Podcasts about Mind your business

It's been nearly two years since Hurricane Helene's impact was felt across Western North Carolina. In January 2025, Governor Josh Stein appointed a special Advisory Committee for Western North Carolina Recovery and established GROW NC (Governor's Recovery Office for Western North Carolina) to serve as the lead organization to guide immediate physical and economic recovery efforts.In early 2026, a sub-committee was formed to examine the region's long term economic outlook, and make recommendations to Governor Stein and State leaders that would set Western North Carolina down a path toward recovery and future economic prosperity.On Wednesday, September 23, 2026, Governor Stein and GROW NC released the Western North Carolina Economic Recovery Plan, a document that focuses on eight core principles that harness current resources and industry proficiency, while aligning goals that will advance the region's efforts to create economic diversity and resilience across all sectors.On this week's Mind Your Business, we unveil the core tenants of the plan, and how the High Country is poised to benefit from this collaborative effort. We'll also talk with Dan Gerlach, a long-time economic strategist and policy advisor in the State about the research that led to the plan. He'll explain how this framework can build off current regional strengths while protecting a unique cultural experience that separates Western North Carolina from many other parts of the country.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

This Friends Like Us, Marina Franklin is chatting with comedians Rob Haze and Gina Brillon about everything from comedy dynamics to Hispanic Heritage Month. Get ready for laughs and thought-provoking insights! Rob Haze is a comedian from Atlanta, Georgia. He is a writer/ performer on Sherman's Showcase on IFC. He was on the Sneaker Sketch  show Sneak This on B/R Kicks. Rob has a stand up album called Haze-o-pedia. Rob's standup has been featured on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Late Show, Comedy Central, and Viceland. Rob has a podcast called The Inconsistent Podcast with Rob Haze available everywhere.  Gina Brillon is a comedian, host, writer and producer born and raised in the Bronx, New York. Brillon has been performing stand-up since the age of 17 and in 2012 became the first Latina winner of NBC's stand-up for Diversity showcase. Named a "new face" at the 2013 Montreal Just for Laughs festival, she went on to release her debut Hour special 'Gina Brillon: Pacifically Speaking' in 2014. Her HBO special 'Gina Brillon: easily offended' was released in 2019 as part of the entre nos series and in 2020 the critically acclaimed 'Gina Brillon; the floor is lava' premiered on Amazon and went on to become an imagen award nominee and a 2021 Gracie award winner. Her latest release 'Gina Brillon; Mind Your Business' premiered on 800pgm earlier this year amassing over a quarter million views in the first month. Brillon's tv roles include guest stars on CBS's Kevin Can Wait, ABC's the conners and appearances on The View, Late Night with Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Most recently, in 2023, she guest starred in the Disney holiday movie 'Dashing Through the Snow' alongside Lil Rel Howery and Ludacris. In 2021, during its 16th season, Gina became the first Puerto Rican comedian to be named a finalist on NBC's America's Got Talent. Always hosted by Marina Franklin - One Hour Comedy Special: Single Black Female ( Amazon Prime, CW Network), TBS's The Last O.G, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Hysterical on FX, The Movie Trainwreck, Louie Season V, The Jim Gaffigan Show, Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert, HBO's Crashing, and The Breaks with Michelle Wolf. Writer for HBO's 'Divorce' and the new Tracy Morgan show on Paramount Plus: 'Crutch  

Fall color is about a month away from its peak here in the High Country, but the seasonal shift toward autum economic behavior is already underway. The impact on visitor counts, the type of interactions people enjoy during their stay, and how events are communicated business to business all impact the visitor experience. The current date on the calendar matters greatly when it comes to how businesses schedule staff, how they throttle their operational expectations, and ultimately the impact the see on their bottom line for an entire year.On this week's Mind Your Business, we examine the hospitality and event industries, and how they work together to curate exceptional visitor experiences in the High Country. Danielle Neibauer owns The Inn at Crestwood and also leads the management team that operates The Horton Hotel in Downtown Boone. She'll detail the seasonal impacts on the hospitality industry, and even explain a few things locals may not know about the hotels they drive past each day.We'll also hear from Suzanne Livesay, Executive Director of the Appalachian Theatre of the High Country. A major factor in the success of an event is related to when the event is scheduled, as much as the make-up of the act itself. Suzanne discusses how she seeks specific events, what she tends to avoid, and how the collaborative approach of experience planning benefits everyone.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon (Friday this week) at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Boss Riot joins The Austin Young Show to talk about Here We Go Again, their newest album and a record shaped by some very real challenges. Made during COVID while members of the band were dealing with surgeries, cancer, loss, recovery, heartbreak, fear and hope, the album became a reflection of everything life was throwing at them. We talk about the song “Don't Grow Up Too Fast,” the role music can play when things get difficult, the band's roots in ska, rocksteady, reggae and soul, and what it takes to keep a band alive for more than a decade. It's a conversation about music, getting older, dealing with the hard stuff and finding reasons to keep creating anyway. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This just in...sometimes it's hard to move around in Watauga County due to traffic congestion!The Watauga County Comprehensive Transportation Plan (CTP) is the steering document that looks at transportation needs for a 25-30 year snapshot, and that document is currently going through a planned revision. On this week's Mind Your Business, we explain the CTP process, how an important survey is gathering public input that informs this work, and how your experiences can be added to future considerations.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon (Friday this week) at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

C'est officiel ! Britney Spears revient en musique avec Will.i.am avec la sortie du titre "Mind Your Business". Mais la chanteuse promet également de publier ses mémoires en octobre 2023. Chanteuse incontournable, on a beaucoup parlé d'elle en avril 2022 lorsque son régime de tutelle s'est enfin terminé. Dans un texte de 4 pages, elle raconte le quotidien de 13 années sous tutelle : forcée à travailler dix heures par jours, sept jours sur sept, droguée... Elle raconte aussi comment elle est privée de son intimité lors de ses tournées ou quand on la regarde quand elle se déshabille. Par “on”, il faut comprendre, son équipe, mais surtout son propre père. Mais comment en est-on arrivé là ? Cette tutelle est-elle vraiment superflue ? Et où en est-on du procès aujourd'hui ? Écoutez la suite dans cet épisode de "Maintenant vous savez - Culture". Un podcast Bababam Originals, écrit et réalisé par Jonathan Aupart. Première diffusion : juillet 2023 A écouter aussi : ⁠Comment le BDSM a-t-il révolutionné la culture ?⁠ ⁠Quelle est la plus grande œuvre d'art réalisée en Lego ?⁠ ⁠Qu'est-ce que le Festival d'Avignon ? Retrouvez tous les épisodes de "Maintenant vous savez". Pour rester informé et recevoir le meilleur de “Maintenant vous savez” chaque semaine, abonnez-vous à notre newsletter. Suivez Bababam sur Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The game of football means a great deal to the High Country and its economy. For decades, championship success on the field has fueled business growth and activity throughout the surrounding High Country region. How the business of college athletics moves forward has a direct impact on the economic performance of a key time of year for our community.On this week's Mind Your Business, we bring you our annual conversation with App State Director of Athletics Doug Gillin. Heading into his 12th season in the AD's chair, we'll talk about the current trends in the business of college football and athletics in general, and how the evolving landscape of college sports will impact gamedays. We'll also discuss how App State athletics is brining entertainment other than sports to the High Country and -- perhaps refreshingly --  we'll hear about possible connection points for student-athletes in the community as they look to make a positive impact on the area during their time in Boone.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the showSupport the show

What's up, Delegation? Word is, y'all brought the business, and SJR is minding ALL of it! In this MYB episode, we're going there—from healing and uncertainty to discernment, relationships, boundaries, purpose, and everything in between. No topic is off the table. So press play for the answers, but stay awhile for the devotion. And listen, if there's something you've been wrestling with in real life, don't keep it to yourself, sis. Hit our line at (214) 790-7871 and leave a voicemail. Who knows? Your question could be the one our girl is speaking some wisdom into next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Students are back at they are EVERYWHERE! The economic impact of the ringing of the school bell certainly drives business, but it also includes a boost to the local workforce, as students settle into their new routines and begin to look for money to spend.On this week's Mind Your Business, we hear from some voices that see the direct benefit of the student economy, from meals served to jobs filled. Aram and Megan Kevorkian own SouthEnd Brewing Company on King Street, and will discuss the differences in their high-traffic patterns and hiring needs, and how students influence both of those trends.As App State students returned to class, they found a pothole-less Howard Street as they walked to campus. Lane Moody, Director of the Downtown Boone Development Association has the latest on the ongoing revitalization project.  We'll discuss what comes next in terms of deliverables and how the town is studying the new pedestrian impacts of this connection between Downtown Boone and the campus community.  Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Fire the Whole Investment Team: Meb Faber on 250 Years of American Compounding and Why CalPERS Can’t Beat a 60/40 allocation https://youtu.be/9lBYkG4J2sY A dollar invested in the U.S. stock market in 1800 is worth roughly $200 million today, and Meb Faber says the giant pension funds paid to beat that kind of compounding usually can’t. In this episode of Wealth Actually, Frazer Rice talks with Meb Faber, co-founder and CIO of Cambria Investment Management and host of The Meb Faber Show, about his new coffee-table book Investing in America: The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market, the shareholder yield thesis behind Cambria’s ETF lineup, and his long-running public campaign arguing that CalPERS and other giant institutional pools routinely fail to beat a simple, low-cost buy-and-hold portfolio. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4WmnPm3GN8jwQtJuCVV9XG?si=nLLcz8y8RSuydORA5_ZHGQ Key Takeaways America is, in Faber’s words, the greatest compounding machine in history. He puts a dollar invested in U.S. stocks in 1800 at roughly $200 million today — a number he uses to reframe how clients should think about staying invested through wars, depressions, and pandemics. The book’s origin story starts with meme stocks. Faber says COVID pulled a new generation of retail investors into the market through gamified trading apps, and he wanted to hand them a historically grounded alternative to day-trading and zero-day options. Diversification is older than the country itself. Faber traces the concept back to 15th- and 16th-century joint-stock voyages — the Mayflower and the Virginia Company among them — where spreading capital across many risky expeditions let “merchant adventurers” survive when any single ship was lost. Shareholder yield, not dividend yield, is Cambria’s core factor. Since the S&P 500’s dividend yield now sits near an all-time low of 1.04%, Faber argues the real signal is cash dividends plus net buybacks — net of the dilution from stock-based compensation that quietly erodes shareholders’ ownership every year. Faber’s CalPERS critique boils down to one line: “the returns are not bad, they’re just not good.” He’s built an entire body of work, including Cambria’s ENDW endowment-style ETF, arguing that giant pools with virtually unlimited access to managers still can’t consistently beat a disciplined global 60/40. Complexity is often the enemy, not the edge. Faber contrasts investing with almost every other field of expertise: hiring the best doctor or coach nearly always helps, but hiring the most sophisticated (and expensive) money manager frequently doesn’t. Illiquidity has a way of showing up at the worst possible time. Faber points to endowments getting caught upside down in 2008–2009 and to more recent leveraged blowups as the same lesson repeating: over-lever a portfolio and you’re out of chips at the poker table. The real accountability gap is career incentives, not investment theory. Faber contrasts Yale, which gets a pass for strong long-term results, with Harvard’s endowment, which he says has underperformed for two decades without anyone losing their job over it — a dynamic he says maps directly onto UHNW family governance. Timestamps [00:00] Cold open — CalPERS CIOs vs. UK prime ministers [00:29] Show open and disclaimer [00:54] Welcome: Meb Faber, Cambria, and the new book [02:07] The $76 price tag and the 1776 joke [03:13] Genesis of Investing in America: COVID, meme stocks, and joint-stock voyages [06:33] The most surprising find: Ben Franklin’s “Mind Your Business” motto [09:09] Argentina vs. the U.S. — what actually drove American exceptionalism [12:47] Cambria today: the shareholder yield thesis [17:46] Why politicians target buybacks instead of stock-based comp [20:54] The CalPERS critique begins [21:34] The Ivy Portfolio, the ENDW endowment ETF, and year-one results [25:45] The Nevada pension comparison and the liquidity-complexity pushback [26:56] Institutional blowups, Harvard’s endowment dysfunction, and misaligned incentives [29:36] The “anti-Switzerland of asset management” bit [31:16] Close: where to find Meb, Cambria, and the book Pull Quotes “No, no, no, no, Frazer — it is $76, in honor of 1776.” — Meb Faber “A dollar would be worth roughly $200 million today… despite wars and depressions and pandemics and everything else terrible that’s happened in the history of the world, this relentless compounding is such a fun story.” — Meb Faber “There are dividend funds in the U.S. today… whose actual dividend yield is lower than their management fee. A negative net dividend yield — an astonishing statistic in 2026.” — Meb Faber “Who’s had more turnover in the past 10 years — CalPERS CIOs or UK prime ministers? Both totally dysfunctional. I think CalPERS has a slight edge, but it’s close.” — Meb Faber “I’m the anti-Switzerland of asset management.” — Meb Faber About the Guest Meb Faber is co-founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer of Cambria Investment Management, an independent, privately owned advisory firm built around quantitative asset management and alternative investment strategies (BusinessWire). He hosts The Meb Faber Show, one of the most widely followed investing podcasts, and is the author of eight books, including The Ivy Portfolio, Global Asset Allocation, Global Value, Shareholder Yield, and now Investing in America: The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market — his first coffee-table book, released to coincide with the U.S. semiquincentennial (Curzio Research). Proceeds from the book go to charities that fund investment accounts for Americans born in the country. A ninth book, The Awesome Portfolio, is slated for release on September 8, 2026 (Meb Faber on X). Contact Meb Faber & Cambria Cambria Investment Management: cambriainvestments.com Cambria Funds: cambriafunds.com Meb’s blog, podcast & research: mebfaber.com The Meb Faber Show: themebfabershow.com Twitter/X: @MebFaber Book — Investing in America: available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and signed via Pages bookstore in Manhattan Beach, CA (Acquirer’s Multiple) Cambria Funds Mentioned Shareholder Yield suite (SYLD, FYLD, EYLD, plus small-cap and large-cap variants) — cash dividends plus net buybacks plus net debt reduction, divided by market cap (MarketWatch) GVAL — Global Value ETF screening the cheapest quartile of roughly 45 country markets by long-term valuation (Cambria — GVAL) TAIL / FAIL — U.S. and global ex-U.S. tail-risk ETFs pairing short-term Treasuries with a rolling ladder of out-of-the-money S&P 500 puts (Cambria — TAIL) Trinity Portfolio (TRTY) — roughly half buy-and-hold, half trend-following across a basket of other Cambria funds (Cambria — Trinity Portfolio) ENDW — Cambria’s endowment-style ETF, discussed on the show as roughly $150–180 million at launch and referenced later in conversation as having grown toward roughly $5 billion in assets with more than 100,000 investors (MebFaber.com) The CalPERS Critique — Further Reading 9 Institutions Can’t Beat a Basic Buy-and-Hold Allocation — MebFaber.com How California’s $450B Pension Fund Misses the Basics of Investing — YouTube Should a Robot Be Managing CalPERS’ Portfolio? — MebFaber.com, 2015 Index Funds vs. Ivy League — MarketWatch/Barron’s Streetwise CalPERS: America’s Misled and Misleading Pension Leader — Retired Public Employees Association CalPERS Section II Performance Tables (2026) — CalPERS.ca.gov Reducing the Noise of AI Investing – FrazerRice.com Frequently Asked Questions How much would a dollar invested in the U.S. stock market in 1800 be worth today?Meb Faber says roughly $200 million, using the figure to illustrate how relentless compounding has powered through wars, depressions, and pandemics over the country’s history. It’s an illustrative, back-of-envelope estimate rather than a precise index calculation, since standardized stock indexes didn’t exist in 1800. Why is Meb Faber’s new book priced at $76?It’s a nod to 1776 and the country’s founding, timed to the U.S. semiquincentennial. All proceeds go to charities that fund investment accounts for Americans born in the country. What is shareholder yield, and how is it different from dividend yield?Shareholder yield is cash dividends plus net stock buybacks (net of new share issuance, particularly from stock-based compensation), divided by market cap. Faber argues it captures real capital return to shareholders better than dividend yield alone, especially now that the S&P 500’s dividend yield sits near an all-time low of about 1.04% and share buybacks have outpaced dividends every year since the late 1990s. What is Meb Faber’s argument against CalPERS and other large pension funds?Faber’s recurring claim is “the returns are not bad, they’re just not good” — that giant institutional pools with access to virtually any manager on the planet still fail to consistently beat a simple, low-cost, diversified buy-and-hold portfolio, once fees and complexity are accounted for. Cambria launched an endowment-style ETF (ENDW) partly to make this a live, ongoing comparison rather than a hypothetical one. What is Cambria’s endowment-style ETF and how does it compare to institutions like CalPERS?ENDW replicates a Yale/Swensen-style endowment allocation — global stocks, global bonds, and real assets like gold, TIPS, and REITs — in a low-cost ETF with an all-in expense under 25 basis points. Faber uses it as a running, real-time benchmark against actual endowment and pension performance reported each fiscal year. Why does Meb Faber say complexity is often the enemy in investing?Unlike most fields, where more resources and the best available experts reliably produce better outcomes, Faber argues that in investing, more complexity and more access to exotic managers frequently doesn’t translate into better returns net of fees — and often just adds cost and illiquidity risk. What lesson does Meb Faber draw from institutional blowups and the 2008–2009 crisis?Endowments that mark their portfolios only once a year got caught badly offsides in 2008–2009, with illiquid positions falling even further than public markets. Faber sees the same pattern recur whenever a fund over-levers and gets forced out of the game — a basic failure of position sizing and situational awareness that keeps repeating at the highest levels of finance. Full Transcript [00:00] Cold Open (produced VO): I said, who’s had more turnover in the past 10 years — CalPERS CIOs or UK Prime Ministers? Both totally dysfunctional. And I think CalPERS has a slight edge, but it’s close. Meb Faber suggested that CalPERS should fire its entire investment team, and that complexity has become a major headwind to their ability to generate returns. Find out more on this episode of Wealth Actually. We’re also going to talk about Meb’s new book, which argues that America is one of the greatest compounding machines in the history of capitalism. [00:29] Show Open (produced VO): Welcome back to the Wealth Actually podcast — the show that features experts, entrepreneurs, and commentators who give you the right knowledge, planning, and guidance so you can preserve your assets and enjoy your wealth. Learn more and subscribe today at WealthActually.com. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not investment, legal, or tax advice. It does not represent the opinions of the employers of the host or guest. [00:54] Frazer Rice: Welcome back. Meb Faber is on the show. He founded Cambria Investment Management, which is a $4 billion ETF group. He also has The Meb Faber Show and does a lot of different writing. He’s famous for being on Twitter and taking on CalPERS. But most importantly, he has a new book out talking about America as a great compounding machine. It’s a lot of fun to have him on. Welcome aboard, Meb. [01:16] Meb Faber: My man, great to be here. Frazer Rice: Oh, thank you for being on. I thank you beforehand for including a piece of my writing in one of your old compendiums on best investment writing. I’ve never forgotten that, so thank you again. Meb Faber: Well, good job making the cut. Frazer Rice: Yeah, right, exactly. I passed the audition. Seen you a few times on The Idea Farm here and there over the years. Meb Faber: Yep. As I tell people with my girlfriend, I met expectations in my recent review, so we’re onto the next year. Look, key to life, Frazer — investors, we’re in a bull market, everyone expects 15% returns forever. Key to investing in life: just low expectations. That’s it. Set your expectations low, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised every day. Don’t lose principal over time — that’ll get you pretty far in life. [02:07] Frazer Rice: So anyway, you’ve got a new book out too, which I thought was pretty cool. I love the fact that you priced it at $17.76 and really focused on the— Meb Faber: No, no, no, no, Frazer — it is $76, in honor of 1776. Now to be clear, we don’t make any money on this book. We’re donating all the proceeds to the Invest America charities that fund accounts for Americans born in this country — a wonderful charity, big supporters of it. Frazer Rice: But yes, in honor of the country’s founding. This is why we have you all to make sure I get that stuff right. But the concept of America as the best compounding machine ever — I think that’s really interesting. First of all, what prompted you to get involved with putting this book together? You’ve written before — seems like you’ve been busy with other stuff, of course — but then you came back and decided this was a good topic to take on. What was the genesis of the book? [03:13] Meb Faber: Yeah, so this is my eighth book, and the first coffee-table book we’ve ever done. People were saying, “What the hell, $76? Are you guys crazy?” Look — this is a beautiful 200-page book. There’s probably 70 pictures, charts, tables. And the concept is in the subtitle: Investing in America: The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market. And the origin story goes back to COVID. Nobody had anything to do — sports stopped, you couldn’t go to the beach. So people were sitting around, and Americans — look, they’re gamblers, they’re risk-takers, we know that. And I said, we can’t do anything about that. So this entire generation of young people turned their attention to the stock market, and we got meme stocks. Today that’s evolved into prediction markets and zero-day options and all sorts of other nonsense. We wanted to grab those young people and say, “No, you don’t understand — the real story is better than any of this. You don’t have to day-trade. You don’t have to bet against the casino and lose.” So we said, let’s do this history since the founding of our republic — what it would have looked like if you could invest from 1800. And the compounding math is so fantastical it seems wrong. A dollar invested in 1800 — and yes, I know there were no indexes back then, chill out, people — but just to be instructive, a dollar would be worth roughly $200 million today. The point is you get on this train despite wars and depressions and pandemics and everything else terrible that’s happened in the history of the world — despite all that, this relentless compounding is such a fun story. On top of that — the founding of our country, and a lot of people don’t know this: when you learn the history of America in elementary school, you learn about the immigration, particularly from Europe, people escaping religious persecution, seeking a better life through freedom — the Mayflower, all that. All true. But what they leave out is that most of these explorations and voyages were funded by companies. Back then they called them joint-stock companies; today we call them companies, LPs, C-corporations — corps, right, partnerships. Because the reality, going back to the 15th century, is that if you’re sending a ship to the New World to find gold, that ship could sink, or there were pirates — you’d lose all your money. So this brilliant invention we call diversification today has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. These companies said, it’s risky to invest in one voyage, but you can own part of a company that invests in 10 or 20 or 30 of these, and maybe one of them will hit. That sounds like venture capital. They used to call these people “adventurers” or merchant adventurers. Hudson’s Bay, the Mayflower voyage, the Virginia Company — many of them failed, many didn’t make money, but some made spectacular profits. It’s a fun origin story that hasn’t really been told about these early entrepreneurs and risk-takers, who honestly still permeate our culture to this day. [06:33] Frazer Rice: In putting the book together, what was the most surprising chart you found that you ended up including? [06:41] Meb Faber: There’s a lot of fun historical statistics in the book. One of my favorite parts of writing it was buying — I don’t know, 50 or 100 financial history books I’d never heard of, books on financial crises globally from various markets. We just had an author on the podcast talking about the global financial crisis of 1873, and on and on — you learn so much. One I love telling people, especially young people — my son or his friends — is: look at a dollar bill or a quarter, and I ask, what’s the motto on there? Well, that used to not be the motto. Ben Franklin, back in the day, the motto on the Fugio cent used to say “Mind Your Business” — which I thought was amazing. And it’s not “mind your business, kid” in the nosy sense — it’s more like, mind your (own) business. It had a sundial on it, too: time is short, mind your business. I thought, let’s go back to that — such a great motto. A bunch of little fun stories, but to me one of the big takeaways of the book is: as a public stock investor, the news is always negative. You turn on CNBC, Bloomberg, pull up your phone, social media — negative, negative, negative, negative. It’s hard to sustain conviction. Look, we haven’t been through a big bear market in 17 years, but when you’re down 30%, 40%, 50%, and you’re reading “Lehman’s going under” and all these crazy headlines — the book lets you zoom out. Each chapter zooms into a decade and then zooms back out and says, okay, 1930s, Great Depression, you lost 80% in stocks — but guess what, here’s your return over the next 50 years. Even over a 20-year period, large-cap stocks become less volatile than bonds, which is an amazing takeaway. Being able to zoom out and say, “I’m a long-term investor, why am I even concerning myself with day-to-day negativity” — that shift in mindset is really important, because when you zoom out, you can barely even see 1987 on a long-term chart of the stock market. I think it’s a useful thing to send to clients, particularly at year-end if you’re a financial advisor. We’ve got big discounts if you buy 50 books online — send it to clients and say, hey, stop going crazy, this too shall pass. [09:09] Frazer Rice: One thing I always have in my mind — I don’t remember if this is exactly true, but Argentina and the US were on roughly equal economic footing back around 1900. When you were putting this together, did you see anything in the US’s political climate or structure — the things that gave it tailwinds to go from 1900 through to now with this rocket-ship growth — versus a country like Argentina, similarly situated, that just muddled along economically? Was there anything in particular that you saw that codified American exceptionalism? [09:51] Meb Faber: Yeah, you’ve got to remember, the US was an emerging market too, for a long period. We didn’t always hold the crown as the largest economy or the largest stock market in the world. The US is two-thirds of world market cap today — astonishing. But if you and I were sipping tea back in 1800 or 1900 and betting on what country would dominate the next century, you’d have gotten a whole host of different answers. That’s part of the fun of this book — you realize, when things got started in Amsterdam in the 1600s, they held the crown, but not forever. It shifted to London, then eventually to New York. And in our own lifetimes, the US wasn’t always the largest stock market — Japan was, in the 1980s. It’s a useful construct: look how much things change. Not even just on a country level — sectors too. Go back 100 years and you’re like, wait, where are the tech stocks? It was railroads. Go back another 100 years and it’s, wait, where are the railroads? There weren’t any — it was banks and insurance. The constant is always change and creative destruction. The big takeaway is you have to be an owner. This ownership mentality is particularly pervasive in the US. Talk to people in Sweden, Europe, Asia, Latin America — they own far fewer stocks than Americans do. Ask what they invest in, and it’s cash in the bank, real estate, maybe. There’s something in the water here. Same thing with entrepreneurship — talk to Americans about failure, and there’s no shame in it here. It’s almost celebrated; we cheer for it. The only thing we like seeing more than someone fail is their eventual rise after failure — the phoenix. There’s a lot of big takeaways in that. It feels like the last 17 years, the US is just going to dominate forever. We wrote a paper called The Bear Market and Diversification a few years back about how special this period has been for US stocks, crushing everything else — but it’s not totally without precedent. In the last hundred years it’s happened three other times where 10-year rolling stock returns hit 15%: the 1920s (the Roaring Twenties), the Nifty Fifty period in the mid-20th century, and my favorite bull market, the late 1990s. And now again today — COVID, meme stocks, the AI boom, whatever you want to call it. Eventually the good times don’t last forever; you probably shouldn’t expect 15% returns to the moon. But pat yourself on the back and celebrate it — it’s been a very special run. [12:47] Frazer Rice: Day-job-wise, at Cambria you’ve got a whole host of different investment theses that you build vehicles around. One that’s gotten my attention, and that I really like the idea of, is the shareholder yield concept — especially the global shareholder yield concept, for the reasons you just described, coming off a very long cycle of US exceptionalism in the stock market. I like the idea of cash flow as an indicator of good investment performance, and diversifying both within and outside the US. With an asterisk here that this is not investment advice, everyone — take us through what you’re thinking on that front, and what else you’re up to at Cambria that’s interesting in the investment ecosystem right now. [13:35] Meb Faber: Sure. It’s kind of crazy, Frazer, but we hit our 20-year anniversary this year, which feels like just yesterday when I started the company. Some of the shareholder yield funds — we now have three with over a 10-year track record, and our oldest, SYLD, is a pesky teenager now. What do you expect out of teenagers? More volatility — hopefully up volatility, not down. We wrote a book on this topic 10, 15 years ago, and a new second edition is out — it’s free online as an ebook, listeners, you can get it from the blog. The subtitle of the book is Shareholder Yield: A Better Approach to Dividend Investing — a pretty bold claim, given there are hundreds of dividend-type funds out there: dividend income, dividend growth, equity income, on and on. Our thesis was that there’s something the entire marketplace hadn’t noticed or appreciated: the rise of share buybacks. Starting in the late ’90s, share buybacks have outpaced dividend distributions in the United States every year. In fact, the US dividend yield on the S&P 500 is at an all-time low of 1.04% — it may cross below 1% for the first time ever, which is astonishing. Our thesis was that a shareholder yield approach — simply cash dividends plus net stock buybacks — outperforms, historically, any dividend strategy you can construct. The “net” matters because it accounts for share issuance, particularly stock-based compensation to the C-suite, which is everywhere in the US — my home state of California’s tech companies love to “make it rain” with stock-based comp. The problem is the average US stock is a diluter: your ownership share goes down every year because they keep issuing more shares. We’ve since demonstrated this in real time across SYLD, FYLD, EYLD (the emerging-market version), and now small-cap and large-cap variants — they’ve done exceptionally well. These funds effectively target a Buffett-like, value-and-quality approach: the average stock coming into the portfolios has roughly a double-digit shareholder yield. Let that sink in — there are dividend funds in the US today, ETFs and mutual funds, that claim to be high-yield or dividend-income funds whose actual dividend yield is lower than their management fee. A negative net dividend yield — an astonishing statistic in 2026. In the US, that shareholder yield is mostly driven by buybacks. In foreign developed and emerging markets, it’s closer to 50-50 — those markets still have more of a culture of cash dividends, so you’ll see yields there closer to 5-6%. But that’s changing, and changing fast. We did a blog post recently calling the UK the “buyback capital of the world” — the UK, China, Japan, and a bunch of other countries have hockey-sticked higher on this. It’s spreading globally, this idea of corporate responsibility: “my stock’s at half of book value, maybe we should consider buybacks.” There’s so much mythology around stock buybacks — we could do a whole podcast on it — and we try to tackle it in the book. Hopefully it’s like a red pill: once you take it, it’s hard to look at investing the same way again, because it feels like you were missing a major piece of the puzzle. [17:46] Frazer Rice: How infuriating is it when the Warrens of the world take aim at buybacks? It feels like an economically illiterate, and certainly politically driven, approach to legislating. To put the clamps on a genuinely useful capital allocation tool — I just don’t understand it. You must look at that and want to shake people and say, you’re missing the point, and you’re not even really targeting the abuses that exist. [18:20] Meb Faber: Well, I try not to be too dismissive of our lovely politicians — the joke I always make is, don’t look down on them, they weren’t taught finance and investing in school either. We don’t teach money and investing in school, and that’s sort of my white whale — I think we should be teaching it as early as elementary school, just basic classes on money. The good news is, roughly a quarter to a third of high schools are now requiring at least one class on the topic. What they’re actually targeting, I think somewhat thoughtfully underneath it, is executive compensation and stock issuance — which is the crazy part, because buybacks are the flip side of that. If a company is consistently loading up its CEO with options and diluting shareholders, and using buybacks to mop that dilution up — that’s what they’re really targeting, but it’s not the buyback itself. It’s the stock-based comp. Buybacks are the exhaust; that happens down the road. The cool part about our methodology is we’re only targeting companies trading at something like 80 cents on the dollar. Buffett is my favorite example here — Berkshire has never paid a dividend, and you might think that’s crazy, but he understands this better than anyone. He’s been writing about buybacks since the 1980s. There’s a great quote from an old Berkshire annual report where he says there’s no better use of cash than buying back your own shares when they’re trading below intrinsic value. Berkshire has bought back a ton of stock over the past several years — smart — they say they’ll buy back at 1.2 times book or below and run a valuation screen. There’s a great, somewhat surprising, takeaway in the book: there’s a myth that CEOs are megalomaniacs who just buy back stock whenever they think it’s expensive or cheap, but if you model it out historically, companies doing big buybacks (say, to retire 5% of market cap) tend to trade at a valuation discount to the market, and companies doing share issuance tend to trade at a valuation premium. There’s a real valuation arbitrage going on — CEOs aren’t dummies. That’s part of what you’re capturing with a shareholder yield approach, as long as it’s consistently recycled. And remember, a buyback is optional — there has to be someone willing to sell into it, so there are always two sides. [20:54] Frazer Rice: Let’s talk about one of my favorite parts of your persona, honestly — your fun critique of CalPERS and what large institutions do (and don’t do well) in managing money, and the inefficiencies that creep in with these big pools of capital as implementation and asset allocation get very complicated and very expensive. Walk me through your thinking when you first noticed the CalPERS phenomenon, and a bit of the history there. [21:34] Meb Faber: My very first book was called The Ivy Portfolio, and we looked at how top endowments manage their assets — Yale, the late David Swensen. One of the strange things about our world in asset management — almost unique among industries — is the assumption that more resources, more money, more access automatically equals better results. That’s true in almost every other endeavor: get the best doctor, you’re probably better off than with your local doctor; best trainer, best nutritionist, best coach, on and on. Not necessarily true in investing. The longer I’ve been in this business, the more I see complexity as often an enemy. So we love to pick on CalPERS — we’ve written a dozen articles: should CalPERS be run by a robot, should they just fire everyone and buy ETFs? We’ve run the simulations, and in many cases these giant institutions — with $500 billion, hundreds of employees, access to literally any fund on the planet — should be able to beat everyone, but they can’t. A very basic buy-and-hold portfolio can mimic what a lot of these top institutions actually deliver. Eventually I got tired of just talking about it. I’ve applied for the CalPERS CIO job at least half a dozen times — they have an opening every other year, listeners, it’s the most dysfunctional organization. I joked on Twitter the other day: who’s had more turnover in the past 10 years, CalPERS CIOs or UK prime ministers? Both totally dysfunctional — I think CalPERS has a slight edge, but it’s close. I said I’d do the job for free — I’d fire almost everyone and get rid of all the illiquid, high-fee investments. But there’s this entire ecosystem of people incentivized to keep the engine running: private equity consultants and the rest of the “two-and-20” crowd. So eventually we said, let’s make this a real, live contest. We launched an endowment-style ETF, ENDW — roughly $150-180 million in it now — and said every June 30th, once we’re through a fiscal year, we’re going to compare results head-to-head. This ETF has no management fee to speak of, all-in under 25 basis points. Can you beat a low-cost ETF like that? Let’s find out. Sure enough, year one — CalPERS has already reported, and they didn’t do badly, but it was basically like a 60/40 portfolio; you’d have been just as well off doing 60/40 and moving on. Our endowment-style allocation actually replicates the average endowment quite well — a nice global mix of global stocks, global bonds, and global real assets (gold, TIPS, REITs, and so on — that real-assets sleeve is one a lot of people leave out). To get closer to a Swensen-level result, you need a couple more ingredients, in my view: you can approximate something like private equity with small-cap value, and approximate the broader endowment risk profile with a bit of leverage, plus tilts to value, global exposure, and trend-following. We’ll see how year one shakes out once all the endowments report — UNC might actually beat us because they had a huge stake in SpaceX, so congrats to Chapel Hill. But I think year one goes to me, sorry to say, CalPERS. I’m going to be a giant irritant on this for years to come. The cool thing is you now have a genuinely investable benchmark. Every endowment investment committee suddenly has to ask, with real fiduciary teeth: can we beat this low-cost ETF? And if we can’t, what are we even doing — why are we studying all these crazy illiquid partnerships instead of just buying a basket of ETFs and calling it a day? That’s going to be an awkward conversation in a lot of boardrooms. [25:45] Frazer Rice: Two comments on that. First — isn’t there someone in the state of Nevada doing something similar, basically running one of the state pension pools with a team of about three people? [25:51] Meb Faber: Yes — we had him on the podcast. I told him, look, you’re putting your money where your mouth is on this. I won’t do his story justice here, I’ll tell you about it off-air — but it’s a great example that this doesn’t have to be as hard as people make it out to be. Frazer Rice: The second thing is — anytime I’ve talked to people in the industry about this, they come back and say, “yes, we technically have an infinite investing horizon, but we have very rigid liquidity needs, so we need to be complex, because our liquidity needs can shift at any moment.” Meanwhile, on one hand I’m thinking, that complexity doesn’t actually help you with liquidity, as far as I can tell — and on the other, it feels like a bit of a convenient excuse. Do you have a response to that? [26:56] Meb Faber: Oh boy, I’ve got a bunch. The endowments famously got caught upside-down in 2008-2009. They only mark their portfolios once a year, June 30th — I wish we could all do that; maybe we should just tell clients, you’re only allowed to look once a year. They were probably down roughly half in ’08-’09, and the illiquid positions were probably down even more. A lot of them got badly offsides, and I don’t think many of them have fully learned the lesson — if you look at the amount of private allocations still sitting in a lot of these portfolios today, it’s a massive amount. I hope they’ve learned the lesson. We’ll see. But it’s a story as old as time — we just saw a version of it recently with a fund blowup, a basic, one-oh-one level failure of situational awareness and position sizing: you over-lever a portfolio, you get taken out of the game, you lose all your money, and then you’re out of chips at the poker table. You watch these mistakes happen at the upper echelons of finance and wonder how it’s still happening — and the core problem is that the career incentives of the people running the money don’t necessarily match the actual investment problem. Yale gets a pass. When Swensen’s successors hit a rough patch, how long do they get a pass? Because Harvard has been a total mess for the last 20 years — there are entire books written about the Harvard endowment, which used to be the Yale before Yale. The Harvard Crimson ran article after article saying, you’re overpaying people, what’s going on here — and the fund would underperform and nobody would actually lose their job over it. That’s the real problem, and I have some sympathy for how hard it is to fix. You deal with a version of this on the personal client side too, with multigenerational wealth — it’s almost an unsolvable structural problem for a Harvard, an endowment, or a CalPERS, because — take Harvard — you’ve got current students, alumni, future students, professors, the people who work at the endowment itself, all with completely different incentives and interests. It creates a genuinely absurd situation where, in no realistic scenario, should the resulting portfolio look like what they actually end up with. It’s an outright disaster, structurally. [29:36] Frazer Rice: It reminds me of a car designed by committee — you end up with this stitched-together Frankenstein’s monster of a product that was never going to work or sell, and it ends up sinking the company. Meb Faber: Yeah, yeah — a Rube Goldberg machine is not what you need. But there’s a reason our endowment ETF, out of the roughly 20 funds we’ve launched, has gotten the least attention — even though it’s now about $5 billion in assets with over a hundred thousand investors. It’s received the least publicity of any ETF we’ve ever done, because it doesn’t benefit anyone in that whole existing ecosystem — it’s actually a genuine threat to it. I was at an institutional conference up in Santa Barbara, at a wine happy hour, talking to three women who run three of the most famous pension and endowment pools of real money in the country. We’d just launched an endowment-style ETF, and they just stared back at me with these icy daggers. I said, oh, sorry — I’m not really a competitor to you, you should easily be able to beat me, I’m just the table stakes. But I think they realized that’s probably not true — they’re going to have a very hard time beating me, which doesn’t exactly make me anyone’s friend. I’m the anti-Switzerland of asset management. [31:16] Frazer Rice: Meb, how do people find the firm, find the book, find you? [31:24] Meb Faber: With a name like Meb, it’s easy. Cambria Funds is the day job, with the ETFs. Meb Faber is the old blog, podcast, and Twitter presence — you can find that just about anywhere. And if you find yourself in Los Angeles, Manhattan Beach, come say hi. We’d love to hear from you if you pick up a copy of the book, Investing in America — let us know what you think. Frazer Rice: Really cool stuff. Thanks, Meb, for being on. This was a blast — let’s do it again. Meb Faber: Let’s do it. [31:50] Close (produced VO): This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes. It is neither investment, legal, nor tax advice. It does not represent the opinions of the employers of the host or guests. https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Actually-Intelligent-Decision-Making-1-ebook/dp/B07FPQJJQT/

The Boone Area Chamber of Commerce hosts Spirit of Boone, its 77th annual membership gathering, September 24th in the Grandview Ballroom at Kidd Brewer Stadium.The full slate of honorees was announced on WATA's Mark in the Morning show on August 11th, marking the beginning of the storytelling about the accomplishments of this year's class. On this week's Mind Your Business, we unveil this year's list of honorees, and talk about what made them a choice for this year's spotlight. We also reconnect with Ashley Galleher, the 2025 Kathy Crutchfield Citizen of the Year award recipient, and we'll hear how ZRC Skate has been impacted over the last year by more through community awareness of this unique business.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Mind your business sometimes! Some people just want attention for their situation not actual guidance and sound advice. You will be left feeling drained while they skip off into the sunset in blissful ignorance.

Registration opened this week for the 3rd installment of the Encore program, the latest offering from the Watauga Leadership Institute. On this week's Mind Your Business, we visit with Dr. Jim Street, Curriculum Coordinator for the Watauga Leadership Institute and Founder of Ridgeline Leadership. He'll preview this year's Encore program, and we'll talk about the value of team and individual skill development, and how that applies to work, life, and helps define ones sense of community.Encore is a cohort-style course offers attendees the opportunity to expand their leadership knowledge, mindset, and skills. Each two-hour session will examine a specialty topic that builds off the core elements of the Watauga Leadership Institute curriculum, while encouraging the self-renewal of your guiding leadership principles.We'll also provide updates on two important and highly visible traffic projects currently underway in the Town of Boone.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

It doesn't take long to think about someone in your life that has stayed in the working world for longer than they may have liked. The retirement dream and target has changed a lot over the years, and that exit from the daily grind becomes more complicated when retiring from a business you own, and that entity has a less than certain future. How do you step away while still providing employment opportunities for your team? How do you get the full value for decades of hard work?On this week's Mind Your Business, we unlock Employee Ownership, not only as an exit strategy for business owners, but also as an employee incentive for small businesses that dream of seeing their company and its culture survive for generations. Illa Burbank, Executive Director of the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center (NCEOC) is our guest this week, and she'll help provide a definition to employee ownership as we explore the different tools within this strategy. We'll also talk about how entrepreneurs can use this ownership system at the start of their business journey, giving them more options for their eventual exit.The NCEOC is hosting the North Carolina Business Continuity & Employee Ownership conference in Raleigh on Wednesday, September 16th, where business owners can learn more about these strategies, and how employee ownership can be positioned as a unique employee retention incentive.Following up on last week's episode, we'll give you the details about a major grant announcement that will have an impact on Western North Carolina's long-term economic recovery from Hurricane Helene.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

It's been almost 21-months since Hurricane Helene's impact was felt across Western North Carolina. While the region has largely recovered from some of the notable physical aspects of the story, the economic recovery will be going on for quite some time.Last week, Governor Stein's Advisory Committee for Western North Carolina recovery met in Boone, where the draft version of the region's Long-Term Economic Recovery plan was discussed. While the full version has not yet been released, valuable feedback came from this discussion that will inform the full report, set to be released later this fall.On this week's Mind Your Business, we visit with Sharon Decker, Governor Stein's Senior Advisor for WNCs Long-Term Recovery. She and the GROW NC team have been hard at work, collecting data and experiences from across the region, with the goal of leaving Western North Carolina in a stronger position than what existed pre-Helene. We'll discuss how this plan will be communicated and how existing assets can prepare the region for economic growth in popular sectors.To advance this work, it's been made abundantly clear from lawmakers at the State and Federal level that additional funding will be required. Earlier this week, Senator Ted Budd testified before US Senate colleagues, and we'll hear exactly what he shared as he works to keep the voice of Western North Carolina alive in Congress.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon (except this week) at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Life has been life-ing, and this week's Mind Your Business episode is proof that you're not the only one trying to figure it out. Sarah Jakes Roberts answers your questions on navigating grief, trusting God in unfamiliar seasons, stepping into His promises after surviving, waiting for marriage without making it an idol, setting boundaries with adult children, and making major relationship decisions. Check out our partners: Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts at https://www.rula.com/EVOLVE patients typically pay $15 per session with insurance. Get 40% off select Lola Blankets products at https://Lolablankets.com by using code EVOLVE at checkout. Experience the world's #1 blanket with Lola Blankets. Shopify: Your landlord has a small business. Your ex has a small business. What are you waiting for? Start your free trial today at https://shopify.com/evolve Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. Its mandate is to promote the effective operation of the U.S. economy. Sometimes such high-flying agencies or policy influencing organizations can feel detached from the day-to-day experiences that make up the High Country economy. However, the Federal Reserve uses a network of economists and data analysts to ensure the voice of Main Street is being heard and helping inform Federal policy and direction.On this week's Mind Your Business, we visit with Bethany Greene, Regional Economist for the Charllotte Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Bethany monitors regional economic trends through data analysis and engagements with the business community in North and South Carolina. We'll discuss the role of the Fed, and how they extract data from locations across the region in a manner that ultimately shows up in policy shaping discussions. We'll also talk about the recent transition of Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, what Western North Carolina can expect, economically speaking, as we move further away from the physical impacts of Hurricane Helene, and what's on the horizon in terms of economy shaping influences.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

July is prime time for tourism season across the High Country. As the calendar flips, vacationers flock to the area, especially those melting in the record heat off the mountain. On this week's Mind Your Business, we will discuss the intentionality that goes into creating the visitor experience, and what July means to both the anchor attractions as well as other businesses that benefit from increased traffic. Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation Executive Director Jesse Pope returns to program to talk July tourism from the perspective of one of our region's most recognizable and frequently visited attractions. We'll learn how he and his staff help set visitors up with great experiences as they depart the gates and head toward other locations. We'll also get the latest on Blue Ridge Parkway road work, and how to access Grandfather Mountain and some of the area's more popular trails and features throughout the month of July.Speaking of road work, we'll also bring Downtown Boone Development Association Director Lane Moody back to the show, as she gives us the latest updates on the Howard Street Revitalization Project.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

As we move through the month of June, the Mountaineer 10-miler, High Country Jazz Festival, and Boonerang are among the summer events that are officially in the books.On this week's Mind Your Business, we dive into the early numbers regarding the economic impact of the Mountaineer 10-miler and Boonerang. Charlie Mercer, CEO of Capstone Event Group rejoins the show to discuss the post-race survey results from over 850 participants in the Mountaineer 10-miler, which includes a breakdown on runner demographics, lodging impacts, shopping and dining activity, and likelihood of repeat trips to the High Country. We then turn attention to the inital visitor data from the 5th annual Boonerang Music & Arts Festival, which further supports the impact event weeknds have on the entire High Country.To wrap up the show, we'll visit with Victoria O'Connell, Water Conservation Program Coordinator with the Town of Boone, as she explains the recently announced Stage 2 Water Restrictions enacted by Boone Town Council, and what this means for residents and businesses.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Sometimes you have to sit back and let people do what they need to do on their own. Alot of people really do need your help and advice while others just want attention and they end up wasting your time.Know when it's time to step back and mind your business.

There are businesses in the High Country that truly connect their product to the place. This week on Mind Your Business, we continue our Built in Boone series, and step inside Booneshine Brewing Company, and talk with President and Co-Founder Tim Herdklotz. As we take a walking tour through the tasting room and production facility, we'll talk with Tim about Booneshine's origin story, their capacity for growth, and the intentionality that allowed them to develop a business that helps "make Boone shine."We'll also go over some logistics for this weekend's Boonerang Music & Art Festival and we'll play a new game called "What are they building over there?"Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

You're listening to the Mind Your Business podcast special edition replay episode, which will only be available for a limited time until June 25th. This is a replay of a Breakthrough Beta Panel hosted inside of James's free live training series, The Business Breakthrough Experience. In this recording, you'll hear from four Business by Design students who use James's exact process attended the training that he is hosting for free live this week and deployed his process to launch their beta and then go on to build repeatable, scalable businesses. Some of them started from zero, some of them already had an audience and wanted to pivot. But if you're someone who's wondering, can I do this, even if I'm starting from scratch, this episode is for you!  In this replay, you'll hear the panelists answer questions from our live audience and Jenni will relay the questions to the panelists. It's everything you would want to know about whether or not you should use ads when you first start out, how to transfer your skill from one-to-one to one-to-many, what it actually takes to build a beta and launch it, how they price their beta and how they converted beta members into a backend membership. All of these things are waiting for you inside the episode… And we have more panels coming up live next week! So if you've ever wanted to see what real success looks like, join Jenni and James for the live panel series available for you when you register for the Business Breakthrough Experience. You can register for James's free training and all of the Breakthrough Panels by heading over to www.businessbydesign.net/bbe! 

Today's Masked Speaker is SUPER GRATEFUL that her dog can't talk... because if she could - everybody would know the WEIRD THING this woman does every morning at 5 am attempting to train her pup. It's something even her HUSBAND can never know.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Earlier this month, the Hunger & Health Coalition welcomed Lindsey Sullivan as the organization's new Executive Director. Lindsey is no stranger to the non-profit scene in Watauga County, having served as Health Strategist at AppHealthCare, where, among other projects, she was a lead voice in the creation of STABLE Workplaces.On this week's Mind Your Business, we catch up with Lindsey at the ribbon-cutting for the newly renovated home of Hunger and Health Coalition, a space that connects their footprint to the Community Care Clinic, following a merger of the two organizations in 2025. After the event, we sat down to discuss leading through transition, the value of listening in the early days of a new role, and how prior knowledge of a business can accelerate opportunity for growth.We'll also provide some fresh news on the FY27 budget plans for Watauga County and the Town of Boone. Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

In this new sermon series pastor encourages us to focus on ourselves and to mind our business.

The wheels on the bus are about to be parked for a few months, as Watauga County Schools dismiss for summer break. As the Class of 2026 makes their way across the graduation stage, many will take their first steps into workforce pathways that will set them up for decades.On this week's Mind Your Business, we visit with Dr. Leslie Alexander, Superintendent of Watauga County Schools, as she recaps the 2025-26 school year. She'll also give an early snapshot of testing results, discuss impending budget impacts, and share details on the scholastic impact of the Class of '26.We delayed this episode a day because we had some Chamber news to share that we could report until late yesterday. The Boone Area Chamber of Commerce has been selected as one of 11 organizations across the country as a finalist for Chamber of the Year, presented by GrowthZone. We'll tell you how this all came about and what comes next!Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon (Friday this week) at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone. Support the show

Two Hot Takes host, Morgan, is joined by guest co-host Hannah Berner of Giggly Squad! Hannah is back and helping us determining if the people in these stories should have minded their business or not. Like do you tell your DIL she's wrong about the earth being flat? Do you change your outfit because your ex told you to? Or what do you do when your husband's mistress is stalking you?! Speaking of business get ready for her new special on Hulu -- None of my Business!! Can't wait to hear your thoughts on these ones. Checkout Hannah's Special & Content: https://www.hulu.com/movie/hannah-berner-none-of-my-business-dcf075e6-79ce-4cbe-b6a4-153f0970fa88 https://www.instagram.com/HANNAHBERNER/ Partners: Credit Karma: Download Credit Karma today and get the credit you deserve. State Farm: This episode is sponsored by State Farm. A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Patreon BONUS Content including FREE stories: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/TwoHotTakes ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ NEW MERCH:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://shop.twohottakes.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ WRITE IN TO US!! Our SubReddit! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoHotTakes/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Full length Video episodes available on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/TwoHotTakes⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Index: 00:00 -- Start Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What do parents do wrong? Caller's teen battering news coverage. Emotional churches. Pope warning on AI. How to overcome fear.

The 7th Annual Vision Northwest North Carolina summit is in the books, and discussions around transportation throughout the region highlighted an agenda filled with local leaders and regional experts.On this week's Mind Your Business, we offer a recap of that day — from keynote discussions to a real life example of why transportation infrastructure matters to areas businesses at the most practical level.Kenny Flowers, Chief Deputy Secretary of the NC Department of Commerce, delivered a keynote address, which coincided with the May 20th release of North Carolina's new Comprehensive Strategic Economic Development Plan — First in Opportunity. The plan outlines four strategic goals covering infrastructure, economic competitiveness, community well-being, and workforce development. Of the nine breakout panels that were hosted at Vision Northwest North Carolina,  we'l  recap the All Roads Lead to Money discussion, featuring Patrick Woodie, President/CEO of the NC Rural Center, and economic development expert Dan Gerlach. The conversation covered the current state of transportation funding, the added strain of Hurricane Helene's $6 billion in road damage, and what a sustainable long-term investment strategy for North Carolina's transportation system looks like.Finally, we'll hear from Meagan Coneybeer of NC Innovation on the Rootsii sweet potato processing project — and what transportation infrastructure means for its future.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Master Herbalist and Metaphysician, Doctah B, returns to our classroom on Wednesday morning with an unmissable program: ‘Mind Your Business and Business Your Mind’. Prepare to learn actionable strategies from Doctah B for running your life with the focus and success of a thriving business. Before Doctah B takes the mic, get ready to meet the remarkable Dr. Bill Releford—a nationally acclaimed podiatric physician renowned for his groundbreaking work in diabetic limb preservation. Dr. Releford's achievements go beyond medicine; he also owns a celebrated winery and vineyard, and operates the largest Black-owned farm in L.A. County. His story is one of innovation and inspiration. We’re also excited to welcome the dynamic researcher, the Irritated Genie, who will present a vital position paper on America's First Global Health Strategy—a must-hear for anyone passionate about our collective well-being. This is not just any broadcast. The Big Show brings together leaders who are transforming lives and championing progress.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A landmark childcare partnership arrived in the High Country last week — one designed to stabilize two different workforces at once. On Friday, May 15th, UNC Health Appalachian officially announced their participation in the North Carolina Tri-Share Child Care Program, becoming the first healthcare system in Western North Carolina to do so.On this week's Mind Your Business, we were at Friday's press conference and have the audio. You'll hear from Halee Hartley of Kid Cove, Jessica Sullins of the Hugh Chapman Early Learning Center, Nathan Nipper of UNC Health Appalachian, and Fred Hunter, Director of Program and Business Development for NC Tri-Share — on what this partnership means locally and what it signals for employers across the state.We'll also share the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce Foundation's announcement of a new fall fundraising campaign — a direct, one-time retention bonus for every childcare worker at a licensed facility in Watauga County. The goal is $60,000 to $75,000, with distribution planned for October 2026. It's the third consecutive year the Foundation has run a targeted fall childcare campaign. To get involved, visit boonechamber.com/foundation.Also on this week's show — a Blue Ridge Parkway update ahead of Memorial Day weekend, covering Great American Outdoors Act construction progress and the latest on Hurricane Helene recovery repairs. Check nps.gov/blri before you head out.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Global pressures are testing economies at every level — and the High Country is not immune. Gas prices, a new Federal Reserve Chair, ongoing conflict abroad, and a midterm election on the horizon are all part of a picture that demands clear-eyed perspective.This week on Mind Your Business, we bring local context to all these issues as we are joined by Jonathan Allen of Allen Wealth Management for our quarterly economic check-in. He'll discuss what the current market conditions mean for investors and business owners here in the High Country, how energy prices affect our summer tourism season, and what smart financial strategy looks like at the midpoint of 2026.We also recap the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce's participation in the annual WNC Chamber Coalition Legislative Visit to Raleigh this week. Eighty-five business and civic leaders representing 14 chambers — including 20 from the immediate High Country — spent two days meeting with state officials, agency leaders, and members of the General Assembly. Governor Josh Stein addressed the group directly, and we'll share highlights from those conversations, including the latest on the state budget.Next week, the Chamber hosts Vision Northwest North Carolina — our annual regional summit — on May 21st at the Watauga Campus of Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute. This year's focus is transportation. Registration is open at boonechamber.com.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

There was a time when your neighbor knew your name, your grandmother's friend's son could check you, and the whole block had some say in how you turned out. Now? People wave and go inside. So what happened?In this episode of Talking Brown Sugar, Rajah and Angela trace the shift from community-deep living to hyperlocalized, mind-your-business culture and ask whether we gained peace or lost something we can't get back.Angela remembers growing up in New York where the neighbors watched you, and North Carolina where the whole street was in your business and told on you. Rajah connects the dots between 9/11, the Patriot Act, social media, and why people started retreating into digital bubbles and what that's cost us in real-world community.They talk about third spaces disappearing (malls, bookstores, libraries), the way social media has wired us to see more negative than positive, and what healthy community actually looks like now neighborhood apps, town halls, holding the HOA accountable.

This week, UNC Health Appalachian became the first healthcare system in Western North Carolina to launch a partnership with the North Carolina Tri-Share program — a childcare cost-sharing model that splits tuition three ways between the employer, the employee, and the state. On this week's Mind Your Business, we visit with Alysia Price, Chief Human Resources Officer at UNC Health Appalachian, to discuss how the partnership works, who it serves, and what it could mean for other High Country employers who are watching closely.Also on this week's show, we mark the completion of Section 1B of the Great American Outdoors Act restoration work on the Blue Ridge Parkway — running from Parkway School to Bamboo Gap in Watauga County — and recap last night's public scoping meeting where Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent Tracy Swartout and agency partners met with the community to begin planning Helene-related debris removal. We also preview the full agenda for the 7th Annual Vision Northwest North Carolina Summit on May 21st at the Watauga Campus of Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute. This year's theme is Driving Regional Progress, with a day of keynotes and breakout sessions focused on transportation funding, workforce access, freight and mobility, and what it takes to move people across Northwest North Carolina. Registration is open now at boonechamber.com.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon (Friday afternoon this week) at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Just because they're online doesn't make them fair game! PLUS: Get Bethenny on The Big Show!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week marks the 3rd annual Fairway Fore Foundation Golf Classic at Jefferson Landing. This annual fundraising tournament fuels the work of the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce Foundation, providing support for economic development projects and investments in childcare, housing, workforce development, infrastructure, and organizational support.The Boone Area Chamber of Commerce is not the only organization that does business on the golf course. In fact, 30% of small business owners say they have initiated or closed business on a golf course. This week on Mind Your Business, we are on location for this year's tournament, highlighting the ways golf and business lead to the relationship equity that can move a deal or project across the finishline.Speaking of business, we have updates on two key project areas -- broadband infrastructure and local convention space. Edward Hinson of SkyLine/SkyBest takes time away from the range to discuss the company's continued Helene recovery efforts along with information about the future of broadband usage in the High Country. Then, we visit with the owner of the Graystone Lodge, Justin Patel. In addition to serving alongside Carolina West Wireless as our tournament co-sponsor, Justin's team has been working on a project that could add valuable meeting and convention space inside the Town of Boone. We'll get the latest details on that project, as well as an early look at the performance of the 2026 tourism season.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

On this episode of Mud Talk Podcast, we bring together two powerful perspectives—law and entrepreneurship—for a real conversation that hits different.Criminal defense attorney Joshua Sherman breaks down what people need to understand about the legal system—from knowing your rights to avoiding the common mistakes that can lead to serious consequences.Entrepreneur Connie Sutters, owner of Connie's Poppin Popcorn, shares her journey of building a business from the ground up, offering insight into the mindset, consistency, and creativity it takes to turn an idea into income.

 On Tuesday, April 21st, the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce and Watauga County Schools hosted the inaugural Trades Signing Day at Watauga High School — recognizing students who have earned, or are on track to earn, an industry-recognized credential through the school's Career and Technical Education program.On this week's Mind Your Business, we recap the event and dig into the 2026 Watauga County Attainment Profile from MyFutureNC, which tracks where our community stands on postsecondary credential attainment against the state's 2030 goals. Dr. Kim Case, Regional Impact Manager for myFutureNC's Northwest Region, joins us to connect the data to real career pathways for students across the High Country. Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Earlier this week, tickets went on sale for the 42nd season of An Appalachian Summer Festival, an annual celebration of the performing and visual arts is held every July in venues across the Appalachian State University campus, featuring an eclectic, diverse mix of music, dance, theatre, visual arts and film programming. This five-week series brings world renowned artists across multiple genres to Boone and the High Country at a highly popular time for summer tourism engagement, which provides a predictable and impactful annual economic benefit to the region.On this week's Mind Your Business, we visit with Allison West, Director of Marketing for App State's Office of Arts Engagement and Cultural Resources. She will preview the full schedule of this year's festival and tell you which events feature the fastest-selling tickets! We'll also discuss the economic benefits of An Appalachian Summer, and how this annual showcase has provided unique opportunities for the development of local artists. Speaking of economic impact, the taxes created by events like our summer festivals (occupancy tax, sales tax) provide impactful dollars to be spent on services in our local community. As the North Carolina General Assembly resumes its work this month in Raleigh, there are several legislative discussions around tax law that could have direct implications for communities across the State. The Chamber's Advocacy Task Force continues to monitor these conversations, and we'll bring you the latest details.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Earlier this week, Lenny Cottom announced the sale of Hawksnest Snow Tubing & Zipline after 35-years of family ownership. Fortunately, this was part of the Cottom's plan, and they worked to find a buyer that shared their vision for the future of this long-time outdoor playground.Business succession does not always go so smoothly, and sometimes a lack of planning can force the hand of a business owner in a way that has a negative impact on employees, customers, and the surrounding community.On this week's Mind Your Business, we hear directly from Lenny Cottom about the sale of Hawksnest, what drove the family's decision, and what comes next for one of the High Country's longest running outdoor attractions. We then tackle the concept of business succession as we visit with Chris Grasinger and John Wilantowicz of Mountain BizWorks. We discuss how developing a plan around the sale of a business can help maximize the value of the return, and ensure employees and customers can continue to count on the goods and services provided. We'll also talk about the growing benefits of buying an established business versus starting a small business from scratch, and how that can factor positively into future financing, community positioning, and other similar considerations.Mind Your Business is written and produced weekly by the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. This podcast is made possible thanks to the sponsorship support of Appalachian Commercial Real Estate.Catch the show each Thursday afternoon (except this week -- tune in Friday, April 10th) at 5PM on WATA (1450AM & 96.5FM) in Boone.Support the show

Tobin gets a little heated to kick off the third hour as Mike Florio needs to be watched because his involvement with the Dolphins makes his role on MNF inappropriate; Tobs begs for Florio to MIND HIS BUSINESS. Tobin and Brittney are still not over that loss to the Lakers so they beat the dead horse and declare that the Norm and Tyler experiment simply does not work! And since Leroy is away we have to Tickle someone's fancy; so Brittney lets the people know what she will be tuned into this sports filled weekend!

Just because they're online doesn't make them fair game! PLUS: Get Bethenny on The Big Show!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.