Podcasts about pollyannaish

Lesley Stahl, a linchpin of CBS News, began at the network in 1971, covering major events such as Watergate, and for many years has been a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” But right now it's a perilous time for CBS News, which has been sued by Donald Trump for twenty billion dollars over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Its owner, Paramount, seems likely to settle, and corporate pressure on journalists at CBS has been so intense that Bill Owens, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” and Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News, resigned in protest. Owens's departure was “a punch in the stomach,” Stahl tells David Remnick in a recent interview, “one of those punches where you almost can't breathe.” And far worse could happen in a settlement with Trump, which would compromise the integrity of the premier investigative program on broadcast news. “I'm already beginning to think about mourning, grieving,” Stahl says. “I know there's going to be a settlement. . . . And then we will hopefully still be around, turning a new page, and finding out what that new page is going to look like.” Although she describes herself as “Pollyannaish,” Stahl acknowledges that she is “pessimistic about the future for all press today. . . . The public has lost faith in us as an institution. So we're in very dark times.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Lesley Stahl, a linchpin of CBS News, began at the network in 1971, covering major events such as Watergate, and for many years has been a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” But right now it's a perilous time for CBS News, which has been sued by Donald Trump for twenty billion dollars over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Its owner, Paramount, seems likely to settle, and corporate pressure on journalists at CBS has been so intense that Bill Owens, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” and Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News, resigned in protest. Owens's departure was “a punch in the stomach,” Stahl tells David Remnick in a recent interview, “one of those punches where you almost can't breathe.” And far worse could happen in a settlement with Trump, which would compromise the integrity of the premier investigative program on broadcast news. “I'm already beginning to think about mourning, grieving,” Stahl says. “I know there's going to be a settlement. . . . And then we will hopefully still be around, turning a new page, and finding out what that new page is going to look like.” Although she describes herself as “Pollyannaish,” Stahl acknowledges that she is “pessimistic about the future for all press today. . . . The public has lost faith in us as an institution. So we're in very dark times.” 

Our culture often speaks of hope as either a Pollyannaish positivism or a measured optimism. Viewed through the lens of the cross, hope becomes an agent of empowering transformation instead. It does not deny suffering. Hope acknowledges that the present conditions are desperate, and it depends on God, with whom nothing is impossible. Hope is […]

This week on the show, Carrie sits down with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tina Rosenberg for a third time to assess the surprising power of solutions journalism. Of course, it wouldn't be a conversation about the news media if it didn't discuss the curious patterns of polarization, exploring how our perceptions of division might be more amplified than reality indicates. Tina, co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, argues that the news, in its relentless focus on the negative, can actually distort our understanding of the world. It's a paradox: the very medium meant to inform us contributes directly to our skewed perspectives.Through her own work, Tina is actively reshaping the narrative. With tens of thousands of journalists now trained in solutions reporting, she and her colleagues are pioneering a new approach – one that investigates what works rather than solely focusing on what's broken. It's not about Pollyannaish optimism or ignoring bad news; it's about rigorous reporting on solutions, examining their effectiveness with the same scrutiny typically reserved for exposing flaws.Carrie and Tina discuss the unexpected ripple effects of this shift, from happier journalists to a renewed sense of purpose in the newsroom. They explore the subtle art of listening, the power of asset-based framing (championed by Solutions Journalism Network board chair, Trabian Shorters), and the vital role of community engagement. This isn't just about journalism; it's about how we understand and address the challenges facing our society. Tune in to discover how a different kind of storytelling can lead to a more nuanced, and ultimately more hopeful, view of the world.Links & Notes:Solutions Journalism NetworkComplicating the Narratives ProjectSolutions Story Tracker (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward (01:32) - Introducing Tina Rosenberg (02:02) - Polarization (05:04) - Solutions Journalism Network (14:23) - Going Where the Mission Requires

There's a significant oversight that often goes unaddressed: the existence of bad actors within and around organizations. We tend to adopt a Pollyannaish view of firms, focusing on positive aspects like innovation, collaboration, and growth. While these elements are crucial, ignoring the darker side of human behavior can undermine our efforts and leave organizations vulnerable to corruption, fraud, and unethical practices.

Over the lifetime of Unstoppable Mindset, I have met many of our guests on LinkedIn. My guest this time, Wallace Pond, is by far one of the most fascinating and engaging people I have had the honor to talk with. Dr. Pond was born into a military family based at the time in Alabama. I do tease him about his not having an Alabama accent and he acknowledges that living on a military base is largely why he does not naturally possess a Southern way of speech. Dr. Pond has lived, worked, and studied in North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He has served as a teacher, a professor and within the corporate world he has held a number of positions including several within the C Suite arena. We get to explore his life journey including learning of a mental health crisis that led him to a career change a few years ago. During my time with Wallace, we talk about many subjects including God and religion, Leadership and what makes a good and real leader. Wallace talks about diversity and how we are focusing so much on tribal issues within our culture that we are losing the art of conversation. Dr. Pond will tell us about his project, the Transformation Collaborative which is an effort to promote real change in how we can become better versions of ourselves. I leave it to Wallace to explain. At the end of our podcast episode Wallace and I agreed to record a second episode in the near future. I'd love your thoughts about what you hear on this episode. Any questions you want me to ask Dr. Pond next time? Please pass them on. About the Guest: Dr. Pond, founder, IdeaPathway, LLC, the Transformation Collaborative™, and Life Worth Living, LLC, has been a missiondriven educator and leader for over 30 years. For the last 20 years, Wallace has been a senior leader in higher education, holding both campus and system level positions overseeing single and large, multi-campus and online institutions of higher education in the US and internationally. He has served as chancellor, president, COO, CEO, CAO (Chief Academic Officer), and board member, bringing exceptional value as a strategic-servant leader through extensive experience and acumen in strategic planning, transformational change, change management, crisis management/turn around, organizational design and development, P&L, human capital development, innovation, new programs, and deep operational expertise among other areas of impact. He has recently added psychotherapy to his practice and provides counseling services as an LPCC under supervision. You can see his counselor profile here. His many thought leadership articles are available at www.WallacekPond.com. Wallace began his career as a high school teacher and adjunct professor and spent six years in the elementary and secondary classroom working primarily with at-risk youth. He was also a public-school administrator and spent another six years as a full-time professor and administrator in the not-for-profit higher education sector, working in both on campus and online education, bringing education to underserved students. Additionally, Wallace has over 15-years of executive, private sector experience, creating a unique and powerful combination of mission-driven and business focused leadership and insights. Ways to connect with Wallace: www.wallacekpond.com www.transformationcollaborative.net https://www.linkedin.com/in/wallace-pond-47b05512/ https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Real-World-Executive-Turbulent/dp/B08C49FQ6Q/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1UIJFVM71G3RZ&keywords=leadership+in+the+real+world&qid=1704824712&s=books&sprefix=leadership+in+the+real+worl%2Cstripbooks%2C159&sr=1-1 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 Well, hi and welcome to unstoppable mindset. Welcome wherever you happen to be. I really am glad you're here with us. I'm Mike hingson, your host today. Our guest is Wallace Pond, a man of many talents. He's been very much involved in helping people and transforming he's got bachelor's, master's and PhDs all, well, I won't say all over the place, but, but he has a number of degrees. Yeah, we, we won't give them all away. I'll let you do that. And he's also now even becoming involved in more things relating to psychotherapy. So I'll have to have him talk to my cat and see if we can do something. Yeah, never, never sure that works. Is, does it? Wallace, but anyway, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're here.   Wallace Pond ** 02:08 Well, thank you so much, Mike. It's just a pleasure to be to be on the show with you. I appreciate what you got to be previously, and really appreciate also kind of the work that you do and what you've accomplished, and I think you have a really healthy and helpful perspective on a number of things, in particular diversity, but I think need to be that more people need to hear so I appreciate the opportunity to be with you well. Thank   Michael Hingson ** 02:37 you. I appreciate that, and would love to work with you any way that we can. Why don't we start on your podcast episode by you telling us kind of maybe a little bit about the early Wallace growing up and all that sort of stuff.   Wallace Pond ** 02:51 Yeah. So I was born in the deep south in the early 1960s very different time. My father was in the Air Force, so even though we were in Alabama, I was born into a desegregated military environment. This the in Montgomery, Alabama, the city was not desegregated. There were still separate bathrooms and water fountains for, quote, colored people, yeah, but on the Air Force Base, it was at least as desegregated as as the military could be at that time. But my folks and my family, both from Idaho, of all places, when my son was born there, about 30 years ago. He was the fifth generation from Idaho. My folks went back to Idaho when I was about, Gosh, nine years old.   Michael Hingson ** 03:49 So was it the military, though that influenced you not to have an Alabama accent?   Wallace Pond ** 03:54 Yeah. Probably parent, parents and military both. Okay, yeah, yeah. So my little sister and I, we were in Alabama and Georgia, Maryland before we went back to Idaho. But yeah, we sort of never got that southern accent, although given an opportunity, I can slip into it, and I certainly recognize it, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 04:17 well, and I love to use the words y'all and all y'all. And I know the difference between the two, which a lot of people don't, but it's   Wallace Pond ** 04:25 a third. There's a third, which is the plural possessive, all, y'all. Oh, all, y'all, that's right, yeah, yeah, which, which, not everybody, which, you don't hear all the time. But no, you're in the South. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 04:37 I love language. Anyway, so you were saying so, yeah.   Wallace Pond ** 04:44 So moved out to Idaho, back to Idaho. That's where my folks were from. And kind of feel like I, you know, some really formative years, nine to probably 18 or so in Idaho, and just had. You know, the the great pleasure over both when I was a child, living with my parents, and then also once I was independent, out of the home. Probably lived in. I could, I could, you know, calculate it, but lived in probably a dozen states, half a dozen countries. Uh, visited 39 or 40 countries. So just one of those people, you know, some folks, one model is to kind of grow up somewhere and be from there, and that's, you know, kind of how you identify. And then there's other folks, like I who just, you know, it's a very different perspective, and it's, you know, a lot of moves, a lot of different experiences, I think my wife and I, we've been married 34 years, and we stopped moving quite so much in the last, oh, probably 15 but I think we've moved 11 times. And in fact, the last kind of big adventure was we spent a couple years over the United Arab Emirates. I was a CEO running a company over there, as well as a college president, at the same time doing both in Abu Dhabi, and that kind of a long arc where I am now. But there was through that. There was there was kind of like K 12 experience, university experience, corporate experience, so pretty kind of broad based, you know, personal and professional background. As you said, I more recently got into into the field of psychotherapy as an actual therapist. That was kind of an interesting career shift, but, but really timely and probably one of the most congruent decisions I've ever made in my life, in terms of, you know, making a life decision that turned out to align with what I wanted to be true and what was making sense for me at The time. So kind of a long arc, but here we are. Here   Michael Hingson ** 07:03 we are. Where did you? Where did you go to college? Yeah, so   Wallace Pond ** 07:07 initially, University of Utah, okay, and I, and I pursued a degree in Spanish and Hispanic literature, which also kind of was not purposeful, it wasn't part of a plan, but it really had a significant impact on some of the things I did in my life, and certainly some of the cultural experiences I had as a student, I lived in Spain and Mexico as well, and then as a professional and as an adult, I also lived in Puerto Rico for three years. So Spanish and Spanish culture kind of a big part, at least earlier in my career, up through probably, I think I was, I left Puerto Rico in 2013 after three years there. So that was, that was kind of the undergraduate. And then, as you mentioned, I have, I have multiple I have three different graduate degrees, two two masters and a PhD in the one at Boston University that was back in the 90s, and then a PhD in education. And then I went back to school for the fourth time, about, Gosh, three or four years ago, when I decided I wanted to go into the helping professions again and be a counselor, and so that was a master's in clinical mental health. And I've been practicing. I've been seeing clients for about three years. I've been I've been seeing clients post grad, in both private practice and in a community health setting. Now for geez, I graduated in July of last year, so I probably, oh, maybe little over 1200 1300 hours of counseling at this point. So that's the educational story. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 09:05 I have to ask, since we talked about language and you spend some time at Boston University, yeah, and so on, did you ever learn to talk Bostonian?   Wallace Pond ** 09:16 So kind of like my experience in the south, you can do it, yeah, I can slip into it. I actually kind of enjoy it. I yeah, I do too, you know. But no, it's not something that I that I ever, ever adopted for myself.   Michael Hingson ** 09:33 I lived in Windsor mass for three years, so I spent some time in the Boston area,   Wallace Pond ** 09:40 great town, you know, Boston. I did a lot of that work, actually overseas, in an overseas program in Germany, of all places. So it's kind of a long, winding road. I've   Michael Hingson ** 09:52 heard that one of my favorite restaurants in Boston closed around or just before the time of the pandemic, Durkin park at uh. And near Fennell Hall, yeah, Quincy Market, I heard that Durgan closed, yeah?   Wallace Pond ** 10:06 And, well, and that was not unique to them. I mean, yeah, the pandemic was pretty rough on restaurants, and a substantial number all over the country didn't, didn't make it through that? Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 10:20 yeah. It's kind of sad. Long before the pandemic, the Carnegie Deli in New York closed, which was one of my favorites, and I knew the owner, but I think, yeah, and I don't even think they can, I don't even think they mail order anymore. I   Wallace Pond ** 10:36 don't know, but I do. I do remember, I do. I'm have some experience with the Carnegie Deli, because that's where I was introduced to pastrami. No better place, yes. And I didn't know I was a pastrami fan until then,   Michael Hingson ** 10:55 and the sandwiches were so small, yeah?   Wallace Pond ** 10:56 Well, right, yeah, it was a workout, like doing curls, lifting the sandwich. Yeah, I unfortunately, one of the things that happened being introduced to pastrami at the Carnegie Deli was I became kind of a pastrami snob. And so you know that my first introduction was as good as it gets. So yeah, it's hard for me to for pastrami to match up since then. Oh, gosh, that was a while ago.   Michael Hingson ** 11:23 Oh, it is. It's really hard. I'm still spoiled by the first Caesar salad I ever had. When my wife and I got married, we spent part of our time in Palm Springs, and then we went and spent the rest of our honeymoon in Phoenix and went to a hotel and stayed at a hotel called the point Tapatio, which had a restaurant up on top of the mountain. On one side, you could see Phoenix. On the other side, you could see Scottsdale. And we ordered Caesar salads that they made at tableside. And back then, in 1982 it included the rig and everything else. And it's still the best Caesar salad I ever had.   Wallace Pond ** 11:57 Yeah. Well, most people alive today are young with, oh, I would say most people born since maybe 819, 80 or so. Have you know, there used to be raw egg and a lot of stuff. Yeah, I don't know if you remember Orange Julius. Oh, yes, yeah, they used to get a raw egg. Was one of the ingredients you could get beat up in a in a smoothie. Yeah, those days are, sure. Guy, oh,   Michael Hingson ** 12:23 the days. Well, Steven, so, so what did you I was going to say, what did you do after college? But that's really kind of hard, because there's a lot of, a lot of after colleges for you. But you said Spanish wasn't really part of the plan, but yet, that's what you you did for an undergraduate degree? How come? Yeah,   Wallace Pond ** 12:43 so this is kind of a funny thing to even admit, but a lot of me back up a step. So my father, he had some kind of intuition, some kind of insight. He really believed it would be helpful for me, maybe really in terms of life experience, maybe in terms of just a skill set to be bilingual. And even back in high school, he started like, I'd come home and he put like, a pamphlet on my bed about, you know, Spanish language, or Spanish class or something like that, you know. And when I got to the University of Utah, I thought, you know, a little bit based upon his, you know, you know, suggestions and support. I i took a few Spanish I remember taking, you know, Spanish 101, then I kind of like that Spanish 102, I was a communications major at the time, and to be honest, I still don't know what that means, Mike, but I was a communications major, and at that time, it was the single largest major on campus, and you could not get courses you sent. You could not register for communications courses, and there were people who were being forced to spend an extra year or more at the U just to get the courses they needed to graduate. And in the meantime, I had said, Well, I'll get a minor. And I thought, well, if I'm gonna get a minor, I probably need to be able to speak it. So I decided to do a study abroad in Spain. Went to school at the University of Seville, four days a week, four hours a day, immersed in Spanish and subjects being taught in Spanish. And by the time I got back, I had, I had earned so many credits in Spanish that there was a pretty quick path to a degree in Spanish and and I didn't have to worry about the problem of not getting courses in in communication, communications, yeah, yeah. So when I got back to the and I also got a bunch more credit by passing some tests, some clap tests, and ended up, you know, with a degree. Did another study in Mexico, ended up with a degree in Spanish. Mentioned Hispanic literature. It just it was the path of least resistance, and something that I really enjoyed. So that's how that happened. I mean, there truly was no plan.   Michael Hingson ** 15:12 Well, things work out, though may not have been part of the plan, but it certainly sounds like it worked out well for you, and it helped integrate into everything that followed, which is always a good thing. It absolutely did. Yeah, I know when I went to UC Irvine starting in the fall of 1968 I entered the year that they had their first graduating class. So the first graduation was for seniors. Was 69 but they also had graduate school, they had medical some medical schools and so on. And very quickly, the school had become known for science, and a lot of people wanted to go off and become doctors. So the year that I entered 1600 people enrolled in organic well or enrolled in biology, and they all wanted to go off and be doctors and all that. And the biosci people said, Okay, well, before you can really be serious about a bio sci major, you're going to have to take a year of organic chemistry   Wallace Pond ** 16:24 that that that that weeded a few folks out, didn't it? From the   Michael Hingson ** 16:29 beginning of my freshman year to the end of my sophomore year, the number of students in biology dropped from 1600 freshmen to 200 sophomores.   Wallace Pond ** 16:38 Yeah, yeah. That's a, I think, a typical experience with I took organic chemistry much later in life. It's another kind of part of my minding journey. But I took an entire pre med curriculum after I finished my PhD, just for pure Self edification. And you know, I was always troubled by the fact that I got through three degrees without really having a good science Corps. And so while I was working as a professor at a college, I ended up taking, well, all but one course of a pre med curriculum. And I remember exec, I remember organic chemistry, and I remember just kind of that, that moment, that realization, where you cannot fake this, no you will put in the time, or you will not get out. Well, I did that. I   Michael Hingson ** 17:29 got my master's degree, my bachelor's and master's in physics, so I did not take organic chemistry. But I know everybody was complaining about memorizing all the reactions and all that and and, you know, I respect it, but I'm glad I didn't have to take it.   Wallace Pond ** 17:44 Yeah, I enjoyed it, but it was also something that, you know, it, like I said, it's not something you can fake, no, it's a completely different animal than than inorganic chemistry. Fascinating, really fascinating, actually, yeah, but definitely requires some mental effort.   Michael Hingson ** 18:06 I enjoyed hearing people talk about it, and enjoyed listening to all of that, but it was different than what I enjoyed doing. And I loved physics, and was especially always interested in the philosophy of physics, the history and philosophy, and of course, one of the big debates about physics is, is it really a quantum and does God throw dice, or is it, is it in reality that there is really determinism and and that's a question that physics still hasn't answered yet. Some people think it has, but it hasn't yet well,   Wallace Pond ** 18:38 and the answer to that question has huge implications for psychology and free will, sure   Michael Hingson ** 18:42 it does all of that. Sure it does, sure, and I am sure that eventually it will all get realized. And you know, my belief is that there are basic laws of the universe and that there are laws that we have to obey to to really progress, but it's our choice. And I, and I am absolutely a firm believer in the fact that there is such a thing as free will and choice.   Wallace Pond ** 19:09 Yeah, and I, I it may be, it may be that we at some point come to some kind of melding of the two, whereby there is some level of free choice or agency, but that that's highly influenced by underlying physics principles of some sort. Correct? Exactly? Yeah, yeah. Ray Kurzweil, the   Michael Hingson ** 19:35 futurist and inventor and a man I worked for for a few years when he was developing the Kurzweil Reading Machine created a doc, or there is a documentary about him. And at the end, he said, you know, everybody keeps wondering if there is a God, and he said, there isn't yet, because we haven't invented it. And I do not buy into Ray's I don't buy into Ray's argument that I don't think that works. Yeah. Yeah, but it is interesting and but you're right, it all really does come down to in psychology, a question of free will, a question of so many different things, and I and eventually will understand it   Wallace Pond ** 20:13 well. And there's an in there other related concepts, you know, for example, the notion of growth mindset, which is a really interesting concept, Carol Dweck, out of Stanford, was the one who kind of popularized this. But the idea that growth mindset, as opposed to fixed mindset, suggests that our futures are malleable, that that our ability to to learn, to grow to achieve objectives is at some significant level determined by whether or not we believe that we can grow and change and progress through new talents and perspectives, etc, versus the extent to which we believe it's more fixed, and that those limits are kind of innate, and there's a there's a potential physics element to that as well. Having said that, I do believe in mostly it's just observation that it absolutely is possible to to grow dramatically, intellectually, spiritually, academically, I'm Trying to some other examples might be things like emotionally, that we are, you know, capable. That's why we have neocortical functions, right, as human rights, right, even separate from other mammals, we have parts of our brain that do stuff, right, you know, that are that are pretty amazing, and that allow for pretty intense evolution. And I don't mean evolution in the historical sense, although that has its own place. I mean as individuals, right? You know, the ability to kind of evolve in the context of our environment. So it we probably won't have a final answer any of that before you and I are gone. But it is a, it is a topic that I find fascinating. Oh,   Michael Hingson ** 22:30 I do too, and, and, of course, the the other part of the question is, you say we may not have an answer before we're gone. Will we really be gone or whatever? So there's, there's that too, right?   Wallace Pond ** 22:45 Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, as part of my own mental health journey, you know, I'm a counselor, but I'm also, you know, in our field, we have this, this, this concept of wounded healer. And, you know, I didn't, you know, just randomly pop up one day in, you know, going from being a corporate executive or a university president to being a psychotherapist, I had my own journey as well mental health journey, and I put myself certainly in that category of of wounded healer. But when we think about, you know, the human experience, right? And as we think about the kinds of things that, just either by chance or by purpose, end up being part of that journey, for me, being exposed to Buddh principles and Buddhist thoughts, Buddhist ideas was really critical in my own healing and the whole notion of impermanence and afterlife. The Buddh take on that, I think, is really compelling. And this idea that there is an afterlife in the sense that we are all comprised of elements and molecules and atoms that will continue on in multiple forms, and that we're comprised of atoms and molecules that have been around, you know, that belonged, that were part of someone in the Roman Empire and part of someone in Greek times, and part of someone on the Savannah, or some animal on the savannah millions of years ago. And although it may not be sort of a Christian notion of an integrated afterlife as some version of yourself, right? I find that the Buddhist perspective really compelling. This idea that you know, the energy, the mass, the mole, the atoms that comprise us do continue on. And there may, in fact, be some integrated version of. That, who knows, you know, my father passed away a few years ago, and and one of the ways that I have, one of the ways that I have grieved that, and one of the ways I have dealt with that loss, is I frequently talk to him, and every you know, and every now and then I'll ask him, you know, you know, I'll tell him, gosh, I wish he could let me know what happened like. So what is it? You know, where are you? Are you know, do you have consciousness? And you know, maybe some way, sometime he'll answer. But for me, right now, a big part of of of that healing in that, in that grieving has been to maintain that relationship with Him through conversation.   Michael Hingson ** 25:45 And should I believe absolutely, I think there's a lot to be said for for the merits of what you were just describing. And the issue, I think, is that, if we also go back to what really is God, you've got the Christians who have tried to shape God in the sense in their image, more than the other way around, and others have done that too, but, but the reality is what really is God, and I think God is the underlying principle for all of us, and I think that we're all part of that God. And so when your father died, or my wife passed away in the end of 2022 there they are still there. I love to tell people that I am absolutely certain that Karen monitors me, and if I misbehave, I'm going to hear about it. So I have to behave, otherwise, I'm going to be in serious trouble.   Wallace Pond ** 26:45 Yeah, you know, there's an interesting I just, I'm just about to finish an absolutely profound book by an author, physician, philosopher. His name is Gabor Mate. He was a survivor of the Holocaust. He was a child of an infant. Actually, the book is called The Myth of normal, absolutely seminal, fabulous, fabulous book, just in general, but also resonates with me on my own mental health journey and as a counselor. But he makes reference in the book to to the actress as Ashley Judd and and a quote of hers, a phrase of hers, which is, I want to, I don't want to mess up the the quote. It is, surrendering to a god you don't believe in the idea that you know, you don't have to believe in a deity in any sort of, you know, codified religious, you know, institutional way to still surrender to, to, to a sense of, of, of a higher power, yeah. And I just, I, you know, I just really appreciated that quote from Ashley Judd, and I think it's really applicable, this idea that we don't have to be dogmatic. We don't have to be it's, you know, an ethical, institutional approach to surrender to a god we don't believe in. You know, that that we can surrender to something bigger, something beyond our own physical existence   Michael Hingson ** 28:24 well and in the Buddha oriented world, it is also, isn't even a matter of surrendering. It's a matter of believing you're a part of and being willing to progress and grow. And oh, I can't resist telling one of my favorite jokes, and I've not done it on here before, I used to listen to Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain tonight. Oh, okay, we did a great imitation of Mark Twain. And I don't know if it was actually Mark Twain that said it, but I attribute it to Mark Twain. But I heard Hal Holbrook say it. He said, You know, when we die, we're going to go to heaven, and when we go to heaven, assuming we go to heaven, we're going to probably be up on a cloud, and we're going to have harp music in the background, and we're going to study, and the more we study, the more we progress, and the more we progress, the more we study. And we're just going to be up there. We're going to study and study and study and progress and progress and progress. And if that isn't hell, I don't know   Wallace Pond ** 29:15 what is that that sounds like a Mark Twain. It   Michael Hingson ** 29:17 does sound like a Mark Twain, and I would suspect that it really came from him somewhere. Oh, gosh, but, but, you know, the the reality is that I think we impose way too many limitations on God and our relationship with God, and it's and it doesn't help us to do it. And I, you know, I hear what Ashley Judd is saying, but again, I think it's not so much a surrender as it is recognizing you're a part of   Wallace Pond ** 29:48 Yeah. That makes sense to me too. Michael, so what   Michael Hingson ** 29:50 did you do when you graduated from college? Initially, I will, I'll tell you the first time, what did what kind of our career path did you go on to?   Wallace Pond ** 29:58 Yeah? So in me. Immediately, I just went to work as a as a school teacher in a in a school for at risk youth in Salt Lake City. I taught Spanish, but I also taught English and introductory algebra and earth science. And, you know, a very common kind of thing in in small schools, you're a generalist, unlike, you know, in large districts, where you kind of, you just teach English all day or whatever.   Michael Hingson ** 30:33 Yeah, I grew up in my teachers were generalists,   Wallace Pond ** 30:36 yeah, yeah. And we also had an intense Outdoor Program in that school. So it was really interesting. We did, you know, we did, you know, snow camping, and we did survival, you know, hikes in southern Utah, you know, just what you could carry on your back. And, you know, through the desert for days, in addition to the, you know, the school work, or the classroom work, which itself was also not very traditional. So, you know, for example, we the classes were a mix of ages. You know, I taught classes with, you know, 1213, year olds and 17 year olds in the same class. It was just, it was dependent upon, you know, academic inclination, desire to be in a big, you know, particular course, you know, in that school was actually pre K, 12, so, you know, just some amazing, amazing experiences for me and for the and for the students, you know, 30 plus years later, whatever it was, 3435 years later, I still remember, you know, I have this, this image, and it's just such a poignant, touching image, particularly when we think about at risk youth and at Risk teenagers, I think we don't always have a very charitable view of kids that don't fit in, and adolescents and teens, you know, that that oftentimes are considered to be, you know, kind of unrefined or self centered or whatever. And I had this image. I still see it. We the this, the school had had a downstairs and an upstairs. And I remember one of my students, he was 18 years old. And, you know, this is back in, gosh, the 80s, and he, would, you know, black leather. You know studs on the leather. You know Jack boots. You know wallet on a chain. You know the kids about, you know, six two and about 190 pounds, the kind of kid that would scare the hell out a lot of people just looking at him, you know, but I had this mental image of of him walking down the stairs, and he's holding the hand of a four year old, helping the four year old down the stairs. I even get a little emotional thinking about it, 35 years later, you know the kind of kid that is so misunderstood, the kind of kid that you know has struggled so much to fit in, the kind of kid who you know is just constantly been battling between, you know, authenticity and acceptance. And here he is, you know, going down the stairs, holding the hand of a four year old preschooler to help him get down the stairs. And I just can't imagine a more poignant vision, yeah, and, and that was a, you know, those kinds of things were common experiences for me in those first couple of years teaching in that environment after my undergraduate work, I   Michael Hingson ** 34:01 spent a number of years living in and around well, I lived in New Jersey and worked in New York, but even before living there, company I worked for allowed me to travel to sell because we were being so successful, we couldn't just do it all from the phone in Southern California. So I stayed at a hotel, oftentimes in the middle of New York, near Times Square. And when I went out at night, there were people, are you? Do you remember the old the guardian angels?   Wallace Pond ** 34:34 Oh yeah. So   Michael Hingson ** 34:36 this guy would come up to me and he said, I'm with the guardian angels. He said, I just want to walk with you, just to make sure you stay safe. And safe. And I said, you know, you don't really need to. I'm really good. We said, we're going to anyway. And when what I've always realized, though, and he was good company, he was great. But what I also realized is that, in general, if you treat people well and. So if you don't act like a jerk, then they're going to, most likely treat you well as as well. And yeah, I never did have a problem with anyone in New York. I had a couple people who would come up to me and say, Does your dog bite? Because I always had my guide dog right, right? And I never knew why they asked. And so my response was, Well, you know, he's not trained to do that, but I wouldn't want to be the person to try to find out. And actually, the reason I use that answer was right. My first guide dog was a golden retriever, and one day we were at UC Irvine on campus, and some students would bring their dogs to college, and then then just let them roam. And a bunch of them organized a pack, and they actually came after me and my guy dog, Squire, who was this wonderful, loving golden retriever, right? And so we were walking, and these dogs were coming up on us from the rear, and Squire jerked away from me. I still had his leash, but he jerked away. So I lost grip on the harness. He turned around and crouched down and growled at these dogs. I've never heard him do that. Oh, wow. And they all just stopped and backed up and somebody else was watching. And he told me later, they just walked away with their tails between their legs, wow. Yeah, and you know, so, like I said, it's all about love, but I think it goes both ways. That with a dog, I wouldn't want to be the person to try to find out whether if they attacked me, my dog would bite. But I think also it's just as true with people. I'm not quite as sure today with all the drug stuff going on, but you know, the reality is, I think for the most part, people really are going to treat you well if you treat them well. Yeah,   Wallace Pond ** 36:47 I don't, I don't challenge that. Michael, I but what I would say is, I think one of the, one of the genuine sort of societal problems, manifestations, let's call it, of the kind of polarization and tribalism that's becoming more and more common. Yeah, is, you know, the deeper that people turn into their own tribe, right? You know, the the more that people insulate themselves from other people that you know don't share their views or their background or their culture. I think one of the real, potentially profound dangers of this tribalized tribalism, and whether it's, whether it's in social media or, you know, where we congregate, you know, face to face, and the deep polarization, not just you know you're wrong, but you're wrong and you're bad, is, is, I think, one of the things that we're really in danger of through that tribalism and isolation is that I think we are broadly use, losing the capacity to navigate conversations, relationships, conflict, agreed with, with people that aren't Like us, right? And I think that's potentially dangerous.   Michael Hingson ** 38:22 I think it's absolutely dangerous, because   Wallace Pond ** 38:25 that skill, that ability to survive to in the face of someone who has very different beliefs, and to get through that without unhealthy conflict, to get through that without casting, you know, aspersions, to get through that without personal attacks, I think is is critical to kind of a functioning society, because we are always going to have diverse perspectives, diverse religions, diverse cultures, diverse political perspectives. That's always going to be true. So the extent to which we are able to navigate that in a productive way is really critical, and I fear that we are because we turn towards what we know with tribalism that we're just losing the opportunity to engage other people who may be quite different than we are, and do that successfully, whereas The you know, turning inward to the tribe actually exacerbates? Well,   Michael Hingson ** 39:44 yeah, there's a lot of truth to that. I guess I'm a little bit of an oddity, even in, I think, among some blind people in that having never seen to me, somebody with a. Skin color is simply a concept, and the it doesn't matter to me about about color, and I work very hard to make sure that I continue with that kind of attitude, because it doesn't really matter to me what a person's skin color is and have never seen it. Haven't ever seen different skin colors. And frankly, I know I can say with certainty I don't care. Now, not everybody necessarily knows me well enough to believe that, but it is still true, because having never seen it. You know intellectually, I know what red is, I know what blue is. I know what Black is. I know what white is, and we can talk about it in terms of wavelength of light too. But you know it's it's still not something that becomes an issue for me. And it amazes me when I hear people talking about and demonstrating prejudice about different skin colors and so on, because it's just not something that really is an issue for me, and I'm always amazed by it. Yeah,   Wallace Pond ** 41:08 it's interesting point you make. I mean, just engaging the life, just engaging life in general, in the absence of visual stimuli, you obviously are have honed very finely other senses. But this idea, you know, and in our culture, in in Western and particularly American culture, it is profoundly visual,   Michael Hingson ** 41:36 yeah, oh, it is, Oh, absolutely, you know. And look, I know blind people who are very prejudiced, and maybe some of them never saw but they've learned it. Fortunately, I'm blessed that I refuse to learn that concept.   Wallace Pond ** 41:50 That's interesting thought, isn't it? You know, I know that we have learned to be incredibly judgmental based upon visual stimuli, right? Is someone short? Are they tall? Do they have acne? You know, are they overweight? What clothes are they wearing? You know, they have the right shoes. And you may be able to determine some of that through other senses at some point, but you would never initially engage someone based upon that perspective, because you wouldn't have it. Mm, hmm. So a very interesting thought, you know, and I,   Michael Hingson ** 42:33 I know my wife and and I also believe my wife was, although she was cited, never really had that kind of prejudice, because she grew up with around people of different skin colors and different races and so on. But we would be talking about sometimes political debates, and she would say, well, so and so knows about that, because he's black. And I would sit there and go, huh? Because I if there was, you know, I couldn't tell that they were black, you know. And it amazed me, and it didn't change my opinion at all. Now, the fact that he was a politician, that's a different prejudice, but that's another story, right? But, but, you know, they're fun to pick on, but, but, you know, the bottom line is that that we've really got to get somehow over some of these things. And I agree with you that the art of conversation, the ability to converse, the ability to really interact with other people, is being lost because of so many things, and that is so unfortunate. Yeah,   Wallace Pond ** 43:38 and I don't want to be Pollyannaish, I mean, or oversimplified a situation. I mean, like I said, I was born in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1960s and there was no need for social media, for people to make judgments, to isolate, you know, to to, I mean, it was legislated. It was it was policy. I mentioned, you know, the colored water fountains and bathrooms. So this is not new. It's, you know, that kind of thing was, has existed in many, many contexts. I think, I think what's qualitatively different today a couple things. One is the existence that the medium, you know, mass media and social media, have a kind of power that I that didn't exist before a platform and an anonymity. You know, you can, you can say things and do things today that wouldn't have been acceptable because you would have been accountable, yeah, in the past, right? It was attached to you individually. So I think that's, that's one change. I think another change is whether we call it, you know, civility, or whether we call it norms, you know, I'm. I'm, you know, I'll be 60 next year. So, you know, I've been around for a little while, but not that long, compared to some people, but in terms of norms, just in the last call it 510, years, maybe even less than 10. I've been just stunned, frankly, by the things that it's now kind of okay to say and do. Yeah, you know that that we just sort of blown through the guard rails? You know that I think, used to kind of exist. It wasn't that you couldn't think it. It wasn't that it didn't exist. It was that there were some sort of norms about what it was sort of okay or acceptable to say or do, kind of in a in a civil society. And I think we've really blown through those guardrails. Social media has helped that politics.   Michael Hingson ** 45:54 What's one example of that?   Wallace Pond ** 45:59 Yeah, so something that comes to mind is, you know, people flaming other people online and social media, right? Personal attacks, yeah, particularly when people are vulnerable. You know, if you're face to face, or if you're in a, you know, a group that's co located with other people if you are on the phone, even, right? It was much, much harder, yeah, to launch those sort of personal, corrosive attacks on people than it is now. You know, I think in politics, you know, there are politicians now who say things, oh yeah, that you couldn't say and survive as a politician,   Michael Hingson ** 46:51 and still shouldn't, but do, yeah,   Wallace Pond ** 46:55 even 10 years ago, let alone 2030 Yeah, it's not that politicians didn't think it, or weren't capable, you know, of it. It's just, you know, I think of like criticism of families, of of war heroes, yeah, you know. Or just weird stuff, like, when did that become? Okay? Yeah?   Michael Hingson ** 47:18 Oh, I hear you. And social media has certainly not helped the process. No,   Wallace Pond ** 47:24 I think what it's done is it's anonymized, least in your mind, if not literally,   Michael Hingson ** 47:30 yeah, which is so scary. I hope we grow up and learn, but you know, we'll see. So what you taught for a while, then what did you go do?   Wallace Pond ** 47:43 Yeah, so again, I never really had a plan. And I know for some people, plans are helpful, important. They provide security. I truly, Michael, never had a quote plan for anything that happened in my life. You know, I've done everything from Teach bilingual kindergarten to run large corporations domestically and internationally, and I've just never had a plan. I've taken advantage of opportunities, and I've kind of pursued things that felt exciting or right, but I I've never really had a plan. So, you know, after my initial teaching experience, I ended up marrying someone who said, Look, I'm going to go work in Germany. I have a job over there. And if you want to come, you can come. If you're not, I'm leaving. So we ended up getting married and going over there together, and we're over there for a few years working for the Department of Defense and Education roles. And then came back to the US, did some more K 12 work, then went full time into higher education, as a as a professor, teaching people to be teachers, as well as Spanish and linguistics. Then moved into the corporate world for a while, came back into higher education, did some senior roles, including President, CEO at a few different institutions of higher education, some in the US, some abroad, and been in the C suite several times in corporate settings, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Executive Officer, the last kind of formal thing I did, working for someone else and or working for a board, I guess I would say, was in the Middle East, United Arab Emirates, and fascinating, wonderful experience. Just so glad I did it. Yeah, for. A cultural perspective, from a growth perspective, the hardest job ever done as a CEO. Never experienced quite that combination of challenges as a CEO, but just a fabulous experience in my wife and younger daughter, who's now off away at college. They lived there in the winter and were able to escape in the summer. I was not, you know, 120 degrees in 85% humidity. Yeah, yeah. Winter's stunning, beautiful, but summer is really hard, yeah. And they would come back to the mountains, you know, Colorado in the summer. But, and something's really interesting to happen when I came back from that. You know, this is kind of interesting. It helps explain, sort of, how did I go from that to working as a psychotherapist, and I still do consulting work and support organizations with transformational change and leadership and things like that. But So how does one go from the CEO of a of a company in Abu Dhabi and the president of a college system to going back to school for the fourth time and becoming a mental health counselor? And the short version to that is when I got back from the UAE, I asked myself a very different question for the first time than I would have in the past. So in the past, the question would have been something to the effect of, you know, what's the next job? And I was in a position to have some time off and kind of decompress. And I didn't ask that question. I asked a very, very different question, which was, what do I want to be true in my life? And I had some support with a counselor for that question, and kind of how I kind of fleshed the answer out and and when I was when I had come up with the answer of what I want to be true in my life, it became very clear that I could not do what I'd always been doing and achieve what I wanted to be true in my life, Those didn't align anymore, and so I had to think very differently about what I was going to do going forward. And that was not so ironically, the same time, but I began to really, really experience some pretty intense mental health challenges, which I had never experienced before. I mean, I had never even really experienced anxiety before like that. I I was my experience was so different for so long, 50 plus years. But when it changed, it point. It changed pretty rapidly and pretty dramatically, and I found myself in a situation where mental health and mental health challenges were now, were kind of Central, and I really had to figure some stuff out. And so that happened at the same time I was kind of pursuing that question of what I want to be different in my life, or two in my life. And what came out of that, in addition to my own kind of healing journey, was this idea that one of the ways that I could achieve, one of the things that I wanted to be true in my life, was to be in the helping professions and to and to leverage my own mental health journey to help others, to be, as I mentioned earlier on, the call A wounded healer, which, by the way, is the case for a lot of counselors. A lot of therapists are wounded healers. And so that's how I kind of got to the place of going back to school and being a counselor, and how that decision had kind of the most congruence, the most alignment of probably any life decision I've ever made, personal or professional, in terms of a decision that supported what I wanted to be true. And that started, gosh, a little over three years ago, is when I went back to school, and now, as I mentioned, I've been seeing clients for, gosh, since December 21 still as a student. And then now I have a private practice. I also work for a community health operation and agency, and I made that choice because I want I didn't want to be in a situation where a client was that could ever I don't want to be in a situation where someone couldn't see me because they couldn't pay and so that's what community health is. It is a. Um, it is a very different environment than private practice. I do both. It is people, you know, court mandated, lot of alcohol and drug substance abuse issues, domestic violence, really, really intense challenges. And I love the work. Sometimes it's overwhelming, but it allows me to really contribute in the ways I've wanted to contribute to people who really desperately need it and may not have the means to pursue that otherwise.   Michael Hingson ** 55:37 Well, you certainly set your your mind and your goals on a on a lofty, although I don't think an impossible task, but given everything that you've done, it's probably reasonable to say you're going to, going to do a pretty good job of helping to to accomplish some of that, or at least make the world better because of it. And you know that's that's hard to argue with. I'm really impressed, and look forward to seeing how the progress goes. Tell me about the transformation collaborative you founded that you also have a couple of LLCs that you've created along the way. Yeah. So the transformation   Wallace Pond ** 56:16 collaborative that was also in that same period of time where I had asked that question, what do I want to be true in my life, versus just what's the next job? And it was a really interesting process. It was about nine months, 12 months, kind of a rotating group of people just kind of brainstorming, noodling on, you know, if we were going to build a consultancy from scratch based on what we know as professionals, based upon our experience, you know, engaging with consultants as as consumers of consultancy, what would it look like? And we came up with it was kind of two, it turned out, you know, through that process, the sort of two driving elements came out of that. One was, we probably have to reinvent the consultancy itself. Because one of the things that kept coming up in the in that brainstorming conversation stuff, was that, you know, the traditional, particularly, you know, the big consultancies, that traditional model is just woefully inadequate. Much of the time. It's overpriced, you know, it's it's superficial, it's on the outside. I won't go into details about all the things that are broken with it, but, but basically, you know what happens is an agency, you know, has a couple of meetings, you know, they put together a report, they throw it over the wall, they have a celebration dinner, they go on to the next client. You know, there's no sense of accountability. There's no role in execution. I'm not talking ever, just broadly. That's yeah, so we the first thing we decide is, you know, what, if we're going to do this, we're not going to do it that way. In fact, we refer to ourselves as embedded partners. We don't call ourselves consultants. Our goal is to, really, you know, to play a role in getting the client from A to B, you know, including actually providing labor, bandwidth, accountability, execution. So that's the first thing that was very different, and also different in terms of how we operate. I told you previously, before we were on the air, you know, we don't have non disclosure agreements with our partners. We don't have, you know, non competes. It's very different. We don't skim out the top, we don't take commissions, but none of that stuff. You know, it's a very different model. The second thing that we determined as part of that process was, you know, if we're going to bring, really bring value, and we're going to be doing what we want to do, you know, we want congruence between what we're doing what we want to do? It really can't be about incremental stuff. It can't be transactional. It can't be, you know, help with a computer program, or, you know, help with a compliance issue. There are lots of folks that do that, lots of agencies that do that. They do it really well, but if we were going to be embedded partners, and if we were going to be doing what we wanted to do, it had to be transformational. It had to be supporting organizations to reinvent themselves for the world they're in, not the one they were founded in. And so those two things came out of that process, and that's what the transformation collaborative. Transformation collaborative is. There's two main things we do. One is supporting organizations through some version of reinvention, transformation, innovation, and the other is leadership. You know, we. We take, we are pretty kind of harsh in our assessment of what we view as leadership deficiencies, even leadership crisis in many organizations today. And so we've developed a model for kind of the competencies and traits that we believe are required for leaders to be effective today, and more importantly, we've developed a program to support that, and we don't call it leadership development, because we feel like that's also not what this is. That's a buzzword. It's a buzzword, and I think it's also a little bit even tainted, because so much leadership development is about the wrong stuff. We refer to it as leadership discovery. And the way the program operates is we support leaders in discovering themselves, as people, as leaders, as identifying elements of of that skill set and traits that they can gravitate towards and really develop or not develop, but can really leverage. Let's use that word to be more effective. And you know, just give you just a really quick example. You know, where of the mind that leadership is rarely, rarely anymore about technical skills. It's rarely about, you know, a leader's own labor, all the stuff that's been traditional leadership stuff is just price of entry. Now, you know, if you aren't, you know, skilled with PNL, if you, you know, can't work well with a board, if you don't have basic management skills, then that's a very different problem. And you know, we see kind of the primary role of leaders today, in addition to facilitating change and transformation, is human capital. The idea being that everything else is a commodity financing, technology, you name it. That's all has a very short shelf life, shelf life, but as a leader, if you can develop powerful, powerful human capital in your organization, that's not a commodity, that's a deep competitive advantage, and it's about ensuring that Your organization is successful, because you make other people successful, yeah, not because you are an individual rock star with your technical skills or business savvy   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:48 interesting. One of the things that I used to do when I managed and led sales teams and people in companies is I always would say to them, you know, I hired you because I know you can do the job, but at least you sold me on the fact that you can do the job. Some people did a better job of selling and didn't necessarily be as successful as I would have liked, but that's okay, but, but my job isn't to boss you around. My job is to work with you to figure out how I can add value to make you more successful. And the people who got that and who were willing to work on that with me were successful, and we figured out what each other's skills were, and sometimes I taught them things that they didn't know. And went both ways, but we worked together and they were more successful. It's all about collaboration. Yeah,   Wallace Pond ** 1:03:41 it's collaboration. And, you know, in a big element, and the collaboration is part of that, in our view, in our view, just at the transmission collaborative, a big chunk of that human capital piece. It's not just, it's not just leveraging labor. In fact, the last thing, right, that's the last thing it is. What it's about is in you know, in fact, we, we like eschew terms like employees, labor, workforce, workers, because we feel like that commoditizes The people who can potentially bring value in the organization. Yeah, it's our belief that if leaders can engage the people in their organization as human beings, if they see the workforce as humanity, and that's and that's, you know, as simple as that is, you will not hear leadership development organizations say that. We'll say it that way, no. But if leaders can see people in their organization as humanity and can address. As such, and can see them as human beings who don't stop being human at the office door. It's not easy. It's hard to put on a spreadsheet. It's a long term proposition, but if an organization truly wants to be sustainable, if they truly want to outgrow or grow at a rate greater than the competition, it is not going to come from commodities like their next technology or even their access to capital. It's going to be do they have, do they have people in the organization that are fully engaged, that are committed to the organization because they feel valued and taken care of. That's, you know, again, it sounds very simple. That's not language you typically hear in a conversation like this, no,   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:59 and it's not necessarily easy to make happen, but if you do it and you learn how to do it, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. You know, I have heard many people say that they really love their job to the point where it's not a job anymore. It says it's a labor of love. It is what they love to do. And I think as a leader, part of my responsibility is to help people explore that opportunity with whatever they're doing, and the ones who truly discover that they love what they do will will do the very kinds of things that you're talking about.   Wallace Pond ** 1:06:41 Yeah, and you know, one of the things that kind of is frustrating to us, if not even confusing to us at the transformation collaborative, is the extent to which, I mean, again, sometimes we take kind of a harsh position, but the extent to which people should kind of know better are, are, you know, either just doing the wrong thing or clueless, yeah, you know. And one of the big organizations, one of the big consultancies that we still have a lot of faith in, is Gallup, and that's because they're, you know, they have such massive data sets, and they really get it in terms of the people piece. They really, really get it in terms of, you know, the human piece. And, you know, employee engagement detachment continues to decline, you know, from four years ago, they continue. The data is just in for 2023 you know, and they continue to feel lower levels of satisfaction and less connection to mission and purpose. And as a result, they are more and more disengaged. And that's just profoundly expensive to organizations, yeah, to have these huge payrolls of people that are disengaged and and they don't get it. And yeah, get it, yeah, and the data is there, right? And the and folks are are communicating what's not working for them. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 1:08:23 it's pretty straightforward, but people are listening Exactly,   Wallace Pond ** 1:08:26 yeah, and you know, people, they don't feel like they have authority in what's expected. Their managers are not giving them good feedback and coaching. You know, they might be managing time and resources, but they're not developing their people. No one asks anyone's opinion about contributing to goal setting or improvement or innovation. They don't feel like the organization gives a rat's ass about their well being, you know, their sense of purpose being part of a team, I said in a recent LinkedIn post just a few days ago. You know, this is not rocket science. I put it all caps, which I almost never do. This is not rocket science. And yet, there are so many leaders that just seem baffled by what's going on. And kind of, one of our goals at the at the transmission collaborative with our leadership Discovery Program, is to really, really get leaders over that hump, you know, and help them develop a completely different perspective. Now, you said it's not easy to do, and that's true, but it's not just because it's an it's a new approach, new skill set, right, new way of thinking, not just because, you know, organizational structures and compensation and culture doesn't necessarily support it, but it's also really hard because. Is, even if you're that kind of leader, that behavior is not traditionally rewarded for you as a leader, right? Like it, you know, it doesn't fit well into the you know, performance, you know, reports to the board and you know, on the fourth slide of the PowerPoint, it's, you know, it doesn't fit well into short term results. And so to do that as a leader, takes a tremendous amount of courage, and it's a really big risk, because you will be speaking a language that many people around you do not speak, that people you report to do not speak, and that has not been traditionally rewarded. So it's, it's, you're right. It is very hard to do for multiple reasons.   Michael Hingson ** 1:10:52 I hear you, you know what? We have been going almost 70 minutes, and I'm going to have to end because, because we have been going almost 70 minutes, yeah, but I think we should do another one of these.   Wallace Pond ** 1:11:06 I'd love to. In fact, I know that a whole bunch of the questions we kind of talked about before, I know we didn't even get   Michael Hingson ** 1:11:13 to, even get to so I would like to, yeah, I'm   Wallace Pond ** 1:11:16 totally fine. I love that. You know, these are the kinds of conversations I really, really enjoy Michael. I, you know, I don't think we do enough. You know, one of the things that I talked about, what I want to be true in my life, and what have I changed, and whatever, I dedicate a lot of time now to engagement, interactions, connections that I can't monetize, that, you know, that aren't about deliverables, that don't connect to some performance goal, but just are nourishing. Yeah, you know, just, and that's worth a lot, yeah? And I feel that's kind of what today's been. So I really appreciate that opportunity.   Michael Hingson ** 1:12:01 Well, if people want to reach out to you, maybe talk with you further, or consult or are use your your efforts and so on. How do they do that?   Wallace Pond ** 1:12:11 Yeah, so there's a couple ways to do that. If they want to go poke around on the transformation collaborative website, website, then they'll see a lot of stuff about, you know, research. We've done things, we've published trends, services. We provide both with transformation and leadership, discovery.

Evan Cohen, in for Greeny, debates with Hembo if the Sixers' gritty win over the Heat is an encouraging or discouraging sign for their series against the Knicks. What version of Joel Embiid will we see in that series? We discuss if Jontay Porter's NBA ban is a good thing for the league or a harbinger of things to come. Hembo has a tendency to use big words that aren't well-known and we play group trivia to wrap up the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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More than 20 years ago, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama characterized the Information Technology revolution as "benign" but cautioned that "the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a post-human stage of history." From Twitter to CRISPR to ChatGPT, a lot has changed since then. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Dr. Fukuyama shares his thoughts on those developments and the recent advances in generative AI, as well as the cultural importance of science fiction.Dr. Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His books include The End of History and the Last Man, Our Posthuman Future, and 2022's Liberalism and Its Discontents, among many others. Other writings can be found at American Purpose.In This Episode* The consequences of the IT revolution (1:37)* Can government competently regulate AI? (8:14)* AI and liberal democracy (17:29)* The cultural importance of science fiction (24:16)* Silicon Valley's life-extension efforts (31:11)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationThe consequences of the IT revolutionJames Pethokoukis: In Our Posthuman Future more than 20 years ago, you wrote, “The aim of this book is to argue that [Aldous] Huxley was right [in Brave New World], that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a ‘posthuman' stage of history. This is important, I will argue, because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species.” But then you added, “It may be that, as in the case of 1984” — and, I think, parenthetically, information technology — “we will eventually find biotechnology's consequences are completely and surprisingly benign.” After 20 years, and the advent of social media, and now it seems like possibly a great leap forward in AI, would you still characterize the IT revolution as “benign”?Francis Fukuyama: That's obviously something that's changed considerably since I wrote that book because the downside of IT has been clear to everybody. When the internet was first privatized in the 1990s, most people, myself included, thought it would be good for democracy because information was power, and if you made information more widely available, that would distribute power more democratically. And it has done that, in fact. A lot of people have access to information that they can use to improve their lives, to mobilize, to agitate, to push for the protection of their rights. But I think it's also been weaponized in ways that we perhaps didn't anticipate back then.And then, there was this more insidious phenomenon where it turns out that the elimination of hierarchies that controlled information, that we celebrated back then, actually turned out to be pretty important. If you had a kind of legacy media that cared about journalistic standards, you could trust the information that was published. But the internet really undermined those legacy sources and replaced it with a world in which anyone can say anything. And they do. Therefore, we have this cognitive chaos right now where conspiracy theories of all sorts get a lot of credibility because people don't trust these hierarchies that used to be the channels for information. Clearly, we've got a big problem on our hands. That doesn't mean that the biotech is not still going to be a big problem; it's just that I think the IT part has moved ahead very rapidly. But I think the biotech will get there in time.While I think most of the concern that I've heard expressed about AI, in particular, has been about these science fiction-like existential risks or job loss, obviously your concern has more to do, as with in Our Posthuman Future, how it will affect our liberal democracy. And you point out some of the downsides of the IT revolution that weren't obvious 30 years ago but now seeing plainly obvious today.To me, the coverage of AI has been really very, very negative, and we've had calls for an AI pause. Do you worry that maybe we've overlearned that lesson? That rather than going into this with kind of a Pollyannaish attitude, we're immediately going into this AI with deep concerns. Is there a risk of overcorrecting?The short answer is, yes. I think that because of our negative experience with social media and the internet lately, we expect the worst from technology. But I think that the possibilities for AI actually making certain social problems much better are substantial. I think that the existential worries about AI are just absurd, and I really don't see scenarios under which the human species is going to face extinction. That seems to be this Terminator, killer, Skynet scenario, and I know very few serious experts in this area that think that that's ever likely to materialize. The bigger fears, I think, are more mundane ones about job loss as a result of advancing technology. And I think that's a very complicated issue. But it does seem to me that, for example, generative AI could actually end up complementing human skills and, in fact, could complement the skills of lower-skilled or lower-educated workers in a way that will actually increase economic equality.Up till now, I think most economists would blame the advance of computer technology for having vastly increased social inequality, because in order to take advantage of existing technologies, if you have a better education, you're going to have a higher income and so forth. But it's entirely possible that generative AI will actually slow that trend because it will give people with lower levels of education the ability to do useful things that they weren't able to do previously. There's actually some early empirical work that suggests that that's already been a pattern. So, yes, I think you're right that we've kind of overreacted. I just think in general, predicting where this technology is going to go in the next 50 years is a fool's errand. It's sort of like in the 1880s asking somebody, “Well, what's this newfangled thing called electricity going to do in 50 years?” Anything that was said back then I think would've been overtaken by events very, very rapidly.Can government competently regulate AI?Anyone who has sat through previous government hearings on social media has been underwhelmed at the ability of Congress to understand these issues, much less come up with a vast regulatory structure. Are you confident in the ability of government to regulate AI, whether it's to regulate deep fakes or what have you — why should I be confident in their ability to do that?I think you've got to decompose the regulatory challenge a little bit. I've been involved here at Stanford, we have a Cyber Policy Center, and we've been thinking about different forms of IT regulation. It's a particular challenge for regulators for a number of reasons. One of the questions you come up with in regulatory design is, “Is this something that actually can be undertaken by existing agencies, or do you actually need a new type of regulator with special skills and knowledge?” And I think, to me, pretty clearly the answer to that is yes. But that agency would have to be designed very differently, because the standard regulatory design, the agency has a certain amount of expertise in a particular sector and they use that expertise to write rules that then get written into law, and then things like the Administrative Procedure Act begins to apply. That's what's been going on, for example, with something like net neutrality, where the FCC put the different regulations up for notice and comment, and you go through this very involved procedure to write the new rules and so forth. I think in an area like AI, that's just not going to work, because the thing is moving so quickly. And that means that you're actually going to have to delegate more autonomy and discretionary power to the regulatory agency, because otherwise, they're simply not going to be able to keep up with the speed at which the technology advances. In normative terms, I have no problem with that. I think that governments do need to exercise social control over new technologies that are potentially very disruptive and damaging, but it has to be done in a proper way.Can you actually design a regulatory agency that would have any remote chance of keeping up with the technology? The British have done this. They have a new digital regulator that is composed of people coming out of the IT industry, and they've relaxed the civil service requirements to be able to hire people with the appropriate knowledge and backgrounds. In the United States, that's going to be very difficult because we have so many cumbersome HR requirements for hiring and promotion of people that go into the federal civil service. Pay, for one thing, is a big issue because we don't pay our bureaucrats enough. If you're going to hire some hotshot tech guy out of the tech sector and offer him a job as a GS-14, it just isn't going to work. So I don't think that you can answer the question, “Can we regulate adequately or not?” in a simple way. I think that there are certain things you would have to do if you were going to try to regulate this sector. Can the United States do that given the polarization in our politics, given all of these legacy institutions that prevent us from actually having a public sector that is up to this task? That I don't know. As you can tell, I've got certain skepticism about that.Is it a worthwhile critique of this regulatory process to think of AI as this discreet technology that you need a certain level of expertise to understand? If it is indeed a general-purpose technology that will be used by a variety of sectors, all sectors perhaps, can you really have an AI regulator that doesn't de facto become an economy regulator?No, you probably can't. This is another challenge, which is that, as you say, AI in general is so broad. It's already being used in virtually every sector of the economy, and you obviously don't want a “one size fits all” effort to govern the use of this technology. So I think that you have to be much more specific about the areas where you think potential harms could exist. There's also different approaches to this other than regulation. In 2020, I chaired a Stanford working group on platform scale, which was meant to deal with the old — at that point it was a kind of contemporary problem­ — but now it seems like an old problem of content mediation on the internet. So how do you deal with this problem that Elon Musk has now revealed to be a real problem: You don't want everything to be available on social media platforms, but how do you actually control that content in a way that serves a kind of general democratic public interest? As we thought about this in the course of this working group deliberation, we concluded that straightforward regulation is not going to work. It won't work in the United States because we're way too polarized. Just think about something like reviving the old fairness doctrine that the FCC used to apply to legacy broadcast media. How are you going to come up with something like that? What's “fair and balanced” coverage of vaccine denialism? It's just not going to happen.And what we ended up advocating was something we called “middleware,” where you would use regulation to create a competitive ecosystem of third-party media content regulators so that when you use the social media platform, you the user could buy the services or make use of the services of a content regulator that would tailor your feed or your search on Google to criteria that you specified in advance. So if you tended progressive, you could get a progressive one. If you only like right-wing media, you could get a content regulator that would deliver what you want. If you wanted to buy only American-made products, you could get a different one. The point is that you would use competition in this sphere because the real threat, as we saw it, was not actually so much this compartmentalization as the power of a single big platform. There's really only three of them. It's Google, Meta, and now X, or the formerly Twitter, that really had this kind of power. The danger to a democracy was not that you could say anything on the internet, the danger was the power of a single big platform owned by a private, for-profit company to have an outsized role over political discourse in the United States. Elon Musk and Twitter is a perfect example of that. He apparently has his own foreign policy, which is not congruent with American foreign policy, but as a private owner of this platform, he's got the power to pursue this private foreign policy. So that was our idea.In that particular case, you could use competition as an alternative to state regulation, because what you really wanted to do was to break up this concentrated power that was exercised by the platforms. So that's one approach to one aspect of digital regulation. It doesn't deal with AI. I don't know whether there's an analog in the AI sphere, but I think it's correct that what you don't want is a single regulator that then tries to write broad rules that apply to what is actually just an enormously broad technology that will apply in virtually every sector of the economy.AI and liberal democracyIn response to the call for a six-month "AI pause," critics of that idea pointed to competition with China. They suggested that given the difficulties of regulating AI, we might risk losing the "AI race" to the Chinese. Do you think that's a reasonable criticism?This is a general problem with technologies. Certain technologies distribute power and other technologies concentrate it. So the old classic 19th-century coal- and steel- and fossil fuel–based economy tended to concentrate power. And certainly nuclear weapons concentrate power because you really need to be a big entity in order to build a nuclear weapon, in order to build all the uranium processing and so forth. But other technologies, like biotech, actually do not concentrate power. Any high school student can actually now use CRISPR to do genetic engineering. And they make biotech labs that will fit in individual shipping containers. So the regulatory problem is quite different.Now, the problem with AI is that it appears that these large language models really require a lot of resources. In fact, it's interesting, because we used to think the problem was actually having big data sets. But that's actually not the problem; there's plenty of data out there. It's actually building a parallel computer system that's powerful enough to process all the words on the internet, and that's been the task that only the largest companies can do. I think that it's correct that if we had told these companies not to do this, we would be facing international competitive pressures that would make that a bad decision. However, I do think that it's still a risk to allow that kind of power to be not subject to some form of democratic control. If it's true that you need these gigantic corporations to do this sort of thing, those corporations ought to be serving American national interests.And again, I hate to keep referring to Elon Musk, but we're seeing this right now with Starlink. It turns out Starlink is extremely valuable militarily, which has been demonstrated very clearly in Ukraine. Should the owner of Starlink be allowed to make important decisions as to who is going to use this technology on the battlefield and where that technology can be used? I don't think so. I don't think that one rich individual should have that kind of power. And actually, I'm not quite sure, I thought that the Defense Department had actually agreed to start paying Musk for the Ukrainian use of Starlink. I think that's the actual appropriate answer to that problem, so that it should not be up to Elon Musk where Starlink can be used. It should be up to the people that make American foreign policy: the White House and the State Department and so forth. And so, I think by analogy, if you develop this technology that requires really massive scale and big corporations to develop it, it should nonetheless be under some kind of state control such that it is not the decision of some rich individual how it's going to be applied. It should be somehow subject to some kind of democratic control.On a normative level, I think that's very clear, but the specific modalities by which you do that are complicated. For example, let's say there's a gigantic corporation that is run by some lunatic that wants to use it for all sorts of asocial reasons, proliferating deep fakes or trying to use it to undermine general social trust in institutions and so forth. Is that okay? Is that a decision that should be up to a private individual or isn't there some public interest in controlling that in some fashion? I hate speaking about this in such general terms, but I think you have to settle this normative question and then you can get into the narrower technical question of, is it possible to actually exert that kind of control and how would you do that?You've questioned in your previous writings whether liberal democracy could survive a world with both humans and posthumans and where we're manipulating human nature. Can it survive in a world where there are two different intelligences? If we had a human intelligence and we had an artificial general intelligence, would such an entity pose a challenge our civilization, to a democratic capitalist civilization?It's hard to answer that question. You can imagine scenarios where it obviously would pose a challenge. One of the big questions is whether this general intelligence somehow escapes human control, and that's a tough one. I think that the experts that I trust think that that's not going to happen. That ultimately, human beings are going to be able to control this thing and use it for their own purposes. So again, the whole Skynet scenario is really not likely to happen. But that doesn't solve the problem, because even if it's under human control, how do you make sure it's the right humans, right? Because if this falls into the wrong hands, it could be very, very destructive. And that then becomes a political question. I'm not quite sure how you're going to want to answer it.The cultural importance of science fictionYou mentioned Skynet from the Terminator franchise. Do you worry that we're too steeped in dystopian science fiction? It seems like we can only see the downside when we're presented with a new technology like a biotechnology breakthrough or an AI breakthrough. Is that how it seems to you?I actually wrote a blog post about this. I really read a lot of science fiction. I have my whole life. There's a big difference between the sorts of stories that you saw back in the 1950s and ‘60s and the stuff that has come out recently. It's hard to generalize over such a vast field, but space odysseys and space travel was very common, and a lot of that was extremely optimistic: that human beings would colonize Mars and then the distant planets and you'd have a warp drive that would take you out of the solar system and so forth. And it was kind of a paean to unlimited human possibilities. Whereas I do think that, especially with the rise of environmentalism, there was a greater consciousness of the downsides of technological advance. So you got more and more dystopian kinds of imaginings. Now, it is not a universal thing. For example, I also wrote a blog about two kind of global warming–related recent science-fiction books. One is TheMinistry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. And that actually is a very optimistic take on global warming, because it's set in the 2050s and basically the human race has figured out how to deal with global warming. They do it, I think, through a bunch of very implausible political scenarios, but there's a ministry for the future that wisely…That book seems a little too comfortable with violence and compulsion for my taste.The other one is Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock: Basically, there's a single rich oligarch in Texas that takes it upon himself to put all this sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere to cool the earth, and he succeeds, and it then changes the climate in China and India. I don't know whether that's optimistic or pessimistic. But I actually do think that it's very useful to have this kind of science fiction, because you really do have to imagine to yourself what some of the both upsides and downsides will be. So it's probably the case that there's more dystopian fiction, but I do think that if you didn't have that, you wouldn't have a concrete idea of what to look for.If you think about both 1984 and Brave New World, these were the big dystopian futures that were imagined in the 1950s. And both of them came true in many ways. It gave us a vocabulary, like, “Big Brother,” the “Telescreen,” or “Epsilons,” and “Gammas,” and “Alphas,” and so forth, by which we can actually kind of interpret things in the present. I think if you didn't have that vocabulary, it would be hard to have a discussion about what is it that we're actually worried about. So yes, I do think that there is a dystopian bias to a lot of that work that's done, but I think that you've got to have it. Because you do have to try to imagine to yourself what some of these downsides are.You mentioned a couple of books. Are there any films or television shows that you've watched that you feel provide a plausible optimistic vision?I don't know whether it's optimistic. One of my favorite book series and then TV series was The Expanse, written by a couple of guys that go by a pseudonym. It's not optimistic, in the sense that it projects all of our current geopolitical rivalries forward into a future in which human beings have colonized, not just the outer planets, but also intergalactically, figured out how to move from one place to another, and they're still having these fights between rich and poor and so forth. But I guess the reason that I liked it, especially the early parts of that series, when you just had an Epstein Drive, I mean, it was just one technological change that allowed you to move. It's sort of like the early days of sailing ships, where you could get to Australia, but it would take you six months to get there. So that was the situation early on in the book, and that was actually a very attractive future. All of a sudden, human beings had the ability to mine the asteroid belt, they could create gigantic cities in space where human beings could actually live and flourish. That's one of the reasons I really liked that: because it was very human. Although there were conflicts, they were familiar conflicts. There were conflicts that we are dealing with today. But it was, in a way, hopeful because it was now done at this much larger scale that gave hope that human beings would not be confined to one single planet. And actually, one of the things that terrifies me is that the idea that in 100 years, we may discover that we actually can't colonize even Mars or the Moon. That the costs of actually allowing human beings to live anywhere but on earth just make it economically impossible. And so we're kind of stuck on planet Earth and that's the human future.I wrote a small essay about The Expanse where I talked about having a positive vision. As I saw it, this is several hundred years in the future, and we're still here. We've had climate change, but we're still here. We've expanded throughout the universe. If an asteroid should hit the earth, there's still going to be humanity. And people were angry about that essay, because this is a future but there's still problems. Yes, because we're still part of that future: human beings.Silicon Valley's life-extension effortsGetting back to biotechnology and transhumanism and living forever, these things you wrote about in Our Posthuman Future: What do you make of the efforts by folks in Silicon Valley to try to extend lifespans? From a cultural perspective, from your perspective as a political scientist, what do you make of these efforts?I think they're terrible. I actually wrote about this and have thought about this a lot, about life extension. In fact, I think human biomedicine has produced a kind of disastrous situation for us right now because by the time you get to your mid-80s, roughly half of the population that's that old has some kind of long-term, chronic, degenerative disease. And I think that it was actually a much better situation when people were dying of heart attacks and strokes and cancer when they were still in their 70s. It's one of those things where life extension is individually very desirable because no individual wants to die. But socially, I think the impact of extending life is bad. Because quite frankly, you're not going to have adaptation unless you have generational turnover. There's a lot of literature now, Neil Howe has just written a new book on this about how important generations are. There's this joke that economists say, that the field of economics progresses one funeral at a time. Because, basically, you're born into a certain age cohort, and to the end of your life, you're going to retain a lot of the views of people that were born going through the same kind of life experiences. And sometimes they're just wrong. And unless that generation dies off, you're just not going to get the kind of social movement that's necessary.We've already seen a version of this with all these dictators like Franco and Castro that refuse to die, and modern medicine keeps them alive forever. And as a result, you're stuck with their kind of authoritarian governments for way too long. And so I think that, socially, there's a good reason why under biological evolution you have population turnover and we humans don't live forever. What's the advantage of everybody being able to live 200 years as opposed to let's say 80 or 90 years? Is that world going to be better? It's going to have all sorts of problems, right? Because you're going to have all of these 170-year-old people that won't get out of the way. How are you going to get tenure if all the tenured people are 170 years old and there's no way of moving them out of the system? I think that these tech billionaires, it's a kind of selfishness that they've got the money to fund all this research so that they hope that they can keep themselves alive, because they are afraid of dying. I think it's going to be a disaster if they're ever successful in bringing about this kind of population-level life extension. And I think we're already in a kind of disastrous situation where a very large proportion of the human population is going to be of an age where they're going to be dependent on the rest of the society to keep them alive. And that's not good economically. That's going to be very, very hard to sustain.Micro Reads▶ IBM Tries to Ease Customers' Qualms About Using Generative A.I. - Steve Lohr, NYT |▶ Six Months Ago Elon Musk Called for a Pause on AI. Instead Development Sped Up - Will Knight, WIRED |▶ AI is getting better at hurricane forecasting - Gregory Barber, Ars Technica |▶ The promise — and peril — of generative AI - John Thornhill, FT |▶ Uber Freight Taps AI to Help Compete in Tough Cargo Market - Thomas Black, Bloomberg |▶ Why AI Doesn't Scare Me - Gary Hoover, Profectus |▶ A top economist who studies AI says it will double productivity in the next decade: ‘You need to embrace this technology and not resist it' - Geoff Colvin, Yahoo! Finance |▶ Meta is putting AI chatbots everywhere - Alex Heath, Verge |▶ The Big AI Risk We're Not Talking About - Brent Skorup, Discourse |▶ Mark Zuckerberg can't quit the metaverse - Laura Martins, Verge |▶ This robotic exoskeleton can help runners sprint faster - Rhiannon Williams, MIT Technology Review |▶ The bizarre new frontier for cell-cultivated meat: Lion burgers, tiger steaks, and mammoth meatballs - Jude Whiley, Vox |▶ A power grab against private equity threatens the US economy - Drew Maloney, FT |▶ Risks Are Growing of a Double-Dip ‘Vibecession' - Jonathan Levin, Bloomberg |▶ NSF partners with the Institute for Progress to test new mechanisms for funding research and innovation - NSF |▶ It's Too Easy to Block a Wind Farm in America - Robinson Meyer, Heatmap |▶ Can we finally reverse balding with these new experimental treatments? - Joshua Howgego, NewScientist | This is a public episode. 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Something very different for this podcast – five guests on one show! Five of my fellow founders of MenoClarity, the knowledge hub for menopause set up in 2023. I'm talking to Pat Duckworth, Prof Joyce Harper, Clarissa Kristjansson, Kate Codrington and Ann Marie McQueen about why we've come together and what we hope to achieve with MenoClarity. This is a wild and at times hilarious conversation! We talk about: - The menopause myths we're hoping to bust - Bringing some positivity to menopause without being Pollyannaish about it - Establishing a middle reliable ground in the currently very polarized menopause world - Bringing clarity to what symptoms are really due to menopause and what might not be - Cherry picking research findings to suit certain narratives - The dangers of getting information from social media - Providing trusted sources of information - The three stages of womanhood – none should be the default, they all matter - How we're not broken in midlife and we don't need fixing - Our inaugural online summit on Friday 29 September – MenoClarity Live: Menopause Without The Hype And more!   If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it and leave us a 5* review on iTunes or wherever you're listening. Order the ebook or audiobook (narrated by Rachel) versions of Rachel's book, Magnificent Midlife: Transform Your Middle Years, Menopause And Beyond at magnificentmidlife.com/book The paperback can be purchased on Amazon or other online retailers: UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Magnificent-Midlife-Transform-Middle-Menopause/dp/173981150X/ US & Canada: https://www.amazon.com/Magnificent-Midlife-Transform-Middle-Menopause/dp/173981150X/ Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/Magnificent-Midlife-Transform-Middle-Menopause/dp/173981150X/ You can listen to all the other episodes and get the show notes at magnificentmidlife.com/podcast. Recommended by the Sunday Times. Feedspot #3 in best midlife podcasts and #14 in best women over 50 podcasts worldwide. You'll find lots of strategies, support, and resources to help make your midlife magnificent at magnificentmidlife.com. Check out Rachel's online Revitalize Experience, a 6-week intensive small group mentoring experience or 1-1 Midlife Mentoring.

 Introducing The Healthy Compulsive Project Podcast, offering information, insights, and inspiration to optimize the obsessive-compulsive personality.  From clinical, personal and Jungian perspectives, help with depth and a light touch for OCPD, perfectionists, control freaks and micro-managers. Transcript:Wait, The Healthy Compulsive? Isn't that an oxymoron?Not in my book. And I'll tell you how I got there.Five years ago I launched The Healthy Compulsive Project, starting with a blog, and later adding a book. Today I'm launching a podcast, an OCPD podcast, but for many more than just those with OCPD. The goal of the Project has been to help people with obsessive, compulsive, perfectionistic, micro-managing and type A personalities live healthier and more fulfilling lives, lives that are better not despite their compulsive tendencies, but because of them.The audience for the Project includes people with Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder—OCPD, and those who might just have a few of the personality traits and don't meet the full criteria for the personality disorder. It's not intended for people with OCD, Obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is a different condition, with different implications for treatment. I'll explain the differences later.The obsessive-compulsive personality type has much to offer. Harness the drive at the root of it and you've got direction, energy and purpose.The word compulsive derives from the words compelled and driven. And that's not always bad. Lots of good has come out of having an inner drive that's hard to resist.But I'm not Pollyannaish about this either. When hijacked by anxiety and insecurity, this energy can lead to a really lousy life: depression, rigidity, chronic irritability, work addiction, and paralyzing perfectionism. And it can destroy relationships.Healthy and unhealthy compulsiveness are like water and ice. It's the same material. But, one flows freely and the other's frozen stiff. All the insistence and determination characteristic of compulsives can be used constructively or destructively.To move toward the healthier end of the compulsive spectrum takes the willingness to face uncomfortable feelings and to forgo the security of overdoing everything with planning, control and perfectionism.You may notice that I'm lopping together the terms compulsive, obsessive, perfectionistic and Type A. While there are differences between them, there is more overlap than distinction. In the great battle between specificity and efficiency, I'm going to side with efficiency on this one, referring to the lot of them as compulsives, rather than listing everyone that my comments might apply to each time.I'll explain the differences in future episodes, but for now I'll say that a common denominator is that they all feel compelled to bring order to what they experience as chaos—for worse and better. And within the obsessive-compulsive personality there are four subtypes. I'll also explain those later, but for now we can describe them briefly as leader, worker, server, and thinker.The New OCPD PodcastGetting back to The Healthy Compulsive Project I began five years ago…Reactions to the book and the blog have been gratifying and encouraging. It seems that they've helped lots of folks look at their condition in a very different way, and to behave in ways that leave them less depressed. It's also helped some of their loved ones feel less oppressed. Many people who've been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder have found hope in the perspective that I've outlined, helping them to shake the impression that having a personality disorder meant they were doomed to a lifetime of misery.But a number of readers have suggested that, given how busy they are, and how much being efficient means to them, it would be easier if they could listen to the blog, rather than reading it. So, starting today, the Healthy Compulsive Project will also include a podcast. The content in the recorded podcast will be virtually the same as that in the written blog. This way you can listen to it while you drive to your job, walk your mongrel, cook your red beans and rice, and tackle other mindless projects so that you feel like you're being more productive.The blog has over 80 written entries at this point, with one or two new posts coming out each month. I'll continue to post new, written blogs. The podcasts will include the recorded version of new blog posts, along with recordings of older blog posts.Some episodes will be like an audio magazine—several articles addressing a central theme. Others will include only one blog article.Upcoming themes in the podcast will include:• Origins of the compulsive personality• Psychotherapy treatment• Work• Relationships and Parenting• Perfectionism and Control• Shame and guilt• Archetypes and Carl Jung• Depression and Anxiety• Mindfulness MeditationOne bummer about podcasts is that you can't hyperlink. I like to hyperlink in the blog so that you know that I'm not just making this stuff up. Well, not all of it. Research on OCPD is still scant, but I do quote the studies we do have when they're relevant. If you want to follow up on any research that I quote, you can find links to the studies in the blog.Two final notes about tone and content in this podcast. Compulsives are a serious lot, and this is a serious subject. I will respect that. But compulsives are also too serious for their own good, and the path forward is being a little less tightly wound. (Or maybe even a lot less tightly wound.) So at times my tone will be lighter, more playful and even mischievous.  Making room for mirth is an intentional part of the Project.Film and television reviews might seem frivolous as well when trying to escape the confines of a personality disorder.  But while information, logic and insight are powerful, they are not always powerful enough in themselves to change us. Characters such as Ove in A Man Called Ove (or Otto, in the more recent Tom Hanks version), Chidi in the television series The Good Place, and Mrs. Poulteny in The French Lieutenant's Woman, can all repel or inspire us to make changes that reason and information cannot.It doesn't take an Einstein to know that doing the same thing the same way will lead to the same problem. Try different for a change.How Has it Come to This?So how did I get here? First of all, I have my own compulsive tendencies which you'll hear about on occasion. Most days I don't meet the full criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, but I do know all too well how the drive to perfect, plan, please and complete can get out of control.Just as an example, as the outlines of this podcast began to take shape, excitement turned to despair as I realized that I wouldn't be able to make it as elegant and as perfect as I wanted it to be. I almost backed out. My challenge will be not to make it perfect, but to welcome its imperfections—however imperfectly—while still producing something that makes sense and is helpful to you guys out there.Back to how I got here….In my clinical practice I began noticing the obsessive-compuls...

Today's guest is Joe Smazal.   Joe is the most active broker in the sale of $2M+ apartment buildings in Chicago. Joe has personally closed over 200 properties, comprised of over 4,300 units, for a total consideration of over $725,000,000. Join Sam and Joe in today's episode. -------------------------------------------------------------- Where did Joe start? [00:00:48] Opportunities in the Chicago real estate market [00:02:41] Considerations for investing in Chicago multifamily properties [00:07:54] Understanding Local Regulations [00:09:10] Challenges and Opportunities in a Competitive Market [00:10:27] Desirable Amenities and Property Types in Chicago [00:13:52] Investing in Chicago [00:19:01] Getting in touch with Joe [00:20:48] Closing remarks [00:21:31] -------------------------------------------------------------- Connect with Joe:  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joesmazal/ Phone : (312) 848-6682  Web: https://interrarealty.com/   Connect with Sam: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/ Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com   SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f -------------------------------------------------------------- Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Joe Smazal (00:00:00) - A market that's challenging, I think weeds out some of the competition. If you're here and you're operating and you're you know, you're doing it the right way for the long haul. Think it it kind of puts up some barriers to entry that can provide a competitive advantage for those that can do it. Well, you know.   Sam Wilson (00:00:16) - Welcome to the how to scale commercial real estate show, whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big. Joe Masel is the most active broker in the sale of $2 million plus apartment buildings in Chicago. Joe, welcome to the show.   Joe Smazal (00:00:36) - Good to be here, Sam.   Sam Wilson (00:00:38) - Thank you so much for coming on today. Appreciate it. Joe, There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less. Can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now and how did you get there?   Joe Smazal (00:00:48) - Uh, as a as it relates to my life, I started in Iowa.   Joe Smazal (00:00:52) - Um, I'm in Chicago, and I got here because of the job. My wife, as it starts, is it's with my career, which Imagine more of what you're asking. I started selling middle market size apartment buildings in the northwest side of Chicago, and Jefferson Township was the submarket of Focus. Um, I got there from a couple of years in medical sales and it just didn't really didn't really see as a long term career for me, enjoyed it, but just wasn't a fit for what I wanted to do in 5 or 10 years down the road, how I got here and being the most active in the space where I work is staying really focused on that niche and not chasing deals or not chasing other kind of distractions along the way.   Sam Wilson (00:01:38) - Got it, man, That's. That's really, really cool. You know, you you're a broker, but you also own apartment buildings there in Chicago, is that right?   Joe Smazal (00:01:49) - Yeah. Do you know my. My bread and butter? The way that I, you know, provide for my family is very much still from brokerage.   Joe Smazal (00:01:56) - But over the course of the last few years I've tried to acquire a small building or two. Um, and it's, it's allowed me to be a better broker, you know, certainly understand what, what my clients deal with a little bit better and I believe in what I do think it's a great vehicle for long term investment for for my family. Um, my wife and I manage them together. So that's kind of been fun. And, and it's going well. It's time to do it for the long haul.   Sam Wilson (00:02:26) - Man. That's really, really cool. Tell me, guess what the opportunity is right now? I mean, you have people buying. Obviously there's transaction volume, but but what's what's the opportunity that you have now maybe that we didn't have a year ago if there is such a thing?   Joe Smazal (00:02:41) - What say that we're dealing with with sellers that have a little bit more conviction to sell? You know, in Chicago, we didn't have, um, we didn't have the run up that and no, this is a national show.   Joe Smazal (00:02:54) - So if I talk too much Chicago.   Sam Wilson (00:02:56) - No, no, this is, this is, this is why you're here on the show is the talk Chicago because we know exactly what's going on in your local market.   Joe Smazal (00:03:02) - Cool. Um, well, in Chicago, um, a couple of years ago, folks were griping that we didn't have the same rent growth and population growth and such as some of the Sunbelt markets did or some of the more popular markets did. And, um, you know, Chicago was looked at as kind of boring. Now, you know, I think that folks to look at the last few years in Chicago and say that Chicago has been much more stable compared to some of those markets. And you know, we never had three caps for caps, you know, unless something was really, really prime. You know, we were selling generally in the fives on the north side of the city and we're still there. And we've had a ton of rent growth here, really strong. We have a very seasonal leasing season because the weather sucks in the winter and the beginning of the leasing season has been really strong.   Joe Smazal (00:03:52) - So we've seen folks kind of come back that left Chicago to explore some of these other markets. And then the folks that have never left seemed to be kind of doubling down and encouraged by encouraged by the operations. In terms of the opportunity here, um, like I mentioned at the beginning of that ramble, you know, we've just got sellers that have a little bit more conviction, kind of circumstantially in some cases that's just a loan maturing or, you know, a loan that have been floating or a partnership or a fund just kind of run its course. Um, and so we're seeing we're starting to see the inventory open up a little bit here this spring and really good real estate at prices that I think makes sense.   Sam Wilson (00:04:36) - No, that's. That's really, really awesome. And you said that things are on average, you think you're still trading in that five cap ish range.   Joe Smazal (00:04:44) - Yeah. I'm, um. He was funny. Mentioned a cap rate as a as the way to refer to pricing but in, in selling a middle market size apartment building.   Joe Smazal (00:04:56) - From your underwriting to my underwriting to another buyer's underwriting, the seller's underwriting to the lenders under a cap raise. You know, it's such a moving target. So I think that if we're underwriting apples to apples and something is stabilized in the consistent format that we usually present them to the marketplace, then I would say, yeah, we're, you know, between a five and a six depending on the submarket, depending on the quality of the real estate. You know, we can sell much lower than that if there's significant upside to the deal. And then if something is more hairy or, you know, not as attractive of a location or, you know, whatever the reason is, you'll see it adjust up from there.   Sam Wilson (00:05:36) - What would you say the average average not not transaction dollar size, but number of doors maybe is the average average number of doors per sale that you work on. I mean, what does it look like in the Chicago market?   Joe Smazal (00:05:51) - Yeah, last year was about 30 units. It was about it was about $9 million.   Joe Smazal (00:05:58) - Over the course of my career, the average has been about $6 million. And, you know, call it 25 ish units. Right.   Sam Wilson (00:06:06) - And that's going to be the standard kind of inventory size that you're working on.   Joe Smazal (00:06:10) - Yeah, it's typically private capital. It's and it's, you know, generally kind of that middle market space that call between, you know, eight units and 100 units in broad strokes. And then, you know, circumstantially slightly more, slightly less.   Sam Wilson (00:06:27) - But I mean, in Chicago proper, that's that that is that's basically what the inventory is, right? I mean, you're not going to run into those two, 300 multifamily, two 300 unit multifamily properties very often. I wouldn't imagine.   Joe Smazal (00:06:42) - No. You know, there's some high rise product downtown that ends up trading more institutionally. That's not really my my focus. You know, we've done some larger deals than what I referenced, but it's not you know, it's not what I'm selling, you know, 20 of a year. And then in the suburbs, you know, you see more garden style deals, you know, two, three story kind of sprawling with the pool, with the clubhouse.   Joe Smazal (00:07:05) - You know, that's more suburban product. My focus being more in the city, it ends up being more, you know, vintage or newer. We've got kind of three vintages of construction here. We've got like, you know, 20 ish construction, 6070s construction. Then, you know, after 2000 construction and walk up or elevator kind of mid-rise buildings.   Sam Wilson (00:07:26) - That's basically what would you say are some maybe top 2 or 3 considerations somebody should take into account when looking at a market like Chicago and you're looking at, like you said, stock that could be up to 100 years old. There's got to be some. Some nuances to investing in that type or that size of property. So what are some of those things that people should be thinking about as they consider this as an investment opportunity?   Joe Smazal (00:07:54) - Yeah. The first place my head went with the answer to the question is more from operations rather than maintenance, you know. Think Chicago being a major market with, you know, a landlord tenant ordinance. Um, you know, you have to even if you're trying to be a a good person, you have to know the rules.   Joe Smazal (00:08:12) - You know, it's more than just kind of trying your best. You have to know the specific rules to operate in Chicago and, and abide by the specific, you know, notice provisions and handling of evictions and that sort of thing. So I think knowing, you know, or having an operational partner or, you know, management company, um, physically, you know, the 20 construction buildings feel like end up having sometimes fewer issues than the, the newer construction stuff. You know, they've been stress tested for 100 years. You know, the adage that they don't make them like that anymore, it ends up being pretty accurate. Um, and so don't know you know, we um versus some of the Sunbelt markets or, or you know Florida we don't have the same don't know some of the same construction issues or the same like weather challenges. You know, insurance here is more reasonable in some of those markets. So physically, I think the buildings are pretty solid. It's more about being able to run them right now.   Sam Wilson (00:09:10) - That makes that makes a lot of sense there. That's yeah, that doesn't surprise me. The 20s vintage stuff is potentially less less maintenance work than some of the stuff that was built there in the in the 2000. I think that's something really important there that you bring up is just understanding, you know, what the local regulations are and how you work inside of them. For somebody like me here in Tennessee, which is a very landlord friendly state, and even in Shelby County, where I'm in Memphis, Tennessee, you know, there's more rules and regulations, but it's still pretty landlord friendly. I mean, by and large, and not that we don't want to do right by our tenants because we very much so want to, but we just don't have to jump through as many hoops as you do. Think It was interesting. I think it was in California where when they started putting in rent control, it was actually kind of spearheaded by somebody that was one of the very, very large multifamily property owners, which is kind of counterintuitive, but in its own weird sort of way, like most regulation does, it builds a hedge kind of around what they're doing and kind of makes the game much more difficult for everybody else to get into.   Sam Wilson (00:10:13) - But, you know, with all that kind of preamble put in there is there is their opportunity inside of that where we say, hey, this is this the game is now more difficult to play. So then that creates opportunity for people that actually want to get it and understand it.   Joe Smazal (00:10:27) - Yeah, for sure. I mean, think, you know, rent control is a horrible policy measure by every standard that, you know, I don't know how many case studies we need to see before, you know, it stops being proposed as a measure to to help tenants because it does anything but, you know. Yeah. Anyway, we don't need to go off on that tangent. Um, but yeah, I think as, as a market, um, you know, a market that's challenging, I think weeds out some of the competition. If you're here and you're operating and you're, you know, you're doing it the right way for the long haul, think it, it kind of puts up some barriers to entry that can provide a competitive advantage for those that can do it.   Joe Smazal (00:11:05) - Well, you know, think of it sometimes from brokerage standpoint, like wish it was harder to get your brokerage license, wish it was wish that there was more barrier to entry in this space because, you know, pulled myself to a high standard. And I wish the whole industry would be able to do that, too. So think if it's if it's competitive and difficult to operate, there is the silver lining is that not everybody can do it. And so if you can and you can do it effectively, um, sometimes it's half the battle.   Sam Wilson (00:11:35) - Absolutely. Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about you and your personal journey. You've been very niche focused, which is, I think for most people, myself included, a challenging thing to do, the one thing to stick with it and just just to master that. What have been some keys for you doing that?   Joe Smazal (00:11:56) - Uh, well, it hasn't been a perfect ride to do that, you know? Think as you. As you grow and as you have some success and doing it, you know, the challenges or the, you know, the the shiny object is doing bigger deals.   Joe Smazal (00:12:11) - And what I've found is that there's not as much velocity in those. You know, generally the institutional firms are set up a little bit differently in the way that they have teams and kind of handle the workload and. And so I took my eye off the ball a little bit and kind of trying to chase some of those and realize it's not really the way for me to to grow my business. I'd rather do more of the size that I'm doing. And, you know, the deal size can kind of gradually work up. But it's been a competitive advantage because in brokerage, you know, it's brokerage. There's a lot of good things about the job. But it is it's not easy. And so think as you have some success, either are tempted in to do something different and more on the principle side or at some point in the journey you get you get tired of kind of the grind of having to feed the front of the pipeline. So one of my advantages has been, you know, some attrition and competition and just a general like kind of doubling down of of my focus on this space.   Sam Wilson (00:13:11) - No, I think that's great. That's absolutely great. Yeah. And that's and that's something that that I do think is a struggle for all of us. But I'm always impressed with people who say, you know what, I've been doing this for a dozen years, 20 years, whatever it is, and this is exactly what I focus on. Yeah, it seems like by and large you've been able there to pull that off. Let's talk a little bit maybe what I have some questions on. Oh, what's trading like Right right now. I know you mentioned you kind of unit size. Is there are there particular amenities that people want in Chicago? Are there certain building styles or types that you say, man, this is doing better than that? So somebody coming to Chicago and wants to invest, they should be looking at whatever it is. Fill in the blank. Are those types of things that we should be thinking about?   Joe Smazal (00:13:52) - Um, yeah. What's trading is call it 20, you know, 15 to 20.   Joe Smazal (00:13:59) - It's up to 50 ish unit product in any North Side market and some of the south side markets, you see the same type of velocity. Um, the trading have a lot of different amenities or they, you know they can be kind of they can run the gamut of finish level and quality, but the common denominator is that they end up kind of lending well to the buyer pool of owner operating long term investor, um, a lot of family offices or private individuals that, that have um, that end up kind of having consistent demand for that type of product. And they don't trade real frequently. I mean, a lot of those are held for decades prior to selling. So when they come up, regardless of what the conditions are in the market, the long term holders in any given submarket end up being pretty territorial with the inventory. So if you can get the right type of inventory, we're seeing really strong demand from that type of buyer pool. Um, amenity wise, you know, I don't know that there's I don't know that there's anything that's a particular hot button.   Joe Smazal (00:15:05) - I mean, it seems like individual Hvac just given kind of the cost of utilities and, and offsetting that to the tenants and then having in unit laundry seem to be probably two for different reasons, but two of the most desirable amenities to have um say there's probably a slight preference towards more stabilized physically versus less and that's changed a little bit over the course of the last few years. Just given, um, you know, the Chicago permitting process has gotten embarrassing, embarrassingly slow, and the cost of construction obviously has gone up kind of everywhere. And here's no exception. So somebody can buy more physically stabilized and create some operational efficiencies or roll it into an existing portfolio. Um, I'd say that product is more attractive than something that has a real heavy lift right now.   Sam Wilson (00:15:56) - That's interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't have thought about that. But again, going back to the, you know, challenges that may be faced from the landlord tenant laws, the rules and those provisions, all those things that that could be a hurdle that maybe you wouldn't want to climb as a new investor coming into the city.   Sam Wilson (00:16:13) - So.   Joe Smazal (00:16:14) - Yeah. And the lead time and giving the notice and then, you know, getting the permitting and doing the work. I mean, it can be a longer cycle than a lot of people have tolerance for. Um. But over the course of the last few years, you know, prior to the recent past, it's been like value add, value add value add. Think it's easier to raise money for. There's, you know, there's some sort of pop kind of earlier on in the hold that creates some excitement for both sponsors and and passive investors. And so, um, but I think there's just been some challenges in the way those get executed recently. We can still certainly sell them and some of them are more attractive than others, but I'd say there's a bias probably towards more stabilized versus less right now.   Sam Wilson (00:16:58) - Right now, that makes that makes a lot of sense, especially if you're out of town. Investors. If you came to me, I'd certainly want to look at more stabilized assets than less.   Sam Wilson (00:17:05) - You know, in the Chicago market, what you mentioned that owners tend to be territorial in in the sense that they probably buy up as much as they can within a given area and they hold them for a long time. I think that's a really compelling, compelling thesis for seller financing. Do you see any deals getting done at this point where they say, hey, look, you know, we want to unload a portfolio seller, Financing is the way to do it that way. I mean, do you see anything on that front happening or is that something that's just kind of outside of. Outside of the norm.   Joe Smazal (00:17:37) - I'd say outside of the norm, you know, down a handful of them over the course of my career, I wouldn't say we've seen really in Chicago. I know that, you know, I'm reading about more getting done nationally as a solution to where the debt market is gone. But I'd say for the type of product that I referenced, most sellers would say if they don't have to do that, they don't really want to do it, and not for everybody.   Joe Smazal (00:18:00) - Some people want to do it as a, you know, as kind of a mechanism to create some some more passive cash flow over the course of the next year, not realize capital gains, whatever the reason why somebody wants to do it. Sure. But I'd say there hasn't really been a significant uptake in it here because the buyer pool that I was referencing or that I have been referencing still still getting fairly attractive term, there's still, you know, kind of the sponsor of choice for most local banks. So they're still getting pretty decent terms. Um, and it's competitive on the buy side. So generally like unless it's something the seller is trying to do is kind of a segue into retirement. Haven't seen a ton of them.   Sam Wilson (00:18:44) - Got it. Okay, cool. No, that's awesome. Joe here, before we jump into the last segment of the show, we were learning how to get in touch with you. Is there anything else we should be thinking about as it pertains to Chicago? Investing in Chicago, investing in multifamily, small multifamily in Chicago? Anything else come to mind you'd love to share with our audience?   Joe Smazal (00:19:01) - Uh, you know, I think Chicago is, is getting some a bit of a bad rap in the in the news.   Joe Smazal (00:19:08) - And, you know, if you read the headlines, I think people that that don't know it intimately could can say I'd rather you know live or invest elsewhere. But Chicago is an incredibly well rounded city. You know, there's a job market where you could do anything in the world. In Chicago, we've got incredible housing stock. We've got great nightlife, restaurants. We have geographic constraints and how the city can expand. So it's not easy to build here in addition to the permitting and, you know, the scarcity of land, it's just we don't see supply grow much in Chicago. So right now we're in a gangbusters rental market when other areas of the country are, you know, are seeing rents recede. And, you know, it's not as bad as the news on the other fronts, you know, it's not without challenges. I'm not being, you know, Pollyannaish about it, but, um. It's a great place to live. Believe in investing here and running my business here. I'm not going anywhere.   Joe Smazal (00:20:12) - And there's a lot of people like me who are going to be here for the long haul.   Sam Wilson (00:20:15) - Yeah. Understand that, man. Absolutely. Love Chicago. A big a big, big fan of the city there. That's. Yeah. If you had to pick any city in the US, I wanted to go visit and spend a weekend, and it certainly would be Chicago. But I'm not just saying that I really, truly love going to Chicago, so it's always, always a good time. And it's kind of like Memphis. I mean, we get we get that bad rap too, or it's like, Oh man, if all you do is read the newspapers, then don't think any of us would ever leave our home. So it's just kind of the way it goes. But Joe, appreciate you coming on the show today. If our listeners want to get in touch with you and learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?   Joe Smazal (00:20:48) - Uh, thanks for having me on, man.   Joe Smazal (00:20:49) - Uh, my cell phone number is (312) 848-6682. I work for a firm called Integra Realty and Terra Realty. Um, yeah, I've got LinkedIn. Joe Small. I'm not super active on the other social media platforms, but I'm pretty easy to get in touch. I'd be a bad broker if I was hard to get in touch with. So you can't touch me Like there's not that many Joe houses running around, so it's easy enough to do so.   Sam Wilson (00:21:19) - Fantastic. Joe, thank you again for coming on the show today. We will include all of that information there in the show. Show notes to look for that if you want to get in touch with Joe. Joe, thank you again. Have a great rest of your day.   Joe Smazal (00:21:30) - Thanks, man. You too.   Sam Wilson (00:21:31) - Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show.   Sam Wilson (00:21:48) - It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.      

Joshua Yaffa first met Evan Gershkovich after Gershkovich arrived in Moscow as a young reporter in 2017. As their friendship grew, Yaffa was impressed with the energy and passion Gershkovich brought to his job. “He had a really deep and nuanced sense of Russia,” Yaffa tells David Remnick. As the regime moved toward authoritarianism and then war, “Evan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or naïve about the context in which he was working. He understood this was a very different Russia than the one he had arrived to.” Still, Yaffa says, there was little reason to think a foreign journalist would be targeted by Putin until Gershkovich was arrested in March and charged with espionage—quite obviously a false accusation. It's the first time the Kremlin has imprisoned an American reporter for spying since the nineteen-eighties, and a significant escalation of tensions between the countries. Yaffa, who has spoken with  Gershkovich's family, reflects on Gershkovich's reporting and life in Moscow, and what may lie ahead. “I've been sending him letters,” Yaffa says. “I tell him how proud I am of him, of course how worried I am about him—but mainly how impressed I am.”

Just a month ago, the story of two lawmakers expelled from the Tennessee legislature captured headlines across the country. Their offense wasn't corruption or criminal activity— instead, they had joined a protest at the statehouse in favor of gun control, shortly after the Nashville shooting at a Christian school. Earlier this week, Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, was barred from the House chamber after making a speech against a trans health-care ban. In the past few years, in Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, legislatures have worked to strip powers from state officials who happen to be Democrats in order to put those powers in Republican hands.  Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor and the author of “Laboratories Against Democracy,” talks about how state politics  has become nationalized. “If you're a politician, and you're trying to rise in the ranks from the local or state level in your party,” he notes, “your best bet is to join the national culture wars”—even at the expense of constituents' real concerns. Plus, the contributing writer Joshua Yaffa talks with David Remnick about Evan Gershkovich, the first American reporter imprisoned in Russia on charges of espionage since the nineteen-eighties. “Evan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or naïve about the context in which he was working,” Yaffa notes, but he returned to Russia again and again to tell the story of that country's descent into autocracy.

Robin kicks off this episode by ambushing Willa with a Pollyannaish take on the collapse of democracy before we move into our less optimistic feelings about the state of games journalism (stop me if you've heard this one before). The news of Waypoint's imminent closure has us in a dour mood that can only be salved by the beautiful murder machines in the new trailer for Armored Core IV, which we watch live. We end with a whirlwind tour of what we've been doing this week, from international travel to clawing our identities back from an uncaring legal system.Timestamps(00:35) Oh no Robin wants to talk about Zooey Zephyr again(05:00) RIP Waypoint(12:55) Why reviewing games is so fucked up part 10,000(20:15) Waypoint eulogy continued(24:45) Wow cool robot corner(38:50) What have Willa and Robin been up to this week?Mentioned this weekZooey Zephyr in MissoulaPatrick Klepek on reviewing AAA gamesAustin Walker's Waypoint manifestoArmored Core VI gameplay trailerMusicStreet Food by FASSoundsYou can donate to the Pride Foundation, which supports queer communities across the U.S. Northwest, here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 Audio recordingSermon manuscript:We have choices when it comes to what we love and what we pursue. We can't love everything equally the same. There are tradeoffs. If you love one thing, it means that you are going to love something else a little less. This is true when it comes to money. Usually the tradeoff when it comes to money is relationships. You can love and pursue money—milk it, squeeze it—but that might very well mean that a relationship suffers. In order to get more money out of a person, you kind of have to abuse them. Or, at least, there's no good deal for them. A good deal for them is a bad deal for you if your goal is to get as much money as you can. This is why people often prefer to make deals with strangers. You can treat strangers however you want. You probably won't see them again or have to deal with them again. If they end up dissatisfied, oh well, buyer beware. A deal's a deal, etc. If you rip off somebody you know, then you might to be confronted by that over and over again. The other party might be angry or disappointed. So if you want to maximize your profits it's best to deal with strangers so you can squeeze as much out of them as you can. Getting as much as you can for yourself is one of those things that is hard-wired into us. We want it. Getting the most for as little as possible is good business sense. So that's good. More than that: it's the correct thing to do, even the moral thing to do. This is similar to another thing that is hard-wired into us: love your friends and hate your enemies. If somebody treats you badly, then give them hell. If they punch you, then you punch them right back and punch them harder than they punched you. But you know that Jesus tells us to love our enemies: “If someone strikes you on the one cheek, then turn so that they might strike you on the other.” Do not return evil for evil, but overcome evil with good. Jesus overturns the morality that seems to be hard-wired in us to hate our enemies. The same thing is true with our dealings with money. It's hard-wired in us to get as much as we can for ourselves. There's nothing wrong with raking it in so long as it's legal. Everyone has to fend for themselves, and if you happen to fend better than others, then so be it. You are probably just a superior human being. That's a common assumption, you know. The more money you have, the more superior of a human being you must be. To that assumption we might respond with what Jesus says in our Gospel reading: “What is highly regarded among people is an abomination in God's sight.” An abomination is something that is totally disgusting. People highly regard power, pride, wealth, self-sufficiency. People believe that the more money and resources they have, the better off they are. This kind of thinking is disgusting in God's sight. True greatness is not being rich or famous or powerful. True greatness is following after God's Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ. Isn't greatness what everybody ultimately wants? Isn't greatness what the world highly regards? This is why you have to smack down your enemies and cheat whomever you can. That's how you get ahead. Less for others means more for you. But this, too, Jesus turns on its head. One time Jesus overheard his disciples arguing. He asked them, “What were you arguing about?” But they wouldn't answer him because they were embarrassed. They had been arguing with one another over who was the greatest. So Jesus called them all together and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he will be last of all and the servant of all.” Then Jesus took a little child and placed the child in the midst of them. Taking the child in his arms Jesus said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me, welcomes not just me but also him who sent me—the Father.” This is so contrary to the way that we think that it is very easy for people to scoff at Jesus as though he were the greatest of all possible fools. Note that this is what the Pharisees did to Jesus in our Gospel reading today after he was done talking about money. The ways of Jesus are so contrary to how we normally think. Who is the greatest? Folks might answer: Mohammed Ali, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Michael Phelps. How do you get to be the greatest? By ruthlessly, relentlessly serving yourself—cultivating your talents, honing your strengths, burning out your weaknesses. How different is Jesus's answer: “If anyone wants to be first, he will be last of all and the servant of all.” Then, so that they wouldn't miss the point, he picked out some random kid. You should serve this random, powerless, favorless kid. This kid can't do anything for you. He can't pay you. He can't make you rich or famous. The uncouth kid might not even have the manners to say “Thank you.” But if you want to be great, if you want to be first, then you must become last and the servant of all. Who ever heard of a servant or a slave being great? That's the opposite of what we think of as being great. But, as Jesus said, “What is highly regarded in people's sight is an abomination in God's sight.” Being a servant or a slave is worst in our books, but think of what Jesus is like. He did not come to lord it over everybody else, even though he is Lord of lords and King of kings. He certainly had that right and ability. Instead he came “not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Those who would be great will follow after this Greatest One. The way that Jesus was great was with his love. Jesus loved. God is love. Heaven is love. Hell is absent of love. Hell has plenty of greatness in it. So many of this world's greatest end up there. Lots of rich people go there. Lots of powerful people go there. Those folks knew how to get ahead, and you can be sure that they haven't changed a bit. You can be sure that the inhabitants of hell will guard their own interests down to the very last penny. They'll slit your throat while you are looking. You might very well find a lot of greatness in hell. What you won't find there is love. So we need to promote love as Christians. Nobody else is going to do it, I assure you. Everybody else thinks that love won't work. For example: Loving your enemies. They say loving your enemies is psychologically damaging. Or being generous: Being generous with your buying and selling will make you poor. Poor people are the worst. They are so miserable. Or serving others: Serving others is the surest way to be miserable and unhappy. Sounds like suffering to me. These contradictions of Jesus's teachings can sound right and quite plausible. It sounds like love, service, sacrifice, and suffering are the problem and not the solution. Isn't that just like the devil? Make what God has said sound hateful, bad, sinister, no good. That's how his speech sounded way back when to Adam and Eve too. Love is not the problem. Love is what saves the world. God is love. Jesus's life was love by which he justified sinners by taking our place. His life continues to be love. The healing that we all need so badly is not going to come from more money or goods. It's not going to come from a battle between the sexes. It's not going to come from loosening all limits and letting everybody go wild with whatever trips their triggers. Healing comes with love—service, sacrifice and suffering for one another. Think of that wild jungle that is called our schools. Kids are so unbelievably mean to each other that the scars of being picked on can be life-long. What if kids would love the least in their midst? That takes courage, because standing up for the least can make you a target. How beneficial and Christ-like would it be for young Christians to step in and not let somebody get absolutely thrashed in their soul? And let's not be Pollyannaish about this. There will be a cost. Standing up and helping the least will make the bullies come after you. They will come after you like Goliath the giant. But if you put your trust in the Lord, you'll be alright—even if you end up with some bruises. Or what if we loved more in the workplace? Workers won't work unless they are compelled to work. They won't go the extra mile. Employers don't care about their workers. They try to pay them as little as they can get away with. Everybody, bosses and workers, look only to their own interests as they each in their own way are trying to be the greatest. What a difference it would make to love your boss, and for the boss to love you. Satisfaction in the workplace does not come from how much money you get paid. Satisfaction is from the love that is there. And what of love in the home? What if you set aside your pride and made it your goal to do what is pleasing to God, serving the others who share your home? Jesus says that we should serve a little child. How much more, then, should you serve the one who is not a child, but with whom you are one flesh? You know those little tricks and snide comments and backhanded ways that you can drive each other up the wall. These barbs and punches give you some kind of evil satisfaction, because, after all, they hit you, so you should hit them back. What if you didn't hit them back? In all these most important areas of life you always have a choice. You can serve yourself or you can serve God. You can't serve both, because you are always going to prefer one over the other. And the easier way is always serving yourself rather than serving God. We do not, by nature, like to serve or sacrifice or suffer. That is to say, we do not, by nature, love. But you have been brought out of the realm of darkness and into God's marvelous light. You have learned what is truly great, what is truly beneficial. You even know the amazing secret by which evil has been conquered. It has been defeated by love. God is love. We love because he first loved us.  

Trigger warnings: pet death, pet euthanasia, pet illness, grief over the death of a loved one, anxiety, bike accident I'm back! Back from my extra-long summer hiatus—longer than I expected or planned for. In this episode, I explain why it took me so long to return and share the grief, anxiety and other mental health struggles I've been dealing with this summer.  If you are dealing with grief or anxiety or similar feelings, scroll down for some links to previous Deliberate Freelancer episodes that deal with these issues, including interviews with therapists. This, obviously, does not replace mental health counseling, and I am not an expert, but you might find these episodes soothing or helpful in dealing with your struggles.  I sought out a new therapist this summer who said something I couldn't believe that I'd never heard before: Anxiety can be a symptom of grief. My cat's death in April, it seems, was affecting me in multiple ways and leading to my newfound anxiety this summer. After a horrible summer 2022, I am ready for a new season. In the U.S., Labor Day signifies the end of summer and gives nearly all of us a “back to school” feeling. So, I am embracing a new season and bidding farewell to a sucky summer. What better way to start off this new season than with a solo business retreat?! In the second half of this episode, I will walk you through what I did—and what I learned—during this week's solo business retreat from my dining room.  I started my retreat with a SWOT analysis. SWOT is a business term that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Corporations and organizations use the strategy, but you can certainly do it as an individual. I find it's a good way to remind yourself what you're great at, and for us, that means what our business should be focused on, as well as where we could improve.  Listing out your weaknesses is not an opportunity to beat yourself up. Instead, it might show where you need to improve or delegate, automate or terminate aspects of your business. See link to episode 26 below for more details on how to do this.  Instead of doing an analysis of Q2 this late in the year, I analyzed where my income came from for the entire year so far. I was going to rate and rank my clients—a tactic I highly recommend—but listing out all my clients showed me that I love all of them this year! Don't roll your eyes. This is not me being too Pollyannaish. It was not a happy accident, either. I have worked hard these past nine years of freelancing to truly analyze what work I accept, who I want to work with, what to charge and when to cut clients loose. And I finally hit a 100% happy success rate!  To rate and rank your client: Make a list of all your clients. Create your own personal ranking system for a variety of things that are important to you, such as great to work with, pays well, pays on time, no scope creep, no phone calls, etc. Then, rank each client on a scale of 1–5. After you rank them, put them in order with the highest ranking at the top. Who's on the bottom? Should you keep those clients that rank so low? How can you get more work from the clients—or the type of clients—that rank the highest?  Feeling so scattered this summer, I wanted to get ahold of my days and weeks again and create the perfect work day and perfect work week. No Meeting Mondays and Half-Day Fridays have been working great for me, so I'm keeping those. It's the Tuesday through Thursday I need to get a better handle on. See episode 19's link below for tips on how to create your perfect work day. Biz Bite: Set a hurdle rate The Bookshelf: “Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting” by Clare Pooley  Resources: Join the Deliberate Freelancer Facebook group.  Support Deliberate Freelancer at Buy Me a Coffee. Check out my new podcast! Association Station Book “Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief: A Revolutionary Approach to Understanding and Healing the Impact of Loss” by Claire Bidwell Smith  Episode #137 of Deliberate Freelancer: I'm Grieving. How Can I Keep My Business Running? Episode #90 of Deliberate Freelancer: Coping with One Year of COVID-19 Lockdown, with Therapist Emily Derouin Episode #70 of Deliberate Freelancer: Techniques to Deal with Anxiety from My New Therapist Episode #48 of Deliberate Freelancer: How to Cope with Coronavirus Anxiety, with Therapist Mira Dineen Episode #52 of Deliberate Freelancer: Embracing Self-Care without Guilt, with Acupuncturist Rachel Brumberger Episode #26 of Deliberate Freelancer: Delegate, Automate and Terminate to Improve Your Business Episode #19 of Deliberate Freelancer: Visualize Your Perfect Work Day—Then Create It Episode #42 of Deliberate Freelancer: Tips from My First Solo Business Retreat of 2020 Episode #3 of Deliberate Freelancer: Host a Solo Business Retreat

It's still summer break, but enjoy this bonus episode before we start up again this fall! Shawn rejoins us to discuss Sons of Provo. We talk about how this movie holds up from a post-Mormon view, whether it portrays Utah Mormonism more accurately than Under the Banner of Heaven, and the current state of Mormon cinema. Mentioned in this episode: 1. Sons of Provo album 2. The Best Two Years, The Other Side of Heaven, The R.M., and The Singles Ward 3. Will Swenson, Kirby Heyborne, and Danny Tarasevich 4. Kirby Heyborne beer commercial 5. This Is Spinal Tap 6. Mormons and the Movies 7. "Pollyannaish" 8. The R.M. soundtrack 9. Jericho Road 10. Pretty Darn Funny and Sheri Dew 11. Once I Was a Beehive, 17 Miracles, Church Ball, and The Chosen 12. Studio C on Conan 13. Mormon No More and Murder Among the Mormons 14. "Same-Sex Attracted" and Believer 15. Shawn's blog: The Everyday Cinephile Post-Mormon at the Movies is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

The city Health Department's subway ad campaign reassuring hard-drug users that they can be “empowered” by “using safely” is not an isolated approach to the epidemic of overdose deaths. It's part of a larger “harm reduction” movement based on the idea that the combination of decriminalization or outright legalization will reduce the tragic number of US overdose deaths — 100,000 last year. The ads are of a piece with the “safe-injection sites” inaugurated by the de Blasio administration.But as evidence starts to come in from the real world, this Pollyannaish view deserves to be questioned.LIKE & SUBSCRIBE for new videos everyday. https://bit.ly/3KBUDSK

With the Omicron wave upon us, it would be Pollyannaish to get overly enthused about the economy's prospects in the new year. But if the economy's performance last year is a guide, we should not be too pessimistic either. Despite being hit hard by the Delta wave of the virus, the economy grew like gangbusters in 2021. It will not grow as strongly in 2022, but inflation, which took off in recent months, will come back to earth. Having said this, how good a year the economy will have depends on the pandemic's path and how well policymakers respond. Webinar Slides

Complexity deserves an improvised response. In the wake of more than a year of uncertainty, our impulses may be to more tightly control and script the experience of school. But what opportunities might reveal themselves if we instead learn to let go and apply the principles of improvisation to leading our communities? With greater flexibility and a spirit of possibility, can we use this moment to imagine School 2.0?Structure is, and always has been, an important element of school. We create systems, benchmarks, routines, schedules, and ways of “doing school” that allow us to measure and define the learning process. But we know that too much structure can have its downsides, sometimes sapping creativity, joy, and inspiration from the experience of school. How can school leaders create the right amount of structure to support emerging agency while giving space for new ideas? And how can we learn to view challenges or setbacks as new possibilities instead of disruptions? Author, co-founder of the online learning space Yellow, and associate fellow at Oxford's Saïd Business School Rob Poynton joins New View EDU to share how improvisation can be a game-changer for school leaders.In this episode, hosts Tim Fish and Lisa Kay Solomon chat with Rob Poynton about how schools can become more Yellow—or in other words, how the same thoughtful, seemingly loosely structured approaches to learning and discovery Rob has designed in his online learning space might be adapted to K-12 schools. Leading from the insight that improvisation is actually a discipline with its own set of guidelines and practices, Rob shares the deliberate process behind making choices that set the stage for deeper learning and relationship-building in a classroom. This starts with how entering a room, greeting students, or placing chairs in different locations can all have startling effects on class behavior. Exploring the idea that a longstanding standardized approach to education is poised to give way to something new and different, he encourages school leaders to view improvisation not as a last resort in difficult circumstances, but a daily practice that can be incorporated into this new vision of what school can become.What, and who, is education for? What's the necessary and healthy tension between structure and discipline, and freedom and creativity? If both are needed in our schools, how can we learn to constantly adapt to the right levels to allow our communities to grow and thrive? And how can we use challenges as springboards to new possibilities—moving from a problem-solving mindset to one that acknowledges that not all problems can be solved, but all problems can lead to potential growth? Rob reminds us that we can't plan for every outcome, control every circumstance, resolve every challenge, or fill every moment. Instead, he urges school leaders to lean into the power of pause, let go of the need for certainty, and invite every member of their communities to join them in co-creative action as they reimagine what the next version of school could be.Some of the key questions Tim and Lisa explore in this interview include:How can school leaders set up environments that reflect where they want to go, not just where they've always been?What is the value and power of “pause,” and how is intentionally pausing part of good leadership practice?How can we learn to reframe challenges and concerns, such as worry over possible “learning loss,” with a spirit of possibility? How can we learn to approach problems not correctively, but creatively?What does it look like to invite others to co-create a community of learning? How can we become more willing and able to support risk-taking in our schools?Resource List:Rob's Website: Learn more about Rob and his unique approach to using improvisational theater to improve leadership practices.Yellow: Check out Rob's online learning space, offering “generative and re-generative learning journeys for the real world.”Do Pause: Rob's most recent book explores the power of pause in life and leadership.Do Improvise: Rob's foundational work on how the practice of improvisation can benefit all disciplines.In This Episode:“You know, so if you take that last piece of practice, use everything, one of my favorite ways to think about that is to reframe any shortage, shortcoming, error, or mistake as an offer. And this is really important. It's not about being Pollyannaish and saying, oh, it's all lovely, it's not about that at all. It's about being much more pragmatic and saying, OK, this has just been canceled or we don't have the budget or there's no time.How can we use the fact that there is no time?” (10:50)“You know, in improvisation, it's not true that we don't prepare. We don't plan in a detailed, detailed kind of micromanaging anticipatory way, but we do a huge amount of a different kind of preparation. We prepare for a territory, not a path, if you will.” (26:50)“Sometimes we forget that the decisions or choices we make about where to put our attention have what I would call an energetic cost. And so if you choose to spend your time focusing on those things you shouldn't do, and that you have to avoid for compliance, and we all understand how important that is and you obviously can't, you know, you can't shirk that, but if all your energy, and if the mood that accompanies it goes on that, the energetic cost is ... you know, we're all now so exhausted and tired and neurotic and paranoid that, that nobody's going to dare suggest something new or different, or let alone outlandish or playful or crazy.” (32:36)“There are costs attached to safety. I know that sounds completely weird, but, you know, there's a lovely quote from Keith Johnston, who's a guru in the improv theater world, but this one is so deeply relevant to all walks of life, particularly teaching and education. ‘Those few people who say yes are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those people who say no are rewarded by the security they attain. Unfortunately, there are more no sayers than yes sayers.'" (34:21)“Pause is not the opposite of action. It's part of action. So pausing is not stopping. It's not surrendering. Pauses enable people to act more effectively more quickly. If you never pause, pause will be forced upon you.” (40:15)Full TranscriptAbout Our Guest:Robert Poynton is the founder of Yellow learning, an online space for regenerative learning, and author of Do Pause and Do Improvise.He lives in rural Spain, in a remote, off-grid house, and is a co-founder of On Your Feet— a consultancy based in Portland, Oregon. He is also an associate fellow of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, where he works on Leadership Programmes, using improv theater as a tool to explore complexity.Rob believes in playing around with things (and people) rather than trying to control them, and is fascinated by the power of place and the absurdity of human attempts to control ourselves, other people, and things around us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Having helped to bring big data to genomics through the lab techniques he invented, such as RNA-Seq, the Stanford molecular biologist Michael Snyder is focused today on how to use data from devices to increase the human healthspan. Some cars have as many as 400 sensors, Snyder notes. "And you can't imagine driving your car around without a dashboard...Yet here we are as people, which are more important than cars, and we're all running around without any sensors on us, except for internal ones." To Snyder, smart watches and other wearable devices should become those sensors, feeding information to our smartphones, which can then be "the health dashboard for humans and just let us know how our health is doing."  (You can sign up to participate in the Snyder lab's study of wearables and COVID-19 at https://innovations.stanford.edu/wearables.)Snyder has been chair of Stanford's Department of Genetics since 2009 and is director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. He has a BA in chemistry and biology from the University of Rochester (1977) and a PhD from Caltech (1982), where he studied with the molecular biologist Norman Davidson. He did a postdoc at Stanford from 1982 to 1986 and then went to teach at Yale in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from 1986 to 2009, when he moved back to Stanford. At Yale, Snyder and his lab helped to develop many of the tools undergirding functional genomics, including RNA-Seq, one of the two pillars of transcriptomics (alongside microarrays). Snyder is also known in the world of personalized medicine for having discovered through genomic analysis of his own blood that he was at high risk for Type 2 diabetes, which he later did develop, but controlled through exercise and diet. That work to create an “integrated personal omics profile” (iPOP) was later described in a 2012 Cell article. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute called it “a landmark for personalized medicine” and an “unprecedented look at one person's biology, showing what can be accomplished in the future.”Snyder is the author of a 2016 book from Oxford University Press called Personalized Medicine: What Everyone Needs to Know. And he has founded or co-founded numerous life sciences companies, including:Personalis (precision oncology through liquid biopsies of tumors)SensOmics (genomics + machine learning to screen for childhood conditions such as autism)Qbio (membership-based access to “BioVault” platform gathering numerous biomarkers to predict health risks and recommend healthy habits)January Therapeutics (albumin-encapsulated nanoparticles to deliver drug molecules to tumors)Filtricine (cancer management through “Tality,” a line of foods that cuts off amino acids needed for tumor growth)Mirvie (formerly Akna – blood tests to predict pregnancy risks such as preeclampsia, preterm birth, gestational diabetes)Protometrix (maker of protein microarrays, acquired by Thermo Fisher)Affomix (maker of technology for high-throughput screening of antibodies against human proteins; acquired by Illumina)Please rate and review MoneyBall Medicine on Apple Podcasts! 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You can tap them to leave a rating if you haven't already.• In the Title field, type a summary for your review.• In the Review field, type your review.• When you're finished, click Send.• That's it, you're done. Thanks!Full TranscriptHarry Glorikian: I'm Harry Glorikian, and this is MoneyBall Medicine, the interview podcast where we meet researchers, entrepreneurs, and physicians who are using the power of data to improve patient health and make healthcare delivery more efficient. You can think of each episode as a new chapter in the never-ending audio version of my 2017 book, “MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market.” If you like the show, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review at Apple Podcasts.Harry Glorikian: Michael Snyder says his life is all about using big data to understand things.He's a molecular biologist, genomics expert, and life sciences entrepreneur based at Stanford University. It's partly thanks to Snyder's work that genomics is a field defined today by big data. In an earlier phase of his career, when he was at Yale, he and his lab members invented some of the fundamental technologies behind functional genomics, that is, the study of gene transcription and regulation, and also transcriptomics, which focuses on the RNA transcripts genes produce.At Stanford he's focused on using big data to transform the healthcare industry, so that it focuses less on reacting to illness and more on proactively lengthening people's healthy lifespans.Snyder is like me in that he's convinced that smartwatches and other wearable devices are going to be an important source of health data. If everyone had one, we could probably detect health problems a lot earlier and make better lifestyle decisions. In fact, about halfway through the interview you'll hear Snyder explain how his own wearable devices have gotten him out of some personal health scrapes. In the middle of one flight to Norway, Snyder says his heart rate went up and his blood oxygen went down. Before his flight even landed, he'd correctly diagnosed himself with Lyme disease and was able to get an antibiotic that quickly cleared out the infection.Later, during the height of the covid pandemic in the U.S., Snyder's lab proved that about three-quarters of the time, they could predict which FitBit users would develop covid symptoms based solely on heart rate data from their devices.The medical establishment hasn't always been receptive to this kind of science. And the era of data-driven collaboration between patients and their doctors has been a long time coming. But thanks to better technology and the impact of the pandemic, Snyder thinks it's finally arriving now.Harry Glorikian: Dr. Snyder, welcome to the show. Michael Snyder: Thanks for having me. Harry Glorikian: It was funny cause I was reading your background and I was like, wow. I mean, so many different aspects of your background, both, you know, from a scientist and an entrepreneur from, you know, helping start, like, I was going through the list of the companies. It was longer than, than I remember. Like, I know quite a few of them, but not all of them. And so I just thought like from a high level, like, how do you explain to someone what you do and why you do it? Michael Snyder: Okay. Well, we're all about big data. We like to use big data to understand things. And these days we want to use big data to transform health. And really that's what my career has kind of been built around. So over the years, we've invented technologies for collecting big data and then we've implemented them. For a long time, when I started out, it was really to try and understand biological systems. People use to study genes one at a time, for example, and proteins, one at a time, we came up with a way of studying them all at once. And that hadn't been done before. And then try and understand them in a systems context so that you weren't really just looking at, you know, if you have a jigsaw puzzle, look at one or a few pieces of the time, we wanted to see the whole puzzle at once as best we could. And so that's really been the philosophy. As I say, it was first choosing to study basic cell biological problems. And then I moved to Stanford now about 12 years ago. And the goal there really was to bring it to medicine see if we can understand medicine, you know, at a holistic level, not just, you know, if you've got high sugar that, you know, you're diabetic. Sure. But are there other things going on as well? Like other metabolic conditions? And that's really the philosophy. Let's look at the whole system, better understand what's going on, and see if we can come up with solutions. Now, the thing, I think that's been a big shtick of ours and at least in the recent years has been focused on keeping people healthy, extending the healthspan as opposed to just doing sick care, which is where medicine is today. So we really want to transform medicine. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. It seems that, you know, health span has become the, the big shift.  And if you look at where we're going from the Affordable Care Act and everything, it's better to, it's more profitable actually to keep someone healthy than just treat them when they're sick. So I like that shift because it brings technology more into the forefront. Michael Snyder: Totally. Yeah, no. And it's going to require a lot of changes and a lot of levels, the whole payment level in the United States is broken. People often only get paid when sick people go in to see them like hospitals, you only get paid to show up when you're ill. We don't put enough emphasis on keeping people healthy because people have said, well, you know, show me it saves money, show me it does it. But until you run those studies, it's hard to do that. So I think the incentive systems are changing. That's slow, but it's also getting  you know, physicians and others used to this concept of bringing in big data to better understand people's health. And maybe to elaborate a little more on this. You know, if you walk into a doctor's office today, it looks pretty similar to the doctor's office of 40 years ago, you know, a few gadgets are updated, but otherwise the same. And guess what the number one user fax machines is in the U.S.? It's the healthcare system. My daughters don't even know what a fax machine is.Harry Glorikian: Yes, yes. It's true. Somebody did ask me the other day, like, can you fax it to me? I'm like, yeah. I think my scanner might, but I don't think I've got a jack that I can actually plug it into to actually send it. ‘Cause I don't do that anymore. Michael Snyder: Nobody does that except for the medical system pretty much. Yeah.Harry Glorikian: So, you know, you've had you, you mentioned it, you had a hand in, in, you know, developing these foundational ideas and technologies in functional genomics, such as, you know, high throughput protein sequencing techniques, you know, known as RNA-seq and then making transcriptomics possible. Like, can you talk about what it's been like to sort of, you know, develop those technologies and then, you know, be at the forefront of trying to answer these big molecular biology questions and, and what in your mind, what came first? Was it, I gotta answer this molecular biology question so I'm actually, I'm going to develop this instrument and then be able to answer that question. Does that make sense?Michael Snyder: Yeah, it's a little of both to be honest. Often we develop technologies out of need or out of observations. We have, so for example, in RNA-seq, we were trying to map where all the transcribed regions were, where all the genes were in yeast, which was the organism we were studying at the time. And we tried this one now very outdated method that just work miserably and we just stepped back a minute, said there's gotta be a better way. And so that's how we came up with, we thought about it, came up with a way and then implemented it and, and showed it worked. And then of course if it works, it takes off quickly, very much like CRISPR. And that's been true for other things. In some cases as we'll make an observation like when we first  invented a way to map the targets of key regulatory proteins called transcription factors there, we saw that these things were, were giving these dots in what's called the nucleus of the cell. And we said, well, where are those dots located? And so we came up with a method for figuring out where are all the, where all the binding sites for our, for these key regulatory proteins. So it's, it's been a variety of ways. And then when it's come to medicine, we, once we invent the technology, so well, people will say, well, well, how can we use these now in other ways that would be beneficial. And I'm not sure what you know, but I was at Yale for a long time, and I had a great time, it was fantastic place, but I was more on the main campus and it was just harder to implement them into medicine. And then about 12 years ago, I moved to Stanford and I'm right in the heart of the medical school where there's all these clinicians and very eager, beavers around, trying to figure out how to better, you know, do medicine these days. And so it's just been easier as we've implemented technologies to roll them out and see how they might work in the clinic. And so I think one of the biggest projects we launched when it came to Stanford was we call it personal 'omics profiling. The idea, you collect a lot of deep data around a person and you do it longitudinally. So we'll, we'll sequence their genome we'll look at all the molecules we can in their blood and urine, meaning their RNA and their proteins and their metabolites. We, we do deep questionnaires and clinical tests on people. And then, and then, yeah, about eight years ago, we sort of got into wearables back when they were just fitness trackers, realizing they would be powerful. So the idea was to collect data on people—while they're healthy, by the way, not while they were sick, while they were healthy—and do it longitudinally, do it every three months and see how they change. And if they got ill, then we collected more sample. And that was the idea. That's turned out to be a really flagship project, I think, for just how we might better implement health. And you raise the issue about starting companies. So a little of my philosophy is I think academics are great at discovery. They're great at proof of principle, but they're not good at scaling. They think they are, but they're not. And this is what companies are just fantastic about. So we've spun off, we think some, what I hope will be powerful companies. One was a DNA sequencing company called Personalis. They've done very, very well.Then we've spun off Qbio, which is doing sort of a, you know, a more commercial version of this personal 'omics profiling, as I mentioned, but they added on whole-body MRI and have some other things that are pretty powerful. So they've, they've got a medical version of, a more actionable version, again, our academic lab is doing this research for us and trying to figure this out, but the company can do it, implement it.And then we have another company, January AI, it's doing continuous glucose monitoring for trying to better control diabetes. So again, we figured out some things in the lab and then it made sense to commercialize it. So, so it all goes kind of hand in hand to me. It all makes sense. And it's very satisfying by the way to do stuff in the lab that, that we think is impactful and then try and get it out there to a broader group. We think that's how you scale. I don't think academics are capable of scaling. Certainly not very well, whereas companies are. Harry Glorikian: Well, yeah, I mean, I, you know, quite some time ago being a product manager, I mean, you, you, you had to like your biggest accomplishment was getting that thing from the bench right out into somebody in the field and, oh my God, it actually, yeah, it did something. Right. And that was the exciting part. Stopping at the research, I would have been like, “That's it? Like, all I got was all I got was a paper out of it?” Like, no, no. I want to, you know, I know that that's always the beginning. Michael Snyder: Yeah, we got excited about the papers, absolutely. But we're very also, it's just fun to see it get out further. Totally. And again, so that's literally all the companies, maybe with one exception have spun off of the things we were doing in the lab said, all right, we get it. Now it's time to scale this out and develop it into something people would be interested in. And it is very satisfying, as you say.Harry Glorikian: So, so, you know, I mean the genome has come down in cost. I mean, a lot of other analytic technologies have come down in cost. I mean, I know the latest thing that Illumina has said is they want to get the genome down to like $60 to do the functional work. Not necessarily the analytics or analyzing part of it. How do you see that changing what you're doing and the impact? I mean, you've got a lot of data, so I feel like you can almost. paint a picture of the evolution of a person.  If you could sort of see the initial traces, how do you see this playing a role in what you're doing and the impact that it's going to have on where it's going next?Michael Snyder: Yeah. I think getting the cost down is a big deal because when we set this up as research, it was very, very expensive. And so  getting it out there will help, especially when you're talking about keeping people healthy because people don't want to dump a lot of money into a healthy person. 'Cause they don't know that—here's a problem with our healthcare system. Most people will shift every 18 months, that's the average time people stay with their provider and then they'll shift to a new one. And that may be because their company's shifted. Not necessarily they did, but their company may have done it. And sometimes they change their job, they shift. So  that's whyIt's a barrier then for, for providers, healthcare providers put a lot of money into you, when 18 months later you're going to be with somebody else. But if the costs are pretty cheap, like the genome sequences, let's say, but the interpretation is $200. It's worth it to you because then it's a lot easier to execute preventative medicine, get your genome sequenced, predict what you're at risk for, and with a fairly low cost. But if they're going to dump $2,000 and you're going to be with somebody else, there's a lot more balking, if you know what I mean.So I think, I think keeping the costs down is a big deal. Qbio, for their exam, they charge $3,500, and on one hand that's a lot of money and we, we like people to do it two months. You get a whole-body MRI and other things. On the other hand, we would argue for it. It should save and already has. We found like early prostate cancer, early ovarian cancer, early   pancreatic cancer, which is a big deal and some heart things and stuff like this is from the first a hundred people that we did. And it's more now. So, so we show it has utility. And of course, if you're one of those people, it's a big, big deal. So, and, but by getting the cost down, it just gets the whole barrier away. Right now you have to pay out of pocket because there is no reimbursement. So the cost gets down and I think people would reimburse because there'll be willing to run trials to show it does work and saves money. So I, I think the whole thing will go together as costs drop, and we can expand this out and show utility. Harry Glorikian: Well, and you know, if you think about the implementation of technology, like if you could carry it around on your iPhone, when you go to your next physician, and you've got it with you right at that also brings the cost down rather than have to do everything all over again.Michael Snyder: Totally. Yeah. In the future. And I think physicians are just warming up those. There's an education side of this from the physicians, you know. When we first got involved in the wearable space, they would tell us how inaccurate it was. And they didn't like the idea that your iPhone would be so powerful. Possibly more powerful than they are. There was a threatening aspect of the whole thing. And I think they're now reassured that, first of all, they're very important. They're not going away. There's these technologies to augment what they're already doing. And, and it's, there's an education side. I remember when genome sequencing first came out, even at an enlightened place like Stanford, I would talk to some of my colleagues and they'd say, well, nobody shows that really worked, you know, and it's got a lot of errors. They just think about the negative. The instant reaction is, you know  we don't really know how to do it. You might tell people something they're not going to get. That's harmful and, and try to tell them, well, look, you have just educate people and educate the physicians. And now, when we first started actually, you know, cancer, even people were pushing back  and cancer is a no brainer. You need genetic tests or sequencing. But for elderly people, it was a strong pushback, right? Everybody's telling you, Mike, what you're doing is really harmful to people. You're going to get people to turn them into hypochondriacs when you sequence their DNA. And now there's some, some people feel that way, but most people have kind of warmed up or at least maybe it's 50-50 are receptive to the idea. Maybe it is a good idea to get a, to find these risks. From our standpoint, just from the first 70 people we sequenced the genome, we found someone's BRCA mutation. And now that person out of mutation suggests they might have certain kinds of cancer. They did a whole-body MRI that early thyroid cancer, we caught that had it removed, saved their thyroid, the rest of their thyroid. That is, you know, very, very useful. Another person, a very young person had a mutation in a heart gene and would have been at risk for cardiomyopathy. It turns out his father died young of a heart attack. And so he had this mutation, we saw this thing and sure enough, he had a heart defect. Didn't even know it. He's on drugs now. So, so these technologies can be very, very useful, very, very powerful. But you have to show physicians that, and then they sort of go, “Oh yeah. Now I get it. We kind of get it.” They may say, well, show us the evidence. And so that's what we're trying to do. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I mean, I just. I've got a book coming out in the fall and I just interviewed somebody who had done participated in BabySeq. Robert Greene's thing, right? And identified an issue  that had a profound effect actually on the decisions of the mother, not the baby.  And so it's an interesting story when she went through it, I was like, wow, that is super impactful. You know, it adds a lot of, you know, it is funny. She said, you know, we did this and I was not expecting this. Right. So it was an eye opener, but it's affected her decision-making going forward.  And it's along the lines of BRCA, what she was informed of, but  I'm sort of saving it for the book. So when it comes out in the fall. Harry Glorikian: But you know, you wrote a book back in 2016, that introduces non-experts to personalized medicine. You know, you covered everything from how DNA works to the applications in genomics, in cancer. So. I almost think like that might need a refresh or at least the publisher might want to put it out again, because I think people are more interested now. But if you were writing that book from scratch today, you know, five years later  would you write it at all? Would you, the field is, I feel like it's exploded in the last five years on the one hand. On the other hand, I still feel like I talk to people that still don't understand the impact of it. So I feel like I'm talking to both sides sometimes, but. How do you think the field has changed in the last five years? And where do you see it going next? Michael Snyder: Yeah. Great question. So when we wrote the book, you know, people really didn't like this area. They didn't like it, sequencing genomes and things. They thought it was harmful.  And the same idea where, I mean, we literally collect millions of data points. Every time we sample someone, then people still bring it up. And so it was really, the goal there was to educate people about what the technologies are, what they're capable of, and this sort of thing. So I think we have come a long ways since then, where the field was mostly against. I asked people to raise their hand. How many of you want to get their genome sequenced? Usually there's a small fraction, even in an educated group. Now it's probably the majority. If they haven't even done it already—they may have already done it. So  I think the world has changed. I think what I would do is update the power of the new technologies. New technologies have come out, even since we first put that book out.So I'd add more. Expand the wearable space. I just think we can put a smartwatch on every person on the planet. If we wanted to a very inexpensive one that would be a health monitor for people. And, and there would be a no better time for that than this pandemic that's going on now, because we actually can show, we can tell when people are getting ill prior tosymptoms from a smartwatch, from covid and other infections. So we can talk about that more if you like, but it's a pretty cool study. We can show again, 70% of the time, we can tell when you're getting ill, because your heart rate jumped up, and we pick it up with a smartwatch. So imagine putting that on everyone in the planet and just letting them know, “Look, we can tell when you're getting ill.” You know, even if it's not perfect, a bunch of the time that we think would be very useful. They don't send their kids who are sick to school, affecting everyone, or it shows up in a nursing home and, you know, you flag it right away. And that would be, we think very, very powerful.I view it as analogous to, you know, a car. A car usually has several sensors. Some have as many as 400 sensors on them. And you can't imagine driving your car around without a dashboard, the gas gauge or, you know, a speedometer or an engine light or all these things on we've gotten so used to this is what you do when you drive a car.Yet here we are as people, which are more important than cars, and we're all running around without any sensors on us, except for internal ones. They're okay. But they're kind of slow. And I just, to me, it's just totally logical. We should all have our own, you know, sensors on us. It's the car health dashboard. Our smartphone will be the health dashboard for humans and just let us know how our health is doing. And it doesn't mean when you see a light go off that for sure something is wrong, but it gives you a heads up. And it has, you know, in, in some cases our profiling has really had life-saving consequences.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. And I'm, well, I mean, it's funny cause I think about these things and I look at a lot of these technologies and. You know, it's always a single biomarker of some sort, right? That that's, you know, a heartbeat or temperature or something. And then I think about, well, the next level has got to be a combination of them, which makes the predictive power that much better. Michael Snyder: That's right. Yeah. We call that multivariate, yeah, where you bring in several features. So you start seeing it enlarge something or a thing on an image, and then you see that those biomarkers of those. That's how we discovered someone with an early lymphoma in our study that had an enlarged spleen, and then we saw certain markers are up in their blood and said, something's not right here. And then they did follow up and sure enough had early lymphoma, no symptoms yet. So again, caught it early, a lot easier to manage just much better off. We have a number of examples like that. So the combination tells you. And the other thing that's very under appreciated is the longitudinal profiling.  People don't realize that if you go in and get tested now, and they rarely look at your old measurements. And so they just see if you're in the normal range and you can be at the high end of the normal range, but you're still “No, all right, you're fine. Don't worry about it.” But if you look at your trajectory, you know, maybe you've been running kind of normally in the low normal range and suddenly this one jumped up, you know 50%. You can still be in the normal range, up 50% and something's headed in the wrong direction and you would be ignored for that. Whereas if we just had very simple algorithms that can flag that sort of stuff. “Look, you're not only up in this marker, but you're up in that one too, which is related, you know, maybe something's going on early.” Let's see what's going on there a little better and catch things earlier again when you can manage it better. So, so I think we ought to bring in longitudinal information again, to me, that's why the wearables are so powerful because they measure it 24/7. Harry Glorikian: Well, I do that with my, my physician. I walk in, I'm like, okay, here's my data for the last, you know, X amount of time. And it's funny because even I've noticed, like during covid, cause I was much more sedentary, like certain things were going in the wrong direction. And I was like, oh no, no, no, no. I got to get those, those back in line. If I didn't have the ability to look at it over time. And I was only looking at that one point, you know, how am I going to see where it's going? Michael Snyder: Out of context. Yeah. Here's another thing that's wrong with medicine today. It's all population-based, so they will make every decision about your health based on population averages and hence that normal range. But again, you may not at all be like normal population levels. And so you've been told, and here's my favorite example, you've been told since day zero that your oral temperature, when you put it thermometer in your mouth is 98.6, but it turns out, first of all, that number is wrong. Yeah. Average temperature is 97.5. But more importantly, there's a spread. So the what's called the 25th quartile is 94.6. So four degrees below and the 75th quartile, 99.1.So in today's world, if your normal baseline temperature is 94.6, that's your healthy temperature, and you walk into a physician's office at 98.6, they'll tell you, “You're healthy. Everything's great. What are you doing? Go home.” But you're at four degrees Fahrenheit over your baseline. I guarantee you're ill.  This is just, it's not healthy. So you got to know your baseline. And for me, by the way, mine is 97.3 and it's been dropping a little bit over the last 10 years. Which is, there's some studies suggesting that is the case actually, so that people do drop a little bit as they get older. But the point is that, you know, my baseline is not 98.6, if I am at 98.6, I am ill. [music interlude]Harry Glorikian:I want to pause the conversation with Michael Snyder for a minute to make a quick request. If you're a fan of MoneyBall Medicine, you know that we've made more than 60 episodes of the show. And you can listen to all of them for free at Apple Podcasts, or at my website glorikian.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.There's one small thing you could do in return, and that's to leave a rating and a review of the show on Apple Podcasts. It's one of the best ways to make sure that other listeners will find and follow the show.If you've never posted a review or a rating, it's easy. All you have to do is open the Apple Podcasts app on your smartphone, search for MoneyBall Medicine, and scroll down to the Ratings & Reviews section. Tap the stars to rate the show, and then tap the link that says Write a Review to leave your comments. It'll only take a minute, but it'll be a huge boost for the show.Thank you! And now back to the interview.[music interlude]Harry Glorikian: You know, just talking about the wearables, because I noticed like earlier you had at least four devices and I think an Oura ring, or maybe… Michael Snyder: I lost it recently, but yes, I normally wear, I normally wear eight of these devices. An Oura ring and four smart watches. I have a continuous glucose monitor and environmental sensors. I've got all kinds of gadgets. Harry Glorikian: Oh Jesus. Okay. Well, so tell us where you see the overlap of these digital devices and the personalized medicine sort of coming together, because I feel like one is much earlier warning system or could be an earlier warning system of what may come in the future. And one is a current monitoring system, of how the machine is working. Michael Snyder: Yeah. I mean, I do think they're an integral part of personalized medicine.   Only now I think people are realizing the power. The pandemic, I hate to say it, helped with that because remote monitoring is now become popular and the concept that you can start managing people.So, a little background, we started on this about eight years ago, when the Fitbit was out there. And people are using these fitness trackers. We thought, well, gosh, these are pretty powerful health monitors because they're measuring your heart rate and they measured 24/7. In fact  you know, the first device we used doesn't exist anymore, a Base watch, it takes 250,000 measurements a day. Now some of them will take 2.5 million measurements. They really follow you in a deep way and they'll measure heart rate, variability, skin temperature. Those can all be pretty accurate, by the way. It depends on the device. Some will measure blood oxygen and even blood pressure. Those are less accurate, but their deltas are pretty good, meaning the changes. And then there's other things out there too, something called galvanic stress response. So they can measure all kinds of things. They're always following you. So we think that's super powerful. Now when we first started, again, physicians pushed back and said, well, you know, everybody knows they're not accurate and we actually want paper coming out. Very soon [they started] saying, well, actually they're more accurate for some measurements, like heart rate than what you measure in a physician's office. My heartbeat can vary by as much as 40 beats per minute, depending whether I drove their biked there. Even if I rest at 15 minutes, it's still different and whatever's going on in my life.And, but if I pull my resting heart rate off in the morning, first thing it's pretty constant, unless I'm either stressed or ill. So you actually have better measurements from some, for certain kinds of measurements from these devices. So that's the first thing you have to show, show them they are accurate and things. So we think we've done that in some cases for some kinds of things. So I think we now just need to get physicians to start thinking about that more and get them as an integral part of your healthcare. That when they show up, they don't have to take your heart rate anymore. They'll just read it from, it'll already be pumped into the system. You can already have it there, and they can follow your trajectory. Since the last time they saw it last, whatever month, six months, two years, what have you, and see what's going on much, much better than these static measurements that they take every few years when you're healthy.So I just think they're going to be super powerful for following your healthy physiology. And then when you get ill, it's all about the delta, the shift from your personal baseline. And what's powerful is because we all have different baselines, different heart rate, different blood oxygen, just what have you. When you shift up, you can figure it out. And the way we got in the most was from our first work, we actually showed a, I actually figured out my Lyme disease. I picked it up from my smartwatch. I suddenly got a pulse-ox, a blood oxygen. And it was because my, my heart rate went up. I was flying to Norway, of all things, and my heart rate went up much harder than normal. And my blood oxygen dropped much lower than normal. And I saw it on the airplane and it didn't return to normal after I landed. And I knew something wasn't right. I thought it was Lyme disease, because two weeks earlier, I was in a Lyme-infested area helping my brother put a fence in in Massachusetts. Most places are Lyme-infested in Massachusetts.And then I saw this and I, I warned a doctor there. It might be, that's a classic case, I warned him, it might be Lyme because of the timing. And later got, by the way, I didn't have symptoms. That was a key. I saw these things before symptoms. I later had symptoms, went to a doctor in Norway. He pulled blood said, yep. My immune cells are up. I've got a bacterial infection. And he wanted me to take penicillin. I said, no, I should take doxycycline. The classic case of, you know, you have to take charge of your own health. He pushed back, but he did give in, in the end  And, and it turns out it cleared it up. I took it for two weeks and when I got back, I got measured. Sure enough, I was Lyme positive, by a sero test and I give him blood right before I left I was negative, so I seroconverted, a very well controlled experiment. The point of all of this aside is, I can figure out my Lyme disease from a simple smartwatch and a pulse-ox. And so that showed the power of these smartwatches for doing this sort of thing. And then that's how we got, we looked into the data and saw every time I got ill from respiratory viral infection, including asymptomatic time, I could see the jump up in heart rate. So we knew it would work for infectious disease. And then when the covid pandemic came, as you might imagine, we just ramped up or really scaled out that study.We are device agnostic. So we rolled out the study in a two part manner. So meaning we first wanted to show that our algorithms and perfect algorithms for detecting covid-19. So we partnered with Fitbit  but also talk to other groups as well, pulled in data. We started with Fitbit, we could, right away, we got 32 people who had been covid-infected  with their Fitbit watch still running. Some people let them burn out.  But we, we, and we had a diagnosis date and a symptom date. And so we could actually show, we initially showed that for 26 of 32, we could see a jump up in resting heart rate from a simple smartwatch, in this case a Fitbit. And we had several different algorithms, both steps and a resting heart rate. We, we showed the algorithms work and then we built what we call it a real time alerting algorithm, actually two of them, we tested them out and they seem to work. So then in December—and we love all of you listening to this to enroll in our study at innovations.stanford.edu/wearables—anyway, what we did in December is showed, we rolled out a real time alerting system that will actually send off a red alert when your heart rate jumps up. It works about  73% of the time. We have 60 people have gotten ill, a little over 60, and we can see those red alert will go out before at the time of symptoms in 73% of cases. And we even now caught two asymptomatic cases where their heart rate went up. They had no symptoms but they happened to get tested and they were positive. So we can show that this thing really does work.  And so now we're trying as the say we are building an infrastructure to roll this out for millions and millions of people.Harry Glorikian: That's good because I was just thinking it would be great if these things would proactively ping you and tell you there's a problem rather than you have to look at them all the time and see where you are compared to baseline.Michael Snyder: Yeah. The one minus is you have to open your app and sync it, and we're trying to do exactly what you just said, set it up so you don't even have to open the app. You probably have to leave it open, but we want to be able to ping you. We have to get IRB approval. That's our review board approval, but we want to do exactly what you just said. So right now you just have to check it out every day. You open your app and you'll see, oh, do I have an alert or not, when you wake up. Do it first thing in the morning. And if you have an alert. We're not allowed to give a medical recommendation but we could say, look, you have a jump up a resting heart rate and I'll let you figure out how to interpret it. But ultimately the plan would be to say, you know, Gosh, maybe you don't want to go to that party tonight or go to work and maybe you want to go get tested for that. Something could be up. That's ultimately where we want to get to with this alerting system. So, and I don't think it will be too far away where we're showing it, where it's going to pull in more kinds of data. So we can get that 73% up to 95%. That's our goal. Harry Glorikian: Yeah, it's interesting. Cause I was talking to just the other night to a friend of mine who's a primary care physician and she was saying, “Well, you know, these things are not very accurate and you know, people are going to come in for problems.” I'm like, okay, hold on. They're, they're actually pretty accurate. They take a lot of data over a long period of time. So, you know, those blips, I can sort of, you know, wipe them out if it's a truly a blip and I can see a lot of information. And it's more accurate than me coming in that one time you'll see me. But the other thing I said to her was, you know, you realize like this is just going to get better. Like the more and more data we have, the better and better these things get. And at some point it is going to be like the standard of how things are done. And it's, I think it's difficult for people to understand that more data, better algorithms. You know, better equipment, all of them coming together. You just end up at a place where you're going to, this is going to be the standard.Michael Snyder: A hundred percent agree. A good case is, imagine if we told people you can't own a thermometer. They're medical devices, nobody should have a thermometer. That means that, you know, nobody would be taking their kid's temperature. By the way, a thermometer is a terrible way to tell if you're getting ill. It's an okay way, I should say. Your resting heart rate is way better. When you show that, that it's kind of funny. A thermometer is a 300-year-old technology, very ingrained in our medical system, and it has some value. Don't get me wrong. But it's not as good as any of these other technologies. We can pull off a smartwatch like resting heart rate and other signals and soon respiration rate, all that stuff you can pull off and you'll have a much better signal for when you're getting ill than a simple, stick a thermometer in your mouth.And it's going to go way beyond infectious disease. One thing we can show, we can get a signal for something called a hematocrit and hemoglobin from a smartwatch, and we can, and that actually can be an early sign that following those levels can give you a clue as to whether you're getting anemia.We have another signal coming from a smartwatch about diabetes, something called insulin resistance with diabetes. So we can get, they're not clinically diagnostic tests. So that, and they're just, they're kind of hints if you know what I mean, but very valuable hints. We think, oh, you see this and you see this change, maybe you should go to a physician and follow up on this. And there's some measurements from a wearable that there isn't even a clinical correlate for. There's something called galvanic stress response, which is conductance on your skin that you know, there is no medical, typical medical correlate for that yet that's a valuable measure. If you're stressed, you will sweat more. If your diabetic you'll have drier skin, it'll give you a signal towards diabetes.So these measurements we think are going to be very, very powerful. No one measurement, it comes back to what you were saying earlier. Multiple measurements together will help give you a better idea of what's going on and clues that something may be up that alert you while you're still in this, you know, fairly healthy state, we hope and can then take the right course, the right intervention course Harry Glorikian: You almost wish there was a spider graph that had your normal, and then show deviation from normal on these multivariates. So you could evaluate it over time. I mean, I find myself having to go, I have to go to that one and I have to go to that one. Then I have to go to that one and it would be a whole lot easier if it was in one format or one graph that could show me where things are. Let  me ask you a question…   Michael Snyder: By the way I think those integrated systems will happen. Yeah. And your car dashboard is a good example, right? There's aren't usually single or single sensors that are triggering. Sometimes they're integrating multiple sensors to set up a signal and that'll be true for your health. And just the way the data is organized again, in our antiquated healthcare system, it comes back because to these individual measurements, whereas instead, you want this as well here, here's your cardiovascular panel, you know, with the five measurements all together and these other panels around systems to tie and even some broader panels besides that, so that you can see things in this more holistic fashion. And another analogy might be, you know, when a pathologist reads images, they write up a report which they give to your physician. Hour physician can't read a pathology image slide to see if you have cancer not, but they can read the report that pathologists get. And so I think that's how we need to integrate these data. To put it in a usable fashion. To be honest, it's not just for the physician, but for the consumer, because they're the ones who can act on it most quickly. They're the ones who are going to have the most time to think about the information. Again, another flaw, and it's, it's no negativity to the physician, but they only have 15 minutes to spend with you. At least in the U S you know, you get a half hour appointment, the physician's only there 15 minutes, they glance at your chart. They do a few things. They make a quick assessment and they're off to the next patient. Then they have to write it up manually. Ironically.  And then  you know, you have a lot more time to spend thinking about what's going on. So if you have this information accessible to you, something doesn't look right. I think it's a better chance for you to take control. It's like me and my Lyme disease, you know, if I wasn't watching what was going on, I don't know what would have happened. It was very valuable for me to have that information. Harry Glorikian: No, no. I mean, I, you know, it's funny because I was, you know, we're using these machines all the time and  you know I try to be as deep in the space as I can be. But if there was an algorithm or a series of algorithms, looking at different data streams that are coming off of me and can sort of be like  my friend, right? Whether it's weight or heartbeat or blood ox or something else that could sort of highlight it for me and then put it into a format that is easy for me to digest. Either graphically or, or a few words. I mean, it would be a lot easier for me to manage myself. Michael Snyder: Yeah, it's coming. I think it will hit, but you're right. I mean, again, medicine's conservative. If you do belong to, you know, Fitbit, or there are certain programs. Or Apple. They'll ping you, you know, here was your weight this week, you get these, but we're just at the trivial stage of what can come. Obviously I think what you're saying, where you would integrate different data types and then see these, and again, in this paper we'll have coming  out soon weshow that you can actually follow people's trajectories and set up AI systems, artificial intelligence systems, follow people's trajectories to look for these deviations. It's still very, very at the early phases. I think they're going to be super powerful for managing chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity. There's something called chronic fatigue syndrome that a lot of folks have, and they have crash days and good days. And to be able to tell all these things are associated with your crash days, watch out for those trying to avoid those. These are your good days, do more of those. It's very, very true in the glucose monitoring space, diabetes. People don't realize it's the next endemic, if you don't realize that. 9% of the us population is diabetic 33% are pre-diabetic. And 70% of those are going to become diabetic. By 2050, they estimate half the population can be diabetic if we keep going the way we're going. So  we need new intervention plans while people are healthy. Don't wait until they're already diabetic and have problems.And this is where the continuous glucose monitoring technology I think is going to be really powerful. Figure out what spikes you. It's very personalized. What spikes you is very different from what spikes me. Right. And be able to see that. I don't know if you've ever worn one, but they're just very, very powerful. And so it's, again, one reason why we formed a company called January AI to help help with that. Harry Glorikian: Well, it's funny because my wife was asking me, she goes, you know, I'm wanting, I'm thinking I want to wear one of these so that I can see what I eat, sort of how it affects me, but it's all by physician prescription. Go and convince your physician, you know, Hey, by the way, I need a script for this. Michael Snyder: Yeah. So  two comments there. One is in Europe there is no prescription, you can get over the counter. So there's less regulation. So they're ahead of us on that. I think it'll happen in the U.S. Right now you do need a physician, but there are studies, there are groups rolling out. So again, I mention ours, but there are others as well. But with January AI, their case. They'd take it even further and you get this continuous glucose monitor for, for 28 days and do the program longer. But you can, it not only shows you what spikes you, but they also train you a little bit, meaning you eat, you know, your favorite food or it could be rice, what have you. Rice, by the way spikes almost everybody. And then the next day you did the same thing. You do it for breakfast, you do the same thing and take a 15 minute walk and it shows how it suppresses your spike. So it's a, it's a behavior intervention program as well. So it teaches you. And we think that's kind of powerful as well. You not only want to get the data in and have people learn from it. And this thing does food recommendations as well.  You want to be able to teach people how to live better, healthier lives as well, doing an intervention, as they say, Harry Glorikian: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, some seeing it so that the data convinces me and then understanding what I need to do to fix it is also very useful. Right. So. Do you think we're ever going to get to? You know, I know that we have data-driven healthcare. Everybody always likes to say we are data-driven, but I mean, truly, like I don't make decisions on businesses without really understanding their profit and loss where their costs are, what their spent. I mean, very detailed analysis. Do you think that we're going to get to this point of [going] beyond hunch-driven medical decision-making? What was that show, oh my God, where the doctor would sort of put all these pieces together and then come out, with a famous actor, I forgot the name of it, but—House yes, yes. House. That was it. I mean, do you think are going to get to more data-driven. I feel like we should be there already in some way. Michael Snyder: Yeah. So, you know, I'm very Pollyannaish. I believe the answer is going to be yes.  I'm like you, I feel like we should be a lot further along and I just think that's the conservative nature of medicine. People think, you know, do no harm. And so they do nothing. And I would argue that doing nothing is harmful.  So I do think we need to get these, the, you know, this data integrated better. I think the best way is to roll out studies like the ones we're doing and others that can show it has power has impact. And that's how you convince people.I'd love to come up with a way to accelerate it. I think programs like this are a really great way to do it. A lot of this stuff is going to be consumer driven. I mean, people are now wearing smartwatches not just for fitness tracking, but for health devices, which is itself now the new concept.So it's coming. And luckily they're fairly inexpensive. I think that's the way it'll happen at, you know, when a lot of new technologies roll out, they are pretty expensive and then only the wealthy can have access to it. But the hope is that as the wealthy uses these and shows it has utility, then the price drops and they get out to everyone. Certainly that's how genome sequencing started. And I think it will be true for a lot of these other technologies. Luckily, smartwatches are pretty cheap to begin with. So even a hundred-dollar smartwatch is a pretty powerful health device, I would argue. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I mean, you know, if, if Illumina achieves its $60, right, for the function—I've been looking at an analytics approach that will bring down whole genome sequencing to $60. So if it's $60 to do the actual work, the wet chemistry, and then $60 to do the analysis, I don't think there's many barriers in the way anymore. Michael Snyder: Yeah,totally, and we're not so far away where people will they'll get their genome sequenced, but now there are technologies to look for early cancer by sequencing DNA in blood, and you knowHarry Glorikian: Liquid biopsy.Michael Snyder: So GRAIL and Gaurdant are leaders there. My company, Personalis is, I think, doing all right. So anyway, that's a, those are areas that we think are going to be powerful and soon they'll become routine tasks, once you show utility. But no company pays for it right now until you show that gee, you do this on healthy people and it doesn't cost the company $5 billion to find three cases, which I won't  yeah, that then it'll roll out.So right now, and the way this works too, for the liquid biopsies, it's looking for, they use it for cancer recurrence, if you've had cancer, you try and see if it'll appear again. And that's very logical. They'll demonstrate utility there. They already are. And then soon it'll be early detection and that'll go to the high-risk families. And it always comes down to who pays and insurers won't pay unless you're at high risk generally. And then soon if it's cheap enough, comes back to your point, if it's cheap enough. It'll be there for everybody. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I have this vision that you're going to go into your CVS or your Walgreens and you, you know, once a year or whatever, and we're going to see things so early that, I'm hoping one day in my lifetime that people will be like “Cancer. What, what, what, what happened?” Like you were able to get so far ahead of it, that it stops becoming an issue. Michael Snyder: “What do you mean you detected cancer only when you saw this giant lump what's that all about?” Harry Glorikian: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Michael Snyder: Yeah. I'm a hundred percent with you. Yeah. Harry Glorikian: So let's say we start, I mean, implementing this at a much larger scale, and broader than what we have now, because I think you and I are probably way ahead of a lot of others on these things. But do you see that effecting a longer life, or do you see it—like, I'm trying to weigh healthspan and lifespan, right?Michael Snyder: Well, it's all about healthspan, yeah. It's all about healthspan. You want to extend the healthy life.  You don't want people hanging on in miserable fashion for years. I think anyway, that's, that's my own view and I think it'll definitely extend healthspan because you'll catch things while people are healthy, not once they're ill, and then you take corrective action and keep them healthy. I think it'll totally extend the healthspan. And the goal is to do that. You know, you want have people that have held a healthy life and then just die. That's how it should go. Harry Glorikian: That's yes. My, my grandmother used to say that when I was younger and I thought it was morbid. And then now as I've gotten older, I'm like, Nope, Nope. That's, that's a good way to go. Like if you're just going to go go, Michael Snyder: Yeah, I think so too. We all know cases where people say, well, at least they died quickly. And we all know cases where somebody is hung on for three years and a lot of pain and very miserable fashion. And I don't, again, at least my own personal view is that that's just certainly not what I want. And those probably should be personal decisions, but minimally, regardless, everything we've been talking about should extend the healthspan, catch things while people are healthy, see these trajectories heading in a bad direction and then take corrective action. And that will have the desired impact. Harry Glorikian: So, one, one final question, before we go. Who do you think  is going to drive that? Is it going to be the healthcare life sciences world, or is it going to be the technology world? That's quickly encroaching. Cause it's, it's not Pfizer that's making this device on my wrist, right? It's, you know, all the other companies you can name. Michael Snyder: Yeah, no, I think it's kind of, ideally it would involve everybody partnering together, but you're right. Technology is having a big impact because consumers are eager for this information, as they often are. And especially as the word gets out and people like you and me start, you know, espousing the wonders and the power of those, these technologies.So I think there's that part. I do think we've got to get all the shareholders aligned, meaning I think employers as well should be big incentivizers of this. Meaning it pays for them to have their employees healthy. And that could be a plan I offer. If you're a big employer, maybe you have your folks enroll in one of these, you know, preventative plans, a hundred bucks a month, keep them healthy. You save a lot of money. I do think it helps to incentivize the users as well. I think people are often lazy. But they're, they're all concerned about their pocketbook and their loved ones.So I think the two ways to incentivize people are give them, you know, discounts on their insurance if they walk their 10,000 steps and you got to come up with ways for them not to cheat  or, or do various things. But  I, I do think that will help. Or you relay their family members who like egg them on a bit. It's because sometimes that's very incentivizing. So I think we need, we need to have good incentive ways to do that.I think financial incentives are one of the better ones. And again, that can relay back to the employer. The employer can offer these plans and then give people bonuses if they do, they're supposed to, you know, if you, if you are overweight and lose weight you know, maybe that would, well, you don't want to be able to get overweight and then lose weight, but you want to incentivize people to lose weight.Anyway, you come up with the right models for incentivizing folks. So, so we need to get the financial models in place. We need to show the stuff works and the technology is going to keep improving, getting cheaper, et cetera. So it's all going to go together, I think, in parallel. And then people like you and me will be out there saying, man, this is amazing. Everybody should be doing this sort of stuff. Harry Glorikian: I say it now. It's just tough to get everybody on board. Michael Snyder: Yeah. People are still scared. Yeah. But that'll go away. Harry Glorikian: I hope so. I hope that physicians get less scared. That's my biggest hope. Michael Snyder: Yeah. We've got to educate them. And those folks, you have to show that it works, that it has power. But they do have these refresher classes, they call them continuing medical education, and a lot of physicians do that. And I think it's a great way. I give a lot of talks at those, as a way to try to, I think, at least show the potential of what we're trying to do. And I think some of them buy it and some of them don't. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. And, and, you know, I think it needs to be integrated into their technological solutions to make it easier for them to sort of absorb it. And the current systems suck. Michael Snyder: That's true. Very true. Yeah. Yeah. They say, well, how do I have time to learn this and know if it's working, I'm too busy taking care of my patients. Yeah. Your point's well taken. Harry Glorikian: So great to speak to you. I look forward to continuing to read all the stuff that you produce and all these amazing, you know, technologies that you're constantly prolifically seem to be putting out there. And I'll let you know when the, when the, when my book is out, Michael Snyder: I definitely want to see it. Thank you. Harry Glorikian: Take care. Bye-bye.

Easter 4 Jubilate April 25, 2021 A+D St. John 16: 16-22 In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Christianity is sometimes portrayed as Pollyannaish. This is the case with the Simpsons’ … Continue reading →

Podcast 030 | In the Studio with Ardith Goodwin1:38     “It's a full time job that is totally a creative-entrepreneur business and I absolutely love it because it is multi-faceted.” 2:30     “In year 9 in my teaching career I was at the top of my profession and my body just kinda gave out.  I had to go on full disability, I had to retire from teaching, and I didn't know what I was going to do.  So for my sanity, I went to the library to check out a lot of books on water color…” 3:12     “It really was one of those things where you're on a path in your life in one direction, and I believe God opened a door and I walked through it…” 4:54    “I totally grasped the idea and understanding that the creative part of the business was the foundation of the entire business…” 8:12     “I'm one of those teachers that can teach you the steps and the process, meaning how to paint a certain way.  But I'd rather teach you how to use our creative mindsets and our creative spirt to move through the world whatever we are facing with creative lenses to help us and equip us to be able to do that a little bit more effectively and in a positive way.” 11:22   “I've always been the type of human that was very Pollyannaish, I was super optimistic and that was one of my super powers.  And then this year kinda waylaid me…but I knew I would need to paint my way through this.” 15:11   “In my classes, we really embrace a sense of community…choosing to uplift one another.” 19:57   “Artists have to adapt, we have to change and troubleshoot things because life is not always gonna move at the speed or pace we think it should.” 21:42   “I didn't have a class or a mentor to teach me how to find a style, so I started studying artists online that had a distinct style to find what gave them their style.” 25:01   “So now, regardless of subject matter, no matter what I paint, I can tap in with my technical framework married to my personal framework and that gives me the ability to understand how to construct a painting distinctly.” 26:08   “As creative and wild as my brain works, I've got to have a list and a plan for the day, so that the business side of me can do well, otherwise I'm all over the place.” 29:36  “Creatively, once you really find a set of creative thinking strategies that really work well for you, and they change how you move through the world, they give you and equip you with the ability to process the five senses in a way that if one isn't working well right now, you can tap into one of the other senses.” 33:14  “An average day would be about 60% creativity and 40% business, and that flips depending on the needs I am facing.” 35:24  “I really am passionate about helping other artists tap into their own creative DNA, so that they can learn how to move through their own world creatively and do it well…” 36:41  “We absolutely need in this world small creative circles of like minds that we can collaborate with…” My paintings and writings are my way of taking that courageous spirit, mixing it in with an insane love of color, experience, and story, and creating works of art that inspire others to see the world as intrinsically beautiful no matter their place or station in life. My hope is that through my marks and my practice, my work will resonate with the viewer so that they sense a connection with the way of life in the south, its geographical influence, and the myriad of colors and marks that make being a southern artist magical.https://www.ardithgoodwin.com/ Jeanne OliverCreatively Made BusinessGet on the waitlist for the next online session! Ten Tips To Take Back The PeaceA free ebook if you are looking for some rest in your day-to-day like I was.Get your free resource Ten Tips HERE. Become the artist you dream to be. Creativity is Calling at jeanneoliver.com. You can connect with Jeanne on Instagram and Facebook. 

 Audio recordingSermon manuscript:Our epistle reading is the second half of Romans chapter 13. Although our reading begins with verse 8, I’d like to also speak about what comes before it. The context for our reading is important. Chapter 13 starts out this way: “Everyone must submit to the governing authorities. For no authority exists except by God, and the authorities that do exist have been established by God. Therefore the one who rebels against the authority is opposing God’s institution, and those who oppose will bring judgment on themselves.” During quiet and peaceable times, this passage is rather vanilla. It’s included in our Catechism’s table of duties for what is required of us towards our rulers. It’s an application of the fourth commandment to honor our father and mother and other authorities. Normally, these are not difficult doctrines. However, never during my lifetime has there been talk like there has been lately. Before this year I had never heard anyone talk seriously about civil war being possible. This year I’ve heard people seriously discuss this on various forums. Now, to be clear, I do not think that this will actually happen. But I think it is telling that such talk is not immediately dismissed by absolutely everyone as being crack-headed. Even though it is still a very remote possibility, the reason why the idea has been entertained by people is that we are only becoming more and more divided. The legitimacy of our rulers is called into question by various groups. The legitimacy of the latest supreme court justice has been questioned. The legitimacy of the president elect has been questioned. Both of these examples have been from opposing sides. Some democrats have questioned one. Some republicans have questioned the other. Questions of legitimacy are, indeed, one of the ways that civil wars can start, even though I think our country is not in great danger of that right now. Regardless, it might be high time for us to blow the dust off Romans 13 and learn from it how we should think about government and our relationship to it. So, as we’ve already noted, Paul says that everyone must submit to the governing authorities, because no authority exists except by God, and the authorities that exist have been established by God. In a way, what Paul says is remarkable for what he doesn’t say almost more than what he does say. For example, he doesn’t say that we should only submit to those governing authorities who are good. He also doesn’t say that we should only submit to those governing authorities who are godly. Perhaps most surprising of all is that he doesn’t say we should only submit to those governing authorities who are legitimate and who came into power in the correct, orderly way. He simply says, “Submit to the governing authorities, for those who govern do so by God’s institution.” Normally an argument from silence is not very powerful, but here I think it is significant. The Roman emperors during Paul’s lifetime were not good or godly or what we would think of as legitimate. Several of them are famous for debauchery and perversion. They all thought that they were divine and were deserving of people’s worship. At least a couple of them came to power by murdering their predecessor. Several Christians had already been put to death by governing authorities by the time Paul wrote this letter. Eventually Paul himself would be executed by the government too. So Paul couldn’t have had a Pollyannaish view of the governing authorities, where he naively said that we should submit to them because he was unaware of the political intrigue that could be involved. No, with eyes wide open he says we should submit to the governing authorities. Now understand that what Paul says is dissatisfactory to everyone with the possible exception of Christians. You are never going to find a civics textbook or a political science book that says what Paul says. Paul, at the same time, is demanding too much, and has his sights set too low. He demands too much because he simply says, “Obey.” Obeying governing authorities is obeying God who put them in their position. Ask any child, and you will find out how difficult it is to simply obey. On the other hand, Paul is aiming too low. It seems that in order for us to make any progress toward a more perfect government we have to have insubordination. Otherwise we will be forever stuck with what we have. That actually isn’t true. God, the author of history, is the one who gives us good government. But it always seems that it’s up to us in order to bring it about. Therefore Paul’s command for obedience seems like a bad idea. But the Bible was not written for the purpose of ushering in a more prefect government, a kingdom of this world, a city set on a hill. It has a different purpose—to bring about God’s kingdom on earth. The Kingdom of God, though, is not of this world. It does not come about by governing authorities exerting their influence to coerce people into doing good. It isn’t brought about by the use of guns or even laws. It comes about by the preaching of the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins for Jesus’s sake. When and where it pleases the Holy Spirit he creates faith in those who hear this Gospel. When they believe in Christ they are justified without any works or merits of their own. They become children of God, heirs of eternal life. This means that they are set free from the futile task of making their own little paradises on earth. They do not need to organize grand projects and coerce everybody else to do their will. They are set free to love, to serve, to do good, wherever and whenever the opportunity should arise. So what Paul says here is not by accident or because of some kind of ignorance. Christians are meant to leave the government be. Submit to it unless the government should ask you to do something against God’s will. Then you must obey God rather than men. Perhaps that will mean that you will face harsh punishment from them, like the apostles and martyrs did. But Peter says that it is a blessed thing to suffer for doing what is good. That, after all, is following Jesus, our master, who also suffered for doing good. But, generally speaking, the government is not going to bother you so long as you are dutiful, honest, and generous. The governing authorities are God’s instruments for our good. It doesn’t matter if they are personally good or evil. God uses them to maintain law and order so that we Christians can lead quiet and peaceable lives, where we keep busy by loving God and loving our neighbor. Because the governing authorities are doing God’s work for our good, it is also required that we pay them for that work. This is what Paul says just before our reading this morning. Paul says, “Pay what you owe to all of them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect, to whom respect is owed, and honor to whom honor is owed.” That’s the verse immediately prior to our reading today. “Pay what you owe,” Paul says. But then our reading starts this way, “Do not owe anyone anything except to love one another.” Did you catch that play on words? There are a couple of levels to it. In verse 7 Paul said, “Pay what you owe. Pay taxes. Pay honor.” In verse 8 he says, “Do not owe anyone anything.” This seems like it is a contradiction, but he is making an important point that I will explain in a second. On another level he is being a little playful and ironic, because he follows up “Do not owe anyone anything” with “except to love one another.” And, as you know, love is a very busy thing. It is always paying, always doing good. So what is Paul getting at when he says, “Do not owe anyone anything” immediately after saying that we should pay what is owed to our governing authorities? What Paul means by that is that we Christians, no matter how lowly we might be, are free. We are children of God. We belong to him. That means that we do not belong to the governing authorities. But here is something mysterious about governing authorities: they never seem to be satisfied with doing the job that God has given to them of maintaining order and justice. They also want to colonize people’s souls. They want to shape and form people into their own image. They want fanatical followers because this enhances their power. They want people to be devoted to their country with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their mind. This was why the Roman emperors wanted people to see them as gods and to worship them as gods. A similar thing goes on today where people give themselves over to one political party or another. Their very identity is wrapped up in how they might vote. This is unbecoming of a Christian. As Paul says elsewhere, “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men.” You were bought with the blood of the Son of God. You belong to him. You must not sell yourself to any party or platform. You must not be fanatical devotees. Only one is your master, namely, Christ. Leave government where it belongs, which is beneath you. Contrary to what most people think, you have more important work to do. This is what Paul goes on to talk about in our reading. The work that you’ve been given to do is to love one another. Love your neighbor. Love the one who is right next to you. Love the person at work who drives you crazy. Love your fellow member of the congregation. Be honest, do your duty, be generous with your resources. The really important things in life are contained in the callings that God has specifically given to you. Far from being at the pinnacle of human life, the government is God’s instrument for the sake of these so-called little things in life—so that they may continue to be done in peace and quietness. You do not exist for the sake of the government. The government exists for the sake of your home-life. The government isn’t as important, as divine, as people make it out to be. Recognize that one of the commonest idols since the fall into sin has been the state. If you think about it, it is not surprising. When people get together they can pool their resources. Together they are able to do things that they can’t do individually. They can build up great systems. This gives them power. They have the power to bless and the power to curse. They can pick the winners and losers. They have something of the power even over life and death, for they can establish armies. They can execute. Wherever there appears to be some kind of power, you can count on us sinful human beings to sinfully worship it. But this is all an illusion, a lie. The history books are full of people who thought that they were humanity’s saviors, but now hardly anybody remembers their names. There is one God, the Lord. There is one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ. He gave himself as a ransom for all when he was executed by the governing authorities. They did this because they despised him. They thought that he was a kook or a nobody. And so it goes to this very day. The high and mighty are busy building a tower that reaches into the heavens. They are busy bringing in a new day that promises justice and a paradise. There is only one way to bring about paradise, and that is through the reconciliation Jesus has worked between the real God (instead of any fake gods) and us. What is truly great is the love that God has for us in Jesus—a love that goes unrecognized because it is so lowly. To Christians he is great. To those who believe in other gods he is small and ineffectual. They imagine that their gods are better. But we will see about that. You understand the present time. It is already the hour for you to wake up from sleep, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is almost over, and the day is drawing near. Jesus is coming.

The Leader Must Be The Flagbearer Of Hope   Daily reports of doom and gloom descend on all of us through the media.  Unemployment, enterprise obliteration, crashing growth rates, plague and pestilence run rampant.  The short term looks bad, but the long term looks worse.  Unlock in haste and repent at leisure or stay locked in and gamble with elimination. I was participating in a German Chamber webinar where the speaker flagged his company's current research which said 39% of Japanese worried they would lose their job and the same number feared their firm would collapse.  Every continent has trouble and every continent is enmeshed in global supply chain configurations, that line up the national economic dominos for big scale, long lasting recessions.  Optimists like me are running on fumes right now.   As a leader, I have to be a fully paid up, active member of Optimists International.  I have to give my team hope of a way through and a future – together.  US firms are fast to furlough and fire, compared to Japanese organisations.  The American Dream of shareholder value says cut costs, cut people and keep the profitability up.  In America, loyalty seems transactional.  Japan reveres longevity.  Television news programmes showing long established small restaurant owners bidding their loyal customers a final farewell, before they disappear for good, are scenes which tug on Japanese heartstrings.   Ninety-nine percent of firms in Japan are Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs).  Some of these medium companies are quite big by western standards, but the vast majority do not employ legions of workers and up until February, they had trouble hiring staff.  The social contract between boss and worker in Japan's SMEs is “I will do everything possible to protect your employ”.  Japan in my experience expects that people will be placed before profits.  In SMEs there is a paternalistic assumption, that the boss thinks of the workers as family.    Big companies often flourish flowery rhetoric such as “our assets go down the elevator every night”, except of course, when they are firing them, to retain shareholder value.  For SMEs, their people are the key assets in the business and they are hard to replace.  As the boss, I have to keep my team employed, no matter what, and I have to keep them after the virus war is over or a coexistence armistice has been arrived at.  This retain aspect is not a given.  In the current situation, people are obviously clinging to their jobs, because their choices are few and ugly.   After the devastation has been halted, what then?  Will the staff decide to stay with the firm and together rebuild out of the bad times?  Or will they conclude that, with their skills, they should move to a bigger firm which is better resourced and more stable and reliable in tough times?  Bosses being transparent has risks.  Telling the team the real situation builds a strong sense of teamwork and commitment to survival.  It might also be secretly building exit strategies by the best and most talented people, who conclude they prefer predictability over flexibility.   This is where the boss has to become a fluent communicator of hope for the future.  We tend to get focused on the day to day, “we have to keep going”, aspects of the leader's role and we take our eye off the future.  We are stressed. We are working harder than before, under considerably more pressure and with a lot less control.  Even before it looks like there is a future, we need to be talking about it.  That doesn't mean Pollyannaish piffle based on a wish and a prayer.  There has to be objective truth in there somewhere or we just stoke the fires of scepticism and doubt.   Yes, we have to watch the day to day reality of getting money in the door, but at the first glimpse of tunnel light, we need to ramp up the “hope for the future” anthem.  We need to marshal everyone's thinking to getting on the front foot.  We need to talk about we the survivors, will survey a reduced competitive plain in front of us.  We have to focus our attention on capturing our clients at that critical moment, when they mentally switch from the “do nothing” ideology to “it is time to take some action”.   We have to expound on how we have become stronger, better positioned for this coming year.  Mention must be made of the growth in the team's capabilities, the new skills which have been added since February.  Our every opportunity must be given over to presenting a future together, where we will not only get back to where we were, but we will now go even further, because of this experience.  Focus on the here and now, has to become focus on hopes for the future. 

3/12/20: PANIC – AMERICAN BARN DOOR STRATEGY With regard to the COVID-19 panic, we need to blame the media and the extremists who had their main focus on impeachment while not sufficiently informing the public when they knew about the potential pandemic. Also to blame are the ignorant amateurs that claim people who are making provisions are chicken littles and discouraging preparedness in the face of supply chain failures. Those who have the Pollyannaish optimism will have it all come back to haunt them tomorrow if the coronavirus turns out to be as bad as many experts predict. On tonight's show, Clyde Lewis talks about PANIC - AMERICAN BARN DOOR STRATEGY. #ExclusiveArticle for #GroundZero #PanicAmericanBarnDoorStrategy

Are you Pollyannaish and simply ignore what you don’t like? Do you feel like if you don’t focus on something it won’t ever come to pass? Are you prepared to face life head on? Learn how to keep it real. Certified life coach, author & award-winning professional life organizer Julie Coraccio shares steps and tips to support you in creating the life you choose, deserve and desire through decluttering your life, mindfulness and how to organize your life. About Clear Your Clutter Inside & Out Clutter is stuck stagnant energy and prevents you from creating the life you choose, desire and deserve. We discuss clutter in all its forms: energetic, spiritual, emotional, mental & physical, relationships, health, finances and more. We share tips and take action steps for clutter free living and how to organize your life. We're thinking outside the box on areas where people might not realize where clutter is blocking them. When we remove clutter from our lives we can discover our passions, lead the extraordinary lives we are all meant to live and share our gifts with the world.

Is depression affecting you or someone you love? What do we know about the best ways to overcome depression? And how can we mitigate the ways that it impacts our relationships? This week, our guest is Michael D. Yapko, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and author of 15 books including Depression Is Contagious: How the Most Common Mood Disorder Is Spreading Around the World and How to Stop It. He is internationally recognized for his work in developing strategic, outcome-focused psychotherapies, the advanced clinical applications of hypnosis, and active, short-term non-pharmacological treatments of depression. Dr. Yapko has been a passionate advocate for redefining how we think about and treat peoples’ problems, especially the most common ones of anxiety and depression. Michael shares how he approaches treating depression and provides some steps that you can take if you’re dealing with depression yourself. As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! Resources: Visit Michael Yapko’s website to learn more about his work. Pick up your copy of Michael Yapko’s book, Depression Is Contagious: How the Most Common Mood Disorder Is Spreading Around the World and How to Stop It FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide - perfect help for handling conflict and shifting the codependent patterns in your relationship Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Your Relationship (ALSO FREE) Visit www.neilsattin.com/depression to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Michael Yapko. Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. It's come up again and again in conversations that are happening in our Facebook group and elsewhere, what do you do if you or your relationship is impacted by depression? In other words, if you're feeling depressed, what can you do to help and get better, and maybe how can you mitigate the effects that your depression is having on your relationship with your spouse or significant other, with your kids, with the other people in your life? Because depression is relational, it affects us, but it also affects how we interact in the world. And then there's also the question of what if your partner is suffering from depression, what can you do then and how can you stand the best chance of helping your partner recover from depression? Neil Sattin: So, these are important questions because depression is affecting more and more people. And I just want to say too, I have a personal story that I'll talk about in a little bit about my own experience with depression in my life, in my family. So, this is personal and I'm prepared for a powerful conversation with today's guest. His name is Dr. Michael Yapko and he is one of the world's foremost experts on depression and its treatment, both for lay people and for therapists who are learning how to help their clients more effectively deal with depression. Among many books... I think he's written more than 10, are the books Depression Is Contagious, How The Most Common Mood Disorder Is Spreading Around The World And How To Stop It. And also, the popular book, Breaking The Patterns Of Depression, which as he just told me, is entering its 19th printing. So very popular work and very helpful in terms of ending or mitigating the effects of depression on your life. We will, as usual, have a transcript of this episode, you can grab it if you visit neilsattin.com/depression or you can text the word Passion to the number 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript for this episode. I think that's all I have to cover for now. So Michael Yapko, thank you so much for being with us here today on Relationship Alive. Michael Yapko: My pleasure. Thank you, Neil. Neil Sattin: So, let's start by creating some context because I think a lot of us feel like we know what depression is and yet there are a lot of common misconceptions about what actually constitutes depression and what the causes of depression are. So, could you start us out with a little bit of background on just answering that broad question, What is depression and what do we know about what causes it, and what doesn't cause it? Michael Yapko: Two very huge questions that I will try and break down in a reasonable way. What is depression? Depression is technically defined by the mental health profession as a mood disorder, but it is in fact much more than that. Depression's tentacles reach into every part of a person's life, from their ability to work, their ability to relate to other people, their ability to function and the depressions that people experience can range from mild to severe, they can range from short term to long term, they can be integrated into a person's life as an ongoing way of just existing. There are so many different facets to depression, that it's really difficult to just think of it in a simple, one-dimensional term. And that's one of the things to appreciate right off the bat is that each person's depression is different. How one person experiences, it can be very different than the way another person experiences it. And so that requires, of course, different considerations in the way that we deal with it, respond to it, manage it. And then as far as what causes depression, the best answer that I can give you is many things and if I were to list all of the things we would have dozens and dozens of risk factors that all contribute to and exacerbate depression. Michael Yapko: When I first started studying depression now almost half a century ago, there were really only two risk factors that were known, gender and family history. And now all these years later we know there are many, many risk factors, but we can group these risk factors into three primary domains. Some of the risk factors are biological, that would include things like neuro-chemistry, disease processes, side effects of medications and so forth. The social factors, the kinds of relationships that people have, the culture they grow up in, the family they grow up in and the kinds of interactions that predisposed people. And then there are the psychological factors, person's individual history, the kinds of traumas that they may have been exposed to, the kinds of stressors that they have faced, coping skills that they have or have not developed, problem-solving skills that they have or have not developed. So, we look at depression in a very multi-dimensional way, the bio-psycho-social model addressing those biological, psychological and social factors that operate in different degrees, in different individuals. Neil Sattin: It is a multi-faceted subject, and I appreciate that when you talk about it, that you're willing to pull all of these different facets in because often the treatment of depression is so one-dimensional and that's something that you talk about right at the beginning of Depression Is Contagious, which is this sense of how, in some ways, the medical model and how it's treated depression through the use of antidepressants has actually hindered people in a lot of ways from really truly being able to surpass the ways that depression is impacting them. Michael Yapko: Yes, I think that that is one of the great disservices of the mental health profession that I'm hoping we can gradually correct. I wish we could instantly correct it, but the first new generation antidepressants came out in the late 80s. I sometimes measure time as BP and AP, before Prozac and after Prozac because with the release of Prozac everything changed. The idea was promoted really as a marketing tool that antidepressants would correct presumed biochemical, neurochemical imbalances. It's a curious thing to me that you can stop almost anybody on the street and if you ask them the questions, "So, what do you think causes depression?" How quick they are to say a shortage of serotonin or some other neurochemical anomaly. And, of course, that has never been proven and, in fact, over the recent years, it has in fact been disproven. The serotonin hypothesis is really all but dead, but the simplistic nature, the one-dimensional nature as you described it, is exactly right. The idea that somehow if you just find the right pill, everything's going to be okay. And especially given what I said earlier about the fact that we know that there are dozens and dozens of factors that contribute to depression, to think of it as only a neurochemical anomaly is really underestimating the complexity of it, which guarantees, therefore, undertreatment. Michael Yapko: And so, it's not even that I'm against antidepressants as much as I'm extremely aware of how very limited they are in their capabilities. And when you look at all of the things that antidepressant medications cannot do, not just will not do, but cannot do. They cannot teach you better social skills and social problem-solving skills. They cannot build a support network for you. They cannot teach you coping skills or problem-solving skills. And the reality is that life is challenging. As the great American humorist, Mark Twain said, "Life is one damn thing after another," and he's right about that and there's plenty of evidence to show that the people who are better problem solvers do better than the people who don't really have much in the way of problem-solving skills. Michael Yapko: So, part of what I'm expecting our conversation to be about is what are some of those problem-solving skills, how do we look at life in a way that decreases the vulnerability. And the reality is no one is immune. If you're capable of moods, you're capable of mood issues. And so, it really is about learning to manage and learning to stay a step ahead of what your own risk factors are. And when I use the term risk factor, I'm talking about anything that increases your vulnerability to a particular disease or condition. And so, when we start getting into what are some of these risk factors, particularly in relationships and families and cultures, there's a lot to say about that. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I definitely want to talk about the risk factors and, most assuredly, want to cover the skills. There were a couple of things though that really surprised me and I think it would be helpful to hear from you about them. One was, you mentioned that in your book that a lot of the studies that seemed to show that the effectiveness of antidepressants were actually selectively published and leaving out the studies that were showing them to be ineffective and couple that with other forms of treatment that have shown to be either as, if not more effective, and especially when you factor in whether or not someone is likely to relapse then they're way more effective than antidepressants. Michael Yapko: Yeah, this is one of the great disappointments to me, that the pharmaceutical industry had very deliberately created this mythology about the shortage of serotonin as a vehicle for selling drugs and it worked. It sounded very scientific, it sounded very clear that depression is a disease, you take a drug to cure the disease and there you go. And even in the most prestigious medical journals, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is arguably the world's premier medical journal, devoted an entire issue, not that many years ago to how it had been fooled itself into publishing data that were selectively provided by drug companies, how they hired what are called ghostwriters, people that have great reputations that they paid a great deal of money to sign their name to studies that were, in fact, written by the drug companies. And in one of the editorials by the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who did a mea culpa expressing a lot of regret about having published erroneous data, misleading data, unwittingly, unintentionally, of course, and other journals followed suit. The Canadian Medical Association Journal, others as well, New England Journal of Medicine. Very prestigious journals that acknowledge this is a huge problem and have had to change the way that they gather data and use data in the studies that they publish. Michael Yapko: So, when it filters down to individual doctors who are prescribers and then certainly to the consumer, the person who's taking the medication, who relies on the physician to provide an accuracy in the science and in the prescriptions, and the physicians themselves are relying on the studies that appear in the medical journals, you can see how the dominoes fall in the direction of people being misled and then forming these belief systems that make it very difficult to change people's minds. So, even right now we have to deal with the fact that the great majority of people who are receiving treatment for depression are receiving antidepressants. And even though the professional associations advocate for at least what's called a combination approach of medication plus cycle of therapy, less than half of people are being given that option, they're just being given the medication as a sole form of treatment, and it certainly isn't doing the patient a favor since that particular sole form of treatment, medications alone, also has the highest rate of relapse of any form of treatment. Michael Yapko: So it's really an important thing for people to appreciate. There isn't a miracle drug, there isn't likely to be a miracle drug. I don't think I'm extreme in saying that when we know that so much of depression is about relationships, the social life of the person. We're probably not going to find a drug that cures depression any more than we're likely to find a drug that cures other social problems like racism or poverty. It's the wrong lens for looking at the problem. And, little by little, that viewpoint is becoming, what started out as an arguable point, is really becoming mainstream, especially as the sophistication of epigenetic research continues to advance. Michael Yapko: Epigenetics is the field of how environmental conditions influence gene expression and it's the field of epigenetics that is highlighting how much of social atmosphere influences individual mood. So it's a really exciting time, but it really challenges many of our pre-existing beliefs about what we think depression is. So, I'm just hoping that for anybody who's listening, they come to appreciate. You can't underestimate how many facets and how many challenges there are associated with depression, and you certainly shouldn't buy into an under-treatment model of just taking a drug and hoping it goes away. Neil Sattin: Right. What gives me so much hope, especially after having read your book, is that it really is a matter of changing the way that you interact with the world. For me, it raises the question, especially in light of this part of our conversation, what about when people suggest, "Well, we'll start you out with the antidepressants to boost your mood so that then you can take on learning the skills that are required for you to learn." Michael Yapko: Well, things depend on individual circumstances, of course. The kinds of factors that somebody would take into account are how long this person's been depressed, how deeply depressed they've been, what their own belief system is about the merits of these drugs. The reality is that when you prescribe medication to someone there's only a 50-50 chance that the first drug you prescribe is going to have any meaningful impact. And, unfortunately, you're going to have to wait a long time for it to develop any kind of therapeutic response. So, to have to wait for the drug to take effect before you can do something with someone, I think is one of those unfortunate beliefs that really isn't grounded in science. There isn't any reason why somebody has to wait. If they're going to take medication, okay, go ahead and take medication if that's your preference and if you think that it's going to make a difference, go ahead. Just believing that it will make a difference will, for some people, actually make a difference. Michael Yapko: This is one of the curious things about depression, it has a very high response rate to placebo-based interventions. And so, you can provide really many different types of interventions that people will respond favorably to, but for every day and for every week that you sit around waiting for the drug to work, you're really disempowering yourself, you're really saying it's the drug that's going to work not me. It's not going to be my abilities, the things that I learned, the things that I changed in my life, the ideas that I change about myself or the world or the nature of depression itself, to put yourself in that passive role is part of the problem. One of the things that I think everybody in this field would agree on, there's not many things that everybody would agree on, but I think this is one of those things that everybody would agree on, that depression is built on a foundation of passivity. If depression was a commercial product, its advertising slogan would be: Why bother? Why bother to try? Why bother to read the book that my therapist recommended? Why bother to do the exercises that my therapist gave me to do? Why bother to go see a therapist in the first place? Why bother? Michael Yapko: And so, the last thing that any therapist wants to do, whatever their orientation happens to be, whatever their personal, professional philosophy happens to be, how important it is for people who want to get past depression to be actively engaged in the process and the idea of telling somebody, "Wait for the drug to work and you don't have to learn anything new and you don't have to do anything new in the meanwhile," to me is just the proverbial fingernails on the chalkboard. I think it's just terrible advice, and I would never encourage anyone to give that kind of advice much less follow that kind of advice. Neil Sattin: I mentioned in the intro that this topic is one that's very personal to me, and I'm hoping I can just take a moment to fill you in on what that even means. And just so everyone knows, I've gotten permission from my mother to talk about her struggle. So when I was about 12 or 13 years old, I was actually away for a trip and while I was away, I got a phone call from my father telling me that my mother was in the hospital, and she was in the hospital because she was suicidal. And this was the first moment that I even had any inkling that depression was going to be something that impacted me directly. It was something out there, it was not something that I even knew was part of what was happening in my family. Neil Sattin: And that moment was the beginning of a struggle that lasted years, with my mother getting all kinds of treatments. And at the time that was the primary vehicle for treating people was, "We're going to find the right drug." And when the antidepressant drugs that they tried weren't working, they decided, "Well we have these other drugs that are for your heart," or for I can't even remember, "but they're for other things, but a side effect has been elevated mood. We're going to try those drugs on you." I don't know the exact number of drugs that they tried with my mother, none of which really had any appreciable effect. Neil Sattin: She also tried shock therapy, which again, changed her but didn't really seem to ultimately return her to being a person who was engaged in the world and not suicidal. And part of this story is that, for me, as the person who is immersed in this and observing it as well, one thing that was talked about was that my mother had experienced some pretty severe trauma when she was young and they talked about how this trauma and the ways that she had learned to cope with the trauma that had been the precursor to all of this, to the mood disorder, to her not knowing how to cope with things that were going on in her life. And to me at the time I thought, "Well if environmental things could be what set this ball rolling, then doesn't it make sense that environmental things could be the thing that actually helps get the ship back going in the right direction?" Neil Sattin: And I had an argument even with her psychiatrist at the time about it and wrote a letter, and really tried to advocate for something more than just, "We're going to find the right drug." Ultimately, my mother who is thankfully still alive, though there was a time when we really didn't think that would be the case, now it's 30 years later from that moment when I got that phone call. And she's doing pretty well. And what ultimately helped her, was being in a program that helped her learn skills for relating and coping with emotion and all the things that I think we're going to be talking about in today's conversation. So reading your book for me, felt like a huge indication for one thing of what I had experienced. And also, I think it's so important for everyone listening who might be feeling hopeless if a drug isn't curing the situation, that there really is more to it than just finding the right pill. And in fact, in my own experience that wasn't remotely what helped my mom survive. Michael Yapko: Yeah. Well, that is an amazing story, and I'm sorry you've had to endure it, all these years. And I'm especially sorry for your mom, but I'm really glad to hear that she's doing a lot better now. Neil Sattin: Yeah, thank you. Michael Yapko: Well the fact that she was run through the mill of trying all of these different drugs and even something as extreme as electroconvulsive therapy or shock therapy, this has been the model unfortunately for many years, when people went in for treatment, they were exposed to that kind of biological one-dimensional treatment. And again, it's not that the antidepressants are bad or should never be considered, it's approaching them realistically. It's understanding that the best that they can do is help with managing some of the vegetative symptoms. They can help with sleep, they can help with agitation, they can help with anxiety when they work for people. And so when you find a drug that works, and there are people that have told me many times over the years that, "This drug saved my life," and I believe them, but to point out as well that there's an upper limit as to what these medications can actually do and how important it is for people to grasp the notion, that even if they choose to go the route of taking an antidepressant medication that it shouldn't be considered enough by itself. Michael Yapko: The importance of getting psychotherapy with somebody who really understands depression well, who can help you identify your particular vulnerabilities, your particular risk factors, because the things that affect you don't affect other people, things that bother you that don't buy their other people, things that bother other people that don't bother you. And that's the point is, as you learn yourself, as you really discover who you are and co-create who you are, to have that deeper insight working for you of, "Here's the kind of person I am." It means that I can take this kind of job, and thrive, but I can't take that kind of job because I'll wither. I can be around these kinds of people and thrive, but I can't be around those kinds of people because all wither. And it's really up to you as an individual to learn your risk factors and learn how to manage yourself. And I think that's one of the other misconceptions that I would want to speak to, the notion of curing depression. I don't really know of any depression expert who would talk about curing it. You learn to manage it, in the same way, that you learn to manage other parts of your life. You don't discipline your child once and now you're done doing the parenting thing. Michael Yapko: You don't make a bank deposit once and now you're done with banking, you don't exercise once and now you're done with the exercise thing. These are things that you have to manage on an ongoing basis and mood falls in that same category of having to manage it constantly and being aware of what your vulnerabilities are and which situations to avoid or to minimize contact with. And which kinds of things to seek out that provide you with the kind of balance and the kind of good experiences that lift your mood and make you feel better about yourself. Neil Sattin: Yeah, one thing that I loved about your book, Depression Is Contagious, is the way that it laid out specific skills that you can develop. And even, I'm not someone... I don't feel like I struggle with depression but as I was reading through, I was like, "Oh yeah, that would be a great skill [chuckle] to actually work on in my life." And what I like is that by doing something that's as practical as developing a new habit or learning how to be discerning in terms of the type of people that you let into your life or how you set boundaries with people, and we're going to get more into this, that these are things that you practice that become part of the fabric of how you act, and because you're doing that, you're weaving your own web of support that helps you manage anything that could lead you down the road of being depressed. Michael Yapko: I think that's true, and I think the starting place is if you understand, truly understand that your views, your perspectives, your way of looking at life is arbitrary. Other people look at it differently. And that really for me was the starting point when I first started researching and studying depression decades ago. Yeah, I started with an interest in the people who faced traumas, the people who faced adversities, the people who probably should have been depressed, but they weren't and I wanted to know why not. What were the skill sets, what were the mindsets that people had who managed adversities and traumas well, without sinking into despair, without sinking into depression? And then it became the challenge, of, can I identify what those skills are, and then can I make them learnable for other people? So it's really not a surprise if you knew my history, of studying depression and my orientation towards it, why I would write books that emphasize the skills and help people identify these are valuable skills to have. And if you don't have these skills, you're much more vulnerable to the kinds of situations that arise where the absence of that skill puts you at greater risk. Michael Yapko: So just as a simple example, you brought up the question of how you decide who to let into your life. That is a very complicated skill set, and it speaks to the question of how do you assess people. How do you determine someone's nature? How do you determine someone's value system? How do you know whether it's going to be a good fit? And for many people, they're so insecure about themselves and they're wondering, "Am I okay? Am I okay? Am I okay?" it never occurs to them to ask the question, "Is this other person okay?" And they end up getting into relationships that are hurtful and damaging and even outright destructive and abusive at the extreme. And when I ask people like that who are in those kinds of relationships, how do you decide who you're going to bring into your life? They look at me quizzically and ask, "Decide?" as if they're not an active agent in the process. Michael Yapko: And that passivity shows up, that I referred to earlier, that passivity shows up in so many different ways. And this is one of the primary ways in the relationship domain, that a person doesn't realize that you have to shape relationships actively, that even the dating process if, if you asked me, "What is the purpose of dating?" I can say it with just a mild degree of being facetious. I think the purpose of dating is to find out, is this person trainable? And can you provide limits to this person and have somebody who actually respects those limits? That's what I mean, and vice versa. But the reality is that by the time somebody starts dating which these days is around age four, by the time people... That's kind of a joke. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: I was wondering, I was like, "Who studied that? That seems really... " Michael Yapko: I'm joking, but people start dating at a much younger age, but by the time you start dating you already have an idea about relationships, you already have an idea about love, you already have an idea about sexuality, you already have an idea about these things and if your ideas are naive or misinformed you bring that mindset to relationships and there's a very good chance then that you're going to build relationships that aren't particularly healthy and productive and you'll pay the price in terms of how it feels to be in that relationship and how it makes you feel about yourself. So that's one of the primary pathways into depression when relationships go bad and when relationships start off badly. Michael Yapko: And for a lot of people, they meet somebody and they fall in lust, and everything is really great for about three weeks, and then they start to discover who this person is or they start to discover things in themselves relative to this person, and then the things start going downhill pretty quickly, and then the whole thing is over in a matter of a couple of months. And when you have people who go through that same cycle repetitively, eventually a lot of people just give up. They think that love's not for them or their relationships just aren't in the cards for them, and without ever realizing that's an incorrect conclusion. But you might want to take a look at the strategy that you have for how you decide who to date, how you decide what to reveal about yourself, how you deal with the inevitable differences between you, how you evaluate this person's way of relating to you. So there are a lot of things that go into it. Neil Sattin: Yeah, the skills that you talk about in Depression Is Contagious, as I was reading through them, I was like, well each of these skills, it should surprise no one. Not only are they good for building how you relate in the world, in general, but they're all really important powerful skills for being in a committed long-term relationship. And I like your emphasis on trainable when I heard that. I appreciate your drawing the distinction of how does someone respond to limits that you set and how do they set limits for you? And I think those are really important distinctions to make. I was also thinking about it just in terms of how we are imperfect beings who enter into relationship and wondering like, "How well do I, as a partner and does my beloved, how well do we respond to the training that's required to actually get better at this?" Because so few people enter it being any good at it. Michael Yapko: Sure, the basic social psychology is that we get attracted to people who are like us, people that we view as having similar beliefs, similar values, and that's great, but what keeps people together is how they deal with the inevitable differences, and that's where the training part comes in. What happens when I want to spend money on things that you don't value? What happens when I want to have friendships with people that you don't particularly like? What happens when I want to spend time on things that you consider trivial or frivolous? And it's in those moments that you're going to discover whether this person can be accepting of the inevitable differences, tolerant of the differences, respectful of the differences or whether they're going to use it as the basis for a constant barrage of criticism that makes you feel less than, make you feel bad about yourself. And therein lies, if you don't have an acceptance of yourself, if you don't believe for yourself that this for you is a reasonable use of your time and your money, and your energy and all those kinds of things, then you can easily feel belittled and victimized. And if we talk about the single greatest risk factor for depression, it's victimization. Victimization of any kind. Michael Yapko: And it's why when you were telling the story about your mother when she was exposed to trauma early in her life, that kind of history of victimization is a huge risk factor. And some people learn earlier than others how to get past that sense of being a victim of life or a victim of other people, and get back on track, and other people end up defining themselves as a victim forevermore. And the reality is that nobody, but nobody overcomes depression by declaring themselves a victim. Now that's not to minimize how traumatic a life experience can be, but it isn't until people come to terms with it and say some variation of, "I'm not going to let that trauma define me. I'm not going to let my history define me." And it's one of the most important messages that I'm giving people all the time. The message is in plain language, "You are more than your history," and to discover what more you become the challenge. But when somebody adopts the perspective, "I am my history," and this is one of the things that I actually chide therapists about, because of how readily some therapists will unintentionally contribute to that by saying to the person, "You are a trauma survivor, you're a survivor," and while on one level that sounds very empowering, on another level, it says that you can define yourself by your history. Michael Yapko: And I don't want to say that to anybody. I want to make sure the message comes across to every person I work with. You're more than your history, that whatever has happened to you... Whatever has happened to you, yes, it needs attention, yes, it needs the opportunity to vent, yes, it needs the opportunity to explore its impact on your life and all the value of what good therapy can do in helping you come to terms with it, but also at some point, sooner rather than later, someone's going to have to be able to say that, "Despite this happening to me, I want to move forward, I want to bring positive people into my life, I want to make better choices for myself, I want to make choices that aren't based on my identity as a victim, I want to make my choices based on the kinds of things that I want happening in my life, eventually, gradually." Neil Sattin: So let's cover maybe some of the top risk factors, just so people can have more of a sense of what they are. And also a question about victimization, because I think so many people might have trouble figuring out or reluctance to identify whether they are being victimized or seeing themselves as a victim. I'm thinking of someone I worked with in particular who is like, "I don't think I'm a victim, I just think other people are to blame for everything that's wrong with me." So I'm wondering if there's a way that we can help someone just get that sense of whether they are adopting more of like a victim mindset in ways that aren't about the word "victim", but are about ways that they might be interacting with the world that would suggest, that sort of thing. Michael Yapko: Okay, well, I talk about victimization, and what most people do, unfortunately, is they instantly assume that what I'm talking about victimization I'm talking about the things that other people do to you, and that's only part of the story. There is no doubt that there are bad people out there, people who are willing to hurt you to get what they want, people who are willing to abuse you, to get what they want, people who really don't care how you feel; they just want what they want. There are people like that out there. And there are also people out there who are absolutely wonderful and that becomes your job to determine who's who. But the other part of the victimization story is how people victimize themselves, and in fact, that's more the common victimization. People are victims of their own beliefs, people are victims of their own attitudes, that when somebody, for example, defines themselves as a perfectionist they're instantly setting themselves up to be a victim of their own inevitable imperfections since nobody's perfect. Michael Yapko: And when you're a perfectionist, while you can justify it to yourself by saying, "Well, I just have very high standards," that's nice; the problem is that what victimization's evolved from perfectionism it means you're creating a toxic internal environment where no matter what you do, it's not good enough, so you're always criticizing yourself, you're always feeling less than, that even when people compliment you, and praise you-you dismiss it as they really don't know what they're talking about, or, "Gee, I guess I fooled them," and that kind of victimization. So to me, one of the most important skills somebody can develop is the ability to step outside your own thinking long enough to evaluate whether what you're thinking or the way that you're looking at things, is reasonable, whether it's accurate. The simplest way I can say it is a lot of what depression is about is that people think things and then they make the mistake of actually believing themselves, and it's why it's so important that people learn how to be critical thinkers, they learn how to gather information and use information. Michael Yapko: But when you say, "Everybody else is to blame. I'm not the victim," you're missing the fact that you are a participant in these interactions. If you're interacting with another human being, then by definition, you are 50% of that interaction, and to act as if you have no contribution to it, then to blame the other person for whatever happens is if you play no role in what happens, is misguided, to say the least. It is leading yourself astray, in terms of the quality of your own thinking. And so the last thing that we want to do is think that "All of these things just happen to me." It's a really difficult thing to be able to discern what are you responsible for and what are you not responsible for, to discern what you are in fact helpless to change and what you're simply assuming you're helpless to change. Michael Yapko: There are times when somebody is genuinely helpless. There's nothing that you can do, there's nothing I can do about the government shutdown that's currently going on as we record this right now. There's nothing I can say that's going to make a difference. I am in fact helpless to change the shutdown. How I view it, what I tell myself about it, how I gauge its significance in my life, all of those things are negotiable, all of those things are malleable. I'm not helpless in that regard. And so the importance of people recognizing that they have decisions that they can make, and this is one of the most telling models of depression, depression like any human problem can be viewed in many, many different ways. Michael Yapko: We can look at it through the lens of biology, we can look at it through the lens of psychology, we can look at it through the lens of sociology, but the important thing about viewing depression as something that is malleable, not fixed, and I think this is the difficulty in dealing with people we love who are depressed, who have given up, who believe that it can't change. And that's really the first challenge is if you really grasp the notion that your ideas can't be trusted, and it's not that you're wrong, you might be in the way that you view things, you might be misinformed, you might believe something that really isn't true and the evidence is contrary, and that's really the challenge then of, I could say for myself, having been in this field now for so many years, how many times as a "depression expert" have I had to redefine my ideas about depression over the years, how many times if I had to change my ideas based on new evidence and new research. Michael Yapko: But that requires flexibility in thinking, and very often depressed people are not known for their flexibility in thinking. They manifest what is called cognitive rigidity where they say, in essence, "That's the way it is and there's nothing I can do about it." And that's the hardest part about being in a relationship with someone who's depressed, who manifests that kind of cognitive rigidity or other forms of rigidity like social rigidity or rigidity of self-definition or behavioral rigidities, those kinds of things. So the biggest risk factor: Believing yourself and the idea of going out of your way, going out of your way to find out, "Here's what I believe. Is that really true? Here's what I think other people are thinking. How can I find out if that's really true? Here's what I think would be the perfect thing, in everybody else's eyes. Well, how do we find out whether that's really true or not?" Michael Yapko: And it's that ability to go outside yourself and to use other people as sources of information, that if you happen to be depressed and you're in a relationship with someone who isn't, think about how much you could learn from that person about how they cope with adversities without getting depressed. What are they doing differently than you? How are they looking at it differently than you? And when you appreciate that viewpoints can be arbitrary, that somebody else can see it entirely differently, that's the challenge is, "How can I move in the direction of seeing it from another angle? How can I experiment with my viewpoint to find out whether that's really true?" Michael Yapko: There's a lot of times when I'm having people go out as a homework assignment in my therapies, to go out into the world and conduct surveys. Here's what you think. Let's find out if that's really how other people see it. Here's what you think you're hopeless or helpless to change. Let's see whether other people see it the same way and start to loosen up those ideas that keep you imprisoned, that lead you to be a victim of your own thinking or your own reactions to things. So there's a lot there, but the other risk factors, is there was the question we started with, what are some of the primary risk factors? Michael Yapko: One primary risk factor is family history. The child of a depressed parent is anywhere from three to six times more likely to become depressed than the child of a non-depressed parent. Just having a depressed parent represents a significant risk factor. And to be more specific about it. What represents the risk is what's called the explanatory style. Every time a two-year-old asks you, "Why, Daddy? Why, Mommy?" and two-year-olds do that roughly 1000 times per day, every answer you give models what's called explanatory style, a style that you have that's quite unconscious for how you explain why things are the way they are, or how you explain how things work. And it's through that explanation and through modeling that children learn the same qualities of explanations, or what is more clinically called attributions, as their parents. Michael Yapko: So, it's really no surprise how when you hit your teenage rebellion years when you're 15 years old and you're saying, "I don't want to be like my mom, I don't want to be like my dad, I don't want to be like my mom, I don't want to be like my dad." And then you hit 38 and you go, "Damn, just like my mom and dad." And the reality is, how could it be any other way? They're the people who shaped your way of looking at things to a significant degree. And so that quality of parenting and modeling and the role of explanatory style is huge, and it's also through them that you learn coping skills for how to deal with stressors, that if every time your mom was depressed, she'd take drugs or every time your dad was depressed or stressed, he'd get drunk, you're not going to learn really good coping skills or good problem-solving skills. Michael Yapko: And then, another factor, and then I'll stop lecturing away here. But another huge factor is the quality of expectation. What do you expect to happen, how do you view the future? The future hasn't happened yet. So it has been said that there are two kinds of mystics in the world: The optimistics and the pessimistics, and they represent two very different viewpoints about the open-ended future. And we have lots of evidence at this point, that it's not just six of one or half a dozen of the other. There are measurable benefits to optimism. Optimists suffer fewer mood problems, optimists suffer fewer health problems, optimists live longer, optimists recover faster from surgeries with fewer post-surgical infections. Optimism has all kinds of benefits. Michael Yapko: And to me, it's such an important point to make that since the future is wide open, I can't do anything to change the past, but the future hasn't happened yet. And there is a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln that I absolutely love. And the quote is, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." And I spend a great deal of therapy time helping depressed people create better futures. Neil Sattin: Wow. Okay, so many things occurring to me, and directions I'd like to go and I'm aware of our time, so I want to make sure, that we stay reasonably focused here. Alright, I'm curious about... Here are a couple of thoughts that are weaving in. One is if part of the problem of being depressed, is this feeling that "Well, this is just the way I am," and I'm willing to go out and I love this idea of actually taking surveys of people, and I could see that as a way to engage random people, right? It's just like, "What do you think about... Do you think, blah, blah?" and test out your ideas about what's true with other random people. But what is the process of change like for changing your beliefs from, "Well, that's just who I am," to actually being able to experience your own malleability, your own flexibility, and to get to a place where suddenly you realize, "Well, that isn't just who I am. I'm not just a victim of the fact that my mother was depressed," let's say, or whatever it is? That that, in fact, even though I have this risk factor or anything that might be a risk factor, that I'm free to change, I'm free to actually learn how to experience seeing the world and experiencing the world in a totally different way. What does that arc look like for people to feel like they can own it versus just, "I'll try that on, but that still doesn't feel like me"? Michael Yapko: Well, of course, we're speaking in very general terms now. And for people that are depressed, that's actually dangerous. Here's another risk factor, it's what's called the global cognitive style. In plain language, it's moreover, general thinking. So for example, someone's boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with them and then they say, "I'll never date again, or I'll never let myself be vulnerable again, that's a manifestation of global thinking. And so really the first step is when you say something like, "Well, that's just the way I am," the starting point is, let's get much more specific. It's not a total overhaul. There are a lot of things about you, no matter who you are, that are good things, things that don't need to change. Michael Yapko: The question is what happens when you brush up against a belief system that limits you? What happens when you brush up against a viewpoint that victimizes you or holds you in place? That becomes the moment where the question arises. Is this fixed or is it malleable? How can I find out? It may feel fixed, it may feel unchangeable but is it really true? And by first asking that question, is there some way to examine whether this is really as fixed as I believe it is, that's what then opens up. Michael Yapko: There's the initial first step of being curious. Socrates said, "Curiosity is the beginning of wisdom," and that is so true that unless you're willing to examine, unless you're willing to question yourself instead of just passively giving up and saying, "Well that's the way that I am." And then to be able to look at other people, you don't have to love everybody, or find something wonderful and everybody and be really Pollyannaish about it, but clearly even the people that you don't particularly care for the people you don't particularly necessarily respect are still good at doing something. What are they good at doing that, what can you learn from them? I've spent 48 years studying people who are good at things to learn how they do what they do. I'm the person who just somebody in the grocery store who's pushing their kid around in a cart and their kid throws a tantrum because he wants cookies, and this parent handles that kid really well. I feel compelled to go up to that person and say, "Wow I really love the way you just handled your kid's tantrum and can I ask you a few questions. Michael Yapko: And learn something from what are they thinking, what are they focusing on? How do they endure the tantrum in order to teach this kid a lesson that you can't just demand cookies and expect to get them every time we go shopping? And really learning from the people around and viewing other people as potential mentors. The value of self-help materials, the value of going into therapy. When you hit the wall, metaphorically speaking, when you reach a point where you just don't know what to do, that doesn't mean there's nothing to be done, it means you don't know what to do. Go talk to somebody who does. That's what the value is of another perspective, and that's where you have the chance to explore other ideas and other possibilities to start to redefine yourself. Michael Yapko: Literally, everybody who has ever recovered from depression, their initial belief was, "I'm going to be stuck feeling this way for the rest of my life." And then they did things, they went to therapy, they experimented with new behaviors, they learned about depression, to discover that it wasn't what they thought it was. They learned to recognize the signs and symptoms, they learned how to experiment with new ideas and possibilities and perceptions, and they invested themselves in redefining themselves so that they would no longer say, "Well, that's just the way I am." So that's really what the art looks like, is starting with curiosity and not necessarily believing things are going to change but being curious that if they were going to change, how would that happen? That if my life was going to move in a different direction if I was going to reach this goal, how would I define it? But here's where the thinking processes get in the way when I talk about global thinking. So often the great, great majority of the time, people come into therapy and they know what they want, they just don't know how to get there. Michael Yapko: And I view the therapist as a bridge builder. Here's what I can do to help build a bridge that helps you get from where you are to where you want to go. But when I ask people, "Okay, if this is your goal, what are the steps to get to it?" They have no idea. And that's really an important thing to appreciate, it's not that they can't reach the goal, it's that they don't know what the steps are, it's too global, for them. It's too poorly defined. Honestly, I wish I had a dollar for every time a client said to me, "Well, all I want is to be happy. Is that too much to ask?" Well, can you get any more global than that? [chuckle] Michael Yapko: And then when I ask somebody, "Okay, so what do you think it takes to be happy?" They look at me like, "What's wrong with you, you don't know what happy is?" Well, of course, I know what happy is, for me, but I don't know what it is for you. And then when I ask the person to identify what are the steps to accomplish this, that's when they discover they have no idea. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Michael Yapko: And so it's not that they're pathological, it's not that they're neurochemically defective, it's not that they're a genetic mutant, it's that they don't know. And that's my point when you don't know when you know what you want, but you have no idea how to get there, talk to somebody who does, that's what the value is of somebody who really understands what it takes to get from here to there. Neil Sattin: Great. Michael, just a quick meta moment. Are you good to go another 15 minutes? Michael Yapko: Yeah, go ahead. Neil Sattin: Okay, great, so this might be a great time to mention, because it's clear that you're super skilled with working with people who are depressed, and I know that you do a lot to bring that skill set to other therapists. So maybe you could just talk for a moment about the kinds of trainings that you do. I know you do occasionally some things for just the regular general public, but the bulk of your work is actually helping therapists learn how to deal with these problems more effectively. Michael Yapko: Yes. I've authored 15 books, and most of those are books for the profession, the other mental health professionals. And much of my professional life is devoted to training other professionals around the world. For the last 30 odd years I've averaged being home, only 100 days a year because I'm doing clinical trainings everywhere else. I'm on a plane every week. And so, the trainings that I do are primarily for mental health professionals. They can easily go to my website, yapko.com and check out my teaching schedule to see when I'm in an area that's close to where they are, and what people can expect to learn are very practical strategies for helping people move through their problems and get to the other side where they feel like they're not just feeling better, but doing better. Neil Sattin: Awesome. Michael Yapko: I'm making a very important distinction there. It doesn't take much really for people to feel better, but it does take a lot for them to actually be better. And by that, I mean to come to terms with the risk factors and reduce those risk factors so that they can move through life, far less vulnerable, far more skilled and managing their own moods. Neil Sattin: And your website yapko.com has a wealth of information for everyone, so I definitely suggest that you listening, go check it out, you'll see where Michael is teaching around the world. There are resources available on the website as well. Videos, he's done etcetera. So definitely check out his website. Neil Sattin: Just as a quick note, when you were talking about global thinking, I was just reminded that I wanted to tell everyone that we have had David Burns on the show to talk about cognitive distortions, which is, your knowledge of that is a great way to recognize ways that your thinking may not be entirely accurate, that what you think may not be true. So, that's episode 133, if you are interested in listening to that. Michael Yapko: David is a wonderful speaker and he's very, very knowledgeable, and he's somebody I've known for a long time. And in fact when people visit my website, one of the videos, it's posted there, is an interview that I did with David talking about his history as a drug researcher and why he left the drug field to move into the realm of providing psychotherapy to people. So that's a good recommendation on your part. Neil Sattin: Yeah, interesting. I had no idea about that part of his history as well. So, I'll definitely check that out. So, let's get back into a couple of important things. One is, I want to ensure that we give our listeners who are in a relationship with someone who's depressed, a certain sense of what they can do. And I know you talk about how valuable going into couples therapy can be for actually helping stimulate the health and well-being of the depressed person as well as the relationship and that seems to weave in with me. All these skills are interwoven, I think, but I'm thinking in particular about the tendency to ruminate and questions about... You've brought up seeking help or asking other people for what they know about how to achieve certain results or dispositions. And I think that's another thing where, if you're depressed, you might tend to ruminate, where you're just kind of obsessively thinking about things and at the same time not know how to reach out for help without feeling like you're burdening other people, and thus feeding into the way that your social network reinforces your depression. And then of course, if you're in a relationship, there's your loved one and there's that dynamic. Neil Sattin: So that's how I tied all those three things together in my mind, and I'm hoping that just kind of giving those quick brush strokes gives you something to work with here because I feel like those are all related and I'm hoping that we can shift people into seeing like, "This is how you avoid making inappropriate requests of people for support, and if you are a person in a depressed person's life, this is how you can show up in a way that's most likely to be helpful." Michael Yapko: Well, you are perceptive in your statement about all of these things being interwoven because they are as well as many other variables as well. And you mentioned rumination. Rumination is a coping style, where the person does spin it around and spin it around and spin it around over and over and over again. And the interesting thing about rumination is if you ask people who are prone to rumination, do they think they're doing something, they would answer, yes, they think the rumination is in fact problem-solving. They don't realize that it's just pointless obsessing. Michael Yapko: And if there is any cure for rumination, it's action. Why I keep emphasizing taking positive action over and over and over again, "I got another facet to, of how it corrects for ruminative thinking and when somebody is in that position to stop the rumination and ask themselves, "Okay, I'm doing this analyzing, what does it mean I should actually do?" If I'm ruminating about, "Did I offend that person? Did I offend that person? I wonder if I offended that person, maybe I offended that person, God, I hope I didn't offend that person." How about if instead of spinning all that around you go ask, "Did I offend you? And if so, I'm sorry," and find out. And that's what I mean by taking action. But the other thing that you're raising is about boundaries in the relationship. How do I keep my depression as best I can from infecting the relationship? Michael Yapko: And there are so many different ways that depression can end up impacting the relationship. How many couples I've worked with families? I've worked with... We're a partner or a child will say to me, "Here are the kinds of awful, nasty things that my partner says when he's depressed," or "Here are the kinds of things that my mommy says to me when she's depressed or when she's not feeling good," and I have to say to the person, "I'm really sorry you're depressed. I am genuinely sorry you're depressed, but you can't say those kinds of things," that, "Your depression is going to lift, sooner, later, your depression's going to lift. But the things that you said to your partner, the things that you said to your kid are going to be echoing in their brains for years, you can't say those kinds of things. "And helping the person start to place boundaries. And what's interesting is, when I say to them, "You can't say those kinds of things," they say, "But that's how I feel." Michael Yapko: Well, therein lies the problem. Just because you're feeling it doesn't mean you have to say it. Just because you're feeling it doesn't mean you have to act on it. Just because you're feeling it doesn't mean it becomes the basis for what you decide to do. And this is one of the models of depression that I find the most instructive. It's called The Stress Generation Model, and this is a model that talks about how depressed people make bad decisions that exacerbate their depression, and this is certainly one of the things that happens in relationships. So part of what I speak to when I'm working with couples where depression's a factor or when I'm working with families, where depression's a factor, is helping them build the boundary. It's not dishonest, it's not withholding, it's just setting limits on how far you're willing to go to introduce toxicity into the relationship and how to protect the people you love from that. Your moods are going to change, the nasty things that you say aren't. And so that is a really critical force. But there's another, as long as we're talking about interwoven factors there's a... So, another factor to bring into it, it's what's called the internal orientation, the internal orientation is how depressed people tend to use their feelings as the indicator of what to do. Michael Yapko: And this is to me, one of the most exciting realms of new research, it's in the realm called Affective Neuroscience. And Affective Neuroscience as a field addresses the question, "How does your mood influence your thought processes? How does your mood influence memory, how does it influence autobiographical memory, how does it influence risk assessment, what you view as risky and what you view as not risky, how does it affect your perceptions of other people?" So for example, when we talk about depression's effect on relationships, part of what you alluded to Neil that was right on the money, is how depressed people often display a pattern of excessive reassurance seeking, that no matter how much reassurance you provide, it's not enough. "Do you love me? Do you still love me? Now, do you love me? Do you love me, do you love me, do you love me now, do you love me, do you still love me, do you still love me?" And no matter how many times you say, "Yes, I still love you. Yes, I still love you. Yes, I still love you," it's not enough until finally, the other person says, "I can't take this anymore." Michael Yapko: So that is one of the patterns that play out in relationships that again, I'm helping people put a boundary on it, that that feeling of insecurity is not something you have to lay on the other person necessarily to ask it again and again and again. Michael Yapko: There's another interpersonal pattern called conflict avoidance, that's also very typical in depressed relationships. The person isn't happy with something and they can't bring themselves to say something about it, so the other person does something and instead of saying, "Hey, that wasn't okay with me," or "Please if you would not do that anymore," or "Please stop that," wouldn't occur to them to say it because they're afraid that the other person's going to leave them, they're afraid the other person's going to get angry, they're afraid the other person's going to throw a tantrum, so they don't say anything. And by not bringing a correction into the interaction, the other person keeps doing what they're doing while they do a slow burn and eventually just can't stand the relationship anymore, and they missed all these opportunities to help shape it, help grow it, help make it better until eventually they just walk away from it, and that's an unfortunate consequence of that kind of conflict avoidance. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so quick question, especially when you were talking about affective neuroscience and how depression might affect one's ability to make good decisions, how do you balance that out with the cure to depression or I guess, maybe I shouldn't be using that word, but an effective way to manage your depression is to take action. So how do you take action, if on the one hand, you're afraid? Well, I'm depressed, so my decisions are going to be bad ones, so the actions I take are going to be bad ones. Michael Yapko: Here's where the ability that I mentioned earlier to step outside your thinking becomes critically important. Let me give you an example. Neil Sattin: Great. Michael Yapko: A woman comes to me and she says to me, "I am so depressed. Have been for a long time." I ask. "Okay, so tell me about it. What can you tell me about it?" She says, "I'm just so lonely. I live alone in an apartment and I sit in my apartment and nobody calls me, and nobody comes to visit me. I go to work and I work in a little cubicle and nobody there talks to each other, they instant message, they text message, but I go to lunch and I sit by myself and nobody talks and nobody... And I'm just so lonely, I'm so lonely, I just sit in my apartment night after night, and I don't do anything and nobody calls me." So then I say to her, "Well, you stand a much better chance of meeting interesting people and developing friendships if every once in a while, you leave your apartment." [chuckle] She says, "I know, but I don't feel like it." Now, that's what I mean by an internal orientation. She is using her depressed feelings to keep herself alone and lonely. Neil Sattin: Right. Michael Yapko: I need to give her another frame of reference, "Whether you feel like it or not, if the result you want is to have people in your life, guess what, you're not likely to meet interesting people in your bathroom. If you're going to want to meet interesting people, you're going to have to go where people are." Now let's talk about the skills that make people less intimidating. Let's talk about how you start a conversation, let's talk about how you keep a conversation going, let's talk about

Jill Richmond joins us today to talk about the U.S. government’s somewhat mixed success to date in regulating cryptocurrency and the growing push by predominantly conservative political forces to reduce federal intervention and give states a bigger say in how this new economy is regulated. Jill brings us up to speed on how crypto trade and lobbying groups such as the Digital Asset Trade Association (DATA), which she Co-Founded, are faring in their efforts to ensure that states pass consistent laws across the board. And she explains how the growing tensions between states and Washington D.C. on crypto regulation involves the principle of  federalism. We’ll give you a report card of states and show how some states are doing better than others at this political gamesmanship. Tune in to find out what’s fact, what’s substance, and what’s grandstanding in the growing political battle over cryptocurrency. Topics Covered in this Conversation with Jill Richmond: – Patchwork of federal regulations – Confusion and lack of clarity – Complex woolly regulatory environment – States trying to create clarity for companies – Many states also creating patchwork of laws – Difficulties of crypto companies to get banked – Interest from banks to move to foreign jurisdictions – Confusion over definition of cryptocurrency and ICOs – Role of federalism in crypto politics – Conservative groups working to give more power to states – Digital Asset Trade Association (DATA)  working to create consistent state legislation – States Report Card – How DATA was created and got involved in legislative activity – States doing the most on regulation – Gubernatorial races and impact on industry – Wyoming becoming Delaware of crypto – Rise of crypto banks – Getting Congress to become more engaged – Closing thoughts and key takeaways   Questions and Comments? podcast@gem.co Guest Contact Information Jill Richmond LinkedIn | Twitter | Telegram Website: Digital Asset Trade Association Resource Links Blockchain and Cryptocurrency: State Law Roundup US Election Sees Crypto-Friendly Politicians Win Governor Races DATA Continues To Move the Needle in Wyoming Wyoming Eyes Creation of Blockchain-Friendly Bank to Lure Bitcoin Startups State Regulations on Virtual Currency and Blockchain Technologies Crypto industry leaders warn Congress: Figure out regulation, or watch innovation leave the US Colorado Digital Token Act Wyoming wants to be Delaware of the West With Business Court U.S. State of Wyoming Defines Cryptocurrency ‘Utility Tokens’ as New Asset Class Transcript: Interview with Jill Richmond Interview Recorded On: January 8th, 2019 Topic: Politics and Crypto   Chitra: Welcome to the show, Jill. It's great to have you.   Jill: No, it's great to be here. Thanks, Chitra.   Chitra: Thanks so much. So this past year there was a tremendous amount of interpretation and confusion it seemed on how different federal agencies were defining how cryptocurrency should be regulated.   Jill: Sure. So - and I think to lean into that a little bit more - I think you have everyone from the SEC to the CFTC to FinCEN determining whether we're looking at property, we're looking at commodity, or we're looking at a security, but none really turning around and saying this may be a new asset class. So, what you have is agencies that leaned in really hard without creating a lot of clarity and companies wrote reactively and proactively trying to respond to what was either coming down the pike as they anticipated it. And so, interestingly enough, what you've started to see as a result of this kind of complex woolly regulatory environment is states and hopefully on the federal side, trying to lean as heavy as they can and trying to create some clarity for companies, individuals, and otherwise, and obviously consumers in terms of how they need to behave, operate within a framework in the United States.   Chitra: Let's pause for a minute and talk about the current state of affairs for businesses and investors when it comes to pain points and friction in how they're operating.   Jill: Okay, sure. So, I guess you sort of need to define what you're talking about here, are you talking about cryptocurrency? Are you talking about blockchain technology?   Chitra: Cryptocurrency.   Jill: Cryptocurrency, fine. Okay. So for cryptocurrency, you have a lot of companies that have very difficult time trying to get banked. So there are banks that are more or less unhelpful to companies that are operating in the US and companies are finding themselves having to find a jurisdiction and bank outside of the US. So there's this, I would say, this interest in moving to other jurisdictions. So that's a huge pain point for companies. Certainly companies who were trying to bank class last year had a very difficult time. I can get to that later. In terms of what legislation is on the ground, possibly in Wyoming to have a bank that basically is supporting blockchain and crypto-based companies.   There are pain points around, even companies, and I'm often uncomfortable in discussing it, but there were companies who essentially said, look, we want to do an ICO. Can we do an ICO in this country? Does that mean that we have to turn around and now only work with accredited investors?   Chitra: An ICO is an initial coin offering, which is a method of crowdfunding in cryptocurrency.   Jill: Yes. So, essentially, companies last year were producing utility tokens and treating those utility tokens effectively as an investment vehicle and running afoul of major securities law. Essentially treating a token, utility token, extensively, which needs to be treated as utility token. In other words, the token has utility consumptive value within the ecosystem.   Chitra: Unlike a security for instance, which the SEC says ICOs and tokens essentially are.   Jill: That's right. So there is still real value in having a utility. That utility token, however, should not, could not, cannot be treated as an investment contract per se. So it's the intent around what that token’s primary purpose is.   Chitra: And this is a source of great disagreement at the federal level.   Jill: It is still a source of great disagreement, although I don't know because the disagreement is such that, the SEC still looks at the how we test as-   Chitra: Which is a supreme court test that deals with securities regulation.   Jill: That's right. And so, in applying that test to, I guess a utility token, it can be very complicated. And as I said, it often is about the intent of the utility tokens. So, there was legislation that was created out in Wyoming. We can cover that, HB 70, which was a bill that was passed in a Wyoming last March that we helped. And I can tell you that we helped shepherd along, which really stipulated effectively what a utility or an open token is and that it is exempt from property taxes.   Chitra: So this is important because the SEC says that cryptocurrency is a security and is illegal unless regulated by the SEC, then you've got the commodities future trading commission. The CFTC says, oh no, cryptocurrency is a commodity. And then you have the IRS saying cryptocurrency is property. And then you have FinCEN which is the treasury’s financial crimes enforcement network saying that it is money. So you have all of these different interpretations. But now you have a state named the Wyoming saying, we believe that utility tokens can be essentially exempt from-   Jill: Property taxes.   Chitra: ...from property taxes. So it seems like this is a perfect example of federalism at play. So can you talk a little bit about how federalism is kind of playing a role here and eventually they'll, it seems that in situations like that often courtside with the federal laws and so how will this all play out?   Jill: Yeah, it's a good question and we haven't seen it yet. So yes, it is a perfect example of federalism, but you still have major issues that fall within, I guess financial markets to some extent, taxes and otherwise that are still at the purview of the state level. So, as long as you are working closely with the state securities, if you're working around securities law as it relates on the state level, you're extensively okay. Do I think that there's going to be a showdown about what's happening in Wyoming? I don't know. We haven't seen it yet and it's hard for me to predict whether we're going to start seeing the courts take on what's happening on a state level. It's still extremely nascent right now. I mean with Wyoming being probably the front runner and the most maybe controversial legislation on the ground in one particular state.   Chitra: Let's go back to the broader area. It seems that many states are now weighing in on how cryptocurrency should be regulated. And the Brookings Institute essentially categorized states in seven different ways. And they said there are states that are unaware, reactionary, appreciative, organized, actively engaged and recognizing innovation potential. And I know that your trade group, The Digital Assets Trade Association has also done a lot of work and done a report card on how states are fairing when dealing with cryptocurrency. Can you sum up what you’ve found?   Jill: Yeah, I think that's fair. So what you saw in 2014, is the first wave of kind of 20 states that came in and started to regulate or started to create legislation acknowledging cryptocurrency and more or less protecting the consumer. So you've got New York and California and the license. So, but fast forward to 2018 really is sort of the next wave of states that fall within those sort of seven categories. So for us at The Digital Asset Trade Association and I love the Brookings, I thought Brookings did a great job of breaking that down, at least for people who were slightly unaware of what's going on on a state level. What we did is take it a little, a step further, which is to say the elections are imminent and let's kind of highlight some of the governors that we know are either proactive. So in the case of Colorado, we had Jared Polis who we know as a state legislator, formed the blockchain coalition.   Chitra: And you're referring to the 2018 midterm elections.   Jill: [crosstalk] That's correct. Yeah. So anyway, the short version of a long story is that where seven of those states fit. So there are seven key states that are really looking into legislation that not only is acknowledging the technology, but are creating safe harbor legislation and also, trying to identify where blockchain technology fits around public and private services. So, can we have state records on a blockchain? Can we have... how are we treating smart contracts? So you have places like Delaware, Arizona was extremely progressive. Wyoming as we know which issued and passed six bills last year, extremely progressive and probably the most progressive.   So our scorecard was basically giving, we're giving governors and states, essentially an A rating or a passive rating or an A rating, so to speak. So at least voters started to understand where their state fit and where their legislators fit around adopting legislation that was probably creating job creation within their state. So it wasn't just about cryptocurrency, it was, look, we're taking a really strong position. We want companies to set up shop in the case of Wyoming and we want to be seen as an innovation hub.   Chitra: So what's at stake really here is the entire new ecosystem that's being built around cryptocurrency. So it's a jobs and attracting more companies to increase your tax base. There seems to be a lot at stake here.   Jill: Yeah, there is a lot at stake and I think there's still that pivotal moment where legislators are starting to see if they take action, they can retain talent, company innovation, staying either in-state and not fleeing to a new jurisdiction. That's the hope. That, that innovation, that sandbox legislation that gets put on the table in Colorado for instance, creates opportunities for new financial based or fintech-based companies to operate within their state and not flee and go somewhere else.   Chitra: What are the stakes for crypto businesses in terms of the friction we talked about, the pain points, what do they want?   Jill: Oh, well. I guess it was September of this year, there was a real, there was a round table on a federal level that was put together with a number of major players within the industry and above and beyond all else, it was clarity. It was just clarity. It was the, look, in order for us to have big money come into this industry, it needs to be regulated well, it needs to be regulated with clarity and their hopes in the friction at least as far as they're concern is as they're building new financial products and infrastructure, that clarity means everything in terms of, again, where that innovation is coming from. Is it in Korea or is it really coming out of the United States? Is it coming from Malta or is it coming from the United States?   Chitra: So you have at the federal level, a patchwork of guidance and confusion. And now you have states jumping in and every state is trying to issue its own idex on regulation of cryptocurrency. You have the underlying kind of a conservative political movement steeped in federalism that's tried to give more [crosstalk] power to the states from ALEC, the conservative organization, the American Legislative Exchange Council. So you have that underlying kind of political movement that's driving some of this stuff. And then we have groups like yours that's trying to wrestle all of this to the ground and finding some kind of consistency. So how is this all working out?   Jill: Well, it's complicated. So, and maybe it helps if I give a little bit of an information. Oh, I help you understand a little bit about DATA, so-   Chitra: Your organization?   Jill: My organization, which is The Digital Asset Trade Association. The Digital Asset Trade Association, let me just sort of give some context to bring you right back. Digital Asset Trade Association was really formed last year. End of January, we had a round table with the chief information officer at the CFTC and the SEC and we sat down in a private room with stakeholders from blockchain and crypto-based companies and said, what can we do to help you? In not so many words, what can we do to help you communicate directly to the companies and understand their pain points and help you understand how do you either both weed out bad actors or be compliant or operate in a way that is moving the needle on proactivity?   And so what came out of it, at least the timing, was Wyoming was really fast moving in introducing six pieces of legislation. And we as an organization that had just been formed, turned around and said, we're going to focus all of our energy and attention over to Wyoming. We're going to work closely with the Wyoming blockchain coalition. We're going to work closely with Caitlin Long and help them shepherd through kind of a stake in the ground and that's what we did and we did it very quickly. It was within two weeks. We sort of dropped in like a SWAT team, testified, introduced as much language, education, support as the state needed. Walked away and said, okay, we have our mission. Our mission is now to use Wyoming as kind of the ground zero, even though there were other states before, but use Wyoming as sort of the proverbial ground zero and say, now let's try and create federal language that takes HB 70, for instance, on a federal level and create consistency among states.   Chitra: [crosstalk] utility token definition.   Jill: This is utility token definition, exactly. And so, we started to get inbound requests from states and guidance and support and we went over to Colorado and started working in Colorado to help pass legislation that by the way, did not pass. But we have a very different makeup in the Senate and the House right now and we have a very progressive governor. And so the short version of a long story, is DATA was really formed to create consistency among states and we will be working with bodies like ALEC to help support that consistency among states.   Chitra: But at the moment, given this patchwork, the fact which of course is democracy at its best and worst as we know it, is this a blessing or a curse that states are jumping in willy nilly to try to change and shape this ecosystem.   Jill: Is it Pollyannaish for me to say it's a blessing and a curse? Because it is. It's a blessing because you almost need to do this pincer move. There's a little bit of a pincer move that needs to happen. States are going to jump in and they're going to try and clarify and they're certainly going to do that hopefully, or at least in their best interest, which is to attract companies and they're going to go head to, so Wyoming is going to go head to head with Delaware and you've got states that are going to start competing with each other to attract talent, to attract innovation. Now is that helpful for those companies? Probably not. The reasons why states are doing it versus why companies need to have some defining language. So, it's a blessing because now you have companies that are like, great, I feel like I can go move-   Chitra: They have a home.   Jill: They have a home, they can move to Colorado and there are a lot of major companies in Colorado. They can move to, you have kind of, you have companies that are now at least exchanges that have turned around and said, okay, we can move out to Wyoming and leave Washington for instance. So you're attracting talent, but you will have to create a serious pincer move around the introduction of a lot of that consistent legislation on the federal side now. And we hope as a trade organization to bridge, we've got many masters, but to bridge that chasm so to speak.   Chitra: And one of the things you're seeing is the education of politicians both at the federal and at the state level about blockchain technology and cryptocurrency and the midterm elections were significant for the cryptocurrency industry in that you had the election of three crypto savvy, crypto friendly governors, I guess it was Jared Polis of Colorado and-   Jill: Gavin Newsom.   Chitra: Gavin Newsom of California and you had the third one was Mark Gordon of Wyoming-   Jill: Wyoming.   Chitra: ... of course. And then you had-   Jill: He was inaugurated last night.   Chitra: Yeah. And then you had two who were re-elected. One was Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island and Greg Abbott of Texas. So you've got five state governors now who are getting educated and are knowledgeable and supportive of cryptocurrency. And that seems to, that that's going to have an impact too.   Jill: Yeah, it will. I mean, you absolutely will. I mean, you're literally starting to see the movement of that legislation right now. You've got bills that are hitting the House floor in Colorado. You have new package legislation that we hope we expect to get very little push back on, but we don't know. There's now five bills that are hitting the House floor on Friday.   Chitra: In Wyoming?   Jill: Wyoming.   Chitra: And what do they, just generally speaking broadly, what are they trying to do those bills?   Jill: So you've got, and I'm going to lose the number, but I think it's HB 76, so forgive me on that. We'll have to edit that. But HB 76, so you have clarifying legislation, which is just re-clarifying HB 70. It helps to clarify in terms of the utility and the exemption of property taxes. And the most important bill, I think that's hitting the floor is a banking bill. Which is setting up the establishment of a bank, which is-   Chitra: A crypto bank.   Jill: A crypto bank.   Chitra: The first of its kind?   Jill: It will be the first of its kind, which is not FDIC insured. So there will be no lending, but it is really for the purposes of depository and acts really for companies to be able to have a bank. I don't know, you've been in this industry long enough to see what it's like to try and set up a bank account. It's often your bank account is shut or frozen or you have a ton of issues and this is a huge pain point for companies. So, I think part of the package of legislation in Wyoming is again, to attract companies and talent.   Chitra: So, in essence is Wyoming trying to become for Crypto what Delaware is for traditional banking for instance?   Jill: It is. Yeah. It is. I think you saw 1977, Wyoming really was the first issue, the LLC. And so, I think there's always been a little bit of a rivalry between Wyoming and Delaware of sorts. But Wyoming has attractive reasons for companies to go. And, I will say that only because I'm watching companies that are relocating to Wyoming that are setting up developer communities across Wyoming that are setting up a secondary office or a third office or a fourth office so that they can take advantage of what Wyoming offers them. Not that I'm plugging Wyoming, I don't live there, but it's-   Chitra: It's one of the states that's proving to be friendly to crypto businesses.   Jill: Yeah, that's right.   Chitra: So let's look ahead to this year, 2019. What do you see happening in terms of federal legislation regulation, state legislation regulation, studies, business development across the spectrum? Where do you see us ending up at the end of 2019 compared to where we were a year ago?   Jill: I think you're going to get a lot more clarity. I mean, I do believe that there is so, I think on a macro level you've seen all of the pieces of the puzzle be put back together again to the extent that you have now strong movement on the state level. So you have a number of bills and key states that are moving. You've got New Jersey that's moving on legislation and Arizona as we know, has moved on legislation. We're getting inquiries from New Mexico and otherwise, legislation that is a little bit more closely aligned with either our agenda of our members or closely aligned with creating innovation etc and just clarity. And I think that the makeup on the federal side, at least in Congress, is such that we will start to move much more quickly in creating consistency as well. So I think-   Chitra: [crosstalk] If nothing else, maybe this is an invitation for Congress to jump in and start to provide some of this legislative language to clarify some of these issues and then reduce the confusion.   Jill: Agreed. I mean, I think this is a good year to see some, either groundbreaking movement or some clarity. So, I think you saw it was maybe December 11th and there was a lot of, it wasn't the most welcome move, but I think you saw the CFTC did a public request for input really around aspects of how Ether and the Ethereum network operates. You're starting to see the engagement at least open inquiries into, let's figure this out.   Chitra: Great. Any closing thoughts, Jill?   Jill: Yeah, I think, look, I'm a big proponent of my organization. We are constantly looking for support in companies that want to join our working groups, especially as we develop working groups post-Wyoming around really around banking and identity and otherwise. And so I would say please sort of visit us at digitalasset.org and keep an eye on what we're doing in Wyoming and keep an eye on what we're doing in Colorado.   Chitra: Great. And where can people learn more about you and the work you're doing?   Jill: So you can find, so digitalasset.org that's probably the best way. And you can certainly reach out to me directly at jill.richmond@digitalasset.org.   Chitra: Awesome. Well, Jill it has been so great to have you on the show, and there's so much going on that a lot of us are not even aware of at the state and federal level. Jill: Yeah. Thanks for asking. Yeah, thank you.

Each day more of our national political and governmental norms fall away. Our national leadership is at best in a moral vacuum, at worst, a corrosive force, an autoimmune disease eating the very fabric of the nation. The violence of the past months reminds us that it does no good to hold the Pollyannaish belief that everything will all be all right, that we’ve been through this before and that the democratic institutions that Madison and the founders designed, and that moral framework upon which it was built, can withstand what we face today. We like to think, based on past crisis, that our systems are strong enduring, resilient. Maybe. But there is no guarantee that it will last forever. After all, the Roman Republic lasted for 500 years and then collapsed. It Collapsed for many reasons similar to the issues and choices we face today. Historian and Professor Edward Watts, in his new book Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny shines a light on the path we are headed down. My conversation with Edward Watts: 

Eva Blue/Flickr, Southern Cross Austereo, CC BY-SASecond wave feminists protested against women’s magazines and beauty pageants. Today, however, beauty and fashion editors such as Elaine Welteroth (recently of Teen Vogue) are some of the most high profile voices of a resurgent feminist movement. On my most Pollyannaish days, I want to cheer online publications that mix politics with fashion and beauty for the way they are mainstreaming feminism. On closer inspection, though, this lashing together of feminist politics with a women’s magazine sensibility has produced some odd results. In today’s episode of Essays On Air - the audio version of The Conversation’s Friday essay series - I’m reading an edited version of my recent essay, The personal is now commercial – popular feminism online. With the #metoo movement bringing feminism right to the centre of mainstream debate, it’s time to take a closer at how popular feminism plays out online. Find us and subscribe in Apple Podcasts, in Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts. Today’s episode was edited by Jenni Henderson. Additional audio Snow by David Szesztay Walter’s Wonderland by Matt Oakley Ms. America, Up Against the Wall by Maisonpop93 Elaine Welteroth (teen vogue editor) on The Real Daytime Australia: Thousands march for equal rights in Melbourne on Women’s Day by Ruptly Ask Mia - Anxiety by MamaMia Women’s March on Washington: Full Rally by The New York Times 80s Interlude by Fanas Tomb Raider (club mix) by Music For Your Plants Kath Kenny does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.