Podcasts about PowerBar

This gripping episode explores one of climbing's most harrowing incidents—the 2000 kidnapping of four young American climbers in Kyrgyzstan's remote mountains. Tommy Caldwell, Beth Rodden, Jason Singer Smith, and John Dickey were world-class athletes with a North Face sponsorship to establish first ascents on untouched granite walls. Their dream expedition turned into a nightmare on August 12, 2000, when they were awakened by bullets striking the rock around their portaledges 1,000 feet up the Yellow Wall. Armed militants from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan forced them to rappel down and took them hostage, executing their Kyrgyz guide to demonstrate their seriousness. For six days, the climbers endured starvation (sharing one PowerBar daily among six people), forced night marches through freezing terrain, and firefights between their captors and military forces. The dramatic escape came when the militants left only one young guard named Su to watch all four hostages on treacherous rocky terrain. When Su became distracted trying to reach safer ground, Tommy Caldwell pushed him off the cliff, believing he had killed him. All four climbers fled through the night to a military outpost. The trauma affected each climber differently. Tommy channeled the experience into obsessive climbing focus, which proved crucial when he accidentally severed his index finger in 2001—he chose amputation and learned to climb better with nine fingers. This mental fortitude led to his famous 2015 Dawn Wall ascent on El Capitan, considered the hardest big wall climb in history. Beth struggled with PTSD, nightmares, and initially lost her love for climbing, though she later became a mental health advocate and published a memoir. The incident became a watershed moment in climbing, highlighting both the sport's capacity to develop mental toughness and the importance of recognizing trauma in extreme sports communities. Show Notes & Timestamps [02:30] Setting the Scene - Introduction to the four sponsored climbers and their dream expedition to establish first ascents in Kyrgyzstan's Pamir Alay Mountains in August 2000. [08:15] The Kidnapping - How the climbers were awakened by gunfire while sleeping in portaledges 1,000 feet up the wall, forced to rappel down to armed militants from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. [15:45] Six Days of Captivity - Details of their ordeal including starvation (sharing one PowerBar daily), forced marches through freezing mountains, and witnessing the execution of their Kyrgyz guide. [22:10] The Escape - The dramatic moment when Tommy Caldwell pushed 20-year-old guard "Sue" off a cliff, allowing all four climbers to flee to safety at a Kyrgyz military outpost. [28:40] Long-term Impact - How the trauma affected each climber differently, Tommy's later finger amputation and Dawn Wall achievement, Beth's PTSD struggles, and the bizarre conspiracy theories questioning their story's authenticity. Email us! thecruxsurvival@gmail.com Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thecruxpodcast/ Get schooled by Julie in outdoor wilderness medicine! https://www.headwatersfieldmedicine.com/

5 Jahre BESTZEIT Podcast - das müssen auch wir erst mal sacken lassen. 5 Jahre voller spannender Geschichten, Emotionen und tollen Gästen, die so nie geplant waren und doch unglaublich schnell verflogen sind. Dank euch allen, die hier regelmäßig zuhören gibt es unser Format nach wie vor und macht uns auch weiter wahnsinnig viel Spaß! Wir werden natürlich nochmal einen Blick auf den WFLWR am vergangenen Sonntag. Philipp und Felix waren vor Ort in München und liefen einmal mehr gemeinsam mit Kai Pflaume zu einer neuen Bestzeit. Ralf hatte wiederum eine ganz spezielle Herausforderung seine Teilnahme via App-Run überhaupt möglich zu machen und viele von euch sind ja erneut in unserem Team für den guten Zweck gelaufen. Hut ab für all eure Leistungen! Einer, der besonders herausgestochen hat, ist unser Gast in dieser Woche: Christian Hiller. Er war ebenfalls in München am Start und setzte sich in unserem Team die Krone auf. Mit 58,16 zurückgelegten Kilometern belegte er national Platz 6 und global einen beeindruckenden 24. Rang. Spannend ist auch seine Laufgeschichte, die eher zufällig im Rahmen eines Schulprojekts parallel zum Fußballspielen begann, welchem er auch heute noch leidenschaftlich nachgeht. Er erzählt wie er es schafft Fulltime Job, Familienleben und das ambitionierte Laufen miteinander zu verbinden und warum das Fußballspielen als Schlüssel dafür sieht, dass er bislang von klassischen Laufverletzungen weitestgehend verschont geblieben ist. Wir sprechen mit ihm über Motivation, Disziplin, die Freude am Sport und warum sein nächster Start ein 1.500m Rennen sein wird.

GOOD DAY HEALTH - DR. JACK - WEEKLY RECAP: Available Thursdays @ 5 AM Eastern GoodDayHealthShow.com Thursday, April 24 -  Dr. Jack Stockwell (www.forbiddendoctor.com & www.jackstockwell.com | Phone: 866-867-5070), a GAPS Practitioner and NUCCA Chiropractor, starts this episode with by addressing a common product on which he receives questions from patients and listeners — energy bars. Many add energy bars and protein bars in an effort to clean up their diet, with row after row of energy bars at health food stores. Here's the thing . . . they're not natural (even when listed as “natural,” and are essentially candy bars made from waste products. Dr. Jack breaks down the ingredients of the most popular energy bars and why they aren't as healthy as you think. Examples of such include the Boulder Bar, Source Bar, Power Bar, Cliff Bars, BioZone Bars, Atkins Advantage Bar (though it's the lowest amount of sugar), BioZone Bar, Balance Bars, and more. Many of these energy bars include excess sugar, sodium, canola oil, ultra-processed ingredients, and soy products, which Dr. Jack advices everyone should stay away from — but, especially men, as it raises estrogen levels. Are any energy bars OK? Well . . . Kind Bar is still processed and sugary, but it's loaded with nuts and is a more doable option should you need to eat a bar. Even Dr. Jack will eat a Kind bar when it's passed out on an airplane. Then, Doug and Dr. Jack discuss the latest work from RFK Jr, why more children and teens are struggling with anxiety and depression, and safety studies for vaccines. Website: GoodDayHealthrShow.com Social Media: @GoodDayNetworks

Tijdens onze vijftigste (!) aflevering hebben we sportwetenschapper en toploper Bas van Hooren te gast. Bas is een expert op het gebied van loopbiomechanica, en we praten met hem over zijn onderzoeken naar blessurepreventie, looptechniek en loopefficiëntie. Wat kun je aan je looptechniek veranderen om blessures te voorkomen of te verminderen? Is er een ideale stapfrequentie, en wat gebeurt er als je die verhoogt of verlaagt? We bespreken onder andere achillespees-, scheenbeen- en knieklachten, maar ook hoe Bas zijn wetenschappelijke inzichten toepast in zijn eigen trainingsprogramma. Met succes: onlangs liep hij de halve marathon van Barcelona in 1 uur en 2 minuten, tevens de limiet voor de EK Atletiek op de weg. Verder hebben Susan en Imo het over een écht rondje lopen in plaats van een heen-en-weertje, over hardlopen in een dierentuin en blikken we vooruit op de EK Indoor Atletiek in eigen land. Veel luisterplezier!    Presentatie: Imo Muller Vaste co-host: Susan Krumins  Gast: Bas van Hooren    Shownotes:    Onderzoek van Bas van Hooren:  http://www.basvanhooren.com/ https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bas-Hooren    Hardlopen door een dierentuin, Bere goeie Run:   https://hardloopnetwerk.nl/bere-goeie-run-2025/    Gelletje nodig voor je marathon nodig? PowerBar gelletjes met 10% korting bij Runbites met de code POWERBAR10 op:  https://www.runbites.nl/collections/powerbar    Voorspel het aantal Nederlandse medailles:  https://www.instagram.com/naardevaantjes_podcast/    Programma EK Indoor Atletiek  https://hardloopnetwerk.nl/ek-indoor-2025/ 

Send us a textIn this episode we talk with Laura King about:Balancing career, life and motherhoodThe evolution of her nutrition strategiesTheories on overcoming her GI distressWhat's next for LauraLaura King is a dynamic professional, whose journey seamlessly integrates her passions for endurance sports, marketing, and community building. Her athletic career began in competitive swimming, eventually leading her to triathlons, where she competed for over a decade, including participation in the Ironman World Championships.Transitioning from triathlons, Laura discovered an affinity for cycling, particularly in gravel and mountain biking disciplines. Her dedication in these areas have been evident through her participation at gravel events around the world, including UCI Elite Gravel World Championships.In the professional realm, Laura has 16 years of experience in sales and marketing at companies like Powerbar and GU Energy Labs, where she leveraged her athletic insights to drive brand growth.Demonstrating her entrepreneurial spirit, Laura co-founded and co-directed the Rooted Vermont Gravel race, an event that emphasized community engagement and inclusivity in the cycling world.Through her social media platform and work to expand cycling participation, Laura has used her voice to advocate for the representation of women in the sport of cycling. She has been outspoken about the ability for women to simultaneously have children while continuing to pursue their passions. Throughout her pregnancy, Laura was able to ride over 7,000 miles, which enabled her to maintain what fuels her spirit. She is passionate about highlighting the positives of a life with children and the ability for it to exist in harmony with one's own endeavors. Currently, Laura serves as a brand ambassador to a number of brands in the outdoor industry, is a board member for the Gravel Cycling Hall of Fame and runs marketing for Paradis Sport.Please note that this podcast is created strictly for educational purposes and should never be used for medical diagnosis and treatment.Connect w/ Laura: IG: www.instagram.com/lauracameronkingGravel Kings PodcastMentioned:Untapped Maple: https://amzn.to/4124qes:GU: https://amzn.to/4i1vFN4NR Episode #39 wi/ Ted KingNR Episode #18 w/ Jess CeraMORE NR New customers save 10% off all products on our website with the code NEWPOD10 If you would like to work with our practitioners, click here: https://nutritional-revolution.com/work-with-us/ Save 20% on all supplements at our trusted online source: https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/kchannell Join Nutritional Revolution's The Feed Club to get $20 off right away with an additional $20 Feed credit drop every 90 days.: https://thefeed.com/teams/nutritional-revolution If you're interested in sponsoring Nutritional Revolution Podcast, shoot us an email at nutritionalrev@gmail.com.

Dr. Allison House and Shawn Zajas explore the evolution of branding in dentistry, moving beyond traditional visual elements like logos to focus on authentic storytelling and human connection. They discuss how modern branding requires dentists to align their practice with their true identity rather than performing to market expectations. Using examples from consumer brands like Power Bar versus Cliff Bar, they illustrate how authentic storytelling builds trust and attracts the right patients. The conversation emphasizes that successful dental branding isn't about following trends or implementing systems, but rather about clearly communicating who you are and building genuine connections with patients who resonate with your approach.

Unser Partner Scalable Capital ist der einzige Broker, den du brauchst. Inklusive Trading-Flatrate, Zinsen und Portfolio-Analysen. Alle weiteren Infos gibt's hier: scalable.capital/oaws. Aktien + Whatsapp = Hier anmelden. Lieber als Newsletter? Geht auch. Das Buch zum Podcast? Jetzt lesen. NVIDIA macht schlechte Stimmung. Vielleicht wegen Alibaba. Ansonsten gibt's Zahlen von ASML, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla & T-Mobile. Außerdem freuen Daimler Truck die Zahlen von Volvo. Achja: Trump macht eigene Finanzprodukte & Tschechien will Bitcoin bei Zentralbank. Make America Healthy Again. Abnehmspritzen. Fitness-Boom. All das beflügelt Powerbar und damit auch die Aktie von Bellring (WKN: A3DGED). Geldwaschen ist verboten. Das Krypto-Geldwäsche-Tool Tornado Cash zu sanktionieren, ist es scheinbar auch. Was heißt das für den Coin? Diesen Podcast vom 30.01.2025, 3:00 Uhr stellt dir die Podstars GmbH (Noah Leidinger) zur Verfügung.

Sortimentsstrategien für Marktplätze wie Amazon, OTTO und Co. sind ein absolutes Hot Topic im Marketplace Kosmos. Nachdem viele Brands in der ersten Phase des Marktplatz-Booms darauf setzten, durch die Listung des Vollsortiments eine hohe Sichtbarkeit und viele Sales zu erzielen, folgte in der zweiten Phase ein Fokus auf Produktqualität, Content-Strategien und vor allem Advertising. Nun finden sich Hersteller und Marken in einem enormen Wettbewerb mit qualitativ hochwertigen Angeboten von Händlern und Konkurrenzmarken wieder. Werbeplätze sind stark umkämpft, sodass Advertising-Maßnahmen zunehmend teurer werden. In dieser Episode erklären Moritz Meyer und Florian Vette, inwiefern eine passende Sortimentsstrategie der Schlüssel zu einem nachhaltigen und profitablen Marktplatz-Geschäft sein kann. Warum brauchen Marken eine Sortimentsstrategie? Welche Artikel sollten im Fokus stehen und wie wichtig sind Marketplace-Only Produkte? Unsere Hosts teilen Tipps und spannende Best Practices von Fun Factory, Trixie, Bama und Powerbar. Themen: Produktauswahl, Market Shares, Marketing, Advertising, Profitabilität, Marge, Vendor Konditionen, Jahresverhandlung, Amazon Seller, Hybrid-Modell, AVS, WKZ, Chargebacks, Logistik, Preisstabilität, Retailer, Sortimentsfokus, Marketplace-Only Produkte, Bundles, Gebinde, Produkt-Sets, Produkteinführung, Internationalisierung, Saisonalität

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In this episode, Tom Oliver shares his career journey that began as an 'Army brat,' his aspirations to attend the Air Force Academy, and how he navigated challenges during his military service, including life-threatening situations while flying. After transitioning to the corporate world, Tom excelled in turnaround and crisis management roles at companies like General Foods, Nabisco, and Dole Food Company, showcasing his ability to streamline processes and improve performance metrics. Later, Tom ventured into entrepreneurship, founding a successful medical device company. Throughout his career, Tom emphasizes the importance of mentoring, developing people, and the simple but powerful principle of 'try.'   Episode Highlights: 10:19 Flying Career and Near-Death Experiences 14:31 Transition to the Pentagon 17:01 From Military to Corporate: The Big Shift 27:05 Addressing CEO Burnout 28:06 Revitalizing Dole Food Company 32:36 Innovative Solutions for Workforce Management 37:10 From Corporate to Entrepreneurship 37:41 The Power of Trying   Tom Oliver is a seasoned leader specializing in business turnarounds, change management, and strategy execution. As CEO of CoolSystems, he transformed a struggling startup into a leading medical device company, growing revenues to $19M despite significant challenges. His career highlights include leading PowerBar's $415M acquisition by Nestlé, saving Dole Food Company $131M through global productivity initiatives, and driving a 97% revenue increase at Dolefil. Known for his ability to rebuild companies from the ground up, Tom's focus on innovation, strategic growth, and culture-building consistently delivers extraordinary results across industries.   How to connect with Tom: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasoliver/   For more insights: Follow me on my YouTube Channel: https://bit.ly/47GgMdn  Sign up for my Weekly Newsletter:  https://bit.ly/3T09kVc Sign up for my LinkedIn Newsletter: https://bit.ly/49SmRV3 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In dieser Folge tauchen Florian Vette und Ole Schleth tief in die Welt der Amazon-Software ROPT ein und zeigen, wie Marken wie Powerbar von ihrem Einsatz profitieren. ROPT bietet Unternehmen datenbasierte Lösungen, um operative Herausforderungen effizient zu bewältigen – von der Zeitersparnis bis hin zur Umsatzsteigerung. Unsere Hosts teilen praxisnahe Einblicke in Themen wie die Steuerung mehrerer Marktplätze, das Identifizieren von Verkaufsgewinnern und -verlierern sowie die Analyse von Werbekampagnen. Wie lassen sich unterschiedliche Marktplätze optimal vergleichen? Und wie hilft ROPT dabei, länderübergreifende Trends und saisonale Schwankungen frühzeitig zu erkennen? Ein besonderes Augenmerk liegt auf der Analyse von KPIs wie ACoS und Kosten pro Produkt. Erfahre, wie ROPT dabei unterstützt, Kampagnenmanagement effizienter zu gestalten und Performance-Anomalien schnell sichtbar macht. Zudem sprechen Florian und Ole über die Content-Monitoring-Funktionen der Amazon-BI, die Änderungen an Produktbeschreibungen, Bildern und der Buybox überwachen. Du möchtest keine Folge verpassen, hast noch Fragen oder willst gerne Kontakt zu uns aufnehmen? Dann folge oder schreibe unseren Hosts Florian Vette und Moritz Meyer ganz einfach bei LinkedIn. Weitere Informationen zum Thema Amazon & Online-Marktplätze findest du auf unserem MOVESELL Blog oder in unserer YouTube Academy.

Send us a Text Message.How does a food scientist transform her love for running and music into a thriving business? Discover the answer as Jennifer Maxwell, co-founder of Power Bar and creator of Jam Bar, takes us through her fascinating journey. From her origins in the energy bar industry with her late husband to the innovative creation of Jam Bar, Jennifer shares her expertise in food science and nutrition. Learn about the natural ingredients that make Jam Bar stand out, like maple syrup, grape sugar, honey, and dates, and why organic matters for both personal health and the planet.Jennifer opens up about the influence of her family and passions on her career. Hear touching stories about her children's musical talents and her own achievements in running, including marathons and trail running. Reflecting on the loss of her husband, an Olympic marathon runner, Jennifer discusses how his passing impacted her competitive spirit and fueled her dedication to promoting music and athletics in the community. Get an insider's view on the latest developments at Jam Bar, including new product launches and their commitment to philanthropy.Join us as we explore the meticulous world of food science and nutrition through Jennifer's eyes. Understand the challenges and rewards of creating healthy, delicious, and shelf-stable products. Uncover the secrets behind achieving a one-year shelf life for Jam Bar without preservatives, and the creative process of developing new flavors. We wrap up this inspiring episode with a call to action—stay connected, follow, share, and rate our podcast, and reach out if you're looking for a coach. Don't miss out on Jennifer's inspiring story and the innovative work she's doing with Jam Bar.Here's a link to listen to Jenny playing in a band.https://www.reverbnation.com/goodkarma8 You can reach out to us at:https://coffeycrewcoaching.comemail: Carla@coffeycrewcoaching.com FB @ Over the Next Hill Fitness GroupIG @coffeycrewcoaching.comand Buy Me a Coffeehttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/Carlauhttps://hydra-patch.com/discount/OTNH10https://rnwy.life code: OTNH15https://jambar.com code: CARLA20

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In dieser Episode des Infinite Talk Podcasts geht es um Sports Nutrition für maximale Leistung bei den adidas TERREX INFINITE TRAILS. Wir diskutieren die Anpassung von Kohlenhydratmengen, die Bedeutung der Flüssigkeitsaufnahme und die neuen Black Line-Produkte von Powerbar für Athleten. Die individuelle Ernährungsanpassung sind der Schlüssel für Spitzenleistungen im Sport. Bleibt dran für weitere spannende Themen zur Ernährung und Leistung!

Discover how to optimize your diet and hydration for peak running performance and recovery, as the RunRX coaches share insights from their own experiences and the latest sports nutrition research.Timestamps of big takeaways[0:22] What to Eat Before and After a Run- Coach Caroline introduces the topic of what to eat before and after a run for optimal performance and recovery[02:05] Individual Nutrition Needs- Coach Valerie emphasizes that nutrition needs are highly individual past the basic elements of running form- The coaches discuss their experiences trying different nutrition approaches like carbo-loading, paleo, and keto for running performance rather than weight loss- Coach Caroline shares how different runners have varying results with pre-run foods [05:47] Testing What Works for You- The coaches advise testing and retesting to see what nutrition approach works best for each runner- Most people have enough stored energy for runs under a half marathon without extra fueling- Loading up on hydration, protein or carbs right before running often leads to problems[08:47] Changes in Sports Nutrition Knowledge- Coach Valerie reflects on the evolution of exercise physiology and sports nutrition understanding since the 1990s- The coaches discuss the introduction of engineered sports nutrition products like the PowerBar and share a professor's recommendation to eat Snickers instead for a more balanced fuel source[11:32] Fueling Differences Between Road and Trail Running- Coach Caroline shares her experience with different fueling options and the needs in trail running vs road running- Coach Valerie shares her experience testing a fat-adapted low-carb approach vs. a high-carb approach during a 50k trail race[16:34] Wrapping Up with Our Key Takeaways- Finding the foods that make you feel your best while running and being consistent with them in training and racing is key- The coaches can provide guidance on fueling, hydration and weight management as part of the holistic RunRx coaching approach, but we do not prescribe specific dietsRate, Review & Subscribe ReminderDon't forget to like and subscribe to our show. You can also rate and review our show on Apple Podcasts! We're on Spotify as well!Links to check out-- https://www.runrx.fit/-- FREE 30 day reboot on YouTube by RunRX https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDPcF8ZrDdILC8bYyn2zR-4xvqKRzp2re-- Follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/runrxfit/ and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/runrx/ -- Have questions? Email us at support@runrx.fit-- Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RunRX

I've said it once and I'll say it again…it's crazy how the number one brand in the entire convenient nutrition category (e.g. Premier Protein) can still have so much untapped organic growth opportunity! BellRing Brands (NYSE: BRBR) is a portfolio that owns a collection of convenient nutrition brands like Premier Protein, Dymatize Nutrition, Powerbar, and Joint Juice, which was previously wholly-owned by Post Holdings. A fast-paced and busy lifestyle is pushing consumers to switch to quick and healthy meal options. This has resulted in above average categorical growth rates and increased household penetration of RTD protein shakes that promote active lifestyles. Bellring Brands had a strong Q4 with net sales reaching $472.6 million, which was up 24.6% YoY. Premier Protein (~83% of BellRing Brands total revenue) grew 30.2% YoY, which came from mostly volume increases. Dymatize Nutrition was down just under 1% YoY stemming from a slight volume decrease. Moreover, I provide two deep dives into the functional CPG portfolio's "hero SKU families" of Premier Protein RTD protein shakes and Dymatize protein powders. In this quarter, BellRing Brands leadership decided to discontinue the operations of PowerBar in the North American market, but the company will continue offering the brand internationally. Finally, I explain several different growth opportunities that are untapped at Premier Protein. These include how operational improvements will create more revenue and my predictions that Premier Protein will start to diversify both its highly concentrated domestic sales channel mix (e.g. convenience stores) and geographical revenue mix. FOLLOW ME ON MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS LINKEDIN - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaschallmba⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ YOUTUBE - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.youtube.com/c/joshuaschall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TWITTER - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/joshua_schall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INSTAGRAM - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/joshua_schall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ FACEBOOK - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/jschallconsulting⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/joshua-schall/support

Amir Szekely, Owner at CloudSnorkel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he got his start in the early days of cloud and his solo project, CloudSnorkel. Throughout this conversation, Corey and Amir discuss the importance of being pragmatic when moving to the cloud, and the different approaches they see in developers from the early days of cloud to now. Amir shares what motivates him to develop open-source projects, and why he finds fulfillment in fixing bugs and operating CloudSnorkel as a one-man show. About AmirAmir Szekely is a cloud consultant specializing in deployment automation, AWS CDK, CloudFormation, and CI/CD. His background includes security, virtualization, and Windows development. Amir enjoys creating open-source projects like cdk-github-runners, cdk-turbo-layers, and NSIS.Links Referenced: CloudSnorkel: https://cloudsnorkel.com/ lasttootinaws.com: https://lasttootinaws.com camelcamelcamel.com: https://camelcamelcamel.com github.com/cloudsnorkel: https://github.com/cloudsnorkel Personal website: https://kichik.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, and this is an episode that I have been angling for for longer than you might imagine. My guest today is Amir Szekely, who's the owner at CloudSnorkel. Amir, thank you for joining me.Amir: Thanks for having me, Corey. I love being here.Corey: So, I've been using one of your open-source projects for an embarrassingly long amount of time, and for the longest time, I make the critical mistake of referring to the project itself as CloudSnorkel because that's the word that shows up in the GitHub project that I can actually see that jumps out at me. The actual name of the project within your org is cdk-github-runners if I'm not mistaken.Amir: That's real original, right?Corey: Exactly. It's like, “Oh, good, I'll just mention that, and suddenly everyone will know what I'm talking about.” But ignoring the problems of naming things well, which is a pain that everyone at AWS or who uses it knows far too well, the product is basically magic. Before I wind up basically embarrassing myself by doing a poor job of explaining what it is, how do you think about it?Amir: Well, I mean, it's a pretty simple project, which I think what makes it great as well. It creates GitHub runners with CDK. That's about it. It's in the name, and it just does that. And I really tried to make it as simple as possible and kind of learn from other projects that I've seen that are similar, and basically learn from my pain points in them.I think the reason I started is because I actually deployed CDK runners—sorry, GitHub runners—for one company, and I ended up using the Kubernetes one, right? So, GitHub in themselves, they have two projects they recommend—and not to nudge GitHub, please recommend my project one day as well—they have the Kubernetes controller and they have the Terraform deployer. And the specific client that I worked for, they wanted to use Kubernetes. And I tried to deploy it, and, Corey, I swear, I worked three days; three days to deploy the thing, which was crazy to me. And every single step of the way, I had to go and read some documentation, figure out what I did wrong, and apparently the order the documentation was was incorrect.And I had to—I even opened tickets, and they—you know, they were rightfully like, “It's open-source project. Please contribute and fix the documentation for us.” At that point, I said, “Nah.” [laugh]. Let me create something better with CDK and I decided just to have the simplest setup possible.So usually, right, what you end up doing in these projects, you have to set up either secrets or SSM parameters, and you have to prepare the ground and you have to get your GitHub token and all those things. And that's just annoying. So, I decided to create a—Corey: So much busy work.Amir: Yes, yeah, so much busy work and so much boilerplate and so much figuring out the right way and the right order, and just annoying. So, I decided to create a setup page. I thought, “What if you can actually install it just like you install any app on GitHub,” which is the way it's supposed to be right? So, when you install cdk-github-runners—CloudSnorkel—you get an HTML page and you just click a few buttons and you tell it where to install it and it just installs it for you. And it sets the secrets and everything. And if you want to change the secret, you don't have to redeploy. You can just change the secret, right? You have to roll the token over or whatever. So, it's much, much easier to install.Corey: And I feel like I discovered this project through one of the more surreal approaches—and I had cause to revisit it a few weeks ago when I was redoing my talk for the CDK Community Day, which has since happened and people liked the talk—and I mentioned what CloudSnorkel had been doing and how I was using the runners accordingly. So, that was what I accidentally caused me to pop back up with, “Hey, I've got some issues here.” But we'll get to that. Because once upon a time, I built a Twitter client for creating threads because shitposting is my love language, I would sit and create Twitter threads in the middle of live keynote talks. Threading in the native client was always terrible, and I wanted to build something that would help me do that. So, I did.And it was up for a while. It's not anymore because I'm not paying $42,000 a month in API costs to some jackass, but it still exists in the form of lasttootinaws.com if you want to create threads on Mastodon. But after I put this out, some people complained that it was slow.To which my response was, “What do you mean? It's super fast for me in San Francisco talking to it hosted in Oregon.” But on every round trip from halfway around the world, it became a problem. So, I got it into my head that since this thing was fully stateless, other than a Lambda function being fronted via an API Gateway, that I should deploy it to every region. It didn't quite fit into a Cloudflare Worker or into one of the Edge Lambda functions that AWS has given up on, but okay, how do I deploy something to every region?And the answer is, with great difficulty because it's clear that no one was ever imagining with all those regions that anyone would use all of them. It's imagined that most customers use two or three, but customers are different, so which two or three is going to be widely varied. So, anything halfway sensible about doing deployments like this didn't work out. Again, because this thing was also a Lambda function and an API Gateway, it was dirt cheap, so I didn't really want to start spending stupid amounts of money doing deployment infrastructure and the rest.So okay, how do I do this? Well, GitHub Actions is awesome. It is basically what all of AWS's code offerings wish that they were. CodeBuild is sad and this was kind of great. The problem is, once you're out of the free tier, and if you're a bad developer where you do a deploy on every iteration, suddenly it starts costing for what I was doing in every region, something like a quarter of per deploy, which adds up when you're really, really bad at programming.Amir: [laugh].Corey: So, their matrix jobs are awesome, but I wanted to do some self-hosted runners. How do I do that? And I want to keep it cheap, so how do I do a self-hosted runner inside of a Lambda function? Which led me directly to you. And it was nothing short of astonishing. This was a few years ago. I seem to recall that it used to be a bit less well-architected in terms of its elegance. Did it always use step functions, for example, to wind up orchestrating these things?Amir: Yeah, so I do remember that day. We met pretty much… basically as a joke because the Lambda Runner was a joke that I did, and I posted on Twitter, and I was half-proud of my joke that starts in ten seconds, right? But yeah, no, the—I think it always used functions. I've been kind of in love with the functions for the past two years. They just—they're nice.Corey: Oh, they're magic, and AWS is so bad at telling their story. Both of those things are true.Amir: Yeah. And the API is not amazing. But like, when you get it working—and you know, you have to spend some time to get it working—it's really nice because then you have nothing to manage, ever. And they can call APIs directly now, so you don't have to even create Lambdas. It's pretty cool.Corey: And what I loved is you wind up deploying this thing to whatever account you want it to live within. What is it, the OIDC? I always get those letters in the wrong direction. OIDC, I think, is correct.Amir: I think it's OIDC, yeah.Corey: Yeah, and it winds up doing this through a secure method as opposed to just okay, now anyone with access to the project can deploy into your account, which is not ideal. And it just works. It spins up a whole bunch of these Lambda functions that are using a Docker image as the deployment environment. And yeah, all right, if effectively my CDK deploy—which is what it's doing inside of this thing—doesn't complete within 15 minutes, then it's not going to and the thing is going to break out. We've solved the halting problem. After 15 minutes, the loop will terminate. The end.But that's never been a problem, even with getting ACM certificates spun up. It completes well within that time limit. And its cost to me is effectively nothing. With one key exception: that you made the choice to use Secrets Manager to wind up storing a lot of the things it cares about instead of Parameter Store, so I think you wind up costing me—I think there's two of those different secrets, so that's 80 cents a month. Which I will be demanding in blood one of these days if I ever catch you at re:Invent.Amir: I'll buy you beer [laugh].Corey: There we go. That'll count. That'll buy, like, several months of that. That works—at re:Invent, no. The beers there are, like, $18, so that'll cover me for years. We're set.Amir: We'll split it [laugh].Corey: Exactly. Problem solved. But I like the elegance of it, I like how clever it is, and I want to be very clear, though, it's not just for shitposting. Because it's very configurable where, yes, you can use Lambda functions, you can use Spot Instances, you can use CodeBuild containers, you can use Fargate containers, you can use EC2 instances, and it just automatically orchestrates and adds these self-hosted runners to your account, and every build gets a pristine environment as a result. That is no small thing.Amir: Oh, and I love making things configurable. People really appreciate it I feel, you know, and gives people kind of a sense of power. But as long as you make that configuration simple enough, right, or at least the defaults good defaults, right, then, even with that power, people still don't shoot themselves in the foot and it still works really well. By the way, we just added ECS recently, which people really were asking for because it gives you the, kind of, easy option to have the runner—well, not the runner but at least the runner infrastructure staying up, right? So, you can have auto-scaling group backing ECS and then the runner can start up a lot faster. It was actually very important to other people because Lambda, as fast that it is, it's limited, and Fargate, for whatever reason, still to this day, takes a minute to start up.Corey: Yeah. What's wild to me about this is, start to finish, I hit a deploy to the main branch and it sparks the thing up, runs the deploy. Deploy itself takes a little over two minutes. And every time I do this, within three minutes of me pushing to commit, the deploy is done globally. It is lightning fast.And I know it's easy to lose yourself in the idea of this being a giant shitpost, where, oh, who's going to do deployment jobs in Lambda functions? Well, kind of a lot of us for a variety of reasons, some of which might be better than others. In my case, it was just because I was cheap, but the massive parallelization ability to do 20 simultaneous deploys in a matrix configuration that doesn't wind up smacking into rate limits everywhere, that was kind of great.Amir: Yeah, we have seen people use Lambda a lot. It's mostly for, yeah, like you said, small jobs. And the environment that they give you, it's kind of limited, so you can't actually install packages, right? There is no sudo, and you can't actually install anything unless it's in your temp directory. But still, like, just being able to run a lot of little jobs, it's really great. Yeah.Corey: And you can also make sure that there's a Docker image ready to go with the stuff that you need, just by configuring how the build works in the CDK. I will admit, I did have a couple of bug reports for you. One was kind of useful, where it was not at all clear how to do this on top of a Graviton-based Lambda function—because yeah, that was back when not everything really supported ARM architectures super well—and a couple of other times when the documentation was fairly ambiguous from my perspective, where it wasn't at all clear, what was I doing? I spent four hours trying to beat my way through it, I give up, filed an issue, went to get a cup of coffee, came back, and the answer was sitting there waiting for me because I'm not convinced you sleep.Amir: Well, I am a vampire. My last name is from the Transylvania area [laugh]. So—Corey: Excellent. Excellent.Amir: By the way, not the first time people tell me that. But anyway [laugh].Corey: There's something to be said for getting immediate responsiveness because one of the reasons I'm always so loath to go and do a support ticket anywhere is this is going to take weeks. And then someone's going to come back with a, “I don't get it.” And try and, like, read the support portfolio to you. No, you went right into yeah, it's this. Fix it and your problem goes away. And sure enough, it did.Amir: The escalation process that some companies put you through is very frustrating. I mean, lucky for you, CloudSnorkel is a one-man show and this man loves solving bugs. So [laugh].Corey: Yeah. Do you know of anyone using it for anything that isn't ridiculous and trivial like what I'm using it for?Amir: Yeah, I have to think whether or not I can… I mean, so—okay. We have a bunch of dedicated users, right, the GitHub repo, that keep posting bugs and keep posting even patches, right, so you can tell that they're using it. I even have one sponsor, one recurring sponsor on GitHub that uses it.Corey: It's always nice when people thank you via money.Amir: Yeah. Yeah, it is very validating. I think [BLEEP] is using it, but I also don't think I can actually say it because I got it from the GitHub.Corey: It's always fun. That's the beautiful part about open-source. You don't know who's using this. You see what other things people are working on, and you never know, is one of their—is this someone's side project, is it a skunkworks thing, or God forbid, is this inside of every car going forward and no one bothered to tell me about that. That is the magic and mystery of open-source. And you've been doing open-source for longer than I have and I thought I was old. You were originally named in some of the WinAMP credits, for God's sake, that media player that really whipped the llama's ass.Amir: Oh, yeah, I started real early. I started about when I was 15, I think. I started off with Pascal or something or even Perl, and then I decided I have to learn C and I have to learn Windows API. I don't know what possessed me to do that. Win32 API is… unique [laugh].But once I created those applications for myself, right, I think there was—oh my God, do you know the—what is it called, Sherlock in macOS, right? And these days, for PowerToys, there is the equivalent of it called, I don't know, whatever that—PowerBar? That's exactly—that was that. That's a project I created as a kid. I wanted something where I can go to the Run menu of Windows when you hit Winkey R, and you can just type something and it will start it up, right?I didn't want to go to the Start menu and browse and click things. I wanted to do everything with the keyboard. So, I created something called Blazerun [laugh], which [laugh] helped you really easily create shortcuts that went into your path, right, the Windows path, so you can really easily start them from Winkey R. I don't think that anyone besides me used it, but anyway, that thing needed an installer, right? Because Windows, you got to install things. So, I ended up—Corey: Yeah, these days on Mac OS, I use Alfred for that which is kind of long in the tooth, but there's a launch bar and a bunch of other stuff for it. What I love is that if I—I can double-tap the command key and that just pops up whatever I need it to and tell the computer what to do. It feels like there's an AI play in there somewhere if people can figure out how to spend ten minutes on building AI that does something other than lets them fire their customer service staff.Amir: Oh, my God. Please don't fire customer service staff. AI is so bad.Corey: Yeah, when I reach out to talk to a human, I really needed a human.Amir: Yes. Like, I'm not calling you because I want to talk to a robot. I know there's a website. Leave me alone, just give me a person.Corey: Yeah. Like, you already failed to solve my problem on your website. It's person time.Amir: Exactly. Oh, my God. Anyway [laugh]. So, I had to create an installer, right, and I found it was called NSIS. So, it was a Nullsoft “SuperPiMP” installation system. Or in the future, when Justin, the guy who created Winamp and NSIS, tried to tone down a little bit, Nullsoft Scriptable Installation System. And SuperPiMP is—this is such useless history for you, right, but SuperPiMP is the next generation of PiMP which is Plug-in Mini Packager [laugh].Corey: I remember so many of the—like, these days, no one would ever name any project like that, just because it's so off-putting to people with sensibilities, but back then that was half the stuff that came out. “Oh, you don't like how this thing I built for free in the wee hours when I wasn't working at my fast food job wound up—you know, like, how I chose to name it, well, that's okay. Don't use it. Go build your own. Oh, what you're using it anyway. That's what I thought.”Amir: Yeah. The source code was filled with profanity, too. And like, I didn't care, I really did not care, but some people would complain and open bug reports and patches. And my policy was kind of like, okay if you're complaining, I'm just going to ignore you. If you're opening a patch, fine, I'm going to accept that you're—you guys want to create something that's sensible for everybody, sure.I mean, it's just source code, you know? Whatever. So yeah, I started working on that NSIS. I used it for myself and I joined the forums—and this kind of answers to your question of why I respond to things so fast, just because of the fun—I did the same when I was 15, right? I started going on the forums, you remember forums? You remember that [laugh]?Corey: Oh, yeah, back before they all became terrible and monetized.Amir: Oh, yeah. So, you know, people were using NSIS, too, and they had requests, right? They wanted. Back in the day—what was it—there was only support for 16-bit colors for the icon, so they want 32-bit colors and big colors—32—big icon, sorry, 32 pixels by 32 pixels. Remember, 32 pixels?Corey: Oh, yes. Not well, and not happily, but I remember it.Amir: Yeah. So, I started just, you know, giving people—working on that open-source and creating up a fork. It wasn't even called ‘fork' back then, but yeah, I created, like, a little fork of myself and I started adding all these features. And people were really happy, and kind of created, like, this happy cycle for myself: when people were happy, I was happy coding. And then people were happy by what I was coding. And then they were asking for more and they were getting happier, the more I responded.So, it was kind of like a serotonin cycle that made me happy and made everybody happy. So, it's like a win, win, win, win, win. And that's how I started with open-source. And eventually… NSIS—again, that installation system—got so big, like, my fork got so big, and Justin, the guy who works on WinAMP and NSIS, he had other things to deal with. You know, there's a whole history there with AOL. I'm sure you've heard all the funny stories.Corey: Oh, yes. In fact, one thing that—you want to talk about weird collisions of things crossing, one of the things I picked up from your bio when you finally got tired of telling me no and agreed to be on the show was that you're also one of the team who works on camelcamelcamel.com. And I keep forgetting that's one of those things that most people have no idea exists. But it's very simple: all it does is it tracks Amazon products that you tell it to and alerts you when there's a price drop on the thing that you're looking at.It's something that is useful. I try and use it for things of substance or hobbies because I feel really pathetic when I'm like, get excited emails about a price drop in toilet paper. But you know, it's very handy just to keep an idea for price history, where okay, am I actually being ripped off? Oh, they claim it's their big Amazon Deals day and this is 40% off. Let's see what camelcamelcamel has to say.Oh, surprise. They just jacked the price right beforehand and now knocked 40% off. Genius. I love that. It always felt like something that was going to be blown off the radar by Amazon being displeased, but I discovered you folks in 2010 and here you are now, 13 years later, still here. I will say the website looks a lot better now.Amir: [laugh]. That's a recent change. I actually joined camel, maybe two or three years ago. I wasn't there from the beginning. But I knew the guy who created it—again, as you were saying—from the Winamp days, right? So, we were both working in the free—well, it wasn't freenode. It was not freenode. It was a separate IRC server that, again, Justin created for himself. It was called landoleet.Corey: Mmm. I never encountered that one.Amir: Yeah, no, it was pretty private. The only people that cared about WinAMP and NSIS ended up joining there. But it was a lot of fun. I met a lot of friends there. And yeah, I met Daniel Green there as well, and he's the guy that created, along with some other people in there that I think want to remain anonymous so I'm not going to mention, but they also were on the camel project.And yeah, I was kind of doing my poor version of shitposting on Twitter about AWS, kind of starting to get some traction and maybe some clients and talk about AWS so people can approach me, and Daniel approached me out of the blue and he was like, “Do you just post about AWS on Twitter or do you also do some AWS work?” I was like, “I do some AWS work.”Corey: Yes, as do all of us. It's one of those, well crap, we're getting called out now. “Do you actually know how any of this stuff works?” Like, “Much to my everlasting shame, yes. Why are you asking?”Amir: Oh, my God, no, I cannot fix your printer. Leave me alone.Corey: Mm-hm.Amir: I don't want to fix your Lambdas. No, but I do actually want to fix your Lambdas. And so, [laugh] he approached me and he asked if I can help them move camelcamelcamel from their data center to AWS. So, that was a nice big project. So, we moved, actually, all of camelcamelcamel into AWS. And this is how I found myself not only in the Winamp credits, but also in the camelcamelcamel credits page, which has a great picture of me riding a camel.Corey: Excellent. But one of the things I've always found has been that when you take an application that has been pre-existing for a while in a data center and then move it into the cloud, you suddenly have to care about things that no one sensible pays any attention to in the land of the data center. Because it's like, “What do I care about how much data passes between my application server and the database? Wait, what do you mean that in this configuration, that's a chargeable data transfer? Oh, dear Lord.” And things that you've never had to think about optimizing are suddenly things are very much optimizing.Because let's face it, when it comes to putting things in racks and then running servers, you aren't auto-scaling those things, so everything tends to be running over-provisioned, for very good reasons. It's an interesting education. Anything you picked out from that process that you think it'd be useful for folks to bear in mind if they're staring down the barrel of the same thing?Amir: Yeah, for sure. I think… in general, right, not just here. But in general, you always want to be pragmatic, right? You don't want to take steps are huge, right? So, the thing we did was not necessarily rewrite everything and change everything to AWS and move everything to Lambda and move everything to Docker.Basically, we did a mini lift-and-shift, but not exactly lift-and-shift, right? We didn't take it as is. We moved to RDS, we moved to ElastiCache, right, we obviously made use of security groups and session connect and we dropped SSH Sage and we improved the security a lot and we locked everything down, all the permissions and all that kind of stuff, right? But like you said, there's stuff that you start having to pay attention to. In our case, it was less the data transfer because we have a pretty good CDN. There was more of IOPS. So—and IOPS, specifically for a database.We had a huge database with about one terabyte of data and a lot of it is that price history that you see, right? So, all those nice little graphs that we create in—what do you call them, charts—that we create in camelcamelcamel off the price history. There's a lot of data behind that. And what we always want to do is actually remove that from MySQL, which has been kind of struggling with it even before the move to AWS, but after the move to AWS, where everything was no longer over-provisioned and we couldn't just buy a few more NVMes on Amazon for 100 bucks when they were on sale—back when we had to pay Amazon—Corey: And you know, when they're on sale. That's the best part.Amir: And we know [laugh]. We get good prices on NVMe. But yeah, on Amazon—on AWS, sorry—you have to pay for io1 or something, and that adds up real quick, as you were saying. So, part of that move was also to move to something that was a little better for that data structure. And we actually removed just that data, the price history, the price points from MySQL to DynamoDB, which was a pretty nice little project.Actually, I wrote about it in my blog. There is, kind of, lessons learned from moving one terabyte from MySQL to DynamoDB, and I think the biggest lesson was about hidden price of storage in DynamoDB. But before that, I want to talk about what you asked, which was the way that other people should make that move, right? So again, be pragmatic, right? If you Google, “How do I move stuff from DynamoDB to MySQL,” everybody's always talking about their cool project using Lambda and how you throttle Lambda and how you get throttled from DynamoDB and how you set it up with an SQS, and this and that. You don't need all that.Just fire up an EC2 instance, write some quick code to do it. I used, I think it was Go with some limiter code from Uber, and that was it. And you don't need all those Lambdas and SQS and the complication. That thing was a one-time thing anyway, so it doesn't need to be super… super-duper serverless, you know?Corey: That is almost always the way that it tends to play out. You encounter these weird little things along the way. And you see so many things that are tied to this is how architecture absolutely must be done. And oh you're not a real serverless person if you don't have everything running in Lambda and the rest. There are times where yeah, spin up an EC2 box, write some relatively inefficient code in ten minutes and just do the thing, and then turn it off when you're done. Problem solved. But there's such an aversion to that. It's nice to encounter people who are pragmatists more than they are zealots.Amir: I mostly learned that lesson. And both Daniel Green and me learned that lesson from the Winamp days. Because we both have written plugins for Winamp and we've been around that area and you can… if you took one of those non-pragmatist people, right, and you had them review the Winamp code right now—or even before—they would have a million things to say. That code was—and NSIS, too, by the way—and it was so optimized. It was so not necessarily readable, right? But it worked and it worked amazing. And Justin would—if you think I respond quickly, right, Justin Frankel, the guy who wrote Winamp, he would release versions of NSIS and of Winamp, like, four versions a day, right? That was before [laugh] you had CI/CD systems and GitHub and stuff. That was just CVS. You remember CVS [laugh]?Corey: Oh, I've done multiple CVS migrations. One to Git and a couple to Subversion.Amir: Oh yeah, Subversion. Yep. Done ‘em all. CVS to Subversion to Git. Yep. Yep. That was fun.Corey: And these days, everyone's using Git because it—we're beginning to have a monoculture.Amir: Yeah, yeah. I mean, but Git is nicer than Subversion, for me, at least. I've had more fun with it.Corey: Talk about damning with faint praise.Amir: Faint?Corey: Yeah, anything's better than Subversion, let's be honest here.Amir: Oh [laugh].Corey: I mean, realistically, copying a bunch of files and directories to a.bak folder is better than Subversion.Amir: Well—Corey: At least these days. But back then it was great.Amir: Yeah, I mean, the only thing you had, right [laugh]?Corey: [laugh].Amir: Anyway, achieving great things with not necessarily the right tools, but just sheer power of will, that's what I took from the Winamp days. Just the entire world used Winamp. And by the way, the NSIS project that I was working on, right, I always used to joke that every computer in the world ran my code, every Windows computer in the world when my code, just because—Corey: Yes.Amir: So, many different companies use NSIS. And none of them cared that the code was not very readable, to put it mildly.Corey: So, many companies founder on those shores where they lose sight of the fact that I can point to basically no companies that died because their code was terrible, yeah, had an awful lot that died with great-looking code, but they didn't nail the business problem.Amir: Yeah. I would be lying if I said that I nailed exactly the business problem at NSIS because the most of the time I would spend there and actually shrinking the stub, right, there was appended to your installer data, right? So, there's a little stub that came—the executable, basically, that came before your data that was extracted. I spent, I want to say, years of my life [laugh] just shrinking it down by bytes—by literal bytes—just so it stays under 34, 35 kilobytes. It was kind of a—it was a challenge and something that people appreciated, but not necessarily the thing that people appreciate the most. I think the features—Corey: Well, no I have to do the same thing to make sure something fits into a Lambda deployment package. The scale changes, the problem changes, but somehow everything sort of rhymes with history.Amir: Oh, yeah. I hope you don't have to disassemble code to do that, though because that's uh… I mean, it was fun. It was just a lot.Corey: I have to ask, how much work went into building your cdk-github-runners as far as getting it to a point of just working out the door? Because I look at that and it feels like there's—like, the early versions, yeah, there wasn't a whole bunch of code tied to it, but geez, the iterative, “How exactly does this ridiculous step functions API work or whatnot,” feels like I'm looking at weeks of frustration. At least it would have been for me.Amir: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it wasn't, like, a day or two. It was definitely not—but it was not years, either. I've been working on it I think about a year now. Don't quote me on that. But I've put a lot of time into it. So, you know, like you said, the skeleton code is pretty simple: it's a step function, which as we said, takes a long time to get right. The functions, they are really nice, but their definition language is not very straightforward. But beyond that, right, once that part worked, it worked. Then came all the bug reports and all the little corner cases, right? We—Corey: Hell is other people's use cases. Always is. But that's honestly better than a lot of folks wind up experiencing where they'll put an open-source project up and no one ever knows. So, getting users is often one of the biggest barriers to a lot of this stuff. I've found countless hidden gems lurking around on GitHub with a very particular search for something that no one had ever looked at before, as best I can tell.Amir: Yeah.Corey: Open-source is a tricky thing. There needs to be marketing brought into it, there needs to be storytelling around it, and has to actually—dare I say—solve a problem someone has.Amir: I mean, I have many open-source projects like that, that I find super useful, I created for myself, but no one knows. I think cdk-github-runners, I'm pretty sure people know about it only because you talked about it on Screaming in the Cloud or your newsletter. And by the way, thank you for telling me that you talked about it last week in the conference because now we know why there was a spike [laugh] all of a sudden. People Googled it.Corey: Yeah. I put links to it as well, but it's the, yeah, I use this a lot and it's great. I gave a crappy explanation on how it works, but that's the trick I've found between conference talks and, dare I say, podcast episodes, you gives people a glimpse and a hook and tell them where to go to learn more. Otherwise, you're trying to explain every nuance and every intricacy in 45 minutes. And you can't do that effectively in almost every case. All you're going to do is drive people away. Make it sound exciting, get them to see the value in it, and then let them go.Amir: You have to explain the market for it, right? That's it.Corey: Precisely.Amir: And I got to say, I somewhat disagree with your—or I have a different view when you say that, you know, open-source projects needs marketing and all those things. It depends on what open-source is for you, right? I don't create open-source projects so they are successful, right? It's obviously always nicer when they're successful, but—and I do get that cycle of happiness that, like I was saying, people create bugs and I have to fix them and stuff, right? But not every open-source project needs to be a success. Sometimes it's just fun.Corey: No. When I talk about marketing, I'm talking about exactly what we're doing here. I'm not talking take out an AdWords campaign or something horrifying like that. It's you build something that solved the problem for someone. The big problem that worries me about these things is how do you not lose sleep at night about the fact that solve someone's problem and they don't know that it exists?Because that drives me nuts. I've lost count of the number of times I've been beating my head against a wall and asked someone like, “How would you handle this?” Like, “Oh, well, what's wrong with this project?” “What do you mean?” “Well, this project seems to do exactly what you want it to do.” And no one has it all stuffed in their head. But yeah, then it seems like open-source becomes a little more corporatized and it becomes a lead gen tool for people to wind up selling their SaaS services or managed offerings or the rest.Amir: Yeah.Corey: And that feels like the increasing corporatization of open-source that I'm not a huge fan of.Amir: Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to lie, right? Like, part of why I created this—or I don't know if it was part of it, but like, I had a dream that, you know, I'm going to get, oh, tons of GitHub sponsors, and everybody's going to use it and I can retire on an island and just make money out of this, right? Like, that's always a dream, right? But it's a dream, you know?And I think bottom line open-source is… just a tool, and some people use it for, like you were saying, driving sales into their SaaS, some people, like, may use it just for fun, and some people use it for other things. Or some people use it for politics, even, right? There's a lot of politics around open-source.I got to tell you a story. Back in the NSIS days, right—talking about politics—so this is not even about politics of open-source. People made NSIS a battleground for their politics. We would have translations, right? People could upload their translations. And I, you know, or other people that worked on NSIS, right, we don't speak every language of the world, so there's only so much we can do about figuring out if it's a real translation, if it's good or not.Back in the day, Google Translate didn't exist. Like, these days, we check Google Translate, we kind of ask a few questions to make sure they make sense. But back in the day, we did the best that we could. At some point, we got a patch for Catalan language, I'm probably mispronouncing it—but the separatist people in Spain, I think, and I didn't know anything about that. I was a young kid and… I just didn't know.And I just included it, you know? Someone submitted a patch, they worked hard, they wanted to be part of the open-source project. Why not? Sure I included it. And then a few weeks later, someone from Spain wanted to change Catalan into Spanish to make sure that doesn't exist for whatever reason.And then they just started fighting with each other and started making demands of me. Like, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to delete that, you have to change the name. And I was just so baffled by why would someone fight so much over a translation of an open-source project. Like, these days, I kind of get what they were getting at, right?Corey: But they were so bad at telling that story that it was just like, so basically, screw, “You for helping,” is how it comes across.Amir: Yeah, screw you for helping. You're a pawn now. Just—you're a pawn unwittingly. Just do what I say and help me in my political cause. I ended up just telling both of them if you guys can agree on anything, I'm just going to remove both translations. And that's what I ended up doing. I just removed both translations. And then a few months later—because we had a release every month basically, I just added both of them back and I've never heard from them again. So sort of problem solved. Peace the Middle East? I don't know.Corey: It's kind of wild just to see how often that sort of thing tends to happen. It's a, I don't necessarily understand why folks are so opposed to other people trying to help. I think they feel like there's this loss of control as things are slipping through their fingers, but it's a really unwelcoming approach. One of the things that got me deep into the open-source ecosystem surprisingly late in my development was when I started pitching in on the SaltStack project right after it was founded, where suddenly everything I threw their way was merged, and then Tom Hatch, the guy who founded the project, would immediately fix all the bugs and stuff I put in and then push something else immediately thereafter. But it was such a welcoming thing.Instead of nitpicking me to death in the pull request, it just got merged in and then silently fixed. And I thought that was a classy way to do it. Of course, it doesn't scale and of course, it causes other problems, but I envy the simplicity of those days and just the ethos behind that.Amir: That's something I've learned the last few years, I would say. Back in the NSIS day, I was not like that. I nitpicked. I nitpicked a lot. And I can guess why, but it just—you create a patch—in my mind, right, like you create a patch, you fix it, right?But these days I get, I've been on the other side as well, right? Like I created patches for open-source projects and I've seen them just wither away and die, and then five years later, someone's like, “Oh, can you fix this line to have one instead of two, and then I'll merge it.” I'm like, “I don't care anymore. It was five years ago. I don't work there anymore. I don't need it. If you want it, do it.”So, I get it these days. And these days, if someone creates a patch—just yesterday, someone created a patch to format cdk-github-runners in VS Code. And they did it just, like, a little bit wrong. So, I just fixed it for them and I approved it and pushed it. You know, it's much better. You don't need to bug people for most of it.Corey: You didn't yell at them for having the temerity to contribute?Amir: My voice is so raw because I've been yelling for five days at them, yeah.Corey: Exactly, exactly. I really want to thank you for taking the time to chat with me about how all this stuff came to be and your own path. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Amir: So, I really appreciate you having me and driving all this traffic to my projects. If people want to learn more, they can always go to cloudsnorkel.com; it has all the projects. github.com/cloudsnorkel has a few more. And then my private blog is kichik.com. So, K-I-C-H-I-K dot com. I don't post there as much as I should, but it has some interesting AWS projects from the past few years that I've done.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.Amir: Thank you, Corey. It was really nice meeting you.Corey: Amir Szekely, owner of CloudSnorkel. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment. Heck, put it on all of the podcast platforms with a step function state machine that you somehow can't quite figure out how the API works.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Jennifer Maxwell is best known as the co-founder of PowerBar with her late husband, Brian Maxwell. Not only did the couple found a hugely successful company, they created the energy bar sector. Before PowerBar, which launched in 1986, there were no energy bars. These days, Jennifer continues to reinvent in the energy bar space with the launch of JAMBAR. While Jennifer's passion for running certainly played into her interests in creating an energy bar company, her life as a runner started long before then. Jennifer has been running since she was a child, and running continues to be an important part of Jennifer's life and identity. Over these many years, the part running has played in Jennifer's life has morphed to suit her needs. And her needs have changed dramatically over the years. This is the story of how running has helped shape Jennifer's life and in turn how Jennifer has utilized this sport to navigate some of life's most difficult challenges. Her story is testament to the many ways we can weave running into our lives, and how truly remarkable the relationship to this sport can be. Keep Up with Jennifer Maxwell and JAMBAR Website: jambar.com Keep Up with The Masters of Running Podcast Instagram: @themastersofrunningpodcast Episode with Sue McDonald and Terry Howell: https://shows.acast.com/the-masters-of-running-podcast/episodes/sue-mcdonald-terry-howell Website: shows.acast.com/the-masters-of-running-podcast Keep up with The Planted Runner Instagram: @theplantedrunner Website: theplantedrunner.com Ways to Connect and Engage with Women's Running Stories Instagram: @womensrunningstories Twitter: @WomenRunStories Website: womensrunningstories.com Email host Cherie: clouiseturner@gmail.com Women's Running Stories is a member of the Evergreen network: https://evergreenpodcasts.com/

In this episode of Run with Fitpage, we have celebrated sports performance expert, Dr. David Bailey. Vikas and Dr. David talk about various aspects of training, hypoxic training, and a lot more. Holding a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Loughborough University, Dr. Bailey's research, delved into the impact of sports supplements on exercise recovery and training adaptation. With a Master of Science in Exercise Physiology and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Sports Science, both from esteemed institutions, Dr. Bailey boasts a remarkable educational background. With over two decades of experience in elite sports as a coach, sports scientist, performance manager, and nutritionist, Dr. David Bailey brings a wealth of expertise to the table. For the past decade, he has served as the Head of Performance at the Israel Premier Tech professional cycling team, leading multidisciplinary sports science teams to enhance athletic performance at the highest level. Dr. Bailey is also an esteemed advisor to sports nutrition and technology companies, contributing as a key opinion leader to global sports science consensus statements.Before his prominent role in cycling, Dr. Bailey held the position of Senior Research Scientist with Nestlé, where he directed global sports nutrition research for PowerBar. Prior to this, he served as a sports physiologist with the English Institute of Sport throughout three Olympic cycles, including the Athens, Beijing, and London Games. His support was instrumental for athletes competing in cycling, triathlon, and other endurance sports.In his leisure time, Dr. Bailey is an avid endurance athlete, enjoying both winter and summer sports in Switzerland, his place of residence.Know more about Dr. David Bailey through his website, www.davidbailey.chBlood tests recommended by Dr Bailey: https://www.personalabs.com/blog/periodic-blood-tests-are-important-for-athletes-heres-why/https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/post-and-pre-season-blood-tests-for-athletes/About the hostVikas hosts this weekly podcast and enjoys nerding over-exercise physiology, nutrition, and endurance sport in general.  He aims to get people to get out and 'move'.  When he is not working, he is found running, almost always.  He can be found on nearly all social media channels but Instagram is preferred:)Reach out to Vikas:Instagram: @vikas_singhhLinkedIn: Vikas SinghTwitter: @vikashsingh1010Download Fitpage App: fitpage.in/the-all-new-fitpage-app/Subscribe To Our Newsletter For Weekly Nuggets of Knowledge!

After another insanely positive quarterly performance, Premier Protein is now the number one brand in convenient nutrition, but it's a recent “under the radar” partnership announcement that has me thinking about a previous crazy prediction I made in early 2021. BellRing Brands (NYSE: BRBR) is a portfolio that owns a collection of convenient nutrition brands like Premier Protein, Dymatize Nutrition, Powerbar, and Joint Juice, which was previously wholly-owned by Post Holdings. A fast-paced and busy lifestyle is pushing consumers to switch to quick and healthy meal options. This has resulted in above average categorical growth rates and increased household penetration of RTD protein shakes that promote active lifestyles. Bellring Brands had a strong Q3 with net sales reaching $445.9 million, which was up 20.3% YoY. Premier Protein (~80% of BellRing Brands total revenue) grew 19.9% YoY, which came from almost equal growth in volume and price. Dymatize Nutrition was up 32.3% YoY stemming from large volume increases. Moreover, I provide two deep dives into the functional CPG portfolio's "hero SKU families" of Premier Protein RTD protein shakes and Dymatize whey protein powders. I also explain why a recent expansion of the co-manufacturing network announcement with SunOpta should have you believing in my $2 billion prediction for Premier Protein. But you might be thinking...why is this important and how does a billion-dollar plus RTD shake product line, that's already the market leader, grow 100s of millions more each year to reach $2 billion in 2025? Few points to make here: (1) this additional manufacturing capacity helps them keep their full lineup of flavors on shelves…and more skus per store and larger TDPs generally equal higher sales. (2) delivering products more efficiently will create cost savings that can be reallocated back into growth activities like marketing. (3) the additional capacity will speed up company backstock replenishment again…which gives the sales and marketing teams more confidence to get aggressive on growth activities that increase velocity in the short-term. Finally, more manufacturing capacity allows for innovation aggressiveness when format would the same as top-sellers. What I mean by that is…if Premier Protein had a new plant-based protein innovation they believe is a winner, but no capacity for its already winning proven products…they would be gun shy on launching that. So, as you can see…there's A LOT more upside in the brand! FOLLOW ME ON MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS LINKEDIN - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaschallmba⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TWITTER - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/joshua_schall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INSTAGRAM - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/joshua_schall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ FACEBOOK - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/jschallconsulting⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/joshua-schall/support

Jordan Bar is an Assistant Director of Sports Performance Coach at Duke Sports Performance. He joined the staff full-time in the Fall of 2015 as an assistant Sports Performance Coach after time spent as an intern and volunteer coach within the department. As a men's soccer student-athlete, Bar attended Fairfield University for two years before transferring to the University of Hartford, where he earned his bachelor's degree in Exercise Science with a concentration in Spanish Language. Bar is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, a USA Weightlifting Level 1 Coach, FMS Certified, as well as TPI Level 1 and TPI Level 2 in both Fitness and Power Bar played soccer for many years competitively as a goalkeeper at the elite youth level, winning the US Club Soccer National Championship in 2006, as well as at the division I level winning the MAAC Championship with Fairfield University in 2008. Between his time at Fairfield and Hartford, Bar spent time playing soccer at the professional level overseas in Europe. After Hartford, Bar gained more experience, competing at the semi-professional level in the US playing in the USL-PDL and NASL. In his sapre time, Bar is an avid golfer, and currently holds four club championship titles (2017, 2019, 2021, 2022) at Duke University's Golf Club.

Kyle is the head of an agency called "The Brand Leader" and he is also a former magazine editor who has also worked for Nike. He spent much of his career focused on e-commerce in the fashion, outdoor, and sports industries, which are perfect examples of culture as lifestyle brands. We talk about this idea of brands in culture in this episode. Kyle's company "The Brand Leader" has worked with the likes of Lulu Lemon, and Power Bar. So we talk about what business culture is, and how lifestyle brands build a culture internally and externally. In addition, we also have a discourse about mental health and the workplace.

First Chair catches up with Makayla Meixner, an AASI-certified Level I snowboard instructor, about nutrition. Makayla holds a master's in nutrition and is a registered sports dietitian who works primarily with winter sports athletes. Listen in for tips on how to fuel yourself to sustain your energy AND perform your best. Eating well, and snacking throughout the day, will help you keep your energy levels high so you can perform and help your students excel. PSIA-AASI members: Access special members-only pricing from PSIA-AASI Official Supplier on PowerBar products on the Pro Offers page to get a great deal on bars: https://members.thesnowpros.org/products/pro-offers

Episode 54 – Jenny Maxwell founder of JAMBAR join us to talk about sports nutrition, what it was like to be one of co-founders of PowerBar and why eating healthy foods and snacks are important to athletes and those on the go. 

Don't miss this captivating conversation on how music and food can enhance our lives in unexpected ways! Jennifer Maxwell, a mother of six, athlete, musician, and food science expert, shares her journey from creating the iconic PowerBar to launching her new Certified Organic energy bar called JAMBAR. With flavors like Jammin' Jazzleberry and Chocolate Cha Cha, JAMBAR combines Jennifer's passions for nutrition, athletics, music, and community. Tune in to discover how Jennifer's love for music led her to the drums and how she beautifully blends her expertise in food science with her musical inspiration to create these delicious and nutritious bars. Find out how JAMBAR stands out in the crowded energy bar market, offering real food ingredients, organic nutrition, and a satisfying taste without excessive sweetness. Links and notes related to this episode can be found at https://mpetersonmusic.com/podcast/episode160 Connect with us: Newsletter: https://mpetersonmusic.com/subscribe Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EnhanceLifeMusic/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/enhancelifemusic/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpetersonpiano/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/musicenhances Sponsorship information: https://mpetersonmusic.com/podcast/sponsor Leave us a review on Podchaser.com! https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/enhance-life-with-music-909096 In-episode promo: Songtrust https://www.songtrust.com/  (use code ENHANCELIFE20 for 20% off)  

But first some B5 news.Shotseeker: Yay Elias is not dead! John's love language is avenging your death. The only thing believable about this technology is that NYC would spend a staggering amount of money on it. This episode really doesn't work in the context of its airing time.A More Perfect Union: The Great Filter? Shaw's still in a simulation, John's a stripper pimp, there's a wedding, root goes horseback riding. Meanwhile Fusco has to go to a tunnel full of corpses. Michael Emerson's Irish accent is... not good. Jarold shipping intensifies.QSO: root dress-up episode! 4 Alarm Fire, the best tumblr tag. Our headcanon is that root could burn water. Jude goes on a Powerbar rant. Dollar Store Picardo.Connect with the show at @babylonpodjectHelp us keep the lights on via our Patreon!Justen can be found at @justenwritesAna can be found at @The_Mianaai, and also made our show art.Both Ana and Justen can also be found on The Compleat Discography, a Discworld re-read podcast.Jude Vais can be found at @eremiticjude. His other work can be found at Athrabeth - a Tolkien Podcast and at Garbage of the Five Rings.Clips from the original show remain copyrighted by their original rightsholders, and are used under the Fair Use doctrine.Music is by Arne Parrott, who can be found at http://atptunes.com/This show is edited and produced by Aaron Olson, who can be found at @urizenxvii

The gang's all here again…which should be huge news for Premier Protein heading into the back-half of its fiscal year. But as I normally do with my performance update content of publicly-traded functional CPG brands, I will use the recently filled earnings report, earnings conference call, and any relevant publicly disclosed news, in this case it's BellRing Brands (NYSE: BRBR) 2023 Q2 earnings release, to obviously update you on the performance of brands in that portfolio, but also use it as the backdrop to discuss market insights within the active nutrition formats of the liquids and powders. BellRing Brands is a portfolio that owns a collection of convenient nutrition brands like Premier Protein, Dymatize Nutrition, Powerbar, and Joint Juice, which was previously wholly-owned by Post Holdings. A fast-paced and busy lifestyle is pushing consumers to switch to quick and healthy meal options. This has resulted in the increased household penetration of RTD protein shakes that promote active lifestyles. Bellring Brands had a strong 2023 Q2 with net sales reaching $385.6 million, which was up 22.3% YoY. Premier Protein (~80% of BellRing Brands total revenue) grew 26.2% YoY because it was able to exercise pricing power because of its strong brand equity in the inflationary market. Dymatize Nutrition was up 10.5% YoY stemming from price increases. Moreover, I provide two deep dives into the functional CPG portfolio's "hero SKU families" of Premier Protein RTD protein shakes and Dymatize whey protein powders. Finally, I explain why Premier Protein bringing back a collection of its slowest velocity SKUs speaks to the confidence that BellRing Brands leadership has in its production expansion plans. In the latest quarter, they saw double-digit production growth and expect to have incremental capacity in 2024 north of 20%. I've talked about this extensively in previous content, but the company has a plan they are executing on for additional supply which included adding capacity to existing co-manufacturing network, expanding the co-manufacturing network, and having former big poppa Post Holdings build an aseptic processing facility to produce RTD shakes. Additionally, the footprint in each of these new facilities is much larger and allows for a quicker ramp up in the case of adding more production lines. You might be wondering how a billion-dollar RTD shake product line, that's already the market leader, can grow 100s of millions more each year? Remember, for one…Premier Protein hasn't been able to do much marketing or pull any substantial promotional levers. Secondly, they didn't have their full lineup of flavors on shelves at most retailers until very recently. And finally, they're severely under-distributed in the grocery and mass channels. So, there's A LOT more upside in the brand, believe it or not…and that doesn't even consider Dymatize continuing its growth story. FOLLOW ME ON MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS LINKEDIN - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaschallmba⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TWITTER - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/joshua_schall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INSTAGRAM - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/joshua_schall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ FACEBOOK - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/jschallconsulting --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/joshua-schall/support

Dr. Juan Salinas Creator of Pnuff Crunch joins Michael Rasile on For the Love of Sports to discuss his career in sports science, nutrition, and creating a new snack category. After starting to go to the gym in college to impress the girls on the Rutgers campus, Dr. Juan took a liking to his fitness journey. Understanding what was needed for the body to perform at the highest level, he went on to get his PhD in Food Science going to work on brands like Oreo, Trident, and Power Bar. Once he had the opportunity to work with athletes on the Power Bar brand, Dr. Juan was able to continue moving down the path of actual nutrition and decided to create his own company where he focused on a snack food that was actually good for you! Pnuff Crunch was born and Dr. Juan went on to secure investment from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank! Go buy some Pnuff Crunch! https://www.pnuff.com/ Follow Pnuff on the socials: https://www.facebook.com/pnuffcrunch https://www.instagram.com/pnuffcrunch/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrkkoW3thYojWWEMNIbjTiw

The majority of triathletes come to the sport lacking in their swim background. Whether you're an adult onset swimmer, or haven't swam much since your youth the coaches of Team Next Level can help you better plan out your swim training so that you show up to your next race fit and fast and ready to PR that swim leg. We talk about all the ways to set up your training, what swim aids are useful (and how to use them), and how to get the most out of your swim. This is part 1 of a 3 part series that will look at training for each of the three disciplines of triathlon. Listen in and we are sure you'll find something to help improve your swim. #SwimSesh. Team Next Level - http://www.goteamnltri.com Insta- https://www.instagram.com/team_next_level_tri/ Quad Pod - https://www.instagram.com/next_level_quad_pod/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnajZtFBm-TmHpaA7_GrKEg Magic 5 goggles: https://themagic5.com/ Eney Buoy: https://eneybuoy.com/ PowerBar: https://sport.powerbar.com/ info@goteamnltri.com

Are the recent Premier Protein and Dymatize Nutrition product innovations enough or is it time for BellRing Brands to go M&A hunting in 2023? As I normally do with my performance update content of publicly-traded functional CPG brands, I will use the recently filled earnings report, earnings conference call, and any relevant publicly disclosed news, in this case it's BellRing Brands (NYSE: BRBR) 2023 Q1 earnings release, to obviously update you on the performance of brands in that portfolio, but also use it as the backdrop to discuss market insights within the active nutrition formats of the liquids, powders, and bars. BellRing Brands is a portfolio that owns a collection of convenient nutrition brands like Premier Protein, Dymatize Nutrition, Powerbar, and Joint Juice, which was previously wholly-owned by Post Holdings. A fast-paced and busy lifestyle is pushing consumers to switch to quick and healthy meal options. This has resulted in the increased household penetration of RTD protein shakes that promote active lifestyles. Bellring Brands had a strong 2023 Q1 with net sales reaching $367.2 million, which was up 18.3% YoY. Premier Protein (~80% of BellRing Brands total revenue) grew 22.9% YoY because it was able to exercise pricing power because of its strong brand equity in the inflationary market. Dymatize Nutrition was up 2.5% YoY stemming from price increases. Moreover, I provide two deep dives into the functional CPG portfolio's "hero SKU families" of Premier Protein RTD protein shakes and Dymatize whey protein powders. Finally, I recall my previous comments and predictions from early to mid-2021 to explain the product innovation strategy at BellRing Brands that includes the breakfast occasion (e.g. Premier Protein cereal and Premier Protein frozen pancakes), nighttime occasion (e.g. Premier Protein Good Night), and plant-based protein (e.g. Dymatize Plant). FOLLOW ME ON MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS LINKEDIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaschallmba TWITTER - https://www.twitter.com/joshua_schall INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/joshua_schall FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/jschallconsulting MEDIUM - https://www.medium.com/@joshuaschall

Purchasing volume has fallen for both Premier Protein and Dymatize, yet total revenues for the brands keep climbing…what's going on here? As I normally do with my performance update content of publicly-traded functional CPG brands, I will use the recently filled earnings report, earnings conference call, and any relevant publicly disclosed news, in this case it's Bellring Brands (NYSE: BRBR) 2022 Q4 earnings release, to obviously update you on the performance of brands in that portfolio, but also use it as the backdrop to discuss market insights within the active nutrition formats of the liquids, powders, and bars. BellRing Brands is a portfolio that owns a collection of convenient nutrition brands like Premier Protein, Dymatize Nutrition, Powerbar, and Joint Juice, which was previously wholly-owned by Post Holdings. A fast-paced and busy lifestyle is pushing consumers to switch to quick and healthy meal options. This has resulted in the increased household penetration of RTD protein shakes that promote active lifestyles. Bellring Brands had a strong 2022 Q4 with net sales reaching $379.2 million, which was up 11.5% YoY. Premier Protein (81% of BellRing Brands total revenue) grew 10.1% YoY because it was able to exercise pricing power because of its strong brand equity in the inflationary market. Dymatize Nutrition was up 31.6% YoY stemming from price increases. I also give some more detail later in the content about why both Premier Protein and Dymatize struggled with comparative volumes. Finally, I explain why the voluntary product recall, that was initiated by one of the company's contract manufacturers, might not be much of a problem to available supply and brand equity at all based on information that I found throughout the financial documents. FOLLOW ME ON MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS LINKEDIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaschallmba TWITTER - https://www.twitter.com/joshua_schall INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/joshua_schall FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/jschallconsulting MEDIUM - https://www.medium.com/@joshuaschall

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Dr Trent Stellingwerff from the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific. Trent has a very interesting background in applied research and translation through coaching Olympic athletes etc. Formerly head of R&D at PowerBar. In a really fun chat we talked mainly about his research with the very important relatively new area of relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S). RED-S effects not only exercise performance but also health. We also sports performance after pregnancy. Important take home: Need to be in long-term energy balance for long term ideal body composition, health and exercise performance. Twitter: @TStellingwerff. 0:00. Introduction and Trent's background 6:58. Melbourne commonwealth games. His wife ran there. Craig Mottram: Shivers up the spine! 10:40. Relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S). Low energy availability (LEA) etc. 14:15. Problematic vs adaptable. LEA 17:20. Effects on hormones and RMR 18:00 Sex differences 20:15. Guidelines for measuring energy expenditure 25:34. Measuring body weight too crude. If in energy deficit RMR decreases. 28:40. Partitioning energy to vital organs 32:24. Indicators of RED-S 34:25. RED-S results in greater stress fractures 37:25. LEA due to exercise vs diet 40:50. Ovulation doesn't occur every cycle 43:23. Exercise performance vs RED-S 45:35. RED-S and health. Need to be in energy balance for ideal body composition, health and exercise performance long term. 49:37. Power to weight ratio 52:56. Overtraining can be due to RED-S. Energy intake not considered enough in overtraining studies. 56:44. RED-S/overtraining and heart rate. 59:47. Things not working in the lab/real life. Don't assume. 1:04:20. Timing of carbohydrate intake 1:06:20. Exercise and pregnancy 1:10:39. Muscle biopsies no big deal after childbirth! 1:11:32. Derek Clayton wished he had a muscle biopsy in 1969. Inside Exercise brings to you the who's who of exercise metabolism, exercise physiology and exercise's effects on health. With scientific rigor, these researchers discuss popular exercise topics while providing practical strategies for all. The interviewer, Emeritus Professor Glenn McConell, has an international research profile following 30 years of Exercise Metabolism research experience while at The University of Melbourne, Ball State University, Monash University, the University of Copenhagen and Victoria University. He has published over 120 peer reviewed journal articles and recently edited an Exercise Metabolism eBook written by world experts on 17 different topics (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-94305-9). Connect with Inside Exercise and Glenn McConell at: Twitter: @Inside_exercise and @GlennMcConell1 Instagram: insideexercise Facebook: Glenn McConell LinkedIn: Glenn McConell https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenn-mcconell-83475460 ResearchGate: Glenn McConell Email: glenn.mcconell@gmail.com Subscribe to Inside exercise: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3pSYnNSXDkNLH8rImzotgP?si=Whw_ThaERF6iIKwxutDoNA Apple Podcasts: https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/my-podcasts/show/inside-exercise/03a07373-888a-472b-bf7e-a0ff155209b2 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84ZTdiY2ZkMC9wb2RjYXN0L3JzcwAnchor: https://anchor.fm/insideexercise Podcast Addict: https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/4025218 YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UChQpsAQVEsizOxnWWGPKeag

The show kicks off with a discussion about VIPs: find out what the boys think about them, and whether it's worth the effort and $$ to try to get under the white tents. Meanwhile, the world's top cycling team is switching from Shimano to SRAM: should we be excited? Someone on the show says “yes!” Also, Joe's wife has returned from the imaginary BSS HQ in sunny Spain. Are the midday meal and the siesta still things? And finally, a note from our friend “Cyclegator” in Seattle leads to a discussion about where our listeners are from. It's easy to get a shout-out. Pump up your tires, grab a PowerBar, and let's go!Got a question or comment?Tweet it @bikeshopsociety @cyclingreporter @joegasparWant a shoutout on the pod, do you like to write letters?Email us: mail@bikeshopsociety.comCall and leave a message: 833-4MY-BIKEVisit our website, or don't. bikeshopsociety.com

Now seen as a very competitive market, the protein/nutritional bar category has gone through many ups and downs. This week on Beyond the Shelf, we spoke with the Founder and CEO of JAMBAR, Jennifer Maxwell. As an industry veteran, Jennifer walked us through how the protein/nutritional bar category has shifted since she first created the iconic PowerBar brand several decades ago. She also gave us some insights into her latest brand, JAMBAR, including why it was important for them to create a nutritional and artisan product that gives back to their community.To stay up to date on all new episodes, subscribe to Beyond the Shelf on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and iHeartRadio – and don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.Beyond the Shelf is a food & beverage podcast that dives into a wide range of topics with guests from all corners of the food & beverage industry, including founders/CEO's, marketers, chefs, dietitians, researchers, and other influencers. Topics range from retail and production trends, expert tips on food marketing and advertising claims, to inspiring stories from food & beverage companies, popular chefs, and much more! From ChefsBest – taste and quality experts in the food and beverage industry.

Mother to six, runner, musician, Jennifer Maxwell created PowerBar with her athlete husband, Brian Maxwell. They sold PowerBar to Nestle in 2000. Music was therapy to Jennifer after Brian passed away. She took up drumming and performs in 2 bands. Music also inspired JAMBAR, the organic artisan energy bars she launched in 2021 filled with good-for-you natural ingredients. JAMBAR donates 50% of after-tax profits to organizations to support the transformative pursuits of music and active living.Fearless Fabulous You is broadcast live Wednesdays at 12 Noon ET.Fearless Fabulous You Radio Show is broadcast on W4WN Radio - Women 4 Women Network (www.w4wn.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Fearless Fabulous You Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.

Since 1987, Jennifer Maxwell has been powering the fitness world with energy bars. Maxwell, who founded PowerBar with her late husband, Brian Maxwell, sold the company in 2000 to Nestle.  When her husband passed away suddenly in 2004, she took some time to  heal and to raise her six children, but soon set about crafting an energy bar for a new generation. Headquartered in San Rafael not far from Maxwell's home in Ross, JAMBAR, whose name is inspired by Maxwell's passion for music, makes organic,  naturally sweetened energy bars crafted with high-quality protein and  fiber. Jennifer joins Justin to discuss this new bar brand!

Will Dymatize have enough power remaining in its growth story to make up for some predicted Premier Protein headwinds from a product recall? As I normally do with my performance update content of publicly-traded functional CPG brands, I will use the recently filled earnings report, earnings conference call, and any relevant publicly disclosed news, in this case it's Bellring Brands (NYSE: BRBR) 2022 Q3 earnings release, to obviously update you on the performance of brands in that portfolio, but also use it as the backdrop to discuss market insights within the active nutrition formats of the liquids, powders, and bars. BellRing Brands is a portfolio that owns a collection of convenient nutrition brands like Premier Protein, Dymatize Nutrition, Powerbar, and Joint Juice, which was previously wholly-owned by Post Holdings. A fast-paced and busy lifestyle is pushing consumers to switch to quick and healthy meal options. This has resulted in the increased household penetration of RTD protein shakes that promote active lifestyles. Bellring Brands had a strong 2022 Q3 with net sales reaching $370.6 million, which was up 8.2% YoY. Premier Protein (81% of BellRing Brands total revenue) grew 7.3% YoY because it was able to exercise pricing power because of its strong brand equity in the inflationary market. Dymatize Nutrition was up 16.8% YoY stemming from price increases. Finally, I provide some details around the Premier Protein voluntary product recall from its contract manufacturer Lyons-Magnus and explain if I think it will cause any long-term issues to the company's reputation and the reputation of the product in question. FOLLOW ME ON MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS LINKEDIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaschallmba TWITTER - https://www.twitter.com/joshua_schall INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/joshua_schall FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/jschallconsulting MEDIUM - https://www.medium.com/@joshuaschall

Taste Radio's hosts discussed several recently announced collaborations, including those of high-profile drink brands that have aligned to create new RTD cocktails, a well-known entertainer and an upstart energy drink company and a humanitarian initiative that connects with better-for-you brands. They also chatted about notable new products, including a line of shelf-stable tamales, NA wine and beer and a protein bar with a somewhat odd name. Show notes: 0:52: It Wasn't Intended To Be A “Gotcha.” The Uniform, Upgraded. Cookies Make Ray Happy. – After a brief chat about the perpetual problem of uneven heating and cooling in offices, Ray puts John on the spot about a prediction that came true and the hosts collectively spoke about what moves their needles for canned cocktails. They also praised UNSTUCK, an initiative that connects leading CPG brands with suppliers that hire refugees, offered mixed opinions about a brand-centric music video and lauded innovative new products, in particular an amaretto-flavored cola, spiked aguas frescas and soft, doughy cookies. Brands in this episode: Coca-Cola, Jack Daniel's, Frecsa, Simply, Vita Coco, Captain Morgan, Topo Chico, Chobani, That's it, La Colombe, GoodPop, Petit Pot, Pitaya Foods, Joyburst, Gruvi, Visitor Beer, Fillo's, A Dozen Cousins, Calidad, Jambar, Powerbar, Ghia, Brooklyn Cannery, Bell's Cookie Co.

Dymatize continues to carry the bigger heavier Premier Protein on its back, but are things set to change in the back-half of BellRing Brands' fiscal year? As I normally do with my performance update content of publicly-traded functional CPG brands, I will use the recently filled earnings report, earnings conference call, and any relevant publicly disclosed news, in this case it's Bellring Brands (NYSE: BRBR) 2022 Q2 earnings release, to obviously update you on the performance of brands in that portfolio, but also use it as the backdrop to discuss market insights within the active nutrition formats of the liquids, powders, and bars. BellRing Brands is a portfolio that owns a collection of convenient nutrition brands like Premier Protein, Dymatize Nutrition, Powerbar, and Joint Juice, which was previously wholly-owned by Post Holdings. A fast-paced and busy lifestyle is pushing consumers to switch to quick and healthy meal options. This has resulted in the increased household penetration of RTD protein shakes that promote active lifestyles. Bellring Brands had a strong 2022 Q2 with net sales reaching $315.2 million, which was up 11.7% YoY. Premier Protein (81% of BellRing Brands total revenue) grew 6.5% YoY because it was able to exercise pricing power on the market. Dymatize Nutrition was up strongly at 54.9% YoY stemming from both strong volume increases and excellent pricing benefits. I'll update you on some additional strategic decisions on the Dymatize brand that should help further grow their ecommerce sales. Finally, I provide an update on the Post Holdings spin-off distribution and explain what that could mean for BellRing Brands. FOLLOW ME ON MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS LINKEDIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaschallmba TWITTER - https://www.twitter.com/joshua_schall INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/joshua_schall FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/jschallconsulting MEDIUM - https://www.medium.com/@joshuaschall

Hear Jennifer Maxwell--co-founder/creator of PowerBar, THE original energy bar, with her late husband Brian Maxwell--talk about growing up in Bolinas, California and what lead to her passion for running, athletics and food science, how she met Brian in Berkeley and together they created Powerbar, what runners ate before energy bars were a thing, what it was like to start a business in the "old days" before the advent of modern technology and how they grew it to eventually be bought by Nestle for $375 million in 2000, how she managed to keep moving forward and raise 6 children amidst the tragic passing of Brian from a heart condition in 2004, the importance of music to her and how drumming became a major and ongoing part of her life, the creation of JAMBAR and the blending of her passions--music, athletics/wellness, and healthy eating--into an exciting new venture where 50% of profits go to support music and active living, and much more! Follow along: @JAMBAR Jambar.com

As someone who ate powerbars in high school in the 90s, I'm really rooting for PowerBar to make a comeback. Today, I'm trying out their recovery drink, a 20g whey protein chocolate shake with 57g carbs.

“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author What's your story? In today's episode we explore the stories we tell ourselves and others and why stories matter. We'll cover: How to change your story. Powerful ways to become empowered Eating right tips for active women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s Why midlife is the time to try new things he importance of self acceptance and being truthful about your capabilities and where your body is At midlife, you're gifted with an entire second adulthood to know and love yourself on a deeper level. To figure out who you are and what you want. To take all the mistakes you made in your first adulthood, throw them in a makeover blender, and create a smoothie of an existence. Nothing is written in stone, and anything and everything is possible. How do you start to transform so you can Rock Your Midlife? You change your stories. By changing your stories and taking action, you can become the woman you've always wanted to be. Annette, Simmons, author of, Drinking from a Different Well: How Women's Stories Change What Power Means in Action will discuss how women can learn to trust their instincts, tell their stories, and benefit the common good. Then Jennifer Maxwell, co-founder of the original PowerBar energy bar, will share her amazing story of how she healed through music after the death of her husband. Plus, she'll tell us about her new company JAMBAR and share secrets to positive aging and staying vibrant and healthy at midlife. Want to try JAMBARS for yourself? Visit JAMBAR.com, and use code DRELLEN20 for 20 percent off.

“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author What's your story? In today's episode we explore the stories we tell ourselves and others and why stories matter. We'll cover: How to change your story. Powerful ways to become empowered Eating right tips for active women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s Why midlife is the time to try new things he importance of self acceptance and being truthful about your capabilities and where your body is At midlife, you're gifted with an entire second adulthood to know and love yourself on a deeper level. To figure out who you are and what you want. To take all the mistakes you made in your first adulthood, throw them in a makeover blender, and create a smoothie of an existence. Nothing is written in stone, and anything and everything is possible. How do you start to transform so you can Rock Your Midlife? You change your stories. By changing your stories and taking action, you can become the woman you've always wanted to be. Annette, Simmons, author of, Drinking from a Different Well: How Women's Stories Change What Power Means in Action will discuss how women can learn to trust their instincts, tell their stories, and benefit the common good. Then Jennifer Maxwell, co-founder of the original PowerBar energy bar, will share her amazing story of how she healed through music after the death of her husband. Plus, she'll tell us about her new company JAMBAR and share secrets to positive aging and staying vibrant and healthy at midlife. Want to try JAMBARS for yourself? Visit JAMBAR.com, and use code DRELLEN20 for 20 percent off.

Carrie chats with entrepreneur Jennifer Maxwell, who was a co-founder of PowerBar and the current CEO and founder of JAM Foods! They talk about her journey into the world of sports nutrition, her love story with her late husband (Olympian Brian Maxwell), the PowerBar story, how running has helped her deal with his passing, and much more!

Today, Angela and Amy focus on fueling during racing and training.  They answer some listener questions and share their own fueling strategies.  Full disclosure: I Race Like a Girl is sponsored by Powerbar and both Angela and Amy use Powerbar in training and racing so you will hear them mention those products.  However, you will also hear us talk about other brands, as well. Here's what's covered: How many carbs/calories  do you need per hour and in what form   How Angela fuels in training and racing (bike and run) Keep it simple Importance of sodium  Amy's fueling strategy Why electrolytes are important and how much to take  Don't be afraid of salt  Sweat test! Caffeine as performance enhancer- strategies, pills vs gels  Different types of carb sources and why that's important for digestion  Why you might have gut issues on the run Preloading your calories before big training days  Carb are king Ketones not keto  Post workout fueling

Sometimes life sidelines us, knocking us off the path we thought we'd be on forever, or at least for the foreseeable future. Menopause can certainly trip us up. But so can many other random, sometimes terrible, events we never saw coming. And sometimes we end up contending with all of it. This week's guest, Jennifer Maxwell, knows all about that and talks about how she has maintained her athleticism, passion, and profession while raising six kids after losing her husband unexpectedly.  Jennifer is a nutritionist, food scientist, and the co-founder of the original energy bar, PowerBar along with her late husband Brian. She is currently the CEO and founder of JAM Foods, the maker of JAMBAR energy bars. She is also a competitive runner, the mother of six children, and an accomplished drummer who performs in two San Francisco Bay Area bands. You can learn more about her and her work with JAM Foods at https://jambar.com/ (jambar.com).  **Support the Podcast** InsideTracker: 20% off at http://insidetracker.com/feisty (insidetracker.com/feisty) Nuun Hydration: 30% off at https://nuun.life/feisty-blog (nuunlife.com)  with the code HITPLAY  Previnex: 15% off your first order with code HITPLAY at https://www.previnex.com/ (https://www.previnex.com/)  Bonafide: 20% off your first purchase when you subscribe to any product with code HITPLAY at https://hellobonafide.com/ (https://hellobonafide.com/) Nutrisense: Use code "hitplay" at https://nutrisense.io/hitplay (nutrisense.io/hitplay) for $30 off any subscription to the CGM program This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podsights - https://podsights.com/privacy Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Reconnecting on Allentown and the Lehigh Valley, Triathlons, Brand Authenticity, and More: Kyle is an executive specializing in crafting outstanding experiences for global brands. A former magazine editor, he also spent a bunch of his career with a focus on the fashion, outdoor, and sports industries through the e-commerce and digital lens for brands such as Nike, Dr. Martens, KEEN, Lululemon, PowerBar, Ariat, Chrome Industries, Nuun, and others. Kyle's unique blend of design, branding, and digital best practices lends itself to creating and leading some of the foremost brands. Quote: "Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened." — Billy Graham A bold, charismatic speaker, with a penchant for hitting brand's sweet spots, he brings his experience to any size group or audience on the topics relating to online or digital business growth, e-commerce trends and tactics, A/B testing, branding, positioning, and design. Kyle is currently focusing on digital trends online, the future state of retail in a post-pandemic world, the complexity of global brand expansion, and branding post-pandemic.   Today's Guest & Resource Links: Web: http://thebrandleader.com/ (thebrandleader.com) Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyleduford/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyleduford/) Instagram: @thebrandleader, @yeahthatkyle   Watch us on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fxRHI5XpxfU (https://youtu.be/fxRHI5XpxfU)   Timestamped Show Notes: 00:30 - Introduction 11:00 - I used to ride my mom's Bianchi. For years, I would steal it, she would know it. It was a little bit bigger than me, so I kind of grew into it. We actually moved to Burnsville way up through 309. We're just a little bit outside the Parkland School District, but I refuse to go to Northwestern High School is a different district. So I would ride my bike almost every day to train for wrestling from Burnsville down the back way through down to the old Parkland High School, which is Orefield, and it was just a fantastic ride. 21:30 - I wanted to write for Outside, Men's Health, and Men's Journal which are the ones we talked about. Yeah, they just wouldn't have me. They're like, hey, nice job, kid. Here's a lollipop go read our magazine somewhere else. I was like, well I think I'm a good writer. I think I can handle this and they wouldn't even give me the time of day. So I did my first Triathlon in the fall of 1999. I did the Catalina Island Triathlon off the coast of Los Angeles. I had lost 100 and change pounds to do my first race. I was miserablfe. I was unhappy. So I gained all this weight, a long story, but I ended up losing it all. Because I was training for triathlons. I didn't know I was just running and my knees couldn't sustain me because I was too heavy. So I started biking like I used to, and then, long story short, I'm cycling and swimming and running and someone said you should do a triathlon. I said, okay and I signed up for one in November of 1999. 30:00 - I think clydesdale calss was never closer, I think it was 200 lbs. But regardless, you're talking about whether they were fantastic triathletes or not, they were still athletes, and they're still out there doing it. I don't care how big you are, or if you're like, quote, in shape or out of shape. You have significantly different needs at that size. I mean, just the square inches of pound pressure you put on your feet as you run is just substantially different. So we would talk about things for them, we were the first. There was a woman out of California, her name is Rachel Sears, she was a semi pro athlete, she married a guy named Phil Cosanta. These are names I haven't heard of in years, who was a coach out there. She convinced me that there was a mechanisation in any kind of training called periodization. That is how you peak when you peak, how you put baseballs and so forth, and how you get ready

Doc and William talk about John Daly's legendary Miami Taco Bell run; a Utah fan finding an oddity in his protein bar; a case of Choose Your Own Adventure; and Gamblin' Dans.

Retired Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher talks his time on the Teams, his murder trial, and the charges brought against him. He also discusses his deployments overseas, the current state of Afghanistan, and MMA.  https://eddiegallagherbook.com/ https://theeddiegallagher.com/ https://pipehitterfoundation.org/ 00:00:04 Intro 00:00:45 "The Man In The Arena" 00:06:55 Story background  00:07:27 Orders to clear Mosul 00:10:22 Rumblings of discontent start 00:13:03 Accusation of stabbing ISIS prisoner 00:15:27 ISIS the most brutal 00:18:46 We have a video / Investigation begins 00:20:37 House gets raided - guns out  00:25:27 Platoon rated best 00:28:45 Deck is stacked  00:31:15 Non-profit steps in. Another fight ensues 00:36:20 Charges come down 00:40:21 Power Bar, Red Bull, sunglasses and a picture 00:46:45 Andrea Gallagher and Eddie's brother get involved 00:47:55 Trump tweets 00:53:28 Pipe Hitter Foundation 1:03:27 Lies spread to the White House 1:07:06 Spyware 1:14:00 Prosecutions witness admits killing ISIS prisoner 1:20:50 Reputation 1:23:58 Lawsuit against the military 1:27:00 No regrets 1:29:35 Thoughts on Afghanistan 1:37:10 ROE changed 1:41:07 Bureaucracy in the military 1:41:55 PC culture in the military 1:48:30 China 1:50:05 Worst conditions 1:53:55 MMA  2:02:00 Signs the flag 2:03:54 PFL fights 2:05:34 We talk betting picks and strategy 2:18:13 Who makes it through BUD/S 2:20:25 Gym warriors 2:21:33 Breaking point 2:24:37 training, guns, working out, the book, wrap up

Brand isn't just a catchy name and a pretty looking logo. In fact, those two aspects should be positioned at the back of the list when coming up with a brand strategy. Going deeper than just aesthetics, your brand needs to be defined both internally with your staff as well as externally to your customers what you stand for and how you plan to accomplish that mission.Our guest today, Kyle Duford, helps us understand how differentiating between listening to the market, your competitors, internal staff, customers you have and the customers you want allow you to set your brand up for success. Kyle is an executive specializing in crafting outstanding experiences for global brands. A former magazine editor, he has spent much of his career with a focus on the fashion, outdoor, and sports industries through the e-commerce and digital lens for brands such as Nike, Dr. Martens, KEEN, Lululemon, PowerBar, Ariat, Chrome Industries, and others. Kyle is currently focusing on digital trends online, the future state of retail in a post-pandemic world, the complexity of global brand expansion, and branding post-pandemic.