Podcasts about Definition

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This week, we're going deep into the Ongoing History of New Music vault to talk about "Definitions". Often in the music world, we hear terms discussed...but where did they come from, and what do they mean? What do "New Rock" and "Alternative" mean? What's a "Major Label" or "Indie"? "Boutique" and "Vanity"? Got that covered too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the second part of this series, Dr. Tesha Monteith and Dr. Jennifer Robblee discuss updates to the emergency room recommendations for the acute treatment of migraines.  Show citations:  Robblee J, Minen MT, Friedman BW, Cortel-LeBlanc MA, Cortel-LeBlanc A, Orr SL. 2025 Guideline Update to Acute Treatment of Migraine for Adults in the Emergency Department: The American Headache Society Evidence Assessment of Parenteral Pharmacotherapies. Headache. 2026;66(1):53-76. doi:10.1111/head.70016 Robblee J, Khan FA, Marmura MJ, et al. Reaching International Consensus on the Definition of Refractory Migraine Using the Delphi Method. Cephalalgia. 2025;45(9):3331024251367767. doi:10.1177/03331024251367767 Show transcript:  Dr. Tesha Monteith:   Hi, this is Tesha Monteith with the Neurology Minute. I've just been speaking with Jennifer Robblee about her exciting work, defining refractory migraine with an international consensus, as well as her work with the American Headache Society on a guideline update for parental pharmacotherapies for migraine in the emergency department. So Jennifer, we've just been chatting on the podcast about all the great work out of the American Headache Society, updating the emergency room recommendations for acute treatment of migraine. Can you give a summary of those findings? Dr. Jennifer Robblee:  We looked at all of the new data for randomized control trials in the emergency room. We found 26 new trials, and several of those were actually a class one study that we felt had a low risk of bias. And from that, we applied the grading. So we actually have two grade A medications where it is that you must offer, of course, to the appropriate patient. And that's prochlorperazine IV, and greater occipital nerve blocks. Now, there's also a grade A must not offer, and that's IV hydromorphone. Then we have some grade B, which is should offer, and that's dexketoprofen, ketorolac, metaclopramide, sumatriptan subcutaneous, and supraorbital nerve blocks. So really exciting that we have lots of things that we can now say we have pretty good evidence or very good evidence to offer them to our patients. Dr. Tesha Monteith:  Great. It's always nice to see this update based on evidence. Dr. Jennifer Robblee:  Yes, I think it's so important, because right now when we see patients, and I'm sure you get this all the time, they come back, say they were in the emergency room for a severe headache and they got a migraine cocktail. And you're like, "Do you know what you were given?" And they say, "I don't know. I was just told it's a migraine cocktail." And as you know, that mean many, many different things. And when you are able to pull the records, it is many, many different things that a migraine cocktail can mean. So I'm hoping that this can start to standardize what we're actually giving our patients as we await more trials in the future that might start to tell us what that combo of treatments really should be. For right now, these at least tell us what individual treatments have the best evidence. Dr. Tesha Monteith:  Thanks so much, Jennifer.  

On Tuesday, the San Diego City Council will be voting on adopting a new working definition of antisemitism.Councilmember Stephen Whitburn is proposing adopting a definition crafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, also known as the IHRA.The definition has been widely adopted by countries, states, cities and schools. But critics say it's imprecise and could have broader implications for freedom of speech.Tuesday on Midday Edition, we look at the history of the IHRA definition, how it's been interpreted and put into practice and competing perceptions of antisemitism.Guests:Jonathan Graubart, political science professor and chair, San Diego State University

Pechvogel – „Warum muss so was immer mir passieren?“ – das fragen sich die so genannten Pechvögel. Denn Missgeschicke, Unglücke und peinliche Situationen kleben an ihnen wie Pech.

In part one of this series, Dr. Tesha Monteith and Dr. Jennifer Robblee discuss an international consensus definition for refractory migraine and why clearer criteria are needed.  Show citations: Robblee J, Minen MT, Friedman BW, Cortel-LeBlanc MA, Cortel-LeBlanc A, Orr SL. 2025 Guideline Update to Acute Treatment of Migraine for Adults in the Emergency Department: The American Headache Society Evidence Assessment of Parenteral Pharmacotherapies. Headache. 2026;66(1):53-76. doi:10.1111/head.70016 Robblee J, Khan FA, Marmura MJ, et al. Reaching International Consensus on the Definition of Refractory Migraine Using the Delphi Method. Cephalalgia. 2025;45(9):3331024251367767. doi:10.1177/03331024251367767 Show transcript:  Dr. Tesha Monteith: Hi, this is Tesha Monteith with the Neurology Minute. I've just been speaking with Jennifer Robblee about her exciting work defining refractory migraine with an international consensus, as well as her work with the American Headache Society on a guideline update for parental pharmacotherapies for migraine in the emergency department. Hi, Jennifer. Thanks again for coming on our Neurology Minute. Dr. Jennifer Robblee: Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Dr. Tesha Monteith: You've done a lot of work in the area of refractory migraine. Why don't you tell us why you felt there need to be clarification on the definition? Dr. Jennifer Robblee: Well, this is a patient population that I'm really passionate about. There's not enough research out there. We don't really know who these patients are, why they're not responding to treatment, and we don't know how to help them because we have no guidelines, obviously, since they're refractory to what we use for treating. So I thought it was really good to get an international group to standardize our definition and hopefully help move the research forward. Dr. Tesha Monteith: Why don't you tell us a little bit about the consensus definition Dr. Jennifer Robblee: So we came up with an international consensus definition for refractory migraine that was laid out the same way that migraine is, say, laid out in the ICHD-3 diagnostic manual, if you want to call it that. So we have different criteria on. So criterion A basically allowed for it to be episodic or chronic migraine. Criterion B had three subcriteria, so you needed to have at least two out of three of severe to very severe disability and/or a constant background headache and/or at least eight monthly migraine days. Criterion C was about the lack of response to treatment. And basically it says that you needed to have failure of all medication categories, and there is an extra one for an other in case any new treatments emerge before the diagnostic criteria get updated. And what we considered a, quote, unquote, failure was that you did not have a 50% improvement in monthly migraine days, or you had intolerable side effects, or you had an absolute contraindication. There is a caveat that you need to have at least four true lack of efficacies. And then the CGRP monoclonal antibody or gepant category and the onabotulinumtoxin toxin category both had to be a true lack of response. And of course, there's a criterion B to say that this should not be from another diagnosis. Dr. Tesha Monteith: Thanks so much, Jennifer.

Turbopuffer came out of a reading app.In 2022, Simon was helping his friends at Readwise scale their infra for a highly requested feature: article recommendations and semantic search. Readwise was paying ~$5k/month for their relational database and vector search would cost ~$20k/month making the feature too expensive to ship. In 2023 after mulling over the problem from Readwise, Simon decided he wanted to “build a search engine” which became Turbopuffer.We discuss:• Simon's path: Denmark → Shopify infra for nearly a decade → “angel engineering” across startups like Readwise, Replicate, and Causal → turbopuffer almost accidentally becoming a company • The Readwise origin story: building an early recommendation engine right after the ChatGPT moment, seeing it work, then realizing it would cost ~$30k/month for a company spending ~$5k/month total on infra and getting obsessed with fixing that cost structure • Why turbopuffer is “a search engine for unstructured data”: Simon's belief that models can learn to reason, but can't compress the world's knowledge into a few terabytes of weights, so they need to connect to systems that hold truth in full fidelity • The three ingredients for building a great database company: a new workload, a new storage architecture, and the ability to eventually support every query plan customers will want on their data • The architecture bet behind turbopuffer: going all in on object storage and NVMe, avoiding a traditional consensus layer, and building around the cloud primitives that only became possible in the last few years • Why Simon hated operating Elasticsearch at Shopify: years of painful on-call experience shaped his obsession with simplicity, performance, and eliminating state spread across multiple systems • The Cursor story: launching turbopuffer as a scrappy side project, getting an email from Cursor the next day, flying out after a 4am call, and helping cut Cursor's costs by 95% while fixing their per-user economics • The Notion story: buying dark fiber, tuning TCP windows, and eating cross-cloud costs because Simon refused to compromise on architecture just to close a deal faster • Why AI changes the build-vs-buy equation: it's less about whether a company can build search infra internally, and more about whether they have time especially if an external team can feel like an extension of their own • Why RAG isn't dead: coding companies still rely heavily on search, and Simon sees hybrid retrieval semantic, text, regex, SQL-style patterns becoming more important, not less • How agentic workloads are changing search: the old pattern was one retrieval call up front; the new pattern is one agent firing many parallel queries at once, turning search into a highly concurrent tool call • Why turbopuffer is reducing query pricing: agentic systems are dramatically increasing query volume, and Simon expects retrieval infra to adapt to huge bursts of concurrent search rather than a small number of carefully chosen calls • The philosophy of “playing with open cards”: Simon's habit of being radically honest with investors, including telling Lachy Groom he'd return the money if turbopuffer didn't hit PMF by year-end • The “P99 engineer”: Simon's framework for building a talent-dense company, rejecting by default unless someone on the team feels strongly enough to fight for the candidate —Simon Hørup Eskildsen• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sirupsen• X: https://x.com/Sirupsen• https://sirupsen.com/aboutturbopuffer• https://turbopuffer.com/Full Video PodTimestamps00:00:00 The PMF promise to Lachy Groom00:00:25 Intro and Simon's background00:02:19 What turbopuffer actually is00:06:26 Shopify, Elasticsearch, and the pain behind the company00:10:07 The Readwise experiment that sparked turbopuffer00:12:00 The insight Simon couldn't stop thinking about00:17:00 S3 consistency, NVMe, and the architecture bet00:20:12 The Notion story: latency, dark fiber, and conviction00:25:03 Build vs. buy in the age of AI00:26:00 The Cursor story: early launch to breakout customer00:29:00 Why code search still matters00:32:00 Search in the age of agents00:34:22 Pricing turbopuffer in the AI era00:38:17 Why Simon chose Lachy Groom00:41:28 Becoming a founder on purpose00:44:00 The “P99 engineer” philosophy00:49:30 Bending software to your will00:51:13 The future of turbopuffer00:57:05 Simon's tea obsession00:59:03 Tea kits, X Live, and P99 LiveTranscriptSimon Hørup Eskildsen: I don't think I've said this publicly before, but I just called Lockey and was like, local Lockie. Like if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like we'll just like return all the money to you. But it's just like, I don't really, we, Justine and I don't wanna work on this unless it's really working.So we want to give it the best shot this year and like we're really gonna go for it. We're gonna hire a bunch of people. We're just gonna be honest with everyone. Like when I don't know how to play a game, I just play with open cards. Lockey was the only person that didn't, that didn't freak out. He was like, I've never heard anyone say that before.Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Leading Space podcast. This is Celesio Pando, Colonel Laz, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Leading Space.swyx: Hello. Hello, uh, we're still, uh, recording in the Ker studio for the first time. Very excited. And today we are joined by Simon Eski. Of Turbo Farer welcome.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Thank you so much for having me.swyx: Turbo Farer has like really gone on a huge tear, and I, I do have to mention that like you're one of, you're not my newest member of the Danish AHU Mafia, where like there's a lot of legendary programmers that have come out of it, like, uh, beyond Trotro, Rasmus, lado Berg and the V eight team and, and Google Maps team.Uh, you're mostly a Canadian now, but isn't that interesting? There's so many, so much like strong Danish presence.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, I was writing a post, um, not that long ago about sort of the influences. So I grew up in Denmark, right? I left, I left when, when I was 18 to go to Canada to, to work at Shopify. Um, and so I, like, I've, I would still say that I feel more Danish than, than Canadian.This is also the weird accent. I can't say th because it, this is like, I don't, you know, my wife is also Canadian, um, and I think. I think like one of the things in, in Denmark is just like, there's just such a ruthless pragmatism and there's also a big focus on just aesthetics. Like, they're like very, people really care about like where, what things look like.Um, and like Canada has a lot of attributes, US has, has a lot of attributes, but I think there's been lots of the great things to carry. I don't know what's in the water in Ahu though. Um, and I don't know that I could be considered part of the Mafi mafia quite yet, uh, compared to the phenomenal individuals we just mentioned.Barra OV is also, uh, Danish Canadian. Okay. Yeah. I don't know where he lives now, but, and he's the PHP.swyx: Yeah. And obviously Toby German, but moved to Canada as well. Yes. Like this is like import that, uh, that, that is an interesting, um, talent move.Alessio: I think. I would love to get from you. Definition of Turbo puffer, because I think you could be a Vector db, which is maybe a bad word now in some circles, you could be a search engine.It's like, let, let's just start there and then we'll maybe run through the history of how you got to this point.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: For sure. Yeah. So Turbo Puffer is at this point in time, a search engine, right? We do full text search and we do vector search, and that's really what we're specialized in. If you're trying to do much more than that, like then this might not be the right place yet, but Turbo Buffer is all about search.The other way that I think about it is that we can take all of the world's knowledge, all of the exabytes and exabytes of data that there is, and we can use those tokens to train a model, but we can't compress all of that into a few terabytes of weights, right? Compress into a few terabytes of weights, how to reason with the world, how to make sense of the knowledge.But we have to somehow connect it to something externally that actually holds that like in full fidelity and truth. Um, and that's the thing that we intend to become. Right? That's like a very holier than now kind of phrasing, right? But being the search engine for unstructured, unstructured data is the focus of turbo puffer at this point in time.Alessio: And let's break down. So people might say, well, didn't Elasticsearch already do this? And then some other people might say, is this search on my data, is this like closer to rag than to like a xr, like a public search thing? Like how, how do you segment like the different types of search?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: The way that I generally think about this is like, there's a lot of database companies and I think if you wanna build a really big database company, sort of, you need a couple of ingredients to be in the air.We don't, which only happens roughly every 15 years. You need a new workload. You basically need the ambition that every single company on earth is gonna have data in your database. Multiple times you look at a company like Oracle, right? You will, like, I don't think you can find a company on earth with a digital presence that it not, doesn't somehow have some data in an Oracle database.Right? And I think at this point, that's also true for Snowflake and Databricks, right? 15 years later it's, or even more than that, there's not a company on earth that doesn't, in. Or directly is consuming Snowflake or, or Databricks or any of the big analytics databases. Um, and I think we're in that kind of moment now, right?I don't think you're gonna find a company over the next few years that doesn't directly or indirectly, um, have all their data available for, for search and connect it to ai. So you need that new workload, like you need something to be happening where there's a new workload that causes that to happen, and that new workload is connecting very large amounts of data to ai.The second thing you need. The second condition to build a big database company is that you need some new underlying change in the storage architecture that is not possible from the databases that have come before you. If you look at Snowflake and Databricks, right, commoditized, like massive fleet of HDDs, like that was not possible in it.It just wasn't in the air in the nineties, right? So you just didn't, we just didn't build these systems. S3 and and and so on was not around. And I think the architecture that is now possible that wasn't possible 15 years ago is to go all in on NVME SSDs. It requires a particular type of architecture for the database that.It's difficult to retrofit onto the databases that are already there, including the ones you just mentioned. The second thing is to go all in on OIC storage, more so than we could have done 15 years ago. Like we don't have a consensus layer, we don't really have anything. In fact, you could turn off all the servers that Turbo Buffer has, and we would not lose any data because we have all completely all in on OIC storage.And this means that our architecture is just so simple. So that's the second condition, right? First being a new workload. That means that every company on earth, either indirectly or directly, is using your database. Second being, there's some new storage architecture. That means that the, the companies that have come before you can do what you're doing.I think the third thing you need to do to build a big database company is that over time you have to implement more or less every Cory plan on the data. What that means is that you. You can't just get stuck in, like, this is the one thing that a database does. It has to be ever evolving because when someone has data in the database, they over time expect to be able to ask it more or less every question.So you have to do that to get the storage architecture to the limit of what, what it's capable of. Those are the three conditions.swyx: I just wanted to get a little bit of like the motivation, right? Like, so you left Shopify, you're like principal, engineer, infra guy. Um, you also head of kernel labs, uh, inside of Shopify, right?And then you consulted for read wise and that it kind of gave you that, that idea. I just wanted you to tell that story. Um, maybe I, you've told it before, but, uh, just introduce the, the. People to like the, the new workload, the sort of aha moment for turbo PufferSimon Hørup Eskildsen: For sure. So yeah, I spent almost a decade at Shopify.I was on the infrastructure team, um, from the fairly, fairly early days around 2013. Um, at the time it felt like it was growing so quickly and everything, all the metrics were, you know, doubling year on year compared to the, what companies are contending with today. It's very cute in growth. I feel like lot some companies are seeing that month over month.Um, of course. Shopify compound has been compounding for a very long time now, but I spent a decade doing that and the majority of that was just make sure the site is up today and make sure it's up a year from now. And a lot of that was really just the, um, you know, uh, the Kardashians would drive very, very large amounts of, of data to, to uh, to Shopify as they were rotating through all the merch and building out their businesses.And we just needed to make sure we could handle that. Right. And sometimes these were events, a million requests per second. And so, you know, we, we had our own data centers back in the day and we were moving to the cloud and there was so much sharding work and all of that that we were doing. So I spent a decade just scaling databases ‘cause that's fundamentally what's the most difficult thing to scale about these sites.The database that was the most difficult for me to scale during that time, and that was the most aggravating to be on call for, was elastic search. It was very, very difficult to deal with. And I saw a lot of projects that were just being held back in their ambition by using it.swyx: And I mean, self-hosted.Self-hosted. ‘causeSimon Hørup Eskildsen: it's, yeah, and it commercial, this is like 2015, right? So it's like a very particular vintage. Right. It's probably better at a lot of these things now. Um, it was difficult to contend with and I'm just like, I just think about it. It's an inverted index. It should be good at these kinds of queries and do all of this.And it was, we, we often couldn't get it to do exactly what we needed to do or basically get lucine to do, like expose lucine raw to, to, to what we needed to do. Um, so that was like. Just something that we did on the side and just panic scaled when we needed to, but not a particular focus of mine. So I left, and when I left, I, um, wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do.I mean, it spent like a decade inside of the same company. I'd like grown up there. I started working there when I was 18.swyx: You only do Rails?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Rails. And he's a Rails guy. Uh, love Rails. So good. Um,Alessio: we all wish we could still work in Rails.swyx: I know know. I know, but some, I tried learning Ruby.It's just too much, like too many options to do the same thing. It's, that's my, I I know there's a, there's a way to do it.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I love it. I don't know that I would use it now, like given cloud code and, and, and cursor and everything, but, um, um, but still it, like if I'm just sitting down and writing a teal code, that's how I think.But anyway, I left and I wasn't, I talked to a couple companies and I was like, I don't. I need to see a little bit more of the world here to know what I'm gonna like focus on next. Um, and so what I decided is like I was gonna, I called it like angel engineering, where I just hopped around in my friend's companies in three months increments and just helped them out with something.Right. And, and just vested a bit of equity and solved some interesting infrastructure problem. So I worked with a bunch of companies at the time, um, read Wise was one of them. Replicate was one of them. Um, causal, I dunno if you've tried this, it's like a, it's a spreadsheet engine Yeah. Where you can do distribution.They sold recently. Yeah. Um, we've been, we used that in fp and a at, um, at Turbo Puffer. Um, so a bunch of companies like this and it was super fun. And so we're the Chachi bt moment happened, I was with. With read Wise for a stint, we were preparing for the reader launch, right? Which is where you, you cue articles and read them later.And I was just getting their Postgres up to snuff, like, which basically boils down to tuning, auto vacuum. So I was doing that and then this happened and we were like, oh, maybe we should build a little recommendation engine and some features to try to hook in the lms. They were not that good yet, but it was clear there was something there.And so I built a small recommendation engine just, okay, let's take the articles that you've recently read, right? Like embed all the articles and then do recommendations. It was good enough that when I ran it on one of the co-founders of Rey's, like I found out that I got articles about, about having a child.I'm like, oh my God, I didn't, I, I didn't know that, that they were having a child. I wasn't sure what to do with that information, but the recommendation engine was good enough that it was suggesting articles, um, about that. And so there was, there was recommendations and uh, it actually worked really well.But this was a company that was spending maybe five grand a month in total on all their infrastructure and. When I did the napkin math on running the embeddings of all the articles, putting them into a vector index, putting it in prod, it's gonna be like 30 grand a month. That just wasn't tenable. Right?Like Read Wise is a proudly bootstrapped company and it's paying 30 grand for infrastructure for one feature versus five. It just wasn't tenable. So sort of in the bucket of this is useful, it's pretty good, but let us, let's return to it when the costs come down.swyx: Did you say it grows by feature? So for five to 30 is by the number of, like, what's the, what's the Scaling factor scale?It scales by the number of articles that you embed.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: It does, but what I meant by that is like five grand for like all of the other, like the Heroku, dinos, Postgres, like all the other, and this then storage is 30. Yeah. And then like 30 grand for one feature. Right. Which is like, what other articles are related to this one.Um, so it was just too much right to, to power everything. Their budget would've been maybe a few thousand dollars, which still would've been a lot. And so we put it in a bucket of, okay, we're gonna do that later. We'll wait, we will wait for the cost to come down. And that haunted me. I couldn't stop thinking about it.I was like, okay, there's clearly some latent demand here. If the cost had been a 10th, we would've shipped it and. This was really the only data point that I had. Right. I didn't, I, I didn't, I didn't go out and talk to anyone else. It was just so I started reading Right. I couldn't, I couldn't help myself.Like I didn't know what like a vector index is. I, I generally barely do about how to generate the vectors. There was a lot of hype about, this is a early 2023. There was a lot of hype about vector databases. There were raising a lot of money and it's like, I really didn't know anything about it. It's like, you know, trying these little models, fine tuning them.Like I was just trying to get sort of a lay of the land. So I just sat down. I have this. A GitHub repository called Napkin Math. And on napkin math, there's just, um, rows of like, oh, this is how much bandwidth. Like this is how many, you know, you can do 25 gigabytes per second on average to dram. You can do, you know, five gigabytes per second of rights to an SSD, blah blah.All of these numbers, right? And S3, how many you could do per, how much bandwidth can you drive per connection? I was just sitting down, I was like, why hasn't anyone build a database where you just put everything on O storage and then you puff it into NVME when you use the data and you puff it into dram if you're, if you're querying it alive, it's just like, this seems fairly obvious and you, the only real downside to that is that if you go all in on o storage, every right will take a couple hundred milliseconds of latency, but from there it's really all upside, right?You do the first go, it takes half a second. And it sort of occurred to me as like, well. The architecture is really good for that. It's really good for AB storage, it's really good for nvm ESSD. It's, well, you just couldn't have done that 10 years ago. Back to what we were talking about before. You really have to build a database where you have as few round trips as possible, right?This is how CPUs work today. It's how NVM E SSDs work. It's how as, um, as three works that you want to have a very large amount of outstanding requests, right? Like basically go to S3, do like that thousand requests to ask for data in one round trip. Wait for that. Get that, like, make a new decision. Do it again, and try to do that maybe a maximum of three times.But no databases were designed that way within NVME as is ds. You can drive like within, you know, within a very low multiple of DRAM bandwidth if you use it that way. And same with S3, right? You can fully max out the network card, which generally is not maxed out. You get very, like, very, very good bandwidth.And, but no one had built a database like that. So I was like, okay, well can't you just, you know, take all the vectors right? And plot them in the proverbial coordinate system. Get the clusters, put a file on S3 called clusters, do json, and then put another file for every cluster, you know, cluster one, do js O cluster two, do js ON you know that like it's two round trips, right?So you get the clusters, you find the closest clusters, and then you download the cluster files like the, the closest end. And you could do this in two round trips.swyx: You were nearest neighbors locally.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes. Yes. And then, and you would build this, this file, right? It's just like ultra simplistic, but it's not a far shot from what the first version of Turbo Buffer was.Why hasn't anyone done thatAlessio: in that moment? From a workload perspective, you're thinking this is gonna be like a read heavy thing because they're doing recommend. Like is the fact that like writes are so expensive now? Oh, with ai you're actually not writing that much.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: At that point I hadn't really thought too much about, well no actually it was always clear to me that there was gonna be a lot of rights because at Shopify, the search clusters were doing, you know, I don't know, tens or hundreds of crew QPS, right?‘cause you just have to have a human sit and type in. But we did, you know, I don't know how many updates there were per second. I'm sure it was in the millions, right into the cluster. So I always knew there was like a 10 to 100 ratio on the read write. In the read wise use case. It's, um, even, even in the read wise use case, there'd probably be a lot fewer reads than writes, right?There's just a lot of churn on the amount of stuff that was going through versus the amount of queries. Um, I wasn't thinking too much about that. I was mostly just thinking about what's the fundamentally cheapest way to build a database in the cloud today using the primitives that you have available.And this is it, right? You just, now you have one machine and you know, let's say you have a terabyte of data in S3, you paid the $200 a month for that, and then maybe five to 10% of that data and needs to be an NV ME SSDs and less than that in dram. Well. You're paying very, very little to inflate the data.swyx: By the way, when you say no one else has done that, uh, would you consider Neon, uh, to be on a similar path in terms of being sort of S3 first and, uh, separating the compute and storage?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, I think what I meant with that is, uh, just build a completely new database. I don't know if we were the first, like it was very much, it was, I mean, I, I hadn't, I just looked at the napkin math and was like, this seems really obvious.So I'm sure like a hundred people came up with it at the same time. Like the light bulb and every invention ever. Right. It was just in the air. I think Neon Neon was, was first to it. And they're trying, they're retrofitted onto Postgres, right? And then they built this whole architecture where you have, you have it in memory and then you sort of.You know, m map back to S3. And I think that was very novel at the time to do it for, for all LTP, but I hadn't seen a database that was truly all in, right. Not retrofitting it. The database felt built purely for this no consensus layer. Even using compare and swap on optic storage to do consensus. I hadn't seen anyone go that all in.And I, I mean, there, there, I'm sure there was someone that did that before us. I don't know. I was just looking at the napkin mathswyx: and, and when you say consensus layer, uh, are you strongly relying on S3 Strong consistency? You are. Okay.SoSimon Hørup Eskildsen: that is your consensus layer. It, it is the consistency layer. And I think also, like, this is something that most people don't realize, but S3 only became consistent in December of 2020.swyx: I remember this coming out during COVID and like people were like, oh, like, it was like, uh, it was just like a free upgrade.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah.swyx: They were just, they just announced it. We saw consistency guys and like, okay, cool.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: And I'm sure that they just, they probably had it in prod for a while and they're just like, it's done right.And people were like, okay, cool. But. That's a big moment, right? Like nv, ME SSDs, were also not in the cloud until around 2017, right? So you just sort of had like 2017 nv, ME SSDs, and people were like, okay, cool. There's like one skew that does this, whatever, right? Takes a few years. And then the second thing is like S3 becomes consistent in 2020.So now it means you don't have to have this like big foundation DB or like zookeeper or whatever sitting there contending with the keys, which is how. You know, that's what Snowflake and others have do so muchswyx: for goneSimon Hørup Eskildsen: Exactly. Just gone. Right? And so just push to the, you know, whatever, how many hundreds of people they have working on S3 solved and then compare and swap was not in S3 at this point in time,swyx: by the way.Uh, I don't know what that is, so maybe you wanna explain. Yes. Yeah.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes. So, um, what Compare and swap is, is basically, you can imagine that if you have a database, it might be really nice to have a file called metadata json. And metadata JSON could say things like, Hey, these keys are here and this file means that, and there's lots of metadata that you have to operate in the database, right?But that's the simplest way to do it. So now you have might, you might have a lot of servers that wanna change the metadata. They might have written a file and want the metadata to contain that file. But you have a hundred nodes that are trying to contend with this metadata that JSON well, what compare and Swap allows you to do is basically just you download the file, you make the modifications, and then you write it only if it hasn't changed.While you did the modification and if not you retry. Right? Should just have this retry loops. Now you can imagine if you have a hundred nodes doing that, it's gonna be really slow, but it will converge over time. That primitive was not available in S3. It wasn't available in S3 until late 2024, but it was available in GCP.The real story of this is certainly not that I sat down and like bake brained it. I was like, okay, we're gonna start on GCS S3 is gonna get it later. Like it was really not that we started, we got really lucky, like we started on GCP and we started on GCP because tur um, Shopify ran on GCP. And so that was the platform I was most available with.Right. Um, and I knew the Canadian team there ‘cause I'd worked with them at Shopify and so it was natural for us to start there. And so when we started building the database, we're like, oh yeah, we have to build a, we really thought we had to build a consensus layer, like have a zookeeper or something to do this.But then we discovered the compare and swap. It's like, oh, we can kick the can. Like we'll just do metadata r json and just, it's fine. It's probably fine. Um, and we just kept kicking the can until we had very, very strong conviction in the idea. Um, and then we kind of just hinged the company on the fact that S3 probably was gonna get this, it started getting really painful in like mid 2024.‘cause we were closing deals with, um, um, notion actually that was running in AWS and we're like, trust us. You, you really want us to run this in GCP? And they're like, no, I don't know about that. Like, we're running everything in AWS and the latency across the cloud were so big and we had so much conviction that we bought like, you know, dark fiber between the AWS regions in, in Oregon, like in the InterExchange and GCP is like, we've never seen a startup like do like, what's going on here?And we're just like, no, we don't wanna do this. We were tuning like TCP windows, like everything to get the latency down ‘cause we had so high conviction in not doing like a, a metadata layer on S3. So those were the three conditions, right? Compare and swap. To do metadata, which wasn't in S3 until late 2024 S3 being consistent, which didn't happen until December, 2020.Uh, 2020. And then NVMe ssd, which didn't end in the cloud until 2017.swyx: I mean, in some ways, like a very big like cloud success story that like you were able to like, uh, put this all together, but also doing things like doing, uh, bind our favor. That that actually is something I've never heard.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I mean, it's very common when you're a big company, right?You're like connecting your own like data center or whatever. But it's like, it was uniquely just a pain with notion because the, um, the org, like most of the, like if you're buying in Ashburn, Virginia, right? Like US East, the Google, like the GCP and, and AWS data centers are like within a millisecond on, on each other, on the public exchanges.But in Oregon uniquely, the GCP data center sits like a couple hundred kilometers, like east of Portland and the AWS region sits in Portland, but the network exchange they go through is through Seattle. So it's like a full, like 14 milliseconds or something like that. And so anyway, yeah. It's, it's, so we were like, okay, we can't, we have to go through an exchange in Portland.Yeah. Andswyx: you'd rather do this than like run your zookeeper and likeSimon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes. Way rather. It doesn't have state, I don't want state and two systems. Um, and I think all that is just informed by Justine, my co-founder and I had just been on call for so long. And the worst outages are the ones where you have state in multiple places that's not syncing up.So it really came from, from a a, like just a, a very pure source of pain, of just imagining what we would be Okay. Being woken up at 3:00 AM about and having something in zookeeper was not one of them.swyx: You, you're talking to like a notion or something. Do they care or do they just, theySimon Hørup Eskildsen: just, they care about latency.swyx: They latency cost. That's it.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: They just cared about latency. Right. And we just absorbed the cost. We're just like, we have high conviction in this. At some point we can move them to AWS. Right. And so we just, we, we'll buy the fiber, it doesn't matter. Right. Um, and it's like $5,000. Usually when you buy fiber, you buy like multiple lines.And we're like, we can only afford one, but we will just test it that when it goes over the public internet, it's like super smooth. And so we did a lot of, anyway, it's, yeah, it was, that's cool.Alessio: You can imagine talking to the GCP rep and it's like, no, we're gonna buy, because we know we're gonna turn, we're gonna turn from you guys and go to AWS in like six months.But in the meantime we'll do this. It'sSimon Hørup Eskildsen: a, I mean, like they, you know, this workload still runs on GCP for what it's worth. Right? ‘cause it's so, it was just, it was so reliable. So it was never about moving off GCP, it was just about honesty. It was just about giving notion the latency that they deserved.Right. Um, and we didn't want ‘em to have to care about any of this. We also, they were like, oh, egress is gonna be bad. It was like, okay, screw it. Like we're just gonna like vvc, VPC peer with you and AWS we'll eat the cost. Yeah. Whatever needs to be done.Alessio: And what were the actual workloads? Because I think when you think about ai, it's like 14 milliseconds.It's like really doesn't really matter in the scheme of like a model generation.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. We were told the latency, right. That we had to beat. Oh, right. So, so we're just looking at the traces. Right. And then sort of like hand draw, like, you know, kind of like looking at the trace and then thinking what are the other extensions of the trace?Right. And there's a lot more to it because it's also when you have, if you have 14 versus seven milliseconds, right. You can fit in another round trip. So we had to tune TCP to try to send as much data in every round trip, prewarm all the connections. And there was, there's a lot of things that compound from having these kinds of round trips, but in the grand scheme it was just like, well, we have to beat the latency of whatever we're up against.swyx: Which is like they, I mean, notion is a database company. They could have done this themselves. They, they do lots of database engineering themselves. How do you even get in the door? Like Yeah, just like talk through that kind of.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Last time I was in San Francisco, I was talking to one of the engineers actually, who, who was one of our champions, um, at, AT Notion.And they were, they were just trying to make sure that the, you know, per user cost matched the economics that they needed. You know, Uhhuh like, it's like the way I think about, it's like I have to earn a return on whatever the clouds charge me and then my customers have to earn a return on that. And it's like very simple, right?And so there has to be gross margin all the way up and that's how you build the product. And so then our customers have to make the right set of trade off the turbo Puffer makes, and if they're happy with that, that's great.swyx: Do you feel like you're competing with build internally versus buy or buy versus buy?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, so, sorry, this was all to build up to your question. So one of the notion engineers told me that they'd sat and probably on a napkin, like drawn out like, why hasn't anyone built this? And then they saw terrible. It was like, well, it literally that. So, and I think AI has also changed the buy versus build equation in terms of, it's not really about can we build it, it's about do we have time to build it?I think they like, I think they felt like, okay, if this is a team that can do that and they, they feel enough like an extension of our team, well then we can go a lot faster, which would be very, very good for them. And I mean, they put us through the, through the test, right? Like we had some very, very long nights to to, to do that POC.And they were really our biggest, our second big customer off the cursor, which also was a lot of late nights. Right.swyx: Yeah. That, I mean, should we go into that story? The, the, the sort of Chris's story, like a lot, um, they credit you a lot for. Working very closely with them. So I just wanna hear, I've heard this, uh, story from Sole's point of view, but like, I'm curious what, what it looks like from your side.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I actually haven't heard it from Sole's point of view, so maybe you can now cross reference it. The way that I remember it was that, um, the day after we launched, which was just, you know, I'd worked the whole summer on, on the first version. Justine wasn't part of it yet. ‘cause I just, I didn't tell anyone that summer that I was working on this.I was just locked in on building it because it's very easy otherwise to confuse talking about something to actually doing it. And so I was just like, I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna do the thing. I launched it and at this point turbo puffer is like a rust binary running on a single eight core machine in a T Marks instance.And me deploying it was like looking at the request log and then like command seeing it or like control seeing it to just like, okay, there's no request. Let's upgrade the binary. Like it was like literally the, the, the, the scrappiest thing. You could imagine it was on purpose because just like at Shopify, we did that all the time.Like, we like move, like we ran things in tux all the time to begin with. Before something had like, at least the inkling of PMF, it was like, okay, is anyone gonna hear about this? Um, and one of the cursor co-founders Arvid reached out and he just, you know, the, the cursor team are like all I-O-I-I-M-O like, um, contenders, right?So they just speak in bullet points and, and facts. It was like this amazing email exchange just of, this is how many QPS we have, this is what we're paying, this is where we're going, blah, blah, blah. And so we're just conversing in bullet points. And I tried to get a call with them a few times, but they were, so, they were like really writing the PMF bowl here, just like late 2023.And one time Swally emails me at like five. What was it like 4:00 AM Pacific time saying like, Hey, are you open for a call now? And I'm on the East coast and I, it was like 7:00 AM I was like, yeah, great, sure, whatever. Um, and we just started talking and something. Then I didn't know anything about sales.It was something that just comp compelled me. I have to go see this team. Like, there's something here. So I, I went to San Francisco and I went to their office and the way that I remember it is that Postgres was down when I showed up at the office. Did SW tell you this? No. Okay. So Postgres was down and so it's like they were distracting with that.And I was trying my best to see if I could, if I could help in any way. Like I knew a little bit about databases back to tuning, auto vacuum. It was like, I think you have to tune out a vacuum. Um, and so we, we talked about that and then, um, that evening just talked about like what would it look like, what would it look like to work with us?And I just said. Look like we're all in, like we will just do what we'll do whatever, whatever you tell us, right? They migrated everything over the next like week or two, and we reduced their cost by 95%, which I think like kind of fixed their per user economics. Um, and it solved a lot of other things. And we were just, Justine, this is also when I asked Justine to come on as my co-founder, she was the best engineer, um, that I ever worked with at Shopify.She lived two blocks away and we were just, okay, we're just gonna get this done. Um, and we did, and so we helped them migrate and we just worked like hell over the next like month or two to make sure that we were never an issue. And that was, that was the cursor story. Yeah.swyx: And, and is code a different workload than normal text?I, I don't know. Is is it just text? Is it the same thing?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, so cursor's workload is basically, they, um, they will embed the entire code base, right? So they, they will like chunk it up in whatever they would, they do. They have their own embedding model, um, which they've been public about. Um, and they find that on, on, on their evals.It. There's one of their evals where it's like a 25% improvement on a very particular workload. They have a bunch of blog posts about it. Um, I think it works best on larger code basis, but they've trained their own embedding model to do this. Um, and so you'll see it if you use the cursor agent, it will do searches.And they've also been public around, um, how they've, I think they post trained their model to be very good at semantic search as well. Um, and that's, that's how they use it. And so it's very good at, like, can you find me on the code that's similar to this, or code that does this? And just in, in this queries, they also use GR to supplement it.swyx: Yeah.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, of courseswyx: it's been a big topic of discussion like, is rag dead because gr you know,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: and I mean like, I just, we, we see lots of demand from the coding company to ethicsswyx: search in every part. Yes.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Uh, we, we, we see demand. And so, I mean, I'm. I like case studies. I don't like, like just doing like thought pieces on this is where it's going.And like trying to be all macroeconomic about ai, that's has turned out to be a giant waste of time because no one can really predict any of this. So I just collect case studies and I mean, cursor has done a great job talking about what they're doing and I hope some of the other coding labs that use Turbo Puffer will do the same.Um, but it does seem to make a difference for particular queries. Um, I mean we can also do text, we can also do RegX, but I should also say that cursors like security posture into Tur Puffer is exceptional, right? They have their own embedding model, which makes it very difficult to reverse engineer. They obfuscate the file paths.They like you. It's very difficult to learn anything about a code base by looking at it. And the other thing they do too is that for their customers, they encrypt it with their encryption keys in turbo puffer's bucket. Um, so it's, it's, it's really, really well designed.swyx: And so this is like extra stuff they did to work with you because you are not part of Cursor.Exactly like, and this is just best practice when working in any database, not just you guys. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I think for me, like the, the, the learning is kind of like you, like all workloads are hybrid. Like, you know, uh, like you, you want the semantic, you want the text, you want the RegX, you want sql.I dunno. Um, but like, it's silly to like be all in on like one particularly query pattern.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think, like I really like the way that, um, um, that swally at cursor talks about it, which is, um, I'm gonna butcher it here. Um, and you know, I'm a, I'm a database scalability person. I'm not a, I, I dunno anything about training models other than, um, what the internet tells me and what.The way he describes is that this is just like cash compute, right? It's like you have a point in time where you're looking at some particular context and focused on some chunk and you say, this is the layer of the neural net at this point in time. That seems fundamentally really useful to do cash compute like that.And, um, how the value of that will change over time. I'm, I'm not sure, but there seems to be a lot of value in that.Alessio: Maybe talk a bit about the evolution of the workload, because even like search, like maybe two years ago it was like one search at the start of like an LLM query to build the context. Now you have a gentech search, however you wanna call it, where like the model is both writing and changing the code and it's searching it again later.Yeah. What are maybe some of the new types of workloads or like changes you've had to make to your architecture for it?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think you're right. When I think of rag, I think of, Hey, there's an 8,000 token, uh, context window and you better make it count. Um, and search was a way to do that now. Everything is moving towards the, just let the agent do its thing.Right? And so back to the thing before, right? The LLM is very good at reasoning with the data, and so we're just the tool call, right? And that's increasingly what we see our customers doing. Um, what we're seeing more demand from, from our customers now is to do a lot of concurrency, right? Like Notion does a ridiculous amount of queries in every round trip just because they can't.And I'm also now, when I use the cursor agent, I also see them doing more concurrency than I've ever seen before. So a bit similar to how we designed a database to drive as much concurrency in every round trip as possible. That's also what the agents are doing. So that's new. It means just an enormous amount of queries all at once to the dataset while it's warm in as few turns as possible.swyx: Can I clarify one thing on that?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes.swyx: Is it, are they batching multiple users or one user is driving multiple,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: one user driving multiple, one agent driving.swyx: It's parallel searching a bunch of things.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Exactly.swyx: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, the clinician also did, did this for the fast context thing, like eight parallel at once.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes.swyx: And, and like an interesting problem is, well, how do you make sure you have enough diversity so you're not making the the same request eight times?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: And I think like that's probably also where the hybrid comes in, where. That's another way to diversify. It's a completely different way to, to do the search.That's a big change, right? So before it was really just like one call and then, you know, the LLM took however many seconds to return, but now we just see an enormous amount of queries. So the, um, we just see more queries. So we've like tried to reduce query, we've reduced query pricing. Um, this is probably the first time actually I'm saying that, but the query pricing is being reduced, like five x.Um, and we'll probably try to reduce it even more to accommodate some of these workloads of just doing very large amounts of queries. Um, that's one thing that's changed. I think the right, the right ratio is still very high, right? Like there's still a, an enormous amount of rights per read, but we're starting probably to see that change if people really lean into this pattern.Alessio: Can we talk a little bit about the pricing? I'm curious, uh, because traditionally a database would charge on storage, but now you have the token generation that is so expensive, where like the actual. Value of like a good search query is like much higher because they're like saving inference time down the line.How do you structure that as like, what are people receptive to on the other side too?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. I, the, the turbo puffer pricing in the beginning was just very simple. The pricing on these on for search engines before Turbo Puffer was very server full, right? It was like, here's the vm, here's the per hour cost, right?Great. And I just sat down with like a piece of paper and said like, if Turbo Puffer was like really good, this is probably what it would cost with a little bit of margin. And that was the first pricing of Turbo Puffer. And I just like sat down and I was like, okay, like this is like probably the storage amp, but whenever on a piece of paper I, it was vibe pricing.It was very vibe price, and I got it wrong. Oh. Um, well I didn't get it wrong, but like Turbo Puffer wasn't at the first principle pricing, right? So when Cursor came on Turbo Puffer, it was like. Like, I didn't know any VCs. I didn't know, like I was just like, I don't know, I didn't know anything about raising money or anything like that.I just saw that my GCP bill was, was high, was a lot higher than the cursor bill. So Justine and I was just like, well, we have to optimize it. Um, and I mean, to the chagrin now of, of it, of, of the VCs, it now means that we're profitable because we've had so much pricing pressure in the beginning. Because it was running on my credit card and Justine and I had spent like, like tens of thousands of dollars on like compute bills and like spinning off the company and like very like, like bad Canadian lawyers and like things like to like get all of this done because we just like, we didn't know.Right. If you're like steeped in San Francisco, you're just like, you just know. Okay. Like you go out, raise a pre-seed round. I, I never heard a word pre-seed at this point in time.swyx: When you had Cursor, you had Notion you, you had no funding.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, with Cursor we had no funding. Yeah. Um, by the time we had Notion Locke was, Locke was here.Yeah. So it was really just, we vibe priced it 100% from first Principles, but it wasn't, it, it was not performing at first principles, so we just did everything we could to optimize it in the beginning for that, so that at least we could have like a 5% margin or something. So I wasn't freaking out because Cursor's bill was also going like this as they were growing.And so my liability and my credit limit was like actively like calling my bank. It was like, I need a bigger credit. Like it was, yeah. Anyway, that was the beginning. Yeah. But the pricing was, yeah, like storage rights and query. Right. And the, the pricing we have today is basically just that pricing with duct tape and spit to try to approach like, you know, like a, as a margin on the physical underlying hardware.And we're doing this year, you're gonna see more and more pricing changes from us. Yeah.swyx: And like is how much does stuff like VVC peering matter because you're working in AWS land where egress is charged and all that, you know.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: We probably don't like, we have like an enterprise plan that just has like a base fee because we haven't had time to figure out SKU pricing for all of this.Um, but I mean, yeah, you can run turbo puffer either in SaaS, right? That's what Cursor does. You can run it in a single tenant cluster. So it's just you. That's what Notion does. And then you can run it in, in, in BYOC where everything is inside the customer's VPC, that's what an for example, philanthropic does.swyx: What I'm hearing is that this is probably the best CRO job for somebody who can come in and,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I mean,swyx: help you with this.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, like Turbo Puffer hired, like, I don't know what, what number this was, but we had a full-time CFO as like the 12th hire or something at Turbo Puffer, um, I think I hear are a lot of comp.I don't know how they do it. Like they have a hundred employees and not a CFO. It's like having a CFO is like a runningswyx: business man. Like, you know,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: it's so good. Yeah, like money Mike, like he just, you know, just handles the money and a lot of the business stuff and so he came in and just hopped with a lot of the operational side of the business.So like C-O-O-C-F-O, like somewhere in between.swyx: Just as quick mention of Lucky, just ‘cause I'm curious, I've met Lock and like, he's obviously a very good investor and now on physical intelligence, um, I call it generalist super angel, right? He invests in everything. Um, and I always wonder like, you know, is there something appealing about focusing on developer tooling, focusing on databases, going like, I've invested for 10 years in databases versus being like a lock where he can maybe like connect you to all the customers that you need.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: This is an excellent question. No, no one's asked me this. Um, why lockey? Because. There was a couple of people that we were talking to at the time and when we were raising, we were almost a little, we were like a bit distressed because one of our, one of our peers had just launched something that was very similar to Turbo Puffer.And someone just gave me the advice at the time of just choose the person where you just feel like you can just pick up the phone and not prepare anything. And just be completely honest, and I don't think I've said this publicly before, but I just called Lockey and was like local Lockie. Like if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like we'll just like return all the money to you.But it's just like, I don't really, we, Justine and I don't wanna work on this unless it's really working. So we want to give it the best shot this year and like we're really gonna go for it. We're gonna hire a bunch of people and we're just gonna be honest with everyone. Like when I don't know how to play a game, I just play with open cards and.Lockey was the only person that didn't, that didn't freak out. He was like, I've never heard anyone say that before. As I said, I didn't even know what a seed or pre-seed round was like before, probably even at this time. So I was just like very honest with him. And I asked him like, Lockie, have you ever have, have you ever invested in database company?He was just like, no. And at the time I was like, am I dumb? Like, but I think there was something that just like really drew me to Lockie. He is so authentic, so honest, like, and there was something just like, I just felt like I could just play like, just say everything openly. And that was, that was, I think that that was like a perfect match at the time, and, and, and honestly still is.He was just like, okay, that's great. This is like the most honest, ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say to me. But like that, like that, whyswyx: is this ridiculous? Say competitor launch, this may not work out. It wasSimon Hørup Eskildsen: more just like. If this doesn't work out, I'm gonna close up shop by the end of the mo the year, right?Like it was, I don't know, maybe it's common. I, I don't know. He told me it was uncommon. I don't know. Um, that's why we chose him and he'd been phenomenal. The other people were talking at the, at the time were database experts. Like they, you know, knew a lot about databases and Locke didn't, this turned out to be a phenomenal asset.Right. I like Justine and I know a lot about databases. The people that we hire know a lot about databases. What we needed was just someone who didn't know a lot about databases, didn't pretend to know a lot about databases, and just wanted to help us with candidates and customers. And he did. Yeah. And I have a list, right, of the investors that I have a relationship with, and Lockey has just performed excellent in the number of sub bullets of what we can attribute back to him.Just absolutely incredible. And when people talk about like no ego and just the best thing for the founder, I like, I don't think that anyone, like even my lawyer is like, yeah, Lockey is like the most friendly person you will find.swyx: Okay. This is my most glow recommendation I've ever heard.Alessio: He deserves it.He's very special.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Amazing.Alessio: Since you mentioned candidates, maybe we can talk about team building, you know, like, especially in sf, it feels like it's just easier to start a company than to join a company. Uh, I'm curious your experience, especially not being n SF full-time and doing something that is maybe, you know, a very low level of detail and technical detail.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. So joining versus starting, I never thought that I would be a founder. I would start with it, like Turbo Puffer started as a blog post, and then it became a project and then sort of almost accidentally became a company. And now it feels like it's, it's like becoming a bigger company. That was never the intention.The intentions were very pure. It's just like, why hasn't anyone done this? And it's like, I wanna be the, like, I wanna be the first person to do it. I think some founders have this, like, I could never work for anyone else. I, I really don't feel that way. Like, it's just like, I wanna see this happen. And I wanna see it happen with some people that I really enjoy working with and I wanna have fun doing it and this, this, this has all felt very natural on that, on that sense.So it was never a like join versus versus versus found. It was just dis found me at the right moment.Alessio: Well I think there's an argument for, you should have joined Cursor, right? So I'm curious like how you evaluate it. Okay, I should actually go raise money and make this a company versus like, this is like a company that is like growing like crazy.It's like an interesting technical problem. I should just build it within Cursor and then they don't have to encrypt all this stuff. They don't have to obfuscate things. Like was that on your mind at all orSimon Hørup Eskildsen: before taking the, the small check from Lockie, I did have like a hard like look at myself in the mirror of like, okay, do I really want to do this?And because if I take the money, I really have to do it right. And so the way I almost think about it's like you kind of need to ha like you kind of need to be like fucked up enough to want to go all the way. And that was the conversation where I was like, okay, this is gonna be part of my life's journey to build this company and do it in the best way that I possibly can't.Because if I ask people to join me, ask people to get on the cap table, then I have an ultimate responsibility to give it everything. And I don't, I think some people, it doesn't occur to me that everyone takes it that seriously. And maybe I take it too seriously, I don't know. But that was like a very intentional moment.And so then it was very clear like, okay, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna give it everything.Alessio: A lot of people don't take it this seriously. But,swyx: uh, let's talk about, you have this concept of the P 99 engineer. Uh, people are 10 x saying, everyone's saying, you know, uh, maybe engineers are out of a job. I don't know.But you definitely see a P 99 engineer, and I just want you to talk about it.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, so the P 99 engineer was just a term that we started using internally to talk about candidates and talk about how we wanted to build the company. And you know, like everyone else is, like we want a talent dense company.And I think that's almost become trite at this point. What I credit the cursor founders a lot with is that they just arrived there from first principles of like, we just need a talent dense, um, talent dense team. And I think I've seen some teams that weren't talent dense and like seemed a counterfactual run, which if you've run in been in a large company, you will just see that like it's just logically will happen at a large company.Um, and so that was super important to me and Justine and it's very difficult to maintain. And so we just needed, we needed wording for it. And so I have a document called Traits of the P 99 Engineer, and it's a bullet point list. And I look at that list after every single interview that I do, and in every single recap that we do and every recap we end with.End with, um, some version of I'm gonna reject this candidate completely regardless of what the discourse was, because I wanna see people fight for this person because the default should not be, we're gonna hire this person. The default should be, we're definitely not hiring this person. And you know, if everyone was like, ah, maybe throw a punch, then this is not the right.swyx: Do, do you operate, like if there's one cha there must have at least one champion who's like, yes, I will put my career on, on, on the line for this. You know,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think career on the line,swyx: maybe a chair, butSimon Hørup Eskildsen: yeah. You know, like, um, I would say so someone needs to like, have both fists up and be like, I'd fight.Right? Yeah. Yeah. And if one person said, then, okay, let's do it. Right?swyx: Yeah.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um. It doesn't have to be absolutely everyone. Right? And like the interviews are always the sign that you're checking for different attributes. And if someone is like knocking it outta the park in every single attribute, that's, that's fairly rare.Um, but that's really important. And so the traits of the P 99 engineer, there's lots of them. There's also the traits of the p like triple nine engineer and the quadruple nine engineer. This is like, it's a long list.swyx: Okay.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, I'll give you some samples, right. Of what we, what we look for. I think that the P 99 engineer has some history of having bent, like their trajectory or something to their will.Right? Some moment where it was just, they just, you know, made the computer do what it needed to do. There's something like that, and it will, it will occur to have them at some point in their career. And, uh. Hopefully multiple times. Right.swyx: Gimme an example of one of your engineers that like,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I'll give an eng.Uh, so we, we, we launched this thing called A and NV three. Um, we could, we're also, we're working on V four and V five right now, but a and NV three can search a hundred billion vectors with a P 50 of around 40 milliseconds and a p 99 of 200 milliseconds. Um, maybe other people have done this, I'm sure Google and others have done this, but, uh, we haven't seen anyone, um, at least not in like a public consumable SaaS that can do this.And that was an engineer, the chief architect of Turbo Puffer, Nathan, um, who more or less just bent this, the software was not capable of this and he just made it capable for a very particular workload in like a, you know, six to eight week period with the help of a lot of the team. Right. It's been, been, there's numerous of examples of that, like at, at turbo puff, but that's like really bending the software and X 86 to your will.It was incredible to watch. Um. You wanna see some moments like that?swyx: Isn't that triple nine?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, I think Nathan, what's calledAlessio: group nine, that was only nine. I feel like this is too high forSimon Hørup Eskildsen: Nathan. Nathan is, uh, Nathan is like, yeah, there's a lot of nines. Okay. After that p So I think that's one trait. I think another trait is that, uh, the P 99 spends a lot of time looking at maps.Generally it's their preferred ux. They just love looking at maps. You ever seen someone who just like, sits on their phone and just like, scrolls around on a map? Or did you not look at maps A lot? You guys don't look atswyx: maps? I guess I'm not feeling there. I don't know, butSimon Hørup Eskildsen: you just dis What about trains?Do you like trains?swyx: Uh, I mean they, not enough. Okay. This is just like weapon nice. Autism is what I call it. Like, like,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: um, I love looking at maps, like, it's like my preferred UX and just like I, you know, I likeswyx: lotsAlessio: of, of like random places, soswyx: like,youswyx: know.Alessio: Yes. Okay. There you go. So instead of like random places, like how do you explore the maps?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: No, it's, it's just a joke.swyx: It's autism laugh. It's like you are just obsessed by something and you like studying a thing.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: The origin of this was that at some point I read an interview with some IOI gold medalistswyx: Uhhuh,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: and it's like, what do you do in your spare time? I was just like, I like looking at maps.I was like, I feel so seen. Like, I just like love, like swirling out. I was like, oh, Canada is so big. Where's Baffin Island? I don't know. I love it. Yeah. Um, anyway, so the traits of P 99, P 99 is obsessive, right? Like, there's just like, you'll, you'll find traits of that we do an interview at, at, at, at turbo puffer or like multiple interviews that just try to screen for some of these things.Um, so. There's lots of others, but these are the kinds of traits that we look for.swyx: I'll tell you, uh, some people listen for like some of my dere stuff. Uh, I do think about derel as maps. Um, you draw a map for people, uh, maps show you the, uh, what is commonly agreed to be the geographical features of what a boundary is.And it shows also shows you what is not doing. And I, I think a lot of like developer tools, companies try to tell you they can do everything, but like, let's, let's be real. Like you, your, your three landmarks are here, everyone comes here, then here, then here, and you draw a map and, and then you draw a journey through the map.And like that. To me, that's what developer relations looks like. So I do think about things that way.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think the P 99 thinks in offs, right? The P 99 is very clear about, you know, hey, turbo puffer, you can't run a high transaction workload on turbo puffer, right? It's like the right latency is a hundred milliseconds.That's a clear trade off. I think the P 99 is very good at articulating the trade offs in every decision. Um. Which is exactly what the map is in your case, right?swyx: Uh, yeah, yeah. My, my, my world. My world.Alessio: How, how do you reconcile some of these things when you're saying you bend the will the computer versus like the trade

Hear leading dermatologist Dr. E. James Song and patient advocate Ana Rinck share their perspectives on the use of biosimilars to manage psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. The use of biosimilars is growing with 24 currently on the market and more on the way for the treatment of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. What does this mean for you? Find out as we explore the use of biosimilars, the impact of interchangeability, what it's like switching to a biosimilar, and what questions to ask your health care provider with leading dermatologist and NPF Medical Board member Dr. E. James Song, Director of Clinical Research at Frontier Dermatology Partners, and patient advocate Ana Rinck who currently uses a biosimilar to treat her psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis.   The intent of this episode is to offer an update on the use of biosimilars and to hear the experience of those who have used biosimilars to manage psoriatic disease. This episode is sponsored by Organon. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro to Psoriasis Uncovered and guest welcome to dermatologist Dr. E. James Song, Director of Clinical Research and Co-Chief Medical Officer, Frontier Dermatology, and patient advocate Ana Rinck, who presents her experience with using a biosimilar to treat psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis.  (0:58) Definition of what is a biosimilar in comparison to a biologic which is also referred to as the original bio-originator or reference product.   (3:10) What biosimilars are available and how they are used. (4:35) The term interchangeable and what it means for use of a biosimilar. (5:46) Ana's diagnosis to treatment options starting with use of topicals to ultimately use of a biosimilar.  (7:57) Treatment discussion and choices when faced with diminishing effectiveness within a class of medications. Should a biosimilar be considered as an option?                                                                                                                                                                (9:50) Questions to consider when there's a change in treatment. (10:57) FDA announcement to simplify the development process for biosimilars and what that means for the future use of biosimilars. (13:55) What to consider when thinking of a biosimilar as a treatment option and where to find help when needed.     (14:53) The hope and equity of access that biosimilars represent is here for the appropriate individual. Key Takeaways: ·       A biosimilar is an FDA-approved biologic product that behaves and functions like a brand biologic treatment which is also called the reference product or bio-originator. There are no clinically meaningful differences between biosimilars and their reference product.  ·       The FDA has approved several biosimilars for the treatment of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. Some have been identified as interchangeable which means a biosimilar could be substituted for a reference product without a health care provider's approval pending state legislative rules.    ·       Don't be afraid to ask questions or access resources to assist with preparing for a medication change should that change be initiated either by yourself, your healthcare provider, or your health insurance company.    Guest Bios:   E. James Song, M.D. is a nationally recognized dermatologist and clinical researcher who is also a Clinical Instructor at the University of Washington. Dr Song is recognized as a key opinion leader in treating psoriasis and atopic dermatitis. He is actively involved in the development of new therapies for dermatologic disease and has firsthand experience with treatments before they come to market. Dr. Song has been published extensively in peer review journals and regularly participates in meetings both as a lecturer and attendee.  He is also a Medical Board member of the National Psoriasis Foundation. He believes that the best health outcomes come from shared decision making between the patient and physician. Dr. Song strives to help patients understand not only their condition, but all their treatment options.  Ana Rinck is a patient advocate and volunteer for the National Psoriasis Foundation. She developed psoriasis in 2009 following symptoms she noticed for a few years which proved to be challenging to diagnose. She managed for many years on topicals and intralesional injections. In 2018 she was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis and started use of a biologic realizing she needed to protect her joints from further damage. She now uses a biosimilar to manage her psoriatic disease. Ana owns her own private consulting business and is an Operations and Project Manager.  Resources: -Learn more about biosimilars, interchangeability, and state substitution rules.   -Armstrong A, Callis Duffin K, Feldman S, Glick B, Kalb R, Reddy S, Schwartzman S, Yamauchi P, Calabrese C, Cordoro K, Desai S, Gladman D, Han G, Hawkes JE, Hsu S, Kircik L, Koo J, Kreuger GG, Lebwohl M, Leonardi C, Lewitt GM, Liao W, Liu C, Markenson J, Merola JF, Orbai A, Prussick R, Richardson V, Soung J, Van Voorhees AS, Wallace E, Weinberg J, Wine Lee L, Harris J, Koons S, Howard L. Position Statement on the Use of Biosimilars for Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis. National Psoriasis Foundation Medical Board. 2023. -If you need help finding a dermatologist near you contact the NPF's Patient Navigation Center for assistance.   

Zach tears up watching his kids stop a country crowd cold with a 200-year-old hymn, turning a Larry Fleet concert into an unexpected worship service. The guys wrestle with the healing of the man at the Pool of Bethesda, confronting the uncomfortable truth that some people would rather stay sick than be healed. Jase shares a longevity tip that traveled from Clint Eastwood to Morgan Freeman to his ears, and Willie Robertson crashes the recording mid-Bible study with his entourage in tow. In this episode: Ephesians 2, verse 6; Colossians 3, verses 1-4; Luke 22, verses 54-55; 1 John 1, verse 7; 1 John 2, verses 5-6; 1 John 2, verse 24; 1 John 2, verse 27; 1 John 2, verse 28; 1 John 3, verse 6; 1 John 3, verse 24; 1 John 4, verses 4, 10, 12-13, 15-16; 1 John 5, verse 20 “Unashamed” Episode 1287 is sponsored by: https://myphdweightloss.com — Find out how Al lost 80+ pounds. Schedule your one-on-one consultation today by visiting the website or calling 864-644-1900 and mention "AL" https://ruffgreens.com — Get a FREE Jumpstart Trial Bag for your dog today when you use promo code Unashamed! Get $35 off your first box of wild-caught, sustainable seafood—delivered right to your door. Go to: https://www.wildalaskan.com/UNASHAMED. http://unashamedforhillsdale.com/ — Sign up now for free, and join the Unashamed hosts every Friday for Unashamed Academy Powered by Hillsdale College Check out At Home with Phil Robertson, nearly 800 episodes of Phil's unfiltered wisdom, humor, and biblical truth, available for free for the first time! Get it on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and anywhere you listen to podcasts! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/at-home-with-phil-robertson/id1835224621 Listen to Not Yet Now with Zach Dasher on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or anywhere you get podcasts. Chapters: 00:00 Popcorn Monday  02:10 Texas Pride & Life on the Road 05:20 Morgan Freeman Quotes Clint Eastwood 08:30 When Cultural Wisdom Sounds Biblical but Isn't 13:00 What the Bible Says About Power 19:05 Willie Crashes the Podcast  25:40 The Kingdom Looks Nothing Like Earthly Power 33:20 Pride, Humility, & the Upside-Down Kingdom 41:30 How Phil Challenged the World's Definition of Strength 52:20 Final Reflections on Power & Pride — Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As I highlighted in my analysis, the average gas price margin is 1 to 3 cents per gallon, however during the week last week that had been expanded to 31-34 cents per gallon (and some higher than that through the weekend). But the question is, does that example meet the legal definition of “gouging” under law? 

Doctors Lisa and Sara talk to Consultant Nephrologist Dr James Tollitt about Chronic Kidney Disease. We started by defining this and asking detailed questions on diagnosis, pitfalls to avoid, before getting his advice on risk stratifying patients and options for management. Excellent key messages with some easy practice pointers to take away that will benefit your patients and practice.  Disclaimer: All educational content in this podcast was developed as part of the Circulation Health collaborative working project between Boehringer Ingelheim Limited, Greater Manchester Primary Care Provider Board and Health Innovation Manchester. Content has been created by Circulation Health Clinical Leads for educational purposes, reflecting NHS Clinical Lead and guideline-based recommendations. Boehringer Ingelheim had no input into content development. They have provided financial resources to support Podcast recordings related to this project. You can use these podcasts as part of your CPD - we don't do certificates but they still count :) Resources: NICE CKD Chronic kidney disease: assessment and management (last updated Nov 2021, accessed Feb 2026): https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng203/chapter/recommendations GP Notebook Deteriorating eGFR (how to spot accelerating decline in renal function and advice on how to approach this): https://gpnotebook.com/en-GB/pages/renal-medicine/deteriorating-egfr-in-ckd The British Journal of General Practice: The National CKD Audit: a primary care condition that deserves more attention. Aug 2018: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6058639/ Ipsos MORI poll from 2014 looking at what the Public know about Kidneys: https://www.thinkkidneys.nhs.uk/aki/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Think-Kidneys-Report-270115-Understanding-what-the-public-know-about-their-kidneys-and-what-they-do.pdf Liu et al. Accounting for Age in the Definition of Chronic Kidney Disease. JAMA Intern Med Oct 2021. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34459844/ Clinical Digital Resource Collaborative: Renal Disease Search tools (EMIS and SystemOne): https://cdrc.nhs.uk/resources/systmone-resource-centre/specialties/systmone-renal-urology-overview/chronic-kidney-disease-ckd/ The Kidney Failure Risk Equation (UK): https://www.kidneyfailurerisk.co.uk/ ___ We really want to make these episodes relevant and helpful: if you have any questions or want any particular areas covered then contact us on Twitter @PCKBpodcast, or leave a comment on our quick anonymous survey here: https://pckb.org/feedback Email us at: primarycarepodcasts@gmail.com ___ This podcast has been made with the support of GP Excellence and Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board. Given that it is recorded with Greater Manchester clinicians, the information discussed may not be applicable elsewhere and it is important to consult local guidelines before making any treatment decisions.  The information presented is the personal opinion of the healthcare professional interviewed and might not be representative to all clinicians. It is based on their interpretation of current best practice and guidelines when the episode was recorded. Guidelines can change; To the best of our knowledge the information in this episode is up to date as of it's release but it is the listeners responsibility to review the information and make sure it is still up to date when they listen. Dr Lisa Adams, Dr Sara MacDermott and their interviewees are not liable for any advice, investigations, course of treatment, diagnosis or any other information, services or products listeners might pursue as a result of listening to this podcast - it is the clinicians responsibility to appraise the information given and review local and national guidelines before making treatment decisions. Reliance on information provided in this podcast is solely at the listeners risk. The podcast is designed to be used by trained healthcare professionals for education only. We do not recommend these for patients or the general public and they are not to be used as a method of diagnosis, opinion, treatment or medical advice for the general public. Do not delay seeking medical advice based on the information contained in this podcast. If you have questions regarding your health or feel you may have a medical condition then promptly seek the opinion of a trained healthcare professional.

Zugehört und mitgeschrieben. Folge zweihundertneunundfünfzig wird lehrreich. Manche Lehrkräfte würden sogar von einer Raketenfolge sprechen. Worum geht's? Donnie wurde überredet auf eine Party zu gehen. Tja, könnt ihr euch schon denken wo es hin geht? Wir glauben nicht. Denn wer hätte schon Augen-Gate auf dem Zettel gehabt?! Schreibt doch gern in die Kommis: "Sportfreunde Stiller". If you know, you know! Aber Achtung: kein Classic Donnie in Sicht. Oder vielleicht arbeitet unser Host ja an einer neuen Definition dessen? Puh. Jetzt wird es doch noch deep. Schnell den Text beenden. Bleibt gesund ihr Lieben. Ciao!Codes, Support und Partner:innen von Donnie unter https://linktr.ee/dosullivanMehr von Donnie gibt es auf Twitter, Instagram, Twitch und YouTube: Donnies Hauptkanal und Donnie Uncut.Ihr wollt Donnie unterstützen? Hier geht's zur Patreon-Seite von TWHS: https://www.patreon.com/TWHSBock auf Merch? Hier geht's zu Donnies Supergeek-Shop: https://supergeek.de/de/donnieosullivan/Feedback oder Fragen an Donnie? Schick eine Mail an donnie@poolartists.de! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Q Edmonds interviews Victor Menasce, a partner at Y Street Capital. Victor shares his unique journey from electrical engineering to real estate investing, discussing the lessons learned along the way, including the importance of managing expectations and stress. He emphasizes the significance of relationships in business and the need for a supportive environment to achieve success. The conversation highlights the value of honesty in communication and the impact of one's inner circle on personal and professional growth.   Professional Real Estate Investors - How we can help you: Investor Fuel Mastermind:  Learn more about the Investor Fuel Mastermind, including 100% deal financing, massive discounts from vendors and sponsors you're already using, our world class community of over 150 members, and SO much more here: http://www.investorfuel.com/apply   Investor Machine Marketing Partnership:  Are you looking for consistent, high quality lead generation? Investor Machine is America's #1 lead generation service professional investors. Investor Machine provides true 'white glove' support to help you build the perfect marketing plan, then we'll execute it for you…talking and working together on an ongoing basis to help you hit YOUR goals! Learn more here: http://www.investormachine.com   Coaching with Mike Hambright:  Interested in 1 on 1 coaching with Mike Hambright? Mike coaches entrepreneurs looking to level up, build coaching or service based businesses (Mike runs multiple 7 and 8 figure a year businesses), building a coaching program and more. Learn more here: https://investorfuel.com/coachingwithmike   Attend a Vacation/Mastermind Retreat with Mike Hambright: Interested in joining a "mini-mastermind" with Mike and his private clients on an upcoming "Retreat", either at locations like Cabo San Lucas, Napa, Park City ski trip, Yellowstone, or even at Mike's East Texas "Big H Ranch"? Learn more here: http://www.investorfuel.com/retreat   Property Insurance: Join the largest and most investor friendly property insurance provider in 2 minutes. Free to join, and insure all your flips and rentals within minutes! There is NO easier insurance provider on the planet (turn insurance on or off in 1 minute without talking to anyone!), and there's no 15-30% agent mark up through this platform!  Register here: https://myinvestorinsurance.com/   New Real Estate Investors - How we can work together: Investor Fuel Club (Coaching and Deal Partner Community): Looking to kickstart your real estate investing career? Join our one of a kind Coaching Community, Investor Fuel Club, where you'll get trained by some of the best real estate investors in America, and partner with them on deals! You don't need $ for deals…we'll partner with you and hold your hand along the way! Learn More here: http://www.investorfuel.com/club   —--------------------

raunchy

In this episode, Etienne Nichols sits down with Staci Miller, a Human Factors and UX Strategist at GenUX, to demystify the role of human factors (HF) in the medical device regulatory pathway. Staci explains that many companies mistakenly treat HF as a "box-checking" exercise late in development, leading to costly submission delays or rejections when the FDA finds the documentation fails to tell a cohesive safety story.The conversation dives deep into the technical distinctions between a Use-Related Risk Analysis (URRA) and a User Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (uFMEA). Staci provides a framework for deciding which approach fits your product, emphasizing that while large conglomerates with post-market data may lean toward uFMEAs, startups and those with novel devices should prioritize the URRA to effectively map out user interactions without the crutch of existing market data.Finally, Staci addresses one of the most persistent myths in the industry: the idea that clinical trial data can replace human factors validation. She clarifies that while the two can overlap in specific, premeditated circumstances (such as complex implants like aortic valves), they serve entirely different masters—one focused on clinical efficacy and the other on the safety of the user interface across diverse environments.Key Timestamps04:12 – The common disconnect: Integrating Human Factors into ISO 14971 risk management.06:45 – URRA vs. uFMEA: How to choose based on your post-market data and predicate device status.10:30 – The "Definition of Done": Tracking the lifecycle of HF documentation from phase zero to market release.13:15 – System errors vs. Use errors: How to identify root causes during summative studies.18:50 – The "Clinical Trial Myth": Why efficacy data is not the same as usability validation.22:10 – Design Inputs vs. Design Outputs: The "Blueprint and the House" analogy for FDA submissions.25:40 – The impact of the "Use Environment": Testing for movement in ambulances and lighting in radiology suites.Quotes"The FDA doesn't put things out there just to have a good time... If they've made human factors a requirement and you're treating it as a 'suggestion,' you're giving yourself enough rope to hang yourself." - Staci Miller"People are obsessed with the product themselves—the design outputs. But the FDA wants to see the design inputs. They want to see the blueprints of how you built that house, not just the wallpaper." - Staci MillerTakeawaysPremeditation is Key: If you intend to use clinical trial data for HF validation, it must be planned in the protocol from the start; you cannot retroactively claim clinical data satisfies usability requirements.Map User Groups Early: Distinguish clearly between primary and secondary users. Bloating user sets without explaining how or why they engage with the device complicates your risk profile.Environment Matters: Documentation must account for the physical "10,000-foot view," including noise, lighting, and motion (e.g., an ambulance), as these are often where critical use errors occur.HF is Risk Management: Human factors should not live in a silo. It must align with the scales of harm (negligible to catastrophic) defined in ISO 14971 and work in tandem with Quality and Regulatory teams.ReferencesISO 14971: The global standard for the application of risk management to medical devices.FDA Human Factors Guidance: The primary document outlining expectations for usability testing and documentation.Etienne Nichols: LinkedIn ProfileMedTech 101: URRA vs. uFMEAThink of a uFMEA (User Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) like a car manufacturer looking at an old model to see why the brakes failed in the past—it relies on known data to fix specific parts.A URRA (Use-Related Risk Analysis) is like teaching someone to drive a brand-new type of vehicle (like a spaceship) for the first time. Since you don't have "crash data" yet, you have to carefully map out every single step the pilot takes and imagine every possible way they could push the wrong button in the heat of the moment.SponsorsGreenlight Guru: This episode is brought to you by Greenlight Guru, the only quality management platform designed specifically for the medical device industry. Whether you need to manage your QMS to stay compliant with ISO 14971 or streamline your clinical data through their EDC solutions, Greenlight Guru helps you move faster with less risk.Feedback Call-to-ActionWe want to hear from you! Do you have questions about your specific regulatory pathway or a topic you'd like us to cover? We provide personalized responses to every listener who reaches out. Send your thoughts, reviews, or suggestions to podcast@greenlight.guru.

Aaliyah Idrissa is a 16-year-old filmmaker native to Washington, D.C. From a young age, storytelling has existed as her longstanding aspiration. As opportunities opened with age, a promising career in the arts blossomed. Weekly screenwriting classes soon led to an acceptance into the prestigious, 16-week-long program "Black Girls Film Camp" in the coming years. Throughout this duration, she developed a short film, "Rewinded" (2025), from the concept to the writing to the directing. This film has been screened at a multitude of festivals, even breaking national barriers, which has allowed for Aaliyah's involvement in various professional settings and speaking panels. Following her participation as a teen director in the program, she has only further expanded this ambition by creating her acclaimed independent film, "The Definition of a Hero" (2025), single-handedly pioneering the writing, directing, producing, cinematography, and even acting (in collaboration with her father). During this period, Aaliyah enrolled in a college course at the George Washington University, where she meticulously studied the "History of World Cinema" for one semester-- all whilst simultaneously attending her regular high school classes.

Teste Schritt 2½ selbst: Pausiere den Podcast bei Minute 2:14. Der klassische Gutachtenstil scheitert oft an einem kleinen, aber entscheidenden Punkt. Viele Studierende schreiben in der Subsumtion einfach den Sachverhalt ab. Nicht, weil sie zu wenig Definitionen kennen – sondern weil ein Zwischenschritt fehlt, den im Studium fast niemand erklärt. In diesem Podcast zeige ich dir Schritt 2½ im Gutachtenstil: den konkretisierten Prüfungsmaßstab. Du lernst: • warum Subsumtion oft künstlich schwer wirkt • welcher Denkfehler im klassischen Gutachtenstil steckt • wie du Definition und Sachverhalt sauber miteinander verbindest • wie du Schritt 2½ direkt an einem Klausurfall anwendest Statt nur zuzuhören, zwingt dich dieser Podcast auch in die praktische Umsetzung: Du formulierst selbst eine konkretisierte Definition zu § 536 Abs. 1 BGB und überprüfst anschließend, ob dein Prüfungsmaßstab wirklich funktioniert. Wenn du diese Arbeitsweise regelmäßig trainieren willst, findest du hier mehr dazu: ➡️ Upside-down-Plattform (Examensfälle trainieren) https://endlich-jura.de/pod Dort arbeitest du nicht mit isolierten Definitionen, sondern mit Original-Klausuren – genau so, wie du es später im Examen brauchst. Mehr Inhalte zur Examensvorbereitung:

Introduction to the Topic of Faithfulness: The discussion shifted to continuing the study of the characteristics of God for God's teachers. Jevon Perra identified that they were starting with "faithfulness," which is the ninth characteristic in the manual for teachers.Reading and Interpretation of Faithfulness: Brian Genovese read the passage defining faithfulness as the measure of a teacher's advancement and their complete trust in the word of God to "set all things right". Jevon Perra summarized that true faithfulness involves reversing the world's thinking entirely by surrendering all problems, not just some, to one answer.Application of Faithfulness to Daily Life: Jevon Perra admitted that while it is easy to discuss spiritual lessons, it is hard to apply them to daily life, noting they struggle with compartmentalizing spiritual principles away from "real world" issues like money or family stress. They recognized that attachment to any outcome brings suffering, and true faithfulness means trusting that all things are perfect. Soo Kim then joined the meeting.Challenges of Implementing Faithfulness: Brian Genovese commented that using these enlightened concepts in daily activities is the tough part, especially the concept of faithfulness. Jevon Perra pointed out that whether faithfulness is easy or tricky is determined by the individual, and they noted that Brian Genovese appeared easygoing on the outside but admitted to struggling internally.Personal Growth and Letting Go of Judgments: Jevon Perra shared that as they get older, their problems are not as deep, and they are increasingly able to catch themself in moments of stress and let go of judgments. They concluded that fulfillment and peace come from faithfulness, which involves letting go of resistance to how things are, even though struggle is inherent to physical existence.The Necessity of Drama and Struggle: Jevon Perra emphasized that nobody wants a life or a movie without challenge or suffering, which is necessary for a good story. Jevon Perra shared that a mistake in a novel they wrote was not including an antagonist, because drama is essential for a better story.Relating Personal Drama to Conflict: The conversation turned to the issue of personal drama, which Jevon Perra noted they try to avoid and often judges in others, leading to their own suffering. Jevon Perra provided the example of marital conflicts, which can escalate from a small issue, like a misplaced toothbrush, into a battle of disrespect and attacks.Addressing Family Conflict and Judgment: Jevon Perra shared a personal conflict with their mother, who they feel persistently takes advantage of them, leading to feelings of anger and frustration. They questioned why they hold on to the suffering-inducing judgment that their mother should have the capacity to do things for herself.Discussing Manipulation and Lack of Forgiveness: Brian Genovese related to Jevon Perra's experience, describing growing up with a depressive mother who knew how to manipulate their emotions. Brian Genovese shared that the childhood experience of walking on eggshells and being afraid to speak led them to cut their mother out of their life for the last 15 years, preventing her from ever knowing their daughter. Jevon Perra connected the lack of forgiveness to the belief in separation and noted that these irritations are "gifts" that reveal inner errors.Weakness and Strength Translation to Career: Jevon Perra observed that Brian Genovese's greatest strength—being gentle, kind, and considerate—can also be a weakness, making it difficult for them to aggressively pursue their goals. Brian Genovese acknowledged that this translated into their professional career, where they initially sought security over freedom but eventually forgave their mother and transitioned to real estate, which offered the freedom to volunteer and help others, an action they always felt they needed to do.The Futility of Seeking External Change: Jevon Perra concluded that suffering is not resolved by changing one's environment, job, or people, noting their recent experience of resigning from a job for freedom, only to find themself working harder. They realized that attachment to a better past or future state is part of the cycle of self-judgment.Deepening the Definition of Faithfulness: Brian Genovese read the concluding passage on faithfulness, which describes it as consistent, wholly honest, unswerving, full of trust, gentle, joyous, and tolerant. The passage concludes that faithfulness, which implies the acceptance of God's word, rests in quiet certainty on that alone to which all faithfulness is due.Separation vs. Connection and Identity: Jevon Perra discussed the difference between heaven (connectedness with God) and hell (separation), noting that the world one sees depends on whether they are using Christ's vision or their own. Jevon Perra illustrated how identity is often based on superficial comparison, using examples of moving from California to Missouri and then to Orange County, where their sense of self-worth fluctuated based on where they were relative to others. They concluded that their ability to feel good has nothing to do with external circumstances because their identity is not that of a human in a body, but an eternal being who chose this experience.Resistance and Atonement: Jevon Perra stated that when they perceive an "unpushable boulder" that they must move, they experience stress and resistance. The only work to be done is letting go of resistance and judgment, a process called atonement, which is the recognition that the work is already done and there is no need to hold on to any grievances.Enlightenment and the Non-Person: Soo Kim introduced a concept from a meditation teacher that a "person" can never achieve enlightenment, because believing one is a person is already a form of separation. Soo Kim noted that the goal is to let go of the person and "pop into that state of enlightenment". Soo Kim observed that the ego tries to hijack and take credit for spiritual progress, which reinforces the personhood.Recognition vs. Service: Brian Genovese added that people often join volunteer groups for recognition, wanting credit for the work they do. Brian Genovese asserted that service should be for the greater good and to accomplish good works, not for personal recognition. Jevon Perra connected the desire for recognition to the belief that one is a separate "person".Ego Struggle with Status Change: Jevon Perra shared their personal ego struggle with a recent change in status, moving from president of their company to a sales representative with an office in a storage closet. Jevon Perra noted the irony that this demotion was what they wanted but that their ego struggled with the worse-looking business card and inability to feel superior in conversations.Self-Validation and Spiritual Bypassing: Soo Kim related to the desire for self-sufficiency and the feeling of unfairness when others receive more praise. Soo Kim emphasized the importance of self-validation and pointed out the danger of spiritual bypassing, questioning whether they are in a body or if the body is in them.The Body as a Fragmented Consciousness: Jevon Perra proposed a different perspective: the body is *in* the self, not the self *in* the body. Jevon Perra presented the analogy of consciousness as a powerful, shattered mirror, with the individual being one isolated fragment that lowered its awareness to experience separateness, demonstrating an "incredible amount of control".Acceptance and the Inevitable Script: Jevon Perra concluded that this perspective makes the individual completely separate from the character's script, enabling the character to be faithful, patient, and defenseless, even if the character's personality is always "sketchy". They stated that enlightenment might not change the things that they judge, and the suffering person will never be changed.Life as a Dream or Simulation: Brian Genovese furthered the discussion by questioning if their current reality is another dream, similar to the dream world entered during sleep. Jevon Perra agreed, citing Elon Musk's high probability assessment that this is a simulation or "base reality".The Appeal of Drama in the Simulation: Jevon Perra noted that the most popular video games are not focused on "hugging," but on conflict, stealing, and conquering, demonstrating a human preference for drama. They reflected on the hypocrisy of accepting drama in movies and games but rejecting it in their own life and with their family, which leads to suffering.Closing and Future Topic: Brian Genovese expressed that the discussion had "open[ed] another chamber" in their mind. The meeting concluded with the agreement to discuss "open-mindedness" next time.

In this episode of the GaryVee Audio Experience, I dive into the essential components of a truly happy and successful life: perspective, self-love, and a redefined sense of success. I break down why the simple act of being grateful is the foundation of my work ethic and why "luck" isn't what you think it is. I also share my unique take on the relationship between ego, humility, and self-esteem.You'll learn about:The 400 Trillion to One Odds of Being YouWhy Ego Is Just Pure InsecurityThe "Constellation" of Self-Esteem, Confidence, and HumilityHow to Counter Hate with LoveWhy You Must Be Kind to Yourself Before Anyone ElseThe Strategy to Get Everyone to Love ThemselvesWhy We Must Change the Definition of Success from Money

Since Aston Villa's defeat to Chelsea, there have been almost 70 messages in the Mailbag, so it's time Dan Rolinson and John Townley tried their best to answer them, LIVE!

Get One Month FREE of Riverside Pro of Live Plan here:https://riverside.com/?utm_medium=creator&utm_source=YouTube&utm_campaign=505&utm_content=integration1&utm_term=Mar2026Unlock your first product and start getting paid as a creator (FREE download)https://the505podcast.courses/paidofferplaybookWhat's up Rock Nation! Today we're joined by Greg Hoffman, former Chief Marketing Officer at Nike, where he spent nearly three decades helping shape one of the most iconic brands in the world. In this episode, we break down why emotion separates unforgettable brands from forgettable ones, how Nike built cultural relevance instead of just selling products, the creative systems that powered some of the brand's most legendary campaigns, why curiosity is the most important trait for creators, and how founders can build brands that actually last in an AI-driven world.Check out Greg here:https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@ghoffbrand⁩  https://www.instagram.com/ghoffbrand/Timestamps00:00 – Intro00:01:11 – People Buy the Promise00:03:26 – Emotion Builds Great Brands00:04:16 – Greg's Definition of a Brand00:07:03 – The Kobe Shoe Story00:07:45 – Why Companies Get Risk Averse00:08:28 – Leading From the Front00:10:12 – Innovation Requires Failure00:11:41 – Algorithms Won't Define Brands00:13:04 – Pushing the Envelope at Nike00:13:20 – Riverside Sponsor Break00:14:06 – The “What If?” Mindset00:15:03 – The Savile Row Inspiration00:16:54 – Borrowing Ideas From Other Industries00:18:28 – Curiosity Is the Creator Superpower00:18:57 – Kobe Bryant's Curiosity00:21:05 – Do Creatives Need Constraints?00:22:24 – Volume Beats the First Idea00:23:25 – The Power of Three Framework00:25:06 – The Viral Street Football Campaign00:27:13 – Creative Culture Drives Marketing00:28:15 – Creative Systems and Filters00:29:10 – Where Greg Finds Inspiration00:30:34 – No Insight, No Story00:31:33 – The Jordan Failure Commercial00:33:16 – Why Meme Culture Works00:34:47 – Turning Insight Into POV00:36:12 – Nike ID and Customization00:37:23 – Kobe's Soccer Sneaker Inspiration00:38:05 – Are You Born With Taste?00:39:08 – Taste in the AI Era00:40:03 – “Be a Sponge” for Taste00:41:33 – Style, Performance, Culture00:42:03 – Learning Taste From Others00:44:01 – Technology Raised Design Quality00:45:11 – Disposable Photography Problem00:46:11 – Why Photography Still Matters00:48:05 – Sneaker Industry Competition00:49:58 – Performance Culture Brands00:51:25 – Why Big Brands Must Play Small00:52:37 – Building Worlds Inside Brands00:54:30 – The Rise of IRL Experiences00:55:03 – Nike's Underdog Mentality00:56:31 – Multi-Dimensional Campaigns00:57:41 – Story vs Product Specs00:58:00 – Overground vs Underground Marketing00:59:10 – Always-On Performance Marketing01:00:11 – Emotional Value of Products01:01:13 – What Underground Marketing Means01:02:09 – Earning Cultural Relevance01:03:28 – Brands Must Build Worlds01:04:54 – Power of Physical Experiences01:06:22 – Never Lose the Underdog01:07:41 – Resources Don't Create Innovation01:08:32 – Multi-Layer Campaign Strategy01:09:48 – Story Beats Product Specs01:11:10 – Three Layers of Marketing01:12:32 – Performance vs Brand Marketing01:13:40 – Emotion Drives Products01:15:36 – You Can't Chase Cool01:16:47 – Origin of Iconic Products01:17:56 – Function Creates Longevity01:19:12 – When Products Become Culture01:21:03 – Start With Intent01:22:45 – What Makes Products Last01:24:31 – Culture vs Trends01:26:17 – Community Drives Longevity01:28:02 – Earning Cultural Authority01:29:44 – Stay Close to Community01:31:18 – Brand Building in the AI Era01:33:02 – Humanity Is the Advantage01:35:19 – Athlete Personal Brands01:36:48 – Creating a Brand North Star01:38:22 – Defining Brand Identity01:39:50 – Content Needs Strategy01:41:34 – Building a Brand World01:43:21 – Storytelling Creates Revenue01:45:07 – The Long Game of Branding01:46:58 – Authenticity Wins Long Term01:49:16 – The After PartyIf you liked this episode please send it to a friend and take a screenshot for your story! And as always, we'd love to hear from you guys on what you'd like to hear us talk about or potential guests we should have on. DM US ON IG: (Our DM's are always open!) Bfiggy: https://www.instagram.com/bfiggy/ Kostas: https://www.instagram.com/kostasg95/

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. We're talking with Dr. Allen Holmes, Senior Pastor of Definition Church. Allen has served at Definition for 25 years, leading it from a congregation of 30 people to one of the fastest-growing churches in the country. But in this conversation, we don't start with strategy—we start with the soul. Allen shares how a personal marriage crisis early in ministry exposed deep character issues and launched him on a decades-long journey of spiritual formation that has shaped both his leadership and his church. Is it possible that the greatest lid on your ministry isn't your strategy—but your inner life? Allen challenges leaders to rethink success, crisis, and longevity through the lens of character formation. Pressure reveals who you really are. // Leadership rarely collapses because of incompetence—it collapses because pressure exposes unaddressed character issues. Early in seminary and marriage, Allen's wife told him she didn't love him and didn't want to remain in ministry. The crisis shattered his sense of calling and identity. Allen—by God's grace—was able to ask: What in me has produced this? That shift from defensiveness to humility marked the beginning of deep transformation. From gifted producer to formed leader. // Allen explains that many leaders are rewarded for production, not formation. A gifted communicator can build a crowd while remaining insecure, defensive, and relationally immature. You can be a great producer and a poor leader. True leadership requires learning to lead yourself. For Allen, that meant confronting independence, insecurity, and relational blind spots—issues rooted in his upbringing that were sabotaging both marriage and ministry. Prioritizing presence over performance. // The turning point in Allen's growth was deceptively simple: he began prioritizing his relationship with Jesus. Guided by a mentor, he learned to read Scripture for formation rather than information and to cultivate rhythms of prayer, worship, and dependence on the Holy Spirit. Ministry leaders face an occupational hazard—handling Scripture transactionally for sermons while neglecting personal communion with Christ. For Allen, consistent morning surrender became the foundation for long-term sustainability. Marriage as spiritual formation. // Allen describes marriage as God's primary classroom for sanctification. Drawing from the biblical metaphor of Christ and the Church, he explains how learning to live in the presence of his wife taught him how to live in the presence of God. Simple daily rhythms—morning prayer, consistent check-ins, shared meals, evening walks, praying together—have sustained their relationship for decades. Rather than competing with ministry, his marriage strengthens it. What God forms privately shapes what leaders produce publicly. Culture flows from character. // Over 25 years, Allen's commitment to personal formation has shaped Definition Church's culture. Every staff member has a “rule of life” and an intentional growth plan. Personal development is written into job descriptions as the number-one responsibility. Staff are given monthly retreat days to spend extended time alone with Jesus. Spiritual practices are embedded into the life of the church. Allen believes you reproduce who and what you are—so the greatest contribution a leader can make is becoming more like Christ. The power of staying. // Allen notes that lasting impact often requires long tenure. His senior leadership team has served together for decades, building trust and shared formation. In a skeptical culture, credibility grows through consistency. But longevity without formation is dangerous. The process prepares leaders for the purpose; bypassing the process risks collapse. Like Joseph's journey from entitlement to anointing in the Old Testament, leaders must pass through refining seasons before they can steward influence well. To learn more about Definition Church, explore their resources, and connect with Allen, visit definition.church. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I'm grateful for that. If you enjoyed today's show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they're extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Lastly, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Portable Church Your church is doing really well right now, and your leadership team is looking for solutions to keep momentum going! It could be time to start a new location. Maybe you have hesitated in the past few years, but you know it's time to step out in faith again and launch that next location. Portable Church has assembled a bundle of resources to help you leverage your growing momentum into a new location by sending a part of your congregation back to their neighborhood on Mission. This bundle of resources will give you a step-by-step plan to launch that new or next location, and a 5 minute readiness tool that will help you know your church is ready to do it! Click here to watch the free webinar “Launch a New Location in 150 Days or Less” and grab the bundle of resources for your church! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Today’s going to be a really good conversation. It’s one of those conversations that I think we all need to have, looked carefully at, think about ourselves, think about the teams we lead. I really do think it’s one of those make or break kind of conversations. And so you’ll be rewarded for tuning in today. Rich Birch — Excited to have Dr. Allen Holmes with us. He’s a senior pastor of a church called Definition Church. He’s been there since 2000, so a few years. They’re located in North Carolina and is one of the fastest growing churches in the country. They have a residency program as well that’s called to train and develop next generation of mission-minded ministry leaders. And believing that generosity is a privilege, Definition Church also partners with a number of other ministries, churches, and organizations to really serve their community. Dr. Allen, so glad you’re here. Thanks for being here today.Allen Holmes — Wow. Well, I’m so excited to be here, Rich, and appreciate the invitation.Rich Birch — Oh, this is going to be a fun conversation. Why don’t you kind of fill out the picture?Allen Holmes — Yeah.Rich Birch — Tell us a little bit about Definition. Kind of tell us the story. Give us a sense of the church.Allen Holmes — Well, my wife and I, we grew up down in Wilmington, which is on the coast of North Carolina. In 2000, we were finishing seminary and looking for a church, really looking for a city where we could plant our life and stay in one place kind of forever. And we were in a small town. Our first church was in a small town of about 1500. And Greensboro was one of the cities we visited, and there was a church here that had lost their pastor. They only had about 30 people.Allen Holmes — And the truth is that was safe and kind of gave us a a lot of freedom to make mistakes and learn and grow as leaders and as a man and a woman, as a married couple, as parents, you know, all the things without mistakes, really the pressure of a big church and a lot of expectations. And that was perfect for us. And and we fell in love with the city and it’s been 25 years now. It’s hard to believe that. And and but we love it here. Greensboro’s home now and and Definition’s been great to us.Rich Birch — So good. Well, I want to take advantage of the fact that you’ve been at your location, at your church for a number of years. When you look back over two and a half decades of ministry, and you know you’ve seen a lot of churches in your community, and then just even wider you know across the country, that sort of thing. Where have you seen leadership fall apart in churches? We’ll start with the negative to start.Allen Holmes — Yeah.Rich Birch — When’s it break down most often? Why does, you know, why do the wheels come off? Where have you seen that happen?Allen Holmes — You know, I think generally it’s just anything that creates pressure. So I think we have a tendency to train and prepare as leaders when there’s no pressure.Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — And then all of a sudden we find ourselves in a situation where there’s a tremendous amount of pressure. And in those moments, it’s not what we know that matters, but who we are. Rich Birch — So true.Allen Holmes — It kind of gets it gets exposed. And this happened for me the first time I was in seminary. It was my second semester. My wife, Tina, and I had just gotten married. So we were five months into marriage. I was living my dream. I mean, seminary for, you know, somebody who wants to be a pastor is like Disney World, right? I mean, I’m in class every day studying the Bible, surrounded by all these people that love Jesus. I’ve got this vision for changing the world. I mean, it was just wonderful.Allen Holmes — And in month five, towards the end of that second semester, I came home and and my wife wasn’t doing well. I didn’t realize, you know, how bad it was. But that day I came home and she said, I don’t love you. Rich Birch — Wow.Allen Holmes — And I don’t want to be married. I will never be in the ministry. I'm going home.Rich Birch — Wow.Allen Holmes — And it’s like, all of a sudden, my whole world just began to fall apart. You know, at that stage of life, the only thing that really mattered to me was ministry. You know I had this call, this sense of calling. And my marriage.Allen Holmes — I really I grew up in a broken home, really didn’t have any family. And my wife and actually her family were family to me.Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — And so in that moment, it felt like I was losing everything that mattered. Rich Birch — Wow. Allen Holmes — And I realized that despite all of my gifts and my zeal and my passion and my good intentions, beneath the surface, I had all of this on all of these unaddressed issues from my life story that were now coming to the surface and creating a mess in my marriage. And that crisis, that pressure exposed those things and created an opportunity for me to learn and grow. And by God’s grace, we dropped out of seminary, we moved back home. And I met Dr. Bennett, who became a mentor to me. He was a retired pastor.Allen Holmes — And I just started this journey of instead of being focused on just what I do and what I could produce, which is all I knew up until that moment, to really asking some deeper questions about who am I? And what’s driving all of this behavior and what’s creating this problem in my marriage? And how do I invite Christ to really do a deeper work in my heart and life and character? And and I’ve been on that journey now for almost 30 years.Rich Birch — Wow. That’s incredibly compelling. One of my mentors, he talks about how he burnt out early and he had kind of, you know, ended up on the side of the road and, you know, in a really bad spot in life. And he says, he looks back on that and says, wow, by by God’s grace, that happened. Allen Holmes — Right. Rich Birch — You know, and, and wow, that, you know, his whole, it changed the whole trajectory of you know his life and he made a whole bunch of changes. And he feels really, in a weird sort of way, thankful for for that, if even though you’re thankful, it feels like a weird emotion to have around such a crisis you know in you know in your life. Allen Holmes — Right.Rich Birch — Now, so many leaders, we’re so focused on the mission. We’re so focused on leading others. We’re so focused on pushing forward. We miss this stuff. There's there are these things bubbling under the surface. And and we haven’t had the grace of a wife who would raise her hand and say, hey, this enough is enough. Why do you think that gap is so common in ministry? Why is this just like a thing we see all the time?Allen Holmes — Well, I think to your point, in ministry, just like not just in ministry, but any organizational leadership, you’re rewarded and celebrated for what you produce. And the truth is that’s all most people can see. I mean, when my marriage blew up, if you would have gone around and interviewed my friends, my family, Tina’s family, my professors, if you would have asked anybody about me, they would have said, Allen's a rising star. He loves God. I mean, he he’s doing all the stuff. He’s checking all the boxes. This guy’s going to really be somebody one day.Allen Holmes — But what you couldn’t see is that beneath the surface, I didn’t know who I was. And I was insecure. I was defensive. I was independent. I really didn’t know how to do relationships well. I was insensitive.Allen Holmes — I didn’t have like a bad, ugly heart. I mean, I loved and cared about people. I just had all of these unaddressed, unfinished issues in my life. But my giftedness would allow me to produce despite that.Allen Holmes — You know, I think sometimes people um wonder why are leaders great at leading, but, you know, they struggle to lead themselves. I’m not sure that’s really a real thing. What leaders are good at doing is they’re great at producing. They’re not great at leading if they're not great at leading themselves. In other words, I can be a great producer and a bad leader.Rich Birch — Right. Right.Allen Holmes — I can be great on stage and draw a crowd and kind of be a slave-driving leader. And it might, from a numbers perspective and people that aren’t close, they look at it and think, wow, this is wildly successful. But the people on the inner circle know better, that the culture is unhealthy and and this person’s, you know, shallow or he’s a tyrant or whatever the, you know, whatever the case might be.Allen Holmes — There’s all kinds of ways to build a crowd in American culture today that have very little to do with Jesus. And we’ve seen that over and over and over again. So I think in order to be a great leader, you have to be able and willing to lead yourself.Rich Birch — So what did that process look like for you the kind of internal journey of trying to name what your wife had or or define maybe what your wife had named to really get clarity on that? Maybe unpack that step a little bit first before we get on to what changed. You know, how how did you, what did that look like? How, what kind of space did you have to create? What, what, did where did that, what did that part of the journey take you?Allen Holmes — Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, when I look back on all this, I’m, you know, I’m just so grateful for God’s grace because I didn’t even understand the process I was in. I mean, you know, I was just in it and trying to navigate it. But by God’s grace, I decided to ask the question, what in my character has produced this in my marriage. And what’s really shocking about that is all of my seminary buddies were saying, what is wrong with your wife? Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — And I, by God’s grace, was saying, what’s wrong with me?I had enough humility to look at my wife and go, you know, I married this woman because she was so full of grace and kind and gentle, this beautiful soul, this beautiful person. So if she’s reacting this way, chances are she’s not the problem. You know, sometimes.Rich Birch — Wow. Wow.Allen Holmes — Something about our relationship is producing that. And actually, so what it was is, my wife grew up in this really great, healthy family, parent, two-parent home, siblings, people in her house all the time. Her mom cooked every night. I ate at their house five nights a week. I mean, it’s like their family became my family.Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — Well, I grew up with none of that. I grew up with a single mom, basically all by myself, raising myself. And those two worlds just collided. So when we went seminary, I was doing school full-time and working full-time, and she was working full-time. And I thought, well, that was normal. That’s what I’d been doing for years and years. I’d worked my way through college. I’d been and on my own since I was 18.Allen Holmes — And so that seemed normal. But for Tina, it’s like she went from living in this beautiful community to being all by herself at seminary, and I’m not even there. Rich Birch — Right, right. Wow.Allen Holmes — And she’s and so she was relationally just dying, and I didn’t know how to be sensitive to that. You know, I wanted to just say, you know, get over it. Life’s hard…Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — …which would not have worked. Rich Birch — Right. Yes. Allen Holmes — You know But I just had enough grace to begin asking, God, what are you trying to do in my heart? And and like you were saying earlier about your buddy, the thing I would say today, if I would have married a woman strong enough to tolerate that moment, I would have been I would have never survived in ministry because I would have been a driven, legalistic, judgmental, demanding kind of pastor that that really, I think, used the Bible to beat people up.Allen Holmes — And I mean, instead of being a man who really actually experienced, I guess, an inner this inner, deeper work and can invite people into something that is deeply spiritual and transformational and life-giving, you know, I would have just been this ugly, difficult pastor to be with. And so I’m so grateful. I mean, that that really began this journey that just changed and has literally touched everything about my life and ministry and our marriage today. I mean, it’s amazing.Rich Birch — Yeah. So what, what changed? What, how did you change your, you know, approach to making decisions, to dealing with the pressure, dealing with the pace? You know, obviously we were kind of at the point in the journey where you took a pause and made some changes, but eventually, you know, you ended up back on that path and back into ministry and have been leading and the ministry has been flourishing. So what were some of the, the kind of shifts that you made that were that, in hindsight seemed like that was, those were keystone decisions.Allen Holmes — Well, this sounds so silly to even say it, especially to Christian leaders, but I had to prioritize my relationship with Jesus.Rich Birch — Right, right.Allen Holmes — Well, there’s a good idea.Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, exactly. Write that down. What did he say? No but that’s true, though. Lean in on that because you know that there are…Allen Holmes — Yes.Rich Birch — Listen, we all know we go, we all go through seasons where that our relationship goes colder. Some of us, we, you know, we just, it’s been like years, decades since we feel like we’ve had a thriving relationship. So lean in on that.Allen Holmes — Well, you know, it’s interesting when I when we moved back to Wilmington and I started spending time with Dr. Bennett, he just he just pressed me on that all the time. Give your mornings to Jesus. Give your mornings to Jesus. And I just began learning how do I develop a meaningful time with Jesus every day? How do I read the Bible for formation instead of information.Rich Birch — That’s good.Allen Holmes — And how, you know, how do I worship for formation? How do I what is my relationship to the Holy Spirit and inviting him into those moments to help me see and to understand, to teach and to heal and to counsel me into healing, wholeness, growth, all those things.Allen Holmes — You know, how do I press into community? You know, I was so independent. And the truth is, I mean, 30 years later, I’m still working on this.Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — I was so trained to be independent and I liked being independent. I wasn’t unhappy independent… Rich Birch — Right. Allen Holmes — …but independence allows you to hold on to your immaturity because nobody’s challenging it.Rich Birch — Nobody’s in your business.Allen Holmes — Nobody’s confronted. That’s right. And so I just began really developing that time with Jesus and just fell in love with spending time with Jesus. And again, that that changed everything. And again, as silly as that sounds, I’ve been in so many groups. It’s kind of shocking how often I’m with pastors and they just say, I just, I don’t have time to read my Bible.Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — I don’t have time to worship. I can’t give 15 or 20 minutes in the mornings to the Lord. And it’s like, if that if that’s true, then something is just so out of order about our life and ministry. And we’ve not learned to juggle all of that. And because we’re not handling that well, so many pastors, they don’t finish in ministry. Rich Birch —Right.Allen Holmes — Ministry chews them up and spits them out. And so we have to make that the priority. So important. So important.Rich Birch — Yeah, I really appreciate that. I appreciate you leaning in on that. And this is an area where it’s an occupational hazard in what we’ve picked to do…Allen Holmes — Oh, yeah. That’s right.Rich Birch — …because our our job is to produce that in other people. And so we have to handle the scripture in in a way, you know, it’s like a part of what we do to produce the content we produce or whatever that is. And it can become very transactional if we don’t watch. And so I really appreciate you leaning in on that.Allen Holmes — That’s exactly right.Rich Birch — What about on the married side? What advice would you give? Again, you’ve, you’ve are happily married today and you know, all these years later.Allen Holmes — Yeah, that’s right.Rich Birch — And, what, what rhythms have you found that have worked well for you and your wife, for you to continue to lead and to lead, you know, at a high level. The reason why we’re talking is because you’re leading a fast-growing church.Allen Holmes — Yeah.Rich Birch — But, you know, you’re doing that and keeping your marriage. What are some of the rhythms that you, that you help coach other, maybe younger leaders to, to really instill on that side, to, to, to be, to be whole on that side?Allen Holmes — One of the things that was so helpful early on is recognizing that my marriage was God’s gift to me to learn, not just to grow and to mature as a man, but even to learn to walk with God.Allen Holmes — And one of the things you see in Scripture over and over and over again is the primary metaphor God uses to describe our relationship with Him as a husband and a wife, that we’re the bride of Christ.Allen Holmes — And what I found is that my marriage and my relationship with Jesus were running in parallel. So if I learned something with Tina, it strengthened my relationship with Jesus. And when I would learn something with Jesus, it would actually strengthen my relationship with Tina, that they were you know playing off of each other that way.Allen Holmes — And so as Tina and I started working on our marriage, I mean, it was it was as simple like even when I think about giving my mornings to God. When I wake up every day, the first thing I do is I roll over on my knees. I acknowledge Jesus, you are my king, king of my heart and life.Allen Holmes — I invite the Holy Spirit to fill me fresh for that day. And I probably pray there three to five minutes, and then I roll over on my back and put my hand on my sleeping wife. And I just take a minute and begin praying and and blessing my wife.Allen Holmes — And then I’ll get up and I’ll I’ll kind of have of usually a couple hours where I can just be in the Word, I can worship, I can be in so have silence and solitude and just allow God to minister to my soul. And then i don’t ever leave the house without giving my wife a kiss, telling her I love her, embracing her.Allen Holmes — During the day, I’m going to check in two or three times. How’s your day going? What’s going on with you? You know, if I’m driving somewhere or between meetings, you know, little quick touches. Rich Birch — That's good.Allen Holmes — When I get home, I’m going to walk in the house. The first thing I’m going do is I’m going to find Tina. We’re going to eat dinner together that night. At the end of the day, we’re going to maybe go on a walk that night. We may get in bed and just both be reading a book for a little bit. We might talk about our day or what’s going on with our kids or life.Allen Holmes — Before we go to bed, before we go to sleep, we’ll pray together. And again, I want to make sure that I’m affirming my love for… When I describe all of that to people and what I try to tell them is have a response. The Christian life is learning to live in the presence of God. And marriage is learning to live in the presence of your wife.Allen Holmes — And so I know throughout the day what’s going on in the heart of my wife and how to love and serve her well, even when I’m here at work. And as a Christian, I’ve got to learn how do I live in the presence of God and recognize he’s always with me. And I want to bring Jesus into every moment, every meeting, every decision. And versus I have devotional time and I leave God at home. And then I come to work and do my work.Allen Holmes — So that’s just one example. As I learned how to do that with Tina, I saw how to apply to my relationship with God and vice versa.Rich Birch — That's so good. Yeah, that’s so helpful. Let’s talk about how your internal life and your own growth and your own staying close to him, what impact has that had on the church, on your team, on the people you lead? How do you see those two, you know, working together?Allen Holmes — Yeah, that’s a great question. So part of it is you reproduce who and what you are. Rich Birch — True. Allen Holmes — So what we’re describing, and of course, I’ve got 25 years of this, and so that gives me a little bit of an advantage in that regard because this takes time to build. You know, it doesn’t happen overnight. But when this has been kind of the direction of your life for over 25 years, then it becomes the direction of the organization and the people that you lead. And so on our on our church staff and our church and the way we do ministry, the way our we you know our mission is all affected by what we’re talking about.Allen Holmes — And so our staff, that you know, they all have a rule of life. They all have a very intentional plan a plan for their spiritual and personal and leadership growth in their life. And and we work as a team to to facilitate that. In fact, in our job descriptions, their number one responsibility is their personal growth and development. And we tell them all the time, the greatest thing you can do for everyone in your life is to learn and grow as a leader. That’s the greatest contribution you can make. When you do that, you everybody comes up. you You bless everybody. So work harder on who you are than what you’re building.Allen Holmes — And so we just emphasize that. And and then we do little things like, you know, in our in our church culture, we once a month, they have a retreat day where they’re required to go and be alone with Jesus for a whole day. And they’re being paid to do it. Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — It’s their, you know, it’s part of their job. We emphasize a spiritual practice every month, and we’re doing that in all of our groups, and we model that as a staff. Like in January, our spiritual practice is fasting, and we’re about to begin you know a season of prayer and fasting like a lot of churches do in January. And so that’s integrated into everything that we’re doing as a church and to our staff. They’re encouraged to do that, and so we’re just constantly making sure that they’re learning and growing. And then that begins to shape the culture your church. It shapes your ability to actually make disciples in your church. I mean, at the end of the day, if on a scale of 1 to 10, as a follower of Christ, if I’m a five, I can only lead three and fours… Rich Birch — Right. Allen Holmes — …and I can only attract twos.Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — And then there’s nobody that I can help, right?Rich Birch — Right. Yes. Yes.Allen Holmes — Because I’m already at the bottom.Rich Birch — Right. Right. Yeah.Allen Holmes — But if I can be an eight and lead sixes and sevens and attract four and fives, then we can reach down and help the two and threes get up, you know. So my what God is doing in me, and that’s true for everybody on our team, is the greatest contribution they can make, and it brings everybody up. And so that’s just really worked into our culture.Rich Birch — Think at like from a diagnostic point of view. A church calls you up and they feel stuck organizationally. They feel like, man, things are just, they’re not going well. When you take a call like that, is your reflex to go towards, well, where are things with the with the leadership team internally?Rich Birch — Or you know do we start organizationally? Hey, let’s fix a couple of things. Help us talk think Help us think through um how do you handle that kind of conversation? Or how does this conversation inform a conversation like that when it comes your way?Allen Holmes — That’s a great question. I mean, generally my response will be, I’ll tell people really, if you need organizational, just kind of practical, how do I do it information, I just give them some resources, you know, so I’ll send them, go to the Grow Conference. They’re probably the best in the world at it. Rich Birch — Yeah, they're so good.Allen Holmes — They can tell you how to do these different things. But then I want to come back to the thing I think we can help you with is really the soul of your organization, which is a reflection of what God’s doing in you. So let’s talk about who you are as a leader, the way you live your life, the way you lead your staff, the culture that you’re building and creating. Because ultimately, if you get all these systems, but you don’t have culture, culture trumps systems every single time.Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — And when you get the systems and the culture right, you begin, everybody’s attracted to that. In fact, I think maybe one of the big problems in Western culture, and this is hard to admit, but I think the church has to admit this, is that people, people are not going to church. Church attendance is on decline, but it’s not because people don’t want God. They’re just not convinced they can find him at church.Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, that’s so true. Yeah.Allen Holmes — I mean, they’re they’re spiritually hungry, but the cultures of our church, people come into that culture and what they kind of intuitively know is that this doesn’t feel healthy or spiritual. So you can create all the systems you want and send out flyers and do all kinds of things. But if people show up at your church and what they intuitively know is that this isn’t healthy and spiritual, you can’t grow your church. So you have to begin there.Allen Holmes —It’s also true if it is healthy and spiritual, even if your systems are a little suspect, people will tolerate a lot of a lot of that because they’re so spiritually hungry. And I think that’s more true than ever before.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s very true. Yeah. Well, yeah, my good friend, Carey Nieuwhof, he says like, man, it would be so sad if people came to our churches and all they found was us, right? You know, at the end of the day, right? Like we were trying to point them to Jesus and as as kind of elementary as it sounds, but it’s just so true.Rich Birch — If there isn’t something happening there that’s bigger than just what they can get anywhere else, why would they come to us? Why would they engage in our churches? Yeah, that’s that’s…Allen Holmes — You know, we just came through Christmas, and and one of the things that I think Protestants miss is is when we think about Christmas, we think about Emmanuel, God with us. We think about the incarnation, God became flesh, and we think that’s something that happened 2,000 years ago. And the truth is, that’s supposed to be true of the church today. We are the body of Christ.Rich Birch — Yes.Allen Holmes — God in us. And when that’s true, people, when they show up at our churches or show up at our dinner table, they should experience Jesus when they’re with us because we’re becoming more and more like him.Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah, it’s good.Allen Holmes — And then our life gives validity to our message.Rich Birch — Well, one of the things I’m working on a book for for churches about breaking the 2,000 barrier. And one of the interesting stats that we’ve bumped into is that oftentimes the, when a church breaks the 2,000 barrier, the senior leader and often the senior leadership team have been there for going on two decades, 18 years, 19 years, 22 years. Like it’s just a really common pattern you see.Rich Birch — Now that’s not the perception. Our perception is like, oh, there’s like the just add water mega fast church that just explodes and it all happens. But that actually isn’t the normative pattern. the Normative pattern is it’s it takes a long time. You’ve been at your church for 25 years. Talk us through how longevity, how does that tie into this conversation? How does it tie into the impact you’re seeing, you know, at Definition? Talk us through that.Allen Holmes — Yeah. You know, it’s interesting when I, one of the other real key moments for me is I went back to do my doctorate of ministry degree at Gordon-Conwell in redemptive leadership. And so much of what we were studying is how God works in the crisis, in these pressure moments to, you know, expose the unfinished places in our character so that we can grow and become more like Jesus and therefore maximize our kingdom impact in the world.Allen Holmes — And one of my professors, Dr. Powers, he actually wrote a book called Redemptive Leadership. It’s a simple little book, but profound, where he describes leadership development in five stages. And stage one is is a skilled leader where you get a leadership role just based on your skill. So maybe the ability to preach. And so they call you to be the pastor. That’s how I became the pastor of my first church. I could preach. I hadn’t done anything else. But they let me be a pastor because I can preach.Allen Holmes — And then the second stage is a principal leader where you begin to understand why you do what you do. But the third stage, which is so important, is the character stage. And in order for a leader to go through the character stage, God always uses a crisis to bring him into that stage. But when he comes into that stage, he has a choice.Allen Holmes — In that stage, he can open his heart and allow God to do that deeper work, or he can go back and hide behind his skills and principle. And that’s what pastors do a lot of times. The reason you see this turnover every, you know, depending on what statistic you read, every two to four years, pastors are leaving churches is because they come into a church and they have this honeymoon season, and then all of a sudden there’s a crisis that exposes some things, and they start floating their resume and hiding behind their skill, rather than allowing God to deal with their character so that they can advance and become a transformative, redemptive leader. Rich Birch — That’s so good.Allen Holmes — So I think one of the things that’s been so true for us is we’ve just tried to say to people, when there’s a crisis, don’t panic, don’t run away, see it as an opportunity.Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — In fact, I ended up doing my dissertation on the idea that if we could teach this model to leaders, that it would cause them to respond differently in the crisis. Instead of running from it, they would run to it and open their heart, and God could use that to really propel them into their redemptive future. And the research said that was true.Allen Holmes — And so we’ve tried to really work that in our culture to understand when something goes wrong, don’t run away and don’t hide.Rich Birch — Right.Allen Holmes — Let’s run into it and trust God to meet us there so that this thing, God works redemptively to use it for your benefit and to launch you into your future. And because that’s been our culture, people have stuck around. I mean, my lead team, Rick has been here 25 years. He’s actually here two Sundays longer than I’ve been here. Rich Birch — Love it.Allen Holmes — Eric’s been here 24 years. Jonathan’s been here 19 years. Steve’s been Chelsea’s been here almost this year will be 14 years. Steve’s been here 10 years. I mean, so they’ve just been here a long, long, long time, and that but that’s why, is that they’ve seen these moments and we’ve helped them to find God in it so that actually works for us instead of against us.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s that’s great. I love that. You know, I think if more churches, if more leaders had the mindset, even as we led our people that like, hey, if they come to us and it feels like there’s a crisis brewing here, I do feel like our culture is so bent towards like, it’s not just them leaving, it’s us leaving them. It’s like, okay, time’s up, you’re done, like move on. We would never say it that way because we’re better Christians and we know, but but that’s the vibe we give people.Allen Holmes — Right.Rich Birch — And And I do think it’s been interesting as we’ve been looking really from a church growth point of view, this is a really sticky trend that we see that it’s like you, the key leaders have to be here for a long time. And it makes sense on lots of levels. Allen Holmes — Right. Rich Birch — This level, it makes sense. It makes sense on just like community influence. Like you you have to be around for a long time. People are super suspicious of the church and they’re not You know, they don’t come like that maybe 30 years ago, people trusted the church. Well, that’s just not true anymore. Allen Holmes — Right. Rich Birch — And so when you’re around for a long time that, you know, that makes a difference. And it’s hard to, it’s not like a really pithy bullet point because it’s like, well, just stick around. But it is, it’s critically important to the, you know, to the overall mix.Allen Holmes — Yeah, you know, that make that reminds me of a couple of things. One, one of the, think, things we have to be careful about today is I think we are doing such a good job of planting churches. We’re all for church planting. We just help the church in our city plant. We’re about to launch somebody out next year to plant under the church. I mean, that’s a fantastic thing, but we’ve gotten so good at it.Allen Holmes — If you’re a 30-year-old and you plant a church and you start with 500 on day one, it could be detrimental to your spiritual journey. And we just have to kind of recognize that.Rich Birch — Talk more about that. Why would that be?Allen Holmes — Well, like when I think about myself, when I came to Definition, we had about 30 people, and we did not average 100 for an entire year until my seventh year here.Rich Birch — Right. Right.Allen Holmes — Now, during those seven years, I thought it was the greatest church in America. I mean, we were having a good time, and we were basically a college ministry more than a church back then. When I came, we had an older congregation, but my first Sunday, 15 college students showed up.Rich Birch — Okay.Allen Holmes — And, of course, I was only 26, and so I naturally gravitated towards them. We kind of became this college ministry, and it wasn’t until several years later that they were old enough to get married and start having babies that we actually became a real church. And, uh, but during that time, the truth is God, I just believe God was in that because I was still so young and inexperienced and immature as a man and leader that the last thing I needed was any more success.Allen Holmes — It would have really, success can really blind you to your areas of, you know, where you need really need to grow. In fact, one of the things that you see in several places in Scripture, and one of the things that we tell our church all that time, that the Christian life is a lifelong, transformational journey with Christ. Rich Birch — Yep.Allen Holmes — And you see this in several places in Scripture. Let me give you a couple examples. You think about Joseph. I don’t if you’ve ever thought about this story, but I was preaching on it a couple of years ago, and I realized in this story, there are three times that Joseph has a coat. His first coat as a child is a coat of entitlement, and it needs to be ripped off.Rich Birch — Yes.Allen Holmes — His next coat was given by Pharaoh. It’s a coat of self-sufficiency. It needs to be ripped off, and Potiphar’s wife took it off. And then third, there’s a coat of anointing where he’s come through this crucible. He’s come through these seasons of pain and struggle and wrestling and and suffering that has produced this character. And now God can elevate him and give him almost unlimited power and authority without the threat of him abusing it.Allen Holmes — Well, without that process, God could never. If God puts any man in that position without that process, it destroys you. I mean, you you’re not prepared. You can’t handle that. You know, tell people all the time that one of the reasons God doesn’t just tell us our future, you know, people are always wanting to know, you know, what’s God going to do?Allen Holmes — And the truth is, if God told us what we were going to be doing in 10 years, we’d try to go there tomorrow. And the process prepares us for our purpose. You cannot bypass the process… Rich Birch — That’s good. Allen Holmes — …and still fulfill your purpose.Rich Birch — That’s so good.Allen Holmes — And so God works in that that challenge. I think about Psalm 23, and I think Psalm 23 describes three stages. First stage is that I’m this child. I’m very young and immature in my faith. And then I become this warrior. And then I eventually become friend. But I have to go through the valley of the shadow of death to get up that mountain in order to be a friend of God. Allen Holmes — And there’s no way to bypass that. it’s seeing you You see this over and over and over again in scripture. And it’s just part of our sanctification. It’s the way God works in our lives.Rich Birch — It’s so good.Allen Holmes — Now, one of the things that sometimes somebody might hear all this and they go, well, I know so-and-so. I’ll give you a great example, classic example of this. Chris Hodges is one of the most respected pastors in America.Rich Birch — Yeah, for sure.Allen Holmes — And he he has pastored one of the fastest growing churches in in America. But there is a reason he has been so fruitful. And the reason is before he ever became a pastor, he didn’t start that church until he was 40.Allen Holmes — And before becoming that pastor, he’d served under two of the best pastors and two of the strongest churches in America. So he was so much more mature than the average church planter when he started. And I’m 53, I don’t think I’m where Chris was at 40 when he started that church.Rich Birch — Right. Right.Allen Holmes — So that was a big advantage in why they’ve been able to be so consistently fruitful for such a long period of time. And we just have to recognize that. And again, that’s why it’s so important that we’re focused on what God is doing in us… Rich Birch — So good. Allen Holmes — …because over time, that’s what produces the best results. It’s just a mature man or woman of God.Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s so good. Love it. Well, Allen, thank you so much for today’s conversation. This has been a great, it’s been really rich conversation. There’s a lot more we could we could talk about, but I really appreciate you giving us the time today. As we wrap up today’s episode, what any kind of final words you’d give to a leader, as they’re thinking about reflecting on this kind of inner life, leading themselves, you know, trying to align who they are outside with who they are inside. Help us Help us with the kind of final word as we kind of wrap up today’s call.Allen Holmes — Yeah, you know, I was reading a book recently, and and this quote, I’ve just been meditating on it the last couple of weeks, and it the quote is, God loves us as we are, not as we should be, for none of us are as we should be.Rich Birch — It’s good. Oh wow that's good.Allen Holmes — And I say that just to say I think so many pastors are trying so hard like the older brother in the prodigal story. They’re trying so hard to work for God and to prove something. And I just think we got to begin with falling in love with him and trust he’s better at producing than we are. And if we just fall in love with Jesus and allow him to make us more like that father, his kids will come running home.Rich Birch — That’s so good.Allen Holmes — because they’re looking for fathers. They’re they’re looking for that place of grace and life and hope. And so that characterizes who we are in our soul. And people are just so attracted to that. So I would just say to all the pastors and leaders listening, God is crazy about you. You can’t do anything about that. You don’t have to earn it and none of us deserve it. And if we can learn to really receive that and fall in love with Jesus again, it just changes everything.Rich Birch — So good. Well, sir, I appreciate you being on today’s episode. If people want, if we want to send people online somewhere to track with you or with definition, where do we want to send them so they they could connect with you?Allen Holmes — Yeah, they can just Google Definition Church. And I do have a website. There’s not much on it yet. There’s probably not anything there that’s going to help them. But I need to do a better job of developing some content and getting it out there. But the best place to look would be just to go to our website. There are some resources there for churches.Rich Birch — That’s great.Allen Holmes — And of course, you know, we’d love to hear from them. And we really appreciate you just letting us, inviting us to be on the show today and to get to encourage leaders is such a such a privilege.Rich Birch — No, I appreciate you. I just want to honor you. You know, publicly. We reach out to churches like this, frankly, because you end up on the fastest growing church list. And we’re like, hey, what’s God using? And I love where this conversation went today. I think super helpful for people. So thanks so much, Allen. Appreciate being on today.Allen Holmes — Thanks, Rich. Have a great day.

Rob Arnott returns to Excess Returns to discuss the biggest questions facing investors today, including the impact of geopolitical conflict, the valuation gap between U.S. and international markets, the long-term investment implications of artificial intelligence, and why extreme spreads between growth and value may present major opportunities. Arnott, founder of Research Affiliates and pioneer of fundamental indexing, explains why AI itself is not necessarily a bubble but many AI stocks may be priced for implausible growth. He also discusses why small cap and value stocks may offer some of the most compelling long-term opportunities in decades, how market narratives drive valuations, and why diversification beyond the U.S. could be critical for investors. Throughout the conversation, Arnott draws on decades of market history to explain how bubbles form, why profit margins tend to mean revert, and how investors should think about positioning portfolios for the next market cycle.Topics covered in this episode:• Why Rob Arnott believes AI is real but many AI stocks may be in a bubble• How market narratives can push valuations far beyond fundamentals• Why U.S. stocks trade at roughly twice the valuation multiples of international markets• The widening valuation gap between growth and value stocks• Why small cap stocks may be one of the most attractive opportunities today• The massive capital spending required to build the AI ecosystem• How technological revolutions historically destroy jobs but create new opportunities• Why investors should learn to use AI tools to remain competitive• The definition of a market bubble based on implausible growth expectations• Lessons from the dot-com bubble and the history of dominant technology companies• Why profit margins tend to mean revert over time• The long-term outlook for international stocks and diversification• How fundamental indexing works and why it can create rebalancing alpha• The concept of the “Trifecta” approach combining value, core indexing, and growth• The risks of conglomerate premiums and the diversification discount• Why the largest companies in the market rarely remain dominant over long periods• How investors should think about balancing growth exposure with cheaper opportunitiesTimestamps:00:00 AI vs AI Stocks: Why Arnott Sees a Bubble00:01 Introduction to Rob Arnott and Research Affiliates02:13 The Iran Conflict and How War Impacts Markets06:41 U.S. Valuations vs International Opportunities08:50 The Extreme Spread Between Growth and Value10:00 The Small Cap Opportunity and Index Effects13:08 The Citrini AI Paper and Long-Term Technology Shifts14:09 How Technological Revolutions Destroy and Create Jobs16:00 How AI Is Already Changing Investment Research20:00 Why AI Tools Are Still Losing Money23:40 How Investors Should Think About AI Exposure25:21 Arnott's Definition of a Market Bubble27:41 Lessons from the Dot-Com Bubble28:34 Profit Margins and Mean Reversion30:34 Technology Moats and Competitive Disruption32:12 Will Mean Reversion Still Work in Markets?36:02 The Case for International Stocks41:39 The Trifecta: A New Framework for Indexing51:15 Why Expensive Slow-Growth Companies Underperform56:25 Conglomerate Premiums and Mega Cap Tech57:00 The Long-Term Case for Value and Small Caps01:00:00 Why Market Leaders Rarely Stay on Top

Sex After 50, No Apologies with Suzanne Noble [TESSA] In this enlightening episode, we dive deep into the evolving conversations surrounding sex, aging, and the open nest lifestyle with Suzanne Noble, a trailblazer in advocating for older adults embracing their sexuality. As a returning guest, Suzanne shares her journey since our last chat, discussing how her experiences have shaped her understanding of intimacy in later life. We explore the idea of being “open nesters” and how it reflects a new chapter filled with opportunities for growth, connection, and reinforced relationships with partners and family. SEX AFTER 50 Suzanne recounts the inception of her podcast, born out of her open relationship and a desire to discuss sex among older individuals. Following the release of the film “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which centers around a 61-year-old woman’s journey to sexual fulfillment, Suzanne found herself thrust into the spotlight as a relatable voice for women discussing sex and aging. This episode chronicles her evolution as a content creator, detailing how she transitioned from starting this project with a partner to eventually providing insights and reflections independently, underscoring her status as a vital resource in the realm of sexual health for older adults. 2:01  The Birth of a Podcast 4:57  Insights from Expert Interviews 8:19  Redefining Relationships in Later Life 12:56 Expanding the Definition of Pleasure 19:28 Body Confidence and Acceptance 30:14 Reflections on Aging and Acceptance We delve into the often stigmatized subjects of erectile dysfunction and vaginal atrophy, with Suzanne sharing that these issues affect roughly 50% of individuals over 50. Reflecting on her personal experiences and those of her guests, she emphasizes the importance of open conversations surrounding these challenges. This dialogue highlights the lack of medical support and resources available to older adults, urging the need for healthcare providers to prioritize discussions about intimate health and pleasure as people age. Throughout the episode, we explore the notion of redefining pleasure beyond traditional paradigms, encouraging listeners to embrace a broader understanding of sexual intimacy that isn’t solely orgasm-centered. The discussion shifts towards the importance of maintaining curiosity and communication within intimate relationships, emphasizing how these elements can enhance sexual experiences as people navigate changes in their desires and bodies. As the conversation flows, Suzanne shares her insights on mens' roles in these conversations, particularly around penile health, while shedding light on tools like penis pumps and cock rings. We also touch on the importance of body confidence as we age, reflecting on communal spaces, such as nudist retreats, that celebrate diverse bodies and foster acceptance. This acceptance, Suzanne demonstrates, can empower individuals to express their needs and desires boldly, a pivotal aspect of healthy, fulfilling relationships. The episode concludes with reflections on the power of identity transformation in the later stages of life. Suzanne discusses her current casual relationship, emphasizing how this stage is about enjoying shared experiences and prioritizing pleasure in new and enlightening ways. This openness and self-acceptance, she argues, are essential for anyone navigating the complexities of intimacy in their golden years. With her enthusiastic and candid approach, Suzanne Noble provides inspiration for those in the open nest stage of life to reclaim their narratives around sexuality and aging, encouraging them to engage in meaningful conversations and experiences without shame. Tune in to discover how embracing curiosity, compassion, and courage can transform the landscape of intimacy for older adults. About Tessa Tessa Krone is the engine behind and the face of The Open Nesters. Tessa holds an MA in Consciousness Studies and is a speaker, coach, program, and journey facilitator & leader, author, and, of course, Podcaster. Her offerings are based on her mission to help people open to their most self-expressed, loving selves. Tessa's specialties include embodiment from all the senses and elements of our inner and outer lives, ranging from mindfulness, dance, play, and sensory exploration in nature. If she had one superpower, it would be to help people, especially as they age, to live more open-hearted lives. Please email Tessa to make a connection. And visit her page here on the Open Nesters Website. If you like, please answer the question: What do you need to OPEN your NEST? In your LIFE. In your BODY. In your SPIRIT. Do you need MORE… Adventure  Freedom of Expression  Exploration and Fun  Body Movement  New circles of friends  Deep love relationships

In this episode of The Yegi Project, Dana Grinnell, a master in clean living and founder of Free Living Co., shares insights on toxic ingredients in products, the importance of clean skincare, and sustainable packaging. Discover how her journey from healthcare to clean beauty can help you make healthier choices for yourself and the planet.Connect with Dana Grinnell!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana_grinnell/Website: https://freelivingco.co/Takeaways* Toxins in everyday products* Definition of clean living* Creating a clean skincare line for teens* Sustainable packaging innovations* Impact of consumer choices on health and environmentIf you would like to be a guest on a future episode of The Yegi Project, please email info@yegiproject.comThe Yegi Project is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and more!https://linktr.ee/theyegiprojectDisclaimer: This podcast or any other The Yegi Project episodes on this platform or other podcast streaming platforms is not legal business or tax advice. I make this content based on my own experience as a business owner and MBA for educational and entertainment purposes only. #theyegiproject Podcast Audio & Video Edited by Elizabeth HadjinianInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/theyegiprojectTikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theyegiproject YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@theyegiproject

In a world swirling with uncertainty and global chaos, Proverbs 21 arrives as a timely anchor for our souls. This passage reminds us of a fundamental truth that can transform our anxiety into peace: God rules over rulers. The opening verse declares that the king's heart is like a stream of water in the Lord's hand, turned wherever He wills. No political upheaval, no international crisis, no earthly authority operates outside God's sovereign control. While we may have vastly different opinions about current events, while confusion and frustration may tempt us to lose focus, we are called to remember that nothing catches God off guard. He has read the end of the book, and He wins. This doesn't mean we live with reckless abandonment or ignore the world around us, but it does mean we refuse to let global distractions pull us away from our mission of making disciples where we live, work, and play. The passage also confronts our tendency to justify our own actions, reminding us that while every way seems right in our own eyes, the Lord weighs the heart. We cannot fool God with partial obedience or self-serving rationalizations. As we face uncertain times ahead, this chapter calls us to trust in God's perfect justice, His unfailing mercy, and His absolute sovereignty over every nation, every leader, and every circumstance we encounter.Sermon Notes – Proverbs 21 & God's Sovereignty  --------------------------------  DETAILED NOTES  --------------------------------  I. God Rules Over Rulers (Prov. 21:1)  - “The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will.”  - In a world full of information, conflict, and confusion, nothing is outside God's control.  - Definition of God's sovereignty:   God's absolute and kingly authority whereby he not only has the right to rule over all creation, but actively governs and accomplishes all things according to his wise and holy will, including the outworking of salvation history.  - God is sovereign over:   - Kings, presidents, and rulers   - Nations and wars   - History and salvation  - This sovereignty doesn't excuse reckless living but produces peace and confidence in God's plan.  - Revelation and Daniel affirm God's control and final victory (Dan. 2:21; 4:35).  - Satan's tactic: use global chaos to distract the church from its mission—making disciples where we live, work, and play.  II. God Weighs the Heart (Prov. 21:2)  - “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.”  - We are skilled at self-justification; feelings and perceptions can lie.  - Outward obedience is not the same as inward submission.  - God is not impressed with appearances (1 Sam. 16:7).  - He searches the heart and tests the mind (Jer. 17:10).  - Many surrounding verses reinforce this:   - v.5: Haste leads to poverty.   - v.6: Ill-gotten gain is a deadly trap.   - v.8: The guilty way is crooked; the pure walk uprightly.   - v.9, 19: Wise living affects the peace of our homes.  III. Mercy, Justice, and Consequences (Prov. 21:10, 12, 18)  - v.10: “The soul of the wicked desires evil…” – sin is not neutral; it loves what harms.  - v.12: God observes the wicked and brings them down. Nothing escapes His notice.  - v.18: “The wicked is a ransom for the righteous…” – God will ultimately reverse wrongs and vindicate His people.  - Choices have consequences; justice is certain (Rom. 2:5–11).  - God shows no partiality; He will judge according to works.  IV. God's Sovereignty Rules (Prov. 21:30–31)  - v.30: “No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the Lord.”  - v.31: “The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord.”  - Human planning, power, and strategy are real—but not ultimate.  - Job 42:2; Isa. 14:27; Eph. 1:11; Rom. 11:33–36: God's purposes cannot be thwarted; His ways are beyond our comprehension, yet absolutely sure.  - This should give deep peace in uncertain, turbulent times.  --------------------------------  PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS  --------------------------------  1. **Respond to Global Events with Faith, Not Panic**    - Stay informed, but don't be consumed.    - Let God's sovereignty shape your news intake, social media habits, and conversations.  2. **Stay on Mission**    - Don't let world chaos distract you from making disciples.    - Ask: “How can I be faithful where I live, work, and play today?”  3. **Invite God to Weigh Your Heart**    - Pray Psalm 139:23–24 style prayers: “Search me, O God…”    - Ask where you might be justifying disobedience or compromise.  4. **Take Sin and Consequences Seriously**    - Teach and model that choices have real outcomes (for yourself, your family).    - Repent quickly; don't “store up wrath” (Rom. 2:5).  5. **Rest in God's Final Victory**    - When you feel fearful, meditate on Prov. 21:30–31 and Rom. 11:33–36.    - Anchor your hope in Christ's return and ultimate justice.  --------------------------------  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS  --------------------------------  1. How does Proverbs 21:1 practically change the way you view elections, wars, and world leaders?  2. Where do you feel most tempted to let global events distract you from everyday discipleship?  3. Can you identify a time when you “felt right” but later realized you were just justifying yourself (Prov. 21:2)? What did God show you?  4. In what areas of life do you tend to forget that choices have consequences before God?  5. Which verse in Proverbs 21 (or in Romans 11:33–36) most encourages you right now, and why?

Robinhood's co-founder reveals the brutal reality of surviving an 80% market crash, going "founder mode" to cut corporate bloat, and what actually happened during GameStop. Vlad Tenev is the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood. Not only did he navigate the unprecedented GameStop crisis, but he completely re-engineered the fintech giant to thrive. He breaks down the brutal transition from bloated hyper-growth to a lean machine, why a "juicy falsehood is more powerful than a boring truth", and the 3 distinct phases of AI integration separating the winners from the dead. Believe it or not, GameStop was not his hardest moment. ----- Approximate Timestamps: (00:00) The Unprecedented Crisis (00:33) The Truth About GameStop (09:30) Why False Narratives Win (10:39) Surviving an 80% Market Crash (16:02) Firing the Nice Founder & Going Founder Mode (24:25) Rules for High Performance (28:50) The Young Talent Advantage (35:13) First Principles Storytelling (39:07) 3 Phases of AI Integration (50:03) Building AI That Reasons (01:02:59) Fixing Private Market Access (01:20:04) Deciding What to Build Next (01:22:05) Surviving 1800% Inflation (01:31:22) How Robinhood Makes Money (01:39:51) Redesigning the Modern Bank (01:47:47) The Definition of Success ----- Check out Vlad: https://investors.robinhood.com/management/vlad-tenev https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlad-tenev-7037591b/ ------ Newsletter: The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------ Follow Shane Parrish: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/shaneparrish⁠ Insta: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet/⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/⁠ ------ Thank you to the sponsors for this episode: +Granola AI, The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings: https://www.granola.ai/shane Check out the Granola Notes +Download The League App today and find your perfect match! https://click.theleague.com/qmhm/0vdzsmj5 +Shopify: https://shopify.com/knowledgeproject +.tech domains: Nothing says tech like being on .tech https://get.tech/ And a Big shout out to Wouter Teunissen who prepared a book on Robinhood that helped me prepare! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

#121Josh, Matt, and Mike are back for another trio episode, and things heat up right from the cold open as Mike unleashes a spicy critique of Danny Meyer's restaurant empire. Comparing Meyer's concepts to "safe, VH1-style" dining, Mike questions his public persona compared to boundary-pushing restaurateurs like Keith McNally and Stephen Starr. After the fiery start, the guys settle into discussing the intricacies of project management, prioritizing ideas using tools like ClickUp, the nuances of developing a burger blend over seven months, and Mike's past life as a bedroom musician. The temperature rises again when Matt dives into a heated debate about professional titles: What makes someone a Sommelier? If you step off the restaurant floor, are you a "former" Somm, or is it a lifelong title just like being a Chef? The trio wraps up the episode by exploring the anti-chef-driven restaurant movement, celebrating the brilliance of the original Momofuku Ssäm Bar, and Mike's full, unfiltered take on Meyer and the Eleven Madison Park buyout.Timestamps04:05 Parenting reflections and having a 10-year-old08:29 Using ClickUp and Replet for restaurant project management16:45 Wine blending, barrels, and case yields22:30 Why did it take 7 months to develop a burger blend?25:52 Mike's past life as a musician35:36 The Great Sommelier Debate: What defines an active Somm?42:26 Are TV personalities like David Chang still considered Chefs?56:23 The brilliance and innovation of the original Momofuku Ssäm Bar01:00:51 The anti-chef-driven restaurant movement01:07:18 Retirement, career transitions, and leaving the restaurant floorLinks and resources

With the Oscars on the horizon, everyone's talking about awards. But should we try to win awards? Or are they a distraction from what our true priorities should be? Spencer Folmar of Hard Faith Films and the Hard Faith Film Festival joins Nathan and Joseph to discuss. Definition of award: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/award Christian artist Forrest Frank no longer accepting awards: https://cbn.com/news/entertainment/forrest-frank-says-he-will-no-longer-participate-awards-shows-shares-conviction Hollywood actorTimothy Challamet wants to be great: https://www.imdb.com/news/ni65146405/ Why awards are meaningless: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2023/2/23/23610516/awards-oscars-grammys-best-business-media Actors who say awards don't matter are lying: https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64429244/?ref_=hm_nw_tp_4 Websites The Overthinkers: theoverthinkersjournal.world Nathan Clarkson: nathanclarkson.me Joseph Holmes: linktr.ee/JosephHolmes Spencer Folmar: hardfaith.org

Introduction of Generosity (Characteristic Seven): Jevon Perra confirmed the group was reading from the "Manual for Teachers," specifically focusing on the seventh characteristic, generosity. Soo Kim volunteered to read the text defining generosity, which is noted to have a special meaning for the "teacher of God" that is contrary to the world's usual meaning.Definition of Generosity in the Context of the Text: The text defines the world's generosity as "giving away in the sense of giving up," while for the teacher of God, it means "giving away in order to keep". The concept of generosity rests ultimately on trust. The true meaning is considered alien to worldly thinking due to its clear reversal of the world's perspective.Discussion on Keeping Through Giving: Jevon Perra elaborated that non-physical things, such as love, compassion, creativity, curiosity, and courage, are kept through the act of giving them away. Giving away non-physical items is presented as a non-zero-sum game, unlike the physical world where giving away a dollar results in a loss of that dollar.Generosity and True Self-Interest: The text states that the teacher of God is generous out of self-interest, but this does not refer to the world's definition of self, as anything they cannot give away is considered valueless. This self-interest relates to the true self, which seeks abundance, connection, and forgiveness, in contrast to the separate self which operates under a zero-sum game.Atonement and the Recognition of Perfection: Jevon Perra discussed atonement as the recognition of one's inherent perfection and connection, noting it is not about paying a price for sins. Suffering in the perceived world is considered inevitable, but resistance to suffering is what causes pain.Generosity, Trust, and Transcendence: Brian Genovese agreed that trust and giving lead to a feeling of lightness and transcendence, citing the example of the yogi Yogananda. Jevon Perra noted that the search for spiritual achievement can itself become another path of separation if it focuses on external forms.Critique of Religious Structures and Artificial Experiences: Jevon Perra discussed how structures are built around genuine spiritual experiences to keep them alive, referencing figures like Joseph Smith and Muhammad. They argued that trying to artificially transfer someone else's connection with God diminishes the authentic, personal experience.Introduction of Patience (Characteristic Eight): Following the discussion on generosity, the group moved on to the eighth characteristic, patience. Soo Kim read that patience is natural to the teacher of God because they are certain of the outcome, even if the timing is unknown, allowing them to wait without anxiety.Patience and the Illusion of Achievement: Jevon Perra discussed how the world, where the desired outcome has not yet happened, is a world of anxiety because one feels the need to achieve and search. They concluded that the game of life is not about achievement, but about noticing the dynamic that achievement never truly brings lasting contentment.The Illusion of Happiness and Wanting: kristen and Jevon Perra discussed how happiness is often a fleeting sensation of wanting that is temporarily satiated before the desire returns. The concept of contentment is defined as the lack of wants.Noticing and Releasing Anxiety: Jevon Perra explained that the key to moving past these struggles is to notice one's own patterns and to practice releasing inner tension, often through meditative breathing exercises. Jevon Perra stressed that all suffering is self-imposed and is caused by clinging to things one believes are necessary for protection or survival.

On the first day of each month, we release Grace & Knowledge, a more in-depth article from Paul that allows him to expand on biblical truths beyond his weekly Wednesday's Word.Our prayer is that this resource helps you “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen” (2 Peter 3:18).In this month's Grace & Knowledge, Paul teaches that parenting, and every relationship, is transformed when we remember our own need for God's mercy and extend that same compassion to others.

Send a textDownload Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribePop culture. Cancel culture. Judeo-Christian culture. Everyone likes to talk about "culture," but what actually is it? One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, the poet and essayist T.S. Eliot, wrote a short book, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, attempting to answer exactly that question. Written in the latter days of World War Two, as the Allied nations began to realize that Germany's surrender was imminent and that it was up to them to rebuild European culture, Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture was part of a broader anxiety among European and American elites about what the postwar world would look like. In Chapter One, Eliot proposes three necessary ingredients for the existence of high culture: the durability of social classes, regionalism, and the balance of unity and diversity in religion. He also gestures towards two possible definitions of culture: first, simply that which makes life living, and secondly, the incarnation of the religion of a people. Jonathan and Ryan discuss Chapter One, as well as related matters, such as California cuisine.Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780190864651T.S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (in Christianity and Culture): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780156177351Richard M. Gamble's The Great Tradition: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781935191568C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780060652920Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780199538744H.I. Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Why I Am Now a Christian": https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/Charles Taylor's A Secular Age: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780674986916New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.comSupport the show

Hour 3 of A&G features... Clinton deposition on Epstein CA teacher starts UrineGate An encouraging Gender Bending Madness Update! Vance stopping fraud & banning pajamas See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Guest: Deric Keller - Certified Business Coach with Exit Momentum, former $10M business ownerEpisode Overview: Financial advisor David Chudyk interviews business coach Deric Keller about strategies that make businesses more profitable, sellable, and sustainable while improving owner wellbeing.Key Topics Discussed:1. Common Hiring MistakesFounders often hire to "fill a seat" rather than designing the role firstThis creates "Frankenstein roles" that are hard to replace and measureBest practice: Use the "elevate and delegate" model - categorize tasks by what you love/hate and are good/bad at, then delegate the bottom tier2. The Hustle TrapBusiness owners often wear burnout as a "badge of honor"Example: Owner doing parts runs while $60K in bids pile up (70-80% close rate)Key insight: Are you busy with the right things that generate revenue?Delegate tasks you hate/aren't good at to focus on high-value activities3. Tracking the Wrong MetricsMost founders track profit incorrectly by hiding expenses to avoid taxesThis hurts: credit applications, equipment financing, home purchases, and business valuationClean books = higher business value4. What Drives Business Valuation Factors that LOWER value:Over-reliance on one customer (lack of diversification)Weak human capital (high turnover, inexperienced staff)Missing systems/processes/intellectual propertyPoor financial predictabilitySingle vendor dependencyFactors that INCREASE value:Customer diversificationStrong, experienced teamDocumented systems and processesRecurring revenue (3-6 point multiple increase)Clean financial records5. Understanding Business MultiplesMost businesses sell for a multiple of EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, Amortization) or net profitTypical multiples: 1-3x (weak business) to 6-15x (strong business with recurring revenue, great systems)SaaS companies often valued on revenue multiples (though AI is currently driving these down)Who buys you affects the multiple (strategic buyer vs. PE firm)6. When Hustle Stops WorkingHard work creates bottlenecks when you're the decision-maker for everythingLeads to: burnout, key person dependency, slowed growthSolution: Decentralized command (like military model) - give teams the mission, let them executeBalance: You can't give equal TIME to business/family/health, but you can give equal INTENTION7. The 3D Diagnostic ModelDirection: Where is the company going? What are the goals?Design: What's the structure, systems, processes, financial model?Dynamic: What's the human element? Who might be holding you back?8. Leadership DevelopmentLeadership is a learned skill, not innate talentRequires repetition and practice ("reps")Best professionals in every field have coaches9. Work-Life Integration StrategiesBe strategic with focus and intentionWhen with family: phone down, fully presentGym time: have a plan, execute, leave energizedDaily practices: journaling, meditation, prayer, gratitudeLearn-teach-implement cycle: consume content, teach it to someone, apply it10. Definition of Wealth Deric's answer: Legacy - Making an impact that outlasts you, influencing people you'll never meet through the business owners and teams you coachCall to Action: Visit ExitMomentum.com to:Take a free business assessmentBook a 3D diagnostic call (no cost)Access free tools and insightsSchedule an in-person leadership labKey Takeaway: A sellable business is a good business, even if you never sell it. Building systems, diversifying revenue, and developing your team creates value regardless of your exit timeline.Links referenced in this episode:www.weeklywealthpodcast.com/endgameexitmomentum.com

Hereinschneien – Manchmal kommen Menschen einfach spontan zu Besuch. Sie schneien herein, ob man es will oder nicht – und das ganz unabhängig von der Jahreszeit.

Hour 3 of A&G features... Clinton deposition on Epstein CA teacher starts UrineGate An encouraging Gender Bending Madness Update! Vance stopping fraud & banning pajamas See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Text us with topic or guest suggestions!Advisory programs. It seems we either love them – or dread them. The same goes for our students. David and Audrey have encountered a lot of different advisory programs over the years and at various schools, but never one that is as comprehensive and as in tune with all of its stakeholders as the one at the International School of Bangkok. In this show we chatted with Andy Vaughan, Dean of Students at ISB and head architect of their advisory program. Andy is a Kiwi who has been living overseas with his family for the past 20 years teaching and leading in South East Asia. Currently working as the High School Dean of Students at International School Bangkok, Andy was previously the Athletics Director at ISB and in the past has taught Physical Education, Science, Health and Outdoor Education. He is passionate about establishing systems in schools that proactively ensure we support student well being to ensure all students feel like they belong and are cared for.Our guiding question was: “How can schools create effective advisory programs?”Here are some topics covered in this episode:Definition and Purpose of an Advisory ProgramThe Importance and Benefits of Having an Advisory ProgramPossible Settings and Locations for Conducting Advisory SessionsKey Participants in Designing the Advisory ProgramScheduling: When Advisory Sessions Typically OccurInsights and Lessons Learned from Designing and Implementing Advisory ProgramsResources shared in this episode: CASEL for SELRULER Approach for SELGeelong Grammar School - Positive Education/Psychology approach to wellnessMario Platform Wellness@ES - One approach to integrating wellness at the elementary school level Supporting Episodes: The Role of Dean of Students -- A Key Piece of the SEL-Academics Puzzle: Meet Andy Vaughan (Ep 83)Fostering Lasting Change in Schools: Four Factors to Consider, With Jim Reese (Ep 81)Get Well Soon(ish)! Laying the Groundwork for Much-Needed, Sustainable, Holistic Wellness Programs. (Ep 75)Service + Learning + Trip = Deep Understanding: Creating Teachable Moments with Kimberly Haley-Coleman of GlobeAware (Ep 97)RecordSupport the show Remember to access our Educators Going Global website for more information and consider joining our Patreon community at patreon/educatorsgoingglobal!Email us with comments or suggestions at educatorsgoingglobal@gmail.com Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.Listen on your favorite podcast app: connect from our share page.Music: YouTube. (2022). Acoustic Guitar | Folk | No copyright | 2022❤️. YouTube. Retrieved October 11, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOEmg_6i7jA.

What if the real reason you avoid getting savvy with money isn’t math? Vivian Tu, former Wall Street trader turned founder of “Your Rich BFF,” is back, and this time she’s asking us to rethink everything we think we know about money, including the complicated emotions that come with it. From paying an $8,000 lease break in her twenties to becoming the breadwinner in her marriage, Vivian opens up to Danielle about the evolution from being “smart” with money to being wise. But this isn’t just a finance conversation. It’s about shame. It’s about immigrant parents and sacrifice. It’s about dating red flags, prenups, consumerism, and the quiet fear so many women carry that they’re “bad with money.” Plus, the one investing mistake too many of us are making without even realizing it. In this episode of Question Everything, you’ll learn: The personal changes (freezing embryos, retiring her parents, starting a trust) that led her to write her new book Well Endowed The difference between being smart with money and being wise with money The lie that most women are being told about their money habits How to have hard conversations about money, from the first date to long-term partnership Why you should never get married without a prenup (don’t worry, even if you did, it’s not too late!) Why credit card debt is one of the most problematic types of debt and how to tackle it with a plan Why you can’t rely on willpower to be financially successful A statistic that shocks Vivian: 50% of couples don’t talk about money until they are already engaged The common mistake that some people are making with their retirement savings that will cost you in the long run Why Vivian calls consumerism a “trap” and urges us to “deinfluence” our lives How to curb lifestyle inflation with three simple questions A simple hack to save money on online purchases The moving lessons Vivian learned from her immigrant parents’ sacrifices, and how she’s using that knowledge to build generational wealth Why putting your credit score on your dating profile is suddenly a flex Vivan’s suggestions for how to have meaningful money conversations on the first date (without seeming obvious) How to reframe the big financial decisions of your twenties and thirties, and beyond Follow Vivian on TikTok @yourrichbff Make sure to check out Vivian’s book Well EndowedSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today is day 57 and we are in the section on the Second Article of the Apostles' Creed on Jesus Christ the Son of God. Today we are on the sixth line: “He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of The Virgin Mary” and studying question 57. 57. What is the relationship between Jesus' divine and human natures? At the moment of Jesus' conception, the divine nature of the one eternal Person of the Son was united to our human nature. Therefore, Jesus Christ is fully and truly both divine and human, but without sin. His two natures are united without division, separation, mixture, or change. (Luke 1:26–38; John 1:14; Philippians 2:6–8; Hebrews 2:10–16; 1 John 4:2–3; Definition of Chalcedon) We will conclude today with The Collect for The Presentation of Christ in the Temple found on page 603 of the Book of Common Prayer (2019). If you would like to buy or download To Be a Christian, head to anglicanchurch.net/catechism. Produced by Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Madison, MS. Original music from Matthew Clark. Daily collects and Psalms are taken from Book of Common Prayer (2019), created by the Anglican Church in North America and published by the Anglican Liturgical Press. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Catechism readings are taken from To Be a Christian - An Anglican Catechism Approved Edition, copyright © 2020 by The Anglican Church in North America by Crossway a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Welcome to the WHOOP Research Series, where we breakdown into the extensive, scientific research conducted by the WHOOP Performance Science team. On this week's episode, WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist, Dr. Kristen Holmes sits down with WHOOP Senior Research Scientist Dr. Greg Grosicki to unpack the latest WHOOP Research Study on Heart Rate Variability Coefficient of Variation or HRV-CV. Using data from 21,000+ WHOOP members and 2 million nights of sleep, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Grosicki reveal why day-to-day stability in your HRV may matter more than the number itself. HRV-CV proves to outperform traditional metrics in detecting the real impact of alcohol, sleep consistency, and metabolic health, making it a great measure of healthspan. By looking deeper into the study, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Grosicki explains how HRV-CV can help you program your training smarter, improve your healthspan and build autonomic resilience. This episode unpacks how measuring HRV-CV isn't just about performance, but risk stratification and understanding your physiology over-time, not just day-to-day. (01:11) Intro To The Study: Why Is HRV-CV Important? (04:09) HRV-CV and Risk Stratification(08:28) Definition of HRV-CV(11:40) What HRV-CV Indicates in Athlete Recovery(14:26) Breaking Down The WHOOP Study(17:13) HRV-CV Trends in Shift Workers(21:21) Why Is HRV-CV an Important Biomarker?(25:18) HRV-CV Trends in Individuals on GLP-1 Medications(26:29) The Weather vs. The Climate: HRV vs. HRV-CV(33:41) The Results: Breaking Down the Data(36:37) How HRV-CV Responds to Certain Behaviors(39:38) Trends Between HRV-CV Between Age, Biological Sex, and Body Mass Index(49:54) How To Improve HRV-CV(56:39) New Research Roles and Opportunities at WHOOPReferences:American Journal of Physiology PublicationHRV-CV: The Key Metric for Lifestyle Consistency and StabilitySupport the showFollow WHOOP: Sign up for WHOOP Advanced Labs Trial WHOOP for Free www.whoop.com Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Paul Auslander, President of SeaBridge Private Wealth, a division of SeaBridge Investment Advisors LLC joins the Chuck Toddcast for a wide-ranging conversation about the intersection of money, markets, and the current political moment. Auslander walks through how the political climate now factors directly into financial planning projections, noting that European indices doubled the S&P's performance last year as capital flows shift overseas, and that a growing number of wealthy clients are hedging by moving money out of the United States. He offers candid takes on the issues keeping investors up at night: the inevitability of Social Security cuts (though he argues simply pushing retirement age from 67 to 69 would stabilize the fund), the likely future of Social Security privatization, crypto's evolution from a technological revolution into a special interest that bought its own policy outcomes, and whether there's money to be made off bad Trump policies that are likely to be reversed. Auslander also explains why the bond market is a better barometer of economic health than the stock market, why private equity is sitting on mountains of sidelined capital, and why he remains cautiously bullish on 2026 — largely because AI is only in the "second inning" and massive disruption is still ahead. The conversation also ventures into territory financial planners don't usually discuss publicly. Auslander addresses whether the wealthy are worried the "pitchforks are coming for them," pointing to economic anxiety driving a spike in gun sales and a pop culture landscape that increasingly portrays corporations and the ultra-rich as villains. He breaks down the rise of family offices — private wealth management firms for the ultra-wealthy that take a long-term investment view — and explains why companies increasingly choose to stay private thanks to nearly unlimited private capital, rather than face the scrutiny of public markets. They also dig into the generational divide between investing and gambling, the casino-like nature of prediction markets, and the burden that post-Lehman Brothers insurance and regulatory requirements have placed on small businesses and regional banks that had nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis. Auslander closes with a pointed message: that Fed independence and the rule of law are paramount to economic stability, and that centrism — not ideological extremism — remains the best way to run the country. Go to https://zbiotics.com/CHUCKTODDCAST and use CHUCKTODDCAST at checkout for 15% off any first time orders of ZBiotics probiotics.” Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/chuck. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Thank you Wildgrain for sponsoring. Visit http://wildgrain.com/TODDCAST and use the code "TODDCAST" at checkout to receive $30 off your first box PLUS free Croissants for life! Link in bio or go to https://getsoul.com & enter code TODDCAST for 30% off your first order. American Finance Disclaimer: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.196% for well qualified borrowers. Call 866-885-1081, for details about credit costs and terms. Or https://apply.americanfinancing.net/thechucktoddcast Timeline: (Timestamps may vary based on advertisements) 00:00 Paul Auslander joins the Chuck ToddCast 01:30 Paul’s origin story 02:45 Financial planning was mostly done by insurance companies in 70’s 03:30 Northerners move to FL for taxes & weather, but FL is pushing it socially 06:00 Fiduciary responsibility is the line of demarcation in financial planning 07:00 Factoring the political climate into financial planning projections 08:30 European index doubled the performance of the S&P last year 09:30 Tax policy is generally the biggest concern for investors 12:00 A cut to social security payments is bound to happen 13:00 If you push retirement from 67 to 69 the SS fund becomes healthy 15:15 Social security privatization likely to happen in the future 17:15 Money to be made off bad Trump policies that are likely to go away? 18:15 Crypto became a special interest & bought support for pro crypto policy 20:00 Crypto is a revolution that predates Trump & will outlast him 21:30 Lesson to be learned from rise then collapse in price of silver? 22:30 Central banks are buying silver, gold and assets 24:00 How many people are hedging by moving money out of the U.S.? 24:45 Europe is spending big money on arms & infrastructure 26:00 Definition of a “Family Office” 28:30 Family office investments are increasingly popular & take the long view 30:00 Are the investors/wealthy worried the pitchforks are coming for them? 31:30 Economic anxiety driving a spike in gun sales 33:00 Pop culture portrays corporations & wealthy as the villains 34:30 Private equity has a lot of money on the sideline, looking for investments 37:30 The burden of insurance requirements on small business 40:00 Small & regional banks paying for the sins of Lehman Brothers 41:00 Companies stay private due to near unlimited private capital 41:45 Do young people like investing… or do they just like gambling? 42:45 Thoughts on prediction markets? 44:00 There’s a casino like approach to certain markets 45:15 If the house flips, you could see money get withdrawn from markets 46:30 How do Trump’s relationships with world leaders affect projections? 47:45 The bond market is more indicative of economic health than stock market 48:45 Uncertainty will impact earnings 49:15 Why are you feeling bullish on 2026? 51:30 AI is only in the 2nd inning. Disruption is coming 54:30 Thom Tillis sounds like a different man now that he’s retiring 55:30 Centrism seems like the best way to run the country 57:30 AI won’t be replacing financial advisors anytime soon 59:45 What’s one question you want every presidential candidate to answer? 1:00:15 Fed independence and rule of law are paramountSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Garth Heckman The David Alliance TDAgiantSlayer@Gmail.com    What do you want for your kids? Happiness? Great life? Money? Health?    Proverbs 24:16 For a righteous person falls seven times and rises again,   Rising After the Fall: The Resilience of the Righteous Scripture: “For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes.”(Proverbs 24:16)   1. The Reality of the Fall - the gun will go off, someone will get shot The first thing we notice in this verse is a sobering honesty: the righteous fall. Many people operate under the misconception that a life of faith is a life of perfection or a shield against gravity. But Solomon doesn't say the righteous might fall; he says they fall "seven times." In biblical terms, the number seven often represents completeness. This suggests that the righteous will face complete, repeated, and sometimes exhausting setbacks. The Fall is not a Failure of Faith: Falling is simply part of the human condition. Whether it is a moral lapse, a financial collapse, or an emotional breakdown, being "righteous" does not mean being “bulletproof." I love Mauy Thai because you get kicked and punched and elbowed and kneed and that is the real world… most people don't like to fight because they don't want to feel pain… but once you get over that you become deadly.  2. The Definition of Righteousness If both the righteous and the wicked face "calamity," what is the difference between them? The difference isn't found in the descent, but in the response. The Wicked: When they stumble, they stay down. Their foundation is built on circumstances, so when circumstances crumble, they are undone. The Righteous: Their righteousness isn't based on their ability to stand perfectly; it's based on their relationship with the One who pulls them back up. Righteousness is a matter of orientation, not just performance. 3. The Grace of the "Again" The power of this verse lies in two words: "rise again." This is the theology of the second chance (and the third, and the seventh). God is more interested in your recovery than your stumble. The "rising" is an act of grit fueled by grace. It implies that as long as there is breath in your lungs, the story isn't over. "Failure is not the opposite of success; it is a stepping stone to it. In the Kingdom of God, failure is often the classroom where we learn the most about God's strength and our own weakness."   Application: How Do We Rise? Acknowledge the Fall: Don't waste energy pretending you didn't trip. Honesty is the first step toward upward mobility. Reject the Label: You may have fallen, but you are not "a failure." You are still "the righteous" because of whose you are. Lean on the Lifter: We don't rise by our own bootstraps. We rise because we serve a God who reaches down into the pit. Conclusion: If you find yourself on the ground today—spiritually, mentally, or professionally—take heart. The "seven times" you've fallen are not a tally of your defeat, but a setup for your next rising. Dust yourself off; your Storyteller isn't done writing yet.   Would you like me to expand on this with some specific modern-day illustrations or perhaps draft a concluding prayer to go with it

For over a decade, Jordan Sather has stood at the front lines of the digital information war — building one of the earliest independent platforms decoding Q in real time, getting banned from nearly every major platform during the censorship purge, and continuing to investigate the deeper layers of power, influence, and corruption behind stories like Epstein, intelligence blackmail networks, Pizzagate and the battle between mainstream and alternative media. In this wide-ranging and grounded conversation, Jordan walks us through his personal awakening, the rise (and infiltration) of the Q movement, the truth and distortion surrounding the Epstein files, and the psychological traps that can derail even the most sincere truth-seekers. You will not find blind allegiance or doom-fueled paranoia here — it's a sober exploration of psyops, influence operations, and the responsibility that comes with knowing. If you care about discernment in a chaotic age, this episode is essential listening.Time Stamps (00:00) Episode Teaser (00:34) Opening Conversation (04:37) Understanding Ibogaine and Its Effects (06:25) The Healing Power of Ibogaine (25:24) The Definition of Self-Love That Was Revealed (33:35) Intergenerational Healing (40:51) Reverence vs. Worship: Understanding the Difference (42:43) Yerasimos' Ayahuasca Experience (46:27) The Role of the Medicine in Personal Development (52:54) The Supplemental Dose: Processing Emotions and Ancestral Trauma (01:00:30) Integration and the Challenges of Returning to Normal Life (01:03:09) The Relationship Between Self-Betrayal and Self-Love (01:15:20) The Importance of Intent and Reverence in Medicine Work (01:22:28) Surrender and Trust: Lessons from the Divine Realm (01:27:25) Setting Intentions and Personal Reflections (01:30:09) The Impact of Social Media and Technology (01:40:37) Voluntarism and Political Philosophy (01:43:49) Personal Growth and SpiritualityGuest Linkshttps://www.jordansather.com/ Connect with UsJoin our membership Friends of the TruthRise Above The Herd Take the Real AF Test NowDiscover Your Truth Seeker ArchetypeWatch all our episodesConnect with us on TelegramFollow us on InstagramAccess all our links

Die Zettelwirtschaft – Briefe, Urlaubskarten und Prospekte – alles durcheinander: Wenn der Schreibtisch so oder so ähnlich aussieht, herrscht eine Zettelwirtschaft.

A Note from James:In the first episode with Dr. Nicole McNichols, we talked about chemistry, myths, and why communication matters more than performance. This episode goes deeper—into biology, anatomy, dopamine, desire, and the mechanics of pleasure.There are a lot of myths around sex. Some are cultural. Some are Hollywood. Some come from bad science. And some just come from silence.This conversation gets specific. We talk about orgasm, desire, scheduling sex, the so-called “missionary problem,” novelty in long-term relationships, and why so much of what we assume about men and women sexually just isn't true.If Part 1 was about mindset, Part 2 is about understanding how sex actually works.Episode Description:What actually happens in the body during orgasm? Why does anticipation sometimes feel better than the act itself? And why are so many of our beliefs about sex simply wrong?In Part 2 of this three-part series, Dr. Nicole McNichols breaks down the biology of desire, the science of orgasm, and the myths that quietly sabotage long-term relationships.She explains why dopamine peaks during anticipation, why consistency—not intensity—is often key to orgasm, and why “missionary” might be underrated. They explore the anatomy of the clitoris (including research only fully mapped in 2006), the orgasm gap, responsive vs. spontaneous desire, and why scheduling intimacy can actually increase desire.This episode reframes sex not as performance, but as collaboration—an evolving, communicative process rooted in curiosity and growth.What You'll Learn:Why dopamine spikes during anticipation—and how to avoid the post-expectation letdownThe difference between spontaneous and responsive desire (for both men and women)Why consistency is physiologically critical during orgasmThe science behind the orgasm gap and what actually closes itWhy scheduling intimacy can increase frequency and desire—not kill spontaneityTimestamped Chapters:[00:02:00] No One Craves Bad Sex & The Myth of “Boring” Positions[00:03:18] Previously on Part 1: Porn Myths & Feeling Wanted[00:04:00] Chemistry, Pheromones & The Role of Safety[00:06:00] Sexual Growth Mindset & Compatibility[00:08:00] Fireworks vs. Communication[00:10:00] Anatomy, Diversity of Touch & The Clitoris Explained[00:12:00] Scripts, Feedback & How to Talk During Sex[00:17:00] Novelty, Micro-Novelty & Preventing Boredom[00:19:00] Wanting, Liking & Learning: The Pleasure Cycle[00:23:00] Expanding the Definition of Sex[00:25:00] The “Sex Recession” & Frequency Myths[00:27:00] Planning Intimacy & Scheduling Sex[00:31:00] Why Missionary Deserves a Rebrand[00:34:00] Internal Anatomy, the Clitoral Complex & Size Myths[00:39:00] What Is an Orgasm, Physiologically?[00:45:00] The Orgasm Gap & Why Fingering Matters[00:47:00] Consistency vs. “Faster & Harder”[00:49:00] Masturbation Myths & No Nut November[00:51:00] Refractory Period & Aging[00:55:00] Multiple Orgasms & What Research Shows[01:00:00] Love, Orientation & Novelty in Long-Term RelationshipsAdditional Resources:You Could Be Having Better SexNicole McNicholsHelen O'Connell – Research mapping full clitoral anatomy (MRI studies)Beverly Whipple – Orgasm research & physiological studiesA Moveable Feast – Referenced during discussionSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI Agents. AI Agents everywhere.

Raised inside the Church of Immortal Consciousness and taken from his mother under the banner of “spiritual purpose,” Danny Rensch grew up in a world where channeling spirits and chasing chess mastery were intertwined. In this gripping conversation, the International Master and co-founder of Chess.com opens up about being groomed for greatness by a chess-obsessed cult leader, the trauma of spiritual manipulation, the collapse of the collective that shaped him, and the long road toward forgiveness and integration. Danny shares how chess became both his escape and his evolution — an unsolvable, unforgiving game that mirrors life itself — and how he helped lead the digital revolution that brought the royal game to over 200 million players worldwide. This is a raw, nuanced exploration of consciousness, power, resilience, and what it really means to reclaim your own narrative.Time Stamps (00:00) Episode Teaser (00:34) Opening Conversation (04:37) Understanding Ibogaine and Its Effects (06:25) The Healing Power of Ibogaine (25:24) The Definition of Self-Love That Was Revealed (33:35) Intergenerational Healing (40:51) Reverence vs. Worship: Understanding the Difference (42:43) Yerasimos' Ayahuasca Experience (46:27) The Role of the Medicine in Personal Development (52:54) The Supplemental Dose: Processing Emotions and Ancestral Trauma (01:00:30) Integration and the Challenges of Returning to Normal Life (01:03:09) The Relationship Between Self-Betrayal and Self-Love (01:15:20) The Importance of Intent and Reverence in Medicine Work (01:22:28) Surrender and Trust: Lessons from the Divine Realm (01:27:25) Setting Intentions and Personal Reflections (01:30:09) The Impact of Social Media and Technology (01:40:37) Voluntarism and Political Philosophy (01:43:49) Personal Growth and SpiritualityGuest Linkshttps://www.chess.com/ Danny's incredible memoir “Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life”Connect with UsJoin our membership Friends of the TruthRise Above The Herd Take the Real AF Test NowDiscover Your Truth Seeker ArchetypeWatch all our episodesConnect with us on TelegramFollow us on InstagramAccess all our links

How often do you start a task without knowing exactly what “finished” looks like? That single missing step quietly fuels procrastination, perfectionism, and hours of unnecessary work. Instead of making progress, tasks expand, standards keep shifting, and you're left feeling busy—but not done. There's a simple productivity habit that fixes this instantly: define your finish […]

We Like Shooting - Ep 650 This episode of We Like Shooting is brought to you by: C&G Holsters (Code: WLSISLIFE) Midwest Industries (Code: WLSISLIFE) Primary Arms Night Fision (Code: WLSISLIFE) Blue Alpha Mitchell Defense (Code: WLS10) Bowers Group (Code: WLS) Swampfox Optics Guests: Matt Larosiere Patreon.com/fuddbusters Text Dear WLS or Reviews +1 743 500 2171  New Public Notes Page: https://dngrsfrdm.com/public/ BULLET POINTS Nielsen Device Boosterless Silencer System The Nielsen Device is a boosterless silencer system designed for direct-thread mounting on pistols, eliminating the need for a traditional Nielsen booster or piston. It enables suppressed shooting with standard direct impingement pistol designs without the torque issues associated with boosters. The system uses a proprietary boosterless mount and boosterless booster assembly for reliable function on various pistol calibers. Mission First Tactical (MFT) New Pocket Holster Mission First Tactical (MFT) introduces a new pocket holster designed for concealed carry, featuring a durable construction with a sticky exterior for secure pocket retention. It accommodates micro-compact pistols and supports quick draw access while preventing printing. The holster is compatible with popular subcompact firearms like the Sig P365 and Glock 43. Luth-AR Globe Charging Handle The Luth-AR Globe Charging Handle is an AR-15 charging handle featuring a large spherical knob for ambidextrous operation, designed to reduce fatigue during extended shooting sessions. It is constructed from 7075 T6 aluminum with a hard coat anodized finish and weighs 1.6 ounces. The handle allows for easier manipulation in various conditions, including gloved use, and is compatible with standard AR-15 upper receivers. Note (Nick) GAFS https://gafshub.com/wls GUN FIGHTS No one stepped into the arena this week. WLS IS LIFESTYLE Note pocket carry Thin Line Weapons NFA Collection Thin Line Weapons offers a selection of NFA-regulated firearms including suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns. The page lists products such as the Huxwrx Flow 556K suppressor and various SBR configurations. All items comply with National Firearms Act requirements and are available for purchase with appropriate ATF approvals. GOING BALLISTIC ATF's ‘Engaged in the Business' Rule Mirrors Canada's Firearms Confiscation Approach (Shooting Wire Analysis) The article argues that the ATF's Final Rule on the Definition of “Engaged in the Business” Selling Firearms and Ammunition, effective May 20, 2024, effectively enables a backdoor gun grab in the US similar to Canada's 2020 Order in Council banning over 1,500 firearms models. It claims the rule reclassifies private sales and occasional transfers as requiring a Federal Firearms License (FFL), mirroring Canada's prohibition-then-buyback strategy. The piece warns this erodes Second Amendment rights by criminalizing common firearm transactions without due process. Utah HB 431: GOP Rep. Cheryl Acton Pushes to Ban Open Carry on College Campuses (Savage) Utah Republican Representative Cheryl Acton has introduced House Bill 431 to prohibit the open carry of firearms on the campuses of public colleges and universities in the state. The bill targets loaded firearms visible to others, aiming to enhance campus safety amid concerns over gun violence. It applies specifically to institutions under the Utah Board of Higher Education. Tumbler Ridge Shooting Highlights Gun Control Arguments (Bearing Arms Analysis) (Savage) The article analyzes a shooting incident in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, where a man used a restricted firearm to kill two people before being stopped by an armed civilian. It critiques how gun control advocates exploit such tragedies to push for stricter laws despite existing severe restrictions on firearms in Canada. The piece argues that the incident demonstrates the consistent pattern of gun control arguments relying on emotional appeals rather than evidence of effectiveness. Bearing Arms: Reason Transgender Gun Ban Proposal Won't Advance (Savage) The article discusses a proposed federal rule by the Biden administration to prohibit firearm purchases by individuals with gender transition-related medical diagnoses, such as gender dysphoria. It argues the rule faces significant legal and political hurdles, including likely injunctions from courts that have blocked similar ATF actions. The author asserts it lacks momentum and is destined to fail. Shooting News Weekly Critique of Evidence-Free Claims on Guns and Public Safety Conflict (Savage) The article criticizes a purported expert's assertion of a conflict between concealed carry and public safety, labeling it as evidence-free hackery. It argues that such claims lack empirical support and misrepresent data on concealed carry impacts. The piece defends concealed carry by highlighting the absence of credible evidence linking it to increased public safety risks. New Mexico House Bill 86 (HB 86) Sweeping Gun Control Measure Scheduled for Hearing (Savage) New Mexico's House Bill 86 proposes comprehensive gun control measures including bans on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and ghost guns, along with red flag laws and restrictions on open carry. The bill is set for a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on February 17, 2026. Sponsored by Rep. Rehm, it aims to address gun violence through multiple regulatory changes. REVIEWS Review: Jaqin Ta'Sox from Connecticut From; Jaqin Ta'Sox: Review I still think y'all are gay. But, regarding ep 647. I agree with Jerambay, 99%. I agree with Shawn as far as the narrative being twisted, disagree with most of his thoughts on the agents. Everyone who can legally carry should be able carry everywhere, full stop. The narrative of him carrying a 320 with spare mags to “cause chaos” is BS. The difference in Rittenhouse and the Minisota Nut, is in their choices. Rittenhouse didn't look for danger, danger found him, he ran away, then defended himself. Minisota nut, put himself in the middle of a wave of insanity. Had he gave the agents a buffer, he could've yelled and cursed all he wanted. Tragic, but justified.   Review: From Jeff E Comment only. Liberals are the biggest fucking idiots. They try to tell us how Trump is a dick tator, while they do everything in their power to dismantle the Constitution, specifically 2A. The very things that were setup to limit government, not to limit us. Sadly, they don't teach this in school anymore, (about Constitution limiting government). While like in Illinois they call our politicians “lawmakers”, when they should be called servants. Jeff E Five Squares Review: Anonymous Coward from Pennsylvania Anonymous Coward from Under My Desk Great show. Worth five squares. Ask me about my weiner. Before we let you go – JOIN GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA We'd love if you supported the show, join Agency 171 at agency171.com. Lot's of prizes, rewards and kick ass swag. No matter how tough your battle is today, we want you here fight with us tomorrow. Don't struggle in silence, you can contact the suicide prevention line by dialing 988 from your phone. Remember – Always prefer Dangerous Freedom over peaceful slavery. We'll see you next time! Nick – @busbuiltsystems | Bus Built Systems Jeremy – @ret_actual | Rivers Edge Tactical Aaron – @machinegun_moses Savage – @savage1r Shawn – @dangerousfreedomyt | @camorado.cam | Camorado