Podcasts about elements

If your company delivers great products, excellent service, and competitive pricing, why are customers still treating you like a commodity?   Many construction and building material companies believe they're creating value, yet struggle to explain exactly why customers choose them over competitors. As markets soften and pricing pressure increases, leaders who fail to articulate their true value often get pulled into a race to the bottom. In this episode, Bradley Hartmann explores Bain & Company's Elements of Value Pyramid and reveals why customers frequently buy for reasons far beyond price, product quality, or innovation.   In this episode you will How to identify the specific forms of value that make customers more loyal and less price-sensitive. Why ease of doing business, risk reduction, expertise, and confidence often matter more than lower pricing. Five practical leadership questions that help uncover hidden value, strengthen differentiation, and improve margins.   Listen now to discover how understanding and communicating your unique value can help you win stronger customer relationships, command better margins, and avoid competing solely on price.   Click HERE to download the B2B Elements of Value Pyramid or HERE for the interactive website by Bain.   At Bradley Hartmann & Company, we help construction teams improve sales, leadership,  and communication by reducing miscommunication, strengthening teamwork, and bridging language gaps between English and Spanish speakers. To learn more about our product offerings, visit bradleyhartmannandco.com. The Construction Leadership Podcast dives into essential leadership topics in construction, including strategy, emotional intelligence, communication skills, confidence, innovation, and effective decision-making. You'll also gain insights into delegation, cultural intelligence, goal setting, team building, employee engagement, and how to overcome common culture problems—whether you're leading a crew or managing an entire organization. Have topic ideas or guest recommendations? Contact us at info@bradleyhartmannandco.com.   New podcasts are dropped every Tuesday and Thursday.     This episode is brought to you by The Construction Spanish Toolbox —the most practical way for construction teams to learn jobsite-ready Spanish in just minutes a day over 6 months.        

Ever feel like your practice is collecting dust, waiting for the next full moon? It's time to take the magic out of the ritual closet and sweep it into the kitchen, the boardroom, and even your morning coffee.Tahverlee breaks down 26 practical, delightfully witchy ways to turn your everyday mundane moments into potent, sacred acts. Magic isn't just about elaborate ceremonies; it's woven into the boundaries you set, the clothes you wear, and the way you flirt with the universe.What's Brewing in This Episode:How to program your day before your feet even touch the floor.Simple shifts to turn your home into a living, breathing sanctuary.Using your personal style and fierce boundaries as protective shields and manifestation magnets.Learning to dance with the natural rhythms of nature, spirit, and your own body.You are the ultimate co-creator of your reality. Tune in, get inspired, and let's sprinkle some magic onto your to-do list!Join us for The Elements of Spirit. Get FREE access when you pre-order any of Tahverlee's books at Tahverlee.com. *************************Tahverlee is a Social Impact Entrepreneur, Author, Artist, High Priestess, Ritualist, and Initiate of the Sacred Way. Visit Moon Temple Mystery School for ancient teachings for our modern world, spiritual coaching, and everything you need to know as you walk your awakening path. Gather with us for Sacred Sunday, a FREE open temple gathering.Join Witch School to unlock the Magic within.Get Tahverlee's Sacred Gifts, your FREE pass to a magical awakening journey. Find all of Tahverlee's books and her oracle deck at Tahverlee.com.Watch this and all episodes of the Moon Temple Mystery School Podcast on YouTube. Learn more about Tahverlee:Moon Temple Mystery SchoolTahverlee.com Contact Tahverlee directly:Tahverlee@MoonTempleSchool.com Follow Tahverlee:InstagramTikTokYouTube Theme Music by Les Konley | Produced by Les Konley

Humility is not a weakness or a sign you're a pushover, instead it's a mental health tool that just might be exactly what our loneliness epidemic and anxiety culture are desperately craving. Humility is an accurate, grounded sense of who you are. And that grounded sense of self is a foundation for confidence, deeper connection, and holistic mental health. Here's what we'll explore this episode: There are four research-backed types of humility to focus on: Relational humility — how you hold yourself in relation to others; not above, not below Intellectual humility — holding beliefs with openness; curiosity over certainty Cultural humility — recognizing the limits of your own cultural lens and genuinely welcoming differences Existential humility — making peace with uncertainty, impermanence, and the big unanswerable questions of human life You might be doing great in one area and struggling in another (that's normal). These types aren't perfectly clean categories, but they offer areas for self-reflection and focus as you work to boost your humility and emotional wellbeing throughout the month.  With these areas in mind, we'll use researcher Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren's framework to build humility through three core ingredients: Know Yourself — honest self-awareness of strengths and limits, without self-preoccupation Check Yourself — reducing defensiveness and the need to protect your ego Go Beyond Yourself — cultivating empathy and humility as a deep relational practice These three ingredients aren't just a nice framework for self improvement, they're a pathway to reducing loneliness, increasing connection, and building the kind of holistic healing and joy that Joy Lab is all about. If you're in the Joy Lab Program, your first Experiment will help you locate yourself within these four types and start the work.   About: The Joy Lab Podcast is an Ambie-nominated podcast that blends science and soul to help you cope better with stress, anxiety, and depression. It's hosted by integrative psychiatrist Dr. Henry Emmons and holistic mental health researcher Dr. Aimee Prasek. The podcast is best paired with the Joy Lab Program. Bonus: spread some joy and keep this podcast ad-free by donating (Joy Lab is powered by the nonprofit Pathways North and your donations are tax-deductible).    Like and follow Joy Lab on Socials:  Instagram Linkedin Watch on YouTube     Sources and Notes for our Element of Humility: Joy Lab Program: Take the next leap in your wellbeing journey with step-by-step practices to help you build and maintain the elements of joy in your life.  More on C.S. Lewis from the C.S. Lewis Foundation. Book: Humble by Daryl Van Tongeren, PhD Hagá & Olson. 'If I only had a little humility, I would be perfect': Children's and adults' perceptions of intellectually arrogant, humble, and diffident people. Access here. Nielsen & Marrone. Humility: Our current understanding of the construct and its role in organizations. Access here. Porter et al. Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility. Access here. Van Tongeren et al. Humility. Access here.  Weidman et al. The psychological structure of humility. Access here. Wright et al. The psychological significance of humility. Access here. Wendell Berry's book Standing by Words   Key moments: [00:00:00] Welcome + intro to Joy Lab's Element of Humility — solo episode with Dr. Aimee Prasek [00:00:30] Clearing up the bad takes: what humility is not — not weakness, not martyrdom, not dismissing your talents [00:01:00] The social science of humility: why we're drawn to humble people from mid-adolescence on, and why it primes us for connection [00:02:00] Humility as antidote to certainty culture and self-destructive perfectionism; the formal definition unpacked [00:02:45] C.S. Lewis on humility as self-forgetfulness — and the powerful paradox it reveals about hyper self-focus [00:03:30] The reframed Lewis quote: "Humility is not thinking less of yourself — it's thinking of yourself less often" [00:04:15] Introducing the four research-backed types of humility: relational, intellectual, cultural, and existential [00:05:00] Deep dive into intellectual, cultural, and existential humility — leaning into curiosity over certainty [00:06:00] Why humility is harder than other Elements — and why it's worth it anyway [00:07:00] The obstacles: certainty culture, fear of being wrong, pressure to perform vs. just be [00:08:00] Ego protection, the stress response, and why humility can feel like a physical threat to the nervous system [00:08:45] Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren's three ingredients for building humility: Know Yourself → Check Yourself → Go Beyond Yourself [00:09:45] Humility as medicine for the loneliness epidemic, anxiety, and depression — why culture is craving this right now [00:10:30] What's coming next: knowing ourselves, plus your first Joy Lab Program Experiment [00:11:00] Closing poem: The Real Work by Wendell Berry   Full transcript here   Please remember that this content is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice and is not a replacement for advice and treatment from a medical professional. Please consult your doctor or other qualified health professional before beginning any diet change, supplement, or lifestyle program. Please see our terms for more information. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call the NAMI HelpLine: 1-800-950-6264 available Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. – 10 p.m., ET. OR text "HelpLine" to 62640 or email NAMI at helpline@nami.org. Visit NAMI for more. You can also call or text SAMHSA at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

How are the elements used in ritual?

I would love to hear from you! Send me a message if you would be interested in me speaking at your church!Welcome to Carlton Brethren Church!Today's message is from Exodus 22.1-23.33 “Elements of Godly Living”Let's get some stuff straightened out!Carlton Brethren Church1096 270th StGarwin, IA 50632Listen to last week's message:Exodus 21:1-36“Getting Some R&R”http://joshmiller.buzzsprout.comWe now have over 300 episodes!Listen and be blessed by studying God's word!#grateful #praise #worship #christiantiktoc #Jesus #God #church #sermon #preaching #church #safe #secure #love #respect #hope #compassion #healing #refugepastorjosh Support the showThank you for joining me!  I pray these message enhance your walk with the Lord. 

Dr Susan Trachman is a Psychiatrist with 30 years of experience specializing in treating medically unexplained illnesses through the lens of psychiatry. She helps patients delves into the brain-body connection, and addresses the damaging misconception that a condition is "all in your head.  Follow her work at www.susanbtrachmanmd.com, and check out her new book, It's Not Just in Your Head: Demystifying the Brain-Body Connection in Medical Illness. Go to www.kidsandart.org to follow and support this month's highlighted nonprofit, helping children with cancer and their families through Art.

Buckle up and get ready for a high-energy, screen-free adventure perfect for your next family road trip! In this episode of Family Trivia with Dad and Lad, we test your knowledge on the natural elements that shape our world: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.This kid friendly episode is packed with mind-blowing fun facts to spark awesome discussions in the car or around the dinner table.Turn off the tablets, power up your brains, and let's see who will be crowned the Elemental Master of the family! Don't forget to pause the audio to lock in your answers before Dad calls them out!Fun News! Family Trivia with Dad and Lad has a MERCH STORE!You can find, T-Shirts, Hoodies, Hats and more for you or that Trivia Loving friend or family member! Visit the link below to go to the Family Trivia with Dad and Lad Merch Store!https://www.bonfire.com/store/dadladtrivia/

People pleasing is often misunderstood as simply being "too nice," but for many people it's much deeper than that. It can become a nervous system survival strategy shaped by childhood conditioning, fear of rejection, emotional hypervigilance, and the longing to feel safe, accepted, loved, and connected. In this episode, Colette explores people pleasing through the lens of Ayurveda, nervous system healing, and emotional awareness. She shares how these patterns can disconnect us from our true nature and why healing involves much more than simply "setting boundaries" or "learning to say no." Drawing from both Ayurvedic wisdom and her own personal journey, Colette discusses how chronic people pleasing can manifest as anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, exhaustion, over-responsibility, insomnia, digestive imbalance, nervous system depletion, and emotional disconnection. She also explores the connection between people pleasing and the nervous system's fawn and freeze responses, and why the body may still perceive boundaries as unsafe even when the rational mind knows they are necessary. In this episode, you'll learn: Why people pleasing is often a nervous system adaptation rather than a behaviour The connection between people pleasing, the fawn response, and freeze response How childhood experiences can shape patterns of self-abandonment The Ayurvedic understanding of people pleasing through Vata and Pitta imbalances Why boundaries alone are often not enough for healing How chronic hypervigilance impacts the body, mind, digestion, hormones, and nervous system How Ayurveda supports nervous system repair, emotional awareness, embodiment, and self-trust Gentle practices to help reconnect with your voice, truth, and authentic self Check out Colette's online services:  Online Consultations - https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/consultations Private Digestive Reset Cleanse - https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/digestive-reset-cleanse Online Daily Habits for Holistic Health Program - https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/daily-habits Reset-Restore-Renew Program - https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/reset-restore-renew Have questions on Colette's online services? Book a FREE 15 min Services Enquiry Call here. https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/consultations Do I have an accumulation of ama/toxins in my body? Take this quiz to find out  https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/resources Elements of Ayurveda Podcast Community This new online community was created for those who wish to go deeper into Ayurveda, together. Inside, you'll find: Monthly live Zoom meetups  Early access to podcast episodes  Member forums for discussion and Q&A  Mindfulness and self-care practices  Seasonal group challenges and reflections This community is a conscious, supportive space to connect, learn, and grow with others walking the Ayurvedic path. Come say hello, introduce yourself, and be part of this living, breathing community. Join the new Elements of Ayurveda Podcast Community - https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/community   Stay connected on the Elements social media: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/elementsofayurvedapodcast/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/elementshealingandwellbeing Thank you for listening! If this episode supported you, please consider leaving a review and if you think this information would be helpful to family or friends, please share this episode so we can spread this wisdom of Ayurveda.  Stay tuned and stay aligned with the Elements of Ayurveda Podcast. Thanks for listening!

In episode 574 of 'Coffee with Butterscotch,' the brothers check in on the new How Many Dudes box art with some real click-through numbers, then dive into Far Far West, a co-op shooter where you're a robot cowboy fighting skeletons and it somehow all works. They dig into what makes it click, why the Joker system is smart, and whether it can stay fun as the min-maxers inevitably show up.Support How Many Dudes!Official Website: https://www.bscotch.net/games/how-many-dudesTrailer Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgQM1SceEpISteam Wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3934270/How_Many_Dudes00:00 Cold Open00:28 Introduction and Welcome01:16 How Many Dudes Box Art11:26 Far Far West Nail or Whiff25:05 Exploring the Game Mechanics29:36 Rogue-like Elements and Progression35:17 Design Aspects and Player Experience40:10 Balancing Fun and Challenge47:53 Overall Impressions and RecommendationsTo stay up to date with all of our buttery goodness subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts (apple.co/1LxNEnk) or wherever you get your audio goodness. If you want to get more involved in the Butterscotch community, hop into our DISCORD server at discord.gg/bscotch and say hello! Submit questions at https://www.bscotch.net/podcast, disclose all of your secrets to podcast@bscotch.net, and send letters, gifts, and tasty treats to https://bit.ly/bscotchmailbox. We also built Ludokit, a tool for managing store pages, promo art, localization, achievements, credits, fonts, change logs, and more. Check it out at https://ludokit.com!Finally, if you'd like to support the show and buy some coffee FOR Butterscotch, head over to https://moneygrab.bscotch.net. ★ Support this podcast ★

Einstein famously didn't say "God doesn't play dice with the universe". But what about cards? That periodic table you stared at in high school has a surprising origin story; once you hear it, you can't unsee it

Congratulations! You have been made the cafe manager! Now what? Well, you are now occupying one of the most critical roles in all of coffee retail. As a leader you have a lot of growth opportunities and can make a massive difference as you serve the company, the staff, and the customers. The first six months - a year is a pretty critical time where you either build trust and establish healthy outlooks and habits, or you succumb to the dysfunction and stress that management without structure and purpose falls into.  Today we are going to go over practices, mindsets, and approaches to your role and the work of management that are proven to set you and everyone else up for success vs the all too typical burn-out that seemingly is baked it to the manager role. It does not have to be! This episode shows you how.    1:1 CONSULTING + COACHING! If you are a cafe owner and want to work one on one with me to bring your shop to its next level and help bring you joy and freedom in the process then email  chris@keystothshop.com Book a free call now:  https://calendly.com/chrisdeferio/30min    Related episodes:  229 : 7 Tips for New Managers 248 : The 5 Elements of Resourcing your Team 261 : The Basics of Managing Managers 226 : The Art of being Indispensable at Work w/Bruce Tulgan 179 : What you MUST Know About Employee Culture w/ Stan Slap 172 : Why Tracking Performance is a Must! 028 : Why it's Ok to be the Boss w/ Bruce Tulgan : A guide to defining and fighting the under management epidemic in your cafe so you can be the manager your staff need 018: Hiring, Culture, and the Future of your Shop 013 : Leadership & Management Master Class w/ Eva Attia : Leadership | management | hiring | career 004: Leadership in the Cafe : 10 Steps to Being a People First Leader 258 : Prioritizing your Mental Health in the New Year w/ Dr. Lara Pence 244 : Top 10 Ways to Lose Employees

What should curlers actually be doing in the offseason? With so much conflicting fitness advice online, it can be hard to know what matters most. In this episode, I break down the five essential elements that every curler's offseason training program should include to improve performance, reduce injury risk, and prepare for a stronger season on the ice. From assessments and strength training to conditioning, mobility, and long-term planning, you'll learn what separates a curling-specific program from a generic fitness routine. Whether you're training independently, following a program, or working with a coach, these five pillars can help ensure your efforts this summer translate into better performance next season. EP Lab's next training block begins June 8. Join now to access the final weeks of Phase 1 and receive both our full gym and limited-equipment training options designed specifically for curlers. Check out some past episodes: Episode 65: Why you aren't a better brusher Episode 54: Owning the position and creating force during brushing Episode 56: Core training To stay as up-to-date as possible, make sure to join the Empowered Performance newsletter and to follow me on Instagram at @empoweredperformance   All mentioned resources are available in the show notes on my website at www.empoweredperformance.ca/podcast  

Dr. Edwin "Ted" Bergin is Professor and Chair of Astronomy at the University of Michigan. Ted is an astrochemist who is interested in understanding how and why stars, planets, and living organisms came to be. He examines the formation of stars and planets to better understand the origins of Earth and life on Earth. Since the newly forming stars and planets he studies are so far away, Ted uses astronomical techniques to determine the presence and abundance of the molecules needed to form living things. When he's not pondering the origins of life, Ted loves spending time with his family. Recently, he began a quest to fulfill his lifelong dream of learning to play the guitar. Ted enjoys old school 1970s rock and roll music, and he is slowly working his way up to playing pieces like George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun". He completed his undergraduate training in Astronomy at Villanova University, and he was awarded his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Massachusetts. Before joining the faculty at the University of Michigan, Ted worked as an astronomer/astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Ted has been awarded the University of Michigan Henry Russel Award for his exceptional scholarship and teaching. This is the highest award given to Assistant Professors. Ted joins us to talk about his experiences in life and science.

The Heavy Elements Riverside special is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Riverside – Out of MyselfRiverside – Artificial SmileRiverside – Loose Heart (live)Riverside – Beyond The EyelidsRiverside – Volte-Face (live)Riverside – The Same River (live)Riverside – Hybrid TimesRiverside – Forgotten LandRiverside – New Generation SlaveRiverside – Saturate MeRiverside – Egoist Hedonist (live)Riverside – Acid RainRiverside […]

Why is it so difficult to truly rest, even when we're exhausted? In this episode, Colette explores the deeper Ayurvedic understanding of rest, nervous system regulation, productivity culture, and the relationship between Vata and Pitta imbalance. Many people today are living in a constant state of overstimulation and "doing," leaving the nervous system unable to fully soften and restore. Colette looks at how modern culture often praises dysregulation when it looks productive, why rest can feel emotionally difficult, and how busyness can become a way of avoiding deeper feelings and disconnection from ourselves. She covers the following in this episode: Why many people struggle to truly rest The Ayurvedic understanding of nervous system dysregulation How productivity can become connected to identity and self-worth Why slowing down can sometimes feel unsafe The connection between rhythm, dinacharya and nervous system safety Why summer season can become surprisingly depleting Gentle Ayurvedic practices to calm Vata and soften excess Pitta Reconnecting with enoughness, presence and restoration This episode is a gentle reminder that rest is not laziness or something we earn only after burnout. From an Ayurvedic perspective, rest is an essential part of healing, restoration and sustainable wellbeing. Elements of Ayurveda Podcast Community This new online community was created for those who wish to go deeper into Ayurveda, together. Inside, you'll find: Monthly live Zoom meetups  Early access to podcast episodes  Member forums for discussion and Q&A  Mindfulness and self-care practices  Seasonal group challenges and reflections This community is a conscious, supportive space to connect, learn, and grow with others walking the Ayurvedic path. Come say hello, introduce yourself, and be part of this living, breathing community. Join the new Elements of Ayurveda Podcast Community    Check out Colette's online services: Online Consultations Digestive Reset Cleanse Online Daily Habits for Holistic Health Program Reset-Restore-Renew Program Have questions on Colette's online services? Book a FREE 15 min Services Enquiry Call here. Do I have an accumulation of ama/toxins in my body? Take this quiz to find out Stay connected on the Elements social media: Instagram Facebook Thank you for listening! If this episode supported you, please consider leaving a review and if you think this information would be helpful to family or friends, please share this episode so we can spread this wisdom of Ayurveda.  Stay tuned and stay aligned with the Elements of Ayurveda Podcast. Thanks for listening!

Edition 455 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Abstracted – SirensCrimson Glory – TriskaidekaElegacy – Theory of SinVanderlust – Humanity 3.0 – The New CanaanPyramid Theorem – Open Hearts (feat. James LaBrie) Now To Then: HeKzVenomDominationThe ChainsTerra NovaLine In The SandJourney’s End?Hashashiyyin Atomic Symphony – Oath TakerCompile – IllusiveZero Hour […]

In this episode we're diving into one of the oldest and most universal frameworks for understanding yourself, the four elements, tracing their roots from ancient Babylon to Ayurveda and breaking down the practices, rituals, and meditations that bring each one to life and how you can work with these energies to bring more balance back to your life. Yoga Nidra TT Summer Cohort is open for enrollment get all the details here and save 20% off through May 31st with code NIDRA75 Find Your Meditation Match- ⁠⁠⁠Take the quiz here⁠⁠⁠ More Mindful in Minutes ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join the free 5-day Nervous system reset to overcome overwhelm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Books ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Order Meditation For The Modern Family⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You Are Not Your Thoughts: An 8-Week Anxiety Guided Meditation Journal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ **⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download 4 sample days from You Are Not Your Thoughts Here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠** Join MIM on Patreon here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Order Meditation For The Modern Family⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Let's Connect Email Kelly your questions at info@yogaforyouonline.com Follow Kelly on instagram @yogaforyouonline Please rate, subscribe and review (it helps more than you know!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edition 454 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Devin Townsend – Enter The CityGreen Carnation – Sweet to the Point of BitterThe Vendetta Ride – DreamsInner Vitriol – Weaker and FadingGeoff Tate – Power Now To Then: AssignmentWith The End Comes SilenceChristineSilent NationEntering The UniverseEnd Of The MachineAll AboutProgressive Changes […]

Tormore, Portintruan, and the Long Game of WhiskyShow Notes: www.whiskeyinmyweddingring.com/reviews/ep-237-sukhinder-singh-tormore-portintruan-elixir-spirits-show-notesThanks to Sukhinder for joining me, and thanks to Kurt Maitland and the Manhattan Whiskey Club for the introduction!If you haven't joined the Patreon community yet, please consider doing so at patreon.com/whiskeyinmyweddingringAs of December 2025, the $25/month bottle share club level is sold out!Join at the $5/month level for first shot at an open spot when a member retires and to keep receiving ad-free episodes via Patreon. If you haven't yet, please follow Whiskey in my Wedding Ring and the Whiskey Ring Podcast on Instagram and Facebook.Elixir Distillers Website: https://elixirdistillers.com/Tormore Distillery Website: https://www.tormoredistillery.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tormoredistillery/Portintruan Distillery Website: https://www.portintruan.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/portintruan/Single Malts of Scotland Website: https://singlemalts.com/Port Askaig Website: https://portaskaig.com/Elements of Islay Website: https://www.elementsofislay.com/Black Tot Rum Website: https://blacktot.com/Elixir Trails Website: https://elixirtrails.com/The Whisky Exchange Website: https://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/

Review Guide: Black-Letter LawMost first-year law students master the stories and cases but struggle to grasp the mechanical rules that truly unlock exam success. This episode cuts through the chaos, revealing how to turn dense judicial opinions into precise, actionable law—step by step. If you're tired of superficial recognition and ready to command the black letter law with certainty, this is your blueprint to mastery.You'll discover why most law students fall into the trap of passive familiarity and how recognition knowledge sabotages exam performance. We break down the six pillars of rule mastery—elements, definitions, tests, standards, exceptions, and defenses—that build a rock-solid foundation for legal competence. Through concrete examples like the zone of danger in negligence or the six elements of breach, you'll learn to dissect complex doctrines into bite-sized, memorization-proof checklists.We explore the crucial difference between recognition and usable knowledge—why the ability to recall and apply rules from memory makes all the difference on exam day. You'll learn practical techniques, like the nine-part template for every doctrine and creating attack sheets—the ultimate exam toolkit that distills weeks of study into a single, portable map. With these tools, you'll transform overwhelming fact patterns into a logical sequence of targeted legal inquiries.Most importantly, you'll understand how to execute under pressure—using the because rule to explicitly connect facts to law and avoiding common traps like missing elements or fuzzy concepts. By the end, you'll see law school not as a game of luck, but as a machine you can master, engineer, and eventually innovate upon.Perfect for any law student aiming to break out of recognition and into true mastery—this episode arms you with the mental architecture to ace your exams and build the foundational skills for a brilliant legal career.Key topics:The distinction between case story and black letter law – the cargo vs. the delivery vehicleSix pillars of rule mastery: elements, definitions, tests, standards, exceptions, defensesThe importance of mechanical precision over policy debates and vague conceptsThe universal nine-part template for digesting doctrines: name, purpose, elements, triggers, exceptions, defenses, remedies, traps, relevanceRecognition vs. usable knowledge: moving from passive familiarity to active masteryPractical techniques for issue spotting, attack sheets, and the iconic "because" rule for analytical clarityThe importance of training your mind to retrieve and reproduce legal rules flawlessly under pressureThe hidden traps: missing elements, emotional reasoning, fuzzy language, and the role of surgical precision in excelling

Grab your frosted tips and your most questionable life choices, because this week Rob, Dave, and Kurt are stepping onto the roller coaster of madness that is Fear (1996) Is it a gritty psychological thriller about a father protecting his daughter? Or is it an accidental comedic masterpiece where a future Oscar nominee carves "Nicole" into his chest and declares war on a German Shepherd? We're leaning heavily toward the latter Join the guys as they break down: The Dirk Diggler Defense: Would Mr. Walker have been more chill if he knew Marky Mark was a future A-lister? Red Flag Bingo: Counting every time Reese Witherspoon's Nicole should have sprinted in the opposite direction. Peak '90s Aesthetic: A deep dive into the baggy jeans, the angst, and that infamous needle drop of The Sundays' "Wild Horses." The MVP of Unhinged: Deciding once and for all if David McCall is a terrifying villain or just the world's most dramatic teenager.   Chapters 0:00 - Kicking Off the Show and Podcast Introduction 1:20 - Analyzing a Listener's 'Let Me In' Dilemma 3:03 - Introducing the Hosts and Teasing The Movie 4:26 - Diving Into Yearbook Memories and Crisco Confessions 8:10 - Unpacking Siskel & Ebert's 'Fear' Reviews 12:20 - Behind the Scenes of 'Fear' and 90s Thriller Tropes 16:19 - Deconstructing the 'Final Dad' Trope in 'Fear' 21:30 - Wahlberg's First Big Movie Role in 'Fear' 27:31 - Analyzing Reese Witherspoon and Alyssa Milano's Performances 30:58 - 'Fear' at the MTV Awards and Favorite Movie Moments 37:12 - Unforgettable and Cringeworthy Quotes from 'Fear' 45:51 - Breaking Down the Most Memorable Scenes in 'Fear' 51:53 - Unbelievable and Questionable Moments in 'Fear' 57:12 - Identifying the Most Quintessential 90s Elements in 'Fear' 59:23 - Crafting Greeting Card Messages and Favorite Songs 1:02:23 - Who Was the Real Most Valuable Player in 'Fear' 1:03:34 - The Most Unhinged and Intense Scenes from Mark Wahlberg 1:12:43 - Assessing 'Fear's' Rewatch Value and Final Judgement 1:16:33 - How to Connect with the Podcast and Share Your Thoughts 1:20:06 - Discovering New Facts and Funky Bunch Trivia 1:23:52 - Wrapping Up 'Fear' and Teasing Next Week's Show   Connect with Totally 80s and 90s Recall  Website: https://bleav.com/shows/totally-80s-and-90s-recall/  Email: 80s90srecall@gmail.com  Voicemail: (509) 426-4542  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/80s90srecall   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if the biggest thing blocking your manifestations… isn't your mindset—but the energy your body is still holding onto? In this expansive conversation, I'm joined by Trysha Berndt, AKA The Capacity Queen, a Nervous System and Emotional Regulation Coach who specializes in blending neuroscience, somatics, and soul to create experiences, ceremonies, and workshops that help people expand their capacity for life, healing, and manifestation. Together, we dive into the connection between manifestation, nervous system regulation, Kundalini energy, emotional release, and what it actually means to feel safe in your body. Trysha shares her personal journey through postpartum depression, healing, and the synchronicities that led her into Kundalini breathwork and somatic work. We also unpack why manifestation becomes so much more powerful when you stop gripping tightly to outcomes and instead open yourself to possibility. This episode is deep, grounding, emotional, and incredibly expansive. ✨ In this episode, we talk about: Trysha's healing journey & manifestation story The synchronicity that led her to Kundalini breathwork What Kundalini energy actually is How emotions & trauma get stored in the body Why emotional release can happen during breathwork Expanding your energetic capacity Nervous system regulation & manifestation Feeling safe enough to receive what you want Letting go of rigid manifestation timelines Why "Show me how good it can get" is such a powerful mantra

Edition 453 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Parallel Minds – SuferoEvergrey – Architects Of The New WeaveHeKz – QismaAssignment – Nothing To SayDimension Act – Phantom Reality Now To Then: WolverineA Sudden DemiseHibernatorThe Bedlam OvertureInto the Great NothingA House Of PlagueCarouselHis Cold Touch Noveria – WavesDivinity Compromised – Free […]

Join Robyn and Colleen Benelli as they welcome back author and geologist Nicholas Pearson to explore the deep folklore of his newest book. Discover how humble stones like flint and salt have shaped human civilization and carry profound spiritual virtues. This conversation bridges the gap between scientific geology and soulful magic to help you connect with the wisdom held within the earth. In This Episode, You Will Learn: Discover the historical and metaphysical power of flint as a portal stone for transformation. Explore the alchemical journey of emeralds and their message of unconditional self love. Master the art of using salt for purification and understanding its role in human evolution. Release resistance by working with the dual energies of light and shadow found in amber and jet. Understand the planetary connection between lead and Saturn for justice and grounding. Mentioned in this Episode: The Witching Stones (Book by Nicholas Pearson) Crystals for Psychic Self-Defense (Book) The Seven Archetypal Stones (Book) Foundations of Reiki Ryojo (Book) Crystal Divination (Upcoming Book) Flint, Emerald, Lead, Salt, Amber, Jet Gillespie Museum at Stetson University  Theosophical Society in America Connect with Nicholas www.theluminouspearl.com www.instagram.com/theluminouspearl  www.linktr.ee/theluminouspearl  www.patreon.com/theluminouspearl  nicholas@theluminouspearl.com  Free webinar: Elements of Reiki: Introducing a Traditional Healing Art - Theosophical Society Workshop with TSA: Reiki Secrets Revealed: Traditional Techniques to Supercharge Your Healing Practice Shinpiden training: Usui Reiki Ryoho Shinpiden: 3rd Degree & Master/Teacher Training  Connect with Robyn and Colleen ReikiLifestyle.com  Reiki Classes All Levels of Reiki Training  Free Online Reiki Share:  Tuesdays from 9:30–11:00 am Pacific Time  Reiki Lifestyle Podcast  YouTube: Reiki Lifestyle Instagram: @reikilifestyleofficial  Email: info@reikilifestyle.com Free phone consultation: Love the Show? If this episode helped you on your journey, please Subscribe and leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your support helps us share the gift of Reiki with more people around the world!

Edition 452 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Pervy Perkin – Cucumber Of The GodsPervy Perkin – I BelievePervy Perkin – MalebolgePervy Perkin – Of Echoes and Reflections Need – NorchestrionNeed – TilikumNeed – 7ΗNeed – Entheogen Riverside – I’m Done with YouRiverside – Volte-FaceRiverside – Hybrid TimesRiverside – Beyond […]

Edition 451 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Vanden Plas – Postcard To GodVanden Plas – On My Way To JerusalemVanden Plas – The Empyrean Equation Of The Long Lost ThingsVanden Plas – The Ouroboros Spheric Universe Experience – Mental TormentsSpheric Universe Experience – Near Death Experience/Lost GhostSpheric Universe Experience […]

Episode: 00319 Released on May 18, 2026 Description:  This week on Analyst Talk with Jason Elder, Debbie Osborne returns to the podcast to discuss the release of the second edition of her new book, Elements of Crime Patterns: A Foundation for Theory and Practice. Debbie explains how the book serves as a practical thinking tool for analysts, investigators, researchers, and criminal justice students seeking to better understand the mechanics of crime patterns and serial offending. The conversation explores the importance of qualitative data, modus operandi information, and why better crime reporting is essential for identifying linked crimes and improving public safety. Debbie also shares how the book can help analysts articulate and justify their reasoning when identifying patterns, while providing exercises, critical thinking guidance, and real-world crime scenarios. Jason and Debbie discuss the future role of AI in improving crime reports, the challenge of creating standards across law enforcement agencies, and how Debbie's upcoming crime analyst novel series will bring these concepts to life through storytelling.

In this episode of the DecaMillionaire Decoded podcast, host Justin Goodbread explains how lack of standardized processes can cost a business millions of dollars. To prevent time waste and inefficiency, Justin introduces a proprietary "nine-element framework" designed to serve as an operating system for the entire company. Relentless AI Toolkit: https://tools.relentlessvaluecoaching.com/ Learn more about Relentless Value Coaching:  https://www.justingoodbread.com/coaching/ DecaMillionaire Decoded on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JustinGoodbread

Edition 450 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Myrath – Soul of My SoulChimp Spanner – AutogenesisStam1na – KäärmeennyrkkiEanna – Divergence of a Wrong SkinSeventh Wonder – Eternal Flame Now To Then: WolverineA Sudden DemiseHibernatorThe Bedlam OvertureInto the Great NothingA House Of PlagueCarouselHis Cold Touch Defecto – Eclipsed by the […]

Tom Logue - May 17th 2026 Jesus is not just part of life—He is the cornerstone holding everything together. In this message from Matthew 21, we continue through our series The King & His Kingdom as Jesus tells the parable of the vineyard owner—a sobering and powerful parable directed at the religious leaders who had rejected God's authority and refused to honor Him with what He entrusted to them. Jesus describes a landowner who plants a vineyard, entrusts it to tenant farmers, and sends servants to collect fruit from it. But instead of honoring the owner, the tenants reject, beat, and kill the servants—and eventually even kill the owner's son. Through this parable, Jesus exposes the failure of the religious leaders of Israel. God entrusted them with His people, His city, and His kingdom, but instead of stewarding those things faithfully, they used them for themselves. They rejected the prophets God sent to call them to repentance, and now they were rejecting the Son Himself. But this message doesn't stop with them—it confronts us too. At the center of this sermon is a deeply practical and challenging truth: we are stewards, not owners. Everything we have has been entrusted to us by God—our bodies, our relationships, our time, our finances, our gifts, and even the message of the gospel itself. The question is not whether we have these things, but whether we are stewarding them in a way that honors the One they belong to. This message challenges us to take honest inventory of our lives. Are we stewarding our bodies well? Are our relationships healthy? Are we using our time wisely in light of eternity? Are we serving God with our money, or being mastered by it? And are we faithfully sharing the gospel that has the power to save and transform lives? The sermon also explores the biblical call to generosity and tithing—not as religious obligation alone, but as an act of worship and trust. Ultimately, Jesus is worthy not just of leftovers or percentages, but wholehearted devotion. Like Mary of Bethany breaking the alabaster jar at Jesus' feet, we are invited to become worshippers who “break the bottle” because Jesus gave everything for us. And at the center of it all stands Jesus Himself. Quoting Psalm 118, Jesus reveals that He is the cornerstone rejected by the builders. Remove the cornerstone, and everything falls apart. But when our lives are built upon Him, everything else finds its proper place. This message is an invitation to stop living like owners and begin living like faithful stewards—people who surrender every part of life to Jesus, the true King and cornerstone of it all. Learn more about our church: https://restoredtemecula.churchFollow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/restoredtemeculaand Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/restoredtemecula #Matthew21 #Stewardship #JesusIsKing #Cornerstone #ChristianLiving #Generosity #Gospel #RestoredTemecula Share this message with someone who needs to hear it. Chapters (00:00:00) - Welcome Home: Restored Church(00:00:30) - Matthew(00:01:30) - Holy Spirit Prayers for the Church(00:04:32) - Read the Parable of the Vineyard Owner(00:05:22) - Jesus' Parables in Matthew 21(00:08:28) - Parable 8: Elements of the Parable(00:09:02) - Jesus Parable of the Vineyard(00:14:23) - Jesus' Words on the Kingdom of God(00:18:47) - We're Stewards of What God Entrusts to Us(00:20:03) - Some Things That God Entrusts to Us(00:25:26) - Take a Look at Your Relationships(00:28:11) - How Are You Using Your Time?(00:32:47) - God Entrusts Us With Money(00:37:15) - The Biblical Principle of Tithing(00:40:34) - Tithing is a Test(00:45:46) - Why Mary Broke the Bottle for Jesus(00:50:26) - Follow Jesus With Your Finances(00:51:01) - Ways of Steward of the Gospel(00:56:22) - Are You Rejecting the Cornerstone of Life?(01:01:33) - He's so Patient With SINners!(01:08:03) - All God's People(01:09:35) - Prayers for the Day

Hunter Keegan checks in for Mental Health Awareness Month with some commentary on HBO's The Dark Wizard documentary series, general Bipolar Recorder Project updates, and plans for the summer. Follow us on Instagram / Twitter / YouTube @BipolarRecorder SUPPORT THIS SHOW AT www.bipolarrecorder.com/shop

The Heavy Elements Green Carnation special is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Green Carnation – Sanguis (Blood Ties)Green Carnation – As Silence Took YouGreen Carnation – The World Without a ViewGreen Carnation – Leaves of YesteryearGreen Carnation – Dead But DreamingGreen Carnation – Writings On the Wall Green Carnation – Light of Day, Day of DarknessGreen […]

In this episode of the Coast To Coasties podcast, I sit down with Currently serving Coast Guard reservist / Author D.M.WEBBER as he discusses his newest novel "COLD FRONT" which is the start of a trilogy is the mystery & suspense thriller genre book series drawing from a particular small boat 29' vessel sailor named Logan Cross. Elements of the fictional story heavily draw upon investigating murder, corruption, covert ops, and enemies from within our main character's own ranks!Coast Guard material in fictional novels is a surprisingly limited supply market of eventful can't put down stories which D.M.WEBBER has successfully written and requested to come and share the making of the start to his amazing series with everyone here. Drawing upon his time serving in active duty and with the reserves has led to a multitude of experiences that feed and shape the world he has created starting with this first of 3 books and all while making it both relating to an existing Coastie serving and equally as much for friends and family of currently serving Coasties who would like insight into some of the things we actually encounter in our time of service. He drew his inspiration from the likes of Tom Clancy Jack Ryan novels and incorporates elements of aviation, small boat life, cutter life, command center, and CGIS which readers familiar with these parts of the Coast Guard can relate to very well. Before coming into this episode I knew very little about the books and after uploading this I have already purchased my copy and encourage all of you to check it out and help support one of very few Authors we have serving in the U.S Coast Guard right now writing about fictions heavily drawing inspiration from work assets we actually use and work we actually do! Go check him out at dmwebberbooks.com and on his instagram page at dmwebberbooks!

Edition 444 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Widek – Beyond The Edge of TimeUrne – Be Not DismayedCold Night For Alligators – AstonishingFor My Demons – Shades of PastDead Air Divine – Ride Now To Then: TexturesWalls Of The SoulZman/TimelessReaching HomeTo Erase a LifetimeTouching The AbsoluteTransgression Twelve Foot Ninja […]

Colette explores the Ayurvedic concept of Sadvritta, often translated as right living or ethical conduct, and how these timeless teachings can help us navigate modern life with more awareness, compassion, and harmony. While Ayurveda is often associated with food, herbs, and daily routines, the classical teachings remind us that true health goes far beyond the physical body. Our thoughts, beliefs, speech, and interactions with others all influence our mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. In today's fast-paced and highly stimulated world, where disconnection, reactivity, and social tension are increasingly common, Sadvritta offers a practical and deeply relevant framework for living consciously and cultivating both personal and collective wellbeing. In this episode, Colette explores: Why Ayurveda considers ethical living essential for health The connection between the mind, relationships, and physical wellbeing How our beliefs influence the doshas and nervous system Mental ama (toxins) and the impact of overstimulation on the mind The importance of contentment and mental hygiene Social Sadvritta and the role of compassion, truthfulness, and respect in daily interactions How reactivity and disconnection affect collective wellbeing The relationship between Sadvritta and ojas (vital essence) Small daily practices to cultivate a more compassionate and conscious life Check out Colette's online services: Online Consultations https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/consultations Private Digestive Reset Cleanse https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/digestive-reset-cleanse Online Daily Habits for Holistic Health Program https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/daily-habits Reset-Restore-Renew Program https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/reset-restore-renew Elements of Ayurveda Podcast Community https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/community Have questions on Colette's online services? Book a FREE 15 min Services Enquiry Call here. https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/consultations Do I have an accumulation of ama/toxins in my body? Take this quiz to find out https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/resources Stay connected on the Elements social media: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/elementsofayurvedapodcast/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/elementshealingandwellbeing Thank you for listening! If this episode supported you, please consider leaving a review and if you think this information would be helpful to family or friends, please share this episode so we can spread this wisdom of Ayurveda.  Stay tuned and stay aligned with the Elements of Ayurveda Podcast. Thanks for listening!

Edition 448 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Karnivool – ThemataKarnivool – AozoraKarnivool – DeadmanKarnivool – Alpha Omega Caligula’s Horse – The World Breathes with MeCaligula’s Horse – The AscentCaligula’s Horse – Daughter of the MountainCaligula’s Horse – Graves Teramaze – Esoteric SymbolismTeramaze – The Harmony MachineTeramaze – DepopulateTeramaze – […]

Special discounts up for AIE Melbourne (LS discount) and AIE World's Fair (group discounts up to 25% - CFPs still open for Autoresearch and Vertical AI) Cya there!Abridge did not start as an “GPT wrapper”. It was founded in 2018, years before the Cambrian explosion of AI application layer companies. OpenAI launched ChatGPT publicly on November 30, 2022 and by then, Abridge had already spent years doing the unglamorous work of building trust for one of the highest context, most important workflows in healthcare: the conversation between a patient and a clinician.Abridge's original wedge was clinical documentation. Listen to the visit, generate the note, reduce the clerical burden, and let clinicians spend more time with patients instead of the EHR. By focusing on how doctors actually document, how health systems actually buy, how EHR integration actually works, how clinicians verify outputs, and how missing context during a visit turns into downstream friction across billing, prior authorization, quality, and follow-up, the adoption of LLMs became a force multiplier on a workflow already optimized for sensitive context gathering.The company has scaled fast: Abridge says it is projected to support 80M+ patient-clinician conversations this year across 250 large and complex U.S. health systems, with support for 28+ languages and 50+ specialties. It raised $300M at a $5.3B valuation in June 2025, after a $250M round earlier that year.Today, Janie Lee and Chaitanya “Chai” Asawa of Abridge join us for another crossover pod with Redpoint's Jacob Effron (who is on the board of Abridge) to dive into how Abridge is building the clinical intelligence layer for healthcare starting with ambient documentation, then expanding into clinical decision support, prior authorization, payer/provider/pharma workflows, and eventually real-time agents that act before, during, and after the patient conversation. We go inside the product, data, infra, evals, workflow, privacy, and org design choices behind bringing AI into one of the highest-stakes enterprise environments from 100M+ medical conversations and specialty-specific evals to real-time alerts, EHR integration, de-identification, clinician-scientist teams, and why healthcare may solve some of the hardest AI problems first.We discuss:* Why Abridge started with clinical documentation, “pajama time,” and saving clinicians 10–20 hours a week* The transition from ambient scribe to clinical intelligence layer: save time, save money, and save lives* Why conversations between patients and clinicians may be the most important workflow in healthcare (patient visit summary feature)* Chai's “healthcare-coded Glean” framing: context is king, but healthcare raises the stakes on safety, evals, and rollout* Why Abridge wants AI to feel like “air conditioning”: always in the background, but only interrupting when it truly matters* The prior authorization example: turning a denied MRI weeks later into real-time guidance while the patient is still in the room* Why payer policies, EHR data, medical literature, and hospital-specific guidelines make the problem hard, and also create the moat* How Abridge thinks about ambient form factors: mobile, desktop, in-room devices, nursing workflows, multimodality, and future AR* The multi-sided healthcare customer: CMIOs, CFOs, CIOs, clinicians, patients, payers, and pharma* The hardest AI problem at Abridge: high-quality, low-latency, low-cost real-time support in a high-stakes clinical setting* When Abridge uses frontier models vs proprietary models, and why its unique data from medical conversations matters* Why “every agent is a coding agent underneath,” and how the EHR can be thought of as a filesystem for healthcare agents* How Abridge approaches personalization across individual doctors, specialties, and health systems* Why “AI slop” is AI without context, and how edits, memories, and clinician preferences create a data flywheel* Abridge's eval stack: LFDs, LLM judges, in-house clinicians, third-party evaluators, specialty-specific evals, and progressive rollout* HIPAA, PHI, de-identification, one-way anonymization, customer contracts, and learning from healthcare data safely* What changes when you operate at 100M+ conversations: reliability, cost, post-training, model routing, and infrastructure optimization* Why the same clinical conversation can serve doctors, patients, payers, pharma, and future clinical-trial workflows* How Abridge works with EHRs, and why deep interoperability is table stakes for clinician adoption* Why healthcare AI has regulatory tailwinds, why 80/20 does not work here, and why high-stakes domains may drive AI forward* Why Abridge embeds “clinician scientists” into product and eval teams* What Chai learned from Glean about search, quality, and durable AI infrastructure* Why the future of AI infra may look like context layers, event-driven systems, Kafka, Temporal, sockets, CRDTs, and tools built for humans* Why Janie changed her mind on “PRDs are dead,” and why crisp written clarity matters more in complex AI products* How Abridge uses Claude Code, Cursor, and coding agents internallyAbridge:* Website: https://www.abridge.com/* X: https://x.com/AbridgeHQJanie Lee:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janiejleeChaitanya “Chai” Asawa:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casawaTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction and what Abridge does00:02:05 From ambient documentation to clinical intelligence00:04:04 Clinical decision support and context as king00:06:57 Alert fatigue, proactive intelligence, and prior authorization00:12:36 Ambient AI form factors and healthcare customers00:16:59 The hardest AI problems in healthcare00:18:26 Frontier models, proprietary data, and model strategy00:21:07 The EHR as a filesystem for agents00:24:03 Personalization, memory, and clinician preferences00:30:40 Evals, LLM judges, and progressive rollout00:36:47 HIPAA, de-identification, and privacy00:39:21 100M conversations and operating at scale00:44:10 EHR integration and the clinical intelligence layer00:46:39 Healthcare regulation, latency, and high-stakes AI00:50:11 Clinician scientists and long-tail quality00:53:04 Lessons from Glean and durable AI infrastructure00:57:03 The future of agentic healthcare workflows00:57:34 PRDs, product clarity, and building serious AI products01:03:11 AI coding tools at Abridge01:04:06 OutroTranscriptIntroduction: Abridge, Clinical Intelligence, and the Latent Space x Unsupervised Learning CrossoverSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay. This is a special crossover Latent Space Unsupervised Learning pod.Jacob [00:00:07]: Very excited to do this.Jacob [00:00:08]: At this point, we get together once a year.Swyx [00:00:10]: Once a yearJacob [00:00:11]: And this is a fun occasion to get to do it on.Swyx [00:00:13]: I really wanted to talk to Abridge but I felt very underqualified because healthcare is not something we cover very intensely. It just so happens that Redpoint's our big investors and supporters of Abridge.Jacob [00:00:27]: Anytime you want to have a portfolio company on your podcastJacob [00:00:29]: Please, by all means.Swyx [00:00:31]: So we'll introduce our guests. Chai and Janie, welcome to the pod.Janie [00:00:34]: Thanks for having us.Chai [00:00:35]: Thank you.Janie [00:00:35]: We're excited to be here.Chai [00:00:36]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:36]: So for listeners, what do you guys do, just to situate you guys in the company?Janie [00:00:42]: Abridge is a clinical intelligence layer for health systems. We really started with documentation and building for clinicians and as we think about reducing the burden that clinicians have, they're spending 10 to 20 hours a week on documentation. There's a massive doctor shortage in the country. We also think that conversations between patients and clinicians are probably the most important workflow in healthcare. It's where care is given and received but if you think about the 20% of our GDP that goes towards healthcare, almost everything is a derivative of that conversation, whether it's the claim, the payment, the actual diagnosis given, the treatment. And we've started with a conversation to reduce the burden for doctors on documentation but we're really excited about the path ahead as we become this broader clinical intelligence layer.Chai [00:01:34]: I'm Chai. I work on clinical decision support at Abridge.Swyx [00:01:37]: Yes.Chai [00:01:37]: And so as Janie said, we're uniquely situated where we started off with the clinical note. What I'm really excited about and where we're expanding towards is what are all the things you can do before the conversation, during the conversation and after the conversation if you did have access to all the context about patients, payer guidelines, medical literature and put that together and to serve, how healthcare could look fundamentally different.Swyx [00:02:01]: And that's the context engine that you guys have?Chai [00:02:04]: Yes.Swyx [00:02:04]: Is that what it's called? Okay.Swyx [00:02:05]: So historically, as I understand it, the company started in 2018. A lot of people would be familiar with the AI voice notes form factor that doctors would be “Well, do you consent to being recorded?” It replaces handwriting and what have you. But it sounds like more recently there's been a big transition in the company. Tell me about the broader transition.From Documentation to Clinical Intelligence: Save Time, Save Money, Save LivesJanie [00:02:26]: So from a transition perspective, we really think about our journey as The first act was: how do we help save time? And that's where a lot of that original product was.Swyx [00:02:37]: By the way, one of those interesting statsSwyx [00:02:39]: On your landing page was, doctors spend time after hours.Janie [00:02:43]: They call it pajama time.Swyx [00:02:44]: Why is that pajama time?Janie [00:02:46]: Doctors after work in their pajamasSwyx [00:02:48]: In their pajamas. OhJanie [00:02:49]: At home are just writing and catching up on their notes every day.Janie [00:02:53]: Some of our favorite customer love stories, we have a Slack channel called Love Stories. We have clinicians telling us, “Abridge has helped us, from retiring early or we're now finally able toJanie [00:03:06]: go home and eat dinner with our kids for the first time.”Chai [00:03:08]: Save the marriage in some cases.Swyx [00:03:10]: One of the quotes was “We're not divorcing anymore.”Swyx [00:03:12]: I'm asking, “Why?”Swyx [00:03:14]: Because they're working too much.Janie [00:03:16]: But, in terms of where we're going and where we're expanding, we really think about our second and third acts around how do we help health systems save and make more money. Health systems are operating with record-low operating margins. It's getting harder and harder to serve patients and they have regulatory, some tailwinds but also a lot of headwinds coming their way and AI is ripe for helping on the saving and make-more-money piece. And then ultimately, how do we help save lives? The fact that our software and our product is open millions of times a week before, during and after a patient walks in the room, gives us massive opportunity with products like clinical decision support, which Chai is building but so many others to improve patient outcomes and probably one of the most important workflows and problems to be going after right now.From Glean to Healthcare: Context Is KingJacob [00:04:04]: One thing that's interesting, Chai, is you came over to Abridge from Glean and clinical decision support, which for our listeners is, in the context of a visit, helping a doctor figure out the right type of care. It's really a search problem in many ways, going through lots of different data sources. Very analogous to your previous role as one of the earliest engineers over at Glean. I'm sure a lot of our listeners are curious what's similar about the problems that you're going after now and what feels different, now that you're in healthcare.Chai [00:04:33]: Very similar. Taking a step back, with every wave, there's a lot of very similar patterns that happen across different products. A lot of social networking products look the same. A lot of credit-based products look the same. And we're seeing that very similar in the agent era with many companies, of course, in Redpoint's portfolio and so forth. And the key insight between both companies is that you have amazing models but context is king. Context is what puts them to work. So I see it in a lot of ways, a lot of similarities in this is a healthcare-coded version of Glean but the differences are really interesting. A couple things that come to mind. First and foremost, the rigor of the setting we're in. The downside risk is extremely high here in healthcare. It can be fatal in some cases. You prescribe something that the patient is allergic to for example. Whereas at Glean, it's “Oh, you got the question wrong.” It wasn't the end of the world in most cases. And so what does that mean? That shapes our evaluation strategy, both offline evaluation, progressive rollout and there's a lot more we could go into there. Second thing that comes to mind is, vertical versus horizontal. In both cases, there's a large variance but when Glean is, it's a much more horizontal company, there's a variance of personas, companies that you're working with. We also have a variance of personas, different types of specialties, different hospital systems. But the variance is a little more narrow. So from a product perspective, you're able to focus far more, especially when you have a maturing technology and you're building new products that never existed before. It lets you go after them much more easily and especially in healthcare where so many problems were solved with labor and process, that it's extremely ripe for AI to keep helping augment and enable. And the final thing that's really interesting, Abridge specifically compared to many other companies in the AI area, is the modality we started with where we're ambient and we're always listening in the background. And many more AI products will go that way but it's how we started. And that's the greatest form of AI we can create, AI that's seamless. You're not looking at your screen. It's always there. It's always helping you out and being proactive. The Jarvis vision that, every hackathon I went to over the past decade, there was always a Jarvis competitor. But Abridge very much started from the opportunity and continues to go that way.Ambient AI and Alert Fatigue: When Should the Product Interrupt?Jacob [00:06:57]: One thing that is super interesting then from a product perspective is you have this always-on seamless in the background and then you have to decide when you break the wall almost and say, “Hey, clinician, you might not have thought about X,” or whatever it is that you want to do. And in healthcare traditionally there's been this idea of alert fatigue and a million pop-ups and then a doctor just ignores all of them. It's probably a pattern that a lot of builders are thinking through now. How do you think about the right way to intervene or to pop up in a doctor visit?Janie [00:07:26]: It's such a good question. Alerts are notorious in healthcare specifically. Over 90% of alerts are ignored. The first and most important thing is context is everything, as Chai alluded to and I also think about how do we go from being reactive alerting to really proactive intelligence at the point at which it matters most. One thing we like to say is we want our product to feel like air conditioning. It should be in the background just making things better and if there is something that has great clinical risk and we're acutely aware that intervening now and not later is incredibly important, we should decide to act. But if you think about proactive versus reactive, instead of alerting a clinician during a visit when they're with their patient having a pretty serious and sensitive conversation, how do we prep a clinician before they walk into the room with that patient? And so historically, clinicians might have to manually go through charts with a patient that they've had over the course of months or years and they'll try to suss out what are the things they should be doing. You can imagine a world with Abridge. We'll summarize all of the most recent context for you, tell you based on the reason for a visit the patient is coming in for the types of things you should be discussing. And so you're going into that conversation prepped rather than walking in cold to that patient visit and then having this product interrupt you five or 10 times throughout the visit. And there might be times where it's really important to interrupt. We have a product called Prior Authorization and so this is when you may go into a doctor's office with knee pain. They'll prescribe you an MRI and so many of us have had this experience before, where in four weeks you'll get a call saying, “Hey, Sean, that MRI that you were prescribed wasn't approved and why don't you come back in? We'll figure it out.” In a world with Abridge, we might choose to quietly but still alert a doctor in that visit. And alert is probably not even the word we would want to use. Before a patient leaves, we would want to tell the doctor, “Hey, Doctor, before Sean leaves, you should ask him, has he had physical therapy and has his pain lasted for more than six weeks? Because the Aetna plan that he's on in California requires six things. We've already confirmed four of them have been met ‘cause we have all the context. But these two last criteria, if you can address with Sean before he leaves the room, we could guarantee that your MRI is approved before you leave.” And so when you think about clinical usefulness, impact to the patient, there are instances in which if we can catch a doctor while the patient is still in the room, as we think about save time, save money, save lives, we get to check all of those boxes. But when doctors have 15 minutes between visits, we have to be really thoughtful about when it matters.Prior Authorization: Reducing Latency in CareChai [00:10:23]: There's this interesting product opportunity AI has is reducing latency in the world. For example, prior authorization is an example of where care gets delayed and so great AI can reduce that. And the problem with alerts before partially is a technical problem: the quality of your alerts really matters. They're going to get ignored if you get alerts that... Similarly in engineering, where they're noisy alerts that you can't act on. But if you can make really high-quality alerts with both the context, as Janie said, and really high-quality models, then you can create a whole other game.Janie [00:10:53]: And I really like that experience because it starts to tease apart, what makes this so hard and unique. One, to make that prior authorization example possible, think about all the data that you need to have. You need to integrate with the electronic health record to know all of the patient context. Do we have access to your previous labs, previous imaging? And then to match you and to know that you're on Aetna, we have to collect all of the different payer policies and they vary by state. Some of these payer policies live on websites. Some of them live in unstructured 50-page PDF files.Jacob [00:11:31]: I thought this episode wasJacob [00:11:31]: To make sure we didn't scare people from healthcare.Janie [00:11:34]: But when you think about the things that make it hard, it also gives you the moat.Janie [00:11:39]: And then the second is the AI and the model quality we need to be able to hang our hat on. And so the bar, similarly when I worked at Opendoor, I worked on pricing models. Every outlier wiped out the margins of 30 and so similarly here in healthcare, the bar for accuracy is so high. And then I'd say the last is workflow is everything. If insurance companies deploy AI, it typically happens too late and this is when you have the notorious comical examples of AI just fighting each other when it's too late. But if we can pull forward the use of both the AI but also the ability to solve problems when the patient's in the room, you can start to collapse what typically takes weeks or months after your visit, ideally down to minutes or real-time. And it's where healthcare is both very difficult but also extremely rewarding if you can crack it.Product Form Factors: Mobile, Desktop, In-Room Devices, and ARSwyx [00:12:36]: Just to get some baseline on the form factors, because I've seen some videos on your website and stuff. You guys talk a lot about ambient AI. Is it primarily on the phone? Is there any other form factor that people get Abridge in? Is there an Abridge room setup where it's always on? I don't know.Jacob [00:12:55]: An Abridge podcast studio.Janie [00:12:58]: Primary form factor is mobile and desktop. UsuallyJanie [00:13:00]: Clinicians are walking in and out of rooms with mobile but at the end of the day, when they're closing out their notes or wanting to prep for the day ahead, they might use desktop. We have been having a lot of really interesting partnership conversations with a lot of these in-room device companies as you think about the power of multimodality and even more data, as you think about all of what is not captured today. It is fascinating to think about, especially even as we go into building and scaling our nursing product. It's one where nurses constantly, as they're walking in to check in on a patient for two minutes or maybe even 30 seconds,Janie [00:13:43]: Starting an Abridge experience is probably going to take longer than the visit. And so what can we do with in-room devices that are always on starts to raise really interesting and fun product questions.Swyx [00:13:54]: I was thinking, the way in tech companies we have all these Google MeetSwyx [00:13:58]: And other things, we might as well set up entire rooms with just Abridge tech.Chai [00:14:02]: Very much. AR glasses and related form factors are also relevant: how do we bring the information to the clinician in real-time without a screen, while still letting them focus on the patient?Swyx [00:14:18]: Do you think they want that? I'm skeptical of AR, but I'm curious what you've tried.Chai [00:14:26]: Admittedly, it's not a near-term product roadmapChai [00:14:29]: By any means. I'm being far-fetched.Jacob [00:14:31]: There's some sick AR stuff for surgeries.Swyx [00:14:33]: Really?Jacob [00:14:33]: When people are trying to visualize, you're about to make an incision but you want to see, what the cut might look or what the body might look like inside and they can layer in imaging.Swyx [00:14:43]: That's cool.Chai [00:14:45]: At some point in the future.Janie [00:14:46]: But there are a lot of our largest customers and at the largest health systems integrating already and so even as we think about building into it, unlocks a lot of product capabilities.Swyx [00:14:57]: And just to establish the terminology. Sorry, and I know I'm asking basic questions somewhat for myself but also for the audience who might beHealth Systems, Buyers, Clinicians, Patients, and PayersSwyx [00:15:05]: Less integrated. When you say health systems, it's like the Johns Hopkins, the Kaiser Permanentes.Janie [00:15:09]: Mayos, the Kaisers of the world.Swyx [00:15:10]: These are your customers, right? And the outcome that you deliver for them is happier doctors, reduced cost of processing, reduced mistakes. It's weird in a sense that I feel like there's also, a secondary customer, the customer of the customer and I don't know if you — do you think about it that way?Janie [00:15:28]: The other interesting and complex part of building product is we have our buyers, who are the chief medical information officersJanie [00:15:39]: The chief financial officers, the CIOs of these large health systems. Our users today are clinicians but if you think about who downstream is impacted, it's patients. And so as we build, with every product in mind, we think about who we're building for, who the secondary user is and what does that mean either in terms of experience, security compliance, ROI that we have to make tangible. And so like you said, time savings is one of them. But for CFOs, they care a lot more than just time savings. We have to show for every dollar you put into Abridge, because you have more compliant documentation or because you have fewer queries coming from your billing team, we save or add real dollars to your bottom line or top line, are things that we're constantly thinking about because of the dynamic across all three sets of users.Chai [00:16:32]: There's a whole other axis too with the payers and pharmaChai [00:16:35]: as well. Connecting all these three big stakeholders in healthcare isSwyx [00:16:39]: Do the payers ever see your data? Sorry, the payers meaning the insurers, right?Chai [00:16:44]: Yes.Swyx [00:16:44]: They also see Abridge data?Chai [00:16:47]: NoSwyx [00:16:47]: Like the direct integration to you guysChai [00:16:48]: They wouldn't see the raw Abridge data but when you're working together on something like prior authorization, whatever information they need, we'd communicate to them.Jacob [00:16:59]: That's cool. I would love to dig into the AI side. You still have a lot of problems on the AI side. And so maybe to start at the highest level, what's one of the hardest problems you have to solve in AI at Abridge today?The Hardest AI Problems: Quality, Latency, and CostChai [00:17:11]: To make things simple, let's take, building off the prior auth example. So one thing Janie talked about is okay, this data is all over the place and there's this combinatorial explosion of procedures, payer policies and even sometimes different health systems. There can be some cross-product of all of these different considerations you have to take into account. But what's really hard about this problem is doing it real-time in the conversation. So, in any AI product, usually the three KPIs you care about are quality, latency and cost. Now, what we're saying is we want you to do this real-time in the conversation, guiding the clinician. How do we do it in a way that does not break the bank? But we're using — But we also need very intelligent models because you're working with this cross-product of data and this, all this context layer as well. So you need high intelligence and high-quality because you don't want the alert fatigue but you also need to be fast and cost-effective. And so that's where a lot of clever engineering goes. It's okay, without getting into all the details here, can you model these policies in some intermediate representation or other things that you can do that can make this problem tractable? And of course, the Pareto frontier is always changing but we are also trying to do this now.Model Strategy: Third-Party Models, Proprietary Data, and Medical ConversationsJacob [00:18:26]: What implications has that had for what you take off-the-shelf and say, “ what? We don't need to be world-class at X. We'll just take this from the model providers or from some infrastructure player,” and what you're “No, this is where we spend most of our time focused on”?Chai [00:18:38]: This is, the fun challenge in AI?Jacob [00:18:42]: It changes every three months? SoChai [00:18:42]: Of course, with the shifting landscape, we try to be extremely thoughtful on predicting the trends of where third-party models are going and where we can uniquely go. And, sometimes when you talk about AI models, we're the models are just going to get infinitely better. But I don't think... It may be in the grandness of time you could say that but, within every month, every quarter, there's specific ways they're getting better. They're training on a lot more, coding data to be better coding agents, for example. And soChai [00:19:14]: We have to think about where are the things that won't — unique data that we're uniquely training on or to step back a little, where is a proprietary model bringing advantage to us is if it can give higher quality or lower cost and latency for similar quality, very similar to many other companies. And when we can do that is when we have proprietary data. So, for example, we have on the order of eighty million or hundreds of millions now getting close to of medical conversations.Jacob [00:19:44]: It's insane.Chai [00:19:45]: This is a unique data set. And this data set, it's very interesting because this data set is effectively a large part of the trace between the patient and the provider. That's where the quote-unquote debugging happens in healthcare. We have these traces at scale, as in as, our CEOs even called it, an exhaust that comes out of our product. And so when you have these traces, that's how you can train better agents on certain use cases, whether it's your transcription diarization use cases or so on or like note generation models and we can do that much cheaper and faster. But we're always also working with these third-party model providers. We closely collaborate with them and that's how we predict where the trends are going. The thing that I think about a lot is that, I know that the model providers are going to train much more on agentic workflows and so forth, so that's great, so that you have a better agentic harness. But the other thing that's interesting is that the model providers, because a large class of the consumer model providers is healthcare queries, that they might, optimize to train a lot of healthcare data to encode the knowledge in its weights. And this is just a great thing for us as well, where the off-the-shelf models can keep bett-getting better at general healthcare information, such that what our strategy is, we have a constellation of models, we can use something for this, that and, we only care about, at the end of the day, the best product experience.EHR as File System: Agentic Workflows and Real-Time InterfacesJacob [00:21:07]: And, you have, overall capabilities improving. I'm curious, as these models get better, is there something you look at and you're “, three months ago, we really couldn't do that but God, the the latest models really allow us to do it”?Chai [00:21:19]: So here's something interesting that I've, been toying with. So all models are... This wasn't super obvious a year ago but now it's become clear and clear that almost every agent is a coding agent underneath the hood? So you give it whatever file system, it can write its own code and so forth. So when you think about within healthcare and the use case that we have, you can think of the EHR effectively like a file system. It's just — it's a storage of all this information. It's a lot of information there that cannot fit into the context window, at least of today's models and you want to use that context effectively for all these product use cases we're talking about. And so if you have better agents that can, manipulate data, read that data, treat it as a file system as we see they're going and we know model companies are investing this way, then that very directly benefits us.Swyx [00:22:09]: Yeah. Okay, cool. Again, just establishing basic things. But we're going back to the model stuff. I'm really interested in double-clicking more on the real-time, element, which is pretty important for both of you. Is it — Is real-time just batches of every one minute, every five minutes? Is that how we do it? Or is there some more native, genuinely real-time in the sense that OpenAI has a real-time API or Gemini has a real-time API?Chai [00:22:35]: Yeah. Yeah. So today it is more on the on the batch basis but there's interestingChai [00:22:41]: Prototypes that we have that we're still not fully, full time, voice in text out or in that sense. But, can you trigger your models, your agents or agentic workflows, depending on the right times in the conversation?Chai [00:22:58]: And so you can imagine, different techniques to bring this latency down and, you want to bring the feedback loop down as much as you can. And so a lot of clever engineering there without fully... Maybe one day we'll do full voice in and text out, train a model to do something like that.Swyx [00:23:15]: You do — People don't want voice in voice out?Chai [00:23:18]: Now we aren't creating experiences that are, during the conversation, inter — It's almost likeSwyx [00:23:25]: Might be too disruptiveChai [00:23:26]: Too disruptive until, who knows, maybe eventually you could have full voice agents once we — the quality and we improve the comfort of the technology. But right now gra — that change is much more gradual and it's more text focus, text out.Janie [00:23:42]: And so much of currently what our product is trying to do is allow a clinician to focus on their patient and maybe at some point but right now patients, clinicians don't want a third voice, at least in a literal voice in that room. And so how do we be there with all the contacts and information ready at hand when there's the right moment?Personalization: Individual Doctors, Specialties, and Health SystemsJacob [00:24:03]: Jenny, one thing I'm curious about is how you think about, personalization in the product. I imagine, every doctor is a special snowflake in their own way, has their own way they like to do things. There are probably a bunch of different approaches you could take to doing that, both within the model layer itself but then also just with clever prompting or engineering. How do youJacob [00:24:20]: Deliver on that?Janie [00:24:21]: It's such a good question. Personalization is massive for us. We think about personalization at three levels. The first is at the individual, the second is at the specialty level and then the third is at the health system or the organization level. To your point, there are a lot of individual preferences. You-When a note is produced, it almost is a reflection that is so deeply personal of a doctor's work and how they give care. And so do they have preferences on things like style? They might want bullets versus paragraphs, really concise versus comprehensive. They also might have phrases that they really like to use or the templates that they want every note to be structured. And, we see it in our feedback all the time. We want two spaces in between sentences or I refuse to use this tool. And so that's something that we've had to build in. And the tricky part is how do you make sure that stylistic preferences don't interrupt accuracy and quality and that's something that we've really had to refine and hone over time. Second is at the specialty level. A cardiologist note or workflow is going to look very different from a dermatologist workflow.Jacob [00:25:32]: I assume cardiology notes are the highest stakes for you guys, given your CEO is a cardiologist.Jacob [00:25:36]: It's “Oh my God, make sure we get this one.”Janie [00:25:37]: Shiv, our CEO, is still a practicing cardiologist. He rounds once a month. And so, first call when we want just quick and easy user feedback too.Janie [00:25:46]: But, specialties require a lot of personalization, both in terms of what does the product look and so we make sure that as new users onboard, we catch that and the product proportionally reflects that. But also on the back end, evals at the specialty level, they are hard-earned to calibrate and get. What does a really great dermatology note look like? What makes it complete? What makes it compliant and billable is very different than a primary care doctor. And so it's not just about what does the product experience look but on the back end tuning and really deepening our understanding for the specialists. What does great output look like? And that's, a problem that we need to calibrate internally, externally, online, offline but, takes lots of cycles but is necessary in a high-stakes environment. And then at the health system level, for products like clinical decision support, you have health systems who've spent years or decades refining their best practices and they want to know, “Hey, we love your clinical decision support product but how do we embed our own hospital guidelines into them to inform clinicians before, during or after a visit what brest — best practices should look like?” And as you think about, deepening moats as well, when health systems, trust us with that data, allow us to productize it and directly into the clinical workflow, makes us a really great partner to health systems who want to build something that truly meets their needs, their practicing guidelines.AI Slop, Memory, and Product Data FlywheelsChai [00:27:23]: And I want to add onto that. The for the clinical documentation problem, it's very similar to AI writing that doesn't feel like your own and then we call that slop. But the way I describe one framing of slop is like AI without context. But we have all that context and both the clinicians, can have it and can guide it. And so part of the other interesting exhaust for us is, memory is, one of these new systems recordsChai [00:27:49]: Almost.Janie [00:27:50]: And we also have all the edits people make on our product and when you think about a data flywheel and how we get better over time becomes really powerful as a mechanism to just going deeper in personalization.Jacob [00:28:04]: It's interesting. I love this idea of working with systems on the guidelines they built up over a long time. I feel like so many of the best AI app companies today are... The question is: How do you take the expertise that a law firm or a bank has built up over many years and then add that as context and also a special sauce over, a an AI tool? And so seems like y'all are really doing that very effectively.Janie [00:28:24]: We're now starting to have our customers ask, “What are other customers doing?”Janie [00:28:28]: “And how are they doing it?”Janie [00:28:30]: And as we think about having visibility across such a large set of care being delivered right now, a really interesting place we could also partner.Swyx [00:28:40]: I'm just curious. I — This may be a nothing question but, how different are health system guidelines from each other? Don't they all converge to the same thing? And if not, where do they differ?Chai [00:28:52]: At a really high level, they're going to talk about very similar things but the difference is probably in some more of the details. “Oh, you should refer to specialists only when XYZ conditions are met,” or so forth and maybe different organizations have different practices and guidelines around that. But high level, talking about similar things but the details are what, of course, that shapes the context and the decisions you make.Swyx [00:29:15]: And this all goes into the context engine and it might affect the notes but maybe not.Chai [00:29:21]: The — For these local pathways, we're definitely thinking about it a little more for our clinical decision support product.Chai [00:29:26]: So yeah.Swyx [00:29:27]: Which is your stuff, yeah.Swyx [00:29:28]: And then the memory which you raised, let's just tell us more about that. What have you tried in memory? What's the structure of the memory? What works? What doesn't work?Chai [00:29:38]: There's, of course, many different ways you could do memory, where it's okay, can you bake it into the model weights or can you do it in some external store? For us, what's interesting is, of course, when you think the models are rapidly changing, whether it's in-house or third-party, baking into the model weights, sometimes you worry that it could be a little throwaway. And so, how do you... You need to find a way that you decompose the problem, the preferences from the underlying models and so forth. The thing we're right now most both that's easiest to start with and we're excited about is having, a separate store for memory, where you have, for example, a memory sub-agent that's, working in the background, figuring out what are the important parts of the clinician's actions that we want to remember for the long term. And then you can also imagine, other things where in the — you have background jobs that are running that are collating these, memories similar to Sleep, of course and what other pattern, patterns products do as well. Learning over all these action, all the action data we have, again, note edits, the conversations they did and the actual transcripts.Evals: LFD, LLM Judges, and Clinical SafetyJacob [00:30:40]: What about evals? How in the world do you... It is such a complex product surface area. We would love to hear you riff on that and also how has that evolved? I'm sure you've gotten better at it, so any learnings along the way.Janie [00:30:50]: From an evals perspective, we, from day one when we build any new product or feature, we think about, what does good look like? And there are table stakes things like clinical safety but then you start to get deeper into what does good quality look like. And when you go into something like our core product, there's stuff like style and completeness and there's things like does this note become something that can be billable, which is very high stakes for a health system. We have a number of ways in which we get confidence for this. We have, internal in-house clinicians who do what we call an LFD process to give us our very first pass at is this or isn't this a good enough output, look at the effing data.Jacob [00:31:41]: LFD?Chai [00:31:42]: That's why I was smiling. I was “Is Janie going to mention what it stands for?”Jacob [00:31:46]: I was not... There's like a million acronyms.Jacob [00:31:48]: How am I supposed to know that I don't? So “Oh yeah, of course, an LFD.”Swyx [00:31:51]: I've never heard of LFDs.Chai [00:31:53]: It's a bridge for sure.Janie [00:31:55]: I got through three days and then I had to ask someone.Janie [00:31:58]: I thought it was just me that didn't knowJanie [00:32:01]: It's our internal process.Swyx [00:32:02]: But look at the data as a meme in ML, ‘cause you tend to not look at it. You just want to look at number go up.Chai [00:32:06]: Exactly.Swyx [00:32:07]: But yes.Janie [00:32:08]: But so, we make sure we look at the data and then as we think about all of the components of good output, we, one, create LLM judges across all of these and we make sure with annotated data and either internal or external evaluators, we feel like these judges are calibrated. And then depending on the stakes, we also work with in-house and third-party evaluators across all of these before we ship any big change. And the goal is, in terms of evolution, how do you go from this process taking months, down to weeks, down to days? Some of it is, a true science and ML problem. A lot of it's also just, hard operational work. Have you planned ahead in terms of what you need? Have you really optimized the capacity that you need across all of the different specialties you need? Have you gotten a really good sense of which third parties are great to work with for what use cases? This takes a lot of domain, expertise and, lots of mistakes and errors in figuring that out. And so as much of it is an ML problem, so much of it has also been operational gains that are hugely important, where domain-specific expertise is everything.Specialty-Level Evaluation and Progressive RolloutsJacob [00:33:23]: But it's funny, ‘cause I feel like people talk about healthcare like it's one giant market and the reality isJacob [00:33:26]: It's, dozens and dozens of sub-markets. And so it feels like in your evals you have to build that up across the board, probably.Swyx [00:33:34]: And is specialization the primary cardinality at... That's the word that comes to mind.Janie [00:33:40]: Sometimes, depending on the product or the use case. And so if we're making a note improvement or feature for a particular specialty, definitely but we have products that are for nurses. We have products that, are really aimed at making the document or the output a lot more billable. And so we'll want to work with coding teams and not necessary clinicians. And so likeJacob [00:34:05]: Coding meaning healthcare coding.Janie [00:34:06]: Yes. Yes.Jacob [00:34:07]: NotChai [00:34:07]: Yes. I see you.Swyx [00:34:07]: Other kinds.Janie [00:34:09]: But is this output proportional to the work that was delivered? Is there sufficient documentation to justify the amount that a health system may end up charging? And so, specialty sometimes but also domain, very different across all of the different products that we're working for. And building out that network is, not easy and is where a lot of our operational investments have gone into.Chai [00:34:35]: And I view a lot of analogies to self-driving cars here, where, part of it is we really want progressive rollout of features to test in the real world is this useful? Is this going to work? One big difference compared to past lives is before I'd build a product, maybe I'd alpha it and then I'd like GA it the next week, ‘cause I'm “Go, move fast, ship,” and whatnot. But the mentality is like you... I want to make contact with the reality as quick as possible but I want a progressive rollout. Because as much as I get as large of an offline eval set, I want the distribution of that to match real-life distribution. And over time, by rolling out early, similar to Waymo has a tagline, “The world's most experienced driver,” another thing that can, at least linearly increase for us is, both the size of our evaluation offline and online, that and it all feeds back.Janie [00:35:25]: Something that's been earned over time, speaking of evolution, is just the trust we've gotten with customers. Historically, a lot of these health systems, when they bring on new vendors, their release cycles are quarters, sometimes twice a year. We've gotten our customers onto monthly release cycles, which is pretty fast for health systems but what is more exciting over the last, call it, few quarters, has been, a subset of our customers have said, “We want to innovate with you. We trust you,” and we have a pretty, decent chunk of our customers who say, “We'll develop with you outside of these monthly release cycles. We have a higher tolerance. We know that the stakes are very high but we want to be the first ones using these products, giving you feedback.” And so for a pretty substantial set of our customers, we've been able to convince them to be able to ship, in this gradual way before GA. Something we talk about a lot internally is, trust is earned in drops, earned in buckets and so we still can't do what I used to do when I worked at Loom. We had 30 million users. I'd just be, rolling out experiments left and. The bar is still quite high for iterative rollout but because of the trust we've earned, we're able to learn at pretty high volume very quickly.Privacy, HIPAA, and De-IdentificationSwyx [00:36:45]: Your scale is still pretty huge.Swyx [00:36:47]: One thing I want to... We were going to go into scale? In a sec. One thing I wanted to call up, follow up on evals, which, again, just coming from a generalist engineer point of view, just thinking through what would people be scared of in doing this, the privacy and HIPAAJacob [00:37:00]: Elements of this. I have zero experience in that. What do you have to do? What is surprisingly not that bad?Chai [00:37:06]: So one thing that's really important here from a compliance perspective is very much that any of the data we use needs to be de-identified, any real-world data we use as a basis of online eval sets we're learning from. And so you have to — And there's, very clear, government guidelines, what counts as PHI. And so we've even have built models that can take, for example, a clinical transcript and remove all the key PHI indicators and so you have a scrubbed/de-identified version. And then once you... And so one thing that's important is first you've got to get confidence in that model in the first place? And prove that out. Because, now you have, multiple probabilistic systems on top of each other.Chai [00:37:46]: But once you have that, then you can train on it use it for evaluation and so forth, provided one of the cool things also that you can do from a business side is the right data contracting as well with your partners.Jacob [00:37:57]: Is the anonymization one way? Once it's done, you cannot undo it? Or is there someoneChai [00:38:01]: YesJacob [00:38:02]: Who holds the master key that can... Yeah, okay. So it's one way.Chai [00:38:05]: It's one way. Yeah.Jacob [00:38:06]: That's how it works. I just wanted to... Because, there's a lot of this, learning from feedback and everything that, you would want to debug more but you can't because you just physically don't allow yourself to.Janie [00:38:17]: Some of it's also written in our customer contracts in terms of who can or can't access PHI data, how long do we retain it,Jacob [00:38:27]: Very goodJanie [00:38:27]: Before it gets de-identified. And so we have a pretty high bar for who can access that PHI data, just to make sure that we always respect our customer data and privacy. But that's something that we partner with our customers on too, to make sure that as we want full, as close to precision as possible in that qualityJanie [00:38:48]: We can still use it.Jacob [00:38:50]: But it'll be fascinating to see how that space evolves? Because you think about, I used to work at a company that, did a lot of healthcare data in the cancer space and if you asked, the average cancer patient, “Hey, do you want people, do you want other patients to be able to learn-”Chai [00:39:03]: Take it.Jacob [00:39:03]: “... Learn from your experience?”Chai [00:39:04]: Take it all.Jacob [00:39:05]: They're “Please.”Jacob [00:39:06]: “I'd love, nothing more than for other people to be able to learn fromJacob [00:39:10]: The experience that I had.” And so in the past it was a lot harder to do that learning. But with this technology, that might really be practical and so it'll be fascinating to see how that continues to evolve.Chai [00:39:21]: There's so much in our data set of 100 million conversations.Chai [00:39:26]: You can imagine things like insights that you can give to the clinician. How could you, oh, how could you have reacted to this? In coaching or insights around, which treatments are effective or, like... Because you have this, again, this data source that was never captured before but that's, where, intuition or experience is created from, going back to this idea that the conversation is the agent of truth.Operating at Scale: Reliability, Cost, and Token EfficiencyJacob [00:39:46]: Back to the 100 million conversations, I feel like you have this insane scale that maybe only a few other AI app companies have and everyone else dreams of. So not everyone has had to confront this yet but maybe just talk about some of the challenges of operating at that scale and what, our listeners have to look forward to if they ever get to this level of scale.Chai [00:40:05]: At large and larger in scale, so of course there's a general, infrastructure reliability. When you... In any given startup, you're building the plane while it's flying. So there's some notion of that. But what gets interesting on the AI and ML side for sure is this, as you get at more and more scale, so one, you have the data to first and foremost do this. But, you start thinking about costs or infrastructure in a whole different way at scale versus, a prototype.Chai [00:40:34]: You can use the most expensive model, you can burn as many tokens as you want but when you're doing 100 million conversationsJacob [00:40:41]: Token max on leaderboards are less upsetting than that context.Chai [00:40:45]: . When you're doing that and so that comes for we have the data and we also have the team that's able to post-train based on this and you can optimize for efficiency, especially in areas where you believe that maybe a lot of the quality headroom is less so and you don't expect the other off-the-shelf models to go that way, such that you want to do, efficiency maximization, in terms of compute and tokens.Jacob [00:41:08]: I feel like you guys live in the future in some way where most use cases today are really just in use case discovery mode, where it's “God, I really hope I can find something that can get to scale,” and so you're always going to use the most powerful model. And then the few things that do get to this level of scale, you start to do those optimizations.Chai [00:41:22]: It's a natural trajectory where it's like zero-to-one, we're not talking about any of these optimizations.Chai [00:41:26]: But when maybe we're in the one-to-100 or so forth, then we're in optimization mode and, what works out really well is you've got all this data from zero-to-one that lets you do this.What Comes Next: The Conversation as the Shared Healthcare PlatformJacob [00:41:36]: That's fascinating. I feel like one thing that's so interesting about the Abridge footprint is that you're in the doctor-patient visit in real-time. I always like to say, there's like probably 50 years' worth of product you could build on top of that. What gets each of you, I don't know, what are you most excited about building, either in the short term or medium term or even, long down the line?Janie [00:41:53]: Something that I get really excited about is that the same conversation can serve so many stakeholders. If you think about the conversation, a doctor needs to know what is the documentation, how do I make sure that this fully represent the care I gave? A patient needs to know, “What the heck just happened? This was really overwhelming. What are my next steps?” A payer needs to know, was this the proper and appropriate care given? A pharma company might want to know why isn't this drug being properly used or is there a good candidate for this clinical trial that I'm about to run? And where I get excited is that our product and our platform and our infrastructure can be the same product across all of those things and start to what's today, separate, very expensive, complex systems that serve each one of these stakeholders in very different ways, start to collapse all of that into a singular platform that enables not just more efficiency across the board but also better outcomes for everyone. And, all of us experience healthcare in probably very painful ways and knowing that there is a world in which we can simplify a lot is really exciting to me and it all starts with the conversation.Chai [00:43:15]: It's interesting. Of it very similar to going back to the KPIs that any AI product cares about. How do you increase quality of care? How do you reduce latency to care? And how do you reduce costs? Which is a huge, in healthcareJacob [00:43:28]: They call it the triple aim in healthcare.Chai [00:43:30]: But very similar to building AI products and the thing that really excites me is when we talk about that latency piece, we talked about one example earlier of prior authorization, can you reduce the latency to care? But you can imagine so much more. Oh, as soon as the lab value gets updated, do you have like a background agent that, kicks off and uses all the context to be “Oh, hey, the patient should do this next,” for example. And of flagging that to the clinician who's always in the loop but reducing that latency, to care. And then you can imagine this is much further down the road but it's like even connecting that to the direct patient and the consumer. And so how can you, how can you build a bridge to all of these things?EHR Partnerships and the Clinical Intelligence LayerJacob [00:44:10]: Very cool. The connections piece is just an ever-growing thing. And one of the key partners is the EHR and I wonder what that relationship is like. Will they, look at this as, something that is valuable enough that they want to own someday?Janie [00:44:29]: Our partnerships with the EHR is, we know that we have to be extremely close partners with all the EHRs who we partner with. Being able to not only pull and push all of the data into the right places is, not only table stakes, if we can't do that, health systems don't want to use us. The second and the reality of today is clinicians spend a lot of their days in the EHR. So much of what allowed us to win in the largest health systems was pretty direct and, very close partnerships with some of the largest electronic health records that allowed us to pull and push data with APIs that weren't ready out of the box. And clinicians want to save clicks. Anytime we introduce a new product that, adds two clicks for them in their day, they're “We're not going to use it.”Janie [00:45:21]: They have 15-minute back-to-back appointments with their patients. They're spending, hours during pajama time doing documentation. Every second and every minute counts and so we really think about being deeply integrated into the EHR as also table stakes to getting real usage and adoption. And anything that we build or introduce, we really talk about earn the right internally a lot, which is we have to provide so much value or save so much time that people will use us. But those are the two things that are close to us, is we know that the product won't be used unless it is deeply interoperable.Chai [00:46:01]: And strategically, to your point, it's like what does EHR want to own versus us? EHRs are really focused on the clinical workflows and so forth but some of the things that we're talking about here, I do these traditionally are outside of the domain where it's oh, connecting pairs and providers together with provider policies or the clinical trial matching, as Janie brought up. And so these are, entirely — we position ourselves as building this entirely new intelligence, clinical intelligence layer across, again, providers, pharma and, payers.Chai [00:46:33]: And so that's a it's a whole different ballgame that we try to playChai [00:46:36]: In combination with them.Jacob [00:46:37]: But it's like a different layer of scope.Healthcare AI Regulation, Technical Depth, and What Changed Their MindsJacob [00:46:39]: I'm curious, you are both relatively newcomers to healthcare. People have these, there's lots of futuristic healthcare AI takes of “Oh, everything will look different.”, now that you've been in healthcare for a bit, you live at the edge of AI, what have you, changed your mind on around this, as you think about what healthcare looks like in ten, 20 years? Any updates to your mental model from the time being close to the problems?Chai [00:47:02]: One thing that IChai [00:47:04]: Was hesitant about before and it's a common thing when I'm trying to recruit engineers that people ask me around, is definitely oh, healthcare, heavily regulated space. And it is, rightfully so. You want to keep, the patients at the end of the day safe. But one of the interesting things that, is a that surprised me how much it is coming to the company is there's a lot of really favorable regulatory tailwinds as well. Where you think about, government really wants interoperability between all these systems that we talked about and so agents can access this information. The government just in January, the FDA released updated guidance on clinical decision support, what I work on in such a way that they used to have guidance from like 2022 that required you to have, mention all these options and do all these other things but it's a very forward and forward-looking way. And so for me, what's been really cool to work on is this, there's this very special moment both in AI in general, we all know that but there's a special moment also regulatory in healthcare as well.Janie [00:48:05]: One thing I would call out is for the very reasons things are higher stakes or, potentially considered more difficult in healthcare, it's where some of the hardest AI problems will get solved first, just because the bar is so high. When I first joined, I was “Oh, this is where we'll be on the tail end of where, all of the AI innovation will be able to be applied.” But when you think about, zero error evals or multi-step workflows that have really low tolerance, a lot of the innovation will happen here just because we have to or else we can't ship.Jacob [00:48:42]: ‘Cause like in other domains, you'd much rather just solve the 80%-is-good-enough problems firstJanie [00:48:46]: 80/20 doesn't work hereChai [00:48:48]: And building off that, traditionally, there was a bit of stigma that, oh, healthcare companies are not that interesting from a technical perspective or I've seen that or faced that myself. But these are really hard and fun problems from a pure technical perspective beyond just the impact. How do you bring the latency of this thing down and make it really high-quality?Reducing Latency: Clinical Workflows, Agents, and Implementation RealityJacob [00:49:07]: How do you bring the latency of things down?Chai [00:49:10]: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So okay, let's answer the latency question. And maybe hopefully not too redundant with some of the things I've said earlier but some part of it is with any latency, you have to like what is, what is really your bottleneck. In a lot of workflows, it's sometimes it's the model itself. And so that's where like our data flywheel, our post-training team and so forth come in so that can you make the models far more efficient. So that's one aspect of latency. But there's whole other aspects of latency where it's okay, on top of that, if you use a constellation of different models, can you use — can you first use like a — it's like thinking fast and slow. Can you use a cheap, fast model that triages and hands it off to a larger model where you get more intelligence and so forth and so all theseChai [00:49:56]: Clever tricks to make it work.Chai [00:49:58]: And by the way, we are totally — we also realize that the parameter frontier is changing and so these tricks will — may not get us to where we want to be in five years but we need to if we want to build a useful product right now.Jacob [00:50:11]: Should we go to the quick-fire or you want to ask more about Abridge? We can stuff everything that's not Abridge into the quick-fireSwyx [00:50:16]: I don't mind. I was — I feel like Janie was on the topic of more long tail stuff, which isSwyx [00:50:21]: Not the eighty/twenty thing and that really matters. And I'll —, if you have any tips or cool stories or just general approaches that have worked for you that's interesting to dig into.Janie [00:50:32]: One of them is even just how we staff our teams looks different than a traditional software engineering team, I'd say.Swyx [00:50:40]: Let's go.Clinician Scientists, Edge Cases, and Evals at ScaleJanie [00:50:41]: We have a bunch of folks with different roles who are clinicians and so we have this role called the clinician scientist and I heard one of our leaders refer to them as mutants recently. But they are people who've had clinical backgrounds, so MDs typically, who are also deeply technical, somewhere, on the spectrum of like a full stack engineer all the way to like extremely scrappy prompter. But having each of these people embedded within our teams instantly raises the bar for everything that we build because not only are they determining, is this product clinically useful but they're deeply embedded in our whole evals process. And so when we talk about LFDs, when we talk about what is our actual evaluation criteria, you don't want Chai or me creating what those are because we don't have clinical background. But is probably unique to Abridge but has been game changing. And when you think about where the puck is going, you have people build with clinical backgrounds who are technical and where AI tools are going, they just becomeJanie [00:51:53]: More and more, critical and like the killers of the team. And so that's one. And then the second is just the scale at which we do evals to catch that long tail up front before anything ever gets into production is something that we've pretty much like really started to fine-tune, both from a scale but when do we know we need to get several hundred versus several thousand offline responses, what helps us make that quick decision and make this less of an art and as much of a science as possible. But that's also been something we've had to tune over time.Swyx [00:52:27]: And you have partners who opted in to give you those evals.Janie [00:52:31]: So we work either internally or with third-party for offline evals and then we have customers who also agree to give us, whether it's like thumbs up, thumbs down to like choose this or that, a lot of data to get us to what is as close to fully confident as possible.Swyx [00:52:51]: The term that comes to mind isSwyx [00:52:53]: Like active learning on things where you're weak. I feel like it's a lost artSwyx [00:52:58]: Is a lot of the polish that comes into doing something like this.Janie [00:53:02]: Really.Chai [00:53:03]: Hundred percent.Lessons from Glean: Technical Foundations and AI App InfrastructureJacob [00:53:04]: Maybe, on a totally unrelated note, Chai, you had a very, storied run at Glean b

The Agentic Patient is here — and most healthcare systems don't have a plan for it. In this special reverse-role episode of Faces of Digital Health, Eric Sutherland interviews host Tjaša Zajc about what a year of using AI through her own chronic illness has actually taught her about patients, doctors, and the future of healthcare AI. 200 million people will ask ChatGPT a health question this week. The question is no longer whether patients will use AI to navigate their care — it's how to help them do it well, without harm, and in productive partnership with their clinicians. In this episode: - Why "patients know best" breaks down for chronic patients - The three archetypes AI is creating: minimizers, cyberchondriacs, and informed collaborators - What happens when doctors dismiss patients who use AI - A two-model verification method for cross-checking medical AI advice - Why "digital literacy" is the wrong name for the most important skill in modern healthcare - Two prompts that genuinely change what AI gives you back - What health ministries should actually do — and why we shouldn't offload patient AI education to doctors ⏱ CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro & reverse-role experiment 01:00 Eric Sutherland: "a data guy with personality" 01:36 A year as a chronic patient using AI 02:50 Same prompt, different LLMs — the trust problem 04:30 How The Agentic Patient series was born 06:00 Three patient archetypes 09:00 When doctors dismiss AI, patients start hiding 12:30 Dale Atkinson, HIMSS Europe, and data outside the clinic 13:30 200M weekly ChatGPT health queries — who's accountable? 15:30 The two-model cross-verification method 17:00 Making 7-minute appointments work with AI 19:30 Finland's Elements of AI — a model for healthcare 22:00 Why chronic patients may not know best 24:30 Five minutes with a health minister 27:00 Two prompts that change AI outputs 30:00 The agentic patient is a survivor, not a tech enthusiast

What if the biggest wake-up call of your life became the reason you completely reinvented your future? In this episode of Wickedly Smart Women, host Anjel B. Hartwell welcomes Janet McConnell, a Senior National Champion Bodybuilder who began competing in her late 40s, Janet brings decades of experience in strength training and lifestyle habits that support cognitive health, resilience, and vitality. As the author of Elements of Aging Well, she blends science-backed insight with real-world strategies to help women age with confidence, strength, and purpose.  Janet shares how a shocking health diagnosis at age 46 forced her to confront the reality of burnout, unhealthy habits, and the long-term impact of putting herself last. Instead of accepting prescriptions as her future, she made a bold decision to change her life through one consistent habit: resistance training. If you've ever wondered whether you've waited too long to prioritize yourself, this episode will challenge everything you believe about aging and personal transformation.   What You Will Learn: How one consistent habit can create massive health transformation over time. Why resistance training is one of the most powerful tools for healthy aging and cognitive health. How high-achieving women often disconnect from their health while building successful careers. Why mindset shifts must happen before lasting behavior change can occur. How Janet reversed alarming health markers without extreme dieting. What happens physically and mentally when strength training becomes part of a long-term lifestyle. Why aging does not automatically mean decline or loss of vitality. How identity and purpose evolve when transitioning out of corporate life. Why women over 45 should rethink the way they approach fitness and longevity. How healthy habits become votes for the person you want to become. Connect with Janet McConnell LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/janet-mcconnell-65703a1b2/ YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@AgingStrongforLife    Connect with Wickedly Smart Women® Wickedly Smart Women Wickedly Smart Women on X Wickedly Smart Women on Instagram Wickedly Smart Women Facebook Community Wickedly Smart Women Store on TeePublic [5X Award-Winning Book] Wickedly Smart Women: Trusting Intuition, Taking Action, Transforming Worlds Email: listeners@wickedlysmartwomen.com      

Edition 447 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Gus Drax – Sentio Ergo SumTextures – Closer To The UnknownA Thousand Allies – Tragedy FusionWolverine – A Perfect AlignmentQuaoar – Oblivion Now To Then: SoenDiscordiaIncendiaryLunacy (live)VirtueAntagonistPenanceGod’s AcreJinnThe WordsSavia Between The Buried And Me – OvertureAxios – PyramidAvenged Sevenfold – Creating GodSpiritbox […]

Send us Fan MailMark Jones of Real Estate AF sits down with industry veterans Patrick Conway and Adam Hughes to reveal the secrets to building a profitable, sustainable career in any market. They cover the power of coaching, focusing on high-value "green time" activities, and implementing simple systems like the "15 & 1" daily goal to create a referral-based business that lasts. Learn to stop being busy and start being profitable. Key Points* The Power of Coaching: Long-term success is attributed to mentorship and being truly coachable—the ability to execute without opinion.* Better, Not Bigger: A smaller, more focused business can be significantly more profitable (e.g., from 19% to 68% profit margin).* Green Time vs. Red Time: Maximize your income by focusing on "Green Time" (money-making activities) and delegating or systematizing "Red Time" (administrative tasks).* Systems for Success: Implement simple, consistent daily goals like the "15 & 1" rule (15 calls, 1 warm lead) to build momentum.* Referrals Are Key: The most efficient way to grow is to get one new client from every existing client by specifically asking for the business.* Mindset Over Market: Individual effort, strong systems, and a relationship-based approach matter more than overall market conditions.* Build Your Support System: Success requires a strong network, including professional coaches and personal accountability partners.Chapters (Timestamps & Topics)* 00:00 - Intro: The Power of Coaching & Relationships* 01:52 - Origin Stories: From Title Reps to Top Producers* 06:40 - Patrick's "Rookie of the Year" Success & The Roller Coaster Effect* 09:25 - The "Bigger Isn't Better" Philosophy & 68% Profitability* 12:20 - Adam's "Rock Bottom" Turning Point & Defining "Coachable"* 15:05 - Green Time vs. Red Time: Calculating Your $660/Hour Worth* 19:04 - The "15 & 1" Daily Formula & 6 Elements of a Great Call* 22:15 - Building a Referral Engine: The "Just One Deal" Script* 25:30 - The High-Trust Interview: How to Win & Filter Clients* 29:40 - Why Market Conditions Don't Dictate Your Success* 32:12 - A Personal Story of Resilience: The Power of a Relationship Business* 35:00 - Final Takeaways: Embrace the Boring & Run the PlayMark JonesSenior Loan Officer | NMLS #513437iThink Mortgage powered by Premier Mortgage Resources | NMLS #1169Equal Housing OpportunityAll content on this channel is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute a commitment to lend, loan approval, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, or investment advice. Loan terms, interest rates, program availability, down payment requirements, and eligibility are subject to credit approval, underwriting guidelines, investor overlays, market conditions, and change without notice.Opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of iThink Mortgage, Premier Mortgage Resources, any affiliated companies, podcast guests, employers, brokerages, lenders, builders, or industry partners.Guests appearing on this podcast speak on their own behalf. No compensation is given or received for referrals, endorsements, podcast appearances, or business recommendations unless specifically disclosed. Nothing discussed should be interpreted as a referral agreemSupport the showKey Factors Podcast is Powered by LoanBot.com Host: Mark Jones | Sr. Loan Officer | NMLS# 513437 If you would like to work with Mark on your next home purchase or as a partner visit iThink Mortgage.

In this episode of Big Gay Book Club, we review the Thai GL novel The Water (Volume 2 of the 4 Elements Series) by Salmon and compare it to the Thai GL series adaptation. If you love girls love stories, LGBTQ literature, or sapphic media, this episode is for you.We break down what makes the novel so compelling, including character development, emotional depth, and queer representation. We also explore how the series adapts the story and what moments work better on screen versus in the book.If you want to support us and gain access to bonus content become a Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BGE Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Wanna talk queer media with us and our friends? Join our Discord: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BGE Discord Link⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠This episode along with all our other episodes are now available on YouTube: Check out the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BGE Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠As always, please feel free to reach out to us on all the things. We love hearing from you!Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@biggayenergypod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter(X)      ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠biggayenergypod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tik Tok      ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@Biggayenergypod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tumblr      ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠biggayenergypod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠#Englot #4Elements #TheWater #ThaiGL

In this episode of Take-Away with Sam Oches, Sam talks with Rachel Cope, founder and CEO of 84 Hospitality, which has four concepts in its portfolio, including the eight-unit Empire Slice House. Rachel — who NRN recently named to the Power List of restaurant founders, and who was also named a 2026 James Beard Award Semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurateur — opened the first Empire in 2013, and every restaurant that she's opened since has been imbued with the five things she's passionate about: people, art, music, booze, and of course food. In fact, 84 Hospitality is so committed to the atmosphere of their restaurants that they don't even call them restaurants; they call them “hangouts,” because their main goal is for customers to enjoy themselves on site and plug into their community. Rachel joined the podcast to talk about the details that go into a great restaurant atmosphere — from a curated music playlist to free prosecco pours — and about how she's positioning Empire Slice House and its counter service offshoot, Empire Slice Shop, to be a major growth opportunity. In this conversation, you'll find out why:The best leaders figure out how to adapt to their situationA carefully tailored restaurant atmosphere can be the difference between a good time and a great timeCreativity must be balanced with practicality Quirky real estate is a great characteristic — until you need to scale The restaurant industry must resist becoming too transactional Have feedback or ideas for Take-Away? Email Sam at sam.oches@informa.com.

Edition 446 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Dream Theater – Beyond This Life (live)Dream Theater – Home (live)Dream Theater – Caught In A New Millennium (live)Dream Theater – Metropolis Pt. 1 (live) Opeth – The Moor (live)Opeth – The Drapery Falls (live)Opeth – Blackwater Park (live)Opeth – The Leper […]

Last time we spoke about the battle Yaoyi. Japan pushed hard into Hubei with a plan: surround the main Chinese forces and seize Yichang, hoping to use it to strike at Chongqing. At first, the fighting was chaotic and punishing. The Chinese side tried to hold the line and disrupt the advance, and they even managed setbacks for the Japanese, pushing back, retaking key ground, and hitting supply and positioning weaknesses. But victory came with a cost: commanders were lost, and every gain was hard-won. Still, the battle didn't unfold as a clean Chinese retreat or a simple Japanese win. As Japanese units shifted and tested for openings, the Chinese forces adjusted—delaying, regrouping, and fighting to keep their formations from being completely trapped. Eventually, Japan managed to break through at critical moments, especially through crossings and maneuvers that the Chinese had not fully sealed off. In the end, Japan succeeded in taking Yichang, but it didn't achieve the decisive annihilation it wanted.    #201 The New Fourth Army Incident and the Strained United Front Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. After the catastrophe of the early 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entered the war against Japan in a political mood that was both hopeful and wary: it wanted to be seen as a genuine national leader of resistance, yet it also feared being absorbed—or destroyed—by the Guomindang (KMT) state it had spent years battling. That tension became the organizing principle of the war's early years. The turning point came from the Xi'an Incident in December 1936, which forced a new calculation in Nationalist politics. In the months that followed, agreements between KMT and CCP representatives were publicly proclaimed in August and September 1937, after the Shanghai fighting began. Under these arrangements, the CCP accepted constraints that in peacetime would have looked like surrender: it pledged to strive for Sun Yixian's "Three People's Principles," to end its former policies of armed revolt and sovietization, to abolish the soviet government, and to discontinue both the term "Red Army" and the expectation that its forces would operate outside central control. Communist troops would be treated as part of the national military under KMT command, and the revolution's old administrative structures were to be formally dismantled. In return, the KMT offered the CCP something just as important: space to exist publicly and politically. Liaison offices were permitted in key cities; the CCP was allowed to publish the New China Daily; and it could nominate representatives to KMT advisory bodies. Civil rights were extended—political prisoners were released—and subsidies were established to help cover administrative and military expenses in "reintegrated" areas and territories. The war thus transformed the tactical reality on the ground: the CCP could not treat the KMT as an immediate enemy, but it also could not afford to become politically passive. It had to learn how to fight Japan while building legitimacy fast enough to survive the next phase. In the first year and a half, the Party Center focused on three problems that kept returning in different forms: how the "united front" would be defined—especially what the CCP's relationship to the National government should be; how to coordinate military strategy and tactics with Nationalist units without losing control of its own operations; and how leadership should be consolidated, particularly for Mao Zedong in a party that still contained rival centers of authority. These disputes mattered not just for doctrine but for survival, because the CCP's autonomy was constantly being tested by the very alliance that was supposed to protect it. Mao's own approach to the united front combined cooperation with a refusal to surrender independence. Publicly, the CCP praised Jiang Jieshi and the KMT and promised unity, but it did so in language that was deliberately broad. In private (and in internal party debates), Mao treated unity as conditional: the CCP must not split the united front, but it also must not be "bound hand and foot." The strategic idea that emerged was political initiative under constraints—fighting when it could plausibly claim justification, keeping enough restraint that the CCP would not appear self-interested or anti-national, and deciding for itself when to engage and when to withdraw. This balance was reinforced through military reorganization. In August–September 1937, CCP forces were reorganized as the Eighth Route Army (8RA), with roughly 30,000 men drawn from Long March survivors, local forces, and new recruits. The 8RA was divided into three divisions: the 115th, 120th, and 129th, commanded by Lin Biao, He Long, and Liu Bocheng respectively. Shortly after the war began, the National government also authorized a second major Communist force: the New Fourth Army (N4A), to operate in central China. Its core came from those left behind when the Long March began in 1934—small groups surviving in difficult conditions against continuing KMT pressure. Officially authorized at 12,000, it took months to reach that strength. Nominally commanded by Ye Ting, actual military and political control rested with Xiang Ying and Chen Yi. From the start, then, the CCP's wartime "integration" with the National system coexisted with a clear effort to preserve internal control. Ideologically, the CCP worked to make its revolutionary program compatible—at least in appearance—with a national resistance coalition. On the New Democracy demonstrated how this strategy operated on two levels. In KMT-controlled spaces, its language could be read as aligning with liberal-democratic expectations: public participation, multi-party governance, legally protected civil rights. But in CCP-controlled areas, the same text could carry sharper class-based and authoritarian implications. The Party wanted a united front that broadened support without becoming committed to Nationalist limits on how society itself might be reorganized after victory. Meanwhile, even as the rhetoric of unity rose, the CCP worried about something more dangerous than military setbacks: the possibility that the KMT might accommodate Japan. Late 1939 and early 1940 made this fear harder to dismiss. Japan pursued collaboration with Wang Jingwei, culminating in the establishment of a "reorganized" government at Nanjing in March 1940. At the same time, Japanese intermediaries sought approaches to Chiang Kai-shek himself—an effort that the CCP tracked closely as a sign that peace negotiations might be possible even when battlefield conditions looked grim. Propaganda was involved, but the anxiety was real: if Japan and the Nationalists reached an arrangement, the CCP's whole wartime legitimacy-building effort could collapse overnight. As a result, the united front was interpreted inside the CCP not as a permanent coalition with the KMT, but as a flexible strategy with a cardinal purpose: to prevent peace between Japan and the Nationalists. Mao's position on the united front reflected this. For him, the alliance was meant to suspend the possibility of a China–Japan settlement, not to end the CCP's separate identity. The CCP could participate in a reconstituted national framework—possibly even a "democratic republic"—to gain legality and influence, but it should remain politically and, where possible, physically separate from the KMT. By 1939, however, the practical meaning of "flexibility" collided with reality. What had seemed, to some observers, like an unusually cordial entente began to fade. The KMT Central Committee adopted measures early in 1939 aimed at restricting Communist expansion, and armed clashes increased through the summer and continued into autumn and winter—especially around North China Communist bases. The period of rising conflict was later labeled by the CCP as the "first anti-Communist upsurge" (roughly spanning December 1939 into March 1940), but the crucial point was that both sides viewed each confrontation as a test of legal rights, moral legitimacy, and control over territory. Strategically, the CCP understood the KMT's effort as an attempt to check unauthorized growth of Communist armed power and to recover areas where influence had already slipped away—either to the Communists or, by indirect effect, to Japan. The KMT emphasized its traditional legal authority; the CCP countered with its claim to an "evolutionary" moral right to challenge the government's legitimacy. In practice, the conflict took the form of increasingly systematic military pressure, including a blockade around the Shen–Gan–Ning region. By this point, the blockade involved large numbers of troops (on the order of hundreds of thousands), halting Communist expansion and disrupting direct contact with other Communist forces farther afield, even as fighting flared along border zones and around vulnerable points in the Communist defensive perimeter. So, by the edge of the "middle years," the wartime alliance had not broken into open civil war—but it had also stopped being secure. The united front survived, yet it operated under strain: its language of cooperation continued, while "friction" between partners hardened into a central feature of the resistance struggle. Transition into the war's second phase began in early 1939, shaped by the stalemate Mao had already anticipated at the sixth plenum in late 1938. Mao argued that during this prolonged "new stage" the forces of resistance—above all, Communist-led forces—would strengthen. The overall result, however, was mixed. In Shandong and Central China, new Communist bases did take shape. But across much of North China, Japanese consolidation cost the resistance heavily in manpower and population. Base-area economies suffered serious strain, and the peasantry endured hardships more severe than at any earlier point. This stalemate had two main dimensions. The first was the growing resentment of the Nationalists toward Communist expansion—resentment made especially sharp by their own losses. As the Nationalists were driven out of regions that had previously provided them their greatest wealth and power in the central and lower Yangtze basin, they also lost the "cream" of their armies. In contrast, the CCP was spreading through the wider countryside behind Japanese lines, extending its influence and winning broader popular support. The second dimension was Japan's desire—and need—to consolidate territories it had only nominally conquered and to extract economic value from them. After all, the logic of the "China Incident" was to draw on China's labor and resources to strengthen Japan, not to bleed Japan's gains away by draining wealth into China's vast interior. A Japanese colonel, lamenting the situation, captured the frustration of this drift into deeper entanglement: he regretted that Japan had not ended the "China Incident" once its initial objectives were reached. Instead, Japan was drawn into the hinterland and became bogged down in endless attrition—leaving it with little more than "real estate" rather than the popular support it believed it would secure from those it claimed to "liberate." To improve their position, Japanese authorities—still fragmented by internal rivalry—pursued several strategies. One was a new peace offensive aimed simultaneously at Jiang Jieshi, alongside efforts to establish a "reformed" Nationalist government under Wang Jingwei, who had fled Chongqing in December 1938. Japan also recruited more collaborators and puppet officials. Finally, it carried out forceful military, political, and economic measures intended to establish effective territorial control and eliminate opposition. During the middle years of the war, the Communists described their conflicts with the Nationalists using the euphemism "friction". By 1939, what many observers—possibly incorrectly—had viewed as an unusually warm alliance began to break down. In early 1939, the KMT Central Committee adopted measures meant to restrict the CCP. From the summer onward, military clashes began and continued into autumn and winter with increasing frequency and intensity, most of them concentrated around and within the North China base areas. The Communists later labeled the period from December 1939 to March 1940 the "first anti-Communist upsurge." Naturally, each side accused the other of aggression and claimed self-defense against unjust attacks. Strategically, though, the North China "upsurge" functioned as a Nationalist attempt to limit the CCP's expansion beyond the areas assigned to it and to regain influence in regions the Communists—or the Japanese—had already taken from the KMT. Jiang Jieshi framed the matter as a defense of legal rights grounded in tradition, while the Communists asserted an "evolutionary" right to challenge the moral legitimacy of those legal claims. During 1939, the Nationalists began to blockade Shen–Gan–Ning around its southern and western perimeter. Within a year, this blockade grew to nearly 400,000 troops, including some of the last remaining Central Army units under the command of Hu Zongnan. The blockade stopped further Communist expansion, especially into Gansu and Suiyuan, and severed direct contact between SKN and Communists operating in Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) adjacent to Soviet Central Asia. The Xinjiang Communists—including Mao Zedong's brother—were eliminated in 1942. Meanwhile, fierce fighting erupted along the Gansu–Shaanxi border and in the north-eastern corner of SKN near the Great Wall at Suide, as the blockading forces probed for weak points. Elements of He Long's 120th Division were even pulled back from the Jin–Sui base across the Yellow River to strengthen SKN's regular defenses. Economically, the blockade was even more damaging. During 1939, central government subsidies to the Border Region budget were cut off. Trade between the Border Region and other parts of China nearly stopped, a devastating blow to a region unable to supply itself with many basic commodities. At the same time, Nationalist and regional forces also attempted to expand their military and administrative authority into Hebei, Shanxi, Henan, and Shandong—areas the CCP now considered its base zones. In resisting these efforts, the CCP predictable accused its rivals of harming resistance work and damaging the people's interests. The "experts in dissension" were said to cooperate with the Japanese and their puppets. Based on increasing collaboration by regional units with Japan, the CCP implied that this was a deliberate and cynical strategy—described as "crooked-line patriotism"—intended to preserve those units for future anti-Communist operations. Even so, the CCP tried to avoid an open break with the Nationalist regime in Chongqing. In public, it consistently portrayed these clashes as being initiated by local commanders acting beyond orders from higher authority—despite knowing this depiction was false. Jiang Jieshi, unable to refute the claim outright, effectively permitted it to serve as the justification for a firm Communist response. Mao Zedong outlined the general resistance policy as "justification, expedience, and restraint". The CCP was to fight when it could claim justification and when it could gain advantage, but not to press attacks beyond what the Nationalists would tolerate or in ways that could damage its image as selfless patriots. Communist forces were expected to keep initiative as much as possible in their own hands—deciding when to engage, whether to engage, and when to disengage. The most striking episode of the "first anti-Communist upsurge" was the rupture with Yan Xishan in December 1939. Tensions in Shanxi had been rising throughout the summer and autumn, as Yan and his conservative supporters—associated with the "Old Army"—linked the Sacrifice League and the Dare-to-die Corps of the "New Army" with Communist forces. When base areas and Japanese occupation eventually took over much of his province, Yan was forced into exile at Qiulin across the Yellow River in Shaanxi. In November, Yan ordered his Old Army to disarm the Dare-to-die forces with help from central units dispatched by Hu Zongnan. In the bloody fighting that followed, these elements gradually broke free of even nominal provincial control and fully completed their connection with Communist forces. More than 30,000 people went over to the Communists. One KMT intelligence agent described the process with bitterness and a sense of inevitability: the Communists were first "full of sweet words," flattery, and distortions designed to open things up and conceal their actions. But once they had fully entrenched themselves, and once the low-level base had been established, they turned and bit. The agent suggested they had suspected things might end this way, but were not aware how quickly events would move—or that it could happen precisely while Communist calls for "united front" and "maintenance of unity for resistance" filled the air. About a month later, in February and March 1940, elements of the 8RA beat back this so-called upsurge. Zhang Yinwu's forces were disarmed and dispersed across the plains of north Hebei. To the south, Chu Huaiping and Shi Yusan were pushed out of the base area, as was the KMT-appointed provincial governor Lu Zhonglin. Although some non-Communist forces remained in the region, the CCP's and CCLY bases were never again seriously threatened by forces affiliated with the central government. Reinforcing the CCP's accusations, Shi Yusan was later executed in 1940 by the central government for collaboration with the Japanese. By late 1939, CCP central authorities maintained that the areas where the CCP could expand its armed strength were mainly limited to Shandong and Central China. In those regions, the CCP continued trying to carve out bases where they could operate. The situation in Shandong was complicated. After the Japanese invasion, most Nationalist-affiliated forces stayed in the province, while Communist forces and bases were weaker and more scattered than further west. Only in late 1938 did major 8RA units from the 115th and 129th Divisions—led by Xu Xiangqian and Luo Ronghuan—enter Shandong to link up with the Shandong column and local guerrillas, including survivors of a large band recently decimated by the Japanese. Even with these efforts, Communist actions led to clashes not only with Japanese forces but also with various Nationalist-affiliated groups—groups that were stronger than the Communists at the time. Until late 1940, the CCP's clashes with Nationalist forces in Shandong were actually bloodier than clashes with the Japanese. The CCP understood that its Chinese rivals mistrusted one another, and that their attitudes toward the CCP varied widely. The main Nationalist forces were often not tightly affiliated with Chiang Kai-shek or the central government. Instead, they operated under independent—and at times disgruntled—regional commanders. Communist tactics were expressed through slogans emphasizing ways to win support and isolate hardliners: develop progressive forces and win over fence-sitters while isolating "die-hards"; flatter top echelons, enlist the middle ranks, and hit the rank and file; and win over Yi Xuezhong, isolate Shen Honglie, and eliminate Qin Qirong. Still, unlike other North China base areas, the Communists were unable for several years to neutralize Nationalist forces in Shandong. Even if Japanese mop-up campaigns had not weakened those Nationalists, the text suggests the Communists may still have struggled to do so. By November 1940, Xu Xiangqian claimed meaningful progress while admitting Shandong had not yet become a fully consolidated base. CCP successes were greatest along parts of the Shandong–Hebei border, around the Taishan massif in central Shandong, and near the tip of the peninsula far to the east. Elsewhere, "progressive forces" remained weak. Communist regular troops numbered about 70,000, which was far below the party center's goals of 150,000 regulars and between 1.5 and 2 million self-defense forces. Moreover, systematic economic reforms had barely begun. The CCP relied on familiar practices—confiscations, collections of "national salvation grain," contributions, and loans—alongside a conventional taxation system adjusted to favor poorer peasants. Communist expansion in Central China was even riskier, with a greater likelihood of large-scale conflict with central government forces than in the north. In much of North China, "friction" came primarily from rapid Communist expansion into areas with partial vacuums. In Central China, however, base-building required displacing an existing Nationalist military-administrative presence closely tied to Jiang Kai-shek and the Chongqing government. The burden of this expansion was carried mainly by the 6th Detachment (northern Anhui and Jiangsu) and the 5th Detachment, which was reinforced by 15,000 to 20,000 8RA troops under Huang K'o-ch'eng. As Chen Yi's 1st Detachment crossed from south to north through the corridor provided by Guan Wenwei's local forces, it became actively involved as well. This expansion—driven by increasingly urgent directives from Mao and Liu during the latter part of 1939 and into 1940—brought the N4A north of the river into ever more frequent and sharper clashes with Nationalist authorities in Anhui and Jiangsu, especially with units under Jiangsu governor Han Deqin. South of the river, though, Xiang Ying did not directly challenge Chongqing's commanders. Mao later charged that Xiang Ying may have been influenced by Wang Ming, or else he may simply have seen no realistic alternative. His forces—three detachments plus a headquarters unit—were heavily outnumbered by Qu Chutong's Nationalist units, not to mention Japanese forces and their puppets. Even if Mao insisted bases could be built "anywhere," the Shanghai–Hangzhou–Nanjing triangle was especially difficult terrain. Xiang Ying and his followers had survived with extraordinary tenacity in the mountains of South China between 1934 and 1937, enduring brutal search-and-destroy operations that were not lifted until the war began. It therefore seems unlikely that such survivors would suddenly become "right-wing capitulationists."  Yet by spring 1940, Mao was pressing Xiang Ying more intensely. The Central Committee's message was explicit: expansion was necessary in all cases. It meant reaching into all enemy-occupied areas rather than being bound by the Kuomintang's restrictions—going beyond Kuomintang limits, not waiting for official appointments, not depending on higher-ups for financing, and instead expanding armed forces freely and independently. It also meant setting up base areas without hesitation, independently mobilizing the masses in those areas, and building united front organs of political power under Communist Party leadership. The struggle between Nationalists and Communists involved more than contests for control of territory behind Japanese lines. It also involved national-level politics, ideology, and leadership. One worrying development for the CCP was the campaign throughout 1939 to expand Jiang Kai-shek's prestige and formal power—adding more titles for him across major party, government, and military positions. In early 1939, the Central Executive Committee appointed him "director-general" of the Kuomintang, a title reminiscent of the one previously held by Sun Yat-sen. In addition, during the summer and autumn of 1939 there was talk of constitutional rule. In November, the KMT announced plans to convene a constitutional assembly the following year. If Jiang could fulfill these promises, he and his government could gain new legitimacy and wider popularity. Mao and his colleagues could not allow this to go unchallenged. If the Nationalists were to have a paramount leader and authoritative spokesperson, the CCP needed one as well. The timing of Mao's famous "On the new democracy"—written in late 1939 and published the next January—was therefore no accident. Its substance had been anticipated earlier, but its final timing and full development were shaped by the KMT's constitutional movement. The CCP's entry into this competition served as both a bid for support away from the KMT and a statement of the multi-class united front that the CCP wanted to lead. Although "On the new democracy" was written in a tone that seemed moderate, it persuaded many Chinese readers that the CCP had either diluted its revolutionary objectives or postponed them to a distant future. In Kuomintang-controlled areas, the work could be read through the liberal values associated with Anglo-American democracy—popular participation, multi-party government, legally protected civil rights. In CCP-controlled territories, the same language carried stronger authoritarian, class-based meanings. In internal documents meant for party audiences rather than public consumption, the ambiguity was removed, showing a tough but patient and flexible commitment not only to resistance but also to social control and social change. During this same period, the Communists expressed deep concern about Nationalist capitulation to Japan—not only on the battlefield behind Japanese lines but also at the highest levels. Some of this concern was propaganda, but beneath propaganda lay genuine anxiety. In late 1939 and early 1940, politically aware Chinese already knew that Japan was negotiating with the unpredictable Wang Jingwei, who had fled Chongqing a year earlier. A "reorganized national government" in Nanjing was finally established in March 1940, representing the most formidable collaboration with Japan to date. Less well known, but equally important, was that Japan was also seeking an understanding directly with Jiang Kai-shek through intermediaries in Hong Kong. This effort, called "Operation Kiri"—described as spreading a "feast for Chiang"—combined intrigue with a kind of dark comedy. Reports suggested Chiang's reported interest in peace could have been a stratagem designed to discredit Wang Jingwei by keeping him waiting. But even if Chiang had no intention of coming to terms with Japan, the Communists could not be sure what the outcome would be until after the multi-pronged peace offensive had failed. By the middle of 1940, China had never been so isolated. In Europe, the "phony war" ended in the spring when Germany launched a blitz across the Low Countries. France fell soon after, and England appeared likely to be next. Japan used this moment to press China to sever its last tenuous connections to the outside world: cutting the Burma Road, trade with neutral Hong Kong, and the rail link running from Hanoi to Kunming. At the same time, Russia was engaged in a difficult and embarrassing war with Finland and reduced military aid to the Nationalists. The United States was only gradually moving away from isolationism and clearly regarded England as more important than China. In Chongqing and elsewhere in "Free China," signs of war weariness, despair, and demoralization were visible. Under these circumstances, Mao's insistence on aggressive expansion was a calculated risk—either it would deter any Japanese advance, or it would place the Communists in the strongest possible position in case a split between the KMT and the CCP became unavoidable. In Central China, the size and pace of the fighting kept increasing, starting in the final months of 1939. One flashpoint was the clash between Luo Pinghui's 5th Detachment and units of Han Deqin's Jiangsu force near Lake Gaoyou. In the following months, Guan Wenwei's forces ranged along the left bank of the Yangtze, repeatedly running into Luo's troops as they operated farther north. Luo also began receiving some 8RA reinforcements, moving them south through areas controlled by the 6th Detachment. Clearly, a major showdown was taking shape across north and central Jiangsu. At the same time, the South Yangtze Command was doing poorly. Nationalist commanders Leng Xin and Qu Chutong restricted its activities so severely that Mao and Liu gradually abandoned the idea of building a unified, consolidated base in that region. During late spring and early summer, Chen Yi moved most of his 1st and 2nd Detachments north of the Yangtze. In September, the 3rd Detachment followed suit, crossing the river into the area around Lake Chaohu, where the 4th Detachment was already stationed. After these moves, only the Headquarters Detachment—under Ye Ting and Xiang Ying—remained south of the Yangtze, positioned at Qingxian in southern Anhui. As the military situation edged toward an open confrontation, negotiations began in June 1940 between representatives of the KMT and the CCP. The core issues were Communist operating zones and the authorized strength of the armies led by the CCP. Proposals were exchanged, followed by equally sharp and hostile counter-proposals, but no agreement was reached. The KMT viewed it as a concession to permit the CCP "free rein" north of the pre-1938 course of the Yellow River, with the exception of southern Shanxi, which was to remain under the influence of Yan Xishan. In exchange, the KMT demanded that all 8RA and N4A units evacuate Central China. In effect, the KMT was offering the CCP something it was already prepared to allow, in return for the CCP giving up what it might soon be able to obtain by force of arms. Nationalist authorities then issued a set of deadlines, but without clearly stating what would happen if those deadlines were violated. On the surface, the CCP appeared to be complying in part. The movements of Chen Yi and the South Yangtze Command could look like obedience, but in reality they were responses to orders coming from their own superior leadership rather than instructions issued by the Nationalists. Even so, Xiang Ying's continued delays and evasions during the autumn and winter of 1940 remained puzzling. One possibility is that he felt—quite reasonably—that Mao had already lost confidence in him and that once he crossed to the north bank of the river he would lose his command. Another complication was that directives from Yan'an were sometimes ambiguous and even contradictory. He may also have been trying to reach secure understandings with KMT commanders about evacuation routes and guaranteed safe conduct out of the area. For a period, Han Teqin kept most of his forces—estimated at about 70,000 men, far outnumbering the N4A—in north Jiangsu, thereby blocking the expansion of the 6th Detachment and slowing further southern intrusions by 8RA troops. But by mid-summer he realized he would have to counter the N4A build-up in central Jiangsu, or else risk writing that region off to the Communists. A confusing sequence of engagements then unfolded, culminating in a decisive battle in early October 1940 near the central Jiangsu town of Huangjiao. Over the course of four days, several of Han's main-force units belonging to the 89th Army were destroyed, while others were scattered. That battle also served as a signal for the 6th Detachment to advance more aggressively in the north. In the aftermath, one of Han's principal commanders entered collaboration with the CCP, while another defected to the Nanjing government under Wang Jingwei. Although Han Teqin managed to maintain a foothold in Jiangsu until 1943, his real power had been broken. Relatively little attention was paid to the battle of Huangjiao in the Chinese press. The KMT did not want to publicize what it considered a disastrous defeat, while the Communists were satisfied to stay silent about an episode that conflicted with their proclaimed policy of a united front. As could be expected, during the autumn—after Han Teqin's defeat—KMT-CCP negotiations deteriorated further. In early December, Jiang Kai-shek personally ordered that all N4A forces withdraw from southern Anhui and southern Jiangsu by 31 December. He also ordered that the entire 8RA be positioned north of the Yellow River by the same deadline, followed one month later by the N4A. Discussions then followed between Ye Ting and Qu Chutong's deputies concerning the route to be taken, safe conduct, and—astonishingly—the money and supplies that were to be provided to the N4A to help it move. On 25 December, Mao Zedong ordered Xiang Ying to begin evacuating immediately. Yet it was not until 4 January 1941 that Ye and Xiang actually started moving. Almost immediately, Qu Chutong's forces harassed and dispersed the N4A Headquarters Group, which included administrative personnel, wounded soldiers and dependents, as well as combat-ready troops. In an attempt to reorganize, they moved southwest toward Maolin, where they were surrounded by Nationalists and, over the next several days, were cut to pieces. Losses were heavy on both sides. The CCP suffered an estimated 9,000 casualties. Xiang Ying tried twice to break out of the blockade on his own, but failed. He was then denounced as a deserter by Ye Ting, who took over full command of the doomed forces. Xiang Ying eventually escaped, but he was killed a couple of months later by one of his own bodyguards, motivated by the N4A gold reserves that he had taken with him. Up to the very end, Xiang either failed or refused to seek refuge in Liu Shaoqi's domain north of the Yangtze. The unfortunate Ye Ting was arrested and spent the rest of the war in prison. He was finally released in 1946, only to die one month later in a plane crash, along with several other high-ranking party members. On 17 January, Jiang Kai-shek declared that the New Fourth Army was dissolved for insubordination. Direct contacts between Yan'an and Chongqing nearly came to an end, and CCP military liaison offices in several cities held by the Nationalists were closed. This is what became known as the New Fourth Army incident, also referred to as the South Anhui incident. Clearly, it functioned as an act of retaliation for the defeats suffered by Han Teqin in north and central Jiangsu. It ended any realistic prospect of establishing a consolidated Communist base south of the Yangtze. Still, from a strategic perspective, these losses were ultimately more than offset by the gains achieved farther north. In fact, only a few months later, the reorganized N4A quietly began reintroducing some units into this region, where they carried out guerrilla activities without possessing a secure territorial base. Unlike the relative silence surrounding the fighting at Huangjiao, the New Fourth Army incident sparked bitter, prolonged controversy. The CCP argued that it was a second "anti-Communist upsurge," even more serious than the first. Presenting themselves as martyred patriots, they depicted their opponents as people who wanted to end the War of Resistance through what they called "Sino-Japanese cooperation" aimed at "suppressing the Communists." In their account, the Nationalists wanted to replace the war of resistance with civil war, substitute capitulation for independence, trade unity for a split, and replace light with darkness. People were telling each other the news and were horrified. Indeed, they claimed that the situation had never been as critical as it was at that moment. The Nationalist response, of course, was that provocations had been numerous and serious, and that violations of military discipline could not be tolerated. But the KMT's unwillingness to describe in detail its own defeats at the CCP's hands left it speaking in broad generalities. In the propaganda battle, the CCP clearly gained the better position and won more political capital. If it was politically valuable to be regarded as a national hero, it was even more valuable to be seen as a national martyr.  Many Chinese—and some outside—observers were genuinely alarmed and feared that civil war might openly resume. Yet, with a few exceptions, the events that culminated in the New Fourth Army incident have generally been interpreted as marking the breakdown of the second united front. That interpretation, however, is described as being wrong in two respects. First, the CCP understood the united front not as a narrow arrangement limited to a few major partners, but as a strategy that could be applied flexibly to all political, military, and social forces in China—from the highest levels of the central government down to the smallest village. Relations with Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang regime mattered, but they did not, by themselves, constitute the whole of the united front. Even regarding Jiang and the Nationalists specifically, the common reading is said to be misguided. Throughout the war, a cardinal objective of the united front was to prevent peace between Japan and the Nationalists. Therefore, if clashes between CCP forces and those of the central government on such a large scale as at Huangjiao and Maolin could occur without leading to peace with Japan and without triggering a full-scale resumption of civil war, then this should not be understood as the end of the united front—it should be seen as its fundamental vindication. If friction at that scale could nevertheless be tolerated by Jiang Jieshi, then fears about his future accommodation with Japan were greatly reduced. Following the New Fourth Army incident, the CCP reorganized its political and military presence in Central China. The Central Plains and South-east China Bureaus were merged and renamed the Central China Bureau, with Liu Shaoqi placed in charge, reflecting the area's importance to Party Central. The New Fourth Army was also reorganized completely and substantially regularized. Chen Yi became its new acting commander, since Ye Ting was imprisoned. He directed the force, now divided into seven divisions. Each division had territorial responsibilities, and in each region the CCP claimed the establishment of a base. Indeed, base construction proceeded in earnest only after the friction of 1940 and the New Fourth Army incident. In the years that followed, the operating areas of the First through Fourth Divisions contained expanding enclaves of consolidated territory, where military dominance was joined with open party work: administrative control, the development of mass organizations, local elections, and socio-economic reforms. The other three areas fluctuated between semi-consolidated and guerrilla status. With the incident, the worst phase of the KMT-CCP conflict was now over. When CCP documents later speak of a third upsurge in 1943, they refer to something openly political. With the exception of Shandong—where a fairly strong Nationalist presence persisted for a longer time—the overall balance of power among Chinese forces behind Japanese lines had shifted in favor of the CCP by mid-1941. In subsequent years the CCP's predominance became even more pronounced, until by the end of 1943 the Communists were virtually beyond challenge by Chinese rivals.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. After the CCP and KMT entered the united front, cooperation felt conditional from the start. Mao pushed the New Fourth Army to reorganize and preserve Communist autonomy, even as the 1937 agreements publicly pledged obedience to KMT leadership. In 1939–40 the Communists worried that Chiang might negotiate peace with Japan; so they expanded bases and military presence, triggering repeated clashes. The pressure intensified when KMT orders forced the New Fourth Army to evacuate south Anhui in late 1940. 

Edition 445 of Steve Blease's Heavy Elements is now available as a podcast. Playlist: Temples on Mars – Sleepwalking into ExtinctionAmorphis – The CircleJinjer – Green SerpentKatatonia – ThriceIhlo – WraithBetween The Buried And Me – God TerrorRivers of Nihil – The Sub-Orbital BluesBenthos – The Giant ChildTómarúm – Shed This Erroneous SkinGreen Carnation – Too […]

What does integrity truly mean in Ayurveda and why does it matter now more than ever? In today's rapidly expanding global wellness space, conversations around ethics, responsibility, and authenticity are becoming increasingly important. While this episode doesn't focus on specific events, it acknowledges that moments of rupture in any healing tradition can serve as powerful invitations to return to its roots, back to awareness, accountability, and integrity. In this episode, I'm joined by Vaidya Jayarajan Kodikannath, CEO and Academy Director of Kerala Ayurveda (USA), he brings both traditional wisdom and modern perspective to this essential conversation. Together, we explore the ethical foundations of Ayurveda, the responsibilities of practitioners and teachers, and how integrity can be embodied in both personal practice and professional life. In this episode, we discuss: What integrity means within the context of Ayurveda Why this conversation is especially relevant in today's global wellness landscape The role of dharma in guiding ethical decision-making What is a dharma-based business in Ayurveda Marketing your Ayurveda business with integrity How to cultivate discernment and inner authority when navigating the wellness space Subtle ways integrity can be compromised, even unintentionally The importance of self-awareness and personal practice in maintaining professional integrity Ayurveda as a consciouness-based medicine Ayurveda is more than a system of health, it's a path of conscious living rooted in awareness, responsibility, and alignment with natural law. As the tradition continues to evolve and expand globally, maintaining its integrity becomes a shared responsibility. This conversation offers both practitioners and students an opportunity to reflect, deepen their understanding, and reconnect with the values that uphold Ayurveda at its core. Episode Sponsor: Kerala Ayurveda Academy offers certification programs where you can build real knowledge, real confidence, and real impact for yourself, family, and clients. If you're looking for: Authentic Ayurvedic education rooted in classical texts Supportive mentors who guide you every step of the way A program designed to help you actually practice Ayurveda Visit the KAA website www.keralaayurveda.us for more information, and let them know you heard about KAA here! Visit National Ayurvedic Medical Association (NAMA) here.   Elements of Ayurveda Podcast Community This new online community was created for those who wish to go deeper into Ayurveda, together. Inside, you'll find: Monthly live Zoom meetups  Early access to podcast episodes Member forums for discussion and Q&A Mindfulness and self-care practices Seasonal group challenges and reflections This community is a conscious, supportive space to connect, learn, and grow with others walking the Ayurvedic path. Come say hello, introduce yourself, and be part of this living, breathing community. Join the new Elements of Ayurveda Community here https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/community   Check out Colette's online services: Online Consultations https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/consultations Private Digestive Reset Cleanse https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/digestive-reset-cleanse Online Daily Habits for Holistic Health Program https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/daily-habits Reset-Restore-Renew Program https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/reset-restore-renew Have questions on Colette's online services? Book a FREE 15 min Services Enquiry Call here. https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/consultations Do I have an accumulation of ama/toxins in my body? Take this quiz to find out https://www.elementshealingandwellbeing.com/resources Stay connected on the Elements social media: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/elementsofayurvedapodcast/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/elementshealingandwellbeing Thank you for listening! If this episode supported you, please consider leaving a review and if you think this information would be helpful to family or friends, please share this episode so we can spread this wisdom of Ayurveda.  Stay tuned and stay aligned with the Elements of Ayurveda Podcast. Thanks for listening!

Host Meg Wolitzerpresents four works in which nature and the out-of-doors drive both plots and character.  Humorist Jenny Allen does battle with her stubborn plants in “Garden Growing Pains,” read by Kirsten Vangsness.  The majestic Canadian border separates an Indigenous family in Thomas King's “Borders,” read by Kimberly Guerrero.  A housewife masters one of the elements in “Flying,” by Alyce Miller. The reader is Kirsten Vansgness again.And a sudden storm creates a sense of abandon in the Kate Chopin classic “The Storm,” read by Jane Curtin.  “Garden Growing Pains,” “Borders,” and “Flying,” were presented in cooperation with CacheArts and Utah Public Radio, KUSU-FM. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

WarRoom Battleground EP 993: The Strong Undercurrent Of Christianophobia In Some Elements Of Israeli Culture

Clean energy has a dirty secret buried deep in the Congo. The Elements of Power author Nicolas Niarchos is here to pull the supply chain apart link by link.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1315What We Discuss with Nicolas Niarchos:"Clean" energy isn't clean — the cobalt in your phone or EV may have been hand-dug in dangerous DRC mine pits by workers living under near-slavery conditions, earning barely enough to scrape by.China processes 70–90% of critical battery metals and owns major mines across the DRC and Indonesia, giving it a stranglehold on the global supply chain that dwarfs OPEC's peak leverage over oil.Supply chain audits are largely theater — documents have flagged child labor and dangerous conditions at specific mines, yet production never stopped, and conditions often worsened in the years that followed.Communities surrounding DRC mines face heavy metal contamination, mine collapses, and the world's highest rates of congenital birth defects — a catastrophic human toll that's invisible at the point of sale.You're not powerless: using your devices longer, raising concerns at shareholder meetings, and pushing elected officials to prioritize ethical sourcing are concrete steps that create real, compounding pressure for change.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: BetterHelp: 10% off first month: betterhelp.com/jordanButcherBox: Free protein for a year + $20 off first box: butcherbox.com/jordanDeleteMe: 20% off: joindeleteme.com/jordan, code JORDANBooking.com: Book your getaway now with booking.comSimpliSafe: 50% off + 1st month free: simplisafe.com/jordanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.