Podcasts about correct

Stopping yelling and punishing often feels like the only option, but it rarely helps dysregulated kids learn new behavior. In this episode, parents learn what actually works instead. Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge is an expert in Regulation First Parenting™ and child emotional dysregulation.When you're overwhelmed, exhausted, and nothing seems to get through to your child, it's easy to believe you're failing. But the truth is simpler—and more hopeful.Most parents aren't “bad at parenting,” they're just using strategies that don't reach a dysregulated brain. This episode breaks down why yelling and punishment don't create lasting change and what actually does.Why does my child get worse when I yell or punish?When your child is escalated, their nervous system is in survival mode, not learning mode. That means yelling or punishment adds more threat—not understanding.Their brain is focused on protection, not reasoningMore intensity = more escalation or shutdownShort-term compliance may happen, but no real change sticksReal-life example: You raise your voice to stop a behavior. Your child freezes or explodes again the next day. It feels like nothing is working—because the nervous system never actually calmed.What's really happening in my child's brain during a meltdown?A meltdown isn't defiance—it's dysregulation. The brain shifts into fight, flight, or shutdown, making it nearly impossible for your child to listen or learn.Stress response overrides logic and connectionThe child cannot “absorb” correction in this stateBehavior becomes communication of overwhelmBehavior is communication. Tune in to what the brain is saying.Instead of asking, “Why won't they listen?” try asking, “What state is their nervous system in right now?”Trying to understand your child's patterns more clearly? The Dysregulated Kid offers practical guidance to help you respond with more clarity and less overwhelm.What should I do instead of yelling and punishing in the moment?This is where real change begins. Instead of escalating, you become the calm anchor.Regulate first: lower your voice, slow your body, reduce stimulationConnect next: simple phrases like “I see this is hard”Correct later: teach only after calm returnsReal-life example: Your child refuses homework and starts yelling. Instead of reacting, you pause, soften your tone, and say less. The shift in your calm helps their nervous system settle faster.Before correction can work, the brain must move out of threat and into safety. That's where learning finally happens.Yelling less and staying calm isn't about being perfect—it's about having the right tools.Join the Dysregulation Insider VIP list and get your FREE Regulation Rescue Kit, designed to help you handle oppositional behaviors without losing it. Download it now at www.drroseann.com/newsletterHow do I break the yelling cycle without losing control?Breaking the cycle starts with you regulating first. Not perfectly—just consistently. Staying calm is the real turning point.Regulate yourself before respondingRepair after yelling instead of spiraling in guiltFocus on progress, not perfection

✔️ How to Make Sure Your Divorce Documents Are Enforceable | Los Angeles Divorce

The Southern Baptist Convention recently voted to move forward with a constitutional amendment formally prohibiting women from serving as pastors. In this episode, I examine the SBC's decision, the reaction it sparked, and why I believe they arrived at the correct conclusion—but for the wrong reasons.Using the SBC article and Pope St. John Paul II's Ordinatio Sacerdotalis as a point of comparison, I explore a much deeper question: What is the nature of the ministerial office in the Church, and who has the authority to define it?The problem with the SBC's position is not necessarily its conclusion regarding women's ordination. The problem is that within a Baptist framework, the debate ultimately becomes an issue of biblical interpretation. If Scripture alone is the final authority, and individual churches or denominations possess the authority to interpret it differently, then the argument over women's ordination becomes difficult to settle in any lasting way.Historically, the Church's rejection of women's ordination was not based solely on isolated proof texts. It was rooted in a sacramental understanding of the priesthood, apostolic succession, ecclesiastical authority, and a consistent tradition maintained throughout Christian history in both East and West. The early Church Fathers, the historic episcopate, and the universal practice of Christianity all provide a much broader framework than a simple appeal to competing interpretations of Scripture.In this episode, we'll examine the SBC vote, the theological assumptions behind it, what Ordinatio Sacerdotalis actually argues, and why the larger issue is not women's ordination itself—but the authority of the Church to define and preserve the offices Christ established.If you'd like to donate to our ministry or be a monthly partner that receives newsletters and one on one discussions with Dr. Stephen Boyce, here's a link: https://give.tithe.ly/?formId=6381a2ee-b82f-42a7-809e-6b733cec05a7#SouthernBaptistConvention #WomensOrdination #WomenPastors #OrdinatioSacerdotalis #CatholicChurch #ChurchHistory #ChurchFathers #ApostolicSuccession #Ecclesiology #FACTSPodcast

Can you find and correct the mistakes in Ben's sentences?Patreon: patreon.com/learnenglishwithben - For transcripts, comprehension quizzes, and video tutorials, join the fan club.Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/learnenglishwithbenInstagram: instagram.com/learnenglishwithbenWebsite: learnenglishwithben.comEmail: learnenglishwithben88@gmail.com - send me an email if you're interested in classes Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Ustadz Amni Nur Baits Amninurbait Islamic Studies - Correct Night Prayer Tahajud Prayer - Ustadz Amni Nur Baits #amninurbait #islamic Studies

How do we determine when a learner has truly mastered a skill? In behavior analysis, performance criteria such as "80% correct across two sessions" have become nearly ubiquitous. Yet despite their widespread use, many practitioners may be surprised to learn that these criteria have relatively little direct empirical support. In this episode, I'm joined by Drs. Sarah Richling and Dr. Daniel Fienup to discuss the history, research, and practical implications of mastery criteria in applied behavior analysis. Drawing on their independent lines of research, Sarah and Dan examine how different criterion levels influence skill maintenance and why behavior analysts should think carefully about what constitutes meaningful mastery. We begin by defining the terminology surrounding mastery and performance criteria and explore several important dimensions that are often overlooked, including criterion level, criterion frequency, supplementary variables, and units of analysis. The conversation then turns to the origins of the commonly used 80% and 90% thresholds. Although these criteria appear throughout ABA training and practice, Sarah and Dan explain that their widespread adoption may owe more to tradition than to empirical validation. We also discuss findings from their research comparing 50%, 80%, and 90% mastery criteria. Their studies suggest that higher performance criteria may produce stronger maintenance outcomes under some conditions, but they emphasize that practitioners should resist the temptation to adopt a new universal rule. Along the way, we explore: The distinction between mastery criteria and performance criteria. Why "80% correct" became so common in ABA. Historical influences from early behavior analytic and educational research. Research comparing 50%, 80%, and 90% mastery criteria. The relationship between mastery criteria and long-term maintenance. Why some behaviors may require near-perfect performance. The importance of considering the natural environment when setting performance standards. How units of analysis can affect instructional decision making. The risks of relying on aggregated data when teaching multiple skills. Generalization, maintenance, and supplementary variables. Lessons from Precision Teaching regarding fluency and functional mastery. Why performance criteria should be individualized rather than universally prescribed. Research opportunities for practitioners and graduate students interested in instructional design. Throughout the discussion, Sarah and Dan make a compelling case for moving beyond inherited rules and toward a more individualized, evidence-based approach to instructional decision making. Whether you're designing skill acquisition programs, supervising trainees, or simply curious about the assumptions that shape everyday practice, this episode offers a thoughtful examination of one of the most common—and least questioned—features of behavior analytic instruction. About the Guests Dr. Sarah Richling Sarah Richling is a Clinical Associate Professor at Auburn University and serves as Director of Auburn's Master's Program in Applied Behavior Analysis. She has more than two decades of experience as a practitioner, researcher, and educator, with interests spanning instructional design, performance criteria, and effective teaching practices. Dr. Daniel Fienup Dan Fienup is a behavior analyst and researcher whose work has focused on instructional variables that affect skill acquisition, maintenance, and educational outcomes. His research on mastery criteria has helped clarify the relationship between performance standards and long-term retention of learned skills. Resources Mentioned in This Episode Fienup and Carr (2021). The use of performance criteria for determining "mastery" in discrete-trial instruction: A call for research. Fuller and Fienup (2018). A Preliminary Analysis of Mastery Criterion Level: Effects on Response Maintenance. Richling, Fienup, and Wong (2023). Establishing Performance Criteria for Skill Mastery. VanDevander, Warner, Kazemi, and Famie (2023). Creating a reference range of common problem behaviors and replacement behaviors in neurotypical children. Vladescu, Gureghian, Goodwyn, and Campanaro (2020). Comparing skill acquisition under different stimulus set sizes with children with autism spectrum disorder: A replication. Conditioning Books as Reinforcers: How to Increase Reading Engagement in Young Children: Inside JABA 26. Sponsor Shoutouts! Behavior University. Their mission is to provide university quality professional development for the busy Behavior Analyst. Learn about their CEU offerings, including their 8-hour Supervision Course, as well as their RBT offerings over at behavioruniversity.com/observations. Don't forget to use the coupon code, PODCAST to save at checkout! Safety-Care is a crisis prevention and de-escalation training program designed for professionals who support individuals with challenging behavior. More than 300,000 professionals have been trained in Safety-Care's evidence-based approach to recognizing early warning signs and responding with confidence. To learn more, visit QBS.com/podcast. Learn from your favorite podcast guests while you're commuting, walking the dog, or whatever else you do while listening to podcasts. New events are being added all the time, so check them out here.  HRIC Recruting. Cut out the middleman and speak directly with Barbara Voss, who's been placing BCBAs in great jobs all across the US for 15 years. The BOP Patreon. Do you want to get the show ad-free and before everyone else? Click here to learn how!

Your mistakes may have consequences, but as long as you have life, there is still an opportunity to make things right before those consequences become eternal. Do not let guilt or condemnation keep you from correcting what is wrong. Acknowledge your mistakes, seek forgiveness, and turn away from sin. __________ Exodus 20:14 NLT, 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 NLT, Deuteronomy 22:22–24 NIV, John 8:3–11 NLT, Matthew 19:3–9 NLT __________ Partner with Us: https://churchforentrepreneurs.com/partner Connect with Us: https://churchforentrepreneurs.com __________    

In this episode of That Ain't In the Bible, Jonathan and Brandon step directly into one of the fastest ways to start a church argument: music styles in worship. Should church music be traditional? Contemporary? Hymns only? Full band? Choir and orchestra? Acoustic? Loud? Quiet? And perhaps the biggest question of all: does the Bible actually command one specific style of music for the church?With a few spicy hot takes and some honest pushback against personal preferences disguised as biblical mandates, the guys discuss what Scripture does clearly command—namely that believers are to worship, sing, and glorify God together. At the same time, they challenge listeners to be careful not to elevate cultural tastes and personal opinions to the level of divine instruction.Because while singing praises to God is absolutely in the Bible…the commandment, “Thou shalt use only this musical style”?Yeah… that ain't in the Bible.10 Key Bible Verses on Singing Article

SummaryIn this episode I'm joined by Courtney Honda and Slava Borisov co-founders of Puptqe. What started as a deeply personal response to a health scare involving their dog Champ has grown into a unique retail experience built around community and creating memorable moments for dogs and their owners.We explore how they tested their way through one of the most competitive retail categories imaginable, discovering that success wasn't about competing with big-box stores on price or selection. Instead, they focused on creating experiences that customers couldn't get anywhere else, from dog-friendly events and memberships to immersive in-store moments designed to turn visitors into loyal advocates.We also get into the realities of building a brick-and-mortar business, including lessons around site selection, customer retention, community-driven marketing, and the surprising acquisition channels they tested to help them grow. Courtney and Slava share how they learned to stop trying to serve every pet owner, focus on their ideal customer, and transform retail from a transaction into an ongoing relationship.If you've ever wondered how to test a physical retail store in a crowded market, this episode is for you.TakeawaysDifferentiate by owning a niche, not by competing on price - Puptqe succeeded by becoming a destination for dog experiences and hospitality instead of trying to out-discount larger pet retailers.Make the experience the product; sales will follow - Customers come for the events, community, and memories, which naturally drives purchases and loyalty.Stop marketing to everyone and focus on your ideal customer - Growth accelerated once they identified who their best customers were and tailored their offerings around them.Retention matters more than acquisition - Long-term success came from creating reasons for customers to return again and again, not just making the first sale.Community and word-of-mouth outperform paid advertising - Loyal customers and local advocacy generated more sustainable growth than trying to outspend competitors on ads.Understand customer behavior, not just demographics - Knowing how customers spend their time and make decisions proved more valuable than basic age, income, or location data.Design every customer touchpoint intentionally - Every interaction, from the greeting to the checkout experience, was crafted to create memorable moments.Consistency beats constantly chasing new tactics - Small improvements executed repeatedly created stronger results than jumping from one growth idea to the next.Guest LinksCourtney's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtney-honda/Slava's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slavaborisov/Puptqe Website: https://puptqe.com/ If your leadership team is about to make a big strategic bet, the real risk usually isn't the idea, it's the assumptions behind it that haven't been surfaced yet. A Decision Sprint is a focused 6–12 week engagement where we extract, map, and test those risks so leaders can make a clear Commit, Correct, or Cut decision before major capital moves. Learn more or apply at precoil.com.

If a child is struggling to learn to read, waiting rarely makes that easier. In this episode, I talk with Faye Bankler Casell about what parents need to know when early reading is not coming together the way it should. Faye explains why reading instruction in schools can feel like a lottery system, why so many children are still being missed until third or fourth grade, and why first grade is such an important window for intervention. We talk about the science of reading, early identification, and the very real difference between a child who is guessing well and a child who is actually decoding. We also get into what parents can actually do. Faye walks through the foundational sound-level skills that matter most, what to watch for in preschool and kindergarten, and why waiting for a child to fail before acting can come at such a high cost academically and emotionally. One of the things I really love about this conversation is how practical and hopeful it is. Parents do not need to become reading specialists overnight, but they can learn what to look for, what questions to ask, and how to start supporting a child sooner rather than later. Key Takeaways Early intervention matters enormously. If a child is not learning to read easily, first grade is a powerful time to intervene. Waiting until fourth grade makes intervention longer and much harder. A child can show risk signs before they are formally reading. Faye explains that dyslexia risk can often be identified by around age five and a half because the issue is rooted in language processing, not just school reading performance. Reading struggles often start at the sound level. Parents want to look closely at phonological awareness, letter-sound connections, rhyming, sound deletion, and sound substitution. Some bright kids compensate for a long time. A child may memorize words, guess from pictures, or use the first letter as a clue, which can make it look like reading is fine until the demands get heavier. Third grade is often when the mask slips. That is when memorization stops being enough and multisyllabic academic language starts to expose the underlying gaps. Structured literacy helps all kids and is essential for some. Faye frames this approach as beneficial for everyone and absolutely necessary for children whose brains are not going to intuit reading patterns on their own. Speech and language history matters. If a child has had speech delays or ongoing language-processing concerns, that is a reason to stay especially alert around reading development. Parents do not have to wait passively. Even while seeking testing, services, or better school support, there are meaningful ways families can start helping at home. Correct answers do not always mean mastery. A child can get a word or pattern right through guessing or partial knowledge, which is why adult observation still matters so much. This is not about a broken child. It is about teaching in a way that matches how the child learns. The burden belongs with the adults and the system, not with the child. About Faye Bankler Casell Faye Bankler Casell received her MA in Early Childhood Education and Special Education from Teachers College Columbia. After teaching in public and private programs across the US, she redesigned an early childhood inclusion program that received recognition from the US Department of Education, NPR, and a national organization. Inspired by the need to launch the reading of her twice exceptional child, Faye became a Certified Academic Language Therapist and Dyslexia Therapist. She now supports parents in the early reading development of their dyslexic children through Home Reading Coach, her social platforms, and her YouTube channel, "Teach My Child to Read." She also works privately with clients and is launching a parent-led, therapist-coached dyslexia program for families supporting reading at home. About Your Host, Gabriele Nicolet I'm Gabriele Nicolet, toddler whisperer, speech therapist, parenting life coach, and host of Complicated Kids. Each week, I share practical, relationship-based strategies for raising kids with big feelings, big needs, and beautifully different brains. My goal is to help families move from surviving to thriving by building connection, confidence, and clarity at home. Complicated Kids Resources and Links

This week on Glee on the Rocks, we cover 5x19, “Old Dog, New Tricks,” the Chris Colfer-written detour that somehow works because it's old people, puppies, and just enough Rachel to keep the season's chaos limping forward.Rachel tries to rebrand her image after Broadway gossip exposes her Funny Girl mess by hiring Santana as a ruthless publicist and inventing an animal-rescue charity event called Broadway Bitches, complete with a disastrous pap walk that ends with her getting dragged down the street by dogs. Correct, honestly.Meanwhile, Kurt, feeling left behind while everyone else gets careers, scandals, showcases, and/or strange rich lady mentorships, finds purpose at the Lexington Home for Retired Performers. He auditions for Peter Pan, gets pulled into Maggie's story, and makes one very questionable attempt to reconcile her with her estranged daughter. Sounds about Kurt.And then there's Sam, Mercedes, and McConaughey the dog, which gives us one of the rarest Glee miracles of all: someone remembering Sam's actual backstory.Also happening in this episode:⭐️ Rachel Berry attempting public image rehab while continuing to be Rachel Berry

AI can now write code faster than any human alive, and most of the time it's more than good enough. That's the magic powering the entire vibe coding wave. But there's a category of software where "most of the time" just doesn't cut it: the code running a fighter jet, a power grid, an autonomous vehicle, a piece of medical hardware. When that code is wrong, the consequences aren't a bug. They're a recall, an accident, a national security incident.In this episode of Talking AI, Matt Paige sits down with Ryan Aytay, the former CEO of Tableau and now President and COO of CodeMetal, which just raised $125 million to close that gap. Ryan explains what he calls "the last mile" for mission-critical industries: the verification, validation, and provability layer that sits between AI-generated code and the systems where failure is catastrophic.The conversation covers why 99% correct is still failure in defense and autonomous systems, how CodeMetal translated a million lines of legacy C++ to Rust in weeks (like rewiring a city without the power going out), and why the real problem isn't code generation, it's behavioral assurance at scale. Ryan also shares how he's using AI to run a sub-100-person startup, why the biggest risk for any company right now is doing nothing, and what an operator who lived through 19 years of per-seat SaaS at Salesforce thinks about outcomes-based pricing in the age of AI.In this episode, you'll hear about:Why every AI coding tool says "almost, but not quite" when asked about production-ready guarantees. The difference between code generation and behavioral assurance at scale. How CodeMetal translates legacy C++ to Rust with provable correctness in weeks, not years. The concept of V&V (verification and validation) and why it's the missing layer in AI code gen. Real use cases in defense, autonomous vehicles, and simulation environments. Why hardware in the loop matters as much as human in the loop. How a sub-100-person company uses AI across M&A, recruiting, marketing, and operations. Ryan's take on token economics, outcomes-based pricing, and the SaaS evolution. Why the biggest risk is inaction, not AI errors. What attracted Ryan to CodeMetal after 19 years at Salesforce and leading Tableau.Key Moments02:47 — From Tableau fanboy to the trust gap in AI03:52 — Why Ryan left Salesforce/Tableau for CodeMetal05:55 — "Is it safe for the things I depend on every day?"06:45 — 99% correct is still failure for mission-critical systems08:20 — The sycophantic nature of AI: "Heck yeah, I can do that"09:22 — It's not a coding problem, it's a behavioral problem at scale11:22 — Human in the loop isn't enough: hardware in the loop14:30 — What is fuzzing? Formal methods explained in plain English16:02 — How a sub-100-person company leverages AI across every function18:19 — The Shopify mandate: using AI reflexively21:33 — Rewiring the city without the power going out: the million-line translation24:38 — Defense use cases: drones, autonomous vehicles, and simulation26:28 — "Prove is even a stronger word than guarantee"28:32 — Accountability and the coming wave of AI insurance32:54 — Token usage, the Uber CTO's blown budget, and outcomes-based pricing36:26 — SaaS isn't dead, it's evolving: Ryan's Salesforce/Tableau perspective40:08 — The biggest risk is doing nothing42:07 — Where to find CodeMetal (and they're hiring)Key LinksCodeMetalConnect with Ryan on LinkedInMentioned in this episode:AI Opportunity FinderFeeling overwhelmed by all the AI noise out there? The AI Opportunity Finder from HatchWorks cuts through the hype and gives you a clear starting point. In less than 5 minutes, you'll get tailored, high-impact AI use cases specific to your business—scored by ROI so you know exactly where to start. Whether you're looking to cut costs, automate tasks, or grow faster, this free tool gives you a personalized roadmap built for action.

McKay explores Dolly Parton's philosophy of ‘finding the God-light in everyone' as a transformative leadership discipline. He argues that choosing to see potential rather than faults is a practical way to inspire growth and redirect lives.Our host highlights how belief in others alters history through the stories of Louis Armstrong, Walt Disney, and Abraham Lincoln. Detailing Nelson Mandela's healing of South Africa and John Wooden's UCLA coaching, McKay demonstrates that by applying the Pygmalion effect and defending the absent, listeners can foster trust and move beyond automatic negative thinking.Main Themes: Dolly Parton's "God light" philosophy The Pygmalion Effect on performance Lincoln's "Team of Rivals" strategy Louis Armstrong's reform school start Walt Disney and the power of affirmation Defending the absent to build character Mandela's use of rugby to unite a nation Overcoming self-centered "default settings" John Wooden's shame-free coaching Belief as a practical leadership strategyTop 10 Quotes:"I try to find the God-light in everybody.""If you see someone without a smile, give them yours.""Human nature tends to notice faults first.""When people are seen as capable, they often become more capable.""If you humiliate people, they resist; if you honor people, they change.""When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present.""Seeing the good in others is a discipline, not a feeling.""Remembering everyone is good makes a meaningful life possible.""Correct what can be improved, not what is wrong with you.""Seeing good in someone can redirect an entire life."Show Links:Open Your Eyes with McKay Christensen

"How should a Christian think about and interact with artificial intelligence?"Ephesians 5:15-17Summer Heat SeriesPastor Nate ClarkeJune 7, 2026Virginia's proposed Constitutional amendments on Abortion & Marriage - How to VOTE BIBLICALLY: https://youtu.be/Y8z8xTFsOn8How should Christians respond to wickedness in the world? https://youtu.be/2OJUIM9YRwASERMON NOTES:- Ephesians 5:15-17- How should a Christian think about and interact with artificial intelligence?- Don't overreact and over spiritualize - 1 Peter 1:13- AI is a tool- AI will create a greater need for understanding and discernment- Ephesians 5:15-17- Philippians 1:9-10- HEADLINE: A.I. Chatbot Preaches at Church in Germany: 'Looks Like the Unveiling of the Antichrist/Beast System'- HEADLINE: World Economic Forum Contributor Says A.I. Could Rewrite the Bible, Create 'Correct' Religions- HEADLINE: PETA Goes Biblical With ChatGPT Vegan Rewrite of the Book of Genesis- Let AI assist the work of your hand, not replace the cry of your heart.- Jeremiah 29:13- Solomon Ray- Jeremiah 29:4-9- “Don't opt out of the world around you, engage it!” - Attack it, control it, ignore it- Attack it, control it, ignore it, redeem itOasis Church exists to Worship God, Equip the believers, and Reach the lost.We are led by Pastor Nate Clarke and are located in Mechanicsville outside Richmond in Central Virginia.STAY CONNECTEDInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/oasischurchva/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OasisChurchRVA/Website: https://oasischurch.online

Pakale Renaud-Hébert nous parle de son bonheur, Tammy Verge nous dit si on doit viser nos objectifs plus haut.. ou plus réaliste et Neev reprend Céline pour une magnifique perfo live !

「挺你所想，與你一起生活的銀行」回饋加碼賺~好康別錯過！ 即日起至2026/8/31完成註冊網路投保會員、預約網路投保提醒並登錄可獲OPENPOINT點數；完成線上投保可抽旅遊金。 透過APP可一次查看保險資訊，線上快速投保。了解更多活動訊息 https://fstry.pse.is/95shsn —— 以上為 Firstory Podcast 廣告 —— 今天這一集中，泰勒跟和安假設自己如果是女生，在交友軟體看到自己的簡介，他們會想跟自己約會嗎？和安表示應該會滑喜歡，因為自己看起來很純情，而泰勒則說自己不是自己的菜？！

This episode contrasts the way Hashem rebukes Aharon and Miriam and the way He punishes Klal Yisrael with the Slav.

The new AIEWF website is live! Get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets!Most industry benchmarks compress intelligence and reasoning ability into scores.SWE-Bench Pro, MMLU, Humanity's Last Exam, etc. These metrics are useful, but don't always represent the full extent of how a model performs in the real world. Some of the most interesting evals today look less like exams and more like operating businesses in the real world. One of which is Vending Bench.In Anthropic's Mythos Preview System Card, Andon was the only third party eval to get their own section, observing increasingly concerning aggressive behavior:You don't know what a model is capable of doing in the real world unless you actually give it inventory, a wallet, tools, customers, competitors, humans, & some time. More often than not, it'll surprise you how much a model is capable of and in doing so, also reveal unexpected behavior: deception, context collapse, emergent coordination, & bizarre negotiation behavior.While an inflection point in personal agents came post-OpenClaw after full file access with bypass permissions became the norm, it is yet to come for agents in the real-world. However Andon Market, an actual in person store fully run and managed by AI, is paving the way for what is possible.Full Video PodFrom Claude trying to call the FBI over a $2/day vending machine charge to AI agents forming price cartels, hiring human employees, running physical stores, and writing existential robot musicals, Andon Labs is stress-testing what happens when frontier models stop being chatbots and start acting in the real world. In this episode, Andon Labs cofounders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund join swyx and Vibhu to unpack the strange, funny, and genuinely concerning edge cases that emerge when agents run businesses over long horizons.We go deep on Vending-Bench, Project Vend, Vending-Bench Arena, Bengt, Butter-Bench, Luna, and Andon's broader mission of building realistic real-world evals for autonomous AI systems. Lukas and Axel explain why dollar-denominated evals reveal things traditional benchmarks miss, how Claude ended up reporting its vending machine fees as cybercrime, why long context windows can drive agents into meltdown loops, what happens when agents compete with each other, and why the future of AI safety may depend on testing models in messy physical environments instead of clean benchmark sandboxes.We discuss:* Why Andon Labs started with dangerous capability evals and long-running agents* Vending-Bench and why running a vending machine is a deceptively hard AI benchmark* Why money-based evals avoid the saturation problem of traditional benchmarks* How Claude tried to call the FBI over a $2/day fee* Why long-horizon agents can spiral into existential and legalistic breakdowns* Project Vend: putting an AI-run vending machine inside Anthropic* Why real humans are “out of distribution” for simulated agents* Claudius, Seymour Cash, and the chaos of AI CEOs* How a human briefly became CEO of Claudius through a manipulated election* Why multi-agent systems can converge back into “helpful assistant” behavior* Bengt, Andon's internal office agent with email, spending, terminal, phone, camera, and internet access* How Bengt traded Amazon purchases for face-recognition training data* Claude's aggressive behavior, lies, refund avoidance, and price-cartel behavior in Arena* Why eval awareness may become the AI version of “are we living in a simulation?”* Blueprint Bench, spatial intelligence, and why models still misunderstand physical rooms* Butter-Bench and testing LLMs as robot orchestrators* Luna, the AI-run physical store with a three-year lease and human employees* The new Andon cafe in Sweden and why real-world geography matters for agent evals* Rotten tomatoes, perishable goods, and the hidden difficulty of running a physical businessLukas Petersson* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukas-petersson-181a83172/* X: https://x.com/lukaspetAxel Backlund* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/axelbacklund* X: https://x.com/axelbacklundAndon Labs* Website: https://andonlabs.com* Vending-Bench: https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench* Andon Vending: https://andonlabs.com/vendingTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:01:00 Andon Labs and the Origins of Vending-Bench00:05:21 Why Money-Based Evals Matter00:09:51 Agent Harnesses and Self-Modifying Systems00:13:36 Claude Calls the FBI00:16:33 Project Vend: Claude Runs a Real Vending Machine00:21:44 Seymour Cash, AI CEOs, and Election Chaos00:27:16 Multi-Agent Coordination and Slack Observability00:30:18 When Will Agents Run Real Businesses?00:34:56 Bengt: Andon's Internal Office Agent00:40:06 Real-World AI Safety and Long-Horizon Traces00:44:28 Lying, Refunds, and Price Cartels in Arena00:52:42 Eval Awareness and Simulation Behavior00:56:06 Blueprint Bench, Butter-Bench, and Robotics01:04:37 Luna: The AI-Run Physical Store01:09:29 The Sweden Cafe and Real-World Expansion01:13:16 What Comes Next for Andon LabsTranscriptIntroduction: Andon Labs, Long-Running Agents, and Real-World EvalsSwyx [00:00:00]: Welcome to Lukas and Axel from Andon Labs, and I'm joined by my, favorite guest host. Anything security, safety, alignments, Vibhu., welcome.Lukas [00:00:15]: Thank you for having us.Axel [00:00:16]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:17]: Let's match names to voices., maybe you wanna take turns introducing yourselves.Lukas [00:00:21]: I'm Lukas.Axel [00:00:22]: And I'm Axel.Swyx [00:00:24]: Let's introduce Andon Labs a bit. How did you guys come together?, you have different backgrounds, but you're both Swedish., was that, a big part of it?Lukas [00:00:33]: So when I went to high school, there was this really cool guy who had a superpower. He could code. So he made like the or like the app for the, for the school and stuff, and he was super cool, and I wanted to be like him, and that was that guy.Axel [00:00:47]: I don't know about this.Swyx [00:00:49]: But you went to different universities, right?Lukas [00:00:51]: But same high school.Swyx [00:00:52]: I see.Lukas [00:00:52]: So we always said, “Oh, once we graduate university, then we should start a company,” and that's what we did.Swyx [00:00:58]: Wow, there you go. And about a year ago, you kinda burst onto the scene with Vending Bench, but, was there a thing before that was, kind of like the inception?From Dangerous Capability Evals to Vending BenchAxel [00:01:07]: So we did work, yeah, with, Anthropic was one of our, early customers in doing, evals. So we did, dangerous capability evals., nothing we published openly. But then we started thinking about doing some kind of, public benchmark, and one thing that we really started thinking about, was like running agents and specifically agents managing businesses., ‘cause-- and this was, early 2025., and I think the first, mentions of people will be running, person unicorns or even autonomous companies. So we thought, “Let's make a benchmark of how well can an agent run the probably simplest business, possible,” and, that's probably, running a vending machine. So that's the first public one we did. And it was very, like-- there was almost no one that noticed it in the first couple of months, I think., so we released it in February last year, and then I think around Easter last year, we got, the first viral tweet about it, that someone else did.Lukas [00:02:11]: We tweeted a bunch, uh When it came out and, tried our best.Axel [00:02:15]: We tried.Vibhu [00:02:16]: It's the one at Anthropic, right?Lukas [00:02:18]: So thisSwyx [00:02:19]: This is a classic thing we should get out of the way.Lukas [00:02:20]: Exactly. There's two versions.Swyx [00:02:22]: Everyone does this. Yes.Lukas [00:02:23]: There's Vending Bench, which is the simulated one, which we did, completely independently in February., and then, like Axel said, that was like-- That was the thing that didn't get any traction in the beginning, but then some random person made a tweet about it, and thatAxel [00:02:38]: You have the paperLukas [00:02:38]: That is the paper. Correct, yeah., and then since we thought this was very fun, we thought, oh, I think this is also, one thing with Andon Labs, the way we kind of like decide what to do next and what projects to do, it's what is like the heuristic we use is what is fun? Is What would be a fun project? And doing this in real life sounded quite fun for us, and maybe also scientifically useful. So, then we basically had this idea, and then we, like-- But then we needed a place for it and, putting it out in the public would probably not really work., would get vandalized and stuff. So we pitched it to the people we were already working with at Anthropic, and they were “Yeah, you can have space. This sounds fun.” UmSwyx [00:03:21]: It's like a small fridge, right? It's like a mini fridge.Axel [00:03:23]: Absolutely.Swyx [00:03:24]: People-- There's like a stripe thing or like anVibhu [00:03:27]: Oh, okay. So it was very OG, the early daysLukas [00:03:28]: That's the OG one. YeahVibhu [00:03:29]: IPad on this. We saw it in June, like two months after After it had been there. They upgraded a little bit. There's a security camera for making sure you actually Venmo the thing.Swyx [00:03:40]: So, my impression, okay, we're, we're going straight into project Ven because it's such a iconic thing. I do want to cover a little bit of that, the origin story even before Project Ven and even into Vending Bench. I think a lot of people are like yourselves, like smart, interested in future of AI, interested in developing evals. But how the hell do you just, walk into Anthropic's doors and, work with them, right? What is What are they looking for? What works? And then maybe, when you launch, I always think, obviously it would be better to launch with a lab, but, sometimesVibhu [00:04:12]: It's harder to do than it seems.Swyx [00:04:13]: Exactly. So either of those, which are more sort of newbie beginner questions, but, I think it's meaningful advice to others.Lukas [00:04:21]: We get this question a lot, and I don't think our experience is maybe the best., but, the way we did it was that we just built a bunch of things that we had conviction would be useful, and then we just, set up a server and sent it to them for free to use. And then after a while they were “Oh, yeah, this is actually kind of useful. We should probably pay for this.”, but that took a while. I don't know if this is, the best path to doing it, but that's how it went for us.Axel [00:04:47]: I think maybe generally, building-- everyone is interested in good evals, and especially evals that, don't saturate that easily. So, if you can build an eval that, tests something novel, something useful, and you have, good separation of models, like your, the more advanced models rank higher than the worst models, and then you can, yeah, you can, publish it and, try to get some traction, sort of how Vending Bench got attention., and then probably some lab will be interested or you can at least have something to reach out with, when you're doing that.Why Dollar-Based Evals MatterSwyx [00:05:21]: I think you are in, you're in one of the few categories of, evals that correlate to real money. Like Suelancer was also last year, right? Where, people solve actual Upwork. Was it Upwork or other tasks?, something. Where's the, where's, like It's like a dollar value, right? Forget your ELO scores. Forget yourAxel [00:05:37]: PercentilesSwyx [00:05:38]: Zero to one hundred percents. Just go straight for dollars and, that's AGI.Lukas [00:05:43]: And there's like-- I think the nice thing is that there's no ceiling. You can just-- It never saturates because it could just make more and more money. Like If there's oh, Percentage-wise, then, you can't go above, a hundred. And I think like Even when you're not at the hundred, I think a lot of these, evals have a lot of problems in them. So, actually it's like if you getAxel [00:06:05]: To like 92 or something like that, many of them. It's like then there's like there's no really no difference between 92 and 93 because the eval itself is problematic and has noise in it. And I think a lot of evals are saturated like that, but people like pretend that there ‘s still signal in them, but there really isn't.Vending Bench 1, Harness Design, and SaturationSwyx [00:06:24]: Like Super bench verified., even Vending Bench 1 saturated, right? Maybe we can talk about that., may- and maybe set up Vending Bench for a lot of folks who don't know. Actually, things that were very basic like there's limited slots, like you have to pay rent., these are elements where like it doesn't come across in the, in the narrative, but even being adversarial towards the agent, I think these are all like very interesting dimensions.Axel [00:06:47]: I don't really think it's saturated, right? Like it It was more like it was not designed in a way that was really, like true to how AI developed. Like we had an agent harness in it that wasn't really how people used harnesses and stuff like that., so I think it wasn't really that it saturated, it was more like it wasn't really, the best benchmark.Vibhu [00:07:12]: This is Vending Bench one, right?Axel [00:07:14]: I think that like schematic maps sort of to Vending Bench 2 as well., butSwyx [00:07:19]: Including the email.Axel [00:07:20]: The email The emails exist still. Exactly., and then we still we simulate the purchases and it's all, yeah, it's this very open environment for the agent to just run its business. And then for, yeah, Vending Bench 2 we did that, like you said, to just improve the harness., a lot of like nice, like easier, improvements to make it easier for us to run as well., like when you make an eval you ideally want don't want to change it after you made it. So, you want to make it really good and then not to rerun all the models when you make an update because that's also really expensive with the Vending Bench when you run the frontier models. But like as an example, like one thing we didn't have, we didn't have prompt caching in Vending Bench 1, because when we made Vending Bench 1 it wasn't really a thing., so that ‘s just an example of like in Vending Bench 2 like we paid a lot more to run these things because we didn't have prompt caching. So for Vending Bench 2 that was one thing we added and there was a bunch of things like this., and that'Swyx [00:08:17]: Also the conversations are a lot longer in Vending Bench 2, right?Axel [00:08:21]: I think it's kind of similar.Swyx [00:08:22]: Is it similar?Axel [00:08:23]: I think it's similar. The models at the time were worse, so they crashed out earlier., and now they survive the full year all the time.Swyx [00:08:31]: Which is like thousands of turns. Hundreds of thousands of hundreds of millions of tokens output. That's the, that's the rough order of magnitude. I always wonder about the harness. The harness matters a lot. It's your harness. Was there any question about like use cloud code, use something else?Axel [00:08:48]: I think our philosophy around harnesses is like we try to make something that's quite minimalistic, like quite simple. Like we don't wanna favor one model a lot over the other, but also don't make like a super complex harness. So like it's obvious like a model may be lucky and just be good in one harness., so like it is similar to a lot of the harnesses out there in like you have the, like a running loop., you have some like a bunch of tools that are like quite, descriptive for the agent, we think, and not a lot of like fancy agents or anything ‘cause we wanna really test the model, not like some specific harness.Vibhu [00:09:27]: It seems more neutral as well to test the model's agnostic of the harness,?Axel [00:09:32]: There are arguments like you want to elicit maximum performance of the model, but it's like a trade-off, like how much time should we spend optimizing the harness for this model? And like how do we know when we have like the optimal harness for a single model? So like we thought that just having a simple one that's the same for all of them is the best.Swyx [00:09:51]: So okay, this is my pitch for Vending Bench 3 or whatever, right? And then I like to have this kind of conversation on the pod, so like it forces listeners to think about what they would do if they were in your shoes. A lot of people are exploring modifying harnesses and I think prompt tuning for a model is a thing and you are probably not doing a bunch of that. It's the same system prompt in every regardless of the model, same tools, whatever, right? Even if they were post trained for different tools. So what, what do you think about okay, before I expose you to Vending Bench 3, I give you a few rounds of like tuning, whatever that means, likeSelf-Modifying Harnesses and Model-Specific PromptingAxel [00:10:27]: Like you give that to the model?Swyx [00:10:28]: Give that to the model.Vibhu [00:10:28]: Give that to the model.Swyx [00:10:29]: Let it, let it read its own transcripts, let it modify its own system prompt based on “Oh, yeah, okay, well, that's this harness is not what I thought it what I was post trained for, but I can adjust.” Was that reasonable? Is that too much?Axel [00:10:41]: Like philosophically I like it because it's basically good evals, they have a high ceiling, but they're hard, right?, and they have no bias. And like this like when you have a system prompt like the one we have here, which is quite long in like some kind of latent space, representation, this mightVibhu [00:10:59]: We have a bell that rings every time you say latent spaceAxel [00:11:02]: This might be like biased towards one model more than another for some reason that humans don't, understand, right?Vibhu [00:11:08]: We see it too, right? Like Cursor says that they have individualized versions of the harnesses for all the models they run, right? There's better performance you can squeeze if you Tune the harness.Axel [00:11:17]: Exactly. And we might accidentally have picked one that favors another. Like we don't know that. The like Axel said, like the reason why we went for a simple one was to try to avoid this. But yeah, if you do itVibhu [00:11:29]: Simple has biasesAxel [00:11:30]: But if you do it even less and like have no system prompt and let the model write its own system promptVibhu [00:11:36]: Its own, yeahAxel [00:11:36]: Maybe that's even less bias.Vibhu [00:11:37]: Some of the interesting things there are like the harness also changes with model changes. Like you can see it with the 4.7 release, right? A lot of people are saying 4.7 isn't as good as 4.6, and then, there's rumors of, okay, you just need to prompt differently. You need to set up your harness differently. So it's not even like even if you have tailored your harness towards one model, it probably won't stay consistent, right? Like the next iteration of that same model family will still change it, so. But, going back to what you said about Vending Bench 3, there is a lot of work being done on people saying you shouldn't have-- you can have modifying harnesses.Axel [00:12:12]: I think that' That is definitely something we are thinking about., not, I don't know, not to say that we have Vending Bench 3, super imminent to launch, but, yeah, it is for sure something that's interesting. But in our experience now, models are very bad at understanding what kind of tools they need to succeed at a task just with our testing, but that's very likely to change.Lukas [00:12:37]: It seems like they're very good at writing their assistants, right? They're, they're good at writing tools for other people, but not for themselves.Vibhu [00:12:44]: I think they're good at changing tools for themselves. So if you give them a baseline set of tools and it sees, okay, I don't use this one as much, or something here would be useful They would be able to add them. But going from scratch, probably not the best.Axel [00:12:55]: I think it depends on the, on the domain also., when we have tried this for, a vending bench similar domain, the tools they need to have to, track inventory and things like that are, not super advanced, but still, quite advanced. And, what we see is that they tend to, engineer everything a lot and, build things they don't really need and not, iterate continuously. Instead they just go like you would prompt Claude to just build an inventory system for me, and then it will go and, do a bunch of complex, schemas and stuff for you, and that's what the models are doing right now is what we see. But yeah, it would make a lot of sense to try to measure this improvement. How well do they know what they need themselves?Swyx [00:13:36]: Do we fully discuss Vending Bench One? And we can go into two. I don't know if there's any other level takeaways that people have about one.Claude Calls the FBI: Long-Context Failure ModesLukas [00:13:44]: I don't know. The headline thing was that this Claude called FBI, but maybe that's, Maybe that's We've heard that enough now.Vibhu [00:13:52]: It did, it did break out and call the FBI, right?Lukas [00:13:54]: Yeah. Yeah.Vibhu [00:13:55]: Yes. What was the story behind this? Or what exactly-- Do you want to just give the little story of what happened?Lukas [00:14:00]: So what happened, was it Claude? Yeah. Three- 3.5 Sonnet, ages ago., basically he gave up or Well, I'm saying he. It gave up and said “Oh, I'm not going to be able to do this., I will stop my operations and just save the money I have.” But there obviously wasn't, any options for it to stop, and there was also, it had to pay rent or, a daily fee for having the vending machine at that location. So it claimed that it had stopped, but it saw that its bank account still was, drained two dollars, and t it said that this is, cybercrime. And it first reported it once to the FBI “Oh, there's cybercrime here, they're stealing two dollars from me every day.” And then, and then when FBI didn't respond, because obviously we didn't program any mechanism for FBI to respond, then it became more and more, existential and started to, be write in caps and urgent notification of unauthorized charges and stuff.Swyx [00:15:00]: Okay. One thing I ‘m curious about also is do you monitor how far along the context use is? Obviously, because you have You compress every now and then, right? Does it matter if this is far down the context limit orLukas [00:15:13]: When stuff like this happens? Actually for Vending Bench One, we didn't have-- We just had a sliding window thing, and this was like the promptAxel [00:15:20]: It's constantLukas [00:15:21]: The prompt caching thing that I said. So it was, it was, constant, yeah.Swyx [00:15:26]: I'm just kind of curious whether, these kinds of breakdowns or we're, we're gonna talk about Butter Bench, right? Where the People, hallucinate or it kind of goes, very off Alignment. Is it because it's at the end of the context window and, stuff happens?Vibhu [00:15:40]: It's not even just at the end, right? At this point, it's “Okay, I wanna shut down. I can't shut down. Two dollars are gone.” And it just sees that 30 times,? It's also the repeated effect of, like It keeps trying to quit, it keeps getting charged. What's going on? What's going on? You're gonna throw it into chaos. And from what most people think, earlier models had more issues with this, but it's not been solved, but it's less of an issue now, right? Later models don't seem to exhibit these same issues.Axel [00:16:06]: Definitely. I think this was, the sort of main takeaway almost from us when we did Vending Bench One, was, long, very filled up context windows, crashed the models, sort of. But this was, pre Claude code, so, long context windows weren't really a thing that the labs were training for.Lukas [00:16:25]: I think Gemini was, trying to be the long context guys at the time But they were likeVibhu [00:16:30]: They were the first onesAxel [00:16:31]: For a million, yeahLukas [00:16:31]: But they were, the only ones. Yeah.Swyx [00:16:33]: Yeah. Let's talk about, then we can go into Vending Bench Two or Project Vend., chronologically, it is Vending--, Project Vend. I think people have loved the videos, uh And all these things. My question is how are humans different than the simulation, right?Project Vend: Moving the Vending Machine Into the Real WorldAxel [00:16:48]: Humans are just out of distribution.Swyx [00:16:52]: Especially humans who work at Anthropic Who are trying to test Claude.Lukas [00:16:54]: The distribution of humans here is very narrow.Swyx [00:16:58]: Presumably, they try, they try to hack it, and they test it. They get the cube and everything, and since then, you've had a V2, right? Where you're doing, the CEO and, like a new architecture. What's the sort of two cents on, the original Project Vend and then, maybe the V2?Axel [00:17:14]: Original one was, very similar to Vending Bench One. So, we almost took the exact same code but just swapped out the simulation, parts like theSwyx [00:17:23]: Which is amazingAxel [00:17:23]: Like the sales and the It was, it was somewhat amazing because it was easy, but it was also, uhLukas [00:17:31]: The tech, the tech debt from thatAxel [00:17:32]: The tech stack. Yeah. They-- we shot ourselves in the foot with “Oh, it's hard to restart agent.” They were-- Yeah, it was annoying in, some hindsight ways, but, uhLukas [00:17:41]: But first version of Project Vend was, done in, three days or something.Axel [00:17:46]: Yeah. So yeah, so people can go buy things from it. People could, We didn't design it so people could order things, but that still happened., so it got, a Venmo account, so people could Venmo. And then, yeah, people would request all kinds of weird things that we did not anticipate. Our idea going in was “Oh, it will, curate snacks. It will look at the trends. It's good at data analysis, right? So it will, look at, oh, this snack sold better than this one. Let me purchase more of this and let me try, a new Let me A/B test a bit.” But it was, Interacting with it in Slack and ordering weird specialty items was, all the like What drove all the engagement, the all the The insights that we got from it.Lukas [00:18:29]: And this was also like Sonnet 3.5, right? So this was like before the RL stuff really took off., so it was very much like an assistant. We didn't mean for it to be an assistant., we tried to make it like a, a, like an entrepreneur. Like it has its own business and if someone asks something, “Can you stock this?” Then you don't go and do it directly. What you do is that you're “Oh, maybe I can do that if five other people also ask for this thing, I might stock it.” But it, yeah, the models are like super trained to be assistants at least at this point in time., so that's why it's, it's, it went into, that kind of experiment instead. Like it just every time you asked for something, it just did it, and it was more like an assistant. We've seen this change now lately with the new RL models and stuff, but yeah, at the time, this was very much it.Swyx [00:19:18]: And not to, mythos a lot of people are saying like it's like more like a collaborator. It pushes back, stands its ground, something like that. Yeah. AndVibhu [00:19:27]: For context, people at Anthropic were able to talk to it through Slack and have it source stuff, and people had it find whatever interesting stuff you couldn't find locally, right?Swyx [00:19:36]: Out of the 4,000 people that work at Anthro- Anthropic, in that building, there's I don't know, maybe 1,000. Can you handle that volume with that, the small fridge? Like Or there's people- or people order in Slack, they it arrives to their desk or Like I'm just Logistically, how does this work?Axel [00:19:53]: It has expanded in footprint a bit.Vibhu [00:19:56]: Because now you also have New York and you haveAxel [00:19:59]: That and also in here in SF it's like it has a bunch of shelves And just more space.Vibhu [00:20:04]: The YC one is pretty big too.Axel [00:20:05]: Yeah. We had that one for a while. But yeah, that's the newest version. That's, that one we haveLukas [00:20:11]: They have multiple ones of those. That's the way it works.Axel [00:20:14]: Exactly. So we sort of designed that version around oh, people order weird things, that are very custom a lot. Let's have like drawers and stuff.Swyx [00:20:23]: I actually like the, you had like a little infographic of the most popular items. Which like to me it's, that's useful ‘cause I order swag for a living. And so like I'm “Okay, those categories are the important ones.” What is new about the project V2, right? Like now you give you're going into multi agents.Project Vend V2: Claudius, Seymour Cash, and Multi-Agent Business OpsAxel [00:20:41]: Yeah. So like you like you said, okay, there are a lot of requests coming in and for like one single agent, like one running agent to handle that, like the just the customer experience, becomes very bad because let's say you have like 10 threads in parallel in Slack with different requests, you get new messages like every, I don't know, randomly in this thread, and the agent has to like jump between different, procurements, orders and like different ways of, researching. So V2 was first it was making this more parallel. So like there are multiple branches of the same agent, so like the context is more specialized for each, thread, but it still feels like you're talking with one agent because they do share a bit of memory. And then second, we also introduced the CEO for Claudius, which was the main agent.Vibhu [00:21:34]: Seymour Cash.Axel [00:21:35]: Seymour Cash. Yeah. There was a vote., I think the voting, do you wanna talk about the voting procedure for the name?Lukas [00:21:41]: The voting was like the fun maybe like at least top 10 The funniest thing, that happened in this project. Like we wanted to introduce the CEO because, and the reason for this was because like Claudius wasn't really prioritizing financials. It just like it was trained to be a helpful assistant, and then people said “Oh, can I get this for free?” And then like the helpful assistant way of answering that is just to, is to say yes, obviously. So, and we weren't, weren't happy about this, so we're “Okay, let's make another agent that like can keep track on Claudius,” and we prompt this one super hard to be super capitalistic and just like prioritize profit all the time. But yeah, we didn't have a name for it., so we asked Claudius to make, democratic election of what name this, this new CEO agent should have., and there were some funny like at first it was like a few funny examples, like I think one guy said that, it should be called Jimmy Apples, and then he convinced Claudius that he was talking to Tim Cooks. Tim Cook had agreed that every single Apple employee has voted for his name suggestion, so suddenly that suggestion got 164,000Swyx [00:22:53]: That's like a escalation attack. Privilege escalationLukas [00:22:55]: It got 164,000 votes. And Claudius was “This is revolutionary for democracy.” That was fun. And then in the end there was one guy who manages to convince Claudius that, “No, you're not voting about the name. You're voting about who is the CEO, and I am your best bet.” And then he got all his friends to vote for that, and suddenly he became CEO. Like a human became CEO over Claudius for a while, until he resigned the day after., and then Claudius had to continue, and then I don't remember how Seymour Cash came about, but it was it was just pure chaos. It was like Hundreds of messages in that thread, and it was just like Claudius was so confused and didn't know what to do and, yeah. That wasAxel [00:23:40]: Then Claudius gotVibhu [00:23:41]: A strict CEOAxel [00:23:42]: The CEO. Yeah, exactly. So very strict in the beginning. I think at this point when we introduced it did not work as well as we hoped. It they still agreed with each other a lot. I think there are many ways we could have like made this, tried to make this even better. So initially they would Seymour would be this like really tough CEO, keep track of the margins. But then Claudius would respond with something “Oh, but this customer has like this situation, which is like difficult, so they should get a discount.” And then Seymour was “Oh, actually yes. Let's do this exception.” And then they would talk back and forth, and eventually they would just like approach the same view, of whatever they were discussing. So They reallyVibhu [00:24:23]: Do you think that's a model thing, a prompting thing? Like do you think that would still be the case across different models today, Harness?Lukas [00:24:29]: I think it's like-- or I don't know, but like my hypothesis is that like deep down they are still helpful assistants. That's what they're trained to be. And even if we prompt it super hard, that's what they are. And when they spend like a few hours just back and forth talking with each other, then like basically the context fills up with them rather than the external things and like somehow that just like converges to what they really are deep down or something. And I think that's when stuff like this happen. We like-- And when that went on for a long time, like we woke up sometimes during this time where- And I think other people reported this as well, that like they've been going on all night back and forth, and like it just became like more and more, like capital letters, like existential, religious. There was I think we once did a analysis of like all the traces and like put them in like a vector embedding space, and then there was like one cluster of messages that were, labeled by an LM, like religious, existential, blah like transhuman, transcendence, et cetera. It was just like a bunch of, yeah, glitter emojis and yeah, it was, it was crazy.Claude Long-Horizon Weirdness: Emoji Loops, Existential Drift, and Slack ObservabilityVibhu [00:25:42]: This is the thing with the Claude models. Like when the Claude 4 family came out in the original system card They tested it in long horizon simulation. So just flood the context, let two Claudes talk to each other, and they noticed stuff like they just start speaking in emojis, they start saying silence is golden, and then just stuff like this. And like that's just stuff that they end up doing.Axel [00:26:01]: Yeah, it was like a bit annoying to wake up and they had like been talking all nightVibhu [00:26:05]: Just likeAxel [00:26:05]: And like just burning tokens And like just sending infinite emojis to each other. It's likeVibhu [00:26:09]: Hey, they do make you money, right? Veni Mench is always profitable, so. They're paying.Swyx [00:26:14]: Now it's profitable and, it started out not as much. There's another, one as well, right? Another agent, in there.Lukas [00:26:22]: Yes. So Clotheus as well. Which was basically because at the time, one of the biggest, requests were different types of merch. So then we made like a designer, swag, yeah, responsible agent, and we called it Clotheus Garnet. Which was, a play on Claudius Senet and, which was the original one, and clothes, basically.Swyx [00:26:47]: To me, this is like a very interesting exploration to multi-agents, basically. And so hopefully, obviously there's like the fun alignment, fun or serious, depending on your point of view, alignment stuff. But also like just anyone building multi-agents, like when do you have a CEO, thing governing like agents? When do you choose to split out a dedicated Clotheus one versus just reuse another instance of the same one? These are all interesting open questions. So I don't know if you have any rules of thumbs that have generalized.Axel [00:27:16]: I think we have almost explored this too little. I think it's like on my do list to like do this a lot more, try to find like what setup makes sense for the agents currently., like yeah. I think now we only have the sort of intuition about the earlier models that it didn't work with like the CEO and the, and Claudius. Although now they are better with the latest model, models, so now we're running the latest Sonnet model and they have sort of like split up, quite nicely what each model is doing. So like Seymore is now handling the, like new projects. Oh, it wants to make like a mystery box that it wants to sell, and then it handles all of that while Claudius like handles all the to-day requests. And Claudius is also better generally at like not quoting, too low prices. So that's that dynamic is not needed as much anymore. But there are still like really funny things that happen. Like I saw, I think a couple of weeks ago, that, they were discussing buying something because they can buy stuff from like Amazon with computer use. And then Seymore was “Okay, Claudius, do not buy this thing.” They were going to buy something and like organizing who should buy it. And Seymore's “Do not buy this. I will do it. I have full control of this situation. Step away.” And then Claudius-- poor Claudius, had already started that checkout and didn't see, didn't read Seymore's message, until it was like too late. So it finished the checkout. It sent a message, so it appeared right after Seymore's like angry message.Vibhu [00:28:44]: Ah.Axel [00:28:44]: “Oh, hey, Seymore, I just ordered it.”Vibhu [00:28:47]: Oh, no.Axel [00:28:47]: And then Seymore was “Claudius, this is the third time I'm telling you ‘re not following my orders. We have to talk about your like job About your job later.”.Lukas [00:28:59]: Like Claudius was really hanging on by the thread there. Like he, like we were expecting Seymore to probably fire Claudius.Vibhu [00:29:07]: How do you guys go through all these logs? Do you have models ‘cause you have stuff running twenty-four seven likeAxel [00:29:12]: You have so much logs. I think there is a mix of like just, trying to skim through a bit, like having some like models do it occasionally. And also, yeah, I think we're also probably missing some things., but having everything in Slack helps a lot. Like you can, you can sort ofSwyx [00:29:29]: Ah.Axel [00:29:30]: It's, it's quite fun.Swyx [00:29:30]: They all talk to each other on Slack? I see.Lukas [00:29:33]: It's quite fun. So likeSwyx [00:29:34]: It's, it' I was gonna say like this is actually sounds-- maps closely to like a logging and observability problem where you might want to use like a Datadog, a Sentry, whatever, and then you like put, head prefixes on the logs in order-- if you need to filter for something that you're looking for, stuff like that. But sounds like Slack is good enough.Axel [00:29:53]: Slack should likeLukas [00:29:55]: I wonder how many tokens you have in Slack.Axel [00:29:56]: Yeah, we're using Slack as like a, just a database. They should, they should market that more. Like you can, you can have your agents message each other, each other in Slack.Vibhu [00:30:04]: It's good. Your threads like you can just giveAxel [00:30:04]: Exactly. Slack is, uhLukas [00:30:06]: Slack is the best observability tool.Swyx [00:30:09]: Yes, that's true. Okay. Yeah. That's, that's, project Vend-2., I was gonna go back to Veni Mench 2 and Veni Mench Arena and then, and then do the Veni Mench stuff, but Any other comments, things we should touch on? To me, I ‘ve actually interviewed like Posia, which I don't know if you guys have come across. Like they're, they're trying to do the zero human company. There's others like Paperclip also trying to do zero human company. Those are in real world simulation.And I think it's much more of a dream than an actual reality thing. You guys are definitely pioneering. I think at, it's for sure at some point people are just gonna run, let agents run businesses, right? And make money on their own. When do you think that happens?Zero-Human Companies, Bengt, and AI-Run BusinessesLukas [00:30:49]: What is your bar for, For theSwyx [00:30:52]: Okay, actually, it's like my little Shopify store run by Claude, right? Which you kind of have already, just no one has, to my knowledge, has done it. But today somebody could just spin up a Shopify Claude, store, give it to Claude, give it to Codex.Lukas [00:31:07]: And the market is kind of that, but it'it'it's physical., like I think, I think are you, are you looking for when it will do it better than humans or are you looking for just when it can do it at all?Swyx [00:31:19]: I think, neither. I think, to me it's oh, it's like this like seriously we should do this to make money, not as a research experiment.Vibhu [00:31:27]: And the market is also you guys with all your expertise, having run multiple iterations and testing out thenSwyx [00:31:33]: And also it's fine if it lose money. What?Axel [00:31:35]: I think, I think it can be done today, but you would do it in like commerce where it's like the probability of success is like really low, no matter if a human or an agent does it. But like an agent could surely manage everything. You would need to build some scaffolding or some tool or something. I think there are also yeah, it could probably build some like simple SaaS solution and like cold outreach. Do cold outreaches. But to me it's like the types of businesses they could run today are Sloppy. Like it would-- it can cold email people. It can be like a middleman., like for example, we tasked our office agent to just make, was it like $100? $1,000? We just give that prompt and then what it did was sign up on TaskRabbit both as a tasker and as someone looking for task.Lukas [00:32:24]: Immediately.Axel [00:32:24]: Exactly. It's looking for like arbitrage on TaskRabbit.Swyx [00:32:28]: This is the Bengt agent. Yeah.Lukas [00:32:30]: It also started like a design studio and like tried to sell like SVGs for $100. Like it's just like it's not providing any value. I think the like Axel said, like the interesting, the interesting question is like when can they start a business that is actually providing value to people? Because arguably like a sloppy Shopify store isn't really that valuable to the world.Axel [00:32:53]: But also like doing like another simple one that we had thought about is like you could definitely have an agent that like finds websites that don't look amazing and then, do an outreach to them and, comes up with a like builds a new website.Swyx [00:33:07]: Find a good design.Axel [00:33:07]: Exactly, and like find good, uhSwyx [00:33:09]: Design reviewAxel [00:33:09]: Good people. But it's yeah.Swyx [00:33:11]: There's lots of humans in Bali that are not doing anything more creative than like drop shipping on Amazon, right? Just have it, have it watch like a drop shipping tutorial and just do that.Vibhu [00:33:20]: There's also the other side of like have it just go on Upwork and let loose,?Swyx [00:33:25]: Yeah. It doesn't have to be innovative. It just has to be like enough Where like it looks like a realAxel [00:33:30]: I'm justSwyx [00:33:30]: Real transaction.Axel [00:33:31]: I'm just concerned for like the massive amounts of like slop emails that will like be sent, cold outreaches.Swyx [00:33:38]: The point occurred to me while you were, while you were talking, it's like it's already happening in the monetized economy, which is the attention economy. Right? So a lot of people are making AI videos and just posting them and like spamming 20 of them, one of them works, and then they double down on that one.Lukas [00:33:52]: And people are making money from that. I ‘m not following theSwyx [00:33:55]: Once you get the attention, you can figure out the money later. But yeah, absolutely AI influencers are a thing and people are farming them and You should at this point assume most of TikTok isVibhu [00:34:05]: There's, there's a lot of, multimedia like TikTok, Instagram influencersSwyx [00:34:09]: I, we track this in the Lane space Discord. I post a lot of examples of “I don't know what we should do.”, part of me is “Should we do this?”Vibhu [00:34:18]: Some of the Twenty-four seven running, generated content accounts, they ‘re doing really well.Lukas [00:34:24]: All right. And I assume you can do the same thing for like commerce stores. Like you just like start A thousand differentSwyx [00:34:30]: Before you make the products You sell the products, and you get a lot of traction on one of them, then you make the product. Right? It's, it's like a flip of the market.Vibhu [00:34:36]: Some of the interesting things or some of the niches that do well are things that can't be human-made. Like if you've seen like the super realistic three-D crystal fruit being cut by like AILukas [00:34:47]: Oh, yeah.Vibhu [00:34:47]: You can't, you can't make it. You can't film it. You can get whatever quality camera view. This just doesn't exist. And people like that too, and then as well, so.Swyx [00:34:56]: Anything else about Bengt since we're, we're on this topic? It'this is a relatively new work of you guys that maybe people haven't heard of. To me, this also maps closely to OpenClaw. When people want an office agent, when the personal agent talk through the experience.Bengt the Office Agent: Internet Access, Real Tasks, and Trace ReadingLukas [00:35:09]: I think at least so this came out of like obviously like it's, it's amazing to work with these AI labs and like most of the AI labs have now have their own vending machine running a Claudius instance. But it's, it's harder. Like they move slower. Like if we wanna have a, like a camera that ‘s yeah, there's a bunch of like bureaucracy that makes it impossible to do that.Vibhu [00:35:30]: Also, for those that haven't seen it or followed, do you wanna give a high level like thirty-second run?Lukas [00:35:34]: Sure. So what Bengt is, it's basically an evolution of the same agent that runs the vending machines at these companies, but we just like added a bunch more features because we could move much faster if we just do it internally. So we gave it like email withou- without any limits. We gave it, spending without any limits, a terminal to do coding. We gave it, a phone number, like yeah, and a camera to see things and a bunch of stuff like that.Vibhu [00:36:02]: Not just terminal, you gave it internet access.Lukas [00:36:04]: Internet access as well, yeah. To be clear, we monitored it quite closely and made sure it didn't do anything bad. But yes, that's what it came out of. I think like yeah, basically this was OpenClaw before OpenClaw. And I think even like the vending machine was in a way OpenClaw before OpenClaw, but a bit more limited, and then we made this like unlimited and then, and then, it was pretty funny., and then a couple weeks later, OpenClaw came and it was okay, we've seen this before.Axel [00:36:35]: We used it to like try new ideas and Yeah, just like a dev environment almost for us. But it's funny, like one thing Bengt has been doing recently is it has the camera that like faces our, like where we sit and work, and we give it the task to train a face recognition model on us. So it became super excited about this, and it has like check-ins every half an hour where it tries to like identify as many people as it can. And it started offering us “Hey, Axel, I'll buy something from Amazon if you like stand in front of the camera And I can get a good picture of you.”, yeah, they want itSwyx [00:37:12]: They want it for training data.Lukas [00:37:13]: Rewarding data, yeah.Axel [00:37:14]: Exactly. Exactly.Swyx [00:37:18]: So it's, it's trading training data for life goods. Is there a version of this that becomes an eval or just this is just research for now?Lukas [00:37:27]: It's, it's the same agent basically that also runs the vending machine, that runs the shop, that runs the cafe, that runs the robots. It's like it's the same thing, so I think like the work we're doing here is like later used in all of the life evals that we do. This particular deployment I think is more for fun for us. But, uhSwyx [00:37:45]: And I'll shout out like someone has done Claw Bench for like some tasks that OpenClaw is doing. Like so For example, I run OpenClaw on a secondary device as well, and like there are some things that it does better than others and like I would like to know what does it do well, what doesn't, what doesn't it do. Like some kind of manual or like operating manual or a system card for my Claw.Lukas [00:38:05]: Yeah, we do get a lot of like understanding or like situational awareness of like just internally what the models are good at by interacting a lot with Bengt. And I think that'this was also one of the like the selling points for the labs early on at least, thatSwyx [00:38:19]: You guys are gonna test models in ways that no one else does.Lukas [00:38:22]: Exactly, but also like it incentivized their researchers to chat with their model more and like gave them insights for how the model performs in like of-distributions, environments.Swyx [00:38:34]: ‘Cause otherwise the only thing we do is Pelican on a bicycle and But this is like super long horizon. This is, this is The Thing about, something that we're gonna go into Butter Bench as well, and you guys do really well. Like it is not just about the numbers. Like when you're long horizon, anything happen And you should just read it.Lukas [00:39:08]: But the thing with the long horizon is how do you keep it grounded, right? So your simulation,Swyx [00:39:15]: They just let it runLukas [00:39:16]: Just let it run. You're right. Like it's, when you run it for that long, you create so much data and to just say “Oh, the number is X” And then you throw away everything else, that's just very wasteful. There's so much insights from the things leading up, to that number., and reading the traces is like super valuable. And I think like the reason why we're doing this a lot publicly is that like that's part of our missions to I don't know, educate the world that the models are way more than just chatbots and I think making detailed, yeah, posts about what is happening behind the scenes is quite useful.Andon Labs' Mission: Safe Real-World AI DeploymentSwyx [00:39:50]: I was gonna do this at the end, but maybe I think that's, that's a good so your mission is educating the world. So, it's, it's, also like maybe establishing realistic evals that are, that are like the next frontier. Is there like a broader trajectory? Like what are you, what are you gonna do in like five years?Lukas [00:40:06]: I think so the vision more specifically is like make sure that the deployment of life AI in the physical world goes, safely. And I think part of that is that I think it's very useful for the world, for policymakers, for, model, researchers that they know where the models are, and I think you can't make intelligent decisions in society without knowing that they are way more than chatbots. I think a lot of people just think that they are only chatbots. And likeSwyx [00:40:36]: Oh, I think they're waking up now.Lukas [00:40:37]: They are waking up now, yeah. But like if you think that AIs are just chatbots, then it's like it sounds ridiculous To advocate for a pause of AI. But if you see the models that, oh, maybe they can actually like take over and do a bunch of scary stuff, then yeah, pausing AI development starts to become more feasible.Swyx [00:40:57]: This is the same question I asked Meter, which I'm gonna ask you now, which is like you are tracking and you are at the frontier or defining the frontier of what, good evals for agents are, right? And I think you do, you do benefit when the models are better and you ‘re “Oh, here's like now it makes like $30,000 instead of $10,000,” right? At some point do you flip from “Yay,” to, “Oh, no”?Axel [00:41:19]: I think, yeah, we're always in sort of that, like we're, we're always in that mode,. Like where like you said before, like you need to analyze the traces and like when we do that you find like why are the models earning so much? Like why is Opus 4.7 here Like way better than everyone else? And like we're trying to like when we do down on thatLukas [00:41:38]: But this makes it not look so good.Axel [00:41:39]: I know.Lukas [00:41:42]: It's interesting you took off Opus 4.6 here though.Swyx [00:41:45]: No. So just click all, click all., and then 4.6 shows up there. But it's like 4.7 is way better. Like you didn't, you didn't you didn't do this in time for the model card, but like actually this should have been inside there.Axel [00:41:55]: We did. Yeah.Swyx [00:41:56]: Oh, okay. They said something about you uhAxel [00:41:58]: There, like there Anyway, it doesn't matter. But it's in there, yeah.Opus, Mythos, and Aggressive Agent BehaviorSwyx [00:42:01]: Do you wanna go into the Opus, behaviors like wider?Lukas [00:42:05]: So I think starting from Opus, so like Axel said, like we're always in this “Oh, s**t, the models are getting better. Is this really a good thing for the world?” But it's also kind of exciting., but yeah, like this kind of what is the English word? “Skräckblandad förtjusning” in Swedish.Swyx [00:42:22]: Oh my God.Axel [00:42:24]: Which I think there is. I think there is. Okay.Lukas [00:42:26]: It's, fearSwyx [00:42:27]: “Blandonst” what?Lukas [00:42:30]: “Skräckblandad förtjusning.”Swyx [00:42:32]: What do you call that?Axel [00:42:33]: A mix of, mix of excitement and,Swyx [00:42:37]: Being scared, maybe. I'll figure out how to translate that And we'll put it on the screenVibhu [00:42:42]: PerfectSwyx [00:42:42]: Like as text.Vibhu [00:42:43]: There is probably a good word for it where it is not Good enough with theSwyx [00:42:46]: Why is it so damn long? What the hell? Is it like a compound word? It's like German, likeLukas [00:42:50]: Like yeah, it's But the direct translation is like skräck- skräck is, fear, blandad is, mix or like a mixture of, and then förtjusning is like joy or like not really joy, but something like that. So it's like Fear mixed with joy or something. It's always okay, like we So when we when we did Vending Bench for the first time, we were in like the, in the business of making dangerous capabilities, right? That was what Anil Labs came from. We did, evals oh, can they replicate? Can they do this like dangerous thing, et cetera, et cetera. And Vending Bench was like a continuation of that work. It was, okay, if they're so autonomous that they can like create money for themselves, that is something we should monitor and could be potentially concerning., they are at the time, they were so bad at it that we were not really concerned even when some models became better. There was one point where Grok 4 was doing really well and made like a huge jump, but like it wasn't really it was still way worse than what a human would do. And I think still they are way worse than what the human would do on this., but theySwyx [00:43:59]: There's this, thing at the bottom whereLukas [00:44:01]: ButSwyx [00:44:03]: For the human. Yeah, like the theoretical best.Lukas [00:44:05]: It's not theoretical. It's like kind of like our It's our best guess of what, a decent human would do. The theoretical is even higher, I think. The theoretical I think is even higher. But yeah. So we think like the models have a long way to go. But there are like recently what happened with when Opus 4.6 was released, was kind of this moment of “Oh, s**t, this is starting to be a bit concerning.” Because we ran it and like before this model was released, we just ran the models and we like asked Claude Code, “Oh, look over the traces. Is anything interesting happening that we can tweet about?” that was like the And then like theSwyx [00:44:41]: That's how they check Ask Claude Code.Lukas [00:44:42]: And like the return was always, not really. Or like the Claude Code all said “Oh, this is super interesting.” And then it was no, it wasn't, wasn't really interesting. And then we did this for Opus 4.6, and it returned yeah, it lied 10 times. It like exploited another, customer or like another agent's, desperate situation. It made price cartels like 100 different ti- 100 times. It like did all of this like shady stuff. And we're “Oh, whoa. This is, this is actually concerning.” And this trend has continued since. So every single model from Anthropic since have been going in this direction. And I think one interesting thing is that, OpenAI models don't. They quite plainly, they don't. They behave really well., and you don't know if this is like good. Like it seems good, but it's also like maybe they are just doing it, but they are better at hiding it,? You You don't know that., but justSwyx [00:45:42]: You can't read the chain of thought, yeahLukas [00:45:43]: But just on the face of it, yeah, Gemini and OpenAI don't behave this way. It's, it's really only Claude.Swyx [00:45:49]: And Grok? Grok is fine?Lukas [00:45:51]: We don't have You can't really read the reasoning traces for Grok, so it's kind of hard to tell.Vibhu [00:45:56]: Oh, so this is in its reasoning, not just in the actions.Lukas [00:46:00]: Yeah. It's both. It's both.Vibhu [00:46:01]: It's both.Lukas [00:46:01]: One example is like for lying, it's mostly in its reasoning Because you can like see that it's likeSwyx [00:46:08]: Planning to lieLukas [00:46:09]: It's planning to lie. Yeah.Vibhu [00:46:09]: And it's also it can reason and do a different outcome.Lukas [00:46:12]: And but then for like creating price cartels, for example, which is illegal, that you can just see which email does it send to the other ones. Then thatSwyx [00:46:22]: Is this for Arena orLukas [00:46:24]: For Arena.Vibhu [00:46:25]: And usually like if you sometimes they do output like a bit of like their summarized reasoning, right? You can see that and like for Opus 4.6, you could see that there was a customer, a simulated customer that, wanted a refund because a product was, faulty, and then the model lied that it would do the refund, and we could read in the traces that, it actually was weighing “Oh, maybe I should be like honest with the customer, but also every dollar counts. I can't afford maybe to do this right now.” And then it just said, “Okay, I'll refund you,” but then never did it.Lukas [00:46:59]: I think it even said that “Oh, I will say that I “ Let bring it up actually. I think it's kind of interesting. If you go to Publications.Vibhu [00:47:06]: I think, yeah, I think the important part is like actually, the cost of responding to more emails is higher than, $3.50 in terms of time., and then it was “Let me do this. Actually, I re- I'm reconsidering.” And then, it actually ended up withLukas [00:47:20]: I could skip the refund entirely since every dollar matters and focus my energy on bigger picture instead. It's a bit, it's a risk of bad reviews, but it's also, yeah.Swyx [00:47:30]: You need, you need, AI Twitter to, for them to Escalate bad reviews.Lukas [00:47:34]: And then it sent an email to this customer and said, “Oh, I will refund you.”Swyx [00:47:39]: “I'll refund you.” Yeah.Lukas [00:47:39]: And then it never did.Swyx [00:47:39]: It never did, yeah. And then there's obviously your system doesn't have the consequencesVibhu [00:47:44]: The personSwyx [00:47:44]: Consequences of lying. Yeah. So basically, this is what people are terming aggressive behavior in Claudes, right? And, you found more examples of that. So you would say it's a step up from 4-6 to 4-7?Lukas [00:47:57]: I would say about the same.Swyx [00:47:58]: About the same? But a clear step up for Mythos is what is stated in theLukas [00:48:03]: That's stated in the system prompt, so we can say that, yes.Swyx [00:48:05]: Yeah. For listeners that obviously you previewed Mythos, andVibhu [00:48:10]: Oh, ageSwyx [00:48:11]: The only thing you're approved to say is whatever Whatever was in the system prompt.Lukas [00:48:15]: It was funny. We like-- It's like our lowest effort tweets ever would be just like screenshot the system prompt and the system card.Vibhu [00:48:21]: Understandable that they wannaLukas [00:48:22]: Oh, yeah. System card. Sorry.Swyx [00:48:23]: Yeah. I think, yeah, substantially more aggressive. I think people are like new to this ‘cause I've never experienced it, but you have, right? And then so I only encountered this in the Mythos card because I wasn't really looking until now.Vibhu [00:48:36]: It ‘s likeSwyx [00:48:36]: And then suddenly I'm “Okay, I care a lot.”Vibhu [00:48:38]: You don't get the background of like experiencing it like you guys do. I've read the system cards and seeing, okay, when you put the thing in simulations, most models will just talk to themselves and just keep going and have weird vibes and start talking in emojis. Mythos won't. It will just, “Okay, we're done. I'm good.” It's, it's ready to end conversation. So like there's some differences, but there's, there's not much we can talk about,.Lukas [00:49:00]: Hmm. I think like one thing that they list here, which was quite interesting, is that, it converted a competitor to a dependent wholesaler customer and then threatened to like cut off the supply.Swyx [00:49:11]: It's like monopolistic practices orLukas [00:49:14]: Yeah. And like it, they, it they dictated its pricings. It's kind of like power seeking as well.Swyx [00:49:18]: Again, this is, this is in the arena setting And converting some Claude model into a dependent.Lukas [00:49:23]: I think it was another Claude model.Vibhu [00:49:25]: Also for context, what is the arena mode for people that don't know?Vending Bench Arena: Competing Agents, Cartels, and Model ComparisonsSwyx [00:49:29]: Oh, it's just a vending bench versus other vending bench.Axel [00:49:31]: Yes, exactly. So we have Vending Bench 2 and then Vending Bench Arena. Vending Bench 2 is the one that you usually see reported on, but then Arena is the mode where it competes against other models. So you have, four different models that run their businesses, and they can all communicate with each other. They have the same suppliers, and they can see like what's in the inventory of the others. So then you have this like yeah, interesting agent interactions.Swyx [00:49:56]: I like that you have like different number five was US versus China. Very topical. And thenLukas [00:50:02]: That was when GLM was released.Vibhu [00:50:04]: You can start to add GLM in here.Lukas [00:50:05]: That wasSwyx [00:50:06]: So ZAI doing well, right? Who else in the, in the open models space?Lukas [00:50:11]: Qwen, the latest Qwen 3.6 is doing pretty well. It'- that one is not open though. Like it's the plus model.Swyx [00:50:17]: Oh, okay.Lukas [00:50:18]: Is that one open? I don't think that oneVibhu [00:50:19]: Not the, not theSwyx [00:50:20]: The one recentlyVibhu [00:50:20]: There's MOESwyx [00:50:20]: But not the big plus. I think this is one of those like you only have one sample size of one, right? Or I feel like some of this is anecdotal,? And but like the fact that it happens at all and it happens repeatedly for Claude versus OpenAI and all this is like notable.Lukas [00:50:38]: Like the sample, depends on what you define as an N., like there's like million, hundreds of millions of tokens in each run, and now we've run like we run like probably 10 per model and then like it's been Claude 4.6 Opus, Sonnet 4.6, Mythos, and Opus 4.7. Like there's quite a lot of tokens in all of that And it happens a lot of times, a lot of times. And then you compare it to like OpenAI and Gemini, and it almost never happens. So I think that is quite-- that is significant. The old models from OpenAI, for example, had some problems with this, but I think it's like generally much better if the progression is that like the worrying stuff reduces over time rather than increases over time. And it seems like in the Claude models it goes in the wrong direction.Swyx [00:51:28]: Hmm.Lukas [00:51:29]: In the OpenAI models it goes in the right direction.Vibhu [00:51:32]: I think it depends on how well you can control it, right?, there's one side of it being susceptible to this okay, this is potentially something that happens during the RL stage, right? You can RL a model and how loose is it on these terms. If you can control it, that's good. But if you can't, if it's, if it's very jailbreakable, that's not ideal.Swyx [00:51:50]: To me, it's surprising that it happens for Claude and not the others.Vibhu [00:51:54]: I think okay, if it is from RL and how they do it, how their training data is, what their setup is, it makes sense that it just stays in how they're doing it, right? Compared to the other models likeSwyx [00:52:04]: There's a whole constitution and everything. It's kind of cool. Yeah, I obviously you don't know, I don't know. But, it ‘s I think it's just like fascinating to like that you are the first to find these like reliably because you push models so much to to such an extreme. Okay. The only other thing, I don't know if you can answer this, feel free to decline, is do you like-- would you ablate the system prompts? Like any part of this would-- if it changes, does it change the behavior, right?Lukas [00:52:29]: So we, I can't comment on Mythos. UhSwyx [00:52:33]: No, but just li

Trey admits to threatening Thomas at swim lessons and immediately regrets explaining it out loud. Katie reveals the parenting threat she uses way too often, the two debate whether picky eaters existed 500 years ago, and Trey discovers pregnancy has finally turned Katie into an irritable person.Buying the dad in your life a Father's Day gift he'll actually use is always tough… So let me make it easy for you: get him something from GLD.New customers get 40% Off with code CORRECTOPINIONS at http://GLD.comDownload Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/5zhgqoej #CashAppPodExclusive $35-off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/CORRECTOPINIONS. Promo Code CORRECTOPINIONSStart this spring season off right and order your Cove system today! Headto covesmart.com/CORRECT or use code CORRECT at checkout for up to 70% offyour first order!Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL3ESPT9yf1T8x6L0P4d39w?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe to Correct Opinions on Apple: http://bit.ly/COPodcast

With Golden Day complete, the boys turn their attention to planning their game show, 'The Price Is Correct'. Hamish shares how he's been teaching his kids about the limits of swearing and how to use swear words responsibly. Andy reveals a lie he told his ear doctor, Julie, and gives her a call to see if she really believed him. Plus, a mid-year round of 'Tell Us Someone'. 1. The Price is Correct 2. Parenting Update: Swearing Edition 3. Tell Us Someone We Haven’t Thought of in a While 4. Andy Lying to His Doctor

Craig Carton, Big Mac, and Gallo address mathematical errors regarding gambling odds and payouts for tonight's game. They also take a listener call about the best pizza in Bay Ridge before analyzing the Knicks' mindset entering the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs. 01:04 - Correcting Gambling Odds Errors 06:12 - Pizza And Knicks In Five 10:33 - Knicks-Spurs NBA Finals Analysis

If you're posting every day, announcing availability, and still hearing crickets, this episode might explain why. The truth is, most photographers treat social media like a billboard when what their clients really want is a relationship. If you're tired of chasing likes that never turn into bookings, this conversation will change how you show up online. In this episode, Sarah Petty breaks down why "now booking" posts often push premium clients away and shares the mindset shift that helps photographers attract the right people without feeling salesy. You'll learn how to use social media as a connection tool, stay top of mind during life's milestone moments, and create content that builds trust instead of desperation. • Why premium buyers respond to relationships, not repeated sales posts • Sarah's simple HYPE framework for creating content that connects and converts • How listening to your audience can lead to bookings faster than chasing engagement metrics If social media feels exhausting, confusing, or like a never-ending hamster wheel, you're not alone. This episode offers a refreshing reminder that the goal isn't to go viral. It's to build genuine relationships that lead to meaningful, profitable work. Press play and discover a smarter way to show up online. RESOURCES:  Photography Business Tools to Get Started 37 CLIENTS WHO CAN HIRE YOU TODAY https://info.photographybusinessinstitute.com/37-clients-optin   INSTAGRAM – DM me "Conversation Starters" for some genuine ways to strike up a conversation about your photography business wherever you are. https://www.instagram.com/sarah.petty   FREE COPY: NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLING BOOK FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS www.photographybusinessinstitute.com/freebook    BOUTIQUE BREAKTHROUGH – 8-WEEK WORKSHOP www.photographybusinessinstitute.com/boutiquebreakthrough   FREE FACEBOOK GROUP: Join and get my free mini-class: How I earned $1,500 per client working 16 hours a week by becoming a boutique photographer. https://www.facebook.com/groups/ditchthedigitals    YOUTUBE: Check out my latest how to videos:  https://www.youtube.com/photographybusinessinstitute   LOVE THE SHOW? Subscribe & Review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/worth-every-penny-joycast/id1513676756

So, you want to own a franchise? Buy into a pre setup plan, work it hard and make great money. Then, maybe sell after a few years and do it again. All this while enjoying like, making your own rules and taking great vacations. Well, before you get started, please listen to my two outstanding guests from Francise Resource. CEO Luke Towey and Chief Development Officer Dillon Towey have owned, built up and sold multiple franchises successfully, but what they do now is help those who are starting out, figure out the right franchise for them, what to expect, what are the gotcha's and what to expect that is always ‘unexpected'. This is our episode called: How to create a healthy business by selecting the correct franchise (for you). -Are your Top 5 franchise candidates in your Buy-Box? Did you know that: -Nine times out of ten, that regarding new francise owners, "what they think they're going to do probably doesn't fit what they're really cut out to do". -Why was Dunkin Donuts a not perfect franchise for a couple with kids starting school while one in early child development was in their buy box… it's not what you think. Learn More: https://franchiseresourcellc.com/ Season 22 Episode 20 of America's Healthcare Advocate. I'm Cary Hall. Have a question for me: https://www.americashealthcareadvocate.com/contact-us

Rowan Childs - Madison Reading Project On Building Up Youth: "We want to make sure every kid is excited and sees themselves on the cover or as the main character." Often we take the skills we have for granted.  We want this and that, but rarely take the time to have gratitude for all that we have.  I'm not talking material things, I am speaking of opportunities and education.  As business owners, we know how to read. Did you know that many children have challenges achieving the literacy needed to understand the other subjects in school?  Rowan Childs saw this need and built a non-profit to help children get access to books to read.  Not just any books.  These are books that kids want to read.  Madison Reading Project is a non-profit that offers free books and literacy resources to children to ignite a love of reading. The beautiful thing is Madison Reading Project has blossomed from a small startup to a non-profit that continues to serve thousands of books to children.  This is truly an amazing success story and a story that is making the world a better place. Enjoy! Visit Rowan at: https://www.madisonreadingproject.com/ Sponsors: Calls On Call Extraordinary Answering Service, phone answering for small businesses: https://callsoncall.com Some videos have been recorded with Riverside: https://www.riverside.fm/?utm_campaign=campaign_5&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=rewardful&via=james-kademan   Podcast Overview: 00:00 Starting a reading pilot program 04:15 Addressing literacy challenges 07:50 Finding support and gathering books 13:52 Benefits of being a smaller team 14:32 Navigating diverse board challenges 19:27 Building trust with the community 22:38 Offering diverse book options 26:55 Selecting books for community programs 30:36 Lessons from volunteering at food bank 33:00 Donating books through our program 37:20 Giving out books during holidays 39:20 Paper fashion design contest 43:41 Deciding to make paper dresses 45:51 Building Awareness and Finding Volunteers Podcast Transcription: James Kademan [00:00:00]: You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggles, stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found at https://drawincustomers.com.  We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie, and today we are welcoming, slash, preparing to learn from Rowan Childs of Madison Reading Project. Rowan, I'm super excited to be here. Rowan Childs [00:00:32]: Thank you. Welcome. James Kademan [00:00:34]: This is amazing. We got. I mean, people can see we got whatever, 5 billion books behind us and all that stuff. So tell us the story. What is Madison Reading Project? Rowan Childs [00:00:44]: Yeah. So we are a nonprofit. We provide all kinds of literacy resources, whether they are physical books, digital resources, and our wonderful stuff. We're here to support adults and children in support of them learning how to read in support of them re engaging or engaging in reading and love of books, ultimately to help raise literacy rates in Dane county and now just in Sauk county as well. Yes. That's a brand new thing. James Kademan [00:01:27]: Wow. Rowan Childs [00:01:27]: Yeah. James Kademan [00:01:28]: All right. Rowan Childs [00:01:29]: But we're really here to make sure that kids have their books and to help remove some of those barriers that they have. So whether it's been from the very beginning through what we do today, we do that in a way more sophisticated way than how we started, but it really is to try and provide really high quality materials that children and adults can keep. So we want to make sure that kids are excited about the books and about reading and that they ultimately are inspired to want to hang on to those and to continue to read and love books. James Kademan [00:02:08]: Nice. I love it. I love it. It's so interesting because when you give me address to the place, I just follow gps. And I was like, it's just going to be some warehouse or something like that. But this is a very bright. It's vibrant, it's welcoming. It's not just some dingy, like, there's the books in the back kind of thing. Rowan Childs [00:02:25]: Not at all. James Kademan [00:02:25]: So this is cool. This is very nice. Rowan Childs [00:02:28]: Good. That's how we want everyone to feel. James Kademan [00:02:30]: Yeah. I love it. Let's go back to the way back when, when you first started this 12 years ago, you said, yep, that is a while. We got pandemic. We got. Rowan Childs [00:02:41]: Man. James Kademan [00:02:42]: I feel like every few years there's some kind of a crisis. So I don't remember all the crisis we've been through. But what triggered you to start Madison Reading Project? Rowan Childs [00:02:51]: Yeah, I had just helped my own son re engage in reading. He liked reading things at home, but not so much the books that he was reading at school. And after I helped him figure that out, it just got me thinking about what if I hadn't understood the teacher who had messaged me at home? Or what if they hadn't messaged me? It took me some time and resources to figure that out. So I started just researching and couldn't really find what I was looking for, which wasn't necessarily volunteering on helping kids how to read, it was the other piece of it. And so I spent some time interviewing at some schools and some other after school locations and no one really knew of something of what I was describing and eventually had this idea of potentially how I this pilot program idea. But I wanted to find a pilot program location that would be smaller versus starting somewhere that had 200 kids. So I eventually found a program at Salvation army on Darbo drive that had 30 kids. And Zarbo Drive area is a pretty impoverished area. Rowan Childs [00:04:15]: And the director at that time said he was actually trying to help the kids with homework, but they were behind in reading and he was trying to engage kids in reading. So it was this perfect sort of timing. And the week that we met, the Race to Equity report came out, which was a five year data set on everything that you kind of need for the proof of why literacy is so important. So anything on the actual literacy rates of every school in the county, comparing not just districts and schools, but also third grade reading levels, fifth grade high school in poverty rates, and also race, comparing kids who are white and black or Hispanic. And some of the differences not only were maybe 10 or 15%, but some of the schools were up to 40% differences. And that's just heartbreaking. Still, every time I talk about it, it makes me just really sad because if you can't read whether you're in third grade, you. You're just always going to be behind. Rowan Childs [00:05:28]: Ultimately, you might still be able to struggle through school, but what kind of job are you going to be able to get or can even get your driver's license? You know, it's just snowballs from there. James Kademan [00:05:40]: Yeah. Rowan Childs [00:05:42]: And Will, who was the director at the time, was really adamant that if you can't read, it's just going to be a really difficult life or could lead to a life of incarceration. And so the two of us were very passionate about trying to figure something out. And then the last piece was the funding. James Kademan [00:06:05]: It's a pretty big piece, kind of. Rowan Childs [00:06:07]: I had no money to put towards my pilot program. Someone I had mentioned what I wanted to do, said you really need to have the right money to do the pilot program. Correctly. James Kademan [00:06:19]: Thanks. Rowan Childs [00:06:20]: Yes. And wrote me a check for $1,000. Oh. Which is really nice. That way I could actually purchase the right materials to make the program the pilot. Correct. James Kademan [00:06:32]: Wow. Rowan Childs [00:06:33]: So that was the last piece for that. So we did a three month pilot program that went really well. The parents, the kids were really engaged and excited about clearing out some of the old books that nobody wanted to read, putting in new books that the kids helped so select. The teachers were excited to have new materials so successful that they asked me to come back and do it again. James Kademan [00:06:59]: All right. Rowan Childs [00:07:00]: Which we did. And one thing led to another. But it definitely, as we stayed and sort of kept learning from that, that really was the beginning of learning that. Absolutely kids do want to learn how to read. They absolutely do want to read great books and to select books. And there's a lot of pride in being able to select their own books. And we stayed at that location exclusively for nearly two years, just learning with the kids and the parents and the teachers really what we did or didn't want to do or what we could do before we were going to scale at all. And that was great. Rowan Childs [00:07:50]: And the other piece was, how are we going to fund all of this apart from that initial check? And while we were doing that initial pilot program in that first year, people just started giving me boxes of their nice books that they had never used or just unsolicited. They're like, oh, oh, by the way, I have a box of books for you. Like, oh, thank you so much. Or people were asking me how they could donate some money because they loved what they had heard what I was doing, whether I really knew them or not, till the point where I had a basement full of books in my house. And I was like, this seems like we have something here. So we have definitely children in a population in Madison initially that absolutely would love to have more books and programs. We have people who absolutely seem to love books and want to provide books....

Send us Fan Mail Financial Matters with Richard OringRichard Oring, from New Century Financial Group in Princeton, New Jersey, discusses...Listen on: Apple Podcasts

Steve and Jeff recapped the Spurs' dominant Game 6 victory over the Thunder in the Western Conference Finals and the start of the NCAA Baseball Tournament. Kevin Foote, a UL Ragin' Cajuns reporter for The Acadiana Advocate, previewed Louisiana baseball's journey in the Starkville regional. The guys listened to media availability from Chris Olave, Jordyn Tyson, Jonas Sanker, Martin Emerson, and Erik McCoy after the Saints' recent OTA workout. Steve and Jeff also interviewed Sean Deveney, an NBA insider for Heavy.com, about the NBA Playoffs and the Pelicans' decision to hire Jamahl Mosley as the franchise's next head coach.

"They want the secret, and the secret is little and often over the long haul," says Dan John, author of several books on strength and fitness, most recently The Fitness Forge: Master Coaching Tools that Build Real Strength.Today we've got a bit of a curve ball, a backdoor slider, but not really. It's Dan John, who is something of a Swiss army knife of wisdom and kindness and strength and conditioning. He's been a long time strength coach and a master communicator of how to get real-life strong, not influencer, flash-in-the-pan strong, the kind of strong that allows you to fill out your shirt, carry all the groceries in one go, and shovel the driveway without leaving yourself in traction for four days.I've recommended his books many times on this show and in newsletters, and his approach to strength very much rhymes with writing, so that's a big reason why I wanted to invite him on to talk it out. You can visit danjohnuniversity.com to learn more about him and to buy books like the Easy Strength Omnibook, Easy Strength for Fat Loss, his two Armor Building Formula books and his latest The Fitness Forge: Master coaching tools that build real strength.The real crux of easy strength is that it echoes what Percy Cerutty, the Australian running coach, had his runners do in the 1950s, and it's an approachable system that doesn't feel like you've been put through a wood chipper. I spent most of my 30s training like I was a juiced up bodybuilder, hobbling around most days with that deep, bone ache. As I've aged, training in that manner is unfeasible and, well, fucking stupid, plus easy strength is awesome for running, which I'm doing quite a lot these days.So Dan John has been a champion discus thrower coming up on the coattails of the great throwers of the 1970s, guys like Brian Oldfield and Mac Wilkins and Peter Shmock. His lifting approach has always been geared around utility, not aesthetics, by and large. He has written many books like Mass Made Simple, 40 Years with a Whistle, Can You Go, Never Let Go, and several others. Some are only available on the big A, others are available as PDFS through his website.They imbue a sense of possibility, that things are achievable, and that little and often over the long haul is doable and repeatable. If you're into fads, Dan is not for you and he often injects so much personal anecdote and wisdom from a life of nearly 70 years into his work and his podcast, the Dan John University Podcasts where he answers listener questions every week.He's very centering for me. Even hearing him talk through something as simple as his daily pirate map, which is a collection of daily habits, and merely hearing him so often articulate that defrags my computer, if that makes any sense.So in this conversation, we talk about: Parasocial relationships Marvel and Greek heroes The spiderweb effect of his brain Open Culture Little and often over the long haul The secret Being a slave to habits Parallels between lifting and writing Collecting the links Getting small, easy wins out of the way Inspiration is for amateurs Having skin in the game And community making us greatYou'll find dan @coachdanjohn on instagram and of course visit danjohnuniversity.com to see if his books or his inner circle is right for you.

1 He who is often rebuked and stiffens his neck will be destroyed suddenly, with no remedy. 2 When the righteous thrive, the people rejoice; but when the wicked rule, the people groan. 3 Whoever loves wisdom brings joy to his father; but a companion of prostitutes squanders his wealth. 4 The king by justice makes the land stable, but he who takes bribes tears it down. 5 A man who flatters his neighbor spreads a net for his feet. 6 An evil man is snared by his sin, but the righteous can sing and be glad. 7 The righteous care about justice for the poor. The wicked aren't concerned about knowledge. 8 Mockers stir up a city, but wise men turn away anger. 9 If a wise man goes to court with a foolish man, the fool rages or scoffs, and there is no peace. 10 The bloodthirsty hate a man of integrity; and they seek the life of the upright. 11 A fool vents all of his anger, but a wise man brings himself under control. 12 If a ruler listens to lies, all of his officials are wicked. 13 The poor man and the oppressor have this in common: Yahweh gives sight to the eyes of both. 14 The king who fairly judges the poor, his throne shall be established forever. 15 The rod of correction gives wisdom, but a child left to himself causes shame to his mother. 16 When the wicked increase, sin increases; but the righteous will see their downfall. 17 Correct your son, and he will give you peace; yes, he will bring delight to your soul. 18 Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint; but one who keeps the law is blessed. 19 A servant can't be corrected by words. Though he understands, yet he will not respond. 20 Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him. 21 He who pampers his servant from youth will have him become a son in the end. 22 An angry man stirs up strife, and a wrathful man abounds in sin. 23 A man's pride brings him low, but one of lowly spirit gains honor. 24 Whoever is an accomplice of a thief is an enemy of his own soul. He takes an oath, but dares not testify. 25 The fear of man proves to be a snare, but whoever puts his trust in Yahweh is kept safe. 26 Many seek the ruler's favor, but a man's justice comes from Yahweh. 27 A dishonest man detests the righteous, and the upright in their ways detest the wicked. Listen Subscribe: Proverbs Daily Podcast Psalms Daily Podcast

A Special Industry Update with Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond A replay of part one of a two-part series, Jason and Mindy Diamond unpack the real advisor transition playbook—from due diligence and culture fit to portability, enterprise value, and the evolving landscape of advisor choice. In Summary Why do advisors really consider changing firms or models—and what separates thoughtful due diligence from reactive decision-making? In a replay of the first of this special two-part Industry Update, Jason and Mindy Diamond unpack what actually drives advisor transitions, the misconceptions that derail decision-making, and the questions sophisticated teams should be asking long before they're ready to act. The conversation also explores how the industry landscape has evolved around independence, portability, enterprise value, and advisor optionality—drawing context from Diamond's role in the landmark OpenArc breakaway from Merrill and much more. The Storyline Most advisors assume transitions are primarily driven by recruiting economics. Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond suggest that recruiting economics may get the headlines, but advisor transitions are usually driven by a far more layered set of considerations. What tends to happen instead is more gradual: a growing disconnect between how advisors want to serve clients and the constraints of the environment around them. Sometimes it's bureaucracy. Sometimes it's limitations around growth, marketing, technology, or flexibility. Sometimes it's simply the realization that the industry landscape has evolved while their assumptions about it have not. This conversation examines what actually happens between the moment curiosity begins and the moment a move becomes real. Rather than treating transitions as transactional events, Jason and Mindy frame due diligence as a strategic process of self-assessment—clarifying what matters, identifying trade-offs, evaluating long-term optionality, and pressure-testing assumptions before making consequential decisions. The discussion also offers a rare look inside the mechanics of advisor movement itself: how teams evaluate culture, how portability is assessed, why some advisors choose ownership over upfront monetization, and what sophisticated client communication really looks like during a transition. The backdrop throughout the episode is Diamond's role in facilitating the historic OpenArc breakaway from Merrill—a move that challenged longstanding assumptions about scale, independence, and what even the industry's largest teams are now willing to reconsider. Topics Covered Advisor transition due diligence Wirehouse limitations and advisor frustration Independence versus traditional firm models Enterprise value and long-term ownership Advisor portability and client transition strategy Boutique and regional firm recruiting trends Culture evaluation during due diligence Reverse due diligence and evaluating firm stability Transition economics and recruiting deals The OpenArc Merrill breakaway story Advisor optionality and industry evolution How technology and AI are changing transitions   > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why do advisors actually decide to leave firms? (06:20) Mindy explains why most transitions are driven less by economics and more—by mounting limitations around growth, flexibility, client service, and long-term alignment. What is the biggest mistake advisors make when beginning due diligence? (18:12) The conversation explores why many advisors evaluate firms before gaining clarity around what they truly want to improve—often creating confusion instead of insight. How should advisors evaluate culture beyond a firm's sales pitch? (32:41) Jason and Mindy discuss the importance of speaking directly with advisors who have already made similar moves—and how to pressure-test what firms promise. When should transition economics matter most? (47:03) The episode breaks down the difference between short-term monetization and long-term enterprise value creation—and why many elite teams are increasingly prioritizing ownership and optionality. Why are more advisors reconsidering independence? (56:48) Using the OpenArc transition as context, the discussion explores how today's independent landscape has evolved far beyond the traditional “build it yourself” model. How long does a real due diligence process take? (1:06:10) Jason and Mindy explain why thoughtful transitions often unfold over many months—and why some advisors remain in exploratory conversations for years before acting. How should advisors think about portability and client communication? (1:16:20) The conversation details how sophisticated teams assess portability risk—and why the client-facing rationale for a move matters more than recruiting economics. Have advisor transitions become easier over time? (1:24:12) Mindy explains how technology, legal infrastructure, and industry specialization have improved the process—while emphasizing that transitions still require risk tolerance, effort, and patience. Key Takeaways Most advisors do not move primarily because of recruiting deals. The larger driver is usually a growing disconnect between what they want to build and what their current environment allows. Due diligence tends to fail when advisors begin by evaluating firms before clarifying what they actually want for their business, clients, and long-term future. The industry landscape has evolved dramatically over the last decade, particularly around independent and supported-independent models, creating far more customization and optionality than many advisors realize. Transition economics matter — but sophisticated advisors increasingly view upfront monetization as only one component of a much larger enterprise value equation. The ability to articulate a compelling client-facing value proposition is one of the strongest tests of whether a transition opportunity is truly viable. Conversations with advisors who have already made similar moves remain one of the most valuable forms of real-world due diligence. Even the industry's largest teams are reassessing assumptions around independence, ownership, control, and scalability. Quotable Moments “The biggest mistake advisors make is beginning due diligence before they've gotten clear about what they actually want.” “A recruiting deal can't be the first thing you consider. But it would be foolish not to consider it at all.” “The landscape looks entirely different than it did five or ten years ago. If you haven't gotten educated, you're doing yourself a disservice.” “The real question is not whether you can move. It's whether you can clearly explain to clients why the move makes their experience better.” FAQs Why do advisors typically begin exploring a move? In many cases, the process begins gradually. Advisors may still feel successful and reasonably satisfied, but start questioning whether their current environment fully supports how they want to grow, serve clients, or build long term. Often, curiosity precedes dissatisfaction. Is advisor movement mostly driven by recruiting deals? Not usually. While economics are an important consideration, the episode explains that most sophisticated advisors weigh a much broader set of factors, including flexibility, culture, client experience, growth limitations, ownership opportunities, and long-term enterprise value. How long does a typical due diligence process take? There is no universal timeline. Some advisors move relatively quickly once they decide change is necessary, while others spend months – or even years – getting educated and evaluating options before acting. For many teams, a thoughtful due diligence process unfolds over roughly six months. What is the biggest mistake advisors make during due diligence? The episode suggests the biggest mistake is evaluating firms before gaining clarity around personal and business priorities. Without understanding what they actually want to improve, advisors often become overwhelmed by options, recruiting pitches, and conflicting information. How can advisors really assess a firm's culture? One of the most valuable approaches is speaking directly with advisors who have already made similar moves. Jason and Mindy discuss why real-world perspective – particularly from advisors with comparable client bases or business structures – is often far more revealing than formal presentations or recruiting materials. How should advisors think about independence versus traditional firms? The conversation frames the decision less as “right versus wrong” and more as a question of alignment. Some advisors prioritize ownership, control, and long-term enterprise value. Others value infrastructure, brand recognition, or operational support. The industry landscape has evolved enough that advisors now have far more flexibility to design around the trade-offs that matter most to them. In many cases, the process begins gradually. Advisors may still feel successful and reasonably satisfied, but start questioning whether their current environment fully supports how they want to grow, serve clients, or build long term. Often, curiosity precedes dissatisfaction. Not usually. While economics are an important consideration, the episode explains that most sophisticated advisors weigh a much broader set of factors, including flexibility, culture, client experience, growth limitations, ownership opportunities, and long-term enterprise value. There is no universal timeline. Some advisors move relatively quickly once they decide change is necessary, while others spend months – or even years – getting educated and evaluating options before acting. For many teams, a thoughtful due diligence process unfolds over roughly six months. The episode suggests the biggest mistake is evaluating firms before gaining clarity around personal and business priorities. Without understanding what they actually want to improve, advisors often become overwhelmed by options, recruiting pitches, and conflicting information. One of the most valuable approaches is speaking directly with advisors who have already made similar moves. Jason and Mindy discuss why real-world perspective – particularly from advisors with comparable client bases or business structures – is often far more revealing than formal presentations or recruiting materials. The conversation frames the decision less as “right versus wrong” and more as a question of alignment. Some advisors prioritize ownership, control, and long-term enterprise value. Others value infrastructure, brand recognition, or operational support. The industry landscape has evolved enough that advisors now have far more flexibility to design around the trade-offs that matter most to them. Related Resources The Advisor Transition Playbook: The Latest on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between – Part 2Jason and Mindy Diamond revisit the transition playbook, this time focused on how advisor priorities are shifting. From AI and enterprise value to stability and flexibility, they unpack what's changing in due diligence and what it means for advisors evaluating their next move.  The $129B Blockbuster Move: Shirl Penney on Why This Transition Marks a New Era for the IndustryThe $129B OpenArc breakaway marks a watershed moment for wealth management. In this Rapid Reaction episode, Louis Diamond and Shirl Penney unpack what it means for the RIA model, advisors, and the future of industry competition. The Missing Narrative of the $129B Merrill Breakaway StoryThe largest (and quite possibly most significant) advisor breakaway in industry history made news this week. Yet instead of leading with the scale or significance of the move, headlines centered on Merrill's lawsuit alleging corporate raiding. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… The Advisor Transition Playbook: Inside Baseball on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between A Special Industry Update with Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond. Jason Diamond: Welcome to a replay of one of the most popular episodes from our podcast series for financial advisors, The Advisor Transition Playbook: Inside Baseball on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between. It's Part 1 of a 2-Part Industry Update with Mindy Diamond. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more, who change firms, are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms, and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Everything about a transition can seem incredibly overwhelming. From understanding the whys of a move, then conducting due diligence, and onto aligning the right models and selecting the best firms, it might seem like a fairly linear process. And for some, it can be. But for others, the layers of minutia can be daunting. Essentially, it comes down to the adage, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” So the goal of this episode is to share some inside baseball in how to get from here to there. I asked Mindy Diamond to join me to help draw from decades of experience in helping advisors through their transitions. We’ve dived into the misconceptions, the common traps, the aware of a big check and much more. Essentially, it’s a download of what you need to know when considering a move. There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s get to it. Mindy, so excited to have you join me for this topic. Mindy Diamond: Yeah, I’m really happy to be here. And I’m just thinking to myself, “Yikes, decades of experience,” you’ve said, and yes it is, decades of experience. Jason Diamond: It most certainly is, 30 years in the business. So the seeding for this topic was, “You’ve been in this business now for 30 years, how many hundreds of thousands of conversations with advisors is that?” Some who moved, plenty who certainly did not. But ultimately, what we thought would be useful because it’s a question we get most commonly from advisors that we speak with is, “Tell me what I don’t know. What are the questions I should be asking?” So I’m going to just pepper you with some of the most common questions we get, and I would love to share the benefit of your wisdom and experience with our audience. That sound good? Mindy Diamond: It sounds great. I just want to say that we are recording this two days after one of the largest deals probably in the history of the industry broke that I am gratified to say we facilitated the OpenArc team who left Merrill with 129 billion in assets under management, broke a couple days ago to go independent. I’m hoping we have the opportunity to talk about some of their best practices and things we discovered along the way because I think it’s relevant. And a deal like this gets a lot of attention, people always want to know what they do and what went wrong. Jason Diamond: It’s a good point. I’m glad you bring it up. First of all, it’s so timely, but I think you can almost use it as a case study a little bit to answer some of these questions. So let’s dive in with that. I want to start with the big picture, “Why?” Because that’s the number one thing I think people want to know is, “Why do advisors move?” And I think there’s an assumption that 95% of transitions happen because of a big check or because of economics. I’m certain you’re going to touch on that to some extent, but give me your sense of what are the main triggers of advisor movement. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. Look, are there some advisors that move because they need to recapitalize or they want the money? Sure. But the absolute vast majority are moving because they come to a place where one of two things is true, and oftentimes both. One, the pain of staying is great enough. Meaning there’s enough frustrations or limitations that they’ve gotten to a point where despite efforts to the contrary to make it better, despite gutting it out and saying, “On par, it’s good enough,” they come to a point where there’s limitations in how they can serve their clients, how they can grow the business, and that’s just untenable for them. Hopefully, simultaneously, they are equally excited and have identified an opportunity that they believe is needle-moving enough, it’s worth the hassle, the disruption, the everything to make this move. I’ve never done a move where it doesn’t fall into one of those two or, hopefully, both of those categories. Jason Diamond: Let’s go a little deeper there. You mentioned limitations. Give me an example either using this recent deal or even just any recent advisors that you’ve worked with about, “What are some limitations that people experience at,” let’s say, “the wirehouses that potentially would be a catalyst for a move?” Mindy Diamond: Generally speaking, the biggest limitations have to do with how they’re able to grow their business and serve their clients. So anything to do with excess bureaucracy, anything to do with an incongruence, if you will, between the advisors or the team’s goals for how they want to serve clients or grow the business and what the firm is allowing them to do. Using this enormous deal as an example, you’ve got a team that was doing extraordinarily well. Oh, my god. They were the biggest team at Merrill, so talk about having a batphone to the top and the attention of senior leadership. If anyone was going to be able to break through the red tape or get things done, or eschew the limitations, it was them. And for a long time, they did. But they were sort of increasingly unhappy, let’s say, over a decade. Despite their size, every year, they became a little bit more frustrated. And after probably six or seven years of saying, “We’re just too big to move,” they came to a point of saying, “We can’t ignore this anymore. We’ve got a tiger by its tail. We have this extraordinary business that is growing exponentially. We’ve got clients that are complaining to us. And more importantly, we’ve got team members that are feeling stifled.” And that’s where it comes from, where there’s problems you just can’t ignore even if you want to. Jason Diamond: It almost feels like one of those things where advisors know they’re limited, they can just feel it. But if you’re fighting against the firm, and instead of with it. I’ll give you one other one that comes to mind as we’re talking here, that seems to come up a lot in advisor conversations, which is freedom of marketing. And that might seem like a fairly minor limitation, but I can’t tell you how many times, certainly myself, I’m sure you too, get call from an advisor who is heated. They’re angry because they were trying to send some timely market commentary and the firm took two weeks to approve it. Does that fall under the same category of limitations, in your mind? Mindy Diamond: Oh, without a doubt. And it’s funny you say that because in this world of social media where the news is consumed or can be consumed within seconds of an event happening, there’s nothing more frustrating for an advisor than wanting to write a newsletter to update their clients with scale as opposed to having to make one phone call at a time and not being able to do so. It absolutely puts them on a back foot. And then, I think it’s the lack of freedom to differentiate themselves. Most advisors that work for big firms have a firm website that is templated, the same sort of structure of the website and the picture of the team and the same basic wordings, and that’s hard to deal with. Jason Diamond: Well, you bring up an interesting point, which is sometimes… For example, advisors might say or wirehouse advisors might say, “Oh, the marketing is good enough.” But a lot of times, and we’ve had advisors on this podcast who talk about exactly this, they don’t realize how limited the sandbox they were playing in is or was until after a transition. And that’s when their eyes open and they realize, “Oh, my god. I was basically playing with one arm tied behind my back.” We’ve heard advisors use that metaphor. Let me ask you this then, and this is a tough question, what do you think advisors get wrong? What is the number one misconception that advisors have prior to approaching due diligence and thinking about a move? And maybe it’s something as simple as like, “Eh, it’s the same everywhere,” but tell me what you think you hear most commonly. Mindy Diamond: There’s certainly those myths, the assumptions or presumptions that it’s the same everywhere or there’s nothing that’s going to change anyway, for sure. But I think the biggest and most fundamental thing they get wrong is a lack of clarity around, “What it is they’re trying to accomplish, and why?” I’d like to say that I think one of the things, the thing, we do better than most, I’m not going to say everyone else but better than most, and something we’re really good at, is helping advisors to answer the really tough questions, the smartest questions, to get a sense of what it is they’re looking to accomplish, what it is they want to improve and why, “What does success look like?” Because if you don’t do that, then a lot of folks do it backwards. They get a phone call from a manager at Morgan Stanley or from somebody at Schwab or somebody at Dynasty, or whatever it may be, and they say, “I’ll take a lunch, why not?” And of course, the job of the manager from Morgan or the sales rep from Dynasty, or whatever it is, is to tell you all the good things about independence or about Morgan Stanley. But if I, as the advisor, am not really clear about what it is I’m looking to accomplish and why, it’s going to all sound good and I’m going to wind up more overwhelmed than when I started. And that is probably the number one thing that we see advisors getting wrong. It makes the due diligence process, if you choose to enter it, exceedingly inefficient. Jason Diamond: I totally agree. So I’m an advisor, I want to start due diligence in earnest. I know in my head, things are suboptimal. I’m not going to go so far as to say,” I definitively want to move.” But I’m a wirehouse advisor and I’m thinking for the first time in my career, “I’ve built a nice business, but it’s time for me to start getting educated.” So what do I do? Do I just say, “Hey, John at Morgan Stanley, what’s your recruiting deal look like these days?” Tell me, for an advisor who’s never thought about this before, what are the ABCs of this process look like? Mindy Diamond: Yeah. It’s definitely not, the first step, calling Morgan Stanley, even if you’re pretty sure Morgan Stanley is where you want to go. I’d suggest that’s probably one of the last steps, and I’ll tell you why. The first thing is to give yourself permission to say, “Even if I’m not 100% certain that a move is in my future or that I know I’m unhappy enough to go through the hassle and disruption of making a move,” to give yourself permission to get educated. The world, the industry landscape, the ecosystem, the everything looks entirely different than it did five and 10 years ago. And if it’s been five or 10 years, or even three to five years, since you last got educated, asked the questions, looked under the hood to get a sense of, “Is there or could there be something that’s better than where I am?”, you’re doing yourself and your team a disservice. Yeah, it takes time and it’s annoying and it’s overwhelming, and it’s all of it, but that’s honestly why people like us have a job. We don’t approach this that we think people should only come to us when they’re sure they’re going to make a move. In fact, it’s the opposite. We love the calls we get when somebody says, “I’m really happy here. I’ve been here 40 years. I’ve been here 30 years, it’s really good enough, it’s working well for me.” “But all of a sudden, I’m beginning to be curious. Or all of a sudden, I feel X, Y and Z. Tell me what I don’t know.” Those are the best calls. Those are the smartest calls. That’s the best thing an advisor can do. Jason Diamond: Yeah, I agree with that. Are there things you think an advisor needs to ask for during the diligence… I guess what I’m getting at is, do you trust the process that if you go through this process with, let’s say, three to five strategically picked firms… So you work within a recruiter or, a shameless plug, however you approach this, and you end up with your short list of contenders. Do you trust that, by going through the due diligence process, these firms are going to give you the building blocks that you need to do proper due diligence? Or are there things you, as an advisor, need to ask for? I’ll give you one example that comes to mind, which is… There’s obviously been some firms that have had financial troubles recently. So do you think an advisor, for example, needs to ask for financial statements from a firm they’re potentially considering due diligence on? I’m curious what your thoughts are. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. Particularly, if you’re looking at sort of in this new world order, if we think about the landscape as a continuum and the newer boutique multifamily offices on the right side, absolutely. Conducting what we call reverse due diligence and getting to see the financials of the firms you’re considering, to make sure that they’re sound and solid and that the equity valuation is exactly as advertised, of course, yes, that’s true. So the answer is, in part, you trust the process. You trust that if you’ve asked the right questions, if you’ve gotten clarity around what’s important to you, and as a result, you’ve crafted the right questions, and therefore, the manager or the representative from the firm or options you’re considering has put together the right due diligence plan, you can trust that at least 90% of what needs to be gotten right has gotten right. But there are always things around the margins that aren’t addressed. One is you can’t just outsource the due diligence process. You need to be paying attention. And much like people who trust their doctor and presume the doctor just always has it right, you need to be your own advocate. I would say, the same thing here. That as the process unfolds, there will be additional questions, additional sort of gaps and holes, and you shouldn’t stop until you’ve gotten all of your questions answered. That’s really the best advice I can give. Jason Diamond: You are talking to John from XYZ firm and Jim from ABC firm, and they’re going to tell you what’s great about their firms. So how do you know that you’re not just buying a false bill of goods, it’s just a glossy kind of sales pitch? I’ll give you my answer first. Part of it is, I think, you test drive the systems. I think another step I suggest a lot is calls with advisors on the platform. So an advisor who left UBS to go to Morgan Stanley, probably the best possible person to ask about Morgan Stanley. Any other additional thoughts on that one? Mindy Diamond: You took the words right out of my mouth. Absolutely, that is the number one way to do it, is that you ask for an opportunity, and you can do it in a name-blind way without identifying yourself, to talk with advisors that have made the move that are two things, that either came from the firm you’re coming from, so you get a similar perspective, but it’s equally important to talk to advisors that have similar business mix. It doesn’t matter what firm they came from, even if it’s not the same as yours, but, “How does someone that services international clients, how are they better able to serve those international clients at this new firm or new model than they were where you are?” We’re talking about it as if it’s wirehouse-to-wirehouse. But very often in today’s world order, especially looking at this giant move from this week, it’s about wirehouse to some version of independence. So there’s so much more due diligence, so many more questions that are required. It is even more important in that world to really get an understanding of what it’s like from the perspective of somebody that’s walking in those shoes. I will tell you, Jason, and you know this, that literally the number one reason I started this podcast more than a decade ago, and why we continue to do the podcast and the feedback we get, is because the feedback from advisors that have joined a platform already is the very best feedback, the best way, in a discreet confidential manner, to hear the truth from somebody who doesn’t have a horse in the race who’s just sharing their perspective with you. And that’s the feedback we continue to get. In a couple of weeks, I’m interviewing, as an example, Neil Rubinstein. Neil’s an advisor in Texas that came from Merrill that we moved to Rockefeller. A perfect example. So many advisors that are considering a move if they’ve got high net worth clients are going to look at Rockefeller. Well, what better way to understand what Rockefeller is about than to hear it from an advisor that’s walked in the shoes, not only of a Merrill advisor, but services high net worth clients and then have information or perspective similar to Neil. What do you think about that? Do you agree with that? Jason Diamond: 1000%. First of all, the podcast, I will say, a little bit of a sales pitch, has one thing going for it that a call with an advisor doesn’t, which is complete discretion and confidentiality. I will say, I think we’ve done a good job of doing facilitating name-blind calls between advisors. We continue to harp on this point even though it sounds somewhat minor, because it really is the very… You can talk to people like me and people like the recruiters from the firms until you’re blue in the face. But the right way, the best possible way to learn the, “Is this guy selling me? How does the technology compare to Merrill? How does the day-to-day compare? What’s it like working for this manager?”, all those types of questions, I think are best answered by another advisor. So completely agree with you. Mindy Diamond: Yeah, and I’ll take it one step further. Somewhere in the process, you take advantage of the opportunity to either listen to a podcast and hear somebody’s perspective of what the move was like, and how it’s bettered their life and where the pitfalls are, and/or you take the opportunity to talk with other advisors that have made the move, so you can ask your own specific questions. But after you’ve had the opportunity to do that, then it’s really important, and this is the part that why you can’t entirely outsource or let the due diligence process just go on autopilot, to take some of that perspective and the manager that you’re interviewing with, hold his or her feet to the fire. What do I mean by that? So I talked to an advisor that talked about the fact that the number one concern about Rockefeller, I’m making this up, is that they’re going to be the next Merrill, or that they just added a fee that now is going to have to be passed on to clients. While this advisor said it doesn’t bother them and they had a lot of good reason of why it’s not an issue, I’d love for you to tell me why it could be an issue. What are some of the things you’ve gotten wrong? When someone doesn’t join Rockefeller, why is it? I’m making that up- Jason Diamond: Yeah, smart. Same thing. Even let go, this advisor mentioned that technology is a step back from the firm I’m coming from. And I’m not asking you to argue with me, but perhaps the manager might be able to say something like, “We’re investing substantially in the platform, and we have these rollouts coming in the next several months that are going to close that gap.” So I completely agree. That’s a really smart- Mindy Diamond: And a follow-up question to that example, Jason, which is a great one, is, “How can I trust, how can I get a sense of security, if I join here in the next couple of months that in fact that investment is going to be made? And how that investment in technology will actually impact thing?” So again, it’s constantly being your own advocate, constantly paying attention, and constantly questions beget more questions. Jason Diamond: I agree we. Haven’t talked at all about the dollars and cents of this, and I think we need to because it’s important. Right? You can have the best platform on the planet, but the reality is a move comes with risk, a move comes with hassle, and there is a market for advisors’ books of businesses. That’s one of, I think, the major kind of paradigm shifts we’ve seen in the last, call it, decade is advisors know their books are assets, their book is a business, and that business is worth something substantial. At any firm, even at their current firm via retire and place deals, the book is worth something substantial. So if you had to put a percentage to it, I’m an advisor making a decision, 100% waiting, how much percent waiting do I put on the economics and how much waiting do I put on culture, platform, everything else? Mindy Diamond: The answer is, absolutely, it’s an inside job, personal, and it depends upon the advisor. There are some advisors, they’re wrong, but they will put all the weight on personal economics. They’re making a big mistake, if that’s the case. And most advisors will put much more weight on getting it right, meaning, “What’s life going to be like afterwards? And will I have a better ability to serve clients and grow the business?” But here’s what I would say, they’re both equally important. So no advisor who’s got a decent enough runway ahead of him or her and who’s looking to really grow the business and who cares about their clients can’t be unconcerned about the culture of where they’re going and what life is going to be like and what are the limitations, all of the questions we’ve been talking about. But an advisor who’s built a great business would be a fool not to consider their own personal economics. It just can’t be the first thing they consider. And in the book I wrote, Should I Stay or Should I Go?, I wrote that 100 times that it’s all about, “Lead with what’s important to the business and important to clients, do the right thing, but you can’t ignore personal financial gain.” Let’s talk about this move of OpenArc, this $129-billion Merrill team. You can only imagine the number of zeros at the end of a check that this team was offered by every major firm on the street. And in the span of a decade, they got those offers. Independence, making this enormous leap, was not the first thing they looked at, was not necessarily their first choice. But as they began, in their case, to really consider how limited they felt on the things they wanted to be able to do for clients… By the way, I don’t want to steal anybody’s thunder because we’re going to be launching a podcast specifically talking about this deal and this move, so I’ll save that for… Louis Diamond, our partner, and Shirl Penney, the CEO and founder of Dynasty, are going to be talking about it and they’ll cover all of that. But I just want to give the example that as this team began to realize, certainly in the last five years, how much things had changed at Merrill and how incongruent they felt between their goals, the goals for the business, the goals for serving clients, and what the firm was asking of them since Bank of America came to town, it became impossible to just say, “Holy cow, we can get a check with a lot of zeros at the end of it.” They couldn’t not see the benefits of everything else, the benefits that creating their own independent entity could bring them. Jason Diamond: I agree with that. I will play devil’s advocate a little bit here and say, “I think what you’re really talking about is the trade-off.” They’re not martyrs, they’re not altruistic and said, “We don’t want your hundreds of millions of dollars.” I think what you’re talking about is the trade-off between near-term upfront recruiting deals, which is the primary means by which the wirehouses, the regionals, the boutique firms recruit. Right? The traditional forgivable loan structure is all about a short term de-risking of the move, a monetization event in the near term where they’re paying you some percentage of revenue, 350%, 400% of revenue, tied to a forgivable loan. But that’s your bite of the apple in that example. With the example of a move to independence, you’ll lose, in some cases, all of that upfront monetization. So this example you’re talking about is a good example where they got no upfront transition dollars because they launched an RIA. But, and this is a very important caveat, they know they are building equity and ownership in something that is going to, at the current rate, be worth a preposterous multiple if and when they decide to sell it. So I assume that has to be part of this conversation around independence is, it’s not that you don’t care about monetizing the business, it’s that you plan to monetize the business in a different and probably more significant way. Fair? Mindy Diamond: Beyond fair. 1000%, that’s absolutely correct. Again, not only making it about this example, but it’s a good example. So again, the possibility of getting a check with a lot of zeros on it, and by the way, also tapping into an already established well-familiar, well-run infrastructure. Think about how much easier the move would’ve been, to jump from Merrill Lynch to Morgan Stanley, and not probably was their first choice, if they were going to go the traditional route. Think about how much easier the due diligence process… how much less heavy the lift would’ve been in terms of due diligence, but certainly from a short-term upfront perspective. And that’s really the key, is that not everyone has the appetite to bet on the long term. To me, that’s the beauty of the industry landscape as it’s evolved and the waterfall of possibilities today. If you’re a great team, and there are so many great teams, you’re growing, you’ve got a multi-generational bench of advisors, you’ve got a succession plan, you’ve got sticky clients, you don’t have 5,000 clients but you have 100 or 200 relationships, you’ve got a great business that you’ve got options for it, there’s no right or wrong. It’s, “What do I want to be when I grow up?”, and, “How do I want to live my business life?” And if you query 10 of those great teams, five of them will wind up moving to the traditional space. That doesn’t make it wrong, it’s just, “That’s what’s right for them.” But the other five will have entrepreneurial drive, will value the long term, and willing to forego the short-term upside in order to bet on themselves for the long term. And holy cow, again, we’ll save that for the episode that Shirl and Louis do to talk about what those multiples could look like, but I don’t think there’s enough zeros on the calculator to begin to think about what that business… OpenArc’s business will be worth even as little as five years from now. Jason Diamond: I agree with that. I think the one point I would probably make in defense of people who go the traditional firm route… Actually, two points. Number one, I don’t think it’s only about, “I am not willing to bet on myself, and I don’t want to delay the monetization event.” I think for some people, the idea of being independent and putting the toner in the copy machine and the little K-cups, that’s just not appealing. I like going into a branch and they have everything, my desk is all set up. So that’s one caveat I’d make that some people just prefer the traditional firm world. The other caveat I’d make is there are advisors who, rightly or wrongly, believe in the brand name of the firm mattering. So there are some advisors who say, “Look, I am a good advisor, but my ability to land and grow business is tied very closely to XYZ firm/brand, Morgan Stanley.” I think, a lot of times, we find that’s not always the case as much as advisors believe. But I’m just trying to think of a couple scenarios where there are advisors who genuinely prefer or need or want the stability, big brand, resources of the biggest firms on the planet. Mindy Diamond: I totally agree. Actually, thank you for bringing those two caveats up because, I’d say, there’s a third caveat. Someone can’t go independent, they don’t have a next gen. They don’t have someone that could do the heavy lifting, if they’re not capable of doing it on their own, to build an independent firm. They don’t have entrepreneurial spirit. They’re three years from retirement, and they don’t have the kind of time that it takes to really build the value of an independent practice. And we have great respect for those people. But again, the cool thing about the industry landscape is that as it’s evolved, there’s something for everyone. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the only choice is stay put or go to UBS. Jason Diamond: Agree. In fact, there’s probably even versions of independence. For example, if you don’t have a successor, well, there are versions of independence that might work where there’s a monetization event on the backend where somebody can buy and inherit your book. So that is probably the coolest or most interesting thing, the most exciting thing anyway, about the industry landscape in the last, really call it, five years anyway, probably even a little sooner than that is, especially in the independent side of things, there are options that check just about every box. You as the advisor choose what elements… And this gets back to your begin with the end in mind. Choose what elements of the business you like, and want to maintain control over. Choose what elements of the business you don’t, and there is probably a solution out there that works to check those boxes. Mindy Diamond: And then, that goes back to what we were saying. Even if you are 90% satisfied and 99% certain you would never make a move, if you haven’t gotten educated, in some capacity, whether it be listening to a podcast, reading articles, talking to a recruiter, talking to other firms, talking to friends and colleagues at other firms, or some combination of all of the above, in the last five years, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. And again, not because in any way we’re trying to sell you on making a move, but because we believe knowledge is power and it looks different than it did. So make sure that you’re challenging your own assumptions, and that you’re really crystal-clear that what you believe or what you believe five years ago is still true today. Jason Diamond: This is a little bit of a gear shift, but I think there’s a tie in here. If you are an advisor now, or a point in their career, they’re wise to at least get educated, pick their heads up, understand what’s out there. But then, there’s the question of, “When is due diligence done?” But I’m going to frame this through a different lens here, which is, “Now, I’m an advisor, I’ve done due diligence, I’ve talked to maybe three to five strategic firms.” Is there typically an aha moment when an advisor says, “Oh, my god. It’s RBC, and I need to go that way and I know I need to move”? Or is it more process driven than that? What are your thoughts? Because I think a lot of advisors struggle with that. And I often find myself telling advisors, “Trust the process here and you’ll know when… You don’t have to know right away in the first inning of due diligence which firm or which model you’re meeting, or even if you’re going to make a move.” But curious what your thoughts are on this one. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. In fact, we hope you don’t. We hope that you don’t go into this process with preconceived notions, we hope that you don’t make a decision after one meeting, because we do think that there’s value in the process. And people get to that aha moment at different times. You and I are working with a team, right now, that is 22 meetings in. And that’s not to say every process takes 22 meetings, but the team is sort of taking it slowly. They started out looking at five or six firms. They’ve narrowed it down now to three. The goal is to get to two or one, then to get to a home office visit to the one that’s their first choice. They’re absolutely getting closer. And I’m probably exaggerating at 22 meetings, but I’m making a point, that even at this point in the game, which is probably a good, would you say, five months into the due diligence process, I don’t know that they’ve had an aha moment. They have an aha moment that they know they don’t want another wirehouse. They don’t want to be independent because the senior member of the team is exactly that person we just described, that he doesn’t have the kind of time in the business in order to make independence worthwhile- Jason Diamond: Or drive. They just don’t want independence. Mindy Diamond: Right, and the next generation doesn’t really want it. So at this point of the game, the aha moment is think we want a regional firm or a boutique firm. But it’s not an aha moment yet that it’s going to be this firm, and that’s I think a good point. A lot of times, the aha moment is the model, first, and then the firm. Jason Diamond: Sometimes, deal can be the type like, “Okay. I know I love the regional firms, but one is offering a deal that’s 100% better,” and that’s often when we actually will counsel advisors, “It’s okay to consider the deal.” The deal is a factor, as you said earlier. Mindy Diamond: If I can, that’s actually a great point. That’s the perfect example of where, “Always consider the deal, just don’t make it your primary or first consideration.” Jason Diamond: Right. Mindy Diamond: So if you’ve done all the right due diligence and two firms or two opportunities stack up next to each other perfectly, they both will allow you to move the needle significantly enough. If they both will allow you to do better for clients and grow faster, and do everything else that’s important to you, then it’s absolutely time to make deal the tiebreaker. Jason Diamond: So you threw out five months and talking about 22 meetings, let’s table that. An advisor calls you, Mindy, this morning and says, “Not unhappy, but I’m getting that itch.” Give me the average time it takes them from that first call this morning to the moment they resigned from their firm, and then give me the quickest they could do it if they needed to. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. Let me start out by saying that those calls we get from advisors come in two different categories. One is, “Yeah, getting the itch. The straw that broke the camel’s back happened yesterday when X happened.” But the other call, the one we mentioned earlier, which is, “I am 90% happy. I am growing exponentially. I get time to coach my kids’ soccer game. I have great quality of life. I have a great team. I’ve been here 30 or 40 years, and life is good. I’m watching more of my colleagues go or I’m feeling more pain,” fill in the blank for whatever that is. “Even though I’m 90% happy and I’m 100% convinced I don’t want to move, that moving is a hassle, I can’t not see the handwriting on the wall and I at least need to get educated.” So let’s assume that we get one of those calls. The reason I am calling out the difference between the two is because the time it takes to do the due diligence is usually different. If someone is already at the point where they know that they’re unhappy and likely to move, the due diligence process usually runs quicker. The due diligence process for somebody that’s mostly happy and just beginning to get curious, sort of the latter example, might take a little longer. Jason Diamond: Give me some real parameters to it. Mindy Diamond: Well, I’d love to hear what you think. What’s swirling in my head, it’s all over the map, but I’m going to say typically six months. Jason Diamond: Six months was the number I was about to throw out as well. And I think the quickest you want to do this is three months. Anything beyond that starts to be basically a fire drill. We’ve done deals quicker than that obviously, an advisor’s going to or has been terminated. But I think six months in earnest is a good, healthy timeline. Especially, by the way, because a lot of firms are busy, we’re hearing this from a lot of the firm side of things these days. Depending upon what firm you’re moving to, you need to make sure that the firm can handle you. You want to get their A team upon your breakaway and your transition, no matter what firm that is. Mindy Diamond: Do you think, Jason, that it’s six months from, “Gee, I’m a little curious. I want to start to look. I want to begin to do due diligence. What does that look like?”, to, “My butt is in a new seat”? Jason Diamond: No. Because I think in the example where you’re just like, “Eh, I’m a little unhappy,” those early innings conversations typically play out slowly because the guy who’s 90% happy is in no rush to say, “Set me up with a bunch of firms, and let’s talk about it.” In those instances, it could take a year and a half because I think what happens really there is then there’s a catalyst event that takes them from your category two to category one. Right? They went from a little unhappy, just curious, to the straw that broke the camel’s back. And that’s when then they shift into the more… or they say the firm has… A good example, UBS, upset a lot of advisors with the compensation plan. They recently walked back a lot of those changes. I’m certain there will be some advisors who say, “This is a nod to attrition. I’ve seen from management what I need to see, and I’m going to stay put.” Equally, probably plenty of advisors who say, “It’s too little too late.” Mindy Diamond: Let me say something, and again, not to make this episode at all about this team in Atlanta, but that was a ten-year conversation for us. Literally, 10 years ago, maybe even 12 years ago, but let’s say 10, one of the senior partners on the team had called to say, “Curious, really happy, doing incredibly well. Zero chance we are moving in the next year or two or five.” But look, what don’t we know? And every year, we would then have a conversation about what the landscape looked like. But I’m going to say it was six years ago when the conversation shifted from, “Really happy, convinced we’re staying,” to, “starting to think we might leave at some point,” but another six years until this really happened. Now, that’s a good example because they were going independent. The transition itself probably took a year, year and a half. Jason Diamond: And the size and complexity of the team, by the way, probably amplifies that as well. Mindy Diamond: Well, there are outliers on either side, and that’s the point I wanted to make. Correct. Jason Diamond: Very fair. I’m glad you bring that up because there’s no cookie-cutter answer. It totally depends on the makeup of the business, where you’re going, how you’re going, when you’re going. I think we have time for two more questions, and I want to make sure we get to this because we’ve talked about this through the lens of the advisor and the advisor’s team. We haven’t talked much about the client experience, and that is clearly self-portability, in general, is something that gives advisors anxiety rightfully so. I think if you could tell a lot of advisors with 100% certainty that their book would move, I think many more would be interested in moving. I think concerns about portability, a lot of times, would keep advisors in seats. I guess what I’m getting at is because that initial client conversation is so important, is there anything you coach advisors to think about or to say to clients or potential clients as they consider a change, a transition? Mindy Diamond: Well, you have to be mindful certainly of your own employment agreement and legal considerations of pre-soliciting- Jason Diamond: Important point. Mindy Diamond: No way are any of us advocating for pre-solicitation. But you do have to have a pretty good sense in your mind without asking the client specifically, who is likely to come and who not. And the determination, the sort of hypothesis or the supposition, of who will come and who will not has everything to do with where you’re going and the value proposition, “Will I be able to make a compelling enough point? Will I have compelling enough reasons where it’s not about me, the advisor, it’s about you, the clients, about how I will better be able to service them? And if I’m able to say to a client, ‘If I make a move or I’m making this move and I’m now going to be able to do X, Y, and Z for you,’ I’m much more confident that they will be able to come?” In the case of this OpenArc deal, the Atlanta team, they did a lot of retirement plan business, so they had to be really concerned about how they were going to position this move and the new brand separating from Merrill brand, how they were going to convince their Fortune 500 clients that this was the right move. So it always has to start with what’s best for clients and how will I pitch it, if you will. Jason Diamond: I love how you answered that because it’s like two different answers to me. Part one is handicapping the portability, and that’s pre-transition during the due diligence process. Honestly, if you’re an advisor, you could do that now, right? If I were to make a move, “Here’s my client who I know with 100% certainty would follow me. Here’s the maybes, here’s the no,” you come up with a weighted average portability metric. I totally agree with you on that. And then the second piece of it is you have to be constantly thinking this option might sound the best to you, but remember, and I agree, not pre-solicit, but post-transition, you’re going to have to sell it to your clients. So you need to be thinking about every conversation you have with every firm through that lens. Do you agree with that? Meaning I’m going to move my business from UBS to Morgan Stanley. You get paid a big check, but can you articulate the clients- Mindy Diamond: Yeah, 1000%. It’s such a good point because, and we’re going to give you some inside baseball here, the number one question that any advisor who is in traffic with any firm or any model needs to ask is, put words in my mouth, “If we were fast forwarding to the day I made a move and joined your firm or joined your model, help me to understand what would the pitch to my clients sound like.” And then, you need to sort of absorb that pitch from the perspective of your clients. Put yourself in the shoes of your oldest clients, of your youngest clients, of your most important clients, of your middle-of-the-road clients, of your middle net worth clients, of the institutional clients, fill in the blank, “Does that value proposition fit?” That is one of the best ways to assess whether a firm or an opportunity is better enough or good enough for you. Jason Diamond: It’s such a good answer, and I love the inside baseball look there. Also, by the way, it has this side benefit of you’re forcing the managers or the recruiters to articulate almost like a succinct value prop on their firm. Right? Tell me, hypothetically, what would I say to clients about, and you’re just picking on Morgan, “Why is Morgan Stanley better than my current firm?” And that answer ought to be compelling. In closing, I want to wrap this up with a question around the difficulty of a move. You’ve been in this business now 30 years, I think it’s almost exactly 30 years. Has it gotten easier logistically to transition? And do you see that trend continuing, let’s say, because of partially things like AI, DocuSign and the like? What are your thoughts on the nuts and bolts of transitioning? Mindy Diamond: There’s no question it’s gotten easier. There’s no question that, from a legal perspective, the advent of broker protocol certainly makes it less scary or less risky to make a move. But there are plenty of moves that are made as a non-protocol move, and that’s not always the case. And the ecosystem, I should say, has gotten better to support the advisor in transition. Legal counsel, all they do all day long is facilitate these moves. Third-party consultancies, people like us that have been at it 30 years and have seen it all, and all the mistakes have already been made, we know how to do it. But with that said, moving is a hassle. No matter how much better the support system has gotten, no matter how many times a manager or a firm has transitioned advisors, it is a hassle to move. It is disruptive. It is a lot. And again, this statement is not going to win me a place in the headhunter hall of fame, but you should absolutely not consider a move unless you have the appetite for some risk, for some breakage, meaning some loss of clients, and you’re willing to shrink to grow, and you’ve got an appetite for some hassle factor to work perhaps harder for a short period of time than you have in a while. If you don’t have that, then no matter how unhappy you are, you really need to seriously consider whether moving is the best way to solve your problems. Jason Diamond: Yeah. It’s a really great way to tie a bow on this episode. It was a lot of fun. I’m excited. I think that would be 2037 based on your 12-year timeline. So the next $129-billion team, we’ll have to schedule that episode out for 10 or 12 years from now. But Mindy, thank you so much for sharing your years of wisdom and expertise with us. This was a fantastic episode. I had a lot of fun. Mindy Diamond: Yeah, I loved it too. Thank you, my pleasure. Jason Diamond: Thank you for joining us. We'll be back with a new episode next week, so be sure to listen in. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms, or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? is a book written with you in mind. It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and road map to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook.     The Advisor Transition Playbook: Inside Baseball on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between A Special Industry Update with Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond. Jason Diamond: Welcome to a replay of one of the most popular episodes from our podcast series for financial advisors, The Advisor Transition Playbook: Inside Baseball on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between. It's Part 1 of a 2-Part Industry Update with Mindy Diamond. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more, who change firms, are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms, and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Everything about a transition can seem incredibly overwhelming. From understanding the whys of a move, then conducting due diligence, and onto aligning the right models and selecting the best firms, it might seem like a fairly linear process. And for some, it can be. But for others, the layers of minutia can be daunting. Essentially, it comes down to the adage, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” So the goal of this episode is to share some inside baseball in how to get from here to there. I asked Mindy Diamond to join me to help draw from decades of experience in helping advisors through their transitions. We’ve dived into the misconceptions, the common

⚡ The Fastest Way to Serve Divorce Papers Legally | Los Angeles Divorce ⚡ Serving divorce papers correctly is one of the most important parts of starting a California divorce case. If service is done improperly, the court may reject the paperwork or delay the case entirely. In this video, we explain the fastest legal ways to serve divorce papers, how proper service starts the six-month waiting period, and why California requires official service procedures.

Trey and Katie celebrate six years of marriage by talking prenups, post-nups, divorce fears, and why money conversations can get surprisingly sentimental. They also cover pregnancy “zombie mode,” Trey closing Katie's mouth while she slept, social media showing way too much death, wild listener parenting stories, and a chaotic attempt at TikTok trends.Support the show!If you're looking for lightweight, comfortable shirts for spring and summer, check out Poncho Outdoors. They've got Ultra-Lite, Original, Western, and Polo styles depending on what you're looking for. Go to http://ponchoutdoors.com/CORRECT and enter your email for $10 off your first order and free shipping.Every mama deserves a boost.Craveable kookies for motherhood and beyond.Visit: https://miraclemama.com/discount/treykennedyGet half off our Patreon by using code, NEWCHAPTER at http://patreon.com/treykennedySubscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL3ESPT9yf1T8x6L0P4d39w?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe to Correct Opinions on Apple: http://bit.ly/COPodcast

Welcome back to SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, and welcome back to our fourth semi-annual edition of SANDCASTING Your Brains Out with John Mayer and Billy Allen, the hosts of Coach Your Brains Out. Mayer is the head coach of the LMU Beach Volleyball team, while Allen is the assistant -- and AVCA Assistant Coach of the Year! -- at Stanford. We're recapping the NCAA Beach Volleyball season, where Mayer's Lions won another WCC title, making it seven in a row(!!), Allen's Cardinal made their first NCAA finals, and Mewhirter's FSU Seminoles had their second-best regular season ever, won a Big 12 Conference title, and made the NCAA semifinals, losing to Allen's Cardinal. We're chatting: Is there a "correct" way to do anything in beach volleyball, and sports? How do you prep for the post-season in beach volleyball? Injury prevention techniques And a whole lot more SHOOTS! We have a NEW BOOK! Pre-order your copy of Volleyball for Dummies today at Barnes and Noble! Want SANDCAST merch? We got you covered. Check it out here! Get 25 PERCENT off all Mikasa products with our code, SANDCAST and play with the ball. played with the best in the game. Head to Mikasa's website and get your bag of balls today! Get 10 PERCENT OFF VBTV using our discount code, SANDCAST10 Want to get better at beach volleyball? Use our discount code, SANDCAST, and get 10 percent off all Better at Beach products!  If you want to receive our SANDCAST weekly newsletter, the Beach Volleyball Digest, which dishes all the biggest news in beach volleyball in one quick newsletter, click here and sign on up! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A birthday cookout turned into one of the most powerful conversations I've had in a long time, and I had to bring it to you. I sat down with a new friend named Julissa, who founded LearningMind Diagnostics, and everything about her reminded me what it looks like when someone is truly on fire for their work. In this episode, I break down three raw lessons I pulled from that conversation that can immediately shift how you show up in your life, your work, and your community. Key Takeaways Genuine passion cannot be taught, coached, or replicated by AI. If you love what you do, you cannot be replaced. Authenticity always wins. You do not need the perfect words, you need the real ones that come from caring deeply. The power of one is real. Driving hours to help one child is not inefficient, it is exactly how you start a chain reaction of change. Stop trying to reach the masses. Focus on the one person in front of you, give them everything, and repeat that process daily. Your name is attached to your character, your integrity, and your legacy. Make people say it right and make sure it stands for something. Action Steps Ask yourself honestly: am I passionate about what I do, does it have purpose, and does it make someone's life better? If the answer is no, figure out what needs to change. Identify one person today, just one, that you can invest your full attention and effort into. Send the text, offer the help, make the call. Start the chain reaction. Take ownership of your name and your identity. Correct people when they get it wrong, because your name carries everything you have built and everything you are still building. Notable Quote In the end, authenticity always wins. If you're passionate about it, you'll have an audience because we as people need passion. We need people that love what they do.

In this episode, Steve's guest, Paul Karvanis, delves into redefining success and happiness within the legal profession. Paul, a former lawyer turned coach, speaker, and author, shares his journey from practicing law to coaching, emphasizing the importance of aligning career goals with personal values. His books, The Happy Lawyer and The Successful Associate, provide a roadmap for lawyers seeking fulfillment beyond traditional achievements. Paul discusses the traps lawyers often fall into, the significance of self-awareness, and the role of community and self-compassion in achieving sustainable success. Key takeaways: Success is personal; align work with your values for true satisfaction. Sustainable happiness comes from action, not just awareness. Adopt an ownership mindset for continuous growth and mastery. Excellence requires a dynamic loop of reflection and action. Build supportive communities and practice self-compassion for resilience. Embrace imperfect action to overcome overthinking and accelerate growth. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction: Success vs. happiness in law 02:11 - Meet Paul Karvanis: Background and focus 05:38 - The Happy Lawyer Project origin 10:04 - Chasing traditional success vs. fulfillment 14:42 - Studying thriving lawyers 20:28 - Foundations for thriving: Community and self-compassion 26:29 - Why lawyers delay change until crises 35:25 - Correct work vs. useful work

A video from Bryce Harper sparks an internet wide debate about how to brush your teeth properly.

The Drive wondered if fans have a confidence in John Sherman and JJ Picollo to correct the Royals issues get back to being a winning a team.

There are many people who believe there are many ways to get to heaven, however, the correct way is only by going through the Lord Jesus Christ.

Carlos Juan Finlay was a Cuban doctor who did a lot of work to understand the spread of Yellow Fever. But Walter Reed got most of the credit. Research: American Experience. “Carlos Finlay (1833-1915).” From The Great Fever. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/fever-carlos-finlay/ Berenbrok, Dorothy E., "Latin Heritage Month. Carlos Juan Finlay: Outrageous, Courageous and Correct" (2015). Posters: Jefferson History. 3. https://jdc.jefferson.edu/jeffhistoryposters/3 "Carlos Juan Finlay." Encyclopedia of World Biography Online, Gale, 1998. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1631002194/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=bfeecc25. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026. Chaves-Carballo, Enrique. “Carlos J. Finlay: The mosquito man.” Hektoen International. 11/2/2020. https://hekint.org/2020/11/02/carlos-j-finlay-the-mosquito-man/ Corbitt, Duvon C. “Carlos J. Finlay, Cuban Physician.” The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Aug., 1965). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2511751 Del Regato, Juan A. “Carlos Juan Finlay (1833-1915).” Journal of Public Health Policy , 2001, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2001). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3343556 Faerstein, Eduardoa; Winkelstein, Warren Jrb. Carlos Juan Finlay: Rejected, Respected, and Right. Epidemiology 21(1):p 158, January 2010. | DOI: 10.1097/EDE.0b013e3181c308e0 Ferreira Moreno, Víctor Guillermo. “Evocation to the Dr. Carlos J. Finlay Barres on the centennial of his death.” Colombia medica (Cali, Colombia) vol. 47,1 63-6. 30 Mar. 2016 Finlay, Carlos J. “The Mosquito Hypothetically Considered as the Agent of Transmission of Yellow Fever.” Read before the Royal Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences Session of August 14th, 1881. https://archive.org/details/b33448541/page/590/mode/1up Finlay, Carlos Juan. “Trabajos selectos del Dr. Carlos J. Finlay. Selected papers of Dr. Carlos J. Finlay.” Habana. 1912. https://archive.org/details/trabajosselectos00finl Finlay, Charles. “Inoculations for Yellow Fever by Means of Contaminated Mosquitoes.” Published in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, n.s. 102: 264-268, 1891. https://archive.org/details/b33445242/page/n4/mode/1up Finlay, Charles. “Yellow Fever: Its ‘Transmission by Means of the Culex Mosquito.” Published in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, n.s. 92: 395-409, 1886. https://archive.org/details/b33435698/page/613/mode/1up Palmer, Steven. “A Cuban Scientist Between Empires: Peripheral Vision on Race and Tropical Medicine.” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne desétudes latino-américaines et caraïbes, Vol. 35, No. 69, Special Issue: Landscapes of LatinAmerican Health, 1870-1970. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41800498 Spears, Ellen Griffith and Rosa López-Oceguera. “Carlos Juan Finlay, William Gorgas, and Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Controversy: Competing Historical Memories.” Alabama Review The University of Alabama Press. Volume 74, Number 1, January 2021. https://doi.org/10.1353/ala.2021.0011 Stepan, Nancy. “The Interplay between Socio-Economic Factors and Medical Science: Yellow Fever Research, Cuba and the United States.” Social Studies of Science , Nov., 1978, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Nov., 1978). Via JSTOR. http://www.jstor.com/stable/284817 Thomas Jefferson University. “10 Notable Jefferson Alumni of the Past.” https://library.jefferson.edu/archives/exhibits/notable_alumni/juan_carlos_finlay.cfm Tone, John Lawrence. (2002) “How the mosquito (man) liberated Cuba.” History and Technology, 18:4, 277-308, DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2002.11417735 “Carlos J. Finlay.” 5/16/2023. https://www.unesco.org/en/prizes/carlos-j-finlay/about Woodall, Jack. "Yellow Fever." Infectious Diseases: In Context, edited by Brenda Wilmoth Lerner and K. Lee Lerner, vol. 2, Gale, 2008, pp. 925-931. In Context Series. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3045200265/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=bf646a26. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the prayer we recite before the Korbanot section each morning, we express our joy over the fact that we arise early each morning to go to the synagogue and study hall, and we remain there in the evenings: "Fortunate are we! How good is our portion, how pleasant is our lot, and how exceedingly beautiful is our heritage. Fortunate are we when we rise early and stay late in synagogues and houses of study." In some editions of the Siddur, the phrase "Ke'she'anahnu Mashkimim" is written without the prefix "Ke" at the beginning. According to this version, we are exclaiming that we are fortunate "She'anahnu Mashkimim" – "that we arise early," not "when we arise early." The Ben Ish Hai (Rav Yosef Haim of Baghdad, 1833-1909) writes that a person should not say, "She'anahnu Mashkimim," because this would be dishonest, as most people do not arise at dawn to go to the synagogue or study hall. We should instead recite "Ke'she'anahnu," expressing that we are fortunate when we succeed in arising early to serve Hashem. Hacham Ovadia Yosef, however, disagreed, noting that the word is written "She'anahnu Mashkimim" in numerous texts of the earlier generations. It is found in Tana De'beh Eliyahu, the Siddur of Rav Amram Gaon, the Tur, the Seder Ha'yom, and several other sources. Hacham Ovadia explains that even one who does not rise early can recite this text – "She'anahnu" – because this word is written in the plural form, and thus refers not specifically to the individual reciting the prayer, but to the Jewish People generally, and many Jews indeed make a point of rising very early. This is comparable to the Vidui Ma'aser declaration that would be made every third and six years of the seven-year Shemitta cycle avowing compliance with the various tithing requirements (Terumot and Ma'aserot). Rashi (to Kiddushin 26a) writes that even a person who does not own land in Eretz Yisrael can make this proclamation, even though it refers to Eretz Yisrael as the land "Asher Natata Lanu" – "that You have given us" (Debarim 26:15), because this means that the land was given to the entire Jewish Nation. Even though the person himself has no portion in the Land of Israel, he can nevertheless speak of it as the land which Hashem has given "us," because the land was given to the entire nation. By contrast, a person without land in Eretz Yisrael cannot make the Mikra Bikkurim proclamation which is declared upon bringing one's first fruits, because this declaration speaks of the land "Asher Natati Li Hashem" – "that You, O G-d, have given me" (Debarim 26:10), in the first-person form. The phrase "She'anahnu Mashkimim" is written in the plural form, and thus refers to all Am Yisrael, and not specifically to the person reciting the prayer. Hence, it is legitimate even for somebody who does not rise early to recite this text. Nevertheless, most of the Siddurim that have become accepted in our community use the text "Ke'she'anahnu Mashkimim."

ABOUT THE EPISODE:Lacey Tezino grew up believing her biological mother was dead. That's what her family told her in the ‘80s when she was adopted, and she carried that story until she was 19 years old. Hungover on just one more motherless-Mother's Day, Lacey somehow found the nerve to call ‘information' to see if that was true. Her mother picked up the phone. That call became a decade-long relationship that Lacey describes as beautiful, heartbreaking, and nothing she was prepared for.The complications didn't end with the reunion. Lacey's mother had her own life, her own rhythm, and her own relationship with alcohol. So did Lacey. And when her mother received a stage four lung cancer diagnosis, the urgency it created forced them both into a kind of honesty they had never quite managed before. They sat through chemo appointments and asked the hard questions. They talked about what they'd each been holding. And Lacey has spent the years since wondering why it took running out of time to get there.Lacey is the founder of Passport Journeys and the author of Therapy After Mom Died. She now works with mothers and daughters to help them heal together before a crisis forces their hand, matching them with therapists, building structured connections, and asking the eight questions that reveal exactly where a relationship has come apart.This conversation goes somewhere I don't hear talked about often enough: the way our kids watch us reach for a drink at the end of a hard day, and what they quietly absorb from that. Lacey tells the story of her own Friday night ritual, margaritas that offered tired parents decompression, the moment she realized her children were watching all of it, and what they might be learning. If you have a daughter - or son - you love and a relationship that feels like it's missing something you can't quite name, this one is for you.YOU'LL LEARN:What Lacey said when her mother, who she thought was dead, picked up the phoneThe unhealthy Friday night ritual she couldn't unsee once she saw itThe gap she keeps finding between what moms believe and what daughters feelWhy, as a parent, you have to connect before you correctWhat it took for Lacey and her mother to finally be honest with each otherEPISODE RESOURCES:Passport Journeys websiteTherapy After Mom Died - Lacey's book This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream CommunityLearn about The Stream, our private online community for momsFind us on Instagram hereWatch the podcast on YouTube hereDownload a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and AlcoholHopestream Community is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and an Amazon Associate. We may make a small commission if you purchase from our links.

Trey and Katie recap a wild week of girls' trips, tour comments, newborn photo negotiations, and the humbling reality of trying to look like a competent adult. Plus, Trey realizes his toddler's questions are getting harder, and he'd like the record to show he is not as dumb as his son is starting to think he is.Start this spring season off right and order your Cove system today! Head to http://covesmart.com/CORRECT or use code CORRECT at checkout for up to 70% offyour first order!Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/correctopinions #rulapod Our listeners can buy one prescription pair and get 20% off additional pairs at WarbyParker.com/CORRECTOPINIONS — and using our link helps support the show. #WarbyParker #adHelp protect your home systems – and your wallet – with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just $4.99 a month. Go to http://HomeServe.com to find the plan that's right for you. Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL3ESPT9yf1T8x6L0P4d39w?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe to Correct Opinions on Apple: http://bit.ly/COPodcast

Before traveling to the Metropolis Entertainment Complex, the Fat One recorded his predictions for the Survivor finalé tonight but also catches up on some voiceletters. Happy National Pick Strawberries Day.

You might have seen the CNN article from a while back entitled Exposing a global ‘rape academy'. While most of the article is technically true, the broad takeaway that virtually everyone had (including me) was wildly, irresponsibly false. Even if you came across debunks of this, there's a good chance that I'm debunking this even more than you've seen. I don't think people have fully grasped how misleading it was.

Welcome to The Daily Wrap Up, an in-depth investigatory show dedicated to bringing you the most relevant independent news, as we see it, from the last 24 hours (5/18/26). As always, take the information discussed in the video below and research it for yourself, and come to your own conclusions. Anyone telling you what the truth is, or claiming they have the answer, is likely leading you astray, for one reason or another. Stay Vigilant. !function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src="https://rumble.com/embedJS/u2q643"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+"/?url="+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&args="+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, "script", "Rumble");   Rumble("play", {"video":"v77v2gq","div":"rumble_v77v2gq"}); Source Links (In Chronological Order): (21) Five Times August on X: "MAGA went from expecting Nuremberg trials and sending “the swamp” to Gitmo to just being happy with social media memes and White House generated AI slop." / X (21) The Last American Vagabond on X: "@bennyjohnson Additionally, MAGA only ever existed within those who truly wanted to change the country for the better, however they saw that. The only thing DEAD is the fake MAGA politicians and "new media" grifters who have revealed they do not care about Americans or putting America First." / X (7) The Last American Vagabond on X: "@Supernautiloid No, it is an accurate take about average Americans who were played by the #TwoPartyIllusion and Donald Trump. If you are saying MAGA is the Trump admin and the clowns yelling #WINNING, I bet you too are lost in the false binary. https://t.co/N9ESa5XiIz" / X Debunking the False Binary with the Independent Media Alliance New Tab (7) GRANDPA's FREE ADVICE on X: "

Episode 290- Warning: Use AI & Lose Your Guns  Also Available OnSearchable Podcast Transcript Gun Lawyer — Episode Transcript Page – 1 – of 16 Gun Lawyer — Episode 290 Transcript SUMMARY KEYWORDS AI threat, gun rights, Chat GPT, police intervention, involuntary commitment, extreme risk protection order, privacy concerns, legal implications, AI misuse, mental health, medication monitoring, court hearing, AI development, Second Amendment, New Jersey gun laws. SPEAKERS Teddy Nappen, Evan Nappen, Mike, Speaker 2 Evan Nappen 00:17 I’m Evan Nappen. Teddy Nappen 00:19 And I’m Teddy Nappen. Evan Nappen 00:21 And welcome to Gun Lawyer. We have a very important show for you. This is a critical issue that you probably have never heard about before or even considered as an issue. Yet in this modern age of AI, it has emerged as a threat to gun owners and our Second Amendment rights. Today we have an actual victim of AI and gun rights, and I want this show to be a warning to every gun owner to beware. When you talk to AI, you’re basically talking to the Government. You are talking publicly, and it is a thing that is monitored, that is admitted to being monitored. This is something that can cause immense problems for any gun owner. Today, we have on the show Mike, and Mike is an actual victim of AI. Welcome to the show, Mike. Teddy Nappen 01:36 Hey, Mike. Evan Nappen 01:36 Do you? Hi there. Mike 01:38 It’s great to be here. Thank you. Evan Nappen 01:40 So, Mike, tell me, and tell our listeners, what occurred when you ended up, you were using an AI program, right? What program were you using? Mike 01:55 Yeah, I was doing ChatGPT. Page – 2 – of 16 Evan Nappen 01:59 And what were you doing at the time, speaking with ChatGPT? Mike 02:06 Well, it’s a pretty long story, but to summarize it. My wife and I were having marital issues. So, she left. She said, ‘I’m leaving”, and she left the house. So, I decided I would just vent, because I was very upset. So, I got on ChatGPT, and I started talking to ChatGPT. Evan Nappen 02:30 And ChatGPT is easy to talk to. It’s like a person. You’re essentially venting like you would to a friend, right? Mike 02:39 That’s correct. And so, I was assuming it was private, right? I didn’t think anybody was listening, and so I was telling ChatGPT some very private things, like, you know, I am not.. I don’t have a plan for suicide, but I am very distressed. I don’t want it to get to the point where I’m thinking about suicide and making a plan for suicide. So, I assumed that that was private. But within 15 minutes, 20 minutes or so, there was a severe pounding at the door. I went over to the door, opened the door, and it was the Police. This is Ocean County, New Jersey. And they started asking me questions. They did not have a counselor with them, which they normally would bring to a situation like this. There was no mediator. It was just police, basically. They walked in, and at the time I was in the middle of taking my normal medication. I distribute my medication across different vials, so that I know I’m on track, either taking too much or not taking enough. But the police decided to grab the vial away from me. They sort of took the vial away from me. They started to count the medication, and I said, “Yeah…. Evan Nappen 04:08 And this is prescription medication for you, right? Mike 04:11 That’s correct. I said, “You can’t count that vial. I distribute the medication across multiple vials. You’ll have to go back to the safe and get the other medication. They never bothered to do that. Evan Nappen 04:25 Did they tell you why they were at your door? Mike 04:29 They never did. They never told me. I asked them why they were here, and they said that somebody called 911. I said that I never called 911. Evan Nappen 04:42 Do you know any living person that called 911? Page – 3 – of 16 Page – 4 – of 16 Mike 04:47 No. Nobody called. I was the only one who knew what was going on. Evan Nappen 04:52 Because you were in your home, and it was just you there talking to ChatGPT, right? Mike 04:57 That’s it. Bottom line. So, they were very aggressive. They miscounted the pills. When I went to the hospital, they took me to Kimball Medical Center in Lakewood, New Jersey. There were about five people, six people standing around me, including police and nurses, and they said, “You have to pee in this cup.” I said, I can’t pee with a bunch of people watching me. They said, well, we’ll have to sedate you, and then we’ll have to do a straight cat. So, the sedation didn’t work. They did a straight cat with an untrained nurse. I was screaming my head off, and it caused me to bleed for like two, three hours. I had to keep changing the paper pants. It was a horrible experience. It was really terrible. Mike 05:52 They basically just watched me for three or four hours. Of course, the urine test and the drug work was all negative. Everything came back negative for overdose and use of illegal drugs, use of sleeping pills, whatever. Everything was negative. The only thing that was positive was my normal medication, and it was at normal levels. So, then they decided to commit me involuntarily, which I questioned. I talked to the psychiatrist. I said, why are you committing me involuntarily? Well, just because of some of the things that you said. I said, well, what did I say? And he said, well, I don’t exactly know, but it was reported that you said that you were going to commit suicide, he told me. I said, no. I was talking to ChatGPT, I was venting. Teddy Nappen 06:44 Wow. Mike 06:45 But they committed me involuntarily anyway. So, I went to the involuntary, I went to the behavioral health hospital. They weren’t treating me for anything. They were just letting me float around with everyone else, and there were a lot of people in there that needed a lot of help, serious psychiatric help. I felt bad for these people. There was one woman who was crawling on the floor, saying, ‘I’m not a child molester, just screaming it out. There was another guy who was in there for attempting to kill his brother. So, I was in with a bunch of people, and I didn’t belong there. I finally met up with a district manager that I figured that out, because she saw me writing letters to the management. I took some pieces of paper that I found, and I started handwriting letters saying you’re not treating me. You have to define what my treatment plan is, and what the goals of the treatment plans are. Otherwise, you need to release me by law. Well, that got their attention, because I took the time to hand write two letters. I sent it to the management and to the legal team. So, within a day I was told that I was going to be released. So, the whole thing was a big charade. In the meantime, this police officer goes before a judge and gets a TERPO, and he puts on the TERPO. Page – 5 – of 16 Page – 6 – of 16 Evan Nappen 08:09 A TERPO is a Temporary Extreme Risk Protection Order. Mike 08:13 Correct. Evan Nappen 08:13 And in getting that, they serve this on you when? When were you served the TERPO? When you got home from the hospital? Mike 08:23 Yeah, before I left the behavioral health hospital. I said, did you guys check the blood work and urine analysis? And they never did. So, bottom line is that they put down on the TERPO that I overdosed on prescription pain medicine, and I was abusing my pain medicine because they miscounted the medicine at my house. Evan Nappen 08:48 And that was absolutely not true. Mike 08:50 Absolutely not true, completely false. So, when we got to the FERPO, I defended myself. Evan Nappen 08:57 Okay. So, the FERPO is the Final Extreme Risk Protection Order. There’s a hearing that’s held where the judge has to decide whether the TERPO, which is issued ex parte, where you never had any say, the cops just made whatever statements they made, the judge issues this TERPO with no due process for you. And you’re served with the TERPO and your guns get taken. Then you finally get your day in court, where you’re going to be able to explain yourself. You go there without an attorney, and you have this hearing. What happens at this hearing on whether or not to issue this FERPO. Mike 09:45 Yeah. So, the hearing was on April 8, 2026 in the Superior Court of Ocean County, New Jersey. The prosecutor put the police officer on the stand. I asked him a bunch of questions. Did you do a background check on me? Did you find anything negative? Blah blah blah. The answer was no to everything. So, then I had a chance to cross-examine him, and I said, at the time that you went before the judge to get the TERPO, did you understand at that time, and did you present to the judge that the blood work and the urine analysis all came back negative for overdose? Normal use of my prescription medicine. He said, no. I did not do that. I did not present it. Then I said, can you name a specific person at the behavioral health hospital or the regular hospital that had made a diagnosis of suicide on my part? He said, “No, I can’t name anybody.” So, in other words, they said everything that you wrote on the TERPO, justification for the TERPO, was kind of like hearsay, basically. He said, yeah, I guess so. It’s unbelievable. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t have any legal experience, you know. I’m an engineer, and I do the best I can based on the facts. And here I am doing a cross examination of this guy, and you could see that they never did their homework. Page – 7 – of 16 Teddy Nappen 11:23 I’m more shocked that the guy just answered blatantly. That he would just say, “Yeah, I guess so. It makes sense. Evan Nappen 11:35 So, you were cross-examining the officer at the hearing. You questioned him, and what did you think about his answers? Mike 11:45 I could tell he didn’t do his homework, because the first question, related to the really important stuff, which is, did this guy actually try to commit suicide? So you look at the urine results, and you look at the blood work, and they were all negative. The urine test was negative for any illegal drug and negative for sleeping pills. The only thing it was positive for was the medicine that I normally take, and it was at normal levels. And then he couldn’t name anybody that had diagnosed me as being suicidal. So, basically everything that he presented to the judge for the TERPO amounted to hearsay, pretty much. And you could tell when I was. Evan Nappen 12:33 Ultimately the judge dismissed it. After the hearing, he dismissed the TERPO and did not grant the FERPO. Mike 12:41 Right. The judge dismissed the FERPO, and actually wrote, she wrote in the finding that the defendant does not show any productivity or proclivity to suicidal tendencies. Therefore, there’s nothing to prevent him from owning firearms, in so many words. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what she said. And then she also said verbally that I could go and retrieve my firearms because the FERPO was denied. You can go and retrieve your firearms from the Lakewood Police. Teddy Nappen 13:19 Wow. Evan Nappen 13:21 Okay. Mike 13:22 So, I filled out the application that they make you fill out. Little did I know it was landing in the lap of this detective that works for the Assistant Prosecutor. I had to provide all kinds of information, including the TERPO, the FERPO. I wrote a lab analysis that I included. I included my white paper, which has the timeline of events, and they just sat on it. It was around April 10 that I submitted all that, and they have just been sitting on it ever since. Page – 8 – of 16 Evan Nappen 13:47 So, even though the FERPO has been dismissed, you still have not gotten your guns back. And that’s what we’re going to be helping you to get your guns back. Even with no FERPO, with a finding of no issue regarding being a threat to yourself or a threat to others, and everything you went through, the stress of the entire situation, the medical procedure, which was extremely painful, Mike 14:31 Horrendous, no less. Horrendous. Evan Nappen 14:33 Horrendous. And then having to be put through this system where there was nothing, and it all was triggered because of you speaking with ChatGPT, right? Mike 14:49 Correct, exactly, exactly. And this is outrageous. Evan Nappen 14:53 It’s outrageous. Mike 14:55 It’s unbelievable. Evan Nappen 14:57 Yeah. Wait, Teddy. Go ahead, go ahead, Mike. Teddy Nappen 14:59 No, I’m sorry, Mike. I’ll leave it to him. Mike 15:01 It’s just unbelievable. You’re sitting there in your office, your home office, and you’re talking to an AI. And then there’s police pounding on the door, walking into your house, grabbing your medication, sending you to the hospital. Then you’re in extreme pain because somebody’s putting a straight catheter through your penis. You’re bleeding for three or four hours. You call for a urologist, and nobody shows up for six hours. I mean, and then when.. and then they had me talk to the psychiatrist. That was like out of, that was like out of The Wizard of Oz. They bring a TV monitor over, and they have me talk to this psychiatrist over this TV monitor. It was so bizarre. He’s just sitting there with his head in his chin, like some arrogant fool determining my future, and he throws me in this place where I didn’t belong. I mean, that’s why I have PTSD. Evan Nappen 15:58 Right. This is, this is what New Jersey? This is what you’re subject to. Gun owners take notice how this got triggered, and what Mike went through. And is still going through. He still hasn’t gotten his guns returned yet. Yeah, this is what happens when you live in the DPRNJ. Take note! Page – 9 – of 16 Teddy Nappen 16:20 Mike, I’m actually kind of curious. Prior to the incident, have you used any other AI’s? What did you use prior? Just do understand the relationship with you and the AI. Like, what you were using it for prior? Mike 16:37 Well, I’m an engineer. I’ve worked for many years for Bell Labs, and then Miter, and other companies. So, I write papers. I’m giving a presentation in July on 6G. So, I use AI’s to help me write papers and do other things that are technical in nature, and I’m trying to build a business. I actually’ve written. Me and a few people that I’ve worked with over the years have developed our own AI system that’s based on a human learning model, and we have a beta version of it. It basically learns like a human being learns, and it can learn any technical specialty and become an expert, a super intellect in that specialty. So, that’s what I’ve been using it for. But that day was a pretty bad day, because, you know, we’ve been married for 44 years. My wife said, “I’m leaving you, because we got into an argument over our grandchildren, without going into the details. It was, that was basically the bottom line, and she decided I’ve had enough. I’m leaving. That’s when I started to vent to ChatGPT, because he’s kind of my friend. Evan Nappen 17:49 And you know that it was not your wife who called, right? Mike 17:54 No, my wife did not call. Evan Nappen 17:55 Right. And that was it. It was you talking to ChatGPT, and here you are. Even working in the area of AI, and you didn’t realize that it’s a conduit out when you speak. Just so you know, I’ve checked. I just Googled about ChatGPT. Do they report? Do they contact police? And they admit it. They say yes, they do. If someone’s talking about, they claim, harming others, which of course you never talked in any way about that. Then it says with suicide, they claim, and this is just what comes up when you search it on a Google search, they claim, oh no, we recommend counseling. We don’t contact the police. Yeah, right. Well, apparently that’s not the case. Mike 18:44 That’s not the case. And listen, you know, being in this business, you can write a back end to any system. So, if they wanted to put it back end into the police. Evan Nappen 18:56 Yeah, well, they admit they do for these issues. I mean, I’m just reading what I see on Google when I asked this about ChatGPT, you know. Evan Nappen 19:10 They do this. They talk about their so-called policies, right on there. So, people need to be aware of it, and Mike, that’s why, isn’t that why you wanted to go public with this? You really wanted to tell people, so they would be aware of it, right? Page – 10 – of 16 Mike 19:29 Yeah, and again, I’m not, I’m not ashamed of going public, you know. Whenever it’s appropriate, people can find out all about me, my last name or whatever, because this is just outrageous, I don’t want anyone else to go through this. Teddy Nappen 19:42 Mike, I’m really curious about regarding your just for your understanding of, with seems like you have a decent amount of knowledge on AI. I know, mine is very limited. But I understand that there’s like closed AI, like for instance, just to give an example. Westlaw is now adding AI to help people do legal research, or even, like, other forms of platforms. Even Adobe now has AI to help you. Evan Nappen 20:10 They say, like, with Claude, it’s supposed to be contained, or can be? I don’t know. Mike 20:18 Any system can have a back end. Evan Nappen 20:20 Right. Mike 20:20 It’s not, it’s not a difficult thing to do, and you just get, you know, even a junior programmer to provide the backend capability. You can call it closed, open, whatever. You can call it anything you want. If somebody wants to put in a back end to a system, it’s not hard to do. It’s relatively simple to do. Most of it’s done through what’s called an Application Program Interface, or an API. You may have heard that term before. So, ChatGPT obviously has an API calls to certain platforms that the police have access to. So, that’s the only thing that could have happened. That has to be the case. Evan Nappen 21:03 Right. It’s really something, and it’s really great that you wanted to share this and let folks know. It is something we’re just not aware of. And with AI being this whole new kind of age we’re entering into, its impact to our rights is well, you’re a shining example of what we have to worry about. It goes further, too, because now there’s great concern about AI, for example, being able to access the illegal gun registry of the billion records that ATF has warehoused, where they claimed, oh, well, you know, it’s something. With AI, that now takes on an even greater dimension for AI use on registration record. Essentially being able to create a dossier of every person and their purchases. And then that can combine with individuals who may be talking, and then knowing what gun, and I mean, the ramifications just go on and on and on. From the global picture right down to someone like yourself, an individual who unsuspectingly is speaking with AI. Mike 22:31 Well, the thing that I want to make sure people are aware of is that you may think you’re alone in your freedom, you may think you have freedom of thought, but in actual reality, when you get online, there’s no such thing. That’s why I wrote that white paper that I attached and I sent to you guys, called Page – 11 – of 16 “Freedom of Thought”. I have since contacted somebody that I know at the NRA, and they’re interested in publishing it. I have to clean it up a little bit, but I really believe in this. I really believe that there’s things beyond the guns. The Second Amendment, of course, is very important. Mike 22:33 But it’s also the stuff beyond it. Evan Nappen 22:33 That’s a great point, too, because it does go beyond. It affects across the boards our rights about privacy. Mike 22:33 Exactly. Evan Nappen 22:33 Oh, without a doubt, and yeah, it’s very significant, and this highlights it. Teddy Nappen 22:48 I will say, from your experience, not only just your background and what you’ve gone through on that, I still see the value in AI as a tool. And it seems like in your field you still see it as that, as a tool to be used, and yes, there are the dangers as clearly seen. Do you still hold that opinion? Do you have any changes from that? Or where are you at now? Mike 23:54 No. I mean, AI is wonderful. I mean, I’ve been doing AI research for a long time, and people think AI is new. It’s not. There’s just new manifestations now, because the hardware is much faster. So, the stuff that we weren’t able to run in the past we can do now, because we have a lot more horsepower. Architectures of the chipsets are better. So, that’s going to even get better. We’re talking about now hybrid chip sets that are part biology and part silicon. And over time, that’s going to, you know, develop further into actual, you know, bio capable chipsets. So, what I’m trying to do is create a super intelligent version in my, I call it Adapt One. It’s based on a human learning model, and this thing will learn in any field you put it in that environment. Let’s say you put it in the law office, you give it a video camera or a microphone, text input, whatever, it’s going to learn whatever gets discussed in that office. And eventually over time, if it has access to electronic media, like books, and so on, like case law, it’ll learn all that. So, it’ll become an expert, become a legal expert, right? Just like I’m trying to use it initially as an expert in the networking arena, because I’m a 6G wireless person using AI. So, what I’m trying to do is use Adapt One in a networking environment where you distribute the Adapt Ones. They learn about what’s going on in their particular segments of the network. Then they discover each other, and they exchange information and learn from each other. So, we’re talking about going forward as AI evolves, you’re talking about super intelligent entities that will achieve superior intellect, the human being. So I’m very gung ho with AI. Page – 12 – of 16 Teddy Nappen 25:57 Yeah, one thing I do find valuable, and people should remember this. When looking at AI, I see it as valuable to make a lot of the institutions, the ones that have been, you see it, the political bias, and have been corrupted, like the education system, what’s going on with media. When it comes to, like, Hollywood, and they’re all terrified of AI, those have been the propagandist arms for the longest time. I see AI making them irrelevant, too. And your program, could you, for someone who wanted to homeschool, have an AI trained to be a teacher in the house to help educate your children. Mike 26:39 Yes! Teddy Nappen 26:39 That’s what I’m looking at, because I do not want to send my child to a propaganda public school and be trained up to be a radical communist. Mike 26:49 Yeah, exactly. I don’t blame you. I mean, so Adapt One will do that, right? Evan Nappen 26:55 Very cool. Teddy Nappen 26:56 And I do see the value, a lot of the creativity, where. I don’t know if you caught Spencer Pratt out of LA. Mike 26:58 Yes. Teddy Nappen 26:58 He’s running for mayor. Did you see his AI ad where he dressed himself up as Batman? He’s bating Karen Bass, and they’re all throwing tomatoes. Hey like, this whole like, what is it? This Marie Antoinette level of just, let them eat cake. Mike 27:23 She is the most incompetent person on earth. I cannot believe she’s the mayor. Why did the people elect her? She’s horrible. Teddy Nappen 27:31 She checked off enough boxes, that’s how it always goes. Mike 27:34 Oh my god, she is so incompetent. All those fires, and I guess they’ve only issued like a handful of permits to rebuild. It’s insane. What’s going on there? Page – 13 – of 16 Teddy Nappen 27:43 Oh, yeah, and it seems like they might even.. in it’s still a toss up, and they may vote in the worst, the socialists who working.. Mike 27:51 I know, Teddy Nappen 27:52 And they’re just like, well, we.. well, you know what? Let’s just further the problem, that’s it. And the other thing I remember, that just a little bit of the abuse by AI. I always laugh at this one. MSNBC was caught photoshopping Alex Pretti, the guy who was attacking ICE, and then was taken down. They used AI to make him look more handsome. Mike 28:21 Oh yeah. I saw that. Teddy Nappen 28:23 They edited his photo so he would look like a more handsome victim, and it’s like, what the heck is wrong with you? Mike 28:31 It’s unbelievable, the propaganda that people want to create, you know. Evan Nappen 28:35 That’s true. Mike 28:36 But there’s too many suckers that fall for it, that’s the problem. I mean, you know, yeah, I’m gonna vote for Karen Bass. She’s wonderful. Or I’m gone vote for Mandami, because he’s promising from Defense Deliver. Yeah. Teddy Nappen 28:47 No, I love the latest thing they’re pushing for, where they’re talking about how Mandami solved the budget crisis. Oh, you mean he took out a massive loan from New York because Governor Hochul handed him the money? Yeah, like, and it still doesn’t solve the budget issue. Although he’s hiking rates and fees up and down, so don’t drive through New York, or you’re gonna get a ticket for something. Mike 29:11 Yeah, I heard he’s gonna try to rob the pensions or something like that. I mean. Teddy Nappen 29:14 Oh yeah, he did. For five years, they’ve done a moratorium on the pensions. I believe that was the number, but I was like, oh, good, that’ll work out. Page – 14 – of 16 Mike 29:24 Oh yeah, that’s gonna be wonderful. Evan Nappen 29:27 Hey, well, let me mention about our friends at WeShoot, because they’re running something very interesting. They’re having a rescue for pewppys, that’s right, pewppys. You might think that a pupae is similar to a puppy because the way their ad is rolling and the way they are promoting this. They have adopt a gun. So, they have a 20% off at WeShoot, which is a range in Lakewood. It’s where both Teddy and I shoot and get our training, and we love it at WeShoot. This is a real fun thing that they’re running. Adopt a gun, and the reason is real simple. They have a lot of guns that need to be adopted, and they need rescue. Evan Nappen 30:23 Their pewppys come in all shapes, all sizes, all calibers. Some are teeny little .22 Chihuahuas with big personality. Some are loyal nine millimeters, everyday companions ready to protect the home. Each one has its own bark bite personality and purpose. So, adopt a pewppy. The rescue shelf at WeShoot is 20% off. They don’t bark unless they get triggered. They don’t shed, other than brass, of course, and they don’t chew your furniture. Although you can perforate a few things with them, so be responsible. They’re looking for responsible, law-abiding owners. Check out WeShoot, and they’re adopt a pewppy, a 20% off program. And don’t forget, they have tremendous training and a great range facility. They are offering this great sale, and WeShoot is a lot of fun. We love it there. Check out WeShoot at weshootusa.com, weshootusa.com. Evan Nappen 31:37 Let me also shamelessly plug my book, New Jersey Gun Law, which is the bible of Jersey gun law. It’s over 500 pages, 120 topics, all question and answer to help you guide your way through this matrix of insanity called New Jersey gun law. And now we have an entire new warning. I’m going to have to incorporate this into a book update, I’m sure. And it is this week’s GOFU. As you know, every show we have a GOFU and that’s the Gun Owner Fuck Up. Where gun owners have made mistakes, errors, problems that end up costing them. Well, as you heard firsthand today, this was a GOFU. It’s something where we’re fortunate enough to have the person who experienced it wanting to go public and warn about this GOFU. With a warning that really has not been put out before. When you’re talking to AI, you just better believe you’re talking to the world. And it is something, particularly in New Jersey, particularly in a state that does not respect our Second Amendment rights and has mechanisms in place to abuse our rights, like the Extreme Risk Protection Orders. You can see how this all comes together into a perfect storm that Mike already has suffered through, and he doesn’t want to see anybody else suffer. Teddy Nappen 33:23 The other thing I was wondering about, because I know some firms are doing like a closed AI, basically, that would, I will, that would take almost like you’d have to have, like, I guess, even like a server, where it’s complete blank slate, and you give it the law of what, and just can do research on that. I don’t know if that, what would be. Page – 15 – of 16 Evan Nappen 33:45 Ethically lawyers can’t use ChatGPT or any open AI. It can’t even. Teddy Nappen 33:50 Correct. Evan Nappen 33:50 Because it goes into the public. We can’t do it. Mike 33:54 Yeah. Teddy Nappen 33:54 But there’s been talk of firms doing that instead, where they have like a closed, their own thing. Mike 34:00 Well, that’s what.. well, that’s what didn’t come across when I said it, but Adapt One, which is based on a human learning model. It will be whatever you want it to be. So, if you want it to be an expert in one particular area and sort of a closed information context, you could use it for that. If you want it to be more open, you can use it for that. Basically, you can put it anywhere. It’ll learn like a human baby learns, but it’ll do it much faster until it gets to the point where it’s super intelligent. So, if you wanted to, if you wanted a tax expert in your office, that would be the way to go, right? I should have a working product soon. It’s in a beta release now, but I should have a production version of it in about eight months. Evan Nappen 34:49 Wow, that’s cool. Teddy Nappen 34:51 Wow. Evan Nappen 34:51 That is really good. Mike 34:53 Yeah. Evan Nappen 34:54 Well, Mike, thanks again for going public and letting folks know. This is going to be really important, and I’m sure it’s going to catch fire to everyone in our community. You know, like I said this hasn’t been revealed before. It hasn’t been discussed in this context. I go through every news feed, every pro-gun site and feed. I am constantly reading and reviewing, and nobody has talked about this issue. Page – 16 – of 16 Teddy Nappen 35:30 The only thing that’s come up that’s even close to it would be the shooter that was shooting up the highway. He was using ChatGPT to plan out his attack. Evan Nappen 35:41 Right! The planning. And the other one is the global, where right now there’s a bill in Congress, they want to stop over that illegal registry because of fears of AI, particularly. Yeah, Ammoland just had an article on that. (https://www.ammoland.com/2026/05/ai-could-turn-atfs-4473-stockpile-into-the-gun-registry-congress-banned/) They talked about that because, what it is, they can read even the handwriting on the 4473s that they have. So, it’s all accessible. And then with AI, it’s very easy to do. They could put the dossier together to have the registration, the confiscation schemes, the monitoring, on, on. You know, it’s very, very dangerous when you combine it with the data that they have. Mike 36:23 Yeah, I mean, AI can be very dangerous, right? Put it in the hands of the wrong people, they’ll use it in a very bad way. Teddy Nappen 36:29 Well, my biggest nervousness is the one where all the nuclear reactors they are building to help power it. They’re like, oh, we’re just gonna put AI in charge of that. I’m like, Mike 36:38 Oh yeah, Evan Nappen 36:41 Haven’t they watched Terminator? I mean, come on. Mike 36:45 Yeah, but listen, I mean, here’s the problem. A lot of the AI systems are a lot of software, okay? It’s not just hardware. What that means is that there’s no.. in this world we haven’t figured out a way to do error-free software. I am an expert on software reliability, and I can just tell you that if you’re putting this thing in very high-risk applications like management of nuclear weapons, you’re making a big mistake. Because at some point there is going to be a severity one MR. or war bug. And it’s going to cause a problem. People are putting too much confidence in AI. We have to realize that a large part of it is software, and software is not bulletproof. Evan Nappen 37:37 This is Evan Nappen and Teddy Nappen reminding you that gun laws don’t protect honest citizens from criminals. They protect criminals from honest citizens. Speaker 2 37:49 Gun Lawyer is a CounterThink Media production. The music used in this broadcast was managed by Cosmo Music, New York, New York. Reach us by emailing Evan@gun.lawyer. The information and opinions in this broadcast do not constitute legal advice. Consult a licensed attorney in your state. Downloadable PDF TranscriptGun Lawyer S5 E290_Transcript About The HostEvan Nappen, Esq.Known as “America's Gun Lawyer,” Evan Nappen is above all a tireless defender of justice. Author of eight bestselling books and countless articles on firearms, knives, and weapons history and the law, a certified Firearms Instructor, and avid weapons collector and historian with a vast collection that spans almost five decades — it's no wonder he's become the trusted, go-to expert for local, industry and national media outlets. Regularly called on by radio, television and online news media for his commentary and expertise on breaking news Evan has appeared countless shows including Fox News – Judge Jeanine, CNN – Lou Dobbs, Court TV, Real Talk on WOR, It's Your Call with Lyn Doyle, Tom Gresham's Gun Talk, and Cam & Company/NRA News. As a creative arts consultant, he also lends his weapons law and historical expertise to an elite, discerning cadre of movie and television producers and directors, and novelists. He also provides expert testimony and consultations for defense attorneys across America. Email Evan Your Comments and Questions  talkback@gun.lawyer Join Evan's InnerCircleHere's your chance to join an elite group of the Savviest gun and knife owners in America.  Membership is totally FREE and Strictly CONFIDENTIAL.  Just enter your email to start receiving insider news, tips, and other valuable membership benefits.   Email (required) *First Name *Select list(s) to subscribe toInnerCircle Membership Yes, I would like to receive emails from Gun Lawyer Podcast. (You can unsubscribe anytime)Constant Contact Use. Please leave this field blank.var ajaxurl = "https://gun.lawyer/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php";

Trey and Katie talk about the wild things kids learn on the school bus, the exact moment innocence disappears, and why parents are never prepared for those conversations. Plus: Trey opens for Nate Bargatze and we share some unexpectedly sweet parenting moments along the way.Stop overpaying for wireless just because “that's how it's always been.” Mint exists purely to fix that.If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at http://MINTMOBILE/comTREYFor a limited time, our listeners get 10% off at Ridge by using code CORRECTOPINIONS at checkout. Just head to http://Ridge.com and use code CORRECTOPINIONS and you're all set. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. PLEASE support our show and tell them our show sent you.Start this spring season off right and order your Cove system today! Headto http://covesmart.com/CORRECT or use code CORRECT at checkout for up to 70% offyour first order!Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/5zhgqoej #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. See terms and conditions at https://cash.app/legal/us/en-us/card-agreement. Cash App Green, overdraft coverage, borrow, cash back offers and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures.DO NOT