Podcasts about north star

This is episode 855. Read the complete transcription on the Sales Game Changers Podcast website. Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here. The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here. FeedSpot named the Sales Game Changers Podcast at a top 20 Sales Podcast and top 8 Sales Leadership Podcast! Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts! Purchase Fred Diamond's best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now! Today's show featured an interview with Matthew Radomski, Regional Vice President of Federal Civilian at Harness. Find Matt on LinkedIn. MATT'S TIP: "The customer is the North Star. Their success should be your success. Everything else figures itself out. Don't focus on selling. Focus on their value and what matters to them, and then help them along the way."

Hey friends, Chase here Jeff Boyd is on the show today, and this conversation is about building the kind of life and business that does not always look like the predominant story on the internet. Jeff is the founder and chairman of MTE, More Than Energy, which he describes in this episode as "an energy that loves you back." Before that, he spent 15 years as the President and co-owner of Luggage Free, where he expanded global operations to more than 100 countries before selling the company in 2019. What I loved about this conversation is that it is not the usual story about chasing the next app, raising venture capital, or building something because the internet told you that is what entrepreneurship is supposed to look like. This is a conversation about physical products, unsexy businesses, competition, fatherhood, leadership, and what it means to keep choosing hard things on purpose. Jeff says it plainly right at the top: "That's why I tell my team all the time. They just look at me and I'm like, if it were easy, everybody be doing it. We got to do what nobody else is willing to do, and then you're going to be happy we did it. And I tell them that I'm like, oh yeah, this is hard. And I'm excited about it. Because now that's an opportunity for us because we'll outwork anybody." That idea is at the center of this episode. We talk about the grind of building something real, why curiosity matters more than credentials, what sports teach us about business, why leadership is not about personality type, and how the best things in life often come down to loving the process instead of obsessing over the outcome. Why This Conversation Matters Right Now Most of the entrepreneurs and creators we see online are building in public, building digitally, or building something that looks like the current version of what the internet rewards. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not the only path. In this episode, I say: "A lot of folks I know in the audience feel a pressure to make their businesses walk and talk and look like the creators and the entrepreneurs that see out there in the world, which is one of the reasons I want to start celebrating some people who are building really successful lives, careers." That is why I wanted to have Jeff on the show. He built and sold a shipping business. Now he is building a physical product in the health and wellness space. He is not chasing the obvious thing. He is not trying to make his work look like everyone else's. Jeff's path is a reminder that there is a whole world of entrepreneurship outside the digital-first story. There are products, services, local businesses, physical goods, retail shelves, manufacturing problems, customer conversations, teams, families, and real-life constraints. And sometimes, that is where the opportunity is. What We Explore in This Episode Jeff's early business story and how he became employee one at a shipping company before helping grow it around the world. The "answer is yes" mindset that helped Luggage Free expand into all 50 states and more than 100 countries. Why physical products are different and what changes when you are building with atoms instead of bits. The origin of MTE and why Jeff wanted to build "an energy that loves you back." What it means to enjoy the grind when the work is hard, relentless, and full of problems you do not know how to solve yet. Fatherhood, presence, and time and why Jeff says he is "so all in now" with his family. Competition, sport, and business and why Jeff still trains and competes as a long jumper. Leadership and authenticity and why Jeff says people do what you do, not what you say you do. Second and third career arcs and what Jeff has learned about zooming out, building teams, and letting people play the right roles. The Core Idea: If It Were Easy, Everybody Would Be Doing It One of the strongest threads in this conversation is Jeff's relationship with hard things. He is not pretending the grind is glamorous. He says straight up that building physical products, selling through retail, and getting people to care is hard. But he also sees that difficulty as part of the opportunity. "You know I some of this stuff I think the harder it is, the better for me. For sure. You want, you want to bear. People are going to be like, oh, I don't have the guts to do this. That's right. Yeah. And then the ones that do, that's a that's another level, right? That's another fence they cleared. But then it's like, okay, well now you did that. But are you ready to grind now because it's a grind." That is the mindset that shows up again and again in the episode. The point is not that everything should be hard for the sake of being hard. The point is that difficulty can reveal where other people quit. That is true in sport. It is true in business. It is true in building a family, a product, a brand, a company, or a body of work. The Answer Is Yes Jeff's first major business story starts with Luggage Free. At the beginning, the company was taking orders by hand and trying to get the phone to ring. Then the first real call came in. "Anyway, so we're trying to get the phone to ring so we can handwrite our orders. And the first call, the guy, you know, we're all. It was kind of like a movie. We're all like, you know, hushed around him, waiting, you know, hearing him, he's like, oh, I'm sorry, we don't serve. North Carolina hangs up. And we were like, oh, dude, Gary, of course you serve anybody." That moment became a kind of operating philosophy: "And I was like, from now on, the answer is yes. Like whatever anybody says answered yes. And with that really that charge? Yeah. We were quickly in all 50 states and we grew to 109 countries throughout the world. And it was always in response to a call." There is something powerful in that. Not because saying yes is always the right answer, but because early in a business, the market often tells you where to go before your strategy deck does. Someone calls. Someone asks. Someone has a need. Someone gives you a clue. The question is whether you are willing to follow it. Building Something You Can Hold After selling Luggage Free in 2019, Jeff had time and space. He was not rushing into the next thing. He was riding his bike, playing tennis, spending time with his family, and looking for what might call him next. What called him was not another service business. It was a physical product. "And so in 19 sold it 2019, 2019 were operating all over the world, offices all over and sold it and was kind of free to at that point, I was like, all right, I want to like what I loved about it was the challenge and the fun and the competition. Right. You're building, you're competing." He continues: "But I what I yearn for was a product and something that was tangible I could actually hold right and do a different scent or a different flavor or different size or different color, whatever." That desire eventually became MTE. Jeff had been trying to solve his own energy problem, stacking supplements, chasing better mood, better energy, and better performance, until he realized the pieces were not working together. "And I realized I was like, Frankenstein. I mean, like, we were talking about it last night, like piling all these supplements together to try and make yourself feel better, even even like ten supplements, which doesn't sound that bad. Shit. Crazy. Yeah. We'll be like a suitcase full when you're traveling, you know?" MTE came from that search. "So we built it's an energy that loves you back. Right. Like an energy drink that loves you back. Yeah. Right. So you get prebiotics and caffeine free blend. That's better than caffeine. Yeah. So now you're getting energy that feels great that you can trust. Sure. And no jitters, no crash, no impact on sleep." Curiosity, Thrill, and Figuring It Out One of my favorite parts of this conversation is when Jeff talks about starting something in a category where he did not have obvious experience. He had not built beverage brands before. He was not a chemist. He was stepping into a new world. His answer was not fear. It was curiosity. "Yeah. Like, I like hair on fire. Like, let's go figure this out." Then he gets to the larger point: "I like it's curiosity and thrill. And that's what it boils down to. Right. Like, I think you you like that's what entrepreneurship is. It's solving problems and and finding solutions to things. Even if you've done it 20 times, they're going to be solutions that need to be had in the evolving world and landscape in which we operate." That is entrepreneurship in a sentence. You do not get to know everything before you begin. You do not get a guarantee that the answer is obvious. You get a problem, a question, a changing landscape, and the chance to learn fast enough to keep moving. Jeff says: "But that's why I love it. I think if, if we boil it down, I love the curiosity that that is necessary to just because you're like, I don't know the answer to that. Instead of that overwhelming me or said of panicking, I'm going to go learn because I'm sure there's more than one answer. We'll figure out. Maybe we'll triangulate, figure it out. Yeah, get to a solution. And and then we'll know for next time. And then we'll be able to iterate and make it better. And on it go. Like I love that process." You Have to Love the Process The conversation moves from business into fatherhood, sport, and the shape of a life. Again and again, we come back to process. Jeff says it directly: "Yeah. You have to love the process, right? And I think that's true of anything, particularly in stuff like that where it's easy to focus on the outcome. I'm lose 20 pounds, I'm going to whatever it is, I'm going to get this promotion, you know. And then I think what happens is then the outcome just naturally happens because you love the process." This applies to entrepreneurship, training, parenting, leadership, and creative work. If you are only trying to reach the finish line, you miss the life that happens while you are getting there. Jeff connects that idea to family: "Like the time is fleeting, right? For whatever it is. And you really have to enjoy the journey because, you know, like, I look at things like, if it's a line that's made up of just millions and millions of dots, and those dots would represent any given period in time." He continues: "Right. College graduation, high school graduation. They get married like whenever it is. You've decided that they've you've set them free. The that point will just be one of hundreds of millions of points that made up the line. Yeah. So, you know, looking and it's kind of the same with like a business, right. Like if you're just all you want to do is sell the business, you're just focused on that. You're going to miss all these hundreds of millions of, of experiences or anything else, right?" Competition Brings Out the Best in People Jeff is still a competitive long jumper. He talks about master's track, world records, regional meets, and the way competition gives him purpose. That competitive lens shows up in business too. "I love it, I love it, I think I think I love to compete. Like I was just telling my buddy the other day, like, I don't like when he's fine, but I hate losing, which is weird, right?" Then he goes deeper: "So I just love the competition, and I love the process that goes into it. And having, you know, so being able to have a purpose and go in and compete and I love competing. Sure. I just think it brings out the best in people." For Jeff, sport is one vehicle for competition, but not the only one. Business is another. "Sports is just a vehicle to compete. Right. So is it the competition like because it brings the best out in you or why do you like it. Yeah, I think I think just that it's the vehicle for sports. Sure. So I like it as an umbrella. I love it in the business." He talks about the shipping company in that same frame: "Like even the shipping company I had towards the end, I was I didn't have a lot of passion for it, but I had, you know, a very competitive space and there were upstarts in the industry and you're like, all right, well, these guys are trying to take my lunch money, you know, like, right. Not on my watch." Leadership Means Leading From the Front When I ask Jeff what is required of leadership, his answer is simple: "Got to lead from the front, I think. Right. I mean, yeah, it's people do what you do, not what you say you do." He adds: "I think you need to be genuine too. Yeah. Right. Like, if you're, if you're genuine and authentic, I think people are more prone to get in line and buy in and say, I'm, I'm, I'm subscribing to what? You're where you're leading me again." That is an important distinction. Leadership is not just having followers. It is not having the loudest voice in the room. It is not projecting certainty at all times. It is what people see you do. It is the consistency between your words and your behavior. It is whether the people around you believe that the thing you are asking from them is something you are willing to model yourself. Nobody Does It Alone Later in the conversation, Jeff talks about what he has learned in this newer chapter of his life and career. One lesson is the importance of zooming out. Another is the myth of the lone genius. "And then the other thing I've learned is you like, nobody does it alone. Right? I mean, that's like total myth. Yeah. The myth of the lone wolf. The lone genius. Yeah. It's, you know, you need a you need a whole group of people that are going to bring ideas that you would have never thought of. They're going to execute your ideas that you do have." He continues: "Right? They're going to they're just they're going to champion for you in ways that you never even knew needed to be championed. You know, I mean, all the things you need a you need a great team and you need to find." That is a hard-earned lesson for builders. The bigger the thing you are trying to create, the less likely it is that you can muscle your way through alone. You need ideas you would not have had. You need people who can execute. You need people who can challenge you, support you, and help you see what you are missing. Role Players Matter One of the most useful leadership ideas in this episode is Jeff's realization that not everyone on a team has to be an all-star. "And the other thing I talk about all the time is it's you have to resist the urge to demand that everybody in your team is an all star, right? Like even the greatest sports teams have role players, and they have guys that sit on the bench to get the starters ready for the playoffs." He explains what he learned: "But they don't, you know, they're they're effectively benchwarmers. But they have a role in the team. And you have a trainer and you have a coach and assistant coaches and all. You know, it's it's the whole organization." That perspective changed the way he thought about people and teams: "That was difficult for me earlier on. I, I just felt like everybody had to be an all star. If you're not at all star, you're you're like, I'm failing you or you're failing me. And either way, you got to go. You know, we're going to get somebody else in here." The lesson is not to lower standards. It is to understand roles. Great teams are not built by pretending everyone is supposed to contribute in the same way. About Jeff Boyd Jeff Boyd is the founder and chairman of MTE (More Than Energy), colloquially known as 'energy that loves you back'. MTE has prebiotics and a caffeine-free blend that functions better than caffeine, giving users feel good energy they can trust, with no spike, no crash, and no impact on sleep. Prior to founding MTE, Jeff spent 15 years as the President and co-owner of Luggage Free where he expanded global operations to over 100 countries before selling the company in 2019. In his free time, Jeff is a notorious oenophile, cyclist and long jumper. If he's not on the bike, on the track, or in the cellar, he enjoys traveling the world with his wife and two children. www.getmte.com Instagram YouTube Timecodes 00:00 – Jeff on why hard things create opportunity 02:06 – Chase welcomes Jeff to the show in Seattle 02:21 – Why this episode is different from the usual digital-first entrepreneurship conversation 05:21 – Jeff begins the story of becoming employee one at a shipping company 07:35 – "From now on, the answer is yes" 09:21 – Selling the company in 2019 and wanting to build a product 10:31 – Jeff starts getting the itch to build something new 15:40 – Why building a physical product is not a get-rich-quick scheme 17:57 – Jeff explains MTE: "an energy that loves you back" 22:35 – Starting in a category where you do not have all the experience 23:59 – Curiosity, thrill, and solving problems as entrepreneurship 28:01 – Fatherhood and being "born to be a dad" 31:12 – Why Jeff is "so all in now" with his family 33:16 – Time, family, business, and "millions and millions of dots" 36:18 – Why you have to love the process 38:15 – Attitude, winning, and sports psychology 39:23 – Jeff on still competing in long jump 42:00 – Why Jeff loves competition 46:33 – Leadership, authenticity, and leading from the front 50:45 – Zooming out and finding your North Star 51:47 – Why nobody does it alone 52:05 – Building teams with role players, not only all-stars 58:37 – "When people show you who they are, believe them" 01:03:14 – MTE cans, flavor work, and mango pineapple 01:05:08 – The Reggie Watts collaboration 01:09:20 – Why the harder path can be better 01:12:15 – Retail as the next frontier 01:17:03 – Jeff's three-pillar vision for MTE 01:17:45 – Ingredients, paraxanthine, prebiotics, and clean energy Questions to Ask Yourself If you want to turn this episode into action, take a few minutes with these questions: Where am I making my business or creative life look like someone else's version of success? What is the "non sexy" opportunity I might be overlooking because it does not look cool online? Where could "the answer is yes" help me learn faster? What hard thing am I avoiding that might actually be the opportunity? What problem do I not know how to solve yet, and who could help me triangulate an answer? Where am I too focused on the outcome and missing the process? What part of my life is made up of "millions and millions of dots" that I need to appreciate now? Am I leading from the front, or only telling people what I value? Where am I expecting everyone to be an all-star instead of building a real team? What would it look like to zoom out and find the North Star again? A Simple Practice for Builders Here's something practical you can do this week. Pick one hard thing in your work or life that you have been treating as a sign to stop. It might be a distribution problem, a hiring problem, a creative problem, a sales problem, a health problem, or a relationship problem. Then sit with Jeff's line: "Oh yeah, this is hard. And I'm excited about it." Do not use that line to pretend the hard thing is easy. Use it to reframe what the hard thing might be showing you. It may be pointing to the part where other people quit. It may be pointing to the skill you need to build next. It may be pointing to the person you need to ask, the rep you need to take, or the process you need to fall in love with again. The work is not always to find an easier road. Sometimes the work is to become the kind of person who can walk the hard one with more purpose. Final Thought This episode is a reminder that business is not only about scale, speed, funding, or hype. It is also about curiosity, grit, family, physical products, role players, clean energy, long jumps, retail shelves, hard conversations, and the willingness to keep learning when you do not already know the answer. Jeff's story is not about avoiding the grind. It is about choosing the right grind. It is about building something thoughtfully, leading from the front, and staying close enough to the process that the outcome has room to take care of itself. Until next time: do what nobody else is willing to do, and love the process enough to keep going.

We are halfway through the year, and holy bananas, where did it go? If your stomach just dropped because you're nowhere near the goal you wrote down in December, stay with me.You do not toss out the plan you made. You check it.In this episode, Brandi walks you through the exact mid-year reset she just ran with her Strategist Society members, the one that stops the panic spiraling and replaces it with real data. You'll pull your numbers, find out where you're actually sitting in your business, do the gap math (it's smaller than you think), and walk away with three action steps for the next seven days.In this episode, you'll learn:Why service providers should plan in 90-day increments instead of 12-month chunksThe year-over-year growth number that tells the truth about your business (and why the average business only grows 5 to 10% a year)The car-seat gut check: are you in the driver's seat, passenger seat, back seat, or the trunk?How to close your revenue gap by spreading it over six months instead of panicking over the whole numberThe brain dump exercise that took Brandi from a $250K year to $1.2MWhy "I don't like it" is not a reason to skip what actually works (cold email, cold calling, Upwork, local networking)How to reconnect to your North Star and pick the two life areas to focus on nextMentioned in this episode:Strategist Society (scale to consistent $10K, $15K, $20K months): https://thestrategistsociety.comConversions for Clients (just getting started, no clients yet): https://conversionsforclients.comDM Brandi the word RESET on Instagram for the lightning version: https://instagram.com/brandimowlesReady to scale past $10K months?If you're sitting here thinking "this is exactly what I needed, but I'll talk myself out of doing it alone," that's exactly what Strategist Society is for. It's the room where we look at your real numbers with you, tell you where to raise your prices, help you brain dump your gap fill, and hold you to the three things you committed to. Built for service providers ready to scale to consistent $10K to $20K months on less than 25 hours a week. Head to https://thestrategistsociety.com.Loved this episode?Screenshot it, share it to your stories, and tag @brandimowles. It helps more service providers find the show and it makes my whole day.Now go do the dang thing.Follow the Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/serve-scale-soar/id1477998650Follow Brandi on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brandimowlesFollow Brandi on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Brandiandcompany

In the second Scrum V pod of the week, Lauren Salter heads to London to speak to retiring Wales great George North, who's set to play his final professional game for the Barbarians against Wales in Twickenham on Saturday. Meanwhile Gareth Rhys Owen is in camp with the Wales men's side to catch up with Blair Murray

Alan Lazaros lost his father in a car accident before he could even remember him. He went on to do everything right — top engineering school, MBA, corporate career, elite global earner. And then at 26, he was in a near-fatal car accident of his own. Same way his dad died. And that's when everything cracked open.In this episode, Hugs sits down with Alan — host of one of the world's top 100 personal development podcasts, Next Level University, with over 2,300 episodes, listeners in 180+ countries, and more than 7,200 one-on-one coaching sessions under his belt — for one of the most intellectually rich and emotionally honest conversations Sol Meets Heart has had.They go deep on the four parts of your nature (mental, physical, emotional, spiritual) and which one is secretly driving your life. Alan breaks down the three fears that box people in — fear of failure, fear of success, and fear of judgment — and why most people don't even know which one is running them.They talk about productive avoidance, why personal development can become an escape from actual healing, and what it really means to build self-worth versus self-belief. Alan also opens up about co-founding the Next Level Hope Foundation with his business partner Kevin — turning Father's Day, a painful holiday for both of them, into a day of celebration for kids without fathers.This one hits differently.

Clearing the Noise to Accelerate Execution In a world driven by intentional clutter, endless to-do lists, and over-engineered applications, hosts Mark Cardone and Theron Feidt dedicate this milestone episode to the ultimate success filter: Simplicity. True genius isn't creating a concept that looks dense and complicated just to confuse people; genius is the ability to boil massive ideas down to their absolute core so they can be seamlessly executed. Whether you are running an elite martial arts dojo or structuring a scaling enterprise, complicating your process is a mask for hiding a lack of clarity. In this tactical blueprint, Mark and Theron outline how to aggressively pare down your thoughts, your schedule, and your core mission so you can stop wasting critical energy and start moving the needle. Key Frameworks & Action Steps Action Step 1: Establish Simplicity of Thought (Sharpen the Signal) When your mind is constantly flooded with shallow inputs, your decision-making agility cracks. Achievers purposefully install mental filters to quiet the noise and gain immediate clarity. The One-Question Filter: Before pulling the trigger on a new initiative or micro-task, run it through this unshakeable lens: "Does this active decision explicitly move my result?" If the answer isn't a hard yes, it is an engineered distraction. The 20-Minute Input Blackout: Dedicate a non-negotiable window every single day to complete sensory silence. Turn off your notifications, shut down the news, and step away from all streaming content. Give your brain the tactical margin it needs to digest information and solve deep problems. If twenty minutes makes you nervous, start with ten—but pull the plug on the noise. The Top 3 Rule: Stop working off an exhaustive to-do list of twenty items. If everything is important, nothing is. Limit your active daily focus to your Top 3 Priorities at one time. Once those are finished, you can cleanly pull secondary items into your priority bucket. Action Step 2: Implement Simplicity of Action (Lighten the Load) High productivity is not about adding more busywork to an already bursting calendar; it is about aggressively removing low-value friction so your focus can compound. Plan the Night Before: Never enter your morning on the defensive. Before your head hits the pillow, identify the single highest-impact action step that will move the needle tomorrow. Schedule it first so you hit the ground running without burning precious willpower on trivial morning choices. The D.E. Filter (Delegate or Eliminate): Conduct an aggressive operational audit using the classic A-B-C-D-E time matrix guidelines: Delegate (The 80% Rule): If a team member can handle an essential task at least 80% as effectively as you, hand it off immediately. Free yourself up to operate exclusively in your highest strategic zone. Eliminate: Ruthlessly locate the deep habits and activities that do not actively serve your vision, business growth, or relationships, and permanently erase them from your schedule. Action Step 3: Simplify Your Purpose (The Decision Compass) Fulfillment requires a streamlined North Star. If you cannot describe why your business or character exists in a clear, brief sentence, your daily execution will default to chaos. The One-Sentence Purpose Statement: Reject long, paragraph-length corporate mission statements that read beautifully but mean nothing in active practice. Boil your overarching vision down to a crisp, concise, single sentence (e.g., "Team Leader," "Joy Bringer"). The Mirror Reminder: Take your purpose sentence and physically anchor it to your environment—write it boldly across your bathroom mirror. Successful people do not need to be taught what to do, but they do require sharp, immediate daily reminders of who they are choosing to be. Speak It Out Loud on Hard Days: When operations hit an inevitable speed bump and frustration peaks, stand in front of the mirror, change your posture, and clearly speak your purpose statement out loud to the room. Hearing your own voice declare your absolute coordinates cuts through emotional clutter and instantly resets your trajectory. "Simplicity is the canvas of peak performance. When you complicate your thinking, you anchor your execution. Pick your Top 3 needle-movers today, cut the noise, and execute." Links & Resources Mentioned in This Episode Ignite Your Growth Portfolio: Head over to Achieve Results NOW! to claim your free copy of our high-performance guide, Ignite Results: 4 Easy Steps to Measurable Results in 30 Days! Join the Inner Circle: Share your Top 3 daily priority adjustments and connect with a global network of focused, action-oriented leaders on Facebook at facebook.com/resultsnow. Deepen the Blueprint: Missed our historical breakdown on character alignment, willpower muscles, and warrior traits? Make sure to go back through our archive and stream Episode 506 (How Achievers Think, Act, and Live) to complete your personal optimization trilogy! Thank you for listening, commenting, and subscribing. Now get out there and achieve results NOW! ARN Suggested Reading: Blessings In the Bullshit: A Guided Journal for Finding the BEST In Every Day – by Mark Cardone & Theron Feidt https://www.amazon.com/Blessings-Bullshit-Guided-Journal-Finding/dp/B09FP35ZXX/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=blessings+in+the+bullshit&qid=1632233840&sr=8-1 Full List of Recommended Books: https://www.achieveresultsnow.com/readers-are-leaders Questions? 1.   Do you have a question you want answered in a future podcast? 2.   Go to www.AchieveResultsNow.com to submit. Connect with Us: Get access to some of the great resources that we use at: www.AchieveResultsNow.com/success-store www.AchieveResultsNow.com www.facebook.com/achieveresultsnow www.twitter.com/nowachieve Thank you for listening to the Achieve Results NOW! Podcast.  The podcast that gives you immediate actions you can take to start seeing life shifting results NOW!

It's Monday, June 22nd, A.D. 2026. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com.  I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Adam McManus Canadian Parliament passes anti-Bible bill Sadly, Canada's Parliament passed the anti-Bible bill. LifeSiteNews.com reports that a final attempt to stop Bill C-9 was defeated. The bill, which threatens to criminalize quoting parts of the Bible, including on homosexuality, will soon become law. On Wednesday, June 17, a majority of Members of Parliament voted down an attempt by conservative Andrew Lawton to stop Bill C-9 “once and for all.” In an X post, he wrote, that the liberals “voted down my motion to withdraw the divisive and toxic Bill C-9 to stand up for freedom of expression and freedom of religion.”  Another conservative Member of Parliament, Brad Redekopp, called the official passage of Bill C-9 a “dark day” for Canada and religious freedom. The bill was introduced by Justice Minister Sean Fraser last year. Specifically, Bill C-9 would remove Section 319(3)(b) of Canada's Criminal Code.  That's the section which protects the good-faith expression of a person's religious views based on religious texts such as the Holy Bible. Galatians 6:7 declares, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked.” Proof that Fauci funded lab research that sparked COVID A trove of communications and documents released by outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard show that Dr. Anthony Fauci “provided millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research” on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that Fauci “lied to Congress,” reports LifeSiteNews.com. In a viral overnight social media video on June 19th already seen by millions, Gabbard made this announcement. GABBARD: “Before the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, provided millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, work which is now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic. “Now, in support of President Trump's maximum transparency mandate, today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I'm releasing never-before-seen communications and documents that expose exactly how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus's lab leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for this dangerous research that caused immeasurable harm and countless lost lives. “Now, these documents expose Fauci's direct role in influencing and manipulating [Intelligence Community] assessments on COVID 19, and how Fauci lied to Congress in 2024 when, under oath, he denied knowledge of or participation in discussions with intelligence officials about viral research.” Dr. Fauci's close Intelligence Community relationships enabled him to “assume three key roles during the pandemic that shielded him from scrutiny as he wielded outsized influence.” First, Fauci funded risky coronavirus research linked to Big Pharma and the pursuit of “universal vaccines” worth trillions of dollars. Second, Fauci was the behind-the-scenes advisor who, with his hand-picked experts, pushed the Intelligence Community to endorse a natural, animal origin to hide his dangerous research. And third, Fauci became the nation's pandemic “pundit” and publicly pushed lies, disinformation, and censorship. GOP Senator: Trump's peace deal with Iran seemed elusive Appearing on Fox News Channel on June 17th, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed his approval of the deal that President Donald Trump negotiated with Iran, reports RealClearPolitics.com. SCHMITT:  “The president of the United States, President Trump, was very clear from the get-go what the mission here was, which was to ensure that Iran would never have a nuclear weapon. They have no ability to do that. And they're signing on the dotted line now, Sean, for the first time, that they're not going to do that. “And we don't need to trust them. We just need to verify that. Effectively, the president knocked out their military capability. Their Navy is at the bottom of the sea. They have no air defense. Their nuclear program is in shambles. It's nowhere near ever being started up again. And we can always go back and mow the lawn, if necessary, because we've got eyes on it. “The president has provided now, through all of that action, space for diplomacy. That has always been his North Star. There's always more things to do. We need to make sure, obviously, we're verifying all of this. But the president has pulled off something here that most experts, six months ago, wouldn't have thought was possible. And I think it's good for the American people.” FBI foiled terrorist plot against UFC 250 event at White House A terror plot targeting the Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House on June 14th reportedly involved those who were ready to deploy snipers and drones armed with explosives to carry out a mass casualty attack against U.S. government officials. In a June 16th statement, FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency and its law enforcement partners became aware of the potential threat on June 10. He confirmed that authorities stopped the alleged plot before it began. Patel said, "Thanks to the rapid action of this FBI, our partners, and the Department of Justice in a multi-state operation, multiple individuals are now in custody and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold. “We are built to detect, respond to, and bring to justice those who threaten the lives of American citizens — particularly during large gatherings like the historic UFC 250 fight" which drew 85,000 people to the Ellipse. James Talarico: God is non-binary; Jesus does not call us to worship Him And finally, James Talarico, the Texas Democrat candidate in the U.S. Senate race against Republican Ken Paxton, has made some bizarre claims about God and Jesus. Listen. TALARICO:  “God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between. God is non-binary.” And here's what Talarico said about Jesus. TALARICO: “Not once in the entire Bible does Jesus ask us to worship Him. All He asks is that we follow Him.” Pastor Josh Howerton, Senior Pastor of Lakepointe Church in Dallas, Texas, called James Talarico a heretic. HOWERTON: “The whole last book of the Bible is the Lamb is seated on the throne with more people than anybody can count bowing down and worshiping Him, throwing crowns before Him. And then anybody who won't do that, He's throwing them into the lake of fire. “This is not me being mean or exaggerating: he's an actual heretic, like a biblically-defined false teacher and heretic. “Politicians, since the beginning of time, have been twisting Scripture, using Scripture to try to convince people to do what they want. This is the first guy I've ever seen whose whole platform is using the Bible to convince Christians to support godless things.” Revelation 5:13 says, “Then I heard every creature in Heaven and on Earth and under the Earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying: “To Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” Close And that's The Worldview on this Monday, June 22nd, in the year of our Lord 2026. Subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com.  Plus, you can get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.

On this episode of CFO at Home, Vince talks with David Nassief, who went from being fired and nearly broke at 63, to achieving a seven-figure net worth by 69. David explains how decades of procrastination, market timing, and inconsistent 401(k) contributions left him unprepared, then describes how he rebuilt by turning off financial ·noise,· studying extensively, and creating a one-page ·Wealth Compass· with nine trail markers and five North Star principles, to stay focused and avoid shiny-object mistakes. David discusses how he attributes his results to investing a large portion of income monthly, using low-cost index funds, and taking advantage of market volatility to buy more when markets fell. They also discuss the destructive impact of fees, skepticism of market forecasts, the challenge of getting back in the market after timing exits, and David·s key tips: get out of debt, follow the money, and prioritize self-education. Check out David·s free PDF compass and book for details at onepagewealthcompass.com. Key Topics: 01:30 From Fired to Millionaire 02:22 Decades of Money Mistakes 03:24 No Plan No Future 06:06 Building the Wealth Compass 08:35 Two Funds and Volatility 14:33 Why Market Timing Fails 15:47 Job Loss and Commission Pivot 16:28 Nine Markers and Principles 20:49 Fees Advisors and Termites 25:43 Two Tips Debt and Skepticism 28:49 Education and Staying Disciplined 31:24 Book, Compass, and Final Encouragement Key Links: https://onepagewealthcompass.com/ Contact the Host - vince@thecfoathome.com Want to be a guest on CFO at Home? Send Vince a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1628643039567x840793309030672500  

Stay informed on South Carolina Women's Basketball with Gamecocks Talk with Captain Will your premier source for the latest news and recruiting updates. As three-time NCAA National Champions, the team is preparing to defend their title season. Agot Makeer is bypassing the typical freshman learning curve by absorbing the physical, high-stakes tactical demands of the Canadian National Team. We see this international experience hardening her defensive rotations and perimeter confidence, ensuring she arrives back in Columbia already calibrated for the brutal physicality of Dawn Staley's system and SEC play. Women's basketball is continuously evolving, with NCAA Women's Basketball and the WNBA receiving acclaim for their exciting gameplay. Under the leadership of Head Coach Dawn Staley, the team includes players such as Chloe Kitts, Ashlyn Watkins, Tessa Johnson, Joyce Edwards, Maddy McDaniel, Adhel Tac, Agot Makeer, Ayla McDowell, and Alicia Tournebize are expected to enhance the team's performance this season. Newcomers Justine Loubens, Oliviyah Edwards, Jordan Lee, Jerzy Robinson, Kaeli Wynn, and Kelsie Andrews look to contribute heavily. Tune in to Gamecocks Talk with Captain Will, broadcasting daily. For comprehensive coverage of South Carolina Women's Basketball, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Follow every episode by subscribing to "Gamecocks Talk with Captain Will" on YouTube and clicking the "bell" icon to receive notifications.

What if one simple daily habit this summer could reduce screen battles, spark meaningful conversations, and build your child's character — all at the same time? Summer reading activities do not have to be complicated to be powerful.This episode shows how 10 minutes a day of read alouds can transform your summer into something your kids actually remember . . . with practical ideas for every age from elementary all the way through high school:✅Why read alouds are the single most powerful summer reading activity you can do✅Age-by-age ideas for elementary, middle school, and high school that actually work✅How one question after any chapter sparks real conversations without any pressure✅Simple hands-on activities that pair perfectly with any book your family is reading✅Why stopping read alouds when kids can read on their own is one of the biggest homeschool mistakes✅Why 10 consistent minutes beats any elaborate summer learning plan every timeGrab the FREE Read Aloud Magic and start your summer reading activities this week.Resources for YouRead Aloud Magic (free resource — favorite read aloud books, tips, and ideas, linked in show notes) Show Notes:One Simple Summer Habit That Does More Than Any CurriculumWhat if I told you there is one simple habit this summer that could reduce screen battles, build family relationships, improve reading skills, spark meaningful conversations, and create memories your kids remember for years? It doesn't require expensive curriculum, elaborate lesson plans, or hours of preparation.Many homeschool moms during the summer are thinking — should we keep schooling? What if they forget something? Do I have enough time to take a break? What if summer learning could feel more like family connection and less like school?Summer is the perfect time to shift from worksheets to stories, from checklists to conversations, and from assignments to curiosity.The One Habit: Read AloudsRead alouds give you so much more than just reading. They give you leadership. They give you learning. They give you character development. They give you family bonding and family conversation. And best of all, one book can work for many ages.I still remember when Steve was reading the Little Bridges series to our kids. We were driving in our giant van and all of a sudden the kids started talking about how that grandpa in the story was so crotchety. They said they'd never want their grandpa to act like that. Did I ask them questions? Did I give them a multiple-choice test? No. They had been so involved in the story that they were comparing the grandpa's character to their own grandpa's. That is family bonding, character development, and family conversation — all happening naturally.How to Get Started This WeekIf you are not reading aloud, especially in the summer when things slow down, I want to challenge you to pick a book today or tomorrow and start reading 10 minutes a day. Before breakfast, after breakfast, before bed, during lunch while the kids are eating and you have their full attention.Don't overthink it. Consistency matters more than length. It is better to do 10 minutes every single day this summer than to do 30 minutes today and then nothing for five days. Schedule it. Put it on your calendar so it actually happens.What C.S. Lewis Knew About Stories and ImaginationC.S. Lewis lost his mother when he was very young, and books became a refuge for him. He spent countless hours in mythology, fairy tales, and classic literature. That imagination was what inspired the Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters.He said — reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning. He believed this is where children grasp meaning. Through stories, children encounter courage, sacrifice, honesty, loyalty, and faith before they are even able to explain those things. Read alouds feed both the mind and the heart. They do more than teach reading skills. They shape your kids' imagination, character, and faith.Too often when we start school, we squash that imagination — sit down, do a bunch of workbooks, read this short story and answer these questions. That is not education. We need to protect curiosity and imagination. How did we get to where we are with technology and creativity? Because someone had imagination. And a lot of times that starts with really good books.Summer Reading Activities for Elementary AgesFor elementary-aged kids, focus on wonder, curiosity, and family connection. Picture books, chapter books, family read alouds are all great places to start. Read under a tree. Go up in a backyard fort. Spread out a blanket at the park. Read during popsicle time. Build a blanket fort and read underneath it. Listen to audiobooks in the car.Make it fun. Draw your favorite characters. Create a craft related to the story. Act out scenes. Create a treasure hunt based on a book.Laura Ingalls Wilder's mother Caroline was a certified school teacher who believed in education and literacy as essential, not optional. Even during the difficult frontier years, no matter where they lived, she prioritized teaching her children to read. And those family experiences became the inspiration for the entire Little House series.What if you read Little House in the Big Woods this summer? Make homemade butter. Learn a pioneer chore. Cook over a fire. Compare pioneer life to modern life. Easy, fun, and meaningful — not just reading and writing.Summer Reading Activities for Middle SchoolMiddle schoolers often become passionate about specific topics. Right now my 11-year-old is into history and has been reading historical fiction. Maybe your kids are into horses, planes, ancient history, missions, nature, or sports.Let your child pick the topic — not you. They will be so much more interested. Then let them read three kinds of books on that topic — a fiction book, a biography, and a nonfiction. For Hunter, that looked like a fictional baseball story, a biography of Derek Jeter, and a book on the science and math of baseball.Ask one question after reading each day — what surprised you? What would you like to learn more about? What would you have done differently in that story? Then maybe do one extra activity. Watch a documentary, go to a museum, cook a related meal, build a model.These things develop critical thinking skills, ownership, and independent learning. I didn't want my kids to always have to do everything a teacher told them. I wanted them to think for themselves, plan for themselves, and make choices for themselves.Summer Reading Activities for High SchoolMany moms stop reading aloud when their kids can read on their own. Big mistake. Many stop in high school. Even bigger mistake. Teens still need discussion. They still need to develop their listening skills. They need exposure to great ideas. And they still need family connection.We still read aloud in the morning, and Steve would read to them several evenings a week. For older kids, try a Christian biography, a mission story, historical fiction, great literature, the classics, or an apologetics book. Don't be afraid of a classic just because the vocabulary feels heavy — the ideas are worth it.Ask questions like — what character stood out today? What would you have done in that person's place? How does this compare to Scripture? What leadership lesson do you see? Choose one biography or one classic and read it together, then discuss it once a week. Over ice cream. At a coffee shop. On an evening walk. Keep it simple.Bringing It All TogetherPair your read alouds with simple summer experiences. If you're reading about Harriet Tubman, go outside at night and look at the North Star — she followed it to guide enslaved people to freedom. If you're reading about a historical time period, bake something from that era.Just last week we were reading Why Don't You Get a Horse, Sam Adams? and we made Johnny Cakes for breakfast — which we found out are actually called journey cakes because you could take them on a long journey and they wouldn't go bad. She was telling her dad all about it when he got home that evening. That is learning that sticks.Summer becomes intentional, relational, and memorable — not just educational.You don't have to recreate school. You don't need elaborate plans or expensive curriculum. One book. One conversation. One family read aloud can inspire a love of learning. And inspiring a love of learning? That's the easiest thing read alouds do.To help you get started, grab my free Read Aloud Magic resource in the show notes. It has 20 to 30 of our family's favorite read aloud books, tips for how to run read alouds, and simple ideas for turning books into meaningful family learning experiences — no workbook required.Will you take the read aloud challenge this summer? Start this week — just 10 minutes a day. That's all it takes.

Welcome to Circle Church Global!

Kellen Sampson joins the JAMODI Podcast for a deep dive into championship culture, player development, coaching philosophy, leadership, and the principles that have helped build one of the most successful programs in college basketball at the University of Houston.In this conversation, Coach Sampson shares lessons learned from growing up around the game, working alongside legendary coach Kelvin Sampson, developing elite defensive teams, simplifying coaching, building player confidence, and creating an environment where accountability and relationships thrive.From offensive rebounding and defensive identity to player development and leadership, this episode is packed with practical wisdom for coaches at every level.

On this week's episode with host Davis Hovey, we hear about Invasive Species Awareness Week in Kodiak, Coast Guard Base Kodiak is getting a new child development center, funding cuts and high fuel costs hamper salmon weirs and surveys, an interview with one of 15 U.S. House of Rep. candidates Matt Schultz, and the Sun'aq Tribe is moving its preschool to the old North Star building.

“I didn't know there was a need.” Two years ago, Dr. Irv Siegel, a past president of Beit Rayim Synagogue in Vaughan, Ont., heard about growing food insecurity in York Region, one of Canada's wealthiest suburbs, where one in five families faces food insecurity. He was surprised to learn that hundreds of public school kids in Thornhill and Richmond Hill often come to school without lunch. So for the past two years, volunteers from the synagogue have shown up every Thursday morning with fresh produce and bagels to feed students they will never met. Siegel's successful Feed the Children School Lunch program hit a milestone last week: it's now provided 7,000 nutritious lunches to students in four York Region public schools. They don't write a cheque: instead they bring all the food, wash and assemble all the lunch bags on site, and deliver the meals to the school office before the bell rings. School staff say these meals are sorely needed. The program doesn't operate anonymously. For organizer Irv Siegel, the Star of David on every lunch bag is intentional. He wanted students, families and educators in York Region's diverse public schools to know that a Jewish community was reaching beyond its own walls to help its neighbours. On today's episode of The CJN's North Star podcast, host Ellin Bessner takes you inside this noteworthy response to childhood hunger. And full disclosure: she volunteers there, too. Related links Learn more about Beit Rayim synagogue's Feed the Children School Lunch program and how to donate or volunteer. Read how memorial and yahrzeit plaques have now moved into the digital sphere with a portable kiosk at Beit Rayim, in The CJN from 2023 . Discover how rising cost of groceries was impacting Jewish families in the Greater Toronto Area at Passover, in The CJN. **** Credits Host and writer: Ellin Bessner ( @ebessner ) Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Izzie Helenchilde (producer), Michael Fraiman (Director of Digital Content), Alicia Richler (Editorial Director) Music: Bret Higgins Support our show Subscribe to The CJN newsletter Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt) Subscribe to North Star (Not sure how? Click here ) Watch our podcasts on YouTube. Help others find this podcast by leaving us a review for “North Star” on Apple Podcasts via your iPhone or iPad device, or with your Android. (Spotify allows only starred ratings but you can do that, too!)

TEX-TREK Mission 381: STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE's "North Star" Back-Trekking RetrospectiveAfter our recent discussions of "Spectre of the Gun" and "A Fistful of Datas," we now time travel back to the 22nd Century for the ENTERPRISE cowboy episode. This week Chris Garis of THE TRANSPORTER ROOM beams aboard TEX-TREK for our Back-Trekking Retrospective on "North Star."As always, available in both video and audio-only formats.Watch on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQkflyJs__4Get RSS feed:https://anchor.fm/s/f37edb0c/podcast/rssApple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tex-trek/id1495605753?uo=4Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/6mdZ030Klldxwn7SSc5PKpJoin our Discord server:https://discord.gg/YXPeRyQh7ySupport us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/txtrekStar Trek: Enterprise, Season 3 Episode 9"North Star"Written by David A. GoodmanDirected by David StraitonArcher and the crew try to discover why a 19th century-era Human settlement has been placed in the middle of the Expanse.http://www.facebook.com/textrekhttps://www.instagram.com/txtrek/http://twitter.com/TxTrekhttps://www.tiktok.com/@txtrekEmail: fathereeactual@tex-trek.com

Todays Sports recaps the NorthStar's weekend in Lewistown

EPISODE 202 - It's another one of Dave's overly ambitious, not-even-a-horror choices as Gary Daniels tries to be the next Jean Claude Van Damme. Well, Van DAMME does this surprise in places, especially when f***ing BIG VAN VADER SHOWS UP!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last month, during a ceremony to award the Jerusalem Unity Prize, Israeli President Isaac Herzog greeted the audience with a warning about “a terrible process of brutalization” that has been threatening Israeli society. He singled out extremist Jewish Israelis living in the West Bank, who he called an “anarchist mob,” and whose ongoing attacks against Palestinians “defiled every moral, legal, and Jewish norm.” Herzog isn't alone in criticizing the current situation on the West Bank. Israel's military chief recently issued similar warnings, as did the Israeli defence minister. The Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called it vigilantism. Earlier this month, Canada joined several European countries in announcing a fifth round of sanctions against extremist settlers, slapping financial and travel bans on two Israelis and five groups whom Canada says are enabling Jewish settler violence. Yet the violence continues. Last year, the Israeli Defence Forces reported 867 such attacks in the West Bank. Extremists have set fires to Palestinian homes and mosques, and also near Christian sites including a church. They've destroyed orchards, stolen livestock, drained water tanks, and beaten—and even killed—Palestinian civilians. Last year, on June 29, the extremists turned against their own army: an IDF battalion clashed with a group of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, who threw stones and beat the soldiers.   One Canadian wanted to take action. Ronit Yarosky is a Montreal-based peace activist who flew to the region this month, as part of a mission of volunteers who oppose the recent escalation in attacks. For a week, she stayed with Palestinian Bedouin families' homes on the outskirts of Taybeh, a mainly Christian village near Ramallah, in the hope that her presence—together with other Jewish and Israeli peace activists—might deter attackers from setting up new illegal Jewish outposts.  Yarosky joined The CJN's North Star podcast from Taybeh to share what she's seen. We also speak with Maytal Kowalski, the executive director of JSpace Canada, from Vancouver, who has done similar volunteer work herself. Related stories: Hear Ronit Yarosky on her struggle to hold on to her friendship with a Muslim man post-October 7 on The CJN's In Good Faith podcast, from Nov. 2025. Hear more from Maytal Kowalski of JSpace Canada, when she joined The CJN's North Star podcast in May 2025 to explain why Canada brought in its first round of sanctions on Israel, over the humanitarian aid situation in Gaza. Learn more about Torat Tzedek , the Israeli NGO supported by New Israel Fund, that is sending observers such as Ronit Yarosky to provide “protective presence” to Palestinians in the West Bank who are facing home demolitions, dispossession and Israeli settler violence. Credits Host and writer: Ellin Bessner ( @ebessner ) Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Izzie Helenchilde (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Alicia Richler (editorial director) Music: Bret Higgins Support our show Subscribe to The CJN newsletter Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt) Subscribe to North Star (Not sure how? Click here ) Watch our podcasts on YouTube. Help others find this podcast by leaving us a review for “North Star” on Apple Podcasts via your iPhone or iPad device, or with your Android. (Spotify allows only starred ratings but you can do that, too!)

Teachhoops.com⁠ ⁠WintheSeason.com⁠ ⁠CoachingYouthHoops.com⁠ ⁠https://forms.gle/kQ8zyxgfqwUA3ChU7⁠ ⁠Coach Collins Coaching Store⁠ Check out.  [Teachhoops.com](⁠https://teachhoops.com/⁠) 14 day Free Trial Youth Basketball Coaches Podcast Apple link: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coaching-youth-hoops/id1619185302⁠ Spotify link: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/0g8yYhAfztndxT1FZ4OI3A⁠ ⁠Funnel Down Defense Podcast⁠ ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/funnel-down-defense/id1593734011⁠ Want More ⁠Funnel Down Defense⁠ ⁠https://coachcollins.podia.com/funnel-down-defense⁠ [Facebook Group . Basketball Coaches](⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/basketballcoaches/)⁠ [Facebook Group . Basketball Drills](⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/321590381624013/)⁠ Want to Get a Question Answered? [ Leave a Question here](⁠https://www.speakpipe.com/Teachhoops⁠) Check out our other podcast [High School Hoops ](⁠https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/high-school-hoops-coaching-high-school-basketball/id1441192866⁠) Check out our Sponsors [HERE](https://drdishbasketball.com/) Mention Coach Unplugged and get 350 dollars off your next purchase basketball resources free basketball resources Coach Unplugged Basketball drills, basketball coach, basketball workouts, basketball dribbling drills,  ball handling drills, passing drills, shooting drills, basketball training equipment, basketball conditioning, fun basketball games, basketball jerseys, basketball shooting machine, basketball shot, basketball ball, basketball training, basketball camps, youth basketball, youth basketball leagues, basketball recruiting, basketball coaching jobs, basketball tryouts, basketball coach, youth basketball drills, The Basketball Podcast, How to Coach Basketball, Funnel Down Defense FDD Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Next up in You Pick 'Em June we're going back to 2004 to discuss an album that many would consider a cult classic. We're joined by Jessie and we're deep diving Northstar's Pollyanna. Should they be considered part of an emo trinity? Listen and weigh in! BECOME A PATRON and support the show while access to exclusive material: http://www.patreon.com/hsnepod Be sure to follow us on all social media @HSNEpod and visit http://www.hsnepod.com for official merchandise and more! Join in the conversation on our official Discord https://discord.gg/b3AdrAYURm  High School Never Ends is a part of the Dragon Wagon Radio independent podcast network.  www.dragonwagonradio.com

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we're joined by Tim Foot, CEO of Slingshot Group. With nearly three decades of ministry and leadership experience having worked with thousands of churches, Tim brings deep insight into one of the most critical drivers of church health: your team. In this conversation, we explore what separates stagnant teams from those that create real momentum and how leaders can shift from survival to remarkable impact. Why teams stall out. // After working with thousands of churches, Tim consistently sees the same patterns: unclear expectations, misaligned priorities, lack of structure, and unspoken tension. Many teams are overly task-driven but underdeveloped relationally. Others don't fully understand how their strengths and weaknesses fit together. The danger of “hero-driven leadership.” // When a church relies too heavily on one standout leader to carry the mission it results in what Tim calls “hero-driven leadership.” While it can produce short-term results, it ultimately leads to burnout, unrealistic expectations, and fragile systems. Leaders often fall into this trap because it feels productive, and even rewarding, to be the one with all the answers. But over time, it limits team development and creates dependency instead of shared ownership. From hero to team. // The future of healthy ministry is team-based leadership. Instead of building ministries around individuals, churches must build systems and cultures where teams thrive together. This requires leaders humbly admitting they don't have all the answers and a willingness to slow down in order to build alignment. When leaders shift from being the “hero” to developing others, they unlock far greater long-term impact. The seven “key signatures” of remarkable teams. // Tim introduces a framework of seven core areas that every healthy team must develop: conviction, message, culture, roles, systems, friction, and risk. These “key signatures” work together like elements in music, providing structure that leads to a strong, unified outcome. Conviction anchors the mission (“why we exist”), while message communicates that mission clearly. Culture shapes how people experience the team, and roles define how individuals contribute. Systems enable growth, friction drives improvement, and risk fuels breakthrough. Why friction is actually healthy. // One of the most counterintuitive ideas Tim shares is that healthy teams need friction. Many leaders try to eliminate tension, assuming harmony equals health. But in reality, the absence of friction often means important issues are being avoided. Healthy friction leads to better ideas, stronger alignment, and greater innovation. The key is ensuring it doesn't become personal. When friction turns relationally destructive, it's unhealthy. But when it stays focused on ideas and outcomes, it becomes a powerful driver of growth. A practical tool for leaders. // To help teams take action, Tim points leaders to a free “team awareness assessment.” This tool helps churches evaluate how they're doing across the seven key signatures, identifying areas of strength and opportunities for growth. It's designed to spark meaningful conversations that lead to real change. A final challenge for leaders. // Tim leaves leaders with a simple but powerful reminder: if your mission matters, your team matters more. Churches often focus heavily on the people they're trying to reach, but neglect the health of the people they're leading alongside. Sustainable, mission-moving ministry requires both. To learn more about Tim's book Reaching for Remarkable: The 7 Key Signatures Behind Every Remarkable Team and take the free team assessment, visit reachingforremarkable.com or explore additional resources at slingshotgroup.org. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I'm grateful for that. If you enjoyed today's show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they're extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: TouchPoint As your church reaches more people, one of the biggest challenges is making sure no one slips through the cracks along the way.TouchPoint Church Management Software is an all-in-one ecosystem built for churches that want to elevate discipleship by providing clear data, strong engagement tools, and dependable workflows that scale as you grow. TouchPoint is trusted by some of the fastest-growing and largest churches in the country because it helps teams stay aligned, understand who they're reaching, and make confident ministry decisions week after week. If you've been wondering whether your current system can carry your next season of growth, it may be time to explore what TouchPoint can do for you. You can evaluate TouchPoint during a free, no-pressure one-hour demo at TouchPointSoftware.com/demo. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Listen, listen, listen, pull in close because today’s conversation, I don’t even know your church, but I know that a large portion of your budget is being spent on the thing we talk about. In fact, lots of churches, it’s like half of their budget. And it’s an even larger portion of the outcome of your ministry. It’s incredibly important what we’re talking about today. And so you do not want to miss this. Rich Birch — And we’ve got an expert that has worked with not tens of, not hundreds of, but literally thousands of of churches like yours and wants to help you take steps forward. Excited to have Tim Foot with us. He has nearly 30 years of experience, which I’m not sure how that’s possible, such a young man, as a leader, pastor, coach, speaker, musician in both Australia and North America, bringing a diverse background to his role as the CEO and president of Slingshot Group. If you’re not aware of who Slingshot Group is, they take the guesswork out of nonprofit and church staffing. He’s recently written a book that I’m excited for you to learn more about. But Tim, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.Tim Foot — Rich, it is so glad, it’s so great to be on with you today. I’m excited about this conversation.Rich Birch — So good. I'm I’m excited for it too. Why don’t you kind of give us a bit of the Tim Foot background? Tell us a little bit about about you and kind of give us the how do we end up here in this conversation today?Tim Foot — Yeah, it’s interesting. I often say to people, I had no idea that I’d be on the other side of the world to where I started doing what I’m doing. But this is what happens, Rich, when you say, keep saying yes to God.Tim Foot — Born and raised Tasmanian, worked as a musician and in ministry in Sydney for 10 years after moving from Tasmania, then relocated to Boulder County, Colorado in 2002, been here for 25 years now in ministry at a great church called Lifebridge Christian Church. Built ministry there for 10 years and went bivocationally started working with the Slingshot Group when there was a handful of us doing a handful of staffing and coaching work and then things exploded.Tim Foot — And I really, really hit my sweet spot and saw how God had been preparing me for so many years to work with teams, love teams, love the strategy of teams, love working with people, love the fact that placing the right leader on the right team exponentially moves the mission forward and affects culture in all kinds of ways.Rich Birch — So true.Tim Foot — And so I’ve had all kinds of roles in Slingshot over the years, now get to lead our team of amazing consultants around the US serving so many, and beyond, serving so many ministries and teams move mission forward.Rich Birch — Love it. I’m so glad that, yeah, this is going to a good conversation. You know, one of the things I want to take advantage of is the fact you’re really an expert. You know, you’ve worked with, you and Slingshot have worked with thousands of churches and organizations, and you you really get a chance to see churches at an interesting inflection point.Rich Birch — You know, often when we’re hiring a team member, bringing someone in or trying to develop our teams, you know, we’re thinking about the future and we’re, we’re taking a step back. And like you say, I do think it’s a transformative inflection point that you’re involved in. Rich Birch — So you’re sitting across the table from a lot leaders, and maybe even some leaders who their mission is stalling. Like things aren’t maybe going as well as we would hope. Are yeah there any patterns in that you’re seeing, are there things that you see time and time again in churches that might be holding us back?Tim Foot — Yeah, I immediately thought of a common question we’ll ask teams when we’re brought in when it comes to needing a new person on the team or helping coach leaders. We’re often brought in in crisis moments, moments of transition, but they’re also moments of incredible opportunity.Tim Foot — And we’ll often ask the question, hey, do you want a painkiller or do you want a vitamin? And so often the the team is thinking they want the painkiller, they want the pain to go away. They want to solve the problem, they want to fill the seat, or they want to break through whatever it is they’re struggling with. But honestly, deep down, they need to start a regimen of vitamins to help them get to a healthy place to move the mission forward.Tim Foot — We often will see an unawareness that the wrong people are around the table. Or an unawareness that they need other leaders around the table to help them move forward, whether it be vocational paid leaders or volunteers.Tim Foot — We’ll often see misalignment and a lack of focus on the right things. Communication misfires around why the mission actually matters. We’ll often teams see teams that are task-driven at the expense of relationships.Tim Foot — And then an unawareness of strengths and weaknesses and how they complement each other, how they help move you forward or how they hold you back. Other patterns are a lack of structure to support the work. Elephants in the room, taboo topics, fear around failure that leads to lack of innovation. So many different patterns we’ll see and be able to diagnose and say, hey, we need to have conversation around that because I think uncorking that will help you accelerate the mission.Rich Birch — That’s cool. One of the things I love by reputation that I love about Slingshot is I love that you’re asking those bigger questions that it’s not just like, okay, how do we get to let’s just, let’s get the next hire done and move on.Rich Birch — It’s like, you know, you’re, you’re trying to ask those bigger questions and which I, that which I think, you know compliment to you and your organization that you’re trying to. Because we know when we need the painkillers, but really we need to take some good vitamins over an extended period of time to make our things more healthy for sure. Hmm.Tim Foot — You know, Rich, when we jumped into staffing work almost 20 years ago now, we had to educate the church on the need to have outside advice around staffing. But it was a lot of art and not as much science.Tim Foot — And now we’ve developed so much science around the art with with things like our candidate match tool. When you’re looking for a leader, you have to align around what you actually want in that new leader. So many teams will say, hey, we need this, this, this, this, this, this. And in the end, they’re looking for a purple unicorn. And that’s not going to help.Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And we’ll talk about that as we get deeper in the conversation.Rich Birch — Right. Yes.Tim Foot — But Rich, last time I looked, unicorns are still mythical creatures. Rich Birch — True. Tim Foot — And so working working out what you actually need… Rich Birch — Right. Tim Foot — …and getting an awareness around alignment with who’s around the table may actually change your idea of what you’re looking for. Alignment is so important in getting an awareness of what our strengths and weaknesses are. Are we focused on the right thing? And are we actually moving the mission forward right now or is it stalled out?Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, that’s good. One of your consultants, that remember once I was in a conversation about that very issue and and you know we had really lofty goals for what we were trying to hire. And and they they walked us through that conversation where it was like, okay, well, let’s let’s think about how many of these people are actually out there.Rich Birch — So and you list off hat half a dozen things that we were looking for and you cut back and you think, well, how many people actually work in the church? How many people have worked as long as we want to work and have had experience that we did and have done the stuff that we want to do?Rich Birch — And you literally get down to like, Well, there might be three people, you know, like, you know, and so anyways, that’s, that’s, that’s so true.Tim Foot — And actually… Rich Birch — You… Yeah, go ahead.Tim Foot — …that’s what we’ll often say. There are maybe three to five people when you have all of these filters in place, they can actually fill this role.Rich Birch — That’s true.Tim Foot — And that’s why you need to focus on ministry and you need to let us focus on finding those people.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s good. That’s great. And yeah, and if there’s three to five and one of them is Jesus, the other is the Holy Spirit. So it’s like, you know, you’re down to just a very few. You… Tim Foot — And Rich, let’s not talk about why many, many teams wouldn’t hire Jesus these days.Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. That’s a whole other topic. that’s That’s great. Now, you’ve said something once that caught my attention, and it’s in my head has been branded to you. And it’s that most of us were trained on a model, a leadership model that nobody named out loud, that everyone, that we’ve all absorbed.Rich Birch — What is that model? You know, what it look like? And I know when you named this, I started seeing this everywhere I looked. I was like, oh, wow, I can see this in multiple different places in myself and in our organization. What what is this model?Tim Foot — Yeah, I mean, the the model we see is hero-driven leadership. It’s when we rely too much on individuals to actually carry the mission. And I think the cracks have happened.Tim Foot — I mean, we’ve seen it, Rich, you and I are similar ages. I think the cracks are happening generationally. The builders and boomers were wired differently for a different time and culture. And us Gen Xers, we can code switch. I mean, we we see we see that happening all the time. And as we stepped into leadership, the cracks started to appear.Tim Foot — I mean, we see it every week. Another leader burning out, doing stupid things because of too much pressure. Then millennials and Gen Z are now leading in a new way that we need to embrace.Tim Foot — And so I think we’re seeing those cracks around that hero dependence, and we’re starting to see the need more than ever to have a team awareness, a holistic approach, or we’re just going to have leaders continue to burn out.Tim Foot — And we sit we see it around unrealistic hiring expectations, a lack of support for great leaders when they’re hired, a lack of development.Tim Foot — Hero dependence is a terrible staffing and growth strategy and becomes a massive trap when it comes to a number of the key focus areas or patterns we’ve seen that healthy teams focus on and move mission forward.Rich Birch — Yeah. See, this is the thing when you, I heard you say that once and it, it literally, I sat up and I was like, oh man, I’ve seen that in my own, you know, my own hiring. I’ve seen that in the way I’ve talked with, you know, I see the leaders around me. You see these people who they’ve kind of built the entire ministry around themselves and they’ve built, it’s like, it doesn’t work if they don’t, it’s like, they’re such a unique individual. They have to lift it all. Rich Birch — But what makes that model so sticky? Like, why do we keep coming back to that? Why? Even if we know like intellectually in our heads, yeah, that’s not a good idea. It feels like we just keep coming back to this same thing time. In fact, we actually reward it. We’ll be like, wow, isn’t that great? This person’s amazing. And we just kind of keep moving on. Why is that?Tim Foot — It’s the shiny object trap. I mean, that that the the shiny object, aka the the talented leader that we think is going to catapult the ministry. Often we see it in in hiring conversations when a particular organization wants to go after somebody that’s been in at a much bigger organization than them. And often that person, if if they can attract them, will come in with a playbook that isn’t uniquely suited to the organization they’re stepping into. Or there aren’t systems to support that new leader and the growth that’s going to happen. And burnout happens at every level. But but we both know, Rich, busy work makes us feel productive. But is it the right work?Rich Birch — That’s so true.Tim Foot — And and we know that we can be ourselves the shiny object. We we want to it feels good to be the hero. It feels good to be the one that’s solving problems. Rich Birch — Sure.Tim Foot — It feels good to be the one that has all the answers. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And I think that’s one of the biggest threats in healthy leadership today is feeling like you have to have all the answers. Because I think one of the most powerful statements from healthy leaders and healthy teams is, hey, we don’t know what to do next. Because it actually opens up the room for new thought. It opens up the room for collaboration. And it opens up the room for teamwork. Tim Foot — But it’s easier to move quick. It’s easier to move quick and be surrounded by people who agree and play it safe.Rich Birch — So true.Tim Foot — And then down the road, we realized that we weren’t growing in every sense of that word. And the mission was stalled out. We know we often have to slow down, re-strategize, look at who’s around the table, work out how we work together to move faster in the long term. We have to be vulnerable to make a team work. And sometimes it requires us to actually help others win than focus on heroes. Tim Foot — I mean, you think about a winning sports team. It’s not about just one person out there doing all the work. We’ve got to work together as a team. You know, it’s it’s it’s how do we work together and have had have less dependence on that shiny object, those standout leaders or those heroes?Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. I love that. I remember years ago, we had a coach come in and as a lead team, and this basically spent a week with us and then, you know, try to help us get better in our leading of our people. And I remember at the end of the week, the leader who we brought in said you answer way too many questions. And I was like what do you mean by that? They’re like, you need to ask more questions and you answer. You’re you’re putting yourself way too much in the middle of all of this and you’re not letting…And I was like, oh that’s a good insight. You know, we’re not raising up other people we’re trying to uh you know make it all about us rather than about our teams. Well, I’d love to talk about your book.Rich Birch — So the title is Reaching for Remarkable: The Seven key signatures behind every Remarkable Team. Let’s start with the word Remarkable. You literally have it twice in your title and subtitle. Why Remarkable? And how does that relate to hero? Because I was like, isn’t that the same thing? Like, isn’t it couldn’t this be reaching for the heroic? So unpack that.Tim Foot — I love that word remarkable. And it’s always been our mission at Slingshot. We build remarkable teams through staffing and coaching because your mission needs a remarkable team to move it forward. Tim Foot — Jesus left us with the most remarkable mission. And but it wasn’t enough. He needed a team to move it forward. And if Jesus needed a team to move it forward, we need to move it forward as a team.Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And so we’ve all got these unique expressions of that remarkable mission. But if that mission matters, your team matters more. Rich Birch — That’s good.Tim Foot — And so when it comes to Remarkable, it’s about the mission. It all comes back to the mission. And we never fully arrive, Rich. We’re always reaching.Rich Birch — That’s good.Tim Foot — We’ve always got to be focusing on the right things, doing the deep work of of of reimagining, reinventing, and re-moving forward to reach for remarkable momentum when it comes to our mission. But we’ve got to focus on the team and the right the right areas to move that mission forward.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. So you actually talk about these, there’s these seven key signatures. Can you take a little bit of time and just unpack those? We won’t be able to get into all of them, but kind of talk us through how does it hang together as kind of a big idea?Tim Foot — Well, give you a little bit of context behind why they’re key signatures. You mentioned it in the intro, in a former life, I was a working musician and I would do solo gigs. It was my tentmaking job to do ministry back in Australia. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — I would work three to five nights a week as a musician. And I always had way more fun working with other musicians in a team setting, because ah a band is essentially a team. And my best experiences, Rich, was when I was on stage with other musicians who were often better than me, but I was leading the band. We all lifted each other. And to achieve remarkable results, there was structure to it.Tim Foot — I mean, you know, there’s structure to music. There’s harmony and there’s rhythm and there’s key signatures. There’s tracks to run on that allow us to have a remarkable output. Rich Birch — That’s good.Tim Foot — And so as I move from that world into team strategy world, team specialist world, building teams world, I realized, hey, there are also tracks to run on as a team to reach for health and reach for remarkable, a remarkable output and remarkable momentum. And so that’s where we came up with these seven key focus areas that we call the seven key signatures behind every remarkable team.Tim Foot — And they’re a pathway, they work together. And I’ll run through them quickly. And then we can unpack what you what you want to unpack with the time that we have left, Rich.Tim Foot — But though, and they’re simple. I mean, these are patterns that I’ve observed over the last 16 years staffing teams, but the last 30 years growing in teams, learning from teams, leading teams. I mean, you and I both grew up in in church, Rich, and I learned a lot of of leadership lessons from being a volunteer on teams in in in my late teens and and early 20s, so much.Rich Birch — Yes, 100%.Tim Foot — But these patterns, this pattern or these key signatures start with number one, conviction. Conviction, which is a shared sense of why you exist and what you’re called to do. It’s the why behind the what. It’s the Simon Sinek. People buy why you do, not what you do. So that’s number one is conviction. Tim Foot — Number two is a message, a compelling and consistent way of communicating what matters most because, Rich, everything communicates. What’s the story our leadership is communicating? What we say, what we don’t say, our actions, our systems and processes. What story is it communicating? That’s number two. Tim Foot — Number three is culture, the values and behaviors that shape the soul of our team. How are people experiencing your ministry organization or your team?Tim Foot — Number four is roles, unique contributions for remarkable impact. Roles that clarify how we work together. Tim Foot — Number five is systems, which is scalable design for remarkable growth. Systems scale our mission. Tim Foot — Number six is friction because healthy friction moves the mission forward. How do we embrace healthy friction for growth? Tim Foot — And then the last one, number seven, and these all build on each other, is risk, which is bold moves that drive remarkable outcomes, initiatives that lead to breakthrough, strategic risk, not blind gamble. So those are the seven.Rich Birch — Love it. And you know friends, i I do think I would highly recommend that you pick up copies of this book. To me, when I when I saw this, to me, this feels like the kind of book that we should read together as a leadership team. Like, hey, let’s pull this together. You know maybe you’re looking for a fall thing to do with your leadership team. This would be a great book for you to pick up and go together. Rich Birch — There’s a couple I would love to tease out a little bit. I’d love you to pull out for us. Help us understand. You differentiate between conviction and message, two different things. I think lots of times we might collapse those into one. Why are they two separate? Help us understand the difference between those two.Tim Foot — Absolutely. Conviction, again, is why we do what we do. Without shared conviction, you won’t move the mission forward. There won’t be a reason behind initiatives. They’ll fall flat. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — There won’t be a reason behind the message you’re communicating. That’s why they’re different. So conviction is what keeps us in on the days we want to quit.Tim Foot — I mean, think about the early church in Acts 4. It’s a great, best example of conviction. Peter declaring in Acts 4:20, we cannot help but speak about what we’ve seen and heard. They didn’t just believe. They acted. It drove every decision.Tim Foot — If the disciples were just compliant, when Jesus ascended, they would have scattered. But because they were convicted, they ah nearly all of them gave their very lives for the mission. Conviction is our North Star. It’s It’s like calling. it’s It’s what keeps you the days, keeps you in it, the days you want to quit. And Rich, we know there’s going to be plenty of days you to quit. Tim Foot — Message, however, is is the story we’re communicating. It’s how we hire, fire, onboard, develop. It’s how we communicate our conviction and our overall mission. And in the book, we list a bunch of traps for each of these seven key signatures. And we can chat about some of the most common traps. But a common trap for for message is assumption. Rich Birch — It’s good.Tim Foot — We assume people understand and care like we understand and care. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And we don’t ask enough questions. I mean, it’s why Jesus’ ministry was full of questions, Rich. Rich Birch — Right. Right.Tim Foot — Because he was he was cementing conviction. I mean, Jesus asked the best questions and rarely gave the answers. He lived the answers and he teased the answers out because that’s what led to conviction. That’s why they build upon each other. Tim Foot — You can’t have a story without conviction. You can’t have a message without conviction. And you can’t have a healthy message unless you are asking the right questions to make sure people are hearing and understanding it. Tim Foot — Did you like like did you understand what I just communicated? What did you just hear that I that I said?Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — Why why are why are you so convicted to by our mission?Rich Birch — Yeah.Tim Foot — Why are you committed to it? So many great questions.Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s good.Tim Foot — The book is full of questions too. I’m a I’m a serial question asker. They used to call me “Quiz” when I was a teenager because I asked so many questions.Rich Birch — Yeah.Tim Foot — And it wasn’t until later that a mentor and co-founder of Slingshot, Stan Endicott—I think you know him, Rich—that he he convinced me that my proclivity for asking so many questions was actually a spiritual gift and not a special need.Rich Birch — Yeah. Tim Foot — Because questions, questions move conversations forward.Rich Birch — Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it’s true. It’s so good. And yeah, as I’ve shifted into full-time coaching, I have found, yeah, like that the the skill of asking a good question, it’s like, you know, I think the best moments I have with the people I’m working with are when we’re, I’m asking questions and they’re discovering, they’re tripping on to their own answers that maybe are a little different even than I would have. But just asking good questions, super important.Rich Birch — Okay. Another one that stood out to me of the, and again, friends, you’re going read all this. Obviously we can’t cover this in just, you know, half an hour conversation. But talk to me about friction, healthy friction. Tim Foot — Yeah. Rich Birch — So I literally have said as an executive pastor, my job was to remove friction from the organization. And so when you say, oh, you lots of us are trying to remove it. I was like, ouch, that’s me.Rich Birch — Because I think that’s, ah you know, I would I want to find places where we’re stuck and say, how do we get those unstuck and push this thing forward? So talk to me about why I’m wrong about friction.Tim Foot — I was there too, Rich. I was absolutely there. But when I get to number six, when we’re speaking on this or teaching on this, I will often say, hey number six is a wait, what? Tim Foot — I thought this was the sign of an unhealthy team. I used to think that. I used to think that the harmonious teams were the healthy ones, that when I walked into a context where there was all harmony with the team, that it was there was healthy, the absence of friction was healthy. But it’s not. It’s a sign of unhealth. Tim Foot — And I’m talking, there’s two kinds of friction, healthy and unhealthy. I’m talking about healthy friction. I mean, you think about a car and how the rubber meets the road, causes friction, moves the car forward. If you don’t have friction in your team, your mission isn’t going on anywhere.Tim Foot — It’s interesting, Zippia workplace survey found out that 76% of employees in the workplace avoid conflict, which is a real problem because healthy friction sharpens and aims teams, while avoiding conflict leads to complacency and stagnation.Tim Foot — Teams where members are passionately embracing friction will not only push through and forward to great results, they’ll attract and retain, which is really important, they’re going attract and retain top leaders. It’s where the mission truly comes alive and evolves to all it can be. Good leaders, rich, know to allow it. They know not to control it, but closely monitor it.Tim Foot — We get to decide if the tension or friction we allow is healthy or unhealthy. We call this the loaded gun of the seven key signatures, because when this gun goes off, it either breaks through a door or a wall that you needed to break through, or somebody gets hurt. And good leaders know how to monitor that and help it break through and not damage other leaders.Rich Birch — Yeah, let’s double click on that. Help me understand. So yeah, I’m going with you. I can see what you’re saying. You know, healthy friction, you know, unhealthy friction, good friction, bad friction. So give me an example. Rich Birch — You walk into it, you’re working with a ah church and there’s some telltale signs of, friction that’s that’s negative, that’s actually pulling the organization back, that’s that could be potentially hurting, or maybe has gone too far, or what’s, I’m not sure the best way to say that. Versus, hey, no, here’s some here’s some good friction that’s actually some good heat here that’s pushing the tires forward. Help us, what does that look like?Tim Foot — When when it becomes personal, Rich, that’s always the way you know it’s trending towards unhealthy. We’ll get to it in a minute, but we’ve got a team assessment on our website now around these seven key signatures, and we talk about unhealthy, inconsistent, functional, remarkable.Tim Foot — Most most teams live in that functional space. If you’re below unhealthy, it’s trending toxic, and that’s when you need ah that’s when you need the 4Sight group and Jenni Catron to come I mean, do some some deep, deep culture work. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — I’m all about our ecosystem. I know you are too, Rich. It’s like when you need the deeper work, then you need the specialist. Rich Birch — Sure, sure.Tim Foot — But right now you’ve got the general practitioner. Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.Tim Foot — But but when it gets when it gets personal, you know that that’s unhealthy friction. Rich Birch — That’s good. Right.Tim Foot — And let’s go back to um the the harmony piece. Because that’s one of the traps when it comes to friction. it’s It’s the harmony trap. And it’s like it’s you wanting there to be you know violins and and and and birds singing and for everybody to be loving each other. That’s also a sign that there is unhealthy friction. Rich Birch — Right. Tim Foot — Because there’s things lurking that have been pushed down below the surface that are going to come out sideways that if you had just dealt with it straight away, it actually could have become momentum for your mission. It’s the unspoken influences trap. it’s the It’s the elephants in the room.Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — It’s what everybody’s thinking about, but nobody’s talking about. That’s going to that that’s gonna be insidious and it’s going to chip away at the health of your team. Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.Tim Foot — And it’s gonna become unhealthy friction. And so that’s a great question to ask. And that’s in the book too. What’s every thinking about, nobody’s talking about? Because that’s what we need to engage.Tim Foot — Now, if we think that’s going to lead to unhealthy friction, let’s have the the conversations outside of the meeting. So that when we get to the conversations inside of the meeting, we can engage this as healthy friction that will actually address the topic and will move us forward rather than becoming personal and eroding relationships.Rich Birch — That’s good. Yeah, that question, what’s everybody thinking about that nobody’s talking about? That’s powerful. And I can see, yeah, that even even the organizations I’ve led, you can see where there’s seasons where we try to push away that friction. nd that can be just super negative. And it’s like this, we’re all just in la-la land. We’re all just, you know, can see that for sure. Tim Foot —Yeah.Rich Birch — So you wrote this book, you put this resource together. help me understand how you’re hoping it will help our, our churches. You know, I’m picture, I’m a church of a thousand people. Maybe I’m the executive pastor. I’ve got a team of 12 to 15 people on my team. And how how could, how could this be a helpful resource for us?Tim Foot — Well, this I believe this is the most important work we need to be doing, Rich, because if your mission matters, your team matters more. So often we get so focused on the people we’re serving that we forget the people we’re serving with.Tim Foot — And if we’re stalling out mission, mission-wise, then we’re not moving forward. And that’s not and we’re not being obedient to God’s call. And so what I’m hoping is, I mean, personally, our kingdom first principle at Slingshot is to leave teams better than than the way we found them. And the last thing we want to do is place great leaders on unhealthy teams.Tim Foot — So what we’re hoping is that teams are going to focus around these seven alignment areas and start to move mission forward, attract great leaders, retain great leaders. When we place, I mean, I you and I have both had healthy long-term ministries at churches, and it is a massive blessing when you, if God wills it, and you stay somewhere long term. I want other people to experience that. And that happens when the right leaders are placed on the right team.Tim Foot — So what I’m hoping churches do is they take our team awareness assessment on on our website, reachingforremarkable.com, which is attached to slingshotgroup.org. And they get a sense of, okay, where what where might we need attention in these seven key areas? Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s good.Tim Foot — Because it heat maps, it gives you percentages, you can take it as a team. And then to start the real important conversations.Tim Foot — I mean, I’ve been in rooms with this work, Rich, where you start to see teams have conversation around alignment and and teams that were that were stale or leaders that were burnt out start to get a glimmer of hope. Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s good.Tim Foot — That, oh, if we start to have these conversations around these areas, if we walk this pathway, if we focus in these areas where we’re struggling right now, we’re going to start to see results.Tim Foot — I mean, I even think about the key signature of systems. You know, it’s systems that scale remarkable growth. If we’re not building systems to to accommodate the growth that we keep praying for, God’s not going to bring the increase. Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s true. Tim Foot — Because God isn’t going to bring growth if it’s going to hurt us. We have to be building the right kind of systems to support our teams and leaders so that the growth can come. It’s a stewardship issue. Rich Birch — Yes, yep.Tim Foot — So what I’m hoping happens in churches all over the place is that they start to focus on these key signatures and see mission momentum results that moves them forward as an organization.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Why don’t you tell us, you’ve mentioned it, but tell us a little bit more about the team awareness assessment. Give us like a bit of a, you know, you’ve kind of given us an overview there. Give us a little bit more why we should take that test and give us that URL again that we can send people to.Tim Foot — It’s reachingforremarkable.com and it’s it’s literally 10 minutes or less. Rich Birch — Right.Tim Foot — And it’s free as a leader. You can jump in and take it or you can sign up and and take it as a team. And it gives you obviously the team percentage on each of these key signatures. but also your own results. And when we’ve worked with real high-performing teams, it’s fascinating to watch these great leaders compare their individual percentage on each of these key signatures with their entire team and just to see alignment start to happen and the right conversations to happen.Tim Foot — Because we want to be able to focus in on where alignment is needed most. It may be real simple, Rich. Most teams live in that functional space. Rich Birch — Sure. Tim Foot — Functional’s fine.Rich Birch — Yeah.Tim Foot — But it’s not going to get remarkable results. Rich Birch — Yeah.Tim Foot — And our mission is too important. We have to focus on team alignment to move it forward.Rich Birch — Yeah. It’s so good. Yeah. I was talking to a a leader recently of a very large church and they were saying, you know, I just feel like, I feel like we got a go Pro. And what he was saying is exactly what you’re saying is like, Hey, we we’re we’re fine. We’re functioning.Tim Foot — Right. Right.Rich Birch — But man, we want to go remarkable. We want to go from just just because we can do this thing week in, week out in their case, have thousands of people show up, tens of thousands of people show up. But it’s like, that’s not enough. We got it. But the mission’s too important. We’re trying to reach people. How do we go remarkable? Which to me, I think picking up a copies of these books as a team would be a great first step. Rich Birch — Where do people, where can people pick this up? Where can they get your book if they’re looking for that? I’m assuming Amazon, but is there anywhere else we want to send them?Tim Foot — No, Amazon’s a place to go. Rich Birch — Yeah, that is the bookseller apparently.Tim Foot — I mean, it’s we know these days where wherever where everybody’s going, Amazon’s the way. And I would just add to Rich that as a leader, you want to know. This is information you want to have.Rich Birch — Yes.Tim Foot — We’ve talked so much about self-awareness. And if we’re in leadership, we need to show up to our team self-awareness. So many profiles. Rich Birch — Yep.Tim Foot — We don’t talk enough about team awareness. You need to know as a leader if you’re moving your mission forward or where you might be stalling out because it’s too important. And these seven things, as I said earlier, Rich, they’re not they’re not rocket science. Tim Foot — I mean, I like to I like to couch it this way: Conviction shapes the heart. Message shapes the voice. Culture shapes the atmosphere. Role shape contribution. Systems shape sustainability. Friction shapes growth. Risk shapes the future. And that’s why I hope you’ll dig into this with us. Rich Birch — Love it. Tim Foot — Because we want to see the kingdom move forward and we want to see churches full of healthy teams that not only great leaders want to come and be part of, great volunteers want to be a part of and help move this forward.Rich Birch — That’s so good. Well, I think that’s a great place to end it. I was like, man, that’s, I’m like, I want to preach. Amen, brother. That’s fantastic. If people were, so we’ll send them to Amazon. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. If people want to track with you or with Slingshot, where do we want to send them online to connect as well?Tim Foot — Slingshotgroup.org is our company website. And there’s a bunch of great stories there. There’s places that you can engage. We would love you to be in our ecosystem. And yeah, you can jump over there to reachingforremarkable.com. And we would love to come alongside you and help you continue to move forward in the unique ways that God has called you to.Rich Birch — Well, Tim, it’s great to see you. Tim Foot — You too.Rich Birch — We were just remarking before, we had dinner together there a couple months ago. That was fun, but it was fun to put the recording on today and connect a little bit. Appreciate you, brother. Thanks so much for being here today.Tim Foot — Thanks for having me, Rich.

Last 4 days before regular tickets sell out at AI Engineer World's Fair - this is the single biggest gathering of AI Engineers, Founders, Leaders, and Researchers in the world. Attendees get >$5000 worth of sponsor credits and talk tracks are looking FANTASTIC. Join us!The AI scaling debate always focuses on the question of “how do we get more GPUs?” but the better question may be: how do we make the most of ones we already have.The fact that a frontier lab like xAI could be running at sub-10% MFU (Model FLOPs Utilization) is just a hint at what the real problem may be.For context, older frontier-scale training runs were already much higher than 10%. GPT-3 was around 21% MFU. Gopher was around 32%. Megatron-Turing NLG was around 30%. PaLM reached around 46%. And our guest Anjney says best-in-class MFU today is closer to 60–70%.It's not necessarily that xAI is uniquely incompetent (it's clear they have talented folks) but rather the priorities may be flipped in the GPU arms race.While GPU access is a bottleneck, simply increasing CapEx won't automatically translate to better models as frontier AI is increasingly a systems problem: scheduling, utilization, networking, kernels, frameworks, data pipelines, parallelism, cluster reliability, and the thousand small decisions that determine whether your theoretical FLOPs become real training progress.From building Discord's developer platform and backing frontier AI companies like Anthropic, Mistral, Black Forest Labs, and Periodic Labs to now building AMP's independent compute grid, Anjney Midha has spent years close to the real bottlenecks of AI scaling. In this episode, Anjney joins swyx at Periodic Labs to unpack why the AI race is not just about buying more GPUs, why 95% utilization would have been considered an outage at Google, and why the next era of AI infrastructure has to be more aligned, more efficient, and more responsible.We go deep on AMP's vision for a compute grid that makes FLOPs flow like megawatts, the difference between full-stack AI labs and horizontal pooling, why AI data centers need community buy-in, and how compute markets could evolve into something closer to an independent system operator. Anjney also explains why DeepMind's unpublished research points to a market failure, why end-of-life prediction remains one of the most important AI applications he has thought about for fourteen years, and why “output maxing” may become a new discipline for frontier systems.We also discuss Anthropic's culture, why “luck favors the prepared mind” in coding models, how Claude cracked coding, why too much capital too early can make AI labs fragile, what Periodic Labs is trying to do with science and superconductors, why great researchers can become great CEOs, and why Silicon Valley is both deeply missionary and deeply mercenary.We discuss:* Why 95% utilization was considered an outage at Google* Why AI infrastructure waste compounds at frontier-lab scale* Why “move fast and break things” does not work for AI data centers* How data center backlash, power grids, and community incentives shape AI scaling* AMP's vision for making FLOPs flow like megawatts* Why compute needs an independent system operator* How interruptible demand and dynamic prioritization worked inside Google* Why DeepMind research hoarding creates negative externalities* AMP's 1.2GW base-load ambition and the need for 6GW of spike capacity* Why end-of-life prediction could become one of AI's most important healthcare applications* Frontier Systems, output maxing, and full-stack alignment* Why APIs and abstraction layers become lossy as organizations scale* Superconductors, standards, and the dream of lossless systems* SF Compute, open protocols, and the future of compute marketplaces* Why non-NVIDIA chips can still benefit from NVIDIA's reference architecture* Trust boundaries and why chip startups need visibility into future model architectures* Why VCs often underestimate researchers as CEOs* Scientists as star athletes of the mind* Why great CEOs need to be confrontational up and down the stack* Why leading the frontier matters more than “winning”* How Anthropic cracked coding* Why culture is fragile, not a permanent moat* Why hardship was a feature, not a bug, for Anthropic* Why Anthropic's P0 was coding from day one* Periodic Labs, physics as the constraint, and technical reality* Silicon Valley mercenaries, missionary teams, and what happens after a breakthroughAnjney Midha* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjney* X: https://x.com/AnjneyMidhaAMP PBC* Website: https://amppublic.com/* X: https://x.com/amppublicTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:09 Why AI Compute Is Being Wasted00:03:17 Responsible Infrastructure and Data Center Backlash00:06:07 AMP Grid: Making FLOPs Flow Like Megawatts00:12:41 Foundry, Frontier Labs, and Research Hoarding00:14:42 Gigawatt-Scale Compute and End-of-Life Prediction00:24:08 Frontier Systems, Output Maxing, and Alignment00:27:38 Compute Markets, SF Compute, and Non-NVIDIA Chips00:32:57 Trust Boundaries, Co-Design, and Researcher CEOs00:38:17 AI Coachella and First-Principles Thinking00:42:43 Leading vs Winning in Frontier AI00:45:54 How Anthropic Cracked Coding00:48:25 Culture, Hardship, and Anthropic's P000:54:03 Periodic Labs, Physics, and Silicon Valley Mercenaries00:56:26 Rishi Valley, Singapore, and Money as a Measure00:58:47 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptIntroduction: Anjney Midha, AMP, and Compute WasteSwyx [00:00:00]: We're in Periodic Labs with Anjney Midha, CEO, founder of AMP. Welcome.Compute Utilization: Node Allocation, MFU, and AlignmentAnjney [00:00:09]: Thanks for having me. At Google, there are two types of utilization usually, right? That you're measuring in these clusters. One is node allocation, and then the other's MFU. Node utilization is usually like what percentage of cards in the data center are just, used, and that, if it's not at, 95%-Swyx [00:00:29]: There is no excuseAnjney [00:00:29]: There's no excuse, right? I think 95% at Google, which is where my co-founder, Seb, came from, he built the Borg, PBorg/GQM scheduler at Google, and there I think 95% was considered an outage, so 96% node utilization is, should be standard. And most single-tenant clusters are not running at that. So that's one. And then MFU should be, I would say the best in class today is somewhere between 60 and 70%. I think this is a leadership question, right? Fundamentally it's an alignment question, which is are the people who are funding the cluster and then deploying the cluster actually aligned? And sometimes theoretically they are, but in practice the number of people in the chain, the supply chain between, the capital and all the way to whoever's managing the cluster and then whoever's measuring what the output is, are just so many, degrees of separation away that, the, The Have you ever heard the radian metaphor, which is at the beginning of an arc, if you have two arcs that are two lines that are just off by a few degrees, that-Swyx [00:01:33]: It spreads outAnjney [00:01:34]: It spreads out, right? Or at scale. And I think what's happening is a lot of cluster implementations and infrastructure, a lot of frontier labs and other teams, that's what's happening, is they're, they initialize the plan, which is kind of like North Star with a team that wants to do good, but then they're, required to scale so fast instead of iteratively that the wastage just compounds really fast at scale. And so I think we know the answer, which is just do iterative bring ups. If you spend time with people who've been in the semiconductor industry or the DSN industry for a long time, this is not new, and I don't think AI should be an excuse. Sure. Something What is new? Okay. We have a lot of new capabilities, but that doesn't mean just abandon common sense. Common sense should always be in fashion. ? AI scaling doesn't change the in fact, if anything, AI scaling should be putting a premium on the value of common sense and infrastructure because the margin of error now is so much lower and the costs of wastage are so much higher. And the cost of wastage, by the way, is not just economic. I'm, obviously I'm, I'm an investor, or I'm an investor by background. Over the last few years now we're running an AI infrastructure business called, AMP. And I think that it's okay to say this time is different on the capabilities front. We are genuinely getting capabilities at, of the, of a kind we haven't had before. That doesn't give you an excuse to say this time is different for everything, especially infrastructure. So look, I love the hacker mindset and the hustler mindset. Now, that's great for the startup mindset, but you remember this moment where Zuck went from saying, “Move fast, break things” to, move-Responsible Infrastructure and Data Center BacklashSwyx [00:03:10]: Fast and stable infrastructureAnjney [00:03:11]: Move fast with stable infrastructure. I think now we need to move fast with, responsible infrastructure. People are going to ask where the impact is. There was a really In our class yesterday, Scott Nolan, who's the founder of General Matter, came by at Stanford to speak about energy bottlenecks. And he had a phenomenal idea. He said, “if you look at the marginal unit economics of compute per hour,” he goes, “let's call it, $4 an hour. If you're having to bring up a new data center in a new community, why not just say we're going to charge 4.50 an hour, and that marginal impact or that marginal increase, we just literally take that and give it to the local community as cash?” I can tell you as a customer of that compute, I would love that. I'd be happy to pay an additional 50 cents per hour at scale.Swyx [00:03:57]: Wow. Yeah.Anjney [00:03:58]: Because if that means the public benefit is so clear to the communities that the data centers are coming up in, I'm going to feel like that compute is much more reliable. Up to 20% of all data centers this year in the US, my understanding is are at risk.Swyx [00:04:13]: Of community backlash?Anjney [00:04:14]: Correct. Of not getting the community support they need to get brought up.Swyx [00:04:19]: Wow. That's a huge number.Anjney [00:04:20]: Yeah. Now, we, I think we should dig into what that number is. I think it's a little bit of overstated. These things can get over-reported, but it-Swyx [00:04:27]: They don't just care about jobs. They care about all the other stuff around it, right? They care about power grid, they care about environments-Anjney [00:04:33]: Power grid, permitting, and so on. And imagine I think if you said there's a new AI deal. If we're bringing up a data center in your community, we're actually going to reduce the cost of your electricity bill. Okay, now we're talking. Right? The community's going, “Okay. Now this is a deal. I feel like a partner in this.” Right now that's not happening. There will be audits, there will be investigations, and when the, when the regulators come, I don't know when it's going to be, the folks who are moving fast and breaking things in the name of AI progress better be prepared. That's certainly not how we're procuring compute. Or we're, we're trying as much as we can to work with partners who have long-term track records. Many of whom, by the way, are not, AI providers. I think this whole idea of neoclouds being somehow this new category is a lot of marketing speak. There are really good, reliable, trusted data center providers in America who've been around 20 plus years. I love those folks. They know how to Sure. Are they sponsoring happy hours at NeurIPS? No. Are they legibly listed in Build? No. Are they hanging out in my, in, situational awareness parties? No. But they're adults. I trust them.Swyx [00:05:44]: They can run LAN. They can run power.Anjney [00:05:45]: They can run LAN, power, and shell. They have credit histories. We sit down, we have a conversations. Many of them live in Silicon Valley. They've, they've had to deal with the boom and bust cycles of the internet, and I love those folks. They are stable infrastructure partners and thinkers. And I think there's a lot of short-term thinking going on in the compute layer, and it's going to catch up to us. It's not going to be good.AMP Grid: Making FLOPs Flow Like MegawattsSwyx [00:06:07]: You talk about aligning incentives, and, I would think that aligning incentives means you have the full stack in one company, which is xAI and OpenAI, right? So you as a standalone infrastructure layer, why are you somehow more aligned to your portfolio companies than people who just own the whole thing?Anjney [00:06:28]: In systems design, right, there's, there's two regimes of, architecture, right? You have integration, and then you have pooling and utilization, right? So the Or rather, the way to increase utilization often is you can do systems integration where you collapse a lot of process into one node, or you can pull out a process from a node and share that amongst various That resource amongst several different nodes. And so we see the AMP grid, which is, the, what, the system we're building here, which is basically a compute grid. We're trying to do for compute what the electric grid-Swyx [00:07:02]: PowerAnjney [00:07:02]: Yeah, what the power grid did for electricity. It-- this is a pooling and utilization layer across clouds, And so we're actually the opposite of a full stack integration like approach.Swyx [00:07:12]: Super horizontal.Anjney [00:07:13]: Where it's much more horizontal and it's, it's multi-cloud, it's multi-silicon. The goal is to try to make FLOPs flow like megawatts, and that is very hard to do today for many reasons. There's stranded pools of compute all over the place and there's no fungibility. And so right now we do it at the level of scheduling, and we often do it at the economic layer. But as we start to announce what we're working on, it's extraordinary like how many folks are coming out of the woodworks and saying, “Hey, I'm actually working on a way to make compute fungible at this part of the stack and that part of the stack.” And as a grid, we'd like all of these folks to participate on the grid. There's, people often ask me, “Andra, are you a new cloud?” And I go, “No, actually neoclouds are suppliers.” sometimes they'll ask, “Are you a venture capital firm?” I go, “No, actually they are, they are demand like sort of off-takers of the grid.” We see ourselves as what's called an independent system operator. So if you study the history of the electric grid, once it became legible to a lot of factories and industrial sort of participants that, hey, actually it turns out pooling is a good idea. We should pool our generators instead of all having a generator running at half capacity in our backyard. There was a need for an independent entity who could coordinate all these parties. Transmission line, power generation, facilities, transmission lines, factories, and that neutral coordination mechanism is very critical. In order-- If you study like the history of grids, the most enduring ones were those that never owned their own assets. They were ones that had, or often started with long-term anchors who are uncorrelated sources of demand, a steel factory, a shoe mill or whatever in a particular town who weren't competitive, where the steel factory want to spike up at night, the shoe mill wanted to spike up during the day. So then you pool and you share, right? So each of you is guaranteed some base load, but then you kind of schedule your spikes to drive a peak utilization across the town. The gold standard, so to speak, historically, has been these utility companies like PJM Interconnect in the northeast of America, where they, over many years became this what's called an ISO, an independent system operator of the grid. So that's how we see ourselves. Economically, that's what we are. From a technical perspective, we started at the scheduling layer because Seb and Mihai, who, run engineering here, built that at-Swyx [00:09:28]: Did your schedulingAnjney [00:09:28]: They did that at Google. And, -Swyx [00:09:32]: And you have infra shops from Discord as well.Anjney [00:09:35]: I have some.Swyx [00:09:35]: I don't know, I don't know if Discord is like the primary identity, but what-whatever, I'm just kind of-Anjney [00:09:39]: No, D-Discord was-Swyx [00:09:40]: Choosing a well-known name.Anjney [00:09:42]: Well, I So I was running the developer platform there. The internal infrastructure I was not responsible for. That was actually a guy by the name of Mark Smith, who was extraordinary. And yes, Discord did pool So Discord is actually a counter example. I had the chance to learn a lot about fully, full stack infra there because-Swyx [00:09:56]: It's the same thing, yeahAnjney [00:09:57]: It's the, it's the other architecture which is, Discord built its own WebRTC vo-voice and video infra. So like Discord did not use-Swyx [00:10:08]: For the calls, yeah.Anjney [00:10:09]: Yeah, did not For communication, Discord did not use third party infra. It was all built in-house. And then the way you maximize utilization was you pool demand from the world's 200 million plus monthly active gamers, right? And so that's, that's how those stacks were constructed. Again, in systems design, the two concepts that keep coming up over and over again are abstraction and composition, right? And-Swyx [00:10:31]: Bundling and unbundlingAnjney [00:10:33]: Bundling and unbundling, abstraction, composition, like verticalization and-Swyx [00:10:36]: HorizontalAnjney [00:10:36]: Horizontalization. So in that sense, AMP is an independent system operator of the grid. We pool demand, we pool supply from a number of partners we trust At about 1.3 gigawatt scale over four years. And then we pool demand from some of the world's best, research labs and so on. We're sitting at one, periodic labs who need extraordinary long-term demand. And the idea is that, each of them is guaranteed base load on the grid, but they can spike up and down flexibly on, for compute, with much shorter timelines as needed. That was roughly the design of the program I came up with at a16z called Oxygen. The same-- That was the same design of the GQM, BorgX, Borg GQM implementation at Google that Mihai and Seb had built. Which was that how do you allow, teams inside of Google, on the internal infrastructure to be guaranteed capacity, for their base workloads? But when they need to spike up on research, how could they ensure that was sufficiently there? And of course, the big innovation that was not discovered, but kind of implemented in the space, this infra space maybe three, four years ago at Google was the idea of interruptible demand, right? Where you just queue up a bunch of jobs and through this like sort of credit system, there can be a bidding mechanism.Swyx [00:11:53]: Like priorities.Anjney [00:11:54]: It's a dynamic prioritization Basically. And jobs can get interrupted based on somebody else who's saying, “what? I have 10 tokens, 10 credits I want to spend on this job.” Another like team lead, research lead is “Genie 3 or whatever is only worth five, credits, and NanoBanana2 is worth 10 credits,” and so the NanoBanana job gets priority. That's a, that's a made up example.Swyx [00:12:15]: It's very real. Brain Marketplace was real. And, we've, we've covered this on the pod with David Luan, who was-Anjney [00:12:20]: Oh, great. OkaySwyx [00:12:20]: Was there. And the criticism is that, well, actually sometimes you need central command to go all in on a thing. And actually sometimes capitalism via credits doesn't work. Not, this is not a criticism of AMP. I'm just saying, this is a thing that has been tried, internally within Google, and it led to Google missing GPT.Foundry, Frontier Labs, and Research HoardingAnjney [00:12:41]: Like, we structured ourself essentially very similarly to Google. We are structured as a holdings company. So, Alphabet holdings is Alphabet holdings, and then they've got these subsidiaries called Google and-Swyx [00:12:51]: Other betsAnjney [00:12:52]: Other bets and so on. We've got, AMP holdings, and we've got our infrastructure business, and then we've got a capital business called Foundry that incubates new frontier AI labs or invests in them as venture capital, like Periodic. We put a few hundred million dollars into Anthropic from our fund earlier this year. So wherever we feel like teams are making progress, especially researchers and so on who've pushed the frontier inside of existing labs like DeepMind, I find, there comes a point where they feel misaligned with the dictatorship of Alphabet holdings. And at that point, sometimes the dictatorship doesn't want them anymore. And they're “Thank you. You've done your job here. You've kind of helped us through the zero to one phase, and for whatever reason, we're going to deprioritize your amazing, omni model or whatever it is, and instead we're going to prioritize coding.” And, I think that's a tragedy, but I get it. They're Sergey and team are running their own business there. But that doesn't mean we the rest of us should sit around waiting for that progress to get unlocked for the rest of the world and humanity. If you think about how much extraordinary research has happened inside of DeepMind over the last 10 years, I, Demis and Sergey and those guys did such a great job. But at the end of the day, so much of that has never seen the light of day?Swyx [00:14:00]: Or they're like papers only, but they never actually shipped it to production or-Anjney [00:14:03]: What's worse is the paper is actually not even being published anymore ‘cause there's a six-month embargo inside of DeepMind, right? We've heard about this where a paper comes out, and then I think there's a six-month embargo window where if anybody on the business team says, “This could be interesting” It's embargoed for life.Swyx [00:14:18]: Exactly. So the stuff that gets published is the stuff that's not good enough.Anjney [00:14:21]: There's an adverse selection problem, basically. Yeah. At this point-Swyx [00:14:25]: It's, it's a common complaint at NeurIPS, by the way, that's “Well, why would I look at the papers that are the trash of GDM?”Anjney [00:14:31]: Again, I think it's a tragedy. I get it. They're running their business, but the rest of the I think there's negative externalities of research being hoarded, and so that'there's a market failure. And somebody needs to unlock that research, and we can't do it on our own. We only have 1.2 gigawatts of compute. That's nothing. That's about $40 billion of cloud spend. We're going to need a lot-Gigawatt-Scale Compute and End-of-Life PredictionSwyx [00:14:51]: By the way, is that's a new number. I haven't, haven't come across that gigawatt number. That's huge.Anjney [00:14:56]: Yeah. And to be clear, we haven't secured all of it. That's how much demand we have started to secure. I think publicly we haven't actually confirmed how much we have for this year. In order-Swyx [00:15:04]: Where do you want to get to?Anjney [00:15:06]: I think the steady state would be that we have a base load pool Of 1.2 gigawatts at all times Of base load capacity. For spike capacity, right now my estimate is we need roughly six gigawatts over the next four years for all our teams to feel like they were able to keep moving the frontier, whatever they're working on, whether it's, like superconductor discovery over here. There's a new investment we're working on right now, which is in the end of life prediction space in healthcare. It's extraordinary how much you can, you can give this was actually my graduate school work. I went to grad school for bioinformatics at Stanford Med. And I know we-Swyx [00:15:40]: Econ, MCS, bio.Anjney [00:15:41]: So my-- I was this really weird cat where, I was never satisfied with my major options. So at one point I was an econ major, then I was a CS major, then I was a MCS major called mathematical computational science, and they decided they were going to end that major. So I took all that coursework, and I applied it to grad school, my graduate degree in bioinformatics, which was the master's program, and then I thought I was going to do a PhD. I never ended up doing it. I dropped out and went to work at Kleiner. But I was lucky enough to apprentice with this professor at, Stanford Med. His name is Nigam Shah, and he was working on end of life prediction. Stanford is one of the only research facilities in America that has a longitudinal patient data set that's larger at scale. I think it's at least 12 million patient lives. The only larger data set is at the VA, the Veterans Affairs, of America. And to do research, like do any deep learning and so on that data set, it was called the STRIDE data set at that time, you had to be a Stanford Med School affiliate, which is why I went and enrolled in the bioinformatics department. End of deep learning was early. Nigam Shah had the visibility-- the vision to see that, you could do end of life prediction to help palliative care. In America, the, over 30% of all Medicare, Medicaid spend, at least at that time, was spent on end of life care. And what's we grew up in Asia, so we all-- Yeah, at least I won't speak for you, but I have A very different relationship with death than I find folks who grew up in America do. In America, spiritually and culturally, especially in Western societies where Christianity, the Christian tradition sort of frames death as this terminal point, there's often a judgment day and so on. The way we view death is with a finality. In Indian culture, in Hindu culture, death is one-Swyx [00:17:35]: Also, he's Buddhist as well.Anjney [00:17:36]: You're Buddhist, yeah. So it's one, it's one step in a journey of many lives, right? And so, I grew up in this city called Chennai in the south of India, and when people die, you dance on the street. There's like a procession where your body is carried to be cremated and your family, like celebrates and there's drums and so on. It's this huge thing. And, It's because the idea is that you're going to be reincarnated. You've been liberated from the responsibilities of this life, and now you're onto your next. It's a new It's like going off to a new college or whatever, right? And so it was so alien to me when I got here as an undergrad- That the medical system works backwards from that assumption that we have to view death as this terminal thing and delay it, postpone it's a bad thing. And so at the time, clinical decision support in the United States was this very primitive field. Even to this day, physicians in the United States often will tell you when you have a terminal disease, this is your, we've diagnosed you, which is great. Our ability to diagnose you is extraordinary. You have somewhere between six months to six years to live. What do you do with that information? The error bars are so high that then you In times of uncertainty, we default to culture, and when the culture is let's-- this is a bad thing, I've got to prolong my life, then you start doing things like And just to, just sort of from a systems perspective, what's going on there is Physicians often feel like they need to provide such high error bars because there's always some uncertainty in end of life diagnosis, and if you provide the wrong Diagnosis or recommendation to your patient, you can be sued for medical malpractice. And then your license can be taken away. It can be catastrophic for your career. In contrast, if in countries where that's not the case, what you often observe is that patients, physicians are quite prescriptive with their recommendation. They say, “Hey, this is your condition. The literature says that you probably have this much time on Earth left. My expert opinion is that you are an outlier or whatever.” And they try to be more prescriptive, and that empowers a patient, right? ‘Cause then a patient can say, “I trust my doctor. They said on average, I have six months to live, but if I do these things, I may have a shot because of my particular predispositions or my genetic history or whatever.” And that empowers you to go about your life in a actually more scientific way than leaning on religion, culture, spirituality, and so on. In contrast, here, because of that medical malpractice sort of thing looming over your head, a physician never gives you a clear recommendation. So instead you say, “Okay, Doc, well, let's try it all.” And then you start a whole regime of drugs and therapies, and then you often spend weeks and weeks in the hospital, and that deteriorates your quality of life. And when that deteriorates your quality of life, you instead of spending your last few days doing the things you love with your family, you're spending it on a hospital bed. And that ends up being thirty percent of Medicare and Medicaid. So it's worse for the patients. The doctors feel terrible. The American taxpayer is paying a huge amount of money. And so this is why Nigam Shah, who was this professor at Stanford, said, “Anjney, if there's “ I kind of sat down with him. I was this young, I'd, I was twenty-one, and I was “I want to work on a big problem.” He's “The big problem is end of life care.” And so we tried to do deep learning to say, to-- So we started trying to run deep learning on these tried patient data sets to say, “Could you have an AI system make a recommendation that is orders of magnitude more precise about how much time you have left once you've been diagnosed with a terminal condition than a human?” And then if we can get that precision to be high enough, then you can empower the patient. And it turns out the tech works. Like it's-- Once you get the data set, like RL works. Honestly, even regression models work. You don't need to get that fancy. At the time, we were just trying, doing like very simple neural nets.Swyx [00:21:54]: Simple solutions, yeah.Anjney [00:21:54]: Today, what we can do with RL is extraordinary. The problem remains then and now is regulatory, because you actually can't shift the burden of the wrong clinical diagnoses from the physician to the AI system. And so at that time, I got quite disillusioned ten years ago for, twelve years ago where, ‘cause I felt I just didn't have the resources to influence regulation. Today, I'm very lucky. I'm in a different place. I've, I'm a lot older, and so I've been spending a lot of time on my next incubation, which is how can we unlock the, patient empowerment by training AI models to do end of life prediction much, with much more precision and ac-Swyx [00:22:37]: Oh, wow. You're still focused on this the whole time.Anjney [00:22:40]: The-- I haven't been able to get, this out of my mind a single day for the last fourteen years. This is the hill I want, I would like to die on. There's two, I would say. What? I actually, I'd prefer not to die.Swyx [00:22:51]: Yeah, exactly.Anjney [00:22:52]: But I think two bipartisan issues, I think two issues that should be bipartisan in America are how do we empower patients to make the right clinical decisions at the end of their life, such that we're reducing the taxpayer burden with science? It's just good old science, and AI can help here. And the second is, net positive data centers, ‘cause I think that's the biggest critical bottleneck on training and good enough AI models to help people at the end of their life. So there's sort of two sides of the, of the same scaling bottleneck curve, but those two, we formed AMP as a public benefit corporation. My wife and I, who you've met, you've met Viv. Her passion is education. Her family is a long line of educators and so on, and, of physicists. And so this class is my attempt to stop being the black sheep of the family and be a, an educator. But if I'm not educating, the thing I would be doing is working, on these two problems, whether on the political spectrum or as a researcher back at, in some lab. And my hope is if anyone's listening to this podcast, if they're passionate about either of those two topics, I'd love to hear from them. We'll, we'll we can share the contact in the show notes, but, we're looking for people to join both of those missions on the, on the political side as well as on the medical side, on the research side.Frontier Systems, Output Maxing, and AlignmentSwyx [00:24:08]: You said, this is a discipline that you want to form. You call it's called variously called Frontier System. It's variously called One Person Frontier Lab. What is the ideal name or shape of this? Like the, what is the mission?Anjney [00:24:24]: Of the class?Swyx [00:24:26]: Of the discipline that you're, exploring, right? I The class is called Frontier Systems. But like for me, maybe one phrase is you're, you're just anti-waste, right? Which is wasting GPUs, wasting in human and Medicare. But is there, is there a broader theme that I'm, that maybe you can encapsulate more succinctly?Anjney [00:24:45]: Yeah. The, from an engineering perspective, it's very simple. It's output maxing. It's the, it's the department of output maxing.Swyx [00:24:51]: Making the most of what we have.Anjney [00:24:52]: Exactly. I'm a huge believer in optimal outcomes. I think both in America and other countries, we are losing our appreciation for nuance, and this is the thing of And AI is the same case, right? Oh, the bitter lesson holds. Okay, fine. But that doesn't mean you just like throw 500 GB300, 500,000 GB300s at your suboptimal model scaling and you waste a bunch of compute. It also doesn't mean that, the most optimal is to have like 50 different architectures where there isn't enough standardization. One of the reasons Anthropic has had extraordinary sort of velocity is ‘cause they picked the transform architecture and said, “This is simple. Let's double down on it,” right? And now luckily there's enough investment going to the space that we can afford other architectures, but at the time, investment was just too fragmented into other architectures, so that arguably unlocked scaling. So I think there's a philosophy. I think we all owe it to ourselves to do output maxing with a new capability called AI on a global level. I think if I was starting a new department at Stanford, depending on how fuzzy or technical I wanted to be, I'd probably call it the Department of Alignment. Like-Swyx [00:25:59]: It's an overloaded termAnjney [00:26:01]: But it is, But alignment really Is a hard problem. And I think when you unlock it, full stack alignment is super hard in any organization and in any system. Like in a, in a venture capital firm, if you can have full stack alignment between your limited partners and your, the founders who are creating the value and ultimately the public that owns the IPO stock, that is a gift that keeps giving. And when you study the history of these systems, when they start off, they usually start out small scale where the feedback loop is actually so tight that there's alignment. And then the more you try to scale, the more division of labor happens, the more specialization happens, and at each step you add abstractions. And wherever there's an API interface, there's like loss. There's communication loss. And so I think a really cool thing would be for us to figure out is there a way for us to have our cake and eat it too as an engineering discipline? Is there a way to actually scale up and scale out Without losing any alignment, without lossy transmission?Swyx [00:27:01]: You mean standards?Anjney [00:27:02]: So standards is one way. The other way is you just have net new capabilities. So like what we're trying to do here is discover new superconductors. A room temperature superconductor would be a lossless transmission mechanism for energy. We would have flying cars. We are right within a few years of having a new room temperature superconductor. So I think those are the two. You either have to standardize On protocols or API specs that allow lossless communication, or you can come up with a whole new capability that unlocks so much abundance, the standardization doesn't matter ‘cause you just unlock net new capacity. This, the, so this is what I spend my days thinking about these days.Compute Markets, SF Compute, and Non-NVIDIA ChipsSwyx [00:27:38]: No, I think every infra person at, who wants scale and wants to output max does eventually end up thinking about this. We don't have time to go into it, but we have done an episode with SF Compute-Anjney [00:27:50]: Oh, coolSwyx [00:27:50]: That is trying to standardize The futures contract for compute. I don't, I don't know how that's going by the way, but like at some point this will be public.Anjney [00:27:57]: Oh, I think Evan is awesome and SF Compute is the kind of effort that I hope we can accelerate because what often happens is these exchanges are very hard to get, they, it's hard to bootstrap them, right? Because they often require-- There's many inefficiencies between parties. There's trust boundary inefficiencies in infrastructure because you don't trust, one part of the stack doesn't trust another part of the stack to give them visibility. There's capital markets inefficiencies, there's operational efficiencies. So if you can inject like a single shock to the system of a ton of compute demand or supply, then you can accelerate, these new flywheels. And so my hope is one day, or soon, if SF Compute needs extra like has excess capacity, they just hook it up to the grid and they get flooded with demand from us. And on the other side, if they have a ton of demand but they don't have supply, they just again hook up to the grid and it's a two-way protocol where they can just hook up to our capacity. And I don't think we're too far from that. Today our working implementation of it is mostly through a group of labs, universities, and a few sort of trusted parties who are, who all feel like they're in alignment to borrow an over sort of used word. But our hope is to just have it be an open protocol that anyone can hook up to on-Swyx [00:29:20]: Hook up for demand or hook up for supply? In primarily demand, it sounds like. Like you-Anjney [00:29:25]: No, bothSwyx [00:29:26]: You would want to offer demand.Anjney [00:29:27]: Both. Yeah. Unfortunately, what's happened in the last six weeks is, we thought we'd have a bunch of excess capacity by the end of this year. It's all gone.Swyx [00:29:37]: It's exploding.Anjney [00:29:38]: It, yeah. It's all gone. And so I have, my text messages are full of friends, we know many of these people, these are founders who've raised billions of dollars in San Francisco going, “Oh, any chance you have like 50 nodes in the next few weeks?”Swyx [00:29:51]: What is the scope for, non-Nvidia, right? You have Lisa Su coming and, Rainer Pope as well. And so There is a lot of demand for, more performance Alternative architectures and all that. At the same time, this hurts your standardization.Anjney [00:30:11]: I don't think so. So actually Rainer's a great example, right? Rainer is a CEO and founder of, MatX. I actually had him by for office hours in the class earlier today, and there was an insight he brought up that I hadn't considered before, which is when they decided to pick the standard For their data center, they picked the NVIDIA reference architecture. So the MatX chips Just plug in to any site that has an NVIDIA bring up planned. And, the-Swyx [00:30:42]: It's just software then. It's, it's not the-Anjney [00:30:44]: A-Swyx [00:30:44]: Hardware.Anjney [00:30:46]: Well, from an input and IO perspective It's the same footprint as an NVIDIA rack.Swyx [00:30:52]: That makes sense.Anjney [00:30:53]: Where they have done, innovated a bunch from what I can tell is on systems co-design. Which is where a lot of the gains are to be had. And so he picked He was “Anjney, we, there's just so much work to do when you're building a new chip company.”Swyx [00:31:08]: Can't fight every front.Anjney [00:31:08]: You just can't fight on every front. So my question to him was, “Well, you're working on this new chip. Their tape-out is next year. What, who are you going to partner with to host the chips?” And he said, “Whoever will host them. That's just not, that's not my focus.” And I said, “But how did you “ you decided back to our earlier systems design question, he decided that, he didn't want to be a full, fully integrated chip provider. The bottleneck they're focused on is the logic die, and they, he feels they can crank out a ton of performance gains through co-design there. But then that means you delegate, to our question earlier, it, you he's the data center provider is a different part of the stack, and so then he's dependent on that part of the ecosystem to host his chips to get the performance gains to the customer. So now you have another abstraction, and you might have loss. So I asked him, “How do you prevent loss?” And back to your point, he said, “I just picked the NVIDIA standard ‘cause I didn't want to Like I wanted to piggyback off of an existing protocol.” And that, what's great about NVIDIA is that reference architecture is known.Swyx [00:32:15]: Open.Anjney [00:32:15]: It's open. They've published it. So Jensen's actually enabled someone like Rainer to build a chip company like MatX, and I don't see them as competitive. The compute demand is so high. Like, I don't I think NVIDIA's not able to meet the demands of production, so we just need more chips. And I think it's very smart what MatX has done, which is say, “We're just going to we're not going to innovate on the data center design ‘cause actually, thank you, Jensen, you've done all the hard work. Where we can innovate is somewhere else.” And I think that's, that's very healthy. I think that's how we unblock new bottlenecks. And my view is these, the, chip teams like MatX, who have arrived at the insight that co-design is the way, The primary bottleneck for them is trust boundary. To do co-design well, you need visibility into the next model generation as soon as possible ‘cause it takes two years to tape out. So if by the time I bring my chip to market, your model architecture's changed, I'm host. Now, when he was inside Google, he was sitting next to the Gemini team. He was on Palm or whatever.Trust Boundaries, Co-Design, and Researcher CEOsSwyx [00:33:19]: His co-founder was the, was one, was one of the Palm guys, I think.Anjney [00:33:23]: Yes. Yes, exactly. So when you're inside the trust boundary of Google, then your systems co-design loop is super tight. When you leave as a founder, one of the biggest risks you take is now you're outside the trust boundary. And so what I love doing is helping chip teams who can help us unlock more capacity for the independent ecosystem access to trust. Because when I If I've been, involved with a lab from day one, and I was lucky enough to work with Anthropic, and then I'm on the board of Mistral and helped Black Forest Labs get started. I think at this point I'm on six or seven different teams.Swyx [00:33:57]: Only six? I feel like my mental number was going to be 13, but yeah, it's-Anjney [00:34:02]: No, I go deep with one at a time.Swyx [00:34:04]: You're founding CEO of Arena.Anjney [00:34:07]: Nah, that was an, that was an-Swyx [00:34:08]: Administrative CEOAnjney [00:34:09]: It was an administrative five-month gig where Whalen and Anastasios were graduating from their PhDs, and they didn't need a product team. So I helped recruit the head of engineering product and design. But Anastasios has always been the CEO of that company. I played a pinch-hitting I'm an intern. I was CEO intern For five months. -Swyx [00:34:33]: I interviewed him, and he's he's very well-spoken. I think he's a debate, former debate, champion. But also very quantitative and mathematical, which is-Anjney [00:34:41]: He-Swyx [00:34:41]: Such a unicorn.Anjney [00:34:43]: See, what's amazing about him? If you look at his output, he's an output maxer. By the time he was graduating from his PhD, which he only graduated last year, he had published more work with a citation count than, people twice his age. But at the same time, he'd already started a project called LLM Arena that was being used by millions of people As a side project. And time and time again, what I've realized is venture capitalists suck at seeing human beings as, dynamic agents where-Swyx [00:35:14]: They want to put you in a boxAnjney [00:35:15]: They want to put you in a box.Swyx [00:35:15]: This is your thing.Anjney [00:35:16]: So the first time I got introduced to Anastasios, somebody had told me “Oh, he's amazing, but he's a researcher.” I was “what? What do you mean he's a researcher?” That's what-Swyx [00:35:28]: Like he's not a CEO, not a founder.Anjney [00:35:29]: Not a CEO, exactly. I was “Are you crazy? Do you Have you met Dario?” Dario's a scientist. He's gone from zero to, what will soon be a trillion-dollar company in four years. Being a CEO, nominally speaking, is not that hard. Being a good CEO is hard. Being a great CEO actually requires a level of performance that scientists who have already published at the top of their field have accomplished. It is super hard to be a competitive scientist. To publish in academia over the last 20, 30 years, to make it to the top of your discipline at a place like Berkeley, you are a star athlete. Like, you are an athlete of the mind, and you perform at the highest levels. And to get there, whether you're, Anastasios or Whalen at Berkeley, or you are Robin, who-Swyx [00:36:23]: BFL, yeahAnjney [00:36:24]: With Black Forest, who created Stable Diffusion, or if you're, like Guillaume at Meta, who created Llama before he started Mistral. The amount of human leadership you have to demonstrate to get the resources, like get the trust of the organization, publish it, put it up. I would just fund researchers all day Right? If who have contributed already to the field. If they've, if they've put SOTA out there, they're, they're star athletes already. If they haven't done SOTA Look, they can still be good CEOs, but then I find the failure mode is that they just don't want to be CEOs, they primarily want to publish, and that's okay, too. One of the things we do with the AMP Grid is we donate excess compute. We have two nonprofits, like university labs. We carved out like a couple thousand H100s. But I do think there's extraordinary research being done on university campuses. My father-in-law's a physicist. He's a professor. Extraordinary work in physics, and we need that. But if you want to be a CEO, what you need to be willing To do is be super confrontational, outside of science. Like within the scientific community, some of the best researchers are very confrontational about their convictions, right? This architecture is right. To be a great CEO, you basically have to be willing to be confrontational up and down the stack.Swyx [00:37:41]: To your own team.Anjney [00:37:42]: To your own team-Swyx [00:37:43]: To customersAnjney [00:37:43]: Hiring, recruiting customers. Well, I would say, Yeah, pretty much to everyone Everybody. Of course-Swyx [00:37:50]: I see, I feel a little bit of that in my own work, but yeah, I can't imagine the stakes that Dario has had to go through. It's, it's pretty insane.Anjney [00:37:56]: No, I don't think the stakes are that different From how you're feeling it, right? Stakes are personal scaling vectors, right? The stakes that seem so low to you, like having this podcast where you can talk to somebody and just have a you're an extraordinary communicator, right? Like already in this conversation, you've pulled more out of me than most people, and I've been on 12 podcasts in the last two weeks.AI Coachella and First-Principles ThinkingSwyx [00:38:17]: I think I, we've just seen each other enough that there's some base trust.Anjney [00:38:20]: There's base trust.Swyx [00:38:20]: And I think, and I know that you, that I've done my homework and like I know that trust is a big deal for you, so.Anjney [00:38:27]: I think trust is about consistency, and you and I have seen each other In the community for years, right? Like, I remember the first time we met was at NeurIPS in New Orleans. I don't know if you remember that, luncheon.Swyx [00:38:38]: Oh my God.Anjney [00:38:39]: Reiko had set up this Reiko's amazing, and he set up this luncheon and-Swyx [00:38:43]: Yeah, I was “Who's this Discord guy?” I'm “Okay.” But-Anjney [00:38:45]: No, you weren't-Swyx [00:38:46]: You were just “You made some investments.”Anjney [00:38:47]: You were much less polite. You were “Who's this VC?” You're like-Swyx [00:38:51]: No, I Was I? Oh my God.Anjney [00:38:53]: It was-Swyx [00:38:53]: I'm so sorryAnjney [00:38:53]: It was visible on your face.Swyx [00:38:54]: I'm so sorry. But you weren't, you weren't The introduction was bad. I was I didn't know who you were.Anjney [00:39:00]: The, see, this is the thing about context, right? Like, but then I think I heard your accent. And I was “Are you-”Swyx [00:39:06]: Singapore, yeahAnjney [00:39:06]: “Are you Singaporean?” And you're “Yeah.” And I said, “I went to high school, JC, in Singapore.” And then the ice broke. But This is the there are in the scientific community, sometimes the stakes are very high for people who haven't had the emotional, what is called EQ Coaching and mentorship, right? Which is like to have scientific impact, you often need to be a extraordinary emotional, like emotionally in tune person with the folks you're trying to influence. And so what comes so naturally to you is actually a super high stakes thing to other people. And so I wouldn't assume that Dario's more stressed out than you. These things are you'd be surprised how similar and small sometimes the problems are to you That some of the world's biggest, leaders are facing. And that's what I've learned from this class. The guest speakers are Sam, Satya, Jensen.Swyx [00:40:01]: AI Coachella.Anjney [00:40:02]: Yeah. It's AI Coachella, right? So we got to get all the headliners, and they're I'm very lucky that some of these people have either mentored me over the years or I've done business with them. And when you, take the performative stuff out and any assumptions you may have about these people that you read in the press or on Twitter, We're all just humans. We're all trying to get along. And what's so special about this moment is AI is forcing, like scaling, the bitter lesson is forcing a lot of people to revise their assumptions for how the world works and go back to first principles or go and educate themselves. So the kind of people I was, I won't name who this person is, but I was at an event last week in Texas and, ran to somebody who said, “Anjney, I came across the class. What do you think about real time action prediction models?” And I was, don't know how happy it made me feel when they asked me that question. I know they've done the work. They've challenged themselves. I'm, they didn't ask me, “What do you think of world models?” They said, “What do you think of n-”Swyx [00:41:04]: Real time action predictionAnjney [00:41:05]: “action, real time action prediction models?” World models, don't get me wrong, are cool and everything, but you and I both know that is a layer of abstraction that is sometimes not usefully precise enough. Right? Ours-Swyx [00:41:16]: There's like four different kinds of world models.Anjney [00:41:17]: Yes, exactly.Swyx [00:41:18]: We've done the part with general intuition, by the way, which is very focused on, -Anjney [00:41:22]: Oh, cool. Yes. I love Pim. Pim is great. And this is what I love about people who've done that level of work. They realize they're not in competition with people who the rest of the world thinks they're in competition with.Swyx [00:41:34]: Because they're not in the category, they're in the specific thing they're trying to do.Anjney [00:41:37]: They're focused on their mission, and they have a systems understanding of the bottleneck they're trying to solve. And when somebody else says, “I'm working on real time, action prediction models too,” Pim goes, “Oh, I love that person. I want, I can learn from them.” But the minute they're “Oh, that person's a world model person,” it's “like which type of world model person?” But mostly they're just trying to figure out if it's a waste of their time, because we don't have enough time. So, Pim, for example, is super, loves this other company I work with we've talked about called Black Forest Labs. And he's mentioned to me multiple times that he's so, He thinks what Flux is doing is really cool. Andy Blattman came by and spoke in the class. And what I find over and over again is for people who do the work, who can be usefully precise enough about like what is actually going on in the world of frontier research, The sense of camaraderie is still well and alive, but it gets lost sometimes when you have to like abstract The technical complexities in, business terms And then the VCs are “How are you different from that world model?” I'm going to say Where do I even start to explain this stuff? And then the misalignment creeps in.Leading vs. Winning in Frontier AISwyx [00:42:43]: This is good. Yeah, I think, people listening get a sense of, what it is like to operate at a real level, like yourself, rather than at, the journalist level, where you have to sort of put everyone in, a rough category and create a narrative of competition, and who's winning today, who's behind.Anjney [00:42:58]: It-- this idea of winning is so Weird to me.Swyx [00:43:03]: You do want to win. You want you want competitiveness.Anjney [00:43:06]: No, I think you want to lead.Swyx [00:43:07]: You want SOTA.Anjney [00:43:07]: No, I think you want to lead. Yes, so you want to push the frontier. You want to push the SOTA. You want to do something that hasn't been done before. You want to capture value, but you don't want to capture so much value that, people think you're unaligned with your mission or trying to do what's best for the world. You want to capture enough value that you can keep innovating, right? And I think that people want to lead, they don't really This idea of winning and losing, again, I love Jensen. He's a, he's a leader. The mindset that he talked about on Dwarkesh's podcast, right? He's “I didn't wake up with a loser mindset.” I think that was awesome, right? Because he's, he's an engineer. Dwarkesh has done the work. So there's at least-- even though the, to me, it was very obvious they're talking about the same thing, they just passed each other. They just had to basically, Jensen has this, five-layer cake abstraction of how the industry works. And Dwarkesh had, I think from that podcast, had more of, a pre-training, mid-training, post-training systems loop concept.Swyx [00:44:04]: It's just a factor of who he talks to, right? Again, it's very clear.Anjney [00:44:06]: It's the systems It's the abstraction, the mental models, the It's the whole-- Dude, so much of the problem in the world is reasoning by analogy. And then the assumptions that are held invisibly.Swyx [00:44:19]: Yeah, I've, I've said, this is actually the best time in human history for first principles thinkers. Because everything you think will happen is actually now coming true.Anjney [00:44:28]: Correct. And the venture capital community is, notorious for this, where people look-- In times of uncertainty, they, cling to axioms that ended up being true from the previous era, and they kind of like proclaim them with confidence as if they're truths, but they're not. And it's very important to see the distinction between a heuristic and an axiom. An axiom can be proven-Swyx [00:44:55]: Like from internal consistency point of viewAnjney [00:44:56]: With internal consistency. A heuristic is a way you kind of a shortcut. And my God, the number of people I have had to put up with over the last few years who proclaim-- use heuristics As axioms to judge people, to judge which companies are going to succeed or the number of people who are “Oh, yeah, Anthropic, they're just training models right now,” but this one continue.Swyx [00:45:22]: Because that's a B2B SaaS?Anjney [00:45:23]: Yeah, the, like Which over the fullness of time, if you squint at it, maybe. But the way you arrive there is so important that you can-- you just, you can dismiss people. Here's what happened, right? What happened is Anthropic basically achieved takeoff in October of last year. That training run-Swyx [00:45:41]: Whatever, three seven?Anjney [00:45:42]: I forget the numbers now, but whatever that checkpoint was-Swyx [00:45:45]: We saw the cognition.Anjney [00:45:46]: Yeah. Right? You probably-- The, to those of us in the community, especially once post-training was done and it was released in December-Swyx [00:45:52]: Yeah. Can I sneak a sneaky question in there? I don't know if you have a perspective, maybe you don't, I just The number one question is how did Anthropic crack coding, right? Because Claude One, Claude Two, okay, like it was part of it, but it wasn't a big deal. And the leading hypothesis, it's a lucky dice roll that was then compounded, right? Like it was like Mildly better, but then they saw it and they were “Okay, let's really invest.”How Anthropic Cracked CodingAnjney [00:46:17]: I had this very annoying teacher. I went to this boarding school called Rishi Valley in India, which is like this, bird preserve. It's like three hundred and fifty acres of bird preserve in rural India, and there was no technology for seven years. There was this teacher, I won't name them, but they would have this-- I hated it every time he said this to me. He was “Luck fa-favors the prepared mind,” which is like a common saying, but the way he delivered it, always grated me, ‘cause he was always I was always one of those kids who got, a good grade without trying very hard. ‘Cause like high middle school is not that hard if you, if you're generally, paying attention and so on. And there was this one time where I-- But then I would get an eighty percent grade, and he would keep pushing me to say “The reason you didn't get the ninety-five plus percent is because you're not that lucky.” And I would say, “What do you mean?” ‘Cause I would think that I deserved that grade, and I would sometimes argue with him. And he'd say, “You didn't have a prepared mind. If you want to get lucky again “ There was basically one time where I got like ninety-five or ninety-six on this, on this subject, and I, now that I felt entitled. I was “Okay, I'm going to keep doing this,” and I didn't. And then he was “Luck favors a prepared mind. You got lucky last time, but you got to stay prepared.” And I didn't understand what he meant. Now, as I'm older, I'm okay, these adults actually knew a thing or two. Anthropic has been the most prepared company for four years. And so then when the right, context data comes in, the right developers start sending in, the right context diffs, Sure, you could say you got lucky, but if you ask me, they're pr-pretty damn prepared with paranoia for like four years. And you have to remember, it was so hard for them to get going early on that they had to do so much more with so much less that you just have to be prepared to be so efficient.Swyx [00:48:06]: Yes. There's numbers on their burn compared to OpenAI. I've, I've written about it, but they are so much more efficient in their, in their tech stack.Anjney [00:48:14]: It's not even It's not funny.Swyx [00:48:14]: Not even close.Anjney [00:48:15]: Yeah. But it's so clear, right? Like how to output max for the world. They have been prepared, and you could call that luck, but Luck favors the prepared mind.Culture, Hardship, and Anthropic's P0Swyx [00:48:25]: This is one of those things that I was going over some of your old lectures and, you were data, people think it's a moat and actually it's culture and actually it's team Actually. And I, it's-- there's different levels of moats, and this is the ultimate one that determines everything else. Which you can then compoundAnjney [00:48:43]: You're saying culture is the ultimate moat? Yeah. But the thing about culture is it's very fragile. So moats, I don't think they're-- there's very few moats I found that are actually moats. They're-- It's, it's a nice concept, but in reality, you have to replenish your culture. Ben Horowitz was, the speaker in CS153 on Tuesday, and I asked him this question about the culture bottleneck in teams because, there are several AI teams-Swyx [00:49:09]: His book, Hard Things About Hard ThingsAnjney [00:49:11]: Hard Thing About Hard Things. But more concretely, there are so many AI labs today that have all the cash they need, they have all the compute they need, and they're still not able to ship anything SOTA. And then you start seeing people leave and so on, and my diagnosis, it's, is it's the culture. And so I asked him, Ben, they're-- He's been one of the most aggressive investors in AI labs. He goes back to this thing which resonates in my mind a lot. It-- When I used to work at a16z, I would, book a conference room, and right outside the conference room, which is closest to the toilet ‘cause it was the fastest way for me to go use the bathroom between Zoom meetings-Swyx [00:49:45]: Oh my God, I'll put maxing my toilet optimization. Okay, never mind.Anjney [00:49:48]: It was not healthy in hindsight, but maybe this is TMI. But anyway, outside that conference on the wall was this quote that was printed that said, “Culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions.” And it's by Bushido, is this, Japanese philosopher. And if you stop taking the actions that demonstrate the mission alignment to what you've said to your team and to your-- the world matters to you, then your culture starts to fray. So it's not actually a moat, I would say. It's a very brittle, fragile thing that requires daily tending to like a garden. But if you figure out the system to keep that garden tended, which I think ultimately comes down to knowing yourself ‘cause you most naturally, if you're authentic and so on, you'll naturally make trade-offs that seem effortless to you, but that reinforce your culture. And then That becomes this very hard thing for other people to catch up to. And at Anthropic, from day one, there was this mission like-- missionary like zeal and belief that, hey, these capabilities will scale. These systems are stochastic, not deterministic. There will be error bars, and until we crack interpretability, there's risk. And at some point, people will go-- stop using Claude just for coding. They'll use it in some mission-critical context where there's-- it'll throw off a bug, and then people are going to come blame them, and they want to be on the right side of history where they said, “Yes, this is a powerful technology. We think it's going to change the world, And we want to be very measured and scientific about the fact that, ‘Hey, guys, these are stats models, statistical models.' That's how statistics works.” ultimately, when you're training neural nets, it is just a statistical system. And I think that Belief that safety is important and that it might seem toy-like in the early days, and sometimes, you could say, “Anjney, they totally over-exaggerated the risk,” like two years ago when they said, “Let's not launch Claude One,” or whatever. Well, okay, maybe in hindsight, but hindsight is twenty/twenty. And at the time, they didn't know how that model would be used, and to them it felt existential if somebody came and said, “You weren't responsible. It-- This wrote a bug.” The liability associated with that is massive. So how do you prevent against that? Well, day in, day out, you say safety. And when you start deviating from that, you have the team hold you accountable, you have the world hold you accountable, and I think that becomes a moat over time. At some point, that moat will get challenged and so on, and then it become fragile. I hope it endures because that's the beauty of having founders run the show, ‘cause they can make really hard trade-offs to do mission alignment. The hardest part is in the earliest days when you don't have a group of people who are going through difficulty, stress, crisis together, then your culture doesn't get defined sharply enough, and that's what I'm worried about right now, is there's so much money going to these labs. There's no hardship. There's no-Swyx [00:52:50]: To anyone who knowsAnjney [00:52:51]: There's no to anyone who knows. And that, in hindsight, was a feature, not a bug for Anthropic. The number of people who said no, the number of people who said, “Sorry, we're all doing investors in OpenAI,” that is competitive difference. It forces you to really understand, what is the hill you want to die on at the expense of everything else. What's the P zero? And there, P zero from day one was coding. The reason, the mechanism system there was if we crack coding, Then we will crack AGI. Our mission is AGI. We want to get there safely. If we focus on codin

Country music icon Jo Dee Messina joins Jaime on the podcast to pull back the curtain on her highly anticipated new studio album, Bridges—marking her first new record in 12 years. In this deeply personal and inspiring conversation, Jo Dee opens up about the road bumps, heartbreak, healing, and unwavering faith that shaped this new chapter of her life and music. Written almost entirely by Jo Dee herself, Bridges stands as her most authentic work to date. We dive into the mindset of a true fighter, how she maintains her incredible health and workout regimen on the road, and why her legendary anthems continue to cross genres and generations. From her musical influences that go far beyond country music to the humbling moments when modern icons like Lainey Wilson credit her for paving the way, Jo Dee shares what it really means to be a North Star in the music world. On today's episode, we discuss: Health & Resilience: Jo Dee's current workout regimen, her great health, and whether she was always built to be a fighter. Beyond Country: Her diverse musical tastes, creative influences, and what makes her current live show so powerful. The Power of Collaboration: The joy of collaborating with peers and the artists she admires most. A New Generation: How trailblazing for artists like Lainey Wilson, Ella Langley, Sierra Ferrell, and Nikki Lane shapes her legacy. The Making of Bridges: Inside the 12-year journey to her most complete, self-written album, and the profound new purpose behind it. "The Jesus I Know": The deep, spiritual reason behind the only track on the album she didn't write herself. Decades of Connection: Why her bond with her fans has only grown stronger over the last thirty years. __ Connect with Jrodconcerts Media: Website: jrodconcertsmedia.com Instagram: @Jrodconcertsmedia Subscribe: If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5-star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify! __ Support The Show: Apple Pay: Whether you're shopping online for everyday needs or treating yourself, skip the hassle. Shop with Apple Pay. Terms apply. https://www.apple.com/apple-pay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Nassif was fired at 63 with a six-figure salary he'd somehow never turned into savings, facing the real possibility of being broke by 65. What he built in the six years that followed — a seven-figure portfolio, genuine financial freedom, and a book about how he did it — started with a single sheet of paper. The One Page Wealth Compass is David's distillation of 21 books and 13 podcasts into two columns: nine steps to financial freedom in the right sequential order, and five North Star principles to keep you from veering off track. His central argument is that making money and building wealth are entirely different skills — and most people, including highly paid professionals and elite athletes, are only trained in one of them. Raymond and David cover a lot of ground: the Max Planck forest experiment that perfectly explains decades of financial circular motion, the NBA and NFL statistics that make a carpenter named Dale Schroeder look like a genius, why debt freedom isn't just a math problem, and why student loans are haunting people well into their 70s and 80s. There's a spiritual thread running through David's story too — his belief that the hardship arrived exactly when he was ready for it, and not a moment before. Download the one-page compass free at onepagewealthcompass.com/free, or pick up the full book on Amazon. https://a.co/d/01oXS2Va Raymond Aaron has shared his vision and wisdom on radio and television programs for over 40 years. He is the author of over 100 books, including Branding Small Business For Dummies, Double Your Income Doing What You Love, Canadian best-seller Chicken Soup for the Canadian Soul, and he co-authored the New York Times best-seller Chicken Soup for the Parent's Soul. Raymond's latest, co-authored book is The AI Millionaire's Path: Discover How ChatGPT‐Written Books Become Bestsellers and How They Can Make You a Millionaire Author! www.Aaron.com

(Part 1 of a 2-Part Series)Most people have goals, but far fewer have a clearly defined purpose. In this episode of The Genesis Frequency, Dr. Stephen Kosmyna explores the difference between achieving goals and living a life guided by purpose.While goals provide destinations, purpose provides direction. Purpose becomes the "North Star" that helps us make decisions, stay focused, overcome obstacles, and find deeper meaning in our work and relationships. Drawing on the teachings of Jack Canfield and years of personal development experience, Stephen discusses how purpose creates fulfillment, generates energy, and helps us remain aligned with our values even when life becomes chaotic.Listeners will learn why purpose is more than a career or job title, how joy serves as an internal compass, and how limiting beliefs and the desire for certainty often prevent us from discovering the work we were truly meant to do.This episode is an invitation to begin asking bigger questions about your life, your contribution, and the impact you want to make in the world.Next week in Part Two: We'll move from discovery to application as we walk through the practical process of creating your own personal Life Purpose Statement and defining the mission that will guide your future decisions and goals.

Are you a senior corporate executive or elite high-ticket sales leader chasing the all-elusive concept of financial freedom without knowing your exact numbers?  In this powerful solo episode, Billy Keels reveals the critical knowledge gap that keeps high-earning directors, VPs, and senior AEs trapped on the corporate clock despite putting in hundreds of thousands of hours over two decades.  Discover the single, foundational question you must answer with absolute specificity to calculate your unique freedom formula, decouple your future from an unpredictable stock market casino, and establish a clear North Star that transforms your multinational corporate DNA into predictable side-business cash flow.

As enterprises move agentic AI from controlled pilots into production customer-facing workflows, the gaps in data continuity, governance, and human-agent coordination become the deciding factors in whether AI scales or stalls. In this episode, Shri Nandan, VP of AI Experiences at Comcast, examines why customer experience has become the real stress-test for enterprise AI — and what it takes to scale with customer trust intact. The conversation covers the three data foundations required for context continuity in production, practical principles for human-AI orchestration, and why cross-team governance — a single North Star across CX, IT, and operations — is what separates the organizations that scale from those that fragment. This episode is sponsored by NiCE. Learn how to structure landing pages for higher conversion and how to use self-qualification systems to prioritize high-intent leads. Download our free PDF report, "B2B AI Lead Generation Guide," at emerj.com/aig1

On June 17, the suspect caught and charged in connection with breaking a window, then setting fire to Montreal's Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, is scheduled to have his bail hearing. Court documents show the suspect, Steven Luu, 38, is from the Montreal borough of Saint-Leonard, about 20 kilometres away from the synagogue. He was caught on the scene by local Westmount public safety patrols. Subsequent security video showed the suspect in the back alley of the shul repeatedly throwing a rock to break the window, then tossing two explosive devices through. He's been in custody since the June 5 attack, while undergoing a court-ordered psychiatric assessment, which is now concluded, according to Quebec government officials. He's been charged with six counts, including arson, arson by negligence, using an explosive with the intention to damage or destroy the synagogue, possession of an explosive, possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, and wearing a disguise with the intent to commit a crime. But the target congregation's spiritual leader, Rabbi Lisa Grushcow, says she can't understand why there hasn't yet been a hate component attached, since it's obvious to her that this was no impulsive act. Local media reports suggest he had a walkie-talkie with him when he was picked up. “To me—not as a lawyer, not as a politician, but as a civilian and a Jewish community member and leader—this seems absolutely ridiculous, right? I will eat my kippah if it was totally random that this person chose to cross town into a neighbourhood that wasn't where he lived, in the middle of the night, and multiple times threw a rock at the window to try and open it, and then threw in an incendiary device—that it had nothing to do with it being a synagogue?” Rabbi Grushcow told The CJN's Ellin Bessner. Rabbi Grushcow joins today's episode of North Star to discuss the escalation of attacks on her shul since Oct. 7, beginning with a spray-painted swastika in February 2025. She reveals that this fire bomb damaged a storeroom attached to her own personal study and vows to proceed with the rituals of her congregation's Jewish life, in defiance of the hate. Related stories Learn more about why the suspect has been in custody since June 5, after being arrested at the site of the attack, in The CJN. Read or send a message of support online to Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom though their website, and see all the other comments from politicians, multi-faith leaders. See what The CJN reported in February 2025 when a swastika was spray painted on the synagogue. Credits Host and writer: Ellin Bessner ( @ebessner ) Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Izzie Helenchilde (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Alicia Richler (editorial director) Music: Bret Higgins Support our show Subscribe to The CJN newsletter Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt) Subscribe to North Star (Not sure how? Click here ) Watch our podcasts on YouTube. Help others find this podcast by leaving us a review for “North Star” on Apple Podcasts via your iPhone or iPad device, or with your Android. (Spotify allows only starred ratings but you can do that, too!)

This week on Bloodbath, Andrew and Petula look back on the story "The Walking Wounded" from Alpha Flight #106, where Northstar comes out. The post Back Issue Bloodbath Episode 548: The Walking Wounded (Alpha Flight #106) appeared first on Geek Hard.

This week on Bloodbath, Andrew and Petula look back on the story "The Walking Wounded" from Alpha Flight #106, where Northstar comes out. The post Back Issue Bloodbath Episode 548: The Walking Wounded (Alpha Flight #106) appeared first on Geek Hard.

Partner with Jay: https://www.jayschwedelson.com/contactㅤPre-order Jay Schwedelson's new book, Stupider People Have Done It (out June 9, 2026).All net proceeds are donated to The V Foundation for Cancer Research, let's kick cancer's butt: https://www.amazon.com/Stupider-People-Have-Done-Marketing/dp/1637635206ㅤSubscribe to Jay's newsletter for weekly marketing tips and tactics: https://www.jayschwedelson.com/newsletterㅤRegister for Eventastic (FREE + VIRTUAL!) https://www.eventastic.comㅤRegister for GuruConference (FREE + VIRTUAL!) https://www.guruconference.comㅤConnect with Jay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schwedelson/Check out Jay's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@schwedelsonCheck out Jay's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jayschwedelson/Ask Jay anything: https://www.jayschwedelson.com/askㅤLeave a comment and follow the show, it really helps us out!ㅤBig shoutout to our sponsor, Knak!Marketers, you know the pain… You spend hours on a campaign, and then it gets stuck in review cycles and barely looks like what you started with.Knak makes it simple. Design emails and landing pages, collaborate, and launch - all in one place. No tool hopping, no messy handoffs, with AI built in to help you move faster.See how it all works, get started at knak.com/demoㅤThe link between ranking high on Google and getting cited in AI overviews has quietly fallen apart over the past year, and Jay Schwedelson has the numbers to prove just how fast. He lays out the small, almost boring tweaks that decide whether AI tools surface your content or skip right past it, then makes the case that your prettiest emails might be the ones working against you now. Stick around for a soccer confession and a book update with a genuinely good cause behind it.ㅤBest Moments:(00:42) Only 38% of pages cited in Google's AI overviews still rank in the top 10, down from 76% a year ago.(01:18) Put a date on everything you publish, because the AI tools are hunting hard for a recency signal.(02:15) Rewrite your headlines and page titles as questions so the LLMs actually pull them in.(03:33) Meltwater found 75% of LinkedIn AI citations come from personal profiles, not company pages.(05:33) Live text in the first 150 to 200 characters is becoming the new North Star for email.(09:14) His book hit number one new release on Amazon, with all proceeds going to cancer research.

Amy Reichanadter, Chief People Officer at Databricks, joined us on The Modern People Leader to discuss her upskilling journey throughout her career, creating consumer-grade employee experiences, and leading through rapid technological change. ----  Sponsor Links:

Welcome to Circle Church Global!

As Jonathan Levy prepares to preside over his final Grade 12 graduation ceremony as head of school on Wednesday June 17, the outgoing leader of TanenbaumCHAT says the mission of Jewish education has never been clearer. "We need an incredibly strong ark so that we can go out and be among the people," Levy told teachers, students, parents and staff during a speech at a recent farewell tribute, reflecting on a 17-year tenure that ends in June. The American-born educator saw Canada's largest private Jewish high school navigate declining enrolment, mergers, then rapid growth, the COVID pandemic, and most recently, the challenges facing Jewish students after Oct. 7. But Levy says, throughout it all, his goal has always been the same: helping to build a new generation of Jewish leaders ready to engage confidently with the wider world. He is leaving Toronto for a new leadership role beginning July 1 running one of the most prominent Jewish private schools in the United States: the Charles E. Smith JDS in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. It has a smaller enrolment and is spread on two campuses spanning Grades K-12. Levy, one of Canada's most influential Jewish educators, joins today's episode of The CJN's North Star podcast with host Ellin Bessner to discuss what pluralistic Jewish education looks like now. Related stories Read The CJN's coverage from just after Oct. 7 2023 when CHAT was targeted by bomb threats and also when some students were even physically threatened, in The CJN Discover how TanenbaumCHAT added 14 new classrooms beginning in the summer of 2023 due to booming enrolment, in The CJN. Learn more about the Tribute event held for Jonathan Levy on May 25, 2026 at TanenbaumCHAT Credits Host and writer: Ellin Bessner ( @ebessner ) Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Izzy Helenchilde (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Alicia Richler (editorial director) Music: Bret Higgins Support our show Subscribe to The CJN newsletter Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt) Subscribe to North Star (Not sure how? Click here ) Watch our podcasts on YouTube. Help others find this podcast by leaving us a review for “North Star” on Apple Podcasts via your iPhone or iPad device, or with your Android. (Spotify allows only starred ratings but you can do that, too!)

In this episode, Dana is joined by Mark DeCarlo, an Emmy-winning comedian and author who makes a compelling case that the most important job you have is to be happy. Mark shares how a near-death experience in high school completely reoriented his life, teaching him to use happiness as the ultimate "North Star" for every decision. He argues that fear is always self-destructive and that failure isn't just an option: it's a requirement for discovering your purpose. Mark offers a simple yet profound framework for identifying what truly brings you joy and challenges the myth that you have to suffer now to be happy later.  Mark's Website Mark's Instagram  ---------------------- Watch this episode. Learn more about Phoenix and Flame, connect with Dana, and listen to more episodes here. Book Dana for your next speaking event or workshop.

You can love your daughter more than anything and still feel like you're speaking different languages. That's the tension we dig into with Madeline Anderson, founder of Girl Dad Network and author of Girl Dad, as we get honest about what actually builds a strong father daughter relationship and why so many families drift into distance without meaning to.We talk about how Madeline went from a UCLA business economics track and a finance career into a purpose-driven mission after realizing something was missing and stress was piling up. From there, we unpack what she noticed in college: a lot of young women carry real pain around their dads, often fueled by disconnects more than bad intent. Her key idea is powerful: it's rarely a “dad problem” or a “daughter problem” so much as a communication translation issue, and translation can be learned.Then we get practical. We cover how distractions and phones create an attention gap, why “including your daughter in your world” can be a game-changer, and how even a simple invitation to join you for football, golf, music, or errands rewrites the story she tells herself about her worth. We also break down a topic every dad of a teenage daughter should understand: hormonal cycles, mood shifts, and how to respond with grace without walking on eggshells.If you want parenting tips that improve connection, reduce conflict, and help you become the steady North Star your daughter can trust, you'll get a lot from this conversation. Subscribe, share this with a fellow dad, and leave a review with the one insight you're taking into your home. ---Welcome to The Brad Weisman Show, where we dive into the world of real people, real life, and everything in between with your host, Brad Weisman!

 EPISODE DESCRIPTION I sat down with Firas Isa, the founder of Crypto Dispenser, a bootstrapped and profitable company that has been quietly building Bitcoin on-ramp infrastructure since 2017. Firas started with a single Bitcoin ATM, partnered with GreenDot Bank to place cash deposit points across 100,000 retail stores like CVS and Walmart, and has grown to over 100,000 registered users , all without taking a penny of outside investment. In this conversation, we dig into why cash is still the purest way to buy Bitcoin, the brutal reality of getting bank accounts shut down repeatedly, and why Firas believes Bitcoin is the world's most peaceful revolution against currency debasement. If you have ever wondered how to buy Bitcoin without going through a big exchange, or you are a founder trying to understand what it actually takes to survive a decade in the crypto space on a bootstrap budget, this episode is for you. DISCLAIMERNothing mentioned in this podcast is investment advice and please do your own research. It would mean a lot if you can leave a review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share this podcast with a friend. Be a guest on the podcast or contact us - https://www.web3pod.xyz/ CONNECT Crypto Dispenser Website:https://www.cryptodispensers.com/Crypto Dispenser Twitter/X: https://x.com/cryptodispenserFiras Isa LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/firas-isa/Web3 with Sam Kamani Podcast: https://www.web3pod.xyz KEY POINTS WITH TIMESTAMPS • [00:01] Sam introduces Firas Isa and Crypto Dispenser , a bootstrapped, profitable Bitcoin on-ramp with 100K+ users• [01:43] Firas explains how Crypto Dispenser started in 2017 with one Bitcoin ATM and has since pivoted to an online platform supporting debit, credit, ACH, wire, and PayPal• [02:32] Firas shares his origin story , studying political science at Loyola University and learning about money printing, the petrodollar, and empire collapse• [05:30] Discussion on the US gold standard, the Federal Reserve, and Voltaire's warning that fiat currency eventually goes to zero• [10:19] How Bitcoin Pop (Bitcoin Point of Payment) works , generating a barcode inside the Crypto Dispenser account and loading cash at CVS, Walmart, or Walgreens• [12:19] Why Crypto Dispenser is non-custodial and why that matters , users own their Bitcoin the same day they buy it• [13:43] Why cash remains the only true way to buy Bitcoin without relying on the traditional banking system• [20:34] The brutal reality of maintaining bank accounts as a crypto startup , banks shutting them down every six to eight months• [23:23] The rise of neo-banks like OneSafe (backed by Coinbase) and how they have helped but still face the same de-risking pattern• [26:13] How Crypto Dispenser differentiates through hands-on customer support against giants like Coinbase and Strike• [30:56] Trends Firas is watching , prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, and what they say about younger generations seeking financial freedom• [37:46] Firas's vision for the next two to three years , scaling the business, potentially bringing on VC capital, and continuing to grow organically• [39:15] North Star metrics , 100K registered users, approximately 2,000 monthly paying users• [41:45] Firas's ask , give Bitcoin a chance, and reach out if you are a developer or investor who wants to help scale

Synopsis: While biotech is increasingly measured by clinical milestones and financial outcomes, Rahul Chaturvedi welcomes two leaders who argue that true success begins and ends with patients. In this deeply personal and inspiring conversation, Mike Raab, President & Chief Executive Officer of Ardelyx, and Laura Williams, Chief Patient Officer, share how empathy, resilience, and patient advocacy have shaped both their careers and the culture of the company they've built. Mike reflects on an unconventional journey that spans pharmaceutical sales, rare disease leadership at Genzyme, venture capital at NEA, and ultimately leading Ardelyx through some of biotech's most difficult challenges—including a Complete Response Letter, massive layoffs, and a historic FDA reversal that resulted in approval without additional clinical trials. Laura shares her path from rural Mississippi to becoming a physician, recounting the transformative patient experience during the HIV epidemic that inspired her move from academia into industry and ultimately into a pioneering Chief Patient Officer role. Together, they explore what patient-centricity truly means beyond corporate slogans, how Ardelyx embedded patient advocacy into the C-suite, and why empathy must be a core competency for biotech leadership. The discussion also dives into clinical trial diversity, commercializing therapies for underserved populations, navigating regulatory adversity, responsible capital allocation, and the future of building enduring biotech companies. It is a powerful reminder that when patients become the North Star, resilience, innovation, and impact naturally follow. Biography: Mike Raab Mike has served as Ardelyx's President and Chief Executive Officer since March 2009. Before Ardelyx, Mike was a partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the world's largest and most successful venture capital firms, where he specialized in healthcare investments focusing on the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors. Prior to joining NEA in 2002, Mike spent 15 years in commercial and operating leadership roles in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. He was senior vice president, therapeutics and general manager of the renal division at Genzyme Corporation, a Sanofi company. In this position, Mike launched and oversaw the sales growth of sevelamer, the leading phosphate binder for the treatment of hyperphosphatemia, with over $1.0 billion in worldwide sales in 2013. Mike was also instrumental in the worldwide launch of Genzyme's therapies for Gaucher disease, Ceredase and Cerezyme. Laura Williams, MD, MPH Laura has served as Ardelyx's Chief Patient Officer since 2025, having joined the company in November 2020 as Senior Vice President, Global Therapeutic Strategies and Patient Advocacy. Laura was later promoted to Chief Medical Officer in 2021. Laura is a life science enterprise leader with extensive experience as a pharmaceutical drug developer, healthcare policy advisor, patient advocate, and portfolio strategist. She is an accomplished, results-oriented, physician scientist and board member who is committed to discovering, developing, and commercializing innovative therapies that address unmet medical need. With nearly 30 years of pharmaceutical experience, across all clinical development phases and multiple therapeutic areas, in both large pharma and smaller biotech, Laura has a proven track-record in drug development, as indicated by her leadership and major contributions toward eight drug approvals.

Want our guidance to build and run your own marketing engine? Book a call with our team: https://call.contractordynamics.com/yt?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=Description&utm_campaign=6.11.26Get our FREE marketing course for contractors here: https://course.contractordynamics.com?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=Description&utm_campaign=6.11.26If you're a roofing company owner spending real money on marketing every month and you still can't tell me which channel produced your best jobs last month — this video is for you.Most roofing owners are tracking the wrong things.Impressions. Clicks. Website visits. Video views. Cost per lead.None of those metrics connect directly to revenue.In this episode, Joseph Hughes breaks down the one marketing metric that actually matters: Cost Per Acquired Job (Customer Acquisition Cost) — and why understanding this number changes everything about how you grow your roofing company.You'll learn why most roofing companies are flying blind when it comes to marketing performance, how to build a tracking system that connects marketing to revenue, and what happens when you finally gain visibility into what's actually driving growth.Key Takeaways for Contractors✔️ Why cost per lead can be one of the most misleading marketing metrics✔️ The only marketing number that truly connects to revenue✔️ Why most roofing companies can't accurately measure marketing ROI✔️ How to build a tracking system that creates marketing confidence✔️ The difference between owning your marketing and renting results from agencies✔️ Real-world results from a roofing company that took control of its marketingTimestamps00:00 The marketing metric that actually matters02:04 Why customer acquisition cost is your North Star metric04:44 Why most roofing companies don't know their numbers07:16 The problem with outsourced marketing and disconnected tracking12:06 How customer acquisition cost transforms your marketing decisions16:40 Case study: How Modern Roofing went from 14 leads per year to 14 leads per weekIf you want to learn how Contractor Dynamics helps roofing companies build tracking systems that connect marketing activity to revenue, watch this free video that walks through our entire system:https://www.contractordynamics.com/training/?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=Description&utm_campaign=6.11.26Ready to put this into action for your company?Schedule a Marketing Demo with our team and we'll show you exactly what needs to be built inside your roofing company to stop guessing and start making marketing decisions with confidence.

Few artists have a career as unique and prolific as today's guest, Richmond Virginia's own, Nickelus F. Over multiple decades, F has dazzled listeners with his ridiculous technical skills as an MC, the authenticity and honesty in his subject matter, and his production chops that feature a degree of stylistic variety that was always impressively pulled off. With that said, he's recently taken aim at carving out what will eventually be known as the “Nickelus F sound”. And in this episode, he talks about this pursuit through the lens of his terrific new album, The Undisputed, dives into his artistic process as an MC and producer, and reflects on key lessons he's learnt from previous chapters in his career. You rarely hear such wisdom, honesty, and genuine excitement from one of rap's OGs. Don't miss this. The Plug (1:01). The Interview (2:34). Formative hip-hop connections (2:59). Current chapter of F's career and lasting legacy (7:03). Learning from earlier eras of F's career (14:42). Improving as an MC over time (22:00). Writing process (26:09). Richmond music scene (33:47). The Undisputed as Nickelus F's “North Star” (41:35). Honing in on the fundamentals of rap on The Undisputed (44:57). The “Nickelus F sound” (47:37). Upcoming projects / tour dates / merch (59:53). Support Trick Dice Records here: https://www.trickdice.co/  Buy/stream The Undisputed here: https://nickelusf.bandcamp.com/album/the-undisputed  Follow Nickelus F on Twitter here: https://x.com/NickelusF  Follow Nickelus F on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/nickelusf/?hl=en  Edited by: Alyssa Rodriguez Intro/Outro beat by: BLOODBLIXING -- Fiending for some more quality rap content? Visit the RMPP website: https://rmpp.squarespace.com/ Want to support and help us grow? Become a RMPP Patron, and gain access to exclusive content: https://www.patreon.com/therapmusicplugpodcast  Looking to connect? DM me @rapmusicplugpod on Twitter and Instagram, or shoot me an email at qlctv.podcast@gmail.com  

If you knew you had to hear 50 nos before getting to a yes, wouldn't you be excited to collect every single no?As the co-host of The Naked Room podcast, CEO of Hey Y'all!, and brand storyteller, Kelly Garthwaite has guided her career by a mindset defined by bold pivots, creative reinvention, and an unwavering commitment to her purpose. We first connected with Kelly through Entreprenista, and from the moment we met her, it was clear she isn't afraid to step outside the lines in pursuit of what truly lights her up.By trusting her instincts, embracing change, and staying connected to her "why," Kelly has navigated multiple career shifts while building a life and business aligned with her values. Whether she's behind the camera, behind the microphone, or helping brands tell meaningful stories, she continually follows the things that make her tick and refuses to lose sight of her North Star.In this episode of the Step Out of Line Podcast, "Never Lose Sight of Your North Star," we talk about entrepreneurship, storytelling, rejection, resilience, and the power of trusting your inner voice. Kelly shares why rejection is simply part of the journey, how unexpected pivots can lead to your greatest opportunities, and what it takes to keep moving toward the life you're meant to build.This conversation is a reminder that success isn't always a straight line, and that every no brings you one step closer to the right yes.

70% of what American children eat today is ultra processed food and the regulatory system that's supposed to protect them has been asleep for decades. In this episode, I sit down with Nick Green, co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market, the membership-based online grocery platform that built a $700 million business by treating healthy food access as an infrastructure problem, not a willpower problem. Nick grew up watching his mother drive across Minnesota to find organic options before the internet existed and 20 years later, built the company meant to make that struggle obsolete. We get into the GRAS self-certification loophole that lets food companies rubber stamp their own ingredients as safe, why synthetic dyes and preservatives banned across Europe remain standard in the US, and how Thrive goes beyond EU standards to vet every single product on its platform. We also cover what the GLP-1 trend is actually revealing about the deeper food system failure, why the American healthcare model was built for infectious disease and is fundamentally unprepared for chronic disease prevention, and the shared metabolic roots of cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer's. Nick breaks down how AI is now personalizing the grocery experience for 1.7 million members, why becoming a public benefit corporation was a legal commitment to the mission not just a branding decision and what it actually takes to keep a company anchored to its Northstar when investors, scale, and short-term incentives are all pulling in the opposite direction. Reduce your risk of Alzheimer's with my science-backed protocol for women 30+: https://go.neuroathletics.com.au/youtube-sales-page Subscribe to The Neuro Experience for evidence-based conversations at the intersection of brain science, longevity, and performance. _____ TOPICS DISCUSSED 00:00 Intro: The Ultra Processed Food Crisis Nobody Is Talking About Honestly 01:06 Nick Green and the Mission Behind Thrive Market 01:27 Growing Up in Minnesota: How a Mom's Grocery Struggle Built a Billion-Dollar Insight 07:24 70% of Kids' Diets Are Ultra Processed — and It's Not a Willpower Problem 08:38 The Membership Model: How Thrive Makes Organic Cheaper Than Conventional 09:31 AI-Personalized Grocery Shopping: Building Your Cart Around Your Health Goals 13:47 The Food System Is Rigged: MAHA, the FDA, and the GRAS Loophole 16:13 Synthetic Dyes, Preservatives, and Why the EU Bans What America Allows 20:43 The Most Unregulated Food Category: Supplements and Ultra Processed Crossover 22:04 How Thrive Vets Every Product: Auditing Manufacturers Up the Supply Chain 23:13 Thrive's Own Brand: 25% of Sales and a Mission-Driven Private Label Model 25:09 Gives Memberships, Free Access, and Building a Community Around the Mission 27:25 The Regulatory Gap and Its Cost: Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes, and Chronic Disease 29:44 GLP-1s Are Not Enough: Why Pharmacology Alone Can't Fix the Food System 32:41 Thrive vs. Whole Foods: The Key Structural Differences 35:43 Alzheimer's Risk, Ultra Processed Food, and the Framingham Heart Study 36:48 Why the Healthcare System Was Built for Infectious Disease — Not Chronic Prevention 38:05 Metabolism Is Upstream of Everything: Cancer, Heart Disease, Alzheimer's 40:03 MAHA, Government Regulation, and Why Consumer Empowerment Is the Real Solution 45:58 1.7 Million Members and Less Than 1.5% Market Penetration: The Scale of What's Left 47:23 The Un-Everything Store: Curation as a Competitive Advantage 49:16 What Keeps Nick Going: Mission as Decision Filter 51:31 Why Authenticity Always Wins — and What Thrive Wants to Prove to Every Founder _______ Thank you to our sponsors Timeline: https://www.timeline.com/partners/neuro-athletics Honey Love: https://www.honeylove.com/NEURO — Save 20% Off Honeylove #honeylovepod BASED Bodyworks: https://basedbodyworks.com/ — Use code NEURO for 20% off BiOptimizers: https://bioptimizers.com/neuro — 15% off with code NEURO Qualia Life: https://qualialife.com/NEURO — 50% off + extra 15% with code NEURO _______ I'm Louisa Nicola - clinical neurophysiologist - Alzheimer's prevention specialist founder of Neuro Athletics. My mission is to translate cutting-edge neuroscience into actionable strategies for cognitive longevity, peak performance, and brain disease prevention. If you're committed to optimizing your brain- reducing Alzheimer's risk and staying mentally sharp for life, you're in the right place. Stay sharp. Stay informed. Join thousands who subscribe to the Neuro Athletics Newsletter → https://bit.ly/3ewI5P0 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/louisanicola_/ Twitter : https://twitter.com/louisanicola_ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Architectural Authenticity: Engineering Human-First Cultures with Justin RicklefsIn a recent episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Podcast, host Josh Elledge sat down with Justin Ricklefs, the Founder and CEO of Guild Collective, to unpack the structural vulnerabilities facing modern brands in an over-automated, AI-saturated business landscape. Justin, an elite executive coach, corporate strategist, and author of Give a Damn, details how the obsession with rapid digital scale and complex software stacks often dilutes a company's greatest asset: genuine human connection. This conversation provides an intentional framework for mid-market founders and enterprise leaders looking to eliminate internal friction, maximize employee retention, and build high-trust corporate cultures that drive predictable brand equity and sustainable long-term valuation.The Strategy of Presence: Transforming Corporate Purpose into Measurable PerformanceThe pervasiveness of modern hustle culture often pushes executive teams to resolve structural bottlenecks by stacking complex tactical tools rather than addressing root operational misalignments. Justin Ricklefs argues that this over-reliance on technological infrastructure creates severe administrative debt, introducing confusion into customer-facing operations and fracturing internal alignment. True organizational health is achieved when leaders embrace extreme clarity of purpose, moving their core mission statements out of forgotten files and embedding them directly into daily operations, recruitment pipelines, and performance reviews. By simplifying the brand narrative and filtering strategic capital allocation through a defined "North Star," enterprises shift from a model of reactive firefighting to an intentional, high-accountability framework that outpaces standard industry margins.Building a resilient, human-first culture requires corporate architects to look past superficial workspace perks and establish deep emotional connection and psychological safety across all management tiers. When a business mistakes superficial engagement programs for authentic workplace health, it inadvertently creates a sterile environment that triggers staff disengagement and executive burnout. Real operational scalability is unlocked when leadership designs structured check-ins that evaluate personal well-being alongside metric production, opening transparent communication channels that allow diverse teams to take calculated operational risks. This commitment to continuous learning and open experimentation transforms employee output, proving that corporate innovation is an organic downstream consequence of an inclusive, highly connected internal ecosystem.To insulate an enterprise's bottom line against shifting algorithmic trends and market volatility, leaders must actively model personal decompression and radical operational discipline. Executive decision-making is severely diminished under chronic stress, making intentional periods of digital detox and silent strategic reflection essential tools for maintaining executive resilience. When corporate leaders protect their own mental and emotional focus, they establish a corporate standard that values long-term sustainable growth over immediate, short-term micro-gains. Ultimately, long-term market dominance belongs to the organizations that treat their people as the primary infrastructure of the enterprise, weaving absolute transparency into every client touchpoint to establish permanent, premium authority across their entire vertical.About Justin RicklefsJustin Ricklefs is the Founder and CEO of Guild Collective, a best-selling author, a seasoned corporate consultant, and an executive leadership coach. Drawing from extensive experience guiding enterprise networks and mid-market founders through rapid organizational transitions, Justin specializes in humanizing corporate structures to unlock exponential revenue and talent retention. He is the author of Give a Damn, a definitive playbook dedicated to helping modern executives align operational discipline with authentic organizational empathy.About Guild CollectiveGuild Collective is an elite corporate consulting firm and leadership development agency designed to help companies construct high-performance organizational cultures. The consultancy specializes in executing comprehensive culture audits, custom brand blueprint designs, and executive mentorship pipelines to streamline cross-functional alignment. Through structured implementation playbooks, Guild Collective enables businesses to eliminate operational friction and scale their brand presence predictably by putting human capital at the center of their strategy.Links Mentioned in This EpisodeGuild Collective Official Website: guildcollective.comJustin Ricklefs on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/justinricklefsKey Episode HighlightsThe Over-Tooling Trap: Analyzing why adding excessive automation software introduces hidden administrative debt and dilutes core brand authority.The Human-First Brand Blueprint: Implementing the four critical corporate pillars of clarity, connection, creativity, and structural commitment across all management lines.The Purpose Audit Mandate: Shifting company values from static document files into lived operational workflows, onboarding systems, and employee KPIs.Ditching Toxic Hustle Culture: Leveraging deliberate silence and regular digital detox routines to sharpen executive focus and high-stakes strategic decision-making.Perks vs. Authentic Culture: Understanding why superficial corporate benefits fail to replace deep behavioral accountability and transparent team relationships.ConclusionThe conversation with Justin Ricklefs reinforces that sustainable corporate optimization requires a balanced synthesis of structural discipline and un-copyable human authenticity. By standardizing internal performance metrics around psychological safety, simplifying the brand narrative, and protecting human-centric strategic capacity, corporate leaders can build high-valuation business assets that continuously scale their industry impact.More from The Thoughtful Entrepreneur

In this episode, Sam Smith, Director of Inspections Enablement, shares his leadership journey from the depths of a submarine to the heart of API Group's fastest-growing program. Sam discusses how investing in people became his North Star and why he walked away from chasing titles to find a company that prioritizes long-term growth over short-term wins.  

Send us Fan MailShan and Erika built Shades By Shan from a San Francisco garage into a nationally distributed cosmetics brand carried in more than 600 JCPenney Beauty stores, but the real lesson is not simply how they scaled, it is how they protected their mission while navigating the pressure of national retail. This conversation is a sharp, deeply human study in founder discipline, radical honesty, community-led growth, and the kind of purpose-driven strategy that turns a small team into a powerful market presence.Show NotesShan and Erika's story reveals what happens when a brand is built with commercial ambition and a deeply personal North Star, because Shades By Shan was never designed to be just another cosmetics company; it was created as a vehicle for representation, retail readiness, and direct support for single parents through The MamaBerries Nonprofit Foundation.Shan and Erika share how their experience growing up with a single mother became the foundation for both Shades By Shan and their 501c3 nonprofit, proving that a founder's “why” can become a true strategic advantage when it is embedded into the business model.They break down the realities of national retail, including why they initially had to decline JCPenney's offer, how the retailer ultimately backed their expansion, and what small brands must understand before saying yes to a massive opportunity.The sisters discuss the operational discipline behind scrappy growth, from launching with limited capital to building community, visiting stores, protecting cash flow, and making decisions without outside investors.Their partnership offers a powerful lesson in family business leadership, showing how clear lanes, trust, honest conflict, and ego-free execution can help founders move through pressure without losing the mission.Guest Contact & ConnectShan and Erika are the founders of Shades By Shan, a San Francisco-based cosmetics company founded in 2018 and now available online and nationwide at JCPenney Beauty. A portion of every purchase supports single parents in need through their 501c3 nonprofit, The MamaBerries Nonprofit Foundation.Website: Shades By ShanInstagram: @shanberriesTikTok: @shanberriesLinkedIn: Shan Berries---Subscribe and ReviewIf you loved this episode, drop us a review, share it with a badass woman in your life, and subscribe to Badass Women in Business wherever you get your podcasts.Stay badass. Stay bold. Build it your way.Keep up with more content from Aggie and Cristy here:Facebook: Empowered Women Leaders  Instagram: @badass_women_in_businessLinkedIn: ProveHer - Badass Women in BusinessWebsite: Badasswomeninbusinesspodcast.comAthena: athenaac.com

Kaôh F***ing Rong Rewatch Ep 1 Jump back in time as Rob Cesternino and Chappell kick off a brand new rewatch series, “Kaôh F***ing R?ng,” diving deep into Survivor Season 32: Kaôh R?ng—Brains vs. Beauty vs. Brawn. Ten years after its original airing, this recap series launches with a close look at the season premiere, where the heat is fierce, strategy starts immediately, and big personalities dominate the island from day one. Hosted by Rob Cesternino and joined by Chappell, this full-spoiler rewatch episode unpacks why Survivor: Kaôh R?ng still stands out in the franchise. The duo zeroes in on camp life taking center stage, from the shock of Jennifer's ear bug nightmare to the infamous split of the Brains tribe and Ty’s heartfelt depiction as a multi-layered “beauty.” Chappell and Rob walk through the episode's retro vibes, contrasting old-school Survivor premieres with today’s high-octane new era, and debate whether the season's memorable characters owe their impact to casting or clever editing. Key moments include: – Aubry's rocky start on the Brains tribe and her season-long growth arc – Debbie's arrival as a fully-formed Survivor original, giving “coach energy” right from her first confessional – Ty's struggle fitting in on the Beauty tribe and why his vulnerability wins hearts – The Brawn tribe's messy first Tribal Council, including a tie vote and a first boot that stuns both hosts – Hot takes on Scott and Jason as Survivor's last true “villains” and how the show's editing shaped their portrayals Rob and Chappell question which gameplay choices early in Kaôh R?ng shaped the flaming dynamics that follow—did the show lose its “North Star,” or is this the era Survivor got the balance right? They also look at how the season's themes and casting twists shaped both the episode and Survivor's evolution. Don't miss this nostalgia-packed Survivor 32 deep dive—tune in to see whether this classic season still delivers the heat, and join the conversation as the “Kaôh F***ing R?ng” journey continues. Chapters: 0:00 Kicking Off the Kaôh R?ng Rewatch 0:44 Revisiting Survivor: Kaôh R?ng's Legacy 2:17 New Era vs. Old Era Survivor 4:23 Filming Order and Season History 7:06 Survivor's Shift to Fiji Explained 11:07 Brains vs. Beauty vs. Brawn Returns 14:14 Camp Life and Character Moments 18:48 Weird Casting Fits in Tribes 21:47 Breaking Down the Brains Tribe 24:37 Aubry's Anxiety Attack in Episode One 28:13 Debbie's Survivor Impact and Archetype 31:01 Liz Markham's Casting Backstory 34:20 Neil's Infamous Jury Speech 39:39 Beauty Tribe: Ty and Caleb's Friendship 49:03 Michelle's Under-the-Radar Winner Edit 52:17 Anna Khait's Survivor Evolution 57:58 Brawn Tribe's Bug Trauma Incident 1:04:44 Alicia's Puzzle Struggles and Early Vote 1:16:25 Kaôh R?ng Premiere: Nostalgia and Wrap-up To order Rob’s book, The Tribe and I Have Spoken, visit www.robhasabook.com Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Kaôh F***ing Rong Rewatch Ep 1 Jump back in time as Rob Cesternino and Chappell kick off a brand new rewatch series, “Kaôh F***ing R?ng,” diving deep into Survivor Season 32: Kaôh R?ng—Brains vs. Beauty vs. Brawn. Ten years after its original airing, this recap series launches with a close look at the season premiere, where the heat is fierce, strategy starts immediately, and big personalities dominate the island from day one. Hosted by Rob Cesternino and joined by Chappell, this full-spoiler rewatch episode unpacks why Survivor: Kaôh R?ng still stands out in the franchise. The duo zeroes in on camp life taking center stage, from the shock of Jennifer's ear bug nightmare to the infamous split of the Brains tribe and Ty’s heartfelt depiction as a multi-layered “beauty.” Chappell and Rob walk through the episode's retro vibes, contrasting old-school Survivor premieres with today’s high-octane new era, and debate whether the season's memorable characters owe their impact to casting or clever editing. Key moments include: – Aubry's rocky start on the Brains tribe and her season-long growth arc – Debbie's arrival as a fully-formed Survivor original, giving “coach energy” right from her first confessional – Ty's struggle fitting in on the Beauty tribe and why his vulnerability wins hearts – The Brawn tribe's messy first Tribal Council, including a tie vote and a first boot that stuns both hosts – Hot takes on Scott and Jason as Survivor's last true “villains” and how the show's editing shaped their portrayals Rob and Chappell question which gameplay choices early in Kaôh R?ng shaped the flaming dynamics that follow—did the show lose its “North Star,” or is this the era Survivor got the balance right? They also look at how the season's themes and casting twists shaped both the episode and Survivor's evolution. Don't miss this nostalgia-packed Survivor 32 deep dive—tune in to see whether this classic season still delivers the heat, and join the conversation as the “Kaôh F***ing R?ng” journey continues. Chapters: 0:00 Kicking Off the Kaôh R?ng Rewatch 0:44 Revisiting Survivor: Kaôh R?ng's Legacy 2:17 New Era vs. Old Era Survivor 4:23 Filming Order and Season History 7:06 Survivor's Shift to Fiji Explained 11:07 Brains vs. Beauty vs. Brawn Returns 14:14 Camp Life and Character Moments 18:48 Weird Casting Fits in Tribes 21:47 Breaking Down the Brains Tribe 24:37 Aubry's Anxiety Attack in Episode One 28:13 Debbie's Survivor Impact and Archetype 31:01 Liz Markham's Casting Backstory 34:20 Neil's Infamous Jury Speech 39:39 Beauty Tribe: Ty and Caleb's Friendship 49:03 Michelle's Under-the-Radar Winner Edit 52:17 Anna Khait's Survivor Evolution 57:58 Brawn Tribe's Bug Trauma Incident 1:04:44 Alicia's Puzzle Struggles and Early Vote 1:16:25 Kaôh R?ng Premiere: Nostalgia and Wrap-up To order Rob’s book, The Tribe and I Have Spoken, visit www.robhasabook.com Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Capes & Lunatics Ep #474: The Wedding of Northstar   This episode your team of Phil, Lilith, and Justin celebrate Pride Month with a review of Astonishing X-Men #51 (August 2012) featuring the wedding of Northstar, the first mainstream comic book gay marriage.   Tune in today and don't forget to review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and anywhere else you can!    Capes & Lunatics Links  → Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/capeslunatics.bsky.social → Twitter https://twitter.com/CapesLunatics → Instagram https://www.instagram.com/capeslunatics/ → Facebook https://www.facebook.com/capesandlunatics → YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/CapesandLunatics   ==================  

You're being outshouted. The average person now absorbs 5,000+ messages a day and reaches for their phone 205 times — and the industry's big answer was to staple "AI-powered" onto the homepage and call it a repositioning. That's not building a brand. It's a withdrawal from the one account you can't overdraw.Amit Singh has spent three decades building brands at Adobe, American Express, Starbucks, and Nintendo — long enough to watch "dot-com" go from billboard flex to embarrassing relic, and he's convinced AI is headed the exact same way. His argument: the companies sprinting to rebrand as AI companies are mortgaging years of earned trust, while the question that actually decides whether you survive — why should you exist? — goes unanswered in most boardrooms. He maps where AI earns its seat at the table, where it quietly wrecks your creative without anyone noticing, and why the people declaring storytelling dead are reading the wrong scoreboard.We also cover:A Meta study found AI-generated copy matches or beats humans on sub-$100 products — and consistently *loses* on anything pricier, where emotion does the selling. Most teams are pointing it at exactly the wrong work.Nintendo doesn't make video games. It makes smiles. Why your reason to exist is the North Star you build against — and the one thing you'll never put in an ad.88% of marketers have adopted AI. Adoption was never trust — and Amit thinks the gap between the two is where the real risk is hiding.Long-form is quietly back: why a five-minute Adidas film outperforms your six-second TikTok precisely *because* attention has never been scarcer.

Scott Cameron is a two-time Emmy Award-winning creative leader who has spent his career executive producing international adaptations of Sesame Street, bringing this iconic brand to audiences in 190 countries and 31 languages. He joins us for this special episode to talk about what 57 years of research-driven storytelling has taught him about how story actually changes people.