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Synopsis: In a powerful tribute to a fearless leader, friends and collaborators share stories of Alice Wong's unwavering commitment to centering disabled voices and challenging systemic inequality in all its forms.This show is made possible by you! To become a sustaining member go to LauraFlanders.org/donateDescription: Alice Wong lived longer than she expected, but not long enough. The celebrated disability activist lived by the principle that disability justice is integral to all liberation movements, and centered disabled stories with the Disability Visibility Project. When Alice Wong died on November 14 at the age of 51, people across social movements shared their grief and awe for her work, such as her bestselling 2022 memoir, “Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life”. She has been called an oracle, visionary, unapologetic and fearless, and our guests, Wong's dear friends and collaborators, are committed to lifting up her legacy. Sandy Ho is the Executive Director of the Disability & Philanthropy Forum and partner with Alice Wong and Mia Mingus in the Access is Love campaign. She was asked by Alice Wong to post her letter after she passed, where Wong writes “. . . our wisdom is incisive and unflinching.” Steven Thrasher is an acclaimed journalist, professor and author of “The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality & Disease Collide”. He was suspended from teaching classes after speaking out — as Wong also did — on Palestine. Join us as we celebrate Alice Wong and ask what is the work to be done when it comes to healthcare and civil rights for disabled people. Plus a commentary from Laura on imagining the next 100 years.“A lot of Alice's advocacy was focused around the systems that force disabled people to be at the margins . . . Whether it is the Black Lives Matter movement or the pandemic, we see the ways in which our society and political systems respond, and not in ways that prioritize those who are least privileged and have the least amount of power.” - Sandy Ho“I remember talking to [Alice Wong] about the ways she had been conditioned as a disabled Asian American woman to try to accept crumbs, to not complain, to be very docile. I thought that she was really brilliant in bridging together not just Asian American communities, but queer communities, LGBTQ communities, all the communities where your body is made to feel like it doesn't belong.” - Steven ThrasherGuests:• Sandy Ho: Executive Director, Disability & Philanthropy Forum• Steven Thrasher: Daniel Renberg Chair of Social Justice in Reporting, Northwestern University; Author, The Viral Underclass & The Overseer Class *Recommended books:“Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life” by Alice Wong, *Get the book“The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide” by Steven Thrasher, *Get the book(*Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. The LF Show is an affiliate of bookshop.org and will receive a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.) Watch the episode released on YouTube; PBS World Channel 11:30am ET Sundays and on over 300 public stations across the country (check your listings, or search here via zipcode). Listen: Episode airing on community radio (check here to see if your station airs the show) & available as a podcast January 14th, 2026.Full Episode Notes are located HERE.Full Conversation Release: While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation. Music Credit: 'Thrum of Soil' by Bluedot Sessions, 'Steppin' by Podington Bear, and original sound design by Jeannie Hopper Support Laura Flanders and Friends by becoming a member at https://www.patreon.com/c/lauraflandersandfriends RESOURCES:Related Laura Flanders Show Episodes:• “The Future is Disabled”: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Watch / Listen: Episode Cut and Full Uncut Conversation• The New Disabled Population in Gaza: Comedian & Disability Advocate Maysoon Zayid: Watch / Listen: Episode Cut and Full Uncut Conversation• Anita Cameron & Keith Jones on The Americans with Disabilities Act: A Civil Rights Milestone With Miles To Go: Watch / Listen: Episode CutRelated Articles and Resources:• Disability Visibility Project, Founder: Alice Wong• DisabledWriters.com• Access Is Love• A Tribute to an Oracle, Alice Wong, by Rebecca Cokley, November 26, 2025, The Nation• Trump Gutted AIDS Health. Care at the Worst Possible Time, by Steven W. Thrasher & Afeef Nessouli, December 1, 2025, The Intercept• On Valentine's Day, Let's Recognize Why #AccessIsLove, by Alice Wong, February 14, 2019, Rooted In Rights• Remembering Alice Wong: Writer, Advocate, Friend, by Steven W. Thrasher, November 17, 2025, LitHub• Crips for eSims for Gaza, chuffed.org• Alice Wong Interview with Steven Thrasher with subtitles, Watch• Alice Wong, 2024 MacArthur Fellow, MacArthur Foundation Laura Flanders and Friends Crew: Laura Flanders-Executive Producer, Writer; Sabrina Artel-Supervising Producer; Jeremiah Cothren-Senior Producer; Veronica Delgado-Video Editor, Janet Hernandez-Communications Director; Jeannie Hopper-Audio Director, Podcast & Radio Producer, Audio Editor, Sound Design, Narrator; Sarah Miller-Development Director, Nat Needham-Editor, Graphic Design emeritus; David Neuman-Senior Video Editor, and Rory O'Conner-Senior Consulting Producer. FOLLOW Laura Flanders and FriendsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauraflandersandfriends/Blueky: https://bsky.app/profile/lfandfriends.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/LauraFlandersAndFriends/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lauraflandersandfriendsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFLRxVeYcB1H7DbuYZQG-lgLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lauraflandersandfriendsPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/lauraflandersandfriendsACCESSIBILITY - The broadcast edition of this episode is available with closed captioned by clicking here for our YouTube Channel
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose while the Nasdaq came under pressure as investors moved away from technology stocks and Nvidia, Apple and Oracle pulled back, Certified Financial Planner Chad Burton on retirement strategies, More on the next seminar with EP Wealth Advisors CFP's Chad Burton and Ryan Ignacio at the Palo Alto Elks Lodge January 15th at 6:30pm covering important tax strategies and more
Today's poem offers a new year's resolution worth keeping. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Omar Tawakol is the CEO and founder of Rembrand, an AI-powered virtual product placement company. He founded BlueKai, a data management platform acquired by Oracle for $400M+ in 2014, and Voicera, an AI meeting assistant acquired by Cisco in 2019. He currently serves on the board of The Trade Desk and as a General Partner at super{set}.In this episode of World of DaaS, Omar and Auren discuss:Why virtual billboards work better than 3D product placementHow AI eliminates two-year product placement negotiationsWhy virtual placement grew 10x faster internationally than in the USThe mistakes repeat founders make at scaleLooking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and follow us on X @worldofdaas.You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Omar Tawakol on X at @otawakol.Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)
WBSRocks: Business Growth with ERP and Digital Transformation
Send us a textAI commercialization and regulatory scrutiny are reshaping the market. Product announcements from SAP, Unit4, Deltek, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite highlight continued investment in cloud distribution, verticalized functionality, and embedded AI—often via hyperscaler marketplaces and agent frameworks—while transactions such as SYSPRO acquiring riteSOFT and Advantive acquiring PINPoint reinforce the ongoing push toward capability-led M&A in manufacturing and asset-centric environments. Partnerships like Pipefy with Oracle reflect the race to operationalize generative AI beyond experimentation, while the antitrust ruling involving SAP and the shareholder investigation into Lamb Weston Holdings serve as a reminder that legal, regulatory, and governance forces remain an active counterweight to rapid innovation.In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry analysts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to analyze current enterprise software stories. We covered many grounds, including the direction and roadmaps of each enterprise software vendor. Finally, we analyzed future trends and how they might shape the enterprise software industry.Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNRK47Sjt-UQuestions for Panelists?
Gary and Shannon kick off Hour 1 in full NFL playoff mode, admitting the emotional void left by the absence of Monday Night Football and bracing for the long offseason ahead. They react to a wild NBA moment as Steve Kerr gets ejected with Snoop Dogg on the call, then shift to breaking news with the sudden death of Rep. Doug LaMalfa, reflecting on legacy versus partisan noise. The conversation moves through foreign policy, including why Mexico is not Venezuela and eyebrow-raising talk about Greenland and NATO — before turning lighter as Gary’s dog Peter becomes an NFL playoff picker for social media. The hour wraps with the latest chapter in Lenny Dykstra’s saga and listener talkbacks about line-cutting disasters at Disneyland, culminating in a debate over the Matterhorn ride and the unforgettable discovery of the “abdominal bears.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Have you felt like 2025 was one massive ego death where everything you thought you were supposed to be doing got stripped away and you're left wondering what the hell just happened? In this final episode of the three-part series, I share my brutally honest year-in-review of 2025, the Year of the Snake. I walk through shutting off my Facebook ads in March (my main revenue source), retiring Spellbound after three years, the mistake of taking on two funnel projects in September that wrecked havoc because I'm not wired to build other peoples' businesses, my Costa Rica revelation about reciprocal community, and why stepping into 2026 means finally letting go of the "marketing expert" identity to own being the strategist and oracle who sees patterns, provides insights, and helps people find alignment before they build anything else.BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING TO THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL DISCOVER:The February 28th shift when Kathryn left a 25-year Cancer cycle and stepped into Leo via Zodiacal Releasing (an ancient astrology timing technique), entering a peak period around vocation and career at the exact moment she woke up energized to start cutting expenses, shutting off ads, and making radical decisions her ego was terrified of, and why this timing perfectly aligned with the Year of the Snake's mandate to shed what no longer serves.Why Kathryn made less revenue in 2025 but earned more profit by cutting her $4-5K/month Facebook ad spend, retiring the scalable group program model, and realizing she'd structured her online business exactly like the brick-and-mortar she sold to escape (high overhead requiring $10K+ monthly sales just to break even), and how her Moon in Aries in the 6th house (ruled by Mars in the 2nd house of money) created massive turmoil navigating financial safety while her soul craved simplicity.The September mistake of saying yes to two full funnel buildout projects despite knowing she's not wired for implementation or behind-the-scenes deliverable work, experiencing ghosting clients and lack of recognition (triggering her Leo in the 10th house need for feedback and reward), and the brutal clarity that her real value is as a strategist and oracle providing insights, breakthrough thinking, and pattern recognition (Mercury in Gate 43), not building other people's systems while her own business sits in the background.Why the identity shift from "marketing expert and conversion copywriter" to alignment-focused strategist felt like an ego death, how her wide open G center in Human Design means she's not wired to wrap her identity around what she does for work or be known for one thing, and what stepping into 2026 looks like with multiple income streams (Selling the Invisible AI system, 1-1 mentorship layering astrology and strategy, business evolution sessions) all serving the deeper work of helping entrepreneurs find alignment first, then expression, then systems, then revenue instead of the surface-level "attract more clients and make more money" hamster wheel that's completely out of alignment for her Scorpio rising depth.And while you're here, follow us on Instagram @creativelyowned for more daily inspiration on effortlessly attracting the most aligned clients without spending hours marketing your business or chasing clients. Also, make sure to tag me in your stories @creativelyowned.To get Wispr Flow the crazy handy voice-to-text AI that turns speech into clear, polished writing in every app. click here.Selling the Invisible: Exactly how to articulate the value of your cosmic genius even if your message transcends the typical “10k months” & “Make 6-figures” types of promises. Free on-demand training >>>
Daily Power Affirmations for your Creative Maniac Mind (in 60 Seconds)
Click here to Shop Affirmation Decks, Oracle Decks, and more! Use Promo code: RCPODCAST20 for 20% off your first order! Today's Power Affirmation: As I give to others, my life becomes fulfilled. Today's Oracle of Motivation: When you give something to another person, whether material or in service, a physiological response happens within you. A warm, fuzzy feeling creeps in and helps you make sexy time with your happiness. Your brain releases pleasure endorphins, including oxytocin, which lowers stress. Oxytocin makes you feel more connected to others, which is why good deeds are often paid forward. The greatest gift to yourself is a gift to someone else. Pay it forward! Designed to Motivate Your Creative Maniac Mind The 60-Second Power Affirmations Podcast is designed to help you focus, affirm your visions, and harness the power within your creative maniac mind! Join us every Monday and Thursday for a new 60-second power affirmation followed by a blast of oracle motivation from the Universe (+ a quick breathing meditation). It's time to take off your procrastination diaper and share your musings with the world! For more musings, visit RageCreate.com Leave a Review & Share! Apple Podcast reviews are one of THE most important factors for podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to leave the show a review on Apple Podcasts! Click this link: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Hit “Listen on Apple Podcasts” on the left-hand side under the picture. Scroll down under “Ratings & Reviews” & click “Write A Review” Leave an honest review. You're awesome!
Click here to send me a quick message :) What if your cycle was a storyteller? An oracle? A guide to help you more deeply understand what your body is telling you?This is exactly what your cycle is, whether you're in your peal fertility years, have irregular cycles, hormonal imbalances, are perimenopausal or beyond. And while for some people, hormonal birth control is an important ally, for others they were put on the pill to "regulate" their hormonal imbalance before they really got a chance to understand what else might be underlying the imbalance.In today's medley episode, you'll hear a little about hormonal birth control and its effect on the body from Gabrielle Jansen. Then I share about the origins of the phrase "your cycle is a vital sign" and more on how you can begin paying attention to what your cycle is telling you. And finally I introduce the importance of getting curious about your irregular cycle if that's something happening for you. While it can be very normal to have irregular cycles in your early post-menarche years and perimenopausal years, no matter when you're experiencing them it can be helpful to pay extra attention to get a sense of what else they might be telling you, too.Whatever signs and symptoms you may be experiencing, this episode is a little glimpse into your cycle as an oracle, and each of the full episodes are a deeper dive into these topics, which I recommend listening to if any of these topics piques your interest.Resources:Free live class, Jan 13th 2pm eastern (recording avail): What's Your Menstrual Cycle Telling You?Free guide: Track Your Cycle using FAM - get startedToday's show notes: Your cycle is an oracleEpisode 23: Your body on birth control w Gabrielle JansenEpisode 38: Your cycle is a vital signEpisode 66: What is your irregular cycle telling you?If you loved this episode, share it with a friend, or take a screenshot and share on social media and tag me @herbalwombwisdomAnd if you love this podcast, leave a rating & write a review! It's really helpful to get the show to more amazing humans like you. ❤️DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for educational purposes only, I am not providing any medical advice, I am not a medical practitioner, I'm an herbalist and in the US, there is no path to licensure for herbalists, so my role is as an herbal educator. Please do your own research and consult your healthcare provider for any personal concerns.FREE CLASS - What's Your Menstrual Cycle Telling You? Jan 13th 2pm eastern. Sign up at herbalwomb.com/cycleSupport the show
In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at why private-data inferencing may be the next trillion-dollar AI marketHighlights00:28 — Larry Ellison's grand AI plan for 2026 is centered on the holy grail for CEOs, boards of directors, and business leaders. They're looking to unlock the power of all their data for AI reasoning and inferencing. Oracle's promise is that Oracle's solutions are going to allow companies to be able to reason and do inferencing on all of their private data, and to do so very securely.01:24 — Here are the pieces that he said are going to come together for this: the existing Oracle databases and all the data that's in them plus now the new Oracle AI Database. They've got their Oracle Applications, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. All of those pieces are coming together.02:59 — We've all heard about training AI models. He said that is a spectacularly huge and fast-growing business. But, he said, when you then take that away from training the models and get it into the corporate world, to be able to do the reasoning over and inferencing on private corporate data, he said that's an even bigger market than training AI models.03:24 — And he said Oracle is going to be right in the thick of these two — the largest and fastest-growing markets in history — now in the Cloud Wars. Oracle, I believe, has taken the lead position in saying, “We cannot just outline it and describe it. We can do it. We can deliver it, and we can do that now.” This is where Ellison has helped to distinguish Oracle from all other competitors.04:08 — He's done this for the last half century, and I think at this point, with some of the different pieces he's put together, we've got to position Oracle as the leader — at least right now — in enabling the fulfilment of this Holy Grail, where companies are able to unlock and unleash the power of all of their data for AI applications and AI purposes, leading the way into the AI economy. Visit Cloud Wars for more.
Click here to Shop Affirmation Decks, Oracle Decks, and more! Use Promo code: RCPODCAST20 for 20% off your first order! Today's Power Affirmation: I consciously connect with my meals, one bite at a time. Today's Oracle of Motivation: Sharing a meal was once a sacred ritual for all living creatures. Though we still depend on food for survival, much of the developed world has forgotten the sacredness of the meal thanks to the easy access and the "busyness" of life. What if you slowed down, closed your eyes, and dedicated all your senses to each bite of a meal? What is the aroma, texture, flavor? Where did this food come from? What sacrifice, cultivation, and transportation occurred for this food to end up in your belly, providing you with energy and a new life force? Every meal should be a Thanksgiving... Designed to Motivate Your Creative Maniac Mind The 60-Second Power Affirmations Podcast is designed to help you focus, affirm your visions, and harness the power within your creative maniac mind! Join us every Monday and Thursday for a new 60-second power affirmation followed by a blast of oracle motivation from the Universe (+ a quick breathing meditation). It's time to take off your procrastination diaper and share your musings with the world! For more musings, visit RageCreate.com Leave a Review & Share! Apple Podcast reviews are one of THE most important factors for podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to leave the show a review on Apple Podcasts! Click this link: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Hit “Listen on Apple Podcasts” on the left-hand side under the picture. Scroll down under “Ratings & Reviews” & click “Write A Review” Leave an honest review. You're awesome!
Introducing Rob Ruiz Meet Rob Ruiz, a seasoned Senior Full Stack Developer with nearly two decades of expertise in WordPress innovation and open-source magic. As the Lead Maintainer of WP Rig since 2020, Rob has been the driving force behind this groundbreaking open-source framework that empowers developers to craft high-performance, accessible, and progressively enhanced WordPress themes with ease. WP Rig isn’t just a starter theme—it’s a turbocharged toolkit that bundles modern build processes, linting, optimization, and testing to deliver lightning-fast, standards-compliant sites that shine on any device. Show Notes For more on Rob and WP Rig, check out these links: LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robcruiz WP Rig Official Site: https://wprig.io GitHub Repository: https://github.com/wprig/wprig Latest Releases: https://github.com/wprig/wprig/releases WP Rig 3.1 Announcement: https://wprig.io/wp-rig-3-1/ Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher DeRosia, and with me today I have- Rob Ruiz: Rob Ruiz. Topher: Rob. You and I have talked a couple of times, once recently, and I learned about a project you’re working on, but not a whole lot about you. Where do you live? What do you do for a living? Rob: Yeah, for sure. Good question. Although I’m originally from Orlando, Florida, I’ve been living in Omaha, Nebraska for a couple of decades now. So I’m pretty much a native. I know a lot of people around here and I’ve been fairly involved in various local communities over the years. I’m a web developer. Started off as a graphic designer kind of out of college, and then got interested in web stuff. And so as a graphic designer turned future web developer, I guess, I was very interested in content management systems because it made the creating and managing of websites very, very easy. My first couple of sites were Flash websites, sites with macro media Flash. Then once I found content management systems, I was like, “Wow, this is way easier than coding the whole thing from scratch with Flash.” And then all the other obvious benefits that come from that. So I originally started with Joomla, interestingly enough, and used Joomla for about two or three years, then found WordPress and never looked back. And so I’ve been using WordPress ever since. As the years have gone on, WordPress has enabled me to slowly transition from a more kind of web designer, I guess, to a very full-blown web developer and software engineer, and even software architect to some degree. So here we are many years later. Topher: There’s a big step from designer to developer. How did that go for you? I’m assuming you went to PHP. Although if you were doing Flash sites, you probably learned ActionScript. Rob: Yeah. Yeah. That was very convenient when I started learning JavaScript. It made it very easy to learn JavaScript faster because I already had a familiarity with ActionScript. So there’s a lot of similarities there. But yeah. Even before I started doing PHP, I started learning more HTML and CSS. I did do a couple of static websites between there that were just like no content management system at all. So I was able to kind of sharpen my sword there with the CSS and HTML, which wasn’t particularly hard. But yeah, definitely, the PHP… that was a big step was PHP because it’s a proper logical programming language. There was a lot there I needed to unpack, and so it took me a while. I had to stick to it and really rinse and repeat before I finally got my feet under me. Topher: I can imagine. All right. So then you work for yourself or you freelance or do you have a real job, as it were? Rob: Currently, I do have a real job. Currently, I’m working at a company called Bold Orange out of Minneapolis. They’re a web agency. But I kind of bounce around from a lot of different jobs. And then, yes, I do freelance on the side, and I also develop my own products as well for myself and my company. Topher: Cool. Bold Orange sounds familiar. Who owns that? Rob: To be honest, I don’t know who the owners are. It’s just a pretty big web agency out of Minneapolis. They are a big company. You could just look them up at boldorange.com. They work for some pretty big companies. Topher: Cool. All right. You and I talked last about WP Rig. Give me a little background on where that came from and how you got it. Rob: Yeah, for sure. Well, there was a period of time where I was working at a company called Proxy Bid that is in the auction industry, and they had a product or a service — I don’t know how you want to look at that —called Auction Services. That product is basically just building WordPress sites for auction companies. They tasked us with a way to kind of standardize those websites essentially. And what we realized is that picking a different theme for every single site made things difficult to manage and increase tech debt by a lot. So what we were tasked with was, okay, if we’re going to build our own theme that we’re just going to make highly dynamic so we can make it look different from site to site. So we want to build it, but we want to build it smart and we want to make it reusable and maintainable. So let’s find a good framework to build this on so that we can maintain coding standards and end up with as little tech debt as possible, essentially. That’s when I first discovered WP Rig. In my research, I came across it and others. We came across Roots Sage and some of the other big names, I guess. It was actually a team exercise. We all went out and looked for different ones and studied different ones and mine that I found was WP Rig. And I was extremely interested in that one over the other ones. Interestingly enough- Topher: Can you tell me why over the other ones? Rob: That’s a great question. Yeah. I really liked the design patterns. I really liked the focus on WordPress coding standards. So having a system built in that checked all the code against WordPress coding standards was cool. I loved the compiling transpiling, whatever, for CSS and JavaScript kind of built in. That sounded really, really interesting. The fact that there was PHP unit testing built into it. So there’s like a starter testing framework built in that’s easy to extend so that you can add additional unit tests as your theme grows. We really wanted to make sure… because we were very into CICD pipelines. So we wanted to make sure that as developers were adding or contributing to any themes that we built with this, that we could have automated tests run and automated builds run, and just automate as much as possible. So WP rig just seemed like something that gave us those capabilities right out of the box. So that was a big thing. And I loved the way that they did it. Roots Sage does something similar, but they use their blade templating engine built in there. We really wanted to stick to something that was a bit more standard WordPress so that there wasn’t like a large knowledge overhead so that we didn’t have to say like, okay, if we’re bringing on other developers, like junior developers work on it, oh, it would be nice if you use Laravel too because we use this templating engine in all of our themes. We didn’t want to have to worry about that essentially. It was all object-oriented and all that stuff too. That’s what looked interesting to me. We ended up building a theme with WP Rig. I don’t know what they ended up doing with it after that, because I ended up getting let go shortly thereafter because the company had recently been acquired. Also, this was right after COVID too. So there was just a lot of moving parts and changing things at the time. So I ended up getting let go. But literally a week after I got let go, I came across a post on WP Tavern about how this framework was looking for new maintainers. Basically, this was a call put out by Morton, the original author of WP Rig. He reached out to WP Tavern and said, “Look, we’re not interested in maintaining this thing anymore, but it’s pretty cool. We like what we’ve built. And so we’re looking for other people to come in and adopt it essentially.” So I joined a Zoom meeting with a handful of other individuals that were also interested in this whole endeavor, and Morton reached out to me after the call and basically just said, “I looked you up. I liked some of the input that you had during the meeting. Let’s talk a little bit more.” And then that eventually led to conversations about me essentially taking the whole project over entirely. So, the branding, the hosting of the website, being lead maintainer on the project. Basically, gave me the keys to the kingdom in terms of GitHub and everything. So that’s how it ended up going in terms of the handoff between Morton and I. And I’m very grateful to him. They really created something super cool and I was honored to take it over and kind of, I don’t know, keep it going, I guess. Topher: I would be really curious. I don’t think either of us have the answer. I’d be curious to know how similar that path is to other project handoffs. It’s different from like an acquisition. You didn’t buy a plugin from somebody. It was kind of like vibes, I guess. Rob: It was like vibes. It was very vibey. I guess that’s probably the case in an open source situation. It’s very much an open source project. It’s a community-driven thing. It’s for everybody by everybody. I don’t know if all open source community projects roll like that, but that’s how this one worked out. There was some amount of ownership on Morton’s behalf. He did hire somebody to do the branding for WP Rig and the logo. And then obviously he was paying for stuff like the WPrig.io domain and the hosting through SiteGround and so on and so forth. So, we did have to transfer some of that and I’ve taken over those, I guess, financial burdens, if you want to think of it like that. But I’m totally okay with it. Topher: All right. You sort of mentioned some of the things Rig does, compiling and all that kind of stuff. Can you tell me… we didn’t discuss this before. I’m sitting at my desk and I think I want a website. How long does it take to go from that to looking at WordPress and logging into the admin with Rig? Rob: Okay. Rig is not an environment management system like local- Topher: I’m realizing my mistake. Somebody sends me a design in Figma. How long does it take me to go from that to, I’m not going to say complete because I mean, that’s CSS, but you know, how long does it take me to get to the point where I’m looking at a theme that is mine for the client that I’m going to start converting? Rob: Well, if you’re just looking for a starting point, if you’re just like, okay, how long does it take to get to like, okay, here’s my blank slate and I’m ready to start adopting all of these rules that are set up in Figma or whatever, I mean, you’re looking at maybe 5 minutes, 10 minutes, something like that. It’s pretty automated. You just need some simple knowledge of Git. And then there are some prerequisites to using WP Rig. You do have to have composer installed because we do leverage some Composer packages to some of it, although to be honest, you could probably get away with not using Composer. You just have to be okay with sacrificing some of the tools the WP Rig assumes you’re going to have. And then obviously Node. You have to have Node installed. A lot of our documentation assumes that you have NPM, that you’re using NPM for all your Nodes or your package management. But we did recently introduce support for Bun. And so you can use Bun instead of NPM, which is actually a lot faster and better in many ways. Topher: Okay. A lot of my audience are not developers, users, or light developers, like they’ll download a theme, hack a template, whatever. Is this for them? Am I boring those people right now? Rob: That’s a great question. I mean, and I think this is an interesting dichotomy and paradigm in the WordPress ecosystem, because you’ve got kind of this great divide. At least this is something I’ve noticed in my years in the WordPress community is you have many people that are not coders or developers that are very interested in expanding their knowledge of WordPress, but it’s strictly from a more of a marketing perspective where it’s like, I just want to know how to build websites with WordPress and how to use it to achieve my goals online from a marketing standpoint. You have that group of people, and then you have this other group of people that are very developer centric that want to know how to extend WordPress and how to empower those other people that we just discussed. Right? Topher: Right. Rob: So, yeah, that’s a very good question. I would say that WP Rig is very much designed for the developers, not for the marketers. The assumption there is that you’re going to be doing some amount of coding. Now, can you get away with doing a very light amount of coding? Yes. Yes, you can. I mean, if you compare what you’re going to get out of that assumed workflow to something that you would get off like Theme Forest or whatever, it’s going to be a night and day difference because those theme, Forest Themes, have hours, hundreds, sometimes hundreds of hours of development put into them. So, you’re not going to just out of the box immediately get something that is comparable to that. Topher: You need to put in those hundreds of hours of development to make a theme. Rob: As of today, yes. That may change soon though. Topher: Watch this space. Rob: That’s all I’ll say. Topher: Okay. So now we know who it’s for. I’m assuming there’s a website for it. What is it? Rob: Yeah. If you go to WPrig.io, we have a homepage that shows you all the features that are there in WP Rig. And then there’s a whole documentation area that helps people get up and running with WP Rig because there is a small learning curve there that’s pretty palatable for anybody who’s familiar with modern development workflows. So that is a thing. So the type of person that this is designed for anybody that wants to make a theme for anything. Let’s say you’re a big agency and you pull in a big client and that client wants something extremely custom and they come to you with Figma designs. Sure, you could go out there and find some premium theme and try to like child theme and overhaul that if you want. But in many situations, I would say in most situations, if you’re working from a Figma design that’s not based off of another theme already that’s just kind of somebody else’s brainchild, then you’re probably going to want to start from scratch. And so the idea here is that this is something to replace an approach, like underscores an approach. Actually, WP Pig was based off of underscores. The whole concept of it, as Morton explained it to me, was that he wanted to build an underscores that was more modern and full-featured from a development standpoint. Topher: Does it have any opinions about Gutenberg? Rob: It does now, but it did not when I took it over because Gutenberg did not exist yet when I took over WP Rig. Topher: Okay. What are its opinions? Rob: Yeah, sure. The opinion right out of the gate is that you can use Gutenberg as an editor and it has support like CSS rules in it for the standard blocks. So you should be able to use regular Gutenberg blocks in your theme and they should look just fine. There’s no resets in there. It doesn’t start from scratch. There’s not a bunch of styling you have to do for the blocks necessarily. Now, if you go to the full site editing or block-based mentality here, there are some things you need to do in WP Rig to convert the out-of-the-box WP Rig into another paradigm essentially. Right when you pull WP Rig, the assumption is you’re building what most people would refer to as a hybrid theme. The theme supports API or whatever, and the assumption is that you’re not going to be using the site editor. You’re just going to kind of do traditional WordPress, but you might be using Gutenberg for your content. So you’re just using Gutenberg kind of to author your pages and your posts and stuff like that, but not necessarily the whole site. WP Rig has the ability to kind of transform itself into other paradigms. So the first paradigm we built out was the universal theme approach. And the idea there is that you get a combination of the full site editing capabilities. But then you also have the traditional menu manager and the settings customizer framework or whatever is still there, right? These are things that don’t exist in a standard block-based theme. So I guess an easy example would be like the 2025 WordPress theme that comes right out of the box. It comes installed in WordPress. That is a true block-based theme, not a universal theme. So it doesn’t have those features because the assumption there is that it doesn’t need those features. You can kind of transform WP Rig into a universal theme that’s kind of a hybrid between a block-based and a classic theme. And then it can also transform into a strictly block-based theme as well. So following the same architecture as like the WordPress 2025 theme or Ollie or something like that is also a true block-based theme as well. So you can easily convert or transform the starting point of WP Rig into either of those paradigms if that’s the type of theme you’re setting out to build. Topher: Okay. That sounds super flexible. How much work is it to do that? Rob: It’s like one command line. Previously we had some tutorials on the website that showed you step-by-step, like what you needed to change about the theme to do that. You would have to add some files, delete some files, edit some code, add some theme supports into the base support class and some other stuff. I have recently, as of like a year and a half ago or a year ago, created a command line or a command that you can type into the command line that basically does that entire conversion process for you in like the blink of an eye. It takes probably a second to a second and a half to perform those changes to the code and then you’re good to go. It is best to do that conversion before you start building out your whole theme. It’s not impossible to do it after. But you’re more likely to run into problems or conflicts if you’ve already set out building your whole theme under one paradigm, and then you decide how the project you want to switch over to block-based or whatever. You’re likely to run into the need to refactor a bunch of stuff in that situation. So it is ideal to make that choice extremely early on in the process of developing your theme. But either way it’ll still work. That’s just one of the many tools that exist in WP Rig to transform it or convert it in several ways. That’s just one example. There are other examples of ways that Rig kind of converts itself to other paradigms as well. Topher: Yeah. All right. In my development life, I’ve had two parts to it. And one is the weekend hobbyist, or I download cadence and I whip something up in 20 minutes because I just want to experiment and the other is agency life where everything’s in Git, things are compiled, there are versions, blah, blah, blah. This sounds very friendly to that more professional pathway. Rob: Absolutely. Yes. Or, I mean, there’s another situation here too. If you’re a company who develops themes and publishes them to a platform like ThemeForest or any other platform, perhaps you’re selling themes on your own website, whatever, if you’re making things for sale, there’s no reason you couldn’t use WP Rig to build your themes. We have a bundle process that bundles your theme for publication or publishing. Whether you’re an agency or whether you’re putting your theme out for sale, it doesn’t matter, during that bundle process, it does actually white label the entire code base to where there’s no mention of WP Rig in the code whatsoever. Let’s say you were to build a theme that you wanted to put up for sale because you have some cool ideas. Say, page transitions now are completely supported in all modern or in most modern browsers. And when I say print page transitions, for those that are in the know, I am talking about not single page app page transitions, but through website page transitions. You can now do that. Let’s say you were like, “Hey, I’m feeling ambitious and I want to put out some new theme that comes with these page transitions built in,” and that’s going to be fancy on ThemeForest when people look at my demo, people might want to buy that. You could totally use WP Rig to build that out into a theme and the bundle process will white label all of the code. And then when people buy your theme and download that code, if they’re starting to go through and look through your code, they’re not going to have any way of knowing that it was built with WP Rig unless they’re familiar with the base WP Rig architecture, like how it does its object-oriented programming. It might be familiar with the patterns that it’s using and be able to kind of discern like, okay, well, this is the same pattern WP Rig uses, so high likelihood it was built with WP Rig. But they’re not going to be able to know by reading through the code. It’s not going to say WP Rig everywhere. It’s going to have the theme all over the place in the code. Topher: Okay. So then is that still WP Rig code? It just changed its labels? Rob: Yeah. Topher: So, it’s not like you’re exporting HTML, CSS and JavaScript? The underlying Rig framework is still there. Rob: Yeah. During the bundle process, it is bundling CSS and HTML. Well, HTML in the case of a block-based theme. But, yeah, it is bundling your PHP, your CSS, your JavaScript into the theme that you’re going to let people download when they buy it, or that you’re going to ship to your whatever client’s website. But all that code is going to be transpiled. In the case of CSS and JavaScript, there’s only going to be minified versions of that code in that theme. The source code is not actually going to be in there. Topher: This sounds pretty cool. You mentioned some stuff might be coming. You don’t have to tell me what it is, but do you have a timeline? When should we be watching for the next cool thing from Rig? Rob: Okay, cool. Well, I’m going to keep iterating on Rig forever. Regardless of any future products that might be built on WP Rig, WP Rig will always and forever remain an open source product for anybody to use for free and we, I, and possibly others in the future will continue to update it and support it over time. We just recently put out 3.1. You could expect the 3.2 anytime in the next six months to a year, probably closer to six months. One feature I’m looking at particularly closely right now is the new stuff coming out in version 6.9 of WordPress around the various APIs that are there. I think one of them is called the form… There’s a field API and a form API or view API or something like that. So WP Rig comes with a React-based settings framework in it. So if you want your theme to have a bunch of settings in it to make it flexible for whoever buys your theme, you can use this settings framework to easily create a bunch of fields, and then that framework will automatically manage all your fields and store all the data from those fields and make it easy to retrieve the values of the input on those fields, without knowing any React at all. Now, if you know React, you can go in there and, you know, embellish what’s already there, but it takes a JSON approach. So if you just understand JSON, you can go in and change the JSON for the framework, and that will automatically add fields into the settings framework. So you don’t even have to know React to extend the settings page if you want. That will likely get an overhaul using these new APIs being introduced into Rig. Topher: All right. How often have you run into something where, “Oh, look, WordPress has a new feature, I need to rebuild my system”? Rob: Over the last four or five years, it’s happened a lot because, yeah, I mean, like I said, when I first took this thing over, Gutenberg had not even been introduced yet. So, you had the introduction of Gutenberg and blocks. That was one thing. Then this whole full site editing became a thing, which later became the site editor. So that became a whole thing. Then all these various APIs. I mean, it happens quite frequently. So I’ve been working to keep it modern and up to date over the past four years and it’s been an incredible learning experience. It not only keeps my WordPress knowledge extremely sharp, but I’ve also learned how various other toolkits are built. That’s been the interesting thing. From a development standpoint, there’s two challenges here. One of the challenges is staying modern on the WordPress side of things. For instance, WordPress coding standards came out with a version 3 and then a version 3.1 about two years ago. I had to update WP Rig to leverage those modern coding standards. So that’s one example is as WordPress changes, the code in WP Rig also needs to change. Or for instance, if new CSS standards change, right, new CSS properties come out, it is ideal for the base CSS in WP Rig, meaning the CSS that you get right out of the box with it, comes with some of these, for instance, CSS grid, Flexbox, stuff like that. If I was adopting a theme framework to build a theme on, I would expect some of that stuff to be in there. And those things were extremely new when I first took over WP Rig and were not all baked in there essentially. So I’ve had to add a lot of that over time. Now there’s another side to this, which is not just keeping up with WordPress and CSS and PHP, 8. whatever, yada yada yada. You’ve also got the toolkit. There are various node packages and composer packages of power WP Rig and the process in which it does the transpiling, the bundling, the automated manipulation of your code during various aspects of the usage of WP Rig is a whole nother set of challenges because now you have to learn concepts like, well, how do I write custom node scripts? Right? Like there were no WP CLI commands built into WP Rig when I first took it over. Now there’s a whole list. There’s a whole library of WP CLI commands that come in Rig right out of the gate. And so I’ve had to learn about that. So just various things that come with knowing how do you automate the process of converting code, that’s something that was completely foreign to me when I first took over WP Rig. That’s been another incredible learning experience is understanding like what’s the difference between Webpack and Gulp. I didn’t know, right? I would tell people I’m using Gulp and WP Rig and they would be like, “Well, why don’t you just use Webpack?” and I would say, “I don’t know. I don’t know what the difference is.” So over time I could figure out what are the differences? Why aren’t we using Webpack? And I’m glad I spent some time on that because it turns out Webpack is not the hottest thing anymore, so I just skipped right over all that. When I overhauled for version 3, we’re now not using Gulp anymore as of 3.1. We’re now using more of a Vite-like process, far more modern than Webpack and far better and faster and sleeker and lighter. I had to learn a bunch about what powers Vite. What is Vite doing under the hood that we might be able to also do in WP Rig, but do it in a WordPress way. Because Vite is a SaaS tool. If you’re building a SaaS, like React with a… we’re not a SaaS. I guess a spa is a better term to use here. If you’re building a single page application with React or view or belt or whatever, right, then knowing what Vite is and just using Vite right out of the box is perfect. But it doesn’t translate perfectly to WordPress land because WordPress has its own opinions. And so I did have to do some dissecting there and figure out what to keep and what to not keep to what to kind of set aside so that WordPress can keep doing what WordPress does the way WordPress likes to do it, but also improve on how we’re doing some of the compiling and transpiling and the manipulation of the code during these various. Topher: All right. I want to pivot a little bit to some personal-ish questions. Rob: Okay. Topher: This is a big project. I’m sure it takes up plenty of your time. How scalable is that in your life? Do you want to do this for the rest of your life? Rob: That’s a fantastic question. I don’t know about the rest of my life. I mean, I definitely want to do web development for the rest of my life because the web has, let’s be honest, it’s transformed everyone’s way of life, whether you’re a web developer or not. You know, the fact that we have the internet in our pocket now, you know, it has changed everything. Apps, everything. It’s all built on the web. So I certainly want to be involved in the web the rest of my life. Do I want to keep doing WordPress the rest of my life? I don’t know. Do I want to keep doing WP Rig the rest of my life? I don’t know. But I will say that you bring up a very interesting point, which is it does take up a lot of time and also trust in open source over the past four or five years I would argue has diminished a little bit as a result of various events that have occurred over the past two or three years. I mean, we could cite the whole WP Engine Matt Mullerwig thing. We can also cite what’s going on with Oracle and JavaScript. Well, I mean, there’s many examples of this. I mean, we can cite the whole thing that happened… I mean, there’s various packages out there that are used and developed and open source to anybody, and some of them are going on maintained and it’s causing security vulnerabilities and degradation and all this stuff. So it’s a very important point. One thing I started thinking about after considering that in relation to WP Rig was I noticed that there’s usually a for-profit arm of any of these frameworks that seems to extend the lifespan of it. Let’s just talk about React, for example, React is an open source JavaScript framework, but it’s used by Facebook and Facebook is extremely for-profit. So companies that are making infrastructural or architectural decisions, they will base their choice on whether or not to use a framework largely on how long they think this framework is going to remain relevant or valid or maintained, right? A large part of that is, well, is there a company making money off of this thing? Because if there is, the chances- Topher: They’re going to keep doing that. Rob: They’re going to keep doing it. It’s going to stay around. That’s good. I think that’s healthy. A lot of people that like open source and want everything to be free, they might look at something like that and say like, well, I don’t want you to make a paid version of it or there shouldn’t be a pro version. I think that’s a very short-sighted way of looking at that software and these innovations. I think a more experienced way of looking at it is if you want something to remain relevant and maintained for a long period of time, having a for-profit way in which it’s leveraged is a very good thing. I mean, let’s be real. Would WordPress still be what it is today if there wasn’t a wordpress.com or if WooCommerce wasn’t owned by Automattic or whatever, right? They’ll be on top. I mean, it’s obviously impossible to say, but my argument would be, probably not. I mean, look at what’s happened to the other content management systems out there. You know, Joomla Drupal. They don’t really have a flourishing, you know, paid pro service that goes with their thing that’s very popular, at least definitely not as popular as WordPress.com or WordPress VIP or some of these other things that exist out there. And so having something that’s making and generating money that can then contribute back into it the way Automattic has been doing with WordPress over these years has, in my opinion, been instrumental. I mean, people can talk smack about Gutenberg all they want, but let’s be real, it’s 2025, would you still feel that WordPress is an elegant solution if we were still working from the WYSIWYG and using the classic editor? And I know a lot of people are still using the classic editor and there’s classic for us, the fork and all that stuff. But I mean, that only makes sense in a very specific implementation of WordPress, a very specific paradigm. If you want to explore any of these other paradigms out there, that way of thinking about WordPress kind of falls apart pretty quickly. I, for one, am happy that Gutenberg exists. I’m very happy that Automattic continues. And I’m grateful, actually, that Automattic continues to contribute back into WordPress. And not just them, obviously there’s other companies, XWP, 10Up, all these other companies are also contributing as well. But I’m very grateful that this ecosystem exists and that there’s contribution going back in and it’s happening from companies that are making money with this. And I think that’s vital. All that to say that WP Rig may and likely will have paid products in the future that leverage WP Rig. So that’s not to say that WP Rig will eventually cost money. That’s just to say that eventually people can expect other products to come out in the future that will be built on WP Rig and incentivize the continued contributions back into WP Rig. The open source version of WP Rig. Topher: That’s cool. I think that’s wise. If you want anything to stay alive, you have to feed it. Rob: That’s right. Topher: I had some more questions but I had forgotten them because I got caught up in your answer. Rob: Oh, thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment. I mean, my answer was eloquent. But I’m happy to expand on anything, know you, WordPress related, me related, you know, whether it comes to the ecosystem in WordPress, the whole WordCamp meetup thing is very interesting. I led the WP Omaha meetup for many years here in Omaha, Nebraska and I also led the WordCamp, the organizing of WordCamp here in Omaha for several years as well. That whole community, the whole ecosystem, at least in America seems to have largely fallen apart. I don’t know if you want to talk about that at all. But yeah, I’m ready to dive into any topics. Topher: I’m going to have one more question and then we’re going to wrap up. And it was that you were talking about all the things you had to learn. I’m sure there were nights where you were looking at your computer thinking, “Oh man, I had it working, now I gotta go learn a new thing.” I would love for you to go back in time and blog all of that if you would. But given that you can’t, I would be interested in a blog moving forward, documenting what you’re learning, how you’re learning it and starting maybe with a post that’s summarizes all of that. Obviously, that’s up to you and how you want to spend your time, but I think it’d be really valuable to other people starting a project, picking up somebody else’s project to see what the roadmap might look like. You know what I mean? Rob: For sure. Well, I can briefly summarize what I’ve learned over the years and where I’m at today with how I do this kind of stuff. I will say that a lot of the improvements to WP Rig that have happened over the last year or two would not be possible without the advent of AI. Topher: Interesting. Rob: That’s a fancy way of saying that I have been by coding a lot of WP Rig lately. If you know how to use AI, it is extremely powerful and it can help you do many things very quickly that previously would have taken much longer or more manpower. So, yeah, perhaps if there was like five, six, seven people actively, excuse me, actively contributing to WP Rig, then this type of stuff would have been possible previously, but that’s not the case. There is one person, well, one main contributor to WP Rig today and you’re talking to them. There are a handful of other people that have been likely contributing to WP Rig over the versions and you can find their contributions in the change log file in WP Rig. But those contributions have been extremely light compared to what I’ve been doing. I wouldn’t be able to do any of it without AI. I have learned my ability to learn things extremely rapidly has ramped up tenfold since I started learning how to properly leverage LLMs and AI. So that’s not to say that like, you know, WP Rig, all the code is just being completely written by AI and I’m just like. make it better, enter, and then like WP Rig is better. I wish it was that easy. It’s certainly not that. But when I needed to start asking some of these vital questions that I really didn’t have anyone to turn to to help answer them, I was able to turn to AI. For instance, let’s go back to the Webpack versus Gulp situation. Although Gulp is no longer used in WP Rig, you know, it was used in WP Rig until very recently. So I had to understand like, what is this system, how does it work, how do I extend it and how do I update it and all these things, right? And why aren’t we using WebPack and you know, is there validity to this criticism behind you should use webpack instead of Gulp or whatever, right? I was able to use AI to ask these questions and be able to get extremely good answers out of it and give me the direction I needed to make some of these kind of higher level decisions on like architecturally where should WP Rig go? It was through these virtual conversations with LLMs that I was able to refine the direction of WP Rig in a direction that is both modern and forward-thinking and architecturally sound. I learned a tremendous amount from AI about the architecture, about the code, about all of it. My advice to anybody that wants to extend their skill set a little bit in the development side of things is to leverage this new thing that we have in a way that is as productive as possible for you. So that’s going to vary from person to person. But for me, if I’m on a flight or if I’m stuck somewhere for a while, like, let’s say I got to take my kid to practice or something and I’m stuck there for an hour and I got to find some way to kill my time 9 times out of 10, I’m on my laptop or on my phone having conversations with Grok or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. I am literally refining… I’m just sitting there asking it questions that are on my mind that I wish I could ask somebody who’s like 10 times more capable than me. It has been instrumental. WP Rig wouldn’t be where it is today if it wasn’t for that. I would just say to anybody, especially now that it’s all on apps and you don’t have to be on a browser anymore, adopt that way of thinking. You know, if you’re on your lunch break or whatever and you have an hour lunch break and you only take 15 minutes to eat, what could you be doing with those other 45 minutes? You could just jump on this magical thing that we have now and start probing it for questions. Like, Hey, here’s what I know. Here’s what I don’t know. Fill these knowledge gaps for me.” And it is extremely good at doing that. Topher: So my question was, can you blog this and your answer told me that there’s more there that I want to hear. That’s the stuff that should be in your book when you write your book. Rob: I’m flattered that you would be interested in reading anything that I write. So thank you. I’ve written stuff in the past and it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. But I also don’t have any platforms to market it either. But yeah, no, I made some… I’m sorry. Topher: I think your experience is valuable far beyond Rig or WordPress. If you abstract it out of a particular project to say, you know, I did this with a project, I learned this this way, I think that would be super valuable. Rob: Well, I will say that recently at my current job, I was challenged to create an end to end testing framework with Playwright that would speed up how long it takes to test things and also prevent, you know, to make things fail earlier, essentially, to prevent broken things from ending up in the wild, right, and having to catch them the hard way. I didn’t know a lot about Playwright, but I do know how toolkits work now because of WP Rig. And I was able to successfully in a matter of, I don’t know, three days, put together a starter kit for a test framework that we’re already using at work to test any website that we create for any client. It can be extended and it can be hooked into any CI CD pipeline and it generates reports for you and it does a whole bunch of stuff. I was able to do this relatively quickly. This knowledge, yes, does come in handy in other situations. Will I end up developing other toolkits like WP Rig in the future for other things? I guess if I can give any advice to anybody listening out there, another piece of advice I would give people is, you know, especially if you’re a junior developer and you’re still learning or whatever, or you’re just a marketing person and just want to have more control over the functionality side of what you’re creating or more insight into that so you could better, you know, manage projects or whatever. My advice would be to take on a small little project that is scoped relatively small that’s not too much for you to chew and go build something and do it with… Just doing that will be good. But if you can do it with the intent to then present it in some fashion, whether it be a blog article or creating a YouTube video or going to a meetup and giving a talk on it or even a lunch and learn at work or whatever, right, that will, in my experience, it will dramatically amplify how much you learn from that little pet project that’s kind of like a mini learning experience. And I highly encourage anybody out there to do that on the regular. Actually, no matter what your experience level is in development, I think you should do these things on a regular basis. Topher: All right. I’m going to wrap this up. I got to get back to work. You probably have to get back to work. Rob: Yeah. Topher: Thanks for talking. Rob: Thanks for having me, Topher. Really appreciate it. Topher: Where could people find you? WPrig.io? Rob: Yeah, WPrig.io. WP rig has accounts on all of the major platforms and, even on Bluesky and Mastodon. You can look me up, Rob Ruiz. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on all of those same platforms as well. You can add me on Facebook if you want, whatever. And I’m also in the WordPress Slack as well as Rob Ruiz. You can find me in the WordPress Slack. And then I’m on the WordPress Reddit and all that stuff. So yeah, reach out. If anybody wants to have any questions about Rig or anything else, I’m happy to engage. Topher: Sounds good. All right, I’ll see you. Rob: All right, thanks, Topher. Have a good day. Topher: This has been an episode of the Hallway Chats podcast. I’m your host Topher DeRosia. Many thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. If you’d like to hear more Hallway Chats, please let us know on hallwaychats.com.
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Aaron Delp (@aarondelp), Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and Brandon Whichard (@bwhichard, @SoftwareDefTalk) discuss the top stories in Cloud and AI from December 2025.SHOW: 990SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #990 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW NOTES:Link to December 2025 News and ArticlesFEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netBluesky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.socialTwitter/X: @cloudcastpodInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod
Send us a textA new year invites new rhythms, and the kitchen is one of the most powerful places to begin. In this episode of the Magick Kitchen Podcast, Leandra Witchwood and Elyse Welles explore how to start — or refresh — a kitchen witchery practice rooted in green magic, balance, and everyday life.They discuss why kitchen witchery and green witchcraft are inseparable paths, how perfection and rigid planning can block magical flow, and why the hearth has always been the energetic heart of the home. From cooking with seasonal ingredients to working with what's already in your spice cabinet, this conversation offers grounded ways to make magic sustainable, nourishing, and intuitive.You'll also learn how food connects us to cycles — the moon, the body, the land — and why honoring ingredients through use, reuse, and gratitude matters deeply in the craft. The episode closes with a simple cinnamon–apple tea or simmer pot practice you can make right away using common kitchen ingredients.January 6 – January 27 | Tuesdays at 7 PM EST | Live via ZoomLearn to handcraft blends for cooking, herbalism, ritual, and hands-on spellwork into a month-long journey where your kitchen becomes a place of power, healing, and everyday enchantment. A short, spoken invitation calling women who feel the Dark Goddess stirring to step into embodied power through a nine week initiatory journey with ancient goddesses. Learn more at elysewelles.com/redthread. Have you felt the call of the Oracle? This May, join me in Greece to walk Delphi, Eleusis, Aphrodite's Springs, and the Temple of Artemis. Be anointed in sacred waters and experience the prophecy still alive in the land. Learn more at elysewelles.com/2026Immersives. The Rebel Mystic Coven is my heart-crafted teaching circle in South-Central Pennsylvania—a sanctuary where curiosity meets mystery and seekers kindle their inner fire. As an Eclectic Coven, we explore a variety of topics and areas of study to help build our awareness, deepen our practices, and develop understanding.
Lunar Theme: Full Moon in Cancer brings a powerful awareness of how we begin the year of 2026. This Moon is allied with the planet Jupiter currently in the sign of Cancer. With this planetary alignment, it is possible to bring increased harmony and inner awareness into important areas of your life.How to Predict Your Own FutureCancer is endowed with great empathy, emotional resilience, and the capacity to heal the emotional woundedness in yourself and others. You have another great asset in the form of unparalleled psychic and spiritual ability for getting the answers you need for living in an authentic and creative way. Cancer is associated with the 4th house, guided by the Moon. This is the house of the “mothering energy”. The lunar house is at the root and foundation of life. Here's where the subconscious patterns and beliefs about life and self are developed. Questions for 2026 “How does an individual embrace, experience and move through the times of energy constriction, inertia, confusion, emotional numbness, physical blockage, psychic delusion, and challenges to the spirit?” On a personal level, how will you deal with the life systems that are no longer functioning? Notice Capricorn energy.The dilemma of what is “home” ? The regard and treatment of our “home, planet Earth” is on the line.How are all the inhabitants upon the planet going to reconnect with this as “home” and live more equitably with one another?Rebirth and Awakening: Rebirth and healing are the essential evolutionary paradigm shifts that are moving through the entire collective on this planet. This Full Moon in Cancer brings everyone face to face with the question of how to embrace being self-nurturing, truthful, loving, creative, and willing to take the “high road” by listening to the wisdom from within your inner self.The sign of Cancer is the potential to activate self-insight, deep nurturing, and the experience of understanding the emotion of vulnerability. Currently, the massive and pervasive health, socio-political, cultural, and spiritual crises are indicators that healing can only occur when everyone is included as having value as a human being. Reference: "Writing from the Body by John Lee with Ceci M. Kritsberg Let's have an Astrology Conversation. I look forward to seeing you. Now is the time.https://www.soulsoundinsights.com/light-reading.htmlhttps://www.soulsoundinsights.com/music-musings-meditation.htmlI am proud to announce my new offering as a Certified Creative Depth Coach. As a Creative Depth Coach, I provide guidance, support and soul insights on how to discover, explore and navigate your life by recognizing your magnificent "Creative Genius". Some of my modalities and Soul tools are "Art as Process" EFT Tapping, Sound and Music for Inner Journeying , using the wisdom of Astrology, Tarot, Oracle and Numerology. l Enjoy Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Taurus Drumming Video:https://vimeo.com/769123538/b344b2b541"Calling the Wild" or " QuickSilver and Astro Magic" Original Music by MaeRuth McCants
Daily Power Affirmations for your Creative Maniac Mind (in 60 Seconds)
Click here to Shop Affirmation Decks, Oracle Decks, and more! Use Promo code: RCPODCAST20 for 20% off your first order! Today's Power Affirmation: By pumping my action muscle, I make hesitation my bitch. Today's Oracle of Motivation: Whenever you feel the hesitation gremlins sneaking in, count down from five and pump up your action muscle! Turn the alarm clock off, count down from five, and jump out of bed like a squid on a rocket to space! Put your gym shorts on, count down from five, and jog out the door like you're running from your mother-in-law. Sip your coffee, count down from five, and say hello to that sexy peer who is too shy to talk to you. If you don't pump up your action muscle, you have a 100% chance of never making progress. You can have it all if you flush your hesitation monsters down the commode. Designed to Motivate Your Creative Maniac Mind The 60-Second Power Affirmations Podcast is designed to help you focus, affirm your visions, and harness the power within your creative maniac mind! Join us every Monday and Thursday for a new 60-second power affirmation followed by a blast of oracle motivation from the Universe (+ a quick breathing meditation). It's time to take off your procrastination diaper and share your musings with the world! For more musings, visit RageCreate.com Leave a Review & Share! Apple Podcast reviews are one of THE most important factors for podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to leave the show a review on Apple Podcasts! Click this link: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Hit “Listen on Apple Podcasts” on the left-hand side under the picture. Scroll down under “Ratings & Reviews” & click “Write A Review” Leave an honest review. You're awesome!
Barracuda, Oracle, Aflac, The European Space Agency, Wired and the "Tinder for N*zis" are all part of this week's insanity...
Click here to Shop Affirmation Decks, Oracle Decks, and more! Use Promo code: RCPODCAST20 for 20% off your first order! Today's Power Affirmation: As I follow my wishing heart, I encourage others to start. Today's Oracle of Motivation: When you garden your passion flowers, you add fresh growth to the collective tree of life. By honoring your excitement and watering your dream seeds, you permit others to open their wacky wings and take flight, too. Listen to the song of your wishing heart and share what lights you up. You may not know if your sharing is helping, but trust that it is - even if nobody seems receptive, caring, or supportive. Release all expectations of feedback and trust the flow. Those in need will see you doing your sweet-ass thing and start watering their dream seeds, too. Soon enough, you'll all be twerking at the top of your freedom towers. The world needs your guidance much more than you know. Designed to Motivate Your Creative Maniac Mind The 60-Second Power Affirmations Podcast is designed to help you focus, affirm your visions, and harness the power within your creative maniac mind! Join us every Monday and Thursday for a new 60-second power affirmation followed by a blast of oracle motivation from the Universe (+ a quick breathing meditation). It's time to take off your procrastination diaper and share your musings with the world! For more musings, visit RageCreate.com Leave a Review & Share! Apple Podcast reviews are one of THE most important factors for podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to leave the show a review on Apple Podcasts! Click this link: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Hit “Listen on Apple Podcasts” on the left-hand side under the picture. Scroll down under “Ratings & Reviews” & click “Write A Review” Leave an honest review. You're awesome!
After discovering his sister's chilling diary detailing encounters with a so-called Forest God, a grieving brother hikes into the wilderness to confront the ancient entity that drove her to madness—and finds himself face to face with something far more powerful than grief. Listen ad-free with early access + bonus stories – sign up for a 7-DAY FREE TRIAL of SCP Premium. Cancel anytime. No commitment. This story is derived from The SCP Foundation Database and is released under Creative Commons Sharealike 3.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ * * * CONTENT DISCLAIMER: This episode contains explicit content not limited to intense themes, strong language, and depictions of violence intended for adults. Parental guidance is strongly advised for children under the age of 18. Listener discretion is advised. #thescpexperience #scp #scpfoundation #scpencounters #securecontainprotect #scpstories Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of Econ 102, Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg cover Europe's economic future, how internet discourse has changed politics, the rise of identitarian populism on both the right and left in America, and more.-Sponsors:NotionAI meeting notes lives right in Notion, everything you capture, whether that's meetings, podcasts, interviews, conversations, live exactly where you plan, build, and get things done. Here's an exclusive offer for our listeners. Try one month for free at https://www.notion.com/lp/econ102. NetSuiteMore than 42,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE proven platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine learning: https://netsuite.com/102 Found Found provides small business owners tools to track expenses, calculate taxes, manage cashflow, send invoices and more. Open a Found account for free at https://found.com-Shownotes brought to you by Notion AI Meeting Notes - try one month for free at https://www.notion.com/lp/econ102Europe continues to focus more on regulation than innovation, creating challenges for economic growthTraditional European industries like auto manufacturing are struggling with the transition to electric vehiclesChinese companies are producing better and cheaper electric cars that align with Europe's climate goalsThe Gaza deal is viewed positively because it considers Gaza's economic future beyond just stopping violenceAn economically self-sustaining Gaza might be less likely to support groups like HamasGulf Arab countries could potentially assist with Gaza's economic development given their expertiseIsrael has been militarily successful against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran but faces global criticismIsrael's approach to international criticism has often relied on projecting strength rather than building alliancesIsrael remains dependent on other countries for military supplies despite its own manufacturing capabilitiesRegular people are disengaging from politics, leaving only the most extreme voices engaged ("evaporative cooling effect")Political discussions on platforms like X (Twitter) have become increasingly extremeYoung political staffers who work for both parties are heavily consuming this extremist contentThe speakers observe parallels to the political unrest of the 1960s-70s, which eventually dissipatedUnlike previous eras, today's extremism remains highly visible online even as the general public tunes outDiscussion of Zohran Mamdani's election in New York as representing a new direction in leftist politicsConcern about the mainstreaming of far-right figures like Nick Fuentes who previously were more fringeThe conversation reflects concern about the polarization between extremes while the majority of people disengageThere's agreement that substantive engagement with ideas is needed rather than simply dismissing opponents-Timestamps:00:00 — Introduction00:24 — Europe and Russia03:02 — China and Electric Cars04:38 — Israel-Gaza Conflict06:43 — American Sentiment Toward Israel09:57 – Sponsors: Notion | Netsuite12:00 — Online Extremism and Political Disengagement22:50 — Staffers and Extremism24:25 – Sponsor: Found25:29 — New York Politics and Mamdani31:47 — The Future of Leftist Politics34:11 — Race and Identity38:06 — Islam and Immigration38:44 — Identitarian Populism41:44 — Closing Thoughts-FOLLOW on X:https://x.com/eriktorenberghttps://x.com/Noahpinion-Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details, please see https://a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
C dans l'air du 2 janvier 2026 - IA : demain tous chômeurs ?Présentation de Salhia BrakhliaL'intelligence artificielle (IA) prend de plus en plus de place dans nos vies. Elle commence même à remplacer certains emplois et suscite de ce fait une inquiétude grandissante. Aux Etats-Unis, la mutation a déjà commencé. Dans le secteur du conseil, le géant Accenture a annoncé pas moins de 12 000 licenciements. L'ampleur de ce plan social est inédite dans ce domaine d'activité et traduit une certitude : l'adaptation à l'IA n'est plus une option. Un signal fort dans un secteur historiquement fondé sur le capital humain.Dans le secteur bancaire européen, ce sont de plus de 200 000 emplois qui pourraient être supprimés d'ici à 2030, selon une étude de la banque Morgan Stanley relayée par le Financial Times. Ces perspectives posent question quant à la façon dont le marché du travail va être façonné dans le futur. Malgré les craintes d'une menace pour l'emploi, des analyses soulignent que l'IA n'élimine pas les postes mais transforme les missions, en concentrant l'effort humain sur les tâches complexes et stratégiques. Si l'IA automatise déjà une grande partie des tâches répétitives, l'humain demeure en effet un atout dans de nombreux domaines, comme les relations commerciales.Les États-Unis, qui se déjà sont emparés de ce marché, cherchent à accroitre leur avance. Dans cette optique, le président Donald Trump a lancé il y a un an le projet Stargate. Chiffré à 500 milliards de dollars, il est destiné à bâtir les centres de données géants de la future génération d'IA. Le programme est élaboré par OpenAI, la firme qui a lancé ChatGPT, la société d'investissement japonaise SoftBank et le géant du numérique Oracle. Les poids lourds mondiaux du numérique comme Amazon, Microsoft ou encore Facebook devraient profiter des retombées. Pour l'heure, leur capitalisation boursière atteint des sommets... Et commence à préoccuper les investisseurs et les autorités financières. Ces derniers craignent qu'il s'agisse d'une bulle et que tout s'effondre comme un château de cartes.La rupture technologique introduite par l'IA a des répercussions dans le domaine militaire, ce qui constitue enjeu majeur. Quelles places occuperont par exemple les robots et les drones sur le champ de bataille ? La question se pose déjà. Le 1er mai 2024, la France a ainsi annoncé la création de l'Agence ministérielle de l'intelligence artificielle de défense (AMIAD), rattachée directement au ministre des Armées. Bertrand Rondepierre dirige cette structure pensée pour doter la défense française de capacités souveraines en IA. Une équipe de C dans l'air l'a rencontré.L'IA va-t-elle nous priver de dizaines, voire de centaines de milliers d'emplois dans un proche avenir ?Une bulle financière est-elle en train de se former dans le secteur de l'IA ?Comment l'IA va-t-elle modifier le visage des guerres à venir ?Nos experts :- Nicolas Bouzou - Économiste – Directeur fondateur du cabinet Astérès - Chroniqueur à L'Express- Emmanuel Duteil - Directeur de la rédaction – L'Usine Nouvelle- Isabelle Ryl - Vice-présidente Intelligence artificielle - Université Paris Sciences & Lettres (PSL)- Guillaume Grallet - Journaliste – Le Point - Auteur de « Voyage aux frontières de l'intelligence artificielle »
Daily Power Affirmations for your Creative Maniac Mind (in 60 Seconds)
Click here to Shop Affirmation Decks, Oracle Decks, and more! Use Promo code: RCPODCAST20 for 20% off your first order! Today's Power Affirmation: As I align my habits, decisions, and actions with my dreams, my creative ideas become real things. Today's Oracle of Motivation: The world abounds with stimulating distractions, and it's easy to lose yourself in a labyrinth of activities, projects, and directions. But you'll never complete any journey if you keep changing your route. Bring your dreams to reality by aligning your habits, decisions, actions, goals, and core visions with each other in a hierarchy, like your chakras. Cultivate habits so you can make better decisions that support the actions you will take to reach your goals, which in turn support your dreams. The amateur spends time on anything that catches his attention, but the pro circulates time to everything that aligns with her dreams. Designed to Motivate Your Creative Maniac Mind The 60-Second Power Affirmations Podcast is designed to help you focus, affirm your visions, and harness the power within your creative maniac mind! Join us every Monday and Thursday for a new 60-second power affirmation followed by a blast of oracle motivation from the Universe (+ a quick breathing meditation). It's time to take off your procrastination diaper and share your musings with the world! For more musings, visit RageCreate.com Leave a Review & Share! Apple Podcast reviews are one of THE most important factors for podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to leave the show a review on Apple Podcasts! Click this link: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Hit “Listen on Apple Podcasts” on the left-hand side under the picture. Scroll down under “Ratings & Reviews” & click “Write A Review” Leave an honest review. You're awesome!
In this episode, host Sandy Vance and Hari Balasubramanian, the Chief Technology Officer, Health Information Systems at Solventum, sit down for a deep dive into how AI-driven healthcare technology is reshaping the industry. Together, they explore how Solventum is building innovative products and services that streamline documentation, billing, and coding while improving the patient experience and saving valuable time for healthcare professionals. From what's happening at Solventum right now to the company's move toward fully autonomous coding, this conversation unpacks how healthcare payers and providers can rethink financial performance in the age of artificial intelligence. Hari also shares practical insights for CIOs evaluating these systems and explains how Solventum measures real-world improvements driven by AI. If you're interested in healthcare innovation, revenue cycle transformation, or the future of AI in health information systems, this is an episode you won't want to miss.Check out Solventum's Education Session and Case Study Session that was presented in the AI Zone at HLTH 2025.In this episode, they talk about:What's going on with Solventum right nowHow Solventum is serving healthcare payersSolventum's move toward complete autonomous codingThe common misconceptions about improving financial performance for providersHow CIOs should evaluate their work when engaging with these systemsMeasuring the improvements produced by AI with Solventum's systemsA Little About Hari:Hari Bala joined Solventum as Chief Technology Officer, Health Information Systems, in May 2025, bringing more than 25 years of experience building large-scale, distributed systems across healthcare, cloud, and security, with deep expertise in GenAI, data science, analytics, and machine learning. Previously, he led AI, data, analytics, and cloud transformation efforts at GE Healthcare and Oracle Cerner, where he helped establish Oracle's AI Services organization and later led the Health Data Intelligence and Analytics platform following the Cerner acquisition. Earlier, Hari spent nearly 19 years at Microsoft in leadership roles spanning Azure, Search, Cosmos DB, Windows, Office 365, and mobile and browser technologies.
Original air date: August 17, 2025 A special episode featuring Amanda Yates Garcia, also known as The Oracle of Los Angeles. Amanda is a writer, socially engaged artist, public witch, and doctoral student in the department of World Arts Cultures and Dance at UCLA. Her first book, Initiated, received a starred review from Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly and has been translated into six languages. Amanda hosts the Between the Worlds podcast, which looks at the Western Mystery traditions through a mythopoetic lens and has been downloaded over 2.5 million times, with over 1,900 five-star reviews. Amanda is the founder of Mystery Cult, a 20k strong online and in-person community on Substack dedicated to eco-somatic ritual practice and cultivating radical enchantment. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch Instagram TikTok Bluesky Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1855 kicks off with a bombshell AP investigation revealing how Silicon Valley giants IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, and more spent decades building China’s surveillance state. Also covered, malicious Chrome extensions stealing credentials from 170+ sites, Microsoft’s ambitious Rust migration plans, China’s combat-ready humanoid robot, and Japan restarting the world’s largest nuclear plant. -Want to be a Guest on a Podcast or YouTube Channel? Sign up for GuestMatch.Pro -Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes $11.99 – For a New Domain Name cjcfs3geek $6.99 a month Economy Hosting (Free domain, professional email, and SSL certificate for the 1st year.) Promo Code: cjcgeek1h $12.99 a month Managed WordPress Hosting (Free domain, professional email, and SSL certificate for the 1st year.) Promo Code: cjcgeek1w Support the show by becoming a Geek News Central Insider Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens episode 1855 with a bombshell. The Associated Press released a major investigation into Silicon Valley’s role building China’s surveillance state. Companies like IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, and Oracle sold technologies for facial recognition and predictive policing. These tools enabled mass detention in Xinjiang. Cochrane expressed horror at the findings and emphasized American companies’ complicity in human rights abuses. Next, the podcast covered serious browser security concerns. Two malicious Chrome extensions had been stealing credentials from over 170 websites for years. Cochrane stressed the need for caution when installing plugins. He also highlighted how attackers exploit trusted extensions through manipulative tactics. Additionally, Cochrane discussed Microsoft’s ambitious plan to replace all C/C++ code with Rust by 2030. The company faces ongoing security challenges from memory safety issues in legacy languages. However, he noted this remains a research project rather than an official goal. Still, the move reflects broader industry trends toward Rust adoption. The episode then featured GitHub Universe 2025’s most influential open-source projects. Cochrane remarked on how the development landscape continues to evolve. TypeScript has emerged as a dominant language alongside new tools that streamline workflows. Meanwhile, advancements in humanoid robotics took center stage. Engine AI unveiled its T800 combat-ready humanoid robot with impressive features. The company even released a viral video of the robot kicking its CEO to prove authenticity. Following this, Cochrane covered the Blackbird flying car prototype. This eVTOL innovation showcases paradigm-shifting propulsion technology. It could transform urban transportation in the coming decades. The podcast also reviewed Android Central’s best smartphones of 2025. OnePlus 15 claimed the top spot thanks to its impressive specs and consumer-focused features. Furthermore, Cochrane addressed a controversial topic: Anna’s Archive scraping Spotify’s entire library. He expressed mixed feelings about the situation. On one hand, artists and the music industry face real harm. On the other, questions about digital preservation and access deserve consideration. Finally, the episode explored groundbreaking brain simulation research. Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer enabled unprecedented neural modeling. This marks a significant step toward understanding neurological diseases. Cochrane wrapped up by discussing Japan’s plans to restart the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant. Local residents remain concerned about safety despite government approval. The decision reflects Japan’s shifting energy strategy post-Fukushima. As the episode closed, Cochrane wished listeners a Happy New Year. He encouraged self-reflection and thanked everyone for tuning in throughout the year. Show Links Silicon Valley’s Role in Building China’s Surveillance State Two Chrome Extensions Caught Secretly Stealing Credentials from Over 170 Sites Microsoft to Replace All C/C++ Code With Rust By 2030 This Year’s Most Influential Open Source Projects EngineAI Unveils T800: Combat-Ready Humanoid Targets Mass Production Aviation Startup Shares Incredible Video of Prototype EV’s Maiden Takeoff Flight Android Central’s Best of 2025: Phones Pirate Archivist Group Scrapes Spotify’s 300TB Library This Breakthrough Brain Simulation Captures a True Brain at Work Japan Prepares to Restart World’s Biggest Nuclear Plant The post Money over Ethics: Silicon Valley and China’s Police State #1855 appeared first on Geek News Central.
Daily Power Affirmations for your Creative Maniac Mind (in 60 Seconds)
Click here to Shop Affirmation Decks, Oracle Decks, and more! Use Promo code: RCPODCAST20 for 20% off your first order! Today's Power Affirmation: I am exploding with life beyond ever before and glowing with eagerness for more. Today's Oracle of Motivation: People often misperceive a disconnection from 'normal' societal activities such as running, hiding, or betraying your family, friends, or community. Yo, that is pure donkey dung! When you disconnect, you trade belligerent nights out for sexy knowledge hunts and intimate gatherings, living for others for living for yourself, chasing money for attaining purpose, mindless dribble for passion explosions, busyness for intention, and soul extortion for soul unification. You are exploding with life beyond ever before and glowing with eagerness for more! Designed to Motivate Your Creative Maniac Mind The 60-Second Power Affirmations Podcast is designed to help you focus, affirm your visions, and harness the power within your creative maniac mind! Join us daily for a new 60-second power affirmation followed by a blast of oracle motivation from the Universe (+ a quick breathing meditation). It's time to take off your procrastination diaper and share your musings with the world! For more musings, visit RageCreate.com Leave a Review & Share! Apple Podcast reviews are one of THE most important factors for podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to leave the show a review on Apple Podcasts! Click this link: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Hit “Listen on Apple Podcasts” on the left-hand side under the picture. Scroll down under “Ratings & Reviews” & click “Write A Review” Leave an honest review. You're awesome!
As we cross the threshold into 2026, this episode is an invitation to remember.To remember your faith.To remember your trust.To remember the quiet, unwavering magic that has always lived within you.This is not a goal-setting episode.This is not about forcing outcomes or hustling timelines.This is a devotional transmission — a remembering of who you are when you stop grasping and start listening.In this episode, I share reflections on:✨ Trusting yourself again after cycles of doubt✨ Releasing fear-based timelines and distorted pressure✨ Returning to faith — not outside of you, but within you✨ Allowing magic to meet you when you move from devotion instead of urgency✨ Stepping into 2026 grounded, open, and aligned with your soul's rhythmThis episode is meant to be listened to slowly.Perhaps with a candle lit.Perhaps with your hand on your heart.Perhaps more than once.Let this be the frequency you carry forward.⸻
Certified Professional Astrologer, Kenzie Dolan, revisits her ritual this new year by pulling a 12 month, 26 card spread using There Are No Coincidences Oracle Deck by Aliza Kelly & The Dreamkeepers Tarot Deck by Liz Huston.She pulls one final message coming from the lived experience in 2025, 12 cards for the 12 months in 2026, and one over-arching message for 2026.For 2025, she pulls 3 of Wands & Dreams.For January, she pulls Queen of Cups & Dice.For February, she pulls 4 of Pentacles & Water.For March, she pulls King of Wands & The Sun.Tune in for the winter message for Q1 in 2026, and follow along for Q2, Q3, and Q4.A preview of the all cards:Zero Major ArcanaTwo Ace's1 King1 Queen3 Four's2 Six's1 Eight1 Five1 Nine1 Three1 Ten5 Fire4 Earth3 Air2 Water7 Cardinal4 Fixed3 Mutable4 Chance4 Nature3 Threshold3 Cosmos
Jaclyn Zukerman Delory sits down with Kim Woods — philanthropist, author, and self-described "strategic oracle" — to explore how she blends corporate strategy with intuition. Kim shares her turning point after her son's health challenges, how Eastern practices transformed their lives, powerful client wins, practical tips for accessing intuition, her morning ritual, and the story behind her Oracle card deck. Today's episode is brought to you by Jaclyn's Wayfair storefront. She rounded up all her holiday hosting must-haves, from the bar cart and food warmers to take-home containers, charcuterie gift setup, and my favorite wine opener — shop everything at creatorsearch.io/wayfair/JackieZuk. Follow Next On Scene on iHeartRadio, Spotify, and social channels for more conversations where visibility meets legacy.
Follow Monstercat Silk on all platforms - https://monster.cat/silk Follow our playlists: https://ffm.bio/monstercat Tracklist 1. Dokho & Ra5im - Savaya Bay [Monstercat Silk] [00:35] 2. Flexible Fire & Enviado Vida - Drops Of Dew [Monstercat Silk] [04:53] 3. Banyan - Ephemeral [Monstercat Silk] [08:05] 4. ORACLE & ALLKNIGHT - I Know [Monstercat Silk] [11:33] 5. Shingo Nakamura & Warung - Worlds Apart [Monstercat Silk] [15:13] 6. A.M.R & MØØNE - Numb [Monstercat Silk] [19:13] 7. ALLKNIGHT - Should've Known Better [Monstercat Silk] [23:29] 8. rshand x WASSU x MØØNE - Lessons Learned [Monstercat Silk] [27:46] 9. Sonicvibe - Peace Of Mind [Monstercat Silk] [32:48] 10. Warung & Tailor - Something To Hold Onto [Monstercat Silk] [38:18] 11. Shingo Nakamura & Warung - Worlds Apart (PROFF Remix) [Monstercat Silk] [43:02] 12. rshand & Nina Carr - Evergreen [Monstercat Silk] [49:50] 13. Liam Thomas & Finding Mero - Phrases [Monstercat Silk] [53:19] 14. Shingo Nakamura - Come Closer (Josh Kramer Rework) [Monstercat Silk] [57:05] Thank you for listening to Monstercat Silk Showcase! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Click here to Shop Affirmation Decks, Oracle Decks, and more! Use Promo code: RCPODCAST20 for 20% off your first order! Today's Power Affirmation: I peace in and out and all things in between. Today's Oracle of Motivation: Why have we created a collective habit to say only, "Rest in peace"? What if we activate peace everywhere? What if we live in peace, laugh in peace, share in peace, relate in peace, debate in peace, connect in peace, make love in peace, create in peace, and even disagree in peace? When you add peace to the foundation of all aspects of your life, life becomes peaceful. Do your part to help the world one peace at a time. Peace in and out and all things in between! Designed to Motivate Your Creative Maniac Mind The 60-Second Power Affirmations Podcast is designed to help you focus, affirm your visions, and harness the power within your creative maniac mind! Join us daily for a new 60-second power affirmation followed by a blast of oracle motivation from the Universe (+ a quick breathing meditation). It's time to take off your procrastination diaper and share your musings with the world! For more musings, visit RageCreate.com Leave a Review & Share! Apple Podcast reviews are one of THE most important factors for podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to leave the show a review on Apple Podcasts! Click this link: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Hit “Listen on Apple Podcasts” on the left-hand side under the picture. Scroll down under “Ratings & Reviews” & click “Write A Review” Leave an honest review. You're awesome!
The Information's Cory Weinberg joins TITV Host Akash Pasricha to discuss Uber's potential acquisition of parking app SpotHero. We also talk with Elon Musk Reporter Theo Wayt about xAI's massive third data center expansion in Memphis and Creative Strategies' Austin Lyons about which photonics startups NVIDIA might target for M&A in 2026. Finally, we get into Oracle's potential "chip-backed" securities and Brookfield's new cloud company, Radiant, with AI & Finance Reporter Miles Kruppa.Articles discussed on this episode: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-considers-deal-parking-app-spotherohttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/brookfield-start-cloud-business-lower-cost-aihttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/elon-musks-xai-buys-building-third-supersized-data-centerTITV airs on YouTube, X and LinkedIn at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Or check us out wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe to: - The Information on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theinformation- The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/subscribe_hSign up for the AI Agenda newsletter: https://www.theinformation.com/features/ai-agenda
En septembre, il est devenu pendant quelques instants l'homme le plus riche du monde, devant Elon Musk. Dans «La Story», le podcast d'actualité des «Echos», Margaux Boulte et Henri Gibier analysent le parcours du fondateur d'Oracle, Larry Ellison.« La Story » est un podcast des « Echos » présenté par Margaux Boulte. Cet épisode a été enregistré en décembre 2025. Rédaction en chef : Clémence Lemaistre. Invitée : Henri Gibier (conseiller éditorial aux Echos). Réalisation : Willy Ganne. Chargée de production et d'édition : Clara Grouzis. Musique : Théo Boulenger. Identité graphique : Upian. Photo : Andrew Harnik/Getty Images/AFP. Sons : BFM, Bloomberg, Oracle, WSJ News. Retrouvez l'essentiel de l'actualité économique grâce à notre offre d'abonnement Access : abonnement.lesechos.fr/lastory Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
Our hero wakes-up on a tropical island, but this is no vacation. He must stop a strange energy field taking over the city. But perhaps he's really the one in danger...Tune in and find out!Thanks to Jason for the Call-in and Rich for the emails!Rich's blog - https://lunchboxadventures4.wordpress.com/Game System: Custom (Novas & Nebulae Modern Playtest)Oracle - "The Oracle" (My own free oracle on itch.io and DTRPG)Music/Background Sounds - Tabletop AudioSend me an email with any feedback here -> jamessral@proton.me
It's our final episode of 2025 and who better to join Matt, Ted, and Travis as they dish out some holiday dinner awards than ESPN's very own Derek Rae! After chatting about their fav holiday TV episodes, the quartet then hand out some major awards - The Roast Turkey Award ... the Glazed Ham Award ... the Fruit Cake Award ... and of course ... THE MAULTASCHEN AWARD! The fellas then wrap up episode 178 by putting some white and red gifts under the VfB tree before Derek "The Oracle" Rae makes his annual - and bold! - VfB prediction for the Rückrunde! Happy holidays all!
IFS announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Softeon. Salesforce opened a new office in Stockholm, continuing its investment across Northern Europe amid the region's accelerating AI adoption. Oracle and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced a joint effort to further advance the DOE's current and future AI and advanced computing initiatives. Oracle also announced enhancements to how hospitality brands engage with guests and manage their operations.Connect with us!https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com866-499-8550LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/erp-advisors-groupTwitter:https://twitter.com/erpadvisorsgrpFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/erpadvisorsInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/erpadvisorsgroupPinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/erpadvisorsgroupMedium:https://medium.com/@erpadvisorsgroup
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/AnalyticJoin The Normandy For Additional Bonus Audio And Visual Content For All Things Nme+! Join Here: https://ow.ly/msoH50WCu0KIn this segment of Notorious Mass Effect, host Analytic Dreamz delivers a comprehensive breakdown of the landmark TikTok-U.S. investors deal aimed at averting a nationwide ban. Analytic Dreamz examines the binding agreements announced via CEO Shou Zi Chew's internal memo, shifting TikTok's U.S. operations to majority U.S. investor control for its 170+ million American users.Key details include the new joint venture structure: 50% owned by U.S.-aligned investors (Oracle 15%, Silver Lake 15%, MGX 15%), with ByteDance at 19.9% and affiliates at 30.1%—keeping Chinese ownership below 20% to meet U.S. requirements. A 7-member majority-American board will oversee independent operations, including data protection, content moderation, and algorithm security.Analytic Dreamz explores the sensitive algorithm retraining on U.S.-only data to prevent foreign manipulation, potential shifts in user experience, data storage via Oracle, and the $14 billion valuation. The segment covers political context, Trump's deadline extensions to January 23, 2026, targeting closure on January 22, ongoing Chinese approval uncertainties, creator impacts on 7+ million businesses, and bipartisan skepticism.Tune in as Analytic Dreamz analyzes how this reshapes TikTok's future amid U.S.-China tensions. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/analytic-dreamz-notorious-mass-effect/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Hillel Fuld is a globally recognized startup advisor, tech marketer, and speaker helping entrepreneurs turn ideas into scalable, profitable businesses. Named Israel's top marketer by Forbes—who called him "the man transforming Startup Nation into Scale-up Nation"—he has mentored over 600 founders in marketing, growth, and storytelling, guiding startups from vision to revenue. His work and insights have been featured in CNBC, Inc., Fast Company, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, The Next Web, and Business Insider, and he was ranked the 7th most influential tech blogger worldwide. Hillel partners with top global brands including Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Nike, creating strategies that deliver lasting impact. A sought-after international speaker, Hillel shares his expertise on marketing, entrepreneurship, and Israeli innovation. Above all, he's a proud husband to Racheli and father of five. During the show we discuss: The key mindset shifts required to move from startup mode to a sustainable business. Why many startups struggle to turn ideas into revenue—and how to bridge the gap. Why every founder should create an investor deck, even without plans to raise capital. How to validate product–market fit before scaling too early. The role of authentic storytelling in building trust and brand credibility. Common traits shared by the most successful founders. How startups balance innovation and execution with limited resources. The most overlooked marketing lever that can make or break early growth. Resources: https://www.hillelfuld.com/
Click here to Shop Affirmation Decks, Oracle Decks, and more! Use Promo code: RCPODCAST20 for 20% off your first order! Today's Power Affirmation: I transform my darkness into lasers of light. Today's Oracle of Motivation: Your shadow is as important as your light - your oneness with the universe includes both. Parts of the shadow, such as anger, frustration, negativity, and irritation, are packed with energy, which means they can be used constructively to fire up your motivation muscles. These dark expressions can fuel a better life with deeper relationships and more meaning. If you find yourself consumed with darkness, transform the energy into lasers of positivity. The tree of life cannot grow to kiss heaven unless the roots reach deep into hell. From chaos comes expansion! Designed to Motivate Your Creative Maniac Mind The 60-Second Power Affirmations Podcast is designed to help you focus, affirm your visions, and harness the power within your creative maniac mind! Join us every Monday and Thursday for a new 60-second power affirmation followed by a blast of oracle motivation from the Universe (+ a quick breathing meditation). It's time to take off your procrastination diaper and share your musings with the world! For more musings, visit RageCreate.com Leave a Review & Share! Apple Podcast reviews are one of THE most important factors for podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to leave the show a review on Apple Podcasts! Click this link: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Hit “Listen on Apple Podcasts” on the left-hand side under the picture. Scroll down under “Ratings & Reviews” & click “Write A Review” Leave an honest review. You're awesome!
In this episode of The Metrics Brothers, Ray Rike and Dave Kellogg unpack Benedict Evans' latest landmark presentation, AI Eats the World, and explore why this moment may rival or even surpass the original “software is eating the world” era. Drawing parallels to Marc Andreessen's 2011 thesis, they examine how AI is no longer just another platform shift, but a force capable of reshaping labor, capital allocation, and entire industries at once.The conversation spans the explosive rise in AI infrastructure spending, from hyperscaler capex surging past $400B to the growing strain on power, compute, and supply chains. Ray and Dave discuss why this moment feels different from past tech cycles, not just because of scale, but because AI directly targets labor, which represents more than half of global GDP. They explore whether AI is creating real moats or accelerating commoditization, and why many enterprises are still stuck in experimentation rather than true deployment.The episode also dives into historical parallels from elevators and telephone operators to cloud computing highlighting how software enabled automation always feels threatening before it quietly becomes invisible. Along the way, they unpack the strategic tension facing AI leaders: go down the stack for scale or up the stack for value capture. With insights on hyperscalers, OpenAI, Oracle, and the economics of AI adoption, this episode challenges leaders to rethink how value will actually be created and captured in the age of AI.If you want to understand what's hype, what's durable, and why “AI eating the world” may be the most consequential shift since the internet itself, this episode is a must-listen.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
You may have heard of side channel attacks. Now Jason explains what a side oracle attack is and how a side oracle attack in conjunction with AI could be effective against the HQC or Falcon PQC algorithms.
In this special New Year episode, I take you through your 2026 star sign reading with a yearly affirmation and oracle card for every sign. As I was pulling the cards, so many messages, themes and intuitive nudges came through, and today I'm sharing all of it with you. If you want to save the picture of your reading, find it here. Whether you're Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius or Pisces, this episode offers guidance, clarity and inspiration for the year ahead. I have popped the time stamps below so that you can skip to your, or your loved ones star sign!I'll walk you through: • Your 2026 affirmation • Your 2026 oracle card • The energy, guidance and feelings that came through • What this means for your growth, alignment and manifestation practice in the New YearUse this episode as your anchor for 2026! Save your affirmation, write it in your journal, share it with someone you love, or pop the card image on your desktop.And if you'd like to do your own yearly New Year card spread, (which means getting SUPER deep guidance for 2026, by pulling a card for Jan all the way to Dec for 2026, my brand-new 3-Day New Year Manifestation Course is now available. Check it out here! It includes a walking meditation, a beautiful guidebook with self/spiritual development exercises and journal prompts. Most excitingly, it includes a soundtrack ritual to take you through doing your own powerful card reading - your new year card spread. If you want to grab a deck of cards for a discount, you can bundle your card decks and course here.Let's step into 2026 with clarity, confidence and an open heart.Let the magic begin,Cleo xxSIGN UP FOR RESET AND RECEIVE - NEW YEAR COURSE HERE!BUNDLE DECKS OF CARDS AND THE NEW YEAR COURSE HERE! TIME STAMPS: ARIES - 5.42TAURUS - 8.55GEMINI - 13.30CANCER - 16.50LEO - 20.03VIRGO - 22.55LIBRA - 26.00SCORPIO - 27.50SAGITTARIUS - 33.37CAPRICORN - 35.36AQUARIUS - 40.00PISCES - 43.30Visit Pass Around the Smile here!Join my Facebook community group here!Find me on Instagram@passaroundthesmile@cleomasseyFind me on Tik Tok@cleomassey_The Pass Around the Smile podcast is recorded on Bundjalung Country, in South East Queensland, Australia. We acknowledge the Yugambeh people of the Bundjalung Nation, the traditional owners of this land. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
Live into your greatest possibilities. Join the Limitless Life Club today! https://www.oracleonpurpose.com/the-limitless-life-membership In this episode, I sit down with internationally recognized business success coach Vanessa Shaw, founder of Business Growth Academy, to explore how women can redefine success, follow their intuition, and create real impact in business and life. From her early days as a stay-at-home mom in Switzerland to coaching Europe's largest law firm, Vanessa's story is one of courage, alignment, and purpose. She opens up about trusting her instincts, taking bold leaps before she felt ready, and transforming the way women-owned law firms operate today. If you've ever felt the pull for "something more," this episode will inspire you to lean into that inner knowing and take action toward a bigger vision. Tune in to the full episode on Oracle On Purpose Podcast: Empowering Women in Law and Business. P.S. If you're ready to deepen your understanding of the Law of Attraction and activate real change in your life, check out my audiobook "POWER Up the Law of Attraction"—now available on Audible and Amazon. It's the perfect next step for anyone ready to turn insight into transformation. Grab your copy here! https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Studios-Brilliance-POWER-Attraction/dp/B0F3G1ZD18/ Enjoy the podcast? Subscribe and leave a 5-star review! You can also tune in to this episode on YouTube and all your favorite podcast platforms. Vanessa Shaw is the CEO and Founder of The Business Growth Academy, helping women entrepreneurs—especially those leading law firms—build thriving, profitable, and purpose-driven businesses. With two decades of experience and clients worldwide, she empowers women to achieve freedom, financial success, and fulfillment through smart strategy and aligned leadership. Connect with Vanessa Shaw: Website: https://businessgrowthacademy.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessashawcoach LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vcshaw/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs9MFh3HCLHazBuEqlZuZgA Tune in to her podcast, "Get Rich Without Being A Bitch": https://businessgrowthacademy.com/podcast/ I am Lia Dunlap, The Oracle on Purpose with a mission to change people's lives for good. With over 25 years of experience as an Intuitive Business Architect and Coach, I have helped thousands of clients in 76 countries, including hosting three international retreats. As a Best-Selling Author, Founder of the Master Creators Academy, Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, International Speaker, and Creator of the POWER Plan Life Coaching Program, My Purpose Is Clear: Helping YOU find and follow Your Purpose. I have worked with thousands of leaders, entrepreneurs, and business owners for over two decades, helping them find and experience their Unique Life Purpose. Catch the latest episodes of Oracle On Purpose here! https://www.oracleonpurpose.com/podcast-new Work with Lia today. https://www.oracleonpurpose.com/meet-the-oracle Ask the Oracle - Join the next Oracle Insight & Alignment Call. https://www.oracleonpurpose.com/offers/Qcb9YRFF How Aligned Is Your Business with Your Highest Power? Take the Quiz here: https://oracleonpurpose.outgrow.us/powerbizquiz Connect with Lia Dunlap! Website: https://www.oracleonpurpose.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoachLiaDunlap X: https://x.com/CoachLiaDunlapInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachliadunlap/# YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8IOgSSGVVNG2usEJE07X8g LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachliadunlap Produced by https://www.BroadcastYourAuthority.com
I recently rewatched Dune and have always been obsessed with the lore of the Bene Gesserit...a secret society of elite women with superhuman mental and physical abilities? Count me in! Today we deep dive the Bene Gesserit, and find their real-life counterparts in history (The Vestal Virgins and the Oracle of Delphi) and try to see which women today have modern day Bene Gesserit elements to them. Check out https://www.squarespace.com/fluently to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code FLUENTLY Elevate your closet with Quince. Go to Quince.com/fluently for free shipping on your order and 365 -day returns. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to masterclass.com/fluently for the current offer. 03:48 Deep Dive into the Bene Gesserit 18:34 The Vestal Virgins: Ancient Rome's Sacred Keepers 31:18 Punishments and Privileges of the Vestal Virgins 40:56 The Oracle of Delphi: Ancient Greece's Spiritual Influencer 57:05 Modern Day Bene Gesserit Archetypes
We're joined today by Joshua B. Lee, founder of StandOut Authority and co-creator of YOUmanize™, the movement redefining human-first branding. Known as the “Dopamine Dealer of LinkedIn,” Josh has helped launch the first social media ads on MySpace, managed nearly $1B in ad spend, and worked with brands like Google, Oracle, and AWS.
The underground counterculture world of independent DVD production spanned a huge variety of niche interests. Outlaw motorcycle stunt man Ghost Rider is an example of something that can never be replicated in today's world of total surveillance. Topics include: Ghost Rider motorcycle DVDs, underground indy media in 90s and 2000s, Bum Fights, INDECLINE graffiti collective, ADDTV, underground audio, Bam Margera, CKY, Jackass show, Big Brother videos, skateboard culture, Jump Off a Building Toy Machine video, Pennsylvania, prostitution, Bill Hicks, irony of laws, real life characters, modern internet motorcycle outlaws always get caught, surveillance built into technology and media, content creation, cameras ubiquitous, AI, no escape for anyone, TikTok divestment, Larry Ellison, Oracle, Middle East sovereign wealth films, total corruption, big money buying off executive branch, Paramount, David Ellison, Warner Brothers Discovery, buying up all media, Netflix, CBS, Bari Weiss, pay to play, CNN, technocratic oligarchy taking over American government, AI economic bubble, bringing nuclear power plants back up and running, nuclear fusion company merge with Trump media, data centers, so called green energy just a competitor being pushed out of the market, chemical industry takeover of EPA, doubling legal level of formaldehyde in air, real criminals at the top of the system, new media also part of propaganda system, right wing influencers, in-fighting of MAGA, JD Vance doing damage control at TPUSA America Fest
Click here to Shop Affirmation Decks, Oracle Decks, and more! Use Promo code: RCPODCAST20 for 20% off your first order! Today's Power Affirmation: I am the hero in my own video game. Today's Oracle of Motivation: You are leveling up. You are gaining superpowers. You bust through brick walls and smash the skulls of fear gremlins around every corner. You fall off cliffs. You get attacked and eaten by monsters. But you always show back up twice as strong, mentored by the wisdom of your wounds. Bust through the levels! Throw fireballs at all that resist and blindside the boss who holds your passion hostage! Free the royalty within and conquer your creative empire. Be the last action hero! Designed to Motivate Your Creative Maniac Mind The 60-Second Power Affirmations Podcast is designed to help you focus, affirm your visions, and harness the power within your creative maniac mind! Join us every Monday and Thursday for a new 60-second power affirmation followed by a blast of oracle motivation from the Universe (+ a quick breathing meditation). It's time to take off your procrastination diaper and share your musings with the world! For more musings, visit RageCreate.com Leave a Review & Share! Apple Podcast reviews are one of THE most important factors for podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to leave the show a review on Apple Podcasts! Click this link: Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Hit “Listen on Apple Podcasts” on the left-hand side under the picture. Scroll down under “Ratings & Reviews” & click “Write A Review” Leave an honest review. You're awesome!
Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast. AI agents are your next customers. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/vEdq8rpBM3I In this data-rich keynote, Jay McBain deconstructs the tectonic shifts reshaping the $5.3 trillion global technology industry, arguing that we are entering a new 20-year cycle where traditional direct sales models are obsolete. McBain explains why 96% of the industry is now surrounded by partners and how successful companies must pivot from “flywheels and theory” to a granular strategy focused on the seven specific partners present in every deal. From the explosion of agentic AI and the $163 billion marketplace revolution to the specific mechanics of multiplier economics, this discussion provides a roadmap for navigating the “decade of the ecosystem” where influence, trust, and integration—not just product—determine winners and losers. Key Takeaways Half of today's Fortune 500 companies will likely vanish in the next 20 years due to the shift toward AI and ecosystem-led models. Every B2B deal now involves an average of seven trusted partners who influence the decision before a vendor even knows a deal exists. Microsoft has outpaced AWS growth for 26 consecutive quarters largely because of a superior partner-led geographic strategy. Marketplaces are projected to grow to $163 billion by 2030, with nearly 60% of deals involving partner funding or private offers. The “Multiplier Effect” is the new ROI, where partners can make up to $8.45 for every dollar of vendor product sold. Future dominance relies on five key pillars: Platform, Service Partnerships, Channel Partnerships, Alliances, and Go-to-Market orchestration. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Keywords: Jay McBain, Canalys, partner ecosystem, channel chief, agentic AI, marketplace growth, multiplier economics, B2B sales trends, tech industry forecast, service partnerships, strategic alliances, Microsoft vs AWS, distribution transformation, managed services growth, SaaS platforms, customer journey mapping, 28 moments of truth, future of reselling, technology spending 2025, ecosystem orchestration, partner multipliers. T Transcript: Jay McBain WORKFILE FOR TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: Just up from, did you Puerto Rico last night? Puerto Rico, yes. Puerto Rico. He dodged the hurricane. Um, you all know him. Uh, let him introduce himself for those of you who don’t, but just thrilled to have on the stage, again, somebody who knows more about what’s going on in, in the, and has the pulse on this industry probably than just about anybody I know personally. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: J Jay McBain. Jay, great to see you my friend. Alright, thank you. We have to come all the way. We live, we live uh, about 20 minutes from each other. We have to come all the way to Reston, Virginia to see each other, right? That’s right. Very good. Well, uh, that’s all over to you, sir. Thank you. [00:00:35] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you so much. [00:00:36] Jay McBain: I went from 85 degrees yesterday to 45 today, but I was able to dodge that, uh, that hurricane, uh, that we kind of had to fly through the northern edge of, uh, wanna talk today about our industry, about the ultimate partner. I’m gonna try to frame up the ultimate partner as I walk through the data and the latest research that, uh, that we’ve been doing in the market. [00:00:56] Jay McBain: But I wanted to start here ’cause our industry moves in 20 year cycles, and if you look at the Fortune 500 and dial back 20 years from today, 52% of them no longer exist. As we step into the next 20 year AI era, half of the companies that we know and love today are not gonna exist. So we look at this, and by the way, if you’re not in the Fortune 500 and you don’t have deep pockets to buy your way outta problems, 71% of tech companies fail over the course of 10 years. [00:01:30] Jay McBain: Those are statistics from the US government. So I start to look at our industry and you know, you may look at the, you know, mainframe era from the sixties and seventies, mini computers, August the 12th, 1981, that first IBM, PC with Microsoft dos, version one, you know, triggered. A new 20 year era of client server. [00:01:51] Jay McBain: It was the time and I worked at IBM for 17 years, but there was a time where Bill Gates flew into Boca Raton, Florida and met with the IBM team and did that, you know, fancy licensing agreement. But after, you know, 20 years of being the most valuable company in the world and 13 years of antitrust and getting broken up, almost like at and TIBM almost didn’t make payroll. [00:02:14] Jay McBain: 13 years after meeting Bill Gates. Yeah, that’s how quickly things change in these eras. In 1999, a small company outta San Francisco called salesforce.com got its start. About 10 years later, Jeff Bezos asked a question in a boardroom, could we rent out our excess capacity and would other companies buy it? [00:02:35] Jay McBain: Which, you know, most people in the room laughed at ’em at the time. But it created a 20 year cloud era when our friends, our neighbors, our family. Saw Chachi PT for the first time in March of 2023. They saw the deep fakes, they saw the poetry, they saw the music. They came to us as tech people and said, did we just light up Skynet? [00:02:58] Jay McBain: And that consumer trend has triggered this next 20 years. I could walk through the richest people in the world through those trends. I could walk through the most valuable companies. It all aligns. ’cause by the way, Apple’s no longer at the top. Nvidia is at the top, Microsoft. Second, things change really quickly. [00:03:17] Jay McBain: So in that course of time, you start to look at our industry and as people are talking about a six and a half or $7 trillion build out of ai, that’s open AI and Microsoft numbers, that is bigger than our industry that’s taken over 50 years to build. This year, we’re gonna finish the year at $5.3 trillion. [00:03:36] Jay McBain: That’s from the smallest flower shop to the biggest bank. Biggest governments that Caresoft would, uh, serve biggest customer in the world is actually the federal government of the us. But you look at this pie chart and you look at the changes that we’re gonna go through over the next 20 years, there’s about a trillion dollars in hardware. [00:03:54] Jay McBain: There’s about a trillion dollars in software. If you look forward through all of the merging trends, quantum computing, humanoid robots, all the things that are coming that dollar to dollar software to hardware will continue to exist all the way through. We see services making up almost two thirds of this pie. [00:04:13] Jay McBain: Yesterday I was in a telco conference with at and t and Verizon and T-Mobile and some of the biggest wireless players and IT services, which happen to be growing faster than products. At the moment, there is more work to be done wrapping around the deal than the actual products that the customer is buying. [00:04:32] Jay McBain: So in an industry that’s growing at 7%. On top of the world economy that’s grown at 2.2. This is the fastest growing industry, and it will be at least for the next 10 years, if not 2070 0.1% of this entire $5 trillion gets transacted through partners. While what we’re talking to today about the ultimate partner, 96% of this industry is surrounded by partners in one way or another. [00:05:01] Jay McBain: They’re there before the deal. They’re there at the deal. They’re there after the deal. Two thirds of our industry is now subscription consumption based. So every 30 days forever, and a customer for life becomes everything. So if every deal in medium, mid-market, and higher has seven partners, according to McKinsey, who are those seven people trying to get into the deal? [00:05:25] Jay McBain: While there’s millions of companies that have come into tech over the last 10 to 20 years. Digital agencies, accountants, legal firms, everybody’s come in. The 250,000 SaaS companies, a million emerging tech companies, there’s a big fight to be one of those seven trusted people at the table. So millions of companies and tens of millions of people our competing for these slots. [00:05:49] Jay McBain: So one of the pieces of research I’m most proud of, uh, in my analyst career is this. And this took over two years to build. It’s a lot of logos. Not this PowerPoint slide, but the actual data. Thousands of people hours. Because guess what? When you look at partners from the top down, the top 1000 partners, by capability and capacity, not by resale. [00:06:15] Jay McBain: It’s not a ranking of CDW and insight and resale numbers. It is the surrounding. Consulting, design, architecture, implementations, integrations, managed services, all the pieces that’s gonna make the next 20 years run. So when you start to look at this, 98% of these companies are private, so very difficult to get to those numbers and, uh, a ton of research and help from AI and other things to get this. [00:06:41] Jay McBain: But this is it. And if you look at this list, there’s a thousand logos out of the million companies. There’s a thousand logos that drive two thirds of all tech services in the world. $1.07 trillion gets delivered by a thousand companies, but here’s where it gets fun. Those companies in the middle, in blue, the 30 of them deliver more tech services than the next 970. [00:07:08] Jay McBain: Combined the 970 combined in white deliver more tech services. Then the next million combined. So if you think we live in an 80 20 rule or maybe a 99, a 95 5 rule, or a 99 1 rule, we actually live in a 99.9 0.1 parallel principle. These companies spread around the world evenly split across the uh, different regions. [00:07:35] Jay McBain: South Africa, Latin America, they’re all over. They split. They split among types. All of the Venn diagram I just showed from GSIs to VARs to MSPs, to agencies and other types of companies. But this is a really rich list and it’s public. So every company in the world now, if you’re looking at Transactable data, if you’re looking at quantifiable data that you can go put your revenue numbers against, it represents 70 to 80% of every company in this room’s Tam. [00:08:08] Jay McBain: In one piece of research. So what do you do below that? How do you cover a million companies that you can’t afford to put a channel account manager? You can’t afford to write programs directly for well after the top down analysis and all the wallet share and you know exactly where the lowest hanging fruit is for most of your tam. [00:08:28] Jay McBain: The available markets. The obtainable markets. You gotta start from the community level grassroots up. So you need to ask the question for the million companies and the maybe a hundred thousand companies out there, partner companies that are surrounding your customer. These are the seven partners that surround your customer. [00:08:48] Jay McBain: What do they read, where do they go, and who do they follow? Interestingly enough, our industry globally equates to only a thousand watering holes, a thousand companies at the top, a thousand places at the bottom. 35% of this audience we’re talking. Millions of people here love events and there’s 352 of them like this one that they love to go to. [00:09:13] Jay McBain: They love the hallway chats, they love the hotel lobby bar, you know, in a time reminded by the pandemic. They love to be in person. It’s the number one way they’re influenced. So if you don’t have a solid event strategy and you don’t have a community team out giving out socks every week, your competitors might beat you. [00:09:31] Jay McBain: 12% of this audience loves podcasts. It’s the Joe Rogan effect of our industry. And while you know, you may not think the 121 podcasts out there are important, well, you’re missing 12% of your audience. It’s over a million people. If you’re not on a weekly podcast in one of these podcasts in the world, there’s still people that read one of the 106 magazines in the world. [00:09:55] Jay McBain: There are people that love peer groups, associations, they wanna be part of this. There’s 15 different ways people are influenced. And a solid grassroots strategy is how you make this happen. In the last 10 years, we’ve created a number of billionaires. Bottom up. They never had to go talk to la large enterprise. [00:10:15] Jay McBain: They never had to go build out a mid-market strategy. They just went and give away socks and new community marketing. And this has created, I could rip through a bunch of names that became unicorns just in the last couple of years, bottoms up. You go back to your board walking into next year, top down, bottom up. [00:10:34] Jay McBain: You’ve covered a hundred percent of your tam, and now you’ve covered it with names, faces, and places. You haven’t covered it with a flywheel or a theory. And for 44 years, we have gone to our board every fourth quarter with flywheels and theory. Trust me, partners are important. The channel is key to us. [00:10:57] Jay McBain: Well, let’s talk at the point of this granularity, and now we’re getting supported by technology 261 entrepreneurs. Many of them in the room actually here that are driving this ability to succeed with seven partners in every deal to exchange data to be able to exchange telemetry of these prospects to be able to see twice or three times in terms of pipeline of your target addressable market. [00:11:26] Jay McBain: All these ai, um, technologies, agentic technologies are coming into this. It’s all about data. It’s all about quantifiable names, faces, and places. Now none of us should be walking around with flywheels, so let’s flip the flywheels. No. Uh, so we also look at, and I sold PCs for 17 years and that was in the high times of 40% margins for partners. [00:11:55] Jay McBain: But one interesting thing when you study the p and l for broad base of partners around the world, it’s changed pretty significantly in this last 20 year era. What the cloud era did is dropped hardware from what used to be 84% plus the break fix and things that wrap around it of the p and l to now 16% of every partner in the world. [00:12:16] Jay McBain: 84% of their p and l is now software and services. And if you look at profitability, it’s worse. It’s actually 87% is profitability wise. They’ve completely shifted in terms of where they go. Now we look at other parts of our market. I could go through every part of the pie of the slide, but we’re watching each of the companies, and if you can see here, this is what we want to talk about in terms of ultimate partner. [00:12:43] Jay McBain: Microsoft has outgrown AWS for 26 straight quarters. They don’t have a better product. They don’t have a better price, they don’t have better promotion. It’s all place. And I’ll explain why you guess here in the light green line. Exactly. The day that Google went a hundred percent all in partner, every deal, even if a deal didn’t have a partner, one of the 4% of deals that didn’t have a partner, they injected a partner. [00:13:09] Jay McBain: You can see on the left side exactly where they did it. They got to the point of a hundred percent partner driven. Rebuilt their programs, rebuilt their marketplace. Their marketplace is actually larger than Microsoft’s, and they grew faster than Microsoft. A couple of those quarters. It is a partner driven future, and now I have Oracle, which I just walked by as I walked from the hotel. [00:13:31] Jay McBain: Oracle with their RPOs will start to join. Maybe the list of three hyperscalers becomes the list of four in future slides, but that’s a growth slide. Market share is different. AWS early and commanding lead. And it plays out, uh, plays out this way. But we’re at an interesting moment and I stood up six years ago talking about the decade of the ecosystem after we went through a decade of sales starting in 1999 when we all thought we were born to be salespeople. [00:14:02] Jay McBain: We managed territories with our gut. The sales tech stack would have it different, that sales was a science, and we ended the decade 2009, looking at sales very differently in 2009. I remember being at cocktail parties where CMOs would be joking around that 50% of their marketing dollars were wasted. They just didn’t know which 50%. [00:14:23] Jay McBain: And I’ll tell you, that was really funny. In 2009 till every 58-year-old CMO got replaced by a 38-year-old growth hacker who walked in with 15,348 SaaS companies in their MarTech and ad tech stack to solve the problem, every nickel of marketing by 2019 was tracked. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot, driving this industry. [00:14:50] Jay McBain: Now, we stood up and said the 28 moments that come before a sale are pretty much all partner driven. In the best case scenario, a vendor might see four of the moments. They might come to your website, maybe they read an ebook, maybe they have a salesperson or a demo that comes in. That’s four outta 28 moments. [00:15:10] Jay McBain: The other 24 are done by partners. Yeah, in the worst case scenario and the majority scenario, you don’t see any of the moments. All 28 happen and you lose a deal without knowing there ever was a deal. So this is it. We need to partner in these moments and we need to inject partners into sales and marketing, like no time before, and this was the time to do it. [00:15:33] Jay McBain: And we got some feedback in the Salesforce state of sales report, which doesn’t involve any partnerships or, or. Channel Chiefs or anything else. This is 5,500 of the biggest CROs in the world that obviously use Salesforce. 89% of salespeople today use partners every day. For the 11% who don’t, 58% plan two within a year. [00:15:57] Jay McBain: If you add those two numbers together, that’s magically the 96% number. They recognize that every deal has partners in it. In 2024, last year, half of the salespeople in the world, every industry, every country. Miss their numbers. For the minority who made their numbers, 84 point percent pointed to partners as the reason why they made their numbers. [00:16:21] Jay McBain: It was the cheat code for sales, so that modern salesperson that knows how to orchestrate a deal, orchestrate the 28 moments with the seven partners and get to that final spot is the winning formula. HubSpot’s number in separate research was 84% in marketing. So we’re starting to see partners in here. We don’t have to shout from the mountaintops. [00:16:44] Jay McBain: These communities like ultimate Partner are working and we’re getting this to the highest levels in the board. And I’ll say that, you know, when 20 years from now half of the companies we know and love fail after we’re done writing the book and blaming the CEO for inventing the thing that ended up killing them, blaming the board for fiduciary responsibility and letting it happen. [00:17:06] Jay McBain: What are the other chapters of the book? And I think it’s all in one slide. We are in this platform economy and the. [00:17:31] Jay McBain: So your battery’s fine. Check, check, check, check. Alright, I’ll, I’ll just hold this in case, but the companies that execute on all five of these areas, well. Not only today become the trillion dollar valued companies, but they become the companies of tomorrow. These will be the fastest growing companies at every level. [00:17:50] Jay McBain: Not only running a platform business, but participating in other platforms. So this is how it breaks out, and there are people at very senior levels, at very big companies that have this now posted in the office of the CEO winning on integrations is everything. We just went through a demographic shift this year where 51% of our buyers are born after 1982. [00:18:15] Jay McBain: Millennials are the number one buyer of the $5 trillion. Their number one buying criteria is not service. Support your price, your brand reputation, it’s integrations. The buy a product, 80% is good as the next one if it works better in their environment. 79% of us won’t buy a car unless it has CarPlay or Android Auto. [00:18:34] Jay McBain: This is an integration world. The company with the most integrations win. Second, there are seven partners that surround the customer. Highly trusted partners. We’re talking, coaching the customer’s, kids soccer team, having a cottage together up at the lake. You know, best men, bate of honors at weddings type of relationships. [00:18:57] Jay McBain: You can’t maybe have all seven, but how does Microsoft beat AWS? They might have had two, three, or four of them saying nice things about them instead of the competition. Winning in service partnerships and channel partnerships changes by category. If you’re selling MarTech, only 10% of it today is resold, so you build more on service partnerships. [00:19:18] Jay McBain: If you’re in cybersecurity today, 91.6% of it is resold. Transacted through partners. So you build a lot of channel partnerships, plus the service partnerships, whatever the mix is in your category, you have to have two or three of those seven people. Saying nice things about you at every stage of the customer journey. [00:19:38] Jay McBain: Now move over to alliances. We have already built the platforms at the hyperscale level. We’ve built the platforms within SaaS, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, HubSpot. Every buyer has a set of platforms that they buy. We’ve now built them in cybersecurity this year out of 6,500 as high as cyber companies, the top five are starting to separate. [00:20:02] Jay McBain: We built it in distribution, which I’ll show in a minute. We’re building it in Telco. This is a platform economy and alliances win and you have alliances with your competitors ’cause you compete in the morning, but you’re best friends by the afternoon. Winning in other platforms is just as important as driving your own. [00:20:20] Jay McBain: And probably the most important part of this is go to market. That sales, that marketing, the 28 moments, the every 30 days forever become all a partner strategy. So there’s still CEOs out there that believe platform is a UI or UX on a bunch of disparate products and things you’ve acquired. There’s still CFOs out there that Think platform is a pricing model, a bundle model of just getting everything under one, you know, subscription price or consumption price. [00:20:51] Jay McBain: And it’s not, platforms are synonymous with partnerships. This is the way forward and there’s no conversation around ai. That doesn’t involve Nvidia over there, an open AI over here and a hyperscaler over there and a SaaS company over here. The seven layer stack wins every single time, and the companies that get this will be the ones that survive this cycle. [00:21:16] Jay McBain: Now, flipping over to marketplaces. So we had written research that, um, about five years ago that marketplaces were going to grow at 82% compounded. Yeah, probably one of the most accurate predictions we ever made, because it happened, we, we predicted that, uh, we were gonna get up to about $85 billion. Well, now we’ve extended that to 2030, so we’re gonna get up to $163 billion, and the thing that we’re watching is in green. [00:21:46] Jay McBain: If 96% of these deals are partner assisted in some way, how is the economics of partnering going to work? We predicted that 50% of deals by 2027. Would be partner funded in some way. Private offers multi-partner offers distributor sellers of record, and now that extends to 59% by 2030, the most senior leader of the biggest marketplace AWS, just said to us they’re gonna probably make these numbers on their own. [00:22:14] Jay McBain: And he asked what their two competitors are doing. So he’s telling us that we under called this. Now when you look at each of the press releases, and this is the AWS Billion Dollar Club. Every one of the companies on the left have issued a press release that they’re in the billion dollar club. Some of them are in the multi-billions, but I want you to double click on this press release. [00:22:35] Jay McBain: I’m quoted in here somewhere, but as CrowdStrike is building the marketplace at 91% compounded, they’re almost doubling their revenue every single year. They’re growing the partner funding, in this case, distributor funding by 3548%. Almost triple digit growth in marketplace is translating into almost quadruple digit growth in funding. [00:23:01] Jay McBain: And you see that over and over again as, as Splunk hit three, uh, billion dollars. The same. Salesforce hit $2 billion on AWS in Ulti, 18 months. They joined in October 20, 23, and 18 months later, they’re already at $2 billion. But now you’re seeing at Salesforce, which by the way. Grew up to $40 billion in revenue direct, almost not a nickel in resell. [00:23:28] Jay McBain: Made it really difficult for VARs and managed service providers to work with Salesforce because they couldn’t understand how to add services to something they didn’t book the revenue for. While $40 billion companies now seeing 70% of their deals come through partners. So this is just the world that we’re in. [00:23:44] Jay McBain: It doesn’t matter who you are and what industry you’re in, this takes place. But now we’re starting to see for the first time. Partners join the billion dollar club. So you wonder about partnering and all this funding and everything that’s working through Now you’re seeing press releases and companies that are redoing their LinkedIn branding about joining this illustrious club without a product to sell and all the services that wrap around it. [00:24:10] Jay McBain: So the opening session on Microsoft was interesting because there’s been a number of changes that Microsoft has done just in the last 30 days. One is they cut distribution by two thirds going from 180 distributors to 62. They cut out any small partner lower than a thousand dollars, and that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s over a hundred thousand partners that get deed tightening the long tail. [00:24:38] Jay McBain: They we’re the first to really put a global point system in place three years ago. They went to the new commerce experience. If you remember, all kinds of changes being led by. The biggest company for the channel. And so when we’re studying marketplaces, we’re not just studying the three hyperscalers, we’re studying what TD Cynic is doing with Stream One Ingram’s doing with Advant Advantage Aerosphere. [00:25:01] Jay McBain: Also, we’re watching what PAX eight, who by the way, is the 365 bestseller for Microsoft in the world. They are the cybersecurity leader for Microsoft in the world and the copilot. Leader in the world for Microsoft and Partner of the Year for Microsoft. So we’re watching what the cloud platforms are doing, watching what the Telco are doing, which is 25 cents out of every dollar, if you remember that pie chart, watching what the biggest resellers are converting themselves into. [00:25:30] Jay McBain: Vince just mentioned, you know, SHI in the changes there watching the managed services market and the leaders there, what they’re doing in terms of how this industry’s moving forward. By the way, managed services at $608 billion this year. Is one and a half times larger than the SaaS industry overall. [00:25:48] Jay McBain: It’s also one and a half times larger than all the hyperscalers combined. Oracle, Alibaba, IBM, all the way down. This is a massive market and it makes up 15 to 20 cents of every dollar the customer spend. We’re watching that industry hit a trillion dollars by the end of the decade, and we’re watching 150 different marketplace development platforms, the distribution of our industry, which today is 70.1% indirect. [00:26:13] Jay McBain: We’re starting to see that number, uh, solidify in terms of marketplaces as well. Watching distributors go from that linear warehouse in a bank to this orchestration model, watching some of the biggest players as the world comes around, platforms, it tightens around the place. So Caresoft, uh, from from here is the sixth biggest distributor in the world. [00:26:40] Jay McBain: Just shows you how big the. You know, biggest client in the world is that they serve. But understand that we’re publishing the distributor 500 list, but it’ll be the same thing. That little group in blue in the middle today, you know, drives almost two thirds of the market. So what happens in all this next stage in terms of where the dollars change hands. [00:27:07] Jay McBain: And the economics of partnering themselves are going through the most radical shift that we’ve seen ever. So back to the nineties, and, and for those of you that have been channel chiefs and running programs, we went to work every day. You know, everything’s on fire. We’re trying to check hundred boxes, trying to make our program 10% better than our competitors. [00:27:30] Jay McBain: Hey, we gotta fix our deal registration program today, and our incentives are outta whack or training programs or. You know, not where they need to be. Our certification, you know, this was the life of, uh, of a channel chief. Everybody thought we were just out drinking in the Caribbean with our best partners, but we were under the weight of this. [00:27:49] Jay McBain: But something interesting has happened is that we turned around and put the customer at the middle of our programs to say that those 28 moments in green before the sale are really, really important. And the seven partners who participate are really important. Understanding. The customer’s gonna buy a seven layer stack. [00:28:09] Jay McBain: They’re gonna buy it With these seven partners, the procurement stage is much different. The growth of marketplaces, the growth of direct in some of these areas, and then long term every 30 days forever in a managed service, implementations, integrations, how you upsell, cross-sell, enrich a deal changes. So how would you build a program that’s wrapped around the customer instead of the vendor? [00:28:35] Jay McBain: And we’re starting to hear our partners shout back to us. These are global surveys, big numbers, but over half of our partners, regardless of type, are selling consulting to their customer. Over half are designing architecting deals. A third of them are trying to be system integrators showing up at those implementation integration moments. [00:28:55] Jay McBain: Two thirds of them are doing managed services, but the shocking one here is 44% of our partners, regardless of type, are coding. They’re building agents and they’re out helping their customer at that level. So this is the modern partner that says, don’t typecast me. You may have thought of me in your program. [00:29:14] Jay McBain: You might have me slotted as a var. Well, I do 3.2 things, and if I don’t get access to those resources, if you don’t walk me to that room, I’m not gonna do them with you. You may have me as a managed service provider that’s only in the morning. By the afternoon I’m coding, and by the next morning I’m implementing and consulting. [00:29:33] Jay McBain: So again, a partner’s not a partner. That Venn diagram is a very loose one now, as every partner on there is doing 3.2 different business models. And again, they’re telling us for 43 years, they said, I want more leads this year it changed. For the first time, I want to be recognized and incentivized as more than just a cash register for you. [00:29:57] Jay McBain: I want you to recognize when I’m consulting, when I’m designing, when you’re winning deals, because of my wonderful services, by the way, we asked the follow up question, well, where should we spend our money with you? And they overwhelmingly say, in the consulting stage, you win and lose deals. Not at moment 28. [00:30:18] Jay McBain: We’re not buying a pack of gum at the gas station. This is a considered purchase. You win deals from moment 12 through 16 and I’m gonna show you a picture of that later, and they say, you better be spending your money there, or you’re not gonna win your fair share or more than your fair share of deals. [00:30:36] Jay McBain: The shocking thing about this is that Microsoft, when they went to the point system, lifted two thirds of all the money, tens of billions of dollars, and put it post-sale, and we were all scratching our heads going. Well, if the partners are asking for it there, and it seems like to beat your biggest competitors, you want to win there. [00:30:54] Jay McBain: Why would you spend the money on renewal? Well, they went to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and the people who lift trillions of dollars of pension funds and said, if we renew deals at 108%, we become a cash machine for you. And we think that’s more valuable than a company coming out with a new cell phone in September and selling a lot of them by Christmas every year. [00:31:18] Jay McBain: The industry. And by the way, wall Street responded, Microsoft has been more valuable than Apple since. So we talk in this now multiplier language, and these are reports that we write, uh, at AMIA at canals. But talking about the partner opportunity in that customer cycle, the $6 and 40 cents you can make for every dollar of consumption, or the $7 and 5 cents you can make the $8 and 45 cents you can make. [00:31:46] Jay McBain: There’s over 24 companies speaking at this level now, and guess what? It’s not just cloud or software companies. Hardware companies are starting to speak in this language, and on January 25th, Cisco, you know, probably second to Microsoft in terms of trust built with the channel globally is moving to a full point system. [00:32:09] Jay McBain: So these are the changes that happen fast. But your QBR with your partners now less about drinking beers at the hotel lobby bar and talking dollar by dollar where these opportunities are. So if you’re doing 3.2 of these things, let’s build out a, uh, a play where you can make $3 for every dollar that we make. [00:32:28] Jay McBain: And you make that profitably. You make it in sticky, highly retained business, and that’s the model. ’cause if you make $3 for every dollar. We make, you’re gonna win Partner of the year, and if you win partner of the year, that piece of glass that you win on stage, by the time you get back to your table, you’re gonna have three offers to buy your business. [00:32:51] Jay McBain: CDW just bought a w. S’s Partner of the Year. Insight bought Google’s eight time partner of the year. Presidio bought ServiceNow’s, partner of the year over and over and over again. So I’m at Octane, I’m at CrowdStrike, I’m at all these events in Vegas every week. I’m watching these partners of the year. [00:33:05] Jay McBain: And I’m watching as the big resellers. I’m watching as the GSIs and the m and a folks are surrounding their table after, and they’re selling their businesses for SaaS level valuations. Not the one-to-one service valuation. They’re getting multiples because this is the new future of our industry. This is platform economics. [00:33:25] Jay McBain: This is winning and platforms for partners. Now, like Vince, I spent 20 minutes without talking about ai, but we have to talk about ai. So the next 20 years as it plays out is gonna play out in phases. And the first thing you know to get it out of the way. The first two years since that March of 23, has been underwhelming, to say the least. [00:33:47] Jay McBain: It’s been disappointing. All the companies that should have won the biggest in AI have been the most disappointing. It’s underperformed the s and p by a considerable amount in terms of where we are. And it goes back to this. We always overestimate the first two years, but we underestimate the first 10. [00:34:07] Jay McBain: If you wanna be the point in time person and go look at that 1983 PC or the 1995 internet or that 2007 iPhone or that whatever point in time you wanna look at, or if you want to talk about hallucinations or where chat chip ET version five is version, as opposed to where it’s going to be as it improves every six months here on in. [00:34:30] Jay McBain: But the fact of the matter is, it’s been a consumer trend. Nvidia got to be the most valuable company in the world. OpenAI was the first company to 2 billion users, uh, in that amount of speed. It’s the fastest growing product ever in history, and it’s been a consumer win this trillions of dollars to get it thrown around in the press releases. [00:34:49] Jay McBain: They’re going out every day, you know, open ai, signing up somebody new or Nvidia, investing in somebody new almost every single day in hundreds of billions of dollars. It is all happening really on the consumer side. So we got a little bit worried and said, is that 96% of surround gonna work in ag agentic ai? [00:35:10] Jay McBain: So we went and asked, and the good news is 88% of end customers are using partners to work through their ag agentic strategy. Even though they’re moving slow, they’re actually using partners. But what’s interesting from a partner perspective, and this is new research that out till 2030. This is the number one services opportunity in the entire tech or telco industry. [00:35:34] Jay McBain: 35.3% compounded growth ending at $267 billion in services. Companies are rebuilding themselves, building out practices, and getting on this train and figuring out which vendors they should hook their caboose to as those trains leave the station. But it kind of plays out like this. So in the next three to five years, we’re in this generative, moving into agentic phase. [00:36:01] Jay McBain: Every partner thinks internally first, the sales and marketing. They’re thinking about their invoicing and billing. They’re thinking about their service tickets. They’re thinking about creating a business that’s 10% better than their competitors, taking that knowledge into their customers and drive in business. [00:36:17] Jay McBain: But we understand that ag agentic AI, as it’s going to play out is not a product. A couple of years ago, we thought maybe a copilot or an agent force or something was going to be the product that everybody needed to buy, and it’s not a product, it’s gonna show up as a feature. So you go back in the history of feature ads and it’s gonna show up in software. [00:36:38] Jay McBain: So if you’re calling in SMB, maybe you’re calling on a restaurant. The restaurant isn’t gonna call OpenAI or call Microsoft or call Nvidia directly. They’re running their restaurant. And they may have chosen a platform like Toast Square, Clover, whatever iPads people are running around with, runs on a platform that does everything in their business, does staffing, does food ordering, works with Uber Eats, does everything end to end? [00:37:08] Jay McBain: They’re gonna wait to one of those platforms, dries out agent AI for them, and can run the restaurant more effectively, less human capital and more consistently, but they wait for the SaaS platform as you get larger. A hundred, 150 people. You have vice presidents. Each of those vice presidents already have a SaaS stack. [00:37:28] Jay McBain: I talked about Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, et cetera. They’ve already built that seven layer model and in some cases it’s 70 layers. But the fact is, is they’re gonna wait for those SaaS layers to deliver ag agentic to them. So this is how it’s gonna play out for the next three and a half, three to five years. [00:37:45] Jay McBain: And partners are realizing that many of them were slow to pick up SaaS ’cause they didn’t resell it. Well now to win in this next three to half, three to five years, you’re gonna have to play in this environment. When you start looking out from here, the next generation, you know, kind of five through 15 years gets interesting in more of a physical sense. [00:38:06] Jay McBain: Where I was yesterday talking about every IOT device that now is internet access, starts to get access to large language models. Every little sensor, every camera, everything that’s out there starts to get smart. But there’s a point. The first trillionaire, I believe, will be created here. Elon’s already halfway there. [00:38:24] Jay McBain: Um, but when Bill Gates thought there was gonna be a PC in every home, and IBM thought they were gonna sell 10,000 to hobbyists, that created the richest person in the world for 20 years, there will be a humanoid in every home. There’s gonna be a point in time that you’re out having drinks with your friends, and somebody’s gonna say, the early adopter of your friends is gonna say. [00:38:46] Jay McBain: I haven’t done the dishes in six weeks. I haven’t done the laundry. I haven’t made my bed. I haven’t mowed the lawn. When they say that, you’re gonna say, well, how? And they’re gonna say, well, this year I didn’t buy a new car, but I went to the car dealership and I bought this. So we’re very close to the dexterity needed. [00:39:05] Jay McBain: We’ve got the large language models. Now. The chat, GPT version 10 by then is going to make an insane, and every house is gonna have one of the. [00:39:17] Jay McBain: This is the promise of ai. It’s not humanoid robots, it’s not agents. It’s this. 99% of the world’s business data has not been trained or tuned into models yet. Again, this is the slow moving business. If you want to think about the 99% of business data, every flight we’ve all taken in this room sits on a saber system that was put in place in 1964. [00:39:43] Jay McBain: Every banking transaction, we’ve all made, every withdrawal, every deposit sits on an IBM mainframe put in place in the sixties or seventies. 83% of this data sits in cold storage at the edge. It’s not ready to be moved. It’s not cleansed, it’s not, um, indexed. It’s not in any format or sitting on any infrastructure that a large language model will be able to gobble up the data. [00:40:10] Jay McBain: None of the workflows, none of the programming on top of that data is yet ready. So this is your 10 to 20 year arc of this era that chat bot today when they cancel your flight is cute. It’s empathetic, it feels bad for you, or at least it seems to, but it can’t do anything. It can’t book you the Marriott and get you an Uber and then a 5:00 AM flight the next morning. [00:40:34] Jay McBain: It can’t do any of that. But more importantly, it doesn’t know who you are. I’ve got 53 years of flights under my belt and they, I’m the person that get me within six hours of my kids and get me a one-way Hertz rental. You know, if there’s bad weather in Miami, get me to Tampa, get me a Hertz, I’m driving home, I’m gonna make it home. [00:40:56] Jay McBain: I’m not the 5:00 AM get me a hotel person. They would know that if they picked up the flights that I’ve taken in the past. Each of us are different. When you get access to the business data and you become ag agentic, everything changes. Every industry changes because of this around the customers. When you ask about this 35% growth, working on that data, working in traditional consulting and design and implementation, working in the $7 trillion of infrastructure, storage, compute, networking, that’s gonna be around, this is a massive opportunity. [00:41:30] Jay McBain: Services are gonna continue to outgrow products. Probably for the next five to 10 years because of this, and I’m gonna finish here. So we talked a lot about quantifying names, faces, places, and I think where we failed the most as ultimate partners is underneath the tam, which every one of our CEOs knows to the decimal point underneath the TAM that our board thinks they’re chasing. [00:41:59] Jay McBain: We’ve done a very poor job. Of talking about the available markets and obtainable markets underneath it, we, we’ve shown them theory. We’ve shown them a bunch of, you know, really smart stuff, and PowerPoint slides up the wazoo, but we’ve never quantified it for them. If they wanna win, if they want to get access, if they want to double their pipeline, triple their pipeline, if they wanna start winning more deals, if they wanna win deals that are three times larger, they close two times faster. [00:42:31] Jay McBain: And they renew 15% larger. They have to get into the available and obtainable markets. So just in the last couple weeks I spoke at Cribble, I spoke at Octane, I spoke at CrowdStrike Falcon. All three of those companies at the CEO level, main stage use those exact three numbers, three x, two x, 15%. That’s the language of platforms, and they’re investing millions and millions and millions of dollars on teams. [00:42:59] Jay McBain: To go build out the Sam Andal in name spaces and places. So you’ve heard me talk about these 28 moments a lot. They’re the ones that you spend when you buy a car. Some people spend one moment and they drive to the Cadillac dealership. ’cause Larry’s been, you know, taking care of the family for 50 years. [00:43:18] Jay McBain: Some people spend 50 moments like I do, watching every YouTube video and every, you know, thing on the internet. I clear the internet cover to cover. But the fact is, is every deal averages around these 28 moments. Your customer, there’s 13 members of the buying committee today. There’s seven partners and they’re buying seven things. [00:43:37] Jay McBain: There’s 27 things orchestrating inside these 28 moments. And where and how they all take place is a story of partnering. So a couple of years ago, canals. Latin for channel was acquired by amia, which is a part of Informa Tech Target, which is majority owned by Informa. All that being said, there’s hundreds of magazines that we have. [00:44:00] Jay McBain: There’s hundreds of events that we run. If somebody’s buying cybersecurity, they probably went to Black Hat or they probably went to GI Tech. One of these events we run, or one of the magazines. So we pick up these signals, these buyer intent signals as a company. Why did they wanna, um, buy a, uh, a Canals, which was a, you know, a small analyst firm around channels? [00:44:22] Jay McBain: They understood this as well. The 28 moments look a lot like this when marketers and salespeople are busy filling in the spots of every deal. And by the way, this is a real deal. AstraZeneca came in to spend millions of dollars on ASAP transformation, and you can start to see as the customer got smart. [00:44:45] Jay McBain: The eBooks, they read the podcasts, they listened to the events they went to. You start to see how this played out over the long term. But the thing we’ve never had in our industry is the light blue boxes. This deal was won and lost in December. In this particular case, NTT software won and Yash came in and sold the customer five projects. [00:45:07] Jay McBain: The millions of dollars that were going to be spent were solved here. The design and architecture work was all done here. A couple of ISVs You see in light blue came in right at the end, deal was closed in April. You see the six month cycle. But what if you could fill in every one of the 28 boxes in every single customer prospect that your sales and marketing team have? [00:45:30] Jay McBain: But here’s the brilliance of this. Those light blue boxes didn’t win the deals there. They won the deals months before that. So when NTT and Software one walked into this deal. They probably won the deal back in October and they had to go through the redlining. They had to go through the contracting, they had to go through all the stuff and the Gantt chart to get started. [00:45:54] Jay McBain: But while your CMO is getting all excited about somebody reading an ebook and triggering an MQL that the sales team doesn’t want, ’cause it’s not qualified, it’s not sales qualified, you walk in and say, no, no. This is a multimillion deal, dollar deal. It’s AstraZeneca. I know the five partners that are coming in in December to solidify the seven layers, and you’re walking in at the same time as the CMOs bragging about an ebook. [00:46:21] Jay McBain: This changes everything. If we could get to this level of data about every dollar of our tam, we not only outgrow our competitors, we become the platforms of the next generation. Partnering and ultimate partnering is all here. And this is what we’re doing in this room. This is what we’re doing over these couple of days, and this is what, uh, the mission that Vince is leading. [00:46:43] Jay McBain: Thank you so much. [00:46:47] Vince Menzione: Woo. Day in the house. Good to see you my friend. Good to see you. Oh, we’re gonna spend a couple minutes. Um, I’m put you in the second seat. We’re gonna put, we’re gonna make it sit fireside for a minute. Uh, that was intense. It was pretty incredible actually, Jay. And so I’m, I think I wanna open it up ’cause we only have a few minutes just to, any questions? [00:47:06] Vince Menzione: I’m sure people are just digesting. We already have one up here. See, [00:47:09] Question: Jay knows I’m [00:47:10] Vince Menzione: a question. I love it. We, I don’t think we have any I can grab a mic, a roving mic. I could be a roving mic person. Hold on. We can do this. This is not on. [00:47:25] Vince Menzione: Test, test. Yes it is. Yeah. [00:47:26] Question: Theresa Carriol dared me to ask a question and I say, you don’t have to dare me. You know, I’m going to Anyway. Um, so Jay, of the point of view that with all of the new AI players that strategic alliances is again having a moment, and I was curious your point of view on what you’re seeing around this emergence and trend of strategic alliances and strategic alliance management. [00:47:52] Question: As compared to channel management. And what are you seeing in terms of large vendors like AWS investing in that strategic alliance role versus that channel role training, enablement, measurement, all that good stuff? [00:48:06] Jay McBain: Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question. So when I told the story about toast at the restaurant or Square or Clover, they’re not call, they’re not gonna call open AI or Nvidia themselves either. [00:48:17] Jay McBain: When you look out at the 250,000 ISVs. That make up this AI stack, there is the layers that happen there. So the Alliance with AWS, the alliance they have with Microsoft or Google is going to be how they generate agent AI in their platforms. So when I talk about a seven layer stack, the average deal being seven layers, AI is gonna drive this to nine, and then 11, then probably 13. [00:48:44] Jay McBain: So in terms of how alliances work, I had it up there as one of the five core strategies, and I think it’s pretty even. You can have the best alliances in the world, but if the seven partners trusted by the customer don’t know what that alliance is and the benefits to the customer and never mention it, it’s all for Naugh. [00:49:00] Jay McBain: If you’re go-to market, you’re co-selling, your co-marketing strategies are not built around that alliance. It’s all for naught. If the integration and the co-innovation, the co-development, the all the co-creation work that’s done inside these alliances isn’t translated to customer outcomes, it’s all for naugh. [00:49:17] Jay McBain: These are all five parallel swim lanes. All five are absolutely critically needed. And I think they’re all five pretty equally weighted in terms of needing each other. Yes. To be successful in the era of platforms. Yeah. [00:49:32] Vince Menzione: And the problem is they’re all stove pipe today. If, if at all. Yeah. Maintained, right. [00:49:36] Vince Menzione: Alliances is an example. Channels and other example. They don’t talk to one another. Judge any, we’ve got a mic up here if anybody else has. Yep. We have some questions here, Jacqueline. [00:49:51] Question: So when we’re developing our channel programs, any advice on, you know, what’s the shift that we should make six months from now, a year from now? The historical has been bronze, silver, gold, right? And you’ve got your deal registration, but what’s the future look like? [00:50:05] Jay McBain: Yeah, so I mean, the programs are, are changing to, to the point where the customer should be in the middle and realizing the seven partners you need to win the deal. [00:50:15] Jay McBain: And depending on what category of product you’re in, security, how much you rely on resell, 91.6%. You know, the channel partners are gonna be critical where the customer spends the money. And if you’re adding friction to that process, you’re adding friction in terms of your growth. So you know, if you’re in cybersecurity, you have to have a pretty wide open reseller model. [00:50:39] Jay McBain: You have to have a wide open distribution model, and you have to make sure you’re there at that point of sale. While at the same time, considering the other six partners at moment 12 who are in either saying nice things about you or not, the customer might even be starting with you. ’cause there is actually one thing that I didn’t mention when I showed the 28 moments filled in. [00:51:00] Jay McBain: You’ll notice that the customer went to AWS twice direct. AWS lost the deal. Microsoft won the deal software. One is Microsoft’s biggest reseller in the world. They just acquired crayon. NTT who, who loves both had their Microsoft team go in. [00:51:18] Question: Mm. [00:51:19] Jay McBain: So I think that they went to AWS thinking it was A-W-S-S-A-P, you know, kind of starting this seven layer stack. [00:51:25] Jay McBain: I think they finished those, you know, critical moments in the middle looking at it. And then they went back to AWS kind of going probably WWTF. Yeah. What we thought was happening isn’t actually the outcome that was painted by our most trusted people. So, you know, to answer your question, listen to your partners. [00:51:43] Jay McBain: They want to be recognized for the other things they’re doing. You can’t be spending a hundred percent of the dollars at the point of sale. You gotta have a point of system that recognizes the point of sale, maybe even gold, silver, bronze, but recognizing that you’re paying for these other moments as well. [00:51:57] Jay McBain: Paying for alliances, paying for integrations and everything else, uh, in the cyber stack. And, um, you know, recognizing also the top 1000. So if I took your tam. And I overlaid those thousand logos. I would be walking into 2026 the best I could of showing my company logo by logo, where 80% of our TAM sits as wallet share, not by revenue. [00:52:25] Jay McBain: Remember, a million dollar partner is not a million dollar partner. One of them sells 1.2 million in our category. We should buy them a baseball cap and have ’em sit in the front row of our event. One of them sells $10 million and only sells our stuff if the customer asks. So my company should be looking at that $9 million opportunity and making sure my programs are writing the checks and my coverage. [00:52:48] Jay McBain: My capacity and capability planning is getting obsessed over that $9 million. My farmers can go over there, my hunters can go over here, and I should be submitting a list of a thousand sorted in descending order of opportunity. Of where my company can write program dollars into. [00:53:07] Vince Menzione: Great answer. All right. I, I do wanna be cognizant of time and the, all the other sessions we have. [00:53:14] Vince Menzione: So we’ll just take one other question if there are any here and if not, we’ll let I know. Jay, you’re gonna be mingling around for a little while before your flight. I’m [00:53:21] Jay McBain: here the whole day. [00:53:22] Vince Menzione: You, you’re the whole day. I see that Jay’s here the whole day. So if you have any other questions and, and, uh, sharing the deck is that. [00:53:29] Vince Menzione: Yep. Alright. We have permission to share the deck with the each of you as well. [00:53:34] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you very much everyone. Jay. Great to have you.