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Competing in a Future World of Infinite Intelligence Navigation: Intro From Knowledge Workers to Judgment Workers The AI-Native Company: Org, Hiring, Culture The Human Element: Are We Underestimating It? Scenarios Our Take Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show:   Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Introduction Welcome to episode 79 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we take a leap into the big unknown. This is a thesis episode, not your classic analysis, in-depth sharing episode. The big idea for this episode is that we may be approaching the cognitive age, and how would one, or how would a company compete in a world of infinite intelligence? The big idea, again, is that intelligence, which has been mostly scarce and expensive for all of human history, might become abundant and cheap. If that happens, what happens to work, what happens to companies, what happens to society? This episode will be really framing a lot of these discussions. From knowledge workers to judgment workers, addressing the AI native company and how does that change, going into the human element and whether or not we’re underestimating it, and finally, ending up going into scenarios, feasible scenarios of a future where, well, intelligence is abundant. Intelligence is quasi-infinite or infinite itself.Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Big questions for this episode 79. From Knowledge Workers to Judgment Workers We can start with from knowledge workers to judgment workers. Let’s go back first to how came the knowledge worker. It’s a 20th-century invention from Peter Drucker in 1959. The idea here is that that category might be splitting. The production of knowledge itself is on its way to being commoditized by AI. However, our perspective is that judgment around production of knowledge is not disappearing and is staying for a bit control managed by humans. What’s your take on this, Nuno? Do you agree with this split?Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think it’s a little bit more profound than that. It’s not just judgment. Definitely, human judgment will be needed. We’ve seen agents perform all sorts of funny things in the wrong way when left alone to their own devices. Even some very well-known AI researchers coming forward and saying, “Hey, I tried to use this myself, and actually I messed up some of my systems,” or “I messed some of my code. I messed up some of my flows for a period of time.” I think just having human-in-the-loop from a judgment standpoint will be needed for a significant amount of time. That is something you can’t just delegate into machines, into algorithms, et cetera. The second part is, ultimately, there needs to be contextualization, and that contextualization, I think, comes from two forms. One from actual data, where the machine, I think, at some point will catch up, or the machines will catch up. The algorithms, at some point, on the data analysis will get better and better and have probably the closest to the truth that you can get, minus all the biases that are in the data, just to be clear, because data has a ton of biases. We’ve looked at this in the past and discussed it at prior episodes. But maybe on that, I think the machine has a chance to catch up, or the machines have a chance to catch up, so there’s less of distinctiveness from the human standpoint. But then, on just the attributes, the ability when you’re judging some situation, you’re in the middle of the situation. You’re judging the person and how it’s acting, in some ways, a lot of the things that end up happening, end up happening because there’s human interaction. There’s someone on the other side. I see how they’re delivering the message, how they’re implicating. We’ll talk about it later in the context of the organization and what changes in companies. I don’t think it’s just judgment. I think there’s a little bit more than that. One of the reasons I went to the dark side of management early on in my career from being an engineer was Peter Drucker and this notion of the knowledge worker, which he later on reemphasized with the publishing of his book, which for me was seminal and defined a lot of my career in life, the post-capitalist society, which is this notion that information rich and information poor is going to be the key distinctiveness that will happen in the world. The two big camps, information rich, information poor, which links back to this invention of the term knowledge worker, that knowledge is going to be key in some ways. I think that’s what we’ve seen for the last decades. Again, I think judgment is not going anywhere, but I think it’s beyond judgment. There’s elements of humanity and involvement that won’t go away anytime soon, where human-in-the-loop are particularly critical. We’ll discuss later some scenarios, but for me, that’s my stick in the ground. I think human-in-the-loop is going to be critical for many decades to come.Bertrand Schmitt While we are talking about all of this, and we share some possible scenarios, there is always that question. This is moving so fast right now. If you think about AI 10 years ago, AI 5 years ago, AI with the launch of ChatGPT 3, and then AI the past 2 years, now we have agents that are running at scale. Things are moving very fast. I can tell you, me in 6 months, the change has been pretty dramatic in terms of what I can use AI for. There is always that question that whatever we are thinking about cannot just be connected to what we were able to do 6 months ago or even today, we have to think and project ourselves at least in the next 6–12 months. Of course, we can go beyond that, and we will do that with some future scenarios, but it’s a very fast-moving, and it’s not clear yet where are the limits.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think that’s a very fair point. Let me try to analyze things that I don’t think will change anytime soon for the next few years. Agreed with you that many things will change, and we’ll have a lot better tools, platforms out there. That will be difficult to predict what exactly won’t change. I think there’s elements of humanity, and some of them do relate to judgment, like having good or bad taste, having a view on it, on whether something looks good or bad. Obviously, all of this sometimes is subjective, but some of it may not be as subjective as people think it is. The elements of contextualization. I think a little bit going back to what we did at Chamaeleon ourselves, where we built this platform, Mantis, and the objective of building Mantis was not really to replace us, was that it was a core augmentation layer in some ways that we would use investment or investor judgment as humans in the loop to systematize pattern recognition and a variety of other things, but that Mantis would really elevate all that judgment, not just in terms of timing, us being more productive, but also in terms of the quality of the decisions we’re making. Think of it as a little bit like having our human judgment in the context of operating Chamaeleon at a higher altitude, where we are more aware of the things that are happening and how they actually happen. The ability to really get to the data pieces and then make decisions on top of that that generate the needed alpha in our case for investors. What I mean by this is I think there’s always going to be core elements of humanity that I do think are going to be difficult for the machines to replace. For example, the taste piece people are like, “I can figure out what’s the taste in the market.” Yeah, but that’s mainstream. That doesn’t identify what’s the next big thing, which normally doesn’t start from mainstream. It starts from something else. It could start from opinion leaders and influencers. It could start by someone having a different way of addressing a problem and having a solution that hasn’t been thought through. For example, elements of creativity, I think, in human judgment and in human operations is something that I feel the machine will still have difficulty to replace.Bertrand Schmitt Let’s not forget how today current algorithms are working by feeding them enormous quantity of data, actually as much data as we can find. Finding more data is becoming a limitation these days. What it means is that it’s very hard for AI to think beyond its training data. There is some level of logic that’s being added, but at the same time, take the launch of the iPhone. What was the opinion before launch? Is that no, it doesn’t make sense. Not enough battery life, no keyboard, no this, no that. If you just base your analysis on what’s written out there, what’s being sold out there, you would just say, “It’s going to fail.” AI might really follow that more generic advice and perspective because that’s what in the training data and that’s what they’re in volume. It’s, of course, raising a lot of questions of, how do you improve the quality of the training data? How do you separate the weed from the chaff? There are a lot of questions there, and obviously, it will get better over time. But it’s still a critical part of how it’s working today. It won’t be that easy to change. I really like your point regarding Mantis, and I will say in general, platforms that you build with AI or leveraging AI capacity. Because when we say knowledge production is going to disappear, but we’ll keep judgment, it will be a different type of judgment because the quantity and quality of knowledge we will have in front of us to build our judgment will be very different. If suddenly we have for free the work of 10 interns or 5 junior analysts or whatever, and you can run that on nearly anything you do in life or at work, it’s completely dramatic. Your judgment was not used to be exercised so often because often you were missing quality data to have a judgment. Before it was a lot of finger in the wind and trying to smell something, but you didn’t have enough to make a serious analysis. Except if you are working as a strategy consultant, as you used to do, Nuno. That part is actually quite interesting. That the judgment itself will be exercised much more often and hopefully on the base of much more in-depth analysis for a lot of things. We will work very differently.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro We will go in-depth, faster and more fact-based, more data-based along the way. The question some of you might have right now is, is there some judgment that’s going to go away? Is there some judgment? We seem to be defining that there’s this organization, we’ll talk about it later, that goes from doers more into deciders. I think there’s some nuances to that, so I’ll just hit pause on that. In terms of judgment, obviously, there’s judgment that has been hidden over the years under the pretense of being wisdom, but it’s actually not wisdom. It’s just repetitive tasking, and it’s rules-based for the most. There’s a lot of judgment done, in particular in the white-collar space, that you could say it’s just reps. People have been doing it all along like that, and so therefore to say, “I’ve done it before like this, so I’ll do it the same way.” There’s actually no best in class, no analysis, no nothing. It’s just, “I’ve done it like that before.” I think that type of judgment will disappear because, again, algorithms will be as good, if not much better at that. They’ll be better at figuring out, actually, this would be the better way to do this. That’s how you play it forward. Then the question is, if there are fundamental, wise people in the organization, people that can really take that more complex elements of judgment, how do you go from the world we have today, which is a world of apprenticeship, where people come out of college, they go and work, and they learn their way, and therefore, hopefully over time, some of them, not all of them, we know that, but some of them will develop that wisdom to be great decision makers 15, 20 years down the road? How do we do that in a world that now is saying, “I don’t need people out of college because I can do it myself, and I can do individual contributor, and I can have agents doing the work that would require some manifestation of management in the middle.” Basically, “I don’t need this stuff. I don’t need you.” It’s a little bit the story we’re in. How do you create then this apprenticeship? How do we create then wisdom? My two cents on that is that wisdom, because of what we were just discussing and what, for example, myself and Bertrand was just saying, because of more often interactions with more data-stressed information and insights, what will happen is people will get better through their own reps in whatever form they’re doing, in day-to-day life, in internships, et cetera. In some ways, that will create the accelerated growth. It’s a little bit the interactions with agents and the interactions with our beloved AI algorithms that will create that growth over time and maybe not as much with other people. That still leaves the question around social interactions, but that’s probably the way this gets sorted. Apprenticeship gets sorted through the machine and the human having more interactions in effect.Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you because when we talk about apprenticeship, in some ways a lot of time was wasted on stuff that were not that important. But in a way, that was the price you had to pay in order to be there when people make the big decision to try to get some wisdom from that one hour of interactions that’s really useful and make a difference out of your full week. But the rest of your full week was just basic stuff that you had to do like a machine in a way. Why not let a machine do that? That, for me, is a big question. You could argue there is a transition period where it could be hard. For instance, if you can work hand in hand with AI smartly while you are doing your 4, 5 years of universities, you could graduate with a very different knowledge, perspective, judgment, skill set than anyone who graduated 5 years ago. I think that part will require a question around, “How do you change education?” You see what I mean? If you keep education the same way, expecting that the output is someone that should go now into 5 years of apprenticeship, that’s not going to work because companies will be, “No apprenticeship anymore.” On the contrary, you have to come much more knowledgeable and ready to use the tools. The tools are so efficient that the bar pretty high. You need to come already very well-grounded. If the education is not doing their job, that will be trouble. That part for me, I think is often forgotten. In some ways, the new-found importance of universities as a place to, and not just universities, the trade to really deliver people who are ready for the workforce. If on the business side, the expectation can change, of course, you have to change the education on the other side. My worry probably right now is that it doesn’t look like universities are in touch with what businesses are looking for, businesses are working on. Of course, that’s very worrisome because the cost of university has increased very significantly. It’s not clear quality of education has improved at all. If anything, it could be the opposite. It’s pretty scary. Of course, it’s going to raise a lot of questions. How much is education worth in that type of situation? Maybe another point because we talk a lot about apprenticeship, how this stuff was useful, but at the same time, if we go back in time, not long ago in the ’50s, if you wanted to be a developer, for instance, ’50s, ’60s, the job was very different. There was barely any programmation language out there. You had to use punch cards. Your time truly spent doing the coding was very limited. Once you had your stuff working, then, the debugging was a total nightmare. My point is that no one is looking back to that time saying, “You know what? It was great. It was a great way to learn and to do an apprenticeship for 5 years. To do that crappy job of punching cards for the boss.” There was little value in this. Guess what? Everyone is happy it’s not being done anymore by anyone. I think we also have to see what AI is bringing in a similar way is that everyone’s job is going to become quite different. There are a lot of big parts of the job who are not going to look back with fondness. Just looking back as, “Wow, that was very machine-like type of job. I’m glad I’m done with it.” People will want to jump directly to the next step. You don’t need to go to the punch card phase to be able to be a good developer for the past 40 years. I guess it will be the same with AI.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think so. The difficulty we have as humans is to also visualize dramatically different scenarios and landscapes, professionally. It’s difficult for us to anticipate what are the jobs of the future. Jobs have changed a lot in the last few decades, not even the last century. What people do, the migration initially from the agricultural society to then the industrial society to then the services society, and in some ways, the shift within the services industry, and now we’re seeing another shift, so we can’t really anticipate what those jobs look like. Back to your point on education, because I think that’s a very important point. If you’re right now an undergraduate student or a postgraduate student, for that matter, and you’re not figuring out your own mechanisms of learning outside of your syllabus, outside of what your professors are telling you, et cetera, you’re going to face very difficult times. If you’re not right now using all these AI tools proficiently, all these cycles of vibe coding, co-working, et cetera, with agents in the mix, you’re going to have a really tough time. If you’re not at this point in time as proficient as someone like myself or Bertrand, and given that we’re nerds, we’re relatively proficient with a lot of these tools that are out there. On top of it, some of us have our own platforms in-house. If you’re not as proficient as we are with those tools, you’re going to have a very difficult time because then people like us won’t need you. I think that’s the sad truth. It’s like at some point, if you’re not needed, you’re not needed. Then again, you may find something else that’s more interesting for you to do. Start your own company, go join a new exciting job doing whatever it is that you need to do next, et cetera. But again, I think the bar is very high. If you’re in college right now, again, undergrad, postgraduate, this is the time of transition. This is the worst time. It’s not the best time, it’s the worst time. Because education and all these institutions haven’t adapted to it yet. You need to adapt. You need to adapt. You need to adapt. If you don’t, you’re going to pay for it, not just in the loans you need to repay, but also in terms of actually having difficulty finding your career path in those first few critical years.Bertrand Schmitt You need to be especially proactive when you’re facing this type of period where businesses are adapting as fast as they can because they all know it’s going to be survival of the fittest very quickly. Universities typically are working on a very different pace, and it’s pretty guaranteed they are not going to have adapted as fast as businesses. In time of big dramatic change, it will be trouble. It will be trouble. Yes, you will have not fun. Not saying it was part of the deal when you sign up for that loan and decided to go for university. But that’s life. There has been issues before. It’s not the first time. You have to do something about it. You talk about your perspective about, “Hey, why do we need you if you are not already fluent and very efficient with these tools and stuff?” The truth, in some ways, it’s even worse than that. Each time we spend with someone who is not efficient with all of this is less time we spend with the tools that are already providing magic for us.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Exactly.Bertrand Schmitt It’s a very big choice of, “Hey, do I spend more time training this person?” Do I just… there is an opportunity cost. Or, do I spend more time staying at light speed? Why do I slow down to do something else in the hope that maybe I will get to return versus the light speed I’m already on? It’s a lot of tension. Again, it’s certainly new. But if we want to look back, I think you talk about the switch from agriculture and society, industrial society, and now the service industry. The reality is that, yes, we have made dramatic changes in the past before. 140 years ago, we were 90% agricultural society in Europe, in the US, 90% of us. Today, it’s what? 2%. So my point is that that’s a normal evolution. There is no progress without change. Sometimes the rate of change is soft, and sometimes you have a step function. Now it’s a step function, and it’s also a pretty fast step function. Before, it could take decades to get new stuff being put in place, to have electricity come up, this or that. Now we see that the rate of investment in AI is insane, way beyond anything we have seen before. Two, in a way, a lot of the architecture behind the scene was already there to support an even faster transition. What’s new might be the pace of the transition, how unnatural it might look. But at the same time, if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who lived 150 years ago, I mean, this was also a dramatic change for them. From horses to cars to planes to rockets, pretty big change, maybe even bigger change.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe the silver lining, just to bookend this section, is one, there will be new roles. There are a lot of things we can’t anticipate. There will be new roles, there will be new jobs being created, and new things that we can’t really quite grasp yet. The second part is that the rules are changing, and they’re changing, I would say, in general, for the better. If you are a decision-maker or an organization, and you still have your job, you’re probably making more important decisions with more data, with more tooling around you, with less red tape, hopefully over time. I know that will not hold true for all the big corporations out there that are listening to us, but it is starting to happen. Things are making an impact on how decision-making is made. There’s less and less red tape along the way in certain organizations. There are more and more fact-based discussions happening as we move along. The silver lining is better jobs, more jobs, different jobs in the future, hopefully as well. Secondly, the second part of the silver line is that the jobs that exist today, hopefully, will be more interesting, certainly on the knowledge space and on this judgment space that we’re now introducing as part of this episode. The AI-Native Company: Org, Hiring, Culture Switching gears, maybe to how does that shift? How does the company of the future look like? How does an AI native company look like? I feel there are a lot of discussions on, “Oh, you only need one person to run everything.” Let’s not go to that level. We’ve had a couple of episodes where we focused on AI as your co-founder and a couple of other elements that you guys can go back to. Let’s focus on a more evolutionary view of what’s happening to organizations, and maybe start with the org structure. In general, we should see more flat organizations where mid-level managers have to justify their pay in some ways because middle management are routers. They are normally routing tasks. It’s sometimes aggregating it, synthesizing it, and pulling it back up. Guess what? AI and agents in general are very good at that. The synthesis piece, et cetera, is not as well needed. One could say there are several elements of middle management that are valuable, like the coaching of people, the creation of apprentices, and the accountability that comes with some of middle management. But lo and behold, most of middle management is seen as a little bit of a thin line that doesn’t need to necessarily exist. I feel we’re moving into a world of smaller teams, more senior teams, where there’s more judgment at the top, where you’ll have people that both do a mix of what we used to call management in its new form, but also a lot of individual contribution. If you’re not used to that, if you’re not used anymore to be an individual in the future, again, and if you’re a very senior in an organization, maybe this is the right time to either reinvent yourself, find some other job that doesn’t require as much of that, which we’ll have plenty of those jobs for the next few decades, or maybe retire. I’ve actually, shockingly enough, seen people who have said, “You know what? This thing is changing too fast, too dramatically. My industry is changing quite aggressively right now. I’m about to retire in a couple of years. I’m just going to retire now.” I’ve literally met two people who have done that. Again, there’s nothing wrong about it. I think we’re, again, going through a step function and a huge shift, but figuring out where you fit in this new model of organizations, more senior at the top, smaller teams, more of a mix of individual contribution with management than ever was done before.Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you. In some ways, I’m not surprised that some people might say, “You know what? It’s now time to retire.” I feel a bit sad, maybe because it means you don’t like to keep reinventing yourself and changing your habits and thinking about new stuff. You were a creature of habits, I would say, if that’s your conclusion. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion, obviously, and a way of life. I guess that’s what happened, again, at regular times in the past in terms of big change. What I can see is that the rise of, you can call it the full-stack individual, someone who will have multiple roles inside the team. Before, you had to really separate the role. Especially in the US, there is such a clear separation between every role you can have in a company. Let’s take a tech company. You will have people doing design, people doing different types of designs, people doing front-end development, back-end development, and operations. You see step-by-step hyper-specialization. I have seen that, and it’s true that the level of complexity you had to deal with at some point requires some level of hyper-specialization because it will take you 6, 12 months in order to be really, really strong on a specific topic, a specific language. God forbid, trying to go deep into something that you had no real experience into. But I feel with AI, it’s a big change, actually. It’s the opportunity to go beyond that. It’s the opportunity to do more, to touch more. You can combine designing and shipping code, product managing and shipping code, being an analyst and deploying. Of course, we have to think how it works because putting a marketer shipping code to production, maybe that will get you into trouble. But I think that there must be some change. We see it changing dramatically, how fast we can get into something, something different from what we are used to. I think it would be crazy not to take that opportunity to dramatically change the scope of many positions and put an end to that hyper-specialization. I think for me, in some ways, hyper-specialization was bad. There is only so much you want to be a specialist in because a lot of things, a lot of opportunities are actually coming from the mixing of many different ideas, many different perspectives, and you lose if you go to hyper-specialization.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I don’t think the age that is coming is the age of the generalist. I think it’s going to be the age of the multispecialist. We’re going to go into an age of multispecialization, which is a little bit, we’ve mentioned it as well in the past, what Amazon defines as an athlete or T-shaped or pie-shaped people, people that have on top an amazing ability to do general management, strategy, managing teams, et cetera, then have spikes. Spikes into business development, corporate development, product management, whatever it is. With AI and with agents, the development of those spikes, as we’ve been discussing in this episode, will actually be easier. It’s almost like a given. If you want to go deeper and deeper into a certain area, you can go much faster. I think that level of multispecialization is going to be really cool to observe. I’m not sure we’ve had an age of multispecialization over the years. Maybe people would point out, well, the Da Vinci example, people that are great across very different areas. Maybe that’s an example of multispecialization. But honestly, from my perspective, this is going to be an exciting time because of that, because you’ll have people who, instead of being just focused on this area of sales, and I only do that, they can actually and should actually do a lot of other things. So the work, as we were talking before, can be more interesting. More demanding as well, because the judgments you need to make are more complex. The context you need to actually gain needs to be gained much faster. At a level of magnitude, you haven’t been able to do it before. Talk about information overload. But actually, ultimately, the roles can be a lot more interesting, a lot more exciting, because I can jump around. If I’m an investor, in this case, we have two investors on this conversation. But if I’m an investor, one of the things that we start looking at is actually not just looking at a startup as, is this startup doing something in AI or not? Is it AI-enabled or not? Is it an AI platform or not? But actually, more fundamentally, is this an AI native startup? Meaning, organizationally, culturally, is this the company that’s already in the AI age? How is the team working? How are they defining things? It’s not just that they only have two or three people. It’s like, what are those two or three people doing? How are they doing it? What cadence are they doing it on? What tools are they using? How are they making decisions? I feel we’re still actually relatively early on that track. It’s very interesting because we’ve had all these companies raising mega rounds. First round out, we invested in one of them, but there have been many frontier labs out there raising a ton of money. But a lot of them don’t have a fundamentally different way of doing business. Of organizing themselves, of how they do the day-to-day. Although they’re working on cutting-edge stuff, with very notable exceptions, they’re actually not using it themselves. They’re not actually shifting how they do stuff themselves.Bertrand Schmitt For me, that’s very interesting because in the past, I used to be quite conservative on how you manage and run a company in the sense that if you’re already in tech, if you are already on the cutting edge of what technology can deliver, and this and that, don’t waste time trying to invent a new org structure. Just focus on delivering something great, amazing, and be great at technologies. That’s already your huge differentiator. At the time, there was no real reason to innovate on the team organization. I have seen so many teams that tried to innovate, and it was just catastrophic because there was not much to innovate on, because we had decades of optimization that we could leverage. There was no reason to invent. But here it’s very different. There is a dramatic shift in how you can organize differently a company. I don’t think there are any blueprints yet on what’s the best way to do it because it’s too new. But at the same time, I would feel very bad to invest or support a company that first is not focused on AI or AI-enabled, but at the same time is not trying to innovate on the team itself. Because if you don’t do that, you’re going to get killed by someone who is going to innovate better than you on not just the product, but on the org as well.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Indeed. The shifts are pretty substantial. If you look, for example, just at hiring, what do you hire for? Certainly, there’s this element of the multispecialized orchestrator, which normally will be someone with quite a lot of wisdom and expertise. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone who’s old, but someone who has the ability to work with all the AI tooling and platforms out there and be an orchestrator of agents. Why do they make judgments, make decisions, move stuff forward really, really, really quickly? Again, those jobs are going to be the best jobs. The second part, I think that is very interesting, around hiring, is you’re going to skew towards the elements that are potentially either very aligned with the use of AI tooling and platform, AI expertise, or being AI native, or someone who’s used to using AI. That’s one side of the fence. On the other side, you’re going to actually be optimizing to hire people that have the characteristics that will be difficult for AI to replace immediately, like taste and the notion of fundamental accountability and notion of implications, the notion of how you affect change in organizations, how you affect change in individuals, the elements of coaching, and beyond coaching. You’ll be optimizing for those kinds of hires as well. Then, last but not least, for me, I feel that there is a momentum already happening. I think it will happen even more, which is the tendency to under-hire rather than over-hire. The moment of the good old days of blitz scaling, “Oh, let me go and hire 300 people to scale my go-to-market and just land grab market.” Now, that’s not how it’s going to work. People are going to try and first get the efficiencies in-house with top talent and see if there’s, at the end, the need to hire more people or not, rather than the other way around. I think the issue here is a little bit of what we alluded to before in this episode. There is a tax on individuals. If you hire more people, you’ll have to manage people, you’ll have to work with them, et cetera. If I don’t need to, I might as well work with the agents that the tools and platforms that I use give me access to. Because that’s a world that’s much more efficient, right?Bertrand Schmitt I’m in total agreement with you on this. It’s definitely raising way more questions than before because, again, on one side, you have the product, the technology used to build products that are completely different. At the same time, all of this is also enabling new ways to design organizations and to scale differently, especially in a world where, as we have seen in 3, 6, and 12 months, stuff that you thought were impossible are suddenly becoming possible. So you’re, “Hey, I’m going to scale and burn a shitload of money for 6 months before I know if there is any return.” Versus, “You know what? Maybe I just wait 6 months. The AI has improved enough so that we don’t need this new team. We don’t need these people to do stuff.” Because actually, if you just wait 6 months, we will have stuff coming for free from either new AI models or new AI tools or this or that. If you remember, we used to say that in mobile, things were going three times as fast as on the web in terms of pace of innovation and speed of development and stuff. I mean, with AI, it’s 5X mobile.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe even more. Yes, well.Bertrand Schmitt Maybe even more, maybe 10X. Every assumption around blitz scaling or scaling in general was based on past assumptions. It’s not based on how is the industry evolving today. Might make more sense for you to really grow your agents and spend more money on more tokens. I remember, of course, Jensen is selling his business interest, but he was saying, “Hey, for each one of my 450K engineers, he better spend 250K in tokens a year.” I’m not saying it’s the right way to say it, but I think there is some truth in it, and that would be something to think about. Have we maxed out the token usage per employee? I’m not talking in a stupid way because token maxing and wasting money has no value and is as stupid as it gets. But if you are truly getting a return on these tokens, can you use more? Can you generate more? Can you create more loops so that one engineer manages not just 10 agents, but 50 agents, but 200 agents? I think that’s the big question. We’re trying to add more people. More people means more management, more issues, more this, more that. That would be a fair question. Another piece of the puzzle is how do you build in a way your… I don’t know if it’s a digital twin, but more like the digital version of your companies represented by agents. How do you make sure that everything you do as a business is truly captured, is truly leveraged so that your agents are getting better and better? Not just because the model gets better, but because you are putting more data into it, because it has more opportunity to learn, and as a result, gets better at your specific business.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro The next big thing is culture. How does culture change? I think the biggest shift that I see is, why would you do meetings all the time?Bertrand Schmitt Yes.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro At least at Chamaeleon, we have a very small team, just by the way. We have a very small team at Chamaeleon. We’ve reduced by way more than 50% the time we spend on meetings between each other across the board, one-on-ones, partner meetings, et cetera. I think we’re really pushing to be more and more asynchronous. There’s stuff you can process via message. I was just asking one of my colleagues, “Can you just send me that prompt for that so I can just do that on CoWork?” Or “Can I just go on Mantis and do this? Can you tell me the cycle?” Or vice versa. Basically, it’s a little bit like you’re just going to do it. I don’t need to meet. I don’t need to meet all the time. There are some things where we still need to meet and interact, and we need to brainstorm at times, and we need to go to a different level of abstraction on the top end. Then on the lower end, there might be things that are a little bit more specific and governance-related and operational-related that we need to agree on that are more sticky. But otherwise, the culture is going to be biased towards build. “Go and do it,” rather than, “Let’s do a meeting.”Bertrand Schmitt Yes.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Async is the thing. I’m more and more like we have a couple of interns this summer. “Can we async this?” They’re like, “What does that mean?” “Can we make this interaction asynchronous?” Because synchronous interactions for me are very expensive. Can you send me something that I can process, and then I can send it back to you? We don’t waste time on you giving me context and whatever. Then I’m not ready quite yet because I need to process it. Maybe I’m in between two meetings that I’m actually thinking about other things in my mind.” Again, I feel that shifts how stuff is done. One, build rather than meeting. Two, asynchronous versus synchronous. In some way, millennials had it right when they shifted a lot to messaging and stuff like that. Let’s do more asynchronous rather than synchronous, those two elements from just an operating model of the company are significant. Maybe this is a good time for me just to put one parenthesis because there’s this thing that’s bugging me as we’re talking here. Everyone who is listening to us at this point in time might be saying, “Cool, but I work for this large organization. We’re just now…” Everything we’re saying here is contextualized by time. We’re giving you extreme situations. We’re looking into the future. Some companies that we’re talking about might be doing this already as we speak. Some of them might be in the process of doing this and might in the next couple of months be doing it like we are describing it here. Some of them might take years to get there. Then again, some of the companies that might take years might actually be destroyed in between or meanwhile, and be disrupted. Some of them might not because they’re in very legacy businesses, and it’s fine, and it’s okay. Again, don’t take everything that Bertrand and I are saying today as this is gospel, and it’s going to happen tomorrow, and why the hell are we not doing it? We think that aspirationally, this is where you should be moving to as an organization, whatever size you’re at. Speed will matter, as we discussed before, but not everyone, obviously, is going to move as fast as we’re describing it here.Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Me, for instance, take inspiration often with what some of the AI labs, frontier AI labs, are doing, the way they are working, especially in OpenAI and Anthropic. They are clearly at the top of the spear in terms of what is it that you can do because they have access to models we don’t have access to, because they have unlimited tokens they can use for tasks. They hire people who are, of course, 100% on AI. They are the best example of what is achievable if you have the top minds, if you have the latest models, if you have unlimited tokens. From there, you can take that for our needs and for our situation, and others in industries that are not as advanced. Definitely, you have some time. But as you say, things are moving fast, things are changing. Wall Street is going to expect better returns because when we discuss all of this, the conclusion is that you should be able to do more with less. That’s as real as it gets at some point. By the way, that’s what you see. You see better performance, a better business performance right now. So even if you might not get disrupted, you’d better start there. For some, it might take more time, and they might still be fine.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe to bookend this section, clearly what we’re saying is organizations are going to change. Their MOs are going to change, the structures are going to change. There are elements of what we discussed before in terms of judgment that are fundamental to this. The ability that in some ways, one would say a lot of the technique of getting solutions out there, even in brainstorming or problem-solving, is going to get democratized. The algorithms are able to do that. On the other hand, having points of view and having wisdom is not necessarily democratized, necessarily by the machines. It can be facilitated, it can be more productive in achieving that level of wisdom, but wisdom still will matter at the end of the day. We’re not saying that’s out of the question. Actually, that’s going to be the asset. People who have fundamental wisdom that can come to the table and frame things. We see this even today in prompt engineering, on just creating prompts. The better your prompt is, the better the outcome is going to be, the result that you get from the algorithms. That’s not going to change, in my opinion, anytime soon. That UI interaction piece is not going to change anytime soon. Again, if you’re an organization thinking through organizational structure, culture, if you’re thinking through hiring, these are some of the elements that we think will give you an opportunity, but I would actually go one step further. On the positive side, I would say, they give you arbitrage. If you’re able to move faster than your competitors and really adapt your org faster, you’ll reap the benefits faster as well. That’s what many still say and relate to as the word innovation. That’s how innovation gets accelerated. I think there’s a huge opportunity right now for arbitrage. If you move fast, experiment, experiment on new org structures, experiment with talent, you’ll know that some of them will work well, some of them will fail miserably, so you can’t experiment on literally everything. On the other side, I think the doomsday scenario is if you don’t, if you’re on the other side and your competitor is outpacing you on trying these different organizational models, structure, hiring models, and operating models, they’ll potentially just disrupt you. They’ll do stuff that you thought you had the moat on, and lo and behold, you don’t anymore. Sometimes it comes just from org, just from injection of people with a different MRO, different operating model.Bertrand Schmitt The Human Element: Are We Underestimating It? Maybe we can move to our next section about the human elements. Are we underestimating it or are we overestimating it? The three things that are a big part of the human elements, emotion, creativity, and synthesis. Is it just soft skills, replaceable part? On the contrary, is it the durable part now that we have automated intelligence?Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I’ll start with emotion first because I think it’s probably the easiest of all the ones you’ve mentioned. Emotion is key. Many of you listening to us will know this. The way you deliver a certain message, the emotion that you have when you deliver it, just in and of itself, this could be a sentence, it’s something verbal, et cetera. Makes a difference between the person or the people on the other side actually adopting it or actually just resisting it. Emotion is critical. It’s what runs the world. Everyone talks about a bunch of things, but emotion is a currency that is still naturally human. It will be, I feel, difficult for these AI tools and platforms to recreate it fully until there’s some literally very high-definition manifestation of them as avatars or some physical manifestation of them as robots and all that stuff. It will take a while for that emotion to be manifested. Emotion, I think, is still something that we as humans have as a moat, and it’s critical. As you mentioned before, I was a strategy management consultant at McKinsey, and getting people to action is actually 80% about the delivery, communication, the emotion that you surround the project itself, more than sometimes the truth. It’s great to have the truth and to have something that is similar to the truth in terms of analysis, but in some ways, that’s not what really moves change. Change is moved by, I would argue, a significant amount of emotion and alignment on emotions.Bertrand Schmitt You could argue that’s something that most politicians have perfectly understood. If you look at most campaigns these days, everything on emotions, maybe the tagline might be one word. It’s interesting when you see from that perspective that actually it’s very little on facts, very little on all of this, but more about emotion. You could argue it’s the same for businesses in the future? That’s a fair question. I think creativity is another one that’s quite important. At the same time, it’s not so easy because I must say I’m quite amazed when I’m looking for creativity from AI, either to generate the image, to generate video, to generate audio, or to generate text. AI can be pretty creative. I still think you need to control its creativity; you need to understand what’s good, what’s bad, what’s quality, but at the same time, I can see even in creative tasks, AI can be a very strong partner. I’m talking about any creative task, like invent a name for a product, let’s brainstorm the mission for the company. AI can actually be doing a pretty impressive job. That’s the type of job where you will hire experts, where you will use some of the best people in your team to help you for days. We say, “You can do quite a lot.” It’s an interesting one because I think there is some unique human creativity, and at the same time, AI can be pretty strong at creative task as well.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I agree. In particular, if it represents benchmarking, if it represents repetition, if it represents seeing the world and then coming up with something that presents itself as creative, to be honest, it can actually outpace humans. If it’s like genuine light bulb moments of creativity, angles that haven’t been tried before, certainly not in the same way, I think humans still have the advantage. To your point, I agree. This is not a humans-win situation. On the previous one, on emotion, still, part of it is because, also on emotion, there are exchanges. You and I might be looking at each other, and from the facial expressions and the reactions, where you judge that for AI to get there, it’s going to take a long time. There’s going to be a lot of very complex algorithmic stuff put into that for AI to be able to create synthetic emotional behaviors, but creativity, I agree with you. There are a lot more nuances to it today, where AI does have significant advantages at the end of the day. Synthesis depends. Synthesis, I feel, if we’re talking about holding a bunch of messy assumptions, contextualized inputs with different layers of data adjacent to them and then trying to create and form one coherent, fully accountable point of view that you stake something on, like a decision, a company, a business unit, whatever, I think humans have the advantage. Part of it is the complexity of what we have today with generative, pre-trained transformers, today with GPTs, where the hallucination comes through, where it’s really more statistical analysis. Over time, maybe synthesis will be a forte for AI. Right now, I think we still have that ability to really be the ultimate decision-makers and judge-makers and have that wisdom put at the table to make those decisions. Honestly, models are very good on balancing both sides, so ended up, as we say in Portuguese, neither fish nor meat. It’s to balance both sides’ answers. That’s not helpful in most cases. When you’re in a difficult position where, for example, the future of a company, company is almost dying, what do you do? I’m not sure your AI algorithms that are going to give you a great solution. Because it will give you a median or average solution, which likely will lead you to a median or average outcome, which in this case would be failure. Again, on synthesis, there are some areas of advantage for human beings. If you are looking for clearly synthesized perspectives on certain elements that are maybe less edge-focused, they’re more than the normal part of the normal distribution, then probably AI agents are brilliant at that. All the tools we have today are pretty good at that, and I think they’ll just get better over time. That’s how I see synthesis.Bertrand Schmitt I think a lot of improvements will come with a better fine-tuning of agents to what’s special about your company. Because if you just take a general agent, there is only so much. It can understand your industry, your company, and your way of working. I think that part of making sure your agents are finely trained, finely tuned on your own business, so that they can give you a really well-calibrated feedback, will have a lot of importance.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think that’s absolutely spot on. Maybe to end it, what is definitely different about humanity? Definitely, emotion, as we discussed, some pieces of synthesis. Creativity, maybe the light bulb creativity, not the more repeatable creativity, the one that you can put and encapsulate into processes in some ways. There are elements of us being physical, which robots can’t still recreate. That’s definitely an advantage. The embodied, we’re embodied. That’s obviously a huge advantage. With that also comes advantages because we have to interpret each other, and we have to see the complexities in physicality that land to it. Is human and the human element categorical difference? If we’re having a more philosophical discussion around this, I think it is. I think it will be for at least the foreseeable future and maybe decades to come, even in whatever scenarios we’ll discuss, which is our next section, scenarios.Bertrand Schmitt I would say projecting beyond 10 years is always pretty hard on this because, again, some of the improvements we are talking about we can imagine based on how it has evolved, but at the same time, there will be disruptions in AI. Stuff that we take for granted in terms of weakness, especially, might not be there in a few years from now. Either because it has been solved through brute force or because the field will have made significant change and improvements and discoveries, making some of our points moot. If we talk about embodiment, obviously, robots are coming. How fast, how cheap? That will be a big question. Right now, they’re not very smart. They’re usually very specialized. The more we move to a more general form factor, humanoid form factor, the more I think it will change. Also, another piece of the puzzle is that we have the assumption of agents having trouble to convince humans and stuff. At some point, we keep assuming that humans in the loop. If we’re talking about agents convincing another agent, not having embodiment might be even more efficient. That will be another perspective. Going forward, we will have not just agents we control who are doing a job and scanning the job, but agents truly interacting with other agents. You have agents controlled by one person, one team in your company, working either together or maybe not confrontationally, but trying to think and having different perspectives with another agent, controlled by other teams. I don’t think we have seen much of that now. We have seen mostly agents that are controlled by one team doing one job in one direction. Not multiple teams agents working together, or against or in parallel with another team agent. I think we will see some interesting things coming out of that.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Scenarios Switching to scenarios, we love our two-by-twos. We haven’t done one in a while. This time it’s a two by two. We have four scenarios. I think on one axis, we would have potentially the capabilities of AI. One side would be more incremental. The other side would be the extreme full AGI. I’ll define it in a bit so that we can at least have a little bit of a definitional view on what the AGI is. Then the other axis would be how gains are distributed, concentrated versus broad. Obviously, if they’re very concentrated, it’s more unequal. It only goes to a few companies, a few people, a few individuals. If it’s broad, it’s much more dispersed through society, et cetera. AGI, just to try to define it, the formal definition of it is that it’s a hypothetical AI that matches or exceeds human capabilities across virtually all cognitive and practical tasks. In some ways, AGI can learn, reason, and adapt to novel situations across any domain. Then there are several mutations on this, but there’s one notion, or rather, there are three notions that normally are across a lot of these definitions. One is generalization, ability to seamlessly transfer knowledge from one domain to another without needing retraining, which is a very impressive skill that we humans still seemingly have. Autonomy in agency, the capacity to operate independently, set goals, plan and execute complex tasks. I think AI is their issue with agents to a lot of that extent. Then, last but not least, human parity, performing economically valuable work at or above the level of a typical human knowledge worker. If you listen to one of our last episodes, you’ll realize that Bertrand and I have slightly different views on AGI, and if it’s already here or not. I think, definitionally, maybe we have slightly different views on what the definition actually is. For me, maybe AGI is a little bit more what some would call superintelligence and generalized superintelligence. Strict to census, Bertrand is more connecting to AGI as in its prime definition. It behaves as well or better than a human thing. Maybe that’s what’s leading us to differences on whether AGI has arrived or not.Bertrand Schmitt Personally, I will have a different scale where I will put AGI, as you just said, in some ways, relatively similar in performance to your average human being. On top of it, it’s able to touch different domains that most humans are not able to do. Usually, there is some level of specializations where in AI, it can be more generic. I will put ASI, Artificial Superintelligence, as clearly the step beyond. Something that, on any dimension you pick, it’s able to beat a human expert. From my perspective, I think we already discussed that, but we are at AGI already. We have AI that can do way better, not just way better, but at least as well as humans on many topics, sometimes better. Yes, there are some topics that are not for AI yet. Embodiment, for instance, to flock with your humanoid robot in 2026. For me, we are partially there or fully there in AGI. If we take the stricter definition, ASI, we are definitely not there, but my guess is that it’s moving quite fast. We might be there in a few years from now. I don’t think we are talking about multi-decades. It’s 5 years, maybe 10. Of course, there are questions because people will say, for instance, “Hey, how do you become truly super-intelligent when all your training is based on human data?” That’s not an easy one because how do you train on that? To be way better, not just a bit better, but way better. Maybe I’m going on a tangent, but some are looking at AI learning from AI, AI being taught from AI, AI fighting with AI, AI challenging AI. The same way we saw this AlphaGo moment where AI was not trained anymore, like in chess with human moves, but has been trained to play against itself. That’s when it reached superintelligence in Go. It reached superintelligence by playing against itself and basically letting go of that human baggage, if you want, and going to the next level. What I found interesting in that, actually, first, that’s what happened, but two, there was some analysis that the average level of Go players and the top players went up after AlphaGo because AlphaGo, in a way, opened doors that humans didn’t believe were open in front of them, or they didn’t see them. They didn’t see these doors, so they didn’t bother to open them. AI opened new doors, but interestingly enough, humans improved after that, thanks to AI. You see what I mean? It was an interesting, okay, that self-learning from AI was the way to go beyond the current level of human knowledge and human expertise, but at the same time, humans were able to follow up. It was not like suddenly humans are totally useless crap. They improved. Did they still beat AI? Maybe not, but it was definitely also helpful.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Back to our scenarios. We’re going to take the definitional extreme just for argument’s sake for scenarios. We’re going to talk about maybe what you were saying, ASI rather than full AGI, but like ASI. Again, artificial superintelligence as the extreme on the one hand. Let me talk about maybe the first scenario that would come to mind. Maybe we can call it the plateau scenario. All of this was great, but it was all smoke and mirrors. They were great at some cognition stuff. They’re a great tool. At some point, they’re going to hit a wall. Hallucinations are never going to be a thing of the past. We can’t fully trust them on really hardcore stuff. We’ll gain productivity enhancements. We’ll keep gaining those productivity enhancements, but at some point in time, we really won’t reach ASI. We really will be stuck with what we have. It’s a little bit like we get the next big thing, the next big spreadsheet, the next big internet, but it’s not going to change the whole world beyond just productivity, enhancements, and amazing tools that we have available to us that makes us much better. In that scenario, the winners will continue being fast adopters, probably small and medium businesses, because there won’t be a push for maximum speed either, so they’ll catch up at some point. Then AI native companies will be better companies than other companies, but not necessarily overall disruptors across the board. It’s not necessarily a new species of companies. It’s just companies that are a little bit better at doing stuff, which we also saw during the internet phenomenon and that first big push forward and then bubble, where we had some companies that were fundamentally different on how they operated. It took us another couple of decades for companies to be more and more digitally native along the way. Basically interesting, but it’s boring. It’s like, cool, we got tools, we got promised the world. What are the implications? All these companies that are worth trillions and trillions of dollars are not worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Because at some point we’ll face competition, commoditization. It will just be tools and platforms. They will not unlock that next stage. Therefore, this will have been a bubble, and likely it would be a hard landing to that bubble. That’s the implication.Bertrand Schmitt I would just say that, yes, I agree with you, but I would just say overall, even if it stopped today in terms of quality improvement, speed or stuff, or it barely improves, I still think we will have 10 years of madness just to leverage everything that we have today.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Understood, Bertrand. This is a scenario. I understand, but maybe we’re going to hit a wall, and we’re going to hit that wall next year, or we’re going to hit that wall in 2 years or whatever.Bertrand Schmitt Possibly. I’m just saying we still have 10 years of goodness from that big push in AI we experienced the past few years.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Absolutely. Agreed, but it’s boring.Bertrand Schmitt It’s boring. It’s a plateau.Nuno Gonçalves Pedro It’s a plateau. The second one is more of something that we have AI, but humans in the loop are going to be critical along the way. The judgment work that we described earlier in the episode is going to be critical to everything that happens. It’s, I would call it the augmentation scenario. The AI will be a great augmentation tool for humans, but humans will never really quite stop being in the loop. Some of the gains that AI has are broadly distributed in society and in the startup, big corporation and small medium business world. Everyone will have access to them. We humans, are still very important. We have all these augmentation things, and AI is mostly benign. There will be a couple of issues, but honestly, at the end of the day, we’re just better. We’re better, faster, more data-driven, more factually current. We’re doing stuff faster, but humans

Walter Schreifels is behind some of THE most influential bands in the Hardcore, Post-Hardcore, and emo scene. He is a founding member of Gorilla Biscuits, Quicksand, and Rival Schools, and played bass in Youth of Today. Personally, he is one of my favorite musicians out there. In this episode, we talk with Walter about his early life, his connection to spirituality, how he copes with the stress of just being human, and how Rival Schools took the name of a video game and managed not to get sued. 

In this episode of Personally Speaking, Msgr. Jim Lisante is joined by Conor McDonald. Conor is an NYPD captain and the son of NYPD hero Detective Steven McDonald. Twenty nine year old Detective McDonald was shot and paralyzed from the neck down in 1986 by a 15 year old teenager who was stealing a bike in Central Park. Despite his injuries, Detective McDonald went on to publicly forgive the teenager. Conor talks about his father's life, his message of forgiveness, the Catholic faith that gave him the courage to forgive, and what that message means for all of us.Support the show

You were never meant to walk through life alone. When you receive Jesus Christ, you are brought into the eternal relationship shared between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that divine love real in your everyday life. He reveals the Father as a good and generous God, teaches you more about Jesus through Scripture, and equips you with wisdom for every area of life. His conviction is not rejection but an act of grace, drawing you back into relationship with God. He is not confined to a church building. Because you are His temple, He goes with you everywhere. God does not simply want to visit your life. He wants to make your heart His home.

Discover how to stop taking life personally and reclaim your inner peace. This spiritual talk explores awareness, the observer within, emotional freedom, conscious living, and the stories the mind creates. Learn to step back from reactions, release unnecessary suffering, and experience life with greater clarity, mindfulness, self-mastery, and spiritual awakening while becoming less reactive, more present, peaceful, and grounded daily. Stay Connected. Be Inspired. Grow With Us. Receive Rev. Lee's Daily Thought and Agape's weekly newsletter—created to bring greater clarity, peace, spiritual awareness, and practical wisdom into your everyday life. Sign up here: https://www.agapespiritualcenter.com/free-affirmations Help Us Share Healing, Truth, and Transformation When you become a supporting member of Agape Spiritual Center, you are doing more than making a donation. You are helping us create teachings, healing experiences, and a welcoming spiritual community where people can discover their worth, awaken to their power, and transform their lives. Every recurring gift, regardless of the amount, helps us reach more people and expand this work in the world. Join us in making a meaningful difference. Become a supporting member here: https://agapetx.infellowship.com/OnlineGiving/GiveNow/NoAccount/

Send us Fan MailMark Shapiro is an American-born Canadian baseball executive, born April 3, 1967, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shapiro joined the Cleveland Indians in 1991, rising from an entry-level role to general manager (2001) and then team president (2010). During his 24 years there, the Indians won six division titles and two AL pennants. He was named Sporting News Executive of the Year twice, in 2005 and 2007.In 2015 he became president and CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays, succeeding Paul Beeston. He hired Ross Atkins as GM, oversaw renovations to the Dunedin player development complex and Rogers Centre, and signed a five-year extension in December 2025. Under Shapiro, the Blue Jays have reached the postseason five times, including their first AL pennant in 32 years in 2025.He's also served on several MLB committees, helping introduce the Automated Ball-Strike System, instant replay, and the pitch clock. Personally, he's a dual US-Canadian citizen, has two children, and was portrayed by actor Reed Diamond in the 2011 film Moneyball.A Few Quotes From This Episode“Don't worry about being charismatic. Worry about caring deeply. Don't worry about being a super decision maker. Obsessively focus on the best process and prioritization and understanding leverage.”"The best leaders lead a decision-making process. I'm very rarely making a decision, and if I am, we have a good chance to make a bad decision.”“If you had to say what is the single most important value to building an elite, best-in-class organization, I would say open-mindedness, is where you have to start.”ResourcesBook: Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal Book: Good to Great by Jim Collins About The International Leadership Association (ILA)The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Attend The Global Conference in Toronto, October 28-31.About  Scott J. AllenWebsiteWeekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for LeadersMy Approach to HostingThe views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.

Hello everyone! Personally, I believe this episode to be the best episode of Teach Me, Teacher in a long time. James Nottingham is most known for his work with The Learning Pit, but he has also written several books, and consults regularly around the world. His newest book, Teach Brilliantly, can be found here. In this episode, we discuss the state of education around the world, the embattled nature of teaching, what matters in pedagogy, and what constitutes effective feedback for students. Truly, I loved this talk so much. Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/KUPg9BuYSaM David B. Jones, CEO and Partner of Mercer Assessments, is helping organizations attract the right A-Players by making labor markets more efficient through defensible human capital insights. By combining psychometric science, workforce analytics, and AI-enabled technology, David helps employers identify, develop, and retain the right talent while empowering people to discover careers where they can thrive and make meaningful contributions.  In this conversation, David introduces The R.E.A.P.E.R. Framework—Review the Situation, Explore Alternatives, Agree a Course of Action, Execute the Plan, and Refine the Approach. He explains why organizations should begin every challenge with a thorough situation review, how collaborative decision-making creates alignment before execution, and why continuous refinement drives long-term organizational success. David also discusses how AI is reshaping talent management, why organizations need real-time workforce insights instead of static reports, and how Mercer Assessments leverages technology while preserving the integrity and defensibility of human capital assessments. — Attract the Right A-Players with David B. Jones  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. Today, my guest is David Jones, the CEO and partner of Mercer Assessments, focused on providing defensible human capital insights and foresight in the fields of talent acquisition, leadership development, and organizational productivity. David, welcome to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Great to be here.  Well, I’m excited to have you here, especially because you are the first guest—maybe not completely from the Middle East because we had a couple of guests from Israel—but definitely from Dubai, where you are. Maybe that is also impacting the answer that you’re going to give to my question. So here is my first question. What’s your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business, Mercer Assessments?  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think obviously a lot of skills around resilience and being able to think about how you maintain your own personal well-being, but also the well-being of the workforce, is something which has come to the fore in the last couple of weeks, for sure, living in Dubai. But I think very much of my North Star—by educational background, I’m a labor market economist. Although I’ve worked in HR and talent management for pretty much all of my career, I think I’m always thinking about how to make markets more efficient.  I think the labor market, in some ways, and what it takes to become efficient, is very similar to a fish market, a stock market, or any other market that you can think of. What you need to be able to make the best decisions is really good data, really good up-to-date information, both on the supply side and on the demand side.Share on X I think a lot of what we do at Mercer Assessments, and a lot of what we do in talent management more generally, is really about trying to do that. Trying to help individuals understand what their strengths are.  Trying to match them to specific careers that will be more fulfilling for them in the long term and also help them be more productive for their employers. As well as helping employers understand what the important skills are for today and tomorrow, and how they can predict how people will perform in certain environments. So really trying to bring the supply side and demand side together. I think, notoriously, labor markets have very bad information.  Typically, most people get their career guidance from their parents or their grandparents, which can be great for aspiration but doesn’t always necessarily keep them up-to-date in terms of what’s happening in today’s workplace. So I think this is really my anchor, if you like, where a lot of what we do in our innovation, our technology, or our engagements with clients typically comes back to this point. Fundamentally, how do we make labor markets more efficient and more functional for all of the stakeholders?  Yeah, that’s fascinating. So would you say that if you are doing this well, then more people will feel fulfilled in the roles that they work in?  I mean, I think that’s definitely the aspiration, right? That’s definitely what you would hope to do. I think, as individuals, I’m sure we can all think of those really, really great days where you think that you nailed it at work, and you think that this is something where you can make a really specific contribution. It just feels good, and all those people around you have the benefit of that. It becomes something which is infectious for those around you.  I think it’s important for the economy on a macro level, right? I think if we are able to provide opportunities, provide career paths, and help people understand what their unique strengths are, then this is something which helps to promote productivity and positivity more generally, right? At the individual, team, family, and societal level, it affects all sorts of dimensions.  So maybe this is kind of a side question, but I’m really wondering, is this AI revolution, as we’re going through it, influencing your work, and is it changing the requirements of employers?  Yeah. I think we’re in a very interesting time. I mean, I’m not a futurologist. I’m not a prophet. I’m not somebody who makes these sorts of big predictions about the future. But I think the case for AI, to some extent, is still unproven in terms of what it’s actually delivered to date. I mean, I think there’s obviously a lot of investment. There’s a big impact on the environment. But I don’t think we’ve had something really groundbreaking discovered by AI at this point that’s new.  It seems to be quite backward-looking in many ways, based on ingesting data from all the novels that you have on your shelf and that I have on my shelf. Maybe they’re going to ingest this podcast in the future. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem that there’s been a unique breakthrough that humanity has not been able to, or would not be able to, achieve by itself. And yet, I think the promise and the anticipation of what AI can do is quite compelling, right?  I think the way that it is impacting the labor market especially… Ironically, it’s impacting probably software developers the most today. It’s interesting that a lot of people in white-collar fields, professionals maybe, are also feeling like it’s changing the way they’re working. So there’s a big debate, I think, about whether it’s going to be an augmentation or whether it’s going to be a replacement of some sorts of tasks. I think one thing you can say with certainty is that the concept of a job is definitely going to change. If you look at the roots of the word—the etymological roots of the word “job” in the English language—it literally means “a task” rather than a role as such. Yeah. So I think we’re going to get this greater atomization of people’s roles. What used to be bundled together as one job is now going to be much more atomized into specific skills, specific tasks.  The opportunity there is that we all get to do more of the things that we find more fulfilling and less of the repetitive, dangerous, or dull types of things that we have to do in our jobs sometimes.Share on X But I think it has some second-order impacts in terms of how people develop their careers and the competence and confidence that people, particularly when they’re junior in their jobs, need time to build—the ability to operate at a higher level. So I think we’re all going to have to be leaders in lots of ways, even leaders in our own work.  Yeah, I agree with you. That’s fascinating. So, David, let’s talk about the framework. What would be a framework? Think of something that allows you to be more effective in your job—something maybe that you personally discovered or that you and your colleagues developed. Something that helps you be more effective in creating those labor market matches, finding the right candidates, and assessing them. Something that you can describe in three, four, or five steps, or maybe three or four ways of looking at things. Anything that comes to mind?  So there are a few things. I did miss a few things because I think—I don’t know if you’ve heard the news. We’re recording this, and I think the British prime minister has just resigned today. This is, I think, our seventh prime minister in 10 years. I’m sure each one of those prime ministers had their own framework in terms of what they wanted from their political leadership and how they were going to operate in government.  So I think we’re definitely operating in a much more VUCA world, right? This mnemonic is about being volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. I think, to some extent, that means that having a framework has to be something that is constantly being amended, reviewed, and updated in many ways. A lot of what we do in assessment—we have very clear statistical frameworks where we look at particular behaviors or particular characteristics, and we try to make sure we measure them. But I thought maybe that was too detailed and too comprehensive.  So one of the things we do when engaging with our clients is that we have a sort of consulting approach. It’s like a cycle. We start by reviewing the situation, so it’s like a situation appraisal, if you like. We use this internally as well in Mercer Assessments. So we try to understand what’s happening, what’s going well, and what we’re concerned about—just trying to get any data or information that we can.  Then it's important, particularly with a team or with a client, to explore what the priorities are, what's important, and what is causing them the most thought or requiring the most energy to address.Share on X So reviewing, exploring, and then agreeing on a course of action. Making sure that there’s consensus or, if you’re in an organization, making sure you’ve got the budget and the endorsement from headquarters or senior management. Then I think you can go into a planning stage. Making sure you’ve got a focus on execution and that you know what has to happen and when.  Then I think you can go into the ability to have that as a cycle and review or evaluate the plan itself. Is it on track? Is it on time? Is it on budget? Is it achieving its objectives? You can continue on this sort of reflexive cycle. So if you were to do that, it becomes quite sinister. The mnemonic becomes R.E.A.P.E.R., like the Grim Reaper or like “reap what you sow,” because you review, explore, agree, plan, execute, and then review again.Share on X So it can become, hopefully, a virtuous cycle, but it can also become an ongoing process.  I love it. So Yeah. So if you refine, maybe the last one is refined, and then you avoid repeat— Yes. Yeah.  Yeah. Oh, great.  That’s good. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, love it. So basically, what you’re looking for is helping your customers with an initial problem and then helping them generally improve their organization by continuing to refine and add to it, making it better over time.  Yes, correct. Yeah.  So it turns into a recurring engagement.  Yes, that’s the hope. Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully, if you have that relationship with the client and also with your team, you have this ability to recognize what you’ve achieved together, but you can also plan what you want to do differently next time.  So you’re the CEO of Mercer Assessments, which is the Dubai operation. Is this just a geographic branch of the Mercer Group, or is it a separate business that operates in multiple geographies?  Yeah. So actually, it’s a new venture for Mercer globally. My background is that I was one of the founders of a company called The Talent Enterprise, which was acquired by Mercer just over two years ago. It had also made an acquisition of another company before that called Mettl. So we were more of a talent assessment type of company.  We would do talent acquisition, talent development, leadership development, things like high-potential identification, succession planning, and these types of applications. Employee engagement as well, things like employee well-being assessments and stuff like this. The psychometric assessment field. So if you or your listeners are good at Greek, you would know that “psychometric” means “measurement of the mind.”  Yeah, right. So this is really what we’re trying to do. We’re accredited by the British Psychological Society to say that the tools we have, use, or develop have validity, reliability, and are statistically stable within the sorts of bounds that you would expect when measuring human beings.  It can never be perfect, but it’s considered to be predictive. Mettl was more focused on skills assessment. That was one of their big areas of focus, along with educational assessment. So coming together as Mercer Assessments, we’re now part of this big global organization. Although we’re based in the Middle East, we’re now working in Asia, Europe, North America—we’re just starting to do more work in North America—and Australasia. So this is the sort of big, hairy, audacious plan that we have.  That must be pretty intense if you’re working around the clock, essentially working around the globe. Then Mercer is… It can be.  Yeah, it can be. Even working in the Middle East, you have different working weeks. Some of our clients work on Sundays. But we have a good team. We have a big team. We have great technology. So we have scalable ways of doing it.  So what drives growth in this business?  I think it is changing. If you were to ask me that question even two years ago, I would say it’s to do with the change, the transformation, or the aspiration of the client, of the organization. If they’ve got a new operation, or they’re expanding, or they need to develop new skills, or they need to make sure their productivity and positivity are enabling them to keep up with their competitors, then these things would often trigger the sorts of interventions that we help our clients with.  That’s still true to a large extent, but what's changing a lot is what you were talking about earlier—to do with AI and expectations from technology. So I think what we're doing a lot more of now is real-time decision support.Share on X It used to be that our deliverables would look like a PDF report. They would say, “Okay, this is Steve. We’ve assessed Steve. These are Steve’s strengths. These are his areas for development. This is the sort of team or the certain type of colleague that he would thrive working with.  These are the people or the situations that he might struggle with.” That type of static report. Then either we or the client—sometimes if you’re looking at large numbers of people—you’d have to do a lot of spreadsheet work or a lot of PowerPoint work and say, “Okay, now we need to match that with your strategic objectives.” So I think what’s happening now is we’re focusing a lot more on the data.  Our technology is providing much more of a dashboard report, so Steve can access his results straight away because that’s actually when Steve is most interested in them and they’re most relevant—not two weeks later when you schedule a coach or someone to give him feedback. You’re interested as soon as you finish the last question. You want to know, “Okay, what does this say about me?” We can add lots of AI layers to that to help you implement it or understand it. Then for the organization, we now provide much more of a dynamic dashboard-type report.  So if, I don’t know, the CFO leaves this afternoon and the CEO calls the CHRO and says, “Okay, who are the internal candidates for this role?” You can come up with an answer. It doesn’t have to be something where you say, “Let me check my filing cabinet,” or, “Let me put a PowerPoint together for you and get back to you later this week or next week.” You can actually do that type of matching within the platform that we have. We have our own platform called Lighthouse, and it really helps you match individuals or teams to certain tasks or to certain ventures or aspirations that the organization might have.Share on X  Yeah. So instead of providing individual reports for individuals, you now operate this platform for your clients, and then they can look up the people involved in changes. So how is it different to scale the business with this type of approach? What makes it more complex?  Yeah. So on the one hand, it can help us a lot as our own organization because we can be much more pervasive 24 hours a day across the different time zones that we operate in. If you’re our client, you don’t always have to rely on having a meeting or a call with us in person. You can go and find that answer yourself. It’s quite an intuitive process and platform. You can access it and get value from your own data. I think that’s the key thing that I’m trying to emphasize that’s changed.  Clients are now impatient with SaaS platforms in particular when they’re not able to access their own data directly. So there’s a little bit of disintermediation going on in the enterprise software business as a whole. That’s the key trend that I’m trying to highlight here. But it also helps us to be more scalable. Just to take a step back to the previous discussion about AI, I think when it comes to using AI in your business, the key strategic choice is what you’re not going to use AI for.  For us, we made the choice actually three or four years ago that we’re not going to use AI in the assessments themselves. Not today. Maybe in five years’ time or ten years’ time we might change our mind, and we’re constantly reviewing that. But we need these defensible assessments. We need to be able to say, “This is fair and objective, and we’re coming with an external point of view that is transparent and defensible in every sense of that word.”  Yeah. You don’t want to hallucinate assessments for clients or even run the risk of that happening, right?  Yeah, absolutely. And there are some companies that have done that, right? I mean, there are lots of cases you can find where companies have said, “Hey, we just need a five-minute video, and I can tell you everything you need to know about this person, and you can make decisions about their career and all sorts of stuff,” right? I’m not saying we won’t get there in the future, but I just don’t think that’s good enough at the moment.  And I think with a lot of things that you do with chatbots now, if you’re judicious about it, you might be able to say, “Well, actually, that’s interesting, but it’s not good enough,” right? It’s not a finished product. It’s not something that I can execute on. What we can do is add a lot of value around the assessment. So we can do things like AI-based development planning, right?  When someone wants to see their results—and people normally want to see their results almost immediately after they’ve finished their assessments—you can start to say, in the flow of work, in the client’s environment, whatever their learning partners or learning architecture may be, “Okay, here’s a development plan for you,” customized and curated within that environment for your strengths, how to emphasize them, and also for any development areas or new learnings that you want to address.  We can also do things like AI-based proctoring, right? We can give the client a risk report on an application and say, you know, how genuine is this? What other software does Steve have open on his laptop? Is there a shadow in the room? Where are his eyes going? Is he looking at someone else? Is he getting help from someone else? Is this really Steve? All these sorts of things, right? We can do that. We can also develop customized case studies for the organization around its specific tasks and challenges that the organization has.  So you can come up with very specific, job-related assessments. AI can add a lot of value to all of these things. It can provide greater scale and a greater ability to sustain our growth. But with the core of what we do today, we’re saying, “Look, you need to be able to trust us.” And we want to be able to show you the answer. If you have a question about any of our assessments, we can check. There’s an audit trail, and we can show you the answer. It’s not just, “The computer came up with this idea. We don’t know.” But that’s intellectual property, and you know that it works, and you’re sticking with it. You don’t allow AI to bastardize it, basically, yeah, which makes sort of sense. So, David, what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? That’s a great question. I mean, there’s lots of things. I think a lot of them come around, you know, what is this threshold between what we do as humans and what we use AI or other technology to help us do? And I think that threshold is constantly being reviewed. A lot of it is to do with how do you make growth sustainable. We have had massive growth in the last five or six years, and that’s a great thing.  But I think it means you have to make sure the foundations of your organization are strong so that you can move from one to another. I mentioned earlier that we’re just starting to focus on North America as one of our new markets, and I was very keen that we didn’t do that until this point or even next year because we’re not the organizational equivalent of The Beatles, right? Like, we can’t just expect to turn up in a big, sophisticated, very strong, highly cultured market and be able to expect that we’re going to do things like we’ve done them everywhere else, or that we don’t need to think about how we communicate with those prospects and those clients.  So that’s a really big step for us. And how we manage data, I think, is probably the key thing. Fundamentally, if I was to come back to answer your question, I think it’s how we manage data because I think clients are becoming much more sophisticated, much more impatient with people who curate their data. They say, “Look, you know, we know we’re generating lots of data inside the organization,” right? Which is typically what we do, right? It’s people data.  Normally in most work environments, you can tell when somebody opens their laptop, or you can tell when they walk in the office door, or you can tell sometimes even what they’re doing inside the working space, right? Their ID has got an RFID in it or something like that. So there’s lots of data that’s constantly being generated inside the organization, and clients want to get value from that data. And having a sort of third-party proxy come in and say, “Hey, we can do your payroll for you,” or “We can send a questionnaire to people once a year, and that can let you know whether they understand health and safety or they’re engaged in their workplace,” it’s not really satisfactory anymore, right?  The clients are saying, “Okay. I want to be able to get value from my data, and I want to be able to see that. I want the analytics. I want to ask questions that are not able to be prescribed at the beginning.” “And I want to be able to do these queries in real time.”  So essentially, would that require you to get integrated with your clients to some degree so that you can process the data in real time as it emerges? It’s really interesting because I think what I’m hearing from my clients is they’re actually frustrated with that. In the sort of classic SaaS world, which we’ve had in organizations now for 20, 30, maybe even 40 years, you integrate the big internal ERP systems or CRM systems, and you integrate them, and then you have to sort of work within their framework, right? And you might see a report that’s already pre-programmed, but you don’t necessarily see the data, right? If you wanted to say, “Okay, what’s the trend today over the 24-hour clock?” or “How is it changing in June compared to May?” or “How does it relate to the temperature?” or whatever, right?  You can come up with all these questions that you might not be able to predict and then plan and have a sort of pull-down standard report. So to do that, you need access to the data. And I think clients are saying, “This is our data.” This data belongs to us. We want to be able to see that directly, and we want to be able to use that as a decision-support tool, and not necessarily just have a report.”  Yeah. So they’d rather own the data and apply your tools to their data without you necessarily having access to the data or something like that?  Yeah. It’s also a source of differentiation for them, right? Because they know that if… I’m not going to mention these companies. I’m sure you and all your viewers know the big brands. It’s interesting what’s happening with their share prices recently, right? They’re all maybe suffering a little bit from a decline in their share prices, on average. It’s basically a standardized way of doing things, right?  There’s pretty much the same way that any corporation in any part of the world is going to do it because that’s the way you get efficiency through that software. But if an organization says, “Actually, we’ve got an insight into something that we think is unique and differentiated, and we want to make decisions in a slightly different way, or make them faster,” that’s a point of competitive advantage.  Does that mean they wouldn’t want you to apply their idea to other customers because it’s their unique property? They’d just want your tools to help them process their data. They don’t want to share it with you.  Yeah. There are clients like that. We do deal with very sensitive industries, and sometimes government departments, where we have to be able to certify that type of approach. I think that’s likely to become more common in the future as people become more sensitive and more aware of the value, the opportunity, and the threat of what can happen with their data.  Yeah. I mean, some people say that information is now ubiquitous. It’s the questions that are really important because that’s how you communicate with AI. Maybe the question itself can be proprietary know-how—knowing how to ask the right kind of question. They don’t want…  No. I mean… Yeah, I agree. Completely. Yeah. You’re absolutely right. Again, to go back to assessments, we’ve recently released a whole bunch of assessments that measure skills in AI as a domain. We’ve got all sorts of technical and non-technical AI assessments. Obviously, one of the skills that we look at is prompt engineering. If you’ve used some of the generative AI platforms, you’ll always get an answer.  They’re pre-programmed to give you an answer, and most of them are also pretty polite. They fluff up your ego a little bit and say, “Hey, great question.” “That was really interesting.” Then they’ll give you an answer. You need to be aware of that. You need to probe and make sure you’ve not just got an answer—you’ve got the answer. Or at least the best answer that makes sense for you. Then you’ve quality-checked it.  You’ve taken it from one platform, put it into another platform, and then into a third platform. Whatever you’ve done, you need to have that awareness and those specific skills to get the most value out of it. It’s very dangerous, and I think we can all see it. I’m sure your inbox is like my inbox. You get emails from people and think, “Okay, well, that’s not an email from a person.” It’s a bulleted email. It’s not personal. It’s not directed at you. Sometimes it’s hard to understand what it even means.  Yeah. You’re right. So David, who is the ideal customer for you that can most benefit from your solution?  That’s a good question. Personally and professionally, I like clients who challenge us. I like clients who ask questions that make us think in a different way, so we can hopefully give them value and really answer those questions. I think that’s important for us to develop. Clients who are looking for new insights or different foresights that help them in their business—those are the kinds of clients we’re looking for. Definitely the ones who are pushing the envelope and helping take us forward in terms of quality.  So if those types of people are listening to this show and would like to learn more about what you do and how you might be able to help them, where should they go? Where can they find out more?  Yeah, absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m David B. Jones on LinkedIn. There are a lot of David Joneses. I think David Jones is the most common name for a British man—even more common than John Smith—so there are a lot of us around. But you’ll be able to find me as David B. Jones. You can also find Mercer Assessments. You can find out more about us through those channels. I’ll be happy to answer any questions or provide more information.  Is there a website people should check out? Do you have a separate website for Mercer Assessments?  We do. Mercer Assessments is part of the mercer.com website. That’s where you’ll find more information. There are also a number of books we’ve published on particular subjects to do with assessment, talent, and leadership development more generally. Those are all available on Amazon as well.  Okay. So if you’re out there and you’re looking to have a more sophisticated view of your people and their aspirations and how they fit the type of work that you want them to do, and you’d like to understand more deeply, then check out Mercer Assessments, David B. Jones. Actually, it’s easy to just put in “David Jones Mercer,” and David will pop up that way.  Check out the books that David and his colleagues have published. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts. And David, thanks for coming to the show and sharing your experience and insights. I mean, it seems to me that you have a much more nuanced approach than most talent assessment or performance assessment organizations, and you have a lot more tools at your disposal. It’s a combination of technology and professional expertise. So that’s fascinating. Thanks for coming on the show. And if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you follow us because we come out every week with exciting entrepreneurs like David. I will. I will. Thank you, Steve. Important Links: Davidi's LinkedIn David's  website

Big K Hour 02: Hear how you can acquire a piece of KFC history--personally owned items from the original Colonel Sanders! full 1278 Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:10:51 +0000 n6waTgRx7YGQBFOPyEegnfodKQwPZ1IV news The Big K Morning Show news Big K Hour 02: Hear how you can acquire a piece of KFC history--personally owned items from the original Colonel Sanders! The Big K Morning Show 2024 © 2021 Audacy, Inc.

A blues legend, a saint, a haunted squire, and a possessed tailor — five people who, across four centuries, were each said to have come face to face with the Devil himself.==========HOUR ONE: Many tales describe encounters with the devil himself. Yet not all are the same. Sometimes Satan approaches his prey… other times, the lost soul goes seeking Lucifer to make a deal. Either way, the results are never favorable. (Diabolical Dealings With The Devil) *** It wasn't until recently that I'd even heard of the cryptid, Ahool. In case it's new to you as well, it's a winged cryptid that some portray as a giant bat, others claim it's a flying primate. Personally, I think it looks like a werewolf with bat wings. Whatever it is, we'll learn a bit more about the Ahool. (The Cry Of The Ahool)==========HOUR TWO: 

Of course a lot of people likely don't believe in heaven or hell and many will dismiss such things as mythical tales or folklore. However there are places on Earth that could be considered hell – no not Detroit or Wichita. We're talking about actual places that look like the entrances to purgatory. And perhaps they really are. (Secret Doors to the Underworld) *** A king, a gossoon and a bear walked into a bar. No, this is not the first line of a joke, but a common occurrence in Potrero Hill in San Francisco, California, during the 1880s. The king was Frank McManus, the gossoon was Frank's baseball-playing brother, Cornelius, and the bear was a large inebriated ursine. (King of the Irish Hill) *** Why are some people suddenly vigorous, alert, and feeling much better shortly before they pass away? It is something that has happened since time began, but medical experts are still baffled by it. (Terminal Lucidity Phenomenon) *** While many say the most haunted hotel is the one in Colorado that was used in the film “The Shining” - there is evidence that one in Eureka Springs, Arkansas deals with even more paranormal activity. (The Crescent Hotel)==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: Two men were found dead in the bushes, beheaded… and emasculated. But that was just the beginning of the Mad Butcher's killing spree. (The Cleveland Torso Murders) *** Seeing reptiles in Oklahoma isn't all that uncommon – even dinosaur fossils are found in the state. But there have also been reports of something much stranger – a snake/human hybrid creature more terrifying than it sounds. (Oklahoma Snake Man)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:“Baba Vanga” from Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.com/magazine“Diabolical Dealings With The Devil” by Laura for Paranormal Scholar: https://tinyurl.com/y94czoxt,https://tinyurl.com/yc5uy7mj“The Cry of the Ahool” by Gary Brandt from Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.com/magazine“Secret Doors To The Underworld”, by Facts Verse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU6-lfWk3Zo“King of the Irish Hill” by Paul Drexler for Crime Traveller: https://tinyurl.com/y7tmp6lz“Terminal Lucidity Phenomenon” by Cynthia McKanzie for Message to Eagle: http://ow.ly/5G8W30ocL0Q“The Cleveland Torso Murders” by Doug MacGowan for Historic Mysteries: https://tinyurl.com/ycwha94c“The Crescent Hotel” by Amanda Penn for Vocal Media Horror: https://tinyurl.com/ycvral8j“Oklahoma Snake Man” by Bab Salam (link to story no longer exists)==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)=========="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46==========WeirdDarkness®, WeirdDarkness© 2026==========To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at affiliates@radioamerica.com, or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).

Howie Kurtz on Caitlyn Clark shining at the WNBA All-star Game, growing questions around Mitch McConnell's absence, and the White House admitting they cancelled federal grants to blue states. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you trust your own thoughts during times of deep grief? Personally, I don't. We have a spiritual enemy who seeks to exploit our pain by whispering lies to us -- lies about God, lies about others, and lies about ourselves. Believing these lies can be devastating. In Today's Daily Word & Prayer, I identify some of the lies I have been tempted to believe. Join me and learn how to combat them.

What separates the people who get stronger after a rejection from the people who stay stuck on it?In this episode of Supra Insider, Marc Baselga and Ben Erez drop the guest format for a one-on-one conversation, with Marc interviewing Ben about a piece he started writing on vacation. The trigger was an email from someone who prepared hard, didn't get the role, and said it was impossible not to take it personally. Ben explains why that reaction revealed the real subject was resilience, what he notices when debriefing candidates who bounce back versus those who don't, and why he tells people to transcribe their interviews rather than trust their memories.They explore the four ingredients Ben believes actually cultivate resilience, the one situation where sending a hiring manager more than a thank-you note can swing a decision, and the step-by-step protocol he runs when something falls apart, drawn from three layoffs, a long run of rejections before his Facebook offer, and a torn ACL.If you're coming off a rejection and trying to make sense of it, preparing for interviews and looking for a better way to debrief yourself, or just curious how two operators think about setbacks, this episode is for you.All episodes of the podcast are also available on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.New to the pod? Subscribe below to get the next episode in your inbox

Most Christians spend the entire waiting season asking God for the breakthrough. Almost nobody stops to ask the harder question: what God is really waiting to hear an answer to.After years of doing loans, I have watched a pattern repeat itself. The client who prays for the refi to consolidate credit card debt closes the loan and maxes the cards again in six months. The cash-out that was supposed to save the business gets spent on a truck. The inheritance is gone in two years. None of these people were bad. Nobody asked them the honor question before the money hit.I am recording this one from inside my own storm. Personally and in my business, I am asking myself this exact question every morning. This is not a lecture. It is a conversation from the seat I am actually in right now.What we cover:Why God delays the breakthrough for people He loves. The delay is not punishment. It is protection. He is not going to hand you a breakthrough that becomes the next crisis.The pattern I have watched from the broker seat for years. The refi, the cash-out, the inheritance. Same story every time. The behavior that caused the problem does not disappear when the money shows up.The three questions God is asking you in the wait: Will I still tithe when it is a real number? Will I still work as it depends on Him? Will I still remember who I was when I had nothing?The three moves you can make today, in the storm, that prove out your answer to the honor question before the breakthrough ever arrives.Scriptures referenced:Luke 16:10, Deuteronomy 8:17, Deuteronomy 8:18The wait is not God ignoring you. It is God asking you a question. If you can answer it in the storm, the storm becomes the training ground for everything He is about to release.If this episode hit you, the last episode covers what God is actually doing behind the scenes while your situation feels stuck. Subscribe so you do not miss the next one.

Howie Kurtz on the DOJ withdrawing subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said to be 'ruffling feathers' in the administration, and a Secret Service agent on JD Vance's detail being investigated for allegedly leaking operational security information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The stunningly beautiful goddess Calypso offers Odysseus something that you might think no human being could ever refuse: never to age and never to die. Stay with me on this Island and you will achieve immortality. And yet refuse it he does. I am really excited to see the new Christopher Nolan film version of The Odyssey. Last summer holidays I read it to my boys whilst we were holidaying on the next island along from Ithica. And there are so many fascinating philosophical and theological issues it raised: not least, what are we to make of Odysseus' preference for risk and death over immortality and agelessness. Earlier this year the American tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson launched his Immortals programme; at a cost to the individual of a million dollars a year, it offers a promise held out in its strap line “don't die”. In a fascinating essay on why Odysseus is right to refuse this, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that there are some things that the immortal Gods are not able to do that human beings are: not least amongst them is to show courage. If you can't risk anything because you cannot die, then how can you possibly be courageous? What sort of life would the hero Odysseus have if he stayed with Calypso on her deathless realm, and gave up any need for his famous craft and resourcefulness? And what would love itself mean if you could never put anything on the line for others? That's why we cheer Odysseus on as he decides to refuse Calyspso her seemingly unrefusable offer. Despite being a convert from Christianity to Judaism, Nussbaum intriguingly suggests that there is something about this giving up of immortality that explains one of the key features of Christian theology: of God becoming human, of a God who is prepared to suffer and die in the name of love. What is attractive about both Odysseus and Jesus is that they are both prepared to have skin in the game, which is pretty much the very definition of incarnation. Personally, I don't buy the idea that that science could one day make us immortal. But, and here's the point, even if it were true, I think we should refuse it. Indeed, I don't think we often fully grasp what immortality of this sort would mean. Because to live beyond the realm of suffering and death is to live in a way that is no longer human – without the possibility of heroism, without the possibility of risking all for love. Why is it, for instance, that so often in Greek mythology, perfect Gods fall in love with imperfect human beings rather than their own kind? Because fragile humanity can exhibit exciting virtues, risky love-soaked courage in the way that the gods just cannot. Of course we don't want those we love to be taken from us. Yet also, death is what makes life valuable and precious. In the words of the late Queen Elizabeth II, “grief is the price we pay for love”. What Odysseus discovers on Calypso's Island, is that without death, life will be drained of its meaning.

Netflix Is Struggling to Stay on Top…. and the Stock Reflects It For years, Netflix has been the dominant force in streaming, consistently taking market share from its competitors. However, recent data suggests the competition is beginning to chip away at that lead.   Netflix reported earnings last week, and the results showed a company that is executing well. Profits continue to grow, customer cancellations remain among the lowest in the industry, and the company is still producing blockbuster franchises like Bridgerton and Stranger Things that attract millions of viewers.   The concern in the report wasn't profitability, it was engagement. Viewer engagement measures how much time subscribers spend watching content and how often they complete a movie or series. The more engaged customers are, the less likely they are to cancel their subscription in favor of another streaming service. That's why this metric is so important.   Netflix still accounted for 7.8% of total TV viewing in April, making it the largest subscription streaming platform. However, that was its lowest share since May 2025, suggesting competitors are gradually gaining ground.   The stock has reflected those concerns, declining roughly 40% over the past year despite continued earnings growth. I've always liked what Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings had to say as he frequently emphasized the importance of staying focused and keeping the business simple. That's a philosophy that has served our investment firm well over the years.   Now, with increasing competition from Disney, HBO Max, YouTube, and others, Netflix is reportedly exploring additional subscription offerings similar to what Amazon and Apple provide. Personally, I think that would be a mistake.   At this year's Emmy Awards, Netflix earned 111 nominations. Instead of expanding into new subscription services, why not invest even more heavily in creating award-winning shows and movies? If they produced enough quality content to earn 120 or even 130 Emmy nominations next year, subscriber engagement would likely take care of itself.   Sometimes the best strategy isn't to do more, it's to do one thing exceptionally well. What do you think? Have you canceled or considered canceling your Netflix subscription? Or do you still believe Netflix offers the best streaming service?   U.S. oil supplies are falling to concerning levels U.S. oil inventories have fallen to levels that should be a concern. The current U.S. oil stockpile is just under 410 million barrels. On a seasonal basis, we have not seen inventories this low since 2018. The seasonal comparison is important because summer is one of the highest-consumption periods of the year.   The U.S. consumes about 20.6 million barrels of oil per day, produces approximately 13.9 million barrels per day, and relies on imports for roughly 7 million barrels per day. At the same time, the United States exports about 4 million barrels of oil per day, likely because companies can receive higher prices for that oil in international markets. If we somehow stopped producing and importing oil entirely, the current commercial stockpile would last roughly 20 days.   The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has been reduced to approximately 317 million barrels, is also at its lowest level since 1983. At current consumption rates, that reserve would represent roughly 15 days of consumption.   Replenishing U.S. oil inventories to higher levels could take many months or even years. Now with WTI oil around $90 a barrel that higher price could actually be a good thing.   You may be wondering why I would say that, especially since higher oil prices often mean higher gas prices at the pump, but higher gas prices may encourage consumers and businesses to reduce their energy consumption. A lower consumption rate could help slow the decline in inventories and give the U.S. a chance to rebuild its oil supplies.   Over the last six months, have you found yourself reducing your energy usage? And do you plan to reduce your consumption going forward?   Banks Had a Great Quarter, Is It Time to Invest? Last week, the banks reported financial results that topped estimates for both earnings and revenue. They also showed improved efficiency as expenses declined as a percentage of revenue. After such a strong quarter, you might think the coast is clear and it's time to invest in the banking sector.   For the cautious investor, however, it's important to look at the other side of the coin. I'm not expecting the banks to fall dramatically but returns going forward could be more muted because of several factors.   First, there is net interest margin, which measures the difference between what a bank earns on its assets and what it pays depositors and debt holders to borrow money. Banks now have very large balance sheets, so even if net interest margins decline, the dollar amount of profits can remain substantial. However, further pressure on margins could still become a headwind for future earnings growth.   There are also other risks for conservative investors to consider. The ongoing situation with Iran could create additional uncertainty. The AI boom could experience a rough patch, and while the economy and labor markets appear strong right now, investors cannot ignore the possibility of an economic slowdown.   Rising interest rates could also prove difficult for banks if rates move significantly higher from current levels, potentially putting pressure on their profit margins. The good news is that bank valuations are not excessively high, which could help limit the downside risk in the event of a market pullback.   To be clear, we are not anticipating a major decline in the banks we hold in our portfolio. However, investors should make sure the banks they own have very strong balance sheets. Strong capital positions and manageable debt can help reduce downside risk if the economic environment becomes more challenging. A strong quarter is certainly a positive sign for the banks, but investors should remember that great earnings today do not always guarantee great returns tomorrow. Valuation, balance-sheet strength, and the economic environment will all play an important role in determining future returns.   Are new homes actually a better deal than existing homes? There is an interesting trend developing in the housing market: the median price of a newly built home is now lower than the median price of an existing home. Historically there has been about a 20% premium for new homes.   At first, that sounds surprising. New homes are typically more expensive, so how can they now be cheaper? One major reason is that the type of new homes being built and sold has changed. Builders are increasingly focusing on smaller homes, townhomes, and more affordable developments. Townhouses now account for about one in five new single-family homes, which is the highest share since the National Association of Home Builders began tracking the data in 1985. In many cases developers are focusing on attainable homes for the middle-class which means the homes are roughly 1,200 to 2,000 square feet on smaller lots. As a result, the median price of a new home can look lower than the median price of an existing home, even though that doesn't necessarily always mean buyers are getting more house for their money.   In other words, the comparison isn't always apples to apples. A new townhome or smaller home may have a lower price than an older, larger single-family home. That can make new construction appear to be a better deal, but buyers need to carefully consider what they are actually comparing.   There are some real advantages to buying new. Builders are offering incentives such as mortgage-rate buydowns and assistance with closing costs. These lower rates make the monthly payment lower and more achievable than a comparable existing home. New homes typically require less maintenance, come with modern finishes and new appliances, are more energy efficient, and often come with warranties.   But there are risks and a big one many people may not consider is lower resale value. Many of these new home developments only provide a handful of floorplans and they are built on a smaller parcel of land, which leads to less distinctive homes. If you go to sell your home within a few years, you may also be competing against the homebuilder if new homes are still being built in the community.   The bottom line: new homes may offer some of the best deals in the housing market right now, but buyers need to look beyond the headline numbers. Compare the size, location, price per square foot, HOA fees, upgrades, and the total monthly cost. A new home may be a better deal than an existing home, but make sure you understand exactly what you are getting for your money.   Stock Trading Is Off the Charts! There is a frenzy happening in the stock market right now. With individuals buying and selling stocks, along with institutional investors constantly trading, Wall Street is generating enormous trading fees. But one has to ask the question: Does all of this activity make sense?   U.S. average daily trading volume in equities and options hit a record in the second quarter, with 73 million options contracts and 20 billion shares traded. Think about that number for a minute: 20 billion shares of stock changing hands over just three months. Let that sink in.   We have not seen this much activity in individual stocks since the end of the dot-com bubble, and we all know how that turned out.   The good news is that, with this frenzy of stock trading, more people are beginning to seek professional help managing their portfolios. The bad news is that many brokers are really just salespeople who may not have a strong investment philosophy or truly understand what they are doing. They will simply ride the wave until the crash comes, just as happened at the end of the tech bust.   Back then, even a year after the market had collapsed, some brokers were still telling their clients to stay invested because the market would eventually come back. I remember an old saying I learned when I first entered the industry: “The broker knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”   It took the Nasdaq more than 15 years to get back to breakeven after the dot-com bubble burst when it fell close to 80% from top to bottom. That is why it is so important, when seeking financial advice, to understand the investment philosophy of the broker or investment adviser you are working with. Does their philosophy make sense to you? Does it align with your goals? And, most importantly, does it make sense for your portfolio?   When markets are rising and everyone is making money, almost any strategy can look brilliant. The real test is what happens when the frenzy ends.   If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is! A recent story in Barron's highlights a warning that applies to everyone, not just professional athletes.   Several current and former professional athletes reportedly invested in an online business opportunity that sounded too good to be true. Three former NFL players were interviewed by Barron's and collectively they said they lost more than $1 million. The pitch was simple: invest at least $50,000 in an online store and they'll handle everything from social-media marketing to manufacturing store inventory. Investors were told they would get their original investment back within six months, and then receive 80% of the profits.   Sounds like a great deal, right? Unfortunately, according to the investigation, it appears the sales weren't real. The stores were built using Shopify and appeared to be generating significant revenue. But investigators reportedly found questionable orders, including one $5,000 order for 100 desktop humidifiers and 120 USB-powered cup warmers. The person at the shipping address said they never placed the order and “Who needs 100 humidifiers and 120 cup warmers?” There were also other red flags including one e-commerce site, Dailyprodtrend, doesn't appear in Google search results and the web address is just a random string of numbers and letters.   The scheme is run by a 24-year-old entrepreneur named Mohamed Coulibaly and to gain credibility he used celebrity connections citing the names of about two dozen current and former pro athletes and other public figures as clients in a pitch deck. He also has created an image of wealth and success with one athlete saying he saw what appeared to be $25 million in a business account that Coulibaly showed him on a cellphone screen. It's important to remember that no matter how successful someone appears or how many famous people they know you still need to do your own due diligence.   A big problem is the websites were just the beginning of what appears to be a longer con. Once investors had their Shopify login credentials, they were given the impression the business was healthy due to these “fake” orders and then were presented with an even bigger bet that involved the Dubai investment firm Middle East Venture Partners. Unfortunately, this appears to have led to more red flags and still no return on investment.   Before investing, you should independently verify the revenue, customers, expenses, bank statements, contracts, and the actual business itself. Don't simply rely on an online dashboard or someone else's claims about how much money is being made.   The bottom line: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And the more exciting and guaranteed the opportunity sounds, the more skeptical you should become.   Financial Planning: Conservation Easements: Valuable Planning Tool or Tax Trap? Conservation easements are a tax planning strategy that allows a landowner to permanently donate certain development rights to a qualified conservation organization in exchange for a charitable income tax deduction equal to the reduction in the property's value. When used as Congress intended, they can provide meaningful tax benefits while preserving land for future generations. For example, a family that owns a 1,000-acre ranch valued at $10 million may have no intention of developing the property and want to ensure it remains open space permanently. By donating a conservation easement that limits future development, the property value may decline to $6 million, creating a $4 million charitable deduction while allowing the family to continue owning and using the land. This type of transaction aligns with the purpose of the law because the conservation benefit is the primary goal and the tax deduction is an incentive. However, taxpayers should be cautious of strategies that appear too good to be true. In recent years, the IRS has aggressively challenged syndicated conservation easement transactions that were marketed primarily as tax shelters. In these arrangements, investors often contributed a relatively small amount of capital to a partnership that acquired land, and promoters claimed the donation of a conservation easement created deductions several times larger than the investors' original contribution. For example, an investor might contribute $250,000 and be promised a $1 million charitable deduction based on an aggressive property valuation. Many of these transactions relied on inflated appraisals and lacked a genuine conservation purpose, resulting in significant IRS scrutiny, disallowed deductions, penalties, and litigation. While conservation easements can be used in specific situations, they should be approached with caution and used only when there is a legitimate conservation objective. As with many tax strategies, a benefit that appears disproportionately large compared to the underlying economic activity is often a warning sign that additional due diligence is needed. Are Porsche Cars Losing Their Excitement? Porsche cars have long been known for their high-end, exciting sports cars. But lately, the company has been losing sales compared with last year.   Porsche faces plenty of competition, but its global deliveries were down 16% during the first six months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025. Last year, the company benefited from strong demand for the electric Macan, while it also ended production of the gasoline-powered 718.   The company was also hurt by the loss of U.S. tax incentives for electric vehicles, which contributed to the decline in sales. Porsche sold 37,712 vehicles in North America, a 13% decline from last year. China, which accounts for roughly 10% of Porsche's sales, saw an even larger drop, with sales falling 32% to 14,501 vehicles.   The price of a Porsche starts at around $65,000, but the average transaction price is closer to $125,000. And if you know anything about these cars, you also know that the maintenance and upkeep can put significant pressure on your wallet. You would think that if you're spending $125,000 on a car, you shouldn't have to spend a fortune maintaining it. But that can be part of the trade-off when owning a high-performance luxury vehicle.   So, are Porsche cars losing some of their excitement? Would you be willing to spend $125,000 on a new Porsche, or would you rather purchase a less expensive American car?   Time to Say Goodbye to EV Car Maker Polestar? I would occasionally see Polestar vehicles on the road, and I believe the company even has a dealership at UTC Mall. However, I didn't know much about the company and was surprised to learn just how complicated its ownership structure is.   Polestar is closely tied to Volvo, which is 79% owned by the Chinese company Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. The automotive world has become incredibly complicated over the years. I always thought of Volvo as a Swedish company, but that is no longer technically the case.   The ownership change began in March 1999, when Ford Motor Company paid $6.5 billion to acquire Volvo. However, Ford later sold 79% of Volvo to Geely in August 2010 for approximately $1.8 billion. The remaining 21% is publicly owned through stock ownership. In other words, Ford appears to have taken a significant loss on its investment.   Now, Polestar is facing serious challenges in the United States. The U.S. government is concerned about the company's connection to China and the possibility that data collected by the vehicles could be accessed by the Chinese government. As a result, new Polestar vehicles are no longer expected to be sold in the U.S.   What is strange, however, is that Volvo vehicles are still being sold in the United States, even though Volvo is also majority-owned by Geely. The situation shows just how complicated the relationship between the U.S. auto market and Chinese ownership has become.   There are currently reports of fire-sale discounts on Polestar vehicles, with some discounts reportedly reaching as much as $25,000 just to move the cars. These vehicles originally sold for roughly $55,000 to $75,000 when new.   I'm not sure who would want to purchase one at this point. The biggest concern may not even be the vehicle itself, but what happens to service and support for existing owners. It is possible that Volvo will continue servicing Polestar vehicles, but I would be skeptical about whether maintaining a separate service infrastructure for the brand will be worth the company's time.   After all, relations between the United States and China are currently far from ideal. For Polestar owners, that could create some serious questions about the future of their vehicles.   The New Tobacco Companies The three remaining major players in the tobacco industry are Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, and Altria Group. It should come as no surprise that the number of cigarettes sold in North America has dropped by about 33% since 2020, while the number of tobacco smokers continues to decline rapidly.   But don't be fooled: Tobacco companies have developed smoke-free products that are gaining popularity, but that does not mean they are healthy. The two primary alternatives tobacco companies are now selling are vaping products and something called an oral nicotine pouch.   It is easy to see when someone is vaping because of the large clouds of vapor produced. Nicotine pouches, however, are much less noticeable. They are placed between the front of your teeth and your lip, similar to chewing tobacco. The difference is that you don't need to spit out saliva every few minutes because the nicotine is slowly released into your system.   Currently, in North America, about 7% of the population vapes, up from 3.7% in 2020. Nicotine pouches are also growing rapidly, although you can't see who is using them. In 2024, approximately 23 billion nicotine pouches were sold worldwide, a 50% increase from 2023.   Make no mistake: Both of these products contain nicotine, which is highly addictive and keeps people coming back for more. Some may believe that nicotine pouches are simply a way to move away from cigarettes, but that isn't necessarily the case. The pouch itself can become addictive as well.   Tobacco stocks have performed well, with some nearly doubling over the last few years. More institutional investors who previously dumped these stocks for ethical reasons are now returning because of the growth of smoke-free products.   It all sounds like smoke and mirrors to me. There are simply too many issues surrounding nicotine and the addictive nature of these smokeless products for me to feel comfortable investing in the tobacco industry.   Companies Discussed: Fiserv, Inc. (Ticker: FISV)

With one foot out the door for Calgary and Terminus Festival, we're offering up a fairly light and breezy Pick Five episode focusing on sentimental songs. What in particular do we mean by that? Nostalgic? Melancholy? A little cheesy? Personally resonant? Listen and find out.

In this episode of Personally Speaking, Msgr. Jim Lisante is joined by Fr. Jewel Aytona. Fr. Jewel is a missionary preacher with the Congregation of the Fathers of Mercy in Auburn, Kentucky. He travels throughout the country conducting missions and retreats and spreading the Good News. His brother, Fr. Joseph Aytona, is also a priest with the Fathers of Mercy. Fr. Jewel talks about his life, his family, his vocation journey and why he wanted to be a missionary priest.Support the show

We keep being told that artificial intelligence is going to help us do just about everything. Make us healthy. Personally tutor each student. Run our businesses efficiently. Make our decisions. Even fold our laundry. As a result, we would have hours of additional free time, and our AI machines would make discoveries previously unimaginable for humankind.  What does that really mean? Will AI really make things better? To find out, award-winning journalist Joanna Stern let AI run her life for one year. The results were both funny and unsettling, and she reported what happened in her new book I Am Not a Robot. Stern used AI tools and robots to do her household chores, manage her health, and transport her family on its vacation. If she needed a decision  made or a task done, she let AI take the lead. The results were not what you'd expect, and Stern has produced an AI guide for ordinary people and gets around the hype and jargon that clutters our AI discussions. Humankind is only a few years into the AI Age, but you can join us in-person—or virtually, like an AI agent—to get Joanna Stern's lessons on what to expect and what it means for you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Want to Start or Grow a Successful Business? Schedule a FREE 13-Point Assessment with Clay Clark Today At: www.ThrivetimeShow.com   Join Clay Clark's Thrivetime Show Business Workshop!!! Learn Branding, Marketing, SEO, Sales, Workflow Design, Accounting & More. **Request Tickets & See Testimonials At: www.ThrivetimeShow.com  **Request Tickets Via Text At (918) 851-0102   See the Thousands of Success Stories and Millionaires That Clay Clark Has Helped to Produce HERE: https://www.thrivetimeshow.com/testimonials/ Download A Millionaire's Guide to Become Sustainably Rich: A Step-by-Step Guide to Become a Successful Money-Generating and Time-Freedom Creating Business HERE: www.ThrivetimeShow.com/Millionaire   See Thousands of Case Studies Today HERE: www.thrivetimeshow.com/does-it-work/  

If you’re struggling as you learn how to stop taking your child’s behaviour personally, girlfriend, I get you! That feeling — that your child is doing something to you — is an easy one to fall into. Not just being difficult, but somehow, specifically, deliberately difficult, aimed at you. You’ve had the thought before, even if you didn’t say it out loud: why does he do this to me? First of all, I want to admit, I have most definitely been there. But I want to offer you a different question to reframe that. Not because your frustration isn’t valid — it is — but because that first question keeps you stuck. It keeps you reacting instead of understanding. And once you swap it out, something in the whole relationship starts to shift. “Why Is He Doing This to Me?” vs. “This Is Just How He’s Wired” In a recent coaching conversation, one of the moms I work with was working through exactly this. Her son has a hard time sitting still, gets bored fast, and constantly needs something new to stay engaged — and she’d been reading that as defiance. As him pushing back against her, specifically, was on purpose. But that constant need for stimulation, that low tolerance for boredom, that instinct to keep moving toward the next interesting thing? That could also be reframed as a personality thing. That’s a recognizable Enneagram Type 7 pattern — a child whose core wiring orients toward possibility and away from anything that feels confining. He’s not doing it to her. He’s doing it because that’s how he’s built to move through the world. That distinction changes everything about how you respond. A defiant child needs a consequence. A Type 7 child who’s drowning in boredom needs variety, movement, and a shorter runway between tasks. Same behavior. Completely different parenting response — and you can only get to the right one once you stop making it about you. A Quick Note on ADHD A quick caveat: trouble sitting still, low tolerance for boredom, always chasing the next stimulating thing — that can also be part of an ADHD profile, not just an Enneagram 7 pattern. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and this isn’t a substitute for an evaluation, and it’s a separate conversation from learning how to stop taking your child’s behaviour personally — both can be true at once. The Enneagram points to motivation; ADHD is something more neurological. A child can be both — and understanding one doesn’t rule out the other. If this is showing up across settings, not just during school time, it may be worth a conversation with your pediatrician, who can guide you toward an evaluation if needed. And if ADHD is already part of your homeschool reality, you might also like How to Homeschool When Everyone Has ADHD (And You’re Exhausted). It’s Not Just About Kids This same shift showed up for two other moms in a Confident Homeschool Mom Collective conversation, both talking about their husbands. One had spent years frustrated that her husband seemed to avoid conflict at almost any cost — going quiet in arguments, smoothing things over instead of hashing them out, seeming to just… ignoring the conflict instead of addressing it. And she read that as him not caring enough to address the unmet needs under the conflicts. Once she understood he was a Type 9, whose deepest instinct is toward peace and away from friction, she wasn’t excusing the pattern — but she stopped taking it personally. It wasn’t about her. It was his wiring, doing what it’s always done. Enneagram coaches often see 9s and 8s pair up in marriage — and 8s aren’t afraid of conflict at all. So imagine how he was receiving her in those moments: not as someone smoothing things over peacefully, but as someone withholding, someone who wouldn’t engage. (If you want to see this dynamic from the other side, I loved this Enneagram 8 mom’s story of growth — it’s a great window into how an 8 experiences conflict, connection, and homeschooling.) Kids, partners — the pattern is the same. The behaviour that used to feel like a verdict on you turns out to be almost entirely unrelated to you. It’s wiring. And wiring isn’t personal. How to Stop Taking Your Child’s Behaviour Personally When You Think in Black and White If you’re someone who tends to see things in black and white — this behaviour is good, another behaviour is bad — this shift can feel disorienting at first. It’s not that boundaries stop mattering or that behaviour stops having consequences. That is certainly not my goal here. However, it IS that you stop assigning motive where there isn’t one. Your child avoiding boredom isn’t defiance — in fact, there’s a bounty to boredom when it’s handled well (I go deeper on that in how to deal with your kids’ homeschool boredom). Your partner avoiding conflict isn’t apathy. Once you can separate the behaviour from an imagined motive aimed at you, you’re free to respond to what’s actually happening instead of reacting to a story you’ve built around it. And if it’s you who’s the bored one some days — bored of the routine, bored of the sameness, bored in a way that feels a little taboo to admit as a homeschool mom — that’s real too, and worth naming (here’s a whole post on being the bored homeschool mom). What Changes When You Stop Taking It Personally You start responding instead of reacting. You start getting curious instead of assuming offense or hurt. Instead of why does he do this to me, you start asking: What does this behaviour tell me about how he’s wired? What does he actually need right now? Is this about me at all, or is this simply him? That question — is this about me, or is this just them — is one of the most useful tools I know for a homeschool mom learning how to stop taking her child’s behaviour personally. It doesn’t make the hard moments disappear. Your Type 7 son will still get bored mid-lesson. Your Type 9 husband will still go quiet when things get tense. But you’ll stop absorbing those moments as a referendum on you, and that alone changes how much of the day you carry home with you emotionally. Where to Begin You don’t need to become an Enneagram expert overnight to make this discussion valuable. Start small: the next time your child’s behaviour sends you into a spiral of why does he do this, pause and ask instead, is this wiring, or is this really about me? If you do that, you’ll find it’s the former — and that single shift in framing can be enough to bring you back to curiosity instead of hurt. Certainly, if you want to go further, understanding your child’s — and your partner’s — Enneagram type is one of the fastest ways to build this reframe into a daily habit rather than something you have to remember to do in the moment. If this resonated, I’d love to help you think through it. Book a free Aligned Homeschool Reset Session and let’s find out what’s really driving the dynamics in your home — and how to stop carrying what was never yours to carry. Book your free Aligned Homeschool Reset Session Two Ways to Join the Homeschool Mama Book Club 2026 The Homeschool Mama Book Club 2026 is the one thing I wish someone had offered me in my early homeschool years. 1. Join the Book Club Newsletter — free, every Wednesday Every Wednesday morning, a warm, thoughtful email lands in your inbox drawn from the books we’re exploring together. Reflections, journaling prompts, and practical takeaways — even if you haven’t read the book. Sign up for the free Book Club Newsletter here → 2. Join us live in the Confident Homeschool Mom Collective Every Friday at 10am Pacific, a group of homeschool mamas gathers to talk about the things that actually matter — roundtable conversations, book club discussions, Writer’s Room sessions, actionable strategy sessions, and real talk about what it actually feels like to do this every day. Your first Friday is completely free. Join the Confident Homeschool Mom Collective here → Come Talk Through How to Stop Taking Your Child’s Behaviour Personally With Us This is exactly the kind of conversation we have, every single week, in the Homeschool Mama Book Club. A place where you say the thing out loud — why does he do this to me — and a room full of women nod because they’ve thought it too. We read together, we talk it through in book club discussions, we bring our real questions to Writer’s Room sessions and strategy conversations, and in the middle of all that, you get tools to really support your homeschool mom life. The women who show up every Friday will tell you it feels like a reset — a space where they’re actually seen, understood, and encouraged, without competition or judgment. If you’ve been carrying how to stop taking your child’s behaviour personally all on your own, this is where you bring it instead. You’re Invited — Join the Book Club → Get My Weekly Book Reflection Want to Go Deeper? Understanding the Enneagram for Homeschoolers Enneagram For Homeschool Moms: A Self-Awareness Tool That Makes You a Better Educator, Mom & Partner Sibling Bickering in Homeschool Families: What's Normal & How to Handle It The Guilt Journal for Homeschool Moms You're Invited to the Homeschool Mom Book Club 2026 How to Reimagine Your Homeschool Support: 7 Essential Lessons How to Create a Personalized Homeschool High School That Fits Your Teen Tired of Homeschool Sibling Fights? Try These 3 Simple Strategies! Understanding the Enneagram for Homeschoolers Interest-Led Homeschool for Confident Moms: An Enneagram 8 Mom's Story of Growth 5 Reasons Your Homeschool Child Won't Do Work & How to Motivate Your Child Child-Led Learning Benefits Your Kids (& You) Will Love How to Facilitate Child-Led Learning in Your Homeschool Latest episodes How to Stop Taking Your Child’s Behaviour Personally July 21, 2026 You’re Invited to the Homeschool Mom Book Club 2026 July 14, 2026 Post-Partum Overwhelm in Your Homeschool: 12 Ways to Cope July 12, 2026 A 2023 High School Graduate’s Thoughts on her Homeschool Life July 11, 2026 What It’s Like? The Homeschool to High School Transition July 11, 2026 Navigate Homeschool High School (What You Need to Know) July 7, 2026 How to Set Realistic High School Expectations? 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April 21, 2026 Overcome Imposter Syndrome: How to Build Confidence as a Homeschool Mom April 14, 2026 How to Get Started Homeschooling in 2026 April 11, 2026 9 Mistakes That Make Your 1st Homeschool Year Stressful (& How to Avoid Them) April 9, 2026 How to Make Confident Homeschool Decisions (Without Seeking Permission) April 7, 2026 How to Homeschool When Everyone Has ADHD (And You’re Exhausted) March 31, 2026 Exhausted Homeschool Mom? 8 Things That Will Give You Hope March 24, 2026 Stop Second-Guessing as a Homeschool Mom (& Use Your Magic) March 17, 2026 “You’re Not Falling Apart. You’re in the Winter Homeschool Slump.” March 10, 2026 The Lies Homeschool Moms Believe That Makes Everything Harder March 2, 2026 You’re Not Failing. You’re Caught In An Inner Critic Loop. Here’s How to Get Out February 24, 2026 How to Stop People-Pleasing as a Homeschool Mom (One Mom’s Story) February 17, 2026 How to Stop the Inner Critic as a Homeschool Mom: The Charmed Life I Was Chasing (& the Pattern I Didn’t Know I Was Living) February 10, 2026 The Most Important Way to Take Care of Yourself as an Overwhelmed Homeschool Mom February 2, 2026 How to Do Kindergarten in Your Homeschool: A Fun & Effective Guide January 29, 2026 The Real Reason You’re Overwhelmed (It’s Not the Curriculum) January 26, 2026 Unexpected Feelings When Your Homeschooler Gets Accepted to University January 22, 2026 How to Stop Being a Hostage to Homeschool Pressure (& What to Do Instead) January 19, 2026 The Truth About Finding Your Homeschool Rhythm January 13, 2026 The Confident Homeschool Mom Podcast: Introducing the 1% Pivot January 6, 2026 Purpose-Driven Homeschool Planning for 2026: How to Recalibrate the Year with Clarity December 23, 2025 1% Shift to a Calm Homeschool Life December 23, 2025 12 Things I've Learned About Homeschool Moms: Self-Care Tips for Overwhelmed Homeschool Moms December 10, 2025 12-Day Homeschool Mom Self-Care Challenge to Come Back to Yourself December 2, 2025 What is the Reimagine Your Homeschool Group Coaching? November 18, 2025 Not Just a Homeschool Mom — Why You’re Disappearing (And How to Come Back) November 11, 2025 Teaching World War to a Homeschooled Eight Year Old November 10, 2025 Reimagine Your Homeschool: Feel Free, Inspire Curiosity and Do What Works November 5, 2025 the role of imagination in a home education November 4, 2025 Subscribe to the Confident Homeschool Mom podcast YouTube Apple Audible Spotify Call to Adventure by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3470-call-to-adventureLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (function(m,a,i,l,e,r){ m['MailerLiteObject']=e;function f(){ var c={ a:arguments,q:[]};var r=this.push(c);return "number"!=typeof r?r:f.bind(c.q);} f.q=f.q||[];m[e]=m[e]||f.bind(f.q);m[e].q=m[e].q||f.q;r=a.createElement(i); var _=a.getElementsByTagName(i)[0];r.async=1;r.src=l+'?v'+(~~(new Date().getTime()/1000000)); _.parentNode.insertBefore(r,_);})(window, document, 'script', 'https://static.mailerlite.com/js/universal.js', 'ml'); var ml_account = ml('accounts', '1815912', 'p9n9c0c7s5', 'load');

John 7:37-52 Please turn to John chapter 7. We'll be considering verses 37-52 this morning. You can find that on page 1062. The context of chapter 7 has been the Feast of Booths - also called the Feast of Tabernacles. It was one of the three major festivals in the Jewish calendar, so there were lots of people in Jerusalem. Earlier in the chapter, Jesus appeared at the temple in the middle of the festival and began teaching. That caused a crowd to gather around him. And most of the crowd was amazed. They had heard of or seen Jesus' signs (or miracles)  but now they witnessed his teaching. In our text this morning, we will hear that it is now the end of the feast. Jesus called for people to come to him but, as you will hear, he received a mixed response. Some were intrigued but others all the more wanted to kill him. Reading of John 7:37-52 Prayer There's no doubt that water is THE foundation to our physical existence. Our bodies are made up of about 60% water. Without water, we cannot survive for more than a few days. Without water, crops cannot grow and animals cannot survive. But for us in our day and age, water is readily available. Even in drought situations, we manage pretty well. Farmers can pump water from the underground water table to water their crops. We can clean and store water from storm runoff. We can dam rivers and we can pump water from one region to another. The worst it gets here, is that we're told to only water our lawns on certain days. But if you lived in Jerusalem back in the first century, it was very different. They didn't have all the modern technologies to drill or store significant amounts of water. Given its geography high up in the mountains, Jerusalem didn't have any nearby rivers. The Kidron valley and brook were dry for most of the year. And so, the people really did rely on the seasons. They hoped and prayed for rain at certain times of the year. It's no wonder that Jesus used the concept of water to symbolize spiritual realities. Remember, we saw that first back in chapter 2 when Jesus turned water into wine, symbolizing his cleansing ministry. And again, we saw that in chapter 4, when Jesus told the woman at the well that she needed his living water and that when she drank it, she would never be thirsty again. He was speaking of the eternal life that she would receive through believing in him. Well, this morning we have a new spiritual reality symbolized by water. And that is the ministry of the Holy Spirit. He will be like rivers of living water flowing forth from our hearts. So, this morning we'll begin our time with that… with Jesus' teaching about the giving of the Spirit. That's verses 37-39. As we'll see in a minute, his analogy of water directly connects to what was happening at the Feast. And then second, we'll survey the responses to Jesus' teaching. That's verses 40-52. As you heard, out of people's hearts flowed very different responses to Jesus. That's where we are headed. #1 The Holy Spirit - the River of Living Water As we get into the verses about the Holy Spirit, let me first note that the Feast of Tabernacles was at the very end of the dry season. In fact, most years, it had not rained for months in the leadup to the festival. To be sure, Jerusalem did have a source of water. Their main source of water at the time was the Gihon Spring which they diverted into the Pool of Siloam. It was on the south side of the city about a third of a mile down from the temple. It was King Hezekiah about 700 years earlier who had a tunnel dug through the rock to reach the spring and divert the water to inside the city. Just a few years after he finished that, Assyria surrounded Jerusalem and attempted to cut off the supply lines, including water, but they did not know of the hidden water channel. And so, Jerusalem was able to endure. By the way, if you go to Jerusalem today, you can actually walk through Hezekiah's water tunnel. I did that several years ago with a friend. It's about 1/4 mile long and pretty narrow and the water is maybe 1-2 feet deep. At one point my friend snuck ahead, turned off his little flashlight and then, when I rounded a corner, he jumped out at me. I may or may not have been momentarily scared. Anyway, you end up at the Pool of Siloam - or a small portion of what remains. I'm telling you this because at the Feast of Booths, every day one of the priests would make his way down to the Pool of Siloam. Jewish literature records that he would dip a golden vessel into the pool, and he would make his way back to the Temple. The crowds would follow him as he passed through the lower gates into the temple area. Trumpets would sound as he ascended the temple steps. They would read from passages like Isaiah 12:3 which says, "with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation." That was our call to worship this morning. And then with great pomp, when the festival branches described in Leviticus 23 were waved, the priest would pour the fresh water onto the altar. A channel was made for that purpose, and it would drain to the base. The purpose of the water was a remembrance of God's provision of water in the wilderness. Remember, the Feast of Booths was about celebrating God's provision in the wilderness. That included water from the rock. God called Moses to strike a rock, and when he did, water flowed forth. Well, on the seventh day of the feast, Jewish literature also records that the water ceremony happened 7 times. 7 times the priest would fill the golden vessel from Siloam and return to the temple, and pour it onto the altar. By the seventh time, the water would have overflowed from the altar onto the temple floor. And while this was happening, the people were rejoicing, waving various branches while the trumpets sounded and the water flowed. It was on this day, the 7th day, called the great day, that Jesus stood up and cried out “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'” We don't know what time of day Jesus proclaimed these words, but the people would have had water on their minds. It was hot and dry. Likely it had not rained. Furthermore, they either anticipated the priests carrying the water to the altar or they just witnessed that event. They were thirsty - physically and spiritually. And Jesus cried out to them, calling them to come to him and drink. And not only would their spiritual thirst be quenched, but if they came and drank, rivers of living water, he said, would flow from them. The apostle John then adds a brief commentary that Jesus was referring to the Holy Spirit. Those who came to him would receive his Spirit, once he was glorified. Now, before we consider what that means for you and me, let me note 4 brief things. #1. Jesus quotes a Scripture which says, "Out of his heart [the one who believes] will flow rivers of living water." There's actually no single Old Testament passage directly matching the quote. However, several Old Testament texts parallel this idea. We read from Isaiah 44 earlier in the service. Verse 3 says, "I will pour water on a thirsty land" and then "I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring." Zechariah 14:8 was another one. It was also read during the Feast of Booths. It speaks of living water flowing out of Jerusalem. There are other passages like Ezekiel 47 and Isaiah 55 which are similar. In other words, the idea of living water connected to the Holy Spirit and salvation is very prevalent in the Old Testament. #2. Some Greek translators believe that the "rivers of living water" referenced here is the Holy Spirit being given out of Jesus' heart, not ours. They argue that phrase "whoever believes in me" is actually part of the invitation to drink and does not describe the one who has a river flowing from his heart. Honestly, there are some good arguments for that. Personally, I lean toward the translation we use. But I also think that even if this alternative is true, those who believe are still the recipients of the Holy Spirit. When we receive the Spirit, then our hearts will display forth the Spirit's ministry in us. So, in the end, I don't think it really changes the impact. #3. The third thing I want to point out. The fact that verse 39 says that the Spirit would be given after Jesus was glorified does not minimize the Holy Spirit's work in the Old Testament. No. From the very beginning in Genesis 1, the Spirit was present. He was hovering over the waters. He was at work in the hearts and minds of the remnant of God's people - true Israel. The Spirit directed people to look forward to the Messiah who would come. The Apostle Peter in 1 Peter 1 tells us that the Spirit of Christ was at work in the prophets who testified beforehand about Christ's sufferings and glory. What is the difference, then? The giving of the Holy Spirit mentioned in verse 39 is the outpouring of the Spirit to all peoples, not just Israel, but every tribe, tongue, and nation. Furthermore, as the Spirit dwells in his people, he now applies the finished work of Christ to us. So, the difference is in the scope of the Holy Spirit's work and the fulness of salvation being applied. I think that's important to understand. #4 - the last brief comment. And this is related. When verse 39 speaks of Jesus' glorification, I'm guessing you have in mind Jesus' ascension to heaven where he now reigns. That's true. However, John's Gospel includes Jesus' death and resurrection as part of his glorification. We're going to see this very clearly when we get to chapter 12. We will see that Jesus finally tells his disciples that his hour HAS come. And what is that hour? Jesus tells them it is the hour of his glorification. He must die in order to be raised. So, as we think of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we need to understand that he is applying Jesus' full ministry including his atonement for our sin through his sacrifice and the hope and new life we have in his resurrection and ascension to glory. It is out of that fulness as the inaugurated King, that Jesus sends his Spirit to continue his ministry to the ends of the earth. Now, I know that's a lot of theology packed into those comments. Let me summarize it this way. Jesus' promise of his Spirit is an amazing promise and reality for you and me. Every single one of us is spiritually thirsty. Every single person in the entire world is spiritually thirsty. Not everyone recognizes it but we all long for meaning and purpose. We all experience pain and suffering. We all know the toil of work as a consequence of the fall. Those thing weigh on us every single day. And Jesus promises that when you come to him in belief, out of your heart will flow rivers of living waters. Through the ministry of the Spirit in you, the abounding grace of God in Christ will flow to you and from you. Your heart will display to others the transforming ministry of the Spirit. And others who likewise are given the Spirit will minister to you through him. To be sure, that does not minimize the impact of our remaining sin, nor does it minimize the realities of our suffering and grief in life. But what it does is give us an unshakeable foundation. Repentance from sin.  Hope in grief. Joy in suffering. Perseverance in trials. Through the Holy Spirit in us, we can live, not only with our eyes fixed on the cross and the redemption we have from our sin, but we can fix our eyes on our resurrected and glorified Lord. Through his Spirit, rivers of living water will flow. His ultimate sender is the Son, but the blessings of his ministry will flow from you to me and from me to you. It will flow between us and overflow to our community around us. An old song came to mind this week. A 1970's children's song. "I've got a river of life flowing out of me." Some of you are old enough to remember it. Do you remember the chorus? "Spring up, O well, within my soul; Spring up, O well, and make me whole; Spring up, O well, and give to me; That life abundantly" May that river of life, God's Spirit, abundantly minister in us and through us as we drink of the living waters of Christ. Amen? Divided Responses Now, we're not done. Here's where we are. Jesus made an astonishing offer. For those who come to him and drink, out of their hearts will flow the living water of God's Spirit. The question now is, how did the people respond? What did flow out of their hearts? Well for some it was curiosity, for another, it was an honest search. But for the priests and Pharisees, it was the exact opposite. Instead of rivers of living water, out of their hearts flowed hatred and bitterness. Let's consider those three categories in verse 40-52. (1) those intrigued by Jesus, (2) those who outright reject him, and (3) those honestly evaluating. That first group, those who are intrigued, find Jesus very interesting. He has interesting things to say. He's some kind of prophet. In verse 40, some said that he is THE prophet. That's a reference to Moses' prophecy in Deuteronomy that a Prophet would come after him. Others said, "This is the Christ." That may include some who truly believed. But we get the sense that it's just an external observation. After all, the apostle John does not use his favorite word, believe. He just notes that some "said" he was the Christ. I think we should also put the temple officers into this first category. Last week, we read that the chief priests and Pharisees sent the temple officers to arrest Jesus. These were Levites assigned to temple security. But notice that they did not arrest Jesus. And what was their reason? Verse 46, "No one ever spoke like this man!" They could not do what they were commanded to do because they were amazed by his teaching and authority. This first group is marked by an external recognition that Jesus is unique. He plays some important role in God's purposes. But they had yet to take the next step toward belief. I suspect some will. That brings us to the second group mentioned here - the chief priests and Pharisees. They are not intrigued by Jesus one bit. There is no possibility in their minds that he may truly be the Son of God. Their hearts are hard. Multiple times in these verses they react to even the suggestion that Jesus may be legitimate or the desire to consider his claims. And think about this: these were the very men who presided over the water ceremony at the feast. Some even participated in the water being poured out on the altar day after day, but they could not recognize the living water standing in their own temple courts Look at what they said to the officers that did not arrest Jesus. They said, "Have you also been deceived?" They then appealed to their own authority and they literally cursed the crowd. Verse 49, they said, "this crowd that does not know the law [you know, like they do] is accursed.” Think about the contrast between the hearts of the Pharisees and the hearts of those who would come to Jesus. Those who believe in Jesus are promised rivers of living water flowing from their hearts. Yet, out of the hearts of the Pharisees and chief priests came deceit and anger. And look how they responded to Nicodemus. Nicodemus was one of them. All Nicodemus wanted to do was judge fairly. But the Pharisees responded, "Are you from Galilee, too?" That's a classic ad hominem. They attacked Nicodemus for merely suggesting that Jesus deserved a fair hearing. They just wanted to kill Jesus. Rather than rivers of living water, out of their hearts flowed rivers of hate and self-serving unbelief. Out of some hearts will flow love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Those fruits of the Spirit, identified in Galatians 5, will flow forth from those who have been given the Spirit - those who believe. But out of the hearts of these so-called leaders of Israel flow self-idolatry, enmity, strife, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, and envy. Out of one flows fresh, clean water, spiritual water, that is life giving and quenches the soul, yet out of the other, stagnant, poisoned water that accuses and kills. Which brings us to the third response. I've already mentioned Nicodemus, but let's consider his response more thoroughly. In fact, I think Nicodemus was originally in that first category. He was intrigued. Back in chapter 3, as Coleman reminded us last week, Nicodemus had sought Jesus out at night. Something compelled Nicodemus to want to know more. But he didn't understand when Jesus told him he needed to be born again. He had yet to believe. But in these verses Nicodemus has moved from being intrigued to honestly desiring to evaluate Jesus' claims. He even defended Jesus, asking that he be given a fair hearing. We get the clear sense that Nicodemus was a man of integrity. Even though he was a teacher of Israel and part of the Sanhedrin, he wanted to know the truth. In verse 51, look what he says to his fellow Pharisees, "Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?" Do you hear his honest desire to know the truth? I want to remind you that John wrote his Gospel primarily for Jews of the later first century. John has been revealing who Jesus is as the Messiah. And he wants his readers to have an open heart and mind like Nicodemus. John wants his readers to give Jesus a hearing, as verse 51 says. Really, John wants them to believe, but at this point in the book, he just wants them to take a step forward and truly evaluate Jesus for who he is. As Coleman pointed out last week, some of you here are like Nicodemus and have an honest heart and seek to live a life of integrity. But you've yet to respond to Jesus calling to come to him and drink. Will you evaluate Jesus' claims and calling? You know, as we move forward in the Gospel of John, one thing that we'll see is that the two neutral responses to Jesus will go away - both the intrigued by Jesus' response and the honest search response. The temple officers will be forced to choose. And Nicodemus himself will be called to account. What will they decide? We'll find out in chapters 18 and 19. What will you decide? So where does that leave us? Well, Jesus is still standing and calling out, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink." The water that he gives will never run dry, because it is nothing less than the Holy Spirit, poured out from our risen and glorified Lord, applying all the riches of his death and resurrection to thirsty souls. And so, will you stand at a distance, intrigued but uncommitted? Will you be like Nicodemus, honestly seeking him out, but not yet willing to come to him and drink. Or will you drink of his life-giving stream? For those of you who have, the promise is yours: out of your heart will flow rivers of living water. The Spirit of truth and grace will flow in you and through you, forever. Amen.

I go a lot deeper on this stuff inside EVOLVE, come check it out if it feels right → http://evolve.geekpsychology.comWhy failing at even a small goal makes INFPs question their whole self-worth, and what's actually going on underneath it.In this video you'll learn:Why one mistake can feel like proof that you're a failure as a personThe cognitive function driving this reaction and why INFPs feel it harder than most typesA story from my own life about a mistake I made publicly, and how I kept it from turning into shame0:00 The question: why one failure feels like proof you're worthless1:00 Meet the Soul, the function behind your identity2:00 The story: my Reddit post that backfired3:00 Waking up to the fallout4:00 How I kept it from becoming shame5:00 It's not you, it's the action you took6:00 Treat it like a game and learn from what doesn't work

Jesus made a profound promise to His disciples before leaving: He would not abandon them. Through the Holy Spirit, described as another advocate of the exact same kind as Jesus Himself, believers are never left alone. The Holy Spirit's deepest work is not simply empowering us for ministry but convincing us of who we truly are: children of God. Rather than striving to earn identity through gifts, performance, or spiritual achievement, we are invited to receive our identity as a daily gift from the Spirit. Life has a way of pulling us back into an orphan mentality, but the Holy Spirit continually reminds us that we belong to God. You are not an orphan. You are a child of God, and that is the foundation everything else is built on.

Cultivate Personal Love for God . . . I. By Listening to God in His Word! (20a) II. By Speaking to God in Prayer! (20b) III. By Meditating on the Mercy of Jesus! (21) Practical Implications o What would you say your life is truly seeking/loving? How can renew a value of seeking God? o How can you more consistently seek God in Word, Prayer, and Meditation? o What is your time, place & plan for Daily time w/ God?

This is part one of this interview. Part 2 and 3 should air next month. Chad and Alta Dillard have had some very interesting experiences, and we get into the initial bunch of them here. Personally, I really like their approach to it all, and find the story compelling. I will include their bio below this.Chad & Alta met and married in the early nineties in the city of Little Rock Arkansas. The marriage was one of destiny and as Alta would say, arranged. What they did not know is that from that moment on the couple would partake in a journey into the world of unknown and High Strangeness.From aliens to ghosts, to a shape shifter, from meeting people who have been seen, and some unseen, this is a story for the open minded. In 1995 Chad & Alta experienced their first UFO, a massive sight in Hammond, Louisiana. This experience opened their eyes and led them to the well-known French Quarter in New Orleans where the high strangeness continued.As they tried to take day by day to understand their place and purpose of these unusual events, they met a young lady, a co-worker named Jacqueline. Little did Jacqueline know this would be the most unusual bond of her life. In 1997, a night that would live with them to their last breath, Chad, Alta and Jacqueline were taken from a street corner in the French Quarter. Alta calls this “the night of missing time” where the three have shared their own individual experiences. Everything from Chad's blue being encounter, Alta's blond female interaction, and an implant found in her arm and four digit prints. Their story will take your breath away.The High Strangeness continued when, in 1999, Chad and Alta moved to New Mexico where Chad went face to face with a black eyed adult and other anomalous happenings. The couple moved to Denver, Colorado for their jobs, and found themselves in the middle of the infamous Columbine High School massacrewhich occurred on April 20, 1999.In 2001 the couple found their way to Alabama where Chad works with his dad in the locomotive business. Their stay continues to bring High Strangeness into their lives. The strange encounters continued, or should we say followed them, as they discovered a sasquatch creature, ghosts, red orbs, lizard monkeys and so much more.Chad and Alta encountered their second UFO while driving across Mississippi in 2012 and discovered that one of their family members has had a similar experience. The story gets more and more strange. How does this all play together? Well, they can't be sure, but what they do know is that it has happened . Sit back and listen and Chad and Alta will tell you.2026 Update: Sadly Alta passed away in Oct of 2022. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Continuing the next series of Creating Dementia Solutions episodes, we explore the real-life experiences of individuals and families affected by dementia.Through intimate conversations, each episode shares a unique story — from early memories and the moment of diagnosis to the challenges, small victories, and emotional journeys that follow. Also discussed is the caregiving component – and how folks have stepped into the caregiving role in support of a loved one with dementia.This time, Stacy Wines - CEO of Carewell Services Southwest in Battle Creek - talks about her caregiving experiences. Like many, they started early and evolved personally - and in a career.Episode ResourcesMiles for Memories websiteMiles for Memories technologySherii Sherban talks to Community Matters about MFM technologyMore Creating Dementia Solutions episodesABOUT MILES FOR MEMORIESMiles For Memories is a Calhoun County, Michigan organization created in 2013 to raise awareness and funds for Alzheimer's Disease. Later in 2014, the vision was expanded to include all types of dementia. MFM raises money each year through sponsorships, community events, and grants to gather funds to create local programming for both the person living with dementia and the caregiver. Along with local efforts, 20% of the funds to prevention-related dementia research. Miles for Memories is a committee of 70-plus volunteers and are always looking for more to get involved.

In 1912, an axe killed all eight people sleeping in a Villisca, Iowa farmhouse, and the two men suspected of it — a traveling preacher and a business rival — both walked free.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/VilliscaReverendRivalREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84usw4FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Conspiracy theories, while often dark, can also be kind of humorous due to being so outlandishly unbelievable. For example… is the Earth's moon artificial, and actually an extraterrestrial spaceship? We'll look at the strange theory. (Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?) *** In 1912 one of the most brutal slayings in America took place in the small town of Villisca, Iowa… a murder so brutal that numerous documentaries have been made about it, books have been written, and amateur detectives have poured over the facts and suspects still trying to find out who the murderer was that swung the bloody axe. (The Unsolved Villisca Ax Murders) *** The President of the United States, no matter who is in the position at the time, is always in danger from those who would like to see someone else in office. We'll hear on the news of the assassination attempts that came close, but we more often than not are completely unaware of the attempts and plans that have been thwarted – and some of those attempts to kill a sitting U.S. President have been extremely bizarre. (Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents) *** Some Biblical accounts seem unbelievable and we tend to dismiss them as fantasies, or dreams of the person writing the events down. But what if some of the strange creatures described in the bible are actually real – but come from another dimension, or even outer space? (Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible?) *** If you are told there is a city that has been built specifically for the dead, you probably think of some ancient culture that worshipped their ancestors. Personally, I think of pyramids in Egypt… but I never would've thought of the suburbs in California, USA. (California's City of the Dead)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:02:33.183 = Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?00:08:21.362 = The Unsolved Villisca Axe Murders ***00:20:59.742 = California's City of the Dead00:31:12.990 = Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible? ***00:39:47.780 = Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents00:48:06.915 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?” posted at Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdhz5563“The Unsolved Villisca Ax Murders” by Joe Turner for HistoricMysteries.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8mnfp6, and from HauntedRoom.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/36b6k2h4“California's City of the Dead” by Hugh Landman for Ranker.com's Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckrxjzd“Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible?” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr3d8dpk“Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents” by Richard Stockton for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/26avtuhr(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January, 2022This episode of Weird Darkness runs from a Cold War theory that the Moon is a hollow alien spacecraft, through the 1912 Villisca ax murders that left eight people dead in a single Iowa night, into the California cemetery city of Colma where the dead outnumber the living a thousand to one, on to a former NASA engineer's claim that the prophet Ezekiel witnessed a UFO, and closing with some of the strangest attempts ever made on the lives of sitting U.S. presidents.It opens with the Spaceship Moon Theory, proposed in July of 1970 by Soviet Academy of Sciences members Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, who argued the Moon is a hollowed-out planetoid engineered by unknown beings and steered into Earth's orbit. Darren walks through the claims stacked behind the idea — the Moon ringing like a bell for more than an hour after the Apollo 12 crew crashed their lunar module into it on November 20th, 1969, craters of wildly different widths that all share the same shallow depth, moon rocks dated older than the Earth itself, and the near-perfect circular orbit that lets the Moon exactly cover the Sun during an eclipse.From there the episode turns to Villisca, Iowa, and the night of June 9th, 1912, when someone entered the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed all six members of the family along with two young house guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger, striking each victim with an axe as they slept. Darren lays out the crime scene that neighbor Mary Peckham and Josiah's brother Ross discovered the next morning — cloth draped over the mirrors, two cigarette butts in the attic, a slab of bacon left beside the Stillinger girls, and a bloody basin in the kitchen — and the suspects who never brought closure, from traveling minister Reverend George Kelly, who spoke of eight dead bodies before the news broke and later gave a confession the court dismissed, to Josiah's embittered business rival Frank Jones. More than a century on, the boarded-up house survives as a museum where investigators report a heaviness on the stairs, drifting fog, and the sound of dripping blood after the 2 a.m. train whistle.Next the show travels to Colma, California, the suburb built for the dead, where roughly 1,600 living residents share the ground with more than 1.5 million graves across 17 cemeteries. Darren traces how San Francisco banned burials in 1900 and evicted its dead, triggering the largest grave relocation in history after the 1906 earthquake, with more than 150,000 bodies hauled south and tens of thousands reburied in mass graves when families wouldn't pay the ten-dollar transfer fee. He points out the famous names resting there — Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss, William Randolph Hearst, Joe DiMaggio, brain-injury case Phineas Gage, and self-declared Emperor of the United States Joshua Norton — alongside the darker footnotes of looted skeletons, discarded headstones repurposed as gutters and seawalls, and the town's own gallows-humor slogan, "it's great to be alive in Colma."The episode then examines whether extraterrestrials appear in the Bible, centering on the vision of the prophet Ezekiel by the river Chebar and the four winged creatures with human hands, calf-shaped feet, and four faces that rose out of a fiery whirlwind. Darren details how former NASA chief engineer Joseph F. Blumrich, honored in 1972 for his work on the Saturn and Apollo programs, set out to disprove Erich von Däniken's ancient-astronaut claims and instead became convinced, arguing in his book The Spaceships of Ezekiel that the prophet had described a landing spacecraft — rotor blades, fairing housings, landing legs with round footpads, and remote mechanical arms rendered in the only words an ancient man had for them.The episode closes with a run of bizarre presidential assassination attempts, from John Hinckley's 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan over an obsession with actress Jodie Foster, to the 2013 ricin letters mailed to the Obama White House by a man framing an Elvis impersonator over an online feud, to truck driver Samuel Byck's 1974 plot to hijack a DC-9 and crash it into the White House to kill Richard Nixon. Darren ends on the two women who tried to kill Gerald Ford seventeen days apart in September of 1974 — Manson follower Lynette Fromme, who never chambered a round, and Sarah Jane Moore, whose shot missed by six inches because her replacement revolver's sights were misaligned.

Just a couple hundred meters from our church office, a missile struck an apartment building.It happened around 7:00 in the morning. Thankfully, I was still at home drinking my coffee when I heard the explosion. A few hours later, as I drove to church, I was met with a large traffic jam because the missile had hit the very road I travel every day.When I arrived at the office, I walked down the street toward the scene. I could see the top of the apartment building where the missile had struck. Three people had been killed.The top of the building that was hitLiving in Ukraine, these things affect us.We've now lived through more than four years of war. Missile strikes, drones, air raid sirens, and destruction have become part of everyday life. As I reflected on that morning, one thought kept weighing on my mind: the danger of a hardened heart.The Danger of a Hardened HeartOne of the effects of living in a war-torn country is that prolonged exposure to war, death, pain, and violence slowly hardens the heart. I've experienced this myself. The reality is that you cannot live through years of destruction and become emotionally overwhelmed every time another missile strikes. We develop ways to cope. But as Christians, we must be careful that those coping mechanisms do not become callousness. That's exactly what the enemy wants.The same thing happens spiritually. When sin surrounds us every day, we gradually become accustomed to it. What once grieved us no longer does. Suffering can have the same effect.I still remember the first morning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The explosions. The fear. The uncertainty. But then came the second day, the third day, the first month—and eventually the years. The temptation is to become numb. In fact, after this most recent missile strike, I found myself almost more frustrated by the traffic jam than by the explosion itself. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm saying that's the temptation.So how do we guard our hearts?Jesus Didn't Shy Away from Pain and SorrowThe answer begins by looking at Jesus. Isaiah describes the coming Messiah this way:He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. - Isaiah 53:3One of the great encouragements of the gospel is that Jesus never kept His distance from a broken world. He didn't avoid suffering. He walked straight into it. When we look at a world filled with war, sickness, injustice, and death, we realize we cannot fix it all. But Jesus entered into humanity's suffering and understands it better than anyone.Jesus Never Dismissed the Pain of OthersOne of the clearest examples is found in John 11. When Jesus came to the tomb of Lazarus, He found Mary, Martha, and the others weeping.When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. - John 11:33Jesus knew He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. Yet He didn't rush past their sorrow. He entered into it. He never dismissed their grief simply because He knew how the story would end.Jesus Had Deep Compassion for PeopleThroughout the Gospels, compassion is one of the defining marks of Jesus' ministry. He never treated people's pain as an interruption or inconvenience. He entered into their sorrow and walked alongside them. That's a great comfort for every believer. Whatever grief we carry, Jesus understands. He has experienced suffering Himself, and our Savior is never distant from the pain of His people.Jesus Was Indignant at InjusticeJesus' response to suffering was not only compassion. When a man with leprosy came begging to be healed, Mark writes:Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched the man... - Mark 1:41Jesus was angered by the effects of sin and the suffering it had brought into the world.bLiving through this war, I've felt that myself. Watching innocent Ukrainians suffer naturally stirs anger toward the evil that caused it. There is a place for righteous indignation—but we must be careful what we do with it.Jesus Did Not Stay Dwelling in GriefOne of the things I love about the Gospels is that Jesus never remained in sorrow. He entered fully into the suffering of others, yet He didn't allow Himself to marinate in grief. Again and again, we see Him entrusting Himself to His Father. Jesus understood that grief had its proper place, but it was never meant to become His dwelling place. That's an example we desperately need to follow.Jesus Made Time to Be with the FatherThroughout the Gospels we repeatedly find Jesus withdrawing to lonely places to pray. Again and again, He stepped away from the crowds to spend time with His Father.When we live in the middle of continual trauma, we need those same rhythms.Personally, I've found the book of Psalms to be one of the greatest helps. More than any trauma manual, the Psalms give voice to our grief while continually directing our hearts back to God.Jesus Carried Joy in the Midst of SufferingJesus was a man of sorrows, but He was also a man of joy. On the night before the cross, He prayed:I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. - John 17:13Think about that. Jesus spoke of joy as He walked toward the cross. That is one of the beautiful tensions of the Christian life. We experience grief, pain, and loss, yet at the same time we possess a joy that suffering cannot take away because it is rooted in Christ.Following Jesus in a World of SufferingOne of the unique realities of ministry in Ukraine is that suffering can produce two very different responses. God often uses pain to soften hearts and draw people to Himself. But prolonged suffering can also harden hearts.As followers of Christ, our calling is not to offer shallow answers. It is to follow the example of Jesus—to enter into the pain of others with compassion, to grieve over injustice, to remain close to the Father, and to hold fast to the joy that only He can give.May God guard our hearts from becoming hardened. And may He help us reflect the heart of Christ in a world that desperately needs the hope of the gospel.

With Constantine Hatzivassiliou—Partner, Certuity Golf taught Constantine Hatzivassiliou how to perform under pressure. Building a nearly $5B multi-family office taught him that the best advisors become the first call when life, not just the markets, gets complicated. In Summary Many advisors spend years mastering investments, but for affluent families, portfolio management is often just the starting point. Jason Diamond welcomes Constantine Hatzivassiliou, Partner at Certuity, to discuss how his journey from aspiring professional golfer to leader of a nearly $5B multi-family office shaped his approach to client service. Their conversation explores why trust is earned long before a crisis, how family office services evolve naturally from client needs, and why the advisor's role increasingly resembles that of a quarterback coordinating every aspect of a family's financial life. The discussion also examines organic growth, referrals, fiduciary advice, private equity's impact on the RIA landscape, and the qualities that allow advisors to become indispensable over decades—not just market cycles. The Storyline Many advisors spend years perfecting investment management. But as clients become more successful, the job changes. The questions become bigger than portfolio construction. A business is being sold. A family dynamic shifts. A tax issue emerges. An estate plan needs updating. Suddenly, the advisor isn't simply managing assets—they're coordinating decisions, relationships, and emotions. For Constantine, that broader role was shaped long before he entered wealth management. As an aspiring professional golfer, he learned lessons about discipline, preparation, and performing under pressure that continue to influence how he serves clients today. Jason and Constantine explore how Certuity grew from approximately $210 million in assets to nearly $5B, not through acquisitions but through referrals and a service model built on becoming indispensable to the families they advise. Constantine explains why he believes the best advisors function more like quarterbacks than portfolio managers, orchestrating the many moving pieces that come with significant wealth. The conversation also examines the evolution of the multi-family office model, the role of fiduciary advice, the impact of private equity on the advisory landscape, and why experience, judgment, and trust remain the qualities clients value most. Ultimately, this episode is about what it takes to become the first call when life – not just the markets – becomes complicated. Topics Covered Lessons from professional golf that translate to wealth management Building Certuity from $210mm to nearly $5B in assets What distinguishes a multi-family office from a traditional RIA Why referrals fuel long-term organic growth Becoming the “first call” for affluent families Fiduciary advice and the evolution of the advisory profession Family office services beyond investment management Private equity and M&A in the RIA space Developing the next generation of advisors Trust, relationships, and lifetime client service > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors How did professional golf prepare Constantine for advising wealthy families? (3:45) Constantine explains why competing under pressure taught him discipline, emotional control, and process—qualities that now guide every client relationship. How did Certuity grow from $210 million to nearly $5 billion? (8:00) He shares why nearly all of the firm's growth has come organically through client referrals rather than acquisitions or aggressive recruiting. What separates a multi-family office from a traditional advisory firm? (11:45) The conversation explores how expanding into trust, estate, tax, and family office services became a response to client needs—not a business strategy. Why should advisors think of themselves as quarterbacks? (20:00) Constantine recounts a client business sale that fell apart at the closing table and explains why advisors often become the person holding everything together. How does Certuity view private equity and acquisitions? (36:20) Jason and Constantine discuss when outside capital can make sense—and why Certuity has chosen a different path centered on client alignment. Why do wisdom and experience still matter in an AI-driven world? (29:30) Despite advances in technology, Constantine argues that judgment, trust, and perspective remain the qualities affluent families value most. Key Takeaways High-net-worth clients increasingly value coordination, judgment, and perspective over investment selection alone. Family office services often evolve naturally as advisors respond to increasingly complex client needs. Sustainable organic growth is rooted in trust, which explains why referrals account for the overwhelming majority of Certuity's new business. Golf and wealth management share the same disciplines: preparation, emotional control, patience, and executing under pressure. The most valuable advisors become trusted partners during life's defining moments—not simply portfolio managers. Technology continues to reshape wealth management, but experience and wisdom remain difficult to replicate. Building a lasting advisory business requires investing in culture, succession, and the next generation of talent. https://youtu.be/m72Hq6bMTo4 Quotable Moments “The best advisors aren't simply managing portfolios. They're the first person clients call when life gets complicated.” “A bad shot in golf is the equivalent of a bad day in the market. You can't let one dictate everything that comes next.” “More often than not, we're not just financial advisors—we're financial therapists.” “Growth gets the headlines. Trust is what makes it possible.” FAQs What is a multi-family office? A multi-family office delivers integrated services beyond investment management, often coordinating tax, estate planning, philanthropy, business planning, and other complex financial matters for affluent families. Why has Certuity grown primarily through referrals? Constantine attributes the firm's growth to deep client relationships, a collaborative service model, and becoming the trusted advisor clients recommend to others. How does golf relate to wealth management? Golf reinforces discipline, emotional control, preparation, and performing under pressure—all qualities Constantine believes are essential for effective advisors. What is Constantine's perspective on private equity in wealth management? While he understands why many firms pursue private equity, he believes every strategic decision should ultimately be measured against what best serves clients. What qualities distinguish exceptional advisors today? According to Constantine, exceptional advisors become trusted coordinators of a client's financial life—bringing together specialists, solving problems, and providing perspective during life's most important moments. A multi-family office delivers integrated services beyond investment management, often coordinating tax, estate planning, philanthropy, business planning, and other complex financial matters for affluent families. Constantine attributes the firm's growth to deep client relationships, a collaborative service model, and becoming the trusted advisor clients recommend to others. Golf reinforces discipline, emotional control, preparation, and performing under pressure—all qualities Constantine believes are essential for effective advisors. While he understands why many firms pursue private equity, he believes every strategic decision should ultimately be measured against what best serves clients. According to Constantine, exceptional advisors become trusted coordinators of a client's financial life—bringing together specialists, solving problems, and providing perspective during life's most important moments. Related Resources Emotional Intelligence: The “Untouchable” Differentiator in an AI World Intentional Growth: How Top Advisors Build Businesses That Last The 10 Characteristics of the Most Successful Teams Constantine HatzivassiliouPartner  Constantine Hatzivassiliou is a Partner at Certuity, a nationally recognized multi-family office serving affluent families, entrepreneurs, executives, foundations, and endowments. He advises clients on the complex financial, tax, estate, and business planning decisions that accompany significant wealth, helping families coordinate all aspects of their financial lives through a comprehensive family office approach. Drawing on more than two decades of experience, Constantine works closely with successful business owners, corporate executives, and multi-generational families to simplify financial complexity and align investment management, tax planning, estate planning, philanthropy, and family governance strategies. As a Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA®), he frequently assists entrepreneurs in preparing for liquidity events, business transitions, and the long-term stewardship of family wealth. His clients often view him as a trusted advisor and strategic sounding board, helping them navigate important financial decisions with the perspective of both a family office professional and a coach. Prior to joining Certuity, Constantine held advisory and banking positions with The Bank of New York Mellon, Bernstein Global Wealth Management, and Pacific Mercantile Bank. Before entering the financial services industry, he was a Golf Professional and member of the PGA of America, experiences that continue to shape his disciplined, competitive, and relationship-focused approach to advising clients. Outside of his professional responsibilities, Constantine is passionate about mentoring young athletes and strengthening the communities in which he lives and works. He serves as a Board Member of Coerfontaine Football Club (CFC), a premier youth soccer organization focused on developing young athletes and helping them pursue collegiate and professional opportunities while fostering leadership, discipline, and character. He also serves as Chair of the Safety and Security Committee for Parkland, where he works alongside community leadership to enhance resident safety, security, and quality of life. In addition, Constantine is a Founding Board Member of The Boardroom, a private membership organization focused on fostering meaningful relationships among business leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals through networking, education, and philanthropy. Born in Greece, Constantine spent his childhood in Montreal before relocating to South Florida. He attended the University of Florida before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Florida Atlantic University, where he graduated with honors. He holds the Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA®) designation. A lifelong student of the game, Constantine remains active in golf and is a member of Muirfield Village Golf Club, founded by his longtime  hero and mentor, Jack Nicklaus, as well as Parkland Golf & Country Club. Constantine resides in Parkland, Florida, with his wife, Stephanie, and their two children, Nicholas and Olivia. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. Episode Transcript Lessons from the Links: From Golf Pro to $5B Family Office Partner A conversation with Jason Diamond and Constantine Hatzivassiliou, Partner at Certuity. Jason Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Lessons from the Links: From Golf Pro to $5B Family Office Partner. It’s a conversation with Constantine Hatzivassiliou, partner at Certuity. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned and, each year, one in four advisors managing $1 billion or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education-driven and based on building relationships starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report, it’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions, download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Golf is a way of exposing who you really are, there are no teammates to blame, no clock to run out and no hiding from a bad decision. Every shot demands discipline, patience and the ability to stay focused when the pressure is highest, my guest today knows that firsthand. Before becoming a partner at Certuity, a multifamily office approaching five billion in assets, Constantine Hatzivassiliou was pursuing a career as a professional golfer. An injury ultimately redirected his path towards wealth management but many of the lessons he learned on the course still shaped the way he serves clients today. Certuity has grown from roughly 210 million in assets to nearly five billion, that’s impressive on its own but the more interesting story is how they’ve done it. The firm has grown largely through referrals built around a multifamily office model and focused on becoming far more than an investment advisor to the families it serves. In Constantine’s view, the best advisors aren’t simply managing portfolios, they’re the first person clients call when a business is being sold, a family issue becomes complicated or a major decision carries consequences well beyond the balance sheet. Constantine and I discuss the lessons golf teaches about handling pressure then we dive into the evolution from the traditional wealth management world to the multifamily office model, why referrals drive nearly all of Certuity’s growth, how he thinks about private equity’s influence on the advisory business and what it takes to become the first call for the wealthy families they serve and perhaps, most importantly, why the same qualities that help someone succeed on a golf course may be surprisingly relevant to building trust over a lifetime. It’s a great conversation so let’s dive in. Constantine, thank you so much for joining, thrilled to have you here. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Thank you for having me, excited to be here. Jason Diamond: Yeah, absolutely. So, you had an unconventional path to wealth management, you started as a professional golfer, I think that’s a first for us on this show, before ultimately transitioning into this world. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey and what brought you here? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Yeah, I never thought I’d be here, my parents were certainly shocked that I got here path wise. Growing up, immigrants from Greece, you settle into Florida the traditional way where you either go down the diner route or the gas station route in mechanics which my father was the latter and school and education was never priority, it was always about supporting the family needs. So, next thing you know, sports are a critical part of any good household, that’s how I was raised and I played everything but golf. I grew up on a golf course because my parents believed that a location of a property was critical to long-term financial success. We lived on a golf course, it was in our backyard, we’d stare at it and we’d use it to play football or baseball or anything but actual golf. And my freshman year at the University of Florida, I started dating a girl on the golf team and she got me hooked to the point where, after four years of hitting balls with the women’s and men’s golf team at the University of Florida for six hours a day, we finished school and realized I’m actually pretty good at the game and, while I have a finance and economics background and degree, let’s try and pursue this for a living and I was blessed. I had a sponsor who helped me succeed at golf on a small scale, it was a humbling experience to say the least. I was competing and playing with Sean O’Hair, Ken Duke, guys who made it out on tour for a very long time, we had the same sponsor so we functioned as a team, it was a collegiate team effectively trying to make it out on tour. And, unfortunately, my second year of competing, I blew out my back doing heavy deadlifts which set me aside for 18 months. While I was recovering, my primary sponsor was in financial services and says, “Hey, you have a background in this, it’s killing you not being able to be on the golf course, why don’t you come work for me while you’re rehabbing so that, when you get back to playing golf, it’s easier for you to talk about our business as a sponsor to try and develop business to throw it to the financial services side?” And Jason, the reality is, after 18 months working there, I fell in love with it. I made way more money working in that environment than I ever would’ve made playing golf because, again, I came to the game late. I was decent but I was nowhere near the caliber of players that are succeeding now out on tour. So, I pivoted after having met my wife and decided to settle down into the wealth management space and, what is it now, 26 years later, going strong. So, it’s been a fun transition from golf into wealth management to say the least. Jason Diamond: Probably my favorite background … I watch a lot of golf, I should caveat that, probably my favorite origin story we’ve had, I’ll give you the Wanamaker trophy or whatever you get, first place. Let’s talk about the business now, so Certuity. For our audience who may not be familiar, tell us a little bit about the firm, what types of clients do you serve and any context you can provide on size as well. We’ll talk about how your firm got there but just give us where we are today to start with. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, goal by the end of the year is to have $5 billion in AUM, we’re just shy of that now. We currently service 428 families across the country. So, we’re boutiquey and nimble, we’re based in South Florida, we have offices in New York, San Fran and LA. I’m fortunate to be one of four partners at the firm supporting the growth and the direction of the company and it’s a fun endeavor in the sense that, when we first started, I was employee number four 16 years ago and, with 210 million in AUM at the time to grow it to where we are today, to learn all the things that we have over the years, the curve balls that were thrown at us because all of us came from massive institutional wealth management firms. So, we transitioned from the Bernsteins of the world, the BNY Mellons of the world into an RIA in the South Florida market, there was absolutely an entrepreneurial learning curve involved. Jason Diamond: I bet. And on follow-up question, 16 years ago, did you have a book of business, client business and do you still maintain a book of business today? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: I do. The four of us at the firm share in all of the clients, we work together. Being in the Southeast, I’m responsible for, let’s call it, the Southeast demographics of the US which is a large portion of Certuity’s book. I have a partner in Tennessee, I have a partner in LA and San Francisco and we divide and conquer across the country. But, yes, we came over with a small book, we’ve all grown it organically since then. So, we’ve been very effective in how we’ve grown. Jason Diamond: Just from adding new client money? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Strictly through new clients referred to us by existing clients. Jason Diamond: Wow. I want to talk more about the growth because that’s remarkable. But before I do, can we double click on the service model? So, I would say the most typical we hear, I think more of our guests typically come from the wirehouse world where it’s I have my book, you have your book. What does your service model look like? So, is it truly, if it’s working well from the end client perspective, you should be interchangeable with your partners and it’s a true team approach? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: How we engage our clients, the theory should be I can get hit by a bus tomorrow and outside of the client not being able to speak to me directly, they will not have a hiccup in any way, shape or form. And when we’re dealing with families across multiple generations, the way we’ve built our platform, that continuity is critical in the engagement process for the clients hiring us to help them through all of the challenges that they face. Jason Diamond: What’s your sweet spot in terms of client size? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Our average client size today has just shy of eight million AUM with us. We have some clients who have $1 million certainly but they’re strategic in that their friends, their family, they could be centers of influence who help send business our way because they value what it is that we do and there’s a strategic partnership because we might need them for their trust and estate services or their accounting work and they have clients who have a need and we’re on the short list of people they refer to. Jason Diamond: That they trust. Yeah, makes sense. So, I’ve seen this in the news and also even on your own internal materials, I’ve seen you described as both a modern multifamily office, you’ll also obviously hear the term RIA as well. Does that distinction matter at all? And maybe my second part of that question would be what is the distinction between that space, whatever you call it, and the more traditional firm world from a client service perspective? You mentioned that all of your partners from that world. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: I started in this industry truly at an institutional level at Bernstein in New York and, for anyone who knows Bernstein, they really do brainwash you on the fiduciary model and the values affiliated with that philosophy has translated through my career at BNY Mellon which has a very similar feel as Bernstein. And then, when we came here, we instilled that same core value principle of fiduciary responsibility for our clients so we are very different than a traditional wirehouse or brokerage house, it is why we’ve grown so successfully. I would never, one, work for an institution that did bide by those standards and, secondarily, I wished Congress and Senate would turn around and actually implement a mandatory fiduciary liability for all financial advisors because, far too often, we see prospective clients or families get taken advantage of because the individual sitting across from them giving them financial advice is not necessarily aligned with their goals and objectives. Jason Diamond: So, I take it you are fee only. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: We are fee only. Jason Diamond: Yeah. I don’t want to lose the thread on the first part of my question. Do you think there is a distinction between a multifamily office and an RIA? I don’t want to lead you here but to me it implies a different level or different caliber of service model that probably includes more of the ancillary trust and estate and CPA type stuff that higher network clients need but curious what your thoughts are. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Our first seven years at the firm, we were strictly an RIA, we functioned as an advisory service provider to our clients. What attracted me and my partners to Certuity was the nimbleness of the firm. So, for instance, at BNY Mellon, we often deemed a change necessary as moving an aircraft carrier across the world but it was an impossible task to accomplish. But when you’re small and nimble and clients come to you with a need and you’re in the service, ultimately, first and foremost, it made sense for us to start building out family office services for our clients because they had a need and we found it as a way to centralize everything because, far too often, when the communication standards break down between all the individual parts, one, it’s more expensive for the clients and, two, the process isn’t efficient, things get missed. So, we tried, largely due to our growth, to bring everything in house and our clients appreciate that for it. Jason Diamond: So, this is not a chicken and egg situation, this is very much we had large clients, we were attracting large clients and, in order to service them optimally, here’s what we felt we needed to build. Is that fair? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: 100%. Jason Diamond: Let’s shift gears, I need to go deeper on the professional golf thread a little bit. I promise I won’t make the whole interview about your golf background. I’m curious if you feel like that experience or that, I don’t know, upbringing or, I guess, background laid any foundation for the way you engage with clients today or the way you operate as a business leader today. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, there’s a couple parts to that. The golf side, certainly, just from an engaging client perspective, 90% of our clients are golfers. Jason Diamond: It’s very true. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Right. It just helps because of our background and certainly with some of the clients and partners that we have at the firm, golf is a critical thread in what we do. However, when it comes to golf, what I learned playing golf at a high level directly translates to how we manage money for clients and I’ll express it this way. There’s generally two types of golfers, there’s the artist, the Sergios of the world who don’t fundamentally function off of specific points in their swing or a very structured platform, they see something, their mind becomes creative and they execute on it. I was never that way, I am a numbers person, I think everything analytically, I break everything down to the minute, everything is strategized and organized, I was taught to practice that way by Coach Alexander at the University of Florida and that foundational element seemed easy, it worked. If you practice properly, you’ve succeeded. Under pressure, all those hours and hours of repetition translated to success more often than not. In our industry, it’s process-driven, it has to be unemotional. A bad shot in golf is the equivalent of a bad day in the market, you can’t let one bad day in the market influence everything you do for the next year. Same way on the golf course playing in a tournament, you can’t allow one golf shot to affect the rest of the round. We kid with our clients oftentimes that, while we are fundamentally their financial advisor, more often than not, we’re their financial therapist. We have to control their emotions and make sure they’re not making an irrational decision. For instance, a couple days ago we were out with a client the day that Iran shot down one of the US military helicopters and we’re sitting down at lunch and, all of a sudden, his phone starts blowing up because he’s getting all these Google alerts to the market heading in the wrong direction and he had to go do a life insurance test later on that afternoon. So, all week, he had prepped and he was calm and he was relaxed, he was really excited, he’s, “My wife is setting me up with a new insurance policy and I know it’s for her benefit but all my numbers look good, I’m going to ace this and my premiums will be really low because of it,” it was a $25 million policy. And as he’s looking at his phone and he sees the market collapsing in his mind, his blood pressure rose to no end, you could see that his anxiety level went through the roof and, had I not been there with him at the time to hold his hand through that process, his afternoon would’ve been shot. I would’ve got a phone call saying, “What are we doing to prevent 2% loss in my portfolio,” because that’s how he thinks and, in that moment, I was the therapist to talk him off a ledge. It’s so hard for individuals to manage the stress of the markets, that golfer mentality of, okay, just breathe, relax, let’s see what’s going on, let’s make an educated, confirmed decision, let’s circle back with our caddy if we’re on tour and competing and make a unified decision for the long-term success of the goal that we’re trying to achieve. And what we do every day is the same thing with our clients. Jason Diamond: It’s an incredibly thoughtful answer, I expected a version of the latter part of your answer. I appreciate that you added the part about just most clients like golf, enjoy talking about golf, enjoy playing golf and it’s an effective business development tool, there’s no question. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, I have two kids, a 12-year-old and an eight-year-old, my son who’s 12 who’s an exceptional soccer player and wants to, aspires to play professionally one day has now fallen in love with golf which I’m ecstatic about. I think golf and tennis, from a business development perspective- Jason Diamond: Yeah, lifelong sports. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: And I look at it now and my mentor when I started in the business was absolutely right. The fact that I could get a CEO of a Fortune 100 company to want to actively spend four hours with me where we could dive into the weeds about their personal life, their financial situation, their business, you could never get that time otherwise. I urge everyone who’s coming out of college or is going into college who wants to aspire to be in any type of sales related role, golf is a great venue to make long-term relationships. Jason Diamond: And importantly, tennis is not as good on the knees long-term or the back long-term. So, you stick to golf, you get a little more longevity out of it. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: It does help, yes. You’re right. Jason Diamond: My thought always goes to people call it the 15th club in golf, just this mental element of the game and to me it’s the clear moment in golf that always comes to mind for me is the 72nd hole. I don’t know if you just watched the US Women’s Open but Nelly Korda standing over a two-foot putt that I really thought she missed, is there an equivalent of that moment? Are you ever able to recreate that pressure in your current role or is that something that you miss? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Jason, we have those moments weekly, countless stories. Here’s where I love my job. I’ve transitioned from being the guy behind the screen who is just trading accounts, that’s where we all start and you have to have that foundational perspective of what’s involved in trading an account on a daily basis. Not that we ever picked stocks to an extensive level, we were generally managing ETFs, mutual funds and strategies but I’ll give you an example. So, just last week, we had a family and this is where the family office side comes in more so than the financial advisory services come in. We had spent four months in helping a family sell their business, it was a life altering moment, the dad started the business, the dad had been independently successful, net worth of well into eight figures, was happy and content, brought his son into the business, son was brilliant, saw an opportunity within the business and grew the business by 4,000%. Jason Diamond: Literally? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Yup. All because of this, the son saw a different direction and pivoted the business and grew it out and here he is, getting ready to have their first child and he gets approached by a firm to acquire his business. They’re ecstatic, the number was perfect, I thought it was overvalued, I was telling them that there’s no way they could turn it down because the number was too significant. Had they gone to the market, they would probably never achieve that level of return. And literally, the day of closing, as we’re expecting the wire to come through, the deal gets pulled. So, here you have the father who’s crushed because he was trying to provide something for his son, the son who’s just devastated because he now was preparing for the second stage of his life and you go through at that stage the classic stages of grief, it’s the cycle that goes through it. I was holding their hand through the three-month process up to there, every day, hourly calls, strategizing, building everything out, organizing the accounting team, organizing the attorneys, getting it all to work out. And here I am, father and son, unbelievably stressed, you have the wives in the background who can’t quite comprehend what’s going on, you have employees beneath them who are now confused as to there was a transition getting ready to take place and the only person who can step in under that critical moment to bring everybody back together was me. So, here I am thinking, 20 years ago, I’ll just pick stocks and bonds for individuals but now I’m in the middle of deal flow trying to help a family solve the issues that arise. So, those are hugely critical- Jason Diamond: Yeah, that’s right. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: …moments where, because our clients are our friends and family, we care for them like they’re our own, you become emotionally attached. And the same pressure that I felt when I won my first mini tour event after college, when I had to get up and down from the impossible bunker shot and I hit it to six feet and I made the crucial put to win my first $23,000 check which I thought was unbelievable, they gave you those big old-fashioned- Jason Diamond: The Happy Gilmore checks. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Exactly, right? It was the greatest day at that time. The stress of being in that bunker trying to hit that shot is the same stress I felt having two phones ringing, one the father, one the son where we have to keep that situation separate. So, you’re diving into unbelievably stressful situations and the best part is, when we get it all solved and literally yesterday we solved the entire dynamic of the business, I get a text from the son saying that this was the most incredible rollercoaster experience he’s ever experienced, that he’s incredibly grateful for all that I did and our team did for him and that, for the rest of his life, we will always be the first person he calls to solve any of his problems. So, for us, that’s the recreation of that stressful moment and then the victory on the back end. Twenty-five years ago, I got the big Happy Gilmore check. Yesterday, I got that text which I’ve printed out and framed and have it in my office as a constant memory of why it is we do what we do. Jason Diamond: And I would bet that’s more impactful than the $23,000. It’s an incredible story and I’ll tell you why, you said it but it’s as far away from stocks and bonds as you could possibly get. But I think, most advisors, a story like that resonates much more. It leads into my next question. You intentionally choose to service a high net worth segment of the market and I would assume that number’s probably creeping up, not down over time in terms of who you service. My thought is that’s a very competitive segment of the market as well. Is this how you differentiate is just you make it about those types of human examples or is there more to it? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: I’m envious of the advisor who could walk into a room of 200 people and they become the central focal point of the room where they can walk up to every single person and fearlessly ask them incredibly personal information, I’m not wired that way. For me, I’m very much the individual that I will find the one person that I have common ground with, I will deepen that relationship and I will add value and, because of the value that I create, I become a critical component of that individual’s success. And that’s how we’ve grown our business holistically at the firm largely buy that extra layer of service. We’re a commodity business. Being in South Florida, the clubs that I belong to, 10 to 15% of the members feel like they’re financial advisors. You could throw a rock anywhere and find a financial advisor so how do I differentiate myself? The only way I can truly differentiate myself and my firm is the level of service we provide, to go that extra step. To where, when we’re calling a client, they know I’m calling them to support their needs not because I’m seeking something for any ulterior motive. Jason Diamond: But you don’t mention financial planning or investment management or asset custody. Is that because I assume just that’s table stakes? Of course we do that but … Okay, yeah. Makes sense. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: That’s the easy part, right? That’s foundationally … And to your earlier point, you were asking the RIA model. One of the biggest challenges that we had down here in South Florida was the RIA model is new. If you were in the northeast, RIAs are very common, out west, incredibly common. Down here in South Florida, I just finished dealing with Bernie Madoff. Jason Diamond: You were fighting the good education fight a little bit. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: At Bernstein, 108 of our clients had assets with Bernie Madoff. Jason Diamond: Yeah. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, when you leave, one of our biggest growing curves as an RIA in South Florida was, when you leave the power of BNY Mellon or Bernstein and you’re some random little shop called Certuity, no one knows who you are. So, there was a big part of our education in the business was learning how to educate clients and prospective clients on the value of the RIA model and the fiduciary model in particular. Jason Diamond: Could you give me the 30-second answer to that if somebody says who are you, your prospect? I’ll tell you why I ask. Forget just Bernstein’s and BNYs of the world, a Morgan Stanley advisor or Merrill advisor has the exact same fear. I’m leaving Merrill to go launch Jason Diamond Wealth Management, my client’s going to say, “Well, who is that?” So, give me the quick pitch. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Your typical broker, let’s say, you’re not really hiring JP Morgan, you’re not really hiring Wells Fargo, you’re not hiring Goldman Sachs, you’re hiring the advisor who works for that institution. Now, yes, that advisor has the Rolodex of data and information available at the firm level but, ultimately, you’re entrusting that individual to make your decisions for you. The broker who leaves the brokerage model to open up their own brick and mortar operation has to then decide are they continuing down the wirehouse brokerage model where they’re transactional in nature, the economics behind that, far more profitable. The revenue streams affiliated with a brokerage house drastically blows us out of the water. But then you have to also look at yourself in the mirror so how are you running your book of business, how are you running your practice. So, to answer your 30-second question, the RIA model, in my opinion, is truly the only way any family of wealth should proceed with an advisory firm because you want an individual who is aligned in your goals and objectives. Our clients know that I’m their chief financial officer, I work for them. They task us with building out a financial strategy that is customized to their individual needs and they never have to worry do I have an ulterior motive as to why I’m presenting an option in that strategy. And, because of that, the fiduciary model, I think, is critical for our success as a firm and, again, as I mentioned earlier, I wish it’s something that was industry well and not the vast minority. Jason Diamond: Yeah. No, that’s a great answer. So, do you think then that, as time has gone on, this has gotten easier? I assume the answer is yes either because more clients are aware of your brand and/or more aware of the space as a whole. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: The first thing that helped the most was some gray hair. When I started at Bernstein, I attempted to solicit new clients very much the same way I do today. But when I was 26 years old and I’m sitting in front of a family worth and the dad was in the 70s and he lived his life and I’m younger than his kids, he would look at me and say, “What do you really know? What experience do you have?” So, doing this now for as long as I have, the number one thing that has helped me the most in growth is just wisdom and time. Without that, yes, you can be a rockstar stock picker. We have so many kids coming out of college today with the advent of AI and technology that have algorithms that could run unbelievable portfolios and there is a segment of the market who wants to hire and engage those individuals but, generally speaking, the families that we service, that is 10th or 12th on the list of importance. Jason Diamond: No, I think that’s spot on. I think most high net worth clients counterintuitively agree with that, that alpha, for lack of a better term, is really not the name of the game or not in the top five reasons why you would engage with a financial advisor. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Agreed. The biggest thing that we’ve been doing to educate clients especially in today’s environment, I had a call yesterday with an individual, a client who lives in New Jersey who works out of New York for a hedge fund, he knows our space incredibly well. He’s one of those kids, 28 years old, brilliant, as smart as you’ll ever be but his tax bracket is atrocious. He is paying so much of his W-2 income in taxes and building out a strategy that can reduce his tax liability by several hundred thousand dollars a year far exceeds any alpha I can generate by picking a top decile performer. Jason Diamond: What was the strategy? Move to Florida? I’m just kidding. Don’t answer that. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: We offered that but, unfortunately, he has to be physically in the office in New York City but yes. Jason Diamond: I think that will resonate, by the way, your gray hair comment. I appreciate the humility and the modesty in that because, the reality is, one of the questions I was going to ask you about was next-gen talent cultivation. In my opinion, this is a hard game for younger folks for that reason. People sit across from other people with a lot of money and they say, “Why am I going to entrust you with my life’s work when you just don’t have that degree of experience?” I was asking more even about your firm success and your firm story, have you felt like that’s caught on more? Do you have more brand awareness, if you will, now when you go to a prospect meeting or do you think you’re still constantly fighting that education fight? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, first part, brands, it’s improved in our immediate network. In our little bubble of the world, yes, it’s known. Let’s call it, in South Florida the influential attorneys, the accountants, the divorce attorneys know who we are because, having been down here long enough, we’ve had opportunities to work together. Our network of friends, certainly, the word spreads. But in the grand scheme of things, we are so small in the South Florida landscape or the LA landscape or the New York landscape so any incremental gain that we pick up is meaningful. And then, as it relates to young talent, our success is completely, long-term, derived by the young talent that we bring in to nurture them to help them grow. I look at our success, two of our critical mentors and board members of our firm are in their 80s, their children and grandchildren, nepotism aside, whether it was interning while in college or coming to work for us after school, they’re our best employees. And our goal as a firm, just like how I was offered the opportunity to become a partner and own a piece of the business, our goal long term will be to transition the business to this younger generation that we’re developing. I look at, again, those two board members who are in their 80s, the advice they’ve given me is don’t ever stop working, you have to be doing something. And I turn to them and say, “I don’t work every day.” I put in 20 hour days, well, not quite 20, 18 hour days but it’s never work because, what I do every day, I don’t deem it work, I love what I do, I don’t ever see myself stopping. Because they’ll tell me all of their friends that have stopped working or sold their business, invariably, the men die within six months because boredom and we always joke around that you’ll continue to work forever. So, I would hope that one day I transition into that advisory board member role where I step aside day-to-day activity where I’m now a mentor to our younger generation that we’re promoting into partners because we’ve made promises to our clients that we will forever be their family office. So, we have to, as part of our growth model, have those transitions in place because we’re servicing many families that have 85-year-old clients and two-year-old clients and we’re tasked with the two-year-olds as well as the 85-year-old. Jason Diamond: I also feel like there’s a little bit of younger generations I think have been reluctant to some degree to get it, you can disagree with this, to get into this space because there’s a more appeal to things like investment banking and sales and trading to some degree. The other problem obviously you alluded to is asset gathering. Your model speaks so clearly to success because you don’t say I own the client, that’s my relationship. To me, you plant the seeds of being able to handle succession much better than somebody who does the mine is mine and yours is yours approach. Is that fair? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: That’s completely accurate. And I think there’s two types of people that serve in the financial advisory space. You have the individual who is analytics driven, who likes being behind the bank of monitors trading account and there’s a critical part of our firm and our success is driven by the team in the office that aren’t necessarily client facing that do all the heavy lifting every day because they’re really doing the heavy work. Myself, my partners, the select few, while talented and able to do that, realize the value that we present is quarterbacking the relationship and helping understand all the components. We kid around that we’ve all stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, we’ve become experts in tax, we’ve become experts at trust and estate planning, we’ve become experts at divorce, we’ve become experts at the medical field. It’s shocking how it’s 2:00 in the morning and you get a phone call, panic attack by a client saying they need a doctor for X, Y and Z, can you connect me. So, the younger generation, yes, the sexy space is investment banking and that is really hard work. I could not do what my friends at Goldman do who are at these private mid-market funds, that’s just not me. I’ve been fortunate that I stumbled into an avenue in financial services that I think perfectly fits my personality and my want and desire to help others because that’s what we’re driven by and we try and hire people with that same mindset. The hardest thing as an RIA especially in South Florida is finding and retaining talent that is like-minded and that could function well within our family. Jason Diamond: If you build a firm predicated on culture and client service, I understand, certainly, the importance of that. I want to shift gears, I don’t want to lose this thought. You mentioned organic growth, it’s incredible. You have not mentioned inorganic growth at all and maybe because you haven’t had to but give me your thoughts on M&A, private equity in this space, do you have plans to sell the business, take on a capital partner, buy other RIAs? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Yeah. So, I understand why private equity in the last 10 years has come into the market. For years, they bought up insurance practices, that recurring revenue, sticky assets, it makes sense. Personally, I’m not a fan of them being in our markets, I think they’re motivated at the end of the day by AUM growth, revenue growth and the second transaction which, for most of our clients, would not make sense because, again, that then questions why it is that we’re motivated to do something. Am I taking extra risk in the portfolio because I want to grow the AUM because I’m looking to sell in a year? Am I bringing in a strategy that has a higher fee? For us, it doesn’t work. In the brokerage model, it makes perfect sense. Now, there are some RIAs who leave the wirehouses, open up an RIA shop, do really well for their clients but don’t have the long-term aspirations of making the institution a legacy to where they’re passing it off. I hope my kids one day want to come work for dad and follow in his steps, that’d be amazing. Just like our younger generation working at the firm, our goal is we’ve already targeted the three or four guys that will be partner one day and we’ll transition the business over to them. But it’s okay if there’s an RIA out there who doesn’t have that transition product or isn’t motivated by that and is looking at it as a vehicle that I’ve built a really good successful book of business and I want to now retire and spend time with my family and kids and travel, et cetera, and that’s where PE steps in and offers an attractive number and the person makes their move. So, I can’t fault the individual for wanting that and I’m not saying that they’re not doing well by their clients, it’s just, for us, I’m not a fan of it because, again, I’m first critically and always focused on what’s best for the client. Jason Diamond: Fair. And I largely agree with some of what you said around private equity in this space but private equity enables … Obviously, it’s capital so which enables acquisitions which is why a lot of firms take on private equity. So, what about the idea of potentially buying businesses to start up inorganic growth? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: We have gone down the road of acquiring other institutions potentially. The challenge is, because we manage money so uniquely and our approach is so different, I’m not going to bring on an institution or bring in a new partner to the firm or a new book of business that we’ve acquired if the methodology and the life of that book doesn’t mirror ours. So, yes, there is opportunities to grow through acquisition, it’s not something that we are leaning on heavily. However, for the right institution that’s available that is aligned with our thinking, whose clients would value and appreciate how we do things or, if that institution is doing something truly unique that we would want to bolt onto our platform, all day long because, again, for the benefit of the client, it makes sense. So, yes, there are opportunities for that. Too often we find that, when a book is available for acquisition, the highest bidder tends to win out and we don’t have the deep enough pockets to write a multiple that we don’t deem to be, let’s call it, market neutral. Jason Diamond: Yeah, market prudent. I understand the premise and I think that’s fair. I also think you have the luxury, because of your organic growth, you can be super, super picky about inorganic and I love how you bring it all back to the lens of the client. Can this improve the client experience in some way? And, if so, yes, we’ll take a look. I got time for one more question, I can’t believe time has flown. You’ve had a remarkable journey, professional golf now partner at a $4 billion plus on the way to $5 billion RIA multifamily office. What are you most proud of when you reflect on your career journey? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: What am I most proud of? To see what Rich, myself and Mark and Jayson built over these years from where we were sitting in a small conference room, struggling to figure out how do we find a way to hire a trust and estate attorney to help with that component, which CPAs do we bring on board in-house because clients have a need. So, the entrepreneurial spirit involved in growing the business, the late nights, the struggles, the banter back and forth, to put so much blood, sweat and tears into this and now to look at all that we’ve accomplished, being in four separate states with offices, having so many wonderful employees that have come to us from all over the world, Germany, from China, from Tokyo, bringing people in to the US and building out something that, when we leave at the end of the day, are incredibly proud of. My father’s no longer with us, for 50 years, I always strived to make him proud because he never told me that he was proud of me, he was the classic Greek old-fashioned dad. I think he looks down on his now for everything that we’ve built and would say that he’s proud of us so, for me, that’s the best. Jason Diamond: Yeah. That’s an incredible place to end. Thank you for sharing that, it’s a touching place to end and I appreciate you being open. Thank you. This has been one of my favorite episodes, your journey, your humility, your honesty, your transparency, it’s no wonder you’ve built a business you’ve built. So, thanks for joining us, Constantine. I look forward to having you back on to talk about the next chapter. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Thank you. Next time we’ll do it from the golf course. Jason Diamond: Oh, absolutely. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? Is a book written with you in mind? It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook.   Lessons from the Links: From Golf Pro to $5B Family Office Partner A conversation with Jason Diamond and Constantine Hatzivassiliou, Partner at Certuity. Jason Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Lessons from the Links: From Golf Pro to $5B Family Office Partner. It’s a conversation with Constantine Hatzivassiliou, partner at Certuity. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned and, each year, one in four advisors managing $1 billion or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education-driven and based on building relationships starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report, it’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions, download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Golf is a way of exposing who you really are, there are no teammates to blame, no clock to run out and no hiding from a bad decision. Every shot demands discipline, patience and the ability to stay focused when the pressure is highest, my guest today knows that firsthand. Before becoming a partner at Certuity, a multifamily office approaching five billion in assets, Constantine Hatzivassiliou was pursuing a career as a professional golfer. An injury ultimately redirected his path towards wealth management but many of the lessons he learned on the course still shaped the way he serves clients today. Certuity has grown from roughly 210 million in assets to nearly five billion, that’s impressive on its own but the more interesting story is how they’ve done it. The firm has grown largely through referrals built around a multifamily office model and focused on becoming far more than an investment advisor to the families it serves. In Constantine’s view, the best advisors aren’t simply managing portfolios, they’re the first person clients call when a business is being sold, a family issue becomes complicated or a major decision carries consequences well beyond the balance sheet. Constantine and I discuss the lessons golf teaches about handling pressure then we dive into the evolution from the traditional wealth management world to the multifamily office model, why referrals drive nearly all of Certuity’s growth, how he thinks about private equity’s influence on the advisory business and what it takes to become the first call for the wealthy families they serve and perhaps, most importantly, why the same qualities that help someone succeed on a golf course may be surprisingly relevant to building trust over a lifetime. It’s a great conversation so let’s dive in. Constantine, thank you so much for joining, thrilled to have you here. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Thank you for having me, excited to be here. Jason Diamond: Yeah, absolutely. So, you had an unconventional path to wealth management, you started as a professional golfer, I think that’s a first for us on this show, before ultimately transitioning into this world. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey and what brought you here? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Yeah, I never thought I’d be here, my parents were certainly shocked that I got here path wise. Growing up, immigrants from Greece, you settle into Florida the traditional way where you either go down the diner route or the gas station route in mechanics which my father was the latter and school and education was never priority, it was always about supporting the family needs. So, next thing you know, sports are a critical part of any good household, that’s how I was raised and I played everything but golf. I grew up on a golf course because my parents believed that a location of a property was critical to long-term financial success. We lived on a golf course, it was in our backyard, we’d stare at it and we’d use it to play football or baseball or anything but actual golf. And my freshman year at the University of Florida, I started dating a girl on the golf team and she got me hooked to the point where, after four years of hitting balls with the women’s and men’s golf team at the University of Florida for six hours a day, we finished school and realized I’m actually pretty good at the game and, while I have a finance and economics background and degree, let’s try and pursue this for a living and I was blessed. I had a sponsor who helped me succeed at golf on a small scale, it was a humbling experience to say the least. I was competing and playing with Sean O’Hair, Ken Duke, guys who made it out on tour for a very long time, we had the same sponsor so we functioned as a team, it was a collegiate team effectively trying to make it out on tour. And, unfortunately, my second year of competing, I blew out my back doing heavy deadlifts which set me aside for 18 months. While I was recovering, my primary sponsor was in financial services and says, “Hey, you have a background in this, it’s killing you not being able to be on the golf course, why don’t you come work for me while you’re rehabbing so that, when you get back to playing golf, it’s easier for you to talk about our business as a sponsor to try and develop business to throw it to the financial services side?” And Jason, the reality is, after 18 months working there, I fell in love with it. I made way more money working in that environment than I ever would’ve made playing golf because, again, I came to the game late. I was decent but I was nowhere near the caliber of players that are succeeding now out on tour. So, I pivoted after having met my wife and decided to settle down into the wealth management space and, what is it now, 26 years later, going strong. So, it’s been a fun transition from golf into wealth management to say the least. Jason Diamond: Probably my favorite background … I watch a lot of golf, I should caveat that, probably my favorite origin story we’ve had, I’ll give you the Wanamaker trophy or whatever you get, first place. Let’s talk about the business now, so Certuity. For our audience who may not be familiar, tell us a little bit about the firm, what types of clients do you serve and any context you can provide on size as well. We’ll talk about how your firm got there but just give us where we are today to start with. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, goal by the end of the year is to have $5 billion in AUM, we’re just shy of that now. We currently service 428 families across the country. So, we’re boutiquey and nimble, we’re based in South Florida, we have offices in New York, San Fran and LA. I’m fortunate to be one of four partners at the firm supporting the growth and the direction of the company and it’s a fun endeavor in the sense that, when we first started, I was employee number four 16 years ago and, with 210 million in AUM at the time to grow it to where we are today, to learn all the things that we have over the years, the curve balls that were thrown at us because all of us came from massive institutional wealth management firms. So, we transitioned from the Bernsteins of the world, the BNY Mellons of the world into an RIA in the South Florida market, there was absolutely an entrepreneurial learning curve involved. Jason Diamond: I bet. And on follow-up question, 16 years ago, did you have a book of business, client business and do you still maintain a book of business today? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: I do. The four of us at the firm share in all of the clients, we work together. Being in the Southeast, I’m responsible for, let’s call it, the Southeast demographics of the US which is a large portion of Certuity’s book. I have a partner in Tennessee, I have a partner in LA and San Francisco and we divide and conquer across the country. But, yes, we came over with a small book, we’ve all grown it organically since then. So, we’ve been very effective in how we’ve grown. Jason Diamond: Just from adding new client money? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Strictly through new clients referred to us by existing clients. Jason Diamond: Wow. I

Lucas Aoun is a naturopath, researcher, educator and one of Australia’s most respected and popular biohackers. This was one of my favourite conversations this year. Personally, I learned a lot. There’s too much in it for me to do justice to the conversation by providing an incomplete snapshot, but I’ll just say, if you’re interested in outside the box thinking, alternative treatments and therapies, and zero bullsh*t or bro science, take a listen. Enjoy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Personally Speaking, Msgr. Jim Lisante is joined by actor Elijah Alexander. Elijah stars in the critically acclaimed series “The Chosen” portraying the calculating Roman magistrate Atticus. He's a graduate of The Yale School of Drama and has decades of experience in film, television and on stage. He has also recently joined the cast of the upcoming biblical film “Daniel: The Fiery Furnace” portraying King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon which will release in U.S. theaters nationwide in September. Elijah was born to an Egyptian/Israeli Jewish father and an Irish/Welsh Lutheran mother. He speaks about how his journey of faith unfolded while filming “The Chosen” last year and he was baptized on the set.Support the show

Ask Me Anything and takeaways of the day featuring Andy, Randy, Beau, and Abe.

The Enlightened Family Business Podcast Ep. 164: Unlocking Inner Potential: Tools for Sustainable Leadership with Shalin Desai   In the Enlightened Family Business Podcast, host Chris Yonker welcomes Shailendra (Shalin) Desai, an engineer and longtime Art of Living teacher who has spent 20 years teaching breathing techniques and meditation in 64 U.S. cities, including Fortune 500 companies. They discuss shifting leadership needs, employee disengagement, and generational differences, emphasizing that calm, regulated nervous systems support trust, connection, and better decision-making. Desai explains Art of Living's SKY Breath (Sudarshan Kriya) and cites research, including a Yale study comparing outcomes with mindfulness-based stress reduction and an emotional intelligence program, noting benefits like reduced cortisol and anxiety and increased purpose. He guides listeners through a short bellows breathing (Bhastrika) exercise and brief meditation, recommends starting the day with the practice, and frames breathwork as daily "mental hygiene."   ·       00:54 Meet Shalin Desai ·       04:25 Leadership Engagement Crisis ·       08:34 Generational Leadership Shift ·       11:02 Breathwork For Calm Leaders ·       17:42 Why Breath Before Meditation ·       21:22 Guided 12 Minute Practice ·       36:02 When To Use It ·       36:35 Real World Impact Stories ·       42:22 Mental Hygiene Mindset ·       43:20 Resources And Farewell   Websites ·       artofliving.org ·       chrisyonker.com     About Shalin Desai Shalin Desai is the Director of Programs for the Art of Living Foundation, one of the world's largest nonprofit organizations, whose initiatives have positively impacted over 500 million people across 180+ countries. With more than 25 years of experience teaching breathwork and meditation, Shalin is known for integrating ancient wisdom with modern leadership and well-being practices. He also serves as Chief Revenue Officer of Sri Sri Tattva, a global wellness brand offering natural and Ayurvedic products that promote holistic health through a blend of tradition and science. For over 15 years, Shalin has designed and delivered corporate leadership and wellness programs for organizations including Microsoft, Dell, Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, Salesforce, Eli Lilly and Company, and Merck & Co.. His work helps leaders and teams manage stress, build resilience, and cultivate mental clarity while reconnecting with a deeper sense of purpose. Personally trained by Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Shalin is among a select group chosen to train teachers of the Art of Living programs. Through his seminars and speaking engagements, he combines scientific insight with practical tools that help individuals and organizations unlock sustainable performance and well-being.He is also known for his Intuitive Life Scan, a breakthrough approach in which trained guides provide unbiased, highly accurate insights into an individual's unique situation. Using techniques that access the intuitive space—also called Absolute Intelligence—participants gain clarity and actionable guidance beyond what conventional knowledge can offer. A highly engaging speaker known for his relatable storytelling and humor, Shalin inspires audiences with practical techniques they can apply immediately to improve focus, leadership, and overall well-being. Shalin holds a degree in Supply Chain Management from the State University of New York and lives in Indianapolis with his wife and two children.

Send us Fan MailIt might not be obvious, but taking everything personally could be the thing holding you back from thriving in your business and life.If you would like to learn more about The Mothered Business Mastermind, click here. Want to download the 15 minute CEO Map? If you only have 15 minutes it will tell you exactly what to work on to move the needle in your business. Click here. Please say hi to me on Instagram @robyn.gooding or take a peek at my website for more info www.robyngooding.comClick here to book your call anytime! If you loved this episode, I'd appreciate if you could leave a review or share on your socials. It truly means the world to me and helps amplify this message for other mothers desiring a supportive business for motherhood.  Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The content shared reflects my personal experience and professional perspective as a coach.Any stories shared are anonymized or composite examples drawn from real experiences, with identifying details changed to protect privacy.This podcast does not constitute medical, legal, financial, or...

Why I Quit Social Media (Personally & Professionally) As a Former Social Media Manager and Life Coach This is not to guilt you to quitting social media. This is not to present myself as better than anyone else. This is my own personal experience: What a social media manager does Other uses I had for social media What I found it did to my brain How I took small steps towards truly quitting it What positive results were shown to me after doing this Enjoy this listen, take what you need & find encouraging and leave what you don't. Contact: helloannabarr@gmail.comwww.awkwardlyanna.com Philippians 4:7-8 NIV [7] And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. [8] Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Thank you for listening!

Author and autism advocate Carrie Cariello joins Morgan to share the deeply personal story behind her book Marriage: I Love You (for Now). What happened after their son was diagnosed with autism, how the diagnosis affected every member of their family, and why protecting their marriage became just as important as advocating for their child. Carrie opens up about grief, parenting differences, marriage counseling, raising a child with special needs into adulthood, and the lessons she and her husband have learned after 27 years together. This is the kind of advice parents or anyone wanting to have kids needs to hear!

Could a direct conversation with a prospect or tenant save your next lease from falling apart?In Episode 94 of I Own A Shopping Center Now What, Beth Azor explains why shopping center owners must remain personally involved in the most important parts of their business, even when they have leasing brokers and property managers handling day-to-day operations.Beth shares how direct conversations with hesitant prospects can reveal concerns that brokers may not uncover and create opportunities for flexible lease structures, including percentage rent and sales-based termination rights. She also explains how personal relationships with tenants can improve rent collection, prevent balances from becoming unmanageable, and reduce avoidable vacancies.The lesson is simple: delegate the work, but never delegate all responsibility for your tenants, prospects, and multimillion-dollar asset.

Leadership comes with an emotional cost. And turnover is one of the heaviest parts of the game. In this episode of The Level Up Podcast, Paul Alex breaks down how to stop taking employee turnover personally and start leading with clarity, maturity, and emotional control. Let's be real… People will leave. Top performers will move on. Ambitious operators will outgrow their roles. And if you take every resignation as a personal betrayal… You will burn yourself out. In this episode, you'll learn: Why your company is a vehicle, not a permanent destination for everyone How high-performance cultures naturally attract ambitious people Why turnover should push you to build stronger systems How emotional detachment helps you protect your peace and replace talent faster The truth is simple: People may come into your business for a season. But the mission continues. Your job is not to hold people hostage. Your job is to hold the standard. Build the culture. Train the operators. Document the process. And keep the machine moving no matter who leaves. High-level leaders do not collapse when someone exits. They wish them well. They protect the team. They activate the replacement plan. They keep driving the ship. Because when you stop fearing turnover… You build an organization that cannot be shaken. Protect your peace. Build the systems. Lead without ego. And keep leveling up. Your Network is your NETWORTH! Make sure to add me on all SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS: Instagram: https://jo.my/paulalex2024Facebook: https://jo.my/fbpaulalex2024YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGhDAD1JyGGzSQUPD9lc9HQLinkedIn: https://jo.my/inpaulalex2024 Looking for a secondary source of income or want to become an entrepreneur? Check out one of my companies below to see if we can help you: www.CashSwipe.com FREE Copy of my book “Blue to Digital Gold - The New American Dream”www.officialPaulAlex.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if your heart isn’t shut down to love at all? What if it’s being protected by something you can’t see? If you’re a midlife woman wondering why you can’t find love, the answer isn’t always about the wrong partner or bad timing. It may be an invisible heart wall. You might have an energetic protection set up that’s kept you emotionally safe for years, but is now the very thing keeping you lonely. You’ve read the books. Listened to the podcasts. Maybe even worked with an energy healer or therapist. And yet here you are, still single and wondering what’s not working. After 20 years of coaching midlife women, I’ve noticed the same pattern over and over. It’s rarely about a lack of options or bad luck. Most of the time, my clients had no idea the wall was even there. What a Heart Wall Actually Is Dr. Bradley Nelson, creator of the Emotion Code, first encountered this phenomenon while working on his wife. He perceived something like a wall surrounding her heart. It wasn’t physical, but energetic. Practitioner Robin Friedman later developed a guided meditation to help people find the wall and release it. I’ve used this method many times, with results that still surprise me. A heart wall forms unconsciously, over years, as a way to survive heartbreak and emotional disappointment. It’s not a flaw or proof you did something wrong. It’s a protective structure you created, and like most protection, it can overstay its welcome. How the Wall Forms in Midlife By midlife, most women have endured more than one heartbreak. A wall like this can build from one big heartbreak or from many smaller ones, layer by layer, from: Repeated disappointment that leaves you feeling like you have a “bad picker” A belief that your chance at love has already passed Subtle grief around aging, or the sense that time is running out Sheer exhaustion from the hoping-trying-disappointment cycle None of this means you failed at romance. A heart wall is simply what’s left over when love goes wrong and self-preservation kicks in. Whether you’ve dated a little or been through three divorces, the wall can show up the same way. It doesn’t scale with how much heartbreak you’ve had, only with how much you needed to protect yourself from it. The catch is you can’t selectively block pain and stay open to love at the same time. Protection and intimacy share the same doorway into your heart. Close it to one, and you close it to both. Signs Your Heart Wall May Be Activated You might be dealing with a heart wall if you notice yourself: Feeling emotionally guarded even when things are going well Consistently attracting partners who aren’t available Feeling disconnected or unmoved even when someone genuinely nice shows interest Saying “I want love” but resisting any action that would actually lead to it Putting off dating altogether, even though you say you want a relationship If a few of these sound familiar, that’s your signal you’ve been protecting yourself. Now the question is whether that protection still serves you. It’s worth pausing on that question, because it’s not a yes-or-no answer. The wall that protected you at 30 may not fit who you are in midlife. What felt necessary after one heartbreak might now be standing between you and a different kind of partner who wouldn’t cause that same type of hurt. Unfortunately, protection that was once accurate can become outdated without ever getting the update it requires. The Heart Wall Meditation: What It’s For (and What It Isn’t) This is the part I want to be really clear about. The goal of this process isn’t to rip the wall down. It’s to become conscious of it, and choose from there. Awareness gives you the opportunity to DECIDE what you want to do. In a relaxed, meditative state, you bring your awareness to your heart center and ask if a wall is present. If so, you ask to see it. People experience this differently. Some see brick or stone, others see glass, fog, wood, or something layered and mixed. I’ve even seen chains or a cage instead of a wall. There’s no one right image. From there, you simply ask if it’s safe to take the wall down now? Occasionally, the answer is no and that’s useful information. You can try again another time. When the answer is yes, you then choose how it comes down. Most people take it all down, but sometimes I’ve had to take a second pass at it. Whatever happens is exactly what’s supposed to happen in that moment. Some people feel immediate release. Others see the wall clearly but nothing shifts the first time. Neither outcome is wrong. This is a gentle process, not a one-time fix, and guided by your own inner wisdom. That’s what makes it so safe and simple to do. Release the Wall But Keep Discernment This is the piece people most often miss. Releasing a heart wall is not the same as throwing your heart wide open to anyone who shows interest. You still need to hold your standards. If someone lies once, doesn’t pursue you consistently, cancels more than once, or doesn’t keep their word, that’s vital information about your date’s potential. Don’t let your heart override those glaring red flags because you feel more open now. Your head and your heart are a stronger team than either one alone, and one without the other tends to lead right back to heartbreak. Taking the wall down means it’s time to date more consciously and be more open. Stay aware, true to your boundaries, and decide who can earn access to you. This approach is far better than defaulting to either total protection and being shut down or total openness to anyone who shows interest. This is really where the resistance tends to show up. You might ask yourself: What if I open up and get hurt again? What if I pick poorly again? What if I’m too old or it’s just too late? What if nothing changes? These are fair questions, and I won’t pretend to know exactly how your story unfolds. However, if the wall has come down, that’s a sign you’re ready to work with these questions instead of avoiding them. The wall did its job and you’re not erasing that. You’re upgrading it, replacing an automatic shutdown with a more conscious form of protection. That is your own clarity, judgment, and willingness to walk away when things aren’t right. After going through this powerful, yet gentle visualization, most women feel a release, or at least lighter and more open to possibilities. Personally, I’ve had amazing results. And I’ve taken lots of women through this over the years with wonderful results. I’m not saying they find love the next week, but they feel more at ease and comfortable with taking the steps to meet someone special. Experience It for Yourself If you’d like to be guided through this remarkable process rather than attempt it solo, I’m hosting a live 90-minute Heart Wall Meditation event: Wednesday, July 29th, from 10-11:30 am ET on Zoom There will be time afterward to talk about what came up and ask questions. It’s just $22, and there’s no replay, so it’s worth carving out the time to join live. This meditation isn’t only for romantic blocks, either. The process doesn’t mention love. You set your own personal intention for the meditation. Women have used it for business growth, friendships, creative resistance, spiritual growth, or anywhere something invisible seems to be in the way. Click the link to register now. The program is limited to 10 women. I’m Ready to Release My Heart Wall Key Takeaways A heart wall is a normal, protective response to past heartbreak, not a personal flaw You can’t selectively close your heart to pain while staying open to love; they share the same door The goal of the heart wall meditation is awareness and conscious choice Releasing the wall doesn’t mean abandoning discernment. Your boundaries still matter Change may happen instantly, gradually, or over multiple sessions and all of these are normal FAQ What is a heart wall? A heart wall is an unconscious energetic barrier that forms around the heart as protection after emotional pain, first identified by Dr. Bradley Nelson, creator of the Emotion Code. How do I know if I have a heart wall? Common signs include feeling emotionally guarded even in good circumstances, repeatedly attracting unavailable partners, feeling numb toward people who show genuine interest, and continually delaying efforts to date despite wanting a relationship. Does removing a heart wall mean I’ll immediately find love? No. Removing a heart wall doesn’t guarantee an instant relationship. What shifts first is usually how you feel, such as lighter, more open, and more willing to be seen. That shift is what makes new possibilities available. Can a heart wall meditation be used for things other than love? Yes. The same process can be applied to any area where you sense internal resistance, including business growth, friendships, or creative blocks. Do I have to do anything with the wall once I see it? No. You can simply become aware of it without removing it. Awareness itself is valuable, and you can choose to take further action whenever it feels right. Will taking down my heart wall make me less discerning about who I date? No. Releasing a heart wall doesn’t remove your judgment or standards — it removes an unconscious block. You still evaluate red flags, hold boundaries, and walk away from anyone who doesn’t earn your trust; you’re just no longer doing it from behind an automatic shutdown. { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [ { "@type": "Question", "name": "What is a heart wall?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "A heart wall is an unconscious energetic barrier that forms around the heart as protection after emotional pain, first identified by Dr. Bradley Nelson, creator of the Emotion Code." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "How do I know if I have a heart wall?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Common signs include feeling emotionally guarded even in good circumstances, repeatedly attracting unavailable partners, feeling numb toward people who show genuine interest, and continually delaying efforts to date despite wanting a relationship." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Does removing a heart wall mean I'll immediately find love?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "No. Removing a heart wall doesn't guarantee an instant relationship. What shifts first is usually how you feel: lighter, more open, and more willing to be seen. That shift is what makes new possibilities available." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Can a heart wall meditation be used for things other than love?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Yes. The same process can be applied to any area where you sense internal resistance, including business growth, friendships, or creative blocks." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Do I have to do anything with the wall once I see it?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "No. You can simply become aware of it without removing it. Awareness itself is valuable, and you can choose to take further action whenever it feels right." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Will taking down my heart wall make me less discerning about who I date?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "No. Releasing a heart wall doesn't remove your judgment or standards, it removes The post Why Can’t You Find Love In Midlife? It Might Be An Invisible Heart Wall appeared first on Intuitive Edge.

This episode is brought to you by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Boulay, the industry standard for Quality of Earnings, tax, and audit services, serving search fund entrepreneurs for 20+ years⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠*This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Oberle Risk Strategies⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: Insurance Broker and Insurance Due Diligence Provider for Search Funds and Other Small-to-Medium-Sized Businesses⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  * This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kilpatrick, a leading global law firm with a dedicated search fund team that works with searchers from inception, to acquisition, to exit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Click Here to Subscribe to the In The Trenches YouTube Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠*Since the first blog post that I wrote in April of 2021, I have been rather public with my opinion that nobody knows what it's like to be an entrepreneur or CEO unless you've been one. Personally, and professionally, we face both challenges and opportunities that few others can relate to. Though many understand the rewards of company leadership (things like compensation, decision making authority, and independence) few understand the sometimes-arduous journey that's required to both get there, and to stay there. This is why it can feel genuinely lonely at the top: In spite of their best efforts, our spouses, direct reports, and friends simply don't understand what it's really like. More accurately, they can't be expected to.The point of today's episode is to give the uninitiated a peak behind the curtains, and to provide but one example of what leadership really looks like at the ground level. My guest today, Rishi Sahel, is a great example of a CEO who has withstood more than his share of punches to the gut: As you'll hear in our discussion today, these punches included (but were not limited to) an acquisition of a manufacturing company in the middle of Covid when lockdown orders were in full effect, a post-covid supply chain crisis, Post-covid runaway inflation, a Lost warehouse, an attempt to buy their primary manufacturing facility from out underneath them, wire fraud, tariffs impacting a global supply chain and global customer base, and one unforgettable presentation to members of a local city council – all of which is about a million miles away from the comfortable confines of Bain, where Rishi spent many years prior to pursuing his dream of acquiring a small business. As you'll hear, despite all of these challenges, the company that he has built has enjoyed incredible growth and success. But hopefully better understanding the details of his journey will give you pause the next time you're tempted to get too enamoured with what seems to be an unambiguously positive headline. In presenting Rishi's story to you, I don't at all mean to suggest that leadership is all downside and no upside. Quite the contrary, in fact. Instead, I'm providing you with this dose of reality only because I assume you're much more familiar with the upsides of entrepreneurship and leadership, and much less familiar with the price that you're likely to have to pay in order to receive those benefits.

When a child screams, "I hate you," "You're the worst mom ever," or "I wish you weren't my parent," it can feel deeply personal. But in this episode of the Soaring Child Podcast, child and family therapist Ashley Gobeil explains that these explosive moments are often not signs of defiance, manipulation, or bad parenting. They are often signs of a dysregulated nervous system, emotional overwhelm, and a child who does not yet have the language or tools to express what is really going on inside. In this powerful conversation, Dana Kay and Ashley unpack what is really happening underneath intense ADHD-related meltdowns, why shame can keep both parents and children stuck in painful cycles, and how parents can respond in a way that calms the storm instead of feeding it. Ashley shares practical language parents can use in the moment, how to hold boundaries without escalating the situation, and why repair after a rupture is so important for building emotional regulation, connection, and long-term accountability. This episode is a compassionate reminder that parents do not have to get it perfect. They simply need to keep showing up, one moment at a time. LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW Ashley Gobeil's Website: https://ashleychildtherapies.com.au Ashley Gobeil on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healing_with_ashley Ashley Gobeil on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ashley.gobeil.50 ADHD Thrive Institute: https://adhdthriveinstitute.com/ ADHD Thrive Jumpstart 4 Parenting: https://info.adhdthriveinstitute.com/parentingadhd Free ADHD Masterclass: https://bit.ly/3GAbFQl KEY TAKEAWAYS [03:50] Hurtful words during meltdowns are usually communication, not defiance. When a child says things like "I hate you," Ashley explains that there is usually something much deeper happening underneath the behavior. [04:44] In the moment, it is not deliberate disrespect. Ashley emphasizes that these moments are often intense overwhelm, not a conscious choice to attack the parent. [05:42] Kids with ADHD often have very few tools available when dysregulated. When their nervous system is overwhelmed, the tools they may have learned often "go out the window." [06:39] Their nervous system can experience ordinary requests as threats. Even something as simple as being asked to put shoes away can trigger fight, flight, or freeze when a child is already overwhelmed. [07:35] "I hate you" may really mean "I feel out of control." Ashley explains that hurtful words often point to feelings like fear, shame, grief, lack of control, or not feeling understood. [09:15] Parents can shift their response by changing the lens. Instead of seeing the child as disrespectful or defiant, parents can view the behavior as a window into distress. [10:28] Shame can create a painful loop for both parent and child. The child may feel ashamed after losing control, and the parent may spiral into thoughts like "Have I failed?" or "What am I doing wrong?" [15:44] The parent's internal response comes first. Ashley encourages parents to remind themselves: "My child is not giving me a hard time. They're having a hard time." [17:35] Naming the feeling can help deescalate the moment. Parents can say things like, "You're really angry with me right now," or "Something really big must have happened for you to say that." [22:43] Repair is essential, and it is never too late. Ashley explains that repair after rupture helps rebuild connection, reduce shame, and teach emotional accountability over time. MEMORABLE MOMENTS "Have you ever had one of those moments where your child looks straight at you and says, I hate you. You're the worst mom ever. I wish you weren't my parent." "children's behaviors are a form of communication." "it is not a deliberate defiant moment or a deliberate disrespect." "they just go straight into the survival nervous system response." "There's just like tons of stuff happening at once and like their nervous system's on fire." "I feel really out of control. I feel like I don't get to make choice. I don't feel understood." "So so many of them actually feel terrible by themselves." "every single child has this deep innate desire to have a positive, loving relationship with their parent." "These are just words. This is not an emergency. This is not a reflection of my parenting." "It is never too late to go back and have a repair conversation." DANA KAY RESOURCES

Mean comments sting. Anyone who tells you to "just ignore the haters" is skipping the hard part. In this episode, Ginny Priem shares what happened when a podcast episode she guested on hit 156,000+ views on YouTube and the comment section turned cruel, and exactly how she handled it.You'll learn how to deal with internet trolls, negative comments, and online criticism without taking it personally, why cruel comments say everything about the person writing them and nothing about you, and how to run online hate through the UNSUBSCRIBE™ Filter: BLOCK, MUTE, SWAP, and MANAGE.In this episode:The real reason your brain takes mean comments personally (especially after narcissistic abuse or toxic relationships)When to block someone and why it's a boundary, not a weaknessHow to stop replaying a cruel comment in your headThe question swap that changes how every troll comment landsA comment-reading protocol that protects your peace as your platform growsWhy more exposure always means more criticism, and why that's actually a good signGinny Priem is a keynote speaker, a #1 bestselling author of, Master Certified Coach, and TEDx speaker recognized as one of the Best Keynote Speakers in Minneapolis.Work with Ginny 1:1: BOOK HEREBook Ginny to speak: FIND OUT HOW GINNY CAN HELP IN 90 SECONDSSPONSORSGet 15% of SPOOGE sun protection at SPOOGE.CO with code GINNY15ine+ nutrition: Save 15% on your order of Super Greens, Collagen, Sleep and more with code GIN15 at inenutrition.comIf this episode helped you, follow the show, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

What happens to your creativity when you're in pain or sick, and can you ever get it back? How can you find and sharpen your author voice? J. Daniel Sawyer talks about voice mastery, writing with chronic pain, and building an eclectic author business. In the intro, leaning into your Strengths and deciding what you want to achieve by the end of the year; and Bones of the Deep by J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Writing fiction through chronic pain and re-emerging into health after surgery How your physical health shapes (and darkens) your fiction Rebooting an author business around a weekly Substack column What author voice really is, and why it's fundamentally about sound The building blocks of voice: functional vocabulary, dialect, and musicality The “crossing the line twice” trick for hearing your own voice objectively You can find Dan at JDsawyer.net or on Substack. Transcript of the interview with J. Daniel Sawyer Jo: J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers. So welcome back to the show, Dan. Dan: Hello, Joanna. It's good to be back. Jo: Goodness me, you have been on the podcast a few times, but actually, the last time was April 2017, which is crazy. It's nine years ago. When I saw your book, I was like, “I can't believe we haven't talked for that long.” For anyone who doesn't know you, tell us a bit more about— What does your creative and author business look like these days? Dan: Oh, well, these days it's in a state of recovery because it basically ground to a halt while I was dying a few years ago. It turned out I had an organ disease from the time I was a kid that I didn't know about, and it just progressively got worse and worse, putting me in more and more pain. I hit a point around about 2020 or so where I was in so much pain that I couldn't write fiction. I continued to write nonfiction, but when you're carrying around a lot of physical pain, there comes a point where so much of your brain's activity goes into coping with it that you actually lose the ability to model other people's emotional states—or at least well enough to write fiction. So I was very frustrated, and I was despairing that I was ever going to be a novelist again. Then suddenly, what I was sick with went acute. I went to the emergency room, and they're like, “Oh, if you don't have surgery in the next 24 hours, you're going to die.” So I went and got surgery, and there was one bed in the whole state. There was a three-hour drive to get to the one that was available in the time window. I get there. They wheel me into the OR. I wake up afterwards, and I realise that I'm not in pain, and that I had never felt that before in my adult life. Jo: Wow. Dan: Just the walls of my whole reality came caving in. Two weeks later, I was back up and working, and since then I've been slowly reacquiring my ability to write fiction. So now I've got four novels going again, like I used to have going all the time, as well as doing a weekly column and all sorts of other stuff. Jo: I think a lot of people will be interested in this. A lot of writers have chronic pain issues or chronic health issues, and yours sounds like it was a sort of down, down, down, down—and then more of a sudden up. Maybe just talk a bit more, because I feel like a lot of the time people are too hard on themselves about, “Oh my goodness, if I can't write fiction, is it the end of everything?” So how did you adapt to that, with the mental health aspect of dealing with that change in circumstance? Dan: Well, it was happening so gradually, and it happened at the same time that a whole bunch of other weirdly stressful things happened, like COVID and a couple of family emergencies that derailed my whole life for a couple of years. I assumed it was just really bad stress that would pass with time. So I had the despairing feeling, because when you write fiction, it tends to occupy a central place in your self-concept. I'd also been through very tough times before, so I was like, “Well, got through that then, maybe I'll get through this now.” I just made sure to keep writing something, because at least you keep the discipline of the words flowing. There was still thought going on, so I would have ideas for novels and write them down. There were good days and bad days. Occasionally I would sit down and be like, “I feel like fiction today,” and I would write a couple thousand words, and then it would be 10 months before I could do that again. When you work with your mind, it is really easy to develop or sink into the delusion that your mind is not your body. Now, if you're paralysed or you're missing limbs, you can still write—but your mind and your body are a single system, and eventually, if something terrible is wrong with your body, it's going to affect your cognition, your emotive abilities, and all the things that we depend on for creativity. That doesn't necessarily mean that if you're sick or injured, or you've got chronic health problems from birth, that you can't write. It just means that it really is one of the factors that goes into shaping your experience of the world, that goes into shaping the way you process things and they come out on paper. When there's a massive change in your health, it's going to show up in your fiction somehow. If your health goes way down, especially if you get into a lot of pain or you have a terminal illness, your fiction's going to get darker. One of the reasons—I discovered this after I got my surgery—one of the reasons is that the sense of impending doom is actually a medical symptom of organ death. Jo: Well, don't say that to a dark writer like me. I have a sense of impending doom the entire time. Dan: Well, there's a cognitive sense of impending doom that you get if you're modelling systems and you see how things can go wrong. But the sense that you feel the claws of demons grasping at your heart all the time—that can be a medical symptom. So pay attention to that. I didn't know that until afterwards, or I'd have gotten looked at a lot sooner. Jo: That is really interesting. You mentioned there you are reacquiring the ability to write fiction, or that's what you've been focusing on. You also talked about having to reboot the business. So what are some of the concrete things you're doing to rebuild? Dan: Well, the first thing I did is I allowed myself to get talked into doing a weekly Substack column a couple of years ago, and that's worked out really well. Pay is pretty decent. I've been posting most everything for free except for some previews of upcoming books, but I'm now learning the art of paywalling, so that also helps. Getting paid for the weekly column is quite nice, and a side effect is that it does drive people occasionally to the fiction, even though I'm writing nonfiction. It more frequently drives people to the nonfiction books, but it gives me a good place to announce new releases, to promote book bundles, Kickstarters, and all that sort of thing. It's a very good place for that because the people who are subscribing there—especially the people who are subscribing and supporting—are interested enough in what I'm saying that they want my email every week. So it's a good filtering mechanism for building the email list as well. Jo: You used to do a lot of audio. That's how we connected way back, like 17 years ago, I think, when we first connected. So are you still doing a lot of audio? Dan: I am not at the moment. It's not because of a decision to drop the audio. It's because I am now building my house, and I don't have a place that's quiet enough to record dependably. I'm living in a little RV at the moment while I build the house. In the deep winter, everything is quiet enough in the forest to record some things, and so I do audiobooks for clients, and I work on audiobooks of my own that are coming out. It's not quiet enough to podcast, and it's not quiet enough to be recording any other time than when the whole world is asleep. Hopefully by next year I will have the recording studio building built, and then I'll be back at it. Because boy, I miss it. Jo: I know. So you mentioned there bundles and Kickstarters and things, and we reconnected because I bought a StoryBundle, and your new book, The Pitch-Perfect Author, was in the StoryBundle, which was part of why I bought it anyway. So let's get into the book and what's useful. Let's start with— What is author voice anyway, and why is it important? Dan: Author voice. Everything about the way that you write is part of your author voice. The themes that you gravitate to, the way that you turn a phrase, the way that you tell a joke, the way that you handle dramatic tension. When all of that combines, it creates in the reader's mind an emotional fingerprint, a gestalt that says, “This is a Joanna Penn book. This is a Dan Sawyer book,” or whoever. When you bring the focus down further, author voice is fundamentally an auditory phenomenon. You can see this if you look at the careers of writers who had major worldview shifts during their career, or who shifted genres. If you read an Isaac Asimov mystery, and you read Asimov's Guide to the Bible, and you read Isaac Asimov's The Robots of Dawn, they're all Asimov. You can hear him talking to you through all of those different venues. So author voice is not a genre thing. It's not dependent on content. It has to do fundamentally with how your brain processes language and how it comes out of your mouth. That, in turn, is based on patterns that were laid down when you were pre-verbal as an infant. You learned language by mapping the music of the conversations around you, and then gradually learning that the sing-song you were hearing corresponded to ideas. That's how the brain bootstraps itself into language. So when you start writing, just like when you start speaking, you wind up imitating a lot—unconsciously—the people you've read and heard, because that's how you develop your voice. There comes a point at which all the various influences on you, and who you are, and how they pass through you, crystallises into something definite. By the time you're a moderately competent writer, and you're finishing novels and short stories well, your author voice is pretty well established. But that doesn't mean it's sharp, because most people don't actually concentrate on learning to hear their author voice, so they can't tell when it's off. This is why new writers who revise a lot tend to revise their voice right out. When they write, they're using language as feels right to them, but when they read, they're reading it like an English teacher, or through the lens of someone who has very definite ideas about how grammar should work in all circumstances. So they tend to smooth the quirkiness out of their voice, and what you get is something flat. It doesn't feel alive. It may convey information, it may tell a good story, but it doesn't feel like you're entering something that's living. Jo: I think this is so difficult, especially for people who are new to writing. Because I remember very much spending the first few years going along to writers' conferences, and there were always sessions on “you must find your writer's voice.” You must find your author's voice, and we publish books because of the voice, and all this. It was very, very confusing to me. As you say, it has to emerge somehow, and yet that emergence seems to be very hard to accept. So what are some of the ways we can perhaps think about voice? You mentioned there some patterns. You talk about music. So what are some of those angles? In the book, you have different chapters on all of these things, but maybe just talk more about some of the elements. Dan: The first and most obvious is functional vocabulary. This is not the number of words that you know. These are the words that you can reach for in the moment. You can expand your functional vocabulary by deliberately using more words—burnish your inner thesaurus. The greater your functional vocabulary is, the more your personality is going to come out through your voice. When you've got more options to do something that's just the way that you want to do it, the closer it's going to be to the way you want to do it. So there's functional vocabulary. There's your native dialect and accent. You, being British, have a different set of preferred terms for everything than I, being a West Coast American, do. One of the great differences that's always visible between an English writer and an American writer is that you guys have a different way of speaking. When you speak of a difference between one thing and another, you talk about how this car is different to that car. And Americans say this car is different from that car. It always marks out a British writer versus an American writer. There are 100 little things like that. They happen not just between major countries, but within regions in every country. You could tell on paper the difference between someone from Yorkshire and someone from London, just as I can tell on paper the difference between someone from the West Coast and someone from Mississippi. Even if they're highly educated, the idiom, the preferred turns of phrase, the preferred imagery—all of that is going to be a little bit different, and it conveys that regionality. There's also the musicality of the language. This is the actual rhythm of the words with which you speak. When you learn to analyse poetry or to write poetry, you learn something called scansion. How a poem scans is—what are the beats of the lines, how are the beats of the lines related to each other, and how does the rhyme move in and out of that? A Shakespearean sonnet, or a sonnet from the Elizabethan era, has a specific metre, a specific number of lines, and a specific rhyme scheme, and the metre is iambic pentameter. An iamb is “bum-bum,” if I remember right. It's the rhythm of the heartbeat. It's “bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum.” And you can hear it in the name of the metre, the iamb. The iambic pentameter is where the stressed syllable is the second syllable and the unstressed syllable is the first syllable. All of Shakespeare is written in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. The pentameter is five feet per line, so one iamb is “bum-bum”—that's one foot—and five of those makes one line of Shakespeare. We all have inherent rhythms like that in the way we naturally speak, but we can also tweak those rhythms on purpose to achieve dramatic effect. The iamb has the sound of the heartbeat. It's a very reassuring speech rhythm. The trochaic is a much more rapid one—it mirrors the rhythm of a rapidly beating heart. So you see this a lot in Edgar Allan Poe, especially in his frenetic poems like “The Bells,” how they jingle, jingle, jangle on a hoary moonless night. There's a rushing sound to that metre. You're going to find that you will automatically do a little bit of this, just the way that you'll automatically have picked up the convention of breaking sentences up into shorter lengths during really exciting or suspense-filled parts of your book. Once you know what it is, you can start to use it on purpose. Quite a lot of developing your voice is learning to recognise these latent, existing qualities in the way you communicate, and sharpening them up and making them conscious tools that you can pull in whenever you want. Jo: On the one hand, there are a lot of technical words there that are really interesting, and maybe poets know a lot more of those words than most other writers. The book is really interesting in that way—kind of learning about these different things. I guess I want to reassure people as well that, as you said, some of this can be unconscious. So often when I'm self-editing and I'm reading a sentence to myself, there's something that doesn't feel right about it. So I will rewrite that sentence so that it feels right. Sometimes we do something that might be grammatically less correct, but it sounds better than it did before. So many of these things we almost know instinctively, just from reading so much. Dan: Oh, yes. From reading so much and talking so much, and again, from the way you acquire language. That gives you a template in your head of what sounds right. Language is inherently musical. So if you've ever listened to a song—especially one that wasn't recorded by a professional, but someone singing in a church choir, or your kid practising for a recital, or you practising for a recital—you know that feeling that happens when someone hits a wrong note. There's that little wince down in the core of your being, and then the song carries on and you forget about it, unless there are too many of them, in which case you just sort of cower and ooze out of the room. That feeling of “Ooh, someone just hit a wrong note”—that's exactly the feeling you get when you're reading through to edit your work and something is off in the technical layer of your voice. You should pay attention to that and rewrite so that it feels good, or feels great, which is even better. You've got the opposite of the wince, which is that sense of rapture and joy if you're listening to a professional musician and they go on an amazing guitar solo, or a flautist does an incredible trill that just sends shivers up your spine. That sense of excitement and joy—that's what happens when you're reading and the author does something with the language that makes the whole piece fly. So you want to be paying attention for those too, because those you'll commit without intending to. When you're reading back and you find those, you want to make note of them, because that's you seeing where you are at your strongest with your voice. By learning both where you're making mistakes and where you're being brilliant—just like with anything else—you can start to advance towards being brilliant more often and making fewer mistakes. Jo: Then there's a difficulty around where the line is, especially when you're an early-stage writer. Many people work with editors, and you mentioned the problem of revising your voice away, and that may also happen if you're working with an editor. Like you said, as a Brit, I work with an American editor, Kristen, and she's excellent. She's very, very good at letting my voice be my voice, and then fixing things that make it better. But a lot of people don't feel that way about their editors. So how can people understand where those lines are between being well-edited and becoming a better writer, and then needing to hold the line on their voice? Dan: It really helps if you understand where you are weak. Why are you hiring the editor in the first place? I'm a big believer in the utility of having other eyes on the manuscript, but it's really important to know what you're looking for from them. You and I have both been to the Oregon Coast writing seminars, back when that was a thing. Jo: Mm. Dan: One of the things they would talk about with editors is when you've got a story editor or a beta reader who says, “Hey, something here didn't work in the story for me,” you usually don't want to look at that point. You want to trace back from that point to figure out where you set the wrong expectation. Any editorial feedback is going to have a gap between what they notice and what really needs to be fixed. As a writer, learning to interpret the feedback properly so that you actually elevate the material, instead of interpreting the feedback like you're trying to do customer service for an employer, where you just want to make the customer happy, is a really important skill to develop. That's regardless of whether the feedback has to do with voice or plot or characterisation or whatever. Some editors are really good at back-tracing and actually spotting the real problem. Editors make their money, or get hired, or get picked by you to volunteer, because they're good at being an audience—not because they're good at being a writer. So learning to interpret the editorial feedback is a really important step in that maturation journey. Jo: Yes. I think “maturation journey” is a good way to put it. Personally, I think it was around book five when I really felt, “Okay, now I see what my voice actually is.” Like, it had to be five novels, and then I was like, “Okay, now I know.” I just didn't get it before then, and then finally—I don't know—a penny dropped or something. Maybe I grew into it, grew more confident, that kind of thing. Dan: Yes, and that's actually about right. If you look at writers with a big catalogue, five books in is usually where they start really sounding like them. So that's a pretty normal maturation curve. There is a way to speed it up, which is to read your books aloud—or even better, make audiobooks and then listen to them a thousand times. Listen to them until you are sick of them, and then listen to them until you start to like them again. Jo: That's a lot. Dan: It's a lot, but there's a really specific neurological mechanism at work. You're familiar with the comedy term “crossing the line twice,” right? Jo: Not really. Dan: Okay. Have you seen the Monty Python Spam sketch? Jo: Yes. Dan: Okay. So for those of you who have not seen this—in the Monty Python Spam sketch, there's a couple, they're in a diner, and everything on the menu has spam in it. They say the word “spam” so much that you just want to shoot your television. But they keep it up, and then suddenly, at some point—it's a different point for everybody watching—they keep it going on long enough that everybody gets there. At some point, the word “spam” itself becomes hilarious, and you can't stop laughing, and you don't know why, because it shouldn't work, but goddammit it really does. It's so funny that we named junk email “spam” after this sketch, because it's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want, but it keeps showing up anyway. That's crossing the line twice. What's going on is that your brain is getting accustomed to a sound. It has extracted all of the meaning it can, and so it's doing what it does with all sensory input. When it thinks it's got it mapped out, it's trying to filter it. Unless you are going to sit and concentrate on it, you can't feel the texture of the fabric of your clothing on the back of your legs, because your brain—despite the fact that it's getting that input all the time—is filtering that out, because it needs you to have your resources free for thinking. When you experience something over and over and over, no matter what it is or how complex it is, the brain habituates like that. But if that signal refuses to be filtered, and the input keeps coming, and it keeps getting more intense, or it stays persistent and it's too complex to filter easily, your brain starts to think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn't be filtering this out.” “Maybe there's meaning here that's important for my survival that I hadn't extracted.” And so suddenly it starts searching for meaning to associate with that sensation—and that's the point at which the joke becomes funny again, or you start to experience your voice as if it's somebody else's. When you begin to experience your author voice as if it's somebody else's, you can hear it as a distinct, objective style, rather than just as an echo of the voices that are in your head. That's why music students practise over and over and over, even on a piece they know cold. They're doing the same trick that I'm advocating with listening to your audiobooks until you're not sick of them anymore. Jo: I mean, I think that's terrifying, because I just don't want to listen to my books over and over again. I think it's very interesting that you think it could shortcut that voice process. Staying on audio—since we last spoke, I have done a lot of my own audiobook narration, mainly for nonfiction, but also my short stories. I haven't done my full-length fiction. What I discovered in doing this is that what read fine to me when I was self-editing my own work on the page—and obviously I'm hearing it in my head—when I perform the audiobook, I actually have to edit things again. So what are some of your tips for how we can bridge that gap? Because that's kind of strange. Dan: So what's happening is that there's a much wider latitude of things that work on the page than what works with voice. The reason is that with voice, all of those rhythmic elements I was talking about before are really pronounced, as well as all the sensual elements. Basically every word and sound has a mouth shape. The mouth shape affects the emotional valence of the sound. Stuff that's unpleasant tends to have a really close-in feel—I'm trying to scrunch my face up—where you would grit your teeth and scrunch up your face if something is unpleasant. And if something is really pleasant, it tends to have a rounded feel, and our language reflects it. In fact, all languages reflect this, because language is a physical thing that's based on the sensuality of the body. So, like, in all cultures “mama” is the word for mother that babies first say, regardless of what it is. It has a round feel, because babies associate their mother with roundness. A lot of language is built up that way, from baseline sensual cues. When you're working just in text, that aspect is not nearly as obvious to you. When you're reading, it's not as obvious to you. It's still at play, but when you go to do something verbally, and you go to read a text, all of those sensual cues come in at the same time. Then the rhythm comes in hard, and you suddenly realise that—hey, that conveys the thought, but it doesn't feel right. So you wind up retooling a bit. There's also occasionally tongue twisters, which you have to work your way around. So that's why that happens. Jo: Then I guess another thing—I hear quite often, people say, “Oh, I don't like my voice.” And they mean, “I don't like speaking out loud. I don't want to be on video. I don't want to be on audio.” I wonder— Does that sort of resistance potentially affect their writing voice? Are there ways people can get over that feeling? Dan: Yes, for sure. There are a few things that go into that. One is basic self-loathing. A lot of people carry it around. Most people learn to make a decent life even though they kind of secretly suspect that they're not worth anything, or they secretly find themselves revolting. That kind of thing you can't really fix with exercises. That's something you fix with — Jo: Therapy. Dan: Psychological work, or spiritual work, or that kind of thing. Jo: Yes. Dan: But the not liking the sound of your own voice—that's easy to fix. Here's why it happens. When you're listening to your voice as you speak, the bones in your head are amplifying the bass signals and attenuating the treble. It's kind of like if you were to shout in another room and your spouse hears you, but they can't make out the consonants. That's because all the consonants are being filtered out by the wall in between, but the bass is being resonated through. The same thing happens in your head. So when you get on a microphone—especially if it's an accurate microphone—you're suddenly hearing what everybody else hears when you speak, and it sounds thin and tinny and unpleasant compared to what you're used to hearing. The really easy way to get around this is to get a microphone that is tuned for singers. The condenser mic that I have isn't made anymore, so I can't really recommend a good condenser mic. If you're on a dynamic mic, the Shure SM58 is the one to use. I podcasted with that for years before I could afford an upgrade. It is tuned for singers to sound as good as possible without any other help from the sound engineer, which means that the baseline sound for that microphone is what you're hearing in your head. If you use the right equipment, you get around that problem really quickly, to the extent that you can technically. Then after that, it's just a matter of crossing the line twice. You listen to yourself enough that you stop hearing, “Oh my God, I'm talking,” and you start hearing, “Oh, that voice is making this sound.” And once you hear, “Oh, it's that voice making this sound,” you don't have that problem anymore, ever again. Jo: Oh, good. Well, hopefully that's fixed it for people. And of course, there are lots of brilliant things in the book, The Pitch-Perfect Author. Before we finish up, I did want to return to your Substack. I was having a look at it, and it includes some really interesting things. Like, you're doing this metalwork, which is really cool. It felt coherent to me, because I know you, and you're a polymath, and you're interested in so many things. So your Substack kind of stood out to me as quite eclectic, compared to, say, other writers who are going on Substack to try and sell specific books. So is this a deliberate marketing choice, or is it just be an interesting person and you will attract people who are interested more generally? Dan: Well, I suppose it kind of winds up being the latter, but basically it's that I get bored easily. If I'm going to be writing every week, I need to stay interested in it. One of the books I wrote when I was really sick—that's not out on the market yet, but it is serialised on Substack—is a guide to self-education. It'll be coming out later this year on the general market. It's called Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible. I talk in there quite a bit about the illusion of discrete areas of knowledge. There is a level of learning at which the silos of information start to collapse together. Woodworking and writing have a lot to do with each other. A lot of the terminology we use in writing is pulled from the trades—especially woodworking, and metalworking, and gunsmithing. As you begin to spot these connections between different areas of knowledge, it becomes really easy to slide between them for your hobbies, for your writing, for just your personal gratification. As I've gotten older—and also as I've gotten access to a little space that's not contained within a teeny little apartment—I have just gone with it. As I've discovered, “Hey, this thing is tangentially connected to this other thing over here,” I'm like, “Oh, well, I'm going to go over to this other thing and see what's over there.” It's tremendously creatively fertile. Since a lot of the things that our language connects us to have to do with trades and crafts and nature, it gets you out in the open air, which is really good for any writer—because sitting at a desk all day is worse than smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years. Jo: I love that. Dan: My curiosity is the chief feature of my Substack, and it kind of works for me as a writer, because it's also one of the chief features of my fiction. Jo: Me too, and I was actually quite inspired by your Substack. Because I think this happens when you've been in the writing industry long enough. Substack has become the sort of trendy place to be now. People are going into specific niches, very much like blogging did, and then podcasting had to be on a specific niche, and all this. Of course, we know logically that, marketing a book—you know, if you had just a Substack on voice mastery, then for sure that would be a better marketing vehicle. But, as you say, how boring. Dan: Well, it depends a lot on what you're trying to cultivate as an author. If you're a single-genre author with a very narrow niche, and you're really happy writing that kind of stuff, then a narrow column supporting it is not a bad idea. Especially when you serialise old novels, once you've got 20 or 30 under your belt. That's not a bad idea, because you're trying to attract people who want one thing and want it regularly. If I were to get a reader who wants one thing and wants it regularly, and finds it, say, in my Clarke Lantham mysteries, and then they hop over to my science fiction—oh boy, are they going to be pissed. If they're not there for my voice, and they're just there for the way I write a mystery plot, then not only are they not going to get what they're looking for—but they're going to start to doubt whether they can trust that they're going to get what they're looking for in my next mystery. Whereas if they're coming to me through something where the multiplicity of what I'm doing is on display—whether that's this Substack, or whether that's what I used to do on The Every Day Novelist when I was podcasting that, or whether it's what I did with all the after-shows on my fiction podcast when I was doing that—then they kind of know what they're in for. The people who stick with me are more likely to be people who are in it for the experience of my voice. And for my bibliography, that's what I've got to offer, because I'm all over the place in terms of genre and subject matter. Jo: Yes, which is why I find you interesting. Dan: Oh, why thank you. Jo: So where can people find you and your books online? Dan: Well, you can find pretty much everything at JDsawyer.net. I've got the weekly column at jdanielsawyer.substack.com. At jdsawyer.net there's a page with all of my podcasts on it, and there's also a store with all of my books on it. Of course, everything is also available on Amazon and just about everywhere that the distributors take you. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was great. Dan: Thank you, Joanna. It was great to talk to you again.The post Author Voice Mastery, And Rebooting an Author Business With J. Daniel Sawyer first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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