Podcasts about generally

  • 5,441PODCASTS
  • 11,236EPISODES
  • 33mAVG DURATION
  • 2DAILY NEW EPISODES
  • Jun 29, 2026LATEST

POPULARITY

20192020202120222023202420252026

Categories




Best podcasts about generally

Show all podcasts related to generally

Latest podcast episodes about generally

Our Daily Bread Podcast | Our Daily Bread

As the US Civil War (1861-1865) dragged on, both sides resorted to conscription (the draft) to fill their ranks. Under the Confederate law, a draftee could dodge service by hiring a man who was exempt from the draft to replace him—in most cases someone under or over the conscription age. Generally, the “principal” (as one evading the draft was called), paid a fee to the government as well as a large sum to his substitute. Only the wealthy could afford substitutes. The apostle Paul writes of the cosmic spiritual war, where “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and “the wages of sin is death” (6:23). There was no clause or loophole that gave those with “means” some way out. But what about a substitute for us all? The writer to the Hebrews praises God, who in His infinite mercy sent Jesus to be our substitute—to bear the punishment our sin deserved, to pay our debt by sacrificing “the body of Jesus Christ once for all” so that we would be “made holy” through His substitutionary sacrifice (Hebrews 10:10). We have “died with Christ,” and one day “we will also live with him” (Romans 6:8). That’s the good news right there. Christ died for you and for me; the substitute took our place. We’re now more than simply survivors of the war. We’ve become the sons and daughters of God.

Muscle Maven Radio
Ep 134: Are you training in the wrong zone? How to use training zones effectively

Muscle Maven Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2026 56:50


In this episode, Ashleigh and Rachel provide a comprehensive overview of the Training Zones 1 through 5, giving you all the information you need to understand and use them effectively, including: Generally what your heart rate, perceived exertion, and overall feeling should be in each zone What kinds of exercise and duration are appropriate for each zone The pros and cons of training in each, including common misconceptions Addressing the dreaded "Grey Zone" (zone 3) and why lots of people are using it incorrectly How individuals can adjust or tweak their cardiovascular training work to better suit their goals, improve their fitness and body composition, and minimize injury risk, and more! We are very excited to announce our new sponsor, True Nutrition, where you can customize your own protein! Choose a mix of protein bases, a range of delicious flavors and sweetness level, and boost your protein with adaptogens, collagen, immune support, electrolytes and much more. Save time, effort, and money by combining all your supplement needs into one delicious protein powder. Head to truenutrition.com/MUSCLE and use the code MUSCLE for 20% off your custom mix! Join the conversation - leave a comment on the podcast, share the episode on social media, or leave a comment, topic idea, or question on the website: https://musclescienceforwomen.com/contact Or send a voice message here and they may play it on the pod! https://www.speakpipe.com/msg/s/468952/1/3h8gyc5cfc71vsbu  Check out the MSW Substack here: https://musclescienceforwomen.substack.com Learn about all of the MSW training programs here: https://musclescienceforwomen.com/programs Subscribe to the new YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@musclescienceforwomen 

Do you really know?
Why are most people right-handed?

Do you really know?

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2026 4:42


Around the age of 4, children develop a preference for using one of their hands to complete certain tasks, like drawing for example. The same goes for foot preference, when it comes to which foot they use to start going up a flight of stairs, or to kick a ball. It even goes for our eyes and ears. Generally when a child reaches the age of five, their preference for using one side of the body to carry out tasks is truly ingrained. This developmental process is known as right-left asymmetry. According to the US National Library of Medicine, 85-90% of adults are right-handed. What dictates whether we prefer using our left or right hand? Isn't being left-handed hereditary? Why do people say that left-handed people are more creative? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the last episodes, you can click here : ⁠Is eating bread actually bad for you?⁠ ⁠How can I eat healthy on a budget?⁠ ⁠Are men still being paid more than women?⁠ A Bababam Originals podcast. A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance. First Broadcast: 13/4/2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

medicine generally right handed first broadcast us national library bababam originals
The Up Devotional
Only a suffering God can help

The Up Devotional

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2026 2:00


What are some of the things that all people have in common?  We're all born and we all die. As pundits often say, we all pay taxes!  Further, we all need food, oxygen and water. We probably all like to be happy and don't like to be sad. Generally speaking, we want our lives to […]

Do you really know?
What are the warning signs of a toxic friendship?

Do you really know?

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2026 4:34


What are the warning signs of a toxic friendship? Today is World Friendship Day, a chance to reflect on how important friends are in our lives. Generally speaking, having friends is a positive thing which brings us moments of fun and joy. But toxic friendships can exist too and in such cases, the relationship can be more of a burden than anything else, for one of the people involved at least! Let's talk about some of the red flags that can help you identify them. First things first, why is it called a toxic friendship? What are the most common toxic friend behaviours?  ⁠In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions !⁠ To listen to the last episodes, you can click here : ⁠Do I have generalised anxiety disorder?⁠ ⁠Why do friend breakups hurt so much?⁠ ⁠Who are the RMT, the organisation creating massive travel disruption across the UK?⁠ A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance. First Broadcast: 20/7/2022 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ChannelBuzz.ca
HPE Financial Services’ Brad Shapiro on new partner financing offers and the ITAD opportunity in AI refreshes

ChannelBuzz.ca

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2026 23:33


Brad Shapiro, senior vice president and chief sales officer of HPE Financial Services HPE Financial Services is making a concerted push to be less of a “best-kept secret” and more of a deal-closing engine for partners. At HPE Discover 2026, Brad Shapiro, senior vice president and chief sales officer of HPE Financial Services, walked In the Channel through several new partner-facing offers unveiled at Monday’s Partner Growth Summit. The standout is the 90/9 Advantage structure: 90 days with no payments, followed by nine months at 1 per cent of the original equipment cost, before shifting to level payments. Shapiro said the program is designed to blunt the sting of recent price hikes by pushing costs into future budget cycles without requiring customers to find new money mid-year. On the networking side, HPFS is stacking three offers to help HPE take share from competitors: 0 per cent financing on Mist or Aruba Central software, a “10 per cent better than cash” hardware financing rate, and a competitive takeout program that monetizes displaced gear. The used equipment angle is particularly timely. Shapiro noted that memory shortages have driven up resale values for retiring gear, creating an offset against new hardware costs. “It’s the equivalent of the car market in the early COVID days,” he said. HPFS also expanded its approved credit capacity by 150 per cent, a move Shapiro said was driven by partner frustration with re-approval cycles as component prices fluctuated. The interview also touched on HPFS’s partner pledge – Shapiro said his team does not receive quota retirement until the partner gets paid – and the growing importance of IT asset disposition and chain of custody as Canadian customers navigate AI-driven infrastructure refreshes. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca. You’ll find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub on the menu bar at the top of the page. Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Today, my guest is Brad Shapiro, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer of HPE Financial Services, the captive financing arm of HPE. Brad is responsible for the global partner-facing financing strategy and programs that help resellers and MSPs close bigger deals and get paid faster. We sat down at HPE Discover last week to talk about the new partner portal enhancements HPEFS rolled out at Partner Growth Summit, the thinking behind the company’s aggressive credit expansion, and how IT asset disposition fits into the overall AI infrastructure refresh wave that’s starting to hit customer budgets. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Brad Shapiro. Brad, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Brad Shapiro: Sure. Glad to be here, Rob. Robert Dutt: You guys rolled out some meaningful enhancements to the HPEFS partner side on Monday: payment structures, promotional pricing, and competitive pricing tiered to the partner’s relationship level. Canada is on the first wave of that for July 1. I understand a bunch of Canadian partners are having a party for that. For a Canadian reseller or MSP who wasn’t here this week, what does it actually change in how they can put a deal together for their customers? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. So as you said, lots of exciting announcements here for Discover. And I think first and foremost, what HPEFS has put together is really focused on helping the HPE partners sell more in a couple of key areas. So we’ve all seen, you know, with commodity prices going up and the price increases around products, we’ve got some really interesting offers that have gained a lot of traction in the market. The 90/9 Advantage is one of the key ones. And that offering partners can offer to their customers is 90 days of no payments, nine months at 1% of the original equipment cost, and then it goes to level payments after. So while we can’t address that the product prices are increasing, what we are doing is providing help for customers who didn’t plan for this in the budget cycle, right? CFOs didn’t say, “Oh, here’s more money because prices are going up.” So it allows the end-user customer to kind of plan for this into the next budget cycle and beyond so they can get the compute power they need. So that’s a key one. The other area, when we look at the networking space, right, we’re very excited about, you know, Aruba and Juniper coming together in the new HPE networking, and they’ve got some tremendous offerings out there. But to really help them and help customers avoid kind of a double payment, like we want to go take market share, we want to be aggressive. So the first offer is 0% financing on the networking software, whether that’s Mist or Aruba Central. Then we have on the hardware side 10% better than cash as a financing offer. So that’s a really cool offer. And then we’ve added a really aggressive focus on IT asset disposition. So we want to go in, help customers by monetizing the competitor’s assets, taking those out, and then putting HPE networking assets in. So when you combine those three offers—0% on software, 10% better than cash on hardware, and a competitive takeout on the competitor’s products—we think we’re really helping partners go and address and partner up with HPE networking and be aggressive in the market to help HPE take share. Robert Dutt: Going back to the 90/9 program, what areas is that covering? Brad Shapiro: That covers all products. So it’s really a financial structure that can address the whole portfolio. And again, it’s a very attractive offer. We’ve seen it compared to any other financing offers we put out there. We’ve seen the pipeline ramp tremendously. It’s really addressing a need that’s out there in the marketplace. Robert Dutt: Before getting into the details of some other programs, you touched on the supply chain situation that is on every partner’s mind right now. I’m curious over the last five months or so that this has been such a big factor. What have you been hearing from partners in terms of what they’re asking for from you, and where they’re looking for help here beyond obviously some clarity and whatever break they can get? Brad Shapiro: I’ll talk from a financial services perspective. It’s really about how can we help the partner address some of the customer concerns. One of the big ones is budgeting. It’s always been the case that there’s more to do than you have budget for. This just puts another wrinkle in it that is unprecedented. I’ve been doing this quite a long time. I’ve really not seen the market dynamic as we have it today. But that’s where financial engineering and financial structuring comes into play. Also, a lot of customers, while the new prices have gone up, when customers are retiring assets, what many don’t realize is the used equipment that’s coming off—the used equipment market has also increased in value. We’re able to give customers a lot more money for their used gear than they’re used to. That’s been helping offset some of the increases on the new product side. Robert Dutt: It’s the equivalent of the car market in the early COVID days. Brad Shapiro: Absolutely. Same type of scenario. Robert Dutt: The announcement around a 150% increase on approved credit capacity—that’s a pretty striking number. Is that part of the response to that? What’s driving you guys to go aggressively there right now? A response to that uncertainty, a response to tariffs, a response to all the things we see going on? Brad Shapiro: It’s a response to a few things. Yes, the price increases. For a while, the component pricing was so uncertain that there was a shorter validity period for quoting. The idea of increasing the credit line created enough room so that our partners didn’t have to keep going through the cycle. What we were hearing as feedback was, “Hey, we would go get a request from HPEFS, we get it approved, then if pricing went up, then we had to go through that process again.” We wanted to give plenty of headroom and be aggressive to allow partners to quickly get their deals done and not have to go through a process twice. It was ease of doing business, speed, and really helping them close their deals. Robert Dutt: Not a peculiar problem for HPE and HPEFS either. That’s something that we’re hearing across the industry front as a major partner issue—the idea of customer sales cycles and “validity” not matching up in any real way. Brad Shapiro: Yeah, absolutely. We’re trying to do our part to help partners get deals done. The good news is HPE on the BU side, on the compute side, announced a longer price validity. I know that they announced that here at Discover and there was really good feedback at the Partner Growth Summit. I think overall HPE, we’re all trying to address and help partners get their deals done with customers. Robert Dutt: The 0% software financing tied to VM migration is interesting when it feels like you’re trying to smooth that painful transition for folks who are on a platform and looking to move somewhere new. Is that the right way to think about it, or what else are you applying to that model? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so I think just in general, we’re trying to provide customers a way to engage and look at our CloudOps suite—Morpheus and Zerto and OpsRamp and the whole suite—and really focus on how can we make it easy for the customer to say, “Yeah, let me try this.” So at the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be something where they’re coming in and wiping out one versus the other. The cost differential is so great and we believe that if they can just lower the number of licenses on VMware, we can help them reduce costs. So they may look to put in our CloudOps software in certain places and reduce those VM licenses. 0% financing makes it an easier decision: “Hey, I can pay over time and it’s the same as paying cash, no interest.” It’s just another option for customers who may not have it in this year’s budget. Robert Dutt: I’m trying to track it because it’s something that you’re kind of ramping up on though in competitive areas. Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so what’s new from HPEFS, I would say this year versus maybe the past five or seven years, is a renewed focus on leveraging our financing capabilities to help partners sell more with HPE. We didn’t really have in the last five or seven years a lot of financing promotions. We’ve integrated with the BUs. We’ve listened to the partners. They want to see us come out with integrated offers that help drive more sales. And so we’ve been working closely with the BUs. We’ve been developing these offers over the past year. It started a little bit at last Discover, but we’re really hitting our stride now as an organization. And I think the partners are really going to benefit from that. Robert Dutt: PGS also saw the debut of sustainability competencies for partners through HPEFS and through Partner Ready Vantage in combination there. What does earning that competency mean in practice? What does a partner get and why should they be pursuing it? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so from our perspective, when we think about sustainability, we think it’s a really important aspect of the overall business. We have a responsibility. And so from a partner perspective, by getting that accreditation, there’s incentives that they can get under the Partner Ready Vantage program. And from an HPEFS perspective, we’ve created circular economy reports to help support partners and customers. And we’re proud that we’ve issued our 2,000th report to customers, and that keeps growing. So as sustainability continues to be an important part of this, I think partners have a role to play in helping their customers, but also can earn more from HPE. Robert Dutt: What are you hearing from partners around the idea of sustainability as part of the quoting and solution offering process? It’s just something that I feel like I’m hearing more of from Canadian partners in particular because of a series of regulations and requirements, and in some public sector spaces, the way it’s being weighted. Brad Shapiro: From my perspective, and I have a global role, so in certain geographies around the world, it’s very, very important. And it varies across geographies, but everywhere you look, it’s a growing trend in terms of importance, as you mentioned, in terms of government responses. We’re seeing more governments putting requirements in there. So my feeling is addressing sustainability is quickly becoming a must-have if you’re going to offer solutions. And so we’re right there with our partners in terms of helping them do that. Robert Dutt: It also connects to—and this is something that we touched on a little bit earlier—the idea that every customer upgrading their network and compute stack to something that’s more capable of AI has that corresponding pile of displaced gear that they’ve got to do something with. Brad Shapiro: Yeah. Robert Dutt: I guess, how significant do you see the ITAD opportunity in this refresh wave in the near future, and how do you help partners get in front of that? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so again, I think there’s a significant opportunity, and I think HPE networking is really well positioned in that AI space. So from our perspective, in looking at the products that we can displace readily, there’s a pretty large install base. Some of our competitors have many customers out there, so the idea of putting those assets back into reuse somewhere is very real. So we think we can do well to help that customer monetize the asset. We can also put that back into reuse, which is good for the environment, and at the same time, help customers really modernize their network, because that’s really a solid foundation you need. When you think about AI, everybody thinks about the compute side and GPUs, but the network is so critical to having that solid AI foundation, and we believe HPE networking is the right choice. Robert Dutt: Across the board in your purview, is there a Canadian dimension here worth calling out? We’re hearing a lot more about data sovereignty driving decisions and that kind of thing about where workloads live. But does that also extend to how customers think about decommissioned hardware and where it goes? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, look, I think from a decommissioned hardware perspective, we are very careful about chain of custody and where that ends up. And I think that’s one thing that differentiates HPE when we’re thinking about decommissioning versus many others out there. We’re a large brand. It’s really important to us to decommission in the right way, following all the regulations that are out there. So if you’re a Canadian partner or a Canadian customer, knowing that the HPE brand… we are as focused on doing those things in the right way and following the rules and regulations. Our brand reputation is at stake, and we put a lot of thought and resource, time and energy into that. Robert Dutt: What’s the single biggest piece of feedback or most common piece of feedback you’ve been getting from partners here at Discover this week? What are they talking to you about? What are they curious about in terms of what you guys can bring to bear for their customers? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so I think there’s been a lot of positive feedback on the offerings that we’ve come out with. As I mentioned before, we’re showing up differently now. We’re showing up coordinated with the different business units across HPE with these offers. That’s helpful. The other thing we’re focused on is really about the partner experience. So it’s not just having the right offers. It’s making them easy to access, operationally making it a smooth process. We want to be fast. We want to be predictable. When we put lines of credit in place, we commit to funding. We want to fund our partners fast. So my whole team doesn’t get quota retirement in sales until the partner gets paid. So it’s really important that we align our metrics and the way we’re measuring ourselves with what’s going to delight the partner and create a better experience for them. Robert Dutt: Has there been a notable increase in terms of acceleration there on partners getting paid? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, I would say it’s long been a focus of ours, but we’re really emphasizing it in coming out and being very deliberate about what we want to do in terms of turnaround times. We call it our partner pledge, but the idea is we want partners to know that we can be a reliable source of funding. Not only does financing help them close the deal and make the deals bigger, but then they can get paid faster as well. That really helps their metrics because most partners, most businesses, are looking at cash flow and free cash flow and all those kind of metrics. And financing with HPEFS really helps. The other thing it does is when you think about a partner’s capacity to do business, if they’re financing through HPEFS, it’s HPEFS’s credit line that’s being used, creating more availability for the partner to sell other solutions. So it doesn’t go against their credit limits. Robert Dutt: Not to get all “what have you done for me lately” with you, but what can partners expect from your business over the balance of 2026, as much as anyone has visibility into the near future? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. I think what partners are going to see is, again, we talked about the offerings—us showing up with very competitive offerings, us showing up looking to help partners win, and again, helping partners. We want partners to think about, “Okay, there are these financing capabilities and I want to leverage those. How do we grow the HPE business?” The HPE business for our partners should be a growth engine for them—a profitable growth engine—and HPEFS is really here to help facilitate that. Robert Dutt: One thing I hear from folks in similar seats to you all the time is the idea that they feel their capabilities are underused or under-understood by partners. Generally speaking, obviously there are some exceptions to any rule. Does that kind of map with how you feel, and what’s the one tool, offering, or program that you offer that you think more partners would benefit from getting to know and adding to their toolkit? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. I think Phil Mottram said it. He said, “HPEFS is one of our best-kept secrets.” So, yeah, I think generally we feel like we can do a better job, but I would say even coming to this Discover—and I’ve been to many, many, many Discovers—HPEFS is showing up because the marketing team has just done a fantastic job of integrating not only HPEFS, but kind of a whole value proposition focusing around IT economics. And I think that’s been a pivotal message here at Discover. From a partner perspective, again, I go back to all of those special financing offers that you just can’t get generally in the marketplace. You know, 0% on CloudOps software, 0% financing on Mist and Aruba Central. We’ve got a very competitive financing offer on storage. We talked about earlier the networking offerings that we have. So, across the portfolio, there are these offerings that you can only get from HPE and HPEFS. Robert Dutt: For an MSP or reseller who hasn’t thought much about asset disposition as part of their services offering, but is thinking, “Okay, well, maybe this is something I need to get into,” what’s the entry point? Is it something they engage you on directly, or do they kind of have to build their practice first and then bring you into the picture? Brad Shapiro: Well, I think they can engage us. If there’s an opportunity… the way I think about it is most customers are focused on, “What am I going to get that’s new? I need new technology for a project.” A lot of customers don’t have the wherewithal or focus on the disposition side. We think many customers end up giving their product away. Maybe somebody takes it and goes, “I’ll take care of it for you free of charge.” And the customer thinks, “Oh, this is great,” but there’s money in those assets, particularly now with the memory shortage. Anything with memory is going to have value. So for a partner, you don’t need to be an expert; just understand what the customer has in their environment and what they might be getting rid of. And it’s really just contacting HPEFS and we’ll do the assessment of whether there’s market value or not for the partner. Robert Dutt: That’s kind of where I wanted to go. Anything you want to throw out there in summation or in closing? Brad Shapiro: No, I really appreciate you having me. And it was great to get an opportunity to showcase what HPEFS is bringing to the table. I’m really excited and proud of what we’re doing and the role we can play in helping the partners grow with HPE. That’s what being a captive financing company is all about. So, looking forward to winning and growing with the partners in Canada. Robert Dutt: All right. Thank you for taking the time. Brad Shapiro: Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Brad Shapiro from HPE Financial Services. I’d like to thank Brad for his time, and I’d like to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you found the conversation useful, the best way to support the show is to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review if you’re so inclined. My takeaway from the conversation? HPEFS is making a deliberate shift away from being a passive financing option to an active weapon in the competitive arsenal. The 90/9 Advantage, the networking offer stack, and especially that partner pledge about quota retirement tied to partner payment speed—those are signals that HPE is serious about removing friction from channel economics. For Canadian partners, the July 1 portal rollout and the emphasis on chain of custody for ITAD are worth getting familiar with. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

UBM Unleavened Bread Ministries
Forgiveness is Freedom - David Eells - UBBS 3.27.2026

UBM Unleavened Bread Ministries

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2026 115:03


Forgiveness is Freedom David Eells – 3/27/26  (audio)    We need faith in order to receive God's benefits, faith to receive His healings, deliverances, provision, salvation and so on. There is something that's just as important as faith because unforgiveness can block you from receiving any of that.  Mat 6:15 ASV  But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.   Unforgiveness brings the curse of the Bible listed in Deuteronomy 28. It is a very big problem and a major reason why people don't receive what they need from God.   How do we prove that we have forgiven and how do we show forgiveness? In other words, how is forgiveness manifested through us to others? And how do we show, or what do we show, to others to prove that we have forgiven them? I think we can see some pretty good signs from this verse: (Rom.12:14) Bless them that persecute you; bless, and curse not. When you're persecuted by someone, your doesn't really want to forgive them. But we really don't have any choice and it's the right thing to do, since the Lord has forgiven us such a great debt its only right to forgive everybody else their debt according to Jesus in Mat 18.  The penalty there is that Father turns the unforgiving over to tormenting demons in Mat 18:34-35. Forgiveness is extremely important if you want to bear fruit so the Lord can walk in you.  You will stumble without His grace. Forgiveness is every bit as important as the faith message because God does not give grace to people who don't forgive, or to people who judge, or to people who are bitter, or to people who are “just hurt” as they say. (Jas.2:1) My brethren, hold not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, [the Lord] of glory, with respect of persons. Are you holding the faith of Jesus Christ our Lord with respect of persons? James goes on to give the example of having more respect for the rich man than the poor man.   Then he speaks of another form of respect of persons that's also quite common. (Jas.2:8) Howbeit if ye fulfil the royal law, according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ye do well: (9) but if ye have respect of persons, ye commit sin, being convicted by the law as transgressors. If you're seeking to be justified by something that you are doing, but that somebody else isn't doing, be very, very careful because there are things that you are not doing and they are doing. And so James says not to be a respecter of persons. As it was with those under the Law, it also is with us. (Jas.2:11) For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou dost not commit adultery, but killest, thou art become a transgressor of the law. So if you've transgressed in anything, then you've transgressed. If you've sinned in anything, then you have sinned. And, of course, if you are not willing to give grace to someone else when they have sinned, just remember that God doesn't have to give you grace when you sin.   James warns us, (Jas.2:12) So speak ye, and so do, as men that are to be judged by a law of liberty. In other words, if you want to be judged by a law of liberty, be sure you judge other people by a law of liberty. Judging is the first thing you do when you don't forgive someone. You are judging this person unworthy of forgiveness when Christ already forgave you and Jesus warned us about that. (Mat.6:14) For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. (15) But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. The Father will turn you over to the tormenters until you pay your debt to God, since you didn't think your brother was worthy of having his debt to you cancelled by receiving forgiveness from you.  (Jas.2:12) So speak ye, and so do, as men that are to be judged by a law of liberty. What's the “law of liberty”? Well, he's using the Law here by way of an example. If you demand the Law be used on someone else, instead of giving them the same grace and “liberty” that the Lord offered to you, but you don't want to demand the Law be used to judge you, then you need to remember that the Lord will use the Law on you. (Jas.2:13) For judgment [is] without mercy to him that hath showed no mercy: mercy glorieth against judgment. What you sow, you reap, according to the universal law that the Lord has given us. (Gal.6:7) Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. If you sow mercy and forgiveness, and refuse to judge unrighteously, as Romans 14 warns against doing, then God will show grace and mercy to you.   God is the judge. When Paul turned a sinner over to Satan in 1Co 5 it was God who judged and it must be that way today. This was governmental unforgiveness. Personal judgment and personal unforgiveness is owed by us. Governmental unforgiveness coming from God through elders is important to protect others. When this happens God will confirm the judgment. But in Pro 26:2  As the sparrow in her wandering, as the swallow in her flying, So the curse that is causeless alighteth not.  How dangerous it is, for we can actually sever our own grace and ruin our own future by not forgiving other people. (Jas.3:14) But if ye have bitter jealousy and faction in your heart, glory not and lie not against the truth. Faction, of course, is seeking to separate people from others, especially to separate followers through selfish ambition. Judgment, jealousy, faction, criticism, gossip; these are all manifestations of unforgiveness, and many forms of it, because people are tempted to “lie against the truth” when they're attempting to cause division through jealousy or selfish ambition because they want something that God has not given to them.   But we should always wait and trust in the Lord to provide and ordain things for us, and not try to gain it ourselves. Jealousy causes people to try and obtain things through their own efforts. (Jas.3:15) This wisdom is not [a wisdom] that cometh down from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. (16) For where jealousy and faction are, there is confusion and every vile deed. The reason these people are turned over to vile deeds is because of unforgiveness the Father turns them over to tormentors as Jesus said. Mat 18:34-35  And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due.  35  So shall also my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from your hearts.    Many people have made themselves judges and think they have the right not to forgive other people but, if they are usurping this position, in other words, if they're seizing and holding this position, office, or power, etc., instead of God giving it to them, then they're going to bring a curse upon themselves. God guarantees it. (Jas.4:11) Speak not one against another, brethren. He that speaketh against a brother, or judgeth his brother, speaketh against the law, and judgeth the law: but if thou judgest the law, thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge. (12) One [only] is the lawgiver and judge, [even] he who is able to save and to destroy: but who art thou that judgest thy neighbor? Do you see what I'm saying here? James is saying the exact same thing. Only One has the right to judge; only the Lord has the right and He chooses through whom He will judge and it will not be someone in sin.  2Co 10:6  and being in readiness to avenge all disobedience, when your obedience shall be made full.  The apostle Paul said, (Rom.2:1) Wherefore thou art without excuse, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest dost practice the same things. If you judge others, then you judge yourself. We can't judge, be unforgiving, bitter, factious; or be attempting to bring judgment on other people. (Eph.4:29) Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth ... (Jas.3:8) But the tongue can no man tame; [it is] full of deadly poison. Of course, God can tame the tongue and sometimes we learn obedience through the things we suffer.   The Bible said that even about Jesus. (Heb.5:8) Though he was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which he suffered. When we suffer for speaking things we shouldn't, it motivates us to be very careful before the Lord. (Eph.4:29) Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth, but such as is good for edifying (or “building up”) as the need may be, that it may give grace to them that hear. It's always legal to edify, to build up, to give grace; it's not always legal to tear down and we have to be careful that it's only the Lord Who does that. He is the Judge. It is legal to give grace but it is not always legal to judge. (Eph.4:30) And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption. (31) Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and railing, be put away from you, with all malice. These are all manifestations of unforgiveness.  Paul is warning us here and he mentions railing in (1Co.5:11) But as it is, I wrote unto you not to keep company, if any man that is named a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such a one, no not to eat. As a sin that is worthy of separating from people, he commands us to separate from any man who is called a brother, if he is reviling or railing. Reviling is from Loidoros, meaning abusive railing. The word for “railing” is blasphemia, which is the same word for “blaspheming,” and it means “to speak against.” Both reviling and railing are speaking against others. And as we just read in James, “Speak not one against another, brethren.” (Eph.4:31) Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and railing, be put away from you, with all malice. If you don't put this away, you will pay for it and usually pretty quickly. Generally, your body will start going downhill, circumstances will start going downhill, the grace of God will be gone from you, etc. (Eph.4:32) And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you. We see that so often in Scripture: if God forgave you, you have to forgive.   (Col.3:12) Put on therefore, as God's elect, holy and beloved, a heart of compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, longsuffering. A person who judges other people illegally is a proud person. A person who is unforgiving is a proud person. This is a person who has put him or herself up on a pedestal and thinks they have the right to not forgive, that they have the right to judge instead of giving that right only to God. They are sitting in the place of God. He says that through lowliness, meekness and longsuffering, we suffer long with other people's errors and problems and weaknesses, etc. (Col.3:12) Put on therefore, as God's elect, holy and beloved, a heart of compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, longsuffering; (13) forbearing one another, and forgiving each other, if any man have a complaint against any; even as the Lord forgave you, so also do ye.  Paul is talking about personal forgiveness here and we always have to give personal forgiveness every time. He's not talking about governmental unforgiveness because it would truly be a sin to forgive someone in a governmental situation. When it's the responsibility of an elder to judge and they don't do it, then they are sinning. For instance faction must be dealt with swiftly or it will spread and destroy many with “vile deeds”. However we always have to forgive any offense against us personally or we won't be forgiven, which is the foundation of our salvation. In Mat 18:15  And if thy brother sin (against thee [some ancient authorities omit this and it does not have a numeric pattern]), go, show him his fault between thee and him alone: if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. The factious always disobey the command to go to the brother they are judging “alone” which makes them backbiters or back stabbers (Rom 1:30). They do this because their slander will be refuted by the witnesses. (Col.3:14) And above all these things [put on] love, which is the bond of perfectness. Of course, if you love your brother as yourself and you are not a respecter of persons, then you're going to want to afford every right and every privilege to him that you want for yourself.  This will bond you instead of divide you. If you want God to judge you according to grace and mercy, then remember you have to give that same grace and mercy to others. (Col.3:15) And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to the which also ye were called in one body; and be ye thankful. (16) Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. It's not possible to let the Word of Christ “dwell in you richly” unless you're going to be obedient to the golden rule. The Word will not be manifested in you if you have unforgiveness. Unforgiveness blocks so many things that God could give to you and opens up the door for so many more sins that will take over your life, so that the Word will not be manifested in you.   The Word is Jesus and He will not be manifested in you if you have unforgiveness. All of those other fruits of bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, railing, and malice will be manifested instead of the Word. It doesn't matter what God has promised you; they won't come to pass because God's promises are conditional upon repentance and faith.   (Col.3:16) Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms [and] hymns [and] spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts unto God. (17) And whatsoever ye do, in word or in deed, [do] all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. So whatever we do, we are to do it in Jesus' Name; in other words, as representing Him. The meaning for the Greek word for name is nature, character, and authority. To do everything in His name is to do it like He would; that's exactly the meaning of Colossians 3:17. If we would do what Jesus would do, then the Word would be manifested in us.   What is the nature of forgiveness? I believe what Jesus is doing is He is helping us to understand those circumstances in which we find ourselves most likely to fall into unforgiveness. Those circumstances aren't the big curses that we think they are. We need to understand that wicked people who come against us and tempt us to fall into unforgiveness or bitterness or judgment, are actually a blessing. They cleanse the body of leaven. We need to understand that the Lord is sovereign and no person can come into our life without God's grace. We need to understand what He says about them.  (Luk.6:22) Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you [from their company,] and reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for Son of man's sake. Well, we certainly don't think that we're being blessed when people do such things, but from God's point of view, we are. We shouldn't be so near-sighted to see only the circumstance and not what God says about the circumstance behind the scenes because what is being worked in us is for eternity. (23) Rejoice in that day (We sure need to remind ourselves of this because the flesh just cries out, doesn't it?), and leap [for joy] for behold, your reward is great in heaven (Can you imagine? This obnoxious person who is accosting you is actually creating a reward for you in heaven!); for in the same manner did their fathers unto the prophets. (24) But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. (25) Woe unto you, ye that are full now! for ye shall hunger. Woe [unto you,] ye that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. (26) Woe [unto you,] when all men shall speak well of you! for in the same manner did their fathers to the false prophets. So we see that if these same wicked people speak well of us it is a woe to us.  Jesus said, “Woe ye that laugh now.” Yes, sometimes you weep, you mourn because of things that you go through at the hands of other people. But He said, “Woe ye that laugh now, for ye shall mourn and weep.” If we laugh at the judgment of others it is a woe to us. Things are going to be turned around. We are about to be treated badly by the world as a trial, but God says, “leap [for joy] for behold, your reward is great in heaven.” The reward that God is giving is not just a breath that He calls this life; the reward that God gives lasts forever and ever. If we could really understand what He's saying here and what is happening here, I believe we would leap for joy. God is true to His Word.   And now Jesus is going to tell you what it really is to be a forgiving person and what the fruit of being a forgiving person is. (Luk.6:27) But I say unto you that hear, Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you. If you let bitterness or unforgiveness rise up in your heart, it's just not possible to obey this. (Luk.6:28) Bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you. (29) To him that smiteth thee on the [one] cheek offer also the other; and from him that taketh away thy cloak withhold not thy coat also. The only person who can do this is a forgiving person, a person who is not judging. They are being obedient to the Lord and they have His grace working in them. Of course, you don't have the grace to do these things if you're unforgiving because then God withholds His grace. He gives grace only to the humble. (Jas.4:6) But he giveth more grace. Wherefore [the scripture] saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble. (Luk.6:30) Give to everyone that asketh thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again.  Those with faction and witchcraft stole from us whenever there was an opportunity and we have never asked it back but God always repays it multiplied when we just give it. In other words, He doesn't want you to judge these people. He tells us, (1Co.5:12) For what have I to do with judging them that are without? Do not ye judge them that are within (meaning those within the Church)? In obedience to this, before the faction leave the Church in a rage we correct their slander, fornication, lies, lusting, etc. After they leave we have only judged them carefully when the Lord told us to. (13) But them that are without (outside of the Church or not in the Church) God judgeth. (Luk.6:31) And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.   Here again is that perfect law of liberty. Giving mercy when we want mercy, sowing the very seed that we need because each seed brings forth after its own kind. If you want mercy, you sow mercy; if you want forgiveness, you sow forgiveness, etc. God will bring it back to you. (Luk.6:32) And if ye love them that love you, what thank have ye? Oh, it's easy to love and forgive people who love and forgive you, but what about giving love and what He is telling us to do here. (Luk.6:32) And if ye love them that love you, what thank have ye? for even sinners love those that love them. There's no reward for us in loving those who are good to us. (33) And if ye do good to them that do good to you, what thank have ye? for even sinners do the same. True; even sinners do the same, so we have to be above that. We have to be able to do it even for the wicked and the unworthy, and God will give us grace to do this. It all comes by grace from God but we forsake our own grace if we are unforgiving.   (Luk.6:34) And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? even sinners lend to sinners, to receive again as much. (35) But love your enemies, and do [them] good, and lend, never despairing; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be sons of the Most High: for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil. I know that you want to be a son of God, not just a child of God. The manifestation of sons is what the whole world is waiting to see. (Rom.8:19) For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. He's telling you here how to be a son.   If you don't want to do these things or if you give little esteem to these things that Jesus is saying, you forsake grace. And if you're unforgiving, then, of course, you won't have grace to do these things. And not only won't you have grace to do them, you won't want to do them. It will not be possible for you to do them. If we want to be sons of God, we have to be like His Son. And what did Jesus say? (Luk.23:34) Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. (35) But love your enemies, and do [them] good, and lend, never despairing; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be sons of the Most High: for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil. (36) Be ye merciful, even as your Father is merciful. (37) And judge not, and ye shall not be judged: and condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned.   Be careful that if any judgment or any condemnation is coming through you, that it's coming from God and not from you. If you have any personal feelings, if you have personal bitterness or unforgiveness toward someone, then you're not neutral and God can't use you. He can't use you as a son, as He could use His Son, because His Son was truly forgiving. (Luk.6:37) And judge not, and ye shall not be judged: and condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: release, and ye shall be released. Jesus forgave the sinners but governmentally judged the judges. When you're holding people captive to their sins or, in other words, holding them accountable to their sins against you, it says to “release and ye shall be released.” (Luk.6:38) Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, shall they give into your bosom. For with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again. This is just so important for us to remember! However we give it out to others, however we sow it, that's what is going to come back to us.   We've seen how unforgiveness manifests itself in our thoughts and our actions. Forgiveness also manifests in our thoughts and our actions. Here's a good example: (Mat.5:38) Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: (39) but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil ... According to the Law, you were able to demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. You had the right to execute vengeance under the Law. But the Law could make nothing perfect, and God decided that He needed a better Covenant with better promises, so He gave us the New Covenant.  Paul in 1Co 5 told the Church to throw the fornicator and reviler out to save the Church because a little leaven leavens the whole lump. Now this is definitely talking about not resisting humans because we're told in (Jas.4:7) Be subject therefore unto God; but resist the devil, and he will flee from you. We are told to resist the devil and his demons but Matthew is talking about the person, the flesh and blood, with whom we are not supposed to fight. The elder must resist the wicked for the Church with governmental authority as we have seen. The angels go out to take down slander because it is an attempt to destroy souls and families with witchcraft.  Individually we fight against our real enemy, the principalities and the powers. (2Co.10:3) For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh (4) (for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds), (5) casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.  (Mat.5:39) But I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil: but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. If you forgave a person immediately, as you should do, then you would be able to resist retaliation. If you overcome unforgiveness every time someone attacks you that's a good thing, and if you finally overcome it in your nature, you won't have any problem obeying what Jesus commanded here. The majority of the Church doesn't pay much attention to these Scriptures for they are self-crucifying. They would rather appease their flesh and retaliate in order to get out of this crucifixion to their flesh.   (Mat.5:40) And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. That really comes against the flesh; we are really swimming upstream here to be obedient to Jesus. Unforgiveness is common. It's thought of as a worthy thing in the world but the Lord speaks very harshly against it. (Mat.5:41) And whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him two. This also really goes against the flesh. The flesh is prideful and doesn't want to do this; and God hates pride. Unforgiving people are prideful people because they think that they have the right to judge.   (Mat.5:42) Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. This is humiliating to the old man. (43) Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy: (44) but I say unto you, Love your enemies ... Of course, this is the total opposite of unforgiveness, judgment, bitterness, wrath and demanding your rights. (Mat.5:44) But I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; (45) that ye may be sons of your Father ... Look at how many times the Lord connects sonship with this kind of humility in our lives. He connects sonship with the kind of humility that doesn't judge, the kind of humility that forgives.   (45) That ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. We wonder why God doesn't judge certain people around us; we wonder because He is so longsuffering with the wicked and vessels of dishonor so the elect among them will be saved as in Romans 9.  But He needs and uses those vessels of dishonor to try us and crucify our flesh. (46) For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? …(48) Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.   Brethren, some of the worst of men can be saved, Paul and Peter were but Judas was not. Pray for your families that they forgive, repent, and be among the chosen. Here is something many leave out, God's will.  Rom 9:2-5 that I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart.  3  For I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh: (He had great love and great faith but few were saved. Why?) 6  But it is not as though the word of God hath come to nought. For they are not all Israel, that are of Israel: (The same is true of the recognized “Church”.) 7  neither, because they are Abraham's seed, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall thy seed be called. (The chosen lineage among Abrahams children.) 8  That is, it is not the children of the flesh that are children of God; but the children of the promise are reckoned for a seed. (Only those who have faith in the promises.) 9  For this is a word of promise, According to this season will I come, and Sarah shall have a son. (A type of the promised seed of all nations. This was after God rejected Ishmael, a type of the rejected seed of all nations.) 10  And not only so; but Rebecca also having conceived by one, even by our father Isaac--  11  for the children being not yet born, neither having done anything good or bad, that the purpose of God according to election (choosing) might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth, (Only “many are called but few are chosen”.) 12  it was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger.  13  Even as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.  (Two types of world-wide people.) Many will argue with this but God says in 14  What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid.  15  For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.  16  So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, (The choice is not man's but Gods. Religion doesn't count.) but of God that hath mercy. 17  For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth.  18  So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will be hardeneth.  19  Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he still find fault? For who withstandeth his will?  20  Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why didst thou make me thus?  21  Or hath not the potter a right over the clay, from the same lump to make one part a vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor?  22  What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted unto destruction:  23  and that he might make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy, which he afore prepared unto glory,  24  even us, whom he also called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles?  25  As he saith also in Hosea, I will call that my people, which was not my people; And her beloved, that was not beloved.  26  And it shall be, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, There shall they be called sons of the living God.  27  And Isaiah crieth concerning Israel, If the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that shall be saved:  28  for the Lord will execute his word upon the earth, finishing it and cutting it short.  29  And, as Isaiah hath said before, Except the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, We had become as Sodom, and had been made like unto Gomorrah. 

In VOGUE: The 1990s
Vogue's Beauty and Wellness Editor on Every Viral Trend She's Tried (And Which Ones Are Worth It)

In VOGUE: The 1990s

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 16, 2026 32:58


Margaux Anbouba, Vogue's Senior Wellness and Beauty Editor is a little bit of a guinea pig when it comes to wellness and beauty trends. “I think I am sometimes too game to try something, but it's a lot of fun,” Margaux admits, “It's a hazard of the job, I suppose.” In this episode, she sat down with Chloe to talk about everything in the space she's been trying lately and to what effect.  They started off by talking about one of the hottest and also most hotly contested wellness options on the market right now: peptides. Margaux recently visited longevity specialist Dr. Amanda Kahn, “the peptide princess” of the Upper East Side, for a lengthy introductory appointment where they covered all of her medical and personal history. “I talked to her about how I'm feeling emotionally, how I'm feeling physically, and then she came back to me with this incredible list of peptides I could try.” Margaux plans to try several different peptides in her stack; among them is an off-label microdose of GLP-1s, in hopes of reducing inflammation throughout her body. She's also trying out GHK, which is meant to help with skin regeneration, and CB-4211 for increased exercise capacity and energy. Relatively new to exercising, Margaux tells Chloe about Emsculpt, a sort of high-intensity electrical muscle stimulation used to tighten and tone. Another similar technology is EMS, which is a low-level stimulation that helps deepen contractions during workouts. “It's sort of Black Mirror-ish in a way,” she says of the device. The first time she tried Emsculpt, after removing the device from her stomach, she was incredibly sweaty. The second time, less so. Generally, practitioners recommend four sessions. The pair also discuss one of Margaux's favorite (and less sweaty) activities—the buccal massage. Buccal refers to the mid-face area right below the cheekbone, and this massage technique takes place both inside and outside the mouth—yes, there will be fingers inside your mouth. Mariam Saprichyan, an esthetician at Karine Kazarian in New York and practitioner of buccal massage, explains that it opens up the lymph nodes, helps with blood flow, and relieves much of the tension we hold in our faces. Not particularly squeamish, Margaux shares another of her latest trials: injecting RADIESSE biostimulating molecules into her scalp. At a swanky room in The Hotel Chelsea, Margaux met with Los Angeles-based Nurse Practitioner Lauren Goodman. “She talked to me about how the scalp is a way to do a lot of lifting without showing anything on the face.” It's informally referred to as a crown lift. And there will always be more to try! To hear their latest Aura ring sleep scores, preferred sunscreens, and Margaux's advice on colonoscopies, check out the episode and subscribe to her weekly newsletter, I Tried That.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Get Rich Education
610: Don't Buy Your Next Rental Until You Ask These 12 Questions

Get Rich Education

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2026 42:23


Keith shares his "dirty dozen" due diligence questions every investor should ask before buying property, from gauging build-to-rent saturation and local job growth to testing cash flow and exit strategies.  He explains why even new-builds still need inspections and how to think about rents that may stay flat while expenses rise.  Aundrea Newbern, an experienced investor, broker, and property manager active in Southeast Georgia and Michigan, offers a real-world look at today's long-term and short-term rental markets, including shifting tenant behavior and local restrictions.  She also details how she's using AI to streamline property management, improve screening, optimize pricing, and cut maintenance costs, giving listeners practical ideas to apply in their own portfolios. Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/610 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866  Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes. To get in the best physical, mental, and professional shape of your life, go to DanielThomasHind.com and apply for Daniel's intensive 1-on-1 coaching for burnt-out entrepreneurs and executives. Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review"  For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com  Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:   Keith Weinhold  0:01   Keith, welcome to GRE. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, talking about vital due diligence questions that you have to know the answers to before you buy your next property. Even advanced investors don't know to ask some of these. Then a terrific guest tells us how she is practically applying AI to increase rental occupancy, save on maintenance expenses and drive rental income today on Get Rich Education.   Speaker 1  0:28   Since 2014 the powerful Get Rich Education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord show host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, and delivers a new show every week. Since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads in 188 world nations. He has a list show guests and key top-selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps. Build wealth on the go with the Get Rich Education podcast. Sign up now for the Get Rich Education podcast, or visit getricheducation.com   Keith Weinhold  1:11   You know, Mid South Home Buyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider, I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties, it's an executive coach for nine years now. Their CEO, Terry Kerr, and his COO, Pat Nix, have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners, his name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life physically, mentally, and professionally, you can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one on one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to danielthomashind.com H I N D, that's Daniel Thomas hind.com and sign up before Spotsville Flock Homes helps multifamily owners exit the operator grind, whether it's your sixplex or a 50 unit apartment through a 721 exchange. This defers your capital gains tax. It's a strategy long used by institutions. Now you can swap tenants and toilets for passive income and zero management. Request your initial valuations. See if your property qualifies at flockhomes.com/gre that's F L O C K homes.com / G R E.   Speaker 2  2:57   You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.   Keith Weinhold  3:13   Welcome to GRE. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. The world's biggest problems are also the world's biggest businesses. That's not a coincidence, and it squarely includes the problem of having enough quality housing. We talk about how to do that profitably and diligently, and on the topic of diligence, I've got a dirty dozen due diligence questions, call it I suppose these are smart questions to ask before you get under contract to buy your next property, and some of these could just as well apply to your existing rental property. Build to rent properties have become so popular, but ask the question, are these build to rent properties becoming overbuilt in this neighborhood? That's the first due diligence question, and a lot of investors overlook this, so you got to be mindful that build to rent often means lots of new construction in one smaller defined area. What you should do is ensure that new supply is being absorbed by renters. Some red flags to look out for are if multiple nearby communities are offering heavy concessions or free rent enticements, that is a sign that they're having difficulty luring in new renters to the area, and now taking a couple months to rent a brand new build isn't that unusual, but does the whole thing kind of feel like a mattress liquidation sale? Renters shouldn't have more signing bonuses than NFL free agents. The next due diligence question: Does this market still have population? And job growth, or am I late to the party? New workplace construction is a bullish market sign. Workplace construction, I'm talking about like a new office building, especially a new medical clinic, a new data center, a new factory. These signs are super bullish for an area, because not only does that attract the jobs and support the housing, as you can imagine, but see, that also means that whomever built the new workplace, oh, they probably did some research, and they're bullish about that area for a reason, they're going to look into that and do their due diligence that you can leverage before they spend perhaps 10s of millions of dollars or more in building a new workplace.    Keith Weinhold  5:45   The population should be stable or rising. Red flags are if growth already peaked and layoffs are increasing, don't arrive late to the party after the DJ has already packed up. The next question, when you're looking into a property, is is this unit likely to cash flow on day one? You know, you need to wonder, is the unit occupied or vacant. Some investors don't even think to ask that question until they get down the road a ways. When it's occupied, does the rent meet or exceed expenses with a buffer for maintenance and vacancy, now, if it's negatively cash flowing and you're solely enjoying the other four ways real estate pays, that might be okay, but you need to be comfortable with adopting a monthly bill that may or may not work. And do you know what I call a negatively cash flowing property? I call it a 401k property, because you have to keep feeding it every month like it's a 401k. A negatively cash flowing property effectively reduces your salary like a 401k does, and anyone that is serious about building real wealth when they're young enough to enjoy it would not invest in a 401k outside of the employer match portion.    Keith Weinhold  7:07   I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Here on Get Rich Education, episode 610 I've answered three out of twelve dirty dozen due diligence questions, and with abundantly minded grow your means answers that you're just not going to find on ChatGPT. Before I get to the fourth one, do you know what the word diligence means? Anyway, you probably have some idea. The definition of diligence is the quality of working carefully and persistently, demonstrating steady effort and thorough attention to a task. It implies a strong work ethic, meticulousness, and a commitment to completing duties well. All right, that is the definition. Diligence is the opposite of negligence. The next one, does my new build property need an inspection first? And this is a question, actually, that came in from Jake in Manhattan. Yes, it always does, whether it's resale or new build. It is always a good idea to get an inspection. One of the biggest misconceptions, really, is that new build means problem free.   Keith Weinhold  8:16   People just equate new build with problem free. No, that is not the case. New build can have problems. There could still be foundation cracks that are beyond normal settling, perhaps improperly installed roof flashing that could cause leaks, maybe windows or doors that are installed out of square, and a bunch more stuff that could be wrong, even in new build a presale inspection after you get the property under contract that only costs 350-650 dollars for single family rentals and 500-900 dollars for a duplex. This is cheap insurance. It's also good peace of mind, get it done. Sometimes investors want to skip the inspection when they need a quick close. Buyer, beware of the risk. The fifth due diligence question: What happens to my numbers if rents flatten for two years? And this is a more germane question than usual today, because rent growth is slow here in this cycle. Single-family rents are up just 1.3% year over year per totality, and expenses tend to rise with inflation. All right, so if your rents flatten for two years, project that ahead like your other expenses are rising, and see that the property would still remain financially stable. We cannot build a business plan on motivational quotes. Next, am I buying near major employers or near hopes and dreams with work from home trends, which can probably better be called. Called work from anywhere, trends buying near major employers is actually less important today, but it still matters. It is good to have diversified employers and stable payrolls somewhat nearby. Promises about future development might never happen. Sheesh, some areas have been up and coming since cassette tapes, the seventh due diligence question, what's the property tax trajectory here? That's the question. Taxes are often stable and increases predictable, but is there a local budget shortfall? And see, this is the type of due diligence that few people do keep in mind, and I'm bringing up new build a lot, because there are so many new build income properties today on new builds. Also, look out, year one taxes can look deceptively low until improved property is assessed in year two, and any reputable provider, and when you contact our GRE investment coaching here, we're going to point that out to you.    Keith Weinhold  11:05   This is how you can, though, sometimes get unusually low property taxes in year one if they have not assessed the improvement yet. Question eight, and this comes from Violet in Peoria, Arizona, is the builder offering real incentives, or are they just hiding the true price? Okay, well, incentives - they should genuinely improve your deal without inflating the pricing. Here, look out for sunglasses and a fake mustache for financing. It's mandatory that you have an appraisal. This protects you against overpaying in an appraisal, even though it's done for bank collateral purposes, checking the quality of their collateral, which is the property, you know, it is also a good independent third-party valuation check. This is a good tool to keep you from overpaying. Back around the 2008 days, the global financial crisis, you know, often then the lender and the appraiser could collude to give you favorable appraisals, somewhat inflated values, and as it turned out, I was an investor then and ended up being the beneficiary of some of those favorable appraisals, but since then the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, stepped in. They were formed to step in, so that those parties are no longer in cahoots with each other, and yes, incentives are explicitly disclosed to the lender and appraiser. For example, if you have a seller that offers to pay half of your closing costs if you pay their full sale price. Okay, the appraisers do know that they have that information before they provide you with the appraised value. Ninth, what's the vacancy rate in this area right now? This is a good due diligence question to ask. A balanced market has about five to 6% vacancy, eight to 10% or more. That can often be the sign of a weak market, but this might be all right in build to rent communities, and that's due to longer initial lease up periods that you have there. Due diligence question 10. Would I still want this property if appreciation slowed dramatically? You want to ask yourself this question because you cannot predict appreciation. The answer to this question is most likely yes.   Keith Weinhold  13:35   You would still want the property even if appreciation slowed dramatically, because as a listener here, you understand that with a 20% down payment, just 2% price appreciation creates a 10% return on your equity, and you're also benefiting from the other four ways real estate pays, but if you're absolutely counting on appreciation to do all of the heavy lifting over the long term, that's less investing, and that is more hoping with spreadsheets. What's more predictable is something like inflation profiting on your loan, which is a force on its own. Next, ask this question: How old are the big ticket items like the roof, HVAC, plumbing, sewer, and electrical? I mean, if you get a number of expensive items that are near the end of their life, you could soon become emotionally attached to ibuprofen. At GRE Marketplace, we work with either extensively renovated properties or new build properties, so this is rarely a concern. These big capex items, capital expenditures, and that is really the way to go. Extensively renovated or new build property, because see that way the cost of having all this done for you both. Before you buy the property, that means that what you're essentially doing is financing the cost of all this into the loan, you're financing into the new roof, HVAC, plumbing, sewer, electrical, if any of that applies, and if you're buying a fixer upper, well, then a lot of times you need to pay cash for these items, and you lose repair time where the property could have been rented during that renovation time. Work with our investment coaching here, and you're going to be all set. Those big ticket items are rarely a concern. And then what happens is, if you have a break even or a positively cash flowing property. The tenant covers all of your operating expenses with the rent payment, and you never have to pay any money at all for these big ticket items. They pay for your mortgage and everything else, and you never lose the time because these things were done before you bought.    Keith Weinhold  16:01   And the last one question 12. What you want to ask is, what's the exit strategy if I ever want to sell? That's the last question. Begin with the end in mind. The fewer doors the property has, the easier it is to sell. Single family homes win big here. I mean, your eventual buyer down the road, they could be a gleeful owner occupant, even if the rental math were poor. That buyer wouldn't even know that the rental math is poor, because they're not renting it out, they're going to live there themselves. Sometimes your single family rental tenant even becomes your eventual buyer. This can work with duplexes too. Sometimes you can get an owner occupant, or your tenant stays there and continues to reside there as they're the owner, and they rent out the other side as well. But if you're trying to sell at 30 duplex, well, now you're exposed to cap rates and investor sentiment and market cycles, it's sort of like trying to offload a small corporation. That doesn't mean that apartments are bad, but they are substantially less liquid than single family rentals. That's your exit strategy that we're looking at. They are the dirty dozen due diligence questions every investor feels bumps, I have you will too, but these questions and answers are really going to go a long way toward helping you own right, and when you stick with it, real estate is a forgiving and lucrative asset class because you're paid in so many ways. Hey, coming up shortly, a guest that you haven't heard from in a while, and I know that some of you have missed hearing her voice. We'll talk a bit about the state of the real estate market here in a period where prices are remarkably stable, housing transactions are only about 80% what they usually are, and then we'll discuss how she's using AI in her real estate investing today. It's how she's increasing her occupancy and optimizing the amount of rent being collected. She splits her time in a couple ways between real estate markets in both Michigan and Georgia, and then in both the short term and long-term rental markets. That's next. I'm Keith Weinhold. You're listening to Get Rich Education. What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine?   Keith Weinhold  18:31   You sure can at Ridge Lending Group, NMLS 42056 They provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone, because Ridge specializes in investment property, they'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequal, and even chat directly with President Chayley Ridge. While it's on your mind, start at ridgelendinggroup.com that's ridgelendinggroup.com Let me ask you something, if you've worked hard to build wealth, is your money positioned to actually support your goals? A lot of accredited investors leave capital sitting in cash because it feels safe, but inflation and missed income opportunities can quietly erode its value. Freedom Family Investments offers freedom notes for investors seeking structured income backed by real estate, it's a straightforward approach built on real assets, not speculation. In full disclosure, I'm an investor myself. What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works, so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk, and nothing is guaranteed, but with a track record of consistent on-time investor payouts, they've built real credibility. Go to Freedom Family investments.com to book a clarity call, or text Family 266-866 that's Family 266-866,    Speaker 3  20:02   Hi, this is Russell Gray, co-host of the Real Estate Guys Radio Show, and you're listening to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream. We've got a special treat for you today is for the first time in a few years we hear from someone that's served since 2020 in house here in both operations and as an investment coach. Today she serves GRE in a different capacity internally, but a lot of you still ask about her. That's why she's here. She's got both the formal education with her MBA, and is about as robust in being a real estate investor as you can be at the same time. Oh, it's a warm welcome back to the talented Andrea Newburn.   Aundrea Newbern  20:51   Hey, Keith, it's so great to be back. It's been a long time.   Keith Weinhold  20:54   Well, you've continued to grow not just in your business but in your family size since you were last here. Congrats there. I'd like your thoughts, just generally, about the American residential real estate investment market today, where we've got these sort of rising prices in low supply areas, we have slightly falling prices in oversupplied areas, we've got mortgage rates that have normalized, we've got tough affordability for renters that want to be first time home buyers, so just tell us about what you see, big picture. Andrea,   Aundrea Newbern  21:28   Yeah, absolutely, and so I invest and operate predominantly in the Southeast, so this will probably be a little bit more of a lens from the Southeast market, but as you know, I still actively invest in real estate myself. I help, you know people buy rental properties, also. But then the main thing that I'm doing now is I have a property management company down in Southeast Georgia, and so I'm seeing things more from the lens of what investors are doing, where they're investing, where rents are going, and if people are even buying properties. So it's been a little bit interesting. I mean, what I'm seeing is that, as you all know, it slowed down. We're not seeing as many investors buy properties, but people still are doing it, and they're still finding good cash flowing properties. Where the challenges come in is you're not making as much money on these properties as you did four or five years ago, so you know your margins are going to be a little bit less, your cash flow is going to be a little bit less. And then we're seeing, you know, rents kind of stabilize depending on the type of asset class that it is, so you know things are not doing wonderfully, but they're stable from what I'm seeing in the southeast market,   Keith Weinhold  22:31   and now you do a good bit of investing in sort of Brunswick and out toward the Georgia coast, including places like Jekyll Island, where G. Edward Griffin wrote his book about the formation of the Fed, and all that in general. How has that area been from a residential supply standpoint? For example, we know in neighboring Florida they've had a lot of oversupplied pockets. How are we looking there? I think you have a lot of occupancy right now from talking to you earlier.   Aundrea Newbern  22:59   We do, so I manage two different types of investments, right? I manage the long-term rental properties. There's less of those like on Jekyll Island, there's more of those in the mainland and Brunswick. And then we do the vacation rentals, which is very, very heavy on Jekyll Island and St. Simons Island. What we're seeing this year, if we talk about maybe those vacation rentals first, and then I'll talk about the long-term vacation rentals, we're still seeing a lot of demand, a lot of people are still coming. We're not really down from this time last year, but the one big thing we're seeing is people are booking their vacations last minute, they're not booking them months in advance at this point. So that's definitely had a little bit of an impact and had us on edge, because we're like, okay, where are these vacations? And then, sure enough, they're booking a couple weeks out now, so that's going really well. The investors that have purchased homes on Jekyll and St. Simons, especially Jekyll, are doing really good. They're still making a lot of money. They have high occupancy. Where are we seeing a little bit more of the challenge is with the long-term rentals. So rents are kind of staying flat from where they were last year in some of those B and C markets. We may even see a slight decrease, just a couple percentage points, and then it's taking longer to fill the property. So last year we could typically get a qualified runner in in three to four weeks. Now we're seeing anywhere from five to eight weeks. Right now,   Keith Weinhold  24:11   as far as on the short term side, have restrictions affected you at all, like banning Airbnbs, for example, and how have you seen that play out in other areas? Because you certainly network with other people that do short-term rentals. Can you tell us about that?   Aundrea Newbern  24:26   Yeah, absolutely. So I can talk about the Southeast market, for one, where in Jekyll, St. Simons, Brunswick, we're seeing no rental restrictions whatsoever. We do have to have a process to register the rental with a county, but it's so easy. It's literally a form. We do an inspection once a year, and that is it. I don't know that this is a fact, but a lot of the commissioners and politicians in the area also have rental properties. I think that probably has a little bit of an impact on that up here in Michigan, which, you know, I have another home, and I live in Michigan part of the time as well. There's a lot of restrictions, in fact, my. House right now is in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and they already have a rental ban where you can't do less than 30 days, so you're already having to go into that midterm market, and now they have some proposals up with the local municipality to even eliminate some of that, so we're seeing that in this area.   Keith Weinhold  25:17   Generally, do you tend to see it in nicer, ritzier areas where they want to make the short-term rental restrictions.   Aundrea Newbern  25:24   Yes, I do. Absolutely. Up here in Sterling Heights, where I live, the average home of my neighborhood is around five to six hundred thousand dollards and they absolutely do not want those here. But if you go a few neighborhoods over, where you're looking more of like the two hundreed to three hundred thousand dollars range, they don't seem to have as much of an issue with those. There   Keith Weinhold  25:40   We've been talking about short term rentals in both Southeast Georgia and then in Metro Detroit, where you currently spend quite a bit of your time. Talk to us about the long term rental market with affordability for buying being down, that really hurts the prospective first time home buyer, so they need to be more likely to rent, which would make some people wonder. Oh, well, then how could vacancy possibly go up in an area? Well, you know, migration - we've touched on it - is one reason why that might happen. Another reason why it might happen is you might see more doubling up.   Aundrea Newbern  26:15   Yeah, we do. We see a lot more families coming in. In fact, last week we just rented a property out to somebody where the parents were renting with their children, their grown adult children that also had kids, they're getting bigger houses, right? So they're actually feeling that need to fill up some of our larger homes, but it's multi-generational now. We are seeing a lot more roommates come in, too, instead of two roommates, you'll see three people come in and get a house together. The other thing we've noticed that's been really drastic, maybe the last three or four months, is the debt load that we're seeing. So, when we run people's background checks and look, they've got a lot of credit card debt now. We didn't see that as much years prior.   Keith Weinhold  26:50   All right, so you're seeing that at the street level, that's a statistic that we can read about, that American savings rates are down and the proportion of debt is often up. You're seeing it in real time, there. Do you see potentially, Andrea, this propensity for people to want to sort of bend things and have someone that's not on the lease live there with them in order to cut costs? So, you know, is there really anything in this environment that we really need to be careful about when we're screening tenants with them having such a debt load, and having to struggle with inflation and rising prices.   Aundrea Newbern  27:23   Yeah, absolutely. The debt load, number one, you know, we'll see them increasing, and that's something we want to keep an eye on. So, we're having to kind of retool our policies to look more critically at that debt load. They may not be delinquent on anything now, but if we've seen it gone up significantly in the last few months, I bet you it's coming. So, we're trying to retool our policies to be able to deal with that, you mentioned people having unauthorized tenants in the home that has persistently been an issue for us, maybe the past year. We find this often that that's happening, and usually it's because that person wouldn't qualify on the application, but they still bring in money and can help with the rent. The third thing, and this is with the advent of AI, right, how big AI has come is, we're seeing a lot of documents that are clearly fraudulent, but they look really, really good, because AI has created them. So that's another issue.   Keith Weinhold  28:09   Gosh, that's interesting. Well, I want to ask you more about AI, and you know, Aundrea, America is in such a weird time with AI today. You probably saw it at these college graduations across the nation, where a luminary is up front at the lectern making a commencement speech, and they get booed by students for talking about embracing AI, and that's probably because the student feels threatened about AI taking the job that they might not get, and you know what's funny, I suspect there's some of those same students, they loved it when AI helped them write an essay in order to get to graduation and wear that cap and gown, so..   Aundrea Newbern  28:51   Absolutely.   Keith Weinhold  28:52   Yeah, that's what I knew when I say that we're in a weird time with AI, but I know that you've really embraced AI as a property manager and investor almost from the get-go to make your property operations more efficient, so that you don't have to raise prices on owners, and you can keep those owner expenses down and increase resident retention at the same time. So, tell us more about how you're using it.   Aundrea Newbern  29:16   Yeah, so my team, I think, hates me for this right now, but in the last six months we have literally changed our operations front to back in a few different ways. Number one, we've changed the systems that we use, so you know, for vacation rentals as well as long-term rentals, you have your property management system that kind of streamlines everything, and that you do everything in. We've started going to platforms that are a little bit more AI friendly, so they have AI agents built in and they have AI functionality already in them, so that we're not having to purchase additional tools to come in and add them as a layer on top of our systems. So that's kind of the basic thing that we're doing, but the other fun things that I've been able to do, and I'm still, you know, working on this, and we're refining it daily, is using AI actually as kind of like a virtual assistant, essentially. So we do have virtual assistants with a company, and they're great, and we love them, and they do a wonderful job. However, they're human, so they're not perfect, but these AI agents, once you've trained them to do a lot of the back office tasks that your virtual assistants can do, after a certain number of iterations and training, they don't really make mistakes. So knowing that we have that, and we can continue building on that. We don't have to add FTE to our team, which increase our labor costs. That's allowing us to not raise our prices on our clients, and which I'm sure they're all happy about, because other property management companies are doing that right now,   Keith Weinhold  30:33   Right, so property management companies are going to have to do this to stay competitive and keep up, whether they want to or not, and when I think about using AI in real estate, you know, one of the first things I think of, just say that tenant journey from attracting the tenant to placing them. When I think of the cutting edge, I think of help with marketing and writing advertisements, which I think is kind of a simple thing to do, sort of an easy way to implement AI, and also when I think about that early part of the journey, really I think about using AI as a leasing assistant, and sort of how you see that more, the 24/7 front desk, if you will. I mean, if you have an AI leasing assistant that can answer questions for your prospective new tenant and follow up with leads that can be a big deal. I mean, a lead that sits unanswered for six hours, they just kind of turn into a cold French fry, and instead AI can answer those questions and schedule that tour. If a prospective tenant asks the same question four times, you know the AI doesn't get frustrated and leave out some sigh. So, can you tell us more about kind of that front end, the marketing, and then the leasing end? Are you using AI as a leasing assistant essentially?   Aundrea Newbern  31:47   We are. So, if we talk about maybe the marketing piece of things before we get into the leasing, we're not using as much AI with marketing at the moment. I have had it write some copy for me for some marketing, and I'm not usually crazy about it. I still think it looks like AI right now, so we're having to do a lot of changes with that, but what it has done a really good job at helping us out in the last few weeks is have it go analyze your website, have it analyze how you come up in search functions, right? So, if somebody's going to Google or if they're going to Gemini or they're going to Chat GPT, what's happening with your website and your company when people are looking for property managers, for example, it does a very thorough check on that. It's also really good at reviewing your website and telling you where you have gaps in terms of maybe you need to, you know, change something here or there, or you have certain links that are not helping in your search functionality. So, I think it's really good as far as analyzing stuff. That's kind of about all we've done as far as marketing, as far as a leasing assistant goes, this has essentially been like the biggest lift I think we've had from AI, period, in the last couple years. So, maybe a year ago, we implemented a software, and I'm going to leave the name out, because I'm sure you know I'd rather not do that, but it's a software, and there's a bunch of different options that you can use for this, but essentially it collects all of our leads for us, so we set it up, you know, we set criteria for the type of tenant and our policies for, you know, what type of tenant would qualify, and they call in or message or email this number or this email address, and the AI essentially goes through and asks them a series of questions, lets them know if they would potentially qualify or not. If they would not, then it will not allow them to schedule showings for any of our properties, if they would, with no exceptions. Then we can go ahead and get them scheduled, and the AI actually goes through and gets them scheduled as well. So it is a huge help for us.   Keith Weinhold  33:30   That is really nice. Okay, helping out with tenant screening, there can it arrange tours, put them on the calendar, then if they're qualified.   Aundrea Newbern  33:40   Yes, it actually gives them an option and shows them all of the dates we have available, so the person can go ahead and schedule their showing. It can provide updates if we need it, so if we change our policy, it can send that out to the tenants for us as well. So that process I would say is about 90% automated right now. It doesn't really take much human intervention, except for us to review things and make sure there's nothing kind of wonky with the schedule or anything like that.   Keith Weinhold  34:00   Okay, so if they're qualified and interested, the prospective tenant can fill out an application, and then is AI assisting on the screening, and are you still meeting with them in person before they get the keys and sign the contract?   Aundrea Newbern  34:14   Yes, and no. So we still do meet with them in person to be able to do like that walkthrough of the property and make sure we're documenting issues, and all of that, which, by the way, I think in the next year that'll probably be automated as well, but we're not quite there yet. They do not have to come in in person, in terms of signing the lease or anything like that. That's all done remotely. If they want to, they can, but we really don't have to meet with them until it's time for move in at this point.   Keith Weinhold  34:36   All right, we're seeing the evolution of AI since it was really Chat GPT that was pioneering and rolling out in November of 2022 so we're coming up on four years of really this activity being integrated into our lives, and I think we both know that it's only going to get better from here, so when we have a tenant that. It's actually placed, of course. I often like to say they call the discipline property management, but it could probably very well be called tenant management. And I think, about, you know, is everything okay after the tenants there? As far as AI having a maintenance triage function, if there's a maintenance request, of course, you're going to want to prioritize something differently if it's a big plumbing leak that's damaging the subfloor versus just having a slow drain, you know. You probably want to be sure either one of those things are taken care of, but one is going to get priority over the other. So, can you tell us more about after that tenants place the maintenance triage and using AI there?   Aundrea Newbern  35:38   Yeah, so we've pretty much automated the maintenance process in the last year, other than, you know, actually making sure the vendor went out and did what they were supposed to do. So, right now, with us, a tenant has to go in, unless they have a disability and can't do it, of course, but they have to go in and put in any work orders through our system, and essentially what happens is we've created kind of a workflow, so here's the issues of the types of things that would not be considered an emergency unless they answer, you know, certain questions a certain way. Here are the things that are emergencies and requires to go out pretty much no matter what, right? For the things that are non-emergency, or they're not clear in what the actual issue is, which is probably the number one problem we have, is they say, 'My lights aren't working, that's it, we don't know anything else about it, and then come to find out it was just a light bulb, or come to find out it was just their breakers tripping. The AI actually goes in and analyzes what they put in as the issue and selected, and then asks them a series of questions, and then, based on their responses, it actually tells them what to go do to troubleshoot it. We're seeing right now with data, it's eliminating maybe about 40% of the things that we would send somebody out for, yeah, it is huge, and the tenants are doing it, and they're not really pushing back or having issues with it most of the time, but then there are certain things that AI can't quite figure out, we're still training it on, so we do have to send somebody out or call, but it's having a huge reduction in us having to send folks out for this.   Keith Weinhold  36:56   Okay, yeah, we're not talking about completely eliminating humans, but that's huge, if they can have AI give them the answer to maybe some routine maintenance thing, probably that they could have gone and found out on their own, but yeah, that saves 40% of maintenance visits, that's a big deal. All right, so not too much backlash from tenants, not saying, like, oh, hey, I don't want to be talking with your robot, come on, not so much of that.   Aundrea Newbern  37:20   No, not yet. Now we are looking right now at implementing an actual AI agent that would answer the phone to handle these types of just maintenance issues, nothing else but maintenance for right now. And we've tested out a lot of different softwares that do this. Some are better than others, but none of them are perfect yet. And I could call and definitely tell I'm talking to AI, maybe some people couldn't. I feel we're probably going to have a little bit more blowback when that starts getting implemented and rolled out.   Keith Weinhold  37:44   Yeah, I imagine people are just going to get more and more used to this, you know. I wonder, how much AI is helping you with rent pricing, what amount to set the rent for. I mean, for example, isn't it interesting if AI knows that, hey, a bunch of units in the neighborhood all around you, they already have high occupancy. It's really tight in this sub market, where maybe it would advise you to bump up your rent. So, tell us about how AI is helping you with rent pricing.   Aundrea Newbern  38:12   Yeah, so you know, as a broker, I obviously have access to the MLS, which we use for a lot of data, but then sometimes there's rentals that are not on the MLS, so you know an owner went and listed it themselves, and I actually have an agent that their task is to go in every couple of days, and they'll analyze any of our existing listed properties that we have that are not occupied. We're still waiting on somebody to apply, and it'll go and tell me, "Hey, is anything else been listed? Has anything that was out there when we did our review two days ago? Has anything closed? Can we figure out, you know, what price it rented for? Sometimes it can, sometimes it can't, but it'll provide me a report every two days, automated, in my inbox for me to be able to look at on that. So it's really nice.   Keith Weinhold  38:51   Wow, this could be hugely useful. Yeah, or imagine on the flip side of that, if AI detects that there are a lot of vacancies in your area that, hey, you probably don't want to get so aggressive with rent increases. In that case, was there any last way that you're using AI in real estate? Maybe something I didn't think about asking you, Aundrea.   Aundrea Newbern  39:10   If we talk about long-term rentals, not as much. I think you kind of hit on the main things that we're using it for right now, but if we look at vacation rentals, it is doing a lot more there, I think, at the moment than it is long term. So, for example, pricing - we have dynamic pricing that we use for all of our vacation rentals, and the dynamic pricing isn't perfect, so somebody still has to physically go in and make sure no tweaks need to be made, that there's nothing weird going on in the software. I now have an AI agent that, that is their number one job. They go in once a day, they review all of our pricing. They let me know whether we need to adjust it up, down, change our minimum days, maximum days, and we make the adjustments. We're training it now to actually do those for us, but we haven't let it do it yet, so we're still waiting there. It's still waiting on its approval for me to do that, but things such as pricing, things such as going through and analyzing guest feedback, or guest. First tone, even in messages, it's providing me reports on that daily, so I can help identify problems that are maybe small problems before they become big.   Keith Weinhold  40:07   It makes sense that it would be more applicable in short-term rentals with all the turnover that you have there. Well, Andrea, let us know if there's a way for our followers to keep up with you and what you're doing, because people still ask about you here. You're so well liked. Let us know.   Aundrea Newbern  40:26   Yeah, so there's a couple of ways. If you're wanting to kind of see what we're doing with property management or our company, you can go to goldenaislesretreats.com There's also for a way for you to get in touch with me there. You can also check me out on LinkedIn or on Facebook, so I'm there as well, and I'd be happy to connect with anybody. I miss our listeners.   Keith Weinhold  40:43   Oh, Andrea, it's been valuable. It's been great having you back.   Aundrea Newbern  40:46   Thank you, Keith.   Keith Weinhold  40:53   Yeah, great to hear from Aundrea again on the show. It has been a few years. If you use professional management like I do, they will most likely be applying AI in a lot of the ways that we discussed. Coming up on the show soon, a life coach that's had a profound effect on a number of guests that we've hosted here on the show over the years. He has agreed to join us. He doesn't do a lot of appearances like this, so it'll be great. We'll hear directly from Daniel Thomas Hind, and how he transforms the lives of so many business people and investors professionally, physically, and mentally. I'm confident that it's going to help you get more out of life too. Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.   Speaker 1  41:45   Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss, the host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.    Keith Weinhold  42:13   The preceding program was brought to you by Your Home for Wealth Building, getricheducation.com.

Management Blueprint
335: Building the Connected Car Before the iPhone with Allen Nejah

Management Blueprint

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2026 24:07


Allen Nejah, CEO and System Solution Architect of SunMan Engineering, is driven by a lifelong passion for aerospace, invention, and solving complex engineering problems. From dreaming of becoming an astronaut as a child to working with major aerospace, defense, automotive, medical, robotics, IoT, and semiconductor organizations, Allen has built a career around turning ambitious technical ideas into real-world systems. We explore The Allen Nejah Engineering Framework — Live with Integrity, Be Intensely Curious, Get Organized, Plan Every Baby Step, and Learn from Mistakes — a practical mindset for building breakthrough technologies with discipline and resilience. Allen explains why integrity must exist not only in business relationships but also in the engineering itself, how complex projects must be broken into testable steps, and why curiosity, visualization, planning, and iteration are essential to solving problems across industries. He also shares the story behind InfiniGear, his AI-powered adaptive transmission system, and the healthcare technology inspired by his mother's experience in assisted care. — Building the Connected Car Before the iPhone with Allen Nejah  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Allen Nejah, the CEO and System Solution Architect of SunMan Engineering, dedicated to providing customers with high-quality, on-time engineering and on-budget solutions for their product development and prototyping needs. Allen, welcome to the show.  Yes, that is correct.  Great to have you on the show. And I’d like to ask you my favorite first question: What is your personal ‘Why,’ and how are you manifesting it in your business?  So Steve, first I want to thank you for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate your time and interest. Of course.  As a kid, for whatever reason, I always wanted to have an airplane manufacturing company, an aircraft manufacturing company—something I always wanted to have. And I always wanted to be an astronaut. As a matter of fact, I studied aerospace and mechanical engineering with the dream of being an astronaut, going to fly and all that. So that’s kind of something that’s still in my pocket and that I still want to do. From there, it kind of pushed me in this direction. And yeah, now I work with a number of different companies in the aerospace industry. I work with the Air Force. I’ve worked with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and a number of others. And I work on both space and aviation projects that really kind of bring my dream to life. So I still haven’t gone to outer space yet, but I still have a little more time.  Yeah. Elon Musk is promising a million people, and his bonus is linked to putting a million people on Mars as the first colony. So there may still be room there.  They need a lot of us to go there, trust me. Well, actually, we’re going to do a lot of activities on the Moon first, and then from there, I’m sure they’re going to be looking for older people, older men, to do some tasks over there. And I’d volunteer to go.  You may be familiar with the Mars trilogy—Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. It talks about people moving to Mars and how they terraform it. And then they figure out how to extend life to 150, 200 years. So if that works out, then maybe there’s another lifetime to be lived on Mars.  Yeah. I definitely believe that we will end up living on other planets, for sure. I see that very clearly. It could be 50 years or more before we actually become a space-based civilization. But the Moon has already started, right? We’re going to be there in the next 5 to 10 years, trust me. So anyway, I’m very excited about that. Yes.  Yeah, it is very exciting. What I’m looking for on this podcast—what makes it kind of unique—is that I am a junkie for frameworks and mental models. We are almost 400 episodes in, and every episode has a different mental model that our guest comes up with or shares. So think about something that helped you build your business, or maybe helped you develop your products, or how you work with your engineers, or how you work with clients. So think about something that has three to five steps or three to five aspects that create a result.  That’s very clear to me. Those are the key things for any successful person. First of all, honestly, you have to be interested. You have to be in “go” mode. You cannot push somebody to start building something, like a building or actual construction, if their mind is not into it. The very first thing is, it’s got to be you. That’s number one, right? And you know it. Definitely organization is a very key factor for me. Being organized, being detail-oriented—that’s something that is super, super important. Planning and organization make a huge difference in whatever you do, right? And most importantly, integrity. I mean, that’s number one. That’s number one, number two, number three, number four—all of it.  So integrity is all of it. No matter what you do, if there’s no integrity, people will walk away from you. At the beginning, every business makes mistakes, and they learn and so on. So don’t beat yourself up. It’s okay. You make a mistake, you learn from it, and then you don’t do it again, right? Learn from it. So yeah, I would say those are at least three. If anything else comes to mind, I definitely will share it with you. But the most important things are integrity, organization, and clear planning based on knowledge. Not just planning for the hell of it, but planning based on understanding what you’re doing. That’s important. Integrity comes into your personality. It comes into the quality of the work you do.  It comes into the engineering you do. It comes into all of that, right? Even in engineering, it’s not only on the personal level that integrity has to be there. On the engineering level, integrity has to be there too. Whatever you do, you’ve got to make sure it’s working. One of the things we learned the hard way after 35 or 36 years is that it’s very important to have the knowledge base and to do things in a very organized way. And that’s kind of part of my personality. If I’m not confident about the end result, I don’t even commit to it. I’ve got to see it in my mind. Whatever problem comes up, if I don’t see the solution in my mind, I won’t even commit to it. It comes back to quality, integrity, and all of that. And I guess what I was going to say earlier is that everything that we do—as part of, again, the quality and integrity I mentioned—is that we have a lot of baby steps built into the process.  That’s what I wanted to say earlier. So for every step, the whole plan is split into, I don’t know, tens, hundreds, or thousands of different steps and branches. Because technology is not one thing. It’s usually a combination of different sciences. So mechanical engineering, electronics, material science, firmware, AI—those are all different types of expertise. And you’ve got to bring them all together. And for all of those baby steps, you’ve got to have some sort of test at the end of each step before you move on to the next one. Iteration.  Yeah. So, okay, what I’m hearing is integrity is number one. And then curiosity, perhaps. So curiosity is this driving force. Visualization is important. I’m thinking about Einstein, who said that imagination is more important than knowledge because imagination is infinite, while knowledge encircles the world. I think it was something like that. So visualization is important. Get organized. Do thorough planning. And learn from mistakes.  Yes. Absolutely. Okay.  That’s great. So what do you call this? Is this the Allen Nejah Framework, or what’s it called?  One more thing. One more thing. Again, that’s kind of under the umbrella of integrity. So I have two families. It’s one family. I have a family at home, and I have a family at work. And believe it or not—and you already know this—we all spend more time with our family at work than with our family at home. That’s true. It’s true for me. It’s true for a lot of people. You go to work, I don’t know, from 8:00, 9:00, or 10:00 in the morning until 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, or 9:00 at night. That’s almost 12 hours. And by the time you go home at 5:00, 6:00, or 7:00, what? You spend two hours with your family, maybe three hours at most, and then it’s back to work. So the team is part of my family, and truly it is part of my family. Those are the first group of people, the first group of associates, that you have to take care of.  You have to be a brother to them, be a friend to them, be a father to them, be a mother to them. Seriously, it’s all about human interaction. It’s all about, “I like you, I don’t like you,” and it goes from there. “I feel good about you. I don’t feel good about you.” And so it’s very important to have those relationships in your business, or whatever it is you do. For me, all our people, all our employees—even from 35 years ago—are still in touch with us. I have kids who came through as junior-high interns, then high-school interns, then university students, even master’s degree students. Now they’re 40 years old. And we’re still in touch. So I’m in touch with hundreds of engineers and people that I’ve worked with over the past 35 years. And that’s a lot of value. That’s the biggest asset.  Yeah. Basically, they call it a school. You create a school, right? Your own professional school. That’s wonderful. So tell me about this special gear called InfiniGear. How is it special? How did you come up with it, and how is it being used? It’s an interesting question. First of all, let me explain to you very quickly what I-Gear is. So I-Gear is an AI robotic adaptive gearbox, or transmission, and that’s a mechanical transmission. It’s not an electronic transmission. It’s an actual mechanical gearbox that goes into any machinery or equipment. I mean, obviously, the one that everybody can relate to immediately is cars. Every car—not EV cars, but every car—has a transmission. A transmission usually is bigger than the engine. It’s heavier than the engine. It’s the guy that goes through all the center of the car, takes all that center, okay?  That’s it—a transmission. It’s big, it’s heavy. By the way, it’s amazing how it works. It’s absolutely amazing how it works if anybody gets into a transmission and sees all of it. There are about 300 to 400 gear sets in there. There are about six or seven clutches. There’s about 3,000 to 4,000 parts in a standard transmission. So that’s why it’s so big and so heavy. The efficiency is so low because all these gears have to be interacting with each other. As a matter of fact, believe it or not, the transmission efficiency is only 50%. So it’s actually as low as you can get. But you have to have a transmission in the car. If you have no transmission in the car—I’m talking about ICE cars with an engine—they’re not even able to drive because the engine has no initial power and no initial RPM.  The AI transmission, the robotic transmission that I have invented, and that we have developed over five to seven years— Since 2017 or ’18 we’ve been working on it. It’s a gearbox that has only two gears versus 200 to 300 gears, and it’s one-fourth or one-fifth of the size. And also, while your standard transmission has five or six or seven or eight gears in your car, this has unlimited gears, okay? And it’s AI, so it can see what’s going on with the road, what the weather is, and all combinations of conditions. If you’re going onto a hillside, it’s already going to shift for you, so it saves energy. So that’s what we have developed. It’s a robotic transmission.  Right now, we’re actually talking to the U.S. Army, and they have some interest. We are at a very initial stage with them. And it’s kind of difficult to bring it into the market because it’s a safety factor, and there are a lot of requirements and tests that have to go into it before we can actually get it into trucks and cars. To summarize the benefit, if you put that transmission into an EV, we can increase the range by 40%, which is huge. A company that can improve a battery by 1% gets millions of dollars thrown at it. Once we can prove that this is working and pass some tests and so on, it’s going to be very huge. Wow. When do you expect this to happen?  I’m hoping within the next two years. Hopefully, by the end of those two years, we make it home and get it into cars and trucks and commercialize it.  Then you will turn into a unicorn—a big unicorn, right?  Yeah. Again, EVs are only one application. There are wind turbines, tanks, boats, some aircraft, and helicopters. A helicopter’s transmission is half the size of the helicopter itself, so the weight and everything else become very significant. So if we can eliminate that weight and size, we can gain a lot. Especially in vehicles, it makes a huge difference and all that.  Wow. That’s probably something that drones would benefit from too. Yeah. It’s mind-boggling. So what drives growth in your business other than your inventions?  So at SunMan Engineering, we have two arms. One arm is that we provide engineering services, product architecture, and product development to other companies—small companies, mid-size companies, and bigger companies like IBM, Sony, Samsung, and Apple. We have about 300 or 400 of those clients. And we also work with government agencies and contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Kaiser Electronics, just to name a few. We have also had contracts directly with the Army and the Navy in the past. And that’s what we’re trying to do now—to gain some of those projects again. And InfiniGear, the I-Gear, could be a project that, fingers crossed, we’d be working on with the U.S. Army. So that’s one arm of what we do. The other arm is that we develop new technologies. We develop them, work on them, and then license them, or let our clients utilize them in some of their projects through partnerships and so on.  So you’re a service company as well as a product company?  Yes. We are a systems and product company. We’re considered a systems and product company, yes.  Now, do you call this systems integration? In the IT world, they used to call it systems integration when you had different systems and—  We are more than systems integrators. Systems integrators buy different technologies and put them together. It’s still engineering, don’t get me wrong. Yeah. You still have to engineer everything and put it together. But what we do is actually customize things from the ground up. Sometimes we do integration because it’s faster, easier, and sometimes cheaper. Some of the components and some of the functionality can be integrated. But generally, we customize every project from the ground up. And generally, for your information, we cater to aerospace, robotics, and IoT. IoT is communication—all sorts of wireless and different types of communication: Wi-Fi, 5G, Bluetooth, all sorts of stuff, right? And also medical. So medical, robotics, aerospace, IoT, and also semiconductors, which also serve these different industries.  So how is it possible? I mean, you have a relatively small team, right? Fifteen people or so?  Twenty-seven, twenty-eight people.  Twenty-seven. Okay, sorry.  Yeah. With a small team.That’s exactly the very first question you asked me. That’s exactly how it affects and how it comes into the picture. Being organized—I mean, we’ve done this so many times. It’s like we make things so efficient because we already have a plan. Every project we do, in concept, is the same thing. The process is the same. The application is different, but the process is the same. So going through that process and having a very reliable process in place that we follow very religiously makes us super, super efficient. And also, being small, we don’t have to go through a number of different layers. Everything comes to one or two people, gets approved, and we get it going. Everything happens the same day. Nothing waits until the next day here.  Are you involved in every project?  Fortunately and unfortunately, I’m involved in every project. And one of my goals is to eventually focus on fewer projects so I’d be more effective and efficient. So that’s one of my goals for the next few years. I-Gear is one of them, and we’re also working on another project. It’s for healthcare, it’s for the elderly and infants. Eventually it’s going to be a robot, but right now we’re making the device that is the brain of the robot. So it gets to know the person, it gets to know their habits, it gets to know everything about the person, about their family, about their health, about how they behave. We can remind them of different things. We can assist them with different things. We can watch them. We can emotionally work with them. There are so many different applications that we’re working on now. We can even do preventive diagnostics.  What “preventive diagnostics” means is that before the patient or the person gets sick or develops some sort of disease, we can actually identify it before that happens. That’s great. And that’s the most important part of this device. It has so many different applications and different ways it can help and assist an elderly person. And within the next two or three years, my goal is to integrate this into a robot. So we’re going to have a robot that physically helps you as well. My mother ended up in one of those care centers, and I saw how much she was declining on a daily basis—not weekly, not monthly, but daily.  And there was nothing, unfortunately, that I or any member of our family could do. I mean, we were there every day, don’t get me wrong, but that’s all we could do for her. We’re all busy. We all have lives. I mean, we were there almost every day, but really, she did not get the care that she needed. And that’s what kind of put me in that frame of mind—how can I help someone like my mom? And that’s how it started about two years ago. And as a matter of fact, now it’s one of the biggest markets. Yeah. It’s one of the biggest. So that’s fascinating. So how can you have so mental bandwidth that you can cover different industries, go deep into different industries, and innovate and invent stuff? How does that even happen?  Honestly, I personally work pretty much 12 hours a day. Even on my vacations, I work. Don’t get me wrong, I have a very good life. I work hard and I play hard. I am a very active person. I played as a semi-professional soccer player until I was 58 years old, believe it or not. Actually, next week I’m going to be 65. I still can play. I still can go and compete with 25- and 30-year-old kids, and I still do good, I think. So I keep myself in very good shape. I do mountain biking. I do about 10 to 15 hours of heavy-duty exercise on a weekly basis, and that kind of balances what I’m doing. To answer your question, yes, it’s too much, but yeah, we have to spend more time. There is no magic to it. Sometimes it gets to be too much, but I like what I’m doing, so I enjoy it.  Yeah, it shows. Elon Musk is also an example of being able to run six big companies in different areas and be a groundbreaker. But you’re doing something very similar. You are breaking ground in different industries.  Yeah. Actually, as I mentioned, I have established different startups and sold them. I have worked on a number of different companies and technologies. As a matter of fact, back in 2005, I brought a whole bunch of different technologies to cars. Any type of car you drive—I don’t care what it is—almost everything in the dash belongs to technologies that we developed from 2005 to 2008. There are some videos and some information on my LinkedIn. I invite people, including yourself, to look into it. The stuff we did back then was in 2005. The iPhone only came out in 2007. We came out with these technologies between 2005 and 2008. Back then, we had Genie. Today they have Alexa and I don’t know what everybody else calls theirs.  Yeah. We had Genie. Genie would talk to you. I mean, I’m not just saying it. Please go watch the videos. We have them. So you would just talk to the car, and the car would do everything for you. We came up with a device that initially you could install as an aftermarket stereo in the car. Basically, it would connect all the sensors in the car to the outside world. This was the very first time. As a matter of fact, internet connectivity in the car is my technology. Every single car in the world since 2014 has been connected to the internet, and that’s my technology, my patent, and my license. Of course, I’m not getting much money from it. Unfortunately, I’ve kind of been robbed on that. But at least I can brag about it—that’s our technology. So yeah, we brought a whole bunch of technologies to market. My vision back then was to make the car robust enough to drive without a driver.  That’s happening now.  It’s happening now. As a matter of fact, we had a car that we put our system into, and we were demonstrating it. And again, there are hundreds of videos about that technology that you can find on the internet. As a matter of fact, we were on PBS for nine months in 27 countries talking about future cars, and that video is also out there. So that was in 2010. They had a half-hour program with my company and with me about future cars. And everything we said, we had the basis for it, and it happened.  So, Allen, if you had a magic wand and you could wish for anything to happen in your business, what would that be? So as I said earlier, I like to be more focused now. I’m very spread out with the business—not only with the technical side of things, but also with the business side of things. I really want to get away from the business side and just focus on the technology. That’s what I enjoy more. I do the business side because I have no choice. That’s part of the work, right? But I would like to get to the point where I can focus only on technology, and other people can worry about the other things. So that’s my goal.  Okay. So if someone is listening to this and they would like to be like you, what would you advise them? Let’s say they are 20 years old and they want to grow up and be an inventor, come up with solutions, work in different industries, and solve big problems. What’s the path? What would you tell them?  So first of all, don’t be like me, that’s for sure. Honestly, you’ve got to enjoy life more than I do. And I do enjoy life. Again, I have different hobbies. I do different sports. I ski, I bike, and those are my hobbies, right? Most importantly, again, we talked about this at the beginning. You’ve got to like what you do. And doing business is not easy. Don’t expect to get into it and have everything work out. Usually, by default, everything goes wrong. So that’s normal. It used to bother me. It used to make me upset, nervous, and all that. But over the last seven to ten years, I learned that things happen, and you just have to resolve them and go through them. Bad things can happen. Good things can happen. It’s all part of the mix. You’ve got to have a very strong personality. Generally, a good percentage of people go paycheck to paycheck, and it’s mental—it’s in their mind. They make a lot of money. They make $100,000 every paycheck. But if you get a paycheck, your mind is like, “Okay, my next paycheck is coming two weeks from now, then another one two weeks after that,” right? And if those two weeks come and you don’t get your paycheck, they go nuts. They go crazy. So if you’re like that, you cannot go into business. In business, it’s all about failure and success. If you’re lucky, that’s a different story. I can go buy a lottery ticket, and only one person out of millions wins. That’s luck. That’s different.  But then they lose it all. Lottery winners tend to lose it. Within a year, they’re broke.  Yeah, that’s a different story, of course. What I’m saying is that, yeah, some people get lucky. That’s the exception. Don’t compare yourself to that. Don’t go after that.  Don’t count on it.  Doing business is usually a challenge, no matter what. So you’ve got to have a very strong personality.  So yeah, resilience is everything. Well, that’s wonderful. So if someone would like to learn more about SunMan Engineering, or they want to connect with you, what should they do and where should they go? Yeah, the best thing is to please visit the website, which is sunmantechnology.com. There is a contact form there, and you can contact us. We’d be happy to get in touch with you and see how we can help.  Okay, fantastic. Well, Allen Nejah, the CEO and chief engineer of SunMan Engineering, and the inventor of many products in different industries, including InfiniGear, which is going to revolutionize transmissions. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your insights and wisdom. And those of you who are listening, if you enjoyed this, make sure you subscribe and follow us because every week I bring on an amazing entrepreneur to talk with you. Thanks for coming, Allen, and thanks for listening. Important Links: Allen's LinkedIn Allen's website

Nurturing Financial Freedom
Diversification: Domestic vs International Equities

Nurturing Financial Freedom

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2026 29:05


In this episode, we look at a question many investors are asking right now: why own international stocks when U.S. stocks have done so well for so long? We start with the reality behind the question. Over the past decade, the S&P 500 has far outpaced developed international markets, and that gap has made investors wonder whether international exposure still matters. Ed explains that this skepticism is understandable. Many large U.S. companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon, already sell products around the world and benefit from global growth. That makes it easy to think a U.S. stock portfolio already provides enough global exposure. But the other side of the issue is concentration. The U.S. market now represents roughly 60 to 65 percent of global market capitalization, which means a U.S. only investor is choosing to leave out about 35 to 40 percent of the global stock market. Now, this is not an anti U.S. argument. U.S. companies remain dominant, innovative, and important. The point is that diversification asks whether it makes sense to concentrate entirely in one country, even one as strong as the United States. The discussion then turns to history. Alex explains that market leadership is never permanent, even though it often feels permanent in the moment. Investors are shaped by what they have recently experienced. Today, many younger investors have only known an environment where U.S. equities beat international markets. That can make diversification feel unnecessary. But in earlier periods, international stocks, emerging markets, and even fixed income led for meaningful stretches of time. The lesson is not that international stocks are guaranteed to outperform next. The lesson is that no one knows what will lead next. Alex describes diversification as an exercise in humility. We do not diversify because we know what is going to happen. We diversify because we do not know. Trying to build a portfolio around yesterday's winners can turn investing into performance chasing. That may work for a while, but history shows that trends change, valuations shift, currencies move, and leadership rotates. Our main takeaway is that diversification can feel frustrating during long periods when one asset class dominates. But its purpose is not to win every year. Its purpose is to build a portfolio that can handle many different market environments over time. International exposure remains part of that discipline because it adds different currencies, economies, industries, demographics, and market cycles to a long term investment plan. You can always email Alex and Ed at info@birchrunfinancial.com or give them a call at 484-395-2190.Or visit them on the web at https://www.birchrunfinancial.com/Alex and Ed's Book: Mastering The Money Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Money-Mind-Thinking-Personal/dp/1544530536 Any opinions are those of Ed Lambert Alex Cabot, financial advisors, RJFS, and Jon Gay, and not necessarily those of RJFS or Raymond James. The information contained in this report does not purport to be a complete description of the securities, markets, or developments referred to in this material. There is no assurance any of the trends mentioned will continue or forecasts will occur. The information has been obtained from sources considered to be reliable, but Raymond James does not guarantee that the foregoing material is accurate or complete. Any information is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision and does not constitute a recommendation. The examples throughout this material are for illustrative purposes only. Raymond James does not provide tax or legal services. Please discuss these matters with the appropriate professional. Diversification and asset allocation do not ensure a profit or protect against a loss. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. CDs are insured by the FDIC and offer a fixed rate of return, whereas the return and principal value of investment securities fluctuate with changes in market conditions. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index of 500 widely held stocks that is generally considered representative of the U.S. Stock Market. Keep in mind that individuals cannot invest directly in any index, and index performance does not include transaction costs or other fees, which will affect actual investment performance. Individual investor's results will vary. This information is not intended as a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any security referred to herein. Future investment performance cannot be guaranteed, investment yields will fluctuate with market conditions. International investing involves special risks, including currency fluctuations, differing financial accounting standards, and possible political and economic volatility. There is an inverse relationship between interest rate movements and bond prices. Generally, when interest rates rise, bond prices fall and when interest rates fall, bond prices generally rise. Investing in small cap stocks generally involves greater risks, and therefore, may not be appropriate for every investor. The prices of small company stocks may be subject to more volatility than those of large company stocks. Securities offered through Raymond James Financial Services, Inc. Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through Raymond James Financial Services Advisors, Inc. Birch Run Financial is not a registered broker/dealer and is independent of Raymond James Financial Services. Birch Run Financial is located at 595 E Swedesford Rd, Ste 360, Wayne PA 19087 and can be reached at 484-395-2190. Any rating is not intended to be an endorsement, or any way indicative of the advisors' abilities to provide investment advice or management. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only.Links are being provided for information purposes only. Raymond James is not affiliated with and does not endorse, authorize, or sponsor any of the listed websites or their respective sponsors.Raymond James is not responsible for the content of any website or the collection or use of information regarding any website's users or members. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Gaggle: An Arizona politics podcast
What Mark Lamb's scandal means for the future of CD5

The Gaggle: An Arizona politics podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2026 24:24


Former Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb is running for Congress with the coveted endorsement from President Donald Trump. Generally, this is a sure fire way to win the election. But Lamb is facing an uphill battle after an Arizona Republic investigation found him at the center of multiple controversies. This previously low-suspense race to replace Congressman Andy Biggs, who vacated his seat to run for governor, has turned on its head weeks before primary voting begins. This week on The Gaggle, we are joined by the two Republic reporters who broke this story. They join the show to walk us through what their investigation found and what the future of CD 5 could look like. Email us! thegaggle@arizonarepublic.com Leave us a voicemail: 602-444-0804 Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tik Tok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Guest: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Gersony, Robert Anglen Hosts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ron Hansen⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Stephanie Murray Producer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amanda Luberto⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Weather With Enthusiasm
Morning Briefing — Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | Zmanim, NWS Chicago and More

Weather With Enthusiasm

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2026 10:41 Transcription Available


Morning Briefing — Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | Zmanim, NWS Chicago and MoreWest Rogers Park, Chicago (ZIP 60645) | Weather With Enthusiasm — Kol Simcha Productions═══════════════════════════════════════════HEBREW DATE & PARSHA═══════════════════════════════════════════Hebrew Date: 24 Sivan 5786Parsha: Beha'alotcha• Aharon HaKohen kindles the Menorah• Journeys of the Jewish people in the wilderness• Laws of Pesach Sheni — the second Passover opportunity═══════════════════════════════════════════TODAY'S ZMANIM — ZIP 60645 (West Rogers Park)═══════════════════════════════════════════Alos HaShachar (Dawn): 3:22 AMMisheyakir (Earliest Talis/Tefillin): 4:00 AM (lenient) / 4:10 AM (machmir)Netz HaChama (Sunrise): 5:15 AMSof Zman Shma (GRA): 9:02 AMSof Zman Tefila: 10:18 AMChatzos (Halachic Midday): 12:50 PMMincha Gedola (Earliest Mincha): 1:28 PMShkiah (Sunset): 8:25 PM═══════════════════════════════════════════WEATHER SUMMARY — NWS CHICAGO (LOT)═══════════════════════════════════════════Issued: 3:12 AM CDT Tuesday June 9, 2026 | Forecaster: BorchardtToday: Mostly cloudy to partly cloudy, mid-upper 80s. Isolated afternoon showers possible, mainly south. PWATs near 2" (tropical moisture). Generally manageable.Tonight: MUCAPE >3,000 J/kg, shear >30kt — Level 1 of 5 severe storm risk. Isolated storms possible as convective cap weakens. 30-40% PoP.Wednesday (BIG CONCERN): Two storm windows: - 2–6 PM: EML breaks, possible supercells north of I-88. MUCAPE >5,000 J/kg, shear 25-30kt. SPC Level 2-3 of 5. - 6 PM–midnight: Cold front squall line, training/flash flood risk, tornado risk possible. Heat indices approaching/locally exceeding 100°F. Upper 80s–low 90s.Thursday: SPC Level 3 of 5. MUCAPE >3,000 J/kg, 0-3km SRH >300 J/kg. All-hazard threat: tornadoes, destructive winds, hail, flash flooding. Hottest day south of I-80.Friday–Saturday: Relief. Surface high, upper 70s–80°F.Next week: Expansive troughing, cool, periodic storm chances.═══════════════════════════════════════════WEATHER HISTORY — JUNE 9═══════════════════════════════════════════1972 Black Hills / Rapid City Flood — June 9, 1972Nearly stationary thunderstorms dumped up to 15 inches of rain in 6 hours over the Black Hills of South Dakota. Canyon Lake Dam failed at 10:45 PM, sending a wall of water through Rapid City. 238 killed, 3,057 injured, 1,335 homes destroyed, $165 million in damage (~$1.23 billion today).Source: NOAA NWS Rapid City | USGS═══════════════════════════════════════════FAMILY ACTIVITIES — CHICAGO METRO, JUNE 9═══════════════════════════════════════════1. Brookfield Zoo — Dinos Exhibit | 3300 Golf Rd, Brookfield | Open today | Admission required | brookfieldzoo.org2. Kids Bowl Free Summer Program | Participating bowling centers | FREE for kids daily | kidsbowlfree.com3. Lincoln Park Zoo | 2400 N Cannon Dr, Chicago | Open daily | FREE admission4. Chicago Cultural Center | 78 E Washington St | Open daily | FREE5. TOMORROW (June 10): Gallagher Way Outdoor Movie — Zootopia 2 | Next to Wrigley Field═══════════════════════════════════════════TOMORROW'S ZMANIM — ZIP 60645 (June 10, 2026)═══════════════════════════════════════════Alos HaShachar: 3:22 AMMisheyakir: 4:00 AM (lenient) / 4:10 AM (machmir)Netz HaChama (Sunrise): 5:14 AMSof Zman Shma (GRA): 9:02 AMSof Zman Tefila: 10:18 AMChatzos: 12:50 PMMincha Gedola: 1:28 PMShkiah (Sunset): 8:25 PM═══════════════════════════════════════════NOTE: No Shabbos times today — this is a Tuesday episode.Next Shabbos: June 13, 2026 | Parshas Sh'lach | Mevarchim Chodesh TamuzRosh Chodesh Tamuz: June 15–16, 2026═══════════════════════════════════════════Weather With Enthusiasm is ranked #10 on FeedSpot's "20 Best Weather Podcasts" list (updated June 3, 2026).New morning briefings every day at 7 AM local time. Historical weather episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.Produced by Kol Simcha Productions | Chicago, Illinois#weather #zmanim #Chicago #NWS #morningbriefing #forecast #Jewishtimes #WestRogersPark #WeatherWithEnthusiasmBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/weather-with-enthusiasm--4911017/support.Weather with Enthusiasm is produced by Kol Simcha Productions.New episodes drop daily (B'N)— a morning forecast at 7 AM and historical deep dives Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact: kolsimchaproductions@outlook.comHistorical content is thoroughly researched and factually verified. After it has been factually verified it often will say so in the description. Should you find any mistakes, please email kolsimchaproductions@outlook.com so we can look into it and correct it. Not affiliated with any government agency or academic institution. Presented for educational and entertainment purposes — with meaning.Support the show — exclusive bonus episodes available to subscribers for just $2/month at spreaker.com/organization/kol-simcha

Authentic Talks 2.0
Episode 303 | Removing Energetic Blocks: The 3 Areas That Are Keeping You Stuck | Host: Shanta Generally

Authentic Talks 2.0

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2026 35:02 Transcription Available


In this powerful episode of Authentic Talks 2.0, we explore three hidden blocks that may be keeping you from the life you desire: unworthiness, fear, and resistance to receiving.Through relatable insights for women, men, and teens, you'll discover how these limiting beliefs show up in everyday life and learn how to begin releasing them. The episode concludes with a powerful affirmation and reflective journal prompts designed to help you identify what's holding you back, uncover its roots, and step into greater confidence, worthiness, and possibility.If you're ready to move beyond self-doubt and embrace the life meant for you, this episode is for you.Host:Instagram: @AuthenticTalks2.0 Email: AuthenticShanta@gmail.com Website: www.AuthenticTalks2.com Facebook: AuthenticTalks2Youtube: @authentictalkswithshanta7489 #AuthenticTalkswithshanta #MindsetTransformation #HealingJourney #KnowYourWorthBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/authentic-talks-2-0-with-shanta--4116672/support.

Wizard of Ads
Make More Money by Reducing the Friction

Wizard of Ads

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2026 5:34


Business owners ask, “How can we get customers to do what we want them to do?”And then they create an app and insist that you download it.How many apps have you been told that you need to download? (Look at your phone and count them.)Generally speaking, retail apps are good because they reduce the friction of your shopping experience. Service provider apps are bad because they increase the friction of your service experience.How many times have you had to reset your password?Have you ever had an app demand the answer to a question that sent you on a mission to find the answer?How many times have you been presented with a pick-list that did not include your need?Do you sometimes feel like you are making things easier for the service provider instead of them making things easier for you?Six different service apps have recently increased my frustration to the point that I am now searching for six new service providers to replace them.I was not surprised when I learned that all six of those companies are in decline.And I'll wager that none of them knows why.Operational efficiency is a worthy objective. Just be careful that you are not shifting your workload onto the shoulders of your customer.Every designer of a service app believes their app is going to be user-friendly, easy to understand, frustration-free, and save the customer a lot of time.In reality, these apps are felt to be unfriendly and frustrating.We both know that the objective is not to save time for us, but for us to save time for the service provider. They have established neat little cubicles to meet their own needs, and now they are telling us to crawl into each little cubicle and do what we are told.This technology is not working for me. It is forcing me to work for them.Wealthy superstar business owners do not ask, “How can we get customers to do what we want them to do?”Superstars ask, “How can we do what customers wish we could do?”Brian Scudamore, Dewey Jenkins, and Aaron Gaynor are superstar builders of service businesses.Each of these superstars has elevated their service business to become a shining star in the dark night of every customer.These men say:“How can we make it effortless and frustration-free for the customer?”“We have to find more ways to make it easier for people to do business with us!”“How can we delight the customer in ways they did not expect?”“We will always have a solution for every customer. No one will be left behind. We never walk away from a person who needs us.”Brian Scudamore built 1-800-GOT-JUNK into the World's Largest Junk Removal Service by making every problem his problem.“We make junk disappear. All you have to do is point.”For many years Brian has been pondering the question, “How can we do what customers wish we could do?”Brian identified four big things that his customers wished were possible, but that were clearly impossible.Last month Brian Scudamore figured out how to do all four of those things!When he makes his big announcement, I expect his company to quickly double in size.I would tell you to buy stock in his company, but I can't.Brian owns the whole thing. No investors, stockholders, or board of directors.Now you know how miracles are made.Roy H. WilliamsNOTE FROM INDY: I put an Aaron Gaynor radio ad on the first page of the rabbit hole for you. – Indy BeagleSmall-business growth creates a frustrating paradox: the more a business succeeds, the more overwhelmed the owner becomes. Small-business coach Jason Rosado helps small-business owners strengthen their teams, and create more free time for their owners.In this week's episode of MondayMorningRadio Jason tells roving reporter Rotbart how a business owner can identify whether their business truly needs more customers — or whether it is operational inefficiencies and leadership inflexibility that are preventing growth. If you could use some practical techniques for reducing stress and preventing burnout, check out Jason Rosado at MondayMorningRadio.com

Financial Clarity for Doctors
The Stock Market Will Not Do What You Expect

Financial Clarity for Doctors

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2026 31:55


In this episode of Financial Clarity for Doctors, hosts Corey Janoff and Rachelle Vanderzanden talk through some stock market noise.  It's hard to know when to listen to headlines and what information to heed.  What we listen to as investors and what the movers and shakers listen to may be very different. Discussion in this episode include: The focus of retail investors, including local news, conflicts, prices close to home, and talking heads like Ray Dalio. For individual investors, it's hard to look past the noise to see if the fundamentals are sound for investing. The focus of institutional investors including earnings/profits, interest rates, and taxes. Generally, if companies are making money, big investors are happy to hold stock in those companies despite other happenings in the world. Our expectation of how the stock market will perform and how it does perform are often very different. As always, focus on your long-term strategy!  Trying to use information in the short-term to make decisions about your long-term investments can often be counterproductive.  You can end up selling due to fear and then missing out on gains.  No ones wants that! For more financial planning tips from Corey and Rachelle, find them on social media! LinkedIn: @CoreyJanoff; Instagram: @CoreyJanoff and @VanderzandenRachelle; and Twitter: @CoreyJanoffCFP Discussions in this show should not be construed as specific recommendations or investment advice. Always consult with your investment professional before making important investment decisions. Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, a registered investment advisor, Member FINRA/SIPC.  Finity Group, LLC is a separate entity from LPL Financial.  Citations: Dalio, Ray.  New York Times. A Legendary Investor on How to Prevent America's Coming ‘Heart Attack'. Published May 7, 2026. Earnings reports pulled from Google AI Overview.

Gnostic Insights
Gnostic Pentacost

Gnostic Insights

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2026 28:50


Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week I was listening to one of the radio preachers I like to listen to and I caught a sermon on the Pentecost, and I realized I had at that point a Gnostic insight that Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, when it infused the disciples in the upper room—that is the coming of the Third Order of Powers released by the Christ after his resurrection—that the Third Order Powers are the “anointing of the Holy Spirit.” So quickly, let’s look at the Acts of the Apostles book out of the New Testament, Chapter 2, which is what we now call Pentecost. And when the day arrived that completed the fifty days after Passover, they were all gathered together in one place, and suddenly there came a noise, like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them to utter. Now dwelling in Jerusalem, there were devout Judeans from every nation under the sky, and on the advent of this noise, the multitude gathered and were confused, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and astounded, saying, look, are not all of those who speak Galileans? And how is it that each one of us hears his own language, the languages in which we were raised? And all were amazed and entirely at a loss, saying to one another, what does this portend? But others, ridiculing them, said, ah, they’re full of sweet new wine. But Peter, standing up along with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them all. Judean men and all of you staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and lend your ears to my words, for these men are not drunk, as you suppose, as it is the third hour of the day. Rather, this is what was declared through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall happen, says God, that I will pour forth from my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall dream dreams.” [Hart's New Testament] Pentecost by el Greco Now, it’s a much longer passage, and it’s very thrilling and exciting, but we don’t have time today to go into it. Perhaps we’ll speak about this in more depth very soon. But that is the first Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon humanity. And I’m going to talk about that today to clear up that confusion, because I’ve always had a bit of a confusion over what we speak of as the Holy Spirit dwelling in us in a Christian manner, or the Holy Spirit coming like tongues of fire in the Pentecost story of the upper room in the book of Acts, yet we all have the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within every cell of our bodies and throughout our entire organism. All of the Second Order powers are infused with the power of God. So what is the Holy Spirit then? And now I understand the distinction between the infusion of the Third Order of Powers and the infusion of the Second Order of Powers. You see, we are Second Order Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are First Order Powers. They have their place Above. We are their fruit. We are their spores. (And I actually ran across a radio preacher, of all things, again last week, saying that the original word for fruit as used in the New Testament is spore. And I’m like, yes, that is exactly what I’ve been saying. So that was another cool Gnostic insight that came by way of a Christian radio preacher. So you can never tell what you’re going to hear on Christian radio.) So, we are the spores of the First Order of Powers. We are their fruit. We are their children. We are the Second Order of Powers, and that is all living things in the cosmos. Everything that moves around, everything that’s soft and squishy, the meat, as I like to say, as opposed to the mud, which is the realm of the Demiurge—the rocks and minerals, the molecules and atoms. But the Third Order of Powers is the army of the Christ. We’ve spoken of that often. We’ve had three recent episodes about the indwelling of the Christ. For example, The Gnostic Redemption of the Nag Hammadi from May 29th, 2026, Army of the Christ, May 16th, 2026, and Understanding Gnosticism: The Path to Inner Knowledge from May 9th, 2026. These all have to do with the coming of the Third Order of Powers. And the coming of the Third Order of Powers didn’t come to Earth until Christ walked the Earth in the form of a human, and that is Jesus the Christ. He’s the only one who has ever claimed that “I and my Father are One.” Jesus is not the same as Buddha. Jesus is not the same as Muhammad or any other prophet. Jesus is not simply a good teacher or an exemplar of morality and ethics. If you think that, as many modern theologians do—the postmodern theologians, the deconstructionists—they have reduced the power of Jesus to that of a prophet or a teacher. And even people I hear, strangely enough, out there on YouTube, claiming that Jesus was a fraud—that there is no such thing as anything that happened in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. That’s an absurdity that is being promulgated by non-believers. If you are a believer in the Father, then you are a believer in the Christ, because Christ was the emissary of the Father to Earth to bring the correcting algorithm, I like to call it, to Earth to patch up our Second Order Power that has been forgotten. We’re born with it. We fully instantiate it within our bodies, but we’ve overlaid it with all kinds of junk, karma and memes from our environment that cloud our gnosis, cloud our ability to perceive the power of the Aeons within us. Christ came, the Third Order of Powers, the army of the Christ, to help us to remember, to remind us of our Second Order power, to remind us of where we come from, to remind us of the Father and the Aeons above. I took notes from the Pentecost sermon I listened to, and I’m going to represent these notes as a Gnostic teaching for you, because once you have the gnosis working in you, once you’ve come to terms with Christ and the Father and the Aeons and the gnosis that you were born with, once you begin to remember your inherent transcendence, then you can read the New Testament with eyes wide open. You can understand the mysteries of the New Testament much better than typical Christians do, because they’re trapped in a formula that is derivative of the early Catholics that had stripped the gnosis out of the Bible in the first place. So we must free ourselves from the doctrine, but not free ourselves of the gnosis. Tricky. The occasion known as Pentecost was when Jesus had been crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then ascended back up above into the Fullness—above the Fullness, because he’s the king of all. And he had promised that he would send a helper—to not worry. He had told his disciples, don’t worry, I’m sending you a helper to help you bring the gnosis to the world, essentially is what he said. This was also promised in the Old Testament. And here I’m going to read you a very important verse out of the Old Testament and translate it for you into Gnostic terms. The verse is Ezekiel 36:24—28, where God promises to cleanse and put a new heart and a new spirit into believers. Now it’s tricky when going all the way back to the Old Testament, because the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, well, it’s pretty much equivalent to the Demiurge. And that’s very dicey, very tricky. The ego of the God of the Old Testament, the ego of Jehovah, is when Jehovah speaks in very egoistic terms about itself and about obedience and the law because, remember, Jehovah is law-bound. The Demiurge doesn’t remember; the Demiurge has forgotten its origins above. When this radio preacher referenced Ezekiel 36, I went to what’s called the online Bible Gateway. That’s a resource you can use. And you type in any phrase or any citation, such as Ezekiel 36:24—28, and it will give you all of the various translations. And you can choose which translation you read or you read them all. Well, since this was a Hebrew exhortation, I decided to use the Orthodox Jewish Bible, which does have a lot of Hebrew in it. So then we have to go into Hebrew translations, but that was a good exercise as well. Oh, to go back and clear up confusion about how to read the Old Testament—if the Old Testament is largely demiurgic, it’s basically when Jehovah is speaking that’s demiurgic. But the prophets were in touch with their gnosis. The prophets were talking to the God Above All Gods. They weren’t talking to Jehovah. They were talking to the God Above All Gods. So their prophecies are coming from above. That seems a pretty simple way to understand it. So the histories are one thing. That’s the histories of the of the Hebrews who were the people of Jehovah. Jehovah was their tribal god. And then there are the prophets who were speaking to the God Above All Gods and giving the Hebrews instructions from the God Above All Gods. These are higher instructions than Jehovah. You see, Jehovah doesn’t remember that it’s a fallen part of an Aeon. Here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about that Aeon as Logos. Many other Gnostics call it Sophia. I prefer Logos. That’s out of the Tripartite Tractate. Logos split apart when he fell and abandoned the chaos down below. And the Demiurge is part of that chaos. So the Demiurge put this world in order, formed the heavens and the Earth in a godlike manner, because he had all the blueprints. He had the remembrance of how things went together, but he didn’t have the remembrance of the Father or the remembrance of his better ascended Self, that being Logos, or the Aeons out of which he fell, the Fullness out of which he came. The Demiurge woke up down here in chaos and remembered that things should not be chaos, wanted them to go back into an orderly manner, had the blueprints of Paradise, essentially, that’s how you can put it, and formed this Earth. But this is an imitation. This is a deficiency of Paradise, and it’s especially deficient because there’s no love here. The minerals do not know love. The mud does not know love. Love doesn’t come from the bottom up, from the Demiurge up, from Jehovah up. Love, consciousness, comes from the God Above All Gods down to us in the form of a Second Order Powers. But we have forgotten, and the Demiurge forgot. So here is a word from one of the prophets who was in touch with the God Above All Gods, giving assurance that salvation would come, that remembrance would come. The Demiurge doesn’t block the prophets because it egotistically thinks that the prophets are speaking of it. You know, the Demiurge takes personally being God, but he’s mistaken in that. He’s a lesser god, the god of this cosmos, but the God Above All Gods is the one who speaks through the prophets. Here’s Ezekiel 36:24—26, from the New King James Version. For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Or as The Orthodox Jewish Bible puts it, A lev chadásh also will I give you, and a ruach chadasháh will I put within you; and I will take away the lev ha-éven (stony heart) out of your basár, and I will give you a lev basár. Now, when it speaks of I will give you a new heart, in Hebrew that is lev chadásh. Lev means inner self, the seat of will and moral character. Chadásh means anew, fresh, renewed, restored. So lev chadásh refers to a renewed inner disposition. A transformed moral center. A recreated will aligned with the Father rather than with stubbornness or idolatry. And when it speaks of and put a new spirit within you, in Hebrew that word, the new spirit, is ruach chadasháh. And it means a new spirit, an awakened pneuma. And pneuma is a Gnostic term. That is the spiritual part of us. Our One Self. So the ruach chadasháh is the spirit. Ruach is spirit, breath, animating force, inner vitality. That’s what it means. Chadasháh means fresh, new, renewed. So in Ezekiel, ruach chadasháh means a new animating principle. A renewed inner drive or spiritual vitality placed within the person. You see where I’m going with this? This is the Third Order of Powers. A new motivating force that empowers obedience and life. This cleansing of a new heart and putting a new spirit within you, ruach chadasháh. It means stripping away the meme shroud is how I generally refer to it in the Simple Explanation. Peeling off all those layers of confusion that obscure our originating Fullness. That’s the filthiness. It’s not the original sin. We aren’t born with original sin. We are born as Second Order Powers, much loved out of the first order powers of the Fullness of God. We forget when we come down here into this material world created by the Demiurge. And then we plug into this culture around us. Think of the media and the social media and all of the lies and confusions that are spread, both purposefully meant to mislead you and confuse you, and just accidentally because people make mistakes and people say the wrong things, even when they think they’re saying the right things. So that’s the filthiness. And the idols— these are the things that you cling to. Generally this narcissistic age we live in is an age of idols, but the idols that we worship aren’t little statues of gods. They are our exercise equipment and our bags of makeup and our, well, of course they can be influencers and they can be movie stars and television actors and musicians and sports figures and politicians. Those can be your idols if you treat them as idols, if you idolize them, if you go all weak in the knees and do anything they say. But we also have our own idols in the form of the things that we cling to and pile up around us that we buy, got to have this, got to have that, got to have this, got to have that. These are idols. So this is a promise to cleanse us from that. In other words, to strip away your meme shroud and let the Fullness shine forth from within you. But it goes beyond that, because it says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. And that new heart is the lev chadásh, which is new spirit. And the new heart is lev basár, which literally means in Hebrew, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche. Oh, see, our psyche, that is not our pneuma—that's a Gnostic term as well. We have our pneuma, which is our spiritual Fullness. We have our psyche, which is our psychological aspect—our ego lives there. And we have our hylic, which is the material to which we are bonded in this material world. So this passage promises to put a new heart within us, a lev basár, a soft, receptive psyche; that is to soften our hearts, because they’re hardened by the world and by the memes we cling to. It says, furthermore, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh. And the heart of stone in Hebrew is lev ha-éven, meaning heart of stone, or a hardened psyche. Going to remove that heart of stone, which is very interesting, because of course, I say that the hard rocky places, the stones are demiurgic. That’s the material level, that’s the elemental level. So the heart of stone is the demiurgic heart that we have put inside of us, that we’re bonded to. But this passage wants to turn it into a new heart, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche, as we were originally born with—lev basár. So it says, I will give you that new heart and put a new spirit within you, and take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. The heart of stone, lev ha-éven. And the purifying waters are what do it. I will sprinkle clean water on you. In Hebrew, that was literally mayim tehorím, meaning clean, purifying waters. Jesus spoke of the purifying waters. In the New Testament, in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, a Pharisee named Nicodemus had sneaked out one night to speak privately with Jesus. He didn’t want anyone to know. And Nicodemus said to Jesus, Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform unless God is within him. And in reply, Jesus said to him, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless someone is born from Above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus says to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Jesus replied, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed, because I’ve told you it is necessary for you to be born from Above. [Hart's New Testament] Jesus is speaking of the same water, the water of the spirit, that cleanses us and allows us to be born again from Above. Later on in the book of John, Chapter 7, verse 37, Jesus stood up and said loudly, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts living streams of waters will flow. Now he said this in regard to the spirit, whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament] And this is speaking of the Holy Spirit—what we call the Holy Spirit—because of course we have spirit, we’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us, the First Order of Powers. But he’s talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that comes after Jesus is “glorified.” And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living Above, just as we will all be living Above, in a glorified body, in the presence of the Father. Now, the promise that Jesus referred to—he was quoting out of the Old Testament—something that all of the listeners in his audience already knew. And it’s from Isaiah 12:3 that says, Therefore with joy will you draw water from the wells of salvation. The water that is being drawn is this water that’s being referred to, that we’ve been discussing, out of Ezekiel 36:24—28. That is the living water, the mayim tehorím—the Holy Spirit that bathes us now within and without. We draw the living water of the Third Order Powers into us. This is why accepting the mission of the Christ into your innermost being is essential, because there’s no other way to wash away the memes, the obscurations of the world around us that confuses us and causes us to forget. We’re born with a noble nature. We’re born as Second Order Powers, directly from the Fullness above, but we get lost in the confusion of this world that is created and run by the Demiurge. We forget our ethereal origins. We forget about the Father. We forget about the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The spirit that we’re born with becomes smothered, smothered by the worldly memes we cling to and that cling to us. The living water that comes into our new softened heart can only come when you relinquish the ego that is causing you to hold on tightly to those memes, all those false promises that the world gives. They will not save you. They will not make you happy. They might give you a momentary piece of pleasure when something arrives in the box from Amazon on the front porch, but as soon as you’ve used it, it’s just another thing. But the living water never dies. It’s living waters from the Father flowing all the way downstream through the Son, through the Fullnesses, and only through Christ inside of us can we be washed, baptized from within to loosen the hold. So, the lev chadásh, renew your psychic heart, captures the same teaching that the Tripartite Tractate teaches—that the psyche must be reoriented and made stable. The ruach chadashá, awakening within you the spirit that is from Above, is the same as activating the pneumatic seed, as we say in Gnosticism, not a moral reform. The lev basár, a living heart, soft, able to receive the light, receptive, this is the Tripartite Tractate’s softened, harmonized psyche, that can receive the pneumatic imprint of Christ. And the divine seed will rise within you and rule in peace is what the Tripartite Tractate says of the pneuma ruling through the psyche once integration occurs. So, this is the Gnostic paraphrase then of Ezekiel 36:26—28: I will renew your ego's psychic heart, and I will awaken within you the pneumatic spirit—the One Self that flows from above. I will remove the heart hardened by the archons and the never-ending war, and I will restore your Second Order heart, soft, receptive, and able to receive the light. Through this new heart and new spirit, the divine seed of the Christ within you will rise and rule in peace. That’s just another way we could say the phrase in Ezekiel, in a more Gnostic way. It’s a bath, loosens the hold, washes away those memes, those sins, as the church likes to call it. But it’s more than just your mistakes and your problems. It’s all the stuff that we have around us. That is the job of the Christ, to open our eyes to our original Second Order power, to live within us, to correct our mistakes, to correct our faulty algorithms, to protect us from this demiurgic immersion that we find ourselves in, in this material world. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represents all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. Step aside. Take your ego off the throne. Take the Demiurge off the throne, if you’ve enthroned it. Put down your idols. Push away your possessions, at least long enough to allow the Third Order Powers to come in. Ask the Christ to come in and wash you with the Holy Spirit. Invite the Holy Spirit, the army of the Third Order of Powers, into your organism, literally, and it will cleanse you. It will wash you. Walk in the Spirit of God. Let your eyes be opened to the truth. We’ll talk more about this again. Until then, God bless us all, and onward and upward. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Key Chapters in the Bible
6/4 Isaiah 1 - Repent & Return

Key Chapters in the Bible

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2026 12:13


Today we begin our study of Isaiah! Isaiah is an incredibly important book in the Bible and today we'll give a quick overview of the book of Isaiah and his message to us repentance and faithfulness to our faithful God. Join us! DISCUSSION AND STUDY QUESTIONS: 1.    The name "Isaiah" means "The Lord is salvation". According to the podcast, why is that a great summary of the Book of Isaiah? How does God's covenant relate to the theme that the Lord is our salvation? 2.    Based on the podcast, what is a prophet? Likewise, what is the "office" of a prophet? Do you remember what the podcast said was the difference between "foretelling" and "forthtelling"? What are those differences? What were these differences for?  3.    Verse 1 tells us that Isaiah prophesied during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. Generally speaking, what was going on during this time?  4.    Read over verse 2. What does this verse mean? Why do you think that the Lord has Isaiah begin on this point here?  5.    In verse 3, who is the "Israel" that is being spoken about? What do we learn about them from this verse?  6.    Read over verses 4 to 6. In verse 4, how were the people weighed down in iniquity? In verses 5 & 6, what was the result of their sin?  7.    Verse 9 & 10 makes the amazing comparison between Israel and Sodom and Gomorrah. From what you know about Genesis 19, what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah? Why is verses 7 to 9 warning the people that they are at risk of the same judgment as those infamous cities?  8.    In verses 11 to 15, what religious acts were rejected by the Lord? Why did He reject them? In our world today, how might a person have a similar mindset in their religion and likewise be rejected by the Lord?  9.    Clearly Israel has been rebelling against the Lord and they are about to face His judgment. Yet the Lord gives them a path of repentance in verses 16 & 17. What does He tell them to do? Why? What would it take for them to carry out this kind of righteous pursuit from now on?  10.    Verse 18 is a heartwarming verse reflecting God's heart for His people. What does He tell them? In verse 19, what does He promise them?  11.    Verses 21 to 23 return to the theme of Israel's sin. What sinful things were the people doing? What righteous things were they not doing?  12.    In verse 25 & 26, what is the relationship between God's judgment and their purification? Why would we want to submit to this kind of "refining fire" in our own life?  13.    In verse 27, when God redeems His people, by what means will He redeem them?  14.    In verses 28 to 31, what will be the fate of those who are not redeemed? In light of their sins, why is this fate "just" and deserved?  Check out our Bible Study Guide on the Key Chapters of Genesis! Available on Amazon just in time for the Genesis relaunch in January! To see our dedicated podcast website with access to all our episodes and other resources, visit us at: www.keychapters.org. Find us on all major platforms, or use these direct links: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6OqbnDRrfuyHRmkpUSyoHv Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/366-key-chapters-in-the-bible/id1493571819 YouTube: Key Chapters of the Bible on YouTube. As always, we are grateful to be included in the "Top 100 Bible Podcasts to Follow" from Feedspot.com. Also for regularly being awarded "Podcast of the Day" from PlayerFM. Special thanks to Joseph McDade for providing our theme music.   

The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
427: 15 Life Investments — 10 Daily Choices, 5 Big Moves

The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2026 51:24


The bad habits you didn't pick up. The good habits that you did. The thoughts you chose to hold on to and explore further and the ones you let go. The priorities we set and the long-term dreams we said yes to and gradually stepped toward. Both the simple everyday choices paired with the foundational decisions that require long-range planning and commitment play a role in the quality of our life today and down the road. Generally, we understand this truth, but whether or not we put it into practice depends on how consciously we live our lives. How present we are, how clear-eyed we are (i.e., self-aware), and how brave we are. When it comes to nurturing dreams into materialization, it is first the awareness of where we point our sails of intention, and then the knowledge of which everyday choices will increase the potential for our eventual arrival. Most real, lasting change happens quietly and goes unnoticed until it suddenly seems to appear, but the truth is, it was built over time by our daily choices and big investments. Today, we'll explore 10 everyday, perhaps seemingly mundane and inconsequential choices that actually contribute significantly to a healthier daily life today and tomorrow, along with five significant investments that require serious consideration. All 15 choices will strengthen our well-being and lead us to being able to fulfill our dreams. View the complete Show Notes on The Simply Luxurious Life blog - https://thesimplyluxuriouslife.com/podcast427 

Pursuing God with Gene Appel
Episode 1289: Five Financial Traps Worth Avoiding

Pursuing God with Gene Appel

Play Episode Listen Later May 29, 2026 6:09


Solomon identified five financial traps that quietly keep people stuck. Impulsiveness, buying something you don't need because the deal seemed too good to pass up. Stubbornness, refusing to follow a plan because pride gets in the way. Laziness, skipping responsibility and hoping things work out anyway. Self-indulgence, spending everything on yourself until there's nothing left. And craftiness, chasing get-rich-quick schemes instead of doing the steady work. The answer to why you never seem to have enough almost always comes down to management, not income. Generally, it isn't that you don't have enough. It's what you do have that hasn't been handled well. God wants to bless and multiply what you have, but He can't multiply what you aren't managing faithfully. It all comes down to consistency with what's already in your hands.Pursuing God with Gene Appel is designed to help you pursue God, build community, and unleash compassion. Grounded in Scripture and shaped by Eastside's conviction that God's grace is for everyone, each episode invites you to discover God's presence and activity in your life.

Daily Shower Thoughts
Cats generally make a lot more sounds in movies. | + 25 more...

Daily Shower Thoughts

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2026 6:14


The Daily Shower Thoughts podcast is produced by Klassic Studios. [Promo] Check out the Daily Dad Jokes podcast here: https://dailydadjokespodcast.com/ [Promo] Like the soothing background music and Amalia's smooth calming voice? Then check out "Terra Vitae: A Daily Guided Meditation Podcast" here at our show page [Promo] The Daily Facts Podcast. Get smarter in less than 10 minutes a day. Pod links here Daily Facts website. [Promo] The Daily Life Pro Tips Podcast. Improve your life in less than 10 minutes a day. Pod links here Daily Life Pro Tips website. [Promo] Check out the Get Happy Headlines podcast by my friends, Stella and Mickey. It's a podcast dedicated to bringing you family friendly uplifting stories from around the world. Give it a listen, I know you will like it. Pod links here Get Happy Headlines website. Shower thoughts are sourced from reddit.com/r/showerthoughts Shower Thought credits: WindowAfraid5927, Krostas, MCAmmutseba, TheOddPelican, maestrozeldafan, Asterisk49, disgusting-brother, bigpeepee2000, Iwillnotbeokay, freighter79, Chickypickymakey, IWNotDWYToday_v2, RoosterMiserable1275, the_original_Retro, Imagelessjt, Puff_The_Magic_Scaly, Papi0158, SuperShae, , , UnDeRmYmErCy, Half-rated, 321ggo, tearsaresweat, i-am-froot, _Duality_, misslillotus Podcast links: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZNciemLzVXc60uwnTRx2e Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-shower-thoughts/id1634359309 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/daily-dad-jokes/daily-shower-thoughts iHeart: https://iheart.com/podcast/99340139/ Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a5a434e9-da18-46a7-a434-0437ec49e1d2/daily-shower-thoughts Website: https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/dailyshowerthoughts Social media links Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DailyShowerThoughtsPodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DailyShowerPod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DailyShowerThoughtsPodcast/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dailyshowerthoughtspod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

52 Pearls: Weekly Money Wisdom
Episode 325: From Passion to Pickleball Pioneer: Building a Second Act Business with Christy Howden

52 Pearls: Weekly Money Wisdom

Play Episode Listen Later May 26, 2026 28:21 Transcription Available


What does it look like to turn a hobby into a thriving business — with no roadmap, no industry model to follow, and a drafty warehouse as your starting point? Melissa Joy, CFP®, sits down with Christy Howden, CEO and co-founder of Wolverine Pickleball, to trace an extraordinary entrepreneurial journey from stay-at-home mom to leader of one of the country's first pickleball-centric destination facilities.Christy shares how a 2017 New Year's resolution sparked a business she never could have predicted, and how she and her business partner bootstrapped their way from rented school gyms to a 38,000 square foot facility that has become a community hub for connection, play, and purpose. Along the way, Melissa Joy, CFP®, weighs in on what financial planners can and cannot say about investing in private businesses and why having a frank conversation with your advisor matters more than the answer you get.What You'll LearnHow Christy and her business partner built Wolverine Pickleball from the ground up with sweat equity, community volunteers, and a minimum viable product mindsetWhy 80% of their investors were women and what it means to make a lifestyle investment that overrides professional financial adviceHow Melissa Joy, CFP®, approaches conversations about investing in small businesses and passion projectsThe funding realities female entrepreneurs face and why the statistics around fundraising make building community capital even more importantHow a second act business can emerge from a life transition and why community is often the renewable energy source behind entrepreneurial endurancePractical ways listeners can support small businesses beyond just showing upConnect with Christy: wolverinepickleball.comhttps://www.instagram.com/wolverinepickleball/ https://www.facebook.com/WolverinePickleball/Third-party rankings and recognition from rating services or publications are no guarantee of future investment success. Working with a highly rated advisor does not ensure that a client or prospective client will experience a higher level of performance or results. These ratings should not be construed as an endorsement of the advisor or by any client, nor are they representative of any one client's evaluation. Generally, ratings, rankings, and recognition are based on information prepared and submitted by the advisor. This ranking is based on data as of 12/31/2025. The ranking was released on 02/12/2026. Pearl Planning and Melissa Joy did not pay any compensation to be considered for this rating and does not pay an annual fee for marketing usage of the logo. The methodology used to determine The Michigan 50 Companies to Watch award can be found here: Please visit the ranking methodology page for more info.The previous presentation by PEARL PLANNING was intended for general information purposes only.  No portion of the presentation serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from PEARL PLANNING or any other investment professional of your choosing. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, or any non-investment related or planning services, discussion or content, will be profitable, be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful. Neither PEARL PLANNING's investment adviser registration status, nor any amount of prior experience or success, should be construed that a certain level of results or satisfaction will be achieved if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. PEARL PLANNING is neither a law firm nor accounting firm, and no portion of its services should be construed as legal or accounting advice. No portion of the video content should be construed by a client or prospective client as a guarantee that he/she will experience a certain level of results if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. A copy of PEARL PLANNING's current written disclosure Brochure discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or at https...

Radio Free Mormon
Podcaster Meggan Hayes (Generally Unquotable) Joins the Show!

Radio Free Mormon

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2026 131:52


Bill Reel and RFM are joined this week by Meggan Hayes, host of the “Generally Unquotable” podcast, which features a news report on things Mormon every weekday morning! How does Meggan do it? Where does she get her stories? What are the biggest stories she has covered? These are just some of the things we’ll… Read More »Podcaster Meggan Hayes (Generally Unquotable) Joins the Show!

Mormon Discussions Podcasts – Full Lineup
Podcaster Meggan Hayes (Generally Unquotable) Joins the Show!

Mormon Discussions Podcasts – Full Lineup

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2026 131:52


Bill Reel and RFM are joined this week by Meggan Hayes, host of the “Generally Unquotable” podcast, which features a news report on things Mormon every weekday morning! How does Meggan do it? Where does she get her stories? What are the biggest stories she has covered? These are just some of the things we’ll… Read More »Podcaster Meggan Hayes (Generally Unquotable) Joins the Show! The post Podcaster Meggan Hayes (Generally Unquotable) Joins the Show! appeared first on Mormon Discussions Podcasts - Full Lineup.

Mormonism LIVE !
Podcaster Meggan Hayes (Generally Unquotable) Joins the Show!

Mormonism LIVE !

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2026 131:52


Bill Reel and RFM are joined this week by Meggan Hayes, host of the “Generally Unquotable” podcast, which features a news report on things Mormon every weekday morning! How does Meggan do it? Where does she get her stories? What are the biggest stories she has covered? These are just some of the things we’ll be finding out in this fascinating episode of Mormonism Live!

Early Break
The Playoffs generally aren't a time when you want a long break---something happened this year in the NHL for the first time since 1919

Early Break

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2026 7:20


-Per ESPN, it's been 107 years since an NHL team had a break between two playoff series as long as the one the Carolina Hurricanes areexperiencing-The Hurricanes last played on May 9 th , when they completed a 4-game sweep of the Philadelphia Flyers. They then watched theMontreal Canadiens and Buffalo Sabres play a 7-game series, pushing the start of the Eastern Conference finals to May 21—11 dayssince Carolina last played---the longest wait in 107 yearsOur Sponsors:* Check out Hims: https://hims.com/EARLYBREAKAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast — CodeGen, Agents, Computer Vision, Data Science, AI UX and all things Software 3.0

Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets!On the product side, everyone is getting Computer - Perplexity, Manus, Cursor, and so on. Meanwhile on the research side, agentic evals like TerminalBench and GDPVal are also assuming computer (Harbor). On both ends, the consolidating LLM OS stack has become a standard toolkit, and Daytona is one of a small set of AI Infra companies that are booming because of it.“The end of localhost” has been Ivan Burazin's obsession for more than a decade.Something that is all too familiar…Long before agents became the default way people talked about software development, Ivan was already chasing the idea that development should not depend on a fragile local machine. CodeAnywhere, one of the first browser-based IDEs, was an early attempt at that future: move the development environment into the cloud, make setup reproducible, and free developers from the endless “works on my machine” tax.The thesis was directionally right, but the market wasn't ready yet.However, agents changed that. They do not care about a laptop, desk setup, or favorite editor. They need a computer they can access through an API: something stateful enough to keep working, fast enough to spin up instantly, flexible enough to resize, isolated enough to be safe, and composable enough to run the messy real-world workflows that real software engineering actually requires.Daytona isn't just selling “sandboxes” in the narrow code-execution sense. It is the latest version of Ivan's original localhost thesis.In this episode, Daytona's CEO joins swyx to explain why AI agents need more than code execution boxes: they need composable computers, stateful sandboxes, instant startup, dynamic resources, and infrastructure that can survive workloads going from zero to 100,000 CPUs.We go deep on the new agent compute market: Daytona's hard pivot from human dev environments to AI sandboxes, the New Year's Eve MVP that customers begged for, why Daytona runs on bare metal with its own scheduler, how one customer runs almost 850,000 sandboxes a day, and why RL/eval workloads went from 0% to roughly 50% of usage in just months. Ivan also explains why agents need Windows and macOS machines, why CLI may matter more than MCP, why Kubernetes is painful for this workload, and why the future AI cloud may look more like Stripe than AWS.We discuss:* How Daytona grew out of CodeAnywhere, Shift, and the “end of localhost” thesis* Why Daytona pivoted from human dev environments to AI sandboxes* Why agents need composable computers instead of disposable code execution boxes* The New Year's Eve MVP that customers chased API keys for* Why Daytona chose bare metal, stateful snapshots, and its own scheduler* How Daytona spins up one sandbox in ~60ms and 50,000 sandboxes in ~75 seconds* Why Daytona's biggest customer runs ~850,000 sandboxes a day* How RL/eval workloads create zero-to-100,000 CPU spikes* Why RL workloads went from 0% to roughly 50% of Daytona usage* Why customers compare Daytona against EKS/GKS and say they're “never going back”* Why every AI agent may need a computer, including Windows and macOS environments* The Apple licensing constraints that make macOS sandboxes hard* Why CLI gives agents more power than MCP* How open source helps agents integrate Daytona* Why agent-generated PRs may break today's CI/CD assumptions* Why AI SaaS companies reselling tokens may face a cold shower* Why the AI cloud may look more like Stripe than AWSIvan Burazin* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanburazin* X: https://x.com/ivanburazinDaytona* Website: https://www.daytona.io* X: https://x.com/daytonaioTimestamps* 00:00:00 Hook* 00:01:12 Introduction* 00:03:15 CodeAnywhere, Shift, and the end of localhost* 00:05:58 What Daytona is: composable computers for AI agents* 00:08:07 The pivot from dev environments to AI sandboxes* 00:10:17 The New Year's Eve MVP and customers begging for API keys* 00:12:56 Bare metal, stateful sandboxes, and Daytona's scheduler* 00:17:28 60ms startup, 50,000 sandboxes, and 850K daily runs* 00:21:53 Spiky RL/eval workloads and the new agent infra problem* 00:28:12 RL workloads, Kubernetes pain, and dynamic resizing* 00:33:31 Why every AI agent needs a computer* 00:38:48 macOS sandboxes and Apple's licensing problem* 00:44:28 Why CLI may matter more than MCP* 00:48:11 Open source, GitHub stars, and agent integration* 00:53:11 Git, CI/CD, and agent collaboration bottlenecks* 00:58:15 Founder life and building a 25-person infra company* 01:02:44 AI SaaS, token resale, and API-first business models* 01:06:10 GPU sandboxes, data centers, and compute growth* 01:09:48 Why the AI cloud may look more like Stripe than AWS* 01:11:26 Closing thoughtsTranscriptIntroduction: Daytona, CodeAnywhere, and the End of LocalhostSwyx [00:00:02]: Okay, we're in the studio with Ivan Burazin, CEO of Daytona. Welcome.Ivan [00:00:07]: Thanks for having me, man.Swyx [00:00:08]: Ivan, you and I go back.Ivan [00:00:10]: Way back.Swyx [00:00:11]: How I don't even know how, you found, did you reach out or, for Shift.Ivan [00:00:17]: I reached out to you. The reason was you - we were just - we were thinking about I was one of the co-founders of CodeAnywhere, the first browser-based IDE, and so we were thinking a long time of, localhost should die. And you had this article.Swyx [00:00:29]: End of localhost.Ivan [00:00:30]: Then I reached out to you because of that, and then we talked, and I was actually at a different job and learning about I was the head of, developer experience, and you were quite well-versed in that, and I actually reached out to you, among other people, how do we go about that? What are the key things and whatnot at this point in time? And you were nice enough to take the call, and I remember I was late on your call with you.Swyx [00:00:51]: I don't remember.Ivan [00:00:52]: I remember because I was with my then I'm thinking of a girlfriend or wife at that point in time, I'm not sure. It's the same person, so that's great, and I was late ‘cause we were, in, Italy on, vacation, and then I was late for something. I felt so bad, and you were so nice to be, good about.Swyx [00:01:10]: The reason I'm nice is because I'm also late to other people, so it's like, who's, who's without sin here, yeah, so I have to, for those who don't know, InfoBip Shift, there's this whole thing that, you did in the past, and, and that was basically one of the inspirations for me starting AI Engineer, which is like, I have to thank you for giving me that push to be like, “Oh, you can, you can build and sell conferences?”Ivan [00:01:34]: I remember you asked you asked me at the beginning to give me advisory shares, and I was so focused on what we were doing, I said no, and I should've took the advisory shares. So I'm sorry, dude. But anyway.Swyx [00:01:43]: We're not, we're not venture backed.Ivan [00:01:44]: No, it doesn't matter.Swyx [00:01:45]: It's Yeah, anyway, so I think what's impressive about you is that CodeAnywhere is the thing that you've been trying to build, and, you kind of put it on hold and then came back after InfoBip. Just give us the story, do you - the story and the origin story, going into Daytona.From CodeAnywhere and Shift to DaytonaIvan [00:02:05]: Sure. Like, really way back, me and my co-founder have been together. I say this, I've said this multiple times, it's like we were married and divorced and married. Some people actually ask me is my co-founder my partner. they thought it literally. It's not literally, but we have done multiple companies together, and to your point, we had this shift where we went from the CodeAnywhere to the conference called Shift, and then back to, Daytona. We originally started stacking servers, doing like virtualization in the early 2000s and, routers and doing basically all these things, at a foundational level, and that was a services company which we sold to focus on what my co-founder actually invented, which was the very first browser-based IDE, right, I say the first. Before us was actually Heroku. They did it for a very short time until they became Heroku. But outside of them, we were the only one, and it was called.Swyx [00:02:55]: There was Cloud9.Ivan [00:02:57]: Cloud9 came out slightly after us. There was Replit, which came out when we stopped doing it, Replit came out, and they have been successful since then, which is great. There was Nitrous.io. There was quite a few that existed at the time, but it was like too early. But the interesting part is that we, at that point in time, because there was no VS Code, there was no Kubernetes, and Docker had just started when we Or I'm not sure if it was even public at that point in time. And so we had to build everything to the whole stack ourselves and that was the key learning that we brought into and that we've been using in Daytona today. So it was super early. There's about 3 million people used CodeAnywhere. It was slightly, it was angel-backed more than venture-backed. We ended up paying everyone back because it didn't have that sort of scale. But, three years ago, we started something similar with Daytona, which is not what we are today, but it was automating dev environments for human engineers, the basically the underlying stack of CodeAnywhere. And then we did a hard pivot last January to sandboxes. And so here we are.Swyx [00:04:01]: Historic pivot, yeah, and, it's one of those things where, I had independently invested in CodeAnywhere, but also in E2B, and then both of you pivoted into the same thing, and I'm like, “F**k.”Ivan [00:04:12]: You invested, you invested in Daytona. You invested in Daytona. But you were the first If we had not got your check, we wouldn't have done it.Swyx [00:04:18]: No way.Ivan [00:04:19]: No, it was like, “We have to get him on board first,” and you were that kicker that we, that got us off the ground.Swyx [00:04:23]: No, because you were putting me on your pitch deck, man. I was like, “Man, this is like a good trip if I don't invest.”Ivan [00:04:29]: That's because it was your quote. It's like we.Swyx [00:04:30]: Yeah. It's the end of localhost.Ivan [00:04:31]: Did a bunch of research about end of localhost and who was interested in that,.Swyx [00:04:34]: No, that's like, I put, I wrote that blog post, and every single company in that field reached out to me, and then every VC who was receiving those pitches then also had to call me and, talk it, talk through it with me.Ivan [00:04:47]: It's finally happening though.Swyx [00:04:48]: It was really super interesting.Ivan [00:04:48]: It's finally happening.Swyx [00:04:49]: It's finally happening.Ivan [00:04:49]: Yeah, it's finally.Swyx [00:04:49]: It's finally happening, with maybe sort of non-human users. Yeah, so what is Daytona today? Let's get like a quick description. I'm wearing the shirt.What Daytona Is Today: Composable Computers for AI AgentsIvan [00:04:58]: You're wearing the shirt. Yes,.Swyx [00:04:59]: It says, I think your branding is very good. Like, it's very consistent. It runs AI code. Like, it cannot be simpler.Ivan [00:05:05]: Exactly, but we're gonna probably have to change that.Swyx [00:05:07]: Oh, s**t.Ivan [00:05:07]: It's also a subset of what we do. Unfortunately, we really love this, Run AI Code is super simple. People interpret it different ways. I think we've given out 5,000, 6,000 of these shirts. People wear them with pride because it doesn't really market about us.Swyx [00:05:21]: Yeah, Daytona's on the back.Ivan [00:05:22]: It markets the back. It markets to the person itself, so I think we did a really good job on that one. But it is also a subset of what we do, because people, when they think about Run AI Code, they just think about these small, let's call it isolates, code execution boxes that, you send some code, you get an output. Whereas what Daytona is today is essentially composable computers for AI agents. It is, the market calls them sandboxes which can be misleading.Swyx [00:05:44]: All these things. All these things on.Ivan [00:05:45]: Yeah, exactly, ‘cause it can be misleading ‘cause people usually think about sandboxes as a demo or a test environment versus a production-grade environment. But what Daytona does, if you think of the laptop that you have in front of you or the computer that's over there, or, my wife is an architect, so she has like a Windows with a 3D graphics card inside to do 3D rendering. Like, as humans, we have different computers or different compositions of computers. And our belief is strongly that agents today and going forward will need all these different compositions of computers to do different types of tasks. And so we offer that basically through an API.Swyx [00:06:19]: Yeah, to give people - I'm trying to sort of front-load all the aha moments or the wow moments so that people can, stay engaged and click like and subscribe. the market is exploding, right? Like, you have been reporting 74% month-on-month growth, and it also, it's just been growing for a while. Like, it's been going like this. And every single - It's not just you guys. It's every single.Ivan [00:06:41]: Everyone, yeah.Swyx [00:06:42]: Sort of, compute provider. I don't know if you agree with me saying compute provider or not.Ivan [00:06:48]: It's fine.Swyx [00:06:48]: Yeah. So like organically PLG-driven growth, but also enterprise is doing super well, I think I wanna rewind to January of last year when you did the pivot. Like, so you obviously called this market early, and you were positioned for it, and you are now one of the market leaders. But what was the insight that made you do the pivot?The Pivot: From Human Dev Environments to Agent SandboxesIvan [00:07:06]: The insight that made us do this pivot is the quarter before that, so end of 2024, when we had - Basically, we did a demo with - I don't I think we discussed this as well, Devin was not public. You actually gave me access to Devin at that time. So Devin.Swyx [00:07:25]: I did?Ivan [00:07:26]: Yeah, you gave me access.Swyx [00:07:26]: I don't think I was supposed.Ivan [00:07:27]: Yeah, exactly.Swyx [00:07:28]: Yeah, I.Ivan [00:07:28]: So it doesn't matter. You.Swyx [00:07:29]: Yeah. I gave like three friends access.Ivan [00:07:31]: Yeah, or it was a call and you showed it to me. It doesn't matter. but OpenDevin was available, which is now called OpenHands. And so we're like, “Oh, this seems to be a thing. This is not public. Let's take our for human automation of dev environments and take, OpenDevin and launch that as a SaaS.” And we did that. Not very many people signed up and used it, but a lot of people reached out that were building agents, and they were like, “Hey, my agent needs a compute sandbox runtime,” whatever you wanna call it. I forgot what it was called at that point. And then we were like, “Oh, amazing. This is a new market. Here is our infrastructure. Here's our product, and go.” And what we found really fast, soon, was that people did not like what we had built. It didn't work. And I remember talking to people at the beginning when we're doing this, the sandbox we're building for agents. People were like, “Oh, why is it different? It's the same thing. We have like EC2, we have VMs, we have all these things.” But we saw that everyone we gave it to, it was like 20, 30 people, they all said, “No.” Like, “This is not what we need. This sort of breaks.” And basically, me and my co-founder not knowing a lot about - ‘cause we're infra people. We're not AI people. So I basically took it upon myself to like watch every single podcast that exists, including all of, all of these and all that, and sort of get up to date, read all the blogs, like get, understand what's going on.Swyx [00:08:45]: Do you wanna shout out who else was useful, just in case people are also looking.Ivan [00:08:49]: Generally we -, I looked at There's a few of podcast, different segments and different types. So there's you guys, No Priors, Bill Gurley's was great while.Swyx [00:09:04]: VG2, yeah.Ivan [00:09:05]: Yeah, while it was around. So there's a few. 20VC is interesting from a different dynamic, and some are different dynamic. But there was, also Red Points.Swyx [00:09:14]: We're not really about the compute market.Ivan [00:09:15]: It was also already - Sorry?Swyx [00:09:16]: You're, you want - You're looking at the agent infra market.Ivan [00:09:19]: I was looking at the agent market and the AI market in general and sort of understanding who are the players, what the perception, and how that goes. And like obviously you complement this with like going to conferences, going to events, going to meetups, reading white papers, like doing all the things that you have to do to understand what's happening. And so when we figured, when we sort of had an idea of what we had to build, literally over the New Year's Eve, literally on New Year's Eve, I half vibe coded the first MVP, first minimal viable product of what Daytona is today. And I went to sleep at like 3:00 AM or something like that. I was doing - I just put my like baby daughter and wife to sleep and, Happy New Year's, and go back to just, doing this. And I sent it to my co-founder, my CTO, and he saw it in the morning. He's like, “This is absolute garbage.” “Do not show this to anybody at all, but the idea is good.” And so he took two weeks, and he rebuilt it.Swyx [00:10:09]: Did it like look like that? Listen, I - It was rough idea.Ivan [00:10:12]: Oh, not even, not even close. Like it was it was way worse. But it was like a very - It was a simplistic view of what it should be. Like, it worked, but it was not ideal. And so he went, we went down the whole, which is his job as CTO, to go, and he came back with this version. We then called all the people that had said like, “This is garbage,” a quarter ago. And we set up these calls, and we gave it to - We just demoed it to everyone. And all the calls went long, every single one. They were 15-minute calls, and they all went to like 25, 30 minutes or whatnot. And everyone said, “We need, we want access.” There was no login, just an API key, ‘cause it was just a beta or an alpha. And they said, “Oh, we want access.” And we're like, “Sure, yeah. Okay, thank you very much.” But after like the next day, if we'd not send it, every single one, like every call that we did, everyone came back, “Where is my API key?” Like everyone wanted it. We're like, “S**t.” Like this is it. Like I've never felt So one, the understanding to your point was like most people thought it was the same infrastructure for humans and agents. We understood a quarter ago it's not. We just didn't know what was the right primitive. And then when we came, and we can talk about what that is, and we gave it to these people, I've never seen, I've never experienced - I've done multiple companies in my life. I've never experienced this, that people literally call you if you do not give them access. Like they want access right now. And so it's like, okay, they don't want this. the thing that they want doesn't seem to exist, or they have not found it, and they really want what we want. And then when we understood that we're onto something, and then when you think about the size of the market, like the market for human engineers and enterprise is a very large market, so think GitLab or whatnot. But the market for every single agent that will exist ever in the future is just like, what is that market? How big is that? And we're like, “We are all in on this.” And so that is where we made sort of the cut between the old product and the new one.Bare Metal, Stateful Sandboxes, and the Lambda + EC2 ModelSwyx [00:12:02]: Yeah. But it wasn't composable at the time?Ivan [00:12:05]: It was very - It was basically just a Linux box that you could change, that you could define number of CPUs, disk, and RAM. Like that is what you could do, but you couldn't have multiple operating systems, you couldn't resize it on the fly, you couldn't add a GPU, you couldn't do like all the things. It was just the, just the first sort of variation of that, yeah.Swyx [00:12:22]: Was it bare metal from the start?Ivan [00:12:24]: It was bare metal from the start. And so the interesting thing that we thought about right away, so our.Swyx [00:12:29]: Which, give people the background, what is the normal path?Ivan [00:12:32]: Yeah, so, basically most providers run this on top of VMs. And also.Swyx [00:12:37]: Firecracker.Ivan [00:12:38]: Yeah, they run on Firecracker and VM. And so we also fire - We can get - We have multiple isolation layers and we can do that. But the common way to do it is that they, one, that the state of the machine, or the hard disk is not part of the sandbox itself. And the other thing is they're not meant to last forever. So most of them are preemptible, like they can There's a time that they can live. And so our thought was when we were going into this is, agents will be like humans in the sense of you don't want your laptop to be shut down until you're done with work. Like, and you want to close the lid and open the lid, it's the same state. So you - Agents would want that, like the pause and come back. They want those two things. But also agents really want speed, right? Can they get it? So when we thought about it's like we need something insanely fast, how to make it fast, how to make it long-running, and stateful. And so those two things, it's like combining a Lambda and an EC2, right? Those two things together. And so we didn't have an idea how others did it, ‘cause we didn't know too that there was a market around this. It was more like, okay, this is what we need, what they need. And we looked at Kubernetes, it wasn't wasn't good enough for that. We looked at Nomad, it didn't enable that. And so our history in rewriting our own scheduler at CodeAnywhere is basically what my CTO came up with. Like, he's like, “Oh, the learnings from there,” and he brought it. And the funny thing is, our third co-founder, when he saw it, he's like, “Dude, what is this? This is like 2008.” Like, we went back in time, and he's like, “Exactly.” And so the reason why Daytona is like super fast, and you see this on benchmarks, is we essentially, we run on bare metal. We have our own scheduler, we use the underlying, disk, CPU, and RAM of the underlying machine, which means your IOPS are insanely fast because there's no, there's no network between an EBS or something like that. But also the snapshot, the point in time, the templates, are also preloaded on the bare metal machines. So when you fire off a sandbox from a template or a snapshot, you're essentially directed to the bare metal machine where that snapshot is based on that NVMe drive, and then it literally just turns on that machine, and it's local. There's no network latency, anything on there. And so that is sort of the specificities that we, when we're thinking from first principles, what a computer would look like for an agent, that is what we came up with, and that's what we created.Benchmarks, 60ms Startup, and 50,000 SandboxesSwyx [00:15:02]: Yeah. I should maybe, I don't know if you endorse this, but there's someone that does compute SDK, you guys do very well on there, with like the TTI, right? I. is this a, is this a is this a relevant benchmark for you guys? I don't know.Ivan [00:15:16]: I don't know, and it changes every day. So today RKL is.Swyx [00:15:18]: I don't know what RKL is. Never heard of it.Ivan [00:15:20]: Yeah. RK, yeah, so it is there.Swyx [00:15:22]: You are, at least a third of the next tier of performance, and then, there's a lot of other better-known names that are very slow to start.Ivan [00:15:31]: Yeah. We've been the number one by far for a long time, and now there's different, there's different definitions also of sandboxes, different isolation patterns, different other things. So RKL runs it literally on the S3, the data, so it's very different, and they spin up a sandbox, spin up a container for that, so it's a different type of thing. So the definition of a sandbox is something that we can all, we all need to get along with. But yeah, we're insanely fast on getting these things, up and running. And so you can see even there that it's a zero point 0.10 to 0.11, so.Swyx [00:16:03]: Close enough. Yeah. what else do you need, right?Ivan [00:16:05]: Yeah. So the benchmarks itself, so, in this, in I don't think the benchmarks equate to market ownership or revenue or anything like that. and I've seen this with multiple benchmarks, not just in sandboxes, but in general benchmarks around.Swyx [00:16:20]: It's table stakes. It's just like.Ivan [00:16:21]: Exactly. But it doesn't hurt.Swyx [00:16:22]: Just roughly check.Ivan [00:16:22]: Like you definitely have to be up there and you have to be competing so that people know that, oh, this is definitely one of the top. Because this is only one dimension of what customers look for. There's other things like how many can you spin up consecutively? There's a feature set, there's support, there's like all different things that people look at, but you definitely have to be there, on the benchmarks.Swyx [00:16:40]: How many people do people spin up consecutively?Ivan [00:16:43]: So we have.Swyx [00:16:43]: Or concurrently, is the Concurrency, right?Ivan [00:16:45]: There's three metrics that we look at. And so one is like time to spin up one, and so our time to spin up one is 60 milliseconds with network latency. So request, spin up, reply, 60, the whole thing, 60 milliseconds. That is one. But if you wanna spin up 50,000 at once, we are now at about 75 seconds. So it takes about 75 seconds to spin up concurrently 50,000. Some others, there's public data around this, like take 2,000 seconds, which is 30 minutes. Like there's different variations of that. And then there is the so it is speed of one, speed of like multiple, and then how many can you consistently have up and running. And so we basically have right now no limit to how much we can add because we basically own our own metal. But the biggest customer of ours does like about 850,000 every single day is sort of where they're, where they're just shy of a million every single day that they're running, we do have a request for half a million concurrent, which is literally half a million CPUs somewhere running. So that's an interesting.Swyx [00:17:44]: They pay by like vCPU seconds.Ivan [00:17:47]: By seconds, yeah.Swyx [00:17:47]: Or whatever. Yeah. Okay, and so and then, and the other thing is, the sleeping and the resuming, ‘cause it's all the stateful resumption of all these things, how, what kind of workload are people putting through this, right? Like how is it Do we measure by gigabytes in memory, gigabytes in storage? I don't In like network attached storage. I, what are the costly ones of, out of all these features?Workload Economics: CPU, RAM, Network, and StorageIvan [00:18:15]: The most expensive thing are CPU.Swyx [00:18:18]: Okay. Yeah, of course.Ivan [00:18:18]: The second one, yeah Then it's RAM, then it's disk. We actually don't charge.Swyx [00:18:22]: Which is snapshotting, right?Ivan [00:18:23]: No, it's actually the, snapshotting's part of it, but basically the size of your hard disk, of your machine. So do you have 10 gigabytes, do you have 20, do you have 50, do you have whatever? And then the transference of that. Right now, currently we don't charge for, network at all at Polychron.Swyx [00:18:37]: Oh, you gotta, yeah, you gotta fix.Ivan [00:18:38]: Yeah. It is very much a it's a larger and larger part of our bill, so we're working around, that part there. Obviously, that is the least, expensive, so the hard disk is the least expensive, so it's basically CPU, RAM, for us network, ‘cause we don't charge the customer, and then hard disk, is how it's split up. But there's also different types of workloads, so we basically split it up into two types of workloads in Daytona. One is what we call background agents or long-running agents. and the other is, basically RLs and evals, which I put sort of together. And so they have very different patterns of usage, and if you look at the usage of a background And I'll just name names of companies, not specifically.Background Agents vs. RL/Evals: Two Usage ShapesSwyx [00:19:21]: Yeah, open, all hands.Ivan [00:19:23]: Yeah. So like a background agent's a Cognition, a Lovable, a like all these things are Harvey. These are all long-running, background agents. And so if you look at their usage patterns, their usage patterns are similar to human, which is like follow the sun. Basically, the usage patterns of that is like noon is probably the highest, and the midnight is the lowest, and then weekends are lower. weekday is higher.Swyx [00:19:42]: Yeah, that's a fun question. How global is it? Is it very US-centric or?Ivan [00:19:46]: The US is a large part, but we have currently, we have Asia, Europe, and the US regions.Swyx [00:19:52]: So it's quite global.Ivan [00:19:53]: Yeah, it's quite global. We have it all over. It's interesting that our I talked to you a bit about this. Our number one city by user.Swyx [00:20:01]: Hmm.Ivan [00:20:02]: Is Singapore.Swyx [00:20:04]: Oh, wow. Amazing.Ivan [00:20:05]: Which is an interesting one, right? Not by revenue, just by just like by individual head count.Swyx [00:20:09]: Really?Ivan [00:20:09]: Just like an interesting thing.Swyx [00:20:10]: Singapore is, Singapore is weirdly high in the adoption charts of AI for the population. It's like an, seven, eight million population. And it's like keeps showing up.Ivan [00:20:20]: No, it's quite interesting. We were quite shocked, and I was like, “Oh, this is interesting.” And also one that's up there.Swyx [00:20:24]: There's a reason I'm doing AI using Singapore. it's because I'm from there.Ivan [00:20:27]: We're there. We're gonna, we're gonna be there as well. and it's interesting that Japan is in the top or like Tokyo's in the top, which is in all the tech cycles it has never been. It has never been, so it's quite interesting that they're.Swyx [00:20:39]: I think the Japanese just love AI. Yeah. It's that, and then it's Brazil. That's it.Ivan [00:20:44]: Brazil has always been in.Swyx [00:20:45]: I think.Ivan [00:20:46]: Even when I look, if you look at like GitHub's data and ask historically with CodeAnywhere, it was always like US, Western Europe, and then you'd have like India, Brazil, China, like that would be there. But like Singapore was not in, specifically Japan was never in sort of that top, that top.Swyx [00:21:01]: Yeah. Weird pockets.Ivan [00:21:01]: Weird. Yeah, so it's very global.Swyx [00:21:02]: Okay, so actually that, but that's helps you to distribute your load through, all time?Ivan [00:21:08]: The interesting thing is like we have those kind of loads, but if you look at the researcher loads, they're quite different. So what they are is like if you give them concurrency of 10,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 CPUs at ARMb, when they fire off a run, it's just 100%. And then it just runs, and then it stops. So it's very, the usage pattern is squares basically, right? And it's also not follow the sun, because people will fire it off at midnight before they go to sleep but then wake up and so it's very unpredictable, so you don't know where that is. So the shapes of the usage are quite different than we have had before. And also what's interesting is when it's sort of a follow the sun, even if you have a high growth company, you can sort of predict your usage patterns and have enough capacity for that, because it's sort of, it grows in a, in a way you can project. When you have companies doing sort of like evals and RL, they're super spiky. So they're gonna come in, it's like, “We're gonna use nothing, then can we have 100,000?” Right? And then go back down. And then 100,000, go back down. So it's very different, right? And.Swyx [00:22:09]: Do you want to lock them into commits so.Ivan [00:22:11]: Yeah, we do.Swyx [00:22:12]: Yeah, okay.Ivan [00:22:12]: We so we have to lock them into some sort of commits to have that capacity, because we have to have, basically we have to have the capacity for peak. Right? And so right now, Daytona's mean utilization is 15%, 1-5.Swyx [00:22:25]: Oh my God.Ivan [00:22:26]: So it's very low.Swyx [00:22:27]: Because it's very spiky.Ivan [00:22:27]: It's very spiky, but we get up to 90%. so we have these things. And so what we're, what we're looking at right now as a company is similar to Cloudflare where you can like geo move things around, but that works really well for basically the background agent where it's follow the sun. But this, it's not. Like it's a very different shape. Obviously with scale you figure these things out, but that's an interesting new problem that we have, as a compute provider in the agent space. And when we were doing the conference recently, and so we talked to like Nikita from Neon and.Swyx [00:22:57]: I should bring it up.Ivan [00:22:58]: Parag from Parallel and whatnot, everyone has the same problem. Whereas the usage is super spiky, and this is something that has not happened before, that you have these types of like it was always, it the amplitudes were not this high, right? So it's quite interesting use case and problem solve.Compute Conference and Spiky Agent InfrastructureSwyx [00:23:12]: Yeah, I don't know if we're gonna bring this up again, but let's just talk about the conference, you had like 1,000 something people at the Warriors game, at the Sorry, where is it? What's.Ivan [00:23:22]: Chase Center.Swyx [00:23:23]: Chase Center.Ivan [00:23:23]: Chase Center.Swyx [00:23:24]: I went. It was, it was very impressive. Obviously, you can, how to throw a conference, what did you learn? you put, you pulled together all these impressive names.Ivan [00:23:33]: What I.Swyx [00:23:34]: What were you looking for?Ivan [00:23:35]: My thesis behind the Compute Conference was let's bring together people that are building infrastructure for AI agents. Because when I think of what we're building, it is the agent is the primary user, what are the ergonomics and usage patterns of agents, and so we can do that. And what I found, this was a theory, it wasn't proven, is that we all have these problems, as I touched onto. And I was, as I was talking on stage, it was like we all have the same underlying infra problems, which is this spiky workloads, unpredictable workloads that we've never had before, in human, compute or human infrastructure. And it's, again, it's the same when I was talking to Parag or when I was talking.Swyx [00:24:20]: Lynn. Nikita.Ivan [00:24:21]: Lynn, Nikita. Lynn especially, I was talking to her the other day as well. Like the It is a very interesting type of problem to solve because I can touch on Cloudflare because there's a lot of like talk about that recently as to how they solve that, which is they have a bunch of geos, and basically, as users work in different places, and depending on your tier, they can move you around the geos. And so that how, that's how they get the higher utilization. But you can sort of predict these, and it's If it's something in You'll rarely get a spike that is 10 orders of magnitude. Like you'll get a like let's say one of your customers has some like an exponential curve. What is that to I'm using Cloudflare as an example. 10%, 20%, whatever it is. I don't, I don't have this data, I'm just assessing. It's surely not 10x, right? It's surely not something there. And so how do you go out and solve this problem? And we're all solving this in different ways. So we have.Swyx [00:25:11]: She also has the same thing.Ivan [00:25:12]: Yeah, I know specifically that like Neon had that issue as well. Like how are we solving these spiky loads and things like that ‘cause we talked about it. And so the interesting thing for me to actually internalize was, yes, everyone that's building for agents first is going through this, and we're all solving similar problems, which is quite.Swyx [00:25:28]: Let me let me double-click on this. Okay. So for example, Neon, I happen to know that they're very sort of S3 oriented, right? so they're just like fully bet on S3. And you get to benefit from S3's distribution and infrastructure. So I would imagine that Neon doesn't have to care, whereas Lynn maybe has to care a bit more because obviously she's doing GPU inference. And, for listeners, we did an episode with her, one and a half years ago. And you have to care. But like, right?Ivan [00:25:54]: Parag cares for sure, and Nikita.Swyx [00:25:58]: And Parag is C of, Parallel.Ivan [00:25:59]: Parallel, yeah.Swyx [00:26:00]: Former CTO of Twitter.Ivan [00:26:01]: Twitter, yeah.Swyx [00:26:02]: They are the search.Ivan [00:26:03]: Yeah, they're search, yeah.Swyx [00:26:03]: I You and I know but the listeners don't know.Ivan [00:26:08]: Yeah, we can put it down in the screen, and so ‘cause we, when we were talking.Swyx [00:26:11]: I'll put it up on the, on the screen.Ivan [00:26:12]: Yeah, right.Swyx [00:26:12]: People can look it up if they need.Ivan [00:26:14]: Look it up. And, yes, but they still have CPU and RAM, allocation that you have to have up and running. And so CPU and RAM, you have to allocate that and have that ready. And so there's basically two ways to do it. One is you either over-provision and you can handle the bursts, or two, you basically have, I don't know if this is a term, just-in-time compute, which is like as your load becomes, as your usage comes in, you can fire off requests for VMs or bare metals at other cloud providers and then get them up and running.Swyx [00:26:43]: This is if you go above 100%, right?Ivan [00:26:45]: Yeah, this is.Swyx [00:26:46]: Like your overflow.Ivan [00:26:46]: If your overflow, like spillage or whatever you do.Swyx [00:26:48]: You probably lose money on it, but it doesn't matter, right?Ivan [00:26:50]: It, not Well, you might, you might not That is a more cost-effective way to do it but it's a slower way to do it. Because basically what you have to do is you have to like queue your requests, spin up these just-in-time compute, get it all ready, provision it, and then get your workload there. And so if the time isn't important that much, that's fine, and you can do that. But if your customer, and especially for, let's say, the RL training runs, the reason why a lot of people come to us is because GPUs are more expensive than CPUs, right? So you want your GPU running at, what, 100% the entire time. And so when you're running runs on CPUs, when the when the CPU cycle is like down and spinning up the next one, you want that to be instantaneous so that your GPU doesn't go down, right? And if you then have to like go out and provision machines, you're essentially telling the GPU that it has to wait, and that's incurring our cost. So there's things that you have to try to solve for there.RL Workloads, Declarative Images, and Kubernetes ReplacementSwyx [00:27:43]: Yeah, let's talk about the different workload, right? You said that, what was it? A few months ago, you had zero RL workload and now it's 50%.Ivan [00:27:52]: It will be this one, 50%, yeah.Swyx [00:27:54]: Let's talk about how different it is, right? Like I imagine, for example, a lot less dynamic code generation of like arbitrary code. Like here, it's probably all the same code. You're just doing parallel runs or something, I don't know.Ivan [00:28:05]: Yeah. So you'll have multiple Depends on the like for each run, you'll have a snapshot. And they, for the most part, they actually do use our declarative image builder, which is like, “Oh, we, the agent wants these dependencies, these env vars.”Swyx [00:28:17]: These ones, yeah.Ivan [00:28:18]: Yeah, the declarative image builder, it.Swyx [00:28:20]: Which is a very modal like thing that they.Ivan [00:28:22]: Yeah. And so we build it on the fly and then we propagate that snapshot, and you can spin up as many sandboxes as you want against that snapshot. And then if you have to do changes, the model can, or like it could be also be automated. It's like, “Oh, now for the next run, we need to install these things or remove these things or whatever to get, a task done,” and then it goes off and runs that. So yes, that is something that it seems that they prefer. The number one reason I found, or should I say, let's take a step back. What we are competing against in that environment is essentially managed Kubernetes. So EKS, GKE, whatever. That is what the vast majority run on. And anyone that has tried Daytona versus GKE, EKS is like, “I'm never going back.” That has always been. There's a few reasons. One is the ergonomics. So if you have, if you're using Kubernetes to spin that up, you have to essentially manage the interface interactions with that. Daytona, although as a compute provider, it's more akin to a Twilio and Stripe from a consumption perspective than it is an AWS. Like you have an API, an SDK, it's quite like easy and seamless to get these things up and running, that's one. The other is the speed to which we spin up, which we mentioned earlier, which is much faster, and the scale to which we can go to. We haven't got into features, but an interesting feature is that it's very hard to OOM, or out of memory, our sandboxes, because we can dynamically on the fly.Swyx [00:29:48]: Resize.Ivan [00:29:49]: Resize, which is like impossible on almost any other thing. There are some technologies that enable you to do that, but it's like a very hard thing. And so we actually saw this when, the Terminal Revenge team is, brought us actually. So thank you, Alex and the team, that brought us into this whole space.Swyx [00:30:05]: It's just very rare that, a framework would just say, “Guys, just use Daytona.”Ivan [00:30:11]: Yeah, I think it says it somewhere. Yeah.Swyx [00:30:13]: Yeah. I was like, “What is this?”Ivan [00:30:15]: There's all, there's multiple there, but they also mention a few other places. and so Daytona specifically-We have, the, just jumping on themes here We, I don't know where it says Data Center.Swyx [00:30:27]: I, there.Ivan [00:30:27]: Doesn't matter.Swyx [00:30:28]: There's a very strong recommendation, which is, very unusual. Which is, it's.Ivan [00:30:33]: We do not pay them for this, just.Swyx [00:30:34]: I know, yeah. They just like you.Ivan [00:30:35]: Yeah, they like us. yeah, and also a thing, so, Data Center has multiple isolation sets underneath. The customer doesn't have to know what they are. But basically we have Docker, which is a container, that's hardened with Sysbox. So it's Docker's, isolation that is a security equivalent to a VM, but it's still a container. And that is the default, and they, especially in these training workloads, really like that as an interface to be able to use just a basic Docker container, and we enable Docker and Docker. Which for these RL runs, if you need to do a Docker compose or Kubernetes, you can spin up a K3S inside of these things, which unlocks a huge amount of workloads that you can do that you cannot do on other providers. So just on that part is much more interesting. And so we went that, through that. We showed them that we could do that, and they enjoyed that quite a bit. They being the general venture people.Swyx [00:31:28]: Those people, yeah.Ivan [00:31:29]: And Harbor people.Swyx [00:31:29]: Harbor people, do are they, are they a company yet?Ivan [00:31:33]: As far, I do not know.Customer Pull, Slack Connect, and the Computer Use BetSwyx [00:31:35]: Okay. All right. Yeah. It's like super obvious that like, there's a lot of excitement and success around these things, okay, so yeah, tell us more, right? Like, this is an exploding workload, Harbor adopted you, which helped speed things along. But what are you learning as this new workload comes online?Ivan [00:31:53]: There's a couple things that we learned, which we chat about in the beginning. We, and this has led our story, as we mentioned, we like talked to a lot of customers along the way, and we add more features and more tool sets as we talk to customers. And it's interesting that And I think it's that the ecosystem is so small and/or the models get smarter, where when we see one user come with a request, we know it goes on a roadmap if like three to five customers come with the same request in that week. It's like very bizarre. It happens so many times, which is.Swyx [00:32:27]: Because they're all friends.Ivan [00:32:28]: Sorry?Swyx [00:32:28]: They all, they're all friends. They're all in the same group chat.Ivan [00:32:30]: Yeah, probably, yeah. ‘Cause and they're like, “Oh, can you do this?” And I'm like, “Okay, this is interesting. We'll put it on a feature request.” And then the next one's like, “Oh, can you do this?” “Okay.” It's all the same, right? It's always the same. And so what we try to do, and I personally try to do, I try to be on as many call, quote-unquote “sales calls” I can. I'm in every Slack channel. We literally have about 1,000 Slack Connect channels, something like that. It's an interesting, there's so many interesting things you find out when you have all the Slack channels. You can also see where people, transfer between companies. You see leave Slack channel, enter Slack channel. It's an interesting thing. Also, just I digress, I feel that Slack Connect is literally LinkedIn what it should be. You have a list.Swyx [00:33:08]: LinkedIn charges you to, use your own connections, but Slack doesn't, right? Slack is like, do it for free. It's more lock-in. It's great.Ivan [00:33:15]: Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. It's one of the reasons.Swyx [00:33:17]: You're gonna pay Slack for life.Ivan [00:33:18]: Exactly. You're there for life. So that's interesting. And so one of the things, the newer things we were talking about earlier is we made a big bet and put a lot of investment on computer use. that is not seen publicly the light of day. We haven't GA'd that yet, but we have.Swyx [00:33:32]: Is there a thing I can pull up?Ivan [00:33:33]: There is computer use there. It's right up a bit.Swyx [00:33:36]: Oh, yeah. Okay.Ivan [00:33:38]: What we have, what we talked about and what we've seen publicly is there's this theme now about, the human emulator where And Elon from XAI has talked about this publicly, and if you think about the models today, they're actually quite sophisticated and they can do a lot of work, but they still don't have access to all the tools. Like, I'm a strong believer that the most efficient way for an agent to work is essentially headless or through, terminal or whatnot. But if we, if we look at knowledge work in general, there's about 100 million knowledge workers in the US, about a billion in the world, and knowledge workers, and the salaries of them aggregate to 10 trillion in the US 50 trillion worldwide.Swyx [00:34:24]: Wow.Ivan [00:34:25]: Something like that. And if we look at, the five most important sectors of that, so like healthcare and government and financial services and whatnot, that's about 56% of that. So let's say it's about half of that. So in the US it's about 25 trillion, and most of them, most of that work is actually still locked into legacy apps inside of Windows, which is not going anywhere for a very long time. Like, people just won't invest in that. How much of it? our assumption is the following: if, in the RPA market, which is similar market, well, not the same 25% of, these white collar, workers', work is automated. If an agent is more sophisticated, can go through more runs, figure stuff out, let's say it's, 40%, right? And so if you take 40% of that, you get to essentially, $10 trillion a year.Swyx [00:35:17]: That's a TAM.Ivan [00:35:18]: That is a that is a TAM. So that's the TAM of the models, right? That's not our, essentially ours. But you get to that size, and to be able to do that, you essentially have to give agents these computers with the legacy. So computer use, either Mac or Windows or Linux. Linux we also obviously have and others have. But Windows specifically is something very new, and the only option right now is an EC2 with, Windows or on Azure. Both of them take anywhere from three to five minutes to spin up. We've created an actual sandbox, so it's a second instead of milliseconds, but you have, point in time snapshots, you have, forking, you have all the things that you have from a sandbox, but essentially enables you to hopefully unlock all this value. And so that's been our big push and bet, but we've sort of, kept our ear to the ground. What is sort of the next things in the market?RPA Returns: Why Agents Still Need ComputersSwyx [00:36:06]: Yeah, knowledge work, and building, and sort of RPA, the next wave of RPA. I got very excited about RPA kind of during COVID times. The UI path was IPO-ing. And it was, a very hot Isn't it, Eastern European?Ivan [00:36:20]: It is, Romanian.Swyx [00:36:21]: Romanian?Yeah, it might be the only Romanian, big unicorn okay, yeah. This I don't I don't, I don't have like a I think there's, I think there's a stage being set for the resurgence of RPA, ‘cause everyone understands that, yeah, no one wants to deal with these shitty apps and no one's gonna rewrite them. Like, you just have to do, a remote operation and programmatic operation of them.Ivan [00:36:45]: If you wanna unlock it, my own setup was basically the following. So I was doing a board deck recently, last month, whatever, and I'm like, “Okay, let's just, let's just do automated.” So, all our data's in, ClickHouse and PostHog and QuickBooks, where everyone else's is, and I'm basically, connected that all to, my Cloud code, like go off and go Cloud code whatever. Go off and, here's the integrations, go do that. It pulled out the first report, which was great. It connected to Brex and all these things, pulled it, which was great, and then I say, “Okay, now pull out this, and this,” and I kept getting, really well McKinsey-style design reports, but the data said partial data. all the missing data, partial data. Like, it can't access all the things, and I got so frustrated, and so I got, I got, my Mac Mini virtual sandbox with OpenClaw. I gave it its own account in our company, and then I went to all these services and created a read-only account, so literally like an intern in your company. And so I would say, “Now go and do this report,” and it would get the same, or like, “I can't via the MCP or the API or whatever. I can't get all the information.” I'm like, “Go log in.” And it will log into the website, then go in, export the data. It'll export the data and do the thing end to end. So even for things that have today APIs, not all of it is exposed, and I to get value, I get immense value right now, but it has to be a computer usage, unfortunately, and so I spend a bunch of tokens just on that, but I get the job done. And so if even a startup like ours, and using all the hottest tools, still needs a computer agent what hope does, Goldman have to have a headless, right?Swyx [00:38:22]: Yeah, what a - Why isn't Microsoft doing this?Ivan [00:38:27]: I'm pretty sure, Satya had a post yesterday.Swyx [00:38:29]: Oh, okay. I see.Ivan [00:38:29]: Which was like, “Every agent needs a computer.”Swyx [00:38:31]: I see, I see.Ivan [00:38:32]: So they have launched something recently.Swyx [00:38:34]: Yeah, they have Microsoft Power Automate, I'm sure, I'm sure, they're gonna have their version.macOS Sandboxes, Apple Constraints, and the Windows OpportunityIvan [00:38:39]: Version of that, yeah.Swyx [00:38:39]: You're gonna try to do yours, and it - I always know there's always demand for Mac, but I know it's, tricky to host, macOS sandboxes.Ivan [00:38:49]: We will have macOS sandboxes fairly soon. The problem with macOS, OS sandboxes is, I'm deep in this, I don't know how much interesting is.Swyx [00:38:55]: No, it's.Ivan [00:38:56]: MacOS has this problem.Swyx [00:38:57]: It's a licensing thing, right?Ivan [00:38:58]: Licensing thing. So one, you're allowed to run only two parallel VMs per machine, so that's one. Two, you can only license to a different user every 24 hours. So if you come in and theoretically, if I wanna charge you per second and I charge you one second, I have to have it idle for the rest of the day. I can't have anyone else doing that. So the pricing will be different in the sense that I will have to - we would have to charge for 24 hours, and that's not even, that's not even the most difficult thing. But the, thing above that is, from a security perspective, they enable you to do memory snapshot, pause, resume, but only on the same physical drive, physical machine. And so what you can do in, Windows world or Linux world is that I can move in the background, your snapshot from one to the other and manage load, right? Here, if you wanna do that, you essentially have to have your.Swyx [00:39:49]: Yeah, snapshots. Yeah.Ivan [00:39:50]: Your.Swyx [00:39:51]: It's like.Ivan [00:39:51]: Physical machine.Swyx [00:39:52]: You can't break it up.Ivan [00:39:53]: You can't, you can't move things around that, and all of that is, that part is, from a security standpoint, if it is written. Like, I understand the security aspect of that, but it disables you from doing these agentic, like really scalable agentic workloads.Swyx [00:40:08]: You need to do a vibe-coded, clean room implementation on macOS that you can then - That's like Clean OS or something. I don't know.Ivan [00:40:17]: So. We have.Swyx [00:40:18]: ‘cause like Linux was originally like a clean room rewrite of Unix.Ivan [00:40:21]: Okay. Yeah.Swyx [00:40:21]: Or something like that, right? Like same thing to macOS. Someone needs to do it.Ivan [00:40:25]: Someone will do that, and someone will have some long-running agents for a few days to figure this stuff out. But yeah. So definitely we - we're really close to offering something ‘cause people do want it, but the pricing will be different, and the feature set will be sort of stringent.Swyx [00:40:38]: Yeah, nobody's gonna use this. like, the labs, the labs will because they want to automate macOS.Ivan [00:40:42]: They have to do RL. They have to do RL again. But even if you The - So the point is with the RL part, if you, if you do RL on macOS, then the next iteration of the model comes out, it will be able to use these tools significantly. Then you actually need to run those, that somewhere. So you're gonna have to have that, later on. And from, if anyone at Apple is listening, I very much feel that they are shooting themselves in the foot of the scale of the revenue of compute or licensing they could get if they would just enable a concurrency model similar to what you can get on a Windows and a, and Linux.Swyx [00:41:17]: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure they've heard this before. They just don't care. Yeah, it's And maybe they will change their mind with the new CEO.Ivan [00:41:24]: Yeah. We'll see.Swyx [00:41:25]: We'll see.Ivan [00:41:25]: High hopes.Swyx [00:41:26]: High hopes.Ivan [00:41:26]: High hopes.Swyx [00:41:27]: Okay. But I, it's very clear the market opportunity is huge in Windows, and you can go for a long time on just Windows, but your customers are gonna want both. and I think, it is interesting to me that, this is the sort of God application of agents, right? Like, I don't It was - How big was OpenClaw for you guys? Like, was it, was there, a significant bump.OpenClaw, Agent Labs, and the B2B2C Sandbox MarketIvan [00:41:54]: Not for us because we.Swyx [00:41:54]: Because you already.Ivan [00:41:55]: We're kind of positioned differently. Whereas although it's completely PLG and we have individual developers that use it, most of the users that use Daytona are sort of a B2B2C. Sort of it's either B2B or B2B2C. So, in the researcher world, it's B2B, so you're selling to, labs and neo labs and things like that. But on the long-running agents, it's mostly, from a scale revenue perspective, it's mostly B2B2C, where you have a app layer agent that uses you at a big scale.Swyx [00:42:26]: Like a Manus. Yeah.Ivan [00:42:28]: Like a Manus Lovable type of thing.Swyx [00:42:31]: Yeah. I think that's the question of, well how, um-Uh, yeah, B2B to C is basically to me what I've been calling an agent lab, which is kind of like you're not in a model lab, but you're making a very good wrapper that is a platform that other people can sign up so they don't have to code those things. Yeah, it sound, it sounds like a much better market than the direct OpenClaw market.Ivan [00:42:56]: I've like - We I've done multiple things. So the CodeAnywhere's part of our career path R in the calendar, was very much an end user developer product. And so that is great. It You can get a lot of developer love, and I feel that we do as a company have a bunch of developer love. But it's a different type, where it's people building these things. Again, it's more akin to a Twilio because you don't really run - As a person, you wouldn't run Twilio. I don't know how many people remember. It was like ask your developer billboard and whatnot. And people really love Twilio, but they only used it inside of like, “Oh, I'm building this app or service for thing.” And so we're very much directly to that. And you also know that I used to work for a competitor for Twilio, so it's kind of ingrained, in my DNA.Swyx [00:43:35]: People don't know InfoBip is that big.Ivan [00:43:38]: Yeah, it's.Swyx [00:43:39]: Because.Ivan [00:43:40]: It's a billion euro.Swyx [00:43:40]: They're all American. They're like, “Whatever's in Europe doesn't matter to me.” But like it's the, it's the same size or bigger? Same size?Ivan [00:43:46]: It's about half the size.Swyx [00:43:47]: Half the size?Ivan [00:43:48]: Yeah, about half the size.Swyx [00:43:48]: It's like, yeah.Ivan [00:43:48]: Still huge. Multiple billions a year. Yes.Swyx [00:43:51]: That's crazy.Ivan [00:43:51]: Exactly, and so that - These are like really interesting and large revenue-generating, very sticky businesses. Whereas when you're selling to the - When your focus is the end developer, it is a very hard sell because they're very price sensitive, very price conscious, very around that. And there's very It's very hard to scale. Your cap is the number of people that are willing to spin up - First of all, wanna spin that up, and then spin up multiple of these. Whereas if you're in the enterprise one, like we know everyone's talking about like how many tokens they're spending, I'm spending. Like a lot of companies today are like, “If this is our company, spend as much as you can.” Like basically that is where we're going. And so if you think about that paradigm, where you're selling to companies that say, “Spend as much as you can to generate, productivity,” versus, “Oh, I'm a single person. I have this much budget, and I'm doing this thing because it's fun or it's helping me out or whatever.” Like it is a different, it's a different go-to-market, I think, strategy.MCP, CLIs, and Sandboxes as the Agent RuntimeSwyx [00:44:50]: Yeah, there's a lot of discussion. I'm just kind of going through like the mental list of things that are in your favor, which is, for example, MCP versus CLI. Like obviously you want CLI. It's been very good for you. I feel like it's maybe a drop in the bucket or maybe it's huge. I'm just checking whether it's like these are big trends.Ivan [00:45:10]: Those things you - work well in our favor, to your point just because every.Swyx [00:45:13]: They're kind of drop in the bucket, right?Ivan [00:45:15]: I think it's like sort of all the things come together. And so there's so many things that impact that. To your point, like OpenClaw wasn't huge for us, but like having the agent SDK, from Anthropic, so or Cloud Claude Code was very interesting. The reason why it was interesting is that a lot of, let's call them app I don't know what to call them, app layer agent companies, essentially they are like, “Oh, I can create this new app, this new agent. All I need, I just use Claude Code, and I throw it into a sandbox, and then I have my interface to the human to that.” And so that enabled so many more companies to actually offer this, and then they would pull on sandbox. So that was, that was interesting. And to your point, like MCP, versus the CLI, the MCP is an interface against an API, whereas the CLI is like you can actually go do things. Like this is it. The difference between integrations and actually running scripts or data or analysis against a thing. So being able to use a CLI very well enables the agent to do more things, and it's because that people will invoke a sandbox, they'll run it in the CLI, and but it'll do anal-analysis on that data and then give you an actual result versus just, pulling data from an API source.Swyx [00:46:29]: Yeah, it's a layer of indirection basically, it's the same thing as agentic search versus RAG, which where you're.Ivan [00:46:34]: Exactly, yeah.Swyx [00:46:34]: Just like you just win whenever people put more agents into their workflow. And so like it doesn't really matter, but I'm just kinda teasing out like what else have people heard about that like it's sort of, “Oh yeah, this is another sandbox use case. Oh yeah, that's another one.” Am I, am I missing any big ones?Ivan [00:46:51]: The thing, the thing that people, which is the computer use stuff, which I think is probably the most interesting one, is, and to your point, we've talked to so many people over the last year. It's like, “Oh, like why do you need a sandbox? Why do you need this? Why this?” And to your point, it's like, “Oh, I need sandbox for this. I need sandbox for that. I need sandbox-” It's like, “Oh, I need it for every single thing.” And so basically what I, what I - and it sounds like a broken record, it's like you use a laptop every single day, right? And you are n of one. It's just you. But now imagine how And by the way, the laptop, the computer PC market, the PC market is about equal to the cloud market in total. So it's about 150, 180 billion a year. Something like that. It's about roughly the three cloud hyperscalers is about equal to like Apple, HP, Lenovo, whatever, It's a little bit less, but it's sort of like that. And now imagine And that's just like, so how big is the addressable market? What, how many people are there in the world now? What's the last data?Swyx [00:47:45]: Let's call it eight billion.Ivan [00:47:46]: Eight billion. And so let's say you can have two computer, like you have one personal and one business, whatever. Like so it's double that, right? and so that's 16 billion, right? How many agents are gonna be running in two years, in 10 years, in 100 years? Like And for every single task, they will need one of these. And so how big is that? That market is essentially quote unquote “infinite”. You will get to the point, and Dylan Patel was at the conference talking about, from SemiAnalysis, that talks usually about GPUs, was also talking about how CPUs will now be a bottleneck because it will be the constraint. You won't be able to grow, or we won't be able to have enough of these because there won't be enough CPUs to basically do.Swyx [00:48:23]: Yeah. Well, I actually had a really good podcast with Doug Oliphant, who, which was his president at SemiAnalysis, where they've basically been like, yeah, it's been a GPU shortage first, but then it's cascaded down to memory and now to CPUs.Ivan [00:48:35]: CPU, yeah.Swyx [00:48:35]: It-What's next? So networking. So, networking actually has been in shortage for a while if you're looking at, just GPU networking. But, yeah, it's really crazy the amount of computer use that's going on, yeah, cool. I, other questions are, just the one very big part is the open sourceness which you didn't have to do, your competitors don't do, like it's not, a lot of people are worried about keeping their projects open source because some competitor can just slot fork it. I don't know if there's any reflections on just being an open source company.Open Source, Trust, and Enterprise ProcurementIvan [00:49:15]: Yeah. There's a bunch. So we the original product that we did was open source.Swyx [00:49:19]: Yeah. CodeAnywhere.Ivan [00:49:20]: So doing that was actually very good for us. There's basically a saying of, What's the saying? Like, companies that are, that are doing really well, measure themselves against, free cashflow, that are kinda okay, it's EBITDA, then, it's, it goes all the way down.Swyx [00:49:36]: The worst is like GitHub stars.Ivan [00:49:37]: GitHub stars. GitHub stars are the worst, yeah. So you go all the way down to GitHub stars. And so our original one was GitHub stars. That's what we talked about, we're at the point we're talking about revenue, so we're we've gone up the stack on that. And so we started.Swyx [00:49:47]: No, profit.Ivan [00:49:48]: Yeah. We haven't, we're, we'll get there. We'll get there. But basically at that point we did stars and GitHub and it was useful, and the original variation that we did, it we split the core into its own repo and it was Apache 2.0, so very, permissive. And then we basically would bundl

Insight of the Week
Commemorating the Shabuot Offering

Insight of the Week

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2026


Numerous reasons have been given for the time-honored, cherished custom to eat dairy foods on Shabuot. One of the lesser-known explanations is that offered by the Rama (Rav Moshe Isserles, Poland, 1530-1572), in his glosses to the Shulhan Aruch (Orah Haim 494). Interestingly enough, the custom the Rama describes is to eat a dairy meal followed by a meat meal. As Halacha forbids using the same loaf of bread for a dairy meal and a meat meal, eating these two meals necessitates the use of two separate loaves. These two loaves, the Rama writes, commemorate the special Shabuot sacrifice, which, as the Torah commands in the Book of Vayikra ( 23:17), consisted of two loaves of bread, and was thus named Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem (the "two-breads sacrifice"). We might wonder why, according to the Rama, no such commemoration is made for a similar sacrifice brought on the second day of Pesach. The Korban Ha'omer was offered from the newly-harvested barley on the 16 th of Nissan, and it paralleled the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem brought on Shabuot. The Mishna (Menahot 68b) teaches that each of these two sacrifices functioned as a "Matir" – meaning, it made something permissible. The Korban Ha'omer made it permissible to eat from the newly-harvested crops, and the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem made it permissible to offer Menahot (grain offerings) in the Bet Ha'mikdash from the newly-harvested crop. Meaning, although it was permissible to eat from the new grain after the offering of the Korban Ha'omer on the 16 th of Nissan, it remained forbidden to bring a meal-offering in the Temple from the new grain until the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem was brought on Shabuot. Seemingly, if – as the Rama writes – we make a commemoration on Shabuot for the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem, then we should also make a commemoration on the second day of Pesach for the Korban Ha'omer. Why don't we? The answer lies is a fundamental distinction between these two sacrifices. This distinction is expressed in a comment by the Sefat Emet (Rav Yehuda Aryeh Leib of Ger, Poland, 1847-1905) discussing a situation where, for whatever reason, the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem was not brought on Shabuot. When it comes to the Korban Ha'omer on Pesach, the Sages inferred from a verse that the new grain becomes permissible for consumption after the 16 th of Nissan even if the sacrifice was not offered. Although the sacrifice is what permits the new grain, if there was no sacrifice, the grain becomes permissible after that day. One might have thought that since no such textual inference was made in regard to the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem, the new grain remains forbidden for use with Menahot if this sacrifice is not offered. (This is, indeed, the view taken by the Minhat Hinuch, Siman 307.) The Sefat Emet, however, writes that this is not so. He explains that the Torah does not actually forbid using the new grain for sacrifices before the offering of the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem. Rather, it requires that the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem must be the first sacrifice brought from the new crop. This sacrifice is called a "Minha Hadasha" – "a new grain offering," because it was the first grain offering prepared with the newly-harvested wheat. This is the only reason why sacrifices may not be brought from the new crop before Shabuot – because the special Shabuot offering must be the first sacrifice brought from the new grain. Naturally, then, if – for whatever reason – this sacrifice was not brought, sacrifices may nevertheless be brought from the new crop after Shavuot. This understanding of the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem points to a fundamental distinction between this sacrifice and the Korban Ha'omer on Pesach. The Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem is not actually a "Matir." Its function is not to permit wheat for use with sacrifices. It is offered as part of the celebration of Shabuot, which is called "Yom Ha'bikkurim" (Bamidbar 28:26) – the day of the new produce, when the first portion of newly-harvested wheat is brought as a sacrifice. The Korban Ha'omer, by contrast, is not inherently linked to Pesach. It happens to coincide with Pesach, but it has nothing inherently to do with this holiday. The Torah commanded offering this sacrifice on the 16 th of Nissan to permit eating the new crop, but this offering is not part of the observance of Pesach. This is seen clearly in the Rambam's rulings regarding the distribution of these sacrifices among the Kohanim. Generally speaking, the portions of a sacrifice given to the Kohanim were distributed only among the Kohanim who were "on duty" when the sacrifice was offered. However, the special Yom Tov sacrifices were distributed among any Kohen who wanted a portion, even if the Yom Tov was not during his "shift." In Hilchot Temidin U'musafin, the Rambam writes that the Korban Ha'omer was treated like a regular sacrifice – given only to the Kohanim who were "on duty" that day – but the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem was distributed among all the Kohanim, as it is a Yom Tov sacrifice. This clearly shows that the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem is part of the celebration of Shabuot, whereas the Korban Ha'omer is not part of the celebration of Pesach. This easily explains why, according to the Rama, we make a commemoration of the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem on Shabuot, but make no similar commemoration of the Korban Ha'omer on Pesach. Since the Korban Sheteh Ha'lehem was an integral part of the Yom Tob of Shabuot in the times of the Bet Ha'mikdash, it warrants a commemoration now, when we cannot offer the sacrifice. The Korban Ha'omer, by contrast, was not an integral part of the Pesach celebration, and so it does not warrant a commemoration nowadays.

The Investing Academy Podcast
Canada's Inflation Just Spiked to 2.8% | Here's What's Coming

The Investing Academy Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2026 6:50


Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/pSi51iX0apE The latest inflation report for Canada is out, giving us crucial insights into the current state of the economy. We're breaking down the year-over-year increase in the inflation rate to 2.8%, a notable jump from March's 2.4%, and discussing how rising gas prices are a key factor. This financial news provides a deeper understanding of the consumer price index and its implications for Canada today.

Retire With Ryan
Are You Receiving Your Full Spousal Social Security Benefit? #306

Retire With Ryan

Play Episode Listen Later May 19, 2026 14:08


Are you getting your full entitlement, spousal Social Security, or—like one of my recent clients—missing out on hundreds, even thousands, of dollars each year? This week, I discuss how spousal benefits work, what the eligibility requirements are, and the critical steps you need to take to ensure you aren't leaving money on the table. If you or your spouse are nearing retirement or already collecting benefits, this episode will equip you with the knowledge to maximize your Social Security income and avoid common mistakes.   You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in... [00:00] Spousal social security benefits [01:56] Criteria for receiving spousal benefit [02:25] Calculation of spousal social security benefit [07:26] Confusion when both spouses are eligible for their own and spousal benefits [09:46] Sue's social security increase [11:24] Misconception that adjustments are automatic    Understanding Spousal Social Security Benefits If you are married (or divorced after a marriage of at least 10 years), you may qualify for spousal Social Security benefits. For those with limited earning histories or lower primary insurance amounts (PIA), this benefit is especially valuable. At your full retirement age (FRA)—which is 67 if you were born in 1960 or later—you can collect up to 50% of your spouse's full retirement benefit, so long as your own benefit is less than half of theirs. If your own benefit exceeds half your spouse's, you'll receive your own larger benefit. Social Security will always pay the higher of the two benefits, but not both combined. This makes it vital to understand where you fall before claiming.   How Early Claiming Reduces Your Benefit Timing is critical. Claiming spousal benefits before your FRA means your payments will be permanently reduced. The reductions work as follows: For the first 36 months before your FRA, your benefit is reduced by 25/36 of 1% for every month claimed early. Additional months over 36 are reduced by 5/12 of 1% per month. For example, if a spousal benefit of $800 is claimed 36 months early, the amount drops to $600, a 25% reduction. If claimed 60 months early (at age 62), the benefit falls by roughly 35% to $520.   Key Rules of Spousal Benefit Eligibility To receive a spousal benefit, several conditions must be met: Your spouse must be collecting their Social Security benefit (unless you're claiming divorced benefits, in which case your ex only needs to be eligible). You must be at least age 62 (or have a qualifying child under 16 or with a disability in your care). Generally, you need to be married for at least one year before applying, though this rule doesn't apply if you're the parent of your spouse's child. If divorced, you must have been married for at least 10 years. Spousal benefits do not increase if you wait past your full retirement age to claim. The maximum is always 50% of your spouse's PIA. Delaying only increases benefits on your own work record, not on a spousal claim.   Spousal Benefits Are Not Automatic One major pitfall couples face is assuming that spousal benefits "switch on" automatically when their higher-earning spouse starts collecting their benefit. In reality, the Social Security Administration often needs to be contacted directly to initiate the higher spousal benefit. I share a case where a client (Sue) was entitled to a much larger benefit once her husband began taking Social Security at age 70, yet her benefit wasn't increased until she contacted Social Security, resulting in a missed $900/month for six months. Social Security would only issue six months of retroactive pay, meaning the client lost out on another six months of increased income. Don't assume the system will identify and correct missed benefits for you—it's up to you (and your advisor) to ensure you're receiving everything you've earned.   Resources Mentioned Retirement Readiness Review Subscribe to the Retire with Ryan YouTube Channel Download my entire book for FREE  Social Security Fairness Act   Connect With Morrissey Wealth Management  www.MorrisseyWealthManagement.com/contact Subscribe to Retire With Ryan

Sports R Dumb
Schedule Release Videos R Excessively Long and Dumb (But We Still Generally Love 'Em)

Sports R Dumb

Play Episode Listen Later May 19, 2026 28:01 Transcription Available


Do you need a 9-minute video to learn about your favorite team's schedule? Certainly not! But the sports world loves milking things for all they're worth, and so we wind up with incredibly intricate schedule release videos like the NFL has once again launched. Or, perhaps you wait a month into the playoffs to learn who the MVP of the NBA is, despite those votes being tallied a month ago.Plus, it's Sean's birthday this week! He reflects on his birthday bash celebrations and things he's started doing as an older man. Such things include getting wildly sore after physical activities, like a brief toss of a Frisbee.Referenced in This Episode:Steven Jackson and Arian Foster NFL Shop CommercialAtlanta Falcons Schedule Release Video

Gangland Wire
Jerry Catena and the New Jersey Genovese Empire

Gangland Wire

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2026


Retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Detective Gary Jenkins sits down with returning guest Scott Deitch for a detailed exploration of one of the more understated yet influential figures in organized crime—Jerry Catena. Scott Deitch, known for his deep research and engaging storytelling, brings insight from his books Cigar City Mafia, Garden State Gangland, and his upcoming release Jersey Boss. The conversation moves from Tampa's mob history to the inner workings of the Genovese crime family, with a focus on Catena's calculated rise through the ranks.

Monster Fuzz
The Deer Woman

Monster Fuzz

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2026 63:23


Deer Woman, sometimes known as the Deer Lady, is a spirit in various Indigenous American mythologies. Generally she kills men who have harmed women and children, she is vengeful and murderous, and known to lure these men to their deaths. She appears as either a beautiful young woman with deer feet or as a deer. As Native political goals and social movements continue to expand in response to the increasing violence against Indigenous women, new retellings of Deer Woman's story have emerged. Contrary to her traditional narrations, Deer Woman has been reimagined within the framework of missing and murdered Indigenous women, abandoning her image as a murderous seductress for that of a self-saving hero acting out of necessity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Mike Hosking Breakfast
Mike's Minute: Fees Free was a mistake - let's not repeat it

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2026 2:09 Transcription Available


I have learned a lot about kids and university, having had two attend and graduate and one still immersed in the experience. Here are the takeouts. Generally, you go for a reason. You have an idea of what you want to achieve and those who don't, flounder quickly. I have many examples of kids who enrolled because "that is what you do". Schools too often give university as a default. It has a snobbery about it as if successful people only go on to tertiary learning. It seems the wider lesson we have all learned is Jacinda Ardern's "next year is on me" was fatally flawed because funding the first year was literally a waste of money and even when it got put to the back end of study, it would seem the world hasn't been changed. So they are scrapping it. The reality is people on a path will incur debt in the belief that whatever it is they are studying will serve them well, provide challenge and enjoyment, and hopefully pay a wage that allows them to pay back the loan and get on with their lives. University has always been heavily subsidised anyway on the idea that we all benefit. But to suggest you study for anyone other than your own personal satisfaction and enhancement is farcical. So no more first year/last year artificiality. The money will be put elsewhere, perhaps into the more practical side of the workforce. Personally, I wouldn't mind it being saved. It's not like we actually have the money in the first place anyway. But the Winston Peters argument appears to be the trades, which makes it yet another of those debates that is constantly tinkered with and never really resolved. Is paying an employer to train a person any more or less wasteful, or artificial, than paying a university to train a doctor? We need doctors as much if not more than we need plumbers. Both are valuable, both are in short supply. The Peters argument will of course be driven by the immigration aspect of it all. If we don't train who we need, we bring them in and before you know it you have a "butter chicken tsunami". It's of course a government again picking winners and I would have thought we had already learned that lesson. Peters' other idea, if you remember back, was bonding students to regions, or indeed immigrants to regions. That didn't work either. The trick here is not to repeat past mistakes. And yet the budget is destined to include at least one. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Protestant Libertarian Podcast
Ep 264: God, Israel, and the Suzerain-Vassal Treaty

The Protestant Libertarian Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2026 18:33


In this episode I discuss how the covenant God made with Israel in the Old Testament was a form of an ancient Near Eastern suzerain-vassal treaty. Building from the fantastic work of Sandra Richter's ‘Epic of Eden' book, a suzerain vassal treaty is one in which a king or imperial power, the suzerain, makes a treaty with a lesser kingdom or people, the vassal. They are asymmetrical in the sense that the suzerain clearly holds the power but also reciprocal in that both parties are contractually obligated to one another. Generally, the vassal offers loyalty and taxes to the suzerain while the suzerain grants military protection in peace. Seen in this light, the covenant God makes with Israel depicts him as the rightful king, and in the climax of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy 27-32, the blessings and curses of covenant faithfulness are laid out clearly. If vassal Israel honors suzerain YHWH by obeying His Law, God will bless Israel, keep them safe and well-fed in the land, protect them from outsiders, and allow them to be a light to the pagan nations. If Israel breaks covenant, God will withhold his protection. This logic, found already in the giving of the Decalogue in Exodus 19-24 and Leviticus 26, can be understood through the framework of suzerain-vassal treaty, depicting God as the true king. For Christians seeking to derive political principles from the Old Testament, this is one important aspect of ancient thought to consider.  Media Referenced:Epic of Eden: https://a.co/d/0hZfe5ZZDru Johnson on OT Politics: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-263-the-torah-the-old-testament-and-christian-politics-with-dru-johnson/ The Protestant Libertarian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and a part of the Christians For Liberty Network. The Libertarian Christian Institute can be found at www.libertarianchristians.com.Questions, comments, suggestions? Please reach out to me at theprotestantlibertarian@gmail.com.  You can also follow the podcast on Twitter: @prolibertypod, and YouTube, @ProLibertyPod, where you will get shorts and other exclusive video content. For more about the show, you can go to theprotestantlibertarianpodcast.com. If you like the show and want to support it, you can! Go to libertarianchristians.com, where you can donate to LCI and buy The Protestant Libertarian Podcast Merch! Also, please consider giving me a star rating and leaving me a review, it really helps expand the show's profile! Thanks!

The John Batchelor Show
S8 Ep866: Elizabeth Peek critiques redistricting as an unattractive game that voters generally dislike. She emphasizes that population growth in Texas and Florida provides more long-term political power than manipulating district lines in blue states. (2/

The John Batchelor Show

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2026 4:28


Elizabeth Peek critiques redistricting as an unattractive game that voters generally dislike. She emphasizes that population growth in Texas and Florida provides more long-term political power than manipulating district lines in blue states. (2/16)1930 THE BEETLE HORDE, ASTOUNDING

Kingdom Culture Conversations
[On Purpose 2026] Russ Miller, CreationMinistries.org: Can We Draw a Distinction Between "Creationism" Generally and "Biblical Creationism" Specifically?

Kingdom Culture Conversations

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2026 35:44


The return of "What About?" Wednesdays! Text us your questions for apologist and pastor Robby Lashua!Today:"Can we draw a distinction between 'creationism' generally and 'Biblical creationism' specifically?"Wait.  Read that question again.  Author Russ Miller isn't just suggesting that creationism generally, within all its forms, or young Earth creationism specifically aren't Biblical, he's suggesting that there is a Biblical approach and perspective of Young Earth creationism rooted in a global reading of Noah's flood.  He's advocating for a view in which he suggests the Bible is clear and Christian confusion about varied schools of thinking about creationism is rooted in a haphazard approach to God's word.Controversial?  Yep.True?  That's for you to decide.Background:In the summer of 2016, the annual Crusaders Charge into Summer Reading campagin introduced us to Russ Miller, a storied and established Biblical creationist who lives, believe it or not, off-the-grid in a crater in northern Arizona.  If that were not crazy enough, during that summer, Miller introduced us to his book, "The Cost", and he made two audacious claims.First, Russ Miller claimed that the universe and all of creation was established by God in six 24-hour days, less than 10,000 years ago.  He claimed he had scientific and scriptural evidence to back up his claims.Second, Miller claimed that if our nation continued to deny God the creator and the concept of "Imago Dei" -- that we are created in the image and likeness of God, on purpose, and for a purpose -- our culture would go into a freefall, losing all concept of right and wrong, falling into chaos and disorder.Now, ten years later, Russ Miller is back and his warnings and worries have exploded into reality.  Our country and our culture are mired in confusion about truth, gender, marriage, race, identity, spirituality, and more.We are paying what Miller called "The Cost" of losing track of who we are and whose we are.Miller's latest book is "Consider the Cost" -- an updated and expanded version of "The Cost" that is available at no cost in the three offices of Northwest Christian School -- and his message remains the same:  we must understand that we were created by God on purpose -- we are not biochemical happenstance -- and we were created for a purpose.  We are loved and valued.  The truth is knowable.  We have a reason.  We have a mission.This summer, we're going deep into creationism.  We are going to spend time with audacious individuals who believe in Young Earth, Old Earth, Theistic Evolution, Geocentricity, and, yes, a Flat Earth.  Our journey will be anchored in God's word as we enjoy some pretty amazing conversations.But, at the end of the day, diverse positions aside, every moment and every word of the KingdomCultureConversations.com episodes that we will hear this summer (between May 11th and September 28th) will be rooted in one truth:  You were created on purpose and for a purpose.To learn more about Russ Miller and his organization, "Creation and Evolution Science Ministries", please follow this link.To get a copy of "Consider the Cost", you can pick up a free copy of the book in the three offices of Northwest Christian School in Phoenix, Arizona or "Kingdom Culture Conversations" is a podcast created by Northwest Christian School in Phoenix, Arizona.For more information on Northwest Christian School, visit:  https://www.ncsaz.org/To reach out to Geoff Brown, please email gbrown@ncsaz.org or you can reach him by cell phone:  (623)225-5573.

Today In Space
Starship Flight 12 Is Coming — And Falcon Heavy Just Reminded Us What SpaceX Can Do

Today In Space

Play Episode Listen Later May 8, 2026 43:21


On this week's episode, we break down what to expect for Starship Flight 12 coming up next week & we share the moments from our last live stream hanging out during another falcon heavy launch! There's a lot going on in the world and the space industry and we want to get you amped up for the next big rocket launch Starship flight 12 success is success for future Artemis missions and NASA;s journey to the moon again. So wish the team's luck and get caught up on everything since flight 11 in EP413! I'm Writing My First Book and Making My First AI! Sign up for our newsletter to follow along and learn more (sign up at chat3dp.ai) Is YOUR Company Looking to Hire Talented People in the Aerospace/Robotics/Technology fields? Email us at  todayinspacepodcast@gmail.com  for our in-podcast job listing ad rates and start finding talent within our community! Let's build a fantastic future together! We'd like to thank our sponsors:AG3D Labs (go to ag3dlabs.com to learn more, get started 3D printing, and sign up for our newsletter and 3D Printing AI release!) Resources: Video from Space leading up to Flight 12: https://x.com/spacex/status/2047800137133756633?s=46 Starship Development Comic Infographic by Alex G Orphanos SPACEMAN COMICS:  Digital ($2)  https://stan.store/AG3Dlabs/p/space-comic-poster-01-by-spaceman-comics Physical (starting at $23) https://ag3dreplicator.com/products/starship-development-comic-poster-matte-vertical-spacex-inspired-infographic Support the podcast: • Buy a 3D printed gift from our shop -  http://ag3dprinting.etsy.com• Get a free quote on your next 3D printing project at  http://ag3d-printing.com • Today In Space Merch:  James Webb Space Telescope Model (3DPrinted)  https://ag3dprinting.etsy.com/listing/1839142903 SpaceX Starship-Inspired Rocket Pen (3DPrinted)  https://ag3dprinting.etsy.com/listing/1602850640 Timestamps: 00:00 Starship Flight 12 Incoming 00:58 Starship Development, Raptor V3, Pad 2, and more! 04:25 Moon Landers for NASA Artemis 3 & 4 - NO MORE NRHO? 04:45 What is NRHO? Generally, not technically 05:35 LEO For Artemis 3 06:41 About Writing My First Book & Making 1st AI 08:51 Your Space Company Looking to Hire? Advertise Jobs on the Podcast! 10:13 Falcon Heavy Replay for Viasat 3-F3 Launch Hangout Stream LIVE

DK Pittsburgh Sports Radio
DK's Daily Shot of Steelers: Is offense generally improved?

DK Pittsburgh Sports Radio

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2026 14:14


Award-winning reporter Dejan Kovacevic, a lifelong veteran of the Pittsburgh sports scene, delivers three 'Daily Shot' podcasts every weekday morning, one each covering the Steelers, Penguins and Pirates! Plus three additional 'Double Shot' videos that stream live on YouTube every weekday afternoon starting at 3 p.m. Eastern! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

DK's Daily Shot of Steelers
Is offense generally improved?

DK's Daily Shot of Steelers

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2026 14:14


Award-winning reporter Dejan Kovacevic, a lifelong veteran of the Pittsburgh sports scene, delivers three 'Daily Shot' podcasts every weekday morning, one each covering the Steelers, Penguins and Pirates! Plus three additional 'Double Shot' videos that stream live on YouTube every weekday afternoon starting at 3 p.m. Eastern! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Growing Pulse Crops
Getting Crop Protection Products Labeled for Pulses

Growing Pulse Crops

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2026 30:25


Todd Scholz is vice president of research and member services for USA Pulses, which until last year was known as the USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council. This year Todd will retire after 26 years with the organization. He joins us today to talk about the industry's work in getting more crop protection tools labeled for pulse crop growers. USA Pulses is a nonprofit organization that has been pushing for pulses in our food system since 1965. Their work supports over 5,000 growers, processors, and exporters across the US, working from field to fork to strengthen the industry and highlight the value of pulses worldwide. Todd's job as vice president for research and member services is to take research needs from producers/industry and try to marry it with researchers and funding to answer the need to be able to raise the crop. Today, Todd discusses USA Pulse's research priorities, their involvement with the IR-4 program and that program's importance for pulse crop growers, global harmonization of maximum residue limits and some reflections from his 26 years in his role.“ There's an organization called IR-4. It was created in the sixties, and its purpose was to provide the link for specialty crops to get access to pesticides. Generally, when a registrant or a pesticide company wants to label a pesticide, they look for easy returns. So that's corn, soybeans, maybe wheat and other major crops. And so the specialty crops get ignored. So the IR-4 was organized and formed and its history is so amazing. It started with one guy, a desk, and maybe a secretary. And now it's about a $15 million program.” - Todd ScholzThis Week on Growing Pulse Crops:Meet Todd Scholz, vice president of research and member services for USA PulsesExplore the industry's work in getting more crop protection tools labeled for pulse crop growers.Discover the IR-4 Program and its importance for pulse crop growersGrowing Pulse Crops is produced by Dr. Audrey Kalil and hosted by Tim Hammerich of the Future of Agriculture Podcast.

The Daily Mastery Podcast by Robin Sharma
The Secret to Growing Every Relationship Starts Within

The Daily Mastery Podcast by Robin Sharma

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2026 3:23 Transcription Available


I do believe that the finest goal for a life greatly lived is to work daily to remember who you truly are (before the busyness and hurts of the world blocked you from this knowledge).I am speaking of that part of you beyond flesh and bones.That part of you that is… …heroic versus egoic…brave versus insecure…loving versus selfish…peaceful versus worried As you build and strengthen that relationship with your highest and best, every other relationship rises with you!…your relationship with your loved ones, your work, your prosperity and the world at large ascends. Sometimes dramatically. Generally incrementally.My latest book “The Wealth Money Can't Buy” is full of fresh ideas and original tools that I'm absolutely certain will cause quantum leaps in your positivity, productivity, wellness, and happiness. You can order it now by clicking here.FOLLOW ROBIN SHARMA:InstagramFacebookYouTube

Grumpy Nostalgia: Second Look Cinema
608.Contact (1997): Nerds Discover New Life in Our Galaxy. An New Cheese

Grumpy Nostalgia: Second Look Cinema

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2026 63:33


Send us Fan MailThis week's brand new episode features what we call a "thinking man's Sci-Fi" movie.  Generally, that's code for boring. And there's some of that to be fair, but for the most part this one is pretty good. If you can buy McConaughey as a priest, you can pretty much believe anything.  Even the existence of little green men (which there are none here either).  Stick around to the end where we present part 2 of our 2026 Summer Movie Preview: The Leftovers.  Is as intriguing as it sounds.

Elucidations: A University of Chicago Podcast
Episode 155: Rebecca Lowe discusses speaking freely

Elucidations: A University of Chicago Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2026 40:28


Last episode, we talked about free speech, and this time, we sit down with Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center) to discuss the related but slightly different topic of speaking freely. Speaking freely: the thing you feel entitled to do when a superior says to you: “you may speak freely.” But although speaking freely is the phenomenon our guest is interested in characterizing, rather than trying to characterize it directly, her approach is to get granular about what it means not to speak freely. What are the different ways you might be blocked from saying what you would otherwise say, if you were fully unfettered?Rebecca Lowe discusses three broad categories of failing to speak freely. Type 1 is where you lack the capacity either to utter words or to determine their content, e.g. because you have laryngitis, or because someone put their hand over your mouth, or because an evil demon controls everything you say. Type 2 is where you're able to speak, and you're able to control what you say, but something is preventing you from communicating in the way you've decided to, e.g. when you want to call your friend, but your phone battery is dead. Type 3 is where you're able to speak, you're able to control what you say, and the situation allows you to communicate in the way you've decided to, but you refrain from speaking your mind because of some perceived risk, e.g. when you want to suggest your friend dump her boyfriend, but hold back because you're worried she's going to get offended.One subtlety of these categories is that they are not logically independent. If you're blocked from speaking freely in the Type 1 way, you're thereby also blocked from speaking freely in the Type 2 and Type 3 ways. And if you're blocked from speaking freely in the Type 2 way, you're thereby also blocked from speaking freely in the Type 3 way. The converse doesn't hold: for example, as our bad boyfriend example emphasized, you can be blocked from speaking in the Type 3 way without being blocked from speaking in the Type 1 way. Indeed, as Rebecca emphasizes, it's only people who can speak in the Type 1 way who can be blocked from speaking in the Type 3 way!In this episode, our guest argues that the public conversation about a person's right to speak their mind would go more smoothly if we tried to keep these distinctions in view. That is, whenever we feel indignant about someone's ability to speak being suppressed, we should consider the details of the situation. Which of these three types of obstructions was it? Was the person able to speak their mind in the situation? Then, we can consider whether they were entitled to do so. Generally we are, but it seems there are certain exception cases. The hope is that by breaking down what is at issue in any particular case we're discussing, we'll arrive at a better understanding of what its moral lessons are.It was a fun and lively conversation, and I hope you enjoy it! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daf Yomi for Women - Hadran
Menachot 109 - April 30, 13 Iyar

Daf Yomi for Women - Hadran

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2026 45:59


A third challenge is brought against the ruling of Raba bar Avuha, which posits that one who vows to bring "an ox from my oxen" must provide his best ox. The difficulty arises from a comparison to commercial law: if a person sells "a house among my houses," they are not legally obligated to provide the buyer with their finest property. This discrepancy is resolved by distinguishing between the laws of hekdesh (consecration to the Temple), where the Sanctuary maintains the "upper hand," and the laws of sales, where the seller retains the "upper hand." If an individual vows to bring an offering to the Temple of Onias in Egypt, the fulfillment of that vow depends on its specific phrasing. Generally, if the vow was intended for a Temple for God, the offering must be brought to the Temple in Jerusalem; however, if the vow was specific to the Temple of Onias, there is a dispute as to whether the offering is considered a sacrifice and would be punished by karet or if the person has merely committed a "meaningless" act. A kohen who served at the Temple of Onias and subsequently repents is barred from performing service in the Temple in Jerusalem. This was a penalty to such priests, categorizing them as equivalent to a blemished kohen; while they are disqualified from performing the sacrificial service, they are still permitted to eat and share in the distribution of the sacrificial foods (kodashim) with their fellow priests. Likewise, a kohen who served in idolatrous worship is disqualified from serving in the Temple. Rav Nachman and Rav Sheshet debate four specific scenarios to determine if they constitute "serving" an idol and whether a priest who performed them can return to Temple service. These four cases are: slaughtering an animal to an idol intentionally, sprinkling the blood unwittingly, bowing down to the idol, and accepting the idol as a god by verbal declaration. A fundamental debate exists between Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda regarding the nature of the Temple of Onias itself - specifically, whether it was established for worship of God or for idolatry. Each Sage cites a different historical tradition regarding the political and family disputes that led Onias to flee to Egypt and build his Temple.

Nerd Noise Radio
[RERUNS] Ch. F - "Backtracks - THE OTHER 50!" (orig rel 04/28/2020)

Nerd Noise Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2026 148:13


2026 Show Notes Addendum:    To round out our second (and final) visit to the realm of backwards VGM (and very closely related non-VGM) on Nerd Noise Radio, let's replay the 2020 original series, which was also a two-parter, but instead of being two "equal billing" parts, it was a one part "episode proper" and then a supplemental Ch F "F-isode" bonus. In addition to being one of my all-time favorite projects to work on in show history, the series also marked an important turning point in show history as the first installment was our last ever NNR broadcast on the main feed to be produced in GarageBand on MacOS (except for the deliberate call-back that was C1E75 in 2023), and the F-isode was my first ever production in Audacity and Ardour in Linux (then Ubuntu Studio (KDE), now, Fedora (GNOME)). Original Show Notes below are largely faithful to the original with one MASSIVE exception: the tracklist is now populated with all the relevant track info, where it was originally withheld to keep the mystery and mystique alive.   ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Original Show Notes (modified to show track names on 04/20/2026):   ------------------------------------------------------------------------   You are tuned to Nerd Noise Radio – Channel F. Today's “F-isode” is significant not only for being only the second F-isode we've had in over a year, when they used to be quite a bit more common, but is also significant for being the first ever production of Nerd Noise Radio of any type to be produced entirely on Linux. Historically, the show has been produced on Mac. With a small backlog of previously-produced, but not-yet-released music blocks that were, of course, produced on the Mac still in reserve for future episodes, it will be some time yet before the Mac presence fades from the show completely. But it is my hope to do the lion's share of future all-new production on Linux moving forward. So, the shift will be a glide, rather than a snap. But that shift starts...here.    Longtime listeners of the show will know full well what a Channel F F-isode is, but a pair of really beautiful things happened early this month which will have brought new attention to the show, from faces as near and dear as my fellow Des Moinesers (and surrounding communities), to as far-flung as Linux fans all the world over. For an explanation of what Channel F is, and how it relates to Nerd Noise Radio as a whole for the newcomers, as well as the details of who and what the new faces are, and how all that came about, see below. Also, for a descripton of how this F-isode relates to our April Fool's episode, “Backtracks”, see the blog....or just sit, back, relax, and enjoy, as you listen to.....”The OTHER 50”!     Timestamps provided, but track details withheld for now in case anyone wanted to play the guessing game on the tracks. A follow-up blog post on April 30th will provide the entire track list information for both Backtracks and for today's outing. So, be on the lookout for that.    In the meantime, enjoy!    Tracklist (ALL TRACKS ARE PLAYED IN REVERSE - except Intro)! Track# - Track - Game - System(s) - Composer(s) - Timestamp   A1) Intro – 00:00:00    01) Options - Daffy Duck in Hollywood - Genesis - Matt Furniss – 00:12:13    02) September 2015 - N/A (system menu music - eShop) - 3DS / WiiU - Kazumi Totaka – 00:16:33    03) The Mall - Skate or Die 2 - NES - Rob Hubbard – 00:19:44    04) Evil Dante - Cratermaze - TG16 - Jun Chikuma, Keita Hoshi, Toshiaki Takimoto, Masaru Takahashi, and/or Takayuki Iwabuchi – 00:21:21    05) Character Select - Cosmic Carnage - 32X - Hikoshi Hashimoto – 00:23:01    06) Ethnic Cave and Flame - X-Men - Arcade - Konami Kukeiha Club – 00:25:06    07) Jazz 3 - Sim Copter - PC - Jerry Martin – 00:27:36    08) Reckless Running - Sega Rally Championship - Saturn - Naofumi Hataya – 00:32:38    09) Collision Chaos Zone (Present) - Sonic CD (NA) - Sega CD / Windows 95 - Spencer Nilsen, David Young, Mark Crew, and/or Pastiche – 00:36:45    10) Main Menu - Sonic Mania - Multiplatform - Tee Lopes – 00:40:02    11) Opening 1 - Hisou Kihei X-Serd - PC Engine - Koji Hayama – 00:41:10    12) Brinstar Red Soil - Super Metroid - SNES - Kenji Yamamoto and/or Minako Hamano – 00:42:56    13) Stage 3-3 - Ai Chou Aniki - PC Engine - Iwasaki Taku – 00:46:40    14) Options - Bram Stoker's Dracula - Genesis - Matt Furniss – 00:50:00    15) The Vile Peaks - Final Fantasy XIII - PS3 / XB360 - Masashi Hamauzu – 00:51:26    16) Twilight Palace (Outside) - LoZ: Twilight Princess - GameCube / Wii / WiiU - Toru Minegishi and/or Asuka Ohta – 00:54:49    17) Outside Ref, The Pyramid of Ice - Dungeon Explorer 2 - PC Engine - Masaaki Inoue and/or Akihiro Honma – 00:58:00    18) After the Battle - LoZ: Twilight Princess - GameCube / Wii / WiiU - Toru Minegishi and/or Asuka Ohta – 01:00:05    19) The Vertical - Ghost in the Shell - PS1 - Joey Beltram – 01:02:23    20) Spin on the Bridge - Streets of Rage 2 - Genesis - Yuzo Koshiro and/or Motohiro Kawashima – 01:08:44    21) Cycle 1 - Streets of Rage 3 - Genesis - Motohiro Kawashima and/or Yuzo Koshiro – 01:13:03    22) Track 11 - Illusion Blaze - PC (AdLib) - D.A.C.  – 01:16:12    23) Naruto (Light Armor) - Cosmic Carnage - 32X - Hikoshi Hashimoto – 01:18:45    24) Bases 1 & 2 - Contra - NES - c: Kazuki Muaoka / a: Hidenori Maezawa and/or Kiyohiro Sada – 01:20:31    25) Imperial Death March - Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back - NES - c: John Williams / a: Paul Webb – 01:22:05    26) Fly Like a Butterfly - Jet Set Radio Future - XBox - Hideki Naganuma – 01:22:43    27) At Doom's Gate - DOOM - PC (Midi) - Bobby Prince – 01:25:59    28) Alone in Love - Jewel Master - Genesis - Motoaki Takenouchi – 01:29:13    29) Naja - Cosmic Carnage - 32X - Hikoshi Hashimoto – 01:31:26    30) Swamp - Samurai Ghost - TG16 - Gappy, Miyoshi Okuyama, and/or Hiroyon – 01:33:36    31) Segadore Genesid 64 - N/A (non-VGM - original chiptune) - N/A (Genesis sound hardware - attempting to replicate C64 sound hardware) - Mr. Sonic699 – 01:34:43    32) Stage Theme 4 - Shinobi - Arcade - Yasuhiro Kawakami – 01:36:48    33) Title Theme - Double Dragon - NES - Kazunaka Yamane – 01:38:24    34) Field 3 - JJ & Jeff - TG16 - Takeaki Kunimoto – 01:40:05    35) Zena Lan (Light Armor) - Cosmic Carnage - 32X - Hikoshi Hashimoto – 01:42:07    36) Bearhattan Transfur - Fist of Awesome - Multiplatform - Brendan Ratliff – 01:44:22    37) Map - Wolfchild - Genesis - Matt Furniss – 01:47:47    38) Tyr (Heavily Armored) - Cosmic Carnage - 32X - Hikoshi Hashimoto – 01:49:03    39) Level 1 - Chip Chan Kick - PCFX - Yoshio Furakawa, Masahara Iwata and/or Hitoshi Sakamoto – 01:50:46    40) Stage Theme 1 - Spider-Man vs. The Sinister Six - NES - David Whittaker – 01:55:13    41) S.O.R. Super Mix (Stage Vers.) - Streets of Rage 2 - Genesis - Yuzo Koshiro and/or Motohiro Kawashima – 01:58:37    42) Stickerbush Symphony - Donkey Kong Country 2 - SNES - David Wise – 02:04:06    43) Level 3 - Tetris - CD-i - Jim Andron – 02:06:22    44) Unknown City - Doxa - PS4 (Unreleased) - Daniel Capo – 02:08:51    45) Main - N/A (Non-VGM - non-VGM computer program music) - PC (Microsoft Interactive Sampler) - Unknown – 02:10:06    46) Althena's Shrine - Lunar: The Silver Star - Sega CD - Noriyuki Iwadare, Hiroshi Fujioka, and/or Isao Mizoguchi – 02:11:09    47) Zora's Domain (Day) - LoZ: Breath of the Wild - WiiU / Switch / Switch 2 - c: Kōji Kondō / a: Yasuaki Iwata – 02:12:12    48) Martinis for Two - The Sims - PC - Jerry Martin and/or Marc Russo – 02:15:24    49) Ending - Super Castlevania IV - SNES - Masanori Adachi and/or Taro Kudo – 02:21:46    50) Ending - N/A (Non-VGM) - N/A (fan-made covers of Metroid OST played on a battery of analog synths) - c: Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka / a: Luminist  – 02:25:58    [There is no Outro]   Total Episode Runtime: 02:28:13    About the new faces: Jeff Pitts of Des Moines Cityview Magazine did a mini-vignette on four local podcasters, and reached out to me to be one of them. The mini-article appears in the April Issue of the magazine which can be viewed online (Link below). In addition to that, Jason Evangelho, a tech-writer for Forbes Magazine who focuses on Linux very generously boosted my tweets about my first production in Linux, which went on to become the most liked and retweeted tweet in my history on the platform. I make it a point to look at “the numbers” as little as possible, so I don't know how many (if any) of the new faces stuck around. But certainly a number of them at least had a peek. If you are a new face, either brought to the show through the Cityview article, or through Jason's buff of my tweet, get a hold of me to let me know you're here!     Presuming we did have at least a few stick around, I should give an explanation of what Channel F is, relative to Channel 1, and Archive Super Bonuses, so you know how this show works. I will do so at length on the blogspot version of this episode, where the blog format is more accommodating of lengthiness. But I will give you a brief overview here:     Channel 1: This is “the show proper”. These are “the actual episodes”. On average, 10 fresh episodes a year (with reruns to fill in the blanks). Other than extraordinary circumstances, they follow a standard “enhanced mixtape” format: a short, semi-standard intro, and standard housekeeping outro bookending a winding, twisting journey through sound. We have had quite the spate of non-standard “Channel 1” Episodes of late though, so for the newcomers, I wanted to stress what “normal” looks like. We don't anticipate having anything else non-standard for several months moving forward.    Channel F: This is my side-outlet for bonuses, betas, extras. It can be virtually anything. And additional mixtape music block (like today), but has been all sorts of things. We even had one that was an exposition on a certain episode's outro. Anything that doesn't fit in Channel 1, but that I still want to have full attention (podcast feed, blog, social media, Archive.org, etc) becomes a Channel F “F-isode”.    Super Bonuses: These are for the times where I have something that I felt was worth producing, and felt was worth putting out there, but did not want to clog up the podcast feed, or the blog, or social media with. Generally, it takes the form of remixes and twists on existing content. Since they only come out on Archive, and not anywhere else, and since they're not really advertised, this creates a nice “underground” quality to them. I usually drop hints inside Episodes and F-isodes if there are any Super Bonuses planned. But beyond that, a person just needs to know to be on the lookout. They will release even less consistently than F-isodes, but will also tend to be in bursts around certain episodes that are rich for alternate twists on their content.    See the blogspot version of this episode if you'd like to know more about these. Link below. Meanwhile, our next all-new episode is planned for August, though I do have some really great reruns lined up for the months between. Even those will still constitute much more of a “return to normalcy” for the show than what our past several months of fresh content offers, so a great chance to “get to know us” I hope you will enjoy! We also have a secondary podcast feed which is dedicated entirely to reruns, which will feature reruns different than the ones on the main feed, if you wish to explore even more Nerd Noise Radio history. It can be found on your podcatcher of choice by the name “Nerd Noise Radio Reruns”.    Cheers!    Link to the Cityview Article:    http://dmcityview.com/CityviewApril2020/html5/index.html?page=1&noflash (page 50)    You can find previous articles by Jeff by searching www.dmcityview.com or as compiled on Muck Rack:    https://muckrack.com/jeff-pitts/articles    Link to Jason Evangelho's Forbes articles  (@killyourfm on Twitter)    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/#18ee68a0d36f    Link to Blogspot version of today's “F-isode” (for the long version the Channels descriptions, etc.)    https://nerdnoiseradio.blogspot.com/2020/04/channel-f-backtracks-other-50.html 

forbes field track spider man stage jazz massive cycle mac rage streets april fools archive historically composer generally audacity pyramid john williams channels linux bases macos forbes magazine garageband martinis backtracks c64 david young blogspot reruns fly like orig vgm pastiche yuzo koshiro muck rack cityview paul webb ardour yasuaki iwata minako hamano nnr channel f spencer nilsen luminist stage theme at doom hidenori maezawa hiroshi fujioka jason evangelho motohiro kawashima mark crew hirokazu hip tanaka taro kudo nerd noise radio
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 24, 2026 is: arboreal • ahr-BOR-ee-ul • adjective Arboreal is a formal and literary word used to describe something that relates to trees. It is also used in technical contexts to mean "living in or often found in trees," as in "arboreal primates." // Despite weekly hikes on the same trail, she never ceases to be amazed by the arboreal beauty. See the entry > Examples: "In the saplings' early years, slow growth is the key to arboreal longevity, so the matriarch keeps her offspring in the shade." — Mike Dilger, The Guardian (London), 21 Oct. 2025 Did you know? Arboreal took root in English in the 17th century, at a time when language influencers were eager to see English take on words from Latin and Greek. Apparently unsatisfied with a now-obsolete adjective treen meaning (as recorded in our Unabridged dictionary) "of, relating to, or derived from trees," they plucked arboreal from the Latin arboreus, meaning "of a tree"; its ultimate root is arbor, meaning "tree." That root arborized—that is, branched freely (to use the term figuratively): English abounds with largely obscure words that trace back to arbor, meaning "tree." Generally synonymous with arboreal are arboraceous, arborary, arboreous, and arborous. Synonymous with arboreal specifically in the sense of "relating to or resembling a tree" are arborescent, arboresque, arborical, and arboriform. Arboricole is a synonym of arboreal in its "inhabiting trees" sense. (The influencers may have overdone it a bit.) Arboreal is far more common than any of these, but other arbor words also have a firm hold in the language: arborvitae refers to a shrub whose name translates as "tree of life"; arboretum refers to a place where trees are cultivated; and arboriculture is the cultivation of trees. And of course we can't forget Arbor Day, which since 1872 has named a day set aside for planting trees. You'd be forgiven for assuming that the English word arbor, in the sense meaning "a garden shelter of tree boughs or vines twined together," is rooted in the same source as arboreal, but in fact it comes from the Latin noun herba, meaning "herb" or "grass."

Management Blueprint
328: Set Goals in 5 Steps with David Steele

Management Blueprint

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2026 19:50


https://youtu.be/vmziYo0mPmE David Steele, serial entrepreneur and Founder and CEO of One Wealth Advisors, is driven by a simple but powerful mission: helping people. Whether through wealth management, hospitality ventures, or advising founders and leadership teams, David sees all of his businesses through one lens—service, care, and improving the lives of the people they touch. We explore David's OKR Goal Setting Framework—a practical system for turning intention into results: identify, articulate, share, measure, and execute. David explains why limiting goals to just a few priorities creates clarity, how articulating and sharing them builds accountability, and why consistent measurement and execution are what ultimately drive outcomes. He also shares how this framework applies differently in life versus business, why simplicity beats complexity in strategic planning, and how a hospitality mindset fuels both growth and long-term client loyalty. — Set Goals in 5 Steps with David Steele  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is David Steele, a serial entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of One Wealth Advisors. David, welcome to the show.  Oh, thanks for having me.  Well, great to have you. You have a very interesting career and interesting businesses, and you keep a lot of balls in the air. So I'd like to dig in. I was very interested in what I read on your website about your personal mission and why you do things. So would you mind sharing with our listeners what your personal “why” is and how you are manifesting it in your business and businesses?  My personal why—it's always people. And everything I've done in my life is about figuring out ways that I can help people.Share on X I have done so in what is seemingly different businesses. My primary role is founder and CEO of a wealth management financial planning company called One Wealth Advisors, where we work with a little over 400 families, helping them manage their financial lives. But I’ve also created two restaurant companies that are, I think, involved in the conversation around culture. They’re cool, they’re interesting. They currently have seven restaurants combined, with four more opening over the next six months. And these are seemingly different businesses, but for me, it's really about people. The financial planning company, I see as a hospitality business—we serve people. I’m very skeptical of the majority of the financial services industry, which tries to sell their value proposition on their technical wizardry or perspective on investing or tricks or whatever. And for us, it's like—that's commoditized. Everybody’s doing the same stuff. Our value proposition is that there is nobody who will envelop you with more care, love, service, attentiveness, responsiveness, and proactiveness in the industry than we will.Share on X And we can compete on that. And when I describe my financial planning company that way, and I then talk about restaurants as hospitality businesses—which is not much of a stretch—where we envelop people with deliciousness and great service, the common thread comes through. But maybe the deeper common thread for me is my partners in these different businesses. My role in their lives is to help them—as individuals, as partners in our companies—to live happy, peaceful, productive lives and to feel valued. So for me, I do the same thing every day, all day—but everyone else sees these different weird things. I’m the board of a coffee shop company, another restaurant company, a music band management company, and a music production company. And my view on all of those is that I'm there to provide hospitality and service to the founders and the executive teams of those companies. So for me, it's all about people.Share on X Very interesting. I mean, the hospitality angle and the quality-of-life angle—I saw it on your website. You really don't talk about financial performance there at all. You talk about how to improve the life of your clients. That’s kind of the big theme there. And I like the blogs as well—that also comes back to the quality-of-life theme. So anyhow, I don't want to get too deep into this, because what I'm curious about is frameworks. This is a podcast about frameworks, and I wonder—what is the framework that has worked in your life that is simple to explain, maybe three to five steps, that you could share with the audience? Something they could use to help their own businesses or themselves by implementing or thinking about things in a clearer, simpler way. It's so basic. The key to life, in my mind, is so basic. Identify goals—two to four. More than five is probably too many. And I don't care if it's for your business, your life, a relationship—I don't care what it is. Actually identify those goals. Articulate those goals—clear, concise, as few words as possible. Try to apply some type of measurement to those goals. And then once those goals are articulated, you can measure them, whether they succeed or fail. It becomes pretty clear what a strategic plan might look like to achieve those goals. And I think that goal setting is human magic.  I've written a couple of life plans throughout my life, and I never looked at them again after writing them—until many, many years later. And lo and behold, I achieved everything I’d written on those life plans. I usually don’t look at them for 10 years. And I just think the clear articulation of the goal, sharing the goals with people—because then you become accountable, to yourself and to them—it's out in the world. You're going to achieve those things.Share on X Okay, so identify, articulate, share, measure, and execute—is that the framework?  That’s it.  Yeah. Love it. That’s great. Yeah, I mean, goals do have a magic to them, so if you don’t ever look at them, how do you not forget them?  I think that’s the human magic part. I mean, for a business, I do believe goal setting and strategic planning should be a continual process. For life planning, I think it's probably okay to articulate your goals and maybe not look at them again. And I don’t necessarily think for life planning you need to have a written strategic plan. The human magic part is that if you say you want to do something in life, and you articulate it and you share it with people, the human magic part is it’s now present forever in your subconscious. And so energetically, you’re going to, I think, very naturally orient yourself around those goals just simply in your everyday existence. And I think that’s for maybe for life planning. For businesses, I do think it’s best to have a framework for this, and so my businesses use, and I don’t care what the framework is—we use objectives and key results, OKRs. They're pretty commonly used now. And I don’t care if you use KPIs, OKRs, or whatever it may be. You and your team should sit down each year, and ideally you already have a long-term vision for the company, which should be pretty concise and focused. And then your annual goal setting in between and what I’ll call tactical plans or mini strategic plans that you can then look at each quarter. With the objectives and key results, we assign a leader to each objective. The leader understands that they are tasked with organizing the necessary team members to achieve the goal.Share on X We have key results that we define in our annual strategic planning meeting, and then we have quarterly check-ins. I’m the CEO of the financial planning company, so I check in with each leader every quarter to see how they’re progressing on their objectives and the key results for those objectives. And then for the restaurant companies, I am the executive chairman of both of them and a co-founder. I meet with the CEO, and then the CEO meets with the team to check in on their progress of their goals. So the human magic part is this idea that you can just say, “I want to do this thing,” write it down, and not look at it again. But for business, I do think it requires a more consistent, structured, written approach.  So help me with these OKRs. I mean, I’m familiar with the OKRs, but what I've always wondered is, when you have key results for every objective, then is this not too limiting in terms of having to choose the kind of objective which you can measure with the key results, as opposed to—and maybe this is my blind spot here. Maybe there are objectives that don't really lend themselves to regular measurement of key results, but because they are maybe binary. Either we acquired this new location or we didn’t, there’s not really much key results other than it has to be a size, profitability, whatever. So I don't know—maybe I'm rambling here—but what's your view on this?  Well, I mean, I would push back a little bit on that. Let's say your objective is to acquire—through vertical or horizontal integration—another business. I think a key result could be, over the course of the year: what is the process by which you're identifying potential companies to acquire? What is your vetting process? What is the activity around outreach, vetting, and analysis? Maybe sometimes there's a bit of a square peg, round hole problem with this, but I don’t think there’s a negative to articulating the binary objective, even if it’s imperfect key results that you’re going to be using to measure them. Yeah, I think I need more clarity on this. I always thought of the two sides of the coin is you’ve got the easily measurable things, which typically pertain to the business—growing the business, executing processes, doing sales activities, this kind of stuff, which is working on the present. And then you have those bigger—what do you call them—OKRs or Rocks—those big objectives that is going to build more capacity in your business for the future so that you can expand the business. That might be hiring a key executive to own your marketing function, where key results are maybe trickier to define, but it's really important for the future. Do you see any distinction between these two?  I mean, maybe—but let's go back to the original point. What started this conversation was that I think you should have a framework. I don't really care what the framework is. All I'm arguing for is identifying and articulating goals, and figuring out some kind of strategic planning process to achieve those goals. I actually don’t really care what it is. I've consulted with a number of businesses—helping entrepreneurs start businesses, probably close to eight now—and I'm always surprised that something as simple as writing down goals, articulating them, measuring them, and building a plan around them is not natural to most people. I think if people just start with the basics, they're already ahead of most. And this is about as basic as it gets.  Yeah, that’s true. So what drives growth in your business, in the One Wealth Advisors business?  We're in a very luxurious position, and I tell people I'm the richest person they've ever met. And people are like, “What?” And I say, “Well, I have everything I want, and you can't be richer than that. There's no such thing as richer than having everything you want,” at least the way I define it. And where I'm going with this is—I've tried to espouse a philosophy across the company that every team member should spend less than they make, no matter what. And not overextend themselves with commitments—like a mortgage—that causes stress and anxiety and so forth and so on. So there’s a fiscal discipline and that’s espoused across each team member, and most importantly, me and my brother—we started the company together, and we're the major shareholders. If we take that approach, that’s number one. The second thing is—we don't have any sales, marketing, or business development efforts whatsoever, which is shocking to 99% of business people I talk to. But it's grounded in a philosophy that the greatest salespeople we're ever going to have are our clients—talking to their friends and their network. And if we put literally 100% of our effort into serving our clients for free—they'll spread the word. They’ll be so excited about what we do for them and with them that they will be more than willing that if somebody asks them who they should talk to or work with, the answer is us. We've been doing that for almost 20 years now. The practice started 35 years ago, but we've been operating this way for almost 20 years.  And our annual growth rate is about 20% a year, without any business development or marketing whatsoever. We could probably be growing more than that, but we keep our spending in check. We don’t overextend ourselves, so it doesn't force us to stay on that treadmill. The idea of being on a treadmill—having to grow just to keep up—causes me stress and anxiety, and I don't like that. So that's One Wealth. Now, restaurants are a less good business. My financial planning company will do seven and a half million in revenue this year with 13 employees. My first restaurant company will do $30 million in revenue with 350 employees. It's a much more labor-intensive, harder business. And the people I started the restaurant companies with—just to be blunt—for them to build wealth so they can afford to take care of their families the way they deserve to, for their talents and their creativity, et cetera, et cetera, you need to grow. And so the way we define growth in the restaurant company, just frankly, is through building the organizations so they are ready to scale.  That means having leadership that's trained, has mastery, and understands how to lead each level of layers of management, and then opening new restaurants. Or with one of our companies, it's a line of consumer packaged goods. The Flour + Water Hospitality Group is my first restaurant company, and we've launched frozen pizza in 40 grocery stores, and we have dried pasta in 75 stores now. And we're going to really try to grow that. And that’s measurable, right? It's new restaurants, more grocery stores, more revenue. So we're a bit more intentional about growing those businesses.  That’s really interesting. So when you grow an asset management firm by 20% over 20 years, then maybe half of that comes from the appreciation of the assets, doesn't it? No—and I know where your head went, which is the S&P 500 has grown at about 10% a year over the last 100 years. But the truth is, about 55% of our clients' assets are in equities on average, and about 45% are in bonds. If you're younger, you have more equities; if you're older, you have less. But the average annual return for a portfolio like that is probably closer to about 6.5%. So about a third of our growth has probably come through market appreciation. We don't generally lose clients, so your math is clean, right? If we lost clients, we'd have attrition and would need to replace them, which doesn’t really happen for us. So about maybe two-thirds of our growth has come from referrals.  Yeah, that's pretty cool. I mean, I've also learned that if you have a business with high churn, then you have no time to serve your customers.  And if you’re spending a lot of effort on business development, you’re spending less time on serving your customers, and you’re going to have higher churn.  They're not going to refer you, because they're not getting great service—and then they churn instead of referring. So it's very smart.  We do an annual survey of our clients, and we always score above 95% in terms of satisfaction. We also do an annual survey with our team members, and we score really high there as well. The greatest evidence of that is our turnover is damn near 0% since we launched the company. Generally, people who work with us don’t leave us.  That's awesome. So you're doing a lot of things right. It seems like you have a clear plan, you’ve got strategic planning, you understand what you want, what you need, what you don’t need. What is one thing that you are actively trying to figure out in the asset management business? Well, we launched—unfortunately—a tax practice this year. I say “unfortunately” because we had no interest in competing with CPAs. Historically, we referred our clients to CPAs. But there's a problem in the tax business. My assessment is that taxes are becoming more complex, not less. Less people want to become accountants and there’s a supply-demand problem with accountants. And the existing accountants, in my view, have taken on too many clients, and their service has deteriorated. We get more and more complaints about clients dissatisfaction with their accountants than anything else in our practice. So we finally said, “You know what?  We're going to beta test a tax practice.” We're doing tax returns this year for 15 clients. I never wanted to do this type of business. It actually makes sense, because financial planning and tax are deeply intertwined. The fact that they were ever separate disciplines, in retrospect, doesn't make much sense. So I'm glad I'm being forced into it—but it's a problem. I'm not sure how good we are at it yet. I hope we don't mess it up too much this year with these 15 clients, and I hope we eventually really good at it. But it’s the problem for me, and I’m not happy about it.  So you said there are 13 people in the wealth management, so you have a couple of people on the tax side?  Yeah, we have, call it, one and a half people dedicated to tax. And then we've partnered—well, there's one more variable in tax, which is interesting. I believe AI will eventually do 90-plus percent of the work that an accountant does. There's an intersection—or an inflection point—that hasn't been hit yet, which is: fewer accountants, more complex tax work, and AI hasn't solved it yet. My hypothesis is that we can start to develop the muscle memory and mastery around doing tax. Eventually, AI will be such a strong support that we'll be able to do tax returns for all of our clients with a relatively small number of people. That’s our hypothesis. In the interim, we've partnered with a company called April, which is a venture-backed startup that provides the analysis and tax return preparation. So we have one and a half people who organize the tax work for our client base, but then the actual heavy lifting of the analysis is done by April. And if April is listening to this, it's fine when I say we're perfectly happy to replace April with AI once AI is ready—but it just isn't ready yet. So we're just getting started on something that we believe will eventually become relatively easy. But right now, it's still a bit clunky.  I don't know if it was Warren Buffett or someone else—maybe his partner—who talked about how important tax planning is in actually making money. If you do the right kind of tax planning, it's basically one half of the return you can make just by optimizing your taxes. Would you agree with that?  Well, I don't know that I'd be comfortable making a blanket statement like “one half.” I think the wealthier you are, the higher the probability that with advanced tax planning, the net impact on your wealth over time could be more than half. I mean, think about estate planning. We have a client, for example—a taxable estate is one where your net worth is over, I'm going to simplify, about $13 million per person. So for a married couple, $26 million. Anything over that gets taxed at—again, I'm averaging—around a 50% estate tax when you die. Okay, so what can you do? You can, while you're alive, give away some of that $13 million instead of waiting until you die. How can you do that? Maybe you make investments in your kids' names rather than your own, so it's not part of that $13 million. We had a client, for example, who invested in a company that ended up being worth $60 million. But guess what? That $60 million was not in their name—it was in their kid's name. So it skipped a generation. So what is that worth? Fifty percent of anything over $26 million in estate tax—what is that worth in terms of average annual return? I don't know—you can't really calculate it cleanly. But it's millions and millions of dollars. Yeah, so it's very high leverage—that's the point.  Yeah.  That's amazing. I mean, you shared some really great ideas here. I like the framework: identify your goals, articulate them, share them with other people. I like the sharing because it basically creates some peer accountability, right? And also people are then aligned with what your context is. So that’s great. Then measure and execute—that's great. We talk about OKRs, we talk about tax planning, and the philosophy of building businesses—the difference between a business that needs to grow and one that can grow more organically. That’s amazing. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience? And then I’m going to ask you, of course, if people would like to learn more about what you do and would like to learn more about One Wealth Advisors, where should they go and where can they learn more? But first, what's your final message to our listeners? Well, you didn't rehash the first thing I said, which is—it's always about people. It’s always about people. Everything one does in life, in my opinion, should be in the service of others somehow. And I think that's what gives us our greatest sense of satisfaction, self-worth, and place in the world. So I really want to leave people with that message. In terms of reaching me, I have a website I built, because I do a bunch of different things. One Wealth Advisors has its own website, which you can easily search, but I also have davidsteele.xyz, which primarily points to One Wealth, but then points to the other stuff I do, including other businesses I’ve started, and the boards I’m on, and the consulting work that we do. Okay, that's definitely worth exploring. So check it out. And if you enjoyed this conversation and you're listening here, don't forget to subscribe and tune in, because every week I have an exciting entrepreneur coming on the show to share their learnings and insights. Important Links: David's LinkedIn David's website One Wealth Advisors website

New Discourses
Fascism and the Naturalistic Fallacy

New Discourses

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2026 15:38


New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 155 Underneath the hood of Fascism is a heavy insistence that its program aligns with various aspects of Nature. Generally, the belief that something being "natural" (right or wrong in the assessment) means that it is also good is referred to as the "naturalistic fallacy." That means it is an error. That something is "natural" does not necessarily imply that it is good. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay addresses the weird appeals to Nature in Fascist ideologies. Join him to understand the mentality! Latest from New Discourses Press! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2026 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #Fascism