Podcasts about Fantastic

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Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/j0TuosYDQe4?si=7mzUwBe4PrQ-eB2E In this insightful session from the Ultimate Partner Live event in Bellevue, Washington, Vince Menzione sits down with Stephen Boyle, Corporate Vice President for Enterprise Partners at Microsoft, to pull back the curtain on the tectonic shifts redefining the tech ecosystem. Boyle details Microsoft's massive organizational pivot into enterprise and SME/channel divisions , explaining how artificial intelligence acts as the foundational thread unifying systems integrators, software vendors, and digital natives. Moving past market noise surrounding competing foundational models , he highlights Microsoft's strategy to become the ultimate “platform of platforms” by prioritizing user choice, security, and trust. Emphasizing a shift away from infrastructure technicalities and toward practical business outcomes , Boyle delivers an urgent mandate for partners to scale technical talent, eliminate traditional operational silos, and brace for the incoming consumption-driven, agent-based future of enterprise computing. Key Takeaways Microsoft has restructured its global sales divisions into distinct Enterprise and SME/Channel organizations to better target its massive total addressable markets. Artificial intelligence is fundamentally altering the partner ecosystem by dismantling traditional software and systems integrator silos to build interconnected, multi-party solutions. Rather than forcing alignment to a singular model, Microsoft aims to be the definitive platform of platforms by offering extensive choice across over 1,100 language models. The enterprise landscape is rapidly moving past experimental AI pilot phases and entering production setups completely focused on transforming core business outcomes. Tomorrow's service organizations are aggressively evolving into software-minded operations that deploy repeatable, highly specialized internal autonomous agents. Managing tokens and monitoring usage metrics represents the emerging operational baseline for balancing efficiency against the scaling expenses of large language models. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags AI frontier, platform of platforms, enterprise partners, global systems integrators, digital natives, language models, token consumption, agent sprawl, citizen developers, shadow IT, business outcomes, technical enablement, marketplace growth, hyper-scalers, processing fluency, sovereign AI, industry ecosystems, data governance. Transcript [00:00:00] Stephen Boyle: This is the biggest, most transformative, iterative change in technology we’ve ever seen, where, if you wanna call it a paradigm shift or whatever word comes after paradigm shift. [00:00:12] Vince Menzione: We just came back from Ultimate Partner live in Bellevue, Washington, where we hosted incredible leaders for two amazing days. Come join us for this next session where we explore the tectonic shifts we’ve all been seeing. Uh, I am thrilled to invite our next guest up on stage. I’ve known this gentleman for several years back in my days at Microsoft, and, um, we’ve been friends, actually Microsoft, and then we both went and did different things, came he’s come back to Microsoft in a big way. [00:00:46] Vince Menzione: Uh, Steven Boyle, for those of you don’t know, is recently a named the C. We will talk about it in a second, but I, I need to announce you properly. Is the corporate vice president, which by the way in Microsoft is a big deal for enterprise partners. He and Nicole De and I would say are the two Microsoft leaders in the organization. [00:01:06] Vince Menzione: Nicole is the channel chief. Steven has a, a big remit and we’ll talk about that up on stage. But I’m just so delightful for his support and for making the time in a very busy week at Microsoft ’cause this is CEO summit this week to make some time to come with us and be on stage with me. Please welcome my good friend Steven Boyle. [00:01:29] Vince Menzione: Good to see you, sir. To see. So I’m gonna put you on this side. [00:01:33] Stephen Boyle: Okay. [00:01:35] Vince Menzione: The hot seat. So I’m gonna, I, I didn’t do a justice and I, I wanted you to explain your role. I, I think I know, but I think for the, for the people in the room, uh, talk to us what Enterprise Partners means at Microsoft and what that role remit and remit looks like. [00:01:50] Stephen Boyle: Um, CVPs may or may not be important, but one thing they don’t do is get invites to the CEO summit. So I’m super pleased to be here with you guys. No, no, it’s totally cool. It’s totally cool if that phone rings. No, I’m kidding. Doesn’t. So what does it mean? So I’d like quickly, um. January last year, uh, we split the sales organization into enterprise and small to medium enterprise and channel. [00:02:15] Stephen Boyle: You guys probably familiar with that? Nicole is the, uh, chief partner officer lives in the SMA and C world and drives the channel, um, drives our marketplace business and, and a lot of other things. Um, for that 60 billion, um, you know, total addressable market that we have. Down there in SME and C. Um, at the same time, we established enterprise partner as part of Nick Parker’s overall organization. [00:02:40] Stephen Boyle: Um, but for most of 2025 we ran it as global systems integrators and advisories, ISVs and digital natives. So three separate footprints all focused entirely on, on, on enterprise. Um, in December, January, we talked about establishing an enterprise partner leader that would. You know, aggregate all of this stuff. [00:03:00] Stephen Boyle: Um, I was fortunate to come through, um, some frankly, pretty hairy, uh, experiences, I bet with some of our senior leaders. Um, I, I’ve loved to [00:03:08] Vince Menzione: been in the room for that [00:03:09] Stephen Boyle: questions like, why Steven Boyle and things like that, right? And really have to dig deep to, uh, to justify. Anyway, uh, I’m blessed and honored, uh, to run that entire portfolio of partners, uh, for the entirety of the enterprise partner world, which now from a chief revenue officer perspective, belongs to Deb. [00:03:25] Stephen Boyle: Deb Co. So Deb is the enterprise leader for all of our sales that we do into that space. Awesome. Um, I have three regional leaders, Nina Harding here in the United States, Ehab Ra in in Europe, and Heather Gordon in Asia that mirror and replicate and flow down the things that we decide to do from a strategy perspective for the, uh, for the core. [00:03:45] Vince Menzione: And we love Nina. She’s been, she was at our last event, [00:03:47] Stephen Boyle: super, super lady. And, uh, you know, the US is still 50% of our overall business. [00:03:53] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:03:53] Stephen Boyle: Too big to fabric. Every time I talk to Nina, I’m like, Nina, you’re too big to fail. We can’t cover you anywhere else. So you know, you’ve gotta be successful here in the Americas. [00:04:01] Vince Menzione: So I think just for breaking it up, I, ’cause I do want to like, it’ll lead to the next question, right? So you have the global systems integrators, all these systems integrators. Essentially you have all of the software companies we used to call ISVs, we now call SDCs or software development corporations. [00:04:17] Vince Menzione: And then you also have the AI stack, I’ll call it. Right? So under Jason Grafe. Yeah. Many, many might know. Jason’s been a guest on the podcast and was Satya’s chief of staff at one time, eight years. Eight years. Wow. I didn’t realize there was that many. [00:04:31] Stephen Boyle: Carry carried a lot of bags for Satya over the years. [00:04:34] Vince Menzione: Unbelievable. Well, let’s, I mean, so AI is an important component, right? And you saw Jay’s, Jay talking, just talking about AI and all these things. I would love to start here, right? Because, uh, you’re, you’re, I wanna get your perspective as Microsoft, your perspective as Microsoft on the biggest shifts you’re seeing in defining this we’ll call AI Frontier. [00:04:54] Vince Menzione: We’re seeing right now, how should partners translate that into how they position and go to market externally? How, how do we need to think about this time? [00:05:02] Stephen Boyle: Yeah, that is, uh, that is a huge question and I’m not sure we’ve got enough time to go into the, into all of the detail. Um, so let me sort of up level it a little bit for you. [00:05:10] Stephen Boyle: And I think, look, the move that we meet at made a couple of months ago and pulling together those three aspects. Nicole had already done it in SME and C. Right. One partner organization across the world with a very common set of goals. We were working closely together, Sandy Gupta, on ISV, Jason on ai, and myself on on si. [00:05:29] Stephen Boyle: But we were still working closely together across silos. So the opportunity for me, 60 days into this role is AI just allows you to wire the partner ecosystem together differently. Right? And even if you look at how we’re going to market an AI today, um. You know, with, with, with chat GPT, with Claude, with Anthropic, um, I think there’s something like 1100 different, you know, language models on Microsoft today. [00:05:55] Stephen Boyle: So the way I think about AI is we are absolutely gonna be the ultimate platform of platforms. Yeah, choice is incredibly important. Um. It’s, it’s, you know, turn the clock back 12 months, everybody was chat gpt five point x, you know, and then six months ago it was Gemini and now it seems to be clawed. And honestly I don’t know what it’s gonna be next quarter. [00:06:15] Stephen Boyle: So the only thing I can do is offer you choice. [00:06:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:18] Stephen Boyle: And from a partner perspective, I think that minimizes or reduces the risk that you have betting on the Microsoft platform because you can go in a multitude of different directions. I know we’re not in Europe, but if you were in Europe and you were worried about G-G-D-P-R and Jay mentioned sovereignty, you’d probably be like lining up really closely to Misra. [00:06:37] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. And a bunch of other Europe, European partners. So wherever you are in the globe, I wanna be that platform choice. Um, and we will lead with our own first party solutions. I hope they’re not coming for me. Um. I parked safely in the hotel. It can’t be me. Um, but you weren’t vibe coding in the room. Um, but you know, wherever you are in the world, in whichever industry you are in, um, it is our intent to, to offer that platform of platforms and to give the broadest set of partners the opportunity to engage with us. [00:07:07] Vince Menzione: I think that’s really important because I, I have found, especially in the last month or two, people are, it’s almost like a knee jerk. Don’t you feel like people don’t know what to do? There’s been so much noise in the press and the media and, and the markets around open AI and anthropic especially. Where do I go? [00:07:26] Vince Menzione: Seems to be like when I, when I sit, I watch everybody in the room here. I think they’re, they’ve all been thinking that as well. So you can, [00:07:31] Stephen Boyle: there’s a, a little bit of a deer in the headlights moment. Yes. And even I like, I get that. Yeah. Um, you know, I saw, uh, Jay slides. Jay, love the presentation. Love the slides, man. [00:07:40] Stephen Boyle: I’m gonna steal several of them. Um, we’ll talk about that later. We, we [00:07:43] Vince Menzione: have the deck, [00:07:45] Stephen Boyle: but, but in all seriousness, you know, this, this is like. It’s a new paradigm. I will date myself a little bit. Some of you might heard me say this. I sold many computers in the 1980s. Mini computers. Some of you in the room are going, what’s a mini computer? [00:07:59] Stephen Boyle: Um, I sold client server for Sun Microsystems in the nineties. I sold an awful lot of Oracle databases in the Auts, I think they’re called, and I’ve done two stints with Microsoft. This is the biggest, most transformative. Iterative change in technology we’ve ever seen. What, if you wanna call it a paradigm shift or whatever word comes after paradigm shift. [00:08:18] Stephen Boyle: Um, and we are building intelligent systems at scale faster than we’ve ever seen. Scalable, mission critical solutions being implemented today inside of Microsoft and with our most important customers. So, and we can’t do it without partners, right? There is absolutely nothing we can do in this industry. I will, I will put the, you know, the elephant in the room out there. [00:08:40] Stephen Boyle: Our ISD organization has between five and 7,000 people. Our forward deployed engineering organization is about a thousand people. [00:08:47] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:08:48] Stephen Boyle: So when you look at the scale of the total addressable market that Jay just talked about. We are gonna service directly like this much [00:08:55] Vince Menzione: used to be 5%. Was it even, is it even that high? [00:08:58] Stephen Boyle: I doubt it’s, I doubt it’s even that. And the billions of dollars that we spend every year helping our customers transform to what we’re now calling frontier firms is gonna be, have to be driven with every single person in this room in some way, shape, or form. Judson is not asking Marla to significantly increase ISD. [00:09:15] Stephen Boyle: Not asking John to significantly increase FDE, although we probably will hire in that area just because of the, the newness and the, you know, bright shiny object that everybody’s like, oh, FDE, I’ve gotta have those. We’ve got a thousand already today that have been around in John’s organization for 10 plus years doing the things that we are doing today. [00:09:32] Stephen Boyle: But we are gonna build out that muscle. But the real way we’re gonna build out that muscle is with all of you in this room. That’s like categorical. That is my like, probably number one goal for the next one to three years is make sure that, that story that Jay just told about Microsoft not being involved in AstraZeneca. [00:09:48] Stephen Boyle: I probably won’t tell Judson that Jay, but I love the story. Um, like if you could all do that for me, like win, um, that is so, you know, from our worldwide learning, through our skilling enablement through our cloud solution architects that I personally own. We are pivoting aggressively towards making sure that the partners understand our platforms better than any other job, number one for me right now, if you don’t understand what I’m selling, like I’m kind of dead in the water obviously. [00:10:15] Stephen Boyle: Well, [00:10:15] Vince Menzione: I was gonna ask you why now? Why Microsoft? Why now? Right? Because there is a lot of noise. You know, Google just announced, you all announced your results on the same day, which was astounding. That was freaky, wasn’t it? It was. It was the first time. And the, the total commitment, customer commitment is over a trillion dollars now, I think 1.2 trillion is what I counted up. [00:10:33] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. [00:10:34] Vince Menzione: But it’s saying a lot about like, what do I do now, like as these partners in the room. Um, how, I think you kind of already, and you’ve talked about this, about differentiating where Microsoft is, I think J Slide does a lot of justice there. It says how, uh, Microsoft Partners came into the room, surrounded the customer. [00:10:52] Vince Menzione: It feels like Microsoft has always leaned in big time on partners. Uh, more so I would say than any other organization out there. What would [00:10:59] Stephen Boyle: you say Joe Roses, my chief of staff, business manager and so many other things was telling me last night that, you know, we used to say 500,000 partners. [00:11:05] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:11:06] Stephen Boyle: it’s a, it’s a significantly higher number than that as well. [00:11:09] Stephen Boyle: So there’s an element of, you know, back to the deer in the headlights, which partners are, are more important. One of my other phrases that I say on a regular basis, the winners and losers are yet to be decided in this next wave. Like, I want all of us to on the right side of that argument. Right? But, but it’s gonna be a challenge and, and companies are going through shifts. [00:11:28] Stephen Boyle: You know, Accenture, maybe, possibly doesn’t need 750,000 employees in the not too distant future. Maybe TCS at 600,000 doesn’t need 600,000 human employees. So we’re going through this dramatic shift of, you know, what’s the right balance going forward. What I would say about Microsoft is notwithstanding the fact that we’ve figured this out for 51 years, which is a little bit mind blowing, um, that you know, all the way back in the seventies we’ve gone through so many iterative changes. [00:11:56] Stephen Boyle: People have questioned just like they’ve questions. A lot of other technology companies, are you gonna be around for the long haul? I think we’ve proven time and time again, and I love Jay’s story. I’ve used that myself about how many companies disappear on a, on a decade to decade, you know, business. 10 years ago I had the opportunity to listen to Craig Clayton Christensen, who’s sadly no longer with us. [00:12:15] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. But you know, the books that he wrote and the story that he told to Microsoft 2014, we were nowhere in cloud. [00:12:21] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:12:22] Stephen Boyle: AWS was so far ahead of us, it was crazy. And he came in and he’s like. You know what? You guys need to be successful. You need to figure out how to cross this chasm again, and we’ve done it time and time again. [00:12:32] Stephen Boyle: You can go back. You know, Microsoft used to be known as a fast follower in ai. I don’t think we’re a fast follower. I think we’re right up there. We’re right at the front, but that race is still being run and the winners are losers are yet to be decided. [00:12:44] Vince Menzione: I was in that room with Clayton Christensen with you, by the way. [00:12:46] Vince Menzione: I remember, I remember that. That was at a Prism conference. [00:12:49] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. Yeah. [00:12:50] Vince Menzione: You men, you touched on this with the GSIs a little bit. How do you see the roles evolving? You know, we, we, we bucketed all, we’ve always been. Fantastic about bucketing ISVs or SDCs and sis and digital natives. Yeah. How does it, how does that all come together? [00:13:06] Vince Menzione: Does it come together any differently in this new AI platform era, or is it the same? [00:13:11] Stephen Boyle: I look, I, I’ve said this for a long time, like if you go into AstraZeneca, the six plus, you know, frontline partners, there’s probably a whole board of second, third tier that, that we don’t know about doing, you know, things across the AstraZeneca group. [00:13:25] Stephen Boyle: It takes several villages and sometimes a small town, especially in my world, in the enterprise world, strategic five hundreds. Yeah. Um, you know, we, we ran some reports a few years ago and it is shocking how many global systems integrators have a footprint in Shell or Exxon or, you know, bank of America or whatever else. [00:13:44] Stephen Boyle: So I’ve always believed that partner to partner is critical. Yeah. I think it became even more critical in the, in the AI world, and I’ll take my new friends at Anthropic. So I went to the first Anthropic partner Summit. Some of you might have been down there in, in San Diego, um, just a couple of months ago. [00:13:59] Stephen Boyle: Same partners, same people from the same partners. In the room, you know, talking about what they’re gonna do together with Anthropic. Um, and I’m looking out across this audience going, okay, well I know him and I know her and I know those guys, and like, I need to figure out how I’m gonna weave this together. [00:14:14] Stephen Boyle: So it’s not just an Accenture and Anthropic or an NTT data and anthropic, but it’s an NTT data plus anthropic plus Microsoft. Story going forward. And then who’s best at delivering those services capabilities? So it’s it at every juncture that I see in the, in the partner community, and this is the, the reason why I argued vehemently with Nick, that it has to be one organization I’m gonna create maybe given a little bit away. [00:14:40] Stephen Boyle: So if you’re recording, stop now. Um, I’m gonna create an enablement organization that is partner agnostic. I don’t necessarily care. I do care about the digital natives, but I don’t care about how I train them. Right. What I’m more important of is how do I train the digital natives in what the sis are doing, and how do I train the sis and what the ISVs Plus digital Natives are doing. [00:15:01] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:15:01] Stephen Boyle: That is my, that’s my game plan. If I fail there, then I think we fail to raise the bar and be differentiated in an AI world, and I’m not set up like that today. [00:15:12] Vince Menzione: I wanna, I wanna ask you, uh, uh, because I was looking at Jay’s slide and the, the managed piece is. And we have a lot of managed service providers in this room today. [00:15:20] Vince Menzione: A lot of them, by the way, come from the old school of managed services. The managed piece seems to be like, if I’m doing something today with ai, we’re gonna talk about security next, uh, up on stage here. It seems like there’s a new set of skills or a different approach to the customer, don’t you? Don’t you agree? [00:15:37] Stephen Boyle: I I [00:15:37] Vince Menzione: think you need to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all [00:15:39] Stephen Boyle: times. I think what it boils down to is you can’t do AI unless you do certain other things. [00:15:44] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:15:44] Stephen Boyle: Right. You could be a modern work specialist and you could make a lot of money being a modern work specialist, or you could be a, a dynamic specialist. [00:15:52] Stephen Boyle: We just held our, uh, inner A in a circle conference last last week, which I was disappointed to miss for the first time in a few years. Those, those days are, are, are fast becoming over. [00:16:03] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:16:04] Stephen Boyle: Um, why? Because everything that I’ve just said is tied together by ai. Yes. And in order to do good ai, you need good data. [00:16:12] Stephen Boyle: And in order to trust everything that you’re getting, as Judson talks about trust and intelligence, you need to wrap that in a really secure [00:16:19] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:16:19] Stephen Boyle: You know, en en environment. Now we will do our best to provide levels of security into how we deliver ai. But that’s not the end of the game, right? You have to take it all, all the way to the edge. [00:16:30] Stephen Boyle: So that’s why a siloed partner or a singular commercial solution area partner in Microsoft’s terms, has got to transform its business. ’cause if you’re gonna do ai, you’ve gotta do those other things as well. [00:16:41] Vince Menzione: Agreed. I must see the model changing, and in fact, I see like bigger organizations becoming managed service providers in many respects. [00:16:48] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, there’s still, there’s still a role for all the old terminology you mentioned is SV to sdc. Yeah. I’m like, I’m been around long enough. Look, it’s ANB still anv, it’s still an isv. Thank you. Independent software vendor. Um, and it’s, you know, where, where AI is allowing software to be, you know, frankly developed in a number of different places. [00:17:07] Stephen Boyle: We are all citizen developers. Um, you know, I was on a call with our internal leadership yesterday, um, and you guys might have heard this story ’cause I think it came out at Ignite. When we turn the agent 365, around and on ourselves. We found 130,000 agents running across Microsoft that had been developed and deployed internally with, I mean, you could call it shadow it. [00:17:28] Stephen Boyle: I guess that would be one phrase that you would use for it, but the reality is if you, if you haven’t got something to do your job today, you have the tools. To build it really, really fast. Um, and that, you know, that’s, that’s a great opportunity for people to be able to do their work, you know, in a better and in a different way. [00:17:45] Stephen Boyle: But it’s also a huge opportunity to make sure that data governance and security and all the other things that we need to deliver are there out of, out of the gate and out of the platform that we deliver. So security’s absolutely critical. Not saying that managed services won’t grow, um, at, at some level as well, but only if they transform into this multifaceted way. [00:18:04] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. Thinking [00:18:05] Vince Menzione: about, well, that’s what I was, I was gonna lead to here with innovating. It’s happening across, I mean, we’re talking about chips, we’re talking about foundational models, LLMs, we’re talking about applications, we’re talking about agents. How should we think about where to play and how to differentiate as partners in this room? [00:18:22] Stephen Boyle: I think. [00:18:25] Stephen Boyle: So look, I mean, one, one of the ways that Judson talks about it is I think silicon’s gonna change over time. Yes. NVIDIA’s definitely the 800 pound gorilla, maybe the 8,000 pound gorilla. Yeah. Uh, but you know, if you read the press, there’s, there’s things happening in, in different places as first party silicon, which we clearly are, are developing, um, in a quantum direction for sure. [00:18:45] Stephen Boyle: Um, there’s lots of different language models that haven’t even been launched on, on, on the marketplace yet, so. You know, Judson’s trying to uplevel our conversations. You’ll hear us talking about conversations more and more as we go into FY 27, um, that obviate all of those layers. Just like even when I was selling Sun Microsystems, it was about the business outcome and the business solution that we were solving for not necessarily the fastest piece of hardware or the best client service solution on, on the market. [00:19:17] Stephen Boyle: So I think what’s gonna happen over the next 12 to 24 months is we’ll have so many different models to choose from. We’ll have more silicon to choose from, but those won’t be the real buying decisions. The real buying decisions of what? How am I trying to transform my finance organization, my HR organization, and my supply chain? [00:19:36] Stephen Boyle: Because the underlying technology, Judson says commodity I, I guess I can go with that. It will be commoditized and we’ll really start to focus back on what the important things are. We’re moving a lot from pilot to production. You guys have probably seen that. The numbers that Jay just showed about how many. [00:19:52] Stephen Boyle: Projects are failing, is getting less and less because we’re getting smarter and smarter about what it takes to actually drive the business outcome. And I need all of us to be talking that same language. Yeah. Having conversations with head of HR about how we’re gonna transform human capital management in the, in the age of agents, if you like, like the underlying platform. [00:20:14] Stephen Boyle: It’s not, don’t worry about it. You wanna be on a secure platform. Don’t get me wrong. But at the same time, I don’t think we, we spent too much time worrying about that. [00:20:21] Vince Menzione: Yeah. We’re not, what you’re saying is we’re not spending enough time on outcomes. On the business outcomes. Right. And that’s where we need to focus. [00:20:27] Vince Menzione: We’re, we’re focusing on, I, I feel like we’re, it’s a signal to, to noise ratio that we’re living through right now. There’s too much noise. [00:20:33] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. [00:20:34] Vince Menzione: And we’re not focusing on the signal. I think that’s what you’re saying. [00:20:36] Stephen Boyle: I, it’s got to be, I mean, to be honest with you, it’s always been, you know, even when I sold what I would perceive, you know, sun in the nineties was a rockman ship to the stars and, you know, kind of sad what happened to that company. [00:20:47] Stephen Boyle: Um, but we, we were, we were fixated on, we had the best client server. But, but nobody was buying, you know, a piece of Sun hardware as a room heater, which is all it did, you know, like for the longest. But if you had SAP, if you had Cybase, if you had Bond, remember Bond, I mean all of those applications that drove the business outcomes, we’ve gotta get back to that kind of mentality. [00:21:09] Stephen Boyle: Yes. And worrying a little bit less about the underlying architecture. Yeah. It needs to be, it needs to be part of the conversation. ’cause it needs to deliver trust and security and intelligence and everything else. Then you need to rapidly move to what are you trying to achieve and how can we ensure the, the, the success of, of your business outcome. [00:21:27] Stephen Boyle: And look, I mean, Palantir pri you know, sort of came out and said, well, the way we do that is through forward deployed engineering. Um, and they stole the show. And, and, you know, they’re, they’re doing very well as a result of doing that. Uh, but if you go and talk to, um, Tom Siebel’s organization at C3 ai. [00:21:43] Stephen Boyle: They’ve had FDS for quite a while. You know, I told you about John Chuchu 10 years ago. John Chu, Chuck’s job was to go and get all the applications that we needed on the Microsoft phone. Remember that? [00:21:54] Vince Menzione: Yes. Um, [00:21:55] Stephen Boyle: you know, so we’ve pivoted John o over the years to doing what he’s doing now, which is to go sometimes in partnership with, with partners into the customer and say, what is it you’re trying to achieve? [00:22:05] Stephen Boyle: Let me show you how I can build that for you in three weeks or three months. That might have taken you three years. We literally just did a hackathon with one partner last, last, last week with, uh, with our ISE organization, the, the, the forward deployed, uh, group that John runs. Um, and one of the big customers said, I’ve just done in three days what would’ve taken me three months. [00:22:26] Stephen Boyle: Now he hasn’t productized it and rolled it out and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is that is how fast things are changing. And this was not a small company. This was a very, very large oil company, and they were like blown away by how much we can achieve. We’ve gotta do that at scale. [00:22:41] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:22:42] Stephen Boyle: You know, we, we have a commitment to scale our FDE community through partnerships to touch all of the S 500 in a very personalized way. [00:22:51] Stephen Boyle: And then, you know, at a slightly, you know, lower ratios down through the, through the majors and into, into Nicole’s SME and C world as well. [00:22:59] Vince Menzione: Jay talks about the decade of the ecosystem. He coined that term back, back on a podcast way back in nine, in, uh, in 2020. Microsoft has been at the, for, we used to call partner to partner back, back in the day. [00:23:10] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. Do you remember those days? How do you think about this ecosystem evolving and what steps are you taking to help bring these organizations together? Because I, I, again, we look at the seven seats or 6.3 seats at the table. The customer has the power now that they didn’t have before. ’cause they have the commitment with like with Microsoft and they can buy off of the marketplace and pull together multiple organizations to go, go do that. [00:23:34] Vince Menzione: How do you think about helping to orchestrate that as the leader of the enterprise partner business? [00:23:39] Stephen Boyle: So I’ll start with a really big example, and I’ll try and sort of scale it down a little bit. But my friends at Accenture, with the Accenture, Microsoft Business Group, we spend an awful lot of time, you know, in, in each other’s pockets, in each other’s deals. [00:23:51] Stephen Boyle: We know everything that’s going on in the Accenture, Microsoft Business Group. And a couple of weeks, or maybe a month or so ago, I was told that the Microsoft Business Group is now larger than the SAP Business group. It probably flip flops. [00:24:03] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:24:04] Stephen Boyle: it won’t be too long before the Anthropic Business Group is bigger than both of those. [00:24:08] Stephen Boyle: So what I need my Microsoft team to do is to not spend all of their lives in the. A MBG, the Azure, the Accenture, Microsoft Business group, but to go make friends in the Anthropic Accenture Business group and frankly still to make friends in the SAP business group and maybe in the Oracle Business Group and the list goes on. [00:24:27] Stephen Boyle: So at a macro 11, in the very largest accounts where we haven multiple practices, where we haven’t spent time before, I’m gonna. Push my people into uncomfortable zones and I’m gonna push them to go into those other areas and I’m gonna load them up with technical talent and cloud solution architects and ai, you know, forward deployed engineers. [00:24:45] Stephen Boyle: And I’m gonna force different people to talk together that haven’t talked together. So I can do that in TCS. I can do that, Capgemini, I can do that. Um, you know, in Europe with Capgemini and Misra is a classic example. Um, with the, with the Indian sis, Indian based sis, they’re all big enough where I know all the practices exist. [00:25:04] Stephen Boyle: I just need to do a better job of, of talking to them. Now, when you downsize that into, you know, into a, a company that doesn’t have all of that scale, this the same truth still holds. I need to talk to people who aren’t necessarily motivated every single day to do something with Microsoft. I need to talk to people who are motivated to do something with an AI partner or even a traditional SaaS partner. [00:25:27] Stephen Boyle: I noticed yesterday, actually no, this morning I got a notification that we just passed, um, a billion dollars in revenue on the marketplace with ServiceNow. [00:25:35] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:25:36] Stephen Boyle: Um, and I think AWS announced the same thing, by the way this month as well. Um, so thank you to the ServiceNow people. Yeah. Um, you know, that is that there’s a tremendous demonstration of how far we’ve come in marketplace. [00:25:48] Stephen Boyle: ’cause that’s another one where we trailed AWS quite significantly. But with the right partnerships. And driving the right motions, we can, you know, we can definitely catch up and we will continue to pass, uh, some of, some of the other hyperscalers in, in, in that way. So really the bottom line to your question is partner to partner is still real. [00:26:08] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:26:08] Stephen Boyle: how we do it and what we use to tie things together. And I know that compensation drives behavior and we’re not gonna get into a compensation about like how we get compensated and everything else, but the reality is I’ve gotta break down those barriers and those silos and I’ve gotta deliver real meaningful enablement and practice development so that, so that the people who sit in the Anthropic business group and the people who sit in the Microsoft Business Group are spending as much time together as they are with me. [00:26:34] Stephen Boyle: That makes sense. Simply put, that’s what I, I need to achieve at scale rapidly. [00:26:40] Vince Menzione: So to, we’re getting close to time here, but as you look forward, what would define the most successful partnerships in this ecosystem? Is it, is it what you described, the opening up the aperture or for the, for the leaders in the room here today, what should they go do better and differently? [00:26:58] Stephen Boyle: Um, so obviously we’re closing out this fiscal, we’ve got Microsoft start and Microsoft start for partners coming up in July. Um, I mentioned the fact that we’re, we’re driving. Cu customer engagement through the lens of conversations and how do we achieve business outcomes? I would encourage you to, to gravitate, if you like, above the commercial solution areas where you might have understood, this is how I interact with Microsoft today. [00:27:23] Stephen Boyle: Um, and abstract it up to that AI layer. You know, think about trust, think about intelligence, think about business outcomes, and how do I potentially weave together a story? If I’m in the dynamic space, how do I get better in data? If I’m in the data space, how do I get better in. In that modern work environment, but really use AI as the overlay to, to help tie that together. [00:27:44] Stephen Boyle: That’s one thing. The second thing is if we’re not training you in the right direction, it’s stevenBoyle@microsoft.com. Let me know. Awesome. Um, we’ve got programmatic stuff, um, you know, and we’ve got high touch stuff as well. So I think this is, this is another time where Microsoft is gonna over pivot on all of the training and enablement that we need to do to make sure that you’re, you know, you’re grounded in our platform. [00:28:07] Stephen Boyle: Um, I think there’s a huge opportunity with this agenda future to become more of a software partner. You know, even the deepest services organizations are going to need agents, and the more successful ones will be the ones that can turn on those agents in a repeatable way. So. Our agents, the new SaaS. I’m not exactly saying that, but I think that the agen future is one where even the more services oriented companies will, will have teams of agents that they’re deploying. [00:28:35] Stephen Boyle: In fact, I had a very, very large systems integrator, um, in, in the EBC just about a month ago, three weeks ago. Um, and I was sat next to their head of consulting and he showed me what he called his God dashboard. Uh, and right in the middle of his God dashboard there are like 450 accounts. All of whom I recognized, ’cause they were all in the enterprise, right in the middle of his dashboard was, how many tokens am I spending? [00:29:00] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:29:01] Stephen Boyle: Like, not like what’s my daily runway? You know, not am I making a profit on that account or anything else like that is like, how many tokens have I consumed? Yeah. Because there is an awful lot of, that is the new juice, if you like. That’s, that’s driving the success. You can have the smartest people on the planet, but you’ve got to still arm them with all the best tools that are available out there. [00:29:22] Stephen Boyle: So it’s fascinating to listen to him, how he had gone through that thing of, you know, agent sprawl, how many are really working, how many are not working? How can we prove that? You can prove it through, you know, managing your tokens. There’s a new version of. Finops for tokens, for want of a better phrase, that’s gonna be critical for us all to understand. [00:29:40] Stephen Boyle: ’cause they’re not cheap, they’re not free, that’s for sure. And, and they might not be cheap if you’re not, if you’re not managing them and using them effectively. Yeah. So that’s the other thing that I would really get on top of. And, you know, we’re gonna make some announcements in the not too distant future about the consumption driven future. [00:29:56] Stephen Boyle: Um, that, that we will, that we will deliver with our first party and third party platforms going forward. So that’s another. Another critical thing [00:30:03] Vince Menzione: sounds like some exciting announcements. Pretty soon. [00:30:06] Stephen Boyle: Yeah, could look close. Quarter four, help me close. Quarter four. Yes. That’s priority number one, two, and three right now. [00:30:12] Stephen Boyle: Uh, but get ready for some, you know, for some new announcements in July. Um, look, the future is incredibly bright with Microsoft. It’s incredibly bright in the industry as a whole, right? I mean, let, let’s be honest, the, the growth targets that we will have for ne next year are astronomical, and we will not make them without the partner community that we have, without training and enabling the partner community that we need for tomorrow. [00:30:34] Stephen Boyle: So like, stay close, you know, stay engaged. Talk to your partner development managers, talk to the talk to field reps, talk to the accounts that that, that you are in, and stay as close as you possibly can to our emerging strategy. And, um, you know, look, I, I think if I had fivefold or tenfold the people I have today, I still wouldn’t be able to touch everybody that I would like to touch in the partner community. [00:30:58] Stephen Boyle: So I’ll apologize in advance. Um, but we’re gonna have some, you know, some really cool ways of learning. Um, and we’re gonna make sure that they’re available to the widest possible audience. [00:31:07] Vince Menzione: Well, we bring the practitioners and the experts in the room to help with that as well. Right? Yeah. Because you can’t always have a partner development manager tied to everybody in the room. [00:31:14] Stephen Boyle: I, I would do hackathons on AI every week with every partner and every part of the world, but I can’t. [00:31:19] Vince Menzione: Yeah, exactly. Well, so good to have you today. Thank you. So good to see you again. I don’t know what your schedule is like. I, we didn’t, we don’t have enough time for questions. [00:31:28] Stephen Boyle: That’s cool. [00:31:28] Vince Menzione: From the audience. [00:31:29] Stephen Boyle: I’m gonna stay around for a little [00:31:30] Vince Menzione: while this [00:31:30] Stephen Boyle: morning and I’m coming back [00:31:31] Vince Menzione: for cocktails. Alright, terrific. So. Stephen Boyle will be here for cocktail hour. Thank you. Four 30 and uh, I wanna thank you, sir. So good to have you. Thank you. Good to see you. Absolutely. [00:31:42] Stephen Boyle: So much. Absolutely. Hey, thanks everybody. [00:31:43] Stephen Boyle: Thanks for what you do today, and hopefully thank you for what you do tomorrow as well. [00:31:46] Vince Menzione: Thank you. An incredible leader. [00:31:49] Stephen Boyle: Don’t forget, ultimate [00:31:51] Vince Menzione: partner Alive is coming soon, June 18th at our executive breakfast in New York. I hope to see you there.Description The Future of Tech is Here. Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ I

The Pittsburgh Pirates lost again as the bullpen struggled, again. Plus, Antwone Kelly makes his major league debut. What can we expect from him?Khristian Curtis makes his Triple-A debut and dominates. Could we see him in the majors this year? Subscribe to the Bucs on Deck Substack for daily content on the entire Pittsburgh Pirates organization. bucsondeck.substack.com/subscribeAlso, check out the YouTube channel for daily videos on the Pirates' organization.www.youtube.com/@bucsondeck Get full access to Bucs On Deck at bucsondeck.substack.com/subscribe

Hello everyone! In light of the tragedies facing the world and America today, I found it timely to bring this talk to teachers. I don't believe there has ever been a time in modern history when our students need to be doing what matters most—exploring their thoughts and reflecting on the ideas, experiences, and lives of others. With the murder of George Floyd giving rise to Black Lives Matter protests across the globe, and an unprecedented pandemic changing everything about modern life, we need to become better teachers NOW. To help give us the tools to empower students in such a way, I brought on my friend Travis Crowder to discuss his approach to reading workshop, and more specifically, his use of journals as tools for student reflection. If you missed part one, check it out here.  If you've ever struggled with keeping a journal or binder neat (or useful), or wondered if there was a better way to get kids invested in their reading, this is the podcast for you.  Travis Crowder is the co-author of Sparks in the Dark, and his latest book, Reflective Readers is out now (and it is FANTASTIC.) This episode originally appeared as #167.

"McElroy & Cubelic In The Morning" airs 7am-10am weekdays on WJOX-94.5!!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The tenth installment of Fresh Immigrants, Rotten Fascists introduces us to the Gangoli family - first generation Indian immigrants to America. Familiar faces Irrfan Khan and Tabu play the parents, but the big marketing angle was Kal Penn's dramatic turn as their son, he of the multiple names throughout the movie. THE NAMESAKE, based on a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, directed by Mira Nair, was certainly an important step in Penn branching out from his Harold and Kumar persona, but it's also a gentle, heartfelt portrayal of what it's like to have two homelands.Thank you for checking this new project out, whether you are a long-time Contrarians fan or someone who's just trying to listen to people talking positively about immigrants and negatively about fascism. If you have any recommendations for future entries in the series, let us know!Many thanks to the amazing Jordan Cooper for composing our intro and outro. Fantastic collaborator to work with - and he has a They Might Be Giants podcast: DON'T LET'S START. You can also check out Jordan's band TROUBLE'S AFOOT on Bandcamp!- Interested in more Contrarians goodness? Join THE CONTRARIANS SUPPLEMENTS on our Patreon Page! Deleted clips, extended plugs, bonus episodes free from the Tomatometer shackles… It's everything a Contrarians devotee would want!- Our YouTube page is live! Get some visual Contrarians delight with our Contrarians Warm-Ups and other fun videos!- Our buddy Cory Ahre is being kind enough to lend a hand with the editing of some of our videos. If you like his style, wait until you see what he does over on his YouTube Channel.- THE LATE NIGHT GRIN isn't just a show about wrestling: it's a brand, a lifestyle. And they're very supportive of our Contrarian endeavors, so we'd like to return the favor. Check out their YouTube Channel! You might even spot Alex there from time to time.- Hans Rothgiesser, the man behind our logo, can be reached at @mildemoniospe on Instagram or you can email him at mildemonios@hotmail.com in case you ever need a logo (or comics) produced. And you can listen to him talk about economy on his new TV show, VALOR AGREGADO. Aaaaand you can also check out all the stuff he's written on his own website. He has a new book: a sort of Economics For Dummies called MARGINAL. Ask him about it!

In this episode of the Independent Thinking Show for ⁠⁠@FifthWrist⁠⁠ Radio, Roman (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@TimesRomanAU⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Claus (⁠⁠@tapir_ffm⁠⁠) are joined by Felipe Pikullik (@felipepikullik), a fantastic German independent watchmaker.We chat about Felipe's early fascination with watches, persistence in gaining entry to watchmaking school in Glashütte, and formative work with Stefan Kudoke (skeletonization) and Rolf Lang (restoration and prototyping from scratch). Felipe describes the evolution of his watchmaking from decorating stock calibers to his most recent release of an in-house calibre Sternenhimmel FPA1; and explains his “in-house architecture” definition (FPA1 uses mostly in-house parts but not 100%), choices like German silver for finishing and patina, a handcrafted balance wheel displayed front-side, a retrograde date adjusted via lug mechanism to avoid pushers and danger zones, and his unique use of aventurine in the dial and movement construction.In our opinion, Felipe is one of the most exciting indie talents, delivering outstanding value and a unique voice in the indie horology space.We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did.Make sure to check out Felipe's work @felipepikullik and www.felipe-pikullik.de Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@FifthWrist ⁠⁠#fifthwrist #fifthwristradio #fifthwristradiopodcastIndependent Thinking Show is a place dedicated to showcasing the great people doing interesting and cool things in the world of horology.  To join our crew group chat then please email us at contact@fifthwrist.com and if you have time please leave us a review wherever you listen to our podcast.We remain fiercely independent with no commercial partners, or sponsored content. We only speak to people we respect and like - and that's a pretty rare thing these days! Thank you for joining us.Theme Music:  ⁠⁠The Wrong Time by Silent Partner⁠⁠ (via YouTube Free Music Channel)

This week, the boys talk about the Mike Babcock situation in Edmonton and talk about how wonderful the Stanley Cup Final has been and many might be missing out. Lyle Richardson of Spector's Hockey talks about the Dylan Larkin situation in Detroit and how it'll be the lasting mark in the Yzerman regime. 

Air Date - 10 June 2026According to the National Institute of Health, one in four Americans suffers from chronic pain. The good news is that most pain can be effectively eliminated if the correct medical resources are applied to properly diagnose and treat the root causes.Returning to Destination Unlimited this week, my guest Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum says, “It's the body's mechanism for signaling that something needs attention, much like the flashing oil light on a car's dashboard. If you put oil in the car, the oil light goes out. If you give the body what it needs, the pain goes away.” Dr. Teitelbaum is one of the most trusted and frequently quoted medical authorities in the world on pain, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, energy, and long COVID. He is the author of 12 books, including the bestselling From Fatigued to Fantastic!, Real Cause Real Cure, The Fatigue and Fibromyalgia Solution, and the popular free smartphone app Cures A-Z.His website is https://endfatigue.com/, and he joins me this week to share his path and new book, Pain Relief in 4 Simple Steps: Eliminating the Root Causes of Chronic Pain.#JacobTeitelbaum #VictorFuhrman #DestinationUnlimitedConnect with Victor Fuhrman at https://victorthevoice.com/Visit the Destination Unlimited Show Page https://omtimes.com/iom/shows/destination-unlimited/Subscribe to our Newsletter https://omtimes.com/subscribe-omtimes-magazine/Connect with OMTimes on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Omtimes.Magazine/ and OMTimes Radio https://www.facebook.com/ConsciousRadiowebtv.OMTimes/Twitter: https://twitter.com/OmTimes/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/omtimes/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2798417/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/omtimes/

Sensual Vol.1 RnB FANTASTiC | 27 July 2025 | 362.88 MB A loop kit inspired by the smooth sounds of Chris Brown, Drake, Bryson Tiller, The Weeknd, SZA, and many […]

Cyclops Kit

"McElroy & Cubelic In The Morning" airs 7am-10am weekdays on WJOX-94.5!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before he became known as the Hip Hop Chef, he was helping shape North Carolina's hip-hop culture.In this episode of Capital City Podcast, Capital J and DL Glass sit down with the Hip Hop Chef to discuss his journey through the early days of Greensboro's hip-hop scene, the impact of local radio, and the people who helped build the culture throughout North Carolina.From the era of 102 Jamz and legendary personalities like K-Nice, Polo, and T-Love to the evolution of hip-hop in the Carolinas, this conversation uncovers stories and history that many fans have never heard before.If you love hip-hop history, North Carolina culture, radio, DJs, community pioneers, and the untold stories behind the music, this is an episode you do not want to miss.Topics include:
• Early North Carolina hip-hop culture
• The rise of 102 Jamz
• North Carolina's influence on hip-hop
• Building community through music
• The Hip Hop Chef's journey
• Untold stories from the cultureSubscribe to Capital City Podcast for conversations that preserve and celebrate North Carolina's contribution to hip-hop culture.#CapitalCityPodcast #HipHopChef #NorthCarolinaHipHop #102Jamz #HipHopHistory #NCMusic #CapitalJ #DLGlass #Podcast

Hour 1 - We start with headline news, but then it is time for Lead-Off Sports with Ted Woodward. KU is out, and will not advance to the College World Series. Still a great season the Jayhawks can be proud of.

This week on the Any Given Runday podcast, we welcome back original Fantastic 4 member, Conor Sweeney, to talk about his upcoming 330km relay from Achill to Baltray, how his fitness has improved since we last talked to him after the Dublin Marathon, the Dublin City Half Marathon, Hot Yoga and much more11:00 We welcome back Conor Sweeney 13:53 Training and Preparation for the Relay Challenge16:50 The Role of Coaching and Injury Management since Dublin Marathon19:44 The Benefits of Hot Yoga for Runners22:49 Planning the Relay: Origins and Team Dynamics25:58 Logistics and Game Plan for the Relay Challenge29:30 Training for the Challenge36:01 Charity and Purpose39:04 Logistics and Support Crew41:31 Nerves and Excitement44:11 Nutrition and Strategy49:40 Future Goals and AspirationsYou can donate at the link:https://www.idonate.ie/fundraiser/AchillToBaltrayIf you would like to come on to the podcast and talk about your Dublin Marathon journey is 2026:https://forms.gle/KghbvxtATqzGsRbV6Or you are an experienced running coach with value to give to our listeners:https://forms.gle/Ct6dVFoHdJgJZbUcAYou can follow us on Instagram:@anygivenrundaypodcastUse 'Run10' to geth 10% off the Ultimate Muscle Rub Recovery Set, which is designed to support post-workout recovery, relaxation, and everyday muscle comfort after exercise, training, or long active days. This premium recovery bundle brings together carefully selected Ultrapure essentials to help you unwind, recharge, and feel refreshed from head to toe.https://ultrapurelabs.ie/products/sports-r You can now get 20% off all Perform Nutrition products, including their new Electrolytes+, using the code 'AGR' at checkoutPerformNutrition.com

Welcome back to the archive. In this special dual transmission, we turn our forensic radar toward a tiny, sun-bleached rock sitting in the literal centre of the Mediterranean Sea: the island of Malta.Built entirely out of soft, honey-coloured Globigerina limestone, Malta's hyper-dense historic cities are marvels of defensive architecture. In a space so profoundly compressed, where secrets are supposed to be impossible to keep, two completely different killers attempted to use the physical environment to construct the perfect cryptographic mystery.This week, we open two distinct historical drawers to execute a parallel forensic audit, proving that no matter how deep the water or how thick the limestone walls, the material signature of a crime can never be completely erased from the ledger.The Case Files Act I: The Marsamxett Harbor Torso Murder (1955) We descend into the post-WWII soot, coal grime, and severe economic desperation of the Valletta dockyards. When local fishermen haul up waterlogged burlap sacks from the silent depths of Marsamxett Harbour, they discover the cleanly dismembered torso of a missing dockyard clerk. The head and hands are entirely missing—a calculated tactical void designed to strip the victim of his biological identity. We trace the parallel micro-grooves of an industrial bone saw, a rare maritime double-hitch knot, and a single, crumpled scrap of local newspaper caught in a printing-press registration error that collapsed the dragnet directly onto a brutal domestic conspiracy.WHO was killed, and WHO killed them?? Act II: The Strait Street Locked-Room Inquest (1843) We slide the chronological grid back more than a century, climbing the steep stone steps into the dark, elite world of faded aristocracy along the infamous, vice-ridden corridor of Strada Stretta. A wealthy noblewoman is found smothered in her grand four-poster bed. The room is an airtight box: windows barred from within, the heavy oak door locked from the inside, and the key still resting firmly in the interior cylinder. Across the room, her private safe sits completely gutted. This wasn't a supernatural evasion—it was a masterful, low-fidelity mechanical deception. We dissect the material relics that unravelled the plot: an English gold pocket watch intentionally fractured to freeze the time at 3:14 AM, microscopic traces of white beeswax left deep inside a lock, and a simple silk thread trick that shattered an ironclad alibi.How....on earth did the key to the lock....remain stuck on the inside of the door opposed to the outside? In This Episode, We Explore: How hyper-compressed living spaces dictate the logistics of criminal concealment. The mechanical signatures left by industrial tools on bone structure. The physics of the classic "silk thread" locked-room exploit. How microscopic anomalies in everyday objects—from ink alignment to fractured brass gears—become permanent investigative anchors. Thank you so much for your support as always legend and have a FANTASTIC week ahead mates!!!

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve's sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Bob and Matt discuss the final issues of H2sh Part 1 and the future for the Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee dumpster fire. (Spoilers for this episode)Current Comic Rankings:Fantastic Four #1-87 (‘61) Jack Kirby & Stan LeeNew X-Men (‘01) Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Phil Jimenez, & al.Fantastic 4 (‘09) Jon Hickman, Steve Epting, & al.Doom (‘24) Sanford Greene & Jon HickmanFantastic 4 (‘02) Mark Waid, Mike Wieringo, & al.Boy Wonder (‘24) Juni BaFantastic 4 (‘89) Walt Simonson, Art Adams, & al.(New) Avengers & Secret Wars (‘13) Jon Hickman, Leinil Yu, Esad Ribić, & al.Archie v. Predator (‘15 & ‘19) Alex de Campi, Fernado Ruiz, & Robert Hack Batman: City of Madness (‘24) Christian WardUltimates Omniversal (‘15) Al Ewing, Kenneth Rocafort, Travel Foreman, & al.Aliens vs. Avengers (‘24) Jon Hickman & Esad RibićDC & Sts of Gotham (‘06) Paul Dini, Dustin Nyguen, & al.Archie Punisher Batman (‘94) Lash, Buscema, Goldberg, O'Neil, Dixon, & al.Batman: Broken City (‘04) Azz & Eduardo RissoGotham Y1 (‘23) Tom King & Phil HesterSuicide Sqaud: Get Joker! (‘22) Azz & Alex MaleevMighty Avengers (‘13) Al Ewing, Greg Land, Luke Ross, & al.Legend of the Blue Marvel (‘08) Kevin Grevioux, Mat Broome, & Roberto CastroBlack Panther (‘22) John Ridley, Germán Peralta, &c. Gotham City Sirens (‘09) Paul Dini, Guillem March, Peter Calloway, & al.Dr. Mid-Nite (‘99) Matt Wagner & John Snyder∞ Gauntlet (‘91) Jim Starlin, George Pérez, & Ron LimX-Men #1-19 (‘63) Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, & Werner RothAvengers (‘63) Jack Kirby & Stan LeeBlack Knight (‘21) Si Spurrier & Sergio DávilaSuperman v. FF (‘99) Dan Jurgens & Art ThibertFF: 1234 Grant Morrison & Jae LeeWerewolf by Night (‘23) Derek Landry & Fran GalánAvengers World (‘14) Nick Spencer, Jon Hickman, Stefano Caselli, & al.Batman: Hush (‘03) & H2sh (‘25) Jeph Loeb & Jim LeeAvengers AI (‘13) Sam Humphries & André Lima AraújoX-Men: Grand Design (‘19) Ed PiskorFF: Grand Design (‘19) Tom ScioliDC vs. AEW (‘26) Steve Orlando & Travis MercerGotham Knights (‘00) Devin Grayson, Roger Robinson, & al. Gotham Knights (‘02) Scott Beatty, Roger Robinson, & al.Gotham Knights (‘04) AJ Lieberman, Al Barrioneuvo, & al.

NOTE: Co-host Steve Waid is under the weather and won't be on the podcast this week. At this point, we're not quite sure when he might be able to return. Prayers would be sincerely appreciated. This week, in the third and final installment of our interview, Jeffrey Baker tells us about a fuel incident at Talladega, a penalty the very next week at California, an ACRIMONIOUS split with Jeremy Mayfield, and being man enough to apologize to Mike Wallace. Hosts Rick Houston and Tony Liberati then dig into the November 1, 2001, issue of Winston Cup Scene. Mike Wallace has a career day at Phoenix … and in the process … makes a STRONG case to keep his Roger Penske-owned team open for business. But then Jeff Burton INSISTS on ruining the Cinderella story by getting by Mike in the closing laps to win … and give Roush Racing a 1-2-3 sweep of the weekend's Cup, Busch, and Truck series events. There are actually FOUR big races that weekend. Cup, Busch, Truck … and trying to get from the track to Game One of the World Series. Martinsville Speedway's Mike Smith shares a FANTASTIC memory of Dale Earnhardt, and … finally … this issue raises an age-old question: Team Dave or Team Sammy? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Talking:- Denny Hamlin's fantastic finish at Nashville- Did the race go too long?- Cleetus McFarland at Nashvegas- Michigan International Speedway memoriesBrought to you by Triad Bank, & Getaway Carts in Soulard!

Hello everyone! In light of the tragedies facing the world and America today, I found it timely to bring this talk to teachers. I don't believe there has ever been a time in modern history when our students need to be doing what matters most—exploring their thoughts and reflecting on the ideas, experiences, and lives of others. To help give us the tools to empower students in such a way, I brought on my friend Travis Crowder to discuss his approach to reading workshop, and more specifically, his use of journals as tools for student reflection. If you've ever struggled with keeping a journal or binder neat (or useful), or wondered if there was a better way to get kids invested in their reading, this is the podcast for you.  Travis Crowder is the co-author of Sparks in the Dark, and his latest book, Reflective Readers is out now (and it is FANTASTIC.) This episode originally appeared as episode #166.  

Standing out as a dental practice is easier than you might think — and thank goodness for that! Kiera gives three steps to find what makes you and your practice unique even when you feel like you're as vanilla as can be. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and I hope you're having an amazing day. I am so excited to podcast with you. I get so giddy when I know it's podcasting day and I literally can't sleep at night. I get so excited for the next day and I just really want to make sure that what I'm delivering for you and all the different podcasts are exactly what you need because I do believe that my job in this world is to positively impact the world of dentistry and give you quick tactical tips that are going to change your life, change your practice and make you   Remember why you chose dentistry. Dentistry should be fun, you guys. Owning a practice should be fun. And I know that it's not always going to be fun. I've accepted as a business owner, there's highs and lows, and that's just the flavor of business ownership that we sign up for. And so today I wanted to just give some quick tactical tips because I feel like so many of us are trying to figure out how can we stand out as dental practices without it being just about cost. There's so much more because we talk about marketing and you guys know my Achilles heel is marketing. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.   ⁓ But it's really truly how can you be your own brand, your own fragrance, your own style, and yet still attract the patients that you want. And I think it's actually easier than you might think because we help practices all the time stand out for who you want. And what I found is the number one most important thing when you're looking at your practice is be true to who you are. I remember I was reading the book Traction.   by Gina Wickman, guys know, shout out. I'm a big proponent of that book. do a lot of Dental A Team's version of traction. We have traction within Dental A Team. And, I remember at end of the book, they were talking about how, like, know thyself and be free as a visionary. And, ⁓ if that's who you are or you're an integrator, like know thyself and be free. And I think when it comes to your own practice, know thyself and be free and make sure it's what people want. And then make sure you're talking to those people. I think about, have some friends that are.   are very into nature and them getting on the podcast, I'm probably not going to attract the same type of people that I attract. I want people that are driven, growth minded, entrepreneurs, people that are seeking that next level, people that want to have fun in life. That's who Kirita is and that's my style. That's my brand. And I remember when I started Dental A Team, I had some people tell me that, Kirita, there's absolutely no way you're going to be able to impact everybody across the nation and that's not going to work for you as a consultant. And I am so grateful and thankful that I stuck true to my gut.   I struck two to who Kiera Dent is. And while at the same time I can say true to Kiera, I need to also know what the market's asking for. If I'm just here to talk kumbaya with you, I'm probably going to attract a different crowd. But the people who want to be with Kiera, who want to be a part of Dental A Team, it's crazy. At the masterminds, I look at our doctors and our office managers and they are very similar to who I am and who I am on the podcast. So if that resonates with you, come be a part of our community.   you can reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com or go to our website, book a call. I'd love to chat with you. And I do still vet a lot of the people coming into our company. And, ⁓ I want to make sure that you're a good match for us. And so I think when I'm looking at what can you do to stand out within your own practice and how can you compete? It's who are you and what makes you different. And if you don't know, go read your reviews, go read the Google reviews, go read to see. And if you read dental, interviews, they always talk about that. They're fun, that they're positive, that they changed my life, that they make dentistry so simple.   That is Kiera Dent to the core. wanted to be the Dr. Seuss of systems. I wanted to make doctors and teams have easy profitability without it being hard. And so when I look at the reviews, that is true core to Kiera. So I want you to say who's true core to you. ⁓ And a good way to do this is to go back to what your core actually is. So go back to what the core values are. Why did you even start the company? When I go back and I look at Kiera Dent, like what were my three core fundamentals? You can ask Tiff this was the beginning of day one. Like it was fun, do the right thing and ease.   from the beginning of time, it's always been what I've said. I said, if we're not having fun, I don't wanna do this. Like truly, it's a hobby for me, it's a good time. And now we've created into an incredible business. Do the right thing always. Like do the right thing for the customer, do the right thing for our team, do the right thing for our clients. Like that is what I want you to do. And I'm not gonna sit here and give you a rules of do the right thing. Like as a core individual, you need to have that to your core. To me, it's a, we over deliver. We always come to the table. Like I want you just to do the right thing. And that needs to be a moral compass for you.   And then ease, I don't need people who make it clunky hard, all the different pieces, I need you to make it easy. And that's been my model since the beginning of time, I wanted everything to be easy, do the right thing and fun. That's Kiera's core, that's who I am. And so for you to go back and it's core values versus aspirational values. And so I really want you to look at what are the core of your company? And is that fulfilling?   I remember there's dental office I opened, me and the doctor, her core was very edgy. would say edgy is probably one of our core values of that company. We were listening to Drake at six in the morning. Like that was our core and we wanted it to be this edgy vibe. were in downtown Denver. That's what we did and it attracted the right type of people. Now my parents, if they walked into that dental practice, there is absolutely no way in their right mind that they would want to stay there. But a lot of people in downtown Denver, we knew our avatar, we knew who we wanted. So we were going to attract that. So I really want you just to think of like,   How can you stand out? How can you make sure that this practice feels like home to you? So step one is go back to your core of why did you even start this business? And let's make sure that that's really incorporated in everything you do. Number two, I want you to really make sure that who you are fundamentally is what you're branding and what you're speaking to. ⁓ And then make sure the third thing is you look to see what do patients really want and what are they valuing? So.   I think so many practices, the reason you get lost in the mix is because you've just got standard marketing across the board. says like, we care about our patients. We have the exact same services listed. We've got generic online presence. There's nothing that identifies or differentiates you. There's a practice in California that I really love. And she said like, we love ⁓ changing the way people feel about going to the dentist. And I have another dentist who their tagline is to be the community, the, like the dentist that the community chooses.   ⁓ And I have another office that's like to change the way people feel about going to the dentist. And another one is to just be your foodie dentist. Those people, you guys, I didn't even pull up my notes. didn't look at it before I got on the podcast. Those are ones that I can just rift, repeat, remember because they stand out to me. They're not just generic marketing. And so for you, what is it that makes you stand out? I've got a doctor and he called it, ⁓ I think it's called Empower Dentistry.   ⁓ and I love that because his whole model is like empowering patients to be confident about their health, to be confident about their decision-making and really spend a lot of time educating his patients. So for you, like, what is that one thing for Kiera? You guys, I'm the Dr. Seuss of dentistry. I have a good time. have a lot of fun. I am not your standard consulting company. We do things very different at Dental A Team. I want people, we get the same type of results, if not better.   But we do it in Kiera Dent's way. We do it in a fun way. We do it in a way that makes team members happy. Our job is to light people up. Life's my passion, dentistry is my platform. That's Kiera Dent. And if that doesn't resonate you, then you're not gonna be listening to the podcast. But if it does resonate with you and you're like, yeah, I wanna have the best life and I wanna have team that's lit up and I wanna do it in an easy way, not a hard way. You guys, I'm not cookie cutter. If you want standard scripts on how we do X, Y, we have them, but that's not gonna be where I'm going to lead from. We're gonna lead from what's your vision and your practice to what did the numbers tell us? Then we're gonna implement systems based on that information.   That's how we operate. Most people are like, Hey, you want systems? Fantastic. Here are your systems. And I'm like, no, why am I coming in and giving teams more work? Like nobody wants that. What we want is what's the vision of the practice? What are the numbers tell us? Let's put systems into place that way. Again, it's all boiling it down to that ease, that simplicity that's going to guarantee results. So what is your clear differentiator? What's your clear identifier? And so when we have it, like, I don't want to be Chick-fil-A McDonald's.   like competing across the board. I want something that's going to make you resonate. I've got holistic dentists and it's like full comprehensive health for their patients is what they want them to have total wellness of health. And you might say like, but Kiera, I'm just like, like, I just do dentistry. I just want to do dentistry and I'm very vanilla. Like there is nothing that stands out about me. I do bread and butter dentistry. It's very simple. Well, I'll say vanilla is very great ice cream that a lot of people like.   How can we make your vanilla ice cream better than the next person's vanilla ice cream? So I just wanna highlight that no matter what you do, there is something that's your special sauce. There is something special and unique about you and your practice that's going to drive and resonate with other people. There's billions of people on the planet. You don't need all of them. You just need your core crew of people that want to come to you as a practice. So I would say, what is it of, how are you going to make sure people stand out to you?   and looking back at your core values, looking back to why, what makes you, you go look at the reviews and make sure does that speak? And if it does, amazing, keep doing more of that. And if it doesn't, let's change that and revamp it a little bit so that way you do feel like it's home. I have had so many offices try to be something they're not, they're like, well, Kiera, everyone says I need to be on social media and I don't like it. Then don't do it. Like you can be at home, you can be there, you can still like.   I am the silent dentist. Like don't like social media. Great. You're going to probably find people that don't like social media. So let's do flyers and mailers and other things that could attract people in. ⁓ Or find a team member that really is great at it so you don't have to do it. For me, you've got to show up a couple of times. That's part of being a business owner and I don't love it, but I'm going to be true to Kiera. You're going to be true to you. Be true to you because the thing is I want you to just feel like you're at home. When I get on the podcast, I get to just be Kiera.   This is Kiera unfiltered. It's funny when people get on our practice assessment calls or like wanting to work with us calls and we're assessing to see, are you a good fit for us and are we a good fit for you? I'm sitting in my studio. Like what you guys see is where I work every single day. The microphone, I don't usually talk to people on a microphone, but I will pull it on over so people can see it. Like I'm just Kiera. This is who you get. I'm real raw. Someone asked me a very personal question on a sales call the other day and I was like, you know what?   I am so grateful that you feel so comfortable to be able to ask me those questions. I'm Kiera. This is who I am. I always want people to feel like I'm just Kiera Dent from the block. Like I'm your next door neighbor. I'm the person who's not here to judge you. I'm here to give you a hand up. I'm not here to slap your hand, tell you you should have known that because you're a dentist. That's what I want people to feel. So I think it's a what's your core. And then also the second piece is what do you want people to feel when they come to your practice? Because that's going to help them laser in with you way more than anything else.   So looking at those core values, how do you want them to feel? For me, it is a no judgment zone in Dental A Team. Our whole team knows this. You like nobody should ever, like I will not hire people that are snooty tooty attitudey. Like I'm just not here for that. That's not our culture. That's not our brand. That's not who we are. Our brand and our style is very much a come as you are, we love you we're gonna take you to your goal, your vision. I'm not here for everybody to get to the DSO world. I want you to live your best life. Your practice should serve you your needs in your life, not the other way around. But I will tell you,   I did not have that refined on day one of opening this company. That has come over time of what do I want dentists to feel? What are people saying? What is it that sets me apart from other people? And I do believe that your practice and how you stand out is not a one and done check it off the box. My core, one and done. And as long as I don't deviate from that, I'm probably gonna be pretty solid. The second thing is who we are and our fundamentals, those have not changed. But how I talk to people, what I want people to feel when they come to our company.   That's morphed and evolved. It's always been a no judgment zone, but I think it's become more and more and I market that more and more and I want people to just feel safe. I want people to feel seen. I want people to feel heard. I realize as business owners, myself included, as I morphed and evolved, gosh, that's something I wanted. You could start to listen in to what your patients say. Why do they choose you? And you might even have people that you trust a lot. I have asked certain people like, why did you choose Dental A Team over somebody else? 95 % of the time it's because we don't judge. We aren't cookie cutter.   and we actually have been there, done that and do it successfully and we bring the team along. Those are typically the reasons people choose our company over someone else. And I always get energy, always. So I care, we love your energy. And I'm like, great. So they like a good time. They want somebody who's fun. That's my core value. So yeah, like we're getting it. But listen to why people are choosing you. Maybe it's the Google reviews. Maybe it's because you are the holistic dentist in your area. Maybe it's because all their friends and family trust you. Listen to that and brand with that.   People will tell you if you will listen why they choose you, why you're the best in their opinion. And if that's your favorite patient, do more of that. That's how you're going to stand out. Again, you're not going for the billing and you're going for your niche community of people that want to come to you. ⁓ I know I've got a pediatric dentist. He's so popular, like one of the top of the top of the top and he's just himself and he shares his real life. Some of you may be like, that's not me. Again.   You've got to do your differentiator based on who you are. If you're not loud and outlandish, don't be that online because they're going to come in and be like, it was a bait and switch. Like, wow, this person's dead in the water when I show up. Or if you're like dead in the water, but you're super outlandish in the practice, they might feel like, wow, that's very different. You need to have it where you guys are synced in. People feel like they can understand. People feel like they're on the same page with you. It feels the same. Like that's what branding is. This is how you differentiate is what our presence is online is who we are in person.   And so I would just say, take an exercise today. Go through and figure out what on earth do we need to do to stand out in our crowd? Number one, what's our core value? What do we stand for? Who's the core? What is the core of who we are? Number two, what do we people to feel? Read our reviews, how do we want them to feel? And then number three, how can I do more of that and has it evolved over time? Those would be like quick, simple three steps, but make sure online presence matches in-person presence. In-person presence matches online presence. Our online presence is fun.   There's dots, there's confetti, there's smiling, laughing people. That's not just pictures. When you're in an office, you're laughing your freaking head off. It's hilarious. We're having a good time because teams don't want to do hard. Teams don't want to have a non-fun. Why do I make the podcast? Yes, for a lot of value for you, but also for you to have your teams experience this before they even work with us. How can you test drive the car without test driving the car? Well, here's a great way to do it. How can people test drive your practice without doing it?   How can they say, my gosh, of all the dentists out there, I wanna work with you. And then I'm gonna say this, and I know this is annoying and I'm sorry, but this is another piece that you're gonna stand out and it's through your Google reviews. You've gotta be kicking it over there. If you need, talk to Swell. Swell.co, I think is their website. Tell them Dental A Team sent you, get the best deal. Zeke and I have known each other for eight years and he has never changed the pricing on the people I refer to him, which thank you, Zeke. Shout out to you. Swell is the best one I've ever met. I know there's a ton of them out there. I have like vetted all of them. Best of the best of the best.   So if you want a great one, like you've got to also be the best. And so I just did this with a team the other day ⁓ and I had all of them go leave reviews. I had all of them practice asking for reviews. And I taught them like, you can be the best dentist, but if you're not the best marketed dentist online, no one's gonna find you. And imagine me with my picket fence out there, like picketing, like save the teeth. If you're the best dentist in the best dental office, you have a moral obligation to save those teeth. People only have 28.   Some might have 32, but most of us only have 28. And we only have one shot at that. And I believe that people deserve the best of the best. So you also have an obligation to get those reviews up, to ask your patients to leave your reviews, but that's gonna tell you how you stand out. Please also make sure you have fun. Do things that light you up. Marketing is like, my gosh, it's my least favorite thing to do. But I realized, Kiera being Kiera and just showcasing that is marketing.   And I can have a truckload of fun with you guys on here. I can have a great time on the podcast. I can share all my wildest things. I can talk to you about whatever I want to talk to you about. And you can get to know Kiera, real Kiera. You can get to know Kiera Dent from the block. And that's where I realized like, this is fun for me. Now me going and making dumb social reels. Sorry, all you that love it. I'm not trying to diss on you at all. That's not a diss. I just absolutely loathe it. Like I would rather sit here and talk to you and give you like tactical tips than I would like making up a funny meme.   I'm a freaking hilarious human, but I don't like staged humor and I don't have a great marketer next to me and it just feels hard. That's not something that I'm like, yay, marketing day. Now if I had a marketer who lived next door to me and they're like, hey, I got seven ideas for you, let's roll. I would freaking love it. But make sure it's something that you jive and enjoy. And if you don't love it and then people are gonna feel it. Now, that doesn't mean it's uncomfortable. You gotta get out of your comfort zone. But if you absolutely loathe something, you guys like, I...   You have a marketer who did this and I felt like an idiot. I'm not good at remembering how to say things and being on script. Like I feel so dumb and so uncomfortable that I'd rather sit there and have you rift with me, like ask me questions like top, top dental softwares, top AI softwares, top practices, how they perform. What are the top five things that the most elite leaders do? I would rather do that. It's the same thing. I can still create reels, but they're conversations and topics that I know you guys want to hear. And I know you're going to have a good time hearing.   and I know I can give you amazing value without you ever working with me. That's Kiera Dent's MO. So what's your MO? What drives you? And if you need a minute, go take like two hours at a Starbucks, figure out what your core values are. What do you want people to feel when they come to your practice? And then look to see what is the core? What are the things that light you up? Again, maybe that you're not perfect at. I love to give tactical practical. And like I said, that morphed over time. What do I people to feel has morphed over time. So maybe do a revamp. See how can we stand out a little bit stronger?   and then ride it guys. Trust it, own it, embrace it, because the more confident you are in it, people are buying your confidence, they're not buying you. The reason people come to Dental A Team is because when I got on the podcast, you guys, I've been there, I've done it, I've seen it all, like you probably can't tell me something. I would love somebody to challenge me, bring me something I haven't ever heard before. But I have so much confidence that no matter which practice you are, where you're at, I know ways to turn your life around and your practice around and do it very quickly and easily.   I'm that confident. That's what you're buying. You're buying my 10 years of being on the freaking road going into 500 plus offices. That's why people sign up with Dental 18 plus they love our energy. Yeah, I'm a good time. So let's do it fun and let's share all that experience. Why are people signing up with you? What is the confidence you have? Are you the best at doing those fillings? Are you the best at doing those crowns? Highlight that, get excited about it. People are buying your confidence and the more confident you can be through your reviews, through your online presence, the more they're going to spy you. It's not their dentistry they're buying.   It's the confidence in you and your team. And if you can remember that, you will stand out of a crowd all day long. So I feel like I usually can do a quick wrap for you and like, here's the five things for you to take. Today, it's not, it's a rift. It's a, here are the ways that I see people stand out. Here are the ways that I've been able to stand out. Here's the ways that we've been able to change things for you. But I really feel like standing out is not about doing more. It's about doing the right thing that lights you up consistently. Getting on the podcast, do you know how many episodes I've recorded?   Do know how many times I pushed play over here and said, all right, let's go? Consistency can out deliver flash in the pan. I have been doing this for seven years now. Seven years we've been talking together. Seven years we've been hanging out. Almost 10 years I've been traveling to offices. That's consistency guys. And doing consistency, doing the right things consistently. It's not about doing more.   I didn't ratchet up our podcast amount, doing the same amount since the beginning of time, and that's still a lot. ⁓ But I think for you to stay consistent, speak your truth, people will come to you, I promise you. Don't think it's about doing more. Don't think it's about that. Just being aligned so where people can feel your true authenticity and your genuine love, people will buy that all day long. We're in a world inundated with noise and starving for wisdom.   Be that different voice, whatever yours is. And if we can help you in any way, if I can be your cheerleader, if our team can like help you see the goodness in you, because sometimes it's hard to see the goodness in you. We do this with offices, we help them out. I've got a doctor right now in California and we're helping her see like how she's fantastic to drive more patients to her practice. So reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. Be proud of yourself. There are people that need you specifically. Not everybody wants you, not everybody wants Dental A Team, but the people who really do that resonate.   They're going to find me and my voice. why I ask you guys to share because you're listening. Please share with other people just like you because odds are if you like me, your friends are going to like me and we're going to be able to help them change the world of dentistry. Same thing. If your patients like you, odds are they've got friends and family that are going to love you as well. Ask them. Don't be afraid to get the reviews from them. And for all of you, I'm asking you today, if you love the podcast, leave us a Google review. Go leave me a review share because I need more people like you listening to this podcast.   I am on a mission to impact every single dental practice out there and to positively impact them and to change the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible. And I can't do that alone. I need you to share. So share and ask your patients to do the same, but it's very hard for you to ask somebody when you haven't done it yourself. So if you've never left a Google review or it's been a while, go leave Dental A Team at Google review. We'll put it in the show notes. It's very easy for you. ⁓ and the second thing I would ask is share us with somebody, share the podcast with somebody today, share this episode with somebody shared in a Facebook group.   because you're gonna get more confidence and have your team do the same thing. You can have them listen to this episode, share with people, leave a review. I had an office, 10 people left me a review that day because they were having a hard time and feeling disingenuous asking for reviews. Get people comfortable, get people confident and they'll do it more often, same thing with you. And I'm a very easy person. Leave me a great review. You love the podcast, you're clearly giving your time to me. So leave a review, say how much you love it and then feel confident asking somebody and ask somebody today because more people need your dentistry.   More people need you to change their lives. It's your moral obligation to show up, do the right thing, have fun and do it with ease. Did you like those core values? That was a nice wrap for all of you. Thanks for listening. I adore you. I'm here to serve you on any level I can. Reach out, join us at an event, come to our mastermind, whatever it is, do something today. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. And as always, thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time on The Dental A Team podcast.  

Your Nerd Side — Weekly RecapWolverine video game:SNIKT! Marvel's Wolverine from Insomniac is officially set for September 15, 2026 on PS5, giving fans a darker, bloodier solo Wolverine game from the team behind Marvel's Spider-Man. The Boys:The Boys has reached its wild, bloody series finale with Season 5, Episode 8, “Blood and Bone,” which dropped May 20, 2026. The ending is getting big fan reaction, especially around Homelander, Butcher, and whether the finale felt epic enough. Spider-Noir:Nicolas Cage is officially leading Spider-Noir, playing a 1930s private investigator version of the Spider-Man mythos. The cool hook: you can watch it in black-and-white or color, making it feel like superhero meets classic detective noir. Indiana Jones comics:Marvel is bringing back Indiana Jones: The Further Adventures in two deluxe hardcover volumes, collecting classic Marvel Indy stories and movie adaptations. These hit in September 2026, with collector-style leatherette binding, debossed covers, and ribbon bookmarks. 30-second show scriptThis week on Your Nerd Side: Wolverine is finally ready to pop the claws, with Insomniac's Marvel's Wolverine slashing onto PS5 on September 15, 2026. The Boys has officially wrapped its brutal final season, and fans are still debating if “Blood and Bone” delivered the ending Homelander and Butcher deserved. Nicolas Cage steps into the shadows with Spider-Noir, a 1930s detective-style Spider-Man series you can watch in black-and-white or color. And for collectors, Marvel is digging up classic Indiana Jones comics in deluxe hardcover editions this September. Nerd culture is not slowing down.

Hello your recipe of the week on a Saturday is here!Enjoy!Importantly, enjoy some great olive oil discounts if you buy your oil from here:https://www.citizensofsoil.com/OLIVE10TDLand use the code OLIVE10TDLYou can buy the books of the authors I have invited on the podcast here:https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/thedeliciouslegacypodcastLove,ThomSupport the podcast on Ko-Fi and Patreon for ad-free episodes! https://ko-fi.com/thedeliciouslegacypodcasthttps://www.patreon.com/c/thedeliciouslegacySupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/the-delicious-legacy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This Week on the Toy Power Podcast; we are leaning into the significance of the Episode number - being FOUR. So we decide to spotlight Twelve of the Key Teams consisting of Four Members throughout Pop Culture History! With each Team / Group mentioned; we address the Teams official Title; the Individual Characters that make up said Group; plus their noteworthy first appearance in Pop Culture History. An in-depth conversation why said Team is significant to each of us in our own personal way & what they really mean to us. With a good mix of Movies, Comics, TV & overall cultural phenomenon's; this is an interesting & unique way to highlight & chat towards some properties that we don't talk about very often... Or the back story to why we continue to talk about some of our Favourite properties so much!! Enjoy! Which Group / Team did we leave off our list; that you would have had on yours? Let us know!!Support the show: http://patreon.com/toypowerpodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Elsa Nilsson is a fantastic flutist, composer, and bandleader. She's originally from Gothenburg, Sweden, but now lives in Brooklyn, NY - where all the hipsters live. Her music is inspired by human connection to locations of the natural world. She's a winner of the National Flute Association's Jazz Flute Competition, and the recipient of multiple Chamber Music America grants. She has performed at Sweden's Nefertiti Jazz Club, Earshot Jazz Festival, Mount Hood Jazz Festival, and the Aarhus Jazz Festival among many others. Her latest release is called “Liminal", and she has a project that's called "Atlas Of Sound", an ongoing series that explores humanity's relationship to specific locations. My featured song is “Tree Of Life” from the album PGS 7 by my band, Project Grand Slam. Spotify link. —----------------------------------------------------------- The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries! Click here for All Episodes  Click here for Guest List  Click here for Guest Groupings  Click here for Guest Testimonials Click here for Reflections Click here for Special Collections Click here for Legends Click here to Subscribe  Click here to receive our Email Updates Click here to Rate and Review the podcast —---------------------------------------- CONNECT WITH ELSA:www.elsanilssonmusic.com —---------------------------------------- ROBERT'S NEWEST RELEASE:“MI CACHIMBER ALL STARS” is the new, expanded version of Robert's single, “Mi Cachimber”, which he wrote for his father. Featuring Camila Cortina on Rhodes and Xito Lovell on trombone in addition to Benny Benack III and Dave Smith on flugelhorn, and Project Grand Slam's rhythm section. CLICK HERE FOR OFFICIAL VIDEO CLICK HERE FOR ALL LINKS —-------------------------------------- ROBERT'S RECENT RELEASE: “MA PETITE FLEUR STRING QUARTET” is Robert's latest release. It transforms his jazz ballad into a lush classical string quartet piece. Praised by a host of classical music stars. CLICK HERE FOR YOUTUBE LINK CLICK HERE FOR ALL LINKS —---------------------------------------- Audio production: Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films   Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast: Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com   Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music: Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com    

Is being single actually lonely… or are we just taught to fear it? In this deeply honest solo episode, Reed opens up about the messy, liberating, emotional rollercoaster of single life — from dodgy dates and incredible seggs to heartbreak, healing, k'nk exploration and learning how to stop losing yourself in relationships. Expect candid chats about:

A dead man chooses what looks like the safest punishment in hell, convinced he understands the trap better than everyone before him. But as endless time passes in silence and fog, one terrible question begins to grow: what if the suffering only ends for those willing to keep going? What A Man Believes by Robert Sheckley. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.You can listen to every episode of The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast without commercials for less than the cost of a burger and fries once a month. Our Lost Sci-Fi Premium members love it and you will too. Get a free week to check it out at https://lostscifi.com/premium or click on the link in the description.

THE FANTASTIC POUR Brett welcomes John Steib to the Fantasti-Lounge for a new edition of the Fantastic Pour! We talk The Beast, whip up a blue cocktail and mocktail, and read Avengers #167. Join us in the Fantasti-Lounge as we discuss if Hank is best with the Avengers or the X-Men; Waterski stunt shows; George Perez's mastery, and much, much more! Secret Pour-igins: Blue cocktails Cocktail: The Blue Beast Blue Beast Syrup recipe Add 2 cups water to pot and heat on low Stir in 1 cup sugar Squeeze 1 lemon and 1 orange into pot and stir Remove from heat and let cool Add 3 drops of blue food coloring and stir Place in container or cup and set aside COCKTAIL Ingredients (per drink): 1½ oz. Vodka ½ oz triple sec 1 oz. Blue Beast syrup 1 oz. Fresh lemon juice 2 sprig of mint Seltzer or Sprite Instructions (per drink) Add mint sprig and lemon juice to shaker Muddle mint lightly Add vodka, triple sec, Blue Beast Syrup, and ice to shaker Shake and strain into Collins glass filled with ice Top with seltzer or sprite Garnish with mint MOCKTAIL Ingredients (per drink): 1 oz. Blue Beast syrup 1 oz. Fresh lemon juice 2 sprig of mint Seltzer or Sprite Instructions (per drink) Add mint sprig and lemon juice to shaker Muddle mint lightly Add Blue Beast Syrup, and ice to shaker Shake and strain into Collins glass filled with ice Fill with seltzer or sprite Garnish with mint Comic: The Mighty Avengers vol.1 #167, Marvel Comics, 1977 Have a question or comment? E-MAIL: fwpodcasts@gmail.com You can find The Fantastic Pour on these platforms: Apple Podcasts Amazon Music Spotify The Fantastic Pour podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK: Fire & Water website: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com Fire & Water Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Fire & Water on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fireandwaterpodcast Fire & Water on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/fwpodcasts.bsky.social Fire & Water Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcasts Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts Brett can be found on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/imagine8design/ and Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/imagine8design.bsky.social

He's one half of the Farrelly Brothers

Fantastic video out of the Dorchester Courthouse of aspiring rappers doing aspiring rapper things, plus more Somali Fraud in Ilhan Omar's district.  Visit the Howie Carr Radio Network website to access columns, podcasts, and other exclusive content.

Another overseas-and-back journey is on tap for the April 2026 New Music Train today, as it rolls from Sweden to NYC, with Niklas Nygards and Jason Goebel picking the tunes. The former goes for a track from Fantastic Cat, while Jason has a three-fer: Friko, Sluice and Nine Inch Noize. Rockin' the Suburbs on Apple Podcasts/iTunes or other podcast platforms, including audioBoom, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon, iHeart, Stitcher and TuneIn. Or listen at SuburbsPod.com. Please rate/review the show on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends.Visit our website at SuburbsPod.comEmail Jim & Patrick at rock@suburbspod.comFollow us on the Threads, Facebook or Instagram @suburbspodIf you're glad or sad or high, call the Suburban Party Line — 612-440-1984.Theme music: "Ascension," originally by Quartjar, next covered by Frank Muffin and now re-done in a high-voltage version by Quartjar again!  Visit quartjar.bandcamp.com and frankmuffin.bandcamp.com.

You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, my guest is Dr. Justin Coulson, an Australian parenting expert and father of 6 who has his PhD in psychology and is the author of 10 books on parenting and the co-host of the Happy Families podcast with his wife, Kylie. We discuss the psychology behind peaceful parenting, including how self-determination theory explains kids' challenging behavior. Dr. Justin also shared his three E's of discipline.Know someone who might appreciate this episode? Share it with them!And if you love the podcast, FREE ways to help us out:1- Rate and review the podcast in your podcast player app2- “Like” this post by tapping the heart icon ♥️3- Share this with a friend. THANK YOU!We talk about:* 1:45 – Introduction to Dr. Justin Coulson and his personal parenting turning pointHow struggles with anger and discipline led him to rethink everything and study psychology.* 08:20 – Learning to regulate ourselves, practicing repair, and growing over time.* 15:50 – Why peaceful parenting starts with the parent's self-awareness and regulation.* 19:50 – Understanding behavior through compassion and curiosity.* 20:50 – The HALTS frameworkHow hunger, anger, loneliness, tiredness, and stress impact children's behavior.* 23:00 – Self-determination theory and parenting* 33:00 – The 3 E's of Effective Discipline* 41:50 – How to use the 3 E's in everyday parenting moments.Real-life examples: screens, sibling conflict & collaboration* 49:00 – Building trust and the “goodwill bank” with kidsWhy collaborative parenting pays off when tough limits are needed.* 53:30 – Advice to his younger parenting self: “soft eyes”A powerful reflection on kindness, connection, and showing up with compassion.* 56:30 – Where to find Dr. Justin CoulsonHis podcast, books, and upcoming work on boys and healthy masculinity.Resources mentioned in this episode:* Dr. Justin's website and podcast* Yoto Screen Free Audio Book Player* The Peaceful Parenting Membership* Evelyn & Bobbie brasConnect with Sarah Rosensweet:* Instagram* Facebook Group* YouTube* Website* Join us on Substack* Newsletter* Book a short consult or coaching session callxx Sarah and CoreyYour peaceful parenting team- click here for a free short consult or a coaching sessionVisit our website for free resources, podcast, coaching, membership and more!>> Please support us!!! Please consider becoming a supporter to help support our free content, including The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, our free parenting support Facebook group, and our weekly parenting emails, “Weekend Reflections” and “Weekend Support” - plus our Flourish With Your Complex Child Summit (coming back in the summer for the 3rd year!) All of this free support for you takes a lot of time and energy from me and my team. If it has been helpful or meaningful for you, your support would help us to continue to provide support for free, for you and for others.In addition to knowing you are supporting our mission to support parents and children, you get the podcast ad free and access to a monthly ‘ask me anything' session.Our sponsors:YOTO: YOTO is a screen free audio book player that lets your kids listen to audiobooks, music, podcasts and more without screens, and without being connected to the internet. No one listening or watching and they can't go where you don't want them to go and they aren't watching screens. BUT they are being entertained or kept company with audio that you can buy from YOTO or create yourself on one of their blank cards. Check them out HEREEvelyn & Bobbie bras: If underwires make you want to rip your bra off by noon, Evelyn & Bobbie is for you. These bras are wire-free, ultra-soft, and seriously supportive—designed to hold you comfortably all day without pinching, poking, or constant adjusting. Check them out HERESarah: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today's guest is Dr. Justin Coulson. He's an Australian parenting expert with a PhD in psychology, the author of 10 books on parenting, the co-host of the Happy Families podcast with his wife, Kylie, the father of six children, and, last but not least, grandfather of one.We discuss the psychology behind peaceful parenting, including how self-determination theory explains kids' challenging behavior. Dr. Justin also shared his three E's of discipline, which I just loved.If you like this episode, please share it with a friend so more parents can learn about peaceful parenting. If you're a fan of the podcast, you can help us out not only by sharing it, but by leaving a review and a five-star rating in your podcast player app. While you're there, don't forget to follow the show so you don't miss an episode.If you'd like to support us even more, you can become a supporter on Substack to help us offset the cost of making the show. We'll put a link in the show notes.Let's meet Dr. Justin. I hope you enjoy this conversation and get as much out of his insights as I did.Sarah: Hello, Dr. Justin, and welcome to the podcast.Dr. Justin: Sarah, I'm so glad to be with you. Thanks for having me on.Sarah: Yeah, and it's morning for you, evening for me—nice—and I'm just glad that we could make this time to talk to each other. I really appreciate it. Thank you. So, could you just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?Dr. Justin: Sure. I grew up on the east coast of Australia, about an hour north of Sydney. Geographically, that kind of locates where I was. I was the teenage boy that every parent hopes they will not have. I don't think I was a particularly bad kid, but I certainly wasn't a good kid.My parents were spending a small fortune—I'm a 1975 baby, I turned 50 last year—but this was in the late '80s and early '90s. My parents were spending so much money to send me to a private school. Because we were on the coast—a very quintessentially Australian thing—I was wagging school.Do you say “wagging school” in Canada? Is that a term Canadians use?Sarah: No, but I think we get the context. I think it means not going to school.Dr. Justin: Yeah, I was truant. They thought I was there, but I wasn't.Sarah: We say skipping.Dr. Justin: I was skipping school. Okay, yeah. We call it a school wag.So I would go to school in the morning and get my name marked off in roll call. Then I would sneak out of the school. Across the road from the school, there were bushes—kind of a forest, or whatever you might call it in Canada and America. I would get changed out of my tie, long pants, and black school shoes, throw on some board shorts and a T-shirt.My surfboard was stashed in the bush, and I'd grab it from the hiding place. Then I'd jump on a bus, go to the beach, and surf all day. Afterward, I'd get a bus back to school in the afternoon, change back into my uniform, and race into the school just in time to get my name marked off, looking like I'd been at school all day.This was in the days before schools communicated with parents via email and text, because none of that existed. I was able to get away with it.So I finished high school. I scored in the bottom 15%—Sarah: Goodness.Dr. Justin: Not just my class, but of the entire state of New South Wales. My parents were devastated.I didn't care. I wanted to have a media career. I wanted to be a radio announcer. So I got into radio. If you've ever listened to the radio—and no offense to radio people—you know you don't have to do well at school to be good at radio. You just have to be able to sit on the microphone and say things that make sense.I knew I could do that, so school didn't matter to me. I didn't care about it. That's what I did.But this is where it intersects with parenting.About 10 years into my radio career, my wife and I were having some challenges, particularly around my parenting. We had a threenager and a newborn baby.That three-year-old—I had always held the opinion that my children would do as they were told, and if they didn't, I would make sure they understood that I was the father and that their job was to do as I said.So I was very punitive. I basically made all of the parenting mistakes you can imagine when I would get angry, frustrated, and ill-tempered. It's not that I was a bad father—I spent a lot of high-quality time loving my kids—but I was also really short-fused and highly aggressive.Frankly, I went from threatening to hitting really fast. You call it spanking; we would call it smacking. I was very, very quick to smack or spank my three-year-old, and it wasn't working.After one particularly bad incident where things escalated, I really did lose control. I didn't just spank her once. There were multiple spankings. This was like a 10-minute escalation session where it just got worse and worse and worse.My wife was out at the time. When she came home, I said to Kylie, “I'm a bad father. I'm not doing this well. I'm making a lot of mistakes, and here's what happened while you were out.”Full confession: Kylie has always been this wonderfully supportive wife—very kind, gentle, compassionate, soft-spoken, thoughtful, considerate, empathic—all of those beautiful attributes that I prize and treasure in my good wife.She was none of those things that day.She had fire in her eyes and said, “You are not living up to the father that I hoped you would be, and you're also not living up to the husband I need you to be.”And it took me back, because I was already feeling downcast. I felt like I was failing anyway, and she just—it was like she picked up a great big lump of wood and whacked me over the head with it and said, “No.”Of course, she didn't actually do that, but that's how it felt. It felt physical. Visceral. Like, Ow. This is serious.I left my radio career shortly thereafter.I was working at one of the biggest radio stations in Australia at the time, and I gave up all the backstage passes with global superstars and hanging out with record company executives at the best restaurants, eating their food so they could bribe me to play their music on the radio station. I went back to school.I became a full-time student. I worked part-time at three different jobs while studying full-time. I'd sleep under the desk at university so I could do the study and the work—Sarah: No surfing this time?Dr. Justin: No surfing this time, no. I was just so committed to it.After eight and a half years of full-time study, I graduated with a doctorate. I had to do a couple of other qualifications first, including a psychological science degree. I graduated with a doctorate in psychology and became a university lecturer.Along the way, Sarah, we went from having our two kids at that point to having our third child in my first year of study, our fourth child in my fifth year of study, and our fifth child while I was doing my doctorate. Shortly after I left the university setting, stopped lecturing, and started writing books and giving talks, we had our sixth child.So we're the parents—Sarah: Amazing.Dr. Justin: —of six daughters. Today, they range in age from 12—the youngest—to the oldest, who is in her mid-to-late 20s. She and her husband have a baby now. They've been married for a few years.Sarah: Wow. You're a grandpa.Dr. Justin: A grand—I'm a grandpa. We have a two-and-a-half-year-old grandbaby, four adult children, one in her teens, and a 12-year-old.So that's kind of my very short version of the journey.Along the way, I've written a bunch of books. We've got a TV show in Australia called Parental Guidance. We've had three seasons of that show on primetime TV. I've got a website and all the things that you'd expect—a podcast and so on.Sarah: What did you do when you had that aha moment—that realization that you weren't being the kind of dad you wanted to be, and your wife also agreed that you weren't being the kind of dad she wanted you to be? What did you change?Because you just mentioned that you spent eight and a half years going back to school. I imagine that you made some changes before you had six kids. So what did you do right away, maybe for anyone listening who can relate to those feelings of rage and feeling triggered by your child?Dr. Justin: Sarah, the first thing I'd say is that there was no linear change, and there were no immediate changes, because I didn't know what to do.I was unskilled. I was uneducated. I didn't know anything about psychology, and I clearly didn't know anything about parenting.But I found a mentor. I have a faith background, and there was a writer who wrote eloquently and compassionately. I just felt like he understood me, and he became a mentor to me.I also discovered a guy called Alfie Kohn. You might be familiar with Alfie Kohn.Sarah: Oh, Alfie Kohn was the first thing I ever read about parenting—Dr. Justin: Oh, great.Sarah: —before I even had kids. And he was on the podcast last year, which felt like a full-circle moment between how influential—I told him on the podcast, “You have probably had the biggest influence on me—not only in my parenting, but in my life's direction—of any single person out there.”So, sorry, fan-girl moment. I'm right there with you with Alfie Kohn.Dr. Justin: Yeah. I've gotten to know Alfie over the years as my academic career advanced and I began to understand where he took his research from.I read his book Punished by Rewards—I think it was a 1993—Sarah: That was my first one too.Dr. Justin: Yeah, it's a 1993 publication or something.Sarah, it was just so influential.What happened was, I was doing my university degree and learning things, and honestly, I'd be sitting there thinking, Hang on, the things they're teaching me in these university courses seem to clash with what Alfie Kohn taught me in Punished by Rewards.So I spent a lot of time in the notes section at the back—you know, all the references nobody ever reads?Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: As I went through them, I discovered researchers named Edward Deci and Richard Ryan from the University of Rochester in upstate New York.They had developed a theory known as self-determination theory.A large portion of Alfie Kohn's work is based on self-determination theory.So I really dug deep into that. I still love Alfie, but I moved very much into the academic side because I became a university lecturer and really got into the nitty-gritty of understanding the deepest depths of what self-determination theory is all about. That has become the foundation of the work that I do.And to your question: nothing is linear when you are trying to make improvements.Whether you're trying to change your diet, exercise, get your finances in order, or improve your relationships, you have insights. You have moments where you think, Oh my goodness, this is what I need to do. I need to show up with warmth on my face and soft eyes.And then three hours later, one of your children does something, and you forget what soft eyes look and feel like. You look at them with hard eyes, frustration in your voice, and short, clipped sentences.Then half an hour later, you think, Oh, self-awareness. I missed that.So it's this gradual process: two steps forward, one step back. Three steps forward, one step back. Four steps forward, three steps back. Eight steps forward, no steps back.Over the years, I had this beautiful experience—and maybe you've had a similar experience in your family as you've raised your kids.We were maybe in my third or fourth year of study. My wife has an early childhood background. She knows child development. She knows what kids need.She was a little skeptical about a lot of the things I was starting to talk about and discover as I went through university and got into the depths of what the research meant—comparing and contrasting it with what was mainstream, but actually not always quite right.We had some tension around how we should respond to the children. I was moving away from that authoritarian bent and developing ideas around exploring their world more.One night, I came home from university a little late. It was probably around 9:00 p.m. Our three children were still awake.As I drove into the driveway, all the lights in the house were on. The windows were open. Looking through the living room window, I could tell the house was—to put it politely—a mess.And as I stepped into the house, the kids—it was just awful.I walked over to Kylie and said, “Honey, it looks like it's been a pretty tough day.”I was trying to be compassionate and empathic. I was really trying to do what psychology says is the right thing to do.Kylie looked at me without hesitation and said, “Don't give me any of that psychology crap. I've had the worst day in the world.”Then she stormed out and said, “You fix it,” and walked into the bedroom and closed the door.Again, this is not how my wife usually is, but it had been a really rough day. The kids were feral. The house was a mess.I looked at my priorities. I sat down with the child who was struggling the most and worked with her for two or three minutes. She calmed down, I gave her a little food, and put her to bed.Within about 20 minutes, I had all three kids in bed, and I was so proud of myself.I stepped into the kitchen and started tidying up. I thought, I'll just give Kylie some space.After another 30 or 40 minutes of tidying, I stepped into the living room and said, “Honey, I know you're really upset. It's been a pretty tough day. I wasn't trying to be judgy or anything.”And she said, “It's fine for you. You're not dealing with it all day. You walk in and think you can just snap your fingers and everything's fine.”Then she looked at me and said, “But tonight, you walked in and it feels like you snapped your fingers and everything's fine.”And we had this beautiful conversation where she said, “I've been resenting the things you've been trying to tell me because it felt like you were telling me I was wrong.“But I've been watching, and I'm actually seeing that the things you're doing are working, and our family is feeling better.”It took four or five years to get there, Sarah.It's not like I had this epiphany—I'm a bad father, I need to change—and suddenly I was a good dad.There were many embarrassing, shameful moments after that epiphany where I still made terrible decisions and treated the children badly.Even today, I still lose my temper, say things I shouldn't, and get frustrated, because kids are kids and we're fallible humans.But we call parenting parenting because it's about us. If it were about children, we'd call it childrening.Which sounds silly, right?Dr. Justin: But what I've really discovered is that if I can learn how to regulate myself—high emotions equal low intelligence—then I can regulate my emotions, turn them up or down appropriately for the context, and keep them in harmony with my long-term goals, which are to have loving, kind relationships with my children.If I can do that, I'm going to approach them with a tremendously different focus than I will if I'm looking for a short-term fix.And that is something—Anger is a habit. Yelling is a habit. Time-out is a habit. Reward charts are a habit.We can create other habits. We just have to understand the processes and principles behind those habits and then practice them, like we practice a song on the piano, until we finally get it right.Sarah: I love that.So you and Kylie really had a journey—a back-and-forth dance of your own processes and your own development.I do love how you say it's really about us. Whenever I'm working with clients, after a couple of sessions they'll say, “You know what? This isn't even about my kid. This is just about me.”Dr. Justin: Yes. Yes.Sarah: Nobody wants to believe that at first, because it's so much easier to think, I've just got to change them and what they're doing.But it's really all about what we're bringing to the moment and what we're bringing to the relationship.Dr. Justin: I get in trouble sometimes for being overly provocative and saying things that are insensitive, so a quick warning:I want to say what I'm about to say with all the compassion in the world and all the tenderness and care in the world, because I work with people every single day who are dealing with exactly the struggles you're talking about.I want to step into the world of neurodiversity—ADHD, autism, trauma—those kinds of areas.What we're talking about applies there as well. It's just harder.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: But ultimately, if I'm raising an ADHD child or a child who's been through a traumatic experience, once again, parenting is not about them. It's about how I show up for them.So I can say, “Well, my child's like that,” or, “I'm like this because of the diagnosis,” or because of the label, or because of the trauma, or because of the neural networks doing what they're doing.I can say all of those things, and many people do. It's understandable, and I have all the compassion in the world for them when they do.But the key thing I want to highlight is that in spite of all of those challenges your child might be facing—or even that you might be facing—today begins now.It begins with what you put on your face and what you think in your mind.If we can soften our features and go to our children with kindness and compassion while still holding appropriate limits—or working with them to develop appropriate limits—then what we can say is:“Yes, that bad thing happened,” or, “Yes, we are dealing with this difficulty, so what are we going to do about it?”We can fall into the I can't do anything way of thinking, which is really ineffective and doesn't help at all.Or we can step into I have this incredible thing psychologists call agency, or self-efficacy, where I can make a decision now, and if we work on it, we can actually improve things.It might be a longer, harder road. There may be more obstacles to climb over than a typical family without those challenging circumstances.It may be harder.But we can always improve.I never want to be the person who puts limits on what kids can do or what parents can do.If we change our language, change our focus, and recognize that this is a long game—Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: —which requires sustained effort every single day, it's extraordinary the progress we can make and the changes we can create in our home and our family.Sarah: For sure. Yeah.And unfortunately, it's a long game, right? Because I think today we always want quick answers and solutions.Really, it's just showing up every day as best you can and repairing when you don't show up the way you wish you had.And I think another really important part of it—which you were talking around a little bit—is trying to understand our child's experience and see things from their perspective.I was just talking to a client about that today:What's the most emotionally generous explanation you can come up with for their behavior?Because we don't actually know why anyone does anything, since we're not in their brain.But we often jump to, They're being rude on purpose, or They're trying to annoy me.Really, if we can think, Well, I don't know why they're doing this, but there's probably a reason, because kids want to be good. They want to be connected with us.And just reminding ourselves that they're not giving us a hard time—they're having a hard time.That actually makes it easier, I think, to show up as your best, most compassionate self—with, as you say, soft eyes and warm features.Dr. Justin: Yeah.No child wakes up in the morning thinking, Today's the day. I'm just going to ruin everything.This is the perfect opportunity. My parents are tired and frazzled. There's a cost-of-living crisis. There are all these challenges happening, and if ever there was a moment—it's now. I'm going to do it today.They don't wake up thinking that.Like you said—and you said it so perfectly—kids really do want to please us.I know some parents listening to me say that right now are thinking, No, no. My child does not want to please me.And so the question becomes: Why? Why are they struggling?And maybe this is a nice way for me to bring in some of the principles I learned as I went deeper into self-determination theory.There are a couple of times when children are almost guaranteed to be challenging, and this has nothing to do with self-determination theory. This is just general psychology and wellbeing.I always think of Germany. A police officer tells you to stop, but they don't say the word stop because they're German.In German, the word for stop is halt—H-A-L-T.So we add an S to the end, and the acronym becomes:Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, or Stressed.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: Those are the five times when you can all but guarantee your children are not going to be doing well.If they are hungry, get some food into them—ideally a little protein, because it's satiating and helps them feel full quickly.If they're angry, then we've got to remember: high emotions equal low intelligence.You can't think straight in a high emotional state.So our job is to get curious, not furious, because if we fight fire with fire, we end up with a scorched-earth policy and everything gets burned.Dr. Justin: Lonely.I could be sitting right next to you, Sarah, and feel disconnected and lonely—Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: —even if we were very close.Our children are sometimes literally sitting at our kitchen bench, and they feel alone. They feel a little lost. Because of the way we're responding to them—with hard commands, correction, and direction rather than connection—they feel lonely.Tired.I don't even need to explain that.Even as adults, I don't know any couple who, at the end of witching hour—or whatever you might call it in North America, that 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. stretch when the kids—Sarah: Yeah.Dr. Justin: —are just oof…It's the end of that period, and you're exhausted, the kids are exhausted, and you look at your husband or wife and say, “You know what? We are so tired. We're shattered. But boy, are we nailing it tonight.”Nobody ever says that when they're tired—Sarah: Yeah.Dr. Justin: —because you're not nailing it. You're just hanging in there.And it's the same with kids.Then the S is for stressed, and that includes sickness, because sickness is a stress on the body as well.Those five indicators are going to let you know when your child is likely to be challenging, and I think they're really good to watch out for.But if we go a little deeper and talk about self-determination theory, it says that each of us has these needs.You have them, Sarah, and I have them, and our children have them—even your mother-in-law has them.We have three basic psychological needs.When we're in environments where those needs are supported, oh my goodness, we thrive. These are environments we're drawn to and attracted to. We approach them with a smile on our face and can't wait to be there.But if the environment is what researchers call need-thwarting or need-frustrating—meaning it frustrates and thwarts those needs—then we avoid it.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: Or, if we're in those environments, we act in ways that are challenging.So the basic psychological needs are:Number one: a sense of relationship, or relatedness. That's the technical term they use.Relatedness is a sense of mutual belonging.Sarah: So would it be similar to mattering? Like you feel like you matter to somebody?Dr. Justin: Yeah. There's been a lot of talk recently about mattering.But it's reciprocal mattering. It's not just one-way.It's I matter to you, but you matter to me.Sarah: Yeah.Dr. Justin: Let me use Mother's Day as an example.We just had Mother's Day in Australia at the start of May.If I've got a great relationship with my mother-in-law, and it's Mother's Day, I'm probably going to spend the morning with my wife and family while my children celebrate their mum. Then maybe at lunchtime, we head over to the in-laws to celebrate my wife's mum.If I feel like that relationship need is supported at my mother-in-law's—meaning there's mutual belonging, I matter to her, she matters to me, we enjoy one another's company, and it feels good—I'm going to say:“Great. Let's get in the car. Let's go. What do we need to do?”But if I'm going to a need-frustrating environment—if there's tension, antagonism, snide remarks, eye rolls, silence, defensiveness, or wounds from bad things that happened in the past—that environment doesn't feel good to me.So I'm going to say to Kylie:“Honey, why don't you take the kids to your mum's? Have a great lunch. We've made a big mess this morning, and I think the best thing I can do for your Mother's Day”—and I'll frame it nicely, of course—“is stay home, tidy the house, clean up the kitchen, get everything ready, and put dinner on for tonight so you can have your perfect Mother's Day dinner. I'll see you in four hours.”And then I send her out the door.Why?Because my in-laws' home has become a need-thwarting or need-frustrating environment. I just don't want to be there.And if I am there, I'm going to be sullen and sulky. I might try my best for half an hour and then say, “Oh, this is too hard,” and retreat—Sarah: Or text. The adult version of misbehavior.Dr. Justin: Yes, exactly. Exactly.But if I'm a child in a need-thwarting or need-frustrating environment, I'm going to get into fights with the kids I don't like.Or I'm going to say, “I don't want to go to school because everyone picks on me because I don't regulate my behavior properly because I've got ADHD.”Right?So school becomes a place I don't want to go.Or maybe you have a faith background and your child doesn't have any friends at church.Or you've signed them up for soccer, but they don't know anyone on the team.And they're saying, “Yeah, but I don't want to go.”It all comes down to relationship.Relationship is the basic psychological need that's being thwarted.Now, the second basic psychological need is competence.Competence, I would describe as feeling like I can do the thing I'm being asked to do.Sarah: Or that I want to do.Dr. Justin: Yeah. We'll get to want to in just a second, because want-to is the third basic psychological need—autonomy.So stay with me on competence for a second.Competence is capability. Capacity.It's not even necessarily about being able to do something—it's about feeling like you're making progress toward the goal.Let's say I'm joining acrobatics and trying to learn how to do a handstand.That's really tricky. It's a tough skill.If I show up every week to acrobatics, even if I've got great friends there—so my relationship need is supported—and I love my coach, but every time I try to do a handstand my shoulders buckle, my elbows aren't straight, my form is wrong, I fall over, or I can't stay up…After four or five or six weeks, I'm going to say:“I don't like this anymore. I'm out.”I had a daughter who wanted to come cycling with me.I'm a really keen cyclist. I ride on the road. I'm a middle-aged man in Lycra.But I also ride on the velodrome.You've seen those velodrome bikes at the Olympics—the indoor track where they go around and around and around.You might have noticed that after they finish the race, they keep pedaling and do another 10 laps.The reason is twofold.Number one: there are no brakes on those bikes.And second: they use what's called a fixed gear, meaning that when the wheels are spinning, the pedals are spinning.If you stop pedaling, you're going to get thrown over the handlebars because the wheels are still moving, which means the pedals are still moving, even if you try to stop them.So you just have to keep riding until the bike slows down.My daughter wanted to come to Friday night velodrome racing with me.We didn't have the money, but we spent all this cash on a bike, the Lycra, the helmet, the special shoes—it cost a lot, and I was a poor university student.But my daughter wanted to cycle with me, and I wasn't going to miss that opportunity. So we sacrificed and made it happen.Unfortunately, she was competing against girls who had been riding for four, five, or six years.For the first few weeks, she gave it a good go, but she was losing by several laps every race.After about a month, she said:“Dad, I don't want to do this anymore.”And my response was:“But I've spent all this money.”But what was really going on was that as much as she liked the girls and the atmosphere, she didn't feel competent—Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: —and she didn't see progress.She didn't feel like she was ever going to master the activity, so her motivation and wellbeing plummeted.Cycling became a need-thwarting environment for her.Whether it's piano, violin, rock climbing, cycling, swimming, math, PE class—it doesn't matter.If your kids don't feel like they can do the thing, they're going to push back.They're going to say:“This is too hard. I don't like it.”They won't use these exact words, but what they're really saying is:“This is a need-frustrating environment for me. I don't like it. I don't want to be there.”And then they start to act out.My mom got to the stage with me as a 13-year-old boy where she was physically holding me by the arm and dragging me into my piano lessons.Dr. Justin: Which brings me to my third and final basic psychological need, which is autonomy.A lot of people hear the word autonomy and think it means freedom—that kids can do whatever they want. They think it means independence.That's not what autonomy means, certainly not in the strict scientific form we're talking about within this theory.Rather, autonomy comes down to identifying the value of an activity and therefore endorsing the actions required to do the activity.See, if I, as a 12-year-old, looked at piano and thought:This is going to be a lifelong skill that will bring me joy, that I'll be able to share with others, that I can use in service of my family and community. If I can play piano or keyboard, I could be in a band. I could do all of these things.If I identified the value in the activity, then I would endorse the work required to learn it.So autonomy is not about freedom and independence. It's about choice based on values.That's a lot when you're thinking about three-, four-, and five-year-olds, but not necessarily—Sarah: No, I love that.We talk about that all the time in my communities—how important it is for kids to have autonomy.And I think you can have autonomy even when kids can't be independent, right?Because you can't have a four-year-old who's independent, but you can have a four-year-old who can make decisions that matter.Dr. Justin: Yes, yes.And that decision goes well beyond, Do you want to wear the blue suit or the green one?Sarah: I'll quote our friend Alfie Kohn. He says, “Kids should have the ability to make decisions that make adults gulp a little bit.”Dr. Justin: I love it. Yes. Beautiful.Let me give an adult version of this, and then I'll swing it back into childhood, because sometimes parents hear this and think, This isn't quite computing for me.In Canada, you drive on the right-hand side of the road.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: And it's true that if you choose to drive on the left-hand side of the road, the authorities will probably get involved. You may cause harm to somebody. You could even end up in prison.But even in the middle of the night, when nobody's on the road, I can't imagine there are too many Canadians who get in the car and think:Tonight's the night. Nobody's watching. I'm gonna drive on the left.You are being absolutely controlled by the government and by the law. You're driving on the right-hand side of the road.But because you identify the value in driving on the right-hand side of the road, nobody has to compel you to do it.You just do it because you endorse the idea that driving on the right is safer. It's what you need to do.So our job with our children is twofold.First, when it comes to these basic psychological needs, we want to help them be in environments—or create environments—where those needs are supported.We want to send them to a school where they have good relationships, where somebody says, “Hey, come sit with us,” where teachers know them by name and smile when they see them and are excited to support them.A school where they're able to experience progress—which might mean less emphasis on grades and more emphasis on developing capability.And a school where they feel like they have some say in where they're going and what they're doing.Rather than being forced to attend a school like I was when I was a teenager, they get to say:“No, I want to go to that school because that's where my friends are.”Or:“That's where the teachers help me feel good.”Or:“That's where my interests lie.”That's the basic psychological-needs concept.Now let's bring that into discipline, which is what started this whole conversation.Based on this theory—and I guess it ties back to a lot of what Alfie Kohn has said as well—I developed a little model that's really easy to memorize and even easier to enact.I call it the Three E's of Effective Discipline.The Three E's of Effective Discipline are need-supportive.If you look at the root of the word discipline, it comes from the idea that we teach, guide, and instruct—that we show the way to follow.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: But if you look at the modern definition of discipline, the modern definition is punish.Punish means exact retribution. It means hurt. It means make someone pay a price.Sarah: Make people feel bad on purpose.Dr. Justin: Yeah. That's exactly right.And I'm interested in disciplining our kids, not punishing our kids.Punishment is need-thwarting, right?If you make someone feel bad on purpose, there goes the relationship. They feel incompetent, and you've taken away their autonomy.So standard discipline strategies—whether it's time-out, spanking, yelling, withdrawing privileges, taking away the iPad, bribery—all of those standard discipline practices trample over basic psychological needs.We've got to come up with something better.So I developed the Three E's of Effective Discipline, which are basically this:On a beautiful bed of empathy, we explore, we explain, and we empower.Sarah: Ooh, I love that.Dr. Justin: Explore basically means I sit down with my child at an appropriate time.Because we always try to fix things right here, right now.Sometimes we need to, but often intervention simply to make sure people and property aren't hurt—that's all you need.Then you can say to your child:“We'll have a chat about this later when nobody's got a head full of steam.”Kick it down the road.You don't have to fix things right here, right now. Most of the time, it's just not necessary.So once everyone is calm, you explore.You say:“Hey, I've noticed there's been a lot of tension in our home lately between you and your brother.”Or:“Have you noticed that for the last few weeks we've had so much conflict about screens?”And your child says, “Yeah.”And you say:“I just want to listen because parenting's about parents, right? I must be getting something wrong here. Can you help me understand what I'm missing? Where am I going wrong? What's the real problem from your perspective?”Now, there are three things that make this better.Number one: never do it with an audience.Kids always want to save face. They don't feel competent when we start these conversations in front of other people.Number two: have some treats.Because once you're feeding them, they're like:“Oh, I'm not in trouble. We're just chatting, and there are cookies,” or a thick shake, or something like that.And number three: take notes.When you're trying to solve problems—and that's really what discipline is—The Three E's of Effective Discipline are about problem-solving.Discipline—meaning helping, teaching, guiding, instructing—is really about solving problems.So if I want to solve problems effectively in my home—if I want to discipline my children well—I'm trying to say:“Where are you coming from? What am I missing?”When you take notes on what your kids are saying, it's amazing how much information they give you because they realize:You're really listening to me.Sarah: Yeah. You're taking me seriously. You're writing down what I say.Dr. Justin: They're blown away by it.So they'll tell you a bunch of stuff.Now, every now and then they won't. Sometimes they'll shrug and say, “I don't know.”And you can say:“Well, if you don't know, that's fine. But if you did know…”This drives kids crazy, but it's my favorite sentence.“If you did know, what do you think the answer would be?”Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: And they roll their eyes.“Well, I don't know. That's what I said. If I knew, I'd tell you, but I don't know.”And I say:“I know you don't know, and I understand that if you did know, you would tell me. But if you did know, what would you tell me?”Sarah: I love that.Dr. Justin: They get this feeling—it's like this horrible psychological trick where:I don't know the answer, but if I had to come up with one, I guess I'd say this…And now the conversation starts.You get momentum.Sarah: You Jedi mind-trick them.Dr. Justin: Yeah. It's beautiful.And you write it down.At no point are you allowed to interrupt.At no point are you allowed to tell them they're wrong.At no point are you allowed to respond with your adult wisdom.You just listen.Sarah: Okay, and we're still on explore?Still on the first E?Dr. Justin: We're still on the first E.You make all these notes, and once it sounds like they've told you everything, you say:“All right. So what you're telling me is…”And then you read the notes back.This is the oldest psychological strategy in the book—I'm not saying anything new here.If they say, “Yes, that's what I'm saying,” you say:“All right. Great. I've got it.”If they say no, then you say:“Oh, what have I missed? How did I get this wrong? Clarify it for me.”And they give you more information.But there's a really valuable question at the end.When they say, “Yes, that's what I'm saying,” you ask:“Fantastic. Is there anything else?”Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: The power of asking that extra question is profound.It forces them to go deeper.Sometimes they'll say, “No, that's it.”But often, their first answers are shallow answers to get you off their back.They're thinking:I'm telling you what I think you want to hear.But when you say:“Got it. You're happy with this answer? Fantastic. Is there anything else going on?”That's when they look at you and think:Oh—you're actually serious about this. You really care.Sarah: And you're really listening to me.Dr. Justin: Yeah.And it's profound what children will give you after you ask, “Is there anything else?”Once you've got everything written down, confirmed, and you're clear, the next step is explain.Dr. Justin: Now, there are a couple of things around explain.Explain is basically the part where you tell them what they need to know. This is the parent bit.But all too often, we step into lecturing, and the kids fall asleep. They're like, “Oh, here we go again. I thought this was going to be different, but it's no different after all.”So there are a couple of things we need to get right here.Number one: if you're going to explain anything to your children, my recommendation is that you keep it to less than 20 seconds.Now, there's no science around this. This is just my experience in talking with parents and kids in my own family. I find that if you talk for more than 10 to 20 seconds, kids really do tune out, and it goes back to the way things have always been.The second thing is that I always ask permission.“Now that I've listened to you, Sarah, there are just one or two things I'd love to run by you about what's going on. Do you mind if I do that?”I want to make this absolutely clear: as a parent, you do not need your child's permission to tell them things. I really, absolutely, honestly believe that. As the parent, you have the right to tell them stuff they need to know.But this isn't about rights. This is about effectiveness.If I launch into, “Well, Sarah, now that I've listened to that, I get it, but I need to tell you these two things,” I'm already bringing defensiveness back into the relationship.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: Barriers are coming up.Whereas if I say, “Sarah, this is so helpful. As I've listened to you, two things have come to mind. Do you mind if I share both of those with you?” Your instant response, even as I say it—I'm watching your face—Sarah: I'm nodding.Dr. Justin: And you're going—Sarah: Yeah.Dr. Justin: Yeah. I actually want to know.You're opening up your heart and mind to me, and we're just role-playing this.Sarah: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: And that's what our kids do. They're like, “Oh, okay.” Because we've given them the courtesy of listening—Sarah: Well, and you're not trying to use your power over them.Dr. Justin: Exactly.This is a non-coercive, really supportive conversation.And I still haven't had this happen. A lot of parents will say, “Well, what happens if they say no?”And I'm like, “I've raised six kids, and they've never actually looked at me and said, ‘Now that I think about it, no, I don't need to know anything that you…'”They've just never done it.But even if they did—Sarah: Well, if they do, it's probably that they're—what did you say? When emotions are high, intelligence is low. Maybe it wasn't the right time to have the conversation.If they're saying no, then they're probably still angry and holding onto whatever was going on for them.Dr. Justin: Exactly.But if they're that angry, they're probably not going to have explored nicely with you anyway.Sarah: Yes, exactly. So pick—Dr. Justin: A different time.You're probably not even going to—Sarah: Get to that point. Yeah.Dr. Justin: So it's very much: keep it really short, ask permission, and then share.Sarah: Okay. So give me examples.You said, “We've been fighting about screens,” was one example. You also gave the example of, “You've been fighting a lot with your brother.”So in the explain—10 to 20 seconds—choose one of those scenarios. After hearing your child, what would you say in that 10 to 20 seconds?Dr. Justin: I did this just the other day with my 16-year-old daughter, Lily, who is on social media more than she should be. There's been some tension and conflict.I listened. She shared some ideas, and I said, “There are just a couple of things I want to run by you. Is that okay?”She said, “Sure, Dad.”I said, “Great. There are certain times when we're trying to connect or have family time, and there are certain contexts where you're on your device and we just can't reach you.”She looked at me and said, “Yeah, I know.”I said, “Okay. The second thing I want to highlight is that we've noticed you're sleeping in because, even though you're not supposed to, you've been taking your phone into your bedroom at night and staying up late scrolling. Unless I'm reading it wrong, I'm pretty sure that's what's been happening.”And she said, “No, I have been, Dad. You're right.”So it's just two really succinct sentences where I'm stating what I'm seeing. I'm sharing my experience.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: If it were the sibling fighting, I'd say, “Yeah, your brother is really annoying. I get what's going on. Sometimes I wish he didn't live in our house as well.”I might have a joke with them about the challenge associated with that.And then I might say, “So when this happens, can I just share how it feels for me? It breaks my heart. I love both of you so very much, and my dream is for our family to enjoy being in one another's company and to look forward to conversations and jokes and doing the things we do. When this stuff is going on, it feels like that's a pipe dream.“And secondly, psychologically—you know I've got this PhD in psychology—I know that there's damage being done to the way your brother feels about himself. That's what I'm worried about.”So I've had both of those little conversations on two different topics, sharing two different things, and both were about 10 seconds each.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: Again, it's conversational. It's not lecture-style.Sarah: And it's from the heart.I can feel it, even though this is just an example you're giving. I can feel that it's from your heart—that you're really being open and sharing with your child what your true concerns are.You're not trying to power over or control. You're really sharing a heartfelt sentiment.Dr. Justin: Yeah. Thank you. That's the goal.You won't always do that, but that's the goal.The reason there's a problem is because your values are not being upheld in the home, and you're trying to communicate that in a way that shows you honor them and that they've got a brain.Now, we've used two really grown-up versions—or teenage versions, I guess. But you can have the same conversations with three- and four-year-olds. It's just shorter. It's simpler.Usually, with those conversations, in a pretty tight timeframe—60 to 90 seconds—you've done the whole process.There is a higher-order—Sarah: Okay, so what's the third part?Dr. Justin: Just before I get to that one, if you really want to do the advanced version of explain, what I'll often do after I've explored with my child is say:“Okay, so this is the bit where I'd normally explain what's going on from my point of view. I wonder if you can tell me what you think I'm going to say here.”Sarah: Ah.Dr. Justin: And so I get them to explain the explain to me.The reason that's so effective is that whenever my mouth is the one that's moving, my brain is the one that's working.If I can get their mouth moving, their brain is doing the heavy lifting.Sarah: Love that.Dr. Justin: That's really, really effective.And then the last one—Sarah: Is empower.And you're also helping them see things and develop empathy, right? To see things from somebody else's perspective.Dr. Justin: Yes. Powerful.The last one is empower.That's literally as simple as saying, “Okay, so I get where you're coming from. We've had that conversation very thoroughly. You know what my challenge is here. What do you think we should do?”“Where do we go from here? How do we solve this in a way that we can both feel good about?”It's true that every now and then, your child will shrug their shoulders and say, “I don't know.”Or they'll shrug and say, “Well, we should just do what I want to do.”And as a parent, that's where you step in and say my favorite line:“Don't you just wish? Don't you just wish we could?”Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: Because—well, let me ask you, Sarah. When I say, “Don't you just wish,” or, “Wouldn't it be good if we could?”—same thing—what have I actually said?Sarah: Total empathy. Heaps of empathy.Dr. Justin: Total empathy.But I've also said something else really clearly.Sarah: That that's not going to work.Dr. Justin: Correct. The answer is no.But it's a no with so much love, kindness, empathy, and gentleness in it—Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: —that your child goes, “Oh, yeah. I know.”And then you say, “So let's see if we can come up with a solution that will work.”What else might work for you when it comes to your brother?What else might work for you when it comes to the party on Friday night that I'm not willing to let you go to?What else could work when it comes to our screen challenges? Because this is an ongoing issue for us, isn't it?Every now and then, you won't get an answer right away. You'll say, “Well, let's talk about it again tonight,” or, “Let's talk about it again tomorrow once you've had some time to think about it.”But I'm big on deadlines.“We need to have this worked out by the end of the weekend, okay? I don't want to go through another week of this. We've got to find a solution. If we haven't had another chat by tomorrow night, we're going to sit down and work it out then.”And I also don't have a problem at this point—Laura Walker is a researcher at BYU in Utah, and she did a study published in the Journal of Adolescence where she found that parents who use these kinds of strategies—she's not talking about the Three E's of Effective Discipline, because that's the thing I developed, but it's based on the same sort of theory that she researches—Parents who use these kinds of strategies, even when they do have to step in and say, “All right, well, we haven't come up with a solution, so it's going to be my way,” kids are much more likely to be responsive and compliant—Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: —because we've been through a process with them that is not autocratic. It's not authoritarian.They've felt like they had a voice. Their perspective has been seen and heard. They've had some input.And even though they don't get what they want all the time—because we're the parents, and sometimes the fact that we've climbed 47 rungs on the ladder of life and they've only climbed 13 is all we need.Sarah: That's what I call in my work the goodwill bank.When your kids experience you as collaborative, non-coercive, and not power-tripping—when they know, over the period of their childhood, that they can trust you to take their preferences into account and be respectful of them—then when you do have to say no about something, even if they don't like it, there's this goodwill bank behind you and this level of trust.When you mentioned, “You can't go to the party on Friday,” I never had that issue with my kids because everything was so collaborative.We'd have similar conversations. I didn't have—I'm not very good at thinking of things like the Three E's—but similar kinds of processes where they'd say why they wanted to go, I'd say what my concerns were, and then they'd invariably say, “Oh, yeah, you're probably right.”It was never, “You can't go.”It was, “These are my concerns. This is what I've been thinking about.”Because they experienced that whole process over years of parenting, you don't get the pushback because they don't feel like you're power-tripping them.Dr. Justin: Yeah.Sarah, I had an experience with one of my adult children who was still living at home. I think she was maybe 19 or 20 when this happened.She wanted to go and do something, and I said to her, “You're an adult. You do get to choose for yourself whether you will do this or not, but I've got some really big concerns about you doing it.“I actually think you're putting yourself into a dangerous situation. There's some history, some volatility, and some challenges if you go and involve yourself in this particular activity. Tell me why this is so important to you.”So she walked me through it, and I said, “Okay, I get it. How do my concerns stack up against your desire to be there?”And she said, “Dad, I get what you're saying, but I want to go.”And I said, “Okay, so…”You used that beautiful term, the goodwill bank. I can't remember exactly what my words were, but I'm going to use your term right now, because I essentially said:“I'm going to use the goodwill I've built up with you over the last however many years and step in really firmly and say you're making a mistake.“As your dad, even though you're an adult, I want to forbid you to go. That's how strongly I feel about this. To the degree that I can, I forbid it.“Ultimately, you will choose because you are an adult, but I don't want you there.”Sarah: I'm going on the record.Dr. Justin: Yeah, yeah.“I need you to trust that this is a bad idea. We can come up with any number of other activities you could do instead, with different people in a different location, but this is a bad idea, and you have none of my support should you go.“If you go and something goes wrong, you call me and I'll come rescue you. But it is a bad idea, and I forbid it.”And I couldn't believe I was saying those words. I've never said them in my life, and now I was saying them to an adult.But she looked at me and said, “Okay.”Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: She didn't fight me. She didn't say, “I can do what—”Sarah: No, because you built up the history with her of how she experienced you.Dr. Justin: Yeah. She was like, “Wow, this is serious. He's never said that before. If he feels that strongly, maybe he's right. Maybe I need to find an alternative.”So anyway, that's the Three E's of Effective Discipline.I feel like I've talked too much, Sarah. I wanted to be much more conversational, but I get carried away when we—Sarah: No, no. I love it.I feel like it's very complementary to the things that I teach, and you've given me some new things to teach parents as well.I love having sort of snappy—the Three E's of Discipline. I think that's great. I love it. I'll share it.Dr. Justin: Yeah, please. Absolutely.It's helped so many millions of parents.Sarah: Yeah.Well, I love that we've connected across the world—from the other side of the world to each other—and I look forward to hopefully talking to you again in March of 2027 when your book Boys comes out.I figured we were going to talk about that, but we had such a lovely conversation about peaceful parenting, discipline, and—oh my God, it's gone right out of my head—Dr. Justin: Self-determination theory.Sarah: Self-determination theory.I think it was a really great conversation, and I really appreciate you sharing all of your experience and wisdom.Dr. Justin: I loved the conversation.Like I said, it was too one-sided. I wish we'd been able to go backward and forward a bit more, but let's do it again.Let's chat again next year when the book comes out, and we'll talk about boys and how to help them.There's so much talk about toxic masculinity.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: Wouldn't it be great if we could give them a view of healthy masculinity—a model of that to follow?That's what my book is all about: how we can guide boys into a healthy form of masculinity.Sarah: Well, for folks in Australia, your book is coming out in June 2026. For folks in North America, it's not coming out until spring 2027.So I will definitely be ringing you up and having you come back on to talk about the book when you've got your North American release. I know we're going to have a great conversation then.Before I let you go, though, I have a question that I ask all my podcast guests:If you had a time machine and you could go back and tell your younger parent self something, what advice would you give yourself?Dr. Justin: Jean-Jacques Rousseau said there is—I can't remember the quote exactly—but: What wisdom is there that is greater than kindness?I've paraphrased it. It's not perfect, but it's something along those lines.Interestingly, Rousseau had, I think, five children—maybe six—and he put them all into orphanages somewhere in the first 18 months of their lives so he could spend more time writing and focusing on how to be a good person, which I just find criminal. I can't believe it.So take it for what it's worth, but “What wisdom is there that's greater than kindness?” is what Rousseau said.I've mentioned this idea of soft eyes a couple of times. If I could go back, I would teach myself about kindness. I'd teach myself about many of the things we've talked about today.But I just want to quickly share the story of soft eyes.As an academic, I want everything I say to be evidence-based. There is no evidence that I'm aware of where people have done any kind of randomized controlled trial where parents are asked to interact with their children with soft eyes, neutral eyes, hard eyes, or anything like that.Soft eyes is this idea—I was giving a presentation at a public library one time, and an elderly lady stepped into the back of the room, sat down, and listened to the last 25 or 30 minutes of my presentation. She must have liked what she could hear from the corridor outside, and she stepped in to listen.After everybody had left, she walked over to me and said, “I really enjoyed what you shared. I'd love to tell you something my grandmother said to me.”So we're going back into the early 1900s.Her grandmother said, “Whenever you're talking to your children about matters of discipline, make sure you have soft eyes.”And I thought, I really like that.Because if you try to have a conversation with somebody and your eyes are soft, you just can't say mean things. You can't say harsh things. You can't have harsh thoughts.If you soften your eyes, your face softens and your heart softens. You have this beautiful compassion and kindness, this ability to see the best in them rather than the worst in them, to assume positive intent.There's something gorgeous about soft eyes.So I would go back and quote Rousseau better than I just quoted him to you, and I would tell my younger self that soft eyes will make a tremendous impact on all of my relationships.Sarah: Ah.There's an American—I don't know if you've heard of him in Australia—but he's a pretty well-known marriage counselor, Terry Real.Dr. Justin: Oh, yeah. I quote him in my book.Sarah: Yeah, yeah. He does a lot of work about—well, he says something like, “There's nothing that harshness can accomplish that kindness can't accomplish better.”Dr. Justin: That's so beautiful.Sarah: Mm-hmm.Dr. Justin: Thank you. That's inspiring. I'm so glad you shared that.Sarah: Yeah. I love it.It's hard to remember, but I think it is true. And I wish that—and I know the world needs a dose of that right now.Dr. Justin: Yeah. Yeah.Sarah: One hundred percent.Well, thank you so much.Where's the best place for folks to go and find out more about you and what you do?Dr. Justin: Probably my podcast, the Happy Families Podcast. My wife and I drop a 15-minute nugget of parenting wisdom every day, five days a week.Sarah: Oh, wow!Dr. Justin: Yeah. It's a lot of content, but it's bite-sized chunks, and it's entertaining. We're fun. We get to do it together.And the Happy Families Podcast. I've got a website called happyfamilies.com.au, but basically, if you like what we've talked about—Sarah: We'll link to all of that in the show notes. We'll link to your website and your podcast, and I'm sure it's easy to find you.Dr. Justin: That sounds great. Thanks, Sarah.Sarah: Thank you so much.Dr. Justin: What a great, great conversation. Lovely to be with you.Reimagine Peaceful Parenting with Sarah Rosensweet Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahrosensweet.substack.com/subscribe

The Sourdough Impostors In Your Grocery Aisle

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Is your practice going out of network to make more money? Fantastic, but make sure you listen to this episode first. Kiera talks about all the numbers you absolutely need to know before you make the decision, and other, smaller considerations you could make instead. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners this is Kiera and today I am excited to chat with you about a pretty popular topic that people are always wanting to ask questions about they want to get to know like Kiera, I just want to go out of network. And I say, great, let's talk about it. Let's have a really good conversation about what going out of network actually means what it looks like for you and your practice and how we're able to support you on that.   So if you're new to the Dental A Team, welcome, I'm Kiera Dent. I love all things dentistry. My last name really is Dent and I believe that our job is to positively impact the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible. I think that we are so lucky and so blessed to be able to work in dentistry, to be able to serve and help so many patients. And so I hope that you just know that you're doing a great work out there, that you are changing lives, that you are benefiting so many people. And I am so glad that you've chosen to spend your time with Dental A Team.   If you love our podcast, please, like, please go leave us a review. Like, subscribe, share. It helps us out so much. You have no idea. Just like you want patients to leave you great reviews after you see them. Leaving us a great review for the podcast actually helps us reach more practices and that's our ultimate goal. And I do read them and I'm so grateful for your amazing reviews. So let's talk about going out of network. Going out of network, everybody wants to do it because they want to make money, right? Like I am getting these terrible reimbursement rates and so that's why I'm going to do it.   But what I want you to realize is when you go out of network, you actually become a marketing company. Okay, I hope you heard that. When you go out of network, you become a marketing company. And what that looks like is you now have to work to retain these patients. So when I help practices go out of network, like that's totally fine. You're allowed to do it, but let's make sure we look at the numbers. Let's make sure we do the math. How much is it going to cost for us to market to these new patients? How is it going to be for us to retain these new patients? How are we going to be able to actually get these patients to stay with us long-term?   Now we don't have the insurance clause that's keeping patients here. Also, if you don't know, insurance companies do often send letters to your patients telling them, hey, if you just go down to this other dentist, they're actually an in-network provider. I kid you not, you think that it's dirty, they're allowed to play dirty. So just so you know, when you do this, you start facing this huge uphill battle and I've had practices almost go belly up after going out of network. That's not to say that going out of network's wrong.   but I even have practices that are fee for service right now and they're like we just cannot drive new patients because trying to compete with people in network is so hard and I think about it like Let's just run the fees and I know you sit here and you dream about this grand day of like but Kiera if I was out of network I could get paid so much for a crown and I'm like, yes But then you're only doing like two crowns instead of 20 crowns So there is a volume game, which is not a wrong game to play But I just want you to like realize that you really have to drive your marketing. You have to be   top notch, you have to look to see how you're gonna drive patients to your practice. You have to beg, you will have an uptick in your spend on marketing when you go out of network as well. So it's not all flour, sunshine and gravy. And so sometimes I just look at like, what's the biggest pain point and could we maybe drop one or two insurance companies instead of dropping all of them. If you have more patients than you know what to do with and I'm talking you are booked out seven, eight, nine months to get your patients back in. It might be worth considering, could we drop one or two plans?   Or could we expand and add in more providers before we drop insurances? So look at our lowest paying reimbursables and see what if we just drop those and offer them our membership plan so they become these fee for service patients. But with the membership plan, they are more tethered to the practice, right? Because they're paying for this, they're going to be coming in two times a year. You have two opportunities to see them. I will tell you as a fee for service patient myself, I do not usually go in two times a year. And it's because I'm like, I gotta pay like 300 bucks. But when they have a membership plan,   They don't think like that. They're like, put my cleaning is free. Just like they think of with insurance. So when you're going out of network, really starting to think about all these possibilities of like, all right, what are we going to need to change to be able to drop? So when I have people looking at this, I think about number one, what is the cost to benefit ratio? And if we lost all these patients, let's pretend none of them come, let's go for our worst case scenario, would we be able to sustain? Do I have enough patients to be able to sustain that? And am I willing to do that? Some practices,   Totally, they're good to go. They're like, yes, Kiera, I'm just fine. I can absolutely 1000 % handle this. Other people are like, no, I can't. If I lost all those patients, we would not be able to sustain. So that's the first step before we go out of network. The second step is let's make sure we're prepared to go out of network and handle all those phone calls. And how are we going to save and maintain and retain these patients? Can we get them on membership plans? Third, what are you gonna do about the insurance companies that are calling your patients constantly?   When you out of network, you move into a marketing company. You are constantly striving to keep these patients with you, retain these patients, make sure that they're always there. They're no longer just coming to quote unquote automatically. And so I think about it like, let's run the opportunity cost for when we're going out of network to see, is this something I really want to do? do you want to do this? And I think so many people are like, okay, I'm going to just do this.   we're going to run, we're going to do, and then like, let's maybe do a little bit of prep work. And so there is out of network, like collection verbiage, there is an out of network plan. ⁓ There is all of this. And I just think like, when we go through it, you want to make sure that you are fully prepared financially, mentally, emotionally, as a team, we are locked and loaded and we are good to go. And so if you've looked at those numbers and you're set,   I really want you to think about how you're going to be a marketing company. And so when we look at this, thinking about how can I retain all these people? How can I make sure before I go and drop, like truly before you go and drop insurance, how can I make sure all these patients are going to continue to come back to us? Is it something that we can do of like, can I put into place and start reaching out membership plans? Can we work on our patient experience? Can we make sure like, what's gonna set us apart from the insurance company down the street?   I have a doctor and they are amazing and they are fee for service and they've been fee for service for years. I'm talking like they are so lucky. They've got the Taj Mahal of a practice. It's gorgeous. They've got state of the art technology. Their fees are really not that much higher, but they have like, could you not multiple practices? There's probably 10 around them that are all insurance driven and they're like, but our dentistry should speak for itself. And I'm like, I don't disagree with you, but when times get tighter, things get harder.   People are gonna look at this. guys, I have even, Kiera Dent, who knows dentistry, I have switched. I have a doctor who's fee for service. This is embarrassing. Me as a patient, I'm going to tell you. I have a dentist fee for service. I know they do great dentistry, but they're fee for service. My husband, he's got a great dentist who's got a great hygienist. They're in network with my husband's insurance. I was like, well, I'll just go to them for my cleanings. And if I ever have work that needs to get done, I'll go to the fee for service practice.   Even myself, because I'm just like, well, is it really worth the cost? Like, it's just a cleaning. Like I could just go to the other dentist and you might be like, no cure. But you got to think about the patient. I know you think your dentistry is amazing, but to that patient, a cleaning is a cleaning is a cleaning. Unless they love your hygienist or they love you, they love your front office. They love something about your practice so much that they're willing to pay almost like I pay $300 out of pocket versus insurance. pay $30 a month.   and I get to go have a great cleaning by this amazing hygienist. I also can look at my x-rays, but I think about it, this is where I say you've got to be a marketing company. What's going to make this person continually come to you and choose you every single year when the insurance companies are hitting them, the economy's hitting them, the price is hitting them, and they don't know if your filling is better than the dentist down the street that is closer to them, is in network with them, and they don't need to drive to you. How do you set yourself apart?   So ways that fee for service practice, like I'm telling you, I got the Taj Mahal. They're amazing. They're great. But even then they struggle. And so I think before we decide we wanna drop out of network, I really want you to just make sure, am I committed to being a marketing company? I'm doing the reels. I'm doing the social media. I'm putting like a freaking banner outside. I am asking for reviews and referrals. I'm making sure that we concier all of our patients. We're doing follows with them. Our doctors are giving them a call afterwards. Like I'm talking next level.   So I go to a fee for service chiropractor. She's amazing. She does a nerve and I have actually some like weird nerve things going on. And so I really love her. She's fee for service. But when I have like something that comes up in my life and I message her, it is an above and beyond over the top on her of like, absolutely care. I take care of yourself. I'm going to reappoint you. I'll reschedule you. It is a white glove service when I work with her. And so I'm willing to pay a premium. I also am able to get in on the weekends. If I need something from her, I message her and she's like, yep.   I, she can do house visits for me, but I think you have to realize like when people are paying out of pocket full price, just doing great dentistry is not enough for them. They are expecting great customer service, great experiences. Why should I be paying my money? And sometimes that's not even enough. And you can say, we've got say to the art this, we've got say to the art that. So what this practice we had to do for fever service, they get a tour every single time we walk them through, we have towels for them. We walk them to the front. They have a dedicated treatment coordinator.   There's somebody who's dedicated for phones. We have a dedicated concierge who sits in the front office who brings things for you. That's the welcoming and greeting who sits there and chit chats, who knows every single patient by name. That is the level of concierge service and marketing for these fee for service practices. If you've got competition around you. If you don't, podcast doesn't apply to you. But I think when most people are thinking about going out of network, they're just like, I'm going to go like screw it. Delta Dental, Aetna, I'm so sick of your freaking fees. I'm going to now be paid what I'm worth.   I don't disagree with you. You are worth that. But I also want to make sure that you're fully prepared to be that high level concierge doctor that has to do so much more to retain these patients. I have another doctor who went out of network, literally almost went bankrupt. ⁓ The practice is struggling. They don't have enough patients. They are constantly trying to recruit new patients. They're looking at it and they're looking to rejoin in network because everything is falling apart. Family's falling apart. Life has fallen apart. Profitability has fallen apart.   because they just did not realize how much effort it is to try to bring in new patients on your own. So one way you could look before you even go into it is look at your new patients and see how many new patients are we attracting just by reviews and referrals alone before I go out of network. And if I'm not bringing in a lot of people by reviews and referrals right now as the best dentist, they love me. I've got like this healthy cult following with them. If I don't have that, I might wanna work on that to see what are the patients who are fee for service   Why are they coming here? Ask them, ask people like, you can survey your patient base. Like what would you guys love? Like if you had to pay a little bit more for dentistry, what would it be? Are you more, because they don't know the difference of a great dentist and a not so great dentist. And I think that that's what people don't realize is our dentistry, as much as I wish that it was a differentiator for patients, it's not. They don't know if that filling in that crown is better than the dentist down the street who's in network. They have no idea.   What they're looking at is cost and even a great experience, they still might come down to cost. And I'm not here to say that it's all cost because I believe that people are willing to pay for great experiences. You look at why does Chick-fil-A do better than McDonald's? We look at why is Target oftentimes better than Walmart, but is it really? And who are you? And I don't think all patients come for cost. I think there is a lot of space in today's world to stand out of knowing their name, driving it, but we also have to be careful because   We are facing real people are like, how's the economy and is it impacting dentists? And I'm like, those who are doing regular dentistry, no, it's not. They're great. But those who are outside of that, so we're talking all on X cases, cosmetic cases, fee for service patients. If they don't have a loyal patient base right now, people are considering costs. They are considering what are we going to do? And I know that that's why you are also probably considering fee for service. What about fee for service? What about this? What about that?   those pieces I think are very much needing to be highlighted and addressed of, all right, if the economy is pushing dollars, what can we do to offset that? If I'm needing to increase our fees to offset dollars within our practice for profit margins, what else can we do for this? And I really think for you to look at when you're going out of network to say, is this something I'm willing to do? Is this something our practice is fully equipped with?   Are we getting enough reviews and referrals just by being a great practice today to go out of it? And am I willing to like up my ante, not just being a great dentist, because you dropped that network guys, they're going to like fly away to a practice that does accept them. And like I said, your insurance company is going to try to convince them because they get a lot more money when it goes through an in-network provider than an out-of-network provider. And they're going to, they hustle them. And so for you to just accept that you will be a marketer, you will be constantly looking for patients.   you'll be constantly trying to fill your books and is it something you want to do? And is that an additional piece you want to add to your already big to-do list or is it not? And you might be hearing like, Kiera's pro insurance. I'm not, we have a lot of offices that are out of network, but I will say my out of network ones, every single call, it is always a, do I get more new patients? How do we get patients? Unless you're in a really busy area, I have a few where like them cutting insurance was the best thing they could have done because they just were inundated with patients.   and it was like kind of pruning a tree and they needed to prune. So them dropping insurances strategically, they were okay if they lost every single patient, they would still be able to take care of their entire team. All the people, they even had like a dental office across the street moving. They're like, that's fine, take our patients. Like we are good with that. But I will say, if you are not prepared to do that, I might just add a pause for you before you go out of network. So thinking about going out of network, run your numbers to see, can we survive when we lost all the patients?   Number two, I want you to think about are we prepared to be a marketing company and what do we need to do to make sure people stay? Number three, look at our reviews and see how many of them and our referrals and our new patients, how many are coming from reviews and referrals of people referring us and would they continue to do so? Please like check your ego, pretend you are not this person. Will they continue to do so if you go out of network? Four, what can we proactively do to make patients want to stay here? Can we start adding some of these concierge pieces or is it like, hey, when we go out of network, we add these concierge pieces.   Can we get people more on membership plans? So when we go out of network, it doesn't hurt us as much because they're tethered to our practice already. I would be prepping and preparing you and this is what we do with our offices before they do it. Some offices still choose to go out of network and I say that's fine. But again, every choice has a consequence, whether positive or negative that you need to be aware of to make the best decisions. And I believe better insights, better knowledge result in better decisions. So if you need help going out of network, you're like, my gosh, these are things that I need help with.   please reach out before you do it. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. This is how we're able to help you. This is how we're able to just make sure that you've thought through all the pieces and then whatever path is best for you, we're able to guide you through it. And if you've already decided to go out and now we're kind like, shoot, I don't have all these things in place. Great. This is what we do. So reach out. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. This is what we specialize in. This is what we're experts in and you can choose. It's like, it's a choose your own adventure.   Just make sure you know what the ending looks like for either opportunity so you choose the best decision for you, your practice, and your patients. And as always, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team

This is The Zone of Disruption! This is the I AM RAPAPORT: STEREO PODCAST! His name is Michael Rapaport aka The Gringo Mandingo aka aka The People's Pickle aka The Jewish Brad Pitt aka Captain Colitis aka The Disruptive Warrior aka Mayor Rapaport 2029 and he is here to discuss: Drake drops 3 albums in 1 day Fantastic 4 NBA Teams Left The Cleveland Cavaliers fan who ate horse crap Prediction for The New York Knickerbockers Rama Mamdani's Vile Playlist Swastika flag flown at NYU & the writing on the wall David Krumholtz talking crazy to The Dingo & a whole lotta mo'. This episode is not to be missed! CaptainPicks To Win In Sports Betting: https://www.winible.com/checkout/1357777109057032537?store_url=/captainpicks&c=kickoff Rate & Review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Send questions & concerns to: iamrapaportpodcast@gmail.com Subscribe to Rapaport's Reality Feeds: iHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-rapaports-reality-with-keb-171162927/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rapaports-reality-with-kebe-michael-rapaport/id1744160673 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3a9ArixCtWRhfpfo1Tz7MR Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/rapaports-reality-with-kebe-michael-rapaport/PC:1001087456 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a776919e-ad8c-4b4b-90c6-f28e41fe1d40/rapaports-reality-with-kebe-michael-rapaport Stand Up Comedy Tickets on sale at: MichaelRapaportComedy.com If you are interested in NCAA, MLB, NBA, NFL & UFC Picks/Parlays Follow @CaptainPicksWins on Instagram & subscribe to packages at www.CaptainPicks.com www.dbpodcasts.com Produced by DBPodcasts.comFollow @dbpodcasts, @iamrapaport, @michaelrapaport on TikTok, Twitter & InstagramMusic by Jansport J (Follow @JansportJ) www.JansportJMusic.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Time to turn the April 2026 New Music Train to the listeners and that means the OG, Steven Routledge, will be steaming out of Scotland. He's got the train headed for the midwest where Paul Hayden is eagerly waiting on the platform. The duo have tunes from Lunar Shadow, Fantastic Cat, The Shits and Crocodiles. Rockin' the Suburbs on Apple Podcasts/iTunes or other podcast platforms, including audioBoom, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon, iHeart, Stitcher and TuneIn. Or listen at SuburbsPod.com. Please rate/review the show on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends.Visit our website at SuburbsPod.comEmail Jim & Patrick at rock@suburbspod.comFollow us on the Threads, Facebook or Instagram @suburbspodIf you're glad or sad or high, call the Suburban Party Line — 612-440-1984.Theme music: "Ascension," originally by Quartjar, next covered by Frank Muffin and now re-done in a high-voltage version by Quartjar again!  Visit quartjar.bandcamp.com and frankmuffin.bandcamp.com.

Fantastic show this week guys! Tournament trail updates from multiple events happening within the last week. Plus we take a look at the difference between cover water to eliminate water, and just going through the motions aimlessly; and what that can mean for your day on the water! Major changes to the multi species scavenger hunt series, and a whole lot more!Link for Identifier Tin Tag mentioned in show! Just Select JBP as the club and the image will update, don't forget to add your name or social handle too!For Ketch: https://www.bluefoxgifts.com/blue-fox-tin-tag-aluminum-kayak-tournament-identifier/For YakAttack: https://www.bluefoxgifts.com/blue-fox-tin-tag-lb-fits-the-leader-board-aluminum-kayak-tournament-identifier/ Online

Today we celebrate new music on the show with my guest Sammy Elfanbaum, Singer Songwriter of Post Sex Nachos. Fantastic band that blurs the lines of Indie and Pop Music.  I first heard these guys on college radio and immediately searched them out. Sammy stops by today to talk all about the history of the band and also to talk about their upcoming album  "Big Bad" which will be out Sept 18th, 2026. Catch the Nachos out on the road all summer on the festival circuit and also a full headlining tour starting later this year.   See my brand new Don't Tell Comedy Special right here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w0Z1nwUQPY  I have a ton of new tour dates including NYC and Boston this week. Hit the link - https://www.deandelray.com/tourdates  Join my Patreon and support this podcast for less than a cup of coffee - https://www.deandelray.com/patreon Thank you so much for tuning in each week I really appreciate it. Have a great week. DDR  

A desperate young executive discovers that his office safe has become a doorway to the future, and every exchange leaves him richer than before. But when impossible money starts circulating through New York banks, Peter Merton realizes the people on the other side may not care what happens to him once their experiment is finished. Peter Merton's Private Mint by Harlan Ellison. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.You can never have enough Harlan Ellison. Unfortunately, very few of his stories have entered the public domain, and after today's episode there is only one more Ellison story left for us to feature. You'll hear that final story in the coming weeks.If you went searching for a Harlan Ellison story in the October 1956 issue of Fantastic, you wouldn't find one. Unless, of course, you knew that Ellison sometimes used the pen name Lee Archer. Open your copy of Fantastic to page 74, Peter Merton's Private Mint by Harlan Ellison…Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, A lonely wanderer escapes years of darkness and silence only to find that the world beyond his refuge recoils from him in terror. Every step toward warmth and companionship pulls him closer to a revelation that no living soul could endure unchanged. The Outsider by H. P. Lovecraft.

Had to call on one of the pop culture greats to dive into this week's explosive Summer House! Ira Madison III is here! And go buy his FANTASTIC book Pure Innocent Fun where books are sold.FOLLOW DUMPSTER DIVE ON SOCIALS/POD PLATFORM

On this week's show we take our first look at the new batch of Ikea smart home products that support matter. Are they worth the money? We also read your emails and take a look at the week's news. News: TCL RGB Mini-LED TV with up to 9,000 nits brightness now available AMC Wants To Start Airing Sports Programming to Fight Cord Cutting LG ELECTRONICS LAUNCHES 2026 QNED EVO MINI LED TV LINEUP Will micro-LED ever really replace OLED? Other: NBC Releases First Look at David Boreanaz in The Rockford Files Reboot Are the Low Cost Matter Compatible Devices From Ikea Worth It? On this week's show we take our first look at the new batch of Ikea smart home products that support matter. If you are in the Amazon, Apple, Google, Homey or Samsung ecosystem you can connect these devices directly to your home via matter.  These are some of the lowest cost devices we have seen and they come from a reputable vendor. So how do they work? To answer that, we put the Grillplats plug and two variations of the Bilresa Remote Control (Dual Button and Scroll Wheel) through a two week test. Here is what we found.  GRILLPLATS Plug ($7.99 at Ikea) What can we say? This is a solidly built matter plug for $8 that never misses.  What we like: Extremely affordable — one of the cheapest Matter-over-Thread smart plugs available. Energy monitoring — tracks power usage, voltage, current, and accumulated energy (great for automations like "notify when washer finishes"). Acts as a Thread repeater — helps strengthen and extend your smart home mesh network. Compact & sturdy design with manual on/off button. Easy setup via QR code. Fast, responsive control. What you should consider: Power limits — max 300W for motor loads (e.g., not ideal for fridges, dryers, or high-inductive appliances). Energy reporting through matter is not fully supported by all automation ecosystems. . Can be physically wide and block adjacent outlets on some power strips. Excellent value if you already have a Thread network and mainly need basic on/off control. It's a strong budget pick, but not perfect for heavy appliances. BILRESA remote control kit ($14.99 at Ikea) These dual-button remotes make it much easier to control your smart products. You can use them to turn devices on and off, dim lights, change colors, or activate groups and preset scenes. And at about $5 a piece they are the best value remote out there! What we like: extremely cheap — one of the most affordable Matter-over-Thread smart remotes available. Simple & intuitive — two clearly different buttons (with indentations) for quick on/off, scenes, dimming, or groups. Supports single press, double press, and long press (up to 6 actions total). Battery powered (2x AAA) — long life and easy to replace. Can be placed anywhere (magnetic back + adhesive metal plate for wall mounting). Compact and unobtrusive design — looks like a simple light switch on the wall. Responsive! Almost no delay from button push to device/scene activation. What you should consider: Setup can be finicky — pairing takes too long and fails requiring multiple attempts.Once device in the tree pack would not pair and said it was already in a home. Even a factory reset (done multiple times) would not fix this issue. After a call with Ikea Tech Support. A new three pack was sent out.  Limited feedback — a small status LED doesn't give much information. Fantastic budget remote if you want simple physical control for lights and scenes in a Matter smart home. Just be aware that two button actions are required to turn a light on and off. So if you are using it to control lights you may make a single press on the larger button turn a lamp on and a single press on the smaller button turn the lamp off. Hitting the first button does not toggle the state of the controlled device.   BILRESA remote control with Scroll Wheel ($9.99 at Ikea)  Use to turn smart products on/off, dim and change the color of light sources, or operate a group or preset scenes. With this controller you get three sets of buttons which are indicated by a small LED. Each set has a single, double, and long press. In addition there is a scroll wheel that is supposed to dim lights. The dimmer did not work with homekit over matter but even if it did the action is difficult to uses since the wheel is slick and slippery. Moving between groups is cumbersome as well. You have to wake up the device to see which group you are currently on. Or just dive in and see what happens! What we like: Cheap! Versatile controls — Scroll wheel for dimming/brightness or color temp/RGB adjustments (if you can get the wheel to scroll). Up to 9 programmable inputs. Compact and portable — Small (about 2.75" x 2" x 1"), easy to hold or mount on walls/fridges.  What you should consider: Scroll wheel feel and usability issues — Slippery, hard to rotate (especially on a table), wobbly, or lacking grip/texture.  Ecosystem limitations — Wheel functionality is poorly supported in some platforms like Apple HomeKit and Google Home.  Setup and documentation frustrations — Pairing can be tricky  Great concept and price but we recommend waiting for firmware fixes and broader Matter support. Consider the simpler dual-button BILRESA version. 

Do you often feel like your homebase emotionally is a little … chaotic? Kiera reminds listeners that having a "calm" practice doesn't necessarily mean having a slow practice; rather, it's an intentional place, and it's worth existing in. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and today is such a great day. It's podcast day and I'm so excited to be here with all of you. I hope that you're excited for today. And again, I hope that you just remember that we are truly so blessed and so lucky to be living in the world of dentistry. I love being in dentistry. I love helping people have smiles. I love that like smiles are contagious, that good dentistry is contagious, that great teams are contagious. And today, today's podcast is   ⁓ calm is contagious and so is chaos. And, I think a calm practice model is really something that's going to help high performing offices feel easier. And I was actually talking to one of my business coaches the other day and he said, Kiera, I just want you to know that chaos is contagious. And so is calm. ⁓ our company is going through some really evolutionary changes. I'm very excited about them, but at the same time, I've made the joke that sometimes I feel like an orange juice being squoze. And the other day told my husband, was like, no, no.   that's too much juice that comes out of one squeeze, I actually feel like an olive. Like you are pressing everything out of me to get one teeny tiny drop of olive juice ⁓ or olive oil. And I just feel like sometimes practice owners, might feel this way. Office managers, you might feel this way where ⁓ sometimes that chaos is very, very contagious. And sometimes I think we accidentally live there. That might be our emotional home that we live in. It might be the place that we naturally go back to. And so just thinking that maybe there is another path.   maybe you coming in with a space in the center of calm and seeing how your team and your patients respond to that rather than coming in with this chaos. I did the trend, the AI trend where you ask chat GPT to make you a character based on what it knows about you. And it was fascinating for me because the character I got was me in a business suit. was holding papers. had traction in the background. had, it was kind of this like a tornado flurry behind me and I was holding a barbell weight because I do like to work out.   and I was in a black and white, so black skirt, white shirt, like holding this barbell weight in my hand and there's a tornado coming down behind me with like papers kind of flying and it was like, you're in this building phase of a little bit of chaos and this tornado. And then I decided to ask it like, well, based on where you know our company is going and where you know I'm going, build me a picture that looks like that. And it was fascinating because there was me in a cream suit, no black and white.   I was sitting there actually barefoot. So I'm in like a very professional suit. My arms were folded. I was very much at like peace and calm and ease. was at, there was like a sun. So it was like Hawaii slash Greece. Like I love to travel, but it was behind me. So was like no longer chasing or striving. was there. Family was incorporated rather than like being there. Working was part of my like Zen. And that's the image that I hold. And I think that that analogy and that story hopefully just shows that both are real.   I'm the same person and I'm living in a world of chaos or I'm living in a world of calm. And even my body feels better when I think about me being calm. And I think that there's times of chaos and there's times of calm. And I was actually chatting with my therapist the other day and we were talking about this like chaos versus calm, this force versus flow, this like drive and hit results versus like, you know, have flow. And she said, Kiera, it's kind of like being in a kayak. And she said, you know, a lot of people are trying to like force.   So you get in the kayak and you're rowing upstream and you're like working really, really, really, really hard to get somewhere, but you're going against everything. And it really is chaotic and you get exhausted and you get burnout. And I think so many practices feel this way. And she's like, versus Kiera, think what you think of calm or flow is like, you just get in the kayak, put your hands in the air and let go of the paddle and you just float wherever you're going to go. And she said, that's actually not flow, that's apathy. She said, flow or this calm is when you're actually in the kayak and you're looking ahead.   and you see rapids or you see a rock and you like put the paddle in to steer around it. And then when it's calm, you actually enjoy that calm rather than having your focus so far down that you're afraid of the rapids that you forget to enjoy the moment you're in today. And hopefully with some of those analogies I've given and some of those examples, you can see yourself in a practice of both of these are contagious. You can be the Kiera and the tornado where it's like, I got the barbell and I'm doing it all, but I'm exhausted and there's a smile, but it's a fleeting smile.   or there can be this calm and centered. And so today, just helping you realize that like a calm practice is not a slower one. It's a very intentional, right? Like me having two businesses, a lot of business owners, when you look at them, a lot of our multimillion, I'm talking my five, 10, 15, 20, $30 million practices, it's very different who that owner is compared to my like startup one, two, $3 million. And what I've noticed, and even some of the five, 10, 15, I'm not saying just when you hit a certain dollar amount, you become this.   But what I do see is these owners are very intentional with their time. One that runs a $30 million organization, works out, doesn't have any apps on their phone, ⁓ has another side business. They're running all these practices. But when you meet this person, you don't feel that anxiousness. You feel this like very much like they're willing to just sit down and have coffee with you and chat with you about your life.   It's very fascinating. And so I also hope that you realize like calm is not a indicator that you're a slower practice. It's an indicator that you're intentional and chaos is not an indicator of growth. think sometimes even for myself, it's like, but if we're having chaos, it's like what I'm darting through traffic, am I really making progress or does it just feel good to have an adrenaline rush? And so chaos is not a sign of growth. Most of the time chaos means that there's missing structure. Now there's going to be times, right? There will be times of rapids. There will be times of   boulders coming down the river, but we don't have to stay there and we don't have to live there. And so I just wanted to kind of go through today a couple of quick tips that I see of these calm, like flourishing, thriving, imagine me sitting there, cream colored suit, very calm. Like literally that's the image that I have in my mind of who I want to be and the practice I want to have and the business I want to create. Because to me, that's more sustainable. That's more fun for my team. It's more fun for me.   And so just going through that. if you guys don't know who we are, I'm Kiera Dent Dental A Team. I'm obsessed with all things dentistry. Our philosophy of Dental A Team is to positively impact the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible and to literally break through the myth that to have a successful practice, you have to be stressed. You have to have chaos. I do believe running a successful practice should be easy and it can be easy with the right team that's empowered. I believe you can have it all. And so ⁓ really truly, I wanna just help you see that like,   You are not always just going to be calm and you're not always going to be chaotic. There's going to be that. But what is your baseline center that you go back to? I think is more of what it is. And for someone like Kiera, who chat GPT says there's a tornado around. I actually just got back from a trip and my team said, Kiera, you feel so calm. And I do think that there's intentionality behind it. I want to show up differently. And I think there's a few best practices that I'm happy to share. So I think calm comes from predictability, not personality. ⁓ I'm a very vibrant human and yet there's calm that comes from predictability. So   Like when we look at this, it's consistent scheduling patterns. It's hitting our daily targets. It's making sure we know our profit margins. It's making sure that our whole team is following structure and processes. And so when we go through a practice assessment with new offices, we talk about, you have a vision and a 10 year target together? And does your team actually know where we're headed? Then do we use KPIs and data to make decisions? Are we profitable? And do we have our systems documented and in place? And do we have right people, right seats?   And then based on those answers, it usually determines if we're stressed out or not. And usually that stress level influences the rest of those other items within a circle. And the more stressed the doctor is, usually the lower those numbers are. And so when we look at it of how do we have like what a good day looks like in our practice, how do we have our systems being documented and followed by all? How do we ensure that we have the correct processes and flow and scheduling and all of that? It does not happen overnight, but it is being very intentional. And I will say a crazy schedule.   creates KZ dental practices, not scheduling and driving patients to where we want them to schedule rather than saying, where do you want to schedule? All these little, little minute decisions that we make throughout our day, how we communicate, they actually create more or less chaos. Having said structured meetings, I will tell you the practice that is multi-millions, 10, 15, 20, 30. I'm not joking. Every single department, every single practice meets every single week for meetings. It's structured. There's agendas. There's accountability. And my company,   Mondays are meeting days. have our leadership meeting. We have our marketing and client success meeting. We have our consultant meeting. Like we are very, very, very intentional. I meet with my executive assistants and we go through everything. Everything is mapped out. There are agendas. There's follow through. There's follow up. We have tracking systems for it. We review our numbers. We have a scorecard. And this is what we teach practices to do. And I think when you have that predictability as an owner, usually your stress comes from people not doing the jobs that you think that they should be doing.   or cashflow. Typically, those are like one of the two areas that you're stressed out. Sometimes there's other things, but usually it's one of those two levers of a practice. ⁓ And then like you just feel the weight of it all on yourself. So then you run around crazy creating this tornado and then you are stressed out. And so for this of how do we actually build this structure for our team? And so I feel like if you are driving, sometimes you can actually be driving and hitting huge numbers and huge success, but you feel like you're exhausted at the end of the day. And I feel like where's the and can we have   great success in production and happiness where we're leaving the end of the day. The answer is yes, but it's intentional, it's designed and it's slowly chipping away. Just like with like a lot of compliance things, we're not going to be compliant overnight. You're not going to be this calm practice overnight, but I would look at your practice and I would do a little autopsy of it, of where is the bulk of your stress coming from? I can't tell you how often I do this. It's usually when I'm very stressed. I try to do it at least once every three to six months of what's causing me the most amount of stress and where can we fix systems? Where can I delegate and elevate?   And then how can I actually be more intentional and show up better? I've learned that having meetings right at 8 a.m. stresses me out to no end, especially on Monday mornings. So we've moved those to where I have them at 10, 30 or 11 so I can come in prepared and I'm not showing up frantic. So whatever your rhythm is, whatever your model is, I really do believe take an audit of your practice and let's see where we could be 1 % more intentional. And don't worry, you can have a whole running list, but we've got to prioritize the top one or two things. That's what we as consultants are really good at doing is practices usually have like.   I wanna do everything and that's the chaos like throw up. And we're like, perfect, let's like dig through and sort through and like, let's work with this and this. These two items are gonna reduce your stress dramatically right away. So I would recommend like, look to see where you feel the most unpredictable, the most stressed and let's identify that and let's either elevate and delegate or create systems and processes or fix it to figure out what it is. Maybe you're not looking at the numbers consistently. Maybe you're scheduling a psychotic. Maybe we're not closing enough cases.   there is usually one or two massive pain points. And if we just fix those one or two, you're actually gonna move from that chaos to calm very quickly. And what you'll see is a result of actually exponential growth. So the next ⁓ piece that I've noticed with these calm versus chaotic practices is calm practices remove the decision fatigue. So you're not sitting there making decision after decision after decision, right? We have a set process of how we schedule. We have a set process of how we hire. We have a set process of how we...   set up a room for filling our crown. We have a set process for how we run our leadership meetings. We have a set process for how we terminate people. That is like, I feel as a business owner, and Jason and I talk about it a lot, it's like death by a thousand cuts. And I'm like, I don't want to answer another freaking question. If I see another Slack message, like I'm out and it's just because you're just pecked to death with decision after decision after decision. But to me, that's an indicator of we lack systems and we lack accountability to those systems. So what we can do is like,   doctors where you may be the bottleneck, like what's one or two things where you're like, I am pecked to death on these questions. Great. Who really should own that? And how can we delegate and elevate to that person where we're not being apathy, we're not in the kayak or we're just throwing the paddle in the water and saying, take me where you want me. It's, very intentional with this. So there's less decisions that need to be made. I will tell you, this is a, this is a snowball approach and it feels like you will never get there. And you slowly start adding pieces one by one, by one, by one, by one.   and that snowball starts to compact and it feels like it's so fluffy and it's not getting together. And then we start to roll it and it gets a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, meaning less and less and less is sitting on your shoulders. A lot of times through this, you can actually go through those matrix where it says like, what are you good at? you, and you love doing what are you good at, but you hate doing, what do you want to be good at? But you're actually not good at it. And what do you like not good at and hate doing? You can actually start to categorize your, ⁓ your tasks within those that oftentimes helps you figure out where to delegate.   where to elevate. I think doctors and OMS who do this together, you might be able to find these gaps. So we remove that decision fatigue because owner doctors, you're not the only one who has this office managers. You're also having it to where you're just like, we have a team member, Kaylee, and she like taught elementary school for quite some time. And she'd be like, my lid is flipped. And it's like, there's just too much on us that creates that chaos. And either what we do is then we stay in that chaos or we become apathetic and we just stop caring. And that's where it leads to burnout. And so how can we have like,   Systemization, and like I said, it's not an overnight sensation. Dental A Team has so many systems, we've got so many processes, we've got onboarding, we've got terminating, we've got documents, we've got resources, we have people to help out, we've got tons of set processes and systems for you. And I think once you have that, you can then start to have ownership. We can have defined decisions. And then we also have documented standards. You start to build what's called a knowledge base. There's a great book called Come Up for Air that really talks about how to systematize this.   And it's not rigidity, it's just relief. Like the team now knows like, okay, when one plus one, like it's two and we do this. If it's red and green, we do this. They're not having to sit there and be like, hey doctor, what do you want me do for this? Hey, what do you want me to do for this? Like even for myself, like people are like, well, what do you want for birthday gifts? And I finally called Britt last night and I said, Britt, we just need a process for this. Like it's getting too large and too big. And I'm realizing these are decisions I don't need to be making constantly, but they just run in the back of the white noise. And I think,   once you commit to, I'm gonna be calm and profitable, you start to realize these things that are just pecking you to death and we start to make changes for it. And so I just want you to know that like very sophisticated practice owners actually make less and less decisions. I will also say that it's an identity loss and an identity shift that a lot of these owners feel because you're so used to being the go-to girl or guy that everything's coming through and you're like, I don't want that anymore. So then when people stop needing you, it becomes weird. And you actually sometimes,   Myself, I'm only speaking for Kiera. You might not be this way and I hope you're not You might actually go create chaos to feel important. So also look at yourself and sometimes we've been in this chaos I don't know like Psychoticness I've been there I've lived there to where that feels comfortable for me and when I'm calm and things are not broken Sometimes I wonder like what's going on and I go and create chaos So I think also know thyself and watch yourself to see like what is a decision that I'm making constantly that I could have someone else make   I think having a really good org chart or accountability chart has really streamlined it for us. had a great fractional COO come into our company. She organized it really well for us. And it was like, so I literally pulled out the legend. I'm like, okay, this decision should go to this person. And it's a reworking and I'm not going to lie to you. I felt like we were a snow globe that was shaken up and it lasted for about three months of just pure hell and chaos. But then it started to shift down and it was like, perfect. Britt makes these decisions. Shelbi makes these decisions. Tiff makes these decisions. Paul, Jenna.   down the line, Doug, Tyler, all of our team, these are the decisions are capable of making. And then when something comes up, people are like, Hey, who is this? And we all talk about like, based on the job duties, based on the job descriptions, this should go under this person. And then how can we give them the autonomy and the guidance to where I'm not answering every single decision, but we've got enough guidance around it to where I'm not having to answer every single one of these questions. So I'd say right now is a quick call to action on that is   figure out what decisions are coming past your desk every single day that you're like, this is not sustainable. And then let's create a delegation elevation and a system in a process to make it to where these decisions are not coming by you. And then point three that I want to make is calm is a leadership signal, not just a feeling. And so when I look at it, you can actually see how doctors operate. So a very chaotic practice is doctors rush, team fails, that patients fail it, mistakes increase. Calm leaders,   pause instead of react, they address issues early and they protect recovery times. Like there's literally CEO time built into their schedule. And what it looks like is when we have this of ⁓ running frantic and everybody's feeling it and we're making very like in the minute decisions. I started like figuring it out where we have an agenda and we actually, it's our parking lot. And that has saved me so much of those like on the fly decision-making. It's like, nope, put it there. If it's not something that has to be answered life or death today.   We actually have it to where I respond to my questions usually once a week with our team. like, you can even just feel like, as I say that, I went from this like, my gosh, it's like bombarding me constantly to I have a set day, I have a set time, my team knows when I'm gonna respond to them. They can get back. Now you might be like, well, Kiera, patients are calling. 95 % of the patient issues, like there's some that need to have emergent issues. And I still have a folder that is must do today. Usually there are two items in that folder every single day that are absolute must do today.   And half of those actually aren't even like must do's today. So for you to have a like, this is when I have, like, this is when we answer questions. These are my meetings. People just park their issues that they need from me. I've had doctors where they're just being bombarded by team members. Team members, you're not doing it wrong. Doctors just are like trying to do a filling, trying to go and do this exam, try to stay on time, try to sell treatment, try to make sure everything's running. And then you guys are coming in like, Hey, did you get this Invisalign case? Hey, did you get this crown? Hey, hey, hey.   And if you guys have read the book, the one minute manager, it's like a monkey being put on your back or my friend described it as a magnet. We're like, you're just like dumping them or as like an office manager, she's like sticky notes compiling over you to where we've actually done it for offices, whatever your path is. If it's like we have a Google doc, everybody just dumps it there. We review it once a week. Fantastic. Or I've had some doctors where they have like a list outside their office where people just go and write it they put the due date on it. So that way it can be again, a consolidated time. You review this during your CEO time, but like you can even just feel that it's like,   It's a calming, it's a how do we operate? I'm not gonna run in this like frantic frazzled and you just let people know it's not fair for the team. It's not fair for patients and it's not fair for you to be making all these decisions haphazardly. And so I think just like when we actually look at this, doctors take their CEO times. I call it deep work time for myself. It's blocked in my schedule. It's taken me about a month to get my schedule there. I like it in the mornings. I don't like meetings in the mornings like.   I have a very, very, very structured of when I like to do it. They also figured out me when I used to do podcast recording, like it just was not working and serving. So I think even if you are a seasoned practice owner and you've done this before, look to see where can this be refined? Where can we make it towards it? More of your operating style, but literally stop skipping our CEO time every single week. I've seen practices that don't like that's all like doctors just own their power time, their CEO time, office managers and front office team members own that. We do it for about a month. Nothing else changes.   team starts to notice, things start to get done more effectively, tone starts softening, communication improves and culture actually elevates. And so if you do nothing else other than just like hold your CEO time to where you make decisions rather than being frantic and on the fly, you're going to actually have a lot more calm. So as we look through this, like I said, calm is contagious and so is chaos. And I think which...   It's almost like, you know how they say, you've got like an angel and a devil sitting on either side of you, or there's like a Indian, Native American story where it's like, which wolf am I feeding in the inside? Which one am I feeding? Am I feeding the calm side of me or the chaos side of me more every day? And our decisions are actually serving the calm side or the chaos side. And like I said, it does not mean less growth. It does not mean less anything other than more stability, more ease, more true flow.   And so for you, just look at it like, how can we increase our predictability? How can we reduce unnecessary decisions? And how can we lead with regulated energy and structure? So that way everyone's on the same page. I think like calm is not the absence of pressure. It is the presence of structure. And when I heard that, I thought like, gosh, that's so solid because pressure is still going to come. And I my husband and I, were walking the other day and   Some things happened in the company and I just said like, Jace, this is just like another stroke or color or flavor of business. Like that's all it is. This is part of it. Like it's not gonna go away. These things, it's not like we'll have a marathon and we'll get to the end line and like all of our problems will suddenly be dissolved. It's just, how are we able to contain that? How do we navigate through that? How do we respond to that? And are we more on the calm side or the chaos side? And I will say this is a habit. It is not something that most people are born innately with.   I will say it's discipline and it's dedication and it's following through. But really I think it's who do you want to be as a leader? What do you want to show up for me? I just realized like I'm not showing up as the best wife. I'm not showing up as the best sibling. My siblings would call me and I just like they would wait weeks on ends before I'd respond to them. And I'm like, that's just not who Kiera wants to be anymore. ⁓ Kiera wants to be the sister, the mother, the wife that can come in and show up in a way where my family gets the best of me, not just work. I wanted to come in where work was getting the best of me and I wasn't being   like barky on all of my decision making and being annoyed. Team members would say like, here we used to brace asking you for things like you're always polished, you're always professional. But like we know there's this air of annoyance. And for me, my team deserves better. I deserve better. My family deserves better. And I think there is a different and a better way to live if you choose it. So I think like if your practice is feeling just maybe heavy, ⁓ it's not a failure. It's just a signal. And oftentimes I think when you decide to commit to this,   It unlocks a lot of like refinement in the practice and unlocks a lot of systems that we could do. It unlocks leadership opportunities that doesn't have to just sit on your shoulders anymore. And so I think this is some of our favorite work in Dental A Team because it helps us like practices are able to feel this release immediately. We're able to quickly like navigate and streamline. So if that's feeling like you or you're like, gosh, Kiera, you're speaking directly to me, which I know a lot of you feel, reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com or go to our website and click the book of call. It can just be like, let's talk through this and let's give you some tangible tactical ideas.   to help take you from where you are to where you wanna go. Whether you work with us or don't, you will leave that call with tactical resources. You see a map of like, where am I today versus where I wanna go, like I was explaining. And it's actually one of the most fulfilling things for me is to be able to do that for practices to where you can actually see that. So reach out, I'd love to do it. It's no pressure, totally complimentary and just giving you kind of a baseline of where you are. Or if you're like, my gosh, like I need the help, reach out. This is literally what we specialize in. This is what we're experts in and it's what we're obsessed with doing.   So reach out because this is the time for you to choose to have growth and calm, not one or the other. And I believe that the best practices have that. So you guys, is your chance. This is the time. Reach out if there's any way we can support you. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.