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Show Links: Apply for Our Mentorship Program Visit our Website   Podcast Transcript: Show 71: Step by Step Guide to Portfolio Building with the B.R.R.R.R Strategy Host: Welcome back to "The Property Side Hustle Podcast" Today, we're diving deep into a strategy that's turbocharged the portfolios of countless investors: the BRRRR method. That's B-R-R-R-R, and it stands for Buy, Refurbish, Refinance, Rent, and Repeat. It's a powerful way to rapidly expand your property portfolio, and we're going to break it down step-by-step for you in today's episode. Host: The BRRRR strategy is all about leveraging your cash or using bridging finance to acquire undervalued properties, adding value through refurbishment, and then pulling your initial investment back out through refinancing. This allows you to recycle your capital and quickly move onto the next project. Imagine having one lump of money for a cash deposit and using it over and over again instead of just once. You are literally pulling out your deposit money or lump sum of cash every time you refinance – that's the goal. Step 1: The Buy – Cash is King (or Bridging Loan is Your Ace) Host: This is where the rubber meets the road. You need to find a property that has bags of potential but isn't quite reaching its full market value. Think tired decor, outdated kitchens and bathrooms, think swirly carpets, damp up the walls, or even minor structural issues. These are the goldmines for BRRRR investors. But where do you find these hidden diamonds in the rough? Where would you start to look for these properties? Host: Let's talk sourcing. One prime hunting ground is auction properties. Auctions can be a fantastic way to snap up a bargain, often way below the market value. However, they require quick decision-making and readily available funds. This makes cash or bridging finance essential. Do your research beforehand, read the legal pack and look for any red flags, inspect the property and view it, and set a firm budget. You need to analyse the deal and get your numbers and costings done. Don't get carried away in the heat of the moment! Another area to explore is properties that have been on the market for an extended period, say six months or more. These properties might be overlooked by other buyers, or the seller might be more willing to negotiate. There's usually a reason why they haven't sold, so do your due diligence, but these can be excellent opportunities. And finally, for the truly savvy investor, we have unsold lots. These are properties that have gone to auction but failed to meet their reserve price. Often, the auctioneer or estate agent will be keen to sell these properties quickly, and you might be able to negotiate a significant discount. This can be a goldmine for BRRRR investors. Now, the key here is speed and securing the deal. Sellers often favour cash buyers, so having access to funds is crucial. This is where bridging finance often comes into play. A bridging loan is a short-term, interest-only loan secured against the property itself. It allows you to move quickly and secure the purchase, even before you've finalised your long-term financing. Often, investors use a combination of cash and bridging finance, leveraging their available capital while using the bridging loan for the remainder. Remember, due diligence is paramount. Get a thorough survey, understand the local market, and negotiate really hard. Don't fall in love with the property; fall in love with the deal is my biggest advice. Step 2: The Refurbish – Unleashing the Property's Potential Host: You've bought the property – congratulations! Now the real work begins. This is where you add value and transform the property into something desirable for tenants. Think beyond cosmetic improvements. Consider upgrading the heating system, replacing windows, or even re-configuring the layout. A well-planned refurbishment not only increases the property's value but also attracts higher-quality tenants willing to pay more rent. Create a detailed budget and stick to it. Get multiple quotes from reputable contractors, and don't be afraid to manage the project yourself if you have the skills. Keep meticulous records of all expenses, as this will be crucial for the next step. Remember, every pound you invest wisely now will pay dividends later. Step 3: The Refinance – Releasing Your Capital Host: The refurbishment is complete, the dust has settled, and your property looks fantastic. Now it's time to get your initial investment back. This is where the magic of refinancing comes in. You'll approach a mortgage lender and have the property revalued. Because you've added value through the refurbishment, the property's new valuation should be significantly higher than what you initially paid. You then secure a new mortgage based on this higher valuation. The loan amount will be higher, allowing you to pay off the bridging loan and, crucially, pull out a significant portion of your original cash investment. This is the key to the BRRRR strategy. You've effectively recycled your capital, and it's now ready to be deployed on your next project. Step 4: The Rent – Generating Cash Flow Host: With the refinance complete, you're now ready to find tenants. A well-presented property in a good location should attract quality tenants quickly. Set a competitive rent that reflects the market value and the improvements you've made. Thorough tenant referencing is essential to minimise the risk of problem tenants. The rental income generated from the property will cover your mortgage repayments, property management fees, and any other associated costs. This creates a positive cash flow, which is the lifeblood of any successful property portfolio. Step 5: The Repeat – Building Your Empire Host: And now for the best part: Repeat! With your initial capital recycled, you can now go back to step one and start the process all over again. This is how you rapidly scale your property portfolio. Each successful BRRRR cycle adds another income-generating asset to your portfolio, building your wealth and financial freedom. Host: The BRRRR strategy isn't without its challenges. It requires careful planning, meticulous execution, and a good understanding of the property market. But the rewards can be substantial. By strategically buying, refurbishing, refinancing, and renting, you can unlock the power of leverage and build a thriving property portfolio much faster than through traditional methods. Remember, the key is to recycle your deposit, turning one investment into many. We currently have many mentees on our property mentorship program using this exact strategy and they are building monthly income and wealth. It's game changing, when you have a plan of action and someone to support you to get you to your end goal… So why not apply for our property basecamp mentoring program today and if we think you're a good fit – we may just invite you to join us and become a member. Where we support you ongoing on your own property journey and give you access to our community of likeminded people and a whole bunch of benefits like online courses and monthly 1-2-1 mentoring and support. Interested?? Check the show notes for our link to apply or visit psnpropertyblog.com Host: That's all for this episode of The Property Side Hustle Podcast - Join us next time as we explore another exciting strategy for property success. Until then, stay safe, and take it easy….

Welcome to Hilary Topper on Air, a 12-year-old podcast that helps you grow both personally and professionally.  I'm Hilary topper, and today we're exploring "The Evolution of Triathlon: From Origins to Impact." Whether you're a seasoned triathlete or just curious about this fascinating sport, there's something here for you.   Let's kick off with a personal anecdote. Did you know that I never even thought about a triathlon until 2014, when I went to Sanibel Florida and the Tourism director told me about the Captiva Triathlon? Who would have thought that 10+ years later, I would be addicted. Today, we'll uncover that story. Host: Let's wind back the clock to the 1970s. It all began in sunny Southern California, where a group of friends wanted to settle an argument about who was the fittest athlete. This led to the creation of the first triathlon in 1974. But the real game-changer came in 1978 with the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii, founded by U.S. Navy Commander John Collins and his wife Judy. The event transformed overnight into a global phenomenon, challenging athletes to conquer the formidable swim, bike, and run. The Ironman wasn't just a race; it was a test of human endurance and willpower, drawing competitors from around the world and setting the stage for the triathlon's future growth. Before we go any further, I want to thank our sponsors: The Russo Law Group, they are an amazing group of lawyers who really care about you and protecting your assets. Go to VJRussolaw.com. Vimazi, the shoes I love to train and race in. I've been really loving their walking shoe lately as well. Go to Vimazi.com and check out my website at ATriathletesDiary for a special discount code of 20% off!!!  Medi-Dyne, is an incredible company for all your injury prevention and pain relief products. I also have a discount code of 20% off for them as well! And, Playtri, your multisport specialists for all your triathlon needs. They have so many opportunities for franchising. If you love the sport of triathlon, check out Playtri.com and learn more about opportunities to get your own shop. The 1980s and 1990s were pivotal for triathlon. As the sport gained momentum, media coverage helped propel it into the limelight. Televised events showcased the grit and determination of athletes, captivating audiences globally. Sponsorships poured in, and triathlons began sprouting up worldwide. Iconic events like the Nice Triathlon and the World Triathlon Championships played a significant role in its popularity. It wasn't long before triathlon became synonymous with endurance and athletic excellence. I think it was in 1982 when Julie Moss competed in the Ironman Triathlon for her college senior research project. She competed in a grueling 140.6 mile combination of swimming, biking and running in one event. She was in the lead. At fifteen feet from the finish line, she watched her rival pass her and thirty seconds later, she crawled across the finish line. Inspiring millions of people.  I hadn't heard about Julie back then, but as soon as I started getting into the sport of triathlon, I quickly learned about her story and eventually read her book, Crawl of Fame. And, if you haven't read it, you should. It's a great book about motivation and inspiration. Triathlon's accessibility also expanded, with local races encouraging more people to participate, further cementing its place in the sports world. When I started in triathlons in 2015, I was not an athlete by any means. I cut gym. I wasn't athletic. But the thought of doing something that was so outside my wheelhouse, made me excited. And, after that first triathlon in Captiva, I was hooked. I couldn't get enough of them. The thought of swimming, which I had to learn from scratch, biking, which I also had to learn from scratch, and running, which I knew very little about, thrilled me. It wasn't until I put the whole thing together that I realized that triathlons are much bigger than all of us and they need to be respected. A lot of people think, oh what's the big deal and they sign up for a half or a full ironman, and then they realize that it's not an easy feat. Gwen Jorgensen was and still is my hero as well as Julie. Gwen won the 2016 Olympics for triathlon. That was so incredibly exciting, watching her fly through this sport. I think that she also pushed her boundaries and showed the world that anyone can do this, despite the fears. In my new book, which will be coming out in 2025, I interviewed Gwen and she told me about a fear that she had on the bike. I have a similar fear. By talking with her and reading her book, Gwen Jorgensen: USA's First Olympic Gold Medal Triathlete by Meyer & Meyer Sport Publisher, you will be elighted by her. She talks about how she went on a motorcycle fast down a mountain and that helped her. It also helped me by just reading about it. The rise of triathlon has had a profound impact on the fitness community. It's not just about competing; it's about transformation. Triathlon clubs have emerged everywhere, fostering camaraderie and support among athletes. The sport has inspired new training methodologies and even lifestyle changes. But I do want to make note here that not all triathlons are associated with Ironman. There are so many amazing race companies out there including EventPowerLI, EpicRaces, Alpha Win, Integrity Multisport and the list goes on and on. Don't poo poo the smaller races. They are tough and they are inspiring as well. Once you do a sprint triathlon, you are a triathlete. You don't have to do an Ironman or Half Ironman to be a triathlete. I can't tell you how many people find out I am a triathlete and the first question they ask me is “did you do an ironman?” The other thing to note here, is that many of these smaller race companies do put on 70.3 races and also 140.6 races. These races are known as half distance and full distance races, especially if they are not Ironman branded. It's amazing when I go to the open water and see so many familiar faces. Or, when I go to an event, I feel like it's a big party. I know so many people and people I don't know, I meet either in transition or on the course or even at the after party. It's so amazing to feel so connected with these folks. The other thing that is incredible is that professional triathletes are approachable. I have friends who swam in the Olympics and friends who have competed in Kona as a professional triathlete. It's pretty cool that you have that opportunity to talk with so many amazing people in this sport. I have also read so many amazing books on people who have transformed their entire lives by doing a triathlon and realizing that anything is possible. When you do a triathlon or any endurance event, you push beyond your limits and discover your true potential. Fast forward to today, and triathlon is more dynamic than ever. Technology plays a huge role, with advanced gear and apps helping athletes optimize their performance. Social media has connected the global triathlon community, allowing for the sharing of tips, stories, and support. Triathlon is not just a sport; it's a lifestyle millions embrace. I love looking at strava and seeing what my friends and acquaintances have done. It's inspiring to me.  As we look to the future, triathlon will continue evolving, shaping the fitness landscape in exciting ways. As we wrap up, let's recap the fascinating journey of triathlon. From humble beginnings in the 1970s to its current status as a global sporting phenomenon, triathlon's evolution is a testament to human endurance and passion. We encourage you to share your own triathlon experiences or aspirations with us. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll dive into [tease next episode topic]. [Outro Music Fades In] Outro: Host: Thank you for tuning in to Hilary Topper on Air. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Connect with us on social media to keep the conversation going. Also, if you have a topic in mind, please let me know at hilarytopper@gmail.com. That's Hilary with one “L”. Until next time, keep pushing your limits and discovering new adventures. Special thanks to our sponsors, Vimazi, Medi-Dyne, And, Playtri. Go to my website at ATriathletesDiary.com and click on discounts to get discounts. My cover page has all of the sponsors there and you can find out more about each one of them there. If you want more information on the show, visit our new website, hilarytopper.com or find us on Spotify, iTunes or Google Play. Have a great week and we'll see you next time…  

Host: "Welcome to 'Numbers Game,' the podcast where we dive deep into the world of finance, accounting, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adrian Lawrence, and today, we're going to explore the dynamic world of accountancy recruitment in two of the UK's most prestigious cities – Oxford and Cambridge. We'll be discussing the current trends, the challenges, and what you can do to land that dream job in this competitive market." Host: "Oxford and Cambridge. These two cities are renowned worldwide, not just for their universities but also for their thriving professional landscapes. When it comes to accountancy, both cities host a plethora of opportunities, thanks to their diverse economies, which include everything from educational institutions to tech startups, research organizations, and established financial firms." "First, let's talk numbers. According to recent statistics, the demand for accountants in both Oxford and Cambridge has seen a steady increase over the past few years. The financial services sector in both cities is expanding, driven by the universities' economic influence and the growth of technology and science parks. With a growing number of businesses, the need for skilled accountants, financial analysts, and auditors is at an all-time high." "However, the unique environments of Oxford and Cambridge mean that recruitment here is not exactly like in London or other major cities. Both cities have a blend of traditional and modern businesses, which means the recruitment process can vary widely depending on the company and the role." Host: "Let's break down the recruitment landscape. In Oxford and Cambridge, firms range from the 'Big Four' accounting giants, like Deloitte and PwC, to smaller boutique firms and startups. This diversity creates a wide array of opportunities for candidates – but it also means that the skills and attributes sought after can vary significantly." "For example, larger firms in these cities tend to prefer candidates with strong academic backgrounds and relevant work experience, often requiring specific qualifications such as ACA, ACCA, or CIMA. This is where the universities come into play – Oxford and Cambridge universities themselves produce a wealth of talent every year. Graduates from these institutions are highly sought after, particularly because of their analytical skills, problem-solving abilities, and the rigorous academic training they receive." "But it's not just about academic excellence. Recruiters in these cities are increasingly looking for candidates who display a blend of technical know-how and softer skills. That means strong communication skills, adaptability, and a proactive approach to problem-solving. Given the smaller, more collaborative nature of many firms in these cities, the ability to work well in a team and a willingness to take on varied tasks is crucial." Host: "So, what are the current trends in accountancy recruitment in Oxford and Cambridge? One key trend is the growing emphasis on technology. As digital transformation sweeps across industries, the accounting sector is no exception. Firms are looking for candidates who not only have traditional accounting skills but also a strong grasp of digital tools and software, such as advanced Excel skills, data analytics tools, and even experience with artificial intelligence in financial modeling." "Another trend is the increasing importance of flexible working arrangements. Post-pandemic, many firms in Oxford and Cambridge have adopted hybrid working models. This shift means recruiters are searching for candidates who are not just technically competent, but also able to thrive in remote or flexible work environments. Being able to work autonomously and stay productive without the traditional office setup is a big plus for many employers in these cities." Reach out to our team today for Accountancy Capital - Oxford Team Accountancy Capital - Cambridge Team

Host: Welcome to The Medium Effect, the podcast where we explore the tools, platforms, and strategies that can help writers and creators level up their online presence. I'm your host, Adrian Lawrence, and today we're diving into the benefits of publishing on Medium.com — the platform that's revolutionized digital publishing for writers, bloggers, and thought leaders alike. Whether you're a seasoned author or someone looking to share your insights for the first time, this episode is for you. So, grab a coffee, take a seat, and let's talk about why Medium.com is a game-changer for your writing career! Host: Let's start with the basics — accessibility. One of the biggest advantages of Medium.com is that it's open to everyone. You don't need to be a professional writer with a publishing deal to get your voice out there. Whether you're writing your first article or your hundredth, Medium welcomes writers from all backgrounds and skill levels. Why is this important? Well, unlike traditional publishing platforms, where gatekeeping can be a barrier, Medium is a democratized space. If you have something valuable to say, there's a space for it. Medium makes publishing so simple: you create an account, write your piece, and publish — no design or web development skills necessary. Plus, its minimalist interface is intuitive and distraction-free, which is a huge benefit for those of us who want to focus on our words without getting bogged down in the technical side of things. Host: Now, let's talk about what makes Medium truly unique — the built-in audience. One of the biggest challenges for writers is finding readers. You can have the best content in the world, but if no one sees it, it's like shouting into the void. Medium solves this problem by giving writers access to a community of over 100 million active readers. The platform's algorithm helps you get discovered, recommending your content to readers based on their interests. This is different from starting your own blog, where building traffic often feels like climbing a mountain. Here's the kicker: Medium's audience isn't just passive readers — they're engaged. People come to Medium specifically to read and discover new ideas. That means your chances of getting meaningful feedback, having your content shared, and even going viral are significantly higher. And if your article resonates, it can get picked up by one of Medium's partner publications, which can drastically increase your visibility. Publications like The Startup, Better Marketing, and Personal Growth are highly respected and have massive readerships. Host: Let's shift gears and talk about something everyone loves: making money. If you're a writer who wants to turn your passion into a revenue stream, Medium offers a compelling path. Through the Medium Partner Program, writers can get paid based on how much engagement their stories receive. The more time readers spend on your articles, the more money you make. It's not just about clicks or page views, but actual reader engagement — which means you're incentivized to create high-quality content that resonates with your audience. Writers have reported making anywhere from a few dollars to thousands per month through Medium. Of course, it's not a get-rich-quick scheme, but it does provide a legitimate way to monetize your writing without having to rely on ads or affiliate marketing. Additionally, if you're a freelance writer, Medium can act as a portfolio to showcase your best work. Potential clients can easily see your writing style, ideas, and how people are responding to your content. Host: Writing can sometimes feel like a solitary activity, but Medium makes it easy to connect with others in your field. Whether you're looking for collaboration opportunities, feedback, or simply to grow your network, Medium's social aspect plays a huge role. Make sure to visit our Medium.com pages Topics include Outsourcing your CFO.

Host: Welcome to The C-Suite Chronicles, the podcast where we dive into the world of corporate leadership and explore the roles, responsibilities, and strategies of the top executives steering today's biggest companies. I'm your host, Adrian Lawrence, and today we're going to break down everything you need to know about C-Suite executives. Who are they? What do they do? And why are they so crucial to the success of any organization? Whether you're an aspiring leader, a curious employee, or a business enthusiast, this episode is for you. So, let's get started and unravel the mysteries of the C-Suite! Host: Let's start with the basics — what exactly is the C-Suite? The term refers to the top-level executives whose job titles typically start with the letter “C,” standing for "Chief." These executives are responsible for making major decisions and driving the strategic direction of the company. The “C” in C-Suite stands for Chief, as in: Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Chief Operating Officer (COO) Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) And so on. In short, these are the key decision-makers in an organization. The C-Suite holds immense power, but with that power comes tremendous responsibility. Their decisions can affect not only the employees and shareholders of a company but also the markets in which they operate, the broader economy, and even the global community. So, how did we get here? The concept of the C-Suite has evolved over time. In the past, top executives often wore many hats, but as businesses have grown more complex, the roles in the C-Suite have become more specialized. This specialization allows each executive to focus deeply on a specific function, making sure that all aspects of the business are strategically aligned. Host: Now that we understand what the C-Suite is, let's dive into some of the key roles. These are the executives you'll typically find at the helm of major organizations, each bringing a unique set of skills and responsibilities. Host: First, we have the CEO, arguably the most well-known executive in the C-Suite. The CEO is responsible for the overall vision and strategy of the company. They're the face of the organization, setting the tone for company culture and long-term goals. The CEO works closely with the board of directors and is ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the organization. CEOs are often seen as the “final decision-makers” on big strategic moves — acquisitions, partnerships, expansions into new markets, or even laying off employees during tough times. Their leadership style can define a company's future. For example, think of iconic CEOs like Steve Jobs, who transformed Apple into a tech giant through visionary leadership. Host: Next up is the CFO. This person handles the financial health of the company. The CFO is responsible for everything from financial planning and analysis to risk management and reporting to shareholders. Essentially, if it has to do with money, it's on the CFO's radar. In today's business world, a CFO isn't just a number cruncher. They're a strategic partner to the CEO, helping guide decisions based on data, market trends, and financial forecasts. They also play a crucial role during major transitions like mergers, acquisitions, or IPOs. Host: Moving on, we have the COO, who is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company. The COO takes the CEO's vision and makes sure it's implemented across the entire organization. Think of the COO as the execution expert — they make sure that everything runs smoothly, from manufacturing and supply chain management to human resources and project execution. In many companies, the COO is the person making sure that ideas translate into reality. Reach out to our teams today. FD Capital for CFO Recruitment Exec Capital for C-Suite Executives C-Suite Capital and C-Suite Recruit are our blogs.

Host: Welcome to Executive Insights, the podcast for UK directors and C-suite executives, where we dive deep into the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the business landscape. I'm your host, Adrian Lawrence, and in today's episode, we'll explore topics that are crucial to leaders at the helm of organizations across industries in the UK. Host: Let's kick things off with one of the most pressing topics on every boardroom agenda: the rise of Artificial Intelligence. While AI promises greater efficiency, cost savings, and innovation, it also forces a rethink of traditional leadership roles. Guest Speaker - AI Expert: We've reached a point where AI is not just a tool but a strategic partner. For UK directors and C-suite executives, this means balancing technological adoption with human capital. It's about using AI for data-driven decision-making while ensuring that it doesn't undermine the human element of leadership. Host: Exactly! AI is great for automation, but leaders must focus on fostering creativity and emotional intelligence. How do you see UK businesses adjusting to this balance? Guest Speaker: Many are using AI to optimize operations—logistics, supply chains, customer service—but the best-performing organizations also emphasize reskilling their workforce and building a culture of continuous learning. Host: A great point. Leaders can't overlook the human aspect. As AI grows in influence, directors and executives will need to sharpen their skills in empathy and emotional intelligence. Host: Next, let's talk about the economic landscape. Post-Brexit, UK businesses are navigating uncertain waters. Between changes in trade regulations, fluctuating exchange rates, and shifting supply chains, many C-suite leaders are rethinking their business models. Guest Speaker - Economist: Absolutely. The UK is facing a challenging economic environment, with inflationary pressures and supply chain disruptions. Directors and C-suite executives must focus on building resilience by diversifying suppliers, re-evaluating international markets, and even exploring new trade agreements. Host: How do you see UK companies adapting to these challenges? Guest Speaker: I see a focus on regional trade partnerships, particularly with non-EU countries, and an increasing interest in nearshoring. Directors are also exploring innovative financing models to mitigate risk and ensure liquidity in this volatile environment. Host: That's a key takeaway—resilience and adaptability. Leaders who proactively seek new opportunities while managing risk will be better positioned to weather the storm. Host: Another crucial topic on every director's mind is sustainability and ESG compliance. Investors, regulators, and customers are demanding more from businesses in terms of environmental responsibility and ethical governance. Guest Speaker - ESG Consultant: That's right. ESG is no longer just a compliance checkbox—it's a strategic priority. Directors and executives must embed sustainability into the core of their operations. This not only enhances brand reputation but also drives long-term financial performance. Host: What specific actions should leaders take to improve their ESG standing? Guest Speaker: Start with a materiality assessment—what issues are most relevant to your stakeholders? Once identified, set measurable goals, whether that's reducing carbon emissions, enhancing diversity in leadership, or improving supply chain transparency. And most importantly, communicate your progress transparently. Guest Speaker: Organizations that invest in mental health programs, promote work-life balance, and create opportunities for career development will stand out in a competitive talent market. To keep up to date with news and events from FD Capital and Exec Capital why not read our popular news blogs?

Welcome to a special episode of our podcast: "Discovering Your Inner Superpowers: A Journey of Resilience and Self-Belief." Today, we're exploring the extraordinary strength within each of us and how grief recovery serves as a transformative journey unveiling our inner superheroes. Life's challenges often feel insurmountable, but hidden within these struggles are our very own superpowers waiting to be discovered. Grief recovery tests our resilience, pushing us through a rollercoaster of emotions. Yet, it's in this journey that we unearth our untapped potential, our inner strength poised to soar. Self-Belief and Transformation] Believing in ourselves is the cornerstone in realizing these superpowers. It's about acknowledging the courage within, the ability to rise after every fall, and the determination to move forward in the face of adversity. This belief fuels our journey of transformation and healing. Embracing Grief as a Source of Strength  Recovery from grief isn't about erasing pain; it's about integrating it, learning from it, and channeling that experience into a source of empowerment. Our vulnerabilities morph into strengths, and our scars become wisdom born from pain. Highlighting Resilience and Inner Strength Remember, you possess the power of resilience—the ability to endure, adapt, and grow stronger. Each trial overcome, every tear shed, and each step forward is a testament to your unwavering strength. Encouragement and Self-Acknowledgment Today, I encourage you to look within and acknowledge your superpowers. Embrace your uniqueness, your ability to persevere, and the strength cultivated through life's storms. You are empowered, capable, and worthy of all the beauty life offers. Support and Connection To those navigating grief and loss, remember that within you lies an unwavering superhero. Embrace the journey, believe in yourself, and draw upon your inner strength. You are more powerful than you know. Invitation for Connection: Yes@LifeCoachAdele.com Host: Let's walk this path together, empowering one another, celebrating victories, and supporting each other through the challenging moments. I'm here to connect and help Stay well out there, xoxo Adele   About Adele:  At 27 years old, I survived a plane crash. That near death and life experience changed my path and led me on a deeper journey of discovery that I now share so I can help others. Little did I expect I would experience a significant loss later in my life.  I often say drowning in a capsized plane was easier than becoming a widow. Grieving my life partner proved catastrophic, a deep wound that still weeps when the Band-Aid is pulled off, raw and tender when touched. Loss challenged every aspect of my life, but I did find relief through community, neuroscience, nutrition and by embodying a rich spiritual practice.  I am an NLP Trainer, Homeopath, Death Doula, Akashic Reader and Grief Coach and have the honor of helping those seeking to ease their painful losses and amplify happiness since 2002. Along with being an author, I have been on countless stages sharing my messages of hope. I know that life always offers us more than what we see or believe is possible; even when we grieve.  How do you find happiness when life doesn't look so bright?  I am here to help light the way.   yes@lifecoachadele.com https://www.lifecoachadele.com Complimentary Rainbow Energy Session: https://live.vcita.com/site/pj6nd2nw1oky5ogs/online-scheduling?service=drkxsgl8va1u4yv9 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adele.anderson.1238/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lifecoachadele/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lifecoachadeleanderson/ Podcast: Mind Your Freedom: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mind-your-freedom/id1471675465 Office: cellular: 604-885-8236 #griefrelief #griefrecovery #griefsupport #griefandtraumaretreats #deathdoula #findingyourpurposeaftergrief #superpowersofresilience #lifecoachadele #deathdoula

Welcome back, dear listeners, to another episode of The Career Evangelist Podcast, where we delve deep into the ever-changing world of work. In today's episode, we're diving headfirst into a topic that has become more relevant than ever: "How to thrive in a remote work culture." Sponsor: BetterHelp offers patients access to counselors and therapists through private online live chat, phone and video conferencing and is the world's largest counseling service. Link here. The landscape of work has evolved dramatically, and remote work has cemented itself as a prominent feature of this new reality. As the lines between home and office blur, it's crucial to not just adapt but thrive in this remote work culture. So, whether you're a seasoned remote worker or just starting to embrace this transformative way of working, join us as we explore the strategies, insights, and tips that will help you not just survive but truly thrive in the remote work culture of today and tomorrow. So, grab your favorite cup of coffee, settle into your home office, or pop in those earbuds during your daily walk—because you're in for a wealth of knowledge and inspiration in today's episode. Host: Let's get started on the journey to thriving in a remote work culture.   Grab a copy of my eBook: "Network your way into your next role using LinkedIn". Link here.

Struggling to record solo eps? This one is for YOU! Maggie Sturgis is in her mid-twenties figuring out WHAT life is in adulthood and how the hell to get through it... and she's sharing her journey publicly on her Let's Bring It Up podcast, to help others along the way. So today, Maggie's here to fill us in about how her early podcast journey is going, what she's learning, and most importantly, how she's able to (at least seemingly) ramble on in solo episodes like an frickin' BOSS and stop saying "um" so much (#relatable).On her podcast Let's Bring It Up, Maggie Sturgis leads her audience through the topics that, well... no one wants to bring up! Sometimes the most important thing isn't exactly what you're saying, it's that you're saying something at all. Tune in each Monday to hear Maggie's thoughts around issues such as body image, mental health, relationships, and what's going on in the world around us. CONNECT FURTHER WITH GUEST:Podcast: https://apple.co/3Q9VYG2 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maggiebrennen_ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maggiebrennen_ CONNECT FURTHER WITH ANGIE:Podcast: https://www.yougetwhatimsaying.com Listen Early and Dynamic Ad-Free on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/44Y6rbYSocial Media: https://beacons.ai/theactualangie/socialmedia Contact: yougetwhatimsaying.podcast@gmail.com Monetize Your Podcast: https://beacons.ai/theactualangie/monetizeSupport the Show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/yougetit/membershipADVERTISE ON THE SHOW: To inquire about host-read ads or to become the show's next Presenting Sponsor, please send an email to yougetwhatimsaying.podcast@gmail.com.EPISODE CREDITS:Podcast Logo: Abby MurdockPodcast Cover Photography: April Bowers CreativeBE ADVISED:Formerly titled Podfluencer Society (for before that, 4 Things For Your Podcast), episodes 1-114 share insights and strategies specifically for podcasters. As the podcast has undergone a complete rebrand, some links and information referenced in earlier episodes have likely changed. Please contact us at yougetwhatimsaying.podcast@gmail.com if you cannot find what you are looking for. The views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team or the owner of this Intellectual Property. This podcast is not an authority of legal advice, and listeners are encouraged to seek professional counsel with regard to their brand, business, and otherwise. Many of the product and service promotions in each episode are under the negotiated terms of affiliate or sponsorship agreements. If a link is clicked and a purchase is made, an affiliate commission may be received. However, we recommend products or services that we personally endorse and believe may be beneficial to others. This information is disclosed in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

Were you here when @sharonsaysso shared about us? It was the start of amazing things here at Gather! The week she shared, we released an episode called “10 Ways to Become an Everyday Host” and it quickly became our most downloaded episode to date. As years have gone by, we wanted to bring the conversation back to the surface because it is more important now than ever! In culture, we are often told narratives that gathering is for a select few, with a certain income, certain skill set, and steady friend group. What if that wasn't true? What if the key to gathering is something entirely different? Through my own rewriting, and listening to many of you, I have curated a list of unconventional ways to be an everyday host. Not just any host, but an intentional one that cultivates meaningful connection. In this episode we will discuss these 10 key topics: 1: Seeing a need & willingness to go first2: Willingness to fail 3: Commitment to growth: personally & practically 4: Becoming the designated diffuser & difficult conversation manager 5: Prioritizing ambiance 6: Creating food intentionally 7: Shifting from untouchable to intentional hospitality 8: Creating Systems & Stations 9: Auditing your kitchen 10: Working towards leading with vulnerability and authenticity See this list as a way to identify where you need to grow, what you do well, and where you need to head next! From there, we would love to support you through blog posts, guides, and workshops found at www.gatherintentionalliving.com Cotier Brand:Save 15% on conversation napkins at Cotier w/ code Gather15 through their website here!

Released  30 June 2022. Distilling lessons from the author's book, The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy during World War II, this podcast provides applicable suggestions for the US military today. As in World War II, the press is both a weapon and a possible vulnerability in modern warfare. Click here to read the article. Keywords: press, World War II, public affairs, TikTok, media Episode Transcript  Stephanie Crider (Host) Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1: Alexander G. Lovelace) Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Alexander G. Lovelace, author of “Tomorrow's Wars and the Media,” which was featured in the summer 2022 issue of Parameters. Lovelace is a scholar-in-residence at the Contemporary History Institute of Ohio University. His first book, The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy during World War II, is being published by the University Press of Kansas in 2022. (Host) It's great to have you on Decisive Point, Alex. Thanks for making time for us.  (Lovelace) Thank you for having me. (Host) Let's jump right in. Your essay offers practical suggestions for how the press can be used by public affairs officers, commanders, and policymakers to achieve victory in coming conflicts. You say these lessons are applicable for today's wars, even when they're fought on TikTok. So give us some historical context. How did we get here? (Lovelace) The Second World War was a media war for two big reasons. The first one is that all sides really tried to harness the media as a weapon during that conflict. This really came out of the philosophical and technological mindset of total war. There's a real philosophical shift where warfare is suddenly not so much something you do to the enemy army, but also has to involve the enemy population. That grows from the French Revolution up to World War II, and it's accompanied also by a technological shift. Warfare is becoming much more deadly, particularly for civilians. At the same time, the media is also part of this change. You have technology such as telegraphs and photography which has a military use but also has a civilian use and a media use for civilian press. So by World War II, which is the first total war, at least the first one that is openly fought as such, the media is going to play a big role in that. So that's one reason. The second reason is even as commanders are trying to use the media as a weapon, they're also being susceptible to it influencing their decisions on the battlefield. You have these two things: the media as a weapon and the media being used by commanders, influencing commanders' decisions, and it creates a model of military-media relations which survives total war. We haven't fought many total wars lately, but, in the era of limited war, the media is still a big factor. Vietnam becomes a television war, and there's a big debate over how much that influences. But you see this throughout the war on terror (war on terrorism) and up to the current conflict in Ukraine, which some commentators have called a TikTok war because a lot of Americans and a lot of news is being shared on the latest information-sharing platform. (Host) Can you explain in a little bit more detail how the news influences commanders' battlefield decisions? (Lovelace) The news really influences commanders' decisions in, I would say, three big ways. The first one is maybe the most obvious to Hollywood. It's the general who's media-obsessed, wants publicity,

Passionate about meditation, Heather Nieves shares the benefit of sharing meditation with our children.   We discuss the physical and mental benefits of meditation we have experienced with our children.   As a bonus, she ends the episode with some breathing to ground down.   Heather is a podcast host of Let's Talk Meditation with Heather Nieves, a Women's Empowerment Coach & Founder of I Love Me Yoga. To learn more about Heather and the benefits of meditation, visit: 5 Day Free Breathe in Love Yoga & Meditation Experience at https:www.heathernieves.com/breathinlove Her podcast, Let's Talk Meditation with Heather Nieves: https://www.HeatherNieves.com/podcastInstagram: @iamheathernieves https://www.instagram.com/iamheathernievesFacebook: Meditation for Mamas & More https://www.facebook.com/groups/meditation4mamas/ Check out the mom self-love journal on Amazon.   When moms take those few minutes each day to practice self-love, it allows us to love others at our best.  Getting to Know You: The Family Journal and Game to learn more about your family and record the fun memories.  Now available on Amazon!    A Day In The Life Of A Stay-At-Home Mom journal provides 2 pages for each day.  Completing the reverse to-do list is the perfect reminder of all you accomplish in a single day. Most importantly, it will reflect the unmeasurable value you bring to your family.Mom Treading Water (The Imperfect Mom) is available on all podcast apps or right here! www.momtreadingwater.com/podcast-episodes/Please rate, review, subscribe, and share Mom Treading Water.  Thank you!Please join our Facebook Group, Mom Treading Water to celebrate 1 year with some fun giveaways!  https://www.facebook.com/groups/490411995647295/Follow Mom Treading Water:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QJgpKp6z0U&t=51sTikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMd3dbnxT/Instagram: @imperfectmomtreadingwater Thank you for supporting the growth of Mom Treading Water! *Please note that I may earn a small commission on affiliate links at no extra cost to you.  Thank you for supporting the success of Mom Treading Water.   

Released 13 April 2022. In this podcast, Pfaff argues understanding the ethical logic available to one's adversaries will allow US leaders and planners to leverage China's behavior and optimally shape US policies and actions. Click here to read the original article. Episode Transcript: Chinese and Western Ways of War and Their Ethics  Stephanie Crider (Host) Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1 Anthony Pfaff) (Host) Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Anthony Pfaff, author of “Chinese and Western Ways of War and Their Ethics,” featured in Parameters Spring 2022 issue. Dr. Pfaff is the research professor for strategy, the military profession, and ethics at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College and a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Welcome, Dr. Pfaff. I'm glad you're here. Let's talk about China and the West, war, and ethics. Your thesis for this piece posits how one fights shapes how one governs that fighting. The article relies on traditional and contemporary scholarship from both East and West to describe differences in how each views the practical and ethical aspects of war and how they can interact. Understanding the ethical logic available to one's adversaries allows one to better understand their behavior as well as how to better shape one's own actions and policies to avoid misunderstanding. Some people think China is unethical. Let's just start there. In fact, you note that in December of 2020, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe claimed the Chinese government has “no ethical boundaries” in their pursuit of power. Please expand on that. (Pfaff) Yeah. Sure. This is a common refrain. A big theme in it is that the other side—they're unethical. And I wanted to write this because it's not true. Now, they may be doing some things which by our own lights are unethical; they may be doing some things that are unethical by their own lights. What I'm not doing in this paper is adjudicating. And I'm not saying that there is a moral equivalency between the kinds of things China does and the kinds of things the United States does. I'm not saying there's a moral equivalency between the kind of aims that the United States has and China has. I think we can make arguments that a lot of what the Chinese do is in fact unethical. However, it is wrong to say they aren't considering it. There is a fairly rich conversation even in their own People's Liberation Army (PLA) journals and think tanks and conferences, and all that, where they do raise these kinds of concerns. So what I wanted to do is kind of map out: How do these concerns arise, and what shapes how they get expressed in Chinese policy in Chinese thinking as well as our own? And I thought it was important to contrast it with how we do it so a reader can understand, “Oh, this is sort of a natural process that all security communities, states—however you want to define it—do.” These are almost unavoidable categories but do affect not how we just think about fighting, but how we think about the norms governing that fighting. To say the other side just doesn't have any is to oversimplify and to miss a lot. It risks misinterpreting what in fact the other side actually thinks it's doing and thinks it's responding to. (Host) Let's talk about the ways and ethics of war. What do you mean by this, and how are the Western and Eastern ways of war different? (Pfaff) In terms of what I'm talking about here, in terms of what a way of war is and how it relates to the ethics of war,

Released 6 April 2022. This podcast is based on a compendium that resulted from a conference on “Military Operations in an Urban Environment” cosponsored by the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in conjunction with the Kentucky Commission on Military Affairs, the U.S. Army War College, and the Association of the United States Army. At the time of the conference, the concept of homeland defense was emerging as an increasingly important mission for the U.S. military. Click here to read the compendium. Episode Transcript: Soldiers In Cities  Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1: Michael C. Desch) (Host) Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Michael Desch, editor of Soldiers in Cities: Military Operations on Urban Terrain, published by the US Army War College in 2001. A graduate of Marquette University, he holds master's and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. I'm so glad you're here, Michael. Thank you so much for taking time to go through this with me today. (Desch) My pleasure. (Host) Military Operations on Urban Terrain: Please briefly walk us through the basic concepts of this monograph. (Desch) Military operations in cities is not a new topic. But the period of time in which we put together this collection of papers saw a renaissance of interest in the topic. It really was connected with a series of high-profile, urban operations that sort of reminded us all that operating in urban areas presented great challenges—challenges much greater and unique to those of military operations on other sorts of terrain. You know, the big thing on the American side, of course, was the famous Battle of the Bakaara marketplace (Battle of Mogadishu), chronicled in Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down: (A Story of Modern War). But there was also the First Battle of Grozny, in which the Russian military tried to suppress the Chechen uprising and felt that they had to do so, in part, by assaulting the capital of Chechnya, Grozny. Neither of these operations was pretty. And neither of them, I think it's safe to say, was fully satisfactory to the respective militaries involved. And so military operations on urban terrain became a hot topic. There was a lot of doctrinal attention to it. But also, at least in the United States, there was an effort to build or improve the infrastructure for (military operations on urban terrain or) MOUT training at various Army combat training centers and other Army facilities. I was at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky, at the time, and one of the US Army facilities that was investing in a significant upgrade of its MOUT training facilities was the (US Army) Armor School at Fort Knox in Kentucky. Why Kentucky and why MOUT? That was the reason that we undertook this study. (Host) Let's talk about military operations on urban terrain today. What did the monograph get right? (Desch) Well, military operations on urban terrain have been a pretty much consistent part of military operations in recent conflicts. So, most famous, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, were the operations in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Today, we're seeing military operations in conjunction with the Russian special military operation in eastern Ukraine. And the Russian case is interesting both for instances in which the battle is taking place in urban areas, particularly in the southeast, in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, but also where, at least so far, they're not being undertaken,

Barry Courter is back on During the Break - 2022! Barry is the food and entertainment writer and columnist for the Times Free Press. He also co-hosts the What Podcast - a podcast centered around live music events, venues, bands, and artists! We will talk about life, podcasting, music, Riverbend, and Bonnaroo! === THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: Granite Garage Floors of Chattanooga: https://granitegaragefloors.com/location/chattanooga Vascular Institute of Chattanooga: https://www.vascularinstituteofchattanooga.com/ MedicareMisty: https://medicaremisty.com/ The Barn Nursery: https://www.barnnursery.com/ Guardian Investment Advisors: https://giaplantoday.com/ Please consider supporting the podast by becoming a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/duringthebreakpodcast This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Let's Review [Video description begins] Topic title: Let's Review. The host is in the host space. [Video description ends] HOST: Let's review what you've learned in this course. There are a wide range of techniques you can draw on to overcome nervousness and communicate with confidence in business settings. You can consciously decide what impression to make. Breathe properly, plan and structure what you'll say, and focus on being authentic and engaging. Then use your voice and body language to reinforce your message and convey confidence and authority.

Thank you for joining us today, folks on this very special podcast episode, we're going to be talking with an aspiring future military officer. He's also been serving on The Morning Formation Podcast as a volunteer apprentice for the last few months. So, in the background, this gentleman has provided me with technical assistance, and the editing of many of my podcast episodes. And I wanted to bring him on board, because I think it's really important for us as military veterans and people within our military community to reach back and mentor and provide an experience of learning and leadership. So I'm very honored to have Mr. Avi Dhanraj, as a member of The Morning Formation Podcast team. 

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Interview with Luc Carlin of Let's Talk Cannabis. Including a recap of the US National Pandemic Emotional Impact Report and Measuring the Emotional Impact of the 'Rona on the U.S. Population Guest: Luc Carlson, Host @Let's Talk Cannabis LMC https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsTalkCannabis https://lmc.productions/ Let's Talk Cannabis LMC covers a range of issues involving cannabis like branding, marketing, business, investing and much, much more. Host: Josh Kincaid, Capital Markets Analyst & host of your cannabis business podcast. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshkincaid/ Episode 544 of The Talking Hedge: Your Cannabis Business Podcast. ​Covering cannabis products, reviews business news, interviews, investments, events, and more. https://www.theTalkingHedgepodcast.com Music Info: Song: Dark Trap Beats Hard Rap Instrumental | Gang | 2018Artist: LuxrayBeats Keywords: Hemp News, Weed News, Cannabis News, Marijuana News, Cannabis Business, Marijuana Business, Cannabis Industry News, Marijuana Industry News, Weed News 420, Talking Hedge Podcast, Cannabis Podcast, Marijuana Podcast, Business Podcast, CBD podcast, THC podcast, Cannabis Pitch Deck, Marijuana Pitch Deck, Marijuana Investment Deck, Cannabis Investment Deck, Cannabis Compliance, Cannabis Data, Cannabis Banking, Cannabis Investment, Pot Stocks, Cannabis Stocks, Weed Stocks, Marijuana Stocks, Cannabis Data, Marijuana Data, Cannabis Analytics, Marijuana Analytics, Cannabis Sales Data, Marijuana Sales Data Josh is not an investment adviser. The Talking Hedge is long gold and silver. Listeners should always speak to their personal financial advisers.

Interview with Luc Carlin of Let's Talk Cannabis. Including a recap of the US National Pandemic Emotional Impact Report and Measuring the Emotional Impact of the 'Rona on the U.S. Population Guest: Luc Carlson, Host @Let's Talk Cannabis LMC https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsTalkCannabis https://lmc.productions/ Let's Talk Cannabis LMC covers a range of issues involving cannabis like branding, marketing, business, investing and much, much more. Host: Josh Kincaid, Capital Markets Analyst & host of your cannabis business podcast. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshkincaid/ Episode 544 of The Talking Hedge: Your Cannabis Business Podcast. ​Covering cannabis products, reviews business news, interviews, investments, events, and more. https://www.theTalkingHedgepodcast.com Music Info: Song: Dark Trap Beats Hard Rap Instrumental | Gang | 2018Artist: LuxrayBeats Keywords: Hemp News, Weed News, Cannabis News, Marijuana News, Cannabis Business, Marijuana Business, Cannabis Industry News, Marijuana Industry News, Weed News 420, Talking Hedge Podcast, Cannabis Podcast, Marijuana Podcast, Business Podcast, CBD podcast, THC podcast, Cannabis Pitch Deck, Marijuana Pitch Deck, Marijuana Investment Deck, Cannabis Investment Deck, Cannabis Compliance, Cannabis Data, Cannabis Banking, Cannabis Investment, Pot Stocks, Cannabis Stocks, Weed Stocks, Marijuana Stocks, Cannabis Data, Marijuana Data, Cannabis Analytics, Marijuana Analytics, Cannabis Sales Data, Marijuana Sales Data Josh is not an investment adviser. The Talking Hedge is long gold and silver. Listeners should always speak to their personal financial advisers. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/talkinghedge/support

Interview with Luc Carlin of Let's Talk Cannabis. Including a recap of the US National Pandemic Emotional Impact Report and Measuring the Emotional Impact of the 'Rona on the U.S. Population Guest: Luc Carlson, Host @Let's Talk Cannabis LMC https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsTalkCannabis https://lmc.productions/ Let's Talk Cannabis LMC covers a range of issues involving cannabis like branding, marketing, business, investing and much, much more. Host: Josh Kincaid, Capital Markets Analyst & host of your cannabis business podcast. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshkincaid/ Episode 544 of The Talking Hedge: Your Cannabis Business Podcast. ​Covering cannabis products, reviews business news, interviews, investments, events, and more. https://www.theTalkingHedgepodcast.com Music Info: Song: Dark Trap Beats Hard Rap Instrumental | Gang | 2018Artist: LuxrayBeats Keywords: Hemp News, Weed News, Cannabis News, Marijuana News, Cannabis Business, Marijuana Business, Cannabis Industry News, Marijuana Industry News, Weed News 420, Talking Hedge Podcast, Cannabis Podcast, Marijuana Podcast, Business Podcast, CBD podcast, THC podcast, Cannabis Pitch Deck, Marijuana Pitch Deck, Marijuana Investment Deck, Cannabis Investment Deck, Cannabis Compliance, Cannabis Data, Cannabis Banking, Cannabis Investment, Pot Stocks, Cannabis Stocks, Weed Stocks, Marijuana Stocks, Cannabis Data, Marijuana Data, Cannabis Analytics, Marijuana Analytics, Cannabis Sales Data, Marijuana Sales Data Josh is not an investment adviser. The Talking Hedge is long gold and silver. Listeners should always speak to their personal financial advisers.

Will the U.S. federally legalize cannabis? Which state pulled in over $180M in monthly revenue? Let's talk cannabis and politics with Luc Carlson! Guest: Luc Carlson, Host @Let's Talk Cannabis LMC https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsTalkCannabis https://lmc.productions/ Let's Talk Cannabis LMC covers a range of issues involving cannabis like branding, marketing, business, investing and much, much more. Host: Josh Kincaid, Capital Markets Analyst & host of your cannabis business podcast. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshkincaid/ Episode 544 of The Talking Hedge: Your Cannabis Business Podcast. ​Covering cannabis products, reviews business news, interviews, investments, events, and more. https://www.theTalkingHedgepodcast.com Music Info: Song: Dark Trap Beats Hard Rap Instrumental | Gang | 2018Artist: LuxrayBeats Keywords: Hemp News, Weed News, Cannabis News, Marijuana News, Cannabis Business, Marijuana Business, Cannabis Industry News, Marijuana Industry News, Weed News 420, Talking Hedge Podcast, Cannabis Podcast, Marijuana Podcast, Business Podcast, CBD podcast, THC podcast, Cannabis Pitch Deck, Marijuana Pitch Deck, Marijuana Investment Deck, Cannabis Investment Deck, Cannabis Compliance, Cannabis Data, Cannabis Banking, Cannabis Investment, Pot Stocks, Cannabis Stocks, Weed Stocks, Marijuana Stocks, Cannabis Data, Marijuana Data, Cannabis Analytics, Marijuana Analytics, Cannabis Sales Data, Marijuana Sales Data Josh is not an investment adviser. The Talking Hedge is long gold and silver. Listeners should always speak to their personal financial advisers.

Will the U.S. federally legalize cannabis? Which state pulled in over $180M in monthly revenue? Let's talk cannabis and politics with Luc Carlson! Guest: Luc Carlson, Host @Let's Talk Cannabis LMC https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsTalkCannabis https://lmc.productions/ Let's Talk Cannabis LMC covers a range of issues involving cannabis like branding, marketing, business, investing and much, much more. Host: Josh Kincaid, Capital Markets Analyst & host of your cannabis business podcast. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshkincaid/ Episode 544 of The Talking Hedge: Your Cannabis Business Podcast. ​Covering cannabis products, reviews business news, interviews, investments, events, and more. https://www.theTalkingHedgepodcast.com Music Info: Song: Dark Trap Beats Hard Rap Instrumental | Gang | 2018Artist: LuxrayBeats Keywords: Hemp News, Weed News, Cannabis News, Marijuana News, Cannabis Business, Marijuana Business, Cannabis Industry News, Marijuana Industry News, Weed News 420, Talking Hedge Podcast, Cannabis Podcast, Marijuana Podcast, Business Podcast, CBD podcast, THC podcast, Cannabis Pitch Deck, Marijuana Pitch Deck, Marijuana Investment Deck, Cannabis Investment Deck, Cannabis Compliance, Cannabis Data, Cannabis Banking, Cannabis Investment, Pot Stocks, Cannabis Stocks, Weed Stocks, Marijuana Stocks, Cannabis Data, Marijuana Data, Cannabis Analytics, Marijuana Analytics, Cannabis Sales Data, Marijuana Sales Data Josh is not an investment adviser. The Talking Hedge is long gold and silver. Listeners should always speak to their personal financial advisers. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/talkinghedge/support

Will the U.S. federally legalize cannabis? Which state pulled in over $180M in monthly revenue? Let's talk cannabis and politics with Luc Carlson! Guest: Luc Carlson, Host @Let's Talk Cannabis LMC https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsTalkCannabis https://lmc.productions/ Let's Talk Cannabis LMC covers a range of issues involving cannabis like branding, marketing, business, investing and much, much more. Host: Josh Kincaid, Capital Markets Analyst & host of your cannabis business podcast. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshkincaid/ Episode 544 of The Talking Hedge: Your Cannabis Business Podcast. ​Covering cannabis products, reviews business news, interviews, investments, events, and more. https://www.theTalkingHedgepodcast.com Music Info: Song: Dark Trap Beats Hard Rap Instrumental | Gang | 2018Artist: LuxrayBeats Keywords: Hemp News, Weed News, Cannabis News, Marijuana News, Cannabis Business, Marijuana Business, Cannabis Industry News, Marijuana Industry News, Weed News 420, Talking Hedge Podcast, Cannabis Podcast, Marijuana Podcast, Business Podcast, CBD podcast, THC podcast, Cannabis Pitch Deck, Marijuana Pitch Deck, Marijuana Investment Deck, Cannabis Investment Deck, Cannabis Compliance, Cannabis Data, Cannabis Banking, Cannabis Investment, Pot Stocks, Cannabis Stocks, Weed Stocks, Marijuana Stocks, Cannabis Data, Marijuana Data, Cannabis Analytics, Marijuana Analytics, Cannabis Sales Data, Marijuana Sales Data Josh is not an investment adviser. The Talking Hedge is long gold and silver. Listeners should always speak to their personal financial advisers.

I give my Opinion on Tekashi 69 Taking over interviews this week andHow he kept Touching the host why i feel he was doing so

Shen & Shan Show: LGBTQ+ Pride & BusinessOn this episode of Shen and Shan Show, Shenice and Shan interview Thomas, a fellow podcast host of Let's Talk About Gay Stuff and business owner of EconomiWorks. We speak about the foundation of their career, entrepreneurship, podcast, relationship, and  story of letting family and friends in on being part of the LGBTQ+ community. Show Thomas your love and support:EconomiWorkshttps://economiworks.com/ https://www.facebook.com/economiworkshttps://twitter.com/EconomiWorkshttps://www.instagram.com/economiworks/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCker8HFYDTh6dL9j3fRSmMwhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/economiworks/Let's Talk About Gay Stuff Podcasthttps://letstalkaboutgaystuff.com/https://www.instagram.com/letstalkaboutgaystuff/https://twitter.com/talkgaystuffhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBHXdCaXTTiy8lWciJI7weQhttps://www.facebook.com/LetsTalkAboutGayStuffThis show is supported by Empower Financial - Retirement Planning & Life Insurance - https://www.empowerfinanciallife.comSupport the show (http://paypal.me/shenandshanshow)

 Engineering Influence sat down with Karen Erger, the Director of Practice Risk Management at Lockton Companies, the world's largest privately held insurance brokerage firm to discuss managing risk when returning to the jobsite during COVID-19. Host:Welcome to ACEC's Engineering Influence podcast brought to you by the ACEC Life Health Trust - www.aceclifehealthtrust.com. I'm pleased today to be joined by Karen Erger. She is the Director of Practice Risk Management at Lockton Companies, the world's largest privately held insurance brokerage firm. And today we're going to be talking about all things risk management, especially in the age of COVID-19 and what engineering firm leaders need to think about when returning to the office, not just the office, but the job site and dealing with clients, with paused work, and contracts and all these things that six months ago, we didn't have to think about. And now we are living in a time of complete and utter economic shutdown that starting to restart, and that's posing a lot of, a lot of questions. So Karen, thank you for coming on the show, number one, and number two, tell us a little bit about what you do at Lockton and how you would approach this massive issue.Karen Erger:Thanks, Jeff. It's a pleasure to be with you today. Appreciate being on the program. So my job at Lockton is providing education risk management, education, resources, to Lockton's clients, and specifically our group of clients are architects and engineers. I have the privilege of working with about 40 professionals at Lockton whose sole focus is architects and engineers all sit on the eighth floor of a building in Kansas city. And so my job is to prepare risk management, education, resources, and programs and advice for our clients, but also for my internal clients, for the people who serve our architecture and engineering clients. My background is being an attorney representing architects and engineers in malpractice suits. So I'm a good, witch not, not a bad witch. And so I did that and for all the rest of my career, I've been a broker pretty much exclusively working with architects, engineers, and contractors.Host:So you know, the industry, you know the ins and outs and the challenges that firms have to deal with on a regular basis. But of course the COVID-19 is anything but regular. Have you ever really approached something... I mean, have you ever dealt with something of this magnitude because it's just been so widespread and also just from your position both as a broker and as an attorney, how do you get your arms around this whole issue? And, and, and the fact that there has been such a disruption and that firms are not only dealing with questions about keeping their businesses afloat at any given time, but then also dealing with reopening the offices, how you doing with employees, but then also with their clients. And then a lot of what we're going to be talking about today is on the client side, which is getting back to that worksite, getting back to that paused work in a changed environment and world after this pandemic or, you know, as it still happens, like, how do you get your arms around this whole subject?Karen Erger:Well, Jeff tough and unprecedented times, for sure. And you're right, that firms have really, they have to fight this battle if you want to call it that on so many fronts dealing with what's going to happen internally with employees and how they will work and externally with clients on projects and how we handle those, how we get those started, how we manage them at cetera. My specific focus is on practice risk management. So the thing that I'm usually looking at is how can engineers and architects run their practice so that they no other way to say it, get in less trouble and are able to have better relationships with clients, which is kind of the foundation of having fewer problems and also do better projects. So one of the things I've noticed is though this is a very unprecedented time as you point out, I'm always amazed in the 30 years I've been doing this, how we're usually going back to the toolbox of risk management and deploying some of the same tools, despite the fact that this is a very difficult and unique situation.Karen Erger:So communication and documentation. I mean, I I can just, I can feel your audience groaning. Like here comes the lawyer talking about communication and documentation again, but it's really one of the things that I think is going to be critical in restarting projects and dealing with clients and probably on the home front too, although that's not my specific focus in what I do. So I think whenever there's a situation like this, whenever there's some big moving event, we're, we're, we're all pulling together to try and make things better. I think it's very tempting to skip and skimp on communication and documentation because we just want to get the project moving. We're all in this together. And we all, we're all people who are of good intent and we all understand each other, which can be absolutely true. Even people of good intent though, can misunderstand each others actions after the fact.Karen Erger:And that's why it's so important to communicate with clients about, okay, so COVID-19 presents certain problems to us, whether that be in actually accomplishing the project or doing site visits. Now that now that our ability to do that can be compromised by the need to follow safety procedures by the fact that people are at home by the fact that people can take mass travel communication with clients about those issues is key. It's always tempting to assume that we know what's in the other, other fellow or gal's head, but we need to have those conversations and we need to document those conversations. We need to give our clients the information that they need to make good decisions. So the pros and cons of for example, here's how we're going to do site visits. And here's, here are the ways we can do it. And here are the pros and cons of those agree on that. And then commemorate that in writing, whether it's, you know, just, just a piece of paper, but ideally an amendment to the contract, if that is what is needed here. So that later we all understand what's going on, but also forget about the covering your butt aspect of this for a minute also, so that we're sure that we're on the same page. There's something about writing things down that can be very helpful and no, no, no, that's not what I meant or I didn't hear you when you said that. That's not what I wanted here.Host:Yeah. So that's a really good point. I mean, for firms that a lot of this is kind of hindsight because it's hard to really, you can't go back in time and start that communication process now because we're so late into the process, but looking ahead, God willing for the next shoe to drop the next big challenge. It's a good point that starting that communication early are there any recommended processes or, or best practices in that communication that firms should really adopt in, let's say future contracts with clients. Is there any addendum, is there any language or instruments that affirm a general counsel should say, okay, we're going to add this now into our, you know, our contracts moving forward because the situation that we find ourselves in?Karen Erger:Yeah. Well, that's, that's a great question. And I love that you've struck on contracts. That's a good way to get a lawyer wound up and talking. So thank you for that, Jeff. Yeah, let's, let's talk about contracts going forward. And actually this is also a contracts looking backwards because one of the things that I recommend to our clients is that this is the time to pull out the contracts for your existing project and see where you stand with respect to your rights and duties to the client. So some of the things that I would expect people to be more thoughtful about now that we've, we've had this very momentous experience of COVID-19 are things like understanding what your rights are when the project is suspended by the client, which of course, lots of them are. Do you have the right to additional compensation and additional time?Karen Erger:Does the contract spell that out? So we know that the AIA and the EJDC documents do that. They're very clear about this, but we also know that not all documents are AIA and EJCDC, and lots of times our engineer and architect clients are not in a position where they can dictate what the contract form will be. So what I would expect, or what I would hope for is that firms will start to think about what are our non-negotiables here, what is very important and what have we learned from COVID-19 that needs to be incorporated in our contracts going forward. You mentioned kind of what, what can we do now that we've, we've had this experience. Another thing that there's going to be a lot of focus on, I think is what are what are, what is the damages delay situation? If there's, if there's a delay that is beyond our reasonable control, do we have responsibility for that?Karen Erger:Or does the contract expressly say that we do not? So I've heard a lot of talk about, perhaps we need a, force majeure or clause, which is just law, French for superior force, and contractors typically have them in their contracts, but often design professionals do not. I've seen some insurance carriers proposed different, different different provisions that actually talk about a pandemic virus that might be wise. There's also language in the AIA and EJDC, excusing delays, if they are, I think AIA is due to reasonable cause and EJDC is delays through through no fault of the engineer. So we'll want to look at things like that. And finally, one last thing. So that's two, the third would be additional services. So what does the contract say about your ability to claim additional services? Because as I'm sure we're going to discuss today, some of what's happening here is going to, I think really mandate looking back at the project and perhaps making some changes in it.Karen Erger:Can we be compensated for those changes? And that's something that additional services will be valuable for. And I guess this is a sub point. I said, there were only going to be three. So this is a sub point to that one. Being very aware of what the notice requirements of your contract are. If the contract says you've got to get five days, notice to the client or confer with the client before providing additional services, know that and do it contracts, aren't just something to be sitting in a dusty drawer someplace. They can really help you, but only if you know what they say and you're aware of where you stand contractually.Host:And that's a really good point. And the thing that popped in my mind was I guess, two questions. The first is that that nature of force majeure not really being part of design contracts, is that, why is that, is that more of a, the perspective from the design side of things saying that, well, you know, our work is kind of controlled. We don't we don't need that force majeure in there because when are we going to actually have to exercise it? Has it been just a kind of a generational thing where, you know as contracts with developed over time and as the legal cannon developed over time that it's just been left out because it's not like, wow, you know, it's design work. We're not, we're not on the site. We don't have to worry about that. And, and, and is that a perception that needs to change now that everybody's kind of been tossed into the whole situation together? No matter what you're doing, if you're at home working on, on a computer or, you know, in an office, you know, doing the work?Karen Erger:Oh, that's a, that's a good question on a really timely one. I just want to make it clear just because something isn't labeled force meajeure doesn't that it doesn't accomplish that intent, that language that I mentioned in AIA and EJDC which is that delay beyond your reasonable control is something that you won't be penalized for that really is force majeure it. So just kind of practice pointer pro tip. When you're looking at your contract, don't just look for force majeure, look at something like time for performance, because that's where I would expect to see those, those provisions you asked about how did we get here? Why is that the contractors typically have force majeure clauses, and we don't have such expansive and explicit provisions in our contract as design professionals. I think part of the reason that something that you touched on, which is we don't go to the site, we're not affected by kind of the physical forces of it's raining, and we can't make concrete in the rain. We work at our desks. And soKaren Erger:Maybe there's less emphasis on what will we do if it's raining or what will we do if there's wildfires nearby and we can't go to the site. And to a certain extent, it's still true that we can work from our desks, that we are a little less impacted by it than we think we are. But, you know, this is a bigger question than this podcast probably admits of, but I think one of the things that's going to be terribly interesting is it seems like people are able to be productive from afar. It seems like remote work and work from home is, is working. That people are being productive and, and whatever like that. So two things, one, can we do this forever? Is there going to be a point where we're kind of grant kind of grind our gears? Cause we can't all sit around a table looking at things and shoving stuff around and, and I guess too, are we really being productive at home? I think so. I hope so. But kind of the proof of the pudding, isn't going to be evident for a little while.Host:A little while. Yeah. and the only followup to that is kind of the position between prime and sub. So if you are, you know, if you're a prime, if you're a prime on the contract you know, I can imagine that you're, you're maybe more inclined to have that language in there or, or to consider what do we, what maneuverability do we have should something happened like this disruption, if you're, if you're a subcontractor you're, I would imagine your hands are a little bit more tied or, or is it something where if you're a subcontractor coming into, to a project and you're going to be, you know signing on the line to start that work, is it, should that perspective change, should you be more aggressive in creating room to maneuver in that contract?Karen Erger:Right. So the sub-consultant is usually stuck with whatever the prime negotiates be that for good or ill, or at least I guess from a risk manager standpoint, I kind of hope so we're, we're always preaching to the prime to flow down what you've taken on and not, not give better than, than you got. So if you've taken on some higher than normal standard of care that isn't perhaps entirely insurable, unfortunately you've kind of got to share that with the sub consultant and that is kind of the sub consultants burden, but I think it's important that sub-consultants be aware of what is being flowed down to them so that they're aware of their contractual obligations, I guess, ideally I do know of primes and subs who work together time and again, and who have a course of dealing with each other, joining forces and negotiating or talking in advance about what we're going to negotiate would be a wise move here. And, and let me let me just speak from the about the sub-consultant issue for a second, because one of the things that, and this is not just pandemic related, one of the things that always concerns us about our clients big and small is sub-consultant risk. So when a prime takes on when a prime seed's part of the scope to a sub,Karen Erger:The prime is still stuck with the liability for that. And they know that I know they know that, but the sub really holds some of their liability wellbeing in their hands. So two things that are always important that are never going to go away and maybe are more important now are choosing subs who are well qualified and that's not just the firm is well qualified, but the team is well qualified and also making sure that the subs have good and sufficient insurance. I'm not saying that insurance is the solution to everything, and that should not be the risk management plan, but making sure that the subs are adequately insured is, is terribly important because as the prime, you don't want to be holding the bag for the, for the whole thing, if there is a problem.Host:Yeah. That's probably more important now than ever to really look at who you're doing business with.Karen Erger:Absolutely. And if I can just expand on that, I've seen it happen where, you know, let's say our firm is in Kansas city and there's a sub locally that they really like, and they work together all the time. Well, now they have a job in Portland and fortunately the sub has an office in Portland, but a]is the office in Portland, the A team, like the Kansas city sub, or is it the Z team that we don't really want to be working with and qualifying your team is important too.Host:Let's, let's talk about that additive design work that we kind of talked about a little bit earlier, because one of the things that is a hallmark of, of our industry is that, you know, engineers should be trusted advisors to their clients, which means they should be able to provide solutions. They should not just do the work, but identify challenges, potential solutions to improve the project, to be that expert, to get the best result from the design through the construction, really from start to finish. And in this world that we're living in now know, we, you know, we had a recent round table with our Research Institute, which is kind of an adjunct to ACEC. And one of the things that was brought up during a panel discussion on the buildings that we live in work in, and what they're going to look like after COVID are really the challenges of designing buildings that have now different humidification systems, different air flow systems, air exchanges, what's the code now?Host:Well, should we do more than code? You know, all these challenges, you know, that are now there, if you have a project that you're working on either, you know, and as a design stage right now, and you're looking at it and saying, you know what, this isn't going to work the way that the offices have are set up in this design, the way that the mechanical, the, all that stuff is, is, is, is placed right now that, that, that works six months ago. But now not, you know, not now so much, you know, how, how should engineering firms approach these issues and, and, you know, how could, how should they broach that with the clients to say that, you know, the project was great when we started, but we have to look at what we now need to do to make this a workable solution.Karen Erger:Yeah, Jeff, this is this is in a way this isn't a new problem. This kind of goes back to what I was saying before, because even pre COVID-19 that we had periods where the economy was slow and clients mothballed a project, maybe mid design, and then when they want to get going on it again, the design firm really needs to take a hard look at everything that's been designed in light of what the circumstances are now. And those are things like scope, schedule, and budget, but also have laws and code change. What about the owner's objectives? And the design criteria are those different? Do we still have the people necessary to, to do this project? What about our sub-consultants, et cetera, et cetera, going to a client and saying, we need to spend time doing that may not be met with, you know, clapping of hands.Karen Erger:They feel like they've paid for this design and they should be, they should be done. We should just be able to re animate this thing, but that's not, that's not the way that design works. And I guess my hope is that in the face of covert, it's going to be really plain that no, we cannot just pick up. And especially with the, with the built environment, sort of things that you're talking about, things like, like an office structure, I'm thinking that to a sophisticated owner, it's going to be pretty clear that no, we need, we need to rethink a lot of things here. And maybe fortunately there is, there's no way somebody could have anticipated that this would happen. Right. I think that's the one thing that we all I hope agree on is that there's no design professional out there who, who last July could have been, like there could be a pandemic.Karen Erger:So we're going to have to put the workstation six feet apart. And in fact, no owner would wear that, right? Because they, they want to have those people closer together. Cause real estate is expensive. So when projects restart a lot of these factors that I was talking about before are going to have special relevance. And you touched on this one, the initiatives to try and control viral, spread through HVAC design in a, in a way it's a pretty exciting time to be mechanical engineer, because that does seem like it's going to be an important part of the solution set to a lot of these problems. I was just re a design firm, just released a very interesting paper about indoor relative humidity. And it turns out that having indoor relative humidity of 40% does a lot to control viral spread. It can substantially suppressed, all means of COVID-19 spread.Karen Erger:But most most buildings in cold climates or mixed climates have a relative humidity that's 20% or lower, but you can't just stuff humidifiers in there. I mean, I'm a lawyer. That's what I would do like, Oh, Hey, let's get a humidifier and stuff it right in the room. And then that will fix everything up, except that's going to impair other systems, walls, ceilings, floors those will buckle. Those will have problems and it will create other health problems too, like mold. So that's where that's where design professionals and their special knowledge come in. This is a problem that they can solve. I mean, nobody would wish this problem on anyone, but it's, it's a great time to be a mechanical engineer. This really is an opportunity to do something significantly important.Host:Yeah. That's where it comes to like the challenge and opportunity. It's it's, you know, the one thing that was the takeaway from a lot of the the engineers and experts on the panel was it's actually a great time because we have the ability to improve on designs, offer new solutions, create new areas of focus and business that we didn't have before. And now, you know, we can start talking about these other issues and, and expand our, you know, it's an opportunity for expansion and, and, and really not just expansion of existing businesses, but, you know, new disciplines to come out. So it, it, you know, it's, it's the double edged sword it's having to go back and saying, okay, well, you know, and you're right. The client on the client side should have that interest of saying, well, at the end of the day, does your end consumer I E the person who's going to be signing the lease for an office building, or for, for, for a couple of floors, do they want to sign a lease for an office that isn't going to be the best for their employees?Host:And, you know, so hopefully it is that give and take and understanding that the end result has to be beneficial for everyone. But it's going to be interesting to see how this does impact, especially the private vertical market because, you know, a road is a road you're not really going to be changing anything related to, to do the pandemic when it comes to, you know, surface infrastructure or a bridge or a rail line, but yeah. And the development of a train car and the development of of the office building that will change. Well, let's talk about the job site itself and getting employees back onto that job site. Cause you can do as much as you can to make sure that the office environment is a security bubble and that you're doing everything you should to minimize the spread of COVID within the office environment. But the minute an employee leaves the office and goes to a job site they're out of that security bubble. And how does affirm do the most it can to protect their employees? Because then they're interacting with contractors, with the builders, with a number of other people in other companies that probably all have different levels of response, right? Risk nightmare.Karen Erger:Yeah. Well, you know, when, whenever, whenever we're interacting with other people who are partially responsible for the outcome, that can be tricky not to fall back on my good friends communication and documentation, but I think that's where this begins is thinking about, okay, so now that we are facing this pandemic, what, what are our challenges going to be as far as doing what we need to do on site and having that discussion with the owner, having that discussion with the contractor, again, going through here, here's our plan, given what we know from the CDC and other credible sources about how we might be able to do this, talk about the pros and cons and document what that go forward plan is including contract amendments. If that's, if, if our, our scope is changing, which it may be, and then, you know, you, you touched on the contractor's control and that's, this is tricky because the contractor does, should have plenary control over job site safety and the design professional doesn't want to be in a situation where they're starting to call the shots on job site safety. On the other hand, we need to keep our employees safe when they go to the job site and you, ACEC, have put together a lovely new resource guide to returning to the office and the job site that is incredibly detailed and even includes a checklist, which when I site checklist, I see my clients smile. Cause they like those. I think that will be very useful.Host:Yeah. That's new ACEC, New York Jay Simson. I'll give him a shout out for putting that together, but it's nice. But yeah, that, that, and Charles, our GC was very, very engaged in getting this thing together. And as you know him, you know, his work, he's very detail oriented I tuned in. But yeah, that's, that's a really good point because one of the things that we always talk about is duty of care and, and that, you know, engineering, shouldn't broach that line into, you know, extending beyond it's core responsibility for the design, because at the end of the day, the, the construction firm should have that responsibility of, of actually producing the design to specification.Karen Erger:So, so you I won't read the entire guide to cause cause people listening to this podcast can go find it, but just touch on a couple high level things just to think about obviously things I would think about are don't don't force employees to go to the job site, obviously sick people shouldn't go, but no one should be forced to go. If they're, if they're not comfortable doing this, do the education that you need to do so that they understand social distancing and other COVID-19 safety guidelines, give them the PPE that they need to be safe on the job site. And I think this is terribly important to empower them to suspend site visits. If when they get there, the situation is not per the COVID-19 plan, or if other concerns exist, they should stay that they're leaving the site state. The reason document that in the email to the project manager and perhaps the client.Karen Erger:Yeah. Nobody should feel forced to do that. And I think it's important to impress that on staff who go to the site because some of them tend to be less experienced staff. They might feel like they have to do it no matter what, it's their job, take one for the team. No, this is about their safety what's best for the firm is that all of their employees, their most precious resources stay safe. And that really needs to be impressed upon them because they want to do their job. They want to do the right thing, but it's important that they know that that's an important part of it. If it's not safe, it's okay to leave.Host:Yeah. And of course, I think I should be imparted at the top down. Right. So the project manager, even, even, you know, leadership at the firm, you know, has to be, yeah, that has to be a kind of a charge given from the top so that the people at the bottom know that they have air cover to make that decision when they have it. And they're empowered to make that choice.Karen Erger:Yeah. You mentioned something earlier. If I can, if I can tell them to this kind of, you didn't, you didn't say stay in your lane, but, but that was kind of what you were saying about, about the contractor is don't, don't mess around in job site safety, do what your, what you're skilled at doing, stay within your skillset. And just going back to what we were talking about about design. I think it's important that design professionals do that too, because there may be aspects of this that are not within a particular design professionals, competence, maybe they will need to retain or recommend that the owner rate retain, for example, an industrial hygienist or whatever like that. It's important to know where your competence stops and were additional help is needed. And I say that mostly because after working with A/E's for 30 years, they want to help the client. And it's important not to let that, that really wonderful desire lead you into taking responsibility for things that you don't have within your professional competence.Host:That's a really good point because you don't want to overextend yourself and again, expose yourself to risk.Karen Erger:Exactly.Host:And the positive on that, it provides the opportunity for firms to enter into strategic partnerships with other disciplines that they otherwise wouldn't do work with. So instead of coming up with an answer on the fly, find somebody who's good at what that, you know, industrial hygiene or something else and, and bring them into the fold.Karen Erger:I definitely see evidence of that happening and would also remind folks that insurance is still important. If a contract is going to flow through us, it's that's time to talk to your broker about, will we be covered for this? If we are sued on a primary basis, is something better to be assigned to the owner and also what insurance does their sub-consultant have. In fact, it might even be important to ask what insurance could our sub-consultant ask. Since we're not talking about the kinds of disciplines that we're used to engaging with this, isn't a matter of a structural engineer, engaging someone else to do a report that they would normally do. This is something a little different and a great time to call on your broker for help.Host:Yeah. I really appreciate you bringing up the the guide. That's you can find that up on the ACEC website -the Coronavirus Resource Page right there in the home, on the home site, you'll see a link to it and a guide version one, because things are changing. So we're going to be updating that a lot. And you brought up a good point, I think is a good way to round everything out is, is really kind of figuring out what you may or may not need. And talking to an expert experts such as yourself, where can people find you? If you are in the A/E industry and you're have these questions and you need some, some counsel on some risk management you know, we're, what's the best way of getting in touch with you or, or your colleagues at Lockton?Karen Erger:Yup. I will answer, anybody's email that at Kerger@lockton.com. That is definitely the best way to get in touch with me these days now that we all duck unfamiliar calls on our phone because they're afraid someone's trying to sell us a used car warranty, but I'd be happy to hear from anyone. One of the best ways that I learn is through our clients and other architects and engineers questions.Host:Well, Karen, I really appreciate you coming on the show. This is where there's a lot to talk about here. And I don't think this is going to be the only conversation we'll have. And you know, as things develop and, and as new information comes out or, or, you know, if there's something that peaks your interest, let us know and we'll have you back on. But for now, we've, we've kind of covered the top line of, of, of kind of risk management in the age of COVID-19. Hopefully it's food for thought for a lot of our member firms and check out the guide that we have, the ACEC Guide to Returning to the Office and the Jobsite. And Karen, you have a great rest of the week happy belated, 4th of July.Karen Erger:And it's been a pleasure. I hope I can come back and talk to you again.Host:Wonderful. We'll have loved to have you back on. And again, this has been ACEC's Engineering Influence podcast brought to you by the ACEC Life Health Trust. We'll see you next time.

Episode 001 | March 06, 2020 Dr. Eric Horvitz is a technical fellow at Microsoft, and is director of Microsoft Research Labs, including research centers in Redmond, Washington, Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York, New York, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bengaluru, India. He is one of the world’s leaders in AI, and a thought leader in the use of AI in the complexity of the real world. On this podcast, we talk to Dr. Horvitz about a wide range of topics, including his thought leadership in AI, his study of AI and its influence on society, the potential and pitfalls of AI, and how useful AI can be in a country like India. Transcript Eric Horvitz: Humans will always want to make connection with humans, sociologists, social workers, physicians, teachers, we’re always going to want to make human connections and have human contacts. I think they’ll be amplified in a world of richer automation so much so that even when machines can generate art and write music, even music with lyrics that might put tear in someone’s eye if they didn’t know it was a machine, that will lead us to say, “Is that written by a human. I want to hear a song sung by a human who experienced something, the way I would experience something, not a machine.” And so I think human touch, human experience, human connection will grow even more important in a world of rising automation and those kinds of tasks and abilities will be even more compensated than they are today. (music plays) Host: Welcome to the Microsoft Research India podcast, where we explore cutting-edge research that’s impacting technology and society. I’m your host, Sridhar Vedantham. Host: Our guest today is Dr. Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and director of the Microsoft Research Labs. It’s tremendously exciting to have him as the first guest on the MSR India podcast because of his stature as a leader in research and his deep understanding of the technical and societal impact of AI. Among the many honors and recognitions Eric has received over the course of his career are the Feigenbaum Prize and the Allen Newell Prize for contributions to AI, and the CHI Academy honor for his work at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction. He has been elected fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for the Advancement of AI , where he also served as president. Eric is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He has served on advisory committees for the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, DARPA, and the Allen Institute for AI. Eric has been deeply involved in studying the influences of AI on people and society, including issues around ethics, law, and safety. He chairs Microsoft’s Aether committee on AI, effects, and ethics in engineering and research. He established the One Hundred Year Study on AI at Stanford University and co-founded the Partnership on AI. Eric received his PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University. On this podcast, we talk to Eric about his journey in Microsoft Research, his own research, the potential and pitfalls he sees in AI, how AI can help in countries like India, and much more.   Host: Eric, welcome to the podcast. Eric Horvitz: It’s an honor to be here. I just heard I am the first interviewee for this new series. Host: Yes, you are, and we are really excited about that. I can’t think of anyone better to do the first podcast of the series with! There’s something I’ve been curious about for a long time. Researchers at Microsoft Research come with extremely impressive academic credentials. It’s always intrigued me that you have a medical degree and also a degree in computer science. What was the thinking behind this and how does one complement the other in the work that you do? Eric Horvitz: One of the deep shared attributes of folks at Microsoft Research and so many of our colleagues doing research in computer science is deep curiosity, and I’ve always been one of these folks that’s said “why” to everything. I’m sure my parents were frustrated with my sequence of whys starting with one question going to another. So I’ve been very curious as an undergraduate. I did deep dives into physics and chemistry. Of course, math to support it all – biology and by the time I was getting ready to go to grad school I really was exploring so many sciences, but the big “why” for me that I could not figure out was the why of human minds, the why of cognition. I just had no intuition as to how the cells, these tangles of the cells that we learn about in biology and neuroscience could have anything to do with my second to second experience as being a human being, and so you know what I have to just spend my graduate years diving into the unknowns about this from the scientific side of things. Of course, many people have provided answers over the centuries- some of the answers are the foundations of religious beliefs of various kinds and religious systems. So I decided to go get an MD-PhD, just why not understand humans deeply and human minds as well as the scientific side of nervous systems, but I was still an arc of learning as I hit grad school at Stanford and it was great to be at Stanford because the medical school was right next to the computer science department. You can literally walk over and I found myself sitting in computer science classes, philosophy classes, the philosophy of mind-oriented classes and cognitive psychology classes and so there to the side of that kind of grad school life and MD-PhD program, there are anatomy classes that’s being socialized into the medical school class, but I was delighted by the pursuit of- you might call it the philosophical and computational side of mind- and eventually I made the jump, the leap. I said “You know what, my pursuit is principles, I think that’s the best hope for building insights about what’s going on” and I turned around those principles into real world problems in particular since that was, had a foot in the medical school, how do we apply these systems in time-critical settings to help emergency room, physicians and trauma surgeons? Time critical action where computer systems had to act quickly, but had to really also act precisely when they maybe didn’t have enough time to think all the way and this led me to what I think is an interesting direction which is models of bounded-rationality which I think describes us all. Host: Let’s jump into a topic that seems to be on everybody’s mind today – AI. Everyone seems to have a different idea about what AI actually is and what it means to them. I also constantly keep coming across people who use AI and the term ML or machine learning as synonyms. What does AI mean to you and do you think there’s a difference between AI and ML? Eric Horvitz: The scientists and engineers that first used the phrase artificial intelligence did so in a beautiful document that’s so well written in terms of the questions it asks that it could be a proposal today to the National Science Foundation, and it would seem modern given that so many the problems have not been solved, but they laid out the vision including the pillars of artificial intelligence. This notion of perception building systems that could recognize or perceive sense in the world. This idea of reasoning with logic or other methods to reason about problems, solve problems, learning how can they become better at what they did with experience with other kinds of sources of information and this final notion they focused on as being very much in the realm of human intelligence language, understanding how to manipulate symbols in streams or sequences to express concepts and use of language. So, learning has always been an important part of artificial intelligence, it’s one of several pillars of work, it’s grown in importance of late so much so that people often write AI/ML to refer to machine learning but it’s one piece and it’s an always been an important piece of artificial intelligence. Host: I think that clarifies the difference between AI and ML. Today, we see AI all around us. What about AI really excites you and what do you think the potential pitfalls of AI could be? Eric Horvitz: So let me first say that AI is a constellation of technologies. It’s not a single technology. Although, these days there’s quite a bit of focus on the ability to learn how to predict or move or solve problems via machine learning analyzing large amounts of data which has become available over the last several decades, when it used to be scarce. I’m most excited about my initial goals to understand human minds. So, whenever I read it a paper on AI or see a talk or see a new theorem being proved my first reaction is, how does it grow my understanding, how does it help to answer the questions that have been long-standing in my mind about the foundations of human cognition? I don’t often say that to anybody but that’s what I’m thinking. Secondly, my sense is what a great endeavor to be pushing your whole life to better understand and comprehend human minds. It’s been a slow slog. However, insights have come about advances and how they relate to those questions but along the way what a fabulous opportunity to apply the latest advances to enhancing the lives of people, to empowering people in new ways and to create new kinds of automation that can lead to new kinds of value, new kinds of experiences for people. The whole notion of augmenting human intellect with machines has been something that’s fascinated me for many decades. So I love the fact that we can now leverage these technologies and apply them even though we’re still very early on in how these ideas relate to what’s going on in our minds. Applications include healthcare. There’s so much to do in healthcare with decreasing the cost of medicine while raising the quality of care. This idea of being able to take large amounts of data to build high quality, high precision diagnostic systems. Systems that can predict outcomes. We just created a system recently for example that can detect when a patient in a hospital is going to crash unexpectedly with organ system failures for example, and that can be used in ways that could alert physicians in advanced, medical teams to be ready to actually save patient’s lives. Even applications that we’re now seeing in daily life like cars that drive themselves. I drive a Tesla and I’ve been enjoying the experience of the semi-automated driving, the system can do. Just seeing how far we’ve gotten in a few years with systems that recognize patterns like the patterns on a road or that recognize objects in its way for automatic braking. These systems can save thousands of lives. I’m not sure about India but I know the United States statistics and there are a little bit more than 40,000 lives lost on the highways in the United States per year. Looking at the traffic outside here in Bangalore, I’m guessing that India is at least up there with tens of thousands of deaths per year. I believe that that AI systems can reduce these numbers of deaths by helping people to drive better even if it’s just in safety related features. Host: The number of fatalities on Indian roads is indeed huge and that’s in fact been one of the motivators for a different research project in the lab on which I hope to do a podcast in the near future. Eric Horvitz: I know it’s the HAMS project. Host: It is the HAMS project and I’m hoping that we can do a podcast with the researchers on that sometime soon. Now, going back to AI, what do you think we need to look out for or be wary of? People, including industry leaders seem to land on various points on a very broad spectrum ranging from “AI is great for humanity” to “AI is going to overpower and subsume the human race at some point of time.” Eric Horvitz: So, what’s interesting to me is that over the last three decades we’ve gone from AI stands for almost implemented, doesn’t really work very well. Have fun, good luck to this idea of just getting things up and running and being so excited there’s no other concerns but to get this thing out the door and have it for example, help physicians diagnose patients more accurately to now, “Wait a minute! We are putting these machines in places that historically have always relied upon human intelligence, as these machines for the first time edge into the realm of human intellects, what are the ethical issues coming to the fore? Are there intrinsic biases in the way data is created or collected, some of which might come from the society’s biases that creates the data? What about the safety issues and the harms that can come from these systems when they make a mistake? When will systems be used in ways that could deny people consequential services like a loan or education because of an unfair decision or a decision that aligns mysteriously or obviously with the way society has worked amplifying deep biases that have come through our history?” These are all concerns that many of us are bringing to light and asking for more resources and attention to focus on and also trying to cool the jets of some enthusiasts who want to just blast ahead and apply these technologies without thinking deeply about the implications, I’d say sometimes the rough edges of these technologies. Now, I’m very optimistic that we will find pathways to getting incredible amounts of value out of these systems when properly applied, but we need to watch out for all sorts of possible adverse effects when we take our AI and throw it into the complexity of the open world outside of our clean laboratories. Host: You’ve teed-up my next question perfectly. Is it incumbent upon large tech companies who are leading the charge as far as AI is concerned to be responsible for what AI is doing, and the ethics and the fairness and all the stuff behind AI which makes it kind of equitable to people at large? Eric Horvitz: It’s a good question. There are different points of view on that question. We’ve heard some company leaders issue policy statements along the lines of “We will produce technologies and make them available and it’s the laws of the country that will help guide how they’re used or regulate what we do. If there are no laws, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be selling something with a focus on profit to our zeal with technology.” Microsoft’s point of view has been that the technology could be created by experts inside its laboratories and by its engineers. Sometimes is getting ahead of where legislation and regulation needs to be and therefore we bear a responsibility as a company in both informing regulatory agencies and the public at large about the potential downsides of technology and appropriate uses and misuses, as well as look carefully at what we do when we actually ship our products or make a cloud service available or build something for a customer. Host: Eric, I know that you personally are deeply involved in thinking through AI and it’s impact on society, how to make it fair, how make it transparent and so on. Could you talk a little bit about that, especially in the context of what Microsoft is doing to ensure that AI is actually good for everybody? Eric Horvitz: You know, these are why this is such a passion for me – I’ve been extremely interested starting with the technical issues which I thought- I think- really deep and fascinating, which is when you build a limited system by definition that’s much simpler than a complex universe that’s going to be immersed in, you take it from the laboratory into the open world. I refer to that as AI in the open world. You learn a lot about the limitations of the AI. You also learn to ask questions and to extend these systems so they’re humble, they understand their limitations, they understand how accurate they are, you get them a level of self-knowledge. This is a whole area of open world intelligence that I think really reads upon some of the early questions for me about what humans are doing, what their minds are doing, and potentially other animals, vertebrates. It started there for me. Back to your question now, we are facing the same kind of things when we take an AI technology and put it in the hands of a judge who might make decisions about criminal justice looking at recommendations based on statistics to help him or her take an action. Now we have to realize we have systems we’re building that work with people. People want explanations. They don’t want to look at a black box with an indicator on it. They will say, why is this system telling me this? So at Microsoft we’ve made significant investments, both in our research team and in our engineering teams and in our policy groups at thinking through details of the problems and solutions when it comes to a set of problems, and I’ll just list a few right now. Safety and robustness of AI systems, transparency and intelligibility of these systems- can they explain themselves, bias and fairness, how can we build systems that are fair along certain dimensions, engineering best practices. Well, what does it mean for a team working with tools to understand how to build a system and maintain it over time so, that it’s trustworthy. Human AI collaboration – what are principles by which we can enable people to better work in a fluid way with systems that might be trying to augment their intelligence such that is a back and forth and understanding of when a system is not confident, for example. Even notions about attention and cognition is, are these systems being used in ways that might be favorable to advertisers, but they’re grabbing your attention and holding them on an application because they’ve learned how to do that mysteriously – should we have a point of view about that? So Microsoft Research has stood up teams looking at these questions. We also have stood up an ethics advisory board that we call the Aether Committee to deliberate and provide advice on hard questions that are coming up across the spectrum of these issues and providing guidance to our senior leadership team at Microsoft in how we do our business. Host: I know you were the co-founder of the Partnership on AI. Can you talk a little bit about that and what it sought to achieve? Eric Horvitz: This vision arose literally at conferences and, in fact, one of the key meetings was at a pub in New York City after meeting at NYU, where several computer scientists got together, all passionate about seeing it go well for artificial intelligence technologies by investing in understanding and addressing some of these rough edges and we decided we could bring together the large IT companies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft to think together about what it might mean to build an organization that was a nonprofit that balanced the IT companies with groups in civil society, academic groups, nonprofit AI research to think through these challenges and come up with best practices in a way that brought the companies together rather than separating them through a competitive spirit. Actually this organization was created by the force of the friendships of AI Scientists, many of whom go back to being in grad school together across many universities, this invisible college of people united in an interesting understanding how to do AI in the open world. Host: Do you think there is a role for governments to play where policies governing AI are concerned, or do you think it’s best left to technology companies, individual thinkers and leaders to figure out what to do with AI? Eric Horvitz: Well, AI is evolving quickly and like other technologies governments have a significant role to play in assuring the safety of these technologies, their fairness, their appropriate uses. I see regulatory activity being of course largely in the hands of governments being advised by leadership in academia and in industry and the public which has a lot to say about these technologies. There’s been quite a bit of interest and activity, some of that is part of the enthusiastic energy, you might say, going into thinking through AI right now. Some people say there’s a hype-cycle that’s leaking everywhere and to all regimes, including governments right now, but it’s great to see various agencies writing documents, asking for advice, looking for sets of principles, publishing principles and engaging multi-stakeholder groups across the world. Host: There’s been a lot of talk and many conversations about the impact that AI can have on the common man. One of the areas of concern with AI spreading is the loss of jobs at a large scale. What’s your opinion on how AI is going to impact jobs? Eric Horvitz: My sense is there’s a lot of uncertainty about this, what kind of jobs will be created, what kinds of jobs will go away. If you take a segment like driving cars, I was surprised at how large a percentage of the US population makes their living driving trucks. Now, what if the long haul parts of truck driving, long highway stretches goes away when it becomes automated, it’s unclear what the ripples of that effect will be on society, on the economy. It’s interesting, there are various studies underway. I was involved in the international academy study looking at the potential effects of new kinds of automation coming via computer science and other related technologies and the results of that analysis was that we’re flying in the dark. We don’t have enough data to make these decisions yet or to make these recommendations or they have understandings about how things are going to go. So, we see people saying things on all sides right now. My own sense is that there’ll be some significant influences of AI on our daily lives and how we make our livings. But I’ll say one thing. One of my expectations and it’s maybe also a hope is that as we see more automation in the world and as that shifts in nature of what we do daily and what were paid to do or compensated to do what we call work, there’ll be certain aspects of human discourse that we simply will learn, for a variety of reasons, that we cannot automate, we aren’t able to automate or we shouldn’t automate, and the way I refer to this as in the midst of the rise of new kinds of automation some of which reading on tasks and abilities we would have in the past assumed was the realm of human intellect will see a concurrent rise of an economy of human around human caring. You think about this, humans will always want to make connection with humans, sociologists, social workers, physicians, teachers, we’re always going to want to make human connections and have human contacts. I think they’ll be amplified in a world of richer automation so much so that even when machines can generate art and write music, even music with lyrics that might put tear in someone’s eye if they didn’t know it was a machine, that will lead us to say, “Is that written by a human. I want to hear a song sung by a human who experienced something, the way I would experience something, not a machine.” And so I think human touch, human experience, human connection will grow even more important in a world of rising automation and those kinds of tasks and abilities will be even more compensated than they are today. So, we’ll see even more jobs in this realm of human caring. Host: Now, switching gears a bit, you’ve been in Microsoft Research for a long time. How have you seen MSR evolve over time and as a leader of the organization, what’s your vision for MSR over the next few years? Eric Horvitz: It’s been such an interesting journey. When I came to Microsoft Research it was 1992, and Rick Rashid and Nathan Myhrvold convinced me to stay along with two colleagues. We just came out of Stanford grad school we had ideas about going into academia. We came up to Microsoft to visit, we thought we were just here for a day to check things out, maybe seven or eight people that were then called Microsoft Research and we said, “Oh come on, please we didn’t really see a big future.” But somehow we took a risk and we loved this mission statement that starts with “Expand the state-of-the-art.” Period. Second part of the mission statement, “Transfer those technologies as fast as possible into real products and services.” Third part of the statement was, “Contribute to the vibrancy of this organization.” I remember seeing in my mind as we committed to doing this, trying it out-  a vision of a lever with the fulcrum at the mountain top in the horizon. And I thought how can we make this company ours, our platform to take our ideas which then were bubbling. We had so many ideas about what we could do with AI from my graduate work and move the world, and that’s always been my sense for what Microsoft Research has been about. It’s a place where the top intellectual talent in the world, top scholars, often with entrepreneurial bents want to get something done can make Microsoft’s their platform for expressing their creativity and having real influence to enhancing the lives of millions of people. Host: Something I’ve heard for many years at Microsoft Research is that finding the right answer is not the biggest thing, what’s important is to ask the right, tough questions. And also that if you succeed in everything you do you are probably not taking enough risks. Does MSR continue to follow these philosophies? Eric Horvitz: Well, I’ve said three things about that. First of all, why should a large company have an organization like Microsoft Research? It’s unique. We don’t see that even in competitors. Most competitors are taking experts if they could attract them and they’re embedding them in product teams. Microsoft has had the foresight and we’re reaching 30 years now since we kicked off Microsoft Research to say, if we take top talent and attract this top talent into the company and we give these people time and we familiarize them with many of our problems and aspirations, they can not only come up with new ideas, out-of-the-box directions, they can also provide new kinds of leadership to the company as a whole, setting its direction, providing a weathervane, looking out to the late-breaking changes on the frontiers of computer science and other sciences and helping to shape Microsoft in the world, versus, for example, helping a specific product team do better with an existing current conception of what a product should be. Host: Do you see this role of Microsoft Research changing over the next few years? Eric Horvitz: Microsoft has changed over its history and one of my interests and my reflections and I shared this in an all-hands meeting just last night with MSR India. In fact, they tried out some new ideas coming out of a retreat that the leadership team from Microsoft Research had in December – just a few months ago, is how might we continue to think and reflect about being the best we can, given who we are. I’ve called it polishing the gem, not breaking it but polishing, buffing it out, thinking about what we can do with it to make ourselves even more effective in the world. One trend we’ve seen at Microsoft is that over the years we’ve gone from Microsoft Research, this separate tower of intellectual depth reaching out into the company in a variety of ways, forming teams, advising, working with outside agencies, with students in the world, with universities to a larger ecosystem of research at Microsoft, where we have pockets or advanced technology groups around the company doing great work and in some ways doing the kinds of things that Microsoft Research used to be doing, or solely doing at Microsoft in some ways. So we see that upping the game as to what a center of excellence should be doing. I’m just asking the question right now, what are our deep strengths, this notion of deep scholarship, deep ability, how can we best leverage that for the world and for the company, and how can we work with other teams in a larger R&D ecosystem, which has come to be at Microsoft? Host: You’ve been at the India Lab for a couple of days now. How has the trip been and what do you think of the work that the lab in India is doing? Eric Horvitz: You know we just hit 15 here – 15 years old so this lab is just getting out of adolescence- that’s a teenager. It seems like just yesterday when I was sitting with the Anandan, the first director of this lab looking at a one-pager that he had written about “Standing up a lab in India.” I was sitting in Redmond’s and having coffee and I tell you that was a fast 15 years, but it’s been great to see what this lab became and what it does. Each of our labs is unique in so many ways typically based on the culture it’s immersed in. The India lab is famous for its deep theoretical chops and fabulous theorists here, the best in the world. This interdisciplinary spirit of taking theory and melding it with real-world challenges to create incredible new kinds of services and software. One of the marquee areas of this lab has been this notion of taking a hard look and insightful gaze at emerging markets, Indian culture all up and thinking about how computing and computing platforms and communications can be harnessed in a variety of ways to enhance the lives of people, how can they be better educated, how can we make farms, agriculture be more efficient and productive, how can we think about new economic models, new kinds of jobs, how can we leverage new notions of what it means to do freelance or gig work. So the lab has its own feel, its own texture, and when I immerse myself in it for a few days I just love getting familiar with the latest new hires, the new research fellows, the young folks coming out of undergrad that are just bright-eyed and inject energy into this place. So I find Microsoft Research India to have a unique combination of talented researchers and engineers that brings to the table some of the deepest theory in the world’s theoretical understandings of hard computer science, including challenges with understanding the foundations of AI systems. There’s a lot of work going on right now. Machine learning as we discussed earlier, but we don’t have a deep understanding, for example, of how these neural network systems work and why they’re working so well and I just came out of a meeting where folks in this lab have come up with some of the first insights into why some of these procedures are working so well to understand that and understand their limitations and which ways to go and how to guide that, how to navigate these problems is rare and it takes a deep focus and ability to understand the complexity arising in these representations and methods. At the same time, we have the same kind of focus and intensity with a gaze at culture at emerging markets. There are some grand challenges with understanding the role of technology in society when it comes to a complex civilization, or I should say set of civilizations like we see in India today. This mix of futuristic, out-of-the-box advanced technology with rural farms, classical ways of doing things, meshing the old and the new and so many differences as you move from province to province, state to state, and these sociologists and practitioners that are looking carefully at ethnography, epidemiology, sociology, coupled with computer science are doing fabulous things here at the Microsoft Research India Lab. Even coming up with new thinking about how we can mesh opportunistic Wi-Fi with sneakers, Sneakernet and people walking around to share large amounts of data. I don’t think that project would have arisen anywhere, but at this lab. Host: Right. So you’ve again teed-up my next question perfectly. As you said India’s a very complex place in terms of societal inequities and wealth inequalities. Eric Horvitz: And technical inequality, it’s amazing how different things are from place to place. Host: That’s right. So, what do you think India can do to utilize AI better and do you think India is a place that can generate new innovative kinds of AI? Eric Horvitz: Well, absolutely, the latter is going to be true, because some of the best talent in computer science in the world is being educated and is working in this, in this country, so of course we will see fabulous things, fabulous innovations being originating in India in both in the universities and in research labs, including Microsoft Research. As to how to harness these technologies, you know, it takes a special skill to look at the currently available capabilities in a constellation of technologies and to think deeply about how to take them into the open world into the real world, the complex messy world. It often takes insights as well as a very caring team of people to stick with an idea and to try things out and to watch it and to nurture it and to involve multiple stakeholders in watching over time for example, even how a deployment works, gathering data about it and so on. So, I think some very promising areas include healthcare. There are some sets of illnesses that are low-hanging fruit for early detection and diagnosis, understanding where we could intervene early on by looking at pre-diabetes states for example and guiding patients early on to getting care to not go into more serious pathophysiologies, understanding when someone needs to be hospitalized, how long they should be hospitalized in a resource limited realm, we have to sort of selectively allocate resources, doing them more optimally can lead to great effects. This idea of understanding education, how to educate people, how to engage them over time, diagnosing which students might drop out early on and alerting teachers to invest more effort, understanding when students don’t understand something and automatically helping them get through a hard concept. We’re seeing interesting breakthroughs now in tutoring systems that can detect these states. Transportation – I mean, it’s funny we build systems in the United States and this what I was doing to predict traffic and to route cars ideally. Then we come to India and we look at the streets here we say, “I don’t think so, we need a different approach,” but it just raises the stakes on how we can apply AI in new ways. So, the big pillars are education, healthcare, transportation, even understanding how to guide resources and allocations in the economy. I think we’ll see big effects of insightful applications in this country. Host: This has been a very interesting conversation. Before we finish do you want to leave us with some final thoughts? Eric Horvitz: Maybe I’ll make a call out to young folks who are thinking about their careers and what they might want to do and to assure them that it’s worth it. It’s worth investing in taking your classes seriously, in asking lots of questions, in having your curiosities addressed by your teachers and your colleagues, family. There’s so much excitement and fun in doing research and development, in being able to build things and feel them and see how they work in the world, and maybe mostly being able to take ideas into reality in ways that you can see the output of your efforts and ideas really delivering value to people in the world. Host: That was a great conversation, Eric. Thank you! Eric Horvitz: Thank you, it’s been fun.

Due to advances in imaging scans, kidney cancer often is detected by chance and early in the disease process. Dr. Ross Krasnow discusses minimally invasive robotic surgery and other treatment options for localized kidney cancer.   TRANSCRIPT Intro: MedStar Washington Hospital Center presents Medical Intel where our healthcare team shares health and wellness insights and gives you the inside story on advances in medicine. Host: Thanks for joining us today. We’re talking to Dr. Ross Krasnow, a urologist who specializes in urologic oncology at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Welcome, Dr. Krasnow. Dr. Krasnow: It’s great to be here. Host: Today we’re talking about management options for localized kidney cancer and, in particular, the minimally invasive surgery options available to some patients. Dr. Krasnow, what do you mean when you say localized kidney cancer? Dr. Krasnow: So, localized kidney cancer is cancer that originates from the kidney but is confined to within the kidney or the fat surrounding the kidney or adjacent structures surrounding the kidney. It can also be in some of the lymph nodes, but it has not yet spread to far away lymph nodes and other organs that are not directly touching the kidney. Host: How common is kidney cancer, in general, and then how common is localized kidney cancer? Dr. Krasnow: So, kidney cancer is the seventh most common cancer generally, in men and in women. When it presents, most of the time it is localized at the time of presentation. And that’s really because of a stage migration that’s occurred over the years. The kidney lies in the back of the body, and as you can imagine, before we had advanced imaging, it was only picked up when it became symptomatic and at that point it was very large, it would cause pain, it would cause blood in the urine, and it had often already spread at the time of presentation. Now there’s been a stage migration and what that means is often it is picked up incidentally. A patient has imaging such as an ultrasound or a cat scan for another purpose. They have gallstones, they have vague pain, they have indigestion. And they end up getting some sort of imaging and that imaging just happens to show a small renal mass. More and more we’re picking this up when it’s asymptomatic and confined to the kidney, and it’s easier to treat. Host: So, an individual could come in thinking that maybe they’re just having some back pain and they get an MRI for example, and it turns out that it’s cancer. What is somebody’s reaction to something like that? Dr. Krasnow: Just to be clear, often when they get that MRI for back pain, the pain is not even related to the cancer; it’s completely unrelated. I think most patients, when they learn that they have a renal mass, are very nervous. And I hope that when I see them and talk to them I can reassure them that they’re going to be fine, most all of the time. Especially when these tumors are small. They’re very easy to manage and very rarely life-threatening until they get to a certain size or demonstrate evidence of spread. Host: So, does kidney cancer tend to strike certain individuals or certain demographics of people more often than others? Dr. Krasnow: It’s actually quite sporadic. There’s a slightly increased risk in patients who are smokers, patients who are obese and have diabetes. Certainly, there’s an increased risk in more unusual patient populations such as those with certain genetic predispositions or those on dialysis. But I would say, for the most part, the vast majority of patients I see it in, it‘s completely sporadic. Host: So, if an individual is diagnosed with a localized kidney cancer - so that fairly contained cancer - what types of treatment might a doctor recommend? Um, you know, traditionally they talk about active surveillance, they talk about radiofrequency. Can you talk about those common types a little bit, and then some of those minimally invasive options? Dr. Krasnow: When I first see a patient that comes to me with a renal mass, I’m actually reluctant to call it a cancer right away. And that’s because one third, one out of three patients with a small renal mass less than, say, three or four cm, don’t actually have cancer. They just have a growth on the kidney. The other two thirds of those patients do have a cancer, but it actually tends to not be very aggressive, and these cancers are not very aggressive until they’re over, say, three or four centimeters. Once I frame it like that, patients are immediately reassured. And then I talk about some of the management options. Active surveillance is a great option for certain patients. Even renal masses less than three cm have almost no metastatic potential. And that ultimately is what we worry about, not actually having a tumor on the kidney but having a tumor on the kidney that has the potential to spread. Knowing that allows us to offer active surveillance for patients. That means that we watch the mass every, say, three to six months for some time, maybe extend that out to every year, and if the tumor doesn’t seem to be growing, we may not need to treat them at all. This is a really great option for patients who are older, have a lot of other medical problems, or, for whatever reason, are reluctant to have surgery. Maybe they have just one kidney, and were very concerned about preserving their kidney function. When the tumors are over three or four cm, I do tend to recommend some form of treatment, although that’s not always the case. And, of course, it’s not realistic to watch tumors in patients who are very young. You’re not going to watch a tumor in a thirty-year-old for forty years. So, when we talk about the treatment options, again, there are many.  One is often we don’t even have to biopsy these masses but sometimes we do biopsy them to confirm that they’re a cancer.  The treatment options from the least invasive to the most invasive, would be having our colleagues in radiology simply put a needle in it, and through that needle they can burn or freeze the mass. That is called radiofrequency ablation when you burn it or cryoablation when you freeze it. Again, that’s a great option for patients who are older, have some other medical problems. It’s also a great option for tumors that are small and in a location where the damage from freezing it or burning it would be confined to just the cancer and not damage other structures that are nearby. The long-term results of cryoablation and radiofrequency ablation are not as clear. The short-term results show very good efficacy, maybe just a little bit less than radical surgery—but not by much.  There are certainly situations where ablative techniques are not appropriate. If the tumor is large, is in the middle of the kidney close to blood vessels, close to adjacent organs such as the pancreas, the duodenum, the liver, if it’s close to where the urine collects in the kidney - those techniques aren’t controlled enough.  So, at that point, we do recommend radical surgery. Also, patients who want the most effective treatment, the gold standard, we recommend radical surgery. Most often for a small renal mass that is a partial nephrectomy. So, that’s removing the part of the kidney that has the cancer in it while leaving the rest of the healthy kidney behind. In the past, we did too many radical nephrectomies. That’s when we remove the whole kidney for small renal masses. It was really unnecessary. While effective as a cancer therapy, it hurt patients in terms of their renal function, and we really concentrate on maximizing and preserving renal function now. Host: When you have those treatments such as radiofrequency or cryoablation, those very focused and targeted type therapies, do you also have to undergo chemo or radiation, or any other subsequent treatment? Dr. Krasnow: It actually is one of the few cancers that doesn’t respond well to chemotherapy at all.  And agents for the management of kidney cancer tend to work on the immune system. They also tend to be reserved for patients with metastatic disease or disease that’s already spread. Radiotherapy is ok for kidney cancer. The problem is that it damages the rest of the kidney. So, for localized kidney cancer, chemotherapy and radiotherapy are not…are not needed and they’re not great options. Host: So, what about something like immunotherapy? That’s…that’s becoming more and more common for so many types of cancers. Could you talk about that a little? Dr. Krasnow: Yes. So, immunotherapy for kidney cancer has made a lot of waves lately as second line therapy for patients with metastatic disease who have failed first line therapy. There are investigational studies looking at it for localized kidney cancer. Those would be patients who have a very large mass that may not be able to be treated surgically, and you may consider giving them some sort of therapy before surgery to see if you can shrink it to the point where surgery is a viable option. The other space that it’s being looked at is in patients with high-risk localized cancer, so they had surgery but the tumor appeared very aggressive, and the risk of recurrence is high. In that…those are patients you may consider giving an agent such as an immunotherapy agent right after surgery, even if they don’t have evidence of metastatic disease. Those two settings are completely investigational right now and are not the standard of care. Host: Let’s go back and talk about those surgical options.  So, could you elaborate a little bit further on partial nephrectomy? Dr. Krasnow: So, partial nephrectomy is when we remove the part of the kidney that just has the cancer in it, leaving the rest of the healthy kidney behind. This is in order to preserve renal function and also to maximize cancer control, arguably better than the ablative techniques, such as cryoablation and radiofrequency ablation. The great progress that we’ve made in partial nephrectomy is that we’re now able to do it in a minimally invasive fashion, specifically using robotic laparoscopy. This allows us to make small keyhole incisions, get to the kidney, remove the part of the kidney that has the cancer in it using excellent visualization that the robotic optics provides for us, and then reconstruct the kidney afterwards, to close up all the vessels, and to close up where the urine drains out, in order to achieve a good outcome for the patient. And we can now approach the kidney from the front or from the back, which is helpful for patients who have a tumor in the back of the kidney or for patients who have had prior abdominal surgery where the abdominal cavity may be very scarred and adhesed. Both of these techniques are also extremely good for patients with obesity, because otherwise an open incision would be very large, painful, and lead to a longer recovery. Host: So, when you’re talking keyhole incisions, about what size is that? Could you give a visual? Dr. Krasnow: The incisions are between half and one centimeter. Host: And how does that work when you’re going in through such a small incision - how are you able to remove part of an organ? Dr. Krasnow: So, we have a camera that has 3-dimensional vision. When we’re doing the surgery, we can actually get depth perception. And, the instruments we place are wristed, so we get more dexterity than we would otherwise through what we would call straight laparoscopy. The last option for localized cancer, when we can’t spare the kidney, we do have to often remove the whole kidney, and maybe remove some of the lymph nodes around the kidney, and we’ve also made advances in minimally invasive techniques for more advanced localized kidney cancer. When kidney cancer that’s localized is very advanced, it can even extend into big vessels within the body, and traditionally that type of surgery would be approached open in order to perform a vascular operation where you’re not only removing the kidney, but you’re removing tumor that’s within blood vessels. This can now be done oftentimes using the robotic platform as well. So, whereas patients would be staying in the hospital for a week or two after surgery with a prolonged convalescence, they can go home in a day or two with very little blood loss. Host: So, when you approach a patient who you’ve determined needs surgery for their kidney cancer and you say, “We’re gonna offer you this robotic treatment method,” what’s their reaction, or what questions do they usually have? Dr. Krasnow: Most patients are just interested in how long they’re going to be in the hospital for and how long it’s going to take them to recover. And also, they want a treatment option that’s going to offer the best chance at cure. And I tell them that the robotic partial nephrectomy or a minimally invasive radical nephrectomy is the best way to achieve cure but also provides them to have a fairly rapid recovery. Host: What does that recovery time look like in comparison to that traditional open surgery? Dr. Krasnow: So, the traditional open surgery, in order to get to the kidney, we would have to make a very large incision in the front or the side of the patient, have to go through many layers of muscle, and sew that back together. Patients after were extremely sore, they would have difficulty walking and breathing afterwards because of the soreness. Also, during the surgery there was an increased risk for blood loss and other complications. Because we’re making small keyhole incisions, the patients have very controllable pain after surgery. They can restart their diet much earlier, the next day really. Most patients can go home one or two days after surgery compared to staying in the hospital for a week or longer, and they can get back to work much quicker. Host: What sort of, uh, restrictions at home or restrictions at work would an individual have after that minimally invasive surgery? Dr. Krasnow: So, after surgery, actually the day after surgery, we want them up walking, moving around, sitting, eating, trying to get back to as much normal functioning as possible. The only thing I ask the patients not to do for a few weeks after surgery is to avoid really heavy straining, heavy lifting, running, strenuous exercise, swimming - things like that, but for the most part they can go about their day when they get home. Host: What are some of those other benefits for the patients or for their caregivers to minimally invasive surgery? Dr. Krasnow: For some people, cosmesis matters. And the small incisions are much more cosmetically pleasing than the large incisions we made in the past. So, for certain patients who are looking to go swimming that summer and want to wear a swimsuit, you can hardly ever tell that they had surgery. I think that technology is even going to get better. Host: Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Krasnow. Dr. Krasnow: Thank you so much for having me. Conclusion: Thanks for listening to Medical Intel with MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Find more podcasts from our healthcare team by visiting medstarwashington.org/podcast or subscribing in iTunes or iHeartRadio.

Panel: Aaron Frost Brian Love Special Guest: Amir Tugendhaft In this episode, Aaron and Brian talk with Amir Tugendhaft who is a web developer who is located in Israel. He finds much gratification developing and building things from scratch. Check out today’s episode where Aaron, Brian, and Amir talk about just that. Other topics include UI Design, Flexbox, UX design, PrimeNG, and ag-Grid. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:52 – Host: Welcome! Today’s panel is myself, Brian, and our guest is Amir Tugendhaft! 1:13 – Guest: I am a developer and experience with Angular and React. 1:56 – Host: You spend your days/nights there? 2:03 – Panel: He is committed. 2:08 – Host: I am going to back up a second, and Brian could you please introduce yourself, please? 2:26 – Brian: I am the CETO at an Angular consulting firm (Denver, CO). We have the pleasure with working with Aaron from time-to-time. My Twitter handle is @brian_love – check it out! 2:52 – Host: What is CETO stand for? 2:59 – Brian answers the question. Brian: I oversee the crew among other things. 3:31 – Host: What do you want to talk about today, Amir? You are the guest of honor today! 3:40 – Guest. 4:00 – Host: That is a lot of information – that might be more than 1 episode. We have to stay focused! 4:14 – Host: I read one of your recent blogs about Cross Filled Violators. I met you through your blog before we did the Host: Give us your own ideas about starting your own app. 4:50 – Guest answers the question. 6:17 – Host: I am biased. But here is a fact. I used to work on a large team (60 people) and everyone committing to the same page app. We were using Angular.js 1.5, which I think they are still using that. I know that it worked but it wasn’t the easiest or fastest one to maintain, but it worked. 7:05 – Brian. 7:10 – Host: What are you trying to do? React doesn’t fulfill that need. I think you are being hyperballic and using extreme cases as the norm. Let’s be honest: we do cool stuff with jQuery plugins when we didn’t have a framework. When they say that the framework is stopping them then I say: I agree to disagree. 8:00 – Host: What do you think, Amir? 8:04 – Guest: I don’t have preferences. I try to build applications through the technologies and create components and simple applications. 8:30 – Brian. 8:33 – Guest: You create the component, and then... 9:21 – Brian: You don’t have to have a template file and another file – right? 9:35 – Guest. 9:48 – Host: I do in-line styles and in-line templates. One thing I learned from React is that I like my HTML, style and code. I like it being the same file as my component. I like that about that: I like single file components. This promotes getting frustrated if it gets too big. Yeah if it’s more than 500 lines than you have to simplify. That’s one of the things that l like. 10:47 – Brian: Modules versus... 10:55 – Guest. 11:07 – Host: I think in React and Vue you have the word module but in JavaScript you have a file that exports... 11:26 – Host: I have my opinion here and talking with Joe. He made a good point: at a certain level the frontend frameworks are the same. You could be doing different things but they basically do the same thing. 13:57 – Guest: Basically what that means is that the technology used it will do the same thing. Your patterns and practices are huge. 14:17 – Brian: If you are talking about the 3 popular frameworks out there – they are basically doing the same thing. I like Angular a little big more, though. Like you said, Aaron, people tend to pick the same one. I like the opinionated things about Angular. You get properties, components or called props or inputs you are getting a lot of the same features. It comes down to your personal preference. 15:31 – Host: What else Amir? 15:35 – Guest: Let’s talk about the UI. 16:05 – Brian. 16:08 – Guest asks a question. 16:25 – Brian: How have you tackled this problem? 16:34 – Guest: I kind of ran with it. If there wasn’t something that I liked I started from scratch, because it really didn’t feel right. 16:51 – Brian: I am an enemy of starting over type of thing. You have a lot of engineers who START projects, and they can say that they start this piece, but the experts and choice team members have what it takes to ship a feature. I mean fully ship it, not just 80%, but also the final 20%. I think it takes a lot of pose decision making to say I want to rewrite it but not right now. I still need to ship this code. I have always been a bigger fan as not rewriting as much as possible; however, if you started with good patterns then that’s true, but if you are starting off with bad patterns then maybe yes. I like that opinion b/c you have to start right. Brian: How do you do your CSS? 19:05 – Guest. 19:52 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 20:30 – Brian: How do you make those decisions, Amir? 20:39 – Guest: I see something that I like and ask myself how do I apply this to my design and I start scaling things. 21:50 – Host: Are you using a tool like Sketch for your initial UI design? 22:05 – Guest. 22:54 – Host: I worked on a project where the client had a designer (UX). 24:00 – Host and Guest go back-and-forth. 24:51 – Host: I am sure it’s all about the quality from your designer, too. Hopefully it works well for you and it’s quality. 25:18 – Host: There is a lot to building an app from scratch. I am not a good designer. I am not a designer – I mean straight-up. I got nothing. I appreciate team members that can do that. 26:06 – Guest: Do you write...? 26:35 – Host: Only on the most recent project. The designer didn’t own the HTML CSS but he initially wrote it and then gave it to me and now I own it, and it’s in components. If he wants updates then I have to go and make changes b/c he doesn’t know Angular. If it’s a sketch or a PNG you have to make it look like that. That’s what most of my career has been. Host: HTML and CSS got me 762x easier once Flexbox came around! I know there is a decimal there! 28:23 – Host talks about Flexbox some more. 28:42 – Guest asks a question. 28:50 – Host: I suppose if I really had heavy needs for a table then I would try CSS grid could solve some problems. I might just use a styled table. 29:12 – Brian: ag-Grid or something else. 29:21 – Host: On this recent project...I’ve used in-house design and other things. If I ever needed a table it was there. I don’t rebuild components b/c that can get expensive for me. 30:50 – Brian: Accessibility. 31:00 – Host: Your upgrade just got 10x harder b/c you own the component loop. I really don’t build tables or drop-downs. Only way is if I really need to build it for a specific request. 31:30 – Brian. 31:58 – Host: Let me give you an example. You can think I am crazy, but a designer gave me a drop-down but he told me to use PrimeNG. I had the chose of building my own drop-down or the designer has to accept whatever they gave him. I made the UI make what he wanted and I made the drop-down zero capacity and then... Host: When you click on what you see you are clicking on the... Host: Does that make sense? 33:35 – Guest. 33:50 – Host. 34:25 – Brian: That is interesting; remember when... 34:58 – Host: We will send this episode to Jeremy – come on Jeremy! Any last ideas? Let’s move onto picks! 35:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-day free trial! END – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular React C# What is a UX Design? UI Design Flexbox Sketch ag-Grid PrimeNG Brian Love’s Twitter Aaron Frost’s Medium Amir’s Medium Amir’s Twitter Amir’s GitHub Amir’s LinkedIn Amir’s Facebook Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Aaron Movie: “A Star Is Born” Concept - Model Driven Forms Amir Puppeteer Arrow Function Converter Brian TV Series: “The 100” Angular Schematics

Panel: Aaron Frost Brian Love Special Guest: Amir Tugendhaft In this episode, Aaron and Brian talk with Amir Tugendhaft who is a web developer who is located in Israel. He finds much gratification developing and building things from scratch. Check out today’s episode where Aaron, Brian, and Amir talk about just that. Other topics include UI Design, Flexbox, UX design, PrimeNG, and ag-Grid. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:52 – Host: Welcome! Today’s panel is myself, Brian, and our guest is Amir Tugendhaft! 1:13 – Guest: I am a developer and experience with Angular and React. 1:56 – Host: You spend your days/nights there? 2:03 – Panel: He is committed. 2:08 – Host: I am going to back up a second, and Brian could you please introduce yourself, please? 2:26 – Brian: I am the CETO at an Angular consulting firm (Denver, CO). We have the pleasure with working with Aaron from time-to-time. My Twitter handle is @brian_love – check it out! 2:52 – Host: What is CETO stand for? 2:59 – Brian answers the question. Brian: I oversee the crew among other things. 3:31 – Host: What do you want to talk about today, Amir? You are the guest of honor today! 3:40 – Guest. 4:00 – Host: That is a lot of information – that might be more than 1 episode. We have to stay focused! 4:14 – Host: I read one of your recent blogs about Cross Filled Violators. I met you through your blog before we did the Host: Give us your own ideas about starting your own app. 4:50 – Guest answers the question. 6:17 – Host: I am biased. But here is a fact. I used to work on a large team (60 people) and everyone committing to the same page app. We were using Angular.js 1.5, which I think they are still using that. I know that it worked but it wasn’t the easiest or fastest one to maintain, but it worked. 7:05 – Brian. 7:10 – Host: What are you trying to do? React doesn’t fulfill that need. I think you are being hyperballic and using extreme cases as the norm. Let’s be honest: we do cool stuff with jQuery plugins when we didn’t have a framework. When they say that the framework is stopping them then I say: I agree to disagree. 8:00 – Host: What do you think, Amir? 8:04 – Guest: I don’t have preferences. I try to build applications through the technologies and create components and simple applications. 8:30 – Brian. 8:33 – Guest: You create the component, and then... 9:21 – Brian: You don’t have to have a template file and another file – right? 9:35 – Guest. 9:48 – Host: I do in-line styles and in-line templates. One thing I learned from React is that I like my HTML, style and code. I like it being the same file as my component. I like that about that: I like single file components. This promotes getting frustrated if it gets too big. Yeah if it’s more than 500 lines than you have to simplify. That’s one of the things that l like. 10:47 – Brian: Modules versus... 10:55 – Guest. 11:07 – Host: I think in React and Vue you have the word module but in JavaScript you have a file that exports... 11:26 – Host: I have my opinion here and talking with Joe. He made a good point: at a certain level the frontend frameworks are the same. You could be doing different things but they basically do the same thing. 13:57 – Guest: Basically what that means is that the technology used it will do the same thing. Your patterns and practices are huge. 14:17 – Brian: If you are talking about the 3 popular frameworks out there – they are basically doing the same thing. I like Angular a little big more, though. Like you said, Aaron, people tend to pick the same one. I like the opinionated things about Angular. You get properties, components or called props or inputs you are getting a lot of the same features. It comes down to your personal preference. 15:31 – Host: What else Amir? 15:35 – Guest: Let’s talk about the UI. 16:05 – Brian. 16:08 – Guest asks a question. 16:25 – Brian: How have you tackled this problem? 16:34 – Guest: I kind of ran with it. If there wasn’t something that I liked I started from scratch, because it really didn’t feel right. 16:51 – Brian: I am an enemy of starting over type of thing. You have a lot of engineers who START projects, and they can say that they start this piece, but the experts and choice team members have what it takes to ship a feature. I mean fully ship it, not just 80%, but also the final 20%. I think it takes a lot of pose decision making to say I want to rewrite it but not right now. I still need to ship this code. I have always been a bigger fan as not rewriting as much as possible; however, if you started with good patterns then that’s true, but if you are starting off with bad patterns then maybe yes. I like that opinion b/c you have to start right. Brian: How do you do your CSS? 19:05 – Guest. 19:52 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 20:30 – Brian: How do you make those decisions, Amir? 20:39 – Guest: I see something that I like and ask myself how do I apply this to my design and I start scaling things. 21:50 – Host: Are you using a tool like Sketch for your initial UI design? 22:05 – Guest. 22:54 – Host: I worked on a project where the client had a designer (UX). 24:00 – Host and Guest go back-and-forth. 24:51 – Host: I am sure it’s all about the quality from your designer, too. Hopefully it works well for you and it’s quality. 25:18 – Host: There is a lot to building an app from scratch. I am not a good designer. I am not a designer – I mean straight-up. I got nothing. I appreciate team members that can do that. 26:06 – Guest: Do you write...? 26:35 – Host: Only on the most recent project. The designer didn’t own the HTML CSS but he initially wrote it and then gave it to me and now I own it, and it’s in components. If he wants updates then I have to go and make changes b/c he doesn’t know Angular. If it’s a sketch or a PNG you have to make it look like that. That’s what most of my career has been. Host: HTML and CSS got me 762x easier once Flexbox came around! I know there is a decimal there! 28:23 – Host talks about Flexbox some more. 28:42 – Guest asks a question. 28:50 – Host: I suppose if I really had heavy needs for a table then I would try CSS grid could solve some problems. I might just use a styled table. 29:12 – Brian: ag-Grid or something else. 29:21 – Host: On this recent project...I’ve used in-house design and other things. If I ever needed a table it was there. I don’t rebuild components b/c that can get expensive for me. 30:50 – Brian: Accessibility. 31:00 – Host: Your upgrade just got 10x harder b/c you own the component loop. I really don’t build tables or drop-downs. Only way is if I really need to build it for a specific request. 31:30 – Brian. 31:58 – Host: Let me give you an example. You can think I am crazy, but a designer gave me a drop-down but he told me to use PrimeNG. I had the chose of building my own drop-down or the designer has to accept whatever they gave him. I made the UI make what he wanted and I made the drop-down zero capacity and then... Host: When you click on what you see you are clicking on the... Host: Does that make sense? 33:35 – Guest. 33:50 – Host. 34:25 – Brian: That is interesting; remember when... 34:58 – Host: We will send this episode to Jeremy – come on Jeremy! Any last ideas? Let’s move onto picks! 35:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-day free trial! END – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular React C# What is a UX Design? UI Design Flexbox Sketch ag-Grid PrimeNG Brian Love’s Twitter Aaron Frost’s Medium Amir’s Medium Amir’s Twitter Amir’s GitHub Amir’s LinkedIn Amir’s Facebook Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Aaron Movie: “A Star Is Born” Concept - Model Driven Forms Amir Puppeteer Arrow Function Converter Brian TV Series: “The 100” Angular Schematics

Panel: Aaron Frost Brian Love Special Guest: Amir Tugendhaft In this episode, Aaron and Brian talk with Amir Tugendhaft who is a web developer who is located in Israel. He finds much gratification developing and building things from scratch. Check out today’s episode where Aaron, Brian, and Amir talk about just that. Other topics include UI Design, Flexbox, UX design, PrimeNG, and ag-Grid. Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: AngularBootCamp.Com 0:52 – Host: Welcome! Today’s panel is myself, Brian, and our guest is Amir Tugendhaft! 1:13 – Guest: I am a developer and experience with Angular and React. 1:56 – Host: You spend your days/nights there? 2:03 – Panel: He is committed. 2:08 – Host: I am going to back up a second, and Brian could you please introduce yourself, please? 2:26 – Brian: I am the CETO at an Angular consulting firm (Denver, CO). We have the pleasure with working with Aaron from time-to-time. My Twitter handle is @brian_love – check it out! 2:52 – Host: What is CETO stand for? 2:59 – Brian answers the question. Brian: I oversee the crew among other things. 3:31 – Host: What do you want to talk about today, Amir? You are the guest of honor today! 3:40 – Guest. 4:00 – Host: That is a lot of information – that might be more than 1 episode. We have to stay focused! 4:14 – Host: I read one of your recent blogs about Cross Filled Violators. I met you through your blog before we did the Host: Give us your own ideas about starting your own app. 4:50 – Guest answers the question. 6:17 – Host: I am biased. But here is a fact. I used to work on a large team (60 people) and everyone committing to the same page app. We were using Angular.js 1.5, which I think they are still using that. I know that it worked but it wasn’t the easiest or fastest one to maintain, but it worked. 7:05 – Brian. 7:10 – Host: What are you trying to do? React doesn’t fulfill that need. I think you are being hyperballic and using extreme cases as the norm. Let’s be honest: we do cool stuff with jQuery plugins when we didn’t have a framework. When they say that the framework is stopping them then I say: I agree to disagree. 8:00 – Host: What do you think, Amir? 8:04 – Guest: I don’t have preferences. I try to build applications through the technologies and create components and simple applications. 8:30 – Brian. 8:33 – Guest: You create the component, and then... 9:21 – Brian: You don’t have to have a template file and another file – right? 9:35 – Guest. 9:48 – Host: I do in-line styles and in-line templates. One thing I learned from React is that I like my HTML, style and code. I like it being the same file as my component. I like that about that: I like single file components. This promotes getting frustrated if it gets too big. Yeah if it’s more than 500 lines than you have to simplify. That’s one of the things that l like. 10:47 – Brian: Modules versus... 10:55 – Guest. 11:07 – Host: I think in React and Vue you have the word module but in JavaScript you have a file that exports... 11:26 – Host: I have my opinion here and talking with Joe. He made a good point: at a certain level the frontend frameworks are the same. You could be doing different things but they basically do the same thing. 13:57 – Guest: Basically what that means is that the technology used it will do the same thing. Your patterns and practices are huge. 14:17 – Brian: If you are talking about the 3 popular frameworks out there – they are basically doing the same thing. I like Angular a little big more, though. Like you said, Aaron, people tend to pick the same one. I like the opinionated things about Angular. You get properties, components or called props or inputs you are getting a lot of the same features. It comes down to your personal preference. 15:31 – Host: What else Amir? 15:35 – Guest: Let’s talk about the UI. 16:05 – Brian. 16:08 – Guest asks a question. 16:25 – Brian: How have you tackled this problem? 16:34 – Guest: I kind of ran with it. If there wasn’t something that I liked I started from scratch, because it really didn’t feel right. 16:51 – Brian: I am an enemy of starting over type of thing. You have a lot of engineers who START projects, and they can say that they start this piece, but the experts and choice team members have what it takes to ship a feature. I mean fully ship it, not just 80%, but also the final 20%. I think it takes a lot of pose decision making to say I want to rewrite it but not right now. I still need to ship this code. I have always been a bigger fan as not rewriting as much as possible; however, if you started with good patterns then that’s true, but if you are starting off with bad patterns then maybe yes. I like that opinion b/c you have to start right. Brian: How do you do your CSS? 19:05 – Guest. 19:52 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 20:30 – Brian: How do you make those decisions, Amir? 20:39 – Guest: I see something that I like and ask myself how do I apply this to my design and I start scaling things. 21:50 – Host: Are you using a tool like Sketch for your initial UI design? 22:05 – Guest. 22:54 – Host: I worked on a project where the client had a designer (UX). 24:00 – Host and Guest go back-and-forth. 24:51 – Host: I am sure it’s all about the quality from your designer, too. Hopefully it works well for you and it’s quality. 25:18 – Host: There is a lot to building an app from scratch. I am not a good designer. I am not a designer – I mean straight-up. I got nothing. I appreciate team members that can do that. 26:06 – Guest: Do you write...? 26:35 – Host: Only on the most recent project. The designer didn’t own the HTML CSS but he initially wrote it and then gave it to me and now I own it, and it’s in components. If he wants updates then I have to go and make changes b/c he doesn’t know Angular. If it’s a sketch or a PNG you have to make it look like that. That’s what most of my career has been. Host: HTML and CSS got me 762x easier once Flexbox came around! I know there is a decimal there! 28:23 – Host talks about Flexbox some more. 28:42 – Guest asks a question. 28:50 – Host: I suppose if I really had heavy needs for a table then I would try CSS grid could solve some problems. I might just use a styled table. 29:12 – Brian: ag-Grid or something else. 29:21 – Host: On this recent project...I’ve used in-house design and other things. If I ever needed a table it was there. I don’t rebuild components b/c that can get expensive for me. 30:50 – Brian: Accessibility. 31:00 – Host: Your upgrade just got 10x harder b/c you own the component loop. I really don’t build tables or drop-downs. Only way is if I really need to build it for a specific request. 31:30 – Brian. 31:58 – Host: Let me give you an example. You can think I am crazy, but a designer gave me a drop-down but he told me to use PrimeNG. I had the chose of building my own drop-down or the designer has to accept whatever they gave him. I made the UI make what he wanted and I made the drop-down zero capacity and then... Host: When you click on what you see you are clicking on the... Host: Does that make sense? 33:35 – Guest. 33:50 – Host. 34:25 – Brian: That is interesting; remember when... 34:58 – Host: We will send this episode to Jeremy – come on Jeremy! Any last ideas? Let’s move onto picks! 35:20 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-day free trial! END – Advertisement – Cache Fly! Links: Vue jQuery Angular React C# What is a UX Design? UI Design Flexbox Sketch ag-Grid PrimeNG Brian Love’s Twitter Aaron Frost’s Medium Amir’s Medium Amir’s Twitter Amir’s GitHub Amir’s LinkedIn Amir’s Facebook Sponsors: Angular Boot Camp Fresh Books Get a Coder Job Course Cache Fly Picks: Aaron Movie: “A Star Is Born” Concept - Model Driven Forms Amir Puppeteer Arrow Function Converter Brian TV Series: “The 100” Angular Schematics

Host: Let’s Make It Happen Ministries Elder Timothy Bumpus Guest: Evangelist G. Cooper, Pslamist Kourtney Henderson, The LMIH Praise Team. Musicians: Wille Picket and Brethren - Saturday, November 11, 2017

Joining our program to talk about these topics is the Executive Director of the APEC Secretariat Dr. Alan Bollard. Before heading the Singapore-based APEC Secretariat, Dr. Bollard served as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand as well as the nation's Treasury Secretary. And he's with us on the phone. Host: As you know, China has assumed the chairmanship of APEC 2014. Then, what difference does it make? What implications does China's chairmanship have for China, the other APEC economies and the rest of the world? Bollard: China is hosting APEC this year, and it's been a very busy, very active year with a number of important initiatives for boosting trade, investment and sustainable growth agreed and more still to come. It's been a year when APEC has been invigorated. Trade ministers from the region will meet in Beijing, and they will sign off on more initiatives to strengthen our economies, job creation and wages, and those will all go to the economic leader's meeting in another week for them to be announced. It's been a year when APEC has been invigorated. It's been a year when we had a lot of meetings and a record number of ministerial meetings. They've all been organized very well and very thoroughly. We still have more to do, but I am hopeful that we will deliver policies that will specifically address infrastructure investment and connectivity gaps to ensure that people and goods can move around the Asia-Pacific more cheaply and easily, for example. Within some of policies being worked out, China has been quite innovative in terms of looking for new drivers for growth. We know that, in the past, APEC growth was driven by strong trade growth. Since the global financial crisis, trade growth has slowed down so we're looking for new growth drivers in the region. Host: Let's talk about the FTAAP and the trade landscape in the Asia-Pacific. You know, the FTAAP has been talked about for many years, but has not progressed as fast as some regional FTAs, such as the US-led TPP and the ASEAN-led RCEP. So, based on your inside knowledge and expertise, the proposed FTAAP, TPP and RCEP, which one do you think will be the future? Bollard: Well, I think that depends on how far you look. I know that China is doing a lot of work, looking at the FTAAP. FTAAP has been cited as a possibility for some years, but really at the moment it's only a vision, and we want to work out what it might actually mean. We know that it's a long-term objective. It won't suddenly reach FTAAP. But we do see that as being the big goal out into the future. China this year would like to bring FTAAP to our attention, and probably agree to work on a study that will help us understand what it means; when we might achieve it; how we might achieve it; and what paths would be followed to get there; could this be the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), or a different stepping stone. It's still a work in progress. Host: But for the benefits of the entire Asia-Pacific region, in your opinion, which trade pact should the 21 APEC economies really engage in, regardless of any political factors? Bollard: Well, they have all seen it. They said in the past that we are moving towards FTAAP. That's already been said. But we don't know enough about what that means yet, and China wants to clarify all that. At the moment, the only negotiations are RCEP and TPP. Indeed, we cannot be sure about what those mean, because it's still too early to know what's in the material. Maybe TPP will be concluded this year, but it's still not secure. Host: Just as you said, the FTAAP is certainly still a vision, but do you think it's feasible? Bollard: Yes, but it will take some time, and it will take a lot of commitment from leaders for us to get there. So, I think it is achievable, but it will be somewhere in the future. What is quite possible is that TPP and RCEP will both need to be concluded first. Host: Alright, let's move on to the topic about China's New Silk Road strategy. As you know, Chinese President Xi Jinping has proposed a so-called "One Belt and One Road" initiative, which is meant to strengthen cooperation and economic ties between China and its neighboring countries. So, what're your thoughts on this initiative? Bollard: I think that's very much in line with APEC's initiatives for connectivity, which means physically connecting our trade routes, and addressing more complex structural barriers to make it easier for goods, services and people to get across borders. I expect it will make use of some APEC trade facilitation measures like the introduction of electronic forms and customs single windows that reduce red tape at borders so that those sorts of initiatives can happen. It isn't an APEC initiative; it's a Chinese government's initiative. But it's very much in line with what we are trying to do. Host: So, what opportunities do you think the Silk Road Economic Belt will bring to China and the other APEC economies? Bollard: At the moment, most trade opportunities are around the Pacific Rim, but when you start recovering and growing again, there will be a strong demand for the export of merchandise and other goods from East Asia. At the moment, most of that goes via the Malacca Straits, between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. But people are looking for new possible trade routes and if those across China can be competitive, then there will be a lot of demand for services for them. Host: Lastly, I know you've travelled to China multiple times this year because of the APEC meetings. So, would you care to share with us some of your personal experience here in China? Your impressions about the country? Bollard: Ok. Well, this year I have come to China maybe a dozen times for a lot of meetings. It's been a very interesting experien