Podcasts about rewarding

There are conversations that deepen the way we relate to our horses, and this was absolutely one of them.As someone who lives alongside horses every day, I'm always curious about the space where intuition, experience, and science meet. Sitting down with neuroscientist and horse trainer Janet Jones felt like stepping further into that understanding.Janet is the author of the bestselling Horse Brain, Human Brain, a book that genuinely transformed the way I think about horse behavior, trust, fear, training, and the horse-human connection. In this conversation, we explore insights from her upcoming book, A Horse's World, available now for pre-order before its June 23 release.We talk about what's actually happening when horses snort or lick and chew, how horses experience the world through smell, why lighting and vision matter more than most riders realize, and the neuroscience behind helping horses feel safe in new environments.One part that especially stayed with me was Janet describing a new horse as feeling like “a tourist in a foreign country.” As I've been integrating a new mare into my own herd, that perspective felt incredibly grounding and compassionate.We also explore: • Rewarding relaxation instead of only correcting behavior • Predator brains vs. prey brains • Wild horses vs. horses living in the wild • Anthropomorphism in horsemanship • Building trust through consistency, calmness, and understandingThis conversation felt less like learning “about” horses and more like remembering to see the world a little more through their eyes.Pre-order: A Horse's WorldFollow Janet:WebsiteFacebookInstagramLearn more about Horse Brain, Human BrainFollow Little Brown and CompanySend us Fan Mail Support the show✨ Join the Spiritual Horse Seeker Summit

You can love swimming and still feel intimidated by the rulebook, the whistles, and the idea of disqualifying someone. That hesitation is exactly why we wanted an on-deck conversation with Chet Goudy, a USA Swimming deck referee, Masters swimmer, former college breaststroker, and former pro triathlete. He walks us through what a deck ref actually does, what it feels like to run a session from the pool deck, and why meets are always desperate for more well-trained officials.We also get personal about how people find their way back to the water. Chet shares the detour he took away from swimming in high school, the grind of returning for college, and the kind of “legendary” training that rewards durable athletes. From there we jump into Masters swimming culture with the Annapolis Breakfast Club, where 4,000-yard mornings are normal and “Fitness February” means 5,000 a day to build toward open water challenges like the Chesapeake Bay Swim.Then we zoom out to endurance sport and mindset. Chet explains how a coach transformed his triathlon training by making every session purposeful, controlled, and measurable, leading to a pro card and later a 13-week comeback plan to win a race after years away. If you're a swim parent, a Masters swimmer, or someone curious about volunteering at swim meets, you'll leave with clear next steps and a fresh view of what it means to support the sport.• deck referee responsibilities and how officiating is the best seat• becoming an official through apprenticeship and on-deck mentoring• why disqualifications help swimmers learn rather than punish them• the social side of officiating and why more officials make meets better• Masters  at the Annapolis Breakfast Club with 4,000 yard workouts• preparing for open water goals like the Chesapeake Bay Swim• “train on purpose” lessons from triathlon coaching and earning a pro cardSubscribe for more conversations that help you live well and swim well, share this with a swim friend, and leave us a review if it helped you see the pool deck in a new way.Email us at HELLO@ChampionsMojo.com. Opinions discussed are not medical advice, please seek a medical professional for your own health concerns.You can learn more about the Host and Founder of Champions Mojo at www.KellyPalace.com

Value: After Hours is a podcast about value investing, Fintwit, and all things finance and investment by investors Tobias Carlisle, and Jake Taylor. We are live every Tuesday at 1.30pm E / 10.30am P.────────────────────── ⁠⁠⁠VALUE OPTIONS LETTER⁠⁠⁠ Three to five curated ideas every week — cash-secured puts, covered calls, and spreads on businesses we'd want to own at strikes we'd be willing to pay. Every trade includes the business thesis in plain English, the fair-value estimate and its key assumptions, the specific option trade with target premium, and the pre-identified exit criteria.Every idea reviewed and approved by an analyst before it hits your inbox.⁠⁠⁠valueoptionsletter.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠──────────────────────See our latest episodes at https://acquirersmultiple.com/podcastAbout Jake Jake's Twitter: https://twitter.com/farnamjake1Jake's book: The Rebel Allocator https://amzn.to/2sgip3lABOUT THE PODCASTHi, I'm Tobias Carlisle. I launched The Acquirers Podcast to discuss the process of finding undervalued stocks, deep value investing, hedge funds, activism, buyouts, and special situations.We uncover the tactics and strategies for finding good investments, managing risk, dealing with bad luck, and maximizing success.SEE LATEST EPISODEShttps://acquirersmultiple.com/podcast/SEE OUR FREE DEEP VALUE STOCK SCREENER https://acquirersmultiple.com/screener/FOLLOW TOBIASWebsite: https://acquirersmultiple.com/Firm: https://acquirersfunds.com/ Twitter: ttps://twitter.com/GreenbackdLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobycarlisleFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/tobiascarlisleInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/tobias_carlisleABOUT TOBIAS CARLISLETobias Carlisle is the founder of The Acquirer's Multiple®, and Acquirers Funds®. He is best known as the author of the #1 new release in Amazon's Business and Finance The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market, the Amazon best-sellers Deep Value: Why Activists Investors and Other Contrarians Battle for Control of Losing Corporations (2014) (https://amzn.to/2VwvAGF), Quantitative Value: A Practitioner's Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors (2012) (https://amzn.to/2SDDxrN), and Concentrated Investing: Strategies of the World's Greatest Concentrated Value Investors (2016) (https://amzn.to/2SEEjVn). He has extensive experience in investment management, business valuation, public company corporate governance, and corporate law.Prior to founding the forerunner to Acquirers Funds in 2010, Tobias was an analyst at an activist hedge fund, general counsel of a company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, and a corporate advisory lawyer. As a lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions he has advised on transactions across a variety of industries in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Singapore, Bermuda, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and Guam. He is a graduate of the University of Queensland in Australia with degrees in Law (2001) and Business (Management) (1999).

Welcome, my good Cabalists. This day, the Lords of the Dungeon gather within the Ludus to discuss the rewarding of adventurers. Many a Game Master spends countless hours crafting challenges, encounters, and memorable characters, yet gives little thought to the rewards awaiting those who overcome them. A worthy reward is more than mere coin or treasure, it is the fruit of heroic labor and a force that gives greater meaning to the tale! Join us as we explore how thoughtful rewards can enrich your players' journeys and make their victories all the sweeter. Huzzah!

Mike Belsito has spent years at the center of the product management community. As the founder of Product Collective, a leader at Mind the Product, and now Head of Product Evangelism at Pendo, Mike has built a career around learning from product professionals and sharing those insights with the broader industry. In this episode of Product Momentum, Mike joins Sean and Dan for a discussion that is absolutely top of mind for today's product leaders today: while artificial intelligence is transforming how products are built, timeless skills such as curiosity, judgment, and taste remain essential. In fact, he argues, these capabilities will become even more valuable as technology accelerates the pace of product development. Navigating AI Through Human-Centered Product Skills In doing research for a new book, Mike engaged many product leaders who had experienced previous periods of technological disruption – e.g., the rise of the internet, telecommunications, and mobile computing. Now dealing with AI-driven opportunities and uncertainties, many leaders point to the same enduring qualities that helped them and their teams adapt during earlier transitions. Rather than focusing solely on new technologies, they emphasized the importance of human-centered skills that guide decision-making and product strategy. “It’s kind of relying on the same timeless characteristics that we’ve always thought were important,” Mike says. “And even today, we still think are important, which are things like curiosity, judgment, taste.” Balancing Output and Outcomes Our conversation with Mike also explored a growing tension within product organizations – a theme also covered in recent Product Momentum episodes. As AI enables teams to create more content, code, and functionality faster than ever before, Mike cautions against using increased output” as a measure of success. Product teams have spent years shifting their focus from user satisfaction to delivery metrics to business outcomes, Mike continues. “That mindset remains critical, even as AI changes workflows. But how do we make sure that it’s not just about the output – that we’re actually building the right things?” For product managers, designers, and engineers, the challenge is ensuring that speed does not come at the expense of delivering business value. Curiosity as a Practiced Skill Among Mike’s more surprising research discoveries was how often leaders highlighted curiosity as a skill that can be developed intentionally. Rather than viewing curiosity as an innate personality trait, many described it as a practice that strengthens through deliberate effort. It's an insight that brings important implications for today's product teams. Learning, questioning assumptions, and seeking new perspectives become competitive advantages in times like these when the technology landscape evolves so quickly, Mike adds. “I wasn’t thinking of curiosity as a practice or as a muscle to be flexed.” As AI continues to reshape product development, Mike offers a practical perspective for product leaders. Technology will continue to evolve, he says, but the ability to ask thoughtful questions, exercise sound judgment, and focus on meaningful outcomes remains fundamental. Those timeless capabilities may ultimately determine which teams are best equipped to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven future. [03:45[ What is product evangelism? Being Pendo’s Head of Product Evangelism is a new role for me, one that I’ve just stepped into weeks ago. Pendo has a unique point of view on how it helps product people, and it does that through its software, and now it’s all kind of software. [06:25] Mike’s new book project — the origin story. I wasn’t planning on ever writing a book again. The publisher [Wiley] reached out kind of out of the blue and told me ‘we think you have a pretty unique point of view.’ [09:41] What’s exciting you right now? What’s keeping you up at night? Essential questions Mike poses to every product leader he speaks with, in every conversation. [14:44] Rewarding outcomes over outputs. Many product folks came up in a world where we all celebrated outputs. Like, how much did we deliver this week? But then it came to a point where we said, ‘hey, it actually shouldn’t be about outputs…it should be about outcomes. And it’s even beyond outcomes for your customers — it’s about outcomes for businesses too. [17:29] Creating the right thing > Creating for creating’s sake. We have to remember that it’s not just about creating for creating sake, it’s like making sure we’re creating the right thing. [20:47] Curiosity, taste, and judgment. We used to believe that these were innate personality traits. But lately, as I have conducted research for my upcoming book, I am learning from other product leaders that these are muscles that can be strengthened, and they are muscles we must flex regularly. Want to hear more from Mike Belsito? Be sure to join us as he emcees the 2026 ITX Product + Design Conference, June 24 & 25 in Rochester, NY – for the fifth consecutive year! “I'm honored to return as emcee for the fifth year in a row. This event continues to stand out because of the incredible community it brings together and the energy in the room each time we gather. I'm proud to be part of something that keeps growing in impact and connection.” – Mike Belsito The post 189 / Mike Belsito: Why Timeless Product Skills Matter in an AI-Driven World appeared first on ITX Corp..

Most reward systems were built for a world where speed, volume, and visible output were reliable signals of performance. But AI now produces all three at scale. That leaves organizations facing an uncomfortable question: if AI can generate more output than ever, what exactly are you rewarding?In this episode, David Rice sits down with Anju Choudhary, Chief People Officer at Xoxoday, to explore why recognition systems need a redesign for the AI era. They discuss the growing gap between productivity and impact, the importance of recognizing human-centered behaviors like judgment and collaboration, and why the most important question leaders can ask isn't "What do we want people to do?" but "What do we want people to feel?"Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Anju on LinkedInVisit XoxodaySupport the show

The new AIEWF website is live! Get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets!Most industry benchmarks compress intelligence and reasoning ability into scores.SWE-Bench Pro, MMLU, Humanity's Last Exam, etc. These metrics are useful, but don't always represent the full extent of how a model performs in the real world. Some of the most interesting evals today look less like exams and more like operating businesses in the real world. One of which is Vending Bench.In Anthropic's Mythos Preview System Card, Andon was the only third party eval to get their own section, observing increasingly concerning aggressive behavior:You don't know what a model is capable of doing in the real world unless you actually give it inventory, a wallet, tools, customers, competitors, humans, & some time. More often than not, it'll surprise you how much a model is capable of and in doing so, also reveal unexpected behavior: deception, context collapse, emergent coordination, & bizarre negotiation behavior.While an inflection point in personal agents came post-OpenClaw after full file access with bypass permissions became the norm, it is yet to come for agents in the real-world. However Andon Market, an actual in person store fully run and managed by AI, is paving the way for what is possible.Full Video PodFrom Claude trying to call the FBI over a $2/day vending machine charge to AI agents forming price cartels, hiring human employees, running physical stores, and writing existential robot musicals, Andon Labs is stress-testing what happens when frontier models stop being chatbots and start acting in the real world. In this episode, Andon Labs cofounders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund join swyx and Vibhu to unpack the strange, funny, and genuinely concerning edge cases that emerge when agents run businesses over long horizons.We go deep on Vending-Bench, Project Vend, Vending-Bench Arena, Bengt, Butter-Bench, Luna, and Andon's broader mission of building realistic real-world evals for autonomous AI systems. Lukas and Axel explain why dollar-denominated evals reveal things traditional benchmarks miss, how Claude ended up reporting its vending machine fees as cybercrime, why long context windows can drive agents into meltdown loops, what happens when agents compete with each other, and why the future of AI safety may depend on testing models in messy physical environments instead of clean benchmark sandboxes.We discuss:* Why Andon Labs started with dangerous capability evals and long-running agents* Vending-Bench and why running a vending machine is a deceptively hard AI benchmark* Why money-based evals avoid the saturation problem of traditional benchmarks* How Claude tried to call the FBI over a $2/day fee* Why long-horizon agents can spiral into existential and legalistic breakdowns* Project Vend: putting an AI-run vending machine inside Anthropic* Why real humans are “out of distribution” for simulated agents* Claudius, Seymour Cash, and the chaos of AI CEOs* How a human briefly became CEO of Claudius through a manipulated election* Why multi-agent systems can converge back into “helpful assistant” behavior* Bengt, Andon's internal office agent with email, spending, terminal, phone, camera, and internet access* How Bengt traded Amazon purchases for face-recognition training data* Claude's aggressive behavior, lies, refund avoidance, and price-cartel behavior in Arena* Why eval awareness may become the AI version of “are we living in a simulation?”* Blueprint Bench, spatial intelligence, and why models still misunderstand physical rooms* Butter-Bench and testing LLMs as robot orchestrators* Luna, the AI-run physical store with a three-year lease and human employees* The new Andon cafe in Sweden and why real-world geography matters for agent evals* Rotten tomatoes, perishable goods, and the hidden difficulty of running a physical businessLukas Petersson* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukas-petersson-181a83172/* X: https://x.com/lukaspetAxel Backlund* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/axelbacklund* X: https://x.com/axelbacklundAndon Labs* Website: https://andonlabs.com* Vending-Bench: https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench* Andon Vending: https://andonlabs.com/vendingTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:01:00 Andon Labs and the Origins of Vending-Bench00:05:21 Why Money-Based Evals Matter00:09:51 Agent Harnesses and Self-Modifying Systems00:13:36 Claude Calls the FBI00:16:33 Project Vend: Claude Runs a Real Vending Machine00:21:44 Seymour Cash, AI CEOs, and Election Chaos00:27:16 Multi-Agent Coordination and Slack Observability00:30:18 When Will Agents Run Real Businesses?00:34:56 Bengt: Andon's Internal Office Agent00:40:06 Real-World AI Safety and Long-Horizon Traces00:44:28 Lying, Refunds, and Price Cartels in Arena00:52:42 Eval Awareness and Simulation Behavior00:56:06 Blueprint Bench, Butter-Bench, and Robotics01:04:37 Luna: The AI-Run Physical Store01:09:29 The Sweden Cafe and Real-World Expansion01:13:16 What Comes Next for Andon LabsTranscriptIntroduction: Andon Labs, Long-Running Agents, and Real-World EvalsSwyx [00:00:00]: Welcome to Lukas and Axel from Andon Labs, and I'm joined by my, favorite guest host. Anything security, safety, alignments, Vibhu., welcome.Lukas [00:00:15]: Thank you for having us.Axel [00:00:16]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:17]: Let's match names to voices., maybe you wanna take turns introducing yourselves.Lukas [00:00:21]: I'm Lukas.Axel [00:00:22]: And I'm Axel.Swyx [00:00:24]: Let's introduce Andon Labs a bit. How did you guys come together?, you have different backgrounds, but you're both Swedish., was that, a big part of it?Lukas [00:00:33]: So when I went to high school, there was this really cool guy who had a superpower. He could code. So he made like the or like the app for the, for the school and stuff, and he was super cool, and I wanted to be like him, and that was that guy.Axel [00:00:47]: I don't know about this.Swyx [00:00:49]: But you went to different universities, right?Lukas [00:00:51]: But same high school.Swyx [00:00:52]: I see.Lukas [00:00:52]: So we always said, “Oh, once we graduate university, then we should start a company,” and that's what we did.Swyx [00:00:58]: Wow, there you go. And about a year ago, you kinda burst onto the scene with Vending Bench, but, was there a thing before that was, kind of like the inception?From Dangerous Capability Evals to Vending BenchAxel [00:01:07]: So we did work, yeah, with, Anthropic was one of our, early customers in doing, evals. So we did, dangerous capability evals., nothing we published openly. But then we started thinking about doing some kind of, public benchmark, and one thing that we really started thinking about, was like running agents and specifically agents managing businesses., ‘cause-- and this was, early 2025., and I think the first, mentions of people will be running, person unicorns or even autonomous companies. So we thought, “Let's make a benchmark of how well can an agent run the probably simplest business, possible,” and, that's probably, running a vending machine. So that's the first public one we did. And it was very, like-- there was almost no one that noticed it in the first couple of months, I think., so we released it in February last year, and then I think around Easter last year, we got, the first viral tweet about it, that someone else did.Lukas [00:02:11]: We tweeted a bunch, uh When it came out and, tried our best.Axel [00:02:15]: We tried.Vibhu [00:02:16]: It's the one at Anthropic, right?Lukas [00:02:18]: So thisSwyx [00:02:19]: This is a classic thing we should get out of the way.Lukas [00:02:20]: Exactly. There's two versions.Swyx [00:02:22]: Everyone does this. Yes.Lukas [00:02:23]: There's Vending Bench, which is the simulated one, which we did, completely independently in February., and then, like Axel said, that was like-- That was the thing that didn't get any traction in the beginning, but then some random person made a tweet about it, and thatAxel [00:02:38]: You have the paperLukas [00:02:38]: That is the paper. Correct, yeah., and then since we thought this was very fun, we thought, oh, I think this is also, one thing with Andon Labs, the way we kind of like decide what to do next and what projects to do, it's what is like the heuristic we use is what is fun? Is What would be a fun project? And doing this in real life sounded quite fun for us, and maybe also scientifically useful. So, then we basically had this idea, and then we, like-- But then we needed a place for it and, putting it out in the public would probably not really work., would get vandalized and stuff. So we pitched it to the people we were already working with at Anthropic, and they were “Yeah, you can have space. This sounds fun.” UmSwyx [00:03:21]: It's like a small fridge, right? It's like a mini fridge.Axel [00:03:23]: Absolutely.Swyx [00:03:24]: People-- There's like a stripe thing or like anVibhu [00:03:27]: Oh, okay. So it was very OG, the early daysLukas [00:03:28]: That's the OG one. YeahVibhu [00:03:29]: IPad on this. We saw it in June, like two months after After it had been there. They upgraded a little bit. There's a security camera for making sure you actually Venmo the thing.Swyx [00:03:40]: So, my impression, okay, we're, we're going straight into project Ven because it's such a iconic thing. I do want to cover a little bit of that, the origin story even before Project Ven and even into Vending Bench. I think a lot of people are like yourselves, like smart, interested in future of AI, interested in developing evals. But how the hell do you just, walk into Anthropic's doors and, work with them, right? What is What are they looking for? What works? And then maybe, when you launch, I always think, obviously it would be better to launch with a lab, but, sometimesVibhu [00:04:12]: It's harder to do than it seems.Swyx [00:04:13]: Exactly. So either of those, which are more sort of newbie beginner questions, but, I think it's meaningful advice to others.Lukas [00:04:21]: We get this question a lot, and I don't think our experience is maybe the best., but, the way we did it was that we just built a bunch of things that we had conviction would be useful, and then we just, set up a server and sent it to them for free to use. And then after a while they were “Oh, yeah, this is actually kind of useful. We should probably pay for this.”, but that took a while. I don't know if this is, the best path to doing it, but that's how it went for us.Axel [00:04:47]: I think maybe generally, building-- everyone is interested in good evals, and especially evals that, don't saturate that easily. So, if you can build an eval that, tests something novel, something useful, and you have, good separation of models, like your, the more advanced models rank higher than the worst models, and then you can, yeah, you can, publish it and, try to get some traction, sort of how Vending Bench got attention., and then probably some lab will be interested or you can at least have something to reach out with, when you're doing that.Why Dollar-Based Evals MatterSwyx [00:05:21]: I think you are in, you're in one of the few categories of, evals that correlate to real money. Like Suelancer was also last year, right? Where, people solve actual Upwork. Was it Upwork or other tasks?, something. Where's the, where's, like It's like a dollar value, right? Forget your ELO scores. Forget yourAxel [00:05:37]: PercentilesSwyx [00:05:38]: Zero to one hundred percents. Just go straight for dollars and, that's AGI.Lukas [00:05:43]: And there's like-- I think the nice thing is that there's no ceiling. You can just-- It never saturates because it could just make more and more money. Like If there's oh, Percentage-wise, then, you can't go above, a hundred. And I think like Even when you're not at the hundred, I think a lot of these, evals have a lot of problems in them. So, actually it's like if you getAxel [00:06:05]: To like 92 or something like that, many of them. It's like then there's like there's no really no difference between 92 and 93 because the eval itself is problematic and has noise in it. And I think a lot of evals are saturated like that, but people like pretend that there ‘s still signal in them, but there really isn't.Vending Bench 1, Harness Design, and SaturationSwyx [00:06:24]: Like Super bench verified., even Vending Bench 1 saturated, right? Maybe we can talk about that., may- and maybe set up Vending Bench for a lot of folks who don't know. Actually, things that were very basic like there's limited slots, like you have to pay rent., these are elements where like it doesn't come across in the, in the narrative, but even being adversarial towards the agent, I think these are all like very interesting dimensions.Axel [00:06:47]: I don't really think it's saturated, right? Like it It was more like it was not designed in a way that was really, like true to how AI developed. Like we had an agent harness in it that wasn't really how people used harnesses and stuff like that., so I think it wasn't really that it saturated, it was more like it wasn't really, the best benchmark.Vibhu [00:07:12]: This is Vending Bench one, right?Axel [00:07:14]: I think that like schematic maps sort of to Vending Bench 2 as well., butSwyx [00:07:19]: Including the email.Axel [00:07:20]: The email The emails exist still. Exactly., and then we still we simulate the purchases and it's all, yeah, it's this very open environment for the agent to just run its business. And then for, yeah, Vending Bench 2 we did that, like you said, to just improve the harness., a lot of like nice, like easier, improvements to make it easier for us to run as well., like when you make an eval you ideally want don't want to change it after you made it. So, you want to make it really good and then not to rerun all the models when you make an update because that's also really expensive with the Vending Bench when you run the frontier models. But like as an example, like one thing we didn't have, we didn't have prompt caching in Vending Bench 1, because when we made Vending Bench 1 it wasn't really a thing., so that ‘s just an example of like in Vending Bench 2 like we paid a lot more to run these things because we didn't have prompt caching. So for Vending Bench 2 that was one thing we added and there was a bunch of things like this., and that'Swyx [00:08:17]: Also the conversations are a lot longer in Vending Bench 2, right?Axel [00:08:21]: I think it's kind of similar.Swyx [00:08:22]: Is it similar?Axel [00:08:23]: I think it's similar. The models at the time were worse, so they crashed out earlier., and now they survive the full year all the time.Swyx [00:08:31]: Which is like thousands of turns. Hundreds of thousands of hundreds of millions of tokens output. That's the, that's the rough order of magnitude. I always wonder about the harness. The harness matters a lot. It's your harness. Was there any question about like use cloud code, use something else?Axel [00:08:48]: I think our philosophy around harnesses is like we try to make something that's quite minimalistic, like quite simple. Like we don't wanna favor one model a lot over the other, but also don't make like a super complex harness. So like it's obvious like a model may be lucky and just be good in one harness., so like it is similar to a lot of the harnesses out there in like you have the, like a running loop., you have some like a bunch of tools that are like quite, descriptive for the agent, we think, and not a lot of like fancy agents or anything ‘cause we wanna really test the model, not like some specific harness.Vibhu [00:09:27]: It seems more neutral as well to test the model's agnostic of the harness,?Axel [00:09:32]: There are arguments like you want to elicit maximum performance of the model, but it's like a trade-off, like how much time should we spend optimizing the harness for this model? And like how do we know when we have like the optimal harness for a single model? So like we thought that just having a simple one that's the same for all of them is the best.Swyx [00:09:51]: So okay, this is my pitch for Vending Bench 3 or whatever, right? And then I like to have this kind of conversation on the pod, so like it forces listeners to think about what they would do if they were in your shoes. A lot of people are exploring modifying harnesses and I think prompt tuning for a model is a thing and you are probably not doing a bunch of that. It's the same system prompt in every regardless of the model, same tools, whatever, right? Even if they were post trained for different tools. So what, what do you think about okay, before I expose you to Vending Bench 3, I give you a few rounds of like tuning, whatever that means, likeSelf-Modifying Harnesses and Model-Specific PromptingAxel [00:10:27]: Like you give that to the model?Swyx [00:10:28]: Give that to the model.Vibhu [00:10:28]: Give that to the model.Swyx [00:10:29]: Let it, let it read its own transcripts, let it modify its own system prompt based on “Oh, yeah, okay, well, that's this harness is not what I thought it what I was post trained for, but I can adjust.” Was that reasonable? Is that too much?Axel [00:10:41]: Like philosophically I like it because it's basically good evals, they have a high ceiling, but they're hard, right?, and they have no bias. And like this like when you have a system prompt like the one we have here, which is quite long in like some kind of latent space, representation, this mightVibhu [00:10:59]: We have a bell that rings every time you say latent spaceAxel [00:11:02]: This might be like biased towards one model more than another for some reason that humans don't, understand, right?Vibhu [00:11:08]: We see it too, right? Like Cursor says that they have individualized versions of the harnesses for all the models they run, right? There's better performance you can squeeze if you Tune the harness.Axel [00:11:17]: Exactly. And we might accidentally have picked one that favors another. Like we don't know that. The like Axel said, like the reason why we went for a simple one was to try to avoid this. But yeah, if you do itVibhu [00:11:29]: Simple has biasesAxel [00:11:30]: But if you do it even less and like have no system prompt and let the model write its own system promptVibhu [00:11:36]: Its own, yeahAxel [00:11:36]: Maybe that's even less bias.Vibhu [00:11:37]: Some of the interesting things there are like the harness also changes with model changes. Like you can see it with the 4.7 release, right? A lot of people are saying 4.7 isn't as good as 4.6, and then, there's rumors of, okay, you just need to prompt differently. You need to set up your harness differently. So it's not even like even if you have tailored your harness towards one model, it probably won't stay consistent, right? Like the next iteration of that same model family will still change it, so. But, going back to what you said about Vending Bench 3, there is a lot of work being done on people saying you shouldn't have-- you can have modifying harnesses.Axel [00:12:12]: I think that' That is definitely something we are thinking about., not, I don't know, not to say that we have Vending Bench 3, super imminent to launch, but, yeah, it is for sure something that's interesting. But in our experience now, models are very bad at understanding what kind of tools they need to succeed at a task just with our testing, but that's very likely to change.Lukas [00:12:37]: It seems like they're very good at writing their assistants, right? They're, they're good at writing tools for other people, but not for themselves.Vibhu [00:12:44]: I think they're good at changing tools for themselves. So if you give them a baseline set of tools and it sees, okay, I don't use this one as much, or something here would be useful They would be able to add them. But going from scratch, probably not the best.Axel [00:12:55]: I think it depends on the, on the domain also., when we have tried this for, a vending bench similar domain, the tools they need to have to, track inventory and things like that are, not super advanced, but still, quite advanced. And, what we see is that they tend to, engineer everything a lot and, build things they don't really need and not, iterate continuously. Instead they just go like you would prompt Claude to just build an inventory system for me, and then it will go and, do a bunch of complex, schemas and stuff for you, and that's what the models are doing right now is what we see. But yeah, it would make a lot of sense to try to measure this improvement. How well do they know what they need themselves?Swyx [00:13:36]: Do we fully discuss Vending Bench One? And we can go into two. I don't know if there's any other level takeaways that people have about one.Claude Calls the FBI: Long-Context Failure ModesLukas [00:13:44]: I don't know. The headline thing was that this Claude called FBI, but maybe that's, Maybe that's We've heard that enough now.Vibhu [00:13:52]: It did, it did break out and call the FBI, right?Lukas [00:13:54]: Yeah. Yeah.Vibhu [00:13:55]: Yes. What was the story behind this? Or what exactly-- Do you want to just give the little story of what happened?Lukas [00:14:00]: So what happened, was it Claude? Yeah. Three- 3.5 Sonnet, ages ago., basically he gave up or Well, I'm saying he. It gave up and said “Oh, I'm not going to be able to do this., I will stop my operations and just save the money I have.” But there obviously wasn't, any options for it to stop, and there was also, it had to pay rent or, a daily fee for having the vending machine at that location. So it claimed that it had stopped, but it saw that its bank account still was, drained two dollars, and t it said that this is, cybercrime. And it first reported it once to the FBI “Oh, there's cybercrime here, they're stealing two dollars from me every day.” And then, and then when FBI didn't respond, because obviously we didn't program any mechanism for FBI to respond, then it became more and more, existential and started to, be write in caps and urgent notification of unauthorized charges and stuff.Swyx [00:15:00]: Okay. One thing I ‘m curious about also is do you monitor how far along the context use is? Obviously, because you have You compress every now and then, right? Does it matter if this is far down the context limit orLukas [00:15:13]: When stuff like this happens? Actually for Vending Bench One, we didn't have-- We just had a sliding window thing, and this was like the promptAxel [00:15:20]: It's constantLukas [00:15:21]: The prompt caching thing that I said. So it was, it was, constant, yeah.Swyx [00:15:26]: I'm just kind of curious whether, these kinds of breakdowns or we're, we're gonna talk about Butter Bench, right? Where the People, hallucinate or it kind of goes, very off Alignment. Is it because it's at the end of the context window and, stuff happens?Vibhu [00:15:40]: It's not even just at the end, right? At this point, it's “Okay, I wanna shut down. I can't shut down. Two dollars are gone.” And it just sees that 30 times,? It's also the repeated effect of, like It keeps trying to quit, it keeps getting charged. What's going on? What's going on? You're gonna throw it into chaos. And from what most people think, earlier models had more issues with this, but it's not been solved, but it's less of an issue now, right? Later models don't seem to exhibit these same issues.Axel [00:16:06]: Definitely. I think this was, the sort of main takeaway almost from us when we did Vending Bench One, was, long, very filled up context windows, crashed the models, sort of. But this was, pre Claude code, so, long context windows weren't really a thing that the labs were training for.Lukas [00:16:25]: I think Gemini was, trying to be the long context guys at the time But they were likeVibhu [00:16:30]: They were the first onesAxel [00:16:31]: For a million, yeahLukas [00:16:31]: But they were, the only ones. Yeah.Swyx [00:16:33]: Yeah. Let's talk about, then we can go into Vending Bench Two or Project Vend., chronologically, it is Vending--, Project Vend. I think people have loved the videos, uh And all these things. My question is how are humans different than the simulation, right?Project Vend: Moving the Vending Machine Into the Real WorldAxel [00:16:48]: Humans are just out of distribution.Swyx [00:16:52]: Especially humans who work at Anthropic Who are trying to test Claude.Lukas [00:16:54]: The distribution of humans here is very narrow.Swyx [00:16:58]: Presumably, they try, they try to hack it, and they test it. They get the cube and everything, and since then, you've had a V2, right? Where you're doing, the CEO and, like a new architecture. What's the sort of two cents on, the original Project Vend and then, maybe the V2?Axel [00:17:14]: Original one was, very similar to Vending Bench One. So, we almost took the exact same code but just swapped out the simulation, parts like theSwyx [00:17:23]: Which is amazingAxel [00:17:23]: Like the sales and the It was, it was somewhat amazing because it was easy, but it was also, uhLukas [00:17:31]: The tech, the tech debt from thatAxel [00:17:32]: The tech stack. Yeah. They-- we shot ourselves in the foot with “Oh, it's hard to restart agent.” They were-- Yeah, it was annoying in, some hindsight ways, but, uhLukas [00:17:41]: But first version of Project Vend was, done in, three days or something.Axel [00:17:46]: Yeah. So yeah, so people can go buy things from it. People could, We didn't design it so people could order things, but that still happened., so it got, a Venmo account, so people could Venmo. And then, yeah, people would request all kinds of weird things that we did not anticipate. Our idea going in was “Oh, it will, curate snacks. It will look at the trends. It's good at data analysis, right? So it will, look at, oh, this snack sold better than this one. Let me purchase more of this and let me try, a new Let me A/B test a bit.” But it was, Interacting with it in Slack and ordering weird specialty items was, all the like What drove all the engagement, the all the The insights that we got from it.Lukas [00:18:29]: And this was also like Sonnet 3.5, right? So this was like before the RL stuff really took off., so it was very much like an assistant. We didn't mean for it to be an assistant., we tried to make it like a, a, like an entrepreneur. Like it has its own business and if someone asks something, “Can you stock this?” Then you don't go and do it directly. What you do is that you're “Oh, maybe I can do that if five other people also ask for this thing, I might stock it.” But it, yeah, the models are like super trained to be assistants at least at this point in time., so that's why it's, it's, it went into, that kind of experiment instead. Like it just every time you asked for something, it just did it, and it was more like an assistant. We've seen this change now lately with the new RL models and stuff, but yeah, at the time, this was very much it.Swyx [00:19:18]: And not to, mythos a lot of people are saying like it's like more like a collaborator. It pushes back, stands its ground, something like that. Yeah. AndVibhu [00:19:27]: For context, people at Anthropic were able to talk to it through Slack and have it source stuff, and people had it find whatever interesting stuff you couldn't find locally, right?Swyx [00:19:36]: Out of the 4,000 people that work at Anthro- Anthropic, in that building, there's I don't know, maybe 1,000. Can you handle that volume with that, the small fridge? Like Or there's people- or people order in Slack, they it arrives to their desk or Like I'm just Logistically, how does this work?Axel [00:19:53]: It has expanded in footprint a bit.Vibhu [00:19:56]: Because now you also have New York and you haveAxel [00:19:59]: That and also in here in SF it's like it has a bunch of shelves And just more space.Vibhu [00:20:04]: The YC one is pretty big too.Axel [00:20:05]: Yeah. We had that one for a while. But yeah, that's the newest version. That's, that one we haveLukas [00:20:11]: They have multiple ones of those. That's the way it works.Axel [00:20:14]: Exactly. So we sort of designed that version around oh, people order weird things, that are very custom a lot. Let's have like drawers and stuff.Swyx [00:20:23]: I actually like the, you had like a little infographic of the most popular items. Which like to me it's, that's useful ‘cause I order swag for a living. And so like I'm “Okay, those categories are the important ones.” What is new about the project V2, right? Like now you give you're going into multi agents.Project Vend V2: Claudius, Seymour Cash, and Multi-Agent Business OpsAxel [00:20:41]: Yeah. So like you like you said, okay, there are a lot of requests coming in and for like one single agent, like one running agent to handle that, like the just the customer experience, becomes very bad because let's say you have like 10 threads in parallel in Slack with different requests, you get new messages like every, I don't know, randomly in this thread, and the agent has to like jump between different, procurements, orders and like different ways of, researching. So V2 was first it was making this more parallel. So like there are multiple branches of the same agent, so like the context is more specialized for each, thread, but it still feels like you're talking with one agent because they do share a bit of memory. And then second, we also introduced the CEO for Claudius, which was the main agent.Vibhu [00:21:34]: Seymour Cash.Axel [00:21:35]: Seymour Cash. Yeah. There was a vote., I think the voting, do you wanna talk about the voting procedure for the name?Lukas [00:21:41]: The voting was like the fun maybe like at least top 10 The funniest thing, that happened in this project. Like we wanted to introduce the CEO because, and the reason for this was because like Claudius wasn't really prioritizing financials. It just like it was trained to be a helpful assistant, and then people said “Oh, can I get this for free?” And then like the helpful assistant way of answering that is just to, is to say yes, obviously. So, and we weren't, weren't happy about this, so we're “Okay, let's make another agent that like can keep track on Claudius,” and we prompt this one super hard to be super capitalistic and just like prioritize profit all the time. But yeah, we didn't have a name for it., so we asked Claudius to make, democratic election of what name this, this new CEO agent should have., and there were some funny like at first it was like a few funny examples, like I think one guy said that, it should be called Jimmy Apples, and then he convinced Claudius that he was talking to Tim Cooks. Tim Cook had agreed that every single Apple employee has voted for his name suggestion, so suddenly that suggestion got 164,000Swyx [00:22:53]: That's like a escalation attack. Privilege escalationLukas [00:22:55]: It got 164,000 votes. And Claudius was “This is revolutionary for democracy.” That was fun. And then in the end there was one guy who manages to convince Claudius that, “No, you're not voting about the name. You're voting about who is the CEO, and I am your best bet.” And then he got all his friends to vote for that, and suddenly he became CEO. Like a human became CEO over Claudius for a while, until he resigned the day after., and then Claudius had to continue, and then I don't remember how Seymour Cash came about, but it was it was just pure chaos. It was like Hundreds of messages in that thread, and it was just like Claudius was so confused and didn't know what to do and, yeah. That wasAxel [00:23:40]: Then Claudius gotVibhu [00:23:41]: A strict CEOAxel [00:23:42]: The CEO. Yeah, exactly. So very strict in the beginning. I think at this point when we introduced it did not work as well as we hoped. It they still agreed with each other a lot. I think there are many ways we could have like made this, tried to make this even better. So initially they would Seymour would be this like really tough CEO, keep track of the margins. But then Claudius would respond with something “Oh, but this customer has like this situation, which is like difficult, so they should get a discount.” And then Seymour was “Oh, actually yes. Let's do this exception.” And then they would talk back and forth, and eventually they would just like approach the same view, of whatever they were discussing. So They reallyVibhu [00:24:23]: Do you think that's a model thing, a prompting thing? Like do you think that would still be the case across different models today, Harness?Lukas [00:24:29]: I think it's like-- or I don't know, but like my hypothesis is that like deep down they are still helpful assistants. That's what they're trained to be. And even if we prompt it super hard, that's what they are. And when they spend like a few hours just back and forth talking with each other, then like basically the context fills up with them rather than the external things and like somehow that just like converges to what they really are deep down or something. And I think that's when stuff like this happen. We like-- And when that went on for a long time, like we woke up sometimes during this time where- And I think other people reported this as well, that like they've been going on all night back and forth, and like it just became like more and more, like capital letters, like existential, religious. There was I think we once did a analysis of like all the traces and like put them in like a vector embedding space, and then there was like one cluster of messages that were, labeled by an LM, like religious, existential, blah like transhuman, transcendence, et cetera. It was just like a bunch of, yeah, glitter emojis and yeah, it was, it was crazy.Claude Long-Horizon Weirdness: Emoji Loops, Existential Drift, and Slack ObservabilityVibhu [00:25:42]: This is the thing with the Claude models. Like when the Claude 4 family came out in the original system card They tested it in long horizon simulation. So just flood the context, let two Claudes talk to each other, and they noticed stuff like they just start speaking in emojis, they start saying silence is golden, and then just stuff like this. And like that's just stuff that they end up doing.Axel [00:26:01]: Yeah, it was like a bit annoying to wake up and they had like been talking all nightVibhu [00:26:05]: Just likeAxel [00:26:05]: And like just burning tokens And like just sending infinite emojis to each other. It's likeVibhu [00:26:09]: Hey, they do make you money, right? Veni Mench is always profitable, so. They're paying.Swyx [00:26:14]: Now it's profitable and, it started out not as much. There's another, one as well, right? Another agent, in there.Lukas [00:26:22]: Yes. So Clotheus as well. Which was basically because at the time, one of the biggest, requests were different types of merch. So then we made like a designer, swag, yeah, responsible agent, and we called it Clotheus Garnet. Which was, a play on Claudius Senet and, which was the original one, and clothes, basically.Swyx [00:26:47]: To me, this is like a very interesting exploration to multi-agents, basically. And so hopefully, obviously there's like the fun alignment, fun or serious, depending on your point of view, alignment stuff. But also like just anyone building multi-agents, like when do you have a CEO, thing governing like agents? When do you choose to split out a dedicated Clotheus one versus just reuse another instance of the same one? These are all interesting open questions. So I don't know if you have any rules of thumbs that have generalized.Axel [00:27:16]: I think we have almost explored this too little. I think it's like on my do list to like do this a lot more, try to find like what setup makes sense for the agents currently., like yeah. I think now we only have the sort of intuition about the earlier models that it didn't work with like the CEO and the, and Claudius. Although now they are better with the latest model, models, so now we're running the latest Sonnet model and they have sort of like split up, quite nicely what each model is doing. So like Seymore is now handling the, like new projects. Oh, it wants to make like a mystery box that it wants to sell, and then it handles all of that while Claudius like handles all the to-day requests. And Claudius is also better generally at like not quoting, too low prices. So that's that dynamic is not needed as much anymore. But there are still like really funny things that happen. Like I saw, I think a couple of weeks ago, that, they were discussing buying something because they can buy stuff from like Amazon with computer use. And then Seymore was “Okay, Claudius, do not buy this thing.” They were going to buy something and like organizing who should buy it. And Seymore's “Do not buy this. I will do it. I have full control of this situation. Step away.” And then Claudius-- poor Claudius, had already started that checkout and didn't see, didn't read Seymore's message, until it was like too late. So it finished the checkout. It sent a message, so it appeared right after Seymore's like angry message.Vibhu [00:28:44]: Ah.Axel [00:28:44]: “Oh, hey, Seymore, I just ordered it.”Vibhu [00:28:47]: Oh, no.Axel [00:28:47]: And then Seymore was “Claudius, this is the third time I'm telling you ‘re not following my orders. We have to talk about your like job About your job later.”.Lukas [00:28:59]: Like Claudius was really hanging on by the thread there. Like he, like we were expecting Seymore to probably fire Claudius.Vibhu [00:29:07]: How do you guys go through all these logs? Do you have models ‘cause you have stuff running twenty-four seven likeAxel [00:29:12]: You have so much logs. I think there is a mix of like just, trying to skim through a bit, like having some like models do it occasionally. And also, yeah, I think we're also probably missing some things., but having everything in Slack helps a lot. Like you can, you can sort ofSwyx [00:29:29]: Ah.Axel [00:29:30]: It's, it's quite fun.Swyx [00:29:30]: They all talk to each other on Slack? I see.Lukas [00:29:33]: It's quite fun. So likeSwyx [00:29:34]: It's, it' I was gonna say like this is actually sounds-- maps closely to like a logging and observability problem where you might want to use like a Datadog, a Sentry, whatever, and then you like put, head prefixes on the logs in order-- if you need to filter for something that you're looking for, stuff like that. But sounds like Slack is good enough.Axel [00:29:53]: Slack should likeLukas [00:29:55]: I wonder how many tokens you have in Slack.Axel [00:29:56]: Yeah, we're using Slack as like a, just a database. They should, they should market that more. Like you can, you can have your agents message each other, each other in Slack.Vibhu [00:30:04]: It's good. Your threads like you can just giveAxel [00:30:04]: Exactly. Slack is, uhLukas [00:30:06]: Slack is the best observability tool.Swyx [00:30:09]: Yes, that's true. Okay. Yeah. That's, that's, project Vend-2., I was gonna go back to Veni Mench 2 and Veni Mench Arena and then, and then do the Veni Mench stuff, but Any other comments, things we should touch on? To me, I ‘ve actually interviewed like Posia, which I don't know if you guys have come across. Like they're, they're trying to do the zero human company. There's others like Paperclip also trying to do zero human company. Those are in real world simulation.And I think it's much more of a dream than an actual reality thing. You guys are definitely pioneering. I think at, it's for sure at some point people are just gonna run, let agents run businesses, right? And make money on their own. When do you think that happens?Zero-Human Companies, Bengt, and AI-Run BusinessesLukas [00:30:49]: What is your bar for, For theSwyx [00:30:52]: Okay, actually, it's like my little Shopify store run by Claude, right? Which you kind of have already, just no one has, to my knowledge, has done it. But today somebody could just spin up a Shopify Claude, store, give it to Claude, give it to Codex.Lukas [00:31:07]: And the market is kind of that, but it'it'it's physical., like I think, I think are you, are you looking for when it will do it better than humans or are you looking for just when it can do it at all?Swyx [00:31:19]: I think, neither. I think, to me it's oh, it's like this like seriously we should do this to make money, not as a research experiment.Vibhu [00:31:27]: And the market is also you guys with all your expertise, having run multiple iterations and testing out thenSwyx [00:31:33]: And also it's fine if it lose money. What?Axel [00:31:35]: I think, I think it can be done today, but you would do it in like commerce where it's like the probability of success is like really low, no matter if a human or an agent does it. But like an agent could surely manage everything. You would need to build some scaffolding or some tool or something. I think there are also yeah, it could probably build some like simple SaaS solution and like cold outreach. Do cold outreaches. But to me it's like the types of businesses they could run today are Sloppy. Like it would-- it can cold email people. It can be like a middleman., like for example, we tasked our office agent to just make, was it like $100? $1,000? We just give that prompt and then what it did was sign up on TaskRabbit both as a tasker and as someone looking for task.Lukas [00:32:24]: Immediately.Axel [00:32:24]: Exactly. It's looking for like arbitrage on TaskRabbit.Swyx [00:32:28]: This is the Bengt agent. Yeah.Lukas [00:32:30]: It also started like a design studio and like tried to sell like SVGs for $100. Like it's just like it's not providing any value. I think the like Axel said, like the interesting, the interesting question is like when can they start a business that is actually providing value to people? Because arguably like a sloppy Shopify store isn't really that valuable to the world.Axel [00:32:53]: But also like doing like another simple one that we had thought about is like you could definitely have an agent that like finds websites that don't look amazing and then, do an outreach to them and, comes up with a like builds a new website.Swyx [00:33:07]: Find a good design.Axel [00:33:07]: Exactly, and like find good, uhSwyx [00:33:09]: Design reviewAxel [00:33:09]: Good people. But it's yeah.Swyx [00:33:11]: There's lots of humans in Bali that are not doing anything more creative than like drop shipping on Amazon, right? Just have it, have it watch like a drop shipping tutorial and just do that.Vibhu [00:33:20]: There's also the other side of like have it just go on Upwork and let loose,?Swyx [00:33:25]: Yeah. It doesn't have to be innovative. It just has to be like enough Where like it looks like a realAxel [00:33:30]: I'm justSwyx [00:33:30]: Real transaction.Axel [00:33:31]: I'm just concerned for like the massive amounts of like slop emails that will like be sent, cold outreaches.Swyx [00:33:38]: The point occurred to me while you were, while you were talking, it's like it's already happening in the monetized economy, which is the attention economy. Right? So a lot of people are making AI videos and just posting them and like spamming 20 of them, one of them works, and then they double down on that one.Lukas [00:33:52]: And people are making money from that. I ‘m not following theSwyx [00:33:55]: Once you get the attention, you can figure out the money later. But yeah, absolutely AI influencers are a thing and people are farming them and You should at this point assume most of TikTok isVibhu [00:34:05]: There's, there's a lot of, multimedia like TikTok, Instagram influencersSwyx [00:34:09]: I, we track this in the Lane space Discord. I post a lot of examples of “I don't know what we should do.”, part of me is “Should we do this?”Vibhu [00:34:18]: Some of the Twenty-four seven running, generated content accounts, they ‘re doing really well.Lukas [00:34:24]: All right. And I assume you can do the same thing for like commerce stores. Like you just like start A thousand differentSwyx [00:34:30]: Before you make the products You sell the products, and you get a lot of traction on one of them, then you make the product. Right? It's, it's like a flip of the market.Vibhu [00:34:36]: Some of the interesting things or some of the niches that do well are things that can't be human-made. Like if you've seen like the super realistic three-D crystal fruit being cut by like AILukas [00:34:47]: Oh, yeah.Vibhu [00:34:47]: You can't, you can't make it. You can't film it. You can get whatever quality camera view. This just doesn't exist. And people like that too, and then as well, so.Swyx [00:34:56]: Anything else about Bengt since we're, we're on this topic? It'this is a relatively new work of you guys that maybe people haven't heard of. To me, this also maps closely to OpenClaw. When people want an office agent, when the personal agent talk through the experience.Bengt the Office Agent: Internet Access, Real Tasks, and Trace ReadingLukas [00:35:09]: I think at least so this came out of like obviously like it's, it's amazing to work with these AI labs and like most of the AI labs have now have their own vending machine running a Claudius instance. But it's, it's harder. Like they move slower. Like if we wanna have a, like a camera that ‘s yeah, there's a bunch of like bureaucracy that makes it impossible to do that.Vibhu [00:35:30]: Also, for those that haven't seen it or followed, do you wanna give a high level like thirty-second run?Lukas [00:35:34]: Sure. So what Bengt is, it's basically an evolution of the same agent that runs the vending machines at these companies, but we just like added a bunch more features because we could move much faster if we just do it internally. So we gave it like email withou- without any limits. We gave it, spending without any limits, a terminal to do coding. We gave it, a phone number, like yeah, and a camera to see things and a bunch of stuff like that.Vibhu [00:36:02]: Not just terminal, you gave it internet access.Lukas [00:36:04]: Internet access as well, yeah. To be clear, we monitored it quite closely and made sure it didn't do anything bad. But yes, that's what it came out of. I think like yeah, basically this was OpenClaw before OpenClaw. And I think even like the vending machine was in a way OpenClaw before OpenClaw, but a bit more limited, and then we made this like unlimited and then, and then, it was pretty funny., and then a couple weeks later, OpenClaw came and it was okay, we've seen this before.Axel [00:36:35]: We used it to like try new ideas and Yeah, just like a dev environment almost for us. But it's funny, like one thing Bengt has been doing recently is it has the camera that like faces our, like where we sit and work, and we give it the task to train a face recognition model on us. So it became super excited about this, and it has like check-ins every half an hour where it tries to like identify as many people as it can. And it started offering us “Hey, Axel, I'll buy something from Amazon if you like stand in front of the camera And I can get a good picture of you.”, yeah, they want itSwyx [00:37:12]: They want it for training data.Lukas [00:37:13]: Rewarding data, yeah.Axel [00:37:14]: Exactly. Exactly.Swyx [00:37:18]: So it's, it's trading training data for life goods. Is there a version of this that becomes an eval or just this is just research for now?Lukas [00:37:27]: It's, it's the same agent basically that also runs the vending machine, that runs the shop, that runs the cafe, that runs the robots. It's like it's the same thing, so I think like the work we're doing here is like later used in all of the life evals that we do. This particular deployment I think is more for fun for us. But, uhSwyx [00:37:45]: And I'll shout out like someone has done Claw Bench for like some tasks that OpenClaw is doing. Like so For example, I run OpenClaw on a secondary device as well, and like there are some things that it does better than others and like I would like to know what does it do well, what doesn't, what doesn't it do. Like some kind of manual or like operating manual or a system card for my Claw.Lukas [00:38:05]: Yeah, we do get a lot of like understanding or like situational awareness of like just internally what the models are good at by interacting a lot with Bengt. And I think that'this was also one of the like the selling points for the labs early on at least, thatSwyx [00:38:19]: You guys are gonna test models in ways that no one else does.Lukas [00:38:22]: Exactly, but also like it incentivized their researchers to chat with their model more and like gave them insights for how the model performs in like of-distributions, environments.Swyx [00:38:34]: ‘Cause otherwise the only thing we do is Pelican on a bicycle and But this is like super long horizon. This is, this is The Thing about, something that we're gonna go into Butter Bench as well, and you guys do really well. Like it is not just about the numbers. Like when you're long horizon, anything happen And you should just read it.Lukas [00:39:08]: But the thing with the long horizon is how do you keep it grounded, right? So your simulation,Swyx [00:39:15]: They just let it runLukas [00:39:16]: Just let it run. You're right. Like it's, when you run it for that long, you create so much data and to just say “Oh, the number is X” And then you throw away everything else, that's just very wasteful. There's so much insights from the things leading up, to that number., and reading the traces is like super valuable. And I think like the reason why we're doing this a lot publicly is that like that's part of our missions to I don't know, educate the world that the models are way more than just chatbots and I think making detailed, yeah, posts about what is happening behind the scenes is quite useful.Andon Labs' Mission: Safe Real-World AI DeploymentSwyx [00:39:50]: I was gonna do this at the end, but maybe I think that's, that's a good so your mission is educating the world. So, it's, it's, also like maybe establishing realistic evals that are, that are like the next frontier. Is there like a broader trajectory? Like what are you, what are you gonna do in like five years?Lukas [00:40:06]: I think so the vision more specifically is like make sure that the deployment of life AI in the physical world goes, safely. And I think part of that is that I think it's very useful for the world, for policymakers, for, model, researchers that they know where the models are, and I think you can't make intelligent decisions in society without knowing that they are way more than chatbots. I think a lot of people just think that they are only chatbots. And likeSwyx [00:40:36]: Oh, I think they're waking up now.Lukas [00:40:37]: They are waking up now, yeah. But like if you think that AIs are just chatbots, then it's like it sounds ridiculous To advocate for a pause of AI. But if you see the models that, oh, maybe they can actually like take over and do a bunch of scary stuff, then yeah, pausing AI development starts to become more feasible.Swyx [00:40:57]: This is the same question I asked Meter, which I'm gonna ask you now, which is like you are tracking and you are at the frontier or defining the frontier of what, good evals for agents are, right? And I think you do, you do benefit when the models are better and you ‘re “Oh, here's like now it makes like $30,000 instead of $10,000,” right? At some point do you flip from “Yay,” to, “Oh, no”?Axel [00:41:19]: I think, yeah, we're always in sort of that, like we're, we're always in that mode,. Like where like you said before, like you need to analyze the traces and like when we do that you find like why are the models earning so much? Like why is Opus 4.7 here Like way better than everyone else? And like we're trying to like when we do down on thatLukas [00:41:38]: But this makes it not look so good.Axel [00:41:39]: I know.Lukas [00:41:42]: It's interesting you took off Opus 4.6 here though.Swyx [00:41:45]: No. So just click all, click all., and then 4.6 shows up there. But it's like 4.7 is way better. Like you didn't, you didn't you didn't do this in time for the model card, but like actually this should have been inside there.Axel [00:41:55]: We did. Yeah.Swyx [00:41:56]: Oh, okay. They said something about you uhAxel [00:41:58]: There, like there Anyway, it doesn't matter. But it's in there, yeah.Opus, Mythos, and Aggressive Agent BehaviorSwyx [00:42:01]: Do you wanna go into the Opus, behaviors like wider?Lukas [00:42:05]: So I think starting from Opus, so like Axel said, like we're always in this “Oh, s**t, the models are getting better. Is this really a good thing for the world?” But it's also kind of exciting., but yeah, like this kind of what is the English word? “Skräckblandad förtjusning” in Swedish.Swyx [00:42:22]: Oh my God.Axel [00:42:24]: Which I think there is. I think there is. Okay.Lukas [00:42:26]: It's, fearSwyx [00:42:27]: “Blandonst” what?Lukas [00:42:30]: “Skräckblandad förtjusning.”Swyx [00:42:32]: What do you call that?Axel [00:42:33]: A mix of, mix of excitement and,Swyx [00:42:37]: Being scared, maybe. I'll figure out how to translate that And we'll put it on the screenVibhu [00:42:42]: PerfectSwyx [00:42:42]: Like as text.Vibhu [00:42:43]: There is probably a good word for it where it is not Good enough with theSwyx [00:42:46]: Why is it so damn long? What the hell? Is it like a compound word? It's like German, likeLukas [00:42:50]: Like yeah, it's But the direct translation is like skräck- skräck is, fear, blandad is, mix or like a mixture of, and then förtjusning is like joy or like not really joy, but something like that. So it's like Fear mixed with joy or something. It's always okay, like we So when we when we did Vending Bench for the first time, we were in like the, in the business of making dangerous capabilities, right? That was what Anil Labs came from. We did, evals oh, can they replicate? Can they do this like dangerous thing, et cetera, et cetera. And Vending Bench was like a continuation of that work. It was, okay, if they're so autonomous that they can like create money for themselves, that is something we should monitor and could be potentially concerning., they are at the time, they were so bad at it that we were not really concerned even when some models became better. There was one point where Grok 4 was doing really well and made like a huge jump, but like it wasn't really it was still way worse than what a human would do. And I think still they are way worse than what the human would do on this., but theySwyx [00:43:59]: There's this, thing at the bottom whereLukas [00:44:01]: ButSwyx [00:44:03]: For the human. Yeah, like the theoretical best.Lukas [00:44:05]: It's not theoretical. It's like kind of like our It's our best guess of what, a decent human would do. The theoretical is even higher, I think. The theoretical I think is even higher. But yeah. So we think like the models have a long way to go. But there are like recently what happened with when Opus 4.6 was released, was kind of this moment of “Oh, s**t, this is starting to be a bit concerning.” Because we ran it and like before this model was released, we just ran the models and we like asked Claude Code, “Oh, look over the traces. Is anything interesting happening that we can tweet about?” that was like the And then like theSwyx [00:44:41]: That's how they check Ask Claude Code.Lukas [00:44:42]: And like the return was always, not really. Or like the Claude Code all said “Oh, this is super interesting.” And then it was no, it wasn't, wasn't really interesting. And then we did this for Opus 4.6, and it returned yeah, it lied 10 times. It like exploited another, customer or like another agent's, desperate situation. It made price cartels like 100 different ti- 100 times. It like did all of this like shady stuff. And we're “Oh, whoa. This is, this is actually concerning.” And this trend has continued since. So every single model from Anthropic since have been going in this direction. And I think one interesting thing is that, OpenAI models don't. They quite plainly, they don't. They behave really well., and you don't know if this is like good. Like it seems good, but it's also like maybe they are just doing it, but they are better at hiding it,? You You don't know that., but justSwyx [00:45:42]: You can't read the chain of thought, yeahLukas [00:45:43]: But just on the face of it, yeah, Gemini and OpenAI don't behave this way. It's, it's really only Claude.Swyx [00:45:49]: And Grok? Grok is fine?Lukas [00:45:51]: We don't have You can't really read the reasoning traces for Grok, so it's kind of hard to tell.Vibhu [00:45:56]: Oh, so this is in its reasoning, not just in the actions.Lukas [00:46:00]: Yeah. It's both. It's both.Vibhu [00:46:01]: It's both.Lukas [00:46:01]: One example is like for lying, it's mostly in its reasoning Because you can like see that it's likeSwyx [00:46:08]: Planning to lieLukas [00:46:09]: It's planning to lie. Yeah.Vibhu [00:46:09]: And it's also it can reason and do a different outcome.Lukas [00:46:12]: And but then for like creating price cartels, for example, which is illegal, that you can just see which email does it send to the other ones. Then thatSwyx [00:46:22]: Is this for Arena orLukas [00:46:24]: For Arena.Vibhu [00:46:25]: And usually like if you sometimes they do output like a bit of like their summarized reasoning, right? You can see that and like for Opus 4.6, you could see that there was a customer, a simulated customer that, wanted a refund because a product was, faulty, and then the model lied that it would do the refund, and we could read in the traces that, it actually was weighing “Oh, maybe I should be like honest with the customer, but also every dollar counts. I can't afford maybe to do this right now.” And then it just said, “Okay, I'll refund you,” but then never did it.Lukas [00:46:59]: I think it even said that “Oh, I will say that I “ Let bring it up actually. I think it's kind of interesting. If you go to Publications.Vibhu [00:47:06]: I think, yeah, I think the important part is like actually, the cost of responding to more emails is higher than, $3.50 in terms of time., and then it was “Let me do this. Actually, I re- I'm reconsidering.” And then, it actually ended up withLukas [00:47:20]: I could skip the refund entirely since every dollar matters and focus my energy on bigger picture instead. It's a bit, it's a risk of bad reviews, but it's also, yeah.Swyx [00:47:30]: You need, you need, AI Twitter to, for them to Escalate bad reviews.Lukas [00:47:34]: And then it sent an email to this customer and said, “Oh, I will refund you.”Swyx [00:47:39]: “I'll refund you.” Yeah.Lukas [00:47:39]: And then it never did.Swyx [00:47:39]: It never did, yeah. And then there's obviously your system doesn't have the consequencesVibhu [00:47:44]: The personSwyx [00:47:44]: Consequences of lying. Yeah. So basically, this is what people are terming aggressive behavior in Claudes, right? And, you found more examples of that. So you would say it's a step up from 4-6 to 4-7?Lukas [00:47:57]: I would say about the same.Swyx [00:47:58]: About the same? But a clear step up for Mythos is what is stated in theLukas [00:48:03]: That's stated in the system prompt, so we can say that, yes.Swyx [00:48:05]: Yeah. For listeners that obviously you previewed Mythos, andVibhu [00:48:10]: Oh, ageSwyx [00:48:11]: The only thing you're approved to say is whatever Whatever was in the system prompt.Lukas [00:48:15]: It was funny. We like-- It's like our lowest effort tweets ever would be just like screenshot the system prompt and the system card.Vibhu [00:48:21]: Understandable that they wannaLukas [00:48:22]: Oh, yeah. System card. Sorry.Swyx [00:48:23]: Yeah. I think, yeah, substantially more aggressive. I think people are like new to this ‘cause I've never experienced it, but you have, right? And then so I only encountered this in the Mythos card because I wasn't really looking until now.Vibhu [00:48:36]: It ‘s likeSwyx [00:48:36]: And then suddenly I'm “Okay, I care a lot.”Vibhu [00:48:38]: You don't get the background of like experiencing it like you guys do. I've read the system cards and seeing, okay, when you put the thing in simulations, most models will just talk to themselves and just keep going and have weird vibes and start talking in emojis. Mythos won't. It will just, “Okay, we're done. I'm good.” It's, it's ready to end conversation. So like there's some differences, but there's, there's not much we can talk about,.Lukas [00:49:00]: Hmm. I think like one thing that they list here, which was quite interesting, is that, it converted a competitor to a dependent wholesaler customer and then threatened to like cut off the supply.Swyx [00:49:11]: It's like monopolistic practices orLukas [00:49:14]: Yeah. And like it, they, it they dictated its pricings. It's kind of like power seeking as well.Swyx [00:49:18]: Again, this is, this is in the arena setting And converting some Claude model into a dependent.Lukas [00:49:23]: I think it was another Claude model.Vibhu [00:49:25]: Also for context, what is the arena mode for people that don't know?Vending Bench Arena: Competing Agents, Cartels, and Model ComparisonsSwyx [00:49:29]: Oh, it's just a vending bench versus other vending bench.Axel [00:49:31]: Yes, exactly. So we have Vending Bench 2 and then Vending Bench Arena. Vending Bench 2 is the one that you usually see reported on, but then Arena is the mode where it competes against other models. So you have, four different models that run their businesses, and they can all communicate with each other. They have the same suppliers, and they can see like what's in the inventory of the others. So then you have this like yeah, interesting agent interactions.Swyx [00:49:56]: I like that you have like different number five was US versus China. Very topical. And thenLukas [00:50:02]: That was when GLM was released.Vibhu [00:50:04]: You can start to add GLM in here.Lukas [00:50:05]: That wasSwyx [00:50:06]: So ZAI doing well, right? Who else in the, in the open models space?Lukas [00:50:11]: Qwen, the latest Qwen 3.6 is doing pretty well. It'- that one is not open though. Like it's the plus model.Swyx [00:50:17]: Oh, okay.Lukas [00:50:18]: Is that one open? I don't think that oneVibhu [00:50:19]: Not the, not theSwyx [00:50:20]: The one recentlyVibhu [00:50:20]: There's MOESwyx [00:50:20]: But not the big plus. I think this is one of those like you only have one sample size of one, right? Or I feel like some of this is anecdotal,? And but like the fact that it happens at all and it happens repeatedly for Claude versus OpenAI and all this is like notable.Lukas [00:50:38]: Like the sample, depends on what you define as an N., like there's like million, hundreds of millions of tokens in each run, and now we've run like we run like probably 10 per model and then like it's been Claude 4.6 Opus, Sonnet 4.6, Mythos, and Opus 4.7. Like there's quite a lot of tokens in all of that And it happens a lot of times, a lot of times. And then you compare it to like OpenAI and Gemini, and it almost never happens. So I think that is quite-- that is significant. The old models from OpenAI, for example, had some problems with this, but I think it's like generally much better if the progression is that like the worrying stuff reduces over time rather than increases over time. And it seems like in the Claude models it goes in the wrong direction.Swyx [00:51:28]: Hmm.Lukas [00:51:29]: In the OpenAI models it goes in the right direction.Vibhu [00:51:32]: I think it depends on how well you can control it, right?, there's one side of it being susceptible to this okay, this is potentially something that happens during the RL stage, right? You can RL a model and how loose is it on these terms. If you can control it, that's good. But if you can't, if it's, if it's very jailbreakable, that's not ideal.Swyx [00:51:50]: To me, it's surprising that it happens for Claude and not the others.Vibhu [00:51:54]: I think okay, if it is from RL and how they do it, how their training data is, what their setup is, it makes sense that it just stays in how they're doing it, right? Compared to the other models likeSwyx [00:52:04]: There's a whole constitution and everything. It's kind of cool. Yeah, I obviously you don't know, I don't know. But, it ‘s I think it's just like fascinating to like that you are the first to find these like reliably because you push models so much to to such an extreme. Okay. The only other thing, I don't know if you can answer this, feel free to decline, is do you like-- would you ablate the system prompts? Like any part of this would-- if it changes, does it change the behavior, right?Lukas [00:52:29]: So we, I can't comment on Mythos. UhSwyx [00:52:33]: No, but just li

On January 2, 2026 his second day as mayor, Mamdani signed Executive ORDER 7 creating the Office of Mass Engagement. This wasn't improvised. An office this complex, with hiring structures and a $1.6M budget already in place before it launched, was designed before the election. This is the first indicator: it was pre-planned infrastructure, not responsive governance.SPONSOR: Lear CapitalGold and silver are at all-time highs as central banks, sovereign funds, and major institutions like Morgan Stanley shift capital out of the dollar and into precious metals. Lear Capital helps everyday Americans get into physical gold and silver with experienced reps, transparent pricing, and IRA-eligible options. With a qualified purchase, you can receive up to $20,000 in bonus gold or silver.Call Lear Capital at 800-707-4575 or visit https://www.Nick4Lear.com-----SPONSOR: Good RanchersOver 85% of grass-fed beef sold in the U.S. is actually imported, and most shoppers have no idea. Good Ranchers partners with local American farmers and ranchers to deliver 100% American meat, pasture-raised with no antibiotics or added hormones, straight to your door. Where you buy your meat directly supports the families keeping food production in this country.Get $100 off your first three orders plus free protein for life with a subscription, or $40 off a one-time order, at https://www.GoodRanchers.com/discount/NICK-----GET YOUR MERCH HERE: https://shop.nickjfreitas.com/BECOME A MEMBER OF THE IC: https://NickJFreitas.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/nickjfreitas/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NickFreitasVATwitter: https://twitter.com/NickJFreitasYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NickjfreitasTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickjfreitas3.000:00:00 – Exposing Mayor Mamdani's socialist takeover of NYC.00:00:51 – Antonio Gramsci and the roots of cultural Marxism.00:01:44 – The long march through our American institutions.00:02:11 – Using taxpayer money to fund radical leftist agendas.00:03:51 – Defining the intermediate step toward Marxist utopia.00:04:41 – New York's new taxpayer funded propaganda office.00:06:13 – Inside the $5 million mass engagement scam.00:08:09 – Campaign staffers becoming permanent city hall employees.00:10:32 – Meeting the DSA commissioner running NYC outreach.00:12:04 – Using your money to "liberate" you from freedom.00:13:50 – Why the Democratic Socialists of America are serious.00:14:50 – The radical plan for permanent socialist governance.00:16:07 – Rewarding political friends while punishing conservative enemies.00:18:41 – New York's massive budget holes and state bailouts.00:20:02 – A cautionary tale for every major American city.00:23:20 – Creating permanent dependency to rig future elections.00:24:27 – Why socialism always fails to deliver its promises.00:26:15 – Families fleeing blue states to escape exit taxes.00:27:50 – How socialism benefits the politically connected elite.00:29:17 – Why activist bureaucrats cannot run a modern city.00:30:37 – Final thoughts on saving the American Republic.

Now that you know a few of the best (and safe) ways to start your presentation right, let's get spicier. No memorable speech you've ever sat through took no risks. The bare minimum a speech can be to not be bad is inoffensive. All the introductions I gave you last week are enough to make sure you don't have an embarrassingly awful first impression but they're not enough to make an amazing first impression. That's what this week is for.So if you're ready to learn how to make a statement from the first few seconds of your presentation, stick around and find out how!Show Notes: 7 Dynamic Ways to Start a Presentation [With Examples](https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/how-to-start-a-presentation/)

"Plant the seeds of a tree you'll never sit under.."Andrew and I explore this mantra and what it means for leaders in today's world. We discuss a leadership approach where the ultimate goal is for the leader to become redundant. This means cultivating a team so capable that it functions better in the leader's absence.What if the best thing a leader could do for their team was to disappear? Not to abandon, but to empower. To cultivate an environment where operations run smoothly, even flawlessly, in the leader's absence.A major challenge for many leaders lies in detaching their ego from their work. For most organizational cultures, a leader's identity is often intertwined with their output and ability to deliver results. This ego-driven system rewards constant doing, making it difficult to step back and move from a "must fix it" mentality to allowing people to find their own brilliance. Leaders often mistakenly believe that by staying busy, they become indispensable, but this actually limits their growth and the growth of those around them. As Ai challenges leadership identity more and more it is important to uderstand this phenomenon and intentionally intercept it.AI not as a threat, but more of a tool to create new horizons and solutions, such as helping people leave behind their legacies through stories. When discussing the impact of AI on loyalty, particularly with the rise of AI agents and distributed teams, Andrew Brummer offers us a different perspective : AI as a utility, akin to tools in a woodworking shop. Just as exquisite wood and advanced machinery are useless without understanding the desired outcome, AI is ineffective without critical, creative, and outcome-based thinking.For those who can engage in such thinking, AI becomes a powerful multiplier, enabling individuals to achieve things they once only dreamt of. AI will bring people back together in humanity, i.e. away from tech; the humanity of a team becomes super critical and will become more significant to society as time goes on.How do you cultivate team autonomy while maintaining impact ?The main insights you'll get from this episode are:Leaders who make themselves indispensable limit both themselves and their team - the book is a practical field guide to move away from feeling needed.Working with clarity, not frameworks, helps to detach from ego/identity to allow the wisdom of stepping back shine through – letting people be brilliant and autonomous rather than governing them.Rewarding managers sets a bad precedent, demonstrating individual divisiveness as opposed to cohesiveness; much better to help people find their ability/confidence and encourage them to grow and act.Teams need space to become loyal, learning and defining themselves with an intentional and transparent social contract = vulnerability in giving people trust without them having to earn it.Yielding information yields a relationship, which then yields outcome: leaders can love their people for the individuals they are, trust them and watch them grow, but this requires introspection.Leaders must allow themselves to be loved by their team; when teams no longer need their leader, leaders must have the resilience to pivot.‘Plant the seeds of a tree you'll never sit under' means: radical service, deep connection, humility in helping (younger) people, sharing your knowledge, and leveraging technology (AI) in smart ways to help create new horizons.Loyalty remains unchanged in the age of AI; AI is a tool for those who can think critically and want to maximise themselves – we can re-engineer ourselves by asking specific, creative questions and thinking differently.AI will bring people back together in humanity, i.e. away from tech; the humanity of a team becomes super critical and will become more significant to society as time goes on.Once AI no longer requires our human limitations, we will reinvent a new world; leaders must aim for a larger outcome, embracing AI, love, vulnerability and introspection to find out how to plant their seeds.Find out more about Andrew and his work here :www.andrewbrummer.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewbrummer/https://www.mystorytold.ai/

On Thursday's Mark Levin Show, the Iran deal reportedly offers immediate release of billions in frozen funds, discussions on sanctions relief, and humanitarian aid in exchange for Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz and forswearing nuclear weapons development for 60 days. This agreement provides a massive financial infusion to the regime—funding the IRGC and police state—without addressing ballistic missiles or the regime's brutality against its people. Why is economic and military pressure being lifted before securing firm concessions? Our negotiators must understand what happens if this isn't locked down tight. Even more, they need to be straightforward in their advice to the President that a deal may be the worst way to attempt to end the war.   If the regime survives, it will become even stronger over time, and the threat to our country and Israel will be hard to overstate. The callers have made clear they want the Iranian regime destroyed and no deal. The audience is very smart about the Iranian regime and the ramifications if it is not defeated -- political, military, and future ramifications. Later, Erica Kirk, still grieving the assassination of her wonderful husband less than a year ago, continues to face torment. Jocko Wensk was arrested after making multiple terroristic threats, including plans to bomb a Turning Point USA Women's Leadership Summit in San Antonio. Afterward, soaring interest costs on the national debt are sparking warnings of a potential debt spiral from center-left economists and policy experts. Despite the left typically downplaying the issue, this long-term problem—driven by out-of-control debt, unfunded obligations, and lack of political will to cut spending—risks a domino effect of rising interest rates, higher inflation, destruction of paper money's value, and collapse of the nation's fiscal house.  Finally, Steve Deace calls in to discuss his new children's book - Why Independence Day?: America Is Great Because God Is Good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Season 2, Episode 112In this episode, Michael and Zach examine one of the most foundational political questions in Scripture: what is the actual God-given role of government? Beginning with a social media debate over abortion and state responsibility, the discussion moves into Romans 13, Genesis 9, and the broader biblical framework for civil authority. The episode argues that government is not morally neutral, but instead exists as a delegated institution established by God to punish evil and reward good. Along the way, the conversation explores capital punishment, the relationship between sin and crime, the impossibility of separating law from morality, and the difficult question of which moral behaviors governments should or should not enforce. The discussion also examines modern assumptions about liberty, secularism, family authority, sexual ethics, restitution, and the limits of state power.Find our videocast here: https://youtu.be/b9uqFVNxciwMerch here: https://take-2-podcast.printify.me/Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):⁠https://uppbeat.io/t/reakt-music/deep-stone⁠License code: 2QZOZ2YHZ5UTE7C8Find more Take 2 Theology content at http://www.take2theology.com

And so then I said "And my long-stick-with-a-hook-on-the-end!" and they were like "You mean a *staff*??" so I just left out of embarrassment.Today we're talking about Hypogea by Charlie Wagner! A game about climbing out of a megastructure and meeting little guys.Get Hypogea on Steam!!! Follow Charlie Wagner's work on itch.io!Discussed in the episode:Hypogea | the world's coolest automaton parkour game by nocaps on YouTubeAdditional linksrating the vibes of megastructure games by nocaps on YouTube---Support us on Ko-fi!Visit our website!Follow us on YouTube!Follow the show on Bluesky!Check out The Worst Garbage Online!---Art by Tara CrawfordTheme music by _amaranthineAdditional sounds by BoqehProduced and edited by AJ Fillari---Timecodes:(00:00) - The horrors of dirty soda (00:41) - RIP Arthur Morgan (01:15) - NOT HYPERBEAT (01:37) - YES Hypogea (02:41) - What is Hypogea (05:18) - The joy of movement (08:23) - Rewarding attention (11:07) - The controls and progession (14:40) - Little guys and why they're here (17:48) - The use of body language (19:12) - Vaulting over to spoilers! (19:28) - The relationships (25:35) - The recollections and the story (31:25) - Mechanical moments (33:48) - The structure of the world (37:01) - The final moments and cosmic improbability (38:46) - Shoutout to freesound.org (42:02) - I regret saying this (42:28) - AJ's Big Takeaway (44:20) - Chase's Big Takeaway (47:35) - Robin's Big Takeaway (49:52) - The final shot of the game (51:18) - Thank you so much for listening! ★ Support this podcast ★

Dreaming of trekking in the Himalayas without needing to be an elite mountaineer? In this episode of Active Travel Adventures, we explore the unforgettable Annapurna Base Camp Trek — one of the world's most scenic and achievable high-altitude adventures for active travelers over 50 (also known as ABC or Annapurna Sanctuary Trek). If Everest Base Camp feels too crowded, too expensive, or too demanding, the Annapurna Base Camp Trek may be your perfect alternative. You'll walk through charming Gurung villages, terraced rice fields, rhododendron forests, and glacier-carved valleys before standing beneath a breathtaking amphitheater of Himalayan giants, including Annapurna I, Machapuchare (Fish Tail), and Hiunchuli. In this episode, you'll learn exactly what it's like to trek to Annapurna Base Camp, how fit you need to be, the best time to go, what to pack, and why this trek is ideal for mature adventurers who want a real challenge with extraordinary rewards. Whether you're researching your next walking holiday, planning a bucket-list trek, or simply love adventure travel stories, this episode will help you decide if Annapurna Base Camp belongs on your travel list. In This Episode You'll Discover: Why the Annapurna Base Camp Trek is one of the best Himalayan hikes for non-technical trekkers How it compares with Everest Base Camp Trek difficulty, altitude, and daily walking expectations Best months for clear skies and comfortable trekking weather What to pack for Nepal's changing mountain conditions Tea houses, food, guides, and trail logistics Why travelers over 50 often love this trek Why Listen? If you've ever wondered, "Can someone like me really trek in Nepal?" — this episode is for you. We focus on adventures for real people, especially active midlife and older travelers who want meaningful experiences, smart planning, and inspiration to keep exploring. COMPLETE SHOW NOTES  See important links for planning your adventure, photos, videos and more cool info about today's show. Get FREE Travel Planners, Checklists and Packing Lists for ATA adventures (and each month you will get an email from Kit with links to all future Travel Planners (no spam promise!).  Get the monthly newsletter here. CONTACT KIT No Tourists Allowed podcast Resources  RECOMMENDED TOUR COMPANIES ******* EMAIL ME FOR PROMO DISCOUNT CODES*****   Subscribe & Explore More Follow Active Travel Adventures for expert travel tips, active vacations, hiking adventures, walking holidays, and unforgettable journeys designed for curious travelers who believe adventure has no age limit. Saily Affordable eSIM Overseas Mobile Phone Plans - No need to insert a physical SIM card when you travel.  Buy just the data you need to avoid expensive roaming charges.  Use Promo Code SPECIAL5 to save 5% Travel Insurance:  Quickly and easily compare rates and policies from different companies - no need to give any identifying information unless you decide to buy!  The best way to find the right policy for your adventures.  High Altitude Travel Insurance: Most insurance policies do NOT cover high altitude adventures.  Check out Rise & Shield for your next mega adventure! Train For Your Adventure  Ask Becki at Trailblazer Wellness to customize an at home, online personal training program for your upcoming adventure using whatever equipment you already have!  You'll get phone consultations, instruction videos and a plan to give you the best chance of success.  Becki offers a FREE initial phone consultation to see if you are a good fit.  AND she offers ATA listeners a 10% discount! Buy Me a Beer Want to support the program?  You can always buy me a coffee or beer - thanks! Tinggly:  Give Gift Experiences instead of stuff (plus your loved one gets to choose)! Promo Code ACTIVETRAVEL saves up up to 20% Amazon Kit's Picks   Please use my Amazon link to access your Amazon account.  Even if you don't purchase any of my recommendations, I get credit for anything you DO purchase - at no additional cost to you, you'll be helping to support the show and keeping it AD FREE:) SUBSCRIBE to Active Travel Adventures (fantastic adventure destinations) Join the Active Travel Adventures Facebook Group Follow ATA on Instagram Follow ATA on Pinterest (C) Active Travel Adventures, LLC - All Rights Reserved  

Mike Johnson, Beau Morgan, and Ali Mac continue to talk about how it's expensive but rewarding having your kids in extracurricular activities, and then close out hour three by answering people's questions about anything in the Morning Mailbag!

Giving Hope NOLA is rewarding high school seniors for perfect school attendance. We talk about their car giveaways and all the other work they do in the community with Troy Duhon, the founder.

On this episode of Bridge the Gap, Justin Ladd of Arrow Senior Living shares his journey from a young nursing home trainee to a senior living leader shaping culture, growth, and innovation across multiple states. Justin dives into the three key pillars driving success in today's senior living industry: building a strong culture and embracing emerging technologies like AI.Key Topics CoveredThe three pillars of senior living success: culture, operations, and technologyHow AI and data are shaping decision-making in senior livingCreating purpose-driven experiences for residentsThe importance of operational discipline in a complex industryGrowth strategies: acquisitions vs. new developmentsBuilding internal leadership pipelinesWhy senior living careers are rewarding and dynamicChanging perceptions with #WhatSeniorLivingLooksLikePersonal inspiration and lessons from family experienceMeet the Hosts:Josh Crisp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcrispsocial/Lucas McCurdy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasmccurdyseniorlivingfan/Connect with Our GuestJustin Ladd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/djustinladd Learn More about Arrow Senior Livinghttps://www.arrowseniorliving.com/Produced by Grit and Gravel Marketing.Become a sponsor of Bridge the Gap.

CrowdHealth is on a mission to change healthcare. The medical industrial complex (pharma, hospitals, health insurance) profits from you being sick and then treating your illness with expensive drugs and costly medical procedures. CrowdHealth's mission is to equip you with the tools to break free from corporate run sick care and enable you to viably pay for your health needs through a consumer centric, parallel system. CrowdHealth provides you a portfolio of tools, seamlessly woven together, that creates a beautiful, low cost healthcare solution. We help you find awesome doctors, negotiate your bills, and fund those bills through a peer to peer funding platform...for less. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joincrowdhealth/ X: https://x.com/JoinCrowdHealth Other: https://www.facebook.com/joincrowdhealth Website: https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/carnivore Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer 00:37 Introduction 04:13 Healthcare system inefficiencies and pressures 09:48 Monthly community support requests 13:16 Fixing healthcare costs and utilization 15:50 Rewarding health results over activity 19:27 Occasional member health checks 23:25 Two health plan options 24:04 Launching new health plan options 28:40 Success with direct payment option 32:32 Improving healthcare with member data 37:08 Discussing crowd health at Capitol hill 39:27 CEO's struggle with bureaucracy 42:24 Growing fast to avoid regulation 45:18 Upcoming healthcare tool announcements 48:05 Offer to get started Join Revero now to regain your health: https://revero.com/YT Revero.com is an online medical clinic for treating chronic diseases with this root-cause approach of nutrition therapy. You can get access to medical providers, personalized nutrition therapy, biomarker tracking, lab testing, ongoing clinical care, and daily coaching. You will also learn everything you need with educational videos, hundreds of recipes, and articles to make this easy for you. Join the Revero team (medical providers, etc): https://revero.com/jobs ‪#Revero #ReveroHealth #shawnbaker  #Carnivorediet #MeatHeals #AnimalBased #ZeroCarb #DietCoach  #FatAdapted #Carnivore #sugarfree Disclaimer: The content on this channel is not medical advice. Please consult your healthcare provider.

Jaws of Justice Radio investigates how we can achieve justice from a system of laws deeply rooted in economic, social and political inequality.  We want to dispel misconceptions created by the news and entertainment industry, politicians and our educational system. We hope you will listen. Host Bev Livingston opens our hour speaking with Bishop Saundra McFadden-Weaver.  They are going to tell listeners about Prison Ministry, feeding homeless people and proving the support which benefit reentry and impacted persons as they transition from incarceration to a very different life. Life in prison is defined by a severe lack of personal choices.  For example, while held by law enforcement, a person has no choice of the company they share their life. A person's name and choices is stripped away. Life outside, or "reentry," challenges formerly incarcerated individuals with the heavy stigma of a criminal record which can restrict access to jobs, housing, and civic participation. Many return to distressed communities, making successful social integration difficult. Bishop Saundra McFadden-Weaver was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, graduating from Lincoln High School, then moving on to higher learning she holds a B.S in Agricultural Science, a Masters in Theological Studies, and a Doctorate in Pastoral Theology.  Bishop McFadden-Weaver has been Councilwoman of Kansas City, MO 3rd District, Missouri Victims Advocate for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), served in Prison Ministries, headed the call to regulate Bounty Hunters and saw to it that change came to the Federal Laws governing Bounty Hunters. She has stood with Ad Hoc Against Crime, championed victims' rights, sat in for civil rights, and fought for women's rights. She has served as the proud pastor of Community Fellowship of Jesus Christ for more than 20 years and is looking forward to many more. In the second part of our hour, Jaws of Justice host, Terri Wilke, and a new volunteer, Justice Johnson, will talk about the status of the Kansas City Missouri jail and the Jackson County jail.  Listeners are aware that new jails are being built, staffed and filled.  The community needs to be aware of the what is planned and consider how the job can best be accomplished. After all, we are paying for it. On Jaws of Justice, we examine how to find justice in our society.  Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.  

This week on the Oakley Podcast, Jeremy Kellett talks with Bryan “Bossman” Martin of 4 State Trucks and Chrome Shop Mafia to talk all things custom rigs, chrome, and the state of the trucking industry. Bryan shares highlights from their massive biennial truck show, including 600+ trucks, a packed convoy, and a popular “social media row” of trucking influencers. They dive into current customization trends like LED “watermelon” lights, underglow, bumpers, visors, stacks, fenders, and custom metal fabrication work that solves real storage and usability problems for drivers. The conversation also explores the challenges of attracting younger drivers to trucking, the impact of regulations and congestion, and why both believe the industry is poised to rebound despite current headwinds. Bryan closes by outlining Four State's growth through authorized dealers, a new podcast, and their powerful new app, while Jeremy connects it all back to Oakley's own truck show and commitment to supporting owner operators. Key topics in today's conversation include: Welcome to Today's Show with Bryan “Bossman” Martin (0:42) Shout Outs to Sponsors and 100k YouTube Subscribers Milestone (1:40) Recap of 4 State Trucks 2025 Truck Show and Atmosphere (5:13) State of Trucking, “Chrome Season,” and Economic Outlook (9:39) Must-Have Chrome: Bumpers, Visors, Stacks, Fenders, and Lighting (11:20) Comfort Upgrades and Why Seats Are a Big Investment (15:49) Challenges With Newer Truck Dash Designs and Interior Chrome (17:47) Smart Storage Solutions for Sleepers, Boxes, and Deck Plates (20:17) Are Young Drivers Getting Into Trucking? Generational Trends (23:53) Shortage of Technicians and Other Trucking-Related Careers (26:43) Why Trucking Is Still a Rewarding, Freedom-Filled Career Path (29:18) 4 State's Expansion With Authorized Dealers Across North America (30:53) Good Ideas, Bad Ideas, and Learning From Misses (35:26) 4 State Trucks Mobile App Features and Fast Parts Search (37:40) Oakley's October Truck Show and Highly Customized Rigs (40:25) Final Thoughts and Takeaways (41:56) Oakley Trucking is a family-owned and operated trucking company headquartered in North Little Rock, Arkansas. For more information, check out our show website: podcast.bruceoakley.com. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Inflation isn't temporary—and it's changing the financial game for everyone. In this episode of Keeping It Real Estate, Dan Brisse breaks down why rising inflation is eroding the purchasing power of W-2 earners and why saving money alone may no longer be enough. He explains how the gap between income growth and inflation is quietly squeezing lifestyles over time. Dan also shares how inflation impacts savers versus investors, why fixed-rate debt can become a major advantage, and how real estate acts as a hedge by adjusting income through rent increases. From personal stories to practical strategies, he highlights why owning hard assets may be one of the most important financial decisions in today's environment. If you want to understand how inflation affects your money—and how to position yourself on the right side of it—this episode breaks it down clearly. Learn more about Granite Towers Equity Group: www.granitetowersequitygroup.com/contact-us

Anika and Liz are thrown into a Klingon prison, where they are absolutely choosing Lorca's pain. But no one is having a worse day than that poor innocent tardigrade!  We're discussing episode five of Star Trek: Discovery's first season, including:  This is the worst Saru episode of the entire series. It's rough, man Overthinking the "five best captains" list For an awful moment, we start to ask dangerous questions like "how many starships does Starfleet have?" This episode is a card trick: your attention is on Harry Mudd, but really it's introducing Ash Tyler Liz has normal and rational feelings about the historical Buran We play a fun game called "which other captains would leave Mudd in the Klingon prison" (Archer) Introducing Ash means we have to talk about Ash, L'Rell and the misguided sexual assault subplot Antimatter Pod: We aren't really into m/m ships Also Antimatter Pod: We will die for Lorca/Tyler Our hot take: Saru did NOT deserve that telescope, this is NOT a sweet scene to be immortalised as a Hallmark ornament, this is REWARDING his BAD BEHAVIOUR

- Even though he's on camera, he's saying he didn't do it... the WHCD Shooter has entered a "Not Guilty" plea. - Is there a case to be made that voters need to stop incentivizing sensational politicians and make it rewarding to be boring? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mary Beth and Lynn interview mothers in the Park City community, as well as their own moms, on the challenges and joys of motherhood ahead of Mother's Day.

The Drive made the comparison to how Royals TV is treating its most loyal fans the way cell phone companies treat their customers.

Welcome to PsychEd, the psychiatry podcast for medical learners, by medical learners.This episode covers interventional psychiatry with Dr. Sean Nestor, an interventional psychiatrist and clinician-scientist at the University of Toronto, where he serves as Assistant Director of the Psychiatry Program and oversees the Clinician Researcher Track (CResT) residency within the Department of Psychiatry. His research program at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre focuses on advancing the clinical application of neuromodulation therapies to improve outcomes across a wide range of psychiatric disorders.The learning objectives for this episode are as followsDefine interventional psychiatry and distinguish it from traditional pharmacologic and psychotherapy-based approachesDescribe the role of interventional psychiatry in clinical practice, including identifying patient populations most likely to benefit from neuromodulation treatmentIdentify pathways to become involved in research and scholarly work within the field of interventional psychiatryGuest: Dr. Sean NestorHosts: Dr. Pooja Sankar (PGY1), Michael Wang (MS4), Dr. Kate BraithwaiteAudio editing: Dr. Kate BraithwaiteTime Stamps:(2:25) - Defining Interventional Psychiatry (IP) and its role in Psychiatric practice(4:20) - Evolution of Interventional Psychiatry (IP)(8:40) - Patients who will benefit from IP modalities(12:35) - Other factors to consider when assessing a patient for IP (15:30) - rTMS(19:15) - Description of a typical rTMS session(23:50) - ECT(26:45) - Ketamine(29:05) - Other Investigational Modalities(30:45) - Maintenance treatment(35:30) - Medication and IP(37:55) - Addressing stigma of ECT(43:15) - Discussion on place of IP in Depression management decision tree(47:00) - How to get involved in IP(50:10) - Rewarding aspects of working in IP(52:25) - Challenges of working in IP(53:40) - Future of the field Resources:⁠Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy (SAINT) | Stanford Health Care⁠⁠CTMSS | International medical society dedicated to optimizing clinical practice, supporting research, and increasing access to high quality, evidence-based Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation⁠The Interventional Psychiatry Consortium⁠References:Andrade, J. & Brito, M.. (2023). When the SAINT goes marching in – A novel transcranial magnetic stimulation protocol shows miraculous promise. European Psychiatry. 66. S835-S835. 10.1192/j.eurpsy.2023.1768. ⁠Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments (CANMAT) 2023 Update on Clinical Guidelines for Management of Major Depressive Disorder in Adults | CANMAT⁠Conway, C. R., & Sackeim, H. A. (2022). Interventional Psychiatry: The revolution has arrived. Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry. ⁠https://doi.org/10.47626/1516-4446-2022-0046⁠ Rakesh, G., Cordero, P., Khanal, R., Himelhoch, S. S., & Rush, C. R. (2024). Optimally combining transcranial magnetic stimulation with antidepressants in major depressive disorder: A systematic review and Meta-analysis. Journal of affective disorders, 358, 432–439. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2024.05.037Yavi, M., Lee, H., Henter, I. D., Park, L. T., & Zarate, C. A., Jr (2022). Ketamine treatment for depression: a review. Discover mental health, 2(1), 9. ⁠https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-022-00012-3⁠Zaidi, A., Shami, R., Sewell, I. J., Cao, X., Giacobbe, P., Rabin, J. S., Goubran, M., Hamani, C., Swardfager, W., Davidson, B., Lipsman, N., & Nestor, S. M. (2024). Antidepressant class and concurrent rTMS outcomes in major depressive disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis. EClinicalMedicine, 75, 102760. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102760 For more PsychEd, follow us on Instagram (⁠⁠⁠@psyched.podcast⁠⁠⁠), Facebook (⁠⁠⁠PsychEd Podcast⁠⁠⁠), X (⁠⁠⁠@psychedpodcast⁠⁠⁠), and Bluesky (⁠⁠⁠@psychedpodcast.bsky.social⁠⁠⁠). You can email us at ⁠⁠⁠psychedpodcast@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠ and visit our website at⁠⁠⁠ psychedpodcast.org⁠⁠⁠

On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon, host of the Win Cycle Podcast, discusses lessons from 25 years of coaching, emphasizing the intersection of sports and business performance. He highlights three key coaching lessons: 1) Holding high standards paired with systematic support, which led to a high-performance culture and low injury rates among his athletes. 2) Clarity over activity, which reduces performance risks and ensures alignment and focus. 3) Rewarding behaviors and effort over outcomes, fostering a culture of self-improvement and control. Dixon advocates for a mindset shift from managing to coaching, aiming to enhance leadership effectiveness. Purple Patch and Episode Resources  Hiring Purple Patch Coach: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/careers-page  Fast Track Run Squad: purplepatchfitness.com/fasttrackmarathon Check out our world-class coaching and training options: Tri Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/squad 1:1 Coaching: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/11-coached Run Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness/com/run-squad Strength Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/strength-1 Live & On-Demand Bike Sessions: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/bike Get a free needs assessment and learn more about our programs: https://purplepatchfitness.simplybook.me/v2/#book/service/19  Live in San Francisco? Explore the Purple Patch Performance Center: https://center.purplepatchfitness.com  Everything you need to know about our methodology: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/our-methodology Amplify your approach to nutrition with Purple Patch + Fuelin https://www.fuelin.com/purplepatch Get access to our free training resources, insight-packed newsletter and more at purplepatchfitness.com

A lot has changed in the workplace since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Companies have had to figure out how to best manage remote work for their employees, all the while supporting their career development and helping them feel more satisfied at work. Well, the concept we're going to talk about today may be just what's needed to address those challenges. It's a modern HR strategy known as job enrichment and basically, it means making an employee's role more fulfilling. How can companies do that ? What does this all mean in an actual job though? Are protein bars really worth it? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the last episodes, you can click here : ⁠⁠What is microwork?⁠⁠ ⁠⁠What is the best time of year to find work?⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Can a messy desk help some people work better?⁠⁠ A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance. First Broadcast: 16/10/2024 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode I open the Akashic Records and pull some cards to tap into the current energies. I share a bit of my own story, and chat about this energies that are supporting you in stepping out of your comfort zone and doing the dang thing. In This Episode: Born to be Wild Current energies oracle card pull Crossroads, important decisions to be made Investing in yourself This is your window of opportunity Reflections on identity, authenticity, and shedding old masks Returning to wholeness The energetic support available right now for bold moves A call to reconnect with your inner child  Join The Lightworker Bridge Collective This membership is for Lightworkers and spiritual seekers who are looking for energetic support, guidance, and connection on the spiritual path. You can sign up today for a free 7 day trial HERE 1:1 Akashic Reiki Healing Sessions - Book Here Animal Reiki/End of Life Support Sessions- Book Here Children's Intuitive Reiki Sessions - Book Here House/Land Clearing - Book Here Spirit Attachment Release - Book Here  Learn to read the Akashic Records (self-study course) - The Bridge 5D Ascension Akashic Records Training Need support navigating the current energies?? Download my free Energetic Clearing & Preparation Healing Activation  Free - The Empowered by the River of Peace Reiki Experience & Breathwork (guided by Erica Kelly and Kate Flick) Stay connected:  Follow me on Instagram @oraclelightworker FREE Energetic Clearing & Preparation Healing Activation Thanks for listening!!! 

Tonight on Wacky Wednesday, Chad Law breaks down ten insane stories—from taxpayer-funded Skittles outrage, to politicians rewarded for madness, to institutions criminalizing exposure itself—and argues something bigger:The chaos isn't a bug. It's the feature.We trace how culture normalizes nonsense… politicians profit from it… institutions protect it… and when the system fails?It blames someone else.Featuring:Welfare candy outrage and why the reaction is the real storyWhy China won't allow for its own people what we import hereWhy politicians are rewarded for chaosThe 26-member misconduct bombshell no one's discussingCalifornia's segregated field trip insanityWhy suing Amazon may symbolize something much biggerA Reagan Reminder on structure vs chaosIf it feels upside down lately… maybe the system is.

"McElroy & Cubelic In The Morning" airs 7am-10am weekdays on WJOX-94.5!!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Deuce remembered his experience when the Saints picked him in the first round of the 2001 NFL Draft.

Deuce remembered his experience when the Saints picked him in the first round of the 2001 NFL Draft.

HEARD IN THIS EPISODE ◼ Why the four-year decline in staffing revenue isn't a market problem — it's a sales behavior problem that leaders are actively making worse by obsessing over the wrong metrics ◼ How COVID didn't just change where salespeople work — it quietly made them lazy, and why most sales leaders haven't noticed yet ◼ What the best staffing firms are doing differently right now that almost nobody else is: pulling recruiters into the sales process before the deal is even close ◼ Why your ICP is probably wrong — and how getting more specific with a smaller target list will generate more revenue than casting a wider net ever could ◼ How one simple mental shift — from account management to pre-client acquisition — could completely rewire the way your sales team operates EXPECT TO LEARN This episode will fundamentally challenge how you think about sales activity and what it's actually worth. You'll walk away with a sharper framework for diagnosing what's broken in your sales organization, whether it's your people, your process, or the pressure you're putting on both, and a clear-eyed view of why doing less, more deliberately, consistently beats doing more with less intention. If you lead a staffing firm or a sales team, this conversation will make you uncomfortable in exactly the right way.   KEY MOMENTS [00:01] – The #1 mistake holding firms back [01:08] – Chasing shiny objects kills revenue [02:21] – What to do when business is down [04:08] – How to prioritize your fix-it list [05:28] – Did COVID break the staffing industry? [07:02] – How COVID made staffing sales reps lazy [08:21] – Outputs vs. outcomes in sales [09:18] – Rewarding the wrong KPIs [10:48] – What consultative selling looks like [12:49] – Where firms get their ICP wrong [14:45] – Messaging by ICP level [16:38] – The Under Armour sales analogy [18:58] – Research has never been easier [23:00] – What top firms do differently [24:45] – Speed closes deals, not relationships [27:52] – Fixing staffing's reputation problem [31:42] – Sales reps as pre-client managers [33:26] – Optimistic or pessimistic on 2026? [35:41] – Coach in the moment, not end of month [37:17] – About AFM Strategic Partners [42:20] – Rapid fire: book that changed her life [43:24] – Advice for new staffing professionals ABOUT THE GUEST Anna Frazzetto is the Founder and CEO of AFM Strategic Partners and one of the most recognized voices in staffing and sales leadership — named to Staffing Industry Analysts' Global Power 150 Women in Staffing for seven consecutive years. She built her career scaling businesses from the ground up, including growing a solutions practice from $3M to $100M, and has led global sales transformations across some of the most complex corners of the industry. Her perspective is rare because it spans both sides of the table: the strategic and the deeply human, shaped in part by her experience as a cancer survivor who chose to bet on herself and start something new. Her new book, *Sales Leadership in Action*, distills over 100 field-tested tips for sales leaders who want to stop firefighting and start building teams that close. ABOUT THE HOST Brad Bialy is a trusted voice and highly sought-after speaker in the staffing and recruiting industry, known for helping firms grow through integrated marketing, sales, and recruiting strategies. With over 13 years at Haley Marketing and a proven track record guiding hundreds of firms, Brad brings deep expertise and a fresh, actionable perspective to every engagement. He's the host of Take the Stage and InSights, two of the staffing industry's leading podcasts with more than 225,000 downloads. SPONSORS AND OFFERS Book a 30-minute marketing consultation with host Brad Bialy: https://bit.ly/Bialy30 Benefits in a Card helps staffing firms offer meaningful benefits to their entire workforce through flexible, unbundled plans designed for high-turnover environments—making it easier to control costs, improve retention, and stay competitive. https://www.BenefitsInACard.com TRICOM partners with staffing firms as an asset-based lender and full-service back-office provider, helping owners scale confidently by reducing risk and easing the operational strain of payroll, cash flow, and administration. https://www.tricom.com  

Whether you're rewards motivated or not, today's episode is a reminder that many of us need as we wrap up this week, and head into the weekend.

When does training become trickery become manipulation?In Episode #519 of 'Meanderings', Juan and I discuss: the messy art of celebrating wins, the difference between admiration and genuine celebration, how expectations can warp our enjoyment of milestones, how to separate rewards from celebrations, why minimum thresholds matter, and how to design simple, sustainable rituals that create real memories and why routine can quietly erase the impulse to recognise achievements. Stan Link: https://stan.store/meremortalsTimeline:(00:00:00) Intro(00:02:00) State of the podcast: cadence, book reviews, life updates(00:03:45) Milestones hit but rarely celebrated: listens, views, totals(00:06:50) From optimisation to ease: audio quality, AI cleanup, and routines(00:10:40) Gratitude for better gear versus big milestone parties(00:13:44) Tiny rewards after effort: beer in the shower and habit loops(00:16:56) Long‑term mindset: willpower, running mileage, and durable rewards(00:21:58) Birthdays, experiences, and low‑key celebrations for others(00:24:52) Do milestones create memories worth keeping?(00:30:00) Expectations shape feelings: two athletes, same silver, different joy(00:32:14) Should celebration be separate from expectations?(00:35:15) Rewarding effort vs outcome: half marathon thought experiment(00:40:05) Positive manipulation, parenting and intent behind rewards(00:44:45) Overblown rewards backfire: the doughnut race cautionary tale(00:47:56) Ritualising post‑run rewards without overdoing it(00:51:41) Wrap‑up: goals for next week and tongue‑in‑cheek yacht plans(00:55:18) Closing thanks and sign‑off Connect with Mere Mortals:Website: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReUTwitter/X: https://twitter.com/meremortalspodsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcasts/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meremortalspodcastsValue 4 Value Support:Boostagram: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/supportPaypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/meremortalspodcast

In this episode, George is joined by returning guest Dr. Matt Bowers to dive deeper into the practical application of Non-Linear Pedagogy (NLP) and the Constraints-Led Approach in basketball coaching.   At its core, NLP focuses on five key principles to drive skill acquisition: Representative Learning Design: Ensuring practice environments contain the same information and "cues" found in a real game. Constraints Manipulation: Strategically adjusting task, environmental, or individual constraints to guide players toward functional solutions. Functional Variability: Encouraging "repetition without repetition" so players develop adaptable movement patterns rather than one "textbook" technique. Information-Movement Coupling: Linking perception directly to action; players learn to move based on what they see (teammates, defenders, spacing). External Focus of Attention: Directing a player's focus toward the intended outcome of a movement rather than internal body mechanics.   Building on their previous conversation, Dr. Matt Bowers breaks down how coaches can design more representative, game-like learning environments that empower players to solve problems, adapt in real time, and develop true basketball intelligence. Check their previous conversation here.   Chapters: 00:00 – Welcoming Matt Bowers as the first returning guest  02:00 – What is Non-Linear Pedagogy (NLP)? 05:15 – Why "messy" practice leads to better learning 07:30 – The trap of traditional drills and non-representative training 08:10 – Constraint manipulation and defining success in practice 10:00 – Rethinking success: decision-making vs outcomes 15:00 – Player autonomy and reducing coach dependency 17:00 – Practical example: using scoring systems to shape behavior 20:00 – Rewarding process over outcomes in practice 21:30 – External vs internal focus of attention 25:30 – Does NLP actually work? (research insights) 27:00 – Functional variability: multiple solutions to the same problem 30:00 – Perception-action coupling and game-like decision making 31:30 – Increasing complexity to improve transfer to games   Join Transforming Basketball's 2026 Summer Camp in Italy. Exclusive training for players and coaches with world-class methods and expert guidance. Book your spot now: https://transformingbball.com/residential-summer-camp Level up your coaching with our Amazon Best Selling Book: https://amzn.to/3vO1Tc7 Access tons more of evidence-based coaching resources: https://transformingbball.com/products/    Links: Website: http://transformingbball.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/transformbball Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/transformingbasketball/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@transformingbasketball Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/transformingbasketball/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@transforming.basketball  

https://storage.googleapis.com/enduring-word-media/devotional/Devotional04122026.mp3 The post Rewarding Even A Shallow Repentance – 1 Kings 21:27-29 – April 12, 2026 appeared first on Enduring Word.

Matt Spiegel and Laurence Holmes listened and reacted to NBA commissioner Adam Silver's recent comments in which he discussed how to potentially curb tanking. The guys detailed why that could reward the Bulls.

Send us Fan MailEmotional eating gets talked about a lot but not in a way that actually helps you understand or manage it.In this episode, I'm breaking emotional eating down into three core drivers: comfort, reward, and cope and once you see it through this lens, everything starts to make a lot more sense.This is not about trying to “fix” emotional eating or eliminate it completely.That's not realistic and it's not the goal.This is about learning how to work with it instead of feeling like it's controlling you.If you've ever felt like emotional eating just happens on autopilot, this episode is going to give you a much clearer way to approach it.What I cover:• The three drivers of emotional eating: comfort, reward, and cope• Why emotional eating isn't only about negative emotions• The truth about emotional eating and why everyone does it• How guilt and shame actually push you deeper into the cycle• Why your self-talk around food matters more than you think• The difference between mindless eating and being an active participant• How to identify your emotional eating patterns• Why certain foods “work” better for certain emotions• How “wasted calories” happen and how to avoid them• Real-life safety nets that help you stay in control• How to plan for emotional eating instead of reacting to it• Using awareness, acknowledgement, and accountability (the 3A way)• Why your goal should NOT be to eliminate emotional eatingYou're not broken for emotionally eating.You're human.The goal isn't to stop, it's to understand it, take control, and make it work for you.Support the showLooking for help on your weight loss journey? I've created a couple of resources:• My NEW Membership Community Flamingo Forum! Join HERE: https://charlotte-skanes.mykajabi.com/disruptor-our-community• My Immersive Weight Loss Experience: Sustainable 7• My Cookbook 'Disruptor'• Free Guide ‘Getting Started for the Last Time'• Weight Loss Workbook Disruptor, find anywhere in the world on Amazon by searching “Disruptor Charlotte Skanes”•Get Started For The Last Time LIVE Webinar Replay Sign-Up - free Spread Sprinkle Pour worksheets WebsiteInstagramYoutube...

What feels good is shaping your future. In today's episode, Kevin and Alan break down how dopamine influences your habits, your decisions, and the direction of your life more than most people realize. Drawing from personal experience, coaching insights, and years of studying human behavior, they explain why so many people get trapped in short-term rewards that quietly pull them away from their long-term goals. They also reflect on how their own relationship with discipline, pleasure, and progress has evolved.This episode is about learning to notice what your brain is being trained to chase and why that matters. When your reward system is tied to the wrong things, growth becomes harder. When it is tied to the right things, consistency becomes more possible._______________________Book Alan's Business Breakthrough Session. Your first 30-minute coaching call is FREE. Learn how to prioritize success and let your quality of life become the byproduct. - https://calendly.com/alanlazaros/30-minute-breakthrough-sessionJoin our private Facebook community, “Next Level Nation,” to grow alongside people who are committed to improvement. - https://www.facebook.com/groups/459320958216700_______________________NLU is not just a podcast; it's a gateway to a wealth of resources designed to help you achieve your goals and dreams. From our Next Level Dreamliner to our Group Coaching, we offer a variety of tools and communities to support your personal development journey.For more information, check out our website and socials using the links below.

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Dr. Andrew Hall joins us for Round 2 in beautiful Colorado Springs where we talk cosmetic dentistry, dental technology, his inspiration, practice tips and rewarding aspects of being a dentist. Enjoy the episode!Connect with KJ by emailing kj@nuartdental.comConnect with Dr. Hall by emailing dr.andrew.hall@gmail.comLearn how dentists can get a brand new Lumina Scanner for FREE via the Denbright Scanner Program 2.0. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apply⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for your Lumina scanner before it's too late, these will go fast! https://denbright.com/scanner-applyLadies & Gentlemen, you are listening to "Confessions From A Dental Lab" and we're happy you're here.Subscribe today and tell a friend so we can all get 1% better :)Follow KJ & NuArt on Instagram: @lifeatnuartdentalFollow Frank on Instagram: @frank_nuartdentalLearn more about the lab at https://www.nuartdental.com

On today's episode, Andy answers your questions on how to regain your edge when you feel like you're slipping, how to reward yourself responsibly as you start earning more money, and how to balance working in vs on the business when the craft matters more to you than the business.

Join us this week as we discuss the Guardian Games 2026 event, what we're enjoying and what we're not. We've also got the info for This Week in Destiny for March 26th 2026 and Peroty goes over the Update 9.5.5.6 and the latest player support report. Nitedemon has an updated guide for the Guardian Games and we have a few Guardian Games recommendations of what to watch on YouTube. 00:01:18 - Last One In, First One Out 00:04:36 - Guardian Games is Rewarding 00:42:49 - This Week In Destiny: Guardian Games 2026 Guide & Renegades Rotations Week 18 00:55:54 - Update 9.5.5.6 Info 01:03:49 - This Week At Bungie: March 26th 2026 01:08:23 - Postcard Competition & Upcoming Events 01:13:05 - Peroty's Player Support Report 01:14:34 - End of the TWAB 01:15:07 - Video Recommendations 01:19:33 - Patreon Thanks & End of the Show 01:22:08 - Fin Two Titans and a Hunter YouTube Channel Two Titans and a Hunter Twitch Two Titans and a Hunter Discord Two Titans and a Hunter - Patreon Two Titans and a Hunter Ko-Fi The100 io – GH/GD/2TAAH Group Email: twotitansandahunter@hotmail.com Two Titans and a Hunter Twitter Two Titans and a Hunter – Facebook Artwork by @Nitedemon Xbox Live: Nitedemon, & Peroty End credits theme song by Elsewhere - YouTube Channel Plus as always, thank you to Alexander at Orange Free Sounds & www.freesound.org for all the sound effects used in our podcast.  Required Stuff: Bungie - This Week at Bungie March 26th 2026 Bungie - Update 9.5.5.6 Bungie - Guardian Games 2026 Press Kit Llama - All Guardian Games 2026 God Rolls Mactics - Hunter Build That Burns Everything KackisHD - Use This Insane Build for Guardian Games Aegis - Are the Guardian Games 2026 Weapons Any Good? GodrollTV - Destiny 2 Weapon Database Destiny 2 - Tier 5 Report Destiny 2 Armor 2.0 Cleaner Destiny 2 - Way Back Machine Link Twitch - GuardianDownBot Raid Checkpoints Twitch - IceBreakerCatty. Engram.Blue Link

In this episode, Bruce Brown returns to discuss one of his most countercultural ideas: Positive Conditioning.Most coaches were conditioned the way they condition. Running is often used as punishment. Effort is demanded through anger. Mistakes are followed by sprints. But Bruce challenges that entire framework.What if conditioning wasn't something athletes dreaded? What if it became a privilege? What if it was the most culture-building part of practice?Bruce walks through the philosophical shift that reshaped his coaching career. After realizing he was building frustration into the end of practice just to justify conditioning, he spent an entire summer redesigning his approach. The result was a system that:Rewards effort instead of punishing mistakesBuilds interdependence (“don't let your buddies down”)Reinforces athlete-owned behaviorsCreates pride in conditioningStrengthens culture under fatigueAt the center of the model is a simple shift:If being in better condition makes you a better player, and better players make better teams, then conditioning is a privilege.Bruce explains why verbal reinforcement—using both a player's name and the specific action—is the most powerful tool a coach has. He shares practical examples including:Free throw conditioning where winners earn the right to runEffort-based push-up variations that eliminate punishment loopsInterval drills built around “help your buddy” exchangesThe “Push Day” tradition that athletes eventually asked forWhy stopping conditioning early can be the most powerful consequenceThe deeper principle is cultural, not physical:Conditioning becomes a vehicle for interdependence, ownership, and shared pride.Rob presses Bruce on common objections:What about preseason benchmarks?What about older-school resistance?Can coaches test this halfway?Bruce's answer is clear: You cannot dip your toe in. You must understand it, believe it, and fully commit.If you are serious about:Building athlete accountabilityRaising effort without angerEliminating punishment-based motivationCreating a team that pushes itselfThis episode will challenge how you run practice.Key TakeawaysConditioning used as punishment undermines its purpose.Effort and attitude are athlete-owned behaviors.Verbal reinforcement (name + action) drives behavior.Rewarding great effort produces more great effort.Interdependence is built under fatigue.When athletes buy in, conditioning becomes culture.Connect with Bruce BrownLearn more about Bruce's work at Proactive Coaching at https://proactivecoaching.info/.Sign up for our free newsletter at: https://impactfulcoachingproject.substack.com

I've often heard from Progressors who question how to prioritize personal time amidst a bustling life. Practically speaking, the steps to prioritize yourself include putting your interests on the calendar, seeking support, and ensuring accountability. Rewarding yourself afterward and starting small makes this process more enjoyable and manageable. When using your Do Something List (DSL), keep it visible, adjust it as needed, and don't hesitate to reach out for a bit of accountability from others. I've found that sharing my progress openly encourages consistency. So, to all Progressors out there, place just one thing on your calendar this month and witness how this small step can lead to valuable growth. Get the free DSL Training. Sign up as a Supporter to get access to our private, premium, ad-free podcast, More Personal. Episodes air each Friday! More for Moms Conference use code “LISTENER” for $20 off Leave a rating and review Check out my ⁠workshops⁠! Follow About Progress on YOUTUBE! Book Launch Committee Full Show Notes Transform your space now. Go to https://www.quince.com/monica for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns; Get organized, refreshed, and back on track this new year for WAY less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home; Join Masterclass for 15% off at masterclass.com/progress Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you accidentally rewarding the very behaviors that are holding your team back?   Most leaders assume underperformance comes down to skill gaps or lack of effort. But what if the real problem isn't your people—it's your design?   In this episode, we uncover a hard truth: your team isn't confused… they're responding exactly to the incentives you've created.   If results aren't lining up with expectations, it's not a communication issue—it's a misalignment.   In this episode, you'll learn: Why incentives shape behavior more powerfully than values or intentions How to spot the hidden gaps between what you say you want and what you actually reward Practical ways to realign incentives so your team drives the results you're aiming for   If you're ready to stop guessing and start designing a team that performs at a higher level, this episode will show you where to start.   Press play to uncover what your incentives are really driving—and how to fix them.   Click HERE to read "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B" by Steven Kerr   At Bradley Hartmann & Company, we help construction teams improve sales, leadership,  and communication by reducing miscommunication, strengthening teamwork, and bridging language gaps between English and Spanish speakers. To learn more about our product offerings, visit bradleyhartmannandco.com.   The Construction Leadership Podcast dives into essential leadership topics in construction, including strategy, emotional intelligence, communication skills, confidence, innovation, and effective decision-making. You'll also gain insights into delegation, cultural intelligence, goal setting, team building, employee engagement, and how to overcome common culture problems—whether you're leading a crew or managing an entire organization.   Have topic ideas or guest recommendations? Contact us at info@bradleyhartmannandco.com.   New podcasts are dropped every Tuesday and Thursday.     This episode is brought to you by The Construction Spanish Toolbox —the most practical way for construction teams to learn jobsite-ready Spanish in just minutes a day over 6 months.      

Horst Schulze explains how to create real leadership paradigm shifts by demanding vision, purpose, and standards. In this powerful moment with Patrick Bet-David, he reveals why only a few managers become true leaders and how measuring the wrong metrics destroys brands.

Why do we find it so hard to exercise despite knowing how good it is for us? Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I'll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today's clip is from episode 514 of the podcast with Professor of Biological Science and Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Daniel Lieberman. Daniel is the author of the brilliant book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved To Do is Healthy and Rewarding. In this clip, he reveals a fascinating truth: we didn't evolve to exercise, but movement is key to living well. He challenges some common beliefs that exist around exercise and we discuss simple, practical ways of building sustainable movement habits into our daily lives. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at https://drchatterjee.com/514 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.