Podcasts about makes

(Part 2)CNN might merge with CBS News in the future, which means one of them is going to be subsumed by the other. That means layoffs. Makes you pine for the days of stability and reliability. Good news on that front: Dancing with the Stars is entering its ten billionth season. It'll never go away.Topics:Kristyn at KPBSTMZ might be leaving CaliforniaParamount merger affecting CNN and CBS NewsDancing with the StarsEzra Frech

Do "good" chords exist? What about "bad" chords? If they did, how we would we know? In this pod, I consider the case of the Tsimane', an Indigenous people living in the Bolivian Amazon, who have a surprising lesson to teach Western music.For 30% off your first year with DistroKid to share your music with the world click ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠DistroKid.com/vip/lovemusicmore⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

It was a tale of two halves. Saints played awful the first half, and got screwed yet again by the NFL in a call no one has ever seen before. And yet the Saints clawed back, forcing overtime and then scoring again late and going for 2 and coming up just short. There were a lot of bad and good things we saw, and here's our instant reaction. The longer I get from this the more angry I get at that terrible non-fumble call. Makes no sense and yet all the sense in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's Keepin' It Real, Cam sat in a church fundraising meeting and pitched drawing the termites as the devil himself. It did not go over the way he'd hoped. Here's Cam.   ------ It was a thoughtful meeting. Pensive. Cerebral. We were all leaning over the table with pens poised over paper for important notes to be taken. The church needs your help, they said, and we have a small role for you. I listened as the issues and challenges were made clear, and then I heard myself beginning to speak and thought, "Don't do it. Don't say it." But it was too late. To help the campaign, I suggested, let's personify the termites as Satan. We'll create an image of an evil termite with horns and a long red tail. Termites are Satan. Termites are the devil. The parishioners will get it. Termites are the reason we're asking for money, so they'll certainly understand. And maybe it'll prod them to open their wallets a little more. Fundraising ain't easy and we need a big number. Termites are Satan. Let's own it. It was meant in jest, kinda. A baby joke that maybe had just a touch of truth to it. "Well," began the answer in a stunned, silent room, "termites are God's creatures, too." I scribbled something to react to the silence. "But are they?" Maybe it's time to rethink that. Our city is inundated with termite damage to churches. I've said many times now that based on the appearance of our church from the street, St. Paul must be the patron saint of scaffolding. And I have to ask if the good Lord, in all his wisdom and magnificence, would create a creature that relishes devouring his houses. Grateful creatures don't consume their father's house. Makes no sense.   And here's the thing. I read that ninety-nine percent of all the creatures that ever existed on earth are now extinct. The ones we see every day — butterflies, earthworms, stinkbugs — are the rare ones. And I read that Homo sapiens are a micro-fraction of the creatures. Put numerically, we are a one over a one followed by nine zeros – of the creatures that have ever existed. And we think we're so cool. And we are. But God let almost all of them die off. Every one of them. Surely a few of those would've left his houses alone. And yet he let them go extinct and kept the termites. Makes no sense. Makes me wonder if termites aren't the work of Satan after all. I know plenty of homeowners who'd agree, usually while writing a fat check for a termite bond, if they can even find one. I heard a TV preacher say one time that Satan's greatest trick is convincing us he doesn't exist. Maybe that's the whole gimmick. Get a soft-spoken church fundraising consultant in a quiet room to call the devil one of God's creatures. I'm deeply skeptical of his claim. Heck, come look at the scaffolding. And if God did make the creature that would devolve into termites, it was late on the sixth day. Tired. Distracted. Not paying attention. He wasn't finished, either. A little while later, same drooping eyelids, same wandering mind, God made the creatures that would devolve into Auburn fans. But that's a topic for another day. I'm Cam Marston, and I'm just trying to keep it real

If you are a big Star Wars fan, then arguably, some of the best content out there right now is completely fan made. Makes sense, we made the Expanded Universe back in the day. Now its the likes of Star Wars Theory at the helm, with Vader Episode II: Echoes of the Jedi....

LEVITICUS LESSON 2 PART 1 It is strongly suggested you listen to lesson 1 parts 1 & 2 first.  Lesson 1 is an introduction to Leviticus and will give you perspectives on this book since Leviticus can be very irrelevant to us in the 21st century.  I mean all this about sacrifices and blood and entrails and bulls and sheep seems like the book of Leviticus was only for them then with no connection for us.  However, Jesus said in John 5:39, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me.” We will see that these sacrifices and offerings do testify of the coming Messiah, the Christ, our Jesus.  Just like He taught.  Makes sense right?  He is God, the only God. Here's the links to lesson 1 part 1 and part 2. Lesson 1 part 1 – https://lightofmenorah.podbean.com/e/leviticus-lesson-1-part-1-introduction/ Lesson 1 part 2 - https://lightofmenorah.podbean.com/e/leviticus-lesson-1-part-2-introduction-holiness-repentance-revival/ Doing searches on the internet one finds that the Hebrews just out of Egypt were very comfortable with animal sacrifices as it was a widespread religious practice across ancient near east in their days.  The pagans used them for various reasons.  Gifts or food of their gods. Communal Meals: sacrificial meat was shared between worshippers and their community. Very similar to the Peace or Fellowship offerings in Lev. 3.  Atonement and Appeasement: Rituals served to appease divine anger, secure favor for individuals, tribes, or entire nations. The ritual practices were common among the nations of the ancient near east.  One would find … Complete Burning vs. Sharing: Near Eastern traditions sometimes placed the entire animal on the fire or buried it, though sharing portions was also common. Selection of Animals: Archaeological faunal evidence shows a strong preference for young or juvenile livestock, such as sheep and goats. Divination: priests examined internal organs—especially sheep livers (hepatoscopy)—to read omens and discern the will of the gods. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sacrifice [2] https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/sacrifice-in-ancient-israel/ [3] 

Happy Labor Day. Why not listen to an our latest episode about work since you don't have to work? Makes sense right? Come join as as we review David Spade and Theo Von's latest comedy team up!

John & Heidi share funny stories of people doing weird things... plus John chats with a guest. We visit with Skweezy Jibbs Makes A MovieLearn more about our radio program, podcast & blog at www.JohnAndHeidiShow.com

Andy Schwartz CEO, OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners  |  Kevin Spahn Founder, Spahn Financial (now OnePoint BFG) Two former Northwestern Mutual advisors, two very different paths. Andy Schwartz and Kevin Spahn share what it takes to build, grow, merge, and create lasting enterprise value. In Summary What separates a successful advisory practice from an enterprise with the ability to grow well beyond its founders? Andy Schwartz and Kevin Spahn offer two different perspectives on that question. Both spent decades at Northwestern Mutual, but their paths eventually diverged. Andy left to help build what is now OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, an $18B+ firm expected to surpass $20B by year-end. Kevin built one of Northwestern Mutual's top practices before deciding to merge his business into OnePoint and become an equity partner. Louis talks with Andy and Kevin about the decisions behind both journeys: creating a true firm rather than an aggregation of practices, transitioning advisors from 1099 to W-2, using outside capital without relinquishing control, rethinking succession, and determining when equity in a larger enterprise can offer greater opportunity than continuing to build alone. Underlying it all is a factor that's much harder to quantify: trust. The Storyline Andy Schwartz and Kevin Spahn have known each other for roughly 30 years. They met while both were building careers at Northwestern Mutual, where Andy became an important mentor to Kevin as Kevin transitioned from practicing law and estate planning into wealth management. After roughly 30 years at Northwestern Mutual, Andy and his partners left in 2015 with approximately $3B in assets to launch independently. What began as Bleakley Financial eventually became OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, an $18B+ enterprise that Andy expects will surpass $20B by the end of 2026. That kind of growth required more than attracting assets. Andy describes the evolution from a predominantly 1099 structure into a firm where more than 85% of advisors and AUM are now W-2. The shift created a more cohesive enterprise, gave advisors access to equity, and ultimately positioned OnePoint to bring in minority capital from Joe Duran's Rise Growth Partners. Andy makes an important distinction about that relationship: OnePoint is “private equity invested,” not “private equity owned.” The structure gave the firm capital and expertise while allowing its partners to retain control. Kevin faced a different decision. After more than 30 years at Northwestern Mutual, his practice had grown to 18 people and approximately $2B in assets. He was happy at the firm, but his clients had evolved, his business had become increasingly complex, and the internal succession plan he once envisioned carried risks he could no longer ignore. He could have built an independent firm himself. Instead, he chose to merge with OnePoint. The decision wasn't driven by the largest possible check. Kevin saw the opportunity to become an equity partner in a larger enterprise, give his team and clients a more durable future, and leverage infrastructure he didn't want to recreate himself. For both men, the story ultimately comes back to the same principle: The right economics matter, but sustainable partnerships require trust, shared philosophy, and the belief that everyone involved can create more value together than separately. Topics Covered Building an enterprise versus building a practice Northwestern Mutual and the path to independence OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners' growth from ~$3B to $18B+ Organic growth versus M&A Creating a growth-oriented advisor culture Moving from a 1099 model to a predominantly W-2 structure Equity ownership and advisor alignment Minority private equity investment Rise Growth Partners and Joe Duran Internal succession versus an external merger Selling versus merging an advisory business Merging versus teaming versus going it alone Evaluating equity versus cash in a transaction The economics of leaving a captive firm Centralization versus advisor autonomy Trust as a factor in partnerships and transactions > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors How did Andy and Kevin's 30-year relationship ultimately lead to a transaction? (04:11)Kevin explains how Andy helped him transition from attorney and estate planner into wealth management, beginning a professional relationship that would eventually make their partnership possible decades later. Why did Andy leave Northwestern Mutual after roughly 30 years? (08:45)Andy describes wanting greater flexibility, a multi-custodial platform, and more optionality for clients and the business—a decision that ultimately led to the creation of OnePoint BFG. Why did Kevin decide his longtime Northwestern Mutual practice needed something different? (15:49)Kevin explains how his clients, service needs, and business evolved over time, while concerns about his original internal succession plan led him to consider a different path. What has driven OnePoint's growth from approximately $3B to $18B+? (21:41)Andy outlines the firm's emphasis on client experience, advisor experience, organic growth, and carefully selected inorganic growth—and why helping advisors grow is fundamental to the model. Why does Andy say OnePoint is a firm rather than an aggregator? (23:54)The distinction comes down to alignment, shared responsibility, centralized resources, equity, and a partnership structure in which advisors are accountable to one another. How did OnePoint convert a predominantly 1099 advisor base into a W-2 enterprise? (29:26)Andy explains why capital and equity became necessary to build the next stage of the business and why trust was essential to bringing advisors into a more integrated structure. Why did OnePoint choose minority private equity investment? (33:13)Andy shares why Rise Growth Partners offered something previous potential buyers had not: a structure designed to benefit the broader advisor partnership while preserving control. Why did Kevin merge with OnePoint rather than shop his practice broadly? (36:43)For Kevin, maximizing price wasn't the objective. His decision centered on trust in Andy, confidence in OnePoint's infrastructure, and creating a strong future for clients and employees. Why did Kevin choose equity in the larger firm instead of simply cashing out? (40:57)Kevin explains why he believes participating in the future growth of a larger enterprise offers a compelling alternative to relying solely on the future growth of his own practice. How should advisors evaluate the “golden handcuffs” that can make leaving difficult? (46:42)Andy argues that the analysis needs to compare what an advisor gives up with the potential growth, economics, equity, and leverage available on the other side. How much conformity does a true enterprise require? (49:06)Andy explains why OnePoint sits somewhere between complete advisor autonomy and complete centralization, seeking enough consistency to create enterprise value without eliminating entrepreneurial flexibility. What would Andy and Kevin tell their younger selves? (52:06)Kevin emphasizes surrounding yourself with the best people possible, while Andy reflects on having the courage to make a difficult change after a successful 30-year run. Key Takeaways Building enterprise value requires more than asset growth. OnePoint's evolution included changing its ownership structure, integrating advisor practices, creating equity opportunities, and investing in centralized capabilities. Organic growth remains central even in an M&A-driven market. OnePoint targets approximately 10% organic growth and evaluates prospective partners partly on whether they are growth-oriented and whether the firm can meaningfully help them grow. A collection of successful advisors does not automatically make a firm. Andy sees shared ownership, alignment, accountability, infrastructure, and centralized services as critical distinctions between an enterprise and an aggregator. Outside capital does not have to mean giving up control. OnePoint chose a minority investment from Rise Growth Partners that provided capital and strategic support while leaving control with its operating partners. Succession can expose risks that growth may obscure. Kevin began reconsidering his internal succession strategy when he recognized its dependence on his continued production, key employees, and the future economics of an aging client base. The highest purchase price isn't always the most valuable transaction. Kevin prioritized equity participation, infrastructure, continuity for his employees and clients, and confidence in his future partners over broadly shopping his business for the highest bid. Trust can determine whether structural change is possible. From OnePoint's 1099-to-W-2 conversion to Kevin's decision to merge, both guests repeatedly point to established trust as the foundation that allowed significant business decisions to happen. https://youtu.be/jkIoynpZj6Y Quotable Moments “The biggest mistake advisors make is they buy their own bullshit.”— Andy Schwartz “We're not an aggregator, we're a firm.”— Andy Schwartz “The biggest issue is trust. Either they trust you or they don't.”— Andy Schwartz “I wasn't looking to sell my business. I was looking to merge it.”— Kevin Spahn “You have to trust them. You have to see that they provide value. And you need to be on the same page philosophically.”— Kevin Spahn “Associate yourselves with the best people you can… It accelerates your trajectory in ways that you can't do on your own.”— Kevin Spahn FAQs Why did Andy Schwartz leave Northwestern Mutual? After approximately 30 years at Northwestern Mutual, Andy and his partners wanted greater flexibility, the ability to operate on a multi-custodial basis, and more optionality for clients and the business. They left in 2015 with approximately $3B in assets and launched the independent firm that ultimately became OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners. How large is OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners? At the time of the interview, Andy says OnePoint manages more than $18B and expects to exceed $20B by the end of 2026, even without additional organic growth. What has driven OnePoint's growth? Andy points to three priorities: client experience, advisor experience, and growth. The firm targets approximately 10% organic growth while also expanding through acquisitions and partnerships with advisors it believes fit the OnePoint model. Why did OnePoint move advisors from 1099 to W-2? The firm wanted to evolve from a platform supporting individual practices into a more integrated enterprise. That required creating firm-level economics and equity that could be used to attract, retain, and align advisors. Today, Andy says more than 85% of OnePoint's advisors and AUM are W-2. What does “private equity invested, not private equity owned” mean? Rise Growth Partners holds a minority, non-controlling interest in OnePoint. The investment provides capital, expertise, and strategic support while the operating partners retain majority ownership and control of the business. Why did Kevin Spahn leave Northwestern Mutual? Kevin says he remained happy at Northwestern Mutual, but his practice and clients had evolved. His work had shifted increasingly toward investments and complex high-net-worth planning, while he also began identifying risks in his intended internal succession plan. Why did Kevin merge with OnePoint rather than launch his own independent RIA? OnePoint already had the infrastructure, people, and capabilities Kevin would have needed to build himself. The merger allowed him to focus on clients while becoming an equity partner in a larger enterprise he believed could grow faster than his standalone practice. Why didn't Kevin shop his practice to multiple buyers? Kevin says his decision was driven primarily by trust. He had known Andy and other OnePoint partners for decades and believed the firm offered the right future for his clients and employees. His choice ultimately came down to staying at Northwestern Mutual or joining OnePoint. How do Andy and Kevin suggest advisors evaluate a potential partner? Their discussion points to three fundamental considerations: trust, demonstrable value, and philosophical alignment. Economics matter, but both argue that a sustainable partnership depends on confidence in the people and business on the other side of the transaction. After approximately 30 years at Northwestern Mutual, Andy and his partners wanted greater flexibility, the ability to operate on a multi-custodial basis, and more optionality for clients and the business. They left in 2015 with approximately $3B in assets and launched the independent firm that ultimately became OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners. At the time of the interview, Andy says OnePoint manages more than $18B and expects to exceed $20B by the end of 2026, even without additional organic growth. Andy points to three priorities: client experience, advisor experience, and growth. The firm targets approximately 10% organic growth while also expanding through acquisitions and partnerships with advisors it believes fit the OnePoint model. The firm wanted to evolve from a platform supporting individual practices into a more integrated enterprise. That required creating firm-level economics and equity that could be used to attract, retain, and align advisors. Today, Andy says more than 85% of OnePoint's advisors and AUM are W-2. Rise Growth Partners holds a minority, non-controlling interest in OnePoint. The investment provides capital, expertise, and strategic support while the operating partners retain majority ownership and control of the business. Kevin says he remained happy at Northwestern Mutual, but his practice and clients had evolved. His work had shifted increasingly toward investments and complex high-net-worth planning, while he also began identifying risks in his intended internal succession plan. OnePoint already had the infrastructure, people, and capabilities Kevin would have needed to build himself. The merger allowed him to focus on clients while becoming an equity partner in a larger enterprise he believed could grow faster than his standalone practice. Kevin says his decision was driven primarily by trust. He had known Andy and other OnePoint partners for decades and believed the firm offered the right future for his clients and employees. His choice ultimately came down to staying at Northwestern Mutual or joining OnePoint. Their discussion points to three fundamental considerations: trust, demonstrable value, and philosophical alignment. Economics matter, but both argue that a sustainable partnership depends on confidence in the people and business on the other side of the transaction. Related Resources Rise and Reinvent: Joe Duran on Building and Rebuilding World-Class Firms From Insurance Sales to $8B RIA: A Northwestern Mutual Breakaway Story The 4th Annual Advisor Transition Report Andy SchwartzCo-Founder, Managing Partner, and Chief Executive Officer Andy Schwartz is the Co-Founder, Managing Partner, and Chief Executive Officer of OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, where he also serves as a Wealth Management Advisor. A CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® with more than 40 years of experience, Andy has built his career around helping clients make confident, well-informed financial decisions at every stage of life. He works extensively with physicians and business owners on wealth building, retirement planning, and tax-efficient asset transfer across generations. A 2026 finalist for Wealth Management Awards CEO of the Year (under $25B AUM), Andy brings the same discipline to leading the firm that he brings to client relationships: comprehensive planning, long-term thinking, and an unwavering commitment to independence and integrity. Beyond his client work, Andy is deeply invested in the advisory profession itself. He co-hosts The Advisor’s Compass podcast, offering candid, practical guidance on the business and responsibilities of being an advisor. His mentorship philosophy is straightforward: pass the ladder back down. His industry recognition spans more than a decade, including Top 1,200 Advisor by Barron’s (2018–2024), Top 250 Wealth Advisor and Best-In-State Wealth Advisor by Forbes (2018–2024), Top 400 Financial Advisor by the Financial Times (2018–2020), and Top 100 Independent Advisor (2020–2023). He was named Executive of the Year by NJBIZ in 2019 and was a finalist for the Invest in Others Lifetime Achievement Award for more than 20 years of service with NJ SEEDS. Andy holds a B.S. in Finance and Marketing from Rowan University and is actively involved with Nourish NJ, the Navy SEAL Foundation, the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ, and JSDD. Outside the office, he enjoys golf, reading, and time with his family at the beach.   Kevin SpahnPartner and Wealth Advisor Kevin Spahn is a Partner and Wealth Advisor at OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, bringing more than three decades of experience in comprehensive financial planning to his clients and the firm. Kevin’s path to wealth management is rooted in the law. After earning degrees from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin, he began his career as a practicing attorney before making a deliberate pivot toward financial planning in 1993. He joined Northwestern Mutual, then founded Spahn Financial, building a practice centered on thoughtful, holistic planning for families and business owners. That practice joined OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners in 2025. His approach has remained consistent throughout: help clients build and protect wealth not just for themselves, but for the generations that follow. Kevin works with clients on comprehensive financial plans that account for the full picture, understanding that the impact of good planning extends well beyond an individual portfolio to families, businesses, employees, and the broader community. Kevin is based in the greater Chicago area.   NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… Build, Grow & Transact: Making the Leap from Northwestern Mutual to a $20B Enterprise A conversation between Louis Diamond, Andy Schwartz, CEO of OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners and Kevin Spahn, Founder of Spahn Financial (now OnePoint BFG). Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Build, Grow & Transact: Making the Leap from Northwestern Mutual to a $20B Enterprise. It’s a conversation with Andy Schwartz, CEO of OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, and Kevin Spahn, founder of Spahn Financial, now OnePoint BFG. I’m Louis Diamond, and this is The Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. Each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education-driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions, and more, inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: There’s a big difference between building a successful practice and building an enterprise. I think Andy Schwartz and Kevin Spahn offer a unique perspective on that distinction from two very different sides. Both spent decades in the Northwestern Mutual system. Andy ultimately left to build what became OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, taking the firm from roughly three billion to nearly 20 billion and transforming just about every aspect of the business along the way. Kevin built one of Northwestern Mutual’s top practices before reaching a different inflection point, deciding what he wanted the next phase of his career and business to look like. Rather than go independent on his own or simply monetize what he had built, he chose to become part of Andy’s growing enterprise. That makes their story particularly relevant for our Build, Grow, and Transact series. Andy can speak to what it takes to build a firm capable of becoming an acquirer, from converting advisors from 1099s to W-2s, to creating equity opportunities, to bringing in outside capital while remaining very deliberate about being private equity-invested rather than private equity-owned. And Kevin brings the seller’s perspective, how you evaluate the economics, the trade-offs, and ultimately the people you’re trusting with the business you spent more than 30 years building. Because whether you’re building, buying, or considering a transaction of any kind, the numbers are only part of the equation. As you hear from both Andy and Kevin, trust may be the most important currency of all. So let’s get to it. Andy and Kevin, thank you so much for both joining us today. Andy Schwartz: Great to see you again, Lewis. Thank you for having us. Louis Diamond: I’ve been excited about this interview for a bunch of reasons. One, our Build, Grow, Transact series has become a real staple of our show and we got lots to talk about there. But also, the friendship, the relationship that you two have had for over 30 years really stood out to me. So before we get into the nuts and bolts, talk about your relationship. How’d you guys meet, and how did your career stay so intertwined together when you’re in different geographies and at different firms, and have each been very successful in your own rights? Andy Schwartz: Sure. Kevin, do you want to start with that? Kevin Spahn: Sure. I started in this career in 1994 and met Andy sometime after that. He was a more advanced financial planner. I was an attorney, and then I transitioned into this business. So when I first joined Northwestern Mutual, which is my first broker dealer, I didn’t really have a background in investments. At the time, a lot of Northwestern Mutual reps were learning the investment business because they maybe originally started with Northwestern Mutual focusing more on insurance planning. My background was more estate planning. At the time, if you think early ’90s, if you did estate planning, insurance often went hand in hand with that. The estate exemption in early 1990s was about $600,000. So if you pass more than $600,000 to your children, there was a 55% tax. One way around it was to put insurance in an irrevocable trust, help cover the tax that way. So it really was a popular common strategy back then, and it’s really what got me into the business. But I quickly realized that I didn’t want my future to be insurance and estate planning. And there was a conflict if you acted as someone’s attorney and sold insurance. So I had to pick one way or the other. I decided long-term it would be better for me to move into the wealth management space. But with that little background in that, I had a lot of work to do. So took a lot of tests, became a certified financial planner. But the person that helped me the most along the way was Andy. We became friends, we sat on committees together. That’s really how we met, I would say. So we worked side by side interacting with our home office and representing the field, bringing issues to the home office that we thought were beneficial to the field. As we did that together, I got to know Andy. And then separately, I learned from him how he built his business and how they would review clients’ portfolios and come up with solutions. So I really credit Andy with helping me more than anyone else to transition from attorney, financial planner doing more estate planning insurance to wealth management. Louis Diamond: Very cool. Hey, I would say, maybe I’m a little biased, that, Kevin, you picked the right path in hanging up the law shingle and coming into wealth management. Kevin Spahn: I tell a lot of people I’m a reformed attorney. Andy Schwartz: Great. Louis Diamond: Exactly. My dad would say the exact same thing. Very common at dinner tables in the Diamond households. Andy Schwartz: I was always grateful that I wasn’t smart enough to be an attorney. Louis Diamond: There we go. Andy Schwartz: That’s where my gratitude lies. Yeah. Louis Diamond: There we go. Andy Schwartz: Some would say he’s too smart. Louis Diamond: There we go. Andy, question for you. I mean, anyone who is at or was at Northwestern Mutual, I mean, you’re like Elvis to them. It’s absolutely crazy the amount of fanfare and brand recognition that you and your brother Scott have. But for those who maybe missed your first podcast appearance with us a number of years ago, or aren’t or weren’t within the Northwestern Mutual system, or haven’t been familiar with Bleakley and now OnePoint BFG, just give us the cliff notes, the origin story, how you got into the business, and how’d you get from here to there? Andy Schwartz: Yeah. So the origin is probably pretty common, probably by accident. Going into my senior year in college, I was working in a restaurant, had a falling out with my boss. I happened to be dating a woman who was living with a general agent with Fidelity Union Life. No one will have ever heard of Fidelity Union Life, but their secret sauce was they sold life insurance to college seniors on a note. So if you can get a $10 money order, because where I went to school, nobody had a checking account, then you could basically get a note signed and they would buy insurance. And then when they graduate, hopefully they’d pay for it. I started selling life insurance my senior year in college. And then my twin brother Scott, who is my partner, and has been for over 40 years, he took an interview with what was the nucleus of our present firm actually. I just went up to Northern New Jersey in May of 1984 because I was an expert. I had been selling life insurance to college kids for six months, so I knew everything you had to know. We met with these guys, and we both ended up joining them. So that was a Northwestern Mutual district agency, and that was 1984. We got licensed right away. I got my CFP in ’86. We always knew that it was going to be about planning. So I think we had the right idea. We were a little ahead of the curve because there weren’t a lot of CFPs in ’86. We got securities license immediately. So before Northwestern had securities license, we got securities license with US Life actually. And then it was really a volume business, a client-building business. We always tried to act as a firm and share resources. We were small, but like a lot of people, we started out selling A shares and B shares and C shares, doing financial planning, selling insurance, and then we made a lot of really good hires along the way. And then after 30 years at Northwestern Mutual, which was a great experience for me, and I have nothing but respect for the institution and certainly the advisors that are there, Kevin certainly was one of them, and I know he feels the same way, but we just wanted to have a little more flexibility. We went independent about 11, almost 12 years ago. We wanted to be able to be multi-custodial. We wanted to have a little bit more optionality for our clients and for ourselves. We left Northwestern at three billion or so in assets, and that was in 2015. It’s in March of 2024, I get introduced to this guy with a crazy accent named Joe Duran. Funny, probably the only person in the industry that had no idea who Joe Duran was me. I’d never heard of Joe Duran. I don’t pay attention. I worry about our firm. I don’t worry about what’s going on outside. So I get introduced to Joe by a mutual friend, and we had an interesting conversation, and it took us probably about four or five months to figure out what we wanted to do. And then in August of ’24, myself and my three partners, we rolled in. And then in ’85, the rest of the firm rolled in. And we can talk a little bit more about that. Today we’re 18-plus billion, growing quite a bit. We’ve been very lucky that we’ve made some very good decisions along the way. We’ve made some bad ones too. But most of the decisions had to do with the people that we hired, the people that we brought on to help us, because I think it’s really important. I always say that the biggest mistake advisors make is they buy their own bullshit, and I try not to, and I realize that I’m smart enough, but I’m certainly not the smartest guy. I’m rarely the smartest guy in the room. So what we try to do is hire lots and lots of really smart people. And we’ve done that. They’ve been loyal to us, we’ve been loyal to them. Yeah, so we’re blessed to have a really great team and lots of good partners. Yeah. Louis Diamond: Yeah, we’ll definitely get into more of the nuts and bolts of the decision to take on capital, partner with Joe Duran’s Rise, but that’s an amazing background. Andy, I have to give you credit because your style, and I think I’m sure there’s business benefits, but it comes from a good place, I’m sure. But the coaching and consulting and just assistance that I’ve heard you provide to so many past and current Northwestern Mutual advisors through sports camps is absolutely incredible. It’s very near and dear to my heart because we always try to lead with education and helping people. So I just wanted to call that out, that your reputation for just providing amazing guidance and coaching to advisors is unparalleled. Andy Schwartz: And it’s been the best part of our journey. We’ve been able to help so many people. We get way too much credit by the way. So everybody gives us way too much credit. But the way I look at it is, I’ve been able to leverage my life because I’ve been able to build a great life for myself and my family, but we’ve been able to leverage that, and that’s where the real gift is. So yeah, it’s been a joyful journey for us. Louis Diamond: Amazing. Kevin, question for you. You walked through your little bit unorthodox background to get into Northwestern. Can you talk about where your personal practice is today? And then I want to ask you about the decision to leave Northwestern and sell and team up with Andy and team. Kevin Spahn: Well, I have to go back to the beginning. What was attractive to me about this business is I went from a career which was confrontational adversarial. I was a trial attorney for six years, and every day I would fight with people over things I didn’t necessarily have a personal interest in and I didn’t really believe in always. But the adversarial confrontational nature wasn’t really my personality, and I would take it too personally. So sometimes I’d go home in a bad mood because I was fighting with somebody taking a deposition. At night, after so many years as a trial attorney, I started going to people’s houses and doing wills and trusts. And that’s where the dynamic of working with a client or a potential client, feeling that you helped them and walking out of the meeting where they would appreciate what you did for them, and you build a relationship and actually all of a sudden have a friend, that dynamic was attractive to me. That’s really what got me to transition into the business. So I think it was really helpful to me at the beginning of this career. As Andy said, we all grew our businesses one client at a time. There’s a lot of doors closed, phones hung up on. There’s many people that don’t want to talk to you. There’s many people that don’t call you back. There’s many people that you think you’re getting somewhere with and you don’t. And that’s difficult for people because people often, young reps take that as personal rejection. I had the benefit of comparing what I was dealing with as a young financial planner to what I had dealt with as an attorney in litigation. I think it just was perspective that I knew I didn’t want to do that anymore. So the negatives to this business didn’t seem that bad to me. I loved the independence. I loved all the relationships that I was building. And that part of it is to this day my favorite part of the business. When you ask about the present, what basically happens is you start out taking anybody and everybody as a potential client or as someone that you would be willing to work with. And then over time you work with more successful people. So where I’m at today is working with pretty successful people, but they’re all the same, meaning we like working with nice people. If people are nice, we work with them. I feel we can help anybody. Over the years, one client at a time. The thing that I probably, if I could go back, would change is I think Andy and I are both good at meeting people and building trust and providing value, so that’s why they work with us. So I think that’s just something we’ve both been able to do. He’s much better than I am at building an organization. So I built an organization basically hiring people, that whenever we got too busy, I hired another person. Drawback in terms of that is, anybody that I interview I think is great, and I think they’d be great to join the organization. I like them all. In spite of that, I’ve also brought in many good people that I love. At this point, my firm has 18 people. We’re a little subset of Andy’s larger firm. I think one of the most attractive things to me about joining Andy’s firm is what Andy mentioned before: the people. As opposed to me having to build this all out myself, going independent, Andy already did that. And he has the infrastructure that would allow me to just merge right into that and not have to go through the pain of figuring all that out, which I don’t even think I’m capable of, to be honest with you. Louis Diamond: You’re probably selling yourself short because the way I understood it, you had one of the top practices within the entire Northwestern Mutual systems, and it’s a firm filled with very successful advisors. For you, Kevin, what was the driving force to leaving NM after all these years? What was bothering you or frustrating you that indicated to you that it was time to do something different? Kevin Spahn: To be honest with you, I was pretty happy at Northwestern Mutual. I love the company and the people. I still have many good friends there that I truly miss. The big thing for me, I don’t know if it was any one thing, to be honest with you, is Andy said there’s optionality, especially on the investment side. I think one of the things that happened to me is, when I first started, I was 31 years old, and most of the potential clients that I would meet and work with, they weren’t what I would call today great investment clients. They didn’t have a lot of money. They had great futures. They might’ve been earning significant income or on the way to earning significant income. So what did they need at that point in their life? They needed planning. They needed protection. They didn’t really need investment management because most of their investments were going into their 401(k). But a lot of those clients that we would take on, and I think that’s the big advantage of Northwestern Mutual, you take on clients that a lot of the investor firms don’t want because they don’t have large investment portfolios. But at some point down the road, all of a sudden you wake up and they do have large investment portfolios. So you bring them in as clients that might buy life insurance from you or disability insurance or something like that. And then you help them, and you give them advice, and you build a relationship with them. Down the road, they make more and more money. They leave jobs, they roll 401(k)s, they have the ability to invest money, stock options, things like that. Next thing you’re doing more comprehensive planning that incorporates investments. As that progresses even further, you work with larger and larger clients, much more significant net worth, more complexity, bigger tax issues. Some of the strategies and opportunities that we now have at this independent RIA are very attractive for these high-net-worth clients. Along the same lines, less of what I do at this point in my career is insurance, mostly because a lot of the people that I meet are older, they already bought insurance, they’re looking more for investment advice as opposed to insurance. So one of the things that most attracted me to Northwest Mutual was their strong insurance products, which helped me for many years. As time went on, I was doing less of that. Louis Diamond: Makes complete sense. So it was a changing of what clients wanted and just the circumstances of your clients where you said, “What got me here when I was 31 was insurance planning, and that’s what my clients needed. But as my practice has evolved, I’ve aged, my clients are older, have more money, the focus shifted from insurance to investments.” And then the distinction was, am I at the best place to run investments in addition to insurance planning, et cetera? It’s a very interesting dynamic. Just the shift in basically your legacy clients was what drove you to consider change. Kevin Spahn: That was a big factor. I think the second big factor was I had my own firm with 18 people. My succession plan was that at some point I would shift ownership of the firm to people that worked with me. So as they owned more of the firm, they would have revenue that was currently at the time being paid to me. In my mind, as it shifted to them, they would buy me out using revenue from the clients that we already had. And I realized that there were some issues with that. In our business, as you get older, in your client’s age, they start taking money out of their portfolios. So everyone understands that in our business, the younger average age client you have makes your book more valuable. I was the biggest driver of new business at my firm, and I started to see that there were some problems with my succession plan. They included, if something happened to me during this succession, that would be a real problem for the people that were buying my business from me if I went that way. If something happened to some of my key people, that would’ve been a problem as well. So it was really attractive to me to… I wasn’t looking to sell my business, I was looking to merge it. So I merged it with Andy’s business. I believe that Andy and what he’s put together and the actual idea of having partners. So I never really had partners, but now I do. Having partners that we’re all on the same page, we all have similar backgrounds, we all bring something different to the table, and we can learn and benefit from working with each other. But also, owning a little piece of a much larger firm was, number one, it put me in a better position in terms of the potential risk of something happening to me or one of my key people. But secondly, I just think it’s more likely to grow at a greater pace than my firm would’ve as I aged from my 60s to my 70s. Louis Diamond: Very interesting. It’s a great realization. I think it’s one that probably every firm owner grapples with at some point, is the romanticism or the ease, some would say, of an internal succession plan. Rewarding those who have helped you build the firm is something I think everyone is interested in. But once that’s put into practice, whether it’s because of capital or sky-high valuations or right people on the bus or risk, et cetera, nowadays oftentimes leads to a firm owner looking at a transaction, whether it’s a merger, a sale, a private equity, capital infusion as a means to solve for succession. So it’s a very interesting way you framed it. Andy, I want to turn it over to you for a little bit. So you mentioned when you launched Bleakley Financial, which was the old name of your firm, out of Northwestern, you’re about three billion. I think I read that you’re about 10 billion or so when Joe Duran and Rise invested you in 2024. You just said you’re at 18 billion now in the middle of 2026. That is absolutely incredible and amazing. Andy Schwartz: We’ll be well over 20 by the end of the year without any additional organic growth. Louis Diamond: That’s absolutely incredible. Andy Schwartz: We’ve got a lot going on right now. Louis Diamond: What’s actually driven that? What’s been the playbook? Andy Schwartz: The three areas that are most important for us, and we had our town hall this morning, and we always talk about the things we focus on as a group, the first and most important is the client experience. I always say to people, if you are their advisor, then that means someone else isn’t. These people, they all deserve to be really well taken care of. They deserve the best service, they deserve the best advice. So that’s something we take really personally. So client experience first. Then we also understand that we don’t just work for clients, we work for our advisors. So I have two jobs. I have, I don’t know, 500 clients I service with my team, and I work for Kevin and 36 other partners and all of our employees. Because again, I recognize that the decision Kevin made… We’re in the middle of a transition out with another advisor, and we pretty much talk to her every day, and I know how hard this is. A transition is so difficult. When you come from a good place, because any of the Northwestern advisor who joins, they’re coming from a good place, it’s not like they have to go anywhere, it’s difficult. So we have the massive responsibility that three or four or five or 10 years from now, that there better be hugs around that this was the best decision ever made or otherwise. That’s the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. So we’ve got to take care of our client experience, we’ve got to take care of our advisor experience. And then obviously, we’ve got to grow the firm so the firm grows organically. So part of this whole idea of serving our advisors is we have to help our advisors grow. I talk to a lot of people on the acquisition side, and if I’m talking to an advisor, it doesn’t matter how big they are, we kind of think of it as a OnePoint way. There’s flexibility in the OnePoint way. But if I can’t help them grow, I don’t want them, because I say it all the time, I’m not the mafia. I’m not here to get a taste. Louis, if you weren’t interested in joining us, if I thought that we could help you grow by doing that, then I want you bad. If I don’t think I can help you grow because we’re so different, or because you’re not going to adapt what we do, or there’s no leverage in it, or you’re already better than we are, I don’t want it. So for us, organic growth, number one, and I think you know the industries well enough, that’s got to be the key. We shoot for 10% organic growth. We’re at a little over 5% so far halfway through the year. So assuming we have the similar second half of the year, we’ll hit our 10. Last year we’re at 7.5%. The second is the inorganic growth. If you truly build a platform, if you truly build a firm that advisors know that they’ll be supported, that they’ll be loved, and you’ll help them grow their businesses, it does make it easier for us. We’re not the highest bidder typically. We can’t. We respect our client’s capital, we respect their equity, so therefore we’re not going to go out there. We’re not an aggregator, we’re a firm. But I think that if we can get that message across, and I think we have, then advisors join us. So that’s been a big part of the growth. And then the market’s helped. Obviously, over the last two years, the market’s been helpful. So that’s how we’ve gone from 10 to 18 and on our way to 22 by year-end. Louis Diamond: This is absolutely incredible. Any advisor or firm owner would say organic growth is important, but just saying it’s important doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. So what are the ways in which you help your advisors or your own practice grow organically? What is it that OnePoint is doing for your advisors? Andy Schwartz: Starting with bringing on growth-oriented advisors. I mean, look, Kevin Spahn and I come from the same place. We learned how to sell. The great thing about coming out of whether they’re broker dealers or out of the different insurance BDs is, these are people that know how to sell. These are people that don’t think that selling is a bad word. A lot of times you go to the wirehouses and they’re not necessarily sales guys. They’re really smart. They think that they’re investment mavens and investment geniuses. I’m not interested in investment geniuses. I’m interested in people that want to take care of their clients, provide everything they can, clients first, do the proper planning, be good advisors, but they’re growth-oriented. So as long as we’re talking with the right advisors. Again, if I’m talking to advisor and they might have a big practice, if they’re not growers, we’re not interested. There’s a sense of responsibility for all the partners because we are a true partnership. It’s not an aggregation. This is a firm. I’m responsible for Kevin. Kevin’s responsible to me. All of our partners are responsible to each other, because if we’re going to do a 10% organic growth target, and if some partner is negative 3%, we don’t put them through the spanking machine, but everybody is very aware of where everybody is and nobody wants to let their partners down. I think either you’re a growth-oriented advisor or you’re a zoo-fed bear. There’s another expression that I got from another Rise Growth Partner or Rise Growth firm. We all kind of communicate and talk to each other. And I was talking about zoo-fed bears, and he said, we call them house cats that think they fight. So they’re house cats, but they have no claws. But I think if you’re careful about who you bring on as partners, and if they are workers, growers, they understand that their job in life is to serve the people. We talk about referrals, we do lots of training to help on referrals. We work on organic growth strategies from the firm, but a lot of it comes from the advisors themselves. Louis Diamond: Makes sense. So it sounds like, to boil it down, it’s being really selective and having a really clear sense of who’s the right fit for your firm. Not that there’s not amazing advisors out there, but just because you’re an amazing advisor, doesn’t mean you’re the right fit to join OnePoint. Andy Schwartz: I think the one big distinction and difference is other than the fact that we are minority-owned with private equity. So we own our business. I mean, I’m the CEO of the firm. I also have the biggest book in the firm. At least for right now, I mean, Kevin was transitioning, so I’m sure next year he’ll be the leading advisor. But I lead the firm, because as far as I’m concerned, you have to lead by example. We are completely aligned. I know exactly what Kevin does every day because I do the same thing. I’m not some attorney or accountant or private equity boss that’s saying, “Oh, I’ve got an idea for growth. We’ll just raise our fees by 5%.” Brilliant. Yeah, we are completely aligned, all of us. I think that makes us a little bit unique, and it really helps us, I think, in our growth trajectory. Louis Diamond: I would agree. The challenge that a lot of advisors-turned-firm-owners or turned-enterprise-builders have is the tug of war between the client work, which either is their ultimate passion and driving force, or it’s something they’re really good at minimum, versus being the owner, the operator, et cetera. I resonate very much, Andy, with the way you handle it. I do the same thing running a company, but also working with advisors. To me, I need to do both in order to do my job well. But that tug of war is tough. So I’m curious, your firm is very large now, you’re a steward of external capital, and you have a $3 billion book yourself. How do you do it? How do you balance the two? Andy Schwartz: Well, fortunately, my kids are grown, so I’m not coaching sports anymore. So I do have a little more time than most. Look, we have a great team. So the idea that I run the firm… I mean, I lead the firm, I don’t run the firm. We have great partners. We have great… Our manager team is fantastic. So I mean, they really run the firm. But this is where my passion is for now. So I don’t mind. Days are typically pretty long. I don’t play golf during the week. Mara and I don’t travel probably as much as we should. Vacations are always a little bit mixed. There’s always room for calls and meetings and whatever. But to me, I mean, I’m grateful to be in this situation. I’m enjoying it. This is such a privilege to be the person that people recognize as the leader of this bunch, of this group. I mean, it is the honor of my life. So I don’t think of it so much as work. It’s my advocation. It does get busy. There are some times where I have to remind myself, “Just enjoy the ride.” I get a little overwhelmed, but I get lots of help and that makes it possible. Louis Diamond: Yep. If you’re not doing the job of the folks that you’re encouraging and leading to do, how do you have fodder to train them, to teach them, to empathize with that? Andy Schwartz: Exactly, you don’t have the credibility. I can ask them to do almost anything because they know I do it myself, and I think that helps. Louis Diamond: Yep. So moving more into the decision to bring on private equity capital, what I thought was probably the most interesting component of your announcement that you took on PE investment was that you completely restructured or reoriented your firm prior to Joe Duran coming in 2024. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Bleakley Financial Group was almost all 1099 contractors. So everyone owned their own books of business, paid Bleakley a fee or an override for certain services. But now, today, over 85% of your advisors and your AUM are W-2 employees, meaning you converted them from 1099 to acquiring them or merging with them. To me, that’s the dream. It’s had to have been very, very, very hard and challenging because there’s so many aggregator firms or platforms that support independent advisors, but the value that they’ve created is fairly minimal relative to one cohesive firm. So can you just talk about that decision, a very big and brave decision to go down the path of acquiring or merging with the practices rather than letting them continue to operate independently? Andy Schwartz: Well, look, we had to… It’s funny because we had been having conversations for years with consultants, and they kept telling us what we had to do. Again, we’re not that smart, so we just kept thinking, “No, we don’t have to do that.” But we were told 10 years earlier that the only way that this thing has any value to the world is you’ve got to have EBITDA for the firm. We talked to all the smart people, we ignored all of them. But what happened was we needed capital and we needed equity in order to bring people on, because people aren’t just joining us just because we can help them grow a bigger business. So the reason we went in the direction we went initially was we just needed capital. We wanted to grow the firm, and the only way we were going to get to is… What’s the old saying? What got us here is not going to get us there. So we needed capital. But we also realized that I had to have something I could sell in the marketplace. And people want equity. So they want cash, but they also want equity, because we’re talking to entrepreneurs. Kevin owned his own firm. He has $2 billion of assets. He wasn’t interested in being someone’s employee, but he was interested in being able to get leverage and be a partner and share equity in a larger firm that had the chance to grow even more. So what the gift that Joe Duran, the Rise folks gave us was that gift of structure and understanding. So that was really helpful, and that’s been a big part of our success. Louis Diamond: Yeah, it’s an amazing journey. Again, I think you could probably write a book or a case study on how that happened. I’m sure there were some downfalls, some people that weren’t all that excited about it, but the results speak for itself. Andy Schwartz: I think people ask all the time because I do get phone calls. People are trying to do this, and they’re struggling. It took us 90 days to basically do it. People say, “I’ve been at this for two years.” And the biggest issue is trust. Either they trust you or they don’t. At the end of the day, I always went to the advisor here, we were a firm for 30-plus years prior, and these guys knew that we always did what we said we were going to do, and we always did. If your people trust you, then you can do it. If your people don’t trust you, it isn’t going to work. Louis Diamond: In other words, your firm added immense value to the advisors as well. Aside from trust, if you weren’t providing a service or services that they found a value that they couldn’t access on their own, it would’ve been 85/15 going the other way for sure. Andy Schwartz: Yeah, 100%. I know it’s not easy, but it wasn’t that hard for us. Louis Diamond: Good. It’s well-earned. So I believe you were Rise Growth Partners’ first investment. Andy Schwartz: We were. Louis Diamond: That’s cool. It’s exciting. You get to be someone’s first, but did it make you uncomfortable that you were the first investment or did you see that as a positive? Andy Schwartz: I actually saw it as a positive. Well, one, because I recognized immediately that Joe Duran and his team were way smarter than we were certainly, and certainly with what we were trying to do. And I figured that it’s almost like the first child. They were so excited to have somebody, and there was so much time and energy, so they just really doted on us. They were really able to help us. Now they’ve got four or five groups that they work with, and obviously we’ve been launched. So the younger babies are getting more time and attention, although we get everything that we need from them. But yeah, that never concerned me. I always thought that would be our advantage. It actually turned out that way. Louis Diamond: Interesting. In thinking through a sale or a minority sale, did you entertain other types of capital, whether it was a family office or a multitude of other private equity sponsors or selling the firm outright? Andy Schwartz: Yeah, we probably had four or five very, very serious conversations. Actually, some got pretty close to the end where we basically just made the decision not to do it. One was a much larger firm, good people. But the problem always was… I was always going to get rich out of the deal because it was going to be 100% sale, but there was really no lift or leverage from the advisors. So the principals, they were willing to pay me a big multiple and my partners a big multiple, and pay these guys basically an average multiple. So we had always told our guys, “Let’s stay together, and someday, this thing, whatever it’s going to turn into be, will benefit everyone.” So with the Duran situation and the deal with Rise did, it gave everybody a chance to benefit from what we were doing. But what was good about all of those false starts was, it taught me a lot because I had… I know you’re involved in this, so you know better than I do, but we’d start conversations, somebody would reach out to me, I would be very specific about what I needed. They would say, “Yep, we can do that.” And then you get to the finish line, and it’s almost like, I started out, I wanted a tomahawk steak and a baked potato, and I ended up getting a two-day-old hamburger with some cold French fries. It’s like, I know I’m not that smart and I know you’re the PE guys, but for God’s sakes, we’re not stupid. So it was funny because in January of ’24, I told my partners, “I don’t want to have any more of these conversations. It was a waste of time and energy. I’m sick of talking to these people. Let’s just put our heads down, and then let’s grow the firm a little bit more, and then we’ll see what the world looks like.” And then I get introduced to Duran. Louis Diamond: Perfect. Makes sense. Yeah, so you were well-educated on the market, the types of buyers, and I always say it’s almost more important to understand what you don’t want more than what you do want. The only way oftentimes to understand what you don’t want is to experience it and touch and feel it and really get into the weeds on it. I like too, Andy, I saw in an article, you said that “we’re private equity invested, we’re not private equity owned,” which is a very cool dynamic. I could imagine why that was important to you to retain majority control. Kevin, I want to bring you back into the conversation. Thank you for being patient here. But I mean, I would imagine you had some real choices. I mean, you could have stayed at Northwestern and been very successful, gone through with your internal succession plan. You could have gone to an independent BD, monetized, figured out succession later. You could have sold the business to a strategic acquirer. You were big enough to take on an investor in some capacity on your own. So options wasn’t your problem. Maybe just walk us through. Did you consider any other pathways? And what were the pros and cons in your mind that led you to doing a transaction with Andy? Kevin Spahn: I’m a little different, I think, than most people in this industry. Even as you grow your business at a certain percentage, none of that stuff has ever really meant anything to me. All I know is I like what I do. So when I came into the business, because I like it, I enjoy it, I spend time doing it, I’ve tried to get better at it. But it comes naturally because it’s something that I don’t look at Monday mornings as, “Oh, no, it’s Monday morning.” I’m excited to go to work. My entire career, once I left law, my business has just grown over the years naturally. But you said something before, Louis, and I think this applies to me. I love to work with the clients. I don’t like what I have to do in terms of running the firm. I never have. It’s never been my cup of tea, but you have to do it if you run a firm. So number one, the thought of all the due diligence that I would have to do to research all the firms out there, I wasn’t really all that interested in doing that. At the end of the day, it comes down to this word trust. I trust Andy. I trust the other partners here too, because I’ve known not just Andy, but I’ve known Scott and many of the other partners for years. So I knew what I was getting myself into. At the end of the day, I knew what they built. I was very comfortable with it, and I was either going to stay at Northwestern Mutual or I was going to come here, but I wasn’t going to go anywhere else. I will say, since I’ve gone, it’s been exactly like I thought. I thought I trusted Andy. And if something happened along the way with the transition, everything that he said has been true, thing that he promised is real. As you deal with more complexities with a bigger book and more and more employees, I knew that I was almost at the breaking point in terms of my own organization and to merge into this organization that, as I said before, he’s already built out. I don’t have to do it. And to benefit from these great people that he has as part of his organization, that’s all been a real blessing for me and my team. So I didn’t shop the marketplace really, but I knew what I was getting into, and it’s worked out clear as I thought it would. Louis Diamond: That’s amazing. I think that’s what most people would covet. But it is a decision in and of itself to not shop the marketplace. I mean, from representing buyers or prospective buyers, I know the pricing leverage or the negotiation leverage and the valuation lift that comes from having an open market, having multiple bids, et cetera. It sounds like that wasn’t the… Obviously you wanted to get fair value for your firm, but for you, it was more, it’s trust, “I’m either going to just stay at Northwestern, which is the devil I know or it’s what I’ve known where I’ve been successful, or I’m going to go to the individual that I trust and forget about all the other noise.” Kevin Spahn: Well, Andy says things, but I know they’re true because I’ve seen him at work. I’ve seen how he’s acted. I’ve seen how he interacts with people. But here’s an example. He cares about the people that are at his firm. He says that, but I know it’s true because I see it. I’m the same. I really care about the people in my firm. So as I think about, well, what about the future of two groups, my clients, but also the people that work in my firm? They’re going to be around long after I am. Well, I don’t want myself to retire someday, get a big check, because there’s all sorts of options to get a check. If I get a check and then my client’s scatter to the wind, and my employees don’t really have a future and they just have to go and find their own way, that wasn’t attractive at all to me. So one of the things that I really appreciate about this opportunity is that there is a plan for both my clients and my employees or the younger team members at formerly Spahn Financial, where I feel very good about the fact that they have a solid, secure future in an industry that they’ve all grown to love without them having to go out and make their own way. Louis Diamond: Makes sense to me. We noted a couple of times in this interview, you talked about equity, partnership, both of you have. So Kevin, for you, what did it mean differently for you to become a partner and get equity in a larger firm rather than, we’ll say, the less risky move of just taking everything in cash? Why was that an important distinction for you? Kevin Spahn: For many years, when I left law and came into this business, I didn’t have any money at the time. I was just starting to make money as a lawyer. It takes a while. I started low. I got trial experience working for the government, so they didn’t pay much. That was three years. Then I was at a firm, and I was just starting to make more money. Then I made this big shift into a career tha

Everyone lives through time, but we continue to struggle to fully understand it. We remain unsure whether time is fundamental or emergent, why it has an arrow pointing from past to future, and how that arrow connects to our experience of time's passage. Jim Al-Khalili's new book is On Time: The Physics that Makes the Universe Tick. We discuss what time is at the most basic level, and how it connects to open questions in biology, cosmology, and quantum mechanics. Mindscape listeners can try StatsKey Pro free for one month with code MINDSCAPE. After that, it's $4.99 per month unless canceled. #ad Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/31/366-jim-al-khalili-on-time-quantum-biology-and-cosmology/ Support Mindscape on Patreon. Jim Al-Khalili received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Surrey. He is currently Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Physics at Surrey. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and has served as past president of the British Science Association. He has been awarded the Michael Faraday Prize by the Royal Society, and has been appointed an appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Web site University of Surrey web page Google Scholar publications Amazon author page Wikipedia YouTube

Sunday August 30, 2026 Intro: I am going to suffer and die. Should I avoid it? Can I? The way of our culture is to do all in our power to avoid it, or at least put it off as long as we can. God's plan is not to remove it or postpone it, but to turn it completely around so that suffering and death are vehicles of good things. for full notes: https://www.cgtruth.org/index.php?proc=msg&sf=vw&tid=3336

Your brain already made up its mind about today's episode, and you haven't even heard the topic yet. That's not a guilt trip; that's neuroscience. In the next few seconds, your mind will label this video interesting or skip it, useful or not, right up your alley or not, and it will do all of that before you have any real information. Today we're calling that out by name. It's called Whole-O-Graphic Vision, and it might be the most useful three minutes you spend all week. Makes sense? Good. Let's get into it. Follow Dr. JC Doornick and the Makes Sense Academy:► Makes Sense Substack - https://drjcdoornick.substack.com ► Instagram: / drjcdoornick ► Substack: / drjcdoornick ►Facebook:  / makessensepodcast ►YouTube:  / drjcdoornick MAKES SENSE PODCAST Welcome to the Makes Sense with Dr. JC Doornick Podcast. This podcast explores topics that expand human consciousness and enhance performance. On the Makes Sense Podcast, we acknowledge that it's who you are that determines how well what you do works, and that perception is subjective and an acquired taste. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at begin to change. Welcome to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses. Welcome to the Makes Sense with Dr. JC Doornick Podcast. SUBSCRIBE/RATE/REVIEW & SHARE our new podcast. FOLLOW Podcast: You will find a "Follow" button in the top right. This will enable the podcast software to alert you when a new episode launches each week. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/makes-sense-with-dr-jc-doornick/id1730954168 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1WHfKWDDReMtrGFz4kkZs9?si=003780ca147c4aec Podcast Affiliates: Kwik Learning: Many people ask me where I get all these topics, which I've been covering for almost 15 years. I have learned to read nearly four times faster and retain information 10 times better with Kwik Learning. Learn how to learn and earn with Jim Kwik. Get his program at a special discount here: https://jimkwik.com/dragon OUR SPONSORS: Operly - Take Back Control of Your Work Day and Get Rid of All Your AI Apps - Welcome to the new world of Time Freedom and Unlimited Scaling and Success with Operly -  https://go.getoperly.ai/video?ref=jean-claude-claude-d-2a95 Blue Blinds Bakery - Handcrafted with all-natural ingredients - www.blueblindsbakery.com 0.00.00 - Teaser 0.14.00 - Intro 1:07.00 - Whole O Graphic Vision Intro 2:34.00 - Great Morning 4:09.00 - The Story Making Machine 6:14.00 - Whole-O-Graphic Vision and the IRS 10:44.00 - The Bouncer 18:43.00 - What is Whole - O - Graphic Vision 25:10.00 - The Question that Changes Everything 31:29.00 - Recognizing the limitations of your vantage point 33:22.00 - Why Certainty Feels So Good 36:18.00 - Add the Algorithm of Social Media 39:53.00 - Closed vs. Open Circuit Mindset 40:31.00 - Makes Sense Glasses 44:10.00 - The Good Shift Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Some advisers are telling agency owners they don't need to know AI all that well themselves. They suggest owners go deep on AI for a month or three, then pass the day-to-day to the team and move on with life. In this episode, Chip and Gini explain why that’s backwards, and how owners who step back from AI are making a mistake. Chip’s argument is that AI doesn’t fit the usual delegation model because it’s moving too fast and touching too much of the business to hand off after just a few months of study. Gini agrees, noting that advice which made sense six months ago is often stale today. Both connect this to credibility with the team: Chip compares the situation to a non-technical manager overseeing developers, who then gets disrespected because they don’t speak the language. Gini says her own coaching works because she’s in the tools constantly enough to give specific workable advice. They also describe pushing AI into something closer to a personal operating system than a work tool, from Chip wanting an assistant that catches him contradicting his own past positions, to Gini’s agent that calls her out when she takes on work she said she’d delegate, telling her flatly it’s not the best use of her time. The episode closes with the advice that staying curious personally is what keeps owners sharp enough to lead a team through a tool that keeps rewriting its own rules. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You need to be in the trenches on AI, at least for the foreseeable future.” Gini Dietrich: “I honestly and truly do not know how I did my job five years ago.” Chip Griffin: “You just don’t come across as confident if you haven’t tried it yourself.” Gini Dietrich: “If you simply get a general knowledge and then leave off in delegation, you’re not getting anywhere near the value that you ought to be.” Related AI should be your agency's friend, not foe Stop chasing AI tools: Start with what actually hurts Using AI the right way for agency biz dev View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I have no creative introduction whatsoever. Gini Dietrich: That’s fine- So maybe- … because I’m gonna phew. Chip Griffin: So maybe, maybe we should just take a, a deep dive for w- you know- … couple of minutes here and try to figure out what it is that we’re gonna talk about today. Gini Dietrich: We’re gonna talk about the bro culture who told agency owners to use AI for three months and then not again. Chip Griffin: Yes. apparently, agency owners need to, to really get up to speed on AI, but then just to hand it all off to the team and move on with their lives. Gini Dietrich: This is the most ridiculous, ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard, and I understand that I don’t have context ’cause I didn’t watch the bro video, but that’s ludicrous. Chip Griffin: And in fairness, I watched it a while back, so my context is a little bit off too. But it- look, this is, this is not, this is not one-off advice. I mean, frequently I hear people advise, you know, agency owners to, to have some general knowledge of something but then to let go. And, I think in some cases that may be worthwhile. But I think AI is moving so fast- … and has such an impact on our businesses that, that we need to … as leaders, we need to remain curious, we need to be hands-on. We cannot simply rely on our teams to do this because it is transformational to our businesses and to our industry, and that’s not something that you leave in the hands of somebody else. Gini Dietrich: Yes, and I know I’ve said this before, but I honestly and truly do not know how I did my job five years ago. Chip Griffin: Yep. Gini Dietrich: Because, it’s such a huge thinking partner for me to help me figure out what I’m missing, what holes I need to fill, what’s overly complicated, what’s too jargony. Like, I don’t know how I did my job without it. So the idea that you would do a deep dive for three months and then be like, “Okay, everybody else take over,” like that doesn’t, that doesn’t make any sense at all. Chip Griffin: No, it does not. Now, in fairness, I think, I think what they were saying was sort of hand over the day-to-day of it, and you can certainly still use it to help you with your own writing and the basic stuff. But I, think you still need to be beyond that. I think you need to be pushing- Yes … the envelope yourself- Yes … experimenting, innovating- Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes … Chip Griffin: inspiring your team. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: And, if you’re not doing that, you’re not getting the most out of it that you can. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Like, yes, because this is one of those things that if you’re not using it, you don’t know what has changed, and it’s changing so fast, right? I mean, a couple of weeks ago, Claude came out and said that they’re watermarking everything, and you can’t just retype it into a new document because the watermark is in the tokens and how it thinks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And everybody freaked out. Like, everybody’s using AI. So, okay, so it’s watermarked. Like, we all know we’re using it. Everybody’s using it. I use it, you use it. Everybody uses it. Like, okay, so it’s being watermarked, but like, if you’re not using it and understanding it and evolving with it, then you might freak out about that. But it’s not that big of a deal. Chip Griffin: It is absolutely not that big of a deal. It’s stupid, in fact, but, you know, if it, if it amuses somebody to, do that, fine. I’m sure that somebody will figure out how to, to reveal those watermarks and post gotchas, kinda like in the old days when people were like, “Gotcha, that CEO didn’t write their own blog post.” No, duh. Gini Dietrich: Really? Yeah. Chip Griffin: And, and, and, their shareholders don’t want them to do that either. Gini Dietrich: Correct. Right. Yes. Chip Griffin: Not, at their hourly rates. And- No … and that, and that was 20 years ago before their hourly rates got to where many CEOs- Right … have their hourly rates today. But in any case, so you Chip Griffin: need to be learning and experimenting and understanding how it’s evolving, because, I mean, even some of the advice that, you know, someone might have given you or I might have given six months ago is not the same advice I would give today. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And, in fact, you know, some of the things about, you know, the importance of providing instructions and guardrails and all that kind of stuff, that may be shifting. You know, we’re now seeing Anthropic saying, “Well, that’s, that’s not really the best way to get things out of the, the more recent versions of Opus and Fable and that kind of stuff. You actually wanna give it more freedom than you did before, otherwise you may not like the results.” And- Yeah … and those things are changing. You know, a, a couple years ago, everybody was like, “You need to tell it what kind of mindset to have. Act as a social media strategist.” Nobody will tell you that today, because that’s not the best way to get stuff out of it. But if you’re not continuing to experiment and roll up your sleeves and be in there day to day and figure out not only how it can help your business, but how it can help you personally, and that’s beyond just the thought part of it. That’s figuring out how do I make it my own personal operating system, my second brain, which I am extremely passionate about, and I think that, most agency owners should really be thinking about this whole, you know, whether, you wanna call it that operating system or second brain concept, having something that really knows you and as much about you as possible so that it’s really there, not even just as a thinking partner or a sparring partner. I mean, it’s, there as a mini you- Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: That can help you to think things through and not forget stuff, which- Yep … as I get older, is more and more important. Gini Dietrich: Well, and one of the things that I’ve done is I do– I’ve done exactly like that. I’ve done exactly that, and I think I’ve talked about this before, that I have a co-CEO agent that I’ve built, and it will s- it kinda, it kinda makes me mad sometimes. But one of the goals that we have inside my organization is to have everything less dependent on me, because right now the, the business is very founder-led. It’s, you know, I’m the thought leader, I’m the brand, all of those things, and it’s a big, big goal over the next three to five years to extract me from some of that and start to build other leaders inside the organization that, you know, can help us scale and do all of those things. So my AI knows that, and I will do something, and it will say Is this the best use of your time? I thought you were trying to extract yourself, and I’m like, “Ugh. Fine!” Chip Griffin: See, yours is more polite than mine because mine will just straight up tell me that it’s not a good use of my time. Yeah, yeah, sometimes it will do that, yeah. and, that I shouldn’t do it. Yeah. Or, my other favorite is it will say, “Well, this does not, you know, match what you said in, you know- 2022.” Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah. Chip Griffin: You know, “Why are you saying this now?” Or something like that. Gini Dietrich: What has changed, or yeah. Yeah, yeah … Chip Griffin: yeah, what has changed, or just it’s, it’s not consistent. Yeah … and, so having it call me out, the, I mean, it … Sometimes it’s caught me on things where I’m just not thinking it through, right? In, the moment I give a quick answer and say, “Yeah, let’s go in this direction,” it’s like, “Wait a minute, hold on.” Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: That c- that conflicts- Yep … with advice you’ve given in the past. Yep. You know, square this up. Gini Dietrich: Yep. And I will say that, you know, you made the point about using it in your personal life, too. I have an agent that is helping me parent a teenage girl, and sometimes I get very frustrated and I’m like, “Meh,” and I type something out, and it literally said to me the other day, “So let me get this straight, Gini. You are raising a strong, independent young woman who can think for herself and do things the way that she thinks are best, and you’re mad that she’s doing this?” And I’m like- Well, when you put it that way, like… Chip Griffin: to, to which I would be tempted to respond, “You know I can delete you at any time, right?” Gini Dietrich: But it holds up a mirror sometimes and you’re like- Chip Griffin: It, does … Gini Dietrich: “Oh, okay.” Yeah. “You’re right. All right, you’re right. You’re right.” Chip Griffin: But it, you know, part of it is just is, is playing the what if game too. And I think that’s something that’s really hard to delegate to your team, or maybe not comfortable for them because- Right … some of those what ifs may result in them not having the jobs that they currently have. Exactly. Not necessarily that they are out of a job, but- Right … but their job would necessarily change. And, you know, one of the things that, that I will often do is I will say to my AI engine of choice, “So, you know, here’s my challenge. How might I go about that differently?” Or, you know, “How could you help me with this?” Or, when it gives me an answer, well, why do I still… ‘Cause sometimes it’ll say, “You need to do this next.” And I’ll say, “Well, why?” Gini Dietrich: Why? You’re right. Why? Chip Griffin: What is it about it that you can’t do- Gini Dietrich: Yeah … Chip Griffin: so I can, you know, make a legitimate decision about really whether it is something I need to take on. And I’d say probably 50% of the time it’s like, no, actually you’re right. I could create a process that would allow me to, you know, maybe not get it all the way there, but close enough. And I think that, you know, having those kinds of conversations and engagement help you to figure out things that are important not just to you, but to the business itself. And if you simply get a general knowledge and then leave off in delegation, you’re not getting anywhere near the value that you ought to be. Gini Dietrich: 100%. I totally agree with that. And I think this, this idea that you should just deep dive for three months or one to three months or whatever it happens to be, and then leave it off to your… Like, that’s just, it’s ludicrous. It’s ludicrous. Like it’s, bah. Bah. Chip Griffin: Yep. And, and I mean, and the, the other thing that I think is helpful is, you know, there’s all sorts of things being said and written about AI, including this podcast, this episode, and previous episodes. And one of the things that I love to do is I love just taking a link to, you know, one of these podcast episodes or videos and, throwing it to Claude and saying, “Hey, anything I should take away from this?” And what it then does is it reads the transcript and takes a look at, all of the behaviors that I currently have with it and say, “Okay, well, you, you’re already doing 90% of this, but here are the two new ideas that you might consider.” Hmm. And it, And, so I find it really helpful, so I will… Sometimes I don’t even watch the video. I’ll just, you know, I’ll see the headline on a, a, video on YouTube, you know, “Get 10X the results of Claude Design by doing this.” And so I’ll just grab the link, and I’ll shoot it over to Claude and say, “Anything? Should I watch this? Is there anything to take away from it?” Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chip Griffin: And, it will come back, and it, because I, do all of the work that I do and because I have systems set up so that it records all of the activity that I do with it and all of the rules and context and all that, it’s able to say, you know, “You’re better than it in these places, you’re worse than it in these places, and this stuff is just, you know, rock stupid- Yeah and you shouldn’t do it no matter whether you can or can’t.” Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that’s exactly right, and, using it in those kinds of ways are the big things I think most people are missing. And you know, you- before we started recording, you and I were talking about how 99% of humans just in general are not using it in those kinds of ways. We’re not building skills, we’re not building agents, we’re not curious about what it can do. We’re not using it in ways that can help us. I mean, I use it, to your point, for everything. I use it for parenting, I use it for home design, I use it for all work-related things. I, I honestly and truly, I don’t know how I lived five years ago without it. I don’t. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, it, can help you find just little things that are just, you know, mind-numbingly annoying and I sometimes will kick myself for not using it as my first port of call. So- Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep … Chip Griffin: for example, a couple of weeks ago, I was having, a, a really technical networking issue in my house, as far as how my laptop was talking to my, my NAS. And it wasn’t doing it exactly correctly, and so it was l- leading to very, very slow transfer speed. So it wasn’t just invisible, it was just really slow- Mm-hmm … in a way that it, shouldn’t have been. And I’m pretty smart about home networking and LANs and all that kind of stuff, and so I, I couldn’t figure it out, and so I did some quick Googling and I couldn’t find it there. And I’m like, “You know what? Let me just give the, exact situation to Claude and see what happens.” Not 10 seconds later, it has come back with a really bizarre solution. I tested it, immediately worked, solved the problem. Gini Dietrich: And it worked. Isn’t that crazy? Chip Griffin: Right. That’s crazy. So I, mean, it, could, it… And, normally you would expect that, the same thing would pop up in Google results, and it didn’t. Gini Dietrich: It didn’t, right. Chip Griffin: Because it was, it was such an edge case that I had. But it was able to, parse through all of the detail and figure out what the real problem was and how to resolve it. And so- Gini Dietrich: And then it worked. That’s crazy … Chip Griffin: and, then it worked. And, otherwise, I would’ve just given up and just had to live with the fact that my laptop was talking incredibly slowly to the NAS. Which it, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world- Right. But, yeah … but there were certain tasks that it just made difficult, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it to work the way it, it should. And so it, helped. So, but if I wasn’t spending the time with, with the tool myself and I, went to a team member, could they possibly solve it? Sure. But, that, A, that’s wasteful- Gini Dietrich: Right … Chip Griffin: and, B, I’m not learning from it. And, I think the, the other thing that we need to keep in mind is that when we lack knowledge about something, it’s harder to manage our people on those tasks. And so, you know, if you are a PR agency owner, the fact that you’ve done PR before helps you to manage your team because you can figure out what actually makes sense. Does it really take this long to do that? And, and, not only do you understand what they’re doing and, how it impacts, but also they respect you more, right? If you are– I’ve seen PR people managed by non-PR people- And it tends not to go all that well because they’re not talking the same language. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: And if we want our whole teams to be energetically using AI, and we’re not using it, we can’t speak that same language. Again, I, used to have occasions where I would see a non-technical person managing a dev team. Gini Dietrich: Oh, no.  That’s a terrible idea. Chip Griffin: And that’s the worst. Right? Yeah. Because th- because developers know they can pull one over on you if you don’t- Then, yeah … if you don’t know what they’re actually talking about, right? And, I always had a much better time managing devs ’cause I, I can code myself and those… So when they kind of give me a, a baloney answer, I’m like, “Really? Really?” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah. No, okay. All right. I guess we can’t do that.” So, you need to understand the AI in order to be able to prod your team, manage your team, encourage your team, inspire your team. So- this is, this is really not one of those things where you can say, “Look, I just, I need to be an executive level person on this, and that’s it.” You need to be in the trenches on AI, at least for the foreseeable future. At some point, it may begin to stabilize, and you can treat it more like a lot of the other activities. But as long as it is developing and evolving as quickly as it is now, you need to be in there, and you need to understand it every single day. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And one of the things I will tell you with my team that I have learned over the last few months is that- They don’t have the same level of, shall we say, excitement that I have around it. And because of that, I’m able to train them and coach them on how to use it. And so I will say, “Well, have you prompted it with this,” or, “Have you tried that?” And they’ll go, “Oh, no.” And then they’ll do that and go, “Oh, well that worked.” And so if I wasn’t using it, you know, constantly like I am, I wouldn’t know to be able to train or coach those things. So I think you’re exactly right. It’s kind of like I say to my market- our VP of marketing all the time, I’m like, “You have the hardest job in this building because this is my core expertise.” And I’m sorry, but like I’m gonna have ideas, and we’re gonna have debates over things that you’re doing because it’s my core expertise. And this is the same thing, like you should know enough to be able to say to your team, “Have you tried this?” or, “Have you thought about that?” or, “Maybe try prompting it with this,” or, “Have it play devil’s advocate,” or, “Have it poke holes in it for you.” So like you can’t do that, to your point, if you’re not using it every single day. Chip Griffin: Well, and I, think you’ve touched on the key thing here, which is that it’s not doing the work for them. It’s coaching. Yeah. It’s mentoring. Yep. It’s advising. Yep. It’s inspiring. And those are all the, the things that you need to do. I’m not sitting here saying that you need to build all the processes out and hand over preset skills- Right, right … or bodies of context or whatever to the team, but, you need to know enough that you can have that, those conversations and say, “Have you tried this? Have you seen this?” You know, you, you– I, experimented with this the other day. You know, I think this is the kinda thing that would really help you doing X, Y, or Z. And you just can’t do that as effectively- Yeah … if you’re just like, “You know, I heard someone say, I heard Chip and Gini talking about this, and I think maybe you ought to do this.” But I mean, you, Chip Griffin: just don’t come across as confident if you haven’t tried it yourself. Gini Dietrich: Yep, 100%. And look, I know I’ve said this before too, but it’s fun. Like, it’s fun. So even if you don’t wanna use it from a business perspective or you haven’t figured out the best use of it, like try it personally, test it out personally. I found this app called Cookshelf where you scan all of the cookbooks that you have, and then it indexes all of your recipes, which is great, and it helps you meal plan and it builds grocery lists and all that. However, you still have to come up with the meal plans ideas. So I have to say, “Okay, I wanna make tacos,” and then I put tacos into the app, and it gives me like 75 recipes from the cookbooks that I own. Overwhelming. Great, but overwhelming. So now I use my AI to say, “Okay, last week we had this, this, this and this. Here’s my app. Here’s all the cookbooks. Give me an idea. I wanna have one night pork, one night steak, one night chicken, one night vegetarian,” and then it does that work for me, and then I go into the app and find the recipe, right? So– And it tells me which cookbook it’s in and which page. So then I just go to my shelf, I pull it off and I cook. Makes things significantly easier. The app made it easier, AI made it even easier. So there are lots of things. I have my books in my library downstairs color-coded, which drives my father-in-law crazy because he thinks I should be using the Dewey Decimal System, but they’re color-coded. They’re like red, orange, yellow, right? So I took a picture of all of my books on all the shelves, there’s more than a thousand of them, and I put them into Claude and I said, “Create me an index of all of the books by author, by title, and then tell me what, which shelf they’re on and which– and how far in.” Now I have my own Dewey Decimal System. So there are lots of ways that you can use AI in interesting ways personally to get excited about it and then transfer that over to the business Yes, they’re color-coded. I know you haven’t gotten past that yet. Chip Griffin: I, I, I just, you’ve left me speechless. Gini Dietrich: It looks so nice. It’s so pretty. Chip Griffin: It, I, I, I, I feel like maybe you should be experimenting to see how AI can act as a therapist for some of the issues you clearly must have- Gini Dietrich: I do have, yes … Chip Griffin: if, if you, if you’re- Gini Dietrich: But it looks really nice. It looks very nice. Chip Griffin: It looks re- it d- that is fantastic. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten rid of all of my cookbooks and most of my regular books because I- Gini Dietrich: Oh, wow … Chip Griffin: stopped cracking them open, and I decided that the fact that they looked good on my shelf didn’t really matter to me anymore. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, see, it matters to me, so. Chip Griffin: And, when it comes to cooking, I prefer the, the, the Top Chef challenge style. You just go and you grab a couple of ingredients, and you say- … “What can I make with this?” Gini Dietrich: That’s weekend cooking, which I agree with. Oh, no. Weeknight cooking, I can’t do that. Chip Griffin: Oh, that’s week, that, that week, that’s- Gini Dietrich: I just have to, like, have a plan. Chip Griffin: No, I do that lunchtime, whatever. I mean, just- Yeah, I don’t have- It, just, it’s the shortens the time, right? So if you’re doing it for lunch- Sure, yep … you know, you got maybe 10 or 15 minutes, so what can I, what can I do with- Yeah … what’s available here? What’s going bad in the… Usually start with what’s going bad in the fridge. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And, grab one or two of those and say- Hmm … “Okay, how can I put this to work?” And it, to me, that’s a lot more fun than using some recipe well, first of all, I’ve always hated recipes, but secondly- Yeah … it’s, not as mentally challenging, and I like my cooking to be mentally challenging. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I don’t have the time during the week. Weekends- Hmm … I totally agree with you, but during the week I don’t have the time. Chip Griffin: Hmm. Well, anyway, on that note, since I feel like we’re starting to veer off topic and off track a bit. Gini Dietrich: I will send photos of my color-coded shelves that we can include with this. Chip Griffin: I, I, that is, that is fantastic or disturbing or perhaps both. So- … on that note, we are gonna wrap up this episode. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

Join the C3 Panthers Podcast as the C3 crew react to and discuss…-Are the Detroit Lions trying to Jack our swagger-Makes predictions for the 53 man roster-How many WR's will Carolina carry into the season-With Haynes King not playing another preseason game what will his role be for the Panthers-Can Sam Hecht be the center of the future for the Panthers-Will Dan Morgan upgrade the LB room before the start of the seasonAll this and MORE!

What if the relationship that changed your life also uncovered the business opportunity you were meant to pursue? In this episode, Moshe Edri, Founder of Spa Sphere, shares how an unexpected relationship led him to discover a massive gap in the aesthetics industry and inspired him to build an AI-powered platform designed specifically for aestheticians. After spending more than 20 years building technology for some of the world's largest companies, Moshe never imagined he'd become an entrepreneur serving the skincare industry. But through one meaningful relationship, he saw firsthand the daily challenges independent aestheticians faced and realized no one was building software around the way they actually worked. Moshe explains how listening to customers, creating genuine partnerships, and staying close to the people you serve has fueled Spa Sphere's rapid growth. He also shares why relationships, are the true competitive advantage for any business, and how meaningful connections continue to shape both his company and his life.   [00:03:28] What He Does and Who He Serves Founder of Spa Sphere, an AI-powered platform built specifically for aestheticians Helps skincare professionals simplify operations and grow their businesses Creates technology around the unique workflows of estheticians Enables practitioners to spend more time serving clients and less time managing software [00:05:19] Solving a Problem No One Else Was Addressing Existing software wasn't designed for the way aestheticians work Many professionals relied on disconnected tools and manual processes Fragmented systems created unnecessary stress and burnout Spa Sphere brings everything together into one purpose-built platform [00:06:41] Helping Clients Create Better Outcomes Supports personalized treatment plans instead of one-time appointments Gives aestheticians tools to guide clients through long-term skincare journeys Helps practitioners increase revenue while improving client care Aligns technology with how estheticians naturally serve their clients [00:11:04] How One Relationship Changed Everything The idea for Spa Sphere began while dating an esthetician Saw firsthand the frustrations of running an independent practice Realized an entire industry had been overlooked by technology companies Combined his background in software with a real-world business challenge [00:12:45] Growing Through Strategic Relationships Focuses on partnerships with educators, coaches, and industry leaders Chooses collaboration over chasing individual customers Creates win-win opportunities throughout the industry Builds momentum through trusted relationships and referrals [00:14:31] The Relationship That Sparked His Mission Credits a personal relationship with introducing him to the aesthetics industry Was inspired by how deeply aestheticians care for their clients Built technology that removes friction so practitioners can focus on people Turned a personal experience into a purpose-driven company [00:17:08] Growing Beyond His Comfort Zone Learned business development as a technical founder Built meaningful partnerships despite being naturally introverted Embraced new challenges to grow both personally and professionally Continues refining the customer experience as the company expands [00:18:59] Why Customer Relationships Matter Gives every client direct access to him Values personal conversations over transactional support Makes time to meet customers whenever possible Believes authentic relationships are the foundation of lasting success [00:20:54] Scaling Without Losing the Human Touch Confident the technology can scale to support future growth More concerned about maintaining exceptional customer support Wants every customer to continue feeling personally valued Committed to growing without sacrificing relationships [00:21:35] Giving Back to the Industry Inspired by the generosity and passion of aestheticians Finds purpose in helping professionals better serve their clients Provides free resources, education, and tools alongside the platform Measures success by the impact he creates for others   KEY QUOTES "The challenge for me was to create the best platform for aestheticians so they need to forget about technology. Technology becomes the easy part, not the hard part, so they can focus on building relationships with their clients." "I'm looking back where I started and where I am today, and it makes me proud that I was capable of creating those meaningful connections and always creating win-win-win situations." "All my clients have my cellphone number. They know about our hamsters, they know about my dog. We've developed those kinds of relationships." "Personal time is what helps build those relationships. That digital persona you show on camera isn't enough." "I'm happy that in a way we are now giving back to them with their time, with their revenue, and with the free content and tools we provide for them." CONNECT WITH MOSHE EDRI Website: https://www.spasphere.ai LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moshe-edri Email: moshe@spasphere.ai   Thanks for tuning in! If you liked my show, please LEAVE A 5-STAR REVIEW, like, and subscribe! Find me on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher

If you're doing EVERYTHING in your relationship and starting to resent the hell out of your partner for it…we need to talk. You're the one who notices. Remembers. Plans. Worries. Follows up. Makes sure things actually happen. And after a while, it stops feeling like we're in this together and starts feeling like: Why am I the only one who cares? I've been a marriage counselor for over twenty years, and I can tell you: this dynamic can get ugly. Because underneath the arguments about dishes, schedules, kids, errands, and who was supposed to do what is something much more painful: If you really loved me, why would you let me carry all of this alone? That's why I invited sociologist Dr. Leah Ruppanner, author of Drained, to join me for a very real conversation about mental load, resentment, and how to create a relationship that actually feels balanced again. And some of what she shared surprised me. Because the solution may not be getting your partner to do more. It may not be splitting everything 50/50. And some of the things you're doing to make your relationship more equitable could actually be keeping you stuck. You'll discover: Why does the mental load turn into such intense resentment? What's really happening when you feel like you're the only one who cares? Why can asking your partner to “just help more” backfire? What if 50/50 isn't actually the healthiest goal? Are you unknowingly making it harder for your partner to step up? And how do you change this dynamic when your partner isn't changing? If you're exhausted from carrying your relationship (and even more exhausted from being angry about it), listen to this before you have the same fight again. Xoxo, Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby Growing Self Special thanks to this month's sponsors of the podcast: Shopify —  Every self-made person started somewhere. Yours starts free at shopify.com/lhs Quince — Quality products you'll actually use that feel like luxury without the price tag. Get free shipping and 365-day returns at ⁠quince.com/lhs⁠ Skylight — Stay connected with the people you love through beautiful digital calendars and photo frames designed for real family life. Learn more at skylightcal.com/lhs.

Over the past three weeks, we’ve been exploring the “core four” values of becoming more like Christ. So far, we’ve talked about humility, unity, and integrity. Each one of these messages could have been a series of its own, but we wanted to put them all together into a single series to demonstrate how powerful they are together. We’ve saved the most important value for last. This week, we’re talking all about love. Love is the foundational and essential core value. If you want Christ to be fully developed in you, don’t start with rules, spiritual gifts, or mission fields. Start with love. Attorney and Christian author Bob Goff says the whole point of the Christian life is for us to become love. Makes sense, right? If God is love and you want to become more like Him, you must become love. That’s the only way Christ will be fully developed in you.

Over the past three weeks, we’ve been exploring the “core four” values of becoming more like Christ. So far, we’ve talked about humility, unity, and integrity. Each one of these messages could have been a series of its own, but we wanted to put them all together into a single series to demonstrate how powerful they are together. We’ve saved the most important value for last. This week, we’re talking all about love. Love is the foundational and essential core value. If you want Christ to be fully developed in you, don’t start with rules, spiritual gifts, or mission fields. Start with love. Attorney and Christian author Bob Goff says the whole point of the Christian life is for us to become love. Makes sense, right? If God is love and you want to become more like Him, you must become love. That’s the only way Christ will be fully developed in you.

Why is it that when we're sick, soup seems like the best answer? Try a steaming bowl of this classic. It's nourishing (packed full of legumes), hearty, and easy to digest. Makes 8-10 serves Ingredients 1 bacon hock 500g green split peas 3L water 1 large onion, diced roughly 2 sticks celery, diced 2 carrots, diced 1 teaspoon sea salt + extra ½ teaspoon pepper 2-3 tablespoons olive oil + extra for drizzling Salt & pepper to season Toasted bread to serve Method In a large pot, bring 3 litres of water, the ham hock, and split peas to a boil. Cover and cook for one hour. Skim off any foam that develops. Add in onions, celery, and carrots and bring to the boil again. Cover, reduce to a simmer and cook for another 60-90 minutes or until the meat from the ham hock can easily be teased from the bone. This will depend on the size of the hock. Remove the ham hock from the soup, peel away skin and discard. Strip the meat from the bone and shred into large pieces. Use a wand blender to blend the soup smooth or leave it chunky if you prefer. Add more water to get a not-to-thick not-to-thin consistency. Taste and season with more salt and pepper as needed. Add the ham meat back into the soup. Serve soup with plenty of buttery toast. Make it your own Use 4 cups of frozen peas instead of split peas. Can use bacon bones instead of a bacon hock. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What makes a good compliment? What are some of the biggest compliments you can give someone? Words have weight. Makes the compliments you give count, and be intentional with your compliments today and always.Thank you for joining us in between seasons for this specialmini-season format of The Victory Couch, Upholstery. We hope these gentle reminders will encourage you to disconnect with what doesn't really matter and CONNECT with those who do (The Victory Couch is hosted by Rick and Julie Rando).Show notes: Continue the conversation over on Instagram@thevictorycouch,Facebook, victorycouchpodcast@gmail.com, or⁠⁠www.thevictorycouch.com⁠⁠Want a new Victory Couch sticker for your water bottle, laptop, guitar case, etc.? Send us a message and we'll mail you one.Listen to the original episode in FULL here:Season 4: Episode 4 – about Ohio rest stops, pet peeves, compliments, and celebrity letters https://open.spotify.com/episode/133DKDIz7GZIBTfjzX6brA?si=Z4Nbg1hQRRymPKZi08mPeAWhat makes a good compliment? What are some of the biggestcompliments you can give someone? Words have weight. Makes thecompliments you give count, and be intentional with your complimentstoday and always.Thank you for joining us in between seasons for this specialmini-season format of The Victory Couch, Upholstery. We hope thesegentle reminders will encourage you to disconnect with what doesn'treally matter and CONNECT with those who do (The Victory Couch ishosted by Rick and Julie Rando).Show notes: Continue the conversation over on Instagram@thevictorycouch,Facebook, victorycouchpodcast@gmail.com, or⁠⁠www.thevictorycouch.com⁠⁠Want a new Victory Couch sticker for your water bottle, laptop,guitar case, etc.? Send us a message and we'll mail you one.Listen to the original episode in FULL here:Season4: Episode 4 – about Ohio rest stops, pet peeves, compliments, andcelebrity letters https://open.spotify.com/episode/133DKDIz7GZIBTfjzX6brA?si=Z4Nbg1hQRRymPKZi08mPeA

Re-releasing a Dental A-Team podcast fan favorite! Britt is fresh off visiting a ton of practices, many of which are part of dental support organizations (DSOs), and she's sharing her insight. With Kiera, she talks about the foundational pieces to set up DSOs for success — everything from training the leadership team, setting up KPIs, providing profit and loss statement education, and allowing culture and patient experience to grow in each practice while keeping an overall brand. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera. And today we are bringing you something so special. I am so excited because this is one of our most popular episodes from the archives. Whether you're hearing this for the first time or catching it again, I am so excited because it's jam packed with a ton of takeaways that you can start using right now in your practice. We have released thousands, literally thousands of episodes. And I wanted to start bringing a few of these amazing episodes back for you. So I hope you enjoy. And as always, thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time.   on the Dental A Team podcast.   speaker-0 (00:31) and I've got the one and only Brittany Stone back on the pod. Guys, she has been a freaking road warrior, traveling to seven offices in one day. Dang, Britt. Welcome back. How you doing? How you feeling? How are you today?   speaker-1 (00:45) I'm good. You made me sound better than I was in one day. Seven in a week. Still a lot, but seven in a week.   speaker-0 (00:51) Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. We could edit that or you guys can just know. in my mind, I think it felt like you were seven in a day. Like you were cruising   speaker-1 (00:58) Yeah.   speaker-0 (01:00) to practices. Seven in a week is so many offices. But guys, don't worry, Britt wasn't like leaving them high and dry hanging out. You were seeing it kind of walk us through. I know you went to quite a few DSOs that had multi practices, multi locations. Kind of what was that like and and how does that even look when you're going to multiple practices like that?   speaker-1 (01:19) Yeah, it's fun. So that was it was a week of my like multi practice location. So one had three offices, one had four offices, the two groups that I work with last week. And so it's fun. It's fun to see one you get to know kind of like the visionaries who who started a thing, whether it's just an owner or multiple partners that are involved in it, get to see kind of their vision and it's it's fun to see   the different also types of practices that are underneath their umbrellas and how they run 'cause usually we've got some different sizes, obviously different locations. So so yeah, I got to go in, meet everybody, go see all the different practices, kind of see what's going on with them, what things we could help with on an individual practice level and then also as an organization. So it was a good time.   speaker-0 (02:07) That's a lot. And I I do think it is fun when you go see multiple practices because this whole idea of DSO is that we want all of our practices to run exactly the same. And I know when I was a regional manager of ten practices, the bottom line is there is no such thing as running every practice the same. I think it's more like getting rid of that illusion that they're all going to be the same. And it's more what are the foundational pieces and the the silver lining strings that we want running amongst them all. Britt, I know you had one practice,   that kind of wanted to do their own thing within a group. Like, how do you how do you get like one, paint the vision of all the practices needing to be at least fundamentally pretty consistent and similar. And then also helping the doctors and the team members understand like, I get it, it might be annoying for you, but for the greater good of all the practices, it really does make everything easier when we run the same. Because I know a lot of practices just want to run as solo practices, but when you're in a group and multi-offices   that no longer serves the greater organization. Like what was kind of your findings with that? How do you how are you finding to get people on board? Is that something you were running into? Just kinda give us your thoughts around that.   speaker-1 (03:16) Yeah, I think every DSO probably struggles or like group practice struggles with all right, how much do we have the same and like where can we kind of let them be their own and shine in their own way? And also from the business side of things for the DSO, right? What things are more financially beneficial for us to be able to do them the same and have on the same system? so that we run it across all offices and get the true benefit of the DSO.   And so that's where you s kind of start to to figure out, all right, there's gonna be a lot of systems that one, yes, anything that impacts other offices or the group overall, we've gotta make the best decision for the group on how we want that to run, whether it's but easy things like payroll is a pretty pretty common one that's gotta be obviously the same across all over offices. If we're using the same software, right, the way we run our schedule, who's allowed to be on our schedule.   All of those things kinda need guidelines that go across the board. So we all know a little bit of the rules of engagement on things like the schedule. So that's kinda I start to think of it as all right, what are the most important things that impact each other that we need to have the same that's also gonna allow us to be most financially beneficial for the DSO? And then what things don't necessarily impact the other offices where those offices can start to really like, all right, what are procedures you do? Great, go run with it, build it up and   Even if we can get some referrals from other offices for that thing, fantastic and they kinda kinda do their own a little bit.   speaker-0 (04:48) For sure.   And but I was thinking like it actually might be fun on this podcast for us to dive into when you're in a DSO, because Br I know your private practice sold to a DSO. I work with lots of DSOs. You work with lots of DSOs. And I think DSOs are a pretty hot buzzword right now in dentistry. of kind of what are some of those things that you should have standardized. I love that you brought up the payroll for sure. for me, some of the things I know I'm looking at is I really am just looking at   Key metrics amongst all practices. And I know, Britt, with a lot of the DSOs that you and I are consulting together, that is one of the biggest things of making sure all of them are hitting the metrics. And then whatever they want to do outside of those metrics, it's pretty much free reign from there. So, like we're talking labs, supplies, overhead, production per hour per provider, hygiene production.   those are like my main things. Case acceptance is another one I really like to watch. Number of new patients per practice is another key indicator that I really love watching. but those are kind of the main things. And then I really feel like in DSOs and multi practices, some of the biggest things that get lost are culture and patient experience. And those are to be different shades for every practice. And I really I like practices to think in like, no, you want the patient to feel the exact same way whether they come to this location.   Or whether they're going to another location. It is that way. And having practices and offices think like I've got one right now and they just acquired another practice. And they're really doing a divide between the offices. And they're they're labeling each office based on the city. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. let's call them all the practice name. So we are all, let's just say, healthy smiles. It's not healthy smiles of probos and healthy smiles of orum. It is   Healthy smiles, and then we have our Aurum location and our provo location. Those are just a quick way because I think when you can have it as an umbrella of all the practices operate as this way, and then here's these different locations, but helping everyone realize there is the healthy smiles way. And we operate on healthy smiles first. Secondary is going to be our location. Are those some of the things you've seen? Like those are one, the key indicators I like to look at. And then secondly, making sure that people realize like the culture and the patient experience.   really need to be dialed in in my opinion, to really help these DSOs grow and flourish.   speaker-1 (07:09) Mm-hmm. I'm with you on KPIs, right? Teaching office managers how to be able to kind of take charge of those, know what's going on in their practice, and that we're all watching those important numbers to be healthy for sure. That's an across the board thing. and then I'm with you on capitalize off the brand. from a lot of the DSOs we work with, where it's a few different locations, usually I feel like a lot of them are gonna be like five or less, where you can truly   make sure that we are maintaining our standard, maintaining our brand, and then capitalize off of that brand for all practices to where there might be a patient who's looking to go to the office, but maybe it's a little bit farther. great, they've got a location that's closer than to me. Awesome. Let me just go ahead and go to that closer location. And agreed. You've got to keep then the culture and the patient experience up to be number one. And what does that look like? What does it stand for? And there are   I will say different pieces that go into that when it comes to maintaining that culture in our practices and that experience. And I think those would be some non-negotiables like you start to build in if it's we're on time, right, with our appointments as much as possible. So that's something we really drive with our teams. We're always friendly with our patients, we're always welcoming. How do we present on the phone?   you can start to dig into some of those things that you really want to represent as a practice and make sure it's ingrained in our team members and how we present.   speaker-0 (08:41) Yeah. And I think like you said it's that culture in that brand. And honestly, I think people forget that that's actually why you became successful. Like that culture, that brand you started developing, that's how you're able to multiple scale across other practices. And I feel like offices that that see all the practices as one company and then the the different locations are just extensions of that company are the ones that really flourish. In that same thing, I feel like Britt, something you and I have really been   trying to hone in on with offices is to make sure that they have a key leadership team. So people that are really in sync to make decisions. and that's for your operations, for your labs, for your supplies, and and then making sure that things can actually execute forward. Because I feel like when we get a lot of partners involved, what happens is everybody has a strong opinion, but those opinions actually are great unless they stop all the the forward progress   And I think they really just have to be key decision players that everybody elects. It's almost like a board. I feel like all the practices are almost like a neighborhood and you need an HOA, like somebody who can actually just make the decisions and execute in the best interest. And maybe you've got a few of them. So you've got, say, your regional manager who's overseeing all of the practices, the overhead, the operations really. You've possibly got a clinical manager on there who's really looking at the hygiene, the dental assistants.   Then you've got probably a dentist on the board who's making decisions as far as what are the clinical diagnoses, what are the supplies that all dentists need across the board. And then you're probably gonna have somebody who's your finance person. So someone really looking at the financials of the practice. And if you can have one of those key players, I feel like just get that honed in. Then you can have all the practices have their own like little leadership teams and whatnot.   But really you've got those four players who can make very strong decisions. And maybe the dentist is the same person as the clinical lead. Maybe that we don't need an extra person there, maybe not. But I think if you can really get that dialed in, you're going to be able to make a lot stronger decisions and be able to move things forward more. Britt, what are you seeing? Like you were literally just in DSOs. Are you finding that that type of structure helps move things along? Or are you finding like, no, we need to have key leaders in other areas?   Wha what's kind of your take on how to make sure decisions can be made? Because I truly feel like once you get the the KPIs dialed in and everyone's reporting in, once you get your office managers looking at their practices, making sure they're profitable and reporting in, then you got your culture and your brand, it's really about getting decisions made quickly and moving things along rather than getting stagnated with so many opinions.   speaker-1 (11:20) Mm-hmm. And I am big on agreed. You've got to figure out who are your key players, what leadership team do you need in place. I am in big support of having someone who's a strong regional manager in place to help make a lot of those kind of smaller decisions for offices, the offices need support on and empowering office managers to make decision decisions within the balance that you give them.   I think the more you expose your office managers and teach them some of the business side to where they really know what those KPIs are, they really know what they're watching, they know how to influence it, you'll become more confident in their decision making as they see things at a kind of higher level, a bigger picture. but when they can have that information, know how to see it from a little bit higher level, start giving them   the the opportunity to make decisions within their practice. So one, they can kind of see the fun and feel empowered to where they really can run that team and own that office. and they don't feel like they're just kind of sitting waiting for people to tell them what to do. and then that they've got a really strong regional behind them who also has the ability to make decisions within the parameters that if it's partners or owner gives them.   to keep moving things forward and same thing. It's a super empowering thing to where they can get more creative and think of o opportunities for the practices than just feeling like they need to wait because they can't make a decision or do anything because someone's not gonna approve of it.   speaker-0 (12:47) And I really love that you talked about having that regional manager understand the business. I feel like in DSOs, you have to have somebody who understands the business and can think like a business owner. That way they can make decisions. Britt, what were some of the things that as you were basically their regional manager, you were in that DSO role? What were some of the things you felt helped? Because I I think I think sometimes business owners forget everything they've learned. So having somebody come through, it's almost like we've forgotten what business 101 is.   of what things we really need to teach them. What have you found that was maybe helpful for you, for your owners to teach you so you could be more successful in your role within that DSL?   speaker-1 (13:28) Sure. I think one of the first things is helping the office managers and regional managers understand what a PL is. Like, and it doesn't even have to be like the terms of this is a PL, but understanding, I like to relate it to it's just like at home if we have a budget, right? And what money do we have coming in, what things are we spending money in, and at the end, you know, what do we have left over? Just helping them understand not overall.   kind of equation of how the business runs and what are the different pieces within that that they can impact, which is ultimately how many patients we have, how much we treatment plan is truly our ultimate potential as an office. And then what we close, what we schedule, what we collect on, and then controlling our expenses, so then we can have a greater kind of profit left over at the end. So helping them understand that big picture and then helping them to understand within each of those little sections, which are   Then KPIs, what are the more like tangible things that we can track that impact that bigger equation to the business? And agreed, I think we don't realize how much we've learned along the way or people have taught us along the way, even myself kind of running through sometimes these KPIs when you haven't seen them before and you don't understand one, maybe where they come from, or two, why would we even track it? And three.   What could I even do to change that number? Like those are things you have to learn over time and someone's gotta gotta actually take the time to invest in teaching you.   speaker-0 (14:59) Which I I don't think people realize that PNL. When I first looked at a PL, I'm like, this looks like a straight up foreign language. Like I don't even know what ninety percent of this means. And so just imagine, if you will, if you've been running a business, you've been looking at PNLs, pretend you were just plunked into like for me, I do not speak Chinese. So being stuck in a class speaking Chinese and them handing me a report and saying, Kiera, you need to be able to read this and figure it out and tell me what I should do with my business.   I would literally look at that and want to cry. And then I'd probably take a picture with my phone and I'd start Googling and I'd hope and pray I could find some type of Google Translate to figure it out. That like I feel is a good way for you to really understand like what it feels like to be those team members when they first start looking at PL. So I think one of the best ways is just practice. and what I've done is like Britt said, is really just   Sit with your regional. Also, you can do this with your office managers, especially in DSOs, because the more your office managers understand the PL and what it should look like, that can help. So it's really just dial into that. tell them what a healthy payroll like payroll should be sitting at less than 30% of our total collections every month. Our lab should be at less than 9% of our total collections every month, supplies 5%, and just go down the list with them so they can see is this good or is this bad?   I love HDA accounting. I think they do a great job. Profy is another one. I'd Bailey is another one. those are just some some accounting companies. I like when they send the P and L because it's red and green. Like HDA is like you get a thumbs up or you get a thumbs down. Makes it a little bit easier. But then asking your regional or your managers to say, Hey, when you look at this P N L, what do you see that's going really, really well? And what do you see are some of the areas that might be trouble areas and why? Because I feel like when you can start to almost   quiz them and role play with them and have more of a collaboration with them, they start reading that PL and figuring it out rather than you always telling them. But like Britt said, you've got to take the time and invest with them. That way they can look at a PNL. I know Shelbi's been doing RPLs. She sends it to me every week and finally I said, Shelbs, what do you see on this? And that was the first time she'd really looked at it. Sha I just had an assignment for her to send them to me every week, which she does great. But then I started asking her to look at them and then we start diving into it and looking at different numbers.   And it's crazy how when you just spend a little bit of time, people can really start to find things that you as the owner might even be missing. And then they can take the accountability and the ownership of it. But just realize like it is a completely foreign language for these poor people. Let's not forget to train them and educate them so they can be set up for success.   speaker-1 (17:38) Mm-hmm, for sure. And I think also when it comes down to it, when you start looking at some of these numbers and you haven't looked at it before, so even office managers, when they look at it and they haven't seen it or regionals, they're gonna start to understand and like it it's fun in in a way to see their eyes kind of open to like, I understand why like I really want to be able to hire an additional team member, but here's where we are, so it makes sense now why now's not the time to hire.   And we need to work on some other things so we can afford to hire another team.   speaker-0 (18:10) Exactly. And then you're no longer as the business owner, the bad guy or the good guy. When your regional says, Hey, I want to hire, you say, Prime, can we afford this? What does the PNL say? And they then are the ones who are answering the question rather than you being like giving the green light or giving the thumbs down. And then they are more again a partner with you. Britt, as a regional, and I'll give my insights of how it felt for me, how does that make you feel when you can as a regional start making those business decisions and truly be like a trusted   side partner where you're like really, really informed in the business. How does that make you as the regional manager, you as the manager, the practice like, what do you feel like when you feel that competent reading PNLs and understanding the business?   speaker-1 (18:54) I loved it. I loved it for one of the biggest reasons is because I'm in a practice, especially as OM, like I'm in a practice every day and can see what I have and what I need and what's actually going on like as close to the ground as possible. So when it's something like this, we're like driving numbers in a certain direction, I'm like, all right, I can see multiple things kind of in the puzzle that I can start to manipulate or impact.   to be able to drive those numbers, drive the results, or if it's like, hey, we want to get new technology, what do we need to do to get there? Great, we want another ITero. Here's a plan of how we can afford to get that new piece of equipment.   speaker-0 (19:33) Exactly. And it it feels so good. Like for me, it just felt like the I like to win. And I felt like it was finally my my roadmap to being able to be successful and and hit the goals that my doctor had, but literally have like the optics, if you will, for success. And so I think it's super paramount of teaching your team members and empowering them. Like even as team members, I know Tiff, Britt, Shelbi, like our whole team. They'll look like, Kiera, can we actually afford that?   That is like one of the happiest days of all of my business time because I'm like, they're actually looking to see, can we afford that? Can we do this? Does this make sense for the business? And it's not me just carrying the weight anymore. So I feel like it's really important for for offices, especially DSOs. Like I would say if we were to recap this and Britt, it's fun that you just came in off of DSO. So I thought, like, hey, let's dive into DSO success of one.   Like set up your KPIs. Make sure you've got all practices reporting in and they understand and like truly spend the time to teach your office managers at each practice what those KPIs need to look like, how to get the information, and then have a set cadence where they're really reporting in with you. The next thing is like build up that leadership team within the DSO of the strong people that can actually make the decisions and they have the autonomy and the authority to execute. And then third, train the team members to really look at these PL so they understand.   Before all that we did talk about like having the standardization of culture, the name, making sure those things run the same. And I feel like within DSOs, you are way, way, way more needed to be structured and to over-communicate than you are in solo or even secondary practices. Like the type of communication, the amount of communication, the amount of I would say like rules with massive air quotes. Like people just need to know the guidelines of what we can or can't do, and they've gotta be black and white. That's kind of like my recap of everything we talked about, Britt.   Of like DSO success, but is there anything I may have missed or things you want to just highlight on your own that you feel really really makes or breaks a DSO from your perspective?   speaker-1 (21:35) I think those are all key pieces that ultimately build to like there's no one or three people at the top that depending on how big you get, right? They can be responsible for making all decisions. So a lot of it is making sure you've got that flywheel of culture going to where you don't have to put so much effort into controlling it. And then you've got key people and support so that the people kinda at the top or the the OGs, the originals who kind of started it.   that you build in support for yourself and you're not having having to make all of those decisions for everybody.   speaker-0 (22:10) Think that that's actually one of the like key pieces that I hadn't even realized is this allows more freedom of those visionaries to go and make decisions, but have a team that can also make decisions and think like that visionary more so. So, like, and to be honest, a lot of people get excited about going and buying the practices that they forget. You need to have that foundation, those guidelines, those ways for people to make decisions without the OGs being there to answer everything. And if you don't have that in play.   Get that in play, hire a coach. That's what we do. We literally help offices get these things set up, things they might not have thought about. Be that mediator who can really remind, show, guide people to get things done. But make sure you have that in play as you're building, but or I would truly suggest before you do it. However, I know all visionaries just go and they buy the practice and then figure it out. So like it's cool. We we know you, we see you, but really getting that ability for people to be it have autonomy.   And so that way the owners don't have to always be making every decision. I think one just empowers everyone and two, it's an easier flowing process for sure.   speaker-1 (23:16) Mm. Absolutely.   speaker-0 (23:17) So guys, there you go. There's Road Warrior Britt coming back in off of a DSO week. We love our DSO practices. But really, I just thought it'd be fun for us to highlight today of what are some of the the key sticks success for DSOs. And Britt, I know you came from a very successful DSO before joining Dental A Team. And so I feel like you just have such a knack for it. And offices who work with you, shoot. You got some of the most raving reviews from the offices you were with. Like I got personal text messages from those doctors thanking you for being there and how much   you're able to clarify. So Britt, kudos to you. it's fun to have you share on DSO secrets and success.   speaker-1 (23:53) Thanks. I do love my D SOs.   speaker-0 (23:56) They're just fun. Britt and I giggle were like, we loved our our new practices, but man, those DSOs, they're like puzzles for us to have to try and figure out, put together. Britt and I will collaborate on these all the time, and it's so fun for those DSOs.   Kiera Dent (24:12) I hope you all loved today's episode as much as I did. It is crazy to think that this many episodes have been released since we started the Dental A Team Podcast. And I started looking to say, my goodness, our listeners need to be reminded of some of the things they may have learned a year ago or two years ago or five years ago, because so many things in our practices weren't relevant back then when we heard them, but they are relevant today. And I would be doing you a huge disservice if I didn't re-release some of these episodes for you to remember, to refine.   to optimize and really truly if you ever need a topic or you're like, my gosh, I wonder if the Dental A Team has anything like this, go onto our website, TheDentalATeam.com, click on our podcast tab and you can literally search any topic. So whether it's overhead or hiring or firing or team morale or engagement or case acceptance or hygiene or associate onboarding or whatever it is, we have so many episodes for you. And so I am going to intentionally be   re-releasing some of the top best episodes for you, pulling back some of the ones that I needed to remember, some of the things that I feel for you to really, really relearn right now and to re-remember, or if it's the first time, welcome. I'm so happy you're listening to it, but I hope you truly enjoyed today's episode. I hope that you share this with somebody. I hope that you go and implement today because we only have one day. We only get today. And so making today the best that it possibly can be. If we can help you in any way, shape or form, reach out Hello@TheDentalATeam.com.   And as always, thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.  

Sit in an enclosed bathroom for ten hours. It's just you in a tiny room with a bath, the fan, and some drift. Whether you're studying, working, reading, sleeping, or unwinding after a long day, this immersive ambient soundscape provides the perfect background soundtrack. No talking, no interruptions—just pure bath in its own tiny bathroom vibe. Ignore the world._________So, for my wife's birthday, I took her to a boutique hotel with a small, fancy room with a bath inside of the overall bathroom so she could read and enjoy the quiet. I did not record during that time. We went downstairs to the restaurant, and that is when I set up the mic in the fancy little bathroom inside the bigger bathroom. (Also, I don't want to ruin any illusion in regards to this episode—but no water was wasted.)Speaking of my wife—I told her that in last week's episode description I jokingly referred to myself as “Mr. Ambience.” And she was like, “That's stupid.”It started as a throwaway line and meandered into my heart.Oh, while we're on last week's episode, which is awesome and you should pop over here. But we were talking about Pat Conroy, and I got to thinking: in another universe, Pat Conroy could have wound up in the NBA. He was a talented baller (and even once shared the court with Mr. NBA Logo Silhouette, Jerry West) if he hadn't been moved around so much as a kid (see his also very good book My Losing Season).Mr. Ambience. I like it. Makes me feel like I have a walking cane and a monocle—that I'm some kind of dapper son of a *****. That is Mr. Ambience. I bet if I were strolling the boutique hotel, swinging around a walking stick like I didn't need it, focusing my monocle on railroad stocks and chatting aloud about my cottage on Lake Conemaugh, the staff would call me Mr. Ambience.Oh, I (Mr. Ambience) have a quandary this week. I know I can't be the only person who, sans any floss, got a piece of fingernail stuck between their teeth because, yeah, no dental floss. And you go from uncomfortable with food particle pressure and wedge a ****** fingernail in there too.I wonder how often it happens to people who are not me (i.e., more normal). There was a time when I thought for sure I was the only doofus making issues worse like that for their teeth.

Your brain already ran its program this morning — before your feet hit the floor. That's not a metaphor. Neuroscience shows your brain boots up yesterday's emotional patterns automatically, the same way an AI model repeats whatever it was trained on. So here's the real question: who's writing the code today — you, or the world? In the next few minutes, I'm going to show you why a two-word gratitude practice is the single most powerful override for your morning routine — and why it's not sentimental; it's strategic. Makes sense? Good. Let's get into it.     Follow Dr. JC Doornick and the Makes Sense Academy:► Makes Sense Substack - https://drjcdoornick.substack.com ► Instagram: / drjcdoornick ► Substack: / drjcdoornick ►Facebook:  / makessensepodcast ►YouTube:  / drjcdoornick     MAKES SENSE PODCAST Welcome to the Makes Sense with Dr. JC Doornick Podcast. This podcast explores topics that expand human consciousness and enhance performance. On the Makes Sense Podcast, we acknowledge that it's who you are that determines how well what you do works, and that perception is subjective and an acquired taste. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at begin to change. Welcome to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses. Welcome to the Makes Sense with Dr. JC Doornick Podcast.   SUBSCRIBE/RATE/REVIEW & SHARE our new podcast. FOLLOW Podcast: You will find a "Follow" button in the top right. This will enable the podcast software to alert you when a new episode launches each week. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/makes-sense-with-dr-jc-doornick/id1730954168 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1WHfKWDDReMtrGFz4kkZs9?si=003780ca147c4aec   Podcast Affiliates: Kwik Learning: Many people ask me where I get all these topics, which I've been covering for almost 15 years. I have learned to read nearly four times faster and retain information 10 times better with Kwik Learning. Learn how to learn and earn with Jim Kwik. Get his program at a special discount here: https://jimkwik.com/dragon OUR SPONSORS: Operly - Take Back Control of Your Work Day and Get Rid of All Your AI Apps - Welcome to the new world of Time Freedom and Unlimited Scaling and Success with Operly -  https://go.getoperly.ai/video?ref=jean-claude-claude-d-2a95 Blue Blinds Bakery - Handcrafted with all-natural ingredients - www.blueblindsbakery.com   0:00 - Teaser 0:23 - Intro 1:30 - GREAT MORNING - Cancer Check In 5:56 - Not All Storms Come To Disrupt Your Life 7:53 - Gratitude is the Launch Pad For Your Great Day 8:21 - The Often Misunderstood Topic of Gratitude 10:25 - AI vs HI 12:15 - Is yesterday's program sufficient for today's plans? 13:11 - Your brain is always learning about you. 16:59 - That which we consume we assume 18:37 - We become efficient with being ourselves 22:00 - Your Brain is like a Search Engine 25:41 - The Two Most Important Words I Use Every Day 30:45 - Toxic Positivity 31:36 - Whole-O-Graphic Vision 40:23 - The Four Stages of Competence 45:48 - Close   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I try to plan my podcasts in such a way that it looks like I know what I'm doing. This is one such episode that may give you pause for thought.... I'd made a list of albums I wanted to discuss this year. Since that list was written on a scrappy piece of paper and not in a spreadsheet saved on my laptop....well you can guess what happened to it. The I decided to just wing it with an episode of three short form ramblings about albums I wasn't sure I could spend a whole episode on. One recorded segment in, I decided on a new album I wanted to discuss with a partner and talk long form. So, common sense would say, do one or the other....I don't have common sense. Welcome to episode 195 of Love That Album. I devote the first part of the show to an incredible album I only discovered in January of this year. It's a 2011 release on the great New Zealand label, Flying Nun from a composer and musician new to me called Grayson Gilmour. The album is called No Constellation, and it's a revelation. Gilmour is not only a brilliant composer, but listening to this and subsequent albums, he's an incredible arranger. How do I describe this album in a few words? It's as if Brian Wilson circa Smile had written math rock. Makes sense? Of course not....but I do my best to put the music in context and convince you that you need this LP in your life. In the second part of the show, I am joined once again by music journalist Jeff Jenkins to discuss the new compilation on the recently revived Popboomerang label, Shake Yer Popboomerang 4. The label was started a quarter of a century ago (!!!) by Melbourne pop obsessive Scott Thurling. He's been a champion of the local pop scene and has released over a hundred albums by great Australian pop bands. He's released many fine albums, but his compilations in particular are amazing. He's got a knack for convincing bands to provide him (mostly) with unreleased cuts. We're not talking bottom of the barrel – he always gets top notch songs – then he curates them into collections that flow really well, despite many of the acts being quite diverse. Scott doesn't always feel comfortable behind the mic (although I did coax him for an earlier episode of LTA), but Jeff being a fellow Popboomerang fan was very keen to join me in discussing this latest collection as well as a history of the label. There is a common link between the two albums. I love 'em both, and they're both on important independent labels. Have at it. The New Zealand music website I mention in the show and highly recommend is Audioculture.co.nz. My huge thanks to JJ for his great conversation and enthusiasm. We'll hear from him again at the year end favourites episode. You can find either of these great albums on Bandcamp. If you enjoy the show, please consider giving us a favourable review on whatever podcast platform you listen on and let your friends know that our show exists. If you don't enjoy the show, tell your adversaries to tune in. I don't care who listens..... Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Network of music podcasts. Check out all the other wonderful shows at http://pantheonpodcasts.com You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbum You can download the show by searching for Love That Album on whatever podcast app you favour (except Spotify). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

According to Lutheran Service Book, the commemoration of St. Monica falls on August 27 each year. To give you enough time to source ingredients for Erin's delicious St. Monica Buns, we're sharing this episode from August 2024 to inspire your ideas for a St. Monica Day Party! Who exactly is St. Monica? How does one celebrate her? To answer these questions (and more), the Party Planning Committee is back!   Monica, mother of St. Augustine of Hippo, is remembered today as an example of faith, patience, and godliness in the face of complicated family relationships.   In this episode, Rachel briefly tells Monica's inspiring life story before suggesting an appropriate menu and party plan befitting the saint's fabled austerity — featuring vegetable porridge, bread, water, loud weeping, and all-night prayer vigils. Thankfully, Erin and Sarah intervene with a much more festive set of ideas, including Erin's original recipe for St. Monica buns (see below) and Sarah's home-grown party games: pin the collect on the saint, “Aqueducts and Leviathans” (a fun “Shoots and Ladders” spinoff), and, of course, a hymn sing. St. Monica's Buns Recipe by Erin Alter Makes 12 buns (can easily be doubled)  Dough  ½ c (117 ml) milk, any kind, lightly warmed 1 ¼ t (½ packet) instant yeast  2 T (25 g) granulated sugar  ¾ t salt   1 large egg  4 T (57 g) butter, softened  1 ¾ c (227 g) flour   Filling  3 T packed brown sugar  ¼- ½ t cinnamon  Scant 1/8 t ground ginger  Good pinch of salt  2 peaches, pitted and diced   Garnish  Milk  Turbinado sugar  Directions Whisk together warm milk, yeast, sugar, and salt a large bowl. Whisk in eggs. Add softened butter, chunked up. Use Danish dough whisk to incorporate flour. Stir vigorously for the duration of one of your favorite songs (ideally 4-6 minutes; the song will help it go faster). The dough will be smooth but still extremely sticky. This is proper.   Transfer the whole mess into an oiled bowl big enough to hold it when doubled. Cover tightly with plastic wrap, and from here there are two possible schedules:  Method 1: Let the dough rise at room temperature until it just shy of doubles, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Transfer dough to the fridge to chill for at least 1 hour and up to 2 days. It is impossible to work with this dough when still at room temperature; don't even try.  Method 2: Let the dough rise in the fridge a minimum of 8 hours, and up to 2 days. It will be just about doubled when it comes out.  From this point, you are now back on the same track, regardless of your rising method. Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease a muffin tin. Combine brown sugar, spices, and salt. Mix in the diced peaches. Set aside to get juicy.  On a well-floured counter, divide the dough in quarters, and then divide each quarter into 3 pieces, so you have 12 pieces of dough.   Roll each piece of dough into a ball. On a well-floured counter, use a rolling pin to flatten it out into a circle, ~ 4 inches wide. Add flour as needed to keep it from sticking. Work fairly quickly, so the dough doesn't get too warm.   Holding the circle of dough in your palm, add two heaping spoonful's of the peaches to the center. Gather the edges of the dough up around the sides, forming a little nest. Nestle the nest into the muffin tin and repeat. If you have extra peaches at the end, you can see if there are any buns that you could scoop a little more into.   Brush the dough edges with a little milk and sprinkle with turbinado sugar.  Bake for 16-18 minutes, until golden brown and bubbly. Let cool at least 5 minutes before removing from the muffin tin and serving.  Optional: Serve with crème fraiche.    Note: If you add extra peaches to a bun, don't let the peaches heap up over the dough much at all. If you do, they will probably overflow in the oven and you will have delicious buns that are very, very sticky to eat and an extremely messy pan to clean. And non-overflowed buns are just as delicious, and much more pleasant to eat.     Crème Fraiche  Combine 1 c heavy whipping cream with 1 heaping T sour cream in a container with a tight fitting lid. Shake for 15 seconds (don't turn this to butter!). Leave it on the counter for 24 hours, covered. Stir it 2-3 times during that time. It will become thickened (similar to yogurt, but not nearly as thick as Greek yogurt) and delicious. Note: If your kitchen is too cold, it won't thicken.   Resources referenced:  Accounts of St. Monica:  St Monica – The Patron Saint of Alcoholics & Mothers! (bishoysblog.com)  St. Monica – Saints & Angels – Catholic Online  Saint Monica – Wikipedia  Recipe for Roman puls porridge:  Romans in Britain – Recipe for Puls Fabata (Fava bean porridge) (romanobritain.org)  Recipe for Roman bread:  How to make Roman bread: a Roman bread recipe (vita-romae.com)  Aqueducts and Leviathans! Want to play a fun game of Aqueducts and Leviathans? Download the PDF Aqueducts and Leviathans Board Game here! Connect with the Lutheran Ladies on social media in The Lutheran Ladies' Lounge Facebook discussion group (facebook.com/groups/LutheranLadiesLounge) and on Instagram @lutheranladieslounge. Follow Sarah (@hymnnerd), Rachel (@rachbomberger), and Erin (@erinaltered) on Instagram! Sign up for the Lutheran Ladies' Lounge monthly e-newsletter here, and email the Ladies at lutheranladies@kfuo.org.

I try to plan my podcasts in such a way that it looks like I know what I'm doing. This is one such episode that may give you pause for thought.... I'd made a list of albums I wanted to discuss this year. Since that list was written on a scrappy piece of paper and not in a spreadsheet saved on my laptop....well you can guess what happened to it. The I decided to just wing it with an episode of three short form ramblings about albums I wasn't sure I could spend a whole episode on. One recorded segment in, I decided on a new album I wanted to discuss with a partner and talk long form. So, common sense would say, do one or the other....I don't have common sense. Welcome to episode 195 of Love That Album. I devote the first part of the show to an incredible album I only discovered in January of this year. It's a 2011 release on the great New Zealand label, Flying Nun from a composer and musician new to me called Grayson Gilmour. The album is called No Constellation, and it's a revelation. Gilmour is not only a brilliant composer, but listening to this and subsequent albums, he's an incredible arranger. How do I describe this album in a few words? It's as if Brian Wilson circa Smile had written math rock. Makes sense? Of course not....but I do my best to put the music in context and convince you that you need this LP in your life. In the second part of the show, I am joined once again by music journalist Jeff Jenkins to discuss the new compilation on the recently revived Popboomerang label, Shake Yer Popboomerang 4. The label was started a quarter of a century ago (!!!) by Melbourne pop obsessive Scott Thurling. He's been a champion of the local pop scene and has released over a hundred albums by great Australian pop bands. He's released many fine albums, but his compilations in particular are amazing. He's got a knack for convincing bands to provide him (mostly) with unreleased cuts. We're not talking bottom of the barrel – he always gets top notch songs – then he curates them into collections that flow really well, despite many of the acts being quite diverse. Scott doesn't always feel comfortable behind the mic (although I did coax him for an earlier episode of LTA), but Jeff being a fellow Popboomerang fan was very keen to join me in discussing this latest collection as well as a history of the label. There is a common link between the two albums. I love 'em both, and they're both on important independent labels. Have at it. The New Zealand music website I mention in the show and highly recommend is Audioculture.co.nz. My huge thanks to JJ for his great conversation and enthusiasm. We'll hear from him again at the year end favourites episode. You can find either of these great albums on Bandcamp. If you enjoy the show, please consider giving us a favourable review on whatever podcast platform you listen on and let your friends know that our show exists. If you don't enjoy the show, tell your adversaries to tune in. I don't care who listens..... Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Network of music podcasts. Check out all the other wonderful shows at http://pantheonpodcasts.com You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbum You can download the show by searching for Love That Album on whatever podcast app you favour (except Spotify). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, host Josh interviews Mina Elias, a seven-figure Amazon seller and founder of The Trivium Group. Mina shares advanced strategies for Amazon PPC, emphasizing the integration of advertising with product optimization and the importance of main images, pricing, and reviews in boosting conversions. He discusses using custom analytics software, My Real Profit, to track key metrics, and stresses the need for continuous testing. Mina also shares his favorite book, productivity tools, and business inspirations, and offers listeners a free Amazon PPC audit through his agency.Chapters:Introduction to Mina Elias (00:00:00)Host introduces Mina, his background in supplements, Amazon PPC, and his achievements in the industry.Statistical Analysis & Analytics Tools (00:01:01)Discussion on using Google Sheets and custom analytics software for tracking PPC and sales data.Custom Software: My Real Profit (00:03:01)Mina explains their custom-developed analytics tool, My Real Profit, for streamlined data analysis.Main Image Optimization Tips (00:04:00)Mina shares what makes main images effective for conversion and how to showcase value propositions.Price Testing Insights (00:05:55)Analysis of how price changes can impact conversion rates and the importance of continuous testing.Three Key Takeaways for Amazon Sellers (00:07:49)Host summarizes actionable tips: integrate PPC with product optimization, optimize main images, and always test pricing.Centralized Analytics & Continuous Testing (00:10:30)Mina emphasizes the importance of a unified dashboard and ongoing, one-at-a-time testing.Most Influential Book: Who Not How (00:11:38)Mina discusses the impact of the book "Who Not How" on his mindset and business approach.Favorite Productivity Tool: Monday.com (00:13:09)Mina highlights Monday.com as a game-changing project and task management tool.Most Admired Figure: Grant Cardone (00:14:05)Mina explains why he admires Grant Cardone and lessons learned from his business approach.How to Connect & Free Audit Offer (00:15:32)Mina shares how listeners can reach him, learn more, and get a free Amazon PPC audit.Links and Mentions:Tools and Software  "Google Sheets": "00:01:28"  "Custom Analytics Software": "00:03:01"  "PickFu": "00:08:55"  "Monday.com": "00:13:09"  "Zapier": "00:13:25"  Websites  "Trivium Group (triviumco.com)": "00:15:32"  Books  "Who Not How by Dan Sullivan": "00:11:47"  "Be Obsessed or Be Average by Grant Cardone": "00:14:19"  Influential Figures  "Grant Cardone": "00:14:05"  Social Media  "Instagram (@theminaelias)": "00:15:32"  "LinkedIn (Mina Elias)": "00:15:32"Transcript:Josh 00:00:00  Today I'm super excited to introduce you all to Mina. Mina is a multiple seven figure seller in the supplement industry. He's an investor, Amazon PPC expert, and the founder of the Tribune Group, an Amazon advertising agency. Mina excels at developing cutting edge supplements for different target audiences and combines his passion for supplements. His background in chemical engineering and chemistry, and his expertise in PPC to crush the competition on Amazon. He has spoken on every major stage in the Amazon industry, consulted over 400 brands, consulted three aggregators worth 1.2 billion combined, and has been on over 100 Amazon and e-commerce podcasts. To share his knowledge and continues to be a leader innovating the Amazon advertising space. His goal is to change the way people perceive Amazon PPC and empower them to take back, control and dominate their ads. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Mina.Mina 00:00:59  Josh, thank you for having me. I'm excited man.Josh 00:01:01  Mina I'm also curious. I mean, you're talking about statistical analysis now, right? And not many Amazon sellers are known for their statistical analysis skills.Josh 00:01:11  where, like, are you doing all of this and just, you know, spreadsheets or Google Sheets or are you do you have a software that's helping, you know, run these numbers and statistically prove that this was a, you know, conclusive test? Yes. Swap it out.Mina 00:01:28  No, we we don't have any software. This is all standard. you know, I mean, this is all, like Google Sheets and stuff like that. We do have a software that. But all that software does is analytics software, and it shows us our PPC spend, our PPC sales, our total sales sessions, cost per session, cook rate, conversion rate, cost per click, and profit. Day by day across all of our different products. So having that view is really useful because you're no longer looking. you know, I was just talking to someone earlier, and, they use like a PVC software and stuff like that. And I'm like, show me how you're looking at things. And they're like really looking at like trends of conversion and trends of impressions.Mina 00:02:11  And I'm like, it's so hard for you to, you know, make a decision based on like looking looking at the data like that. So I think that's where our analytics software helps a lot is we can see the week on week changes and I can see, okay, the ad spend changed like increased by 10%. What happened to my sessions? What happened to my cost per session? What happened to my click through rate or my peak spend was the same week over week. I changed my main image. What happened to my click through rate week over week? Or like okay, here's all of the click through rates. Document them, here's all the sessions, document them, and then go look at like the you know, Google Sheets just do equals average and equals STD dev which is standard deviation. And then it gives you the average and standard deviation is.Josh 00:02:54  I love that. What software tool are you using to gather that data at a baseline right. On a daily basis.Mina 00:03:01  That's my real profit.Mina 00:03:02  So we did we did custom development. So if you want if you want to see our exact analytics, you know you can do it through us. They can sell it to you. It's because it's IP. But my real profit is amazing. And you know because of our size, like, you know, we have 130 something brands. So we decided to just custom develop everything that is like the most streamlined for us to be able to like see the data and very quickly take action.Josh 00:03:28  Yeah, yeah. Makes a lot of sense. I love that. All right, Mina, we've got just a few minutes left, but because you've statistically seen that the main image and price are your biggest needle movers for conversion rate. I'm curious if you can give us just some quick tips in terms of what type of images have you seen performing better than others, and is there kind of a general rule of thumb that you could point towards, although it may be kind of product specific, but any general rules of thumb of what continues to win?Mina 00:04:00  Yeah.Mina 00:04:00  Okay. I also want to say, like, I know I talked about the biggest needle movers. reviews. If you go from a four star to four and a half star, that's a massive needle mover, too. you know, obviously, if you're going from like 300 to 500 to 700 review, it's like a slow burn. But if you go from ...

THIS IS A PREVIEW. FOR THE FULL EPISODE, GO TO Patreon.com/worstofall According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Media Referenced in this Episode: Bee Movie. Dir. Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner. 2007. “A Complete History of Bee Movie's Many, Many Memes" by Paris Martineau. New York Magazine. November 2nd, 2017. “Bee Movie: A Seinfeldian Society” by Joe Strike. Animation World. November 2nd, 2007. “How Bee Movie Won 2016” by Laura Bradley. Vanity Fair. December 30th, 2016. TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.com Interstitial: “A Series of Voicemails Left on Jerry Seinfeld's Answering Machine by one Stephen Sondheim, Composer of Musical Theater and Lover of Bees” // Written by A.J. Ditty and Brian Alford // feat. David Armstrong as “Stephen Sondheim” and Brian Alford as “Jerry” Episode edited by Brian Alford. Interstitial edited by A.J. Ditty. Produced by Josh Boerman, A.J. Ditty, and Brian Alford. This podcast was recorded under a SAG-AFTRA Agreement. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think is impossible. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Ooh, black and yellow! Let's shake it up a little. Barry! Breakfast is ready! Coming! Hang on a second. Hello? - Barry? - Adam? - Can you believe this is happening? - I can't. I'll pick you up. Looking sharp. Use the stairs. Your father paid good money for those. Sorry. I'm excited. Here's the graduate. We're very proud of you, son. A perfect report card, all B's. Very proud. Ma! I got a thing going here. - You got lint on your fuzz. - Ow! That's me! - Wave to us! We'll be in row 118,000. - Bye! Barry, I told you, stop flying in the house! - Hey, Adam. - Hey, Barry. - Is that fuzz gel? - A little. Special day, graduation. Never thought I'd make it. Three days grade school, three days high school. Those were awkward. Three days college. I'm glad I took a day and hitchhiked around the hive. You did come back different. - Hi, Barry. - Artie, growing a mustache? Looks good. - Hear about Frankie? - Yeah. - You going to the funeral? - No, I'm not going. Everybody knows, sting someone, you die. Don't waste it on a squirrel. Such a hothead. I guess he could have just gotten out of the way. I love this incorporating an amusement park into our day. That's why we don't need vacations. Boy, quite a bit of pomp… under the circumstances. - Well, Adam, today we are men. - We are! - Bee-men. - Amen! Hallelujah! Students, faculty, distinguished bees, please welcome Dean Buzzwell. Welcome, New Hive City graduating class of… …9:15. That concludes our ceremonies. And begins your career at Honex Industries! Will we pick our job today? I heard it's just orientation. Heads up! Here we go. Keep your hands and antennas inside the tram at all times. - Wonder what it'll be like? - A little scary. Welcome to Honex, a division of Honesco and a part of the Hexagon Group. This is it! Wow. Wow. We know that you, as a bee, have worked your whole life to get to the point where you can work for your whole life. Honey begins when our valiant Pollen Jocks bring the nectar to the hive. Our top-secret formula is automatically color-corrected, scent-adjusted and bubble-contoured into this soothing sweet syrup with its distinctive golden glow you know as… Honey! - That girl was hot. - She's my cousin! - She is? - Yes, we're all cousins. - Right. You're right. - At Honex, we constantly strive to improve every aspect of bee existence. These bees are stress-testing a new helmet technology. - What do you think he makes? - Not enough. Here we have our latest advancement, the Krelman. - What does that do? - Oatches that little strand of honey that hangs after you pour it. Saves us millions. Oan anyone work on the Krelman? Of course. Most bee jobs are small ones. But bees know that every small job, if it's done well, means a lot. But choose carefully because you'll stay in the job you pick for the rest of your life. The same job the rest of your life? I didn't know that. What's the difference? You'll be happy to know that bees, as a species, haven't had one day off in 27 million years. So you'll just work us to death? We'll sure try. Wow! That blew my mind! “What's the difference?” How can you say that? One job forever? That's an insane choice to have to make. I'm relieved. Now we only have to make one decision in life. But, Adam, how could they never have told us that? Why would you question anything? We're bees. We're the most perfectly functioning society on Earth. You ever think maybe things work a little too well here? Like what? Give me one example. I don't know. But you know what I'm talking about. Please clear the gate. Royal Nectar Force on approach. Wait a second. Oheck it out. - Hey, those are Pollen Jocks! - Wow. I've never seen them this close. They know what it's like outside the hive. Yeah, but some don't come back. - Hey, Jocks! - Hi, Jocks! You guys did great! You're monsters! You're sky freaks! I love it! I love it! - I wonder where they were. - I don't know. Their day's not planned. Outside the hive, flying who knows where, doing who knows what. You can'tjust decide to be a Pollen Jock. You have to be bred for that. Right. Look. That's more pollen than you and I will see in a lifetime. It's just a status symbol. Bees make too much of it. Perhaps. Unless you're wearing it and the ladies see you wearing it. Those ladies? Aren't they our cousins too? Distant. Distant. Look at these two. - Oouple of Hive Harrys. - Let's have fun with them. It must be dangerous being a Pollen Jock. Yeah. Once a bear pinned me against a mushroom! He had a paw on my throat, and with the other, he was slapping me! - Oh, my! - I never thought I'd knock him out. What were you doing during this? Trying to alert the authorities. I can autograph that. A little gusty out there today, wasn't it, comrades? Yeah. Gusty. We're hitting a sunflower patch six miles from here tomorrow. - Six miles, huh? - Barry! A puddle jump for us, but maybe you're not up for it. - Maybe I am. - You are not! We're going 0900 at J-Gate. What do you think, buzzy-boy? Are you bee enough? I might be. It all depends on what 0900 means. Hey, Honex! Dad, you surprised me. You decide what you're interested in? - Well, there's a lot of choices. - But you only get one. Do you ever get bored doing the same job every day? Son, let me tell you about stirring. You grab that stick, and you just move it around, and you stir it around. You get yourself into a rhythm. It's a beautiful thing. You know, Dad, the more I think about it, maybe the honey field just isn't right for me. You were thinking of what, making balloon animals? That's a bad job for a guy with a stinger. Janet, your son's not sure he wants to go into honey! - Barry, you are so funny sometimes. - I'm not trying to be funny. You're not funny! You're going into honey. Our son, the stirrer! - You're gonna be a stirrer? - No one's listening to me! Wait till you see the sticks I have. I could say anything right now. I'm gonna get an ant tattoo! Let's open some honey and celebrate! Maybe I'll pierce my thorax. Shave my antennae. Shack up with a grasshopper. Get a gold tooth and call everybody “dawg”! I'm so proud. - We're starting work today! - Today's the day. Oome on! All the good jobs will be gone. Yeah, right. Pollen counting, stunt bee, pouring, stirrer, front desk, hair removal… - Is it still available? - Hang on. Two left! One of them's yours! Oongratulations! Step to the side. - What'd you get? - Picking crud out. Stellar! Wow! Oouple of newbies? Yes, sir! Our first day! We are ready! Make your choice. - You want to go first? - No, you go. Oh, my. What's available? Restroom attendant's open, not for the reason you think. - Any chance of getting the Krelman? - Sure, you're on. I'm sorry, the Krelman just closed out. Wax monkey's always open. The Krelman opened up again. What happened? A bee died. Makes an opening. See? He's dead. Another dead one. Deady. Deadified. Two more dead. Dead from the neck up. Dead from the neck down. That's life! Oh, this is so hard! Heating, cooling, stunt bee, pourer, stirrer, humming, inspector number seven, lint coordinator, stripe supervisor, mite wrangler. Barry, what do you think I should… Barry? Barry! All right, we've got the sunflower patch in quadrant nine… What happened to you? Where are you? - I'm going out. - Out? Out where? - Out there. - Oh, no! I have to, before I go to work for the rest of my life. You're gonna die! You're crazy! Hello? Another call coming in. If anyone's feeling brave, there's a Korean deli on 83rd that gets their roses today. Hey, guys. - Look at that. - Isn't that the kid we saw yesterday? Hold it, son, flight deck's restricted. It's OK, Lou. We're gonna take him up. Really? Feeling lucky, are you? Sign here, here. Just initial that. - Thank you. - OK. You got a rain advisory today, and as you all know, bees cannot fly in rain. So be careful. As always, watch your brooms, hockey sticks, dogs, birds, bears and bats. Also, I got a couple of reports of root beer being poured on us. Murphy's in a home because of it, babbling like a cicada! - That's awful. - And a reminder for you rookies, bee law number one, absolutely no talking to humans! All right, launch positions! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Black and yellow! Hello! You ready for this, hot shot? Yeah. Yeah, bring it on. Wind, check. - Antennae, check. - Nectar pack, check. - Wings, check. - Stinger, check. Scared out of my shorts, check. OK, ladies, let's move it out! Pound those petunias, you striped stem-suckers! All of you, drain those flowers! Wow! I'm out! I can't believe I'm out! So blue. I feel so fast and free! Box kite! Wow! Flowers! This is Blue Leader. We have roses visual. Bring it around 30 degrees and hold. Roses! 30 degrees, roger. Bringing it around. Stand to the side, kid. It's got a bit of a kick. That is one nectar collector! - Ever see pollination up close? - No, sir. I pick up some pollen here, sprinkle it over here. Maybe a dash over there, a pinch on that one. See that? It's a little bit of magic. That's amazing. Why do we do that? That's pollen power. More pollen, more flowers, more nectar, more honey for us. Cool. I'm picking up a lot of bright yellow. Oould be daisies. Don't we need those? Oopy that visual. Wait. One of these flowers seems to be on the move. Say again? You're reporting a moving flower? Affirmative. That was on the line! This is the coolest. What is it? I don't know, but I'm loving this color. It smells good. Not like a flower, but I like it. Yeah, fuzzy. Ohemical-y. Oareful, guys. It's a little grabby. My sweet lord of bees! Oandy-brain, get off there! Problem! - Guys! - This could be bad. Affirmative. Very close. Gonna hurt. Mama's little boy. You are way out of position, rookie! Ooming in at you like a missile! Help me! I don't think these are flowers. - Should we tell him? - I think he knows. What is this?! Match point! You can start packing up, honey, because you're about to eat it! Yowser! Gross. There's a bee in the car! - Do something! - I'm driving! - Hi, bee. - He's back here! He's going to sting me! Nobody move. If you don't move, he won't sting you. Freeze! He blinked! Spray him, Granny! What are you doing?! Wow… the tension level out here is unbelievable. I gotta get home. Oan't fly in rain. Oan't fly in rain. Oan't fly in rain. Mayday! Mayday! Bee going down! Ken, could you close the window please? Ken, could you close the window please? Oheck out my new resume. I made it into a fold-out brochure. You see? Folds out. Oh, no. More humans. I don't need this. What was that? Maybe this time. This time. This time. This time! This time! This… Drapes! That is diabolical. It's fantastic. It's got all my special skills, even my top-ten favorite movies. What's number one? Star Wars? Nah, I don't go for that… …kind of stuff. No wonder we shouldn't talk to them. They're out of their minds. When I leave a job interview, they're flabbergasted, can't believe what I say. There's the sun. Maybe that's a way out. I don't remember the sun having a big 75 on it. I predicted global warming. I could feel it getting hotter. At first I thought it was just me. Wait! Stop! Bee! Stand back. These are winter boots. Wait! Don't kill him! You know I'm allergic to them! This thing could kill me! Why does his life have less value than yours? Why does his life have any less value than mine? Is that your statement? I'm just saying all life has value. You don't know what he's capable of feeling. My brochure! There you go, little guy. I'm not scared of him. It's an allergic thing. Put that on your resume brochure. My whole face could puff up. Make it one of your special skills. Knocking someone out is also a special skill. Right. Bye, Vanessa. Thanks. - Vanessa, next week? Yogurt night? - Sure, Ken. You know, whatever. - You could put carob chips on there. - Bye. - Supposed to be less calories. - Bye. I gotta say something. She saved my life. I gotta say something. All right, here it goes. Nah. What would I say? I could really get in trouble. It's a bee law. You're not supposed to talk to a human. I can't believe I'm doing this. I've got to. Oh, I can't do it. Oome on! No. Yes. No. Do it. I can't. How should I start it? “You like jazz?” No, that's no good. Here she comes! Speak, you fool! Hi! I'm sorry. - You're talking. - Yes, I know. You're talking! I'm so sorry. No, it's OK. It's fine. I know I'm dreaming. But I don't recall going to bed. Well, I'm sure this is very disconcerting. This is a bit of a surprise to me. I mean, you're a bee! I am. And I'm not supposed to be doing this, but they were all trying to kill me. And if it wasn't for you… I had to thank you. It's just how I was raised. That was a little weird. - I'm talking with a bee. - Yeah. I'm talking to a bee. And the bee is talking to me! I just want to say I'm grateful. I'll leave now. - Wait! How did you learn to do that? - What? The talking thing. Same way you did, I guess. “Mama, Dada, honey.” You pick it up. - That's very funny. - Yeah. Bees are funny. If we didn't laugh, we'd cry with what we have to deal with. Anyway… Oan I… …get you something? - Like what? I don't know. I mean… I don't know. Ooffee? I don't want to put you out. It's no trouble. It takes two minutes. - It's just coffee. - I hate to impose. - Don't be ridiculous! - Actually, I would love a cup. Hey, you want rum cake? - I shouldn't. - Have some. - No, I can't. - Oome on! I'm trying to lose a couple micrograms. - Where? - These stripes don't help. You look great! I don't know if you know anything about fashion. Are you all right? No. He's making the tie in the cab as they're flying up Madison. He finally gets there. He runs up the steps into the church. The wedding is on. And he says, “Watermelon? I thought you said Guatemalan. Why would I marry a watermelon?” Is that a bee joke? That's the kind of stuff we do. Yeah, different. So, what are you gonna do, Barry? About work? I don't know. I want to do my part for the hive, but I can't do it the way they want. I know how you feel. - You do? - Sure. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor, but I wanted to be a florist. - Really? - My only interest is flowers. Our new queen was just elected with that same campaign slogan. Anyway, if you look… There's my hive right there. See it? You're in Sheep Meadow! Yes! I'm right off the Turtle Pond! No way! I know that area. I lost a toe ring there once. - Why do girls put rings on their toes? - Why not? - It's like putting a hat on your knee. - Maybe I'll try that. - You all right, ma'am? - Oh, yeah. Fine. Just having two cups of coffee! Anyway, this has been great. Thanks for the coffee. Yeah, it's no trouble. Sorry I couldn't finish it. If I did, I'd be up the rest of my life. Are you…? Oan I take a piece of this with me? Sure! Here, have a crumb. - Thanks! - Yeah. All right. Well, then… I guess I'll see you around. Or not. OK, Barry. And thank you so much again… for before. Oh, that? That was nothing. Well, not nothing, but… Anyway… This can't possibly work. He's all set to go. We may as well try it. OK, Dave, pull the chute. - Sounds amazing. - It was amazing! It was the scariest, happiest moment of my life. Humans! I can't believe you were with humans! Giant, scary humans! What were they like? Huge and crazy. They talk crazy. They eat crazy giant things. They drive crazy. - Do they try and kill you, like on TV? - Some of them. But some of them don't. - How'd you get back? - Poodle. You did it, and I'm glad. You saw whatever you wanted to see. You had your “experience.” Now you can pick out yourjob and be normal. - Well… - Well? Well, I met someone. You did? Was she Bee-ish? - A wasp?! Your parents will kill you! - No, no, no, not a wasp. - Spider? - I'm not attracted to spiders. I know it's the hottest thing, with the eight legs and all. I can't get by that face. So who is she? She's… human. No, no. That's a bee law. You wouldn't break a bee law. - Her name's Vanessa. - Oh, boy. She's so nice. And she's a florist! Oh, no! You're dating a human florist! We're not dating. You're flying outside the hive, talking to humans that attack our homes with power washers and M-80s! One-eighth a stick of dynamite! She saved my life! And she understands me. This is over! Eat this. This is not over! What was that? - They call it a crumb. - It was so stingin' stripey! And that's not what they eat. That's what falls off what they eat! - You know what a Oinnabon is? - No. It's bread and cinnamon and frosting. They heat it up… Sit down! …really hot! - Listen to me! We are not them! We're us. There's us and there's them! Yes, but who can deny the heart that is yearning? There's no yearning. Stop yearning. Listen to me! You have got to start thinking bee, my friend. Thinking bee! - Thinking bee. - Thinking bee. Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! There he is. He's in the pool. You know what your problem is, Barry? I gotta start thinking bee? How much longer will this go on? It's been three days! Why aren't you working? I've got a lot of big life decisions to think about. What life? You have no life! You have no job. You're barely a bee! Would it kill you to make a little honey? Barry, come out. Your father's talking to you. Martin, would you talk to him? Barry, I'm talking to you! You coming? Got everything? All set! Go ahead. I'll catch up. Don't be too long. Watch this! Vanessa! - We're still here. - I told you not to yell at him. He doesn't respond to yelling! - Then why yell at me? - Because you don't listen! I'm not listening to this. Sorry, I've gotta go. - Where are you going? - I'm meeting a friend. A girl? Is this why you can't decide? Bye. I just hope she's Bee-ish. They have a huge parade of flowers every year in Pasadena? To be in the Tournament of Roses, that's every florist's dream! Up on a float, surrounded by flowers, crowds cheering. A tournament. Do the roses compete in athletic events? No. All right, I've got one. How come you don't fly everywhere? It's exhausting. Why don't you run everywhere? It's faster. Yeah, OK, I see, I see. All right, your turn. TiVo. You can just freeze live TV? That's insane! You don't have that? We have Hivo, but it's a disease. It's a horrible, horrible disease. Oh, my. Dumb bees! You must want to sting all those jerks. We try not to sting. It's usually fatal for us. So you have to watch your temper. Very carefully. You kick a wall, take a walk, write an angry letter and throw it out. Work through it like any emotion: Anger, jealousy, lust. Oh, my goodness! Are you OK? Yeah. - What is wrong with you?! - It's a bug. He's not bothering anybody. Get out of here, you creep! What was that? A Pic ‘N' Save circular? Yeah, it was. How did you know? It felt like about 10 pages. Seventy-five is pretty much our limit. You've really got that down to a science. - I lost a cousin to Italian Vogue. - I'll bet. What in the name of Mighty Hercules is this? How did this get here? Oute Bee, Golden Blossom, Ray Liotta Private Select? - Is he that actor? - I never heard of him. - Why is this here? - For people. We eat it. You don't have enough food of your own? - Well, yes. - How do you get it? - Bees make it. - I know who makes it! And it's hard to make it! There's heating, cooling, stirring. You need a whole Krelman thing! - It's organic. - It's our-ganic! It's just honey, Barry. Just what?! Bees don't know about this! This is stealing! A lot of stealing! You've taken our homes, schools, hospitals! This is all we have! And it's on sale?! I'm getting to the bottom of this. I'm getting to the bottom of all of this! Hey, Hector. - You almost done? - Almost. He is here. I sense it. Well, I guess I'll go home now and just leave this nice honey out, with no one around. You're busted, box boy! I knew I heard something. So you can talk! I can talk. And now you'll start talking! Where you getting the sweet stuff? Who's your supplier? I don't understand. I thought we were friends. The last thing we want to do is upset bees! You're too late! It's ours now! You, sir, have crossed the wrong sword! You, sir, will be lunch for my iguana, Ignacio! Where is the honey coming from? Tell me where! Honey Farms! It comes from Honey Farms! Orazy person! What horrible thing has happened here? These faces, they never knew what hit them. And now they're on the road to nowhere! Just keep still. What? You're not dead? Do I look dead? They will wipe anything that moves. Where you headed? To Honey Farms. I am onto something huge here. I'm going to Alaska. Moose blood, crazy stuff. Blows your head off! I'm going to Tacoma. - And you? - He really is dead. All right. Uh-oh! - What is that?! - Oh, no! - A wiper! Triple blade! - Triple blade? Jump on! It's your only chance, bee! Why does everything have to be so doggone clean?! How much do you people need to see?! Open your eyes! Stick your head out the window! From NPR News in Washington, I'm Carl Kasell. But don't kill no more bugs! - Bee! - Moose blood guy!! - You hear something? - Like what? Like tiny screaming. Turn off the radio. Whassup, bee boy? Hey, Blood. Just a row of honey jars, as far as the eye could see. Wow! I assume wherever this truck goes is where they're getting it. I mean, that honey's ours. - Bees hang tight. - We're all jammed in. It's a close community. Not us, man. We on our own. Every mosquito on his own. - What if you get in trouble? - You a mosquito, you in trouble. Nobody likes us. They just smack. See a mosquito, smack, smack! At least you're out in the world. You must meet girls. Mosquito girls try to trade up, get with a moth, dragonfly. Mosquito girl don't want no mosquito. You got to be kidding me! Mooseblood's about to leave the building! So long, bee! - Hey, guys! - Mooseblood! I knew I'd catch y'all down here. Did you bring your crazy straw? We throw it in jars, slap a label on it, and it's pretty much pure profit. What is this place? A bee's got a brain the size of a pinhead. They are pinheads! Pinhead. - Oheck out the new smoker. - Oh, sweet. That's the one you want. The Thomas 3000! Smoker? Ninety puffs a minute, semi-automatic. Twice the nicotine, all the tar. A couple breaths of this knocks them right out. They make the honey, and we make the money. “They make the honey, and we make the money”? Oh, my! What's going on? Are you OK? Yeah. It doesn't last too long. Do you know you're in a fake hive with fake walls? Our queen was moved here. We had no choice. This is your queen? That's a man in women's clothes! That's a drag queen! What is this? Oh, no! There's hundreds of them! Bee honey. Our honey is being brazenly stolen on a massive scale! This is worse than anything bears have done! I intend to do something. Oh, Barry, stop. Who told you humans are taking our honey? That's a rumor. Do these look like rumors? That's a conspiracy theory. These are obviously doctored photos. How did you get mixed up in this? He's been talking to humans. - What? - Talking to humans?! He has a human girlfriend. And they make out! Make out? Barry! We do not. - You wish you could. - Whose side are you on? The bees! I dated a cricket once in San Antonio. Those crazy legs kept me up all night. Barry, this is what you want to do with your life? I want to do it for all our lives. Nobody works harder than bees! Dad, I remember you coming home so overworked your hands were still stirring. You couldn't stop. I remember that. What right do they have to our honey? We live on two cups a year. They put it in lip balm for no reason whatsoever! Even if it's true, what can one bee do? Sting them where it really hurts. In the face! The eye! - That would hurt. - No. Up the nose? That's a killer. There's only one place you can sting the humans, one place where it matters. Hive at Five, the hive's only full-hour action news source. No more bee beards! With Bob Bumble at the anchor desk. Weather with Storm Stinger. Sports with Buzz Larvi. And Jeanette Chung. - Good evening. I'm Bob Bumble. - And I'm Jeanette Chung. A tri-county bee, Barry Benson, intends to sue the human race for stealing our honey, packaging it and profiting from it illegally! Tomorrow night on Bee Larry King, we'll have three former queens here in our studio, discussing their new book, Classy Ladies, out this week on Hexagon. Tonight we're talking to Barry Benson. Did you ever think, “I'm a kid from the hive. I can't do this”? Bees have never been afraid to change the world. What about Bee Columbus? Bee Gandhi? Bee Jesus? Where I'm from, we'd never sue humans. We were thinking of stickball or candy stores. How old are you? The bee community is supporting you in this case, which will be the trial of the bee century. You know, they have a Larry King in the human world too. It's a common name. Next week… He looks like you and has a show and suspenders and colored dots… Next week… Glasses, quotes on the bottom from the guest even though you just heard ‘em. Bear Week next week! They're scary, hairy and here live. Always leans forward, pointy shoulders, squinty eyes, very Jewish. In tennis, you attack at the point of weakness! It was my grandmother, Ken. She's 81. Honey, her backhand's a joke! I'm not gonna take advantage of that? Quiet, please. Actual work going on here. - Is that that same bee? - Yes, it is! I'm helping him sue the human race. - Hello. - Hello, bee. This is Ken. Yeah, I remember you. Timberland, size ten and a half. Vibram sole, I believe. Why does he talk again? Listen, you better go ‘cause we're really busy working. But it's our yogurt night! Bye-bye. Why is yogurt night so difficult?! You poor thing. You two have been at this for hours! Yes, and Adam here has been a huge help. - Frosting… - How many sugars? Just one. I try not to use the competition. So why are you helping me? Bees have good qualities. And it takes my mind off the shop. Instead of flowers, people are giving balloon bouquets now. Those are great, if you're three. And artificial flowers. - Oh, those just get me psychotic! - Yeah, me too. Bent stingers, pointless pollination. Bees must hate those fake things! Nothing worse than a daffodil that's had work done. Maybe this could make up for it a little bit. - This lawsuit's a pretty big deal. - I guess. You sure you want to go through with it? Am I sure? When I'm done with the humans, they won't be able to say, “Honey, I'm home,” without paying a royalty! It's an incredible scene here in downtown Manhattan, where the world anxiously waits, because for the first time in history, we will hear for ourselves if a honeybee can actually speak. What have we gotten into here, Barry? It's pretty big, isn't it? I can't believe how many humans don't work during the day. You think billion-dollar multinational food companies have good lawyers? Everybody needs to stay behind the barricade. - What's the matter? - I don't know, I just got a chill. Well, if it isn't the bee team. You boys work on this? All rise! The Honorable Judge Bumbleton presiding. All right. Case number 4475, Superior Court of New York, Barry Bee Benson v. The Honey Industry is now in session. Mr. Montgomery, you're representing the five food companies collectively? A privilege. Mr. Benson… you're representing all the bees of the world? I'm kidding. Yes, Your Honor, we're ready to proceed. Mr. Montgomery, your opening statement, please. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my grandmother was a simple woman. Born on a farm, she believed it was man's divine right to benefit from the bounty of nature God put before us. If we lived in the topsy-turvy world Mr. Benson imagines, just think of what would it mean. I would have to negotiate with the silkworm for the elastic in my britches! Talking bee! How do we know this isn't some sort of holographic motion-picture-capture Hollywood wizardry? They could be using laser beams! Robotics! Ventriloquism! Oloning! For all we know, he could be on steroids! Mr. Benson? Ladies and gentlemen, there's no trickery here. I'm just an ordinary bee. Honey's pretty important to me. It's important to all bees. We invented it! We make it. And we protect it with our lives. Unfortunately, there are some people in this room who think they can take it from us ‘cause we're the little guys! I'm hoping that, after this is all over, you'll see how, by taking our honey, you not only take everything we have but everything we are! I wish he'd dress like that all the time. So nice! Oall your first witness. So, Mr. Klauss Vanderhayden of Honey Farms, big company you have. I suppose so. I see you also own Honeyburton and Honron! Yes, they provide beekeepers for our farms. Beekeeper. I find that to be a very disturbing term. I don't imagine you employ any bee-free-ers, do you? - No. - I couldn't hear you. - No. - No. Because you don't free bees. You keep bees. Not only that, it seems you thought a bear would be an appropriate image for a jar of honey. They're very lovable creatures. Yogi Bear, Fozzie Bear, Build-A-Bear. You mean like this? Bears kill bees! How'd you like his head crashing through your living room?! Biting into your couch! Spitting out your throw pillows! OK, that's enough. Take him away. So, Mr. Sting, thank you for being here. Your name intrigues me. - Where have I heard it before? - I was with a band called The Police. But you've never been a police officer, have you? No, I haven't. No, you haven't. And so here we have yet another example of bee culture casually stolen by a human for nothing more than a prance-about stage name. Oh, please. Have you ever been stung, Mr. Sting? Because I'm feeling a little stung, Sting. Or should I say… Mr. Gordon M. Sumner! That's not his real name?! You idiots! Mr. Liotta, first, belated congratulations on your Emmy win for a guest spot on ER in 2005. Thank you. Thank you. I see from your resume that you're devilishly handsome with a churning inner turmoil that's ready to blow. I enjoy what I do. Is that a crime? Not yet it isn't. But is this what it's come to for you? Exploiting tiny, helpless bees so you don't have to rehearse your part and learn your lines, sir? Watch it, Benson! I could blow right now! This isn't a goodfella. This is a badfella! Why doesn't someone just step on this creep, and we can all go home?! - Order in this court! - You're all thinking it! Order! Order, I say! - Say it! - Mr. Liotta, please sit down! I think it was awfully nice of that bear to pitch in like that. I think the jury's on our side. Are we doing everything right, legally? I'm a florist. Right. Well, here's to a great team. To a great team! Well, hello. - Ken! - Hello. I didn't think you were coming. No, I was just late. I tried to call, but… the battery. I didn't want all this to go to waste, so I called Barry. Luckily, he was free. Oh, that was lucky. There's a little left. I could heat it up. Yeah, heat it up, sure, whatever. So I hear you're quite a tennis player. I'm not much for the game myself. The ball's a little grabby. That's where I usually sit. Right… there. Ken, Barry was looking at your resume, and he agreed with me that eating with chopsticks isn't really a special skill. You think I don't see what you're doing? I know how hard it is to find the rightjob. We have that in common. Do we? Bees have 100 percent employment, but we do jobs like taking the crud out. That's just what I was thinking about doing. Ken, I let Barry borrow your razor for his fuzz. I hope that was all right. I'm going to drain the old stinger. Yeah, you do that. Look at that. You know, I've just about had it with your little mind games. - What's that? - Italian Vogue. Mamma mia, that's a lot of pages. A lot of ads. Remember what Van said, why is your life more valuable than mine? Funny, I just can't seem to recall that! I think something stinks in here! I love the smell of flowers. How do you like the smell of flames?! Not as much. Water bug! Not taking sides! Ken, I'm wearing a Ohapstick hat! This is pathetic! I've got issues! Well, well, well, a royal flush! - You're bluffing. - Am I? Surf's up, dude! Poo water! That bowl is gnarly. Except for those dirty yellow rings! Kenneth! What are you doing?! You know, I don't even like honey! I don't eat it! We need to talk! He's just a little bee! And he happens to be the nicest bee I've met in a long time! Long time? What are you talking about?! Are there other bugs in your life? No, but there are other things bugging me in life. And you're one of them! Fine! Talking bees, no yogurt night… My nerves are fried from riding on this emotional roller coaster! Goodbye, Ken. And for your information, I prefer sugar-free, artificial sweeteners made by man! I'm sorry about all that. I know it's got an aftertaste! I like it! I always felt there was some kind of barrier between Ken and me. I couldn't overcome it. Oh, well. Are you OK for the trial? I believe Mr. Montgomery is about out of ideas. We would like to call Mr. Barry Benson Bee to the stand. Good idea! You can really see why he's considered one of the best lawyers… Yeah. Layton, you've gotta weave some magic with this jury, or it's gonna be all over. Don't worry. The only thing I have to do to turn this jury around is to remind them of what they don't like about bees. - You got the tweezers? - Are you allergic? Only to losing, son. Only to losing. Mr. Benson Bee, I'll ask you what I think we'd all like to know. What exactly is your relationship to that woman? We're friends. - Good friends? - Yes. How good? Do you live together? Wait a minute… Are you her little… …bedbug? I've seen a bee documentary or two. From what I understand, doesn't your queen give birth to all the bee children? - Yeah, but… - So those aren't your real parents! - Oh, Barry… - Yes, they are! Hold me back! You're an illegitimate bee, aren't you, Benson? He's denouncing bees! Don't y'all date your cousins? - Objection! - I'm going to pincushion this guy! Adam, don't! It's what he wants! Oh, I'm hit!! Oh, lordy, I am hit! Order! Order! The venom! The venom is coursing through my veins! I have been felled by a winged beast of destruction! You see? You can't treat them like equals! They're striped savages! Stinging's the only thing they know! It's their way! - Adam, stay with me. - I can't feel my legs. What angel of mercy will come forward to suck the poison from my heaving buttocks? I will have order in this court. Order! Order, please! The case of the honeybees versus the human race took a pointed turn against the bees yesterday when one of their legal team stung Layton T. Montgomery. - Hey, buddy. - Hey. - Is there much pain? - Yeah. I… I blew the whole case, didn't I? It doesn't matter. What matters is you're alive. You could have died. I'd be better off dead. Look at me. They got it from the cafeteria downstairs, in a tuna sandwich. Look, there's a little celery still on it. What was it like to sting someone? I can't explain it. It was all… All adrenaline and then… and then ecstasy! All right. You think it was all a trap? Of course. I'm sorry. I flew us right into this. What were we thinking? Look at us. We're just a couple of bugs in this world. What will the humans do to us if they win? I don't know. I hear they put the roaches in motels. That doesn't sound so bad. Adam, they check in, but they don't check out! Oh, my. Oould you get a nurse to close that window? - Why? - The smoke. Bees don't smoke. Right. Bees don't smoke. Bees don't smoke! But some bees are smoking. That's it! That's our case! It is? It's not over? Get dressed. I've gotta go somewhere. Get back to the court and stall. Stall any way you can. And assuming you've done step correctly, you're ready for the tub. Mr. Flayman. Yes? Yes, Your Honor! Where is the rest of your team? Well, Your Honor, it's interesting. Bees are trained to fly haphazardly, and as a result, we don't make very good time. I actually heard a funny story about… Your Honor, haven't these ridiculous bugs taken up enough of this court's valuable time? How much longer will we allow these absurd shenanigans to go on? They have presented no compelling evidence to support their charges against my clients, who run legitimate businesses. I move for a complete dismissal of this entire case! Mr. Flayman, I'm afraid I'm going to have to consider Mr. Montgomery's motion. But you can't! We have a terrific case. Where is your proof? Where is the evidence? Show me the smoking gun! Hold it, Your Honor! You want a smoking gun? Here is your smoking gun. What is that? It's a bee smoker! What, this? This harmless little contraption? This couldn't hurt a fly, let alone a bee. Look at what has happened to bees who have never been asked, “Smoking or non?” Is this what nature intended for us? To be forcibly addicted to smoke machines and man-made wooden slat work camps? Living out our lives as honey slaves to the white man? - What are we gonna do? - He's playing the species card. Ladies and gentlemen, please, free these bees! Free the bees! Free the bees! Free the bees! Free the bees! Free the bees! The court finds in favor of the bees! Vanessa, we won! I knew you could do it! High-five! Sorry. I'm OK! You know what this means? All the honey will finally belong to the bees. Now we won't have to work so hard all the time. This is an unholy perversion of the balance of nature, Benson. You'll regret this. Barry, how much honey is out there? All right. One at a time. Barry, who are you wearing? My sweater is Ralph Lauren, and I have no pants. - What if Montgomery's right? - What do you mean? We've been living the bee way a long time, 27 million years. Oongratulations on your victory. What will you demand as a settlement? First, we'll demand a complete shutdown of all bee work camps. Then we want back the honey that was ours to begin with, every last drop. We demand an end to the glorification of the bear as anything more than a filthy, smelly, bad-breath stink machine. We're all aware of what they do in the woods. Wait for my signal. Take him out. He'll have nauseous for a few hours, then he'll be fine. And we will no longer tolerate bee-negative nicknames… But it's just a prance-about stage name! …unnecessary inclusion of honey in bogus health products and la-dee-da human tea-time snack garnishments. Oan't breathe. Bring it in, boys! Hold it right there! Good. Tap it. Mr. Buzzwell, we just passed three cups, and there's gallons more coming! - I think we need to shut down! - Shut down? We've never shut down. Shut down honey production! Stop making honey! Turn your key, sir! What do we do now? Oannonball! We're shutting honey production! Mission abort. Aborting pollination and nectar detail. Returning to base. Adam, you wouldn't believe how much honey was out there. Oh, yeah? What's going on? Where is everybody? - Are they out celebrating? - They're home. They don't know what to do. Laying out, sleeping in. I heard your Uncle Oarl was on his way to San Antonio with a cricket. At least we got our honey back. Sometimes I think, so what if humans liked our honey? Who wouldn't? It's the greatest thing in the world! I was excited to be part of making it. This was my new desk. This was my new job. I wanted to do it really well. And now… Now I can't. I don't understand why they're not happy. I thought their lives would be better! They're doing nothing. It's amazing. Honey really changes people. You don't have any idea what's going on, do you? - What did you want to show me? - This. What happened here? That is not the half of it. Oh, no. Oh, my. They're all wilting. Doesn't look very good, does it? No. And whose fault do you think that is? You know, I'm gonna guess bees. Bees? Specifically, me. I didn't think bees not needing to make honey would affect all these things. It's notjust flowers. Fruits, vegetables, they all need bees. That's our whole SAT test right there. Take away produce, that affects the entire animal kingdom. And then, of course… The human species? So if there's no more pollination, it could all just go south here, couldn't it? I know this is also partly my fault. How about a suicide pact? How do we do it? - I'll sting you, you step on me. - That just kills you twice. Right, right. Listen, Barry… sorry, but I gotta get going. I had to open my mouth and talk. Vanessa? Vanessa? Why are you leaving? Where are you going? To the final Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena. They've moved it to this weekend because all the flowers are dying. It's the last chance I'll ever have to see it. Vanessa, I just wanna say I'm sorry. I never meant it to turn out like this. I know. Me neither. Tournament of Roses. Roses can't do sports. Wait a minute. Roses. Roses? Roses! Vanessa! Roses?! Barry? - Roses are flowers! - Yes, they are. Flowers, bees, pollen! I know. That's why this is the last parade. Maybe not. Oould you ask him to slow down? Oould you slow down? Barry! OK, I made a huge mistake. This is a total disaster, all my fault. Yes, it kind of is. I've ruined the planet. I wanted to help you with the flower shop. I've made it worse. Actually, it's completely closed down. I thought maybe you were remodeling. But I have another idea, and it's greater than my previous ideas combined. I don't want to hear it! All right, they have the roses, the roses have the pollen. I know every bee, plant and flower bud in this park. All we gotta do is get what they've got back here with what we've got. - Bees. - Park. - Pollen! - Flowers. - Repollination! - Across the nation! Tournament of Roses, Pasadena, Oalifornia. They've got nothing but flowers, floats and cotton candy. Security will be tight. I have an idea. Vanessa Bloome, FTD. Official floral business. It's real. Sorry, ma'am. Nice brooch. Thank you. It was a gift. Once inside, we just pick the right float. How about The Princess and the Pea? I could be the princess, and you could be the pea! Yes, I got it. - Where should I sit? - What are you? - I believe I'm the pea. - The pea? It goes under the mattresses. - Not in this fairy tale, sweetheart. - I'm getting the marshal. You do that! This whole parade is a fiasco! Let's see what this baby'll do. Hey, what are you doing?! Then all we do is blend in with traffic… …without arousing suspicion. Once at the airport, there's no stopping us. Stop! Security. - You and your insect pack your float? - Yes. Has it been in your possession the entire time? Would you remove your shoes? - Remove your stinger. - It's part of me. I know. Just having some fun. Enjoy your flight. Then if we're lucky, we'll have just enough pollen to do the job. Oan you believe how lucky we are? We have just enough pollen to do the job! I think this is gonna work. It's got to work. Attention, passengers, this is Oaptain Scott. We have a bit of bad weather in New York. It looks like we'll experience a couple hours delay. Barry, these are cut flowers with no water. They'll never make it. I gotta get up there and talk to them. Be careful. Oan I get help with the Sky Mall magazine? I'd like to order the talking inflatable nose and ear hair trimmer. Oaptain, I'm in a real situation. - What'd you say, Hal? - Nothing. Bee! Don't freak out! My entire species… What are you doing? - Wait a minute! I'm an attorney! - Who's an attorney? Don't move. Oh, Barry. Good afternoon, passengers. This is your captain. Would a Miss Vanessa Bloome in 24B please report to the cockpit? And please hurry! What happened here? There was a DustBuster, a toupee, a life raft exploded. One's bald, one's in a boat, they're both unconscious! - Is that another bee joke? - No! No one's flying the plane! This is JFK control tower, Flight 356. What's your status? This is Vanessa Bloome. I'm a florist from New York. Where's the pilot? He's unconscious, and so is the copilot. Not good. Does anyone onboard have flight experience? As a matter of fact, there is. - Who's that? - Barry Benson. From the honey trial?! Oh, great. Vanessa, this is nothing more than a big metal bee. It's got giant wings, huge engines. I can't fly a plane. - Why not? Isn't John Travolta a pilot? - Yes. How hard could it be? Wait, Barry! We're headed into some lightning. This is Bob Bumble. We have some late-breaking news from JFK Airport, where a suspenseful scene is developing. Barry Benson, fresh from his legal victory… That's Barry! …is attempting to land a plane, loaded with people, flowers and an incapacitated flight crew. Flowers?! We have a storm in the area and two individuals at the controls with absolutely no flight experience. Just a minute. There's a bee on that plane. I'm quite familiar with Mr. Benson and his no-account compadres. They've done enough damage. But isn't he your only hope? Technically, a bee shouldn't be able to fly at all. Their wings are too small… Haven't we heard this a million times? “The surface area of the wings and body mass make no sense.” - Get this on the air! - Got it. - Stand by. - We're going live. The way we work may be a mystery to you. Making honey takes a lot of bees doing a lot of small jobs. But let me tell you about a small job. If you do it well, it makes a big difference. More than we realized. To us, to everyone. That's why I want to get bees back to working together. That's the bee way! We're not made of Jell-O. We get behind a fellow. - Black and yellow! - Hello! Left, right, down, hover. - Hover? - Forget hover. This isn't so hard. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! Barry, what happened?! Wait, I think we were on autopilot the whole time. - That may have been helping me. - And now we're not! So it turns out I cannot fly a plane. All of you, let's get behind this fellow! Move it out! Move out! Our only chance is if I do what I'd do, you copy me with the wings of the plane! Don't have to yell. I'm not yelling! We're in a lot of trouble. It's very hard to concentrate with that panicky tone in your voice! It's not a tone. I'm panicking! I can't do this! Vanessa, pull yourself together. You have to snap out of it! You snap out of it. You snap out of it. - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - Hold it! - Why? Oome on, it's my turn. How is the plane flying? I don't know. Hello? Benson, got any flowers for a happy occasion in there? The Pollen Jocks! They do get behind a fellow. - Black and yellow. - Hello. All right, let's drop this tin can on the blacktop. Where? I can't see anything. Oan you? No, nothing. It's all cloudy. Oome on. You got to think bee, Barry. - Thinking bee. - Thinking bee. Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Wait a minute. I think I'm feeling something. - What? - I don't know. It's strong, pulling me. Like a 27-million-year-old instinct. Bring the nose down. Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! - What in the world is on the tarmac? - Get some lights on that! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! - Vanessa, aim for the flower. - OK. Out the engines. We're going in on bee power. Ready, boys? Affirmative! Good. Good. Easy, now. That's it. Land on that flower! Ready? Full reverse! Spin it around! - Not that flower! The other one! - Which one? - That flower. - I'm aiming at the flower! That's a fat guy in a flowered shirt. I mean the giant pulsating flower made of millions of bees! Pull forward. Nose down. Tail up. Rotate around it. - This is insane, Barry! - This's the only way I know how to fly. Am I koo-koo-kachoo, or is this plane flying in an insect-like pattern? Get your nose in there. Don't be afraid. Smell it. Full reverse! Just drop it. Be a part of it. Aim for the center! Now drop it in! Drop it in, woman! Oome on, already. Barry, we did it! You taught me how to fly! - Yes. No high-five! - Right. Barry, it worked! Did you see the giant flower? What giant flower? Where? Of course I saw the flower! That was genius! - Thank you. - But we're not done yet. Listen, everyone! This runway is covered with the last pollen from the last flowers available anywhere on Earth. That means this is our last chance. We're the only ones who make honey, pollinate flowers and dress like this. If we're gonna survive as a species, this is our moment! What do you say? Are we going to be bees, orjust Museum of Natural History keychains? We're bees! Keychain! Then follow me! Except Keychain. Hold on, Barry. Here. You've earned this. Yeah! I'm a Pollen Jock! And it's a perfect fit. All I gotta do are the sleeves. Oh, yeah. That's our Barry. Mom! The bees are back! If anybody needs to make a call, now's the time. I got a feeling we'll be working late tonight! Here's your change. Have a great afternoon! Oan I help who's next? Would you like some honey with that? It is bee-approved. Don't forget these. Milk, cream, cheese, it's all me. And I don't see a nickel! Sometimes I just feel like a piece of meat! I had no idea. Barry, I'm sorry. Have you got a moment? Would you excuse me? My mosquito associate will help you. Sorry I'm late. He's a lawyer too? I was already a blood-sucking parasite. All I needed was a briefcase. Have a great afternoon! Barry, I just got this huge tulip order, and I can't get them anywhere. No problem, Vannie. Just leave it to me. You're a lifesaver, Barry. Oan I help who's next? All right, scramble, jocks! It's time to fly. Thank you, Barry! That bee is living my life! Let it go, Kenny. - When will this nightmare end?! - Let it all go. - Beautiful day to fly. - Sure is. Between you and me, I was dying to get out of that office. You have got to start thinking bee, my friend. - Thinking bee! - Me? Hold it. Let's just stop for a second. Hold it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, everyone. Can we stop here? I'm not making a major life decision during a production number! All right. Take ten, everybody. Wrap it up, guys. I had virtually no rehearsal for that.

A Jesus Entrepreneur Collective Commentary with Stan Hustad   There is a version of Jesus that almost everybody can live with. Gentle Jesus. Welcoming Jesus. Compassionate Jesus. Jesus with the children gathered around him. Jesus healing the sick, feeding the hungry, forgiving sinners and telling frightened people not to be afraid. That Jesus is real. But he is not the whole Jesus. And in this challenging edition of the Jesus Entrepreneur Collective, Stan Hustad asks his audience to confront another side of Jesus—the strong, courageous, sometimes confrontational Jesus who was willing to say things that made powerful people uncomfortable. This is Jesus, the Man of the Millstone. And his warning concerning the vulnerable—especially children—is difficult to dismiss. Jesus said that whoever causes one of the "little ones" to stumble would be better off having a great millstone hung around his neck and being cast into the sea. Those are not gentle words. They are not politically convenient words. And they certainly do not sound like the harmless, perpetually agreeable Jesus sometimes presented by modern culture. They are the words of someone who took the protection of the vulnerable with extraordinary seriousness. Jesus Was No Wimp Hustad begins the program with an observation he has made repeatedly throughout his years of broadcasting, teaching and coaching: Jesus was not weak. He was compassionate without being timid. He could welcome a child, touch a leper, forgive a sinner and comfort a grieving family. But he could also challenge religious authorities, confront hypocrisy, overturn tables and stand before political power without surrendering his convictions. Hustad recalls the famous scene from the classic film Ben-Hur. A Roman soldier attempts to prevent Jesus from giving water to the exhausted prisoner. Jesus simply rises and looks at him. No speech. No violence. No threat. Just presence. And the soldier backs away. Whether or not the cinematic scene tells us precisely what the historical Jesus looked like, it captures something important about him: Strength does not always have to shout. Real authority does not require bullying. Courage does not require cruelty. And conviction does not require hatred. That distinction becomes especially important when Christians enter the difficult moral arguments of their time. Don't Mess With the Children The program then moves directly into one of the most contentious issues in American public life: abortion, particularly political efforts to permit abortion very late in pregnancy. Hustad makes no attempt to hide his position. He believes unborn children possess profound human worth, and he believes Christians should speak clearly in their defense. But the challenge goes deeper than a political argument. His question is: What does Jesus' warning about protecting the vulnerable require of people who claim to follow him? That question cannot simply be handed to politicians. It belongs to pastors, business leaders, entrepreneurs, parents and grandparents, teachers, broadcasters and communicators, and ordinary Christians sitting quietly in church pews. The millstone passage is disturbing precisely because Jesus intended it to be disturbing. He deliberately chose an image his listeners would understand: an enormous grinding stone, potentially so heavy that an animal was required to turn it. Then Jesus attached that image to a warning about harming or corrupting the vulnerable. Whatever one's politics, those words should stop a follower of Jesus long enough to ask: Do I take the protection of vulnerable human life as seriously as Jesus apparently did? That is the challenge. Not hatred. Not harassment. Not threats. Not personal condemnation. A challenge of conscience. Conviction Without Cruelty There is another challenge here for the Christian entrepreneur. It is possible to believe something strongly and still behave badly while defending it. Christians do not receive permission to become cruel simply because they believe their cause is righteous. Jesus demonstrated another way: strong convictions, courageous words, compassion for people. Those three belong together. The Jesus Entrepreneur Collective therefore does not call people to attack those with whom they disagree. It calls people to become courageous enough to speak, thoughtful enough to listen, disciplined enough to understand the issue, and compassionate enough to remember that every person in the argument remains a human being. The unborn child matters. The frightened mother matters. The father matters. The physician matters. The person who profoundly disagrees with you matters. Truth and love are not competitors. The difficult task of Christian leadership is learning to practice both. Jesus the Marketplace Man Hustad then returns to one of the recurring themes of the Jesus Entrepreneur Collective: before Jesus became an itinerant teacher, he spent many years in the ordinary world of work. He knew customers. He knew deadlines. He knew workmanship. He knew expectations. He knew what it meant to make something useful and have another person judge its value. Whatever modern occupational title we apply to the ancient tekton, Jesus knew the marketplace. That matters to Hustad because Christianity should never be confined to Sunday morning. If Jesus is Lord, then Jesus belongs in Monday morning too—in the office, in the shop, in the sales meeting, in the boardroom, in the classroom, behind the microphone, and in the difficult public conversations that respectable people would sometimes prefer to avoid. The Jesus Entrepreneur Collective exists in part to recover that connection between faith, courage, work, enterprise and public responsibility. Become an Apprentice Perhaps the most important word in the program is not entrepreneur. It is apprentice. Christians traditionally call the followers of Jesus "disciples." Hustad suggests that modern people might better grasp the idea if they thought of themselves as apprentices. An apprentice watches the master. Studies the master. Practices what the master does. Learns how the master thinks. Makes mistakes, receives correction and tries again. So Hustad poses a far more demanding question than simply, "Do you believe in Jesus?" He asks: Are you apprenticed to Jesus? Are you learning his courage? His compassion? His way of dealing with people? His willingness to challenge conventional wisdom? His concern for the vulnerable? His ability to combine strength and grace? And his willingness to accept the consequences of telling uncomfortable truths? That is considerably harder than simply claiming a religious identity. What's Your MOU With the MOU? Hustad closes with one of his memorable plays on words. Businesspeople know the term MOU—Memorandum of Understanding. So he asks: What is your MOU with the MOU—the Master of the Universe? What exactly is your understanding with Jesus? What have you agreed to do? What responsibilities come with calling yourself his follower? What happens when his teaching conflicts with your politics, your profession, your comfort, your financial interests—or even your friends? Perhaps every Christian entrepreneur needs a personal memorandum of understanding: This is what I believe. This is whom I follow. These are the people I will protect. These are the principles I will not sell. This is how I will treat people who disagree with me. And this is the courage I intend to practice when remaining silent would be easier. That may be what apprenticeship to Jesus looks like in the modern marketplace. And perhaps that is why the image of the millstone still matters. It reminds us that the Jesus who welcomed children was also fiercely serious about what happened to them. Grace was real. Love was real. And so was accountability. THINGS TO REMEMBER Jesus was compassionate, but he was not weak. His love included courage, confrontation and moral seriousness. Protecting the vulnerable is not merely a political issue. For followers of Jesus it is a matter of conscience and discipleship. Conviction does not excuse cruelty. Christians should be able to defend what they believe without dehumanizing those who disagree. Christianity belongs in the marketplace. Faith that disappears when business, money, reputation or controversy enters the room is worth examining. A disciple is an apprentice. Following Jesus means more than admiring him. It means learning to live differently because of him. THINGS TO SHARE Share this program with someone who believes Jesus was merely "nice." Share it with a Christian business leader who is trying to determine how faith should influence difficult decisions. Share it with someone who disagrees with Stan. In fact, that conversation may be particularly worthwhile. The goal should not be to create another shouting match. The world already has plenty of those. The better goal is to create an uncomfortable but honest conversation about human dignity, courage, responsibility, children, conscience and what following Jesus actually requires. THINGS TO DO Before criticizing somebody else, examine your own MOU with the Master of the Universe. Ask yourself: Where am I remaining silent because speaking might cost me something? Where have I confused being loving with being agreeable? Where have I confused being courageous with being angry? Who are the vulnerable people around me whom I have a responsibility to protect? If someone watched my business life for a month, would they discover evidence that I am actually apprenticed to Jesus? Then choose one action: Speak. Serve. Protect. Give. Apologize. Learn. Challenge. Encourage. Or simply refuse to remain comfortably indifferent. AND NOW, A CHALLENGE Stan Hustad has made his argument. You are welcome to challenge it. If you believe he has gone too far, tell him. If you believe he has not gone far enough, tell him that too. If you think his interpretation of Jesus is wrong, make your case. And if this program caused you to reconsider something you had comfortably stopped thinking about, tell him that as well. Write Stan at stan@witradio.net. Better yet, don't keep the conversation between Stan and you. Share this article. Share the program. Start a conversation. And if the idea of becoming an apprentice to Jesus—in your life, profession, business and marketplace leadership—strikes a chord, talk with Stan about becoming part of the Jesus Entrepreneur Collective. Because perhaps the world does not need more people who merely admire Jesus. Perhaps it needs more people willing to apprentice themselves to him—and then have the courage to live like it.

This is the Motion Church Podcast. Thanks for joining us. If you'd like more information about Motion Church, you can always visit our website at motionchurch.com. If you'd like to contribute to what God is doing here at Motion, you can do that at motionchurch.com/give. We hope you enjoyed today's message. Hey, so we're kicking off a new... There we go. Kicking off a new series today called Rock and Soul. Rock and Soul. Did you know that that's an actual genre of music? There are people that have kind of tried to... There was an album. I forget who it was. It's like in the 70s or 80s, like Simon and Garfunkel or something, you know? Anybody feel me on that? And then they came out with an album and it was called Rock and Soul. Not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about... We're gonna shift gears a little bit from kind of the format of our last series. We were very localized in terms of, you know, timeline. We're just looking at some of the stories from the life and ministry of Jesus and stories that demonstrated incredible faith and really enjoyed working. One of my favorite things to do is just kind of taking a passage of Scripture and just working through it, right? Kind of what does it say? What does it mean? How does it apply to us? What are some details that we're inclined to miss? Because we read... Sometimes I do this. Sometimes I just read it to read it and I miss some stuff, right? So I love working through a passage of Scripture like we did each week in that series. This series, we're gonna be all over the place. We are gonna be in Matthew today. We'll probably be in the book of Psalms next week and maybe the book of Exodus the next week. So we're gonna be all over the place. And the point is what we're gonna be doing is looking at in Scripture some of the references to rocks and the imagery and the symbolism and kind of the analogies that rocks have in terms of a spiritual connection to what it is that we're trying to accomplish as followers of Jesus. Makes sense? How many of you like rocks? Rocks are fun. Now, all the dudes, I promise you if we walked outside and there was a pile of rocks, we would pick it up and we would have a target competition, right? We're gonna hit... First one to hit the light pole wins. And for 30 minutes, because all of our arms are trashed these days, right? And then tomorrow we'd wake up and be like, "I don't know what's wrong with..." So we're gonna look at one of the many, some of the many, a few of the many references and illustrations pertaining to rocks in Scripture. Here's what I believe. I believe that anything that is repeated in Scripture is important. If there's a pattern that is repeated, it's for a reason. You're a parent. You know you repeat things that are important because they didn't hear it the first time or the third time or the 300th time. So you just continue to repeat things that are important. I think if there are principles that are repeated, it's there for a reason. It's important. If there is symbolism that is repeated, it also is important. There's got to be something to it, right? And I think that is very true as it relates to rocks. Did you know this... So it's funny when I was writing out my notes, I wrote offhand... This is verbatim what I said. I said, "Offhand, I would venture to say that there are over a hundred references to rocks in Scripture." So then I was like, "Well, I better fact check myself because somebody will do it if I don't." Right? I know y'all. And is somebody gonna call me out because you were wrong past... So I Googled it. And it said that there are roughly between 99 and 136 references to rocks in Scripture, depending on which translation you use. And you know, maybe this is a looser analogy or whatever the case was. So about 100, okay? About 100. And we're only gonna look at a few. You can thank me later. For the next two years, we're gonna be doing a series called Rock and Soul. Got a hundred messages lined out. We're good to go. So we're gonna kick off this week. We're gonna look at an analogy that Jesus uses that highlights the importance of rocks. Here we go. Title for today's message is a firm foundation. A firm foundation. Y'all know this. This is gonna be fun. Sometimes, I think the expectation sometimes when we go to church is like we're expecting to hear something we've never heard before. And I'll be very honest with you. Sometimes we just need to hear what we've already heard and do what we've already... Right? This is for me, right? It's not that I need to learn something new. I need to do better doing what I already know. That's what needs to happen sometimes. So the title is a firm foundation. The first point is, we're gonna call this one construction 101. Construction 101. I know a lot of you guys, guys and girls are kind of in construction industries or construction adjacent injuries. You understand injuries. It's football season. I already think about injuries, right? The construction industry connected like you understand. And if you have it, you've seen houses being built. You understand kind of some of the basic components of construction. We all probably understand how important a good foundation is to whatever it is that you're building. And that's the point that Jesus makes in Matthew chapter 7 verses 24 through 27. It says this. So just before we dive into it, it's the two paths, right? It's the two ways that you can choose to live your life. I think we think sometimes that there's a lot of different paths. And the reality is it's like, yeah, those paths may look different, but it's still the same path, right? You can take this road or you can take this road. One ends well, one not so well. Therefore, if it says therefore, preacher joke, you got to see what it's there for. Therefore, whoever hears these sayings of mine, this is Jesus talking, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock and the rain descended. The floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house and it did not fall for it was founded on the rock. Founded on the rock is another way of saying what the rock was its foundation. So it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand and the rain descended. The floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house and it fell and great was its fall. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to break down both of those paths, right? But what does it look like when you build your house on the rock? What does it look like when you build your house on the sand? What are kind of some of the things that go into that? And ultimately, what is the outcome of that? And really, I hope through contrast, we can see which is the better path for us as if you don't know this. But sometimes again, just important to be reminded of things that we know. So we're going to break it down. You ready? Break it down. I thought you were going to start dancing. Break it down. Break it down. This is the first thing that Jesus said. Therefore, whoever hears these sayings of mine, whoever hears these sayings of mine, that's where for us, for those of us who aspire to be wise people who build their house on the rock, it starts with hearing these words of mine. Now, specifically in context, what is Jesus talking about? The words that he just said, right? So Matthew chapter five, Matthew chapter six, Matthew chapter seven, it's a sermon on the Mount. And in terms of a sermon, best sermon ever preached, ever hands down, bar none, nothing even close, right? Just maybe the modern way to say it would be bars, right? Just so good. Matthew chapter five starts with the beatitudes, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the me, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. And then I'll be honest with you, like the back half of Matthew chapter five is tough. It's tough because he's like, Hey, I know this is what you've been taught, but I actually expect more of you. Like I know this is what you think about adultery, but I'm also going to teach you about lust. I know this is what you think about murder, but this is what I'm going to tell you about anger, right? Not that any of us struggle with those sorts of things, right? Not an angry person at all. Okay. Right. And so he gets into some stuff and he's like, Oh, those enemies that you've got, I'm going to teach you how to forgive them. That, that, that thing that people asked you how to do, I'm going to teach you how to go another mile. I'm like, why did you have to put all that stuff in there? Jesus, right? So it's such good, but challenging stuff, which is kind of the point. And we'll go over this a little bit more in detail at the end. The point for us, those of us who are aspiring to build our house on the rock, y'all, we don't get to pick and choose which sayings of Jesus apply to us or which ones we, we want to fit into our lives. The point is not for us to fit the teachings of Jesus into our lives. It's to fit our lives into the teachings of Jesus. Okay. And I look at, and not easy. Nobody ever said that it was, but worthwhile. It's building your house on a rock and it's something that will last. So he's specifically talking about the words that he just said, Matthew chapter six. This is how you give. This is how you pray. This is how you fast. Also stop worrying about everything. Look at the birds of the air. I take care of them. Look at the flowers of the field. I take care of them. What can you add to your life by worrying about all the things that you be out here worrying about? Right? It's good stuff. And in Matthew chapter seven, he's like, uh, you know, the, the ask, seek, knock, and then also our, our favorite, the judge, not list, you be judged, right? And then the two different paths, Matthew chapter Matthew seven, 13 and 14. He's like, Hey, there's a Broadway and there's a narrow way. And it's like your mama said, if everybody else was jumping off the bridge, would you jump off the bridge also? Right. And then he finishes with, you know, if you hear my words and you do them, you'll be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. However, I think it's safe to expand this to the other teachings, the life of Jesus, the example of Jesus. So anything that Jesus said, anything that Jesus did, I think it is safe for us to assume that when we hear that, when we see that we should do that. Okay. Very good. All right. So that's the simplest takeaway is, is the idea for us, I think bottom line, we need to be hearing the words of Jesus. Like whoever hears these words of mine, we need to hear the words of Jesus. You know why that's so important? Because we hear everything else. We hear everything else. Like just all the chatter and all the talk and all the, the criticism and all the negativity. We hear everything else. We hear the news. We, we, we read the articles, right? We hear the reels. We see the shorts. We hear the opinions. We hear the criticisms and what you better have, what you have to have, if you want to make it, if you want to build your house on something that's going to last is you better build your house on the rock. You need to hear the words of Jesus to give you framework, to understand everything else that you're hearing. I'm hearing it, but is it true? And if I hear the words of Jesus, I know what truth is. So I know that that's not truth. So that doesn't get internalized into my life. If I hear the words of Jesus and I know what's good and right and, and just in those sorts of things, then all of the other things that I hear, they don't have the same effect on me. It just gives us a framework. We need to be hearing the words of Jesus. That means we get into his word. We read the scriptures like personally, like it's not, listen, and y'all know this, but it's not the church's job to feed you. Y'all, if you're eating one time a week, like you're in trouble, you are not getting the proper nutrition. You should be eating all the time. Just eat, eat, right? Sorry, another football reference. Just like we got to be, we have to be, we have to be hearing the words of Jesus on our own. Listen to sermons. Like you're not going to hurt my feelings. I know there are better preachers out there. I listen to them too, right? Listen to people who are preaching the word of God, hear the words of Jesus, be in, come to church. Like we're going to talk about it here too. And that's amazing, but that's once a week and we need to be hearing it more than just that. Get into some small groups where it's being talked about. Have some friendships where you can, you can like break it down. And man, this is what I think it means. And what do you think it means? I have no idea. Tell me what you're thinking, how you feel, and hear the words of Jesus. We just need to hear the words of Jesus. Have you ever known someone so well that you knew what, this happens to me a lot. Everybody thinks they know what I would do. And usually they're right. I'm kind of predictable, right? So there are so many times in my life, somebody's like, yeah, I know what you would have done. So I went ahead and did it. I'm like, all right, you got me. That's right. And so what's the point of that? It's like, you know someone so well that you know what they would do even if they're not there. Why? Because you've heard their heart. You've heard, if you hear the words of Jesus, you hear his heart and you know what you're supposed to do. So the person who hears these words of mine, and then the next part of that, and this is the challenging part of that, and does them, and does them. And I know you know this, but it is not enough to hear the words of Jesus. We need to do something with the words of Jesus. We got to, listen, it's got to get deep down. It's got to penetrate deep enough into your heart that it actually affects the way that you live your life. The point is never, ever just information. The point is transformation. Like information in and of itself is fine, but it's never enough. The point is to have the information that goes in and does a work on your soul that causes you to live differently. This is how it says it in the book of James, James chapter one, verses 22 through 25. One of my favorite passages of scripture, and I say that all the time, and I mean it. I got a bunch of, like some of y'all got a bunch of best friends, which is impossible because best means best. It's my favorite passage of scripture. Here we go. It says, "But be doers of the word and not hearers only." Deceiving yourselves. Isn't that kind of interesting? Because like I think what we do sometimes is we talk ourselves into not doing it because we know it, and that's kind of good enough, right? So we deceive ourselves because we're hearers and not doers also. And then it says, "For if anyone is," this is so good, listen to this, "For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror," checking yourself out, looking at all the angles. I know you snuck in that duck face selfie. I know you did. "Is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror, for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the word, this one will be blessed in what he does." You know what I think that means? Again, when we hear the words of Jesus, we understand the heart of Jesus. When you hear the words of Jesus and you do them, you know who he is. Therefore, you know who you are. You can look in the mirror and you know who you are. And when you leave the mirror, you still know who you are because you've heard the words of Jesus and you've allowed them to get deep enough into your heart that you understand your identity. You're not going to leave and forget who you are just based on who you're with because that never happens. Like, what is it? A code switch? Is that what they call it when you get around different people and you act different? Thank you, trendy. Youth pastor, right? It keeps me in touch. It's not enough. It's not enough to be a theologian. And I think that's amazing that there are people who devote so much of their time and, you know, effort and stuff to learning more about scripture and learning about God. But listen, if you're a theologian and not a practitioner, you are wasting your time. Like, if you got all the knowledge in the world and there isn't any application of that knowledge, you are missing the point. You're missing the boat. You're wasting your time. And trust me when I say this is like, this is not an attack on knowledge. Knowledge, I think, is incredibly important. We should always be aspiring to attain a better understanding of the things of God, but never just for the sake of knowing, but for doing, right? I know it so that I know how to do it. Not just so I know it so that I know it because y'all got a lot of, there's plenty of those. You met the know-it-alls that never do anything. I'm like, that's amazing. You got all this information in your head. How about you get out there and do something with your hands? That was good preaching. Sorry. You know what the difference in my opinion is between knowledge and wisdom? Again, knowledge is incredible. Knowledge is kind of, it's the doorway. It's the step in the right direction, but knowledge is simply information. It's having the information in your head. Wisdom is when you take that information and you apply it to your life. You're a hearer and a doer also. So that's the second part, right? So he hears the words of Jesus and he does them. And then Jesus said, this is like a wise man who built his house, which means, which is to say that then we get about the business of building our house built, which is kind of another way, a clever way of saying, an illustrative way of saying, go build your life on the principles of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, the ways of Jesus. Then go and build your life. Like we are called to be doers, not just in the sense that we're doing God's word, but doers in the sense that we are building something that matters and something that lasts. Our lives are significant. We're not just, you're not just floating through time. Like you're here for a reason. You have a purpose. Like God has called you to do something with your life. So get about building that house, right? I think someone who follows the teachings of Jesus, you feel deep in your soul that you're supposed to do something significant with your life. We use language like this, like something bigger than myself. You feel this sense of urgency to build something and be a part of something that is bigger than yourself. It's something that you can pass on to the generations to come. It's never just about you because you're building something that matters. We're called to be builders and makers, not just grifters and takers. That was a good line. You can say amen or owe me, right? We're called to be builders. We're called to be people who make things, like who creates. God is a creative God and we're made in his image. Therefore we should create. So we're called to be builders and makers, not just grifters and takers. The world and the church for that matter. We've got too many of those. We've got so many people that are always about what can you do for me? What can I get out of this? It's always this consumption thing. It's always, and you live your whole life like that and it even bleeds over into your spiritual pursuits where it's always about consumption. Here's a thought. What have you given? What have you built? What have you contributed? Make sure it's not that we don't consume. It's just also we do contribute as well. So let's get about the building part of this. We hear God's word. We do God's word and we build our lives on the rock. And when you build your life on the rock, it is good for your soul. Rock and soul. Okay, good. Now on the other hand, this I thought about calling this point shoddy craftsmanship. On the other hand, this is the person who Jesus said built his house on the sand. And I thought I was kind of working like why did Jesus choose to use sand as kind of the reference point, the imagery of the foundation of someone who is unwise, a foolish person. And we'll get there. I think there's obviously significance to that, but I think there are some other things that we should point out first. The first thing is it's interesting how the story is set up exactly the same. So he says the wise man, hears the words, does them, then he builds his house on the rock. The foolish man hears the words, doesn't do them. So it's kind of the same order. It's just a different outcome because of what he chose to do with the information that he had. So he hears them. He doesn't do them. And he builds his house on the sand. And you know what I think this, this is just maybe this is my opinion. Maybe I'm reading too much into this. You notice how Jesus directs. It seems to be a directed message at a specific audience. And I think the tendency is to think that this is a message for them. Y'all ever do that and be like, man, that's a good word preacher for my neighbor, right? My wife needed to hear that. My husband show needed to hear that, right? My kids, God bless them, they show needed to hear that. And I think this is a message because we hear that and we're like, oh yeah, yeah, they're not doing the words of Jesus. This is obviously, obviously for all those, those sinners and those pagans and those outsiders. But what does he say? He's like those who hear my words and don't do them. I think this is a message just as much for the insiders as it is for the outsiders. I think it's easy. This is the easy thing to do. It's so easy for us to look at the world and all of the craziness and all of the evil and cast dispersions and be like, oh yeah, the world. And that's fair. Like we're allowed to call things for what they are. We're beholden to truth and light so we can call evil what it is. But this specific analogy is for those who hear the words of Jesus and don't do them. And listen, that very well could be me and you. You can go to church and I hope you do. I mean, I think it's important, right? You can go to church and you can make claims that you follow Jesus, but if you hear it and don't do it, you're a person who's building your house, building your life on the sand. If you aren't doing what he said to do, then you are building your house on the sand. Okay, here's the other thing. This is another thing that's interesting about this passage. Jesus doesn't make any distinction between the fact that both groups are building, right? So one is building their house, building their life on the rock. The other is building their house, building their life on the sand, which is maybe another way to say, hey, they're busy too, right? They've got full plates too. They've got activities too. They've got crowded hearts too. It's not that they're not building something. It's not that they're not winning. It may just be that they're winning at the wrong things. I thought that was good, right? Because I think that's sometimes, sometimes the measure that we use to evaluate the success of somebody's life is like how active they are and how busy they are and how much they accomplish. And that's not the measure. The measure is, are you building your house on the rock? Are you building your house to last? Are you building your house on the foundation, the principles, the teachings, the hearings, the words of Jesus? Or are you just busy building a life that's absent of those things? And if you do, you may be building, but you're not building something that lasts. You're not building something that's going to be significant down the road. And so there's a difference between the choice and foundation, and that makes all the difference. And so here's what we do, the tendency again, because that's the way sometimes that we tend to measure things. We can win, but we can win at the wrong things. And here's what's scary about that is like, I can tell you as a fact, there's a lot of things that I cannot tell you for a fact. There are some things that I've got strong opinions on. There are some things that I've got like, you know, sometimes I make up things just to fill in the gaps. I know, you know, Shelley, when we first got married, Shelley was like, man, you just know everything. I'm like, yes, I do. And the truth is, this is before the internet was like ubiquitous. And the truth is, I just kind of made it up on a best guess, right? And it's like, and I was like, right ish a lot of times. So it just, it just happened to work out. But the truth is like, we don't, we don't know everything, right? But I can tell you this for a fact, like from personal experience, that this is a possibility of this, this building your life on the wrong foundation is a possibility for good church-going folk like me and you. I know you don't want to hear that. And I think, you know, I'm at church, I'm building my, yeah, listen, if you hear it and you don't do it, you're building your house on the sand. And that can happen to any one of us. It can happen to me. It's like there have been seasons in my life where I've been building stuff, but it's not been the right stuff, right? So this is, I'm so thankful to God for these necessary warnings along the way. We can never, we can't ever get to the end of our life and be mad at Jesus for not telling us. Because He told us on the front end, you're going to have these troubles. You're going to have these struggles. Make sure you build your life like all of the warnings that He gave us. I'm so thankful for them. And then, then we get to the foundation selection. So you've got the one who built his house on the rock and the other who built his house on the sand. What is the significance of the sand? You know how foolish that would be, right? To build your house. You've walked on sand. You've been to a beach. You know that sand gives way under pressure. You ever tried to run in the sand? You look like a slug, right? Again, in my mind, I still got it, right? There's still some athleticism there. And you get in the sand, you're like, nah, it's gone. It is gone, gone, gone. You know how foolish it would be to build your house on the sand? It's unstable. It's shifty. Does it sound like some people's lives? The instability gives weight under pressure, gives weight under pressure. There's not some stick-to-it-iveness to it. It's like shifting and moving. That's crazy. Which is exactly the point that Jesus was making, right? That's exactly the point. The people that don't follow His ways, this is what they're inclined to do. They're inclined to just shift, to just change. Just like whatever. There's no stability under pressure. So I'm just going to go on to the next thing. These are the types of people who are inclined to follow their heart. Follow their heart into the next thing, this thing, that thing, everything, whatever is the next shiny thing. There's always the volatility and the instability. And these are the types of people who are so quick to start one thing. And then when it doesn't go, how they think it should go, they're on to the next thing. And that doesn't exclude relationships. I know that's offensive. And Frank, listen, you know, I've decided at some point in my life, in the last few years, I am not going to apologize for sharing the truths about God's Word. Just not going to do it. Like if it offends you, and obviously I want to do that as lovingly, as kindly as possible, but I'm just not going to apologize for telling you what God's Word says. So these types of people, that's why we see, like, marriages dissolve so quickly. It's like, "Oh, well, it's not Cinderella. It's not a fairy tale like I thought it was going to be." So I'm out. Or you can build your house on the rock, where there's some stability and there's some persistence. What is a rock? It is resilience, right? There is some stability in that. And it's like, just because there's adversity and there's hardship doesn't mean that I'm going to dip set, which is, is that another trick? Oh, he's gone. Another trendy word, right? So here's what this starts to look like as you kind of play these two lifestyles out. The one who chooses to build his house on the rock, the one who chooses to build his house on the sand, you really start to see, over time, the difference, right? The contrast between the two. And it takes some time sometimes. I think if you have a small sample size in terms of time, you may not notice that much of a difference. But over the course of time, it will be very obvious that one person, the wise person, is living for something that matters. They're living with purpose. They're living for something bigger than themselves. They're living for something that's actually going to have some lasting value. On the other hand, you got the person who builds their life on the sand and they're just living for the next thing. They're living for the moment. They're living for the feels, right? And that is not, that is, I'm just going to help you out. That is not a way to live your life. Do you notice how, this is interesting, this is the last correlation we're going to make kind of between the two groups. And I think it's, it's one of the most important. Do you notice how each of the groups described, the wise man, the foolish man, both of them, the rains descended, the floods came, the wind blew and beat upon that house. Happened to the, the man who built his house on the, the firm foundation happened to the man who built his house on the sand, but there were two completely different outcomes. What does it say for the man who built this house on the rock? It says the rains came, the rains descended, the floods came, the wind blew and beat on his house. But because it was built on this firm foundation, because it was built on the rock, it stood. On the other hand, the one who built his house on the sand, what happened to him? The rains descended, the floods came, the winds blew and beat on his house and it fell. And it doesn't stop there. It doesn't say it just fell. And it says, and great was its fall. Here's my hope. This is my prayer for us as followers of Jesus, people that come to this church who, who as a community, we are aspiring to live a wise life and build our house on the rock. Just make, make all of these principles a routine, a staple in your life. Hear the words of Jesus, like whatever that looks like, man, if you've got a rhythm where, where you do devotionals and you get into God's word, man, that's amazing. Keep it up. If you don't, that is a great place to start. Be in environments where you're hearing the words of Jesus, but not just picking and choosing. I had an old pastor friend and he's like, some of y'all, not us, other people, other churches, other parts of the world. He was like, some of y'all are like Piccadilly Christians. And y'all don't, does anybody remember Piccadilly? Used to be in the Longview mall, like right when you walked into the right, but that was in the eighties. So disregard that reference, right? But it was a buffet. And what would you do with the buffet? You just go, Ooh, I want some of that. Do not want any of that. And I think that's kind of the tendency sometimes, isn't it? It's like, Oh, we love this Jesus that's meek and mild in this Jesus that's love and rainbows and light. But when Jesus starts telling us these hard teachings that then we have to change our life to fit into his words, not get his words to fit into our life. It gets a little more complicated, right? Build your, hear his words, hear his words, all of them and do them and do them, not just have the information, but experience transformation in your life and then get about building the life, man. Go do that thing. Go, go build your life, build your family, build your legacy, using the principles, the teachings, the words of Jesus, always as the foundation. And here's what's so beautiful about that. It is, it is transcend everything that you do. Every facet of your life should have these principles, these teaching teachings and these ways of Jesus. And that's what we should be about is building our life, building our house on the rock. It is a wise way to build your house, build your house on the rock. It is good for your soul. Amen. It's a good time to say like, Amen. Amen. Let me pray for us. Jesus, thank you so much for, this is not an easy teaching to be honest. I get scared to think that we can hear your words. We can know your words. We can be in church. We can know scripture and still be like the foolish person who builds our house on the sand. God, God helped that not to be any of us. God help us as the book of James says to be not hearers only, but doers also. Father, we don't want to just know your words that we have information. God, we desperately want to experience transformation. God, I want my life to be different because I hear your words. When I hear your words, I know your heart. And when I know your heart, I can't help but be changed. God, give me the wisdom to see the areas that I'm resistant, that I'm hesitant, that I try to make your words fit my life, not my life fit your words. Father, and give me the courage to change what needs to be changed. The humility got to break off whatever needs to be broken off. And Father, in your grace, I know that you'll do that. It says that if we ask, if we seek, if we knock, you're there, you're willing and you're able. So Father, we thank you so much for that this morning. Help us to be people who are wise, Jesus, who build our house on the rock and have this stability, this resilience in our soul. It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen.

There have been few hopes dashed harder than when Matt looked at our topics and thought for a brief, shining moment that maybe dyes were coming to transmog, and not just staying in Player Housing. But no, it's just for Player Housing, and there have been some changes to dyes as we head into patch 12.1 next week. Because we livestream the recording every week, and Liz has been playing WoW our guest host for this week Six took us on a quick tour of his apparently bonkers Housing creation, and we talked about some of the incredible looks you can get with creative item combinations. (And if you like streaming, Liz has been streaming indie games on Twitch, and you can catch the videos on YouTube if you miss the livestream.)And speaking of streaming, we have confirmation this week that BlizzCon will be livestreamed for free. And speaking of things being announced, did you hear there's going to be a new World of Warcraft adventure for Dungeons & Dragons? Pretty wild they announced that with about a month to go til BlizzCon. Makes me kind of excited to see what will be unveiled during the big show.Oh, and this is proof that if you send us some questions for the podcast, we will answer them! Eventually!If you have a few minutes, please fill out our survey to tell us what you think about the podcast. This data is collected by our podcast host, Acast, and will be used to help us improve the show as well as attract potential sponsors. Your answers are completely anonymous. We appreciate your help!If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's Tuesday, August 4, A.D. 2026. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com.  I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Kevin Swanson, Timothy Reed and Adam McManus Amnesty Int'l apologized for smearing Christians and pro-lifers Some good news on the Christian persecution front today.   Amnesty International has officially apologized for publishing a report that accused 117 Christian and pro-life groups in the UK as “anti-rights.”   In the apology, Amnesty admitted the report “should never have been published” and fell “significantly short” of its standards for research. The report had attacked the Evangelical Alliance, Christian Concern, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, The Christian Institute, The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association UK as well as crisis pregnancy centers. Oil is slowing through Strait of Hormuz and the Bab-al-Mandab strait Transporting oil and other goods out of the Middle East has become a real problem. Now the problem has reached its highest crisis point since the wars in the region fired up in the spring.  BBC reports the situation is far worse now, with Iranian pressure at the Strait of Hormuz, and Yemen Houthi pressure put on the Bab-al-Mandab Strait into the Red Sea. Only 10-15 ships a day pass through the Strait of Hormuz. That's about one-eighth the normal shipping flow. And the Bab-Al-Mandab Strait is only getting about 25-30 ships a day. That's about half the normal flow.  Saudi Arabia and Iran's economies both took a hit Saudi Arabia's economy took a 4.8% hit in the 2nd Quarter of this year. Iran is looking at a 5.4% decline for the year, according to International Monetary Fund numbers. Iran is also dealing with 68% inflation this year. Drought and fires impacting Europe God's hand has fallen hard on Western Europe. The United Kingdom experienced its driest July in nearly 200 years. Much of the nation is in drought. France recently battled its largest recorded wildfire, following months of drought and extreme heat. Parts of the Danube River have dropped to the lowest levels in 30 years. Italy's River Po has also registered a historic low. And Germany's Rhine River is at its lowest level since 2018. And fires in Spain and France took down over a million acres, resulting in the destruction of about 300 structures. Syrians & Haitians, here temporarily, were supposed to self deport Monday Here in the United States, 356,000 U.S. immigrants on Temporary Protected Status were ordered to leave by August 3rd. Presently this affects Syrians and Haitians, but may eventually impact another 1,000,000 immigrants from other countries.   This comes after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued last month backed the Trump administration's policy to end Temporary Protected Status. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security website is encouraging self-deportation, offering free travel, and a $2,600 bonus to get them out. New York is pushing assisted suicide and the nuns are pushing back The state of New York is pushing medically-assisted suicide, and a group of Catholic nuns are protesting. The Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm and the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have been granted a reprieve by a federal district court. They will not have to counsel terminally ill patients or assist them with medically assisted suicide, at least for now, according to the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty. Christian physician assistant vindicated for opposing transgender insanity A Christian physician's assistant won her court case in Michigan.  Valerie Kloosterman, a University of Michigan Health-West health worker, was fired five years ago, because of her stance against transgenderism and her affirmation of biblical principles. The health system agreed to pay $410,000 to Kloosterman and her attorneys, while also pledging to “create a religious accommodation policy in accordance with the law, notify and train all its employees, [and] grant reasonable religious accommodations without retaliation.”   Armed citizens stopped mass murderer at Idaho In-N-Out  Burgers Two armed citizens stopped a mass murderer at an In-N-Out Burger restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho over the weekend. Police Chief Matthew Hicks recognized the two heroes for their courageous actions taken when they returned fire on the assailant. HICKS: “We can confirm that there was an off-duty state trooper and a citizen who actively engaged the suspect by returning gunfire towards him. We want to take a moment and commend the actions of the off-duty officer and the citizen and their heroic action to stop this incident. We believe their actions helped drive the suspect away from the scene, preventing further casualties.” Three died and seven more were wounded in the rampage. The suspect, who used an AR-style rifle, now identified as Chad Williams, died as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The New York Post reported that Terry Dudley, a taxi driver in Twin Falls, was among those hit by bullets, according to a GoFundMe account to raise money for his medical expenses.  Dudley, a widower and father-of-four, was shot twice in the back as he charged his Tesla. Massachusetts considers birthday abortions without exceptions The state of Massachusetts is on the verge of allowing abortions up until birth without any exceptions.  Dr. Christina Francis with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, commented on the measure. She said, “It is never medically necessary to purposely end the life of a pre-born child in order to save her mother. Under certain circumstances where a pregnancy complication threatens a mother's life, a physician must separate mom from baby, sometimes when the baby is too young to survive outside the womb.”  Both houses have approved the bill — now awaiting the governor's signature. Maura Healey is Massachusetts's first lesbian governor.   Call Governor Healy at (617) 725-4005 or (413) 784-1200 and urge her not to sign this law that allows abortionists to kill babies on their birthdays. You can also email her through a special link in our transcript today at www.TheWorldview.com. Americans elected three homosexual governors Americans have elected three homosexual governors: Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Colorado Governor Jared Polis. The Wisdom book of Proverbs reminds us that “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when a wicked man rules, the people groan.” (Proverbs 29:2.) Support for homosexual faux marriage is collapsing Support for homosexual faux marriage is collapsing in the states. The latest YouGov Economist poll finds only 54% of Americans now in favor of legalizing the practice, while 32% oppose. The percentage of those who approved of the legalization of homosexual faux marriage peaked in the United States about three years ago at 70%. Washington state fires burned 6,000 acres Those fires in Washington state have burned down about 6,000 acres, including 700 structures. Over 60,000 people have been evacuated from the Spokane area. Christian singer booted from Alaska Airlines flight over “preaching” Christian singer Whitney Lynn's website describes her as an internationally-recognized evangelist, singer, songwriter, and deliverance minister with millions of Instagram views. Last week, before an Alaska Airlines flight took off because of some delay, Whitney stood up and boldly shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a relevant and pithy manner to the captive audience on the plane. Listen to what she said as she filmed herself. LYNN: “Hello, everybody. Good morning. I know we're all waiting. It's kind of frustrating, right? This wait? But I want to tell you that God's timing is perfect, and God knows everything. Maybe He's sparing us from danger today. “So, I want you to rest and know that Jesus Christ loves you so much that He died on the cross for your sins. He rose again in three days. He's alive and He's the one true God. But the wages of our sin is death. Hell forever. “Apart from Jesus, we won't make it to Heaven. But He loves you so much. Make him Lord. Repent of your sins. He is coming back very soon. I pray protection over this flight, in the name of Jesus. Amen.” Oddly enough, the airline staff said they felt “unsafe” and proceeded to escort her off the plane. As she was making her way down the aisle to get off the plane, Whitney dialogued with a male Alaska Airlines flight attendant on video. FLIGHT ATTENDANT: “The crews don't feel safe with you.” LYNN: “They don't feel safe? FLIGHT ATTENDANT: “Yeah.” LYNN: “Oh my gosh! I didn't know the message of Jesus Christ was unsafe. Wow! Do I have any guns or anything like that? No, I don't. “So, freedom of speech is not safe. I tell you what this is. It's called spiritual warfare. Is it a crime? Is it against the law? Can you tell me that? I'm just asking you a question. FLIGHT ATTENDANT: “I'm not going to answer any more questions.” LYNN: “I'm getting my stuff as I'm talking. So, can you answer the question? Is it against the law? To preach the gospel? FLIGHT ATTENDANT:  “I don't need to answer any questions.” LYNN:  “You can. You sure can. Last days. People can't talk about Jesus anymore. That's how you know there's power in that name. Makes people feel unsafe. That's sad, very sad. “Well, God bless everybody. If you know Jesus today, make Him Lord of your life and continue to spread the Gospel. Persecuted to be a Christian, it's coming. We're gonna go to jail.” Whitney Lynn has now been banned for future travel on Alaskan Airlines as well as a few other carriers. Proverbs 28:1 notes that, “The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.” You can write Shane Tackett, the president of Alaska Airlines to object to their decision to ban Christian singer Whitney Lynn. His address is 19300 International Blvd, SeaTac, WA 98188.  Or call: 1 (800) 252-7522. TN listener calls newscast the hub, challenges listeners to evangelize Here at The Worldview in 5 Minutes newscast, Jeff Thompson in Sevierville, Tennessee emailed me and said, “Adam, I want to make two points. First, I see your ministry like a large wagon wheel with many spokes going out in all directions. Your newscast is at the hub, goes out and reaches all points on the compass. You will never know, this side of Heaven, the effect your ministry has had on the lives of the people and what they did with the information you shared. “You are doing a work that the Lord gave you to do. So, He will move the hearts of His people to provide the means to complete the work. Philippians 4:6-7 reminds us, ‘Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.' “Second, I would challenge The Worldview listeners to be like the sons of Issachar. In 1 Chronicles 12:32, it explains that the men ‘understood the times and knew what Israel should do.'  Be intentional in your walk with Christ. Remember to obey our Lord and take the Gospel into all the world. Show the love of Jesus to everyone in your sphere of influence. If we obey this command and love those around us, I can promise that you will have a full and exciting life.” 26 Worldview listeners gave $12,870.83 And finally, by Monday night at 10:30pm Central, 26 Worldview listeners stepped up to the plate and invested their treasure to fund the 6-member team behind The Worldview for another year. Our thanks to Tony and Jennie in Palmdale, California who gave $20.83, Brent in Madison, Alabama and Margaret in Raleigh, North Carolina – both of whom gave $25, Cara in Mebane, North Carolina, Hannah in Leo, Indiana, and Mark in Goodyear, Arizona – each of whom gave $30 as well as Julie in Victoria, Texas and Kevin in Scottdale, Pennsylvania – both of whom gave $50. We appreciate Aiden in Robert, Missouri and Richard and LeAnn in Zeeland, North Dakota – both of whom gave $100 as well as Christa in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, Canada who gave $150. We're grateful to God for Kirsten in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bob in Atascadero, California, and Dan in Frostproof, Florida – each of whom gave $200 as well as Griffin in Kila, Montana who pledged $25/month for 12 months for a gift of $300. We were touched by the generosity of Sean in Winona, Minnesota who gave $500, Frances in Beacon, New York who gave $500, Mitch who gave $500, and Cathy in Fate, Texas who pledged $41.67/month for 12 months for a gift of $500. And we were blown away by Chuck who will continue his $50/month pledge for a gift of $600, David in Northumberland, Pennsylvania who will continue his $50 monthly pledge for another year for a gift of $600, Michael and Jacci in Valley Center, California who will continue their $80 monthly pledge for a gift of $960, Charles in Hollywood, Maryland who gave $1,000, Charcie in Castle Rock, Colorado who gave $1,000, Jack and Genita in Bradstone, Kentucky who gave $1,200, and Jeanne in Columbia, South Carolina who gave $4,000. Wow! Those 26 gifts add up to $12,870.83. Ready for our new grand total? Drum roll please. (drum roll sound effect) $122,550  (sound effect of people cheering) I can finally see the finish line from here. In order to hit our final goal of $123,500 on this second spillover day – Tuesday, August 3rd -- God needs to prompt folks to give the FINAL $950 in order for the 6-member Worldview newscast team to be fully funded for another year. If one person gives $50 and another 3 people pledge $25/month for 12 months, we will get there.  We are so close! Just go to TheWorldview.com, click on Give, select the dollar amount, and make sure to click on the “recurring” button if that's your wish.  And remember this: If you want to continue your monthly pledge to The Worldview that you started prior to July 1, 2026, please email us so we can count your generous ongoing gift toward our total. Help us get across the finish line. Go to TheWorldview.com and click on Give. Close And that's The Worldview on this Tuesday, August 4th, in the year of our Lord 2026. Subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com.  Plus, you can get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ. Extra Print Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky met Trump at White House Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with President Trump at the White House in Washington D.C. last week, reports the Guardian. For Netanyahu, it was his first time back at the White House since hostilities commenced with Iran in late February. The meeting also comes as domestic support for Israel continues to slip, while the Iran war is driving up oil prices before the midterms. In his meeting with Zelensky, President Trump discussed ongoing support for the Ukrainian war effort against Russia. Zelensky stated, “We also spoke about diplomacy. It's important that the diplomatic process be reinvigorated. Our teams will arrange the details of their further communication. I am grateful to the United States for its firm support.” 

Brewers take a series against the Angels but can't get the sweep with Miz on the mound. Trade deadline day and Tarik Skubal is headed to the Dodgers (of course). Makes a 3rd straight Dodgers' World Series and a lockout in 2027 feel almost inevitable. Packers back at practice today, Tucker Kraft OFF of the PUP list over the weekend: See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Don’t get left behind on AWS! Don’t get left behind on AWS! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode, we go deep inside the AWS Marketplace with Louise Strandoo, who spent nearly a decade building AWS’s marketplace business from the ground up and now leads partner development for AWS’s data, analytics, and storage practice. Louise unpacks COST, the six-pillar framework her team built by studying what actually separates hypergrowth startups and billion-dollar sellers from partners who treat marketplace as a side project. We break down why operational excellence has to be in place before you ever enable your sales team, why executive sponsorship from the top of the organization is what keeps a marketplace strategy from collapsing into a single point of failure, and why product-led growth is no longer optional now that buyers, and increasingly AI agents, expect to try, buy, and deploy software without waiting on a human to close the loop, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwyAP7yVy3I Key Takeaways Success on AWS Marketplace requires a comprehensive framework like COST, not just a simple checklist of tasks. Your product must be something customers actually want to buy, not a subpar offering used merely to test the waters. Operational excellence is required to ensure your marketplace motion has the sustainability to scale globally. Product-Led Growth (PLG) is essential for enabling frictionless procurement, especially as buyers shift toward agent-driven AI solutions. Executive sponsorship is critical; building a strategy without leadership buy-in will prevent it from gaining real traction. Sales alignment ensures reps are appropriately compensated and friction is removed, preventing them from avoiding marketplace transactions. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags AWS Marketplace framework, COST methodology, product-led growth, agentic procurement, hyperscaler ecosystem, operational excellence, revenue friction, private offers, co-sell acceleration, strategic collaboration agreements, resilient architecture, cloud commitments, organizational transformation Key Tags Louise Strandoo Audio Episode [00:00:00] Louise Strandoo: Salespeople, rightly so. They don’t wanna introduce something that’s going to add a complexity to the deal. They’re like, why would AWS wanna be involved? [00:00:11] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI’s remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:22] Louise Strandoo: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi. Own [00:00:26] Vince Menzione: your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:45] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s start. [00:00:53] Louise Strandoo: And Louise Strand, come on out. Come on up. Uh, our first, our first [00:00:59] Vince Menzione: Amazon executive at, at this session. Not our first ever, but our first at this session. [00:01:06] Louise Strandoo: Happy to be [00:01:07] Vince Menzione: thrilled to have you. I, why don’t we sit down on an, um, I’ll have you sit here and, you know, you get, take one of the ultimate partner pillows with you since you’re a first assignment attend. [00:01:15] Louise Strandoo: Wonderful. [00:01:16] Vince Menzione: Uh, [00:01:16] Louise Strandoo: good [00:01:17] Vince Menzione: to hear. So great to have you. I thought maybe we’d start, maybe, uh, with you, uh, explaining your role. Then we can start talking about costs, which is the subject is like near and dear, and we’ll talk about that, about what that is. But I want to keep people on their pins of their seats right now. [00:01:33] Vince Menzione: So tell us, tell us more about you and your role and your journey at AWS. [00:01:37] Louise Strandoo: Yeah, well thanks for having me. Good to see everybody in the room. Um, so my name’s Louise. I have spent the better part of the last nine and a half years at AWS and I spent almost that whole time, probably around eight years. In AWS Marketplaces business Development organization, um, I joined to help startups figure out how to scale their business on the marketplace. [00:02:00] Louise Strandoo: And from there, I grew into a number of different roles, helped ISVs figure out how to scale their marketplace business of all sizes. Um, I worked with some of our top sellers on the marketplace, figure out how to really scale their revenue through the marketplace. Today I am actually the lead of the data analytics and storage partner development team. [00:02:20] Louise Strandoo: Nice. Within the US Tech partnerships organization. So it’s been a really cool transition to go from like all marketplace focused. And throughout that time, marketplace kind of became the center of partnerships. Yep. Within our partner program. Um, so now I manage PDMs and partners and we still talk a lot about marketplace. [00:02:40] Louise Strandoo: Also everything else that we do as a partner. So it’s, um, it’s been a fun journey. [00:02:45] Vince Menzione: And we were talking about this earlier, like you started with Marketplace and then moved out where all the other organizations started from partnership and moved into marketplace. Mm-hmm. Almost the other up. And you have built a framework costs [00:02:59] Louise Strandoo: mm-hmm. [00:03:00] Vince Menzione: Characteristics of successful sellers. And I have a set of operating principles about successful partnering. So I’m really intrigued about this conversation. I was hoping you could walk us through it, like what are these characteristics and where do most partners fall short in terms of characteristics? [00:03:18] Louise Strandoo: Yeah, so, um, like all really good things, cost was an effort that I built alongside a bunch of other really smart people. And we started to have this conversation about what does, uh, you know, what does success look like? We we’re focused in the beginning, in my marketplace journey on getting. Partners to sell on the marketplace, getting them to list and adopt the features. [00:03:41] Louise Strandoo: And of course they’re like, why would we do this? And we’re like, that’s a great question. Let’s figure out like really what the why of this whole thing is. And as we started to get partners who were startups and some of our really large partners activated, we started to see all kinds of value and how marketplace was helping co-sell and all this good stuff. [00:03:59] Louise Strandoo: And we needed to figure out like how do we identify what is like the lightning in the bottle? So we looked across some of the most, uh, hypergrowth companies on the marketplace. Mm-hmm. Some of those startups that had really propelled into major success stories. And then some of those like really scaled enterprise sellers, the one [00:04:17] Vince Menzione: that got to a billion dollars. [00:04:18] Louise Strandoo: Exactly. The market, our billion dollar market market. Billion dollar sellers. Right? Yep. And we looked at what are the common characteristics that all of those partners embody. Yes. And how do we kind of. Define a framework that is not a checklist because a lot of us were doing that at the time. Here’s all the things that you should do to make it work well. [00:04:34] Louise Strandoo: It doesn’t really work from partner to partner. Everyone has a unique go-to market strategy. Yeah, so we developed costs to kind of be this overarching tool that partners can use to say, do we have the right kind of fundamental approach to how we’re going to market with AWS and how we’re thinking about the marketplace. [00:04:51] Louise Strandoo: Do we have the right tools to like bring our overall go-to-market strategy to A AWS and to the marketplace so we’re not doing two separate things. That was sort of the genesis of the idea. Makes [00:05:02] Vince Menzione: a lot of sense. [00:05:04] Louise Strandoo: So, um, the characteristics, there’s six of ’em. I won’t go into detail about every single one. [00:05:11] Louise Strandoo: Oh, [00:05:11] come [00:05:11] Vince Menzione: on. We’ll do that one. Yeah. We have some people in the room that are gonna be intrigued by this. Go ahead. [00:05:16] Louise Strandoo: So, um, the first pillar is. Partnership with AWS, you can’t do marketplace without figuring out what, what’s your overall partner strategy, right? So how are you using the partner programs to drive differentiation in your business? [00:05:30] Louise Strandoo: Yep. How are you using our funding programs to elevate the parts of your business that you really wanna accelerate? Um, and how are you thinking about your partner strategy with AWS overall? [00:05:40] Vince Menzione: Interesting. [00:05:41] Louise Strandoo: The second one is, uh, selection on AWS marketplace. [00:05:44] Vince Menzione: Product selection. [00:05:45] Louise Strandoo: That’s right. [00:05:45] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:05:46] Louise Strandoo: You gotta have a product on the marketplace that your customers wanna buy. [00:05:49] Louise Strandoo: I think the biggest thing that partners have done wrong over the years is they think, let’s do crawl, walk, run. We’re gonna put something up there that we’re not, you know, really excited about, but we’ll see how it does and then we’ll try to invest from there. [00:06:03] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. [00:06:04] Louise Strandoo: If you put something out there that nobody knows how to sell, then that you’re not excited about, your customers aren’t probably excited about it either. [00:06:09] Louise Strandoo: There’s no reason it’s gonna do well in the marketplace. [00:06:10] Vince Menzione: Yeah. It makes no sense to me. [00:06:12] Louise Strandoo: Yep. So you gotta have something good. You gotta have your marquee product, and then you wanna use features that are gonna help buyers actually access that product in a way that’s frictionless. Yeah. The third one is operational excellence. [00:06:25] Louise Strandoo: So that’s looking at how are you structuring your organization and investing in all the right processes that you need to scale the business. Reporting at a global scale, understanding how to recognize revenue and thinking about all of the in-between moments of. Being on the marketplace, creating an offer, how does your sales team gonna get in touch with you when you need to send that offer out? [00:06:47] Louise Strandoo: And how are you making sure that an alliance person isn’t trying to find an outlet in a random corner of an airport to send a private offer to a customer? All of that structural stuff to make the, the motion scale. [00:07:00] Vince Menzione: So we’re talking product led growth versus. One off or [00:07:04] Louise Strandoo: all of it? All of it. Okay. No matter what kind of partner you are, you have to have operational excellence. [00:07:08] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. To make sure that your marketplace and your partnership motion has sustainability and scale. The next two, I’ll kind of go through fast. There is, yeah. Um, partner commitment to marketplace revenue. So what do you really want Drive from a revenue perspective, right. How do you get your leaders bought in on that, and how do you set a goal that dictates what you’re doing? [00:07:28] Louise Strandoo: And then how do you define sales alignment? From a structural perspective to say we’re gonna remove friction that could get in the way of the field selling this thing. We’re gonna remove things that are, um, negating reps from wanting to go through marketplace because it’s impacting their comp. Yeah. Or it’s really hard. [00:07:46] Louise Strandoo: All of that kind of structural stuff goes into the sales alliance. [00:07:49] Vince Menzione: So there’s, yeah. I wanted to take this apart a little bit too, if you don’t mind. No [00:07:52] Louise Strandoo: problem. [00:07:53] Vince Menzione: Because I think about this a lot. So when you start talking about an organization, you’re talking about what this, we’ll call it an ISV Sure. Or an si, but. [00:08:00] Vince Menzione: You know, ISPs primarily is where it all started. They need to get their internal operational excellence. Right, exactly. Which means their, their ops piece. Yep. And their sales execution. They’re gonna to market all those things. The sales alignment side. Is that their sales teams [00:08:18] Louise Strandoo: correct. [00:08:19] Vince Menzione: Are compensated properly so that they don’t go around the systems. [00:08:22] Vince Menzione: Exactly right. They’re aligned. They’re aligned to go drive the right results. [00:08:25] Louise Strandoo: Exactly. [00:08:26] Vince Menzione: Because they’ve made commitments as well. [00:08:28] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. [00:08:28] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:08:29] Louise Strandoo: And I always talk about marketplace, like it is transformation. It’s different. It’s not what you’re doing today. [00:08:35] Vince Menzione: That’s right. [00:08:35] Louise Strandoo: Salespeople, rightly so. They don’t wanna introduce something that’s gonna add a complexity to the deal. [00:08:43] Louise Strandoo: They’re like, why would AWS wanna be involved? Stay away. So if that is already there and then on top of that Mm, they don’t get paid as much when they go direct. [00:08:53] Vince Menzione: Right? Right. [00:08:54] Louise Strandoo: They’re not gonna go through the market nice. [00:08:55] Vince Menzione: No, they’re not. [00:08:55] Louise Strandoo: They’re not gonna bring anything to you and the partnership team saying like, Hey, we really wanna figure out how to make this engine work with AWS So we have to do as much as we can to remove that friction from the experience. [00:09:06] Vince Menzione: So, you know, you mentioned private offers, which made me think about like product-led growth versus private offers. ’cause it’s, it feels like marketplace from the beginning. It’s changed. It [00:09:15] Louise Strandoo: has, [00:09:16] Vince Menzione: you’ve been doing this for a number of years. You were first to market with a marketplace. There was, I’ll call a lot of friction because there was channels and other, other routes to market direct selling. [00:09:27] Vince Menzione: Tell us, take us through some of those experiences. Yeah, yeah. Like what was that like? And then obviously you built cos because you had a lot of field engagement with these organizations trying to get them to go do it the right way. [00:09:38] Louise Strandoo: Right? [00:09:39] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:09:39] Louise Strandoo: So it’s interesting actually, when we built the marketplace. [00:09:42] Louise Strandoo: It was completely like a product-led growth motion, as in let’s just figure out a way to let AWS customers find amis in the marketplace. Developers are gonna go get it, and they’re just gonna buy it without any additional push from the field or like co-sell. That doesn’t need to happen. Then we heard from customers, Hey, this is great. [00:10:02] Louise Strandoo: But what we really want is also to be able to buy bigger contracts. We wanna customize our contracts, we wanna negotiate price when we’re buying this on behalf of, you know, large organizations. We’re not just buying what’s on the shelf. We need something more custom. So we introduced this concept of private offers to make sure that we could bring all of that customization into the process. [00:10:23] Louise Strandoo: And then we heard from customers saying, uh, we want to purchase from our preferred channel partners. We really wanna make sure that we’re, you know, not losing that source of, um, engagement with our really critical partners. So we had to figure out, hey, how can we make it so that we’re not competing with the channel? [00:10:41] Louise Strandoo: ’cause we’re not really a channel at all. Right. So we had to go and build our platform that allowed for channel partners to sell through the marketplace and augment that private offer piece to say, Hey, if you want, you can have a channel partner resell your product through the marketplace. So today we kind of see all of those as just different routes to market and different ISVs are gonna embrace different routes to market. [00:11:04] Louise Strandoo: First, the really important thing about costs is that it’s. Pushing partners to think about bringing their go to market strategy that works outside of the partnership to the marketplace. Mm-hmm. So if you’re an ISV that doesn’t sell with channel today, don’t start with channel partners on the marketplace. [00:11:21] Louise Strandoo: Right. If you don’t do product-led growth today, probably figure that out before you start doing it on the marketplace. Yeah. But if you’re doing those things, if you’re not doing those things, you should look at why not, and could we be doing those things and then we have the ways to bring it into your strategy with AWS marketplace. [00:11:38] Vince Menzione: So what separates the partners who kind of build this flywheel of success that you describe from those who treat it maybe as a side project? And do you, do you see less and less of that today too? I wanna, I wanna ask you. [00:11:50] Louise Strandoo: No, I think, um, the more mature the marketplace gets [00:11:57] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:11:58] Louise Strandoo: The more obvious some of the, uh, characteristics of success become and the more important. [00:12:06] Louise Strandoo: Embodying that framework becomes for partners as they grow to become the next billion dollar seller, right? And become the next a hundred million dollar seller. Um, I think a couple things come to mind for me. The first thing is that like at AWS overall, we talk a lot about like resilient architecture. We talk a lot about what does it look like to drive successful transformation. [00:12:29] Louise Strandoo: All of that has to happen in the partnership. Partners that have really strong marketplace motions with AWS, they do not have single points of failure. They are not expecting an alliance lead to manage everything and then have the business collapse if they leave. [00:12:46] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:12:46] Louise Strandoo: They figure out how to delegate and get buy-in from leadership so that they have multiple folks invested in the strategy for multiple angles so that there’s scalability and sustainability. [00:12:58] Louise Strandoo: Without that. You could do all the things right with costs and if there’s res, if there’s no resiliency, if there’s, if there’s a single point of failure, it doesn’t scale and it doesn’t last. [00:13:09] Vince Menzione: It’s so funny ’cause you haven’t seen my seven principles of, of successful partnering, but we talk about growth mindset, we talk about executive commitment and then clarity on your vision and what you’re hoping to achieve. [00:13:21] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. [00:13:22] Vince Menzione: Like that’s your internal victory. You’ve gotta get those things right. That’s exactly what you just said. A hundred [00:13:26] percent. [00:13:26] Louise Strandoo: And you can’t, you, you know, like if you don’t have that executive sponsorship, [00:13:30] Vince Menzione: yeah, [00:13:32] Louise Strandoo: great. You’ve done the cost framework, but where are you gonna go with it? [00:13:35] Vince Menzione: And it’s not just the sponsorship, it’s. [00:13:38] Vince Menzione: Up in, from the top of the organization all the way down to the selling floor. Completely. Right? [00:13:42] Louise Strandoo: Completely. [00:13:42] Vince Menzione: Everybody has to be aligned. Resources, investments all need to be aligned to this. Mm-hmm. [00:13:47] Louise Strandoo: Mm-hmm. [00:13:47] Vince Menzione: We’re speaking the same language earlier. A hundred percent. I love it. I love it. I love it. Um, so what does, we talked about product-led growth, but I want to maybe jump in here a little bit more. [00:13:58] Vince Menzione: Because I think it’s, it’s becoming more prevalent today, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s like, you know, we talked about private offer. It was really private offers, at least my perspective was a few years ago, I wanna buy something from you. Oh, you have a cloud commitment. I can access the cloud commitment. [00:14:13] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. [00:14:14] Vince Menzione: And so it was always the private offer thing that was going on behind the scenes, which required a lot of internal resources to go drive. [00:14:19] Louise Strandoo: Yep. [00:14:20] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about product led growth. ’cause that becomes a fly more of a flywheel that’s automated Yeah. And allows you to sell while you’re sleeping kind of thing, you know? [00:14:28] Louise Strandoo: Totally. [00:14:29] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:14:30] Louise Strandoo: So I think, um, we have heard a lot from customers saying, okay, when we really need to negotiate and we need something custom, we wanna be able to do that. [00:14:40] Louise Strandoo: But we also wanna be able to purchase things quickly. We don’t wanna have to go out to dinner every time we need to upgrade, uh, like our licenses and get a new contract. We wanna be able to experiment and pick the things that resonate best with the line of business users that are, you know, increasingly taking some of that buying power. [00:14:59] Louise Strandoo: And I think especially now that we’re entering into, you know, the unprecedented, unprecedented times, it’s everything is AI like. There is more, um, pressure than ever to have users quickly figure out, does something add value to me and my business right now? And if it does, then I’m gonna keep using it, and if it doesn’t, I’m gonna go to the next thing. [00:15:22] Guest: Right. [00:15:22] Louise Strandoo: Product led growth is really about eliminating some of that I would say. Paperwork at the start of the process and putting the power in the hands of the user to say, can this product solve your challenge? And as more and more buyers are looking at Agen solutions, they wanna be able to try something, see if it works, and then quickly buy it without having to go through a whole bunch of steps because they have work that needs to be done right now. [00:15:54] Louise Strandoo: So the marketplace, that was our roots, like we started with this PLG motion. So we have all of that foundation to do it, and we’ve spent a lot of time over the last two, three years, like really investing in that from our engineering and roadmap perspective to build a whole bunch of features and capabilities that support product-led growth. [00:16:11] Louise Strandoo: We have things like free trials request, demo request, a private offer if you want to. Um, we introduced something, you know, last year that was an express private offer experience. Hey, you know, you want custom pricing. Request it and we’re gonna give it to you right away because the vendor has populated rate cards. [00:16:26] Louise Strandoo: Right? So all of those things I think are really important right now to say, yeah, when your customers like, wanna get going, now let’s stop. Putting barriers in the way and let your product actually show its value immediately. [00:16:38] Vince Menzione: And you were actually putting buttons or making buttons available Yeah. For people’s websites. [00:16:42] Vince Menzione: Exactly. So they could just say, click here and [00:16:43] Louise Strandoo: buy. Absolutely. We buy with a Ws. You can click from your own website, your own marketing pages to route them to the marketplace. If that’s the preferred way to transact, [00:16:50] Vince Menzione: yeah, why not? [00:16:51] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. [00:16:52] Vince Menzione: So you mentioned ai. We talked a little bit, I call it the tectonic shifts. [00:16:56] Vince Menzione: We, we’ve seen this incredible transformation happening so fast. And now we’re talking about agents. Right. And, uh, John Yo was over here from, uh, earlier from Sugar talking about like, what happens if the buyer is an agent? [00:17:08] Louise Strandoo: Totally. [00:17:09] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about that. [00:17:10] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. I mean, I think that PLG and like is the right thing to enable a agentic procurement. [00:17:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:17:19] Louise Strandoo: If, um, you know, like in the, uh. 2019 when private offers were like, that was the big boom. We were like getting people to sign up on the marketplace. All we were focused on was private offers. So many sellers would have products on the marketplace where you’d click and purchase it and it would just say, thanks for buying, and it’d be like, we’ll get in touch with you and like a 24 hours and then we’ll figure it out. [00:17:42] Louise Strandoo: No worries. Thanks for buying. If that doesn’t work. If you’re an agent, it doesn’t work. An agent would be like, okay, this is like a dead end, right? Yeah. Agents are gonna look for products that they can purchase and begin using instantaneously. So yeah, product-led growth is like a really good, um, strategy that ISVs can use to future proof their business and make sure that they’re not just catering to an evolved. [00:18:06] Louise Strandoo: You know, procurement persona who maybe is looking for that faster transaction, but also preparing for that agent persona. Yeah. That is gonna be helping make software procurement scale. [00:18:17] Vince Menzione: So what do the partners in the room need to do to rethink how they think about this? [00:18:22] Louise Strandoo: I think there’s a couple things. I think you know, number one, you can look at the cost framework and start to use it as a jumping off point to evaluate your business. [00:18:31] Louise Strandoo: You can look through a bunch of resources that we’ve put out around costs, and one of the first blogs that I wrote has a Buzzfeed style quiz. You can go through and be like, where are we at? And if you realize after you run through that exercise that you’re farther away from where you wanna be in terms of partnering with AWS, it’s a really good dump like starting point to be like, great, here’s the challenges. [00:18:56] Louise Strandoo: But the biggest message I would relay to the partners is. Do not wait to try to go build this and then bring it to your executives and say, look what I built. It’s not gonna go anywhere. You need to go and use that as the cry to your leadership team. Like escalate. Now here’s the opportunity that we have with AWS. [00:19:17] Louise Strandoo: Let’s look at all of the awesome studies that we and our partners have put out over the years. Look at your competitors that are in the marketplace, your competitors that are partnering with AWS, and start there by saying, we’re. Behind or we’re missing in these areas. We could be doing, you know this, to make our product more a ag agentic ready. [00:19:37] Louise Strandoo: We could be doing more in marketplace to ensure that we’re capitalizing on the private offer business, and we need to figure out how we’re gonna drive commitment now so we can go and build this if you try to build it. Then show the value later. It’s gonna be really hard to then be pushing that boulder up the hill. [00:19:55] Louise Strandoo: So the more that you can lean into getting the sponsorship early on, you’re gonna have a much easier time then navigating, you know, all the hard work that comes with partnership co-sell, um, and, and everything kind of fun that we get to do once we get to go to market with our partners. [00:20:10] Vince Menzione: Do you have one piece of advice for each one of the. [00:20:13] Vince Menzione: Conditions or characteristics for, for, for this group to follow or [00:20:17] Louise Strandoo: think about? I think that, um, the, we didn’t talk about the last one, which is a good one to end on, which is enablement. [00:20:22] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:20:23] Louise Strandoo: Enablement starts with like most of the time, ISVs in particular, and this, it goes for channel partners as well. [00:20:30] Louise Strandoo: They’re like, we gotta enable the field go and enable all the salespeople why they should do all this stuff. You have to do these things like in some sequence though. So if you go and enable the field, everybody do marketplace and they’re like, how? Where do we go, right? Do we send you the leads? Are we slacking you? [00:20:47] Louise Strandoo: Like are we emailing? Like what do we do? You have to then go back and be like, actually, our operational excellence isn’t sorted out. We need to do that first. And who needs to be enabled from that side of the house? Like don’t forget to enable your rev ops teams, your deal desk teams, all of the teams that are kind of essential to making your partnership with AWS Hum need to be enabled in the way that is relevant for their business. [00:21:10] Louise Strandoo: So when you, you know, think about like what do you need to do across all the pillars? It’s gonna be different depending on what your go-to-market focus is. If you’re a hundred percent focused on selling through SIS today and through channel, maybe product-led growth is not the top priority, but then you need to go and figure out, okay, so how have we. [00:21:28] Louise Strandoo: Figured out which partners we wanna work with on AWS and how have we enabled them and have we communicated that enablement to our salespeople? Are we removing unnecessary barriers to them transacting? That’s what you really gotta figure out. So it’s really about looking at how you execute outside of marketplace, outside AWS, figuring out what that, what are the strongest pieces that you do in your business today, across those pillars, and then asking to replicate that with your partnership with AWS. [00:21:56] Vince Menzione: Nice. So to the room here is, um, if someone in this room doesn’t, does one thing differently on the marketplace, what should it be? [00:22:08] Louise Strandoo: There’s so many things I can think about. I think like first [00:22:12] Vince Menzione: you’re coaching ’em [00:22:13] Louise Strandoo: individually, [00:22:13] Vince Menzione: by the way. Just think about it that way. [00:22:15] Louise Strandoo: One of the first things like, it depends on where you’re like, where you’re at in your journey. [00:22:18] Louise Strandoo: So like, quick show of hands, who is, um, a partner that is like using the marketplace today? [00:22:26] Vince Menzione: There’s quite a few actually. [00:22:27] Louise Strandoo: Okay. Awesome. Thank you for helping drive the marketplace. So for those of you that raised your hands, like my sentiment to you all would be figure out how you are incorporating marketplace as the center of your strategy with AWS. [00:22:44] Louise Strandoo: We are increasingly using marketplace as the point of scale for all things about partnership. All things funding are like increasingly requiring some hook into marketplace. So we can actually provide more funding and scale increase like more. So think about like how do you use marketplaces that like center of your partnership, um, for those of you that are not on the marketplace today and are thinking like, is this something that is valuable to me? [00:23:15] Louise Strandoo: Is this something that I should think about and do? You should absolutely. Go look at who are your competitors? Who are the folks that are already out there on the marketplace and, and why aren’t you there? And then you should start to look at what are the characteristics of successful sellers to map out What could we do and what’s the kind of order of operations that we should take to figure out like, how do we get there? [00:23:40] Louise Strandoo: How do we have a plan from the beginning to get buy-in for our partnership with AWS so that we’re not going about it, expecting that it’s gonna just like drive a bunch of leads to the business. It’s not what it does well, but it is gonna help accelerate the way that you co-sell with AWS, which can be a tremendous value add when done appropriately. [00:23:58] Louise Strandoo: So I think, yeah, like figure out the right way that it’s gonna unlock business value depending on what’s most important to your priority. Um. Today [00:24:08] Vince Menzione: we have about three and a half minutes, and I, I’m eager to see if there’s any questions. I, I, um, I, John’s right here with the mic and I love that. I love the, want to get the interaction here in the room. [00:24:19] Louise Strandoo: Yeah, [00:24:20] Vince Menzione: it’s a great group. [00:24:25] Guest: Oh, [00:24:29] Vince Menzione: can they light up that mic? Maybe [00:24:33] Louise Strandoo: Good. [00:24:37] Vince Menzione: There you go. That’s fine. There you go. It’s working. Alright. [00:24:41] Guest: Thank you so much. This is a really great presentation, first of all. I love it. Um, I’m actually part of the, uh, the GSI, so I work cognizant. My name is Ana Hill, um, and I’m manage alliances with ServiceNow. Um, our goal is in the really near future to really engage with all the hyperscalers in sell. [00:25:00] Guest: So that’s one thing. But my interesting, my question is how do you, how, how does AWS measure success? Of the partners who are on your platform, what are the metrics? How do you determine which partners are actually successful and what other partners can use to learn from that? [00:25:19] Louise Strandoo: Yeah, that’s such a great question. [00:25:21] Louise Strandoo: So, um, something that I think is like super helpful that you bring up is cost is not a, um, a scorecard that says everybody that does all these things is a good partner. It’s basically inputs that we have come up with that are supposed to help with the partnership outcomes. Um, so partners, we measure a whole bunch of different things. [00:25:47] Louise Strandoo: I think PDMs and my team carry goals across like seven different categories. There’s a couple of big things that we look at. We look at the revenue that you drive through the marketplace, so whether that’s through private offers or through your self-service business or through. Selling through a reseller, or if you are the reseller, like what is that resell business or driving? [00:26:05] Louise Strandoo: Um, we look at what are the opportunities that you’re bringing and sharing with AWS and that you’re launching. So through our lead sharing mechanism. Not only what are you launching, but what are you sharing with us that is qualified that you’re bringing the field into? Um, we look at things like migrations and migration, realized revenue. [00:26:25] Louise Strandoo: How are you helping drive customers to the cloud? And how are you helping customers not just get everything set up, but you start actually using it. Um, so we really are gonna look across like a multitude of those metrics and when we look at like which partners are kind of leading the way. We’re gonna start to look at the revenue in those buckets, right? [00:26:44] Louise Strandoo: Like who’s sharing and bringing and growing with us? Who’s bringing more opportunities to engage before it happens on the marketplace? Who’s actually completing that transaction? And then who are helping who, who are the partners? Kind of like leading those big types of transformations, migrations, and, and realize revenue. [00:27:00] Louise Strandoo: This is really great. Yeah. Yeah. [00:27:04] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Any other questions? Come on. We’ve got 30 seconds left. We have time for that one last question. Run over there. John. Come on. [00:27:17] Guest: Thank you again, a great, uh, presentation. One question I had is, uh, this morning, right Jay from, uh, oia, right? He identified a whole bunch of, uh, companies that are doing. [00:27:28] Guest: More than a billion dollars in revenue with AWS. [00:27:30] Louise Strandoo: Mm-hmm. [00:27:31] Guest: What would you say are one or two top qualities among these companies that help some drive? I can give [00:27:36] Louise Strandoo: six. And they’re all of these. Yes. [00:27:39] Vince Menzione: The cost, [00:27:40] Louise Strandoo: but like, I think, um, so I love it. Yeah. My, my team we’re working on some content to better capture, like Yeah. [00:27:48] Louise Strandoo: You, you’ve gotten there, you’ve done the six basic things. Now what happens when you’re a billion dollar business? What does it look like there? It’s a lot of the same stuff, right? Like billion dollar billers on the marketplace. They embody that resilience, for example, in their operational mechanisms. [00:28:03] Louise Strandoo: They’re moving beyond the point of there being like one person that creates private offers and they’re like just part of the partnership team. They activate their, um, their deal desk to really manage private offers and marketplace business at scale. They’re integrating their pipeline to share deals proactively through their CRM system and they have really targeted enablement that is. [00:28:24] Louise Strandoo: Really pushing to the field to make sure that every person in their team understands the value of cloud value of AWS and how marketplace accelerates the pipeline. So the more mature that you become as a marketplace seller, like the more that cost is relevant to help keep you on track and be that kind of north star to say like, you could do a cool bunch of stuff with us, but here’s really where you wanna check and see, like what can you do to evolve the business to the next stage? [00:28:49] Vince Menzione: What you’ve said is so like impactful and we have some experts in the room that do this. They help these organizations better understand it’s really getting into your field organization to help them understand how to. How to show up for meetings with AWS re, like how to, how to, uh, co-sell together, how to think about going after these opportunities. [00:29:09] Vince Menzione: What, when you’re, when you’re talking to customers, potential customers about their cloud commitments, like what are the right questions to ask in the pro? There’s so many things, like I’m sure the costs six has like 150 each [00:29:21] Louise Strandoo: Easily [00:29:21] Vince Menzione: steps. Yeah. You know, to it. [00:29:24] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. And I think like, just to follow on that. [00:29:26] Louise Strandoo: Um, we have partners who have gone and they’ve been like, okay, we’re getting a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS. We’re getting funding, and if they don’t have this, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It fails. So this is really like, yeah, it’s about building that resilient architecture to say, if we go big, do we have the execution plan to succeed? [00:29:47] Louise Strandoo: You can’t start with a plan to say, give us a bunch of funding and we’ll go do it. Your salespeople will say. Know what that is. Don’t care. Yeah. So you have to put all of that, you know, all of those building blocks in first to make sure that we can actually execute. [00:30:01] Vince Menzione: You need alignment from the executive suite down to the selling floor. [00:30:05] Louise Strandoo: A hundred percent. [00:30:06] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:30:06] Louise Strandoo: Yep. [00:30:06] Vince Menzione: That’s really what it’s all about. [00:30:07] Louise Strandoo: Yep. [00:30:08] Vince Menzione: Louise, thank you so much. It’s been incredible. So great to have you join us. Thank you [00:30:15] so [00:30:15] Louise Strandoo: much. Yes, thank [00:30:16] Vince Menzione: you. [00:30:16] Louise Strandoo: Thank you, [00:30:16] Vince Menzione: thank you. Thanks for listening to The Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated. Share it with a partner leader in your network. [00:30:26] Vince Menzione: Subscribe where you listen, and head over to the Ultimate partner.com for show notes related content and the resources for this episode. And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.

Noah Hopton, CEO and Founder of Finvisor, helps startups and growing businesses simplify operations by building integrated back-office teams that combine accounting, finance, payroll, HR, insurance, and technology. By combining experienced financial professionals with modern technology, Noah enables businesses to streamline operations, stay compliant, and focus on sustainable growth.  In this conversation, Noah introduces The Adjacent Extension Framework—Earn the Trust, Build the Relationship, Listen for Other Problems, Connect Other Specialists, and Empower the Team with Tech. He explains why proactive service creates lasting client relationships, how solving adjacent business challenges leads to sustainable growth, and why integrated back-office teams outperform disconnected vendors. Noah also shares how AI is reshaping finance operations by automating repetitive work, empowering finance professionals to focus on strategic decision-making, and helping businesses leverage technology to enhance—not replace—human expertise. — How to Outsource Your Back Office with Noah Hopton  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Noah Hopton, the CEO and Founder of Finvisor, helping seed and Series A companies that have outgrown spreadsheets and part-time bookkeepers but aren’t ready for a full-time finance team yet. Their job is to give you the financial clarity to make good decisions at every stage of growth. Noah, welcome to the show.  Yeah. Pleasure to be here, Steve.  Well, great to have you here, and I’m very curious about your career and your business and what you built here. I’m particularly curious about your personal ‘Why’ and how you manifest it in your business.  Personal ‘Why.’ That’s great. Well, I’ll be honest, I didn’t go in thinking I was going to be an accountant or run an accounting firm. You know, I studied accounting in school. Eventually, I thought I was going to probably be more in a kind of front-of-house sales relationship because I enjoyed the people part—making relationships and meeting people.  But I was very fortunate that I found the consulting, fractional CFO world, where I got to discover a love of problem-solving, creating relationships, and creating value for clients. For me, it was kind of this love of helping clients understand their business, helping clients understand what to think about around the corner, where it's not just being in-house with one set of books that you're closing.Share on X  When you’re at Finvisor, my day-to-day, at least when I started, was probably working with 10 to 12 clients a month and helping them understand, “Okay, how did they perform last month? Can they hire a certain number of people? And what’s the plan going forward?”  Yeah, I mean, that’s super helpful. I started life in accounting as well with KPMG, and what attracted me was to essentially have that language of business so that I would be able to understand how a business works and have this confidence of not flying blind, right? That’s really, really cool. So how did you evolve from a CFO into a founder? What was the trigger point for you?  So I was very fortunate. I actually was at a prior firm at one point when I started my career, and they were a little bit like the cobbler with bad shoes, where eventually they decided they had to close shop, and clients were going to be given notice. I, myself, was given notice saying, “Hey, in a week, you’re not going to have a job, Noah.” And so I was really given this moment in life, saying, “Hey, if I enjoy what I’ve been doing, do I think I could do it better than the firm I’d been at?  And do I want to make this leap into being a founder and starting a business?” And so my co-founder and I both talked to each other and said, “Look, we love our clients. We love what we’ve been trying to build. I think we just need to do a little bit of a refresh and restructuring of how this operates.” And so we started our own company. I was very lucky that I started with about, I had about 30 clients and a team of four on day one, which I think is unusual.  Most people in the accounting space start off as a one-person shop, trying to grow from one to two, and having to double their clients or double their size to get there. We were fortunate to have five team members and 30 clients on day one. Originally, our vision was just, “Hey, let’s help with the fractional CFO and the bookkeeping,” but that really evolved over time as we added additional services and really understood where our clients were having problems in their back office.  What are the areas where maybe the insurance brokers they’d been working with weren’t very hands-on and kind of came in once a year? Our clients were asking us, as their CFO, “Hey, can you help us select our health insurance?” And we’re like, “Well, we’re kind of doing the broker’s job. Why don’t we build out our own team?” So that was one of the first verticals we moved into and added by building an insurance brokerage. From there, we kept building, where now not only do you have your CFO and accountant helping you, but you also have them with the ability to go out to market, help you compare quotes, and help get your insurance in place. So you’re essentially expanding the array of virtual services that you’re providing, or fractional services that you’re providing, to your clients?  Correct. Yeah. We really try to own the full back office end to end because I think a lot of people deal with, “Okay, great, I have a bookkeeper, I have a tax accountant, I have an R&D tax provider,” and they’re dealing with four or five different vendors that don’t really communicate. The client is the person playing telephone between the two, and we’re like, “Wait, stop. Why is this the solution?” We should just build a different business where it’s all under the Finvisor umbrella.  It’s all full-time team members who are actually working together on behalf of the client, even if fractionally. Some of our clients only need five hours of a payroll specialist, but they need someone to own that role, and they need that person to be able to talk to their sales tax team because it’s like, “Oh, we hired someone in a new state. Is sales tax applicable there?” And connect those dots because, when you have these disconnected providers, you have a lot of things that can drop because they’re not in people’s field of view.  Yeah, I mean, it’s a great service. If you can get a competent team that will take care of your back office, then you can focus on figuring out message-market fit and then essentially scaling revenue. You don’t have to worry about it, and you don’t have to babysit inexperienced people that maybe you can afford to hire, but who would not be able to own the job.  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s kind of the, “Do you want to…” You know, I think at least when we started in 2014, there was more of a generalist bookkeeper. That’s kind of the typical solution people went with. Nothing against that, but it’s kind of nice to have dedicated specialists in the different back-office areas that you need. I mean, bookkeepers are great.  They’re usually not your best payroll and HR people. They’re not thinking about California final-paycheck laws, or whether you need to offer a 401(k) if you hire someone in California. Whereas, if you have someone whose entire job is payroll and HR, and you need Finvisor to help run your payroll, they’re going to be thinking about those edge cases and helping you along so that you can just build your business, get to the next milestone, and not worry about tripping yourself up because of compliance, taxes, or a lack of visibility in your reporting. Yeah, that’s great peace of mind. So this podcast is about frameworks, and I wonder, what is your framework? How do you help your clients, or how do you figure things out? What have you developed? We’re about 400 frameworks in, so I’m looking for something unique that helps you and is easy to explain—three to five steps maximum.  Yeah. I mean, one of the ones that comes to mind for us is what we’ve really called the Adjacent Extension Framework. So, first, do really good work and earn your client's trust in one area. Makes it easy for them to approach you.Share on X For us, it’s historically been accounting. People think, “Great, get my books put together.” But for us, it’s really about creating a relationship and earning the client’s trust.  Then, as step two, listen for the other problems they’re having. What are the adjacent problems they’re asking you to solve? And then for us, what we’ve really done is double down in those other areas by building specialists in those verticals. Once you’ve earned the client’s trust, if you’re doing their accounting and all of a sudden they’re struggling with invoicing or collections, you can say, “Hey, we can also help you with accounts receivable and collection efforts because we see your AR balance increasing on your financial statements.” At that point, they’re already thinking, “Great, I like working with this person.  Let’s give their team a try and help us solve another problem.” So, for us, it’s really been about finding those adjacent problems, building a team that specializes in them, and then connecting the client with the right expert. The last piece that’s really coming to market now is using technology to empower the team. Historically, a lot of our value came from having experts who could handle the edge cases or the gray areas between payroll, accounting, taxes, and sales tax. Now, with technology, you can also build the data infrastructure to highlight what’s happening for the client while helping guide the team as they manage those clients.  Love it. So what I’m hearing is, number one—or maybe even number zero—is do a great job, right?  The trust.  Okay. So that’s maybe another way of saying it: earn the trust. But is doing a good job enough to earn that trust, or is there more to it?  I mean, I think in any service business, you want to be proactive. A lot of bookkeepers, accountants, and even legal professionals are usually waiting for the client to ask a question before providing an answer. I think the goal should be to think ahead for the client and proactively provide guidance. That came naturally for us because we sit in the fractional CFO seat.Share on X  But even if you’re just doing bookkeeping, you can still catch these things for clients and help them out. Or if you’re selling P&C insurance and helping clients with their general liability coverage, you can think about what other types of coverage they may need. So I’d say the more proactive you can be, the better. The other thing is meeting clients where they already are.  For us, a lot of our clients are on Slack, so we connect with them on Slack. We chat with them as if we were full-time employees because we don’t want the experience to feel different. We don’t want you to feel like you’re emailing a generic support inbox and not knowing when someone is going to get back to you. If you only need fractional-level support, it shouldn’t feel like you’re getting fractional value or a fractional level of communication.  I love it. So you actually own the function inside the organization, so it feels like you’re part of the team, or your people are part of their team. So that builds the trust. So, do a great job, or earn the trust, number one. Number two, build the relationship. Number three, listen to other problems that they might have. Number four, connect them to other specialists. And number five, empower the team with technology.  Yeah. That’s a lot of it. I mean, as an advisor, we’ve grown… I mean, 60% of our growth comes from client referrals. So I think you know you’re doing something right if clients are recommending you to their friends and network. And so hopefully, if someone’s listening to this and you’re not getting referrals, you should be thinking about, “How do we either create more trust for our clients to be referring us, or how do we become more top of mind when clients are having these conversations?”  That’s great. So 60% of your growth comes from referrals. What’s the other 40%? How do you drive growth? What drives growth for you? What’s the other way to drive growth besides referrals?  Yeah. I mean, I think it’s also being connected with the ecosystem that you’re in. In our space, there are a lot of technology partners. Think about Xero, which is an accounting software, QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, payroll software like Rippling, Bill.com. They all have accounting partnerships, and the more you can build with them and grow your team alongside them, clients will reach out to them and say, “Hey, do you have someone who can help us set up Bill.com or help us set up Rippling?  We don’t have a payroll team to do our state tax registrations.” So we’ve seen a lot of good momentum as our software partners start sending us clients to help us grow. I think the other area is trying to figure out where you can have partnerships that will do introductions. We’ve been very fortunate in partnering with a number of VCs. Obviously, the VCs have worked with us because we’re on the board, or we had a mutual client. A lot of them will start to build partnership channels, and it’s a great opportunity.  They’ll say, “We just invested in this company, and you should go talk to Noah’s team to help with your accounting or your fractional CFO.” So it’s really about finding those tangential operators or entities that complement whatever you’re doing.  So are these primarily personal relationships that need to scale, or do you have a way to scale this across other people in your organization—this ability to develop partners? Or is it mainly you?  It depends on the role. A lot of our fractional CFOs on the team continue to build relationships. I would say probably 40% of our new clients come through a channel that’s not through me. There’ll be other people on our team who have built relationships with another VC or another software company. I think one of the key things we’ve always focused on is hiring people who are very, I would say “doers” might be the wrong word, but people who can self-manage and be project managers.  If you find the right people who can take a step back and look at the bigger picture, I mean, sometimes people come to Finvisor and they don’t realize that we ourselves are a business. Yes, you’re doing accounting like you were in-house and getting the books closed, but if you do good work and you realize clients are having problems, you have to think, “Hey, how can I help clients more and also help Finvisor create a win-win?” A lot of times, when we’re hiring, we’re trying to find people who have that type of drive to continue building and helping us internally, and not just do one part of the puzzle they’re responsible for. That might not be the most direct answer, but I would say a lot of it is hiring—making sure it's not just me leading the growth, but me building a team that can help lead the growth outside of just me.Share on X  Yeah. So how do you share the context so that your team members can connect the dots as well as you can? What’s your approach to that?  There’s a couple of ways we’ve done it. One way is we use a note-taker that then feeds into our CRM. For all client communication, whether they meet with us on Zoom or Google Meet, the transcripts are put into a centralized hub for us. It also connects to our CRM in terms of what we’re doing for the clients. At any point in time, someone can ask, “Hey, what’s going on with this client?” They can understand, “Great, this is what the payroll team talked to them about this week.  This is what the CFO team talked to them about last month. These are the problems they’ve been bringing up.” So we can capture that information without it having to be provided orally every single time, and without having to rely on a chat or an email to the team. There are some moments when it’s useful to give the team a larger update, but in general, it’s good to figure out a way to capture the essence of what you’re doing for your clients so that the team can then, in an AI chat-specific way, talk through, “Hey, great, what’s going on with this client? What are their needs? What has changed in the last six months? Who’s working on the client?”  I’ll have a VC that we’re talking to say, “Oh, we’re looking to invest in the CPG space and this type of vertical. Do you have any clients?” We’re at a point now where I don’t know every client. I usually have an idea about most clients, but there are definitely clients where I don’t know everything that’s happened in the last six months because I don’t talk to all 200 clients.  But I can go to our central hub to gain that information and understand, “Okay, great, which client is looking to fundraise and might want to be connected to this VC?” It’s a nice way to connect the dots. They’re looking to invest. The client is looking to raise. We also do brown-bag sessions. We’re a distributed team, so I think you have to be a little more intentional about how you educate the team. We’ll have weekly meetings where we walk through new technology, new changes in what we’re offering, new positioning, and continue educating the team in a more structured format.  The other thing we’ve done to help the team understand what’s going on is to make information as accessible as possible, similar to how we communicate with clients. So the team doesn’t have to log in to a pretty outdated CRM to pull information on a client. It’s either available directly in the Slack conversation or in a more modern tool like Notion, where you can easily search and find the information you want. So basically, you’re managing and harvesting your data and using that to feed people information about how they can develop partnerships. Is that what I’m hearing?  Yeah. And I think a lot of it is also figuring out which playbooks and processes are repeatable, documenting them better, and then educating the team around them. For example, with our fractional CFOs, we want to be in the board meeting. If we can be in the board meeting, A, we can help clients answer questions about their finances more easily, and B, it’s good to have visibility into what the board is saying about the business and where they want to go.  Then, obviously, the VCs are going to say, “Oh, great, this is Ian at Finvisor.” If he reaches out to me about a partnership, they’re going to have a better understanding of what we do because they’ve been in the room with us—or they’ve been in a virtual or in-person boardroom with us.  So you’re basically sharing the playbook so that they have a better understanding of what they can refer you for. Correct. Yeah.  So, switching gears here, Noah, what’s one thing that you’re trying to actively figure out in your business right now?  I mean, the question everyone is trying to figure out, at least in my space, is how they’re going to use AI in some fashion. That’s the kind of million-dollar question everyone keeps talking about—AI in accounting, AI in finance. Right now, we’re really structured in how we’re trying to use it and apply it. But the question I have is, what’s the next year going to look like? What’s five years going to look like as this technology gets more legs and more trust behind it? We’re pretty intentional about what we’re building and how we’re using some of the newer technology with AI. But I think there’s a lot that, at least for me, you have to continue to iterate. The world today feels different than it did three months ago. I’d say for most of Finvisor’s history—and this has been 12 years—it hasn’t felt like that, where a year later things might feel marginally different because we’re maybe 20% bigger or whatever might have happened.  Now, I think there’s a lot more excitement and unknown around technology and how it can either make people more efficient or help highlight and surface better issues that clients need to talk through. But I also feel like we’re in a moment where everyone’s trying to throw AI into every technology. So we're also trying to stay true to who we are, which is people first, relationships first—technology powering us, not being the solution.Share on X  So as you’re scaling AI to improve the information that your people have, your CFOs have, that presumably is going to lead to people doing less of the mechanical, repeatable tasks and more of the judgment tasks. So how do you scale judgment as you’re scaling the impact with AI?  On our side, I think it’s A, trying to organize and structure the data coming in. B, trying to create tooling that isn’t unique to one client but is built in a way that can be customized for each customer. A lot of the firms I talk to that are in the Finvisor space just take a blanket approach—turn Claude on for every fractional CFO, let them connect it to QuickBooks, and try to figure out their own playbooks.  That’s not how we’ve ever run the business. We don’t just hire accountants and let them run the accounting and see how the output turns out. We’re more focused on figuring out what is actually useful for review. Right now, I think AI has been most helpful around quality. It can definitely check that things are consistent and make sure edge cases are being caught.  I think we’re going to get to a future state where it’s not only making sure quality is at the 95th percentile of confidence, but also giving visibility into metrics like CAC, LTV, and churn—things that would normally take longer to pull together. Your fractional CFO might currently spend hours reviewing Stripe data or Shopify data to come to a conclusion. AI can cut out maybe 40% of that data-cleanup layer, where it’s like, “Okay, now they have the tools to dig in and understand what the underlying problem is,” instead of spending so much time cleaning up the data and getting everything organized.  So currently, at least my thesis is that it’s going to allow us to manage more clients because some of the day-to-day—I don’t want to call it busy work—but the work you have to do before you get to the exciting parts of the job will become more automated and less manual, like pulling data out of Stripe, Shopify, your CRM, or NetSuite.  So does that mean you’ll have a different type of people, maybe higher-level thinkers? Or do you think you can elevate your current team to that level?  Yeah. I think you’re… Sorry, I know I was originally answering this through the fractional CFO lens. Most of our fractional CFOs are already at the top of that organizational pyramid. For them, it’s really about helping them have cleaner data, better visibility into the actions they need to take, and better insight into what they should be reviewing and discussing with the client.  If I think more broadly about the back-office finance team, I do think a lot of the more generalist staff accountant and AP specialist roles won’t be spending as much time on the day-to-day blocking and tackling. If a client has 1,000 transactions a month flowing through their bank and credit cards, historically that accountant would sit in QuickBooks Online clicking “Okay, okay, okay,” reviewing every transaction and coding it. Eighty percent of those transactions will simply be coded automatically in real time as they come in. That leaves them to focus on the 20% that actually requires human judgment.  For me, the question is, can we continue to empower those people to be more impactful with that 20%? Are they the right people for that 20%? We’ve always tried to hire people who are proactive and broader thinkers, so I think we have the right team to step into that. If we’d built a traditional BPO model with an outsourced accounting team made up of people who were really just coding transactions at a basic level, I’d be more worried because getting those people to step up and handle edge cases is difficult.  But that’s not how we’ve historically built Finvisor. We’ve always tried to find people who are a little more… I’d rather hire an A-plus player than a B-player just because there’s some savings in the cost structure. I’d rather have the right people who can perform 80% of the time when they’re at bat than just hire someone because they’re cheaper.  Yeah.  Wrong baseball analogy there, but yeah.  Yeah, I understand. So you have A-plus people. Maybe the people who are doing more bookkeeping-type services—their jobs may become automated—but your A-players are going to have best-in-class information, and they can serve more clients that way.  Yeah. I still think that if you think about the typical accounting structure—if you’re working in-house and you have a bookkeeper and a controller—it’s still helpful. Depending on the size of the company, if you’re a small company, you probably won’t need that bookkeeper.  The controller can handle the edge cases and close the books. But at a certain scale, you’ll still want that junior resource supporting the controller so the controller can focus on the higher-level, more strategic work. I think people will simply be able to do more with less if they’re the right person. There will be people who, if they aren’t good at staying on their toes and figuring out edge cases, won’t be the right fit.  AI will probably replace some of those roles. But I think there’s a great opportunity for people who can think more strategically. They don’t have to be a CFO. They can just be a really smart bookkeeper who’s good at handling edge cases. They’ll simply be able to manage three times as many clients as they could when they had to code every single transaction.  Okay. If you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business over the next 12 months, what would it be?  One area that we probably haven’t prioritized enough because of growth is SEO, AEO, and our overall sales build-out. Our paid advertising hasn’t been the strongest part of our business because it hasn’t been the top priority. If I had a magic wand, I’d have someone clean up our SEO and AEO visibility because I know clients love us and we do great work, but I don’t think we’re showing up the way I’d like from an SEO and AEO perspective. So that would be it. Yeah.  Yeah. Yeah. Love it. So, who are your ideal customers? Who do you want knocking on your door? Is it venture-backed companies primarily, or do you also work with private company founders? Who are your sweet-spot customers?  A lot of our clients are going to be in that 5-to-50-employee range, where they don’t need a full-time back office, a full-time accountant, a full-time CFO, or a full-time payroll specialist, but they need someone to own those roles. That way, we can put together the right Finvisor team to support them. We’ve intentionally made ourselves pretty modular, so while the largest group of our clients is in the tech VC world, we also have a lot of SMBs—law firms, beauty businesses, and other professional services businesses.  I would say that, if you looked at the Finvisor client base as a whole, you’d probably see a lot of startups. But we’re also starting to see more SMBs and more traditional businesses that don’t have VC funding but still need help with their accounting, bookkeeping, and modernizing their back office. So it’s a bit of both. Most of our clients are going to be in that 10-to-50- or 100-employee range, where they’re complex enough that they care about their financials and want to understand what they spent last month, where they’re going, and how they’re going to get there.  Earlier-stage companies are sometimes just a little too early. If you’re a one- or two-person company with just an idea, there’s a reason people think about their financials on more of a cash basis. They can think about the five clients they’re working with. Their bank balance ties pretty closely to their financials. There’s not a huge difference between the two when you’re a sole proprietor.  But as you start to evolve, that’s where Finvisor can provide more value. For all of our clients, we do accrual accounting, so we’re recognizing your revenue and your costs over the life of the service. As you start to grow and build, that’s really helpful. Obviously, if you’re at day one, it’s less impactful because you’re living more day to day, week to week, and month to month.  Steve Preda: Okay. So if we have those kinds of companies—which we do among our listeners—and they hear about this and want to fix their back office and outsource it to a reliable partner who can help them own those functions and give them good advice, what’s the best entry point? Where should they go, and how can they connect with you personally as well?  Yeah. hello@finvisor.com comes to me and the sales team. There’s probably a 95% chance you’ll talk to me if you reach out because I still love connecting with most new businesses that come through the door. The other area I wanted to call out that could be helpful for businesses is PEOs. PEOs are great, but I think at some point clients need to graduate from the PEO, and Finvisor is uniquely positioned to be both your insurance broker—helping you quote large-group plans—and your payroll and HR team to help you leave the PEO.  For a lot of our clients, once they pass that 100-employee mark, it’s like, “Great, we now qualify for a large-group plan,” which might have better rates than what they’re getting through the PEO. They just don’t have the team or bandwidth to get off the PEO. We’ll come alongside those larger companies and say, “Great, let’s quote a large-group plan for you. We’ll also put together a transition plan to register you in the 20 states where your employees are currently located.  We’ll make sure you get your workers’ compensation and employment practices liability insurance in place so there’s really no difference—apples to apples—from being in the PEO to running your own payroll.” We help with that transition because I’m always surprised to see companies with hundreds of employees still on a PEO, where the savings could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars if they left. They just don’t have the internal team because they’ve always been on a PEO. They’ve never had to do state registrations, so they don’t know how to do them. Because of that, they’re usually not looking for an alternative path to get off that structure. We can at least review it with them and help them out if it’s a good fit. And just to remind our listeners what a PEO is, in case they don’t know.  Oh, sorry. Yeah. A PEO is a Professional Employer Organization. If you’ve heard of companies like TriNet or Justworks, they’re PEOs. In the health insurance space, there are four primary ways you can get health insurance. Most companies start with small-group plans in the early days because they’re state-mandated. For example, in California, if you’re under 100 employees, the rates my company gets would be the same rates Steve’s company gets if we’re both under 100 employees and we’re asking Blue Shield for a quote from the same ZIP code. That’s small-group insurance.  Then there’s level-funded, where carriers quote specifically based on your employee group. There’s large-group, which is somewhat similar but designed for larger organizations. Then there’s the PEO. Let’s say you’re a 10-person company. You don’t have enough employees to qualify for large-group health insurance, which is usually discounted because the risk is spread across hundreds of employees. The PEO says, “We’ll employ your team. Instead of you directly employing 10 people and buying health insurance for only those 10 people, we’ll employ your team and give you rates based on the 10,000 employees we already have.” PEOs are really popular in places like California and New York, where health insurance is very expensive.  But once you get above about 100 employees, you can usually qualify for your own large-group rates, which are similar to what the PEO is getting. The difference is that the PEO is generally marking up those rates because they need to make a margin on the plan. You can often get those rates directly yourself.  Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Okay. So if you’re listening to this and you’re building a venture-backed startup, or you’re the founder of a professional services firm, a law firm, or another small business with 10 to 100 employees, and you don’t yet have the budget—or maybe you simply don’t need—a full-time CFO, insurance advisor, HR leader, and other functional specialists, then reach out to Noah and Finvisor.  Check out what they have to offer and see what services might be a good fit for your business. Thanks, Noah, for coming on the show and sharing your expertise. It’s fascinating to see how this field is evolving, how you’re tapping into technology, and how you’re focusing on the highest-quality CFOs to help your clients. If you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned.  Follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure you don’t miss an episode. Every week, we bring you exciting entrepreneurs and their best management frameworks. Thanks for coming, Noah, and thanks for listening.  Thanks, Steve. Appreciate it. Important Links: Noah's LinkedIn Noah's  website Noah's email: hello@finvisor.com

Competing in a Future World of Infinite Intelligence Navigation: Intro From Knowledge Workers to Judgment Workers The AI-Native Company: Org, Hiring, Culture The Human Element: Are We Underestimating It? Scenarios Our Take Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show:   Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Introduction Welcome to episode 79 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we take a leap into the big unknown. This is a thesis episode, not your classic analysis, in-depth sharing episode. The big idea for this episode is that we may be approaching the cognitive age, and how would one, or how would a company compete in a world of infinite intelligence? The big idea, again, is that intelligence, which has been mostly scarce and expensive for all of human history, might become abundant and cheap. If that happens, what happens to work, what happens to companies, what happens to society? This episode will be really framing a lot of these discussions. From knowledge workers to judgment workers, addressing the AI native company and how does that change, going into the human element and whether or not we’re underestimating it, and finally, ending up going into scenarios, feasible scenarios of a future where, well, intelligence is abundant. Intelligence is quasi-infinite or infinite itself.Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Big questions for this episode 79. From Knowledge Workers to Judgment Workers We can start with from knowledge workers to judgment workers. Let’s go back first to how came the knowledge worker. It’s a 20th-century invention from Peter Drucker in 1959. The idea here is that that category might be splitting. The production of knowledge itself is on its way to being commoditized by AI. However, our perspective is that judgment around production of knowledge is not disappearing and is staying for a bit control managed by humans. What’s your take on this, Nuno? Do you agree with this split?Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think it’s a little bit more profound than that. It’s not just judgment. Definitely, human judgment will be needed. We’ve seen agents perform all sorts of funny things in the wrong way when left alone to their own devices. Even some very well-known AI researchers coming forward and saying, “Hey, I tried to use this myself, and actually I messed up some of my systems,” or “I messed some of my code. I messed up some of my flows for a period of time.” I think just having human-in-the-loop from a judgment standpoint will be needed for a significant amount of time. That is something you can’t just delegate into machines, into algorithms, et cetera. The second part is, ultimately, there needs to be contextualization, and that contextualization, I think, comes from two forms. One from actual data, where the machine, I think, at some point will catch up, or the machines will catch up. The algorithms, at some point, on the data analysis will get better and better and have probably the closest to the truth that you can get, minus all the biases that are in the data, just to be clear, because data has a ton of biases. We’ve looked at this in the past and discussed it at prior episodes. But maybe on that, I think the machine has a chance to catch up, or the machines have a chance to catch up, so there’s less of distinctiveness from the human standpoint. But then, on just the attributes, the ability when you’re judging some situation, you’re in the middle of the situation. You’re judging the person and how it’s acting, in some ways, a lot of the things that end up happening, end up happening because there’s human interaction. There’s someone on the other side. I see how they’re delivering the message, how they’re implicating. We’ll talk about it later in the context of the organization and what changes in companies. I don’t think it’s just judgment. I think there’s a little bit more than that. One of the reasons I went to the dark side of management early on in my career from being an engineer was Peter Drucker and this notion of the knowledge worker, which he later on reemphasized with the publishing of his book, which for me was seminal and defined a lot of my career in life, the post-capitalist society, which is this notion that information rich and information poor is going to be the key distinctiveness that will happen in the world. The two big camps, information rich, information poor, which links back to this invention of the term knowledge worker, that knowledge is going to be key in some ways. I think that’s what we’ve seen for the last decades. Again, I think judgment is not going anywhere, but I think it’s beyond judgment. There’s elements of humanity and involvement that won’t go away anytime soon, where human-in-the-loop are particularly critical. We’ll discuss later some scenarios, but for me, that’s my stick in the ground. I think human-in-the-loop is going to be critical for many decades to come.Bertrand Schmitt While we are talking about all of this, and we share some possible scenarios, there is always that question. This is moving so fast right now. If you think about AI 10 years ago, AI 5 years ago, AI with the launch of ChatGPT 3, and then AI the past 2 years, now we have agents that are running at scale. Things are moving very fast. I can tell you, me in 6 months, the change has been pretty dramatic in terms of what I can use AI for. There is always that question that whatever we are thinking about cannot just be connected to what we were able to do 6 months ago or even today, we have to think and project ourselves at least in the next 6–12 months. Of course, we can go beyond that, and we will do that with some future scenarios, but it’s a very fast-moving, and it’s not clear yet where are the limits.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think that’s a very fair point. Let me try to analyze things that I don’t think will change anytime soon for the next few years. Agreed with you that many things will change, and we’ll have a lot better tools, platforms out there. That will be difficult to predict what exactly won’t change. I think there’s elements of humanity, and some of them do relate to judgment, like having good or bad taste, having a view on it, on whether something looks good or bad. Obviously, all of this sometimes is subjective, but some of it may not be as subjective as people think it is. The elements of contextualization. I think a little bit going back to what we did at Chamaeleon ourselves, where we built this platform, Mantis, and the objective of building Mantis was not really to replace us, was that it was a core augmentation layer in some ways that we would use investment or investor judgment as humans in the loop to systematize pattern recognition and a variety of other things, but that Mantis would really elevate all that judgment, not just in terms of timing, us being more productive, but also in terms of the quality of the decisions we’re making. Think of it as a little bit like having our human judgment in the context of operating Chamaeleon at a higher altitude, where we are more aware of the things that are happening and how they actually happen. The ability to really get to the data pieces and then make decisions on top of that that generate the needed alpha in our case for investors. What I mean by this is I think there’s always going to be core elements of humanity that I do think are going to be difficult for the machines to replace. For example, the taste piece people are like, “I can figure out what’s the taste in the market.” Yeah, but that’s mainstream. That doesn’t identify what’s the next big thing, which normally doesn’t start from mainstream. It starts from something else. It could start from opinion leaders and influencers. It could start by someone having a different way of addressing a problem and having a solution that hasn’t been thought through. For example, elements of creativity, I think, in human judgment and in human operations is something that I feel the machine will still have difficulty to replace.Bertrand Schmitt Let’s not forget how today current algorithms are working by feeding them enormous quantity of data, actually as much data as we can find. Finding more data is becoming a limitation these days. What it means is that it’s very hard for AI to think beyond its training data. There is some level of logic that’s being added, but at the same time, take the launch of the iPhone. What was the opinion before launch? Is that no, it doesn’t make sense. Not enough battery life, no keyboard, no this, no that. If you just base your analysis on what’s written out there, what’s being sold out there, you would just say, “It’s going to fail.” AI might really follow that more generic advice and perspective because that’s what in the training data and that’s what they’re in volume. It’s, of course, raising a lot of questions of, how do you improve the quality of the training data? How do you separate the weed from the chaff? There are a lot of questions there, and obviously, it will get better over time. But it’s still a critical part of how it’s working today. It won’t be that easy to change. I really like your point regarding Mantis, and I will say in general, platforms that you build with AI or leveraging AI capacity. Because when we say knowledge production is going to disappear, but we’ll keep judgment, it will be a different type of judgment because the quantity and quality of knowledge we will have in front of us to build our judgment will be very different. If suddenly we have for free the work of 10 interns or 5 junior analysts or whatever, and you can run that on nearly anything you do in life or at work, it’s completely dramatic. Your judgment was not used to be exercised so often because often you were missing quality data to have a judgment. Before it was a lot of finger in the wind and trying to smell something, but you didn’t have enough to make a serious analysis. Except if you are working as a strategy consultant, as you used to do, Nuno. That part is actually quite interesting. That the judgment itself will be exercised much more often and hopefully on the base of much more in-depth analysis for a lot of things. We will work very differently.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro We will go in-depth, faster and more fact-based, more data-based along the way. The question some of you might have right now is, is there some judgment that’s going to go away? Is there some judgment? We seem to be defining that there’s this organization, we’ll talk about it later, that goes from doers more into deciders. I think there’s some nuances to that, so I’ll just hit pause on that. In terms of judgment, obviously, there’s judgment that has been hidden over the years under the pretense of being wisdom, but it’s actually not wisdom. It’s just repetitive tasking, and it’s rules-based for the most. There’s a lot of judgment done, in particular in the white-collar space, that you could say it’s just reps. People have been doing it all along like that, and so therefore to say, “I’ve done it before like this, so I’ll do it the same way.” There’s actually no best in class, no analysis, no nothing. It’s just, “I’ve done it like that before.” I think that type of judgment will disappear because, again, algorithms will be as good, if not much better at that. They’ll be better at figuring out, actually, this would be the better way to do this. That’s how you play it forward. Then the question is, if there are fundamental, wise people in the organization, people that can really take that more complex elements of judgment, how do you go from the world we have today, which is a world of apprenticeship, where people come out of college, they go and work, and they learn their way, and therefore, hopefully over time, some of them, not all of them, we know that, but some of them will develop that wisdom to be great decision makers 15, 20 years down the road? How do we do that in a world that now is saying, “I don’t need people out of college because I can do it myself, and I can do individual contributor, and I can have agents doing the work that would require some manifestation of management in the middle.” Basically, “I don’t need this stuff. I don’t need you.” It’s a little bit the story we’re in. How do you create then this apprenticeship? How do we create then wisdom? My two cents on that is that wisdom, because of what we were just discussing and what, for example, myself and Bertrand was just saying, because of more often interactions with more data-stressed information and insights, what will happen is people will get better through their own reps in whatever form they’re doing, in day-to-day life, in internships, et cetera. In some ways, that will create the accelerated growth. It’s a little bit the interactions with agents and the interactions with our beloved AI algorithms that will create that growth over time and maybe not as much with other people. That still leaves the question around social interactions, but that’s probably the way this gets sorted. Apprenticeship gets sorted through the machine and the human having more interactions in effect.Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you because when we talk about apprenticeship, in some ways a lot of time was wasted on stuff that were not that important. But in a way, that was the price you had to pay in order to be there when people make the big decision to try to get some wisdom from that one hour of interactions that’s really useful and make a difference out of your full week. But the rest of your full week was just basic stuff that you had to do like a machine in a way. Why not let a machine do that? That, for me, is a big question. You could argue there is a transition period where it could be hard. For instance, if you can work hand in hand with AI smartly while you are doing your 4, 5 years of universities, you could graduate with a very different knowledge, perspective, judgment, skill set than anyone who graduated 5 years ago. I think that part will require a question around, “How do you change education?” You see what I mean? If you keep education the same way, expecting that the output is someone that should go now into 5 years of apprenticeship, that’s not going to work because companies will be, “No apprenticeship anymore.” On the contrary, you have to come much more knowledgeable and ready to use the tools. The tools are so efficient that the bar pretty high. You need to come already very well-grounded. If the education is not doing their job, that will be trouble. That part for me, I think is often forgotten. In some ways, the new-found importance of universities as a place to, and not just universities, the trade to really deliver people who are ready for the workforce. If on the business side, the expectation can change, of course, you have to change the education on the other side. My worry probably right now is that it doesn’t look like universities are in touch with what businesses are looking for, businesses are working on. Of course, that’s very worrisome because the cost of university has increased very significantly. It’s not clear quality of education has improved at all. If anything, it could be the opposite. It’s pretty scary. Of course, it’s going to raise a lot of questions. How much is education worth in that type of situation? Maybe another point because we talk a lot about apprenticeship, how this stuff was useful, but at the same time, if we go back in time, not long ago in the ’50s, if you wanted to be a developer, for instance, ’50s, ’60s, the job was very different. There was barely any programmation language out there. You had to use punch cards. Your time truly spent doing the coding was very limited. Once you had your stuff working, then, the debugging was a total nightmare. My point is that no one is looking back to that time saying, “You know what? It was great. It was a great way to learn and to do an apprenticeship for 5 years. To do that crappy job of punching cards for the boss.” There was little value in this. Guess what? Everyone is happy it’s not being done anymore by anyone. I think we also have to see what AI is bringing in a similar way is that everyone’s job is going to become quite different. There are a lot of big parts of the job who are not going to look back with fondness. Just looking back as, “Wow, that was very machine-like type of job. I’m glad I’m done with it.” People will want to jump directly to the next step. You don’t need to go to the punch card phase to be able to be a good developer for the past 40 years. I guess it will be the same with AI.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think so. The difficulty we have as humans is to also visualize dramatically different scenarios and landscapes, professionally. It’s difficult for us to anticipate what are the jobs of the future. Jobs have changed a lot in the last few decades, not even the last century. What people do, the migration initially from the agricultural society to then the industrial society to then the services society, and in some ways, the shift within the services industry, and now we’re seeing another shift, so we can’t really anticipate what those jobs look like. Back to your point on education, because I think that’s a very important point. If you’re right now an undergraduate student or a postgraduate student, for that matter, and you’re not figuring out your own mechanisms of learning outside of your syllabus, outside of what your professors are telling you, et cetera, you’re going to face very difficult times. If you’re not right now using all these AI tools proficiently, all these cycles of vibe coding, co-working, et cetera, with agents in the mix, you’re going to have a really tough time. If you’re not at this point in time as proficient as someone like myself or Bertrand, and given that we’re nerds, we’re relatively proficient with a lot of these tools that are out there. On top of it, some of us have our own platforms in-house. If you’re not as proficient as we are with those tools, you’re going to have a very difficult time because then people like us won’t need you. I think that’s the sad truth. It’s like at some point, if you’re not needed, you’re not needed. Then again, you may find something else that’s more interesting for you to do. Start your own company, go join a new exciting job doing whatever it is that you need to do next, et cetera. But again, I think the bar is very high. If you’re in college right now, again, undergrad, postgraduate, this is the time of transition. This is the worst time. It’s not the best time, it’s the worst time. Because education and all these institutions haven’t adapted to it yet. You need to adapt. You need to adapt. You need to adapt. If you don’t, you’re going to pay for it, not just in the loans you need to repay, but also in terms of actually having difficulty finding your career path in those first few critical years.Bertrand Schmitt You need to be especially proactive when you’re facing this type of period where businesses are adapting as fast as they can because they all know it’s going to be survival of the fittest very quickly. Universities typically are working on a very different pace, and it’s pretty guaranteed they are not going to have adapted as fast as businesses. In time of big dramatic change, it will be trouble. It will be trouble. Yes, you will have not fun. Not saying it was part of the deal when you sign up for that loan and decided to go for university. But that’s life. There has been issues before. It’s not the first time. You have to do something about it. You talk about your perspective about, “Hey, why do we need you if you are not already fluent and very efficient with these tools and stuff?” The truth, in some ways, it’s even worse than that. Each time we spend with someone who is not efficient with all of this is less time we spend with the tools that are already providing magic for us.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Exactly.Bertrand Schmitt It’s a very big choice of, “Hey, do I spend more time training this person?” Do I just… there is an opportunity cost. Or, do I spend more time staying at light speed? Why do I slow down to do something else in the hope that maybe I will get to return versus the light speed I’m already on? It’s a lot of tension. Again, it’s certainly new. But if we want to look back, I think you talk about the switch from agriculture and society, industrial society, and now the service industry. The reality is that, yes, we have made dramatic changes in the past before. 140 years ago, we were 90% agricultural society in Europe, in the US, 90% of us. Today, it’s what? 2%. So my point is that that’s a normal evolution. There is no progress without change. Sometimes the rate of change is soft, and sometimes you have a step function. Now it’s a step function, and it’s also a pretty fast step function. Before, it could take decades to get new stuff being put in place, to have electricity come up, this or that. Now we see that the rate of investment in AI is insane, way beyond anything we have seen before. Two, in a way, a lot of the architecture behind the scene was already there to support an even faster transition. What’s new might be the pace of the transition, how unnatural it might look. But at the same time, if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who lived 150 years ago, I mean, this was also a dramatic change for them. From horses to cars to planes to rockets, pretty big change, maybe even bigger change.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe the silver lining, just to bookend this section, is one, there will be new roles. There are a lot of things we can’t anticipate. There will be new roles, there will be new jobs being created, and new things that we can’t really quite grasp yet. The second part is that the rules are changing, and they’re changing, I would say, in general, for the better. If you are a decision-maker or an organization, and you still have your job, you’re probably making more important decisions with more data, with more tooling around you, with less red tape, hopefully over time. I know that will not hold true for all the big corporations out there that are listening to us, but it is starting to happen. Things are making an impact on how decision-making is made. There’s less and less red tape along the way in certain organizations. There are more and more fact-based discussions happening as we move along. The silver lining is better jobs, more jobs, different jobs in the future, hopefully as well. Secondly, the second part of the silver line is that the jobs that exist today, hopefully, will be more interesting, certainly on the knowledge space and on this judgment space that we’re now introducing as part of this episode. The AI-Native Company: Org, Hiring, Culture Switching gears, maybe to how does that shift? How does the company of the future look like? How does an AI native company look like? I feel there are a lot of discussions on, “Oh, you only need one person to run everything.” Let’s not go to that level. We’ve had a couple of episodes where we focused on AI as your co-founder and a couple of other elements that you guys can go back to. Let’s focus on a more evolutionary view of what’s happening to organizations, and maybe start with the org structure. In general, we should see more flat organizations where mid-level managers have to justify their pay in some ways because middle management are routers. They are normally routing tasks. It’s sometimes aggregating it, synthesizing it, and pulling it back up. Guess what? AI and agents in general are very good at that. The synthesis piece, et cetera, is not as well needed. One could say there are several elements of middle management that are valuable, like the coaching of people, the creation of apprentices, and the accountability that comes with some of middle management. But lo and behold, most of middle management is seen as a little bit of a thin line that doesn’t need to necessarily exist. I feel we’re moving into a world of smaller teams, more senior teams, where there’s more judgment at the top, where you’ll have people that both do a mix of what we used to call management in its new form, but also a lot of individual contribution. If you’re not used to that, if you’re not used anymore to be an individual in the future, again, and if you’re a very senior in an organization, maybe this is the right time to either reinvent yourself, find some other job that doesn’t require as much of that, which we’ll have plenty of those jobs for the next few decades, or maybe retire. I’ve actually, shockingly enough, seen people who have said, “You know what? This thing is changing too fast, too dramatically. My industry is changing quite aggressively right now. I’m about to retire in a couple of years. I’m just going to retire now.” I’ve literally met two people who have done that. Again, there’s nothing wrong about it. I think we’re, again, going through a step function and a huge shift, but figuring out where you fit in this new model of organizations, more senior at the top, smaller teams, more of a mix of individual contribution with management than ever was done before.Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you. In some ways, I’m not surprised that some people might say, “You know what? It’s now time to retire.” I feel a bit sad, maybe because it means you don’t like to keep reinventing yourself and changing your habits and thinking about new stuff. You were a creature of habits, I would say, if that’s your conclusion. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion, obviously, and a way of life. I guess that’s what happened, again, at regular times in the past in terms of big change. What I can see is that the rise of, you can call it the full-stack individual, someone who will have multiple roles inside the team. Before, you had to really separate the role. Especially in the US, there is such a clear separation between every role you can have in a company. Let’s take a tech company. You will have people doing design, people doing different types of designs, people doing front-end development, back-end development, and operations. You see step-by-step hyper-specialization. I have seen that, and it’s true that the level of complexity you had to deal with at some point requires some level of hyper-specialization because it will take you 6, 12 months in order to be really, really strong on a specific topic, a specific language. God forbid, trying to go deep into something that you had no real experience into. But I feel with AI, it’s a big change, actually. It’s the opportunity to go beyond that. It’s the opportunity to do more, to touch more. You can combine designing and shipping code, product managing and shipping code, being an analyst and deploying. Of course, we have to think how it works because putting a marketer shipping code to production, maybe that will get you into trouble. But I think that there must be some change. We see it changing dramatically, how fast we can get into something, something different from what we are used to. I think it would be crazy not to take that opportunity to dramatically change the scope of many positions and put an end to that hyper-specialization. I think for me, in some ways, hyper-specialization was bad. There is only so much you want to be a specialist in because a lot of things, a lot of opportunities are actually coming from the mixing of many different ideas, many different perspectives, and you lose if you go to hyper-specialization.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I don’t think the age that is coming is the age of the generalist. I think it’s going to be the age of the multispecialist. We’re going to go into an age of multispecialization, which is a little bit, we’ve mentioned it as well in the past, what Amazon defines as an athlete or T-shaped or pie-shaped people, people that have on top an amazing ability to do general management, strategy, managing teams, et cetera, then have spikes. Spikes into business development, corporate development, product management, whatever it is. With AI and with agents, the development of those spikes, as we’ve been discussing in this episode, will actually be easier. It’s almost like a given. If you want to go deeper and deeper into a certain area, you can go much faster. I think that level of multispecialization is going to be really cool to observe. I’m not sure we’ve had an age of multispecialization over the years. Maybe people would point out, well, the Da Vinci example, people that are great across very different areas. Maybe that’s an example of multispecialization. But honestly, from my perspective, this is going to be an exciting time because of that, because you’ll have people who, instead of being just focused on this area of sales, and I only do that, they can actually and should actually do a lot of other things. So the work, as we were talking before, can be more interesting. More demanding as well, because the judgments you need to make are more complex. The context you need to actually gain needs to be gained much faster. At a level of magnitude, you haven’t been able to do it before. Talk about information overload. But actually, ultimately, the roles can be a lot more interesting, a lot more exciting, because I can jump around. If I’m an investor, in this case, we have two investors on this conversation. But if I’m an investor, one of the things that we start looking at is actually not just looking at a startup as, is this startup doing something in AI or not? Is it AI-enabled or not? Is it an AI platform or not? But actually, more fundamentally, is this an AI native startup? Meaning, organizationally, culturally, is this the company that’s already in the AI age? How is the team working? How are they defining things? It’s not just that they only have two or three people. It’s like, what are those two or three people doing? How are they doing it? What cadence are they doing it on? What tools are they using? How are they making decisions? I feel we’re still actually relatively early on that track. It’s very interesting because we’ve had all these companies raising mega rounds. First round out, we invested in one of them, but there have been many frontier labs out there raising a ton of money. But a lot of them don’t have a fundamentally different way of doing business. Of organizing themselves, of how they do the day-to-day. Although they’re working on cutting-edge stuff, with very notable exceptions, they’re actually not using it themselves. They’re not actually shifting how they do stuff themselves.Bertrand Schmitt For me, that’s very interesting because in the past, I used to be quite conservative on how you manage and run a company in the sense that if you’re already in tech, if you are already on the cutting edge of what technology can deliver, and this and that, don’t waste time trying to invent a new org structure. Just focus on delivering something great, amazing, and be great at technologies. That’s already your huge differentiator. At the time, there was no real reason to innovate on the team organization. I have seen so many teams that tried to innovate, and it was just catastrophic because there was not much to innovate on, because we had decades of optimization that we could leverage. There was no reason to invent. But here it’s very different. There is a dramatic shift in how you can organize differently a company. I don’t think there are any blueprints yet on what’s the best way to do it because it’s too new. But at the same time, I would feel very bad to invest or support a company that first is not focused on AI or AI-enabled, but at the same time is not trying to innovate on the team itself. Because if you don’t do that, you’re going to get killed by someone who is going to innovate better than you on not just the product, but on the org as well.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Indeed. The shifts are pretty substantial. If you look, for example, just at hiring, what do you hire for? Certainly, there’s this element of the multispecialized orchestrator, which normally will be someone with quite a lot of wisdom and expertise. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone who’s old, but someone who has the ability to work with all the AI tooling and platforms out there and be an orchestrator of agents. Why do they make judgments, make decisions, move stuff forward really, really, really quickly? Again, those jobs are going to be the best jobs. The second part, I think that is very interesting, around hiring, is you’re going to skew towards the elements that are potentially either very aligned with the use of AI tooling and platform, AI expertise, or being AI native, or someone who’s used to using AI. That’s one side of the fence. On the other side, you’re going to actually be optimizing to hire people that have the characteristics that will be difficult for AI to replace immediately, like taste and the notion of fundamental accountability and notion of implications, the notion of how you affect change in organizations, how you affect change in individuals, the elements of coaching, and beyond coaching. You’ll be optimizing for those kinds of hires as well. Then, last but not least, for me, I feel that there is a momentum already happening. I think it will happen even more, which is the tendency to under-hire rather than over-hire. The moment of the good old days of blitz scaling, “Oh, let me go and hire 300 people to scale my go-to-market and just land grab market.” Now, that’s not how it’s going to work. People are going to try and first get the efficiencies in-house with top talent and see if there’s, at the end, the need to hire more people or not, rather than the other way around. I think the issue here is a little bit of what we alluded to before in this episode. There is a tax on individuals. If you hire more people, you’ll have to manage people, you’ll have to work with them, et cetera. If I don’t need to, I might as well work with the agents that the tools and platforms that I use give me access to. Because that’s a world that’s much more efficient, right?Bertrand Schmitt I’m in total agreement with you on this. It’s definitely raising way more questions than before because, again, on one side, you have the product, the technology used to build products that are completely different. At the same time, all of this is also enabling new ways to design organizations and to scale differently, especially in a world where, as we have seen in 3, 6, and 12 months, stuff that you thought were impossible are suddenly becoming possible. So you’re, “Hey, I’m going to scale and burn a shitload of money for 6 months before I know if there is any return.” Versus, “You know what? Maybe I just wait 6 months. The AI has improved enough so that we don’t need this new team. We don’t need these people to do stuff.” Because actually, if you just wait 6 months, we will have stuff coming for free from either new AI models or new AI tools or this or that. If you remember, we used to say that in mobile, things were going three times as fast as on the web in terms of pace of innovation and speed of development and stuff. I mean, with AI, it’s 5X mobile.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe even more. Yes, well.Bertrand Schmitt Maybe even more, maybe 10X. Every assumption around blitz scaling or scaling in general was based on past assumptions. It’s not based on how is the industry evolving today. Might make more sense for you to really grow your agents and spend more money on more tokens. I remember, of course, Jensen is selling his business interest, but he was saying, “Hey, for each one of my 450K engineers, he better spend 250K in tokens a year.” I’m not saying it’s the right way to say it, but I think there is some truth in it, and that would be something to think about. Have we maxed out the token usage per employee? I’m not talking in a stupid way because token maxing and wasting money has no value and is as stupid as it gets. But if you are truly getting a return on these tokens, can you use more? Can you generate more? Can you create more loops so that one engineer manages not just 10 agents, but 50 agents, but 200 agents? I think that’s the big question. We’re trying to add more people. More people means more management, more issues, more this, more that. That would be a fair question. Another piece of the puzzle is how do you build in a way your… I don’t know if it’s a digital twin, but more like the digital version of your companies represented by agents. How do you make sure that everything you do as a business is truly captured, is truly leveraged so that your agents are getting better and better? Not just because the model gets better, but because you are putting more data into it, because it has more opportunity to learn, and as a result, gets better at your specific business.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro The next big thing is culture. How does culture change? I think the biggest shift that I see is, why would you do meetings all the time?Bertrand Schmitt Yes.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro At least at Chamaeleon, we have a very small team, just by the way. We have a very small team at Chamaeleon. We’ve reduced by way more than 50% the time we spend on meetings between each other across the board, one-on-ones, partner meetings, et cetera. I think we’re really pushing to be more and more asynchronous. There’s stuff you can process via message. I was just asking one of my colleagues, “Can you just send me that prompt for that so I can just do that on CoWork?” Or “Can I just go on Mantis and do this? Can you tell me the cycle?” Or vice versa. Basically, it’s a little bit like you’re just going to do it. I don’t need to meet. I don’t need to meet all the time. There are some things where we still need to meet and interact, and we need to brainstorm at times, and we need to go to a different level of abstraction on the top end. Then on the lower end, there might be things that are a little bit more specific and governance-related and operational-related that we need to agree on that are more sticky. But otherwise, the culture is going to be biased towards build. “Go and do it,” rather than, “Let’s do a meeting.”Bertrand Schmitt Yes.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Async is the thing. I’m more and more like we have a couple of interns this summer. “Can we async this?” They’re like, “What does that mean?” “Can we make this interaction asynchronous?” Because synchronous interactions for me are very expensive. Can you send me something that I can process, and then I can send it back to you? We don’t waste time on you giving me context and whatever. Then I’m not ready quite yet because I need to process it. Maybe I’m in between two meetings that I’m actually thinking about other things in my mind.” Again, I feel that shifts how stuff is done. One, build rather than meeting. Two, asynchronous versus synchronous. In some way, millennials had it right when they shifted a lot to messaging and stuff like that. Let’s do more asynchronous rather than synchronous, those two elements from just an operating model of the company are significant. Maybe this is a good time for me just to put one parenthesis because there’s this thing that’s bugging me as we’re talking here. Everyone who is listening to us at this point in time might be saying, “Cool, but I work for this large organization. We’re just now…” Everything we’re saying here is contextualized by time. We’re giving you extreme situations. We’re looking into the future. Some companies that we’re talking about might be doing this already as we speak. Some of them might be in the process of doing this and might in the next couple of months be doing it like we are describing it here. Some of them might take years to get there. Then again, some of the companies that might take years might actually be destroyed in between or meanwhile, and be disrupted. Some of them might not because they’re in very legacy businesses, and it’s fine, and it’s okay. Again, don’t take everything that Bertrand and I are saying today as this is gospel, and it’s going to happen tomorrow, and why the hell are we not doing it? We think that aspirationally, this is where you should be moving to as an organization, whatever size you’re at. Speed will matter, as we discussed before, but not everyone, obviously, is going to move as fast as we’re describing it here.Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Me, for instance, take inspiration often with what some of the AI labs, frontier AI labs, are doing, the way they are working, especially in OpenAI and Anthropic. They are clearly at the top of the spear in terms of what is it that you can do because they have access to models we don’t have access to, because they have unlimited tokens they can use for tasks. They hire people who are, of course, 100% on AI. They are the best example of what is achievable if you have the top minds, if you have the latest models, if you have unlimited tokens. From there, you can take that for our needs and for our situation, and others in industries that are not as advanced. Definitely, you have some time. But as you say, things are moving fast, things are changing. Wall Street is going to expect better returns because when we discuss all of this, the conclusion is that you should be able to do more with less. That’s as real as it gets at some point. By the way, that’s what you see. You see better performance, a better business performance right now. So even if you might not get disrupted, you’d better start there. For some, it might take more time, and they might still be fine.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe to bookend this section, clearly what we’re saying is organizations are going to change. Their MOs are going to change, the structures are going to change. There are elements of what we discussed before in terms of judgment that are fundamental to this. The ability that in some ways, one would say a lot of the technique of getting solutions out there, even in brainstorming or problem-solving, is going to get democratized. The algorithms are able to do that. On the other hand, having points of view and having wisdom is not necessarily democratized, necessarily by the machines. It can be facilitated, it can be more productive in achieving that level of wisdom, but wisdom still will matter at the end of the day. We’re not saying that’s out of the question. Actually, that’s going to be the asset. People who have fundamental wisdom that can come to the table and frame things. We see this even today in prompt engineering, on just creating prompts. The better your prompt is, the better the outcome is going to be, the result that you get from the algorithms. That’s not going to change, in my opinion, anytime soon. That UI interaction piece is not going to change anytime soon. Again, if you’re an organization thinking through organizational structure, culture, if you’re thinking through hiring, these are some of the elements that we think will give you an opportunity, but I would actually go one step further. On the positive side, I would say, they give you arbitrage. If you’re able to move faster than your competitors and really adapt your org faster, you’ll reap the benefits faster as well. That’s what many still say and relate to as the word innovation. That’s how innovation gets accelerated. I think there’s a huge opportunity right now for arbitrage. If you move fast, experiment, experiment on new org structures, experiment with talent, you’ll know that some of them will work well, some of them will fail miserably, so you can’t experiment on literally everything. On the other side, I think the doomsday scenario is if you don’t, if you’re on the other side and your competitor is outpacing you on trying these different organizational models, structure, hiring models, and operating models, they’ll potentially just disrupt you. They’ll do stuff that you thought you had the moat on, and lo and behold, you don’t anymore. Sometimes it comes just from org, just from injection of people with a different MRO, different operating model.Bertrand Schmitt The Human Element: Are We Underestimating It? Maybe we can move to our next section about the human elements. Are we underestimating it or are we overestimating it? The three things that are a big part of the human elements, emotion, creativity, and synthesis. Is it just soft skills, replaceable part? On the contrary, is it the durable part now that we have automated intelligence?Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I’ll start with emotion first because I think it’s probably the easiest of all the ones you’ve mentioned. Emotion is key. Many of you listening to us will know this. The way you deliver a certain message, the emotion that you have when you deliver it, just in and of itself, this could be a sentence, it’s something verbal, et cetera. Makes a difference between the person or the people on the other side actually adopting it or actually just resisting it. Emotion is critical. It’s what runs the world. Everyone talks about a bunch of things, but emotion is a currency that is still naturally human. It will be, I feel, difficult for these AI tools and platforms to recreate it fully until there’s some literally very high-definition manifestation of them as avatars or some physical manifestation of them as robots and all that stuff. It will take a while for that emotion to be manifested. Emotion, I think, is still something that we as humans have as a moat, and it’s critical. As you mentioned before, I was a strategy management consultant at McKinsey, and getting people to action is actually 80% about the delivery, communication, the emotion that you surround the project itself, more than sometimes the truth. It’s great to have the truth and to have something that is similar to the truth in terms of analysis, but in some ways, that’s not what really moves change. Change is moved by, I would argue, a significant amount of emotion and alignment on emotions.Bertrand Schmitt You could argue that’s something that most politicians have perfectly understood. If you look at most campaigns these days, everything on emotions, maybe the tagline might be one word. It’s interesting when you see from that perspective that actually it’s very little on facts, very little on all of this, but more about emotion. You could argue it’s the same for businesses in the future? That’s a fair question. I think creativity is another one that’s quite important. At the same time, it’s not so easy because I must say I’m quite amazed when I’m looking for creativity from AI, either to generate the image, to generate video, to generate audio, or to generate text. AI can be pretty creative. I still think you need to control its creativity; you need to understand what’s good, what’s bad, what’s quality, but at the same time, I can see even in creative tasks, AI can be a very strong partner. I’m talking about any creative task, like invent a name for a product, let’s brainstorm the mission for the company. AI can actually be doing a pretty impressive job. That’s the type of job where you will hire experts, where you will use some of the best people in your team to help you for days. We say, “You can do quite a lot.” It’s an interesting one because I think there is some unique human creativity, and at the same time, AI can be pretty strong at creative task as well.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I agree. In particular, if it represents benchmarking, if it represents repetition, if it represents seeing the world and then coming up with something that presents itself as creative, to be honest, it can actually outpace humans. If it’s like genuine light bulb moments of creativity, angles that haven’t been tried before, certainly not in the same way, I think humans still have the advantage. To your point, I agree. This is not a humans-win situation. On the previous one, on emotion, still, part of it is because, also on emotion, there are exchanges. You and I might be looking at each other, and from the facial expressions and the reactions, where you judge that for AI to get there, it’s going to take a long time. There’s going to be a lot of very complex algorithmic stuff put into that for AI to be able to create synthetic emotional behaviors, but creativity, I agree with you. There are a lot more nuances to it today, where AI does have significant advantages at the end of the day. Synthesis depends. Synthesis, I feel, if we’re talking about holding a bunch of messy assumptions, contextualized inputs with different layers of data adjacent to them and then trying to create and form one coherent, fully accountable point of view that you stake something on, like a decision, a company, a business unit, whatever, I think humans have the advantage. Part of it is the complexity of what we have today with generative, pre-trained transformers, today with GPTs, where the hallucination comes through, where it’s really more statistical analysis. Over time, maybe synthesis will be a forte for AI. Right now, I think we still have that ability to really be the ultimate decision-makers and judge-makers and have that wisdom put at the table to make those decisions. Honestly, models are very good on balancing both sides, so ended up, as we say in Portuguese, neither fish nor meat. It’s to balance both sides’ answers. That’s not helpful in most cases. When you’re in a difficult position where, for example, the future of a company, company is almost dying, what do you do? I’m not sure your AI algorithms that are going to give you a great solution. Because it will give you a median or average solution, which likely will lead you to a median or average outcome, which in this case would be failure. Again, on synthesis, there are some areas of advantage for human beings. If you are looking for clearly synthesized perspectives on certain elements that are maybe less edge-focused, they’re more than the normal part of the normal distribution, then probably AI agents are brilliant at that. All the tools we have today are pretty good at that, and I think they’ll just get better over time. That’s how I see synthesis.Bertrand Schmitt I think a lot of improvements will come with a better fine-tuning of agents to what’s special about your company. Because if you just take a general agent, there is only so much. It can understand your industry, your company, and your way of working. I think that part of making sure your agents are finely trained, finely tuned on your own business, so that they can give you a really well-calibrated feedback, will have a lot of importance.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think that’s absolutely spot on. Maybe to end it, what is definitely different about humanity? Definitely, emotion, as we discussed, some pieces of synthesis. Creativity, maybe the light bulb creativity, not the more repeatable creativity, the one that you can put and encapsulate into processes in some ways. There are elements of us being physical, which robots can’t still recreate. That’s definitely an advantage. The embodied, we’re embodied. That’s obviously a huge advantage. With that also comes advantages because we have to interpret each other, and we have to see the complexities in physicality that land to it. Is human and the human element categorical difference? If we’re having a more philosophical discussion around this, I think it is. I think it will be for at least the foreseeable future and maybe decades to come, even in whatever scenarios we’ll discuss, which is our next section, scenarios.Bertrand Schmitt I would say projecting beyond 10 years is always pretty hard on this because, again, some of the improvements we are talking about we can imagine based on how it has evolved, but at the same time, there will be disruptions in AI. Stuff that we take for granted in terms of weakness, especially, might not be there in a few years from now. Either because it has been solved through brute force or because the field will have made significant change and improvements and discoveries, making some of our points moot. If we talk about embodiment, obviously, robots are coming. How fast, how cheap? That will be a big question. Right now, they’re not very smart. They’re usually very specialized. The more we move to a more general form factor, humanoid form factor, the more I think it will change. Also, another piece of the puzzle is that we have the assumption of agents having trouble to convince humans and stuff. At some point, we keep assuming that humans in the loop. If we’re talking about agents convincing another agent, not having embodiment might be even more efficient. That will be another perspective. Going forward, we will have not just agents we control who are doing a job and scanning the job, but agents truly interacting with other agents. You have agents controlled by one person, one team in your company, working either together or maybe not confrontationally, but trying to think and having different perspectives with another agent, controlled by other teams. I don’t think we have seen much of that now. We have seen mostly agents that are controlled by one team doing one job in one direction. Not multiple teams agents working together, or against or in parallel with another team agent. I think we will see some interesting things coming out of that.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Scenarios Switching to scenarios, we love our two-by-twos. We haven’t done one in a while. This time it’s a two by two. We have four scenarios. I think on one axis, we would have potentially the capabilities of AI. One side would be more incremental. The other side would be the extreme full AGI. I’ll define it in a bit so that we can at least have a little bit of a definitional view on what the AGI is. Then the other axis would be how gains are distributed, concentrated versus broad. Obviously, if they’re very concentrated, it’s more unequal. It only goes to a few companies, a few people, a few individuals. If it’s broad, it’s much more dispersed through society, et cetera. AGI, just to try to define it, the formal definition of it is that it’s a hypothetical AI that matches or exceeds human capabilities across virtually all cognitive and practical tasks. In some ways, AGI can learn, reason, and adapt to novel situations across any domain. Then there are several mutations on this, but there’s one notion, or rather, there are three notions that normally are across a lot of these definitions. One is generalization, ability to seamlessly transfer knowledge from one domain to another without needing retraining, which is a very impressive skill that we humans still seemingly have. Autonomy in agency, the capacity to operate independently, set goals, plan and execute complex tasks. I think AI is their issue with agents to a lot of that extent. Then, last but not least, human parity, performing economically valuable work at or above the level of a typical human knowledge worker. If you listen to one of our last episodes, you’ll realize that Bertrand and I have slightly different views on AGI, and if it’s already here or not. I think, definitionally, maybe we have slightly different views on what the definition actually is. For me, maybe AGI is a little bit more what some would call superintelligence and generalized superintelligence. Strict to census, Bertrand is more connecting to AGI as in its prime definition. It behaves as well or better than a human thing. Maybe that’s what’s leading us to differences on whether AGI has arrived or not.Bertrand Schmitt Personally, I will have a different scale where I will put AGI, as you just said, in some ways, relatively similar in performance to your average human being. On top of it, it’s able to touch different domains that most humans are not able to do. Usually, there is some level of specializations where in AI, it can be more generic. I will put ASI, Artificial Superintelligence, as clearly the step beyond. Something that, on any dimension you pick, it’s able to beat a human expert. From my perspective, I think we already discussed that, but we are at AGI already. We have AI that can do way better, not just way better, but at least as well as humans on many topics, sometimes better. Yes, there are some topics that are not for AI yet. Embodiment, for instance, to flock with your humanoid robot in 2026. For me, we are partially there or fully there in AGI. If we take the stricter definition, ASI, we are definitely not there, but my guess is that it’s moving quite fast. We might be there in a few years from now. I don’t think we are talking about multi-decades. It’s 5 years, maybe 10. Of course, there are questions because people will say, for instance, “Hey, how do you become truly super-intelligent when all your training is based on human data?” That’s not an easy one because how do you train on that? To be way better, not just a bit better, but way better. Maybe I’m going on a tangent, but some are looking at AI learning from AI, AI being taught from AI, AI fighting with AI, AI challenging AI. The same way we saw this AlphaGo moment where AI was not trained anymore, like in chess with human moves, but has been trained to play against itself. That’s when it reached superintelligence in Go. It reached superintelligence by playing against itself and basically letting go of that human baggage, if you want, and going to the next level. What I found interesting in that, actually, first, that’s what happened, but two, there was some analysis that the average level of Go players and the top players went up after AlphaGo because AlphaGo, in a way, opened doors that humans didn’t believe were open in front of them, or they didn’t see them. They didn’t see these doors, so they didn’t bother to open them. AI opened new doors, but interestingly enough, humans improved after that, thanks to AI. You see what I mean? It was an interesting, okay, that self-learning from AI was the way to go beyond the current level of human knowledge and human expertise, but at the same time, humans were able to follow up. It was not like suddenly humans are totally useless crap. They improved. Did they still beat AI? Maybe not, but it was definitely also helpful.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Back to our scenarios. We’re going to take the definitional extreme just for argument’s sake for scenarios. We’re going to talk about maybe what you were saying, ASI rather than full AGI, but like ASI. Again, artificial superintelligence as the extreme on the one hand. Let me talk about maybe the first scenario that would come to mind. Maybe we can call it the plateau scenario. All of this was great, but it was all smoke and mirrors. They were great at some cognition stuff. They’re a great tool. At some point, they’re going to hit a wall. Hallucinations are never going to be a thing of the past. We can’t fully trust them on really hardcore stuff. We’ll gain productivity enhancements. We’ll keep gaining those productivity enhancements, but at some point in time, we really won’t reach ASI. We really will be stuck with what we have. It’s a little bit like we get the next big thing, the next big spreadsheet, the next big internet, but it’s not going to change the whole world beyond just productivity, enhancements, and amazing tools that we have available to us that makes us much better. In that scenario, the winners will continue being fast adopters, probably small and medium businesses, because there won’t be a push for maximum speed either, so they’ll catch up at some point. Then AI native companies will be better companies than other companies, but not necessarily overall disruptors across the board. It’s not necessarily a new species of companies. It’s just companies that are a little bit better at doing stuff, which we also saw during the internet phenomenon and that first big push forward and then bubble, where we had some companies that were fundamentally different on how they operated. It took us another couple of decades for companies to be more and more digitally native along the way. Basically interesting, but it’s boring. It’s like, cool, we got tools, we got promised the world. What are the implications? All these companies that are worth trillions and trillions of dollars are not worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Because at some point we’ll face competition, commoditization. It will just be tools and platforms. They will not unlock that next stage. Therefore, this will have been a bubble, and likely it would be a hard landing to that bubble. That’s the implication.Bertrand Schmitt I would just say that, yes, I agree with you, but I would just say overall, even if it stopped today in terms of quality improvement, speed or stuff, or it barely improves, I still think we will have 10 years of madness just to leverage everything that we have today.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Understood, Bertrand. This is a scenario. I understand, but maybe we’re going to hit a wall, and we’re going to hit that wall next year, or we’re going to hit that wall in 2 years or whatever.Bertrand Schmitt Possibly. I’m just saying we still have 10 years of goodness from that big push in AI we experienced the past few years.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Absolutely. Agreed, but it’s boring.Bertrand Schmitt It’s boring. It’s a plateau.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro It’s a plateau. The second one is more of something that we have AI, but humans in the loop are going to be critical along the way. The judgment work that we described earlier in the episode is going to be critical to everything that happens. It’s, I would call it the augmentation scenario. The AI will be a great augmentation tool for humans, but humans will never really quite stop being in the loop. Some of the gains that AI has are broadly distributed in society and in the startup, big corporation and small medium business world. Everyone will have access to them. We humans, are still very important. We have all these augmentation things, and AI is mostly benign. There will be a couple of issues, but honestly, at the end of the day, we’re just better. We’re better, faster, more data-driven, more factually current. We’re doing stuff faster, but humans

Bestie!! If you live for the story times, the dating fails, the unbelievable love stories, and the kind of encouragement that leaves you feeling hopeful, this episode is for you! First, I'm bringing you the update you've all been waiting for! Remember our girly who was DMing me in real time after the guy she met on a dating app suddenly ghosted her, only for her to discover he had flown to Korea, where his ex-girlfriend lives? Well… the story didn't end there. She sent us the rest of what happened, and trust me, it's TEA…Then, I'm sharing one of the most unbelievable, movie-worthy love stories I've ever heard. It's the kind of story that MAKES you believe in fairytales!! You're going to FLIPPPPP.And finally, we're having one of my favorite conversations yet about finding JOY in the middle of life's hardest seasons. If you've been struggling to let go of a relationship, a situation, or a version of your life that isn't serving you anymore, I hope this episode reminds you that sometimes the hardest goodbyes are exactly what make room for the life, and the love, you've been praying for.Whether you're healing from heartbreak, waiting for your person, or just need a little reminder that your story isn't over yet, I hope this episode leaves you feeling encouraged.  Pick up bestie I'm calling!!!

BEEF Let's start with some really good news. For the first time since 2018 the US cattle herd increased by 200K head to 94.2 million head, this however is not the start of beef herd building we've been looking for. The increases are in dairy cows, the beef herd actually declined 200K head to 28.5 million head. I do see some signs of heifer retention with ranchers reserving additional head for breeding. I'm still taking this as a good sign. Additional good news: Our southern border will open to Mexican livestock with one port opening August 24 in Arizona. This entry will probably only be about 3,000 head per week, but we will take the progress. We've gone a week with no new New World screw worm cases, so let's keep the momentum going. Onto the current beef market and we continue to move lower finishing July, and I'd expect the early part of August will continue the decline.  There is an exception as ribeyes and tenderloins seem to have done their summer declines; while the rest of the market softens, they have some demand behind them to keep from further declines. Declines from last week continue though they are getting smaller, and I do think we'll see a bottom to this current market in the next couple weeks. Thin meats, rounds and chucks all moving lower, even grinds, which I almost thought invincible to market declines, are moving lower. I'd still stay ahead of your needs but as this market declines there will be opportunities.  POULTRY Chicken market is down for next week. Boneless skinless randoms, tenders and even wings are all moving lower. This strong production we've seen all year seems to finally be catching up the producers lowering prices to keep things moving. I thought we'd see a minor increase but we're going the other way. Makes chicken a great value this summer. On the avian flu beat – two weeks, no new cases. We'll take that all day long.  GRAINS Last week had all the grain markets moving higher, even corn. Well, that was last week. This week, except for wheat being affected by international unrest and domestic crop stress, corn and soy are moving back down. This week's corn closed at $4.69 down from last week $4.84. Soy closed $11.71 down from $12.26 last week. Soy oil should move lower over the next couple weeks.  PORK Pork bellies are up again this week, closing today at $159 over last week's close of $156. While I do think we have a couple more weeks to go, I think we've got a week or two more before declining again heading into fall. Right now, it's all moving higher. Bellies are about the only thing pushing higher and pork, butts, ribs and loins, steady to down slightly. DAIRY The recent run up on the CME for the block and the barrel seems to have run out of steam. Through Thursday's close block is down 8, barrel is down 5 and butter continues lower down 11. Plenty of raw material available and we're seeing a slowdown heading into August. Savalfoods.com | Find us on Social Media: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn

Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of Pardalote Consulting, joins to discuss their new grant-funded study of blade erosion and heat fatigue in Australia. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall 2025: Well, Rosemary, welcome back to the show.  Rosemary Barnes: Thanks, Allen. Great to be here. For, it’s been a while since we did one of these one-on-one episodes, like a, yeah, a proper, proper guest.  Allen Hall 2025: Well, this is kind of a celebratory episode because your company, Pardalote Consulting, has been awarded, uh, some funding from the Australian Capital Territory’s government for the Energy Innovation Fund. Rosemary Barnes: It’s a really good program that the ACT government has to try and get energy innovation In the state. It’s not a state actually, it’s technically a territory. Little more than just Canberra, the city. Uh, but there are actually quite a few, like, really interesting energy-related companies here, partly ’cause of the, the fund I think helps, but also just tracing back like, [00:01:00] uh, y- you know, in the 20-teens, Australia had a really conservative government that hated renewable energy, and the ACT government had a commitment at that time to 100%, um, 100% renewable electricity for the, the government. And that was one of the only programs that was resulting in a lot of, um, you know, clean energy projects being built, and one of the conditions that they put on that, uh, for people that would win PPAs with the ACT was that you had to have your headquarters in Canberra. So we’ve actually got quite a few, quite a few really cool, innovative companies out of here. Um, like Neoen’s headquarters here. Windlab, uh, yeah, was, was founded here and still has a lot of people here. Pardalote obviously, and you know, a few other companies as well. So despite it being a small city of like, I don’t know, maybe it’s up to 400,000 or something people by now, um, yeah, there is actually quite a lot going on here for energy. Allen Hall 2025: And the Energy Innovation Fund is funded by the wind and solar operators in the area, and your particular [00:02:00] effort has really global consequences. You’re focusing on two areas involving how wind turbines survive Australia, but more, uh, of relevance is to just really tough conditions which exist not just in Australia but around the world. What two areas are you going to focus on?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So the two focus areas are leading edge erosion and high temperature fatigue, which we can probably get into the definitions of those in a minute. But basically my, um– what led me to wanna have a project like this was that when I moved back to Australia in 2021, I– and I started working in O&M, uh, I noticed that the wind turbines that I would look at, the blades that I would look at here behaved really differently to the ones that I worked with overseas. You know, es- especially with leading edge erosion, like often I would be doing a condition assessment of a, you know, a new wind farm. Um, might only have been operating for, you know, two years. That’s a pretty common time for people to get in and do a condition assessment [00:03:00] because their warranty period is about to end and they wanna, you know, make sure that everything is okay. Um, and I would just notice that often, like 90, 100% of blades would already have bad erosion after just a couple of years, which is super-duper fast. And then there are some tools available to check, um, like what kind of erosion are you likely to experience on your site. Like is it a higher severity erosion site or a, a low severity one? Um, and you basically, you know, the status quo globally is to just look at the annual rainfall, um, and the tip speed. And if you’ve got, you know, high for both of those, that’s a bad erosion site. And if you’ve got low for both of those, it’s a, a low erosion site. But when I plotted out the wind farms that I knew had really bad erosion problems onto, you know, a chart with those two axes, I just saw a random distribution of dots. You know? Like, this was not– uh, this had no predictive value for Australian wind farms. And so that led me to believe that, okay, um, you know, things are a bit [00:04:00] different here. Makes sense, you know, most of the knowledge that we have about how wind turbines operate, it’s been developed and validated mostly in Northern Europe. You know? Like it’s, it’s Denmark and the surrounding countries that had, like, the bulk of the early wind energy. First few decades of knowledge were, you know, were mostly there. Of course, there were some other, um, places that had wind turbines, but, you know, most of the The OEMs have been operating for decades, came from Denmark. And I know when I lived in Denmark, the rain there is very different to the rain in Australia. So in Denmark, it’s basically always raining, right? Like, it’s just… Like, even if it’s not raining, you’re still gonna get wet when you go outside ’cause it’s just, like, the air has this just amazing ability to just hold onto moisture. Um, but it’s very, very gentle. But, you know, over an entire year of most days having gentle rain, that adds up to a lot. Whereas in Australia, and especially if you go, like, north to Queensland, it rarely rains. It’s mostly just dry, and when it [00:05:00] does rain, it’s like a tap turns on, and I, I swear you will get bruised from the rain droplets hitting your skin. You know, they just have so much energy in them. So I think that that i- you know, when you look at just the overall rainfall, you really hide something important about how erosion, um, can progress. Then, um, there’s other places in Australia that have very different characteristics. Again, they don’t have that kind of really intense rain but, you know, some of those sites are also having really bad erosion. And so it just occurred to me, I did a lot of research, you know, into what’s going on and, you know, the academics are studying erosion a whole lot, and they’ve got, you know, a lot of standardized tests and, you know, products are developed according to these standardized tests. But the standardized tests don’t actually resemble reality, and especially they don’t resemble reality in Australia. And so my client started asking me, “Okay, you know, the products that we have are, are terrible. We have to replace them every couple of years. It’s, um, causing big problems with also [00:06:00] the amount of energy that you’re losing.” One of the types of, um, leading-edge erosion or leading-edge problems that we have in Australia is that the, the coatings tend to peel off and make these, like, big flakes which will just massively disrupt the airflow, can cause y- you know, at least a few percent AEP loss, and maybe up to five. And even worse than the AEP loss is the revenue loss because it affects it most at, you know, lower wind speeds. Um, you get a bigger hit than at rated wind speeds. So there’s a variety of problems going on with leading edges in Australia, which mean that I, I basically… My clients would ask, “What product should we put on to prevent having to, you know, constantly replace this?” ‘Cause it costs, like- you know, 30, $40,000 per turbine to replace the protection, not to mention, you know, one or two days of downtime. It’s expensive, and I basically, I didn’t have a good answer for them. What, what product should they put on? I don’t know. No, we, we don’t know. One, we don’t know what the [00:07:00] specific, um, characteristics are that are… what the specific local environment, local conditions are that are accelerating leading-edge erosion, one. And two, all of the products tend to be tested around this, you know, there’s this protocol that academics have come up with, and they’ve kind of like assumed that this is representative of how things behave in the field, and it’s– I don’t think it’s particularly true anyway, but it’s especially not true in Australia. There are a few companies that are testing to different standards. Um, definitely applaud them. But without knowing wha- what are the conditions truly like in Australia, uh, it’s really hard to advise, like, what kind of tests should you be demanding from a product you’re considering to be sure that you’re gonna put it on and not gonna be replacing it again in two years. Allen Hall 2025: Because that’s really the trouble in Australia is when you get offered products They have been tested generally in somewhere in Europe and maybe in the United States, and then when they go to [00:08:00] Australia, it’s really unknown as to how those products will do, which is a huge risk for the Australian wind market as to what to choose, how to choose, is it– what’s real in terms of test data. So now you’re gonna go out and do what? Are you gonna put sensors out by the wind farms? Are you gonna try to do more of a statistical summary of the actual environment around wind farms using existing data? What’s the approach here?  Rosemary Barnes: It’s all of the above, but the part that is supported by the grant is that we’re gonna have enough money to be able to buy some scientific-grade sensors and put them on, um, a sample of Australian wind farms. So we’re gonna be looking at a lot more characteristics about the rain than simply is it raining now, you know, how many millimeters per hour. We’re also gonna be investigating, you know, every kind of characteristic of, of that, um, of that rain, um, including, yeah, like the, the energy that’s in it, for example. A, a bunch of stuff. I won’t get into every single [00:09:00] parameter. Um, and you know, other things as well, like measuring UV, solar radiation, um, particles, because, you know, in Australia we have a lot of dirt roads, which I know is very common in wind farms around the world, but Australian dirt roa- roads are always dry and dusty, like 99% of the time, so that’s one of the things that y- you know, maybe that’s causing a difference. Um, so basically putting sensors all over a bunch of wind turbines and then monitoring the erosion, um, a combination of some real-time monitoring and also looking at inspection, um, drone inspection images annually. We also have a- an option where we’ll just be using SCADA data and inspection images, so that’s like a lower cost version where we can combine that with the findings from the scientific-grade instrumented turbines to build up a picture of what types of conditions lead to accelerated erosion.[00:10:00] Allen Hall 2025: So the SCADA data will, will have some information inside of it, you think, that, uh, will correlate to the weather outside?  Rosemary Barnes: It has some Additionally, we can look up, um, you know, just the weather data, like how many millimeters fell during which 15-minute interval throughout the day, what was the temperature. SCADA will tell us also what the temperature was, um, what the speed of the turbine was, so you can calculate the tip speed, ’cause that’s an important thing. Um, yeah, so it’s, it’s two, it’s two tiers of data collection. The scientific grade sensors, as you can imagine, are, are really expensive and y- you know, the, the grant project has contributed a, a lot of funding, um, but it’s not enough to put those, yeah, put a little mini lab on top of every turbine across Australia, obviously. So that we’re using s- doing selectively, and then we can increase the number of wind farms that are included in the study by just doing this, um, cheaper version of the SCADA [00:11:00] plus, uh, weather data that’s available.  Allen Hall 2025: So what are some of the risks on the temperature side for all the high-temperature regions of Australia that have wind turbines? Clearly it’s generally warmer in Australia than it is in, in Scandinavia and Northern Europe. What kind of temperatures are we talking about on the ground?  Rosemary Barnes: Uh, well, temperatures here can get pretty close to 50 degrees. Um, and if you’ve ever been inside a wind turbine blade on a, even a mildly hot day, you’ll know that the temperature inside a wind turbine, and especially inside the blade, is much hotter than what it is, uh, what the ambient temperature is. So this project is one– I’ve actually been talking about this project for, yeah, like over 10 years now. Ever since I started, I moved to Denmark, started working for a wind turbine manufacturer, I had done– I had just finished doing my PhD on composite materials, structural design, and analysis. So, um, yeah, very, very familiar with, [00:12:00] you know, how composite materials work and, in particular, the effect that temperature has on them. I mean, like most materials, when composites get warmer, they get softer, and that is really important for a w- a wind turbine blade. You know, if it gets, um, less stiff, then you’re gonna get a lot more strain, and that is going to affect your fatigue behavior. Y- you know, fatigue is just the application of a little bit of, a small amount of strain. It’s not gonna cause damage, but when you apply it millions, tens of millions of times, like you do in a, o- over a wind turbine’s operate, um, operating lifetime, then that builds up. And, you know, wind turbine blades are a very fatigue-driven design. Um, it’s one of the most important things to consider when you’re designing a wind turbine blade. And so when I got to Denmark and I learned how materials are qualified and how the qualification is treated in the certification process, I just realized it’s not particularly conservative, and also that some of the assumptions that are made that [00:13:00] wo- again, they worked really well in more moderate climates where wind turbines have had most of their developmental history. You know, it’s not such a big deal there if you test at room temperature. Your wind turbine blade is spending most of its operating lifetime at room temperature or below. It’s, it’s rarely, you know, above 30 degrees in Denmark and most of Northern Europe and, you know, also a lot of, um, a lot of America, not, not all of it But, um, in Australia it has just extended periods above that temperature and even exceeding the temperature where, you know, wind turbines have an operating limit and after that they will shut down. But the operating limits are based on ambient temperature. It’s not based on what’s the temperature in the laminate, which is what really matters for blade lifetime. So anyway, I’ve been obsessed, like honestly obsessed about this issue for 10 years. Talked about it with anybody who would listen . But then when I started working in O&M in [00:14:00] Australia and I started seeing some wind farms with an abnormal number of cracks early… again, early in their lifetime, you know, I think one of the wind farms I was looking at was maybe three years old or four at the time. I think it was three actually, and had a lot of cracks, and I looked at a few years in a row and it was more and more cracks every year and I’m like, “Oof, this really looks like end of life fatigue behavior.” A- actually it’s not, y- you know, there’s this concept of a bathtub curve where, um, when you’re looking at failures in components, in, in anything, not just in, um, wind turbine blades, but you know, like you’d start– it’s called a bathtub because, you know, when it starts operating, you’ll get quite a lot of failures. Anything big, any manufacturing defects or anything are gonna cause failures quite fast, and that kind of drops off over time as all of those, uh, get addressed. And then you have, you know, the bulk of your operating life, it’s like pretty low level, pretty, pretty constant for a long time and then as you get towards the end of the [00:15:00] life, you start to see failure rates rise up again. That’s your fatigue failures, your end of life fatigue failures. And so when I saw the same types of cracks more and more each year, I’m like, “This looks like, you know, the foot end of the bathtub, not the head end.” And, uh, it made me worried and I’ve now seen that across a few wind farms in Australia at, um, hotter places. There’s a few blade types that are more prone to it than others, but at this point it’s still a suspicion that that’s what’s going on. I mean, a suspicion backed by a lot of, a lot of theory and knowledge of how the certification process works. But this project now we’ve got some funding to actually go put some sensors onto wind turbines, actually learn what the temperatures are in the blades throughout the whole laminate, um, not just the, you know, on the outside surface or not just the ambient temperature, but actually, you know, develop a temperature gradient across the whole, um, the whole laminate in the blade shell. Um, and [00:16:00] then we’re going to be doing a bunch of modeling basically to look at what is the effect of these different temperatures that blades are really seeing and how much would we expect to… that to decrease a lifetime. And then we should also be able to say, you know, if you have this issue in your wind farm, you might be able to change your operation a little bit and extend your lifetime a lot. Because this one, it’s real– like, in contrast to leading edge erosion, leading edge erosion is just, it’s, you know, every wind turbine has it to a certain extent, and it, it’s always there, but it’s a relatively minor cost to fix it. You know, like it sounds like a lot, like 30, $40,000 per wind turbine, but, um, you know, compared to if you’ve got to replace every blade across your fleet because they’re all, you know, at the end of their life after five years, you know, that’s obviously shocking. And, you know, that’s a bad example, but even in a y- you know, like a less extreme example, maybe [00:17:00] after 15 years you have to do a, you know, a f- a fleet-wide campaign to strengthen blades or something. It’s, you know, m- many millions of dollars for that, and so it c- could make sense to be able to learn, okay, what, what hours of operation should we be avoiding? Additionally, because when it’s super-duper hot in Australia, usually you’ve got heaps of solar power and the electricity price is not that high. So I, I think that there– and I don’t, obviously, before we’ve done the project, I don’t know what the threshold is. But in both cases, we will be aiming to improve the knowledge of how you can operate to avoid these periods of accelerated damage. Allen Hall 2025: Do you think you’re seeing more fatigue-like damage due to the blades operating when it’s hot or not operating when it’s hot, with maybe less airflow around the blade and maybe less cooling going on is just a temperature soak At rest? [00:18:00] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s interesting because the temperature is higher if it’s not rotating, um, because you get a whole lot of, um, convective heat, heat transfer when the turbine is operating. So your temperatures are not gonna get as hot when operating as when they’re standing still. However, if it’s standing still, they’re only very lightly loaded. Like, yes, they’re gonna get, um, blown by, by gusts and, um, have a little bit of bending, but it’s, it’s very, very small compared to, uh, if it is y- you know, operational loads. Uh, assuming that you’re not in the middle of a s- a storm. But yeah, a storm probably doesn’t come with 50 degrees temperatures.  Allen Hall 2025: And what part of the blade is susceptible to these higher temperatures? Is it the resin? Is it the fiberglass or carbon fiber? Or is it the, the glue, the bond joints? What part are you focused on? Rosemary Barnes: The resin is the main part that I’m focused on. It gl- it could be an issue for glue too, actually. I haven’t even looked into what the, um, yeah, temperature assumptions are with, with glue, with [00:19:00] bond lines. But the failures that I’m seeing in the field are not, are not bond line issues. It’s, it’s, um, a laminate problem. Allen Hall 2025: What about balsa and foam inside of the blade? Are they affected by the temperatures or are they pretty temperature stable?  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think they’re affected at these kinds of temperatures, no. They, they don’t really do much actually. The, the core materials, like it, it is very important that they’re, that they’re there, but their job is really to keep the fiberglass separated from its- itself to make it stiffer. So, um, yeah, that’s, that’s unlikely to be a, a major source of problems.  Allen Hall 2025: So this study is gonna work over about three years, and you have a number of wind farms that are participating. Are you looking for more wind farms to participate in Australia?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we can, um, have as many as, as people want to join. We’ve got quite a good selection so far. Definitely can always welcome more. A, a bit limited in how many can get the really, um, good sensor [00:20:00]package, because the grant funding is a, you know, a certain amount, and that’s paying the bulk of those sensors. So, um, those spots are limited. So if anybody wants to really zone in on what is specifically causing erosion on their site, you know, if you know that you have got leading edge protection that is not good enough and you have to replace it soon, but you don’t know what to replace it with, then, you know, that would be the kind of wind farm that might want to consider, yeah, joining this and, um, you know, getting these sensors on their, um… We’re putting them on top of the nacelles, most of them. Um, yeah, so that would be a good match then. Um, and then, yeah, for the ones that are doing the SCADA data and, um, weather data- There’s not such a, a hard limit on how many we can have join like that. So yeah, we can have more, more like that.  Allen Hall 2025: In the temperature fatigue effort, i- is that still looking for participants or are there particular wind turbine types or manufacturers that you’re [00:21:00] looking for to participate? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think, um, I, I mean yes, we can have more of those. That’s a simpler, a, a simpler issue as well. The sensors are not so expensive and, um, it’s, yeah, it’s a, it’s a simpler project to join that one. We only need, you know, a couple of turbines per site, so it won’t be such a, uh, an involved process to get everything up on into the turbines. And in terms of who might like to join that, I would say anybody that is in a really hot area where, you know, where they see a lot of days over 30 degrees, and if they see any days, you know, getting into the high 40s, then I would say that that’s worthwhile. Or even I have seen this issue in some milder sites, um, yeah, depending on the, on the blade type as well. It is more common with polyester resins. They have a, a lower op- uh, maximum operating temperature than epoxy resins. But then also just anybody that has noticed just, hey, [00:22:00] we’ve got a lot of cracks, and it seems like we’re getting more and more cracks every year, which to be honest, can be hard to keep track of if you’re… If you’ve got a full service agreement, uh, you know, an OEM managing your wind farm The early signs of this are gonna be category one and category two cracks. They’re not in exactly the same location. It’s, you know, it’s a tricky one. Normally, if you’re looking at a serial issue, then you’re going to have, uh, well, you know, your ideal pattern for a serial issue is the exact same thing happening over and over again. And so it is harder to pull this out. It also really would be very rare for it to be happening in the first two years or three years, whatever your serial defect liability period is. So it’s quite hard. But, um, another group of wind farms that might like to consider it is if you know that in, you know, a certain number of years you have to renegotiate your service agreement or, you know, it ends and you might have to take over yourself, then this’ll be a really good way for you to [00:23:00] understand, you know, have I got a ticking time bomb here? Um, because it’s not something that you’re gonna be aware of if you haven’t been, you know, doing some really, really in-depth shadow, shadow monitoring of your blades, you know, running your own inspections and looking at every single damage, not just category three, four, five, but lower ones. So yeah, I mean, there’s a, a wide variety of people that, that could be interested in joining. Allen Hall 2025: Are you expecting a number of manufacturers that make leading-edge protection or involved in resin creation, some– there’s a number of resin companies and a variety of resins that are used globally, sort of interchangeably at times. Are you expecting some of those companies to participate in this effort just to learn about the Australian environment? Rosemary Barnes: I think it would be a good opportunity to test out some products and see how they behave in the Australian context. I think that that would be a really good selling point, but I, I have to say that most of the companies doing that sort of thing that wanna enter Australia, they don’t [00:24:00] really consider… Like, from the perspective of wind farm owners in Australia, if you can’t show us wind farms in Australia where this has worked and, you know, show us a before or after, you know, the old LEP lasted Two years and our LEP is going on four years now with no damage. It, you know, unless you’ve got a before and after like that, you can tell us however many turbines that you’ve got installed around the world, but, um, we don’t consider it validated, y- you know? It’s not validated for Australian conditions yet. And I do have this same discussion over and over again with, you know, not just leading edge protection, but all kinds of, um, you know, manufacturers of whatever doodads that you put on to improve a, a wind turbine. It’s so different to Australia. Things break so fast. And I’m talking everything, you know, like vortex generators fall off and, um, yeah, like, uh, you know, bits of lightning protection systems fall off, seals just [00:25:00] crumble and disintegrate. Um, and it, you know, we’re very wary of, of new products. So I, I do– I mean, I’m thinking of it more from my client’s point of view than from the product manufacturer’s point of view. But one thing that I wanna get out of this pro- project is to be able to answer one of the most common questions that I get is, which is, what leading edge protection should I be putting on my turbine? And for now, I don’t know. I, I know a range of products that don’t work in Australia, and not much more than that. So, um, yeah. And it’s also, you know, Australia’s a very varied place with lots of different kinds of climate too. So it’s not gonna be like, you know, the product that works in Queensland is the same one that’s gonna work in Tasmania, which is the same one that’s gonna work in Western Australia. You know, um, so it, this project is gonna really pull out what are the site specific issues you’ve got at your site and what kinds of, um, you know, tests would we need to see a product um, perform in order to know that this [00:26:00] is gonna last on your site. Allen Hall 2025: W- what is the outcome of this project or these two projects? Are they gonna be reports or, uh, a, a continual monitoring system that’s designed for the Australian environment? How do you see this going?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, so one part of it is, um, developing a way to identify periods of accelerated damage and to know not to operate during that time. So we call it protective operation. Uh, so that would, uh, help you if, yeah, you’re trying to extend the life of something or increase the amount of time before you have to repair, then y- you know, that would be useful to have that knowledge. And it will be as simple as just an alert saying, “Hey, accelerated damage conditions. Consider, you know, if you wanna keep on operating.” And, you know, if the price of electricity is super high at that time, they may want to push through, and if it’s low, they probably won’t want to. So that’s one thing. Um, especially, you know, as wind turbines get to their, near the end of their life. I’ve got some clients whose wind farms only have, you know, [00:27:00] maybe five years operation left. They just simply don’t wanna repair their leading edge protection again. They just, they, they don’t wanna do that. So they would be happy to, you know, reduce operation a bit and have their turbine limp through to the end of the period. Y- you know, you want everything to wear out at once. You don’t want brand-new leading edge protection on a turbine that’s going to come down in a couple of years. Um, so, you know, that’s, that’s one part of it. And then the other thing is, you know, turbines earlier in their lifetime, how can we optimize the maintenance schedule with leading edge erosion? Um, so, you know, like it’s a lot cheaper to, uh, replace the LEP if you get– catch it early, but then you don’t wanna be catching it too early and replacing it, you know, constantly when you, you don’t need to. So, um, yeah, it, this, having this knowledge will enable a site-by-site operations and maintenance strategy with respect to leading edge protection. We also have some sites who are having trouble. They’ve got a full service agreement, and the OEM is [00:28:00] responsible for, um, doing the leading edge erosion repairs and protection replacement, but the owner is on the hook for paying for it. At the other end, we’ve got people with full service agreements where technically the, um, manufacturer is supposed to be doing the leading edge protection and paying for it, but they argue about what, when does it need to be done. Because, you know, um, the operator might think if there’s no structural risk, then we don’t need to be replacing it. And in the meantime, you’ve got turbines spinning around for years and years and years with, you know, these huge flakes of leading edge protection s- you know, causing the flow at the tip of the turbine to, to detach and to stall, and horrible aerodynamics, huge losses in power generation and revenue. And they’re having a big fight about, you know, is this necessary to do or not? And then, you know, they’re just gonna put the exact same product on again ’cause the [00:29:00] OEMs are re- all really, really wedded to their own particular brand. It’s like, “Well, last time we had this product and it was factory applied, it lasted one year before it s- it was worse than, you know, if it wasn’t there at all. Uh, we don’t really want you to put that one on again.” And so, you know, having the information that they need to be able to, you know, really bring data to these discussions and, you know, makes a, yeah, data not drama. That’s a, a good approach I think, um, for any kind of negotiation and especially in the case of leading edge erosion. And then for the high temperature fatigue part of the problem, aside from, you know, just wanting to know are your blades aging, should you be looking at remediation action or changing the operation, the other really big key thing is, uh, you might need to have a fight with y- your OEM about if this turbine has been designed and operated correctly. And so then having the data from this, um, project is going to give you the information that you need to come into that [00:30:00] argument with, again, the data not the drama. Um, and to, you know, in- increase your chances of succeeding in that kind of really tricky negotiation.  Allen Hall 2025: So if you’re an OEM or a manufacturer of equipment, an ISP, an operator, pretty much all aspects of wind operations, you probably ought to be getting a hold of Pardalote Consulting and Rosemary to talk about the opportunity to participate in this study. How do people get ahold of you to, to do that?  Rosemary Barnes: People can go to our website, pardaloteconsulting.com, and get in touch via the contact form there, or you can, uh, look me up on LinkedIn, Rosemary Barnes. That’s probably the easiest, fastest way to get ahold of me personally.  Allen Hall 2025: Well, Rosemary, congratulations on the Energy Innovation Fund Awards and the new three-year effort. If you are interested in participating with Pardalote Consulting and working with Rosemary and her team [00:31:00] in Australia, reach out to her on LinkedIn and get that process started, because this report and the data from all this analysis that’ll happen over the next couple of years will be important to the wind industry. So you need to spend some time and get ahold of Rosemary and get this process started now. So Rosemary, congratulations. Uh, thanks for being back on the podcast, and looking forward to, uh, the next couple of years. It sh- should be exciting.  Rosemary Barnes: Thanks so much, Allen.

Topics covered in this episode: Some more things about Django I've been enjoying Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? Where Did All Your AI Tokens Go? AgentsView to the rescue! Careful with phishing all Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Consulting from Six Feet Up Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Calvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Show: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Calvin #1: Some more things about Django I've been enjoying Julia Evans is learning "2010-style" web dev (Django + SQL + server-rendered HTML) after years of Go backends and JS-heavy frontends Query builders: likes defining custom QuerySet classes with chainable filter methods (.approved().future().with_tags()) — more readable than raw SQL Template filters: highlights urlize, linebreaksbr, json_script, and especially querystring for building/modifying query-string links in templates Migrations: still loves Django's auto-generated migrations — 19 and counting on her project Skips inheritance for class-based views; prefers function-based views for sharing code, though fine using Django's own mixins/interfaces Performance surprise: CPU profiling (via py-spy) — not slow DB queries — revealed the culprit; she'd accidentally disabled the cached template loader, and re-enabling it took throughput from ~2-3 req/s to ~12 req/s on a $10/mo VM Michael #2: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? FT Magazine piece by Sam Learner (July 11) on AI coding tools overwhelming open source maintainers - sent in by listener Dylan McConnell, whose main point was that this ran in the Financial Times, not a dev blog. cURL as the case study - Daniel Stenberg has been the only full-time person on it for years; libcurl has been installed an estimated 20+ billion times with 3,000+ listed contributors. Bug bounty killed - cURL ended its paid security bounty program in January, citing an "explosion of AI slop reports" that take real time to debunk and drain morale. Extractive contributions - authoring a PR is now nearly free, reviewing one still costs a human; tldraw's Steve Ruiz closed outside contributions entirely, asking why he'd want someone else writing the easy part. Guido weighs in - van Rossum says projects are holding emergency meetings over the slop flow, and notes LLM patches tend to touch unrelated parts of a file, making review more tedious. "Vibe Coding Kills Open Source" - paper from Miklós Koren's group: packages frequently recommended by coding models saw big download jumps with no matching engagement, breaking the reputation loop that sustains maintainers. Stack Overflow flatlined - over 100,000 questions a month before ChatGPT, under 1,500 last month, with the response rate cut roughly in half; the public archive is now stale training data. The course-creator angle - Josh Comeau's newest web dev course launched at about a third of prior enrollment, and he worries about devs who never learn which questions to ask. But the most interesting portion is what was omitted. Focused on: The end of the curl bug-bounty Omitted: High-Quality Chaos Why the omission is interesting It fits a narrative. The FT piece is a maintenance-and-decline story, and January-Stenberg is a perfect witness for it. April-Stenberg complicates it - same person, same project, better data, opposite direction on the specific claim being used. The tell is already in the article. Learner quotes Stenberg saying AI tools are much better at finding problems than fixing them. That's the April thesis in one line, and it goes undeveloped. Reason for the shift is process, not vibes. Killing the bounty removed the cash incentive and the venue change filtered the rest. Worth saying out loud, because "AI reports got better" isn't quite it - "no bounty plus a real triage platform" is closer. Joke too: Sarah O'Connor wrote a related piece (is this just before skynet launches?) Calvin #3: Where Did All Your AI Tokens Go? AgentsView to the rescue! Local-first desktop/web app for browsing, searching, and analyzing your past AI coding agent sessions (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Gemini, Aider, and dozens more) Auto-discovers session files on your machine — no config needed; everything stored locally in SQLite, no cloud/accounts agentsview usage is a drop-in ccusage alternative — reads from pre-indexed SQLite, reports run 80–220× faster on large histories New Activity dashboard shows peak concurrency, active vs. idle time, agent-minutes, and cost — filterable by project/agent/machine, with a -json CLI report too Full-text + optional semantic search across every session; also imports Claude.ai/ChatGPT chat exports Install via pip install agentsview, uvx agentsview, brew install --cask agentsview, or download desktop binaries from GitHub Releases Michael #4: Careful with phishing all The situation I pass this along because it was a pretty sneaky bit of targeted phishing, and happened to play off an old interaction in bandit's repo. As usual with phishing scams there are a bunch of tells that this isn't legitimate, but just enough plausibility that I could see falling for it in a weak moment. Relative nobodies like me haven't historically been worth the effort to hit with scams this specific. Agents change the game though :-/. Be careful out there folks! Original message From: "Patrick (Blacktrace)" [HTML_REMOVED] To: LISTENER EMAIL Subject: Your Bandit #1350 (B105 NextToken false positive) -- just fixed that exact case Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2026 12:02 AM Hi AJ, Saw your Bandit issue #1350 -- the B105 hardcoded-password false positive on the string NextToken. I build a deterministic gate that filters that class of Bandit noise, and #1350 was literally the case I just fixed: NextToken / next_token / page_token / nextPageToken now stay quiet, while a genuine hardcoded token like api_token="sk-live-..." still fires. Verified against your exact case. 30-second paste: https://blacktrace.co/noise-eraser Where it still trips, published: https://blacktrace.co/kruc Curious whether it clears what you hit -- and if it trips on something of yours, that's the more useful reply. Patrick, Blacktrace I asked Claude for some analysis too. It was pretty good at finding them. The message name-drops enough real detail to feel legit, but the structure is pure phishing - everything in it exists to get AJ onto blacktrace.co. The strongest ones: Freemail sender, corporate signoff. Signs as "Patrick, Blacktrace" but sends from emailpjv@gmail.com. Real company outreach comes from the company domain, not a personal Gmail - and there's no last name. Over-specific targeting. It mirrors AJ's exact public activity - issue #1350, the B105 rule, the NextToken false positive, even the token variants. That's the "just enough plausibility" AJ flagged, and it's exactly what agents make cheap: scrape a GitHub issue, auto-generate tailored bait. Legit cold outreach rarely reads your history back to you this precisely. The entire payload is two links. Strip the technical flattery and the message is just "paste here" plus "see results here." When the whole point of an email is the click, that's the tell. "30-second paste." Low-friction urgency, and "paste" most likely means paste your source into their tool - handing your code to a stranger's site. Exfiltration dressed as convenience. Brand-new, no-reputation domain. blacktrace.co has no track record, and the name is doing some ominous work. The /kruc slug is random noise, not how real product pages get named. Precise-sounding jargon that's actually vague. "Deterministic gate," "noise-eraser" - impressive, empty. Bolted onto correct real details (B105 is the Bandit hardcoded-password test, sk-live- is a Stripe live-key prefix) to borrow credibility. The disarming close. "if it trips on something of yours, that's the more useful reply" - engineered humility that flatters your expertise and baits a response. Makes engaging feel like you're doing them a favor, which drops your guard. Extras Calvin: DjangoCon US 2026 is rapidly approaching, August 24-28, Chicago Ruff v0.16.0 massively expands its default rule set Ruff now enables 413 rules by default, up from 59 https://astral.sh/blog/ruff-v0.16.0 Michael: Completely redesigned the home page. Try /insights in Claude Code (terminal) Joke: We're Safe

Makes sense, doesn't it? Secondly, the .22 LR, when combined with modern suppressors and short barrels, changes the equation for home defense. MichaelBane.TV - On the Radio episode # 301. Scroll down for reference links on topics discussed in this episode. Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed here are our own and may not represent those of the companies we represent or any entities affiliated to it. Host: Michael Bane Producer: Flying Dragon Ltd. More information and reference links: Violent Crime Dropping https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/homicide-rate-dropped-historic-lows-113047039.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/07/24/crime-rates-many-offenses-are-plummeting-across-us-for-reasons-that-arent-simple/ https://www.npr.org/2024/12/25/nx-s1-5230782-e1/the-carjacking-rate-has-started-to-drop-after-a-disturbing-jump-in-previous-years Crime Prevention Research Center/John Lott .22s for Self Protection?/Greg Ellifritz, Active Response Training Why Carry a .22?/Greg Ellifritz, Active Response Training .22 for Home Defense/USCCA Forums Top 5 Best .22LR for Self-Defense/Cassandra McBride, Ammo.com MTM Case-Gard HLST Shooting Table The Music of Paradise Husky The Music of Randy Sharp

Vince Fakhoury Horn speaks with Mushim Patricia Ikeda about working class dharma—from growing up as "the minority of Greensburg, Ohio" in a third-generation Japanese American family, to training in penniless Korean Zen temples where renovating the building was the practice. Along the way: bliss bunnies, samadhi junkies, mutual aid networks, and why affordability may be the grassroots issue of 2026.

(00:00-25:14) Martin thought about bringing Jackson some soup but he didn't. Martin's never wrong. John Rice (Troublemaker from Cape Giraredeau) is on phone lines. Troublemaker says Martin's a 'cool dude.' Makes the trip up from the Cape for Cardinal games about 20-25 times a year. Larry Nickel is up next. Larry watched both Raw and The Derby last night. You don't boo nobodies.(25:22-39:16) Tim's theme song. Someone wants a text audit from like 5 years ago. Comps to Dave Winfield. Never would have seen that moment from last night coming. Sounds like Tim's younger son is going to be a snootful. Jordan Walker jersey sales. France and Spain today.(39:26-51:21) You can get into the ASG tonight for just a little over $1.3K. Chairman is fighting with Chicken Tater in the YouTube chat. Big Al calls in to defend us against Chicken Tater.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Papers is back. Jordan Walker's coming out party is taking the heat of Jackson faking his illness. Playing the villain. People seemed to enjoy the new format. Audio of the call of the Derby winning home run. Barry Bonds talking about Jordan Walker's performance. 31 HRs in 53 swings.Summer '98. Audio of Kyle Schwarber after the derby tipping his cap to Jordan Walker. Jordan Walker talking about 40,000 people booing him at 'The Bank.' Audio of Walker and his family on the Netflix set after the derby.It's Taboo's birthday. The Silent One. Jayson Stark comparing Walker to Chris Carpenter. Audio of a Philly influencer concerned for Jordan Walker's safety. The script was perfect last night. Audio of Buster Olney and Doug Glanville saying this was the best derby they've seen in a while. Chuck in Soulard wants to talk it over. Doug doesn't like Philly fans because they booed Santa. Sassie Cassie.Martin thought about bringing Jackson some soup but he didn't. Martin's never wrong. John Rice (Troublemaker from Cape Giraredeau) is on phone lines. Troublemaker says Martin's a 'cool dude.' Makes the trip up from the Cape for Cardinal games about 20-25 times a year. Larry Nickel is up next. Larry watched both Raw and The Derby last night. You don't boo nobodies.Tim's theme song. Someone wants a text audit from like 5 years ago. Comps to Dave Winfield. Never would have seen that moment from last night coming. Sounds like Tim's younger son is going to be a snootful. Jordan Walker jersey sales. France and Spain today.You can get into the ASG tonight for just a little over $1.3K. Chairman is fighting with Chicken Tater in the YouTube chat. Big Al calls in to defend us against Chicken Tater.Listen to these vocals. The new Will Ferrell show. Angry and agro. Lots of Jordan Walker and home run derby discussion.Look, Doug. Terry Crouppen is back in studio. Talking travels with Terry. St. Louis is gray and needs painted bright colors. Andy stays walking his dog. Didn't there used to be a wall there? The stink of failure. Safaris.Jackson's playing hurt today. We've got Jose Fermin on the phone lines who was in Philly last night for the HR Derby. His cousin who works for the Phillies hooked him up with tickets. Last night had the intensity of a playoff game. He was the only Cardinal fans in his section. The Philly fans. Walker performing under pressure in front of the raucous Philly crowd. He likes the nickname "Ferminator." Could he pitch or catch? He'll be at the game tonight as well.People are jumping off ship and heading to Joy 99 FM. Papers Flu Game. EMOTD.How long does Doug have to listen to this? Jackson is just grinding. Home remedies from Nonna. Meek and feeble. Don't bring that back handed nonsense. Don't straw man me, ho. Replaying the audio of Barry Bonds talking about it being the greatest HR Derby he's ever seen.And the winner of the EMOTD is...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We dive into the nightmare of credit card fraud and how Zach's identity got stolen for Uber rides and Texas Roadhouse gift cards. We also tackle the massive price hikes hitting the tech and gaming world thanks to AI data centers buying up all the hardware, the reality of the Dead Internet Theory, and GTA 6's insane presales. Plus, we finally address the logistical mysteries of the men's room and why some guys prefer to sit. Pull up a chair and join the conversation.Thank you for being part of this crowd!00:00 - Start!00:39 - Welcome to the Crowd01:23 - Naming Kids After Where They Were Conceived04:16 - Lie Detectors & Thumbtacks06:14 - Exciting Lives, Cancer Jokes & Eulogies09:51 - The Legend of "Soft Zach"11:07 - We Got Hacked (Credit Card Fraud)17:46 - The Truth About Men's Bathrooms20:47 - Nostalgic Comedy Music24:21 - Why Happy Feet is Terrible29:43 - Space IPOs32:56 - Student Drivers & Hand-Crank Windows37:51 - Putting Unleaded Gas in a Diesel48:25 - GTA 6 Makes $9 Billion in 24 Hours59:38 - The AI Music Crisis & Beyond Disdain1:07:57 - The Dead Internet Theory1:12:20 - Insane Tech & Console Price Hikes1:24:53 - The Controversial Box Elder Data Center1:29:31 - Microchip Breakthroughs That Break Your Brain1:35:38 - OutroReddit- Our Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/FivesACrowd- Our Account: https://www.reddit.com/user/FivesACrowdPodcastFollow Our Personal AccountsAustin - https://allmylinks.com/austinspomerCam - https://www.instagram.com/effinburch/Chris - https://www.instagram.com/thechrishummel/Tony - https://www.instagram.com/theonlytonyc/Zach - https://www.instagram.com/zvanbeekum/P.O. Box**Please no packages, letters only**Five's A Crowd Podcast1123 N Fairfield Rd #1373 Layton, UT 84041

It's Thursday, July 9th, A.D. 2026. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com. I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Jonathan Clark and Adam McManus 2026 Global Persecution of Christian Index released International Christian Concern released its 2026 Global Persecution Index. The report highlights 20 countries where Christians face persecution. These countries include China, Cuba, India, Iran, and Nigeria. The report also put a spotlight on leaders of countries where persecution is worsening. These leaders include Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The report noted, “Despite mounting repression, Christianity continues to grow in unexpected places.” Examples of this include the Iranian house church movement and China's underground churches. Hebrews 13:3 says, “Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.” Christian British nurse, who affirmed biological accuracy, left alone The United Kingdom's Nursing and Midwifery Council dropped its case against a Christian nurse last week. Jennifer Melle worked at a hospital in London. In 2024, she used biologically-accurate pronouns with a patient who was pretending to be the opposite sex. She then faced suspension and an investigation. Thankfully, the nursing regulatory body has ended its case against her.  Melle commented, “Regulators should protect patients from real harm, not punish nurses for holding Christian beliefs, speaking truthfully about biological sex, or raising serious concerns in the public interest.” Trump: Ceasefire with Iran is over after Iran attacked ships in Strait The United States carried out retaliatory strikes on Iran yesterday. The strikes came hours after Iran attacked commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. The Trump administration also restored sanctions on Iran's oil sales. U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters he considers the ceasefire with Iran to be over.  Listen. TRUMP: “They're vicious, violent people. If they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it. As far as I'm concerned, it's over. I'll speak to our negotiators. They want to negotiate. They're good people: Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner. But they have to come back to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a waste of time dealing with them.” Ban on Planned Parenthood funding expired last week The federal government's ban on Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood expired last week. Congress passed legislation last year that cut the funding for just one year. As a result, dozens of Planned Parenthood locations have closed since then. However, the abortion giant can now resume its reimbursement from Medicaid. Some Republican lawmakers are calling for another bill to defund Planned Parenthood.  Call your Congressman at 202-225-3121 and ask him or her to vote to continue to defund the abortion giant Planned Parenthood. If you don't know who it is, click here and type in your zipcode. Young Men's Christian Assoc. allows men in women's locker rooms Parents are calling on the Young Men's Christian Association to change its transgender policies. The publicly-funded organization allows men, pretending to be women, in women's bathrooms and locker rooms.  The American Parents Coalition says this violates a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The decision affirmed that Title IX protections in federal law are based on biological sex. The coalition stated, “The YMCA has ignored parents' concerns for far too long while maintaining policies that undermine the privacy, safety, and fairness Title IX was enacted to protect.” Plus, it violates the group's stated vision which was to put Christian values into practice by developing a healthy body, mind, and spirit. Send a polite, 2-sentence letter of objection to the president of the Young Men's Christian Association and ask them to live up to their name and their Biblical founding by opposing this transgender insanity. Suzanne McCormick, President, Young Men's Christian Association, 101 North Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60606. (Write to your local YMCA and object as well). Trump's tariffs led to Toyota announcing $3.6 billion U.S. expansion Toyota is expanding its manufacturing in the United States. On Monday, the Japanese car maker announced a $3.6 billion expansion in San Antonio, Texas. This will move some of its production from Mexico to the U.S. It will also bring about 2,000 new jobs to the Lone Star State. This expansion comes after the Trump administration imposed tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts.  Presbyterian Church U.S.A. defends transgender surgeries for kids The largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States supported transgender surgeries last week. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA voted 441-30 in favor of an overture known as “On Access to Healthcare.” The measure defends body-mutilating surgeries for people, including children, who pretend to be the opposite sex. 2 Timothy 4:3-4 says, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.” Christian US soccer player: “I'm just trying to bring people into His light.” The American men's soccer team lost to Belgium on Monday. The game knocked the U.S. out of the 2026 World Cup. Despite the loss, players on the U.S. team continued their practice of praying together on the field after the game. Player Mark McKenzie led the prayer, having become a spiritual leader on the team.  He told The Athletic, “The Lord is at the center of it all. He is the main purpose. … And I'm just trying to bring people into His light in some way.” Worldview listeners weigh in from Washington and North Carolina Rachel Lundberg in Washougal, Washington wrote, “I like The Worldview because It allows me to feel like I'm aware of important things going on without having to spend so much time watching other news and sorting it out or wondering if it's true. I almost always just read it in my email and then I share certain parts with my kids and family. “My 13-year-old son recently wanted to subscribe with his own email so he can read it on his own. I also love when there is an action step to send an email or letter. Makes me feel like I can make a difference. Thank you!” Wow! I loved that last comment, Rachel.  I gave you two suggested action steps today. I hope you follow through on them.  I agree with you.  It feels empowering.  I always try to write or call myself every time I recommend it to you. And Chris Smith in Columbus, North Carolina wrote, “I've been a listener now for 10 years. I've become a vocal and financial supporter as well.  In this current era, it's very difficult to find the truth about what is going on to our fellow Christians in the world without doing a lot of digging. “Since I first found you on Sermon Audio, I've become an addict of your newscast. It's a part of my weekday morning routine to read or to listen to The Worldview. I especially appreciate your correlation to Scripture in two of your stories, your encouragement to keep praying for our persecuted brothers and sisters, and how we can help them financially.” 9 Worldview listeners gave $1,590 on Wednesday And finally, on Wednesday by 7:00pm Central, 9 Worldview listeners stepped up to the plate and invested their treasure to fund the six-member team behind The Worldview for another 365 days. Our thanks to Augustine in Auburn, California and Hope in Big Lake, Minnesota – both of whom gave $20. We were touched by the generosity of Janet in Canton, Illinois, Janice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Hannah in San Jose, California – each of whom gave $100. And we're grateful to God for Melinda in Indianapolis, Indiana who pledged $10/month for 12 months for a gift of $120, Adam in Gile, Wisconsin who gave $150, Tom in Spokane, Washington who pledged $40/month for 12 months for a gift of $480, and Nancy in Flagstaff, Arizona who gave $500. Those 9 gifts add up to $1,590. Ready for our new grand total? Drum roll please. (drum roll sound effect) $19,288 (sound effect of people cheering) That means we have just 2 days to raise $11,587 to hit our $30,875 goal by tomorrow at 12 midnight on Friday, July 10th.  To be honest, that is going to be a challenge. But with God, all things are possible. Since the beginning of this month-long campaign to fully fund the six-member Worldview team for another year, the greatest number of donations has been 15. Let's double that today!  Would you consider choosing to be 1 of 30 people to step up to the plate with a one-time gift or a monthly pledge? That would help us to get significantly closer to our $30,875 goal by tomorrow, Friday, July 10th, at 12 midnight. Go to TheWorldview.com, click on Give, select the dollar amount, and make sure to click on the “recurring” button if that's your wish.  This Christian newscast champions the truth and a Biblical worldview. Invest in it today for another 365 days. I'm reminded of the words from the prophet Isaiah who said, “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!'” Close And that's The Worldview on this Thursday, July 9th, in the year of our Lord 2026. Subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com. Plus, you can get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.

There are celebrity weddings...There are over-the-top celebrity weddings...And then there's whatever the heck happened in today's episode.The gang dives headfirst into the internet's latest obsession with a completely unhinged conspiracy theory surrounding Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding. Apparently it wasn't just a wedding—it was an eldritch ritual to summon an ancient cosmic deity while Jared Leto prepared to become the real-life Morbius. Sure. Makes perfect sense. That's how mornings start around here.Once everyone agrees that absolutely none of this sounds impossible, Rafe introduces a brand-new game that immediately exposes just how much celebrity wedding trivia everyone somehow knows. Is the Empire State Building really lighting up for the wedding? Did Adam Sandler write a song? Were chicken nuggets topped with caviar? Did Taylor sing her vows? Who leaked wedding secrets? How many Grammy Awards were secretly wandering around the reception? And perhaps the biggest mystery of all...why does King Scott know so much about Taylor Swift?The competition gets way more intense than anyone expected as everyone argues through true-or-false questions that become increasingly ridiculous while somehow remaining just believable enough to fool the room. Every answer turns into another excuse to roast billionaires, celebrity culture, impossible wedding budgets, elaborate menus, sports legends, and anyone willing to admit they've been following celebrity news a little too closely.Expect fake facts, real laughs, terrible strategy, conspiracy theories that somehow sound convincing, and enough sarcastic commentary to make every Swiftie slightly uncomfortable—but hopefully still entertained.If you've ever wondered what happens when a comedy podcast gives a room full of sarcastic morning radio hosts a celebrity trivia game based almost entirely on internet insanity, this is exactly that.Spoiler alert: somebody unexpectedly becomes the resident Swift expert, someone else keeps overthinking every question, and everyone leaves wondering whether chicken nuggets and caviar actually belong together.It's another completely unnecessary deep dive into pop culture chaos that somehow becomes one of the funniest competitions we've played.Whether you're here for celebrity gossip, sports references, bizarre internet theories, or simply watching adults confidently answer questions they absolutely don't know, this comedy podcast delivers exactly the kind of beautiful disaster you've come to expect.Because around here, facts are optional, confidence is mandatory, and somehow that's what makes this comedy podcast work.Follow The Rizzuto Show → https://linktr.ee/rizzshow for more from your favorite daily comedy show.Connect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → https://1057thepoint.com/RizzShow.Hear The Rizz Show daily on the radio at 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Radio in St. Louis, MO.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode a group of students and patrons join me to reflect on the recent Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer, and to share stories of how it manifested in our lives based on which of the twelve houses it was transiting in their birth charts. The episode opens with a brief introduction where I talk about the importance of taking into account both the entire range of the sign-based conjunction or copresence between Venus and Jupiter, which lasted from May 18 until June 13, as well as the more intense range of the degree-based conjunction which went exact on June 9. After that I interview several people about their experience of the conjunction, looking at how it functioned in various houses alongside examples of notable public figures who also experienced this transit. This is episode 539 of The Astrology Podcast. Timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction00:02:27 Celebrity Examples: Musk, Spielberg, Biden, etc00:15:43 Factors that Makes the Conjunction More or Less Important00:19:25 Squares from Aries00:22:48 Michelle: Venus-Jupiter Conjunction in 2nd House00:26:30 Arrie - 8th House00:30:32 Laszlo - 3rd House00:34:07 Karina - 8th House00:38:59 Miriam - 12th House00:45:58 Margaret - 1st House00:51:29 Jessica - 1st House00:57:40 Delilah - 11th House01:04:02 Miscellaneous Examples01:17:06 Gillian - 1st House Challenging Example01:28:57 Chiron and Eris01:38:45 Concluding Remarks Watch the Video Version of This Episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwwZmj_Daco - Listen to the Audio Version of This Episode Listen to the audio version of this episode or download it as an MP3:

England are back in action tonight! After putting those Croatian slugs to the sword, it's Ghana's turn to face the wrath of Tommy Tuchel's boys.Marcus and Luke are here (lamppost flag in hand) to preview the big one. What's England's best centre-back partnership? Is Declan Rice actually fit? And is it coincidental that Luke's very own Gosport is the hottest place in the UK today? Makes you think.GET TICKETS FOR THE NEXT RAMBLE WORLD CUP WATCH PARTY HERE!Get your Football Ramble x Admiral kit here.Find us on Bluesky, X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: show@footballramble.com.The Football Ramble, the original and best football podcast. Brand new podcasts every single weekday throughout the Premier League season and every day throughout the 2026 FIFA World Cup.No cliches. No ex-pros like Peter Crouch or The Rest is Football. Just the funniest football conversation out there. Your guardian for the season, daily not weekly. Stick to the Ramble, totally. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.