three offers to buy your business. [00:32:51] Jay McBain: CDW just bought a w. S’s Partner of the Year. Insight bought Google’s eight time partner of the year. Presidio bought ServiceNow’s, partner of the year over and over and over again. So I’m at Octane, I’m at CrowdStrike, I’m at all these events in Vegas every week. I’m watching these partners of the year. [00:33:05] Jay McBain: And I’m watching as the big resellers. I’m watching as the GSIs and the m and a folks are surrounding their table after, and they’re selling their businesses for SaaS level valuations. Not the one-to-one service valuation. They’re getting multiples because this is the new future of our industry. This is platform economics. [00:33:25] Jay McBain: This is winning and platforms for partners. Now, like Vince, I spent 20 minutes without talking about ai, but we have to talk about ai. So the next 20 years as it plays out is gonna play out in phases. And the first thing you know to get it out of the way. The first two years since that March of 23, has been underwhelming, to say the least. [00:33:47] Jay McBain: It’s been disappointing. All the companies that should have won the biggest in AI have been the most disappointing. It’s underperformed the s and p by a considerable amount in terms of where we are. And it goes back to this. We always overestimate the first two years, but we underestimate the first 10. [00:34:07] Jay McBain: If you wanna be the point in time person and go look at that 1983 PC or the 1995 internet or that 2007 iPhone or that whatever point in time you wanna look at, or if you want to talk about hallucinations or where chat chip ET version five is version, as opposed to where it’s going to be as it improves every six months here on in. [00:34:30] Jay McBain: But the fact of the matter is, it’s been a consumer trend. Nvidia got to be the most valuable company in the world. OpenAI was the first company to 2 billion users, uh, in that amount of speed. It’s the fastest growing product ever in history, and it’s been a consumer win this trillions of dollars to get it thrown around in the press releases. [00:34:49] Jay McBain: They’re going out every day, you know, open ai, signing up somebody new or Nvidia, investing in somebody new almost every single day in hundreds of billions of dollars. It is all happening really on the consumer side. So we got a little bit worried and said, is that 96% of surround gonna work in ag agentic ai? [00:35:10] Jay McBain: So we went and asked, and the good news is 88% of end customers are using partners to work through their ag agentic strategy. Even though they’re moving slow, they’re actually using partners. But what’s interesting from a partner perspective, and this is new research that out till 2030. This is the number one services opportunity in the entire tech or telco industry. [00:35:34] Jay McBain: 35.3% compounded growth ending at $267 billion in services. Companies are rebuilding themselves, building out practices, and getting on this train and figuring out which vendors they should hook their caboose to as those trains leave the station. But it kind of plays out like this. So in the next three to five years, we’re in this generative, moving into agentic phase. [00:36:01] Jay McBain: Every partner thinks internally first, the sales and marketing. They’re thinking about their invoicing and billing. They’re thinking about their service tickets. They’re thinking about creating a business that’s 10% better than their competitors, taking that knowledge into their customers and drive in business. [00:36:17] Jay McBain: But we understand that ag agentic AI, as it’s going to play out is not a product. A couple of years ago, we thought maybe a copilot or an agent force or something was going to be the product that everybody needed to buy, and it’s not a product, it’s gonna show up as a feature. So you go back in the history of feature ads and it’s gonna show up in software. [00:36:38] Jay McBain: So if you’re calling in SMB, maybe you’re calling on a restaurant. The restaurant isn’t gonna call OpenAI or call Microsoft or call Nvidia directly. They’re running their restaurant. And they may have chosen a platform like Toast Square, Clover, whatever iPads people are running around with, runs on a platform that does everything in their business, does staffing, does food ordering, works with Uber Eats, does everything end to end? [00:37:08] Jay McBain: They’re gonna wait to one of those platforms, dries out agent AI for them, and can run the restaurant more effectively, less human capital and more consistently, but they wait for the SaaS platform as you get larger. A hundred, 150 people. You have vice presidents. Each of those vice presidents already have a SaaS stack. [00:37:28] Jay McBain: I talked about Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, et cetera. They’ve already built that seven layer model and in some cases it’s 70 layers. But the fact is, is they’re gonna wait for those SaaS layers to deliver ag agentic to them. So this is how it’s gonna play out for the next three and a half, three to five years. [00:37:45] Jay McBain: And partners are realizing that many of them were slow to pick up SaaS ’cause they didn’t resell it. Well now to win in this next three to half, three to five years, you’re gonna have to play in this environment. When you start looking out from here, the next generation, you know, kind of five through 15 years gets interesting in more of a physical sense. [00:38:06] Jay McBain: Where I was yesterday talking about every IOT device that now is internet access, starts to get access to large language models. Every little sensor, every camera, everything that’s out there starts to get smart. But there’s a point. The first trillionaire, I believe, will be created here. Elon’s already halfway there. [00:38:24] Jay McBain: Um, but when Bill Gates thought there was gonna be a PC in every home, and IBM thought they were gonna sell 10,000 to hobbyists, that created the richest person in the world for 20 years, there will be a humanoid in every home. There’s gonna be a point in time that you’re out having drinks with your friends, and somebody’s gonna say, the early adopter of your friends is gonna say. [00:38:46] Jay McBain: I haven’t done the dishes in six weeks. I haven’t done the laundry. I haven’t made my bed. I haven’t mowed the lawn. When they say that, you’re gonna say, well, how? And they’re gonna say, well, this year I didn’t buy a new car, but I went to the car dealership and I bought this. So we’re very close to the dexterity needed. [00:39:05] Jay McBain: We’ve got the large language models. Now. The chat, GPT version 10 by then is going to make an insane, and every house is gonna have one of the. [00:39:17] Jay McBain: This is the promise of ai. It’s not humanoid robots, it’s not agents. It’s this. 99% of the world’s business data has not been trained or tuned into models yet. Again, this is the slow moving business. If you want to think about the 99% of business data, every flight we’ve all taken in this room sits on a saber system that was put in place in 1964. [00:39:43] Jay McBain: Every banking transaction, we’ve all made, every withdrawal, every deposit sits on an IBM mainframe put in place in the sixties or seventies. 83% of this data sits in cold storage at the edge. It’s not ready to be moved. It’s not cleansed, it’s not, um, indexed. It’s not in any format or sitting on any infrastructure that a large language model will be able to gobble up the data. [00:40:10] Jay McBain: None of the workflows, none of the programming on top of that data is yet ready. So this is your 10 to 20 year arc of this era that chat bot today when they cancel your flight is cute. It’s empathetic, it feels bad for you, or at least it seems to, but it can’t do anything. It can’t book you the Marriott and get you an Uber and then a 5:00 AM flight the next morning. [00:40:34] Jay McBain: It can’t do any of that. But more importantly, it doesn’t know who you are. I’ve got 53 years of flights under my belt and they, I’m the person that get me within six hours of my kids and get me a one-way Hertz rental. You know, if there’s bad weather in Miami, get me to Tampa, get me a Hertz, I’m driving home, I’m gonna make it home. [00:40:56] Jay McBain: I’m not the 5:00 AM get me a hotel person. They would know that if they picked up the flights that I’ve taken in the past. Each of us are different. When you get access to the business data and you become ag agentic, everything changes. Every industry changes because of this around the customers. When you ask about this 35% growth, working on that data, working in traditional consulting and design and implementation, working in the $7 trillion of infrastructure, storage, compute, networking, that’s gonna be around, this is a massive opportunity. [00:41:30] Jay McBain: Services are gonna continue to outgrow products. Probably for the next five to 10 years because of this, and I’m gonna finish here. So we talked a lot about quantifying names, faces, places, and I think where we failed the most as ultimate partners is underneath the tam, which every one of our CEOs knows to the decimal point underneath the TAM that our board thinks they’re chasing. [00:41:59] Jay McBain: We’ve done a very poor job. Of talking about the available markets and obtainable markets underneath it, we, we’ve shown them theory. We’ve shown them a bunch of, you know, really smart stuff, and PowerPoint slides up the wazoo, but we’ve never quantified it for them. If they wanna win, if they want to get access, if they want to double their pipeline, triple their pipeline, if they wanna start winning more deals, if they wanna win deals that are three times larger, they close two times faster. [00:42:31] Jay McBain: And they renew 15% larger. They have to get into the available and obtainable markets. So just in the last couple weeks I spoke at Cribble, I spoke at Octane, I spoke at CrowdStrike Falcon. All three of those companies at the CEO level, main stage use those exact three numbers, three x, two x, 15%. That’s the language of platforms, and they’re investing millions and millions and millions of dollars on teams. [00:42:59] Jay McBain: To go build out the Sam Andal in name spaces and places. So you’ve heard me talk about these 28 moments a lot. They’re the ones that you spend when you buy a car. Some people spend one moment and they drive to the Cadillac dealership. ’cause Larry’s been, you know, taking care of the family for 50 years. [00:43:18] Jay McBain: Some people spend 50 moments like I do, watching every YouTube video and every, you know, thing on the internet. I clear the internet cover to cover. But the fact is, is every deal averages around these 28 moments. Your customer, there’s 13 members of the buying committee today. There’s seven partners and they’re buying seven things. [00:43:37] Jay McBain: There’s 27 things orchestrating inside these 28 moments. And where and how they all take place is a story of partnering. So a couple of years ago, canals. Latin for channel was acquired by amia, which is a part of Informa Tech Target, which is majority owned by Informa. All that being said, there’s hundreds of magazines that we have. [00:44:00] Jay McBain: There’s hundreds of events that we run. If somebody’s buying cybersecurity, they probably went to Black Hat or they probably went to GI Tech. One of these events we run, or one of the magazines. So we pick up these signals, these buyer intent signals as a company. Why did they wanna, um, buy a, uh, a Canals, which was a, you know, a small analyst firm around channels? [00:44:22] Jay McBain: They understood this as well. The 28 moments look a lot like this when marketers and salespeople are busy filling in the spots of every deal. And by the way, this is a real deal. AstraZeneca came in to spend millions of dollars on ASAP transformation, and you can start to see as the customer got smart. [00:44:45] Jay McBain: The eBooks, they read the podcasts, they listened to the events they went to. You start to see how this played out over the long term. But the thing we’ve never had in our industry is the light blue boxes. This deal was won and lost in December. In this particular case, NTT software won and Yash came in and sold the customer five projects. [00:45:07] Jay McBain: The millions of dollars that were going to be spent were solved here. The design and architecture work was all done here. A couple of ISVs You see in light blue came in right at the end, deal was closed in April. You see the six month cycle. But what if you could fill in every one of the 28 boxes in every single customer prospect that your sales and marketing team have? [00:45:30] Jay McBain: But here’s the brilliance of this. Those light blue boxes didn’t win the deals there. They won the deals months before that. So when NTT and Software one walked into this deal. They probably won the deal back in October and they had to go through the redlining. They had to go through the contracting, they had to go through all the stuff and the Gantt chart to get started. [00:45:54] Jay McBain: But while your CMO is getting all excited about somebody reading an ebook and triggering an MQL that the sales team doesn’t want, ’cause it’s not qualified, it’s not sales qualified, you walk in and say, no, no. This is a multimillion deal, dollar deal. It’s AstraZeneca. I know the five partners that are coming in in December to solidify the seven layers, and you’re walking in at the same time as the CMOs bragging about an ebook. [00:46:21] Jay McBain: This changes everything. If we could get to this level of data about every dollar of our tam, we not only outgrow our competitors, we become the platforms of the next generation. Partnering and ultimate partnering is all here. And this is what we’re doing in this room. This is what we’re doing over these couple of days, and this is what, uh, the mission that Vince is leading. [00:46:43] Jay McBain: Thank you so much. [00:46:47] Vince Menzione: Woo. Day in the house. Good to see you my friend. Good to see you. Oh, we’re gonna spend a couple minutes. Um, I’m put you in the second seat. We’re gonna put, we’re gonna make it sit fireside for a minute. Uh, that was intense. It was pretty incredible actually, Jay. And so I’m, I think I wanna open it up ’cause we only have a few minutes just to, any questions? [00:47:06] Vince Menzione: I’m sure people are just digesting. We already have one up here. See, [00:47:09] Question: Jay knows I’m [00:47:10] Vince Menzione: a question. I love it. We, I don’t think we have any I can grab a mic, a roving mic. I could be a roving mic person. Hold on. We can do this. This is not on. [00:47:25] Vince Menzione: Test, test. Yes it is. Yeah. [00:47:26] Question: Theresa Carriol dared me to ask a question and I say, you don’t have to dare me. You know, I’m going to Anyway. Um, so Jay, of the point of view that with all of the new AI players that strategic alliances is again having a moment, and I was curious your point of view on what you’re seeing around this emergence and trend of strategic alliances and strategic alliance management. [00:47:52] Question: As compared to channel management. And what are you seeing in terms of large vendors like AWS investing in that strategic alliance role versus that channel role training, enablement, measurement, all that good stuff? [00:48:06] Jay McBain: Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question. So when I told the story about toast at the restaurant or Square or Clover, they’re not call, they’re not gonna call open AI or Nvidia themselves either. [00:48:17] Jay McBain: When you look out at the 250,000 ISVs. That make up this AI stack, there is the layers that happen there. So the Alliance with AWS, the alliance they have with Microsoft or Google is going to be how they generate agent AI in their platforms. So when I talk about a seven layer stack, the average deal being seven layers, AI is gonna drive this to nine, and then 11, then probably 13. [00:48:44] Jay McBain: So in terms of how alliances work, I had it up there as one of the five core strategies, and I think it’s pretty even. You can have the best alliances in the world, but if the seven partners trusted by the customer don’t know what that alliance is and the benefits to the customer and never mention it, it’s all for Naugh. [00:49:00] Jay McBain: If you’re go-to market, you’re co-selling, your co-marketing strategies are not built around that alliance. It’s all for naught. If the integration and the co-innovation, the co-development, the all the co-creation work that’s done inside these alliances isn’t translated to customer outcomes, it’s all for naugh. [00:49:17] Jay McBain: These are all five parallel swim lanes. All five are absolutely critically needed. And I think they’re all five pretty equally weighted in terms of needing each other. Yes. To be successful in the era of platforms. Yeah. [00:49:32] Vince Menzione: And the problem is they’re all stove pipe today. If, if at all. Yeah. Maintained, right. [00:49:36] Vince Menzione: Alliances is an example. Channels and other example. They don’t talk to one another. Judge any, we’ve got a mic up here if anybody else has. Yep. We have some questions here, Jacqueline. [00:49:51] Question: So when we’re developing our channel programs, any advice on, you know, what’s the shift that we should make six months from now, a year from now? The historical has been bronze, silver, gold, right? And you’ve got your deal registration, but what’s the future look like? [00:50:05] Jay McBain: Yeah, so I mean, the programs are, are changing to, to the point where the customer should be in the middle and realizing the seven partners you need to win the deal. [00:50:15] Jay McBain: And depending on what category of product you’re in, security, how much you rely on resell, 91.6%. You know, the channel partners are gonna be critical where the customer spends the money. And if you’re adding friction to that process, you’re adding friction in terms of your growth. So you know, if you’re in cybersecurity, you have to have a pretty wide open reseller model. [00:50:39] Jay McBain: You have to have a wide open distribution model, and you have to make sure you’re there at that point of sale. While at the same time, considering the other six partners at moment 12 who are in either saying nice things about you or not, the customer might even be starting with you. ’cause there is actually one thing that I didn’t mention when I showed the 28 moments filled in. [00:51:00] Jay McBain: You’ll notice that the customer went to AWS twice direct. AWS lost the deal. Microsoft won the deal software. One is Microsoft’s biggest reseller in the world. They just acquired crayon. NTT who, who loves both had their Microsoft team go in. [00:51:18] Question: Mm. [00:51:19] Jay McBain: So I think that they went to AWS thinking it was A-W-S-S-A-P, you know, kind of starting this seven layer stack. [00:51:25] Jay McBain: I think they finished those, you know, critical moments in the middle looking at it. And then they went back to AWS kind of going probably WWTF. Yeah. What we thought was happening isn’t actually the outcome that was painted by our most trusted people. So, you know, to answer your question, listen to your partners. [00:51:43] Jay McBain: They want to be recognized for the other things they’re doing. You can’t be spending a hundred percent of the dollars at the point of sale. You gotta have a point of system that recognizes the point of sale, maybe even gold, silver, bronze, but recognizing that you’re paying for these other moments as well. [00:51:57] Jay McBain: Paying for alliances, paying for integrations and everything else, uh, in the cyber stack. And, um, you know, recognizing also the top 1000. So if I took your tam. And I overlaid those thousand logos. I would be walking into 2026 the best I could of showing my company logo by logo, where 80% of our TAM sits as wallet share, not by revenue. [00:52:25] Jay McBain: Remember, a million dollar partner is not a million dollar partner. One of them sells 1.2 million in our category. We should buy them a baseball cap and have ’em sit in the front row of our event. One of them sells $10 million and only sells our stuff if the customer asks. So my company should be looking at that $9 million opportunity and making sure my programs are writing the checks and my coverage. [00:52:48] Jay McBain: My capacity and capability planning is getting obsessed over that $9 million. My farmers can go over there, my hunters can go over here, and I should be submitting a list of a thousand sorted in descending order of opportunity. Of where my company can write program dollars into. [00:53:07] Vince Menzione: Great answer. All right. I, I do wanna be cognizant of time and the, all the other sessions we have. [00:53:14] Vince Menzione: So we’ll just take one other question if there are any here and if not, we’ll let I know. Jay, you’re gonna be mingling around for a little while before your flight. I’m [00:53:21] Jay McBain: here the whole day. [00:53:22] Vince Menzione: You, you’re the whole day. I see that Jay’s here the whole day. So if you have any other questions and, and, uh, sharing the deck is that. [00:53:29] Vince Menzione: Yep. Alright. We have permission to share the deck with the each of you as well. [00:53:34] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you very much everyone. Jay. Great to have you.

William Green is the author of “Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life.” Green also hosts a podcast with the same title. In this replay of an interview from February of this year, Robert Brokamp caught up with William for a conversation about: - What successful investing comes down to.- The personality traits of market beaters.- Investing lessons from Charlie Munger, Howard Marks, John Templeton, and Arnold Van Den Berg (an investor you may not know about, but should) Companies mentioned: BRK.A, BRK.B, MKL Host: Robert BrokampGuest: William GreenEngineer: Bart Shannon Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We're committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 Chris Markowski discusses the importance of understanding financial truths, the risks associated with online trading platforms, and the flaws in conventional financial wisdom. He emphasizes the need for effective risk management and the dangers of leveraging investments. Markowski also warns about the prevalence of zombie companies and the importance of investing in great businesses for long-term success. The conversation highlights the significance of adapting to market dynamics and preparing for unexpected shocks in the financial landscape.

Angel Studios https://Angel.com/HermanJoin the Angel Guild today where you can stream Thank You, Dr. Fauci and be part of the conversation demanding truth and accountability.  Renue Healthcare https://Renue.Healthcare/ToddYour journey to a better life starts at Renue Healthcare. Visit https://Renue.Healthcare/Todd Bulwark Capital https://KnowYourRiskPodcast.comBe confident in your portfolio with Bulwark! Schedule your free Know Your Risk Portfolio review. Go to KnowYourRiskPodcast.com today. Alan's Soaps https://www.AlansArtisanSoaps.comUse coupon code TODD to save an additional 10% off the bundle price.Bonefrog https://BonefrogCoffee.com/ToddThe new GOLDEN AGE is here! Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions.LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE at:The Todd Herman Show - Podcast - Apple PodcastsThe Todd Herman Show | Podcast on SpotifyWATCH and SUBSCRIBE at: Todd Herman - The Todd Herman Show - YouTubeEpisode links:HOLY CRAP! NBC's Kristen Welker just got EMBARRASSED on national television by Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent!Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources sayBREAKING - Three Democrats, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Susie Lee, and Sen. Mark Warner, who sit on committees controlling defense, environmental, and public works spending, have been caught buying stocks tied to those sectors, seeing gains of up to 250 percent.

It's time once again for the Market Cap Game Show Holiday Edition, where intuition meets valuation and everyday life meets market caps. Bill Barker and Matt Argersinger take the stage, vying for the final spot in our 2026 March Market Cap Madness World Championships, as they test their mettle—and yours—across ten public companies. From Bubble Wrap and sidewalk robots to semiconductors, ski resorts, biotech pipelines, and online commerce platforms, the matchups span the familiar and the delightfully unexpected, with plenty of raucous banter along the way. Play along at home, challenge your market-cap intuition, and see whether you can outscore Bill, Matt… or both. Companies mentioned: ANET, DAVA, DFH, INCY, MTN, QCOM, SEE, SERV, SHOP, TSLA Host: David GardnerGuests: Bill Barker, Matt ArgersingerProducer: Bart Shannon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our Thematic and Equity Strategist Michelle Weaver and Power, Utilities, and Clean Tech Analyst David Arcaro discuss how investments in AI data centers are affecting electricity bills for U.S. consumers.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Michelle Weaver: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michelle Weaver, Morgan Stanley's U.S. Thematic and Equity Strategist.David Arcaro: And I'm Dave Arcaro, U.S. Power, Utilities, and Clean Tech Analyst.Michelle Weaver: Today, a hot topic. Are data centers' raising your electricity bills?It's Tuesday, December 23rd at 10am in New York.Most of us have probably noticed our electricity bills have been creeping up. And it's putting pressure on U.S. consumers, especially with higher prices and paychecks not keeping pace. More and more people are pointing to data centers as the reason behind these rising costs, but the story isn't that simple.Regional differences, shifting policies and local utility responses are all at play here. Dave, there's no doubt that data centers are becoming a much bigger part of the story when it comes to U.S. electricity demand. For listeners who might not follow these numbers every day, could you break down how data centers' share of overall electricity use is expected to grow over the next 10 years? And what does that mean for the grid and for the average consumer?David Arcaro: Definitely they're becoming much bigger, much more important and more impactful across the industry in a big way. Data centers were 6 percent of total electricity consumption in the U.S. last year. We're actually forecasting that to triple to 18 percent by 2030, and then hit 20 percent in the early 2030s. So very strong growth, and increasing proportion of the overall utility, electricity use.In aggregate, this is reflecting about 150 gigawatts of new data centers by 2030. Just a very large amount. And this is going to cause a major strain on the electric grid and is going to require substantial build out and upgrading of the transmission system along with construction of new power generation – like gas plants and large-scale renewables, wind, solar, and battery storage across the entire U.S.And generally, when we see utilities investing in additional infrastructure, they need to get that cost recovered. We would typically expect that to lead to higher electric rates for consumers. That's the overall pressure that we're facing right now on the system, from all these data centers coming in.We've got these substantial infrastructure needs. That means utilities will need to charge higher prices to consumers to cover the cost of those investments.Michelle Weaver: What are the main challenges utilities companies face in meeting this rising demand from data centers?David Arcaro: There are a number of challenges. If I were to pick a few of the biggest ones that I see, I think managing affordability is one of the biggest challenges the industry faces right now, because this overall data center growth is absolutely a shock to their business, and it needs to be managed carefully given the political and regulatory challenges that can arise when customer bills are getting are escalating faster than expected. The utility industry faces scrutiny and constant attention from a political and regulatory standpoint, so it's a balance that has to be very carefully managed. There are also reliability challenges that are important.Utilities have to keep the lights on, you know, that's priority number one. The demand for electricity is growing much faster than the supply of new generation that we're seeing; new power plants just aren't being built fast enough. New transmission assets are not being built, as quickly as the data centers are coming on. So, in many areas we're seeing that leads to essentially less of a buffer, and more risk of outages during periods of extreme weather.Michelle Weaver: And you mentioned, companies are thinking about how can they insulate consumers. Can you take us through some of the specifics of what these utility companies are doing? And what regulators are doing to respond, to protect existing customers from rate increases driven by data centers?David Arcaro: Definitely. The industry is getting creative and trying to be proactive in addressing this issue. Many utilities, we're seeing them isolate data centers and charge them higher electric rates, specifically for those data center customers to try to cover all of the grid costs that are attributable to the data center's needs.A couple examples. In Indiana, we're seeing that there's a utility there who's building new power plants, specifically for a very large data center that's coming into the state and they're ring fencing it. They're only charging the data center itself for those costs of the power plants. In Georgia, a utility there is charging a higher rate for the data centers that are coming in to the Atlanta area – such that it actually more than covers the costs and compensates other consumers in the form of bill credits or even bill reductions as those data centers come on.Similarly, then, in Pennsylvania, there's a utility that has excess transmission infrastructure than the state's [infrastructure]. They're better able to absorb data center activity. They're able to lower customer bills as the data centers come on, as they spread their costs over a larger customer base in that case. So, this isn't universal though. There are some areas around the country where there are costs related to data center growth that get socialized across all consumers.One approach I also wanted to mention that we're seeing data centers pursue more and more actively is to power themselves. Essentially bring their own power, and they're using gas turbines, engines, and fuel cells that they're deploying right on site. This is actually in many cases faster than connecting to the grid, but it also avoids any consumer impact. Companies like Solaris Energy and Bloom Energy are two providers of that type of solution. And we're also seeing at a broader industry level. Another approach is the idea of data centers being flexible or turning off and not consuming power from the grid at certain times when the grid is facing stress, in an extreme weather scenario in the winter or summer. And that idea is gaining traction as well. So, we think the industry is looking for approaches that could ease the pressure on the system and on reliability, manage the affordability issues while continuing to enable and build data centers.Michelle Weaver: You mentioned what a few different states are doing on this front. But data centers are not evenly distributed through states or evenly distributed across regions. Are there regional differences in how data center growth is impacting electricity prices?David Arcaro: There are a couple of key differences that we're seeing around the country. Some areas just aren't getting that many data centers, you know, so I'd point out the northeast – in New England, in New York, we're just not seeing that much data center growth. So, it's less of an issue, the impact of data center power demand impacting customer bills in those areas. And then in some regions around the country, the utility structure is important to be aware of. There are some regions where the price of electricity fluctuates based on the supply and demand of power, rather than being directly set and controlled by a regulator. In those markets, data centers can actually more directly impact the price of electricity and there just isn't an easy way in that case to ring fence them and protect consumers from the impact of price increases.So that's where we think unique challenges can arise. And over time, we would expect to see the most meaningful rate impacts to consumers in those areas specifically. And examples would be New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio. Those are a couple of the states where we're seeing those more volatile and directly impacted prices.So, as we look at utilities, we think the state exposure is going to be more and more important. And so, a few companies like NextEra, Sempra and AEP are a few utilities that are in states that have less affordability concerns and less direct exposure to rate impacts from data centers. And then several power companies like Vistra and Talen have more of their power plants that are in states that have excess infrastructure; and as a result, potentially less affordability concerns.So, clearly the energy sector is facing real challenges and changes. So, Michelle, how are rising electricity bills actually affecting U.S. households?Michelle Weaver: It's putting even more pressure on a consumer that's already being stretched thin by multiple years of inflation and elevated price levels, and electricity is a really different type of good. It's very different from gasoline or other consumer goods or staples – in that it's an essential good. You need to have it. And it's a network service that households are structurally locked into. Unlike gas where you could adjust your trip frequency or take a different type of transport, there really aren't good substitutes for electricity.And so this dynamic weighs on consumers. They have to continue paying these bills, and it weighs particularly heavily on lower income consumers where utility bills make up a much larger portion of their household budget.So, it crowds out some of that other potential spending.David Arcaro: That makes a lot of sense. It's an important expense to consider in terms of the impact on consumers. And, you know, as a result, are consumers blaming data center electricity demand for this rise that we're seeing in bills or are they pushing back?Michelle Weaver: Yeah. Data center development is quickly becoming a NIMBY or “not in my backyard” issue with communities pushing back and even getting projects canceled. Companies really need to find ways to address local concerns about environmental and water related externalities. And message that they're able to insulate consumers, or do something to mitigate these potentially higher electricity bills.A recent poll of around 2200 voters found that just over half of respondents attribute overall electricity price increases to AI data centers, at least somewhat. While around another third, consider them very responsible. And these responses are consistent across all regions and across political affiliations. And I think this consistency across regions is really interesting. As we're talking about before, data centers are not impacting bills in every region. But consumers are still blaming them and still attributing bill increases there.It's clear that both the energy sector and U.S. consumers are navigating a complex landscape with data center growth at the center of the conversation. As policy responses evolve and the U.S. midterm elections approach, this issue is only going to gain more attention. And we'll be sure to bring you the latest. Dave, thanks for taking the time to talk.David Arcaro: Great speaking with you, Michelle.Michelle Weaver: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

Our Chief Cross-Asset Strategist Serena Tang discusses how current market conditions are challenging traditional investment strategies and what that means for asset allocation.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Serena Tang, Morgan Stanley's Chief Cross-Asset Strategist.Today – does the 60/40 portfolio still make sense, and what can investors expect from long-term market returns?It's Monday, December 22nd at 10am in New York.Global equities have rallied by more than 35 percent from lows made in April. And U.S. high grade fixed income has seen the last 12 months' returns reach 5 percent, above the averages over the last 10 years. This raises important questions about future returns and how investors might want to adapt their portfolios.Now, our work shows that long-run expected returns for equities are lower than in previous decades, while fixed income – think government bonds and corporate bonds – still offers relatively elevated returns, thanks to higher yields.Let's put some numbers to it. Over the next decade, we project global equities to deliver an annualized return of nearly 7 percent, with the S&P 500 just behind at 6.8 percent. European and Japanese equities stand out, potentially returning about 8 percent. Emerging markets, however, lag at just about 4 percent. On the bond side, we think U.S. Treasuries with a 10-year maturity will return nearly 5 percent per year, German Bunds nearly 4 [percent], and Japanese government bonds nearly 2 [percent]. They may sound low, but it's all above their long-run averages.But here's where it gets interesting. The extra return you get for taking on risk – what we call the risk premium – has compressed across the board. In the U.S., the equity risk premium is just 2 percent. And for emerging markets, it's actually negative at around -1 percent. In very plain terms, investors aren't being paid as much for taking on risk as they used to be.Now, why is this the case? It's because valuations are rich, especially in the U.S. But we also need to put these valuations in context. Yes, the S&P 500's cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio is near the highest level since the dotcom bubble. But the quality of the S&P 500 has improved dramatically over the past few decades. Companies are more profitable, and free cash flow -- money left after expenses -- is almost three times higher than it was in 2000. So, while valuations are rich, there's some justification for it.The lower risk premiums for stocks and credits, regardless of whether we think they are justified or not, has very interesting read across for investors' multi-asset portfolios. The efficient frontier – meaning the best possible return for any given level of portfolio risk – has shifted. It's now flatter and lower than in previous years. So, it means taking on more risk in a portfolio right now won't necessarily boost returns as much as before.Now, let's turn our attention to the classic 60/40 portfolio – the mix of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds that's been a staple strategy for generations. After a tough 2022, this strategy has bounced back, delivering above-average returns for three years in a row. Looking ahead, though, we expect only around 6 percent annual returns for a 60/40 portfolio over the next decade versus around 9 percent average return historically. Importantly though, advances in AI could keep stocks and bonds moving more in sync than they used to be. If that happens, investors might benefit from increasing their equity allocation beyond the traditional 60/40 split.Either way, it's important to realize that the optimal mix of stocks and bonds is not static and should be revisited as market dynamics evolve.In a world where risk assets feel expensive and the old rules don't quite fit, it's essential to understand how risk, return, and correlation work together. This will help you navigate the next decade. The 60/40 portfolio isn't dead – and optimal multi-asset allocation weights are evolving. And so should you.Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.