Podcasts about correct

CAPTION OCTOBER 1957Bob Zimmerman highlights SpaceX's purchase of a massive plot in Louisiana to establish a private spaceport capable of hosting dozens of Starship flights daily. Zimmerman argues that SpaceX's market-driven approach ensures success, whereas state-sponsored space programs in the UK and Canada often flounder due to bureaucracy. He outlines SpaceX's progress, including recovering the prototype 13 Starship and preparing for flight 14. Finally, Zimmerman notes the successful, on-budget launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, upgrades to NASA's Deep Space Network, and the upcoming nuclear-powered Skyfall mission to Mars. (10)

Send us Fan MailWhat happens when a culture loses its grip on objective reality? On this episode of Strong By Design, Coach Chris Wilson welcomes back Dr. Frank Turek for his fifth appearance on the podcast to discuss his provocative new book, The War on Reality. You can preorder the book at the link below!Frank is a Christian apologist, author, speaker, and founder of CrossExamined.org, and he has spent decades defending the truth claims of Christianity using reason, evidence, and logic. In this conversation, Frank explains why he believes the battle we're facing today goes much deeper than politics or cultural disagreement. It is ultimately a battle over truth, reality, human identity, morality, family, information, and even our understanding of what it means to be human. Chris and Frank explore what happens when subjective feelings begin to outrank objective facts, whether technology and artificial intelligence have made it harder to know what is true, and whether a free society can survive without a shared understanding of reality. They also discuss the role Christians have played in this cultural moment, why defending truth requires more than simply knowing what you believe, and how we can equip the next generation to think critically in a world increasingly confused about truth. If you've ever wondered why the cultural battles of our day seem to go far deeper than politics, this conversation with Dr. Frank Turek will give you plenty to think about. Time Stamps00:00 – Why “your truth” can't define reality00:49 – Welcome to the Strong by Design podcast!01:12 – Join Coach Chris along with our special guest Frank Turek02:48 – The tragic loss of Charlie Kirk05:00 – Why is culture changing?07:01 – Can 'feelings' change biological reality?09:28 – How postmodernism changes the way we see truth12:35 – How modernism led to postmodernism15:00 – Are Christians partly responsible for cultural decline?17:28 – What socialism gets wrong about human nature20:07 – Why work and incentives matter22:55 – Can we really customize reality?24:25 – Finding peace through grief and loss28:44 – Why rebellion is a deeper problem than death31:09 – What history says about culture and civilization33:07 – What the numbers reveal about America37:08 – How language changes the way we see reality39:00 – Can AI be trusted to tell the truth?41:11 – What happens when students use AI to cheat?43:19 – How can we know God exists?45:37 – Get a closer look at The War on Reality (pre-order!)48:55 – Share, rate & review the Strong by Design podcast!  Get the book – The War on Reality:https://thewaronreality.com/ Frank's past episodes:Ep 65 Stealing from GodEp 186 Is the 'Cancel Culture' Loving or Unloving and How Do We Respond?Ep 238 Hollywood Heroes - How Your Favorite Movies Reveal GodEp 310 Correct, Not Politically Correct Connect with Frank:Instagram Connect with Chris:InstagramSupport the showConnect w/ Critical Bench: YoutubeFacebookInstagramCriticalBench.comCriticalNutritionLabs.comStrongByDesignPodcast.com

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What happens when pastors replace the authority of Scripture with mysticism, politics, and speculation? The Smith and Rowland Show examines why a clear understanding of the whole counsel of God matters for sound doctrine and biblical prophecy. In this episode, Alan and Jeff respond to a Prophecy News Watch article titled, "God Had a Wife: When Pastors Trade Scripture for Mysticism and Fables." They discuss claims surrounding Asherah, ancient paganism, and the reinterpretation of biblical history through modern cultural ideas. The conversation also focuses on the Centurion's faith, the authority of God's spoken Word, and the connection between Scripture and the presence of God. Allen and Jeff explain why faith doesn't depend on emotional experiences or a demand for visible signs before obedience. They also warn that separating the Spirit from the Word can lead to confusion and false teaching. The hosts explain how dispensational Bible study provides a framework for understanding the whole counsel of God, including prophecy, Israel's promises, the gospel of grace, and eschatology. They discuss why isolated verses, "verse of the day" readings, and incomplete Bible study can lead to misinterpretation. This episode also examines Paul's warnings in Acts 20, 1 Timothy, and Colossians about wolves, false teachers, fables, endless genealogies, and other doctrines that distract from godly edification. Allen and Jeff stress the value of learning Scripture patiently, "precept upon precept, line upon line," so believers can recognize error and remain grounded in God's Word. Watch Episode 968 of The Smith and Rowland Show for a direct discussion about biblical authority, dispensationalism, prophecy, and the importance of understanding Scripture as a unified message. #Dispensationalism #BibleProphecy #BiblicalTruth #ChristianDoctrine #SmithAndRowland

Joel Klatt riles up Auburn and Texas fans Lane Kiffin leaning into the villain role LSU vs. the SEC College football upset alert Who wins the Heisman trophy? Arizona unveils turnover sword SUBSCRIBE: @NextRoundLive - youtube.com/@nextroundlive @TNRClips - youtube.com/@TNRClips FOLLOW TNR ON SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/7zlofzLZht7dYxjNcBNpWN FOLLOW TNR ON APPLE PODCASTS: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-next-round/id1797862560 WEBSITE: https://nextroundlive.com/ MOBILE APP: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-next-round/id1580807480 SHOP THE NEXT ROUND STORE: https://nextround.store/ Like TNR on Facebook: / nextroundlive Follow TNR on Twitter: / nextroundlive Follow TNR on Instagram: / nextroundlive Follow everyone from the show on Twitter: Jim Dunaway: / jimdunaway Ryan Brown: / ryanbrownlive Lance Taylor: / thelancetaylor Scott Forester: / scottforestertv Tyler Johns: /TylerJohnsTNR Brooks Carter: /BrooksACarter Sponsor the show: sales@nextroundlive.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies, if you have ever been told your labs look normal while your body says otherwise, this one is for you. Dr. Amy Loden is a physician who nearly died from preeclampsia and now builds her practice around what medicine misses in women. She breaks down why pregnancy complications are a warning sign, what perimenopause is really doing to you, and why heart disease deserves your attention more than you think. You will walk away knowing what to ask for and why it matters.If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co mailto:beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/#follow-subscribe-free.In this episode you will learn about:How pregnancy complications reveal health risks that were already there.Why perimenopause symptoms get dismissed as normal aging.The heart disease signs that look nothing like the classic ones.Why good quality sleep matters more than hours in bed.How to eat and move to protect your metabolic health.Episode References/Links:Vitality Medical and Wellness - https://www.vitalitymwc.orgDr. Amy's TEDx talk on pregnancy - https://beitpod.com/amytedxDr. Amy Tiffany on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dramytiffanyDr. Amy Loden on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-lodenThe Postpartum Pivot by Dr. Amy Loden - https://vitalitymwc.org/read-the-bookSubmit your wins or questions - https://beitpod.com/questionsGuest Bio:Dr. Amy Loden Tiffany is a St. Louis-based physician entrepreneur, author, and TEDx speaker dedicated to women's metabolic, hormonal, and cardiovascular health. After surviving severe preeclampsia and experiencing burnout in traditional, high-volume medicine, she pivoted her career toward a personalized, root-cause approach to patient care. As the founder of Vitality, she guides women through major life transitions—from postpartum to perimenopause—to help them recognize subtle warning signs and prevent long-term illness. Through her clinical work and her book, The Postpartum Pivot, Dr. Loden empowers high-achieving women to listen to their bodies, optimize performance, and take control of their long-term health.  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. https://lovethepodcast.com/BITYSIDEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentCheck out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentBe in the know with all the workshops at OPC https://workshops.onlinepilatesclasses.com/lp-workshop-waitlistBe It Till You See It Podcast Survey https://pod.lesleylogan.co/be-it-podcasts-surveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates Mentorship https://lesleylogan.co/elevate/FREE Ditching Busy Webinar https://ditchingbusy.com/Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gLesley Logan website https://lesleylogan.co/Be It Till You See It Podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjogqXLnfyhS5VlU4rdzlnQProfitable Pilates https://profitablepilates.com/about/Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lesley.logan/The Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gFacebook https://www.facebook.com/llogan.pilatesLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesley-logan/The OPC YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@OnlinePilatesClasses Episode Transcript:Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 0:00  If we're going to call pregnancy a stress test, which is becoming an increasingly common term, is pregnancy a stress test of a woman's metabolism and her cardiovascular system? Then we have to ask, what are we stressing it for? And the way I'm looking at this is a little bit different than how I was trained, which again was if you got the problem, the solution is in the pregnancy. So what if we started looking at pregnancy from the perspective of this is an unveiling, an unveiling of what was already there, and that nothing's actually gone wrong. Lesley Logan 0:29  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Lesley Logan 1:11  Oh my God, Be It babe. Get ready. Get your notepad out. Get ready. If you're driving, listen. You're gonna re-listen. You're gonna share this episode with everybody. I am so freaking stoked about the guest that we have. I fell in love with her with every single answer, and we need women like this in the medical world. So Dr. Amy Loden is our guest today. We're going to talk everything from postpartum to perimenopause and heart health, because ladies, you can't be it till you see it if you get sick, cannot. And I know it's confusing. There's so much information out there in the world, and it's like, who do we trust? What do we do? And I'm just so grateful I found her, and you're gonna love it. So make sure you get ready to hit share on this episode for women in your life and the men who need to know about what women are going through. My mind is blown on the episode. Here's Dr. Amy Loden.Lesley Logan 1:54  All right, Be It babe, I'm excited. I'm super stoked. We're gonna talk about all things women, health-related, with an amazing professional person who actually studies this stuff, not what I've read, and then I'm asserting to you because I don't want to be that influencer. I think those people need to take a little step back and let the professionals do it. We have Dr. Amy Loden here on the show, who's going to tell us everything we need to know. But Dr. Amy, we tell everyone who you are and what you rock at, kind of how you got here.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 2:20  Sure, thanks for inviting me. I'm happy to be here, Dr. Amy Loden. I am in St. Louis, Missouri. I help primarily women over 40, but certainly anyone who's like, "How are my hormones working for my life or not? How is my weight in the mirror matching the weight in my head or not?" And all the things that come with life transitions from postpartum to perimenopause, beyond, my goal is that women who've interacted with our team will have a better care experience because it's the care experience we want each of us to have had ourselves, and because each of us are not only professionals within the medical nursing communities, we're patients too, or daughters and sisters and mothers and neighbors and all the things. We know how much it sucks to be patient, right? And so we've tried to redesign what is the best thing for our ladies. Now, in full transparency, we do have a few dudes, but most of them have had their arms twisted by our rock-star ladies, and they are the ones that are coming because they're forced to. And eventually, they decide they like us, but we're pretty cool too. So that's who we serve, and that's what we do. And happy to go into any detail or rabbit hole you want to chase?Lesley Logan 3:21  Oh my God, Amy! I love that. When people ask about the people who listen to this podcast, we have mostly women and a few good men because there are some men out there, including my husband. They want to be interested. They want to. They want their partners, the women, their lives. They want to get what's going on. They don't want them to feel like an alien or like they're alone in this journey. So I think that's really, really cool. I also just want to highlight. I love that you brought up your patients too, because as someone who I feel very lucky to go through my perimenopause journey in today's time when people actually are talking about it, versus even 10 years ago, generations were not talking about this stuff, and I just feel it's really nice because then there's information I would never have known about HRT unless my girlfriend had told me about it. Oh, that could be going on, and then I could talk to someone. Can we go back though? Yeah, I feel like to be a doctor like yourself, who has empathy and understands, like you must have gone through a journey as well. You don't just want to do this Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 4:13  Because you wanted to do this. That's true. Lesley Logan 4:16  Maybe there are a few. There might be a few, but typically, like there there has there's a story there that got you to be like I want to care about this. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 4:24  Absolutely, yeah. So definitely with the traditional college to medical school road, really didn't understand that there's a and I say this with all the love in my heart, but there is a bit of brainwashing to be a good doctor, right? And what is a good doctor was who you've been told it is. It's not necessarily an external criteria. It's who does academic medical center say, and that was very different. I learned through transferring all of my non-medical student fears into the actual application of those fears, and then being a patient and living those fears. That I realized there's a whole lot we're not talking about. There's a whole lot that we're not being told, both as doctors and as women, as patients, and it's hard to realize you don't know what you don't know if you've been told you're the expert and you know everything, right? And most doctors don't go around saying they know everything, but there's enough patients who feel like that's what's communicated, that that's the language I'm using.Lesley Logan 5:18  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 5:19  And that's really frustrating as a patient, so I didn't realize how frustrating though it was until I was a patient, and I'm a mom of five kids, my third and fourth are twins, and really I am so grateful to live in the United States in a time in history where complicated pregnancies does not mean that mom dies, because I developed severe preeclampsia with heart failure, and my twins came 31 weeks instead of at least 37, and I nearly died the night they were born. They nearly died the night they were born, and I just am grateful that God let me be in this situation that I had the help I needed. Historically, these are not good situations. We see this on TV and in movies frequently. And something like 70,000 women a year across the globe die of the same disease I had, preeclampsia. So it's not nothing, even in our day and age, in certain countries, and even in countries where you have advanced medical care and they do everything right. It can still happen. So, that for me was the pinnacle of this isn't working. What we're telling people to do isn't working because I had done all the things.Lesley Logan 6:30  Right, you were a doctor. You did all the things. I did all the things. You enjoyed all the appointments. You were probably doing, and this is your third and fourth. So you knew what it should feel like. You knew what you should be eating. You knew all the vitamins to take.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 6:41  Correct, and it didn't work, right? It didn't work, and so I think that is the fundamental kind of if you place a pivot on why did I change how I think about healthcare as a doctor, it was because of my experience as a patient for myself. My husband had cancer twice, so being the advocate for him in those types of things, guiding my children and now my parents through healthcare, you start to carry a lot of stories, and you start to see, wow, they're not doing what I think is just the bare minimum. And if they're not doing that for me or for my family, I know they're not doing it for everybody else.Lesley Logan 7:11  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 7:12  And then at the same time, holding a ton of grace in my heart because that's—they're doing what they were taught.Lesley Logan 7:17  Right?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 7:17  Right. And they can't do differently if they don't know differently. You can't be better if you don't know to be better.Lesley Logan 7:23  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 7:23  So that is a really tight tension. But I thought I would just keep plodding through and just be a better doctor in that context of me being a patient until a little—I guess it was two years later. My daughter at that time, my oldest, was seven, and I had about 3000 patients. I was working somewhere between 65 and 80 hours a week, and had four kids at that time. And my daughter came up to me one night, and I'm opening the computer. I'm doing work like I do every night, and she says, "You're gonna make my birthday gifts. Like, can I help?" Right, totally innocent seven-year-old looking forward to her birthday knows that her mom shops online, right? And so she's like, "I want to pick my birthday presents," and I kind of stared at her. I was like, "No, no, I'm going to work. We'll do that later," and go watch whatever show. It's probably Paw Patrol for all I know, right? That's in the background. Go watch it. It's gonna be bedtime soon. And she just stands there, and I haven't even looked at her at this point. My eyes are on my computer. I'm just telling her this as I'm going. I'm totally not in the moment, right?Lesley Logan 8:19  Of course, because like you have so many, you have 3000 patients and four kids.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 8:23   I can't keep up. I can't keep up. Right? I'm barely getting enough sleep. I'm not exercising, and I'm just trying to survive. And she doesn't move. And so I remember not totally slow motion, but I remember turning to her and feeling like I was going to be like, "What?" Right? What do you need? And she's just got out of the shower, so her hair's wet. She's got her pink pajamas on, bright big blue eyes, and they're full of tears. And there are just silent tears tracking down her face, and I'm horrified. Oh my gosh, what's wrong? Right now, I'm in fix-it mode.Lesley Logan 8:55  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 8:55  And she still doesn't really budge, and she just says in a very sad voice, "Mommy. Why do you love your job more than me?"Lesley Logan 9:05  Oh.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 9:07  Yes. So the twins tried to kill me. She did kill me, right? Like, that was a knife in my heart because nothing ever had I wanted to be better than a so-called good doctor than to be a good mom.Lesley Logan 9:17  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 9:18  And that was for me the moment that I realized I'm not doing either of these well, and I'm not showing up how I want to be personally or professionally. I'm certainly not taking care of my health. I'm not doing the things I'm telling my patients to do. Like, it was a moment where I really felt the failures. I felt all the feelings, and I told my husband that night, "This is not working anymore." And he actually thought I thought was talking about our marriage, and so he was like, "Oh my gosh, what's wrong with our marriage?" Right? No, but I need to, like, redo. We have to redo this. I either have to retire, or I have to do something different.Lesley Logan 9:51  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 9:51  And he was like, "You're not retiring. You will drive me crazy. Go find something different to do, and I will make sure our family is okay." And so I did. And this June will be five years of having Vitality here in St. Louis and serving women and trying to lean into all the pain and the things and the feelings they're dealing with from all the things and the feelings I dealt with having walked that path.Lesley Logan 10:13  Yeah. Oh, Dr. Amy, I love that you shared that whole story because I think there's so many women who are listening here and, like, they don't have, they may have one kid or they have no kids, but, like, I think we can all relate to, like, having just too much on the plate because.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 10:27  Right.Lesley Logan 10:28  Hello, my high-achieving woman. I see you, everyone here listening. We call recovering perfectionists and overachievers. There's nothing wrong with being a high achiever, but what happens is we tend to just keep saying yes to things, and we're like, yeah, we can fit that one more thing in, that one more thing. All of a sudden, it just comes to, like, a volcano breaking point. Yes, and because we don't, we don't see the signs early that we are at the breaking point. We don't, you know, we, it's almost, it's actually proven to be not true. But everyone uses the frog in the boiling water, right? Like, we just kind of, like, you don't realize how hot it's getting until it's until your daughter is crying in front of you. Oh, exactly.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 11:05  Yes, it was awful. I never want to relive that moment.Lesley Logan 11:08  Yeah, but also, like, thank goodness for her because that she felt brave enough to say that. Like, what a badass she is. I mean, she's just going to be, like, she's just going to be a girl who speaks her mind. She does.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 11:18  She's 13 now, and she heard me tell that story once, and now she's like, "Well, you have to credit me for opening your business because I hadn't said what I did." I was like, "Won't you just tone it down a notch, please?"Lesley Logan 11:27  It's called balance, babe. It's called balance. Yes. Okay. So, can we, like, let's get to some of the health stuff that I think our listeners want to—I want to definitely get into perimenopause, but I do want to, because we started with a pregnancy, and I have had family members who, you know, have had preeclampsia in their, and it's scary. So, how are pregnancy complications connected to long-term heart risk? I don't think anyone's thought about that. I just thought, like, if it's because I don't have kids, like it's going to screw up your pelvic floor, and you might have to rebuild your abs and these other things. But I didn't know it can affect your heart long term.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 12:01  I had no idea. I'm so glad you brought that up. So I actually did a TEDx talk on this very topic, where the idea is pregnancy is so much more than just the birth of a kid. That's how we think about pregnancy in our culture. That's even how we think of it medically, right? Like if you have preeclampsia, you have gestational diabetes, you have high blood pressure, whatever in pregnancy, the answer is end the pregnancy, deliver the kid if they're old enough, right? Like, get, move it along and it's gone. But that I strongly believe is not true. We can't test this in a lab, so you have to do a little bit of extrapolation here. But if we're going to call pregnancy a stress test, which is becoming an increasingly common term, is pregnancy a stress test of a woman's metabolism and her cardiovascular system? Then we have to ask, what are we stressing it for? And the way I'm looking at this is a little bit different than how I was trained, which again was, if you got the problem, the solution is in the pregnancy. So, what if we started looking at pregnancy from the perspective of this is an unveiling, an unveiling of what was already there, and that nothing's actually gone wrong. It's scary. It's horrifying. And yes, absolutely, people die. So how can I say nothing's gone wrong? What I mean is nothing has gone wrong in the context of the situation we put your body in. It's exactly responding the way it should for the context it's in. So if I have underlying insulin resistance, and then I put a pregnancy on top of that or perimenopause, and I'm starting to have more insulin resistance. Well, of course I'm going to develop gestational diabetes. If I'm having a lot more fluid retention and I'm putting up a low weight, of course my blood pressure is going to go up, right? If I've got underlying inflammation, of course preeclampsia is going to develop. So I think we need to stop and think about it as it's not done; it is unmasked.Lesley Logan 13:42  Got it. Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 13:42  And then once you know it's unmasked, you treat it.Lesley Logan 13:45  I see. I see. Because again, we think of pregnancy as just the baby, so you have the baby, but it's well, but there's a problem, an underlying problem that the pregnancy revealed is what you're saying. And so great if having the baby is the safest thing for both people, we do that. But also, you still have this underlying issue.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 14:01  Yes, it's still there. Correct.Lesley Logan 14:03  Yes, and I don't think anyone does that. I think they're just, "Okay. Now you don't have gestational diabetes anymore." But I have had clients who had it, and then afterwards, so what do we got? Oh, I'm fine. Are you correct? I don't think so. I'm not a doctor, but they're not fine. Don't just be diabetes. Yeah, for a moment. Yes.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 14:19  So I actually experienced this as a patient too. I went in after my first pregnancy with gestational diabetes. At the time, I was living in New York City. I walked everywhere. I was a normal weight. I ate pretty clean, and despite being in residency, I'd got decent sleep. I didn't have any other kids. It's my first kid, so I got decent sleep. Right, but I had the baby after having had gestational diabetes. I go see my OB, and she's, "Oh, just follow up with your primary doctor." I go see my primary doctor, and he's, "Your weight's normal, your labs are normal. We're done," and that is how I was trained too. So again, lots of love in my heart. They're not; they're just not told. But for more than 10 years, we've known that women who have these high-risk pregnancies are at high risk not just for diabetes, but heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, dementia. Listen, I can't treat dementia well in the clinic, right? So why wouldn't I want all hands on deck trying to prevent it?Lesley Logan 15:07  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 15:07  But that's not how our medical professionals are trained—nurses, advanced practice providers, any of them. And so we're asking people and expecting people to fill in a gap they don't know exists, and so all these reproductive-age women are falling into it. And then where it gets really interesting is some of the same things you have immediately postpartum in all your different types of hormone fluctuations are matched intermittently for 10 to 15 years before menopause when you're in the perimenopausal years.Lesley Logan 15:32  What?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 15:33  Correct, but that's why these women are feeling, "I'm going to my doctor, I'm putting on weight, I'm doing all the things, it's not working," and they're being gaslit, partly because their doctors don't know what they don't know, and partly because we're not acknowledging this is the same physiologic status of hormones that are different than baseline. So we're not in a country, and we don't have the testing that would promote or facilitate checking what is your normal hormone level at 18, so that we know what 18 should look like, and then by 45, you know, we're not. So we're trying to patchwork together a whole bunch of tests, and different labs have different testing, and different people say different things about testing. It's very confusing.Lesley Logan 16:10  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 16:11  And you end up with women suffering. And at the end of the day, that's the problem I'm trying to solve: is how do we stop these women from suffering? Because they are called to live big lives, to be ambitious for a purpose, for a calling. They have a lot to do, and their health is one of their biggest assets. It should not be a liability.Lesley Logan 16:27  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 16:27  And that's what's happening, especially for women who are trying to not work just in the home but outside the home. Right? There's a lot they're carrying. Yeah. So that's, I don't remember. Sorry, I'm having a total perimenopause moment. I don't remember where we started with that question here. I'll stop there. Lesley Logan 16:42  Don't worry, babe. I got my focus meds on the ADHD today, so I'm tracking. So we're good. But we were talking about the postpartum, and then we got into those hormones that switch as, and they can repeat into perimenopause. And I think this is fascinating. I love that you brought up. It doesn't matter if you're in the home or out of the home. We have big lives. Correct. We can't have our health be a liability, and I think for a lot of us, it feels like, like my girlfriend's a weight-loss coach for women over 40 who feel like their body gave a middle finger. That's what her coaching is, and it's all about not going to yo-yo diet. That's not going to work. We have to figure out what is the underlying issues, and it can only go so far because you said we don't test our hormones at 18. We don't do that, so we don't know what is normal for us, and I remember I was having a lot of health issues, digestive issues in my 30s, and no doctor could help me. In fact, one doctor sending me to, I was in this weird part where they study HIV and Ebola in the hospital, and she's like, "Do you know why you're here?" I don't know why I'm here. I don't. This scares the hell out of me. This feels like a department I should not be in. I'm not in any pain. I feel like I'm taking someone's spot, and so because he could, he just couldn't figure out what's going on my stomach. So I found someone who did an actual test of everything. He's so range normal. We don't know what normal is for you. We just know what the average person of this population of people that who knows who they were that were tested. So what is normal for you might not be the average. And I was, "Oh well, that's the first time anyone said anything that makes sense. That's the first time." So you can be in range, but for your hormones, but it wasn't in range for you because maybe you were used to higher testosterone, you're used to higher things. And so I love that people like you exist. I'm sorry for the frustration of your own journey, but also without people like you, women like me wouldn't have someone going, "Hey, actually, maybe you should be on testosterone right now," even though the, this is what it is. Mine was actually zero, but people, you know, we can actually get you help because I feel so much better because someone finally was listening to me and thought, "Yes, we're not going to compare you to a random person. We got to compare you to how you're used to feeling."Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 18:42  Correct. And for most people, that can't happen in the traditional system.Lesley Logan 18:47  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 18:47  You can't do that in a 10-minute visit.Lesley Logan 18:49  Right.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 18:50  You can't do it when your doctor has 3000 patients, 10-minute visits, and they really don't actually know who you are.Lesley Logan 18:55  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 18:56  You just can't. So we've got a little bit of unrealistic expectations as a society, and then you know any women's magazine or journal article you read says, "Talk to your doctor about this." So then you go in, I'm all prepared. I have my list. I've done it too, folks. Right? This is not a criticism, but they, they can't. They don't have the ability to process it, and the way they're paid is based on the questions they ask you for insurance. So every incentive is misaligned, and at the end of the day, women, people are being screwed.Lesley Logan 19:22  Yeah, yeah. No, it's so true. So I'm glad we talked about the postpartum. I want to get into now. We're in the perimenopause, and yep, this is hard because you mentioned the hormone shift of people after postpartum is its own crazy world. I keep checking on my sister-in-law every day. How are you feeling? Are you feeling okay? Right. You feel okay? She's, "I'm fine." Are you fine? Let me just, I just want you to know. It's okay if you feel different, right? I think I'm crazy, but I know that that people don't realize how they're feeling, and it's hard to get to the doctor until it's too late. So I'm just, I'm on her. But for people like me, we didn't have children, so we have never experienced a crazy shift. We just start to experience, "I don't feel like my, anymore," and all the symptoms are so different for every single person. I'm not having hot flashes, but I'm, I got to keep my hair still here. But my inflammation was insane. I was putting on weight and working out and eating the same. And I don't understand what's going on. You know, so can we talk a little bit about what, I don't know where you want to start with that. So you tell me where you want to start with my post, my perimenopausal people who are not necessarily attributing these changes to that.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 20:27  So I think the biggest confusion I see in the exam room conversations is that there's just question of, am I in perimenopause or not? And it's more of a less of a yes-no and more of, are you on the spectrum, and where on the spectrum are you? And so if you think of it as a sliding scale, because some months those ovaries are working really great, and you feel all the feels, and you're 18 again, but a lot of months maybe you're more like 20 or 25, right? And then maybe out of the blue, I feel like I got run over by shock. Nothing's working for two or three months, and then we're back to 25, right? And so it's ups and downs. You're like, what is happening? It is a roller coaster, and it runs anywhere from 10 to 15 years before you actually go through menopause. So I think of it as reverse adolescence, and I think it's completely ironic that God lets us have teenage girls when moms are going through perimenopause because that is just double-adolescence whammy, right?Lesley Logan 21:19  And no wonder, no wonder marriages don't survive certain things. Right, you have a daughter going through puberty and a wife with a pair of menopause. Good luck to the husband. Correct, becauseAmy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 21:28  I want to have sex. I don't want to have sex. I have pimples all over my face. I don't want to go to the house. I do. My belly's bloated. It's not like my mood's up. All the things, and it's all in reverse. So it's a it's a period of a woman's life that I think needs to be acknowledged, and then within the healthcare system, there's more noise about it over the last five years. You're seeing more and more people talk about this, but there's not a lot of standardization, and so you're getting chiropractic, functional medicine, traditional medicine. You're getting all sorts of different recommendations. So my hope is that over the next decade, we start to see some standardization, and we start to say this is what is normal for this population. You still have to apply it to the person. You cannot take population data and apply it to individuals and say that you're going to have good luck, bye. We'll see you in a year. That doesn't work. What I do think is that women need to know what's normal for that time, and then they need to decide, do they want to do something about it beyond what their body is experiencing? And here's some really interesting data that I hope your listeners suddenly stop and listen. If they don't hear anything I've said yet, this will be really important for women who have hot flashes and night sweats. Either one, they're actually the same thing. We call them vasomotor symptoms. When you have those at a certain degree, so that they're happening most days of the week, more than 10 times a day would be an easy target to kind of pay attention to. You have that, and you choose not to take hormones. You actually have an increased risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke. That does not mean every woman in that category can or should take it. There may be reasons they can't, but the hormones we use today are different than what in the Women's Health Initiative that came out in the early 2000s. So you're getting a lot of confusion because women are reading about data from that, not realizing that it has changed, and that study is not going to be redone. It was a huge study. We're not going to see data like that, so we have to make really informed decisions. But cardiovascular disease, hear me, ladies. Cardiovascular disease, which includes stroke and heart failure, kills more women every year than all your cancers combined. Yeah, I get the women and they come in religiously for their mammograms or their Pap tests, right? But they don't know that the bigger risk is that they're going to die of heart disease, cardiovascular stroke, and we know that one in eight women, roughly, have breast cancer risk, and those women get it. One in two women are getting heart disease. So there's one inLesley Logan 23:50  Two.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 23:51  One in two. So that means there's two of us on this call, right? We already know I'm going to get it because I had preeclampsia. So I'm the one. Lesley Logan 23:56  I was going to say. I hope it's not maybe. I hope it's not you. But, like, thank God you know that because I think it's one and two, especially if you don't know. Because if you know that you're at risk, you do. Then you can you do something. I am. I'm double the risk for breast cancer, so I have to do an MRI and a mammogram every six months, and I have some decisions I might have to make in my life. But because I know.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 24:18  Right, I can take.Lesley Logan 24:20  I can take action. Yeah, correct.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 24:22  And you know, using that same kind of history, if someone comes in my office and says that I don't want to take hormones because I was a breast cancer, I'm like, that's fine. But let's look at all the facts. Let's lay it out like your financial advisor does, and then you can make an informed decision. Because just acting out of fear or reacting is not wise either.Lesley Logan 24:38  I actually really appreciate you mentioning that because it's true. If I'm, I'm very lucky in that I still get to do the HRT that I'm on, even with my risk. But also they're checking me every six months, and I'm checking me. So if anything's going to happen, we're going to catch it so much more quicker. Whereas the hard stuff, there's only so much you can do with that. And so if you're, especially if you're not aware. Say there's all conversations, but I liked the way you laid it out with the wealth manager. I just met with mine. He laid out here's where we're being aggressive. Here's where we're doing this. Here's what's going on here. We're going to move this over here because we're going to risk-manage these risks. And I think that's that's a better way to look at it because we're not going to, every single one of us is unfortunately going to experience something because it's a body. We're not a machine. Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 25:21  It wears out.Lesley Logan 25:22  I did not know it was one in two, girl.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 25:26  Yeah, and what's even more disturbing, you may have heard a lot of women have by now that women's heart disease presents differently than men.Lesley Logan 25:32  Yeah, can you tell us just in case my people haven't heard because I didn't know it was one in two? So let's go over the signs.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 25:38  A lot of times people think of what's the so-called traditional? It's the jaw pain, the radiation of pain from your chest up to your jaw, to your back, down your left arm. Very classic symptoms. Classic because it was studied in men, and then we have these so-called atypical for women because they're not typical compared to men, but they're classic for women. And so, got a little bit of lingo here that it doesn't make total sense. But for women, sometimes it's they just feel a lot more anxious than they've been for unclear reasons. They have this sense that something bad is on the horizon. They can't really place why their sleep is different. Maybe they're having some shortness of breath they didn't used to have. Maybe they go up the stairs in their house, with a laundry basket, and they're huffing and puffing when six months ago they weren't. So it can be very subtle differences. It could be a new fatigue. Check labs are normal, but the fatigue's still there. That worries me when I hear women say this. Unfortunately, the number one sign that you have heart disease is sudden death.Lesley Logan 26:33  Oh.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 26:34  So let that sink in for a second. So we can't always wait on what the signs are.Lesley Logan 26:39  Yeah, we can't fix that. Right. Correct. Okay, so that's hard because our signs are also. I feel like high-achieving women would so easily brush away that anxiety.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 26:51  All the stuff. Correct. Because I have a lot of tabs open.Lesley Logan 26:54  Yeah, I got this going on, or I haven't been working out, so of course I'm out of breath going up the stairs. They would just so easily.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 26:58  It's May, it's graduation season. It's wedding season, right? This is just aging, and that's not the story at all. The problem is 10-minute visit with your doctor who has 3000 patients. They don't know who you are. They're not going to notice that this is different for you.Lesley Logan 27:13  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 27:13  Decreased exercise tolerance is a big one. And so, if you could walk three miles every day in your neighborhood, now you're like, "Wow, I'm really struggling to get through one." I'm worried about that. I want to know what's going on and why.Lesley Logan 27:25  Yeah. So I guess since one getting a 10-minute visit is hard. I, where I live in, I live in Las Vegas. Last I heard, we are short general practitioners by 1400. I don't have one. I go to a women's clinic, and I'm really grateful. It's a, it's also a student-teacher thing. So I actually, they've caught things because the students are asking the questions because they'reAmy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 27:44  Yes, yes.Lesley Logan 27:46  I love them. I'm so grateful for them, but are there things that women can do to check their heart, or is it just being, is it just noticing the one mile versus a three mile? What can we, what are the signs we need to be checking on?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 27:57  Certainly be aware of what your body is telling you. Again, if you have to remember nothing else, this is another one: is that your body is smart; it will talk to you, but you have to listen.Lesley Logan 28:05  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 28:06  So that's really essential. If something's different, say something. You're right. There's a big collapse, if you will, of how much support we have in healthcare, whether it's nurse practitioners or chiropractor or whatever. And the issue is not all of them are trained the same way. So when I worked in the OB/GYN clinic, it became apparent to both of us, on both sides of it, that OBs know stuff about women's health. I don't know, but I know stuff about metabolic and heart health that the OBs aren't taught, and most women use their OBs as their primary care, at least to a certain age.Lesley Logan 28:32  Right.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 28:33  And again, you don't know what you don't know, so you don't realize what you're not looking for that you should be. And our system's not set up for good collaboration. So if I could tell women, here's a checklist of things I want to make sure you get, your doctor is going to give you some resistance, most likely because they don't realize that lipoprotein with a little a, it's like in parentheses at the end of it, not the big A. Lipoprotein little a. If you have that mutation, and 10 to 20% of our population does, you have a different rate of plaque development, at least risk for that than the average risk will miss. If you have high insulin levels, you have a higher risk that you're going to be on a pathway toward diabetes. Those are not things that are standard checks. So knowing that there's other tests you can ask for, and even if your insurance doesn't cover it, they're not expensive tests. Just get it once, right? Have an idea of what's going on in your body once gives you a ton of information. I offer a lot of our patients to wear different glucose monitors, even if they're not on diabetes. And all my physicians who are listening to this are probably like, "You do what?" But the reason is, if you can figure out that your glucose and insulin are high before you develop diabetes or pre-diabetes, if you figured out that insulin-resistant stage, that's a lot easier to fix, and our doctors aren't even taught about what is insulin resistance, what is the criteria for it, and how do we reverse it?Lesley Logan 29:47  Right, because there's some prevention we can do if we have information.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 29:50  There's a ton, and it's things women can do in their homes or their businesses. It's not stuff I'm doing in the exam room.Lesley Logan 29:56  Yeah, and that's also, you know, you're listening to this podcast, you're kind of a go. Anyway, so you're gonna, you'll take the action. Our health insurance is very bizarre. I thought it was crap because, but it has a lot of preventative stuff that goes on with it. Hey, we want to put this thing in your house and check your heart and some other levels every, I don't know, two or three times a week. They keep calling them. I have two adults. We have two ADHD adults in this household. The box is here. One of us will open it when it becomes the pressure. I just have to hang tight. We'll get there. But I'm really impressed by that because we don't have access to a regular doctor. So what information can we gather so we could be watching it and monitoring it? So we can advocate for ourselves if something comes up. So having that prevention is really amazing. Okay, so we talked a little bit about the perimenopause and the different things. What are some simple shifts that women can make now to protect their future? I mean, obviously we have a wide range of women, so the now is different. But what are some things that they could be doing? Because I do think that they are getting information from the magazines and the Instagrams, and we should get it from the person who's experienced it and has seen it. You know, so you.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 31:00  Some easy things, and I say easy relative because they're easy to do, which means they're easy not to do. So acknowledging that, right? It's real. Number one, understanding that just because you get eight hours of sleep, if they're not high-quality hours, you've got a metabolic risk from your sleep not being normal. That's important to understand because you spend a third of your life asleep, right?Lesley Logan 31:19  What's a metabolic risk? Just in case my people. So.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 31:22  If you don't get good-quality sleep, your cortisol goes up. It's one of your stress hormones, and when cortisol goes up, glucose goes up. When glucose goes up, insulin goes up. Insulin's your fat-storing hormone. So even without your sex hormones being involved, or the ghrelin and leptin you're hearing about with weight and GLPs and all that, just those, you're not getting good sleep. It's going to be a problem. Insulin resistance is going to go up. Insulin resistance means your cells are not listening to the insulin your body is giving it, so your body works harder to get more insulin, and the cells work harder to ignore it, and it just keeps going in a vicious cycle. So if we consider that that's the root cause of a lot of these problems we've been talking about, we fix that. Number one is get good sleep, get good-quality sleep, and it's not, not just enough time in bed.Lesley Logan 32:02  Yeah, so.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 32:03  That's important. Number two is most people don't realize that they're doing it backwards. They're, if they're, if they're even able to get exercise in their life right now, right? So we're going to make the assumption that you figured out some exercise regimen you like. We're, we're at that level, but they're doing it at the wrong time, and they're doing it in a way that they're sabotaging their end result. So rather than going to the gym and then going and eating dinner, or going to the gym first thing in the morning and skipping breakfast and all these things, you need to eat protein and fat, and then you need to move your thighs. I don't care if that's jumping jacks, going for a walk, running up the stairs, something where your thighs are moving regularly for 10 minutes. So make it whatever you like doing. This can be the mom at home who's doing all sorts of fun class activity with her kid, right? Like moving the baby around or the teenager can be equally fun to move around for what it's worth. And then it could be the CEO who's getting ready for a meeting and has 10 minutes after eating whatever lunch she had in the five-minute break she did, right? So looking at what makes sense in your life, but 10 minutes of physical activity, ideally after every meal, that's not realistic, but that's ideal. And then you start with the one meal a day you can do, and you do it most days of the week to start with, because most of us have to figure out how to make it a habit.Lesley Logan 33:15  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 33:15  But movement for 10 minutes after eating, it's, it's crucial. I cannot stress that enough.Lesley Logan 33:20  I didn't realize it was. It makes total sense moving your body after eating because I like to go for a walk after I have lunch. Otherwise, I'm tired. Correct. I can't go back to work now. Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 33:30  The reason you're tired though is because your glucose goes up and your insulin went up to match it. When you walk right after you eat, glucose still goes up, but it's less, and so you have less insulin spike. Insulin is the bright driver here, and so you've got to do the movement after. And if it helps to understand why, think back to what our ancestors did 1000 years ago. Right? We weren't checking hormones. We weren't checking insulin. We weren't talking about hacks. We were trying to survive most of the time. Yeah. But the things they did is they, if they, what, after they ate, they moved around. Right? Like they were building their shelters. They were taking care of the kids. They were moving in the community, helping build, create, relocate, whatever. They were always moving, and they did not get the whole three square meals a day. That's bogus. You don't need three meals a day, okay? And most of my ladies don't realize that they're eating their nutrients potentially in the wrong order for their body. That they're eating them in the wrong time for the cycle of the month they're in, they're not getting enough protein, not getting enough fat for their hormones and their brain, and it doesn't happen quickly, right? It's months, years, maybe even a couple decades before they're, I don't know what happened, but my body in the mirror is not the body in my head. This is not who I am. There's a disconnect, and they finally are at that place where they have to do something, where the body is forcing them to stop because they've pushed it as hot as you know.Lesley Logan 34:44  Oh my God, that's a whole episode. We're having you back. I'm just telling you right now because I want to have a whole episode on the whole. Because what I do know is if you eat certain things, if you work out too late, if you get your cortisol up, sleep that. I have been trying to figure out sleep for over a decade, and I, I get good-quality sleep most of the time. But I'm obsessed with it because I'm like, I don't want Alzheimer's. I do not want heart problems. It doesn't really matter what I'm doing at the gym if I'm not sleeping. None of that matters. Doesn't matter what you're, If you don't get good sleep, all the rest is gonna just fall apart anyways. So it's interesting. It makes sense about the food because I remember when I was having problems with my cycle and I had my one of my doctor friends, she said you should try seed cycling because I just, the worst cramps and, like, the worst everything was just the worst in the world, and so I tried seed cycling and my goodness, you know, I'm not a woo-woo girl, but the seed cycling makes, I got, I had no more zits, my boobs didn't hurt as bad, everything leveled out, and I didn't need any extra hormones for it. I was, whoa, so now there must be more. We need to know about it. So we'll have to have you back for that. I can talk to you forever. So we'll just, this is part one of many. I'm just going to take a brief break and then find out if people can find you, follow you, and work with you. All right, Dr. Amy Loden, where do you hang out? You mentioned St. Louis. Can people work with you if they're not in St. Louis? How does this work?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 36:03  Yes, absolutely. Best way to get into contact with our office is just going to our website, www.vitalitymwc.org. They can sign up for a consultation, and we can go through what their options are. There is also lots of opportunity if you don't want to work with us directly, but you want to continue the conversation and hear what we're seeing. I do all the social media I can so that people can hear what's being said in their exam rooms and have it in their real lives too. So you can do that on follow me at Dr. Amy Tiffany, whether it's on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook. You find it where they're also on LinkedIn at Dr. Amy Loden. So lots of places depends on what their needs are. One special offer I do have for your audience: we talked about pregnancy and perimenopausal bit through this conversation, they can contact my office for a free physical copy of my book, The Postpartum Pivot. And before you stop listening, ladies, and you think, "Well, I'm not postpartum." If you've had a baby, you're postpartum even it's 20 years ago. Your body's different than it was before that baby, and so you can understand what does this look like for perimenopause and other types of areas that we go through as we grow less young, but grow more wise.Lesley Logan 37:03  Oh my God! Every one of my female females, that's where your Christmas present is. Sorry, just gonna get a doctor because they don't. It's, if their doctor doesn't tell them, they don't know, right? And then they are just going through it. And I feel so bad because every woman in my life is such a badass, and then they get their body doesn't keep up with what they're wanting to do in life, and then it just becomes not just like a liability, but like this hangup. So you are amazing. Okay, you've given us some great stuff already. I mean, we're gonna have to rewind, and I'll listen to this. I've got, you know, getting my notepad out, but our bold, executable, intrinsic, or targeted steps people can take to be it till they see it. What do you have for us?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 37:37  I want each one. When you be it as you see it, I want you to be true to what your body's telling you, and recognize nothing's gone wrong. Listen when things are happening and they seem like it's a crisis. Nothing's gone wrong. Your body's talking to you. Listen, and when you listen, you become more wise. You become a better version of yourself.Lesley Logan 37:55  Okay, I really love that. We talked about that earlier, but it's true. Some of us think our body is against us, and it's doing something to us. But really, it's like, hello. The alarm bells. Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 38:05  It's doing exactly what it should do for the situation we've put it in. That doesn't mean we like it. You get diabetes. No one's like, oh yeah, my body did exactly what it's supposed to do. But if we understand that, then it becomes a neutral thought. It's not bad or wrong. It's I didn't listen, so now I'm going to stop, and the best place to reverse is as soon as you realize you're going in the direction. Right? It's not to keep going in the wrong direction. So nothing has gone wrong. We just need to listen. We need to turn around, create a better story.Lesley Logan 38:33  Love it. Love it. This is and then so enlightening. This is so fun. Thank you so much for being you and your and and the journey that you've been on is something we can all benefit from. So thank you for that, you guys. We all need to share this episode with all the women in our lives, and I would love for you to make sure that Dr. Amy knows your favorite takeaways. Send them to the Be It Pod as well. And since I'm going to have her back, not that I even like asked her beforehand, but I'm just going to tell her she's doing that. You can send your questions, and we'll make sure we get that. So, beitpod.com/questions. Until next time, my loves, Be It Till You See It. Lesley Logan 39:03  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 39:45  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 39:50  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 39:54  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 40:02  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 40:05  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Denis O'Shea, Founder of Mobile Mentor, helps organizations pursue a clear goal to simplify your tech environment while strengthening security and empowering employees to remain productive. Driven by the joy of learning and intellectual adventure, Denis left a 15-year career at Nokia to build a company that learns about emerging technologies, translates them into business outcomes, and mentors customers through change. In this conversation, Denis introduces The Tech Stack Streamlining Framework: Understand Current Tech Stack, Assess Capacity for Change, Benchmark to Peers, Build the Roadmap, and Deliver Simplified Tech Stack. He explains how immersing his team in a customer's environment, asking thoughtful questions, and benchmarking the organization against its peers can reveal a clear path toward a simpler technology stack. Denis also discusses Mobile Mentor's fast-growing mentoring service, how its Microsoft partnership transformed the business, the challenge of finding technology professionals who are natural mentors, and why people must remain responsible for the quality and accuracy of everything they produce with AI. — Simplify Your Tech Environment with Denis O’Shea  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Denis O’Shea, the Founder of Mobile Mentor, a technology service provider helping thousands of clients find and maintain the right balance, securing devices, protecting data, and empowering people to be productive. Mobile Mentor is also a five-time Microsoft award winner. So Denis, welcome back to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me back. And I have to say, you look fantastic. You’re aging gracefully, and I hope I’m doing the same.  Well, unfortunately, my barber is on vacation, so I couldn’t visit him last week. But it’s great to have you back on the show, and we couldn’t agree whether it was two or four years ago that you were here. Anyhow, it’s great to have you back, and I’ve got some questions for you that I’m curious about. And first and foremost, the question is, what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Mobile Mentor business?  My personal Why is probably learning. And I think the reason I went into business in the first place was to learn and grow as an individual. It certainly wasn’t money. I expect money as an outcome from the process, but I didn’t go into it for money. It was really to learn, and the trigger for me was I did an executive education program in Switzerland. I was living there for a few years, and that blew my mind. That just exploded my mind when I started learning all about mergers, acquisitions, turnarounds, management buyouts, all these different ways of growing a business that were nonlinear.  And that motivated me to go on and do an MBA, and that then motivated me to leave my employer, who was a great company. I was working for Nokia for 15 years. They were amazing, but I decided to leave them and go out and embrace all this nonlinear stuff and found a company from scratch. And one day I thought maybe I’ll do a spin-out, or maybe I’ll do an acquisition, and I’ll do all these different things. And it was purely for the joy of learning and the intellectual adventure. So I think that’s my Why. It’s learning.  Yeah. Well, learning is great, and it’s a big driver of businesses when they are able to learn, especially in today’s age. So tell me a little bit about how Mobile Mentor is reflecting this way of learning. Is it a learning organization, and in what way is it?  Oh, that’s an interesting question, Steve. I would hope we are a learning organization. Something I’ve been saying to my kids and my staff for years is, “We’re a learning species. We can learn anything we put our minds to.” And so I would hope we are a learning organization. And the word “mentor” plays a huge part in not just our brand, but how we work. So we’re a technology service company. We’re always unpacking the latest technology and helping customers figure out what to do with it and how to extract value from it.  So I would hope that we’re good at learning what the technology can do and then translating that into outcomes for customers and helping people unlock the full potential of the technology they’ve just purchased. And when we started 22 years ago, we were focused on mobile devices. That’s why the company’s called Mobile Mentor. Nowadays, it’s mainly AI and security and all that. And by the way, we’re going through a rebrand. The company’s just going to be called Mentor going forward. Just Mentor. So that we can work with all technology, so we remove any association with that small device where we started 22 years ago. So I think we are very good at learning, internalizing the new technology, and then translating that into business outcomes for our customers.  Yeah.  That’s what I feel like our core skill is.  Yeah. And I love this concept of mentoring because essentially it’s not about teaching people, it’s about helping people discover how to be great. And if you can do that, that’s amazing. So that brings me to the next question, which is about frameworks. So this, as you know, this podcast is about frameworks, and what I’m curious about is, what’s a framework that has helped you grow this company, build this company, or help your clients or mentor your clients? Maybe it’s a mentoring framework. Maybe it’s a technology framework. So something that comes to mind that can be explained in three to five steps to our listeners.  Sure. We have a really strong framework at the front end of our sales process. It’s an assessment and roadmap we do for customers. And it’s something that’s on our website. It has a price point, so it’s got a value, but we choose to give it away for free when we get a strong, well-qualified opportunity, or when we have a channel partner bring us a strong lead. We will use this assessment and roadmap process to build a vision for the customer. And the way we do it, we’ve got a good framework for this.  We go through an assessment. So we tell the customer, “We’re going to have a look at your environment holistically and get a really good understanding of the technology stack you have today, all the different technologies you’re using, and also get a good understanding of your organization’s capability and capacity for change, and how you embrace change, how you make change happen. “And we’re going to show you how you compare to a whole bunch of other organizations.” I think we’ve done 174, 175 of these in the last maybe three years. And so we show the customer how they compare to others in their industry and also against others roughly their same size. And then, most importantly, we build out a roadmap, and we show them, “Here’s how you can potentially go from where you are today with today’s technology stack,” which is usually very busy, it’s usually a long list of technologies, “to a much simpler technology stack in the future if they’re willing to consolidate on one or two platforms and do all the possible integrations, automations, and simplifications so that they’re extracting much more value from one or two platforms, like Microsoft, than having a whole colorful mix of different technology vendors.”  So we’ll say, “Here’s a journey you could go on,” and then we describe it in vivid detail, showing all the different parts and how they would go passwordless, how they would automate setting up new employees and all the technology they need, how they would automate all their patching and security, how they would embrace AI into their operations, how they would use AI for productivity improvements, and kind of show this technology journey. That process, or that framework, of doing an assessment, and it covers 120 different topics. So we do the assessment, the comparison, the roadmap.  We find that to be extremely powerful because customers will look at that, and they’ll look at the destination and say, “Right. We want to be there. We want to get that outcome,” and then they’re buying off us. We’re not selling to them. They’re basically saying, “Okay. We want to get there. How do we do it? Help us. How can you come in and help us do it?” So the narrative flips from us being a sales organization to then being a mentor and helping the customer figure out how to get there.  And of course, we want to sell services, and we want to sell long-term contracts to say, “Yes, we can take you from here to there, and it’s a three-year engagement to do all those changes.” So that’s what we want. But the customer is buying it off us because they’ve bought into the destination.  Yeah. And that’s the modern buyer’s journey, right? They research you. Before even they come to you, they want to listen to you because you might have something for them. So I love this framework. So what I noted down was step number one, understand the technology stack that they have. Step number two, assess their ability to manage change or to handle change.  Yeah.  Then you benchmark them to others in their industry or in their peer group. Then you build the roadmap, and then you show them the simplified end state, the simplified tech stack.  Correct. Correct. And then we give them options around how we can help them to get there. Usually, there’s three options. And we say, “Well, what style of engagement works best for you? How would you like us to work with you?” And then it becomes a very comfortable, easy sales process from there, and it becomes easy because we’ve done all the listening.  So when we do the assessment and we cover 120 topics, we do 60 questions in 60 minutes. So it’s two one-hour sessions. And we call it our “friendly interrogation.” But what happens during that time is what I call a selfless immersion in the customer’s world. So we don’t talk about us. We never talk about us. Everything is about them, their technology stack, their environment, their processes, their technical dependencies, all the things about their organization.  So we get this really rich understanding of their environment. And at the end, guess what they say, Steve? Or guess what they say at the end of that interrogation or that assessment session?  I don’t know. Give it to us. What do they say?  They say thank you, which is extraordinary, and it surprised me when it started happening. But people love to be heard. We’re not selling. We’re not pitching anything. We are just seeking to understand their environment and asking a whole bunch of really good questions. So we don’t need to tell them who we are and what we’ve done, that we’ve won Microsoft Partner of the Year and blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to do any of that.  They know that we know our stuff because of the questions we’re asking, because those questions have been refined and refined and refined. So we’re able to get right into the heart of their issues, and they tell us all about their environment and their issues and concerns and frustrations. And at the end of the assessment, they say, “Thank you.” And I remind them, I say, “We haven’t delivered anything yet. All we’ve done is asked you a whole bunch of questions.” But they feel like it was almost a cathartic process of unloading and sharing all of it. And then we do the second session, and the rapport gets even better, and they bring in some different people.  So by the time we get to the end of the assessment, we’ve had a really good conversation about 120 different things. There’s now a high degree of trust. And so when we come back in the third session, we say, “Okay, we heard you. Here’s where you are. Here’s how you compare to others. Here’s where you could be, and here’s what the journey would look like to get you there, taking all the complexities into account, all the dependencies, all the legacy, all the technical debt you might have. “Here’s what it would take to get you to where you want to be.” They’re now listening and they’re trusting us because we’ve listened to them.  Yeah. I love that. That is very powerful. And asking good questions is actually not always easy. In the age of AI, answers are omnipresent, but good questions, good prompts, that’s a skill, right? To ask the right question.  It is. And it’s interesting you mention AI because we’re not using any AI in the way we do this. We could choose to send out a form to the customer and say, “Please fill out this form.” Actually, we tried that. We tried that 10 or 12 years ago in our New Zealand operation, and it was a complete disaster. Nobody wants to fill out a long form and answer all those questions. But if you have a conversation face-to-face, on Teams or Zoom, whatever, you can have the conversation. You’ll get all the information.  But now we’re establishing rapport between us while we do that, and that also gives them a flavor of what it’s like to work with us. How we interact and how we follow up the question, how we drill down, how we clarify and confirm, “Did I understand that correctly?” in a way that you don’t get from just filling out a web form. And we also don’t use AI to analyze the transcript and try and fill it out. We actually do it based on us understanding it, because we find we get way more detail and nuance than relying on a transcript.  That’s very interesting. Definitely, when there’s a human on the other end who is interested in what you’re saying and is listening deeply, it’s a highly motivating and even inspiring thing. That’s why it’s hard to make a talk without the audience, because you need the energy of the audience. So you provide the energy for them to come up with the goods and explain where they are, right?  Yeah, yeah. So let me switch gears and ask you this. What drives growth in your business?  What drives growth? Two things. One, that process sets us up to be able to sell something. The fastest-growing thing that we sell is a service called mentoring, which is very closely aligned to our brand and the way we work, and it’s something that’s very unique to us. So what we figured out is that there are some customers who just want to bring in a partner to build something for them let’s say to deploy some new technology, and then they want the vendor to go away and leave them with it. There are other organizations who don’t want to touch the technology. They want somebody to provide a managed service, so you get all the outcomes.  And those two technology service categories have been around forever, right? Microsoft has 400,000 partners doing this kind of work, doing project work, or providing managed services. We found a huge white space in the middle between those two. We found there’s a big white space in the mid-market, in particular mid-market organizations, where they have their own IT team. They don’t want to give the keys away to a managed service provider and let go. They want to learn all about the new technology.  They want to internalize the knowledge, and they want somebody to come in and help them deploy it with them, and be hands-on-keyboard, and do it together with them, and do lots of knowledge transfer, and help them build the documentation and the knowledge base, and get the experience and the skills so that their skills grow, their confidence grows. And we call that service mentoring, where we’re doing that for them. So we’re not just building it and walking away, we’re building it together with them. And it can be a one-year, two-year, five-year engagement where we’re building out this complex technology capability, but we’re doing it together, and they become the experts over time. That is our fastest-growing, top-selling service.  That’s fascinating. So it’s essentially coaching, mentoring, and still you turn it into an ongoing engagement because it’s not simple, right? There are a lot of layers to it. And what’s the timeline of such a relationship?  Typically three years. Typically. It can be as short as one, it can be as long as five. But for most of the technology transformation projects we’re doing, I would say they’re two, three, four years for the organization to change and embed all the changes and turn off all the legacy technology and fully embrace the new way of working. So our typical contract is three years. And then we set up all the cadences so that we’re working together every week through specific things, and there’s a weekly cadence, our engineers doing all that stuff, and then monthly coming up for air to see how we’re doing against the roadmap. Do we need to make any changes? What’s the focus for next month? And that’s a rolling process that keeps going on and on. And so the two teams end up working extremely closely.  Our engineering team, and we’re bringing in different architects, engineers, and there’s obviously a consistent project manager across it. And on the customer side, they’re bringing different engineers or architects depending on the piece of work we’re doing. But it’s generally all modernizing the way they work with Microsoft technology primarily, and changing from legacy stuff to very modern, invisible security, embedded AI, really trying to accelerate their maturity as an organization.  Yeah. Love it.  Does that make sense?  So it makes sense. I’m wondering, I mean, most businesses these days, they want to have recurring revenue, and even though you have a three-year engagement, it’s still not an evergreen engagement. So what do you do to turn these engagements into more of an enduring one, or you’re not trying to do it because it’s not the purpose?  That’s the $64 million question for our business, Steve, is how do we turn a two-year or three-year engagement into something longer? And it actually comes back to where you started with the learning thing. So what we need to be doing, and this is a constant battle for us, is learning about the latest and the newest technologies and staying ahead of the customer. Always staying ahead in terms of our knowledge so that we can keep adding new things to the backlog of work that needs to be done.  So that we might deploy technology A and get that done and do the migration and modernization, but then we need to move on to B and C and D and E. And there’s always new stuff, and actually the rate of change is accelerating now with AI. Everything is changing so fast, it’s unbelievable. But our job is to stay ahead so that we can always have something new and edgy that we can bring to the relationship. That we’re always able to give new knowledge, information, value.  So is it a managed technology business or is it more of a consulting business?  Ah, we are three different things. We do a lot of project work where people will come in and say, “Migrate us from platform A to platform B.” So we do that. We do this mentoring service where we’re doing the change and modernization together with the customer. We’re also a managed service provider. We have a lot of small and medium businesses that say, “We don’t have an IT team. We don’t want to have an IT team. Manage this stuff, make it invisible to us. Just give us great service and give us great reports and be transparent with us.” And that’s part of our business too.  So I would say we’re roughly one-third professional services, project work, one-third mentoring, and one-third managed services. So more than half the business is recurring revenue in any given year.  So what makes this kind of business hard to scale, or what makes it easy to scale?  What makes it hard to scale is finding great people who can learn and share that learning with customers, so people who are natural mentors. So what we do not want is to hire geeks who want to just put on noise-canceling headsets and sit in front of a screen coding all day. They would not work for us. We want people who are head up, good people skills, want to learn it, but want to share it. Naturally very good at sharing. So getting the right people, that’s one constraint to growth. The thing that makes growth easy for us is our relationship with Microsoft. That’s unbelievable.  We didn’t have a relationship with Microsoft 11 years ago, and they came to us and asked us to become a partner, and we did. And they asked us to work with them on a specific technology that was very immature at the time. And I set a goal for our team. I said, “What would it take us to become the best in the world at that one specific technology? To become the best in the world on that technology as it matures and grows?” And we set that as our North Star and really went after that and focused everything on that.  And that enabled us then to win Microsoft Global Partner of the Year based on our focus on that. And by winning that award, that got us noticed because they got 400,000 partners. So at the time, I was based in New Zealand, so basically the second-last rock before the end of the earth. And so we were nobody in a nowhere place and not noticed, and we’re just one of 400,000, completely lost in the noise. We got noticed when we won Global Partner of the Year and when we got recognized for being the best in the world at that one technology, and that changed everything, and I moved to America.  Then Microsoft introduced us to a whole bunch of customers, including the largest healthcare organization in the world, the largest education provider in the world, and largest government departments. And so now our business is totally different to what it looked like 11 years ago before Microsoft. And this goes on and on. So almost every day, they contact us to say, “Hey, we got this customer over here, and they got this problem, and we thought of you.” And then they introduce us, and we do our assessment, show them how they compare, build a roadmap, and say, “What would you like to do from here?”  Yeah. I’m just very curious about what is that technology, and what is the ideal customer for you for that technology? That technology is a platform called Intune. It’s a device management platform, so it’s for managing desktops, laptops, MacBooks, smartphones, tablets, and all that. And everything we do, of course, starts with a device. And so it’s the technology that secures and manages and configures our devices. Microsoft Intune is the name of the product, and that’s where we’ve got very, very deep expertise. But that leads us to all the other parts of the Microsoft 365 environment, and most organizations are using Microsoft 365 to some extent.  So in most cases, they’re coming to us and saying, “Hey, this customer has bought our licenses. They’ve got Microsoft 365 E5 or E3, whatever. They’re not using it all. They’ve got all these overlapping competitive products. They want to consolidate, reduce costs, or they want to improve security, or they want to simplify their environment. Can you help?” And we’re like, “Hell yeah, we can help. That’s right in our wheelhouse.” And so we have a discovery call with the customer. They tell us what they want to achieve, and if they’re a good fit for our assessment and roadmap, then we’ll propose that. So we’re not trying to sell anything at that stage, and we’ll do that.  It’s many, many hours of work. We’ll do that roadmap and assessment at our cost. Sorry, that’s our investment. That’s our investment in the relationship, so that we’re showing that we’re giving value back to the customer and to Microsoft because they brought us that lead, and we’re creating value from day one. And sometimes the customer will go, “Thank you. We understand the journey. We’re going to do it ourselves,” or, “We’ve got an existing partner,” or, “We don’t have budget,” whatever. And so we don’t land them all, but we’ve got a very high conversion rate. We land a lot of them.  And even if we don’t, I know that we deliver a huge amount of value through the process, and the customer goes, “Wow, that was great. That was a great process. We learned a lot. We can see where we need to go. We might be back in touch in the future when we do have budget or when the stars align.”  Or they refer someone else.  Yeah.  So if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be?  I would say it would be doing more with AI internally. Some days I feel like an imposter because we are selling a lot of AI services, and we do a lot of AI work for our customers. But I, as the leader, I don’t do enough. I’m not doing enough with AI. I’m not building enough capability. I’m leading the charge, but I’m not savvy enough myself. And I feel like our leadership team could be doing more. So I feel like doing more, embedding more AI into how we work, is something I want to change or fix in the next year. Not just doing it for customers.  Yeah. I mean, you can never do enough with AI, right? There’s so much out there and so much changing, and to stay ahead of it, one’s head is spinning all the time. It’s very inspiring, but can be also overwhelming.  That’s true. And one of the things I’m dealing with is managing what we call AI slop, where we see people internally and externally producing things that are not good-quality outcomes because it hasn’t been double-checked. So just because it could be produced quickly and easily by AI doesn’t mean it’s great or specific enough or detailed enough or accurate enough for the result, whether that’s an internal report or an external thing.  So the coaching I’m giving people is you’re still responsible for the thing, the quality of the thing. You have to read it, make sure it’s on point, it’s detailed enough, the customer’s going to be happy with it or your manager’s going to be happy with it. We are still responsible for the thing we produce. Let’s not get lazy.  Yeah. And the more content you generate and the more solutions you generate with AI, the more the mental load on the decision-makers to actually filter out what’s not real and what’s real.  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.  Yeah. I can see that happening. So if someone is listening to this and says, “Wow, I love this idea that you benchmark me, you figure out what our tech is, learn our tech, benchmark us, come up with a roadmap, and evaluate the organization, how fast we can manage change, and then come up with a roadmap and mentor us to get there and simplify our tech stack,” and would like to learn more and perhaps connect with you, where should they go? Where can they find out more information?  I’m on LinkedIn only. I’m not on other social platforms. I’m a bit of a Neanderthal in that regard. But Denis, with one N and O’Shea, O-S-H-E-A, on LinkedIn, and my company is Mobile Mentor. It will be Mentor soon, but we’ll keep the Mobile Mentor alive for quite a while. And so go to the company, mobile-mentor.com. And yeah, love to talk to any of your listeners and audience if this is a technology journey they want to go on or want a partner to work with them. That’s the role we play, being a mentor and helping people get the outcomes, but internalizing it and becoming experts while doing so.  Yeah. So if you want to filter out the AI slop and the AI noise, and you want real people who will look at your specific situations and help you and mentor you and help your staff get up to speed and simplify, then reach out to Denis. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because every week I bring a couple of entrepreneurs who are sharing their frameworks of how they’re improving and growing their businesses, and you can implement some of these things yourself.  So thanks, Denis. Denis O’Shea, the founder and CEO of Mobile Mentor, soon to be called Mentor. Thanks for coming on the show, and thank you for listening. Thank you, Steve. Always a pleasure. Important Links: Denis's LinkedIn Denis's website

Check us out: https://www.determinetruth.com How do we recognize false teachers—and is false teaching only about getting our theology wrong? In this episode of the Determined Truth Podcast, we explore 2 Peter and its urgent warning about false teachers within the church. While Christians often define false teaching primarily in terms of incorrect doctrine, 2 Peter pushes us further. Peter is deeply concerned with both what false teachers believe and the kind of lives their theology produces. We begin by looking at the close relationship between 2 Peter and Jude, including why scholars frequently study these two letters together and how both draw upon Jewish traditions and writings outside the Old Testament canon. Then we work through the major themes of 2 Peter: participating in the divine nature, growing in Christlike character, Peter's eyewitness testimony about Jesus, God's judgment, the return of Christ, and the destructive behavior of false teachers. Along the way, we discuss: Why 2 Peter and Jude are so closely connected What the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are Why biblical writers sometimes reference writings outside Scripture The historical setting and authorship of 2 Peter Peter and Paul's deaths during the reign of Nero What it means to become “partakers of the divine nature” The Eastern Christian doctrine of theosis Why Christian knowledge must produce Christlike character How Peter identifies false teachers Why false teaching is about behavior as well as doctrine Genesis 6, the “sons of God,” the Nephilim, and fallen angels Why Peter insists that God's final judgment is real The return of Christ and the apparent delay of the Second Coming What 2 Peter means when it describes the world being judged by fire Why the future renewal of creation should change how Christians treat creation now Creation care, stewardship, and humanity's responsibility as God's image bearers Why our theology has real ethical consequences Peter's warning is particularly important for the modern church. Correct doctrine alone is not enough if our theology produces greed, exploitation, sexual immorality, injustice, or indifference toward others. Theology matters because what we believe ultimately shapes how we live. And according to 2 Peter, the Christian response to false teaching isn't merely having better arguments. Followers of Jesus are called to grow in moral excellence, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, mutual affection, and—ultimately—love. Determined Truth exists to equip the church to be the church. Learn more and support the ministry at DeterminedTruth.com. Vinnie Angelo & Rob Dalrymple FOLLOW THE PODCAST Subscribe to be notified of our new episodes (each Monday).  Want to help us expand the Gospel of the Kingdom? Leave a review, “like” the podcast, or share it with others.   CONNECT WITH DETERMINETRUTH MINISTRIES The Determinetruth Podcast is a ministry of Determinetruth Ministries. We offer free resources to equip pastors, leaders, and the body of Christ in the US and worldwide for service in the kingdom of God. You can visit us online at https://www.determinetruth.com   SUPPORT DETERMINETRUTH MINISTRIES Determinetruth is a non-profit 501(c)(3), and relies completely on the financial support of our partners around the world.  Please consider partnering with us and making a tax-deductible donation https://tithe.ly/give_new/www/#/tithely/give-one-time/3648601   Want a FREE CHAPTER from Rob's latest book? Sign up for email updates from Determinetruth.   https://mailchi.mp/5672d33f2b95/dt-podcast Music: “Love is Against the Grain” (Dime Store Prophets)  

Grab the King Closer Blueprint: My Step by Step Sales Process for closing over 2,000 deals (Only $27): https://www.titaniumu.com/blueprintWant to work directly with me to close more deals? Go Here: https://www.titaniumu.comWant the Closer's Formula sales process I've used to close 2,000+ deals (FREE) Go Here: https://www.kingclosersformula.com/closeIf you're new to my channel my name is RJ Bates III. Myself and my partner Cassi DeHaas are the founders of Titanium Investments.We are nationwide virtual wholesalers and on this channel we share EVERYTHING that we do inside our business. So if you're looking to close more deals - at higher assignments - anywhere in the country… You're in the right place.Who is Titanium Investments and What Have We Accomplished?Over 10 years in the real estate investing businessClosed deals in all 50 states​Owned rentals in 12 states​Flipped houses in 11 states​Closed on over 2,000 properties​125 contracts in 50 days (all live on YouTube)​Back to back Closers Olympics ChampionTrained thousands of wholesalers to close more deals_________________________________With over 4,000 Videos, this is the #1 channel on YouTube for all things Virtual Wholesaling. SUBSCRIBE NOW!    https://www.youtube.com/@RJBatesIII_________________________________RESOURCES FOR YOU:If you want my team and I to walk you through how to build or scale your virtual wholesaling business from A to Z, click here to learn more about Titanium University: https://www.titaniumu.com(FREE) If you want to learn how to close deals just like me, The King Closer, then download the free King Closer Formula PDF: https://www.kingclosersformula.com/closeGrab Titanium Profits: Our exact system we use to comp and underwrite deals in only 4 minutes. (Only $99) https://www.kingclosersformula.com/titaniumprofitsSupport the show

What will Earl Spencer reveal about Princess Diana in his new memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister? Which accepted stories does he consider untrue—and could his account reopen painful questions for King Charles III, Queen Camilla and the Royal Family?Published ahead of the 30th anniversary of Diana's death, the book promises Charles Spencer's personal account of his sister's childhood, marriage, extraordinary public life and the chaotic days following her death in Paris. Former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond believes it could become an important historical record, while biographer Tom Bower claims Spencer remains furious with Charles, unsympathetic toward Prince William and strongly supportive of Prince Harry.Plus, a major new Princess Diana exhibition is coming to California. What will be displayed at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library? How is Diana's famous John Travolta dress being reunited with Nancy Reagan's White House gown? And what do Diana's childhood clothes, handwritten letters, record collection and recreated spare wedding dress reveal about the woman behind the global icon?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/palace-intrigue-harry-meghan-the-crown-royal-family-news-and-gossip--4522904/support.Palace Intrigue is a daily British royal family podcast covering King Charles, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and the House of Windsor. New episodes every day. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Part of the Caloroga Shark Media network.

Correct in love

This week, Camilla calls in the big (tanned) guns: Kyle K. He started as her Barry's trainer/self-care guru, infiltrated her inner circle, and now—for better or worse—he's part of yours. Kyle promised to come in unfiltered and spill allll the tea. He delivered: Wellness. Witches. Workout lies. Exes. Revenge. The art of being petty. And the wildly specific things that can send him into an immediate spiral.Plus: the story behind Kyle K Quotes, the anonymously run Instagram account that's been documenting—and leaking—the most outrageous things he's said for years. It's a real-life Gossip Girl—and Kyle is its favorite target. Is it iconic? Correct. Is it mildly unhinged? Correct.Most importantly—he's now here for YOU. Send in your self-care dilemmas. Kyle K is officially taking cases. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode. Produced by Dear Media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alan answers a common Muslim challenge alleging that, because Jesus spoke in Aramaic, the Bible doesn't contain the words of Jesus.

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On today's episode of The Therapy Crouch, Abbey and Peter are back answering more of your Ask Me Anythings, and this week things get VERY personal as the pair tackle bedroom confidence, dirty talk and whether getting into the best shape of your life can actually cause problems in your relationship.After one listener reveals her newly ripped husband suddenly wants all the lights on in the bedroom, Abbey and Peter debate body confidence before the conversation somehow ends up with rotating beds, sex tapes and a revelation from the Crouches that catches everyone slightly off guard!We also hear from a listener whose request for a little more communication in the bedroom spectacularly backfires when her boyfriend starts delivering some of the least seductive lines imaginable. Abbey reveals the one word she could NEVER cope with Peter saying, while Pete attempts to offer some bedroom advice of his own.Elsewhere, a new Therapy Crouch superfan gets banned from listening to the podcast in public, Abbey and Peter reveal what they won't let the kids do on holiday, and one listener's mission to get fit and improve his love life leads to his wife quite literally keeping score of their bedroom activity.Things get slightly heated before the end as Abbey's innocent request for a cup of tea turns into a full-blown marital debate over whether she's secretly using some very clever reverse psychology on Pete!00:00 Introduction01:21 Abbey's Animal Obsession05:08 Who's Funnier: Abbey or Peter?06:56 Ask Me Anything07:34 Lights On In The Bedroom09:31 Abbey's “Bulging Disc”11:04 Who Has The Better Body?14:31 Abbey & Peter's Sex Tape15:22 Dirty Talk Disasters17:39 “That Is Correct!”20:16 Abbey's Worst Bedroom Word21:06 Banned From Listening To The Podcast23:56 What Abbey & Peter Ban At Home25:38 The Kids' Holiday Rules27:17 Brewers Droop & Getting Fit28:00 A Shag A Week28:20 Keeping Score In The Bedroom29:24 Abbey's Relationship Reward System30:28 The Cup Of Tea Argument32:35 Abbey & Peter Fall OutTo contact us:Email: thetherapycrouch@gmail.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetherapycrouchpodcast/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/ @thetherapycrouchWebsite: https://thetherapycrouch.com/For more from Peter https://twitter.com/petercrouchFor more from Abbey https://www.instagram.com/abbeyclancyOur clips channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZntcv96YhN8IvMAKsz4Dbg Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://teachhoops.com/ How quickly can one basketball game become an entire story in an athlete's mind? A player has a great opening night and thinks, “This is finally my year.” Another struggles and immediately thinks, “Here we go again.” A player gets fewer minutes than expected and decides the coach no longer believes in them. A teammate has a breakout game and suddenly someone else begins wondering whether they are falling behind. In this episode, Coach Collins explores one of the most important mental-performance lessons athletes and coaches can learn: one game is evidence, not a conclusion. The problem is not that athletes have emotions after competition. That is completely normal. The problem begins when those emotions start creating conclusions that the available evidence does not actually support. One poor shooting night becomes “I'm not a good shooter.” One turnover becomes “I can't handle pressure.” One change in playing time becomes “Coach doesn't trust me.” Coach Collins explains why athletes need to learn the difference between what actually happened and the story they are telling themselves about what happened. Those are two very different things. This episode introduces a simple method athletes can use following games. Create two lists. On the first, write only the facts of the performance: minutes played, shots taken, defensive communication, turnovers, effort, body language, and specific moments. On the second, write the interpretations your mind immediately wants to create. Seeing those two lists next to each other can be powerful. The first contains evidence. The second contains a story. Coach Collins also challenges athletes to approach performance more like scientists. Good scientists do not perform one experiment and immediately announce a conclusion. They gather information, look for patterns, remain curious, make adjustments, and continue testing. Athletes can do the same thing. Instead of asking, “What does this performance say about me?” ask, “What is this performance teaching me?” One question pushes athletes toward identity and judgment. The other pushes them toward curiosity, development, and growth. And this lesson matters after great games too. Athletes can become just as trapped by positive conclusions as negative ones. One great performance does not mean everything is solved. Celebrate it, enjoy it, and then study what created it so those behaviors can be repeated. For coaches, the message is equally important. Our reactions help determine the story athletes attach to their performances. Correct mistakes. Hold standards. Teach the game. But do not allow one performance to become an athlete's identity. A season is long. Roles change. Players develop. Confidence moves up and down. There will be great nights and difficult ones. The athletes who continue to improve are usually the ones who remain curious long enough to learn from all of them. One performance should never tell an athlete who they are. It should tell them what they can learn next. basketball coaching, basketball leadership, mental performance, athlete mindset, sports psychology, coaching athletes, basketball confidence, handling bad games, athlete self-awareness, player development, basketball mental toughness, performance anxiety, overcoming mistakes, basketball season, coaching confidence, athlete identity, growth mindset, basketball coaches, high school basketball, youth basketball coaching, player confidence, learning from failure, coaching mistakes, sports performance, basketball podcast, TeachHoops Keywords Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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https://teachhoops.com/ How quickly can one basketball game become an entire story in an athlete's mind? A player has a great opening night and thinks, “This is finally my year.” Another struggles and immediately thinks, “Here we go again.” A player gets fewer minutes than expected and decides the coach no longer believes in them. A teammate has a breakout game and suddenly someone else begins wondering whether they are falling behind. In this episode, Coach Collins explores one of the most important mental-performance lessons athletes and coaches can learn: one game is evidence, not a conclusion. The problem is not that athletes have emotions after competition. That is completely normal. The problem begins when those emotions start creating conclusions that the available evidence does not actually support. One poor shooting night becomes “I'm not a good shooter.” One turnover becomes “I can't handle pressure.” One change in playing time becomes “Coach doesn't trust me.” Coach Collins explains why athletes need to learn the difference between what actually happened and the story they are telling themselves about what happened. Those are two very different things. This episode introduces a simple method athletes can use following games. Create two lists. On the first, write only the facts of the performance: minutes played, shots taken, defensive communication, turnovers, effort, body language, and specific moments. On the second, write the interpretations your mind immediately wants to create. Seeing those two lists next to each other can be powerful. The first contains evidence. The second contains a story. Coach Collins also challenges athletes to approach performance more like scientists. Good scientists do not perform one experiment and immediately announce a conclusion. They gather information, look for patterns, remain curious, make adjustments, and continue testing. Athletes can do the same thing. Instead of asking, “What does this performance say about me?” ask, “What is this performance teaching me?” One question pushes athletes toward identity and judgment. The other pushes them toward curiosity, development, and growth. And this lesson matters after great games too. Athletes can become just as trapped by positive conclusions as negative ones. One great performance does not mean everything is solved. Celebrate it, enjoy it, and then study what created it so those behaviors can be repeated. For coaches, the message is equally important. Our reactions help determine the story athletes attach to their performances. Correct mistakes. Hold standards. Teach the game. But do not allow one performance to become an athlete's identity. A season is long. Roles change. Players develop. Confidence moves up and down. There will be great nights and difficult ones. The athletes who continue to improve are usually the ones who remain curious long enough to learn from all of them. One performance should never tell an athlete who they are. It should tell them what they can learn next. basketball coaching, basketball leadership, mental performance, athlete mindset, sports psychology, coaching athletes, basketball confidence, handling bad games, athlete self-awareness, player development, basketball mental toughness, performance anxiety, overcoming mistakes, basketball season, coaching confidence, athlete identity, growth mindset, basketball coaches, high school basketball, youth basketball coaching, player confidence, learning from failure, coaching mistakes, sports performance, basketball podcast, TeachHoops Keywords Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Big Idea: We are other-focused in everything. I. Are we hiding our salt in the salt shaker?Matthew 5:13-16“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? It's no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. “You are the light of the world. A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but rather on a lampstand, and it gives light for all who are in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.II. Are we practicing Christian idolatry?Isaiah 1: 13-17Stop bringing useless offerings. Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons and Sabbaths, and the calling of solemn assemblies— I cannot stand iniquity with a festival. I hate your New Moons and prescribed festivals. They have become a burden to me; I am tired of putting up with them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will refuse to look at you; even if you offer countless prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood. “Wash yourselves. Cleanse yourselves. Remove your evil deeds from my sight. Stop doing evil. Learn to do what is good. Pursue justice. Correct the oppressor. Defend the rights of the fatherless. Plead the widow's cause.III. Are we practicing Christian love? Titus 3:4-8But when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, he saved us—not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy—through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit. He poured out his Spirit on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior so that, having been justified by his grace, we may become heirs with the hope of eternal life. This saying is trustworthy. I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed God might be careful to devote themselves to good works. These are good and profitable for everyone.Next Steps: Believe: I surrender my soul to Jesus today.Become: I will become part of the 100% this week.Be Sent: I will work toward 50% this week.Discussion Questions: What does it look like to “lose our salty taste” today?What truths about myself am I most motivated to avoid seeing?Where does God need to grow love in your heart this week?Do you criticize the church's failures yet secretly excuse them in your own life?Is there a need in your neighborhood our church can meet?Who in your life needs to be connected to or reconnected to Jesus?Pray for them by name this week.

Emergency medicine physician and associate chief medical officer for Northwestern Medicine's Central DuPage Hospital Dr. Jeffrey Bohmer joins Bob Sirott to talk about how AI is used in the healthcare field and which way is the most accurate to get your blood pressure reading. He also explains how athletes use eye-training technology that also supports […]

Fr. Mike shows us from our reading of Jeremiah that when we give our hearts and minds over to idols we become foolish. The way of man is not in himself, we need the Lord to guide and correct us. In Ezekiel, we read about the vision of the measuring of the temple and Fr. Mike shows us how the early Church Fathers would read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament. Today's readings are Jeremiah 10-11, Ezekiel 40, and Proverbs 15:5-8. For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/bibleinayear. Please note: The Bible contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.

In episode 502 of The Reformed Brotherhood, Tony and Jesse begin what promises to be a multi-part deep dive into the Parable of the Good Samaritan — one of the most culturally embedded and theologically rich stories Jesus ever told. But before a single character hits the Jericho road, the hosts ground listeners in something easily overlooked: the charged context in which this parable is told. A lawyer — trained, confident, adversarial — steps forward not to learn but to test. What follows is a masterclass in how Jesus turns the law back on those who wield it as a weapon. This episode covers Luke 10:21–36, explores the covenant of works and covenant of grace, the noetic effects of sin, and why the Good Samaritan is far more than a lesson in being a helpful neighbor. Buckle up. Key Takeaways The lawyer's question is self-contradictory from the start. Asking "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" smuggles a works-righteousness assumption into the very grammar of the question. Inheritance by definition is received, not earned. Jesus does not give the lawyer a new paradigm — He reorients him to the true one. The covenant of grace is not a New Testament innovation. It runs through every Old Testament covenant administration. The lawyer should have already known this. "Do this and you will live" is not a Pelagian concession. Christ is holding out the law's own terms — perfect, total, unrelenting obedience — not to suggest it is achievable, but to expose its impossibility and drive the lawyer (and us) to the only alternative: mercy. "Desiring to justify himself" is more complex than it first appears. Tony argues that the desire to fulfill the covenant of works is not inherently wicked — it is the misguided belief that one can which is the problem. This distinction creates room for reading Christ's response as genuinely merciful instruction, not merely rebuke. The noetic effects of sin mean accurate theology can be deployed in service of self. The lawyer knows the right answers and still uses them to avoid repentance. Correct doctrine alone does not save. The fundamental human problem is not ignorance — it is the will's bondage and the heart's self-love. The parable is primarily Christological, not merely ethical. Jesus is the Good Samaritan. The story is not first about mercy ministry; it is about who binds up our wounds when we are left for dead on the road, unable to save ourselves. The priest and the Levite are not exonerated by their ritual obligations. Considerable ink has been spilled trying to justify their passing by on grounds of Levitical purity concerns. The parable refuses that exit. Everyone in the story — and everyone listening — already knows what the right thing to do was. Key Concepts The Covenant of Works Is Not a Black Box One of the more quietly important arguments Tony makes in this episode is that the covenant of works was never meant to be mysterious or inaccessible. When Jesus responds to the lawyer's question by asking, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?" — He does so with a visible assumption: there is a clear, knowable answer, and the lawyer should be able to give it. And he does. Love God completely, love your neighbor as yourself. The covenant of works was always coherent and comprehensible. The problem has never been that its demands were obscure. The problem is that no one — save the Mediator — has ever kept them. Jesus is not introducing a new ethical framework. He is forcing the lawyer to confront a standard he has always known and has never met. The Lawyer as a Warning to Reformed Christians Jesse closes the episode's first movement with a pointed and personal application that cuts across theological self-satisfaction. The lawyer is not a caricature of ignorance — he is a portrait of someone with accurate, affirmed theological knowledge who instinctively deploys it in the service of self-justification the moment he senses conviction. Jesse names this directly as a danger particularly acute in Reformed circles, where doctrinal precision can become a subtle mechanism of self-defense rather than an occasion for repentance. The Reformation's great recovery of grace must not become a new form of the very disease it diagnosed. Knowing the right words about total depravity, the covenant of grace, and the mediator does not exempt anyone from the need to actually be humbled by them. Theology is not armor against repentance — it is, rightly received, the road toward it. Context Is Not Just Setup — It Is Part of the Lesson Tony and Jesse both emphasize that Luke 10:21–24 is not merely throat-clearing before the real content begins. The theological statement embedded there — that the Father has hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to little children, that no one knows the Son except the Father or the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him — is the hermeneutical key to everything that follows. The lawyer approaches Jesus as one rabbi testing another. But Luke has already told his readers that this is not a conversation between equals debating interpretive options. It is the Lawgiver being questioned by someone who does not recognize Him. The parable that follows is not just an answer to a legal question. It is a revelation — the kind that only happens when the Son chooses to give it. Memorable Quotes You do not want to pit the law against the one who has given the law, the one whose character is represented in the law — because you're always going to get owned, and you'll get owned before you realize you've just gotten owned on multiple levels. - Jesse Schwamb Jesus is trying to sort of reorient them back to the true paradigm of grace that is present under all of the Old Covenant administrations. It's not so much a matter of developing a new framework and imposing it on this guy. It's really trying to say, 'Listen — think about this for a second. Think about the fact that, yes, you know you have to love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole strength, your whole mind, and you have to love your neighbor as yourself. You've answered correctly. If you can do those things, you will live.' — with the subtext: and of course you cannot possibly do those things. - Tony Arsenal The fundamental human problem is not primarily ignorance, but the will's bondage and the heart's self-love. It's a problem no amount of correct discipline or doctrine alone can fix apart from some kind of regenerating grace — which is exactly what Jesus is going to illustrate for us in the mercy he's about to display in this parable. - Jesse Schwamb Full Transcript Tony Arsenal: [00:00:00] This parable is not primarily about us figuring out how to do mercy ministry. Like, that's important. It's probably an outcome of this. It's probably something for us to think about. But really, this is actually Christ saying, like, "Hold on a second here, dude." Like, "Let's just think about this." Do you need someone who is going to tell you to pick yourself up off your bootstraps and cross to the other side of the street and leave you to your own devices? Or do you need someone who's gonna throw you on their donkey, who's gonna bind up your wounds, who's gonna pay the innkeeper, and is gonna pledge to pay everything that is owed for your salvation? Right? That's not too on the nose here, I think. Welcome to episode 502 of The Reformed Brotherhood. I'm [00:01:00] Jesse  And I'm Tony, and this is the podcast with ears to hear. Hey, brother.  Jesse Schwamb: Hey, brother. Well, we've got a big one to talk about on this episode. We're marching further and further into all of the glorious parables Jesus told as part of His teaching. And as you and I kind of joked before we began, I mean, what did you call it? Did you say this is, uh, the big daddy?  Tony Arsenal: It's the big daddy, one of the big daddy parables.  Jesse Schwamb: It's one of the big daddy parables. Now, this one is probably second maybe only to the prodigal son. Yeah But in terms of its ubiquity and its kind of just common knowledge in culture, this one ranks right up there. And before I reveal what it is, which you may already know, I was thinking how so many times we look at the Beatitudes as expression of a master class in Jesus teaching the law, and I think that's true. But as I was reading and thinking about this particular parable, I thought, "I don't know. I think this one is, uh, right up there," because [00:02:00] this is like law on law. It's double law. Yeah It's law coming back at the law giver who's trying to use the law to test Jesus, and then Jesus tests him with the law that He himself gave His people. It's... I'm already getting too excited- ... and we've got something to do before we get there. But we're talking about the parable of the Good Samaritan. And so I can't imagine, can I just make a prediction up front? I, you know where I'm going with this, and probably everybody else does. Uh, this is gonna be like two conversations-  Tony Arsenal: At least ...  Jesse Schwamb: probably.  Tony Arsenal: Yeah, at least two.  Jesse Schwamb: Is that fair? Because I realize we, of course, wanna get to the parable itself, and oh, my goodness, how much ink has been spilled. Even going back to, like, if you read, like, Augustine or, like, the early church, like the Patristics, the Church Fathers, there are so much that could be said, and maybe some stuff that just shouldn't be said about all the allegorical potential intent here about these characters. But [00:03:00] there's so much amazing stuff that happens in the opening of this, that's not just the setup, but it is its own lesson, and I'm real excited actually to talk about that with you before we even get into, like, all the good stuff that everybody expects that you wanna talk about. So we're gonna do it all. Tony Arsenal: Yeah.  Jesse Schwamb: We're gonna do it all, but it'll take time.  Tony Arsenal: Yeah. I'm interested to see if we're even on the same page about where to start reading, 'cause I, I think we might not be, and that's gonna be fun. So we'll, we'll let it fly and see what happens. It'll be our own little, uh, podcast game.  Jesse Schwamb: But, uh, I think- Well, I mean, we're gonna be in Luke chapter 10, but I guess to your point, we should be starting in Luke chapter one to get to this. Yeah.  Tony Arsenal: Exactly. But  Jesse Schwamb: we, we do have to back up quite a bit, and I was gonna ask you about that. Yeah. But I, apparently we're just gonna play that on the fly and see where we go.  Affirmations Denials Segment Jesse Schwamb: But of course, the Reformers had their five solos. Chalcedon had its, what, seven withouts. We've got opinions, and we're just as confident about ours, so of course it's time for affirmations, denials, where we affirm something that we think is good or awesome or [00:04:00] we wanna recommend, and we deny, again, something that is not so great or maybe just plain annoying. So before we talk about the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Tony, what do you got for us on this episode? Are you affirming with something, or are you gonna come in with a denial?  Tony Arsenal: Well, I've got two affirmations. That's fine. One is just- I will allow it ... a declaration of joy, and one is, like, a real affirmation. I, I just can't... It would be remiss of me not to share with our podcasting family that my son August and my daughter Adeline, uh, joined the visible church today as- Hear, hear ... uh, non-communicant members. Uh, Augie and Addie were baptized on the 16th of August of 2026, uh, into the visible church, into the name of Jesus Christ. Uh, was, it was just a great service. Um, it's funny because I've been- been talking with Augie. One of the thing with toddlers when you're doing something big like this is you kinda have to talk about it and practice and rehearse, rehearse it and, and get them ready for it. And up until maybe, like, I don't know, three days [00:05:00] ago, every time it would come up he would be saying, "I don't wanna be baptized. I don't wanna be baptized." And, um, you know, I, I, I, you know, I don't wanna force him to do something, but also, like, I make him eat vegetables. But, um- ... he, I, I think it was nerves, and I think something clicked in his head and all of a sudden he was very excited to be baptized. So, um, it was great. We've been talking about, you know, what baptism is, God's promise to you that if you trust him he'll save you. And so today he- Right ... he was like, "God's gonna make a promise to me to save me." So he was very excited. Nice. And he did a great job just standing quietly and listening to the pastor talk. Uh, and Addie was, was, was just a beautiful little girl, and she, um, she loved it as well. So that's just a bonus affirmation. I don't know that I could get through a podcast without gushing over that.  Glorify App and Devotionals Tony Arsenal: Uh, but the, the affirmation I have, uh, this is an, an app that I think some of our listeners may have heard of. Um, some may roll their eyes at it, to be honest with you. Um, I stumbled on this because, uh, you have an Oura Ring, don't you, Jesse? Jesse Schwamb: I do.  Tony Arsenal: You [00:06:00] do, yeah. So for those who don't know, an Oura Ring is like a little wearable ring that's like a, almost like a fitness tracker, but it tracks biometrics, pulse rate, temperature, all these different things, sleep. Um, there's a startup, uh, that has been doing a GoFundMe or a funding kind of thing for, uh, what they're calling like a Christian version of an Oura Ring. So it does a lot of the same things, sleep tracking, basic biometric tracking. Hmm. But it also has like alerts built in, and it's tied into an app that they use for devotionals. So it'll, it'll remind you to pray. It'll remind you, you know, bring you to an app to do a devotion. But the app it uses is a standalone app that I looked up, and it's called Glorify. Have you ever heard of this app before this evening? I have heard of  Jesse Schwamb: this, yeah.  Tony Arsenal: So Glorify is just a small devotional app. Uh, it's not much different than you would expect based on the name. It is connected to this, uh, to this Glorify ring, which again is, is sort of like an Oura Ring tied into this app. But this app basically is, is [00:07:00] designed to help you complete short daily devotional exercises, and they're usually very brief. They're based on a very brief, um, a very brief passage of scripture. Today's passage, uh, c- there's a quote. So today's quote is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It says, "True love does not consist in finding the perfect person, but in faithfully loving an imperfect one." Not sure why this devotional app is using a romance, uh, quote from Bonhoeffer of all people. But that was today's. Um, and the passage is Proverbs 5:15-17. So it's a, it's a devotional based on two verses, which is fine. So you read the passage. There's a very brief devotional on that passage, and then sort of a guided prayer, and they have both premium and free models. The premium model includes like you can listen to the devotional, you can listen to the prayer. Um, but just for example, today's prayer, it, it's very simple. "Loving Father, thank you for, uh, thank you because you're faithful and unchanging. In a world [00:08:00] marked by broken promises, disposable relationships, you remain the same. Teach me to reflect that faithfulness in my relationships. Help me to love with perseverance, grace, and commitment following the example of Christ. Protect marriages, strengthen families, restore what needs healing. May every relationship be marked by respect, truth, and genuine love. Shape in me a heart of integrity that honors you in both the small and significant choices of life. In Jesus' name, amen." So I think what I love about this, and this, I mentioned last week that there was, this is kind of like, sort of like the fluffy evangelical devotions. Like- Right ... there's not a ton of like solid doctrinal meat- But like, it's still nourishing. And sometimes we need a little bit of help. Sometimes we don't know what to pray, we don't know what to read, we're not sure. Sometimes in, I think in our Reformed circles, we feel like if we're not reading large portions of scripture and reading deep theological treaties or long, complex devotionals, that we're really not doing anything, and that's just not the [00:09:00] truth. So I've been using this in addition to other devotional studies I'm doing. I don't do it every day. I mean, there's some like streak functionality, kinda like habit tracking type stuff that's built into it. Um, but it's nice. It's nice to be able to pick it up, read a very short scripture, a brief devotional thought, and then have some guided prayer. I know one of the reasons I don't pray as often as I ought to is because I struggle to know what and how to pray. So even having some written prayers, I mean, this is why the Psalms are good, things like the Valley of Visions are good. Um, having some pre-written prayers that you genuinely pray but you're not having to come up with in the moment can really help. Right. So the app is called Glorify. I know it's available on iPhone. I'm not sure about Android. I'm sure it probably is. I'm sure they wanna have a pretty broad ecosystem. Um, and, and it's good. Again, it's, it's not anything fancy. It's not anything like super technical. Uh, and as I kind of alluded, like some of it's a little weird. Um, I, I didn't read the proverb. I think maybe the proverb is about romantic relationships, why they're, why they're tying in that, um, Bonhoeffer quote in, in the prayer. [00:10:00] But, um, even that, like it's pretty innocuous. And the quotes, like you don't have to read the quotes. It's not like you have to have to do that. Um, you could jump in, just read the scripture or just read the devotion and just do the prayer and you would be fine. So check it out. It's called Glorify, available on iPhone for sure. I'm pretty sure it's on, on Android. And maybe it's something you add daily, you know, this kinda thing like you do when you're on the bus or you're waiting at the grocery store, something quick you can do when you might be wasting that time just sorta sitting around or scrolling Twitter. Again, Twitter's fine. You can use your leisure time as you see fit. But if you wanna fill it with something like this, something that is more spiritual, then this would be a good option to just add a little bit of, uh, a little bit of nourishment to your diet where you might not otherwise be getting it  Jesse Schwamb: I have no proof of this, but I just keep saying it anyway. It might be that we're living in the golden age of really great- ... daily worship resources. Like, something to actually cultivate, not just, like, a devotional nugget, but something that actually leads you into a pattern and a habit of [00:11:00]worship, giving your attentive focus on Jesus. And I love that. So, uh, uh, 'cause I was just thinking, like, I was trying to look back on some of our past affirmations here. We've talked about the book Walking in Faith. I just gave everybody Awake My Soul last week. You're coming in with the Glorify app. I- we've talked about Dwell, if not recently, we've talked about that for some time. It's like a great Bible reading app, and there's lots and lots of new features, by the way, coming out on that- Yeah that are fantastic. And then, yes, all these other great prayers. I, I see, like, these books on prayer, like, actually, I'm sorry, like, prayer books, I guess, as, like, a great way to kinda... It's like a jumper for your car. You know what I mean? Like, just gets you started. What a, what a lovely thing to come into a place and have a launching pad. And I've been using a lot of Into His Presence, which is a collection of Puritan prayers, sometimes because, for instance, this just happened, where I wanted to pray for someone who was just going through a rough time, a good friend of mine. And I went to that place to kinda start and frame, knowing that I was gonna sit down with him and pray, how I might be able to do that well and [00:12:00] effectively. And these things are just, like, really phenomenal resources. It's just an amazing time to have all these things at our disposal. So that's another great option. It's, it's really more about, like you and I have talked about, Tony, like, whatever gets us into that pattern, whatever gets us, like, authentically experiencing under our own volition, coming in the discipline of sitting before God in daily worship with that expression being pretty broad in its representation- Yeah is to really include something of devotional time in the scriptures, memorization, metabolation, metabolizing. Metabolation, I'm just gonna make that up as, like- ... what happens when you, when you take the scripture and metabolize it into your own life. Meditating on it and, you know, again, maybe looking through the confessions and creeds that have shaped our distilled understanding of what the scripture teaches so that we're enhancing and edifying our mind. We're also engaging the heart, and then we're engaging God and ourselves in communication with Him through prayer. I'm all for anything [00:13:00] that gets us into those rhythms, reminds us of the importance of them, and like we talked about last week, makes it so that when we think about what it means to be married to Christ, so to speak, it's not just about whipping out some kind of marriage certificate to prove that, but that we actually have a frame and a behavioral pattern that fits a married person, that- Yeah how they act, how they think, how they behave, how they communicate, they're never too far away from their lovely spouse in some way or another. And so I think that these tools are great ways to get us exactly into that kind of mindset and practice.  Tony Arsenal: Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, like, I think- In our Reformed circles, we can, you know, we, we tend to be maybe a little eggheaded, and we, we tend to be a little more intellectual and, and a little more, I don't know, studious. And there's nothing wrong with that. Um, but I think sometimes it can breed a sort of, uh, elitism and arrogance. Sure. Uh, this is a perfectly valid devotional tool. Yes. Mm-hmm. And, and I think, [00:14:00] you know, kinda like the old adage, like, well, what's the best translation of scripture? Well, whichever one you're gonna read. Exactly. Like, what's the best devotional tool? Whichever one you're gonna use, whichever one's actually gonna bring you into the Word, uh, on a, on a regular basis. Um, and again, like, two verses of the scripture is two verses of the scripture that you might- Right ... not have other spent time, otherwise spent time reading. And it really is short enough, and it saves your progress. Like, you can do, you can do the quote in the morning, and then you can check the scripture on the way to the, you know, the word work, on a stoplight or whatever. Um, if you have the, the paid subscription, you can listen to this stuff, you know, on the, the bus or whatever. Um, so check it out. Glorify app, they have a ring they're making. It's in funding, I guess, if you wanna check it out, you can check that out too. I am neither affirming nor denying whatever this Glory ring is, Glorify ring. But, um, but yeah, the app is great. The, the app is free, and it's, it's worth even just checking out and adding once in a while to your day  Jesse Schwamb: The glory ring or the glorify ring sounds like almost too Tolkien, even for me  Tony Arsenal: Yeah. Yeah. It's the one ring to rule all of your devotions. [00:15:00] Uh, and in the, and in the morning bind them. Jesse, save me from the trail I was about to go on, and, and I was gonna speak in the language of Mordor, I think, on accident. Uh, save us from this. What are you affirming or denying?  Jesse Schwamb: That's  Tony Arsenal: beautiful. Please tell me it's the language of Mordor. Elvish AI and Music Pick Jesse Schwamb: Uh, no, but can I just say at the risk of really taking us really far afield so early on, which is not necessarily off-brand for us, I have done this... I, I don't know if I should be ashamed by this or I should be excited by this. But- ... um, the Elvish tongue in the Tolkien universe-  Tony Arsenal: Oh, no. ...  Jesse Schwamb: is like, there's several... If you're super nerdy, you'll know there's like several different kind of iterations or formulas of it, and there's no, like, official language like Klingon, but there ha- it has been studied, and basically, like, it's kind of like the Eugene Peterson of the language. Like, there's, like, just kind of a dynamic equivalent or an expression of words. Anyway, all that to say- ... there's several languages that, uh, Microsoft Copilot will just not [00:16:00] translate because it says, like, "This one, this language doesn't actually exist. There's not enough for me to do anything." Let me tell you something. Tolkien Elvish is not one of those languages, and I actually built an agent, because I have a coworker who can, uh, who can appreciate all this stuff, that takes a text, translates it into this kind of academic high-level Elvish from Tolkien, and then translates it back to English. That makes anything you're saying way better and far more poetic and just absolutely amazing. So if you wanna have some fun, go and do that with whatever your favorite AI model is. Anyway, that's free of charge. Real quick, my affirmation is more music. It just turns out I've found this band, and I've been listening to them a lot. The band's name is Thronebreaker, which is just a phenomenal name, I think, for any group. Uh, it's amazing. Uh, th- this is... I'm gonna read you their description from Spotify. It just says, "Thronebreaker is Christian metalcore built for the bruised, the doubting, and the ones still fighting their way home." And what I've really been [00:17:00] loving about them is it is kind of like Wolves at the Gate adjacent. It's really lovely music. It is melodic, so it's, there's not just that there's that kind of hard edge, but that is present in it. But, uh, the music is really lovely and beautiful, and in part that's because they're going through this, like, drip of releasing music where they're taking, like, old hymns or maybe songs if you're of a certain age like I am of kind of childhood Sunday school- And they're taking the lyrics, not the melody, and they're reimagining them. So they have two versions of Jesus Loves Me that they just released. They have the old We're Gonna Cross, a song called Glory to the King Most High. These songs are just saturated with gospel. Like, they're just all power, all encouragement, and all authority represented in Jesus Christ. They're incredible, and I've j- where I've, what I've been really blessed by is these two versions of Jesus Love Me are just fantastic. Like, they're orchestral. There is a children's kind of chorus at one point, and it got me [00:18:00] singing that song again, and really, maybe to what you were saying before, Tony, like sitting in those three words, which are really phenomenal words to hear. And so I have been surprised at how moved I've been by what really I, I first understood, of course, as a children's song with simple truth that seems, you know, depending on how long you've known some part of the gospel, obvious. And yet I found them all new again, and a, a really lovely way of just sitting in the truth of God in music that I didn't expect to find. So if you're interested in any of that or maybe just curious of what it would sound like if a Christian metalcore band took Jesus Loves Me and turned it into their genre, then honestly you should just go check out Throne Breaker. I mean, you pretty much have to at this point.  Tony Arsenal: I, I don't ever have anything to add to your musical affirmations or denials, 'cause I, I just don't. What I do have to add is that Throne Breaker actually sounds like some sort of really [00:19:00] amazing, like, mace-type weapon in Lord of the Rings. Yes.  Jesse Schwamb: Yes,  Tony Arsenal: it does. Or like a big hammer that a dwarf carries. And I would also like to say that if you ask Google Gemini to translate something into Tolkien English, it not only will do it, it will tell you how to pronounce it.  Google Elf: A ava aini Ilai amel i trona se.  Tony Arsenal: What do you think that was, Jesse?  Jesse Schwamb: No idea.  Tony Arsenal: First of all, that was elevated Quenya, a Quenya. Yes.  Jesse Schwamb: Yes, that's  Tony Arsenal: the one. Classic Quenya.  Jesse Schwamb: Yes.  Google Elf: A leta Ilai amel aima.  Tony Arsenal: I would be willing to bet... Actually, let's do this.  Jesse Schwamb: Ugh.  Tony Arsenal: Uh, we don't give out prizes very often. Uh, I will say to anyone who can tell me what that is, the first person that emails, uh, or, or goes into the Telegram chat, we'll do this. We'll be professional podcasters and drive people to one of our channels. Here we  Jesse Schwamb: go.  Tony Arsenal: The first person who goes to our telephone, our Telegram chat and tells me what that [00:20:00] means, what that, uh, Elvish means, will get a Reformed Brotherhood T-shirt.  Jesse Schwamb: Oh, that is big.  Tony Arsenal: Yeah.  Jesse Schwamb: That-  Tony Arsenal: So I'm gonna, I'm gonna play it one more time.  Jesse Schwamb: Okay, here we go. Everybody listen. Every- All right, pull over. Stop your vehicles. Here we go.  Google Elf: A leta Ilai amel aima.  Tony Arsenal: There it is, everybody.  Jesse Schwamb: I'm not being a cry- I have a guess, but I, I, I wanna try to win the T-shirt, so I'm gonna- Yes ... wi- withhold. All right. Uh, yeah, that's, that's super fun. Did it, um... Did you also translate it back into English from that  Tony Arsenal: just to see- No, I'll do that later, 'cause that would give away the, that would  Jesse Schwamb: give away the prize. Yeah, it's, it's... We'll have to save that for next week, because that, that is the fun. It creates, like, what I was doing to, to have fun with this coworker is take very technical, like, work-related emails, and I would send it through. It would go through that iterative process, and I actually loved how it, it was talking. Like, it wa- this was an email about risk, and it, it gave, like, these beautiful grand metaphors that didn't sound corny or cheesy. That's the beautiful thing. That's amazing. It [00:21:00] was like true Elvish. Like, you were just like, "I wish I spoke that way all the time about, about risk." And it, like I said, it wasn't just like... You could, you could obviously throw something in and be like, "Make this Shakespearean," or, you know, "Make this, you know, sound like, you know, Milton." This is way better. This is way better, because it's not, like, actually trying to manipulate what you're saying. It's takes, like, the dynamic equivalent of what you said, then translates it back with way more kind of poetic infrastructure while maintaining, like, the essential meaning that you have. I'm, I'm selling this too hard. Everybody just has to go out and try it. So, all right, you know what's at stake here, but here's how you have to win this. If you want a chance, if you want a chance at winning this, you gotta go to t.me/reformedbrotherhood, t.me/reformedbrotherhood, and that link will take you to the Telegram app and our little corner of it, and you're gonna find there's a bunch of chats there. You gotta go to the affirmations or denials chat, and then you gotta put in what is the translation of what Tony just played.[00:22:00] I just love... Isn't it amazing, though, that, like, y- as you discovered, there's more than one version of Elvish available? Yeah. And they do differentiate between the various kinds. This is a big deal. I learned there are actually scholars who have, like, again, filled in kind of like the details of the language- Oh, yeah taking as a basis what Tolkien had there. Yeah. So I think that this is the best. We couldn't have conceived of this if we'd actually tried and planned for it, so-  Tony Arsenal: It's true ...  Jesse Schwamb: it's just better that it all happened in, in real time. It's true. And, and speaking of which, I think now we get to have the fun of figuring out, uh, where in Luke chapter 10 are we gonna begin? Or should we just start in Luke 1 and just let's see how far we can get reading  Tony Arsenal: in this- I could have, I could have Google Gemini read it in elevated Kenya, Quenya I did try to get it to put it in Sindarin, and it wouldn't do it for some reason. I'm not sure. Maybe this anti-Sindarin bias in Gemini,  Jesse Schwamb: man. Disappointing.  Tony Arsenal: It's disappointing.  Jesse Schwamb: Dis- disappointing. So let's kick off some Good Samaritan talk, which again, I think is gonna take us [00:23:00] through maybe in the next couple of conversations, in part because, like I said, we're not even gonna start at, uh, verse 25 because there is so much more that needs to be said, I think, before that. Tony Arsenal: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think actually the proper place to start this, and I, I'm guessing Jesse probably, whether he was there or not, he probably figured out where I was going, uh, over the course of the last 20 minutes or whatever. Um, I actually think the proper place to start, at least one of the proper places to start, is in verse 21. Yeah. Um, and I- we'll talk about why that is. And I'll... I'm gonna read here, um, 21, uh, through the end of the parable. Uh, and this is Jesus talking. He says in this, uh... Well, it, this is, um... Yes, uh, I'll just read it here. "In the same hour He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, 'I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for such was Your gracious will. All things have been handed over to Me by My Father, and no one who knows who the Son is except... No, no one knows who the Son is [00:24:00] except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Himself.'" Then turning to the disciples, he said privately, "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see and did not see it, and hear what you hear and did not hear it." And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?" And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live." But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and he saw him and passed on the other side. So likewise a Levite, [00:25:00] when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. And he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, saying, 'Take good care of him. Whatever you, whatever more you spend I will repay you when I come back.' Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" And he said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "You go and do likewise."  Jesse Schwamb: I think you're right, of course, to back us up into verse 21 because I don't want to keep saying it's always a setup, but Jesus is certainly giving us like the right context in which... Well, Luke of course is the author here and as he's explaining the teaching of Jesus, he does so well to start out with some irony that we don't realize is gonna be ironic until we get to the, to verse 25 [00:26:00] when we realize who's testing Jesus, who's setting this all up. So this idea that the Holy Spirit, everybody rejoicing in the Holy Spirit and the knowledge and the wisdom, the intelligence that's revealed through the Holy Spirit to all of these lesser people and in particular here emblematic the infants That here we have kings and rulers, and in this case, this beloved scholar of the law, who all have this adventure in missing the point. They think, in fact, they're looking for the one who is to set them free, and they can't even see that it's Him who is before him. And yet, incidentally, God has already revealed all these things to the lowest, to the ones who are the most humble, the meek, the mild, the down and outs, the ones who are weak by the view of everybody else. And so it's amazing that if we just kinda, again, like blow past it into, like, just all the characters, we don't see that the teaching starts actually well above this, that even everything we're about to understand, that unfolds in our lives, ev- every spiritual incarnation and insight that we have [00:27:00] first starts with God himself in his revealing it to us both in his general revelation, but of course, in the specific revelation of his teaching. So I like that you started us there, because I, I'm with you. That's where this whole thing launches off, right?  Tony Arsenal: Yeah.  Parables Reveal and Conceal Tony Arsenal: Yeah, and as we come into when we very, like very start of this, uh, series, the, the parable series, Jesus sort of embeds a theology of parables into this introduction, right? Or I should say Luke does. But this, uh, this is written a- as though all of this is occurring as sort of one event. Right. And likely it was, right? So sometimes, uh, in the Gospels, events are kind of, like, moved next to each other for thematic reasons. It's possible that that's the case. It seems like this may have actually just been one, one teaching, and I'll, I'll talk about why that is in a second here. Um, but at the very least, this is placed next to each other in the Gospel almost as, like a, "Here's the theology of parables. Now, here's actually that happening in real [00:28:00] time."  Jesse Schwamb: Yes.  Tony Arsenal: And then also, like, a parable kinda demonstrating it, right? So the theology of the parable here is that there are many prophets, kings who desire to see what it is that, that, uh, uh, the disciples are seeing, right? And all things have been handed over to the Father or to, to the Son, by the Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father. No one who knows who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal, right? So the, the theology of parables here presented in Luke is that the parable itself is being used as a way to reveal the Father and the Son to those whom the Son chooses to reveal it to. The Lawyer as the Fool Tony Arsenal: And that leaves us with this lawyer, um, sort of playing, playing the fool in almost like a dramatic sense, right? In a lot of drama, there's kind of like the fool character who's sort of like the foil or the idiot of the thing who's, who's unaware and is almost like made an example of, right? Um, I, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but there's often a character in a play who's like, uh, it's [00:29:00] almost like the opposite of the everyman, right? The everyman in a, in a play- Right ... or in a movie is sort of like the outsider who things gets explained to, and he's sort of the proxy for, for the audience. Um, I think like, um, Hawkeye in Avengers is kind of the everyman. He's sort of just like this regular dude swept up in this thing, and oftentimes he's the one that, uh, the big characters are explaining things to. And really what that is is the big characters are explaining that to the audience through this proxy. There's also this concept of the fool in a lot of these plays or movies who's sort of like the dummy, the idiot of the play, who things are explained to, and it's still a way to explain it to the audience, but the character doesn't get it. And so that's kind of, kind of the role that this lawyer is playing in this, this narrative here. He, he steps forward. He's like, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answers his question, and then in this like sort of like stunning moment of, like unawareness, he's trying to justify himself. He says, "Well, who is my neighbor?"[00:30:00] As though that's a question that needed to be asked, right? I think, like, we sort of think of it as like, "Oh, yeah, that's a valid question." I actually don't think it is. Like, it's pretty obvious, in the Old Testament at least, who your neighbor is. It's the people who live immediately with you. It's the other people of Israel. It's the people in your immediate concentric circles, the people you have direct access to. Um, and so then Jesus explains it through this parable, and whether or not he gets it at the end, I guess is maybe a little bit unclear. We can talk about that as we get there. But at least in the beginning, he's portrayed as this sort of, like, fool who doesn't understand what Jesus is saying, and then this parable is taught. So it's this theology of, um, revelation to those whom it is intended to, and further obscuring from those it's intended not to, not to illuminate, which is identical. Uh, maybe it's a different flavor of the same thing, but it's the same thing as what Matthew had and what Jesus taught- Right ... in Matthew with the parables. Jesse Schwamb: Right. It definitely is, again, illustrating, again, God's divine prerogative. I think you really have to do a lot of theological gymnastics [00:31:00] to try to work yourself out of a place here that says, like, "Well, this, this knowledge is accessible to all people."  Tony Arsenal: Right.  Jesse Schwamb: That if somehow we just work hard enough, study hard enough, come even before God with the right attitude or do the right things, that somehow all this will be made plain to us, and that's certainly not the truth here. In fact, again, the ironic setup is you have this lawyer asking this question, which creates this strange contrast because here's a man trained in the law, and he approaches the very wisdom of God to test him while the little children already perceive what this fool cannot. So it's irony upon irony, and then I, I like what you're saying. I think, and we'll get to this to anticipate a bit, I'm reading this as he's hoping that the answer to whom is my neighbor, just like he- he's received the affirmative from Jesus saying, "Yes, you understand. Go and do these things. This is life," and we'll get to all of what that means, I think, as well in terms of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. But I think he's hoping that the definition of neighbor is gonna mean that he has [00:32:00] already accomplished the thing then, so that if there's somehow- Yeah ... he could just set the right boundaries. He could say, "Ah, yeah, I'm already good then, Jesus. I already, already did all that stuff." So- It's wild to me that it, it all starts with, of course, like some kind of scribal specialist in the Torah, of course, likely some kind of Pharisee by theological alignment. And as I'm looking at the notes here, what I find particularly stunning as we start this out is that Luke, of course, is able to speak several times in this parable to the intent. And so he says right away with great kind of fanfare and description that the intent here from this scribal Torah person was to test or to tempt, which is the same verb used of Satan's temptation of Christ and of Israel's testing of God in Deuteronomy 6, which of course Jesus is gonna quote here later on. So it's not, of course, like sincere inquiry, like you're saying. It, it is like adversarial probing. It is like really profound setup. It is dripping with like [00:33:00] ulterior motive. It's seeking to expose Jesus as either like heterodox or as diminishing the law's demands. And I think we've talked about this before, so Tony, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure in one of the previous parables we talked about sometimes how these get set up with this kind of weird like oxymoronic setting. Inherit Eternal Life Debate Jesse Schwamb: So like this question of se- uh, uh, itself, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?  Tony Arsenal: Yeah.  Jesse Schwamb: It's like more than just theologically revealing. Biblically it's self-contradictory, 'cause of course like we talked about inheritance, I think actually when we went through the, the parable of the prodigal. By definition, that's received, of course, on the ba- basis of relationship or promise. It's not earned by performance. And if the inheritance comes by a law, it no longer comes by promise, right? I think that's like Galatians. So the lawyer's question already portray- portrays like some kind of weird works righteous paradigm. E- even if you think he's really after trying to understand the true intent of God's heart [00:34:00] behind the law, he is assuming at least in this question that eternal life is some kind of wage that he can earn rather than a gift to be received by grace through faith. And that's a fundamental error that the entire subsequent exchange, including the parable, is designed to expose. It's both, like you're saying, Tony, he has not learned yet what it means to be in the kingdom of God. He's outside of that, and so he's trying... Now Jesus is bringing in this corrective action, as it were, set up in a story, but he's gonna turn the law on him, which, which I don't wanna get too excited about that yet. But he's... But essentially, here we have somebody who's the expert in the law trying to leverage the law by way of force against the one who he does not understand has all leverage and authority over him, and is in fact the law giver himself So he's gonna, Jesus is gonna drive him to see his own ability to keep the law that he claims to honor, and that's more than just brilliant. This is what the law does. You do not wanna pit the law against the one who has given the law, the [00:35:00] one whose character is represented in the law, because you're always going to get owned, and you'll get owned before you realize you've just gotten owned on multiple levels, and I think that's what basically unfolds here. Tony Arsenal: Yeah. Yeah, I, I have a little bit of a different take on the, the word inherit here. Um, I don't think what you're saying is wrong, um, but I think there's a little different flavor here, and actually, I, I think it, it still sort of propels us forward to the conversation we have to have, um, about the law and the gospel and the covenant of works, the covenant of grace. The, the Greek that lays under this word is, uh, it's a compound word of the word for, like, lot or portion and the word for law. And so, so the, this force of the word is more along the lines of, like, what shall I do to have a legal right to eternal life? Like- Right ... inherit, I think we hear inherit, and we think of, like, um, like what you get when someone dies, and so, like, obviously there's nothing you do to earn it, and that's certainly an element of the way this [00:36:00] word is used in some instances. I think reading this and kind of how, how the rest of the text plays out, this lawyer is coming forward and he's like, "What do I need to do to have a rightful legal claim to eternal life?" Right? We might even be able, and this is where it comes into the covenant of grace, covenant of works k- kind of paradigm. We might even be able to say that what this lawyer or this person comes forward to ask Jesus is, how do I gain, how do I gain the benefits of the covenant of works, right?  Jesse Schwamb: Right.  Tony Arsenal: Yep. That's language that was developed later that's not, not, like, biblical language in terms of, like, the actual language within the text, but that's the force of what he's saying. What must I do to be a rightful legal... Uh, what must I do to have a rightful legal claim on all of the blessings of the covenant of works, is really the question that's here. And so Jesus' answer is so instructive- Right ... 'cause what he says is, "Well, what's written in the law?" Like, he, he basically says, like, "Well, you should be able to tell me, teacher- Exactly of [00:37:00] the law, like, what, what needs to happen there." And there's an assumption on Christ's part that, like, there is an answer. I think sometimes, sometimes we, we, uh, we make an error in thinking that the covenant of works was never attainable, that it's somehow this, like, um, it's almost like a black box. Like, nobody could know what we have to do to, like, obtain eternal life. That's absolutely not the assumption Jesus makes. Jesus not only knows that there's an answer, it's such a straightforward answer that he expects this scribe to be able to answer it, right? And the scribe can, right? The scribe says, "Well, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, your strength, and your neighbor as yourself," right? The summary of the law. Just good old classic Westminster larger, shorter catechism. Where's the law summarily comprehended? Summarily comprehended in the Ten Commandments. And then, then again, I don't know the questions exactly, but then it also, like, says, like, "Where does Christ summarize this?" Well, you should love the Lord your God, and you should love your [00:38:00] neighbor as yourself, right? Covenant Works and Grace Tony Arsenal: So the, the lawyer comes forward and says, "What do I need to do to have a legal right to all of the blessings of the covenant of works?" Christ says, "Well, what do you think?" He says, "Well, you obey the entirety of the law." And he says, "You've answered correctly. Do this. Obey the entirety of the law and you will live." So the parable itself doesn't necessarily speak to this law, gospel, covenant of works, covenant of grace paradigm. The, the parable is used to show that not only does this lawyer know what is required of him, but that he won't do it.  Jesse Schwamb: Right.  Tony Arsenal: And I think that's really key, because even in the parable, within the parable itself, there are these figures that know what they should do, right? I, I think, um, we'll get into it, but there's a lot of ink spilled on almost like, um, explaining [00:39:00] why the priest and the Phar- phar- and the, the Levite almost like did the right thing by going to the other side of the room, and it points to like, well, their priestly and Levitical responsibilities, if they touch a dead body, like they can't do those things, and those things are so important. Like, there's a lot of ink spilled trying to almost explain why what they did is right, when the point of the parable is that actually we all know what the right thing to do in that sense was. And even the most righteous people in the mind of the hearers, the Levites and the priests, the most righteous people, even they don't do what they're supposed to do. Jesse Schwamb: Right.  Tony Arsenal: This, this paradigm, this gospel law paradigm, law gospel paradigm, this covenant of works, covenant of grace paradigm, is so baked into the very like fabric of, of human thought that it's just there. And Christ takes this time to point out to this lawyer, like, "You know what's expected of you." And so that's why the phrase desiring to justify himself is so key [00:40:00] here. I actually think that the, the, the I don't wanna go so far as to say, like, that this person was regenerated in the midst of this conversation, 'cause I don't know that. But I actually think that there's a forward movement of this lawyer as he interacts with Christ that is optimistic. I'm optimistic about it, right? Right. He starts out trying to test Jesus, then he star- then he moves to having a desire to justify himself. I think we hear that, we read that, desiring to justify himself, we automatically think that that's a negative thing. But if we think about justifying himself in terms of what he's talking about, how do I fulfill the obligations of the covenant of works, that's not a bad thing to wanna do. Right. It's not bad to wanna obey God's law and to lay claim to His promises. It's a misguided notion of something we can't accomplish, but in itself, desiring to justify himself is to desire to fulfill the obligations of the covenant of works. That's not necessarily a bad thing. And so I think this is a merciful, a merciful [00:41:00] teaching on Christ's part. He's trying to instruct this guy to say, "Look, you can't do it. And even if you could do it, you wouldn't do it. So let's, let's talk about mercy instead and what that looks like." And that's where we get to kind of the end of the, uh, the end of the parable.  Jesse Schwamb: And again, we have to remember that we know that the intent here is actually to test or try Jesus, so He's certainly being merciful by using this opportunity not to just put him on blast, but to actually provide true instruction. And of course, like, that was, to some degree, this turning the question back would've been, like, a rabbinic pedagogical technique, but theologically, this is what floors me, is from the jump, Jesus refuses to let this man treat Him merely as one more voice among competing rabbis. Yeah. Instead, He holds that lawyer to the standard of God's own revealed word by, like you said, asking not just what does it say, but how do you read it? Mm-hmm. He's pressing not just for, like, some kind of recitation, but for the lawyer's own understanding and application, and Jesus is gonna hold him [00:42:00] accountable to his own hermeneutic. So by, by the time we get the answer, we know as readers, and all those present would've understood, he already knows the right answer, and he's not ignorant to God's requirements. He already summarizes the whole moral law correctly, encompassing both tables of the Decalogue. And so I think that does lead us then to this statement that we probably should spend a little time on, like, do this and you will live, like you introduced for us. Like, what does that even mean? Because i- it's not, like, in my view It's not like a Pelagian or Arminian concession that law keeping actually saves. I mean, it is the covenant of works principle stated truly inexorably that the law as law does promise life to perfect obedience. But that's the exact problem. I, I like what you said that it's not as if we can't understand what it would be to comprehend or contemplate this perfect law and what it means to fall under the covenant of works. It's just that he also presents for us at the same time this covenant of grace in which life is [00:43:00] granted freely through faith in the mediator who alone fulfills all of these laws' demands. So it's wild in this back and forth that's happening here where it's... I don't even know if it's fair to say this is like the most incredible subtext ever. I'm imagining trying to process this in real time and realizing everything that's being said, not just listening to what's being said and like the technical answers going back and forth. But I think like you said, that the Spirit even here is at work, I would like to believe, in the life and at the heart and the mind of this lawyer who's bringing forward this question with nefarious intent first to test and to undermine, and then is being drawn in almost inexorably into this debate to more profound understanding about a covenant based on works that cannot be accomplished, uh, in perfect obedience except through the mediator who organizes and distributes liberally this covenant of grace to his children for whom he has accomplished at least passively and then actively in his obedience in life and death. And so Jesus' reply is, I [00:44:00] think, thus a very genuine like if that functions to expose an impossibility. I, I don't think he's teaching salvation by works here, of course. He is holding out the law's own terms so that the lawyer and everybody else listening, and even us as well, can discover through this narrative which is about to happen the impossibility of self-produced righteousness, which again is what this gentleman is theologically all about. He's trying to justify himself. And that is precisely the pedagogical strategy like Paul uses later when he systemizes all of this by saying that the law was our guardian or school master until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith. I think- Yeah ... and it's only because God is good to us and we might sit in some of this teaching, I think this is all in play. So, so I ask you, like, have I gone too far with all this? Like, how much do you think in the real time was being processed? And maybe that's a horrible question to ask because we know the Spirit does this work of illumination and enlightenment, and we're on the other [00:45:00] side of this and have this time to sit and to kind of parse and to really kind of just be pickled in all of this. But there's so much happening here, right?  Tony Arsenal: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, maybe I'll answer the question a, a little bit of a different way. I think, um- We often can think about Old Testament religion, if we wanna kinda call it that. We think about Old Testament religion as though it was totally uniform and, um, entirely legalistic. Right. Uh, my- the, the listener is gonna panic a little bit when I say this, so please don't freak out, but I, I think N.T. Wright, uh, and some of the new perspective on Paul stuff is a, a little bit helpful in this, in that it gives us a foil to sorta push against. Yes. The new perspective on Paul is this idea that, um- Paul was not saying that Judaism was legalistic and Christianity is a grace-based religion, right? He, m- [00:46:00] um, N- NPP is not, is saying, um, Paul was not correcting New or Old Testament religion. And where they go wrong is that they say that Paul actually retains this concept of covenantal faithfulness, covenantal nomism fidelity. Uh, where I think, where I think they're right is that this idea that, like, the Old Testament religion is entirely legalistic and Paul was just sort of correcting that, I think that's way too simplistic. And the reason I say that is that the Mosaic Covenant for, you know, w- and predominantly this podcast is coming from a sort of Westminster Confession of Faith Presbyterian perspective, give or take, right? The, the broad Reformed tradition would say that the, the Mosaic, uh, covenant, the Davidic Covenant, all of the covenants of the Old Testament, and we can break them up in all sorts of different ways, but all of the covenants of the Old Testament, [00:47:00] um, with maybe the exception of the Noahic Covenant, and there's some debate about that, all of those are They're not just, like, supporting structures for the covenant of grace, but they actually are the covenant of grace in various administrations. If that's true, and of course we believe that it is, if that's true, then the people of those covenants understood that on some level. Right. Right? So to think that, like, people under the administration of the covenant of grace somehow thought that they were operating under a legalistic framework doesn't make any sense. Jesse Schwamb: Yeah,  Tony Arsenal: that's true. So, so where I think that applies here is I think this person coming forward, it's not as though the concept of the covenant of grace... Again, that's language that we would develop later, but the concept that God graciously saves His people by the counsel of His own will, apart from their works of righteousness, apart from their meritorious effort, that God [00:48:00] simply extends His grace and conveys the cov- the blessings of the covenant of works to those who trust in the mediator, those who trust in the one to come, the, the forthcoming serpent-crushing seed, right, if you wanna use- Right language from Genesis 3. The, the idea that God simply graciously conveys the blessings of the covenant of works to those people Um, that's not something that's alien to the Old Testament, right? It's not alien to the, even to the Mosaic economy. The most law-based of all of the Old Testament, um, covenants, even that starts with the concept that these people are God's people who he redeemed out of Egypt, right? Right. The redemption out of Egypt comes before the giving of the law, and the giving of the law is a result of the redemption out of Egypt. So to think that this lawyer comes forward, and again, this had been sort of corrupted and distorted and had become a very works-based, uh, [00:49:00] meritorious-based understanding. But the idea that this framework of a covenant of grace is totally alien to this guy just doesn't, it just doesn't, I think it doesn't play. And so I think rather than us read this as I think sometimes we do, of Christ as kind of like giving this guy, trying to give this guy an entirely new paradigm, or like the rich young ruler is very much a parallel kind of situation. We read this, this guy comes forward, he's like, "What do I gotta do to earn eternal life?" Christ is like, kinda basically says like, "Well, you dum-dum, you can't. And I'm gonna demonstrate for you that you can't by- Right ... taking sort of like this situation that you can't possibly believe that you fulfilled and telling you to fulfill it." That's the outcome of this. We'll get to that when we get to the end of the parable. Um, he's not trying to give them a new paradigm. He's trying, in my opinion, he's trying to sort of reorient them back to the true paradigm of grace that is present under all of the Old Covenant administrations. So it's not so much a matter of like [00:50:00] developing a new framework and impli- like imposing this new framework on this guy. It's really trying to say like, "Listen- Think about this for a second, dude. Think about this, right? Think about the fact that, yes, you know you have to love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole strength, your whole mind, and you have to love your neighbor as yourself, right? You've answered correctly. If you can do those things, you will live. With the subtext, which I think is what you're getting at, the subtext of, like, and of course you cannot possibly do those things. Right. Right. So what's the alternative, my friend? The alternative is not justifying yourself by somehow identifying who the person is that you have to love the most. The, the, the, um, the... Well, we'll get this when we get to the parable itself, but the, the alternative is... This will be interesting, 'cause I'm not sure that we... I don't know where you are on this, but, um, the alternative is that there's someone out there who shows us mercy. [00:51:00] Right. There's someone out there who takes care of our need despite our total inability to do so. Jesse Schwamb: That's right.  Tony Arsenal: That's the alternative to the covenant of works, is the covenant of grace. I m- maybe I'm, like, hinting at it too much, so I'll just say it. Like, Jesus is the Good Samaritan, right? Like, there's something for us to learn about our own justification here and our own- Right ... like, um, our own need to be merciful, to treat people as our neighbors. But just like we talked about when we talked about, like, what does the least of these mean, this parable, uh, I'm totally, like, burying the lede for next, next week, but that's fine. This parable is not primarily about us figuring out how to do mercy ministry. Right. Like, that's important. It's probably an outcome of this. It's probably something for us to think about. But really, this is actually Christ saying, like, "Hold on a second here, dude." Like, "Let's just think about this." Do you need someone who is going to tell you to pick yourself up off your bootstraps and cross to the other side of the street and leave you to [00:52:00] your own devices? Or do you need someone who's gonna throw you on their donkey, who's gonna bind up your wounds, who's gonna pay the innkeeper, and is gonna pledge to play- pay everything that is owed for your salvation? Right? That's not too on the nose here, I think. Right. And, and I really look forward to, like, unpacking that, although maybe we don't need to now, but I think, like, this parable is so much more about how salvation works than it is about, like, what it means to have a good neighbor and to be a good neighbor. I think we get bogged down in that, and I just am really excited to talk more about, like, what I think this parable actually gets at.  Jesse Schwamb: I agree, and it's happening in the contex

2 Timothy 2:22-26 (ESV)Andrew and Edwin discuss how the preacher needs to treat even those who need to be corrected.Read the written devo that goes along with this episode by clicking here.    Let us know what you are learning or any questions you have. Email us at TextTalk@ChristiansMeetHere.org.    Join the Facebook community and join the conversation by clicking here. We'd love to meet you. Be a guest among the Christians who meet on Livingston Avenue. Click here to find out more. Michael Eldridge sang all four parts of our theme song. Find more from him by clicking here.   Thanks for talking about the text with us today.________________________________________________If the hyperlinks do not work, copy the following addresses and paste them into the URL bar of your web browser: Daily Written Devo: https://readthebiblemakedisciples.wordpress.com/2026/08/21/2-timothy-2-gentle-not-quarrelsome/The Christians Who Meet on Livingston Avenue: http://www.christiansmeethere.org/Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/TalkAboutTheTextFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/texttalkMichael Eldridge: https://acapeldridge.com/ 

The Minnesota State Fair is more than a 12-day event - it is a full-on lifestyle choice for 12 days, and Alex Lodner knows exactly how to make the most of it. Sunday's with Stephanie this week will feature my full State Fair Guide with picks, tops and tricks for making the most of the next 12 days at the Minnesota State Fair.Upgrade my subscription now so I don't miss the State Fair Guide.My goal with this newsletter is to help you discover new recipes and share things I am obsessed with. I also like to create short essays about what I am thinking about from time to time. It's like the miscellaneous drawer in my kitchen: a little bit of everything, some dribs and drabs—recipes, essays, helpful ideas, occasional interviews, restaurant suggestions, and more.What will I get as a free subscriber?As a free subscriber, you'll receive a newsletter in your inbox every week on Wednesday with a free recipe. You will be the first to know about any new classes or live cooking events I'm teaching, podcast episodes I'm releasing, etc.What else would I get if I paid to subscribe?Great question! First and foremost, you'll get my gratitude (I appreciate your support!!). I am a freelance creator, which means I work for everyone but no one full-time, so I pay all my own healthcare, buy my own groceries for recipes and shows, and fund my own podcast.You will also get the Sunday Subscriber email in your inbox each week. You will have access to the entire archive of posts, plus exclusive content like extra recipes only for Subscribers (there are 65 currently like this Corn Shrmp and Basil Risotto perfect for Summer), and access to Stephanie's Dish chat. .This chat lets you join the conversation, comment on posts, and engage with other people and me in the Sunday Subscriber community. I also link all my Taste Buds Episodes, Podcasts and appearance clips on the Jason Show so if you are into what I do - its all here posted each week. Subscribing is $8/month or $60/year.Whether you are a first-time visitor trying not to waste a single bite or a seasoned fairgoer looking to level up your annual plan, this episode will help you experience the fair like an insider. Perfect for anyone counting down to the fair, food lovers chasing the best bites, and Minnesota locals who want to make the most of every precious day on the grounds. Alex reveals the must-try new foods on her list, the classics she returns to every year, and the hidden gems that still make the fair feel magical even after decades of visits. You'll discover:* Why Tuesday and Wednesday are the smartest fair days for shorter lines* How to approach the new foods list before the most popular items get swarmed* The off-the-beaten-path favorites Alex never skips* Where to find the cleanest bathrooms, quietest rest spots, and easiest shortcuts* Which fair traditions are still worth your time, from the parade to the llama spectacle to the church dining hallsOriginal Episode TranscriptStephanie Hansen (00:00.724)Hello everybody and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast where we talk to cool people in the food space. And today I'm talking to my friend Alex Lodner. And Alex is someone that I feel like I owe a public thank you to. She would fill in on my radio show a lot in the times when I started going to the cabin quite a bit more and started the garden.And I have become friends with Alex over the years. And Alex is also someone that whenever we think of the Minnesota State Fair, she is someone that comes to mind. She's a fair aficionado. She really has done a lot to help with the fair foundation. And I just am loving to geek out with a fellow friend that loves the Minnesota State Fair. Thanks to coming on the program, Alex.Alex Lodner (00:37.55)Okay, I'll take that.Anytime, of course. My favorite subject. You knew that. You knew that when you got me.Stephanie Hansen (00:53.756)I did. I did. So let's talk a little bit about your love of the fair and how it all started.Alex Lodner (01:01.5)yeah, so you know, the fair is kind of a crazy thing, right? It's this insane time for twelve days. I always say that I suspend my entire personality during those twelve days because I don't like crowds, I don't like fried foods, barn animals, you know, all those things are not something that I normally r seek out. And it just those twelve days are just magic. You just lean in and if you do it right, I think it's a it's aan amazing experience. I hear a lot from people who are who go once a year with their, you know, family of five and they they can't understand why I go an average of eight times. And I always tell them it's a completely different experience. When you go multiple times, you're not trying to fit everything into one day. You find your secret rest spots. You find your favorite foods that are maybe a little bit off the beaten path. We always had our sec secret little spaces where we put our blanket down and let the toddler run around andSo it's a very different experience when you go multiple times.Stephanie Hansen (02:02.629)Yeah, I think so too. There was a couple of years where Steph, my radio partner on Weekly Dish and I recorded a podcast and we would meet out there every day and record the podcast. We got a lot of cool behind-the-scenes stories, and just the pace feels different. The fair is like it's like a mini city that happens for 12 days in our state. The rest of the state, believe it or not, sort of comes to a silent pause.It has its own police force, it has mm people that sleep out there for weeks. It really is just like this weird microcosm of something that only happens once a year in our state, and it's actually pretty joyful.Alex Lodner (02:48.458)Exactly. And I used to live a mile away. And so when when my daughter was little, there would be a little parade of strollers of us going back and forth from the fair. We'd go back to the house for a nap. We go back to the fair. And so it really again, when you're right there, it's a very different experience. And the only thing I would say is do not try to go to the Target Roseville during the twelve days of the fair. It empties out, there's no produce.But other than that, it's just it was always so fun to live in that neighborhood. You're you're just in the thick of it. It's it's really it's quite a high.Stephanie Hansen (03:24.741)Yeah, yeah. When we think about the fare, one thing that people talk about a lot and I feel like I just want to address up front is expense, particularly in a year where people aren't feeling flush with cash. it is an expense. It is an expense to go with your family of four or five. Tickets are, I think, $20 unless you've bought them in advance.Alex Lodner (03:47.392)At the door, yeah. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (03:49.002)And you know, food is gonna be expensive because we've seen food costs go up 33% in the last two years. There is a large minimum wage in our state. So yeah, it isn't necessarily a value proposition. There are good values to be had and there are deals to be had. The blue ribbon book is probably the best thing to do.Alex Lodner (04:12.226)Fantastic deal. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (04:14.811)you get like a lot of discounts. There's two for ones and just going on the right days. Like if you're going on senior day or kids' day. So without not I don't want to lay belabor the costs of the fair because I don't it ruins the experience, but it is a thing.Alex Lodner (04:29.88)But it's a thing. It's a definite it's a definite factor. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. And again, I say we used to go every day. I understand that that's not an easy task for most. It's because we live so close. There's the cost of parking, there's a cost of just driving there from Elk River or wherever you're coming from. I have talked to the marketing department off and on in the years about doing a a punch card or a a passport of some sort, but it's just never really gone through.Stephanie Hansen (04:58.801)Yeah, it's a great idea. Cause I think it feels like since COVID, the fair has become even more wild because people couldn't go for the COVID times. And so now it's like people realize what a treasure it is and they don't want to miss it. When you plan your state fair, and are you planning yours already for this year?Alex Lodner (05:24.59)Did you really just ask me that? I'm offended. I'm offended. Yes, I'm planning the state fair this year. Well, so here's a side note. I've actually, other than covering the fair for I don't know, almost 20 years, I've also worked off and on for some vendors there. And this year I'm working for a vendor there. It'll she'll go unnamed, but I'm working for a vendor there. A friend of mine owns a a new vendor. So I'm going to be there.Stephanie Hansen (05:25.937)I'm just asking.Yeah.Alex Lodner (05:55.519)Seven shifts, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I will, I will. Yes.Stephanie Hansen (05:57.519)gosh, I can't wait. Okay, you'll have to tell me off air because I'll make sure to pop by and see you. I over the years, so once we stopped doing the podcast I started doing the garden. And unfortunately for me, garden season in Ely is the end of August and the first week of September. So I basically front-load all my fair experiences. I'll be out there Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. And then I'll leave Monday evening and head up to Ely. And then that's sort of the end of my fair time and I start harvesting everything.But I do love kind of having it in that condensed window too, because I get all the early excitement.Alex Lodner (06:37.614)You do. And yeah, you go during the busy days, don't you? Tuesday and Wednesday are the quietest days. And one of my tips is always to go on a Tuesday and Wednesday, regardless of what deals you get. You're just gonna have the shorter lines. It's just not as stressful. But yeah, I I would I do all the things. I go throughout the whole thing. I don't go on weekends. That's kind of I believe I have weekend shifts, but I'll go work and get out.We do not go as patrons during the weekend. That's we leave that for people who can't go during the week.Stephanie Hansen (07:13.404)Yes, I think in the restaurant business we would call that the amateurs. I know, because it doesn't sound very nice and sound sort of elite. Yep. Okay, so day one, you're heading to the state fair, day one, and you're there for not reporting, not work, you're just there for fun. What are like some of your top things to do?Alex Lodner (07:18.528)I was gonna say we call it amateur hour, but I was not going to say that but you did. We always call it nope, that's amateur hour. Yeah, yeah.That you like to do on day one.Yeah. Such a good question. Last year was my first year as a regular folk going to the state fair on day one. And actually Smart and I talked about that. Like this is just so weird. She she did do her her report, but it's just very strange to not have the new list and to not make sure you get everything in. I think on day one, I still do try andgo for the new things that I have circled. So you know, the official foods and the non-official foods, if people know that there are some new foods that didn't make the official cut, but they're just as exciting, sometimes even better. And I do make sure that I hit those. And the reason that I do that is because once all of our colleagues have reviewed everything, it blows up. And so an example of that is the Amish donuts, Peach's Amish donuts.We when was that? Twenty twenty-three, I believe was their first year. And all of us rated at number one. So we go as a group. So I go with I went for MSP with Steph, March and you know, Minmo goes and strip goes. And we all including Jason Mathis and we all rated at our number one or in their top three. Well then now you know the lines are an hour long. And so I'm not saying we're so powerful, but if you can if you candecide what you want to try out of the official and new foods and hit those on day one before the reporters get there and before we release our reviews. That's your only chance of really getting away from those long lines. We went up to the pizza, to the pickle pizza. We were there when the first year we were there, we walked right up to the to the counter and day two history. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (09:31.165)Yeah. Now it's hard. I went, well, I have 14 new fair foods lined up for Jason to try on day one. And then day two, I have 14 beverage things, non-alcoholic and alcoholic things. And we try to really load them up for the first two days so that, you know, he is part of that queue of of influencers, as it were, of people thatAnd I have to say I've done a really good job of anticipating, not only because I have to think about like what he's gonna like, but which ones are gonna hit.Alex Lodner (10:03.427)Which ones will hit?And you do you only use the official foods? Official new foods? Yeah.Stephanie Hansen (10:09.896)I do, I do. And I know that there are a lot of great foods that come out that are on the new but not official food list. Cause each vendor has new items that they're introducing every year and not all of them make them to the new list. but I try to, I mean, we only have X amount of time, so I try to just load them up with as much as I can. Are thereAlex Lodner (10:30.105)Fourteen is a lot. Uhhuh.Stephanie Hansen (10:31.708)Yeah, I think so. I mean of the I think there were thirty-six new, so we're getting at least a third of them in one day. are there things on the new list that will you're excited to try?Alex Lodner (10:35.905)Yes. I actually have it written down because there's so many of them. So I like the I tend to no I notice when I look at all the new foods that I liked best over the years that I go for the more refreshing things. So I won't necessarily I rarely go for the heartier, heavier things, although we'll talk about that in a second. But the mango sticky rice refresher at Chan's Eatery. Do you know where Chanse Eatery is? It's it's in the north end, and not to be confused, there'sAlex Lodner (11:13.561)Chan's chicken and a stick in the South. Different, different vendor. So they have that. I think it's like gonna be a drink, but it almost looks like tapioca pudding situation, but with sticky rice. Really excited about that. the the it's on days two. Yes, so you're looking at as a drink. Yeah. The strawberry sundae tart with Ube at Sarah's tipsies. Sarah's tipsies pies is one of my I always have foods that I repeat.Alex Lodner (11:43.192)I try not to repeat foods ‘cause there's so many, but I have a handful that I repeat and that's always her pies. Usually I do her lemon lemon blueberry. But I'm gonna try the strawberry tart with ube. Ube is, you know, that's the hot thing. It's been for a while.Stephanie Hansen (11:58.739)It's very ubiquitous in TikTok land. It's the purple sweet potato ingredient.Alex Lodner (12:04.191)Ube or Pondan, which is the green. and then the the banana butterscotch barn razor at Farmers Union. Farmers Union can do no wrong in my eyes. Every they just hit out of the park every time. So really excited about trying that. And it's strange because these are all sweet things, which is not normally my thing, but Greater Tater, which is is it a new vendor this year? Or it might have been last year.They're sort of blowing up on on the socials as well. And they're over by the animal barns and I'm curious to try them too. We tr no, we tried it two years ago. It was there's the really big tater tots and they were d yeah, and they were delicious. Not really my thing normally, butStephanie Hansen (12:45.054)The square ones. And that booth, too, they have a child that has special needs. And yeah. Yeah, he's great. And they do a good job of employing kids with special needs. So outside of the fact that the taters are good, really good, you know, you have this whole heartwarming story piece that I always like.Yeah, he's very popular on socials right now. He's adorable. I pretty much just want to meet him, let's be real. But I'll buy a potato too.And then another mention I want to say that I'm probably most excited about is the caramel apple iced tea from Loon Lake. Loon Lake has such good drinks and again, huge line. Always a huge line. You guys, it goes so fast. Give it a chance. Get in the back of that line. It will surprise you how fast it goes. They're very efficient. They have two sides. So the caramel apple one sounds intriguing. And as I'm saying all these, none of these are things that I would be attracted to during the year, but.Stephanie Hansen (13:52.764)Yeah, I have them on my list too. the caramel infused cold foam kinda sounded good.Alex Lodner (14:19.043)Yeah. I mean any any place would have me at foam. Be a chance eatery. I love my foam. A chance eatery. Yes, yes, cheers. a chance eatery. They also have an iced coffee that I'm going to try that either has the Ube or the Pantan foam. So just just make sure that I'm staying hip with the 19-year-old crowd. I'm gonna try those as well. Right?Stephanie Hansen (13:52.764)You do you and you do love coffee.Pandon foam. Huh. I had Pandon for the first time with my friends Heather Jans, the curry diva, who made me a Sri Lankan curry with it in there. And yeah.Alex Lodner (14:19.043)Yeah, I know they'reReally? I only think of it as a sweet ingredient. Ooh.Stephanie Hansen (14:27.055)No, she uses it in almost everything savory.Alex Lodner (14:30.667)Speaking of people who can do no wrong, my goodness. Yeah. Mm-hmm. yeah, so that's that's sort of on the on the official foods and then the not official, I'm really so a must-stop for me is the dairy goodness building, which is not to be confused with the dairy barn. AndStephanie Hansen (14:33.49)Yeah, she's an amazing person andStephanie Hansen (14:50.334)Help me understand where dear goodness is.Alex Lodner (14:53.145)Dairy goodness is in the dairy building. So the dairy building is right across from the haunted house. The dairy barn is where the cows live and it's way down over by the an barn animals. And soStephanie Hansen (14:58.684)Got it. Okay.Stephanie Hansen (15:04.392)And dairy goodness is where the butterheads are carved and you get the milkshakes.Alex Lodner (15:07.481)Correct. And you have that long winding line and you get milkshakes and my favorite is actually always get the Sundays. I always get the strawberry rhubarb sundae. This year their Sunday is called Moose Soda Apple Pie Sunday. If it does not have cinnamon in it, I will be trying it. So Nope. It's the only it's the only food item I don't I'm not allergic. I just strongly dislike it.Stephanie Hansen (15:22.195)Yum.Stephanie Hansen (15:26.076)Yeah, are you not a cinnamon person? Yeah, my producer is allergic to it.Yeah. that must make a a pumpkin spice latte not your favorite thing.Alex Lodner (15:42.788)Well, fall is hard on me. S listen, I no sweets for me in the fall because they like to put that cinnamon garnish on everything and sometimes I'll just order innocently order cappuccino and there'll be cinnamon on it. And s no, dude. I know it's October, but no.Stephanie Hansen (15:57.511)Outside Yeah, outside of the new foods, are there some classics that you go back for year after year?Alex Lodner (16:01.711)Yeah, always. I always, always have the corn. The corn roast. I've researched, you know, Brad's stuff to death. I know where those farms are. That is just the best there is. And if you're skipping on that, it's it's just it's a must-have. Must have. They cook it for an hour. It caramelizes, so it's so sweet. the key lime pie on a stick is a little known stand. Do you know where that is? It's underneath the beginning of the Skyride by the food building. It's sort of tucked in under there. And it's a key lime pie on a stick dipped in dark chocolate. Divine. I think it's yeah. And I don't know that if they raise their prices this year, but year after year it's been five dollars. I don't know what they're doing this year. But that's delicious. it's kind of one of those foods my daughter grew up on. So when she was a toddler, there'd be chocolate everywhere. And and now we still get that.Stephanie Hansen (16:43.336)Okay, I'm gonna try that.Alex Lodner (17:01.133)And then for me the grain belt blue beer over at now it's the Pratna Prize is sponsoring that pavilion. And so that's at the West End. And they started out with the blue beer, which is a blueberry beer, and then they top it with a foam again with the foam theme, and they top it with blue foam. Well, now they've they have Sangria beer that they can tap it with. They can tap it with all sorts of foam so you can mix the flavors. I go classic, blue beer, blue foam. AndStephanie Hansen (17:30.132)They have that raspberry beer flavored ice cream.Alex Lodner (17:34.327)The ice cream. They so this year it's it's double flavored and I cannot remember what the flavor of it. Peach, peach and raspberry. That was a surprising hit. We all dreaded getting that, I'll be honest. For the first year, it w we just were not sure what it was delicious. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen (17:38.76)Peach.Stephanie Hansen (17:50.442)I thought so too. And I think peach and you can either have peach, raspberry, or a swirl. I think that's gonna be a home run.Alex Lodner (17:57.092)I think so too. It was it didn't taste like beer. And again, speaking of suspending my personality for twelve days, I don't think you've ever seen me have a beer other when I'm forced to when I'm reviewing. And I just love that one. It's again very refreshing.Stephanie Hansen (18:09.608)I think I did do the we did the specialty beverages one year together and all the beers and you just were not having any of it. And I was like, Alex, this one is good.Alex Lodner (18:18.735)Well I was like I tastes like the last thirty, but sure. I've ran out of words. I no longer know how to describe this the taste of this beer. Combining all the beverages and all the official foods was just that was brutal.Stephanie Hansen (18:34.44)Yeah, it was a big day for everybody. Okay, let's talk about some non-fair things. Like one of the things that I really encourage people to do is to go to the llama parade.It is just such a weird, kitschy, funny, fun, joyful experience to see people leading around their llamas in costume. They're in costume. It's just this cute, fun, weird Americana thing that I love so much. Do you have other like activities that you do at the fair that kind of check this box?Alex Lodner (18:50.937)We always watch the parade. So at two o'clock there's always a parade through the fairgrounds. We sit in front of the Bailey House, which it's is that big, beautiful yellow country house at the south end. We always sit right in front of it in the same spot every year. I bring a blanket. We have a blanket that I only save for the fair. It's very lightweight. We just always, always watch that the bands are especially a treat. And if you sit in that area or in front of the admin building, you're actually sitting by the sp by the announcer.So the marching bands really tear it up in front of the announcer because that's where the judges are. So that's a little tip of that's where you if you really want to see them display their full talents, sit in front of the admin building in the South End and they'll really pull it out for ya. what else?I'm trying to think to just some other in I meanStephanie Hansen (20:05.064)Well, yeah, and like seed art or crop art has really blown up in the last couple of years. I really enjoy it and I have seen some of the entries on threads that like preview, they're just they blow your mind, they're so amazing. so that's something, but also like don't overlook like just going and going through like the vegetable buildings and seeing like the big pumpkins and the beautiful tomatoes. They're just like these weird little moments of joy of just seeing some of the cool stuff that people make.Alex Lodner (20:31.241)Mm-hmm. The giant pumpkins. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (20:44.594)When I go into the four H building where they do their performances, the kids have plays. That's really fun.Alex Lodner (20:49.687)Right. Yes. And it's a really nice place to rest. It they have nice bathrooms there. They have nice stadium seating and yeah, you're supporting these kids who've planned on this all year. It's in the robotics competitions are in the education building. That's what we always go through the education building. I would say we go through every building, but probably my favorite is International Bazaar. And admittedlyStephanie Hansen (20:44.594)Yeah. What do you like there?Alex Lodner (21:15.831)I just weave. I do all the weaves. I get I'm not wearing it right now, but I get a bracelet from a specific place that's Kitty Corner from Holy Land. I get one every year from there. And I just I've seen it all a thousand times and somehow I just I just still love it. my my daughter used to get the little stuffed animals that that have the little beads in them. So she's got a collection of it's a snake and a dragon and yeah, we justIt's just you know, it becomes really nostalgic after you go for a while. this is maybe food related, but I'd really wanna encourage people to visit one of the dining halls or the Midway Men's Club. It is food, but you know, we used to have ninety some church halls at the state fair from the in started in the eighteen hundreds, of course, that's all there was, but now there's only two left. There's Salem and Hamlin and Hamlin. And Hamlin has been thereStephanie Hansen (22:08.702)Salem and Hamlin. Mm-hmm.Alex Lodner (22:14.091)is since eighteen fifty two or eight fifteen eight or something like that. And so, you know, go sit in there for a minute. It's so lovely to see all the volunteers that work there. Get an un at coffee at Salem, get whatever at Hamlet. It's all good. And just take that moment and sit down at Hamlet. They have the little the red and white picnic tablecloths and you share a table with people and they will often you turn to them and they will tell you how they've you know it's aStephanie Hansen (22:23.092)Get an egg coffee.Alex Lodner (22:42.915)Great grandfather, grandfather, daughter kids, and they will tell you, I've been coming here since I was eight. And so it's just a really take that moment in that you're at the fair, you're experiencing something, whether it's a cup of coffee or whether it's a a llama, you're experiencing it with people who have memories about it. So chatting with with strangers at those community tables is just a favorite of mine. And Midway Men's Club is they've been volunteering.for years those are all volunteers. I don't know how much their burgers are, but they were three twenty five in previous years. Yeah. I mean, I I think maybe. Yeah. And we call them pocket burgers because they wrap them up so nicely that when when we get burgers, we would get one and then or two and get one put in our pocket. And so we theStephanie Hansen (23:16.522)They're always the cheapest. It doesn't they maybe will have to raise their prices, but I I think they were maybe five bucks, but still the cheapest at the fair.Alex Lodner (23:38.274)Apparently it's the coldest beer at the fair. Again, not a beer drink over here, but that's what they claim. And everything is the least expensive there. And again, you're doing some good. They give all their money to the r to activities in Ramsey County, a lot of kids centered activities. They're all volunteers. So just take a minute and not go for the fancy, the colorful, you know, the hot new thing. But remember those classics because we're gonna lose them. So and I just I just really think they deserve a moment.Stephanie Hansen (23:42.268)And the least expensive. Yeah, that's where Stephanie and I always go first thing after the radio show on Saturday morning. We start at the Midway Men's Club. Yep, we have a beer, we have a burger, we thank them for their service and for being there. And theAlex Lodner (24:10.691)The men's club? Yep.Yeah. Yeah. They're the nicest. They're just the absolute nicest people. They have those fun little bar stools you can sit on. It's yeah. I really just I just really think it's important. If we we all love the state fair and we all talk about it, but then we also complain about it and we have to remember, you know, to give our put our money where to some of those classics as well.Stephanie Hansen (24:37.692)Yeah, I also want to call out Peg's Diner or the Peg. it is a full service restaurant experience and same family has been running it. They have a great egg sandwich. So if you want to start your breakfast.Alex Lodner (24:41.207)Yes. I it's on my list. It's on my list to mention. Yep.Mm-hmm. The only one.Alex Lodner (24:52.685)That I was gonna I have I have that on my list. And this year they're gonna have the dill pickle chicken tender sandwich on an English muffin. Hello. Right? Yep. I wanna say it's I I no, it's not official. It's new but not official. It's the Mr. Peg dill pickle chicken tender sandwich, an English muffin with toppings. And they're also very reasonably priced. The peg is very reasonably priced. They have the outdoor seating.Stephanie Hansen (25:01.738)Okay, you had me there. I did not know about this.Alex Lodner (25:21.247)And it's just it's again, it's one of those times where when I go there, just like when I go to the dining halls, I wanna sit for a minute. I'm not in and out. I wanna take it all in. It's a great place to sit and people watch for a minute.Yeah, taking your time.Stephanie Hansen (25:34.143)Where do you like to shop? You mentioned the bazaar. Do you because I really like shopping in the West End. Yeah, there's a lot of Minnesota makers there that I'm excited about. IAlex Lodner (25:37.185)I don't shop at the fair.Alex Lodner (25:41.635)Do you? You're a bigger shopper than I am. I'm not a very good shopper. I'm a pretty impatient shopper. I look at it and I like you, I go to the I Like You store. And I usually Sarah's stuff is amazing. I have several of her t shirts. I have her hat. I don't know if we're supposed to swear on this show, but it says that okay, it's a sh s**t s**t show on the on the hat. And I like getting the attention from that. People cover their children's eyes. ButStephanie Hansen (25:56.819)Yeah, that's a great one. They have good t shirts.Alex Lodner (26:15.725)So I like that. I do get something from her most years, but I put my money on food. I'll just be honest about that. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen (26:22.514)Yeah. Before we wrap it up, Alex, I wanna know where your secret bathroom is. Cause I feel like everybody has a secret bathroom. Maybe it's one that's not as well traveled as the others.Alex Lodner (26:33.839)Yes.Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So there are good bathrooms in every quadrant. So I don't know if people know this, but the fair is divided into quadrant. They call it quadrant on the inside. And you'll notice that the benches, the benches that you can buy and name after someone, those are all different colors. Those are your quadrants. So yeah, so in front of, for example, in front of ballpark, it's they're all yellow.Stephanie Hansen (20:44.594)Okay, I did not know that. Good tip.Alex Lodner (27:06.699)And so if people the the bench that that we purchased is for our friend Hanzi, who you know, who passed away in twenty seventeen, and he his bench is in front of ballpark. So you sort of dedicate it to someone and put it in front of their favorite place. I digress. Those are quadrants and every quadrant has a good bathroom. You just have to sort of know where. The best ones, honestly, they're not so hidden, but the very end of West End.has the big so anytime you see a red brick building bathroom, they will also have water stations at the at either end of it. So bring your refillable water bottle. That's where you can refill water as well as other places. As well as other places throughout the fair, but you just always look for the red brick building. Those are somehow always clean. Always. In the grandstand, there are tucked away bathrooms that almost I don't think I've ever seen a line there.Stephanie Hansen (27:45.844)That's a good tip.Alex Lodner (28:03.863)And they're also spotless. There's one on either end of the grandstand. They're inside, so you sort of have to know where you're going.Stephanie Hansen (28:10.078)And they're kinda smaller, but they are nice.Alex Lodner (28:13.463)Yeah, they're they're not tiny. They're there's one that's bigger than the other. But yeah, they're they're always spotless. The cleaning crew do there just does a great job. over over in the north end I would say is your most challenging because that's where the food building is. I'm sorry, the south end. That's where the food building is. And so that gets to be a little bit busier traction there. But yeah.I'm loath to give up my secret spot, but I'm going to for you friends of the pod. And it is behind the giant slide. There is a bank of bathrooms back there that are clean, nice. They're right behind our Fox 9 booth, and a lot of TV station people know to go to those bathrooms. So those are good ones if you're looking.Alex Lodner (28:45.153)Okay.Alex Lodner (29:02.703)Well you you r you ruined you ruin it now. But that's one of my shortcuts. So one of the advantages of having of going so many times is people like going with me, not because I'm such great company, but because I lead them through people, you know, that it's gets so congested in front of the grandstand and there's different places where it pinches and I know all the hidden shortcuts and I will not be giving them away. But that's one of them. Right by those bathrooms. That's one of those shortcuts. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen (29:27.664)It is. There's another shortcut under the glider. Kind of by the i it's a back shortcut where youAlex Lodner (29:39.287)Are you gonna tell my shortcut? Do not wait, stop talking. Which short don't. Don't. That's my shortcut. No.Stephanie Hansen (29:45.34)I'm just gonna say it's a shortcut that takes you from the Colossian up to the north.Alex Lodner (29:52.716)I don't think Yes, Steph. We should have talked about this ahead of time. And they you know what? One year they put one year they put a fence up there and I saw the fence when I was heading towards it and I thought they were gonna cut us off, but they didn't. There's still an opening there.Stephanie Hansen (29:55.111)It I won't I'm just I'm just gonna say a AlexStephanie Hansen (30:09.938)Yeah, it's just smaller. It it's a handy one because the my talk one seven booth is up in that area and it's a handy quick to get up there. All right, well Alex, please.Alex Lodner (30:19.383)Yeah. And the best entrance, can we say the best entrance? The best entrance with no lines is right behind the the my talk. Harder to get to because there's no parking by it. But if you're willing to walk a little bit, there's never a line at that entrance. It's a secret little vendor entrance.Stephanie Hansen (30:34.282)Okay, I didn't know about that one.Alex Lodner (30:36.784)it's right behind your booth. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (30:38.142)Yeah, okay. So a secret entrance there. I always we always end up coming in where the where you come in where you rent the scooters and that area because we get dropped off. Yeah.Alex Lodner (30:49.335)At the north end. Yeah. Yeah, that's it's kind of a hike from there. But if you didn't want to walk through the crowds, if it was really crowded, especially for you guys on a Saturday morning, you don't go into the fair. You walk around on the outside of the fair and it will lay lead you to that secret. I'm j but we're just gonna have people wondering aimlessly now because of what I've just said. Ignore what I just said. Don't do that. People hundreds of people lost.Stephanie Hansen (31:06.954)Okay. Do you haveStephanie Hansen (31:12.17)No, do it, do it. Do you have yeah, I was gonna ask you one more question and I just totally can't do you have a park and ride location that you think is good?Alex Lodner (31:27.073)No, I have a little bit of a beef with Park and Ride, honestly. I know it's a great program. I know they're doing their best, but I believe this year they took away the suburban ones. Don't quote me on that, but I did not see them on the list. So the West suburbs used to only have one right by Ridgedale, and there were be lines across the highway. So it's across the highway from Trader Joe's. There would literally be lines across the highway. AndStephanie Hansen (31:51.604)Mm-hmm.Alex Lodner (31:54.466)So it they're just we're not enough in the suburbs. So you're I think what they're trying to get us to do, again, I'm not an official representative, but I think what they're trying to get you to do is to drive closer to the fair and then use a park and ride closer to the fair. So those buses aren't on the highway for a half an hour, which makes sense. So you want to drive into Roseville. my favorite is a new life presbyterian.Stephanie Hansen (32:02.281)Sure.Stephanie Hansen (32:19.242)Okay.Alex Lodner (32:20.001)There's it g it's getting more and more popular, but that's always a really good one. The people it's volunteers from that church. It's where Millie went to nursery school. And so that's our soft spot in our hearts.Stephanie Hansen (32:29.183)Okay. Okay, well I'll send people there then. On behalf of you and Millie. Alex said to come here.Alex Lodner (32:35.585)No, don't Great. Sorry, peeps for you know, I mean, you have a lot of listeners to this show. I'm not used to to having such an amplifier.Stephanie Hansen (32:45.542)You're funny. okay, so just on a personal note, since I have you here before we wrap up, what's next for you? I miss your writing.Alex Lodner (32:55.865)Thank you. I don't Steph, I don't know. I don't know. I've I've been in conversations with a few people. If you had asked me this a year ago, I would have said, absolutely not. I am retired. I'm living my best life. I'm gonna sort of pull a Steph Hanson this winter and be gone most of the winter. But I I miss it. Never thought never thought I'd say that. What's that?Stephanie Hansen (33:14.548)Mm-hmm.Well, and you can do remote work. Yeah. I it's when you can retire and choose your own life, it doesn't mean that you might not choose your old life. It just means that maybe yeah, may well, because I think people think you have to like do something completely different, but you gravitated to what you wanted to do for a reason. AndAlex Lodner (33:26.467)Mm-hmm.Alex Lodner (33:31.79)listen to you. Deep thoughts with Stephanie. It's true.Alex Lodner (33:43.887)True.Stephanie Hansen (33:45.066)what you get the flexibility and the privilege to do is to make it in the image of what you would like. Cause you have the flexibility to say no.Alex Lodner (33:55.074)Right. And I'll I'll say this to be clear. When I say retired, I retired from a very part-time job. So I've always had that privilege. I've been extremely fortunate to have created exactly the career I wanted and to be able to do exactly what I wanted. So and to work with you know, I'm really, really mean this, the best people, right? You and I know that. We worked with the best people of theStephanie Hansen (34:06.025)Yeah.Alex Lodner (34:21.993)Our our community is tiny in the Twin Cities. There's maybe 10 of us that do this. And I love every single one of these people that I've worked with. And so going back to that doesn't is not gonna be a you know, it's it's because it's something that I enjoyed all along. I did not leave it because I wasn't enjoying it anymore. I'd left it because of, as you know, some life changes. So things are settling down andStephanie Hansen (34:42.462)Yeah.Alex Lodner (34:49.899)We'll see. We'll see. You and I will talk. W we'll go have a non a non beer. I'll have coffee, you'll have a beer and we'll figure it out.Stephanie Hansen (34:52.326)Yeah, please keep me in the loop. Yeah. Maybe we'll see each other at the fair this year.Alex Lodner (35:01.283)Possibly I don't work on Saturday, but I might just pop in just to wave at you. I love doing that. I love harassing people from the bleachers.Stephanie Hansen (35:04.894)Okay.Yes, we will be live at Weekly Dish. I will be at Fox, yeah, 9 a.m. Saturday, 9 to 11 at Weekly Dish up in the North End, the first. And then I'll be at Fox Thursday and Friday. We have two-hour shows. The first hour is our national show. Our second hour is our local show. It'll be 10 to noon. And then at noon to th 12:30, I'll be doing a book signing at Fox.Alex Lodner (35:11.534)Nine AMAlex Lodner (35:16.291)The first Saturday. There's two Saturdays. So you're there the first Saturday, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm.Alex Lodner (35:25.763)What what time?Stephanie Hansen (35:37.412)on both days. And then Saturday I'll do a book signing after Weekly Dish ends at 11 for a half hour. And then Monday I'll be back and I'll be on Fox in the 10 o'clock hour. And then in the 11 o'clock hour I'm co-hosting with Jason for that day. And then I'll do a book signing after that. So yeah, lots of fun activities planned.Alex Lodner (35:37.485)Goodness.fun.Okay. All right. I'll have you text me that because I am not gonna remember anything you just said. But I'll have you text me my s thank you, and I will pop in. I I know the secret door.Stephanie Hansen (36:03.795)I will text you. Okay. Thanks, Alex. Yeah, and I forgot to tell you this when we started. Give yourself about 20 seconds before you log off just to make sure that the podcast catches up with our voices. Yeah, exactly. Okay. All right. See you.Alex Lodner (36:18.97)So I'm not just out. Peace out. All right. Talk to you, Love.Stephanie Hansen's @StephaniesDish Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe

Culture shapes how people receive change, and nowhere is that clearer than on a shop floor where history, language, and moral authority all sit alongside the 5S board. Royden Johnson and Luc van Merrienboer bring two distinct lenses to that tension: Royden from years of leading continuous improvement in South Africa, and Luc from rolling out digital transformation across Asia and now the African continent. Their conversation with Ron covers resistance, influence, and what it actually takes to bring people along rather than drag them forward. In this episode you’ll learn: The cultural context of 5S in Asia and Africa (5:01) How 5S connects to every performance pillar in a manufacturing operation (9:43) What digital transformation actually looks like on a shop floor (13:04) Where their passion for continuous improvement comes from (15:42) How to use personal, social, and structural influencing strategies together (17:18) How to handle CAVE people without losing the rest of the team (19:29) Why unemployment history in South Africa shaped resistance to continuous improvement (25:32) What happened when a leader stopped pushing and started listening (27:28) How to speak, listen, and lead while keeping everyone’s dignity intact (31:50) Keep Learning If the discussion about moral authority, influencing strategies, and leading change on a diverse shop floor resonated with you, the School of Leadership offers structured ways to develop those same skills in your own context. Learn More About School of Leadership at gembaacademy.com/leadership Podcast Resources Royden on LinkedIn Luc on LinkedIn Get All the Latest News from Gemba Academy Stay current on new courses, podcast episodes, and continuous improvement resources. Sign up for the Gemba Academy newsletter at gembaacademy.com/news What Do You Think? When you have encountered a CAVE person in your organization, what shifted the dynamic?

Right and wrong are commonplace in our daily vocabulary. Here's a case for why correct and incorrect are far superior.Today on The Sage & The Song I deep dive into my word-nerd tendencies, sharing the etymological reasoning behind my recent love affair with "correct." If I've done my job correctly, you'll join me in keeping this word close from now on and thinking twice before using replacements that cast moral judgement. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Song: "Never" written and performed by Britta GreenViolet.Read the written transmission of this piece on my ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack, Frequency First~ MENTIONS + RESOURCES ~⁠Rose & Sword⁠: my 14-week group mentorship that weaves ancient mysticism, plant medicine and strategic action. Join the wait list now to get notified when the next cohort is open for enrollment. ⁠The Song-a-day Challenge⁠: Obliterate perfectionsim and write 10 songs in 10 days. Click ⁠here⁠ to get notified when the next round opens. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get my weekly Museletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: encouragement in your inbox.Visit my virtual home: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠brittagreenviolet.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Connect on IG: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@brittagreenviolet⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Connect on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@brittagudmunson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

The Five And Five Rule And Can It Correct All The Problems bonus 1170 Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:36:26 +0000 zHqujRnqtq1trmu2bv5yrp3RZECMazz0 sports Sports Daily sports The Five And Five Rule And Can It Correct All The Problems Wichita's popular morning local sports talk radio show is Sports Daily with Jacob Albracht and Tommy Castor. Listen live M-F 8a-11a on KFH! © 2026 Audacy, Inc. Sports https://player.amperwavepodcasting.

https://youtu.be/jPTlkjF8M-c Tanner Taddeo, CEO and Co-Founder of Stable Sea, is driven by a mission to bring Wall Street-grade financial services to Main Street while embodying the principle Stay Put in Your Convictions. By combining blockchain technology, stablecoins, tokenized capital markets, and AI advisory services, Tanner helps businesses access investment opportunities, put idle cash to work, and move money globally with greater speed, transparency, and capital efficiency. In this conversation, Tanner introduces The Lionel Messi Startup Framework—Develop a High-Level Thesis, Talk With and Learn From the Market, Run 30-Day A/B Tests, Iterate Your Offering, and Stay Resolute With Your Convictions. He explains why founders should observe patiently, validate their ideas with customers, and act decisively when market opportunities emerge. Tanner also discusses balancing long-term conviction with continuous experimentation, unlocking 24/7 liquidity through tokenized capital markets, reducing friction in cross-border payments, and finding urgent “morphine” problems that customers cannot afford to leave unsolved. — Stay Put in Your Convictions with Tanner Taddeo  Hello everyone. Steve Preda here, and my guest today is Tanner Taddeo, the CEO and Co-Founder at Stable Sea, an autonomous treasury management platform that helps finance teams and global businesses access capital market products and move money around the globe to 40 currencies with the cheapest FX rates. Tanner, welcome to the show.  Steve, thanks for having me. Excited for the conversation today.  It’s very interesting that this is how you position your business because most businesses in your industry, as I see them, position themselves with low transaction fees, but really their money is made on the FX. So if you do preferential FX rates or cheap FX rates, that can be a very transparent way of getting business. So I don’t know if that connects to your personal why, but I’d love to learn about your personal why and how you manifest it in your business.  Yeah, definitely. At Stable Sea, we’re very mission-driven in terms of everything that we do. The team itself comes from Block, which was formerly known as Square. Yeah. And everyone on the team has been focused on building products for the real economy, for consumer use cases, for business use cases, et cetera, over the course of everyone’s career.  And so when we started at Stable Sea, our primary thesis was, with blockchain, with stablecoins, with some of the tokenized capital markets products like money market funds, bonds, equities, et cetera, that are coming on-chain, how can you really take Wall Street-grade financial services and provision them out to Main Street for businesses that need them the most? And so the why for Stable Sea, for myself, for the team, is really around helping businesses drive greater capital efficiency in their operations. And we service businesses in the real economy that typically make widgets or some sort of physical hardware devices, and they need to send them around the world.  We help them because we give them access to different types of capital markets products, so money markets and private credit and fixed-income products, et cetera. And then we help them move their money around the globe a little bit more efficiently than they could with either their state bank or their credit union or some third-party cross-border payments provider. Because our firm thesis has always been, if you and I ran Coca-Cola or a large organization, we would have the best-in-class transaction banks helping us put our idle capital to work at every point in time during the day.  If you and I ran a steel manufacturing company in Missouri, you typically have a checking account and QuickBooks, and that’s about it. And so for us, it was always about helping businesses grow, save more money, and then operate more efficiently with some of the new technologies that are out there today.Share on X  So that means, presumably, that what you focus on is more about the investment side of the business rather than crypto and blockchain, and helping people access financial products through the blockchain. Help me understand a little bit what you do and how it is different from what people can get from banks?  Yeah. So everything that we do, all the technology that we build and provision, is on-chain. So all of the capital markets products are tokenized. So tokenized bonds, tokenized equities, tokenized fixed income, tokenized money markets. All of the payment services and settlement services that we offer are through the use of stablecoins, and we can send that around the globe, settle it instantly, and then have low FX rates off the back of that. And then we have some of our AI advisory services.  But from a broad paintbrush perspective, at Stable Sea, you’ve got three products that hang off of our platform. You’ve got capital markets, you’ve got global settlement, and you’ve got advisory services. And then with all of that, we share a common architecture, and that architecture is built across many different blockchains. And then we utilize stablecoins and we utilize RWA tokens, or real-world asset tokens, to provision those use cases.  So everything that we do is stablecoin-native, but we don’t lead with that from a messaging perspective. And the reason we don’t lead with that from a messaging perspective is that if you and I ran a bakery here in Brooklyn, New York, and we had a point-of-sale terminal that just got offered RTP access from the Fed for instant settlement, the bakery owner doesn’t really care about the technology underneath it.  They just care, “Do I trust it? Is it going to get me my money quicker, and is it going to be cheaper than my current alternative?” How it happens, not very many people care unless you’re in the industry and you’re a builder, product manager, et cetera, and you want to nerd out on the actual mechanical nature of how the product works. But for us, it’s always been leading with the narrative of, what is the value proposition and how can we drive greater value to the businesses? So that’s how we lead. But to your point on what the difference is, with any new technological paradigm that occurs, rarely is it so disruptive in nature that folks can’t recognize it.  Everything that happens in terms of the innovation paradigm is typically you stand on the shoulders of giants and you make things incrementally better. And so for us, what we do with capital markets is, the first value proposition is that many businesses in the United States just don’t have access to a diverse array of capital markets products. So the first thing that we have done is just provision access, which is an innovation in and of itself because in the traditional markets, if you want to access a money market fund or a fixed-income product, you typically have high hurdle rates, meaning that as a business, you need to invest at least $10 million at the asset manager in question.  You need to hold that there so then you can get access to all these products. With us, you don’t. There’s only a $1 minimum to clear, so I think most folks can handle a $1 minimum. And then secondly, as things go on-chain, the value proposition there is that you have 24/7, 365 liquidity and tradability. And so what that means is that, just from a money market fund perspective, the interest accrues daily and it pays out daily.  So you get this interest that is dripped into your account daily as opposed to waiting for a month. You also have the ability—so let’s say that you and I run this bakery in Brooklyn. Let’s say that we close our business on Friday, and we’ve got $100,000 sitting in our checking account, and we’re closed on Saturday, Sunday because it’s the July 4th holiday. So we know $100,000 is just going to be sitting in our checking account Saturday, Sunday, not being put to work. With Stable Sea, you can put that to work in a tokenized money market fund because it operates 24/7, 365.  So what we see is businesses now that close their books on Friday can just do an auto-sweep into a money market fund, generate yield Saturday, Sunday, get back to U.S. dollars for their open of business. And again, it’s one of those things where it might not sound like the most revolutionary concept in the world, but if you can help businesses, especially in the mid-market, lower mid-market, operate a little bit more efficiently, I mean, saving an additional $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a year is a big value-add to them in the real economy, right? If you’re a large Fortune 100 company, you probably don’t care, or it’s not as valuable. But for us, the companies that run on us, these small increments, standing on the shoulders of giants, a small derivation in innovation is actually really valuable for the end user.Share on X  Well, I think it is because, looking at the inverse of it, I used to be in banking, and I know that one of the biggest moneymakers for banks is float. Yeah. So it’s basically the money that doesn’t earn interest, which they have access to just because they cash the check a day later or make the wire two days instead of one day. And essentially, what you’re doing is you’re taking this money from the bank and you’re giving it to the company that actually should have it in the first place, right? Yep.  Then the question is, how are the banks going to survive if you take away their bread?  Yeah. That is the debate that’s happening right now. I think if you’re one of your G-SIBs, your major banks, you’re going to be okay. So the top 25 banks in the U.S. are going to be just fine, and they make money in tons of different ways, and you’re not going to disrupt that trust ultimately. In the long tail is where I worry because a lot of credit unions and a lot of state banks, they just don’t offer—they’re smaller banks, right?  So they’re not managing—they don’t have a ton of money by virtue of assets under management. So with the deposits that they receive, they need to turn around and recycle that because it’s fractional depository lending, meaning that if I have a checking account, I put 10 grand into it, the bank is then turning around with that 10 grand, making money on it somehow. And you have to think, how does the bank actually make money on that? Well, they typically make it through debt facilities, so mortgages, auto loans, student loans, cards, et cetera.  They’re putting it to work in high-margin financial products back into the economy. They’re not taking that and then buying some money market fund from an asset manager where they make 10 basis points and provisioning that out to the businesses, right? There, I think that we’re seeing a lot of companies move off. They’re taking their money from their checking account, moving it to Stable Sea because we can put it in these capital markets products.  I think that overall, that’s a net positive for the business because the business now has a higher degree of operating capital on hand that they can make money with. But by the same token, if the state banks and the credit unions don’t wake up and respond to this, their depository base will be, if not fully eroded, tarnished and diminished. And what that means for local community health, I’m not sure because banks do play a very important role, especially credit unions and local banks.  You know your local community the best, and so you lend back into that community with the deposits that you receive from that community. So there’s a cyclicality to it which has some poetry in it. And so it’s not apparently clear to me that some of this stuff is going to be a net positive. But at the same time, living in one of the most capitalistic countries and markets in the world, there’s a clear demand for this, and if the banks aren’t going to wake up and serve it, we’ll be there to help businesses do what’s best for them.  Yeah. It’s the invisible hand, right? You increase the efficiency, which will force the banks to also increase their efficiency. And yeah, the smaller banks might have to be more innovative. But they are more nimble, so maybe there are other ways that they can serve the community.  So I’d like to switch gears here and talk a little bit about frameworks. So this is a podcast of frameworks, and 350 episodes in, I’m always looking for some kind of a framework, shortcut, a mental model that you have come across or developed yourself that helps you make more sense of the world around you, get something done. It can be explained in three to five steps, something like that, which the listeners might get some ideas out of and be able to improve their businesses. So what comes to mind for you?  Yeah, two things. I’ll start with a high-level analogy and then go a little deeper. It’s the World Cup right now, so I don’t know if you or any of your listeners are following the World Cup. But if you watch Messi play, his playing style is a great analogy for startups. And whether that be a startup externally where you raise venture capital, or even just intrapreneurship if you’re inside of a big company and you’re on an innovation team, et cetera.  From the outside, it looks like startups are always building things and they’re always moving fast, et cetera. But in reality, if you watch Messi play, Messi really doesn’t move that much on the pitch. He just sits around, he observes, he watches, and then when a hole opens up and some opportunity opens up, he breaks for it, and then he goes and executes. But he spends the vast majority of time just sitting there, tinkering, observing, watching. And then if you’re watching him, you’re like, “He’s not working that hard. He’s just sitting around.”  And then he goes and executes. But he’s always observing, he’s always watching, and there’s a real learning in that. I feel like Silicon Valley, as it relates to startups, there’s this pressure that you always have to be building, you always have to be shipping, you always have to be constantly grinding. I think that wisdom is actually counterintuitive because you want to have a thesis in the market, and then you want to be able to test that thesis quickly. So in some respects, you do want to be shipping all the time.  But you don’t want to be working for the sake of work. You want to have a thesis in the market. You want to be building towards that thesis that will happen in the next six months, 12 months, two years. And then you always want to be learning and talking to the market because when that hole does open up, you’ll have the right product at the right time to go and execute on. So I think that's something that we have learned: being patient and staying resolute in your conviction that what you're building is right.Share on X And it can’t just be a gut feeling. It has to be validated by the market.  So we do a bunch of A/B tests every 30 days where we have an idea about a feature or a product or a direction we want to take it. And the thing is, if you can’t get five CEOs on the phone in 30 days to validate if a product is going to be interesting or not, then that’s a signal in and of itself, right? So for anything that we do, we always have a thesis on the market, and then we spend 30 days testing it. And at the end of those 30 days, we get some feedback.  The reason why we do these A/B tests, just to drill down into one level further, is that the idea of a startup or a product that you have in your head, it’s a living entity. It’s always evolving on the basis of who you talk to, what your team is thinking, what you’re reading in the market, et cetera.  And then you’re trying to take that living concept and plug it into a market. But the market itself is also living, right?  You’ve got regulations, you’ve got different macroeconomic cycles, you’ve got companies that have budget, don’t have budget, people getting laid off in different organizations. The market itself is living and evolving. So you have this idea that is living and evolving, and you have a market that is living and evolving, and you need those two things to stick together. And so for us, we’re always wedded to this concept that product at time A is not going to be product at time Z. You need to constantly be doing A/B tests to figure out what that right fit is.  And then when you have that fit, you need to double down on it and grow it into a line of business. But you also need to recognize that there are very few businesses in this world that have been around for more than 200 years, if at all. So whatever your original product idea is, or whatever the feature that gave you product-market fit is today, you have to consciously be aware that, “Hey, that’s not going to be the thing that gets us to IPO in five years’ time.” So you can’t be lulled into this false sense of security. You always have to be waiting, observing, testing, experimenting, growing, and then if you see opportunity, you strike.  Yeah, this is fascinating. Especially now, things are moving very fast with AI creating capabilities all the time for people to test products or to create capabilities that then get disrupted in a couple of months. So it’s interesting that you say that you have to stay resolute in your conviction. So there is a tension there. You build a thesis and you stay resolute, but then you’re testing and the market might tell you not to be resolute.  And then you also told me that companies don’t live forever. So how do you resolve this tension of being stable with your thesis and not letting your conviction be upended, but also being nimble in the changing market dynamics and everything to respond to? So how do you manage the tension?  Yeah, it’s a good question. There has to be a high-level thesis, right? So for us at Stable Sea, it is as simple as: In 10 years from now, will more finance teams and businesses be on-chain or off-chain than today? And so our high-level conviction is, in 10 years’ time, more businesses will be running their treasury stack on-chain. So that’s our conviction. We know, come hell or high water, that is going to be where the puck is going to be in the future, and we’re going to skate to that future.  So if you start with this high-level conviction that more companies are coming on-chain, that is what we’re building for. Now, how they come on-chain is a matter of debate, which is where the A/B test comes in, right? We originally thought it was going to be for payments. So we built all the stablecoin infrastructure to do global payments in 40 different markets.  Turned out to be not the case, actually. And then we started tinkering as we saw the data coming in and were like, “Okay, some companies are using stablecoins for payments, but there’s a bunch of inefficiencies. That world’s still going to take two or three years to wake up. Where is the wedge in the market today?” And so when we started experimenting with capital markets products, we found that there was this massive opportunity that businesses just didn’t have access to a diverse array of yield-bearing strategies, and they wanted that.  And so that was where we were like, okay, let’s get businesses into the on-chain economy through capital markets. And then what we’re finding is, as folks come onto the platform, everyone uses us today for capital markets, and then 20, 30% of our companies say, “Actually, I do have a cross-border payment need, and I already hold money with you. Can you facilitate that payment or that settlement to Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, et cetera?”  So for us, when I say you need to stay resolute in your conviction, our why is always: We want to take Wall Street-grade financial services and provision them out to Main Street.Share on X The conviction behind that is that you can do that through on-chain technology. And then in 10 years from now, more businesses will be on-chain than off-chain. How we get to that future in 10 years, who knows, right? And that’s where the fun of the startup is.  You’re always testing. And so for us, we’ve waxed and waned on different product strategies, primarily because the market has changed. And as people start to educate themselves on what the value props are, you see where folks find value, and then you build to that value. And in theory, in three, five, seven years, we should be living in a world where more companies are operating on-chain, and then they might use that full product suite.  But out of the gate, it’s kind of like, where is that value, that wedge? You charge as hard as you can into that wedge, and then you continue to expand your product set over time. All with that high-level conviction of, in 10 years from now, we believe that more businesses will be on-chain than off-chain.  So basically, you want to find the point where you can penetrate that market opportunity, and then it’s a land-and-expand kind of thing. And then you expand from there as the market opportunities evolve over time. But you already have a customer, you’re already building trust with them, and now they’re going to be more disposed to buying from you.  Yeah, that’s right. And I think it’s interesting from a mental place being a startup because you’re forced to think so short-term because you just need to generate revenue, get to the next capital round, et cetera. So you’re always building for the moment. But what we try to do at Stable Sea is we try to think as if we were already a Vanguard and a large company, to the extent that we have the luxury of planning for 10 years.  If you think about it in that regard, it takes a lot of the day-to-day anxiety away. It’s a little bit like, if you listen to Warren Buffett, any time that there’s volatility in the market, he’s like, “Well, it doesn’t really bother me because I’m investing for 50 years.” So, is it up 20%, down 20%? Who cares? In 50 years, it’s going to be up 200%, so that’s all I’m worried about, right? And there’s a real luxury when you come and think about it that way. So that’s why I think if you’re founding anything, or if you’re starting something inside of a company as an intrapreneur, you need to have a strong conviction on where the market’s headed in five or 10 years, and then you need to test towards that future. But that also makes the day-to-day operations of the business a little bit more palatable.  So often, you can get caught up in this whipsaw of, “Big Company A launched this product. Regulation came down, wiped out this company. This competitor raised a Series C, and they have way more money in the bank than we do.” And so you can get caught up in all this minutiae, but it doesn’t really matter if you sit back and you say, “I know that I’m going to find a way to make this business exist for the next 10 years.” In 10 years’ time, what does the future look like? Do I feel strongly that that’s going to be the case? Cool. I’m going to build towards that future. And then whatever the headwinds are in the interim, they’re just short-term temporal problems that kind of come and go along.  Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with you. And interestingly, 20 years ago, or 25 years ago, I didn’t feel like I had enough time to think that long term. But now that I’m older, I actually am more patient to have the long view, which is very counterintuitive.  And Dan Sullivan, who is a coach and the founder of Strategic Coach, he is now, I think, north of 80, and he has this thesis that even at his age, he has a 25-year plan, and that allows him to actually create more value. So that’s fascinating. So switching gears here, what drives growth in your business right now?  Yeah. So we govern the business with an assets under management model. So we have USDC, we’ve got money market funds, we’ve got fixed-income products, we’ve got Bitcoin on platform. So we just look at overarching platform balance. And so that’s the primary, very simple heuristic for how we define success: Is that thing growing month over month, quarter over quarter? That’s how we define growth and measure our growth.  But again, the value prop in terms of what drives that, why do companies actually sign up to Stable Sea? Primarily because they just don’t have access. Almost every business that we have talked to so far, and honestly every business that I’ve interacted with, has idle cash sitting in a checking account someplace. Full stop. And that idle cash could sit there for the weekend, i.e., two days, or it could sit for a quarter. If you’re gearing up for quarterly bonuses in Q1, you will escrow a million, $2 million in Q4 so you can pay out in Q1. Not just the U.S. economy, but every economy, there’s just cash sitting around at a bank, and it’s being underutilized.  And so for us, when we go and finally chat to businesses in the mid-market, lower mid-market, even SMBs, we have a customer on platform that invests $2,500 every week. It almost looks like a checking account, or almost looks like retail behavior in some ways. But they do it because they say, “Hey, I don’t make a lot of money with my business, but if I can eke an additional two, three grand at the end of the year, that’s valuable to me.” And there’s a real poetry to that because they’ve never had access to it. They’ve always wanted it.  But banks, large and small, won’t go build for the long tail of the economy. And so finally, we show up and we say, “Hey, here’s your menu of investment options. Here’s the risk profiles. Here’s how you should think of it. Based on the seasonality of your business, we can get you into the right products.” There’s real utility there, and that’s what kind of drives the value proposition and the growth of the business and the business’s assets under management overall.  So you’re looking for opportunities where you can be additive to customers, where there’s a situation where maybe there’s a gap in the market or there’s friction that they are experiencing with investing their money, and you can be the wedge in that situation and offer them a 3X better solution.  Yeah. Correct. Correct. And again, our tagline internally is, “Keep your bank, upgrade your capital.” Because we really don’t want to compete with the checking account. Where you run payroll, where your invoices land if someone pays you, your day-to-day spend, keep your banking relationships because it’s very difficult to usurp that. And also, we don’t want to get into that. That puts us squarely in this neobank realm where you’ve got great companies like Mercury and Rho and Ramp and Brex and a thousand other companies there.  We don’t really want to go compete with that. We’re more of, if you had the privilege of working with some of the largest transaction banks in the world, that’s what we’re trying to be and essentially provision those services out to the real economy, which is typically access to capital markets, access to global foreign exchange for payments and settlement, and then advisory services, tax reporting, et cetera.  Almost like a democratized private banking service.  Yeah. Yeah. All of us at Stable Sea, we’re trying really hard to steer away from the banking narrative, but yes, in the future, if you take that 10-year perspective, yeah, we will most likely be a private banking solution, a democratized version of that.  Yeah. Fascinating. So what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out right now in your business?  Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, the one thing that we’re actively trying to figure out is two things, really. One is, so we build directly into ERP systems like QuickBooks or NetSuite or Oracle or SAP, and we have advisory services. So we take a lot of that data, we build our own model weights on top of it, and then we offer that out to our customers so that they can essentially query their own transaction data and use it for different services.  Now, we’ve got strong signal on the first value proposition for that, but I’m curious mostly for owner-operators in the real economy: What are their biggest back-office pain points? And that’s something that we’re trying to figure out because we hear a lot, “Yes, we don’t have access to savings products.” Okay, we can solve that today. “Yes, cross-border payments are frustrating, slow, and expensive.” Yes, we solve that today.  So we’re looking for that third pillar. One of our VCs always talks to us about morphine versus vitamins, where it’s kind of a crude analogy, but if you go to the hospital and you’re in dire pain, you don’t want to be sold vitamins. You want some morphine, and that’s what you’re going there for, right? And when you’re in a startup and you create products, you’re really looking for that morphine of, people just cannot live without this product. And then you can sell all the value-added services around it, which are essentially the vitamins.  And so for us, we’ve found two morphine-like products where there’s a real pain point for accessing capital markets. Primarily, there is no ability to access that today. And then second, cross-border payments: slow, difficult, expensive, opaque, all the things. Solved that. So the third one that we’re trying to figure out now is: How do we A/B test quickly enough to figure out—we have a treasure trove of data building into ERP systems—what is the highest signal-to-noise product that we can build using a diverse data set to help owners operate their back office a little more efficiently?  So you say highest signal-to-noise. Is it the ratio of signal to noise? So what is the product value which you can detect as being a need in the market? Is this what you mean by that? Yeah, yeah. It’s like, what is that one pain point that is so resolute that people are like, “I would do anything to have this thing solved”? There’s all these value-adds like cash flow reporting and automating some of your tax stuff at the end of the year, which are all nice-to-haves. We’re curious. We’re trying to figure out what it is that folks will say, “I’ve got all this data in my ERP system. I would love to know one, two, three things and have A, B, C automated so my back office can run a little bit more efficiently and my accountant doesn’t have to ask me every quarter-end, ‘Where is X, Y, and Z statement?'”  Yeah. I mean, I’ve got some ideas, but I’m sure that you’ve already thought about most of it, so I’m not going to share them. So if someone is listening to this who is a small business or medium-sized business, and they’ve got some cash just sitting around, or they’d like to invest, but they don’t have big enough balances or the transaction costs are prohibitive for their size of investment, whatever the reason, but they are curious about exploring how to have access to better FX rates, more investment products, where can they learn more, and how can they connect with you?  Of course. Well, connect with me on LinkedIn, Tanner Taddeo, pretty easy to find. And then the platform is stablesea.com. So, free to sign up, no cost whatsoever. Also, no cost to use the platform at all. So feel free to sign up right online, and then, yeah, typically it takes us two days to run through the KYB document requests, and then you’re up and running. So, pretty simple. Stablesea.com, free to sign up and start putting your capital to work. Awesome. We try and make it as seamless as possible.  So I’m just wondering, the name of the company, is it something to do with stablecoin? Is it a sea of opportunities for stablecoin?  It was stablecoin for sure. So we started with the word “stable” and then “sea” because we wanted to provide a sea of liquidity. Both for FX, because we do B2B settlements, which are typically large transactions, low volume. You’re not doing twenty $10 million transactions a day. You’re typically doing one $10 million transaction a week or every other week. But you need a deep pool of liquidity to service that.  And then also, from a capital markets perspective, we wanted to be able to provide a sea of liquidity there for different investment options that companies could access based on the seasonality of their cash flow or the risk tolerance that they have as a business. So stable meets sea, so Stable Sea.  Okay. Well, if you want to keep your bank but upgrade your capital, then reach out to Tanner Taddeo, the CEO and Co-Founder of Stable Sea. He’ll get you more investment opportunities that maybe you have not had access to. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts. Do not miss any episode with exciting entrepreneurs like Tanner. So thanks, Tanner, for coming, and thank you for listening.  Thank you, Steve. Important Links: Tanner's LinkedIn Tanner's website

When Norman Kraft took over the company he wanted to leave his mark. I think he succeeded. What do you think? Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is… Well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So, here’s one of those. [Wagmore Garage Door Ad] Dave Young: Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here. Stephen Semple is sitting here and just told me that we’re… You keep… Man, do you know how to dial into my childhood, Stephen? Stephen Semple: It’s all about you, Dave. Dave Young: It is. Stephen Semple: It’s all about you. Dave Young: I don’t want to make it about me, but it always is. It’s the Swiss Miss and the… So, he’s like, “It’s not the company, but it’s the product inside the company.” We’re going to talk about Kraft Singles. Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: I’m assuming we’re talking about cheese… Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: … or the American cheese product, whatever that means. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: But my God, did I eat a lot of cheese as a kid? I don’t know why. My mom would just let me, my sister sit in front of the TV and grab a stack of Kraft Singles and watch Gilligan’s Island and all the things that were on TV right after school. So, we had a dachshund who knew what a Kraft Single being opened sounded like. Stephen Semple: Oh, that does not surprise me. Dave Young: Right. Is like, “Oh, someone is opening some cheese.” Stephen Semple: You have my attention now. Dave Young: I might get myself a little bite. So, today we’re going to learn about the Kraft Singles story. Stephen Semple: Yeah, and I know it’s a bit unusual because Kraft is a massive company and was a massive company even at the time that this was created, but they were going through a bit of a problem. And I just thought there was some innovative ideas inside the development of Kraft Singles. And look, they sell billions of slices every year. It’s like, look how recognizable it was. Kraft Singles. “Oh, you’re talking about the cheese thing that’s wrapped in the plastic and…” Talk about recognized. Whether you eat the product, like the product, don’t like the product, we all know what it is. The moment I say it, everyone would know what it is. It was very much driven by a change that was happening in the world and a bunch of things that Kraft had recognized because the Second World War has ended and basically what ends up happening was the baby boom. And instead of roughly two million births a year, suddenly the country is having three and a half million births a year, 60% increase. That changes everything. Schools overcrowded, new classrooms being built, neighborhoods appear overnight, but there’s also the whole thing of feeding the kids. School lunch programs were still developing. Kids brought lunch from home, and these lunches were uninspiring. They were yesterday’s pork chops. They were deviled eggs. They were bologna sandwiches. It’s just they were boring, and convenience hadn’t yet caught up to the sandwiches that kids were taking to school. So, it’s the late 1940s. Kraft wasn’t a small food company. It was the largest cheese company in the world. It was primarily cheese at that point, and it was selling roughly a million pounds of cheese a day, generating tens of millions of dollars. So, they were big. And James Kraft had built the company around processed cheese, the product that kind of spoilage and consistency. That’s what the business was built on. But after James retired, the leadership passed to his brother, Norman Kraft. And Norman wanted to make his mark on the business, and he noticed something. What he noticed was… This is the thing I found interesting. He looked at it and he went, “Wait a minute. Pre-sliced bread has changed the bread industry.” Wonder Bread, pre-sliced bread. Dave Young: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, wait. When Norman took over, they weren’t even slicing cheese. They were just- Stephen Semple: No. Dave Young: … selling cheese. Stephen Semple: Correct. Dave Young: Okay. So, this is way before they were wrapping them individually. Stephen Semple: Correct. Correct. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: They were just basically selling cheese. And he looked at it and he said, “Well, there’s pre-sliced bread, and people seem to really like that. What if we could do cheese as easy?” Dave Young: And you know how hard it is to slice a single piece of cheese the size of a Kraft Single? Stephen Semple: It’s really hard. Dave Young: That’s no easy task. Yeah. Stephen Semple: Right, because the- Dave Young: You need a wire or something. Right? Yeah. Stephen Semple: Well, and it crumbles, and it falls apart, and it dries out. So, the engineering challenge of slicing wasn’t actually easy, wasn’t actually easy. And what they discovered was it’s about when to slice. Dave Young: Ah, okay. Stephen Semple: So, what they did was… What the Kraft research team discovered was this elegant solution. Instead of waiting for the cheese to cool completely, they would spread the molten processed cheese across a massive chilled stainless surface and the cheese cooled in the perfectly even slices. Dave Young: Oh, wow. Okay. Stephen Semple: Those slices were then flattened and cut into perfectly uniform three-inch squares. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: So, they made it the size to fit into a standard slice of bread. So, he looked at what’s a standard slice of bread. Cheese should fit into that. Brilliant, brilliant. The product launched not as Kraft Singles. There’s another interesting thing. It launched as Kraft Deluxe. Dave Young: Kraft Deluxe? Stephen Semple: It was eight perfectly sliced pieces in a block, first product of its kind. And guess how well it did? Dave Young: I don’t know. Stephen Semple: Failed. Dave Young: Well, because I remember before we had Singles, we’re buying that. We’re buying a block of Kraft cheese that you just had to peel them off. Stephen Semple: Yeah, but the thing is nobody noticed, and here was the problem. Dave Young: Nobody noticed it was sliced. Is that what you saying, [inaudible 00:06:55]? Stephen Semple: Right, the packaging held the innovation. The name held the innovation. Kraft Deluxe, what’s that mean? Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: So, what consumers saw was a block of cheese. They couldn’t tell it was already sliced because they didn’t even know to look for it being already sliced. The biggest advantage was invisible. Sales suffered. Between 1949 and 1950, the Kraft cheese business declined by almost $8 million. Dave Young: Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this. [Using Stories To Sell] Dave Young: Let’s pick up our story where we left off. And trust me, you haven’t missed a thing. Stephen Semple: Between 1949 and 1950, the Kraft cheese business declined by almost $8 million. Dave Young: Okay. Just they were having trouble letting people know that this cheese is already sliced and easy to grab one and put it on a piece of bread. Stephen Semple: By 1962, more than a decade later, sliced cheese blocks still had not caught on. Dave Young: All right. Stephen Semple: And the product wasn’t failing because people disliked it. The product was failing because people didn’t understand it. Dave Young: What’s Norman going to do here? Stephen Semple: Well, he realized something- Dave Young: I’m rooting for him. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Well, what he realized was something profound. People don’t buy invisible innovation. That’s the problem. People couldn’t immediately see the convenience, so therefore, the convenience didn’t exist. His answer was simple, what he decided to do. Now, here’s what he decided to do according to the documentation, but I actually think there’s a secondary reason why it suddenly became successful. He decided to wrap every slice individually. Now, each slice announced its own benefit. Right? Dave Young: Sure. Yeah. Stephen Semple: That’s what he decided to do. No explanation required. However, when they did that, they also changed the name from Kraft Deluxe to Kraft Singles. Now, I believe, I believe, yes, the wrapping in the plastic was cool, but I believe the thing that made it successful was actually the name change. I think if they had just changed the Kraft Singles, I think they would’ve had success because now the block of cheese, you’re like, “Oh, it’s sliced in the single pieces.” Dave Young: Yeah, I don’t even have to worry about peeling one slice off of the rest, because sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t work. Yeah. Stephen Semple: So, they created the world’s first individually wrapped cheese slices, and that changed everything. Grab one slice, no knife, no mass, perfect proportions, perfect sandwiches. I believe it’s also the name change that contributed to it. Changing it from Kraft Deluxe to Kraft Singles is what made it work. And now, all of a sudden, instead of, you know, just peanut butter and jelly, you can now have ham and cheese, turkey and cheese- Dave Young: Yeah, yeah. Stephen Semple: … bologna and cheese, grilled cheese. Cheese suddenly became a standard sandwich ingredient because it was now as convenient. Dave Young: Bolognan and cheese with a couple of slices of extra cheese just tossed into the lunchbox. Stephen Semple: Yeah, because all of a sudden it was now as convenient as the bread. Dave Young: You could do it. Stephen Semple: Right. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: You could do it, and you could drive the dog nuts by peeling it off. So, by 1970, it’s just massive. And now, sadly, Norman Kraft did not see all of the success because he died less than two years after Kraft Singles launched. Dave Young: Oh, wow. Stephen Semple: He saw it takeoff, but he didn’t see it become the iconic thing it is today, so that’s too bad. But here’s the lesson, because this story to me is partially about cheese because, to me, there’s two things. There’s the one, the noticing sliced bread and going, “Well, why don’t we do sliced cheese?” That’s cool, but I think the biggest thing is you have to make your innovation visible. Dave Young: Yeah, I think that’s a great insight. Stephen Semple: Right? They had already invented a better product, but the problem was a communication problem. Consumers couldn’t see the innovation. It wasn’t easy. It was a marketing problem, and suddenly the packaging became the advertisement, Kraft Singles. And instantly the benefit is I don’t have to educate the consumer. Single slice of cheese, oh, crap, that’ll make making the sandwiches easier. Dave Young: Yeah. And once that becomes visible, as you say- Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: … then you understand what you’re buying. Stephen Semple: Right. Dave Young: And everybody does it now. Right? Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: You can buy a brick of Cheddar Jack cheese or you can buy individual slices, and the packaging looks different. Stephen Semple: Well, and even now- Dave Young: It doesn’t matter if it’s Kraft. Stephen Semple: … the individual slices- Dave Young: Right? Yeah. Stephen Semple: … they put that little piece of- Dave Young: It’s a little piece of paper. Stephen Semple: … paper in between. Yeah. And here’s the other thing is that they realize, “We didn’t have to explain to people, ‘Oh, you could now do a ham and cheese sandwich.'” People would figure that out on… The moment it’s convenient, people will figure out all the ways to add cheese to the sandwich. Dave Young: Yeah. Do you remember eating cheese? These were not single wrap, but Kraft sold a little brick of cheese that was sliced, and the wrapper was like a wax-coated plastic that you could sort of reseal. Right? Stephen Semple: Oh, right. Yeah. Dave Young: But if you were relying on an eight-year-old kid like me to reseal the cheese so that it didn’t get exposed to air in the fridge, it was a losing proposition. You’re going to open it tomorrow, and there’s going to be one edge of it that’s all dried and yuck that you’re going to have to probably carve off of there if you want to eat any of it. So, the Singles wrapping them individually solved that problem, too. Stephen Semple: See, my- Dave Young: It made the cheese Dave proof. Stephen Semple: We did not have processed cheese in our house because my parents were very cheese picky. So, the processed- Dave Young: Oh, really? I did not have processed cheese until I actually was on my own in university having to fend for myself. When all of a sudden stars lit up the sky, and you tasted the wonderful magnificence that is a Kraft Single. I want to grab a brick of it right now and go sit down and try to find some old reruns of some black and white show. Yeah. Stephen Semple: So, my challenge to people is, moment you have an innovation, make it easy for people to see it and experience it. That’s the goal. If the innovation is hidden or requires all sorts of education around it, the innovation is just not going to take off. No matter how great the innovation is, the innovation has to be easy to see the innovation, or if it’s something that’s intangible, the impact of the innovation because, otherwise, the innovation will just never catch on, never catch on. Dave Young: Yeah, I think it’s a good observation. So, where are you going to take me next in my childhood? That’s what I want to know. How do you find- Stephen Semple: I’m not sure. Dave Young: … about all these things about me? Stephen Semple: Well, we have our spies. Dave Young: Been doing some deep research. Yeah. Stephen Semple: I just asked the Dave AI. Dave Young: Yeah. How come nobody has named an AI Dave? Stephen Semple: Are they all just… Isn’t it just implied, Dave? Isn’t it just- Dave Young: I’m going to tell Claude that I’m renaming it. From now on, you’re Dave. All right. Anything else about cheese? Are we done? Stephen Semple: That’s it for right now. That’s it. Yep. Dave Young: Okay. Thanks for bringing us the sliced cheese story to the Empire Builders podcast. Stephen Semple: Thanks, David. Dave Young: Talk to you later, Steve. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big fat, juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute empire building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.

Being a beginner as an adult is its own kind of awkward, and most of us just call it nerves. Irish traditional musician and award-winning podcast host Tara Connaghan says that is not it at all. The real problem is that nobody handed you the rules of the room. She takes Lesley through the four stages of learning, why the frustrating middle is where most people quit, and the rock bottom that gave her clarity. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co mailto:beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/#follow-subscribe-free.In this episode you will learn about:Why five to ten minutes of practice a day beats one long session.The trouble with joining sessions built for high level musicians.What makes correcting an adult learner harder than correcting a child.Why boundaries make newcomers feel safe and know if they fit.How to pick a group that matches your current skill level.Episode References/Links:Session Etiquette Website – https://www.sessionetiquette.comSession Etiquette Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61576848312798In Tune with Tradition Podcast - https://beitpod.com/taraconnaghanpodTara Connaghan Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/tarafiddleTara Connaghan Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/tara.connaghanTara Connaghan LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/taraconnaghanTara Connaghan YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5tQCcQU81_mewa2uMRbq7AEp 153 ft Tanya Dalton - https://beitpod.com/ep153Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert - https://a.co/d/010vNZRZEat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert - https://a.co/d/00rGaxuPSubmit your wins or questions - https://beitpod.com/questions If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. https://lovethepodcast.com/BITYSIDEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentCheck out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentBe in the know with all the workshops at OPC https://workshops.onlinepilatesclasses.com/lp-workshop-waitlistBe It Till You See It Podcast Survey https://pod.lesleylogan.co/be-it-podcasts-surveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates Mentorship https://lesleylogan.co/elevate/FREE Ditching Busy Webinar https://ditchingbusy.com/Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gLesley Logan website https://lesleylogan.co/Be It Till You See It Podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjogqXLnfyhS5VlU4rdzlnQProfitable Pilates https://profitablepilates.com/about/Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lesley.logan/The Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gFacebook https://www.facebook.com/llogan.pilatesLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesley-logan/The OPC YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@OnlinePilatesClasses Episode Transcript:Tara Connaghan 0:00  It's too intimate to be putting pressure on it because I did lose it. So I put my hands on my heart because I feel like it's here. The music, when I play it, it's here. I suppose maybe because it is a fiddle as well, or a violin, but it's something so close, and I have lost it. I did lose it for a while, and if I lost it again, I don't know if I could survive that second loss. Lesley Logan 0:22  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast, where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world, and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity, and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guests will bring bold, executable, intrinsic, and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and be it till you see it. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Lesley Logan 1:03  Okay, Be It babe. Here's the deal: we have a unique topic on the podcast, but actually, we go extremely applicable to your life, if anything. We're going to talk about learning. We're going to talk about rock bottoms. We're going to talk about etiquette with the types of people that you're wanting to be around, and I think it's just quite fun. Tara's my new Irish friend that I didn't know I needed. Her name's Tara Connaghan, and she actually is an award-winning podcast host, and she teaches people how to play Irish music and also be in Irish sessions and the etiquette for that. And you're, what? But all of it is, I think, really the conversation is so helpful because if you want to be it till you see it, and I want to be in a pickleball league, or I want to be teaching X thing, or I want to learn this new skill, some of the things we have to understand is the process of learning, and then the etiquette of how do we join these groups? What are those things? So it's really quite fun. I can't wait for you to hear her, and then you'll have to check out her award-winning podcast because that's so great. Here is Tara Connaghan. Lesley Logan 1:59  All right, Be It babes. This is going to be fun. This is going to be totally interesting. It's a topic I've definitely never had a guest on before, and that means we get to learn something new, but also learn things that we can use along our way to something unique. So, Tara Connaghan is our guest today. Tara, can you tell everyone who you are and what you rock at? Tara Connaghan 2:18  Hi, Lesley. I am an Irish traditional musician. I love playing Irish music. I love playing music in Irish music sessions, particularly. I'm from the northwest of Ireland, which is Donegal, which is kind of, it's not part of Northern Ireland, but it's more northerly than Northern Ireland. But it's geographically Northern Ireland, but not politically, if that makes sense. So we're in the Republic of Ireland. Very confusing. And I've lived all over Ireland. I've lived around the world a couple of bits, but mostly I'm always kind of living around Ireland. But I'm back in Donegal now for the last maybe 12 years, and I just love sessions. But I teach adults a lot, and they're always worried about joining into sessions because they're maybe newcomers to the sessions. So I always thought it was performance anxiety that was the problem, but actually, what's feeding the performance anxiety is that they don't know the etiquette to joining sessions. And so that was why I decided to start a podcast almost a year ago about etiquette, teaching people the etiquette of joining sessions, and I'm learning so much. Oh my God, it's amazing. Lesley Logan 3:21  Okay, there's so many things I want to talk about because, first of all, what are sessions, and then to know what the etiquette is, but also it just goes into a lot of us do label something performance anxiety or just blanket anxiety when really it's we don't know how to be a beginner, we don't know how to enter something new. We don't know how to... It's hard to join a group because when you're an adult, all the groups are already kind of filled, and you're, I've got to join in on something, and they already know everything, and I don't know, and we don't know how to be beginners. Is that kind of what's happening? Tara Connaghan 3:50  Totally, totally, yeah. Lesley Logan 3:52  Okay, so just so we have the definitions, what are sessions, and what is the etiquette? Tara Connaghan 3:56  A session can be lots of... There's lots of different types of sessions and different functions for sessions, but the main session is that it's a group of musicians who get together to play Irish music. Lesley Logan 4:09  Okay. Tara Connaghan 4:09  That's kind of the simplest term or the simplest way of explaining it. It's people who kind of know what Irish music is, and they want to play it with each other, and they want to kind of share their music together, and it's like a team. It's a team. Lesley Logan 4:22  Okay, like you're making a band, but you're not a band, like a group. Tara Connaghan 4:25  Yes, yeah. But there's no... Usually there's... Well, I say usually. A session is usually something without microphones, although sometimes it has microphones because it's maybe for tourists or maybe it's a noisy pub or something. So usually the ones that are in the corner with no microphones, they're just playing to each other. Lesley Logan 4:44  It's like jazz when they get together and they just play together. Okay, so there can be sessions of any kind, but sessions for this would be the Irish musicians getting together. And then is the etiquette different for the Irish music versus, I guess, any musician, or what does that look like? Tara Connaghan 5:00  I don't think it's particularly different. There may be slight differences. I think maybe one of the things is that you could be playing in a session with some of your heroes. They're quite accessible. Irish traditional musicians almost would be classed as... they're professionals but amateurs. Lesley Logan 5:17  Okay, okay. Tara Connaghan 5:18  Because they're not all making a living from it. Okay, so you could have some of the highest-quality Irish musicians playing in a session. You might have just come across, or maybe you've never heard Irish music before, and you walk in and you could be listening to some of the most amazing musicians. Lesley Logan 5:35  That's so cool. I love this. I love this. So this is... I am grateful for the definitions because you're an expert in this area, but this is the thing for a lot of things, right? You could be in a chess group or a mahjong or pickleball. I'm a Pilates instructor who travels to teach Pilates instructors, and I find that if I want to just be in the group, sometimes the nervousness from the other people who maybe watch my videos or things like that, they get nervous and they have this performance anxiety, and it's like we're just here to kind of hang out. So, I guess if we could take it in a broad sense, how did you get here? Because we don't wake up going, "I'm gonna teach this." You know what I mean? It's not like what you tell someone in kindergarten. "When I grow up, I'm gonna teach Irish music." So, can you go back to your journey? Tara Connaghan 6:23  I mentioned that I teach the adults mostly. I have a fortnightly fiddle class that I do, and I also teach at different summer schools or camps or things that we would teach music at throughout the year. And for the last... I've been playing music for nearly 40 years. Oh my god, I am playing music for 40 years. Oh god, that just dawned on me. Oh my god. Lesley Logan 6:45  That's amazing, though, but it's annoying because, wow, so much clout, and also, oh, I'm older than I thought. Tara Connaghan 6:53  Yes, yeah, yeah. So I've been teaching a long time. I do prefer to teach adults. I just have a natural sort of bond because an adult wants to be there. They're putting all their time and their energy, and they really want to be there. Whereas kids, the parents want them to be there. So I just want to be with people who want to do something, and then I can help them. If they don't want to be there, then I can't help them. So in every workshop, even though it's more about repertoire, when you're in the workshop we're like, we learn this tune and we learn this tune and we learn... So we might learn maybe three tunes a day or maybe one tune, depending on the levels of people. And always within one of those workshops or classes or camps, there will always be questions. Once one person asks, "Do I have enough tunes to start, to play in a session? Or can I sit there? Am I allowed to do this? Am I allowed to do that? Do you have to have this?" There's so many questions, and because there's so many unknowns, and they don't know the answers, they are terrified. And then when you're anxious and terrified, you probably do actions that you wouldn't normally do. Lesley Logan 8:02  You make mistakes because the nerves are taking away the ability to be present. Tara Connaghan 8:08  Yes, yeah, yeah. And then they start... Then things happen, and they're like, "Oh, and such-and-such gave out to me for doing something." And I think we've all been given out to. It's a natural sort of... If we go back to the animal kingdom, there's kind of a natural, "Look, you don't do that. You don't do that. Don't do this," and you're kind of almost like a cat would do to its kitten. Lesley Logan 8:31  Yeah. Tara Connaghan 8:33  It's not that you're trying to say you shouldn't be... There's no kind of "you shouldn't" or whatever. But it's just kind of a, "No, no, no. Wait this," or "Wait for your turn," or "Wait to this." So it's kind of the natural... You're teaching the natural language of your culture, whatever. But that's normally given to children. Lesley Logan 8:51  Right. Tara Connaghan 8:52  It's very hard to give that to an adult who is your peer in terms of age, but not your peer in terms of skill, and that's a really difficult thing to do. So Irish people are very, very bad at giving feedback. They don't want to offend anybody, so we just say nothing, and then things can blister away and fester. Lesley Logan 9:11  I wonder if anyone is good at giving feedback very often because we're not trained at that. You don't go to college and learn, "Okay, in your life, if you have to give feedback to someone, this is the way you give it." That's not anything anyone's trained in. So if your culture is more, "We're just not going to say anything at all," it's just going to fester and blister, and we'll just put you over there in the corner. Other people will just tell you what it is and honestly cramp someone's spirit. You could just step on a flower. So I think we all have to learn how to be better at feedback, but it's different when students are learning because when you're younger, yes, there are still personality types that are putting pressure on themselves to be perfect. No matter your age, there are different levels to learning. Correct? Because whether or not you are learning Irish music or anything, every learning has a level. Tara Connaghan 10:02  I mean, there's the four stages of learning. So there's when you're totally unconsciously aware. You're completely unaware. So when you were maybe two, your mother tied your shoelaces. You didn't tie your shoes. You didn't even know that shoelaces existed. They're just not in your conscious realm at all. And then maybe as you get... maybe four or five, you're like, "Oh, hold on a second. My mother's tying my shoes. I want to try that." You start getting, "I want to try it." Then there's that stage where you're conscious of it, but you realize how bad you are at it. So your competency level is pretty poor. You're incompetent, but you're consciously incompetent, so you know you're shit at it. Lesley Logan 10:45  That's so hard because it's so frustrating. Tara Connaghan 10:48  So frustrating. You're like, "I can't..." Sorry, I don't know if I can curse. Lesley Logan 10:52  You can curse on this show. Totally. Tara Connaghan 10:56  So you're so frustrated, as you say, and so many people give up at that stage because they're like, "I can't do this. No, I'm out." That sounds like me with surfing or certain things. I'm just like, "No, I can't do this. I'm out." Lesley Logan 11:10  I understand that. With ADHD, I can be okay being bad at something, but I have to get good at it quickly. Otherwise, I'm out. My attention span's not there. But it is interesting. We see that in people in all learning things, right? I teach people how to teach Pilates, and you can see even if they're already teaching Pilates, when they discover that there is stuff that they didn't know they didn't know, then there's a frustration that no one told them, "I didn't know this." But you can't be told, no one is expert at everything when they're new. You just start new. Okay, so then we're pissed off, we're frustrated, and if we don't quit, what happens next? Tara Connaghan 11:52  So if we don't quit and we keep going, then we start getting to a place where we're more competent. We've got a bit more competency. There's a big range within that. You're starting to get competent, and then you grow up to being much more competent, and you're consciously aware that you're competent. So it's maybe when you're six or seven and you're still tying the shoelaces. You can tie them, but it takes a bit of... You're still focusing on it. That takes a huge amount of energy, so it's a very exhausting stage where you're focusing on, "I have to tie the shoe. I have to do this loop and that loop." And your fingers are just faltering at it. The same with playing an instrument. You're kind of like, "I have to watch my left finger..." Lesley Logan 12:42  "...this thing, and then breathe, and then this one." You're still talking yourself through it. Yes.  Tara Connaghan 12:46  Or even driving. "I have to put my foot here, and I have to look at the clutch. I have to put on my seatbelt before all of that, and I have to look in the mirror." I have to do this. There's so many things. Your brain is still running through the process of how to do it. Then you get to the last stage, which is you're competent, but you're unconsciously competent. So it's totally, did you remember tying your shoelaces this morning? No. You just did it. It becomes ingrained so that you don't even know that you're doing it anymore, but you can do it. The same with playing the fiddle. I'm thinking of something else because it's unconscious. It's already in the muscle memory of my fingers. It's in the muscle memory of my brain, my elbows, my whole body. My body does it, and then I can focus on, not something else, but something like, the next level, which is, "How do I do it better? How do I do the intricacies?" You're listening and going, "Oh, such-and-such did that. I might do that." You're listening for something else. Lesley Logan 13:54  Yeah, you can take more in. My husband's a musician. That's not me, but I can attribute it to things in my world. I retook a workshop I've taken from this person before, and I thought I was just going to sit there and get reminded of a few quotes I liked from them. Then they said something, and I was like, "What? What is that?" And it was just like, "Oh, I didn't know the thing before that. It wasn't ingrained in me, so I couldn't even pick up on this if I wanted to." It was always there, but I didn't have the capacity to hear it or see it or understand it because I just had to get the muscle memory there so that nuance could even stand out. Tara Connaghan 14:35  And that takes years. We're in such a culture that everything is convenient. It's quick. Everything's fast. But I don't think there's anything that can replace just time of learning and putting the time in. Lesley Logan 14:52  Tara, how do you help people do that, though? Because obviously what you do is so unique. But however you help them, we all have to understand that it does take time, and it's hard for adults because there's so much unconscious competence happening because we're in our life. We can drive home without even realizing it. There's just things that we do. It scares the fuck out of me every time. I'm like, "How did I get here? Whoa." How do you remind adults to be patient to go through the different stages? Tara Connaghan 15:18  It's not easy. None of us like it for anything. I got a sewing machine. I am crap at sewing, because I never did it in school. I did woodwork instead. It just takes it. I just have to remind people it may only be five minutes per day, and then supplement it with a couple of maybe intense weekends or an intense week where you really focus on it, almost like 12-hour days. That really supplements it. But you need the five minutes per day, five to 10 minutes per day. I think, really helps people. Lesley Logan 15:53  Okay, let's dive into that because I think people think, "Oh, I'll just do this on my day off." But if you just do several hours on one day, it's almost... Do you think it's better if they were to do five to 10 minutes per day for six to seven days is better than one day for two hours? Tara Connaghan 16:10  Absolutely, 1,000%. Lesley Logan 16:12  And why? Do we know why? Tara Connaghan 16:15  There are actually studies that show that because you're building up the muscle memory. You don't build it up in one go. You build it up every day. You don't wash your teeth just once a week. Lesley Logan 16:27  Right. Right. Tara Connaghan 16:28  You wash them every day because ifLesley Logan 16:30  You washed your teeth for two hours once a week, it wouldn't even make up for it. Even though it's like three times the amount you should brush your teeth, it doesn't even make the difference. Tara Connaghan 16:38  No, it's not going to make the difference because the plaque is already there. It would be too hard to remove it. That's just what it is. And five to 10 minutes, that's nothing. Lesley Logan 16:47  Right. I think that's the hard part because people go, "That's nothing. So does it even matter?" Tara Connaghan 16:53  Yeah. So, tomorrow... I'm learning the concertina as well. I do play the fiddle. I've played the fiddle for almost 40 years, but I have a concertina, which is this little kind of hexagon-shaped instrument. I normally have it at my desk, but I'm not at my desk. I'm actually in New York. Lesley Logan 17:10  Cool. What's a concertina? I gotta look this up. I need a visual. Lesley Logan 17:14  Concertina. Lesley Logan 17:16  Concertina.  Tara Connaghan 17:17  Yeah, so, hexagon-shaped. Lesley Logan 17:21  This is... Oh, that's cool. For everyone who's not Googling this while they're driving, please don't. First of all, they're not cheap. It's like an accordion, but a hexagon has six or seven sides. Tara Connaghan 17:40  Your fingers are working from both sides. Lesley Logan 17:43  Yes. Tara Connaghan 17:44  Yes. So it's very petite and dainty. It's a real kind of woman's... Lesley Logan 17:50  It's so beautiful. An accordion is not sexy. Nothing's sexy about an accordion. This is quite cute. This looks like the Victorian era. Tara Connaghan 17:56  Yes. It's very ornate, and designs in it. So I'm learning that now. I had it right beside my computer because you're, especially if you're doing something, and then you need kind of like coffee beans to refresh your brain. So I used to have that, and I'd play for five or 10 minutes. I didn't have access to my concertina for about 15 years because I had lent it to somebody else, and they forgot to give it back to me. Eventually I got it back recently, and I started playing for about five minutes whenever I got bored, well, not bored, but my brain is overworked and overwhelmed and I needed to deep-dive into it for five minutes. The first day I was like, "Oh my god, I can't even remember where the notes are." I was like one-finger typing. Lesley Logan 18:45  I understand. Yeah. Tara Connaghan 18:47  Until, after a couple of weeks, he came down to the office and said, "That actually sounded quite good." Lesley Logan 18:55  Because it came back to you because you just had it. I love what you said, that you had it right next to you. For anything we're wanting to do, my listeners know I was studying the tarot, and unfortunately it got away from me because I had the app, which is great because when I was traveling I couldn't have the cards, but I'm a physical kind of person. So when I was at home, having the cards and the book at my desk, while I'm waiting for the Zoom call to start, I could just read a page. Having those little doses of information actually allows you to take it in. Whereas it's a lot, especially when you're in the incompetence, it's a lot in the brain to do it and you don't retain as much. I'm studying the science of learning right now, I'm really interested in this, and there's a whole lot we have to do self-reflection and self-quizzing. That's actually the best when you're learning anything. You're not waiting for the test to come where you cram, or in music, I guess, the concert to come where you perform. You have to kind of test your skills on your own and then learn from what you don't know. Tara Connaghan 0:00  Yeah, and I think for joining a session as well, you have to learn to play with other people, and that can be a big learning curve as well, because it might be that you've just started an instrument, so this is totally new. You've got a new instrument. Oh my god. I'm still trying to figure out where the notes are. I'm still trying to figure all this out. You're still kind of incompetent. And you need to learn also how to play with other people if you want to join a session. Lesley Logan 20:26  Yeah. Tara Connaghan 20:27  I think those kinds of camps are a great place to do that. They can be big sessions, so you can kind of hide behind people for a while until you get a bit more competency in playing with others because it's a really different skill, being able to listen to yourself while listening to others.Lesley Logan 20:45  How do you, how do you get the... Because that's a bit of courage and bravery, to go from playing by yourself in your home to, okay, I'm going to take this. What advice do you have for people who... There's embarrassment, there's nervousness. How do you get over yourself enough to go? Because I'm someone who'd be a fly on the wall until I'm shoved off the cliff. That's kind of me. But how do you get yourself ready?Tara Connaghan 21:06  I think it's a good idea, if you're learning from a class situation where you've got classmates, then maybe your teacher might have a once-a-year or once-a-month or once-a-week session where they encourage you to come, if you want to join a session. It's a very gentle process where you're coming into it in a very gentle way. What I would definitely not recommend you do is go into a session where there are high-level musicians who need something totally different. So if you're a beginner musician, you want to be feeling kind of a belonging. You want to sense this sense of community. A high-level musician who's been playing for 40 years, they already have that. What they want is challenge, and you're not going to challenge them if you're a newcomer. So don't be afraid, or don't be... not afraid, but don't be putting yourself in that position. Don't take it personally, I think is what I'm trying to say.Lesley Logan 22:01  Well, this makes a lot of sense to me because in life, if you have a skill or there's something you're doing, it's really good to have people who are your equals, so your classmates, like you mentioned. And then there's the people who are below you, in a different level. Playing with people below you builds your confidence because, whoa, I'm not like that anymore, right?Tara Connaghan 22:19  Yes.Lesley Logan 22:20  Playing with people who are at the same level as you makes you feel comfortable and, okay, I've got my people. But typically, if you're going to play with people who are above you, you'd be paying to play with them. You're in their workshop or you're in their thing because they need people above them to challenge them and people like them who understand what they need. And if they're going to have people below them, it's because they're teaching them.Tara Connaghan 22:43  Exactly. And I think it's funny that you should pick that up so quickly because that seems to be something that we've... I suppose we're so close to it, you can't see the wood from the trees when you're so in the middle of it. And so it's only recently that I figured, from conversations actually, that's more of a teaching environment when we're in a session with people that are below us. And that's a very different thing. That's quite draining because you're giving a lot of energy, and you're not.Lesley Logan 23:10  Getting yourself filled up. There have to be sessions for the person who's more of the expert to be filled up. I get that totally. I teach a lot of students, and I have no problems doing that. But when I am in the workshop to learn, if people bother me to understand, I'm like, "Oh, I'm not in that brain. I'm here." So I find I'm very particular about the places I go to learn in or be challenged in because I want to stay in that frame. And if you are wanting me to teach you in that space, I'm a little bit... Okay, I've got to get my cup filled.Tara Connaghan 23:45  I suppose I would love to be able to say that certain things in certain situations... I think we are quite welcoming.Lesley Logan 23:54  Yeah, and that's the hard part because I don't want to stamp on anyone's flowers or anyone's willingness to learn. And I also think they don't understand what they don't... You know what I mean? They don't know that they're just asking a question. And you are an expert, and you are someone who usually teaches. But there has to be a space where you can go be yourself and be challenged.Tara Connaghan 24:13  Yeah, yeah. I think so. I have found that some people like to shame skilled musicians for having that, and I'm trying to call that out and go, "No, I'm not happy that that is something that should be definitely there."Lesley Logan 24:26  I think that's interesting, right? What an awareness we can have because it's fine to have the need to have the space to be in your creative space or to not be in teaching mode, to be in play mode or creativity mode. And also, how do we remind people of the rules of the space without hurting their feelings or pissing them off or making them feel like they're stupid? I don't know if you have those in Ireland, but people have these signs in their house, like, "In this house, we believe in science," and things like that. There, we believe in these... When you walk into the space, if these-level musicians are playing, you're free to watch, but please write down all questions and save them for your... You know what I mean? It's okay to be in their presence, of course, and be inspired. But this is when you're allowed to ask the questions. I guess it goes back to the etiquette. It's like having rules for... If you're a house that has no shoes on or shoes off, it's kind of like that.Tara Connaghan 25:25  Yeah. I suppose it's always being one of those environments that is very spontaneous. So I think when you have a spontaneous environment, the thought of rules makes it really kind of...Lesley Logan 25:38  I understand. Yeah. Well, Tanya Dalton, we had her on the show, and she talked about when there are boundaries, everyone can be more creative and have more fun.Tara Connaghan 25:50  Yes.Lesley Logan 25:51  She explained it, and you guys, I'll put the link in the show notes because I actually don't remember which episode number she is. But she said if there's a school playground and there's no fence, and the teachers tell the kids, "Hey, stay close to the school building to play," you're going to have some kids who literally don't leave the wall. They just play next to the wall. You're going to have some kids who play in the middle, and then you're going to have some kids who are going all the way to the edge because they want to see how far they can go. But if you put the fence up and you say you just have to stay in the fence, then all of a sudden everyone can play. So I guess it's interesting because some people don't want to have rules on things to affect the creativity, but they'll have more creativity if they just have some set rules.Tara Connaghan 26:35  Yeah, and I think everybody feels safer as well then if there are some sort of boundaries. Especially newcomers can feel safe because they know, "Right, well, this is maybe not the session for me," or "This one is the session for me."Lesley Logan 26:47  Yeah, because I'm the girl who'd be next to the wall because I don't understand. I don't want to fuck it up, and I don't want to embarrass myself, and I don't want to make someone mad. So I would be the person who doesn't even join any session, even the ones at my level, because I wouldn't... So I think that's where it's important. No matter what the thing is that we're joining or learning, we have to understand the etiquette, but also the people above us have to define that so that we can.Tara Connaghan 27:11  Yeah, yeah, I guess. Lesley Logan 27:12  Or at least the host of the place. Tara Connaghan 27:15  Yeah, yeah, yeah.Lesley Logan 27:17  So Tara, your enthusiasm and joy for what you do is so contagious. I really do love it. How did you get to keep your passion for this? Because I have to imagine that in the 40 years of playing music, Irish music hasn't been famous for all 40 years. How did you keep it going? What did you do? Then you're in this new space where you have this podcast. I guess people listening to this have been doing things for 20 or 30 years, and sometimes they wonder if they should keep doing that. Is it worth doing? How do they know when to stop? What advice do you have for that?Tara Connaghan 27:55  I did have a time in my early 30s, which is almost 20 years ago. god, sorry.Lesley Logan 28:03  It's all right. I just looked at pictures of myself at 25, and I was like, "Whoa, that was a long time ago."Tara Connaghan 28:09  When I arrived in New York a couple of days ago, I had a suitcase, and I was trying to walk up the stairs, carry it up the stairs. And this young fella, I think he was probably about 25 or something, said, "Do you want me to help?" And I was like, "No, no, I've got a friend coming. She's going to help me as well." And he said, "Oh, if this was my mother, I would hope somebody would help me." And I was like, "Oh my god!"Lesley Logan 28:27  He was being so sweet, and also...Tara Connaghan 28:32  The realization. But of course I could be his mother. But I don't even have kids.Lesley Logan 28:36  Tara, I understand. I have friends my age who have kids who are in high school, so I was like, "I could have a high schooler." Tara Connaghan 28:44  Yeah, I could totally have somebody who's gone through college, finished college. Anyway, let's not go there. So in my 30s, I did have a bit of a, wow, I thought I would be somewhere different. I thought things would feel different. There was that kind of realization: Is this it? There was always this kind of, I thought it was going to be different, and I thought it was going to be amazing. I went through maybe not a spiral downwards, but I was just lost for a while. And then, it was kind of a spiral to a couple of things. I had somebody who was really, really close to me pass away, and that person held my future dreams. So that totally took the carpet from underneath me. I was like, "Well, what do I do now?" It was totally the end now. And I think when you get to rock bottom, you go, "What are the things that are actually really important?" That's what I had to do. I just had to go food, water... I mean, we're talking basic. I think I had probably experienced a bit of PTSD at the time, post-traumatic stress disorder, because I couldn't plan ahead. All I could think of was the next hour and what are the basic needs that I need. So food, water, shelter, friendship. And I thought, "You know what? Music is what fills my cup." And so I had to figure out what was the thing that fills my cup? I have loads of interests. What was the one thing that I really wanted? And I think when you get to rock bottom, things become so clear. I'm not advocating for getting to rock bottom, but if you want clarity, you will find it down there.Lesley Logan 30:37  I think years ago I heard someone say you can't take someone's rock bottom away. You can give advice, but also, sometimes we don't learn what we need to until we are there. Some of us just need to clear everything away. I have to say, I am so grateful for the rock bottom I had because it was, "Okay, I've got nothing. So if I'm going to add to this nothing, it better be something I want." I don't want to add. It was the first time I had a clean slate. I don't want to add stuff I don't want. So I agree with you.Tara Connaghan 31:11  Declutter.Lesley Logan 31:12  Yeah.Tara Connaghan 31:13  It really declutters the mind, and it really focuses on just the important things. Music was the thing that, it's almost like the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was just something that I had that was present, that was just filling my cup, as you said. So I kept doing that. Not that I was doing it all the time, but when I needed that sort of, because I went home to my parents' house, and I slept for about six months. I didn't go outside the door. I remember having relations saying, "Oh, you can't do that." And I was like, "Please don't ever tell anybody that they can't take the time that they need to recover because I needed that time." It took a good few years, but I needed the six months of complete and utter sleep. Then it took another couple of years before I was able to get back to being a normal person again. I'd say I'm a huge amount stronger because of it, and just more clear. So.Lesley Logan 32:12  Yeah.Tara Connaghan 32:12  Music is just... yeah. And I think every time I'm in a session, the other thing is if I'm playing for money, it's a job.Lesley Logan 32:20  Yeah.Tara Connaghan 32:22  So I kind of removed that. Even though I still get paid, I removed the, "Oh, this one is a gig." It's, "I'm going to go and I'm going to play music. Fantastic. If somebody gives me money at the end, great." Sometimes I want to make sure that it's good money at the end, but I looked at it differently. It wasn't for the money. It was for the music, and then somebody gives me money as well, and that's great.Lesley Logan 32:46  I appreciate you sharing that journey because I think we all look at other people and go, "Oh my goodness, they must have loved this their whole life," and not realize that there are parts of their lives where they loved it, but they didn't get up for six months. Everyone is on an up-and-down journey that hopefully always ends up, but it's going to have its own nuances. And if we don't take the time we need to find what fills our cup, then I don't know that we get to enjoy it. I feel like life is worth enjoying. Yes, sometimes we get paid for things we love, but also we should do things because we love them.Tara Connaghan 33:26  Yeah, totally. So I think that was how I got out of that sort of, "I'm doing it for the money." I don't know if you've ever read Big Magic.Lesley Logan 33:37  Obsessed. Great book.Tara Connaghan 33:39  Fantastic.Lesley Logan 33:39  I'm not sure I agree with her in the more recent years of life, but I love that book. So, everyone must, required reading. So good. Required reading.Tara Connaghan 33:51  Yeah. It just gives so much freedom to your creativity as well. It's like, "Oh yeah, that's so cool." It's like it's a muse. You're the host of a creative idea, and you entertain it, or eventually it'll just go, "Look, I'm an idea, and I need to be created. So if you're not going to create me, somebody else will have to do it." Such a great idea.Lesley Logan 34:14  You guys, if you're wondering what is she saying, you have to go read the book. It's, ideas want to be born, it's Elizabeth Guilbert, I believe that's her name. She wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and she even shares that she still worked as a professor even after she wrote that book, even after it was a bestseller, even after it became a movie. It was years before she thought, "Okay, I can just be a writer for a living." I think that's a really important lesson for all of us who are doing something we're passionate about because the pressure you put on it changes the joy you get out of it, and also what you create.Tara Connaghan 34:50  Yeah. It's too intimate to be putting pressure on it because I did lose it. So I put my hands on my heart because I feel like it's here. The music, when I play it, it's here. I suppose maybe because it is a fiddle as well, or a violin, but it's here anyway. It's something so close, and I have lost it. I did lose it for a while, and if I lost it again, I don't know if I could survive that second loss.Lesley Logan 35:17  Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I think that's really important. Tara, you're so fun. We're going to take a brief break and find out where people can find you, follow you, take sessions with you.Tara Connaghan 35:26  Yeah.Lesley Logan 35:28  All right, Tara. Where do you hang out? They can listen to your podcast. Can anyone play Irish music? Tell us everything.Tara Connaghan 35:36  They can listen to it on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, wherever. It's called In Tune with Tradition. There's also the subtitle, Perspectives on Session Etiquette and Irish Traditional Music. There is a website called Session Etiquette. I also have a tour kind of thing coming up, a private session experience in September 2026, at the end of September. We've got a couple of places left on it. It will be in Ireland. Brilliant. I can't wait.Lesley Logan 36:07  I feel like September in Ireland is probably good weather. Tara Connaghan 36:10  Sometimes. Actually, do you know when it's been really good weather? It's April. April for the last three or four years has been really good, really dry, sunny. Then the rest of summer's awful, and around September sometimes it can pick up again.Lesley Logan 36:23  Feels like Vegas weather, but probably different. April is so beautiful here. Don't take me away, but the summer? Get me out.Tara Connaghan 36:32  I'm in New York, and it was really, really hot for the last couple of days. Today is nice. It's just perfect.Lesley Logan 36:38  Yeah. That's an interesting place to be when it's too hot. Okay, we've talked a lot about learning and things like that. You've given us so much already, but what bold, executable, intrinsic, or targeted steps do you have for people to be it till they see it?Tara Connaghan 36:52  I think they should listen to my podcast, number one. The reason I'm in New York is because it's an award-winning podcast. It has just won some awards.Lesley Logan 37:01  Get out. Congratulations. That's amazing!Tara Connaghan 37:06  Yay! So, anyway, but more actionable steps: I think life is short. Just pick the thing that fills your cup and go for it.Lesley Logan 37:15  Yeah.Tara Connaghan 37:16  If that's Irish music, fantastic. If it's not, do the thing that makes you really, really just gives you so much joy and fills your cup because otherwise you'll always be trying to fill your cup with something that can't fill, can't do it.Lesley Logan 37:31  I agree. I think that's so true. Oh my gosh, congratulations on your podcast. That's incredible, you guys. That's not an easy thing to do, especially with a new podcast, so way to go, Tara. I agree. I was just watching a show, and it's clear there are people on the show who don't have anything else. They don't have something that fills their cup. My husband's listening to somebody, and they're... If you don't have something that's a hobby, something that's creative, friends and family, and work that gives you purpose, if you don't have those three things, f you take one of those away, you put too much pressure on the other things, and they're never going to give you the tripod. You're going to fall over. So I feel like that's really important for today. I think we all need that information. Lesley Logan 38:15  You guys, go listen to Tara's award-winning podcast. Go listen to it, and go figure out if it's... If you don't know what's filling your cup, maybe it's time to start trying new things and be consciously incompetent for a little bit. It'll get better. Share this with a friend who needs to hear it. And until next time, Be It Till You See It. Lesley Logan 38:33  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 39:16  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 39:21  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 39:25  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 39:32  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 39:36  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Nick and JP ask if fans trust Todd Monken to make the correct decision on a starting QB for this season.

HR1 - Falcons must correct operational errors during joint practices with Colts In hour one Mike, Ali, and Beau recap and react to the Atlanta Braves losing to the Minnesota Twins last night 4-2 in Minnesota in game one of their three game series, explain why they think the Braves need more consistent hitting with runners in scoring position to be legit World Series contenders, explain why they think the Falcons preseason opener was all about learning players strengths and weaknesses, react to the Associated Press putting out their preseason Top 25 college football rankings, react to the Ohio State Buckeyes and Oregon Ducks being ranked one and two respectively in the preseason AP Top 25 college football poll, react to the Georgia Bulldogs being ranked as the third best team in the country in the preseason AP college football poll, explain why they think Georgia quarterback Gunner Stockton taking next step will make Georgia an unstoppable force, and then close out hour one by diving into the life of Ali Mac in Ali's Mac Drop!

Keith breaks down why global crises, geopolitical shocks, and nonstop "doom" headlines haven't stopped stocks and real estate from reaching near all-time highs, and what that means for investors focused on inflation-resistant assets.  He also discusses Memphis as a surprising cash-flow market poised to benefit from the AI boom, sharing details on an upcoming webinar with Mid South Homebuyers.  Keith is joined by real estate investor and educator Jared Garfield to unpack the "Seven-Figure Solution," a strategy that combines cash-flowing rentals with tax-advantaged life insurance to create liquidity, reduce risk, and support long-term retirement income.  Together, they explore how disciplined portfolio growth, smart leverage, and coordinated tax planning can help real estate investors better align their assets with their long-term financial goals. Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/619 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866  Join Mid South Home Buyers' one-time, free live webinar featuring Keith Weinhold on September 30 at GetRichEducation.com/MidSouth to learn how Memphis' economic expansion could create new real estate investment opportunities, and have your questions answered in real time. Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review"  For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com  Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript: Keith Weinhold  0:02   Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. The world is about to end again. It's the economic disaster that never arrives. I'll break it down. Then you've been earning money and investing well all these years. How does it all go together? It can culminate in the seven-figure solution, it's about seeing your future today on Get Rich Education. What if I told you that one of America's strongest cash flow real estate markets is also becoming the new brains and brawn behind AI? That city is Memphis, believe it or not. And September 30th, we're going to show you why the smart money is paying attention now, along with an investing opportunity you won't want to miss. Join me, Terry Kerr and Matthew Van Horn of Mid South Homebuyers, the largest turnkey company in Memphis with more than 6,000 homes under management, for a free live webinar, the likes of which I've never done before, we're going to look at what billions in new investment could mean for jobs, housing demand, neighborhood appreciation, and your portfolio. Everyone who attends live will also get exclusive access to the best deal terms Mid South has ever offered. Reserve your free seat at getricheducation.com/midsouth again that september 30. Don't say we didn't tell you. Save your spot at getricheducation.com/midsouth.   Speaker 1  1:39   You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.   Keith Weinhold  1:55   Welcome to GRE from Kankakee, Illinois, to Cherokee, Iowa, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold. This is Get Recid Education, and the world is about to end. Even if you survive, your portfolio surely won't. Oh, jeez. At least that's the impression you get from mass media and what I'll call the Doom Scroll Industrial Complex. Fear creates urgency. Urgency attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs attract ad dollars. And I guess that using a slogan like "everything will probably be fine" well, that's never been a great ratings strategy. Now, can what has happened since 2020. Just this cheery little sequence: COVID, then Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, tariffs, and then the war in Iran. All that just since 2020. I mean, that right there sounds less like an economic timeline and more like a movie plot, or that the world is repeatedly spinning the wheel of misfortune. Yet after all of that, what is the result? Both stocks and residential real estate are near all-time highs. Apparently, the apocalypse has been postponed yet again-at least economically speaking. Now let's zoom out and break down these threats and a few more, all just since 2020, because 2020 is the year where, of course, you had the COVID-19 pandemic, economic shutdowns, the fastest major stock bear market in history, supply chain breakdown. You saw empty shelves, and there was unprecedented government intervention from the Paycheck Protection Program to stimulus checks to mortgage loan forbearance. Then, in 2021 and 2022, you had post-COVID inflation and supply shortages. Now, this was more of a result, not strictly geopolitical, but a major investment threat, and that led to aggressive interest rate hikes. From 2022 to the present, you have Russia's invasion of Ukraine, energy and food shocks came from that, sanctions, instability over in Europe, and really a heightened nuclear risk in 2023. You had the U.S. regional banking crisis. Remember SVB, yes, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic. They raised fears of a financial contagion that would spread like fat. Than a secret in a small town, it actually made me buy some gold. From 2023 to the present, you had the Israel-Hamas war and this broad Middle East instability, Hezbollah attacks, Houthi attacks, Red Sea shipping disruptions. It's almost like a geopolitical group project. And then from 2025 to the present, you have renewed U.S. tariffs and a global trade war, and this year you have the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz disruption. That is the biggest current geopolitical investment threat because it combines all of these things: war, oil disruption, inflation, higher interest rates, and a recession risk. So it's a lot like this particularly unpleasant smoothie that's been blended together.   Keith Weinhold  5:55   All right. Well, all of that-that is just an absurd amount of uncertainty and disruption only since 2020, and though major markets are at all-time highs in the face of this, let's acknowledge that some were hurt here, like apartment building owners vulnerable to interest rate resets, and certain commercial sectors like office. Even worse, let's be sensitive to the fact that COVID in wars have resulted in a real loss of life. GRE's enduring strategy of primarily owning long-term residential rentals with fixed-rate debt has been comparatively really resilient. In fact, these calamities-they probably made you better off from the inflation that it has spurred. More people work from home. Well, that means that they're consuming our product while higher inflation debased our debt and jacked up our property values and our rents. And you know somehow every. single generation thinks that their collection of crises is uniquely terrifying, and it is not. And what do I mean by this? Well, in the 1980s, people feared war with the Soviet Union, the Cold War. A global population explosion so bad that millions or billions of people would surely die from hunger. You had the AIDS crisis. You had a hole in the ozone layer. Well, all those things. Virtually zero investors make decisions based on that stuff: an imminent Soviet attack or mass starvation from overpopulation. There is one thing that is 100% certain here, and that is that more shocks are coming. In case you don't want to sleep well, you can get worked up over the certainty of future calamities, artificial intelligence is making cyber attacks faster and more scalable. AI has even created entirely novel viruses. A confrontation between China and Taiwan that could create risk in the semiconductor space.   Keith Weinhold  8:18   A blockade that might disrupt the world's advanced chip supply, creating more inflation and more uncertainty. Here is what's changed, though, for what investors care about. You know what has changed with today's set of calamities versus those of the 1980s and earlier, because there is something, and it's a big deal for investors. Here's what's changed: recent history shows that the government does more to intervene during disasters, stimulus checks, liquidity programs where they're printing trillions, bailouts, pushing interest rates down to almost zero, quantitative easing. How about a foreclosure moratorium? Anything you know during COVID, it was a lot of these things, and it was the CARES Act, and it was a student loan payment pause. I mean, the Federal Reserve even set up emergency credit facilities. We now know that when the economic building catches fire, policymakers they rarely stand around admiring the flames. They just flood the place with currency. So the best investors they keep prudently building real estate portfolios in the face of risk, not the absence of risk, because the latter does not exist. This incessant government intervention, whether you agree with it or not, it gives you more safety cushions the next time that things fall apart. That's why what appears risk. Is still risky, but less so. So there is more incentive to take on prudent risk than I've ever seen. You know, no politician wants America to fall apart under their watch. So increasingly, they'll just paper over the problem by printing, printing, printing, and then, therefore, the resultant inflation, the consequence of this, that can be dealt with under the next president's watch, not theirs. In fact, future calamities they almost make you want to own scarce real assets that benefit from inflation, not a hedge, a benefit. Trying to time every war, election, banking crisis, tariff announcement, virus, and Fed decision. Trying to time all of those things-that is usually ineffective. You either own more assets, or you get left behind in everything that's happened since 2020. That just underscores this. In fact, Berkshire Hathaway, the closely watched company that Warren Buffett ran for a long time, but he still has influence in.   Keith Weinhold  11:16   You know, they recently began moving out of cash and into assets, they ended their long net selling stretch. In fact, in the latest quarter ended, they've now done the most buying that they've done since early 2022. They have jumped back in the game. It appears that Berkshire Hathaway got tired of sitting on the sidelines and seeing others make gains, and they're pretty bullish on housing too. They bought a home builder. The bottom line here is that shocks are going to keep arriving, and yet productive assets and well-financed residential real estate has repeatedly survived them and just continued appreciating. Don't wait for a risk-free world because you'll wait forever. When you evaluate all these calamities, just since 2020, again, COVID, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, tariffs, and war in Iran, and then you realize that both real estate and stocks are near all-time highs anyway, and the government keeps backstopping asset owners like never before. This is just a fresh angle on how much better off you are when you prudently own more inflation-benefiting assets sooner. I want to tell you about something called the seven-figure solution. You've been here listening to me weekly since 2014. You've been earning money. You've been investing well, and now you're going to see how it all goes together. It's about making sure that your real estate and your other assets appropriately fund your retirement in a way that gives you protection against market downturns, a tax advantage pool of liquidity, the death benefit of a life insurance policy, and actually introduces you to a new form of leverage all at the same time. Now the liquidity here is key because this is where a 401(k) or IRA limit you, they have taxes and penalties if you want to use those funds early. This doesn't, but the seven-figure solution-it's not just for retirees. In fact, our own in-house investment coach Narayish uses something like this, and he is in his 30s. Let's discuss it, and then you'll see where I have an invitation for you, where you can get involved. I'd like to welcome in a guest we last had on the show a few years ago.   Keith Weinhold  13:54   He's a frequent guest on popular shows, including our friends over at the Real Estate Guys Radio Show, and this guest has also been a terrestrial radio show host himself. He's a long-time real estate educator and an active investor, just like you and I. So he speaks from experience and not a textbook. He's the creator of what we'll discuss today, called the Seven Figure Solution. Welcome back to the show, Jared Garfield.   Jared Garfield  14:21   Hey, it's great to be with you again. Thanks for having me.   Keith Weinhold  14:25   It's so good. Now you're with the Haven Bridge Group, and you help people, especially real estate investors, with what's called the seven-figure solution. Tell us about it.   Jared Garfield  14:37   it. Well, Haven Bridge, we get the name for that because people are really looking for a haven of safety, and the bridge is kind of what crosses the gaps that could kind of destroy your wealth, and it's the path to get there. So we want to take people on a path to safety, and the seven-figure solution is the idea that if you're going to be drawing out even 4% per year to not outlive your money, because people are living now. To 8590, 95 years old, and so that means you could have 35 years in retirement. And with inflation and different things like that, you really have to have a lot bigger nest egg than what most people realize. So a seven-figure solution is how to get to more than a million dollars liquid that you can draw on in a tax advantaged manner for the rest of your life, while also having living benefits. And we pull real estate in with it because we want people to have 10 or 15 or 20 rental properties by the time they retired. That they 1031 exchange regularly, so that they're always keeping tax advantages. So that even in retirement you have strong tax advantages, and ultimately we think that when you're 65 or 70, you might want to go from 30 single-family houses to 1031 exchange into one institutional asset that's a little bit less management intensive.   Keith Weinhold  15:57   Okay, so this is a tax advantage vehicle that real estate investors can use during their investing career, and those tax advantages then really convert into something that you can use in retirement as well.   Jared Garfield  16:11   Yes, what it does is it's a vehicle that instead of saving the money from your cash flow from your rental properties in the bank, we say, well, why wouldn't you rather invest in something where it grows tax-free, number one, and then number two, you don't have the penalties like you would with a 401k, where you get taxed and you get penalized 10% if you pull it out. It's liquid, usually about 80 to 90% liquid, so you can pull from it whenever you like, and you can use it for down payments to grow your real estate portfolio. But you can earn sometimes between five and even seven or 8% in a tax advantaged manner where you're not taxed on it, but you're earning a much higher return than if you put the cash flow into a bank.   Keith Weinhold  16:51   All right, so you're building this tax advantage pool of capital that grows over time, and this is important to have some liquidity. You know, Jared, I've often talked to our audience, about three to 5% of your portfolio value ought to be kept liquid. Maybe with a vehicle like this, you would want to put in more of that because real estate investors we have expenses, so you have this liquidity to cover things like vacancies and major repairs, or perhaps you could even use this account for future down payments on additional investment properties. Is that how it's utilized?   Jared Garfield  17:27   Yeah, absolutely. And I get it partially this way because in my early 20s, I got up to where I had about six rentals, and at the time, I also owned a real estate brokerage, and I was doing very well. I was making a six-figure income and things. And what happened is, I back when a   Keith Weinhold  17:41   six-figure income was a big deal.   Jared Garfield  17:43   Yeah, back in the early 2000s, it was a little bit better money. But the funny thing was, I had four rental properties that all went vacant at the same exact time, and so now all of a sudden, I was paying like 4500 bucks a month in mortgages, not counting the house I lived in, but I had to cover four mortgages on four of my rental properties all at the same time, and I hadn't saved the cash flow, so I didn't have a huge emergency fund. All my liquid capital went into down payments and into renovation money to rehab the properties. Okay, and so it put me in a real bind, and I was out driving a Volvo S80 around throwing two paper routes in the mornings, and then going to my real estate brokerage after my paper routes to cover those rental properties. And so this was basically meant as a way to say, okay, this is a way that I have the liquidity. I'm getting a higher return, but now my tenants are not only buying me the houses, but they're also giving me a couple million dollars in life insurance, and they're wrapping my investment component or the cash value of that, the cash value part of the policy. They're wrapping that in a way that it grows tax-free, so it just accomplishes a lot of things. But the other thing that's a beautiful thing about it is there's a lot of things that we call living benefits.   Keith Weinhold  19:02   All right, so you have the living benefits and the tax advantages, and I know how you have pointed out that this can save an investor 10s of 1000s of dollars in taxes per year and hundreds of 1000s or more over time. Can you tell us more about that?   Jared Garfield  19:20   Yeah, because what happens is the money that goes in is growing tax-free, so you don't get taxed on any of the growth. But what we really like about it is, let's say that you're cash-flowing $2,000 a month off your rental properties, and you're putting 2000 a month into this policy. Usually, after the first year, if you're max funding, 80 to 90% of that's liquid. So if you've got 24,000 sitting in there, you've got access to 89 to 90% of the money. So it's pretty liquid. But what happens is over a 20 or 30 year period, that money could turn into three or 400,000 a year that you can pull out in the form of policy loans. And by doing that, it's not taxed. And you can pull that out throughout your retirement tax-free. So if you were paying 25% in taxes and you're pulling out 200 grand a year, that's $50,000 a year in retirement that you're saving in taxes. But that could be over a 20 or 30-year period. So over 20 years, that 50,000 could end up being a lot of money. I mean, 500,000 over 10 years, a million over 20, and so that means you don't have to accumulate as much. But a lot of our investors love it because they'll save it up with discipline, and then that way it's there if the furnace blows. So it makes your real estate safer, but it also becomes your down payment funds to expand your portfolio.   Keith Weinhold  20:40   Okay, the seven-figure solution is the vehicle that we're talking about here, and what part of the IRS code, just briefly, is it that gives this tax advantage?   Jared Garfield  20:51   It's Internal Revenue Code Section 79 that allows it to grow tax-free. In the 1980 s, doctors and a lot of very wealthy people were using this to the point that IRS changed the laws. They went and sued the insurance companies because doctors would go in and dump $2 million in, and they would buy a $2 million life insurance policy. So they were self-insured, which meant that they didn't have any cost of mortality on it. So they basically got all the benefits of the tax-free growth and the tax-free pullout. And the IRS said, "Wait a minute! We think you're doing tax evasion. So what they did is they came around and they said, "We're not going to let you use this loophole anymore for the very wealthiest people to have this. So they came to a compromise, and the compromise was that if you wanted to put in 2 million, you had to maintain a corridor where there had to be a little bit higher amount of life insurance. So you might have to buy a $2.3 million policy, but then you could still dump, say, $2 million in and have all the tax advantages. It's a strategy that's been used for over 100 years by families like the Rockefellers and the Hunts and J.P. Morgan. The very wealthiest families have always used these strategies to grow and protect their wealth.   Keith Weinhold  21:59   Okay, so it's a part of the tax code that allows cash value to accumulate within and be withdrawn from a life insurance policy tax-free.   Jared Garfield  22:11   Correct, and it gives you living benefits, which I alluded to a minute ago. And the living benefits are if if you end up having to go through things like long-term care, disability, if you can't perform, you know certain functions for a certain period of time, chronic illness, critical illness, terminal illness. If any of those things happen to you, you can borrow against the policy and have access to money during those things that would normally decimate your wealth, because you can actually access the death benefit in advance.   Keith Weinhold  22:42   Now I know a little about the six risks. Tell us about that.   Jared Garfield  22:47   Well, Keith, there are six risks that all investors face regularly. The first one is inflation erosion, and that means that your purchasing power often ends up leaking out of your balance. And the balance might look fine, but inflation can eat away at it. So even if you've raised a lot of money, if inflation means that you can buy half as much five or 10 years from now, then you know your wealth isn't as big as you thought. The second is the volatility setback, and that's sequence of return risk. That means that if you retire on a bad year where things really bad, stock market drops, you could end up using your money at a time where it really weakens your wealth because it may have dropped by 50% So if you had a million, now you have a half a million, and you're spending 100,000 a year. At the end of year one, you might only have 400,000 left. So sequence of of return risks from volatility setback, tax drain. That's just the compounding cost of an uncoordinated tax picture can really be a problem, and then the next one is liquidity. If you don't have liquidity and you've locked up all your money and you can't access it until you're 59 and a half without significant taxation and 10% penalties, the liquidity lock is a problem. There's the longevity paradox. What happens if you outlive your money, you know. So living longer is a benefit, but it exposes you to where you might not have enough money to live on in your latter years. The last two are care avalanche, and that is if an unexpected health event happens at the wrong time, it could really destroy your wealth because medical costs have spiraled out of control, and then the last one is the line to land, and that's only one of the six that's really about growth.   Keith Weinhold  24:28   Right, only one of the six of those was about growth. I can't stand the longevity paradox. Yeah, we think we all want to live a long time, but then it's more difficult to fund living a long time, and if you outlive everybody, nobody shows up at your funeral either. The longevity paradox-one of the six risks that the seven-figure solution can really help you with. Now, tell us more about funding it, so you can get a good cash value balance in. There, I know that one way you do it is actually with short-term rentals instead of a paycheck.   Jared Garfield  25:06   We love short-term rentals, especially for our highest net worth clients, because the reason is is the bonus depreciation of the big beautiful bill. Oh, right! You could take up to like 150 or even $200,000 in year one, they take that depreciation that they used to spread out over a whole lot of years, and they make it to where if you get with your CPA and you analyze your short-term rental, you could potentially take all of the furnishings, all of the artwork, all of the dishes and things that are in the property. Sometimes they'll let you take components like the appliances, the air conditioning unit, the furnace, and they'll let you take it all in year one instead of having to line item it and spread it out over you know 27 and a half years. So what this means is, if you have a short term rental, then you you might get like 150 to 200,000 tax break in the first year on the right property, but it's better than that because instead of having to have like 750 hours to hit full-time real estate professional status, it cuts the hours that you have to have significantly down. I think it's more like 150 hours or something like that, or 300. It's like half the hours, and so you can hit the benefits of taking unlimited passive loss much easier if you have a couple of short-term rentals.   Keith Weinhold  26:24   You're listening to Get Rich Education. We're talking with Jared Garfield about the seven-figure solution, something that takes some time to understand, but it can give you a tax-advantaged pool of capital that grows over time, and it also creates this overall tailwind, not just during your investor life, but then it provides tax advantaged retirement income at the same time. More on this when we come back. You're listening to Get Rich Education. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine? You sure can at Ridge Lending Group and MLS 42056. They provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone because Ridge specializes in investment property. They'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequal and even chat directly with President Caeli Ridge while it's on your mind. Start at ridgelendinggroup.com, that's ridgelendinggroup.com.   Keith Weinhold  27:25   Let me ask you something: If you've worked hard to build wealth, is your money positioned to actually support your goals? A lot of accredited investors leave capital sitting in cash because it feels safe, but inflation and missed income opportunities can quietly erode its value. Freedom Family Investments offers freedom notes for investors seeking structured income backed by real estate. It's a straightforward approach built on real assets, not speculation. And full disclosure, I'm an investor myself. What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works, so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk, and nothing is guaranteed. But with a track record of consistent, on-time investor payouts, they built real credibility. Go to freedomfamilyinvestments.com to book a clarity call, or text family to 66866. That's family 266866. This is the   Speaker 2  28:28   Real Wealth Network's Kathy Betke, and you are listening to the Always Valuable Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold.   Keith Weinhold  28:46   Welcome back to Get Rich Education. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. We're talking about the seven-figure solution with Jared Garfield. Something that can be a particular benefit to real estate investors both during your investing career and then once you're in retirement as well, and this can take the form of either an indexed universal life policy or a whole life policy. There are a lot of wrong ways to do this and wrong things to get into. We're talking about the right way. Part of that is funding it as best you can. Can you tell us more about that?   Jared Garfield  29:20   Well, there's a lot of different ways to fund it. A lot of our clients will come in. We have some people who will use rollovers if they're nearing the end of retirement. Some people will roll over a 401k into a cash value life insurance policy because they can do it over a five or seven year period, and they pay the taxes when they roll it over, so their taxes go up a little bit for five or seven years of retirement, but then what happens is that means that during their retirement they're not taxed on the income all the way through retirement, so that can save really significantly. But a lot of our clients will do a flip and dump 40 or 50,000 a year in by just saying I'm going to do one flip a year and use that to. Fund the whole thing, or they'll take the cash flow and dump the cash flow into here instead of the bank, just so that they get the living benefits and they get the much higher return with still 80 to 90% liquidity. So could be cash flow from rentals, could be money from a flip, or sometimes some of these short-term rentals can make 20 to $30,000 a year, and if you get $100,000 tax break, you have more money that's not going to Uncle Sam, and then because that's your discretionary income now, because of the tax break, you could use that money to for down payments to grow your portfolio or to do a flip.   Keith Weinhold  30:35   Now, Jared, I sort of think of the cash value that you're accumulating in this policy as safe money that grows at a slow to moderate steady rate, but if it rarely or ever loses value, can you tell us more about that and the rate of return expected in the policy?   Jared Garfield  30:52   Yeah, absolutely. With the IULs, it's going to depend a little bit upon the carriers and stuff like that, and whether you go with a mutual company and stuff like that. It can vary, but a lot of times people are going with things that are what we call indexed. So you can actually index it to the S and p5 100 if you think that we're going to have a bull market and the market's going to really go up strongly. You can index it to the market, and sometimes they'll have a participation rate where they'll say, "Okay, you can participate up to 12% So if the stock market does 17% the most you can make is 12% So you're giving up a little bit of upside, but that's still not nothing. I mean, that's not three or 4% You can still make you know 10 or 12% that year, but you're giving up the part above the participation rate. And the reason that you do that is if the market tanks and drops by 30 or 40% The worst you can do is 0% return. Zero is my hero because you didn't lose anything. So if you had a half a million sitting there, you don't go down to 250 and then wait eight years to get back to break even. Instead, you're still at half a million. And if the market goes up next year by 20% and you had a 10% cap. Then your half a million, you know, is now at 550,000. When everybody else, if it went up by 10% they're at half the amount that they had.   Keith Weinhold  32:13   You have a story or example of how you've helped somebody with this, because I know a lot of investors that are passionate about utilizing the cash value inside an insurance policy tell us.   Jared Garfield  32:28   Well, I've got one friend who's a developer, and he did like a $5 million policy. And every time he flip a subdivision or flip a house, and let's back   Keith Weinhold  32:36   up. Does a $5 million policy mean that's the death benefit?   Jared Garfield  32:40   Yeah, that's the death benefit. Thanks for catching that. That's the death benefit, but that also has a correlation to how much money you can dump into it. So if you have a $5 million policy, you can dump a lot more money in for the tax free growth. And the quicker you hit that death benefit amount, at that point you're self-insured, and so at that point you really don't have cost of insurance on administering the policy hardly at all, and so at that point, when you're what we call self-insured, the return on the investment becomes a lot better. But this particular developer was able to use this policy because he had so much cash value in, and if he sold a house, he'd take 40,000. If he sold 10 a year, he might take you know 400,000 and dump it into this policy, and so it made him bankable. And he was able to use the money to go out and do new subdivision developments because the bank would actually use the policy as the collateral to be able to give him loans at much lower interest rates.   Keith Weinhold  33:38   That's valuable. Tell us about that. I don't want to use the wrong words here, but then effectively with this example, are you borrowing against the funds in the policy? So therefore, you can get those dollars working for you somewhere else, all while simultaneously the cash value continues to compound and grow. Sort of another form of leverage.   Jared Garfield  34:01   Correct. What they basically do is they basically freeze part of the amount and say, okay, we're using this as the collateral and stuff like that to be able to do the loan. But if it grows and and makes 7% you're still making the money off of the money that's sitting in there. It's just collateralized as part of the loan. And some people will even use it to like go buy a car, like instead of buying a car and going getting a bank loan and paying 7% to the bank, they might borrow money out, go pay cash for the car from the life insurance policy loan, and pay 2% instead of 7% But they're paying it to themselves, and as long as they're paying the interest to themselves, if the money that they borrow out could potentially still earn the same money and earn 7% even though you had borrowed out. So it's doing two things for you at the same time, as long as you're paying that loan interest. But and that depends on the option that you take when you do your loan.   Keith Weinhold  34:54   We love leverage around here. Leverage trumps compound interest. In so many ways. Oh, I'm really glad that you told us some more about that using the funds in more than one way at the same time. Tell us more about what it costs for the investor, the costs of setting this up, and then what some of those trade-offs are, Jared.   Jared Garfield  35:18   Well, that really depends on the individual. I mean, everybody has to sit down and be able to decide what is acceptable for them. You know, a lot of times people will want to max fund the 401k that they're doing at least just to the amount that's matched. But then after that, this could be a great place instead of putting a whole bunch more money into a 401k. Some people will elect to say, "I'm going to put the matching portion into my 401k, but then I'm going to take my cash flow from my real estate and money that I could have contributed to other alternatives and put it into this because I want the liquidity. I want to be able to leverage this money and pull it out without any restrictions. That as long as I can pull out 80 to 90 percent, I could go buy a car wash, or I could invest in a business, or I could, you know, do whatever I wanted to. I could loan it to my kids for their college and make them pay me loans back to my policy. There gives you a lot of flexibility to do it. But the thing that we love about it is we'll do what's called an illustration, and it may end up if you start at the right time, it could be a six-figure passive income stream at retirement, and then if you have the real estate, because this helped you grow your portfolio, where without doing the strategy, you might have ended up with say 10 properties. We might be able to get you to 20 or 30 properties working together as a team with your real estate coaches and stuff like that. Then we can potentially grow your real estate portfolio, and what we want to do is 1031 exchange every seven to eight years. I don't believe in holding properties for 30 years.   Jared Garfield  36:47   I believe in exchanging them every seven to eight years because when the tax benefits have been used up, if you exchange to twice the size portfolio, you have better appreciation on a portfolio worth twice as much. But that new value, you still get the depreciation advantages, where the old value that was half, you know, the depreciation is used up. So you're you're getting new depreciation on the higher value assets, and then our goal would be that by the time you don't want to be involved in managing the property managers, that at some point you're going to have a 200 unit apartment complex with on-site management, and at that point you don't have any financial worries really because you're 1031 exchanging into those apartment complexes, but you have so much equity that you're still maintaining depreciation during your retirement years. When most people who have lesser plans don't have the tax advantages,   Keith Weinhold  37:41   I love that you said so much of that, and to you, the listener, Jared is licensed to do this, and our own in-house investment coach. You mentioned coaching. Naresh has the proper licensing as well to holistically help integrate this into your investor life. And for example, yes, we are rarely of the mindset that you would hold a property for all 30 years because after seven to 10 years, your leverage ratio gets worn down, and then additionally, if you're buying turnkey properties, oftentimes that's when capex expenditures start to enter into the picture. So yes, oftentimes we do these seven to 10 year holds.    Jared Garfield  38:23   I love that. Yeah, that's a really really good strategy, and and it always makes it to where you can grow so much bigger portfolio by not being taxed through that exchange. And you know, believe it or not, there's actually even ways when you have extra cash boot, they do allow if you notify them in advance. Sometimes you can take some of the cash boot on the exchange and roll it into some of the products that we utilize.   Keith Weinhold  38:47   For more specifics, I know you said it's based on one's individual situation, but how much does it cost to set up a policy? And then, are there any ongoing maintenance fees? Can you give us more specifics there?   Jared Garfield  38:59   So, there's small fees to administer the policy because you have people who are trading and doing different things and working within the policy for the funds. But usually, you can set policies up as low as 100 or even $200 a month. We don't usually recommend that because you want to max fund it. Usually, when you're doing these strategies, if you're just doing $100 or $200 a month, you're basically buying life insurance, but you're missing a lot of the benefits because what you want to do is to be able to max fund it. So what we like people to do is get as minimum life insurance. That's not in our advantage because we get paid based on the premium of the amount of life insurance you get. But you get the smallest amount of life insurance for the amount that you can max fund. I would much rather have somebody get a $500 a month policy that, let's say, they could put you know a thousanmd a month in or something like that, than to have somebody get $1,000 a month policy where they're paying a thousand a month but they can't max fund it because by max funding it you're maximizing the growth component of the cash. Value, and so it depends on how much you want. But you can go anywhere from $100 or $200 a month to we have clients that will dump $20,000 a month in because they really want to shield as much money as they can from tax growth.   Keith Weinhold  40:15   Tell us more about who the seven-figure solution is for and who it's not for.   Jared Garfield  40:20   Well, if you're living month to month and you don't have discretionary income, it's probably not a good solution. In that situation, you probably want to get term insurance and just make sure that you cover catastrophic things. But if you've got discretionary income and you've got an extra four to $500 a month that you could use to max fund, we figure most people need life insurance anyway, and the way that we teach it, when you mix it with real estate, rather than pulling it from your monthly budget, doesn't it make a lot more sense to let your tenants buy the houses for you, but also pay for a half a million or a million dollar life insurance policy for you, where the tenants are covering the savings for anything that happens at the property with capex or vacancy or damage, and at the same time covering life insurance and potentially a six-figure passive income that's tax advantaged at retirement. So I pull the money out from other assets and let the assets cover this asset.   Keith Weinhold  41:18   Oh well, Jared, this has been great. Before I ask you if you have any last things to tell the audience about the seven-figure solution, I invite you, the audience, to join us. It's going to be Jared and our own in-house investment coach, Nareesh, bringing you a live online event that you can join from the comfort of your own home next Thursday, the 27th at 8 PM Eastern. You can register now; it's free at grewebinars.com because there are a lot of moving parts, and it does take some time to wrap your head around this, benefiting from the cash value of an insurance policy. And this way you can have a Q and A, and you can get answers in real time at this event. It's called the Seven Figure Solution: Build wealth, reduce risk, and create tax advantage retirement income through real estate. Again, it is next Thursday, the 27th at 8p.m. Eastern, you probably have generated some questions inside your head while you're listening to this, and you can sure have them answered there as you're going to learn a whole lot more about it next Thursday. This could help a lot of people. Jared, do you have any last thoughts?    Jared Garfield  42:38   I think the only thing is that we like to work with the team. We like to work with your CPA. We like to work with your real estate investment coach. I used to be a coach and trainer for Robert Kiyosaki, who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad, and he always talked about power teams. And so we want to be able to be a part of your power team and work with your other advisors to help you implement something. We're not here to give you tax advice. We want you to be able to work with your investment advisors and your CPAs, and just be a part of the team. But I would point out that over my career, I've owned hundreds and hundreds of single-family cash flow rentals, duplexes, fourplexes, apartment complexes. I've done some land development, and I implement these strategies myself. I had 17 Airbnbs, and so these are the strategies that I implemented as a full-time real estate professional. I felt like that this strategy of having a seven-figure solution could help you to avoid some of the pitfalls that I experienced in my 20s.   Keith Weinhold  43:32   So much all comes together for one pretty comprehensive solution. It's the intersection of growing your portfolio, getting tax advantages and having the death benefits of insurance and more all coming together next Thursday, so that you can learn more. Jared, it's been great having you back on the show.   Jared Garfield  43:52   Thanks, Keith. Always glad to join you.   Keith Weinhold  44:00   Integrate the seven-figure solution the GRE way, where we have this conscientiousness about leverage and cash flow. In this case, it's how to prudently leverage a life insurance policy. When it's time to tap your cash value, you take what is a policy loan, not a withdrawal, because you're borrowing against your cash value, hence using the funds in more than one place, and the IRS does not tax loan proceeds. This reminds me of a billionaire and how they borrow against the value of their stock. That way, they don't have to sell their assets. This is similar to what you can do with this. Another thing is that you know real estate investors are not used to a volatile ride because our asset values stay stable. You heard Jared mention the acronym IUL there. That's an indexed universal life policy. It's a real benefit. That says you tie yours to the S and P five hundred. Well, that index was down 18% in 2022, and that your cash value can have an upside ceiling and loss protection on the downside-an option that you'll care more about as you get toward retirement. In 2008, the S&P was down 37% so the math is cruel on value losses. In fact, it's even worse than it sounds because if you're down 30%, then you need a 43% gain just to get back to even. That is just math.   Keith Weinhold  45:39   There are some mistakes to avoid here, and you don't just want to set up your seven-figure solution off of a website. And it is based on products that you might have heard of from companies like Nationwide and Mass Mutual. I strongly encourage you learn more, see how it all goes together, learn how the seven-figure solution compares to other vehicles like a Roth IRA, 401k, 721 exchange, and 1031 exchange. This is very much about seeing your future. You've been listening to me here every week for almost 12 years, earning money from your day job, building your real estate portfolio, either from our investment coaching or on your own. This is how it all goes together. Next week with Jared and GRE investment coach Naresh. By attending live, you can have your questions answered in real time. One last time, you can sign up for the event for next Thursday, the 27th at 8 PM. Eastern, 5 PM. Pacific. Learn about something that's potentially really valuable to you: the seven-figure solution at grewebinars.com. Until next week, I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.   Speaker 2  46:59   Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal, or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.   Keith Weinhold  47:26   The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building, getricheducation.com  

00:00 Nicki Jhabvala's Biggest Takeaways From Preseason Win 22:00 Which Commanders Injuries Do YOU Believe Are Most Concerning? 31:00 College Football Preseason AP Poll Released. What Did Voters Get Wrong?

John 13–17 Jesus announced - and demonstrated - that the Kingdom of God had come. And yet, on the night before his death, Jesus prepared his disciples for a reality they had not expected: the Kingdom had come, but it had not yet come in its fullness. It is a tension we still live in 2000 years later. At bread, we want to live faithfully in the overlap: praying boldly and expecting the supernatural power of the Kingdom to break into the present, while refusing to deny the very real suffering, disappointment and loss of the world we still inhabit. So, how do we live with expectation and disappointment, miracles and unanswered prayers, joy and grief? The heart of Jesus' Farewell Discourse in John “Remain in me.” Correct theology matters, but theology alone cannot hold us. We make our home in Jesus, as he makes his home in us — and from that abiding place come the love, joy, peace and power we need to live as people of the Now and the Not Yet. NB - serendipitously, the Lectio 365 app is working through the Remain in me verses in John 15 this week. Follow along there too! By Hannah Flint

Is Your Dentrix Software Really the Problem, or Do Your Systems Need a Cleanup? Thinking about switching from Dentrix Core to Dentrix Ascend because your software feels messy, outdated, or overloaded with bad data? Before you make the leap, there's an important question to ask: Will changing dental software actually solve the problem? In this episode of the High Performing Dental Team Podcast, Dayna Johnson shares a conversation with a dentist who was considering leaving Dentrix Core after 28 years because of messy patient ledgers, duplicate insurance plans, excessive adjustment types, and years of accumulated data. While Dentrix Ascend could provide a clean slate, Dayna explains why switching dental practice management software without fixing the underlying workflows and team habits could eventually recreate the exact same problems. Whether you stay with Dentrix Core, move to Dentrix Ascend, or consider another dental practice management system, the real goal is to build better systems, stronger SOPs, cleaner data, and consistent team workflows. ✅ Key Takeaways Don't switch dental software just to get a clean slate. First identify what is actually creating the problems in your current system. Your workflows matter more than the software. Duplicate insurance plans, inaccurate ledgers, unnecessary adjustment types, and other data problems often come from inconsistent processes. Clean up patient ledger allocations daily. Correct allocations help ensure payments are applied to the appropriate patient and provider in Dentrix Core. Create clear rules for adding insurance plans. Dayna recommends searching by group number, group plan name, and employer before creating a new insurance plan. Limit security rights. Not every dental team member needs permission to add providers, insurance plans, payment types, billing types, or adjustment types. Build standard operating procedures before changing software. Without consistent SOPs, the same problems can follow your practice into a new system. Create recurring Dentrix cleanup workflows. Maintaining clean practice data should be an ongoing process, not a once-a-year project. Optimize the software you already have. Before investing the time and money into a software conversion, determine whether better training and systems could solve your current challenges.

Complicated Order | Ps. Lacey Bryant What do prophecy, speaking in tongues, and women in ministry have in common? They're three topics that have created some of the biggest questions—and divisions—in the Church. But what if the answer isn't to avoid what's complicated? In "Complicated Order," Ps. Lacey Bryant dives into 1 Corinthians 14 to unpack what Scripture says about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, prophecy, tongues, women in the Church, and God's desire for both spiritual power AND biblical order.  What do we do when we don't understand the gifts of the Spirit?  How should prophecy and tongues operate in the gathered Church?  What happens when spiritual gifts have been abused?  Did Paul really command women to remain silent in church?  How do we welcome the Holy Spirit without embracing chaos? The answer to disorder isn't absence. The answer to abuse isn't avoidance. The answer is maturity. We cannot allow fear, bad experiences, personal bias, or our need to understand everything to keep us from receiving what the Holy Spirit wants to do through His people. The gifts aren't trophies for spiritual people—they're tools in the hands of surrendered people so the love of God can be made visible. It's time to stop merely observing and become available. Holy Spirit, fill us. Teach us. Correct us. Use us.  Listen to "Complicated Order" and discover what it looks like to become a church where the Holy Spirit is welcomed, the gifts are practiced, Jesus is glorified, and people are strengthened.  

The sermon in this video was given by Kathryn Krick. This sermon was given at 5F Church and uploaded on July 26, 2026 to Kathryn Krick's YouTube page. All rights belong toKathryn Krick and 5F Church. This video is for teaching and review purposes only and is protected under fair use.Fair use is a doctrine in the United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, or scholarship.Original Sermon: https://www.youtube.com/live/c-gKEmAobq4?si=GCiBAywXa6XUbJVF

What do professional baseball and tactical strength and conditioning have in common? NSCA award-winning coach Matthew C. Krause knows the demands of both worlds, with 22 years in Major League Baseball (MLB) and his current public safety work with the Pasco Sheriff’s Office. Krause explains how lessons from baseball transfer when preparing law enforcement officers, who face long shifts, changing schedules, and fatigue that affects decision-making. In a new setting, his first step is to learn the job before making adjustments. He explains the Pasco Sheriff’s Office health and human performance model for deputy care and long-term development, then talks through how to show value with data and earn leadership buy-in over time. Krause also looks back on his United States Marine Corps service, mentors, and career opportunities as he advises young coaches to “always take the conversation.” Tune in to hear how you can step into a new setting, prove value, and build programs that last. Reach Matthew by email at mkrause@pascosheriff.org | Find Eric on Instagram: @ericmcmahoncscs and LinkedIn: @ericmcmahoncscs Join the NSCA Tactical Strength and Conditioning Professional Development Group (PDG) on LinkedIn to connect with peers and stay involved in the profession.Show Notes "You do a good job, you work your butt off, you're not sure what you want to do. You take these opportunities. [...] I tell all, all young strength coaches always take the conversation and you might not want it, but it's good to work on your skills as far as your interview skills and kind of understanding. You know, that process, learning how to sell yourself a little bit in those scenarios..." 10:25 "If you're going to be working for another organization or going to be in a team environment, you're never going to get everything you want. So, you have to pick and choose, figure out what you think on your list of things is the most important thing that day, right? And ask for those things, at the right time" 23:20 "I think people out there need to know that you need to give your time back and a lot of it's going to be in the form of education and time and talks like this." 25:30Transcript 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;21;24 Welcome to the NSCA Coaching Podcast season ten, episode six. And then somebody else, you know, you do a good job or somebody, you know, tell people, hey, listen, you work your butt off. You're not sure what you want to do. You take these opportunities and Bruce Hammel, who was the major league strength coach with the Cubs, came and said, hey, listen, you know, there could be some opportunities in baseball for you. 00;00;21;27 - 00;00;48;13 What wasn't where I wanted to be. I thought I was in college football, like I said, and wound up, you know, getting into, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, you know, went down, interviewed. So now, another thing I tell all, all young strength coaches always take the conversation and you might not want it, but it's good to work on your skills as far as your interview skills and kind of understanding, you know, that process, learning how to sell yourself a little bit in those scenarios. 00;00;48;13 - 00;01;09;27 Learn. You know how that dynamic is. This is the NSCA Coaching Podcast where we talked to strength and conditioning coaches about what you really need to know, but probably didn't learn in school. There’s strength and conditioning. And then there's everything else. This is the NSCA Coaching Podcast. I'm Eric McMahon NSCA’s Coaching and Sport Science Program Manager. 00;01;09;28 - 00;01;33;15 Today we have a guest who has extensive experience with the NSCA as a presenter. He was a 2018 Professional Strength and Conditioning Coach of the year, tons of experience working in MLB, but now he's working in tactical, the public safety space with the Pasco County Sheriff's Department in Florida. Matt Krauss, welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. I appreciate you being here. 00;01;33;22 - 00;01;53;17 It's going to be fun. Yeah, yeah it's great man. I'm really excited to hear about your path from MLB and all the work you've done in the past and now working in the tactical space. What's that been like? I'll tell you a lot of a lot of similarities, being in a major League baseball with certain things from, from an everyday perspective, and you got a chance to experience that too. 00;01;53;17 - 00;02;11;17 In baseball. And then coming into the law enforcement space where it's, it's every day. Right? There's, there's, it's 24 hours a day, every day. It doesn't it doesn't stop. So it's one of the things that, that I, that I really like about it because I always like the grind of baseball. Right? You know, 20 something years and then coming into this space. 00;02;11;17 - 00;02;31;18 And I do enjoy that part of it. I enjoy the every day. There's something every day you're preparing for something every day. The ongoing of of it never stopping to where people talking about, you know, loading unloading this when it's every single day, you got to have that knack, to keep people going on on their best day and on on the worst day. 00;02;31;18 - 00;02;53;21 Right. So, and just the mental aspect of of a grind. So I really enjoy the space. That's cool. It's something I hear come through is when you're every single day, there's really no peaking, you know, you go, you always gotta be ready to go. You might be at your best, you might be at 80%. But that's your best that day. 00;02;53;24 - 00;03;30;13 How do you prepare law enforcement officers? And just like you did in baseball, to go out there every single day? Well, you know, the number one thing and for, for for any industry is learning the job and kind of getting understand the mentality and the physical part of it, you know, knowing the job, being around. So I think the ticket out for a six months of you coming into this space, kind of not asking as many questions, being more observational, but, you know, asking here and there, certain things, but just really getting to learn, understanding terminology. 00;03;30;15 - 00;03;48;29 You know, certain things are the same. Certain things are not, but really, you know, diving into it. And I've had an opportunity to, really get a chance to, to, to understand kind of what they're doing. I was not part of shift work. Right. Because baseball is is all day to. But understanding how you apply that to. 00;03;49;04 - 00;04;05;18 But but baseball has that you know that set schedule. You know every single day of the ramp up to a game and then and then there's a travel piece to it. But here it's ramping up every single day. And then and then going from a mid shift to a day shift to a night shift and understanding all those different pieces to it. 00;04;05;20 - 00;04;29;15 As people transition from from those aspects and how to how to apply the process or a program or their routine. All of the things that you would say to to a baseball player, right. But you know, it, it applies here to and how to make those adjustments. So seeing all of it and then getting a chance to dissect it a little bit, you know, obviously when you're a college training coach, when I was, when I was working in college, I worked ten different sports. 00;04;29;15 - 00;04;47;29 There's ten different things going on. And then, and then just being in one area, like, we just just in baseball, you get to dissect a little bit and to really kind of hone down on it. And once you kind of understand and get the chance to, to start implementing and, and so I'm making adjustments to try to make it better. 00;04;48;02 - 00;04;59;05 Tactical wasn't completely new to you. I know you have a military background. What was your path into S&C? Being enlisted in the military? 00;04;59;08 - 00;05;16;25 Well, joining the Marine Corps. So I was in the Marine Corps back when I was 18 years old. That was it was one of my paths, an opportunity to to make money and to go to school wasn't I didn't come from a very, a family with a ton of money. And but I definitely wanted to go to school, you know, I was, say, A33 sport athlete in high school. 00;05;16;28 - 00;05;32;17 And obviously I wasn't good enough in any one of those, you know, I was I got I was a plus player, but not enough to get a scholarship right or to continue on a at a lower level. And so that was part of my path. My dad was a marine. My uncle was a marine. I knew some of the people in my neighborhood that Marines. 00;05;32;17 - 00;05;49;13 And so I, I didn't even think, of another, branch. Right. I was just I was going to be, you know, if I was going to do this, I was going to go into the Marine Corps, and but I knew I wasn't going to do it long term. I mean, my path was, you know, my uncle was a college football coach. 00;05;49;16 - 00;06;07;06 He was at Richmond, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, you know, he played football at Mississippi State. So as you're, you know, building where you want to kind of go in life, you know, I had all these friends I wanted to be on Wall Street coming out of New York. I was a Queens, Long Island guy. Right. And I wanted to be I wanted to get off the island, get out of there and be more like my uncle. 00;06;07;08 - 00;06;27;06 And so I just thought I would, you know, moving, move in that direction. So the Marine Corps was, was a great place for me to one grow up. So I give a lot of a lot of credit to Marine Corps. I was, you know, some punk kid that, you know, thought he knew everything. And then I learned that I didn't know anything and that I needed a little structure in my life. 00;06;27;09 - 00;06;39;21 I like to say it taught me a little bit more of the killer instinct. I wish, I wish I played high school sports after I went to the Marine Corps, I would I would have been a better practitioner. I would have been a better planner. I would have been a lot of things instead of, just doing them. 00;06;39;23 - 00;06;59;05 And, so it definitely prepared me to learn how to focus in on some things, and it helped me be better into my career. And, so I'm very, very appreciative for, for taking an 18 year old kid and teaching him how to grow up. So you got out of the Marine Corps and that pushed you into college. 00;06;59;05 - 00;07;18;21 And were you looking at exercise science? What was your original goal when you were looking at a career? I always laugh, I said, so I had a buddy that I was at East Carolina University. I know Campbell's is, 71 miles from, from East Carolina. So I go over and visit with them, and that's where I saw they had a good sports medicine program. 00;07;18;21 - 00;07;36;29 It was my introduction into the athletic training where it kind of started. I was looking at the different ways how I can kind of get into sports. Talk to us a little bit. And they had a great program. So I knew when I was transitioning out into the reserve piece, they had a unit over in Raleigh that come. 00;07;36;29 - 00;07;56;00 So, you know, registering getting into East Carolina was my entrance. They had that exercise science, you know, different disciplines. You're going to go the exercise physiology or out of the sports medicine route. I started in the exercise science. I mean, in the sports medicine side of it, becoming an athletic trainer and, you know, Coach Connors was there. 00;07;56;00 - 00;08;10;01 A lot of people say at the NSCA, I know who Coach Connors was. He was, you know, I wanted to be him. You know, you know, the way he came in, he would do some pre-game speeches for football, for the men's basketball team that I was working on, like, wow, this guy was like, not only training guys in the bedroom, but he was doing pre-game speeches. 00;08;10;01 - 00;08;30;18 And I was like, that's a job that I want. You know, he got everybody going and I know he's he's done some talks for, for, for the NSCA. And so I was I looked at him as, you know, I wouldn't have known that the strength conditioning was even a job. Right. And when I saw him do it and the way he did it, was exciting to me and say, hey, this is something that I could possibly do. 00;08;30;20 - 00;08;48;20 And, so he actually, you know, crossed the bridge from the athletic training side to the strength conditioning side for me. He was very generous with his time. You know, people, he kind of finished school in December, but I don't graduate to make enough to do an internship. So I did my my my time at his Carolina in the sports medicine program as an athletic trainer. 00;08;48;20 - 00;09;03;24 And then in that window, he allowed me to come in and help out with the men's basketball team. I had to go do my cardiac rehab back in the day, say, internship in the morning, and then in the afternoon, he let me come into the weight room and then help out. And we got to the end of that semester. 00;09;03;24 - 00;09;21;29 I was looking at some some graduate assistantship opportunities from the athletic training side. And coach was like said, I can get you one right now if you won't go down to UCS, but it'll be on the training conditioning side. And I still didn't have enough money, as a driver, but I still wanted to get my masters and, he made a few phone calls for me. 00;09;22;02 - 00;09;43;25 I had a quick interview, and four weeks later I was down in Orlando, Florida, at UCS in that transition. And that's when I started my my career in, say, strength conditioning. Got in, there was work in, you know, football. UCF was working on every sport, obviously as a GA. And then so that was that was it. 00;09;43;25 - 00;10;00;27 He made a few phone calls. You stuck his neck out for me. So I appreciate that. You know, you want to give you a thank you along the way and then, took that opportunity and ran with it. And then the following semester, I took my CSCS and got, you know, became, got my certification and never looked back. 00;10;00;28 - 00;10;19;23 You know, it took my. So from that point, while I was a GA, I worked like 15 sports. There were college football, but took my time did my it did a few other internship. I'll. I worked for the Buccaneers. There are many camps one summer and then the following summer I did it with the Daytona Cubs and that was my entrance into into baseball. 00;10;19;24 - 00;10;40;20 Not to date ourselves here on here in 1999, I went over there and did an internship with the Daytona Cubs and then somebody else, you know, you do a good job as my, you know, tell people, you listen, you work your butt off, you're not sure what you want to do. You take these opportunities. And Bruce Hammel, who was the major league strength coach with the Cubs, came and said, hey, listen, you know, there could be some opportunities in baseball for you. 00;10;40;22 - 00;11;03;05 What wasn't where I wanted to be. I thought I was me in college football, like I said, and wound up, you know, getting into, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, you know, went down, interviewed. So now, another thing I tell all, all young strength coaches always take the conversation and you might not want it, but it's good to work on your skills as far as your interview skills and kind of understanding. 00;11;03;08 - 00;11;22;14 You know, that process, learning how to sell yourself a little bit in those scenarios, learn, you know how that dynamic is, but wound up getting an opportunity and get to take the job with the Pittsburgh Pirates and got into baseball. Never look back. 22 years later. It's been three years for the Pirates. 13 ish with the Reds. 00;11;22;17 - 00;11;52;05 You know, it's a major league level. And in my time with the New York Yankees and I finished in 2020, I like how all those early experiences, you got a ton of experience working with different teams, obviously on the medicine side, and that led you into strength and conditioning. But you had tons of experience building programs. I think, your time with the Reds, your time with the Yankees, now you're working in building a tactical strength and conditioning department at Pasco County. 00;11;52;08 - 00;12;12;01 What are some of the unique challenges when you come in? Maybe the program isn't where it needs to be. How do you build a department from the ground up? So every opportunity along the way is even coming to it, even at UCS at that time. So I don't want to take a step back. It just was that transition from one to Division one. 00;12;12;03 - 00;12;28;21 And we're building a program. So it's just me and somebody else, as the interns, you know, I'm saying then Augus and then I got hired on there as a full time strength coach, and then want of building on that program and being there to kind of see that. But Coach Bridgeman, I think he's done some things with the Navy at the time. 00;12;28;23 - 00;12;41;21 Showed me some administrative things that I didn't know that needed to happen. Right. So you can't put these things away for when it's your turn to kind of be in charge. So I wasn't in charge anything, but I kind of learned the process well because we were limited staff. So he had to put me in some challenging situations that I need to do. 00;12;41;21 - 00;13;00;11 Right. You got to grow up real quick. So then I want to went to the Pirates. Baseball was transitioning into developing minor league programs, right? Because at the time was just a major league strength. I had athletic trainer, assistant trainer, major league strength coach, and a minor league coordinator pretty much only outside of that. It was a lot of internships in and around it. 00;13;00;14 - 00;13;21;09 And then while I was my my time there with the Pirates, we built out that program. We created, a full time position. At different levels. Right. So super short season, you know. Oh, well, Gulf coast, short season, high, low and triple AA were they weren't in crazy salaries, but they were full time positions. Those are probably some of the first in the game at that time. 00;13;21;11 - 00;13;37;09 Correct. And so we were able to from a job creation standpoint that that was that was pretty cool to be a part of that. And then, had the opportunity to, you know, left the Pirates, came to the Reds. We're building the same kind of minor league program at this time. Now, I had a plan. Right. 00;13;37;11 - 00;13;54;22 You need this amount of people. Here's how we're going to roll this off. Carl Alvarez was a major league strength coach at times. I got hired on as a minor league guy, and then. And, had the opportunity to take it, take a major league job, two years later and then spent, you know, 15 years at the Major league level. 00;13;54;22 - 00;14;08;20 So I had, you know, five minor league years and then and then 16 at the major league level. It was it was pretty cool. So being able to watch that program grow put everything in place from a programing standpoint, learning how to deal with the coaches in the front office and all the other people in the scouting department. 00;14;08;22 - 00;14;28;20 What was great, and then getting a chance to to even do with the New York Yankees and building out even more programs, and then adding in the sport science piece and adding in a dietitian and adding all that. So from a job creation standpoint, I feel like we, you know, over say, 20 something years, we're able to, you know, builds almost 30, 35 jobs, you know, in the game, which I'm excited about. 00;14;28;23 - 00;14;47;21 And, and then watching some people that came in behind me that all work for the pirates and different things and moves along and, really excited about having those opportunities to where it gave me this opportunity when I, when I, when I got out of baseball and someone came up here and said, hey, you know, Pasco Sheriff's Office wants to build a human performance program. 00;14;47;21 - 00;15;04;21 At the time, this was an EXOS contract. We had a lot of people here from from special operations that seen some different things. While they were time there in the military, they knew it was something that needed to happen. And then I was lucky enough to, to land this position and I said, hey, you know what? 00;15;04;23 - 00;15;22;27 It's not just going to be a human performance program. We did a health and human performance program, right? We have to add in the the care aspect from we have a lot of people that have issues. So we're able to bring in. So now we're here I guess we're, we're we wanted to go with this was we're the first I call it a long term development program, right. 00;15;22;27 - 00;15;48;05 Where the first health and human performance program or a sports medicine program in law enforcement. So we're playing both both sides of that. When we're able to build out a staff from a job creation standpoint, now we have another strength coach, acts as the trainer and strength coach. We have a chiropractor and a registered dietitian, and we're able to provide care for the people who need, you know, some soft tissue work and some different things that that need to happen. 00;15;48;07 - 00;16;08;11 And taking that team, team approach that we learned through sports over time. On how to provide player care. We need to provide, you know, deputy care and, from from a tactical athlete standpoint and what I mean, long term development, we're able to impact the agency by we we have an explorer program at the high school level that we do, you know, exposure to all these different things. 00;16;08;13 - 00;16;43;24 And we work out of the academy as people come, you know, they want to become deputies. We we have some, opportunity to help and build foundational movements and corrective exercise at that level. And then like this morning, we have people that when we hire them officially into the sheriff's office, where we have a program to where we have a strength conditioning program for for six weeks, as we're training our deputies and teaching them and taking that exposure from those lower levels, right to, to here to where we can build out and show them all the mobility and the FRC stuff and control the programs and weight room programs and, you know, start, you 00;16;43;24 - 00;17;15;14 know, running programs and conditioning programs and agility and everything kind of gets built out. Show them how to expose them to it. And then we we have meetings through our FTO program. And then we do what to control. But we have programs for canines, you know, slot and you know, the tip of the spear. So when you think of a long term development program, Eric, we have stuff from the Dominican Republic to the big leagues, and now we have some things from the high school program and people who want to be in law enforcement or ROTC, whatever, and how we get them all the way to Swat or canine, you know, to to be our 00;17;15;14 - 00;17;43;01 best. And, I feel like we're impacting the agency and getting a lot of support. And so I'm excited to help be a part of that. So you've seen the culture obviously change and MLB to adopt strength and conditioning. Now you're experiencing that on the tactical side. Do you see a big difference in the culture of how strength and conditioning, sport science, all the different areas you mentioned nutrition, sports medicine, all how all these different areas are being adopted? 00;17;43;03 - 00;18;02;11 Yeah, it just takes a little bit of time and, you know, a lot of lot of sweat equity to, you know, in the beginning, you know, in the beginning times with, with baseball. Right? You didn't you didn't have as many people or there are some people on the coaching staff for the nonbelievers. Right. As long as you have some support at the top, it gives you opportunity to kind of, show the value. 00;18;02;13 - 00;18;23;16 Right. And, and how we're going to help impact the agency from, from injury prevention to also to performance and then how how that bleeds into the hitting and ground balls and pitching, you know, everything. And I've watched a huge swing say on the baseball side from from pitching coaches that maybe weren't they don't want to say what not to say. 00;18;23;16 - 00;18;50;20 Not I say as nonbelievers in the beginning, but weren't as adaptive to where that swing over that, say, 20 year period to where they're they're almost your biggest advocate. They they apply the most science right to, to to things to where we gain traction and show them, hey, the value of it to where as the front office started adding people in and, and over time, now you see a huge shift in culture, say, and baseball all the way from the D.R., all the way through the big leagues. 00;18;50;20 - 00;19;15;14 Right. And so I'm, I see the same thing here. You have people here who, who teach the skills. Right? You have shooting skills and jujitsu or defensive tactics and all those different things. And we want to impact the coaching staff to say, hey, here's ways that we can help your skill acquisition, right? To getting people more mobile, right, to get people in a better condition and doesn't, you know, have to be, say, marathon runners or bodybuilders and all those type of things we do. 00;19;15;15 - 00;19;32;18 You have to be in just enough shape to to do the job. And this is a tough job. When they go to trainings, they're out there for six, eight, ten, sometimes the 12 hour shifts, right. So when you're preparing people to do things for 12 hours, you know, you have to be able to dissect that a little bit. 00;19;32;20 - 00;19;52;28 And they got a hard they got a hard job, they got a hard job with a lot of liability. And so we want to make sure that, you know, you know, the number one thing that affects any kind of skill or division decision making is fatigue. And we have to make sure people are ready to do their job so that they're always making good decisions from hour one to hour 12. 00;19;53;00 - 00;20;10;09 You know, that that that's that's the approach. And so I'm just fortunate enough to, to get a chance to see people do something really well. Like I see it on the baseball side, when you get to watch baseball played at a high level for a long time, you get to appreciate a lot of little things. And then I've got a chance to watch people who are really good at their job here. 00;20;10;12 - 00;20;29;16 Show me the right, I guess, the right way to go about, you know, say, policing and law enforcement and how to from a from a skill side of it. And now we're able to to add the all the things that we've done on the sports side of it into this side. So from from a sports medicine side to, to the, you know, conditioning and strength conditioning side. 00;20;29;16 - 00;20;51;03 So now adding some tech. Right. So we're adding in. So we have a full assessments here. We you know we you know we do all smoke screens and movement screens and different things that people you know didn't really think about in 2005 and six and seven, you know, back in the day. And now to where we have, you know, the on base you and this and that and TBI and you have every single kind of, assessment possible. 00;20;51;03 - 00;21;05;16 Well, we're bringing some of those things here, right? We have to get people assessed. We have to get, we're using the body, we're using some tech, we're using some pressure mats. We're going to be adding in some some stuff involved and or some force playing some different things. And, you know, there's a lot of hitting drills that apply to shooting skills, right? 00;21;05;16 - 00;21;23;06 You teach things from the ground up and, and we're showing the value of that because people get better. So, you know, and people need to see the numbers. Right? You want to make change, right? They need to see the body numbers. They need to see some of the, some of FMS numbers. They need to see those things because you just talk about it. 00;21;23;06 - 00;21;43;05 Right. It's you know, they can't really understand it. But when they see it it's like, hey, holy cow. We're actually, you know, I'm actually getting better at some of these things. So it's been fun to watch. Yeah. Sounds sounds exciting. And you talk about the tech before we were talking about job creation and how that's really allowed you to build programs everywhere you've been. 00;21;43;05 - 00;22;05;08 But when I hear that, I'm like, hey, you're going to your leadership and you're asking them for money. Essentially, you're saying, hey, we need money to hire a strength coach or hire an athletic trainer or to purchase this technology. What's your approach going back on what you said you have, you're believers, you're nonbelievers. When you're going to somebody in a leadership position saying, hey, we need budget for this. 00;22;05;11 - 00;22;27;14 They may not be on board. How do you how do you navigate that process? I think over my years of learning how to get to. Yes, and to be patient and and to pick and choose your spots. I think I think when you're a young, trained coach, you don't know when to ask and not ask. So I've learned, like when you lose ten games in a row, you don't go ask for anything. 00;22;27;17 - 00;22;40;26 You mean you went on days in a row and everybody's happy, right? You got you learn how to pick your spots. And I think, you know, those are some of the things that the that I've learned around here. So like when you know, hey, we know we're down X amount of deputies. Right. So don't be asking for things. 00;22;40;26 - 00;22;58;10 Right. And then all of a sudden, you know, when things are moving at full speed around here and things are going well, like know you learn how to pick your, pick your spots. So you learn how to get to. Yes. And then and part of that is, You know, I've learned, you know, in baseball, you have a union. 00;22;58;12 - 00;23;13;13 So I guess you learn that you're only even at your best. You're about to do about 75% of the stuff you really want to do, right? Because there's unions and rules and guidelines and legal stuff and all these other things. So no one ever gets so hope. So. If anyone out there watching, you never have to get 100% of what you want. 00;23;13;14 - 00;23;24;09 If you do that, go in your own business, right? If you want to do everything you want to do, when you want to do it, and how you want to do it right then and there. But if you're going to be working for another organization or going to be in a team environment, you're never going to get everything you want. 00;23;24;09 - 00;23;43;12 So you got to pick and choose, figure out what you think on your list of things is the most important thing that day, right? And ask for those things, at the right time. And we've been lucky enough here to now get some federal dollars. And we are building a performance center, and we are, you know, building and getting a dedicated space. 00;23;43;12 - 00;24;03;18 Right? Because right now I'm in the Joint Operations building, right? I'm going to have a housing human performance, a building. We're in that process. We got some federal dollars, we got some state dollars, we have some county dollars that, we're we're now building a building, right. You know, here. And we have five satellite locations in and around the county or the county, 700mi². 00;24;03;20 - 00;24;27;17 And how we're able to, to do some of those things. And so we found the right time. We built some success. We got some people from an adoption standpoint that want to do these things, from a sweat equity standpoint. And now we're on the other end of this to where, you know, we put the time and and we're being rewarded with, you know, our, our sheriff and our leadership and, and, that, that want to make sure we have a dedicated space to train up to train our deputies. 00;24;27;19 - 00;24;53;27 Right. Not to, and to help impact the agency. So I'm really excited about that, that we're moving in that direction. And they want to build an add on. That's huge man. It's cool to see departments grow. And I think back when you were the president of the PBSCCS, Professional Baseball Strength and Conditioning Coaches Society, and you've really had to be an advocate for strength and conditioning through your whole career. 00;24;53;27 - 00;25;15;27 It goes back to what you said on job creation, and it's it's exciting for me to hear that and just see your involvement. Over the years you've been a presenter, you've been an award winner. What's the NSCA meant to you at different career stages? Well, I want to still say that I moved from the president of the PBSCCS to the administrative director. 00;25;15;27 - 00;25;32;27 I've not left that aspect of the game from the education standpoint. Listen, we all have to give back in certain ways, right? And, you know, and I'm fortunate enough to that the board with the PBSCCS allows me to be a part of, say, the trade show and to be part of what we're going to be doing another webinar here soon. 00;25;33;00 - 00;25;48;07 I think people out there need to know that you need to give your time back and a lot of it's going to be in the form of education and time and talks like this. And so along with that, yes. You know, I still like coming to the, to the, I don't wanna keep screwing up like that. 00;25;48;07 - 00;26;09;26 Kind of. Right. So the NSCA and then just you being let me be a part of this is this is huge. Right? But, I want to just make sure that, you know, that I'm taking the time to, you know, help out people just like Connors and Bridgman and different people. And then, you know, like, obviously one day, like this, this program, the sheriff is, you know, given their time and opportunity to to me, to where I like to give back to some of these things. 00;26;09;26 - 00;26;34;18 Right. And, and go and just, hey, I'm gonna tell you right now that I was going to agree with the way I do things, that it's okay to go out there and be judged by your peers a little bit. I think some people get nervous about that. We all are in the beginning part of our career, and now you get to a certain point to where, you know, I'm okay because some of the things I'm talking about, I'm doing good at and some I'm not doing as good, but hopefully someone in the room can be constructive enough to say, hey, hey, man, here's a better way to do it instead of just kind of beating 00;26;34;18 - 00;26;51;22 you down. And I've been on both ends of that, but I'm not as worried about that anymore. And and I'm okay to. Hey, here's what I got. Here's what we're doing. Help me make it better. Be constructive on that, and then I'll come to you and to other people. Well, through the NSCA. And you got a lot of good people in this tactical space. 00;26;51;22 - 00;27;11;25 And they've been very welcoming. This is the more welcoming they are. So you want to say the sports out of it. And what a great community. And everyone everyone wants to help it get better. And so I, I'm very, very, very appreciative of that. And, so that that's the community with from the NSCA. They've been they've been great. 00;27;11;27 - 00;27;34;20 Yeah. Your willingness to be open to share what you do, even if it's the the best thing out there, or maybe it's something you're still working on. I love that that comes through. If someone wants to reach out and get some of that advice from you, what's the best way for them to do that? Yeah, just as just, you know, I guess if you I don't know if you can put the email up on the screen, but email's the best, way to get Ahold of me. 00;27;34;20 - 00;27;52;24 I do try to reply to all of them. And hopefully, you can just take a little tidbit from here because everyone should put their own flavor on some things. You know, we all take some tidbits from each other, and hopefully you can kind of process some of the things that we're doing here and about, I'm always willing to help because I know other agencies. 00;27;52;24 - 00;28;15;27 Now we're starting to in the state of Florida, right? We have 68 counties, and I hope all 68 counties at some point, they are hiring a strength conditioning coach, and to help all their programs, to help all these deputies. What a much needed, job. Like a lot of job satisfaction and helping these people. Yeah, it's it's really exciting to hear job creation is the name of the game we care about. 00;28;15;27 - 00;28;38;28 Creating opportunities for coaches to move through the field like we have. And that's that's something that comes through on your baseball background through the PBSCCS. This is cool that this was a, baseball episode, but it was also a tactical episode. We don't always cross those two areas in this. In the same, episode here on the podcast. 00;28;38;28 - 00;28;59;02 So I think it speaks to the fact that you can move through different areas of the field, and our skill set is valuable, our knowledge is valuable, and we can take that with us when we have a new career opportunity or something that interests, so I think that's a really positive, encouraging messages for our listeners. Matt, thanks so much for being on today. 00;28;59;04 - 00;29;16;00 Yeah. Thank you. Hey, Eric. Appreciate it. Appreciate your friendship. I think I got a chance to meet two more people today. You know, that that are that are in the background there. So, any time and then I'm also going to be at the speaking at the tactical. Just let everyone know that I'll be speaking at the, tactical conference come August. 00;29;16;02 - 00;29;41;01 I love it. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in today. Great episode. We talk tactical baseball, strength and conditioning. Matt has a ton of information and knowledge experience with the NSCA. He's a great contact so we'll put his information into the show. Notes. Also a special thanks to Sorinex Exercise Equipment. We appreciate their support. This was the NSCAs Coaching Podcast. 00;29;41;09 - 00;30;01;03 The National Strength and Conditioning Association was founded in 1978 by strength and conditioning coaches to share information and resources and help advance the profession, serving coaches for over 40 years. The NSCAs be trusted source for strength and conditioning professionals. Be sure to join us next time.

Is Bryce Underwood Correct?Is Ohio State really “just another game” for Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood?Tony Gerdeman and Tom Orr discuss recent comments from Michigan head coach Kyle Whittingham and quarterback Bryce Underwood about the Ohio State rivalry, including whether hatred is necessary in The Game, how coaches and players should talk about rivalry week, and why comments like these can take on a life of their own once they hit social media.They also discuss Ryan Day, Julian Sayin, the difference between a “cloud” and a “crown” after The Game, why rivalry comments are often performative, and somehow work in Fruit Stripe Gum, Skittle Brow, Rod Smart, the XFL, and the 2001 Las Vegas Outlaws.00:00 — Intro00:10 — Michigan Thursday and rivalry comments00:28 — Kyle Whittingham's comments about not hating Ohio State02:19 — Why Whittingham's answer was reasonable05:14 — Performative rivalry hatred and Ryan Day06:40 — Bryce Underwood says Ohio State is “just another game”08:07 — Why Underwood's answer raised eyebrows10:28 — What quarterbacks should say about The Game12:07 — Coaches, players, and reading between the lines14:01 — How social media turns comments into outrage15:54 — Rod Smart, “He Hate Me,” and the XFL17:15 — More 2001 XFL memories18:07 — BuckeyeInsiders.com and wrap-upIs Bryce Underwood right, or is Ohio State never “just another game” for Michigan? Drop your thoughts in the comments.Subscribe to Buckeye Weekly for daily Ohio State football talk, recruiting coverage, analysis, and more.Visit BuckeyeInsiders.com to become a member and join the conversation.

In this episode the boys continue their ongoing discussion of the influences of popular-socialism, folk-socialism, left-populism, and left-nationalism on the western workers' movement and how to navigate the impossible task of resurrecting the "Real Marxist" tradition.    The Problem With Left Nationalism https://jacobin.com/2026/01/left-nationalism-universalism-populism-melenchon    The Left and Its Meaning https://sublationmedia.com/the-left-and-its-meaning/   Folk Socialism — A Left-Populist Disorder  https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/folk-socialism-a-left-populist-disorder/    A Socialism for the 21st Century https://truthout.org/articles/a-socialism-for-the-21st-century/    Neoliberalism and the Socialist Movement in Britain: From the Third Road to Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit https://mronline.org/2024/09/11/neoliberalism-and-the-socialist-movement-in-britain-from-the-third-road-to-jeremy-corbyn-and-brexit/   Marxist Internationalism or National Interest? https://www.theleftchapter.com/post/marxist-internationalism-or-national-interest    People, class, democracy: re-mapping left populism from populist social democracy to popular socialism  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569317.2024.2371506#d1e175 

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey joins Chad with explanation of the cuts within his budget proposal and reaction to the criticism. Plus, they talk about issues with crime, Todd Barnette stepping down, searching for a new permanent police chief and more.

First Take begins with the Vikings announcing Kyler Murray as their week 1 starter! Can he take them to the playoffs, and how does this affect former 1st round pick J.J. McCarthy? Then, the Rays lead the Yankees in the AL East, but the Evil Empire is still favored to come out of the lackluster American League. Why? Next, noted Bears fanatic Shae Cornette predicts their daunting schedule! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sasho MacKenzie is the founder of the Stack System and one of the lead leading biomechanics experts in in golf.  He joins Corrected Mistakes to dive into why swing speed is crucial for being a better golfer and the ways someone can increase swing speed. For exclusive content and first access check out Corrected Mistakes on Substack: https://substack.com/@correctedmistake  Amazon Storefront: https://shorturl.at/K0UoA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you've been wondering, how can I be less emotionally reactive?, the answer starts with understanding what your child's behavior is really communicating. Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge, creator of Regulation First Parenting™, explains how calming the nervous system creates lasting change for the whole family.Parenting a dysregulated child can leave you feeling like you're constantly putting out fires. You're not alone. When nothing seems to work, it's easy to believe you need a new consequence, a better strategy, or another diagnosis.In this episode, I explain why behavior is communication and why the behaviors you see are often signals of an overloaded nervous system—not the actual problem. You'll learn how changing one simple question can transform your parenting and help your child build real regulation skills.Why Does My Child Keep Having Meltdowns Even When We Try Everything?Many parents spend years trying to stop the meltdown instead of understanding what caused it. Meltdowns, anxiety, defiance, and focus problems are often symptoms—not the root issue.When a child's nervous system becomes overwhelmed, behavior becomes the brain's way of asking for help.Key takeaways:Behavior is a signal, not the problem.Look beyond the symptom to what is overwhelming your child.Regulation creates the foundation for lasting behavior change.Example: A child who explodes during homework may not be refusing work—they may simply have reached their nervous system's limit after a long day.

Confrontation is never easy, but the Bible gives us a clear way to handle it. In this episode, we discuss preparing your own heart, speaking the truth in love, and keeping restoration...not winning—the ultimate goal.

Healthcare could be one of your biggest expenses in retirement, but are you actually planning for it? In this episode of Wise Money, we break down how much you should budget for Medicare and healthcare costs, including what to consider if you retire before age 65. We also discuss IRMAA, HSAs, long-term care, and how rising healthcare costs could impact your overall retirement plan. Season 11, Episode 51 Download our FREE 5-Factor Retirement guide: https://wisemoneyguides.com/    Schedule a meeting with one of our CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERS™: https://www.korhorn.com/schedule-a-call/  or call 574-247-5898.   Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PN9_n9auveY  Subscribe on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/c/WiseMoneyShow Listen on podcast: https://pod.link/1040619718   Submit a question for the show: https://www.korhorn.com/ask-a-question/   Read the Wise Money Blog: https://www.korhorn.com/wise-money-blog/    Connect with us: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/WiseMoneyShow  Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/wisemoneyshow/    Kevin Korhorn, CFP® offers securities through Silver Oak Securities, Inc., Member FINRA/SIPC. Kevin offers advisory services through KFG Wealth Management, LLC dba Korhorn Financial Group. KFG Wealth Management, LLC dba Korhorn Financial Group and Silver Oak Securities, Inc. are not affiliated. Mike Bernard, CFP® and Joshua Gregory, CFP® offer advisory services through KFG Wealth Management, LLC dba Korhorn Financial Group. This information is for general financial education and is not intended to provide specific investment advice or recommendations. All investing and investment strategies involve risk, including the potential loss of principal. Asset allocation & diversification do not ensure a profit or prevent a loss in a declining market. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. This video may discuss estate planning concepts but does not constitute legal advice. Please consult an attorney for advice specific to your situation. Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Center for Financial Planning, Inc. owns and licenses the certification marks CFP®, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and CFP® (with plaque design) in the United States to Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc., which authorizes individuals who successfully complete the organization's initial and ongoing certification requirements to use the certification marks.

In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, my guest is Jocko Willink, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL officer, author and host of the Jocko Podcast. We discuss why discipline, rather than motivation, is the reliable driver of daily action, and how taking action is the most effective way to move through adversity, loss and setbacks. We also discuss how exercise generates energy, the leader's role as a counterweight to team morale, and detachment as a trainable skill for widening perspective and making better decisions under stress. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman David: https://davidprotein.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Jocko Willink (00:00:23) Discipline, Impact & Autonomy in the Military (00:02:40) Energy, Waking Up, Alarm Clock & Debate (00:04:12) Tool: Exercise for Energy; Eating, Fasting & Mental Clarity (00:05:45) Tool: High-Intensity Exercise, Peak Mentality (00:06:31) Winning & Losing, SEAL Selection, BUD/S, Resilience (00:08:34) Leadership, Morale & Mob Mentality; Tool: Detach & Correct (00:10:36) Loss, Grief; Tool: Action as a Cure for Adversity (00:12:17) Sponsor: AG1 (00:13:31) Parenting & Success; Tool: Be the Counterweight, Balance (00:16:07) Sense of Self, Hardcore Music, DIY Attitude & Dissent (00:18:55) Motivation as an Emotion, Discipline (00:19:44) Tool: Move Toward Problems; Indirect Approach & Conflict (00:21:14) Sponsor: LMNT (00:22:46) Meditation, Detachment & Teaching Young Leaders (00:24:19) Depression, Storm Clouds & Losing Perspective (00:26:39) Tool: Detachment, Oil Rig Story, Field of View (00:30:59) Tools: Take a Step Back, Slow Breathing & Widen Field of View (00:32:04) Tools: Chin Up, Hands Down, Listening; Relationships (00:34:18) Sponsor: David (00:35:37) Tool: Deliberate Discomfort & Training Resiliency (00:36:08) Acknowledgements Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joey Diaz and Lee Syatt talk Joey's altercation this weekend, his ever changing five year plan, Joey's trick for dealing with nerves and much more! SHOW NOTES Limited Time Offer - Get 20% OFF Zapply T1 Testo Charge with code CHURCH at http://us.tryzapply.com Thank you to Zapply for partnering with The Church!