Podcast appearances and mentions of Richard Boyd

Welcome to the latest episode of L.I.F.T.S – your bite-sized dose of the Latest Industry Fitness Trends and Stories.  Hosts Matthew Januszek, Co-Founder of Escape Fitness and Mo Iqbal, Founder & CEO of SweatWorks attended PerformX 2025.  In this LIFTS episode, Matthew and Mo are joined by Richard Boyd, Director or Global Wellness Designs. This episode covers: COVID-19's impact on personal training industry. Shift in trainer authority due to increased consumer knowledge. Balancing technology and human connection in PT. AI integration in program design and PT's evolving role. Expanding PT roles and compensation models. Social media and influencers' effect on PT industry. Trend towards comprehensive wellness services in gyms. To learn more about Richard Boyd, click here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-boyd-44034339/ To learn more about PerformX Live, click here: https://performx-live.com/ ====================================================== Support fitness industry news by sponsoring future LIFTS episodes. Contact us at marketing@escapefitness.com for advertising opportunities. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and turn on your notifications so you never miss a new video when it's published: https://www.youtube.com/user/EscapeFitness Shop gym equipment: https://escapefitness.com/shop View our full catalog: https://escapefitness.com/support/catalog (US) https://escapefitness.com/support/catalogue (UK)  ====================================================== Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Escapefitness Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/escapefitness Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/escapefitness LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/escapefitness/   00:00 Intro 02:55 Shift in Trainer Authority and Consumer Education 04:35 Technology and Human Connection in Personal Training 06:41 Future of Personal Training and AI Integration 07:31 Challenges and Opportunities in Personal Training Education 12:06 Compensation and Role Evolution for Personal Trainers 15:57 Impact of Social Media and Influencers on PT Industry 20:00 Adapting PT Models to Meet Consumer Needs 25:12 The Role of Empathy and Assessment in PT 30:03 GLP-1 and Its Impact on PT Industry

Fitness business owners and gym leaders, are you struggling to revive your personal training department? This episode of the Fitness Business Podcast dives deep into the current state of personal training in gyms with experts Richard Boyd and Bob Esquerre, who bring over 20 years of experience. Discover actionable strategies to relaunch or launch a thriving PT program, moving past COVID-era challenges. Learn how to adapt to the modern, educated gym member, measure success beyond revenue, and cultivate a team of trainers who drive member retention and build lasting relationships. Tune in for golden nuggets on transforming your personal training business and creating a culture of excellence within your gym!   Key highlights from the episode: - Upskill your personal trainers to regain authority and effectively engage with today's educated gym-goers. - Celebrate trainers who build relationships and extend member engagement, driving overall gym success. - Ensure clear expectations and consistent training to cultivate a team that embodies your gym's brand and culture, ultimately enhancing customer service and member satisfaction.   Leave us a voicemail!   Leave a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Quotes: “Fitness business owners around the globe are scratching their head wondering what the hell has happened to my PT department." - JT Tamsett "Properly trained staff that represent your brand is your most important asset. Leaving that to chance is not the right play." - Brent Frueh "The trainer is no longer the authority on the gym floor." - Richard Boyd "Celebrate those trainers that are keeping people the longest." - Richard Boyd   Resources: Fitness Business Podcast's LinkedIn CommunityMystery Shopping for Fitness Businesses - Website Bob Esquerre - LinkedIn and Facebook Richard Boyd - LinkedIn Feel Soma - Website Bob Esquerre Recommendation: Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business by Bob Rice Richard Boyd Recommendation: Breath by James Nestor   Merch Sponsor: Fast 30 Coach - Facebook Be a Merch Sponsor - Here   In The Trenches With A REXer: Brent Frueh - LinkedIn Rochester Athletic Club - Website, Facebook and Instagram REX Roundtables - Website and Email REX Leadership Academy - Website   Trusted Suppliers: Glen Taylor - LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram Fit Into Shape - Website, LinkedIn and Facebook HR Network - Website Myzone -  Website MXM Metrics - Website Atlantis Strength - Website   About Your Host: Justin "JT" Tamsett is a fitness industry veteran with over 30 years of experience who aims to reduce global healthcare costs by promoting physical activity. Through his company Active Management, he provides business coaching to fitness entrepreneurs, leads 8 REX Roundtables in the US and Australia, and has spoken at over 40 conferences across 23 countries. His ultimate goal is to create a world of opportunity for his daughter Zoe by helping more people move and stay healthy, while empowering gym owners to build successful businesses that contribute to a healthier society   Related: Gym Management Podcast, Personal Training Business Tips, Gym Owner Podcast, Fitness Industry Leadership, How to Grow a Gym, Member Retention Strategies for Gyms, Fitness Marketing Podcast, Best Gym Business Podcasts, PT Sales Strategies   Please note: We only recommend products we care about (affiliate links support our free content). Thank you for your support!

In this episode, an argument is put forth asserting that the baramin is a Boydian Natural Kind within the disciplinary matrix of baraminology. Listen to find out how this aspect of creation science seems to satisfy the epistemic access and accommodation conditions that Richard Boyd advanced in his 1999 work “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa.”

Welcome to our exclusive podcast, recorded live at IHRSA 2024, in LA. In this episode, hosts Matthew Januszek, Co-Founder of Escape Fitness is joined by Ian O'Dwyer, Co-Founder of Feel SOMA and Richard Boyd, Director of Global Wellness Designs, to discuss all things recovery and taking a more complete approach to improving lives worldwide in the Wellness, Health & Fitness Industry. Topics discussed in this episode, include: ●       Structuring the concept of recovery within fitness. ●       Stress, inflammation and fluid flow and recovery. ●       How eustress can actually build resilience. ●       Debating cold therapy and cryotherapy. ●       Importance of movement and mobility. ●       Fascial mobility and how to train fascia in different directions. ●       Integrating recovery into fitness spaces. ====================================================== Subscribe to our YouTube channel and turn on your notifications so you never miss a new video when it's published: https://www.youtube.com/user/EscapeFitness Shop gym equipment: https://escapefitness.com/shop View our full catalog:  https://escapefitness.com/support/catalog https://escapefitness.com/support/catalogue  ====================================================== Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Escapefitness Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/escapefitness Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/escapefitness LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/escapefitness/

Richard Boyd (@metaversial) is the Co-founder and Chairman of Ultisim, a simulation learning company that utilises gaming technology and AI for a variety of industries including manufacturing and education.   We discuss using technology to better your life (specifically AI and machine learning) and the ways it could be used. We also discuss possible futures and how we can have the best chance of thriving.   You can find out more about Richard and the work he's doing over at https://tanjo.ai/ & https://www.ultisim.com/    Fill out the quick form here: https://forms.gle/AH1tusHRXkC3N5yM6 and be in with the chance of winning an Amazon Gift card   Get your 2-month free trial of my Inner Circle here https://bit.ly/InnerCircle2MTrial   Join the FREE Facebook group for The Michael Brian Show at https://www.facebook.com/groups/themichaelbrianshow   Follow Mike on Facebook Instagram & Twitter

Please join us at patreon.com/tortoiseshack In this episode PalCast co-hosts, Yousef and Helena speak with Irish TD Richard Boyd Barrett from People Before Profit about his decades long involvement and activism for Palestine and the role of mass movements across the globe in bringing about change in Gaza and granting the Palestinians their right to self-determination. They discuss and highlight other struggles such as Ireland and South Africa, and roles such as the Irish Diaspora in the U.S. Richard expresses his view that it is not "in our thousands, in our milions" but it is "in our millions, in our billions" are now with the Palestinians, which is a sign of freedom to come sooner than many think. For more see:https://justworldeducational.org/ The Dublin Podcast with Shamim Malekmian, Hazel Chu and Harry McEvansoneya is out now here:https://www.patreon.com/posts/patron-exclusive-93510568

Emergency meeting discussing Palestine, resistance & the struggle for freedom with:Tariq Ali, author · Refaat Alareer, Palestinian writer live from Gaza · Richard Boyd Barrett, socialist MP in Ireland · Sophia Beach, anti-Zionist Jewish socialist · Ilan Pappé, authorIsrael is launching a brutal attack on Gaza, in what many are calling a "second Nakba". Thousands of Palestinians are being killed, forced to flee and are facing Israeli terror. All this is being done with the support of the West, including politicians like Keir Starmer.Palestinians are right to resist. The 75 years that have passed since the first Nakba have been constant occupation, apartheid and brutalisation of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state. It is crucial in Britain that we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. But we have to ask the question - how can Palestine be free?This meeting will be debating how we can build solidarity in Britain, why Palestinians are right to resist and what a revolutionary strategy for Palestinian liberation looks like.

Richard Boyd Barrett, People Before Profit - Solidarity TD for Dun Laoghaire, discusses the main items on his party's agenda ahead of their think-in in Dublin

People Before Profit TD for Dún Laoghaire Richard Boyd Barrett talks to Hugh and Jen about a pamphlet recently published by his party that set out its unashamedly radical politics and questioned how far the electorate could trust Sinn Fein to implement left-wing policies if in government.They also discuss Richard's views on the need to nationalise industries, how to tackle the housing crisis and when it is appropriate to object to housing in a politician's constituency. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Boyd Barrett, People Before Profit TD, discusses the party's priorities ahead of the new Dáil term, as they continue reiterate calls for price controls, nationalisation of the energy sector and controls on rents and housing costs.

In this podcast Andrew chats with long term fitness industry educator Rodney Corn. Rodney was the Director of Education at NASM, went on to be a co-founder at PTA Global (with Michol Dalcourt, Ian O'Dwyer, Bobby Capuccio,  Scott Hopson, and Richard Boyd), he then co-founded Feel SOMA with his mate Ian O'Dwyer, and now holds the role at Eleiko as Director of education.Rodney shares the origin story of the brand that is Eleiko, a name in strength and conditioning that is associated with the highest level of quality since 1957 (In that time Eleiko barbells have been used to break over 1000 world records!) He also goes into the programs Eleiko has developed for their online, and in person offerings, and their educational experiences. He discusses the thought processes and principles that he uses when creating programs for individuals, and when building and delivering courses for elevating the skill sets of trainers, and coaches globally. Rodney (Corny) takes the deepest dive into training for first responders and tactical based training, breaking down how to train/prepare and program for chaos, taking into account the unpredictable nature of those professions.Many nuggets of wisdom here, grab a pen and be prepared to learn from one of the top fitness industry educators in the world, working with one of the foundational, highest standard companies in the world of strength and conditioning equipment and education.Enjoy. See you again in two weeksHere are some useful links for this podcasthttps://eleiko.com/enhttp://www.feelsoma.com/IG - @rodney_cornIG @eleikoeducationIG @eleikosportRelevant episodesHow to maximise your time in the gym with Ryan Campbell - https://podcasts.apple.com/hk/podcast/episode-21-ryan-campbell-how-to-maximise-your-time-in-the-gym/id1527374894?i=1000522001640Exercise Physiology with Geoffrey Bland - https://podcasts.apple.com/hk/podcast/episode-27-goeffrey-bland-exercise-physiology/id1527374894?i=1000531459176JOINT DYNAMICS links:Joint Dynamics Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/JointDynamicsHongKong/Joint Dynamics Instagram -https://www.instagram.com/jointdynamics/Joint Dynamics Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRQZplKxZMSvtc6LxM5Wckw* Host - Andrew Cox - https://www.jointdynamics.com.hk/the-team/trainers/andrew-cox*The Joint Dynamics online at home exercise program - contact us to purchase your copy https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qUVpoTnn_Wx8dpy7kggnd416307a7lcT/view?usp=drivesdk

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett joined Kieran for this week's Thursday interview.

If there's such a thing as a ‘celebrity' politician then Richard Boyd Barrett would surely make the cut. A very familiar face and voice on TV and radio, Richard is eloquent and outspoken, goes against the grain when it comes to the Dail dress code, and he's mates with one of the world's top supermodels Bella Hadid. Well, he doesn't actually know her, but she does follow him on Instagram and has been sharing a few of his posts recently. More on that, and loads more, in the interview. Check it out. COMEDY:What about President Michael D Higgins' housing speech this week? It has caused quite the stir – we got exclusive access to his voicemails, and he has been getting a lot of calls since making that speech.. Enjoy!Mario GET IN TOUCH:https://www.instagram.com/mariorosenstockofficial/https://twitter.com/giftgrubmariomariorosenstock@gmail.comThe Mario Rosenstock Podcast is produced by Patrick Haughey of AudioBrand See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this week's podcast, we sat down with Richard Boyd Barrett to discuss the ongoing cost of living crisis and the Cost of Living Coalition which has been formed to get active around the issue. A national demonstration is planned for Saturday June 18th at Parnell Square If any listeners would like to get involved with this coalition you can email and contact through social media below: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/COLCIreland Twitter - https://twitter.com/COLCIreland Email - Info@COLC.ie ----- Rupture Issue 7 has been released! The theme of this issue is workand as such will feature great articles on topics such as the four day work week, working conditions during and after covid, and reproductive labour. If you would like to subscribe to the magazine go to https://rupture.ie/subscribe --- Rupture Radio is a weekly podcast looking at news, politics and culture from a socialist perspective. It is produced by members of the RISE network within People before Profit, and is linked to Rupture - Ireland's Eco-Socialist Quarterly. Check out the magazine at rupture.ie Anyone who would like to support the podcast can do so on our Patreon. This will also allow you to get extra content and have a say in topics and interviews we take on. Sign up today at https://www.patreon.com/ruptureradio Any comments or queries please send them to LeftInsidePod@gmail.com or get in touch on Twitter. See you next week, cheers! Social media: Rupture Radio https://twitter.com/RuptureRadio_ Rupture Magazine https://twitter.com/RuptureMag_ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ruptureradio/message

Welcome back to the Candlelit Tales Podcast. This is the story of what happened to Osgar son of Oisín grandson of Fionn MacCumhaill when he woke up after he died… This story is told by Aron Music is by Oisín Ryan and Alan Homan and it is produced by Oisín Ryan and Alan Homan This podcast is proudly sponsored by the people who donate to us each month via https://www.patreon.com/candlelittales and anyone who sends us a once-off donation through the Paypal button on our website http://candlelittales.ie/ #candlelittales #candlelittalespodcast #keepherlit #keephercandlelit #storytelling #livemusic #mythology #irishmythology #mythicalireland #patreon #thankyou #subscribe #youtube #spotify #amazon https://open.spotify.com/show/2102WuUUe9Jl6cGXNwQEKf https://soundcloud.com/candlelittales https://twitter.com/candlelit_tales?lang=en https://www.facebook.com/candlelittales https://www.instagram.com/candlelittales https://vimeo.com/user52850249 https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/00d5c29b-ee1a-4078-aacf-62e1a94522dc/candlelit-tales-irish-mythology-podcast A very special thanks to our patrons: Em Atropa, Emmit, Elias Batchelder, Cathal McGovern, Envihon, Margaret Anderson Kelliher, Brianna Murphy, Anna Fitzgerald, Blake, Jackie Colpitts, Jan Plewa, Pat Fallon, Emma Daniels, Riah Creighton, freya carol soth, AR, Melissa Fritz, Julie Brett, keven siegert, Tyler, Alex Roberson, Eamonn McCrory, E Williams, Melissa MacDonald, Annie Dennison, Jessica Lehrsmith, Mandy McKerl, the all seeing guy, Dinne Mamisch, Natalie Hogan, Jacob Lang, Avery Parducci, Laura Egan, Chelsea Givens, Kirk Freeman, Ciara Joyce, Noah Doucet, Bill Langdon, Paul McDonald, Jennifer Curry, Izzy, Sarah Courtney, Murphy, Meirbhin O Conaill, Kirstie, Jen Neid, Maya, Richard Harvey, Jason Bell, Rosemary, Janique, Brenna myers, Jeremy Gilbert, Susanna Pilny, Maria Gehl, Eilidh Maeve Milliken, Karen Dylan Shevlin, Sally Curran, Ellie Cawte, Seamus Fegan, Maria O'Keeffe, Alana Rush, x, Thomas Cotter, Kyle Mathews, Liz Hinton, Jitka Svobodova, Claire McCafferty, Cú Roí Mac Dáiri, Desiree Lamb, Bess Nicolds, Gigi Cobbe, Marc Rhodes-Taylor, Alexandra French, Maralena Murphy, haleh roshan, Aoife Duffy, Peter Ciampa, Collin Abram, Bean Blackett, Keziah Gibbons, Bridget Ryan, Robert Gallagher, Emer, M, Emily Phelps, Alexandra, James Basquill, Ciara Kenny, Colleen Eldridge, Anne Davis, Kerry Reidy, Kerry-Leigh McCartney, Kelly McDonald, Patrick Demon, Niki Meadhra, Elizabeth Milliken, S.R. Harrell, Rebecca guyett, Linz, Megan Moncrief, Louise Mckenna O'hanlon, Matthew Robson, Bethany Andrews, Richard Boyd, Ana Herrero, L B, Grainne O Brien, Lorien Ennis, Fiona Nic Giolla Cheara, Antoinette Sullivan, Jorgia, Clare, Chiara De Santi, Andrew Thomson, Darren Ó Conbhuí Ward, Jay Mevorach, Liam Henrie, Lucy Jones, Ann Freeman, Elizabeth Finder, Ryan O'Connor, Tara Clarke, Deirdre Quinn, Niamh, Kaelee Dean, Conall Bolger, Grant, Louise Delz, Claire Nolan, Sweeney in the Trees, Claire Bonnie, Conni Dawson, Ana Rakovac, kiva durkan, Anne Hayes, Russell Swanagon, April Last, Emmet, Selina Mayer

Justin is joined in studio by People Before Profit-Solidarity leader Richard Boyd Barrett.

I wanted to bring on a few co-founders (and close friends) of PTA Global to talk about what we learned from creating that company years ago.  I believe that the insights we gained from that company are critical to the success of any business whose success is based on continually bringing value, packaged in an engaging experience to their consumer.  Which is pretty much everyone.  In this episode we talk about the lessons we learned, and who we all became as a result of the successes as well as failures involved in creating a global brand.  What I appreciate about this conversation is its honesty, vulnerability, and authenticity.  We had a lot of fun doing this, and we pulled no punches.  We found ourselves presenting at an event called Meeting of the Minds over a decade ago.  The conference, in partnership with a company called fitpro brought in about two dozen speakers, who were considered the best in the health and fitness industry at that time.  It wasn't our moments on stage, but in the audience, where we started to collectively imagine a client centered industry, driven by collaboration, co-creation and commitment to a common mission.  We got together with Paul Taylor and started to create a framework for the vision that was emerging.  This conversation explores our perspective on the lessons we learned along that journey together.   Thank you to Ian O'Dwyer, Scott Hopson and Richard Boyd for coming on the show.  Special mention to Michol Dalcourt, Rodney Corn and Paul Taylor.   

Richard Boyd Barrett, People Before Profit-Solidarity TD for Dun Laoghaire, discusses issues relating to the party in the lead-up to its annual pre-Dail think-in.

Who are you listening to? It's said that we are what we eat. How about we are who we listen to. In this "Understanding the Times Podcast." Richard Boyd answers a question sent in from a listener. The question deals with who this man is listening to.  Why listening to the right voice is crucial in our spiritual development. Who are you listening to? More @ www.manlikeradio.com

What dies every man need? Do we absolutely know what it is?Listen as Richard Boyd speaks on three crucially important areas of a mans life, If a man does not advance in theses spheres of his life, he will never know his true potential. More @ www.manlikeradio.com

Richard Boyd speaks to Godly men about the two sides of Quitting and winning.More @ www.manlikeradio.com

Manlikeradio presents live Understanding The Times Q &A Podcast, with  Richard Boyd and Auther Culpepper. Tuesday 8 PM (CST). In this live program Auther Culpepper will be responding to four questions posed from our listeners on the being call as men in the ministry. More @ www.manlikeradio.com

Israel is stepping up its ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people, brazenly disregarding international law and routinely committing war crimes. We discuss what the international response should be with: Richard Boyd Barrett, Kerry-Anne Mendoza and Max Blumenthal.Richard famously spoke the truth to the Israeli ambassador in committee at the Irish Parliament.Max is the son of Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to President Bill Clinton, he started Grayzone in 2019 to talk more openly about the situation in the middle East.Resistance TV is a weekly show hosted by Chris Williamson the former Labour MP, Derby Council Leader and the founder of Resist Movement for a People's Party. With a socialist take on things we look at areas of concern for the left wing, Anti Racism, Anti Imperialism, MMT, Injustice, Britain's role in foreign affairs, 21st century Socialism, Alternative Media and more…Live Wednesday's on all our Social Media at 7pm and audio Podcast on Friday'sJoin Resist here www.resistmovement.org.ukSupport us with a donation here paypal.me/festivalofresistanceFollow Chris on Twitter @DerbyChrisW

Tanjo's CEO, Richard Boyd, joins Coruzant Technologies for the Digital Executive podcast. He shares his experience in the movie and entertainment industry, working with greats like James Cameron, Brian De Palma, and Sydney Pollack. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation, his company is bringing about innovative changes to many industries today.

This week we're joined by People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett who spoke to us live from the Dail which is currently sitting in Dublin's Convention Centre due to Covid-19.  Our chat with the Dun Laoghaire TD covered issues like Israel Palestine, the Debenhams workers, housing and loads more besides.   

Challenges, obstacles and painful experiences — these are just some of things life throws our way when we least expect them. But no matter where you are in life right now, remember that you can push past the hard times. You can learn how to rise above life’s challenges. And if you feel lost, here’s a little secret: help others. Being of service to other people can help you find strength and a way out of your problems. In this episode, Robert Joseph Cappuccio, widely known as Bobby, joins us to share his inspiring story of defying hardships and helping others. It’s easier to succumb to self-sabotage and addiction. But you have the power to make your experiences an opportunity for change and hope. Bobby also shares the importance of helping others, especially as a business owner and leader. If you want to learn how to rise above trauma and be inspired to become a force of good to the world, then this episode is for you!    Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year’s time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, your goals and your lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa’s Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, a NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that is capable of boosting the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements that are of highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting edge science) combat the effects of aging, while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health My  ‘Fierce’ Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Discover how to rise above adversities. Understand the importance of intention and knowing who you serve. Learn the difference between internal and external customers and why you need to start focusing on the former.    Resources Gain exclusive access to premium podcast content and bonuses! Become a Pushing the Limits Patron now! Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-aging and longevity with NMN Bio. Connect with Bobby: Website | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram The Self-Help Antidote podcast by Bobby Cappuccio PTA Global The You Project Podcast by Craig Harper The Psychology of Winning: Ten Qualities of a Total Winner by Denis Waitley    Episode Highlights [05:49] Bobby’s Childhood Bobby was born with deformities. He was adopted by a man who had cancer.  After Bobby’s adoptive father passed, his adoptive mother entered a relationship with a cruel man. Bobby experienced all kinds of abuse throughout his childhood on top of having Tourette’s syndrome.  Doctors had to put him on Haldol, which damaged his brain.  Yet, Bobby shares that these painful experiences helped him resonate with others and thrive in his industry.  [12:48] How Bobby Got to Where He is Today  Bobby initially wanted to become a police officer for special victims.  He almost passed the written and psychological assessments, but there was an issue because of Tourette syndrome. At this time, he started working at a gym.  Bobby worked hard. Eventually, he caught the eye of the gym owner, Mitchell.  Mitchell became like a surrogate father and mentor to him. Listen to the full episode to hear how Mitchell shaped Bobby and put him on the path to success!   [20:31] Complications from Abuse and Empathy Some adults tried to intercede for Bobby when he was being abused as a kid. However, he avoided their help because he was scared of being harmed further. You can't just leave an abuser — it's difficult, and even simply attempting can hurt you. We should understand that abuse can affect anyone.  Confident and intelligent women may be particularly susceptible to abuse because they find themselves in a situation they didn’t expect.  [28:58] How Abuse Isolates People Abusers progressively isolate people by creating enemies out of strong alliances.  This can make someone lose their sense of self, making them more vulnerable and dependent on their abusers.  Assigning fault or blame to those being abused will not help anyone.  If anything, that stops people from coming forward.  [30:34] Help Others to Help Yourself Bobby learned how to rise above his traumas and negative emotions.  His mentor taught him to look beyond himself. It was only by helping others find a way out of their problems that Bobby found a way to help himself too.  He started to focus on helping people who were going through something similar to what he went through. [33:32] Focus on the Intention While working as a trainer, Bobby focused less on the transactional side of training and more on the transformational.  He wanted to help people find what they need at that moment and give them the support they need.  By focusing on his intention, he was able to get high rates of retention.  For Bobby, helping others means understanding their goals and wishes.  [36:12] Bobby’s Promotion Bobby’s exemplary performance led him to a promotion that he didn’t want. He was scared of disappointing Mitchell.   He did poorly in managing his team of trainers, which is when a consultant sat him down and gave him advice.  Mitchell also had Bobby stand up and speak in team meetings.  You need to know who you work for and who you serve. When your perspective is aligned with your work, you will bring that to every meeting and interaction.  Are you taking care of the people you need to be responsible for? Hear how Bobby figured out his answer in the full episode!  [43:14] Lessons on Leadership Companies often adopt a top-down mentality where bosses need to be followed. However, a company should not be like this. Companies are made up of people. Your business needs to care for your valuable customers, both internal and external.  Treat your team members with the same level of tenacity, sincerity and intention as your external customers. You can accomplish a lot if you hire the right person, set clear expectations and understand each individual’s motivations. Through these, you can develop the team’s capacity and channel it towards a common vision. [51:19] On Recruiting the Right People David Barton hired Bobby to work as his head of training.  Bobby asked David what two things Bobby should do to contribute the most to the company. David wanted Bobby to be a connoisseur of talent and to train them, train them and train them again.  Bobby brought this mindset throughout his career, and it’s served him well. Don’t be afraid to hire people who are smarter than you.   7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘When you know that there's somewhere you want to go, but you don't know exactly where that is. And you don't have complete confidence in your ability to get there. And what a good guy does is they help you go just as far as you can see.’ ‘We form and calibrate and shape our sense of identity in the context in which we navigate through the world off of one another. And when you're isolated with a distorted sense of reality, and you lose your sense of self, you become highly incapacitated to take action in this situation.’ ‘So I started focusing on things and a mission and people outside of myself. Who's going through something similar to what I have gone through, even if it's not precisely the same situation? How do I help them find their way out? And by helping them find their way out, I found my way up.’ ‘I never saved anyone; you can't change anyone but yourself. But the reason why he called me that is anytime someone would think about joining the gym...I approached it from a transformational perspective.’ ‘And your job is to create and keep your internal customer by serving them with at the very least with the same tenacity, sincerity and intention that you are serving your external customer. If you don't do that, you're going to be shit as a leader.’ ‘I think the only people who don't have impostor syndrome are imposters. Because if you're fraudulent, you wouldn't engage in the level of self-honesty, and humility, and conscientiousness, to go, “Am I fraudulent; is there something that I’m missing?”’ ‘Anything I've ever accomplished, it's totally through other people. It's because I hired people that were a lot smarter than me.’   About Robert Robert Joseph Cappuccio, or Bobby, is a behaviour change coach, author, consultant, speaker and fitness professional. He is a trainer of trainers and at the forefront of the life-altering and ever-evolving industry of coaching.  For over two decades, he has been advocating and pushing the industry-wide and individual shift of perspective in development. Behaviour change is rooted in a holistic approach, not just goals to health and fitness. With his vision, he co-founded PTA Global. It has now become a leader in professional fitness development.  No matter how successful Bobby seems, it didn't start this way. His childhood was filled with neglect, abuse and traumas that could lead anyone on the path to drinking and addiction. Bobby is no stranger to hardship and challenges, but he uses these experiences to connect and relate to others, using his past hardship as a way to help others. Bobby is also the former head of training and development at David Barton Gym, former director of professional development at the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), content curator for PTontheNet, development consultant for various companies including Hilton Hotels, Virgin Active, Equinox, David Lloyd Leisure and multiple businesses nationally and abroad.  With his forward-thinking mindset and work ethic, Bobby champions practical programs that help both corporate and industry personnel, including individuals, get what they truly want. He advocates the process of change mixed in with the mantra of ‘you can be free to play’.  Interested in Bobby’s work? You can check out his website and listen to his Self-Help Antidote Podcast! Reach out to Bobby on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.    Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends to offer them one way to rise above their trauma. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Pushing the Limits, your host Lisa Tamati here, and today I have a fantastic guest all the way from America again, this man goes by the name of Bobby Cappuccio. And he is a world-famous fitness professional. He trains a lot of the trainers that are out there. But Bobby has an incredible story that I really want to share with you today. So, Bobby was born with a severe facial deformity. And he also had deformed legs, and he was given up for adoption. His mother couldn't care for him, and he ended up being adopted by another man. But he had a very, very abusive rough childhood. He also developed Tourette Syndrome at the age of nine. In all this adversity you'd think like ‘oh my gosh, what sort of a life is this guy going to live’? But Bobby has had an incredible life. He's a fitness professional, as I said, he's worked in many gyms. He was the founder and co-owner of PTA Global, which does a lot of the professional fitness development. And he has devised his own strategies and ways of educating people. And his programs are just second to none. When I told my business partner, Neil, that I just interviewed Bobby Cappuccio, he's like, ‘Oh, my God, he's a legend in the space.’ So yeah, he was really a bit jealous that I got to speak to him. So I hope you enjoy this interview. It's some rough topics in there. But there's also some really great gems of wisdom. And the funny thing is what Bobby is just absolutely hilarious as well. So I do hope you enjoy it. Before we head over to the show, though, just want to let you know that we've launched a premium membership for the podcast. This is a patron membership so that you can become a VIP member of our tribe, help support the podcast. This podcast has been going now for five and a half years. It's a labour of love, I can tell you. It takes up a huge amount of my time and resources in both getting these world-class gifts for you, and also in study and research so that I can talk really, and interview very well all these crazy, amazing doctors, scientists, elite athletes and performers. So if you want to support us in keeping the show going, and like what we do in the world, and you want to keep those valuable content being able to be put out into the world, we'd love your support. And for that, we're going to give you lots of member, premium member, benefits. So, check it out at patron.lisatamati.com. That’s patron.lisatamati.com. That’s P-A-T-R-O-N dot Lisa Tamati dot com. And I just also wanted to remind you about my new anti-ageing and longevity supplement, NMN. I’ve co-worked together with molecular biologist, Dr. Elena Seranova, to make sure that you get the best quality NMN there is now. I searched all over the world for this stuff, when I learned about it, and researched about it, and how it works and what it does in the body, and there is a huge amount of science on it. A lot of it's up on our website, if you want to do a deep dive into all things NMN and the NAD precursor, then check it out. It's all about longevity. It's all about slowing down the ageing process and even reversing the ageing process. So if that's something that interests you, and you want high performance, you want help with cardiovascular health, with neuro protection, with metabolic disorders, then this is something that you should look into as well. So check that out at nmnbio.nz, that’s nmnbio.nz, and go and check that out. The supplements have been so popular that I haven't been able to keep up with orders. So on some of the orders, there is a bit of a backorder. But bear with me while we will scale up production. But go over and check that out at nmnbio.nz. Right over to the show with Bobby Cappuccio. Lisa: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today I have another very, very special guest and I was recently on this gentleman's show and now we're doing a reverse interview. I have Robert Cappuccio with me. Robert, welcome to the show. Robert Cappuccio: Oh, thank you. When you say you had a very special guest, I thought you were bringing someone else on. Lisa: You are a really special guest. Robert: Had a lot of anticipation like who is this person? What a surprise! Lisa: Well, you're a bit of an interesting character. Let's say that, throw that. Robert: Just the microphone. Lisa: No, I'm really, really interested to hear your story and to share your story with my audience, and to give a bit more of a background on you. And share gems of wisdom from your learnings from your life, because you've done some pretty cool stuff. You've had some pretty hard times and I'd like to share those learnings with my audience today. So Robert, whereabouts are you sitting at the moment, whereabouts are you in the States? Robert: Okay, so at the moment, I'm in a place called Normal Heights, which is probably a misnomer. It's not normal at all. But it's a really cool, funky neighbourhood in San Diego. Lisa: San Diego, awesome. And how’s lockdown going over there, and all of that sort of carry on? Robert: Oh, it’s great. I mean, on St. Patty's day, I've got my skull from our own green. I've just had a few whiskies. So far, so good. Lisa: This is a very interesting interview. So can you give us a little bit of background? Because you've had a very interesting, shall we say, difficult upbringing and childhood. And I wanted to perhaps start there and then see where this conversation goes a little. Robert: Is there any place you want to start, in particular? How far back do you want to go? Do you want to start from the very beginning? Lisa: Please go right at the very beginning, because you're intro to your backstory is quite interesting from the beginning, really isn't that? Robert: Okay, so I was born, which is obvious, in Manhattan, and I moved to Brooklyn early. So I was born, rather deformed. I was born with a significant facial deformity. And my lower extremities, my legs, quite never— like, if you saw my legs now, they're great. I have a great pair of legs at this moment. I'm not going to show you that because that would be a little bit rude. But my legs were kind of deformed and contorted. I had to walk with braces for the first couple of years of my life. I was given up for adoption. I'm not exactly sure, I have the paperwork on why I was given up for adoption, but I'm not really certain about the authenticity of that story. And I wasn't adopted for a while. So as an infant, I was parentless and homeless and really not well-tended to. I'm not going to get into why I say that because it's pretty disgusting. And then I was adopted. And then my adoptive father, this is kind of interesting, he had cancer, and he knew during the adoption process that he was probably not going to make it. He wanted to make sure that I found a home because nobody wanted to adopt me. Because when they came in, I was physically deformed. It's like, ‘Oh, this baby’s, it's broken. Something's wrong. Do you have a better baby’? And when he saw that, he thought, ‘Right, I've got to give this kid a home.’ So he passed. He passed when I was two. I didn't know him for more than a few months. And I hardly have any memory of him at all. My mother who adopted me, to be fair, she's developmentally disabled, and so she was a single uom with not a lot of skills, not a lot of prospects, terrified. And she basically, I think she met a guy when I was five, who I don't know if there's a diagnosis for him. He was mentally disturbed. He was a psychopath. I don't know if clinically he’s a psychopath, but that's pretty much how it felt. Lisa: You were a child experiencing this. Yeah. Robert: Yeah, I'm not like, I'm never sure in what direction to go with stuff like this. Never sure what’s valid, what's relevant. I spent my childhood in stressed positions, being woken up in the middle of the night with a pillow over my face, having bones broken consistently, and a series of rape, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and just every sort of trauma. Like imagine when I was nine years old, I was diagnosed, on top of that, with Tourette Syndrome. So I was physically deformed, going through shit like that at home. And then on top of it, I started losing control of my bodily functions. I started exhibiting tics, I started exhibiting obsessive compulsive behaviour. At some point, it was uncontrollable, like lack of control of my impulses, of the things that I would say, vulgarity. At some point, the doctors just thought that perhaps I was Scottish. Lisa: And you’re funny as well. Robert: And they put me on Haldol, which damaged my brain. That and the fact that, it's estimated, I've had at least over a half a dozen major concussions within my childhood — Lisa: From the abuse. Robert: — half a dozen to a dozen massive concussions. Yeah. Lisa: Absolute horrific start into life. Robert: When I was 10, I started binge drinking. And I thought this will help, this is a solution. But you know what? It's not. It's a little bit weird when you start a story off like this, because in some sense, it's not me being delusional, or Pollyanna, because I tend to think that I'm a little bit of a realist, sometimes too much, sometimes to the point of walking a fine edge between being hopeful and being a cynic. But I have to say that a lot of things that I experienced when I was growing up, turned out to be quite beneficial. It’s shaped me in a way and it helped me engage in certain career paths and certain activities that I don't think I really would have sought out, had this stuff not happened. So it's not like me, delusionally trying to create like all silver lining about stuff, it was shit. I understand the severity of what I went through. But I also understand where that led me. And I understand the good fortune that I had of running into certain people that resonated with me, and I resonated with them, largely in part because of my history. I don't think I would have related to these people had I not come from where I came from. Lisa: So you’re talking like people along the way that were, ended up being mentors, or teachers or friends or helping you out and through these horrific situations? Is that what you're meaning, sort of thing that would actually helped you? Because I mean, given a background like that, if you were a complete disaster and drug addict, and whatever, nobody would blame you.  You didn't have a good start in life, whatsoever. I mean, look at you now. Obviously you don't have any facial deformities, and you don't exhibit, right now, any of that stuff that actually you were and have been through. So how the hell did you get to where you are today? Because you're a very successful person, you have a very successful and a very strong influence in the world. What, how the heck do you go from being that kid, with brain problems and concussions and Tourette’s and abuse and rape and all of that, to being the person who comes across as one, number one, hilarious, very crazy and very cool?  How the heck do you get from there to there? Lisa: Just listening to, I can tell that you're someone who's highly intelligent, perceptive and an amazing judge of humour. So thank you for that. I think a lot of it was quite accidental. So I had thought when I was younger, that I wanted to be a police officer, originally. And I wanted to be involved with special victims, even before that was a TV show. Brilliant show, by the way, one of my favourite shows on TV. But even before that was the TV show, I thought, if I'm going through what I went through, and it's very hard because I had Child Services in New York City, they were called ACS. They were at my house consistently. But the problem is, I believed at a young age that my stepfather was nearly invincible, like nobody could touch him. Lisa: You were powerless against him. Yeah. Robert: And when they came to the house and like, look, I had broken bones, my arm was in a sling. A lot of times, I broke my tibia. They won't take me to the hospital because they thought they would suspect stepdad of doing it. I couldn't even walk. And these people were sitting down, said, ‘Well just tell us what happened.’ And I somehow knew that, at a critical moment, my adopted mother would falter. She would not have my back. She would rescind on everything she says. Lisa: She was frightened too, no doubt. Robert: She was frightened. I don't think she had the emotional or intellectual capacity to deal with the situation. That's all I'll say on that. But I knew once they left, I just knew they couldn't do anything, unless I was all-in. And if anything went wrong, he would kill me. So I would have to just say that, ‘Well, I fell.’ And it’s like, there's no way a fork, like I would go into camp and I would have stab wounds in the shape of a fork. And people are like, ‘What happened?’ And I said, ‘I was walking, and I tripped, and I fell onto a fork that went through my thigh and hit my femur.’ It's like, okay, that's just not possible. But I kind of knew. And I kind of felt like nobody's coming to the rescue. And I thought, if I was a police officer, and I was worked with special victims, maybe I could be the person that I always wished would show up for me. But then, there were issues with that. So I think I got like, out of a possible 100 on the police test. I did fairly well. I think I got 103, there were master credit questions. And I thought, right, yeah, I'm going. And then I took the psychological and by some weird measure, I passed, that seems crazy to me now. It kind of seems problematic. I think they need to revisit that. But then when I took the medical, and with Tourette's, it was kind of like, ‘Ah, yeah.’ It was a sticking point. So I had to petition because otherwise I would be disqualified from the employment police department. And during that time, I started working in the gyms. And when I was working the gyms, I kind of thought, there's no way I'll ever be as intelligent as some of these other trainers here. I'm just going to make up with work ethic what I lack in intellect. I would run around and just tried to do everything I could. I would try to clean all the equipment, make sure that the gym was spotless. But again, kind of like not like having all my wits about me, I would be spraying down a machine with WD-40. And what I didn't account for is, the person who was on the machine next to me, I'd be spraying him in the face with WD-40 when he was exercising. Lisa: They still do that today, by the way. The other day in the gym and the girl next to me, she was blind, and she was just spraying it everywhere. I had to go and shift to the other end of the gym, is that right, cause I don't like that stuff. Robert: I mean, in my defence, the members were very well-lubricated. And so, people would go upstairs, and like there is this fucking trainer just sprayed me in the face. And the owner would say, ‘All right, let me see who this guy is. What do you talk? This doesn’t even make sense? Who hired this guy?’ We kind of had like the old bowl, the pin. And like you could walk up top and look down into the weight room, and there I was just running around. And there was something about someone running around and hustling on the gym floor that made him interested. He's like, ‘Get this kid up into my office. Let me talk to him.’ And that forged a friendship. I spoke to him yesterday, by the way. So we've been friends for like three decades. And the owner of the gym became kind of like a surrogate dad. And he did for me what most guides do and that is when you know that there's somewhere you want to go, but you don't know exactly where that is, and you don't have complete confidence in your ability to get there. And what a good guy does is they help you go just as far as you can see, because when you get there, you'll see further. And that's what Mitchell did for me. And he was different because I have a lot of adults. So I grew up with not only extreme violence in the home, but I grew up in Coney Island. I grew up living on the corner of Shit Street and Depressing. And there was a constant violence outside the home and in school and I got picked on. And I got bullied until I started fighting, and then I got into a lot of fights. And you just have these adults trying to talk to you and it's like, you don't fucking know me. You have no idea where I come from. You can't relate to me. When you were growing up, you had a home, you were being fed. You were kind of safe, don't even pretend to relate to me. And he was this guy, who, he was arrested over a dozen times by age 30, which was not why I chose him as a mentor. But he had gone through some serious shit. And when he came out on the other end of it, he wanted to be somebody other than his history would suggest he was going to be, and he tried harder at life than anybody I had ever met. So one, I could relate to him, I didn't think he was one of these adults who are just full of shit. I was impressed at how hard he tried to be the person he wanted to be. So there was this mutual respect and affinity, instantly. Lisa: Wow. And he had a massive influence. And we all need these great coaches, mentors, guides, surrogate dads, whatever the case may be, to come along, sometimes in our lives. And when they do, how wonderful and special that is, and someone that you could respect because like you say, I've had a wonderful childhood. In comparison to you, it was bloody Disneyland, and so I cannot relate to some of those things. And I have my own little wee dramas, but they were minor in comparison to what you experienced in the world. So how the heck can I really help you out if you're a young kid that I'm trying to influence. And not that you have to go through everything in order to be of help to anybody, but just having that understanding that your view, your worldview is a limited, privileged background. Compared to you, my background is privileged. Robert: Well, I don't think there's any ‘compared to you’. I think a lot of my reaction to adults around me who tried to intercede — one, if your intercession doesn't work, it's going to get me hurt, bad, or it's going to get me killed. There have been times where I was hung out of an 18-storey window by my ankles. Lisa: You have got to be kidding me. Robert: Like grabbing onto the brick on the side of the building. I can't even say terrified. I don't even know if that encapsulates that experience as a kid. But it's like you don't understand what you can walk away from once you feel good about interceding with this poor, unfortunate kid. I cannot walk away from the situation that you're going to create. So it was defensive mechanism, because pain is relative. I mean, like, you go through a divorce, and you lose this love and this promise, and somebody comes along, ‘Oh there are some people in the world who never had love, so you should feel grateful’. You should fuck off because that's disgusting. And that is totally void of context. I don't think somebody's pain needs to compare to another person's pain in order to be relevant. I think that was just my attitude back then because I was protecting my existence. I've really changed that perspective because, like, my existence isn't threatened day to day anymore. Lisa: Thank goodness. Robert: So I have a different take on that. And I understand that these adults were well meaning, because I also had adults around me, who could have probably done something, but did nothing. And I don't even blame them because my stepfather was a terrifying person. And the amount of work and energy, and the way the laws, the structure, and how threatening he was, I don't blame them. And me? I’ll probably go to prison. But I don't blame them for their inaction. Lisa: Yeah, and this is a problem. Just from my own experiences, like I said, this is not even in childhood, this is in young adulthood, being in an abusive relationship. The dynamic of the stuff that's going on there, you're frightened to leave. You know you are going to be in physical danger if you try and leave. So, I've been in that sort of a position but not as a child. But still in a position where people will think, ‘Well, why don't you just go?’ And I’m just like, ‘Have you ever tried to leave someone who's abusive? Because it's a very dangerous thing to do.’ And you sometimes you’re like, just, you can't, if there's children involved, even, then that's even worse. And there's complicated financial matters. And then there's, whatever the case may be or the circumstances that you're facing, it's not cut and dried. And as an adult, as a powerful woman now, I wouldn't let myself be in a position like that. But I wasn't that back then. And you weren't because well, you were a child. See, you're even more. Robert: I just want to comment on that a little bit. And this is not coming from clinical expertise. This is just coming from my own interpretation experience. I think, obviously, that when a child goes through this, you would think, ‘Okay, if this started at age five, what could you have done?’ But a lot of times we do look at, let's say, women who are in severe domestic violence situations, and we say, ‘Well, how could you have done that? How could you have let somebody do that to you’? And I think we need to really examine that perspective. Because powerful, confident, intelligent women might be especially susceptible. Lisa: Apparently, that’s the case. Robert: Because you have a track record, and you have evidence to support that you are capable, and you're intelligent, and you find yourself in a situation that you didn't anticipate. And I think it's easier to gaslight someone like that. Because it's like, ‘How could I have had a lapse — is it me?’  And it creeps up on you, little by little, where you doubt yourself a little bit more, a little bit more, and then you become more controlled and more controlled. And then your perspective on reality becomes more and more distorted. So I think we have to be very careful when an adult finds themselves, yes, in that position, saying, ‘Well, why didn't you just leave? How could you have let yourself very easily?’ It can happen to anyone, especially if you have a strong sense of confidence and you are intelligent, and because it becomes unfathomable to you, how you got into that situation. Lisa: Looking back on my situation, which is years and years ago now, and have no consequences to the gentleman that I was involved with, because I'm sure he's moved on and hopefully, not the same. But the fact that it shifted over many years, and the control shifted, and the more isolated you became. I was living in a foreign country, foreign language, unable to communicate with my family, etc., etc. back then. And you just got more and more isolated, and the behaviour’s become more and more, more radical ways as time goes on. It doesn't stop there. Everybody's always lovely at the beginning. And then, as the power starts to shift in the relationship — and I've listened to a psychologist, I’ve forgotten her name right now, but she was talking about, she works with these highly intelligent, educated women who are going through this and trying to get out of situations where they shouldn't be in. And she said,  ‘This is some of the common traits. They're the types of people who want to fix things, they are the types of people who are strong and they will never give up.’ And that is actually to their detriment, in this case. And I'm a very tenacious type of person. So, if I fall in love with someone, which you do at the beginning, then you're like, ‘Well, I'm not giving up on this person. They might need some help, and some, whatever’. And when you're young, you think you can change people, and you can fix them. And it took me a number of years to work out and ‘Hang on a minute, I haven't fixed them, I’ve screwed myself over. And I've lost who I am in the process.’ And you have to rebuild yourself. And like you and like your case is really a quite exceptionally extreme. But like you, you've rebuilt yourself, and you've created this person who is exceptional, resilient, powerful, educated, influential — Robert: And dysfunctional. Lisa: And dysfunctional at the same time. Hey, me, too. Robert: And fucked up in 10 different ways. Lisa: Yeah. Hey, none of us have got it right. As our mutual friend, Craig Harper would say, ‘We're just differing degrees of fucked-up-ness’. Robert: That would be spot on. Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And totally, some of the most high functioning people that I get to meet, I get to meet some pretty cool people. There's hardly any of them that don't have some area in their life where they've got that fucked-up-ness that's going on, and are working on it, because we're all works in progress. And that's okay. Robert: The thing you said that I really caught is you lost your sense of self, and the isolation. And that is what abusers do, is progressively they start to isolate, and create enemies out of strong alliances and allies. And when you lose your sense of self, and you're so isolated — because as much as we want to be strong and independent, we are highly interdependent, tribal people. We form and calibrate, we shape our sense of identity and the context in which we navigate through the world off of one another. And when you're isolated with a distance sense of reality and you lose your sense of self, you become highly incapacitated to take action in this situation. And you develop, I think what Martin Seligman, called learned helplessness. And I think assigning fault or blame or accusation either to yourself or doing that to somebody else, not only does that not help, it stops people from coming forward. Because it reinforces the mental state that makes them susceptible to perpetual abuse in the first place. Lisa: Yeah, it's so true. So how did you start to turn around? So you meet Mitchell, Mitchell was his name, and he started to be a bit of a guiding light for you and mentor you, and you're in the gym at this phase stage. So, what sort of happened from there on and? So what age were you at this point, like, your teenage years, like teenagers or? Robert: I met Mitchell  when I was like 19 years old. And what he allowed me to do, and it wasn't strategies, he allowed me to focus outside of myself. Because every emotion, every strong emotion you're feeling, especially in a painful way, resides within you. So if you feel a sense of despair, or you feel disgust, or loneliness, or isolation, or any type of pain, and you would look around your room and go, ‘Well, where's that located? Where's my despair? I searched my whole desk, I can't find it’. It's not there. It's not in your outer world. It's your inner world. And what he gave me the ability to do is say, ‘Okay. I grew up physically deformed. And despite everything I was going through, my physical deformities were one of the most painful things’. But the irony, more painful than anything else because you could see me out in the shops and go, ‘Okay, this is a person who has been severely physically sexually abused, who's suffered emotional trauma’. You could see that as I walk through the aisles, because you say, ‘Okay, this is someone who doesn't look right. This is someone who —', and I can see the look of disgust on people's face when they saw me physically. And then there’s nowhere to hide, you couldn’t mask that. I started thinking, ‘Well, what about people who feel that about their physical appearance and they don't require surgery? What are they going through? And how do I focus more on them? How do I take a stand for that person? What's the areas of knowledge? What are the insights? What are the resources that I can give these people to be more resourceful in finding a sense of self and finding their own way forward?’ Lisa: Being okay with the way that they are, because it must be just— Robert: People are okay with the way they are, seeing an ideal version of themselves in the future. And engaging the behaviours that helps them eventually bridge that gap, where their future vision, at some point, becomes their current reality. So I started focusing on things and a mission and people outside of myself, who's going through something similar to what I have gone through, even if it's not precisely the same situation? How do I help them find their way out? And by helping them find their way out, I found my way up. Lisa: Wow, it's gold. And that's what you ended up doing then, and within the gym setting, or how did that sort of work out from there? Robert: Well, I became a trainer. And in the beginning, I was like an average trainer. But I became, what Mitchell called, like the person who saved people. I never saved anyone; you can't change anyone but yourself. But the reason why he called me that is, anytime someone would think about joining the gym, if they would sit down with someone, they approached it from, ‘Well, what can we do? Can we give you a couple of extra months? Can we give you a guest pass to invite some —‘. They approached it from a transactional perspective, where when I sat down with these people, I approached it from a transformational perspective. ‘What did you want most? What do you want most in your life in this moment? And what hasn't happened? What missed? What was the disconnect? Where have we failed? What did you need that was not fulfilled in your experience here and how do we give you those resources? How do we support you going forward?’ And it was also like, ‘Look, if you want to leave, we totally respect that. You've given us a chance to help you. And obviously, the fault was ours. I never blamed anyone. But if you had the chance to do it again, what would have made the difference? And give us that opportunity’. It’s like, ‘Oh, this person is like a retention master’. It's not that, my focus wasn't in retention, it was the intention rather, to relate to the individual in front of me.  Lisa: I’m hearing about the actual person and their actual situation and their actual wishes and goals, rather than, how can I sweeten the deal so you don't leave? Robert: Precisely, and that had some unintended consequences, because it put me in a bad situation, because I got promoted against my will. And I didn’t want to get promoted. And I thought, ‘I'm just getting a reputation for being somewhat good in my current job. And now they're going to promote it to my level of incompetence. And now I'm going to disappoint Mitchell, he's going to find out this kid's actually an idiot, he's a fraud — ‘I was wrong.’ And the one person who believed in me, I'm going to lose his trust and his faith, and that's going to be damaging.’ So me being promoted into management led to a series of unpredictable events that shaped my entire career. Lisa: Okay, tell us about that. Tell us about it. So you were pushed out of your comfort zone, because you just got a grip on this thing, the crazy worker. Robert: So Mitchell had a consultant, and his name was Ray. His name still is Ray, coincidentally. And he said, ‘Yeah, I think you should promote Bobby, just a small promotion to head trainer. Not like fitness manager, just head trainer’. And when they approached me, it was almost like they told me like, I had to euthanise my pet. It was horrible. I was not excited about this. I was like, ‘Oh, thanks. But no, thanks. I love where I'm at.’ Lisa: Yep. ‘I didn’t want to grow.’ Robert: Well, they had a response to that. They said, ‘There’s two directions you can go in this company, you could go up, or you can go out’. And they fired me that day. Lisa: Wow! Because you wouldn’t go up? Robert: They’re like, ‘You've chosen out. And that's okay. That's your decision’. And I was devastated. Like that my identity is connected to that place. And on my way out the door, Mitchell's like, ‘Come into my office.’ And he’s sitting across from me, and he kind of looked like a very muscular, like an extremely muscular version of Burt Reynolds at the time, which was very intimidating, by the way. And he puts his feet up on the desk, and he's leaning back, and he's eating an apple. He says, ‘You know, I heard a rumour that you're recently unemployed. And so I would imagine, your schedules opened up quite a bit this week. You know, coincidentally, we're interviewing for a head trainer position. You might want to come in and apply because you've got nothing to lose’. What a complete and total cock. And I say that, with love, gratitude, gratitude, and love. So I showed up — Lisa: Knew what you needed. Robert: I remember, I showed up in a wrinkly button-down shirt, that is not properly ironed, which was brought to my attention. And I got the job. And I was the worst manager you've ever met in your life because first of all, my motivation was not to serve my team. My motivation was not to disappoint Mitchell. And that was the wrong place for your head to be in, if you have the audacity to step into a leadership position. Whether you tell yourself you were forced into it or not, fact of the matter is ‘No, I could have chosen unemployment, I would have done something else. I chose this. Your team is your major responsibility.’ And that that perspective has served me in my career, but it well, it's also been problematic. So I had people quitting because for me, I was in the gym at 5am. And I took two-hour breaks during the afternoon and then I was in the gym till 10 o'clock at night, 11 o'clock at night. I expected you to do the same thing. So, I didn't understand the worldview and the needs and the aspirations and the limitations and the people on my team. So people started quitting. I started doing horribly within my position. And then Mitchell brought in another consultant, and he gave me some advice. I didn't take it as advice at the time, but it changed everything. And it changed rapidly. This guy's name is Jamie, I don’t remember his surname. But he sat me down and he said, ‘So I understand you have a little bit of trouble’. Yeah, no shit, man. Really perceptive. ‘So, just tell me, who do you work for?’ So, ‘I work for Mitchell’. He said, ‘No, no, but who do you really work for?’ I thought, ‘Oh. Oh, right. Yeah. The general manager of the gym. Brian, I work for Brian’. So nope, who do you really work for? I thought it must be the fitness manager, Will. So, ‘I work for Will’. He’s like, ‘But who do you work for?’ And now I'm starting to get really irritated. I'm like, yeah, this guy's a bit thick. I don't know how many ways I can explain, I've just pretty much named everybody. Who do you reckon I work for? He said, ‘No, you just named everyone who should be working for you?’ Lisa: Yeah, you got that one down. Robert: ‘Have a single person you work for? Who are your trainers?’  He said, ‘Here, let me help you out. Imagine for a second, all of your trainers got together, and they pooled their life savings. They scraped up every bit of resource that they could to open up a gym. Problem is, they're not very experienced. And if they don't get help, they're going to lose everything. They're going to go out of business. They go out and they hire you as a consultant. In that scenario, who do you think you'd work for?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I'm the one that's thick. I've worked for them’. Because in every interaction you have, it made such a dip because it sounds counterintuitive. But he said, ‘In every meeting and every interaction, whether it's a one-on-one meeting, team meeting, every time you approach someone on the floor to try to help them, or you think you're going to correct them, come from that perspective and deliver it through that lens’. And things started to change rapidly. That was one of two things that changed. The second thing that changed is Mitchell believed, because he would listen to self-help tapes, it inspired him. So he would have me listen to self-help tapes. And he believed that oration in front of a group public speaking was culturally galvanising. And in a massive team meeting where we had three facilities at the time, where he brought in a couple of hundred people for a quarterly meeting. He had me stand up and speak. Oh, man. I know you've done a lot of podcasting and you do a lot of public speaking in front of audiences. You know that experience where you get up to speak but your brain sits right back down? Lisa: Yeah. And you're like, as Craig was saying the other day, ‘It doesn't matter how many times you do it, you're still absolutely pecking yourself.’ Because you want to do a really good job and you go, ‘This is the day I'm going to screw it up. I'm going to screw it up, even though I've done it 10,000 times. And I’ve done a brilliant job. Then it’s coming off.’ Robert: If you’re not nervous in front of an audience, you've got no business being there. That is very disrespectful. I agree with that. I mean, this is coming from, in my opinion, one of the greatest speakers in the world. And I'm not just saying that because Craig's my mate, and he gives me oatmeal every time I come out to Melbourne. I'm saying that because he's just phenomenal and authentic in front of a room. But I had that experience and I'm standing up brainless in front of the room. And as I start to realize that I am choking. I'm getting so nervous. Now this is back in the 1990s, and I was wearing this boat neck muscle shirt that said Gold's Gym, and these pair of workout pants that were called T-Michaels, they were tapered at the ankles, but they ballooned out. You know the ones I’m talking about? And I had a lot of change in my pocket. And all you hear in the room, as my knees were shaking, you can hear the change rattling, which wasn't doing anything for my self-confidence. And just instantly I was like, ‘Right, you're either going to epically fail at your job right here. Or you are going to verbatim with intensity, recite word for word, like everything you remember from Dennis Waitley’s Psychology of Winning track for positive self-determination’. Sorry, Dennis, I did plagiarize a bit. And I said it with passion. Not because I'm passionate, because I knew if I didn't say it with fierce intensity, nothing but a squeak will come out of my mouth, Lisa: And the jingle in the pocket Robert: And the jingle in the pocket. And at the end of that, I got a standing ovation. And that’s not what moved me. Lisa: No? Robert: What moved me was weeks ago, I was clueless in my job. I got this advice from Jamie on, ‘You work for them. They are your responsibility. They are entrusted to you. Don’t treat people like they work for you.’ Now I had this, this situation happened. And my trainers avoided me a month ago when I got promoted. But now they were knocking on my office door, ‘Hey, can I talk to you? Would you help me’? And it just clicked. The key to pulling yourself out of pain and suffering and despair is to focus on lifting up others. Lisa: Being of service. Robert: That was it. I thought I could be good at something. And what I'm good at is not only, it's terrifying before you engage in it, but it's euphoric after, and it can help other people. I can generate value by developing and working through others. Lisa: This is like gold for management and team leaders and people that are in charge of teams and people is, and I see this around me and some of the corporations where get to work and consultants stuff is this was very much this top-down mentality. ‘I'm the boss. You’re doing what I say because I'm the boss’. And that doesn't work. It might work with 19-year-olds who have no idea in the world. Robert: It reeks of inexperience. You think you're the boss because you've had certain qualities, and that's why you got promoted — do what I say. You are a detriment to the company — and I know how many people are fucked off and calling bullshit. I don't care. I mean, not to toot my own horn. Like anything I've ever accomplished, I've learned I have accomplished through hiring the right people and having a team that's better than me. But I’ve been in so many management positions, from the very bottom to the very top of multiple organizations I've consulted all over the world, you are only as good as your team. And to borrow from the late great Peter Drucker, ‘The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. And your most valuable customer’s your internal customer, the team that you hire. Because unless you are speaking to every customer, unless you are engaging with every customer complaint, unless you are engaging in every act of customer service on your own —' which means your business is small, which is fine. But if it's a lot, you're not ‘— you could scale that, it is always your team. And your job is to create and keep your internal customer by serving them with, at the very least, with the same tenacity, sincerity and intention that you are serving your external customer. If you don't do that, you're going to be shit as a leader. And honestly, I don't give a fuck what anybody thinks about that. Because I have heard so many opinions from people who are absolute — they've got a ton of bravado, they beat their chest, but they are ineffective. And it's extraordinary what you can accomplish when you know how to be, number one, hire the right person. Number two set expectations clearly — clearly, specifically. Number three, understand what motivates each individual, as an individual person and as a team, and then develop that team's capacity individually and collectively to channel that capability towards the achievement of a common vision, of a common monthly target. Period. Lisa: Wow. So that's just, that’s one whole lot going on in one. Robert: That is leadership in a nutshell. Lisa: Yeah. And this is the tough stuff because it's easier said than done. I mean, I'm trying to scale our businesses and grow teams and stuff. And number one, hiring the right people is a very big minefield. And number two, I've started to realize in my world that there's not enough for me to go around. I can't be in 10 places and 10 seats at once. You're getting overwhelmed. You're trying to help the universe and you're one person, so you're trying to replicate yourself in the team that you have, and provide the structure. And then you also need those people where you're weak, like I'm weak at certain aspects. I'm weak at technology, I'm hopeless at systems. I know my weaknesses. I know my strengths, so. Robert: I resemble that comment. Lisa: Yeah, In trying to get those people where you, that are better than you. Not as good, but better than you. And never to be intimidated because someone is brilliant at something. They're the ones you want on your team, because they are going to help with your deficits. And we've all got deficits and blind spots and things that we're not good over we don't love doing. And then trying to develop those team members so that you're providing them and treating them respectfully, looking after them, educating them. And that takes a lot of time too, and it's really hard as a smallish business that's trying to scale to go from there wearing a thousand hats. And a lot of people out there listening will be in similar boats as ours, like, wearing a hundred hats and trying to do multitasking, getting completely overwhelmed, not quite sure how to scale to that next level, where you've got a great team doing a whole lot of cool stuff. And then realizing the impact that you can have as tenfold or a hundredfold. Robert: Absolutely. And I'm not really a good business person, per se, like I've owned a few businesses myself, I've worked within quite a few businesses. And I think what I'm good at, and this goes back to another person that I worked for shortly after Gold's Gym. So Gold's Gym was sold, that's a whole story you don't need to get into. This is an interesting guy. I was doing consulting, I was just going out and doing public speaking, I had independent clients. And I crossed paths with an individual named David Barton. This is someone you should get on your podcast. Talk about an interesting individual. And David Barton had the one of the most unique and sexy edgy brands in New York City. And that's when you had a lot of competition with other highly unique, sexy, edgy brands. And he was the first person — he coined the phrase, ‘Look better naked,’ it was actually him. That's the guy. It was on the cover of New York Magazine. I mean, he was constantly, like his club in Vogue, at Harper's Bazaar, he ended up hiring me as his head of training. And his company at that time in the 1990s, which is quite the opposite of the mentality, the highest position you could ever achieve in his company was trainer. It was all about the training, and it made a difference culturally, and it made a difference in terms of like we were probably producing more revenue per club and personal training at that point than almost anyone else in the world, with the exception of maybe Harpers in Melbourne. So this is how far me and Craig go back actually. Lisa: Wow. It’s that right. Robert: Yeah, because we had found out about each other just a few years after that. Lisa: Some of that Craig Harper. Robert: Craig Harper, yeah, when he had his gyms. So we were introduced by a guy named Richard Boyd, a mutual friend who's like, you got to meet this guy, because he's doing what you were doing. And it all started when I went into David Barton gym, and I just thought, this is a different world. This is another level. Am I in over my head? So again, it was that doubt, it was that uncertainty. Lisa: The imposter syndrome.  Robert: But I did. Yeah, and I think we all have, and I think the only people who don't have imposter syndrome are imposters. Because if you're fraudulent, you wouldn't engage in the level of self-honesty, and humility and conscientiousness, to go ‘Am I fraudulent, is there something that I’m missing’? Only a con artist never considers whether or not they're fraudulent, it's ‘Does that keep you stuck? Or does that help you to get better and more authentic, more sincere?’ So I had the presence of mind to ask David a very important question. And I said, ‘David, if there was like two things, or three things that I can do in this company, exceedingly well, what two or three things would best serve the member, the company as a whole, and of course, my career here with you?’ And David leaned back and he did one of these dozens of things he gave me, literally. And he sat there for — it must have been like five seconds — it felt like an eternity and I'm thinking, ‘Oh my god, that that was the stupidest question I could possibly ask. He probably thinks I should have this whole, like sorted out. After all, he hired me, or am I going to get sacked today?’ And then I was like, ‘I can't get sacked. My house just got ransacked by the FBI’. That was a totally different story. He comes, he leans forward. And he says, ‘Two things. Two things you got to do. Number one,’ and a paraphrase, but it was something very similar to, ‘I want you to be a connoisseur of talent, like a sommelier is a connoisseur of wine. I want you to hire interesting, and great trainers. That's number one.’ And he just sat there again. And I'm like, I think it was a power move. Looking back, it was a power move. Lisa: Using the silence. Robert: What’s number two, David? And he said, ‘Train the shit out of them. And when you're done with that, here's number three, train them again. Number four, train them again. Number five, train them again.’ And that stuck with me. And a year later, I wound up leaving David Barton, and I come back to work with him periodically over the course of many years, and I personally loved the experience every time. We’re still good friends today. And I went to NASM, and I became a presenter, senior presenter, and eventually I became the director of professional development for the National Academy of Sports Medicine. And I brought that with me. And trust me, there was times when I was quite a weirdo, because I thought quite differently than then a team of educators and clinicians. But it helped, and it served me well, and served me throughout my life. So I am shit at so many aspects of business. But I am really good, and probably because I'm very committed to recruiting people with the same level of insight, precision, intuition and sophistication that a sommelier would approach a bottle of wine. Lisa: Oh, I need to talk to you about my business at some point. I need the right people because I keep getting the wrong one. Robert: That, I'm very confident I can help. When it comes to recruiting and selection and hiring and training and development, that is my world. Lisa: That’s your jam. Robert: And because anything I've ever accomplished, it's totally through other people. It's because I hired people that were a lot smarter than me. It's funny because that's another piece of advice I got way back in my Gold Gym days, where one of the consultants was in the room and said, ‘You'll be successful to the degree that you're able and willing to hire people that are more intelligent than you’. And Mitchell quipped, ‘That shouldn’t be too hard for you, Bob’. Okay, yeah. Thanks, Mitchell. Yeah. Lisa: Oh, yeah, nice, friend. You need those ones, don’t you? Hard case ones. Hey, Bobby, this has been a really interesting and I feel like we probably need a part two because we haven't even touched on everything because you've had an incredible career. And I just look at you and how you how far you've come and there must have been so much that you haven't even talked about, have been all the really deep stuff that you went through as a child — Robert: No, I've told you everything. There's nothing else. Lisa: But how the hell did you actually turn your mindset around and how did you fix yourself and get yourself to the point you know where you are today, but I think we've run out of time for today. So, where can people engage with what you do and where can people find you and all of that sort of good stuff? Robert: Okay, well, I just started my own podcast. It's decent. Lisa: Which is awesome because I've been on. Robert: So if you are looking for, like one of the most dynamic, interesting and inspiring podcasts you've ever encountered, go to The You Project by Craig Harper. If you still have time after that, and you're looking for some decent podcast material, go to The Self Help Antidote, that is my podcast. And I'm on Facebook. Social media is not really where I live. It's not where I want to live. It's not where I like to live, but I'm there. I'm on Facebook. I mean the rest of the older generation, yeah, piss off kids. And I'm on Instagram. I'm occasionally on LinkedIn, but not really. I will be on Clubhouse because I got to find the time Lisa: What the hel

Join Richard Boyd and Alex Guidry in a special report on "Suicide. " Deadly Thoughts. Suicide is one of the few deaths that can be 100% avoided. With all that is happening with the global pandemic, suicide is still one of the top leading losses of life in the world. Every year more than a million people die due to suicide. And that's the ones we know off, but suicide remains a deadly threat to men and their loved ones. What can we do to help others and ourselves, especially men, not fall to the deadly thoughts and actions of suicide?About the host.Several years back Richard Boyd and his wife Nellie were asked to speak on a radio program. This would be a first for them to talk live on the radio. Recently relocating from New York City they found themselves living at the time in Central Texas.Early that morning they nervously shared from their hearts, how they were truly transformed by the love of God. Upon completion of the thirty-minute broadcast, the station immediately received a call from a local businessman contemplating suicide. He was deeply moved by the sincerity of their words and resolved not to take his life. He then decided to place his trust in God and allow himself to be restored to proper mental health.That became the beginning of more than four decades of ministry to the hurting, along with radio appearances around Central and Southern Texas. Today with the rise of modern technology, Richard has been hosting Podcasts, that now communicate to many people around the world.Manlikeradio was birthed to help Christain men navigate through the times we live in. When Godly men understand the times they gain a greater influence on changing world they live in.More @ www.manlikeradio.com

About Rob SutterRob Sutter, a Principal Developer Advocate at Fauna, has woven application development into his entire career, from time in the U.S. Army and U.S. Government to stints with the Big Four and Amazon Web Services. He has started his own company – twice – once providing consulting services and most recently with WorkFone, a software as a service startup that provided virtual digital identities to government clients. Rob loves to build in public with cloud architectures, Node.js or Go, and all things serverless!Twitter: @rts_robPersonal email: rob@fauna.com Personal website: robsutter.comFauna Homepage Learn more about Fauna Supported Languages and Frameworks Try Fauna for FreeThe Calvin PaperThis episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets: https://www.cbtnuggets.com/Watch this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CUx1KMJCbvkTranscriptJeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm joined by Rob Sutter. Hey, Rob. Thanks for joining me.Rob: Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.Jeremy: So you are now the or a Principal Developer Advocate at Fauna. So I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what Fauna is all about.Rob: Right. So as you've said, I'm a DA at Fauna. I've been a serverless user in production since 2017, started the Serverless User Group in Dubai. So that's how I got into serverless in general. Previously, I was a DA on the Serverless Team at AWS, and I've been a SaaS startup co-founder, a government employee, an IT auditor, and like a lot of serverless people I find, I have a lot of Ops in my background, which is why I don't want to do it anymore. There's a lot of us that end up here that way, I think. Fauna is the data API for modern applications. So it's a database that you access as an API just as you would access Stripe for payments, Twilio for messaging. You just put your data into Fauna and access it that way. It's flexible, serverless. It's transactional. So it's a distributed database with asset transactions, and again, it's as simple as accessing any other API that you're already accessing as a developer so that you can simplify your code and ship faster.Jeremy: Awesome. All right. Well, so I want to talk more about Fauna, but I want to talk about it actually in a broader ... I think in the broader ecosystem of what's happening in the cloud right now, and we hear this term "multicloud" all the time. By the way, I'm super excited to have you on. I wanted to have you on for the longest time, and then just schedules, and it's like ...Rob: Yeah.Jeremy: You know how it is, but anyways.Rob: Thank you.Jeremy: No. But seriously, I'm super excited because your tweets, and everything that you've written, and the things that you were doing at AWS and things like that I think just all reinforced this idea that we are living in this multicloud world, right, and that when people think of multicloud ... and this is something I try to be very clear on. Multicloud is not cloud-agnostic, right?Rob: Right.Jeremy: It's a very different thing, right? We're not talking about running the same work load in parallel on multiple service providers or whatever.Rob: Right.Jeremy: We're talking about this idea of using the best services that are available to you across the spectrum of providers, whether those are cloud service providers, whether those are SaaS companies, or even to some degree, some open-source projects that are out there that make up this strategy. So let's start there right from the beginning. Just give me your thoughts on this idea of what multicloud is.Rob: Right. Well, it's sort of a dirty word today, and people like to rail against it. I think rightly so because it's that multicloud 1.0, the idea of, as you said, cloud-agnostic that "write once, run everywhere." All that is, is a race to the bottom, right? It's the lowest common denominator. It's, "What do I have available on every cloud service provider? And then let me write for that as a risk management strategy." That's a cost center when you want to put it in business terms.Jeremy: Right.Rob: Right? You're not generating any value there. You're managing risk by investing against that. In contrast, what you and I are talking about today is this idea of, "Let me use best in class everywhere," and that's a value generation strategy. This cloud service provider offers something that this team understands, and wants to build with, and creates value for the customer more quickly. So they're going to write on that cloud service provider. This team over here has different needs, different customers. Let them write over there. Quite frankly, a lot of this is already happening today at medium businesses and enterprises. It's just not called multicloud, right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: So it's this bottom-up approach that individual teams are consuming according to their needs to create the greatest value for customers, and that's what I like to see, and that's what I like to promote.Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. I love that idea of bottom-up because I think that is absolutely true, and I don't think you've seen this as aggressively as you have in the last probably five years as more SaaS companies have become or SaaS has become a household name. I mean, probably 10 years ago, I think Salesforce was around, and some of these other things were around, right?Rob: Yeah.Jeremy: But they just weren't ... They weren't the household names that they are now. Now, you watch any sport, any professional sport, and you see advertisements for all these SaaS companies now because that seems to be the modern economy. But the idea of the bottom-up approach, that is something where you basically give a developer or maybe you don't give them, but the developer takes the liberties, I would say, to maybe try and experiment with something new without having to do years of research, go through procurement, get approval to use some platform. Even companies trying to move to AWS, or on to Azure, or something like that, they have to go through hoops. Basically, jump through hoops in order to get them there. So this idea of the bottom-up approach, the developers are the ones who are experimenting. Very low-risk experiments, by the way, with some of these other services. That approach, that seems like the right marketing approach for companies that are building these services, right?Rob: Yeah. It seems like a powerful approach for them. Maybe not necessarily the only one, but it is a good one. I mean, there's a historical lesson here as well, right? I want to come back to your point about the developers after, but I think of this as shadow cloud. Right? You saw this with the early days of SaaS where people would go out and sign up for accounts for their business and use them. They weren't necessarily regulated, but we saw even before that with shadow IT, right, where people were bringing their own software in?Jeremy: Right.Rob: So for enterprises that are afraid of this that are heavily risk-focused or control-focused top-down, I would say don't be so afraid because there's an entire set of lessons you can learn about this as you bring it, as you come forward to it. Then, with the developers, I think it's even more powerful than the way you put it because a lot of times, it's not an experiment. I mean, you've seen the same things on Twitter I've seen, the great tech turnover of 2021, right? That's normal for tech. There's such a turnover that a lot of times, people are coming in already having the skills that they know will enhance delivery and add customer value more quickly. So it's not even an experiment. They already have the evidence, and they're able to get their team skilled up and building quickly. If you hire someone who's coming from an AWS shop, you hire someone who's coming from an Azure shop on to two different teams, they're likely going to evolve that excellence or that capability independently, and I don't necessarily think there's a reason to stop that as long as you have the right controls around it.Jeremy: Right. I mean, and you mentioned controls, and I think that if I'm the CTO of some company or whatever, or I'm the CIO because we're dealing in a super enterprise-y world, that you have developers that are starting to use tools ... Maybe not Stripe, but maybe like a Twilio or maybe they're using, I don't know, ChaosSearch or something, something where data that is from within their corporate walls are going out somewhere or being stored somewhere else, like the security risk around that. I mean, there's something there though, right?Rob: Yeah, there absolutely is. I think it's incumbent on the organizations to understand what's going on and adapt. I think it's also imcu,bent on the cloud service providers to understand those organizational concerns and evolve their product to address them, right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: This is one thing. My classic example of this is data exfiltration in a Lambda function. Some companies get ... I want to be able to inspect every packet that leaves, and they have that hard requirement for reasons, right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: You can't argue with them that they're right or wrong. They made that decision as a company. But then, they have to understand the impact of that is, "Okay. Well, every single Lambda function that you ever create is going to run inside of VPC or is going to run connected to a VPC." Now, you have the added complexity of managing a VPC, managing your firewall rules, your NACLs, your security groups. All of this stuff that ... Maybe you still have to do it. Maybe it really is a requirement. But if you examine your requirements from a business perspective and say, "Okay. There's another way we can address this with tightly-scoped IAM permissions that only allow me to read certain records or from certain tables, or access certain keys, or whatever." Then, we assume all that traffic goes out and that's okay. Then, you get to throw all of that complexity away and get back to delivering value more quickly. So they have to meet together, right? They have to meet.Jeremy: Right.Rob: This led to a lot of the work that AWS did with VPC networking for Lambda functions or removing the cold start because a lot ... Those enterprises weren't ready to let go of that requirement, and AWS can't tell them, "You're wrong." It's their business. It's their requirement. So AWS built that for them to reduce the cold start so that Lambda became a viable platform for them to build against.Jeremy: Right, and so if you're a developer and you're looking at some solution because ... By the way, I mean, like you said, choosing the best of breed. There are just a lot of good services out there. There are thousands and thousands of SaaS companies, and I think ... I don't know if we made this point, but I certainly consider SaaS companies themselves to be part of the cloud. I would think you would probably agree with that, right?Rob: Yeah.Jeremy: It might as well be cloud providers themselves. Most of them run on top of the cloud providers anyways, but they found ...Rob: But they don't have to, and that's interesting to me and another truth that you could be consuming services from somebody else's data center and that's still multicloud.Jeremy: Right, right. So, anyway. So my thought here or I guess the question I have is if you're a developer and you're trying to choose something best in breed, right? Whatever that is. Let's say I'm trying to send text messages, and I just think Twilio is ... It's got all the features that I need. I want to go with Twilio. If you're a developer, what are the things that you need to look for in some of these companies that maybe don't have ... I mean, I would say Twilio does, but like don't necessarily have the trust or the years of experience or I guess years under their belts of providing these services, and keeping data secure, and things like that. What's the advice that you give to developers looking to choose something like that to be aware of?Rob: To developers in particular I think is a different answer ...Jeremy: Well, I mean, yeah. Well, answer it both ways then.Rob: Yeah, because there's the builder and the buyer.Jeremy: Right.Rob: Right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: Whoever the buyer is, and a lot of times, that could just be the software development manager who's the buyer, and they still would approach it different ways. I think the developer is first going to be concerned with, "Does it solve my problem?" Right? "Overall, does it allow me to ship faster?" The next thing has to be stability. You have to expect that this company will be around, which means there is a certain level of evidence that you need of, "Okay. This company has been around and has serviced," and that's a bit of a chicken and an egg problem.Jeremy: Right.Rob: I think the developer is going to be a lot less concerned with that and more concerned with the immediacy of the problem that they're facing. The buyer, whether that's a manager, or CIO, or anywhere in between, is going to need to be concerned with other things according to their size, right? You even get the weird multicloud corner cases of, "Well, we're a major supplier of Walmart, and this tool only runs on a certain cloud service provider that they don't want us to use. So we're not going to use it." Again, that's a business decision, like would I build my software that way? No, but I'm not subject to that constraint. So that means nothing in that equation.Jeremy: Right. So you mentioned a little bit earlier this idea of bringing people in from different organizations like somebody comes in and they can pick up where somebody else left off. One of the things that I've noticed quite a bit in some of the companies that I've worked with is that they like to build custom tools. They build custom tools to solve a job, right? That's great. But as soon as Fred or Sarah leave, right, then all of a sudden, it's like, "Well, who takes over this project?" That's one of the things where I mentioned ... I said "experiments," and I said "low-risk." I think something that's probably more low-risk than building your own thing is choosing an API or a service that solves your problem because then, there's likely someone else who knows that API or that service that can come in, and can replace it, and then can have that seamless transition.And as you said, with all the turnover that's been happening lately, it's probably a good thing if you have some backup, and even if you don't necessarily have that person, if you have a custom system built in-house, there is no one that can support that. But if you have a custom ... or if you have a system you've used, you're interfacing with Twilio, or Stripe, or whatever it is, you can find a lot of developers who could come in even as consultants and continue to maintain and solve your problems for you.Rob: Yeah, and it's not just those external providers. It's the internal tooling as well.Jeremy: Right.Rob: Right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: We're guilty of this in my company. We wrote a lot of stuff. Everybody is, right, like you like to do it?Jeremy: Right.Rob: It's a problem that you recognized. It feels good to solve it. It's a quick win, and it's almost always the wrong answer. But when you get into things like ... a lot of cases it doesn't matter what specific tool you use. 10 years ago, if you had chosen Puppet, or Chef, or Ansible, it wouldn't be as important which one as the fact that you chose one of those so that you could then go out and find someone who knew it. Today, of course, we've got Pulumi, Terraform, and all these other things that you could choose from, and it's just better than writing a bunch of Bash scripts to tile the stuff together. I believe Bash should more or less be banned in the cloud, but that's another ... That's my hot take for another time. Come at me on Twitter if you don't like that one.Jeremy: So, yeah. So I think just bringing up this idea of tooling is important because the other thing that you potentially run into is with the variety of tooling that's out there, and you mentioned the original IAC. I guess they would... Right? We call those like Ansible and those sort of things, right?Rob: Right.Jeremy: All of those things, the Chefs and the Puppets. Those were great because you could have repeatable deployments and things like that. I mean, there's still work to be done there, but that was great because you made the choice to not building something yourself, right?Rob: Right.Jeremy: Something that somebody else could jump in on. But now with Terraform and with ... You mentioned Pulumi. We've got CloudFormation and even Microsoft has their own ... I think it's called ARM or something like that that is infrastructure as code. We've got the Serverless Framework. We've got SAM. We've got Begin. You've got ... or Architect, right? You've got all of these choices, and I think what happens too is that if teams don't necessarily ... If they don't rally around a tool, then you end up with a bunch of people using a bunch of different tools. Maybe not all these tools are going to be compatible, but I've seen really interesting mixes of people using Terraform, and CloudFormation, and SAM, and Serverless Framework, like binding it all together, and I think that just becomes ... I think that becomes a huge mess.Rob: It does, and I get back to my favorite quote about complexity, right? "Simplicity before complexity is worthless. Simplicity beyond complexity is priceless." I find it hard to get to one tool that's like artificial, premature optimization, fake simplicity.Jeremy: Yeah.Rob: If you force yourself into one tool all the time, then you're going to find it doing what it wasn't built to do. A good example of this, you talked about Terraform and the Serverless Framework. My opinion, they weren't great together, but your Terraform comes for your persistent infrastructure, and your Serverless Framework comes in and consumes the outputs of those Terraform stacks, but then builds the constantly churning infrastructure pieces of it. Right? There's a blast radius issue there as well where you can't take down your database, or S3 bucket, or all of this from a bad deploy when all of that is done in Terraform either by your team, or by another team, or by another process. Right? So there's a certain irreducible complexity that we get to, but you don't want to have duplication of effort with multiple tools, right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: You don't want to use CloudFormation to manage your persistent data over here and Terraform to manage your persistent data over here because then you're not ... That's like that agnostic model where you're not benefiting from the excellent features in each. You're only using whatever is common between them.Jeremy: Right, right, and I totally agree with you. I do like the idea of consuming. I mean, I have been using AWS for a very, very long time like 2007, 2008.Rob: Yeah, same. Oh, yeah.Jeremy: Right when EC2 instances were a thing. I guess 2008. But the biggest thing for me looking at using Terraform or something like that, I always felt like keeping it in, keeping it in the family. That's the wrong way to say it, but like using CloudFormation made a lot of sense, right, because I knew that CloudFormation ... or I thought I knew that CloudFormation would always support the services that needed to be built, and that was one of my big complaints about it. It was like you had this delay between ... They would release some service, and you had to either do it through the CLI or through the console. But then, CloudFormation support came months later. The problem that you have with some of that was then again other tools that were generating CloudFormation, like a Serverless Framework, that they would have to wait to get CloudFormation support before they could support it, and that would be another delay or they'd have to build something custom, which is not always the cleanest way to do it.Rob: Right.Jeremy: So anyways, I've always felt like the CloudFormation route was great if you could get to that CloudFormation, but things have happened with CDK. We didn't even mention CDK, but CDK, and Pulumi, and Terraform, and all of these other things, they've all provided these different ways to do things. But the thing that I always thought was funny was, and this is ... and maybe you have some insight into this if you can share it, but with SAM, for example, SAM wasn't extensible, right? You would just run into issues where you're like, "Oh, I can't do that with SAM." Whereas the Serverless Framework had this really great third-party plug-in system that allowed you to do some of these other things. Now, granted not all third-party plug-ins were super stable and were the best way to do something, right, because they'd either interact with APIs directly or whatever, but at least it gave you ... It unblocked you. Whereas I felt like with SAM and even CloudFormation when it didn't support something would block you.Rob: Yeah. Yeah, and those are just two different implementation philosophies from two different companies at two different stages of their existence, right? Like AWS ... and let's separate the reality from the theory here. The theory is that a large company can exert control over release cycles and limit what it delivers, but deliver it with a bar of excellence. A small company can open things up, and it depends on its community members for contributions to solve problems. It's very much like this is the cathedral and the Bazaar of cloud tooling, right?AWS has that CloudFormation architecture that they're working around with its own goals and approach, the one way to do it. Serverless Framework is, "Look, you need to ... You want to set up a stall here and insert IAM policies per function. Set up a stall. It will be great. Maybe people come and maybe they don't," and the system inherently sorts or bubbles up the value, right? So you see things like the Step Functions plug-in for Serverless Framework. It was one of the early ones that became very popular very quickly, whereas Step Functions supporting SAM trailed, but eventually came in. I think that team, by the way, deserves a lot of credit for really being focused on developers, but that's not the point of the difference between the two.A small young company like Serverless Framework that is moving very quickly can't have that cathedral approach to it, and both are valid, right? They're both just different strategies and good for the marketplace, quite frankly. I have my preferred approach, which is not about AWS or SAM vs Serverless Framework. It's the extensibility of plug-in frameworks to me are a key component of tooling that adapts as quickly as the clouds change, and you see this. Like Terraform was the first place that I really learned about plug-ins, and their plug-in framework is fantastic, the way they do providers. Serverless Framework as well is another good example, but you can't know how developers are going to build with your services. You just can't.You do customer development. You talk to them ahead of time. You get all this research. You talk to a thousand customers, and then you release it to 14 million customers, right? You're never going to guess, so let them. Let them build it, and if people ... They put the work in. People find there's value in it. Sometimes you can bring it in. Sometimes you leave it up to the community to maintain, but you just ... You have to be willing to accept that customers are going to use your product in different ways than you envisioned, and that's a good thing because it means customers are using your product.Jeremy: Right, right. Yeah. So I mean, from your perspective though ... because let's talk about SAM for a minute because I was excited when SAM came out. I was thinking to myself. I'm like, "All right. A simplified tooling that is focused on serverless. Right? Like gives me all the things that I think I'm going to need." And then I did ... from a developer experience standpoint, and let's call out the elephant in the room. AWS and developer experience are not always the same. They don't always give you that developer experience that you would want. They give you tons of tools, right, but they don't always give you that ...Rob: Funny enough, you can spell "developer experience" without AWS.Jeremy: Right. So I mean, that's my ... I was disappointed when I started using SAM, and I immediately reverted back to the Serverless Framework. Not because I thought that it wasn't good or that it wasn't well-thought-out. Like you said, there was a level of excellence there, which certainly you cannot diminish, It just didn't do the things I needed it to do, and I'm just curious if that was a consistent feedback that you got as being someone on the dev advocate team there. Was that something that you felt as well?Rob: I need to give two answers to this to be fair, to be honest. That was something that I felt as well. I never got as comfortable with SAM as I am with the Serverless Framework, but there's another side to this coin, and that's that enterprise uptake of SAM CLI has been really strong.Jeremy: Right.Rob: Enterprise it, it does what they need it to do, and it addresses their concerns, and they liked getting tooling from AWS. It just goes back to there being a place for both, right?Jeremy: Right. Rob: Enterprises are much more likely to build cathedrals. They want that top-down, "Okay, everybody. This is how you define something. In fact, we've created a module for you. Consume it here. Thou shalt not write new S3 to web server configuration in your SAM templates. Thou shalt consume this." That's not wrong, and the usage numbers don't lie with SAM. It's got a lot of fans, and it's got a lot of uptake, but that's an entirely different answer from how I feel about it. I think it also goes back to I'm not running an enterprise. I've never run an enterprise. The biggest I've got in terms of responsibility is at best a small company, right? So I think it's natural for me to feel that way when I try to use a tool that has such popularity amongst enterprise. Now, of course, you have the switch, right? You have enterprises using Serverless Framework, and you have small builders using SAM. But in general, I think the success there was with the enterprise, and it's a validation of their strategy.Jeremy: Right, right. So let's talk about enterprises for a second because this is where we look at tools like the CDK and SAM, Serverless Framework, things like that. You look at all those different tools, and like you said, there's adoption across some of those. But at the end of the day, most of those tools are compiling down to a CloudFormation or they're compiling down to ... What's it called? The Azure Resource Manager Language or whatever the heck it is, right?Rob: ARM templates.Jeremy: ARM templates. What's the value now in CloudFormation and those sort of things that the final product that you get to ... I mean, certainly, it's so much easier to build those using these frameworks, but do we need CloudFormation in those things anymore? Do we need to know those? Does an individual developer need to be able to understand those, or can they just basically take a step back and say, "Look, CDK does it for me," or, "Pulumi does it for me. So why do I need to know what's baked into those templates?"Rob: Yeah. So let's set Terraform aside and talk about it after because it's different. I think the choice of JSON and YAML as implementation languages for most of this tooling, most of this tooling is very ... It was a very effective choice because you don't necessarily have to know CloudFormation to look at a template and define what it's doing.Jeremy: Right.Rob: Right? You don't have to understand transforms. You don't have to understand parameter replacement and all of this stuff to look at the final transformed template in CloudFormation in the console and get a very quick reasoning about what's happening. That's good. Do I think there's value in learning to create multi-thousand-line CloudFormation templates by hand? I don't. It's the assembly language of the cloud, right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: It's there when you need it, and just like with procedural languages, you might want to look underneath at the instructions, how it unrolled certain loops, how it decided not to unroll others so that you can make changes at the next level. But I think that's rare, and that's optimization. In terms of getting things done and getting things shipped and delivered, to start, I wouldn't start with plain CloudFormation for any of these, especially of anything for any meaningful production size. That's not a criticism of CloudFormation. It's just like you said. It's all these other tooling is there to help us generate what we want consistently.The other benefit of it is once you have that underlying lingua franca of the cloud, you can build visualization, and debugging, and monitoring, and like ... I mean, all of these other evaluatory forensic. "Evaluatory?" Is that a word? It's a word now. You heard it here first on this podcast. Like forensic, cloud forensic type tooling that lets you see what's going on because it is a universal language among all of the tools.Jeremy: Yeah, and I want to get back to Terraform because I know you mentioned that, but I also want to be clear. I don't suggest you write CloudFormation. I think it is horribly verbose, but probably needs to be, right?Rob: Yeah.Jeremy: It probably needs to have that level of fidelity there or that just has all that descriptive information. Yeah. I would not suggest. I'm with you, don't suggest that people choose that as their way to go. I'm just wondering if it's one of those things where we don't need to be able to look at ones and zeroes anymore, and understand what they do, right?Rob: Right.Jeremy: We've got higher-level constructs that do that for us. I wouldn't quite put ... I get the assembly language comparison. I think that's a good comparison, but it's just that if you are an enterprise, right, is that ... Do you trust? Do you trust something like CDK to do everything you need it to do and make sure that it's covering all its bases because, again, you're writing layers of abstraction on top of a layer of abstraction that then abstracts it even more. So yeah, I'm just wondering. You had mentioned forensic tools. I think there's value there in being able to understand exactly what gets put into the cloud.Rob: Yeah, and I'd agree with that. It takes 15 seconds to run into the limit of my knowledge on CDK, by the way. But that knowledge includes the fact that CDK Synth is there, which generates the CloudFormation template for you, and that's actually the thing, which is uploaded to the CloudFormation service and executed. You'd have to bring in somebody like Richard Boyd or someone to talk about the guard rails that are there around it. I know they exist. I don't know what they are. It's wildly popular, and adoption is through the roof. So again, whether I philosophically think it's a good idea or not is irrelevant. Developers want it and want to build with it, right?Jeremy: Yeah.Rob: It's a Bazaar-type tool where they give you some basic constructs, and you can write your own constructs around it and get whatever you need. But ultimately, that comes back to CloudFormation, which is then subject to all the controls that your organization puts around CloudFormation, so it is ... There's value there. It can't be denied.Jeremy: Right. No, and the thing that I like about the CDK is the idea of being able to create those constructs because I think, especially from a ... What's the right word? Compliance standpoint or something like that, that you can write in these constructs that you say, "You need to use these constructs when you deploy a microservice or you deploy this," or whatever it is, and then you have those guard rails as you mentioned or whatever, but those ... All of those checkboxes are ticked because you can put that all into one construct. So I totally think that's great. All right. So let's talk about Terraform.Rob: Yeah, so there's ... First, it's a completely different model, right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: This is an interesting discussion to have because it's API calls. You write your provider, whatever your infrastructure is, and anything that can be an API call can now be a Terraform declarative resource. So it's that mapping between declarative and imperative that I find fascinating. Well, also building the dependency graph for you. So it handles all of those aspects of it, which is a really powerful tool. The thing that they did so well ... Terraform is equally verbose as CloudFormation. You've got to configure all the same options. You get the same defaults, et cetera. It can be terribly verbose, but it's modular. Every Terraform file that you have in one directory is concatenated, and that is a huge distinction between how CloudFormation wants everything in one template, or well, you can refer to something in an S3 bucket, but that's not actually useful to me as a developer.Jeremy: Right, right.Rob: I can't mount an S3 bucket as a drive on my workstation and compose all of these independent files at once and do them that way. Sidebar here. Maybe I can. Maybe it supports that, and I haven't been able to discover it, right? Whereas Terraform by default, out of the box put everything in its own file according to function. It's very easy to look in your databases.tf and understand what's in there, look in your VPC.tf and understand what's in there, and not have to go through thousands of lines of code at once. Yes, we have find and replace. Yes, we have search, and you ... Anybody who's ever built any of this stuff knows that's not the same thing. It's not the same thing as being able to open a hundred lines in your text editor, and look at everything all at once, and gain an understanding of it, and then dive into the next level of detail a hundred lines at a time and understand that.Jeremy: Right. But now, just a question here, without... because the API thing, I love that idea, and actually, Serverless Components used an API thing to do it and bypass CloudFormation. Actually, I believe Architect originally was using APIs, and then switched to CloudFormation, but the question I have about that is, if you don't have a CloudFormation template, if you don't have that assembly language of the web, and that's not sitting in your CloudFormation tool built into the dashboard, you don't get the drift protection, right, or the detection, and you don't get ... You don't have that resource map necessarily up there, right?Rob: First, I don't think CloudFormation is the assembly language of the web. I think it's the assembly language of AWS.Jeremy: I'm sorry. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.Rob: That leads into my point here, which is, "Okay. AWS gives you the CloudFormation dashboard, but what if you're now consuming things from Datadog, or from Fauna, or from other places that don't map this the same way?Jeremy: Right.Rob: Terraform actually does manage that. You can do a plan against your existing file, and it will go out and check the actual existing state of all of your resources, and compare them to what you've asked for declaratively, and show you what the changeset will be. If it's zero, there's no drift. If there is something, then there's either drift or you've added new functionality. Now, with Terraform Cloud, which I've only used at a basic level, I'm not sure how automatic that is or whether it provides that for you. If you're from HashiCorp and listening to this, I would love to learn more. Get in touch with me. Please tell me. But the tooling is there to do that, but it's there to do it across anything that can be treated as an API that has ... really just create and retrieve. You don't even necessarily need the update and delete functionality there.Jeremy: Right, right. Yeah, and I certainly ... I am a fan of Terraform and all of these services that make it easier for you to build clouds more easily, but let's talk about APIs because you mentioned anything with an API. Well, everything has APIs now, right? I mean, essentially, we are living in a ... I mentioned SaaS, but now we're sort of ... This whole idea of the API economy. So just overall, what are your thoughts on this idea of basically anything you want to do is available now via an API?Rob: It's not anything you want to do. It's everything you want to do short of fulfilling your customer's needs, short of solving your customer's specific problem is available as an API. That means that you get to choose best-in-class for everything, right? Your customer's need isn't, "I want to spend $25 on my credit card." Your customer's need is, "I need a book."Jeremy: Right.Rob: So it's not, "I want to store information about books in a database." It's, "I need a book." So everything and every step of the way there can now be consumed from an API. Again, it's like serverless in general, right? It allows you to focus purely or as close to purely as we can right now on generating customer value and addressing customer problems so that you can ship faster, and so that you have it as a competitive advantage. I can write a payment processing program. I know I can because I've done it back in 2004, and it was horrible, and it was awful. It wasn't a very good one, and it worked. It took your money, but this was like pre-PCIDSS.If I had to comply with all of those things, why would I do that? I'm not a credit card payment processor. Stripe is, and they have specialists in all of the areas related to the problem of, "I need to take and process payments." That's the customer problem that they're solving. The specialization of labor that comes along with the API economy is fantastic. Ops never went away. All the ops people work at the cloud service providers now.Jeremy: Right.Rob: Right? Audit never went away. All the auditors have disappeared from view and gone into internal roles in payments companies. All of this continues to happen where the specialists are taking their deep, deep knowledge and bringing it inside companies that specialize in that domain.Jeremy: Right, and I think the domain expertise value that you get from whatever it is, whether it's running a database company or whether it's running a payment company, the number of people that you would need to hire to have a level of specialization for what you're paying for two cents per transaction or whatever, $50 a month for some service, you couldn't even begin. The total cost of ownership on those things are ... It's not even a conversation you would want to have, but I also built a payment processing system, and I did have to pass PCI, which we did pass, but it was ...Rob: Oh, good for you.Jeremy: Let's put it this way. It was for a customer, and we lost money on that customer because we had to go through PCI compliance, but it was good. It was a good experience to have, and it's a good experience to have because now I know I never want to do it again.Rob: Yeah, yeah. Back to my earlier point on Ops and serverless.Jeremy: Right. Exactly.Rob: These things are hard, right?Jeremy: Right, right.Rob: Sorry.Jeremy: No, no. Go ahead.Rob: Not to interrupt, but these are all really hard problems that people with graduate degrees and post-graduate research who have ... They're 30 years old when they start working on the problem are solving. There's a supply question there as well, right? There's just not enough people, and so you and I can like ... Well, I'm not going to project this on to you. I can stumble through an implementation and check off the requirements just like I worked in an optical microscopy lab in college, and I could create computer programs that modeled those concepts, but I was not an optical microscopist. I was not a PhD-level generating understandings of these things, and all of these, they're just so hard. Why would you do that when customer problems are equally hard and this set is solved?Jeremy: Right, right.Rob: This set of problems over here is solved, and you can't differentiate yourself by solving it better, and you're not likely to solve it better either. But even if you did, it wouldn't matter. This set of problems are completely unsolved. Why not just assemble the pieces from best-in-class so that you can attack those problems yourself?Jeremy: Again, I think that makes a ton of sense. So speaking about expertise, let's talk about what you might have to pay say a database administrator. If you were to hire a database administrator to maintain all the databases for you and keep all that uptime, and maybe you have to hire six database administrators in order for them to ... Well, I'm thinking multi-region and all that kind of stuff. Maybe you have to hire a hundred, depending on what it is. I mean, I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but ... So if I can buy a service like Fauna, so tell me a little bit more about just how that works.Rob: Right. Well, I mean, six database engineers in the US, you're over a million dollars a year easily, right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: I don't know what the exact number is, but when you consider benefits, and total cost, and all of that, it's a million dollars a year for six database engineers. Then, there are some very difficult problems in especially distributed databases and database scaling that Fauna solves. A number of other products or services solve some of them. I'm biased, of course, but I happen to think Fauna solves all of them in a way that no other product does, but you're looking ... You mentioned distributed transactions. Fauna is built atop the Calvin paper, which came out of Yale. It's a very brief, but dense academic research paper. It's a PHC research paper, and it talks about a model for distributed transactions and databases. It's a layer, a serialization layer, that sits atop your database.So let's say you wanted to replicate something like Fauna. So not only do you need to get six database engineers who understand the underlying database, but you need to find engineers that understand this paper, understand the limitations of the theory in the paper, and how to overcome them in operations. In reality, what happens when you actually start running regions around the world, replicating transactions between those regions? Quite frankly, there's a level of sophistication there that most of the set of people who satisfy that criteria already work at Fauna. So there's not much of a supply there. Now, there are other database competitors that solve this problem in different ways, and most of the specialists already work at those companies as well, right? I'm not saying that they aren't equally competent database engineers. I'm just saying there's not a lot of them.Jeremy: Right.Rob: So if you're thing is to sell books at a certain scale like Amazon, then that makes sense to have them because you are a database creator as well. But if your thing is to sell books at some level below that, why would you compete for that talent rather than just consuming it?Jeremy: Right. Yeah, and I would say unless you're a horse with a horn on your head, it's probably not worth maintaining your own database and things like that. So let's talk a little bit more, though, about that. I guess just this idea of maybe a shortage of people, like if you're ... You're right. There's a limited number of resources, right? I'm sure there's brilliant database engineers all around the world, and they have the experience where, right, they could come in and they could probably really help you maintain your database. Even if you could afford six of them and you wanted to do that, I think the problem is it's got to be the interestingness of the problem. I don't think "interestingness" is a word either, but like if I'm a database engineer, wouldn't I want to be working on something like Fauna that I could help millions and millions of people as opposed to helping some trucking company maintain their internal database or something like that?Rob: Yeah, and I would hope so. I hope it's okay that I mention we're hiring. So come to Fauna.com and look at our roles database engineers.Jeremy: You just read that Calvin paper first. Go ahead.Rob: But read the Calvin paper first. I think it's only like 12 pages, and even just the first page is enough. I'm happy to talk about that at any length because I find it fascinating and it's public. It is an interesting problem and the ... It's the reification or the implementation of theory. It's bringing that theory to the real world and ... Okay. First off, the theory is brilliant. This is not to take away from it, but the theory is conceived inside someone's mind. They do some tests, they prove it, and there's a world of difference between that point, which is foundational, and deploying it to production where people are trusting their workloads on it around the world. You're actually replicating across multiple cloud providers, and you're actually replicating across multiple regions, and you're actually delivering on the promise of the paper.What's described in the paper is not what we run at Fauna other than as a kernel, as a nugget, right, as the starting point or the first principle. That I think is wildly interesting for that class of talent like you talked about, the really world-class engineers who want to do something that can't be done anywhere else. I think one thing that Fauna did smartly early was be a remote-first company, which means that they can take advantage of those world-class engineers and their thirst for innovation regardless of wherever Fauna finds them. So that's a big deal, right? Would you rather work on a world-class or global problem or would you rather work on a local problem? Now, look, we need people working on local problems too. It's not to disparage that, but if this is your wheelhouse, if innovation is the thing that you want to do, if you want to be doing things with databases that nobody else is doing, this is where you want to be. So I think there's a strong argument there for coming to work in a place like Fauna.Jeremy: Yeah, and I want to make sure I apologize to any database engineer working at a trucking company because I'm sure there are actually probably really interesting problems with logistics and things like that that they are solving. So maybe not the best example. Maybe. I don't know. I can't think of another example. I don't want to offend anybody who's chosen a more local problem because you're right. I mean, there are local problems that need to be solved, but I do think that there are people ... I mean, even someone like me. I want to work on a bigger problem. You know what I mean? I owned a web development company for 12 years, and I was solving other people's problems by building them a website or whatever, and it just got to a point where I'm like, "I'm not making enough of an impact here." You're not solving a big enough problem. You want to work on something more interesting.Rob: Yeah. Humans crave challenge, right? Challenge is a necessary precondition for growth, and at least most of us, we want to grow. We want to be better at whatever it is we're doing or just however we think of ourselves next year that we aren't today, and you can't do that with challenge. If you build other people's websites for 12 years, eventually, you get to a point where maybe you're too good at it. Maybe that's great from a business perspective, but it's not so great from a personal fulfillment perspective.Jeremy: Right.Rob: If it's, "Oh, look, another brochure website. Okay. Here you go. Oh, you need a contact form?" Again, it's not to disparage this. It's the fact that if you do anything for 12 years, sometimes mastery is stasis. Not always.Jeremy: Right, and I have nightmares of contact forms, of building contact forms, by the way, but...Rob: It makes sense. Yeah. You know what you should do is just put all of those directly into Fauna and don't worry about it.Jeremy: Easy enough. Easy enough.Rob: Yeah, but it's not necessarily stasis, but I think about craftsmen and people who actually make things with their hands, physical builders, and I think a lot of that ... Like if you're making furniture, you're a cabinet maker. I think a lot of that is every time, it's just a little bit wrong, right? Not wrong, but just a little bit off from your optimum no matter how long you do it, and so everything has a chance to evolve. That's there with software to a certain extent, but the problem is never changing.Jeremy: Right.Rob: So, yeah. I can see both sides of it, but for me, I ... You can see it when I was on serverless four years ago and now that I'm on a serverless database now. I like to be out at the edge, pushing that edge out for everyone who's coming behind. It can be challenging because sometimes there's just no way forward, and sometimes everybody is not ready to come with you. In a lot of ways, being early is the same as being wrong.Jeremy: Right. Well, I've been ...Rob: Not an original statement, but ...Jeremy: No, but I've been early on many things as well where like five years after we tried to do something, like then, all of a sudden, it was like this magical thing where everybody is doing it, but you mentioned the edge. That would be something ... or you said on the edge. I know you mean this way, but the edge in terms of the actual edge. That's going to be an interesting data problem to solve.Rob: Oh, that's a fascinating data problem, especially for us at Fauna. Yeah, compute, and Andy Jassy, when he was at AWS, talked about how compute was bifurcating, right? It's either moving all the way out to the edge or it's moving all the way into the cloud, and that's true. But I think at Fauna, we take that a step further, right? The edge part is true, and a lot of the work that we've done recently, announcements with CloudFlare workers. We're ready for that. We believe in it, and we like pushing that out as close to the user as possible. One thing that we do uniquely is we have this concept of user-defined functions, and anybody who's written T-SQL back in the day, who wrote store procedures is going to be familiar with this, but it's ... You bring that business logic and that code to your data. Not near your data, to your data.Jeremy: Right.Rob: So you bring the compute not just to the cloud where it still needs to pass through top-of-rack and all of this. You bring it literally on to the same instance as your data where these functions execute against them there. So you get not just the database, but you get a compute layer in there, and this helps for things like filtering for things like the equivalent of joins, stuff that just ... If you've got to load gigabytes of data and move it somewhere, compute against it, reduce it to something, and then store that back, the speed of light still matters. Even if it's the speed of light across a couple switches, it still matters, and so there are some really interesting things that you can begin to do as you pull more and more of that logic into your data layer, and you also protect that logic from other components of your application.So I like that because things like GraphQL that endpoints already speak and already understand, just send it over, and again, they don't care about the architectural, quite frankly, genius--I can say that because I didn't create it--the genius behind all of this stuff. They just care that, "Look, I send this request over and I get it back," and entire workflows, and complex processes, and everything are executing behind the scenes just so that the endpoints can send and retrieve what they need more effectively and more quickly. The edge is fascinating. The thing I regret the most about the edge is I have no hardware skills, right? So I can't make fun things to do fun things in my house. I have to buy them, but you can't do everything.Jeremy: Yeah. Well, no. I think you make a good point though about bringing the compute to the data side, and other people have said there's no ... Ben Kehoe has been talking about this for a while too where like it just makes sense. Run the compute where the data is, and then send that data somewhere else, right, because there's more things that can be done with data after that initial bit of compute. But certainly, like you said, filtering it down or getting the bits that are relevant and moving a small amount of data as opposed to a large amount of data I think is hugely important.Now, the other thing I just want to mention before I let you go or I want to talk about quickly is this idea of going back to the API economy aspect of things and buying versus building. If you think about what you've had to do at Fauna, and I know you're relatively recent there, but you know what they've done and the work that had to go in in order to build this distributed system. I mean, I think about most systems now, and I think like anything I'm going to build now, I got to think about scale, right?I don't necessarily have to build to scale right away, especially if I'm doing an MVP or something like that. But if I was going to build a service that did something, I need to think about multi-region, and I need to think about failover, and I need to think about potentially providing it at the edge, and all these other things. So you come down to this thing, and I will just use the database example. But even if you were say using like MySQL, or Postgres, or something like that, that's going to scale. That's going to scale pretty well to get to a certain point, and then you're going to have to start sharding, right? When data gets hard, it's time to shard, right? You just have to start sharding everything.Rob: Yeah.Jeremy: Essentially, what you end up doing is rebuilding DynamoDB, or trying to rebuild Fauna, or something like that. So just thinking about that, anything you're building ... Maybe you have some advice for developers who ... I know we've talked about this a little bit, but I just go back to this idea of like, if you think about how complex some of these SaaS companies and these services that are being built out right now, why would you ever want to take that complexity on yourself?Rob: Pride. Hubris. I mean, the correct answer is you wouldn't. You shouldn't.Jeremy: People do.Rob: Yeah, they do. I would beg and plead with them like, "Look, we did take a lot of that on. Fauna scales. You don't need to plan for sharding. You don't need to plan for global replication. All of these things are happening." I raise that as an example of understanding the customer's problem. The customer didn't want to think about, "Okay, past a thousand TPS, I need to create a new read replica. Past a million TPS, I need to have another region with active-active." The customer wanted to store some data and get that data, knowing that they had the ASA guarantees around it, right, and that's what the customer has.So get that good understanding of what your customer really wants. If you can buy that, then you don't have a product yet. This is even out of software development and into product ideation at startups, right? If you can go ... Your customer's problem isn't they can't send text messages programmatically. They can do that through Twilio. They can do that through Amazon. They can do that through a number of different services, right? Your customer's problem is something else. So really get a good understanding of it. This is where knowing a little ... Like Joe Emison loves to rage against senior developers for knowing not quite enough. This is where knowing like, "Oh, yeah, Postgres. You can just shard it." "Just," the worst word in computer science, right?Jeremy: Right.Rob: "You can just shard it." Okay. Now, we're back to those database engineers that you talked about, and your customer doesn't want to shard a database. Your customer wants to store and retrieve data.Jeremy: Right.Rob: So any time that you can really focus in, and I guess I really got this one, this customer obsession beaten into me from my time at AWS. Really focus in on what the customer is asking you to do or what the customer needs even if they don't know how to express it, and build for that.Jeremy: Right, right. Like the saying. I forgot who said it. Somebody from Harvard Business Review, but, "Your customers don't want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole."Rob: Right, right.Jeremy: That's basically true. I mean, the complexity that goes behind the scenes are something that I think a vast majority of customers don't necessarily want, and you're right. If you focus on that product ideation thing, I think that's a big piece of that. All right. Well, anyway. So I have one more question for you just to ...Rob: Please.Jeremy: We've been talking for a while here. Hopefully, we haven't been boring people to death with our talk about APIs and stuff like that, but I would like to get a little bit academic here and go into that Calvin paper just a tiny bit because I think most people probably will not want to read it. Not because they don't want to, but because people are busy, right, and so they're listening to the podcast.Rob: Yeah.Jeremy: Just give us a quick summary of this because I think this is actually really fascinating and has benefits beyond just I think solving data problems.Rob: Yeah. So what I would say first. I actually have this paper on my desk at all times. I would say read Section 1. It's one page, front and back. So if you're interested in it, you don't have to read the whole paper. Read that, and then listeners to this podcast will probably understand when I say this. Previously, for distributed databases and distributed transactions, you had what was called a two-phase commit. The first was you'd go out to all of your replicas, and you say, "Hey, I need lock." When everybody comes back, and acknowledges, and says, "Okay. You have the lock," then you do your transaction, and then you replicate it, and then you say, "Hey, everybody. I'm done. Release the lock." So it's a two-phase commit. If something went wrong, you rolled it all the way back and you said, "Hey, everybody. Forget it."Calvin is event-sourcing for databases. So if I could distill the entire paper down into one concept, that's it. Right? Instead of saying, "Hey, everybody. Give me a lock, I'm going to do something," you say, "Hey, everybody. Here's what we're going to do." It's a deterministic application of the transaction so that you can ... You both create the lock and execute the transaction at the same time. So rather than having this outbound round trip, and then doing the thing in an outbound round trip, you have the outbound round trip, and you're done.They all apply it independently, and then it gets into how you structure the guarantees around that, which again is very similar to event-sourcing in that you use snapshotting or checkpointing. "So, hey. At this point, we all agree. So we can forget all of our old transactions, and we roll forward from here." If somebody leaves the cluster, they come back in at that checkpoint. They reapply all of the events that occurred prior to that. Those events are transactions. They'd get up to working speed, and then off they go. The paper I think uses Paxos. That's an implementation detail, but the really interesting thing about it is you're not having a double round trip.Jeremy: Yeah.Rob: Again, I love the idea of event-sourcing. I think Amazon EventBridge is the best service that they've released in the past couple years.Jeremy: Totally.Rob: If you understand all of that and are already building serverless applications that way, well, that's what we're doing, just event-sourcing for database. That's it. That's it.Jeremy: Just event-sourcing. It's easy. Simple. All right. All the words you never want to hear. Simple, easy, just. Right. Yeah. Perfect.Rob: Yeah, but we do the hard work, so you don't have to. You don't care about all of that. You want to write your data somewhere, and you want to retrieve your data from an API, and that's what Fauna gives you.Jeremy: Which I think is the main point here. So awesome. All right. Well, Rob, listen. This was great, and I'm super happy that I finally got you on the show. Congratulations for the new role at Fauna and on what's happening over there because it is pretty exciting.Rob: Thank you.Jeremy: I love companies that are innovating, right? It's not just another hosted database. You're actually building something here that is innovative, which is pretty amazing. So if people want to find out more about you, follow you on Twitter, or find out more about Fauna, how do they do that?Rob: Right. Twitter, rts_rob. Probably the easiest way, go to my website, robsutter.com, and you will link to me from there. From there, of course, you'll get to fauna.com and all of our resources there. Always open to answer questions on Twitter. Yeah. Oh, rob@fauna.com. If you're old-school like me and you prefer the email, there you go.Jeremy: All right. Awesome. Well, I will get all that into the show notes. Thanks again, Rob.Rob: Thank you, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

PURPOSE, FOCUS, TIMEEvery man has a purpose on this earth. Join Richard Boyd as he speaks on three key elements needed for true success in a man's life. When men implement these important areas of their life, they excel not only for themselves but for others. We all can benefit from Godly wisdom and understanding, and men who attain this wisdom become successful in their purpose.About the host.Several years back Richard Boyd and his wife Nellie were asked to speak on a radio program. This would be a first for them to talk live on the radio. Recently relocating from New York City they found themselves living at the time in Central Texas.Early that morning they nervously shared from their hearts, how they were truly transformed by the love of God. Upon completion of the thirty-minute broadcast, the station immediately received a call from a local businessman contemplating suicide. He was deeply moved by the sincerity of their words and resolved not to take his life. He then decided to place his trust in God and allow himself to be restored to proper mental health.That became the beginning of more than four decades of ministry to the hurting, along with radio appearances around Central and Southern Texas. Today with the rise of modern technology, Richard has been hosting Podcasts, that now communicate to many people around the world.Manlikeradio was birthed to help Christain men navigate through the times we live in. When Godly men understand the times they gain a greater influence on changing world they live in.More @ www.manlikeradio.com

Ciara is joined in studio to discuss the lifting of restrictions, NIAC's decision to rule out the use of the AZ vaccine for the under 60's, mandatory quarantining and Vicky Phelan updates us on her treatment in the US. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

THE BREAKOUT MAN!Join Richard Boyd as he speaks with Robert Cantu on what it means to be a man who is ready to breakout.             Breaking free means that we do not fall back into our old ways. Breaking free means as Christian men, we walk by the rules  God has designed for us. A breakout man is a man who understands what exactly  Christ did once he died? Robert Cantu suggests that Christ did not lay there in the tomb for three days. He was on a mission to let others know, they could break out of the darkness with him. In this candid talk, listen as Robert explains to Richard Boyd, certain key areas Christian men can become men who are able to breakout. And in doing so they will become all that God has designed him to be.                        More @ www.manlikeradio.com

Hope is one of those areas we tend to write off as just a maybe it will happen. When someone claims they hope. We seem to take a cynical stand and even at times encourage them not to put their trust in hope. Yet, it's interesting that hop[e is looked at differently according to the Bible. In this podcast, Richard Boyd explains a way in which we understand that hope is something powerful and needed in a man's life. Without hope, we would be hopeless.join me as we discuss the topics that affect Christian Men today. In the culture at large, confusion abounds with being a man of honor and respect. Today's man has been bombarded with many demands upon his life. Men are no doubt called to lead, but this can only be achieved by other men leading them. Manlike Radio draws from the experience of men who have been tested and proven in living a Godly life. By dealing with both the struggles and victories facing men, this Podcast aims to address such subjects with a God-given directive. Our slogan is very simple, "Godly Talk Produces Godly Walk."More information about Richard Boyd and his Co-Host can be found @ www.manlikeradio.com

Understanding the Times Podcast. With Richard Boyd.Grand Papa is a conversation between Richard Boyd and his eldest grandchild, Alex Guidry. Listen as they discuss the most important factors between grandparents and their relationship to grandchildren. Grandparents can be a great influence on their grandchildren, We as men need to understand that our role in fathering never ends and that God requires us to Father others in Christ.Join me as we discuss the topics that affect Christian Men today. In the culture at large, confusion abounds with being a man of honor and respect. Today's man has been bombarded with many demands upon his life. Men are no doubt called to lead, but this can only be achieved by other men leading them. Manlike Radio draws from the experience of men who have been tested and proven in living a Godly life. By dealing with both the struggles and victories facing men, this Podcast aims to address such subjects with a God-given directive. Our slogan is very simple, "Godly Talk Produces Godly Walk."More information about Richard Boyd and his Co-Host can be found @ www.manlikeradio.com

Understanding the Times Podcast. With your host Richard Boyd. "Seven Biblical Qualities of A Godly Man."This will be teaching on qualities that the bible states true Godly men should possess.Follow along as Christian men seek to understand the times and how to navigate through them.Join me as we discuss the topics that affect Christian Men today. In the culture at large, confusion abounds with being a man of honor and respect. Today's man has been bombarded with many demands upon his life. Men are no doubt called to lead, but this can only be achieved by other men leading them. Manlike Radio draws from the experience of men who have been tested and proven in living a Godly life. By dealing with both the struggles and victories facing men, this Podcast aims to address such subjects with a God-given directive. Our slogan is very simple, "Godly Talk Produces Godly Walk."More information about Richard Boyd and his Co-Host can be found @ www.manlikeradio.comMore @www.manlikeradio.com

Understanding the Times Podcast. With your host Richard Boyd. "Seven Biblical Qualities Of A Godly Man."This will be teaching on qualities that the bible states true Godly men should possess.Follow along as Christian men seek to understand the times and how to navigate through them.Join me as we discuss the topics that affect Christian Men today. In the culture at large, confusion abounds with being a man of honor and respect. Today's man has been bombarded with many demands upon his life. Men are no doubt called to lead, but this can only be achieved by other men leading them. Manlike Radio draws from the experience of men who have been tested and proven in living a Godly life. By dealing with both the struggles and victories facing men, this Podcast aims to address such subjects with a God-given directive. Our slogan is very simple, "Godly Talk Produces Godly Walk."More information about Richard Boyd and his Co-Host can be found @ www.manlikeradio.comMore @www.manlikeradio.com

Understanding The Times Podcast with your host Richard Boyd"Seven Biblical Qualities Of A Godly Man."This will be seven-week teaching on qualities that the bible states true Godly men should possess. Follow along as Christian men seek to understand the times and how to navigate through them.Join me as we discuss the topics that affect Christian Men today. In the culture at large, confusion abounds with being a man of honor and respect. Today's man has been bombarded with many demands upon his life. Men are no doubt called to lead, but this can only be achieved by other men leading them. Manlike Radio draws from the experience of men who have been tested and proven in living a Godly life. By dealing with both the struggles and victories facing men, this Podcast aims to address such subjects with a God-given directive. Our slogan is very simple, "Godly Talk Produces Godly Walk."More information about Richard Boyd and his Co-Host can be found @ www.manlikeradio.comMore @ www.manlikeradio.com

32 Questions is back! We ask one politician 32 questions, with this episode featuring People Before Profit TD, Richard Boyd Barrett.

As harrowing details emerge from the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, Historian Catherine Coreless will join us live on Skype as well as journalist Fionn Davenport and People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett to share their own personal experiences.Housing Minister Darragh O'Brien will be live in studio to give his reactions to the report as well as how he aims to solve Ireland's housing crisis, and the government's aim to vaccinate 700,000 people by the end of March.Pharmacist Kate O'Connell will also be live in studio on the role community pharmacists might play in the roll-out scheme. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Derek Hockaday interviews Richard Boyd, emeritus professor, lecturer in Medicine and fellow of Brasenose College, 30 August 2013. Topics discussed include: (00:00:08) childhood, coming to Merton College, Oxford; (00:01:56) comparing teaching methods between Cambridge and Oxford; (00:03:00) entrance into Oxford including interview; (00:04:18) practical work; (00:05:25) medical schools and teaching staff; (00:06:50) pharmacology; (00:09:25) BSc research (00:10:59) Path and Bac course; (00:12:00) moving to University College Hospital London, 1967 and comparisons with Oxford; (00:16:08) time in Papa New Guinea; (00:17:56) PhD thesis; (00:20:22) Rod Porter as head of clinical department; (00:21:58) Job in Dundee department of Physiology; (00:24:10) returning to Oxford from Dundee; (00:25:58) role as medical tutor for Brasenose College; (00:33:39) cholera treatment; (00:36:49) college life; (00:41:25) effect of internet on medicine; (00:43:04) changes seen in the Oxford Medical School; (00:44:52) pre-clinical students and changes to the pre-clinical courses; (00:52:00) setting up the synoptic paper on pre-clinical course; (00:52:50) evolution of Oxford pre clinical school compared to Cambridge; (00:54:25) writing and editing; (00:55:56) involvement in grant awarding bodies.

 Richard Boyd Barrett, People Before Profit TD for Dun Laoghaire give Pat his reaction to golfgate.   Listen and subscribe to The Pat Kenny Show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.      Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.    You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.  

This episode Diarmuid and Cian sit down with People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett to discuss the government's sly change of the rules around speaking time and the subsequent chaos this caused in the Dáil. Left Inside is a weekly podcast offering a critical look at news, politics and culture from the left. It is produced by members RISE, an eco-socialist organisation in Ireland, find out more on https://www.letusrise.ie/ See you next week, cheers! RISE have just launched RUPTURE, an eco-socialist quarterly magazine which can be found here - https://www.letusrise.ie/rupture - expect plenty of interviews with the writers featured in the coming weeks! Social Media: Twitter - https://twitter.com/LeftInsidePod Richard (https://twitter.com/RBoydBarrett), Diarmuid (https://twitter.com/RisingFlood_), Cian (https://twitter.com/cianplk) Any comments or queries please send them to LeftInsidePod@gmail.com ! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ruptureradio/message

Richard Boyd Barrett, People Before Profit TD for Dun Laoghaire joined us this morning to discuss the cut in PUP and also we heard from a business man who was adversely affected by the cut.    Listen and subscribe to The Pat Kenny Show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.      Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.    You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.

  Richard Boyd Barrett joins Pat to discuss the NPHET Transparency & pandemic payment. Listen and subscribe to The Pat Kenny Show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.      Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.    You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.

Head to www.coffeeforthebrain.com/114 for all links and references.

What is Artificial Intelligence? How can it be applied in business? What is data exhaust and why is it important? How is AI disrupting and enhancing our lives? These are some of the questions answered by AI expert Richard Boyd in Part 1 of this deep-dive interview series on Artificial Intelligence.

How has Artificial Intelligence evolved over the years? How are Machine Learning and Deep Learning Changing Things? How could these new technologies be applied to business? Where is A.I. headed? These are some of the questions answered by A.I. expert Richard Boyd in Part 2 of this deep-dive interview series on Artificial Intelligence.

What are practical applications of A.I. in business? How are you using Machine Learning? What kind of success have you found with using Artificial Intelligence? These are some of the questions answered by A.I. expert Richard Boyd in Part 3 of this deep-dive interview series on Artificial Intelligence.

Join Bishop Conrad and Jessica Palacios as they discuss what men and women can do to encourage each other in both their careers and ministry. Manlikeradio is a Social Media podcast, that is earnestly striving to encourage Christian men, who are truly born again in Christ. In naturally becoming a better man for the divine glory of God. Although the podcast is designed for Christian men, we encourage all men to take part in the advice given in making men like God. Join us live every Tuesday @ 9 PM (Central Standard Time) with your host Richard Boyd. As we candidly discuss the specific topics that typically affect Christian men today. www.manlikeradio.com

Join Pastor Stan Ferrell and Richard Boyd as they discuss what God can do through men in times of chaos. Where is God in this modern world? With all that's going on today. It seems as if God is nowhere to be found. Wars increased crime, hate and other atrocities have occupied center stage. There is probably not a day that goes by that we are reminded of the terrible evil in this world. A tragic thing is that we as humans always seem to find an excuse in someone else or some social situation causing the chaos. God in addition is on our blam list, He is accused more than anyone of much of what is happening. How should we as responsible men undertake or react in a diminishing world? Did not God say we would see an increase in calamities as the days draw close to an end? Did he not warn that if a man rejects His love and commands they would witness a world of turmoil? And men what can we do to see a change in our hearts as the world falls apart? We must understand the time and seasons we live in. Using our God-given spiritual senses to walk in righteousness or we too will relent to the problems of today. Of Issachar, men who had an understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do, 200 chiefs and all their kinsmen under their command. 1 Chronicles 12:32

Richard Boyd and Auther Culpepper discuss what's on their mind, how we as Christian men can improve our lives. What's on your mind? More @ www.manlikeradio.com What is Manlike Radio? The purpose of Manlike Radio Podcast. What does it typically mean to be manly? Well according to the standard dictionary, it is a deliberate act of courage and strength. A traditional attribute in men that is personified by them truly being a man. I felt passionately the leading of the Holy Spirit to start a podcast geared to reaching Christian men around the world. It had to be a program that would develop into helping men in a closer walk with God. But, with a modern-day agenda. With that in mind, we find more people today on social media than ever before, the modern internet has been appropriately named the invention of the century. We all have heard the term the "Market Place," for many years now, and that phrase still holds familiar ground in the hearts of people. Yet, as one Minister who properly uses the internet effectively said, "One can lock themselves away in a private closet and still know peoples business, just by having social media."Something that was on heard of a decade ago. Radio and television have traditionally made their visible mark in the cultural lives of humanity, but even that medium has undoubtedly had to properly adjust to favorably receiving social media. This is now the new normal for today, its open communication effectively reaching the world. The simple fact is that it does not take a truckload of needed money to reach out to others across the globe. This medium has become an excellent opportunity to connect, encourage, and guide men who earnestly desire a closer walk with God. We all naturally possess our own unique calling, which can be grafted into the Manlike Podcast. This can be better accomplished via social media, and expand tremendously our voice for God into the entire world. Let's be encouraged to use this great tool and develop a program that shows Christian men how to have a Godly talk in order to carry out the Godly walk.

In the same way that the cloud can be incredibly helpful, it can also be the source of a few headaches. Just like the printing press, technology can help eliminate the arduous parts of our jobs and help create new specialties. But it doesn’t mean that we have the golden ticket. Today we are talking to Cloud Data Engineer, Richard Boyd, of iRobot about the perils of getting services to talk to each other and keeping your career flexible in the ever-evolving tech world.

Ancient Men! Join your Richard Boyd live 9 PM Tuesday as he shares on the attributes of a true Godly Man. www.manlikeradio.com. In our culture men are ridiculed for being a humble man. They are encouraged not to embrace but to apologize for being a righteous man. The media has grossly;y accused all men of male male chauvinism. We will discuss the biblical truth as to how men of old excelled in their manhood. What is Manlike Radio? The purpose of Manlike Radio Podcast. What does it typically mean to be manly? Well according to the standard dictionary, it is a deliberate act of courage and strength. A traditional attribute in men that is personified by them truly being a man. I felt passionately the leading of the Holy Spirit to start a podcast geared to reaching Christian men around the world. It had to be a program that would develop into helping men in a closer walk with God. But, with a modern-day agenda. With that in mind, we find more people today on social media than ever before, the modern internet has been appropriately named the invention of the century. We all have heard the term the "Market Place," for many years now, and that phrase still holds familiar ground in the hearts of people. Yet, as one Minister who properly uses the internet effectively said, "One can lock themselves away in a private closet and still know peoples business, just by having social media."Something that was on heard of a decade ago. Radio and television have traditionally made their visible mark in the cultural lives of humanity, but even that medium has undoubtedly had to properly adjust to favorably receiving social media. This is now the new normal for today, its open communication effectively reaching the world. The simple fact is that it does not take a truckload of needed money to reach out to others across the globe. This medium has become an excellent opportunity to connect, encourage, and guide men who earnestly desire a closer walk with God. We all naturally possess our own unique calling, which can be grafted into the Manlike Podcast. This can be better accomplished via social media, and expand tremendously our voice for God into the entire world. Let's be encouraged to use this great tool and develop a program that shows Christian men how to have a Godly talk in order to carry out the Godly walk.

In this edition of the Manlikeradio Podcast, Richard Boyd and Auther Culpepper. Speak on the reason so many men are in competition. And even though competition can be beneficial for business, is it good when it comes to our fellow man. In the book of John, chapter 21:21. We read where Peter asks Christ why John was not going to end up in the same fate he was headed to? Men are competitive, but what does God require of us when we are working with our fellow man? More @ www.manlikeradio.com

This podcast interview focuses on product strategy principles that, if applied, have the power to deliver transformative innovation with triple digit ROI. My guest is Richard Boyd, CEO at Tanjo.AI Over the last twenty-six years Richard has led or helped create some of the most innovative game technology companies in the industry. He has served as a game technology consultant for a wide variety of industries including energy, healthcare, education and motion pictures. At Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin he created and led a group of innovative engineers and designers across all mission areas called Virtual World Labs. Richard joined Lockheed Martin in 2007 with the acquisition of 3Dsolve, a North Carolina-based computer game technology firm where he was founder and CEO. Prior to that, Richard was CEO of 3dVillage.com, which was acquired in 2001. 3dVillage was a spin out of Virtus Corporation, where he served for a decade on the executive management team that created several pioneering computer gaming companies including Red Storm Entertainment, with author Tom Clancy; iRock Entertainment with Ozzy Osbourne; and Timeline Computer Entertainment, with author Michael Crichton. Today he’s the CEO of Tanjo.AI, whose mantra is “improving businesses, industries, and people’s lives by bringing machine learning and automation to the world.” This triggered me, hence I invited Richard to my podcast.We discuss how a pragmatic approach to solve every day problems can result in transformative impact. We, too, often don’t realize the solution is right in front of our eyes, and the technology is already there to solve it. Or, as William Gibson once quoted: “The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.” Here are some of his quotes:“The sort of thing that drives me is bringing technologies to bear on problems to solve them in ways that humans alone cannot.it's looking at whatever activity you're engaged in, and trying to figure out, what should humans be doing with our effort and our attention? And what should we be turning over to machines? The answer to that question changes almost every year, almost every month now,Organizations who understand that, and figure that out, will prevail. And those who don't, not only won't be competitive anymore, but they'll appear to be handicapped very soon.If you can do something one time and have it not only pay 10x return on investment, but have that return be an annuity... something you're going to get every single year... the earlier you do that, the more effective and competitive you're going to be.That's why everyone should be waking up and looking at this carefully. You cannot afford not to look at machine learning” By listening to this podcast you will learn three things: The key to machine learning innovation is to not overthink or over reach. Don’t paralyze yourself with endless research with uncertain outcomes, but instead be pragmatic. Look for proven applications with low risk -the low hanging fruit problems unique to your industry, that have a certain outcome, can be applied immediately, and scale radically i.e. can bring a lot of positive impact to many people very quicklyEvery organization has big data today. But it is a big leap from big data to information (data that has been organized) and an even bigger leap from information to Intelligence (information that has been computed so humans can act upon it) Machine learning is uniquely designed to help your organization make these leaps.The next century is about simulation. So, those who become adept at harnessing data intelligence to predict the future and be prepared for it, those companies will prevail. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Scott Hopson, fitness and performance industry leader provides insightful information on: How to design an effective Fitness Program for any population. How to select a Personal Trainer that will deliver transformational results. Why group exercise classes are sweeping the fitness industry.   He is a co-founder of PTA Global and Pivotal – development companies in fitness and performance. Mark Verstegen has described him as “an industry leader,” Richard Boyd attributes him with “one of the best minds in the industry with a gift that is hard to match’, and Michol Dalcourt considers that “his work to the industry is vast and significant.” His clients include EXOS, Gray Institute, Midtown Athletic Clubs, UNIFIT Academy, and numerous other industry-defining organizations. In 20+ years he has authored 50+ accredited courses and certifications, his work is in 100+ countries, and has coached/educated over 100’000+ people globally. 2018 is going to be an incredible year teaching in USA, China, Southeast Asia, Brazil, and Australia. Alongside his better half, Hayley, Scott is truly excited to launch the much-anticipated Pivotal Mentorships. Check out Scott's website Pivotal Coaching

There is a difference between the bride and the wife and in the message Richard Boyd will show from the book of Ephesians exactly what a marriage is suppose to be. Marriage is a mystery but like all mysteries there is an answer given in the word. Welcome to Love Gospel Live. Live Broadcasts Sundays 12:05 PM (Central Standard Time) You can subscribe to website @ http://lovegospelnetwork.com/ To watch any program ON-DEMAND for free, please visit: http://lovegospelnetwork.com/ Love Gospel Live is broadcast each week from Love Gospel Church, San Antonio. Texas. Your host Pastor and speaker is Richard Boyd. We welcome you and encourage you to be part of our online church. Pastor Richard Boyd is a man with a primary passion and focus of The Kingdom of God, and the power of Christ to deliver mankind. He has developed a love in inspiring both leaders and people of all walks of life to grow in the knowledge of Christ and excel in all areas of life. Born in London, England, he moved to New York City with his family during his toddler years. He eventually committed his heart to Jesus Christ and married his soulmate Nellie Rodriguez who was originally from Puerto Rico. A number of years back he and his wife founded Love Gospel Church, a place where all are welcome to receive the freedom we all need in Christ. Richard has traveled much of the world sharing the love, forgiveness and the delivering power of God. You are invited to join this live and recorded programs for your spiritual enrichment, should you need any assistance please contact us at the following. Phone Prayer/ Comments 210 650-3400 Email: lovegospelnetwork@gmail.com Location: Love Gospel Church 8102Cross Creek San Antonio, Texas 78218

We need resilience in our lives, to overcome obstacles and move forward. But we also need to know how to resist that which we rebound from. In part two, Richard Boyd speaks on the significance of resisting. more @ www.lovegospelnetwork.com astor Richard Boyd is a man with a primary passion and focus of The Kingdom of God, and the power of Christ to deliver mankind. He has developed a love in inspiring both leaders and people of all walks of life to grow in the knowledge of Christ and excel in all areas of life. Born in London, England, he moved to New York City with his family during his toddler years. He eventually committed his heart to Jesus Christ and married his soulmate Nellie Rodriguez who was originally from Puerto Rico. A number of years back he and his wife founded Love Gospel Church, a place where all are welcome to receive the freedom we all need in Christ. Richard has traveled much of the world sharing the love, forgiveness and the delivering power of God. You are invited to join this live and recorded programs for your spiritual enrichment, should you need any assistance please contact us at the following. Phone Prayer/ Comments 210 650-3400 Email: lovegospelnetwork@gmail.com Location: Love Gospel Church 8102Cross Creek San Antonio, Texas 78218

Success by Health MLM  Trainer JoDee Baer with Network Marketing Richard Boyd and PM Marketing Network Leads Peter Mingils Building Fortunes Radio

JoDee Baer Success by Health Building Fortunes radio with Peter Mingils

Special guest Richard Boyd joins us to talk about game technology from a long history in the field. The conversation started around games, but completely morphed into a deep dive on AI, Machine Learning, and how to recreate a social history of someone from the past. It was an amazing conversation, packed tight with some great information. Richard’s background Virtual world framework Open source adoptions Machine learning AI timeline Creating a social footprint This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Man was made in God’s image and why? Auther Culpepper and Richard Boyd discuss this topic. This is a sample, if you want to hear the complete podcast. Go to Manlike radio.com

Are you a man who does not show gratitude. One who is not thankful with those in your life. Richard Boyd and Stan Ferrell speak on ways men can become more thankful. More @ www.manlike.com

George wants to see Richard Boyd Barrett become the Housing Minister because 'at least he cares'.

On January 21, 2016, the Hayek Program hosted a book panel on Jacob Levy's 'Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom.' The panel included author Jacob Levy and panelists Peter Boettke, Alan Levine, and Richard Boyd. The panelists discussed whether the pressure between the rationalist suspicion of intermediate group power and the pluralist suspicion of the state can ever be reconciled in a liberal society.

This week on What's the Story? Podcast we change gears and welcome our first Politician to our ranks. Richard Boyd Barrett is TD (Member of Irish Parliament) for the constituency of Dun Laoghaire Rathdown located in South Dublin. After over a decade of political campaigning, Richard was elected to Dáil Éireann in the 2011 general election and has become one of the most prominent voices amongst the anti government opposition. He is a member of the People Before Profit party and is also one of the 16 TDs that make up the Dáil Technical Group. We spoke to Richard about growing up in his constituency, playing football for every team in the borough and how he came to get involved with politics and campaigns. Having grown up in a relatively affluent area and attending one of Ireland's most elite private schools, its been a long road to campaigning for social justice; a road that brought Richard to London, Israel and back again. It was in Israel in the late eighties that Richard was exposed to politics in a way that would inspire him to get involved upon his return to Ireland. We heard all about his early days in the Socialist Workers Party and his involvement in campaigns from Save our Seafront and opposing the water charges. Danny admits he didn't vote for Richard in the last election while Mero proudly admits he did, Danny then does his best to question things like social housing, welfare and opposition to Ireland's low corporation tax rate. All of this and we hear about Lindsey's adventures with BJJ and her upcoming MMA debut, Mero has pink eye, Toblerone banter and Danny continues to spread the word of secret messages within company logos. You can check out all our previous chapters with guests including Paul Stenson, Paul Howard, Tony McGregor, Pat Flynn, Cian Cowley Saskia Tidey and many more by searching WTSpod on iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean and all podcast outlets on Android. Rate, review, subscribe and let us know what you think! Tweet us on @WTSpod and stay tuned for more great guests 

Dave and Tamler celebrate their one year anniversary and 30th episode with one of their least cynical episodes yet.  They talk about 5 philosophy/psychology(-ish) books that influenced and inspired them throughout the years.  They also respond to a listener email that accuses them (mostly Tamler) of being "reckless and irresponsible" in their discussion of responding to insults.   Episode Links (Please note that the Top 5 links below are to purchase books through amazon.com via the Very Bad Wizards amazon affiliate account) Tamler's Top 5 5. The Razor's Edge 4. Culture Of Honor: The Psychology Of Violence In The South (New Directions in Social Psychology)/Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence 3. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Popular Science) 2. Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions 1. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (Penguin Classics) David's Top 5 5. Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman 4. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid 3. The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology 2. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies 1. Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions Honorable MentionsRevenge: A Story of Hope.  Laura BlumenfeldMortal Questions by Thomas NagelThe Fragility of Goodness by Martha NussbaumNot by Genes Alone: by Peter Richerson and Richard BoydThe Principles of Psychology by William JamesDescartes Error by Antonio DamasioBeyond Good and Evil Thus Spoke Zarathustra The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl PopperThe Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah BerlinEthics: Inventing Right and Wrong by J.L. MackieFinally...David shows Richard Dawkins "Lemon Party"  

Last year, on the last day of the HIMSS'11 conference, Richard Boyd of Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs shared his "Simulation Prescription"; showing how gaming and simulation technology have the potential to further revolutionize health care. One year later, OATV was able to catch up with Richard, now Director of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (or as Aneesh Chopra calls him - "Disruptive Man"), on the developments that Lockheed Martin has taken to create a Virtual World Ecosystem Framework. The great news? Lockheed has taken a kernel approach, creating roles for what he hopes is going to become a massively parallel contribution system. AND it's going to be released with an open license with the goal of getting simulation everywhere on any modern web browser. Richard says that we can expect to see the software "kernel" made available midway through 2012, thanks in large part to some of Lockheed's federal partners.

The Armed Services have used simulation tools in training scenarios for a long time, and now virtual world environments are also being embraced by the military. Join us for a mixed reality panel discussion from the 2011 Defense GameTech Users' Conference in Orlando. The moderator is Douglas Maxwell, Army Simulation & Training Technology Center, with panelists Mic Bowman of Intel, Richard Boyd of Lockheed Martin, and Doug Thompson of Remedy Communications. http://www.teamorlando.org/gametech/index.shtmlMetanomics

On the last day of 2011 Healthcare Information Systems Society's Annual Conference & Exhibition, Richard Boyd, Chief Architect for Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs, a renown expert in virtual reality simulation for computer gaming, defense and film industries, shared some of his vision about how advances in gaming and simulation technology have the potential to further revolutionize the healthcare industry, just as other advances in healthcare information technology shown by exhibitors and sessions at HIMSS 11 have done. In particular, Boyd demonstrated examples using interactive 3D simulation technology to enhance understanding of complex healthcare system environments and better forecast potential disruptive events. As one of the creators of the Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs, Boyd leads a group that utilizes cutting edge gaming and virtual world technologies to improve human performance. Before joining Lockheed, Boyd was the General Manager and VP of Sales for Virtus Corporation, where authors Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton were but a few of the collaborators Boys worked with as their gaming titles pushed the envelope of technology. While this session demonstrated very little in the way of open source technology, it does underscore examples of how technology has the potential to be re-purposed in ways that are not initially intended.