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On this episode, Payton dives into the missing person case of Melanie Uribe. One woman claimed she knew exactly where to find her after having a vision that revealed Melanie's location. Links: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/murderwithmyhusband Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/murderwithmyhusband NEW MERCH LINK: https://mwmhshop.com Discount Codes: https://mailchi.mp/c6f48670aeac/oh-no-media-discount-codes Twitch: twitch.tv/throatypie Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paytonmorelandshow/ Discount Codes: https://mailchi.mp/c6f48670aeac/oh-no-media-discount-codes Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbh-B5Or9CT8Hutw1wfYqQ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-dark/id1662304327 Listen on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36SDVKB2MEWpFGVs9kRgQ7 Sources: Strange but True: Season 2, Episode 9 – “Etta Smith” Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack: Season 7, Episode 13 UPI - https://www.upi.com/Archives/1980/12/22/Three-young-suspects-were-in-custody-Monday-for-the/3439346309200/ Unsolved Mysteries - https://unsolved.com/gallery/premonition-of-murder/ The Daily Star - https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/psychic-falsely-arrested-over-vision-31546119 Time - https://time.com/archive/6708759/crime-etta-smiths-fatal-vision/ LA Times - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-27-me-381-story.html Orbit Knowledge - https://www.orbitknowledge.com/people/melanie-uribe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
VR45 - Today on Vapid Response: 25 years after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, we look back on the Forrest Gump of monstrously bad legal takes: former DOJ lawyer and current UC Berkeley law professor (!) John Yoo. We go back to the primary sources to show how the Office of Legal Counsel explicitly authorized torture, indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay, and warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens before giving Secretary of State Marco Rubio a chance to explain why the world should never hold the United States accountable for any of it. Cases and sources discussed: “Time to Think About Torture,” Jonathan Alter, Newsweek (11/4/2001) “Is There a Tortuous Road to Justice?” Alan M. Dershowitz, LA Times (11/8/2001) Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting Counsel for the CIA, DOJ Office of Legal Counsel (August 1, 2002) Possible Habeas Jurisdiction Over Aliens Held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Patrick Philbin & John Yoo (December 28 2001) Constitutionality of Amending Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to Change the "Purpose " Standard for Searches, John Yoo (9/25/2001) “Why We're Dismantling the ICC,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio (July 14, 2026) Check out the OA Linktree for all the places to go and things to do!
Jordan and Max answer audience questions covering MaisonSota in Paris, looking five years into LA's dining future, what cuisine Max would love to learn, sous vide chicken directions, Uncle Pints vs. Lasker, why can't Brentwood have nice things, New Jersey seafood, a Venice schlep decision, the creepy daughter question, LA Times 101 is coming, and a Max fit check.
A sinkhole opens in front of Nicolas Cage's Malibu home and somehow the real story is the emotional fallout among the ultra‑wealthy. In this mini‑sode, we unpack the LA Times report on oceanfront mansions shaking like tuning forks, cliff‑top residents feeling smugly untouchable, and the strange social hierarchy of who's in the ocean versus who merely gazes down upon it. It's climate chaos, coastal drama, and premium‑grade rich‑people delusion — Malibu edition.Source;https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-09-11/at-nicolas-cage-sinkhole-in-malibu-el-nino-fears-alter-good-vibes
- SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST: http://cornerofthegalaxy.com/subscribe/ - COG LA GALAXY DISCORD: https://discord.gg/drr9HFZY2P - COG ANTHEM MUSIC BY RAY PLAZA: https://linktr.ee/munditoplaza - COG ANTHEM MUSIC DOWNLOAD: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3asiasldwKyoCRm1Vzx2h7?si=_LmXI9otT9y9j0ChMGMt2w COG STUDIOS, Calif. -- On this episode of Corner of the Galaxy, Josh Guesman and LA Times soccer reporter Kevin Baxter break down the Galaxy's wild 3-2 comeback victory over the Colorado Rapids, their second consecutive come-from-behind win by the same scoreline. For the first time this season, LA has won back-to-back games, and with only six matches remaining, the Western Conference playoff race has taken a dramatic turn. But this one looked lost at halftime. Colorado carried a 2-0 lead into the break, repeatedly finding space behind the Galaxy defense. Then Greg Vanney changed the approach. LA became far more aggressive with its pressure, disrupted Colorado's attempts to play out of the back, and turned that pressure into opportunities. The result? Three unanswered second-half goals and three enormous points. João Klauss continues to show just how much the Galaxy missed him. After months away, the striker is creating problems again, and his pressure directly produced another goal against Colorado. Then Justin Haak delivered the winner, heading home Robert Taylor's corner for his first LA Galaxy goal and earning recognition on the MLS Team of the Matchday. Josh and Kevin also examine the tactical details behind the comeback. Sergi Roberto and Pablo Ruiz started together in midfield, while Vanney's second-half adjustments allowed Roberto to exert more control and Haak to push into unexpected spaces. Add Marco Reus as a dangerous second-half option, and the Galaxy may be discovering a formula that can change games late. And don't overlook JT Marcinkowski. The goalkeeper made crucial saves that kept a 2-0 deficit from becoming something much worse, and the Galaxy have now rewarded him with a contract extension. Josh and Kevin discuss his remarkable path back from a serious injury and why his performances have become so important to LA's playoff push. Then comes the big question: Are the Galaxy actually going to make the MLS Cup Playoffs? LA has climbed into a playoff position in the table, but games in hand and points per game tell a more complicated story. The Galaxy still have work to do; their goal differential could become important in a tiebreaker, and six matches remain to determine whether this late-season surge ends with postseason soccer. Two weeks. Two halftime deficits. Two 3-2 comeback victories. The Galaxy have finally found some momentum. Now they have to prove they can keep it.
This October will mark three years since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza, igniting a complicated web of wars and regional conflicts across the Middle East. Jonah Goldberg is joined today by the authors of a new book that takes readers inside the minds of Israel's decision-makers during these struggles, unveiling the complicated dynamics behind some of Israel's biggest successes and failures. Join Jonah, Elliot Kaufman, and Yonah Jeremy Bob and they discuss Bibi Netanyahu, Iran, October 7, the beeper operation, the Biden White House, international opinion of Israel, Operation Midnight Hammer, Rafa, Hamas, Hezbollah, the 2015 nuclear deal, Students for Justice in Palestine, and why people get so deranged about Israel. Show Notes: —In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis —School of War Podcast: “Why John Boyd Still Matters” —Benjamin Netanyahu: Bibi: My Story —Jonah's LA Times column The Remnant is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch's offerings—including the Saturday Ruminant, audio versions of all our articles and newsletters, and Jonah's twice-weekly G-File—click here. Instructions on how to set up your members-only feed can be found here, and if you'd like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful. Connect with me on Twitter/X: @RyanHawk12 Instagram: @RyanHawk12 Sign up for Mindful Monday (it's free): This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Danny Meyer is the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and one of the most influential restaurateurs of his generation. He built New York landmarks like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack... He's the author of the classic Setting the Table and the new What Could Possibly Go Right? Key Learnings "Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard." "Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently." Shimon Peres. Danny prefers to live as an optimist. Most people respond to hope. A few will come out of a dark closet hopping on a pogo stick and a few will walk on the shady side no matter what. Most people start the day intending to make it better than yesterday, and they'll follow someone who shows them how that could happen. A growing business needs funding and leadership. It also needs soil. Like a plant needs sun and water and still needs something to grow in. The soil is the culture, and it determines whether anything you plant actually grows. Be explicit about which behaviors you celebrate and which you won't tolerate. Then be relentlessly consistent about both. That's how culture survives you not being in the room. Everyone is watching who gets hired, promoted, and paid. Every time you compromise on either the skills or the character, you send a message that you didn't mean any of the words. Probably unwittingly, but you send it. Curiosity is the behavior Danny celebrates most. If you want a team that treats every day as a chance to be better than yesterday, someone has to actually wonder what could be done differently. Entrepreneurs are upsighted. Danny's word. They only see what's up, only see what could possibly go right, and they look at existing problems that would make the world better if solved. A bad salesperson answers questions you never asked. Danny remembers a shoe store that hauled out everything from the back room regardless of what he wanted. The only two questions that mattered were does it fit and do I like it. A great one gets into your shoes and asks what you'd want. Sometimes they help you get to the question you actually have. There's no job that doesn't benefit from good sales skills, and good writing skills. Entrepreneurial athleticism is the trait Danny looks for in every leader. Talent gets you in the door. Athleticism is dedicating yourself to train plus the mental and emotional mettle to find a way to win. Day one mentality. The day a restaurant opens, nothing is scratched, every door works, nothing is smudged, and you assume everyone might be a critic. Day one of year 10 should be better than the original, because you have ten years of learning. Without that, it only goes backwards. The hiring formula is 49 and 51. Forty-nine percent is how well he thinks you can do the job, which is mostly technical and different for every role. Fifty-one percent is who you are. That 51 percent is Hospitality Quotient. The composite of optimistic warmth, curious intelligence, determined work ethic, empathy, self-awareness, and integrity. Someone with a high HQ is happier themselves when they make someone else feel better. "Cooking a great piece of fish only gets you to the 49-yard line." You need all 100, and it isn't just the servers who need it. It's everybody. A high HQ is a liability in an interview. Danny sometimes has to park his own at the door, because his job isn't to make the candidate feel good. It's to assess how they'll make the staff and the guests feel. Never ask if someone is self-aware. They'll say yes. Ask instead: "What's the greatest misperception other people have about you?" You can't answer it without self-awareness, because you have to know both what you are and what you're projecting. When hiring a chef, Danny already knows they can cook. What he's testing is the feedback loop. Will they get defensive? Grateful? He may well be wrong in the feedback, and he still wants to know early what it's going to be like to lead this person. Caitlin took a reservation and saved a woman's life. She was getting a phone number when the caller's voice started halting. Caitlin sensed something was wrong, asked permission to call 911, and got the address. It was a hemorrhagic stroke. The woman survived and had to relearn how to speak. Caitlin was so moved that she went back to school to become a speech therapist for people with aphasia. When the woman died recently, she left Caitlin the money to pay for it. A good employee books the table accurately. A great one changes someone's night, or their life. Danny's point about Caitlin: nobody trained her for that. The culture did. Mind share is what marketing earns. Heart share is what hospitality earns. Mind share means people know you exist and think of you first. Heart share means they love you and tell everyone they know. The golden rule of hospitality is not the golden rule. Do unto others as you believe they would want done unto them. Service is one size fits all. Hospitality is one size fits one. The salmon that changed everything. Soon after Gramercy Tavern opened, a Union Square Cafe regular told Danny what happened was inexcusable. Her salmon came well done when she'd ordered it rare. Danny's first reaction was that an honest kitchen mistake didn't seem so bad. The mistake wasn't the problem. The response was. At Union Square Cafe, she said, the server would have noticed, quietly removed it, brought soup so her guests could keep eating, recooked it properly, and probably taken it off the bill. At Gramercy, nobody came over while she picked at it. A manager eventually took the plate, handed her a coat check, told her the rest would be waiting at the door, and left it on the bill. "If you don't have language, you cannot teach." For ten years Danny led one restaurant by embodying the behavior he wanted. With two, wherever he was, he wasn't at the other one. It was the first time he had to lead by using his words instead of just embodying what he wanted to see. Enlightened hospitality, in this order: Each other first. How the team treats each other, with generosity and charitable assumption. Then the guests. Then the community and the suppliers. Then the investors, who end up with more because of everything above. Break it anywhere, starting with how people care for each other, and it doesn't work. Lead with generosity. You're in business for tomorrow dollars, not today dollars. His staff charged that woman for the salmon because they were afraid she was working an angle. Danny's response: where is the charitable assumption that maybe we just overcooked it? Nice and kind are different. Nice isn't a bad thing, but sometimes nice is how you avoid addressing a problem. Kind means I'm on your side, which sometimes means holding up the mirror. If someone isn't measuring up and you let it go, that isn't kind and it isn't even nice. Kindness takes the courage to give honest feedback without demoralizing the person. Laying people off during the pandemic wasn't nice. Doing it one at a time was kind. Several hundred people, and nobody got laid off by tweet or mass email. Everyone was spoken to by their own boss. Shake Shack started because Danny asked what could possibly go right. An artist needed someone to run a hot dog cart under an installation in Madison Square Park. His team said they were too busy running four restaurants. Danny's argument was that the park was the front yard of two of them, and you take care of your front yard. They staffed it with their coat checkers and served Chicago-style on purpose. The coat checkers had no work until the weather turned cold, so this gave them a summer job. Chicago-style has eight toppings, which let them find out whether four coat checkers could remember how every regular liked it. The point was proving hospitality isn't only for fancy restaurants. They lost money two years running, and the community started calling it "our hot dog cart." Danny heard the word "our" and knew people felt shared ownership. Then he gave away the building. He built a $750,000 kiosk and donated it to the park, so the park owns the building and his company owns the business. A percentage of every sale goes back into keeping the park beautiful and safe. That first Shake Shack still pays just under a million dollars a year in rent to the park. Danny's champagne moment a year from now: that the book actually meant something to people. He wrote it to teach himself, because that's how he learns. If the lessons he picked up scraping his knees turn out to be useful to someone else, it was worth it. Reflection Questions Which behaviors does your team know for certain you celebrate, and which do they know you won't tolerate? If you asked five of them, would you get the same five answers? Look at your last promotion. Did that person clear the bar on both the 49 and the 51? What did everyone else learn from watching it? Where are you being nice right now when the situation calls for you to hold up the mirror? Podcast Chapters00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 01:36 Meet Danny Meyer 03:23 "It's That Simple, and It's That Hard" 05:15 Optimists and Pessimists Die the Same Way 08:47 Culture Is the Soil 12:53 Why He Celebrates Curiosity 15:44 What Sales Taught Him 19:48 Entrepreneurial Athleticism 23:15 The 49 and 51 Hiring Formula 26:10 "What's the Greatest Misperception About You?" 28:32 Testing the Feedback Loop in an Interview 29:44 Caitlin Saves a Life 32:51 Mind Share vs. Heart Share 34:33 The Golden Rule of Hospitality 35:33 If You Don't Have Language, You Cannot Teach 39:10 Enlightened Hospitality 41:35 Nice vs. Kind 43:10 Laying People Off the Kind Way 45:03 How a Hot Dog Cart Became Shake Shack 50:08 The Champagne Question 52:08 EOPC
We're thinking of a number… No, you have to think… It's five, darling. Five. Hmm? That's the amount of times the great Barry Levitt has guested on this podcast. And the film to mark the occasion? Why, it's MAESTRO, of course — Bradley Cooper's 2023 biopic on composer/conductor extraordinaire Leonard Bernstein! Together we talk through the film's journey on its way to Cooper, trot out some impressions of varying quality, defend the good (i.e. non-Josh Gad) kind of theatre kids, defend bold and impassioned swings, and attempt to unpack the complicated controversies associated with this film. Throw your weight on us, darling. That's it. Put all your weight on us.You can still follow Barry on Twitter and Letterboxd @blevitt93, and still catch his writing over at the likes of Vulture, The Daily Beast, Empire, LA Times, Rolling Stone and more.You can subscribe to his Substack here: https://substack.com/@barrylevitt28 Follow the podcast on Twitter, Bluesky and Instagram and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode! Get in touch with us either via socials or email rambinaboutamblin@gmail.com.Ramblin is created and produced by Andrew Gaudion and Joshua Glenn. A special thanks as always to Emily Tatham for the artwork, and Robert J. Hunter-Clayton & Greg Sheffield for the theme music.You can buy tickets to the Robert J Hunter Band's album launch show on October 10 in London here: https://events.talentbanq.com/events/talentbanq/2123808
You remember the scene: Robert Deniro's wife screaming at him in their apartment for being a jerk about the steak and flipping the kitchen table; Joe Pesci trying to calm them down; the neighbor calling them a bunch of animals; Deniro threatening to eat the neighbor's dog. It's exactly what you expect from director Martin Scorsese. But you know what it's not? It's not what Jonah Goldberg expected to find himself in the middle of after walking in the door the day the Stephanie Slade Remnant aired. What's that? You want more context? Well then you're just going to have to tune in to this rager of a Ruminant, wherein Jonah not only recounts his domestic dust-up over drag queen story hour but dives deep into Trump Derangement Syndrome, Xi Jinping at the White House, the autopen incident, Nikole Hannah-Jones, progressives, teachers unions, Nick Kristof and the rape dogs, Macklemore and Israel, Jonah going woke, rationalism vs reason, family, fusionism, the Western Massachusetts lesbian bar, and how we're all both conservatives and liberals. Show Notes: —The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 —Jonah's review of The Enemy at Home —Wednesday G-File —Nikole Hannah-Jones article —Jonah's book, Suicide of the West —Jonah's book Liberal Fascism —Thomas C. Leonard: Illiberal Reformers —Jonah's LA Times column —Slade Remnant —Friday's DisPod —School of War podcast: “Why John Boyd Still Matters” The Remnant is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch's offerings—including the Saturday Ruminant, audio versions of all our articles and newsletters, and Jonah's twice-weekly G-File—click here. Instructions on how to set up your members-only feed can be found here, and if you'd like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jordan and Max answer audiences questions covering SoFi Stadium suite life, Jordan's son's dessert beating all Yom Kippur contenders, grocery store sushi, Mexico City plans, Max's weird storage issue, LA sesame dishes and the "Jordanador," Highland Park chewing, smuggling horse and birds, Tokyo love & hate, the LA Times got Lielle right but butter wrong, and most people thought the Zoom episode actually sounded great, leading Jordo down a dark path.
We hear from the Clippers' interim CEO on the culture of integrity and compliance that the team will have moving forward. Ryan Kartje of the LA Times talks USC-Oregon and about his new podcast that chronicles the past 25 years of USC football. Are the Chargers already done? Is Mike McDaniel a square peg in a round hole? How did a mascot get an entire team suspended?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mason and Andy Kamenetzky kick off the show with a little preview of Monday Night Football between the Rams and Giants! Will Aaron Donald be making his season debut tonight? Will Puka be out vs the Giants? USC and UCLA both get another win on Saturday and both remain undefeated! USC will host Oregon this Saturday! The crew are joined by Ryan Kartje, from the LA Times, to discuss more USC Football! Ice Breakers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Part 7 in the Mr. Steak series, and Part 6 of the Mr. Steak's Competitive Edge series. This one is from June 1977 and is on the topic of "Update," with Mr. Steak's COO and president Jim Shearon, the VP of Operations John Krielaart, and Ruth Cox, the administrative assistant to CEO and COO on the upcoming Mr. Steak Convention near Durango, Colorado. The Mr. Steak across from Disneyland is mentioned in this one at minute 24. There are 256 restaurants at the time of this recording October 1975 for the November poster tape series. Mr. Steak's Founder, Chairman of the Board and CEO James A. Jim Mather, my Grandpa Mather, interviews people in an effort to increase what he called Mr. Steak's Competitive Edge by encouraging people to smile in order to help beautify America. This was in December 1976 for the benefit of Mr. Steak's nationwide staff in 285 restaurants. Grandpa interjects his thoughts along with Scripture. This seems to have been a monthly series called "Mr. Steak's Competitive Edge," each month with a new theme. Many thank to Kerri Marquadt, owner of 7 of the 286 Mr. Steak franchises including the Cheyenne Wyoming location, for the gift to me of these rare tapes of the Mr. Steak franchisor founder and motivational speaker, James A. Mather. Grandpa Mather was raised by a single mother in the Great Depression in El Dorado, Kansas. He went on to serve as a Navy F2F Hellcat fighter pilot during World War 2. He started the company in 1962. He and his first wife Dottie raised 3 kids in Colorado. He died last year in the presence of his second wife Linda peacefully in Camarillo, California at the ripe age of 102 years young. Funeral services were held at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Newbury Park and performed by Pastor Rob McCoy, whom Jim mentored in the Lord. The still photo is a Mr. Steak mentioned in an advertisement in the LA Times 21 Dec 1978. Enjoy. The Republican Professor is a pro-free-enterprise-system podcast. Therefore, welcome back Grandpa Jim James A. Mather. The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.
Johnny Mac shares comedy news including Taco Bell partnering with Kevin Hart to promote the Live Más Open on Nov. 2, where fans can qualify via Topgolf's Shot Shuffle or an online sweepstakes to compete in a team golf event for a chance to bring back a chosen Taco Bell menu item; qualifiers run through Sept. 27, with a quote from Topgolf CEO David emphasizing accessibility. Chris Rock, at TIFF, says it's harder to be Tom Cruise than U.S. president. Stavros Halkias tells GQ he's chasing one undeniable stand-up special and continues podcasting mainly for money and schedule, wondering if podcasts drain comedians' material. A Notre Dame paper reviews Jim Gaffigan (with opener Ted Alexandro). The LA Times profiles Jo Koy discussing his new Netflix special, stepdad material, and healthier eating on the road. Mac notes late-night August ratings, Wanda Sykes' comments on Saudi comedy festivals, and a Toronto Guardian interview with comedian Sam Sferrazza. 00:13 Kevin Hart Taco Bell Golf02:03 Chris Rock Tom Cruise Take02:31 Stavros Special And Podcasting03:38 Jim Gaffigan Show Review05:22 Jo Koy Netflix And Health10:16 Basement Video And Schedule11:23 Late Night Ratings Roundup12:32 Wanda Sykes Riyadh Festival13:06 Toronto Comic Sam Sferrazza Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/daily-comedy-news-with-johnny-mac--4522158/support.Today's DCN is brought to you by MyBookie use promo code DCN!Daily Comedy News is hosted by Johnny Mac and releases every weekday. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. Part of the Caloroga Shark Media network. For transcripts and show notes visit www.dailycomedynews.comDaily Comedy News with Johnny Mac is a daily podcast covering comedians, stand-up comedy, late night television, and the comedy industry. New episodes every morning. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Contact John at John@thesharkdeck dot com For Uninterrupted Listening, use the Apple Podcast App and click the banner that says Uninterrupted Listening. $4.99/month John's Substack about media is free.
The topic: It’s the final weekend of the 51st annual Toronto International Film Festival and a handful of movie premieres are already stirring up buzz for this upcoming awards season. We talk to FilmWeek critics Amy Nicholson and Maureen Lee Lenker about their favorites from this year’s festival and what movies they think audiences should look out for when they hit theaters. Films to watch for: I Play Rocky Elsinore The Debut Being Heumann Bucking Fastards The Julia Set Ink Fjord The critics: Amy Nicholson, film critic for LAist and the LA Times and host of the podcast ‘Unspooled’ Maureen Lee Lenker, LAist film critic and freelance journalist who's written for Gold Derby, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and Turner Classic Movies. She is also the author of three novels set in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Visit www.preppi.com/LAist to receive a FREE Preppi Emergency Kit (with any purchase over $100) and be prepared for the next wildfire, earthquake or emergency.
New York City Public Schools announced one of the most restrictive AI policies in the country, and LAUSD followed with a quiet moratorium of its own. For any company selling AI-powered tools into K-12, this isn't background noise anymore. It's a sign that the ground rules are being rewritten in real time, and positioning needs to keep up.At the same time, October is arriving with a full plate. Conference season, award deadlines, and the usual run of thematic days are all stacking on top of each other. It's worth asking a harder question before the calendar takes over: which of these deadlines actually matter, and which ones are just habit?This field notes episode covers what's moving fast right now, the AI policy shifts landing in New York City and Los Angeles, the conference and award deadlines worth prioritizing this fall, and what actually earns a response on LinkedIn.What You'll Learn1️⃣ Why NYC and LAUSD's AI policies matter beyond their own districtsNew York's policy sounds like a blanket ban, but it's more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Teachers can still use AI to plan lessons, translate, and communicate with families, they just can't use it to grade, decide who graduates, or counsel a student in crisis. LAUSD's own moratorium on student use of generative AI arrived quietly enough that it reportedly surprised its own school board. When the country's largest districts move first, others tend to follow.2️⃣ What's worth prioritizing on a packed fall conference and awards calendarDA Awards entries close October 1st, EdTech Week runs October 13th - 14th, FETC's prices increase October 30th, and SXSW EDU's Launch competition deadline is November 1st, on top of national conferences like NCTM in Denver and CGCS in Boston. This episode breaks down which deadlines are worth building a strategy around, rather than trying to hit everything.3️⃣ What new findings say about getting a response to a LinkedIn connection requestRichard Vanderblom's poll and analysis found that a "helpful" message, one that references something specific about the person's post, is what actually gets a response. It's a small shift, but one that changes how outreach on the platform should be built.Why It MattersEducation marketers are heading into one of the busiest stretches of the year with less room for error than usual. Districts are rewriting AI policy in real time, marketing calendars are more crowded than usual, and the platforms relied on for organic reach keep changing what earns attention. None of this is a reason to freeze. It's a reason to get more deliberate, know which policy shifts touch a given product, spend fall's limited time and budget on the deadlines that matter most, and build outreach around what's genuinely earning a response right now.Resources Mentioned in this Episode:Operation Bluebird Launches Twitter.nowA new social platform reviving the Twitter name and bird logo, from a startup co-founded by former Twitter trademark counsel Stephen Coates, and referenced as the latest in a long line of platforms trying to pull people away from X.LinkedIn Adds AI-Powered Event HighlightsCovers a new feature that automatically turns live event recordings into short-form clips and chapters, discussed as a reason to treat every livestream as an ongoing content engine.Metricool's 2026 State of AI in Social Media StudyThe report showing three in four social media professionals use AI daily, while only about 12% work under a formal company AI policy.Richard Vanderblom's LinkedIn Post on Connection RequestsA carousel and poll on what actually gets a response when reaching out on LinkedIn, with the finding that "helpful" outreach outperforms a generic pitch.The Marketing Millennials: The 4 Landing Pages You NeedDaniel Murray's article on the "Core Four" landing page framework and the "Hail Mary mistake" of sending cold traffic straight to a demo page.Leoni Consulting Group's Free Education Marketing Planner (reach out via LinkedIn or the contact page)Covers all of the October dates referenced in this episode, with the 2027 edition launching soon.AASPA Annual ConferenceThe American Association of School Personnel Administrators' conference, October 12 - 15 in Austin, TXEdTech WeekNYC's edtech festival, including the Shark Tank pitch competition and an invite-only CEO Summit.ALAS National Summit on EducationThe Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents' national summit, October 15 - 17 in Denver, CO.CGCS 70th Annual Fall ConferenceThe Council of the Great City Schools' conference for district leaders, October 21 - 25 in Boston, MA.NCTM 2026 Annual Meeting & ExpositionThe National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' annual meeting, October 28 - 31 in Denver, CO.District Administration Awards of DistinctionThe awards program discussed in the segment on why an award strategy matters for credibility, even when clients don't think to apply on their own.FullScale SymposiumAn education innovation conference running October 8 - 10 in Indianapolis, IN.FETC 2027 RegistrationRegistration for the Future of Education Technology Conference, with prices increasing on October 30.SXSW EDU Launch Startup CompetitionThe pitch competition for early-stage education startups, with applications due November 1.Leoni Consulting Group's Dear Colleague Letter Roundup (post 1 | post 2 | post 3 | post 4)A collection of the most thought-provoking posts, articles, and podcasts on the Department of Education's recent "Dear Colleague" letter.NYC Public Schools' New AI and Screen Time Policy (official guidance | Chalkbeat coverage | NBC News summary of NYT reporting)Coverage of NYC's new AI policy, discussed in the closing AI policy segment.LAUSD's Generative AI Moratorium on Student Devices (syndicated LA Times coverage via Yahoo News | LAist coverage)Lisa Mo, 2026 Riverside County Teacher of the Year, on screen time, "it's not the plane, it's the pilot."Connect with Elana: LinkedIn
Students often approach their college applications as if each essay is the most important piece of prose they've ever written, which leads to overthinking and anxiety. There is a better way! Amy and Mike invited essay specialist Jill Margaret Shulman to share guidance for writing a stress-free college essay. What are five things you will learn in this episode? 1. What are myths that exist in essay writing? 2. What stops students from getting started with their essay in the first place? 3. What techniques help empower students to write? 4. What are some positive steps if a student gets stuck? 5. What is the one piece of advice about personal essay writing that every student needs to hear? MEET OUR GUEST Jill Margaret Shulman is the author of College Admissions Cracked: Saving Your Kid (and Yourself) from the Madness and College Essay Confidence: Conquer Blocks, Free Your Voice, and Write a Knockout Application Essay. She's also the founder of In Other Words, a college essay coaching service. She has spent decades shepherding families through the college admissions process and has evaluated applications at elite colleges. Shulman has also taught writing at The New School, City University of New York, and NYU and has been featured in Forbes, LA Times, The New York Times, Parents, and elsewhere. She lives in the higher education mecca of Western Massachusetts. Jill can be reached at jillshulman.com. LINKS College Essay Confidence: Conquer Blocks, Free Your Voice, and Write a Knockout Application Essay RELATED EPISODES COLLEGE ESSAY SECRETS MAKING YOUR COLLEGE ESSAYS COUNT DESTRESSIFYING THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS PROCESS ABOUT THIS PODCAST Tests and the Rest is THE college admissions industry podcast. Explore all of our episodes on the show page. ABOUT YOUR HOSTS Mike Bergin is the president of Chariot Learning and founder of TestBright, Roots2Words, and College Eagle. Amy Seeley is the president of Seeley Test Pros and LEAP. If you're interested in working with Mike and/or Amy for test preparation, training, or consulting, get in touch through our contact page.
The time has come for another Open Mic Q&A episode of The Light Gate! That's right! The Light Gate welcomes guest: You, the Audience. It's Open Mic Night! Date: September 14, 2026. Time: 5-7pm pacific / 8-10pm eastern Episode: 176 Discussion: UFOs & The Paranormal! It's Open Mic night! Tonight, The Light Gate features a Q&A episode with your hosts, Preston Dennett and Dolly Safran, and YOU, the audience! Ask us anything! UFOs, ghosts, OBEs, the paranormal, psychic abilities, disclosure, disinformation, the coverup! Time to have some fun. We will also be doing a book give-away contest! Preston Dennett began investigating UFOs and the paranormal in 1986 when he discovered that his family, friends and co-workers were having dramatic unexplained encounters. Since then, he has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and investigated a wide variety of paranormal phenomena. He is a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a ghost hunter, a paranormal researcher, and the author of 30 books and more than 100 articles on UFOs and the paranormal. Several of his books have been Amazon UFO bestsellers. His articles have appeared in numerous magazines including Fate, Atlantis Rising, MUFON UFO Journal, Nexus, Paranormal Magazine, UFO Magazine, Phenomena Magazine, Mysteries Magazine, Ufologist and others. His writing has been translated into several different languages including German, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Icelandic. He has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell, Coast-to-Coast and also the History Channel's Deep Sea UFOs and UFO Hunters and Ancient Aliens. His research has been presented in the LA Times, the LA Daily News, the Dallas Morning News and other newspapers. He has taught classes on various paranormal subjects and lectures across the United States. Dolly Safran has worked as a limo driver, assistant manager at Wendy's, a zookeeper, a bus driver, a security guard, a nurse, and more, including as a civilian worker for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and also in the Army as an employee for the U.S. Department of Defense. Her UFO contacts began around age one, and are still ongoing today. She is a fully conscious UFO contactee and the subject of the full-length book, “Symmetry: A True UFO Adventure.” Sequel coming soon ! LINKS WEBSITE: www.prestondennett.weebly.com YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@prestondennett577/featured FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/preston.dennett/ United Public Radio & UFO Paranormal Radio www.uprntalkradio.com
The time has come for another Open Mic Q&A episode of The Light Gate! That's right! The Light Gate welcomes guest: You, the Audience. It's Open Mic Night! Date: September 14, 2026. Time: 5-7pm pacific / 8-10pm eastern Episode: 176 Discussion: UFOs & The Paranormal! It's Open Mic night! Tonight, The Light Gate features a Q&A episode with your hosts, Preston Dennett and Dolly Safran, and YOU, the audience! Ask us anything! UFOs, ghosts, OBEs, the paranormal, psychic abilities, disclosure, disinformation, the coverup! Time to have some fun. We will also be doing a book give-away contest! Preston Dennett began investigating UFOs and the paranormal in 1986 when he discovered that his family, friends and co-workers were having dramatic unexplained encounters. Since then, he has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and investigated a wide variety of paranormal phenomena. He is a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a ghost hunter, a paranormal researcher, and the author of 30 books and more than 100 articles on UFOs and the paranormal. Several of his books have been Amazon UFO bestsellers. His articles have appeared in numerous magazines including Fate, Atlantis Rising, MUFON UFO Journal, Nexus, Paranormal Magazine, UFO Magazine, Phenomena Magazine, Mysteries Magazine, Ufologist and others. His writing has been translated into several different languages including German, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Icelandic. He has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell, Coast-to-Coast and also the History Channel's Deep Sea UFOs and UFO Hunters and Ancient Aliens. His research has been presented in the LA Times, the LA Daily News, the Dallas Morning News and other newspapers. He has taught classes on various paranormal subjects and lectures across the United States. Dolly Safran has worked as a limo driver, assistant manager at Wendy's, a zookeeper, a bus driver, a security guard, a nurse, and more, including as a civilian worker for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and also in the Army as an employee for the U.S. Department of Defense. Her UFO contacts began around age one, and are still ongoing today. She is a fully conscious UFO contactee and the subject of the full-length book, “Symmetry: A True UFO Adventure.” Sequel coming soon ! LINKS WEBSITE: www.prestondennett.weebly.com YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@prestondennett577/featured FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/preston.dennett/ United Public Radio & UFO Paranormal Radio www.uprntalkradio.com
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly National Best-Seller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Daniel Lubetzky graduated from Stanford Law School. And then declined lucrative job offers to start his own business, only paying himself $24,000 a year for a decade. And then he founded KIND and grew it into a snack brand that Mars later valued at $5 billion dollars. Today he invests full-time on Shark Tank, and he's the son of a Holocaust survivor whose story shaped everything he's built. Find work that gives you energy, purpose, and meaning. If you enjoy what you're doing, you're far more likely to be great at it. And you're already winning, because you get up every morning doing something satisfying. The danger of loving your work is overworking. Daniel did it building PeaceWorks and KIND. You have to pace yourself. His father survived a death march out of Dachau. Twelve and a half when he entered the camp, fifteen and a half during the march. Six feet tall and under 70 pounds, and no shoes. The Nazis were walking prisoners up a mountain to push them off a cliff because they didn't have enough bullets. A snowstorm saved his life. His father, grandfather, and uncle hugged to say goodbye. The snow buried them and formed a kind of igloo that kept them warm through the night. They woke, dug out, and the Nazis were gone. The soldiers who liberated them were Japanese American. The 442nd, the most decorated unit of its size in American history, was made up of men whose own families were being held in internment camps back home. Daniel's family had never seen an Asian person and didn't understand what they were witnessing. Seventy years later, he got to say thank you. A friend called saying they were sitting with a doctor who had a postcard from Larry Lubetzky. That was Daniel's uncle, who had just died. Daniel reconnected with the captain, who had gone on to become a scientist at Harvard, and eventually gave a eulogy at his funeral. The lesson he takes from it isn't perseverance. It's the power of one person to change another person's life. You won't pull off a rescue every day. You can still look someone in the eye at the supermarket. "You have no idea what that person's been going through." Human connection is what pulls people back. At a conference on fighting hate, Daniel heard how young people vulnerable to recruitment were pulled back by ordinary human connection. Being kind in your daily life makes it harder for the people trying to recruit them. There's no such thing as failure or success. Daniel keeps shelves of successes in one office and shelves of failures in another, and now thinks the separation is a mistake. He never would have built KIND without ten years of mistakes at PeaceWorks. PeaceWorks was a college thesis turned into a company. The argument: get neighbors on opposite sides of a conflict doing business together, and you shatter stereotypes, build relationships, and give both sides a stake in each other. He got Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks trading with one another. Daniel turned down $86,000 out of Stanford Law to pay himself $24,000. That's what he could afford, and it's what he paid his team. Grit, wit, and fit. Grit is the work ethic and refusing to give up. Wit is the strategy, the creativity to outthink competitors. Fit is whether the product actually matches what people want. Grit alone isn't enough. Do not assume he was invincible. He cried alone in his studio apartment more than once, convinced he'd made a mistake and was wasting his life. He questioned himself multiple times a day. The jerk who broke him was also right. At a trade show, a buyer told him to stop, that he was way too pushy, to give people space and get out of his life. Daniel was 25 and it broke him. Then he reflected and realized the man was correct. Don't be the ultra-passive person watching the world happen. Don't be the person who only pushes. The job is to be persistent enough to win and be loved for it, which is very hard. "I prepare for anything that I'm not prepared for." Daniel loves winging it and hates preparing. But if there's something he doesn't know, he'll put in the work today, tomorrow, and the day after. Active listening takes real energy. Daniel needs an hour to decompress after every interview he conducts. He's blunt that listening isn't his greatest strength, which is exactly why he's leaning into it. His dad was the best interviewer he ever knew, because he was a coach. When Daniel asked him a question, his father would answer with another question and let him find it himself. A great coach or parent doesn't tell you what to do. They help you ask the questions you need to ask yourself. Telling is the easier skill. Kids keep you humble, and that's the point. You need someone in your life who can call you out when you start thinking too much of yourself, whether that's your kids, your spouse, or your team. KIND started because the healthy snack aisle didn't exist. Training for the 2002 New York City Marathon, Daniel's options were food that tasted like astronaut rations or pure indulgence. Nothing was portable, wholesome, and convenient at the same time. KIND was named after his father, who died the year they launched. Everyone who met him described him the same way. He saw his mission in life as bringing smiles to others. The name became the three pillars: kind to your body, kind to your taste buds, kind to the world. They took a vote on whether to quit. Six or seven people around a table, ten hard years behind them, a major account just lost. The choice was one more shot or two months to go find jobs. They all voted to try again. Then KIND launched. Sampling was the inflection point. Daniel had been treating it as a cost. It was an investment. They went from $800 in 2008 to $800,000 in 2009 to $20 million in free product within a few years, which is what let them scale. Sampling only works if the mousetrap is right. If one in ten people like it, you'll lose your shirt. Nine in ten people who tried a KIND bar wanted to buy more. Those people became the ambassadors. Scarcity, gluttony, and resourcefulness. A wasteful culture runs you into the ground. A scarcity mentality preserves every dollar but caps your potential, because everything looks like a cost center. Resourcefulness is the middle: think like an owner, spend less where you can, and invest where it compounds. Nice and kind are not the same thing. "If you're nice, it doesn't cost you. It's easy. You can be weak and nice. But to be kind, you need to be strong." Kindness requires you to be a protagonist. What Daniel looks for in a founder: Integrity. If he doesn't trust them, no amount of upside matters. Someone worth helping. It's going to be a rollercoaster, and he'll be in the trenches with them. Real passion. Enough that he can sense they'll outwork everyone else. You don't find integrity by asking about integrity. You ask other questions and watch how the person performs. Daniel says Barbara Corcoran is the best on the show at reading people this way. The four C's of a builder's mindset: curious, compassionate, creative, and courageous. Daniel credits them with building KIND, the OneVoice Movement, and everything since. Daniel's champagne moment a year from now: the Builders Movement making real progress. His argument is that every industry has a lobby representing it, and the only group without one is the overwhelming majority of citizens who agree with each other on most issues and want problems solved. He wants a movement that holds all parties and all special interests accountable to that majority. A scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset. Viewing something as a cost instead of viewing it as an investment. This was Daniel's early mistake with Kind bars. He only budgeted $800 a year for samples. He viewed it as a cost. He changed his mind and realized it was an investment. He upped it to $800,000 per year in samples. And eventually to $20 million a year. Scarcity versus abundance. View it as an investment instead of a cost Daniel's 4 C's of a builder's mindset – curiosity, compassion, creativity, and courage for That's how you build both a company and a movement. The difference between being nice and being kind. Being nice avoids conflict to protect feelings in the moment. Being kind is about being willing to risk the moment, telling the hard truth because you actually care about them. His dad, grandfather, and uncle – Near the end of the war, Roman, his father, and his brother were death-marched out of Dachau toward the mountains, where the guards meant to push them off a cliff. A freak overnight blizzard scattered the guards; by morning they were gone. The men who found the survivors were the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion — the only all–Japanese–American unit in the U.S. Army, many of whose own families were sitting in American internment camps at that very moment. Daniel has said those soldiers showed a tenderness that "had not been seen in 1945." Magic – Daniel taught himself magic as a kid in Mexico City and actually worked as a traveling magician through Europe and the Middle East for the better part of a year. He still performs one magic show a year for his team... And he's said it's the only thing all year he genuinely prepares for. Everything else, he improvises. "My team is always very concerned that I just jump into stuff." A scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset. Viewing something as a cost instead of viewing it as an investment. This was Daniel's early mistake with Kind bars. He only budgeted $800 a year for samples. He viewed it as a cost. He changed his mind and realized it was an investment. He upped it to $800,000 per year in samples. And eventually to $20 million a year. Scarcity versus abundance. View it as an investment instead of a cost. Reflection Questions Where in your work are you all grit and no wit or fit? What would change if you spent an hour on strategy before your next hundred hours of effort? Think of the harshest feedback you've ever received. Set aside how it was delivered. Was any of it correct, and what did you do with it? Where in your life are you being nice when the situation calls for you to be kind?
Coming off of a discussion about 9/11 on the DisPod, Jonah Goldberg is feeling ruminative and somber. Accordingly, he has decided to address one of the most important foreign policy issues of our century: the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. That's right. Freedom fries forever, baby. And if that's not exciting enough, The Dispatch's legendary Francophobe-in-chief doesn't stop there, taking up the Texas Trumpapalooza, the Media Research Center, Abdul El-Sayed, pinkwashing, the Muslim-Queer alliance, progressive Jews, Justice Antonin Scalia's brilliant take on the Constitution, lawless e-bikes, and video podcasting. Show Notes: —DisPod on the 9/11 anniversary —Chris Stirewalt Remnant —Jonah's LA Times column —Jonah on NPR The Remnant is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch's offerings—including the Saturday Ruminant, audio versions of all our articles and newsletters, and Jonah's twice-weekly G-File—click here. Instructions on how to set up your members-only feed can be found here, and if you'd like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today, a look at the rip higher in global yields as crude oil prices spiked and the ECB surprised on the hawkish side of expectations. The market is trying to recover its equilibrium on hopes that a Monday meeting between GCC members and Iran will set things right. In the meantime, we have the US CPI report to get out of the way today, an FOMC meeting next Wednesday and Bank of Japan meeting next Friday to contend with. This and much more on today's pod, which is hosted by Saxo Global Head of Macro Strategy John J. Hardy. Links John's The FX Trader piece from today, on currency moves and what to watch for next. Goldman Sachs says that interest rates are set to remain higher and outlines why. LA Times on how the AI future is already here for some forms of video entertainment in China. Some profound thinking on where we are in the "interregnum" as we transition away from the old world order and into the new one. A taste: "Gramsci's interregnum, the “time of monsters” when the old is dying and the new cannot be born, has become a cliché of our political moment, which is usually a sign that it is true. But what it means precisely is this: the conceptual frameworks adequate to the old order have ceased to describe reality, and the frameworks adequate to the new order have not yet been assembled." Read daily in-depth market updates from the Saxo Market Call and the Saxo Strategy Team here. Please reach out to us at marketcall@saxobank.com for feedback and questions. Click here to open an account with Saxo. Intro music by AShamaluevMusic DISCLAIMER This content is marketing material. Trading financial instruments carries risks. Always ensure that you understand these risks before trading. This material does not contain investment advice or an encouragement to invest in a particular manner. Historic performance is not a guarantee of future results. The instrument(s) referenced in this content may be issued by a partner, from whom Saxo Bank A/S receives promotional fees, payment or retrocessions. While Saxo may receive compensation from these partnerships, all content is created with the aim of providing clients with valuable information and options.
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Dr. Martin Seligman is one of the most influential psychologists alive. He's the founder of positive psychology and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Positive Psychology Center. His research reshaped how we understand optimism, resilience, and human flourishing. His books, including Learned Optimism, Flourish, and The Hope Circuit, have sold millions of copies. His latest is Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress. Key Learnings The three parts of agency. Efficacy is the belief you can hit a goal right now, and it drives whether you try. Optimism is the belief you can hit it in the future, and it drives persistence and grit. Imagination is the range of goals you can even picture, and it drives creativity. When a culture has all three, it progresses. When they fall, it stagnates. "Depression and pessimism and happiness and optimism are too important to be left to happy people." Marty calls himself a born depressive and pessimist. He founded positive psychology and still wakes at 4:00 a.m. to a voice telling him he can't do the thing in front of him. What he's built over decades is the skill of arguing back, treating that voice not as truth but as a rival whose job is to make him miserable. The techniques don't come naturally to anyone. A small number of people are born happy. Everyone else has to learn and practice the skills, which is why Marty spent much of his career testing them rather than assuming they work. How you respond to good news matters more than you think. When his wife Mandy won first prize in the biggest black and white photography contest in the world, Marty could have said "congratulations, dear, you deserve it" and moved on. Instead, he named the exact photo that won, asked her to repeat what the editor said word for word, and tied her talent back to how they teach their kids. Ryan's summary of what made it work: specificity and curiosity. Marty calls it active constructive responding, and done consistently, it increases love and commitment and cuts divorce rates. Marty's contrarian take on leadership. He thinks the whole hunt for "what great leaders do" is a wild goose chase, because the great leaders he's met all do completely different things. What good followers have in common is PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. His advice is to promote the leaders who create the most PERMA, and to hold managers responsible for their people's well-being, not just their output, because well-being predicts productivity. Grit and agency. Grit, the idea made famous by his former student Angela Duckworth, feeds straight into optimism and increases how long people push through adversity. On Angela: "one of the best students I've ever had," and "it's great to be outdone." He credits her rare social intelligence, the ability to build allies instead of enemies. Predicting elections by counting optimism. With his graduate student Harold Zullow, Marty studied a century of nomination acceptance speeches and found the more optimistic candidate usually wins. In 1984, they sealed their prediction of the two nominees in an envelope at The New York Times and got it right. The $17,500 lesson. Convinced by Dukakis's optimistic acceptance speech, Marty flew to Edinburgh to place a legal bet and put his entire life savings on Dukakis at 2 to 1. Then he learned the speech was written by Ted Sorensen, and that Dukakis, in his own unscripted press conferences, was deeply pessimistic. He lost everything. The takeaway that shaped his later work: measure the unscripted moments, not the polished speeches. The 2024 call. Trump and Harris were even on optimism in their convention speeches. But across September and October, tracking how each explained bad events in press conferences, Trump got steadily more optimistic. Marty's team sealed another prediction: Trump winning and possibly by a lot. Why the fired-up CEO speech doesn't work great. After Marty published his method, both political parties asked him how to write optimistic speeches. He sent the protocol, and within a few elections everyone sounded optimistic, and it stopped predicting anything, because the optimism was shallow. People don't internalize a leader saying "we're going to crush it." Real agency shows up in the psychology of the team, and that comes from who you hire and how you train them, not from the speech. What the Army taught him. As lead consultant on the Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, Marty helped train 40,000 drill sergeants and profiled 900,000 soldiers from their first day. Three traits predicted who would later earn awards for excellent work and heroism: optimism, high positive emotion, and low negative emotion. On the other side, catastrophizers were more than twice as likely to develop PTSD at every level of combat. The hiring lesson. Hire optimists and happy people. Avoid catastrophizers. And when you can't pick your team, train the pessimists you already have in the skills of agency. "Put It In Perspective." The tool Marty uses to retrain catastrophizers. Picture the ominous "come see me at 4:00" email. Write down the worst thing that could happen, then the best thing, then the most likely thing, then a plan for that most likely case. Catastrophizers skip straight to the worst case and get paralyzed. The exercise pulls them back to what's actually probable. Marry an optimist. "If you're a pessimist, disaster is to marry another pessimist," because you'll both see the worst in every setback. The wine story makes the point about behavior change: after Mandy told him he'd wrecked a family engagement dinner by sending back a bottle, Marty realized that if she complained as much as he did, he wouldn't want to be married to her. He decided to stop. The critical thoughts never went away, but the behavior did. The gratitude testimonial. Think of someone still alive who did or said something that changed your life. Write a 300-word testimonial in three parts: what they did, what you did because of it, and where you are now as a result. Then deliver it in person and read it out loud. Marty has run this with thousands of people. The usual result is that both people cry, and a month later they test as less depressed and higher in well-being. Reading the minds of the dead. Marty's method for measuring agency across history is counting words. Agentic language like "choose," "compete," "can," and "do" versus language of constraint like "obliged" and "assigned." With Claude and ChatGPT, he can now do in one morning what used to take months: reading whole eras of writing and rating how agentic they are. St. Augustine and a thousand years of stagnation. Before Augustine, around 400 AD, Christian thinkers were highly agentic and taught that you could take part in your own salvation. Augustine's doctrine that grace comes only from God set Church teaching for close to a thousand years, and progress collapsed with it. When agency climbs again, as it does under Charlemagne around 800, progress climbs too. The pattern holds when you line it up against GDP, population, and writing about freedom. The manager's real job. "It's your job as a manager not just to keep productivity going, but to increase the well-being and agency of the people under you." Do that, and you get promoted. Fail at it and your time is up. The Champagne Question... What he'd celebrate a year from now. Marty wants psychohistory taken seriously as a real field, one that measures psychological variables, uses them to understand history, and then changes them to raise future happiness and productivity. Reflection Questions: Marty is 84, founded the field, and still wakes at 4 a.m. to a voice saying he can't do it. What does your version of that voice say, and what does it usually say it about? When it shows up, do you accept it as fact or argue back? Think about the last time someone close to you shared good news. Which quadrant were you in: active constructive, passive constructive, active destructive, or passive destructive? What did you actually say? Marty says a manager's job is to raise the well-being and agency of their people, not just their output. If your team was measured on PERMA tomorrow, what score would they give you, and where's the gap? If you liked this one with Marty, you should also listen to... Episode #703: Angela Duckworth - Why Grit Isn't Enough Time Stamps: 2:34 Angela Duckworth, grit & social intelligence 6:05 Active constructive responding: the Mandy photography story 12:13 Why leadership is heterogeneous, and the case for PERMA 14:49 How grit and agency fit together 16:09 The born pessimist who founded positive psychology 21:20 What the book is really about: founding psychohistory 22:52 Predicting elections & the $17,500 Dukakis bet 25:34 The 2024 prediction 29:17 Why the rah-rah CEO speech doesn't help much 31:07 What the U.S. Army taught him: optimism & PTSD 35:19 "Put It In Perspective," the tool for catastrophizers 38:55 Marry an optimist, and the wine-snob story 42:19 The gratitude testimonial 44:49 Reading the minds of the dead & St. Augustine 48:37 The manager's real job 49:33 What he'd celebrate a year from now 51:05 EOPC
A story in the LA Times says that the growth of CD sales are outpacing that of vinyl!
Is the fantasy of football worth the potential price?That's what football athletes, fans and doctors are asking after a new study published in late August revealed that from a sample of athletes who played at least one NFL game in their careers and who died between 2016 and 2021, a minimum of around 25% -- that's one in every four of those players -- had a brain condition called CTE upon their death. But what do these findings really mean for one of the world's most lucrative sports leagues, and how might our cultural ideas about football be creating blind spots for us when we consider the risks of the game? To find out Brittany is joined by Gene Demby, co-host of NPR's Code Switch, and LZ Granderson, host of the LZ Granderson Show podcast, and op-ed columnist at the LA Times.Want more episodes at the intersection of labor, entertainment, and pop culture? Check these out:Has Broadway lost its way?People are struggling financially. Even on TV.Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show's perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 9-8-8, or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Thought we'd forgotten about Venezuela here on The Remnant? Think again! As prone as Jonah Goldberg is to getting distracted by the finer things of life—Old English dialects, zombie movies, etc.—he's kept a weather eye fixed southward on our Bolivarian neighbor. Jonah is joined today by James Story, the former ambassador to Venezuela, to take us deep into the recent history of U.S.-Venezuelan relations, Nicolás Maduro, Delcy Rodríguez, a possible democratic transition, the oil deal, the Venezuelan diaspora, Marco Rubio, the boat strikes, the professional foreign service post-DOGE, and Pax Americana. Show Notes: —The Dispatch: “The U.S. Boat Strikes, One Year Later” —MS Now: “The U.S. drone strike in Venezuela marks a dangerous new era” —Jonah's LA Times column on the oil deal —Anthony Scaramucci Remnant The Remnant is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch's offerings—including the Saturday Ruminant, audio versions of all our articles and newsletters, and Jonah's twice-weekly G-File—click here. Instructions on how to set up your members-only feed can be found here, and if you'd like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Joe Marrese feels annoyed that his four year run of releasing a new episode every week has come to an end. Joe talks about being mentioned in the LA Times. Joe and Aaron pick the winner of the Things People Pretend To Like Bracket. All this and much more on the 270th episode of Joe Code! Be sure to subscribe, rate, & review the pod wherever you listen Write Joe an email: joecodepodcast@gmail.com Support Joe Code at www.patreon.com/joecodepocast
Listen in to these highlights from four of our best recent conversations on things likely on your mind in planning for retirement: purpose, identity, curiosity – and experimenting your way into a fulfilling next chapter. They can spark ideas for what’s next for you. Want to go deeper? Listen to any of the full conversations: What If Retirement Is the Wrong Goal? – John Coleman Change Your Questions, Change Your Life…in Retirement – Marilee Adams, PhD Letting Go to Become Who You Truly Are – Deborah Santana How to Flourish…in Retirement – Daniel Coyle _________________________ Guest Bios John Coleman is the author of Good Money: Six Steps to Building a Financial Life with Purpose. He is the author of five books, and he or his work have been highlighted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the LA Times, Christianity Today, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review, among other publications. Marilee Adams, PhD is the Founder and CEO of the Inquiry Institute, and author of Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, now in it’s 5th edition and it has been translated into 26 languages.. She is an award-winning author, executive coach, and leadership consultant whose work has shaped how leaders think, communicate, and make decisions for more than four decades. Deborah Santana is the author of Loving the Fire: Choosing Me, Finding Freedom. Her work has been featured by Vogue, Oprah, and NPR, among other national and literary outlets. She is the founder of the Do A Little Foundation, which supports women and girls in the areas of health, education, and happiness. Her work explores identity, social justice, spirituality, and the power of collective voice. Daniel Coyle is the New York Times best-selling author of nine books, including Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment, The Culture Code and The Talent Code, Winner (with Tyler Hamilton) of the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize, he is a contributing editor for Outside magazine, he also works a special advisor to the Cleveland Guardians. Coyle lives in Cleveland, Ohio during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife Jen, and their four daughters. _________________________ Other Retirement Podcast Episodes You May Like Best of 2026 – Part One Best of 2025 – Part Two What If I? Best of 2025 – Part 1 The Very Best of 2024 __________________________ Time to take stock of what needs your attention planning for the non-financial side of retirement? Take this free 5-minute assessment. It’s not a report card. It’s a tool to help pinpoint what matters most to you in the years ahead. _________________________
Grab a beer and join us tonight as we cover Ruben Salazar! He was one of the only Mexican-American journalists working in Los Angeles at the time, a columnist for the LA Times and the news director at KMEX, and he'd spent years writing about how the cops out there treated the Chicano community. On August 29th, 1970, he ducked into a bar called the Silver Dollar to get away from a protest that had turned ugly, and a sheriff's deputy fired a tear gas projectile through the doorway that hit him in the head. So tonight we'll get into who he was, what happened that day, and why a lot of people still don't buy that it was an accident. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Key Learnings All the greats have a coach. Strauss is one of the most disciplined humans alive, and he has had one since he was 30. His argument: Tom Brady is an amazing athlete, but would he have performed as well with no coach, or a lousy one? A great coach is objective, encouraging, smart, and experienced. They warn you of obstacles you can't see yet. Strauss doesn't want the Socratic method from his coach. He wants direct advice. He'll use questions when he's leading others. But when he brings a problem to his own coach, he wants to be told: "You have that wrong; you're missing this." So What? Strauss was avoiding a confrontation because he knew the other person would be really upset. His coach said, "So what?" He had the conversation. The person was upset. They got to the other side, and it was better than leaving it out there. Bad news doesn't get better with age. The most effective people are the most open-minded and self-critical. The ones who insist they don't need a coach are usually the ones losing. "Arrogance is the enemy of continued success." Humility isn't pretending you're not good. Strauss says claiming he's bumbling through the job would be silly, and he's proud of what he does well. The humility is in staying open. His team's description of him: strongly held opinions, freely shared, and a mind that changes when the facts do. "You're just a terrible speaker." Strauss was 31, newly president of Vestron, and had written an eloquent after-dinner speech he was proud of. He read it off the page. His boss pulled him aside afterward and told him it was terrible. What two days of media training taught Strauss: Talk about what the audience cares about, not what you want to say Never deliver a written speech unless you're President of the United States Inject your personality Try to make them laugh Be of service to the audience. Strauss opens his class at MIT Sloan by asking the students why they came and what they want out of it. It surprises them every time, because speakers never ask. One meeting with 20 people beats 20 meetings with one person. A young CEO Strauss coaches was sleeping four hours a night and spending 20 hours a week on one-on-ones. Strauss told him to do one weekly meeting with all 20. Delegate with information. Everyone running a group is in the same room once a week and shares everything, including the problems. If it's business, it goes in the room. If it's personal, they can talk one-on-one. Politics shrink because nobody has information nobody else has. Happy stuff doesn't reach the CEO's desk. If it landed on his desk, it's either bad or genuinely complex. That's the system working. Align the words with the dollar signs. Mission, strategy, culture, and compensation all have to point in the same direction. Say you want to be the best in the world while paying people regardless of performance, and they will follow the money every time. The worst comp structure is CEO discretion. It builds a culture where everyone is trying to please one person, and people think pleasing someone means telling them what they want to hear. Hire the most talented people on earth, then support them through thick and thin. Strauss greenlit Dirty Dancing at Vestron on a $5.5 million budget. The first-time director was too scared to speak, so the team pitched it. They claimed the film would change how women dressed, produce an award-winning soundtrack, and win an Oscar. Strauss thought the pitch was nonsense. He didn't even like the script. He greenlit it anyway because he trusted the team over his own judgment. It became the biggest independent hit of all time to that date, a record it held until The Blair Witch Project. Be a good judge of talent, not of products. Knowing which one you are is the whole thing. Leave the escape hatches open. When competitors poured hundreds of millions into VR and the metaverse, Strauss said no. But Take-Two did enough experimentation to move fast if he was wrong, and got paid for every VR project they took on. They lost nothing on the wrong bet. Be creatively risk-forward and financially risk-averse. A well-run film studio had a 30 percent hit ratio, meaning 70 percent of what it released broke even or lost money. So you build the balance sheet first, then take the creative swings. "If you can't afford to lose, you don't play the game." Carl Icahn won because he was a good poker player with a huge stack of chips. When things went against him, he didn't sit around moaning. He went to the next game. At 68, he's up at 4:45 and in the gym by 6:45, often twice a day. Looking your best is a form of respect for other people and for yourself. If you look sloppy and out of shape, it's harder to lead. The other half is simply feeling good enough to show up with energy and a smile. He refuses to hold anyone else to his own personal standard. Everyone is on their own journey, and he doesn't want clones. Thirty minutes of walking five days a week is genuinely good for you. That person is showing up for themselves too. No AI slop in Grand Theft Auto. Take-Two builds handcrafted, building by building. Their teams will use state-of-the-art tools to do great work more efficiently. What they won't do is push a button on someone else's model and call the output theirs. "That's yesterday's headlines." Strauss's father-in-law's answer whenever anyone congratulated him. Take-Two doesn't do the who's-better-than-us party. They show sincere appreciation for great work, and then they get up the next morning and do it again. Reflection Questions Who is the person in your life who will tell you that you have it wrong? What is the confrontation you're avoiding right now, hoping it resolves itself? Have that conversation today. Where are you taking real risk without the balance sheet to survive being wrong? And where are you so protected that you aren't taking any risk at all? More Learning #662: Nick Thompson - Move at an Uncomfortable Pace #626: Rob Kimbel - The Power of Grit and Generosity #525: Frank Slootman - Raise Your Standards & Push the Pace Podcast Chapters00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 01:01 Meet Strauss Zelnick 03:00 President of Fox at 32 06:15 He Greenlit Dirty Dancing and Thought It Would Flop 09:55 How He Finds Talent 11:30 Align the Words With the Dollar Signs 18:56 One Meeting With 20 People 22:33 Up at 4:45, Gym by 6:45 26:20 No AI Slop in Grand Theft Auto 27:55 Why He Doesn't Feel Lonely at the Top 28:53 His Coach's Advice Was "So What?" 29:51 Every Great Leader Has a Coach 32:37 Direct Advice, Not the Socratic Method 35:31 What He Teaches at MIT Sloan 37:03 "You're Just a Terrible Speaker" 39:27 Arrogance Is the Enemy of Continued Success 41:03 Why He Said No to VR 43:52 Creatively Risk-Forward, Financially Risk-Averse 47:20 That's Yesterday's Headlines 49:51 EOPC
Ralph welcomes sportswriter Dave Zirin to talk about his new book, "The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn." Then Ralph speaks to labor activist Gene Bruskin about their upcoming Labor Day event at Busboys and Poets in DC, "Galvanizing Labor Day for a Workers' Compact."Dave Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation, a columnist for the Progressive, and the author of eight books on the politics of sports, including What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States and A People's History of Sports in the United States. His new book is The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.There's a despondency that exists now, I believe, among people who are also very angry about the state of our politics. And the thing that Howard always insisted upon—he was an activist who happened to be a historian, not a historian who was an activist. And that doesn't denigrate his incredible skills as a historian, it just says where his priorities were in his time on this planet. And one of the things that Howard believed so strongly is that the movements themselves needed to have a strong sense of history. The movements needed to know that we live in a time of great ups and downs.Dave ZirinPeople did step up to create the Zinn Education Project. And every book event I'm doing, I'm showing up with copies of their materials and they usually have somebody on the ground doing the organizing at the event. And at the very least, we're helping it be a little bit sticky. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's not just a book event. It's not just celebrating Howard. But it's also something that allows us to be able to make it matter in a way that it otherwise would not—because it's not just about selling books, it really is about building a movement.Dave ZirinGene Bruskin is a veteran of the labor movement as a local union president, an organizer, and campaign coordinator for numerous local and national unions. He has done extensive international labor solidarity work, including with Iraqi workers and unions, and is a founder of US Labor Against the War.What we're breaking through here now (and partly this has been the definition of this resistance movement) it's workers versus billionaires. And I think the labor movement in general coming out of World War II has been captured by this mythology that “What's good for General Electric is good for the nation.” And the more the economy “prospers,” the more it's good for everybody. And it turns out that that's not really the case, because we don't have that kind of equality. And also what's in the national interest in terms of our foreign policy is not in the interest of the average working class person. A lot of that stuff is being challenged and reversed—not enough, but it's forcing some of the more moderate forces to the left, just as we're seeing in some of these Senate and House elections.Gene BruskinI think this is a really important moment for Labor Day because Labor Day, among other things, is generally the kickoff for whatever elections are happening in November. And it's going to be that on steroids this year. But I think the important thing is that, of course, we want to throw out a bunch of these Neanderthal Republicans in the House and Senate. But it's not just a matter of restoring a Democratic majority in the House and Senate. The question is: to what end? And what is on the agenda of a Democratic-majority Congress at this minute? What is the vision that we have for our future that we have to be fighting for? … We have to change this whole climate so that people have some kind of hope, some kind of vision for what we want and what we deserve. And the same old, same old, whether it's a Democratic Congress or not, is not acceptable anymore.Gene BruskinGalvanizing Labor Day for a Workers' Compact (Sep 7, 2026 2:00 pm ET): Busboys and Poets and Ralph Nader present Galvanizing Labor Day for a Workers' Compact, a discussion of how unions can maximize the impact of Labor Day to mobilize workers and voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections and afterwards. (Event is in-person @ Busboys and Poets 14th & V + Livestreamed. Free and open to all, but registration is required.)News 9/4/26* Our top story this week is the neo-colonial oil extraction deal that has been struck between the Trump administration and the government of Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela. This government has been running the country under the barrel of a gun since Trump sent Delta Force to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro from his home in the Bolivarian Republic in January. According to the BBC, the new deal “grants a US-led company 100-year concessions over 17 oilfields in Venezuela, amounting to a staggering 65 billion barrels of crude,” or over one-fifth of the country's proven oil reserves. The White House has released a fact sheet, stating that much of the new extraction will be conducted by North American Blue Energy Partners (Nabep), and that the U.S. government will have “veto power over the appointment of any member of the board of directors, and a majority of Nabep's board of directors must be US citizens.” The announcement of this deal drew scorn from a wide variety of sources. These range from Trump's former special representative on Venezuela and Iran, Elliott Abrams who called the deal “terrible” and sees it as Rodríguez “simply complying with the demands she's getting from Washington,” to Rafael Ramírez, who served as the head of the state-run energy firm, PDVSA, and as the oil minister under former President Hugo Chávez, who is quoted saying the deal “hands over [the oil] and opens the doors to a new colonialism of the United States.”* In more outrageous foreign policy news, Reuters reports the Trump administration has designated the United Kingdom-based pro-Palestine activist group Palestine Action a ”terrorist organization,” part of the administration's “campaign to crack down on left-wing groups” using post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws. The United Nations has decried this move, with the UN's human rights office chief Volker Turk calling it a “disproportionate and unnecessary restriction on the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association as well as the right to participate in public affairs,” adding that the “expansive use of the term ‘terrorism' has been documented to have a chilling effect on civic space.” The UK has sought to bring the legal hammer down on Palestine Action, though these efforts have been somewhat stymied by the courts. Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar of global expression at free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Free Expression (FIRE), said that the US “must reject that censorship - not import it.” Reuters notes that “Israel's foreign ministry welcomed the designation.”* This is not the only case wherein the Trump administration has gone to extreme lengths to punish pro-Palestine activism. California District Judge Noel Wise highlighted this in her recent decision, excoriating the State Department and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for their attempts to deport noncitizens over protected speech. This ruling, stemming from a lawsuit filed by FIRE, “centred on how the second Trump administration revoked visas and detained international students studying in the US after they engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy.” Judge Wise stated in her decision that “in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people..It is not the government's to take.” She added that the strength of our democracy is “diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave' or suffer the government's retaliation.” Mahmoud Khalil, the most prominent victim of the administration's policy of seeking to deport activists they want to silence, applauded the decision, saying “No one should fear speaking up for Palestine.” This from Al Jazeera.* Our final Palestine-related story for this week takes us to Hollywood, where prominent actor and activist Mark Ruffalo's recent comments in opposition to the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. merger, related to Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison's ties to his father's software company Oracle, have been cynically branded as “antisemitic tropes.” According to the LA Times, Ruffalo shared a clip of Safra Catz, Oracle's former CEO and a current Paramount board member speaking at an Israeli-American Council National Summit conference, where she said that “she couldn't discuss Oracle's work with Israel's military, but ‘we have some profoundly scary technology at Oracle and we wanted to make sure that it was available' to Israel,” after October 7th. Paramount's lawyers quickly sought to smear Ruffalo with the charge of antisemitism, including by deploying their allies in pro-Israel groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League. In response, over 150 Jewish filmmakers, academics, writers and even rabbis, signed an open letter which reads, in part, “Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism. It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty.”* In other news, NBC reports the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Friday that “federal commodities-trading law does not preempt Nevada's gambling law as to the regulation of placing wagers on sports.” This piece notes that the 3-0 ruling marks the prediction markets industry's most significant legal setback yet and sets up a showdown at the Supreme Court, since the Third Circuit has already ruled that New Jersey cannot regulate Kalshi. The Trump administration has sought to keep regulation of betting markets under the jurisdiction of the federal body known as the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Notably, the commission, usually composed of five appointees, currently boasts only one single member: Michael S. Selig. Selig is extremely friendly to the prediction market industry and has sought to stave off state-level regulation by arguing for federal preemption.* Kalshi has been in the news for other reasons as well, namely for its attempts to self-regulate. For one, the Wall Street Journal reports that Kalshi issued its first ever lifetime ban this week, to none other than former Congressman and notorious grifter George Santos. This ban was precipitated by Santos' making over $17,000 by “placing bets on his attendance at President Trump's State of the Union address.” Kalshi adds that they issued a $71,356 fine to Santos. For his part, Santos tweeted “Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform…Let's see how much longer you guys are around for.” Newsweek reports that at the same time, Kalshi fined and suspended North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Laurie Buckhout for betting on her own race. Buckhout dismissed her bet as a “dumb mistake” and joked that her “career as a Kalshi trader was short-lived.” Buckhout is running against incumbent Congressman Don Davis in a newly-redrawn district engineered to favor Republicans, but polling shows a tight race. If Buckhout narrowly loses, many will point to this “dumb mistake” as a key reason why.* Another legal battle is unfolding in New York City, where landlords are challenging Mayor Zohran Mamdani's rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants. PIX11 reports that the suit, originally filed in Staten Island but now moved to Manhattan, centers on complaints from landlords that the decision by the rent guidelines board (RGB) to keep rents flat on one and two-year lease renewals for NYC's million rent-stabilized apartments was “predetermined and illegal.” They argue that the board “cherry-picked data and was packed with supporters of Mayor…Mamdani's campaign promise to freeze rents,” while the Mamdani administration maintains that the board is an “independent body and considers both tenant and landlord concerns.” The mayoral administration will defend the decision in court, while the Legal Aid Society and Legal Services NYC have filed a request for the court to dismiss the suit entirely. An article in POLITICO from earlier this month reports that the plaintiffs in this suit hope to bring this case all the way to the US Supreme Court.* Our final stories this week take us back to the campaign trail. First up, Alaska Public Media is out with a report about a “chain of political maneuvers in the governor's race,” kicked off by former Anchorage mayor Tom Begich's “decision to step down to give fellow Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins a better shot at winning.” Kreiss-Tomkins finished first in the August primary, followed by Begich in second place and two Republicans in third and fourth respectively. Under Alaska election law, the top four finishers advance to the general election. This piece recounts how Begich's withdrawal sent shockwaves through the Republican candidate field. With Begich out, “Republican Treg Taylor moved into the fourth spot. But on Sunday, Taylor called for [fellow Republicans Bernadette] Wilson and [Dave] Bronson to consolidate their campaigns and pledged to endorse a combined Republican ticket. In a statement, Taylor urged Republicans to unite behind a single candidate, to counter Kreiss-Tompkins.” While fascinating for political junkies, many have observed that the maneuvers on display here and in Alaska's Senate race seem to undercut many of the arguments in favor of ranked-choice voting, with more effort being put into confusing voters or seeking to induce so-called “ballot exhaustion” rather than facilitating a more enlightened civil discourse.* Our final two stories cover the Massachusetts primaries held this Tuesday. The topline, as Semafor reports, is that incumbents swept their primaries in a stark reversal of the insurgent trend in Democratic primaries this cycle. The most notable of these was the crushing victory of 80-year-old incumbent Senator Ed Markey over his 47-year-old challenger, Congressman Seth Moulton. Markey won with approximately two-thirds of the vote. This piece notes that Moulton, younger but running to Markey's right, was never able to establish the “generational change” dynamic he wanted in this race, as “progressives and LGBTQ rights groups rallied behind…[Senator Markey].” On this latter point, Moulton was roundly criticized by Democratic voters, even in his own district, for “scapegoating” transgender people in the wake of the 2024 election. Reporter Dave Weigel adds a coda to this piece: “The subtext of Markey ‘26 was that he would be a reliable progressive vote for whatever the movement wanted for six more years, and then Ayanna Pressley could come in and replace him. Pressley campaigned [with] Markey, starred in ads; [and] at rallies he gushed about how she was the ‘north star' and if you wanted to know what the right side of an issue was, it was the side she was on.”* Finally, with all of that said, the pro-incumbent wave in Massachusetts did cut both ways. Progressive challengers to moderate Democrat incumbents fell short in the state's eighth congressional district – reelecting Congressman Stephen Lynch for a 14th term over progressive voting rights advocate Patrick Roath. Meanwhile, in the first district, WAMC reports Congressman Richie Neal, a longtime scourge of progressives, fended off a primary challenge from teacher Jeromie Whalen in his bid for a 20th term in the House – though Whalen, a political newcomer, won an impressive 46% of the vote. Neal will however face the formidable independent candidate Nadia Milleron in the general election. Milleron won nearly 40% of the vote against Neal in 2024; perhaps, if she wins over enough of Whalen's primary supporters, she can pull out a victory in November.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe
Mirjam Swanson from the LA Times joined the Kyle Madson to talk Clippers.
- Alonzo Carter, Sacramento State Football HC - Mirjam Swanson, LA Times
Kyle Madson spends hour three talking with Mirjam Swanson from the LA Times and then talks 49ers.
A Los Angeles couple set out to build a 400-square-foot backyard home for about $300,000, only to watch the final cost climb to $600,000 in a project recently profiled by Lisa Boone in the Los Angeles Times. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with Tamara White of Small Housing and Mary Coddington, founder of 12 Incorporated, about what pushed the cost so high. The couple chose an ambitious design and built on a difficult site, but they also had two major advantages many small housing projects never get: they already owned the land, and they were allowed to build. If the land and permissions were already in place, what made the price skyrocket, and how much of that complexity could actually be removed? ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES "A compact ADU built on a dramatic ridgeline ‘floats' over L.A. and its Midcentury neighbor" by Lisa Boone, Latimes.com (August 2026) Norm Van Eeden Petersman (LinkedIn) Tamara White (LinkedIn) Mary Coddington (LinkedIn) Articles mentioned and Downzone: 'She couldn't afford L.A. rent after law school. Her parents' ADU came to the rescue' (Article) Courtenay Cohousing (Site) A Voter's Guide to Asking Candidates about Housing (Site) Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom. This podcast is made possible by Strong Towns members. Thank you! Join fellow members discussing this episode in The Commons.
It's Beto week, we had Gustavo Arelllano from the LA Times. Beto and Greg continue talking about the Sale of the Angels to Stan Kroenke for $4 Billion Dollars. Kroenke's teams have won two Super Bowls, Stanley Cups, an NBA title, and most recently, a Premier League championship. Can he bring a Championship to Anaheim? Will he relocate the team? Should he change the name to the California Angels or the Angels of Anaheim? Bergy and Beto plan a Comedy Show who would in it? and who will join Beto in tomorrow's show? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
After 23 years Arte Moreno sells the Angels! Who bought it? Stan Kroenke whose company, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, owns the NFL's Los Angeles Rams, the NBA's Denver Nuggets, the NHL's Colorado Avalanche and Premier League Arsenal. Plus, Bergy has his 3 things about the Dodgers but today he will complain about the way they have been playing as of late. It's Beto Week so he's bringing in his friends, today Gustavo Arellano from the LA Times joins us! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Gustavo Arellano from the LA Times joins us to talk about the Angels being sold, Food, and his friendship with Beto. Mike Trout spoke about the sell of the Angels. He talked about his contract situation, his relationship with Arte and how he can't wait to meet Stan Kroenke. Andy Kamentzky stops by and meets Gustavo Arellano for the first time. Gustavo talks about food, meeting Anthony Bourdain, how Taco Bell came to be and so much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Johnny Mac covers Jon Stewart's comments on Michelle Obama's podcast about not confusing cultural power with real power, the fragility of leaders toward satire, and whether political comedy helps or corrodes discourse. Brian Baumgartner discusses being The Office's best golfer, joint pain from long tournament weeks, and promotes Voltaren while naming Oscar as his preferred golf partner. The lineup for Last One Laughing UK season three is announced, including Lee Mack, Katherine Ryan, Harry Hill, Katherine Parkinson, Michelle de Swart, Jen Richardson, Morgana Robinson, Josh Jones, Roisin Conaty, and returning Richard Ayoade. Bill Burr talks Massachusetts bar pizza as Anthony Michael Hall praises lobster rolls and Cape fish. Leanne Morgan discusses Season 2 storylines, dating, menopause, elderly parents, and plastic surgery. Trevor Noah adds BaFunny shows in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban, the LA Times recommends several LA comedy nights, and Veronica Slivka's indie-pop project “Me As a Girl” is revealed with new music and a NYC debut show. 00:12 Jon Stewart on Power00:47 Office Star Golf Talk02:13 Voltaren Caddy Pitch03:15 Last One Laughing Cast04:17 Bill Burr Pizza Hunt05:14 Leanne Morgan Season Two07:14 Trevor Noah Adds Shows07:51 LA Comedy Night Picks09:49 SNL Star Secret Music Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/daily-comedy-news-with-johnny-mac--4522158/support.Today's DCN is brought to you by MyBookie use promo code DCN!Daily Comedy News is hosted by Johnny Mac and releases every weekday. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. Part of the Caloroga Shark Media network. For transcripts and show notes visit www.dailycomedynews.comDaily Comedy News with Johnny Mac is a daily podcast covering comedians, stand-up comedy, late night television, and the comedy industry. New episodes every morning. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Contact John at John@thesharkdeck dot com For Uninterrupted Listening, use the Apple Podcast App and click the banner that says Uninterrupted Listening. $4.99/month John's Substack about media is free.
Johnny Mac covers comedy news for Sept. 1, including backlash to Bill Maher after a Real Time monologue scolding Americans for mourning Dolly Parton too much and joking about tributes. The Minnesota Star Tribune reviews Tom Segura at Acme, noting he's building a new set from scratch and not addressing his split with Christina P. Michael Che's four Minneapolis shows at First Avenue reportedly banned bathroom breaks due to Netflix filming and included material on the R-word and fatherhood. Variety reports growing backlash and a campaign urging cinemas to refuse to screen Ali G: Who Iz I? over claims the character is an outdated racist caricature. Other items: Pete Davidson's new look for crime thriller Tommy Karate, Kenan Thompson substituting for Simon Cowell on AGT, late-night ratings led by Rosie O'Donnell week on Kimmel, Blake Griffin's new show The Stepback, a Judy Gold podcast, George Lopez's Big Boys Comedy Fiesta, and LA Times comedians to watch.00:19 Bill Maher Dolly Backlash01:17 Tom Segura Starts Fresh02:22 Michael Che Netflix Taping03:15 SNL Cast Check In03:43 Ali G Film Controversy05:15 Pete Davidson Movie Look05:57 AGT Simon Out Kenan In06:30 Late Night Ratings Roundup07:26 Blake Griffin Late Night Show09:03 Comedy Podcasts And Festivals09:38 LA Times Comics To Watch Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/daily-comedy-news-with-johnny-mac--4522158/support.Today's DCN is brought to you by MyBookie use promo code DCN!Daily Comedy News is hosted by Johnny Mac and releases every weekday. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. Part of the Caloroga Shark Media network. For transcripts and show notes visit www.dailycomedynews.comDaily Comedy News with Johnny Mac is a daily podcast covering comedians, stand-up comedy, late night television, and the comedy industry. New episodes every morning. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Contact John at John@thesharkdeck dot com For Uninterrupted Listening, use the Apple Podcast App and click the banner that says Uninterrupted Listening. $4.99/month John's Substack about media is free.
Byron Allen's ‘Comics Unleashed' Beats Kimmel and Fallon in Key DemoJohnny Mac covers late-night ratings where CBS's Byron Allen rerun of “Comics Unleashed” wins adults 18–49 (161K) over Jimmy Kimmel (158K with Jelly Roll hosting) and a Fallon repeat (154K), though it finishes third in total viewers; he also notes “Funny You Should Ask” beating Seth Meyers in total viewers amid Meyers taking seven weeks off. Other items include Stavros Halkias' self-focused Letterboxd review of the Anthony Bourdain movie, Hannah Berner hosting Paramount+ dating series “Making Love” in early 2027, Jim Gaffigan voicing Santa in a Warner Bros. animated film with Melissa McCarthy as Margie Claus, and Jimmy Carr in talks to host a new “Top Gear.” A Jon Stewart-era Daily Show purple couch is for sale, John Mulaney visits Tinker Air Force Base, and controversies involve Druski's CTE skit, Patrick W. Cutler's Angel Reese parodies, and James Acaster show complaints. LA Times comics-to-watch include Taylor Bos, Angie Stroud, Kat Bird, Davantre Coleman, and Maddy Mays. 00:16 Byron Allen Ratings Shock01:46 NBC Late Night Warning02:34 Stavros Letterboxd Bit02:56 Hannah Berner Reality Gig03:57 Gaffigan Voices Santa05:16 Jimmy Carr Top Gear Talk06:14 Jon Stewart Couch Sale07:30 Mulaney Visits Air Base08:03 Comedy Controversies Roundup11:01 LA Times Comics To Watch1 Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/daily-comedy-news-with-johnny-mac--4522158/support.Today's DCN is brought to you by MyBookie use promo code DCN!Daily Comedy News is hosted by Johnny Mac and releases every weekday. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. Part of the Caloroga Shark Media network. For transcripts and show notes visit www.dailycomedynews.comDaily Comedy News with Johnny Mac is a daily podcast covering comedians, stand-up comedy, late night television, and the comedy industry. New episodes every morning. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Contact John at John@thesharkdeck dot com For Uninterrupted Listening, use the Apple Podcast App and click the banner that says Uninterrupted Listening. $4.99/month John's Substack about media is free.
Johnny Mac recaps comedy news, highlighting a Atlantic piece on Trump satire fatigue: Alec Baldwin says Trump is no longer funny, while Anthony Atamanuik describes The President Show as issue-focused despite Trump being an “albatross,” and the article notes the left-leaning satire boom faded, with Sarah Cooper's pandemic-era rise and later Trump portrayals by James Austin Johnson and Shane Gillis. Mac also cites Atsuko Akatsuka's Guardian interview (a dog-walking Yelp complaint, advice about jealousy from a friend, and hotel habits), David Spade on jealousy and improv trust, and a Ronnie Chieng–Josh Johnson Interview Magazine chat about career ruts and releasing long-form stand-up. Other items: BBC renews Diane Morgan's sci-fi comedy Android, Cam Patterson joins film Love, Love, Billboard's top July comedy concerts, LA Times booker picks, Matt Matthews' pronouns controversy, and Dan Tiernan's Fringe review. 00:17 Trump Satire Fatigue01:39 Sarah Cooper Era02:30 SNL Impressions Then Now02:54 Vaughn Meader Example03:53 Atsuko Interview Bits04:26 Chelsea Handler Ad Rant05:30 Spade On Jealousy05:58 Chieng Johnson Career Rut08:40 Android Renewed09:11 Kam Patterson Casting09:45 Top Comedy Concerts10:56 LA Bookers Picks12:37 Matthews Pronouns Blowup13:31 Fringe Review Tiernan Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/daily-comedy-news-with-johnny-mac--4522158/support.Today's DCN is brought to you by MyBookie use promo code DCN!Daily Comedy News is hosted by Johnny Mac and releases every weekday. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. Part of the Caloroga Shark Media network. For transcripts and show notes visit www.dailycomedynews.comDaily Comedy News with Johnny Mac is a daily podcast covering comedians, stand-up comedy, late night television, and the comedy industry. New episodes every morning. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Contact John at John@thesharkdeck dot com For Uninterrupted Listening, use the Apple Podcast App and click the banner that says Uninterrupted Listening. $4.99/month John's Substack about media is free.
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Blake Mycoskie founded TOMS Shoes in 2006 after a trip to Argentina, where he saw children without shoes and built a company around giving away a pair for every pair sold. TOMS went on to donate more than 100 million pairs of shoes and became one of the most copied business models in the world. What most people don't know is what happened after he sold it, and I'm grateful that he was open to talking about that on this episode of The Learning Leader Show. Key Learnings Make your gratitude specific. Not "I'm grateful for my family." Name the exact thing. Blake's example from that morning: the photos the camp posted of his daughter laughing in the lake, and knowing his stoic kid does not smile like that unless she is genuinely happy. He kept the practice going for five years when he couldn't feel any of it. Blake could not name five things he was grateful for, and he had all the same things in his life he has now. He did it anyway. He credits it as one of the things that kept him going. Surfing is a great thinking practice. Surfing is mostly just sitting on the board. Three hours in the water, ten waves, maybe five minutes standing. The rest is paddling and sitting. That's why it works as a thinking practice. Capture the idea in the moment or lose it. Blake programmed the side button on his Apple Watch to open a voice memo. Every idea he has sitting on the board, he records. They're all waiting when he gets out. He hit every marker and still felt worthless. "I did everything, and I still, deep down in my soul, had this feeling like I'm not worthy, I'm not enough, and I never will be." The external validation was the drug. Selling TOMS cut off the supply. The thing that had been holding up his sense of self was suddenly gone. If you get there and it's empty, don't panic. Panicking is what Blake did, and having money meant he could make expensive mistakes fast. Build the dream house. Get divorced. One thing after another. The emptiness may be the point. Blake's read on it: if achievement delivered what society promises, you'd never go inward. Feeling hollow at the summit is what forces the inner work. He re-patterned the sentence he'd been telling himself since childhood. The old one was "you're not enough." He replaced it with "I am enough. I've always been enough." Twenty minutes every morning and every evening. Forty straight days. It worked, and he no longer needs to do it daily. Sometimes you just need a physical cue to catch the loop. That's the whole idea behind the bracelet he wears. Not magic. A reminder on your wrist that interrupts the thought. Give the second one away. Blake found the bracelet's real power was handing one to a friend. Now you're both wearing it, you're both in on it, and there's an unspoken agreement that neither of you has to have a bad day alone. Men are worse at building that than women are. Tell your kids they're enough, and keep telling them. They're going to get the opposite message from everywhere else, which is exactly why it has to come from you repeatedly. Blake says the relaxation you'll see in them is immediate. Be brutally honest about how hard the job is. Try to talk them out of it. Blake is the last interview in the process now. If he can lay out every negative and they still desperately want it, the commitment is real. "How many people did you convince not to take the role before you got the right person?" Most leaders slip into sales mode, talk the candidate into it, and end up talking themselves into the candidate. What he screens for during the interview process: Integrity first. If it isn't there, it surfaces fast now. Attitude second. The person who never says "that's not my job." Whether they're building a resume or joining a movement. Find the people who cover what you're bad at. Blake is a storyteller, a vision-sharer, and high energy. He is not a supply chain guy, not a finance guy, and he has trouble saying no. So he hired around it. That's what let him actually be the chief shoe giver instead of pretending to be a CEO. Don't wait for permission. Most people stand in line at the front door. Blake looks for side doors. In Argentina he had no investors and no plan, just an idea and the words One For One. Ryan's version for his kids: everyone can apply online. Drive to the restaurant and go talk to the manager instead. Having no experience was the advantage. He'd never made a shoe, so he didn't know which rules he was breaking. Same with outdoor advertising. Same with driver's ed. He learned it from Richard Branson: ask forgiveness, not permission. Nashville wouldn't allow advertising, so he sold art instead. Blake spent two years with the city council and got there by removing the ad from the ad. No price, no call to action. Just album covers on the sides of buildings, called country music art. Once one artist had one, they all wanted one. He sold the company to Clear Channel. You don't attract what you want. You attract what you are. Want honest friends, be honest. Want peace at home, bring peace. Want trust, practice it when nobody's watching. Blake applies it to customers too: sloppy companies attract sloppy customers, and that's usually the real reason the business fails. Charlie Munger got asked how to get a great wife. He said: deserve one. Be known for doing what you said you'd do. Early on Blake didn't have the skills, so he built the reputation on execution instead. Move fast, keep it simple, do it with integrity. Momentum is a form of trust. The other half of that is not overpromising. Blake's own failure mode is getting excited, feeling falsely confident, promising something big, and missing. When it happens, own it fast and be honest, and the relationship usually survives. Be careful using a general-purpose chatbot as a therapist. Blake's warning, and the reason the founders of Sonia built a purpose-built tool instead: the big consumer models are designed to make you feel good about yourself. If you need to hear something hard, that's the last thing you want. He went from skeptic to advisor in six months. Blake met the Sonia founders at a mental health conference, tried the app to be polite, and by the third session was getting insights he hadn't gotten elsewhere. He now spends five to ten hours a week helping them. His reason for loving the work: "Now I get to be the coach instead of the athlete." Stop chasing balance. Design for harmony. Blake picked this up from an executive at Cannes who said she'd given up on balance. He goes hard in phases. Full dad mode with the office waiting on emails. Then all in on a launch and missing things at home. The measure isn't evenly split day to day. It's whether, over a year, everyone in his life feels like they got what they needed to thrive. Including him. Reflection Questions What did you actually feel grateful for today? Not the category. The specific moment. What is the sentence you've been repeating to yourself since childhood, and is it true? In your last hire, how hard did you try to talk them out of it? Or did you spend the interview selling them, and then sell yourself? More Learning #598: Sam Parr - Bold. Fast. Fun. Living by a Mantra & Building a Media Company #547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You #676: Jesse Cole - Built for The Fans (The Owner of the Savannah Bananas) Episode Chapters 00:00 Meet Blake Mycoskie 01:38 Surfing is Great for Deep Thinking 03:41 Make Your Gratitude Specific 05:39 Blake Sold TOMS and Fell Apart 11:20 Advice for Those to "Make It" and Feel Nothing 13:23 "I Am Enough" and the Bracelet on His Wrist 17:35 The No Magic Pill 19:41 The Risk of Chatbot Therapy 22:42 A Surgeon Dad, a Bestselling Mom, and the Pressure Nobody Said Out Loud 25:13 Telling Your Kids They're Enough 31:31 How He Got Country Music Art on the Side of Buildings 35:15 Learning to Be Proud of TOMS Again 38:49 Hiring Around Your Weaknesses 41:25 Try to Talk Them Out of the Job 45:07 You Don't Attract What You Want. You Attract What You Are. 46:54 Don't Wait for Permission 48:34 Be Known for Doing What You Said You'd Do 50:02 The Champagne Question: Harmony, Not Balance 52:28 EOPC
An eight-mile gap keeps Los Angeles from having a continuous river bike route through the heart of the city. Voters approved hundreds of millions of dollars to help close it, but years of planning have pushed the project toward a possible billion-dollar price tag. Carlee Alm-LaBar is joined by transportation advocate Dave Snyder, Pasadena city councilmember and longtime local government leader Rick Cole, and Strong Towns chief technical advisor Edward Erfurt to examine how a straightforward connection became a megaproject. Flood control, emergency access, environmental concerns, neighborhood connections, labor requirements, and long-term reliability have each added something defensible to the plan. Meanwhile, a simpler path could reportedly close the entire gap with the money already available. ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES "The eight-mile gap in the L.A. River bike path downtown has a billion-dollar problem" by Mack Baysinger, Latimes.com (August 2026) Downzone: Start Your Farm: The Authoritative Guide to Becoming a Sustainable 21st-Century Farmer, by Ellen Polishuk and Forrest Pritchard (Site) the Movement Newsletter (Substack) Carlee Alm-LaBar (LinkedIn) Dave Snyder (LinkedIn) Rick Cole (LinkedIn) Edward Erfurt (LinkedIn) Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom. This podcast is made possible by Strong Towns members. Join fellow members discussing this episode in The Commons.
The LA Lakers --- a prestigious basketball franchise that didn't change hands for 46 years --- just sold twice in ten months, the second time for $2.5 billion more than the first. The seller is Mark Walter, CEO of Guggenheim, owner of the Dodgers and part of Chelsea FC, and the man whose laptop and phone the FBI seized off his private jet just as the Lakers deal was coming together. Since then, one of the insurance companies in his orbit has revised its reported related-party investments from $1.4 billion to $17 billion. Quite the rounding error. In this episode, we get into the questions everyone on the Street is suddenly asking. Why would anyone sell the crown jewel of American sports a year after fighting to buy it? What do a bunch of boring life insurance companies most people have never heard of have to do with the trophy assets of the billionaire class? Why do private equity and private credit firms keep buying insurers in the first place — and what happens to that entire model when the disclosures around "related parties" turn out to be, let's say, incomplete? And why did Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, who spent months chasing a Las Vegas expansion team, pivot to the Lakers over a single weekend? The bigger question hanging over all of it: this structure — asset managers selling their own loans to insurance companies they control — underpins a massive share of the boom in private credit. If regulators start pulling on this thread, how many other portfolios look like this one? By way of disclaimer, no charges have been filed and no wrongdoing has been established nor is implied here; our research merely summarizes reporting from Bloomberg, the FT, the WSJ, and the LA Times.
Sara Stein is a seasoned brand builder and product developer with a career spanning Hollywood, fashion, and consumer products.Starting at Writers & Artists Agency and Simpson-Bruckheimer Films, she transitioned to fashion PR, founding S Public Relations in 2001. Best known for launching Los Angeles Fashion Week, she represented over 60 brands, including Universal Consumer Products, Superga, and Erica Courtney Jewelry. She produced live events featuring The Beach Boys and Runway Shows.In 2012, Sara launched Sisters of Los Angeles, a vibrant gift brand sold in upscale outlets across the U.S., Canada, and Japan, including Nordstrom, The Fontainebleau Hotel, LAX, The Broad Museum, Hallmark, and Ritz-Carlton. Her brand was featured on THE TODAY SHOW, Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Cosmopolitan Magazine, The LA Times, Sunset Mag and more. She managed operations, product design, and strategic partnerships before selling the company in 2018.In this episode, Sara shares her journey from Hollywood and fashion PR to building her own consumer brand. We talk about her experience launching Los Angeles Fashion Week, developing Sisters of Los Angeles, growing the brand into major retailers and destinations, and what she learned along the way as a brand builder and entrepreneur.What's Inside: Sara's journey from Hollywood and fashion PR to entrepreneurship Building and growing Sisters of Los Angeles into a widely distributed gift brand Product development, partnerships, and the experience of eventually selling her companyInstagramFacebookSwags to Riches WebsiteSupport the show
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming My guest - Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, the social gaming company he built from zero to $12.7 billion, pioneering a category that generated over a billion app installs and introduced hundreds of millions of people to online play. He's a serial founder who has started ten companies, taught product development at Stanford, and made early seed investments in Facebook and Twitter. His new book is Life at the Speed of Play. Key Learnings Coaches are cheat codes. Mark has hired a surfing coach, a tennis coach, a chess coach, a life coach, and the legendary Bill Campbell. None of them were assigned to him. He went and found them. "You throw to where you swing. You don't swing to where you throw." His tennis coach, Jorge, on learning how to serve. Commit to the natural swing first. You'll miss. You'll look stupid. Eventually your brain realizes you're serious and puts the ball where it belongs. You play to get better. You don't play to win. Not this point. Not this match. What am I doing right now that makes me better in the next game? Kill the ego so it gets out of the way of you being humble and curious. Don't contort the organization around one talented jerk. Colleen McCreary, Zynga's chief people officer, kept a sign on her wall: "No jerks allowed." She once vetoed an acquisition because she believed the founder was toxic. When the organization sees you refuse to bend just to win one point, they build muscle and confidence too. You'll have periods out of alignment. That's okay. Sometimes the person is in a crucial seat and you can't swap them tomorrow. What matters is that you're aligned with the philosophy. Bill Campbell's two lessons: intellectual honesty and courage. Be committed to the deep truths above everything else, and say them to your team even when it hurts. Then have the courage to stand up to your own team, your own board, and your own investors. A well-run company is a democratic dictatorship. Campbell leaned heavily on the dictatorship half. Unapologetically. The flip side of ambition is sacrifice. Everyone says they're a ten out of ten on ambition. Mark's test: would you toil in obscurity for the next ten years, nobody respecting what you're doing, for an 80 or 90 percent chance at something bigger than your wildest dreams? Or take the 80 percent chance at a respectable single and a pat on the back? Nobody believes in us as much as we do. That's why we become founders. At 41, VCs who had already backed Mark twice told him he was too old, too rich, and too settled to go all in on Zynga. Mark isn't all in until he is. He calls it a lazy on-ramp to curiosity. Lots of projects. Looking for signals in a lot of places. Processing. Then it flips. "When the fish are running, we're up all night throwing nets until they're done running, not until we're tired." The chess lesson: play boring. His chess coach told him if you want to beat a player rated much higher than you, play boring and conservative and let them make the mistake. He started doing it. He started winning. Your kids don't follow what you say. They follow what you do. Mark set out to be a different kind of dad than his own, who measured people by their résumé. Then he watched his 15-year-old daughter spend every waking minute with math tutors before leaving on a service trip. "How did we get here? Oh, I know how we got here. They're not listening to what Dad says. They're following what Dad does." Happiness comes from feeling useful to a community you care about. Not from being useful. From feeling it. That's Alfred Adler, by way of The Courage to Be Disliked. There are two levels of success. A life well lived is a life in alignment with what only you can bring to the world. You don't have to build Google to feel like you went for it. The ultimate success is the greatest instantiation of your talents. Use money as freedom, not lifestyle. When Freeloader sold and 28-year-old Mark had more money than he'd ever imagined, he made a list of everything he was going to buy. It totaled about $9,000. He put leather interior in his Pathfinder. He still has the vehicle. He set a $500 million goal that had nothing to do with buying things. At a net worth around $15 million, working with a life coach, he wrote it down because that's the capital required to run a studio of teams chasing many ideas without going to anyone else with hat in hand. "Creatively, that's freedom." Retirement is spiritual death. The stretches between building things are what Mark calls the abyss. Once you've felt the high of building with a great team and shipping something into users' hands every week, it ruins you. You can't be happy with less. Over-fund the things that matter. Not every day is the same. Not every life moment is the same. When one of those moments comes, put all your best players on the ice. The Allen & Company investor tour. They told Mark it was a dog and pony show. Just shake some hands. He told his team: this is our IPO, this is our roadshow, and we are going to use every minute of it the way we want. He gave the biggest public market investors a full presentation, handed them his numbers, and told them to judge him against those numbers in a year. He met with them a year later and had crushed them. King for a day. Carol Bartz brought Mark in to talk to Yahoo's entire senior management. He spent two weeks building a presentation on how he'd run Yahoo if he were king for a day, stood up, and took over the room for an hour. They got a deal done and one person in that room came to work for him. He ran the same play on the CEO of AMEX with a credit card that competed on fun. Amex spent $75 million with them. Seven minutes with Obama became 45. Mark was told the President would ask about his kids and then the meeting would be over. He walked in with a PowerPoint on the ten bold objectives he'd run on if he were president. Obama went through the entire thing and then asked what else he had. Prepare as hard for everything going right as you do for everything going wrong. Mark had under-prepared for the version of where Obama said, "Yeah, I'm buying. What else you got?" We sleepwalk through our own biggest moments. The question isn't what's the agenda or why they want to meet with you. It's: I have five minutes with the king. What is theoretically possible here? The Book of Life. Every year during the Jewish New Year, Mark writes in the same book. Only during that window. It isn't a journal. It's a spiritual board meeting with himself. He reads back through every previous year first, then writes. Partner with your future self. "What will Mark 2030 thank me for doing right now?" It started with quitting smoking. October 19, 1994. "I pulled my own power back. If I can quit smoking and really commit to it, what else can I do?" A year later he quit his job and did something bigger. Even if you missed the big goal, ask what you actually did toward it. Did you talk about it? Did you do real things? Did you turn the boat toward it? If not, maybe you don't believe in the goal. When Mark is at his lowest, he's humbled, he picks achievable goals, and he finds the most grit. When he's winning, he picks stratospheric goals and does the worst. After his biggest successes, he isn't humble enough to succeed again, and he has to go through failure to reel himself back in. Mark's champagne moment a year from now: that the book connects for hundreds of thousands of people, and that he's built a product people find real meaning in. Reflection Questions If you went and hired a coach, who is the person who could most change your life right now? What is your next high-stakes moment, and are you treating it like the dog and pony show or like your IPO? What is the one habit your future self would most thank you for making this year? What would it unlock if you actually committed to it? More Learning #688: Dr. Henry Cloud - Your Desired Future: 5 Steps to Take You Where You Want to Go #689: Eric Ries - Why Good Companies Go Bad, and How Great Companies Stay Great #687: Jim Collins - What to Make of a Life & The 3 Types of Luck Episode Chapters 00:00 Meet Mark Pincus 01:40 Why Mark Hires So Many Coaches 02:25 Lessons From Tennis In Leading People 04:56 Refusing to Bend the Culture for One Great Player 07:03 Lessons From Bill Campbell 09:17 On Being Called a Control Freak 13:38 The Ambition Question Mark Asks Founders 14:53 What High Standards Do to Your Kids 20:55 How Mark Defines Success 23:26 Money as Freedom, Not Lifestyle 29:45 Why High Achievers Can't Retire 32:39 Over-Fund the Things That Matter 34:35 Treating a Handshake Tour Like an IPO Roadshow 35:36 King for a Day at Yahoo and Amex 38:14 Seven Minutes With Obama That Became 45 41:39 The Book of Life 45:21 Why Mark Does His Best Thinking at His Lowest 46:48 The Champagne Question 48:40 EOPC
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guests: My dad, Keith Hawk (also known as Pistol), spent decades leading sales teams at LexisNexis and has taught leadership and public speaking to audiences all over the country. He's the author of multiple books including Get Real Selling. Pistol has that rare ability to be both universally liked and 100% respected by all who know him. My brother AJ Hawk was an All-American linebacker at Ohio State, where he won a national championship. He played 11 years in the NFL, won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers, and retired as the franchise's all-time leading tackler. Now you'll see him every weekday on ESPN as a co-host of the Pat McAfee Show Notes: Key Learnings Be a consciously competent leader. Pistol's framework: you have to understand the processes of the work you're asking people to do, not just the end result. First-line leaders have to know the work at a great level of detail. One tactical way to get there: do after-action reviews on both wins and losses. Know why you win. Know why you lose. Describe both in detail. That's how you earn vivid clarity. Give people vivid clarity. Don't tell your team to "go get the ball carrier." Tell them precisely how to handle each situation. Great leaders are great because they give vivid clarity to the people they're leading on how to do the thing. Stack days. If I can't win by being brilliant, I can win by being able to endure. Just get up and do the thing day after day. Growing up, AJ and I had an unwritten rule: no matter what we did the night before, we were going to the first available lift. You don't have to go to bed early. But you're going to work no matter how you feel. When AJ knew he could do it. Freshman year at Ohio State. A tunnel screen play in camp. He read it perfectly, took off, and delivered a textbook hit on the receiver. That was the moment: "Football's football. These guys are all monsters. But I think I can find a way to make some plays." How to write a book: get up an extra hour early for 200 days in a row and never miss a day. Anybody can do it. You just have to be willing to make the decision, and then follow through, and then follow through again. My scout team Super Bowl. As a scout team QB at Ohio, I picked the Florida game to prepare like it was the real thing. I wore Rex Grossman's number and arm sleeve. Spatted my cleats. I rewrote the practice cards based on real Florida plays. We ended up being in a tight ball game against a national powerhouse. My teammates came back after the game and said practice that week was harder than the actual game. This is when I learned what is possible when prepared for the moment. The Mike Nolan $10 bill story. When AJ was in college, the 49ers head coach Mike Nolan needed to tip a valet and asked if he had any cash. AJ gave him $10. Weeks later, a handwritten note showed up at AJ's college house with a $10 bill inside and a thank-you note from Mike Nolan. Follow-through. Attention to detail. Paying people back. AJ never forgot it. AJ's delusional confidence in Tahoe. AJ had an unlucky drive that left him 254 yards from the pin, in the first cut. Jack Wagner was still on the green in front of us. AJ pulled out a four iron. I told him to wait. He said, "I'm just gonna go, and hit it on the green." He flushed it. Landed on the green 25 feet from Jack. There's power in belief, speaking things into existence, and then doing them. Irrational self-confidence isn't irrational. Pistol quoted Bill Simmons: "As long as you believe it's possible, it's possible." Regardless of what it is. My biggest risk: leaving corporate at the end of 2017. I had a VP of sales job, and I left it all to bet on this podcast. Miranda believed in it maybe even more than I did. That combination made it possible. Pistol's biggest risk: August 1st, 1999. He left LexisNexis after 14 years to go be a public speaker. Two years later, on August 1st, 2001, he came back. Both times on his birthday. His career jumped five notches on his return. Sometimes you have to leave to come back better. AJ's biggest risk: hiding a broken wrist during a Super Bowl run. AJ refused an X-ray or MRI so they couldn't shut him down. The trainer taped and casted it. He played the whole season, won the Super Bowl, and made the Pro Bowl. He had surgery to repair it days after the Super Bowl. The best players are consistent. When I'd talk to AJ's teammates in Green Bay about him, they used the unsexy words: "Most consistent guy on the team. First guy in the weight room. Will be where he's supposed to be on every play." He did that for eleven years. Show up. Every single day. Pistol said it: "Anybody that's been great at something didn't get great on the first day, but they did the right types of things along the way." Don't grade your kid's games. Grade the effort. "Did you play hard? That's all I care about." AJ said his family doesn't have good or bad games. There's only one question after the game: did you play hard or did you not? Show them what "hard" actually looks like. Sometimes kids think they're playing as hard as they possibly can when they're not. AJ's brother-in-law Jack Johnson reminded him of this. You can't just say "play hard." You have to describe it. You have to show them. Otherwise they don't know what the standard is. Model it. Don't tell. Leadership is caught more than it's taught. My primary role as a dad and a husband is to be the model. If I have low standards, my kids will have low standards. If I show up every day, they'll learn what showing up looks like. Do all the work. Then trust your instincts. AJ's approach to football. Reinstall the defense from scratch every year. Take fresh notes. So when it's game time, you don't have to think. You just play. The Dinner Guest Draft: Every hundredth episode, we do a draft. This one: pick five living dinner guests. AJ's table: Michael Jordan Charles Barkley Arnold Schwarzenegger Palmer Luckey Denzel Washington My table: (All dream guests for The Learning Leader Show) Dave Chappelle Dave Matthews Mike Rowe Doris Kearns Goodwin Michael Lewis Pistol's table: (All former guests of the show) Admiral William McRaven Dan Patrick Nikki Glaser Stephen M.R. Covey Oz Pearlman Champagne Moments a Year From Now My dad: Celebrating his 71st birthday dinner with all of us. AJ: To keep being present with his kids while they're still young. To slow down and enjoy it. Me: A good year of college for the older girls in our family. Reflection Questions Where in your work are you giving people vivid clarity? Or are you handing them broad general directives and hoping they figure it out? What is your version of the Mike Nolan $10 bill story? What small act of follow-through could you do this week that someone will remember for years? Where are you being performative right now, doing something for the audience instead of doing it because you want to be great? What would change if you only did it when nobody was watching? More Learning #600 - AJ, Pistol & Ryan Hawk - Setting the Standard #500 - AJ, Pistol, Ryan & Pat McAfee - Live Your Life as a Movie #400 - AJ, Pistol & Ryan Hawk - The Life Experiences That Shape Our Character Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Arena Invite 01:30 Meet Keith "Pistol" Hawk and AJ Hawk 03:34 What Everyone's Been Up To For the Past Two Years 05:09 What We Learned From Robert Saleh (head coach, Tennessee Titans) and Mike Macdonal (head coach of the defending Super Bowl Champion, Seattle Seahawks) About Tackling 08:50 Be a Consciously Competent Leader. Give People Vivid Clarity. 10:44 Inflection Point Stories: When AJ and Ryan Knew They Could Do It 16:33 How Pistol Spotted the Talent Early 21:32 Why Written Communication Is More Important Than You Think 25:21 The Power of Stacking Days 33:06 The Mike Nolan $10 Bill Story 35:24 Delusional Confidence: The Tahoe Golf Moment 42:51 Irrational Self-Confidence Isn't Irrational 43:15 The Biggest Risks Each of Us Ever Took 47:24 Playing Through a Broken Wrist to Win a Super Bowl 50:38 How to Raise Kids With High Standards 54:28 Regimented vs. Disciplined 59:30 AJ's Hack to Beat a Shellfish Allergy 01:06:00 The Dinner Guest Draft Begins 01:21:21 Draft Recap 01:23:43 The Champagne Question 01:26:33 EOPC