Podcasts about ogs

Mike Maples is one of the OGs of seed investing. As the Co-Founder of Floodgate, he has backed the likes of Twitch, Okta, Lyft, Twitter and more. Mike has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade and was also named a “Rising Star” by FORTUNE and profiled by Harvard Business School for his lifetime contributions to entrepreneurship.  In Today's Episode with Mike Maples We Discuss 1.) Lesson from SVB #1: The Importance of Scenario Planning: What is the right way to do scenario planning in startups? What is the difference between good vs bad scenario planning? What do the best scenario plans include and involve? What is the right way to communicate these scenario plans to your stakeholders? 2.) Lesson from SVB #2: The Importance of Financial Agility: What does it mean for a startup to be "financially agile"? From a banking relationships perspective, what can startups do to be financially agile? How many accounts should a startup have? How much runway should be in each? Should startups bank with startup banks as well as traditional banks? Should startups have their money in sweep accounts and money market accounts? 3.) Lesson from SVB #3: How to Master Crisis Communications: Why is it so important for founder to over-communicate in tough times? How transparent should they be in these communications? What does Mike mean when he says "be radically human"? If Mike were to face a crisis, what would he do differently in the way he communicates to his LPs? 4.) Lessons from SVB: The Wider World: Why does Mike believe the level of quantitative easing that occurred in COVID was scandalous? Does Mike believe the USD will continue to be the reserve currency of the world? Will we be in a better or worse macro situation by the end of the year? Has Mike ever had a company that achieved true PMF and failed?

A Scream movie without Sidney Prescott? Fuhgeddaboudit!!! Just kidding. Despite the fact that Neve Campbell wouldn't be returning for the latest installment in Ghostface's franchise, we decided to still give Scream VI (2023) a shot here at Spooky Tuesday. On our latest episode, we're traveling with the Core Four to New York, where Sam, Tara, Chad and Mindy are making new friends, facing new killers, and reuniting with some familiar characters. That's right, baby — Kirby is finally back, and so are about a million props from all the previous films. If Scream (2022) was for the Stab stans, then this new flick is one for the OGs.References: https://gamerant.com/scream-6-opening-scene-ghostface-kill-shocked-directors/https://collider.com/scream-6-sidney-prescott-neve-campbell-absence/

Many people are in prison and don't have anything else to do but be frustrated about the situation. In this episode, Peter shares the incredible story of his life, from a fancy childhood to an unexpected future nightmare in prison.  Listen as he gives insights on the importance of mindset, positive perspective, and faith in God's plan. Overall, this podcast episode offers a powerful and uplifting message of hope and transformation. Peter Meyerhoff is a rare type of person who had the world in his palm as a kid. After high school, he got involved in drugs and was imprisoned for 12 years. After prison, he became successful and made a couple of million dollars. He now owns a sober clothing company and is helping the younger generation not go through the rough pitfalls of life. He aims to motivate people, help people get sober, and change the recidivism rate.   Key Highlights: [00:01 - 05:10] Opening Segment ●        Peter started his life story with a successful childhood until his life changed when he entered high school. ●        He got involved in criminal activities such as stealing cars and breaking into houses to support their drug use. ●        At 18, Peter was falsely accused of stealing $155,000 worth of jewelry and given a 12-year prison sentence for a non-dangerous burglary, which was blamed for influencing other juveniles to commit the crime. [05:11 - 16:10] How Peter Became a Shot Caller ●        Peter talks about how his mindset had shifted after being behind bars for so long. ●        He tells about his life of being in prison and how he gained respect from other prisoners. ●        OGs called Peter “Chappy” in prison because he was addicted to Chapstick.  [16:11 - 22:27] The Prison System ●        Peter is seen as a tough guy who ran yards in jails, leading to people talking about him as tough. ●        Being in solitary confinement taught him mental strength, and he wants to help others do the same by developing a new prison curriculum. ●        Peter talks about getting in trouble while he is in prison, like stuff that wasn't allowed, fancy shoes, and sunglasses that cause him to stay longer in prison due to tickets. [22:28 - 41:47] Switching Mindset ●        Peter put things into perspective when he read a book about a little girl who had been kidnapped for 20 years by a pedophile. ●        He also shares that he used to feel life was terrible but realized he could improve things by working hard toward success. ●        He talks about the business side of things, like making money on football pools or selling cars. ●        Confidence helped him get ahead because most people don't have confidence, which keeps them from succeeding. ●        Peter used to tell himself positive things and put notes up to remind him. He thinks it's important not to give up when things get tough because that makes a person strong. [41:48 - 51:37] Closing Segment ●     He talked about a podcast called Roll Call with Chappy, where his first episode is about interviewing his parents. ●     Roll Call with Chappy is now an approved podcast for tablets in the prison system. ●     Peter recommends reading the book by Jaycee Dugard to help change people's perspectives on their difficult situations. ●     He also promotes his book, "Against All Odds,” about the biography of his life. The last chapter is about acquiring mental strength and switching mindset from negative to positive thoughts.  ●     At the end of the book, he writes about teaching inmates how to be successful through prison curriculum.   Key Quotes: “I have an attitude that like if people tell me I can't do something, I promise you, I'll do.” - Peter Meyerhoff   “You can rewire your brain and program your brain to do anything you want. If you put in the work to make changes.” -  Peter Meyerhoff   “Life's always about perspective.” - Peter Meyerhoff   “If you think you can do something and you tell yourself you can do something, you can do anything. It's all about confidence.” - Peter Meyerhoff   “There's nothing better than like literally changing people's lives.” - Peter Meyerhoff     CONNECT WITH PETER :   @burtsbees Petermeyerhoff.com Instagram.com/peter_meyerhoff Youtube.com/@Chappy23   Get leaner. Live Longer. Be Legendary.   Here's how I can help you reach your goals! 1. Visit N8training.com - mastermind 2. Join our 5-Day Morning Routine Challenge 3. Get my super easy and accessible FREE 5-Day Sugar Detox Program. All you have to do is put in your email and receive access together with a handbook! Thefreesugardetox.com 4.  Start by understanding the science and simplicity of carb backloading for fat loss - go to GetNatesBook.Com. to get a free copy of Nate's bestseller “The Million Dollar Body Method” 5. Get more great tips to get leaner by connecting with me on Instagram @lowcarbhustle 6. Join the MDB Mastermind for just a buck! If you want accountability, coaching, and an amazing training program to get leaner, this is what you need. Go to nate.fit to find out more and get your first 2 weeks for just 1 dollar. If you liked the show, please LEAVE A 5-STAR REVIEW, and share it on social media to get reposted to over 12k of the homies.

2x Super Bowl Champion, Super Bowl MVP, 8x Pro Bowler, (and the list keeps going) and current outside Linebacker for the Buffalo Bills, Von Miller, joins Brandon Marshall, Adam Pacman Jones, and Ashley Nicole Moss in Season 4 Episode 8 of I Am Athlete. How do we define Von Miller? Unpredictable, iconic, and original. Von Miller opens the conversation by defining who he is, how special and humble it is to have had both his parents in his life growing up and still present now being in the NFL, and his respect he has for the Vets and OGs of the game now transitioning into an OG himself. Von talks on he has invested over $500,000 a year on his body through recovery and nutrition and the importance for all to take care of their body. Von gives his flowers to Brandon Marshall, Pacman Jones, and all the OGs who have helped his game. We transition to ask Von the first thing he thinks of with each of these peoples names that have impacted him, Elvis Dumervil, Peyton Manning, Brandon McManus, Josh Allen, how he met OBJ, the time him and OBJ went on tour with Drake for 40 nights, and he touches on the the passing of his good friend Demaryius Thomas. Von Miller says the NFL Script has predicted the Buffalo Bills winning the Super Bowl in 2024 and Lamar Jackson will get paid by the Ravens, who his dream defensive line would be if he can build his team himself, And his Top 5 defensive line players to ever play the game. #VonMiller #BuffaloBills #OBJ SUBSCRIBE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/c/IAMATHLETE?sub_confirmation=1 WATCH MORE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/c/IAMATHLETE CELSIUS is I Am Athlete's essential energy drink of choice on set and before our work outs!⚡️ CELSIUS is Made with premium ingredients, zero sugar, 7 essential vitamins and none of the bad stuff from traditional energy drinks that give you jitters. Visit  https://www.CELSIUS.com/buy-locate/ to find CELSIUS at a retailer near you! #celsiusbrandpartner If you ain't betting on FanDuel Sportsbook, what you doing?! Go to ➡️ https://www.fanduel.com/iamathlete to place your bets

Today we interview one of the co-writers of S6E7 "Rascals". Listen in to get a hot-take on the original script vs what we saw on screen AND take a trip down memory lane with one of the OGs of the sci-fi industry!Want more of Diana Botsford (and who could blame you)?Please select 1 or more of the 3 options below:1) Follow her on IG @digitalred932) Join one of her screenwriting classes3) Check out her short story anthologyAND you can always visit Diana's website to see what her latest projects are! Contact The TNG PodcastSend us a direct message on Instagram or FacebookEmail us: info@thetngpodcast.comDrop us a 90 second voicemailThanks for listening! Live long and prosper!~ Shereese & AndreaPS. Consider supporting our podcast so we can keep making content about this show we all love!

San Quentin's population is changing, and a lot of the old ways are dying out. But some prison OGs don't want to let go of the past. Big thanks to Lieutenant Guim'Mara Berry and Acting Warden Oak Smith for their support of the show. Ear Hustle is a proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Find a full list of episode credits at earhustlesq.com.

Gary Cartlidge is a crypto-artist, graphic designer, street-artist and cyber surrealist since 2018. Through ‘NFT's' Gary went from janitor & making art from a closet to becoming a successful and prolific full time artist. Garys insight and experience as one of the crypto art scene OGs makes him a great interview subject. I hope you enjoy listening to him as much as I did. You can find a link to all of his socials here: https://garycartlidge.art/

Join us for an early look behind the curtains of the most exciting documentary produced about NFTs and Web3 to date, featuring everyone from the OGs to all the current leading artists and creators. Award-winning filmmaker Dan Sickles recently got bit by the crypto bug, and he's gone deep. Raoul sits down with Dan to hear about his journey into crypto and why he decided to make the defining documentary about the space. Dan and Raoul discuss the power of community and memes and how Dan is trying to reflect that in his new film. They also dig into the future of Web3 and how it's going to upend traditional legacy-media institutions. Recorded on January 30, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join us for an early look behind the curtains of the most exciting documentary produced about NFTs and Web3 to date, featuring everyone from the OGs to all the current leading artists and creators. Award-winning filmmaker Dan Sickles recently got bit by the crypto bug, and he's gone deep. Raoul sits down with Dan to hear about his journey into crypto and why he decided to make the defining documentary about the space. Dan and Raoul discuss the power of community and memes and how Dan is trying to reflect that in his new film. They also dig into the future of Web3 and how it's going to upend traditional legacy-media institutions. Recorded on January 30, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Det kom ikke som nogen overraskelse, at Klimarådet tirsdag for tredje år i træk underkendte regeringens evne til at anskueliggøre, at Danmark kan nå sine klimamål. Siden sin første vurdering i 2021 har rådet påpeget, at regeringen gør for lidt, for langsomt og med for mange 'fugle på taget'. Men nu konkluderer klimavagthunden, at ikke alene ser klimamålet for 2025 ud til ikke at kunne nås, der er også høj risiko for heller ikke at nå 2030-målet, og end ikke Danmarks EU-forpligtelse på klimaområdet ser ud til at blive opfyldt. Jørgen Steen Nielsen er bekymret over, at det tilsyneladende ikke har afstedkommet den store politiske panik. Det understreger bare behovet for, at vi hver især undersøger de barrierer, der er. Også inde i os selv, siger han. Og vi bliver lidt ved klimaet. For man kan ikke fortælle historien om klimakrisen, hvis man ikke fortæller om det, der sker i Afrika, og man kan ikke bidrage til at løse krisen, hvis man ikke skriver om det sted, der er hårdest ramt, og hvor så store interesser er på spil. Derfor vil Information det næste år sætte fokus på Afrika. Journalist på Udland Christina Nordvang Jensen kommer ind og fortæller sidst i programmet. Og så til noget helt andet. For kender man Rune Lykkeberg, ved man, at han har en helt særlig veneration for Rocky Balboa. Og han er så heldig, at det franchise, der er blevet bygget op siden den første Rocky-film i 1976, stadig kaster film af sig. Senest Creed III, som han har set med sin søn Nima. Rune er i studiet og fortæller historien om Rocky og Creed.  Og så bliver der tid til en lille nedtur. Denne gang over oppositionen, der når alt kom til alt kastede håndklædet i ringen og droppede kampen mod regeringens planer om at droppe store bededag. Tsk, tsk. Som Rocky ville sige: »Every champion was once a contender who refused to give up.«

Video animation by: Big Flowers Intro/Outro beat by: BLOODBLIXING The Plug (0:21). The Interview (2:00). One of the primary reasons I decided to move to Toronto last summer, was the vibrant music scene in the city. So going to many shows was the extent of what I expected. However, what I was pleasantly surprised to see though was a solid community of underground rap fans that I kept seeing at many different rap events. Many of which were hosted by none other than the pride of Toronto's hip-hop underground, Raz Fresco. Raz is an artist who's career spans over a decade, featuring co-signs and collaborations with true OGs such as Raekwon, and a prolific run of creativity in recent years. Punctuated by his fantastic Magneto Was Right series and other great records in recent years, such as Marvelous Right Wrist and Secret Wars with DIBIA$E. Not only does his catalog speak for itself, but his passion and respect for the art is energizing… and comes through loud and clear in the latest episode of this show. Magnetic Right Wrist tour (3:42). +32 Raz's non-existent rap origin story (9:22). The Toronto hip-hop scene, and Raz's deep engagement with the community (13:04). The conception of the BKRSCLB (25:22). The importance of knowledge of self and spirituality in Raz Fresco's music (28:05). The meaning behind the Magneto was Right series (32:42). The vision behind Marvelous Right Wrist (43:49). Working with Dibia$e on Secret Wars (48:18). Upcoming projects (51:30). Support Raz Fresco and BKRSCLB here: https://www.bkrsclb.com/  Follow Raz Fresco on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/RazFresco  Follow Raz Fresco on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/razfresco/?hl=en  -- 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

What happened to the OG? Crisco and Ekin discuss why disagreements from your fav OGs seem to be playing out online these days. Thanks for listening to this episode of the DJ Ekin Podcast and show your support for the podcast by leaving a 5-star rating and review on Apple Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, […] The post DJ Ekin Podcast: PLAYER'S PLAYLIST 17 w/Crisco Kidd appeared first on Radio Influence.

Jadakiss is the definition of Culture. Jada joins Brandon Marshall, Adam "Pacman" Jones, Omar Kelly, and Ashley Nicole Moss in Episode 5 of I Am Athlete Podcast Season 4. Jadakiss reminisces on his legendary commercial with Allen Iverson back in 2001, what his place in culture and hip hop is, how Sports and hip hop are synonymous, and his advice to young artists entering the game. The crew then remembers the rappers who have had their life taken like Nipsey Hussle, Take Off, Pop Smoke, and how its sickening but can be preventable with therapy and talks with OGs. Later, the crew remembers a moment from Season 3 ranking the Top 5 pettiest people with 50 cent at the top of that list. #Jadakiss #AllenIverson #TakeOff SUBSCRIBE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/c/IAMATHLETE?sub_confirmation=1 WATCH MORE ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/c/IAMATHLETE CELSIUS is I Am Athlete's essential energy drink of choice on set and before our work outs!⚡️ CELSIUS is Made with premium ingredients, zero sugar, 7 essential vitamins and none of the bad stuff from traditional energy drinks that give you jitters. Visit  https://www.CELSIUS.com/buy-locate/ to find CELSIUS at a retailer near you! #celsiusbrandpartner If you ain't betting on FanDuel Sportsbook, what you doing?! Go to ➡️ https://www.fanduel.com/iamathlete to place your bets

 LISTEN  The OGs love the 'ZZA! From the crust to the weird English fried egg, they will pop these pizzas into their love oven and cook 'em up real good. Also, DON'T CHARGE US MORE FOR LESS FOOD!! Catholic keto. Chuck E. Cheese for grown-ups. Grab a slice, won't you?All things OG: https://linktr.ee/ogwltJoin the conversation (and see our artifact album) on our Facebook: facebook.com/oldguyswholovethings and talk to us via email: oldguyswholovethings@gmail.comFind Shawn online: http://www.gruegallery.com  and  https://www.shawndooleyart.com and http://www.dooleyfreelancedesign.comFind Eric online:  https://beacons.page/ericpschwartz (all music by Eric)Additional sound effects from https://www.zapsplat.com

It is a thrill to welcome Clocked Podcast hosts Paige and Dylan to The Jake's Take with Jacob Elyachar Podcast. Paige is the Queen of Challenge TikTok, and her podcast Most Likely Two recaps several top Reality TV shows such as The Amazing Race, Survivor, Vanderpump Rules, and of course, The Challenge. She has also welcomed several cast members to her platform for long-form interviews. Cara Maria Sorbello, Emily Schromm, Jay Starrett, Lolo Jones, Morgan Willett, and Paulie Calafiore are some of her notable interviews, and fan-favorite champion Ashley Mitchell just helped Paige celebrate her 100th milestone interview. Charleston, South Carolina native Dylan Deckard hosts Chillin' with Dylan Podcast. He specializes in recapping Reality TV shows such as The Bachelor and has interviewed many Reality TV veterans, including Big Brother houseguests Christian Birkenberger, Cliff Hogg III, Jessica Milagros, and Nicole Anthony, The Circle's Shubham Goel, and The Traitors USA's Rachel Rilley Villegas. He has also welcomed a plethora of The Challenge cast members that range from OGs such as Jon Brennan and Tina Bridges to champions Jenny West, Jonna Mannion, Wes Bergmann, and Yes Duffy. On January 29, 2022, Paige and Dylan met and developed an incredible friendship, and they collaborated on countless recaps of The Challenge. Paige and Dylan are venturing out of Reality TV and into their latest venture: Clocked the Podcast. These two unlikely yet inevitable best friends will talk about addiction, family, fitness, mental health, and travel. In this edition of The Jake's Take with Jacob Elyachar Podcast, Paige and Dylan spoke about their favorite interviews and previewed Clocked the Podcast. I also asked them for their take on my dream cast for The Challenge: Season 40.

Today I bring you another  one of the OGs of the industry whose work has changed the game for thousands of woman. I have been following this woman's work for OVER a decade and seen her evolution from talking about money to know talking about more feminine ways of being productive. She also has personal development and helping women in her DNA because her mother is one of the pioneers of women's health. Ladies and a few gentlemen, today we Kate Northrup on the podcast and this episode is YUMMY! Before getting into the first guest, this podcast is sponsored by Persuade to Profit our premier 90 days training where clients regularly increase their sales by 30% in 45 to 90 days. In fact, we've had clients increase their sales in as little as three days. Go to PersuadetoProfit.com for more information and apply. Also, if you like this podcast go ahead and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as this will help us spread the word and get these important conversations out into the world. Okay so when I said a couple of weeks ago that the conversations on this podcast were getting deep, I wasn't kidding. This episode is no different. Now in full transparency, we recorded this month's ago when I was still in the midst of some pretty big upheaval and transformation in my business and life. I was also still just getting acclimated with some of the concepts we talk about in this episode. So now listening back to it brings an ENTIRELY new light and perspective and it's EVEN better. Here's what we covered: Creating a sense of safety and security via results versus learning how to signal to our bodies that we are safe The difference between mindset strategies versus working with the body to feel safe Why do sometimes we can have a big expansion only to go into extreme contraction and what to do about it The importance of ancestral work and the study of epigenetics and trauma. A cyclical way of being Productive and successful - including how to use your period to plan your life which is a GAME CHANGER   Resources mentioned in this podcast: Kate Northrup Persuade to Profit

Zach Lawryk is Head of Solutions Consulting @ Rippling, what is solutions consulting? They are the product expert in the solution that ties a business value to help support the sales rep in the execution of their quota. And there is no one better than Zach, prior to leading the solutions consulting team at Rippling, Zach was VP of Solutions Consulting at Slack where he scaled the SE team from 10 to 200. Before Slack, Zach was Head of Solutions Engineering @ Optimizely and before that was Director of Sales Engineering at Box. In Today's Episode with Zach Lawryk We Discuss: 1. ) WTF is Solutions Engineering: What is Solutions engineering and why is it important? How does a software developer turned lawyer become one of the OGs of Solutions Engineering? What is the single biggest piece of advice Zach gives to graduates entering the workforce today? 2.) When and Who: Building the Foundations: When is the right time to hire your first solutions engineer? Should this be a senior hire or a more junior hire? What experience is ideal? Would Zach rather have someone who has sold to the same customer segment or sold to the same deal size? What are the challenges with each? 3.) Making the First Hire: The Process: What is the right hiring process for solutions engineers? Which members of your existing team should be involved in the process? What are some of Zach's favourite questions on the candidates past to determine quality? What are the best case studies and tests to give potential hires to test their aptitude? What are the biggest red flags in the hiring process for solutions engineers? 4.) Integrating into the Team: Making it Work: What is the optimal onboarding process for solutions engineers? Why does Zach think it is important they spend time with customer success in their first month? What is the right way to measure the effectiveness of SE's? How should the entrance of SE's impact the close rate and comp structure for AE's? How can sales leaders prevent division and friction between AEs and SEs?

This week the og cast of Kihp and Copacetic Senpai continue on our journey through Kamen Rider Geats with episodes 20-21. We also inch toward the finales of Kamen Rider Build and Choujin Sentai Jetman as we discuss episode 45 of both shows. Next week is the end of an era for the book club as Kihp, Stef, and David go over the time and finish Changerion with episodes 35-39. In two weeks the Ogs look at Kamen Rider Geats 22-23 along with Choujin Sentai Jetman and Kamen Rider build 46. Send in questions to Podcast@kamenridewithme.com and review us on Apple podcasts so we can keep growing the show. Follow us on cohost @Kamenride, twitter @Kamenridewithme or our website Kamenridewithme.com. Find Merch at KamenRideWithMe.com/merch. Song used Kamen Rider Love Song by Berserk used with permission Support Kamen Ride With Me: A Kamen Rider Podcast by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/kamen-ride-with-me-a-kamen-rid Find out more at https://kamen-ride-with-me-a-kamen-rid.pinecast.co Check out our podcast host, Pinecast. Start your own podcast for free with no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-198289 for 40% off for 4 months, and support Kamen Ride With Me: A Kamen Rider Podcast.

Happy birthday Betches! The OGs are back for a double feature this week. In honor of the special day, the 3 women reminisce on their college days aka where Betches was born. Aleen doesn't miss it, but Jordana and Sami would pull a hot tub time machine to relive it for a week. They then dive into all the celeb tea: Megan Fox's cryptic message amid her rumored split from MGK, followed by Penn Badgley's avoidance of sex scenes, Rihanna's stunning Vogue cover, Bennifer's cringe worthy tattoos, and Barney's alarming rebrand. They wrap up with a TV recap of Vanderpump Rules and the Summer House premiere. Tough call this week, but MGK will be sent to the Caymans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

on day two of my trip up to Iowa I sat down with Scott of Underground Art Studios in Cedar Rapids. Scott is a world class airbrush artist and one of the OGs of the custom motorcycle paint game! Support the podcast by joining our Patreon community where you can gain access to unreleased episodes! https://Www.patreon.com/fastlifegarage @simpson_motorcycle_helmets For me personally I have logged thousands of miles in Simpson's and the fit and quality is perfect for me from how I ride and how I wanna look rolling down the highway! Head on over to https://www.simpsonmotorcyclehelmets.com @Thundermaxefi I have ran these computers for years on my bikes, thundermax is the shit at keeping my bike running it's best and keeping my M8 cool with their electric fan! https://www.thunder-max.com Use Offer code “fastlife” for 10% off @arlennessmotorcycles From complete design collections that can take your bike from stock to custom. Or their parts can be the finishing touches to your custom build. Their performance line of parts give you the custom look we all want while maintaining functionality head on over to https://www.arlenness.com to check out all the amazing products for your build drop the FASTLIFE10 offer code to save yourself 10% on your purchases @lexinmoto I listen to everything from music and podcasts to even audio books as I smash miles across the country with lexin! Also don't sleep on their Gen 2 air pumps a must have for motorcycle travel to have incase of a tire issue https://www.lexin-moto.com Offer code “fastlife” for 15% off @lucky_daves Dave has provided us with a modular bar and riser setup that you can customize to your taste and needs! Pair those with the Lucky Daves seat and your golden for long open roads or aggressive fun! Check it all out at https://www.luckydaves.com Cowboy Harley has your HD needs covered with the performance upgrades we all want including service, sales and a stacked parts department plus the best gear and clothing. Check out https://www.cowboyharleyAustin.com and on Instagram @cowboyhdaustin Make sure to tell them The Fastlife sent you!

Whats up people, we got Ralph Barbosa in the studio today to talk about the recent comments from George Lopez & growing up in a cartel family. And THEN, we got just the boys chopping up about Ohio train conspiracies, UFC conspiracies, and why The Last Of Us is the greatest game ever. 00:00 Beef with George Lopez? 06:22 George Lopez called Ralph to apologize 08:32 OGs need their love too 10:50 Ralph doesn't even think George was being personal 13:50 Andrew Schulz's Slideshow Pain 15:16 Ralph is stuck in Dallas 17:46 Ralph - bum at heart + getting pum pum 21:41 Ralph's family involvement with Cartels 27:52 Ralph's dad and uncle did their time 33:15 Feeling like Michael Corleone 38:18 Ralph leaves before it gets too good 29:14 Dave Chappelle is Ralph's entry into comedy 41:51 Eddie Murphy + Chris Rock + Patrice are special 44:37 Online will let the talented succeed 48:42 People being nice is suspicious 55:02 Check Ralph Barbosa on Entrenos [HBO] 58:19 Ralph Leaves - Elon Musk jelly of Joe Biden? 01:00:47 Andrew's mom kissed another man? 01:03:53 Moms weren't getting RINSED 01:07:03 Back to Biden - fake humble 01:09:50 Control your troops - shouldn't be leaking 01:11:40 Did Islam Makhachev use an IV? 01:17:49 Incredible fight: scoring + pound for pound 01:26:14 Billboard's Rap list + Nicki Minaj might deserve her place 01:38:37 Super Bowl was rigged 01:40:13 Trains should never crash 01:42:58 Are there more poison cargo or people trains? 01:54:20 Andrew watching and playing The Last of Us 01:56:18 TLoU Episode 5 discussion 02:00:50 Best place to hide during Zombie outbreak? 02:01:23 Camp Gagnon's next episode - free diver insane story 02:03:00 Raiding camps or hurricanes - which would you pick? 02:05:25 Alexx would rather become a zombie + The Bloater

NATO har nu i et år vedholdende holdt fast i, at det er enkelte lande, der støtter Ukraines forsvar mod Rusland. Rusland derimod mener, at man står over for et samlet NATO - der bruger Ukraine til at udkæmpe en stedfortræderkrig med Rusland. I dagens Udsyn spørger vi, om NATO kan blive ved med at forsvare sin version af hvad der foregår. Det er ikke til at komme udenom i amerikansk politik - spørgsmålet om adgang til abort. Siden højesteretten sidste år ophævede den forfatningssikrede ret til abort i hele landet, har debatten kørt i højeste gear. Også præsident Biden har abortspørgsmålet så højt på sin dagsorden, at han inddrog det i State of the Union tale - men har ikke ret meget magt til at gøre sine vælgere tilfredse Tilrettelæggelse: Asta Handberg og Tine Linde. Vært: Brita Kvist. Lyddesign: Marie Kildebæk. Redaktør: Tine Møller Sørensen.

Tete vil gi nytt navn til Valentines, og Vita og Wanda forteller om godtestopp. Også skal vi en tur til Knulmyrveien! Hør episoden i appen NRK Radio

This week on the podcast Mikki speaks to Dr Peter Brukner, one of the OGs in the low carbohydrate space. They discuss how he was influenced by Professor Tim Noakes to do something about his own health when we realised he was no longer the fit, metabolically healthy man he was, and was challenged to do something about it. His own success with improving his metabolic markers then got him interested in the wider application of the approach for fat loss, improving blood sugar control and reversing symptoms of Type 2 diabetes led Dr Brukner to broaden his practice to one that educated and informed on the power of low carbohydrate diets for chronic disease. This has lead to him authoring a book (Fat Lot of Good) and setting up a not for profit organisation (Sugar by Half) and a new diabetes reversal programme, Defeat Diabetes. Peter Brukner is a specialist sports and exercise physician whose most recent position has been Australian cricket team doctor for the past five years.Peter is the founding partner of Olympic Park Sports Medicine Centre in Melbourne and Professor of Sports Medicine at Latrobe University. A founding Executive Member of the Australasian College of Sports Physicians, he served two terms as President and played a key role in establishing sports medicine as a medical specialty in Australia.Peter is the co-author of the widely used text book Clinical Sports Medicine and has been team physician for professional football clubs as well as national athletics, swimming, soccer and men's hockey teams including Olympic and Commonwealth Games. Peter was the Socceroos Team Doctor at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and more recently Head of Sports Medicine and Sports Science at Liverpool Football Club.He is the co-founder of the public health campaign SugarByHalf and is committed to the challenge of improving the nation's health with improved diet and increased physical activity. Links:Defeat Diabetes WebsiteBook: A Fat Lot of Good Contact Mikki:https://mikkiwilliden.com/https://www.facebook.com/mikkiwillidennutritionhttps://www.instagram.com/mikkiwilliden/https://linktr.ee/mikkiwillidenSave 20% on all NuZest Products with the code MIKKI20 at www.nuzest.co.nzCurranz supplement: MIKKI saves you 25% at www.curranz.co.nz

The OGs alone and in their element. With a string of guests and/or Rabbit, we come together for an episode with just the original 4 WOP members. We talk music, kurt has a scenario, and Ryan handles the bird opinions. All that and more in this episode of The WOP!

In this episode of #TBNE Rob chats with one of the most relevant OGs of the #entrepreneurship game Ronnell Richards, CEO and Founder of Business & Bourbon. He is a multi-time founder who creates experiences and opportunities through his businesses and content. This pod has been over a year in the making as we kept trying to get together in person but unfortunately, life has other plans. So we finally decided to get online and chop it up. Check out the full episode now!Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review.Connect with Ronnell Richards:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronnellrichards/https://www.businessandbourbon.live/Get Ronnell's Book “Shut The Hell Up and Sell”: https://www.shutthehellupandsell.com/Check out the STHUAS Podcast: https://www.shutthehellupandsell.com/thepodcastCheck out Rob's Episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugaBW3j5aHoConnect with Rob:www.robnapoli.comwww.linkedin.com/in/robnapIG: @robnapoli.riseupShow Produced by: Niranjan Deshpande (Nick), Broken Frames Studio, www.brokenframesstudio.comCreative Director: Maxim Sokolov, www.maximsokolov.com Selling is evolving, are you? Humantic AI is a Buyer Intelligence platform for revenue teams. If you are interested in learning more about Humantic AI use Rob's referral link https://app.humantic.ai/login/?referral_code=robnapoli  Special offer for #BearNation listeners interested in trying Brilliantly Warm (https://www.brilliantly.co/), use this 10% off discount code WELCOME10.The 8 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Choosing a Coach (and how to avoid them!) use this link to get your FREE download: https://www.thaxa.com/p/the-bear-necessities-of-entrepreneurshipWe have teamed up with Phin, a social impact company, to give back for each episode to the communities that we serve. To learn more or get involved with Phin for your company, visit: https://www.phinforgood.com/

With over 80% developer growth the past year, the Solana ecosystem has never been stronger. Chase Barker, Head of Developer Ecosystem at The Solana Foundation joins Brian Friel to talk about the current initiatives happening on Solana that excite him the most, along with the biggest opportunities he sees for Developers on Solana in episode 20 of The Zeitgeist. Show Notes:00:05 - Intro                            01:56 - Background / Start with Solana                        11:49 - Highlights from last year with the developer ecosystem16:13 - Latest exciting initiatives in Solana                  20:56 - Opportunities for devs in Solana 25:03 - Opportunities to build a project on Solana27:36 - Solana plays Pokemon" game           30:43 - Where will Solana be in 5 years                          32:55 - A builder he admires Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:00):Hey, everyone and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom and I'm super excited to introduce none other than the man, the myth, the legend, Chase Barker of Solana Foundation. Chase, welcome to the show.Chase barker (00:24):Hey man, thanks for having me.Brian Friel (00:26):This has been a long time coming. For those who don't know, Chase is the head of developer ecosystem at Solana Foundation. He's one of the earliest guys you could have seen if you were a developer coming into Solana. And it's special for me personally because Chase was the first person I reached out to on Solana. We actually did an episode on your old podcast, Chewing Glass at one point. It's great to be on the other side of the mic though, but officially welcome to the show, Chase.Chase barker (00:49):Thanks man. Yeah, it was super cool and it's also wild for me to be on this other side because we met in some interesting circumstances, you trying to dive into the whole ecosystem and I had no idea what I was doing and I needed help. And you wrote some really cool shit for me for the Solana Cookbook and here you are, leading Phantom. So anyways, I won't dive into that too much. Maybe we'll talk about it later, but it's super cool to be here, so thanks for having me.Brian Friel (01:15):Yeah, thanks for coming on. No, I couldn't agree more. Probably a good place to start, is maybe rewinding time a little bit, going back to some of those early days. Solana's pretty unique from a developer perspective. There was always, having worked in the industry pre-2018, it was always... If you're doing something development wise, solidity is the only game in town you got to be working in EVM. And Solana basically struck it out on its own and completely changed that narrative and you were around to see pretty much that whole evolution. Can you talk a little bit about your journey to finding Solana? Who are you, what were you doing, and what have you seen evolve in Solana since you've been there?Chase barker (01:56):Yeah, for sure. So I've told this story a lot and I'm going to keep this one shorter than I normally do, but I was an engineer for 12 years and then started trading crypto in 2017, made a bunch of money, lost it all in 2018, like most people. And then along that journey I found this project, Kin, who now exists on Solana, but they had their own fork of Stellar and I was into crypto and the bear market in 2018 and they had this hackathon thing and I built a tip bot with a group of other people to be able to tip on Reddit, discord, Twitter and Telegram. And I was like, okay, this is really cool. I really sort of hate my web2 job right now. I'm doing this government contracting work working on legacy Spring VC systems. It was miserable and I've talked about this a lot before and I just got everybody's email addresses and started saying, give me a job.(02:47):And they told me that all the jobs were based in Tel Aviv, but they have this developer relations role for Kin. And I was like, okay, that sounds great. What the hell is that? I had no idea what developer relations was at the time. So did a little bit of research, ended up taking the role and really just started working. They had an SDK, but documentation tried to grow a community. It's a little bit different. I'll get into this from Solana because Kin was like, this is the ICO days. Nobody really gave a shit about use cases. It was just like how am I going to be the most degenerate thing here. It was way ahead of its time, but eventually flash forward after a couple years of really loving what I was doing, traveling around the world, speaking at conferences, and helping people learn how to build in crypto.(03:31):And I heard, and it's March or April 2020 way early, and I'm talking, nobody that I knew, knew about Solana. So they were like, we're going to migrate to Solana this new blockchain. Nobody knows about it, but it's going to be super fast. Our tech team says it's great. So I followed along. Around December, I was involved in the migration process and I had spoken with Dan Albert, who's now the head of the Solana Foundation, and Raj and I engaged with a bunch of these guys but didn't really know them, but I was part of that migration. And then a little bit later into 2021, early 2021, people don't know this, but actually I was leaving Kin and I was looking for another role and I got hired by Circle for one week as a developer advocate. And then I saw Solana had a developer relations role, applied.(04:21):So I actually had an awkward situation where I had to tell Circle that “I know I just started, but I'm going to go work at Solana.” But the reason I worked at Solana is because I just DMed the shit out of Raj and Dan until they finally submitted into saying, okay, finally we're we're going to let you take this role. And at that time all that existed was the core documentation and the PaulX Escrow tutorial, aka the Solana Bible. And that was the start. May 5th, the day after my birthday of 2021, I joined Solana as the first sort of developer advocate and that's sort of the entry point.Brian Friel (05:01):Wow. So yeah, it's not really that long in calendar days. Chase barker (05:07):It's been 20 years. It's been 20 years.Brian Friel (05:09):Yeah, exactly. 20 years in crypto years for sure. A lot has changed since then. Maybe the only thing that hasn't changed is the strategy of just spam DMing somebody to try to get a job. I definitely tried to employ that with you back in the day. I know a few other people who have successfully deployed that strategy as well. But yeah, it's been crazy. There's a lot to talk about here. Maybe we just focus on the last year in particular because you mentioned 2021, it's a pretty crazy year. There was just the public tutorial on the docs and then all these people come in, you get anchor that gets built around that time. Solana takes off, a bunch of independent teams.Chase barker (05:49):Actually, let's go a little bit before that because I think this is just a really interesting thing and I like telling this part because when I started at Kin I was begging people to build on it because nobody was really building on blockchain except Ethereum at the time. And then I started with Solana and I had the exact opposite problem. You had a ton of people that were like, hell yeah, this sounds really awesome, but how the hell do you build on this thing? What the hell is rust? There's no documentation. You go into the Discord and the cord devs are just “go read the tests, that teaches you how to build on Solana.” And that's literally the world that we lived in at the time. And then started putting together this sort of part-time dev advocate team, if you want to call it that. I just skimmed Discord and looked for people who were helping others and be like, hey, come over here into this private discord with me.(06:39):And I'm like, help me scale myself. Because I was starting to write some example code and there was none of that. And then luckily I met Donnie and then Jacob and a couple other guys that are now full-time at Solana Foundation and they were helping in dev support. Jacob was working on the Java STK with Skynet Cap, if any of you guys know him. He was really one of the early OGs there. And then this whole group formed and they were writing content and then you reached out and contributed to the Solana cookbook and this whole thing just came out of nowhere. And I was literally sinking. The demand for Solana was so high because the tech was so new and the sort of hardcore engineers just really wanted to build, and the Dafi's and the Max's and the Armani's just figured the shit out.(07:28):But everybody else was like, let me, let me. And I could not do that on my own. I didn't even have the brain big enough to supply the knowledge to all these people. And then long story short, or maybe long story long is that you and I started talking and you wanted to be part of it and you wrote some really important stuff for the Solana Cookbook, I think retries, possibly PDAs and some of these other things. And it's like, thank you. And I do remember you being like, hey, can I work at Solana? And I didn't have any approval of power at the time and you left me and probably a month later I got approval to hire somebody else, but by that time you were at Phantom, but it seems like it worked out. So it is what it is.Brian Friel (08:12):I think you're right about the demands being so strong for people to figure it out that you just saw people coming together. A lot of times, you look at people who are evangelizing new tech and they're like, hey, here's this awesome thing. Try to explain it. And the first reaction of everyone is like, okay, cool, but then they just move on. And I feel like Solana was one of the few cases where that was the opposite, where everybody was like, this is incredible. How do I use this thing? How do I build this thing? And it was just this hive mind of people coming out of the woodwork to try to make it happen.Chase barker (08:43):Even me leading into Solana, and I say this a lot too because it's true in my mind, and I was like, listen to Anatoli and all this stuff, and I'm one of two things. This is the giant scam, or this is actually really fucking awesome. And luckily my instincts were right on that one and everything sort of worked out. And when I met you and then we started doing this part-time DevRel team that you were a part of for a while, first Solana Foundation.(09:09):And the next thing, my Twitter account became this thing where people would create content and I would share it and then somebody else would be like, oh, I want my shit shared. And then they would make content and I would share it. And this was this huge flywheel and that's really what turned into my account was this person who, you do cool shit, I'm going to share it. And then I became this other guy where I'm also, I do stupid shit and then I also share good shit. So it's this perfect mix of this idiot and then this guy who knows where the good stuff is.Brian Friel (09:46):You either die a developer or you live long enough to be a Twitter celebrity, I guess in your case?Chase barker (09:52):Yeah, I mean I don't necessarily love the celebrity side, but I do love getting DMs from people to say, Hey, all the things that you shared, and you probably hear some of the same like, hey, I got a job here because of this tweet that you made or this thread because I started making threads, who's looking for a job or who's whatever. And in the early days that's all we had, was Twitter. There was no other way to connect. I made a Twitter developer list and I added 300 people to it so that not everybody had to come into Solana Twitter and be like, follow each individual person and these were such manual, weird, really hard... I had no idea what I was doing. Luckily people showed up and were there and then just ran with it. I mean, looking back, dude, it's just awesome to look and see what's happened since then.Brian Friel (10:40):Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. Lots of connections made in those early days, like you said too, where people get jobs, all this kind of stuff happens and it's crazy how little interactions like that go really far.Chase barker (10:49):Yeah, exactly.Brian Friel (10:50):So I guess taking it now to this past year, so we're recording this January 2023. The past year in particular, if you were just an outside observer looking at crypto, you're like, wow, prices are way down, everything's dead. And there's a report that comes out just the other day, Electric Capitalist Developer Report, which says Solana developers grew over 80% in the year. You and I... I had an intuition for this, I'm sure you did too. It was just developer activity.Chase barker (11:20):I didn't have intuition. I actually knew.Brian Friel (11:23):Yeah, you knew. But other people I'm sure had intuition if you're around the developer ecosystem, it's not stopping. Developer activities keeps picking up, summarize a little bit in your words over the last year, what has stood up to you? What are some of the highlights? You mentioned you started this thing and it's just you and DMing people on Twitter and getting this thing going. Now it's a serious operation of a developer ecosystem here going. What are some of the things you're most proud of that stood out to you?Chase barker (11:50):Yeah, so I think the start of the year in January of 2022, we're all sitting there, and the crypto markets nuke, and the blockchain literally is devastated. And that was any sort of pre any sort of ideas about what is wrong, what is it? Basically it was all these sort of liquidators, spamming to try to liquidate people and that just turned into this thing. And I think by that point in time though, we had some really high conviction developers that were already super invested themselves in Solana. So they stuck around and I think that's very unique for that to happen. Everybody's like, when are you going to fix this? But it literally took two to three months before they even identified what those solutions might be and those solutions to many of you, the devs out there were quick and fee-markets and some of these other things that improved.(12:45):But even though these solutions were being built, that shit takes time. So during that same time, Solana NFTs were going through the roof and these bots were spamming the network. Luckily we're flash forward briefly to right now all of those things have been implemented, but the work is never complete. But we've been pretty battle tested and recently, but I think to your original question, what I'm most proud of is being able to keep that morale up, being able to really build out this sticky community and I'm focused on devs, but it's not just the devs. Without that normal diehard community, without the Dev community, without the NFT community, we would've failed miserably like every other blockchain that tried to do what we did failed.(13:33):But I think a lot of this really comes down to personal relationships and when you come into Solana and you get involved, people really cheer you on and there's that sort of camaraderie there that kept people here, even in the darkest of times. I'm just really happy. Like I said, I knew that those numbers were high and to be honest, a lot of the reason while I've been memeing about the 75 developer ridiculous reports that have been coming out, I was memeing it so hard in the last couple weeks because we crawled GitHub internally and we know where our dev numbers are and we always make sure that we know where those things are. So it was sort of funny to me to just keep memeing that and then knowing Electric Capital was going to put out a report that sort of reflected... at least they have some pretty strict rules around what they constitute a dev. Our numbers are slightly higher, but their rules are strict. As a full-time dev, you have to commit code X amount of days per month or whatever that is.(14:32):I'm sure they have that somewhere and the way that they do it, but yeah man, it takes a village to do this and there's not one person you can point to, but there's obviously some champions out there that really made people inspired to continue building. The proudest thing I can think of is all the shit we took this year and we're still here and now we just have been pretty much named and given the silver medal of the second strongest developer community in crypto and you got to give a shout-out to Eat the Kings, fully open source and putting up numbers for devs, so you got to give them credit.Brian Friel (15:06):Yeah, we mentioned a little bit early on about how it was a narrative violation for Solana to have a completely different programming paradigm to not be using Solidity to get into an account model lower level dealing with Rust.Chase barker (15:20):There was FUD that was like “Solana's using Rust? Good luck. You guys are basically screwed.” Nobody's ever going to build on Rust. So that was false.Brian Friel (15:29):Yeah, most loved GitHub developer language though I'm pretty sure that's another narrative violation for you there. So talking a little bit more about what you guys have been up to you, you mentioned you guys have been crawling the GitHubs and you've seen this dev activity, you now have a full-time team like you said that, that you're working with, but it's not just you guys at Solana Foundation, there's all these other ecosystem teams now. There's people like Super Team Dao who are doing their own thing, coordinating devs and building devs. I'd say there's stuff on the community side getting devs and raising awareness there. There's Lamport DAO, I might be giving you too many answers here, but the community side and the tech side, what are some of the initiatives that are happening right now in Solana that have you most excited?Chase barker (16:14):I think one of the most important things to note about Solana Foundation and Labs in general is the headcount stays low. This sounds weird to a lot of people, but our job is to make ourselves irrelevant in the next five to 10 years as an organization, the super team and the Lamort DAOs and Meta Camp and Singapore in these different groups, a lot of them will get grants from the foundation to get themselves up and running. But after that they basically become these sort of miniature Solana foundations where they start growing their community from the inside out and giving out grants and doing all these really cool things. But you think of Solana as this giant bubble and every time one of these new miniature groups spins out, the Solana Foundation bubble gets smaller, and then these other bubbles start getting more and plentiful to eventually you reach a point where Solana Foundation bubble was the size of the rest of these small groups.(17:08):This is the antithesis of Web 2.0, hiring as many people in as much headcount as you can and trying to own everything. I don't want to own everything. I want to find Mertz, I want to find Super Teams. I want to find Meta Camps and I don't want to just go find them and ask them. I want to find these guys that just put everything they have into Solana the blockchain and they're just so passionate about it, that it's like this is the team that we want to put our energy behind. In the beginning it really was a lot of us at Foundation and Labs doing a lot of the talking, but now you have these stronger voices and I'm not going to lie, it makes my life a lot easier to not have to be doing all that talking online anymore, but I still do it.(17:53):And I think the important point here is that if we're going to become a decentralized blockchain, we also want to become a decentralized organization itself and that means nobody has to get our permission. I think one of the greatest examples of no permission is Hacker House was kicked off, everybody's like, when my city and MTN DAO was like, fuck this, I'm just going to make my own thing. And they actually built the best thing that's really happened out of our community to date and they produced multiple, clockwork previously, Kronos, mtnPay, all these guys won hackathons.(18:33):Because T.J. Littlejohn literally came up with mtnPay at MTN DAO and a food line being like, Solana Pay just came out. Oh shit, maybe I should just build a payment thing with this new thing. And then he set up the system and people were paying with USD right there. So if that trajectory keeps happening through Solana, and I know other blockchains are trying to emulate what we do, but there's no way to emulate this unless you actually do this organically and it's happening. And anytime I just find somebody like a TJ or a  MERT or whoever or a Brian or whatever, I'm going to put all my time and energy behind them and that's literally my philosophy and the foundation's philosophy in general, I think.Brian Friel (19:15):Yeah, for sure. No, I've seen that too. It feels like there's more... Solana is the only ecosystem I know outside of Ethereum really is there are these factions not the best word, but it's these unofficial groups of people that... Maybe it started as simple as we like to ski in February and we want to get together and hack. MTN DAO, but it's becoming an official collective now. People are identifying with it. And it has influence in the community. I mean I totally see what you're saying too about the Hacker House is I know we had our own last summer, we kind of piloted the Summer Camp Hackathon fan of Sponsor [inaudible 00:19:51]. But I just see that model continuing to go and more and more teams coalescing around certain regions and sponsoring their own thing.Chase barker (19:57):And for everybody listening here, don't ask for permission, don't ask when, just literally do it. And if you do it and you do it well, the attention will get drawn onto you and then I'll come find you and I'll knock on your door and ask you how I can help. So that's really the sort of mentality that I personally have.Brian Friel (20:15):Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. That was my approach trying to work in this space, just do it and then ask for help or permission. Someone will find you. That's so much better than trying to ask somebody for permission to do something. So I guess that's a good transition to, let's put ourselves in the shoes of a developer who's looking at Solana right now. There's a lot of devs out there that might see Solana and they still think, oh, Rust and scary. That's probably not true. We can talk about that. But there's also probably a lot of devs who maybe know a little bit about Solana, they're kind of like right on the cusp, because they want to jump in. What do you want to say to these devs? What are some of the biggest opportunities that these devs should be looking at right now in Solana?Chase barker (20:56):Yeah, I think there's a couple things here. I think it depends on your demographic and age range. I mostly meant age range. So if you're in college right now, look up solanau.org and it's @SolanaUni on Twitter because Dana is our university relations person who is absolutely crushing it, sponsoring and participating in hackathons, doing workshops, just really bringing in my opinion, the next generation, the most risk averse group of people are students who are still funded by their parents that can make some sort of mistakes early on. So they're the next generation that's going to take this forward and luckily they have some really tech heavy guys out there that are just so dedicated to this, the Solana core engineers and the Jito team and all these different groups that are there to mentor them when they're ready to get in this. But I think SolanaU is probably a really high leverage thing.(21:54):We spend a lot of time working with Build Space who's built Solana Build Space Core, which is an amazing program. Things are getting easier. We're still in that place where new things are coming around the corner and I get a lot of shit for this, especially from Rust maxi's, but there's Seahorse Lang where you can build smart contracts on Python right now, not fully ready for production. There's a version of this in typescript coming. We're doing whatever we can to make it easier because the Chewing Glass thing is true and it's mainly true not because of Rust, not because of Solana, it's because learning Rust and Solana and all those concepts at the same time, is literally painful as hell. But content and all these other things combined put together right now and all of the sort of tooling that different groups are building like indexers and all these things are making the lives easier because as adapt dev you want to deal with “get program accounts and all that stuff”, it's not...(22:56):We're getting to a better place and it's coming right now there's a couple places, I mean solana.com/developers we're curating our own list, but I cannot negate what ELO from SOL Dev has done at soldev.app and the whole entire thing that he's built out. So I'm super bullish on a lot of the stuff they're doing. I think there's just too many things to name of how many independent contributors are out there just building shit. I said this the other day on Twitter, I know when things are getting really good when I can't even keep up with the retweets of the things that are being built that I have no idea about. And then you have this other guy that most people don't really know yet. His name's Jonas and I think it's Soul Play Jonas on Twitter,Brian Friel (23:40):He's our hackathon winner.Chase barker (23:41):Is he?Brian Friel (23:42):Yeah. So when we hosted the Summer Camp Hackathon last summer, we had a Deep Links prize and he won as the best use of Deep Links because he was the first to build a Unity game on Solana using it.Chase barker (23:53):I'm not going to dox his location, but I'm going to tell you this mfr is legend and really going to try to push the gaming world forward on Solana, which I think is the blockchain that has the best ability to actually scale. And I want to give credit where it's due, zk-Tech is going to be fucking amazing, but Solana as is right now, has the best chance to scale if a big top tier sort of gaming company hits and decides to leverage that tag.Brian Friel (24:24):Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I had Anatoly on as the first guest and he always talked about how his dream was blockchain at Nasdaq speed and it was like “it's DeFi all the way". Then you and I are both around for the 2021 craze where it was just all of a sudden it's the world's greatest JPEG trading machine, it's all NFTs. Now we're seeing stuff about gaming. Is there a certain type of developers interested in something they should come to Solana? It's just like everybody... It's not necessarily specialization here, but what are some of the biggest opportunities maybe if you're looking to start a company on Solana, build a project on Solana?Chase barker (25:03):Yeah, I think we're being honest here. If your use case does not necessarily require high throughput, then the options are pretty unlimited in blockchain. But if you want to be able to have fully on chain games.. And not to say that we both know this, when you're building a game on any blockchain, not everything has to be on chain and it's almost like not necessary to the extent, but DeFi, we need to reignite that on Solana. There's been a series of unfortunate events that–whatever, but I think there's a really strong group of people that are working on this open book DEX and this massive amazing thing that came true. But for me personally, I think that the big unlock comes in gaming and the real original use case of crypto that has never actually been solved, which is payments. I mean it's been solved but not in a usable way. If you're going to bring payments to new and emerging markets, the fees and stuff are important because the fees on some of these different chains is more money than is-Brian Friel (26:12):Not feasible. It's a non-starter.Chase barker (26:13):It's not feasible. And Solana Pay and a lot of these other payment options are starting to enable that. And I think it honestly just has the potential to change a lot of lives, JPEGs and all these other things. That's cool. And I love that people are having fun on blockchain also. Solana is definitely the funnest chain by the way, but payments, man payments, we have to do it. We have to get payments, remittances done on chain and Solana's the most equipped to do it, especially related to fees.Brian Friel (26:45):Yeah, I love you said it too about it being the most fun chain, priding yourselves with that because for a while, and I think you noticed this, with every new blockchain, something that starts, the first thing everyone does is copy what worked before. We're going to have an AMM, we're going to do some DeFi thing, we're going to have an NFT marketplace. But I'm starting to see now on Solana things that are uniquely Solana and just couldn't be done elsewhere. And it definitely feels like there's a unique culture. And I'll shout out too, one, we talked about T.J. Littlejohn and you mentioned payments, the Solana pay spec. Yeah, you can send payments to anyone, but you could send any transaction. So he built that NFT photo booth. You take a photo, scan it, and it mints as an NFT using the payment protocol. It's pretty cool. There's another one though, we just had him on as a guest, which will launch fairly soon on this podcast. Have you seen the “Solana Plays Pokémon” game?Chase barker (27:37):Yeah, I have briefly, but I don't know a ton about it.Brian Friel (27:40):I don't know. It's a game like that... It's like you said, it doesn't have to be crazy. It's not everything on chain, but it's almost like a new genre of game because here you have this emulator that's sitting off chain, it's playing Pokémon and it's like anyone can permissionlessly show up and just start voting to say, press this button, press up, press down. And Solana's so fast that it's basically processing these very quickly and all of a sudden you have people warring over, should we train a Squirtle? Should we release the Squirtle? Should we fight this gym leader? It's a toy today, but you can kind of see how wow, this could become kind of a new game genre where it's multiplayer and, you don't know who you're even playing with or against and it's all real time. It's all being coordinated. It's pretty wild.Chase barker (28:22):I think a lot, and I'm a big advocate of looking at the Web2 world and seeing what is possible on Solana, and also what makes sense because not every use case makes sense, but for example, like I said, I mentioned Shek earlier and Wordcel Club, which is the blogging platform and they're doing some other cool social primitives and it's like they're starting to open source those primitives, but why would you do something on web 3.0 that you could do on Web 2.0? And the answer is sort of incentives. And you look at some of these bigger social platforms that absorb 99.9% of the value and there's a way to distribute that value on web 3.0 that there never was in web 2.0. So I think that's an important one. There might be some disagreement here, but I think the group that really got closest to some sort of web 2.0 success was Stepn, because they went product first instead of... You see a lot of stuff in web 3.0 of it's like, developers first developing for developers, they're developing for things like that.(29:27):But Stepn was like, what does everybody do that we could reward them for and get this on chain? And that was working out, this is an incentive mechanism. Obviously it didn't fully work out and I think there's probably... They're working on that, but at the same time, we need to start thinking what in the web 2.0 world is working, how can we do that on web 3.0, and why would that app make sense in web 3.0? And then usually it's incentive mechanisms that give the user a reason to use it, but they're not going to do that with massive delays or lag times or all this stuff. It better work just like web 2.0 if not better if you're going to do that. So really focusing on things that Solana can do that other blockchains can't at this current moment is probably going to be some of the highest rate of success or at least some more of the higher impact things I think.Brian Friel (30:21):Yeah, I agree. It's got to be seamless in the background. There's people in crypto who care, but the vast majority of people don't want to sit around and wait for something to load. So we talked a lot about the state of Solana today, what you're excited about all these different people building. You alluded to this a little bit, but paint a picture for us. What do you see the Solana ecosystem five years from now?Chase barker (30:43):Five years from now, I see myself not having a job anymore, and I'm okay with that because I've said this since day one. If I do my job the way that I'm supposed to do my job by empowering, enabling others, then there's no need for a me anymore. And any true ecosystem that has a foundation or a labs, whatever, there should be a point that they're looking towards. The North Star is literally being able to walk away and that community in those small groups that you've sort of empowered and sort of distributed out, you can walk away and that shit just runs itself forever.(31:19):That's not just the blockchain that's actually distributed community, not just the distributed blockchain. So that's the North Star. Five years, probably not likely, but I do think in the next five years that it's going to be about as easy to build on Solana as it is to build on React. That's what I have in my mind. And we have the firepower in the ecosystem and the dedicated people that I already see completely just trying to push with Seahorse and all these other things. People are just thinking, how can I make this easier for people if we're already there two to three years in from [inaudible 00:31:59] Beta Solana, we're progressing rapidly right now and if we keep that rate in the next five years, it's going to be insane.Brian Friel (32:09):Love that. And yeah, the beta tag, I'm sure given all the trials and tribulations, we will be shedding that beta tag soon.Chase barker (32:17):I haven't seen the Bernie meme in a while and if anybody listening to this doesn't know, Anatoly said that we're going to drop the beta tag after one year from the Bernie meme that he posts about validators.Brian Friel (32:27):Zero days since last Bernie meme. Really? Okay.Chase barker (32:31):I mean who knows if that happens, but I haven't seen him post that Bernie meme in a while, so we'll see. We'll see.Brian Friel (32:36):Yeah, I'll miss that Bernie meme. We'll put some pit vipers on Bernie again, just for all time sake. Well Chase, this has been an awesome discussion, really great having you on, and it's been a long time coming. One closing question we ask all of our guests, I want to hear it from you, is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?Chase barker (32:55):So my initial sort of instinct is to probably mention somebody that's never been really mentioned before, but I can't not just talk about Armani because he was part of the first wallet. He was part of the framework that made Solana better in terms of developer experience with Anchor. And I mean I know he's now building another wallet and it's just the truth. Armani, his whole sort of ethos and what he is trying to do is just trying to make crypto usable and better for a lot of people.(33:34):And I think that's just an important thing for me and I really respect that about him. So I truly think that Armani is one of the people that I really respect the most in the space for what he's done and transparently and just like everybody who has a very large voice gets a lot of shit. And for people like that to stick around, it's incredible. We all deal with it. You work at Phantom, I work at Solana Foundation. Armani has worked at various groups or whatever and we have to just continue what we're doing and just deal with all the that shit we get and you just got to respect that, man. So that's pretty much my answer.Brian Friel (34:17):That's Awesome. I couldn't agree more. Well, Chase, it has been awesome having you on. Thank you so much for your time. Where can developers go to get started with Solana?Chase barker (34:27):Solana.com/developers or I'll also not show our own stuff and you can go to soldev.app as well. We have different offerings like soldev.app has a lot more, solana.com/developers has a little more curated smaller list, but both are very good options. So yeah man, that's the place. So check it out and let's get going.Brian Friel (34:53):Love it. Chase Barker, head of developer ecosystem at Solana Foundation. Thank you so much.

 LISTENFor some it was a disappointingly lousy movie from the 1980s... for others, it is a journey that began in the early 70s and extends to today's biggest Marvel blockbusters. Today the OGs are talking about that cigar-chomping, wise-quacking feather-bearing waterfowl... Howard the Duck. Maligned. Misunderstood. Also... duck junk. Racist cartoon gloves. Yolk talk. Eric ruins everything. QUACK!!!All Things Old Guys: https://linktr.ee/ogwltJoin the conversation (and see our artifact album) on our Facebook: facebook.com/oldguyswholovethings and talk to us via email: oldguyswholovethings@gmail.comFind Shawn online: http://www.gruegallery.com  and  https://www.shawndooleyart.com and http://www.dooleyfreelancedesign.comFind Eric online:  https://beacons.page/ericpschwartz (all music by Eric)Additional sound effects from https://www.zapsplat.com

We've had a great couple of weeks and are excited to share it with you guys! Mackin is back to work, Danielle met with an Astrologer, we've continued polar plunging and even meditating. But even with all that positive energy flowing, it wasn't enough to keep us from having one of our biggest fights ever. There was plenty we didn't get to in this episode that we'll be going DEEP into on this week's episode of Real. Late. Relatable. Like real fuckin' deep! We're so grateful to all of you who have already subscribed and if you haven't subscribed yet, you can support us by clicking here. Also, if you are one of the amazing OGs who was already giving monthly, your current subscription has been canceled and you would need to re-subscribe if you still want to stick around. We love you all and thank you for listening.

Guest: Maggie Presley, Sales Director -- Summa Cannabis / Panna ExtractsThere are some great (and not so great) people who helped build the Nevada cannabis industry as it is today. Today we're sitting down with one of the great OGs here in Vegas--Maggie Presley. Since the medical days Maggie has worked for numerous companies doing pretty much everything under the sun from compliance to sales to production and everything in-between.Topics discussed:Prioritizing who to work with in a saturated marketFor a sales director, what's the most annoying thing buyers do?CCB regulations that are simply a nuisanceMaggie's edible storiesHow to get away with smoking in a hotel roomFind Summa Cannabis and Panna Extracts products in dispensaries across Nevada!...........................................................................................Please Rate, Share, and Subscribe!Want to join the conversation? Email us at sellingweedpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Instagram: @arierrlSubscribe to our YouTube page: Selling Weed

Lex is out, but Daryl and Mat break down all things Super Bowl. From ideal menu to fave commercials to prop bets, plus a look at this year's game! The OGs also break down the new Pro Bowl, NASCAR in a football stadium and play by play news for Hall of Fame athletes all in this week's episode!Subscribe and rank on all podcast platforms.Follow us at facebook.com/reclinerkings and @ReclinerKings on Twitter and Instagram.Sponsorship questions at reclinerkings@gmail.com.

This week, Tyler and Brad talk about spirit week in high schools, specifically one dedicated to wrestling in the greater Phoenix area. Also, they talk about actual wrestling. The guys share their thoughts on NXT Vengeance Day.In WWE, the only item to discuss is Sami Zayn, Roman Reigns, and things happening around both of them. They break down what they saw, what they look forward to the most, and how the crowd reacted (or overreacted) to Cody Rhodes name.In AEW, the women are feuding and its the OGs versus the free agent signees. Jade continues to dominate, but will she join a side? Plus, Rampage is back! But in a bad way.Roses are delivered from Tyler, and Brad cuts a promo on people for telling him they're busy. Be sure to head to richkidmoneybear.com and use the code 19Media for 15% off of your purchase. Support those who support us, and support black-owned businesses!Gimmick Infringement is a proud member of @19MGroup. Head to 19mediagroup.com to check out all of their content offerings. Be sure to also go to gimmickinfringementpod.com to find extra content from the guys. All sound effects and clips come from freesound.org. Stock video files are courtesy of pixabay.com and Adobe Stock. Twitter: @WindDuster, @TylerJMcDowell, @GIPod19Instagram: @therealwinduster, @tymcdowellb, @GIPod19Web: gimmickinfringementpod.com, 19mediagroup.com Merch: https://19-media-group.myspreadshop.com/0:00 Intro 1:35 Spirit Week9:10 NXT Vengeance Day18:51 Sami Zayn32:18 Boos for Cody?38:56 A Rose from Tyler45:50 OGs vs Free Agents in AEW51:20 How to Re-Fix Rampage57:38 Promo of the Week1:00:53 The Week Ahead1:02:46 Closing

Annie Pearl is the CPO @ Calendly, the company that makes scheduling meetings simple and painless. Before Calendly, Annie led Glassdoor's product vision and user experience, managing a 70-person product and design org.  Shreyas Doshi is an investor, advisor, and all-around product OG. Most recently Shreyas spent over 5 years at Stripe where he was Stripe's first PM Manager and helped grow the PM function (from ~5 to more than 50 people). Before Stripe, Shreyas was a Director of Product Management @ Twitter. David Lieb is one of the product OGs of the last decade. As the founder of Bump David pioneered how over 150M users shared data, contacts and more before the company was acquired by Google. At Google, David took this one step further by creating Google Photos. Marty Cagan is one of the OGs of Product and Product Management as the Founder of Silicon Valley Product Group. Before founding SVPG, Marty served as an executive responsible for defining and building products for Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay. Aparna Chennapragada is the former CPO @ Robinhood, revolutionizing consumer finance with commission-free investing. Prior to Robinhood, she spent an incredible 12 years at Google, most recently as VP and GM for Consumer Shopping and also as the lead AR and Visual Search products.  Lenny Rachitsky is one of the OGs of product, having spent over 7 years at Airbnb as a product lead he left to start his newsletter, find it here. This has scaled to thousands upon thousands of readers and one of the most popular newsletters on Substack.  For the last 7 years, Kayvon Beykpour has been at Twitter where he led all of the teams across Product, Engineering, Design, Research, and Customer Service & Operations. Kayvon came to Twitter through Periscope, the live broadcasting app he founded that was acquired by Twitter in 2015. Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, investor, and currently serves as Adobe's Chief Product Officer. Scott oversees all of product and engineering for Creative Cloud, as well as design for Adobe. In 2006, Scott founded Behance, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. In Today's Episode on How to Hire a Product Manager, We Discuss: 1.) When to Hire Your First PM: What are the core signs that the founder must delegate and hire their first PM? What are the first things that are breaking when you do not have one but need one? How does the timing of the first PM differ when comparing B2B vs B2C? 2.) What is the Right Profile: What should founders look for in this first PM hire? What traits make the best? What are the biggest red flags in the personalities and styles of potential candidates? Should they have experience in the product domain they are entering? What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when analyzing the resumes of potential PM candidates? What should they look for in their resume? 3.) The Hiring Process: How To Hire a Product Manager How do we structure and run the hiring process for this person? What tests can we do to understand if they have the skill set we need for the role? How do we structure a hiring panel to make this process more effective? What are the biggest mistakes founders make in the hiring process for PMs?

Irfan Alam is the CEO of Frontrow Health, a startup with a mission to finally put Americans in the front row of their own healthcare. Will and Victoria talk to Irfan about his background in business strategy and development for healthcare companies, how he went about searching for and building the perfect team, and how he started the culture of Frontrow Health on a level where there is balance and people want to join because it has a good culture. Frontrow Health (https://thefrontrowhealth.com/) Follow Frontrow Health LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/frontrowhealth/). Follow Irfan Alam on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/irfanalam12/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Irfan Alam, Founder, and CEO at Frontrow Health, a startup with a mission to finally put Americans in the front row of their own healthcare. WILL: Hi, Irfan. Thank you for joining us. IRFAN: Thanks for having me; super excited to chat more about the whole process of building and launching Frontrow Health. VICTORIA: Yes, we're super excited. Of course, I know you as a client of thoughtbot, and I'm excited to hear your story. And you have this background in business strategy and development for healthcare companies. But what led you to decide to start your own platform? IRFAN: I think it was a combination of two things; one was a lived experience being inspired by the power of entrepreneurship with my family and then working at Everlywell. And then two, it was discovering and being reminded of a critical problem that I saw in the industry that I then became excited about solving. So growing up, I was raised by my two parents and my grandparents. My grandfather was an entrepreneur himself and also an immigrant and kind of brought our whole legacy of my family into the U.S. from Southeast Asia. He has always motivated me to take risks and to build something great for the world, and that's what he's always wanted for me. And so I joined Everlywell, a small digital health startup, back in 2019 because I was excited to get my feet wet in the world of startups. It was just within a number of months after that I had joined where COVID-19 hit, and Everlywell, a home lab testing company based out of Austin, got swept up into the storm of COVID and, in a lot of ways, threw ourselves into the center of the storm when we ended up launching the first home COVID-19 test. And it was that summer of 2020 when I probably had the most profound personal and professional growing experience of my life, just trying to handle this chaos and confusing world that we were all living in. But then also simultaneously watching how a small team could make an outsized impact in the world during a time of need. And that really led me to want to pursue my own startup ambitions. So I started thinking about business school. The founder and CEO, Julia Cheek, went to Harvard Business School in 2009 and publicly talks about it being sort of this magical moment in time where people were flooding in from the downturn economy, excited about solving new problems. And her class of graduates is sort of like a famous class of entrepreneurs. And so I brought it up with her, and she was super supportive. And I went through the process and got super lucky. And I decided to take the summer off in 2021 before coming to HBS and moving back to Boston. And it was during that summer where I started thinking about the problems that companies like Everlywell and direct-to-consumer health brands faced that I realized was not just at the fault of their own but because the industry didn't have the right digital tools necessary to succeed. That's sort of the origin of how Frontrow Health came to be. WILL: Sweet. So perfect segue; tell us more about the mission of Frontrow Health. IRFAN: We're on a mission to put people on the front row of their own healthcare. And we really just want to reimagine how people shop for their healthcare online. What I learned at Everlywell was that this boom of consumer health which means people who are taking charge of their own health and are able to do that directly through these digital health companies was a form of healthcare that could create a tremendous amount of value in people's lives. But that was only really accessible to a small niche audience. And it didn't feel like it was equitably accessible to the average American. And so some of those barriers that I realized as a part of my work at Everlywell for why the average American wasn't engaging with consumer health, this otherwise really powerful form of taking charge of your own health and wellness, was because of these three blockers that we're trying to address at Frontrow Health. The first being that people just don't know about what kinds of solutions are out there that can address their health issues beyond just taking a prescription medication given to them by the doctor that they visit in their office. The second is if they do know, they don't know what to trust. They don't know whether this spam of healthcare companies that they're getting advertisements on from Instagram are the right companies, whether these products are safe and effective for them uniquely because of their unique health issues their unique health history. And then finally, even if they are aware and they do trust the health product, at the end of the day, a lot of Americans just can't afford to spend money out of pocket to pay for these consumer health and wellness products like consumables, devices, virtual services, et cetera. And so Frontrow Health is all about trying to break down those barriers in order to unleash consumer health to the average American. VICTORIA: And were you always drawn to that healthcare industry from the beginning? IRFAN: Yeah. So I grew up very privileged with two parents who are physicians. My mom is a psychiatrist, which is quite rare for women of color, specifically of South Asian descent, to be a psychiatrist. And then my dad was a gastroenterologist. They were always the gut-brain connection between the two. And so, growing up, I somewhat classically assumed that I was going to be a doctor. Got to college, thought that that was going to be my path. I realized quickly that there is a whole world outside of being a physician yourself that I could still be a part of in healthcare without being a doctor. My parents actually, interestingly enough, began to encourage me to think beyond just being a doctor, with them both feeling like the amount of scale of impact that they could have would never be the same as someone who could do that through business or policy or these other facets that are important to healthcare. And so I got to undergrad, started studying policy economics. I started doing internships at different healthcare consulting firms. And I ended up first working at a life science business strategy consulting firm out of college. And it was great, but it ended up not being what I was most excited about because it was really focused on the biopharmaceutical and medical device industry. And what I realized when I got there was I just had this growing passion for digital health and technology, as I saw that it was kind of the future of how people were going to be able to take more preventative charge and improve their health over the long term. And so I was working on this digital health white paper with a partner at the consulting firm I was at, and I was doing research and stumbled upon Everlywell. And then, they had a job opening for this business strategy role. So that's why I ended up taking the leap into the startup world, into the digital health world, and just loved it and kept wanting to continue to grow my experience in that space. WILL: That's amazing. Your parents encouraged you to step outside of just the doctor-physician role and to think higher. So, as a founder, you know, it was amazing that your parents, as physicians, encouraged you to think higher and think into different roles. And as a founder, what were some of the decisions you had to make? What were some of the easier ones? What were some that were surprisingly difficult? IRFAN: I think the biggest misnomer of the founding experience is that founding a company is extremely linear. Sometimes you go one direction forward, and then you take a direction diagonally back, and then you go horizontally straight, and that was my story. When I do my pitch about Frontrow, I try to make it feel a little bit more linear, so it makes sense to people. But the truth is the quote, unquote, "hardest decisions" were about every time there was a direction changing point, and it required a decision about is this the right idea? Do I want to spend more time on another idea? Have I validated this enough? Should I validate it differently? Should I pursue this one further? What does that pursuit look like? Who should I pursue it with? Is it time to raise money? Do I drop out of school? Like, those direction-changing points that then create this much more complex map of the founder experience versus a linear line up into the right is, I think, the more challenging parts of being a founder. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense that you have to really go through this iterative process to figure out where are you spending your time, is it in the right place? A lot of hard decisions to make. And while you were founding Frontrow Health, you were also a part-time investor at Rock Health and reviewing other healthcare startup proposals. So did you see any trends or patterns that influenced how you progressed as a founder? IRFAN: Totally, yeah. That was actually instrumental to Frontrow Health. So the story is when I took the summer off before business school, I started thinking about different problems in the world, healthcare, and non-healthcare. Or actually, to be clear, I started thinking about lots of different solutions and ideas and then quickly began to realize that that was not the right approach to founding. I think the first step is to think about problems, problems you've seen, problems you've experienced, that you know others are experiencing, and then work to a solution from there by starting with what the user is experiencing. And so as I was going through that hacky journey over the summer, just randomly, a number of small healthcare companies started reaching out to me asking me for my opinion and advice about how or whether they should go direct-to-consumer, whether they should sell healthcare products direct to the consumer, which is what I did a lot of work on at Everlywell as one of the pioneering consumer health brands in the space. And I started to notice this trend of me telling these companies, "No, don't do it. It's really expensive. It's really ineffective and unprofitable to acquire customers through traditional paid media avenues like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, et cetera." And, unsurprisingly, you could imagine Everlywell was trying to sell a home diabetes test for people who are type 2 diabetics but were only able to target people based on their interest in yoga and running, which is not really a substitute for a severe chronic condition. And as a result, thousands of people would see our ads every day that had no clinical relevance to our solution. And that was one of the deep problems of why consumer health companies weren't able to reach out to the audiences that actually really needed their solutions. And so when I got to Rock Health at the first semester in business school, doing this sort of part-time investor gig, on the first day, the partners basically told me, "Oh, we don't invest in consumer health." And I was like, "Oh, whoa, okay, that's my jam. That's a bummer. That's like [laughs] the only thing that I know about." And as I started to see the data and the pipeline of companies that were looking for investments and understanding what their unit economics looked like, what their go-to-market approaches looked like, that's when I started to put the dots together that this was not just an Everlywell problem; this was an industry problem. Mark Zuckerberg didn't build Facebook so that direct-to-consumer healthcare companies can cost-effectively target clinically relevant patients online. That just happens to be what it's being used for today. And so that's when I started to realize that there had to be a quote-unquote, "better way." WILL: You bring up social media at Frontrow Health. Have you had to combat the medical advice of social media? IRFAN: Yeah. You mean like this concept of quote, unquote, "Instagram medicine?" WILL: Yes. Yes. IRFAN: It's a great question. So as the story continues, I began to think about what is the right solution to this problem? And instead of Everlywell, I started thinking about the right solution to this problem. What I realized was instead of Everlywell wasting away millions of dollars to big tech companies that wasn't going to improving the health of anybody, what if we gave that money back to the consumer in reward for sharing their health information which would allow us to target them with the right clinically relevant products? That was the first version of Frontrow Health. I called it Health Mart back then. And so I basically started to get people to fill out a Google Form with their health data. And then I worked with my parents to send weekly product recommendations over email based on their unique health needs; you know, I want to sleep better; I'm a diabetic, whatever it is. And then, I wanted to see if I was just going to Venmo them cashback upon purchase if they were going to be any more likely to buy these products for these health brands. And at first, people were incrementally more likely to buy. It wasn't mind-blowing. And so, as I started to talk to the participants of the study, I started saying, "You know, you said that you have high cholesterol. These supplements have active ingredients that have been shown to reduce LDL levels. It's pretty cheap. I'm giving you 25-30% cashback. Why haven't you bought it?" And what they started saying was, "Well, I don't know what these active ingredients are. And before I put that in my body, I want to check with my doctor first." And so that was the final aha moment that led us to Frontrow Health, which is, what if we could bring the doctor into the fold? And instead of consumers just experiencing this Instagram medicine where they're just being blasted with Instagram ads every day about different health products, and they don't know what to trust, that second barrier that I talked about earlier, what if the doctor could instead of just being a guide for what prescription medications you should be taking could also be a guide on what health and wellness products you can be using? And so I added my dad to the email thread, and I said, "Okay, you can talk to an independent medical provider and ask them questions about the products that you're being recommended." And that's when people started buying because then they were able to find the trust in the products that were being curated based on their unique information. WILL: Wow, that's really neat. So to help the audience understand your iteration today, so the first iteration was just giving products and then Venmoing them back cashback. And then the second was bringing in a provider. So what does the product look like today? IRFAN: We went through, like you mentioned, a lot of different iterations of this. There were even prior iterations to this that are more representative of that founder map versus the linear line that you've sort of just heard now. But in terms of where the story went from there, I began to think about how to validate this idea further. I came into winter break; the pilot went well. People were buying a lot of products. And so, I decided to sunset my part-time investor gig at Rock Health and decided to reallocate all my time to working on Health Mart at the time. What I started to think about was, well, what if the doctor was able to earn compensation for writing private product reviews regardless of their opinions? So that was the next iteration was like, how do you incentivize a doctor to take time out of their day to do this new behavior that doesn't exist? Doctors are not writing personalized private product reviews for their patients on supplements, home medical devices, apps, et cetera. And how could we get them to? And so, I started thinking about what are the different motivations of providers? Their time is extremely valuable. How do you incentivize them correctly without incentivizing them to give good or bad feedback but just honest feedback? Then I started basically having my dad recommend Health Mart to his patients every day to see would patients sign up. Like, if doctors were intrinsically motivated to get their patients on the platform so that they can help them get away from Instagram medicine and at the same time earn compensation for themselves as an additional revenue stream, could independent medical providers see that as valuable and a good use of their time? And the first piece of that about whether patients would sign up worked unsurprisingly very well. If your doctor is telling you to sign up for something, or it's free to sign up, and you only pay when you want to buy a product, and they're going to, for the user, be able to ask for feedback from the provider, they were pretty excited. But then the question of would doctors sign up, I started...basically, I had my mom. The next iteration was I had my mom make a couple of posts in these doctor Facebook groups. I put together a little website, a very ugly version of what we have today for a provider marketing page. And I had my mom drop the link in a couple of different doctor Facebook groups. And we actually started getting signups from the doctors. And then, as we started talking to them, what we realized was two things; it was like a win-win. The doctor was happy because they were getting compensated, and they were happy because their patients' health was improving. So when Obama was in administration, he passed a really fundamentally important piece of legislation called The Sunshine Act. And that basically ended this quote, unquote, "golden era" of pharma companies giving kickbacks to doctors. WILL: Oh wow. IRFAN: And so since then, doctors have been very eager to find additional revenue streams that they can leverage their decades of medical expertise to earn. They got medical bills to pay off loans to pay off. They spent 20 years training for this job. And so they were excited about an additional revenue stream that leveraged their medical expertise and also helped their patient. Because they also started saying things like, "Well, my patients are always asking me like, 'What about these supplements I saw for these ads online?'" And the doctor says, "I don't know what these supplements are. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: I don't have the data in front of me. I don't know what the ingredients are. I don't know whether to trust the company or not." And we are building a platform where it's all streamlined for the provider. The provider is able to review the clinical information. They're able to review their patient information. They're able to really quickly write reviews. We give them templates. We give them suggestions. They're able to reapply recent reviews. And so that was sort of the next iteration. And that's actually when thoughtbot came in and when I started thinking about raising a small round, getting a dev shop to help me build the MVP. And that's kind of how the semester ended up closing out. VICTORIA: I love that your mom and dad were so supportive, it sounds like, of you going full-time on this startup. Was that scary for them for you to do that? IRFAN: It's so funny, yeah. So what happened next was I decided I wanted to start raising a small round because I had the conviction that there was a problem to be solved for consumers, for doctors, and for health brands. And we could build this one unique multi-sided marketplace to solve them. I ended up going back to Austin for spring break partially to visit my family and partially because I wanted to pitch to Julia, the founder of Everlywell, who I thought of all people on planet Earth would understand what I'm trying to do. She would get it because I am building a SaaS solution for health brands like Everlywell and her consumers. And she got it. She was jazzed. And so, she decided to angel invest. And that basically spurred a ton of interest from venture capital firms. I wasn't originally thinking about raising an institutional round but was very lucky with the timing. Just before the market crashed, it was a very hot market. And so we ended up closing a real seed round with the question on hand about whether I should pursue this full-time because the capital that I raised necessitated building a real team. Or should I just take a smaller amount of money and go back to school? And it's unsurprisingly, every different person in my life had some opinion about this, from my wife to my investors, to my parents, to my friends. What I wanted was somewhere nestled in between all of those things. And when I caught my dad up on the phone a couple of weeks after spring break and told him of all the crazy stuff that had been happening...and it was just happening and unfolding so quickly. I was like, "Okay, dad. I'm laying out all my cards here. You have full liberty to be mad at me for wanting to drop out of Harvard." And his first reaction was, "Well, you know, I don't really see the downside. Like, you could either start a company that you're really passionate about and it could go well, or you could be the worst entrepreneur of all time and then just come back to school during this leave of absence," or deferral thing that I'm on right now. And that was the first time where I was like, "Oh, you know what? I think you're right." And the truth was I decided to just continue to let the summer go by to think about the decision a little bit more before I formally submitted my deferral to HBS. As the markets turned, we realized that we needed to hire internally to save on cash burn a little bit. And so once I had built this really awesome team that I'm so lucky to be surrounded by, that's when I was, you know, without a doubt in my mind, I was like, I got to keep pushing for this because now we have this awesome team that just wants to keep driving this mission forward. And we were getting traction. We were talking to hundreds of doctors over the summer. We were talking to health brands. And it really felt like we were onto something. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. That's T-B-O-T.I-OVICTORIA: I-N-C-U-B-A-T-O-R. WILL: I hear you have an amazing product team. How did you go about searching and building the right team? IRFAN: We got lucky in a second way because of timing, where the first time was I raised the capital when the market was really hot in April. And then, I started hiring when the market crashed. And, unfortunately, as you all know, lots of people have been getting laid off since the summer, particularly in the tech world: designers, engineers, marketers, et cetera. Now, all of a sudden, there was a flood of really great talent on the market. And that was also what spurred me to start thinking about hiring sooner than I was originally planning to. My forecast was to hire people end of this year, maybe in a month or so from now, to start that process. Versus, we ended up making our first full-time hire, I guess in July, maybe. And it was...the best way I can describe it is like dominoes falling where once you get the first one in, then it builds trust and credibility, and then the next one comes, and the next one. And so the first couple of folks were these two brilliant engineers who were close friends of my interim CTO and classmate, Amit, who was helping us build the foundation of the product this past summer. He did an amazing job of basically recruiting one engineer, Anand, our first engineer who started his career as a PM at Microsoft and then turned into a software engineer at a number of different startups and studied comp sci and electrical engineering at Berkeley with Amit, where they first met. And then the second engineer was Nupur, who was a colleague of Amit, a machine learning engineer at Google Brain and the moonshot X team at Alphabet. And they were both, I think, just kind of tired of big tech and were ready to bet on the upside and their career. And the timing was right based on where the market conditions were. And so they decided to take the leap of faith with me. And then after that, or around that time, kind of in the middle, we were able to bring on our head of design, Jakub, who is like a unicorn human with so much rich experience in the product world. So he was a computer animator and then studied visual arts, but then started his career very early in the coupon website space as a product designer actually. And then led product design as a founding designer at a number of different startups. And then, most recently, was a senior product designer at Roman, which is a really large digital health company similar to Everlywell. And Ro, Everlywell, Truepill, all these companies had mass layoffs in the middle of the summer. And so when Jakub took my call...He talks about a really funny story where he wasn't taking me seriously at all. Convincing these excellent, talented people to come join my dinky startup at the time was not easy. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: And so he just kind of took it because there was a mutual connection. Or he just said, okay, I'll explore what's going on given how crazy the market is. But once he heard what we were building, he was immediately on board, actually, because Roman has also struggled with the same customer acquisition problems. And it's a huge reason why a lot of these digital health companies continue to remain unprofitable. And so he understood the problem deeper than I think anyone because of the experience he had in the same space that we were in. And he realized that there was an opportunity to build a solution to solve these problems. So that was the first core team. And then from there, it kind of just snowballed, you know, there was more and more interest from other folks to join. And we brought in a great junior product designer. We just hired our platform engineer. But that was the original core team from the summer who took the big leap of faith and joined because of the market conditions, the belief in the space. And we actually just met up in San Diego for the first time for a company retreat in person. And it was just fun meeting everyone in person for the first time because now I get to know them as real people and see all their personalities. And we're really psyched about coming to product launch pretty soon here. VICTORIA: That's wonderful and, you know, that compelling vision and having those first initial people join and brought in everyone else. You know, I think part of the reason people are hesitant to join startups is because there is that reputation for kind of unhealthy work-life balance. So you're a healthcare startup. So how do you start the culture of your company on a level where there is that balance and people want to join because it has a good culture? IRFAN: It's a super interesting question that we spent a lot of time actually talking about in San Diego as a team. And it was brought up because I have a somewhat unhealthy relationship with work. And I am constantly working. And this is the most important thing right now in our life. And so Nupur, one of our engineers, had a phenomenal analogy that I think is the right framework to think about this from a company culture perspective. Because I've always tried to share with a team, like, I don't expect them to work nearly as much as I do, and I don't want them to either. I think the analogy was such a fun, helpful way to think about why that was the case. And so she kind of said, "I'm like the aunt, and you're like the single father. And the aunt doesn't have to take care of the baby at nighttime and on the weekends, but the single father does. And it's not that the aunt doesn't care about the company, but there's some space and boundary in that relationship." And so that's actually our motto right now is like, yeah, we all care about this product and this company, quote, unquote, "baby," but there's always biologically intrinsically going to be a deeper relationship between me and this company, for good reason. And so that is going to require me to work harder and longer than anyone else, probably for a long, long time. And I had to be ready for that. My wife and I had to be ready for that. And so far, honestly, I've never been busier. But I've also never been...or, like, I've never had this ratio between busyness and stress where I'm really busy but not that stressed. And I think it's just because I love what I'm doing every day. I haven't ever found this happy balance where I actually just enjoy what I do. And I'm constantly excited about continuing to build the right product to help people. WILL: Wow. VICTORIA: I'm actually babysitting my niece and nephew this weekend. [laughter] My brother would say, "You need to be here on the weekends with them." IRFAN: Maybe not the perfect analogy. But-- VICTORIA: I like it, though. It makes sense. [laughs] WILL: There's a difference. [laughter] VICTORIA: Oh yeah. Will knows; he's a dad. WILL: Yeah. I know company values can be so...we have them. Do we follow them? Or sometimes they get put on the shelf. I was reading your company values, "People first, bias for curiosity, and dream big." For Frontrow Health, how does that play a role in the day-to-day? IRFAN: When Jakub, Nupur, and Anand had all joined like that first core team, we actually spent time writing all this out and creating a document that discussed what the company culture and values were. And we looked at different examples of other companies. Amazon famously has, I don't know, these 16 principles. And we kind of said, okay, we want to pick just a couple because you can't always focus on everything at the same time. And we need some sort of guiding North Star if you will. And so these were the three that we came up with, the ones that you mentioned. So we are people first; we have a bias for curiosity, and we want to dream big. So people first to us means that our mission like we talked about, we want to increase access to healthcare at home for the average American. And so every decision that we make at the company has to pass that litmus test first. Whatever feature we're building, whatever business model approach we're taking, whatever go–to–market approach that we're taking, is what we're doing going to increase access to healthcare at home for the average American? Yes? Then we continue onwards, and then we continue deliberating and deciding; if not, we pass. And so that is how we determine whether we can continue to be people first because that is our mission. And as we're going down that thread, we want to push ourselves to constantly be bettering and asking questions about how we can be better. That is the bias for curiosity. That was one of Everlywell's company values and was the one that I resonated with the most. I find tremendous value in asking questions. Nupur on our team, one of our engineers, is a great example of bias for curiosity. She's constantly challenging and asking the right questions. And that helps us be better at being people first and increasing access even more than we can because we're never settled with what exists today. And then dreaming big is about finding answers to those questions and not settling for the tried and true paths. Some of the greatest companies that have ever been created are the ones that invent new behaviors that have never existed before. So Airbnb, now all of a sudden, people are comfortable with strangers living in their homes. Uber, now all of a sudden, people are comfortable driving in a stranger's car. At Frontrow Health, we're dreaming big in a world where doctors are not currently engaging with their patients related to their home health and wellness journeys when they leave the four walls of their clinic. How can we change the behavior where doctors are more involved in that relationship in a way that doesn't exist today? And so that's a part of what we're trying to do, and dreaming big to go and increase access, like I said, is our ultimate North Star. WILL: Wow. You said something I think that was...it seemed very small, but I think it said a lot about you and your company. You said that you encourage your engineer to ask the hard questions. I think so many times, people hate the hard questions. They are fearful of that. But I think in your field, you have to be able to ask the hard questions. So that's amazing that you brought that up, and you're talking about that. IRFAN: Yeah. And it doesn't...it's not just me, for sure. I think my team is...and it's kind of you to point that out. But yeah, my team does such a great job of holding true to these values on their own and pushing me to remind myself of these values. Nupur actually is Slacking me right now about some thought that she had coming out of a meeting. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: And two points about different alternative ways to think about things. And yeah, I want to keep encouraging them and our future employees to do that. Because you look at the worst examples in healthcare, in particular, tech as well, the worst examples of companies are the ones where the employees were not able to or encouraged to ask questions; that's when things go south. So Theranos is the simplest example of this where they were hiding everything from their employees, and people had questions constantly but never asked them. And that's when more and more bad decisions were made. So I don't want that to be the case for Frontrow. And so it has to start with, yeah, this bias for curiosity. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And I wonder if that's part of your success, being someone who doesn't have a background in engineering or programming specifically and enabling your technical team to build what they need to get done. IRFAN: Yeah. I can't honestly explain to you guys how much I've learned over the past six months from my product and dev team. And you're right that I think one could see my lack of programming as a weakness which, in a lot of ways, it is. But what has also manifested as a result of that is I have naturally had to lean more heavily on my dev team to be owners of decisions that affect our business and to challenge them to think about are we being people first if we build and design solutions in the way that you're describing? I don't know the right approach about how to build this, or on what tech stack, or in what capacity we have the ability to. You guys have to take ownership of thinking through those, solving those problems, and coming up with the right decision. And as a founder, that's scary to do. You're giving up control of the decisions to others. But at the same time, by giving them that autonomy and encouraging them to take ownership of it, they feel I think more and more invested in what we're building. And that hopefully builds the habit of what you guys were talking about around wanting to constantly seek better solutions, challenge because they know that they have a voice in how things turn out. VICTORIA: Right. Maybe you've discovered this naturally or through your education and background. But studies that are done around high-performing technology organizations find that no matter what processes or tools you have if you have that high-trust environment, you'll have better security, more software development throughput, all of those things. So I think you're doing it right by setting your values and creating that kind of high-trust environment. IRFAN: Super interesting. I didn't know that, actually, but it makes sense. [laughs] We've been seeing it. I actually want to give some credit to thoughtbot because thoughtbot helped us set a lot of this important engineering culture at the very beginning, where I had to rely on my thoughtbot engineers, folks like Jesse, Dave, and others, to help me make the best decision for my company. They taught me a lot of these things at the earliest stage back in May around, okay, like, you guys are a consulting firm at the end of the day, technically speaking. But they pushed me to think of it more as how do we co-make these decisions? Like, how do we leverage each other's strengths to make the right decisions? The thoughtbot design team and engineering team...one of our designers through thoughtbot, Steven, is so funny because...and I gave him this feedback, which is great feedback, which is like, he constantly asked questions. And if he hears this, he'll laugh because he's constantly pushing, like, "Why are we designing it this way? Why do you think it should be this way? Where is the evidence that the user wants it to be this way?" And it was a great setup for when our internal team came on because I just kept up that momentum. And then they just kind of took with it and ran. VICTORIA: How did you find us, or how did you find the right technical partners in the very beginning to help you build your vision? IRFAN: It was not an immediately simple process. But when I found thoughtbot, it kind of unraveled quite quickly in a good way. So I was working with Amit like I mentioned, who'll become our interim CTO, one of my classmates at HBS. And he helped me put together an RFP where we outlined all the different feature requirements, all the different intentions for our solution or timeline, our costs, et cetera. And I just did a lot of Google research about different dev shops, and I started talking to dev shops in lots of different locations, U.S.-based, European-based, Asian-based, Latin America-based, started comparing prices. We had questions where we wanted to see their creativity in developing solutions. We started accepting proposals, reviewing those proposals. I somehow stumbled upon thoughtbot's website during this process. And I noticed that Everlywell was one of thoughtbot's clients, Everlywell, the home lab testing company that I used to work at before business school. I was like, oh wow. I knew that our engineering team and our engineering leadership had a really high bar for when we worked with outsourced talent. And so I thought that that spoke volumes about choosing thoughtbot. And so then we actually ended up asking Everlywell CTO an unprompted question of like, "If you had to pick any dev house that you've known or have worked with, et cetera, that was supposed to build you custom software from scratch, who would you pick?" And he said, "thoughtbot." It wasn't even like a question of, what do you think of thoughtbot? Or, what was your experience? It was just like, imagine you had to pick, and, unprompted, he said thoughtbot. So that was actually what did it for me. And I kind of threw aside all the other logistical hoopla that we were going through and said, you know, I got to trust the people who I know and trust, and having verbal confirmation of that was huge. And then, of course, I enjoyed speaking with Dawn at thoughtbot, who was helping broker the whole discussion, and it felt easy. And their proposal was also quite strong. And then, as I dug deeper into thoughtbot, it became clear that no pun intended, you guys are kind of the thought leaders in a lot of ways. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: It's funny, our head of design, Jakub, when I mentioned that he's a unicorn, it's because he also taught himself coding and programming. WILL: Wow. IRFAN: So he's like a pseudo designer and programmer. He can do a little bit of everything. And he actually...when I told him that we were working with thoughtbot, he was like, "Oh, I learned Ruby on Rails back in the day from thoughtbot with whatever content they had published back in time." And then, as I spoke to other dev shops about going with thoughtbot, they started saying things like, "Oh, thoughtbot, yeah, they're kind of the OGs of Rails and a lot of the core tech stack that's been around for a while." And so it was just continued validation of the right approach. And then, we started working with the team in May, right after my second semester of business school ended. And it's been an incredible process. We have never missed any deadlines, and we're actually two months ahead of schedule. And it's not just because they're good at what they do, but it's also because of the culture and the teaching me about the best way to run retros, and sprint planning, and things to think about in terms of trust in your engineer and building that trust, and all the soft, intangible things. It wasn't just like thoughtbot came in and built code. It was thoughtbot came in and helped establish the company in a lot of ways. VICTORIA: That's great to hear. Thank you for saying all those wonderful things. I'm sure me and Will agree 100%. [laughter] IRFAN: Yeah, it's been an awesome process. And yeah, we've even ended up basically bringing on as a full-time independent contractor someone who worked through thoughtbot because we love them so much. And they were just so excellent at what they did. And just, yeah, I think that probably speaks the most volumes about the kind of organization that you guys are running. WILL: I appreciate you saying that. That means a lot. It really does. I want to take a second to kind of circle back and kind of talk about how you find the providers because I think, for me, one of the most influential classes I had in college was my professor said, "Hey, meet me at the pharmacy." So we went to the pharmacy, and he started asking us questions. And he was like, "What medicine do you think would be the most impactful?" And we would try to pull it out. He taught us how to compare the active ingredients. IRFAN: Wow. WILL: Like how some stuff is just marketing, and it's not really helpful and things like that. But I also saw the side, you know, the amazing providers like your parents. You talking about your parents just reminded me of my parents and how supportive they are. So it's just amazing. You had your parents as providers. How did you find providers beyond that that you have to extend that trust to them? IRFAN: I guess two reactions. The first is how do we talk to doctors to get feedback on our solution as we're building it? And then how do we get doctors to sign up and use our solution with their patients? Those are the two chronological steps. So for the first one, we very liberally use a platform called usertesting.com, which we used at Everlywell, where I first got introduced to it. And it's amazing. We have the unlimited package, and we run tons of user tests a day. So, over the summer, we were literally having unmoderated tests from medical professionals, about ten healthcare professionals a day who were coming to our website, coming to our product, giving their feedback through these unmoderated tests. We were quantitatively assessing qualitatively assessing their responses to specific questions that we were asking them. Like, was it easy enough to write a review? What were you expecting to see? How did that compare to what you did see? Like, all the traditional kind of user research. They really helped us build the product, and then we were able to follow up with them, get on the phone with them, ask them more questions about their experience, about their current experience in their clinic, whether patients are asking them about these things, about their interest in certain supplements, et cetera. And then we actually had one medical provider, a family practice nurse practitioner from Vermont, who was so excited about what we were building. She was sending me all this other information and content about how to reach out to other doctors and stuff. And then, at the end of the summer, when we were just about ready to start getting our beta off the ground, we were going to choose one provider to work with who was going to recommend it to their patients, and they were going to slowly kind of monitor the experience. This nurse practitioner actually just happened to reach back out, and we happened to connect again. And she's like, "Okay, what are you guys up to? Are you guys done with your product? I really want to use it." And I was like, "Oh, wow. Well, it's great timing because we're looking for our first medical provider." WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: And so that's where we ended up launching beta with, which was awesome. And since then, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the go-to-market approach beyond just one medical provider. How do we scale to thousands of medical providers? And luckily, selling to doctors is a solved problem, like; the biopharma and medical device industry has been doing this for decades. And so it was really just a part of me brushing up on a lot of the work that I was doing in life science consulting about helping Big Pharma and whatnot go to market and just stealing a lot of notes out of their playbook. So, for example, there are companies that allow you to run ads online that just target physicians. So instead of my dad seeing a Lululemon ad while he's reading The Wall Street Journal, he'll see an ad for Frontrow Health. And so we actually run marketing tests over the summer, towards the end of the summer, with a newer provider landing page that we had built to see what percent were going to click on the ads, what percent were going to come to the website and sign up, and then how much cost would that be per acquisition of a provider. And the results were actually much better than we thought. It was half as expensive as what we originally predicted, which is awesome. WILL: Wow. IRFAN: And that was before Jakub, our new head of design, had even touched the website. We're actually just revamping it right now because he's been going through and revamping other aspects of our product and marketing experience. And now we're at the provider part. So we're actually going to be just about a week or so away from launching the marketing tests and actually getting every day more providers on the platform. The product is now done, so they can start getting their patients on the platform. We just signed our first health brand. So now people are getting real product recommendations and getting ability to earn cashback. And we can be revenue generating, which is also super exciting that we're, like I said, a couple of months ahead of schedule, actually. VICTORIA: That's really exciting, and that certainly sounds like enough on your plate. But is there anything else on the horizon for Frontrow Health that you're excited about? IRFAN: Yes. We are super excited that we're just coming out of stealth mode and launching our full product experience for consumers, medical providers, and DTC health brands. Going forward into 2023, we're really looking to try to find this quote, unquote, "product market fit." Are doctors excited about signing up and getting their patients on the platform? Are those patients excited about the products that we're selling on our marketplace? And are we delivering new lifetime customers for these health brands at a more cost-effective rate than they've ever seen before? And solving that original problem that came to me while I was at Everlywell. And by doing all three of those things, hopefully, we'll begin to increase access to healthcare at home where people who are not suburban high-income folks who can afford to pay out of pocket for preventative healthcare; we can now make that more equitable by bringing down the cost through the cashback, by introducing the element of trust, by engaging with a medical provider, and by opening up people's eyes to thousands of different consumer health and wellness companies that now exist in the world that we want to be able to connect the right products to the right people with. VICTORIA: That's so exciting. I'm really glad we got a chance to talk to you today and hear more about your story. Is there anything else that you want to add before we wrap up? IRFAN: This has been super fun being able to even just reflect and think about our whole story. For anyone else listening who's interested or excited about entrepreneurship, there's a really good book that I read last summer as I started thinking about entrepreneurship for the first time called "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" written by Ben Horowitz, who co-founded the VC fund, Andreessen Horowitz. He was an entrepreneur himself. And it's one of my favorite books because, as the title [laughs] explains, it just talks about the difficulty of the experience and the journey that's still ahead of me. But I think the overall takeaway of the book and my experience over the past year is that it's just the single greatest learning experience of my life. And that's actually really all I'm trying to optimize for personally is I want to keep growing and learning, and learning about the space, learning about myself, learning about how to work on a team, how to lead a team, how to grow a team. And if you're at all interested in any of those things, keep trying to think about all the right problems that are being experienced in the world. And we still live in a world wrought with problems and don't have nearly enough founders trying to go and solve all of them. VICTORIA: That's a really great perspective, I think, to bring to it about your own personal growth. And that's what it's really all about. [laughs] And hopefully, we're able to solve some big challenging problems along the way. IRFAN: Hope so. WILL: You can subscribe to this show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. VICTORIA: If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. WILL: You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. VICTORIA: And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. WILL: Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Irfan Alam.

Thank you so much for tuning in for another episode of Tin Foil Hat with Sam Tripoli. This episode we welcome one of the OGs of Conspiracy Podcasting, Chuck Ochelli, to discuss his upbringing in the drug game, his experience on 9/11 and what he learned about JFK's assassination. Chuck is an encyclopedia of conspiracy knowledge and he drops some bombs during our conversation. Thank you so much for your support. Want To See Sam Tripoli Live? Grab Your Tickets at Samtripoli.comFeb 17th and 18th: The Dojo Of Comedy In Morris Plains New Jersyhttps://www.tiffscomedy.com/Feb 22nd: Comedy Chaos Live At The World Famous Comedy Storehttps://www.showclix.com/event/comedy-chaos-feb22ndFeb 24th: Tin Foil Hat Comedy Night Live at the Spokane Comedy Club https://www.spokanecomedyclub.com/shows/193329Feb 25th: Tin Foil Hat Comedy Night Live At The Tacoma Comedy Club https://www.tacomacomedyclub.com/shows/193327March 2nd-4th: The House Of Comedy Minneapolis https://moa.houseofcomedy.net/attraction/sam-tripoli/Please check out Chuck Ochelli's internet:Website: https://ochelli.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ochellieffect/Twitter: https://twitter.com/OchelliEffectPlease check out SamTripoli.com for all things Sam Tripoli.Please check out Sam Tripoli's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/samtripoliNuked.Social: Please check out Nuked.Social and join our decentralized social media that allows you to connect with telegram and the discord.Check out all of our premium content on ROKFIN.com. 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This week my guest is Karen Jerzyk, photographer , painter, set builder, sculptor, and adventurer. Karen joined the NFT, Crypto art scene early in 2020 making her one of the OGs in the space. Her art is highly recognizable with iconic images of an astronaut in various dystopian and retro settings. She has had some very successful NFT projects including one called Average Creatures which has had almost 500eth volume in its time since its launch in March of 2022. Karen is an interesting and insightful speaker when it comes to all things NFT. You can follow her on Twitter @KJerzykPhoto or follow her on her website here: https://karenjerzykphoto.zenfolio.com/

Co-Host Nick Sparks (https://mountaintoppodcast.com/sparks) Nick Sparks is one of the OGs in the men's dating space, so he and I have known each other and respected each other's work for, wow...fifteen years now. So when Nick started a series of Facebook posts singing the praises of online dating and apps in THIS day and age, it caught my attention...and raised my eyebrows. Nevertheless, fully realizing Nick typically knows what he's talking about, I invited him onto the show for a friendly debate on the current state of meeting women online. Right off the bat, I'm happy to report this conversation does not disappoint. What are YOU guys reporting to me, compared to the reports NICK is getting? And since Nick is single right now, what is his personal experience like these days? What are the pros and cons of meeting women online compared to meeting them IRL? How many of them are recent developments, and how many are basically the same as they've ever been? What changes have the developers of dating sites and apps made that may or may not benefit themselves more than their users? Discover which app both Nick and I agree is unquestionably the best one right now...and the one we both say to steer clear of. Now that said, Nick and I differ considerably when it comes to our respective opinions on Bumble. So is Bumble's policy of women messaging first a problem or an opportunity? What do those women on Bumble really mean when they ask, 'What are you looking for?' In the end, you'll find out how much Nick and I actually agree on vs. 'agreeing to disagree', but one fact is certain...if you want to meet women online, this episode will be an instant help to you. Let's face it, people are being social again and it's time for YOU to meet more women. Talk to me for free when you get on my schedule at https://mountaintoppodcast.com === HELP US SEND THE MESSAGE TO GREAT MEN EVERYWHERE === We'll keep the solid, actionable content coming...all for free. If you love what you hear, please give us a 'thumbs up' by rating the show (takes one second) and leaving us a review. As we say here in Texas, we appreciate you!

 LISTENNew Year, old guys. The OGs recently went to see the new experimental (and divisive) horror movie, SKINAMARINK. It blew their minds and they want to talk about it. Not every movie is for everyone. Also, Chefs are terrible, Virgin Nana and TikTok of the ancients. Look under the bed.Find where to listen: https://linktr.ee/ogwltJoin the conversation (and see our artifact album) on our Facebook: facebook.com/oldguyswholovethings and talk to us via email: oldguyswholovethings@gmail.comFind Shawn online: http://www.gruegallery.com  and  https://www.shawndooleyart.com and http://www.dooleyfreelancedesign.comFind Eric online:  https://beacons.page/ericpschwartz (all music by Eric)Additional sound effects from https://www.zapsplat.com

A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists. This episode on APEX EXPRESS highlights Khamsa, the Arabic word for “five,” is a multimedia art project showcasing Black, Muslim, Immigrant, and Refugee visual artists and musicians traversing the five stages of grief. In September 2022, Khamsa launched with an art exhibition at Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland with a line-up of community events featuring musical performances from the project's hip hop artists and guest artists such as dancer Linkk and harpist Destiny Muhammad. Khamsa continues with an ongoing podcast series and a hip hop album released on October 23, 2022 through Simmons Music Group. Khamsa aims to address the different forms and contexts of grief, weaving both personal and universal experiences of loss. From the personal pain of losing a loved one, to the toll of Islamophobia and prejudice, Khamsa will draw in each and every one of us while bringing the stories and experiences of Black, Muslim, Immigrant, and Refugee artists to the forefront. Khamsa is a project to find harmony in our shared stories, bridging differences in cultures, beliefs, and history. Check out more about their work here: https://www.artogether.org/khamsa/ This episode was interviewed, produced, and edited by @Swati Rayasam.     Muslim, Black, Refugee rappers and artists launch healing project in West Oakland: Khamsa Project OAKLAND, CA – Khamsa, the Arabic word for “five,” is a multimedia art exhibition showcasing twenty Muslim, Black, Immigrant, and/or Refugee visual artists and musicians traversing the five stages of grief. Oakland-based organizations ARTogether and Gathering All Muslim Artists (GAMA) encourage the audience to explore different aspects of trauma's universality, striving to spark new narratives around grief and trauma, by using varied media and disciplines to present new perspectives on mental health. “The 5 stages of grief are not a linear process, we may spend some time in anger and then move to acceptance, spend some time there and move to depression,” says Abbas Mohamed, Executive Director of GAMA. “Our goal is not to remove grief from the community, because grief never goes away, but rather to equip the community with the perspectives needed to process and heal through the grief.” Weaving both personal and universal experiences of loss—from the personal pain of losing a loved one, to the toll of Islamophobia and prejudice—Khamsa is a project to find harmony in our shared stories, bridge differences in cultures, beliefs, and history, and heal through the grief. “Art plays an important role in healing our communities, especially for people of color.” Guled Muse, Executive Producer and Lead Artist, states. “I am truly excited that I was able to work with ARTogether and GAMA to collectively bring artists from different mediums, nationalities, and beliefs to explore their minds in how they process emotions and grief through music and visual arts.” Khamsa ran from September 2 – October 15, 2022 at Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland. This program is made possible with support from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art's Building Bridges Program. Featured visual artists include Keyvan Shovir, Meriam Salem, Nabi Haider Ali, and Zara. Featured musical artists include Bryan C. Simmons, Cheflee, Mani Draper, Spote Breeze, and Sukina Noor. Khamsa Project Transcript Attachment    Khamsa Project Transcript: [00:00:00] Swati:  [00:00:33] Swati: Good evening everyone. And welcome to apex express. This is Swati Rayasam your very special guest host. Tonight I got the chance to sit down with Leva Zand and Guled Muse to talk about their recent project Khamsa which launched at the aggregate space gallery in west Oakland. Khamsa the Arabic word for five is a multimedia art project, showcasing Black, Muslim immigrant, and refugee visual [00:01:00] artists and musicians transversing the five stages of grief.  [00:01:03] Swati: I was so glad I was able to learn about not only Humsa but more about Leva and Glad's backgrounds and how in the process of putting together this show. They navigated their own grief and the multifaceted nature of grief, from the personal, such as the loss of a loved one to the societal toll of the COVID 19 pandemic, Islamophobia, or other forms of prejudice and violence.  [00:01:26] Swati: Stay locked in.  [00:01:28] Swati: Leva and Guled I'm so excited to have you. Welcome to APEX Express. I'm really thrilled to talk about your show, Khamsa, to talk about the music Guled that you've been working on, and Leva to talk a lot more about Art Together and kind of your, vision for using art as part of social change.  [00:01:45] Guled: Absolutely. For sure. And thank you so much for bringing us to the show. Truly appreciate it. My name is Guled Muse. Vallejo, Bay Area. I'm a music producer, curator, event, and content creator[00:02:00] had a lot of years, community organizing in San Francisco.  [00:02:04] Leva: My name is Leva Zand I was born and raised in Iran and I came to the US with my family in 2003 as refugees. My professional background was an international development. And I founded and I started Art Together in 2017 and I'm currently the executive director of the organization. [00:02:25] Swati: Awesome. And can you tell me a little bit more about what Art Together is? [00:02:29] Leva: Absolutely. The promise of Art Together is that we can do community building through art. Our original story is that during 2016 we were all very mad and sad and angry of election of Trump. To me, it was actually a shock because I didn't expect, and I realized that after, like being here for 15 years, I don't really know people enough. And also I experienced a sort of anger and rage in me that was very unique and new. [00:02:56] Leva: And that feeling stayed for a couple of months and I was like, I have to do [00:03:00] something about this. And it's very interesting because it seems like that election of Donald Trump was the moment that I felt American in a way that I felt like I have some skills. This is my community, this is my place, this is my people. I wanna bring those skills home. My goal was like, what is missing in the services that refugees and immigrants are receiving? [00:03:23] Leva: If you remember, we had lots of anti-refugee, anti-immigrant rhetoric back then. Muslim Ban and all of those. So I start researching what services available, what has changed since my family came here. And I realize not that much. There are amazing organizations who are providing services when refugees arrived, or social services, like mental health food or logistical support, like helping them finding housing or employment, but I couldn't find any community building program. I remember when we came here, me and my siblings speak English, but that was not the [00:04:00] case for my parents. And it took them many years to basically found their community. And knowing that, and also be familiar, that, language, is a barrier for new arrivals here for many of them. I was thinking like, what can be a medium that bring people together that they don't necessarily needs language or enter a room, a space that don't immediately feel like, oh, they don't know English, and the shame or isolation that ca comes with it. And that's why art came to mind basically. [00:04:28] Leva: It is something that everybody can enjoy, everybody can practice that you don't have to be artists to go enjoy music or theater or arts. So I started talking with a few friends of mine. And, we put together some concept of this Art Together, like how can art be used as community building? And then I started reaching out to, some service agencies, some resettlement agencies that, Hey, what do you think about this idea? Many of them welcome this idea of like how to use art to bring community together, so [00:05:00] that was the origin of story basically the first year. [00:05:02] Swati: Awesome. Yeah. Guled, if you could just give our listeners like a background, How did you become a musician? What was your inspiration? What's your vibe?  [00:05:12] Guled: As far as my music, it really just started with Rap City, back when I was like 10 years old when I first immigrated to this country and we got cable in the apartment. I remember, the channels we were just flipping through and BET was one of them. And more specifically Rap City. I remember it vividly because I remember like just that small television in the living room. We didn't have too much furniture. And, I remember seeing Black Star, Definition, the music video. And just seeing these brothers just spitting the way that they were was like, was absolutely fascinating. I've always had an experience with hip hop, but then it was much more like the commercial, like bad boy puffy, big willy style, men in black soundtrack. And from a global perspective you only get like what is being pushed to you, but [00:06:00] then really starting to understand regional hip hop, whether it was Outkast, whether it was, listening to hieroglyphics. It was something that fascinated me to the point where I started to participate in the culture as an mc, I was known as that little rapper in school. And, went on and just, things evolved. Being in college, doing a lot of events hip hop related in SF State. Shout outs to Professor Fisher, Donna, Lisa, the whole Africana studies department over there. Major love to them and the experience that they had provided me in being able to also participate in the educational aspects of teaching hip hop. [00:06:36] Guled: I remember moving to Oakland. I think that was the city that really provided the spirit inside of me. I was once outer shell of myself, just didn't know who I was and like really Oakland around that time just like really embraced me. And just being around a lot of creators, a lot of artists inspired me, but then there's so much politics within the rap game. There's a lot. [00:07:00] To the point where artists had to compromise the way that they would rap. The music that they would create. And I was seeing, an underground movement happening at the same time in Oakland, shout outs to Smart Bomb. They're doing phenomenal work. And they really inspired me to the point where, my colleagues and I, we created a website, a music project called Speak With Beats, where we were highlighting, beat makers and musicians from the Bay Area because in the Bay, we are very unique, due to the fact that we're siloed from a lot of other regions where we're not really inspired by what is hot at the moment. It's always been a thing, but now with the internet, everything sounds the same, right? Because you're being inspired by so many different artists from a click of a button. [00:07:44] Guled: But still, there's this unique aspect of people making original music and I wanted to reward them and to highlight these artists that I was just fans of before I was friends, like fans of, just to give them a platform was very important. [00:07:58] Guled: And that's where I [00:08:00] saw where my skillset was. It's transmuted from, like participating more as an mc now, just being much more behind the scenes and utilizing the organizing experience that I've had to empower my people, my colleagues, my friends who are just extremely talented and just to know that I see them.  [00:08:19] Swati: I love that. I love, that's such like a beautiful local Bay Area story. How did you two get into contact? How'd you find each other?  [00:08:27] Guled: It's funny that Leva mentioned like the 20 16, 20 17, moments of our politics. Around that time I was dealing with personal issues, to the point where I just wanted to just step away from a lot of things, including music, art, activism. I was just personally more or less burnt out. And all of this stuff started happening. During 20 15, 20 16, I was wanting to think about ways of like really pushing, the culture that I was witnessing and experiencing and supporting at that [00:09:00] time to like new heights, right? Because when it comes to beat making music, like the instrumental hip hop scene, folks are now getting the taste of it with the lo-fi Cafe Girl, but I wanted to take it, one step further because I seen like the process of how people were creating the music, the way that they were sampling the music, the way that they would just come up with the production out of thin air. And I wanted to merge it in a, in such a way where it was like classical music, like jazz music, right? Because people were just putting out beat tapes consistently. Didn't have no theme, no nothing whatsoever. So I was like, let me try to curate something that was going to affect people in a way that words cannot describe. [00:09:44] Guled: So that's where like the origins of the Khamsa project started coming to be, just bubbling. So around that time I stepped away from a lot, but that project always lingered. It always was there. And I would have not [00:10:00] brought this project into manifestation if it wasn't for my co-creator, my brother, Abaas Muhammad from the GAMA collective Gathering All Muslim Artists. [00:10:10] Guled: Major love to him. He was someone who really just inspired me to push this further because as somebody who was providing support, sometimes you need support, right? I remember, some of my peoples telling me, a therapist also needs a therapist, right? At that moment, he was a person who really helped me out, who just didn't want me to stop my artistry. he recognized it and he really supported me to the point where he brought me into the attention of art together. [00:10:40] Guled: And then just from there, that's where it really started and it's been a long time coming, it's been a long time coming. This project has been years in the making, but it's just started having a mind of its own and I can't thank art together enough. [00:10:54] Leva: Thank you. Thank you for saying that you came from your mind. Let me also share my side of a story. First of all, part [00:11:00] of our mission was supporting refugees and immigrants. Very soon we realized that the disparity in art community and also the exclusivity of art community here, especially for immigrants or refugees it's very hard to get into the art world here. So, I think it was 2018, that we start thinking about how can we support, art together and support artists, refugee and immigrants artists. [00:11:21] Leva: And by then there were a team of like few interns who were working volunteers so we decided to partner with, GAMA, gathering all Muslim artists and Oakland Art, Asian Cultural Center to put a group show together to celebrate refugee immigrants artists in Auckland. [00:11:38] Leva: So we put the show together, I think we showcased at the work of more than 30 of such artists at O A C C, March 16th, 2020. Four days before everything goes down . And, Basically Guled came to one of our meeting. We didn't have office gallery or any of those things back then. And he said, well, I need a [00:12:00] couple thousand dollars for this. And we were looking at the project and we were like, this can be a major project. [00:12:05] Leva: This can be a lot bigger than this. Just the music. So we told him that yes, we are in. Let's see if we can find resources for that. First we didn't get them, and then we applied for a major grant through Doris Duke Foundation, building varied bridges, which is about, bringing more Muslim artists and our Islamic arts to the community here. And back then Angira Huka was our program director and the project developed a lot through talking through meetings and gatherings. we were really trying that not let funding or that the direction of fund shaped the project. And that's always a challenge because funders are interested in specific things. So we took some liberty on that. We took some liberty to making sure Guled's Ideas is actually coming out and GAMA shout out to them. Great partner. and that's how this came together.  [00:12:56] Guled: Yeah. I wanted add as well too, I told Abbas, if I [00:13:00] wanted to pursue this project, like I had to provide compensation for the artists. I feel like it was really important, especially like in the hip hop community over here, there's a lot of pro bono work that goes on. I just wanted to break that culture of pro bono work because people are just working so many jobs while doing music and some of them, they just basically making music for free. [00:13:25] Guled: But just to have that component, to say once again that I see you, like I wasn't going to do this project with without that. So to be able to partner up with Art together, partner up with GAMA, partner up with the Doris Duke Foundation, it was really humbling. It was really one of those moments in my life that kind of reinvigorated my admiration and my aspirations in the arts. And since then, it was just like, it was history.  [00:13:56] Swati: Yeah. I think that it is so critical, for [00:14:00] both of you having worked in community spaces and actively involved in community spaces in different ways, it's so important that like when you create projects or when you pursue things, that you do it with that code of ethics, right? I know that what I am doing is building up folks who are behind me, who are with me, that We seek to create a world in art and in any other aspect that is less exploitative than the one we inherited, the forever pursuit of liberation through that. So, tell me a little bit about what the Khamsa project is and then what was it that inspired you or that kept, you kind of stuck on it.  [00:14:37] Guled: Yeah. It's grief, like there's multiple levels to it. Everybody has their own relation to it. But at that moment, once again, it was just like me losing myself, I was grieving my hopes or whatever that I was personally dealing with at that time. I wanted to create this music project but then have people step inside the music project, [00:15:00] inside the mind of it. [00:15:01] Leva: I got interested in the project because it was about shared human experience. It was a thing that you don't need to be from Somalia, Iran, America, Texas, I don't know. You name it. You don't have to be from any of those to experience grief. [00:15:15] Leva: So it's a shared human experience and that's basically what we are doing at art together to emphasize on things that we can share rather than things that dividing us. And also it is not just grief. It's not grief for life. It can be loss of land, loss of people lots, loss of home. All of those things are lost. [00:15:33] Leva: So it's not necessarily just life that we are losing and we are grieving for. So for me, that aspect was very interesting that this is a shared human experience. And of course the timing of it you know, COVID was happening and before that, the experience of gun violence in this country and what's happening for the Black community specifically here. [00:15:51] Leva: So all of this came together for me at least, it was like this is a shared human experience and this is something that everybody can come and enjoy and [00:16:00] understand and also process. Guled is talking a lot about the music aspect of that, but we also put lots of emphasize and work on the visual, part of it for your listeners who may not know, Khamsa project, we partnered with aggregated Gallery space, which is a gallery in West Oakland, and we basically turned the space, like people could walk and they could, there were stations that they could listen to music, but they were also seeing different form of art forms. We had abstract art. We had video art, digital art. We had fabric art. So all of them were in the one place that walking people through this stages of grief, we all experienced it in a different way and different stages. It's not a linear thing. But Khamsa itself was a project walking through grief while music is with you. And while you are looking at some of these visual arts, this is how I describe it. and also I like it that it's hard to describe because it was very intersectional. It was very different from like other exhibitions or other albums [00:17:00] that you go through because it was just very intertwined with each other.  [00:17:03] Guled: Yeah. the aspect of bridging the gap between different communities was an important aspect, as someone who identifies as Muslim, and I've been in a lot of Islamic art shows and it was always something that relates to politics. They're always, something relates to Islamic history. I really wanted something that was more human. So to be able to have my homies who created the music project at the same time, the visual artists, they were also doing their own thing, creating art for the gallery. The funniest aspect is that none of them riffed ideas off of each other. They were all working independently away from each other. So it was a way to look at this concept from different vantage points, from different identities, but we're all looking at the same thing. [00:17:51] Guled: And that's like kind of the commonality of us just being humans in general. Somebody who now sees the world different. Like what I saw is [00:18:00] like a lot of different groups, they would always share their culture. [00:18:04] Guled: So just like the music project was one component, it was gonna be an instrumental music project, but then, I needed that element of the mc and needed the element of just raw MCs that were in our local area who were just phenomenal to speak on grief, to speak on the state of the community. [00:18:22] Guled: And in the meantime, like just being able to have these visual artists express themselves in such a way was the idea. But things just started . As Leva said, it just started becoming this, when the exhibit got launched, it just became a safe space for people to go through that journey and heal each other. [00:18:42] Guled: Because there was a question in the exhibit where it says, how do you heal and grieve? And the last piece of the puzzle was the people. And they all shared some phenomenal answers and I feel like it's just in the end, became such a community project, like what makes the Bay Area so great, makes the Bay Area so unique.[00:19:00]  [00:19:00] Swati: Yeah. I think that's so beautiful. I am so intrigued by the fact that you had all of these visual, auditory, otherwise artists grappling independently with what is grief to them. Being at the exhibit, you know there were a lot of different examples of grief, right? [00:19:17] Swati: Grief around lost girlhood, grief around home, grief around relationships within family, within community, and all these different aspects. How did you stitch the visual, the auditory, and even the live performance? I'd love for one of you to talk about the live performance.  [00:19:36] Leva: I feel like we were working with immensely talented people. We had two amazing project manager, Abbas and Michelle Lin from Art Together. Shout out to her. I think they did a phenomenal job in coordination because it was not easy to coordinate between that many artists. [00:19:53] Leva: And so part of it was coordination and also, be intentional about every connection. This [00:20:00] project as Guled said was very intertwined with people who were there. Like it was a different experience if you would go there and people were there, and then if you go just watch or look at the arts or listen, it became a safest space for grief because people immediately felt connected to the message. And what I loved, loved about the project was that it brought people to, to see the exhibition and listen to music that we don't necessarily consider them gallery goers or exhibition goers. Right, aunties and uncles came and they were part of creating this space.  [00:20:34] Guled: Yeah, absolutely. I would to say strategically for this project, once again, special shout outs to Angira and, and Michelle for really holding us down, my brother Abbas was such an important part and Art together was such an important part to this project. Their wheelhouse was understanding the visual arts realm and the exhibits and galleries and what it takes for the artists to come up with their pieces. [00:21:00] Myself was on the music. What I really enjoyed about it so much about the music project was just like, once again, I'm just a fan of everybody. I'm a fan of everybody. It was just like, if you had a basketball team, who would you pick? It was my version of Oceans 11 , just like picking the best artists that I knew at that time, you know?  [00:21:21] Guled: When it came to the music production side, I wouldn't have, done this project also with one of my good brothers, Pat Mesiti Miller, phenomenal audio engineer, beat producer and also a curator as well. He would take things sonically to another level. So, once that was done, it was like two worlds coming together and I really feel like the Aggregate Space Gallery really brought these two worlds to merge. [00:21:50] Swati: Guled you know can you tell me a little bit about, Khamsa the music album component of your project and how you originated it. [00:21:58] Guled: Yeah. Right now the, yeah, the Khamsa Music [00:22:00] Project is a five track ep. Each one of the tracks represent the different five stages of grief. I initially wanted to create this more as an instrumental music project. Same way you can kind of feel jazz music, classical music, if you were thinking about, or processing an emotion, creating music that words can't describe, right? [00:22:21] Guled: Like such, like these types of experiences that you go through with grief. But however, as, as years went on, I just felt that the importance of having an mc was crucial. I felt like we needed a voice. We were losing too many hip hop artists, to gun violence. COVID affected us. George Floyd affected us, whenever experiences, critical moments in history happened like the way that hiphop responded was always powerful to me. Whether it was the death of Amadou Diallo and how a lot of the hiphop artists at that time spoke up against his death to Tupac, to Biggie, like they [00:23:00] were reflections of their time. And I just felt it was important the MCs, speak on the state of their consciousness, but also in return, being able to let the community know that they're with them. [00:23:11] Guled: Initially also, we were going to have interludes within each of these tracks, with a phenomenal artist, by the name of Sekina Noor, based out in London, with these MCs talking and rapping with each stage of grief, it was going to be her spoken word pieces during the interludes this divine feminine consciousness of what was going on in the way that we were processing this journey altogether. But yeah, just really touched base with all my homies from the Bay Area who are born and raised in Oakland Richmond, or who have had many years being in the bay, gotten in a lot of game from the Bay Area and these are all like my favorite artists I'm a fan of all of them. [00:24:00] And I guarantee three, four or five years from now you're gonna hear a lot more noise from these people.  [00:24:05] Swati: So in the process of reaching out to all of these artists that you respect all your friends, right? How did you go about curating each of these tracks did you pair the track or the theme to the artist? was that collaborative? [00:24:20] Guled: And what's funny is, cuz all these other MCs, I spoke with them, a long time ago, I told them, straight up like, Hey, listen, I'm not going to ask of this from you if I don't have a budget and as soon as Allah blessed me with the grant money from the Doris Duke Foundation, it was on.  [00:24:36] Guled: These were people that I've known for years, so I've kind of recognized their strengths except for D. Lee, D. Lee is just like one of those people who I met on the fly, and he's such a natural, he's just a phenomenal artist.  Denial [00:24:49] Guled: I was wanting to work with another artist for the track denial, but that didn't work out. But in the meantime, out of the blue, I remember I was just like listening to Water, [00:25:00] water for the Town Project, a project that's a compilation project of the Smart Bomb Collective. And it was a track with D.Lee, with his cousin, spoke Breeze and when I heard him, I was just blown back. I had to just like, you know, press it on repeat again. And I was just like, this is, he's great. You know? And so I had to reach out to my boy, spoke and spoke, reached out to D. Lee and we politiced. And what's funny is that he was the first person to deliver the track to me. And then the dope thing about it too was on the production side, you got pASDOO, who's a phenomenal producer who understands the science of sound.  [00:25:37] Guled: [00:26:00] As far as with the track anger with Mani Draper, you know, shoutouts to Grand National, Mani to me he's such a great artist. I feel like he was able to bring anger home, like if you listen to the track, it sounds like Grand Master Flash is the message. You know, like, just don't push me. And he, I feel like can represent that. And then the energy that he brought with the track, I just knew he would be the right fit. We have Brian Simmons, a phenomenal composer. He tours with fantastic Negrito and this music project that's on his label, he brought it home .   [00:27:00]  Bargaining [00:27:03] Guled: When I was thinking about who will be the right mc for bargaining, Spote Breeze just popped in my mind because of his albums, because of his music. He's a very, very layered, very complex lyricist, and I feel like the stage of bargaining was perfect for him. Cheflee is a genius, and Spote Breeze and Cheflee works together so well. And he brought it home not only providing the instrumental, but also he included the hook and the instrumental, so it was like a song that was writing itself and it just paired so well [00:28:00]  Depression [00:28:14] Guled: When it came to the track of depression, I reached out to my boy Nu Nasa, and Nu Nasa to me is one of the most positive, positive MCs. If you listen to the rest of his catalog of music, it's very uplifting. It's highly spiritual, and I've only known him artistically on that side. I wanted to see his shadow self something that was different. shout outs to aboveclouds from Virginia, he really brought that Boom Bap the style of Boom B ap was perfect.  Acceptance [00:28:46] Guled: [00:29:00] As far as with acceptance, my man, Gavin Anthony. He was somebody who I knew in my years being an mc. He was like, one of my OGs, one of my big brothers in the hip hop community. And he is not only a phenomenal lyricist, he's a phenomenal freestyler and his reflections and is just being like, older than me. [00:30:00] You know, I feel like he's been through the cycles of grief himself, so for him to talk about acceptance, it's kind of like this brotherly advice and just wisdom of somebody who's went through all of this and was able to accept. And I felt like it was a great piece to the puzzle. And then Sydequest really bringing the project home.  [00:30:18] Guled: [00:31:00] Each one of these tracks were challenging for the artists to process. So once again, all of these people I am a fan of, and I just thought like, what would happen if these folks were paired up together. and, The first time I heard it was two months after it got mixed. My boy pASDOO. He was also the audio engineer of this project. He was like, Hey, listen, you're not gonna listen to this project until the listening session. So we had a listening session at the Reef Studios on Oakland, OG Jaren and Brian C. Simmons spot. And when I first heard the project, I was just blown back, I didn't expect, the magic. [00:31:38] Guled: It was hair raising to be in the studio, listening to the songs blare out, the speakers to be around my people. It was definitely a dream come true. Like just sitting there and listening to it all. It felt like I was at a brief moment living my aspiring self. Just being there, [00:32:00] just seeing, just witnessing everything and just knowing that the art was coming from a very deep place. It just came out to being something that I thoroughly enjoy just as a fan and I felt like I put all my chips in one basket and got double in return.  [00:32:16] Swati: Yeah. No, it's a really seamless album. As you said, it had been years between when you talked about this project and when it finally got funded you were like, it's go time. And I think it speaks to the strength of the Oakland hip hop community to your music community that like, everybody was like, absolutely, let's go.  [00:32:38] Swati: You're tuned in to apex express at 94.1 KPFA and 89.3 KPFB in Berkeley and online@kpfa.org. Coming up we have two songs from Khamsa the album. The first Anger by Mani Draper. Co-produced by Mani Draper and Brian C. Simmons followed by [00:33:00] Something by spote Breeze produced by Cheflee    [00:33:03] Swati: [00:34:00] [00:35:00] [00:36:00] [00:37:00] [00:38:00] you just heard Something by Spote breeze produced by Cheflee and before that [00:39:00] was Anger by Mani Draper. Co-produced by Mani Draper and Brian C. Simmons from Khamsa at the album. Now, back to the interview.  [00:39:09] Swati: Going back to kind of what I think both of you said at different points that like this exhibition was really about breaking barriers in terms of who is considered somebody that goes to a gallery, goes to an art show, and also what art is appropriate and then even then, what belongs together. And I think particularly in the space of Islamic art, it's so important both that you married the visual of having, artists of color having, Islamic art, but then also really having this huge hip hop auditory component to explicitly have that conversation of blackness and muslimness and creation together.  [00:39:51] Guled: The thing is that this project was challenging for everybody. Like, for everybody. And when I've approached my homies about it, they're like, [00:40:00] you know, I have to really dig deep because there's trauma involved. We don't normally talk about it as much so for people to muster that up, even with the visual artists as well too, for them to really go into these spaces, that is hard, but they understood that the purpose of it was to really let people know that they're not alone, you know? To bring these world together cuz there was so much, these years, like from the moment this project was thought of to like, when the exhibit was happening, so much was going on in the world. And for people to be that vulnerable it takes a toll. [00:40:38] Guled: But some of the best art, I've ever seen came from those spaces and for them to become the mirror for people to reflect on their own sense of grief gives all this work a lot of meaning. Just the way that the people was also able to participate, in these events. I know you mentioned something about the event [00:41:00] program inside, some were planned and others weren't, one of them in particular, cuz there was just so much gun violence going on in Oakland, we had a shooting that occurred around that time in the mosque, that took the lives of, Asam Al-Awjri and Belal Esa, two people from the community, were lost to gun violence, and also the school shootings that were happening as well. Like even during that moment, while the exhibit was going, we had to curate spaces for that as well. And, just to kind of reflect back, even after the exhibit was done, some of that emotion, some of that energy, it still lingers with me to this day. [00:41:42] Guled: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that also I attended the closing ceremony and you know, Leva you gave this really beautiful speech around the crisis in Iran and what grief was bringing up for you in this space. I was wondering if you'd be open to speaking about that. [00:42:00]  [00:42:01] Leva: Yeah, it takes a lot to be comfortable with vulnerability and that is something that Khamsa and the space that it created, for it to be safe for me as the director of an organization, feel comfortable enough and feel safe enough to come and talking about what's going on in my community. [00:42:20] Leva: Right. And feel safe enough to just cry and talk.  [00:42:23] Swati: just to interject, could you give a very brief overview of what the crisis in Iran is from your perspective? [00:42:29] Leva: So what's happening in Iran is that people are tired of 40 years, four decades of autocracy and dictatorship, and a version of Islam, a version of religion that has been dictated to them no matter what they want or how they want to practice religion. [00:42:46] Leva: Unfortunately, what happened is that under this Islamic regime, I'm not calling it Islamic country because the regime itself is a dictatorship, and this is different from people. So like any fascism, they are harassing [00:43:00] people. They're killing people.  [00:43:01] Leva: I came to the US as refugee because as religious minority back in Iran, my family around their persecution, my uncle is in right now, a couple of my friends are in prison. My uncle is in prison just because he was teaching in a university to people like us, right? So the current uprising started after a young woman got killed under custody of police, morality, police, if you don't know, in Iran, there is morality police who is basically telling women in the streets how to wear hijab, how to practice their religion. [00:43:29] Leva: And people basically got tired of that so the uprising started with that, and very soon people got united that everyone wanted this regime to go. Unfortunately, what's happening is massive execution that has been regime's strategy in the last 40 years. Because again, they're killing and executing young people, young folks, without having any reason for that or any. Fair trial. So that is also grief. And it feels like for my community, we've been grieving for 40 years and that's [00:44:00] why I feel like sharing this stuff and sharing about this emotion is important. But yeah, Basically that's what's going in Iran, protests are still going, the mass execution, basically every day we're waking up to some execution news and we really hope that again we are so desperate and helpless from here. [00:44:17] Leva: That was a day that a big fire was happening in a prison that most of the political prisoners are there. And I had no idea how to process that but still be a professional person, go to work, go to the speech, do the speech, because again, that's my job. So having that space and feeling so comfortable for that many people to just see me crying.  [00:44:38] Leva: Again, the beauty of Khamsa I don't know if I would be able to be the same or talk the same way or tell the same story if it was in another exhibition or another art opening. The space itself I feel like gave me and of course people who were around and I will see them I feel comfortable enough with them. And this is not common in our communities, especially men Muslim men, because [00:45:00] I know many of them and they're friends of mine, it's not common to talk about this emotions, what's going on. And again, Shout out to Guled and the whole team who created that space. during that time, one of our staff member was going through a shooting. And again, as a whole, we felt like, my God, this is space Khamsa, was the right time, right place for all of us to be able to be vulnerable and still feel safe and connected.  [00:45:26] Swati: I really empathize with that feeling of desperation and hopelessness being in diaspora currently. But I think, you know, maintaining conversations around what is going on currently in Iran keeping tabs on what is going on, talking about it, talking about injustice and lending complexity to a narrative and not giving it to the regime, not giving it to the United States government, but really giving it to the people who have deserved it for all this time. [00:45:50] Leva: Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, this is also important for me personally, having many Muslim friends that I want them to also understand that this is not an uprising [00:46:00] against religion and the way that hijab was dictating on us we never had a choice. For me to be able to go to a school, I had to wear hijab, right? We never had a choice to practice what we wanted to do. So this is not an uprising against Islam, it's not about being Islamophobic. or don't want that. It's just people tired of fascism that govern them under the name of this religion. And that's why I feel like solidarity of Muslim community outside of Iran is crucial for them because the government in Iran can't say that, oh this anti-Islam, this is anti-religion movement. But thank you for bringing that up. Absolutely correct that we also have duty to keep this conversation going. [00:46:40] Swati: Yeah, definitely. And I think back to just really what the whole purpose of Khamsa is, right? In terms of humanizing people and bringing to light and bringing to immersive experience. [00:46:53] Swati: This really, scary emotion that all of us are feeling constantly and trying [00:47:00] to avoid. I mean, Guled, how has grief modified and changed over the lifetime of that project and what does it mean to you right now? [00:47:09] Guled: I feel like grief is like one of those, like eternal human tragedies, just when we are very well versed in what it is theoretically, like when it happens to you, you feel the effects, whether you far away, whether you're close to someone. It's like one of those truths, right? For me, just living with it, I remember seeing something really cool about Japanese art where they glue pieces together of like pottery with gold. Because even through all of that, amidst of all of the suffering and the trauma. You gain wisdom, you gain light, you gain hope. You gained this understanding of what it is to be human because day by day we're still like running around. You're just going from one place to another and not really sitting down with the experience, like what it is to live this life, in the third dimension . And I felt that art has always been a [00:48:00] way to bring something from the ether or from a different dimension, from a different place these things that really affect us to the core. [00:48:07] Guled: As far as with, my Muslim identity like Islam. You know, there's a really important fact that people have to understand is that, the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) there was a period of his time called the Year of Sorrow, where he lost his beloved uncle who protected him from his persecutors and his first wife who was holding him down, who supported him since day one. This is somebody who we revere as extremely holy, somebody who had divine revelations from the most high in a very personal way. But yet somebody of this stature still dealt with grief, he still dealt with that. So, the beautiful part about the Muslim artists is the fact that, there's people who identify with Islam you know, and from a different perspective. You could [00:49:00] be Shia, you can, speak on like the history of what happened to the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and his family, and the anger that community still feels to this day during Karbala, you can, speak on behalf of Leva's experience where , you have this regime that is pushing Islam in such a way where it's suppressing people when it's supposed to liberate us. [00:49:22] Guled: And I myself, even though I identify as Sunni, for Somali people in general, when I did the knowledge, you know, we have Sufism we have that spiritual component in our faith. And just knowing the spiritual wisdom behind the experiences that we deal with, in our day-to-day, is kind of way of God still communicating with us. Even outside of a book is God still communicating with us. So this project really, you know, after going through it, it really brought me closer to a higher power. But in the meantime, made me [00:50:00] realize like there's still so much that we have to do. Not even on the activism way, but to just even call somebody. Just tell them that you love them. Like how many of us are really doing that? Because we're chasing money. We, are putting our lives or putting our value towards things that are material, you know? It gave me such a deep reflection and for others to share their art this way and for the community to show up and provide their wisdom. It helped me a lot. It helped me a lot emotionally. It helped me a lot spiritually. It still has a mind of its own, it's still lingering. But I'm grateful and I'm blessed  [00:50:40] Leva: Thank you Guled for sharing. People processing grief very differently. I believe that, I think when I was a child, somebody told me that everybody who's living your life is taking a little piece of your heart with him. And there is a hole there that you have to learn to live with that hole and still survive. There are lots of holes in our hearts, and as we are [00:51:00] growing up, there are more and more of them. So it is actually, how are you gonna manage that? To me, over time, it became the celebration of life. It became the celebration of what we lost. [00:51:10] Leva: If it was a relationship, if it was land, if it was home, how can I cherish the moments because I cannot have them back. Coming to the realization of that, and also give it time, it's like we cannot say that, oh, I'm gonna give a five months timeline to this grief, and then I'm gonna be fine. No, every grief is different.  [00:51:28] Leva: For now I'm at the stage of my life that for me, it became more about celebration of life. Then go back and thinking about that piece of the hole that I have in my heart. It may change in a few years, but I am there. Right now . [00:51:44] Swati: That's such a beautiful sentiment. So for both of you, as we're closing, what projects are currently in the works or up next for either of you, or are you taking a very well deserved nap? [00:51:59] Guled: [00:52:00] As a matter of fact, right now I got the Khamsa Music project on all streaming platforms I have a Spotify playlist right now drop a Gem on them. It's a, It's a song from Mob Deep, one of my favorite hip hop groups. And it's a lot of just powerful hip hop music from different artists, from my own personal listening collection that got me by cuz hip hop taught me a lot. And I just feel like in this moment, I wanted to share that so people could, can get educated and learn and to also feel, and the same way that I really love hip hop. But in the meantime, you know, working with different artists and their music projects, Got some stuff under wraps, I'm still pushing. No matter how much, I'm, I'm trying to , I try I feel like this always still calls me and this still inspires me.  [00:52:50] Leva: We just opened Art Together's center in downtown Oakland. We started with a gallery. We really hope to make it a[00:53:00] new cultural hub for artists who may otherwise not have the opportunity.  [00:53:03] Leva: right now, Unfortunately, artists needs to be artists, they're social media manager, marketing person, project manager. So they have to be all of those things while also their brain is working on the art. I feel like organization like Art Together and specifically artist support program is coming handy because we are trying to take care of the logistic of the board and let the artist brain work the way that it's working. [00:53:27] Leva: Right? And that's why we are trying to have one or two major artistic project every year, the end result is going to be a public display of art, but we are here to support the logistical part of it and make it happen. This is unfortunately part of being an artist that you need to do everything and everything is harder for artists of colors and refugee immigrants, Black artists, everything is harder for them, so this is a mission for this space. I invite everyone to please come 1200 Harrison, downtown Oakland, close to Bart, make a visit. You wouldn't regret that. In terms of like major [00:54:00] projects, we are currently working with Toro Hatari, Japanese American artists for a participatory project that contains some installation coming out of workshops that spark conversation between refugees and non-refugee and locals, sharing experience and sharing a story. So we are excited about that one. That is our major art project for now. But our community art programs and many other stuff are going on. Look at our website, www art together.org. [00:54:28] Swati: Amazing. I am so glad, Leva, that you were all able to find a new home at 1200 Harrison, you said in downtown Oakland. And you know, Guled I think for the most part, all I can say is that we have to keep an eye on you. But, I really appreciate, both of you coming onto Apex Express. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about before we closed out?  [00:54:50] Guled: So the Humsa album is on Bandcamp, on all streaming platforms this project was, an artist-led one. So all money is gonna go [00:55:00] towards, the folks that were involved. just [00:55:02] Guled: Shout out to Simmons Music Group or shout out to Brian Simmons. Shout out to Mani Draper,Nu Nasa, pASDOO. My brother D. Lee, definitely he's next up from East Oakland. Fire! Spote Breeze, Cheflee, my brothers Sydequest, Gavin Anthony, all my brothers. And the music project, major love town, major love to leva, major love to art together. Once again, it gives me reassurance to keep going. And in art and once again, . Major shoutouts to Abbas Muhammad GAMA Collective and shout out to all the listeners [00:55:40] Swati:  [00:55:40] Swati: Amazing. So that would be khamsaprojectartist.bandcamp.com/album/khamsathealbum. We'll drop that in the show notes for those of you who are curious.  [00:55:52] Leva: Everything that Guled says, plus I wanna name the visual artists who were part of this project Fahd Butt, Romina Zabihian, [00:56:00] Keyvan Shovir, Shaghayegh Cyrous, Gazelle Samizay, and Nabi Haider Ali, Meriam Salem, Fatima Zara. They were amazing visual artists. Shout out to Miles, Michelle, Angira, Velasani and everybody else who make this project possible. And thank you. Thank you for giving us this platform and opportunity to talk.  [00:56:21] Guled: See we have like a hundred people on this project. [00:56:24] Guled: Yeah. You say, I was like, this  [00:56:26] Swati: is, this is absolutely a community project.  [00:56:29] Guled: Yeah, definitely a community project.  [00:56:32] Swati: Awesome. Well, thank you both so much.  [00:56:35] Swati: To learn more about Khamsa a collaborative and very clearly community involved project by ArtTogether and Gathering All Muslim Artists Collective or GAMA visit www.art together.org/khamsa. That's KHAMSA. From there, you'll be able to find and purchase the album on Bandcamp, listen to the podcast and learn more about the project as a whole.  [00:56:58] Swati: Thank you [00:57:00] so much for joining us, please check out our website, kpfa.org/program/apex express to find out more about the show tonight and to find out how you can take direct action. We thank all of you listeners out there, keep resisting, keep organizing, keep creating and sharing your visions with the world. Your voices are important. Apex express is produced by Miko Lee, jalena Keane-Lee, Paige Chung, and today Swati Rayasam.  [00:57:30] Swati: Thank you so much to KPFA staff for their support and have a great night.   [00:58:00]  The post APEX Express – 12.26.23 – Khamsa Project appeared first on KPFA.