Podcasts about Pinnacle

Today's practice is about celebrating your progress and integrating everything you've learned. It is a testament to the quiet revolution you are creating within. By consciously layering these techniques, you are building a robust and personal practice, a tool that will be uniquely yours to draw upon whenever you need it. WELCOME TO THIS WEEK'S SERIES: "THE QUIET REVOLUTION: Mastering What You Can Control" Welcome to The Quiet Revolution, a week guiding you with empowering, intriguing, and action-oriented insight and meditations. Your focus this week is on a psychological benefit: gaining control and creating deep, lasting change in your life. If you are driven by personal growth and self-improvement, you will discover ways to not only feel better but also get better at managing your life. Your "revolution" is about creating a profound, personal shift. Your "Mastery" provides you with daily training grounds to cultivate practical skills that can be applied to your daily life. This is day 6 of a 7-day meditation series, "The Quiet Revolution: Mastering What You Control," episodes 3374-3380. YOUR WEEKLY CHALLENGE The Master's Moment Quest: At the end of the day, take a few minutes to write down three moments where you felt truly in control. Celebrate your quiet revolution and all the mastery you've cultivated. YOUR MEDITATION JOURNEY DURING THIS WEEK'S SERIES Day 1:   Visualization to Consciously Choose Your Thoughts Day 2:  Affirmation: "I build my life on my own terms." Day 3:  Mastery Breath Day 4:  Shuni mudra for patience and discipline Day 5:  Second chakra to birth new opportunities Day 6:  Flow meditation combining the week's techniques Day 7:  Weekly review meditation and closure SHARE YOUR MEDITATION JOURNEY WITH YOUR FELLOW MEDITATORS Let's connect and inspire each other! Please share a little about how meditation has helped you by reaching out to me at Mary@SipandOm.com or better yet -- direct message me on https://www.instagram.com/sip.and.om. We'd love to hear about your meditation ritual!  WAYS TO SUPPORT THE DAILY MEDITATION PODCAST SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss a single episode. Consistency is the KEY to a successful meditation ritual. SHARE the podcast with someone who could use a little extra support. I'd be honored if you left me a podcast review. If you do, please email me at Mary@sipandom.com and let me know a little about yourself and how meditation has helped you. I'd love to share your journey to inspire fellow meditators on the podcast! All meditations are created by Mary Meckley and are her original content. Please request permission to use any of Mary's content by sending an email to Mary@sipandom.com. FOR DAILY EXTRA SUPPORT OUTSIDE THE PODCAST Each day's meditation techniques are shared at: sip.and.om Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sip.and.om/ sip and om Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SipandOm/ SIP AND OM MEDITATION APP Looking for a little more support? If you're ready for a more in-depth meditation experience, allow Mary to guide you in daily 30-minute guided meditations on the Sip and Om meditation app. Give it a whirl for 7-days free! Receive access to 2,000+ 30-minute guided meditations customized around a weekly theme to help you manage emotions. Receive a Clarity Journal and a Slow Down Guide customized for each weekly theme.  2-Week's Free Access on iOS https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sip-and-om/id1216664612?platform=iphone&preserveScrollPosition=true#platform/iphone All meditations are created by Mary Meckley and are her original content. Please request permission to use any of Mary's content by sending an email to Mary@sipandom.com.Let go of repetitive negative thoughts. The beach waves were composed by Mike Koenig. Music composed by Christopher Lloyd Clark licensed by RoyaltyFreeMusic.com, and also by musician Greg Keller.

Matt Forbeck is all that and so much more. He grew up in Wisconsin as what he describes as a wimpy kid, too short and not overly healthy. He took to gaming at a pretty early age and has grown to be a game creator, author and award-winning storyteller.   Matt has been designing games now for over 35 years. He tells us how he believes that many of the most successful games today have stories to tell, and he loves to create some of the most successful ones. What I find most intriguing about Matt is that he clearly is absolutely totally happy in his work. For most of Matt's career he has worked for himself and continues today to be an independent freelancer.   Matt and his wife have five children, including a set of quadruplets. The quadruplets are 23 and Matt's oldest son is 28 and is following in his father's footsteps.   During our conversation we touch on interesting topics such as trust and work ethics. I know you will find this episode stimulating and worth listening to more than once.     About the Guest:   Matt Forbeck is an award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author and game designer of over thirty-five novels and countless other books and games. His projects have won a Peabody Award, a Scribe Award, and numerous ENnies and Origins Awards. He is also the president of the Diana Jones Award Foundation, which celebrates excellence in gaming.    Matt has made a living full-time on games and fiction since 1989, when he graduated from the Residential College at the University of Michigan with a degree in Creative Writing. With the exception of a four-year stint as the president of Pinnacle Entertainment Group and a year and a half as the director of the adventure games division of Human Head Studios, he has spent his career as an independent freelancer.   Matt has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games, miniatures games, board games, interactive fiction, interactive audiobooks, games for museum installations, and logic systems for toys. He has directed voiceover work and written short fiction, comic books, novels, screenplays, and video game scripts and stories. His work has been translated into at least 15 languages.   His latest work includes the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game Core Rulebook, the Spider-Verse Expansion, Monster Academy (novels and board game), the Shotguns & Sorcery 5E Sourcebook based on his novels, and the Minecraft: Roll for Adventure game books. He is the father of five, including a set of quadruplets. He lives in Beloit, Wisconsin, with his wife and a rotating cast of college-age children. For more about him and his work, visit Forbeck.com.   Ways to connect with Matt:   Twitter: https://twitter.com/mforbeck Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/forbeck Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/forbeck.com Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mforbeck Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mforbeck/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/forbeck/ Website: https://www.forbeck.com/     About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset today. We get to play games. Well, not really, but we'll try. Our guest is Matt Forbeck, who is an award winning author. He is a game designer and all sorts of other kinds of things that I'm sure he's going to tell us about, and we actually just before we started the the episode, we were talking about how one might explore making more games accessible for blind and persons with other disabilities. It's, it's a challenge, and there, there are a lot of tricks. But anyway, Matt, I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're here.   Matt Forbeck ** 02:02 Well, thank you, Michael for inviting me and having me on. I appreciate it.   Speaker 1 ** 02:06 I think we're going to have a lot of fun, and I think it'll work out really well. I'm I am sure of that. So why don't we start just out of curiosity, why don't you tell us kind of about the early Matt, growing up?   Matt Forbeck ** 02:18 Uh, well, I grew up. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I grew up in a little town called Beloit, Wisconsin, which actually live in now, despite having moved away for 13 years at one point, and I had terrible asthma, I was a sick and short kid, and with the advent of medication, I finally started to be healthy when I was around nine, and Part of that, I started getting into playing games, right? Because when you're sick, you do a lot of sitting around rather than running around. So I did a lot of reading and playing games and things like that. I happen to grow up in the part of the world where Dungeons and Dragons was invented, which is in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, about 30 miles from where I live. And because of that I was I started going to conventions and playing games and such, when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I started doing it when I was a little bit older. I started doing it professionally, and started doing it when I was in college. And amazingly enough, even to my own astonishment, I've made a career out of it.   Speaker 1 ** 03:17 Where did you go to college? I went to the University   Matt Forbeck ** 03:21 of Michigan over in Ann Arbor. I had a great time there. There's a wonderful little college, Beloit College, in my hometown here, and most of my family has gone to UW Milwaukee over the years. My parents met at Marquette in Milwaukee, but I wanted to get the heck out of the area, so I went to Michigan, and then found myself coming back as soon as we started having   Speaker 1 ** 03:42 kids well, and of course, I would presume that when you were at the University of Michigan, you rooted for them and against Ohio State. That was   Matt Forbeck ** 03:50 kind of, you know, if you did it the other way around, they back out of town. So, yeah, I was always kind of astonished, though, because having grown up in Wisconsin, where every sports team was a losing team when I was growing up, including the Packers, for decades. You know, we were just happy to be playing. They were more excuse to have beers than they were to cheer on teams. And I went to Michigan where they were, they were angry if the team wasn't up by two touchdowns. You know, at any point, I'm like, You guys are silly. This is we're here for fun.   Speaker 1 ** 04:17 But it is amazing how seriously some people take sports. I remember being in New Zealand helping the Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind. Well now 22 years ago, it's 2003 and the America's Cup had just finished before we got there, and in America beat New Zealand, and the people in New Zealand were just irate. They were complaining that the government didn't put enough money into the design of the boat and helping with the with the yacht and all that. It was just amazing how seriously people take it, yeah,   Matt Forbeck ** 04:58 once, I mean, it becomes a part of your. Identity in a lot of ways, right for many people, and I've never had to worry about that too much. I've got other things on my mind, but there you go.   Speaker 1 ** 05:08 Well, I do like it when the Dodgers win, and my wife did her graduate work at USC, and so I like it when the Trojans win, but it's not the end of the world, and you do need to keep it in perspective. I I do wish more people would I know once I delivered a speech in brether County, Kentucky, and I was told that when I started the speech had to end no later than preferably exactly at 6:30pm not a minute later, because it was the night of the NCAA Basketball Championship, and the Kentucky Wildcats were in the championship, and at 630 everyone was going to get up and leave and go home to watch the game. So I ended at 630 and literally, by 631 I timed it. The gym was empty and it was full to start with.   Matt Forbeck ** 06:02 People were probably, you know, counting down on their watches, just to make sure, right?   Speaker 1 ** 06:06 Oh, I'm sure they were. What do you do? It's, it is kind of fun. Well, so why did you decide to get started in games? What? What? What attracted to you, to it as a young person, much less later on?   Matt Forbeck ** 06:21 Well, I was, yeah, I was an awkward kid, kind of nerdy and, you know, glasses and asthma and all that kind of stuff. And games were the kind of thing where, if you didn't know how to interact with people, you could sit down at a table across them and you could practice. You can say, okay, we're all here. We've got this kind of a magic circle around us where we've agreed to take this one silly activity seriously for a short period of time, right? And it may be that you're having fun during that activity, but you know, there's, there's no reason that rolling dice or moving things around on a table should be taken seriously. It's all just for fun, right? But for that moment, you actually just like Las Vegas Exactly, right? When there's money on the line, it's different, but if you're just doing it for grins. You know, it was a good way for me to learn how to interact with people of all sorts and of different ages. And I really enjoyed playing the games, and I really wanted to be a writer, too. And a lot of these things interacted with story at a very basic level. So breaking in as a writer is tough, but it turned out breaking as a game designer, wasn't nearly his stuff, so I started out over there instead, because it was a very young field at the time, right? D and D is now 50 years old, so I've been doing this 35 years, which means I started around professionally and even doing it before that, I started in the period when the game and that industry were only like 10 or 15 years old, so yeah, weren't quite as much competition in those   Speaker 1 ** 07:43 days. I remember some of the early games that I did play, that I could play, were DOS based games, adventure. You're familiar with adventure? Yeah, oh, yeah. Then later, Zork and all that. And I still think those are fun games. And I the reason I like a lot of those kinds of games is they really make you think, which I think most games do, even though the video even the video games and so on, they they help your or can help your reactions, but they're designed by people who do try to make you think,   Matt Forbeck ** 08:15 yeah. I mean, we basically are designing puzzles for people to solve, even if they're story puzzles or graphic puzzles or sound puzzles or whatever, you know, even spatial puzzles. There the idea is to give somebody something fun that is intriguing to play with, then you end up coming with story and after that, because after a while, even the most most exciting mechanics get dull, right? I mean, you start out shooting spaceships, but you can only shoot spaceships for so long, or you start out playing Tetris, and you only put shapes together for so long before it doesn't mean anything that then you start adding in story to give people a reason to keep playing right and a reason to keep going through these things. And I've written a lot of video games over the years, basically with that kind of a philosophy, is give people nuggets of story, give them a plot to work their way through, and reward them for getting through different stages, and they will pretty much follow you through anything. It's amazing.   Michael Hingson ** 09:09 Is that true Dungeons and Dragons too?   Matt Forbeck ** 09:13 It is. All of the stories are less structured there. If you're doing a video game, you know you the team has a lot of control over you. Give the player a limited amount of control to do things, but if you're playing around a table with people, it's more of a cooperative kind of experience, where we're all kind of coming up with a story, the narrator or the Game Master, the Dungeon Master, sets the stage for everything, but then the players have a lot of leeway doing that, and they will always screw things up for you, too. No matter what you think is going to happen, the players will do something different, because they're individuals, and they're all amazing people. That's actually to me, one of the fun things about doing tabletop games is that, you know, the computer can only react in a limited number of ways, whereas a human narrator and actually change things quite drastically and roll. With whatever people come up with, and that makes it tremendous fun.   Speaker 1 ** 10:04 Do you think AI is going to enter into all that and maybe improve some of the   Matt Forbeck ** 10:09 old stuff? It's going to add your end to it, whether it's an ad, it's going to approve it as a large question. Yeah. So I've been ranting about AI quite a bit lately with my friends and family. But, you know, I think the problem with AI, it can be very helpful a lot of ways, but I think it's being oversold. And I think it's especially when it's being oversold for thing, for ways for people to replace writers and creative thinking, Yeah, you know, you're taking the fun out of everything. I mean, the one thing I like to say is if, if you can't be bothered to write this thing that you want to communicate to me, I'm not sure why I should be bothered to read this thing well.   Speaker 1 ** 10:48 And I think that AI will will evolve in whatever way it does. But the fact of the matter is, So do people. And I think that, in fact, people are always going to be necessary to make the process really work? AI can only do and computers can only do so much. I mean, even Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity when people and computer brains are married, but that still means that you're going to have the human element. So it's not all going to be the computer. And I'm not ready to totally buy into to what Ray says. And I used to work for Ray, so I mean, I know Ray Well, but, but the but the bottom line is, I think that, in fact, people are always going to be able to be kind of the, the mainstay of it, as long as we allow that, if we, if we give AI too much power, then over time, it'll take more power, and that's a problem, but that's up to us to deal with?   Matt Forbeck ** 11:41 No, I totally agree with that. I just think right now, there's a very large faction of people who it's in their economic interest to oversell these things. You know, people are making chips. They're building server farms. A lot of them are being transferred from people are doing blockchain just a few years ago, and they see it as the hot new thing. The difference is that AI actually has a lot of good uses. There's some amazing things will come out of llms and such. But I again, people are over the people are selling this to us. Are often over promising things, right?   Speaker 1 ** 12:11 Yeah, well, they're not only over promising but they're they're really misdirecting people. But the other side of it is that, that, in fact, AI as a concept and as a technology is here, and we have control over how we use it. I've said a couple times on this this podcast, and I've said to others, I remember when I first started hearing about AI, I heard about the the fact that teachers were bemoaning the pack, that kids were writing their papers just using AI and turning them in, and it wasn't always easy to tell whether it was something that was written by AI or was written by the student. And I come from a little bit different view than I think a lot of people do. And my view basically is, let the kids write it if with AI, if that's what they're going to do, but then what the teacher needs to do is to take one period, for example, and give every student in that class the opportunity to come up and defend whatever paper they have. And the real question is, can they defend the paper? Which means, have they really learned the subject, or are they just relying on AI,   Matt Forbeck ** 13:18 yeah, I agree with that. I think the trouble is, a lot of people, children, you know, who are developing their abilities and their morals about this stuff, they use it as just a way to complete the assignment, right? And many of them don't even read what they turn in, right, right? Just know that they've got something here that will so again, if you can't be bothered to read the thing that you manufactured, you're not learning anything about it,   Speaker 1 ** 13:39 which is why, if you are forced to defend it, it's going to become pretty obvious pretty fast, whether you really know it or not. Now, I've used AI on a number of occasions in various ways, but I use it to maybe give me ideas or prepare something that I then modify and shape. And I may even interact with AI a couple of times, but I'm definitely involved with the process all the way down the line, because it still has to be something that I'm responsible for.   Matt Forbeck ** 14:09 I agree. I mean, the whole point of doing these things is for people to connect with each other, right? I want to learn about the ideas you have in your head. I want to see how they jive with ones in my head. But if I'm just getting something that's being spit out by a machine and not you, and not being curated by you at any point, that doesn't seem very useful, right? So if you're the more involved people are in it, the more useful it is.   Speaker 1 ** 14:31 Well, I agree, and you know, I think again, it's a tool, and we have to decide how the tool is going to be used, which is always the way it ought to be. Right?   Matt Forbeck ** 14:42 Exactly, although sometimes it's large corporations deciding,   Speaker 1 ** 14:45 yeah, well, there's that too. Well, individuals,   Matt Forbeck ** 14:49 we get to make our own choices. Though you're right,   Speaker 1 ** 14:51 yes, and should Well, so, so when did you start bringing writing into what you. Did, and make that a really significant part of what you did?   Matt Forbeck ** 15:03 Well, pretty early on, I mean, I started doing one of the first things I did was a gaming zine, which was basically just a print magazine that was like, you know, 32 pages, black and white, about the different tabletop games. So we were writing those in the days, design and writing are very closely linked when it comes to tabletop games and even in video games. The trick of course is that designing a game and writing the rules are actually two separate sets of skills. So one of the first professional gig I ever had during writing was in games was some friends of mine had designed a game for a company called Mayfair games, which went on to do sellers of contain, which is a big, uh, entry level game, and but they needed somebody to write the rules, so they called me over, showed me how to play the game. I took notes and I I wrote it down in an easy to understand, clear way that people had just picked up the box. Could then pick it up and teach themselves how to play, right? So that was early on how I did it. But the neat thing about that is it also taught me to think about game design. I'm like, when I work on games, I think about, who is this game going to be for, and how are we going to teach it to them? Because if they can't learn the game, there's no point of the game at all, right?   Speaker 1 ** 16:18 And and so I'm right? I'm a firm believer that a lot of technical writers don't do a very good job of technical writing, and they write way over people's heads. I remember the first time I had to write, well, actually, I mentioned I worked for Kurzweil. I was involved with a project where Ray Kurzweil had developed his original omniprent optical character recognition system. And I and the National Federation of the Blind created with him a project to put machines around the country so that blind people could use them and give back to Ray by the time we were all done, recommendations as to what needed to go in the final first production model of the machine. So I had to write a training manual to teach people how to use it. And I wrote this manual, and I was always of the opinion that it had to be pretty readable and usable by people who didn't have a lot of technical knowledge. So I wrote the manual, gave it to somebody to read, and said, Follow the directions and and work with the machine and all that. And they did, and I was in another room, and they were playing with it for a couple of hours, and they came in and they said, I'm having a problem. I can't figure out how to turn off the machine. And it turns out that I had forgotten to put in the instruction to turn off the machine. And it wasn't totally trivial. There were steps you had to go through. It was a Data General Nova two computer, and you had to turn it off the right way and the whole system off the appropriate way, or you could, could mess everything up. So there was a process to doing it. So I wrote it in, and it was fine. But, you know, I've always been a believer that the textbooks are way too boring. Having a master's degree in physics, I am of the opinion that physics textbook writers, who are usually pretty famous and knowledgeable scientists, ought to include with all the text and the technical stuff they want to put in, they should put in stories about what they did in you bring people in, draw them into the whole thing, rather than just spewing out a bunch of technical facts.   Matt Forbeck ** 18:23 No, I agree. My my first calculus professor was a guy who actually explained how Newton and Leipzig actually came up with calculus, and then he would, you know, draw everything on the board and turn around say, and isn't that amazing? And you were, like, just absolutely enamored with the idea of how they had done these things, right? Yeah. And what you're doing there, when you, when you, when you give the instructions to somebody and say, try this out. That's a very big part of gaming, actually, because what we do this thing called play testing, where we take something before it's ready to be shown to the public, and we give it to other people and say, try this out. See how it works. Let me know when you're starting out of your first playing you play with like your family and friends and people will be brutal with you and give you hints about how you can improve things. But then, even when you get to the rules you're you send those out cold to people, or, you know, if you're a big company, you watch them through a two way mirror or one way mirror, and say, Hey, let's see how they react to everything. And then you take notes, and you try to make it better every time you go through. And when I'm teaching people to play games at conventions, for instance, I will often say to them, please ask questions if you don't understand anything, that doesn't mean you're dumb. Means I didn't explain it well enough, right? And my job as a person writing these rules is to explain it as well as I humanly can so it can't be misconstrued or misinterpreted. Now that doesn't mean you can correct everything. Somebody's always got like, Oh, I missed that sentence, you know, whatever. But you do that over and over so you can try to make it as clear and concise as possible, yeah.   Speaker 1 ** 19:52 Well, you have somewhat of a built in group of people to help if you let your kids get involved. Involved. So how old are your kids?   Matt Forbeck ** 20:03 My eldest is 26 he'll be 27 in January. Marty is a game designer, actually works with me on the marble tabletop role playing game, and we have a new book coming out, game book for Minecraft, called Minecraft role for adventure, that's coming out on July 7, I think, and the rest of the kids are 23 we have 423 year olds instead of quadruplets, one of whom is actually going into game design as well, and the other says two are still in college, and one has moved off to the work in the woods. He's a very woodsy boy. Likes to do environmental education with people.   Speaker 1 ** 20:39 Wow. Well, see, but you, but you still have a good group of potential game designers or game critics anyway.   Matt Forbeck ** 20:47 Oh, we all play games together. We have a great time. We do weekly game nights here. Sometimes they're movie nights, sometimes they're just pizza nights, but we shoot for game and pizza   Speaker 1 ** 20:56 if we get lucky and your wife goes along with all this too.   Matt Forbeck ** 21:00 She does. She doesn't go to the game conventions and stuff as much, and she's not as hardcore of a gamer, but she likes hanging out with the kids and doing everything with us. We have a great time.   Speaker 1 ** 21:10 That's that's pretty cool. Well, you, you've got, you've got to build an audience of some sorts, and that's neat that a couple of them are involved in it as well. So they really like what dad does, yeah,   Matt Forbeck ** 21:23 yeah. We, I started taking them each to conventions, which are, you know, large gatherings gamers in real life. The biggest one is Gen Con, which happens in Indianapolis in August. And last year, I think, we had 72,000 people show up. And I started taking the kids when they were 10 years old, and my wife would come up with them then. And, you know, 10 years old is a lot. 72,000 people is a lot for a 10 year old. So she can mention one day and then to a park the next day, you know, decompress a lot, and then come back on Saturday and then leave on Sunday or whatever, so that we didn't have them too over stimulated. But they really grown to love it. I mean, it's part of our annual family traditions in the summer, is to go do these conventions and play lots of games with each other and meet new people too well.   Speaker 1 ** 22:08 And I like the way you put it. The games are really puzzles, which they are, and it's and it's fun. If people would approach it that way, no matter what the game is, they're, they're aspects of puzzles involved in most everything that has to do with the game, and that's what makes it so fun.   Matt Forbeck ** 22:25 Exactly, no. The interesting thing is, when you're playing with other people, the other people are changing the puzzles from their end that you have to solve on your end. And sometimes the puzzle is, how do I beat this person, or how do I defeat their strategy, or how do I make an alliance with somebody else so we can win? And it's really always very intriguing. There's so many different types of games. There's nowadays, there's like something like 50 to 100 new board games that come out and tabletop games every month, right? It's just like a fire hose. It's almost like, when I was starting out as a novelist, I would go into Barnes and Noble or borders and go, Oh my gosh, look at all these books. And now I do the same thing about games. It's just, it's incredible. Nobody, no one person, could keep up with all of them.   Speaker 1 ** 23:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, way too much. I would love to explore playing more video games, but I don't. I don't own a lot of the technology, although I'm sure that there are any number of them that can be played on a computer, but we'll have to really explore and see if we can find some. I know there are some that are accessible for like blind people with screen readers. I know that some people have written a few, which is kind of cool. Yeah.   Matt Forbeck ** 23:36 And Xbox has got a new controller out that's meant to be accessible to large amount of people. I'm not sure, all the different aspects of it, but that's done pretty well, too   Speaker 1 ** 23:44 well. And again, it comes down to making it a priority to put all of that stuff in. It's not like it's magic to do. It's just that people don't know how to do it. But I also think something else, which is, if you really make the products more usable, let's say by blind people with screen readers. You may be especially if it's well promoted, surprised. I'm not you necessarily, but people might well be surprised as to how many others might take advantage of it so that they don't necessarily have to look at the screen, or that you're forced to listen as well as look in order to figure out what's going on or take actions.   Matt Forbeck ** 24:29 No, definitely true. It's, you know, people audio books are a massive thing nowadays. Games tend to fall further behind that way, but it's become this incredible thing that obviously, blind people get a great use out of but my wife is addicted to audio books now. She actually does more of those than she does reading. I mean, I technically think they're both reading. It's just one's done with yours and one's done with your eyes.   Speaker 1 ** 24:51 Yeah, there's but there's some stuff, whether you're using your eyes or your fingers and reading braille, there's something about reading a book that way that's. Even so a little bit different than listening to it. Yeah, and there's you're drawn in in some ways, in terms of actually reading that you're not necessarily as drawn into when you're when you're listening to it, but still, really good audio book readers can help draw you in, which is important, too,   Matt Forbeck ** 25:19 very much. So yeah, I think the main difference for reading, whether it's, you know, again, through Braille or through traditional print, is that you can stop. You can do it at your own pace. You can go back and look at things very easily, or read or check things, read things very easily. That you know, if you're reading, if you're doing an audio book, it just goes on and it's straight on, boom, boom, boom, pace. You can say, Wait, I'm going to put this down here. What was that thing? I remember back there? It was like three pages back, but it's really important, let me go check that right.   Speaker 1 ** 25:50 There are some technologies that allow blind people and low vision people and others, like people with dyslexia to use an audio book and actually be able to navigate two different sections of it. But it's not something that is generally available to the whole world, at least to the level that it is for blind people. But I can, I can use readers that are made to be able to accept the different formats and go back and look at pages, go back and look at headings, and even create bookmarks to bookmark things like you would normally by using a pen or a pencil or something like that. So there are ways to do some of that. So again, the technology is making strides.   Matt Forbeck ** 26:37 That's fantastic. Actually, it's wonderful. Just, yeah, it's great. I actually, you know, I lost half the vision of my right eye during back through an autoimmune disease about 13 years ago, and I've always had poor vision. So I'm a big fan of any kind of way to make things easier,   Speaker 1 ** 26:54 like that. Well, there, there are things that that are available. It's pretty amazing. A guy named George curser. Curser created a lot of it years ago, and it's called the DAISY format. And the whole idea behind it is that you can actually create a book. In addition to the audio tracks, there are XML files that literally give you the ability to move and navigate around the book, depending on how it's created, as final level as you choose.   Matt Forbeck ** 27:25 Oh, that's That's amazing. That's fantastic. I'm actually really glad to hear that.   Speaker 1 ** 27:28 So, yeah, it is kind of fun. So there's a lot of technology that's that's doing a lot of different sorts of things and and it helps. But um, so for you, in terms of dealing with, with the games, you've, you've written games, but you've, you've actually written some novels as well, right?   Matt Forbeck ** 27:50 Yeah, I've got like 30, it depends on how you count a novel, right? Okay, like some of my books are to pick a path books, right? Choose Your Own Adventure type stuff. So, but I've got 35 traditional novels written or more, I guess, now, I lost track a while ago, and probably another dozen of these interactive fiction books as well. So, and I like doing those. I've also written things like Marvel encyclopedias and Avengers encyclopedias and all sorts of different pop culture books. And, you know, I like playing in different worlds. I like writing science fiction, fantasy, even modern stuff. And most of it, for me comes down to telling stories, right? If you like to tell stories, you can tell stories through a game or book or audio play or a TV show or a comic, or I've done, you know, interactive museum, games and displays, things like that. The main thing is really a story. I mean, if you're comfortable sitting down at a bar and having a drink with somebody, doesn't have to be alcohol, just sitting down and telling stories with each other for fun. That's where the core of it all is really   Speaker 1 ** 28:58 right. Tell me about interactive fiction book.   Matt Forbeck ** 29:01 Sure, a lot of these are basically just done, like flow charts, kind of like the original Zork and adventure that you were talking about where you I actually, I was just last year, I brought rose Estes, who's the inventor of the endless quest books, which were a cross between Dungeons and Dragons, and choose your own adventure books. She would write the whole thing out page by page on a typewriter, and then, in order to shuffle the pages around so that people wouldn't just read straight through them, she'd throw them all up in the air and then just put them back in whatever order they happen to be. But essentially, you read a section of a book, you get to the end, and it gives you a choice. Would you like to go this way or that way? Would you like to go beat up this goblin? Or would you like to make friends with this warrior over here? If you want to do one of these things, go do page xx, right? Got it. So then you turn to that page and you go, boom, some, actually, some of the endless quest books I know were turned into audio books, right? And I actually, I. Um, oddly, have written a couple Dungeons and Dragons, interactive books, audio books that have only been released in French, right? Because there's a company called Looney l, u n, i, i that has this little handheld device that's for children, that has an A and a B button and a volume button. And you, you know, you get to the point that says, if you want to do this, push a, if you want to do that, push B, and the kids can go through these interactive stories and and, you know, there's ones for clue and Dungeons and Dragons and all sorts of other licenses, and some original stories too. But that way there's usually, like, you know, it depends on the story, but sometimes there's, like, 10 to 20 different endings. A lot of them are like, Oh no, you've been killed. Go back to where you started, right? And if you're lucky, the longer ones are, the more fun ones. And you get to, you know, save the kingdom and rescue the people and make good friends and all that good stuff,   Michael Hingson ** 30:59 yeah, and maybe fall in love with the princess or Prince.   Matt Forbeck ** 31:02 Yeah, exactly right. It all depends on the genre and what you're working in. But the idea is to give people some some choices over how they want the story to go. You're like, Well, do you want to investigate this dark, cold closet over here, or would you rather go running outside and playing around? And some of them can seem like very innocent choices, and other ones are like, well, uh, 10 ton weight just fell on. You go back to the last thing.   Speaker 1 ** 31:23 So that dark hole closet can be a good thing or a bad thing,   Matt Forbeck ** 31:28 exactly. And the trick is to make the deaths the bad endings, actually just as entertaining as anything else, right? And then people go, Well, I got beat, and I gotta go back and try that again. So yeah, if they just get the good ending all the way through, they often won't go back and look at all the terrible ones. So it's fun to trick them sometimes and have them go into terrible spots. And I like to put this one page in books too that sometimes says, How did you get here? You've been cheating there. This book, this page, is actually not led to from any other part of the book. You're just flipping   Speaker 1 ** 31:59 through. Cheater, cheater book, do what you   Matt Forbeck ** 32:04 want, but if you want to play it the right way, go back.   Speaker 1 ** 32:07 Kid, if you want to play the game. Yeah, exactly. On the other hand, some people are nosy.   Matt Forbeck ** 32:15 You know, I was always a kid who would poke around and wanted to see how things were, so I'm sure I would have found that myself but absolutely related, you know,   Speaker 1 ** 32:23 yeah, I had a general science teacher who brought in a test one day, and he gave it to everyone. And so he came over to me because it was, it was a printed test. He said, Well, I'm not going to give you the test, because the first thing it says is, read all the instructions, read, read the test through before you pass it, before you take it. And he said, most people won't do that. And he said, I know you would. And the last question on the test is answer, only question one.   Matt Forbeck ** 32:55 That's great. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah,   Speaker 1 ** 32:57 that was cute. And he said, I know that. I that there's no way you would, would would fall for that, because you would say, Okay, let's read the instructions and then read the whole test. That's what it said. And the instruction were, just read the whole test before you start. And people won't do that.   Matt Forbeck ** 33:13 No, they'll go through, take the whole thing. They get there and go, oh, did I get there? Was a, there's a game publisher. I think it was Steve Jackson Games, when they were looking for people, write for them, or design stuff for them, or submit stuff to them, would have something toward the end of the instructions that would say, put like a the letter seven, or put seven a on page one right, and that way they would know if you had read the instructions, if you hadn't bothered to Read the instructions, they wouldn't bother reading anything else.   Speaker 1 ** 33:42 Yeah, which is fair, because the a little harsh, well, but, but, you know, we often don't learn enough to pay attention to details. I know that when I was taking physics in college, that was stressed so often it isn't enough to get the numbers right. If you don't get the units right as well. Then you're, you're not really paying attention to the details. And paying attention to the details is so important.   Matt Forbeck ** 34:07 That's how they crash from those Mars rovers, wasn't it? They somebody messed up the units, but going back and forth between metric and, yeah, and Imperial and, well, you know, it cost somebody a lot of money at one point. Yeah. Yeah. What do you   Speaker 1 ** 34:21 this is kind of the way it goes. Well, tell me, yeah. Well, they do matter, no matter what people think, sometimes they do matter. Well, tell me about the Diana Jones award. First of all, of course, the logical question for many people is, who is Diana Jones? Yeah, Diana Jones doesn't exist, right? That's There you go. She's part game somewhere? No, no, it doesn't be in a game somewhere.   Matt Forbeck ** 34:43 Then now there's actually an author named Diana Wynne Jones, who's written some amazing fantasy stories, including Howell's Moving Castle, which has turned into a wonderful anime movie, but it has nothing to do with her or any other person. Because originally, the Diana Jones award came about. Because a friend of mine, James Wallace, had somehow stumbled across a trophy that fell into his hands, and it was a pub trivia trophy that used to be used between two different gaming companies in the UK, and one of those was TSR, UK, the United Kingdom department. And at one point, the company had laid off everybody in that division just say, Okay, we're closing it all down. So the guys went and burned a lot of the stuff that they had, including a copy of the Indiana Jones role playing game, and the only part of the logo that was left said Diana Jones. And for some reason, they put this in a in a fiberglass or Plexiglas pyramid, put it on a base, a wooden base, and it said the Diana Jones award trophy, right? And this was the trophy that they used they passed back and forth as a joke for their pub trivia contest. Fell into James's hands, and he decided, You know what, we're going to give this out for the most excellent thing in gaming every year. And we've now done this. This will be 25 years this summer. We do it at the Wednesday night before Gen Con, which starts on Thursday, usually at the end of July or early August. And as part of that, actually, about five years ago, we started, one of the guys suggested we should do something called the emerging designers program. So we actually became a 501, c3, so we could take donations. And now we take four designers every year, fly them in from wherever they happen to be in the world, and put them up in a hotel, give them a badge the show, introduce them to everybody, give them an honorarium so they can afford to skip work for a week and try to help launch their careers. I mean, these are people that are in the first three years of their design careers, and we try to work mostly with marginalized or et cetera, people who need a little bit more representation in the industry too. Although we can select anybody, and it's been really well received, it's been amazing. And there's a group called the bundle of holding which sells tabletop role playing game PDFs, and they've donated 10s of 1000s of dollars every year for us to be able to do this. And it's kind of funny, because I never thought I'd be end up running a nonprofit, but here I'm just the guy who writes checks to the different to the emerging designer program. Folks are much more tied into that community that I am. But one of the real reasons I wanted to do something like that or be involved with it, because if you wander around with these conventions and you notice that it starts getting very gray after a while, right? It's you're like, oh, there's no new people coming in. It's all older people. I we didn't I didn't want us to all end up as like the Grandpa, grandpa doing the HO model railroad stuff in the basement, right? This dying hobby that only people in their 60s and 70s care about. So bringing in fresh people, fresh voices, I think, is very important, and hopefully we're doing some good with that. It's been a lot of fun either way.   Speaker 1 ** 37:59 Well, I have you had some success with it? Yeah, we've   Matt Forbeck ** 38:02 had, well, let's see. I think we've got like 14 people. We've brought in some have already gone on to do some amazing things. I mean, it's only been a few years, so it's hard to tell if they're gonna be legends in their time, but again, having them as models for other people to look at and say, Oh, maybe I could do that. That's been a great thing. The other well, coincidentally, Dungeons and Dragons is having its best 10 year streak in its history right now, and probably is the best selling it's ever been. So coinciding with that, we've seen a lot more diversity and a lot more people showing up to these wonderful conventions and playing these kinds of games. There's also been an advent of this thing called actual play, which is the biggest one, is a group called Critical Role, which is a whole bunch of voice actors who do different cartoons and video games and such, and they play D and D with each other, and then they record the games, and they produce them on YouTube and for podcasts. And these guys are amazing. There's a couple of other ones too, like dimension 20 and glass cannon, the critical role guys actually sold out a live performance at Wembley Arena last summer. Wow. And dimension. Dimension 20 sold out Madison Square Garden. I'm like, if you'd have told me 20 years ago that you know you could sell out an entire rock stadium to have people watch you play Dungeons and Dragons, I would have laughed. I mean, there's no way it would have been possible. But now, you know, people are very much interested in this. It's kind of wild, and it's, it's fun to be a part of that. At some level,   Speaker 1 ** 39:31 how does the audience get drawn in to something like that? Because they are watching it, but there must be something that draws them in.   Matt Forbeck ** 39:39 Yeah, part of it is that you have some really skilled some actors are very funny, very traumatic and very skilled at improvisation, right? So the the dungeon master or Game Master will sit there and present them with an idea or whatever. They come up each with their own characters. They put them in wonderful, strong voices. They kind of inhabit the roles in a way that an actor. A really top level actor would, as opposed to just, you know, me sitting around a table with my friends. And because of that, they become compelling, right? My Marty and my his wife and I were actually at a convention in Columbus, Ohio last weekend, and this group called the McElroy family, actually, they do my brother, my brother and me, which is a hit podcast, but they also do an actual play podcast called The Adventure zone, where they just play different games. And they are so funny. These guys are just some of the best comedians you'll ever hear. And so them playing, they actually played our Marvel game for a five game session, or a five podcast session, or whatever, and it was just stunningly fun to listen to. People are really talented mess around with something that we built right it's very edifying to see people enjoying something that you worked on.   Speaker 1 ** 40:51 Do you find that the audiences get drawn in and they're actually sort of playing the game along, or as well? And may disagree with what some of the choices are that people make?   Matt Forbeck ** 41:02 Oh, sure. But I mean, if the choices are made from a point of the character that's been expressed, that people are following along and they they already like the character, they might go, Oh, those mean, you know that guy, there are some characters they love to hate. There are some people they're they're angry at whatever, but they always really appreciate the actors. I mean, the actors have become celebrities in their own right. They've they sell millions of dollars for the comic books and animated TV shows and all these amazing things affiliated with their actual play stuff. And it's, I think it, part of it is because, it's because it makes the games more accessible. Some people are intimidated by these games. So it's not really, you know, from a from a physical disability kind of point. It's more of a it makes it more accessible for people to be nervous, to try these things on their own, or don't really quite get how they work. They can just sit down and pop up YouTube or their podcast program and listen into people doing a really good job at it. The unfortunate problem is that the converse of that is, when you're watching somebody do that good of a job at it, it's actually hard to live up to that right. Most people who play these games are just having fun with their friends around a table. They're not performing for, you know, 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people. So there's a different level of investments, really, at that point, and some people have been known to be cowed by that, by that, or daunted by that.   Speaker 1 ** 42:28 You work on a lot of different things. I gather at the same time. What do you what do you think about that? How do you like working on a lot of different projects? Or do you, do you more focus on one thing, but you've got several things going on, so you'll work on something for one day, then you'll work on something else. Or how do you how do you do it all?   Matt Forbeck ** 42:47 That's a good question. I would love to just focus on one thing at a time. Now, you know the trouble is, I'm a freelancer, right? I don't set my I don't always get to say what I want to work on. I haven't had to look for work for over a decade, though, which has been great. People just come to me with interesting things. The trouble is that when you're a freelancer, people come in and say, Hey, let's work on this. I'm like, Yeah, tell me when you're ready to start. And you do that with like, 10 different people, and they don't always line up in sequence properly, right? Yeah? Sometimes somebody comes up and says, I need this now. And I'm like, Yeah, but I'm in the middle of this other thing right now, so I need to not sleep for another week, and I need to try to figure out how I'm going to put this in between other things I'm working on. And I have noticed that after I finish a project, it takes me about a day or three to just jump track. So if I really need to, I can do little bits here and there, but to just fully get my brain wrapped around everything I'm doing for a very complex project, takes me a day or three to say, Okay, now I'm ready to start this next thing and really devote myself to it. Otherwise, it's more juggling right now, having had all those kids, probably has prepared me to juggle. So I'm used to having short attention span theater going on in my head at all times, because I have to jump back and forth between things. But it is. It's a challenge, and it's a skill that you develop over time where you're like, Okay, I can put this one away here and work on this one here for a little while. Like today, yeah, I knew I was going to talk to you, Michael. So I actually had lined up another podcast that a friend of mine wanted to do with me. I said, Let's do them on the same day. This way I'm not interrupting my workflow so much, right? Makes sense? You know, try to gang those all together and the other little fiddly bits I need to do for administration on a day. Then I'm like, Okay, this is not a day off. It's just a day off from that kind of work. It's a day I'm focusing on this aspect of what I do.   Speaker 1 ** 44:39 But that's a actually brings up an interesting point. Do you ever take a day off or do what do you do when you're when you deciding that you don't want to do gaming for a while?   Matt Forbeck ** 44:49 Yeah, I actually kind of terrible. But you know, you know, my wife will often drag me off to places and say we're going to go do this when. Yes, we have a family cabin up north in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that we go to. Although, you know, my habit there is, I'll work. I'll start work in the morning on a laptop or iPad until my battery runs out, and then I shut it down, put on a charger, and then I go out and swim with everybody for the rest of the day. So it depends if I'm on a deadline or not, and I'm almost always on a deadline, but there are times I could take weekends off there. One of the great things of being a freelancer, though, and especially being a stay at home father, which is part of what I was doing, is that when things come up during the middle of the week, I could say, oh, sure, I can be flexible, right? The trouble is that I have to pay for that time on my weekends, a lot of the time, so I don't really get a lot of weekends off. On the other hand, I'm not I'm not committed to having to work every day of the week either, right? I need to go do doctor appointments, or we want to run off to Great America and do a theme park or whatever. I can do that anytime I want to. It's just I have to make up the time at other points during the week. Does your wife work? She does. She was a school social worker for many years, and now as a recruiter at a local technical college here called Black Hawk tech. And she's amazing, right? She's fantastic. She has always liked working. The only time she stopped working was for about a year and a half after the quads were born, I guess, two years. And that was the only time I ever took a job working with anybody else, because we needed the health insurance, so I we always got it through her. And then when she said, Well, I'm gonna stay home with the kids, which made tons of sense, I went and took a job with a video game company up in Madison, Wisconsin called Human Head Studios for about 18 months, 20 months. And then the moment she told me she was thinking about going back to work, I'm like, Oh, good, I can we can Cobra for 18 months and pay for our own health insurance, and I'm giving notice this week, and, you know, we'll work. I left on good terms that everybody. I still talk to them and whatever, but I very much like being my own boss and not worrying about what other people are going to tell me to do. I work with a lot of clients, which means I have a lot of people telling me what to do. But you know, if it turns out bad, I can walk I can walk away. If it turns out good, hopefully we get to do things together, like the the gig I've been working out with Marvel, I guess, has been going on for like, four years now, with pretty continuous work with them, and I'm enjoying every bit of it. They're great people to work with.   Speaker 1 ** 47:19 Now, you were the president of Pinnacle entertainment for a little while. Tell me about that.   Matt Forbeck ** 47:24 I was, that was a small gaming company I started up with a guy named Shane Hensley, who was another tabletop game designer. Our big game was something called Dead Lands, which was a Western zombie cowboy kind of thing. Oh gosh, Western horror. So. And it was pretty much a, you know, nobody was doing Western horror back in those days. So we thought, Oh, this is safe. And to give you an example of parallel development, we were six months into development, and another company, White Wolf, which had done a game called Vampire the Masquerade, announced that they were doing Werewolf the Wild West. And we're like, you gotta be kidding me, right? Fortunately, we still released our game three months before there, so everybody thought we were copying them, rather than the other way around. But the fact is, we were. We both just came up with the idea independently. Right? When you work in creative fields, often, if somebody wants to show you something, you say, I'd like to look at you have to sign a waiver first that says, If I do something like this, you can't sue me. And it's not because people are trying to rip you off. It's because they may actually be working on something similar, right already. Because we're all, you know, swimming in the same cultural pool. We're all, you know, eating the same cultural soup. We're watching or watching movies, playing games, doing whatever, reading books. And so it's not unusual that some of us will come up with similar ideas   Speaker 1 ** 48:45 well, and it's not surprising that from time to time, two different people are going to come up with somewhat similar concepts. So that's not a big surprise, exactly, but   Matt Forbeck ** 48:56 you don't want people getting litigious over it, like no, you don't be accused of ripping anybody off, right? You just want to be as upfront with people. With people. And I don't think I've ever actually seen somebody, at least in gaming, in tabletop games, rip somebody off like that. Just say, Oh, that's a great idea. We're stealing that it's easier to pay somebody to just say, Yes, that's a great idea. We'll buy that from you, right? As opposed to trying to do something unseemly and criminal?   Speaker 1 ** 49:24 Yeah, there's, there's something to be said for having real honor in the whole process.   Matt Forbeck ** 49:30 Yeah, I agree, and I think that especially if you're trying to have a long term career in any field that follows you, if you get a reputation for being somebody who plays dirty, nobody wants to play with you in the future, and I've always found it to be best to be as straightforward with people and honest, especially professionally, just to make sure that they trust you. Before my quadruplets were born, you could have set your clock by me as a freelancer, I never missed a deadline ever, and since then, I've probably it's a. Rare earth thing to make a deadline, because, you know, family stuff happens, and you know, there's just no controlling it. But whenever something does happen, I just call people up and say, hey, look, it's going to be another week or two. This is what's going on. And because I have a good reputation for completing the job and finishing quality work, they don't mind. They're like, Oh, okay, I know you're going to get this to me. You're not just trying to dodge me. So they're willing to wait a couple weeks if they need to, to get to get what they need. And I'm very grateful to them for that. And I'm the worst thing somebody can do is what do, what I call turtling down, which is when it's like, Oh no, I'm late. And then, you know, they cut off all communication. They don't talk to anybody. They just kind of try to disappear as much as they can. And we all, all adults, understand that things happen in your life. It's okay. We can cut you some slack every now and then, but if you just try to vanish, that's not even possible.   Speaker 1 ** 50:54 No, there's a lot to be there's a lot to be said for trust and and it's so important, I think in most anything that we do, and I have found in so many ways, that there's nothing better than really earning someone's trust, and they earning your trust. And it's something I talk about in my books, like when live with a guide dog, live like a guide dog, which is my newest book, it talks a lot about trust, because when you're working with a guide dog, you're really building a team, and each member of the team has a specific job to do, and as the leader of the team, it's my job to also learn how to communicate with the other member of the team. But the reality is, it still comes down to ultimately, trust, because I and I do believe that dogs do love unconditionally, but they don't trust unconditionally. But the difference between dogs and people is that people that dogs are much more open to trust, for the most part, unless they've just been totally traumatized by something, but they're more open to trust. And there's a lesson to be learned there. No, I   Matt Forbeck ** 52:03 absolutely agree with that. I think, I think most people in general are trustworthy, but as you say, a lot of them have trauma in their past that makes it difficult for them to open themselves up to that. So that's actually a pretty wonderful way to think about things. I like that,   Speaker 1 ** 52:17 yeah, well, I think that trust is is so important. And I know when I worked in professional sales, it was all about trust. In fact, whenever I interviewed people for jobs, I always asked them what they were going to sell, and only one person ever answered me the way. I really hoped that everybody would answer when I said, So, tell me what you're going to be selling. He said, The only thing I have to really sell is myself and my word, and nothing else. It really matters. Everything else is stuff. What you have is stuff. It's me selling myself and my word, and you have to, and I would expect you to back me up. And my response was, as long as you're being trustworthy, then you're going to get my backing all the way. And he was my most successful salesperson for a lot of reasons, because he got it.   Matt Forbeck ** 53:08 Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, I mean, I've worked with people sourcing different things too, for sales, and if you can rely on somebody to, especially when things go wrong, to come through for you. And to be honest with you about, you know, there's really that's a hard thing to find. If you can't depend on your sources for what you're building, then you can't depend on anything. Everything else falls apart.   Speaker 1 ** 53:29 It does. You've got to start at the beginning. And if people can't earn your trust, and you earn theirs, there's a problem somewhere, and it's just not going to work.   Matt Forbeck ** 53:39 Yeah, I just generally think people are decent and want to help. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've had issues. Car breaks down the road in Wisconsin. Here, if somebody's car goes in the ditch, everybody stops and just hauls them out. It's what you do when the quads were born, my stepmother came up with a sign up sheet, a booklet that she actually had spiral bound, that people could sign up every three three hours to help come over and feed and bathe, diaper, whatever the kids and we had 30 to 35 volunteers coming in every week. Wow, to help us out with that was amazing, right? They just each pick slots, feeding slots, and come in and help us out. I had to take the 2am feeding, and my wife had to take the 5am feeding by ourselves. But the rest of the week we had lots and lots of help, and we were those kids became the surrogate grandchildren for, you know, 30 to 35 women and couples really, around the entire area, and it was fantastic. Probably couldn't have survived   Speaker 1 ** 54:38 without it. And the other part about it is that all those volunteers loved it, because you all appreciated each other, and it was always all about helping and assisting.   Matt Forbeck ** 54:48 No, we appreciate them greatly. But you know every most of them, like 99% of them, whatever were women, 95 women who are ready for grandchildren and didn't have them. Had grandchildren, and they weren't in the area, right? And they had that, that love they wanted to share, and they just loved the opportunity to do it. It was, I'm choking up here talking about such a great time for us in   Speaker 1 ** 55:11 that way. Now I'm assuming today, nobody has to do diaper duty with the quads, right?   Matt Forbeck ** 55:16 Not until they have their own kids. Just checking, just checking, thankfully, think we're that is long in our past,   Speaker 1 ** 55:23 is it? Is it coming fairly soon for anybody in the future?   Matt Forbeck ** 55:27 Oh, I don't know. That's really entirely up to them. We would love to have grandchildren, but you know, it all comes in its own time. They're not doing no well. I, one of my sons is married, so it's possible, right? And one of my other sons has a long term girlfriend, so that's possible, but, you know, who knows? Hopefully they're they have them when they're ready. I always say, if you have kids and you want them, that's great. If you have, if you don't have kids and you don't want them, that's great. It's when you cross the two things that,   Speaker 1 ** 55:57 yeah, trouble, yeah, that's that is, that is a problem. But you really like working with yourself. You love the entre

VLOG Sept 12 Into Diddy docket, Manzaro files as victimhttps://www.patreon.com/posts/diddy-dockets-as-138696462 Tekashi #6ix9ine new violation alleged;Nadine Menendez gets 4.5 years; Lisa Cook DDC and Pinnacle - Synovus, Tennessee citizen-only FOIA. @UN_PGA Baerbock hmm https://matthewrussellleeicp.substack.com/p/extra-un-pga-baerbock-no-show-on

Raghunath and Kaustubha explore how the pinnacle of Vedānta and yoga is revealed in the simplest exchange: Mother Yaśodā calling little Kṛṣṇa home for dinner. They unpack why quality of love matters more than quantity of achievement, and why “do small things with great love” isn't just a sweet saying—it's the key to real growth. Drawing from Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam (10.11), Mother Teresa, Lord Rāma's squirrel story, and reflections from Scottie Scheffler, the world's #1-ranked golfer, they reveal how fleeting victories fade while love endures. From cows and calves to the defeat of Bakasura, this episode shows that even the smallest offerings—when infused with devotion—hold infinite meaning. Tune in as Wisdom of the Sages uncovers how unselfish love, not spectacle or complexity, delivers the deepest fulfillment and the truest yoga. Srimad Bhagavatam 10.11.12-53 ********************************************************************* LOVE THE PODCAST? WE ARE COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AND WOULD LOVE FOR YOU TO JOIN! Go to https://www.wisdomofthesages.com WATCH ON YOUTUBE: https://youtube.com/@WisdomoftheSages LISTEN ON ITUNES: https://podcasts/apple.com/us/podcast/wisdom-of-the-sages/id1493055485 CONNECT ON FACEBOOK: https://facebook.com/wisdomofthesages108 ********************************************************************* Join the Gita Collective Whatsapp group! https://chat.whatsapp.com/IoClfPirgHXBad5SxjH2i6?mode=ems_copy_t

How This Is Building Me, hosted by world-renowned oncologist D. Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, is a podcast focused on the highs and lows, ups and downs of all those involved with cancer, cancer medicine, and cancer science across the full spectrum of life's experiences. In this episode, Dr Camidge sat down with Ken Culver, MD, the director of Research and Clinical Affairs at ALK Positive Inc.  Drs Camidge and Culver discussed the highlights of Dr Culver's career, which has been shaped by clinical practice, research, industry leadership, and patient advocacy. They noted elements of ALK Positive that set it apart from other patient advocacy groups, including its being entirely created, funded, and led by patients with stage IV lung cancer and their caregivers. Culver explained how he collaborates with patients to expand treatment opportunities, meets with companies and universities worldwide, and helps stakeholders recognize both the unmet needs and financial incentives for developing therapies for ALK-positive lung cancer. Culver detailed his path to the oncology field, which began with an intention to practice as a community pediatrician in Iowa. This led him to pursue residency training in California, where he gained diverse clinical experience, particularly in HIV/AIDS at the height of the epidemic. His early research explored HIV transmission in children born to drug-using mothers, highlighting the immunosuppressive effect of drug abuse even in the absence of HIV. During his fellowship, he contributed to pioneering work in gene therapy. He also participated in research that laid the groundwork for tumor-directed therapies, which later influenced large-scale clinical trials. Eventually, Culver explained that transitioned to industry. At Novartis, he contributed to the development of important drugs and witnessed the transformative launch of imatinib (Gleevec), one of the first targeted cancer therapies. Alongside his professional work, Culver established the Foundation for Peace, a nonprofit providing medical and community support in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Kenya. This initiative, which began with a mission trip in 1989, has grown to involve hundreds of volunteers annually, offering both medical care and broader community services. In his current role with ALK Positive, Culver noted that he has leveraged patient-led advocacy to influence industry priorities, resulting in several new clinical trials for ALK-positive patients. His work emphasizes balancing discovery research with near-term clinical opportunities to directly benefit patients with cancer today. He also shared how he prioritizes tools to empower patients, such as clinical trial finders, and stressed the importance of having contingency plans before disease progression. Overall, this conversation highlights a career that reflects a consistent commitment to science, patient care, and global service, guided by both professional and humanitarian values.

Join Dr. Natalie Crawford and Dr. Shannon Ritchey, physical therapist and founder of EVLO Fitness, as they break down the science of movement, revealing how strategic exercise can transform your hormonal health, fertility, and overall wellness. Key Topics: 1. Strength Training Demystified - Debunking fitness industry myths - Why muscle matters more than cardio - Simple strategies for effective workouts 2. Your Body, Your Fitness Journey - Listening to your body's signals - Avoiding the "no pain, no gain" trap - Customizing exercise to your life stage 3. Hormones & Movement - How exercise impacts reproductive health - Cycle-friendly fitness approaches - Building resilience through smart training 4. Pregnancy & Postpartum Movement - Challenging traditional exercise restrictions - Maintaining strength during major life changes - Recovery and muscle memory secrets Follow Dr. Shannon Ritchey on IG @dr.shannon.dpt Learn more about EVLO fitness https://evlofitness.com/ Pre-order Dr. Crawford's debut book, The Fertility Formula, now! ⁠https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book⁠ Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content, and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ryan & Jake joined by Patrick and Mason try new Pinnacle meals they just released, along with other meals that were recommended. Try Them For... The post 140. Trying New Pinnacle Meals appeared first on Shoot2Hunt.

In this heart-to-heart episode of Soulful IVF, I'm joined by the one and only Dr. Natalie Crawford — a renowned fertility physician, educator, and advocate for women's health. Based in Austin, TX, Dr. Crawford is double board-certified in obstetrics/gynecology and reproductive endocrinology/infertility. She's the cofounder of Fora Fertility, CEO and cofounder of Pinnacle, and the host of the podcast As a Woman: Fertility, Hormones, & Beyond. Her debut book, The Fertility Formula, is set to launch in spring 2026.Together, we dive deep into:Practical ways to support yourself through IVFThe advice she gives her own patients navigating fertility treatmentHow mindset impacts the fertility journeyOptimizing natural fertility through nutrition, gut health, and reducing inflammationA crash course in biology 101: hormones, cellular health, and moreDr. Crawford's personal fertility story and her path to motherhoodThis conversation is both empowering and approachable, giving you the science, wisdom, and encouragement to take an active role in your reproductive health.✨ Whether you're in the middle of IVF, considering treatment, or simply wanting to better understand your body, this episode will leave you feeling informed and inspired.Connect with Dr. Crawford https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/CONNECT with Lisa & get IVF COACHING SUPPORT ------> JOIN September '25 Group Call https://forms.gle/LEHdBwmKfyPEWrBHA Download IVF Mindset Shift Guide https://ivfmanifestingamiracle.myflodesk.comBOOK a complimentary DISCOVERY CALL BOOK: ‘HOLD ON, BABY! A Soulful Guide to Navigating the Ups & Downs of Infertility & IVF.'INSTAGRAMWATCH on YOUTUBELISTEN to the PODCAST on Apple and Spotify:**Please Rate the show & Subscribe! THANK YOU so much for your Reviews of the podcast!Music Credit (Closing Song) by Sam Costigan. Follow her on Spotify and IG

With all of us Celtic fans reeling from boardroom chaos and transfer frustration, this week's Huddle Breakdown Interview offers a welcome break from the turmoil. James sits down with Ted Knutson — co-founder of StatsBomb and pioneer in football analytics — for a wide-ranging interview. Ted shares his journey from gambling at Pinnacle to reshaping recruitment at clubs like Brentford and Brighton, explains why set pieces and throw-ins can “break the game,” and compares the analytics adoption curve in football and the NFL. They also cover Tony Bloom's brilliance at Brighton and USG, the 49ers' influence at Leeds, and what Celtic could learn from smarter clubs abroad. This is a rare chance to hear directly from one of the most influential minds in modern football. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pastor Josiah breaks down the interesting passage where Jesus curses the fig tree and it dies, unable to bear fruit and its correlation to what was happening with the religious system being done away. Furthermore the powerful story of the woman healed of a terrible infirmity. If anything is above Him, it's an idol.

Dr. Natalie Crawford, board-certified OBGYN and REI, breaks down the powerful tools that can help you understand your body's natural fertility signals. Learn how to move beyond basic period tracking apps to truly understand when you're ovulating, time intercourse effectively, and spot potential issues early. Whether you're trying to conceive or simply want to connect with your cycle, this episode gives you practical, science-backed methods to take charge of your reproductive health. 1. Understanding Your Body's Natural Signals - Why your period app might be misleading you - The difference between tracking and truly understanding your cycle - How your body communicates fertility throughout the month 2. The Cervical Mucus Method - What to look for and when to check - Simple techniques you can do at home - How this free method can guide your timing 3. Temperature Tracking Made Simple - Modern tools that make monitoring easier than ever - What your morning temperature reveals about ovulation - Reading the patterns your body creates each month 4. Ovulation Test Strips and Timing - When and how to use these affordable tools - Understanding what a positive result really means - Combining methods for the most accurate results Pre-order Dr. Crawford's debut book, The Fertility Formula, now! ⁠https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book⁠ Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content, and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Behind these walls” es el título del primer adelanto del debut de un nuevo grupo llamado Token Hearts. Lo integran conocidas caras del rocknroll de la ciudad de Atlanta procedentes de The Woggles, Subsonics o la banda de Cat Power. Ellos abren un ecléctico menú de novedades con muchos nombres conocidos aquí abajo.Playlist;TOKEN HEARTS “Behind these walls”THE BLACK LIPS “Kassandra” (Season of the peach)THE MYSTERY LIGHTS “Before you release it”DIRTY FENCES “Running again”DYNAMITE SHAKERS “Ridiculous”THE HIVES “Legalice living” (The Hives Forever, Forever The Hives)THE ROARING 420’S “This is no rebellion (it’s a matter of fact)”THE NUDE PARTY “Not that bad”THE BLANK TAPES “Lazy old summer days” (Good old days)KEVIN ROBERTSON “We found the summer” (Yellow painted moon)GUILLE WHEEL and THE WAVES “Please don’t go”JON BATISTE “Pinnacle” (Big Money)TAV FALCO feat PETE MOLINARI and BOZ BOORER “The ballad or Rue de la Lune”THE LEMONHEADS “The key of victory” (Love chant)THE LIMIÑANAS feat ROVER “Shout” (Faded)Escuchar audio

Fresh from claiming helping Canberra claim its first Minor Premiership since 1990 after an outstanding season, Raiders back-rower Hudson Young says he's hopeful of receiving a call-up for the Kangaroos Ashes Tour later this year. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, I review The Secret History, by Donna Tartt!Goodreads/Fable: Ellie ManoInstagram/TikTok: @hookofabookEmail: hookofabookpodcast@gmail.com

Combining expert misdirection along with some strategically-placed fourth-level spells, the Fellstar Pirates make it to the base of their goal - the first floor of Asgorath's Pinnacle. But getting here was just the easy part, as Zellias belatedly remembers upon ascending to the tower's first level.

Dr. Natalie Crawford is joined by double board-certified Internal Medicine and Lifestyle Medicine physician, Dr. Brook Stubbs, to discuss the powerful connection between nutrition, hormonal health, and overall wellness. Discover how simple dietary choices can transform your energy, fertility, and long-term health. Key Topics: 1. The Gut-Hormone Connection - Understanding your body's internal communication - Why fiber is your secret wellness weapon - How food impacts your hormonal signals 2. Nutrition and Fertility - Breaking down diet myths - Plant-based eating strategies - Simple swaps for better reproductive health 3. Inflammation and Your Body - Recognizing hidden inflammatory triggers - The role of diet in reducing body stress - How food choices affect energy and metabolism 4. Practical Nutrition Strategies - Easy meal planning tips - Building a diverse, plant-forward diet - Sustainable approaches to healthy eating Follow Dr. Brooke Stubbs Instagram: @brookiestubbsMD and @rootedfemme Learn more about her practice https://www.rootedfemme.com/ Pre-order Dr. Crawford's debut book, The Fertility Formula, now! ⁠https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book⁠ Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content, and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The lads gush about the greatest legendary special weapon to join the kinetic slot since the Mountaintop and Riptide. We also talk about the Mountaintop and Riptide's heirs. And the rest of the Pinnacle gear.TIMESTAMPSBushido Armor Set - 29:55Problem Solver Origin Trait - 42:00MINT RETROGRADE - 44:25Lionfish-4FR - 1:08:30Pre Astyanax IV - 1:23:50Theodolite - 1:33:10Outrageous Fortune - 1:46:10PatreonBECOME A PVE PATRON: https://www.patreon.com/podcastversusenemiesSocialsPVE TWITTER: https://twitter.com/PodvsEnemiesPVE BLUESKY: https://bsky.app/profile/podvsenemies.bsky.socialPVE DISCORD: https://discord.gg/TheyfeQDestiny ScienceSCIENCE WEBSITE: https://www.destiny2.science/AudioAUDIO PRODUCTION (Autodidaktos): https://twitter.com/CameronChollarINTRO MUSIC (Radio Orphe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POdqgitXq64

In this episode, Jake and Ryan sit with John Ritner, owner of Pinnacle Foods. To discuss their upcoming projects and what their process is like.... The post 138. Pinnacle Foods & How They Came To Be appeared first on Shoot2Hunt.

Beth Zoneraich, CEO of Pinnacle Fertility, is back on Inside Reproductive Health to share the hard numbers and the deeper philosophy behind what she calls the Pinnacle Operational Model.We deep dive into::Why they automate the back end of patient care (but never the front)How 3,000 unanswered phone calls became 500 new patientsThe “J curve” of operational change (where things get worse before they get better)Whether business leaders can help achieve work-life balance for clinical staffThe build vs buy debateHow they saved $1M saved by building (not buying) a witnessing system

In episode 1919, Jack and Miles are joined by comedian and co-host of Yo, Is This Racist?, Andrew Ti, to discuss… Eric Adams Campaign Advisers LOVE Bribes, In Better News the Anti Mamdani Movement Is Fizzling, Cracker Barrel’s Logo Sparks Right Wing Freak Out For Some Reason and more! Eric Adams Campaign Advisers LOVE Bribes The Anti-Mamdani Movement Is Fizzling Cracker Barrel stock tanks after unveiling a controversial logo change Cracker Barrel Logo Change Sparks Fury Cracker Barrel outrages conservatives with new logo: ‘This is your Bud Light moment’ Cracker Barrel Updates Menu, Decor. Some Miss Its Country Charm. ‘Destroying itself,’ fume Cracker Barrel customers upset at sight of ‘modern day’ look crying ‘change it back’ What Is The Story Behind Cracker Barrel's Logo? Cracker Barrel Boycotts Danny Evins, Restaurant Founder and Focus of Controversy, Dies at 76 'Breathtaking' Document Reveals Pepsi's Logo is Pinnacle of Entire Universe LISTEN: talk to me by DANNSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Natalie Crawford breaks down everything you need to know about your eggs - how many you have, how good they are, and what age really means for your fertility. She explains the difference between egg quality and quantity, how your ovarian reserve is tested, and practical steps you can take to support your egg health at any age. Key Topics: 1. Understanding Your Egg Supply - The natural decline of eggs from birth through menopause - How the monthly egg release system works in your ovaries - Do you lose eggs even when not ovulating or trying to conceive? 2. Testing Your Fertility Potential - AMH blood test and what it measures in your body - Antral follicle count ultrasound examination process - How these tests relate to your remaining egg supply 3. How Age Affects Your Eggs - The relationship between time and egg quality deterioration - Genetic changes that occur in eggs as you get older - Why pregnancy becomes more difficult after age 35 4. Taking Control of Your Egg Health - Lifestyle factors that influence egg quality - The role of inflammation in reproductive health - How diet, stress, and environmental toxins impact fertility Pre-order Dr. Crawford's debut book, The Fertility Formula, now! ⁠https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book⁠ Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content, and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matt and Jack team up without resident "Glue Guy" Dave to discuss "Nine Sols" and other games with parry mechanics. Recorded 8/4/2025AI Generated Chapter ListChapters00:00 Introduction and Gaming Updates03:24 Project Zomboid: Survival and Hilarious Deaths06:59 Exploring New Games: The Alters and Doom Dark Ages10:00 Doom Dark Ages: A Grizzly Bear Experience12:44 Xbox vs PlayStation: The Next Generation Debate16:41 Vacation Gaming: Vampire Survivors and Deus Ex24:11 Nine Souls: A Deep Dive into Gameplay and Mechanics33:47 Mastering Combat Mechanics36:21 Navigating Game Design Challenges39:55 The Thrill of Boss Fights45:47 Exploring the Story and Characters51:52 Thematic Depth and Political Undertones55:07 Counter Mechanics and Gameplay Dynamics59:29 Favorite Parry Systems in Gaming01:06:21 The Evolution of Combat Mechanics01:12:02 Exploring Unique Gameplay Experiences01:17:15 The Impact of Parry Mechanics in Gaming01:23:34 Honorable Mentions and Personal Favorites01:26:03 The Pinnacle of Parry Systems: Sekiro01:39:19 Nostalgia for Retro Games01:40:05 Boss Fights in Nine Souls01:42:32 Final Boss Dynamics01:43:32 Game Design and Replay Value01:44:51 Village Rescue Mission Experience01:46:35 Platinum Trophy Aspirations01:47:09 Frustrations with Game Mechanics01:48:43 Studio's Future and Game Recognition01:50:40 Parrying Mechanics in Gaming01:51:35 Closing Thoughts and Future Games

RJ bell, Steve Fezzik and Scott Seidenberg talk NFL Preseason and much more. RJ Bell opens with humor, likening obvious seasonal choices to betting decisions, and transitions into a sales pitch for pregame season picks, stressing that buying early is always best. He notes past success from cappers including A.J. Hoffman at +75 units, Goodfella at +50, Shaker with 20–26, and Steve Fezzik with 10 of 12 winning years, though Fezzik is down this year with 30 pending bets. A podcast coupon TOUCHDOWN75 offers $75 off. Light conversation covers Fezzik “holding down the fort,” movies like Dances with Wolves and Tin Cup, and McKenzie's trip to Chicago. Shifting to football, Fezzik reports a preseason week one scoring surge: 14 overs, 2 unders, 44.9 points per game, about eight points above totals and eight higher than last year's week one. Yardage and first down numbers barely rose, suggesting other causes, chiefly a new kickoff rule moving touchbacks to the 35-yard line. Week one saw an 80% return rate, same as last year's first week, but higher variance from returns creates more scoring opportunities than uniform touchbacks. Another factor is improved field goal prep—kickers now get balls earlier—producing 88.8% accuracy on 63 attempts, including 18 makes from 50+ yards and a 70-yarder, up from 86% last year. RJ and Fezzik argue this, combined with kickoff variance, will cut punts and boost points. Fezzik advises betting overs now before public momentum inflates totals. They analyze betting market evolution, noting early-week line moves remain sharp but late-week ones have softened due to more public money from legalized wagering. Bookmaker practices limiting sharps quickly are discussed alongside anecdotes from Pinnacle's Henry about reading bettors. Strategic implications emerge for team totals and props tied to strong kickers and returners. RJ prefers season-long overs before adjustment; Fezzik expects kickoff returns to stay near 85% in the regular season. RJ stresses finding betting niches you enjoy. Scott shares success in “longest rush/reception” props using YAC and missed tackle data. Preseason takeaways include that league-wide rule effects matter regardless of personnel, while starter-vs-starter glimpses gain value as preseason progresses. Fezzik's best bet is Detroit +3.5 vs Miami, citing the Lions' third game and 8 days rest against Miami's second game, short week, and back-to-back road travel. RJ outlines how Hall of Fame game participants excel late in week one due to conditioning depth. Scott's best bet is Eagles -4.5 vs Browns, exploiting Cleveland's depleted QB depth versus standout Eagles backup Tanner McKee. Scott presents an offensive tackle composite ranking from PFF and pass block win rate to find teams facing weak tackles; 49ers rank second easiest, making Nick Bosa a candidate for Defensive Player of the Year at +1500, sack leader at +1100, or 15+ sacks at +250. Using the same method, the Giants face the third toughest tackle slate, leading RJ to target under on Brian Burns sacks. Discussion notes good defensive lines facing strong tackles make sack production harder. They close with an announcement that Scott will appear less often due to new opportunities but will return during the season, ending with thanks, a Johnny Cash anecdote, and Fezzik quoting Cash lyrics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bob Archer, President & CEO of Pinnacle Silver & Gold (TSX.V:PINN - OTC:PSGCF - FSE:P9J) joins us to discuss the oversubscribed ~C$1.7M financing and how it will accelerate work at the El Potrero Project in Mexico. Bob outlines the immediate plans for these funds, including: Advancing underground and surface mapping/sampling along a 1.6 km structure with historic high-grade production. LiDAR survey to refine structural targeting and guide drilling plans. Preparing for an underground drill program aimed at defining ore shoots for potential small-scale production. We also discuss the company's strategy to generate cash flow quickly, leverage existing processing infrastructure, and pursue additional acquisitions to grow into a multi-mine operator. Bob highlights the balance between minimizing shareholder dilution and advancing toward production in a challenging financing market.   Please email me with any follow up questions you have for Bob - Fleck@kereport.com. Click here to visit the Pinnacle Silver and Gold website to learn more about the company and read over the recent news.

Dr. Nicole Basa, bariatric surgeon, joins Dr. Natalie Crawford to unpack the complex connection between weight, hormones, and metabolism—breaking it down with real talk, expert insights, and practical tips every woman needs to hear, especially if you've ever felt stuck on your weight loss or health journey. Key Topics: 1. Metabolic Health Basics - Your body's calorie-burning engine - Hormones that control metabolism - How genetics impact weight 2. Hormones and Weight Challenges - Insulin's role in weight gain - Hormone changes during perimenopause - How hormones affect fertility 3. Effective Weight Loss Strategies - Importance of protein intake - Building muscle through resistance training - Breaking weight loss plateaus 4. Medical Interventions for Weight Management - Understanding GLP-1 medications - Bariatric surgery options - Resetting your body's weight set point Follow Dr. Nicole Basa Instagram @nicolebasamd Check out her clinic in Austin, TX https://bamedicalcenter.com/ Pre-order Dr. Crawford's debut book, The Fertility Formula, now! ⁠https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book⁠ Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content, and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amazon is breaking up the operations of its Wondery podcast network and we get into it, working with AI to help with your podcast and keeping it human, rebranding your podcast, what to do before you change the name, plus we're headed to Podcast Movement! Audience feedback drives the show. We'd love for you to contact us and keep the conversation going! Email thefeed@libsyn.com, call 412-573-1934 or leave us a message on Speakpipe! We'd love to hear from you!

Amazon is breaking up the operations of its Wondery podcast network and we get into it, working with AI to help with your podcast and keeping it human, rebranding your podcast, what to do before you change the name, plus we're headed to Podcast Movement! Audience feedback drives the show. We'd love for you to contact us and keep the conversation going! Email thefeed@libsyn.com, call 412-573-1934 or leave us a message on Speakpipe! We'd love to hear from you!

MUSICLars Ulrich has confirmed the rumors that Metallica have been looking into playing the Sphere in Las Vegas next year. https://www.siriusxm.com/talk/howard-stern Sean “Diddy” Combs is already eyeing a major comeback performance at New York's Madison Square Garden following the completion of his prison sentence, his attorney, Marc Agnifilo, tells TMZ. https://www.tmz.com/2025/08/06/diddy-wants-to-perform-at-madison-square-garden-after-release/ Papa Roach fans expecting a new album this year because they've already released two singles -- "Ever If It Kills Me" and "Braindead" -- will have to wait a little while longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HEYf7_Feh0Shinedown are taking their hot sauce business to a restaurant chain. https://www.instagram.com/p/DM-mgZopiDn/Machine Gun Kelly recently shared his eating habits during a Kick livestream with influencer Adin Ross. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-14976871/machine-gun-kelly-sparks-concern-grim-diet-eats-couple-times-week.html San Francisco honored late Grateful Dead founder and guitarist Jerry Garcia on what would have been his 83rd birthday on August 1st. https://www.bhpioneer.com/a_and_e/grateful-dead-guitarist-jerry-garcia-has-childhood-street-named-for-him-in-san-francisco/article_ce73d2cf-2f91-59df-b4c0-4c7d446c1c29.html Def Leppard will perform on NBC's America's Got Talent on August 20th. https://www.instagram.com/p/DM_wmBSxPRH/Jelly Roll will perform on the Stand Up 2 Cancer special, which will tape Saturday at the Pinnacle in Nashville and air on over 30 networks and streaming services on August 15th. Sheryl Crow is the host. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jelly-roll-jonas-brothers-cece-winans-dan--shay-and-more-unite-in-nashville-for-stand-up-to-cancers-fundraising-special-302522935.htmlThree Days Grace guitarist Barry Stock shared a video of himself getting to drive a race car around at the Ozarks International Speedway in Gravois Mills, Missouri. Watch it on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DM9RDnyMj-O/ TVThe stand-alone Hulu app will disappear next year. https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/hulu-app-phased-out-disney-plus-fully-integrating-1236480450/ Aubrey Plaza will play Heidi Fleiss, otherwise known as the "Hollywood Madam," in an upcoming biopic. It marks Aubrey's first major project since the death of her husband Jeff Baena, who died by suicide in January at age 47. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-14976927/Aubrey-Plaza-Heidi-Fleiss-role-husband-suicide-fans-say-look-similar.html "Ketamine Queen", Jasveen Sangha, who has been charged with five counts of ketamine distribution, including one count of distribution resulting in the death of 'Friends' actor Matthew Perry, is headed to trial September 23rd. https://abc13.com/post/jasveen-sangha-known-ketamine-queen-accused-selling-matthew-perry-fatal-dose-gets-september-trial/17450679/ Does Kris Jenner have six toes? https://pagesix.com/2025/08/05/celebrity-news/kris-jenner-called-out-for-having-six-toes-in-alleged-photoshop-fail/ There's a thread that's going viral online, where people are talking about TV shows that started out as a "10 out of 10" . . . but ended as a "ONE out of 10." Here are the most popular responses: "House of Cards" . . . "One of the best shows ever for the first few seasons, and then ended in the most disappointing fashion ever." (They did have to deal with writing Kevin Spacey out of the show, due to his legal issues.)"Grey's Anatomy" . . . "It's a great show, but it's just so repetitive: Same medical conditions, same plots, same everything." "Shameless" . . . "It was 10/10 for several seasons, but got harder to watch the longer it went on.""American Horror Story" . . . "Each season gets worse than the one before.""The Walking Dead" . . . "It overstayed its welcome to the point that it inadvertently erased itself from the mainstream consciousness." It sounds like almost EVERYONE finally bailed at the same time. (When Glenn died.)"That '70s Show" . . . "By the final season, it was almost unwatchable.""Game of Thrones" . . . "Went from peak cinema, to some rushed [B.S.] ending." "Prison Break" . . . "They probably should've just ended it once they escaped the first time.""Yellowstone" . . . "I'm currently half through Season Five, and it feels like watching endless streams of country music videos. So far, the NINE episodes I've watched should've been one, or two at best."Lost" . . . It took this far before someone mentioned "Lost", which a lot of people HATED at the time, before they were disappointed by tons of other shows. MOVING ON INTO MOVIE NEWS:The latest movie adaptation of War of the Worlds apparently sucks. https://www.gamesradar.com/entertainment/sci-fi-movies/amazons-new-war-of-the-worlds-adaptation-which-stars-ice-cube-and-is-filmed-entirely-on-a-computer-screen-debuts-to-0-percent-on-rotten-tomatoes/ RIP: Brad Pitt‘s mom, Jane Etta Pitt, has sadly passed away. She was 84 years old. https://www.eonline.com/news/1420826/brad-pitts-mom-jane-etta-pitt-dead-at-84· AND FINALLYIt's safe to assume that bands play their popular hits all the time. But have you ever wondered just how MANY times? A new study took stats from the website Setlist.fm to find out which songs rock bands have performed over 1,500 times. https://loudwire.com/songs-rock-metal-bands-played-live-more-than-1500-times/ Here are some notable ones:1. "School's Out", Alice Cooper: 3,090 times2. "Rock and Roll All Nite", KISS: 2,228 times3. "Smoke on the Water", Deep Purple: 2,223 times4. "Master of Puppets", Metallica: 1,774 times5. "T.N.T.", AC/DC: 1,588 timesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aussie stocks cracked fresh record highs today, with the ASX 200 lifting past 8,800 points for the first time ever. Markets are buoyed by optimism around US rate cuts and easing trade uncertainty, even as Trump’s new tariffs come into effect tomorrow. Meanwhile, a tagging error by the ASX sparked confusion for TPG Telecom, and gold stocks rallied on the final day of the Diggers and Dealers forum. Plus, REA Group soared on strong earnings, IDP Education bounced, and Pinnacle and News Corp surged. The content in this podcast is prepared, approved and distributed in Australia by Commonwealth Securities Limited ABN 60 067 254 399 AFSL 238814. The information does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Consider the appropriateness of the information before acting and if necessary, seek appropriate professional advice. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Natalie Crawford discusses the complex world of inflammation, exploring its critical role in fertility, reproductive health, and overall well-being. Through personal experience and medical expertise, she breaks down the science behind inflammation, its effects on the body, and practical strategies for reducing its impact on fertility. Key Topics: 1. The Inflammation Spectrum - Acute vs. Chronic Inflammation - Immune System Activation - Progression to Autoimmune Conditions 2. Inflammation's Impact on Reproductive Health - Hormonal Disruption - Ovulation and Implantation Challenges - Reproductive Disorder Connections 3. Gut Health and Inflammation - Dietary Influences on Inflammation - Gut Microbiome and Fertility - Insulin Resistance and Inflammatory Responses 4. Practical Strategies for Reducing Inflammation - Nutrition and Diet Modifications - Stress Management Techniques - Environmental Toxin Reduction Pre-order Dr. Crawford's debut book, The Fertility Formula, now! ⁠https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book⁠ Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content, and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Kill Tony band stuck around for the first ever Dr. Phil Live at The Pinnacle in Nashville, TN for a SOLD OUT show! Insanity, healing in the crowd, and a woman bangs a cake. This Episode's sponsors! Shopify - https://Shopify.com/aboutlastnight For your $1 trial period BetterHelp - https://Betterhelp.com/aboutlastnight For 10% off of first month Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Natalie Crawford is joined by Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a board-certified OBGYN and fierce advocate for changing the conversation around women's health. Together, they demystify perimenopause and menopause by breaking down the hormonal changes women experience and providing empowering strategies for navigating this critical life transition. Key Topics: 1. Your Changing Body's Hormonal Journey - How your ovaries start becoming less cooperative - Why estrogen matters more than you think - Decoding the symptoms no one talks about 2. The Real Story About Hormone Replacement - Busting myths about hormone treatments - What science really says about staying healthy - Finding the right hormone solution for your body 3. Lifestyle Hacks for Feeling Your Best - Building strength when your body feels different - Eating for your inflammation - Nutrition strategies that actually work for midlife 4. Taking Charge of Your Health - Learning the language of your body - Finding doctors who will really listen - Becoming the CEO of your personal health journey Follow Dr. Mary Claire Haver TikTok @drmaryclaire Instagram @drmaryclaire @the_pause_life  Facebook The Pause Life by Dr Mary Claire Haver  YouTube: Mary Claire Haver, MD LinkedIn The 'Pause Life with Dr. Mary Claire Haver Purchase her book The New Menopause  Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content, and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this KE Report Company Introduction, I speak with Bob Archer, President and CEO of Pinnacle Silver and Gold (TSX.V: PINN | OTC: PSGCF | Frankfurt: P9J), as the company shifts its primary focus to Mexico with the El Potrero Project, following a strategic option agreement signed in February 2025.   Key Highlights from the Interview Strategic Shift to Mexico and Restarting Production Pinnacle Silver and Gold transitioned from its Canadian-focused past to pursue high-grade, near-term production opportunities in Mexico. The flagship El Potrero Project, located in the Topia district of Durango, is a past-producing asset, comprising multiple high-grade underground gold-silver mines. The company is using a cash-flow-first model - similar to Bob's prior success at Great Panther - aiming for production before establishing a large resource. Early Sampling Results Surface and underground channel sampling from the central “Pino Cuata” zone delivered grades as high as 85 g/t gold and 520 g/t silver (individual sample) Production-First Strategy and Flexible Option Deal Structured to earn 50% upon entering production, with the path to 90% and potentially 100% ownership. Targeting small-scale, high-margin production (~100 TPD), reducing permitting complexity and capital needs. Existing mill infrastructure and underground access greatly accelerate timelines and reduce costs. Well-Rounded Team with Strong Local Ties CEO Bob Archer brings 45+ years of experience, including founding Great Panther and multiple mine restarts in Mexico. Key technical advisors include metallurgical engineer David Salari, global geologist Colin Jones, and a Mexican technical team with local experience and community engagement. Strong Start to 2025 and Fully Subscribed Financing Recently closed a $1.3M financing, enabling mapping, LIDAR surveys, and potentially underground drilling as early as September. Pinnacle is also evaluating additional acquisition opportunities to replicate the Great Panther playbook. Red Lake Projects Remain in the Portfolio Two 100%-owned assets in Ontario (including the historic Argosy Mine) are on the back burner but remain part of the long-term growth pipeline. Please email me with any follow up questions you have for Bob - Fleck@kereport.com. Click here to visit the Pinnacle Silver and Gold website to learn more about the company and read over the recent news.

Four of the country's largest primary health organisations are pooling their resources together in an effort to deliver more digital solutions. More than 500 general practices, supporting over two million patients fall under the umbrella of Pegasus, Pinnacle, Procare and Tu Ora Compass Health. Justine Thorpe is the Co-chair of the new innovation hub, Health Accelerator. She told Mike Hosking that the next thing they'll be looking at is AI scribe tools for GPs. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

By tempting Jesus to jump off the temple, Satan was inviting Him to win followers by parading the miraculous power of God. Today, Sinclair Ferguson explains why Christ really came: to save sinners by suffering in their place. Read the transcript: https://ligonier.org/podcasts/things-unseen-with-sinclair-ferguson/the-pinnacle-of-the-temple/ A donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Donate: https://donate.ligonier.org/ Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts

Dr. Natalie Crawford explains the IVF journey—breaking down the medical process, emotional rollercoaster, and key ways to prepare. Whether you're just starting to explore fertility treatments or already on the path, she offers expert insights and practical advice to help you feel informed, empowered, and supported on the journey. Key Topics: 1. The IVF Process - Scientific complexity of fertility treatment - Hormone regulation and egg stimulation - The science behind creating embryos 2. Genetic Screening and Reproductive Potential - Chromosomal analysis and embryo selection - Age-related fertility challenges - Giving yourself the best chance at pregnancy 3. Preparing for IVF - Eating for fertility - Lifestyle changes that boost your chances - Taking care of yourself inside and out 4. Being Your Own Health Advocate - Asking the right questions - Understanding what doctors are telling you - Taking control of your fertility journey My debut book, The Fertility Formula, is on pre-sale! Order now! https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content, and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it take to create a workplace where people thrive, expectations are high, and trust is real? In this episode, Eric Stone shares practical advice from his book Jumpstart Your Workplace Culture. From leadership values to employee development, you'll walk away with powerful tools to transform your organization. The Top 3 Key Learnings 1. Culture is the catalyst for execution — Strong relationships, clear communication, and the right tools empower teams to perform at a high level. 2. Training must be practical and continuous — Combine corporate learning with real-time coaching to drive real growth. 3. Accountability builds trust when done right — Set expectations, provide support, and use accountability as a tool to grow, not to punish. About Eric Stone ERIC D. STONE'S passion for business led him to an influential twenty-six-year career at the iconic rental car company Enterprise Holdings, where he quickly became one of the most decorated Regional Vice Presidents in the company's history. His ability to connect and motivate employees from all different generations and demographics allowed his teams to sustain top-level results and a culture of pride. Eric attributes much of this success to his ability to create, ignite, and sustain a high-performance culture—one that enabled him to lead his teams through challenges like 9/11, the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Great Resignation—along with an extraordinary ability to adapt to the unexpected and help others do the same. Eric is the author of the award-winning book Jumpstart Your Workplace Culture and an international speaker on leadership, employee engagement, and creating high-performance organizations. He retired from Enterprise in 2018 and founded Clear Path Ventures, which specializes in guiding young professionals and businesses as they navigate their path to success. The two awards the book has received thus far are The Pinnacle and The International Book Awards. Resources Clear Path Ventures: https://www.ericdstone.com/ https://www.ericdstone.com/ Please, hit the follow button: Apple Podcast: http://cxgoalkeeper.com/apple Spotify: http://cxgoalkeeper.com/spotify We'd love to hear your thoughts — leave a comment and share your feedback! Follow Gregorio Uglioni on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorio-uglioni/ About Gregorio Uglioni: Transforming Business Into Value Generating Engines - Creating Long-Lasting Impact Leveraging Customer Experience - Host Of The Globally Recognized CX Goalkeeper Podcast “Customer Experience Goals” - Speaker at global events & at podcasts - Judge at International Awards - CX Lecturer for several institutions Listen to more podcasts on The Agile Brand network here: https://agilebrandguide.com/the-agile-brand-podcasts/

Want to boost your fertility and take control of your reproductive health? In this episode, Dr. Natalie Crawford shares powerful insights from her upcoming book, The Fertility Formula, to help you understand your body and make informed choices that support conception and overall health. We talk about the basics you may not have been taught in school, the impact of diet, toxins, and exercise, and what really moves the needle when you're trying to conceive. Whether you're just beginning to think about parenthood or deep into your fertility journey, this is a must-listen. Dr. Crawford empowers people to take back their reproductive future—and this episode will help you do the same.

Join hosts Clay Edwards, Shaun Yurtkuran, and Lindsey Beckham for a lively Thirsty Thursday episode of "Uncensored," packed with candid banter, local insights, and hot-button debates. Kicking off with nostalgic chats about cheap beers and vodkas—debating if all vodkas taste the same, from Pinnacle to Grey Goose—the trio dives into spirits like gin (Tanqueray vs. Bombay) and the golden age of liquor packaging. They shout out local spots like RJ Singh's gas station for craft beers and discuss new ventures, including a massive pickleball entertainment complex in Flowood and the trendy Taste restaurant in Ridgeland. Clay plugs his FAFO merchandise at buyfafo.com and invites listeners to the Wildlife Extravaganza at the Clyde Muse Center, featuring celebs like Duck Dynasty's Buck Commander crew, Heather Smith from Naked and Afraid, and Andy Gibson, with gun giveaways and family fun. Shifting to news, they unpack breaking stories: a Wall Street Journal report on a Trump-Epstein birthday card sparking lawsuits and backlash; a salacious Hattiesburg senator scandal involving an affair, subpoenas, and ties to a former Miss Mississippi; and alienation of affection laws in Mississippi. The hosts react to Obama's recent podcast urging boys to have gay mentors for empathy, sparking discussions on masculinity, fatherless homes, and Democratic confusion over losing male voters. Delving deeper, they tackle Jackson's crime wave—debating gang influence (70% per estimates), rap culture's impact (from NBA YoungBoy to local sets), poverty as a choice vs. circumstance, and desensitization from video games and media. They contrast urban "fight or flight" life with white suburban extremes like cults, emphasizing accountability over excuses like systemic racism. Raw, unfiltered opinions on local politics, culture rot, and positive steps under Jackson's new mayor round out this engaging 2-hour chat. Tune in for laughs, debates, and real talk—catch them live on WYAB or online!

What does it take to walk away from something you've trained for your entire life… and then find your way back — stronger, wiser, and with a whole new purpose?In this two-part conversation, we sit down with world-record-holding swimmer Andy Donaldson. But Part One isn't about records. It's about the reset — the season of burnout, career shifts, mental struggle, and the slow, imperfect process of coming home to yourself.Andy was once on the edge of elite swimming. Then he left the sport entirely — went to work as an accountant, burned out, and eventually found himself guiding volcano tours in Nicaragua during the pandemic. Somewhere along the way, he started swimming again —, just for himself.That path led to an unexpected win at the legendary Rottnest Channel Swim… and the beginning of one of the most astonishing comebacks in open water history.

Dr. Natalie Crawford is joined by nurse practitioner, creator, and advocate, Katie Duke, for a deeply honest conversation about fertility, career, and taking control of your future. Katie opens up about her egg freezing journey from the emotional highs and lows to the unexpected medical hurdles and everything in between. 1. Understanding Egg Freezing - What is egg freezing? - Misconceptions about fertility and timing - The importance of reproductive autonomy 2. Navigating Fertility Clinics - The difference between clinical approaches - Red flags in medical care - Importance of personalized medical experiences 3. Personal Fertility Journey - Katie's decision to freeze eggs at 36 - Challenges with different fertility centers 4. Empowerment and Choice - Owning your reproductive decisions - Breaking the stigma around fertility conversations - Encouraging women to explore their options Follow Katie Duke on Instagram ⁠@thekatieduke Check out her website https://www.katiedukeonline.com/ Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content, and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Racing twice in 2002 with Minardi and once again three years later with BAR Honda in 2005, Anthony Davidson's Formula 1 career had a few false starts. But in 2007, he finally got a full-time shot with Super Aguri. Although his F1 career ended just over a year later, Anthony is rightly proud to have reached the top of motorsport. Speaking to Tom Clarkson, he discusses the ups and down of his time in F1 – telling us why he was a better test driver than racing driver, how his incredibly short-notice cameo at the 2005 Malaysian Grand Prix came about, why a groundhog cost him his best ever finish in F1, and what it was like to be involved in the so-called ‘Tyre War era' of Formula 1. Anthony also opens up about winning the World Endurance Championship with Sebastian Buemi in 2014 and why that meant so much to him having felt like ‘everything was lost' after F1. Now a simulator driver for Mercedes, Ant explains how much the sim technology has improved over time, what impact his work has on Mercedes' performance during race weekends and whether sim racing makes Max Verstappen a better driver. This episode is sponsored by: F1 Experiences: want to get closer to Formula One than ever before? Visit f1experiences.com/beyondthegrid to book your official ticket package today.  Vanta: visit vanta.com/GRID to sign up for a free demo today! Indeed: get a seventy-five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com/GRID 

Dr. Natalie Crawford breaks down the essential information about fertility testing, empowering women to understand their reproductive health. Learn when to get tested, what tests reveal, and how to advocate for yourself in your fertility journey. Key Topics: 1. When to Get Fertility Testing -Guidelines for testing based on age -Signs you should seek testing earlier -Importance of not waiting for a referral 2. Male Fertility Evaluation -Semen analysis basics -Impact of testosterone on fertility -What a sperm test reveals 3. Female Fertility Testing -AMH and ovarian reserve explained -Hormone level testing -Ultrasound and anatomical evaluations 4.Understanding Your Results -What tests can and cannot tell you -Interpreting ovarian reserve numbers -Questions to ask your doctor Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Chris and Jason signed on to give an update on the status of the spectacular nature of American Capitalism. Trump's useless strikes on Iran and false declaration of victory prompted us to revisit Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle in relation to contemporary American politics. Revenge of the Spectacle: This Time It's Personalhttp://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/revenge-of-the-spectacle-this-time-its-personal The Game of War. Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle.https://www.threemonkeysonline.com/the-game-of-war-guy-debord-and-the-society-of-the-spectacle/ Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show

Dr. Natalie Crawford and Dr. Shieva Ghofrany dive into the often-unspoken world of women's sexual health. From hormonal changes to relationship dynamics, this episode breaks down the science and stigma surrounding libido, offering candid insights and empowering advice for women at every life stage. Key Topics: 1. Hormones and Sex Drive - The role of testosterone, estrogen, and cortisol - How hormonal changes impact intimacy 2. Perimenopause and Sexual Health - Recognizing hormonal transitions  - Managing libido changes 3. Medical Insights - Contraception and sexual side effects - Vaginal health and non-hormonal options 4. Empowerment and Self-Care  - Breaking down shame and stigma  - Loving your body through different life stages Follow Dr. Shieva Ghofrany on Instagram ⁠@drshievag⁠ Check out her website to learn more about Dr. Shieva Ghofrany and her practice. h⁠ttps://www.drshievag.com/⁠ Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content and freebies. If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Natalie Crawford, double board certified OBGYN and REI, provides an in-depth roadmap for anyone preparing to start their pregnancy journey, covering everything from fertility tracking to preconception health. Key Topics Covered: 1. Birth Control and Fertility Transition - When and how to stop different birth control methods - Impact of birth control on fertility - Recommended waiting periods before trying to conceive - Hormonal vs. non-hormonal contraception effects 2. Fertility Tracking Methods - Understanding the fertile window - Cervical mucus monitoring - Basal body temperature tracking - Ovulation predictor kits (OPKs) -Pros and cons of different tracking techniques 3. Age and Fertility Considerations - Fertility potential by age group - When to seek fertility evaluation - Egg quality and reproductive aging - Recommended timelines for conception attempts 4. Preconception Health Preparation - Importance of prenatal vitamins - Lifestyle modifications for fertility - Nutrition and diet recommendations - Exercise and stress management strategies -Male health considerations 5. Preconception Medical Preparation - Scheduling preconception consultations - Essential medical screenings Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. ⁠Join the Learn at Pinnacle app ⁠to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by ⁠The Pinnacle Podcast Network⁠! Learn more about Pinnacle at ⁠learnatpinnacle.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Natalie Crawford, double board certified OBGYN and REI, breaks down the complex world of reproductive hormones, providing you with a comprehensive guide to understanding their menstrual cycle, hormone function, and reproductive health. Key Topics Covered: 1. Hormone Basics -The HPO (Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Ovary) Axis -How hormones communicate in the body -Roles of key hormones: GnRH, FSH, LH, Estrogen, Progesterone 2. The Menstrual Cycle Explained -Egg development and ovulation process -Hormone fluctuations throughout the cycle -Normal cycle length and characteristics 3. Hormone Health Insights -Identifying normal vs. abnormal cycles -Impact of prolactin and thyroid hormones -Importance of hormone testing 4. Common Misconceptions -Estrogen dominance -Hormone balance -Effects of biotin on hormone testing Want to receive my weekly newsletter? Sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive updates, Q&A, special content and freebies If you haven't already, please rate, review, and follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes every Tuesday. Plus, be sure to follow along on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠@nataliecrawfordmd,⁠⁠⁠⁠ check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Natalie's YouTube channel Natalie Crawford MD⁠⁠⁠⁠, and if you're interested in becoming a patient, check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠Fora Fertility. Join the Learn at Pinnacle app to earn FREE CE Credit for listening to this episode! This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network! Learn more about Pinnacle at learnatpinnacle.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Synopsis: This episode covers the rise and fall of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. “The Second Dynasty consists of nine kings of This. The first was Boethos, for 38 years. In his reign a chasm opened at Bubastis, and many perished. Kaiechos, for 39 years. In his reign the bulls, Apis at Memphis and Mnevis at Heliopolis, and the Mendelsian goat were worshipped as gods. Binothris, for 47 years. In his reign it was decided that women might hold the kingly office. Tlas, for 17 years. Sethenes, for 41 years. Chaires, for 17 years. Nephercheres, for 25 years. In his reign (the story goes), the Nile flowed blended with honey for 11 days.”  – Manetho's Aegyptiaca, as quoted by Syncellus Map of SW Eurasia: https://audio.ancientworldpodcast.com/A4_Map.png Map of Egypt: https://audio.ancientworldpodcast.com/A4_Egypt.png Map of the Pyramid Fields: https://audio.ancientworldpodcast.com/A4_Pyramids.jpg Images: https://www.flickr.com/photos/75506172@N07/albums/72177720326636138 References and Further Reading: https://audio.ancientworldpodcast.com/A4_References.pdf Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com if you would like to advertise on this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices