Podcasts about Congratulations

I was wrong :( --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-philipkosky/support

What Happens when God calls us to reach someone who doesn't look like us, think like us or act like us?" What if God called us to preach the Gospel to someone who hates Christians? That's exactly what happened to a man named Annanias in the book of Acts, when God called him to speak to Saul, a man who was persecuting Christians at the time. But Annanias saying yes to God, even when it was uncomfortable, led to a man who was killing Christians to become one of the greatest men for Jesus the world has ever known. What miracle could be waiting to happen if you just said "yes" to God?Prayed to accept Jesus? Congratulations!Text SAVED to 337-222-3210 or click here https://bit.ly/CC_saved

Congratulations to 2022 Stanley Cup Champion Colorado Avalanche! On this edition of the pod we conclude our Stanley Cup Playoff coverage talking all about the Champs, how the Avs beat the Bolts in 6 games and what comes next....How they were built (:57)The speed game (2:47)More on Avs win/build(6:07)Game 6 breakdown(8:36)Who stays? Who goes? (11:36)Josh Manson (21:20)Darcy Kuemper (25:16) Our Sports Interaction (28:46) features our inside look at the early odds for the 2023 Stanley Cup.In the 2nd half of the pod (31:07) we talk more about the other side of the Cup Final and what the future might look like for the Tampa Bay Lightning. What could happen with Ondrej Palat? What will their roster look like next season and what tough decision do they have?And in our Ultimate Hockey Fans Final Thoughts (41:47) we're getting very excited for the silly season now that the NHL summer is officially here!!!

Sports with Rod 6-27-2022 …Congratulations to the 2022 Stanley Cup Champion Colorado Avalanche

Josh and Gerald are back again as they break down what happened this weekend at the box office with a photo finish in the US between Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick with the Tom Cruise chart-topper hitting a new milestone along the way. Plus Gerald has thoughts on the much-talked-about Herogasm episode six of The Boys season three, and Ben Arnot from Smoking Hot Confessions returns to discuss issues over where the direction is headed for Marvel in phase four of their cinematic universe. All this and Josh and Gerald go old school as they stress the importance of Sega's upcoming multiplayer game Hyenas to a possible return to glory, and recognize the great legacy and bumpy future for Atari as they celebrate their 50th anniversary.  Gear up with your favorite Pop Culture Cosmos shirts and gifts in our TeePublic store at https://www.teepublic.com/user/pop-culture-cosmos Don't forget to Subscribe to our shows and leave us that 5-Star Review with your questions on Apple Podcasts or e-mail us at popculturecosmos@yahoo.com! Brought to you by Pop Culture Cosmos, RobMcZob.com, Indie Pods United, Lakers Fast Break, Inside Sports Fantasy Football, the novel Congratulations, You Suck (available for purchase HERE), Vampires and Vitae, and Retro City Games!

Josh and Gerald are back again as they break down what happened this weekend at the box office with a photo finish in the US between Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick with the Tom Cruise chart-topper hitting a new milestone along the way. Plus Gerald has thoughts on the much-talked-about Herogasm episode six of The Boys season three, and Ben Arnot from Smoking Hot Confessions returns to discuss issues over where the direction is headed for Marvel in phase four of their cinematic universe. All this and Josh and Gerald go old school as they stress the importance of Sega's upcoming multiplayer game Hyenas to a possible return to glory, and recognize the great legacy and bumpy future for Atari as they celebrate their 50th anniversary. Gear up with your favorite Pop Culture Cosmos shirts and gifts in our TeePublic store at https://www.teepublic.com/user/pop-culture-cosmos Don't forget to Subscribe to our shows and leave us that 5-Star Review with your questions on Apple Podcasts or e-mail us at popculturecosmos@yahoo.com! Brought to you by Pop Culture Cosmos, RobMcZob.com, Indie Pods United, Lakers Fast Break, Inside Sports Fantasy Football, the novel Congratulations, You Suck (available for purchase HERE), Vampires and Vitae, and Retro City Games! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/pop-culture-cosmos-one-ho/support

Hello beautiful souls! Today's episode was such a fun one to record as my guest Dr. Julia Mossbridge walks us through the many ways science and spirituality can go hand in hand. Julia teaches us how science can be used to find your spiritual gifts and uncover your purpose. We also chat about being in a state of unconditional love - oneness - and how that opens you up to many more benefits and messages from Spirit. Julia's degrees are in neuroscience and communication sciences and disorders. She's the author of multiple books including ‘The Calling: A 12-Week Science-Based Program to Discover, Energize, and Engage Your Soul's Work' and ‘Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness.'    To learn more about Julia and her organizations: Loveandtime.org (Teaching unconditional love and mental time travel) Thepremonitioncode.com thecallingprogram.com   ++++++++++   Upcoming Events:  Buy a ticket to Julie's upcoming events here: https://theangelmedium.com/events     Work With Julie: Book A Discovery Call with Julie: https://calendly.com/juliejancius/discovery-call Buy Julie's Book titled, Angels and Awakening, on: amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com Angel Reiki School. Learn to bring through angel messages: https://theangelmedium.com/get-certified Angel Membership Waitlist. Get access to Julie's past courses and new LIVE events almost every week: https://theangelmedium.com/angelmembership Private Mentorship with Julie: Email juliejancius@gmail.com for details! Book a Session with Julie or an Angel Reader on her team: https://theangelmedium.com/readings     Be Our Angel: Share this podcast on your social media accounts! Volunteer your time/skills: Email JulieJancius@gmail.com Write a 5-Star Positive Review and we'll enter you into a monthly drawing to win a free 20-minute reading with Julie*. Don't forget to give us your contact info, so we can let you know if you win! Congratulations to Carolina G. who is our winner for the month of June!       Join Me on the Socials Website: www.theangelmedium.com Instagram: instagram.com/angelpodcast/ Facebook Group: facebook.com/groups/angelpodcast TikTok: @angelpodcast

Welcome to Discover More Podcast. Congratulations on choosing curiosity over complacency. This week's guest is Dr. Trang Hoang, Ph.D., LCSW. Dr. Hoang is a professor at the USC School of Social Work, former division director at SSG Alliance, and received her graduate and doctorate degrees at UCLA. This is a very special episode because Dr. Hoang does not do media appearances due to her high emphasis on privacy, so this may be the first and last time you hear from her directly. Dr. Hoang has seven publications under her name and is the co-chair of the AAPI Equity Alliance Mental Health Subcommittee, and served on numerous regional and national associations, such as the UCLA Conflict Resolution & Mediation Team and Council on Social Work Education. Dr. Hoang directly experienced the horrific reality of wars in southern Vietnam and the subsequent refugee experience when she was young, before seeking safety in the United States. Do you ever wonder why life is full of suffering? Do you get stuck in your negative thought patterns and self-talk? Do you want to improve your mental health? Expect to learn a lot about Dr. Hoang's horrific refugee survival experience on a boat, how to improve your mental health, be self-compassionate when it's the hardest, and more. Let's get this started. Show Notes Dr. Hoang's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trang-hoang-6b8b1643/ Dr. Hoang's Email: Thcongviec@gmail.com * Welcome to Discover More Podcast, a community for seekers of curiosity & mental health insights. I am your host, Benoit Kim. A trilingual Korean American veteran and former policy maker. I became a clinician after witnessing the nonnegotiable of mental health and nuanced perspectives in our everyday life. I intend to connect and dissect the intricacies of life by talking to the most fascinating humans I can find. * Thank you for Discovering More with us! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/discovermore/support

Ep. 61 - Rory James of Mutilated Tyrant (recorded July 2020). This week I revisit another interview from the Soundcloud vaults. This interview took place back in July 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. We discuss Mutilated Tyrants origins, influences, and being on Revolver's 'Metal From The Dirt' documentary. Track after the interview is "Under The Cold Dark Moon" by Mutilated Tyrant. -- Mutilated Tyrant will perform at Gallup NM on Friday July 8th 2022 at the Juggernaut along with H.M.B.D., Alliance, Death Mantra, Alchemy, and Black Mountain. Preorder tickets from the bands or get them at the door. -- Congratulations to Mutilated Tyrant for being added to the 2023 Inferno Festival Norway in Oslo. Inferno Metal Festival will take place April 6-9 2023. Visit www.infernofestival.net for more info. — Opening song is by Tribal Kills "Fire In The Sky" (check them out): www.youtube.com/watch?v=adVxRpSaqgI -- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mutilatedtyrant -- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mutilatedty... -- Bandcamp: https://mutilatedtyrant.bandcamp.com/ -- Inferno Festival: https://www.infernofestival.net

 Close a Series A round and that's a sign the venture capital community believes this is a company with a definite future.Congratulations to equipifi, which just closed a $12 million financing round.  In this podcast equipifi CEO Bryce Deeney - a December 2021 guest on the podcast in a full length show - tells why equipifi impressed VCs, what he sees as the company's future, and why credit unions need to be looking hard and now at deploying BNPL.Yes, BNPL has recently hit some bumps in the road - I explore that in a recent CUInsight blog - but Deeney is confident that BNPL will win a place in the lending portfolio of most credit unions.A key will be smart, savvy deployment. He talks about this.Don't miss this podcast. You need to get BNPL on your institution's roadmap. Starting about now.Listen up.

The guys return to talk about what could lie ahead for the team with the NBA Draft in the rear view mirror, and contract opt-ins and NBA Free Agency looming on the horizon this week. Tune in as Joe Soro for lakersball.com, LakerTom and Jamie Sweet from lakerholics.com, Kenneth Stone and "MagicMan" Sean Grice talk with Gerald Glassford about what could potentially be a big week ahead for the team. Could John Wall or Kyrie Irving be an option? Is Russell Westbrook staying the plan all along? Hear our thoughts on the options the Lakers have and thoughts on how it could positively (or negatively) affect the Lakers season on our latest Lakers Fast Break podcast! For the latest news and information on the NBA Draft, subscribe today at NBABigBoard.com and catch the NBA Big Board and Upside Swings shows wherever you get your podcasts. Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to our channel and our social media @lakersfastbreak on Twitter. If you have questions for us give us a shout-out on Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook or send us your thoughts to lakersfastbreak@yahoo.com. Gear up with your favorite Lakers Fast Break shirts and gifts in our Pop Culture Cosmos TeePublic store at https://www.teepublic.com/user/pop-culture-cosmos Presented by our friends at the Hoop Heads Podcast Network, ThriveFantasy, NBA Draft Junkies, lakerholics.com, lakersball.com, Pop Culture Cosmos, Inside Sports Fantasy Football, Vampires and Vitae, the novel Congratulations, You Suck (available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble) and Retro City Games! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lakers-fast-break/support

Congratulations to the Colorado Avalanche for winning the Stanley cup.. Now that the season's over be ready for a lot of content concerning the off season trades for agency free agency get ourselves ready for hockey nor hockey October go stars --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeff-mclaughlin/support

Congratulations to Keegan Murray on being the number four overall pick in the NBA draft. Iowa received commitments from ‘23 basketball recruit Brock Harding and legacy recruit in the ‘24 class, Cooper Koch, both from Illinois. Kendrick Raphael from Florida picked the Hawkeyes as a running back in the ‘23 class, and Iowa landed a DL from Des Moines and a big OT from IL.

This episode was recorded prior to the Mrs. Ohio 2022 pageant. Congratulations to your new Mrs. Ohio 2022! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thepageantbuzz/support

Your Car Insiders Episode #348 - The Average Monthly Car Payment Hits $712  This program was created so that we may be your personal advocate through your car buying experience. We will find the best price for your chosen vehicle, the highest price possible for your trade if applicable and sit with you through the finance process. Our service is unique in that we are with you throughout every phase of your purchase from beginning to end, from the initial handshake “Hello” to the final handshake with “Congratulations and enjoy your new car!” You deserve to understand, be comfortable with and be in control of every step of your vehicle purchase. Show Partners: Precision Auto Care [www.precisionautoshop.com] David R. Farney, PLC [www.azinjuryatty.com] Cobblestone Auto Spa AZ [www.cobblestone.com] Precision Dealer Services [www.precisiondealerservices.com] See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

S6E559 - Aired: Friday, June 24, 2022 – ALL NEW: 6th Season Finale! PLUS, Inside Scoop with Rufus!; Inside Scoop with Rufus: #WillSmith, #SnoopDogg, #MasterP, & more; The Gospel News with Nina Taylor: This Week: Dottie Peoples, The NFL has a new owner, #MelodyHobson, Lisa Knowles, and The Top 10 Songs! Congratulations to Dawkins & Dawkins, with their song "Come by Here" at No. 1! - www.therh3show.com. All New Shows Return: July 18, 2022 Stay Safe, Stay Protected, Stay Home! *No Copyright Infringement intended!!! We do not own the rights to the music that's being played*. ---- Copyright Disclaimer: Excerpts from books, blogs, social media, and public figures protected by Fair Use Clause of the Copyright Act which states - Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A but under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, education and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. ---- #Entertainment, #BlackAlbinism ---- #TheRH3Show Follow The RH3 Show See it first. See it now. Only at www.therh3show.com www.facebook.com/therh3show www.instagram.com/therh3show www.twitter.com/therh3show www.youtube.com/iRepASavior ---- The views expressed here are those of the guests and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of any affiliates of The RH3 Show. ---- Health Minute Disclaimer, please visit: www.therh3show.com. ---- How to listen to The RH3 Show at 6 pm est. M-F on @gospel107.1, you can go to my website www.therh3show.com to check times of airplay, or subscribe to one of the major podcast platforms ... #iHeartRadio, #Spotify, #ApplePodcasts, #GooglePlayMusic, #AnchorFM, other Podcast platforms and search "The RH3 Show". #Gospel107FM, #KitchenTableTalk, #InsideScoopWithRufus, #RealTalkWithRufus, #TRH3S, #TheRH3Show, #BlackAlbino, #AskRufusLetter, #AdviceLetters, #DaytimeTalkShow, #DaytimeTV, #RadioStation, #EntertainmentTalk, Debmar Mercury, OWN, TVOne, Endemol Shine, Tyler Perry Studios, FoxSoul --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/therh3show/message

Greetings Beautiful Beings

Welcome to Week 25 of Bishop Earl Boyea's Disciples Together on the Way challenge. This week is a Review Week. Time to pause, pray and pick your toughest challenge. God bless you. Here's Bishop Boyea's script in full: Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, We are now well into the second third of our yearlong pilgrimage as Disciples Together on the Way. Congratulations and thanks for staying with your commitment. From our beginning in January, we have made it to the summer! As with any long trip, however, it makes good sense to pull over from time to time and see how the journey is going so far.  Maybe there is a need to stretch the legs, have a bit of refreshment and be certain we haven't lost anything along the way.  With that sense of journeying together for the long haul, this week I invite you once again to look back and choose a challenge from the previous weeks and engage in it again.  A list of all the challenges can be viewed by clicking here. It could be a challenge which you struggled with before. Perhaps now will be the right time, with God's grace, for success.  Being willing to re-challenge ourselves is a sign of growth in developing the habits of a disciple.Hopefully there was a challenge in the past months which brought you joy, peace or a new closeness to the Lord. Maybe you lived Lent in a new way through renewed prayer, sacrifice, or the Stations of the Cross. It could be that a relationship was rekindled through your prayer or deliberate thanks. If there was a challenge you wanted more of, pick it up again and work towards keeping it as a lasting habit.Regardless of what you choose to revisit this week, know that the on-ramp to the road of discipleship is never closed for repair.  The love of God invites us back after every falter, flat tire, or detour.  Enjoy the journey, we are in this together! And may God bless you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. + Earl BoyeaBishop of Lansing

Melinda Barkhouse-Ross seizes the opportunity to exact her revenge as she and Gerald talk about the good and bad of the Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi Series Finale (SPOILERS!) plus should there be a season 2? They also give a Ms. Marvel update, share some love for Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness with its look on television, and some head-scratching on a busy week for Disney plus. All this and a preview of the weekend box office with new additions of the horror movie Black Phone and will the Elvis biopic reach a younger audience. The duo can't also forget about Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe on Paramount+ (even Robbie Ross jumps in to share thoughts), Westworld season four and after the Diablo 4 snafu, Gerald eats some "crow" and becomes a turkey. What do we mean by that? Find out as we step back into the PCC multiverse once again! Gear up with your favorite Pop Culture Cosmos shirts and gifts in our TeePublic store at https://www.teepublic.com/user/pop-culture-cosmos Don't forget to Subscribe to our shows and leave us that 5-Star Review with your questions on Apple Podcasts or e-mail us at popculturecosmos@yahoo.com! Brought to you by Pop Culture Cosmos, RobMcZob.com, Indie Pods United, Lakers Fast Break, Inside Sports Fantasy Football, the novel Congratulations, You Suck (available for purchase HERE), Vampires and Vitae, and Retro City Games!

Melinda Barkhouse-Ross seizes the opportunity to exact her revenge as she and Gerald talk about the good and bad of the Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi Series Finale (SPOILERS!) plus should there be a season 2? They also give a Ms. Marvel update, share some love for Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness with its look on television, and some head-scratching on a busy week for Disney plus. All this and a preview of the weekend box office with new additions of the horror movie Black Phone and will the Elvis biopic reach a younger audience. The duo can't also forget about Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe on Paramount+ (even Robbie Ross jumps in to share thoughts), Westworld season four and after the Diablo 4 snafu, Gerald eats some "crow" and becomes a turkey. What do we mean by that? Find out as we step back into the PCC multiverse once again! Gear up with your favorite Pop Culture Cosmos shirts and gifts in our TeePublic store at https://www.teepublic.com/user/pop-culture-cosmos Don't forget to Subscribe to our shows and leave us that 5-Star Review with your questions on Apple Podcasts or e-mail us at popculturecosmos@yahoo.com! Brought to you by Pop Culture Cosmos, RobMcZob.com, Indie Pods United, Lakers Fast Break, Inside Sports Fantasy Football, the novel Congratulations, You Suck (available for purchase HERE), Vampires and Vitae, and Retro City Games! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/pop-culture-cosmos-one-ho/support

"MagicMan" Sean Grice stops by as the Lakers did buy their way into the second round of tonight's 2022 NBA Draft after a trade with Orlando and selected Michigan State guard Max Christie with the 35th pick. Was this a good move for now or later? Plus he and Gerald share some quick thoughts on some possible winners and losers of tonight's festivities and why so much Lakers attention was still toward the latest Kyrie Irving news on the Lakers Fast Break podcast! For the latest news and information on the NBA Draft, subscribe today at NBABigBoard.com and catch the NBA Big Board podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to our channel and our social media @lakersfastbreak on Twitter. If you have questions for us give us a shout-out on Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook or send us your thoughts to lakersfastbreak@yahoo.com. Gear up with your favorite Lakers Fast Break shirts and gifts in our Pop Culture Cosmos TeePublic store at https://www.teepublic.com/user/pop-culture-cosmos Presented by our friends at the Hoop Heads Podcast Network, ThriveFantasy, NBA Draft Junkies, lakerholics.com, lakersball.com, Pop Culture Cosmos, Inside Sports Fantasy Football, Vampires and Vitae, the novel Congratulations, You Suck (available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble) and Retro City Games! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lakers-fast-break/support

Congratulations to RACHEL from ALLENBY GARDENS! The Winner of Mix102.3's Trip Of A Lifetime thanks to Fiji Airways! YOU'RE heading to New York to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Congratulations to WSFM's Trip of a Lifetime winner – DEBBIE from LETHBRIDGE PARK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Radio International - The Ultimate Eurovision Experience is broadcast from Malta's Radio 105FM on Tuesday evenings from 2100 - 0059 hours CET. The show is also broadcast on SWITCH Radio Essex in the United Kingdom live on Wednesday evenings from 1900 - 2300 hours CET as well as on the Facebook Page of Eurovision Radio International with an interactive chatroom.   AT A GLANCE - ON THE SHOW THIS WEEK Eurovision Song Contest 2022 Post Eurovision Depression Cure (Dose 6) - Interviews and clips with the Eurovision Stars 2022 in Turin  Interview with the Kalush Orchestra (Eurovsion Winner 2022, Ukraine) Interview with Nadir Rustamli (Azerbaijan 2022, Number 16) Interview with Mia Dimsic (Croatia 2022, Semi Final 1 Number 11) Interview with Stefan (Estonia 2022, Number 13) Interview with Malik Harris (Germany 2022, Number 25) Interview with Mahmood and Blanco (Italy 2022, Number 6) Interview with WRS (Romania 2022, Number 18) Interview with Ronela (Albania 2022, Semi Final 1 Number 12) Interview with Konstrakta (Serbia 2022, Number 5) Interview with Reddi (Denmark 2022, Semi Final 1 Number 13) Eurovision Cover Spot and The Eurovision Birthday File with David Mann Eurovision Spotlight: Eurovision Song Contest 2022 - The Assessment with Ross Bennett Eurovision Spotlight Special with Nick van Lith from escXtra.com Your music requests New Music Releases by Eurovision Artists   Eurovision Song Contest 2022 - Post Eurovision Depression (PED) Cure: Dose 6 of the PED Cure is on the way with Dr. JP and his nurses. After two Semi Finals and an amazing Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 huge CONGRATULATIONS goes to the Kalush Orchestra for winning the 66th Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Stefania" receiving the highest public vote ever in the history of the contest. Below is the Scoreboard. Ukraine's Kalush Orchestra winning Eurovision 2022 The website of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 can be viewed here and the also over on Wikipedia The Eurovision Song Contest 2022 Scoreboard       During the next few weeks Radio International will be your Ultimate Post Eurovision Depression  (PED) Cure broadcasting interviews the Radio International Team did in Turin during the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 and of course play your favourite songs from the contest. Listen to Interviews, Turkoise Carpet Clips from the Opening Reception, Press Conferences Clips with  Kalush Orchestra (Eurovision Winner 2022, Ukraine), Konstrakta (Serbia 2022), Nadir Rustamli (Azerbaijan 2022), Mia Dimsic (Croatia 2022) Stefan (Estonia 2022), Malik Harris (Germany 2022), Mahmood and Blanco (Italy 2022), WRS (Romania 2022), Ronela (Albania 2022) and Reddi (Denmark 2022)  - looking back at two weeks of our beloved Eurovision Song Contest 2022 in Turin, Italy. The Radio International Interview Hall of Fame: During the Interview Sessions Radio International takes photos and videos which you can find on the Radio International Interview Hall of Fame 2020 and 2021. To view the photos done during the interviews - click here - for the Radio International Hall of Fame Photo Album. This is the Hall of Fame: DANA, Charlotte Perrelli, Linda Martin, Niamh Kavanagh, Katrina of Katrina and the Waves, Charlie McGettigan, Emmelie de Forest, Scott Fitzgerald, Eldar of Ell and Nikki, Sanna Nielsen, Hera Björk, Lina Hedlund and Andreas Lundstedt from Alcazar, Poli Genova, Ira Losco, Jan Johansen Nicki French, Debbie Scerri, Rasmussen, Senhit, Rainer from Wind, Jalisse, Maja Keuc (Amaya),Thomas Forstner, Lisa Andreas, Esther Hart, Vanilla Ninja, Maja Keuc (Amaya), Sibel Tüzün, Sidsel Ben Semmane, Monika Linkyte, Intelligent Music Project (Bulgaria 2022), Mia Dimsic (Croatia 2022), Andrea (North Macedonia 2022), Brooke Scullion (Ireland 2022), Citi Zeni (Latvia 2022), Ochman (Poland 2022), Anna Bergendahl, The Roop, Bilal of NorthKid, Cyan Kicks, Justs, James Newman, Serhat, Vanessa Amarosi, Lesley Roy, Brooke, Franklin, Martina Majerle of Quartissimo, Miriam Christine, Claudia Faniello, Fabrizio Faniello, Chanel, Jordan Ravi, Viorela Moraru, Mia Negovetic, Parvani Violet Vasil, Janice Mangion, Mariette, KEiiNO, Anett Kublin (Anett and Fredi), Tess Merkel, Glen Vella, Anton Ewald, Katrina Dimanta formerly of Aarzemnieki, ManuElla, Tusse, Blind Channel, Danny Saucedo, Jendrik, Tornike Kipiani, GO_A, Kurt Calleja, Rafał Brzozowski, Barbara Pravi, Fyr og Flamme, almost all artists from the Eurovision 2021 and 2022 class.   Find out more details of how to tune in live - click here For full details of this week's Show Content and Play List - click here

On this episode, Producer Seal and Travis talk about the NHL awards, the NBA Finals, and the upcoming NBA Draft!

Congratulations to Sue and Kendra for winning another Gracie Award for their Exceptional Women Podcast. This year, Sue and Kendra won for BEST INTERVIEW FEATURE for their interview with Golden Globe and Emmy winning actress Kyra Sedgwick. We are so proud of them!

Hello beautiful souls! Amber Rae returns to the podcast to share her angel story where she followed the literal push of the spirit! Amber Rae is an artist, speaker, and author of 'The Answers Are Within You.' Today, she reveals how following Spirit led her from one beautiful moment to the next and how much her life changed from then on.   You can learn more about Amber at the following: https://www.amberrae.com/ Instagram @heyamberrae   +++++++++++   Upcoming Events:  Buy a ticket to Julie's upcoming events here: https://theangelmedium.com/events     Work With Julie: Book A Discovery Call with Julie: https://calendly.com/juliejancius/discovery-call Buy Julie's Book titled, Angels and Awakening, on: amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com Angel Reiki School. Learn to bring through angel messages: https://theangelmedium.com/get-certified Angel Membership Waitlist. Get access to Julie's past courses and new LIVE events almost every week: https://theangelmedium.com/angelmembership Private Mentorship with Julie: Email juliejancius@gmail.com for details! Book a Session with Julie or an Angel Reader on her team: https://theangelmedium.com/readings     Be Our Angel: Share this podcast on your social media accounts! Volunteer your time/skills: Email JulieJancius@gmail.com Write a 5-Star Positive Review and we'll enter you into a monthly drawing to win a free 20-minute reading with Julie*. Don't forget to give us your contact info, so we can let you know if you win! Congratulations to Carolina G. who is our winner for the month of June!       Join Me on the Socials Website: www.theangelmedium.com Instagram: instagram.com/angelpodcast/ Facebook Group: facebook.com/groups/angelpodcast TikTok: @angelpodcast

Joe Soltis, CEO, ChoiceLocal (Cleveland, OH)   Joe Soltis is CEO at ChoiceLocal, which Joe describes as “the top performing franchise growth engine” with a “money back guarantee.” The agency offers a wide scope of services for franchisors and franchisees of over 50 brands, enabling them to provide “Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI on the franchisee level” for a “small and medium size business price.”  Large clients might be parent companies of franchise systems, franchisors owning 20 or more franchise systems where each system may have from 20 to 200 franchisees – and up to as many as 6,000 internal franchise units. Small franchise systems may have 10 units. For these smaller clients, the agency facilitates franchise development, consumer, new customer, location, company, and digital talent recruitment marketing. Joe says hiring is a challenge, especially in the franchise space. The agency needs to understand its client's hiring needs, the kind of candidates it desires, and the historical hire rates to know the number of applicants to target . . . then reverse engineer the hire rate/cost per quality candidate by channel and implement the most effective marketing strategy to ensure future growth. Joe says they use the same channels as they do for consumer marketing (in a different order), plus some that are recruitment specific. Joe notes that franchise operations need to beware . . . a lot of agencies will lock clients into proprietary technology solutions . . . that don't fit. ChoiceLocal strives to find the right tools for each client to build a “win-win” ecosystem where franchisor, franchisee, and the agency all win. He says it's important that the tool providers are companies sensitive to client needs, adaptable to a changing market, and willing to invest in “making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers.” Joe started his career working his way up for 10 years in a company that grew to serve Fortune 500 companies. At a time of great personal loss, he changed the direction of his life. In his words, I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” Joe started ChoiceLocal with the mission “to help others” – the agency's franchisor and franchisee partners, agency teammates (to make their dreams and aspirations reality), and people in the community.  Joe structured the agency with the goal of having employees work their 40-hours, then “unplug and leave work at work.” With a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s (far exceeding the “good” score, which is in the 30s), the agency has been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio for the past five years. When Covid struck, the agency created a ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package to help its customers “grow through the downturn,” an initiative that Joe estimates saved 30 franchisees from going out of business.  Giving back to the community is “baked into” the agency's DNA, with 10% of profits dedicated to helping “kids in need.” Joe says the agency's “big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year.” As of this interview, the agency had already helped 6,000 kids in 2022 through such things as meal programs, partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide a home for an in-need family, and through team members' personal volunteer work in the community. Joe says the next thing after achieving this goal would be to “raise the goal.” Recently, the agency spun off a dental franchise, Broadview Dental Group, which Joe targets to be “the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years.” Expectations are that dentists following this franchise system “can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it.” In this franchise system, a dentist maintains 100% of the business's equity and, on retirement, can sell the franchise. Joe can be reached on his agency's website at choicelocal.com, by following ChoiceLocal on social media channels @ChoiceLocal, by following Joe on Twitter @helpothersjoe, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn.  ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Joe Soltis, CEO at ChoiceLocal based in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Joe. JOE: Rob, great to be with you today. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about ChoiceLocal? What is the firm's specialty? What is your superpower? What are you known for? Hit us with it. JOE: We're the top performing franchise growth engine. We work exclusively with franchisors and franchisees, and the reason we do that is we want to give Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI, but we want to be able to do it when you look on the franchisee level at a small and medium size business price while delivering that. When we do that, we offer a money back guarantee. We're the first and only franchise marketing agency to offer that money back guarantee. We work with 50+ brands. We're one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., members of the IFA, the whole nine yards.  ROB: Wow, congratulations. There's a certain clarity to that that is certainly appreciated. Let's peel it back just a layer. When we think about franchise, I think some of us think about restaurants, but there are franchises of all stripes. There is plumbing. There are franchise marketing agencies, for that matter. So what does a typical customer look like? Is there a particular range of franchises, of locations? Because you could have two or two thousand. What's a typical engagement look like? JOE: We work with some franchise systems that are owned by what we would call a platform, like a parent company that owns franchise systems. There are some franchisors that we work with that actually own 20+ franchise systems, and within each of those franchise systems there can range anywhere between 20 franchisees on the small side and 200 on the large side. So, we're talking within these companies 2,000-unit franchise operations, and some franchise systems that we work with even have 6,000+ franchise units within them. Also, on the other end of the spectrum, there are franchise systems that we work with that are 10-unit franchise systems. We power them on franchise development, we power them on consumer marketing and new customer marketing for their franchisees as well as their company and locations, and we also power their talent recruitment through digital marketing to drive highly qualified applicants. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge in today's world, and particularly within the franchising space. ROB: That's a little bit of a wider scope of services than I think we often hear in local marketing, especially once you get into the recruitment side. So that's interesting. Is it the same channels for getting customers in and getting employees in? Is it different? What's the mix of touchpoints there? JOE: It is the same channels, used in a different order, plus there are additional channels that are recruiting specific. Obviously, there's different job boards that are highly important in the recruiting space, and then there's also a whole host of digital channels that can be activated, from geotargeted Google Ads to Facebook advertising. Each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses. Our job within these franchise systems is to understand what their hiring needs are, who they're looking to hire, what their historical hire rates are so we know how many applicants we need to drive, and then we can also reverse engineer the hire rate by channel, and then we can from there figure out their cost per quality applicant by channel and then develop a marketing mix that's going to allow them to continue to grow. ROB: There's a lot going on there. Over time we've seen different platforms that have tried to jump to the forefront to help, I think, organizations like ChoiceLocal, handle marketing for multilocation, for franchises. What's the state of the tool ecosystem for this? Has any tool that tries to help with this problem and actually create a library of content to push out to different locations worked? Or has it not worked and you end up building some of those solutions yourselves? How do you look at dozens of locations, different local needs, some shared content, that sort of thing? JOE: There are a lot of agencies that will come in and sell franchise systems, their own proprietary tech in order to bring that about. What we've generally found is when these marketing agencies bring in their proprietary tech, it's more in the agency's interest and less in the interest of the franchisor and the franchisee. Essentially, it's “Here, take this marketing solution. Take our proprietary tech, and then it's impossible for you to leave us.” That's how they set that up, and it can create some difficulty and a lot of angst within these different franchise systems. When working in the franchising space, what you need to do is build a win-win ecosystem where the franchisor wins, the franchisee wins, and as a byproduct of that, as the agency you win as well. There's a whole host of various tools in this, from Rallio to WebPunch to SOCi. There's a lot of others. Yext. These are all various powerful tools that can be used and deployed. There's other powerful tools in the call tracking space, too. You have companies like CallRail who do a really strong job with this, with call analytics and those types of things. The job of the agency is to find the right tools that are right for that franchise system while also using their agency buying power to leverage economies of scale and do what's in the best interest of their client partners. ROB: If I hear you correctly, there's not a one-size-fits-all best franchise management tool. It is a little bit of a best of breed, it's a what are the needs of your particular brand/set of stores, that kind of thing. Sometimes it is Yext, maybe sometimes you bring CallRail to the table. You're the experts, and you're prescribing the menu that you recommend. JOE: Yeah, that is right. One thing, too, as you follow these companies – depending on how much they're investing in R&D, how much they're willing to listen to their customer, how much they're willing to allow their agency partners to fuel their product roadmap and guide their product roadmap – that's really how you're going to pick your partners, in large part. There's a lot of these SaaS companies that are not very customer service minded. They're more like “Get in, sign up for a product, and then leave us alone” kind of deal, and as an agency, that's not the kind of partner you're looking for. You're looking for ones that will invest in making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers. Why I say that is that's something to look out for in the beginning. And the other reason I say that is the companies that are willing to invest in their customer service also tend to invest in their product development, and you'll notice there's ebbs and flows of who's good and who's bad when they do this. And things change, so you've got to find a partner that's always looking to change and adapt with the market as it changes and evolves. ROB: It's interesting how the cast of characters has changed. When I google for this problem space, Hootsuite is out there, Content and Sprout are out there contending for just a small slice of that franchise deal. But you know they're chasing every other vertical in social as well. I can certainly appreciate – we're in Atlanta; CallRail is a neighbor company here. Do you know their roots a little bit? It's an interesting background on them. JOE: It's a really neat company. ROB: The founder started off with a site to help people with BMWs that were out of warranty to find a local repair shop. My understanding is if you have a BMW that's out of warranty, you need a local repair shop. That's what I've heard. So, he started off doing lead gen for these local shops and then built call tracking to help prove the value of his BMWershops.com website, and ended up building CallRail from it. JOE: What's neat about CallRail, too, is they really have come in – there's a lot of companies that historically have played in that place, and they really trounced them. Some of their advanced features and some of their call analytics, listening to calls, transcribing calls, turning them into qualified leads, or basically saying what's a qualified lead, what's a hot lead, what's not a lead, and how they built some of that technology – it's pretty cool stuff. ROB: Yeah, there's a tremendous customer focus there. I do want to shift gears for a moment; I want to get to the origin story of ChoiceLocal. What led you to create this firm? What led you to this point of focus, of all the areas you could have focused on helping and niches you could have served? JOE: I served at a company that served multibillion dollar companies. I was a Vice President of Operations of Product Development there. We served Fortune 500 companies – FedEx, CBS, other multibillion dollar publicly traded companies. That's where I spent my day and that's who I served. We built a team of 180 full-time digital marketers. Kind of a neat story. Started as employee #8, within a few years worked my way up to VP of Ops and Product Development and did that. It was cool. I learned a lot and I had some really great mentors while I was there. The owners there have done some really amazing things outside of agency, just building multimillion dollar companies and multibillion dollar companies and taking some of them public, like NCS Healthcare and others. So, I learned a ton while I was there over that 10-year period. Then in 2012, we had a pregnancy. Went into an ultrasound room with my wife and there was no heartbeat. So we lost our son, Ben, pretty late in the pregnancy. I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” That's actually how ChoiceLocal got started. In its simple form, our mission always has been – our mission and our core values were written prior to even having a business plan – our mission is help others. We help our partners succeed, our franchisor and franchisee partners, help their dreams and aspirations become a reality. We help our teammates' dreams and aspirations become a reality. We've been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio five years running. We have a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s, which is unheard of high. You ask people, “What is a good employee Net Promoter Score?”, the answer is 30. We're hanging out in the 70s. So, we really work to live that mission and really care about others. Working in the agency space, a lot of agencies will bring in talent, they will work them like crazy for like five years until they burn out, and then they leave and they go in-house. Having experienced that and have friends who've experienced that in other companies, I wanted to do something fundamentally different. That's why we founded ChoiceLocal and built it the way that we have. But our mission of help others is also giving back. We take 10% of the profits out of the company and we use it to help kids in need. Our big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year. We created the Benjamin Isaac Foundation, named after our son, Ben. We just gave a home to a single mother with three kids. Her name is Brie; she's got three beautiful boys. We just had their house dedication two weekends ago, and that was through Habitat for Humanity. We were the sole sponsor for the home. Got to meet her beautiful boys. We helped them move in, had the housewarming and a dedication. It was so cool. It's just so cool. We do tons of other stuff like that. So far this year – it's now June, and we are at a little over 6,000 kids that we've helped through various charities that we partner with. ROB: Well, 4,000 more to go and then another goal. JOE: Yes, raise the goal. ROB: There's a depth in that origin story. I think something that is interesting to think through – when you have a team, when you're giving to causes, how do you connect the day-to-day of what the team is doing to the causes that the company is giving to and really ensure that there's an authentic connection there? I think it can be very disconnected sometimes. Here's the owner, here's the team, we're building this stuff, some money got shot out over here – to a good cause, but maybe it doesn't feel relevant to the day-to-day. So how do you think about connecting the team to the cause? JOE: That's a great question. It's a really great question. The first thing is we hire for people that have the core values that we have. Family, giving, integrity in all things. There's certain ways that you can interview people to make sure that they have those. And if you actually study some of the psychology behind it, if you study various hiring techniques that are used in books like Topgrading and WHO and those types of things, there's ways you can interview for those core values and competencies to screen people out that don't have that. So, you're hiring people that believe what you believe and then you're coming into a culture that celebrates those core values and celebrates those things. For example, we have a team meeting every single month where we update on everything that's happening in the agency, what's going on with business strategy. We're transparent on financials and performance and all of those things so everybody can see what's going on. We have a part where we talk about help others and core values. In core values, people nominate teammates and they celebrate how they live those core values out, and we tell those stories. A lot of those core values are how we help our partners and internally, but it's also how we give back. And then we tie in our financial performance. We then say, “Because we were able to do this, we were able to give Brie and her three boys this gift.” We make it very personal. Along those lines, we also have quarterly volunteering. We try to get every teammate to volunteer once a quarter so they can see, feel, and touch the work they're doing. My personal favorite is when we go to the Boys and Girls Club of America. Those kids need love, they need support, they need good mentors, and when you go there, you feel fantastic afterwards because you've been able to deliver some of that for them. So that's really powerful. And then we also do this BHAG walkthrough. BHAG stands for big hairy audacious goal. We have this roadmap, and then we say, “Here's three kids that were helped because of this. Here's 1,600 kids that were fed for a year in a place of education.” We did this charity giveaway through our annual thing at the International Franchise Association called the ChoiceLocal 10k Charity Giveaway. People enter a drawing giveaway. There's a really cool story – there's a woman who served as a board member of the International Franchise Association; today she owns about 20 Taco Johns franchises. Very successful businesswomen. She picked the Great Harvest Heartland as her charity, and she ended up winning. What I found out after she won is that as a kid, she was so poor that she needed to go to the foodbank to eat. So, it was a very personal gift for her. That's the type of stuff that really hits home, when you always tie it to that personal story. And then when you say, “Because you were able to do this specifically,” and you name the person, “it allowed us to be able to do this.” Sorry, I'm passionate about this – the last thing I'll add to it is helping the business owner. This particular franchisee is having a really hard time and they're on the verge of going out of business. We had a good amount of this through COVID. We announced the ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package for our customers. We have this whole “grow through the downturn” quarterly priority and theme. We saved probably 30 franchisees from going out of business during COVID, and that was really cool. We celebrated each one of those as a company during the team meetings and made a really big deal out of it, because it's a huge deal. They put their life savings into the business. Together, we helped save their business. That's flipping awesome. It's really cool. ROB: What an opportunity. I hear a certain proximity that you're referring to within the team. Is all of your team right there, one office, one team? Is that your world, or are people in different places? JOE: It used to be that way, pre-COVID. We were in the office three days a week, and Monday/Friday work from home. COVID hit and we went 100% remote. Then we had highest teammate Net Promoter Score ever, highest client Net Promoter Score ever, highest revenue ever by far, highest profit dollars. We're like, this is working really well. So we surveyed our team and said, “What do you guys want to do?” and everybody said basically, work from home, come into the office once. So, we instituted that. What we then found is about 10-15% of our staff in a given week would come into the office, and they'd come in on different days, and when they came in there was like 3% of our staff there. It felt a little lonely, and some people like that connectedness. So I just met with our leadership team on this this past week; we're probably going to be instituting now – we do a lot of stuff on Slack. I know a lot of companies do. Basically, we're going to have ChoiceLocal In-Office Day. It's going to be completely optional, but everybody that's going to go is going to go into Slack, fill out this poll, and RSVP and say “Hey, I'm going to be in the office this day” and try to get other teammates to come in. And then they're going to have a group of probably 30-40% of the company in on that individual day, and they can hang out together. Plus we do all the fun stuff. We have team meets once a month. Those are in person. About half the company comes to those; the rest are virtual. We bring in catered food. We're in Cleveland, so we're going to watch a Cleveland Guardians, which used to be the Cleveland Indians, game. ROB: Yeah, that's an adjustment there as well. JOE: Stuff like that. We do Topgolf. We do a big Christmas party every year. Stuff like that. It's fun. It's so fun. ROB: It sounds like an adjustment, but it sounds like listening to the team, it sounds like adjusting well. When I think about folks I've known in the agency world in Cleveland, there's no shortage of opportunity to lose your team to the revolving door of brands. That seems like it's probably the way of life there – not to mention the regional opportunities with vendors. It really does take some work to keep them on the agency side, I think. JOE: Historically, at my prior agency that was definitely a continual challenge. We launched ChoiceLocal with the mission of help others, with the goal – we're not perfect at this; I don't want to sugarcoat it – but with the goal of being a fast-paced, high energy environment, but you work 40 hours, then you unplug and you leave work at work. We were able to build our systems so that's possible. We historically have had almost no turnover. Now, with that said, this year during COVID, our turnover rate has spiked a bit, but it's nothing like I was ever used to. In a year we would have maybe, out of 100 people, like 1 to 2 people leave that we didn't want to leave. Historically. This year that number is probably up to like 4 out of 100. ROB: Yeah, that's turnover, but it's not a high turnover rate. It is managing what it is. It sounds like you have learned a lot along the way. As you think about lessons you've learned building ChoiceLocal, are there particular things you think of that you would wish to go back and tell yourself to do differently if you were able to? JOE: There's a whole host of things. One of the things I have as an advantage is I was a political science major, and I learned absolutely nothing in college that is useful to me today. [laughs] ROB: A beginner's mindset is what you're saying. [laughs] JOE: Yeah, exactly. There's this book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and there's so much truth to that. I was raised treat others the way you want to be treated, and that's how I've always operated. I've always brought that to what I do because I thought it's the right thing to do. But I've actually found it's an amazingly sound business strategy. What I'm going to say now may be a little bit controversial, but there's so much stuff that you learn in business school, like when you're getting your MBA and those types of things, and so much of that you need to throw out and ignore because it's trash. For example, you're a service-based business, so a person is not a commodity. A person is not a tool to be used. A person is not a KPI. They are a person with dignity, a person who has a family, a person who deserves to be cared about, loved, and appreciated. If you just do that and focus on that first, the business results tend to take care of themselves. But at the same point, KPIs are important. Accountability is important. Ensuring that you have that is critical. Knowing that you hire right for core values first and for performance second, but also critically important – all of that integrates really well, and those are really important things. The last thing, from a mistake that I made, that I'll say is there's a book called Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Else Smarter, and basically the premise of the book – and this happens for a lot of folks in agencies, particularly in leadership positions – how did you get successful? You got successful by busting your butt and being pretty smart about the way you do things. That's how you were successful. The weakness that comes with that is as you get a bigger team, you need to shut up, you need to ask questions, and you need to be humble. That's the next level. And that book, for me, as I was evolving and growing as a leader, taught me those skills. It played a really important role, and now it's something I believe in so strongly. I met with a future VP of our organization who's probably going to get promoted to a VP very, very shortly, and I said, “Read this book. Take it to heart and do it.” Then I said, “Here's all the stupid things that I did, and here's how this book helped me.” ROB: You start to pull apart some pieces, many questions come to mind. I start to think about – clearly, when you talk about future VP, there's some planning there. There's still some awareness of individuals in your organization, even though at 100 people, it starts to get hard to know everyone. Especially when some people aren't even coming in one day a week, possibly. It's an interesting mix. I think this probably had to be intentional for you as well – building up the leadership team. What are the pieces you've put in place at different stages in the business to build around you to be your best, but also to help the company be its best, maybe where you aren't? JOE: Hire generous people, people that love helping other people be successful. If you have people on your leadership team that don't believe that, don't have them on your leadership team. And if you don't believe that, work on it. [laughs] It's so critical. You need to hire generous people, surround yourself with generous people. It's funny; I was like, we're the world's best at marketing for franchise systems, world's best at franchise development, consumer marketing for franchising; we're the world's best at recruiting for franchise systems. Why don't we just own a franchise system? So, we launched a separate franchise system, hired a guy who led another franchise system to $750 million in network revenue to be the CEO of it. And he believes what we believe. What attracted him to us first and foremost – and he's got an amazing track record in franchising – was our values. He's a generous person. He believes in integrity. He believes in accountability and performance at the same time. So, you've got to find people that believe that and have those competencies. The other thing I'll say is it's important, if you're hiring somebody to lead a business, that they understand that business. You can do it and you can be successful if you don't understand it inside and out, but it's way harder. If you can find people with the right values but also who have worked at different levels in that industry over the course of their career, they can understand the strengths and weaknesses of various decisions, and when you make a decision, how it affects people in different parts of the organization or what you're actually asking and what it entails to make it happen. Which tends to result in better decisions being made, better business performance, less mistakes. Those are the types of things that you really look for. ROB: What franchise business have you got yourself into, then, now? JOE: The name of it is Broadview Dental Group. Our vision is to be the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years. We have some aggressive plans, but I am very confident that we're going to be able to pull it off. ROB: And I've heard that some different models of roll-up franchise operating groups – I've heard they're taking the dental world kind of by storm. The independent dentist is starting to dry up a little bit. Are you seeing that? Is that part of the move? JOE: Yes, it is, and it's sad. What's ended up happening – there actually is one other franchise system in the dental space. I wouldn't call it a real franchise system. That sounds arrogant. I don't mean it that way. But if you look at how franchise systems typically operate, where they basically have some sort of buy-in and then some sort of royalty, it's set up very different with the buy-in being extremely, extremely, extremely high. It's different. But if you look at most of them, they're called DSOs or DPOs, and what they basically do is a dentist is like “Hey, I want to get my practice to the next level.” Then these DSOs or DPOs, which are typically funded by venture capital – this isn't always the case, but typically with venture capital, they care about one thing, which is maximizing shareholder wealth. They'll say, “Okay, you want to take your business to the next level? Sign here. We get 70% equity in your business up to 90% over time, and we can fire you if we want to, and we'll help get your business to the next level.” When you're a dentist and you're passionate about helping others and you're passionate about your practice and your trade, you basically just need a really good business mentor, and most dentists really haven't had it. So what we're doing is giving them 100% equity in their own business, a way to get to the point where they can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it, and all they need to do is follow our system. And they own 100% of their business. They can sell it when they want to, and when they sell it, they'll sell it for a higher multiple because guess what? In franchising, when you sell your business when you're ready to retire, it's worth more because it's a franchise system and it's proven. There's less risk involved. ROB: Right, it's not (Your Name) Dentistry. It is part of an umbrella. There's brand equity there, there's a system. They don't have to figure it all out. One of my college roommates, his dad was in the dental world, and when you mentioned the high fee to buy in – he always told me dentists like to buy expensive things, so I guess the franchise must be one of those things, just priced for the market, I suppose. When we look ahead to what's next for ChoiceLocal, what's next for marketing in the franchising world, Joe, what are you seeing? What are you excited about for the firm, for what is going to be necessary for your clients to continue as the marketing world evolves? What are you seeing? JOE: There's so much exciting growth ahead. One of the things that I love about being an agency that focuses on ROI and provable results is every time there's an economic downturn, it's good for the agency growth and it's good for your customers. What happens is when there's an economic recession, which I believe we're headed into – we have horrible inflation and there's certain policies that have to be implemented to bring it under control, and the result of that is going to be a recession. What happens in those cases is companies tend to pull back in marketing. But if you're driving marketing where for every dollar they spend, you're giving them $18 in new customer revenue, it's stupid not to spend that. You can grow through the downturn. You can take market share. Imagine putting a dollar in the stock market and getting $18 back within a year. It's a brilliant investment. It's a simple investment. So, what's going to end up happening is that's going to accelerate growth within agencies that are ROI-focused as this economic recession hits, and for however long it hits for. That's exciting. But what I'm also excited about in the newer leading-edge things within agencies is the ability for big data backed with artificial intelligence to transform marketing, to transform business, and frankly to transform medicine. I was talking with the COO of ChoiceLocal, who serves a role with Broadview as well, and we're like, who ever thought that two internet marketers would fundamentally change healthcare and dental care in the U.S.? You'd be like, “Explain that.” It's the same thing you do in marketing with big data. If you have a massive amount of data in a HIPAA compliant way, you can anonymize it, data mine it, and find correlations and causations and literally, with that type of patient data pool, you can change medicine. Similarly, you can do the same thing with marketing, where you can data mine, you can find ways to micro-target ideal customers based on who current ideal customers are – and you may not even know what some of those things are – and then you can target them and measure the performance and lift. That's crazy cool stuff. And that's the newer leading-edge stuff that's really exciting, particularly when you're dealing with franchise systems and the volume that's behind that. ROB: Right. You've got volume there, you've got a growing scale in the business. To think about leveraging it for more than just “Hey, we're bigger” – lots of interesting things there. Joe, when people want to find and connect with you and with ChoiceLocal, where should they go to find you? JOE: They can go to choicelocal.com. Everything is there. They can follow ChoiceLocal on pretty much every social media channel that exists @ChoiceLocal. So they can do that. They can follow me personally on Twitter @helpothersjoe or connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to post a lot of content there that's specific to purpose-driven business, which is a huge passion of mine, as well as franchising and marketing as well. So yeah, @helpothersjoe on Twitter is for me personally. ROB: That's excellent. Joe, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your experiences. Congratulations on what you've built so far and why you're building it. I think everyone listening has enjoyed the depth in the origin of the business and the intentionality as you build it. JOE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for all you've done and thanks for having me on today. It really is a great pleasure. Really appreciate you. ROB: All right, appreciate you. Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

@NBADraftMikeyV is back in the house as one of our favorite draft experts returns to talk NBA Draft as he and Gerald have their version of Thursday's NBA extravaganza and share thoughts on who might go where. The guys are making the picks this time around as we have an awesome NBA Mock Draft in store for you on the Lakers Fast Break podcast! For the latest news and information on the NBA Draft, subscribe today at NBABigBoard.com and catch the NBA Big Board podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to our channel and our social media @lakersfastbreak on Twitter. If you have questions for us give us a shout-out on Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook or send us your thoughts to lakersfastbreak@yahoo.com. Gear up with your favorite Lakers Fast Break shirts and gifts in our Pop Culture Cosmos TeePublic store at https://www.teepublic.com/user/pop-culture-cosmos Presented by our friends at the Hoop Heads Podcast Network, ThriveFantasy, NBA Draft Junkies, lakerholics.com, lakersball.com, Pop Culture Cosmos, Inside Sports Fantasy Football, Vampires and Vitae, the novel Congratulations, You Suck (available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble) and Retro City Games! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lakers-fast-break/support

In this episode of the Epic Outdoors Podcast we call the winners of our Spring/Summer Membership Drive Hunt Giveaway. We are sending lucky hunters on som world class hunts from Alaska Grizzly, Dall Sheep to Nevada Elk and Mule Deer. We spared no expense to secure the best hunting opportunities available for western big game. Congratulations to the lucky winners. 

S6E557 - Aired: Wednesday, June 22, 2022 – ALL NEW: Real Talk with Rufus: "How to Rebuild Trust in a Relationship!"; Inside Scoop with Rufus: #SherriShepherd, #ChrisBrown, #KirkFranklin, & more!; The Gospel News with Nina Taylor: This Week: Dottie Peoples, The NFL has a new owner, #MelodyHobson, Lisa Knowles, and The Top 10 Songs! Congratulations to Dawkins & Dawkins, with their song "Come by Here" at No. 1! - www.therh3show.com. Stay Safe, Stay Protected, Stay Home! *No Copyright Infringement intended!!! We do not own the rights to the music that's being played*. ---- Copyright Disclaimer: Excerpts from books, blogs, social media, and public figures protected by Fair Use Clause of the Copyright Act which states - Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A but under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, education and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. ---- #Entertainment, #BlackAlbinism ---- #TheRH3Show Follow The RH3 Show See it first. See it now. Only at www.therh3show.com www.facebook.com/therh3show www.instagram.com/therh3show www.twitter.com/therh3show www.youtube.com/iRepASavior ---- The views expressed here are those of the guests and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of any affiliates of The RH3 Show. ---- Health Minute Disclaimer, please visit: www.therh3show.com. ---- How to listen to The RH3 Show at 6 pm est. M-F on @gospel107.1, you can go to my website www.therh3show.com to check times of airplay, or subscribe to one of the major podcast platforms ... #iHeartRadio, #Spotify, #ApplePodcasts, #GooglePlayMusic, #AnchorFM, other Podcast platforms and search "The RH3 Show". #Gospel107FM, #KitchenTableTalk, #InsideScoopWithRufus, #RealTalkWithRufus, #TRH3S, #TheRH3Show, #BlackAlbino, #AskRufusLetter, #AdviceLetters, #DaytimeTalkShow, #DaytimeTV, #RadioStation, #EntertainmentTalk, Debmar Mercury, OWN, TVOne, Endemol Shine, Tyler Perry Studios, FoxSoul --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/therh3show/message

We are proud to welcome UltraRunning Magazine's Western States contest winner Natasha Daniels to the URM podcast. Natasha shares her personal story with us, which was selected from over 100 entries in November. We recorded this interview just a few days before Western States to check in with Natasha and find out about her training and experience leading up to the "Big Dance." Congratulations, Natasha, we are all rooting for you!     Subscribe to UltraRunning Magazine   Thanks to our episode sponsor, Whitefish Trail Legacy Run   Follow Natasha and all the 2022 Western States runners at wser.org

In this episode, Allisa Song, a medical student and the CEO and co-founder of Nanodropper, discusses the inception of the device, how it can benefit the eye care industry and more. Intro :38 Welcome to another episode of Eye Care insider :52 About Allisa Song 1:01 I want to hear your story about the history about the Nanodropper – how you came to this idea; what problem you were trying to solve; and how you got here? 2:02 What are the major advantages of your product? Why doesn't our standard bottle function properly like that? 5:06 Can this go on every eyedrop bottle? 6:49 Is there any sort of data that we can look at that shows how much volume of the prescription is saved? 7:51 Can you talk to me about how industry has taken this? What is your take on how they feel about your product? 12:15 How are you distributing your product to the consumers and to the masses? What are your channels to get the product out there? 15:36 What do you think the future holds for Nanodropper? Where do you see this going in the next 3 to 5 years? 17:04 Is there any information that you can provide to our listeners can go to and learn more about your story? 18:23 Congratulations again Allisa 19:03 You'll be graduating from medical school pretty soon? 19:15 Any final words to our listeners? 19:50 Outro 20:26   Allisa Song, is a Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine medical student and the CEO and co-founder of Nanodropper. Song is a serial entrepreneur and inventor with a background in Clean Tech, neuroscience, and harm reduction. In addition to her proven track record of successful fundraising, she has led her teams to dozens of business and design awards, including her most recent USPTO Collegiate Inventor medal awarded by the National Inventors Hall of Fame.  We'd love to hear from you! Send your comments/questions to Dr. Mali at eyecareinsider@healio.com. Follow us on Twitter @Healio_OSN. Song can be reached at support@nanodropper.com.   Disclosures: Mali reports he is founder and CEO of Mali Enterprises; retina medical director at Macular Degeneration Association; grant/research support from Alimera Sciences, Allergan/AbbVie, Chengdu Kanghong Biotechnology, Genentech, Notal Vision, Regeneron and Santen; consulting for Alimera Sciences, Allergan/AbbVie, Eyepoint Pharmaceuticals, Genentech, Kala Pharmaceuticals, Macular Degeneration Association, Notal Vision, Novartis, Regeneron and Sun Pharmaceuticals; speaker bureau for Alimera Sciences, Genentech, Kala Pharmaceuticals, Macular Degeneration Association, Notal Vision, Novartis and Sun Pharmaceuticals; and stock/shareholder with AbbVie and Regeneron. Song is the CEO and co-founder of Nanodropper and serves as an advisor for Bedo Solutions.

Yes, since everyone else is talking about it, we'll talk about it too as Jamie Sweet from lakerholics.com stops by to chat about the latest rumor started by the Athletic's Shams Charania about Kyrie Irving's contract impasse with the Nets and a supposed desire to look to other teams, including the Lakers. All that and our coaching staff on the bench is complete as we talk Kyrie Irving rumors on the latest Lakers Fast Break podcast! For the latest news and information on the NBA Draft, subscribe today at NBABigBoard.com and catch the NBA Big Board podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to our channel and our social media @lakersfastbreak on Twitter. If you have questions for us give us a shout-out on Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook or send us your thoughts to lakersfastbreak@yahoo.com. Gear up with your favorite Lakers Fast Break shirts and gifts in our Pop Culture Cosmos TeePublic store at https://www.teepublic.com/user/pop-culture-cosmos Presented by our friends at the Hoop Heads Podcast Network, ThriveFantasy, NBA Draft Junkies, lakerholics.com, lakersball.com, Pop Culture Cosmos, Inside Sports Fantasy Football, Vampires and Vitae, the novel Congratulations, You Suck (available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble) and Retro City Games! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lakers-fast-break/support

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of SFHM! First off Happy Juneteenth! We had a lot to discuss this episode so without further ado let's get to the docket. Congratulations are in order for the Golden State Warriors as they won the NBA finals besting the Boston Celtics 4-2. We go in depth on the series overall and how the result will impact both teams now only in the present but in the future as well. Deshaun Watson's legal trouble is once again discussed as more civil lawsuits have been added to his case. In the world of pop culture, the Six God himself Drake dropped a surprise album, Rolling Stone created a list of the top 200 Hip Hop albums of all time also the guys discuss the top 10 icons of the 90s. We have all of that and more so remember if you didn't hear it from the horse's mouth stop listening to the ass who told you. SONG OF THE EPISODE: DRAKE-CURRENTS

At the National Conference on Urban Entomology in May, Jody was inspired by Maria Gonzalez-Morales, a grad student from North Carolina State University, and asked for a chance to interview her! She graciously jumped to the mic and the two of them talked about how urban pests have an impact on agriculture. Maria has spent her time during her PHD studying insecticide resistance and in this interview discusses her work specifically with bed bugs in poultry farms. Maria also talks about her dream for the future, which involves creating an inclusive place for Hispanics to learn and be impowered by the information generated from the entomological research around the world. Take a listen. You won't be disappointed. Maria and her national award! Congratulations to her!!Bed bugs can be quite happy living in poultry housingBed bug eggs on the wooden structure within the poultry housingThe chicken does not look happy to be seeing blood feeding ectoparasites in her homeQuestions? Comments? Follow the show on Twitter @Arthro_PodshowFollow the hosts on Twitter @bugmanjon, @JodyBugsmeUNL, and @MSkvarla36Get the show through Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcatching app!If you can spare a moment, we appreciate when you subscribe to the show on those apps or when you take time to leave a review!Subscribe to our feed on Feedburner!  This episode is freely available on archive.org and is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Beginning/ending theme: "There It Is" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing the fifth episode in a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass. Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It's for devs, by devs.Today's guest is Cronos, an on-chain task scheduler that allows users to schedule instructions and winner of the recent Riptide Hackathon. 00:38 - Introductions01:25 - How they started                 02:48 - How they met                     04:26  - Who else is in Austin            05:09  -  Cronos backstory                 07:34 - How they started building tasks    09:11 - TLDR: what is Cronos?              13:33  - Winning the Riptide Hackathon               15:40  - How cronos came to life           18:12 - Building on solana and familiarity with other languages20:16  - Learning curve with rust         22:50 -  Nick's  learning curve              25:04 -  Advice on learning curve         27:08 - What's missing in Solana         29:20  - Advice to new developers on Solana DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.  Chase (00:38):Hey everybody. And welcome to Chewing Glass, the show where we talk to developers building in the Solana ecosystem. Today, we have Nick and Elias from Cronos, the recent winners of the Riptide Hackathon. Welcome guys. How's it going?Elias (00:50):It's going well.Nick (00:51):Yeah, great to be here.Chase (00:52):So let's start with you, Nick. What's your history? How'd you get into this whole thing?Nick (00:56):My background is basically, I worked on the payments team at Uber for about four years or so, helping build out the payroll system there. And so, was working on a lot of international banking integrations and just became very aware how broken the current legacy payment system is. Can't really even tell you the number of times I got woken up at 4:00 AM because some system failed somewhere and had to email a CSV file to some banker to push money through the system, it happens all the time.Nick (01:28):And so I heard about Solana and I had a light bulb moment really, where I realized that this thing is cheaper and faster and easier to use than any existing payment rails that I know about and so, I got quite excited about the potential for disruption there and this was all pre Solana Pay stuff. So, yeah, we dove in during the Ignition Hackathon.Chase (01:52):Oh, you did? Cool.Nick (01:53):Yeah.Chase (01:53):Yeah, I didn't realize that. I was actually, when you were talking, I was thinking in my head, I was like payments? I was like, wow, didn't even build anything on Solana Pay. So you guys were already rolling a little bit before that, so that's cool. Yeah. So Elias, how about you?Elias (02:06):I'm pretty fresh as far as experience in industry. I did have an internship in college as a data scientist in Argentina for a bit. I then transitioned into front-end development that following year and had been a front-end developer up until when I got into Solana development. But that's pretty much it.Chase (02:23):Cool. So, with all that said, you guys' backgrounds, how did you guys end up meeting each other? What's the story? Are you in the same place? You guys are in the same city? How did that work?Nick (02:34):We're both in Austin. Elias is a few minutes north of Austin. I'm kind of downtown and we meet up down here a few days a week. We basically met on Twitter last summer.Elias (02:45):Yeah. I was at Samsung before I met Nick. I was basically a site reliability engineer for this semiconductor facility here in Austin. I didn't love it. I absolutely hated it. So I was creating toy projects on GitHub just for front-end development purposes, just to better my skills, because I wasn't really progressing that well at Samsung. I was then tweeting about it and my philosophy was, well, what's the worst that could happen? Someone's going to see this and maybe look at my repo, who knows?Elias (03:13):Randomly I get a DM from this guy named Nick. He was like, "Hey, I like what you're doing. I looked at your GitHub. We're looking for front-end developers at this product studio that we have in Austin. I would love to grab a beer." And that's really where it started.Chase (03:25):Oh wow. That's awesome. I thought that stuff only happened in Web 3, but I guess it's happening outside of that too. So how did you find that tweet, Nick, in the first place?Nick (03:36):I don't remember, honestly. It's like scrolling the timeline, don't really remember what you saw 10 minutes ago. But, I think I saw Elias tweeting, maybe a GitHub link or something, saw he was a dev and I was just looking through his projects on GitHub. And, I found his resume actually and everything there was kind of focused around like Next.js and React, which we were doing a lot with at the time. And so, I figured sending a DM couldn't hurt and just kind of realized that he was based in Austin. I had just moved here, I think a week or so prior and we met up and grabbed a beer and just hit it off from there and have been working together since.Chase (04:18):Very cool. I think there's a couple other people in Austin. I believe Castle Finance is there. There's actually a pretty decent Solana builder presence at University of Texas at Austin.Nick (04:30):The [inaudible 00:04:30] team is here as well.Chase (04:31):Oh nice.Elias (04:32):I think BuffaLou is also here.Chase (04:34):BuffaLou? The famous BuffaLou is in Austin. Are we doxxing him over here?Elias (04:37):No, he's tweeted about it.Chase (04:39):I'm just kidding. So, that's pretty cool to hear the story about how you guys met. Now, let's dive into a little bit, go a little bit further. Where did this idea get birthed or what were you building? And start at Ignition and lead up to how the idea of Cronos came about.Nick (04:55):As we were saying before, we were looking at Solana initially from that perspective of payments and coming from the payments industry. And so we started in the Ignition Hackathon building an on-chain Venmo where users could send and receive invoices and pay those back on-chain. And then that kind of rolled into a token streaming service. And-Chase (05:16):Was that called Cronos or did it have a name at the point in time?Nick (05:20):Yeah, that was called Factor at the time. What we were specializing on was the use cases of subscription payments and payroll. And specifically we were trying to figure out how to schedule token transfers because it's kind of these inefficiencies in the vesting contract model where the sender has to lock up future payments up front into investing contract. So there's some inefficiency there. And the receiver has to go out of the way to claim from the vesting contract. So we thought if we could schedule token transfers, maybe that would be a better user experience.Nick (05:52):And we were working on that for a few months, got the whole system up and running. And then around February 1st, 2022, when mtnDAO was taking off, we realized that we could generalize that protocol from only supporting token transfers to being able to automate any arbitrary instruction. And from there it just took on a life of its own.Chase (06:14):So you guys were at mtnDAO?Nick (06:16):Yeah, I was at mtnDAO before it was mtnDAO. There was a version of it in 2021 called Mountain Compound. It was way smaller, but it was 14 of us, or so, just locked down in a house, trying to escape COVID, in Salt Lake City. And that was where I first met Edgar and Barrett. Barrett, at the time, was already working on Solana and Edgar and I were working on separate startups, but I think we both got the Solana pill during that time.Chase (06:47):Man. Wasn't expecting that one. That's a really cool story, actually. Those guys are involved in red-pilling a lot of people on to Solana, so I'm always happy to hear these stories. They just keep coming up randomly wherever I go.Nick (06:58):Yeah.Chase (07:00):Yeah, so that's awesome. So when you were building this payment stuff, the idea came around at mtnDAO, and that was, or right at the beginning-ish, I think, of Riptide. TJ was just on the show. That's when he started to talk about building out mtnPay. So you guys were like, "okay, we were doing payments, we just came up with this thing. We think we have solved a really big problem and we're going to build this out." Tell me a little bit more about that.Nick (07:25):Yeah, it started with just a proof of concept. So we just had this basic question of, can you even schedule arbitrary instructions on-chain? And how do you do that? So we started by building a basic Anchor program where users could create tasks and each task is a different account. And inside those accounts we would store serialized instruction data with a schedule.Nick (07:50):We basically had set up a separate off-chain bot process, also written in Rust, but using the RPC client. Which basically watched for task accounts and then would trigger transactions whenever the tasks came due. And we found that we could invoke those inner instructions as CPIs and that then unlocked this whole like, okay, we can schedule any arbitrary instruction.Elias (08:15):Yeah. I remember whenever he called me on our sync, I think it was on Monday because he built the proof of concept during the weekend. He told me, "you know, we have Factor and it's really cool, but imagine if we just generalized it to allow for any arbitrary instruction." And I was like, "Oh. Yeah, let's do that. That's a good idea."Chase (08:33):Yeah, I was really stoked. I remember seeing it the first time and I saw what it was and I was like, "Wow, people are really going to like this." By the way you guys are both technical founders. You both built out Cronos, correct?Nick (08:45):Yeah, correct.Nick (08:46):Mostly Nick, let me just... Mostly Nick.Chase (08:49):Actually, this is probably a good point to talk about what Cronos actually is officially. Like a TLDR for everybody watching. What you guys built and how it actually works at a high level?Nick (09:01):The basic concept is, it's just a keeper network for Solana. Every blockchain, at least that we're aware of right now, has this fundamental limitation and that's, you can't schedule transactions with a validator network and there's a few different reasons why that's the case. But it creates challenges for teams that have background jobs or tasks that they need to run just to make their programs work. And so, what Cronos is, is a keeper network to be able to facilitate that and service that. But the main difference is that we're kind of turning the Solana validators into the keepers for the system rather than relying on some external, off-chain, opaque bot network. And so that's required a lot of deep integration with the validator codebase in order to enable that.Chase (09:48):That is actually very, very cool. I wasn't officially, 100% certain how it worked. So you're using the validators as the keeper network to run these jobs on the network?Nick (09:58):Yeah, exactly. Our v1, proof of concept version was not integrated into the validator network. Hadn't even had that idea at the time, really.Elias (10:08):I didn't even know we could do that, knowing that we can just build a plugin for validators. Pretty cool.Nick (10:13):Yeah, it was around the same time we were building that initial bot that we started seeing some tweets about the account's DB plugin framework. And that has since been renamed to Geyser plugin framework and we just realized that there was all these scaling problems when you rely on these off-chain bots and that they have to submit transactions through the RPC network. And that can take up a whole bunch of bandwidth and you have to compete with other traffic to get those transactions through. And we realized there was this interface that Solana was providing, and the Geyser plugin framework, that we could actually spawn transactions from there. And it was much more efficient and made the system a lot more reliable. And so we basically copy pasted our bot code into the Geyser plugin framework and it mostly just worked out of the box.Chase (11:01):Oh wow. And that's quite unusual. For things that just work. So did you guys actually have to work with the validator community or did you guys have ever set up or run a validator? What's your knowledge there?Nick (11:12):Yeah, we have a few nodes that we got through the Solana server program, which that is a very useful program, if there's anyone that's looking to set up a node on Solana. And we have some servers running on DevNet and Testnet right now, that we're using to stress test the system. But yeah, we've been reaching out to all the node operators we can to talk with them and we're looking to get this thing rolled out on DevNet and Testnet quite soon. And actually, by the time this is published, it should be out on DevNet and Testnet, and we'll have quite a few integrations going on those networks.Chase (11:49):Yeah. I'm not going to lie. So like just leading in the sense, congratulations, you guys won the Riptide Hackathon. This was super incredible. And for me personally, I was so insanely excited to see some tooling win because this is just... developers need this tooling and to see that people watching a hackathon and a lot of these other, in the past, DeFi protocols, which are amazing out there, winning, but to see developer tooling take the grand prize, says a lot about what you guys had built and what the judges thought of it. So, that's quite amazing. So congratulations. But tell me, what was that like? Were you guys, have any idea, any expectations? Like what was your thoughts going through all that?Nick (12:33):Man. Yeah, there was a lot going on at the time, even, even outside the Riptide Hackathon. It was quite a journey, I think, to get here. Cronos was what we wish we had when we were building Factor. We came upon the idea for Cronos because we were trying to build Factor, this scheduled token transfer service. And we're like, "how do you schedule a timer on-chain?" And then we found out you couldn't schedule a timer on-chain, there just isn't a way. So we were talking to some other teams and I think it was, he goes by DoctorBlocks, at Switchboard. He described for us what a Crank function was and how they were running their automations. And from there we just started pulling on that thread and realized that here was all this dev tooling that was missing that we could build out and just started running with it.Chase (13:22):Were you expecting to win the grand prize of the hackathon? How did you react whenever you actually found out that you guys had won that thing? Was there-Nick (13:30):I didn't know we were going to win. We had been getting tips from a few people that we were on these ever shorter shortlists, but we didn't know until the moment of, that the blog post went out, someone sent it to me and then a moment later, Twitter started blowing up. And from there it was just a flood of inbound messages coming in from all directions. And last few weeks have been a lot of dealing with that.Elias (13:57):Yeah. A lot of dealing about knowing what is spam and what isn't from people it's pretty difficult to do.Chase (14:03):So did you guys celebrate, did you guys go out for beers? Like you did the first time you met? Did you do anything?Elias (14:08):Sure did.Nick (14:09):Yeah.Chase (14:11):That's awesome, man. Like I said, it's really great to see some developer tooling win and that value in that. Whenever I started at Solana Labs, like a year ago, there was no developer tooling out there. This was like... Then comes Armani and then here's Anchor. And then now we have all these indexers and then now we have Cronos and they just keep piling on. And eventually we're going to reach a place where every little narrow gap is covered and developers are going to be able to just jump in and do all the things that they could do in Web 2, in Web 3 and it's going to be a huge game changer for everybody. Not quite there, or we're pretty far off from there, I would say. Every tool like this really, really matters.Elias (14:51):To piggyback off that, the most exciting part about this job is not only building it and dealing with really interesting engineering problems, but knowing the impact that it will have to developers and how empowering it is to allow them to automate things on-chain. That's a pretty wild idea. So I'm really excited for that.Chase (15:09):Yeah and I think that's why a lot of engineers get into building out developer tooling instead of products because they're engineers themselves. And they're like, "man, if I was like on the other end of this and somebody built this tool, I'd be so stoked." And how many people that outwardly impacts is probably just a really incredible feeling. And it's just really awesome. So sorry, Factor, but I'm glad that Cronos ended up winning. By the way, is Factor just kind of sitting on a shelf somewhere right now, never to be reopened again?Nick (15:38):Yeah. We, we kind of just rolled Factor into Cronos. Actually the Twitter account is the same Twitter. We just changed the name now.Chase (15:46):Nice. Okay. So it's dead.Nick (15:48):Yeah.Elias (15:49):Dead, but very much alive.Nick (15:51):Yeah.Chase (15:52):Yeah. If Cronos would've never came alive, you would've been sitting at the mtnDAO with TJ, directly competing against each other. So, that's awesome. So basically two of these projects were the winning of the payments track and then the grand champion of Riptide. They both came out of mtnDAO. Every time I hear about mtnDAO and we talk about this, it's one more reason why understanding how incredible it was out there and how many builders were out there building really cool stuff.Elias (16:20):Yeah, the community in Salt Lake was amazing just knowing that you were in the same boat with all these developers. Either just getting into Solana or being in it just recently. Learning Rust and learning the runtime environment and what is possible on Solana is really crazy. And everyone was trying to help each other and answered questions. And if you didn't know the answer, they would direct you to somebody else. And everyone's just like, "yeah, let me help you with this," which is my favorite part about that.Nick (16:48):Yeah, it's been really cool to see communities pop up. Also happening right now is like AthensDAO in Greece. And unfortunately we weren't able to make it there, but I think we'll see, over the coming months, a few more of these communities start to pop up that are a bit more like longer running than just the kind of week long hacker house format.Chase (17:06):Yeah. I'm a big fan of the community run hacker houses and all these sorts of things like mtnDAO, just because whenever it's built out with the community like that, it just forms this other type of bond with everybody and it's just really exciting to see all that happen.Chase (17:23):This is the point in the show where we shift gears a little bit. We talked about that excitement, how Cronos came alive, you guys winning Riptide and now I want to talk about what that experience was like for you guys. Because this is the very important part of this show where we talk about what sucked and what was good and what could be better. So, I want to start with Elias this time. You came from a front-end engineering background? What's actually the languages that you had touched before you came to start building on Solana?Elias (17:58):Even before I was a front-end developer, I was dabbling in data science for a bit. It was a lot of fun, but a bit too meticulous for my taste. So I was dealing with a lot of Python. Fast forward to when I graduate, I was really interested in front-end development, got pretty good at helping with some friends and building toy applications and TypeScript React, some toy web apps with Next.js. And then that's whenever, like I said, met Nick, joined the team and I was building front-end applications for a while at, like, six months. And then I found, like a lot of people who started their Web 3 journey, Nader Dabit's Ethereum article on how to... It was like a super simple... I forget exactly the context of what the project was, but it was on dev.to. And read through it and tried to understand what is this environment? What is this dev environment? What's going on? Not too long after I found Solana and Nick also brought it up, was like, "Hey, we should maybe look into this." And then-Chase (18:53):Did you do Dabit's tutorial on Solana too?Elias (18:55):I did. Yeah, I did. Yeah.Chase (18:56):Yeah.Elias (18:57):It was a lot simpler. I don't know. But also more difficult in some ways. When we were working on Factor, Nick gave me the talk like, "Hey, we may not need front-end developers. So there's a chance that I need you to flex over to becoming a Rust engineer, which is, you know-Chase (19:13):So he didn't fire you?Elias (19:15):No, no he did not. Luckily. Yeah. So fast forward to like mtnDAO when we know finally realize Cronos has a lot of potential. I buy the book that a lot of people seem to have and I have it on my desk right here, the programming Rust book. And it's been my north star, I would say, as far as growing my skills as a Rust engineer, as well as living in the Solana repo and Anchor repos.Chase (19:39):So you guys are building this in straight Rust? Are you guys also using Anchor?Elias (19:44):Yeah. So in the core of Cronos, it's a lot of Anchor. A lot of what I deal with, I'm building and optimizing the Geyser plugin that we have to listen to Cronos accounts and execute tasks when needed. That's just built in Rust and other like asynchronous libraries and things like that, but not Anchor specifically.Chase (20:03):This is the part, the glass chewing, what was your learning curve during that process of learning Rust coming from front-end? Was it as painful as everybody says? Everybody's different on this front, so what was that like to learn Rust?Elias (20:16):A big mistake that I would advise people attempting to get into the space would be first of all, just learn Rust by itself first. At least start there and understand that it is different from Anchor. And it's just a framework that lives with Rust. And then try to understand the Solana runtime just a little bit. And those are three separate entities, but they all coexist and you need the three in order to make a simple to do app in Rust on-chain. So differentiating between those three different entities is really important. And if you just jump straight into a Solana Anchor project, not knowing Rush, you're going to get really confused and pretty frustrated.Chase (20:52):So for you, was it hard or was it just time consuming? You just had to grind it out and you learned along the way?Elias (20:58):Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things that you just have to do every day. You have to, you know, for me every morning before we would go to the mtnDAO-Chase (21:06):Glass for breakfast.Elias (21:07):Yeah, I would literally just sit on the couch and wait for Nick to finish showering before we drove to the office. And I would just read a chapter of the programming Rush book and it would just go over super simple things like structs and basic functions. And if you're a software engineer, it's not too difficult to transition into Rust, it's just another programming language just in the different context. And it looks a little weird with two semicolons next to each other or whatever, syntax. But it's not too bad. One of those things you just got to do every day. And then before you know it, you'll just hit the road running. It's pretty nice.Chase (21:39):I think a lot of people talk about chewing glass, like it's actually Solana, that's the real glass chewing, about learning the native concepts, like using PDAs and these things. And there are people out there who just don't ever end up learning Rust and they never actually tried it. They never just sat down and did it. You could get a little bit resistant to it just because it looks so foreign.Chase (22:00):And then the other part is, I've done a couple of Twitter Spaces around this exact same thing about you saying start with Rust. That's my recommendation always start with the base layer before you're using any sort of framework or anything that's intertwined in it, but there are people out there on the other side of the camp that say, just start with Anchor. I obviously disagree, because I think learning that first base language is always going to be the best. And it's going to save you down the road when you're running into issues.Chase (22:27):I'm going to go ahead and ask you Nick, kind of the same question, what your experience was like? What did you do to learn it? Was it similar to Elias? Was it hard? Was it easy? Was it just time consuming? What would that look like?Nick (22:39):I had some background working in back-end systems. Yeah, for my time out in California, I had worked mostly with Go prior and actually first tried picking up Rust in 2020, because I'd seen it was the most popular language on GitHub and it was just like, what is this? And I actually hated it the first time I looked at it because I was coming from that Go world. And Go is designed to be super ergonomic and easy to read and talk about and communicate and Rust is more optimized for performance,Chase (23:13):Performance and pain.Nick (23:16):Yeah. And so I hated Rust when I first looked at it, and I pushed it off to the side and didn't actually look at it again until we dove into Solana. I've since come to love it. It is a little bit steeper of a learning curve and there are some extra pieces to the mental model that you need, in terms of understanding memory and ownership of variables and how all that stuff works, lifetimes, for example, that other languages don't have. So that makes it a little more complicated or harder to learn. But it's not anything that can't be overcome, I think. It's just another programming language.Nick (23:50):But yeah, definitely breaking apart, as Elias said, the difference between Rust problems, Anchor problems and Solana problems and understanding that these are all like three different systems is probably the hardest thing when you're first diving into Solana because it all looks the same and all the error messages are cryptic and if you don't have a whole lot of debugging experience, it can be hard to pull that thread because all this stuff is quite new and a lot of devs, I think have the pattern of, you get an error message you don't understand, copy it in a Google and see what Stack Overflow results come up. Usually we're running into problems that no other devs have run into yet. And it's just like-Chase (24:28):It's actually pretty cool though. Like to be one of the first group of people on the planet. You guys are going to be the ones who answer these Stack Overflow questions in the future because that always starts somewhere. The first guy had to just figure it out.Elias (24:40):It's cool, but you're like, "I don't know what to do now." I guess we're just going to have to figure it out. So that's where I would just go to the Solana codebase and Nick has recommended multiple times. Just go live in there, you'll understand the runtime environment better, your errors will be easier to debug. It's a lot. The Solana codebase is a lot, but there are parts of it that really help you understand what is going on underneath.Chase (25:03):A lot of people come from Web 2, and again, I'm one of those people. We're used to having our hands held. We're used to being able to find the answers we want. We're used to all these pretty, amazing tutorials and all these different things. And when that's not the case, it makes it a lot harder. Sadly enough, not everybody's this reverse engineering code diver that's going to go do that sort of thing. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and sometimes, at the end of the day, there might not be considered the greatest payoff for all that work. But the true engineers, the ones who just like to figure shit out, are going to go do that and then they're going to figure it out and then they're going to build Cronos. So it's awesome.Nick (25:43):It's definitely how you know you're on the bleeding edge, is when Google doesn't come up with any results for your error message.Chase (25:49):Zero results.Nick (25:51):Yeah.Elias (25:52):The beautiful, no search results for that Google search and like, well, okay cool. Like whatever.Nick (25:57):Yeah. I Would say to any devs that find themselves in this situation, the Anchor discord in particular is my new Google for trying to find solutions to these problems. And usually, 70% of the time, someone has asked about some of the error problems like we're running into in the Anchor discord somewhere. And there's been someone that is able to chime in and help and Armani and the team that's there is extremely helpful in terms of answering questions and generous with their time.Chase (26:27):And Alan and everybody that's out there and Jacob who's on our DevRel team and Donny. There's so many people and these are guys that are actually working on like Serum and Anchor and Solana Labs and all that stuff. But outside of that, the community of people just helping each other solve these problems, it's amazing to watch it happen in real life.Chase (26:48):We've been going on for a while now and I want both of you, if you can, to tell me what is missing from Solana right now, like in tooling? You guys just created one that was missing, where you were seeing a lot of tooling come out.Elias (26:59):I have one.Chase (27:00):Okay. All right, we'll start with you Elias. What are we missing right now?Elias (27:04):I'm probably stealing this from Matt because he's probably thinking about it, but one thing we've ran into recently is DevOps pipelining. It's pretty difficult to handle versioning from so many different projects. And when we're developing, we're having to stay ahead of Mainnet and work on Testnet and it's a very complicated, and different projects do it differently, but right now in our repo, we have a forked version of Anchor just so that we have up-to-date versions of Anchor, but using some different-Nick (27:32):The latest Solana dependency versions.Elias (27:34):Yes. So that right now is something that we have to build, but if there's a way to do that at scale for a lot of other teams, that'd be great.Chase (27:41):Yeah, that's not the first time I've heard that one, but that's a good one. I hear it just because I'm always paying attention to a lot of different places, but I don't know if everybody, except the ones who are coming into this problem actually know that this is something that's kind of necessary. It's not one of the ones that people are most vocal about. It's usually error codes and indexers and all these things. So Nick, did Elias steal yours or do you got something else for us?Nick (28:05):No, I think that's a great one. There's, at least for what we're doing, where we have both on-chain programs and a plugin, that we're trying to ship DevOps challenges around keeping the versions in sync between those two pieces can be challenging. And then, I guess something that's been on my mind a little bit is how there was a DeGit project in the Riptide Hackathon, decentralized Git, which I think, stuff in that space like decentralized DevOps processes and how does a decentralized global team of engineers contribute to a protocol and how do you keep the community open, but also secure, is, I think, an unsolved problem at this point.Chase (28:50):Well, I look forward to the Cronos team actually building out this suite of tools, all of it.Nick (28:56):A few pieces, but yeah.Chase (28:58):Yeah. So I usually wrap these shows up just asking what advice would you give to somebody who's thinking, on the other side, "Hmm, maybe I'm about to jump into Solana. I'm not sure if I want to put in the effort to build something." What general advice would you give somebody who was going to build or is building on Solana right now?Elias (29:17):If you're frustrated with learning Rust, but you're really wanting to build on Solana, then you're doing it right. You're not doing it right if you're not frustrated, that's the chewing glass part.Chase (29:27):Yeah.Elias (29:27):Just keep going. Because at some point you'll be able to look at other projects and their smart contracts and go, "oh, I see what they're doing." Like right now I'm looking at the Holaplex, that's called RabbitMQ plugin or Geyser plugin, shout out to the Holaplex team, and trying to understand why they made certain engineering designs with their plugin and see what we can take from. And that's just the beauty of open source of course. But yeah, if I wasn't chewing glass consistently and I wasn't looking at code and other repos, then I wouldn't be able to do that.Chase (29:58):Yeah. That's awesome. And like it is, I wish everybody would start open sourcing their code out there, but we'll get there eventually. How about you Nick, what kind of advice do you have? And again, we've kind of talked about a few good ideas for the community, so what do you think?Nick (30:13):Yeah, I think probably two things, as Elias mentioned, spending time in the Solana repo, it's helped a lot. There's a lot of patterns in there that, if you're trying to get familiar with Rust, it's a great resource to learn from. And the second thing is to actually read the error messages that you get back, because when you actually pull on that thread, they are very cryptic error messages a lot of times, but they do have information that leads you to the bug and the problem or points you in the right direction, maybe is the best way to put it. I find that skill, that debugging skill is like a muscle that needs to be trained and learned and doesn't always come supernaturally, because it's just hard. But yeah, reading error messages and trying to decipher what they're telling you is a fundamental exercise to dealing with large complex systems.Chase (31:10):Yeah, and it's also just a really cool skillset to have, to be able to just do these manual debugging stuff. Yeah. Like you said it becomes like a natural kind of mental muscle that all of a sudden, now it just happens quite naturally, once you get to a certain point.Elias (31:23):Yeah. One thing for those interested in just in general, distributed systems, trying to understand Solana a little bit better from a higher level, there's a great YouTube course from MIT. If you just search "distributed systems MIT", it's an OpenCourseWare, like 12 lecture series, just to understand like RPCs, multi-threading, concurrency, consensus and things like that. It's really beneficial to understanding distributed systems, blockchains, well, not necessarily blockchains, but at least for Solana distributed systems.Chase (31:55):Awesome. Yeah. There's a lot of people that come into blockchain and they don't even really know what a distributed system is. And then a lot of the times it's like, hey, go actually read about like what this thing is before diving into this.Chase (32:07):All right guys. Well really, really, thanks for coming on the show. I'm glad that we got to catch up. Congratulations winning Riptide. I'll talk to you later.Nick (32:16):Yeah. Well see you in Austin.Elias (32:17):Sounds good. Yeah, see you in Austin.Chase (32:19):All right. Cheers.

Welcome back! Dame called it again. Warriors in 6. Congrats to the dubs. Grab yourself a glass, fill it with whatever makes you happy, and join us while we watch some fights, discuss the Warriors, and check out some changes in the NFL world.

Congratulations to the graduating class of 2022!! Join us as we revisit the question of "What do I do now that I've graduated High School". In this episode we are Joined by Ayden and Jay Pizarro as we discuss what exactly their plans are for the future, and how they plan to achieve them. So grab an Grande Iced coffee and pull up a chair as we discuss life after High School. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/keepin-the-balance/support

Welcome back! Dame called it again. Warriors in 6. Congrats to the dubs. Grab yourself a glass, fill it with whatever makes you happy, and join us while we watch some fights, discuss the Warriors, and check out some changes in the NFL world.