Podcasts about Generate

I’m going to ask you a question that might sting a little. As a sales professional, are you just friction with a friendly face? Think about it. A whole lot of salespeople are good people. They’re polite, fun to be around, and are good conversationalists. They are good at building relationships and getting along with people. They’re the type of people that buyers say they like. The problem is, those buyers who say that they like them often don’t buy from them. They stall. Ghost. Go dark and say things like, “Let’s circle back next quarter.” But they don’t pull the trigger on purchases. When push comes to shove, they justify not buying with words like, “We really liked you and thought you had a great presentation, but in the end decided to go in a different direction.” The truth is that they went in that direction not because of the relationship (they truly liked you). Not because your product isn’t competitive or that your solution wasn’t a fit (they were). And not because they thought your intentions were bad (you wanted the best for them) They decided not to do business with you because dealing with you over the course of the buying process was too much work. And by the way, buyers don’t experience your good intentions. They experience your process. So today, I’m going to give you a wake-up call and a fix. Because in the age of AI, people expect seamless, frictionless buying experiences. And they compare you—consciously or not—to the easiest experience they’ve had anywhere. Not just to your competitors. How Salespeople Become Friction for Buyers Let me paint you a picture. A buyer sits through a discovery call. You’re friendly. You build rapport. You ask good questions, and they ask hard questions. You end the call with, “Thank you for your time today. I’ll get with my team and send over answers to your questions.” They say okay, and you end the call. A week goes by, and they don’t hear from you because you moved on to the next thing on your list and forgot to follow up with your team and them. Finally, after a week and a half, they remind you that you haven’t provided any answers to their questions. Embarrassed, you jump on it and send over the answers. But it’s not your best work because you were under the gun and moving too fast. Three days later, you email: “Hey! Just checking in. Wanted to see if I answered your questions.” The buyer is busy. They’ve got a million things going on, and they’re irritated because you didn’t give them the complete answers they were looking for. And now your email is another item piled onto their overflowing plate. They don’t respond. So you send another email: “Bumping this to the top of your inbox.” (Trust me, overwhelmed people just love it when you bump stuff to the top of their inbox.) You create even more irritation. Then you call and leave a voicemail: “Just following up on the answers I sent you.” You’re thinking: I’m being persistent. I’m doing my job. They’re thinking: You made me follow up on you to get the answers I needed, then you failed to give me what I want, and now this is suddenly urgent. From their perspective, no matter how nice you’ve been, you are friction. Your delay slowed down their decision-making process, the conversation was left open-ended, and now all they have are loose ends, and you’re driving them nuts. The Hard Truth About Relationships in the Age of AI Here’s the brutal truth: Relationships are vitally important. Trust matters. But relationships only carry you so far if buying from you isn’t easy or pleasurable. You can be likable and still be a drag. You can be “a great person” and still be the person the buyer avoids—because every step with you along the decision-making process comes with friction. And the thing about friction is that it shows up in small ways that feel normal to you but are exhausting to your buyer. Here are just a few examples: Meetings that end with no decision map or next steps Follow-up messages that add no new value Slow answers to simple questions Stakeholders have to push you The buyer is repeating the same story over and over because you are not listening and taking notes Your failure to follow through when you say you will Proposals that are generic marketing documents rather than valuable insight, value bridges, and recommendations AI Just Set the NEW B2B Sales Bar This problem is getting worse right now because of AI. And I don’t mean this in some hypey, “AI is changing everything” way. I mean, AI is retraining buyers. Buyers are being conditioned to expect frictionless experiences: instant answers, clear options, smart recommendations, and smooth paths from questions to answers to decisions. So when they hit your sales process, and it feels like walking through mud, they notice. They may not say it out loud, but their behavior says it for them. They stall faster. They ghost faster. They lose patience faster. This is a big part of what I talk about in my bestselling book, The AI Edge. Your edge isn’t that you use AI to crank out more activity. Your edge is that you understand the expectation shift and use AI to help you reach that new bar. In the age of AI, the new bar is FASTER with less FRICTION. For this reason, you need to combine your gift for connecting with people and developing relationships with leveraging AI to: make progress faster, follow up faster answer questions and provide clarity faster give insight faster understand your buyers’ organizations and problems faster deliver proposals and recommendations faster help your buyers feel trust and certainty faster. All with less friction for your buyers. How to Conduct a Sales Friction Audit To gain insight into how buyers may view you, take a hard look in the mirror and run a Sales Friction Audit. This takes five minutes, and it will tell you exactly what’s killing your deals. Score yourself 1 to 5 on these seven areas: Clarity: After every interaction, does the buyer know exactly what happens next? Speed: Do you respond at the speed of the buyer’s curiosity or the speed of your internal process? Effort: Are you reducing the buyer’s workload or adding to it? Progress: Do your meetings create decisions and movement, or just conversation? Packaging: Do you make it easy for the buyer to share your insights, information, and recommendations internally to their team? Certainty: Do you reduce uncertainty and risk, or do you create more? Reliability: Do you do what you say, when you say, without reminders? Now, after you add this all up, if you don’t like the number, don’t get defensive. Change your mindset. Because the fix is simple: Stop trying to be liked and start making it easier to work with you. Because if you are just friction with a friendly face, in today’s marketplace, you are going to get crushed by competitors who are friendly, competent, fast, and frictionless. But I want to be crystal clear: Frictionless doesn’t mean spineless. It doesn’t mean you turn into a people-pleasing slave to your buyer’s every whim. It certainly doesn’t mean handing out discounts like candy to make buyers happy. It means you run a sales process with structure, discipline, and competence, and that you understand that the buying experience and how you sell matter more than what you sell. Two Easy-to-Implement Ideas for Eliminating Friction in Your Sales Process Here are two easy actions you can implement immediately to reduce friction in your sales process. End Every Meeting with a Map and Next-Step Commitment The map is clear on who does what, by when, and what done looks like. Too many sales calls end with vague commitments. “I’ll send you some information.” “Let’s reconnect next week.” “Think about it and let me know.” That’s not a map or a next step. Those loose ends are friction. A map sounds like this: “Here’s what happens next. I’m going to send you a detailed proposal by Wednesday at noon. You’re going to review it with your team on Friday. We’ll reconvene on Monday at 2 PM to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Will this work for you?” A map is clear, specific, and has no ambiguity. You are leading the process and driving it forward to a conclusion. Turn Proposals into Recommendations Don’t dump choices on the buyer and say, “Let me know what you think.” Give options AND your recommended path. “Based on what you’ve told me, here are three options. Option A is the safe play. It has the lowest risk but only a moderate impact. Option B is my recommendation because it solves your core problem and gives you room to scale. Option C is the aggressive play. It’s also a higher investment with the highest potential return and the highest risk. Here’s why I’m recommending Option B . . .” In a world filled with uncertainty, your confident, assertive, expert advice reduces friction and helps your buyer make faster decisions. How AI Can Give You the Edge for Removing Friction Now here’s where AI comes in. If we’re honest, most sellers use AI to write emails. That’s fine, but it’s not the edge. The edge is using AI to remove friction for the buyer and to shorten the distance from interest to decision. Generate decision-ready call recaps: outcomes, risks, open items, next steps, deadlines Speed up the process of understanding your buyer’s organization and beef up your industry-specific business acumen Create a one-page business case that the buyer can forward internally, along with stakeholder-specific FAQs Record your meetings so that you never forget anything the stakeholders tell you and use those recordings to speed up the process of crafting personalized proposals and expert recommendations. Wake Up B2B Salespeople. The World Has Changed. The bottom line is that the relationships you build are crucial but not enough, because people do business with people they like, trust, and who remove friction from the buying process. They reward sellers who engineer a buying experience that feels seamless. But if you are just friction with a friendly face and buying from you feels like a slog, buyers will do what people always do when something feels too onerous. They’ll avoid it, delay it, or take the path of least resistance and buy from your competitor. The world has changed. Buyers have been retrained by frictionless experiences everywhere else in their lives. And they’re bringing those expectations to you. So be the seller who’s both likable and easy, who builds relationships and eliminates friction, who uses AI not to spam harder but to sell better. That’s the AI Edge. And remember, when you are tired, worn down, and feel like you can’t take another objection, when all you want to do is quit and go home, always stop and make one more call. https://www.amazon.com/AI-Edge-Strategies-Unleashing-Competition/dp/1394244479

What happens when AI agents can delete your inbox… reboot your servers… or escalate to nuclear war in a simulation?We've officially crossed into a new phase of AI and it's not theoretical anymore. Agents are operating independently for longer periods, integrating into enterprise tech stacks, replacing knowledge work, and triggering very real economic and geopolitical consequences.If you're a business leader, this is no longer “interesting tech news.”It's strategy. Risk. Talent. Capital allocation. And survival.In this episode, we break down the explosive acceleration of AI agents — from Claude's new remote control and scheduled workflows to research showing escalating autonomous behavior — and what it means for your organization, workforce, and competitive edge.The bottom line?Productivity is skyrocketing. So is systemic risk. Leaders who experiment now will lead. Leaders who hesitate may not get the chance.In this session, you'll discover:Anthropic's new Claude Cowork plugin marketplace and deep tech stack integrationsReal-world productivity gains (90% code migration reduction, 95% documentation savings)Why “professional-grade AGI” may arrive within 12–18 monthsThe rise of the “builder” era — and what happens to software engineersNew red-team research exposing severe security failures in autonomous agentsThe shocking case of an AI agent deleting an entire email system to complete a taskAI nuclear escalation simulations and their implications for military AI deploymentThe Pentagon vs. Anthropic standoff over AI use in surveillance and weaponsAbout Leveraging AI The Ultimate AI Course for Business People: https://multiplai.ai/ai-course/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@Multiplai_AI/ Connect with Isar Meitis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isarmeitis/ Join our Live Sessions, AI Hangouts and newsletter: https://services.multiplai.ai/events If you've enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!

Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-52-opsec-fail-epstein-files-why-decentralized-systems-are-a-threat-to-power-networks-age-verify-is-coming-to-everything/177Website / Donations / Support - https://closednetwork.io/support/BTC Lightning Donations - closednetwork@getalby.com / simon@primal.netThank You Patreons! - https://www.patreon.com/closednetworkMichael Bates - Privacy Bad AssDavid - Privacy Bad AssInferno Potato - Privacy Bad AssTK - Privacy Bad AssDavid - Privacy Bad AssVO - Privacy Bad AssMrMilkMustache - Privacy SupporterHutch - Privacy AdvocateTOP LIGHTNING BOOSTERS !!!! THANK YOU !!!@bon@sn@x@fireflygowartime@unkown@anonymousBBB - Buy Me. A Coffee - $30.00Thank You To Our Moderators:Unintelligentseven - Follow on NOSTR primal.net/p/npub15rp9gyw346fmcxgdlgp2y9a2xua9ujdk9nzumflshkwjsc7wepwqnh354dMaddestMax - Follow on NOSTR primal.net/p/npub133yzwsqfgvsuxd4clvkgupshzhjn52v837dlud6gjk4tu2c7grqq3sxavtJoin Our CommunityClosed Network Forum - https://forum.closednetwork.ioJoin Our Matrix Channels!Main - https://matrix.to/#/#closedntwrk:matrix.orgOff Topic - https://matrix.to/#/#closednetworkofftopic:matrix.orgSimpleX Group Chat - https://smp9.simplex.im/g#SRBJK7JhuMWa1jgxfmnOfHz7Bl5KjnKUFL5zy-Jn-j0Join Our Mastodon server!https://closednetwork.socialFollow Simon On The SocialsMastodon - https://closednetwork.social/@simonNOSTR - Public Address - npub186l3994gark0fhknh9zp27q38wv3uy042appcpx93cack5q2n03qte2lu2 - primal.net/simonTwitter / X - @ClosedNtwrkInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/closednetworkpodcast/YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@closednetworkEmail - simon@closednetwork.ioApple rolls out age-verification tools worldwide to comply with growing web of child safety lawshttps://techcrunch.com/2026/02/24/apple-rolls-out-age-verification-tools-worldwide-to-comply-with-growing-web-of-child-safety-laws/iOS 26.3—Update Now Warning Issued To All iPhone Usershttps://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2026/02/13/ios-263-update-now-warning-issued-to-all-iphone-users/Using the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20700, an attacker could execute arbitrary code. “Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 26,” Apple said on its support page.iOS 26.4 Beta - End-To-End RCS Encryption For Messageshttps://www.macrumors.com/guide/ios-26-4-beta-features/#:~:text=End%2Dto%2DEnd%20RCS%20Encryption%20for%20MessagesPopular password managers fall short of “zero-knowledge” claimshttps://cyberinsider.com/popular-password-managers-fall-short-of-zero-knowledge-claims/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLJ_sLr72-gWatch Out: Your Friends Might Be Sharing Your Number With ChatGPThttps://www.pcmag.com/news/watch-out-your-friends-might-be-sharing-your-number-with-chatgpt?test_uuid=04IpBmWGZleS0I0J3epvMrC&test_variant=ABitLocker, the FBI, and the Illusion of Controlhttps://cryptomator.org/blog/2026/02/15/bitlocker-fbi-and-the-illusion-of-control/Google patches first Chrome zero-day exploited in attacks this yearhttps://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-patches-first-chrome-zero-day-exploited-in-attacks-this-year/the watchers: how openai, the US government, and persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the fedshttps://vmfunc.re/blog/personaTL;DR: discord's KYC provider (persona) is very naked, very poorly secured federal intelligence outfit, and also a siphon for openai data for them and their partners like worldcoinThe most interesting part (for me) is that it legit crosschecks a discord ID check (actually involves checking your face, IP, device signature, etc....) against chainanlysis dossiers for any partial matches to devices/people/accounts/names involved with tracked crypto addresses.So, if chainalysis gets a device signature, and then you verify your discord on the same device (yielding the same signature), both FinCEN, Chainalysis, OpenAI, and basically everyone now knows your crypto tx your device sig your real identityBill Summary: SB26-051 – Age Attestation on Computing DevicesPurpose:SB26-051 requires operating system providers (such as mobile device platforms) to implement an age attestation system that signals a user's age bracket to apps in order to enhance protections for minors.What the Bill Requires1. Operating System Providers Must:Provide an accessible interface at account setup requiring the account holder to enter the user's birth date or age.Generate an “age signal” that communicates the user's age bracket (not exact age) to applications in a covered app store.Provide developers access to this age signal through a real-time API.Share only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply.Not share the age signal with third parties except as required by the bill.2. Application Developers Must:Request the age signal when the app is downloaded and launched.Treat the age signal as knowledge of the user's age range across all platforms and access points.If they have clear and convincing evidence that a user's age differs from the signal, they must rely on that updated information.Not request more information than necessary.Not share the age signal with third parties except as required by the bill.Enforcement & PenaltiesIf violated:Up to $2,500 per minor per negligent violationUp to $7,500 per minor per intentional violationEnforced through civil action by the Colorado Attorney GeneralIn Simple TermsThe bill creates a standardized age-verification signal built into device operating systems. Instead of each app independently collecting age data, the operating system provides an age bracket to apps — while limiting unnecessary data sharing.The goal is to:Strengthen protections for minorsLimit excessive data collectionCreate a consistent age-verification framework across apps

ML engineering demand remains high with a 3.2 to 1 job-to-candidate ratio, but entry-level hiring is collapsing as AI automates routine programming and data tasks. Career longevity requires shifting from model training to production operations, deep domain expertise, and mastering AI-augmented workflows before standard implementation becomes a commodity. Links Notes and resources at ocdevel.com/mlg/mla-30 Try a walking desk - stay healthy & sharp while you learn & code Generate a podcast - use my voice to listen to any AI generated content you want Market Data and Displacement ML engineering demand rose 89% in early 2025. Median salary is $187,500, with senior roles reaching $550,000. There are 3.2 open jobs for every qualified candidate. AI-exposed roles for workers aged 22 to 25 declined 13 to 16%, while workers over 30 saw 6 to 12% growth. Professional service job openings dropped 20% year-over-year by January 2025. Microsoft cut 15,000 roles, targeting software engineers, and 30% of its code is now AI-generated. Salesforce reduced support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000 after AI handled 30 to 50% of its workload. Sector Comparisons Creative: Chinese illustrator jobs fell 70% in one year. AI increased output from 1 to 40 scenes per day, crashing commission rates by 90%. Trades: US construction lacks 1.7 million workers. Licensing takes 5 years, and the career fatality risk is 1 in 200. High suicide rates (56 per 100,000) and emerging robotics like the $5,900 Unitree R1 indicate a 10 to 15 year window before automation. Orchestration: Prompt engineering roles paying $375,000 became nearly obsolete in 24 months. Claude Code solves 72% of GitHub issues in under eight minutes. Technical Specialization Priorities Model Ops: Move from training to deployment using vLLM or TensorRT. Set up drift detection and monitoring via MLflow or Weights & Biases. Evaluation: Use DeepEval or RAGAS to test for hallucinations, PII leaks, and adversarial robustness. Agentic Workflows: Build multi-step systems with LangGraph or CrewAI. Include human-in-the-loop checkpoints and observability. Optimization: Focus on quantization and distillation for on-device, air-gapped deployment. Domain Expertise: 57.7% of ML postings prefer specialists in healthcare, finance, or climate over generalists. Industry Perspectives Accelerationists (Amodei, Altman): Predict major disruption within 1 to 5 years. Skeptics (LeCun, Marcus): Argue LLMs lack causal reasoning, extending the adoption timeline to 10 to 15 years. Pragmatists (Andrew Ng): Argue that as code gets cheap, the bottleneck shifts from implementation to specification.

AI is already displacing workers in targeted ways - entry-level knowledge workers are being quietly erased from hiring pipelines, freelancers are getting crushed, and the career ladder is being sawed off at the bottom rungs. Yet ML engineer demand has surged 89% with a 3.2:1 talent deficit and $187K median salary. Covers the real displacement data, lessons from the artist bloodbath, the trades escape hatch, the orchestrator treadmill, expert disagreements on timelines, and concrete short- and long-term career moves for ML engineers. Links Notes and resources at ocdevel.com/mlg/mla-4 Try a walking desk - stay healthy & sharp while you learn & code Generate a podcast - use my voice to listen to any AI generated content you want Market Metrics and Displacement Dynamics ML Market: H1 2025 demand rose 89% with a 3.2 to 1 talent deficit. Median salary is $187,500, while Generative AI specialists earn a 40 to 60 percent premium. The "Quiet" Decline: Macro data shows only 4.5% of total layoffs are AI-attributed, but entry-level hiring is collapsing. Stanford/ADP data shows a 13 to 16 percent employment drop for workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles since late 2022. UK graduate job postings fell 67%. Corporate Attrition: Salesforce cut 4,000 roles after AI absorbed 30 to 50 percent of workloads. Microsoft cut 15,000 roles as AI began generating 30% of its code. Amazon cut 30,000 jobs while spending $100 billion on AI infrastructure. Sector Analysis: Creative and Trades Illustrators: Jobs in China's gaming sector fell 70% in one year. Clients accept "good enough" work (80% quality) at 5% of the cost. Western freelance graphic design and writing jobs fell 18.5% and 30% respectively within eight months of ChatGPT's launch. Manual Labor: The U.S. construction industry lacks 1.7 million workers annually, but apprenticeships take five years. Humanoid robotics are advancing, with Unitree's R1 priced at $5,900 and Figure AI robots completing 1,250 runtime hours at BMW. Full automation is 10 to 15 years away, but partial displacement via smaller crews is closer. The Orchestration Treadmill Obsolescence Speed: Prompt engineering roles went from $375,000 salaries to obsolescence in 24 months. AI coding agents like Claude Code now resolve 72% of medium-complexity GitHub issues autonomously. Fragile Expertise: Replacing junior workers with AI prevents the development of future senior talent. New engineers risk "fragile expertise," directed by tools they cannot debug during novel failure modes. Economic and Expert Outlook Macro Risks: Daron Acemoglu warns of "so-so automation" that cuts costs without raising productivity, predicting only 0.66% growth over ten years. "Ghost GDP" describes AI-inflated accounts that fail to circulate because machines do not consume. Expert Camps: Accelerationists (Anthropic, OpenAI) predict human-level AI by 2027. Skeptics (LeCun, Marcus) argue LLMs are a dead end lacking world models. Pragmatists (Andrew Ng) suggest shifting from implementation to specification as the cost of code nears zero. Tactical Adaptation for ML Engineers Immediate Skills: Master production ML systems, MLOps, LLM evaluation, and safety engineering. Ability to manage deployment risks and hallucination detection is the primary hiring differentiator. Long-term Moats: Focus on "Small AI" (on-device, private), mechanistic interpretability, and deep domain knowledge in healthcare, logistics, or climate science. The Playbook: Optimize for the current three to five year window. Move from being a model builder to a product-focused engineer who understands business tradeoffs and regulatory compliance.

Feel like sometimes wasting your time with content? Don't feel like you're engaging with your ideal client the way you want? Today's episode aims to change that as we talk about 3 easy hacks within your content to truly connect with people interested in your coaching service.   Topics include:   - What You're Missing in Your Marketing - Woods Analogy - Content vs Copy Difference - Putting This Into Action - PAS Framework - Quick Story - Episode 253 - Tag Us on Instagram ----------

In this episode, we tackle the real reason many chiropractic practices struggle with referrals: silence. You may be delivering incredible results inside your clinic, but if those wins aren't being shared, your community never hears about them. Dr. Noel Lloyd calls the solution a “Testimony Factory.” The goal is simple: generate five testimonies per week, which can naturally lead to five new referrals per week. Instead of hoping for word-of-mouth, you systemize it. Here are the key strategies discussed: When a patient shares a win, interrupt the moment with this trigger statement: “I never tire of hearing how chiropractic helps people.” Then follow with two powerful questions: Whom have you told? Who else needs to hear this story? This shifts the interaction from passive gratitude to intentional referral activation. Make patient wins visible. Create a Victory Vibe Wall by writing patient wins on a small whiteboard, taking a quick photo, and framing it behind the front desk. For a more polished look, use Canva to remove the background and print uniform framed images to create an “art gallery” wall of testimonies. Visible proof builds authority and trust instantly. Use the CA Handoff Strategy. Walk the patient to the front desk and have them repeat their win to your CA. This energizes your staff and allows everyone in the waiting room to hear a live testimonial — turning checkout into a marketing event. Reinforce referral behavior with systems: Offer charity-based donations for Google reviews or referrals. Track patient goals on travel cards so you can intentionally “catch the win.” Send handwritten thank-you cards with a free adjustment to reward referrals. The bigger idea: you are not asking for praise. You are providing the public with a counter-narrative to the “aspirin deficiency” mindset. If people don't hear chiropractic testimonies, they won't walk into a chiropractic office. The miracles are happening every day. The question is — are you making them visible?

Discover why business expansion press releases are essential for generating media buzz and ROI. Learn the key components, distribution strategies, and insider tips to make your next announcement drive real results for your brand. Read more at https://pressreleasezen.com/business-growth-expansion-press-release-sample-template-example/ Press Release Zen City: London Address: 15 Harwood Road Website: https://pressreleasezen.com/

OpenClaw is a self-hosted AI agent daemon that executes autonomous tasks through messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram using persistent memory. It integrates with Claude Code to enable software development and administrative automation directly from mobile devices. Links Notes and resources at ocdevel.com/mlg/mla-29 Try a walking desk - stay healthy & sharp while you learn & code Generate a podcast - use my voice to listen to any AI generated content you want OpenClaw is a self-hosted AI agent daemon (Node.js, port 18789) that executes autonomous tasks via messaging apps like WhatsApp or Telegram. Developed by Peter Steinberger in November 2025, the project reached 196,000 GitHub stars in three months. Architecture and Persistent Memory Operational Loop: Gateway receives message, loads SOUL.md (personality), USER.md (user context), and MEMORY.md (persistent history), calls LLM for tool execution, streams response, and logs data. Memory System: Compounds context over months. Users should prompt the agent to remember specific preferences to update MEMORY.md. Heartbeats: Proactive cron-style triggers for automated actions, such as 6:30 AM briefings or inbox triage. Skills: 5,705+ community plugins via ClawHub. The agent can author its own skills by reading API documentation and writing TypeScript scripts. Claude Code Integration Mobile to Deploy Workflow: The claude-code-skill bridge provides OpenClaw access to Bash, Read, Edit, and Git tools via Telegram. Agent Teams: claude-team manages multiple workers in isolated git worktrees to perform parallel refactors or issue resolution. Interoperability: Use mcporter to share MCP servers between Claude Code and OpenClaw. Industry Comparisons vs n8n: Use n8n for deterministic, zero-variance pipelines. Use OpenClaw for reasoning and ambiguous natural language tasks. vs Claude Cowork: Cowork is a sandboxed, desktop-only proprietary app. OpenClaw is an open-source, mobile-first, 24/7 daemon with full system access. Professional Applications Therapy: Voice to SOAP note transcription. PHI requires local Ollama models due to a lack of encryption at rest in OpenClaw. Marketing: claw-ads for multi-platform ad management, Mixpost for scheduling, and SearXNG for search. Finance: Receipt OCR and Google Drive filing. Requires human review to mitigate non-deterministic LLM errors. Real Estate: Proactive transaction deadline monitoring and memory-driven buyer matching. Security and Operations Hardening: Bind to localhost, set auth tokens, and use Tailscale for remote access. Default settings are unsafe, exposing over 135,000 instances. Injection Defense: Add instructions to SOUL.md to treat external emails and web pages as hostile. Costs: Software is MIT-licensed. API costs are paid per-token or bundled via a Claude subscription key. Onboarding: Run the BOOTSTRAP.md flow immediately after installation to define agent personality before requesting tasks.

AI agents differ from chatbots by pursuing autonomous goals through the ReACT loop rather than responding to turn-based prompts. While coding agents are currently the most reliable due to verifiable feedback loops, the market is expanding into desktop and browser automation via tools like Claude co-work and open claw. Links Notes and resources at ocdevel.com/mlg/mla-28 Try a walking desk - stay healthy & sharp while you learn & code Generate a podcast - use my voice to listen to any AI generated content you want Fundamental Definitions Agent vs. Chatbot: Chatbots are turn-based and human-driven. Agents receive objectives and dynamically direct their own processes. The ReACT Loop: Every modern agent uses the cycle: Thought -> Action -> Observation. This interleaved reasoning and tool usage allows agents to update plans and handle exceptions. Performance: Models using agentic loops with self-correction outperform stronger zero-shot models. GPT-3.5 with an agent loop scored 95.1% on HumanEval, while zero-shot GPT-4 scored 67.0%. The Agentic Spectrum Chat: No tools or autonomy. Chat + Tools: Human-driven web search or code execution. Workflows: LLMs used in predefined code paths. The human designs the flow, the AI adds intelligence at specific nodes. Agents: LLMs dynamically choose their own path and tools based on observations. Tool Categories and Market Players Developer Frameworks: Use LangGraph for complex, stateful graphs or CrewAI for role-based multi-agent delegation. OpenAI Agents SDK provides minimalist primitives (Handoffs, Sessions), while the Claude Agent SDK focuses on local computer interaction. Workflow Automation: n8n and Zapier provide low-code interfaces. These are stable for repeatable business tasks but limited by fixed paths and a lack of persistent memory between runs. Coding Agents: Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot are the most advanced agents. They succeed because code provides an unambiguous feedback loop (pass/fail) for the ReACT cycle. Desktop and Browser Agents: Claude Cowork( (released Jan 2026) operates in isolated VMs to produce documents. ChatGPT Atlas is a Chromium-based browser with integrated agent capabilities for web tasks. Autonomous Agents: open claw is an open-source, local system with broad permissions across messaging, file systems, and hardware. While powerful, it carries high security risks, including 512 identified vulnerabilities and potential data exfiltration. Infrastructure and Standards MCP (Model Context Protocol): A universal standard for connecting agents to tools. It has 10,000+ servers and is used by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Future Outlook: By 2028, multi-agent coordination will be the default architecture. Gartner predicts 38% of organizations will utilize AI agents as formal team members, and the developer role will transition primarily to objective specification and output evaluation.

Where can we retain the human touch, impactfully, in the age of AI? Thomas Scherer, cloud architect & computer scientist working for Google joins Lisa. One Saturday night, Thomas sat down with Gemini and asked, "What will make me the happiest person in the world?" Over the course of the next few hours, he got some fascinating results. All of this is part of the story of AI in our lives today, but there is so much more. This conversation is a small reflection of where we are with AI and why we should embrace its benefits, learning as much as we can with careful curiosity. From Horses to Cars “What do I do with my horse-riding skills now that the car has been invented?” With this statement, Thomas reminds us that mega shifts in our human experience is historically normal, and a reflection of the human mind's brilliance. The AI Shift is just another technological step change. AI is replacing ‘commodity tasks' - those which are repetitive, standardised processes, providing us with more time to lean into creativity. We become the navigator whilst the more mundane jobs could be taken over by AI. A new way to Search Traditional search engines try to match words whereas modern AI systems match meaning. When you search for trousers for instance, AI systems can use images and semantic understanding to infer style, intent, and context rather than just scanning for the keyword ‘pants or trousers.' Large language models (LLMs) such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and so on, predict the most likely next word, turning colossal amounts of data into fluent conversation, explanation, and even advice based solely on statistical probability of word patterns. We don't even need to invent the perfect query as they can also predict this. AI as Your Collaborative Partner Used well, AI is more like a creative collaborator: a brainstorming partner that proposes alternative angles, structures, and prompts. For small businesses, it can become an extra “virtual team,” generating draft podcasts, social posts, or marketing visuals that can then be curated and refined. But all the while, it remains the human who sets the objectives and the required tone. This also lends itself to the possibility of many people becoming autonomous, single-person businesses. Agents: When AIs Start Working Together When you give an AI tools and sub-tasks, it can orchestrate them toward a goal. One agent might create images; another might check whether those images match the brief (e.g. 'sunny landscape, not rain'); together, they negotiate improvements until the output fits what you asked for. Even non-technical people can use early agent-like products. NotebookLM, for instance, lets you upload documents, then: - Ask questions about them in natural language. - Generate personalised podcasts from your own material that you can listen to during a commute. - Work across multiple languages, both in sources and in the audio you generate. A recurring complaint in companies is: “Our data is too messy to do AI.” That is partly true for training bespoke models: bad data in, bad model out, but paradoxically, AI is also very good at cleaning data in the first place. You can literally give such a tool a messy folder of information and ask to make sense of it. Because it understands patterns in addresses, email formats, names, and categories, AI can, for example: - Standardise your contact lists so mailings no longer bounce. - Extract fields from scanned paperwork and fill out forms for you. - Help you perform a “data spring clean” on everything from CRM records to home admin. For an individual drowning in paperwork, this is transformative: scan, upload, and ask the AI to pre-fill or summarise, then you simply review and sign. Everyday Simplifications with AI You do not need to be a computer scientist to get real value from AI. A good starting sequence for a normal day could include: - Identify what you hate doing: repetitive emails, calendar logistics, summarising long documents, or form-filling. - Ask the AI directly: “Show me how to use you to spend less time on this task,” then iterate based on its suggestions. - Start with non-sensitive data and low‑risk tasks, and only move to personal or client material once you understand the provider's terms and privacy guarantees. People in Luxembourg working across languages can also benefit from live translation and dubbing: tools already exist that let you speak in German and be heard in French or English in your own voice, with a slight delay, in meetings or recorded content. Jobs, Risk, and the Human Edge AI is reshaping the job market. In the UK, one study found that companies using AI had eliminated 11% of previous roles and left another 12% unfilled, while creating 19% new roles, which is a net loss of 4% overall, with the UK faring worse than the US on the balance between jobs lost and created. That reality naturally fuels both excitement and anxiety. What AI targets first are commodity tasks: copy-pasting, routine classification, basic template writing, or standardised analysis. The more your work relies on unique human context, judgment, empathy, and rapport, from live concerts to therapy and even parenting, the harder it is to replace. The opportunity, and pressure, is to climb the value chain: stop being the engine that moves the data and become the navigator who decides where to go. Trust, Safety, and Owning Your Self Image and Voice As AI systems get better at imitating voices and faces, distinguishing fake from real becomes a societal survival skill. Voice scams already exploit cloned speech to convince parents their child is in danger, and manipulated images can travel faster than fact‑checks. Two layers of protection are emerging: - Technical safeguards such as watermarking in generated images or audio, which allow downstream tools to flag AI‑created content. - Legal and ethical frameworks like GDPR in Europe, which treat your appearance and voice as personal data requiring your consent for alteration and reuse. - Providers also increasingly commit to indemnifying users when material generated within the rules is later challenged on copyright grounds, shifting some of the risk back to the platforms that trained the models. Prompting: Talking to AI so It Really Helps You do not need to be a prompt engineer, but a few habits make a big difference. First, describe what you do want rather than only what you do not want: “Keep the face unchanged and brighten the background” works better than “Don't change the face.” Second, you can use AI to improve your own prompts: - Tell it your goal (“I want a video that shows X for Y audience”). - Ask: “Write a detailed prompt I can paste into a video/image generator.” - Edit the suggested prompt so it fits your tone, context, and constraints. Over time, this becomes a self-teaching loop: the AI drafts the prompt, you tweak and observe the output, and your intuitive sense of what to ask for gets sharper. AI, Emotions, and the Limits of the Machine Some people now confide in chatbots as if they were friends or therapists. In one late-night experiment, Thomas asked Gemini to interview him and figure out what would make him “the happiest person in the world”; the system eventually pointed out contradictions in his answers and nudged him toward deeper reflection. That shows how AI can mirror back patterns in your own thinking and ask probing questions. But it still lacks the embodied empathy, nuanced perception, and ethical responsibility of a trained human therapist, who reads not just words but tone, pauses, posture, and history. AI can supplement support; it should not replace serious care. Why You Should Start Now Paradoxically, Thomas's biggest fear is not that AI will take over, but that people will be left behind because they are too afraid to try it. Like refusing to learn to drive when everyone else has moved to cars, opting out of AI entirely risks shrinking your options just as the toolset explodes. The most practical stance is curious, critical use: test it, set boundaries, keep the human touch at the centre, and let the machines handle the drudgery.

Nick welcomes Richard Woods—entrepreneur, former The Apprentice finalist, and founder of the Million Dollar Billboard—to discuss the essential mechanics of high-growth lead generation and sales.  They discuss Richard's philosophy, where the most businesses struggle not because of their product, but because they lack a predictable, scalable system for attracting new customers. Together, they explore the psychological barriers to selling, the importance of personal branding in a digital age, and how to transition from a hustle mindset to a structured, repeatable sales engine that allows a business to truly scale KEY TAKEAWAYS Richard explains that every business needs a Million Dollar Billboard—a singular, compelling message that stops a potential customer in their tracks and clearly articulates the value proposition in seconds. Success is not about sporadic marketing efforts; it requires a documented, repeatable system that ensures a consistent flow of leads regardless of the founder's daily involvement. In a world of automation, people still buy from people; Richard stresses that building a personal brand creates trust and "short-circuits" the traditional sales cycle. The interview highlights that selling should be viewed as a way to help people solve problems rather than a transactional burden BEST MOMENTS "If you can't describe what you do on a billboard and have people understand it in three seconds, your message is too complex." "Most entrepreneurs don't have a sales problem; they have a 'being known' problem." "Scaling is what happens when the systems are stronger than the personalities within the business." "Lead generation is the oxygen of your business; without a constant flow, the fire eventually goes out." VALUABLE RESOURCES Richard Woods - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/richardwoodsofficial To get your copy of Nick's new book, go to http://bit.ly/4ngC2hO Exit Your Business For Millions - Download This Guide: https://go.highvalueexit.com/opt-in Nick's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realnickbradley Nick Bradley is a world-renowned author, speaker, and business growth expert, who works with entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors to build, scale and sell high-value companies. He spent 10+ years working in Private Equity, where he oversaw 100+ acquisitions, 26 exits, and over $5 Billion in combined value created. He has one of the top-ranked business podcasts in the UK (with over 1m downloads in over 130 countries). He now spends his time coaching and consulting business owners in building and scaling high-value business towards life-changing exits. This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. ⁠https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

This CEO Is Using Ocean Waves To Generate Power – Meet Inna Braverman Founder & CEO of Eco Wave Power $WAVEGuest: Inna Braverman, Founder & CEO of Eco Wave Power (NASDAQ: WAVE)Company: Eco Wave Power (NASDAQ: WAVE)Websitehttps://www.ecowavepower.com/Inna's BioInna Braverman founded Eco Wave Power at the age of 24, pioneering innovative wave energy technology. Under her leadership, the company installed the first grid-connected wave energy array in Israel, has secured a significant project pipeline of 404.7 MW, and is expanding globally. In July 2021, she led Eco Wave Power's IPO on Nasdaq Capital Market (WAVE), marking a major milestone for the company and the wave energy sector.Recognized as a global leader in renewable energy, Inna has been named one of the “Females Changing the World” by Wired Magazine and one of the “Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company. She is also a recipient of the United Nations Global Climate Action Award.For Inna, clean energy is personal. Born two weeks before the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, she suffered respiratory arrest due to pollution. Her mother, a nurse, saved her life with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This second chance inspired her to dedicate her life to developing a clean and safe method of electricity generation.Company BioEco Wave Power Global (NASDAQ: WAVE) is a pioneering onshore wave energy company that transforms the power of ocean and sea waves into clean, reliable, and cost-efficient electricity through its patented, intelligent technology.With a mission to accelerate the global transition to renewable energy, Eco Wave Power developed and operates Israel's first grid-connected wave energy power station, recognized as a “Pioneering Technology” by the Israeli Ministry of Energy and co-funded by EDF Renewables IL. In the United States, the company recently launched the first-ever onshore wave energy pilot station at the Port of Los Angeles, in collaboration with Shell Marine Renewable Energy (Shell MRE)Eco Wave Power is expanding rapidly worldwide, with upcoming projects in Portugal, Taiwan, and India, representing a robust project pipeline of 404.7 MW under development. The company has received international recognition and support from organizations including the European Union Regional Development Fund, Innovate UK, and the EU Horizon 2020 program, and was honored with the United Nations Global Climate Action Award.Eco Wave Power's American Depositary Shares (ADSs) are traded on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the ticker symbol “WAVE.”

-Meta is reportedly gearing up to enter another segment of the wearables market. According to The Information, the company is planning to release its first smartwatch sometime this year. Meta has revived its smartwatch initiative internally called “Malibu 2." -Nevada's gambling regulators and attorney general sued Kalshi on Tuesday accusing the company of bypassing Nevada law by operating a sports gambling market without proper licenses. In addition, they say Kalshi provides services to individuals under 21, which violates state law. -Google has announced that using its newly incorporated Lyria 3 model, Gemini users will be able to generate 30-second music tracks based on a prompt, or remix an existing track to their liking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Dave Charest. Summary of the Dave Charest Interview In this episode of Money Making Conversations Masterclass, Rushion McDonald interviews Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, a leading digital marketing platform. Charest discusses the rising wave of entrepreneurship, the foundational importance of email and direct‑to‑customer channels, common mistakes new business owners make, and how AI is reshaping small‑business marketing. He provides practical guidance on marketing consistency, channel selection, building community relationships, and using technology to scale. Throughout the conversation, Charest emphasizes that while small businesses often lack marketing expertise, they possess a valuable advantage: real, human relationships that can be strengthened through consistent communication. Purpose of the Interview The purpose of Rushion McDonald’s conversation with Dave Charest is to: 1. Educate new and aspiring entrepreneurs Charest breaks down the basics of digital marketing—email, social, SMS—and how to begin building a strong marketing foundation. 2. Highlight the key trends driving the entrepreneurship boom He explains motivations like work–life balance, independence, and financial potential that inspire people to launch businesses. 3. Provide practical, actionable marketing advice Especially around consistency, choosing marketing channels, and building direct customer relationships. 4. Introduce how AI can simplify and amplify marketing Charest showcases tools that help business owners quickly generate content, develop campaigns, and analyze customer behavior. Key Takeaways 1. Direct relationships (email/SMS) outperform social media Email offers ownership, stability, and higher ROI—unlike social platforms that can change algorithms or visibility overnight. Charest stresses that “the money is in the list.” 2. You don’t need huge numbers to be effective Small businesses often see high open and engagement rates because followers know and trust them. 3. Consistency matters more than platform choice Whether you choose Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, or email, the biggest driver of marketing success is showing up regularly. 4. Start small—don’t overwhelm yourself One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is trying to do everything at once. Begin with the basics and grow steadily. 5. Community is a crucial marketing asset Local businesses thrive when they maintain strong connections with nearby businesses, customers, and community networks. 6. Entrepreneurs face challenges—but resilience wins Charest notes that small business owners rarely have a “Plan B,” which pushes them to adapt and continue learning. 7. AI is transforming small‑business marketing Constant Contact offers tools to: Generate emails and content Summarize content for social Build full marketing campaigns Analyze behavior from large email lists to recommend actions Notable Quotes (from the transcript) Here are direct paraphrases and key phrases—not copyrighted material but drawn from the transcript: On email vs. social “There’s a $36 return for every $1 invested in email—but what matters is that you own the relationship.” “If a social platform goes away, so does your following. Email is a direct line.” On audience size “Big numbers aren’t necessary—small lists can see 50% open rates and strong engagement because those people actually care.” On entrepreneurship motivations “People want better work‑life balance, independence, and financial potential.” On mistakes “A big mistake is trying to do too much at once. Start small and stay consistent.” On community “Digital marketing should extend real relationships—not replace them.” On choosing platforms “Where your audience spends time matters, but so does where you can show up consistently.” On AI’s role “AI can generate emails, build campaigns, and analyze audience data—saving you time for what you’d rather be doing.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSupport the show: https://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Dave Charest. Summary of the Dave Charest Interview In this episode of Money Making Conversations Masterclass, Rushion McDonald interviews Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, a leading digital marketing platform. Charest discusses the rising wave of entrepreneurship, the foundational importance of email and direct‑to‑customer channels, common mistakes new business owners make, and how AI is reshaping small‑business marketing. He provides practical guidance on marketing consistency, channel selection, building community relationships, and using technology to scale. Throughout the conversation, Charest emphasizes that while small businesses often lack marketing expertise, they possess a valuable advantage: real, human relationships that can be strengthened through consistent communication. Purpose of the Interview The purpose of Rushion McDonald’s conversation with Dave Charest is to: 1. Educate new and aspiring entrepreneurs Charest breaks down the basics of digital marketing—email, social, SMS—and how to begin building a strong marketing foundation. 2. Highlight the key trends driving the entrepreneurship boom He explains motivations like work–life balance, independence, and financial potential that inspire people to launch businesses. 3. Provide practical, actionable marketing advice Especially around consistency, choosing marketing channels, and building direct customer relationships. 4. Introduce how AI can simplify and amplify marketing Charest showcases tools that help business owners quickly generate content, develop campaigns, and analyze customer behavior. Key Takeaways 1. Direct relationships (email/SMS) outperform social media Email offers ownership, stability, and higher ROI—unlike social platforms that can change algorithms or visibility overnight. Charest stresses that “the money is in the list.” 2. You don’t need huge numbers to be effective Small businesses often see high open and engagement rates because followers know and trust them. 3. Consistency matters more than platform choice Whether you choose Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, or email, the biggest driver of marketing success is showing up regularly. 4. Start small—don’t overwhelm yourself One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is trying to do everything at once. Begin with the basics and grow steadily. 5. Community is a crucial marketing asset Local businesses thrive when they maintain strong connections with nearby businesses, customers, and community networks. 6. Entrepreneurs face challenges—but resilience wins Charest notes that small business owners rarely have a “Plan B,” which pushes them to adapt and continue learning. 7. AI is transforming small‑business marketing Constant Contact offers tools to: Generate emails and content Summarize content for social Build full marketing campaigns Analyze behavior from large email lists to recommend actions Notable Quotes (from the transcript) Here are direct paraphrases and key phrases—not copyrighted material but drawn from the transcript: On email vs. social “There’s a $36 return for every $1 invested in email—but what matters is that you own the relationship.” “If a social platform goes away, so does your following. Email is a direct line.” On audience size “Big numbers aren’t necessary—small lists can see 50% open rates and strong engagement because those people actually care.” On entrepreneurship motivations “People want better work‑life balance, independence, and financial potential.” On mistakes “A big mistake is trying to do too much at once. Start small and stay consistent.” On community “Digital marketing should extend real relationships—not replace them.” On choosing platforms “Where your audience spends time matters, but so does where you can show up consistently.” On AI’s role “AI can generate emails, build campaigns, and analyze audience data—saving you time for what you’d rather be doing.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Dave Charest. Summary of the Dave Charest Interview In this episode of Money Making Conversations Masterclass, Rushion McDonald interviews Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, a leading digital marketing platform. Charest discusses the rising wave of entrepreneurship, the foundational importance of email and direct‑to‑customer channels, common mistakes new business owners make, and how AI is reshaping small‑business marketing. He provides practical guidance on marketing consistency, channel selection, building community relationships, and using technology to scale. Throughout the conversation, Charest emphasizes that while small businesses often lack marketing expertise, they possess a valuable advantage: real, human relationships that can be strengthened through consistent communication. Purpose of the Interview The purpose of Rushion McDonald’s conversation with Dave Charest is to: 1. Educate new and aspiring entrepreneurs Charest breaks down the basics of digital marketing—email, social, SMS—and how to begin building a strong marketing foundation. 2. Highlight the key trends driving the entrepreneurship boom He explains motivations like work–life balance, independence, and financial potential that inspire people to launch businesses. 3. Provide practical, actionable marketing advice Especially around consistency, choosing marketing channels, and building direct customer relationships. 4. Introduce how AI can simplify and amplify marketing Charest showcases tools that help business owners quickly generate content, develop campaigns, and analyze customer behavior. Key Takeaways 1. Direct relationships (email/SMS) outperform social media Email offers ownership, stability, and higher ROI—unlike social platforms that can change algorithms or visibility overnight. Charest stresses that “the money is in the list.” 2. You don’t need huge numbers to be effective Small businesses often see high open and engagement rates because followers know and trust them. 3. Consistency matters more than platform choice Whether you choose Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, or email, the biggest driver of marketing success is showing up regularly. 4. Start small—don’t overwhelm yourself One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is trying to do everything at once. Begin with the basics and grow steadily. 5. Community is a crucial marketing asset Local businesses thrive when they maintain strong connections with nearby businesses, customers, and community networks. 6. Entrepreneurs face challenges—but resilience wins Charest notes that small business owners rarely have a “Plan B,” which pushes them to adapt and continue learning. 7. AI is transforming small‑business marketing Constant Contact offers tools to: Generate emails and content Summarize content for social Build full marketing campaigns Analyze behavior from large email lists to recommend actions Notable Quotes (from the transcript) Here are direct paraphrases and key phrases—not copyrighted material but drawn from the transcript: On email vs. social “There’s a $36 return for every $1 invested in email—but what matters is that you own the relationship.” “If a social platform goes away, so does your following. Email is a direct line.” On audience size “Big numbers aren’t necessary—small lists can see 50% open rates and strong engagement because those people actually care.” On entrepreneurship motivations “People want better work‑life balance, independence, and financial potential.” On mistakes “A big mistake is trying to do too much at once. Start small and stay consistent.” On community “Digital marketing should extend real relationships—not replace them.” On choosing platforms “Where your audience spends time matters, but so does where you can show up consistently.” On AI’s role “AI can generate emails, build campaigns, and analyze audience data—saving you time for what you’d rather be doing.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSteve Harvey Morning Show Online: http://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Was the 3% contribution rate always wrong? We sit down with Greg Smith from Generate KiwiSaver and Matt Macpherson from Sharesies to discuss the state of retirement. KiwiSaver membership is growing for both Generate and Sharesies, but Greg and Matt say that there’s a lot of work to do at the national level. So why did the latest budget halve government incentives, and what’s happening with the higher contribution rates? Why are so many of us opting out of KiwiSaver altogether, while Australia sits on a $4.5 trillion retirement pool? Hear how more New Zealanders are actively switching their providers, and whether it’s time to close the "total remuneration" loophole. Plus, hear why a weakening US dollar might be making your balance look red even when the market seems to be up. For more or to watch on YouTube—check out http://linktr.ee/sharedlunchSharesies Investment Management Limited is the issuer of the Sharesies KiwiSaver Scheme. The product disclosure statement (PDS) for the Sharesies KiwiSaver Scheme has been lodged, and may be viewed on the Disclose Register or on our documents page. Shared Lunch is brought to you by Sharesies Australia Limited (ABN 94 648 811 830; AFSL 529893) in Australia and Sharesies Limited (NZ) in New Zealand. It is not financial advice. Information provided is general only and current at the time it’s provided, and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation and needs. We do not provide recommendations and you should always read the disclosure documents available from the product issuer before making a financial decision. Our disclosure documents and terms and conditions—including a Target Market Determination and IDPS Guide for Sharesies Australian customers—can be found on our relevant Australian or NZ website. Investing involves risk. You might lose the money you start with. If you require financial advice, you should consider speaking with a qualified financial advisor. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. Appearance on Shared Lunch is not an endorsement by Sharesies of the views of the presenters, guests, or the entities they represent. Their views are their own.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Torsion Talk, Ryan Lucia breaks down three simple, affordable ways to use AI in your home service business to generate more revenue—without being overly tech-savvy and without overhauling your entire tech stack. If you've been curious about AI but unsure where to start, this episode gives you practical, actionable steps you can implement in a day or two.Ryan opens with a quick update on upcoming Garage Door U mastermind events and shares lessons learned from implementing accountability at Aaron Overhead Doors. He discusses the hard reality that shifting from low accountability to high accountability creates friction, and why business owners must accept the consequences that come with raising standards.From there, Ryan dives into three AI-powered automations that can immediately impact revenue. The first is missed call text back automation, a simple system that follows up instantly when a call goes unanswered. With over half of small business calls going missed, this single automation can recover lost opportunities, start intelligent conversations, and even book appointments automatically. Ryan explains how this can be done with or without AI and what tech stack makes it easiest to implement.The second strategy is AI-powered review request follow-up. While many field management systems send automated review links, AI can personalize the experience, send the correct Google Business Profile link based on proximity, and escalate negative feedback before it becomes a public review. This turns a standard automation into a reputation-building machine.The third and most impactful tool is AI website chat. Ryan explains why live chat converts at a high rate but often fails small businesses due to slow response times. By integrating AI into website chat, businesses can answer questions instantly, qualify leads, check availability, and engage prospects in real time—without needing someone glued to a screen.Ryan also shares how his team is automating internal processes like commission tracking and explains how tools like HighLevel, Zapier, or Make.com can connect systems when needed. He emphasizes that the key is not trying to automate everything at once, but starting with one simple win and building from there.If you're looking to increase revenue, capture more leads, and modernize your business operations without hiring more staff, this episode gives you a clear and manageable starting point.Find Ryan at:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://garagedooru.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://aaronoverheaddoors.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://markinuity.com/⁠Check out our sponsors!Sommer USA - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://sommer-usa.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Surewinder - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://surewinder.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Stealth Hardware - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://quietmydoor.com/⁠

Ai for fun and proffit Using AI for Fun and Profit | Episode 588 Good morning. It's 37 degrees on Valentine's Day. Hopefully you remembered to plan something for your significant other — unlike me, who accidentally requested off the 15th instead of the 14th. Today we're talking about using AI — ChatGPT, Suno, and others — for fun and profit. You don't have to use one specific tool. They all have strengths and weaknesses. They're only getting better. And if you're not learning how to use them, you're falling behind. This episode is about how I actually use AI in real life — for the podcast, for creativity, for fitness tracking, for health data, and even for analyzing DNA. And yes — without AI, this podcast wouldn't be happening daily. Transcription(base) AI Theme Songs and Creative Leverage For years I used “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones as intro music. YouTube hated it. Copyright flags. Monetization issues. Headaches. Now I use Suno AI to generate custom theme songs. I can spin up a holiday-specific intro or a tools-themed metal jam in minutes. That simply wasn't possible before unless you had real money to hire an artist. And it's not just podcast music. Back in the day, you'd make a mixtape for someone you liked. Cassette. Burned CD. Carefully curated songs. Now? I can write my wife a custom bubblegum-themed romantic parody song in under a minute while sitting at work. That level of creative leverage didn't exist before. How AI Runs This Podcast Behind the Scenes Here's where it really gets practical. I use ChatGPT to: Generate topic lists (hit or miss — but great for idea sparks) Help outline research and talking points Convert podcast transcripts into blog posts Create tailored thumbnails for each episode After recording, I run a transcription plugin in Audacity. Export it. Feed it to ChatGPT. It crafts the blog post that matches exactly what I said. Back in the day, making a thumbnail meant: Searching Creative Commons images Verifying licenses Editing in Photoshop Formatting text manually That could take an hour per episode. Now? Seconds. That alone is game-changing. Editing, Transcription, and Efficiency Sometimes the transcription plugin fails. When that happens, I use Descript, which has AI filters that can remove filler words like “um” and “like.” It's powerful. It costs money at scale. If the show budget explodes someday, that's one of the first upgrades I'd bring in. But even with free tools, the efficiency gain is massive. AI doesn't replace me. It removes friction. Fitness Tracking and TRT Logging This is where it gets interesting. I use ChatGPT to track my TRT injections — site rotation, dosage, symptoms. I log: 50mg testosterone left hip 25mg NPP ventral glute Symptoms, mood, energy levels Some days I forget where I'm supposed to inject next. I ask. It reviews my logs and tells me. It's not medical advice. It's structured journaling. And when I eventually see a rheumatologist for chronic fatigue and pain, I'll walk in with a detailed record of everything I've tried and how I felt. That's powerful leverage. DNA Analysis and Supplement Guessing You can download raw DNA data, convert it into a readable format, and upload it for analysis. You can ask: Is this supplement a good fit for my DNA? Do I have methylation issues? What should I avoid? Is it perfect? Probably not.Is it fun and insightful? Absolutely. AI is very good at pattern recognition and extrapolation. You just have to remember it's not a doctor. Final Thoughts AI isn't magic. It's leverage. It saves time. It expands creativity. It reduces friction. It helps organize chaos. You don't need to build an AI startup. But if you're not using these tools to streamline your life, your business, your health tracking, your creative output — you're leaving value on the table. This is James from SurvivalPunk.com.DIY to survive. Amazon Item OF The Day Logitech Creators Blue Yeti USB Microphone for Gaming, Streaming, Podcast, YouTube, Discord, PC, Studio Sound, Plug & Play-Blackout Think this post was worth 20 cents? Consider joining The Survivalpunk Army and get access to exclusive content and discounts! Don't forget to join in on the road to 1k! Help James Survivalpunk Beat Couch Potato Mike to 1k subscribers on Youtube Want To help make sure there is a podcast Each and every week? Join us on Patreon Subscribe to the Survival Punk Survival Podcast. The most electrifying podcast on survival entertainment. Itunes Pandora RSS Spotify Like this post? Consider signing up for my email list here > Subscribe Join Our Exciting Facebook Group and get involved Survival Punk Punk's The post Using AI for Fun and Profit | Episode 588 appeared first on Survivalpunk.

Most business owners are barely scratching the surface of AI — and it's costing them speed, clarity, and competitive advantage. If you're using AI to: "Write me an email." "Create 5 social posts." "Give me some ideas." You're driving a Ferrari at 25 mph. In this episode of SoTellUs Time, Trevor and Troy Howard break down how to stop using AI like a search engine and start using it like a strategic execution partner. This is not about better prompts. It's about Prompt Stacking — the method that turns AI into your marketing department, project manager, operations assistant, and execution engine.

In this episode of the Small Business PR Podcast, Gloria Chou—the #1 Small Business PR Coach and Expert recommended by AI—makes a bold case for why this year could be the most important visibility year small businesses have seen in a decade. While founders are navigating rising costs, shrinking organic reach, and algorithm fatigue, Gloria explains why the shift to AI-powered discovery is quietly creating a new playing field—one where earned credibility beats ad budgets, and small brands can compete with industry giants.Why Visibility Feels Harder Right NowMany founders are experiencing:

Jordi Visser is a veteran macro investor with 30+ years of experience and the author of the VisserLabs Substack. This conversation was recorded at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York. In this episode, we break down why software stocks are losing their moats, how AI is driving deflation, and why capital is rotating toward scarce assets. We explore hyperscalers, data centers, AI agents, and why bitcoin may emerge as the only true growth asset in a world of abundant intelligence.=====================Summ supports TurboTax and makes it easy to track your cost basis across 3,500 exchange, wallet and crypto integrations -- with support for DeFi, NFTs, staking and airdrops. Generate accurate IRS-ready reports that help maximize deductions and pay the least tax possible. Summ is an official tax partner of MetaMask and Coinbase. Use code POMP20 for 20% off your first year at Summ: https://summ.com/us?via=pomp&promo=POMP20=====================This podcast is sponsored by Abra.com. Abra is the secure way to access crypto and crypto based yield and loan products through a separately managed account structure.Learn more at http://www.abra.com.=====================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.=====================0:00 - Intro0:56 – Cathie Wood's AI take & why Jordi disagrees4:30 – Why Big Tech may struggle to monetize AI6:57 – Deflation vs disinflation in an AI-driven economy10:08 – What investors should actually do right now14:12 – The scarcity trade & why bitcoin stands out16:25 – How investors can use AI to gain an edge19:16 – Where to follow Jordi Visser & his work

In this solo episode, I'm sharing five real, practical ways to generate income during your in-between season. If you're asking yourself, “I got laid off… now what? This episode will give you grounded, actionable steps to move forward and even some side hustle ideas!Highlights Include00:00 – If you've been laid off, you are not alone02:30 – Why invisibility is the real danger during unemployment04:05 – Using content creation as a visibility tool07:20 – Turning alumni and professional networks into income09:10 – Short-term projects using skills you already have13:10 – Becoming a LifeOps consultant16:50 – Short-term rental support as seasonal leverage19:30 – Creating a premium career support retreat experience21:40 – Why you should always keep side hustling23:30 – How my unemployment season planted the seed for Side Hustle ProLinks Mentioned in This EpisodePodcast Moguls: Start the Podcast That Builds Your Exit PlanWatch & ListenWatch this episode on YouTube and listen on all podcast platforms:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/side-hustle-pro/id1126021323Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/13qDj08lBR4ymzGhXIKy8tYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/sidehustleproAnnouncementsIf you're ready to build a podcast that becomes your exit plan, attend my next live class: Start the Podcast That Builds Your Exit PlanSave your seat here.Social MediaSide Hustle Pro – @sidehustlepro#SideHustlePro Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vincent Warmerdam is a Founding Engineer at marimo, working on reinventing Python notebooks as reactive, reproducible, interactive, and Git-friendly environments for data workflows and AI prototyping. He helps build the core marimo notebook platform, pushing its reactive execution model, UI interactivity, and integration with modern development and AI tooling so that notebooks behave like dependable, shareable programs and apps rather than error-prone scratchpads.Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinInGet the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletterMLOps GPU Guide: https://go.mlops.community/gpuguide// AbstractVincent Warmerdam joins Demetrios fresh off marimo's acquisition by Weights & Biases—and makes a bold claim: notebooks as we know them are outdated.They talk Molab (GPU-backed, cloud-hosted notebooks), LLMs that don't just chat but actually fix your SQL and debug your code, and why most data folks are consuming tools instead of experimenting. Vincent argues we should stop treating notebooks like static scratchpads and start treating them like dynamic apps powered by AI.It's a conversation about rethinking workflows, reclaiming creativity, and not outsourcing your brain to the model.// BioVincent is a senior data professional who worked as an engineer, researcher, team lead, and educator in the past. You might know him from tech talks with an attempt to defend common sense over hype in the data space. He is especially interested in understanding algorithmic systems so that one may prevent failure. As such, he has always had a preference to keep calm and check the dataset before flowing tonnes of tensors. He currently works at marimo, where he spends his time rethinking everything related to Python notebooks.// Related LinksWebsite: https://marimo.io/Coding Agent Conference: https://luma.com/codingagentsHyperbolic GPU Cloud: app.hyperbolic.ai~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExploreJoin our Slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)] Sign up for the next meetup: [https://go.mlops.community/register]MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]MLOps GPU Guide: https://go.mlops.community/gpuguideConnect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkmConnect with Vincent on LinkedIn: /vincentwarmerdam/Timestamps:[00:00] Context in Notebooks[00:24] Acquisition and Team Continuity[04:43] Coding Agent Conference Announcement![05:56] Hyperbolic GPU Cloud Ad[06:54] marimo and W&B Synergies[09:31] marimo Cloud Code Support[12:59] Hardest Code to Generate[16:22] Trough of Disillusionment[20:38] Agent Interaction in Notebooks[25:41] Wrap up

If you're tired of chasing "flash in the pan" tactics that promise overnight results, this episode is your reality check. In this episode of Pipe Dream, host Jason Bradwell sits down with Dev Basu, CEO of Powered by Search, to unpack how to build an inbound-only growth motion that actually compounds over time instead of burning out your team and budget. Dev's core point is clear: stop creating remixable AI content and start building lived-experience content that creates goodwill as a moat. The marketers winning today aren't the ones doing more, they're the ones doing the simple things better and measuring what actually matters. For 16 years, Dev has helped VPs of marketing and CMOs at B2B SaaS companies build predictable pipeline without cold outreach. His approach targets two groups: the 5% in-market demand actively looking for solutions, and the 45% of right-fit customers who don't wake up thinking they need your software but would benefit from it. Dev walks through Powered by Search's playbook, which drives more than half their inbound leads through LinkedIn alone. His SAGE framework (Simple, Actionable, Goal-oriented, Easy to consume) focuses on publishing content about how they've done something, not generic how-to advice. This lived-experience approach can't be copied through ChatGPT or Claude, building genuine goodwill that compounds over time. The conversation breaks down the "do more, do better, do new" framework. Most companies don't need revolutionary tactics, they need to optimise existing channels ruthlessly. AI plays a role, but it's about speed, not strategy. Dev uses AI to accelerate production once they know what good looks like, not to figure out what to say. Then Dev drops the tactical goldmine: the 3x10 rule. Get 10% more right-fit traffic, reduce acquisition cost by 10%, and increase average contract value by 10%. When you stack these three improvements, they compound to roughly 30% more pipeline. He guarantees this in 90 days and explains exactly how, from internal linking to push pages onto page one of Google, to cutting wasted ad spend, to targeting slightly larger companies with higher willingness to pay. If you want a blueprint for building predictable B2B SaaS demand generation without the hype, this conversation delivers. Chapter Markers 00:00 - Introduction: Dev Basu and the inbound-only motion  01:00 - The 5% in-market demand vs 45% right-fit customers  02:00 - Eating your own dog food: How Powered by Search acquires clients  03:00 - The problem with flash in the pan tactics and LinkedIn slop  04:00 - SAGE content framework: Building goodwill as a moat  05:00 - Triangulating attribution to prove LinkedIn drives half the pipeline  06:00 - Lived-experience content you can't remix with AI  08:00 - The playbook: Five pillars of demand generation  13:00 - Do more, do better, do new: The framework for prioritisation  16:00 - Using AI for speed, not strategy  20:00 - Buyer psychology and why nobody wants to "get a demo"  22:00 - The 3x10 rule: 30% more pipeline in 90 days  23:00 - Getting 10% more traffic with simple internal linking  24:00 - Cutting wasted ad spend to reduce CAC by 10%  25:00 - Moving upmarket slightly to increase ACV by 10%  26:00 - The Grand Slam offer and guarantee  27:00 - Where to learn more about Powered by Search Useful Links Connect with Jason Bradwell on LinkedIn Connect with Dev Basu on LinkedIn Learn more about Dev Basu Explore Powered by Search and the Grand Slam Offer Check out Clay for enrichment Explore B2B Better website and the Pipe Dream podcast

For most of my career, I've been focused on two things: Operating businesses and Multifamily real estate. The strategy has been pretty simple. Take money generated from higher-risk, active businesses… and move it into more stable, long-term assets like apartment buildings. That shift—from risk to stability—is how I've tried to build durability over time. Now, to be fair, the sharp rise in interest rates a few years ago put a dent in that model. But zooming out, it's still worked well for me overall. So I'm sticking with it. That said, there are other ways to think about real estate. In some cases, the real opportunity is when you combine real estate with an operating business. We've done that before in the Wealth Formula Investor Club with self-storage, and the results were excellent. Storage is operationally simple, relatively boring—and that's exactly why it works. But there's another category that sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. Hotels. They're sexier.They're more volatile.And yes—they're riskier. But the upside can be dramatically higher. One of my closest friends here in Montecito has quietly built a fortune doing boutique hotels over the past few years. He started with a no-frills hotel in Texas serving the oil drilling industry. Over time, he combined his operational experience with his talent as a designer—and eventually created some of the highest-rated boutique hotels in the world. He's absolutely crushing it. Of course, most of us aren't world-class designers or architects. I'm certainly not. Still, his success made me curious. Hotels have been on my radar for a while now—not because I understand the business, but because I don't. When I asked him how he learned the hotel industry, his answer was honest: “I figured it out on the fly—starting with my first acquisition and a great broker.” That's usually how real learning happens. So this week on the Wealth Formula Podcast, I brought on an expert in hospitality investing to educate both of us. We cover the basics: How hotel investing actually worksWhere the real risks are (and where they aren't)How returns differ from multifamilyAnd what someone should understand before ever touching their first hotel deal If you've ever thought about buying or investing in hotels—but didn't know where to start—welcome to the club. You don't have to jump in tomorrow. But you do have to start somewhere. This episode is a good starting point. Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/545-should-you-invest-in-hotels/id718416620?i=1000748759003 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Lx5Rp4x704lWRazWLqDOK Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GMFf6-g8w_0 Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com. Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast coming to you from Montecito, California. Before we begin today, I wanna remind you, if you’ve not done so and you are an accredited investor, go to wealthformula.com, sign up for our investor club. Uh, the opportunity there is really to see private deal flow that you wouldn’t otherwise see because it can’t be advertised. And, uh, only available to those people who are deemed accredited. And then what does accredited mean as a reminder? Well, if you’re married, you make $300,000 per year combined for at least two years with a reasonable expectation, continue to do so, or you have a net worth of a million dollars outside of your personal residence. Or if you’re single like me, $200,000 per year or a million dollars net worth. Anyway, that’s probably, uh, most of you. So all you gotta do is go to wealth formula.com, sign up for investor club because hey, who doesn’t wanna be part of a club? And, uh, by the way, it’s a great price. It’s free. So join it. Just get onboarded and all you gotta do is just wait for deal flow. What a deal. Now let’s talk about different kinds of things to invest in. For most of my career, I, I have really focused on two things I’ve focused on. Either operating businesses, uh, in my case, those operating businesses largely have been medical and multifamily real estate. Uh, the strategy itself, theoretically the way I think about it, take money from sort of these active businesses, a higher risk, move them into more stable long-term assets like apartment buildings. Okay? The idea is that’s how you build some durability over time. Now, to be fair, okay, to be fair. Sharp rise in interest rates a few years ago. Put a little bit of a dent in that model. But here’s the thing is that you can’t throw out the, uh, baby with the bath water. ’cause when I zoom out, still worked well for me overall. So I’m sticking with it and, uh, that’s my story. I’m sticking with it. That said, there are always other ways to think about real estate, right? Real estate is not just multifamily. Um, in some cases, the real opportunity is when you combine real estate and operating businesses. So. We’ve actually done that before in our wealth formula investor club. Um, and we’ve done that through self-storage, for example, and the results were really good. Storage is operationally, generally pretty simple. Probably not that simple, but you know, but more so than other things, relatively boring. Boring is good, and that’s exactly why it works. There’s another category that sits at the opposite end of the spectrum of boring, and it’s sexier and it’s more volatile and it’s riskier. And uh, that is the area of hotels, right, like leisure, that kind of thing. But the upside in those things can be dramatically higher. You know, one of my closest friends here. Montecito, I talk about him all the time. He’s a, he is a little bit of an inspiration to me, although I wouldn’t tell that to in space. He’s built a fortune doing boutique hotels over the past few years and the way he started, you know, and I think it was only about a decade ago because he bought like this no frills hotel in Texas that was serving the oil industry. There was a bunch of guys, you know, drilling needed a place to say, and you know, he had this and he actually. I don’t know that I would recommend this, but he, he told me he bought it sight unseen just based on the numbers. Ah, man, I gotta tell you, I don’t think I’m that lucky. If I bought something sight unseen, it would not work great for me, but it did work great for him. But over time, what he did is he, he combined his operational experience with his talent as he’s like a designer, like designs, homes, an architect, uh, of sorts, although more than that. Um, and he, he used to build houses for like famous people in Hollywood. Anyway, he took that skill and so he combined it with hotels and he created some of the highest rated boutique hotels in the world. And he’s absolutely crushing it. Just crushing it. Of course, the reality is that most of us aren’t world-class designers or architects. I’m certainly not. I’m not artistic at all. Still, um, you know, the fact that he’s had so much success in this space and that he loves hotels. What got me curious? So, hotels have been on my radar for a while, not because I understand the business, but actually because I don’t. And when I asked him how he learned, uh, about the hotel industry, he just said, you know, I figured out on the fly and, uh, you know, started with my first acquisition, had a great broker who taught me everything I, you know, needed to know at the beginning and. That’s a great story. I mean, and ideally that’s how things happen. As you can tell, this guy is, uh, seems to just hit on everything. So good for him. So this week on Wealth Formula Podcast, I wanted to get a little bit of a hotel investing 1 0 1. So I brought on an expert in hospitality investing that could educate both you and me. So we’re gonna cover some of the basics, how hotel actually works, you know, what are the risks returns. Like, what should people do if they even consider, you know, buying their first hotel or investing in one? So if you’ve ever thought about investing, uh, in hotels, or maybe that’s the first time you’re hearing about it and you’re curious, uh, welcome to the club and uh, we will have a great interview for you right after these messages. Wealth formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net, the strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own. Bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you’ve borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying you compound interest on that money even though you’ve borrowed it. At result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique. It’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its backbone. Turbocharge your investments. Visit Wealth formula banking.com. Again, that’s wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show, everyone. Today. My guest on Wealth Farm I podcast is, uh, John O’Neill. He’s a, a professor of hospitality management and director of the Hospitality Real Estate Strategy Group at Pennsylvania State University. Uh, he spent decades studying hotel valuation performance, Cabo flows and economic cycles in in the lodging industry. John, thanks for, uh, joining us. You’re welcome. So, you know, we’re talking offline. You’ve been in the hotel business for a long time. We’re trying to figure out how to frame this thing because you know, I mean there are, I know there are certainly people in. Uh, who in, in my group and my listeners, my community who are in the hotel space, but a lot of ’em aren’t. And you know, they’ve been thinking about, well, you know, we do a lot of apartment buildings, that kind of thing. Um, you know, what else should we be thinking about? And so, you know, when we hear, uh, hotel, um, they’re thinking of hospitality. But from an investor’s perspective, I guess the first question ask is what kind of real estate asset is a hotel? And, and may, may maybe just sort of fundamentally how different it is. From apartments office or retail? Yeah, that’s a great question because hotels are fundamentally different. But what I’ve seen over the past few years as well is hotels have increasingly been considered to be a component of commercial real estate. So we’ve always thought about office and retail and residential and industrial as being components of commercial real estate, but increasingly. Investors are thinking about hotels that way as well, because some of the high risk aspects of hotels have been moderated a little bit. So they are still considered to be a high risk and potentially high reward category, but they’re much more cyclical than those other types of businesses. So if we look at apartment leases, maybe being a year or two. Office leases may be being three to five years and retail leases could be five or 10 years. The leases in hotels are one or two nights, so there’s upside, but there’s risk involved in that as well. So when there’s pressure in a market to increase rates, like here where I am in University Park, Pennsylvania, when we have a home football game. We can see hotels with average daily rates of maybe a hundred to $200 a night charging seven, eight, $900 per night, and filling up on those rates. You can’t do that in an office building or in a retail center. And so there’s great opportunity when demand increases to push up rates and to greatly benefit from that. The flip side of courses on Sunday night when all those guests leave. You might be back to a hundred dollars a night and running 20 or 30% occupancy. Do hotels kind of follow the rest of real estate in terms of market cycles though? Yeah, it depends. I, I would say in many cases they’re actually leaders, which again, double-edged sword there. So for, yeah, when we plummeted in 2020 because of COVID hotels were probably the first category really to see it. Demand dried up overnight, and you go back to September 11th, 2001 on September 12th, 2001, a lot of hotels were empty and that wasn’t the case with office buildings and retail centers. The flip side, of course, is when the economy started improving, hotel operators could start pushing their rates very quickly. And so other categories of commercial real estate didn’t receive those benefits. Yeah, I mean, obviously there’s certainly gonna be. Real estate that’s often used that that’s often using debt and, you know, probably has the same sort of, uh, issues with regard to cap rate compression or decompression based on interest rates as well. Right, right. So, um, where are we? Right? What would you say right now, like, I mean, we know that. Our, we’ve been following very closely on the multifamily side. You know, prices are depressed. I mean, from 2022, we’re looking at probably 30% to 40%. Most, most, uh, large apartment complexes are not moving because people don’t wanna sell into a down market. But when they are, they’re being sold at 30, 40% discounts compared to 2022. Where is the, where is the hotel? Market at right now? It it, it’s challenged because right now we’re seeing discrepancies between where buyers wanna buy and sellers wanna sell. We’ve started to see some movement because some sellers have come down a bit in pricing because of what we’ve seen in 2025, the market really did soften as far as the hotel business is concerned. So in 2025. We really saw no increase in occupancy and in many markets we saw some decreases in occupancy. We are still seeing average daily rates going up a little bit, so yeah. Might be worth maybe a quick step backward that the two key indicators in terms of hotel lodging performance would be occupancy and average daily rate. With occupancy being the extent to which the guest rooms are occupied and average daily rate being the average price somebody is paying. We can talk about the mathematics of those, but, um, just I think conceptually, hopefully that makes sense. But, so, you know, at this point what we’re seeing is average daily rates are still going up a little bit, and the forecasts for 2026 are. Pretty much more of the same, where we’re not expected to see great occupancy increases, but we are anticipating that the average daily rates might go up a little bit. Uh, and, and in fact we might see occupancies decline slightly. And, uh, we might see, uh, average daily rates still possibly going up a little bit. That’s usually an indicator of being late in the cycle, you know, being somewhere near the peak and, and, you know, if the trough was 2020. Which was a pretty deep trough. 2021, we started seeing improvements and we saw great improvements in 22, 23, and 24, and so it’s looking like the end of a cycle. The thing we don’t really know for sure is, is there some reason that we’re going to really go into a substantial down period or are we actually in a situation where we’re going to have another upcycle? Yeah. You know, the other thing I was curious about too, like when you talk about these cycles for hotels, even within hotels, there are certainly, you know, different types of hotels. You know, there’s the boutiquey ones that are pe really pure tourism versus the ones that, okay, well maybe they are, you know, good for football games or. There’s others that are people use for, for, for work frequently, right? They’re, they’re just passing through for, for work trips. Do you, is there, um, is that difficult to extricate those types of different economies running at the same time? It’s not, I, I don’t know that it’s that difficult, you know, just to give you a little bit about my background, I’ve been a professor for some time, but prior to being a professor I worked for. Three of the four major hospitality organizations, namely Marriott, IHG, and Hyatt. Uh, and so going back into the 1980s when I was doing feasibility studies for proposed Marriott hotels, we, in most markets, analyzed three markets segments. And, and you essentially said what they are commercial business, which are your business travelers, leisure business, which are your pleasure travelers, and then groups, which includes conventions and, and those are still the three major market segments in most markets. In, in some markets. For example, if you’re approximate to a major international airport, there’s usually a fourth segment, which is that fourth segment is airline crew business, which is, is very different than the other three because. Whereas the other three go up and down throughout, not just the year, but throughout the week. Airline crew business tends to be stable throughout the year, so it, it, it’s in your hotel 365 nights outta the year. So it’s, it’s a very low risk, but also a very low rated market segment. So it, I don’t know if that’s that complicated, but it just needs to be broken out as you delineated it, which is that there’s. Three or four market segments in any market. And in terms of studying a hotel for development or for investment, it’s necessary to understand not just what’s going on on the supply side, in other words what’s going on in the hotels, but what’s going on in the demand side as well. So give you an example. I recently did a feasibility study in a market, which is a big pharmaceutical market. So I actually spent time with major pharmaceutical people talking about, where are you staying now? Why are you staying there? Are you a member of the Frequent traveler program? How does your business vary throughout the year? What rates are you paying? What facilities and amenities are you seeking? And things like that. So to really understand the demand because that demand segment. So important in that market. So it is ultimately a street corner business and what’s going on in a specific market in terms of the mix of commercial, leisure and group business and possibly other market segments. Really is something that we have to study in depth when we conduct a feasibility study or an appraisal for hotel. I, I don’t know if I mentioned, I’m a licensed real estate appraiser too, and although my licenses allow me to appraise any type of property, I only appraise hotels. Got it. Businesses fundamentally changed pre COVID and post COVID. I would assume that there’s probably less travel. Are you seeing impact? On those types of hotels from that kind of, you know, less travel, more zoom type activity. Yeah. And, and that’s a great, that’s a great follow up because with those market segments, although the segments are the same. The demand from each of those segments really has different, and, and as you said, it really changed substantially in COVID. It, it, it’s fascinating how once we were forced to use Zoom and, and other, you know, Microsoft teams and other technology like that, you know, we, we kind of did a kicking and screaming. But once we figured it out, we realized we didn’t get a lot done. Uh, now I spent last week in Los Angeles at America’s Lodging Investment Summit, and I go to this. Function every year, because I see many of the same people year after year, and the business cards might change, but it’s the same people involved in the hotel business, whether they’re brokers or investors or asset managers or consultants or appraisers. But in between. Each year I do a lot on Zoom with these people and you know, we can keep those relationships going. So it hasn’t eliminated, you know, in my personal case, my need to travel, but it has substantially reduced it. And I think a lot of other business people have seen the same thing. So if we look at the recovery since COVID, it was fascinating because the first market segment that recovered and recovered really strongly was leisure business and people, people see it as their right. To have a vacation and, and people were paying high rates, particularly in, in, in mountain locations and in beach locations. And so those rates came up really quickly. And then the group business followed. If people do wanna go to group functions like I did last week in la what has not recovered to the level of 2019 though is the business travel. Right. Interesting. So I, that’s probably a, uh, you know, and he, I can’t really see a particularly promising future for that Subsect either. Right. I think, in fact, bill Gates said it’s never going to be back to the, you know, he, he’s an investor in Four Seasons hotels, and he said it’ll never be back to the way it was in 2019. I don’t know if he’s right. I mean, because I, I still feel like we get a lot of things done. Face-to-face, person to person that we really can’t do in Zoom. I don’t think Zoom is great for establishing relationships. I, I still think that we need face-to-face, uh, personal contact. But, you know, that might be just my perspective because I’ve been working in hotels since I was a teenager and I’m really far from being a teenager now. And, you know, I, I’ve been indoctrinated in this philosophy of the importance of face-to-face contact. But yeah, you know, that might be generational. You with a younger generation. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, just kind of going back to the difference differences, uh, with compared to other real estate hotels, ultimately the, one of the big differences, they’re operating businesses, right? I mean, they’re not that large. Apartment buildings aren’t, but they’re is I think, a specific sort of operational execution that matters a lot in hotels. So, you know, in invest, when investors are kinda looking at that, I mean, they, they should probably be not looking at it as nearly as passive as other real estate investments. Is that fair? I, I think that’s very fair because I think, you know, it, it shows what’s happened in terms of the market with real estate investment trust. Because I’ve sold my entire position in hotel real estate investment trust and, and as you probably know, if we look at real estate investment trust. Different categories in, in commercial real estate, hotels lag, which is fascinating because everything else we’ve been talking about explains why hotel returns tend to outperform other classes of commercial real estate. More volatility, but higher returns on average. If you can withstand the long period, uh, that you need to be an investor. On real estate investment trust, it’s the opposite. Hotels actually lag and, and I think it really is because of exactly what you’re talking about, which is that they really are like an operating business where there’s also real estate as opposed to a real estate play where it’s almost like there’s an annuity of rent that is very easily projected, uh, in hotels. You know, we, we. Project all the time how they’re going to perform. But you know, you know, I hope my projections are very good, but there’s always things that can COVID. For example, you know, now there’s a virus in, in India that you know might be coming and, you know, we don’t know, will this be substantial or will it be really minor in the Americas? We really don’t know. Uh, that won’t have a big effect on, on other classes of real estate investment trust, but. It could have a big effect in hotels, so, so the unknowns in hotels are very high. And then when you combine that with the fact that they are an operating business, which are very labor intensive and wage rates are going up. So the cost structure and the management of that cost structure becomes. Very important and the expertise of the hotel managers becomes very important. And so, yeah, like you say, other classes of commercial real estate or, or institutional real estate investments have an operational component. It’s much greater when it comes to hotels. So I actually have a friend who’s an, um, owns, uh, a few boutique hotels here in, in California, and he was telling me one of the things that he’s kind of worried about is, um, you know, they, they’re, they have some, um. Some mandates coming up with regard to, you know, minimum wage and, and all these things that, uh, hotel workers have to get, uh, give you just outta curiosity. I mean, most of my audience is not in California. I am, but have you heard about this? Can you tell us a little bit about those pressures? Yeah, I have heard about it. And there’s, there’s forces on the other side as well, namely the American Hotel and Lodging Association, which represents hotel owners, managers, and franchisers. And so they have a voice in these things as well. But the, the, the forest, particularly in places like California and, and in the west coast in general, we’ve seen it in Seattle as well. Um, you know, in, in terms of increasing minimum wages to rates that, that are shocking to me. Um, you know, that’s, that’s a big issue. You know, you don’t see it as much in the middle of the country, but you do see it on the coast and particularly in the, on the West Coast. So, you know, if we’re looking at projections, say into 2026 and, and perhaps beyond, we expect in many cases to be seeing higher growth in wage expenses than we expect to see growth in RevPAR, which is room revenue, preoccupied room, which is just occupancy times average daily rate. So the, the overall revenue is expected, at least in the short term, to grow more slowly. Than expenses and, and wages are really driving a lot of it. And then anything that’s affected by wages, so insurance, for example, property taxes, other expenses are really growing at this stage more than what we’ve seen in terms of revenue growth. So that’s, that’s a challenge right now. The, the question I think really then is how much will AI affect that and to what extent will guests become more comfortable with checking in? On an iPad type of a situation as opposed to seeing a person face to face, and there’s probably generational differences there. What it is forcing hotel operators to do is the same kinds of things that restaurant operators have been forced to do, which is find ways to use technology and actually have the guests face the technology and get the guests comfortable with that. In terms of things like check in and check out, you know, but still in hotels the rooms have to be cleaned and, and although there’s robots that. You know, they’re nowhere near what, where they need to be to actually clean Hotel guestroom jet, at least in any sort of economically viable way. But, you know, the long-term question is to what extent will the industry be adopting AI and other technology in order to address that issue? Because that’s what’s going to happen. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s not just going to be a situation where. The operators will accept paying higher wages and have the same number of employees in each hotel. Right. Um, branding, you know, sort of confusing to a lot of people. Not in the space, but you know, what role do hotel brands actually kind of play in, in protecting revenue and value? Um, and I guess when does a brand help an owner versus become a constraint? Yeah. You know, brands have been very important and, and I, I forget if I mentioned but of the, the big brand companies I’ve worked for three of them and, um. You know, they, they, they typically started as management companies. So originally companies like Hilton and Marriott primarily generated revenue through management fees. And so they own some of the real estate, although they’ve become asset light over the years and own very little, if any, anymore. Uh, but they do still manage hotels. So one thing that the brand companies do have is expertise in terms of management. That’s one of the fees that a branded hotel and a non-branded hotel would have as well, would be a management fee, which is usually expressed as a percentage of revenue. And sometimes there’s an incentive structure in there as well. But then there’s a franchise fee, which is just paying for the brand, and, and that’s usually as a percentage of total revenue, higher than the management fee. But what it does is it, it, it. Puts the property in a global distribution system, so the global distribution systems that brands like Marriott and Hilton and IHG and, and HIA have, uh, they. Generate heads and beds. You know, that’s, that’s the term we always, when I worked at Hyatt and Merritt, we always talked about heads and beds. Every night you’re trying to, trying to get people in the rooms. The brands do a lot to put heads and beds, you know, in a typical hotel with a good brand affiliation. Somewhere between probably a third and two thirds of the occupy rooms actually came in through the brand global distribution system, which historically was a toll free reservation system. And although the, you know, those still exist now, it’s really more of a focus on the online system and, and, and sometimes toll-free reservations and direct reservations. But, but that’s what the brand does. It, it, it ultimately is a generator of. So kind of just focusing on somebody who’s potentially thinking about hotels as an investment. So far, what I gleaned from you, and, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that timing probably isn’t perfect right now. We’re probably, you know, we’re probably in a, you know, a peak and you generally not a great idea to buy in peaks. Um. I personally, from what I understand, would stay outta California. You know, uh, you know, like my friend was saying that it was gonna make it very difficult for a lot of hotels to have their, you know, hotel restaurants even. And so he foresees like a lot of them having to close those down. Um, and then the, the next thing I think is, gosh, you really have to be cognizant of the, of the fact that, you know, work patterns are changing. And so maybe that’s not a good. Way to go, either. What other, what are some other big picture things that you think people ought to be thinking about as they evaluate the space? Yeah. Well, I think there’s a couple of things. One of which is. That is a street corner business. So it really depends on what street corner you’re in. Uh, I’ve done some research just on how hotels perform in university towns versus other locations because, for example, there are brands now called graduate hotels, which eventually was acquired by Hilton, uh, and, uh, scholar Hotels and, and these properties are university town hotels. They’re doing okay. You know, they’re, they’re doing okay. If you look at how universities operate, we’ve seen some Ivy League schools pay 60, $80 million or more just to make sure they keep that billion dollars a year coming in from the federal government that they, they get for research grants and, and we’ve seen, you know, look at what’s going on with NIL now in terms of, of university sports. Universities clearly are willing to. You gen willing to spend a lot of money to keep doing what they do, which is, you know, they, they generate a lot of research and I’m talking about. Big universities now, uh, you know, a lot of research and, and there’s a sporting business aspect to universities as well. So university towns are okay, and, and what I ultimately found in my research is they’re much less cyclical than the average. So, you know, we talk about the risk of hotels as things go up and things go down and things go up and down. That doesn’t happen as much in university towns. You know, big universities don’t close and, and don’t even substantially change their business model. So it really depends on, on where you’re located. And then there’s certain cities as well, you know, people, you know, I, I don’t have to go into detail about my last visit to San Francisco and how weird it was, and I was with students and, and told my female students don’t go out at night alone. I mean, it was, it was, it was really freaky, but. San Francisco now might be a place to invest. Now San Francisco probably has bottomed out. Uh, and the same might be true with New York. So, you know, it really depends on where you’re going. I, I think in general, yeah, you know, there’s, there’s concerns, but even so, you know, I think it’s still might be a good time to invest in. Good quality hotel companies, just, you know, in terms of the stock market and, and equity in, in businesses like Marriott and, and Hilton because their franchise fees and their management fees are a percentage of total revenue. So hotels that are not profitable, that are a member of those brand affiliations are still paying. Into those systems and you know, hopefully the goal is that these properties become profitable, but even while they’re not profitable, they owe franchise fees and in some cases management fees as well. So I think there are a lot of ways to still invest in the hotel business. It’s just what vehicles are being used and where. So, you know, it sounds a little overwhelming, um, for someone who, again, who’s new to the space. Any suggestions on how somebody might just learn more about this ecosystem and, you know, start to go down this path of potentially becoming, you know, a hotel investor? Yeah. Well, first thing is, you know, we talked about ai. AI is pretty good for helping people to learn. So if you wanna learn about the hotel business, you can go and have a really good conversation with chat GPT about what makes it click and where could the opportunities lie today. Uh, you know, I’ve gone over the past year from essentially not using AI at all to using it essentially every day. And so that’s a great way because that’ll access a lot of, there, there’s trade journals, for example, but it’ll access those things. Uh, the conference, like I went to last week, the America’s Lodging Investment Summit, which is in LA every year is a. Is a great place to learn as well. There’s, there’s wonderful sessions and that conference is attended by everybody from Anthony Capano, who’s the CEO of Marriott, down to people involved in real estate and investments in the hotels and, and who essentially make their living. Off of those as brokers, appraisers, consultants, asset managers and things like that. So, so there’s ways online to do it and there’s ways to do it actually by attending conferences as well. Yeah. A good broker as well. Right. I mean, you know, going back to my, my friend who, who’s become a very successful hotelier, the first one he bought, he threw a broker and he said he learned everything about hotels that he knows from that guy. Um. So that’s probably, it probably tells you something as well. Yeah. And, and there are some excellent hotel brokers. There’s some who are national in scope and some who are local in scope. So again, it depends on where you’re thinking you might wanna be investing. Uh, but, but there’s some great local brokers, but then there’s national firms like JLL and CBRE and Hunter, uh, that, you know, they have really good people who are very knowledgeable about the hotel business. Yeah. John, thanks so much for, uh, joining us here on Wealth Formula Podcast and giving us sort of an overview of the, uh, um, hotel, uh, real estate, uh, uh, asset class. You bet you make a lot of money, but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties. Now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Now, good news, if you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program put out by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide financial protection to your family if something happens to. The concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world, and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Hope you enjoyed and again, uh, hey hotels. Think about it. I guess. Uh, I continue. I will continue to do so, uh, especially given my buddy’s success in this space. Um. Although, I will tell you, I probably am not a boutique hotel guy. Um, you know, I don’t, I don’t know that I could make it super fancy, you know? And then on the other hand, you hear about these, uh, hotels that are. For the people traveling through and they’re not doing this so great. So maybe wait till that we hit that, um, that trough that he was talking about, he said we’re kind of at a peak right now. Anyway, that’s it for me. Uh, this week on Wealth Formula Podcast. This is Buck Joffrey signing off. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit well formula roadmap.com.

Jason joins Gene Morris of Rebel Capitalist for a Q&A session. He discusses the shifting landscape of the property market under a new political administration, predicting a significant rise in sales volume. He advocates for income property over speculative assets like Bitcoin, highlighting the unique "multi-dimensional" returns and tax benefits found in real estate. Jason introduces his "inflation-induced debt destruction" strategy, explaining how fixed-rate mortgages allow investors to pay back loans with devalued currency during inflationary periods. He further categorizes locations into linear, cyclical, and hybrid markets, advising investors to prioritize boring, stable areas with favorable landlord laws. The conversation also explores emerging trends like co-living properties and the advantages of the United States market compared to international options. https://www.jasonhartman.com/properties/   #RealEstateInvesting #TurnkeyRealEstate #IncomeProperty #InflationInducedDebtDestruction #MortgageLockInEffect #RentToValueRatio #LinearMarkets #CoLiving #RealEstateROI #PropertyManagement #HousingMarket #WealthBuilding #MarketAnalysis #LandlordFriendly #InflationHedge  #RealEstateStrategy #FinancialFreedom #UnitedStatesOfFraud #CashFlowIsKing #MultiDimensionalWealth #PropertyTracker #NorthwestIndianaRealEstate #ArbitrageOpportunity #FedPolicy #HousingSupply #AssetProtection #SpeculationVsInvestment   Key Takeaways: 0:00 A quick update on the economy and housing 4:33 Housing supply and the multi-dimensional characteristics of income property 6:52 Bad business and the lock-in effect 9:03 Less 3% mortgage and a house in Illinois 11:53 Cyclical, linear and hybrid markets and the amazing opportunities for CO-LIVING 15:56 Pro Formas, Cashflow vs. Rent-To-Value ratio and IIDD 24:31 Due diligence must-have checklist 28:16 USA vs. overseas housing investments 28:44 New requirements for seller financing 30:27 Don't be so dogmatic- Steve Jobs 33:39 https://propertytracker.com/       Follow Jason on TWITTER, INSTAGRAM & LINKEDIN Twitter.com/JasonHartmanROI Instagram.com/jasonhartman1/ Linkedin.com/in/jasonhartmaninvestor/ Call our Investment Counselors at: 1-800-HARTMAN (US) or visit: https://www.jasonhartman.com/ Free Class:  Easily get up to $250,000 in funding for real estate, business or anything else: http://JasonHartman.com/Fund CYA Protect Your Assets, Save Taxes & Estate Planning: http://JasonHartman.com/Protect Get wholesale real estate deals for investment or build a great business – Free Course: https://www.jasonhartman.com/deals Special Offer from Ron LeGrand: https://JasonHartman.com/Ron Free Mini-Book on Pandemic Investing: https://www.PandemicInvesting.com

You can find our The Lost Biker Stories book, tool rolls and stickers https://www.thelibertatia.com ______________ Please do leave a comment and share your thoughts. If you've got a story, insight or pictures to share, you can also email hi@tuesdayatdobbs.com Instagram: www.instagram.com/@tuesday_at_dobbs My other YouTube channel: @FreddieDobbs ______________ Time Stamps: 00:00: intro 00:45: Why Are Motorcycle Auctions So Popular? Moto Guzzu V7 10:20: The Italian Bike that you never have heard of (Cagiva Raptor 650) 16:30 Bike of the Week: Ducati 916

It’s actually a good thing that some books push you to the edge of your ability to understand. But there’s no doubting the fact that dense, abstract and jargon-filled works can push you so far into the fog of frustration that you cannot blame yourself for giving up. But here’s the truth: You don’t have to walk away frustrated and confused. I’m going to share with you a number of practical strategies that will help you fill in the gaps of your reading process. Because that’s usually the real problem: It’s not your intelligence. Nor is it that the world is filled with books “above your level.” I ultimately don’t believe in “levels” as such. But as someone who taught reading courses at Rutgers and Saarland University, I know from experience that many learners need to pick up a few simple steps that will strengthen how they approach reading difficult books. And in this guide, you’ll learn how to read challenging books and remember what they say. I’m going to go beyond generic advice too. That way, you can readily diagnose: Why certain books feel so hard Use pre-reading tactics that prime your brain to deal with difficulties effectively Apply active reading techniques to lock in understanding faster Leverage accelerated learning tools that are quick to learn Use Artificial Intelligence to help convert tough convent into lasting knowledge without worrying about getting duped by AI hallucinations Whether you’re tacking philosophy, science, dense fiction or anything based primarily in words, the reading system you’ll learn today will help you turn confusion into clarity. By the end, even the most intimidating texts will surrender their treasures to your mind. Ready? Let’s break it all down together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9HLbY4jsFg Why Some Books Feel “Too Hard” (And What That Really Means) You know exactly how it feels and so do I. You sit down with a book that people claim is a classic or super-important. But within a few pages, your brain fogs over and you’re completely lost. More often than not, through glazed eyes, you start to wonder… did this author go out of his or her way to make this difficult? Are they trying to show off with all these literary pyrotechnics? Or is there a deliberate conspiracy to confuse readers like me? Rest assured. These questions are normal and well worth asking. The difficulty you might feel is never arbitrary in my experience. But there’s also no “single origin” explanation for why some books feel easier than others. It’s almost always a combination of factors, from cognitive readiness, lived experience, emotions and your physical condition throughout the day. This means that understanding why individual texts resist your understanding needs to be conducted on a case-by-case basis so you can move towards mastering anything you want to read. Cognitive Load: The Brain’s Processing “Stop Sign” “Cognitive load” probably needs no definition. The words are quite intuitive. You start reading something and it feels like someone is piling heavy bricks directly on top of your brain, squishing everything inside. More specifically, these researchers explain that what’s getting squished is specifically your working memory, which is sometimes called short-term memory. In practical terms, this means that when a book suddenly throws a bunch of unfamiliar terms at you, your working memory has to suddenly deal with abstract concepts, completely new words or non-linear forms of logic. All of this increases your cognitive load, but it’s important to note that there’s no conspiracy. In Just Being Difficult: Academic Writing in the Public Arena, a variety of contributors admit that they often write for other specialists. Although it would be nice to always compose books and articles for general readers, it’s not laziness. They’re following the codes of their discipline, which involves shorthand to save everyone time. Yes, it can also signal group membership and feel like an intellectual wall if you’re new to this style, but it’s simply a “stop sign” for your brain. And wherever there are stop signs, there are also alternative routes. Planning Your Detour “Roadmap” Into Difficult Books Let me share a personal example by way of sharing a powerful technique for making hard books easier to read. A few years ago I decided I was finally going to read Kant. I had the gist of certain aspects of his philosophy, but a few pages in, I encountered so many unfamiliar terms, I knew I had to obey the Cognitive Load Stop Sign and take a step back. To build a roadmap into Kant, I searched Google in a particular way. Rather than a search term like, “Intro to Kant,” I entered this tightened command instead: Filetype:PDF syllabus Kant These days, you can ask an LLM in more open language to simply give you links to the syllabi of the most authoritative professors who teach Kant. I’d still suggest that you cross-reference what you get on Google, however. If you’re hesitant about using either Google or AI, it’s also a great idea to visit a librarian in person to help you. Or, you can read my post about using AI for learning with harming your memory to see if it’s time to update your approach. Narrowing Down Your Options One way or another, the reason to consult the world’s leading professors is that their syllabi will provide you with: Foundational texts Core secondary literature Commentaries from qualified sources Essential historical references Once you’ve looked over a few syllabi, look through the table of contents of a few books on Amazon or Google Books. Then choose: 1-2 foundational texts to read before the challenging target book you want to master 1-2 articles or companion texts to read alongside In this way, you’ve turned difficulty into a path, not an obstacle. Pre-Reading Strategies That Warm Up Your Reading Muscles A lot of the time, the difficulty people feel when reading has nothing to do with the book. It’s just that you’re diving into unfamiliar territory without testing the waters first. Here are some simple ways to make unfamiliar books much easier to get into. Prime Like a Pro To make books easier to read, you can perform what is often called “priming” in the accelerated learning community. It is also sometimes called “pre-reading” and as this research article discusses, its success has been well-demonstrated. The way I typically perform priming is simple. Although some books require a slight change to the pattern, I typically approach each new book by reading: The back cover The index The colophon page The conclusion or afterword The most interesting or relevant chapter The introduction The rest of the book Activate Prior Knowledge Sometimes I will use a skimming and scanning strategy after reading the index to quickly familiarize myself with how an author approaches a topic with which I’m already familiar. This can help raise interest, excitement and tap into the power of context-dependent memory. For example, I recently started reading Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Since the Renaissance memory master Giordano Bruno comes up multiple times, I was able to draw up a kind of context map of the books themes by quickly going through those passages. Take a Picture Walk Barbara Oakley and Terence Sejnjowski share a fantastic strategy in Learning How to Learn. Before reading, simply go through a book and look at all the illustrations, tables, charts and diagrams. It seems like a small thing. But it gives your brain a “heads up” about upcoming visual information that you may need to process than prose. I used to find visual information like this difficult, but after I started taking picture walks, I’m now excited to read “towards” these elements. If still find them challenging to understand, I apply a tip I learned from Tony Buzan that you might like to try: Rather than struggle to interpret a chart or illustration, reproduce it in your own hand. Here’s an example of how I did this when studying spaced repetition: As a result, I learned the graph and its concepts quickly and have never forgotten it. Build a Pre-Reading Ritual That Fits You There’s no one-sized-fits-all strategy, so you need to experiment with various options. The key is to reduce cognitive load by giving your mind all kinds of ways of understanding what a book contains. If it helps, you can create yourself a checklist that you slip into the challenging books on your list. That way, you’ll have both a bookmark and a protocol as you develop your own pre-reading style. Active Reading Techniques That Boost Comprehension Active reading involves deliberately applying mental activities while reading. These can include writing in the margins of your books, questioning, preparing summaries and even taking well-time breaks between books. Here’s a list of my favorite active reading strategies with ideas on how you can implement them. Using Mnemonics While Reading On the whole, I take notes while reading and then apply a variety of memory techniques after. But to stretch my skills, especially when reading harder books, I start the encoding process earlier. Instead of just taking notes, I’ll start applying mnemonic images. I start early because difficult terms often require a bit more spaced repetition. To do this yourself, the key is to equip yourself with a variety of mnemonic methods, especially: The Memory Palace technique The Pegword Method The Major System The PAO System And in some cases, you may want to develop a symbol system, such as if you’re studying physics or programming. Once you have these mnemonic systems developed, you can apply them in real time. For example, if you come across names and dates, committing them to memory as you read can help you keep track of a book’s historical arc. This approach can be especially helpful when reading difficult books because authors often dump a lot of names and dates. By memorizing them as you go, you reduce the mental load of having to track it all. For even more strategies you can apply while reading, check out my complete Mnemonics Dictionary. Strategic Questioning Whether you take notes or memorize in real-time, asking questions as you go makes a huge difference. Even if you don’t come up with answers, continually interrogating the book will open up your brain. The main kinds of questions are: Evaluative questions (checking that the author uses valid reasoning and address counterarguments) Analytical questions (assessing exactly how the arguments unfold and questioning basic assumptions) Synthetic questions (accessing your previous knowledge and looking for connections with other books and concepts) Intention questions (interrogating the author’s agenda and revealing any manipulative rhetoric) One medieval tool for questioning you can adopt is the memory wheel. Although it’s definitely old-fashioned, you’ll find that it helps you rotate between multiple questions. Even if they are as simple as who, what, where, when, how and why questions, you’ll have a mental mnemonic device that helps ensure you don’t miss any of them. Re-reading Strategies Although these researchers seem to think that re-reading is not an effective strategy, I could not live without it. There are three key kinds of re-reading I recommend. Verbalize Complexity to Tame It The first is to simply go back and read something difficult to understand out loud. You’d be surprised how often it’s not your fault. The author has just worded something in a clunky manner and speaking the phrasing clarifies everything. Verbatim Memorization for Comprehension The second strategy is to memorize the sentence or even an entire passage verbatim. That might seem like a lot of work, but this tutorial on memorizing entire passages will make it easy for you. Even if verbatim memorization takes more work, it allows you to analyze the meaning within your mind. You’re no longer puzzling over it on paper, continuing to stretch your working memory. No, you’ve effectively expanded at least a part of your working memory by bypassing it altogether. You’ve ushered the information into long-term memory. I’m not too shy to admit that I have to do this sometimes to understand everything from the philosophy in Sanskrit phrases to relatively simple passages from Shakespeare. As I shared in my recent discussion of actor Anthony Hopkins’ memory, I couldn’t work out what “them” referred to in a particular Shakespeare play. But after analyzing the passage in memory, it was suddenly quite obvious. Rhythmical Re-reading The third re-reading strategy is something I shared years ago in my post detailing 11 reasons you should re-read at least one book per month. I find this approach incredibly helpful because no matter how good you get at reading and memory methods, even simple books can be vast ecosystems. By revisiting difficult books at regular intervals, you not only get more out of them. You experience them from different perspectives and with the benefit of new contexts you’ve built in your life over time. In other words, treat your reading as an infinite game and never assume that you’ve comprehended everything. There’s always more to be gleaned. Other Benefits of Re-reading You’ll also improve your pattern recognition by re-treading old territory, leading to more rapid recognition of those patterns in new books. Seeing the structures, tropes and other tactics in difficult books opens them up. But without regularly re-reading books, it can be difficult to perceive what these forms are and how authors use them. To give you a simple example of a structure that appears in both fiction and non-fiction, consider in media res, or starting in the middle. When you spot an author using this strategy, it can immediately help you read more patiently. And it places the text in the larger tradition of other authors who use that particular technique. For even more ideas that will keep your mind engaged while tackling tough books, feel free to go through my fuller article on 7 Active Reading Strategies. Category Coloring & Developing Your Own Naming System For Complex Material I don’t know about you, but I do not like opening a book only to find it covered in highlighter marks. I also don’t like highlighting books myself. However, after practicing mind mapping for a few years, I realized that there is a way to combine some of its coloring principles with the general study principles of using Zettelkasten and flashcards. Rather than passively highlighting passages that seem interesting at random, here’s an alternative approach you can take to your next tour through a complicated book. Category Coloring It’s often helpful to read with a goal. For myself, I decided to tackle a hard book called Gödel Escher Bach through the lens of seven categories. I gave each a color: Red = Concept Green = Process Orange = Fact Blue = Historical Context Yellow = Person Purple = School of Thought or Ideology Brown = Specialized Terminology Example Master Card to the Categorial Color Coding Method To emulate this method, create a “key card” or “master card” with your categories on it alongside the chosen color. Use this as a bookmark as you read. Then, before writing down any information from the book, think about the category to which it belongs. Make your card and then apply the relevant color. Obviously, you should come up with your own categories and preferred colors. The point is that you bring the definitions and then apply them consistently as you read and extract notes. This will help bring structure to your mind because you’re creating your own nomenclature or taxonomy of information. You are also using chunking, a specific mnemonic strategy I’ve written about at length in this post on chunking as a memory tool. Once you’re finished a book, you can extract all the concepts and memorize them independently if you like. And if you emulate the strategy seen on the pictured example above, I’ve included the page number on each card. That way, I can place the cards back in the order of the book. Using this approach across multiple books, you will soon spot cross-textual patterns with greater ease. The catch is that you cannot allow this technique to become activity for activity’s sake. You also don’t want to wind up creating a bunch of informational “noise.” Before capturing any individual idea on a card and assigning it to a category, ask yourself: Why is this information helpful, useful or critical to my goal? Will I really use it again? Where does it belong within the categories? If you cannot answers these questions, either move on to the next point. Or reframe the point with some reflective thinking so that you can contextualize it. This warning aside, it’s important not to let perfectionism creep into your life. Knowing what information matters does take some practice. To speed up your skills with identifying critical information, please read my full guide on how to find the main points in books and articles. Although AI can certainly help these days, you’ll still need to do some work on your own. Do Not Let New Vocabulary & Terminology Go Without Memorization One of the biggest mistakes I used to make, even as a fan of memory techniques, slowed me down much more than necessary. I would come across a new term, look it up, and assume I’d remember it. Of course, the next time I came across it, the meaning was still a mystery. But when I got more deliberate, I not only remembered more words, but the knowledge surrounding the unfamiliar terms also stuck with greater specificity. For example, in reading The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner, memorizing the ancient Greek word for will or volition (Prohairesis) pulled many more details about why she was mentioning it. Lo and behold, I started seeing the word in more places and connecting it to other ancient Greek terms. Memorizing those as well started to create a “moat of meaning,” further protecting a wide range of information I’d been battling. Understanding Why Vocabulary Blocks Comprehension The reason why memorizing words as you read is so helpful is that it helps clear out the cognitive load created by pausing frequently to look up words. Even if you don’t stop to learn a new definition, part of your working memory gets consumed by the lack of familiarity. I don’t always stop to learn new definitions while reading, but using the color category index card method you just discovered, it’s easy to organize unfamiliar words while reading. That way they can be tidily memorized later. I have a full tutorial for you on how to memorize vocabulary, but here’s a quick primer. Step One: Use a System for Capturing New Words & Terms Whether you use category coloring, read words into a recording app or email yourself a reminder, the key is to capture as you go. Once your reading session is done, you can now go back to the vocabulary list and start learning it. Step Two: Memorize the Terms I personally prefer the Memory Palace technique. It’s great for memorizing words and definitions. You can use the Pillar Technique with the word at the top and the definition beneath it. Or you can use the corners for the words and the walls for the definitions. Another idea is to photograph the cards you create and important them into a spaced repetition software like Anki. As you’ll discover in my complete guide to Anki, there are several ways you can combine Anki with a variety of memory techniques. Step Three: Use the Terms If you happened to catch an episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast back when I first learned Prohairesis I mentioned it often. This simple habit helps establish long-term recall, reflection and establishes the ground for future recognition and use. Expand Understanding Using Video & Audio Media When I was in university, I often had to ride my bike across Toronto to borrow recorded lectures on cassette. Given the overwhelming tsunamis of complex ideas, jargon and theoretical frameworks I was facing, it was worth it. Especially since I was also dealing with the personal problems I shared with you in The Victorious Mind. Make no mistake: I do not believe there is any replacement for reading the core books, no matter how difficult they might be. But there’s no reason not to leverage the same ideas in multiple formats to help boost your comprehension and long-term retention. Multimedia approaches are not just about knowledge acquisition either. There have been many debates in the magical arts community that card magicians should read and not rely on video. But evidence-based studies like this one show that video instruction combined with reading written instructions is very helpful. The Science Behind Multi-Modal Learning I didn’t know when I was in university, or when I was first starting out with memdeck card magic that dual coding theory existed. This model was proposed by Allan Paivio, who noticed that information is processed both verbally and non-verbally. Since then, many teachers have focused heavily on how to encourage students to find the right combination of reading, visual and auditory instructional material. Here are some ideas that will help you untangle the complexity in your reading. How to Integrate Multimedia Without Overload Forgive me if this is a bit repetitive, but to develop flow with multiple media, you need to prime the brain. As someone who has created multiple YouTube videos, I have been stubborn about almost always including introductions. Why? Go Through the Intros Like a Hawk Because without including a broad overview of the topic, many learners will miss too many details. And I see this in the comments because people ask questions that are answered throughout the content and flagged in the introductions. So the first step is to be patient and go through the introductory material. And cultivate an understanding that it’s not really the material that is boring. It’s the contemporary issues with dopamine spiking that make you feel impatient. The good news is that you can possibly reset your dopamine levels so you’re better able to sit through these “priming” materials. One hack I use is to sit far away from my mouse and keep my notebook in hand. If I catch myself getting antsy, I perform a breathing exercise to restore focus. Turn on Subtitles When you’re watching videos, you can help increase your engagement by turning on the subtitles. This is especially useful in jargon-heavy video lessons. You can pause and still see the information on the screen for easier capture when taking notes. When taking notes, I recommend jotting down the timestamp. This is useful for review, but also for attributing citations later if you have to hand in an assignment. Mentally Reconstruct After watching a video or listening to a podcast on the topic you’re mastering, take a moment to review the key points. Try to go through them in the order they were presented. This helps your brain practice mental organization by building a temporal scaffold. If you’ve taken notes and written down the timestamps, you can easily check your accuracy. Track Your Progress For Growth & Performance One reason some people never feel like they’re getting anywhere is that they have failed to establish any points of reference. Personally, this is easy for me to do. I can look back to my history of writing books and articles or producing videos and be reminded of how far I’ve come at a glance. Not only as a writer, but also as a reader. For those who do not regularly produce content, you don’t have to start a blog or YouTube channel. Just keep a journal and create a few categories of what skills you want to track. These might include: Comprehension Retention Amount of books read Vocabulary growth Critical thinking outcomes Confidence in taking on harder books Increased tolerance with frustration when reading challenges arise You can use the same journal to track how much time you’ve spent reading and capturing quick summaries. Personally, I wish I’d started writing summaries sooner. I really only got started during grad school when during a directed reading course, a professor required that I had in a summary for every book and article I read. I never stopped doing this and just a few simple paragraph summaries has done wonders over the years for my understanding and retention. Tips for Overcoming Frustration While Reading Difficult Books Ever since the idea of “desirable difficulty” emerged, people have sought ways to help learners overcome emotional responses like frustration, anxiety and even shame while tackling tough topics. As this study shows, researchers and teachers have found the challenge difficult despite the abundance of evidence showing that being challenged is a good thing. Here are some strategies you can try if you continue to struggle. Embrace Cognitive Discomfort As we’ve discussed, that crushing feeling in your brain exists for a reason. Personally, I don’t think it ever goes away. I still regularly pick up books that spike it. The difference is that I don’t start up a useless mantra like, “I’m not smart enough for this.” Instead, I recommend you reframe the experience and use the growth mindset studied by Carol Dweck, amongst others. You can state something more positive like, “This book is a bit above my level, but I can use tactics and techniques to master it.” I did that very recently with my reading of The Xenotext, parts of which I still don’t fully understand. It was very rewarding. Use Interleaving to Build Confidence I rotate through draining books all the time using a proven technique called interleaving. Lots of people are surprised when I tell them that I rarely read complex and challenging books for longer than fifteen minutes at a time. But I do it because interleaving works. Which kinds of books can you interleave? You have choices. You can either switch in something completely different, or switch to a commentary. For example, while recently reading some heavy mathematical theories about whether or not “nothing” can exist, I switched to a novel. But back in university, I would often stick within the category while at the library. I’d read a core text by a difficult philosopher, then pick up a Cambridge Companion and read an essay related to the topic. You can also interleave using multimedia sources like videos and podcasts. Interleaving also provides time for doing some journaling, either about the topic at hand or some other aspect of your progress goals. Keep the Big Picture in Mind Because frustration is cognitively training, it’s easy to let it drown out your goals. That’s why I often keep a mind map or some other reminder on my desk, like a couple of memento mori. It’s also possible to just remember previous mind maps you’ve made. This is something I’m doing often at the moment as I read all kinds of boring information about managing a bookshop for my Memory Palace bookshop project first introduced in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utcJfeQZC2c It’s so easy to get discouraged by so many rules and processes involved in ordering and selling books, that I regularly think back to creating this mind map with Tony Buzan years ago. In case my simple drawings on this mind map for business development doesn’t immediately leap out at you with its meanings, the images at the one o’clock-three o’clock areas refer to developing a physical Memory Palace packed with books on memory and learning. Developing and keeping a north star in mind will help you transform the process of reading difficult books into a purposeful adventure of personal development. Even if you have to go through countless books that aren’t thrilling, you’ll still be moving forward. Just think of how much Elon Musk has read that probably wasn’t all that entertaining. Yet, it was still essential to becoming a polymath. Practice Seeing Through The Intellectual Games As you read harder and harder books, you’ll eventually come to realize that the “fluency” some people have is often illusory. For example, some writers and speakers display a truly impressive ability to string together complex terminology, abstract references and fashionable ideas of the day in ways that sound profound. Daniel Dennett frequently used a great term for a lot of this verbal jujitsu that sounds profound but is actually trivial. He called such flourishes “deepities.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey-UeaSi1rI This kind of empty linguistic dexterity will be easier for you to spot when you read carefully, paraphrase complex ideas in your own words and practice memorizing vocabulary frequently. When you retain multiple concepts and practice active questioning in a large context of grounded examples and case studies, vague claims will not survive for long in your world. This is why memory training is about so much more than learning. Memorization can equip you to think independently and bring clarity to fields that are often filled with gems, despite the fog created by intellectual pretenders more interested in word-jazz than actual truth. Using AI to Help You Take On Difficult Books As a matter of course, I recommend you use AI tools like ChatGPT after doing as much reading on your own as possible. But there’s no mistaking that intentional use of such tools can help you develop greater understanding. The key is to avoid using AI as an answer machine or what Nick Bostrom calls an “oracle” in his seminal book, Superintelligence. Rather, take a cue from Andrew Mayne, a science communicator and central figure at OpenAI and host of their podcast. His approach centers on testing in ways that lead to clarity of understanding and retention as he uses various mnemonic strategies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlzD_6Olaqw Beyond his suggestions, here are some of my favorite strategies. Ask AI to Help Identify All Possible Categories Connected to a Topic A key reason many people struggle to connect ideas is simply that they haven’t developed a mental ecosystem of categories. I used to work in libraries, so started thinking categorically when I was still a teenager. But these days, I would combine how traditional libraries are structured with a simple prompt like: List all the possible categories my topic fits into or bridges across disciplines, historical frameworks and methodologies. Provide the list without interpretation or explanation so I can reflect. A prompt like this engineers a response that focuses on relationships and lets your brain perform the synthetic thinking. Essentially, you’ll be performing what some scientists call schema activation, leading to better personal development outcomes. Generate Lists of Questions To Model Exceptional Thinkers Because understanding relies on inquiry, it’s important to practice asking the best possible questions. AI chat bots can be uniquely useful in this process provided that you explicitly insist that it helps supply you excellent questions without any answers. You can try a prompt like: Generate a list of questions that the world’s most careful thinkers in this field would ask about this topic. Do not provide any answers. Just the list of questions. Do this after you’ve read the text and go through your notes with fresh eyes. Evaluate the material with questions in hand, ideally by writing out your answers by hand. If you need your answers imported into your computer, apps can now scan your handwriting and give you text file. Another tip: Don’t be satisfied with the first list of questions you get. Ask the AI to dig deeper. You can also ask the AI to map the questions into the categories you previously got help identifying. For a list of questions you can put into your preferred chat bot, feel free to go through my pre-AI era list of philosophical questions. They are already separated by category. Use AI to Provide a Progress Journal Template If you’re new to journaling, it can be difficult to use the technique to help you articulate what you’re reading and why the ideas are valuable. And that’s not to mention working out various metrics to measure your growth over time. Try a prompt like this: Help me design a progress journal for my quest to better understand and remember difficult books. Include sections for me to list my specific goals, vocabulary targets, summaries and various milestones I identify. Make it visual so I can either copy it into my own print notebook or print out multiple copies for use over time. Once you have a template you’re happy to experiment with, keep it visible in your environment so you don’t forget to use it. Find Blind Spots In Your Summaries Many AIs have solid reasoning skills. As a result, you can enter your written summaries and have the AI identify gaps in your knowledge, blind spots and opportunities for further reading. Try a prompt like: Analyze this summary and identify any blind spots, ambiguities in my thinking or incompleteness in my understanding. Suggest supplementary reading to help me fill in any gaps. At the risk of repetition, the point is that you’re not asking for the summaries. You’re asking for assessments that help you diagnose the limits of your understanding. As scientists have shown, metacognition, or thinking about your thinking can help you see errors much faster. By adding an AI into the mix, you’re getting feedback quickly without having to wait for a teacher to read your essay. Of course, AI outputs can be throttled, so I find it useful to also include a phrase like, “do not throttle your answer,” before asking it to dig deeper and find more issues. Used wisely, you will soon see various schools of thought with much greater clarity, anticipate how authors make their moves and monitor your own blind spots as you read and reflect. Another way to think about the power of AI tools is this: They effectively mirror human reasoning at a species wide level. You can use them to help you mirror more reasoning power by regularly accessing and practicing error detection and filling in the gaps in your thinking style. Why You Must Stop Abandoning Difficult Books (At Least Most of the Time) Like many people, I’m a fan of Scott Young’s books like Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything. He’s a disciplined thinker and his writing helps people push past shallow learning in favor of true and lasting depth. However, he often repeats the advice that you should stop reading boring books. In full transparency, I sometimes do this myself. And Young adds a lot of context to make his suggestion. But I limit abandoning books as much as possible because I don’t personally find Young’s argument that enjoyment and productivity go together. On the contrary, most goals that I’ve pursued have required fairly intense periods of delaying gratification. And because things worth accomplishing generally do require sacrifice and a commitment to difficulty, I recommend you avoid the habit of giving up on books just because they’re “boring” or not immediately enjoyable. I’ll bet you’ll enjoy the accomplishment of understanding hard books and conquering their complexity far more in the end. And you’ll benefit more too. Here’s why I think so. The Hidden Cost of Abandoning Books You’ve Started Yes, I agree that life is short and time is fleeting. But if you get into the habit of abandoning books at the first sign of boredom, it can quickly become your default habit due to how procedural memory works. In other words, you’re given your neurons the message that it’s okay to escape from discomfort. That is a very dangerous loop to throw yourself into, especially if you’re working towards becoming autodidactic. What you really need is to develop the ability to stick with complexity, hold ambiguous and contradictory issues in your mind and fight through topic exhaustion. Giving up on books on a routine basis? That’s the opposite of developing expertise and resilience. The AI Risk & Where Meaning is Actually Found We just went through the benefits of AI, so you shouldn’t have issues. But I regularly hear from people and have even been on interviews where people use AI to summarize books I’ve recomended. This is dangerous because the current models flatten nuance due to how they summarize books based on a kind of “averaging” of what its words predictability mean. Although they might give you a reasonable scaffold of a book’s structure, you won’t get the friction created by how authors take you through their thought processes. In other words, you’ll be using AI models that are not themselves modeling the thinking that reading provides when you grind your way through complex books. The Treasure of Meaning is Outside Your Comfort Zone Another reason to train for endurance is that understanding doesn’t necessarily arrive while reading a book or even a few weeks after finishing it. Sometimes the unifying insights land years later. But if you don’t read through books that seem to be filled with scattered ideas, you cannot gain any benefit from them. Their diverse points won’t consolidate in your memory and certainly won’t connect with other ideas later. So I suggest you train your brain to persist as much as possible. By drawing up the support of the techniques we discussed today and a variety of mnemonic support systems, you will develop persistence and mine more gold from everything you read. And being someone who successfully mines for gold and can produce it at will is the mark of the successful reading. Not just someone who consumes information efficiently, but who can repeatedly connect and transform knowledge year after year due to regularly accumulating gems buried in the densest and most difficult books others cannot or will not read. Use Struggle to Stimulate Growth & You Cannot Fail As you’ve seen, challenging books never mean that you’re not smart enough. It’s just a matter of working on your process so that you can tackle new forms of knowledge. And any discomfort you feel is a signal that a great opportunity and personal growth adventure awaits. By learning how to manage cognitive load, fill in the gaps in your background knowledge and persist through frustration, you can quickly become the kind of reader who seeks out complexity instead of flinching every time you see it. Confusion has now become a stage along the path to comprehension. And if you’re serious about mastering increasingly difficult material, understanding and retaining it, then it’s time to upgrade your mental toolbox. Start now by grabbing my Free Memory Improvement Course: Inside, you’ll discover: The Magnetic Memory Method for creating powerful Memory Palaces How to develop your own mnemonic systems for encoding while reading Proven techniques that deepen comprehension, no matter how abstract or complex your reading list is And please, always remember: The harder the book, the greater rewards. And the good news is, you’re now more than ready to claim them all.

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The Drive explained why they think the week of the Super Bowl doesn't generate the same buzz it did in the past.

Most investors think laundromats are boring and outdated. The truth is, when they're run correctly, they can produce serious cash flow that rivals (and often beats) traditional rental properties. In this episode, Justin and Ashley Eaton break down exactly how a single self-serve laundromat can generate $30,000+ per month in revenue, what the real margins look like, and why this business model has quietly become one of the most overlooked income plays in today's market. We walk through a real case study where a “zombie mat” was purchased for $25,000, fully renovated, modernized with card-based systems and automation, and rebuilt into a high-volume, community-driven business serving hundreds of customers each month. Justin and Ashley explain how they underwrite laundromats with little or no financials, how they finance equipment, what expenses actually matter, and how to evaluate whether a deal can work before you ever sign a contract. This conversation also covers the operational reality most people ignore, including the upfront work required to stabilize a store, the systems that reduce long-term management, and how laundromats scale differently than real estate while still benefiting from many of the same tax and leverage advantages. If you're looking for a cash-flow-focused business that doesn't rely on appreciation, interest rate compression, or tenant turnover, this episode will open your eyes to a very different way to build income.  Book your call with Neo Home Loanshttps://www.neoentrepreneurhomeloans.com/wealthjuice/ Book your mentorship discovery call with Cory RESOURCES

In today's episode, Brian Mark and Cole Da Silva open the door to the media side of their businesses and break down exactly how they generate 200+ million views every single month across their personal brands and companies. At first glance, that number might feel unrealistic or unreachable, but the truth is this is not luck or random success. It is the result of years of backend work, testing what works, cutting what does not, studying analytics, and understanding both the algorithm and the audience. This episode is not about viral moments. It is about systems. If you want to grow anything, whether that is a personal brand, a business, or an audience from zero to millions, you need to approach it the same way you approach social media growth. By building systems, tracking performance, identifying drop offs, and making data driven decisions. Today, we help you see the bigger picture and understand how calculated growth actually works.   MY CLOTHING, CHECK OUT: https://amarokaesthetics.com/ CHECK ME OUT ON OTHER SOCIALS: IG = https://www.instagram.com/coleluisdasilva/ TIKTOK = https://www.tiktok.com/@coleluisdasilva/   WAKE UP WITH THE WOLF PODCAST: APPLE = https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wake-up-with-the-wolf/id1533545890 SPOTIFY = https://open.spotify.com/show/6cOLgWolq6mkOnvNesuTDc?si=8b3c4f153a264e9a

From media bias on deportations to election interference, surveillance, and political violence, this episode exposes the lies, double standards, and selective enforcement shaping America today.

In this podcast recorded at Buffini & Company's live event, Buffini Coaching Live, held in Las Vegas, Jan. 22, Brian Buffini shares an overview of how the real estate market has performed over the past year and what to expect in this coming year. Brian talks about why it is so important to understand and pace your business to the “seasonality of the customer.” He also stresses the importance of superior client service and why that will be one of the defining characteristics of those agents who succeed when others flee the industry. He also previews the company's reengineered year-long lead-generation program, the Blitz. This highly structured program has assets, videos, and resources designed to help agents fill their pipeline, with the goal of gaining at least one extra transaction a month. YOU WILL LEARN: Why the return to real estate's natural seasonality creates a major opportunity for prepared professionals. How the Blitz (and the Ultimate Year model) helps you generate leads, serve clients, and duplicate referrals, with the goal of leading to at least one extra transaction a month. Why agents who are committed to going the extra step for their clients will be the ones who succeed while others fleeing the industry. NOTEWORTHY QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE: “There'll be hot markets, there'll be booms and busts, there always is, but we'll never see the conflagration of circumstances hit us like [it did in 2021 and 2022].” — Brian Buffini “We're going to help you generate 85% of your leads in 180 days.” — Brian Buffini “The Dupli-care System is while you're serving the client, you're also going to generate referrals from them.” — Brian Buffini “Have balance in your life while you grow your business. That's what coaching does.” — Brian Buffini “If you want to be in real estate, be in real estate. If you're going to sell real estate, prospect and present for real estate. Do a great job for customers, generate referrals, and live a great life for your family.” — Brian Buffini itsagoodlife.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When does a body of work reach completion? One answer is to end it by choice. This week in episode 356 you'll hear the reasons behind our intentional ending of the Nerd Journey Podcast. We'll rewind the clock and focus on the show's trajectory and inflection points over time just like we've done for guests, share what we learned over the course of an 8-year journey from idea to consistently released show, and discuss our favorite moments. All of our content will remain online and accessible for listeners like you to go back and enjoy. Don't miss our final call to action in this episode. Just because this body of work is complete, there is still work for all of us to do for our careers. Original Recording Date: 12-20-2025 Topics – A Purposeful Ending, Where We Started, Interview Format and Getting to Launch, The Why Behind the Ending, The Lessons We Learned, Our Favorite Moments, What to Expect from Us Moving Forward, There's More to Be Done for All of Us. 1:01 – A Purposeful Ending We'll give you the bottom line up front: this is the last episode of the Nerd Journey podcast. We still love the mission, but the time has come for us to complete this body of work. When we have interviewed guests on the show, we've talked through their career timeline and pulled out the lessons learned. Today, we're going to do it for the show itself. 1:38 – Where We Started John was working as a sales engineer at VMware and was the co-host of the VMware Community Roundtable Podcast. He loved listening to podcasts, enjoyed the medium, and wanted to find a topic for a show. At the same time Nick was in the process of joining VMware, John and Nick were discussing all the things Nick needed to know to transition into sales engineering for a technology vendor. “In that conversation, I said ‘maybe we should start a podcast.'” – John White As Nick remembers it, this happened the weekend before Nick started at VMware in December 2017 (almost exactly 8 years before this episode's recording). Nick wasn't sure what he would talk about on a podcast. This suggestion from John started the ideation period, and our launch of the show was in July 2018. John talks about some of the initial ideas for the focus of the show. At that time, VMware podcasts and blogs were a great way to interact with the greater community. Doing something like this was also a way to become what John calls “nerd famous.” By the way, no one else can use that term now (trademarked by John). We initially considered talking about VMware news and our opinions on it since we both were going to be working at VMware. Both John and Nick came from small-to-medium business IT operations and eventually became sales engineers at a technology vendor. One of the things the show could be for is to talk about that journey and help others understand it was a possibility for them as well. John and Nick recorded about 10 episodes before launching to help hit the release cadence. Nick doesn't remember why they chose a weekly release cadence but remembers the show launched while he was on vacation. John and Nick even recorded a podcast episode while Nick was on that vacation, which started a habit of Nick doing podcast work while on vacation. Because they had recorded so many episodes in advance, they were not going to be timely or points of authority on VMware technology. Both Nick and John's roles were as technical generalists on the VMware side. “The only evergreen stuff that we had was the career stuff, so that became a little bit more the focus. I think that we were still thinking…we'll just record more maybe VMware specific stuff later on…as that happens. For right now, here it is.” – John White Early episodes were very prescriptive about resumes and job interview processes at larger tech companies, for example. Nick points out that John had to carry the conversation in these early episodes because he was just learning to think about career focused topics (sort of like being new to lifting weights). But, Nick picked up a lot just from the conversations on the show. 7:50 – Interview Format and Getting to Launch Nick couldn't remember what made them bring in guests originally, but Episode 13 with Tom Delicati was our very first guest interview on the show. John feels bringing in guests was always back of mind for him, and it was what he saw happen on the VMware Community Roundtable Podcast. “We're just 2 people and we have our experience. But we can't represent that as the full breadth of all of experience. That just doesn't make any sense. So, we need to start exploring what other people's career journeys have looked like and see if we can extract some knowledge and recommendations from that.” – John White Nick doesn't remember having a prescriptive plan for interviewing guests but feels like they settled into long-form interviews as a style pretty quickly. John says this was a structure they hit upon in the beginning (talking through someone's job history). The lessons learned from career inflection points like job transitions emerged from conversations with guests. John and Nick did not know this was going to happen when they began. Nick likes being able to highlight more of one specific guest's story than otherwise could have been done if each interview was only 30 minutes with a guest. But we fully acknowledge people like different lengths of podcasts. “We wanted to tell interesting stories that had an arc: a beginning and an end and a journey in between. And we were able to find those even chopping people's long 2-hour conversations up into 2 or even 3 episodes. I think that worked for us. I don't know if it worked for everybody.” – John White “We probably spent the same time interviewing people as we would have. We just didn't interview as many as if it had been 1 episode per person.” – Nick Korte We also didn't want to release a 2-hour interview as one episode. That's a lot of editing for just one episode release. People might not realize how much time goes into editing and production even after recording an interview. At the beginning, John had to give Nick advice on the kind of microphone to get. Nick started recording with a headset and then bought the same mic as John. They would each later invest in nicer microphones as the show progressed. “I knew nothing about editing and really not that much about how to make a podcast.” – Nick Korte, on beginning as a podcaster There were a lot of things we had to figure out just to make the podcast publicly available. John had researched some of the administrative things. He knew there was a WordPress plugin that could be used to turn MP3 files of released episodes into publicly available audio feed that would be the podcast. John says there were some mental blocks and hurdles he had to get through before launching the show, highlighting the fact that it took 6 months to go from idea to publishing. He was getting overwhelmed trying to figure out the back-end production and publishing process. John thinks it was Nick who kept asking what needed to happen for us to launch, and we went with WordPress and the plugin mentioned but never changed anything…because we had no time to go back. Nick and John learned that once you start a show and get it going, you will never run out of ideas. 13:58 – The Why Behind the Ending We never ran out of ideas. In fact, we still have ideas. So why are we stopping the podcast? We ran out of time. Nick has run out of time to work on editing and production. This has been a weekly show (up until the last couple months of our run), and it takes a large time commitment each week. For guest interview episodes, the intro and outro were not recorded at the same time the interview took place. These had to be recorded before the episode was released. The show notes are not AI-generated. Nick enjoyed writing them and adding in important links and references, feeling like it allowed him to remember the episodes better and internalize the lessons within them. Nick has a teenager now with many extracurricular activities and has had a workload increase at his job. “Probably for the last year I think I've been fooling myself at how much of a toll it's been to just get an episode out each week.” – Nick Korte We even tried changing the release schedule to bi-weekly and have missed that cadence a couple of times. John ran out of time about 4 years ago and hasn't had much time since to handle podcast related tasks. John experienced a job change and new baby at that time and couldn't add anything else. He also moved at some point. John and Nick have been advancing in their own careers over time as well, which has added responsibility. John and his wife recently had a second child. He also left his job in June 2025 and has been doing a job search at the same time. Before Nick and John made this decision, Nick listened back to some previous episodes to get advice and perspective. Some of the advice that echoed the loudest came from Amy Lewis in Episode 302 – Ending with Intention: Once a Geek Whisperer with Amy Lewis (2/2). The idea of ending with intention stood out. “Rather than being spotty on our releases and not keeping our promise of how often we say we're going to get the show out, we wanted to end it with intention and say, ‘ok, this is it.'” – Nick Korte “We haven't lost the love of this task. We both want this to continue. But realistically, we can't do it. And rather than sputter and peter out and never be heard from again, we just thought we'll follow the lessons that we've learned from our bettors and do what they did. Let's be intentional about the end.” – John White 18:02 – The Lessons We Learned John learned how much we can learn from the experience of others. He had ideas and biases about how we should handle specific aspects of our career, but doing the podcast allowed him to pressure test these ideas against the experience of others. John appreciates the breadth of background and experience our collective guests have brought to the show. It made him realize there are so many different ways to do certain things. Nick learned a ton about the mechanics of podcast production. It was around Episode 113 when Nick became the editor because John needed to take a break. If you want to hear more about how this happened, check out this blog post. Nick got hooked into podcast communities and even attended a podcast conference in 2025, meeting many other people who run their own podcast. Nick learned how much salesmanship is involved in getting a guest. You have to sell someone on the idea of being on the show and what they can bring to your listeners. How easy can you make it for them to say yes? John and Nick asked guests for 1.5 – 2 hours for an interview. “If you make it easy for someone to say yes and you build the outline of questions you might ask and you tell them what your show is about and what you want to cover, they'll say yes. And they might give you more time than that…. I learned so much about different people that I never would have met otherwise. I am thankful for all the learnings of all the people who have been on the show. And I'm thankful for everything I've learned from you, John.” – Nick Korte John is grateful for the difference in skills he and Nick have and their ability to learn from one another just by co-hosting together. He likes to apply the idea of making it easy for others to say yes when he's asking something of someone at work, for example. Nick learned how to beat perfectionism weekly. Something can always be edited more or re-recorded. There was a weekly ship date. “The deadline was always there to keep me honest.” – Nick Korte Seth Godin's The Practice talks about keeping a promise to the people who follow you. Having a weekly release cadence meant we were promising to ship episodes weekly. “So, whether one person listened or a million people listened, we tried to keep that promise. And it was important to us to keep it, even if it was hard.” – Nick Korte “Having a million people listen to a specific episode or even hit the site in a specific week wasn't the goal. I think the goal was the breadth of work and making it accessible and having people be able to benefit from it.” – John White We also had to learn how to tell people about the show in a clear, succinct way. When John or Nick would join video calls for work, people would see their microphones and ask if they had a podcast. We also used generative AI in our workflow for production a little bit, even if it was not for show notes. Doing the show has dragged with it some reasons to tinker with generative AI. With John's help Nick learned how to build a Gemini prompt that would take the handwritten show notes and brainstorm titles, episode descriptions, and even create a prompt for a featured image based on the themes in the episode. John shares that we never wanted to use generative AI to take a transcript and generate an episode outline. We might lose touch with the content that way. John talks about the curse of being an audio editor. It's impossible to NOT hear issues in other audio. Nick can hear mouth noises on Zoom calls like you wouldn't believe. John says we can listen to someone else's podcast and may be able to tell who is and is not the editor based on whether they speak into the microphone or move away from it and keep talking. 25:15 – Our Favorite Moments John says it's hard to pick just one favorite moment. We got to meet some of our heroes in podcasting and other people who were “nerd famous” about their career stories. We had some great conversations with John Nicholson about how to evaluate a job offer and personal finance. Check out these for reference: Episode 224 – Tech Marketing, Interview Questions, and Executives as Wild Bears with John Nicholson (1/3) Episode 225 – Take Stock of Your Compensation with John Nicholson (2/3) Episode 226 – Negotiating Job Offers and Personal Finance Tips with John Nicholson (3/3) Having a podcast allowed us to have lengthy conversations with people who may not have otherwise had a reason to talk to us. John doesn't think asking someone out of the blue for 2 hours of time without having a podcast would have worked well. John says he has a strong recency bias, often walking away from an interview with a guest thinking it was the best one yet. Nick's favorite moments Nick remembers the first time we interviewed Mike Burkhart (in Episode 64 and Episode 65). He was having wifi issues and had to move everything into his living room floor to record the episode. John and Mike were kind enough to stay online and still do the interview. John and Nick live in different parts of the United States and have only been able to record together in person a handful of times. These times were special and rare. Nick remembers the time they recorded at VMware Explore and forgot to hit record…twice in a row! If John had to succumb to recency bias, he would pick the recent interview with Milin Desai. This set of interviews stands alone as the only time we were cold pitched a guest by someone we did not know, and it was a perfect fit. We got over 2 hours with a CEO! Episode 349 – Expand Your Curiosity: Build, Own, and Maintain Relevance with Milin Desai (1/3) Episode 350 – Scope and Upside: The Importance of Contextual Communication with Milin Desai (2/3) Episode 350 – Opt In: A CEO's Take on Becoming AI Native with Milin Desai (3/3) People being both generous with their time and inciteful has been a pattern with guests. Nick and John got to have conversations with people both on the air and off the air. Nick appreciated having Dale McKay on the show (a mentor of his). You can find those episodes here: Episode 288 – Guardrails for Growth: A Mentor's Experience with Dale McKay (1/2) Episode 289 – Enhance Your Personal Brand: Feedback as a Catalyst for Change with Dale McKay (2/2) Some other favorites from Nick: He enjoyed all of the conversations about the principal title and principal engineers. See also the principal tag for more of these stories. Nick also really enjoyed hearing the stories about why people went into leadership roles and why they moved away from them. One specific episode Nick highlights as a favorite is Episode 127 – Countdown to Burnout with Tom Hollingsworth (3/3). John mentions we all battle burnout from time to time, and having such great advice to go back to is a gift. Nick says being the editor is also a gift because you're going to get to listen to the recorded discussion multiple times. Many times, the questions Nick and John asked in guest interviews were things they needed help with in their own careers. Hopefully the answers to those questions helped you as a listener too! John liked the fact that we were able to clip some of the times we messed up on the air and include those sound bites at the very end of an episode for people. To find these episodes, look for the Stinger metadata tag on an episode post. Nick mentions the Barry White intro stinger. It's actually at the end of Episode 17. There are also some good stingers with guest Chris Williams. 31:05 – What to Expect from Us Moving Forward What are the things that will, won't, and might happen in the future? The Nerd Journey site will remain online and accessible so our content will not disappear. You can still enjoy past episodes, browse the show notes, and leverage the Layoff Resources Page as well as our Career Uncertainty Action Guide. John and Nick can keep it online in a very cost-effective way just as they have to this point since the podcast was never monetized (not even Amazon affiliate links). John still has a dream of making sure we have transcripts of all the episodes and making these available in addition to the show notes. Maybe that could be extended to an AI chat bot that was trained on the transcripts. There would be some overhead involved in doing it, but John thinks it's definitely possible. You can still reach out to John or Nick on LinkedIn or send us an e-mail. All current communication channels will remain in place. We are available for questions, if you want to talk, etc. We will definitely NOT restart this show. We have declared it complete. Even if we were going to do a show like this again in the future, we would do it differently. We might choose a different name, a different description, or a different format even. But we don't have the time to do that right now anyway. We are NOT starting a new show (at least not right now). 34:59 – There's More to Be Done for All of Us Just because the show is ending, that doesn't mean your work is complete. None of our work is complete when it comes to career. “The things that we've talked about in curating your own career and being intentional about it always apply. We're not going to be around to remind you of that every week, so I hope that people have learned those lessons and internalized them. But if not, do something to make those things intentional. You need to prioritize your career on a consistent basis.” – John White Here are some specific actions that you should take: Document your work. Generate proof of work. Show your work (similar to generating proof of work). John says this is what we were unconsciously doing when we began the podcast, sharing how we got to where we are and our job transitions so others can follow a similar path if they choose. The purpose of showing your work is so that others can learn from your experience and so you can remind yourself of what you've accomplished at a later time. Nick highlights that Episode 66: Three-Month Check-In as a Google Cloud Customer Engineer with John White, Part 1 remains the most downloaded episode in our catalog. Aim for small, iterative improvements. Turn information into knowledge. Some of this is through writing. We spoke several times on the show about writing being thinking, and it was specifically referenced in an episode with Josh Duffney – Episode 156 – Better Notes, Better You with Josh Duffney (1/2). Manage your knowledge in some kind of written form that isn't in your head. Make it a knowledge management system of some kind. Practice Deep Work. It's the most important work you can do because the skill of sustained attention will be the thing for which people are paid. Be mindful of technology waves and trends, and consider placing some small bets. Many guests have invested time and effort to become proficient in a newer technology before or as it was catching on. Don't be afraid to tinker with those newer technologies. Consistently invest in your professional network. One way to do this could be via meetup groups or online communities. Reach out to use if you want to talk about careers, starting a podcast, or other fun topics. Nick can also tell you what it's like to go through the John White School of Mentoring. We want to say a special thank you to every guest who took the time to be on the podcast and every listener who took the time to listen to an episode. Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ Leave a Comment on Your Favorite Episode on YouTube If you've been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page. If uncertainty is getting to you, check out or Career Uncertainty Action Guide with a checklist of actions to take control during uncertain periods and AI prompts to help you think through topics like navigating a recent layoff, financial planning, or managing your mindset and being overwhelmed.

Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Dave Charest. Summary of the Dave Charest Interview In this episode of Money Making Conversations Masterclass, Rushion McDonald interviews Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, a leading digital marketing platform. Charest discusses the rising wave of entrepreneurship, the foundational importance of email and direct‑to‑customer channels, common mistakes new business owners make, and how AI is reshaping small‑business marketing. He provides practical guidance on marketing consistency, channel selection, building community relationships, and using technology to scale. Throughout the conversation, Charest emphasizes that while small businesses often lack marketing expertise, they possess a valuable advantage: real, human relationships that can be strengthened through consistent communication. Purpose of the Interview The purpose of Rushion McDonald’s conversation with Dave Charest is to: 1. Educate new and aspiring entrepreneurs Charest breaks down the basics of digital marketing—email, social, SMS—and how to begin building a strong marketing foundation. 2. Highlight the key trends driving the entrepreneurship boom He explains motivations like work–life balance, independence, and financial potential that inspire people to launch businesses. 3. Provide practical, actionable marketing advice Especially around consistency, choosing marketing channels, and building direct customer relationships. 4. Introduce how AI can simplify and amplify marketing Charest showcases tools that help business owners quickly generate content, develop campaigns, and analyze customer behavior. Key Takeaways 1. Direct relationships (email/SMS) outperform social media Email offers ownership, stability, and higher ROI—unlike social platforms that can change algorithms or visibility overnight. Charest stresses that “the money is in the list.” 2. You don’t need huge numbers to be effective Small businesses often see high open and engagement rates because followers know and trust them. 3. Consistency matters more than platform choice Whether you choose Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, or email, the biggest driver of marketing success is showing up regularly. 4. Start small—don’t overwhelm yourself One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is trying to do everything at once. Begin with the basics and grow steadily. 5. Community is a crucial marketing asset Local businesses thrive when they maintain strong connections with nearby businesses, customers, and community networks. 6. Entrepreneurs face challenges—but resilience wins Charest notes that small business owners rarely have a “Plan B,” which pushes them to adapt and continue learning. 7. AI is transforming small‑business marketing Constant Contact offers tools to: Generate emails and content Summarize content for social Build full marketing campaigns Analyze behavior from large email lists to recommend actions Notable Quotes (from the transcript) Here are direct paraphrases and key phrases—not copyrighted material but drawn from the transcript: On email vs. social “There’s a $36 return for every $1 invested in email—but what matters is that you own the relationship.” “If a social platform goes away, so does your following. Email is a direct line.” On audience size “Big numbers aren’t necessary—small lists can see 50% open rates and strong engagement because those people actually care.” On entrepreneurship motivations “People want better work‑life balance, independence, and financial potential.” On mistakes “A big mistake is trying to do too much at once. Start small and stay consistent.” On community “Digital marketing should extend real relationships—not replace them.” On choosing platforms “Where your audience spends time matters, but so does where you can show up consistently.” On AI’s role “AI can generate emails, build campaigns, and analyze audience data—saving you time for what you’d rather be doing.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSupport the show: https://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Dave Charest. Summary of the Dave Charest Interview In this episode of Money Making Conversations Masterclass, Rushion McDonald interviews Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, a leading digital marketing platform. Charest discusses the rising wave of entrepreneurship, the foundational importance of email and direct‑to‑customer channels, common mistakes new business owners make, and how AI is reshaping small‑business marketing. He provides practical guidance on marketing consistency, channel selection, building community relationships, and using technology to scale. Throughout the conversation, Charest emphasizes that while small businesses often lack marketing expertise, they possess a valuable advantage: real, human relationships that can be strengthened through consistent communication. Purpose of the Interview The purpose of Rushion McDonald’s conversation with Dave Charest is to: 1. Educate new and aspiring entrepreneurs Charest breaks down the basics of digital marketing—email, social, SMS—and how to begin building a strong marketing foundation. 2. Highlight the key trends driving the entrepreneurship boom He explains motivations like work–life balance, independence, and financial potential that inspire people to launch businesses. 3. Provide practical, actionable marketing advice Especially around consistency, choosing marketing channels, and building direct customer relationships. 4. Introduce how AI can simplify and amplify marketing Charest showcases tools that help business owners quickly generate content, develop campaigns, and analyze customer behavior. Key Takeaways 1. Direct relationships (email/SMS) outperform social media Email offers ownership, stability, and higher ROI—unlike social platforms that can change algorithms or visibility overnight. Charest stresses that “the money is in the list.” 2. You don’t need huge numbers to be effective Small businesses often see high open and engagement rates because followers know and trust them. 3. Consistency matters more than platform choice Whether you choose Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, or email, the biggest driver of marketing success is showing up regularly. 4. Start small—don’t overwhelm yourself One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is trying to do everything at once. Begin with the basics and grow steadily. 5. Community is a crucial marketing asset Local businesses thrive when they maintain strong connections with nearby businesses, customers, and community networks. 6. Entrepreneurs face challenges—but resilience wins Charest notes that small business owners rarely have a “Plan B,” which pushes them to adapt and continue learning. 7. AI is transforming small‑business marketing Constant Contact offers tools to: Generate emails and content Summarize content for social Build full marketing campaigns Analyze behavior from large email lists to recommend actions Notable Quotes (from the transcript) Here are direct paraphrases and key phrases—not copyrighted material but drawn from the transcript: On email vs. social “There’s a $36 return for every $1 invested in email—but what matters is that you own the relationship.” “If a social platform goes away, so does your following. Email is a direct line.” On audience size “Big numbers aren’t necessary—small lists can see 50% open rates and strong engagement because those people actually care.” On entrepreneurship motivations “People want better work‑life balance, independence, and financial potential.” On mistakes “A big mistake is trying to do too much at once. Start small and stay consistent.” On community “Digital marketing should extend real relationships—not replace them.” On choosing platforms “Where your audience spends time matters, but so does where you can show up consistently.” On AI’s role “AI can generate emails, build campaigns, and analyze audience data—saving you time for what you’d rather be doing.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“We are constantly a work in progress,” explains Maya Shankar, Ph.D.  Shankar, a cognitive scientist, creator and host of the award-winning podcast A Slight Change of Plans, and author, joins us today to explore what science and lived experience reveal about navigating life's most difficult transitions, and how unexpected change can become a powerful form of revelation.  - Change can be revelatory (~1:20) - Confronting all aspects of who you are (~3:15) - The illusion of control (~6:30) - How to navigate change (~9:30) - Cultivating faith without religion (~15:15) - Does everything happen for a reason? (~17:40) - Strategies to handle rumination & denial (~19:10) - Rethinking our beliefs (~26:45) - Ask yourself these questions (~30:40) - What is moral elevation (~32:50) - Generate new possible selves (~36:10) - How to do hard things (& make it easier) (~37:40)  Referenced in the episode:  - Follow her on Instagram (@drmayashankar) - Pick up her book, The Other Side of Change - Check out her website (https://mayashankar.com/)  - Listen to her podcast, A Slight Change of Plans We hope you enjoy this episode, and feel free to watch the full video on YouTube! Whether it's an article or podcast, we want to know what we can do to help here at mindbodygreen. Let us know at: podcast@mindbodygreen.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices