Podcasts about next era

In this episode, ACEC's Jeff Urbanchuk sits down with Jack Hsueh of Autodesk to explore how engineering firms can deliver more with constrained resources through digital project delivery. From connected data and collaborative workflows to automation and digital twins, they discuss how technology is transforming project execution across the industry. Jack shares insights from major initiatives like the LA28 Olympics and PennDOT, highlighting the importance of object-level data and interoperable systems to reduce rework, save time, and improve outcomes. The conversation also dives into the evolving role of AI in AEC, including automation, augmentation, analysis, Autodesk's AEC data model, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Autodesk Assistant bringing context-aware AI directly into design tools. The episode concludes with practical advice for firms looking to build capacity and resilience: treat digital delivery as a business strategy, invest in digital literacy, create repeatable processes, and pilot AI with clear governance.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the media landscape, but what does that actually mean for podcasting? On this episode of The Podcast Advertising Playbook, Heather sits down with Jeanine Wright, Co-Founder & CEO of Inception Point and former executive at Simplecast, AdsWizz, and Wondery, to unpack what AI-generated audio could mean for creators, advertisers, and the future of content itself.Why AI-generated podcasts are emerging now, and what problems they solve for creators and media companiesThe balance between human creativity and AI execution in modern content productionHow Inception Point approaches accuracy, discoverability, and avoiding a flood of “good enough” contentThe evolving conversation around ownership, IP, and breakout AI-generated personalitiesWhat AI-native podcasting could mean for advertisers, audience targeting, and dynamic listener experiencesFrom production economics to authenticity in advertising, this conversation explores how podcasting may evolve as AI becomes part of the creative process.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On today's episode, Dr. Mark Costes catches up with longtime friend and returning guest Joshua Scott, owner and CEO of Studio 8E8, for a wide-ranging conversation on growth, leadership, AI, and the realities of scaling a people-driven business. Joshua shares the vision behind Studio 8E8's new 11,000-square-foot headquarters, including the long road from finding land to building a dedicated production studio and collaborative team space.  He and Dr. Costes also reflect on the annual Murph workout, the discipline of fitness, and the lessons that carry over into entrepreneurship. The conversation then turns to AI's growing impact on marketing, where Joshua explains why technology should make agencies more human, not less, by freeing teams to focus on strategy, measurement, client relationships, and better decision-making. They also unpack the challenges of hiring, leadership, client service, and protecting trust as a company scales. Be sure to check out the full episode from the Dentalpreneur Podcast! EPISODE RESOURCES https://s8e8.com https://www.truedentalsuccess.com Dental Success Network Subscribe to The Dentalpreneur Podcast

Nishat Mehta, CEO of Lexitas, joins Jennifer Simpson Carr to discuss how AI and technology-enabled litigation services are reshaping the legal industry. From deposition summaries and case triage to client pressure, access to justice, and the future of the billable hour, the conversation explores why law firms can not treat technology adoption as optional. Nishat offers law firm leaders a grounded and strategically honest look at where AI is creating real value. To our listeners: Audio issues during this recording impacted its sound quality, but we're publishing the episode because Nishat's insights are too valuable not to share.

Corey Gloor, the voice of the Tulane Green Wave, joined Sports Talk. Gloor discussed the start of Will Hall's tenure leading the Green Wave.

How do companies create entirely new markets—and why are the best organizations rethinking profit, trust, and corporate purpose? Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Bruce Cleveland, author of Market Engineering, and Eric Ries, author of Incorruptible. We'll explore what “Market Engineering” really means and why companies must actively shape markets to stay ahead, why trust has become one of the most valuable assets an organization can build, and how mission-driven companies outperform during times of disruption. We'll also discuss why the era of shareholder primacy is being challenged, what comes next for corporate leadership, and how AI governance, healthcare, climate markets, and corporate accountability are reshaping the future of business. If you care about the future of leadership, innovation, and building enduring companies in the AI era, you won't want to miss this one.

Pride Month is underway, marking a season of celebration that's become a mainstay for some brands. But earning the trust of LGBTQ+ audiences goes far beyond rainbow merch or a few social media posts. This week on the Modern Retail Podcast, special projects editor Melissa Daniels interviewed LGBTQ+ marketing specialists Matt Tumminello and Matt Wagner of Target10. Their conversation centers on earning trust with LGBTQ customers long before it's time for a Pride collection, starting with the ways companies used to show up and how that's changed over the years. The conversation gets into: How "Pride marketing" is in its third act as cultural winds change How earning trust with LGBTQ+ consumers takes more than a one-time campaign Winning strategies that start with authentic moments and messages

What happens when the newest users on your network aren't people at all? At Cisco Live, I sat down with Aruna Ravichandran, SVP and CMO for AI, Networking, and Collaboration at Cisco, to discuss a shift that could change how organizations think about networks, operations, and AI over the coming years. For decades, enterprise networks have been built around human behavior. People work predictable hours, take holidays, and generally follow familiar patterns. AI agents are different. They work continuously, analyze information around the clock, and increasingly act as digital teammates that can help organizations monitor, troubleshoot, and improve operations at a scale that would be impossible for humans alone. During our conversation, Aruna explained why AI is no longer just an application discussion. As organizations deploy more digital teammates, networks must support a new type of user that never sleeps, never stops learning, and can help identify issues before employees even arrive at work. We explore Cisco's vision for AgenticOps, the role of Cisco Cloud Control as a unified command center, and how AI-driven operations are helping reduce complexity for teams already overwhelmed by alerts, dashboards, and operational overhead. Aruna also shared her perspective on one of the biggest challenges facing the industry today: trust. While the technology is advancing rapidly, organizations need confidence that their digital teammates can make reliable recommendations and support critical operations without removing human oversight. That balance between automation and accountability sits at the heart of Cisco's approach. We also discuss why domain expertise still matters in the age of AI, how Cisco is drawing on decades of networking experience to build purpose-built models, and why the next few years may see every IT professional supported by an expanding team of digital coworkers. If you've been wondering how AI will move beyond chat interfaces and become part of everyday operations, this conversation offers an interesting look at where networking, automation, and AI are heading next. How many digital teammates do you think you'll be working alongside in the next few years, and what tasks would you trust them to handle first?     Useful LInks Anurag Dhingra's blog DJ Sampath's blog Aruna's LinkedIn post re. The AgenticOps stats she mentioned Press Release 

With billions pouring into sports marketing this year, the stakes are high for brands. Ahead of the FIFA World Cup, and with more advertisers backing women's sports, We Are Social Sport's Joe Weston and Fuse's Matt Bailey join WARC's Anna Hamill to discuss the emerging trends in sports marketing.

Daniel is joined by Jay Dawani, co-founder and chief executive officer of Lemurian Labs, where he leads the company's mission to reinvent AI infrastructure for greater efficiency, accessibility and performance. With a background spanning AI system architecture, hardware-software co-design and performance optimization,… Read More

Hour 4: Murph and Markus are back with a packed episode, discussing the Giants' struggles and the upcoming MMA league founded by Scott Coker. The guys dive into the world of mixed martial arts, chatting with the pioneer behind the new league, who shares his vision for the future of the sport. This episode is a must-listen for both Giants fans and MMA enthusiasts. The hosts discuss the Giants' recent losses and the potential moves they could make to turn their season around, including the possibility of trading Robbie Ray and giving Trevor McDonald a chance in the bullpen. They also talk about the importance of building stars in the MMA world and how Scott Coker's new league plans to do just that. Scott Coker, the founder of the new MMA league, joins the show to share his insights on what makes a successful MMA promotion. He talks about his experience with Strikeforce and Bellator, and how he plans to bring a new level of excitement to the sport. The guys also discuss the differences between boxing and MMA, and how the latter has evolved over the years.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hour 4: Murph and Markus are back with a packed episode, discussing the Giants' struggles and the upcoming MMA league founded by Scott Coker. The guys dive into the world of mixed martial arts, chatting with the pioneer behind the new league, who shares his vision for the future of the sport. This episode is a must-listen for both Giants fans and MMA enthusiasts. The hosts discuss the Giants' recent losses and the potential moves they could make to turn their season around, including the possibility of trading Robbie Ray and giving Trevor McDonald a chance in the bullpen. They also talk about the importance of building stars in the MMA world and how Scott Coker's new league plans to do just that. Scott Coker, the founder of the new MMA league, joins the show to share his insights on what makes a successful MMA promotion. He talks about his experience with Strikeforce and Bellator, and how he plans to bring a new level of excitement to the sport. The guys also discuss the differences between boxing and MMA, and how the latter has evolved over the years.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Eric Franchi and Joe Zappa break down the biggest trends they're seeing in early-stage adtech deal flow, including the rise of chatbot and LLM ad networks, integrated marketing platforms, creator infrastructure, and a renewed wave of innovation around mobile apps. They discuss why mobile remains such an attractive market, what kinds of startups are emerging in each category, and where investors and operators are spending the most time right now. The conversation then shifts to the next phase of the Outcomes Era — where simply claiming “outcomes” is no longer enough and companies need differentiated data, supply, or technology to prove it.

Loyalty is no longer just about points and perks. As AI‑powered agents influence consumer decisions, the balance of power shifts—reshaping how trust is built, value is delivered and relationships are sustained. This change is already redefining loyalty across industries. Play this audio version of our webinar to explore how traditional loyalty models are being challenged—and what it takes to build emotionally resonant, trusted and AI‑enabled strategies for the future. What you'll learn: The decline of traditional loyalty models: who's in control—your brand or the machine? What challenges are disrupting loyalty ecosystems? Is loyalty fatigue real? Are brands ready for the consumer power shift? How should you design relevant loyalty strategies? Featuring insights from senior leaders at Arcos Dorados (McDonald's LATAM), Saudia Group and Dynamic Yield by Mastercard, this session uncovers where loyalty is headed, who controls the relationship and how brands can stay relevant in an agent-driven world. Download the slides and watch the video recording of this webinar.  How will the US-Israel-Iran war shape business dynamics beyond the initial shocks? Visit our insights hub at euromonitor.com for free data-driven tools and resources to help you assess risks and plan for longer-term impact.  Lots of brands claim to be number one… but can they prove it?At Euromonitor International, we help brands build trust through evidence-based research. Our claim validation service ensures your marketing messages are backed by real data. Stand out in a crowded market. Visit euromonitor.com/claims to learn more. Introducing Opportunity Minded, a new series from Euromonitor International designed for forward-thinking business leaders like you.  Each episode tackles a strategic approach or topic on corporate agendas.  You'll hear from our experts who share in

Episode #3 of Empathy in the Age of AI, a special 20-part series: https://tinyurl.com/exyw2nua AI is impacting every part of our lives—and we need to start paying more attention.Listen to this eye-opening conversation with Zoltan Istvan, a leading transhumanist who believes science and artificial intelligence will soon defeat biological death and radically transform human civilization.We discuss:Why humans could live for thousands of yearsHow AI could will become conscious and more intelligent than humansWhy capitalism may collapseHow AI brain implants would lead to greater empathy If you care about what it means to be human, you don't want to miss this conversation.00:00 Preview00:33 Episode Introduction 02:36 About Zoltan Istvan05:39 Zoltan's backstory08:29 What is transhumanism?12:16 How a near-death experience turned Zoltan into a transhumanist15:11 Zoltan Istvan's transhumanist political campaign21:35 Top 10 critiques of transhumanism28:42 Why Universal Basic Income (UBI) will become a reality31:35 Why merging with AI is better than being replaced by it35:04 Machine-Human relationships and AI consciousness37:40 Zoltan's book, The Transhumanist Wager40:28 Will technology make us more or less empathic?48:08 Zoltan Istvan's Purposeful Empathy storyCONNECT WITH ZOLTAN✩ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoltan-istvan-78aa2964/✩ Website http://www.zoltanistvan.comCONNECT WITH ANITA✩ Email purposefulempathy@gmail.com ✩ Website https://www.anitanowak.com✩ Buy a copy of Purposeful Empathy http://tiny.cc/PurposefulEmpathyCA✩ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitanowak/✩ Instagram https://tinyurl.com/anitanowakinstagram✩ Podcast Audio https://tinyurl.com/PurposefulEmpathyPodcast✩ Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/anitanowak.bsky.socialSHOW NOTES✩ Zoltan's TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtPy9evJwik✩ The Transhumanist Wager https://www.amazon.com/Transhumanist-Wager-Zoltan-Istvan/dp/0988616114?asin=0988616114&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1Video edited by Jad Misri, Green Horizon Studio

With Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Wealth.com Rafael Loureiro on why estate planning is shifting from a static legal exercise to an AI-powered, advisor-led planning process. In Summary Estate planning has traditionally operated outside the core advisor workflow—handled through attorneys, revisited infrequently, and often disconnected from the broader client relationship. Louis speaks with Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder and CEO of Wealth.com, about how AI is beginning to change that model. The conversation explores how advisors can use tools like Ester to surface planning gaps, stay ahead of client changes, and deliver a more continuous planning experience. For advisors, the broader implication is strategic: as investment management becomes increasingly commoditized, integrated planning and ongoing coordination may become a far more meaningful differentiator. The Storyline Most advisors already discuss estate planning with clients. The challenge is what happens next. In many cases, the process still moves outside the advisor relationship: clients are referred to an attorney, documents are created, and the estate plan becomes something revisited only after a major life event or liquidity event forces an update. Louis and Rafael explore why that structure is starting to break down. Rafael's own estate planning experience following the sale of Emailage to LexisNexis exposed how fragmented the process could feel, even for highly engaged clients working with sophisticated advisors. That experience ultimately became the foundation for Wealth.com and its AI-powered planning platform, Ester. The discussion focuses less on AI as a headline topic and more on how it changes advisor workflow in practice—from document interpretation and planning summaries to surfacing next actions and helping advisors stay proactively engaged as client circumstances evolve. For advisors thinking about the future of planning, the conversation raises a larger question: if financial planning itself becomes increasingly standardized, where does the next layer of differentiation come from? Topics Covered Continuous estate planning AI-powered advisor workflows com and Ester Advisor-led estate planning Family office-style client service Trust and estate attorney collaboration Estate planning for mass affluent clients AI agents in wealth management Dynasty Financial Partners integration Advisor differentiation beyond investment management > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why did Rafael decide to build Wealth.com? (06:04) Rafael explains how his own estate planning experience after a liquidity event exposed major disconnects between advisors, attorneys, and clients. Why did Wealth.com choose an advisor-led model instead of direct-to-consumer? (14:28) The platform was designed around the belief that advisors (not marketing campaigns) are best positioned to initiate estate planning conversations with clients. What does “continuous estate planning” actually mean? (20:13) Rafael describes a system where client life changes, tax events, and asset activity can trigger proactive advisor engagement rather than periodic document reviews. How does Ester move beyond document summarization? (32:30) The platform now identifies planning opportunities, prepares tasks and reports, and increasingly helps advisors automate portions of the planning workflow. Why are enterprise firms and large banks adopting platforms like Wealth.com? (24:57) Many firms were already producing estate planning summaries manually for ultra-high-net-worth clients. AI allows those capabilities to scale much more efficiently. How should advisors think about the role of trust and estate attorneys going forward? (26:50) Rafael argues that AI enhances – not replaces – the attorney relationship by improving efficiency and reserving more sophisticated matters for specialized legal expertise. What may differentiate advisory firms as planning becomes more commoditized? (38:02) The discussion points toward responsiveness, coordination, personalization, and deeper client integration as the next major competitive layer for advisors. Key Takeaways Rafael believes estate planning is shifting from a one-time legal exercise to a continuous planning process supported by AI and advisor engagement. Wealth.com was intentionally built as an advisor-first platform rather than a direct-to-consumer business. Ester's AI capabilities now extend beyond summarization into identifying planning gaps, surfacing opportunities, and preparing advisor workflows. Many firms are using estate planning as a way to deepen relationships and expand into more family-office-style service models. AI may allow advisors to serve more clients while maintaining a higher level of personalization and responsiveness. Trust and estate attorneys remain critical for complex situations, but AI can improve efficiency and help clients arrive better prepared. Advisors who fail to expand beyond investment management risk competing in an increasingly commoditized landscape. https://youtu.be/BDI6XbEz_4E Quotable Moments “When AI moves from simply organizing information to helping drive decisions, estate planning stops being a periodic task.” “Investment management is becoming table stakes. Financial planning is becoming table stakes.” “Why does it have to be that way? Now with AI, why can we not have continuous estate planning?” “It is the intangibles.” “My goal is to empower the advisor.” Related Resources Human Intelligence in the Age of AI: Why Recruiters Still MatterArtificial intelligence can analyze firms and deals. It can't replace the insight and advocacy that help advisors make the right move. The Future of Prospecting: How AI Is Powering the Next Era of Advisor GrowthFINNY Co-Founder Eden Ovadia shares how AI is transforming advisor prospecting: automating outreach, matching advisors with ideal clients, and freeing time for deeper human connection. A forward-looking conversation on what growth will look like in the next era of wealth management. Rafael LoureiroCo-Founder and CEO Rafael Loureiro is a technology entrepreneur and product-focused executive with more than 20 years of experience across startups, growth-stage companies, and Fortune 500 organizations. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Wealth.com, a leading estate and tax planning platform powered by proprietary AI and purpose-built for financial institutions. Under his leadership, Wealth.com has expanded into a comprehensive planning platform, embedding deterministic AI to deliver precise, auditable outcomes across estate and tax workflows. Prior to founding Wealth.com, Rafael served as Chief Technology Officer at Emailage, a global fraud prevention SaaS company acquired by RELX in 2020. He is a member of the Forbes Finance Council and has been recognized across the industry, including CEO of the Year honors and Forbes' Top AI Founders to Watch. Originally from France and raised in Brazil, Rafael now resides with his family in the Phoenix metro 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… Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com A conversation with Louis Diamond and Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com. It’s a conversation with Rafael Loureiro, the firm’s Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer. 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 wire house, 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, and 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: In the wealth management world, estate planning has largely lived in a separate lane. It’s a topic advisors may raise with clients then hand off to an attorney and eventually a set of documents come back, filed away, rarely revisited, and often disconnected from the rest of the planning process. That structure has been in place for a long time and for the most part, it’s gotten unquestioned, but when you step back, it creates a gap between what do clients expect from their advisor and what actually gets delivered when it comes to estate planning. Rafael Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Wealth.com, ran straight into the gap after a planning event of his own which should have been a coordinated process, felt fragmented, manual, and surprisingly opaque. And likewise, I recall the same type of disjointed experience in my own estate planning process. It’s experiences like these that became the starting point for building Wealth.com. What makes this story interesting isn’t just that they’re using AI but how they’re using it inside the estate planning process, and it’s how AI allows the model itself to change from a one-time legal event to something that evolves alongside the client, from static documents to a system that can actually interpret, update, and surface what matters, from a disconnected handoff to something the advisor can actively lead. In my conversation with Rafael, we get into how that plays out in practice, how tools like Ester move from summarizing estate documents to identifying gaps, to prompting next steps, and eventually preparing action on behalf of the advisor, because when AI moves from simply organizing information to helping drive decisions, estate planning stops being a periodic task and starts to look more like a continuous part of the advice process. So let’s dive in. Rafael, thank you for coming on our show today. Rafael Loureiro: My pleasure, Louis. Thank you for having me here. Louis Diamond: Of course. Let’s jump in and in researching you and speaking to you in the past, I got to admit, you had a very different path into the wealth management industry probably than anyone I’ve ever interviewed. So can you walk us through your background briefly and early professional endeavors? Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. The accent that you hear is Brazilian. So I’ve been in the US for 25 years. I’m a software engineer by trade, came here as a HMB, been involved with different companies over the years and then most recently before Wealth.com. I was a chief technology officer with a fraud prevention company, nothing to do with wealth management, but by selling that company, it’s how the Wealth.com story started. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And I was referring to also some of your early career endeavors even before founding your last company, if you’re comfortable sharing that. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been involved with four different startups in different spaces. One of them was in, if you remember all the way back to 2008, the real estate prices, the first startup with foreclosures. So when houses went into foreclosures, me and my partner, we created a system to index that. I also had work on a photo album company. It became a lifetime business. It’s still running. I was the CTO and I did my share of consulting. I used to work for Accenture, Avanade, and then a home builder Fortune 500 companies. So I have a ton of experience in the technology space before Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And you mentioned the last business that you started that I believe sold to LexisNexis. Can you walk through what that business was? Rafael Loureiro: Yeah. So I did not start the business. I joined the business before Series A. The person that started the business, Rei Carvalho, he’s actually Wealth.com chairman. So the team is still together. The US, San Francisco, New York, offices in Sydney, Singapore, London. We serve clients like Coinbase, grew very fast and then got acquired by LexisNexis in 2020 during peak COVID. Think about, we literally signed the documents, popped the champagne on March 2020. No vaccine. Louis Diamond: Oh, my God. Rafael Loureiro: We literally popped the champagne and we all went back home to work from home because that was the guy that’s from LexisNexis. Through that experience, selling a company, one thing you usually do, it’s a big liquidity event and estate planning is always related to big moments. You get married, someone in your family die, you have a new kid, you have a liquidated event. So I work with a financial advisor. They’re amazing. They helped me with financial planning, wealth management, saved me a lot of money insurance. But when it was time to do the estate planning, Louis, my experience was, “Hey, Rafael, we always work with this lawyer, go talk to the lawyer.” And then it was a completely broken process. First, because it was COVID and I had to go see the lawyer face-to-face. That was weird right there. Second, because I was expecting the lawyer to know everything about me because my advisor knows everything about me, know about my life situation, know about liquid event, know about my kids, rental houses, everything and then the engineer. I know what I told the lawyer, but do I know for sure that everything I told the lawyer end up in the document? No, I don’t. Long story short, otherwise it is a long story, we’re having a virtual coffee. I don’t know if you remember everyone, big beard, long hair, everyone working from home, and then somehow all the Emailage C-level team and founders, the co-founders, we start complaining about state plan. Even another example, my chairman, the Wealth.com chairman, Emailage CEO, Rei Carvalho, he was like, “Hey, Rafael, I’m done with the summer heat in Arizona. I’m moving to Denver. I’m going for cooler weathers.” Literally the moment he moved to Denver, he gets a call from his estate planning lawyer, welcome him to Denver and saying, “Hey, we need to update your documents. “But I just spent thousands of dollars creating my documents.” “Yeah, but you live in a new state, you have to optimize your documents.” At that moment, Louis, we’re like, “Where there’s a problem, there is an opportunity,” and the company was born. Louis Diamond: I find the best company origin stories, it’s you have that, you have a personal experience or a moment where you have a realization that there’s a problem that you have that others might have as well, so let’s create a business around solving this problem. It was legitimately at that point, it wasn’t a long burn, we’re going to research, we’re really going to think about this, it was just all of the core team that was fortunate enough to have a big liquidity event were complaining and commiserating about a similar problem on estate planning and then that launched into, let’s build a company, let’s build a platform, a product to solve this problem? Rafael Loureiro: Yes and no. We saw the opportunity. We had just finished selling a company. It takes a lot from you and your family to create a company and to sell a company. Before we started a new company, we said, “Hey, look, we feel like there is something here, but let’s do the proper groundwork, make sure that the market is right, that there is a need that it’s not only us complaining about these.” I’m going to say that we spend a good three month, we have vision document together, doing a market research and then we got excited. Literally my wife who was not super excited in the beginning said, “You guys just sold a company. You’ve been racing 100 miles an hour for the last seven, eight years and you guys going to do this again.” But I love it. It’s part of my DNA. I love the challenge. I love to build and it is a big problem. When you look at the US market, 67% of the population don’t have estate planning. You have to ask yourself, why? Is that because it costs too much money? Is that because people don’t know enough about estate planning that they don’t do it? Is that because people don’t have to think about that? So the opportunity is there. We did the groundwork. We got the team together, at least some of our eight players. We went to Altus Capital, that’s the same venture firm that led the Emailage series B and we said, “Look, we have a vision, we have a team and we believe the market is ready for it. There is no dominant player and it is blue ocean.” And then they gave us the initial funding, them and my chairman, and then we went from having an idea to launching the product in May 2022. Louis Diamond: Wow, that’s amazing. Before we dive into the rapid growth and what the platform looks like, et cetera, can you just give us a quick overview of what Wealth.com looks like today? Who are you serving? Who are you selling to and where does it fit into an advisor’s value proposition or their advice stack, if you will? Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. So Wealth.com we empower financial advisors to provide a family office experience to their clients starting with estate planning and tax planning. What I’m trying to solve, Louis, is my situation. I want my financial advisor to be the hub of my needs. So if the need is financial planning, wealth management, insurance, estate planning, tax planning, I need my financial advisor to be aware of all these verticals, right? Because I know if something happens to one of us, my financial advisor is my person. He or she’s going to get my call from my wife and say, “Hey, am I all right?” I want to empower the financial advisor with all the tools to provide that family office experience to their client. So that’s first, we started by providing doc migration. So think of this, you are mass affluent client, between half a million dollars all the way to 10 million dollars. You don’t have your revocable trust, your will, your power of attorney, your advanced healthcare directive, your guardianship documents. We do that. We create those documents. You go to the workflow on the Wealth.com platform if you have an advisor, I need to make that clear, we’re not direct to consumer business. You have to have an advisor. So you go to that workflow and at the end of the workflow, you get the documents. Those are legally optimized, all the documents. The document you get in California is going to be completely different from the document you get in New York, from the document you get in Florida. I just want to make that point clear. What we noticed, Louis, working with these advisors is if you look at the average advisor, if you look at his or her book of business, 80% is mass affluent. So think lawyers, doctors, firemen, 20% high net worth. Usually the high net worth clients, ultra-high network clients, they already have the documents. They already paid $20,000 to have those documents draft and we were not doing anything for them. So in 2022, we had that light bulb moment even before LLMs. OpenAI launched in 2022, we actually used the Bertha model before OpenAI, but I know I’m digressing. Let me get back here. So I was not doing anything for these high net worth, ultra-high net worth clients. So we had this idea, what if we use AI to read their existing plans, all their grants, LATs, all this sophisticated irrevocable trust, connect to all their assets and then provide a summary of everything they have in place? So that was the idea in 2022. Can we do it? And we did it and that became Ester and that became our family office experience. So just to summarize, we help the advisor clients regardless where they fall in the wealthy spectrum. They don’t have the estate planning documents, we create them. If they already have the estate planning documents, we use AI to read this documents, summarize them and provide insight and observations. “Hey, here are ways that you can optimize these documents.” That’s what we do. Louis Diamond: It’s so valuable. I wish I met you a month ago because I went through a very expensive estate planning exercise with an estate planning attorney and my own personal experience is exactly the same that you had. It’s expensive. I have no idea what I was signing. It was a long questionnaire and it wasn’t driven necessarily by my advisor. They gave me the idea to get updated estate plans, but it was a disconnected process. So this makes a ton of sense. I think let’s pull on the thread of being a direct to advisor company rather than trying to pull an end around the advisor and going directly to a consumer. Why was that an important design decision for you? Because I would assume the total adjustable market might be a little bit bigger if you’re going direct to a retail client that may or may not have an advisor versus going directly to a business, an RIA, a wealth management firm, et cetera. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah. What we notice working within these spaces, something triggers you to do your estate planning. I’m not going to ask why you decide to do yours now, but usually it’s related to death in the family, a kid going to college, you buy a new house, you have a new baby, you’re getting married, you get a divorce. Direct to consumer, you have to find the client at that moment for them to consider estate planning as an important thing to do. There’s actually surveys. I think Fidelity put a survey out, that says family is the main reason why people do estate planning. And the second reason is the advisor. So if you work with a financial advisor, most likely he or she’s going to make you do your estate planning. So we did not want to be on the direct to consumer place spending millions and millions of dollars in marketing. We’d rather spend millions and millions of dollars in AI and technology and serve the advisor and empower the advisor to have this conversation and go to you and say, “Hey, Louis, how is it possible that you don’t have your estate planning document? Let’s do this now.” And I know this is uncomfortable. There’s another survey that came out recently saying that some of the advisors don’t want to talk about that. It’s still a hard subject to approach, but we have to have this conversation. Louis Diamond: I would say it almost sounds like an advisor not wanting to talk about their fees. Let’s not talk about that because it’s uncomfortable and no one wants to hear about it. Rafael Loureiro: Oh, you have to have it because they saw a huge lack of education. For example, one thing that we come across all the time, and I know it’s minor, is kids going to college. “Oh yeah, my daughter’s going to college. I don’t have to do anything.” Yeah, you do. She needs an advanced healthcare directive because if you don’t have one and something happens to her, you cannot just go to the hospital and ask for information. They won’t give it to you. We need to educate our clients. We need to do a better job. And I think advisors play that role and we want to empower them to talk about estate planning and tax planning. Louis Diamond: It makes sense. It’s a brilliant strategy because instead of advisors selling against Wealth.com as like, “I can do better and I have a estate planning guy I can refer you to,” it’s you’re working alongside them and you rely upon the advisor to provide the education to be the trigger moment. And I know again, from personal experience, if my advisor didn’t suggest that I should update my estate planning documents because I moved states, I wouldn’t have done it. It’s not like a fun thing to do. It’s an expense, et cetera. So that makes a ton of sense. You’re partnering with the hub or the influencers, if you will, of who’s driving estate planning in this country. It’s a great strategy. Rafael Loureiro: And you said something very important and I want to highlight, the world is very different after COVID. Before COVID, some of these advisors, all their clients were in the same city. I had one estate planning lawyer to help my clients, right? But now with after COVID or during COVID, people moved. “Oh yeah, I’m not living in a farm. Oh, I moved to Montana. Montana is beautiful. I saw Landman or Yellowstone. Now I’m leaving Montana. Landman is in Texas.” How? Now you don’t have estate planning lawyer in Texas. You don’t have estate planning lawyer in Montana. With the right partnership with Wealth.com, now you can serve all your clients regardless where they are in the US because we are present in every jurisdiction and we have lawyers in every jurisdiction. So we empower you to serve clients regardless where they are in the US. Louis Diamond: Very cool. And how about the pricing model? You don’t have to say what it costs, but is it one license that a firm is buying on behalf of their entire client base or is there an incremental cost for each client? And I’m throwing a lot at you. And then third part of the question is, are you seeing advisors charge directly for the Wealth.com estate planning output or are folks wrapping it into their fee as just a value added service as part of their planning and comprehensive wealth management process? Rafael Loureiro: Very good question. My goal, our goal, has always been we want to make estate planning available, democratized estate planning, make it more accessible to the population. So the way we charge is we charge the advisor annual recurring fee. We do not charge per document. I want you to provide estate planning to all your clients. That’s our goal. I don’t want you to think, oh, but that’s going to cost me money. No, all your clients set them all up with estate planning. Are they charging? It depends. So the way I’m going to say this is, I’m going to say that 60% of my advisors are charging not for the documents because they’re not lawyers, they’re charging to help educate you on estate planning. You as a client, you have to go to the process yourself to get the documents. So that’s where an advisor would send an invitation to Wealth.com. You and your wife or your partner, you’re going to go to the workflow and you’re going to get the document at the end. But the advisor is going to set up a call with you, the advisor is going to help you collect the documents. The advisor is going to educate you why estate planning is important. And some of them are charging for this. Some of our advisors, more on the high net worth, alternate high net worth space, you already charge a very good fee to provide your service so they probably provide Ester output, I should say, as a value added service. It depends on the use case. Louis Diamond: Makes sense. So I’ve heard you talk in interviews about a major gap in estate planning between client expectations and what a client is expecting, hoping to get with estate planning, especially when it comes to interacting with their financial advisor and what is actually fundamentally delivered by advisors. So I’m curious, why is there a gap and why do you think that gap has existed for so long? Is it as simple as people don’t like talking about death and it’s expensive or is there a deeper answer? Rafael Loureiro: I think it’s all of the above and your experience is amazing. You pretty much, you are the typical client. You took long to do it. It costs you a lot of money. You’re now like, next time you have to do an update, you’re going to wait five to 10 years to do it because we spend thousands of dollars to get it updated. Why does it have to be like that? And now with AI, and that’s what I think is going to change a lot in the next five years, is why can we not have continuous estate planning? What I mean by that is work with your advisor. I have connection to all your assets. I have connection to CRM. I have connection to your bank account. If you give me access, I don’t need password, but you can actually connect all your assets, I have connection to the portfolio management platform. So as you live your life, as you get married, as you buy a property… You finally decide to buy a property in Tahoe, I get these pings and then I can empower your advisors to say, “Hey, go talk to Louis and say, hey, it’s time to update your estate plan.” Or a rental property outside your home state in California, you need to update your… Or he has just crossed a tax threshold or he just got married or he just had a new beneficiary. My goal is to empower the financial advisor to provide more and more value to this relationship. I’m not trying to replace the financial advisor, but I’m trying to empower him or her to give you more value so him or her becomes more critical for your relationship. Why people haven’t done estate planning I think is a lack of education, is the fear of the cost. “Oh, I have to talk to a lawyer. Oh my gosh, that’s going to cost me $5,000.” I want to make this easier. I want to make this simple. I want to empower the advisor to demystify estate planning and tax planning, make it more accessible, bring the estate planning more to the middle. What I mean by that is why is this estate planning exclusive to the high net worth, ultra-high net worth? Because in that space, 90% of the people have estate planning, 90% of the people. It’s the fear of the cost, I think, and then people don’t want to think about that. Louis Diamond: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. Yeah. It very much sounds like it’s a win-win. It’s like a next best action type event where you’re giving an advisor on a silver platter a way to add value, which is what I think every advisor wants to do and then it’s a massive value add to the end client. My guess is you don’t have much friction in delivering those sorts of insights to advisors that they can then deliver to their clients. Rafael Loureiro: I would say if you’re not doing it, there is a big risk. You’re going to lose your clients to people that are doing it and they are providing the family office experience. Yeah. Louis Diamond: Yeah. What about the competitive landscape for Wealth.com, whether it’s other FinTechs that are attempting to do something in the space or even just the legacy advisor, the estate planning attorney in town or an advisor’s preferred T&E attorney. How do you think about the competitive landscape in the trust and estate world today? Rafael Loureiro: There are competitors. From day zero when we came in, there were competitors. I don’t see an incumbent. I think now we have became the incumbent. I think there is a segment of the market, just to paint a picture, one third of the advisors are going to retire in the next 10 years. So there is a segment in the market where to your point, they already work with a estate planning lawyer. That’s not a bad thing. They’re like, “Oh yeah, I get leads from this lawyer. My clients are all located in my neighborhood. I don’t need to provide out of state estate planning,” then we’re not going to get there.” But at the same time, if you look at our growth, we’ve been growing and that’s why we just raised a series B, our growth is out there to prove it, we’ve been tripling the company size every year. There’s a need, there’s a demand. Financial advisors are waking up. They are in a very competitive market. They need to provide more to the clients because I feel like investment management, it is becoming table stakes. Financial planning, it is table stakes. So what else can I offer my clients? And that’s why you see some advisory firms offering BillPay. I file your taxes. I’ll get your estate planning done. You got to differentiate yourself. We’re seeing the need. If you look at our penetration, we have now 2,000 firms on the platform and the firms go from independent, a small SMB advisor with one or two advisors in the office, all the way to the top three, three out of the top five banks in the US. We are there, right? Louis Diamond: Wow. It’s interesting. Let’s talk about that. So on the bank side, it’s typically not a segment that is ripe for technological disruption or external tools like this to come in and make a dent. How are banks and very large platforms thinking about Wealth.com? Is it a similar kind of buying journey or decision that an individual RIA or an individual advisor would make or is it a little bit different? Rafael Loureiro: It’s a little bit different. So without mentioning names, these banks, some of these banks that work with high net worth, ultra-high net worth clients, they were providing this summary report that Ester put together, they were, before Esther, but it was taking them 30 to 50 hours. All human labor to put one together, Excel, Visa, PowerPoint, 30 to 50 hours. Even to these very expensive, very wealthy clients, they were only doing once a year. “Hey, here’s your report.” “Oh yeah, but I just sold the house in St. Barts. Can I get a new update?” “No. Next year you’re going to get the update.” I’m not even kidding. It was serious. So they were doing the work, but it was all labor-intensive. Now with Wealth, a much better output, I should say, it’s take minutes. And instead of only reserving these to the very, very wealthy clients, now they can go downstream and offer this to their mass affluent clients and then high net worth clients. They’re all seeing the need. They’re all waking up because they were doing the work, but it was all labor-intensive, like I said, all manual before and they want to automate. Louis Diamond: Very interesting. I definitely want to spend some time talking about Ester. You mentioned it a few times, but before that, I’d say two very real strategic areas that a firm might take on when it comes to estate planning. The first one is a lot of very successful advisors, they cultivate amazing COI referral relationships with attorneys and usually the attorneys are T&E attorneys for obvious reasons. Have you gotten pushback or have you seen that because of Wealth.com, these advisors now are referring less business to these high-powered trust and estates attorneys and then they’re not able to grow their business as much in return. That’s one question if you can weigh in. Rafael Loureiro: I have not heard that. And just to clarify, I think with Wealth, having Wealth as part of your tool framework, you’re going to be able to serve more clients and still leverage your trust estate attorney. And I’ll explain how. For example, we know how to stay our lane. So let’s say you go into the workflow and as part of the workflow, you say, “Hey, I have a special needs child.” At that moment we say, “Stop. Let me put you in touch with a lawyer.” You can decide to use your own lawyer or you can use one of in our network. We have lawyers in every jurisdiction, but it’s up to you. We focus on the revocable trusts and the wealth. If your client requires something more sophisticated, you can still use Wealth.com to map out the client’s situation using Ester. You’re going to be able to see everything they have in place at that moment and then use your relationship, your trust and estate lawyer to make the document update. So I think what we are doing is reserving the most complex case for the trust and estate lawyer if a document needs update, but I don’t think you are breaking that relationship. That relationship will stay there and you’re still going to have that lead exchange, but I don’t have any numbers to answer your question. Louis Diamond: I think that makes sense. It’s not like with Wealth.com, at least not yet. It’s not like there isn’t a role for a T&E attorney and especially for more complex esoteric type situations, an advisor could still refer some of their relationships to a T&E attorney, but they’ll come armed with better information. And also with more clients getting involved with estate planning, there’s also conceivably more opportunities that they can refer out to an estate planning attorney in turn. Rafael Loureiro: Can I use that? You did a much better job than I did. Exactly. Exactly what you said. The difference is now your advisor, your clients are going to be much better informed, that they know exactly what they need from the lawyer. So yeah, 100%. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And then the other one, which is I’d say less commonplace, but it’s a trend. The trend, and you hit on it, that as investments are becoming commoditized or not as differentiated, advisors are being called on to offer more and more services, whether it’s tax preparation in-house or bill pay or picking up clients’ dry cleaning, et cetera. But I think a big area that I’ve seen firms invest in is an in -house trust and estate attorney. Do you think Wealth.com is taking some of the sizzle out of that in-house service or is it just different? Is it two different use cases? Rafael Loureiro: It’s two different uses cases and we actually sell to that use case where if you have your trust estate attorneys in-house, we actually leverage them and they become users on the platform. Going back to my previous answer, now with Wealth.com, you’re going to be able to serve more clients with estate planning. You can actually route some of the use cases back to your trust estate team through Wealth.com. They do whatever they have to do and then you’re able to serve more clients. An example, trust and estate lawyers, they had to read the documents before Wealth.com. They would spend countless hours reading a hundred-page documents. Now with Esther, we do the summarization. We show your trust estate team where all the information was extracted. So instead of reading one document per hour, you’re going to be able to read three documents per hour and visualize the client estate plan and be able to optimize it because we’ve provided insights and suggestions and then the trust and estate lawyer can provide their own and say, “Hey, no, I agree with this one,” or “I think we should also do this.” I think you’re going to optimize the use of your trust estate team. You’re not going to get rid of them. No. Louis Diamond: It’s more so you’re automating the high value differentiated work. It also kind of sounds like, I don’t know when eMoney or MoneyGuidePro came into the mainstream, but it’s almost a difference between a paraplanner for a firm, manually creating pie charts in Excel and PowerPoint and analyzing a bunch of stuff and then eMoney and MoneyGuidePro and NaviPlan and all these companies come about and all of a sudden a lot of the work is automated. And it’s not like a paraplanner is out of work. They just become the experts, the users of the platform and they can allocate their attention to higher value, more bespoke work rather than we’ll say more of the factory kind of below the line things that was taking up a lot of their time. Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. I like to use the analogy of the shoemaker. In the past, the shoemaker would make one shoe. It would be a beautiful shoe, but he would make one shoe a week or every two days. Now you have specialized agents. All that agent does is read estate planning documents. All that agent does is enriching the documents with insight and observations and looking to all the legal law changes that happened recently. So now you’re able to still make the same high quality shoe, but just at a higher volume. And you have a lot of dedicated workers doing one thing and doing one thing extremely well. So my goal is to empower the shoemaker. My goal is to empower the advisor and with a thousand analysts, a thousand paraplanners. So just making my job more efficient. Louis Diamond: I love it. You fit in Ester a good bit. It seems fairly clear what Ester’s doing. Sounds like an amazing value add. Just given the pace of AI innovation and I don’t think anyone knows where it’s going, but what are you most excited about Ester being able to do either now or in the future and what’s the vision if you can project out a year, which seems like an eternity in AI time, what’s on the dream board for what Ester’s going to be able to do for your Wealth.com clients? Rafael Loureiro: As a technologist, I love this question. I see AI in three distinct phases. You had the first phase of Ester in 2022, 2023 when we launched, which was summaries. It was amazing summarizing data. Some of these clients, Louis, think about this, some of these clients, they have 13 documents in place. They had every type of irrevocable trust you can imagine plus a revocable trust in place. They had very complicated assets, very complex assets. So Ester was amazing in summarizing. That was phase number one. Phase number two is now being able to augment. You read the data, you see an opportunity and you create a task that’s right there in front of the advisor saying, “Hey, I think you should reach out to this client and include this report with some of these observations. Click this button if you agree.” You still involve the advisor, the human is still in the loop. And that’s what we are with Ester right now. We do that. We assess the data, we see the opportunity, we involve the advisor, advisor get involved and say, “Yes, let’s do this,” and click a button, an email is triggered, our report is attached. Here we go. The third phase and that’s coming next and very soon is now you have an agent acting on the behalf of the advisor. I still want to make sure, and I want to make this very clear, I don’t want to get myself in trouble, the devices always evolve, but you have all these specific agents, that’s tax planning agent, that’s the estate planning agent, work independently, connected to the world, extremely well-trained with thousands and thousands of documents that we’ve seen over the years, finding opportunities, creating the tasks, creating the emails, creating the report, having everything ready to go, just waiting for the advisor to say, “Do it.” And we do this enough to the point where the advisor is going to say, “All right, you don’t need my permission anymore to do this specific task. Go.” You connect to the IRS, you download the text transcript, you crunch to this data, you create a report and it’s ready to go. The other thing too is I want to be able, my goal in the next year, a year and a half, is I want to continue estate planning. Up to this point, estate planning has been exactly like you described. You go to a lawyer, you pay thousands and thousands of dollars and those documents start collecting dust in a shelf somewhere while you live your life. And being from this space, that’s not how it works. There is new legislation being passed OBBA became like you crossed tax threshold, you have liquidated events, you get married, you get divorced, you buy real estate property, so on and so forth and that document is already stale. Why does it have to be that way? Now with AI, now with the technology we have in place, it won’t be. I promise you. Louis Diamond: Very cool. That’s exciting. That sounds like the perfect evolution of AI from summary, just here’s something you can read quickly to suggesting action, to then taking action. It does seem like the flow that it’s been and I’m sure there’s 15 other flows from here that we don’t even know yet. Or you probably do because you’re in this, but for me, I can’t even imagine what phase four and five are going to look like for you. Rafael Loureiro: Yes, it’s exciting. Louis Diamond: Definitely is. I saw, when I was doing some research for this that Wealth.com announced a fairly major strategic partnership with Dynasty Financial Partners, embedding Ester into their Dynasty desktop. What do you think this partnership says about where the business is going and how do you expect advisors to really take advantage of this in practice? Rafael Loureiro: It was a new development. We’re super excited about the Dynasty Financial Partnership. Before, if you look at before this partnership, we would have to empower advisor one by one with a Wealth.com license. With this partnership with Dynasty, every advisor in the Dynasty family or using the Dynasty desktop is going to be able to use Ester. So they’re going to be furnished with an AI intelligence that they can ask any estate planning questions, they can get tax planning questions answered. They’re going to be able to upload their clients’ estate planning documents and get a summary with opportunities, with everything that they can do for those estate planning documents. I think it fits perfectly well for enterprise IRAs, wire houses, this solution. Instead of doing one by one, you can actually have AI for all your advisors at once answering their most basic questions and taking action. That’s literally like the agents I was trying to describe. So that’s just the first step in that direction and we’re super excited about this. Louis Diamond: Very cool. Let me ask you another one. So you said earlier that as investment management becomes more commoditized that advisors not only have to offer more services and provide more value, but they also have to differentiate from the advisor or the firm across the street to provide more family office services, if you will. But let’s say, and this will be great for you, Wealth.com becomes like air that everyone’s breathing. It almost becomes like financial planning tool, e-Money. It’s commonplace. Now it’s commoditized across the space, it’s not a differentiator anymore to offer financial planning. As Wealth.com expands more firms work with the platform, what do you think is the next layer or next level of differentiation that your clients then can point to if it’s no longer maybe a couple of years from now that we use Wealth.com that we help with estate planning? Rafael Loureiro: Wow, that’s an interesting one, and approach my wife and bring ideas and suggestions. For me, if I can make that happen where the financial advisor is helping with my taxes, so when it’s tax time, we just have to have a one-hour meeting and we’re ready to click a button and have everything done, that can help me with BillPay. And think about like high net worth and ultra-high net worth people where it becomes extremely complicated to do BillPay properly because you have to pay from the right account, from the right trust. If they can take this off my plate so I can focus 100% in my business and my family, it’s mission accomplished. If that means that they’re going to walk my dog to make this happen, I know I’m exaggerating here, but pick up my laundry like the example you use, I think you’re going to have to do this. That in my mind is how these financial advisors survive the AI revolution. It is that personal relationship. It’s knowing me well. It’s spending more time with me than once a quarter. And with AI, with the right AI, and I know AI, there’s a lot of smoke in this space and very little fire, but with the right agents, with the right workflows, one advisor is going to be able to serve more than a hundred clients. Because right now the ratio is a hundred clients per advisor, maybe you’re going to be able to serve like 200, 250 well. Serve them well, knowing them well, knowing them personally. I think that’s going to happen in the next couple of years. Louis Diamond: I think that’s right. It’s more so like the intangibles that an advisor has. Their secret sauce isn’t going to be necessarily we offer these seven things. It’s going to be, I really get you. I understand you. It’s the advisor’s personal relationship and empathy with that client and all the years that they’ve known them. And then it’s just using all these different tools to aid that relationship. It kind of sounds like that’s what you’re saying. It’s all the other stuff that advisors do that might be different today, over time, people catch up and that becomes commoditized similar to we offer financial planning and that’s a differentiator. Now it’s, if they don’t offer financial planning, it’s a problem. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah, 100%. You got it. Yes, it is the intangibles. That’s perfect. Louis Diamond: Okay. I got two more questions for you. What’s one thing you wish more advisors understood about estate planning that they still miss today? Rafael Loureiro: I think there is an education component. Just deploying Wealth.com and expecting is going to work with your clients. It’s not like that. You need to be willing to have the conversation like your advisor did it with you. You need to have the tough call and say, “Hey, are you ready? Do you have estate planning in place? Why not?” And then having that conversation. Louis Diamond: And I would imagine too, it’s also cool, I got all these documents so instead of it getting locked in the safe or locked in the drawer, it’s also incumbent on the advisor to explain the documents. “Hey, these are a bunch of stuff in here that whatever, we don’t have to get into, but here’s the four key things about this document that you should understand. The power of attorney we’ve nominated is your father-in-law. Your proceeds are going to get distributed one-third to your son, a quarter to your daughter,” et cetera. It’s going to be those things and translating the documents into real words that clients are going to understand. Rafael Loureiro: 100%. That is critical because I’m a software engineer, I’m not equipped to be reading a hundred pages document and trying to understand everything that’s there without … Now with AI, you can actually ask Claude to summarize and Gemini to summarize it, but that was not the case three years ago. So that education component is critical. And some of my advisors are actually very successful, I should say. A smaller firm in this case, I’m not going to say the names, I don’t have that permission to say their name, but they are actually doing these estate planning webinars as a lead generation. Because clients are curious about this. Sometimes if you don’t ask them, you’re never going to know, but they’re probably very curious about estate planning. They’re probably very concerned they don’t have the documents in place. Even the ones that have the documents, they’re probably concerned that they need an update and they haven’t done it. So by doing this webinar, they feel more comfortable just going to the event. They know they’re not going to be the center of attention and then asking a question or hear people asking questions. Some of my most successful clients are actually using webinar as a lead generation to explain state planning. Louis Diamond: It’s a great idea. It’s like you’re empowering the advisor to talk more about estate planning. It’s no longer this bugaboo that was too complex or not in their swim lane. It’s empowering them to lead with, it sounds like. Rafael Loureiro: 100% Louis Diamond: Amazing. And last question, if you were an ambitious advisor building a new firm from scratch today, what would you tell them to focus on to create a more durable, harder to replicate future-proof business? Rafael Loureiro: That’s a great question because the factory floor of a hundred years ago, is no longer work. If you have a chance to start from the beginning, it’s a new world. It’s a new world for companies like ours. Even for companies like ours that are in the bleeding edge of technology, everything is changing with AI. How I organize my teams is changing with AI. So I would say select Wealth.com. No, that’s … I’m kidding. I’m kidding, but yes, I’ll say select the right tools, use AI properly, it’s no longer a headcount game. I’m not saying you’re not going to need help, you’re going to need help, but make sure the tools are talking to each other because it is a new age. It’s an agent about speed, about being able to offer more service quicker, about increasing the relationship, the intangibles, to your point. It’s no longer once a quarter call to your clients. So if I had the chance to do everything again, if I had a chance even to start Wealth.com again, it’s different how you organize your team in this age of AI. AI is going to be bigger than the industrial revolution. Trust me, the shockwave is huge. To your point earlier in this call, we’re getting a big jump every month. It’s no longer every year, every month there is something new coming from AI. So if you start your firm again, select the right partners, select the right tools and then hit the ground running. Louis Diamond: Perfect. That’s amazing. Rafael, this has been so fun. I learned a ton from you. You just have a way of storytelling and I absolutely love the why behind Wealth.com, the personal experience that probably a lot of listeners have had as the light bulb moment. And instead of just complaining about it, you actually took action and now are creating the future of estate planning, empowering advisors to offer estate planning to their clients, getting more folks in this country set up with trust and estates and wills, et cetera. So I think it’s amazing what you’re doing and I’m very excited to continue to watch your success. Rafael Loureiro: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunities and just to do a final plug, estate planning, tax planning, stay tuned. There is more coming. Louis Diamond: There we go. Thanks so much. Rafael Loureiro: Thank you. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? is a book written with you in mind it’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook. Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com A conversation with Louis Diamond and Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com. It’s a conversation with Rafael Loureiro, the firm’s Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer. 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 wire house, 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, and 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: In the wealth management world, estate planning has largely lived in a separate lane. It’s a topic advisors may raise with clients then hand off to an attorney and eventually a set of documents come back, filed away, rarely revisited, and often disconnected from the rest of the planning process. That structure has been in place for a long time and for the most part, it’s gotten unquestioned, but when you step back, it creates a gap between what do clients expect from their advisor and what actually gets delivered when it comes to estate planning. Rafael Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Wealth.com, ran straight into the gap after a planning event of his own which should have been a coordinated process, felt fragmented, manual, and surprisingly opaque. And likewise, I recall the same type of disjointed experience in my own estate planning process. It’s experiences like these that became the starting point for building Wealth.com. What makes this story interesting isn’t just that they’re using AI but how they’re using it inside the estate planning process, and it’s how AI allows the model itself to change from a one-time legal event to something that evolves alongside the client, from static documents to a system that can actually interpret, update, and surface what matters, from a disconnected handoff to something the advisor can actively lead. In my conversation with Rafael, we get into how that plays out in practice, how tools like Ester move from summarizing estate documents to identifying gaps, to prompting next steps, and eventually preparing action on behalf of the advisor, because when AI moves from simply organizing information to helping drive decisions, estate planning stops being a periodic task and starts to look more like a continuous part of the advice process. So let’s dive in. Rafael, thank you for coming on our show today. Rafael Loureiro: My pleasure, Louis. Thank you for having me here. Louis Diamond: Of course. Let’s jump in and in researching you and speaking to you in the past, I got to admit, you had a very different path into the wealth management industry probably than anyone I’ve ever interviewed. So can you walk us through your background briefly and early professional endeavors? Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. The accent that you hear is Brazilian. So I’ve been in the US for 25 years. I’m a software engineer by trade, came here as a HMB, been involved with different companies over the years and then most recently before Wealth.com. I was a chief technology officer with a fraud prevention company, nothing to do with wealth management, but by selling that company, it’s how the Wealth.com story started. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And I was referring to also some of your early career endeavors even before founding your last company, if you’re comfortable sharing that. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been involved with four different startups in different spaces. One of them was in, if you remember all the way back to 2008, the real estate prices, the first startup with foreclosures. So when houses went into foreclosures, me and my partner, we created a system to index that. I also had work on a photo album company. It became a lifetime business. It’s still running. I was the CTO and I did my share of consulting. I used to work for Accenture, Avanade, and then a home builder Fortune 500 companies. So I have a ton of experience in the technology space before Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And you mentioned the last business that you started that I believe sold to LexisNexis. Can you walk through what that business was? Rafael Loureiro: Yeah. So I did not start the business. I joined the business before Series A. The person that started the business, Rei Carvalho, he’s actually Wealth.com chairman. So the team is still together. The US, San Francisco, New York, offices in Sydney, Singapore, London. We serve clients like Coinbase, grew very fast and then got acquired by LexisNexis in 2020 during peak COVID. Think about, we literally signed the documents, popped the champagne on March 2020. No vaccine. Louis Diamond: Oh, my God. Rafael Loureiro: We literally popped the champagne and we all went back home to work from home because that was the guy that’s from LexisNexis. Through that experience, selling a company, one thing you usually do, it’s a big liquidity event and estate planning is always related to big moments. You get married, someone in your family die, you have a new kid, you have a liquidated event. So I work with a financial advisor. They’re amazing. They helped me with financial planning, wealth management, saved me a lot of money insurance. But when it was time to do the estate planning, Louis, my experience was, “Hey, Rafael, we always work with this lawyer, go talk to the lawyer.” And then it was a completely broken process. First, because it was COVID and I had to go see the lawyer face-to-face. That was weird right there. Second, because I was expecting the lawyer to know everything about me because my advisor knows everything about me, know about my life situation, know about liquid event, know about my kids, rental houses, everything and then the engineer. I know what I told the lawyer, but do I know for sure that everything I told the lawyer end up in the document? No, I don’t. Long story short, otherwise it is a long story, we’re having a virtual coffee. I don’t know if you remember everyone, big beard, long hair, everyone working from home, and then somehow all the Emailage C-level team and founders, the co-founders, we start complaining about state plan. Even another example, my chairman, the Wealth.com chairman, Emailage CEO, Rei Carvalho, he was like, “Hey, Rafael, I’m done with the summer heat in Arizona. I’m moving to Denver. I’m going for cooler weathers.” Literally the moment he moved to Denver, he gets a call from his estate planning lawyer, welcome him to Denver and saying, “Hey, we need to update your documents. “But I just spent thousands of dollars creating my documents.” “Yeah, but you live in a new state, you have to optimize your documents.” At that moment, Louis, we’re like, “Where there’s a problem, there is an opportunity,” and the company was born. Louis Diamond: I find the best company origin stories, it’s you have that, you have a personal experience or a moment where you have a realization that t

Live from the floor of the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, this episode dives into the massive transformation hitting the energy sector. We explore "Crack the Code 2.0," a frenetic $100 million research effort aimed at unlocking the 85% of oil currently left in the Bakken rock. But this isn't just a traditional oil show. We connect the dots between North Dakota's world-class energy reserves and the exploding demand for Artificial Intelligence, mapping out how the state is uniquely positioned to power the nation's next-generation "intelligence factories." Featuring exclusive interviews with policymakers, regulatory watchdogs, and cutting-edge tech founders, we discuss everything from state infrastructure battles to global technological dominance. Key Moments & Timestamps [00:01:24] – The Front Porch of Innovation An overview of North Dakota's unique regulatory environment and how unprecedented access to lawmakers keeps global giants like Chevron and ConocoPhillips investing in the state. [00:02:31] – Unlocking Bakken 2.0 A deep dive into the conference's core theme: the $100 million collaborative research push to re-energize older wells and extract the massive amounts of oil currently left underground. [00:03:52] – When Energy Meets AI State Representative Todd Porter stops by to explain why a data center is simply a "value-added" project for local electricity, and addresses the growing pains and misconceptions surrounding local hyperscale facilities. [00:04:14] – Navigating the Public Service Frontier Sherry Huggenhopper of the North Dakota Public Service Commission outlines how the agency balances a massive uptick in power demand while fiercely protecting utility rates for everyday consumers. [00:04:24] – Winning the Global AI Race John Hinderaker, CEO of the Center of the American Experiment, draws parallels between the rise of computers and the evolution of AI, tackling the economic opportunities and social media misinformation campaigns surrounding the tech. [00:04:54] – A Conversation with Governor Kelly Armstrong The Governor joins the program to talk about the importance of pragmatic, pro-growth policies, the reality of political competition under new term limits, and why North Dakota cannot afford to say "no" to critical infrastructure. [00:07:00] – AI in a Box: Redefining the Edge Dan Wright, co-founder and CEO of Armada, explains how his company is deploying mobile, megawatt-scale modular AI factories to turn raw energy dominance into global AI dominance. [00:09:11] – Paving the Corridor: The Theodore Roosevelt Expressway Cal Cluen breaks down the multi-million-dollar logistical battle to expand US Highway 85 into a safe, four-lane divided…

From Profit21 and ERP consolidation to AI-powered knowledge capture, Renata Morgan shares how modern distributors are evolving beyond "the way we've always done it." What happens when one of the biggest names in HVAC manufacturing invests in independent distribution? A new entity emerges, swiftly followed by conversations around safeguarding the distributor's company culture, autonomy, and institutional knowledge. Jason connects with Renata Morgan, president of Rheem Northeast Distribution (RND), a collection of four manufacturer-owned distributors, to learn more about Rheem's foray into this side of the channel. They discusses innovating under an established brand umbrella, retaining critical process knowledge as experienced employees retire, and giving back to the professional community. MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Applied AI for Distributors 2026 HARDI BLUE HAWK Epicor Prophet21 RECOMMENDED EPISODES Agentic AI and the Future of Distribution with Ian Heller of Distribution Strategy Group CONNECT WITH JASON LinkedIn CONNECT WITH RENATA Rheem Northeast Distribution LinkedIn *** Distribution Talk is produced by The Distribution Team, a consulting services firm dedicated to helping wholesale distribution clients remove barriers to profitability, generate wealth, and achieve personal goals.    This episode was edited by The Creative Impostor Studios  Special thanks to our sponsors for this episode: Motivate, the #1 Distributor AI Automation Platform. Mention Distribution Talk for 50% off of installation. INxSQL Distribution Software, integrated distribution ERP software designed for the wholesale and distribution industry. Connected Peers, connecting key employees in distribution's leading organizations.

What does the future of CRNA education actually look like? In this episode of Airway Exchange, hosts Nickie and Greg sit down with Hallie Evans, DNP, CRNA, APRN, CNE, FAANA, to explore some of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing CRNA education today, including faculty shortages, mentorship, innovative teaching methods, competency-based learning, and the growing role of AI in healthcare education. Here's some of what you'll hear in this episode:

Personalization is still reactive, and that is why it stopped working. In this episode of Content Amplified, Katie Carroll, VP of Product Strategy at Businessolver, makes the case for moving past variable tags and behavioral triggers into anticipation: helping people before they know what to ask. Katie walks through findings from Businessolver's eighth annual Benefits Insights Report, including the counterintuitive idea that "quiet" (no clicks, no engagement, no support tickets) might be the real success metric, and how an in-house AI hit 91% instant resolution by reading the path a user is already on. She uses concrete examples (an HSA nudge after a pediatrician visit, an auto-enrollment in a prescription management program, a Social Determinants of Health lookup that connects a parent to childcare) to show what anticipation looks like in practice. She also explains why AI SDRs flopped, why marketers have to lean hard into data analytics in 2026, and why the easiest brand to interact with is the one that wins. If you want a practical starting point for building anticipation into your marketing, this one is for you.About KatieKatie Carroll is the VP of Product Strategy at Businessolver, a benefits administration tech company that powers the platform employees use to enroll in their benefits. She has spent her whole career in tech, starting on the consumer side at companies like eBay before moving into B2B, which gives her a rare cross-pollinated view of how people actually want to interact with software. Katie sees the healthcare and benefits space as a personal mission, drawing on the universal frustration most Americans have with the system to push her team toward more anticipatory, helpful user experiences.Show Notes- Connect with Katie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie--carroll/- Businessolver Benefits Insights Report: https://businessolver.com/benefits-insights/Text us what you think about this episode!

Tim and Nick Friedell discuss the main themes and interesting details from Steve Kerr and Mike Dunleavy's pressers. What will the next few years of the Warriors look like? To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, we welcome back Kieren James-Lubin to explore the evolution of blockchain infrastructure from the earliest days of Ethereum to the emerging world of "HardFi", programmable finance backed by real-world assets. The conversation also includes a special reveal from the team building the financial infrastructure backed by hard assets like gold and silver, offering listeners an early look at the launch of tokenized commodities and an on-chain collateral market. Long before institutional digital asset adoption, the team behind Strato was building Ethereum infrastructure for enterprises, governments, and global industrial organizations, helping launch one of the first Blockchain-as-a-Service offerings with Microsoft Azure and co-founding the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. For over a decade, they have operated blockchain systems in production environments where reliability, compliance, auditability, and settlement infrastructure mattered. Remember to Stay Current!  To learn more, visit us on the web at https://www.morgancreekcap.com/morgan-creek-digital/. To speak to a team member or sign up for additional content, please email mcdigital@morgancreekcap.com  Legal Disclaimer  This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice or a solicitation for the sale of any security, advisory, or other service. Investments related to the themes and ideas discussed may be owned by funds managed by the host and podcast guests. Any conflicts mentioned by the host are subject to change. Listeners should consult their personal financial advisors before making any investment decisions. 

With wars raging and supply chains blocked, we’re in an era of geopolitical chaos. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi talks with Gerald Butts, chairman of the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group and former chief of staff to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They discuss how investors and companies are responding to the energy shock, where the green transition might falter and who will emerge winners a decade from now. Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Sommer Saadi, Mohsis Andam, Sharon Chen and Laura Millan. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Healthcare Happy Hour, host David Saltzman sits down with Daniel Metcalf, president of CyberFin and co-leader of NABIP's Cybersecurity & AI Task Force, to discuss how cyber threats and artificial intelligence are rapidly reshaping the health insurance and benefits industry. Daniel explains why the task force was created, the growing risks facing agencies and clients, and how increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks are targeting both businesses and vulnerable consumers. The conversation explores practical steps advisors can take to strengthen cybersecurity, comply with evolving regulations, and prepare incident response plans. Daniel also shares insights into how AI is transforming agency operations, improving scalability and client engagement, while highlighting the importance of responsible adoption, data protection, and maintaining the human relationships that remain central to the advisor role.

In this episode of Aerospace Unplugged, our host Adam Kress is joined by Thea Feyereisen, Distinguished Fellow at Honeywell Aerospace, and Captain Steve Jangelis, Aviation Safety Chair at the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA).They dive into aviation safety from two vantage points, from the perspective of the pilot, and the other from someone who has studied pilots and helps design the cockpits they use.Together, they explore how aviation safety is rapidly evolving, the role pilots play in influencing safety efforts, the growing impact of artifiical intelligence and more. Episode Highlights:• The Evolution of Aviation Safety: Discover how aviation safety priorities have shifted in the past decade toward emerging risks and data-driven insights from aircraft and operations, and what that means for pilots and the role of human factors. • Airspace Transformation and Critical Need for Air Traffic Control (ATC) Modernization: Learn why ATC modernization efforts are crucial for the industry, and what changes must take place to make it successful.• Impact of Technology, Pilot Shortage and Fatigue: Learn how pilot shortages and fatigue are straining airline operations, and how technology, smarter scheduling and fatigue risk science can reduce workload and keep crews alert.• AI in Aviation and the Road Ahead: Explore how AI is being leveraged today to analyze flight and safety data, the pilots' perspective on AI as a decision-support tool and why it's critical to keep humans in the loop. 

Host Alex Usher speaks with Christine Wach, Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Stakeholder Engagement at IDP Education, about the evolution of international student mobility and the shifting global higher education market. Wach traces IDP's origins as an Australian government and university initiative, its transformation into a multinational education services company, and the development of IELTS and other major business lines. The conversation explores the post-pandemic surge and subsequent slowdown in international student flows across Anglophone countries, the growing importance of migration pathways and employability in student decision-making, and the emergence of new destination markets beyond the traditional “Big Four.” They also discuss AI's impact on student recruitment, the challenges of sustainable growth, and how institutions and governments may need to rethink international education strategies in an increasingly competitive and uncertain environment.

Stanley 1913 has moved far beyond a single blockbuster product. Graham Nearn, Chief Product and Sustainability Officer, PMI WW Brands, LLC (Stanley 1913), sits down with Jeremy Goldman to discuss how a brand with a century of history stays absolutely relevant in a trend-driven market. Inside the Episode: - The Credibility Ladder: Why every expansion must pass the four filters of quality, originality, invention, and mission to avoid overextending the brand. - Lifestyle Evolution: How the Vitalize collection and the new Clutch Bottle move the company beyond hydration and into everyday essentials. - Universal Truths: Adapting a global strategy to meet hyper-local needs, from car culture in the US to commute culture in Asia. - Circular Success: A look at the award-winning Take Back program that reclaims 96 percent of materials for the supply chain. - Predictive Learning: Using real-time social dialogue and data to inform the next move before the market catches up. Stop managing a blockbuster product. Start fueling the human experience.

Few names carry as much weight in the fitness industry as Mark Mastrov. As the founder of 24 Hour Fitness — which has grown from a single club to now more than 400 locations — Mastrov went on to build Crunch Fitness and UFC Gym. Now, he's returned to where it all started. In this episode of the Club Solutions Magazine podcast, sponsored by ROR, Mastrov joined host Taylor Gabhart to discuss what brought him back to 24 Hour Fitness, the three priorities driving his first year, where the industry is headed and what operators at every level should be paying attention to right now. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://clubsolutionsmagazine.com/newsletter/ Visit our website: https://clubsolutionsmagazine.com Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClubSolutions Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clubsolutionsmag/ Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/club-solutions-magazine Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clubsolutionsmag

What does the future of lung transplantation look like? In this new podcast episode, Dr. Rachel Ann Criner of Temple Health explores how one of the nation's leading transplant programs is advancing pulmonary care through innovation, operational excellence and research-driven treatment strategies. The conversation examines how Temple Health is expanding transplant eligibility, integrating clinical research into patient care and supporting increasingly complex patient populations through coordinated multidisciplinary care. Listeners will hear insights on: Advances in lung transplant technology and donor organ innovation How leading programs are redefining transplant candidacy The role of coordinated care and remote monitoring in improving outcomes Why clinical trials and targeted therapies are reshaping pulmonary medicine Tune in to learn how Temple Health is helping redefine what's possible in complex pulmonary and transplant care.

Between the rise of AI and its ability to "clone" a coach, the whiplash of being on Threads and finding out your fave coach is kinda a Mean Girl, and the fall of celebrity coaches, there seems to be a crack in the coaching space.What's ACTUALLY going on? And perhaps most importantly, what's next?I share some off-the-cuff thoughts on how I see the online coaching landscape evolving in the coming months (and years tbh!)My predictions include pivoting to totally unexpected offers, the continued surge of IRL experiences, longer programs, "underground visibility", redefining what enough is, going back to school, and how building institutions ourselves could be the key to staying power.What do you think? Slide in my DMs and let me know or tag me on socials with your thoughts, I have a feeling this is a bigger conversation to be had amongst all of us...Connect with Chelsea:

Hey ya'll, In this episode of Bonsai Time, Kevin shares a major life update that has been quietly taking shape behind the scenes for quite some time — and now, it's finally becoming reality.This next chapter brings new experiences, fresh inspiration, and an entirely new rhythm to daily life for Kevin, Kumi, and Juniper. Kevin opens up about the journey leading to this moment, what sparked the decision, and how this exciting change will shape the future of Bonsai Time Podcast moving forward.There's a lot ahead, and Kevin, Kumi, and Juniper are incredibly excited to share the journey with all of you.Thank you for being part of Bonsai Time.Bonsai ON!! The video version is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠soon to comeShow notes, relevant pictures, and links are ⁠⁠⁠soon to comeSee you in the next episode!Sponsor Info: This episode is sponsored by Chris Meade of the Columbus Bonsai Society and by our co-host via the Kevin Faris moving sale of bonsai pottery, tools, and trees. View these items at In Vivo Bonsai of Columbus, Ohio, USA in-person, or online (shipping available) at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠invivobonsai.etsy.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.InVivoBonsai.com⁠⁠⁠ and navigate to the consignment ⁠⁠⁠pottery⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠tree⁠⁠⁠ pages.Mailbag submissions/Community:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠NEW BT DISCORD Chat⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BT Facebook Group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support the Pod:Anytime you listen, subscribe, rate us, or share us with friends, you help keep us motivated to keep making episodes for you all! If you want to take it to the next level, you can also help keep the podcast going by donating to us through Spotify or by sponsoring an episode (contact us directly for that). All donations go back into the podcast such as for our web hosting, recording gear expenses, etc.Podcast Info:The Bonsai Time Podcast is hosted, edited, & produced by Kevin Faris, Ryan Huston, & Kelly Lui. We expect to post new interviews and reflections monthly! Find us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and our email BonsaiTimePodcast@gmail.com.Submit questions or pictures for future Bonsai Brainstorm episodes to our email, social media DMs, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Audio editing of this episode and music are by MIDICANCER. Find more music by them on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SoundCloud⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BandCamp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Host info:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ryan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a former bonsai apprentice of Elandan Gardens and current operator of In Vivo Bonsai nursery and educational operation in Columbus, OH. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kevin ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠is a bonsai practitioner/teacher now living in Massachusetts. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kelly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a newer bonsai artist volunteering and studying especially in the Los Angeles area.More Bonsai Projects by Ryan:Read more about bonsai on his blog and learn more about his educational services ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Find Ryan's online-available bonsai products, seeds, tools, etc. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Each seed kit sold comes with my full 10-year bonsai-from-seed guide.Find Ryan on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠as well if you need more bonsai in your feed.Also, check out some of my video editing work for the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Puget Sound Bonsai Association⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Columbus Bonsai Society⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠'s demonstration archives.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Seth Deutsch, founder of Samson Partners Group, author of The Owner's Manual: Why, When, and How to Sell Your Business to Private Equity, and creator of the EVRS (Exit Value Realization System), for a fascinating conversation on the rapidly evolving M&A landscape for personal injury law firms. Our discussion explores what separates highly valuable firms from the rest of the market. According to Seth, the firms attracting serious attention are those that reduce founder dependency, create durable and diversified revenue streams, maintain strong operational systems, and understand their financials through an investor lens—not just a legal one. We also discussed why private equity activity in the PI space is accelerating so quickly and how the industry may ultimately consolidate into a handful of dominant national holding companies over the next decade. Seth also shared a critical warning for founders: pursuing a sale before properly preparing the business and understanding "why" you want to sell can damage a firm's reputation with buyers for years. For law firm owners, legal industry professionals, and investors alike, this episode provides a rare insider perspective on where the personal injury market is heading and what firms must do now to remain competitive in the next era of legal services. Explore the conversation by topic: "2:58 – What does Samson Partner's Group offer through their legal industry vertical? "15:15 – How do you counsel law firm founders who are considering an exit strategy to prepare them for sale? "25:52 – Will PE acquisition of personal injury firms be individual transactions or could they ultimately roll up into peer industry groups? "38:23 – What increases law firm saleability, what red flags detract buyers, and how can automation and the use of AI increase value? Additional Resource Links: The Owner's Manual: https://a.co/d/fcc3hiL The EVRS Toolkit: https://www.samsonpartnersgroup.com/resources Please reach out to Seth and Kevin if you would like access to more resources such as The EVRS Explainer Video or the Private Equity Legal Alliance White Paper To learn more, visit: certumgroup.com

For the full episode, subscribe here to Inside Call me Back. ____ Subscribe to Ark News Daily ____ This is a sneak peek from the members-only edition of Inside Call me Back, where Dan is joined by Ark Media contributor Amit Segal to discuss whether Israel's war with Iran can be considered a success while the regime and parts of the nuclear threat remain intact, and whether Israel today has a leader, political movement, or civic vision capable of defining the country's next chapter. In the full episode, Amit also takes on listener questions about: Netanyahu's responsibility for October 7 How long does he plan to stay in power? Trump's Gaza “Riviera” plan in hindsight Amit's thoughts on his father's controversial essay about Diaspora Jews Whether the country could be headed back into another cycle of repeat elections To hear the full conversation, subscribe to Inside Call Me Back here. Read Amit's father's piece here.  More Ark Media: Want to join Ark Media? Check out our careers page for new openings. Explore Israel Votes Listen to For Heaven's Sake Listen to What's Your Number? Watch Call me Back on YouTube Newsletters | Ark Media | Amit Segal | Nadav Eyal Instagram | Ark Media | Dan X | Dan Dan Senor & Saul Singer's book, The Genius of Israel Get in touch Credits: Ilan Benatar, Brittany Cohen, Ava Weiner, Martin Huergo, Mariangeles Burgos, and Yuval Semo

AI is not your competitive advantage. It never was. And the entrepreneurs who stop chasing complexity and start doubling down on their humanity are the ones who are going to build the most successful, most fulfilling, most profitable businesses of the next decade. In this episode, Kelly unpacks the eight pillars of the activation era: the framework she has been developing through the Miracle Hour launch. This is not about AI tools, agents, or automation stacks. This is about what human productivity actually looks like when AI handles 98% of what we used to do... and where the irreplaceable value of a human being actually lives in a business. Kelly pulls back the curtain on the results from the Miracle Hour launch and live experience: her highest livestream numbers ever, highest sales conversions ever, and nearly a million dollars in wins generated by participants in 48 hours, and makes the case that all of it was built on the simplest foundation possible. If you have been making your business harder than it needs to be, this episode is your permission slip to stop. Timestamps: 00:45: The Miracle Hour book launch recap 03:00: Why Kelly believes this book was God's timing, and why the AI explosion made the Miracle Hour more urgent than ever 05:30: The conviction that complexity kills growth, and why Kelly has been simplifying everything while everyone else adds more 07:30: What the activation era actually means, what human productivity looks like when AI accounts for 98% of what we used to do 09:00: Applying precise intent and discernment instead of high volumes of output 10:30: Making authentic human connection your main competitive advantage 11:45: Why highly curated smaller settings are converting at 62% higher closing rates 13:00: Why buyers are moving to the top and the bottom and the middle is disappearing 14:30:: Why 84% of premium buyers prefer substantive materials like newsletters over short-form media 15:30: Analog interface: why premium buyers are taking purchasing decisions offline and what that means for your business 16:30: Prioritizing needle-moving work over busywork that creates an illusion of progress 17:30: Community-led growth Resources: Order The Miracle Hour book on Amazon and send your receipt to miraclehourbook@kellyroachinternational.com for instant audiobook access and an invite to the launch debrief on May 13th at 1pm Eastern: available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/05EfhMF0  Join Virtual Business School for just $97 a month, no contract, for guided Miracle Hour every Wednesday at 1pm Eastern, Closing Mastery with Kelly, monthly marketing masterclasses with Danielle, our exclusive community, full sales template bundle and limited-time content creation bonus: https://www.virtualbusinessschool.com/virtual-business-school  Register for Substack Mastery on May 15th: https://accelerator.virtualbusinessschool.com/substack--92237 

In this episode of the Global Regulatory Update, Martin Boer, General Manager and Chief Representative, Europe, speaks with Laurin Frommann, Managing Director & Partner, and Andreas Bürkli, Associate Director at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), about the creation of the new European Anti-Money Laundering Authority, AMLA, and how it will reshape the AML/CFT supervisory landscape across Europe. Drawing on insights from the joint IIF–BCG white paper, The Evolution of the AML/CFT Landscape Under the New European Anti-Money Laundering Authority, the conversation explores how AMLA aims to replace years of fragmented national approaches with a more centralized supervisory framework rooted in risk‑based oversight and greater supervisory coherence. The discussion examines AMLA's dual mandate to supervise high‑risk cross‑border institutions and support Financial Intelligence Units, as well as its ambition to become a data‑driven authority that improves reporting consistency and supports more intelligence‑led supervision. The podcast also looks at AMLA's emphasis on technology‑enabled financial‑crime detection, including how supervisors and industry can work together to assess emerging tools such as AI and machine‑learning solutions. Laurin and Andreas discuss the importance of a proportionate, principles‑based approach across different sectors and customer segments to ensure supervisory expectations remain both effective and achievable. Another focus of the conversation is AMLA's forthcoming direct supervision of 40 firms, designed to act as a “lighthouse” for broader EU supervisory practices. The guests reflect on how firms perceive this designation, the reputational sensitivities involved, and the operational and governance preparations already underway across the industry. The discussion concludes with AMLA's potential global role: strengthening the EU's voice in international AML/CFT standard setting, improving cross‑border coordination, and contributing to more outcome‑focused global frameworks, while also supporting the competitiveness of EU‑headquartered institutions.

Will Ash get cancelled for dropping a bombshell in this episode? Stay tuned and find out just how hot the takes in this conversation are!That's right, this week LeAnn and Ella are joined by Ash to hear all about The Next Era Project: a space for Swifties to connect as they recognize where they are now in life while setting sights on personal growth to reach their best era yet.Ash shares her own Swiftie background with us, what inspired the creation of The Next Era Project, and where new participants can start in this journey through the eras.Plus, this week's song recap serendipitously features evermore's track 7, happiness. We chat about how this song is relatable to the journey of personal evolution while recognizing maybe there is a bit of hope within the lyrics.Be sure to follow The Next Era Project's Instagram at @thenexteraproject. If you're ready to dive into the resources available, check them out here.If you would like to join a future episode of Diary of a Swiftie, send us a DM on our Instagram @diaryofaswiftiepodcast, or send us an email. Thank you to Ash for joining us and sharing all about this exceptional resource available to everyone now!

You don't have a strategy problem. You don't have a discipline problem. You don't have a manifestation problem. You have a space problem. The version of your business — and your life — that's trying to come through this season cannot land in a full vessel. And in this episode, I'm getting deeply honest with you about the sacred summer reset I'm doing right now, in real time, to make room for what's next. Because here's the truth I've watched play out in my life over and over again: every meaningful manifestation has been preceded by a release. The brand collaborations. The revenue milestones. The relationships. The identity shifts. Every single one of them came in after I cleared something out — never before. Manifestation is not a push. It is a pull. And the only thing standing between you and the era you've been calling in is what you're still holding. This episode is for the woman who has read every book, done every visualization, written every affirmation — and still feels like the next level of her life is taking forever to arrive. Let me show you why. Inside this episode: – Why decluttering is the most underrated manifestation practice on the internet (and the pattern I've seen in my own life that proves it) – The three layers of clutter most entrepreneurs only address one of — and why the layer you're skipping is the exact one blocking your next era – A behind-the-scenes look at what I'm personally clearing out of my business, my home, my friend group, and my self-talk this summer – The energetic reframe that changed how I approach every season: "What do I need to release?" instead of "What should I add?" – What I'm calling in once I finish — said out loud, named on the mic, made real Mentioned in this episode:

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!In today's episode of Ops Cast by MarketingOps.com, we're going beyond systems, processes, and technology to talk about how Pros are actually doing and executing the work.  Marketing has grown into a measurable revenue engine, but that transformation has come at a cost, and the pressure on operators is now constant, unrelenting, and in many cases, unsustainable.Our guest is Debbie Qaqish, one of the original pioneers of Revenue Marketing and Marketing Operations, and the founder of her new venture, The Growth Factor. Debbie has spent years helping organizations turn marketing into a measurable driver of business growth, and now she's tackling the human side of that shift, focusing on resilience, leadership, and how marketers can perform at a high level without burning out.Key Topics Include:The evolution of Revenue Marketing and where most companies get stuck todayWhat comes next after accountability and measurement defined the last eraHow AI is rebuilding the role of marketing ops and the expectations placed on teamsWhy does the pressure on marketers feel different now than even a few years agoWhat resilience actually looks like in practice for marketing ops and RevOps rolesHow "caveman brain" shows up in high-stress work environments and affects decision-makingSimple resets operators can use when stuck in fight-or-flight modeWhat effective leadership looks like when pace and pressure are this highHow operators can move from surviving to performing at a high levelIf you've been feeling the weight of constant pressure, changing expectations, and the demand to do more with less, this episode will give you a different lens on what's happening and what to do about it.If you're ready to think about performance, leadership, and resilience in a way that actually fits the reality of modern marketing ops, tune in!For leaders looking for a reset, here is the 10-Minute Leadership Reset™ Ops Cast (https://www.growthfactor.us/opscast)Be sure to like, share, and subscribe to join the conversation at MarketingOps.comEpisode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MarketingOps.com is curating the GTM Ops Track at Demand & Expand (May 19-20, San Francisco) - the premier B2B marketing event featuring 600+ practitioners sharing real solutions to real problems. Use code MOPS20 for 20% off tickets, or get 35-50% off as a MarketingOps.com member. Learn more at demandandexpand.com.Support the show

In this special episode, I explain why we're re-hosting the Unbounded archive at Ungovernable Misfits and end the series with a forward-looking conversation with Colonial, author of Sovereignty Requires Privacy: Lessons from the Fall of Samourai Wallet. Tbd and Colonial explore sovereignty as territorial control—physical and digital—and why exposure is the enemy in a world where information is the battlefield. Colonial unpacks how privacy tools challenge the geopolitical order, why martyrs lose, and why the next era belongs to disciplined, anonymous builders who move with intention. They walk through practical lessons from the Samourai saga, from the limits of playing by “their” rules to a new code for anon warfare, and close with actionable steps listeners can take now, including adopting Ashigaru's Whirlpool implementation and strengthening operational discretion. This one is about clarity over nostalgia: either you control your territory, or someone else will. Resources mentioned: Colonial's writings at sovereigncolony.com; Ashigaru Wallet and Terminal (ashigaru.rs) for Whirlpool; reading on territoriality (Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative) and philosophical frames (Nietzsche, Evola).TWITTER: https://x.com/TheUNBOUNDEDPodYOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@TheUnboundedPodcastHELP GET SAMOURAI A PARDONSIGN THE PETITION ----> https://www.change.org/p/stand-up-for-freedom-pardon-the-innocent-coders-jailed-for-building-privacy-tools DONATE TO THE FAMILIES ----> https://www.givesendgo.com/billandkeonneSUPPORT ON SOCIAL MEDIA ---> https://billandkeonne.org/(00:00:00) Thank You TBD(00:01:41) INTRO(00:03:28) Welcome Colonial(00:06:25) Defining Sovereignty: Territory, Power and the Digital World(00:11:46) Samourai Wallet and the Declaration of War(00:20:22) The Five Lessons(00:41:31) Without Privacy There Is No Freedom(00:57:05) The New Model(01:08:12) One Rule for the Next Era

Gary Takacs and Naren Arulrajah on the three leadership mindsets that separate thriving practices from struggling ones: curiosity over judgment, humility, and a genuine embrace of experimentation. Plus, the solopreneur trap, how to evaluate AI and technology correctly, and the vision exercise that Gary uses with every coaching client.

In this Omni Talk Retail interview, recorded live from World Retail Congress 2026 in Berlin, Chris Walton connects with Kristin Wolf, Chief Strategy & Growth Officer at Ulta Beauty, to discuss how one of beauty retail's biggest players is thinking about long-term growth, AI, and global expansion. Kristin shares how her newly created executive role reflects Ulta's focus on balancing core business growth with future innovation, from scaling internationally to rethinking how AI can transform retail operations, agility, and customer experience. The conversation also explores why traditional planning cycles are breaking down, how organizations need to evolve alongside technology, and why AI is forcing retailers to rethink not just tools, but the way work itself gets done. Plus, Kristin breaks down Ulta's recent expansion moves, including the acquisition of Space NK and partnerships across Mexico and the Middle East, and explains why disciplined innovation matters more than chasing “shiny objects.” Key Topics Covered: • Why Ulta created the Chief Strategy & Growth Officer role • How AI is reshaping retail strategy and organizational design • The future of agility and test-and-learn retail operations • Why growth today requires balancing core business + future bets • Ulta's international expansion strategy and recent global moves • How AI can accelerate both efficiency and customer experience • Why leadership teams need to rethink processes before deploying AI • The changing pace of retail transformation and innovation • How beauty retail continues to lead consumer and omnichannel trends Thank you to Vusion for supporting Omni Talk Retail's live coverage from World Retail Congress 2026 in Berlin. #WRC2026 #WorldRetailCongress #OmniTalkRetail #UltaBeauty #BeautyRetail #RetailInnovation #AIinRetail #RetailStrategy #CustomerExperience #FutureOfRetail

In this Omni Talk Retail episode, recorded live at the Retail Technology Show 2026 in London, Chris Walton speaks with Nikki Baird, VP of Strategy & Product at Aptos, about what is actually shaping the future of retail. Nikki explains why every meaningful technology decision must start with the consumer, and how understanding shifts in behavior is what ultimately drives operations, strategy, and innovation. The conversation dives into AI, where Nikki offers a grounded perspective on where the industry stands today. While adoption is accelerating, most use cases remain surface level. The real opportunity lies in fixing foundational challenges like product data, inventory visibility, and pricing, and pairing that with true operational change. They also explore how point of sale is evolving beyond transactions into flexible, mobile-first platforms that empower store associates and reshape how stores operate. Key Topics Covered: • Why consumer behavior should drive all technology decisions • The gap between AI hype and real-world application • Fixing retail fundamentals to unlock AI's full potential • The evolution of point of sale and mobile-first retail • Why tech investment is not the same as transformation • How solving integration could accelerate retail innovation Thank you to Vusion for supporting Omni Talk Retail's live coverage from Retail Technology Show 2026. More to come, stay tuned! #RTS2026 #RetailTechnologyShow #OmniTalkRetail #RetailStrategy #AIinRetail #RetailInnovation #CustomerExperience #RetailTechnology #Vusion

Let's a moment to discuss the next era of sustainable transport.  And building the national EV mobility platform of the future. In this episode, we explore the rapid evolution of automotive technology and the future of electric mobility with Rei Vardi, Founder and CEO of Eon. Backed by compelling industry data, the conversation highlights how keyless ignition systems have surged from a 70% adoption rate in 2014 to over 90% by 2019—and are now becoming nearly standard in new vehicles. Looking ahead, keyless systems are projected to be integrated into 82% of global vehicle sales by the end of 2025, with North America leading adoption, according to Yahoo Finance. We also unpack shifting consumer priorities. A striking 96% of American drivers say fuel economy is at least somewhat important when choosing a vehicle, while 66% consider it “very” or “extremely” important. At the same time, environmental sentiment is gaining momentum—nearly 35% of Americans support stricter government limits on tailpipe emissions to accelerate electric vehicle adoption according to  University of Chicago. Against this backdrop, Rei shares how he built Eon from a dorm room side project into a national EV mobility platform spanning 30+ cities and over 3,000 vehicles—all without raising outside capital. Eon's model connects underused electric vehicles with individuals and businesses seeking flexible access, enabling owners to earn passive income through a virtual fleet system. To date, the platform has generated over $10 million for vehicle owners and helped prevent more than 16 million pounds of CO₂ emissions. With a background in biomedical engineering, Rei discusses scaling a bootstrapped company, improving automation, and his vision for making EV access simpler, more efficient, and widely accessible. For more information: https://www.eonrides.com/ LinkedIn: @ReiVardi   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this industry keynote, FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller sits down with the "OG" of trucking technology, Scott Moscrip, founder and CEO of Truckstop. Returning from retirement to lead the company he started over 30 years ago, Moscrip shares his unique perspective on the evolution of transportation technology and his mission to empower small carriers. Keep up with Live FreightWaves Events Other FreightWaves Shows Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recorded at Dreamforce, we explore the next era of shopping with Rishabh Jain of Fermat and how agentic commerce is reshaping the customer journey. We discuss the rapid rise of AI-powered discovery, where platforms like ChatGPT are becoming a primary entry point for consumers, and what that shift means for brands.  The conversation dives into the need for rich, contextual, and shoppable content, along with delivering seamless experiences across channels. We also unpack the convergence of behavioral and identity data to drive personalization, and why trust and authenticity are critical.  Show Highlights: ChatGPT and LLMs emerging as primary shopping entry points Shift from traditional SEO to rich, shoppable content Seamless, context-aware experiences across channels Convergence of behavioral and identity data for personalization Agentic commerce across search, merchandising, and personal shopping Trust and authenticity as competitive advantages in AI-driven commerce Follow and Review: We'd love for you to follow us if you haven't yet. Click that purple '+' in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We'd love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select "Ratings and Reviews" and "Write a Review," then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second, and it helps spread the word about the podcast. *** Episode Credits If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com. Let them know we sent you.

The Search for What's Real in a Noisy World In this episode, we start with culture—Coachella, music, nostalgia—and end up somewhere deeper: the state of the world, identity, and why so many people feel exhausted, confused, and disconnected right now. We explore: Why culture feels like it's repeating itself The tension between authenticity and performance How AI and information overload are reshaping how we think Why people are craving depth, simplicity, and truth The emotional and mental toll of constantly trying to "figure out what's real" How chaos and pressure can actually create clarity and purpose This conversation is for anyone who feels like: The world has gotten noisier It's harder to trust what's real Creativity feels harder than it used to Or you're trying to rediscover what actually matters We don't just talk about the problem—we point toward a path forward: simplify, think deeper, and build something real.   Pre-Order the Book Pre-order the book here: http://magnumopusproject.co     If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who needs it. And in the meantime — keep writing new rules. More of a visual person?  You can WATCH today's episode on our Youtube Channel:  Youtube: www.youtube.com/@WriteNewRules   To stay connected, visit us at the following places to help as a guide for you on your journey to becoming an authentic leader!   LinkedIn:  / adriancrawford-nrc  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writenewrules/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@writenewrules   00:00 – Intro 01:25 – The Reality of Building Something New 03:24 – Fear, Risk, and Starting Again 05:06 – What Actually Makes It Worth It 06:17 – Coachella, Culture & Creative Trends 08:18 – Sabrina Carpenter vs Bieber: Performance vs Authenticity 10:20 – Kanye, Influence & Creative Genius 14:14 – Why Culture Matters More Than You Think 15:24 – Are People Craving Simplicity Again? 19:52 – The Problem With Comparison in Culture 21:00 – Nostalgia & Why 2016 Still Hits 23:20 – Why Everyone Feels Exhausted Now 25:08 – The Shift in Global Reality 26:07 – The Next Era of Creativity 28:08 – Artists vs Entrepreneurs: The Tension 30:14 – Selling Ideas vs Living Them 32:03 – Why Wisdom Is the Missing Piece 34:37 – Leadership, Trust & Disillusionment 38:59 – AI, Power & The Future of Creation 40:04 – "I'm Tired of trying to figure Out What's Real" 42:12 – Pressure Reveals What Actually Matters 43:18 – Why You Should Go All In 44:13 – Simplifying Your Life & Thinking Deeper 46:14 – Stop Consuming, Start Thinking 47:06 – Curiosity, Creativity & Following Ideas 48:37 – Final Thoughts  

What if your company's biggest untapped competitive advantage isn't technology or talent, but well-being? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with Dr. Jennifer Posa, an organizational psychologist with 30 years of experience building well-being strategies inside some of the world's most demanding organizations, including Mayo Clinic, Johnson & Johnson, and the CIA. Jennifer shares her bold 2026 predictions for the workplace, explains why most well-being programs fail before they start, and reveals what it actually takes to build a strategy that drives real business results. From psychological contracts to the AI culture crisis brewing right now, this conversation is packed with insights that HR leaders, executives, and people managers can't afford to miss. If you care about the future of your workplace and who's going to be left standing after the next wave of disruption, this episode is essential listening. Key Timestamps [00:01] – Introduction & Jennifer's Unique Background Brandon introduces Dr. Jennifer Posa and her remarkable 30-year career in well-being at high-performing organizations including Mayo Clinic, Johnson & Johnson, and the CIA. [00:55] – When Well-Being Became a Strategy, Not a Perk Jennifer shares the personal and professional turning points that revealed well-being isn't just a "nice to have"—it's backed by decades of research showing measurable improvements in business outcomes. [03:03] – Lessons from the CIA: Well-Being in High-Stakes Environments What does well-being look like when the stakes couldn't be higher? Jennifer unpacks three powerful lessons from her role as Chief Well-Being Officer at the CIA, starting with the critical insight that well-being is individual—not prescriptive. [07:25] – Proactive vs. Reactive: The Well-Being Gap Most Employers Miss Brandon and Jennifer discuss why so many organizations wait for burnout, turnover, and absenteeism before taking action—and what a truly proactive approach looks like when it's embedded at the C-suite level. [08:27] – Prediction #1: Accountability Is the Differentiator in 2026 Jennifer's first 2026 prediction: organizations that hold themselves accountable for employee pain points will win. She breaks down what accountability actually looks like—hint: it's a business strategy, not a wellness app. [13:32] – How to Find the Real Pain Points (Not the Ones You Assume) Jennifer reveals her research-first approach—why she leads with qualitative focus groups before any survey, and how asking "what matters most to you?" unlocks a well-being strategy grounded in truth, not assumption. [17:59] – Prediction #2: Strategic Employee Relationships Drive Exceptional Growth Jennifer introduces the concept of the "psychological contract" and explains why every decision an employer makes right now is either building or breaking that unspoken agreement with their workforce. [21:32] – Scaling the Personal: Well-Being Across 140,000 Employees at J&J How do you make well-being feel personal inside an organization with 140,000 employees across 77 countries—during a global pandemic? Jennifer shares how J&J humanized their strategy at scale. [27:26] – Prediction #3: AI Is a Cultural Issue, Not Just a Technology Issue Jennifer's most provocative prediction: organizations that fail to address the human side of AI adoption will fracture their culture from the inside out. She explains why AI integration is one of the biggest C-suite conversations of our time. [31:45] – How to Prepare Your Workforce for an AI-Driven World Jennifer offers a practical framework for thinking about AI and humans as collaborative partners—and introduces the concept of "performance tradecraft" to help employees build the brain skills needed to thrive amid rapid change. [36:49] – Where to Connect with Dr. Jennifer Posa Brandon wraps up the conversation and Jennifer shares how listeners can follow her work, access her insights, and continue the conversation. A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR Host: Brandon Laws In Brandon's own words: "The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders." About Xenium HR Xenium HR is on a mission to transform workplaces by providing expert outsourced HR and payroll services for small and medium-sized businesses. With a people-first approach, Xenium helps organizations create thriving work environments where employees feel valued and supported. From navigating compliance to enhancing workplace culture, Xenium offers tailored solutions that empower growth and simplify HR. Whether managing employee relations, payroll processing, or implementing impactful training programs, Xenium is the trusted partner businesses rely on to elevate their workplace experience. Discover how Xenium can transform your workplace: Learn more Connect with Brandon Laws: LinkedIn | Instagram | About Connect with Xenium HR: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube

Xaereth and SoloBass15 record Gambit Podcast's 310th episode. Let's talk about the stuff! So much stuff to discuss. Too much, probably. Podcast questions answered. So much madness. Madness!! Here are some links to help you on your way: The Gambit Discord Server Xaereth's Twitch Channel Solobass15's Twitch Channel Gambit Twitch Channel Xaereth's YouTube Channel Solobass15's YouTube Channel Gambit YouTube Channel

In this episode, Griffin sits down with Peter Costanzo of ROI Consulting Group to explore how facilities management technology is rapidly evolving—and why the industry is finally hitting an inflection point.Peter shares his unexpected path into FM tech and what's kept him in the space for over two decades: the increasing complexity, opportunity, and impact of technology on building operations. From the growing role of IT and HR in facilities decisions to the rise of workplace experience as a priority, facilities teams are becoming more integrated than ever before.The conversation dives into major trends shaping the future of FM, including AI, predictive maintenance, and the explosion of sensors. Peter highlights how falling sensor costs and improved connectivity are making smarter buildings more accessible—and how large players like Siemens, Schneider Electric, and Autodesk are investing heavily in this space.They also discuss common challenges, like outdated systems, overwhelming technology choices, and implementation failures. A key theme: success with FM tech isn't just about buying the right tools—it's about long-term thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and actually using the systems to their full potential.If you're trying to make sense of where FM technology is headed—or where to even begin—this episode offers a grounded, real-world perspective on what's changing and what it means for facilities teams moving forward.Resources:ROI Consulting GroupPeter Costanzo LinkedIn

Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Courtney Kelly, founder of Courting - a tennis-inspired brand rooted in nostalgia, community, and seriously good style. What started as an idea for a tennis themed coffee shop (and even a matchmaking app) evolved into a full collection that blends performance, functionality, and fashion in the coolest way. We talk about the real story behind Courting - from growing up around tennis in the 90s to reimagining what the sport looks and feels like today. Courtney shares what it actually takes to build a brand from the ground up: trademarking your idea, pushing through endless design iterations, and learning when to trust your instincts. We also get into starting something new later in your career, navigating stability vs. risk, and letting go of the idea that there's a "right" timeline for success. Plus, a behind the scenes look at what it's been like working together on the collection, and why tension, honestly, and creative trust are the magic ingredients. Courting is about more than just tennis fashion, it's about community, self-expression, and doing something because you genuinely love it. This episode is brought to you by Alice + Olivia, Sam Edelman, and Jones Road Beauty. Exclusively for With Whit listeners, you can get 15% off everything from new arrivals to best sellers by visiting aliceandolivia.com/whitVisit Samedelman.com to explore everything you need for spring and get 15% off with code WITHWHIT15.For a limited time our listeners are getting a free Jones Road Beauty Shimmer Face Oil on their first purchase, just head to jonesroadbeauty.com and use code WITHWHIT at checkout.This episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct, or indirect financial interest in products, or services referred to in this episode.Produced by Dear Media See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.